{"-2ZTmuX3cog":[{"hn_comment_id":7871762,"author":"aroman","month":"2014-06","story_title":"ArchiveTeam rescues Justin.tv videos","text":"I love the ArchiveTeam. Jason Scott, the leader of the project, gave a fantastically entertaining talk about how they saved Geocities, Yahoo! Video, and Friendster \u2014 using a Distributed Preservation of Service Attack. Definitely worth a watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7827399,"author":"chroma","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Justin.tv ending archiving, deleting all archived videos after June 14","text":"A few Defcons ago, Jason Scott gave an excellent talk about this failure mode[1]. Basically, companies host user-generated content for free. Then years later, they destroy it with little or even no notice. Sturgeon's law applies; most of the deleted content is crap. But a lot of it matters to the people who made it. More importantly, a small fraction of it is stuff that future historians would kill for. Collectively, companies that engage in this behavior are burning historical evidence. 1. Archive Team: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11439762,"author":"ggreer","month":"2016-04","story_title":"In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing","text":"Often, this supposedly redundant data is useful in ways current society can't fathom. Millions of photos of the Mona Lisa taken over decades won't tell you much new about the Mona Lisa. But it will tell you a lot about changes in camera technology over that time. Also, the long tail is long . There are whole cultures and subcultures that would be completely forgotten if not for archives. At Defcon 19, Jason Scott gave a talk titled Archive Team: A Distributed Presentation of Service Attack[1]. In it, he explains why this data is important. As you rightly point out, the vast majority of it is boring and useless. It matters to no one but the author and their friends. But some of it is weird or funny, and a tiny bit of it is pure historical gold. The early days of usenet, for example, contain tons of interesting conversations involving people who are now prominent. Thanks to these archives, we can get a better picture of these people's lives than in earlier times. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-4EDhdAHrOg":[{"hn_comment_id":46694143,"author":"garciasn","month":"2026-01","story_title":"I'm Addicted to Being Useful","text":"[VIDEO] This was the single most impactful thing I've ever been told to watch when it comes to 'solving' vs 'listening'.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28820394,"author":"dandotway","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What can you do to help the grieving?","text":"It's counterintuitive to logical-thinking programmers, but you almost never want to tell a grieving person any of the following: 1. \"Things will get better.\" 2. \"I understand your loss.\" 3. \"Here's how we can fix the problem.\" Some insight into why can be gained by watching the short video, It's Not About the Nail : [VIDEO] In many (but not all) cases, if the grieving are willing to communicate at all, they want their cries of pain heard and listened to. They would rather that you cried with them instead of trying to tell them that there is light at the end of the tunnel or that there is a 'fix' for their 'problem' or that we must accept that life is hard and unfair and suck it up.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30412915,"author":"MikeTheGreat","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I develop skills to comfort people and offer compassion?","text":"> You can actually ask, if they talk about the same thing more than once: Is this something you want me to work on and try to fix, or you just want to talk about? Agreed! Asking helps me clarify to myself the possible goals (and make it explicit that \"just\" listening is a valid goal). Even if you don't ask thinking about the question is a nice way to remind yourself that you don't need to solve it for them. My experience has been that women appreciate this question - I think that most men tend to jump into problem-solving mode and actually being asked is a nice change (here in the U.S.) And of course there's this 2 minute video to memorably highlight the idea :) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46267279,"author":"btilly","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system","text":"You may enjoy, It's not about the nail. [VIDEO] What I was doing is very common. Trying to engage logically with what logic can engage with, while failing to recognize that the emotional challenge is what has to be dealt with first. And that once feelings are out of the way, the logical problem will be massively easier to solve.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46693631,"author":"jpadkins","month":"2026-01","story_title":"I'm Addicted to Being Useful","text":"> It took decades for my wife to finally get through and explain not every problem she voices is something that needs a solution. There is a great YT video on this topic [VIDEO] It's not about the nail!","stance":"rec"}],"-4FXLQoLDBA":[{"hn_comment_id":21327118,"author":"user234683","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City","text":"I always recommend this pair of videos when discussing STAR voting vs other alternative systems. The first video is an easy-to-follow explanation of how spoiler effects can happen in both plurality voting and IRV [1]. In the second [2], the guy who created Star voting applies Ka-Ping Yee's methods to Star voting and animates it side-by-side with alternative systems to show its performance. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24945914,"author":"godelski","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Maine Becomes First State to Use Ranked-Choice Voting in a Presidential Election","text":"Simple answer: The math says so [VIDEO] Longer answer: cardinal systems (the generalized form that approval is part of) is able to capture more information about voter preference. It is easiest to see this with something like range voting. You may be familiar with a question like \"Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree.\" That is range. Approval would be \"Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: Disagree, agree\". Conversely FPTP would present you many statements and you have to pick the one you agree with the most, even though you may agree with many in the list. You can probably see here that you are actually able to capture a fair amount of preference information through this, thus allowing to elect representatives that more accurately represent the population as a whole.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27597908,"author":"nickik","month":"2021-06","story_title":"What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?","text":"Ranked Choice Voting is not really a good idea. It has very strange unintuitive behavior. Doing Score based voting is just much better and arguably simpler and less work. I specially like the Star-Voting, where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases. They also have a few variants for multi-winner and representational voting. Its also much more familiar for people from real live, like online review. [LINK] P.S: Wow a lot of down-votes. RCV is just the alternative that got the most marketing, but once you start looking into the different systems I really don't understand people can stick with RCV just because its slightly better then the system before. If you are gone invest all this effort in improving the system, why not go to something easier and objectively better. This video shows the issue very well (one of the people involved in Star voting made it): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29269246,"author":"godelski","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Seattle residents launch Approval Voting initiative for representative elections [pdf]","text":"The first link there does actually compare against ranked choice. It is just called IRV. There's a larger comparison that includes more types of ranked choice (also called \"ordinal\") here[0]. Though I particularly like this animation[1]. I'll also add that there is a lot of nuance to voting and VSE isn't everything. There's a lot of factors to consider including: how do strategies work? Is it scalable? Can it easily be counted and/or verified statistically? How easy is it for voters? How effective are (strong and weak) spoiler candidates? And many more questions. For the most part cardinal methods (like Approval) fair better on all these accounts. There is a slight tradeoff to VSE. Note STAR in [0] has a slightly lower VSE than RP/Schulz (ranked), but a tighter grouping (better vs strategies). But also STAR is more complex for voters and counting than Approval is (I'd still argue STAR is easier for voters and counters than ordinal systems). So these are the types of tradeoffs you're making [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-4Yp3j_jk8Q":[{"hn_comment_id":33012568,"author":"b_fiive","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Learn TLA+","text":"I've invested a fair amount of time into learning TLA+, have bought Hillel Wayne's book (Practical TLA+), and found his stuff super valuable. However, if I could do it again, I would have started in the following order: - 1. Watch [VIDEO] - 2. Watch all of [LINK] - 3. Work through examples on [LINK] I'm normally not a huge fan of YouTube over books / web sites, but in this case the best content comes from Lamport himself, and he's presented it as a YouTube Course. Also, the costume changes are hilarious.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11341738,"author":"agentultra","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Reflections on Programming","text":"Short answer: try starting with TLA+. I'm working on this. My colleague, who is mentoring me, is the one who's finishing his PhD in software engineering. It's his guidance that has helped me so I don't have a good answer for how to teach yourself yet. We're working on a project to create specifications for Openstack and are learning a lot by working together on how formal specifications could be taught to hackers and developers with no formal mathematics training, etc. If you want a brief introduction to the ideas try some of Leslie Lamports talks on TLA+: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15352403,"author":"discreteevent","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Programmers who want to change how we code before catastrophe strikes","text":"No. Have a look at this video. It's worth it. He's just saying that you should think before you code and that most specifications should be just a few sentences stating what you intend to do. Code as a blueprint is not the same. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23523014,"author":"kediz","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some good videos on real implementations of distributed systems","text":"Most of the real world distributed systems would have some videos in some conferences: Spanner: [LINK] Chubby: [LINK] Anything Leslie Lamport: [VIDEO] [LINK] Also the Distributed system course at MIT is fantastic. The labs are also great way to get your hands dirty with distributed system. The link to the class schedule is here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48075169,"author":"gobdovan","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Mythical Man Month","text":">He argues that conceptual integrity comes from both simplicity and straightforwardness If you want to follow this advice, I think Leslie Lamport's formulation is the most concrete. His version is: - Write down a small model of what you are about to build before building it. - Try to see how that model could fail. If it still looks good, either make the spec/design doc/model clearer and more concrete, or start writing the code. - If plain text gets too vague, use math. If you want tools to check it, use TLA+ with TLC or Apalache. Quint and stateright.rs are nearby tools in the same area. --- Materials: - TLA+ videocourse by Lamport: [LINK] - How to win a Turing Award speech: [LINK] - Thinking above the code: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-5wpm-gesOY":[{"hn_comment_id":8843876,"author":"tehmaco","month":"2015-01","story_title":"A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2015","text":"This will probably resonate with people here[1]. A brilliant video by Tom Scott for Computerphile, where he starts to explain what coding timezones correctly is like and by the end of it is in full polite-mini-rant-mode :D [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26090193,"author":"yboris","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Timezone Bullshit","text":"Obligatory post to Computerphile episode about Timezones - a must watch for developers just starting out with Timezones [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8742537,"author":"sk5t","month":"2014-12","story_title":"The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar","text":"An excellent video touching on some of the intractable aspects of our datetime-marking system's personality quirks: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9251680,"author":"myfonj","month":"2015-03","story_title":"How to save datetimes for future events","text":"There is a great (humorous) Computerphile video about this topic: \"The Problem with Time & Timezones\" [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12045428,"author":"zeta0134","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Time Zones Aren\u2019t Offsets \u2013 Offsets Aren\u2019t Time Zones","text":"Computerphile did an excellent overview of time zones and all their complexities in the context of programming: [VIDEO] I was quite surprised by some of the stranger rules out there, especially the regions that chose to skip a day for whatever reason. Timezones are complex! Far, far more complex than simple offsets.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12909588,"author":"wtfishackernews","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Time to Dump Time Zones","text":">Just try to explain to everyday people just how hard the problem is A bit off topic but Computerphile / Tom Scott did an excellent video doing that [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17186531,"author":"psteinweber","month":"2018-05","story_title":"UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?","text":"I really enjoyed this. And I think no one mentioned the very related Computerphile video yet: \"The Problem with Time & Timezones \" [VIDEO] Same topic, equally entertaining (not AS geeky though).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21342175,"author":"enhdless","month":"2019-10","story_title":"US Constitution \u2013 A Git repo with history of edits","text":"> such a reasonable, trivial task? Tom Scott has a pretty good video explaining exactly why writing code about time is not trivial: The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22439875,"author":"coder543","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Measuring Latency in Linux (2014)","text":"That\u2019s a hard question regardless of programming language. One commonly referenced YouTube video about time that explains why this is hard: [VIDEO] A reasonable first approximation of a solution would be to just check every second (or minute, or hour, depending on requirements) whether the current system time is later than the scheduled time for any pending events. Then you probably want to make sure events are marked as completed so they don\u2019t fire again if the clock moves backwards. Trying to predict how many seconds to sleep between now and 3pm on Saturday is a difficult task, but you can probably use a time library to do that if it\u2019s important enough... but what happens when the government suddenly declares a sudden change to the time zone offset between now and then? The predictive solution would wake up at the wrong time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29462437,"author":"jonathansampson","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Goodbye Brave","text":"Great question! Dates and times are one of the most loathed obstacles in writing software that needs to work a particular way across millions of devices situated all across the globe in different regions and time zones. In our case, we had a bit of code that aimed to measure the time until midnight/tomorrow. But when clocks change at midnight (jumping forward or backward), you can wind up with days that appear to be longer than 24 hours in length. And when a day is more than ~24hr in length, you wind up with unexpected answers to seemingly simple math equations. A bit of logic, responsible for setting up a timer, wound up scheduling numerous timers when our 'How long until tomorrow' code began returning negative numbers. That set of unintended timers locked-up the application itself. You can see our issue for the behavior here: [LINK] . For 10 minutes of anxiety, check out 'The Problem of Time & Timezones' from Tom Scott of Computerphile: [VIDEO] . It's a fantastic summary of the issues programmers face when dealing with time :) Sampson (Brave Team)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33353560,"author":"birdman3131","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Australia's weird little time zone (2008)","text":"I have to toss this classic video on the issues with timezones and programming. The sheer amount of growing exasperation as the video goes is hilarious. [VIDEO] The Problem with Time & Timezones - Computerphile / Tom Scott","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47294369,"author":"wolrah","month":"2026-03","story_title":"The surprising whimsy of the Time Zone Database","text":"That might work for the current form of the country-specific time zones officially acknowledged by countries that exist in TLD form, but the tz database contains many more current time zones more importantly piles of historical time zones. Representing just the historical forms of currently recognized time zones in DNS would be a mess, without even getting in to those that are not associated with a country that currently exists and has a TLD. edit: This is a great video explaining a lot of the reasons why time zones are nowhere close to as straightforward as you may think: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-6BsiVyC1kM":[{"hn_comment_id":19296780,"author":"lukifer","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What made you change your mind about a programming language/paradigm?","text":"Rich Hickey's \"Value of Values\"[0] is what finally sold me on the benefits of pure functional programming and immutable data structures. (It remains horrifying to continue working with MySQL in my day job, knowing that every UPDATE is potentially a destructive action with no history and no undo.) [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22773508,"author":"lukifer","month":"2020-04","story_title":"New WebKit Features in Safari 13.1","text":"Immutability has been pretty hot of late, though still controversial. There are several popular languages which encourage or even force immutability (Elixir, Clojure). What sold me on the idea was Rich Hickey's talk, \"The Value of Values\": [VIDEO] I look at it as mostly a safety net: I'd rather use const by default, unless I have a good reason to be able to mutate the variable. (To flip it around: what problem does being mutable-by-default solve?) 9 times out of 10, I don't need to change the value for the lifecycle of the function; and often if I do, the code is cleaner anyway if I use an immutable pattern (such as `const foo = bar.map()` rather than `for(x in bar) foo.push()`). Thanks to the magic of Merkle trees, we can generally make fresh pointers without it costing much memory overhead.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24341042,"author":"josephg","month":"2020-09","story_title":"The database I wish I had","text":"Most software isn\u2019t FAANG. In the long tail of database size, I\u2019d guess 95%+ of databases are smaller than a few hundred megs. And at that size, storage is cheap and storing a full historical record of changes should absolutely be the default. Rich Hickey has a great talk on this a few years ago talking about the difference between Place and Value. He says accountants learned this lesson hundreds of years ago with bookkeeping. Users just don\u2019t generate much data relative to the size of our disks. Well worth a watch, especially if you disagree: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29035199,"author":"elamje","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Programming talks that made something click for you?","text":"Simple Made Easy ( [LINK] ) The Language of the System ( [LINK] ) The Value of Values ( [VIDEO] ) All by Rich Hickey (Clojure creator) - strongest programming speaker I've found to date.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8803885,"author":"lkrubner","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Programming languages and Frameworks to learn in 2015","text":"If you have the slightest interest in the issue of concurrency then you should study Erlang and Clojure. Since Moore's Law has largely faded, and we now gain speed by putting more CPUs in each server (rather than having the individual CPUs be faster) concurrency is an increasingly unavoidable aspect of programming. Joe Armstrong (Erlang) and Rich Hickey (Clojure) have both spent an enormous amount of time thinking about how to support concurrency in a programming language. Armstrong talks about a paradigm that he calls \"Concurrency Oriented Programming\". Armstrong's thesis is surprisingly readable and I recommend it: [LINK] Rich Hickey's video presentation \"The value of values\" is also a good overview of some concepts that are important to Functional Programming: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9852201,"author":"escherize","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Some Functional Programmers Are Arrogant","text":"Hi! I have been a programmer for a couple years and started picking up clojure after watching a few of rich hickeys talks. This is the one that best satisfies your question, imho: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12361706,"author":"unlogic","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Arguments against JSON-driven development","text":"It's funny how catnaroek was completely vendetta-downvoted in this thread for speaking valid things. For those who don't understand the difference between objects and values, this video may be of help: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13285874,"author":"JMStewy","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Why Clojure? (2010)","text":"That talk was \"The Value of Values,\" which I enjoyed as well. Links for anyone interested: [LINK] (1 hour version) [VIDEO] (1/2 hour version)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15779150,"author":"tree_of_item","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Carp, a compiled Lisp with type inference and a borrow checker","text":"Clojure's implementation did not have to be so complicated, there are simpler implementations of persistent data structures. Immutability is obviously the more elegant option as far as I'm concerned: Hickey's The Value of Values [0] lays out the case quite well. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20429950,"author":"lvh","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Clojure\u2019s Approach to Identity and State (2008)","text":"I think Rich Hickey's (the creator of Clojure) talk, The Value of Values, to be a great 'splainer: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37757625,"author":"dmitry-vsl","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Show HN: Leporello.js \u2013 interactive functional programming IDE for JavaScript","text":"Leporello.js follows a pragmatic functional approach. You can use IO functions and throw exceptions as you typically would, without the need for an IO monad or an Option monad. However, there is one critical limitation \u2013 you cannot mutate your data structures. Mutations are not allowed because they would make time-travel debugging impossible. For instance, the following code is forbidden: const point = {x: 1, y: 2} point.x = 2 And instead you should use this: const point = {x: 1, y: 2} const another_point = {...point, x : 2} In Leporello.js, it's vital to avoid mutating data structures; instead, you create new ones. You can watch Rich Hickey's insightful talk [0], where he discusses the advantages of immutability in functional programming. In many ways, Leporello.js bears a resemblance to Clojure. Clojure served as a source of inspiration for Leporello.js, to the extent that I even contemplated building Leporello.js for Clojure first. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-6rWqJhDv7M":[{"hn_comment_id":21070879,"author":"danbruc","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Exotic Physics Phenomenon Involving Time Reversal Observed for First Time","text":"Our conception of time is just totally wrong, or at least this is true for 99.9 % of all humans and that is certainly an underestimate. Something like THE time does not exist, we are just all living together in a small bubble in the universe, all of us experiencing more or less the same gravitational field, all of us moving together at more or less the same speed as Earth moves through space, and that is what makes it look like there is THE time. But actually time is more like counting the calories you burn as you walk through the world, it is specific to you and the path you take. There is a great lecture \u00bbThe Physics and Philosophy of Time\u00ab by Carlo Rovelli [1] aimed at the general public that does a good job pointing out how wrong we are. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31306441,"author":"crispyambulance","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Searching for What Connects Us, Carlo Rovelli Explores Beyond Physics","text":"Rovelli is an astounding communicator. Here's a wonderful lecture he did for the Royal Institute on the nature of Time: [VIDEO] His communication style is a model of lucidity and kindness that more specialists should emulate when talking or writing to general audiences.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17378594,"author":"ballenf","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Carlo Rovelli on the \u2018greatest remaining mystery\u2019: The nature of time","text":"Royal Institute presentation that I really enjoyed. Has some visual aspects, but can be mostly listened to while driving: The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli > From Boltzmann to quantum theory, from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, our understanding of time has been undergoing radical transformations. Carlo Rovelli brings together physics, philosophy and art to unravel the mystery of time. [VIDEO] Posted 13 June 2018, recorded 30 April 2018.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19666714,"author":"zvrba","month":"2019-04","story_title":"The discrete-time physics hiding inside our continuous-time world","text":"Watch this video: [VIDEO] I myself lean to the Aristotelian definition: count of change. After all, all our clocks are built on this definition. If there were a lone particle traveling in an infinite universe, it'd be nonsensical to talk about its speed because there'd be nothing to relate the distance traveled to (and no observer). Indeed, whenever we talk about \"time\" and related quantities like \"speed\", we always compare the observed object to some other, existing reference. So I think of the interaction of particles/matter as being something fundamental, whereas \"time\" is a synthetic human notion.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20298215,"author":"danbruc","month":"2019-06","story_title":"How to Understand the Universe When You\u2019re Stuck Inside of It","text":"There is a very good introduction - 20 lectures of 45 minutes - to loop quantum gravity by Carlo Rovelli [1] who worked together with Lee Smolin on that topic. In a nutshell loop quantum gravity is about triangulating space with tetrahedra, then representing this triangulation as a graph - one vertex per tetrahedron, one edge between every two tetrahedra sharing a face - with the edges labeled with SU(2) transformations describing the change in orientation due to spacetime curvature as one moves from one tetrahedron to a neighboring one, and of course the dynamics of this description. I hope I got this right, I am totally not a physicist. There is also a very good talk for the general public focusing on the nature of time by Rovelli [2] in case the lecture series is to long or technical. Well, I initially started writing this comment because of the quote \u00bbLeibniz argued (against Newton) that there\u2019s no fixed backdrop to the universe, no \u201cstuff\u201d of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships.\u00ab. According to Rovelli - he talks about this in the lecture series mentioned above - Newton was fully aware [3] that his notion of space and time are just abstract notions and that space and time are fundamentally relational. But due to the success of using abstract space and time in science and engineering this got somewhat forgotten and those abstract notions were and are considered much more fundamental than they are. This in lectures two (space) and ten (time) which b","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24163418,"author":"kergonath","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)","text":"We don\u2019t have an answer to this question. I don\u2019t want to discuss metaphysics here, but there is a very interesting discussion on that subject here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-7qT_38iRSc":[{"hn_comment_id":15016894,"author":"reirob","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Facebook\u2019s Onavo Gives Social-Media Firm Inside Peek at Rivals\u2019 Users","text":"Stanford Seminar - Unethical Algorithms of Massive Scale [1]. It's worth watching even if it's 1 hour and 23 minutes. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30273818,"author":"robbedpeter","month":"2022-02","story_title":"TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it\u2019s unclear where it goes","text":">>The 2020 presidential election monitoring project successfully recruited a diverse group of 732 registered voters in three battleground states: Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina. It preserved more than 500,000 ephemeral experiences on Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, and Facebook. These are the fleeting experiences that Big Tech companies use to influence votes and opinions worldwide and that are normally lost forever. >>A preliminary analysis of the data shows that Google search results (but NOT search results on Bing or Yahoo) had a significant liberal bias \u2013 enough to have shifted at least 6 million votes in the months leading up to the election. You need to know the methodology being used to understand the results, as they tracked ephemeral experiences using surveillance software with volunteers. This guy needs a website team in the biggest way. It's hard to find the information and it's scattershot. It's very frustrating because the work he's doing is solid. Don't let the shitty web presence deter you. The Rogan podcast was awkward af but he does provide a lot of substantive content if you're open to listening. [LINK] is probably the most coherent site, but there's no salient tldr breakdown, to learn more you'll need to watch the videos. [VIDEO] is the most comprehensive video, but I'll need to spend more time later to gather better links.","stance":"rec"}],"-8nqnOcoLqE":[{"hn_comment_id":27804198,"author":"fredrikholm","month":"2021-07","story_title":"How to plant a forest: Context is key","text":"A great start is the Paani foundation; they move thousands of villages from water tank dependency to self-sufficiency in their annual competition. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32180267,"author":"carapace","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better","text":"> At scale? Yes, of course, all lifeforms reproduce exponentially. Literally the biosphere would (re-)vivify the Earth automatically if we just stop destroying it. It's been doing it for four billion years. > Can this be implemented globally in a few decades? That I cannot say, but I believe the limiting factors are social/political rather than biological or physical. In other words, yes, if we have the will we could probably turn things around, go from destruction to regeneration, within three decades. It would be unprecedented but I don't see any intrinsic physical reasons that we couldn't do it. The revitalization of the Loess Plateau took less than three decades, and as a side-effect it now produces all the material needed to repeat the process in a new place. > What about making it work in places going dry? Yes. Not only can we do this in places going dry, we can convert desert to (productive food) forest where ever we need it. E.g. \"Greening the Desert\" [LINK] project in Jordan. People are using ecological principles all over the world to regenerate large areas. > Desalination plants and wastewater treatment plants have existed for decades, but are expensive. Today, many people don't have access to clean water because of this. It's a huge problem, it's true. But progress is being made. E.g. check out the projects described in \"India's Water Revolution\" [VIDEO] We can transform the deserts into paradise. The rains will fall. (I'm going to stop now before I start quoting ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32928592,"author":"hosh","month":"2022-09","story_title":"A Climate Love Story","text":"Also, I missed you asking about sharing what I found. Permaculture was the gateway into the world of what is possible. Consider, for example, the 3 permaculture ethical principles: - Care of Earth - Care of People - Fair Share This is all voluntary. It\u2019s not about making people change, or changing the masses. The design principles shows a way of decentralizing food production in a way that is more resilient, adaptive, and also works with the culture (and not just the technologies or methods, hence \u201cperma-culture\u201d)Although the two people who originally put this together doesn\u2019t address Consciousness or spirituality, I have found that these design principles can lead to way of life that has room and integrates cultivation of consciousness. That also lead me to Carol Sanford. You look around at articles and podcast, and then at some point, you see her mentioned all over the place in the permaculture world. As a hint of what is possible, with just better management of water, this series of video talks about implementing better use of water in India, and how it not only restored watersheds, but also helped people socially and addressed economic inequality: Episode 1: \u201cSolving the Crisis in 45 Days\u201d [VIDEO] Episode 3: \u201cFrom Poverty to Permaculture\u201d [LINK] Episode 7: \u201c50 Years of Permaculture at Auroville\u201d [LINK] There are more. We can chat about it by email \u2014 talktohosh at gmail","stance":"rec"}],"-C-JoyNuQJs":[{"hn_comment_id":12327836,"author":"xrstf","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Fixing JSON","text":"Because using certain keys could break your JavaScript (and JSON was designed to be a subset), like { delete: \"me\" } If you don't want to keep a list of known keywords around, just insisting on quotes is the easier way. [EDIT: See also this YouTube video, where Douglas Crockford explains it himself: [VIDEO] ]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21100736,"author":"Figs","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Do we need to rethink what free software is?","text":"You may also get a chuckle out of an anecdote about the license that Douglas Crockford gave during one of this talks: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-DVyjdw4t9I":[{"hn_comment_id":33998759,"author":"pen2l","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Python 3.11 Delivers","text":"This is baseless conjecture and completely without merit. Guido was intimately involved with this speed-up work. I've disagreed with Guido over things but the things you're saying are just weird. I recommend this interview to get a slightly better glimpse of the guy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36904586,"author":"fernandotakai","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Commander Keen's Adaptive Tile Scrolling","text":"link for people that want to watch it: [LINK] i would also recommend another two of his interviews: Todd Howard [LINK] Guido van Rossun [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-DX3vJiqxm4":[{"hn_comment_id":8928652,"author":"unsoundInput","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Riot \u2013 A React-like, 2.5K user interface library","text":"I agree that calling it \"React-like\" seems misleading. When I read about a 'x'-like library I expect something that could actually replace 'x' and provide nearly the same features. Pete Hunt did a great talk on what actually makes React / virtualdom different from other databinding approaches.[1] Using this definition Riot.js looks a lot more like Angular, Ember et al. to me. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36147485,"author":"yazaddaruvala","month":"2023-06","story_title":"React is 10 years old","text":"I'll try one last time: > Sorry none of this makes any sense to me. If you're not familiar with the MVC variants (MVVM, MVP, MVI, MOVE)[0][1] we should start there. Next you should read through some common mistakes of Backbone.js like applications [LINK] and some criticisms of MVC on HackerNews in 2012[0]. Finally if you haven't before these talks, they are the ones that sold me on React: - [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"-EA2FQXs4dw":[{"hn_comment_id":26240787,"author":"ortusdux","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What is a creative product you've discovered recently?","text":"It looks like their kickstarter has all the info: [LINK] Linus did a decent review of the tech back in 2019: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26861364,"author":"icegreentea2","month":"2021-04","story_title":"This is what Doom looks like on a holographic display","text":"Like other people have said, this looks like a Looking Glass dev unit or something. And here's a Linus Tech Tips video of it: [VIDEO] They have some good footage (though obviously it's setup as a hype reel too). Edit: Skip to follow for \"beauty shots\": 4:45 and 8:50. 6:12 for funky shot of the 'flattened' image to give you a sense of what 'trick' they're playing","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27840486,"author":"cfjgvjh","month":"2021-07","story_title":"High-resolution holographic interface [video]","text":"Linus Tech Tips covered them before that gives a pretty good overview [0]. It's a really cool tech and I hope it becomes more affordable in the future. I'd imagine actually feeling like a person is physically present will make Zoom meetings and such a lot less boring. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-EVqrDlAqYo":[{"hn_comment_id":26241750,"author":"gamegoblin","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence (2019)","text":"Highly recommend the Lex Fridman interview to listen to Jeff explain live: [VIDEO] While Numenta doesn't have the amazing results of DeepMind and friends, I think they are doing really great stuff in the space of biologically plausible intelligence.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26344348,"author":"Geee","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Myths about how the brain works","text":"I wouldn't say that the Triune brain theory is a 'myth'. It's just not accurate, but it's not a complete lie either. There certainly are different parts of the brain that have evolved at different times, and have different functions. The older parts have evolved to specific functions, while neocortex, which is found in mammals, has a uniform structure and is capable of learning and adapting to different tasks. 75% of human brain is neocortex. Jeff Hawkings explains the difference between the 'old parts' and 'new parts' pretty well in this interview: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-FENubmZGj8":[{"hn_comment_id":22633368,"author":"keanzu","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Body Camera Once Again Catches an NYPD Officer Planting Drugs in Someone's Car","text":"If anyone reads the parent here and doesn't agree then watch \"You Have the Right to Remain Innocent\" by James Duane. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29413027,"author":"dotBen","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Former Ubiquiti employee charged with stealing data and extorting company","text":"Yup, this is a very important video for everyone to watch, but especially anyone moving to America who doesn't understand the differences to policing in this country vs others. If you have watched this video, you might want to review this highly anticipated follow up several years later: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28026057,"author":"robomartin","month":"2021-08","story_title":"FBI Seized $900K from Safe Deposit Box on 'Pure Conjecture,' Federal Judge Says","text":"Yes, that is a presentation worth watching [0] and a follow-up [1]. Even as someone who is pro law enforcement, I have to keep in mind that their job does not always align with protecting you. In other words, if they pull you over for speeding, the relationship isn't the same as the case where you might be asking a cop for directions or if you are engaging with them because you were a victim of a crime. In the first case they will use their training and knowledge against you to the extent necessary given the circumstances, the the other two cases they will be helpful and supportive. I do not vilify police officers --the individuals-- for this. It is their job. This is what they do. They would not be doing the very difficult work they do every day if they did not, for example, gather evidence and use what suspects say as evidence, etc. My problem is with asymmetry of the law as it pertains to lying. When a politician gets on TV and lies, and lies and lies --for years!--, suffering no consequences whatsoever, well, I just don't think that's right. Thinking of this as an evolutionary process, if the fitness function responds positively to lies, the net result will be evolving towards a condition where lies are a normal part of how one gets ahead or survives. And this is precisely what we have. Some might say: Well, politicians would not be able to say much on so many subjects if the absolute veracity of their statement was a requirement. That's fine. I'd rather they shut the fuc","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34453416,"author":"the_af","month":"2023-01","story_title":"What not to write on your security clearance form (1988)","text":"To my other comment, let me add that this follow up video by Duane specifically addresses your scenario: the concerned parents of a missing girl unwisely spoke to the cops, without knowing they were suspects in the case (because the cops regularly suspect this, \"9 out of 10 times, the caller is the one who committed the crime\" as one cop put it). In this case, the cops suspected the father. After they found the body of the daughter, which had drowned, they didn't tell the father (because he was a suspect but they didn't want to read him his rights) and claimed to be still looking for her in order to continue incriminating her father. His mistake: volunteering to talk to the cops without a lawyer. Watch it here, I've picked the right timestamp for you: [VIDEO] By volunteering to talk to the cops, you may also end up providing information that -- according to the cops -- \"only the killer could have known\". Oops! Even worse, if the interview wasn't taped (and in some cases, even if it was!) the cops can claim, either mistakenly or on purpose, that you provided self-incriminating evidence even if you didn't. Duane provides examples of how, even if your answers are taped but the cops' questions aren't , seemingly innocent answers can get you in trouble. Example: \"I swear I've never touched a gun in my life\" (cops: \"we didn't mention the murder weapon, how did he know it was a gun? We didn't ask this. Suspicious!\").","stance":"rec"}],"-HFwok9SlQQ":[{"hn_comment_id":12033224,"author":"fattire","month":"2016-07","story_title":"I\u2019m a millennial and my generation sucks","text":"Agreed. My favorite quote was \"In some ways I love being a millennial, because it\u2019s so much easier to be better than the rest of our generation\" I can't tell if this statement supports or contradicts the rest of the article, but regardless, this bears watching again... [VIDEO] The generational pile-on goes back and is pretty meaningless.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13066312,"author":"zerognowl","month":"2016-11","story_title":"3 Out of 4 Millennials Have Received Financial Help from Parents After College","text":"Millennials don't exist, according to Adam Conover: [VIDEO] I'm careful using the word \"Millennial\" these days and increasingly skeptical of online articles with the word \"Millennial\" in the title. Thanks to shows like Adam Ruins Everything[1], I am more informed on a variety of topics. (I learn visually and prefer to watch his videos instead of read an article). [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14537934,"author":"sr2","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Decades","text":"I still see the term 'millennial fashion' and 'the noughties' been thrown around, but these are meaningless terms. Here's an interesting talk by Adam Conover debunking the term millennial: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14703086,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2017-07","story_title":"I'm not a Woman in Tech","text":"It kinda makes me thing of the \"Millennials Don't Exist\" talk by Adam Conover. He talks about how generational terms are just made up by authors who want to get rich and they're almost always condescending (those entitled baby boomers, those lazy millennials, those gen x-ers) and how people don't liked to be talked down to: [VIDEO] Are millennials attached do their cellphones? Yes .. so are mothers, fathers, grandparents and some dogs. It's literally the most compact and powerful communication and computational device we've ever had. When you break down all the labels, all you really have is people. Talk to them like people.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15843702,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Why We Blame Millennials for Everything","text":"Adam (from Adam Ruins Everything) does a really good talk at a marketing conference on why Millennials don't exist. Generational titles are never used to bring people up, but always tear a group of people down. Time magazine covers about Baby Boomers from decades ago are almost identical to those calling Millennials entitled today: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16968874,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Americans Are a Lonely Lot, and Young People Bear the Heaviest Burden","text":"I like to refer to Adam ruins everything on Millennials: [VIDEO] TL;DW Generational titles (Boomers, Gen X, Y, whatever) are invented by authors to sell books. They never bring people up and are always used to tear people down. Everything said about Millennials has been said about every generation ever. You can take a Time magazine cover from the 50s about the entitled generation and slap a modern photo on it and it's the same damn thing. It's lazy. Millennials are the most diverse of any generation. That's about all you can really say, other than we're the most in debt and most likely to take unpaid internships compared to any previous generation. It's a straw man and it needs to die.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38029972,"author":"justin_oaks","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Gen Z wants less sex in TV and movies","text":"Adam Conover did a great talk about this [0]. It was entitled \"Millenials Don't Exist\". In it he humorously but also seriously asserts that lumping people together as generations is useless at best and harmful at worst. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-Ht4qiDRZE8":[{"hn_comment_id":3502776,"author":"drucken","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Breaking CAPTCHA with automated humans","text":"The interesting thing about these human-based attempts to defeat individual CAPTCHA-\"protected\" services is that if they are actually reCAPTCHA or variants, they perform a strong socially useful function! This is because reCAPTCHA solving is linked to the digitization of paper documents. There was recently a TEDTalk by the inventor of the CAPTCHA about this topic. It is very informative and entertaining. I highly recommend it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7600445,"author":"vowelless","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy","text":"I highly recommend watching the TED talk by Luis von Ahn, creater of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA. He calls this \"human computation\". He is also the founder of Duolingo. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3774042,"author":"pittsburgh","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Google Now Using ReCAPTCHA To Decode Street View Addresses ","text":"As a developer, I agree that captchas can be a drag on users, and I think we should put serious thought into whether or not their UX-cost is justified. Personally, I try to avoid using them on sites I build. That said, as a user, it's hard to hate ReCaptcha after hearing Luis von Ahn talk about and defend his invention: [VIDEO] It's a clever way to digitize books (and now street signs) while keeping out spambots, and when I combine that knowledge with my affinity for Luis von Ahn as a person I find myself less annoyed every time I have to prove I'm not a robot.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30873560,"author":"elviejo","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Could a game trick users into doing work?","text":"Yes this is called Games with a Purpose. It is Luis Von Ahn thesis. Luis created: recaptcha, to help digitilize books by harnessing millions of captchas. The ESP game to help tag images for search purposes. Both sold to Google And later founded Duolingo, to democratize language learning. His Ted talk is a good starting point. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-I_jE0l7sYQ":[{"hn_comment_id":16857613,"author":"enkiv2","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics probably doesn't contain technical information that's new to any of you, but Ted has a knack for reframing things in ways that make the arbitrariness of certain historical decisions clear: [LINK] On the subject of hypertext, The Web That Wasn't gives a nice history of the idea (for anybody who thinks it starts with TBL -- surprisingly many people!): [LINK] Another reframing-oriented talk is Clay Shirky's \"It's not information overload, it's filter failure\", which ultimately leads to Shirky suggesting the kinds of user-oriented filtering features that Mastodon has implemented: [LINK] At the intersection of neurology and information science, Peter Watts always has something interesting to say, and as a former marine biologist focusing on the nervous system of starfish, this is absolutely in his wheelhouse: [LINK] This one (\"moving away from defensive programming\") justified strong typing in a pretty clear way: [LINK] Dan Dennett is just as relevant as Doug Hofstadter when it comes to metacognition: [LINK] Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science starts slow, but if you don't have much of a historical background (like, if you're only vaguely aware of what happened in CS in the 70s), it's a laundry list of things you should look up and be aware of before you start your next project: [VIDEO] Everybody should understand procedural generation: [LINK] Likewise, since AI is hyped up right now, we should all remind ourselves that IA is a thing too: [LINK] M","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18743000,"author":"smilesnd","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"I love any talk with Joe Armstrong or Alan Kay in it. Joe Armstrong - Keynote: The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science - Code BEAM SF 2018 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19707221,"author":"namelosw","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Joe Armstrong has died","text":"This is so sad. RIP Joe. I'll miss him so much. Erlang is one of the most Perlis languages for me. I'm always a little bit cynical and think Erlang deserve more attention. Several months ago Joe post this tweet about a game company refused to tell other people they are using Erlang. [LINK] I just watched his great talk last year not long ago - The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33432262,"author":"jeffreygoesto","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Why I program in Erlang (2012)","text":"Definitely! I also like \"How we program multicores\" [0], it made \"iff you want the same guarantees Erlang gives you, you'll be in the same performance ballpark in any language, yes, C++ also\" click for me. Joe could explain the basic ideas and where they came from so concise and humble [1], you can probably just binge watch this whole list, one other gem being \"The forgotten ideas in computer science\" [2]... [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-J8YyfrSwTk":[{"hn_comment_id":18371870,"author":"jasim","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Book Review: A Philosophy of Software Design","text":"That'll be a great addition to the book. Can I also recommend Yaron Minsky's talk on OCaml, specifically the part where he talks about \"making invalid states impossible\": [VIDEO] I've found this to be the single most valuable programming technique I've learnt. Richard Feldman dives deeper into the topic with a lot more examples in [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16422538,"author":"chillee","month":"2018-02","story_title":"What Made Lisp Different (2002)","text":"I guess the closest thing to what you want in Ocaml is modular implicits. [LINK] As far as the tradeoff, my view on types is a bit different than yours, I think. First, a quick note: > specify manually all the types of all the functions This is usually encouraged in OCaml, in the form of a .mli file. I think types can be a lot more than \"compiler checked documentation that can also work as basic tests\". They allow you to encode invariants that allow the compiler to check more than basic stuff. I thought this video had a good example. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-J_xL4IGhJA":[{"hn_comment_id":22861327,"author":"floathub","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?","text":"Learn LISP/Scheme and lots of fundamental concepts you probably have a feel for, but in a far more profound way: 1. First watch the SICP series ( [VIDEO] ) 2. Then work through the book ( [LINK] ) If you really do the exercises (an hour here and an hour there), you can feel you brain getting wrapped around many core notions in very illuminating ways.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25355278,"author":"k00b","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What new programming languages did you learn in 2020?","text":"The real beauty is in how few operators you need to achieve maximal expressiveness in a programming language. It makes other programming languages seem extra. Highly recommend the SICP lectures [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26298412,"author":"augusto-moura","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Not Lisp again (2009)","text":"The class mentioned in the article was actually made available under Creative Commons by the MIT OpenCourseWare[1], you can see the entirely of the course in Youtube. I watched and cannot recommend it enough, even for seasoned programmers [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34070116,"author":"wiseleo","month":"2022-12","story_title":"24/7 SICP 1986 lectures stream","text":"It's on-demand on YouTube[1] and an excellent course that is still very much relevant with very high production quality circa 1986. What makes it special is who is teaching it, which is the original authors of SICP. The course thus completely complements their book and is in the same style. The courses from later years are also on YouTube, but they don't feel the same. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34592325,"author":"lab11","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Not even a second of thought: Sussman's & Abelson's SICP [VIDEO] especially the section on streams ( [LINK] ) It changed my outook on programming by pi degrees and I feel it is more needed then ever.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21300514,"author":"chrisa","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1996) [pdf]","text":"The original course videos are on youtube too! I found them a bit easier to watch than reading the book: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21783844,"author":"abiro","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Which of our ideas about computation could survive a thousand years?","text":"I\u2019ve included the halting problem, but omitted the Turing machine, because while ingenious, the latter is simply a hack to make proofs work and not a very good way to think about computation. Similarly, I\u2019ve included distributed representations, but omitted backpropagation since while backprop works very well for a number of problems that are otherwise unsolvable today, it is not a particularly enlightening way to write programs. Also, the first 10 minutes of the introductory SICP lecture contains a livelier presentation of the idea in the quote: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22679855,"author":"lymitshn","month":"2020-03","story_title":"How I became a better programmer (2017)","text":"Maybe more of the hype comes from the fact that its a Lisp. To get a feeling for the \"magic\" of lisp, I would suggest either watching SICP video lecs[0] or reading the book. I started learning lisp, almost the same time I've started learning programming with Java (college). Honestly I was thinking why they don't just teach us that, instead of Java at that time. Also Clojure is created by a fairly respected dude (afaik) Rich Hickey. His talks and Clojure design decision articles on the site are really insightful. Also this talk[1] also pretty good overview of different paradigms and `Clojure way`, imo. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27331671,"author":"laen","month":"2021-05","story_title":"\u201cComputer science is not about computers\u201d","text":"Here is Harold Abelson discussing the topic in ~1986. His introduction to \u201cComputer Science\u201d has stuck with me for years. Interesting to see the lineage of the statement, it must have stuck with him as it has for me, when he first heard it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48329630,"author":"bmitc","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Any advice on how to learn good software architecture practices?","text":"There are a lot of good books here: [LINK] I second the comment ( [LINK] ) recommending How to Design Programs (HTDP) and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). The former has an edX course ( [LINK] and [LINK] ) and the latter has online lectures ( [VIDEO] ) Head First Architecture ( [LINK] ) is good. Reading about systems thinking would be useful. Learning programming languages that have been well designed is helpful. I suggest Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World and Elixir in Action .","stance":"rec"}],"-K11rY57K7k":[{"hn_comment_id":22450285,"author":"RossBencina","month":"2020-02","story_title":"A Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to Asynchronous Programming","text":"I guess that's because they are \"intros,\" and often multi-core event loops are implemented by the language runtime or some threadpool library. This is a good watch: Dmitry Vyukov \u2014 Go scheduler: Implementing language with lightweight concurrency (Oct 14, 2019) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47359538,"author":"c0balt","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler","text":"[VIDEO] - Dmitry Vyukov \u2014 Go scheduler: Implementing language with lightweight concurrency This one notably also explains the design considerations for golangs M:N:P in comparison to other schemes and which specific challenges it tries to address.","stance":"rec"}],"-Ln-8QM8KhQ":[{"hn_comment_id":41883893,"author":"yread","month":"2024-10","story_title":"how come a company founded over 100 years ago has the fastest site","text":"To save you a click: apparently [LINK] is very fast. A person who worked there chimes in [LINK] saying they focused on speed (competing with paper catalogue), used VB.net and SQL Server with stored procs. Some other guy explains [LINK] : \u00b7 Agressive pre-loading pages on hover \u00b7 fixed image dimensions - there is no layout shift when they load \u00b7 Dependency Injection (huh?) - only loading the JS needed on the pages where its needed \u00b7 Uses pushstate to change pages so it feels faster than a full reload \u00b7 agressive CDN and browser caching \u00b7 Server rendered HTML (ASP .net) Funny enough they load almost a meg of JS (YUI and jQuery) but you dont notice because it feels so snappy He made a video explaining it: [VIDEO] which is a lot more interesting than the inane tweet. Maybe we could replace the link with the video?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43926439,"author":"CleanCoder","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?","text":"The low lag part is especially impressive. Here is Wes Bos taking a deeper dive into the intricacies of technologies used to accomplish this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44614763,"author":"_nivlac_","month":"2025-07","story_title":"A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022)","text":"I am SO glad jofzar posted this - I remember this website but couldn't recall the company name. Here's a good video on how the site is so fast, from a frontend perspective: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44800794,"author":"0xTJ","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Why is GitHub UI getting slower?","text":"As an interesting example of the opposite UI experience, this video goes into why the McMaster-Carr website is so incredibly snappy to use: [VIDEO] . It's different from GitHub in many ways (no user-generated content, day-by-day mostly static pages), but it's interesting to see how good a browsing experience can be. It makes sense given that their value as a company depends so much on making it quick and easy to find exactly what you need.","stance":"rec"}],"-MTRxRO5SRA":[{"hn_comment_id":13368165,"author":"icc97","month":"2017-01","story_title":"When You Are Depressed, Make Something","text":"I've run across this quote a few times recently and like it a lot. But there's always the nagging doubt / imposter syndrome telling that you don't really have taste either. Like the people who can taste good food, can't necessarily cook good food. Perhaps it's just enough that you care about something and want to get good at it. I liked Sal Khan's TED lecture [0] about the possibility of us all having the capacity to be cancer researchers in the same vein that people 200 years ago assumed that only the best would be able to read. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17667152,"author":"JesseAldridge","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Learning Math for Machine Learning","text":"I think a lot of people need to start from the basics because they don't have a good foundation in math. The core problem is schools will push you along if you can somehow produce the correct answer for 70% of the problems on a test. Combine this with intense pressure not to fail and you will very likely end up in higher level math courses with many gaping holes in your foundational knowledge. You thus end up relying on tricks and memorization rather than useful understanding. Here is a TED talk where Sal Khan of Khan Academy talks about this: [VIDEO] After struggling to understand advanced math in a lot different contexts I decided to go through the entire K-12 set of exercises on Khan Academy. I blazed through the truly elementary stuff like counting and addition in a few hours, but I was suprised at how quickly my progress started slowing down. I found I could not solve problems involving negative numbers with 100% accuracy. Like (5 + (-6) - 4). I would get them right probably 90% of the time but the thing is Khan Academy doesn't grant you the mastery tag unless you get them right 100% of the time. I found most of my problems were due to sloppy mental models. Like, I didn't understand how division works -- if someone were to ask me what (3/4) / (5/6) even means conceptually I would not have been able to provide a coherent, accurate explanation. \"Uh... it's like taking 5/6 of 3/4... wait no that's multiplication... you need to flip the second fraction over... for some reaso","stance":"rec"}],"-NL76uQOpI0":[{"hn_comment_id":19137483,"author":"EdwardCoffin","month":"2019-02","story_title":"The Mathematics of the Rubik\u2019s Cube (2009) [pdf]","text":"This 15 minute video is a pretty accessible explanation of a technique for solving Rubik's-type puzzles: A simple trick to design your own solutions for Rubik's cubes [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19140029,"author":"foxes","month":"2019-02","story_title":"The Mathematics of the Rubik\u2019s Cube (2009) [pdf]","text":"Mathologer has a nice video explaining how to solve a cube, and they are really using group theory :), [VIDEO] . The key take away is that all you need to do is find a few basic operations (swapping an edge/corner/center) that leaves the rest of the cube unchanged, and then your job is basically done, you apply these until you have a solved cube. This might approach might not give you the optimal algorithm, which has been shown to be able to solve any Rubik's Cube in 20 turns or less [0]. [0] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33719116,"author":"lupire","month":"2022-11","story_title":"2D Rubik\u2019s Cube solution visualization","text":"It's a huge leap to get past the first layer. Your curt rate of progress suggests that your strategy will not solve the cube in your lifetime. And it's almost impossible to do it without taking notes on paper or computer. (If that were doable, their wouldn't be so many walkthroughs). Solving the cube is a hard applied group theory \"homework\" problem. This video explains the principles of solving a Rubik's cube on your own. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-QMHOsfjHq0":[{"hn_comment_id":27455365,"author":"noobermin","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Don't create for an imaginary group of people","text":"This reminds me of this video[0] of a philosophy teacher who argues that we've entered a new era of \"identity\" where identities are based on curated profiles vs. what it used to be, around so-called \"authenticity.\" One of the aspects of that is our identities are curated now to appeal to the \"average online follower\" (he calls it the \"general peer\") which is an abstraction of the \"typical\" person we cater to to get engagement (likes, follows, etc). [0] Forgot video: [VIDEO] Timestamp when he talks about the general peer [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32906910,"author":"ever1337","month":"2022-09","story_title":"The tyranny of the supertweeter","text":"Professor Hans Georg-Moeller of the University of Macau I think has some really good observations and a systematization of what he calls the \"profilicity mode of identity production\", as contrasted to \"authenticity\" and \"sincerity\". He frequently comments on how social media causes people to view their actions not directly, but on a \"second order\", through the eyes of the \"general peer\" as personified by the quantified likes and comments posts get on social media. I haven't done a great job summarizing here but he has a youtube channel with some good videos on the topics: [VIDEO] [LINK] I think his framework helps a lot in making sense of the way people act online and offline in our current age, and the implications for \"identity production\" are quite interesting.","stance":"rec"}],"-QWHkcCP3tA":[{"hn_comment_id":1469143,"author":"stevederico","month":"2010-06","story_title":"Gary Vaynerchuk demonstrates how to get advertisers by cold calling","text":"Just read his book cover to cover, its only 130 pages, he has motivated me to get off my ass and do something. It is really easy to fall into the typical social conventions and not do something because \"I don't feel like it\". Check out a great talk on creating for the long term at RAILSCONF: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2226243,"author":"ludicast","month":"2011-02","story_title":"Gary Vaynerchuk and Hustling - Don\u2019t Underestimate Effort","text":"Loved his talk at RailsConf. Was a longtime fan of his show and he seemed like a real genuine dude. Great off the cuff too. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2816530,"author":"tnorthcutt","month":"2011-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I get traffic on a shoe-string budget?","text":"Borrow other people's traffic. Specifically, guest blog everywhere you can, and set up an affiliate program. If you don't want a public affiliate program, that's fine - only open it to certain referrers. For instance, give bloggers with large audiences who you'd like to target a discount code they can share with their readers. Email/tweet at Smashing Magazine - they're nice folks and I bet they'd mention this, even if just in a tweet. Edit: I see now that you have been guest blogging. Do it more! It's not just about the traffic you see in the next day - it's also a long term link-building strategy. Also, don't get down about \"only\" 5.5k uniques. That means FIVE AND A HALF THOUSAND HUMANS were interested enough to visit your site! Go watch Gary Vaynerchuk's talk at RailsConf 2010: [VIDEO] He talks a lot about caring about your customers/audience/whoever (or, as he puts it, \"giving a fuck\"). Maybe you could put in some sort of \"Not totally convinced? Enter your email here to learn more from the founder\" mechanism, and then personally email those people, get to know them, and convince them to buy (if it's a good fit). Sure, that's not scaleable, but why not do it right now while your traffic is \"low\"?","stance":"rec"}],"-Qph8BNrnLY":[{"hn_comment_id":12319467,"author":"gravypod","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Megaprocessor \u2013 A micro-processor built large","text":"This channel might be of interest to you: [VIDEO] One of my favorite channels as she's done many projects I've had interest in.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6018025,"author":"DanBC","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Valve's flat management structure 'like high school'","text":"Jeri Ellsworth, for people who don't know, does really interesting hardware stuff. \"TSA body imaging at home\" ( [LINK] ) \"Home made EL wire\" ( [LINK] ) \"Recording Audio onto floppy discs\" ( [LINK] ) \"Home made transistor\" ( [VIDEO] ) \"Homebrew NMOS transistor\" ( [LINK] )","stance":"rec"}],"-R-eqJDQ2nU":[{"hn_comment_id":17392837,"author":"dominotw","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Losing 100 pounds in 276 days","text":"I listened to a super interesting podcast about fasting [VIDEO] Dr. Panda goes into detail about fasting and coffee. Great podcast about fasting. Intermittent Fasting Confers Protection in CNS Autoimmunity by Altering the Gut Microbiota [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14180878,"author":"dpatrick86","month":"2017-04","story_title":"You Can\u2019t Trust What You Read About Nutrition","text":"Interestingly, this has been the approach of a dietary study being conducted by a group doing research on a circadian-focused pattern of eating. The study uses a mobile app as part of their distributed clinical trial design. Participants take pictures of their food with only the option of further journaling. Kind of cool. Here's the website for the trial (& app)... [LINK] Here's a video of the principal investigator (Satchin Panda) talking about his research... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14638006,"author":"eneveu","month":"2017-06","story_title":"The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less","text":"The issue with Ramadan is that they eat at night. It is indeed intermittent fasting, but it is not as good as intermittent fasting where you eat during the day, because eating is related to peripheral oscillators of our circadian rhythm. I heard about that a few weeks ago while listening to this podcast by Dr. Rhonda Patrick: [LINK] This article might also be of interest: [LINK] As well as this video interview: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14640450,"author":"moochachana","month":"2017-06","story_title":"The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less","text":"The reason you feel sick is because you're body isn't used to the shift from carbohydrates for energy and ketones as energy (body fat). You get brain fog because only fat in the form of ketones can cross the blood brain barrier. So adaptation to ketones are vital. You need to work into it. No different from exercise, or climate adaptation. Having cold showers shifts your body into using ketones more and more. Regarding not eating breakfast, watch these videos from FoundMyFitness: Dr. Satchin Panda on Time-Restricted Feeding and Its Effects on Obesity, Muscle Mass and Heart Health [VIDEO] Ruth Patterson, Ph.D. on Time-Restricted Eating in Humans & Breast Cancer Prevention [LINK] Time restricted eating, AKA your 16/8, is VERY important. Even if you don't immediately notice changes. Those changes could begin to occur 2 to 8 years later. Depending on adherence. Also based on Dr. Ruth Patterson's advice, skipping breakfast leads to eating late into the night, which is not good for your health generally.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18007596,"author":"bodhibyte","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Molecule produced during fasting has anti-aging effect on vascular system","text":"I'm on a day 4 of a water-only fast and have completed a two-week medically supervised fast as well as many other shorter fast. As an anecdote, I can say water-only fasting in combination with a high nutrient density plant-based diet has helped me overcome some serious allergies and other health conditions. As an added bonus, I've lost 65 pounds from my peak weight over the last few years and my weight has been stable. It's not a panacea, but I've found it to be a net benefit. For those interested in a deeper dive on the benefits of water-only fasting and diets that try to mimic its benefits, as well as time-restricted feeding, see: Valter Longo, Ph.D. on Fasting-Mimicking Diet & Fasting for Longevity, Cancer & Multiple Sclerosis [1] Dr. Valter Longo on Resetting Autoimmunity and Rejuvenating Systems with Prolonged Fasting & the FMD [2] Dr. Satchin Panda on Time-Restricted Feeding and Its Effects on Obesity, Muscle Mass & Heart Health [3] Dr. Satchin Panda on Practical Implementation of Time-Restricted Eating & Shift Work Strategies [4] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] [4] [LINK] [Edit to fix typos and formatting]","stance":"rec"}],"-VsmF9m_Nt8":[{"hn_comment_id":29452047,"author":"SavantIdiot","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Fakelish \u2013 Fake English word generator","text":"Speaking of gibberish english: I know this has been on YouTube for 10 years, but there are always newcomers who haven't had their brain melted by it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13070015,"author":"sangnoir","month":"2016-11","story_title":"How to Master an Accent","text":"There's a fantastic English-sounding song by an italian singer [VIDEO] Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adriano Celentano. It hurts my brain when I try to pick out meaning from the phenomes.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19759026,"author":"Andrex","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Name one thing in this photo","text":"The song \"Prisencolinensinainciusol\" has a similar effect: it's meant to sound exactly like American English to non-native speakers, but is actually just gibberish. Works amazingly well. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29343344,"author":"Izkata","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Walmart pulls children's toy that swears and sings in Polish about doing cocaine","text":"For anyone who hasn't seen it before, here's a song by an Italian composer made to sound like American English, but since it only uses nonsense even English speakers can get a bit of a feel for what we sound like to others: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33149046,"author":"dr_dshiv","month":"2022-10","story_title":"How Wes Anderson Turned The New Yorker Into \u201cThe French Dispatch\u201d","text":"I love foreign fantasy representations of America. My favorite is the Italian music video of a high school class where they sing in made up English. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39822471,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Fans quitting Spotify to save their love of music (2022)","text":"I call your mis-understood English song, and raise you one song purposefully written to use fake-English sounding 'words': > The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, however the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words \"all right\".[8][9] Andrew Khan, writing in The Guardian, later described the sound as reminiscent of Bob Dylan's output from the 1980s.[9] > Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers. The intent was to demonstrate how English sounds to people who do not understand the language proficiently. \"Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang\u2014which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian\u2014I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything.\"[6] * [LINK] * Audio-only: [LINK] * M/V: [VIDEO] Quite catchy.","stance":"rec"}],"-ZSli7QW4rg":[{"hn_comment_id":7205532,"author":"justincormack","month":"2014-02","story_title":"The GNU C Library version 2.19 is now available","text":"The glibc team are great people to work with; I managed to get a patch into this release which had been point blank refused by Ulrich Drepper when he was maintainer, and they were incredibly helpful and the process was really easy. So get your fixes in - glibc is becoming much more standards compliant. Assholes will ruin your project[1], you need to get rid of them, whether it is open source or not. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37506138,"author":"Modified3019","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Don't Use Discord as a Forum","text":"Good call. A good video related to this: \"Assholes Are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk)\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-ZXrJRpA0Jw":[{"hn_comment_id":37652900,"author":"pests","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Show HN: E-Ink Day Schedule","text":"LTT just did a video[1] on an 25inch E-Ink display[2] that runs at 15Hz. It worked way better than I thought it would and is a pretty decent size. Little pricey. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40921890,"author":"jrmg","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Daylight eInk Computer","text":"\u2018Quite high\u2019 is still not what you\u2019d think of as \u2018quite high\u2019 if you\u2019d never experienced earlier versions of eink though. LTT on YouTube has some video reviews of Dasung\u2019s displays. I know tastes vary when it comes to LTT - and they focus on some ridiculous things in the reviews (Can you game on them? Obviously, no.) but if you get past that I do think the videos do a a good job of showing how the monitors feel. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"-ZxPhDC-r3w":[{"hn_comment_id":21472073,"author":"onion2k","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Demoscene guidebook (2018)","text":"I've followed the demoscene for nearly three decades, and the demos get put out every year have always been hugely impressive. The old Amiga stuff like Technological Death was great but the more modern demos like Intrinsic Gravity by Still ( [VIDEO] ) are just amazing . You can get pretty far making demo effects in CSS and JS these days. A couple of my attempts over on Codepen; Text flash - [LINK] (Warning: flashing images) Bitmap text wobble scroller - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37624404,"author":"pierrec","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Sesame Street \u2013 Count to 12 [video]","text":"That's amazing and I'm now wondering if it influenced the demoscene. In fact I'm specifically thinking of \"Intrinsic Gravity\" by Still, which has fairly similar concepts going on, especially at the end. It's also one of the best executable demos I've ever seen. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47571674,"author":"onion2k","month":"2026-03","story_title":"The curious case of retro demo scene graphics","text":"I grew up in the era of the Amiga and got into computing in some part due to demoes like Technological Death and Unreal. Not sure if 10 years is too new to be considered 'retro', but \"Intrinsic Gravity\" by Still is my favourite demo ever. It's lots of different scenes that transition beautifully from one to another: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21477131,"author":"n3k5","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Demoscene guidebook (2018)","text":"> Intrinsic Gravity by Still This one is fun to watch on a 3D display. (As much of it is black & white, anaglyph should also be worth a shot.) Most of the effects could have plausibly been rasterised or blitted into a flat plane; alternatively, all of it could be done in a pixel shader which just colours in two triangles that fill the screen. But (as I discovered to my delight one day when I happened to have access to a Windows machine with a 3D monitor) it's all 3D geometry with a perspective projection. For example, the wibbly-wobbly cone[0], viewed in 2D, could just as well be a flat bunch of sinusoidally gyrating discs all XORed together. But these discs are properly stacked along the Z axis. The demo doesn't natively support stereo displays, so you have to find a tool that can inject itself into the graphics pipeline and modify the projection matrix for each eye. I don't remember which one I used when I tried that, but it had a nifty feature you should seek out: Hotkeys that let you adjust the mapping of depth to the stereoscopic shenanigans (separation and convergence) on the fly. Being able to make such tweaks on a scene-by-scene basis helps a lot with a production that was only designed for cyclops mode originally. The same technique can be applied to many PC demos, but usually it only amplifies a 3D effect that was already there in the first place. In the case of Intrinsic Gravity, it gives you an extra dimension of ' whoa '. Bonus recommendation for those who can't ","stance":"rec"}],"-_aL9V0JsQQ":[{"hn_comment_id":36306165,"author":"lvturner","month":"2023-06","story_title":"","text":"There's a great interview with Eben Upton that explains a lot of this, including what \"Business customers\" actually are (i.e. mostly mom and pop style enterprises) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36925745,"author":"PointedDreams","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Tell HN: Digikey has 1822 Pi4 8GB in stock","text":"This interview with one of the founders from Jeff Geerling was quite insightful, definitely check it out if you haven't already! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-bYAQ-ZZtEU":[{"hn_comment_id":13431732,"author":"sean_patel","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Iceland knows how to stop teen substance abuse","text":"wallethub.com link? Really? Ever heard of Astroturfing? The Big Tobacco and Vaping Lobbyists have tons of \"blog posts\" and \"research\" news that \"debunk\" all the bad things about Vaping and Smoking. Required Viewing: Astroturf and manipulation of media messages | Sharyl Attkisson | TEDx [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13432863,"author":"sean_patel","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Too much sitting, too little exercise may accelerate biological aging","text":"> Every year there's a study that contradicts the last one. That's from Astroturfing by <_INSERT_INDUSTRY_LOBBY_NAME_HERE_> Every time a real study with facts comes out saying X_____ is bad for you, the Corporations and Special Interest Lobbyists working on behalf of X____ will astroturf the media with \"No really, X____ is good for you\" X_____ = Coffee, Diary, Wine, Eggs, Wheat, Soy, Stevia, ..... you get the idea. Required Viewing: Astroturf and manipulation of media messages | Sharyl Attkisson | TEDx => [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13162839,"author":"mrschwabe","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Great online forums?","text":"Yes an astroturfer aka shill I would personally define as someone portraying themselves to be a neutral observer/participant when in reality they are paid/sponsored/incentivized by a state, company, or organization pushing a specific agenda. They are intentionally planted to deceive, distort and sway those unsuspecting of such activity. There is an excellent TED talk [0] on the subject. The problem is rampant and while not new, the recent election cycle has highlighted it greatly. Propaganda does not spread just from 'fake news' or a heavily biased corporate media. It is co-ordinated & perpetuated online. The links and comments on Reddit and HN are prime mediums to infiltrate and carry this out. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17633735,"author":"Jerry2","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Jonathan Albright, a Digital Sleuth Exposing Fake News","text":"I posted this before but after reading about all this \"fake news\" phenomena, I came across this TEDx talk by Sharyl Attkisson: \"How Real Is Fake News?\" [1]. She's a former reporter for CBS News and in the video, she explains where the term comes from, who's behind it and what the long-term consequences are. If you have 10 min of free time, give it a watch. She also gave another amazing talk on corporate astroturfing and media manipulation [2]: \"Astroturf and manipulation of media messages\" [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-bpX8YvNg6Y":[{"hn_comment_id":21937143,"author":"dwyerm","month":"2020-01","story_title":"BusKill: A kill cord for your laptop","text":"Highly recommended by me, too: Zoz at DefCon 23, entitled \"And That's How I Lost My Other Eye...Explorations in Data Destruction\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12363949,"author":"open_bear","month":"2016-08","story_title":"WhatsApp is going to share your phone number with Facebook","text":"Take a look at this talk from DEF CON 23 on what it takes to safely destroy HDDs (spoiler: even explosions don't quite cut it): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-cEn_83zRFw":[{"hn_comment_id":41766878,"author":"faizshah","month":"2024-10","story_title":"What's New in Ruby on Rails 8","text":"I highly recommend you watch the first half hour of DHH Rails World talk on Rails 8 even if you aren\u2019t a Ruby dev: [VIDEO] The idea of Rails 8 is to move away from trend following and try to reject some of the ideas that have become popular in the industry (like being afraid to touch a Linux server or implementing your own auth). Really though provoking stuff.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41884313,"author":"GreenWatermelon","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations","text":"Far too late for the edit window, but the keynote[1] is an absolute must-watch for anyone who does anything related to web development [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41739137,"author":"fileeditview","month":"2024-10","story_title":"I got everything off the cloud and am paying less","text":"> I wonder if there is some major propaganda push on HN to discourage actual software engineers from ever running their servers. Judging from the comments in this and similar posts, sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. AWS and GCP free credits have created a generation of developers that think running a webserver, a webapp and a database is rocket science, and when stuff breaks the whole company might go bankrupt because no one could ever save a corrupted database. Related to this observation you really should watch DHHs keynote talk at Rails World 2024 from about minute 20 to 30: [VIDEO] He addresses exactly this phenomenon. EDIT: changed URL to include timestamp to the start of the relevant content.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42107820,"author":"tomhallett","month":"2024-11","story_title":"SST: Container Support","text":"Context for people who might not get the joke/parody: SST adding containers to their stack might be viewed as a \"betryal\" in a similar way to how some basketball fans felt when LeBron James switched teams, from Cleveland Cavaliers to Miami Heat. LeBron had a media event/interview called \"The Decision\" [1]. I love the clip of @dhh's keynote to engineer's \"learned helplessness\" to AWS and the cloud [2]. While SST + containers is very very different than DHH's Kamal [3], they both embrace containers without the paas service tax (heroku/vercel/etc) or the overhead of kubernetes. 1: [LINK] 2: [VIDEO] 3: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42306970,"author":"Mystery-Machine","month":"2024-12","story_title":"1Password joins the Rails Foundation: Strengthening the community, developers","text":"This is amazing for the Rails ecosystem! Rails has been slowly dying, or at least it felt like that. It was like \"Punk is not dead\" (which it totally is)...dying slowly. Then there were some controversial decisions made about the future of Rails: no build, moving away from TypeScript, etc. These moves were controversial and risky, but seems like they paid off! And then DHH had a great keynote on the latest Rails World... [VIDEO] We're back baby!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42562612,"author":"trevorhinesley","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Lightstorm: Minimalistic Ruby Compiler","text":"That\u2019s one of the beautiful things about the massive Ruby ecosystem: the answer to that question is almost always yes, regardless of your need. I\u2019m not sure what your line of work is, but if you\u2019re doing web dev, check this out for a great primer on the current state of things (Rails 8 + Hotwire): [VIDEO] If you\u2019d prefer just some straight Ruby resources, Ruby Warrior is (or was, been a while since I\u2019ve used it but it appears actively maintained still) a fun intro: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"-epPf7D8oMk":[{"hn_comment_id":34270779,"author":"ararar","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Cost of Cheap TVs","text":"Just get a \"display\". See [VIDEO] where Jeff Geerling talks about how great a TV his non-TV is. He has an NEC UHD Professional Display M551. He gets to control the software on the embedded Raspberry Pi. It's about $1700 but I think it's worth it. Product link [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35374978,"author":"modriano","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Streaming company Roku to lay off 6% workforce","text":"A recent Jeff Geerling video dug into this subject. [0]. Sharp NEC [1] makes and sells TVs without any \"smart\" junk (they're mainly aimed at being 24/7 monitors/displays in businesses). They're significantly more expensive than consumer TVs, but part of that is likely to accommodate 24/7 usage. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"-f-CFQxaUY4":[{"hn_comment_id":30587185,"author":"loudtieblahblah","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Vitamin D supplements lower risk of autoimmune disease, researchers say","text":"Before people get all excited... Prescription strength EPA can cause heart arrhythmia once you start crawling above 4g a day. No idea if it can happen at doses lower. [LINK] I still think 1G-2G of fish oil, with more of a lean to EPA, is probably beneficial over the long run. I, personally, take about 1-1.5G a day of a third-party tested brand but only do so 4 days a week. I give myself a break from supplements over Fri-Sun. Here's a fantastic talk between Dr Rhonda Patrick and Dr. Bill Harris. From the YT Description, he is the author of more than 300 scientific papers on fatty acids and health. He is a professor in the Department of Medicine in the Samford School of Medicine at the University of South Dakota, the co-inventor of the Omega-3 Index, founder of OmegaQuant Analytics, and president and founder of the Fatty Acid Research Institute. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32223397,"author":"lambdaba","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ancient Siberian dogs relied on humans for seafood diets","text":"I learned a lot here, but I'm not able to restitute it accurately now: [Dr. Bill Harris on the Omega-3 Index: Increasing Omega-3 to Promote Longevity & Transform Health ]( [VIDEO] ). From this and other sources, I can summarize an answer as this: omega-3s in large enough doses, doses rarely used in studies, and especially EPA, is extremely good at reducing inflammation (see \"resolvins\" and EPA), is a good natural blood thinner and improves blood lipids. The doctor interviewed above thinks that the reduction of inflammation is the main benefit. This finding stuck with me: smokers with a good level of omega-3s had the same risk of death in a 10 year period than non-smokers with low omega-3s. Re: ratios and food sources; of course there are. Seafood often has almost exclusively omega-3s as far as I'm aware, though I'm sure this doesn't apply to farm-raised salmon, for instance. Re: conversion rate from ALA, I couldn't find good references initially, but I've found someone citing a \"0.5-20%\" range for conversion of ALA to EPA/DHA (and I think the conversion to DHA is even lower, or there was some additional caveat). So that's the point, there is a wide variance.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32366890,"author":"DiabloD3","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Longevity for your parents, what to do?","text":"The NMN research didn't pan out in the end, just throwing that out here. There is something involved in NMN, but taking it (or any of the precursors or metabolites) alone doesn't actually seem to reliably cause what they were looking for. Most likely, it's something like the curcumin vs ground turmeric issue (curcumin doesn't work alone, it combines with another chemical found in turmeric to produce the active chemical, and none of the curcumin supplements work), or with glucoraphanin and myrosinase to produce sulforaphane (popularized by Dr Rhonda Patrick; sulforaphane is short lived, and you need to package them correctly to not self-react in a supplement while it's sitting there on a shelf, so the delivery mechanism is the hard part), or with the flavor of garlic, allicin, another short lived chemical produced by alliin and alliinase (which is why crushing garlic is important instead of slicing, and ground garlic and factory produced minced garlic will never have that magical flavor). Also, as for Omega 3, watch [VIDEO] Dr Rhonda Patrick interviews Dr Bill Harris; the main take away from this isn't that it works (we all know that already), it's what the dose range is: we're all underdosing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33853735,"author":"LinuxBender","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Omega-3 supplements don't provide as much benefits as it claimed on the internet","text":"If interesting in Omega-3 benefits, I would suggest watching this video with Dr. Rhonda Patrick and Dr. Bill Harris who has researched fatty acids for over 40 years. [1] [1] - [VIDEO] [video]","stance":"rec"}],"-fny99f8amM":[{"hn_comment_id":13263201,"author":"mcphilip","month":"2016-12","story_title":"A bigger problem than ISIS: The Mosul Dam is failing","text":"No joke, just finished watching HyperNormalisation[1]. The most depressing part to me is that Adam Curtis isn't off on an easily dismissed tangent in this documentary, he's essentially cross cut the last 40 years into a 3 hour cliff notes guide to some of the darker corners of postmodern philosophy. Specifically, Baudrillard. His 2002 essay, The Violence of the Global[2] has some interesting food for thought: >We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression. HyperNormalism is bleak and offers no solutions for course correcting international affairs, and there's the rub: universal solutions may not exist. For me, my mind's left reeling by the complexity of the times, leaving me at a loss for how to integrate information from sources like Baudrillard into my worldview guiding day-to-day behavior. My typical response is a hyperlocal focus on the people around me in meatspace and trying to at least get the basics right like t","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13350220,"author":"alistproducer2","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Will automation generate social massive protests?","text":"Hypernormalisation is an awesome documentary that actually covers this subject. If you've got a couple hours to kill I highly recommend it. It can be watched on youtube [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18086481,"author":"bartcobain","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"Hypernormalisation from Adam Curtis. I have been looking for another documentary as visual appealing, as evolving as this one but haven't found any other documentary. [VIDEO] Do you know another documentary as good as this one?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24467447,"author":"onion2k","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Do We Have Victorians to Thank for Consumerism?","text":"Adam Curtis is a brilliant film maker. \"Hypernormalisation\" ( [VIDEO] ) and \"Bitter Lake\" ( [LINK] ) are well worth watching too.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13167568,"author":"krenoten","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Leonardo Da Vinci Lost Drawing Discovered","text":"There's a great documentary about this by Adam Curtis called [HyperNormalisation]( [VIDEO] ), discussing how truth is seriously under fire right now.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24968987,"author":"m_ke","month":"2020-11","story_title":"South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes","text":"I recommend watching Adam Curtis' documentary called Hypernormalisation to get a sense of how badly this can get abused by political operatives. Especially this clip: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-gGLvg0n-uY":[{"hn_comment_id":44150911,"author":"aleph_minus_one","month":"2025-06","story_title":"The Future of Comments Is Lies, I Guess","text":"> I think that, ultimately, systems that humans use to interact on the internet will have to ditch anonymity. Relevant meme video (which watching is in my opinion worth your time): Raiden Warned About AI Censorship - MGS2 Codec Call (2023 Version) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44954276,"author":"normalaccess","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Porn censorship is going to destroy the internet","text":"Correct, and it's to put the genii back in the bottle so to speak. Great video on how AI is being actively used to break the internet. Cause a problem, provide the solution. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49265047,"author":"normalaccess","month":"2026-08","story_title":"How Claude marks AI-generated content","text":"This is a meme video but I think it hits the nail on the head. TLDR: AI will force global online digital ID for everyone that uses the internet for the exact reason you mentioned. And that would forever change free speech forever allowing the powers that be to put the genie \"back in the bottle\" so to speak. link: Raiden Warned About AI Censorship - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-gPuH1yeZ08":[{"hn_comment_id":35358013,"author":"jonnycat","month":"2023-03","story_title":"","text":"A tangent from the point of the post, but Komar & Melamid did a similar \"experiment\" with music to produce both the most wanted and most unwanted songs, and the results are amazing/hilarious. The most unwanted song, for example, features all the thing people dislike in music (according to their surveys): opera singers rapping about cowboys, bagpipes, uncomfortably slow tempos, and choirs of children singing ad jingles among other things. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42141817,"author":"endgame","month":"2024-11","story_title":"An oral history of \"We Built This City,\" the worst song of all time (2016)","text":"I know your description includes \"still get regular radio play\", but one of my favourite pieces of troll music is \"The Most Unwanted Song\". They surveyed people to find the things they liked least in music and put it all together. I don't want to spoil just how creatively awful it is or what's in there, so I'll just drop the link and go. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-gYb5GUs0dM":[{"hn_comment_id":5543233,"author":"plasma","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine?","text":"Thought the OP meant the actual 3D game engine in Excel 97. Check out [VIDEO] One of the last easter eggs!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42028767,"author":"bigjump","month":"2024-11","story_title":"'I grew up with it': readers on the enduring appeal of Microsoft Excel","text":"The flight sim Easter egg baked into Excel 97 got me hooked! [VIDEO] Warning - this video shows Clippy, the very irritating paperclip!","stance":"rec"}],"-hCimLnIsDA":[{"hn_comment_id":6503567,"author":"computer","month":"2013-10","story_title":"How to Corrupt an SQLite Database File","text":"See this 3 minute presentation fragment about the \"Do not use JSLint for Evil\" license clause: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14864330,"author":"SonOfLilit","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Software licensing excluding military use?","text":"David Crockford puts a \"don't use this for evil\" clause in the license for all software he releases, creating some interesting situations: [VIDEO] (2:44 and worth it)","stance":"rec"}],"-hxX_Q5CnaA":[{"hn_comment_id":3049571,"author":"jonknee","month":"2011-09","story_title":"Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet","text":"> Bezos looked awkward and nervous Sounds about like every time I've heard him speak. He probably let out some really loud laughs too. Remember his welcome video to Zappos employees? It was a paper based presentation (giant sheets!) where among other things he explained mistakes he and Amazon made and then shared \"everything I know\". He's awkward at moments, but authentic throughout. I like his style. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3233169,"author":"gabaix","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think","text":"I always remember Jeff Bezos' 3 lessons: obsess over customers, invent, think long term. [VIDEO] I love the way he unfolds his ideas simply and disrupts markets, one at a time.","stance":"rec"}],"-i6wvix6buI":[{"hn_comment_id":16554202,"author":"carussell","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Backblaze cuts B2 download price in half","text":"Kyle Drake (neocities.org) dedicated an entire talk[1] to this topic, \"High Volume, Bandwidth Heavy Infrastructure on the Cheap\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19620332,"author":"tw20190409mhbcd","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Netlify Dev","text":"The guy who runs the site gave a talk a while back about how crazy cheap it is to host it, and why cloud vendors like Amazon and Google are making suckers out of people. \"High Volume, Bandwidth Heavy Infrastructure On The Cheap\" [VIDEO] And I'm pretty sure he's also cryptocoin-rich, anyway.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25148713,"author":"diggan","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Show HN: Zfs.rent","text":"I agree with charging the \"appropriate amount\", but that's not what AWS and the other hosting providers are offering though. They are offering you a price that is vastly different than what it actually costs. Instead hosts like Hetzner and OVH uses a price closer to the true cost for bandwidth for their users. Take a look at their dedicated hosting and the pricing. I'm not sponsored by either, but I am a happy user of Hetzner. Check out this talk by Kyle Drake that goes more into the details of bandwidth costs: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-iCIZQX9i1A":[{"hn_comment_id":35165894,"author":"4ggr0","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Lidar Reveals 650-Square-Mile Maya Site Hidden Beneath Guatemalan Rain Forest","text":"Miniminuteman is a YouTuber who's currently debunking Graham Hancocks Netflix Series with some humour and guest interviews sprinkled through it. It's the first time I heard about Graham Hancock but it was enough for me to not be able to really take him seriously. His whole shtick seems to be to smear others and portray himself as a victim of \"mainstream archeology\" and just saying things without evidence which could be true if lots of established facts were to simply be ignored. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38304457,"author":"eesmith","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Nature may have helped sculpt the Great Sphinx of Giza","text":"See Miniminuteman's \"I watched ancient apocalypse so you don't have to\" detailed critique (in 4 parts) starting at [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39071480,"author":"roywiggins","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Challenges to the credibility of two recent Netflix documentaries","text":"I found this lengthy, point-by-point takedown of the Ancient Apocalypse thing both entertaining and informative. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40380606,"author":"roywiggins","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Egypt's pyramids may have been built on a long-lost branch of the Nile","text":"If you like video essays, I enjoyed this movie-length debunking of Ancient Apocalypse. tl;dr: The evidence is simply not there, and real archeology is much, much more interesting. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42588974,"author":"hoerensagen","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Laser mapping reveals oldest Amazonian cities, built 2500 years ago (2024)","text":"I think this video is good Ressource on the topic. [VIDEO] Basically Hancock show lots of interesting and fascinating archaeological sites which is great especially since a lot of these are things that most viewers didn't know about before. But sadly he chooses to use these site only to present his theory for which he's doesn't have any actual evidence.","stance":"rec"}],"-k-V3ESHcfA":[{"hn_comment_id":27030204,"author":"dudus","month":"2021-05","story_title":"The Brazilian Amazon has 'flipped' to become major producer of greenhouse gasses","text":"I blame meat consumption. This video from Mark Rober was eye opening for me. As a meat eater myself I'm convinced that eating meat is unsustainable. It's just a matter of time until we can't keep up with demand and meat will become something only the 1% can afford. [VIDEO] While it's so profitable to burn down forests and grow cattle people will keep doing it. Until there's nothing left .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26049638,"author":"drewg123","month":"2021-02","story_title":"How to lower the price of plant-based meat","text":"The ever growing demand for meat is a leading cause of deforestation. Forests remove far more CO2 than grasslands (think 3 dimensions vs 2 dimensions). Cows require orders of magnitude more land to be devoted to them than plant based food, simply due to the inefficiencies of the sunlight -> plant -> meat -> food production process. If you cut the middle-man out (meat), then the process becomes orders of magnitude more efficient. This reminds me that if by \"better farms with better practices\" you mean free-range type farms, then they are actually far worse for the environment because they are less efficient. Eg, you need more land per pound of meat produced. Cows also produce vast quantities of methane, which is a leading greenhouse gas. The quickest way to slow down global warming would be to cease livestock farming entirely. Watch the documentary \"Cowspiricy\" ( [LINK] ) Or for a shorter view, Mark Rober's \"Feeding Bill Gates Fake Burger (to save the world) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26320249,"author":"drewg123","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald\u2019s, KFC and Pizza Hut","text":"This is the best news I've heard all week. The more widely vegan \"meat\" is available, the more likely it is to be adopted by average people and not just dedicated vegans. Reducing the demand for real beef is probably one of the best things we can do in the short term for the environment, due to the amount of land required for cattle farming, and due to the surprising amount of methane emitted by cattle. (see the documentary \"Cowspiricy\", or Mark Rober's \"Feeding Bill Gates a Fake Burger to save the world: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32609973,"author":"linsomniac","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming","text":"A couple years ago my son and I watched the Mark Rober video \"Feeding a fake burger to Bill Gates to save the world\" [1], and one of the takeaways from that is \"you don't have to go full vegetarian, you can take a step by doing Meatless Mondays\". I don't recall if his video talked about Methane, I do recall it talking about the staggering amount of water that is involved in making meat, and I live in a high plains desert, so water is something on my mind. It's been fun taking small steps. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32963317,"author":"linsomniac","month":"2022-09","story_title":"\u2018I\u2019d rather eat an actual burger\u2019: plant-based meat\u2019s sizzle fizzled in the US","text":"I've been eating more plant based burgers because meat is unsustainable. Carbon emissions from meat are more than all the planes, trains, and automobiles combined. Water required to make 24 hamburgers will fill a pool. Meat is simply an inefficient way of making the calories and proteins we need. I still eat meat, I've just started moving to more plant based products. Mark Rober has a good coverage of this in his video \"Feeding Bill Gates a Fake Burger (to save the world)\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-k3mVnRlQLU":[{"hn_comment_id":12244413,"author":"joshschreuder","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?","text":"I thought I recognised the name... turns out Cliff is the guy from the Numberphile videos who loves klein bottles. He is such an enjoyment to watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24267125,"author":"Balgair","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Being OK with not being extraordinary","text":"Cliff is an amazing person. Just a joy! Every time I see him on Numberphile , my life is made better. [LINK] [VIDEO] P.S. Cliff, we know you're on HN. Please continue being yourself, it seems like a really great person to be!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39159461,"author":"fsckboy","month":"2024-01","story_title":"The KGB, the Computer and Me \u2013 The Cuckoo's Egg Story (1990) [video]","text":"this numberphile/Cliff Stoll video is on a different topic, klein bottles... or maybe more the travelling salesman/knapsack problem, but it's a must see. Cliff is a cool guy (whose geewhiz excitement I can only take in small doses but) he's worth following [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10557774,"author":"newman314","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Cutting a Klein Bottle in Half [video]","text":"You should also watch the related video about how he stores Klein bottles under his house. It's fascinating. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20247333,"author":"jacobolus","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Get an Acme Klein Bottle","text":"To learn about the operation, watch the Numberphile video, \u201cThe man with 1,000 Klein Bottles UNDER his house\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25812813,"author":"garaetjjte","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Running a fake power plant on the internet for a month","text":"Everything this guy does is hilarious and entertaining. See later talk about this event: [LINK] And he drives RC forklift under his house to store Klein bottles he's selling! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35241845,"author":"jacknews","month":"2023-03","story_title":"How a Berkeley Eccentric Beat the Russians \u2013 Then Made Useless, Wondrous Objects","text":"Bah they forgot to mention the best bit. He keeps already-made klein bottles in the crawlspace under his house, and built a remote controlled fpv mini-forklift to retrieve them on demand: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39257511,"author":"superice","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Acme Klein Bottle","text":"If you don't happen to have the time to visit him, here is a playlist of videos Numberphile did on Klein Bottles, his basement warehouse, the intrinsic curvature of pizza, and a whole bunch of other interesting things: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-opBifFfsMY":[{"hn_comment_id":42701093,"author":"nayuki","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Show HN: A blocklist to remove spam and bad websites from search results","text":"Related: Freya Holm\u00e9r - \"Generative AI is a Parasitic Cancer\" [VIDEO] (1h19m54s) [2025-01-02]. She talks at length about how pages of AI-generated nonsense text are cluttering search results on Google and all other search engines.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42974025,"author":"trebeljahr","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you know travel blogs that have animated SVG maps of their travels?","text":"have you seen the Freya Holmer video on generative AI as a parasitic cancer? [VIDEO] Also I love how the internet is \"dead\", yet here we are, on a website with a bunch of humans providing soooo much value that at least corners of the internet still seem very much alive. I wish there were more sites like HN.","stance":"rec"}],"-pKR212H5vQ":[{"hn_comment_id":18498213,"author":"jl","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Autodesk to Acquire PlanGrid (YC W12) to Accelerate Construction Productivity","text":"This is a big deal: this is by far the biggest acquisition of a YC startup with a female founder/CEO. If you want to get an idea of how formidable Tracy Young is, watch her talk at the 2015 Female Founders Conference: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30731549,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Beavers back in London after 400-year absence","text":"Tracy Young advising startup founders to be like beavers (extolling its virtues) is one of the best presentations I've seen: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"-qCKR6wy94U":[{"hn_comment_id":40841557,"author":"pagade","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement","text":"I recently watched these 3 episodes of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Highly recommended. Opioids III: The Sacklers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ( [LINK] ) Opioids II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ( [VIDEO] ) Opioids: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ( [LINK] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22570698,"author":"mattangriffel","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Launch HN: Ophelia (YC W20) \u2013 At-home recovery for opioid addiction","text":"Yes! MAPS has conducted and collected some really great research around psychedelics and their use in the treatment of things like PTSD and addiction. Specifically, Ibogaine Therapy has shown some real promise around drug addiction [1]. Unfortunately, it's going to be quite a while before any psychedelics are FDA-approved. Right now, MDMA and Psilocybin are both in FDA trials (Phase 3 and Phase 2, respectively) but I think Ibogaine is still quite a ways out. Interestingly, in terms of your comment about Ibogaine's use outside of the US: other countries besides the US (and Canada) have not really seen quite the same problem in terms of opioid addiction as we have here in the US. This is mostly due to American pharmaceutical companies historically having been really successful at convincing US doctors to prescribe opioid-based pain medication [2], and due to the fact that pain was added as a 5th vital sign in 2001 by the Joint Commission [3]. That isn't to say that other countries haven't had problems with opioid addiction, but it hasn't generally been at nearly the scale of the problem in the US, and other countries have had varying rates of success with solutions that haven't been possible in the US thus far. [1] [LINK] [2] There's a really great John Oliver segment about this [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29591136,"author":"dstick","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Judge rejects Purdue Pharma's $4.5B opioid settlement","text":"Good. For those that haven't watched them yet, there are 3 John Oliver segments on the subject that will back up the \"Good.\" statement: Opioids [LINK] Opioids II [VIDEO] Opioids III (this one focuses 100% on the Sacklers) [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"-suTmUX4Vbk":[{"hn_comment_id":10048875,"author":"maskull","month":"2015-08","story_title":"The Teflon Toxin","text":"America's Test Kitchen had a nice roundup review of these the other day: [VIDEO] They also have some tips for seasoning them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20915752,"author":"KozmoNau7","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Smoke point of cooking oils","text":"I've tried the flaxseed method, and while the seasoning looked good, it was very fragile. The best method I've found over more than a decade of cooking on cast iron and carbon steel is this one, recommended by Matfer-Bourgeat (who make the best pans IMO) and America's Test Kitchen (at 2:00): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25716126,"author":"iamacyborg","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Chemistry of Cast-Iron Seasoning (2010)","text":"I'm a simple man, I see a post linking to a J. Kenji Lopez-Alt article, I upvote. Another good method is outlined in this America's Test Kitchen video [VIDEO] If you have a friend who runs a Chinese restaurant, you could always try this, too [LINK] I do this regularly and always clean my pan with soap after use.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35413463,"author":"jointpdf","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Compostable fast-food packaging can emit volatile PFAS","text":"Carbon steel is much better than cast iron! It takes some time to build up a nonstick coating (seasoning), but once you do fried eggs will glide around like they\u2019re on ice. I have a Mauviel that I love, but the Matfer Bourgeat is better for eggs because it doesn\u2019t have the steel rivets on the inside of the pan. Both are made in France and cost like $70. This is a solid explainer on carbon steel pans: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-t1_ffaFXao":[{"hn_comment_id":30941374,"author":"Pilottwave","month":"2022-04","story_title":"We\u2019ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute","text":"Lots of comments about his \"arrogance\" but i just see someone passionate, judge for yourself! He has three long interviews on Lex Fridmans youtube channel! I greatly enjoyed watching those those. 1:[Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics]( [LINK] ) 2:[Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe]( [VIDEO] ) 3: [Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality ]( [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38057518,"author":"block_dagger","month":"2023-10","story_title":"The Concept of the Ruliad","text":"Wolfram is always fascinating on Lex even if he goes on a bit too long (it\u2019s Wolfram after all). He talks ruliads in his second appearance: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-whuXHSL1Pg":[{"hn_comment_id":27529408,"author":"paulgb","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Legal expert says Tether and Binance Coin are likely picks for SEC lawsuit","text":"A YouTuber called Coffeezilla had an entertaining video yesterday that I think is one of the most comprehensive (and entertaining) takes on this. It's pretty damning when you look at all the evidence together. [VIDEO] Even in the off-chance that people with a track record of lying about being backed have suddenly gone legitimate, it's a pretty big indictment of the system that it could grow to the size it did while looking incredibly like a scam .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27529420,"author":"_fat_santa","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Legal expert says Tether and Binance Coin are likely picks for SEC lawsuit","text":"Saw a really good YT video[1] on Tether yesterday. Breaks down all the sketchiness. But the problem he mentions in the video is a problem with pretty much all stablecoins, in order to function you must have the proper reserves before generating a token, but inevatably greed kicks in and you start thinking what if you minted coins without the backing. USD pegged stablecoins are basically money printing machines in the hands of whoever runs the project. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27960756,"author":"santamex","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Tether executives said to face criminal probe into bank fraud","text":"This one explains the Tether scam quite nice: [VIDEO] Edit: summary: 8 people founding the tether company, 7 of them with a criminal background. Lying and denying and then admitting after they have no other option. Yeah, seems like a nice company\u2026","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27963747,"author":"arcticbull","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Tether executives said to face criminal probe into bank fraud","text":"I highly recommend the first five Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin podcasts [1] and the (albit a little bit dated) Kalzumeus post [2]. I also really enjoyed the Calacanis podcast with Bitfinex'ed [3] and the Coffeezilla [4]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27967905,"author":"yadaeno","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Tether executives said to face criminal probe into bank fraud","text":"What I don't understand is why major exchanges continue to give tether their customers money when it's not backed by cash? Would an exchange not be incentivised to manage the cash themselves and significantly reduce risk for their customers and business? It seems like huge risk for what looks like a minor convenience. Also, very good video on the history and current state of tether: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34111402,"author":"richbell","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences","text":"> I don\u2019t hold any tether, and I wouldn\u2019t recommend it to others. But the common opinion that Tether is insolvent might be wrong. Tether, as a stable business, is a money printing machine. I\u2019m not sure it\u2019d be worth risking the business and jail time to pump shitcoins I encourage you to watch Coffeezilla's video about Tether. There's lots of shady stuff going on behind the scenes, like them borrowing $383M from Bitfinex and showing that to an auditor to prove they were solvent (~20:00). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45131012,"author":"udev4096","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo","text":"Bullshit. The biggest stable coin, Tether, is pure scam. They are essentially creating money out of nowhere. They were found guilty of massive fraud and were fined $18M [1]. They refuse to get audited by a third-party [2]. The ones that do audit them are just as sketchy as them [3]. I would recommend watching this video to grasp the scope of their fraud [4] [1] - [LINK] [2] - [LINK] [3] - [LINK] [4] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"-zRN7XLCRhc":[{"hn_comment_id":12638187,"author":"Malic","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"grin Here we go... For \"laughing at ourselves\" and oddities of computer languages, there is \"Wat\" by Gary Bernhardt: [LINK] For an opinion on the Sun to Oracle transition, there is \"Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos\" by Bryan M. Cantrill, Joyent. His Larry Ellison rant makes me smile: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13082671,"author":"gbrown_","month":"2016-12","story_title":"\"Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term\"","text":"> not a leaked version of it. It's a fork. If you're interested how it came to be check out this epic talk by Bryan Cantrill [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839529,"author":"antoncohen","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"\"Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos\" by Bryan Cantrill [VIDEO] He starts with a nice history of SunOS and Solaris, goes into open source, then midway through (33:00) he goes into a brutally honest rant against Oracle. Even better is that Oracle was one of the sponsors of the conference.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22544985,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Oracle's history highlights a possible downside to its stance on API copyrights","text":"Whenever I hear Oracle mentioned it reminds me that it's once again time to re-watch the \"Never make the mistake of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison\" rant. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5848931,"author":"insaneirish","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Linux Performance Analysis and Tools","text":"DTrace was deliberately licensed in a way to be incompatible with the Linux kernel. This was commented on directly by Bryan Cantrill on HN [1]. You should also watch his \"Fork Yeah!\" [2] and \"Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns\" [3] talks for full context. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12417017,"author":"TazeTSchnitzel","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice","text":"Oracle killed OpenSolaris. They literally moved Solaris back to being closed-source. With no justification, even, beyond Oracle not liking open-source. Undoing the massive amount of work the Solaris team made in order to open-source it in the first place. There's no more source code releases for Solaris now. Unsurprisingly, almost all the core Solaris team walked. This talk is informative: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15171458,"author":"richard_todd","month":"2017-09","story_title":"The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris","text":"If you are interested, this talk says a lot about what was cool about Solaris, its place in history, the troubles it encountered, and what was wrong with Oracle's approach, leading to little-known open-source forks. [VIDEO] (entitled: Fork yeah! The rise and development of Illumos)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19108460,"author":"TAForObvReasons","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company","text":"The great Scott McNealy quote about Sun really resonated with me: > We kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers and changed computing forever ... and in many ways, it seems like only a \"lifestyle business\" can really prioritize those over core revenue and growth metrics. Bryan Cantrill's discussion is also great: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48991490,"author":"Sammi","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding","text":"You need to listen to what Bryan Cantrill said about his experience at Oracle, before you go there. > What you think of Oracle is even truer than what you think it is: \"Shit mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money\" [VIDEO] > You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0-wB1VY3Nrc":[{"hn_comment_id":23516160,"author":"Orochikaku","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar","text":"A couple of Google Chrome devs talk about the issues surrounding the readability of urls and their security implications and possible solutions in an episode of their podcast[0]. I think they make a compelling argument for hiding most of the url in part to prevent phishing however I do think they should allow this behaviour to be toggled via a flag. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23516951,"author":"AshleysBrain","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs in Chrome 85 address bar","text":"Reading URLs is actually really hard - even for experts. This video covers the problems well: [VIDEO] This is bad for web security, since the registerable domain is the part you have to trust, but it's surprisingly difficult to figure out that part. However I feel a bit uneasy about this since URLs are important and tell you where you are on a website. I prefer Firefox's approach which emphasises the registerable domain in the URL bar and fades out the rest of it, making it easier to spot the important bit. However it's still quite subtle - it could do with being a clearer distinction.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24157805,"author":"davidmurdoch","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Google resumes its attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 86","text":"Jake Archibald (a Googler) presents some decent points on this on the HTTP 203 podcast: [VIDEO] I still don't agree with the removal of URLs, but I do still recommend watching the entire video if you want to get more perspective on the issue (beyond just the conspiracy theories about AMP and control).","stance":"rec"}],"01oeaBb85Xc":[{"hn_comment_id":41591185,"author":"haolez","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Is Tor still safe to use?","text":"Here is an awesome DefCon talk about this topic from the perspective of a darknet vendor. It's amazing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40783889,"author":"vunuxodo","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Law enforcement is spying on Americans' mail, records show","text":"The same person also gave a talk at Defcon: [VIDEO] I'll echo the top Youtube comment here because it fits perfectly: > When the bald dude with a beard on stage introduces an even balder and more bearded dude to talk you know it's gonna be good.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41913122,"author":"thelittleone","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Brazil Arrests 'USDoD' Hacker in FBI Infragard Breach","text":"Sam Bent gave a talk on Darknet opsec in which he recommends what you suggest, regularly changing alias and starting from 0. Quite an interesting talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"03ccxwNssmo":[{"hn_comment_id":38908603,"author":"grumpyfox96","month":"2024-01","story_title":"DIY Book Scanner","text":"There is this classic \u2013 very very impressive but to my knowledge not commercially available and probably never commercialized. 250 pages/min is astounding. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18073825,"author":"ebcode","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Simple Thought Experiment Shows Why We Need Quantum Gravity","text":"Do you happen to know if any of this mysterious researcher's papers might be on the arxiv? And have you looked into automated digitizing machines for your collection? The University of Tokyo seems to have a pretty good one: [VIDEO] :)","stance":"rec"}],"040ejWnFkj0":[{"hn_comment_id":42118193,"author":"panick21_","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Waymo One is now open to all in Los Angeles","text":"Well worth to watch 'Not Just Bikes' new video 'How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)': [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42118425,"author":"drewr","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Waymo One is now open to all in Los Angeles","text":"It's long, but well worth an hour of your time. He even states in the comments that he set out two years ago to make a positive video about AVs: What was most surprising to me was that when I began researching this video (two years ago!) it was going to be about some of the technical challenges that would need to be overcome in order to make self-driving cars a reality, but the conclusion was going to be that ultimately, AVs would be a good thing. By the time I was done researching this topic I was absolutely horrified of our future self-driving dystopia. [VIDEO] The future he illustrates seems mostly plausible, except that it depends on all of the technology functioning flawlessly. I have a hard time believing that streets full of high-speed AVs functioning in perfect synchrony is likely. However, that doesn't change my general agreement with the conclusions he draws in that video and the rest of his channel.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42439799,"author":"k99x55","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Waymo will bring autonomous vehicles to Tokyo","text":"Don't fall on the trap of self-driving cars will make our lives better. They won't. Building cities for people first is what will improve our lives. Watch: How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45575528,"author":"gpm","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Traffic lights with four colors and a new white light are coming","text":"I highly recommend watching the notjustbike video on autonomous vehicles. It outlines a disturbingly plausible path to a dystopia simply by following the lobbying incentives to logical conclusions. This feels like step 0. I'd strongly suggest that if this is coming to somewhere near you, you object, tell your city no, protest, etc. Link to the start of where he starts outlining a path to dystopia (though the first half of the video is informative too) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46996533,"author":"abraxas","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Beginning autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo Driver","text":"I honestly hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going to be a good thing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42118281,"author":"rglullis","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Waymo One is now open to all in Los Angeles","text":"Please, don't. Let's not normalize yet another corporate attempt to privatize urban mobility: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42470201,"author":"CalRobert","month":"2024-12","story_title":"A comparison to Waymo\u2019s auto liability insurance claims at 25M miles","text":"I ride my bike several times a day, and I have very mixed views about Waymo, etc. I care immensely about traffic safety (so much I moved to the Netherlands). If you took the world as it is now and left everything the same except that every car was a waymo and there were no human-driven cars left, I would be ecstatic. Humans are horrible drivers and some of them are downright murderous. If every car were a waymo I could even imagine letting my kids bike to school in the bay (where I used to live), which I wouldn't dream of now. But I think the second-order effects of self driving cars could be terrible. It removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute (exacerbating sprawl), and so far every time there has been a situation where the needs of walkers and cyclists were pitted against the needs of drivers, drivers won. I think the same will happen with self-driving cars, and people will be made to wear beacons just to walk across the street. NotJustBikes discusses this well here [VIDEO] But if we have proper regulation (pretty unlikely I would say) and use things like waymo to stop humans from driving (remember, drivers are the leading killers of children in the US!) that would be great.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42644606,"author":"shinryuu","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Man trapped inside driverless car as it spins in circles","text":"Reminds me of this enlightening video mapping out a possible future where self-driving cars have dominance. [VIDEO] It's very possible that it won't be the utopia it is portrayed to be.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43017343,"author":"okanat","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Tesla Cybertruck Drives Itself into a Pole, Owner Says 'Thank You Tesla'","text":"Allocating dedicated FSD roads is a terrible future. It will basically kill cities. I find myself agreeing with most of the arguments here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43185546,"author":"ahaferburg","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Toyota completes phase 1 construction of futuristic city","text":"> It will have separate roads for autonomous vehicles Not Just Bikes has a video on why that might not be the best idea. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43248152,"author":"rstuart4133","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Amazon\u2019s delivery drones are grounded in College Station, Texas","text":"If that interests you, maybe the question \"how did it get to be like this\" will too. This video is pushing a point down your throat. If you can ignore that at the end it compares Canada's New London to Holland\u2019s Utrecht: [VIDEO] Turns out the choice between \"Middle America Suburbia\" path and the other you describe really is a choice. Some have very deliberately chose one and some equally deliberately have chosen the other. Like you I've nearly always lived in the \"American Suburbia\" style. Like you I literally didn't realise (in fact I would have scoffed at the idea) there were other choices. That was despite the fact I was taught by migrant European teachers, who, when I look back, made it very plain what they thought of the \"American Suburbia\" style of living. Us calmly accepting the extra overheads of longer roads, consequent travel times, power transmission, transport fuel costs, freight and so on just blew them away. It blew me away too once I understood it. Then, again like you, I got live in one of these high density neighbourhoods for a very short while, and experienced the level of social cohesion and the \"big village\" feel of it. Now I think \"wtf? I've been had\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43642339,"author":"nikvaes","month":"2025-04","story_title":"France's new high-speed train has Americans asking: Why can't we have that?","text":"For people who are interested in the question whether self-driving cars are the solution to commuting: an video essay of why self-driving cars are worse for a city than public transport: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43965776,"author":"goda90","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Traffic Fatalities Are a Choice","text":"No pedestrian crossings. No bike lanes. No escape from the noise of thousands of tires going at high speed. No escape from the air pollution of eroding tires and brakes. A vision of that future from a skeptic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44962711,"author":"oblio","month":"2025-08","story_title":"AGENTS.md \u2013 Open format for guiding coding agents","text":"A pessimistic look at self driving cars: [VIDEO] If we end up where the video presents, humans don't deserve technology of any kind.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45151157,"author":"rozab","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features","text":"I recently watched Not Just Bikes' video on the disastrous future side effects of self-driving cars[0]. Of course it made me think about the massive PR push that made us think they were around the corner, but also about the manufactured consent for these technologies in the first place. Right now this kind of discussion is hitting the mainstream with the 'clanker'[1] backlash. I think it's really obvious to a lot of people that the AI push is not organic and is not based around consumer needs, and this manipulation is making people genuinely angry[2] (ok jreg is a performance artist, but just because something is performative doesn't mean it's not real). [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47111439,"author":"catsquirrel28","month":"2026-02","story_title":"New York Just Killed Its Robotaxi Plan. The Real Problem Isn't the Technology","text":"> Imagine the conversation New York legislators could have had if every robotaxi ride generated a cryptographically signed, tamper-evident record of the vehicle's behavior \u2014 independently verifiable by any regulator, auditor, or safety agency. This is putting the cart before the horse. The problem with autonomous vehicles is that there's no standardized third party test suite to validate and certify ahead of time and periodically that the vehicles are capable of behaving correctly in all road conditions even with their sensors degraded as will happen over time. This kind of validation should be done by the state or a neutral third party like UL in the US before a single vehicle is allowed on public roads. Without it they're just unleashing multi-ton weapons on the streets with no guarantee they'll perform adequately. The problems with this were evident in SF when the blackout happened and the Waymos clogged up the roadways. If that happens during a real emergency and blocks the roadways it could result in thousands of deaths. Autonomous vehicles are a bad idea anyway for the reasons in this video[1]. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49175547,"author":"culi","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Waymo \u2013 Dallas Open to All","text":"This urbanist youtuber did a really in-depth video on what the future could look like (both good and ugly effects) if self-driving cars become enough of a success to affect the way we build infrastructure [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"04ERSb06dOg":[{"hn_comment_id":21976811,"author":"ben509","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error","text":"Things are conserved when there's a corresponding symmetry; this is Noether's Theorem.[1] I won't pretend to understand half that article, but here's a video[2] on it. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27227196,"author":"tzs","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Physicists identify the engine powering black hole energy beams","text":"I'd recommend the two episodes released right before the one about the black hole information paradox too. They set up for what is covered in the information paradox episode. \"Why Quantum Information is Never Destroyed\" - [LINK] \"What Survives Inside A Black Hole?\" - [LINK] Maybe the episode before those two also. I vaguely recall that something from the information paradox episode used something from that (and if I'm misremembering, it was still a neat episode): \"Noether's Theorem and The Symmetries of Reality\" - [VIDEO] I have a question about the episodes you cited. They cover how beyond the event horizon space becomes time and time becomes space. They go over how that means that inside you can't go backwards in space for the same reason that out here in the normal universe you can't go backwards in time. You are doomed to only go forward, which inside means toward the singularity. (Much better than the ridiculous analogy often given that you can't get out of a black hole because the escape velocity equals or exceeds the speed of light. That's a ridiculous analogy because it only explains why you can't get out ballistically). But all their explanations used a simplified black hole in a spacetime with just 1 space dimension and 1 time dimension. We've actually got 3 space dimension. Does that mean that in a real block hole past the event horizon, you end up in a spacetime with 3 time dimensions and 1 space dimension? If so, does anything interesting happen due to having mor","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32400037,"author":"michelpp","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Noether's Theorem in a Nutshell (2020)","text":"PBS Space Time has done a couple of episodes on Stationary Action and Noether's Theorem that are approachable by those not yet already exposed to Langrangians: [LINK] [VIDEO] Sabine Hossenfelder also has a good episode on it: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35224004,"author":"psychphysic","month":"2023-03","story_title":"The little-known story behind the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics","text":"If you like reading about Wu from a woman in physics hidden in plain sight aspect you might like the story of Emmy Noether[0]. A mathematician who worked a few doors down from Einstein and produced era defining result in physics. The connection between symmetry and conservation. Noether's theorem to this day is one of the most profound holy shit moments in many physicists education. Her life was been cut tragically short. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42989129,"author":"twiceaday","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Noether's Theorem Revolutionized Physics","text":"TLDR: Do an experiment, then move 10 meters to the left (or rotate 90 degrees, or wait a few days) and do it again. The results don\u2019t change, because the laws of physics don\u2019t change. This realization alone is enough to produce conservation laws. Translational and rotational symmetries produce conservation of linear and angular momentum, and the time symmetry produces conservation of energy. Each symmetry you find leads to new physics. It's such an aha moment. PBS Space Time: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"04Wk9Oi_Fsk":[{"hn_comment_id":8408516,"author":"apaprocki","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Dirty Assembly Tricks in NES Assembly (2013)","text":"2600 programming is alive in the demo scene. This was just created in 2014 and is completely insane: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10998500,"author":"unimpressive","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Jailbreak firmware turns cheap digital walkie-talkie into DMR scanning receiver","text":"On that note, this is one of the most impressive demos I've ever seen: [VIDEO] (When you're familiar with what a baseline atari 2600 game looks like, this is just beyond the pale.)","stance":"strong_rec"}],"05WS0WN7zMQ":[{"hn_comment_id":1479180,"author":"ckuehne","month":"2010-07","story_title":"Where does a tree get its mass?","text":"Can't upvote you enough for this. By the way, Feynman also knows the difference \"between knowing the name of something and knowing something\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4967928,"author":"ars","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Half the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong","text":"> Is this something I should try to avoid with my son, or should I encourage it Avoid. I would avoid spending time learning the names of things. Learn the thing itself, but the name tells you very little. Watch this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"069y1MpOkQY":[{"hn_comment_id":15828808,"author":"jasode","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Trying to spark an emotional connection in the commoditized airline market","text":"For some extra background on EasyJet and Ryanair's ability to charge lower prices than Air France and KLM, Wendover has a short 8 minute video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19562677,"author":"pimmen","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Sweden Wants to Revive Europe\u2019s Overnight Trains","text":"Europe has extremely cheap prizes because the big airlines are trying to compete with the budget airlines. The real question is \"why are budget airlines so cheap in Europe (they often cost about a third of what a budget ticket in the US would cost)?\". Well, lots and lots and lots of reasons why. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"06yy88tLWlg":[{"hn_comment_id":19282702,"author":"emsal","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Minimum Viable Personality (2011)","text":"This sort of ties in nicely to the \"WOKE BRANDS\" video[1] that came out recently from H. Bomberguy. It's a bit lengthy but it goes into a very poignant discussion of the problematic underpinnings of brands adopting a particular aspect of a \"personality\", namely a hypocritical social conscience. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38536831,"author":"IntelMiner","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Tesla battle with Swedish unions spreads to Denmark","text":"That's such an incredibly sad world view and misunderstanding of the parasitic nature of capitalism playing both sides for maximum financial gain I'd recommend educating yourself further on the reality of what you're blaming \"the left\" for [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39056689,"author":"moomin","month":"2024-01","story_title":"The quiet death of Ello's big dreams","text":"Honestly think at this point I should recommend hbomberguy\u2019s video on \u201cWoke Brands\u201d. [VIDEO] I\u2019ll appreciate his politics are way to the left of yours and he\u2019s making this point for a left wing audience, but the TL;DR is: a lot of what you\u2019re perceiving as politics here is literally the market economy acting to maximise profit. His perspective is that _left-wing_ people shouldn\u2019t be conned into thinking this is about anything other than profit maximisation.","stance":"rec"}],"07o-TASvIxY":[{"hn_comment_id":12334927,"author":"m0nty","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Guerrilla Bike Lanes in San Francisco","text":"[VIDEO] Anyone just blindly downvoting snovv_crash should check out the video above and any number of other resources, such as this one: [LINK] There are strong feelings on both sides, but many cyclists feel helmets are a distraction from the real issues which make cyclists unsafe: poor road design and unsafe driving. Cycling itself is (counter-intuitively) a very safe activity which looks dangerous; everyone assumes driving and walking are safe but often they are not. Yet nobody seriously proposes helmets for pedestrians or drivers, just cyclists.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12595245,"author":"Dove","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Study Explains Why We Arrest Moms for Putting Kids in Nearly Non-Existent Danger","text":"If this is a new topic to you (I don't mean, you , SturgeonsLaw, as you are clearly familiar with it :) -- I mean the reader), you would do well to consider both sides. I personally find the arguments that bike helmets cause more harm than good persuasive, and a good and thorough introduction may be found here: [LINK] If you would rather watch than read, there's this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"08mwXICY4JM":[{"hn_comment_id":27217393,"author":"robkop","month":"2021-05","story_title":"As Texas Went Dark, the State Paid Natural-Gas Companies to Go Offline","text":"For a really good overview of what happened in Texas I'd highly recommend practical engineering's video. He provides a technical overview of the entire situation that really helps explain why what happened, happened. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48445732,"author":"otterley","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests","text":"Practical Engineering made an outstanding video on this: \"What Really Happened During the Texas Power Grid Outage?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26604956,"author":"why_Mr_Anderson","month":"2021-03","story_title":"EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document","text":"Ok, i'll bite. You know nothing about the operational details of power grid infrastructure in Texas and what lead to the problems encountered. Here is a good video explaining what happened: [VIDEO] Just FYI, Grady from Practical Engineering channel who made the video is a civil engineer. I also recommend his entire series about power grid (well, actually all his videos are great). )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28156192,"author":"rossdavidh","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The Texas Power Grid Is Hanging on by Its Fingernails","text":"So, I've lived in Texas since the late 90's. There are certainly things that need doing. But this is not really a great analysis. A better analysis of the February grid failure is here: [VIDEO] Long story short: 1) the population has gone up a lot, so all infrastructure (traffic, electricity, water, housing, etc.) has had to increase rapidly 2) the mix 10 years ago was a lot of coal and oil, now it is much more natgas, wind, and solar. These can be reliable, but they are very different than coal and oil, and therefore a lot of new lessons have to be learned. 3) a big reason for the surge in renewables is the way the market is designed, which lets them pocket big bonuses at peak demand times. Since this _normally_ is in the summer during the day, this makes solar a lot more competitive financially. Natgas certainly failed in February, but all three of wind, solar, and natgas had big problems, it was just that the natgas and wind were unexpected while the solar was not (in the winter at night). Thus far, the power grid is holding this summer, even though there is all-time record demand. We certainly do need to increase capacity, but that is mostly due to the surge in population, not any huge mismanagement. I'm sure it could be done better, but it's not unusual for record demand and a new mix of sources to put the system through a learning curve.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32218564,"author":"rossdavidh","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Samsung asks for planning permission for 11 fabs in Texas","text":"So, I wouldn't know, because I haven't watched Fox News in many years. The best low-emotion, technically informed analysis of \"Snowpocalypse\" is probably this one from \"Practical Engineering\", made by a San Antonio-based engineer: [VIDEO] The outages were not from any one \"main cause\", except perhaps \"Texas doesn't get cold that often and wasn't ready\". But, wind icing up was certainly one of several major causes, along with natural gas pressure dropping so that natgas-powered electrical plants could not keep operating.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40927862,"author":"cl0ckt0wer","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Lacking official sources, some Texans use Whataburger app to track power outages","text":"This is the natural outcome from their anti-government politics. Any legislation that would increase their reliability is shot down as ideologically \"wrong\". Practical Engineering has a great review of their outage in February 2021: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45690028,"author":"habinero","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region","text":"The power grid absolutely can fail catastrophically and is a lot more fragile than people think. Texas nearly ran into this during their blackout a few years ago -- their grid got within a few minutes of complete failure that would have required a black start which IIRC has never been done. Grady has a good explanation and the writeup is interesting reading too. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"099cHWSbAL8":[{"hn_comment_id":39174669,"author":"bertil","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Why you've never been in a plane crash","text":"When the conference LeadDev happens in London, they often have Nickolas Means give a talk about an aeronautic topic. It\u2019s usually 45 minutes of nail-biting in-depth analysis of a very complicated problem, and ends with a 5 minute rotation to how the lessons from that incident apply to engineering management in general. (You also feel like you could engineer an airplane, but no you can\u2019t: that\u2019s just Nickolas\u2019 talent for explanation that is fooling you. Airplanes are very hard to make.) This is all done in such a smart, seamless, obvious way to deliver a lesson that would make the Brothers Grimm feel cheated. Strongly recommend. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20545260,"author":"nrb","month":"2019-07","story_title":"In a Life-or-Death Crisis, Humility Is Everything","text":"The article does a poor job of explaining how truly incredibly the flight crew of United Airlines Flight 232 performed under crisis; I watched a talk[1] by Nickolas Means recently that goes deeper into the events of that day and the lessons learned. Wikipedia also has a good summary of the NTSB accident report[3]. 1: [VIDEO] 2: [LINK] 3: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24376454,"author":"wp381640","month":"2020-09","story_title":"List of YouTube channels for improving web development and programming skills","text":"This list with no context is bordering on useless. Here are some channels i've watched and enjoyed: 1. interviewing.io - they do tech interviews with big5/6 tech co candidates and step through them: [LINK] 2. CS Dojo - ex-googler who steps through CS topics (data structures, algorithms) at the intermediate level and applications in python + javascript: [LINK] 3. Academind - Heard of tech x and have no idea what it is? Chances are there is a 20-30 min video on this channel explaining it clearly. He also does longer form \"build x app\" videos: [LINK] 4. comma.ai / George Hotz - ML + AI livestreams from geohot: [LINK] 5. Lex Fridman - ML, AI, python and tons of awesome interviews with luminaries: [LINK] 6. Joma Tech - data science, big companies / startups as a dev and some funny vids: [LINK] 7. Wes Bos - decent css explainer vids for whenever you're _how do i align the fucking boxes_ + react / js [LINK] 8. Rect conf - Sophie and Dan's presentations are great: [LINK] 9. Nickolas Means - not a channel but two presentations that are good: 9.1 How to crash a plane : [VIDEO] 9.2 The original skunk works: [LINK] There are tons of shitty tutorial videos and channels to avoid if you just rely on search (the comments are full of what appear to be dev contractors out of their depth begging for solutions)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33988222,"author":"latchkey","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Waymo's collision avoidance testing","text":"I watched this video yesterday which seems really applicable... How to crash an airplane \u2013 Nickolas Means [VIDEO] Reflecting on the video, they don't need to save everyone, but it certainly should be the first time when not everyone dies.","stance":"rec"}],"0BNejY1e9ik":[{"hn_comment_id":31037093,"author":"mosiuerbarso","month":"2022-04","story_title":"5-min breathing workout lowers blood pressure as much as exercise, drugs (2021)","text":"Thanks for this. My pensioner mother came back from the doctors yesterday with a chest infection, on top of this she has mild bronchitis. I've just sent her this exercises as I'm hoping it might improve her lung health. Although i did send her this one which is a bit easier: [VIDEO] But thanks for posting it, I never knew about this method. Just tried it myself and it rocks.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32140198,"author":"hukuuu","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How to get to sleep after an evening workout?","text":"Hi, two suggestions that work for me: 1) The Wim Hof method. How to do it: [LINK] Guided session: [VIDEO] 2) Reveri - self hypnosis app: [LINK] Also, do you get enough sunlight during the day? They say it balances your circadian rythm. Some other resources that might be helpful: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"0CDXJ6bMkMY":[{"hn_comment_id":3284640,"author":"csallen","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining","text":"I haven't read the book that some others have been recommending, but it looks good (I respect a lot of the people who gave it favorable reviews on its website). Aside from that, I'd say you should do some research on others who've successfully followed this path. They exist -- they're just less likely to show up in tech news, which is heavily influenced by investors (who only care about big wins) and bloggers (who only care about big news). Take a look at the early blog posts from Balsamiq's Peldi, anything by Patrick Mackenzie, the Wufoo guys, Gary Vaynerchuck, or anything from the 37Signals guys. This talk by DHH never fails to motivate me: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3850718,"author":"bira","month":"2012-04","story_title":"Show HN: We decided not to apply to YC so we could try Kickstarter","text":"Have you already watched DHH's \"How to Make Money Online\" presentation ( [VIDEO] )? If not, watch it ASAP. If you go down the bootstrapping road, you must have profits coming in, to fund and further the development of your product. Sooner or later you will have to make money and since you don't seem to have a lot of funds laying around, the sooner the better. Moreover, have you validated your idea(s) (included the previous, failed attempts to excute them and build a viable business)? Are you sure that there are enough people out there with the burning desire to throw money at you for this app to make it worth the hustle? (assuming you want to sell your app, which would be the best and most simple way to make money) As PG says, the worst mistake one can make trying to build a company is building something THEY think is NEEDED by their customers and not what the market actually needs. Listen to your audience. Do the people need an iphone app to \"truly define us\"? Creating a kickstarter campaign was a good move, by the response you'll get you'll understand if you are solving a real problem or not. To expose more people to your app (and validate it or not with a wider set of data) you can use an adwords\\facebook voucher and create a campaign (just search for them). Link to your homepage, track how many visitors opt in vs how many of them just land and bounce away, not interested. Ask questions on Answers sites, open threads on forums your ideal customer hangs out, the more eyebal","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25395820,"author":"leelin","month":"2020-12","story_title":"The Rise and Fall of Ambrosia Software (2019)","text":"Reading the ending hits closer to home and made me more sad than expected! Andrew Welch was uneasy about the idea of scaling up, especially when they could survive as they were just fine off their utility products Way back in the day, YC always said not to worry about competitors raising tons of money (not sure if that's still the rec). The 2008 DHH boostrapping talk during Startup School is still one of the most influential videos on my career as a founder. But that path is increasingly less popular! [VIDEO] Lastly, for all the bolo comments out there, I remember the huge transition from modems to school ethernet that made it playable - it was honestly one of the reasons I was looking forward to dorm life!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2611174,"author":"mgl","month":"2011-06","story_title":"10 YouTube Videos Every Entrepreneur Should Watch","text":"Nice collection but this one with David Heinemeier Hansson on bootstrapping a profitable startup is definitely missing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4046539,"author":"AVTizzle","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Workplace experiments: A month to yourself","text":"The other answers aren't wrong, but I think listening to 37Signals Partner DHH from Startup School would speak best: [VIDEO] Almost more than their products, they're known for their very vocal broadcasting against the standard startup focus of investments, valuations, exits, etc... Their books \"Getting Real\" and \"Rework\" represent their bootstrapping, sustainable-business values - they're not timid in speaking out against the nonsense of the modern startup conventional wisdom. Personally, I think it's a very refreshing and empowering voice for entrepreneurs. It's not without controversy though, so dig in to their content for yourself to make your own judgement. (FWIW - \"Getting Real\" is a free PDF out there somewhere. I recommend it, though others may or may not.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6219003,"author":"hello_newman","month":"2013-08","story_title":"The Best Companies Don\u2019t Do Accelerator Programs","text":"\"Not every important idea is a huge world-changing event. Sometimes building a small company that makes a big difference to a small number of people is more important.\" Totally agree. DHH actually gave a talk about this subject at Start-Up School back in 2008. Definitely worth watching [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7982721,"author":"graeme","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Did you get \"never have to work again rich\" through software?","text":"There is more to business than startups. If you can program, then you can bootstrap a \"lifestyle\" business. I don't love that term, but people know what it means. You can make a business that doesn't depend on traction and scale. Find a prosaic need, and serve it. Could start with consulting, or products. Start small, stay small by Rob Walling is an excellent primer, as is the four hour workweek. The latter glosses over how much effort is actually required to make a \"muse\", but the mindset is spot on. I'm currently doing this. I'll never get a $10 million payout, but I've built good revenue streams and have complete freedom of time. And I did it without knowing programming. You've basically got a superpower in the internet world. You can program AND you have a baseline of entrepreneurial knowledge. Just shift out of startup mode. As long as you've got enough money or time that you can work on something new without starving, it's not THAT hard to make a business that gives you freedom. (No guaranteed success, but the odds are significantly better than in a startup. This talk by DHH is a good overview) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34106120,"author":"_448","month":"2022-12","story_title":"I am done. I give up","text":"Cold email is a hit and miss approach. Just go talk to people face to face. Initially it seems like a non-scalable approach but it works wonders. The silicon valley, VC preached mantra of hyper scale is what muddles the minds of most entrepreneurs. Everyone starts thinking of million of users rather than 100s of users. There is a very interesting presentation at YC startup school 2008: [VIDEO] You will recognise the speaker :)","stance":"rec"}],"0GzzFeS5cMc":[{"hn_comment_id":8940734,"author":"zach","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Code, Eval, Play, Loop \u2013 Common Lisp OpenGL Environment","text":"For Clojure enthusiasts, I highly recomment Zach Oakes' environment in the same vein, Nightmod (his Nightcode IDE specialized with his play-clj library). It's an experimental platform that is a tidy, simple way to experience game programming in a functional style. [LINK] Also, here is his presentation on this subject at the last Conj (great talk): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10949523,"author":"ronjouch","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Clojure is for Type B personalities","text":"If you're interested in Clojure, the gist author (Zach Oakes) maintains a few cool projects [1]: - play-clj, a Clojure game library - Nightcode, an IDE for Clojure - Nightweb, an anonymous P2P social network in Clojure and (non-Clojure) - SolidOak, an IDE for Rust Also, his \"Making Games at Runtime with Clojure\" talk [2] is great. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0JDoll8OEFE":[{"hn_comment_id":21147271,"author":"WilliamEdward","month":"2019-10","story_title":"China laying tracks for 1,000km/h maglev trains","text":"[VIDEO] Please, I urge you to watch this. It explains thoroughly why the situation for railroads is very different between China and America. tl;dw: America is more spread out, has better airline control, and less of a political incentive to expand public transport, than China.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18743070,"author":"lunchbreak","month":"2018-12","story_title":"As the U.S. fantasizes, the rest of the world builds new transport system (2017)","text":"Wendover had a good video about China's rail network a while ago. [1] Major points are: 1. China is willing to build loves that aren't self sustainable - whereas the USA isn't (and the US doesn't factor in the social benefits) 2. China's airspace is mostly military - leading to only small flight corridors and therefore significant delays for flights - making trains more reliable 3. China is willing to make train lines that make no sense beyond connecting areas that are not as friendly to the government to areas that are in the hope of increasing government support in those areas [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18743754,"author":"Fricken","month":"2018-12","story_title":"As the U.S. fantasizes, the rest of the world builds new transport system (2017)","text":"Here's a good video summarizing what China has done with high speed rail in a little over a decade: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19074306,"author":"s1mon","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Chinese New Year Is World\u2019s Biggest Human Migration","text":"This Wendover Productions video \"Why China Is so Good at Building Railways\" [VIDEO] also explains a lot about how things have changed recently to make this migration even more possible in China. They've built so much high speed rail in the last decade that they now have more than the rest of the world, combined. Hong Kong to Beijing is under 9 hours, while comparable distances in other parts of the world are over 40 hours.","stance":"rec"}],"0M7IINwTFVw":[{"hn_comment_id":6628082,"author":"jal278","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Discoveries Ten Years Later in Zelda Speedrun","text":"In case my server gets too sluggish, here's the important youtube link: [VIDEO] Basically there's a speedrunner who is technically adept at the game, is a good communicator, and explains as he plays a complex exploit that facilitates skipping a large part of the game","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8890491,"author":"stolio","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Devs Play \u2013 Hacking a Legend of Zelda ROM [video]","text":"In a similar vein are videos from the speed-running community. Linked below is a video of an Ocarina Of Time speed-run where the guy explains a bit of what it's all about. The level of reverse-engineering is impressive. [VIDEO] But this is the first time I've heard of somebody hacking the game to highlight different aspects of the gamelplay, which is pretty cool.","stance":"rec"}],"0MeRN7LE1LQ":[{"hn_comment_id":23518382,"author":"aliceryhl","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Amazon added a non-compete after the employee entered the U.S. on an L1B visa","text":"Just because he has Amazon stocks of that value doesn't mean he can turn all of that into cash. Economics explained has a great video on the various types of billionaires [1], which uses Jeff directly as an example of the lowest class of billionaire. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23801518,"author":"jasode","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Billionaire Musk's net worth zooms past Warren Buffett's","text":"fyi youtube video of why these simplistic comparisons of \"net worth\" based on shares-times-stockprice is meaningless... - The Ranks of Global Billionaires: Not All Billionaires Are Made Equal : [VIDEO] E.g. Theranos owner Elizabeth Holmes once had a \"net worth\" of 4.5 billion (as calculated by Forbes Magazine[1] for attention-grabbing headlines) ... but that doesn't really mean she was actually 2x richer than Dropbox's Drew Houston who's worth ~2 billion. That said, Elon Musk is a bonafide billionaire but the comparison to Buffett via a volatile Tesla stock price is meaningless. [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25781567,"author":"somethoughts","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Bill and Melinda Gates: America\u2019s Top Farmland Owner","text":"Here's a fun video which discusses the phenomenon you're describing. Its a bit click-baity but does provide an overall summary pretty nicely. Economics Explained - The Ranks of Global Billionaires: Not All Billionaires Are Made Equal: [VIDEO] It even covers the oligarchy scenario :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34082063,"author":"bin_bash","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Protocols, Not Platforms","text":"Economics Explained did a great video on the topic of how diversification is a big problem for some billionaires: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0PclgBd6_Zs":[{"hn_comment_id":27048752,"author":"juliangamble","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Forth \u2013 The Early Years (1991)","text":"This talk by Chuck Moore at Strange Loop was amazing [VIDEO] \"Programming a 144-computer chip to minimize power\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30439894,"author":"thesuperbigfrog","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Frugal Computing (2021)","text":"Chuck Moore (creator of Forth [1] ) has a ultra-low power processor that is a fascinating possible solution: [VIDEO] [1] Forth programming language: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33767392,"author":"bugfix-66","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Stack Computers: the new wave (1989) [pdf]","text":"Look at the Green Arrays F18: [LINK] This is such a simple machine. I am planning to make a tiny emulator as a puzzle for my site. One could probably write an emulator in 80 lines of Go. Here's a clear description of what each instruction does: [LINK] Hilariously, the system has no logical OR, only AND and XOR and NOT, because \"Inclusive-or is rarely needed.\" This system was designed by Chuck Moore, father of Forth. Here is an entertaining video of him explaining the F18A stack machine and programming system: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34206018,"author":"bjconlan","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Why did stack-based CPUs lose out?","text":"Isn't this where Mr Moore's (of Forth fame) cpu designs have gone? (see [LINK] ). Ok maybe not the 'actor' model per say (unless actor channels are thought of core interconnects (I think there is also a global state but I cant remember much of these details at the moment without re-watching the linked strangloop vid.) [VIDEO] or [LINK] is probably the best for groking","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36748616,"author":"thesuperbigfrog","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page","text":"Related Chuck Moore talk: \"Programming a 144 Computer Chip to Minimize Power\" (2013) [VIDEO] How Forth powers ultra-low power computers: \"GreenArrays is shipping its 144-core asynchronous chip that needs little energy (7 pJ/inst). Idle cores use no power (100 nW). Active ones (4 mW) run fast (666 Mips), then wait for communication (idle).\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37012998,"author":"LeonenTheDK","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Intel x86 Documentation Has More Pages Than The 6502 Has Transistors (2013)","text":"That reminds me of the Green Arrays computer with 144 cores, programmed in Color Forth. Chuck Moore has a talk on it here, very interesting stuff: [VIDEO] I'm not sure how far this has gone since then. The site is still up with buy links as well: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37026636,"author":"sph","month":"2023-08","story_title":"My history with Forth, and stack machines (2010)","text":"Here's Chuck Moore talking about the 144-core CPUs his startup is developing: [VIDEO] That's an incredible design I would love to get my paws on.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38161283,"author":"thesuperbigfrog","month":"2023-11","story_title":"milliForth","text":"He has recently done some amazing low power work with GreenArrays: \"GreenArrays is shipping its 144-core asynchronous chip that needs little energy (7 pJ/inst). Idle cores use no power (100 nW). Active ones (4 mW) run fast (666 Mips), then wait for communication (idle). Tight coding to minimize instructions executed will minimize power. The programmer can also reduce instruction fetches, transistor switching and duty cycle.\" [VIDEO] It is like the elegance of Forth in low power, multi-core hardware.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40519117,"author":"aeonik","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Bootstrapping a Forth in 40 lines of Lua code","text":"The two Forths that I've had my eye on: [LINK] And the inventor of Forth has a very power efficient multi-computer chip that can be programmed with colorForth or array forth (he claims most power efficient): [LINK] [LINK] Here is a video about the chip, and some cool Forth demos with it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0Pwj6BuS8Ds":[{"hn_comment_id":32267237,"author":"mike10921","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Popcorn Lung: A Dangerous Risk of Flavored E-Cigarettes (2016)","text":"1000% agree. The whole narrative to non-stop discuss vaping as opposed to smoking is being pushed by the super powerful cigarette companies. Vaping MIGHT be harmful to a person but cigarettes are 100% CONFIRMED to be terrible for humans. Anyone who tries to tell me vaping might be worse I send them to this YouTube video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42547368,"author":"rogue7","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Single cigarette takes 20 minutes off life expectancy, study finds","text":"Vaping is way less harmful than smoking. See e.g. the study [0] conducted by Public Health England that concludes vaping is at least 95% (!) less harmful than smoking. See also this video [1] that shows graphically the different impact it has on the lungs. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0Qkyt1wXNlI":[{"hn_comment_id":2351978,"author":"jjcm","month":"2011-03","story_title":"Amazon shuts down Lendle","text":"It's a shame that they did this. I think Neil Gaiman summarized the wonderful benefits of using the web as a lending tool for books. He has a fantastic interview clip regarding his outlooks on piracy of his books that you can view here: [VIDEO] Here's the transcript, emphasis mine: When the web started I used to get really grumpy with people, because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this A.) a belief, which was completely erronious, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn't tell them to take it down you would lose your copyright - which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was [that] places where I was being pirated, particularly Russa where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was facinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took American Gods, a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely fr","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8594625,"author":"Cowicide","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Spotify CEO Responds to Taylor Swift","text":"Agreed, the part where he says, \"... Piracy doesn\u2019t pay artists a penny \u2013 nothing, zilch, zero.\" - I involuntarily muttered, \"Bullshit.\" out loud. He should probably listen to Neil Gaiman's story on how piracy can, indeed, make artists money: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0Rnq1NpHdmw":[{"hn_comment_id":19251127,"author":"idDriven","month":"2019-02","story_title":"YouTube Just Demonetized Anti-Vax Channels","text":"If you're saying that the standard of 'reporting' on health and science in the media at large is often conflicting and distorted into a confusing and often contradictory form there is definitely validity in that. John Oliver has a great segment called 'Scientific Studies' I'll link at the end of this post, everyone should watch this. If you are able to read the journals directly and have studied how to critically evaluate scientific studies I can guarantee that there is significantly, like thousands-fold, more consistent information. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11990496,"author":"dahart","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)","text":"John Oliver did an awesome bit recently on scientific studies and how popular conceptions of them, especially media portrayals, completely distort the results. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13151275,"author":"brudgers","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Suggest HN: Studies based on small sample sizes shouldn't be on HN","text":"Generally, I think scientific studies are uninformative as news because: 1. Most people are not close enough to the science to form an informed technical opinion. 2. The scientific conclusions of most studies are impractical to implement. John Oliver's analysis is both sophisticated and entertaining: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0SARbwvhupQ":[{"hn_comment_id":2489085,"author":"bajsejohannes","month":"2011-04","story_title":"Your taste is why your work disappoints you.","text":"I recommend The Myth of The Genius Programmer: [VIDEO] What you see on Github is people's polished code - you don't see what they are throwing away. They might be better, but you are probably looking at some of the code they are most proud of. (Actually, for my github/bitbucket page this is no longer the case. After I watched this video, I started publishing as much of my code as possible, if it actually did what it was supposed to)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12637602,"author":"oleksiyp","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Google I/O 2009 - The Myth of the Genius Programmer One of the best talks about code reviews and similiar things [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39034779,"author":"sethops1","month":"2024-01","story_title":"FAQ on Leaving Google","text":"Two talks given by Ben Collins-Sussman absolutely changed my career path from being a hot headed programmer to thinking like a professional engineer. The Myth of the Genius Programmer: [VIDEO] The Art of Organizational Manipulation: [LINK] I rewatch these every few years, or before an interview. Puts me back in the right headspace. If you're reading this Ben, thank you.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8272883,"author":"coppolaemilio","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What do you do when you realize you are not a programmer?","text":"\"I hated discussing what OO pattern should be used\" \"they submit patches to major frameworks, writes things in assembly for fun\" You don't have to do this kind of things to be a programmer. Of course discussing OO patterns with your team is a need but submitting patches to major frameworks is on your free time! If every programmer would do so we wouldn't have so many incomplete open software. Try not to be chased by the \"The Myth of the Genius Programmer\" and keep enjoying creating things. A google talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16375282,"author":"maze-le","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Is there no place for people, who are average at something?","text":"Most people are average, thats kind of the meaning of average. I consider myself an average programmer advancing on an average career path and had plenty of recruiters contact me with interesting opportunities recently. Sure its not Google or Facebook, but so what, I wouln't like to work for a mega coorporation like that anyway. If you doubt yourself because you consider yourself average, consider that the constant talk of excellence, highest skilled people and so forth is mostly HR PR bullshit. Sure, there are extremeley talented people out there, but they are pretty rare. Interesting video, that touches the issue: \"The myth of the genius programmer\"[0]. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0UjpmT5noto":[{"hn_comment_id":10439543,"author":"bsimpson","month":"2015-10","story_title":"A debtors\u2019 prison in Mississippi","text":"Here's the John Oliver version of the same story: [VIDEO] (Also, incognito mode is your friend when cookies conspire against you.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10440564,"author":"utefan001","month":"2015-10","story_title":"A debtors\u2019 prison in Mississippi","text":"This is so sad. This has got to stop. (repost from below) bsimpson 2 hours ago Here's the John Oliver version of the same story: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10977593,"author":"kevin_thibedeau","month":"2016-01","story_title":"\u201cNo Cost\u201d License Plate Readers Are Turning Texas Police into Debt Collectors","text":"Even more relevant is his piece on municipal violations and how they can unfairly steamroll the poor with escalating fees. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13761011,"author":"Clubber","month":"2017-03","story_title":"A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows","text":">How much can the government be stealing from you if you have no money? John Oliver did a good breakdown of how municipalities do pretty nasty things when you can't pay your tickets. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23670175,"author":"SuoDuanDao","month":"2020-06","story_title":"My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works","text":"Well, I can give you a simple example. Where I grew up, you'd hear a gunshot every so often. No one paid it any mind - we knew it was the neighbors hunting out of season. Technically a crime. But we all knew they and their children needed the meat. If everyone did it, the deer population would collapse and no one could hunt effectively even in-season. If someone had called a wildlife officer they could have certainly made the trek down. But no one would think to call the wildlife officers on them, because we knew it would lead to their children going hungry. I think the thing people from rich neighbourhoods miss about that sort of thing is that when they hear stories of that nature [1], people's children going hungry over a minor infraction is seen as a failure of empathy on the constabulary's part. It's not. It's a failure of the law, and the constabulary's job is to uphold the law, not play social worker to people who break it. Hence our community's collective judgement that it was in everyone's best interest if the wildlife officer never found out about our neighbor's poaching activities. [1] Joe Oliver has a great rant about a similar situation, lest readers think this only works in rural settings: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0VyH1laOd2M":[{"hn_comment_id":20872183,"author":"JoeyJoJoJunior","month":"2019-09","story_title":"A Town for People with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome","text":"If you think you suffer from CFS please check out Dr. Howard Schubiner and read his book. [VIDEO] I suffered from chronic pain symptoms for almost 10 years (was unable play the piano and type on the keyboard) until I realized it was 100% psychosomatic.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43990929,"author":"wonger_","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Beyond the Wrist: Debugging RSI","text":"The article matches my experience and that of many others. It also mentions some key ideas that I haven't seen in other RSI/pain-epiphany writeups: - It may take a variety of resources to accept the idea that your pain doesn't mean injury (see the first image). Like, you might hear about Sarno's mindbody connection and think it's total quackery because of the language. Maybe it triggers the BS detector in a lot of us. So listen to the same ideas from other perspectives. The author links to Schubiner's talk on chronic pain, which I heartily recommend as the right balance of rigor and tone: [VIDEO] . Curable helped me too: [LINK] . Click through until you get to the audio sections and give them a listen. Testimonials from tech people may help break the old mental model of pain, or at least point convincingly to resources that do. Josh Comeau, the CSS guy, has a post that links to further testimonials: https:www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/mindbody - The second half of healing is calming down the nervous system. The author accomplished this with different therapies, equipped with greater awareness and tools. Others fix their default stress state by leaving the stressful environment, i.e. changing jobs. Either way, the pain goes away. Kudos to the author for presenting everything clearly.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27229428,"author":"rajlego","month":"2021-05","story_title":"The anus is an evolutionary marvel","text":"If you read some of John Sarno's stuff on psychosomatic pain, it seems highly plausible that most pain is just psychosomatic in nature. [VIDEO] good video on this","stance":"rec"}],"0Z4aF-qiziM":[{"hn_comment_id":29316070,"author":"amboar","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Full key extraction of Nvidia TSEC","text":"One of my favourite talks is Decapping Chips the Hard Way by Adam Laurie and Zac Franken: [VIDEO] That was 8 years ago","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7483295,"author":"amckenna","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Depackaging the Nintendo 3DS CPU","text":"There was also a great talk at Defcon 21 (last year) walking through a similar process all the way to using a picture of the ROM and image recognition to pull binary data. The first half is about building the lab to do this kind of work so you can skip the first 1/3 - 1/2 if you don't care about that part. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34211077,"author":"sweetjuly","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Casio-F-91W die-shot","text":"I really like this one Defcon talk on chip decapping [1]. It's a pretty nasty process but absolutely one you can do on your driveway (poor man's fume hood, don't tell the EPA) at home. You can then just use a standard front lit microscope to take die shots. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0bcZb-SsnrA":[{"hn_comment_id":27870440,"author":"btown","month":"2021-07","story_title":"WaveFunctionCollapse: Generates bitmaps that are locally similar to the input","text":"The creator Oskar St\u00e5lberg has a great overview talk of Wave Function Collapse and how he applied it to his previous game Bad North - it\u2019s absolutely worth a watch! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23905574,"author":"pdoub","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Brick Block (2016)","text":"Please note that this is an old demo that has since grown into a full-blown game: [LINK] (Says Windows-only, but has a working Beta for Mac) Here's a talk by Oskar on how generating such worlds work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29405882,"author":"btown","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Townscaper Running in the Browser","text":"And here's another, slightly more technical talk from him about the \"wave function collapse\" algorithm he uses for procedural generation in his games: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34067299,"author":"symmetricsaurus","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm explained clearly","text":"Oskar St\u00e5lberg has famously used WFC in Bad North and Townscaper. Here's a nice presentation from him explaining it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37470363,"author":"Cognitron","month":"2023-09","story_title":"CityDreamer: Compositional Generative Model of Unbounded 3D Cities","text":"Oskar St\u00e5lberg has some great talks on YouTube about how the systems in Bad North and Townscaper work. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"0fKBhvDjuy0":[{"hn_comment_id":30875354,"author":"coastflow","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Show HN: I Made a Stupid Game","text":"To build intuition on scaling, the 1997 \"Powers of Ten\" video is an excellent resource that is still shown in introductory university physics lectures: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46061663,"author":"vee-kay","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth","text":"I think the video I have linked above is Google's tribute to this Power Of Ten video (linked below, thanks to user dtgriscom for sharing the link in another comment), a classic video that demonstrates the scale of the Universe from the micro to the macro perspectives in a scaling increase by a factor of ten for each scene. Power of 10: [VIDEO] Another relevant video (thanks to user christev for sharing the link): A Brief History of Geologic Time: [LINK] Absolutely humbling to realise how infinitesimally small and irrelevant our existence is, in the grand scheme of theme. Nature and science are amazing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10327262,"author":"jacquesm","month":"2015-10","story_title":"The Benefits of a Quiet Ego","text":"The base of that goes back to a very simple realization: On a cosmic scale nothing that we do is of great importance. This planet likely is not as special as we would like to think it is and we are not as special as we like to think we are. We are to the universe as a single bacterium is to us. [VIDEO] Is a nice recap of just how vast the universe really is and how utterly insignificant we are within it, in spite of all we're figured out and have achieved collectively. It certainly humbles me.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17685958,"author":"cam_l","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Google Maps is no longer a flat map","text":"It is, i remember being captivated by this film in the (mid? late?) 90s.. (from the late 70s, pieced together by hand). Never imagined it would be (partly) possible in realtime.. some 10 years later. (eagerly hanging out for orbit view milky way, but probably not in my lifetime) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24884841,"author":"_Microft","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A New Map of All the Particles and Forces","text":"If you don't mind watching a nearly 50 year old video then I can recommend \"Powers of Ten\" [0], attempting to visualize the different scales on which things are happening in the universe we know of. It is a very short video, just 9 minutes long. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29491486,"author":"andosteinmetz","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Show HN: I rebuilt the Flash app \u201cScale of the Universe\u201d in WebGL","text":"For any who haven't seen it, I also recommend Charles & Ray Eaemes' \"Powers of Ten\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29779062,"author":"okhobb","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The Demise of Scientific American","text":"I really liked the Powers of Ten article / film / book originated within SA which certainly doesn't justify any current editorial choices, but is I hope a fun video for anyone who hasn't seen it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35306428,"author":"photochemsyn","month":"2023-03","story_title":"A Bad Trip to Infinity","text":"The 1977 film Powers of Ten is short and simple but gives one a better feeling for what infinity represents (40 orders of magnitude isn't much in contrast to infinity, but is very large): [VIDEO] There's also an hour-long talk by Prof. Raymond Flood on Cantor's Infinities on YT that covers all the mathematical history.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46059800,"author":"yogsototh","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth","text":"I think there are a few movies that made me realize how much the space is vast, empty and adverse to life. I think it would be nice for people to take a look at them: - Aniara (2018) - High Life (2018) and maybe in a less artistic view: - Powers of Ten (1977) yt: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0fKYVl12VTA":[{"hn_comment_id":42586139,"author":"artembugara","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How to learn marketing and sales as a solo entrepreneur?","text":"I\u2019m a YC founder who did 0 to 2M ARR in founder led sales with absolutely 0 sales background. I\u2019m basically a self-learned coder who had to take CEO role, therefore doing sales. I find this video about enterprise sales from Pete Koomen (YC Partner) to be the best summary: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41175398,"author":"jameslk","month":"2024-08","story_title":"The real \"Wolf of Wall Street\" sales script","text":"The attention grabbing and objection handling pieces are discussed in Never Split the Difference, amongst other ways to negotiate a deal. Basically ask lots of what/how questions until the other party negotiates themselves to your position. The rest of the script is just qualification questions, which you can find written about everywhere if you look up BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) and MEDDPICC (Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Paper process, Identify pain, Champion, and Competition). I wish I had a good book recommendation for qualifying, but it\u2019s the easier part of the sales process: you\u2019re just asking questions and listening, setting yourself up for the next stage. Once you know whether the prospect has a problem you can solve, then you launch into the real sale, generally a presentation or demo tailored to the prospect\u2019s problems and goals. YC posted a pretty good, compact video on enterprise SaaS sales recently, which explains the typical sales lifecycle at a high level and contains further resources: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0fpDlAEQio4":[{"hn_comment_id":22401834,"author":"yawaramin","month":"2020-02","story_title":"The Zen of Go","text":"> I've learned many languages including C, Objective C, Java, Python, Ruby, JS, and some Haskell. You've learned basically the same language over and over again: Algol-family imperative-OO-mishmash. Haskell is probably the most unique out of all of them, and I'm inclined to think you haven't gone too far with it. Perhaps you know SQL though and recognize how a relational (roughly, set-oriented) language can work. My point is that I understand that Go offers you some compelling advantages. We're just saying that other languages offer some pretty amazing things too, and they are even better designed (as languages) than Go. Check out this fantastic talk by Scott Wlaschin to get a sampling of truly different language paradigms and how they approach problems: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20321703,"author":"souenzzo","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?","text":"Rust, Go, Julia, Nim are all cruly braced, procedural, mutable, object oriented languages. I think we need languages that bring new paradigms. All that you quoted fail in this respect. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0g9BcZvQbXU":[{"hn_comment_id":23632470,"author":"d0mine","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Text-Only Websites","text":"Org mode supports inline Latex that can be exported to html. Here's a nice demo on how to write tech docs using Emacs and Org mode [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26431380,"author":"spudlyo","month":"2021-03","story_title":"From Vim to Emacs in fourteen days (2015)","text":"I made a video[0] showing off the power of org-babel, which is the part of org that lets you embed dynamic code blocks in your document. In the video I write a little essay[1] on how git stores data that has a lot of dynamic content that is managed by org. It's a bit like reproducible research or literate programming, but for me it's all about writing technical documents that are easy to keep consistent when things change. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28363030,"author":"spudlyo","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The open calendar, task and note space is a mess","text":"Org mode does a lot of different things, but one use case I find interesting is to be able to mix prose and program output in a technical document in a way that keeps things consistent when things change. I made a video[0] a year or so ago that explores Org's literate programming features that I think does a pretty good job of illustrating the power of Org. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43767570,"author":"spudlyo","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run","text":"Thanks for the shout-out! I think org-babel is really well suited for this task, and can make some really great documentation. You can check out the video[0] from the talk and a git repo[1] with a more advanced demonstration. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"0iJZ_QGMLD0":[{"hn_comment_id":17625217,"author":"Sean1708","month":"2018-07","story_title":"First Successful Test of General Relativity Near Supermassive Black Hole","text":"Minute Physics did a good couple of videos on this[0,1], pretty much the same info as is in the Wiki but might be easier to digest for some people. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24176733,"author":"p1mrx","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Fastest star ever seen is moving at 8% the speed of light","text":"These minutephysics videos provide some idea of what's happening: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] (Although the time dilation in Interstellar is due to gravity, not high-speed travel.)","stance":"rec"}],"0ifChJ0nJfM":[{"hn_comment_id":31637408,"author":"djmips","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Source code for 4kb demoscene production \u201cElevated\u201d released (2016)","text":"Thankfully for the graphics the very person who did the graphics in this Elevated demo is very generous with their time. Inigo Quilez has many instructional videos on his channel in how to code procedural graphics from the very beginner to the advanced. I link a couple of examples. You can watch the more advanced video even as a beginner but trying yourself is easier at the beginner level. Beginner. [VIDEO] Advanced. [LINK] Website. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35426780,"author":"joenot443","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Show HN: Unknown Pleasures, a tiny web experiment with WebGL","text":"[LINK] is what I'm talking about. It's not necessarily a from-zero introduction, but it's a nice resource. [VIDEO] is probably the the most beginner friendly. [LINK] is another great place to start. Good luck and enjoy!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42792829,"author":"modernerd","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Dissecting \"Tiny Clouds\" shadertoy (2017)","text":"Yes, but you can learn it! 1. Get inspired, get motivated. Shaders like these are breathtaking (and well-commented): [LINK] 2. Watch \"Learn to paint with mathematics\" to see a simple shader being built gradually: [VIDEO] 3. Work through [LINK] .","stance":"rec"}],"0iz9PJbs5rE":[{"hn_comment_id":29794867,"author":"MegaDeKay","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The Polygons of Another World: Atari Jaguar (2020)","text":"Modern Vintage Gamer just did a video on the programming of Another World on the Amiga with heavy reference to Fabien's work. The Amiga's architecture really shaped the look of the game that was subsequently ported to many platforms (as Fabien documents as well). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38447465,"author":"83457","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Amiga Graphics Archive","text":"A great video about Another World's graphics and the capabilities of the Amiga it took advantage of... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0j0xzuh-6rY":[{"hn_comment_id":35260801,"author":"snozolli","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Kids Are Not Okay","text":"60 Minutes piece on Douyin (domestic users) versus TikTok (foreign users): [VIDEO] tl;dw: Chinese users get more wholesome content, particularly children, along with usage limits.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39800580,"author":"tivert","month":"2024-03","story_title":"India's TikTok Ban Is a Cautionary Tale for the U.S.","text":"> There\u2019s an equivalent called Douyin. Having used neither, I don\u2019t know what\u2019s the difference, if any. Here's a video about the differences: TikTok in China versus the United States | 60 Minutes: [VIDEO] Douyin is much healthier. Chinese children cannot use Douyin for more than 40 min a day, and it promotes positive content like science experiments you can do at home. American kids can use TikTok as much as they want, and so are addicted. I don't use it, but I'm almost certain it doesn't just show prosocial educational content to kids, but mostly mindless entertainment and influencer ads. The result is the most popular career Chinese kids saw they want to grow up to be astronauts, but American kids want to be social media influences.","stance":"rec"}],"0jI-AlWEwYI":[{"hn_comment_id":25538018,"author":"gilmi","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"I don't know, I haven't watched most of them! But the best one I did watch this year was Alexis King's 'Effects for Less' (Haskell). [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24965656,"author":"one-punch","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Names are not type safety","text":"For those who may not be familiar with the Haskell ecosystem, Alexis King (lexi-lambda) writes many blogs and libraries related to Haskell. For example, you may be interested in her recent talk on effect systems in Haskell at ZuriHac 2020,[1] based on the eff library she mainly contributes to.[2] [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] > he's asking you to read the article more carefully she","stance":"rec"}],"0kahih8RT1k":[{"hn_comment_id":31466610,"author":"k__","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?","text":"I was curious about new types of nuclear reactors. But, it turns out they still can't deliver what nuclear proponents claim. Sabine Hossenfelder explains it very well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32992346,"author":"wickedsickeune","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Europe is in danger of rolling electricity shortages","text":"I would recommend that you watch this video: [VIDEO] It's quite well researched, and for someone who was also wondering why there is European aversion towards nuclear power, it showed me that it's not that simple. Nuclear power is quite inconvenient and not as magical \"free energy\" as it seems.","stance":"rec"}],"0lJKucu6HJc":[{"hn_comment_id":21758613,"author":"davej","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Applications Are Now Open for YC Startup School \u2013 Starts in January","text":"I did the very first Startup School and the most recent Startup School. When I did the first Startup School I made a number of mistakes. The most costly was that I didn't launch early enough. When I did eventually launch my product, I launched with too many features and I found it difficult to explain to my beta testers. It was \"cool\" but my users found that it changed their workflow too much and they didn't want to make the investment to see if it was worthwhile. I got disheartened and gave up. The funny thing was that I was aware that what I was doing was considered \"common startup pitfalls\" even as I was making the mistakes. From talking to other founders, it seems that a lot of us only learn by making the mistake for ourselves. At the most recent Startup School, I started again with a new idea. I was determined to build something that solved a specific problem that was easy-to-explain and I wanted to launch quickly . I'm still very early-on in the journey but I have customers, revenue and growth. I would particularly recommend solo founders to give Startup School a go. As a solo founder, the weekly updates with peers really helped keep me honest with myself. edit: Old (failed) Startup: [LINK] New Startup: [LINK] edit2: If you watch one SUS video ever then watch this 16 minute video from Sam Altman: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20255703,"author":"karmakaze","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Startup idea checklist","text":"This is very much my line of thought. I have come to use different terms for these: - Startup is what I now call VC funded companies. A startup can and often does 'make the world better' for some definition of better - A profitable side-business that could grow into a large stable company starts as a side-project/side-business. This short Sam Altman \"How to Succeed with a Startup\" video[0] plainly covers why this is so. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0lnbdRweJtA":[{"hn_comment_id":30158259,"author":"theanirudh","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Building a Cross-Platform Web and Mobile App from the Ground Up","text":"This talk at Nextjs Conf explores cross platform solutions for common issues like routing, styling and animation. Found it to be quite helpful! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30678906,"author":"theturtletalks","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Solito \u2013 React Native and Next.js unified","text":"It's mainly cross platform components (Fernando refers to them as screens) that can be used on the web, iOS, and Android. In Next.js, you can import these components as pages. On iOS, file based routing does not exist. Solito fills in the cracks. His video at Next.js Conf was really informative: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"0lvUByM-fZk":[{"hn_comment_id":20836779,"author":"CalRobert","month":"2019-08","story_title":"The Mobility Trap: Why We'll Never Fix Congestion by Speeding Up Traffic","text":"Addendum - this video (shared recently in another HN discussion) is a _fantastic_ illustration of the problems of parking minimums, made with Cities: Skylines [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22035489,"author":"CalRobert","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Toyota will transform 175-acre Japan site into a \u2018prototype city of the future\u2019","text":"\"everything is just closer together over here.\" It's not \"just\" close together like it happened. The US has made it illegal to build human-scale dense neighbourhoods for 50% years. Parking minimums, density restrictions, street width minimums, LOS (level of service) planning, etc. all combined to make the US an unwalkable, uncyclable, unenjoyable place to be a human. As a reward the US gets about 35,000 people a year killed by drivers, and many many more indirectly through lung disease, cancer, obesity, etc. as well as parents terrified to let their kids ride a bike. Lots of free parking though. This is a fantastic series illustrating the effect of urban design policy in the US [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20579442,"author":"itronitron","month":"2019-07","story_title":"How Sydney destroyed its trams for love of the car","text":"some readers may be interested in this video which discusses the impact of accommodating cars in cities >> [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27593903,"author":"q_andrew","month":"2021-06","story_title":"SimCities and SimCrises (2017)","text":"For those who are interested in similar discourse, I recommend these cities skylines videos from youtube user donoteat01: [VIDEO] They are sarcastic tutorials on how to worsen your Skylines cities enough to qualify as a realistic North American metro area. If the mic quality bothers you, skip to the newer videos.","stance":"rec"}],"0olpSN6_TCc":[{"hn_comment_id":17888433,"author":"cwkoss","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Cargo ships that sink when their cargo suddenly liquefies","text":"I wonder if sheets of a cloth-like material could be used in loading similar to Mechanically Stabilized Earth Practical Engineering has a great video on this simple but pervasive technology. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25652591,"author":"davidwf","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What YouTube channels do you subscribe to?","text":"I keep a Google Document of these to share just in case people ask about my YouTube interests. I Actually Watched All of Them I have actually watched ALL of the videos on these channels and I don\u2019t even feel bad about it :-) I actually like new videos from some of the ones below (like NativLang, for example) but they maybe don\u2019t hold up in the early videos. - Space Time: PBS Physics, sooo good -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - Lindsay Ellis: Really, really intelligent video essays about film and culture -- [LINK] -- Great First Video: [LINK] - Periodic Videos: Chemistry, including a video for every element -- [LINK] -- Great first video (obviously): [LINK] Other Math and Science - 3Blue1Brown: Amazing math visualizations -- [LINK] -- Great first video, how e^pi*i works: [LINK] - NumberPhile: Fun math videos -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - PBS Eons: Biology! -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - PBS Infinite Series: Math math math, really really hard math -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - SciShow: Science! More poppy but fun -- [LINK] -- Silly first show: [LINK] -- Actual physics: [LINK] - VSauce: Science-y? -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - Practical Engineering: -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [VIDEO] Other Humanities - Alliterative: Connections via language -- [LINK] -- Great first video about gin and gimlets: [LINK] - Bon Appetit: Such fun food stuff! -- Gourmet Makes: [LINK] -- It\u2019s Alive: [LINK] - Masaman: Genetics and human migration (an","stance":"rec"}],"0qKp-0h9P18":[{"hn_comment_id":13789203,"author":"WestCoastJustin","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Nintendo Switch Teardown","text":"This might be slightly off-topic, but if you like this type of teardown content, I highly recommend checking out AVE's channel on Youtube [1]. He does plenty of tool teardown's, things like drills, all types of heavy industrial gear, and some electronics thrown in. I find is fascinating, because you start to learn about the manufacturing process, why mechanical engineers choose specific materials, how they cut corners, and generally how things are made at low cost and high volume. Here's some highlights: - Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer: [LINK] - Hammer Drill Mechanism: [LINK] - Blendtec Blender: [LINK] - KitchenAid Mixer: [VIDEO] - $500 Mining Flashlight: [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22483760,"author":"mumblemumble","month":"2020-03","story_title":"How KitchenAid and Le Creuset Took over Kitchens","text":"I thought the BOLTR teardown of one was entertaining: [VIDEO] Sadly, it's only one model. I'd love to see a lot more consumer products be subjected to this kind of treatment.","stance":"rec"}],"0rCUF-V1esM":[{"hn_comment_id":23710292,"author":"Nextgrid","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Apple Lightning","text":"The independent repair program is bullshit and is just a marketing move to try to appear good and avoid regulation being passed. Louis Rossmann (a popular unauthorized repair shop owner) explains it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24194156,"author":"mehrdadn","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Apple expands independent repair program to Mac after US antitrust investigation","text":"The independent repair program is designed to destroy independent repair businesses and mislead people in the process. It forces their customers to wait 1-2 weeks for any repair (even just a battery replacement) after being forced to provide their personal identifying information, and even then, does not provide parts for anything nontrivial at all. It ensures repair shops don't actually stay in business\u2014customers wouldn't wait 1-2 weeks for just a battery replacement. Louis Rossmann explains it: [LINK] , [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24954357,"author":"Kwpolska","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Is This the End of the Repairable iPhone?","text":"If you\u2019ve got 16 minutes, listen to Louis Rossmann describe how much of a joke it is: [VIDEO] The short version is that Apple (a) does not let those stores order components in bulk, which means 2+ week turnaround on a repair that an independent store can do in 15 minutes, and (b) limits those stores to screens and batteries for iPhones. You can\u2019t fix iPads, can\u2019t fix Macs, can\u2019t fix anything other than these two components.","stance":"rec"}],"0rR9IaXH1M0":[{"hn_comment_id":16750311,"author":"CodeMage","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Google maps shows location of San Bruno shooting","text":"Whenever I hear that brought up as an argument, I recommend listening to what Jim Jefferies had to say about gun control. Despite Jim Jefferies being a comedian and phrasing his arguments in a comical, comedic way, I've yet to see anyone give a convincing counter-argument, especially to the \"you're bringing a gun to a drone fight\" part. Jim Jefferies on Gun Control, part 1: [VIDEO] Jim Jefferies on Gun Control, part 2: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12947505,"author":"ux-app","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Have you done / plan to do any basic \u201cprepping\u201d (tinned food etc)","text":"No worries :) > seems a bit disingenuous to highlight suicide, while at the same time not including injury, rape, or loss of property that result from home invasions. Nothing disingenuous about it. In fact, statistically speaking, the situation is even worse. Introducing a gun into an already violent encounter significantly increases the risk of injury and death. There is tonnes of evidence to support this. Here is one, very specific study that indirectly confirms exactly this. [LINK] And here's another fascinating study PREDICTORS OF FIREARM USE AND EFFECTS OF WEAPONRY ON VICTIM INJURY IN VIOLENT CRIME [LINK] It's a long read, but well worth it if you are really interested in what the literature has to say about the often surprising ways in which guns affect the outcomes of violent crime. And finally here's a pretty honest take on the matter from a comedian. NSFW for language [VIDEO] The humor may not be to your taste, but the points made are fair","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31514884,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)","text":"Round and round we go... As a foreigner, it's appalling to see every excuse imaginable trotted out every time this happens. Don't think you're fooling anyone. You're just making things up on the spot for the sake of pretending to have a rational argument, like an intelligent adult would in your place. But I will eat my shorts if you personally have spent even an hour doing the research before making statements about \"what this would do\", or \"that wouldn't work\", or whatever. I don't mean clicking \"like\" on a Facebook post by a fellow NRA member. Mean literally reading through scientific publications, or looking at statistics published by third parties that are unaffiliated with any United States organisation. Or just Googling to see what the other 96% of the human race does with guns and laws. \"\"No Way to Prevent This\", Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens\": [LINK] Jim Jefferies (an Australian comedian living in the States) on gun control: Part #1: [VIDEO] Part #2: [LINK] Can you counter every single one of his points ? Really? With facts ? That you can link to in a scientific paper that wasn't paid for by a gun lobby in the states? 19 children just died. Please take this a tiny bit seriously and don't just click the reply link to blurt out something in a public forum that can be trivially shown to be false...","stance":"rec"}],"0rSMt1pAlbE":[{"hn_comment_id":11175151,"author":"nabla9","month":"2016-02","story_title":"The Lisp Curse (2011)","text":"Lisp is programmable programming language, especially Common Lisp. It works as programmer amplifier. Better you are, more you benefit from it. I challenge anyone to watch this lecture from Christian Schafmeister and say they are not impressed: [LINK] and [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24646366,"author":"reitzensteinm","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages [pdf]","text":"Your Google talk was one of my top 10 ever, it blew me away. It's not uncommon in the tech industry to build some mad scientist solution - pardon the expression - because we're trying to do something pedestrian but have painted ourselves in to a corner, eg HipHop VM. Doing it to help with cutting edge science is genuinely exciting. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"0rb9CfOvojk":[{"hn_comment_id":37224916,"author":"martin_a","month":"2023-08","story_title":"I Walked Across Luxembourg \u2013 A Hike from the West to the East of the Grand Duchy","text":"I think they want to get rid of the trains going to Interlaken directly. At least that's what I read in the SZ [0]. If you haven't seen it, there's the great talk from David Kriesel on the 36C3 [1] about how Deutsche Bahn is... \"doing statistics\" to hide their delays. It's well worth the hour! [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33132317,"author":"luckylion","month":"2022-10","story_title":"German rail operator says train disruption caused by sabotage","text":"That's why you should hire the PR companies they're using, not the train companies themselves. Partially joking, I think the image stems from the past, but the system degrades when it's not maintained appropriately. There was an entertaining talk at a CCC event a few years back which looked at DB reliability and accuracy (in German): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0rkTgPt3M4k":[{"hn_comment_id":28221530,"author":"yashasolutions","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?","text":"this one looks terrific! I saw the review made by Linus : [VIDEO] - totally got me convinced. I left Apple to System76 2 years ago, but that'd likely be my choice if I'd be doing this today...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28268979,"author":"hanklazard","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Are there contemporary notebooks up for tinkerers?","text":"Same! The LTT review also mentioned the screen resolution as a problem, so that might be a nice upgrade in the future. FWIW, the rest of the review was really glowing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0sHCQWjTrJ8":[{"hn_comment_id":12538452,"author":"the-dude","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Getting things done","text":"> Fast forward few more days or weeks, you're unexcited, you think this is hopelessly daft, you think no will care about it, and slowly de-motivation creeps in. Maybe the idea was not so good after all. That is not a bad thing. Keep on rocking. This guy puts it nicely I think: - [VIDEO] ( explicit ) - [LINK] ( PG rated ) \"Most ideas kinda of suck when you do them.\" That is perfectly fine, move on to the next.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35302695,"author":"HopenHeyHi","month":"2023-03","story_title":"How do you deal with entrepreneurial obsession?","text":"one of my reference on the topic is Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective\" I recently started meditating with Sam Harris's Waking up, which is really helping on bringing more awareness in my life Rolls up newspaper.. thawack Stop that. You don't need that shit. Listen to Ze Frank about Brain Crack (he is a very nice man from a long ago interwebs where people didn't try to sell you self help bullshit): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0vJJlVBVTFg":[{"hn_comment_id":3399581,"author":"irahul","month":"2011-12","story_title":"Design Patterns in Python (Free Book)","text":"I looked at couple of them. Some of the patterns has a note mentioning it is a port of C#/Java/C++ implementation in the Wikipedia article. Python is drastically different from C#/Java/C++, and a direct port of classical patterns won't make much sense. It will work, but it will the equivalent of Fortran programmers writing Frotran in Python. If anyone is interested, this talk by Alex Martelli is a good starting point: [VIDEO] I think Bruce Eckel was writing a book on \"Design Patterns\" in Python, but that's not completed. However, there is a book using Ruby, which shows the classical approach for implementing design patters, then shows how it is done in Ruby: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3755321,"author":"irahul","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Books Programmers Don't Really Read But Recommend","text":"Among the books \"programmers have read\", I have read K&R, Programming Pearls and bits and pieces of Effective Java and C++. I thoroughly enjoyed these books. The other books on the \"have read\" list are on my \"don't bother reading\" list. Code Complete, Pragmatic Programmer, Mythical Man Month et al aren't my kind of books. As far as design patterns go, I believe if you code in Python/Ruby/Perl etc, books covering them in Java/C++ are needlessly verbose and boring. I recommend Alex Martelli's talks [VIDEO] [LINK] And this book which covers design patterns using Ruby. [LINK] Both approaches actually show you practical examples of design patterns in the standard library or real world problems, and shuns patterns which aren't applicable to the language or are too trivial. These talks aren't the end-all, but they will give you a good overall knowledge, and will make further exploration easy. And from the \"haven't read\" list, CLRS is a good book and isn't as dense as it is generally taken to be. It does have sections on proofs, but you can skip it and jump directly to the data structure/algorithm. The pseudo code used in the book is extremely clear, and will convert to simple python in most of the cases. Use it as a reference, or read first few hundred pages. If the book isn't for you, you will know it after you have read the first 100 pages. Another book I recommend is Sedgewick's book on Algorithms. I have read the C version. It mostly covers basic data structures and some accompa","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12851370,"author":"omginternets","month":"2016-11","story_title":"\u201cDesign Patterns\u201d Aren't (2002)","text":"In a similar vein, I found Alex Martinelli's talk on design patterns very level-headed and instructive: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0w_xEUoK79o":[{"hn_comment_id":39123963,"author":"12_throw_away","month":"2024-01","story_title":"We made an animated movie in 8kB","text":"So then I'm going to post my favorite 4k [1], which even if you ignore the file size, is just a very cool use of fractals. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5509737,"author":"xal","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Hello from a libc-free world","text":"Sadly, I don't have any of my own work anymore, although I'm sure I could write out a few procedural texture generators from top of my head. Luckily, the demo scene has collectively decided to go back and open source much of it's best work recently: [LINK] The most recent 4ks are nothing short of stunning: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0wtvQZijPzg":[{"hn_comment_id":21863478,"author":"bitofhope","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"This year's Cantrill talks include one on Ethical Dilemmas [0] and another on the \"Moore's Law\" paper [1]. Highly recommend both. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25457030,"author":"Bayart","month":"2020-12","story_title":"SEC charges Robinhood $65M for misleading customers about revenue sources","text":"Bryan Cantrill has a talk on YT on ethics in software [1]. And as I remember it the take away is that the way we think about problems isn't very conducive to obeying the law, or being good to people in general. And I've got to say the amount of people I see thinking of regulations, social norms or morals as \u00ab cruft \u00bb is pretty alarming. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29601593,"author":"earleybird","month":"2021-12","story_title":"CCPA Scam \u2013 Human subject research study conducted by Princeton University","text":"Bryan Cantrill (DTrace etc) has a good talk on ethics in software engineering[0]. Skip to 12:29 where he recalls Facebook in 2011 experimenting with users news feeds. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"0xS68sl2D70":[{"hn_comment_id":44060149,"author":"panstromek","month":"2025-05","story_title":"ChatGPT Is a Gimmick","text":"If anyone is interested in AI in relation to learning, I think the best take on that I've seen so far was from Derek (Veritasium) in this recent talk: [VIDEO] It's a lot more balanced compared to the doomy attitude in the primary post.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48415838,"author":"teabee89","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Why I'm Skeptical About Efforts to Revolutionize Schooling","text":"Derek Muller from the Veritasium channel gave a great (and funny) talk[1] about how AI will not revolutionize education and I'll quote my favorite part: \"The world is full of heavy objects; yet not everyone is ripped\". Meaning that what fails with AI in education is also what fails in education without AI: lack of motivation that a good coach could provide. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43746531,"author":"runfaster2000","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf?","text":"This excellent presentation (Veritasium) is making much the same point (learning comes from \u201creps\u201d). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47117409,"author":"srean","month":"2026-02","story_title":"$30B for laptops yielded a generation less cognitively capable than parents","text":"[VIDEO] Veritasium's video: \"Effort is the Algorithm\". The world is full of heavy objects but how many of us are ripped ? -- Derek Muller","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47789725,"author":"kevlened","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Why Sal Khan's AI revolution hasn't happened yet, according to Sal Khan","text":"Derek Muller of Veritasium has a presentation on why the promises of a revolution in education are never fulfilled. [0] His hottest take is we're already close to the optimal process for learning, so technology isn't going to improve it. Learning takes work, and no technology can do the work for you. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48323903,"author":"btilly","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Please Use AI","text":"I am reminded of Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning (original video [VIDEO] ) from a year ago. \"The world is full of heavy things, and yet most of us aren't ripped.\" AI is an opportunity. On the one hand, it can be used to let our minds and social lives atrophy. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to help our minds grow. Most people will make the lazy choice. But you can choose to do otherwise. Take, for example, speeches. I do not let AI write my speeches. But my speeches are better for having been critiqued by AI. But the result is still my speech. My thoughts, my ideas, my words, and my meaning. Just improved with rounds of feedback about where it fell flat, where I was likely to lose people, and so on. Feedback that I had to fix. So do not let AI write your speeches. But do use it to push yourself harder.","stance":"rec"}],"0yKf8TrLUOw":[{"hn_comment_id":23054638,"author":"rzzzt","month":"2020-05","story_title":"History of Logo","text":"OT, but Felienne has a great talk on functional programming in Excel (thanks for reminding me of her name): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15928317,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Excel team considering Python as scripting language: asking for feedback","text":"Excel itself is functional and reactive already, wouldn't adding an FRP language on top of that be a bit superfluous? Check out Felienne Hermans' work if you haven't already: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24076251,"author":"brohee","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Scientists rename human genes to stop MS Excel from misreading them as dates","text":"You may enjoy \"Pure Functional Programming in Excel\" by Felienne Hermans presented at GOTO 2016 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26127788,"author":"ggrrhh_ta","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The worst of the two worlds: Excel meets Outlook","text":"This is the talk that I first saw that builds on that: [VIDEO] I found it interesting, fun and great. Still, I would stick to using Excel for the personal analysis of data and not as the language/tool on which software is developed: data & programming logic intermixed, the default way to index cells, the difference between normal cells and array cells, and tables, etc., the fact that some things are just not possible to do fully programmatically without creating your own VB functions and therefore asking recipients of what looks like data to accept running arbitrary code in their machines, etc.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38877743,"author":"robertknight","month":"2024-01","story_title":"CellLVM: A proof-of-concept LLVM to Excel spreadsheet compiler","text":"Related to this, I recommend Felienne Hermans' talks on Excel as a functional programming language - [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"0z03xkwFbw4":[{"hn_comment_id":21951771,"author":"lhuser123","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Caffeine attenuates high-fat-high-sucrose lipogenesis and body fat accumulation","text":"> Nutrition is confusing because we\u2019re not used to looking at lots of tiny effects adding up to something large. This. I think is always more complicated than we think. And one thing that many times is left out of the discussion is that some foods may have different effects on one individual than others. I was once looking for videos that talk about this and after watching too many, the only one found was : \u201cWhat is the best diet for humans? | Eran Segal | TEDxRuppin\u201d [VIDEO] When explaining their studies, at one point he said \u201cIt was not just about the food, it was also about the person eating it\u201d","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38375414,"author":"gardnr","month":"2023-11","story_title":"In the Gut's 'Second Brain,' Key Agents of Health Emerge","text":"Then there's something about Heart Rate Variability (HRV), the vagus nerve, parasympathetic nervous system, and gut biome all being connected. I can measure one of those relatively easily with a chest strap. It seems like the only thing we do know at this point is that we don't know anything. This is an interesting TEDx talk from Eran Segal \"What is the best diet for humans?\": [VIDEO] My current conjecture / conspiracy theory / understanding includes: * Bacteria near the roots of plants generate electricity. * Plants grow faster in electrified soil. * Electrical brain stimulation can enhance brain function. * There are processes and interactions happening in our gut that we really don't understand yet. * Many ubiquitous things in our environment wreak havoc on our gut biomes (e.g. chlorine, emulsifiers). * There may be more to establishing and maintaining a healthy gut biome than simply consuming foods rich in pre/probiotics. The right kind of exercise and stress may play essential role in keeping it all humming along.","stance":"rec"}],"1-dUkyn_fZA":[{"hn_comment_id":7714293,"author":"cube_yellow","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Let\u2019s Make a Bubble Map","text":"A lot of people are starting to use org-mode for that kind of thing. Fully reproducible research in a single file. To check the work, just export the file to pdf/html/etc., or \"C-c C-c\" the code blocks as you read through in org-mode. It's fantastic. For python specifically, this video is a must watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7366559,"author":"hsitz","month":"2014-03","story_title":"IPython: Beginners\u2019 Guide","text":"The Orgmode extension to Emacs has quite an elegant, flexible, and powerful way of doing what you want. Can be hard to wrap your mind around at the beginning but has good payoff once you're up to speed. Here's a video showing how one guy uses it with Python (though it integrates with multitude of languages, including R): [VIDEO] Here's paper (itself from LaTeX generated by Orgmode) describing use of Orgmode for this kind of \"reproducible research\": [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8026315,"author":"taeric","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Patoline: A modern digital typesetting system","text":"I know it gets said a lot, but have you considered emacs and org-mode. Because, it goes a very long way for this. See this great talk showing its use with python. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8189689,"author":"taeric","month":"2014-08","story_title":"Show HN: Lit \u2013 a modern literate programming tool","text":"Do check out org-mode, then. It is surprising how far that tool has been extended. Many of these features are actually under the label \"reproducible research\" nowdays. There was a really good talk given on this at a pypy convention a couple of years ago.[1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8214972,"author":"taeric","month":"2014-08","story_title":"Typographic Programming Language","text":"Seriously, try emacs. You want to see what color you have put in a css field?[1] Want to see the image you are referencing in a repl?[2] More amazingly, want to combine TeX, lisp, a markdown like language, and python/whatever in a single document? Try org-mode.[3][4] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9767343,"author":"rndn","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Emacs for Data Science","text":"This SciPy presentation (Kitchin, John Carnegie Mellon University) on Emacs + org-mode + python in reproducible research is worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16842959,"author":"dahart","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper","text":"I Agree with all those points. I've used org mode for a few things, but not for python notebooks. I remember seeing a great video a few years back on using python in org mode to make a research notebook. It really made me want to try org mode for literate / notebook style programming. I think it was this one: [VIDEO] It sounds like org mode does not store images inline, since you don't like the b64 images in Jupyter? I imagine that could go both ways depending on what you want. Even for diffing, you might like to see that the image changed (though I generally agree that diffing images is not ideal). If you have to package images separately when sharing, then wouldn't inline images score a point for easier sharing? > use other languages that python Agreed, and that is powerful, but this also goes to my point. Jupyter is made for python and org mode isn't. Jupyter comes with python and libraries, where with Emacs you're on your own to figure out how to install and use different languages, and setup your environment so Emacs can see them. You're on your own to bring in images and plots, where Jupyter already understands commands that output images. > Plus, you get to use a proper text editor instead of editing on a browser textarea. Yes, but the editor is Emacs. :) For a lot of people the browser textarea is a bonus because it's the same thing you use everywhere. It's uncomplicated and non-technical and utterly consistent, even if lacking any power.","stance":"rec"}],"10qowKUW82U":[{"hn_comment_id":43333501,"author":"duckerude","month":"2025-03","story_title":"A 10x Faster TypeScript","text":"Anders Hejlsberg explains here: [VIDEO] . TL;DW: - C# is bytecode-first, Go targets native code. While C# does have AOT capabilities nowadays this is not as mature as Go's and not all platforms support it. Go also has somewhat better control over data layout. They wanted to get as low-level as possible while still having garbage collection. - This is meant to be something of a 1:1 port rather than a rewrite, and the old code uses plain functions and data structures without an OOP style. This suits Go well while a C# port would have required more restructuring.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43340601,"author":"yohannesk","month":"2025-03","story_title":"A 10x Faster TypeScript","text":"If you are wondering why not Rust instead of Go, they outline why Rust was not chosen. This is a port not a reimplementation. Many of the data structures can not easily be ported to Rust, such as Nodes with cyclic dependencies. Check the longer interview here: [VIDEO] Also, I think the discussion on esbuild's choice of language applies here as well as it has a large similarity. You can find it here on hn","stance":"rec"}],"13cmHf_kt-Q":[{"hn_comment_id":8620645,"author":"nilliams","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Spider Programming Language","text":"Can't agree with your implication that 'real JS stuff' won't get done and 'JS people' won't get on board due to its 'focus on OOP'. I've yet to see a large JS app written in a 'functional style'. Most large client-side apps I've come across are written in Backbone, Angular, Ember etc. which are all frameworks/libraries that embrace OOP. You shouldn't mistake JavaScript's 'prototypal' nature for it being a non-OOP language. JavaScript and OOP are a very good fit. > The people who will appreciate the trappings of OOP are more than likely the typical classically trained programmers, who will write 300 lines of Spider on the frontend of their Python hobby project, and not touch it again. If you're really dismissing __all of OOP__ to that extent I feel like you are seriously misunderstanding OOP and I highly recommend you read/watch at least: - POODR by Sandi Metz [1] - Explores OOP, SOLID principles, testing, more. The best book on OOP I've ever read. Ignore the fact the code examples are in Ruby (by that I mean, they're easy to understand). - Refactoring by Martin Fowler [2] - The definitive refactoring book... which goes hand in hand with OOP. - Boundaries (Talk) by Gary Bernhardt [4]. He talks about the 'functional core, imperative shell' pattern of software architecture that acknowledges the fact that some form of OOP/procedural/imperative programming is unavoidable. It's a great talk. Outright dismissal of OOP really has no place in modern programming. Even if you get into f","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10296432,"author":"nowprovision","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Your DI framework is killing your code","text":"This talk might be of interest Stuart Sierra - Components Just Enough Structure [VIDEO] - it is a tiny clojure framework but the ideas should be thought provoking, although granted with OO aligned type system not completely adaptable. In this example Customer could possibly just be a data-bucket/map/hashtable/Dictionary, Im not entirely sure how I'd handle reporting though as the example has put me back in OO mode, but a customer report (which knows how to organize data about a customer) shouldnt be part of customer entity (used loosely) in my opinion.","stance":"rec"}],"13eiDhuvM6Y":[{"hn_comment_id":42792440,"author":"PinkSheep","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat","text":"The above commenter was probably inspired by the recent investigative(!) video series by Coffeezilla (and decided not to mention it?). It was either in part 2 or 3, where C-z alleged/suspected Valve's legal actions to have been mostly about good PR and to send a signal to those ~websites~ businesses to keep them in check. However it is indeed the case, that Valve has introduced greater and greater restrictions on inventory handling. The measures obviously go far beyond just counteracting possible scammers and phishing. Still, I am inclined to believe, they could've implemented all these features many years ago, if only they had wanted to. I highly recommend the videos. You can maybe skip the first one. It's mostly about casino owners' drama. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45698560,"author":"BargirPezza","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall","text":"Coffeezilla makes an interesting series of videos about casinos in the csgo community and also makes a video against Valve themselves. Worth a watch imo [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"144uOfr4SYA":[{"hn_comment_id":36543600,"author":"caliaihere","month":"2023-06","story_title":"The Darwinian argument for worrying about AI","text":"Do you seriously think that the people that brought you pfas + other plethora of toxins and their subsequent effects across many systems really care about the dangers of AI? Please, enjoy it while it lasts. What they really need is big fat alien dick to come dick slap them across the face and bring them back to reality. Because of course there will be negative \"known unknown\" consequences and \"unknown unknown\" consequences just like there have been consequences with the rest of the so called \"goodwill\" advancements. It's suicidal to think otherwise. Pretending there wont be is just their historically proven strategy to play down your fears. It's just part of the run of the mill PR management tactic. Nothing new to see here. Tis a good one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38362780,"author":"rramadass","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Sam Altman Exposes the Charade of AI Accountability","text":"All of the talk about \"AI Safety\" and \"Effective Altruism\" cannot be dismissed as BS. As technology has become more and more integrated into the very fabric of society, some dangers are very real unless we explicitly use Human standards of Morals/Ethics to regulate them. Of course this should be no excuse to go off into la-la land. From [LINK] Scholars discuss current risks from critical systems failures, bias, and AI enabled surveillance; emerging risks from technological unemployment, digital manipulation, and weaponization; and speculative risks from losing control of future artificial general intelligence (AGI) agents. Also watch Munk debate: AI research and development poses an existential threat featuring Yoshua Bengio, Max Tegmark, Melanie Mitchell and Yann LeCun - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"14wqBA5Q1yc":[{"hn_comment_id":9792946,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Hacking Super Mario World to Warp to the Credits [video]","text":"I believe it's been posted before, but sethbling (of vanilla-minecraft-hacks fame) pulled off the impossible and did the credit warp on an actual SNES, live[1]. As this video very-nicely explains, this required incredible amounts of pixel-perfect accuracy. Lining up the line of koopa shells on exact x-offsets and very narrow heights mid jump (!) to write the landing-sled - using a controller, realtime - is utterly insane. As a side note sethbling's latest project is teaching[2] (using neuro-evolution) his machine learning bot to play SMW[2], SMB1[3], and Mario Kart (original)[4]. While he machine learning is simple by today's standards, his brief videos give a really nice introduction to the topic that should be accessible to most people. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16992337,"author":"qz3","month":"2018-05","story_title":"MrWint's GBC Pok\u00e9mon: Yellow Version \u201cArbitrary Code Execution\u201d (2017)","text":"There was a time where is discovered the speedrun and tas communities and binge-watched everything it has to offer. I was constantly amazed by what the players achieved, and I especially liked the ones where the gap between tas and human player closes. SethBling made an elaborate, frame-perfect glitch exploit run of Super Mario World where he warps from the first level to the end credits - absolutely unbelievable. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"15R2pMqU2ok":[{"hn_comment_id":34515719,"author":"pistol_pete","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Gut bacteria are controlling your brain","text":"Our gut biomes and the gut-brain axis are pretty mind-blowing in the way they facilitate our behaviors and general mental/physical health. It's amazing how much we haven't figured out yet too...especially with neural pathways. Today's world of commercialized food (a few major foods/culprits in particular) throws inflammation at us in spades, and eating well has honestly made a huge difference in my life -- the most noticeable parts by far being cognition, energy, and mood. Every time I deviate from clean cooking and eating mainly whole foods, it's painfully obvious since my microbiome loves the new, healthier norm. I would highly recommend this podcast (neuroscientist Andrew Huberman) if anyone wants to learn more about improving their gut health and the science and research that we know so far. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31550233,"author":"ellopoppit","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Depression's Unholy Trinity: Dysregulated Stress, Immunity, and the Microbiome","text":"Cold showers, breath exercises (i.e. Wim Hof method), intermittent fasting and physical exercise do wonders for regulating stress, boosting immunity, dopamine, and serotonin. Cutting out sugar and eating fermented probiotic foods like sauerkraut, kimchi and apple cider vinegar can also help your gut microbiome immensely. The Huberman Lab Podcast presents some very interesting data on the science behind these practices: How to Enhance Your Gut Microbiome for Brain & Overall Health | Huberman Lab Podcast #61 [VIDEO] Dr. Justin Sonnenburg: How to Build, Maintain & Repair Gut Health | Huberman Lab Podcast #62 [LINK] Using Deliberate Cold Exposure for Health and Performance | Huberman Lab Podcast #66 [LINK] Dr. Craig Heller: Using Temperature for Performance, Brain & Body Health | Huberman Lab Podcast #40 [LINK] Dr. Jack Feldman: Breathing for Mental & Physical Health & Performance | Huberman Lab Podcast #54 [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36491749,"author":"Aromasin","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Modern Hunter-Gatherers Have Thriving Gut Microbiome, Compared with Californians","text":"This is the sort of advice people need to hear more of. Almost none of us are ever going to realistically adopt a hunter-gatherer lifestyle again. We need more data on how to get close to that within the confines of modern life. There's some great material out there now, but only very recently. I personally really enjoyed this discussion on this between Andrew Huberman and Justin Sonnenberg (Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford University): [LINK] Huberman's prior episode is also great: [VIDEO] Basic takeaway was low sugar fermented food 4-6 times daily. Doable for almost everyone, palate aside.","stance":"rec"}],"15RTC22Z2xI":[{"hn_comment_id":28676710,"author":"asciimike","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Bitfinex just spent $23.7M in fees to make a single Ethereum transaction","text":"James Mickens' \"Blockchains are a bad idea\" talk [1] is a great explanation that discusses exactly that. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17898580,"author":"tootie","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are useless","text":"James Mickens has a pretty good breakdown of why blockchain isn't a good solution for most real-world problems: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17969709,"author":"Reedx","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Crypto\u2019s 80% Plunge Is Now Worse Than the Dot-Com Crash","text":"Can only hide from fundamental issues for so long I suppose... Here's a compelling and fun to watch lecture that James Mickens (Harvard SEAS) recently gave about the problems with Blockchain - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18018169,"author":"onli","month":"2018-09","story_title":"GnuPG can now be used to perform notarial acts in the State of Washington","text":"Notarizing documents is a great example where some people think blockchain is a good use case, and it's never true. Where would be the advantage of the scheme you describe to the current system? There is none. The system already works: people are given power to validate documents by the authority. The authority stores that centrally. The validation is mostly collected centrally. All stuff you can do perfectly fine without needing to run replicated servers storing an evergrowing immutable blockchain sipping authority from the real authority. The current scheme allows things like secret notarization and revocation, stuff a blockchain is very bad at. > it'll be up to the receiving agencies like England's government to decide \"We trust the system the US uses to validate it's notiaries, so we'll add 'USRoxs' to our list of accepted Established Authorities (along with 'TheEnglish' of course)\" Countries already have systems in place to accept documents made in other countries. Works with official translators and stamps/seals of authenticity. In better and funny: Blockchains Are a Bad Idea (James Mickens), [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18745508,"author":"raghava","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"Blockchains Are a Bad Idea (James Mickens) [VIDEO] I find almost all from GOTO 2018 very insightful. [LINK] esp ones listed below. GOTO 2018 \u2022 The Do's and Don'ts of Error Handling \u2022 Joe Armstrong [LINK] GOTO 2018 \u2022 Pragmatic Event-Driven Microservices \u2022 Allard Buijze [LINK] GOTO 2018 \u2022 Why Business Cases are Toxic \u2022 Chris Matts [LINK] GOTO 2018 \u2022 Unconditional Code \u2022 Michael Feathers [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22277231,"author":"DyslexicAtheist","month":"2020-02","story_title":"SEC Commissioner's \u201csafe harbor\u201d proposal for ICOs will only enable scammers","text":":D I also got so annoyed that I started curating blogs and videos (as myth-busters) to help me bring the point across in discussions. My experience with this is sadly that changing anyone's mind who has already made it up is _really_ hard. Here is my list: Blockchains Are a Bad Idea (James Mickens) [VIDEO] Hacking Blockchain (Konstantinos Karagiannis, Chief Technology Officer, Security Consulting, BT) [LINK] Myth Busting: Can a blockchain save healthcare? [LINK] Blockchain Graveyard [LINK] Response to Blockchain & Blockcerts Critiques from Privacy Researcher [LINK] Blockcerts: Using blokchain for identity management is (mostly) ridiculous [LINK] Blockchains from a Distributed Computing Perspective [LINK] Do you need a Blockchain? [LINK] IOTA Tweets from cybergibbons: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25333762,"author":"how2cflags","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Steve Wozniak launches Efforce, a blockchain-based energy-saving platform","text":"I concur with your point, considering we already have methods like hashing to create rather unique signatures, and with frameworks and regulations(laws). I'm going to vaguely quote James Mickens here, but you can basically sue someone if there is an issue. If there is an issue on the block chain? You need to fork it. Oh, and the talk for anyone who's interested considering he conveys a few interesting points I've seen throughout this thread. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28581100,"author":"thesuperbigfrog","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your strongest argument AGAINST Bitcoin?","text":"In \"Blockchains Are a Bad Idea\", James Mickens gives several arguments against blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin: See his presentation here: [VIDEO] 1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions. 2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections. 3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28819217,"author":"thesuperbigfrog","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Web3 Architecture and How It Compares to Traditional Web Apps","text":"Exactly. Making money on blockchain requires retrofitting the web to use blockchain to do what the web can mostly do already. In \"Blockchains Are a Bad Idea\", James Mickens gives several arguments against blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin: See his presentation here: [VIDEO] 1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions. 2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections. 3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29326706,"author":"thesuperbigfrog","month":"2021-11","story_title":"An engineer's observations on Web3 and its possibilities","text":"Web3 requires retrofitting the web to use blockchain technologies to do what the web can mostly do already. In \"Blockchains Are a Bad Idea\", James Mickens gives several arguments against blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin: See his presentation here: [VIDEO] 1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions. 2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections. 3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29396180,"author":"thesuperbigfrog","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Web3 is not Decentralisation \u2013 it\u2019s a Ploy to put Crypto Bros in Charge","text":"Web3 requires retrofitting the web to use blockchain technologies to do what the web can mostly do already. In \"Blockchains Are a Bad Idea\", James Mickens gives several arguments against blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin: See his presentation here: [VIDEO] 1. People have out-of-band trust relationships in real life which reduce the likelihood of malice. Bitcoin-style anonymous identities undermine trust relationships and are not needed for legitimate (not illegal) transactions. 2. Real life legal systems encourage good behaviors. If you have a dispute with someone, you can sue them. Bitcoin and related systems lack these protections. 3. Existing tools such as public-key cryptography and digital signatures can provide most of the functionality that applications need without the problems that blockchain-based systems have.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37341073,"author":"thesuperbigfrog","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Should I Learn Blockchain?","text":"James Mickens gave an entertaining presentation about why blockchain is poorly suited for most application use cases: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"15_-hgsX2V0":[{"hn_comment_id":44711797,"author":"akk0","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Copyparty \u2013 Turn almost any device into a file server","text":"Copyparty is an amazing piece of software. I recommend watching the recent YouTube video for an overview[0]. The developer is a personal friend and my household is proud to own one of 20 limited edition copyparty disc releases. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44714323,"author":"vorgol","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Copyparty \u2013 Turn almost any device into a file server","text":"> into a file server This is underselling it by at least three orders of magnitude. This is astonishing tool, you have to watch the demo video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45800024,"author":"nucleardog","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Why Nextcloud feels slow to use","text":"I think \"people\" deserves clarification: Almost the entire thing was written by a single person and with a _seriously_ impressive feature set. The launch video is well worth a quick watch: [VIDEO] I don't say this to diminish anyone else's contribution or criticize the software, just to call out the absolutely herculean feat this one person accomplished.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46855265,"author":"haunter","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Termux","text":"One of my favorite piece of software was made by the guy with Termux on his phone [0], absolute insane [LINK] 0, [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44711691,"author":"skibz","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Copyparty \u2013 Turn almost any device into a file server","text":"The author of this tool uploaded a YouTube video demonstrating it a few days ago: [VIDEO] At one point in his demo, he uploads a file but terminates the upload more or less halfway. Then he begins downloading the file - which only progresses to the point it had been uploaded, and subsequently stalls indefinitely. And, finally, he finishes uploading the file (which gracefully resumes) and the file download (which is still running) seamlessly completes. I found that particularly impressive.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44731463,"author":"BLKNSLVR","month":"2025-07","story_title":"","text":"Put up a decent demo video on youtube so people can get an idea of how to use it, and start to see its potential. This will be neither quick nor easy. You'll have to decide on what kind of angle to approach it from: cold and 'just the facts' or light and funny using appropriately light and funny demo material, or somewhere in between. Match it to the market or demographic you're aiming for. Recent example of a great demo video that's gotten positive commentary on HN and in the YT comments: [VIDEO] (this has the advantage of being a wizard-level piece of software). Also, use those differentiation examples on the homepage with the same \"slide to show the difference\" effect that the existing homepage example images have (they look generic, they give a very \"just another AI image generator\" vibe). Lastly, but probably should be firstly: Choose the one coolest, differentest thing your software does, and create the coolest, differentest example of the use of that thing, and press heavily on that. Lastly lastly, and probably should be firstly firstly, if you plan to do any of the above, then _fucking plan it out_ don't just go haphazardly into starting to make a video. Tell the boss the plan, including a rough idea of how long it might take to go from now to \"available on youtube / homepage / anywhere else\". By planning and scheduling, the boss can give you a yay or nay before you've actually done the work. It will also give the boss some confidence that you're thinking strategicall","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45802359,"author":"lurker_jMckQT99","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Why Nextcloud feels slow to use","text":"(tangential) Reading the comments, several mentioned \"copyparty\", never heard of it before, haven't used it, haven't reviewed but does there \"feature showcase\" video makes me want to give it a shot [VIDEO] :)","stance":"rec"}],"160F8F8mXlo":[{"hn_comment_id":43155938,"author":"proc0","month":"2025-02","story_title":"AI Is Already Obsolete \u2013 The Open Challenge No One Will Answer","text":"I completely agree. You can see this limitation if you try to create anything complex with the current state of the art. There is also a great video by Alex O'Connor on a simple prompt to generate a full glass of wine, which illustrates this really well - [VIDEO] This wave of AI is amazing. It's a great tool for many applications, and it will even revolutionize many of them, but it is still far from AGI, a term that has been hijacked by the tech industry to hype up their products. In some ways AI has advanced a lot, but in other ways it has been set back by the hype and muddying of the terms.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45363902,"author":"jimbo808","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Getting AI to work in complex codebases","text":"I think you're looking at it too abstractly. An LLM isn't representing anything, it has a bag of numbers that some other algorithm produced for it. When you give it some numbers, it takes them and does matrix operations with them in order to randomly select a token from a softmax distribution, one at a time, until the EOS token is generated. If they don't have any training data that covers a particular concept, they can't map it onto a world model and make predictions about that concept based on an understanding of the world and how it works. [This video]( [VIDEO] ) illustrates it pretty well. These things may or may not end up being fixed in the models, but that's only because they've been further trained with the specific examples. Brains have world models. Cats see a cup of water, and they know exactly what will happen when you tip it over (and you can bet they're gonna do it).","stance":"rec"}],"17KCHwOwgms":[{"hn_comment_id":40527309,"author":"halfcat","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Don't DRY Your Code Prematurely","text":"The visualizations in Dan Abramov\u2019s talk \u201cThe wet codebase\u201d [1] really burned this concept in for me. Seeing what a premature, wrong abstraction looks like visually was eye opening. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37309731,"author":"shadowfoxx","month":"2023-08","story_title":"I don\u2019t buy \u201cduplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction\u201d (2021)","text":"In my career as a software dev I've found one thing to be true - Every Paradigm I ingest that opens new windows of opportunity are great at first pass and as I learn more the more narrow the scope they can be applied. (This is kinda true in life, too. Like when people say, \"Its econ 101 or bio 101.\" etc. What seems like a statement about 'common' knowledge is actually an indication of how shallow your knowledge is!) Specifically related to this topic is a talk by Dan Abramov called, \"The Wet Codebase\" - He says it better than I can sum up and has visual aids : [VIDEO] Other have pointed out code that is similar in function vs similar by coincidence and I think that thought alone is worth chewing on.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37314492,"author":"gosukiwi","month":"2023-08","story_title":"I don\u2019t buy \u201cduplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction\u201d (2021)","text":"I like Dan Abramov's \"The Wet Codebase\" ( [VIDEO] ) -- I've been guilty of doing just what he says in his talk at first, removing all duplications and making the codebase DRY. But then I came to like \"prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction\", as Sandi Metz puts it. Sometimes it's good to wait to have more data to make an easier and more informed decision.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41287191,"author":"halfcat","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Algorithms we develop software by","text":"Dan Abramov talks about WET (write everything twice) [1] as generally a good approach, primarily because you often don\u2019t know the right abstraction up front, and a wrong abstraction is way worse than a copy/paste. He has some good visuals that illustrate how incorrectly dependent and impossible to unwind wrong abstractions can become. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"17jymDn0W6U":[{"hn_comment_id":1638239,"author":"herrherr","month":"2010-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you believe we'll ever encounter aliens?","text":"Check out this video from the American Museum of Natural History: [VIDEO] - It makes me think that we cannot be the only society in the universe - But it also makes be think that it is unlikely that we will find them in the near future or vice versa","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2398399,"author":"moblivu","month":"2011-04","story_title":"The scale of the universe, and everything","text":"Seriously, it amazed me everything. You see everything life, from he mesh that holds the very matter to the limits of the universe; and you can control the hole this, with a Flash slider. Reminds me of the \"Known Universe video from AMNH\" So eye opening: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4787268,"author":"altrego99","month":"2012-11","story_title":"100,000 stars","text":"I am guessing you have liked this too - [VIDEO] Being a video it is not interactive, but definitely does strike something in me. It's almost the Total Perspective Vortex.","stance":"rec"}],"17oCQakzIl8":[{"hn_comment_id":24057879,"author":"cycomanic","month":"2020-08","story_title":"China Uighurs: A model's video gives a rare glimpse inside internment","text":"John Oliver did an excellent piece on the situation of the uighur last week you can watch it here: [VIDEO] I have to say he has really developed his show into an excellent mix of education and entertainment. I used to not like him very much (didn't like his type of humor), but I learn something every time I watch one of his shows, even if it covers a topic I'm already quite familiar with.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26605900,"author":"mkolodny","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Nike Statement on Xinjiang","text":"In case anyone's not aware of what's happening in Xinjiang, this is a great Last Week Tonight episode about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43719023,"author":"blagie","month":"2025-04","story_title":"TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale","text":"I see. That question makes sense. I don't hate China. I'm very glad we have a competing model of governance, and I'd like to see a diverse range of governments in the world. China is experimenting with a very different model, and for all the faults with that model, I'm grateful for that. If the goal is to understand the anger and hatred, a good place to start is the persecution of the Uyghurs. That one is pretty over-the-top evil, and you can learn more here: [VIDEO] There are many other such things happening. In general, hate is based on cherrypicking the bad things about \"them\" and the good things about \"us.\" That's as true across political lines, as across countries, as across some religious divides. To your original question: \"What makes the Chinese government evil in a way that the US Government is not,\" the US government does NOT do things like this. It does a completely different set of evil things, and a completely different set of good things. Part of the reason cherrypicking works is there is no equivalence between e.g. Muslims in Gitmo and cultural oppression in Tibet. They're different. The Chinese government is evil in a way the US government is not, good in a way the US government is not (and vice-versa). Which is worse depends on your set of values, and consequently, it's very easy to make one side seem like pure evil and the other side to seem like pure good. All that said, I do think TikTok (and a lot of other social media) has about the same level of negativ","stance":"rec"}],"1AcEt073Uds":[{"hn_comment_id":17603356,"author":"stcredzero","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Apple releases software fix for MacBook Pro slowdown","text":"Watch a bunch of Louis Rossman YouTube videos. He knows all about the seedy underbelly of Macbook hardware design mistakes. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19665383,"author":"ScottFree","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Baked MacBook Air: A cautionary recipe","text":"Has anyone watched Louis Rossman's video series on this topic? It's pretty funny. He thinks oven reflows are a bad idea. Reballing flip chip GPUs is BULLSHIT - the truth about dead laptop GPUs & repairing them. - [VIDEO] Luckily, he also shows the proper way to do it: Linus Attempts BGA Graphics Chip Repair! - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"1AjhFZVfB9c":[{"hn_comment_id":12060857,"author":"lemming","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Carp: a statically typed lisp, without a GC, for high performance applications","text":"Also check out Pixie's - towards the end of [VIDEO] . It's a really interesting technique, and for a Lisp too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13358243,"author":"agumonkey","month":"2017-01","story_title":"How Lisp-family languages facilitate building bioinformatics applications","text":"It seems so.. which makes my LLVM mention false. There's a talk by the author online [VIDEO] worth it","stance":"rec"}],"1EWQYAfuMYw":[{"hn_comment_id":22191832,"author":"BuildTheRobots","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Snowflake: Graphical SFTP client and terminal emulator with helpful utilities","text":"CuriousMark has a PDP11 video that has some of these demos running on the original hardware: [VIDEO] His videos are surprisingly addictive; they've restored an Apollo guidance computer, Altos and tonnes of other ancient kit.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25485263,"author":"chaos_a","month":"2020-12","story_title":"The original \"Spacewar!\" running on a virtual DEC PDP-1","text":"Here's the same one on youtube with an interview with one of the people who restored it, it's quite an impressive machine. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1Evwgu369Jw":[{"hn_comment_id":6976140,"author":"neilk","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What book changed your life in 2013?","text":"Most of what I read is related to startups or economics, but for the short list of change-my-life books: This year I read a lot about what you might loosely call the Paleo movement / anti-carbs and sugar movement. The New Evolution Diet , The Primal Blueprint , books by Gary Taubes, and so on. I think this is going to change how I eat and exercise forever. The Gift of Imperfection and other works by Bren\u00e9 Brown. Lately this is being promoted by Oprah, which isn't usually a good sign. I think it stands apart because it's not theory or poetry; it's based on some solid research on what people living more productive and satisfying lives are actually doing. If nothing else, her books have made me a better friend when my friends are in pain. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10976039,"author":"andrewtbham","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Is it the Wealth Gap that's bad or the Empathy Gap that comes with it?","text":"I'm unsure how this anecdote proves anything about a correlation between empathy and wealth. Whether you are rich or poor, you can have empathy. If you're interested in empathy, I suggest you watch this brenee brown video. The video may seem anecdotal but she has done a lot of research about shame and vulnerability and... having read her books, money is not something that comes up in the research. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24948552,"author":"rpdillon","month":"2020-10","story_title":"How to deal with extreme physical pain","text":"My employer had me go through training that had this video as part of the curriculum. Though I already understood the ideas, the video was still useful for me. It's less than 3 minutes long. [VIDEO] In short, sometimes people need connection to others; problem-solving mode isn't always the most useful path.","stance":"rec"}],"1H3xQaf7BFI":[{"hn_comment_id":46220255,"author":"mongrelion","month":"2025-12","story_title":"DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says","text":"I recommend everyone to watch GamersNexus' documentary on the NVIDIA AI GPU black market. They explain how companies like DeepSeek can get a hold of chips that are otherwise banned by the US government to export to China [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47457158,"author":"Namahanna","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Super Micro Shares Plunge 25% After Co-Founder Charged in $2.5B Smuggling Plot","text":"The Gamers Nexus GPU Blackmarket deep dive was great at digging into this. [VIDEO] And the entire Bloomberg takedown drama added fire to the flames.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48576040,"author":"jacobgkau","month":"2026-06","story_title":"US holds off blacklisting China's DeepSeek, +100 firms deemed security risks","text":"The GamersNexus documentary ( [VIDEO] ) on the semi-underground GPU trade in China, while a little amateurish in terms of depth and general atmosphere, is an interesting watch and may answer some of your questions. Basically, those export controls make GPUs more expensive for affected parties in China, but don't effectively stop them from being acquired or used over there.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48955482,"author":"dannyw","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark","text":"Gamers Nexus has a good video where his team travelled to China and did some actual investigative journalism: [VIDEO] Firstly, the export-restricted GB202s (e.g. 5090, RTX 6000 Pro Blackwell) are fabled in TSMC, and then packaged/made in... China before they supposedly have to be sold out (by US law; but not by Chinese law). You can immediately see the problem there. Secondly, despite the supposed 'crackdowns' and et al, NVIDIA and their channel partners pretty much will sell to anyone in countries like Singapore without any questions. Third, there's human \"smugglers\" who just physically carry em on trips, and Chinese customs is obviously not going to care about the US's laws on Chinese soil.","stance":"rec"}],"1Hqm0dYKUx4":[{"hn_comment_id":10608802,"author":"ramanan","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Physics of the Piano (2012) [pdf]","text":"A related video on the numbers behind piano music, on why it is mathematically impossible to perfectly tune a piano : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19309568,"author":"ramanan","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Piano Tuning","text":"minutephysics had a nice video about the mathematics that go behind piano tuning too. \"Why It's Impossible to Tune a Piano\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27696642,"author":"voting749227383","month":"2021-07","story_title":"A study of musical scales (2017)","text":"I can help with a couple of these. 12 notes is a kludge, because powers of 2^(1/12) well approximate simple ratios. These simple ratios (such as 3:2) sound good. I like this video for explanation: [VIDEO] Also, the reason that the letters are in the wrong order is that we're playing the wrong scale. The monks who invented the scale usually sang in A-minor (so we use the first letter for that scale). Nowadays, we use the major scale, which has the same spacing between notes, but in a different order. It just so happens that C-major has the same notes as A-minor, so that's why we count from C. A great channel for this is Michael New, he explains everything very clearly: [LINK] Music, much like language, has a lot of technical debt.","stance":"rec"}],"1Jwo5qc78QU":[{"hn_comment_id":22718892,"author":"Hokusai","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Internet Archive\u2019s National Emergency Library Harms Authors","text":"> many unintuitive parts I think a more concrete term for unintuitive is outdated. The use cases for Copyright law were defined a century ago when society and technology was different. It is difficult for current citizens to understand copyright law because has nothing to do with their own day to day experiences and needs. Great video about Copyright by Tom Scott: [VIDEO] Too long didn't see: Copyright is broken needs to be fixed in a way that fits the current situation and needs, but, it is going to be damn hard to do.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23331904,"author":"peterkos","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms","text":"> youtube algo's screwing up content creator A slightly different problem, but Tom Scott did an excellent video on the automation of the copyright system on YouTube: [VIDEO] In summary, auto copyright checking solves Most copyright issues, to a degree that no other solution can really provide. And while there are a small (yet very unfair) number of false positives, the benefit that the system as a whole allows far outpaces that downtrend: for YouTube to exist! With regards to fact checking, I'd be more interested to hear how many people who read those kind of \"fact flags\" actually change their opinion in an easy case (flat earth, climate change, etc.). Honestly, the problem of \"true truth\" might never be solved, but so will the cause of incompetence never disappear.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25090236,"author":"jimbob45","month":"2020-11","story_title":"A Modest Proposal in the New Age of DMCA Takedown Aggression","text":"[VIDEO] Tom Scott explains the situation and the solution best. Just shorten copyright to 20 years (instead of life + 70 years). .......that said, we did just strong-arm the world into matching US copyright law and I\u2019m not sure we could do that now even if we wanted to.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27005230,"author":"0xTJ","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven\u2019s Moonlight Sonata [video]","text":"A really great video (if you're willing to spend the better part of an hour watching it) about this is YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken. The World's Is.[1] by Tom Scott. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27660215,"author":"Laremere","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Dear Google: Public domain compositions exist","text":"I recommend the excellent video by Youtuber Tom Scott \"YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken. The World's Is.\" [VIDEO] While I agree with the OP in broad strokes (they clearly have the right to post and profit off their performance), I find that the vast majority of comments on Youtube's copyright claim system fail to even acknowledge major aspects of the problem. Perhaps Youtube's practical monopoly does it a disservice here, and it's hard to separate \"big self publishing video platform\" problems with Youtube specific problems. Without a system like YT currently has, it would get absolutely sued into oblivion by rightful copyright complaints. This is in many ways is a problem of copyright law not being designed with modern technology in mind. I think a good first step would be a way for copyright owners to be punished for broadly overreaching with their claims.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22683625,"author":"oakesm9","month":"2020-03","story_title":"I got my file from Clearview AI","text":"Related Tom Scott video [VIDEO] tl;dr ContentID is a workaround for a broken copyright system. It's not perfect, but it's better for everyone than falling back to the default of copyright through court.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22917510,"author":"nayuki","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Copying is not theft, but censorship is (2012)","text":"Relevant - Tom Scott explains the copyright situation and YouTube's Content ID: [VIDEO] (42 minutes)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23012818,"author":"anonymfus","month":"2020-04","story_title":"With questionable copyright claim, Jay-Z orders deepfake parodies off YouTube","text":"Yes but an imitation is not necessary and usually a parody. There is a good Tom Scott's video about this distinction and other common misconceptions about copyright: [VIDEO] (42 interesting minutes)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24574903,"author":"gfody","month":"2020-09","story_title":"They're deleting my channel, but they don't know why? [video]","text":"according to Tom Scott's very informative summary of all things youtube and copyright [1] there are seemingly reasonable alternatives to suddenly shutting down a whole channel - it seems like we're not getting the whole story as to why those were rejected or aren't being considered in this case? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24910253,"author":"ehsankia","month":"2020-10","story_title":"RIAA\u2019s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub\u2019s CEO","text":"Absolutely, especially with all the mess on Twitch recently, and with Youtube for the past few years, it's very clear that DMCA needs to be updated. I do like Tom Scott's comprehensive video on the subject [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27007326,"author":"I_Byte","month":"2021-05","story_title":"GitHub repository for Sedgewick's Algorithms is taken down","text":"I recommended checking out Tom Scott\u2019s video on DMCA (0). It\u2019s 40 minutes long and rather YouTube centric however it paints a very clear picture as to why these companies are engaging in a seemingly broken practice. It\u2019s not because they want to, it\u2019s because they are legally required to do so. (0) - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38747068,"author":"happytiger","month":"2023-12","story_title":"AI companies required to disclose copyrighted training data under new bill","text":"The copyright system has been broken for a long time. AI is just making the system\u2019s inadequacy more obvious. Just look at YouTube copyright strike and understand how screwed up the enforcement of a law like this is going to be. Tom Scott did a piece on it that\u2019s worth watching: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39840731,"author":"HaZeust","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Thoughts on Vision Pro","text":"Always has been. Tom Scott did a great video on copyright [1] - it's long overdue to revamp. 1 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1K5oDtVAYzk":[{"hn_comment_id":45348499,"author":"cogman10","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Zip Code Map of the United States","text":"If you find this interesting and you haven't watched it, Go watch \"The hidden pattern in post codes\" [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42975292,"author":"jpjoi","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)","text":"Zip codes are just weird to use for anything other than mail in general because they\u2019re set up based off infrastructure. CGP Grey has a great video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43787407,"author":"schlauerfox","month":"2025-04","story_title":"I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)","text":"CGP Grey, a youtube channel, has a video on some of the problems of the postal codes and addresses from earlier this year that I learned about alternates to my familiar US based system. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44120053,"author":"Arnavion","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Japan Post launches 'digital address' system","text":"See also this CGP Grey video where he talks about post codes / zip codes in general and mentions Ireland's system. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1L2ef1CP-yw":[{"hn_comment_id":36821148,"author":"samldev","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Cooking Air Quality","text":"Matthias Wandel made a great video showing how it's better to place the fan a meter or two away from the window to get more air flow [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27786852,"author":"spearo77","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Passive radiative cooling below ambient airtemperature under direct sun (2014) [pdf]","text":"Matthias tries a few options and evaluates them\u2013 [VIDEO] > Experiments and anemometer measurements to figure out where to best place a fan to optimally air out the house to cool it down at night.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32924287,"author":"nemacol","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Effects of grill patterns on fan performance/noise (2011)","text":"[VIDEO] Matthias has an interesting video that is tangentially related talking about the distance of a fan to a window and air flow. While watching I was wondering how this interacts with PC case fans and if they are losing a lot of performance by being directly against the case.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45287295,"author":"Sweepi","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Noise cancelling a fan","text":"Since all comments seem to agree that noise cancelling wont work, 3 practical tips: 1. use the Bernoulli-Effect, aka get \"up to 50+%\"(depends on fan model) more airflow by placing the fan 0.2(0.5) - 1.5m away from the window. 2. Blow air out of the window, dont try to suck air in. 3. To avoid noise: Put the fan in another room and open the window in the room where you are. Video with data: [VIDEO] (6 minutes)","stance":"rec"}],"1L3eeC2lJZs":[{"hn_comment_id":3405539,"author":"earl","month":"2011-12","story_title":"I'll tell you why movie revenue is dropping...","text":"This video Alamo posted to youtube of an angry customer bitching about getting kicked out for texting is amazing . [VIDEO] tl;dwatch: customer: I was texting and you kicked me out; whine whine whine alamo: gtfo and don't come back","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16922473,"author":"ddingus","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Hollywood Is Wrong: Netflix Is the Future of Film","text":"Yes, agreed! I want to attend one of the Alamo Drafthouse theaters. Friends and family, where they currently do business, have reported a great experience! That's what they are supposed to be selling. Hell, I would! Also, anyone who will do this? [VIDEO] I'll go just on principle. That's bad ass great, and a service to everyone spending their money on what they want to be a good experience.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26333145,"author":"technofiend","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Alamo Drafthouse Files for Bankruptcy","text":"Not only are they very strict, but they have a lot of fun with it. See an angry voice mail from one customer [VIDEO] , or the playlist with a long list of PSAs, many of which include celebrities, asking you to please not talk: [LINK] Props to anyone who can get Neil Gaiman to make a please no talking PSA in the form of an Agnes Nutter prophecy.","stance":"rec"}],"1MGjFKs9bnU":[{"hn_comment_id":15496300,"author":"avs733","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Linotype Typesetting (1960) [video]","text":"If you want to see the entire workflow as implemented by the New York Times there is a great documentary about it. [VIDEO] The documentary covers the last day that the NYT used a metal/linotype press and talks through the entire process that happened from newsroom to printing. It is a truly interesting way to spend 28 minutes.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16404258,"author":"oasisbob","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Typesetting and paste-up, 1970 style","text":"Somewhat related - there's a good documentary about the last edition of the New York Times published using the linotype process called \"Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu\" [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33611027,"author":"Agent766","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Why do we call it \u201cboilerplate code?\u201d","text":"As an aside, check out the 30 minute documentary \"Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu\" ( [VIDEO] ) about the end of the linotype era. I'm amazed at the engineering that went into linotype printing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35394113,"author":"lisper","month":"2023-03","story_title":"The Machine That Bankrupted Mark Twain","text":"There are lots of videos of Linotypes on YouTube. Really interesting stuff. This one is my favorite: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39370488,"author":"pfarrell","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The Last Linotype Newspaper (2022)","text":"There\u2019s a neat documentary from the late 1970\u2019s, \u201cFarewell etaoin shrdlu\u201d. It\u2019s about the final day the New York Times was printed using their linotype machines. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49033853,"author":"ginko","month":"2026-07","story_title":"The Ever-Receding Pocket","text":">It has the last master plate, and some photos of how it all looked on the last day. There is a photo of a technician sweeping up on presumably the last day before the plant was shut down. He looked distraught There's a pretty good documentary showing the last day of linotype typesetting at the New York Times. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1Nh_vxpycEA":[{"hn_comment_id":18997910,"author":"yoodenvranx","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Show HN: I wanted to measure CO2 in my office, so I build a C++ WebServer/App","text":"For those who are wondering about 'changed my life': Tom Scott uploaded a video about CO2 and its influences a few days ago. it's a good palce to start research: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23156286,"author":"wh-uws","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Rising CO2 levels may trigger cognitive impairment, says new study","text":"This one of those things that sounds silly but is actually very easy to test and see it can be a real issue. Tom Scott did a great video on it a while back [VIDEO] Do yourself a favor and get an air quality monitor like an awair [LINK] and monitor the levels. Making sure they are good in whatever indoor areas you spend a good amount of time in is a night and day difference cognitively.","stance":"rec"}],"1OEu9C51K2A":[{"hn_comment_id":10911801,"author":"sitkack","month":"2016-01","story_title":"A brief introduction to C++'s model for type- and resource-safety [pdf]","text":"There are some great talks by Neil MacIntosh about the kinds of static analysis they are building into the tool. CppCon 2015: Neil MacIntosh \u201cStatic Analysis and C++: More Than Lint\" [LINK] CppCon 2015: Neil MacIntosh \u201cEvolving array_view and string_view for safe C++ code\" [LINK] For something of this magnitude I wouldn't consider the project late until mid summer. Stroustrup's keynote at CppCon is a great overview of the semantics they want to support and the errors that the tooling with will prevent. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11496131,"author":"lossolo","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Why would you learn C++ in 2016?","text":"You should watch those cppcon again, because Stroustrup and Herb are saying there many times that smart pointers are NOT should be use instead of raw pointers. Use smart pointers where It's about ownership. You should watch this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11799865,"author":"lossolo","month":"2016-05","story_title":"C++ for Games: Performance, Allocations and Data Locality","text":"It's hardly modern C++ what you will see in this talk. Mike Acton even said that they only use C++ because it's game industry standard but he would prefer C. If you want to start with modern c++ watch this: CppCon 2015: Bjarne Stroustrup \u201cWriting Good C++14\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1OfxlSG6q5Y":[{"hn_comment_id":21652004,"author":"adfm","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Smart Toaster Can\u2019t Hold a Candle to the Apollo Computer","text":"The Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster predates both and seems worth mentioning here for it\u2019s superior user experience and unique analog technology. Technology Connections produced a fantastic teardown video of it a while back. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43792716,"author":"tpoacher","month":"2025-04","story_title":"The hidden cost of AI coding","text":"A related thought, just leaving this here. There's something great about old technology (though obviously one must be aware of survivorship bias when citing such technology), despite the fact that, logically speaking, new technology should have obviously been better. Perhaps it's some variant of Jevons' paradox. The better / more efficient things get, the more of an impetus there is to use them in truly crappy ways. And this is how I'm starting to feel about programming with vs without an AI: you can either program manually to create truly creative, functional, elegant stuff, or use AI to produce garbage more efficiently. There just doesn't seem to be an in-between category, at least in terms of demand. In case you haven't seen this video of a toaster from the 60s before, you're in for a treat: [VIDEO] I'm also reminded of Edsger Dijkstra's quote on elegance: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21688648,"author":"chiph","month":"2019-12","story_title":"How to Make Toast: Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science (2001)","text":"But then how could you make toast when you're not home, like at a conference, or driving in your car? /s This is a pretty cool toaster: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23729367,"author":"Jaepa","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The Classic Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster (2006)","text":"I\u2019d technology connections did a 20 minute long episode on the mechanical design of this toaster. I\u2019d recommend it if you haven\u2019t see it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24102964,"author":"spappal","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?","text":"Since toast is discussed on HN: I remember this video [0] nicely explaining some nice engineering of an interesting toaster. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26637100,"author":"modeless","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Expert Guidelines","text":"The reason is that old toaster designs had unpolarized plugs and therefore a good chance of uninsulated live wires inside, even when off. Modern toasters don't anymore, but folk wisdom lasts forever. Although you make a good point that if your outlet polarity is reversed, you might still have a problem. I don't know if modern designs are robust to that... I learned this from a video about old Sunbeam toasters that was unexpectedly fascinating: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27103908,"author":"CRConrad","month":"2021-05","story_title":"The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences","text":"YouTuber Technology Connections was featured in the recent discussion on diswashing machines and detergents. He's done a video on a lovely ancient toaster, too: [VIDEO] Fully automatic brownness selection, and hands-free insertion and pop-up -- all without any electronic chips at all.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31388714,"author":"thatguy0900","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Most Expensive vs. Cheapest Toaster","text":"[VIDEO] a interesting video on a similar subject, a antique mechanical toaster that works better than many modern ones","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37619632,"author":"mikewarot","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Something that you learnt and made you go Wow","text":"They used to make damned clever toasters, like the Sunbeam Automatic toaster... it was freaking amazing. My dad had one with sales display board, etc... he was super proud of it. Here's a nice video about them.[1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38834784,"author":"zikduruqe","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Tom Scott: After ten years, it's time to stop making videos [video]","text":"What sold it for me, was the Sunbeam toaster. I always wondered why in the cartoons people would get shocked sticking a fork in a toaster. And into the rabbit hole I went... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39008615,"author":"eru","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Should I try to manufacture toasters?","text":"People might _say_ they want something made locally, but when it comes to _spending_ money, they mostly care about price and quality, less about patriotism. Compare the paper 'Prejudice is Free, but Discrimination has Costs' [LINK] In any case, if you are interested in fancy toasters, you might like to have a look at [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41081544,"author":"wumms","month":"2024-07","story_title":"How a car cigarette lighter works, in CT scans","text":"> You might think such a system would involve a thermostat, a microcontroller, and an actuator, but this design [...] has bimetallic arms with steel on the outer surface and copper on the inner surface. As the filament heats up, the arms warm up, causing the copper to expand faster than the steel. This expansion pushes the arms open, releasing the lighter. The coil spring then causes the handle to pop out, signaling that the lighter is ready. Maybe I am in a picky mood, but for me the intro made it sound like all three items (thermostat, microcontroller, actuator) would not be necessary, though of course only the microprocessor is missing from the design (thermostat -> bimetallic arms, actuator -> spring). Mandatory link to another marvel in the same problem space (I found the 19min video worth the time): \"An Antique Toaster That's Better Than Today\u2019s [video]\" [VIDEO] [LINK] [2019, 386 points|5 years ago|232 comments]","stance":"rec"}],"1PGm8LslEb4":[{"hn_comment_id":23453670,"author":"xelxebar","month":"2020-06","story_title":"America is giving up on the pandemic?","text":"> no wonder people don\u2019t believe in global warming, these \u201cexperts\u201d prioritize politics over everything I read this as a clear expression of your frustration. Completely reasonable given the situation. Are you familiar with the YouTube channel \"Smarter Every Day\"? There's this three-part series that might offer a new perspective on the distrust and disillusionment you seem to be feeling: [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] In particular, the channel creator Destin Sandlin explores how YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are being used as a sort of vanguard in a meta-game to undermine our trust in the social institutions we rely on. It's a pretty dystopian-sounding and bleak theme. However, Destin is really good at conveying a message of hope. Use your Critical Mind, of course, but also realize that there's a personal cost to adopting absolutist views like `\"experts\" prioritize politics over everything.'","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21577232,"author":"Aunche","month":"2019-11","story_title":"TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram","text":"> I am just trying to point out how we're quick to flip out about Facebook ads bought in Rubles, yet when it comes to Chinese troll artistry we are completely silent meanwhile Russia is a declining power and China is a mercantilist adversary. You don't have to worried about things that are \"obviously propaganda.\" If you even mention a nuanced take on what the CCP is doing in Xinjiang, you'll instantly get downvoted to oblivion (like this comment) and branded a shill, so the same would happen to legitimate disinformation. The Russian propaganda used in the US was designed to create more divides in order to weaken democracy. For example, an fake advertisement may advocate to \"teach the controversy\" of evolution in a blue state to encourage atheists to be hostile to Christians and vice versa. Smarter every day has an interesting miniseries about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1PhArSujR_A":[{"hn_comment_id":12637750,"author":"sssilver","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Raymond Hettinger's talk about good code reviews -- [LINK] Carmack's talk about functional programming and Haskell -- [VIDEO] Jack Diederich's \"Stop Writing Classes\" -- [LINK] All with a good sense of humor.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14908855,"author":"mrkgnao","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Elm in Production: 25K Lines Later","text":"The use of monads is a side-effect (ha!) of committing to purity throughout a language, and that's what FP is being equated to: pure statically-typed FP. (You can argue about how justified that is, of course. I'm not going into that, but you might want to see what John Carmack has to say[0]. No, he doesn't end by saying \"we should all convert to the church of Haskell now\", but he does talk about how large-scale game programming refactors are made easier when you're working with no (or very disciplined) side effects.) Monads are not the only way to deal with effects while keeping purity, although they were the first discovered and so on: algebraic effect systems as in Koka[1] (and as simulated in Idris or PureScript) are another alternative. Koka infers effects, so it's probably easier for a C-family programmer to pick up (I know little about it, though). [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15288536,"author":"akmiller","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Global Mutable State","text":"What you describe above is similar to what Carmack discussed at his QuakeCon keynote several years back when toying with a game engine on Haskell. Very interesting talk, [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18975656,"author":"lsh","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Functional programming in C++ (2012)","text":"Excellent read, I still remember a lot of it. There is also the accompanying Quakecon presentation where John Carmack talks at length about all this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40703686,"author":"ookdatnog","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Why \"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs\" matters (2011)","text":"I think it is, and if you don't want to take my word for it, John Carmack thinks the same :) There's an old video [0] where he talks in-depth about his explorations of functional programming. It's perhaps a bit more about Haskell than about SICP, but in it he's also quite enthusiastic about what a veteran programmer can still learn from this book. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1TKSfAkWWN0":[{"hn_comment_id":8129665,"author":"kull","month":"2014-08","story_title":"How Magnets Produce Electricity (1954) [video]","text":"Here some modern explanation of the phenomena: (I love the way they explain it) \"How Special Relativity Makes Magnets Work\" [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22323862,"author":"snarfy","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Ultimate Electronics","text":"That's right. Here is a pretty good video explaining magnetism as a relativistic effect of electrostatics - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22827853,"author":"rovolo","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]","text":"Here's a video explainer: [VIDEO] Magnetism affects moving charges, but not stationary charges. A magnetic field in your reference frame is really just an electric field in the moving charge's reference frame.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23892328,"author":"HPsquared","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Bohr\u2013van Leeuwen theorem \u2013 magnetism in solids is a quantum mechanical effect","text":"Magnetism is a side effect of special relativity: moving charges have length contraction (depending on frame of reference) which makes them appear more/less dense and therefore an attractive/repulsive force. Veritasium on YouTube made a much better explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28502795,"author":"programmer_dude","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Why can\u2019t I go faster than the speed of light?","text":"Wow, this is the first time I have understood why nothing can go faster than the speed of light and why time dilation is a thing. A very easy to read article, give it a try. Also if you are curious why a moving charge creates a magnetic field watch this Veritasium video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40772059,"author":"lugoues","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?","text":"Sort of, electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin, electromagnetism, so it's waves in the electromagnetic field with the wire acting as a wave guide. (as far as I understand) Veritasium has a video that goes over this. It was pretty controversial at release but it gives a good overview. [LINK] And why magnets work due to relativity [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41388699,"author":"amelius","month":"2024-08","story_title":"NASA Discovers a Long-Sought Global Electric Field on Earth","text":"I think what GP meant is that (from one viewpoint) magnetism is an emergent property of the electric field and relativity. Here is a simple explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1W_mSOS1Qts":[{"hn_comment_id":43847486,"author":"relwin","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week","text":"Gamers Nexus essentially produced a 3-hr doc on how changing tariffs affect the US computer industry: \"The Death of Affordable Computing | Tariffs Impact & Investigation\" [VIDEO] . Best part is having a product manager show a spreadsheet of costs and margins and explain in real terms ($$$) what tariffs do to their business.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43854490,"author":"prof-dr-ir","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Wyze pays $255k of tariffs on $167k of floodlights","text":"Similarly HYTE, mostly known for their PC cases, gives a remarkably detailed insight, both into their cost structure and how they are impacted by tariffs, in this video: [VIDEO] They also address the question of moving their production to the US.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45942272,"author":"herdymerzbow","month":"2025-11","story_title":"When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts","text":"gamers nexus did a great (and very long) video on the impact of tariffs on US computer businesses. Some of the manufacturers went into quite a bit of detail breaking down their costs and how tariffs would render some products so unprofitable that they would cease to serve the US market. Not sure if it necessarily applies to a niche/low volume business, but the impacts on a larger business were eye opening: [VIDEO] tariffs have chopped and changed so much since this video that the specific tariff amounts mentioned are likely not accurate.","stance":"rec"}],"1WupH8oyrAo":[{"hn_comment_id":19660944,"author":"ryanianian","month":"2019-04","story_title":"How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)","text":"This video of a crow repeatedly \"skiing\" down a roof changed my view of how animals play - I thought it was all \"practice-fighting\" but this crow seems to be playing \"just for the fun of it\". [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21769873,"author":"rkagerer","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates","text":"The \"Just for Fun\" link[1] leads to some entertaining videos: Skiing down a roof: [VIDEO] My girlfriend's spirit animal: [LINK] Teaming up to provoke a catfight: [LINK] Nipping a sausage: [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30793695,"author":"reducesuffering","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Crows possess higher intelligence, thought a primarily human attribute (2020)","text":"Whereas the nut cracking is cool for the intelligence shown towards survival, the one that truly astounds me is intelligence for the sake of having fun. Crow skiing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1Y1kJpHBn50":[{"hn_comment_id":35439713,"author":"HopenHeyHi","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners","text":"If you actually want to be informed on the subject I highly recommend: How to Design Impenetrable Airport Security by Wendover Productions ( [VIDEO] , 14 minutes, well researched) Doesn't appear to have any downsides, appears to be logical, effective, and necessary. Appeals to emotion not withstanding. If you have any good faith suggestions for improvement after watching this I'd be all ears.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19023540,"author":"qazqwert","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Israel airport security stole my laptop","text":"it's not rare in israel becuse they do have a very big terror problem... but the missing laptop is unusual and... mybe you'v had some iligal shit/... cracked software/... idk -or mybe it was just a mistake/missplacment have you asked about the laptop? btw this is a nice video i'll suggest you'd watch regarding israels airport security and oparetion... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35455651,"author":"HopenHeyHi","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Airport scraps 100ml liquid rule with new scanners","text":"That's great that they came over to visit the beach but nobody can look into your soul and know that and sometimes people who are not so nice don't just come over to visit the beach. This presents a challenging problem. It sounds like you are under the impression that people are being inconvenienced simply out of spite or due to the discretion of some unfriendly TSA-type airport employee - nope. Understandable why you would perceive things as such but the reality is very different, there is quite a lot going on, before you even board the plane, that you don't see. Places where it really matters, like Israel, cannot afford to engage in security theatre, it is all derived by logic. How it works as is explained in great detail in this video: [VIDEO] Appeals to emotion mean nothing to me. I get that it feels bad and don't particularly care as being blown up feels worse, promise. If after watching that you have pragmatic improvements to suggest I am all ears.","stance":"rec"}],"1Y1ya-yF35g":[{"hn_comment_id":8104686,"author":"1qaz2wsx3edc","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Two nuclear bombs nearly detonated in North Carolina in 1961","text":"I'm guessing this popped up here after appearing on reddit yesterday. John Oliver did a good report on it. [VIDEO] [LINK] It's pretty frakked up. Edit: Oh, and the cold war is heating up: [LINK] None of this is settling.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15324354,"author":"yeukhon","month":"2017-09","story_title":"\u2018Criticality safety event\u2019 occurred at LANL\u2019s plutonium facility","text":"Nuclear warhead security has always been problematic, not just the facility producing the materials. Watch [1] because reading the rest just make everyone dizzy. Our launch protocol relies on very outdated technology. Not that there is anything wrong with old technology in general (as long as the protocol is well-established)... We don't even want to bring up the recent unfortunate Navy crashes... we ought to really step up. \"Shoot yourself in the foot.\" [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20304497,"author":"cf141q5325","month":"2019-06","story_title":"NSA Improperly Collected U.S. Phone Records a Second Time","text":"Also, a list of the nuclear weapons which got lost [LINK] There is a drove of stories around nuclear weapons, I also enjoyed \"Missile doors left open while Air Force nuclear officer slept\" with the explanation, that they left it open for the food delivery guy. [LINK] John Olivers episode on it is also amazing. [VIDEO] For a weird one meet one of the masterminds responsible for them: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47729381,"author":"Jamesbeam","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Great at gaming? US air traffic control wants you to apply","text":"Reminds me a lot of his report on nuclear security. [VIDEO] A lot of times as a citizen I think you feel that something is \"off\" with different Government jobs but can\u2019t put what exactly. And then you watch one of those reports and be like \"holy duck, how can it be this bad and what are they doing to my people and with my taxes?\" Different country, but a lot of times when dealing with the government I think why are the people working there always grumpy, and then one gave me the \"tour\" of what they have to deal with that is hidden from the public eye. Working toilets? Nah, they had to go outside around the building into Porta Potty\u2019s. He showed me like fifty places in the building with mold. Not the fun white one you get on cheese. I am talking about black fungus out of stranger things eating half the wall. Some offices had signs saying working in a different office today with the date printed to 1998. Inside water was dripping from the ceiling. He is like that\u2019s why we are grumpy. Ever since I bring a piece of cake and some hot coffee when I have to deal with government employees and thank them for their service. They are allowed to be grumpy working under conditions I would expect from a third world country.","stance":"rec"}],"1YFrISfN7jo":[{"hn_comment_id":13687614,"author":"neom","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Theories about a link between the human mind and quantum physics","text":"I spend pretty much every weekend watching (super dyslexic) hours and hours of \"stuff\" about quantum, form quantum biology to physics to astro, here are some good ones around humans and the universe. Some may not seem totally relevant but give foundational knowledge, suggest watching in order: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32554113,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-08","story_title":"\u201cI survived the TCP transition\u201d (2013)","text":"As an aside, the PBS space time video The Speed of Light is NOT About Light : [LINK] As an aside to the aside - as I rewatch it I quickly notice how young he looks (and then note the date is 2015 on there - one of the early ones and the production is less refined). You may also like The Geometry of Causality [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1YbcB6b4A2U":[{"hn_comment_id":27569287,"author":"meowface","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Mind reading technology: helmet aims to unlock brain's secrets","text":">No one cares about someone\u2019s improvised broad generalizations and \u201cone day it\u2019ll be great\u201d patronizing speeches. I was just matching the patronizing, brusque tone in your original post. >The question was what\u2019s it good for as it is today, based on people with knowledge about it. I apologize, then, because I don't think that was clear from your post, which contained only the text \"So what is this tech good for in the first place.\" If your question were \"So what are the device's current capabilities?\" or something similar, then I would've responded differently. >In particular the only thing you demonstrated here is that you have absolutely no knowledge about it. I do, actually. Your question (ending in a period) came across as extremely condescending and dismissive, and as if you were questioning the value of BCIs in general. So my goal with that post was to try to make an argument for the potential of what BCI tech is good for in the first place, as I interpreted your post. If you want an overview of what their company's devices can do today and what's planned, this recent podcast episode with the CEO is a good start: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27888701,"author":"indigodaddy","month":"2021-07","story_title":"I Fired Myself","text":"Following blog post talks more in detail about his meals/daily diet: [LINK] See also where he talks about this a little bit with Lex Fridman. I watched the video first then poked around on Google a little and found his webpage. [LINK] Full podcast which is more about Johnson\u2019s brain monitoring device: [VIDEO] Note I don\u2019t have any affiliation with Johnson or Kernel, just enjoy Fridman\u2019s podcasts.","stance":"rec"}],"1b-bijO3uEw":[{"hn_comment_id":22992116,"author":"Trasmatta","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Restoring the Gold Filter in Deus Ex: Human Revolution \u2013 Director\u2019s Cut","text":"> to be honest it still just came across as conspiracy gibberish to my ear Warren Spector said that his initial idea for the game was \"what if every conspiracy theory was true?\", so that's pretty intentional. So as long as you buy into that conceit, there's a lot of amazingly clever writing in the game. My favorite conversation in the game is probably the one with the AI Morpheus: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27906301,"author":"onli","month":"2021-07","story_title":"A key product of ubiquitous surveillance is people who are comfortable with it","text":"There is that concept that people are comfortable with surveillance, even want it. A maybe somewhat fringe pop cultural reference to that is in Deus Ex (2000), the best video game made so far: > JC Denton: \"Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance.\" > Morpheus: \"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.\" > JC Denton: \"Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence.\" > Morpheus: \"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary.\" > JC Denton: \"No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera.\" > Morpheus: \"The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.\" One can watch it at [VIDEO] , but it's stronger when experienced as part of the game.","stance":"rec"}],"1bNOO3xxMc0":[{"hn_comment_id":19249310,"author":"stingraycharles","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Fearless Concurrency: Clojure, Rust, Pony, Erlang and Dart","text":"Yeah this is true, typically you want to keep blocking functions outside this. By default, core.async allocates as many threads as cores in your CPU. In addition to this, I personally find core.async to deal poorly with flow control (e.g. slow subscribers slowing down the entire flow for every subscriber), and seems to not have a lot of telemetry / it\u2019s difficult to find out what\u2019s going on in the thread pool behind it. I\u2019ve personally settled on Zach Tellman\u2019s Manifold library, which provides a much more sane abstraction and is fully compatible with core.async. For some addition thought and material on these topics, I highly recommend watching this talk by Zach, \u201cEverything Will Flow\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9656075,"author":"cabacon","month":"2015-06","story_title":"What happens when you add a new teller? (2008)","text":"See also a very nice video from ClojureWest about queues in system architectures: [VIDEO] The queue are everywhere - your messaging queue, the threadpool, the hardware threads, and other layers of the stack and APIs you use. The video adds the interesting detail that as you add more tellers (workers) you learn of impending disaster only in the outlier p99 (or higher) latencies; by the time your p85 latency rises, you're already about to stall out.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11281128,"author":"lkrubner","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?","text":"Anything by Zach Tellman: [LINK] [LINK] In terms of his ideas, watch \"Always be composing\": [LINK] And he offers some great thoughts about queues and backpressure in \"Everything will flow\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12250144,"author":"susan_hall","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013)","text":"On dealing with backpressure, I would recommend what Zach Tellman writes about in his video \"Everything will flow\": [VIDEO] Tellman also tells his own adventure about a system something like this: \"a system that would latch up into an overload state because in overload it would log errors at a severity high enough to force the log file to be flushed on every line\" He talks about some problems he faced when writing to Amazon S3, when S3 stopped accepting requests. It's a fascinating talk.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14961501,"author":"lkrubner","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery","text":"No. Check out this video by Zach Tellman. He talks about queues and how they break down under load. One of the least intuitive things he points out is that when you have more processors, the breakdown tends to be more of a step function: everything is running smoothly till the moment that it isn't. [VIDEO] The point he makes arises from basic queue theory and is applicable to all kinds of systems, and how those systems react to load. It's got little to due with particular hardware and everything to do with basic math.","stance":"rec"}],"1bO8zEaSuWg":[{"hn_comment_id":12855288,"author":"kozhevnikov","month":"2016-11","story_title":"LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn","text":"Interesting video about somewhat public tax returns, and hence salary, in Norway and other Nordic countries. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17900688,"author":"CaliforniaKarl","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Tell Your Co-Workers How Much Money You Make","text":"I suggest checking out Tom Scott's \"In Norway, Everyone Can Know How Much You Earn\", at [VIDEO] And then, have a look at the bibliography in the video description!","stance":"rec"}],"1e8VZlPBx_0":[{"hn_comment_id":17680691,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Why is there still guessing involved in \u201cMake something people want\u201d?","text":"Yeah, I think you have a point. I'm not sure existing data is enough to generate ideas about all potential new products though, since behavior is shaped by what things/ideas/knowledge we have access to today. That is, what data is going to tell you that somebody wants a product that they can't even imagine yet? So I'd think consumer behavior data / demographic data / etc. is a useful guide, but I'm not sure it's sufficient in and of itself. All of that said, Alan Kay said something interesting in a set of lectures[1][2] he did a year or so ago. He brought up the idea of basing new product ideas on \"Human Univerals\", or universal aspects of human nature that really don't vary. A writer named Donald Brown wrote a book literally titled Human Univerals [3] which catalogs a number of these (a lot of them are pretty obvious though: food, shelter, sex, etc.). Kay suggested reading this book, pick one of the human univerals, and figure out a way to use technology to address that. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18379846,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you come up with creative, original ideas?","text":"I don't know that I can say I'm particularly good at this, but to the extent that I do have any original / good ideas, I think a big part of it is this: 1. Know at least a little bit, about a lot of stuff. 2. Know a lot about at least a few things. 3. Constantly trawl for new \"stuff\" (eg, read books, magazines, the web, watch documentaries, etc.) 4. Think about how to combine different bits of the \"stuff\" you have in your head. Take notes, write down lots of ideas, even if they're dumb at a first glance. Keep chewing on things, and eventually the penny drops and you see some connection between things that makes sense. 5. Related to that, and I don't do this well enough myself, is \"spend a lot of time thinking about the kinds of problems people have\". I've read a few books on creativity / innovation / etc., but I'm not sure I can say any of them specifically helped, although a few of the ideas may have been useful without my being consciously aware of it. I read some of the Lateral Thinking book and I vaguely recall thinking it seemed somewhat useful. YMMV. [LINK] I also recommend Alan Kay's video series on \"How To Invent The Future\". Part I: [LINK] Part II: [VIDEO] Another thing: I think sometimes ideas come out that are \"ahead of their time\" and seemingly die on the vine, or just get left behind. But sometimes when the environment changes, those ideas become ripe to get re-invented. There's a book title Rethink that sorta deals with this idea. [LINK] Anyway, I think there's ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24040298,"author":"matt_s","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Other examples like \u201cKodak missed digitization\u201d for presentations?","text":"Counterpoint is that they picked one thing (laser printing) out of the dozens of ideas coming out of PARC and capitalized on it to the point that they were found to be a monopoly [0] and forced to license their patents [1]. Watch Alan Kay's \"How to Invent The Future\" talks from Stanford about this [2] and he talks in more depth. I don't think any company could have built products around all of the ideas that came out of there and been successful, they would have been focused on too many things. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] and [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30457221,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?","text":"If I was really truly stuck for an idea and could not get anything to pop into mind, here's something I might try: Apply the \"take an old idea and reinvent it in light of newer discoveries, new technology, or in application to a new problem\" approach. To do that, read about old ideas in some area of interest to you, that didn't catch on, or were abandoned for whatever reason. Use Google, Wikipedia, Sci-hub, old print magazines, old newspapers, whatever it takes. Look at things through a lens of \"Could I resurrect this idea with a new twist that wasn't available when it was first proposed?\" Do that for enough \"things\" there's a chance it'll spark something. Extra hint: if you're looking for a startup idea specifically, Google for one of the multiple lists of \"startup ideas that never work\" that are out there. Of course it should go without saying to be very cautious about jumping into a project where many other people have failed with the same idea: there's probably a good reason for their failure. But IF you can find a new angle or hook that's \"just right\" maybe you can succeed. Or the whole exercise may actually bring a completely different idea to mind. Try to be open minded with this stuff. Also, find the two video series[1][2] that Alan Kay did on \"Inventing the Future\" and watch those. He shares a lot of great ideas in those. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39120584,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Where can I find ideas on what to build (for fun)","text":"I'll repeat my answer to the previous iteration[1] of this question from a couple of weeks ago: ---- You might find something of use in some of this stuff: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] ---- In addition, the two videos on \"How to Invent the Future\" by Alan Kay might be inspirational to you (or anybody else thinking about this topic): Part I - [LINK] Part II - [VIDEO] Actually, this entire playlist is quite interesting, even if you're not looking to launch a startup right now - [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39632916,"author":"morphle","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Alan Kay's talk at UCLA \u2013 Feb 2024 [video]","text":"Xerox made a ROI of 20000% on the laser printer alone [1]. A better version lecture Alan did for Ycombinator startups [2] but doesn't focus on the return of investment. Xerox did shrink a bit since then. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1f6YyH62jFE":[{"hn_comment_id":40998007,"author":"nebula8804","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Kaspersky gives US customers six months of free updates as a parting gift","text":"Kaspersky is a really talented group. Their talk at CCC about discovering a zero-click attack, managing to capture all the stages of the attack, finding four zero day vulnerabilities and discovering a previously unknown spyware that was there for years was a rollercoaster of a ride. If you have the time to watch it I highly recommend it! [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41940200,"author":"brokenmachine","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Security research on Private Cloud Compute","text":"Relevant: 37C3 - Operation Triangulation: What You Get When Attack iPhones of Researchers [VIDEO] Absolutely insane attack. Really opens your eyes on what nation-state attackers are capable of.","stance":"rec"}],"1fZTOjd_bOQ":[{"hn_comment_id":46498246,"author":"finnlab","month":"2026-01","story_title":"It's hard to justify Tahoe icons","text":"I\u2019ve always respected macOS for being the 'stable' choice for not-as-techy people. But recent versions feel like a mess. Running Tahoe on my 2019 Mac Pro (Yes the cheese grater one) has been surprisingly frustrating. Simple things are broken: Ableton couldn't even trigger a microphone permission prompt, forcing me to meddle with a SQLite database, which is definitely not meant for end users to touch, just to get it working. Logitech\u2019s software is stuck in a loop denying it has Bluetooth access (Which it has). And with the added graphical glitches (Apple likes to call them liquid glass) and weird window artifacts (For some reason, all my windows had a black, rectangular border one day), it\u2019s honestly less reliable than my macOS-style Linux rice from 2015. I've recently watched this talk by an ex-apple UI/UX engineer: [VIDEO] I think what he's talking about is precisely what got lost at apple.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46581631,"author":"bsimpson","month":"2026-01","story_title":"The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe","text":"Scott Jenson - who worked on the classic Mac for Apple, and Android for Google - recently gave a talk on this: [VIDEO] The tl;dw is that copying UX lets others invest energy in identifying the paradigm. Linux, which tends to be starved for resources, has historically been reasonably well served by letting Apple and Microsoft define UX, while Linux focuses on implementing it. However, those headlining companies haven't been investing in desktop UX excellence in recent years. It's time for open source projects to embrace experimentation and take the mantle of cutting edge UX, because Apple et. al. aren't paving the way anymore.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46594027,"author":"glkindlmann","month":"2026-01","story_title":"The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe","text":"It may have jumped the shark, but it may be that now there's space for actual experimentation and innovation again. This talk from Scott Jenson (who worked at Apple in Human Interfaces) was thought-provoking and gave me a little optimism: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1faaOrtHJ-A":[{"hn_comment_id":17339911,"author":"gameswithgo","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Diablo devolved \u2013 magic behind the 1996 computer game","text":"What is fascinating is the guy who coded and designed the multiplayer is actually a genius, he was just inexperienced at the time. His next big project was a huge, complicated, MMO that you could start playing before it finished downloading, and everything worked from day 1, which is rather unique among MMOs!] edit, sorry: Pat Wyatt of Guild Wars good interview with him talking about screwing up Diablo and doing a good job on Guild Wars [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37966802,"author":"andai","month":"2023-10","story_title":"MMO Architecture: clients, sockets, threads and connection-oriented servers","text":"See also: Patrick Wyatt interviewed by Casey Muratori at HandmadeCon: [VIDEO] He was the 2nd employee at Blizzard, did the netcode for their games and also for Guild Wars. His blog is great [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"1ffBJ4sVUb4":[{"hn_comment_id":9523529,"author":"glitchdout","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Git in six hundred words","text":"You don't need a course. All you need is to watch the presentation \"Git For Ages 4 And Up\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18513041,"author":"fgonzag","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Gitless: A simple version control system built on top of Git","text":"I think the main problem is that many developers don't think of Git as a DAG, so they don't really understand at a fundamental level what the operations are actually doing. Once you understand this, Git really does become simple. All you have to do is map each command to the actual operation on the DAG. This video really explains it quite well, it's the one video that allowed me to fully grasp everything: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18924115,"author":"Walkman","month":"2019-01","story_title":"How to teach Git","text":"This is very good explanation, but only explains what happens with the files, nothing about the graph what is a git repository. This talk helped me tremendously to finally understand what's going on in git: [VIDEO] It is one of the best talks about git for beginners with an unfortunate title :D Also, this interactive visual tool helped me to understand branching: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37041624,"author":"725686","month":"2023-08","story_title":"A beginner's guide to Git version control","text":"I always recommend getting started with git with \"Git For Ages 4 And Up\" by Michael G. Shwern: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6753186,"author":"Mithaldu","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Mercurial developer responds to \"Switch to git?\"","text":"> \"I've really tried to 'get into' mercurial's mindset several times now, but never could, whereas, IMO, git's model is simple and powerful. \" > > I find it hard to understand what this means The git model can be, to a sufficient degree of completeness, be demonstrated with child toys: [VIDEO] I can't even imagine how a similar demonstration would look like with Mercurial. It would probably involve having a bunch of such trees on the table, and super-glue instead of sticking things together.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9521708,"author":"lawry","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Git in six hundred words","text":"Just watched it, I have to agree, it made a lot things clear that I just didn't understood before, like detached HEAD. Here's the youtube link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12464375,"author":"falsedan","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Some bad Git situations and how I got myself out of them","text":"Here's my standard recommendations: * Learn Git Branching (gentle introduction to git's UI, with a visualization of the DAG) [0] * Git for ages 4 and up (beginner-oriented, teaches you how to model git's internal concepts, 90m video) [1] * Git from the bottom-up (high-level overview of git's internal data structures) [2] * My Git Habits (sophisticated, you will have to study the man pages used to completely internalize the workflow) [3] [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30382748,"author":"crankytown","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: I started a new job and I'm scared","text":"This is a nice crash course / intro to the basics that you can play with at your own pace and with your own throwaway repos: [LINK] With that out of the way, if your bosses want to fire you a week after you've consistently and proactively been trying to learn workflows that are new to you in your new job, you'd actually be dodging a bullet. > I hate that I am always asking people for help You only need to do this for \"tribal\" knowledge, for which you should have (or start) an internal wiki. For the rest, you kinda have to plumb the depths of the public internet... > like today I asked for help to rebase my branch since I have never done it before Yeah, I still remember my first rebase very well, thinking I would just lose everything if it went wrong. I tried a bunch of things on a throwaway repo to figure out what exactly happens, which turned out to be very helpful. I particularly enjoyed this talk once I'd found it: [VIDEO] > At my old job I was the guy that got things done, gathering requirements, designing and developing new features <...> did anyone else ever feel this way and if so how did you over come, did anyone get fired because they are incompetent? That is still your skill set, and not knowing something does not make you incompetent; though not wanting to learn new workflows and tribal knowledge does . I have always had pride in being a newbie to a new team - I get to learn another set of ways someone has thought about working through problems, and more often than","stance":"rec"}],"1gEz__sMVaY":[{"hn_comment_id":8744809,"author":"higherpurpose","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Secret surveillance detected in Oslo","text":"We need to destroy their logic about \"collecting everything, because they might need it in 100 years\" first. They do it because it's so cheap, because they can, and because nobody is really standing up to them. However, if we allowed the government to do anything it wants \"just because it can\", thousands of our current laws wouldn't exist. I don't remember if it was Clapper or Alexander but one of them basically said the whole Snowden thing will blow-over, and they won't have to change a thing . From what we've seen already that seems to be the case. The watered down USA Freedom Act was killed, and they even made their collection powers stronger with that recent Intelligence Authorization Act. Can you believe that? Not even 2 years after the worldwide Snowden scandal, and they shamelessly push for even more spying powers. These people know nothing can touch them or stop them. And that speaks volumes about the state of our current democracies, when the will of the people, who are supposed to control their governments, and are the ones paying their budgets, have no say in the government's decisions. I highly recommend everyone watch this whole video here. It's an eye opener about many things, and I think he may be right about the root cause of the problem (vote transparency in Congress, which causes politicians to be bought, intimidated, and so on for their vote, just like it would happen with normal citizens's vote if it weren't anonymous): [VIDEO] It's from the video where I ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11509420,"author":"kbaker","month":"2016-04","story_title":"When Lobbying was Illegal","text":"This article kinda just glosses over any causes of lobbying, and then complains about the symptoms. There is one incredibly interesting video I have seen which lays out a major root cause of corruption in the US, and the rise of lobbying and corruption since the 1970s. [VIDEO] (Cardboard Box Reform) It is long, but well-reasoned and supported by a lot of evidence. Definitely worth a watch...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31461392,"author":"kilroy123","month":"2022-05","story_title":"How to Be Successful (2019)","text":"This is very long but it goes into a well thought-out theory for why and how this happened. Very interesting stuff. Well worth a watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9148770,"author":"stephensongr","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Why is there no solution for direct democracy?","text":"Voting has to be truly and completely private to not permit of corruption. Smartphones will not and cannot ever be so. Watch this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12474377,"author":"kbaker","month":"2016-09","story_title":"A prototype of a decentralized political party","text":"Just going to have to disagree... I think earmarks are exactly the thing that caused congresspeople to lose all of their power. > you've just put the big donors totally in charge of the campaign, because their spending dwarfs the spending of the candidates themselves. When the donors are the corporations, and earmarks result in higher profits for the corporations, a dangerous positive feedback loop occurs where you basically end up with corporations controlling the government instead of the elected politicians. As far as the worst political decision of the past few decades, watch this video if you have an hour to spare. It lays out the case where adding transparency in congressional voting is really the root cause of Congress being so screwed up. It might change your mind... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18176683,"author":"mtgx","month":"2018-10","story_title":"As Chinese investment pours into the EU, the Europeans are beginning to worry","text":"You may reconsider after watching this video on why secret ballots (or anonymous voting in general) should be preferred over \"voting transparency\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25189571,"author":"swalsh","month":"2020-11","story_title":"WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)","text":"Another great explaination is the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970, here's an interesting video. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25197508,"author":"snomad","month":"2020-11","story_title":"WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)","text":"This video has a nice summary of all the changes in the 1970s, and how many other prominent authors have documented that radical shift. [VIDEO] The author believes the problems can be traced to the US congress switching from closed (anonymous) to open voting on January 3rd, 1971 Somewhat related, this post shows how the US congress has grown incredibly divided over time [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29590274,"author":"kilroy123","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Worker pay isn\u2019t keeping up with inflation","text":"I think they have the correct answer as to 'why' this has happened and what the root cause is: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30204328,"author":"snomad","month":"2022-02","story_title":"There Is a Much Larger Problem Than the Great Resignation","text":"> It would be good to analyze what happened between 1965 and 2022, what has changed that instead of progress we see some kind of downward spiral. Whether you agree with him or not, this video highlights how the 70s changed everything (in the US at least) The Cardboard Box Reform - Nixon's Ghost Bill & A Crucial Flaw in Democracy [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42713688,"author":"jnellis","month":"2025-01","story_title":"WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)","text":"I ran across this theory years ago about a piece of legislation in late 1970 allowed lobbyists into previously closed door committee meetings, thus allowing lobbyists to assert direct pressure on congressional members. The second video is from the same guy but is rather long and goes into this idea that transparency in congressional committees is a counter-intuitively bad idea because it allows lobbyists to proactively apply pressure before anything ever gets to a floor vote. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42718362,"author":"crispywisp","month":"2025-01","story_title":"WTF Happened in 1971? (2019)","text":"I think this group will appreciate this guy's analysis. \"James D'Angelo (Winner 2014 MIT Climate CoLab, ex-NASA scientist) uncovers a crucial flaw in American democracy. Incredibly, the solution \u2013 which lays at the heart of all current social concerns (inequality, the recession, political division, government disapproval, Citizens United, civil rights and corruption) \u2013 costs under 5 dollars. James presents a breathtaking new look at congressional transparency and the troubles it has wrought by opening the doors to special interests and the wealthy. So, welcome to the world of Martin Gilens' 2014 paper and flatline graph. Also welcome to the world created by electronic voting machines and the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 (passed on October 26, 1970). Unheard of in any current political discussion, this act of Congress has produced endless avenues for lucrative lobbying of special interest groups.\" The Cardboard Box Reform - Nixon's Ghost Bill & A Crucial Flaw in Democracy [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1hs451PfFzQ":[{"hn_comment_id":24457944,"author":"leshokunin","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Super Mario Bros. 3 in 3 Minutes \u2013 World Record Speedrun Explained [video]","text":"Excellent video. I'm impressed the author went to recreate the run frame by frame, and then used those findings to analyze what was happening. Never expected this video to turn into a full on reverse engineering explanation. As a side note, this kind of speed run has become more popular in the recent years for a combination of reasons: - First, it's difficult to improve on the regular world records since they're so optimized (just have a look at Quake Done Quick and its sequels). - Second, the emulators available to the speed running community have evolved. They now include better ways to track what's happening in memory. - Third, the games themselves are understood better (as recently exemplified by the Super Mario 64 full reverse engineering). So it's creating a whole new genre of runs that simply isn't about execution anymore. If you're interested in the topic, you might like the Super Mario World speed run that uses a similar technique ( [LINK] ), or the recent work on removing randomness from Wind Waker runs ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36725989,"author":"mbStavola","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Super Mario 64 \u2013 Watch for Rolling Rocks \u2013 0.5x a Presses [video]","text":"The sheer depth of knowledge and analytical ability pannenkoek has is honestly quite amazing. I've become quite spoiled watching their SM64 videos, it's been incredibly hard to find something of similar rigor and production value for other games. The closest I've found so far has been a video on how a group of speed runners were able to conquer RNG for a puzzle in Wind waker[0]. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40945927,"author":"nick238","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Making Python Less Random","text":"If you're developing a game, there's a fairly big issue in that many things may be requesting values from, and thus incrementing, the PRNG, and many of them could be indirectly controlled by the user (where they are, where they're looking, etc. [VIDEO] is a fun video about reverse-engineering Zelda to predict the randomness in a minigame) As far as the approach, I agree in that I don't understand why 'no code changes' is that important, especially in the context of Python which has a general attitude of consent towards monkeypatching code. Maybe one of the randomness sources was hashing all the source files? :P","stance":"rec"}],"1jHUY3qoBu8":[{"hn_comment_id":28867473,"author":"artificialLimbs","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Apple Joins Blender Development Fund","text":"I uncomfortably poked at blender a few times over the years until this tut by Imphenzia, which made me comfortable in under 2 hours: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35361335,"author":"jolexxa","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Blender 3.5","text":"hey me too!! The video that finally helped me get going was this one from Imphenzia on YT: [VIDEO] all his other stuff is great, like building and rigging a low-poly character. Instead of having to follow tutorials and make stuff I didn\u2019t want to, he shows you how to use the tools to make what\u2019s in your imagination!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25532303,"author":"juanuys","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Tutorials for Blender?","text":"For Blender, I've really liked this video, and others by the same chap: [VIDEO] For game dev, I'd start with something with a UI and general-purpose like Godot or Unity, or if you're not a coder, maybe GameMaker and its ilk.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44933251,"author":"Etherlord87","month":"2025-08","story_title":"LL3M: Large Language 3D Modelers","text":"Wrong tutorials. A lot of these models consist of just taking a primitive like a sphere, scaling it, and then creating another primitive, scaling it, moving it, so you have overlapping hulls (\"bad\" topology). Then in shading you just create a default material and set its color. There are models in the examples that require e.g. extrusion (which is literally: select faces, press E, drag mouse). Some shapes are smoothed/subdivided with Catmul-Clark Subdivision Surface modifier, which you can add simply by pressing CTRL+2 in \"Object Mode\" (the digit is the number of subdivisions, basically use 1 to 3, you may set more for renders). Here's a good, albeit old tutorial: [VIDEO] Yes I made some assumptions when estimating it takes about a day to learn to make models like this: you have a free day to spend it in its entirety to learn, and as a hackernews user your IQ is over average and you're technically savvy. And last assumption: you learn skills required evenly, rather than going deep into the rabbit hole of e.g. correct topology; if you go through something like Andrew Pierce's doughnut tutorial, it may take more than a day, especially if you play around with the various functions of Blender rather than strictly following the videos - but you will end up making significantly better models than the examples presented, e.g. you will know to inset cylinder's ngons to avoid the Catmul-Clark subdiv artifacts you can see on the 2nd column of hats. > this tech is insanely useful. No, i","stance":"rec"}],"1qSTcxt2t74":[{"hn_comment_id":20447375,"author":"hombre_fatal","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M","text":"Great post. An essential Blender video to watch is Captain Disillusion's presentation at Blender Conf: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25217293,"author":"lathiat","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Blender 2.91","text":"Some would say this amazing diss by Captain Disillusion at BlenderCon had something to do with the major interface changes in Blender 2.8. The entire presentation is hilarious but for the interface related bit I've linked to 21m15s here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33273890,"author":"lathiat","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommend me a Blender course","text":"I can\u2019t give you a good tutorial but this is a must watch for inspiration and laughs: \u201cCaptain Disillusion: World\u2019s Greatest Blenderer - Live at the Blender Conference 2018\u201d [VIDEO] Note for after: The UI has apparently been fixed","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21371691,"author":"theclaw","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Show HN: Make a video of any word forming out of candy","text":"For those not aware Captain Disillusion is an impressively well produced youtube series mimicking the vibe of 90's kids TV, but for an adult audience. The Captain uses Blender for the 3D effects in his videos, and did a great presentation at the Blender conference last year [0]. The type of effect used to create these candy words is covered in the \"Marble Sorting Machine\" video [LINK] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29437292,"author":"xmprt","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Blender 3.0","text":"I really enjoyed this talk by Captain Disillusion at the Blender Conference 2018 where he goes over some of that - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1rCrfQUcXDI":[{"hn_comment_id":17696243,"author":"misterS","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Deep Space Network Now: Status of communications with our deep space explorers","text":"Dave Jones of EEVBlog has a nice series of videos talking to Richard Stephenson, Operations Supervisor at the DSN's Canberra site. How To Contact The Voyager 2 Probe: Part 1: [LINK] Part 2: [VIDEO] Part 3: [LINK] (the playlist is a mess, and videos are unordered) There are also a couple of Behinde the Scenes videos.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35734942,"author":"7373737373","month":"2023-04","story_title":"NASA Power Hack Extends 45-Year Voyager 2 Mission Even Longer","text":"Video recommendation: How To Contact The Voyager 2 Probe ( [LINK] ) and Pinging The Voyager 2 Probe ( [VIDEO] ) by EEVDiscover","stance":"rec"}],"1rZ-JorHJEY":[{"hn_comment_id":19645113,"author":"Nebbers","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Orange_slice: Research Kernel and Hypervisor in Rust","text":"Would you mind sharing who you watch? I have found a few good ones but feel like there are loads I am missing! Best video I have found to date is [VIDEO] but there are only 2","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24591265,"author":"diehunde","month":"2020-09","story_title":"YouTube Channels to Level Up Your Programming Skills","text":"I also recommend \"Hacking with Andrew and Brad: tip.golang.org\" [1]. They are part of the Go team. It's just something to watch the pros doing live coding. By the way, what's with antirez's colorscheme? I wonder if he really uses that blue background or is it just for the video. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33339051,"author":"otras","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Where to watch skilled developers writing code and explaining ideas?","text":"I\u2019d recommend these two pair programming videos of Andrew Gerrand and Brad Fitzpatrick working on Go related projects. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39694917,"author":"ryanolsonx","month":"2024-03","story_title":":syntax off (2016)","text":"If you've never seen anyone work with syntax highlighting off, there are some YouTube videos that inspired me to try coding with syntax highlighting off: 1. \"Hacking with Andrew and Brad\" - Andrew Gerrand (previously on the Go core team) uses Vim without syntax highlighting.[0] 2. \"Advanced Embed With Go Generate - Andy Walker\" -- this guy uses bold/italics/few colors in his editor. Interesting visual on how you can use font to show different aspects of the code.[1][2] 3. \"Visual Studio Code, No Syntax Coloring, Go Fonts\" [3] 4. \"stb programming FAQ\" - Sean Barrett answers why he uses VC6 and why his syntax highlighting is so minimal.[4] [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"1sd26pWhfmg":[{"hn_comment_id":47679729,"author":"knowaveragejoe","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era","text":"I'm sure they do, yet the models really are getting scarily good at this. This talk changed my view on where we're actually at: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47598915,"author":"panstromek","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Claude Wrote a Full FreeBSD Remote Kernel RCE with Root Shell (CVE-2026-4747)","text":"The talk \"Black-Hat LLMs\" just came out a few days ago: [VIDEO] Looks like LLMs are getting good at finding and exploiting these.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47605205,"author":"ogig","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Claude Wrote a Full FreeBSD Remote Kernel RCE with Root Shell (CVE-2026-4747)","text":"This very question was asked to Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic at this talk: [VIDEO] The answer is complex, worth watching the video. But mainly, they don't know where to place the line. Defenders need tools, as good as attackers. Attackers will jailbreak models, defender might not, it's the safeguard positive in that case? Carlini actively asks the audience and community for \"help\" in determining how to proceed basically.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47633900,"author":"eichin","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Claude Code Found a Linux Vulnerability Hidden for 23 Years","text":"[VIDEO] is the presentation itself. The prompts are trivial; the bug (and others) looks real and well-explained - I'm still skeptical but this looks a lot more real/useful than anything a year ago even suggested was possible...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47680053,"author":"woeirua","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era","text":"You should watch this talk by Nicholas Carlini (security researcher at Anthropic). Everything in the talk was done with Opus 4.6: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47680218,"author":"conradkay","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era","text":"I would've basically agreed with you until I'd seen this talk: [VIDEO] Maybe a bad example since Nicholas works at Anthropic, but they're very accomplished and I doubt they're being misleading or even overly grandiose here See the slide 13 minutes in, which makes it look to be quite a sudden change","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47682507,"author":"underdeserver","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era","text":"I would suggest watching Nicholas Carlini's talk and Heather Adkins and Four Flynn's talks from unprompted: [VIDEO] [LINK] My takeaway is that fuzzing is not just complementary, it also gives a stronger AI a starting point. But AI is generally faster and better.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47732549,"author":"vmg12","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found","text":"The technique Anthropic uses was demonstrated by Nicholas Carlini in a talk he gave 2 weeks ago and it's very simple, when asking LLMs to review code, ask them to review one file in a single session. Here is the video with the timestamp (watch through to ~5:30, they show two different ways of prompting claude). [VIDEO] [VIDEO] IMO the big \"innovation\" being shown by Mythos is the effectiveness with prompting LLMs to look for security vulnerabilities in specific files one at a time and automating this prompting with a simple script. Prompting Mythos with a single file per session is why I suspect it cost Anthropic $20k to find some of the bugs in these codebases. I know this same technique is effective with Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 because I've been using it on my own code. If you just ask the agent to review your pr with a low effort prompt they are not exhaustive, they will not actually read each changed file and look at how it interacts with the system as a whole. If the entire session is to review the changes for a single file, the llm will do much more work reviewing it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48189076,"author":"wkandek","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us","text":"This matches with what Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic said a the [un]prompted conference - [VIDEO] . Very worth watching.","stance":"rec"}],"1sl5KJ69qiA":[{"hn_comment_id":26264404,"author":"wongarsu","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Hypothetical Judgment versus Real-Life Behavior in Trolley-Style Moral Dilemmas","text":"The youtube channel vsauce tried putting people in this situation by putting them in a fake railroad switching outpost and having the operator step out for a phonecall. They took care to educate the subject exactly on how the system works without them suspecting anything, trying to eliminate many of the factors you mention. The video is well worth a watch [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32023894,"author":"Sceptique","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Absurd Trolley Problems","text":"They did this experiment in real life [VIDEO] . It's not 100% perfect but it is still an amazing test.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47751883,"author":"Imustaskforhelp","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack","text":"> Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context. Can I just say that out of all of this discourse happening, this might be the most insightful yet succint position to explain my stance on all of this especially the \"its all social context.\" line. I feel like many of us here might share an answer publicly but I have always believed that if I am in the shoes of someone else, I might act the way they do so in a sense I understand the human part of it. A human did the violence and why. I understand that. Now we can call this violence inhuman, sure, but this action is still done by human and for many reasons. And I also understand why people condemn these actions, we wish to live in a clean and structural world and then we see the messiness of the world. I just feel like just condemning an action would do nothing unless we change the ground conditions but that isn't in the hands of even many of us Hackernews users and this is basically a class aspect to it. I personally feel like there are some similarities to this incident to the Trolley problem actually. Vsauce did a video about it worth watching[0] Thank you for writing this comment. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1tSqSMOyNFE":[{"hn_comment_id":9129580,"author":"np422","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Speed Cameras and the City","text":"Or perhaps it's just the old phrase \"Lies, damned lies, and statistics\" that is appropriate once again? Veritasium explains it better than me. Please watch [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8168475,"author":"javajosh","month":"2014-08","story_title":"Set Up to Fail: How Bosses Create Their Own Poor Performers (1998) [pdf]","text":">Recognizing people's successes and what they are doing well is a 1000% more effective than harping on what people have messed up Yes, this is (verifiably) true. One must be aware, however, that positive feedback is usually going to be ineffective, thanks to natural \"regression to the mean\" effects, elucidated wonderfully in this Veritasium video[1]. (The point, in the end though, is that performance is going to statistically improve if people do worse than average, and do worse if they do really well, regardless of the feedback you give them\", which is called \"regression to the mean\". The net effect is that you might get a false positive for negative feedback, and a false negative for positive feedback if you don't account for the natural tension that brings everything back to average.) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43698292,"author":"divan","month":"2025-04","story_title":"How to win an argument with a toddler","text":"> results are so obviously and immediately measurable Ehm\u2026 not really \u2013 especially not the \"obviously\" part :) Controlled or even abusive coaching can sometimes lead to better short-term results, but often at the cost of athletes\u2019 mental health and long-term performance. What\u2019s worse, coaching culture in many countries falls victim to the \"regression to the mean\" fallacy. I\u2019m sure HN readers are familiar with it, but most coaches aren\u2019t \u2013 and they\u2019re not trained to adjust their intuition accordingly. Coaches tend to praise athletes when they perform well and criticize them when they don\u2019t. But statistically, if an athlete has an unusually good day in practice, they\u2019re likely to perform worse next time. And if they\u2019re having a rough day, odds are they\u2019ll improve next time. That\u2019s just the nature of sports practice. This creates a repeating pattern: praise followed by worse results, and criticism followed by improvement. Over time, this becomes a learned behavior pattern \u2013 reinforced by the environment and by other coaches who interpret it as validation of their approach. Derek from Veritasium has a great video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1uflg7LDmzI":[{"hn_comment_id":15283654,"author":"VarFarYonder","month":"2017-09","story_title":"W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns","text":"James Mickens gave an interesting talk on what we could do to build a better browser: [VIDEO] I'm hoping that WebAssembly might be a route towards allowing something like this to happen. If an alternative to HTML/CSS/JS could be developed in WebAssembly, then we could have a situation where HTML has competition, rather than being the only way to build a website. And browsers can become simpler as the rendering duties are moved out of the browser and to the website itself.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18063446,"author":"zeroname","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Show HN: Thi.ng/hdom \u2013 S-expression based, pure ES6 UI/VDOM components","text":"> Doesn't every freaking mainstream technology suck? I regularly come across rants from significant developers regarding this issue. There probably is no way to prevent this from happening. Because worse is unfortunately better. Web technology is fundamentally different in that you have a big standards body regulating everything from layout down to color blending, then leave it up to multiple vendors to implement all that stuff at great expense and with long delay. Worse, it's all shoehorned on top of some \"document model\" than was never designed with applications in mind. It's a waste. To see what a better platform could look like, consider this: [LINK] [VIDEO] The key here is reducing surface area. It's entirely possible that WASM will bring us closer to that, but the web developers of today probably won't like that. > I regularly and seriously consider to leave software development because of this (as I'm really suffering) but then I remember how much power it gives me despite the horrible faults it has. I don't know what you do, but I find web development to be significantly more frustrating than other areas. That doesn't mean there isn't frustration elsewhere though and it's definitely part of the job.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18421935,"author":"maxharris","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What will future browser be like?","text":"James Mickens at Microsoft Research presents Atlantis, which I definitely think this still the most forward-looking browser architecture out there: [VIDEO] Ideas from this effort are going to be trickling into browsers for years to come. For example, if you squint a bit, you might see a conceptual resemblance between the Syphon interpreter in Atlantis and WASM in shipping browsers.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23932276,"author":"foobiekr","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Why is CSS the way it is?","text":"James Mickens has a talk about doing exactly this [1]. It's a perfectly sensible proposal and the talk is well worth the time to listen to. He makes a solid argument for why this should be done. Problem: in reality, it is unworkable and will never happen, and even if it did the actual level of \"development\" that we actually see in the real world would end up in a situation just as bad as the situation we are in now. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24267699,"author":"maxharris","month":"2020-08","story_title":"\u2018CSS X\u2019","text":"I used to get really angry at CSS because of all of the things that made it a bad fit with component-based systems like React. It made me so unhappy that I worked full-time for about nine months on this project, which was a React-like component system that rendered to canvas. [LINK] I got pretty far! But I gave up working on it when I realized that I was going to be pushing this boulder uphill for years. So what changed? I picked up Swift and SwiftUI, and it turns out that some of the ideas that I had were the same ones the SwiftUI folks went with! For all the web has given us, I think its APIs are holding us back now. I still think we need something open and decentralized that competes with the App store and Play store, but one that offers apps that use basically the same APIs and technology that the native apps use. Last thing: I know Apple cripples browsers on their platforms. I've run into all those issues personally in my work! That still doesn't make the web the right thing. Here's James Mickens telling us how to fix the browser's busted architecture: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"1wAaI_6b9JE":[{"hn_comment_id":16527898,"author":"IngoBlechschmid","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Counterintuitive Properties of High Dimensional Space","text":"I love Matt Parker's take on the fourth dimension: see for instance this one-hour long but very enjoyable talk for general audiences at the Royal Institution: [VIDEO] (Things to See and Hear in the Fourth Dimension) If you know German, then you might like this talk as well: [LINK] (The curious world of four-dimensional geometry)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32195957,"author":"ProllyInfamous","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Strange new phase of matter acts like it has two time dimensions","text":"For anybody whom might be interested in \"what a 4D cube might look like...\" [VIDEO] The entire video in mesmerizing -- one of the coolest party tricks I've learned is the double-twisted morbius strip dissection.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14473929,"author":"jameshart","month":"2017-06","story_title":"4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys","text":"I found this Matt Parker lecture provided some good tools for getting your head around the fact that extra dimensions really do let you go around things, not through: [VIDEO] (the whole thing is worth watching, but the bit about higher dimensional visualization starts there)","stance":"rec"}],"1xQeXOz0Ncs":[{"hn_comment_id":24916369,"author":"Huggernaut","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Type in the exact number of machines to proceed","text":"Nickolas Means has an absolutely wonderful set of talks on themes like this. Particularly relevant here I think, is his talk: \"Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?\" - which goes through the events that occurred at the nuclear power plant, the systemic problems, and how to find the \"second stories\" of why failures occurred. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26193458,"author":"lawrjone","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Judge: Citibank isn't entitled to $500M it sent to various creditors last August","text":"There's an excellent talk from Nick Means (GitHub) called \"Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?\". Link: [VIDEO] One thing it discusses is how the alerts inside the control hub were so noisy, and were logged via a reasonably slow printer, that the alerts which suggested the reactor was in serious trouble only printed hours after you could do anything. And the alert light that said \"shits fucked\" was placed right next to the light about an elevator being out of order. Human error is rarely intentional, and even if it is, a system that fails in response has missed the mark. The talk explains the amazing finds made by the government committee hired to investigate the incident, once they left the idea of 'human error' at the door. I do suggest you watch the video, but as a teaser: it turned out that at the time, most US nuclear engineers had been sourced from nuclear subs. Subs have totally different rules on how to manage the reactor, and train their staff inappropriately for a land-based reactor. Pretty significant cultural find...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27054701,"author":"codebeaker","month":"2021-05","story_title":"White House eyes subsidies for nuclear plants to help meet climate targets","text":"I'll have to dig up a citation. But the [] Three Mile Island accident was in part caused by (former) naval nuclear specialists making poor choices based on optimizing for the wrong things. My memory is fuzzy, but this 37 minute video [2] has a breakdown. If memory serves, the root causes were faults in the pumps and delays in the 28 baud diagnostic printouts running minutes or hours behind which left everyone operating on bad data. Part of that was exacerbated by the operators applying techniques used on subs (something about preferring to keep low pressure in some vessel, because high pressure there could sink the boat if containment was lost), the TMI design didn't need this as it could vent/blow-off, and the operators became somewhat fixated on \"trying to save the boat\" and missed a bunch of procedures. Of course this doesn't invalidate your point, but even if the reactor designs are really similar, it may be a mistake to cross train anyone. (disclosure: haven't seen this video in a year or so, and am generally a fan of nuclear power considering the alternatives, but it needs to be done with different, safer reactor designs and probably with new branding because no matter what it's going to take _forever_ to convince anyone to trust nuclear, when they associate that term with the dangerous, BWR designs that were never intended for land) [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39175168,"author":"tudorw","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Why you've never been in a plane crash","text":"Thanks for that, I really appreciated this breakdown of the accident at Three Mile Island and the concept of 'the second story' with regards systems thinking; [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2-oBNh0UkQc":[{"hn_comment_id":10751120,"author":"agumonkey","month":"2015-12","story_title":"SymbOS: preemptive multitasking OS that can play mp3s, video on 8-bit Z80 PCs","text":"After finding about pico8, I got interested in low res, low color depth UX, this couldn't come at a better time. Beside the flickering, it's pretty neat. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18275246,"author":"exikyut","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Looking Glass, a revolutionary window manager revealed in 2006","text":"Lots and lots of transition animations, and potentially very poor UI/UX model. Demos are not (largely) interactive, so the demoscene is not known for collective skill designing GUIs. The most similar/related type of things I can think of that are interactive are crack/keygen programs that include chiptunes and maybe a cute graphic effect somewhere. For some time I've actually wanted to go track down such programs to analyze/compare/study the progression of design. Kind of difficult to do so though, for obvious reasons (unfortunately). But my impression from the one or two programs I do very vaguely remember using, half for entertainment purposes was that the UI design was sort of at the \"48%-50%\" mark - good enough, but flitting just below the halfway mark instead of just above it. Not remarkable; maybe a few rough edges. Thanks for your comment. It prompted some mental gears to spin and for me to realize the above. -- I do think I understand the spirit of what you're getting at, though, and there are a few things that my brain has decided is relevant, although I can't describe the working-out process that led me to list these. \u00af\\_(\u30c4)_/\u00af - SymbOS ( [LINK] ): preemptive multitasking, windowed GUI, storage on devices up to 128GB, runs on home computers using the Z80 (starting at 4MHz) with up to (_ up to _) 1MB of RAM. (I found this rambling but very interesting demo of what it can do with one of the more capable machines it supports: [VIDEO] ) - kOS ( [LINK] ): limited-access ","stance":"rec"}],"21EiKfQYZXc":[{"hn_comment_id":13930332,"author":"melling","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Opening a new chapter of my work in AI","text":"I really enjoyed this Andrew Ng talk: [VIDEO] Some excerpts: Anti-Evil AI drives funding: [VIDEO] Radiologist will be impacted: [VIDEO] Against Basic Income: [VIDEO] Trolley Problem (who dies): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14878462,"author":"abhgh","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots","text":"> It is hard for me to empathize with Musk\u2019s fixation on evil super-intelligent AGI killer robots in a very distant future. This reminded me of a talk by Andrew Ng I watched recently [1]: \"Worrying about evil AI robots today is a little bit like worrying about overpopulation on the planet Mars ... how do you not care ... and my answer is we haven't landed on the planet yet so I don't know how to work productively on that problem...of course, doing research on anti-evil AI is a positive thing but I do see that there is a massive misallocation of resources.\" Nice talk all around if you can find the time. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"21j_OCNLuYg":[{"hn_comment_id":9430184,"author":"pharke","month":"2015-04","story_title":"The Slow Death of the University","text":"Reminds me of this talk [VIDEO] and also happens to be my current mid-range goal. I've worked on a farm, gardened, and raised chickens growing up and I'm dead set on doing it again, the amount of work that goes into it vs. the amount of food and enjoyment that you get out of it makes it a no brainer if you can take the leap and buy a plot. Construction begins this summer and I couldn't be happier.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28256332,"author":"movedx","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The thing standing between procrastination and daily progress is ritual","text":"That's an interest point! I'm going to find and read that. It reminded me of the guy from Thailand (TED Talk - linked below) who didn't understand why we make our lives so complicated when he can work for 2-3 months of the year and spend the rest of it wondering which of his six houses, which he built, he's going to live in - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42991359,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Obscure islands I find interesting","text":"> And no, I don\u2019t believe in the happy-life-in-the-forest. Jon Jandai moved from a village in rural Thailand to Bangkok, and took up a fulltime labouring job. He struggled to afford enough food to eat, slept in a shared room which was too hot, saved for a month to buy a pair of jeans to wear and realised he was still the same person and still unhappy, and he saw house prices out of reach with educated high-earners working for 30 years to pay a mortgage. He didn't like it, and moved back to his village. He spends a month planting rice and a month harvesting rice and gets enough rice to feed his family of six for a year, and several times more than that leftover to sell at the market. 2 months a year work, ten months free time. He spends fifteen minutes a day tending a half-acre garden and gets enough vegetables for six people to eat, and more to sell at the market. And he fishes. He built a house with earthen building in 3 months. He self-reports being much much happier, whether you believe it or not. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"23X14HS4gLk":[{"hn_comment_id":15030154,"author":"gremlinsinc","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Trump Strategic and Policy Forum, Which Included IBM and GM CEOs, Disbands","text":"By putting people in 'groups' and having those who support him also enforce this idea that we're all in separate groups and need to look out for own little group--this is how fascism grows, this is how hitler took over Germany, this is how a new Hitler figure could take over America too... It's not outside the realm of possibility sure Germans in 1900 couldn't forsee the horrors of 1940. Here's a good video from 1947 explaining the whole thing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27657269,"author":"PaulHoule","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Question about mRNA Vaccines?","text":"I don't know about that, but I do know this. There is a gang of people that is promoting lies about Ivermectin (that it is not only effective against Roundworms but also COVID-19) and COVID-19 vaccines (that they are dangerous.) I am not sure that they expect to convince anybody, but I think the goal is for the people involved to be persecuted and rejected, complain they are being censored, and then become more bonded to the group. It is like how some cults force members into fruitless evangelism. My advice: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"24OXzIRIiMQ":[{"hn_comment_id":22753667,"author":"kyuudou","month":"2020-04","story_title":"The Collective Body: Russian experiments in life after death","text":"The special projects videos in that game are some of the best science fiction creative work ever made, IMO. Also, something I still think is predictive and sends chills up my neck, \"as the Americans painfully learned in Earth's final century\" (presumably the 21st): [LINK] Text of the whole spoken: \"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.\" -- Commissioner Pravin Lal, \"U.N. Declaration of Rights\"\" All special projects video text, starting with 0-24: [VIDEO] Cutscene vids start here: [LINK] Although a bit dated, I still don't see this kind of intellectual quality in most games. Paradox Interactive's Stellaris is about the closest thing to a spiritual successor to SMAC, but it's also its own beast and next-gen 4X.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21904360,"author":"alchemism","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Paean to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (2016)","text":"Some thoughtful sorts put all of them into a series of YouTube segments. I find them to be timeless, and quite heady when listened to in sequence. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24736480,"author":"duxup","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Sid Meier's Memoir","text":"Some how Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was a 4x game that had one of the most interesting stories / atmospheres in video game history, even if it was just from a few clips and quotes. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"24R8JObNNQ4":[{"hn_comment_id":19055530,"author":"Reedx","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Vice Media to Reorganize, Lay Off 10 Percent of Staff","text":"IIRC, I was introduced to Vice with their fascinating coverage of North Korea: [VIDEO] (first trip - Shane Smith was banned from the country as a result) [LINK] (second trip years later, where they got in under the guise of a Basketball game) Unfortunately it's been increasingly hit or miss ever since and now their process seems to be along these lines: [LINK] Also, how is it that so many of these media companies are having layoffs at almost exactly the same time? You'd think it'd be more scattered...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35946000,"author":"MobileVet","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Vice, Decayed Digital Colossus, Files for Bankruptcy","text":"I ran across their North Korea report when it was posted 11 years ago and was an instant fan. Shane was compelling and of course the topic was fascinating. Very few people had gotten in there and brought film out like that before, that I had seen at least. Very eye opening [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16276842,"author":"gkya","month":"2018-01","story_title":"What\u2019s North Korea like?","text":"Vice has a three-part 1-hour-total documentary on North Korea with footage from the country. Part one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"29RkHH-psrY":[{"hn_comment_id":24589645,"author":"GeekyBear","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Windows XP source code has leaked","text":">It was really really stable. Windows 2000 was the last version of the NT branch where Dave Cutler was in charge. He's a legend for a reason. [LINK] Computer History Museum long form interviews: Part 1 [VIDEO] Part 2 [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37976465,"author":"randomifcpfan","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Dave Cutler: The Secret History of Microsoft Windows [video]","text":"The Computer History Museum oral history interview with David Cutler is also very good: Part 1: [VIDEO] Part 2: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"29u_FejNuks":[{"hn_comment_id":16767779,"author":"DanAndersen","month":"2018-04","story_title":"To Make Sassages\u200b","text":"Obligatory mention of the \"18th Century Cooking\" YouTube channel: [LINK] The Mushroom Ketchup recipe is one I repeatedly go back to -- it's just that good: [VIDEO] I also encourage anyone who still has their elderly relatives with them to ask them for recipes they had from their era. My family keeps a common cookbook, and it's nice to be able to pull out Grandma's shrimp-dip recipe for special occasions.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32775600,"author":"scommab","month":"2022-09","story_title":"When Every Ketchup but One Went Extinct","text":"If you want to learn more here is a great video with both the history and recipe for mushroom ketchup: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2A2NY29iQdI":[{"hn_comment_id":28400776,"author":"infogulch","month":"2021-09","story_title":"O.mg Cable","text":"Since this has generated some discussion on locks and picking, there's been some interesting developments on \"unpickable locks\" that sidestep the tolerance problem by decoupling setting the pins from testing them. I.e. pins are tested all at once after they are physically decoupled from the key & keyway, eliminating state space reduction attacks (aka picking one pin at a time) leaving only brute force. One such effort features locks made by Stuff Made Here sent to Lock Picking Lawyer. According to LPL the locks are theoretically sound and he did not attempt to pick them, but these particular implementations had a couple (easily fixable) bypasses. Made for interesting videos on both sides: Stuff Made Here describes the design in detail: TWO Unpickable (?) Locks for Lock Picking Lawyer! - [VIDEO] Lock Picking Lawyer reviews them and performs some bypasses: [1299] Unpickable Locks From Stuff Made Here - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31168122,"author":"yccs27","month":"2022-04","story_title":"High-Security Mechanical Locks (2020)","text":"On the topic of \"novel, non-pin-tumbler mechanisms\": I can recommend the videos by Stuff Made Here [1][2], where he designs two novel anti-picking lock mechanisms, and the related video [3] where LockPickingLawyer tries to pick and bypass them. Together they give a whole new understanding of lock design and picking methods. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31880302,"author":"binarymax","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Enclave: An Unpickable Lock","text":"This looks very similar to the design[0] by Stuff Made Here (and collaborative hardening [1] suggestions by Lock Picking Lawyer)\u2026an excellent set of videos. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"2AXv49dDQJw":[{"hn_comment_id":40750269,"author":"simcop2387","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Wireless power transfer system achieves 270-kilowatt charge","text":"This spurred on some other videos from another youtuber that goes by AlphaPhoenix, he went way into all the details on it including measuring the complete flow of the wave of the electrical power and how it all works. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] (on his second channel, has a lot of \"behind the scenes\" of how it was done) It goes into a lot of depth of how the wave propagates, including measuring it at effectively \"a billion fps\" (he goes over how he does this) along the wire and how impedance matching works, etc. It's about 2.5 hours of video IIRC but it's probably the most detailed and easy to understand demonstration and explanation of all of it that I've ever seen.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40779600,"author":"spaceywilly","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?","text":"As a matter of fact, yes! This YouTube video is probably one of the most amazing things I have ever seen, he measured the change in voltage traveling along a Y circuit, where one end is open and one is closed. You can see the voltage \u201cripple\u201d through both branches of the circuit, reflect of the ends of the branches, and eventually settle into steady state. There are limits to this way of thinking (for example, water can\u2019t travel in the space between \u201ctubes\u201d, but electricity can), but it is a very good way to approximate it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42841064,"author":"brunohaid","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Oliver Heaviside and the theory of transmission lines (2021)","text":"Excellent post! Controlled impedance took me a long time to wrap my head around when starting PCB design, the moment when it finally clicked was watching this excellent AlphaPhoenix video [VIDEO] asking and practically demonstrating the simple question: When you flip on a switch, to turn on anything, send data, morse something etc, how does the circuit know how much current the load at the other end needs? Spoiler: Given that information can't travel faster than light, the simple answer is: it doesn't. So it just guesses and adjusts, which you don't want as it gives you exactly the ringing etc Heaviside identified. The video is a nice complement, as it perfectly visualizes the issues at play. It's a pretty wild bit of understanding to have, even in simple situations like flipping on a light switch.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46269031,"author":"andrewflnr","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Science Communications on YouTube","text":"I want to hijack this comment to plug AlphaPhoenix ( [LINK] ), who is responsible for by far the best explanations of electricity that I've encountered in any format. For instance, this one that clarifies what happens when you try to send electricity on an open circuit, and (IIRC this is the right one) what impedance mismatch is actually about: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43149982,"author":"kzrdude","month":"2025-02","story_title":"But good sir, what is electricity?","text":"AlphaPhoenix's measurements, experiments and visualisations really help! They show some things that are normally not even taught and even electrical engineers will appreciate to see this. This video he made about it is very good, and worth watching if you wonder about how electricity propagates from one end of a conductor to the other. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47053946,"author":"spaceywilly","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Physicists Make Electrons Flow Like Water","text":"Well, the water analogy actually holds up quite well if you consider the charge field moving, not the electrons themselves. This guy has a lot of great videos using water channels to explain electricity. It is fascinating how under a high speed scope, you can see the electrical Charge \u201cflow\u201d like water down each branch of a circuit. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2AecAXinars":[{"hn_comment_id":23529913,"author":"ccurrens","month":"2020-06","story_title":"DIY True 4K Projector","text":"I agree! I particularly liked the one using a two-way plastic mirror and webcam, so that you can maintain eye contact when you're video calling someone. Similar principal to a teleprompter. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23690541,"author":"enobrev","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Video chats short-circuit a brain function essential for trust?","text":"I don't think I'll be trying this, but it's a really interesting DIY solution to ensuring eye contact when video conferencing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23691035,"author":"michaelbuckbee","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Video chats short-circuit a brain function essential for trust?","text":"There's a neat DIY project to try to overcome this: [VIDEO] TL;DW - use some cardboard a two way mirror and an external webcam to make a box you place over your laptop so that it lines up the camera + your eyes.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25758201,"author":"rahimnathwani","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Cheap and simple way to mount a smartphone directly above a laptop display","text":"The 'DIY Perks' channel on YouTube has a nice solution to maintain eye contact: [VIDEO] You can't mount a webcam in the middle of your laptop display, as even a small camera and thin cable would get in the way of looking at the screen. But using a two-way mirror, you can be looking at both the screen and the webcam at the same time, without the webcam being visible to you.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28353414,"author":"itronitron","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The Fatiguing Effects of Camera Use in Virtual Meetings [pdf]","text":"This video shows a project to create a one-way mirror that allows a person to view their monitor while 'looking at' the camera. [VIDEO] If I was planning to do any interviews I would definitely build and use this. It also makes me wonder, when people are staring into the camera if they are looking at a photo instead of the camera lens.","stance":"rec"}],"2AnbYNudAyM":[{"hn_comment_id":47687965,"author":"uzyn","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Razor1911. A demo 40 years in the making","text":"This is so sick! Revision faded out the credits part, which is still really cool on its own. The full version (10m 16s) can be viewed at [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48506793,"author":"RIMR","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Keygen.music","text":"It's so cool to see that some of these groups are still making incredible pieces of digital art as recently as this year! This Razor1911 career retrospective demo from Revision was pretty impressive: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49099212,"author":"MatMercer","month":"2026-07","story_title":"User Interfaces of the Demo Scene","text":"What a great thing to add to this: [VIDEO] I'm not from this era and this article explains a lot of things from the video!","stance":"rec"}],"2BdBfsXbST8":[{"hn_comment_id":24292648,"author":"jhncls","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Knuth versus Email (1999)","text":"Lex Fridman had an interesting interview with Don Knuth close to his 82nd birthday[0]. It's fascinating to learn how much energy he still spends at verifying and investigating each aspect of newly published algorithms. E-mail would probably cut away too much time from what he considers more important. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36016724,"author":"lanstin","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT","text":"IIRC he gets into his work arrangement to try to finish TAOCP: [VIDEO] I don't really like Lex Fridman, but this interview is excellent.","stance":"rec"}],"2DIl3Hfh9tY":[{"hn_comment_id":6883926,"author":"damon_c","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram","text":"I have found this Leonard Susskind lecture to come closest to answering the question of \"why would anyone even suggest such a thing?\" about this subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6884337,"author":"andy112","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram","text":"Others can hopefully chime in with more, but when I first was learning about it, my reaction to the word \"hologram\" was the same as your (1). My understanding is that when they say \"hologram\", they're simply meaning an n dimensional object that's encoded in n-1 dimensional space. If you're not familiar with the basics of the Holographic Principle, start here: [LINK] It's been a while since I've watched these, but IIRC these are very good videos to start with: - [VIDEO] - [LINK] EDIT: Key clippings from the wikipedia article- \" But Jacob Bekenstein noted that this leads to a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. If one throws a hot gas with entropy into a black hole, once it crosses the event horizon, the entropy would disappear. The random properties of the gas would no longer be seen once the black hole had absorbed the gas and settled down. The second law can only be salvaged if black holes are in fact random objects, with an enormous entropy whose increase is greater than the entropy carried by the gas. Bekenstein argued that black holes are maximum entropy objects\u2014that they have more entropy than anything else in the same volume. In a sphere of radius R, the entropy in a relativistic gas increases as the energy increases. The only limit is gravitational; when there is too much energy the gas collapses into a black hole. Bekenstein used this to put an upper bound on the entropy in a region of space, and the bound was proportional to the area of the region. He conc","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13527536,"author":"platz","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe","text":"Black hole Firewalls with Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette (45m+50s quick summary of the holographic principle) [LINK] Leonard Susskind on The World As Hologram (more dense/verbose) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16134795,"author":"keldaris","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Things you must know before you can understand Meltdown as a developer","text":"Since you asked for more depth, I'll focus on the (comparatively easier) task of giving some links to technical literature. First of all, if you already have a traditional QFT background, there's the two extremes of either just taking a simple toy example to play with [1] or a fairly rigorous well written lecture course [2]. For a more general physics/math background I'd recommend a slightly more pedagogical treatment [3], but it's still accurate to the subject matter and therefore contains graduate level mathematics. There's a lot more out there, but these are just some of the descriptions I've personally skimmed and found them to be well written and useful. On the other end of the scale, there's a huge amount of popular documentaries out there that purport to say something about AdS/CFT. Most of them either contain nonsense or don't say very much at all. I don't really know how useful the popular analogies really are, but in the spirit of making at least one recommendation that doesn't contain any math, Susskind's public lectures are easy to watch (here's one [4]), and Susskind is careful not to talk nonsense. There isn't really much on AdS/CFT that's in between graduate level mathematics and math-less popular stuff. The reason is that it's a fairly irreducible concept in the sense that you really need to understand what an anti-de Sitter space is and how conformal field theories work to see why there's a mathematical correspondence between them, and this isn't truly analog","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18818594,"author":"jahnu","month":"2019-01","story_title":"How Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code","text":"Not sure if it's related but this lecture gave me some basic grasp on the notion of holographic representations [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18940571,"author":"zwkrt","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Strangeness of Black Holes","text":"Suskind actually has a whole lecture on Youtube devoted to addressing the paradox of falling into a black hole from the perspective of the person falling in versus an outside observer. The outside observer sees the falling observer catastrophically turned into high-entropy soup smeared across the horizon, while the one falling feels nothing particularly special as they cross the event horizon. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20802887,"author":"aeternum","month":"2019-08","story_title":"How do black holes destroy information and why is that a problem?","text":"There is a somewhat recent theory that supports this idea. It is unclear whether or not things actually fall-in, but the idea is that the entire surface is a hologram, and the surface alone is sufficient to describe the entire contents. (Thus preventing any information loss). Much better described here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2EWejmkKlxs":[{"hn_comment_id":47757051,"author":"inetknght","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Visualizing CPU Pipelining (2024)","text":"The best presentation I've seen about CPU performance related to pipelining, branch prediction, and speculative execution was Chandler Carruth's \"Going Nowhere Faster\" presentation at CppCon 2017 [0]. I do recommend watching the whole presentation, but if you watch nothing else then just watch the 5 minutes or so from the linked timestamp. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15936228,"author":"inetknght","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Intel i7 loop performance anomaly (2013)","text":"Disclaimer: I am not an expert and have not measured. This is armchair theory. But, I would argue two things. First, the former appears to have at least one unaligned arithmetic: > 400538: mov 0x200b01(%rip),%rdx # 601040 <counter> ...while the latter's equivalent instruction is 4-byte aligned: > 40057d: mov 0x200abc(%rip),%rdx # 601040 <counter> So, I would argue that's the biggest source of _speedup_ in the second case. However, I'm really interested in whether that's true since I don't see a memory fence; so the memory should be in L0 cache for both cases; I have trouble believing that an unaligned access can be so much slower with the data in cache. As for the `callq` to `repz retq`, I would venture a guess that the CPU's able to identify that there are no data dependencies there and the data's never even stored; I'd argue that it probably never even gets executed because the instruction should fit in instruction cache and branch prediction cache and all. Arguably. Like I said, I'm not an expert. I'd say run it through Intel's code analyzer tool. [LINK] Tangential video worth watching: [VIDEO] Edit: actually, thinking about it, it's not unaligned access , it's unaligned math . I don't think that should affect performance at all? Fun.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18462716,"author":"pkaye","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Researchers discover seven new Meltdown and Spectre attacks","text":"Chandler Carruth has a good talk with an example of why speculative execution is critical for performance. [VIDEO] It starts around 36m13s time frame.","stance":"rec"}],"2Ex8EEv-WPs":[{"hn_comment_id":5606126,"author":"gingerlime","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Hacking Flask: A Success Story","text":"I would gladly take Flask over Django/TastyPie Could you explain the benefits or difference for you? Personally, I enjoyed using Tastypie, and when things weren't clear, its code was a pleasure to read and made things easier to understand or work out how to solve. Perhaps similar to your experience with the Flask code. I imagine a thinner framework is cleaner in many ways, but then with a more robust framework you get stuff out of the box. In this particular case, getting the request time (+ if you want, sql time etc) is relatively easy and there are a few middleware options to do it in Django. I've seen an interesting talk[1] by Yehuda Katz: \"why rails is hard\". One of the key points, if I can somehow paraphrase, is that with a bigger framework like rails, you get a lot more out of the box for the 'price' of it being heavier... He's comparing rails to node and sinatra, but the same might apply to the comparison between django/tastypie and flask I suppose. Finally, I don't know about flask, but another important point in Yehuda's talk was that some of those things implemented for you, you might not even know that you need. This is true particularly for security, where you probably don't have to think about whether XSS/CSRF protection is implemented etc, you just want things to be secure by default and it's not a feature you even think about... I am not saying flask doesn't have those (I don't know), just that in general that's usually the trade-off between heavier and lighter","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7565259,"author":"dham","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Ask HN: why most startups use ruby and rails?","text":"Rails is not bloated, it just comes with a lot of features. I'd suggest watching these videos. [VIDEO] [LINK] A typical Rails instance will use 100 - 150mb, and does not take a minute to start up. Have you actually used Rails? I have several large projects and none have ever taken that long to startup. I use Ruby for non Rails projects all the time and had no issue finding how to include Active Record and Action Mailer into a Ruby CLI application.","stance":"rec"}],"2FMBSblpcrc":[{"hn_comment_id":42937839,"author":"snowwrestler","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Chris Anderson Is Giving Ted Away to Whoever Has the Best Idea for Its Future","text":"Best TED talk I\u2019ve seen: [VIDEO] I think about this every time I wash my hands in a public restroom with paper towels.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21582554,"author":"leto_ii","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?","text":"Two quick things from back when TED talks were actually interesting/useful: 1. How to tie your shoes the right way (so the knot doesn't come undone): [LINK] 2. How to dry your hands with a single paper towel (so that you prevent unnecessary waste): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26867968,"author":"Someone1234","month":"2021-04","story_title":"The \u201cGranny Knot\u201d","text":"People are very negative about these kinds of TED talks, but I actually improved my hand drying technique after the TEDx on it: [VIDEO] That and using the back of my hand/arm to push off the water from my body after a shower keep our towels much dryer and nicer.","stance":"rec"}],"2IT2oAzTcvU":[{"hn_comment_id":23268091,"author":"rozab","month":"2020-05","story_title":"G2A pays Factorio developer $40k over illegally obtained game keys","text":"Here's a tangentially related def con about the strange economics of that whole scam. Basically, everyone in the chain apart from the cardholder benefits. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24413367,"author":"Mountain_Skies","month":"2020-09","story_title":"The 'brushing' scam that's behind mystery parcels","text":"Nina Kollars had a nice related talk during Defcon on a similar scam buying what she thought was gray market Nespresso pods whose \"seller\" bought for her using a stolen credit card. They also gave her a free Nespresso machine, presumably to give her motive to keep quiet. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38169177,"author":"clutchdude","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Who's Behind the Swat USA Reshipping Service?","text":"In addition to the other commenters, here's an excellent defcon talk on what these some groups do: Nina Kollars - Confessions of an Nespresso Money Mule - DEF CON 27 Conference [VIDEO] Essentially, they wait for a buyer of a product to come along to a listing and order it - they'll then buy it using stolen credentials, have it drop-shipped or reshipped to the end user. Everyone but the person with the original card comes out ahead, which is then pushed to all of us via higher fees if they notice and report the fraud.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42608085,"author":"h3xadecima1","month":"2025-01","story_title":"I made $100K from a dick joke","text":"Nina Kollars gave an interesting talk on scammers selling coffee through eBay using stolen credit cards. Signature way of knowing is they're shipped direct from nespresso and the purchase price is 40-50% cheaper than retail. I ordered some keurig pods and experienced the same direct shipping and cheap prices. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2JAOTJxYqh8":[{"hn_comment_id":35695231,"author":"neom","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Bean leaves don\u2019t let the bedbugs bite by using tiny, impaling spikes","text":"I'd imagine the vast majority of most people on HN already watch Mark Rober, never the less- in case you missed it, he did a fun video on bed bugs last month: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39329294,"author":"123pie123","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Getting rid of bed bugs: trickier than ever","text":"mark rober did a good entertaining video on this, including the various tricks how to get rid of them (and what does not work) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42571369,"author":"dataviz1000","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Passengers Say Turkish Airlines Flights Have Unwelcome Guests: Bedbugs","text":"Here is a fun YouTube video about research based eradication of bed bugs [0] Lots of facts like bed bugs don't carry or transmit diseases. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2JB1_e5wZmU":[{"hn_comment_id":24285701,"author":"devmunchies","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Draft of OCaml Scientific Computing book","text":"I wouldn't say its unloved or on a side track, it's baked into .net as a first class citizen and has dedicated engineers at Microsoft working on it. When I started I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to download .net core on a mac and not do anything else to use F#. Its less popular than C# so its there's not as much documentation from 3rd party sources, youtube videos, etc, but you can use any C# modules in F# so you'll get used to reading C# docs. I would highly recommend this overview of the .Net ecosystem: [LINK] I really like how it showed a preview of \"modern C#\" at 12:20 which is being influenced by F#. After that, this talk opened my eyes to the power of f# philosophy and type system: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26140221,"author":"Huggernaut","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Learn Functional Programming Visually","text":"For anyone looking for a smaller introduction to this book, the author Scott Wlaschin has a talk with the same name: [VIDEO] It doesn't cover a lot of good topics in the book, but it might whet your appetite.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45166241,"author":"rapnie","month":"2025-09","story_title":"'Make invalid states unrepresentable' considered harmful","text":"I can recommend \"Domain Modeling Made Functional\" by Scott Wlaschin presented at KanDDDinsky 2019, that offers a very appealing example for making making invalid states unrepresentable. The example code is in F# but that is a perfect language to demonstrate the general idea. Best-practice I guess boils down to finding the right balance throughout the application design. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47105612,"author":"rapnie","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Parse, Don't Validate and Type-Driven Design in Rust","text":"You can also search for \"make invalid states impossible/unrepresentable\" [0] to find more info on related practices. See \"domain modeling made functional\" [0] as a nice example [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2KSahAoOLdU":[{"hn_comment_id":22417007,"author":"crmrc114","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Recovering Fossil Data on IBM 8\u201d Floppies [video]","text":"I love his videos he has a webpage with merch if you want to support him [LINK] If you are new to his channel I cannot recommend enough the Apollo AGC videos [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22815735,"author":"cpascal","month":"2020-04","story_title":"A circuit board from the Saturn V rocket, reverse-engineered and explained","text":"My new favorite YouTuber, CuriousMarc, has a whole series of videos about restoring the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). His AGC Playlist: [VIDEO] His channel is full of fascinating retro-computing and EE videos.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20329724,"author":"acomjean","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Former NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz Restores Mission Control in Houston","text":"there is a youtube channel trying to rebuild the apollo launch computer. Very nerdy. The memory is rings of magnets. It is pretty fun though: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20449514,"author":"LeonM","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Apollo 11 50th Anniversary","text":"Not so much an article about the 50th anniversary, but just the main article about Apollo 11. If you are into space stuff, and haven't seen it yet, there were some pretty cool projects going on on Youtube in preparation for the 50th anniversary: - CuriousMarc's restoration series of an actual ACG [0] - Applied Science made a replica DSKY electroluminescent glass panel display [1] - Project Egress: A maker collaboration on building a replica of the Apollo 11 door (Adam Savage, Jimmy Diresta, This old tony, Blondihacks, etc) [2] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22417492,"author":"CaptArmchair","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Recovering Fossil Data on IBM 8\u201d Floppies [video]","text":"If you haven't seen this already, CuriousMarc has also done this awesome series on the restoration of an original AGC - Apollo Guidance Computer last year. [VIDEO] And then there are real treats such as the restoration of a Teletype 33 ASR: [LINK] Or them trying to get Fortran to compile on an IBM 1401 Mainframe dated 1959. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27624293,"author":"ArcticCelt","month":"2021-06","story_title":"NASA can't figure out what's causing computer issues on the Hubble telescope","text":"This youtube series of video, follow a group that restored an Apollo Guidance Computer that a collector basically pulled from the trash. [VIDEO] My favorite part is when they needed the version of the software that was used for the moon landing but they only had the source code for a previous version (scanned from giant binder) and the hash value of the version of the landing. By a series of educated guesses, by reading memos and by analysis of the source code they modified the old code the exact way so it gave them the correct hash, confirming that they correctly and exactly recreated the original code. It's being a while and I go from memory, I might have some details wrong. See this video for this story. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32382945,"author":"bmitc","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The Apollo On-Board Computers","text":"The main person behind that effort, as far as I know, is Mike Stewart, and there is an excellent video of him working on restoring original AGC hardware. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42100854,"author":"CableNinja","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Somebody moved the UK's oldest satellite in the mid 1970s, but no one knows who","text":"CuriousMarc on Youtube has a very large playlist of him and a few others restoring the apollo systems they have been able to get their hands on, and youre absolutely correct on the hacky possibilities. There was no authentication, just lock on and issue commands. They were not only able to restore pretty much everything to a working apollo comms and control system, they were even able to use lab equipment to communicate with apollo outright. I linked the first part of the series. Its a long one but very worth the watch even if you arent into everything they cover. Many sats were and are similar, theres not much security. Newer ones with specific uses are most definitely encrypted. The only real saving grace is that the size of dish/antenna and power you need to do anything with stuff actually in space at long distances is beyond what most people could do (not saying a very dedicated nerd couldnt, look at SaveItForParts for example). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2KZb2_vcNTg":[{"hn_comment_id":26980069,"author":"lathiat","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Where does a candle go when it burns?","text":"\"Where do trees get their mass?\" - [VIDEO] This was highly enlightening the first time I watched it :)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9416840,"author":"lkbm","month":"2015-04","story_title":"When You Lose Weight, Where Does It Go?","text":"There's a nice Veritasium episode wherein he asks people on the street where a tree's mass comes from: [VIDEO] (This isn't just one of those \"let's laugh at how dumb people on the street are\" videos; it's done explicitly as a learning exercise. His PhD looked at how addressing misconceptions and going from there to correct explanations works much better than simply providing explanations: [LINK] ) I thought of it upon seeing the first chart in the BMJ article.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15788799,"author":"JshWright","month":"2017-11","story_title":"When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?","text":"An interesting corollary to this is \"Where do trees get their mass?\" Veritasium has a fun video demonstrating how unintuitive this is: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2LyzBoHo5EI":[{"hn_comment_id":15617630,"author":"leipert","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Human Beings Almost Vanished from Earth in 70,000 B.C","text":"I highly recommend by the late Hans Rosling: Why the world population won\u2019t exceed 11 billion. It explains quite well what the sister comment by riffraff refers to. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16724164,"author":"PaulMest","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Giraffes Added to the Endangered Species List (2016)","text":"What do you think the benefits of mandatory population control are? Have you seen any of Hans Rosling's [1] talks on the topic of population growth? After watching, would you still think there is need for mandatory population control? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20293631,"author":"brownbat","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The population of Africa will more than triple by the end of this century","text":"Hans Rosling rebuts this, especially in Factfulness.* If you look at population trends in countries worldwide, populations routinely level out only after improving underlying economic and health conditions. When infant mortality is high and children are an economic necessity, parents compensate by having many kids. When a country gets better healthcare and better economic opportunities, there's an initial generation of population explosion as more kids suddenly survive childhood, but then the population immediately plateaus and begins to recede. The epidemiological studies and population data is overwhelming that the simple model Malthus used fails to explain human behavior. * Also in some videos online: 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] But to put in a closing plug for Factfulness, it's one of the best simple and accessible primers how to avoid major cognitive biases, and also teaches a lot about the current state of the world.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27535915,"author":"xscott","month":"2021-06","story_title":"National parks are overcrowded and closing their gates","text":"This video might be more approachable: [VIDEO] I'm sure it won't convince all of the Malthusian doom and gloom sorts, but it's worth a try.","stance":"rec"}],"2NBG-sKFaB0":[{"hn_comment_id":25081412,"author":"fxtentacle","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Metaprogramming for Madmen (2012)","text":"Before you read the story, I suggest that you look at the result in awe: [VIDEO] That whole game is 96k. Meaning it's roughly 0.07% of the size of an empty Electron app.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7489276,"author":"makmanalp","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Show HN: My Isometric Voxel Engine 6 Months Later","text":"Wow, great work, this reminds me of a lot of demoscene stuff where, when faced with space limitations, programmers aggressively used procedural generation combined with prerendering and caching. The most iconic example I can think of is .kkrieger, the 96kb first person shooter that has (relatively) amazing graphics: [LINK] Video here: [VIDEO] There might be valuable lessons to be had in that domain that might save you some time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7740083,"author":"makmanalp","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Metaprogramming for madmen","text":"This is an amazing insight into how demos are written. Farbrausch stuff has always been inspirational to me. It's very interesting is the sort of extreme version of the idea that data model and code are inherently tied: Especially in functional programming circles it's a maxim that you design your data models first, specifically for your task, and then the rest of the code is pretty much pattern-matching around that. This takes that coupling and makes it even tighter, to serve a higher purpose. I almost feel like given enough time, this could be a JIT: an executable that adaptively strips code and self-minifies over time as you run it. :) Also check out: - kkrieger (windows only 96kb 3D FPS, video here: [VIDEO] ) - the previous post ( [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11852828,"author":"sclangdon","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Source code for 4kb demoscene production \u201cElevated\u201d released","text":"Although they generally didn't compete in the 4kb genre, Farbrausch open-sourced many of their demos and demo-making tools a few years ago [1]. fr-041: Debris [2], and kkrieger [3] (the 96kb FPS) are particularly worth checking out for the uninitiated. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2OSrvzNW9FE":[{"hn_comment_id":12961810,"author":"sndean","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Bouncing bomb","text":"There's a decent video by Veritasium about the Magnus Effect, where the bomb is essentially given lift by its backspin: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25557025,"author":"pqdbr","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Rotating Sails Help to Revive Wind-Powered Shipping","text":"There's a great Veritasium video explaining the Magnus effect and the Flettner rotor here: [VIDEO] The Norsepower company (which installs Flettner rotors on ships) also has a short video explaining the effect here [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27187384,"author":"krisoft","month":"2021-05","story_title":"How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century?","text":"I'm not an expert on it really. They rotate the giant cylinder and the wind is blowing by. The rotation forms a low pressure zone one side of the cylinder which acts as a lift force perpendicular both to the rotational axis of the cylinder and the wind. It's the same effect which \"turns\" a soccer ball if you kick it with a spin. There is a really nice demonstration of the effect in this video: [VIDEO] This wikipedia page has a way better summary than my attempt above: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"2Op3QLzMgSY":[{"hn_comment_id":4882861,"author":"tinco","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Zuckerberg visits Stanford CS106A third year in a row","text":"Heh that's interesting, I just watched 106A yesterday to get an idea of how the programming introduction course is compared to my university (utwente.nl). I actually was a bit disappointed to see that it is very much like our introduction course, except that this teacher is a bit more enthousiastic, and perhaps the course starts at an even more basic level I think. I think for real CS enthousiasts 6.001 at MIT is much more interesting (and fun) to watch: [VIDEO] (it teaches scheme and the lecturer has an awesome way of explaining it)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8060309,"author":"r-s","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Interactive SICP","text":"One section of original lectures are freely available via MITs OpenCourseWare youtube channel: [VIDEO] It would be quite difficult to beat these lectures, while they appear a bit dated, the content is great. SICP is a great way to learn about programming, although I am very surprised they got through the whole book in an introductory course. Chapters 4 and 5 cover some topics I was barely aware of nearing the end of my formal CS education.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14168188,"author":"dmix","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]","text":"Reminds me of the MIT SICP lecture videos from the 80s. The concepts of black box abstraction and the simplicity of using LISP like lego building blocks blew my mind and made me switch from being a UX designer dabbling in Rails to a full blown programmer. It was still entirely relevant to today even though it was a few decades old as the fundamentals of computer science are still fundamental. [VIDEO] Hearing that intro music still brings a smile to my face. I just happen to be relearning math right now as I dive deeper into data science and this is perfect timing. Going to watch this series once I get through my math proofs book (\"Book of Proof\" by Richard Hammack which I recommend to people getting into math [LINK] ).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16501826,"author":"stuxnet79","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What's an (article|book|vid) that changed the way you view programming?","text":"First 10 mins of the first Structure and Interpretation lecture (by Harold Abelson) [1] Famous first words ... \"I'd like to welcome you to this course on computer science. Actually, that's a terrible way to start. Computer science is a terrible name for this business.\" ... and this is where it all clicked to me .... \"Well, similarly, I think in the future people will look back and say, yes, those primitives in the 20th century were fiddling around with these gadgets called computers, but really what they were doing is starting to learn how to formalize intuitions about process \" [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18199123,"author":"otras","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some old talks (10+ y) that are still relevant to watch today?","text":"The Mother Of All Demos is an absolute classic: [LINK] [LINK] I also very much enjoy Feynman\u2019s talks. Here\u2019s one on imagining physics: [LINK] For computer science in particular, I highly recommend the first lecture in the SICP series, especially on the naming of so called \u201ccomputer science\u201d: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27332623,"author":"dancemethis","month":"2021-05","story_title":"\u201cComputer science is not about computers\u201d","text":"Wow, what a MASSIVE missed opportunity to quote the best variation of this idea by far, done by Hal Abelson in the legendary \"6001-Introduction to Computer Science\" class on MIT in the 80s. You can check it here: [VIDEO] Abelson in the first minute crosses both computer AND science, and references the also legendary SICP with \"computer so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic\". Honestly, this alone already made the article that empty.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14168114,"author":"unabst","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Why MIT Switched from Scheme to Python (2009)","text":"I took 6.001 in 1999 (I think). Hal Abelson taught it along with a professor who took off his sweatshirt to reveal a Microsoft tee at his final lecture (he went to Microsoft). What was great about Scheme (Lisp) is that most programs are basically words from your vocabulary, parentheses, and cars and cdrs. With procedural languages, there is always a sense that the language provides all the tools, and the magic happens somewhere underneath the hood. But with Scheme it feels as if it's happening right before you. It makes you feel like a wizard, and not a monkey. And it requires knowing all the spells. It requires knowing how to make magic happen. Or not. Once you know none of it's magic. But that's the point! Python is arguably easier and more practical for both science and work. It's already popular on the web server, and is used everywhere else -- unlike Scheme. But the recent resurgence of functional programming is super exciting with Elixir and Elm and the like. I'm looking forward to building my next project using Elixir. Here is the classic course: [LINK] Original video lecture on YouTube (linked from above): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18309895,"author":"lunchladydoris","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Not Lisp again (2009)","text":"For anyone who wants to feel what this might have felt like (and you've yet to watch them), MIT posted videos of Abelson and Sussman presenting the course on YouTube [0]. I felt a similar sense of magic the first time I saw the derivative section. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23373321,"author":"xyzwave","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm an incoming freshman to college for a CS major, what should I know?","text":"Such a timeless quote. I believe this is the source: [VIDEO] While there, SICP is not a bad way to augment a CS degree :-)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38080096,"author":"efortis","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Today's CS pedagogy is problematic","text":"Some Good Parts: - Professor Richard Buckland has CS playlists on youtube (UNSW eLearning). In one of his lectures he starts writing a sudoku solver (I think) starting with high level abstractions. - Also, at least, the first video of SICP [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40243255,"author":"hickelpickle","month":"2024-05","story_title":"The world's loudest Lisp program to the rescue","text":"Little schemer is good, some people hate it some people love it. But it is a fairly light read the slowly teaches some syntax at a time, questions you about assumptions then revels the information as it goes on. It would be the least dry read. There is also sketchy scheme for a more thorough text, or even the rs7s standard, which are both pretty dry but short. What made me appreciate scheme was watching some of the SICP lectures ( [VIDEO] ) and the little schemer to learn more. I also read some of the SICP along with it, though I put it down due to not having the time to work through it. Scheme is interesting and toying with recursion is fun, but the path a mentioned above is only really enjoyable if you are looking to toy around with CS concepts and recursion. You can do a lot more in modern scheme as well, and you can build anything out of CL. But learning the basics of scheme/lisp is can be pretty dry if you are just looking to build something right away like you already can in a traditional imperative language. But it is interesting if you are interested in a different perspective. But even RS7S scheme is still far from the batteries included you get with CL. I personal found the most enjoyment using Kawa scheme, which is jvm based and using it for scripting with java programs as it has great interop. I used it some for a game back end in the event system to be able to emit events while developing and script behaviors, I've also used it for configurations as well with a g","stance":"rec"}],"2PdJFbjWHEU":[{"hn_comment_id":8506961,"author":"kolev","month":"2014-10","story_title":"The Scientific 7-Minute Workout","text":"The true scientific one is called Body by Science [1]. If you have 100 minutes, invest watching this [2] from God himself (Doug McGuff M.D.). P.S. The next The 21 Convention will be in January 2015 [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29405286,"author":"tacon","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Darebee \u2013 A database of workouts","text":"Julian Shapiro, YCombinator alum, has a very nice guide to building muscle.[0] The gateway drug to the HIT tradition, which began with genius Arthur Jones and Nautilus in the early 1970s, is this video presentation by Doug McGuff[1], author of Body by Science[2]. Whether you follow a HIT protocol or not, you should be familiar with the theory covered in Body by Science. Doug covers the definition of fitness and health (which is unusual right there for a fitness book!), the confounding effects of genetics, fat metabolism, and much, much more. The High Intensity Business podcast has all the leading figures in exercise research as guests, with a rich back catalog and very detailed links in the show notes.[3] And if you plan to do this for the rest of your life, give your future joints a break by not destroying them in your youth.[4][5] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12453587,"author":"xutopia","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Fasting triggers stem cell regeneration of damaged, old immune system (2014)","text":"Actually from what I understood about intermittent fasting it is way better than simply eating less. I'm not a doctor but the mechanisms by which the body burns fat is that it has to send the proper signaling at a cellular level. If you listen to the video here starting at 1h03: [VIDEO] Though the video is to understand how energy is used and stored for workout reasons it explains a bit the mechanism whereby the body decides to store fat or convert it to phosphates for semi-immediate use. I'm convinced that intermittent fasting turns off the body fat storage mechanism and turns on the burn fat mechanism. Unfortunately if you only eat less you never send the signals to your body that it needs to stop storing fat. An intermittent fast is therefore way better than just eating less. For me intermittent fasting means not eating breakfast and eating around 12h30. I've lost 14 pounds this way and I'm finding it really easy to skip a meal now where I couldn't do it without having a headache before.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25796041,"author":"tacon","month":"2021-01","story_title":"The Paradox of Abundance","text":">I'd love to see a star[v]ing obese person. Most obese people are suffering from something called \"internal starvation\", which is a byproduct of insulin resistance. The mini-lecture on fat biochemistry is here[0]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"2Q26XIKtwXQ":[{"hn_comment_id":15215507,"author":"alexashka","month":"2017-09","story_title":"People Don\u2019t Actually Want Equality, They Want Fairness","text":"It's not so much about tax rates and I haven't looked into it too deeply - although I'm sure the big companies hire the best accountants to use every loophole in existence. I am referring to this: [LINK] Companies should not be allowed to simply hang on to 250 billion dollars. Imagine what could be done in science, infrastructure, services etc if 10% of that money went towards those things. There's a great Peter Thiel clip about this that sums it up very well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24462212,"author":"heimatau","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt: US 'dropped the ball' on innovation","text":"Is no one going to talk about the hypocrisy? Eric Schmidt isn't a beacon of sensible innovation pushing America forward. Peter Thiel called him out eight years ago [1] and I strongly encourage you to watch the 4 min clip. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2QrX5jsiico":[{"hn_comment_id":4686084,"author":"gojomo","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Startup School And Survivor Bias","text":"This is a valid criticism, but is mitigated a little by the fact that some of these success stories include within them wisdom from preceding (or competitive-contemporaneous) failures. This is even the case, indirectly, where the Startup School presentation can't fit the speaker's whole story. For example, I think the Travis Kalanick presentation about Uber at Startup School was great. (I'd love to see the time-unconstrained 'two-hour' version of the same talk.) But, it was just about Uber: a current big success. Kalanick also did a shorter -- and perhaps even better -- talk about his previous ventures at the 2011 FailCon: [VIDEO] Combined with the SS12 Uber presentation -- indeed, perhaps best viewed just before -- it provides real context, and a much better idea of the range of outcomes and challenges startups face. And, of the entrepreneurial qualities that gave Kalanick repeated chances at Uber-like success.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14539771,"author":"sbuccini","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Uber CEO Kalanick likely to take leave","text":"I would really recommend watching this talk[1] TK gave at Failcon back in 2011. It's a great insight into Travis's background and the mindset that he imbued into Uber in the early days. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14942823,"author":"flunhat","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Travis Kalanick reportedly sought to reassert control at Uber after ouster","text":"I've found this video from 2011 to be kind of interesting in terms of illuminating how his history as an entrepreneur has shaped his attitude running Uber today (TL;DR - he failed and got screwed over a lot). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2R07FL1wVo4":[{"hn_comment_id":20364671,"author":"thrwitaway","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Bladder cancer 'attacked and killed by common cold virus'","text":"You have no idea how much in the dark you are. Take an afternoon to watch: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] You will wonder how you were blind for so long. Edit, also: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20364239,"author":"thrwitaway","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Bladder cancer 'attacked and killed by common cold virus'","text":"Getting a cold is a great thing. Getting a fever is awesome too. The idea that people need to \"treat\" these events is ridiculous and only weakens one's body even more in the long run. Our bodies are very capable at healing themselves when not taxed with constant barrage of food intake, in particular acid-forming foods, protein, etc. Expand your knowledge beyond what mainstream medicine tells you. Take an afternoon to watch: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21198179,"author":"justsomeone88","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Starving cancer by cutting off its favorite foods","text":"Keto/carnivore is incredibly dangerous to the human body in the long run (5+ years out). Excess protein (in fact, even in the amounts society recognizes as \"normal\") is bad for you. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31730508,"author":"muttantt","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: The biggest lies society/industries have told us or still tell us?","text":"That you need to consume a lot of protein. Excess protein is a silent killer and cause of many diseases. Good place to start going down this rabbit hole: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2S0k12uZR14":[{"hn_comment_id":25552047,"author":"wenc","month":"2020-12","story_title":"How Complex Systems Fail (1998)","text":"The accompanying talk by Richard I Cook at the O'Reilly Velocity conference is here: [VIDEO] When I worked in operations, I would watch this talk every couple of months to remind myself of the principles. The principles are summarized in the list, but the talk adds a bit more context. I find that this context matters for seeing how the principles might be applied.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5125642,"author":"rjzzleep","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Stop Fetishizing Failure","text":"except every single good thing we have is built upon failure. got a gsm phone? broadband? how about a modem? a pc? basic chemistry? cryptography? the very notion of cryptography is embracing the failure of having private data leaked. did you know 802.11 was initially made for infrared? do you remember how much it sucked? maybe if would have progressed faster if it was out in the wild faster. that's how it's progressing now. yeah, you may not like it. and every now and then I hear the idea that \"when you're dealing with critical things, like healthcare where someone's life may depend on it, you cannot afford failure\". except that's not true. those systems actually embrace failure more than anything else. google reliability engineering.or look at this: [LINK] there is a nice talk on failure from richard cook at the velocity conf: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13578909,"author":"hedwall","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some 'must watch' talks?","text":"Richards Cooks How complex systems fail from velocity a couple of years ago [VIDEO] and the paper that's the basis for it is also nice to have handy [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18913365,"author":"wenc","month":"2019-01","story_title":"DIB Guide: Detecting Agile BS (2018) [pdf]","text":"> We should probably be doing modelling and formal verification and stuff like that. This is interesting. Is this a hypothetical notion or can you share any personal experience of having worked on any projects where this is done successfully? I bring this up because there is typically a narrow band of applicability of purely theoretical constructs in most complex systems (AWS & Azure teams both use formal methods [1] to find bugs and to increase confidence in critical algorithms but I don't believe they do this system-wide. Also the verification is only done on the abstraction, not the actual implementation.). Richard Cook gave a talk on \"How Complex Systems Fail\" [2] which addresses this point, and advocates for designing for resiliency as opposed to designing to exhaustively handle all failure modes (which are impossible to predict). Design people often design from some idealized notion of inputs and/or worst case scenarios. Ops people know what can go wrong will go wrong, which is why ops is there to handle the deviations from the norm. Real world design exposes lift points, reveals controls and supports continuous maintenance. Highly reliable systems are evolved, not just designed. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18963486,"author":"wenc","month":"2019-01","story_title":"A Lifetime of Systems Thinking","text":"To build on this discussion, what are some highlights in that book that you found useful? I ask because I've read some systems thinking books (e.g. Systemantics) that were difficult to apply in real life. I come from the perspective of someone with a systems/theory builder personality. The only systems thinking book that I found remotely practical was The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. The most useful piece of short writing on systems thinking that I've come across is \"How Complex Systems Fail\" [1, 2], which talks about designing systems for resiliency, and not for rigid notions of reliability. [1] \"How Complex Systems Fail\" [LINK] [2] Its accompanying O'Reilly conference talk [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2SdGkkp1aq8":[{"hn_comment_id":1975073,"author":"Leynos","month":"2010-12","story_title":"Incredible demos on the Commodore Vic-20","text":"Videos of some of the demos described here: Robotic Warrior [LINK] Robotic Liberation [VIDEO] Impossiblator [LINK] I like that the demo effects are used here to tell a story in addition to being a pure display of coding prowess.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10516221,"author":"msarnoff","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Software developers describing their work in 1973 [video]","text":"The video was posted by an awesome demoscene dude named viznut. Check out the rest of his channel. Experimental music from very short C programs: [LINK] Robotic Liberation (VIC-20 demo): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2SuvO4Gi7uY":[{"hn_comment_id":31801227,"author":"V__","month":"2022-06","story_title":"How Townscaper Works: A Story Four Games in the Making","text":"I didn't know about wave collapse functions before stumbling about Townscaper. Still, I found them hard to understand until I found this video by Martin Donald: [VIDEO] Now, I'm just looking for a use-case to implement them myself sometime.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29410695,"author":"t8y","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Townscaper Running in the Browser","text":"This uses the \"wave function collapse\" algorithm. Oskar Stalberg also made a great demo of how it works[0], but it might not make sense just from that. Martin Donald made a really nice youtube video on how it works[1]. The name \"wave function collapse\" can be off putting but it's pretty straightforward, and an algorithm that can come in handy for many uses both in game development and just general software development. I'm actually procrastinating on HN from working on a GPU parallelised version that can generate millions of positions every frame. In Townscaper you can actually see that the algorithm runs quite slow and lags behind the players input, there's just a bunch of animation to hide it. I'm hoping to eventually get a version that can run in log2(mapsize) time. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31410442,"author":"orls","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Show HN: Simple Wave Function Collapse","text":"Not OP, but I happened to see a good video on this recently: [VIDEO] In short, it\u2019s an algorithm for procedural generation of tiled content, like 2d/3d game maps.","stance":"rec"}],"2THVvshvq0Q":[{"hn_comment_id":8985322,"author":"wmeredith","month":"2015-02","story_title":"New Jurassic World Trailer Hides Improved CGI in Plain Sight","text":"Everything on screen matters. Modern Cinema is a HIGHLY evolved art form. If you have any interest in this at all, YouTube user Every Frame A Painting publishes, short, easily digestible, and well-produced YouTube videos about this stuff that are eye-opening. Here are a few of my favorites: Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy: [LINK] The Silence of the Lambs - Who Wins the Scene? [LINK] Michael Bay - What is Bayhem? [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14666742,"author":"skepticaldrunk","month":"2017-06","story_title":"David Goyer and Josh Friedman Adapting Isaac Asimov's Foundation for TV","text":"That's fair, but being able to understand and direct the popular zeitgeist, be it by instinct or intellect, is a very formidable gift indeed. It's something almost none of us can do (certainly myself included), and those who can will always have detractors. I don't see success as a zero sum game, so I'm happy for people who are successful, even if I wish I had their insight. Total aside, you should check this out when you have time, pretty interesting analysis: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43906367,"author":"ripe","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Sneakers (1992) \u2013 4K makeover sourced from the original camera negative","text":"> Some of the recent Michael Bay movies are so aggressive when it comes to cuts An excellent episode of Every Frame A Painting is \"Michael Bay --- What is Bayhem?\" It explains in detail in what way those particular movies are poorly made. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2U9WMftV40c":[{"hn_comment_id":23161802,"author":"isoskeles","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Simulacra and Simulation","text":"A bit longer but here's another video that covers some of Baudrillard's concepts, in more of a lecture form but much easier to digest than Baudrillard's writing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31887653,"author":"PKop","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Reading Ourselves to Death","text":"Author talks of text as abstraction compared to \"edited\" version of reality of visual media. But videos, movies, TV shows are also abstractions, possibly worse in that they more easily trick our subconscious into perceiving them as more real than words on a page while still being constructions of a \"reality\" based on the creator's point of view. So people think they have an understanding of the world based on fictionalized entertainment and tropes they've experienced thousands of times from screens. Think of any time someone makes a political argument, or comments on a particular aspect of human nature by referencing something they saw in a movie. I think this is odd, at least if over done, as if the constructed media representation is somehow evidence of anything true. As if people don't have to have real lived experience of some phenomena as long as they watched something about it in a show or whatever. Reminds me of Baudrillard's \"hyperreality\" [0] concept, where constructed media becomes \"more real than real\", here's an excellent presentation summarizing the idea [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2V1FtfBDsLU":[{"hn_comment_id":18219401,"author":"afandian","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Rich Hickey has a lot of excellent stuff to say. Not only are his ideas philosophically sound, but also real, practical and ready to use in the form of Clojure. This recent review \"10 years of Clojure\", encapsulates a lot of of the wisdom: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22390394,"author":"hden","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Requirements volatility is the core problem of software engineering","text":"> Requirements change. Every software engineering project will face this hard problem at some point. Rich Hickey calls this a 'situated' program in his talk from Clojure/Conj 2017, where the program has to deal with information and real-world irregularities for extended periods. While agile disciplines help you from one perspective, your tools (e.g. program language) might also help you solve some of the problems. In this framing, Clojure certainly tries to help where the it matters most. Highly recommended to read the transcript or watch the video, even if you are not interested in the language itself. Video: [VIDEO] Transcript: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23420385,"author":"dominotw","month":"2020-06","story_title":"A History of Clojure [pdf]","text":"Rich hickey explains at this timestamp in the video, [VIDEO] \"The information programming problem\" Whole video is gold, is my fav programming talk of all time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16629630,"author":"joncampbelldev","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Types, and Why You Should Care [video]","text":"One of the big benefits of clojure being dynamic is that everything is data (e.g. a map, set, vector or list). This is what allows reuse. - The vast core library of functions that manipulate those data structures can be used for everything in your program, cos it's all data. - Most clojure libraries take and/or return data, reducing the need for clumsy adaptors, or even worse not being able to get at the data you need cos the library writer was really enthusiastic about encapsulation of everything they thought was of no use to consumers. - You don't have a person class, you have a map with a first name and last name. Now the function that turns first + last name into full name can be reused for any other map with the same keys. (A rather spurious example, but a real one would take a large codebase and an essay to describe) I can only recommend watching some of Rich Hickey's talks, particularly these ones, they're not entirely about types, but they express the above ideas much better than I can: - Simple made easy [LINK] - Effective programs [VIDEO] - Are we there yet? (this one is more about OOP, but unless you're using something like haskell, idris etc its relevant for your type system of choice) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839366,"author":"nordsieck","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"We Really Don't Know How to Compute: Gerry Sussman - [LINK] Zebras All the Way Down: Bryan Cantrill - [LINK] Jonathan Blow on Deep Work: Jonathan Blow - [LINK] Simple Made Easy: Rich Hickey - [LINK] Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure: Rich Hickey - [VIDEO] The Last Thing D Needs: Scott Meyers - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17431264,"author":"rboyd","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Clojure Error Messages Are Accidental","text":"That's quite a judgement call to make based on the utility of error messages. I can't remember the last time I was blocked based on a Clojure error message anyway. Errors are less frequent and usually pretty obvious. I think you're wrong to say core devs don't understand modern programming, but you'd probably be right to say that they didn't prioritize making it approachable and stooping to the lowest common denominator. And it's not just Clojure, but datomic, core.async, spec -- all solving real problems in modern large scale programming with elegance. Watch Rich's 'Effective Programs' talk [1] and lmk if you still feel that he's out of touch with modern large scale programming. I think he's pretty in tune. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18365453,"author":"PKop","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Minesweeper in Clojure","text":"Here's a video of the creator of Clojure explaining his preference for dynamic vs static languages, and how he came to the choice of making Clojure dynamic, that may help inform your decision: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27999678,"author":"blacktriangle","month":"2021-07","story_title":"How Dwarf Fortress is built","text":"[VIDEO] Goes until 43:25. The whole talk is worth watching. It's basically about the higher level problems of business app development, how to address them, and how Clojure does address them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31882498,"author":"frogulis","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Revisiting the principles of data-oriented programming","text":"Rich Hickey's talks \"Simple Made Easy\" [1] and \"Effective Programs\" [2] provide a better explanation of these ideas IMO. The specific definition of \"simple\" is pretty crucial. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37766371,"author":"ndr","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Strong typing, a hill I'm willing to die on","text":"Consider reading/watching Rich Hickey's talk Effective Programs [0][1] and Maybe Not [2][3] In [0] in particular there're slides 22/23, here is part of the transcript but makes more sense with the slides on: > And you can call them problems, and I'm going to call them the problems of programming. And I've ordered them here [...] I've ordered them here in terms of severity. And severity manifests itself in a couple of ways. Most important, cost. What's the cost of getting this wrong? At the very top you have the domain complexity, about which you could do nothing. This is just the world. It's as complex as it is. > > But the very next level is the where we start programming, right? We look at the world and say, \"I've got an idea about how this is and how it's supposed to be and how, you know, my program can be effective about addressing it\". And the problem is, if you don't have a good idea about how the world is, or you can't map that well to a solution, everything downstream from that is going to fail. There's no surviving this misconception problem. And the cost of dealing with misconceptions is incredibly high. > >So this is 10x, a full order of magnitude reduction in (?) severity before we get to the set of problems I think are more in the domain of what programming languages can help with, right? And because you can read these they'll all going to come up in a second as I go through each one on some slide so I'm not going to read them all out right now. But importantly t","stance":"rec"}],"2Vrhk5OjBP8":[{"hn_comment_id":37638444,"author":"jerf","month":"2023-09","story_title":"How the Most Useless Branch of Math Could Save Your Life","text":"The video in question for reference: [LINK] Interestingly, when I saw that I figured this channel for a goner because he was going to turn to the darkside, but quite contrary to expectations I feel like his channel has actually blossomed since then. His older videos are fine, but often just explaining concepts that you can find a lot of other explanations on, but some of his recent videos have rocked the boat even among physicists and IMHO he was ultimately proved to be correct for them. I particularly point at his videos about how nobody has measured the one-way speed of light ( [LINK] ), which was well-known among people very very deep in the field of relativity but not very well known outside of that (even amongst physicists in other fields, let alone lay people) and the electricity videos he's done in the last year ( [LINK] , [LINK] ) which attracted a whole whackload of \"debunking\" videos, which were themselves wrong (the best \"bunking\" video, if I may call it that, is probably AlphaPheonix's: [VIDEO] , since he actually set up the experiment, albeit on a smaller scale). They aren't all of that caliber, but the knot theory video was very good too and not something I've seen a hundred times elsewhere, and the airships video that preceded that one clearly had a high degree of research put into it beyond just the hype.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38780364,"author":"moffkalast","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Veritasium: The SAT Question Everyone Got Wrong [video]","text":"Yeah I really liked the AlphaPheonix video[0] where he actually built the thing in a field and explained the entire effect properly. I'm not entirely sure if Derek didn't really understand what he was presenting in that video or deliberately based it on a really misleading bullshit gotcha to troll people and stir debate for clicks, and neither reflects very well on him. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40887462,"author":"reaperman","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Mechanical computer relies on kirigami cubes, not electronics","text":"[VIDEO] AlphaPhoenix did an amazing experiment to measure the speed of electricity FWIW. His other videos are incredible as well and explain EM physics in an absolutely outstanding way.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29923728,"author":"pja","month":"2022-01","story_title":"5.5 mm in 1.25 nanoseconds","text":"His presentation is not very clear & imo the way he answers the question is not actually helpful in actually understanding what\u2019s going on, but he is correct that current will flow in the far side almost immediately. As is made clearer in the documents he shared which contain his discussions with actual physicists, that current will be much smaller than the final current that flows all the way round the circuit, but it is there nevertheless. (In fact that current will initially flow whether or not the two halves of the flat ring are connected - if you think about it things have to work like this, because the middle of the system cannot \u201cknow\u201d whether the far ends are connected until light has had time to get there & back. Relativity is absolute.) Take a look at the video made by YouTuber AlphaPhoenix where he constructs the entire thing on a smaller scale and demonstrates the effect with an oscilloscope: [VIDEO] One way of viewing what\u2019s going on here is to consider the two sides as a pair of large dipole antennas. When the switch (or in AlphaPheonix\u2019s case, a transistor) is turned on, a pulse of electrons is pushed down one antenna, setting up a transient wave in the electromagnetic field around it which induces a current in the opposite direction in the \u201creceiving\u201d antenna on the other side. This happens regardless of whether the wired are connected in a loop or not! Physics is great.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35607664,"author":"bertil","month":"2023-04","story_title":"How do electrons find the \u201cPath of Least Resistance\u201d? [video]","text":"The author has a fascinating video (part of a wider effort of many science YouTubers) that tries to clarify all that. [VIDEO] I\u2019m actually not sure if that makes his explanation more accurate because it\u2019s informed by that, or more regrettably forced metaphor. But the whole series of videos from different creators is worth watching if you want to understand the whole \u201celectrons are moving\u201d thing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36920346,"author":"Manuel_D","month":"2023-07","story_title":"U.S. Marine Corps Antenna Handbook (1999) [pdf]","text":"Not really in the intuitive sense: [LINK] Someone actually went out and tested this: [VIDEO] The electric field is very tightly constrained around the wire. The amount of energy that reaches the light through the gap is incredibly small, not nearly enough to turn on a real light bulb. The bulk of the energy does indeed have to take the path through the wire. I find that video usually leads people to an even less correct understanding than the marbles-in-a-tube analogy. The Veritasum video can essentially be summarized, \"fun fact: two parallel wires act like an antenna, and an extremely small amount of energy reaches the other end before the rest of the energy takes the long path through the wire.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43151809,"author":"Spivak","month":"2025-02","story_title":"But good sir, what is electricity?","text":"Yes, you can see one of the best people do a demonstration of it [VIDEO] It's close enough to c that you should just use c but it can be observed that it's less.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47827472,"author":"sbuttgereit","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Any Color You Like: NIST Scientists Create 'Any Wavelength' Lasers","text":"Looking at the discussion below this comment, I'd just add this video by AlphaPheonix: [VIDEO] Good discussion in the comments there as well.","stance":"rec"}],"2WoDQBhJCVQ":[{"hn_comment_id":32608389,"author":"speedbird","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Why no Roman industrial revolution?","text":"In a broader context of similar ideas, this is seminal: [LINK] , leading to the totally iconic piece of one shot perfectly timed tv: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36997856,"author":"abulman","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99","text":"Ever see the video of a guy walking past a Saturn V (lying in it's side), doing a piece to camera and pointing to the rocket behind him? 'Connections' (1978). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2XLZ4Z8LpEE":[{"hn_comment_id":23696695,"author":"NateEag","month":"2020-07","story_title":"How Did Vim Become So Popular?","text":"Perhaps my favorite video on YouTube is this glorious footage of someone hooking a 1930s teletype up to a computer running Linux: [VIDEO] Watching it for the first time is what finally made ed click for me. And yes, I was disappointed that the author clearly didn't understand why ed has the UI it does. It's about the teletype, not the computational cost of having a WYSIWIG UI.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24722714,"author":"NateEag","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Using a Piece of Paper as a Display Terminal \u2013 Ed vs. Vim","text":"I've linked this before, but this video of hooking a 1930s teletype up to a Linux computer is what made ed click for me. [VIDEO] It's one of the best things on the Internet, IMO.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22909001,"author":"sbuk","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?","text":"Saw this on YouTube last night; [VIDEO] A facinating video that is part of a series going into the restoration of a 1930 Model 15 Teletype. In this video, they use it as a terminal for Linux.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26155634,"author":"emdashcomma","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The VT-69 portable data terminal","text":"If you haven't seen it before, you might enjoy this: [VIDEO] (Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32239432,"author":"WaffleIronMaker","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: YouTube Channels for the Intellectually Curious","text":"I can second CuriousMarc and Ben Eater for anyone interested in computer engineering. CuriousMarc has an amazing series on the Apollo Guidance Computer, as well as great one-off videos like running a linux terminal on a teletype ( [VIDEO] ). Ben Eater does amazing videos on low level electronics, and has a great series on understanding how a computer really works.","stance":"rec"}],"2aCOyOvOw5c":[{"hn_comment_id":8564638,"author":"0x0","month":"2014-11","story_title":"The Mysterious Mental Side Effects of Traveling into Space","text":"I immediately had to re-watch this pretty awesome video after reading the article: [VIDEO] It goes from liftoff to space and back to earth in a handful of minutes, and the enhanced (but real) audio is pretty creepy.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7390009,"author":"sk5t","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Drone Flies Into an Active Volcano [video]","text":"This video of a booster rocket has excellent, mostly-natural sound: [VIDEO] It came to mind due to the airborne / hostile environment combination...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8072257,"author":"ejr","month":"2014-07","story_title":"SpaceX Soft Lands Falcon 9 Rocket First Stage","text":"There's deceleration involved as well. Here's a very nice video of the shuttle boosters on their way down to give you an idea of the velocities involved. [VIDEO] An enormous amount of inertia to overcome so 30% doesn't sound so unlikely.","stance":"rec"}],"2gFsOoKAHZg":[{"hn_comment_id":22449006,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2020-02","story_title":"If your cipher were secure, this image wouldn't have repeating patterns (2015)","text":"I strongly recommend watching hbomberguy's video about flat earthers, \"Flat Earth: A Measured Response\" [VIDEO] The short summary is that flat earthers are probably seen as a rejection of established institutions (like capitalism/neoliberalism) that the (correctly) see as a major source of the problems in their life. Unfortunately, lacking the social/political background required to actually understand these problem, they work with what they can understand. \"The government/etc has been consistently lying to us for decades while our jobs were shipped overseas and our quality of life keeps sliding lower and lower. If they are consistent liars, why should I believe anything they've said?\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19061248,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway","text":"> A flat earth makes sense if you only spent 5 minutes thinking about it and have no background in or exposure to basic science. Not that I particularly want to jump to the defense of people that believe in a flat earth, but they are not people that \"only spent 5 minutes thinking about it\". A lot of time has been spent trying to back up their beliefs and to form a coherent theory. They're wrong , of course, for many reasons, but it's incorrect and dismissive to call them intellectually lazy. The core of flat earth and similar beliefs is often a legitimate reaction against the large established systems in society that, from their perspective, appear to be failing in obvious ways while lying to them regularly that everything is fine. The are recognizing a problem, and attempt to apply something resembling science to try and find answers. I recommend hbomberguy's recent investigation into recent flat earth belief: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20470647,"author":"dejawu","month":"2019-07","story_title":"How YouTube converted people to flat Earth","text":"HBomberguy's \"Flat Earth: A Measured Response\" [0] is also an interesting look into the present-day flat earth \"community\". [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39667315,"author":"smcl","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Latam Airlines SYD to AKL flight: 50 people treated after mid-air incident","text":"Yeah I've known someone (a family, actually) who did the same. In case you want a bit of light entertainment, the video where I learned about this is here - don't worry it's debunking flat earth, not in favour it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2hf9yN-oBV4":[{"hn_comment_id":25541611,"author":"TheJoeMan","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine","text":"I watched this cool youtube video by Thought Emporium where he makes custom spider silk: [VIDEO] Just seems like he reads the manufacturer's instructions!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25581425,"author":"jcims","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Girlfriend warned Nashville police Anthony Warner was building bomb a year ago","text":"With a germ you can kill a few million people - [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] If you want to see someone do cool stuff with the above: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2lisQQmWQkY":[{"hn_comment_id":22436019,"author":"kd913","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Things about the new Firefox browser for Android","text":"Yes, in fact ublock origin has a very advanced global/local case where you can block resources globally or block resources locally and temporarily if you really want. It's generally better to use ublock origin on it's own than to use ublock origin with umatrix or ublock with noscript. Mainly because ublock origin comes wiht neutralising anti-adblock scripts that would get blocked if you combine it with a separate script blocker. [LINK] Here is a good tutorial on how to use ublock origin in advanced mode. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37074753,"author":"schiffern","month":"2023-08","story_title":"YouTube will now show a blank homepage if you don\u2019t have watch history on","text":"Glad to hear it. Note that it can also re-style elements, for example restoring the old (non-bold) Youtube titles: www.youtube.com##h3.title:style(font-weight: 400 !important;) or un-float pesky navbars: ! Disable floating navbars www.nytimes.com##.live-blog-above-main-content:style(position:absolute !important) www.latimes.com##header[data-element=header]:style(position:absolute !important) apnews.com##.Page-header:style(position:absolute !important) www.wired.com##.persistent-top:style(position:absolute !important) www.vice.com##.nav-bar:style(position:absolute !important) You can even run scripts from a built-in library.[0] Eg to disable Youtube rollover previews (including traffic), you can interrupt the event handler with addEventListener-defuser: www.youtube.com##+js(aeld, /^(?:mousemove|pointermove|pointerenter|mouseenter|mouseleave)$/, buttons) The best thing is to read the wiki (which I procrastinated for way too long), especially the parts on filter syntax[1][2] and blocking modes[3]. I used uBO for years without appreciating its full power! Maybe this whets your interest. Cheers [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] (watch this first: [VIDEO] ) [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"2nBPN-MKefA":[{"hn_comment_id":22534673,"author":"jonplackett","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Payments on mortgages to be suspended across Italy after coronavirus outbreak","text":"Anyone who wants to understand this insanity, I recommend MONEY AS DEBT [VIDEO] The first time I saw it I thought it was a luny conspiracy theory, but NO. It's all true.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22574206,"author":"scirocco","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Book recommendations for understanding financial systems?","text":"This is a good start, \"Money as debt\". Saw it in university and since then you will never take financial markets seriously. And all the \"stimulus\" we see is just pushing the can forward. You will start to see through a lot of lies. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30827607,"author":"OrlandoHakim","month":"2022-03","story_title":"What is money, anyway?","text":"I am surprised no one has shared these two important documentary videos on money: Money as Debt: [VIDEO] Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32361563,"author":"zugi","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: \u201cgovernment is printing money\u201d - what does it mean in practice?","text":"> Which in practice means there's literally never enough money in circulation to pay off the 'debt'. I always wondered why so many people were in so much debt, and was really shocked when I came to the understanding that we've designed our monetary system to trap people in debt. [VIDEO] is a cartoonish but thorough explanation for anyone who has the time. This system really is insane. I mean, I thought Bitcoin was dumb because it's based on nothing, but our national government-based monetary systems being based on debt are even worse.","stance":"rec"}],"2o8MDCIlOEk":[{"hn_comment_id":11475112,"author":"yoodenvranx","month":"2016-04","story_title":"USB power supply puts 220 Mains power out on USB jack","text":"Big Clive is _the_ channel for teardowns of everyday electronic stuff. I am actually not that interested in this kind of stuff but somehow I still watch most of his videos. If you are into more... entertaining teardowns you should have a look at AvE. Even if you don't like it you will still learn some useful canadian terms ;) (edit: just to make it clear, AvE is actually very knowledgable. His \"boltr\" teardown series of electronic power tools is most likely the most thorough you will find on the internet) My third goto channel for electronic stuff is EEVBlog who also does amazing stuff. If you are going to watch one teardown today then please watch his rather famous video about the worlds worst tablet computer: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11475444,"author":"TeMPOraL","month":"2016-04","story_title":"USB power supply puts 220 Mains power out on USB jack","text":"> If you are going to watch one teardown today then please watch his rather famous video about the worlds worst tablet computer: [VIDEO] I'm crying out of laughter right now. This is absolutely brilliant. That is, the teardown - the tablet itself is an abomination. Thanks for posting this. This channel is great and seems to have a lot of educational content besides teardowns too.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11475556,"author":"yoodenvranx","month":"2016-04","story_title":"USB power supply puts 220 Mains power out on USB jack","text":"I just copy/paste a comment I made below: > My third goto channel for electronic stuff is EEVBlog who also does amazing stuff. If you are going to watch one teardown today then please watch his rather famous video about the worlds worst tablet computer: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11476783,"author":"stordoff","month":"2016-04","story_title":"USB power supply puts 220 Mains power out on USB jack","text":"> My third goto channel for electronic stuff is EEVBlog who also does amazing stuff. If you are going to watch one teardown today then please watch his rather famous video about the worlds worst tablet computer: [VIDEO] Oh boy, that thing is a MESS. When he first opened it, I thought it looks like the sort of thing I'd knock together - not pretty, probably mildly unstable, but gets the job done. Then he took a closer look, and it's the sort of thing that wouldn't even be acceptable as a secondary school project, never mind a device to be sold.","stance":"rec"}],"2pWv7GOvuf0":[{"hn_comment_id":22754933,"author":"colmvp","month":"2020-04","story_title":"ACM Prize in Computing Awarded to AlphaGo Developer","text":"I almost knew exactly who it was going to be when they mentioned AlphaGo Developer. For those who aren't that well versed in RL, I recommend watching his lectures at UCL ( [VIDEO] ). Really clear explanations that went hand in hand when I was reading Sutton and Barto's introductory book.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44280555,"author":"briandw","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Q-learning is not yet scalable","text":"This papers assumes that you know quite a bit about RL already. If you really want to dig into RL, this intro course from David Silver (Deep Mind) is excellent: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13900946,"author":"deepnet","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Best books on AI?","text":"Sutton & Barto's Reinforment Learning complete this triumvirate [LINK] David Silver's Reinforcement Course is based on Sutton & Barto [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15863115,"author":"magoghm","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinforcement Learning","text":"You can check this Reinforcement Learning Course by David Silver on YouTube: [VIDEO] By the way, I believe David Silver was the lead programmer for AlphaZero.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16140387,"author":"igravious","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Best introductory video courses on ML and Deep Learning?","text":"fast.ai Making neural nets uncool again. fast.ai is dedicated to making the power of deep learning accessible to all.[0] Udacity. Intro to Machine Learning: Pattern Recognition for Fun and Profit[1] MIT 6.S099: Artificial General Intelligence[2] Lecture Series on Artificial Intelligence by Prof. P. Dasgupta, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur[3] DeepMind. Reinforcement Learning Course by David Silver[4] Stanford Winter Quarter 2016 class: CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition.[5] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO] [5] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17010814,"author":"crisbal_","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Reinforcement Learning \u2013 Bandit Problems","text":"As someone who is doing his bachelor thesis on Reinforcement Learning this is some useful information. OT (but not really) question: does anyone here use Reinforcement Learning techniques at work? For the thesis I am working on black-box optimization of 2 variable functions with Reinforcement Learning (and comparing it with Bayesian Optimization techniques). As someone else suggested the Sutton & Barto book is really great knowledge but I would also like to suggest these lessons ( [VIDEO] ) by David Silver (who worked on AlphaGo)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18400214,"author":"visarga","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress","text":"The notions of agent, environment and reward are encountered in Reinforcement Learning which is a sub-field of ML but also relevant to biological agents. There is a great RL course on YouTube by David Silver (one of the creators of AlphaGo, which is probably the most famous application of RL so far). [VIDEO] The course can properly set the perspective of RL and shed new light on the philosophy of mind, if you take what it says and then extrapolate to humans and other agents. What I find fascinating about RL is that it can be defined concretely. Consciousness can only be defined by reference to other words, in a less exact and concrete way. RL can also explain how meaning appears, based on future reward prediction. The rich sensations we have can be explained by an encoding-decoding architecture based on reconstruction error. Many difficulties in RL map back to difficulties humans have in choosing how to act - the exploration-exploitation tradeoff, instinct vs reason (two different ways to perform RL, one based purely on rewards and the other based on an internal model of the world and rewards). Some of the problems related to multi-agent RL are also covered in Game Theory, such as the prisoner's dilemma. Regarding philosophy of language: we have today numerical representations of meaning in words and phrases. They are usually represented as vectors in high dimensional space or sets of vectors. For example it is customary to use 300-1000 dimensions for representing words. Thes","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19170582,"author":"alkhatib","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Dopamine framework: Fast prototyping of reinforcement learning algorithms (2018)","text":"I came across this a few days ago: For Reinforcement Learning specifically, the standard text is Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction[1]. Dave's UCL Course on RL[2] is great too (playlist of all lectures)[3]. Source: Julian Schrittwieser works on Deepmind at Google [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19196264,"author":"colmvp","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2018) [pdf]","text":"I also recommend interested people to watch David Silver's RL lectures at UCL on YouTube. He covers material from the book. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23880387,"author":"confuseshrink","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Powerful AI Can Now Be Trained on a Single Computer","text":"I would start with David Silvers (DeepMind) youtube series to get an idea of what's possible or not. Running an already trained reinforcement learning agent is relatively cheap (unless your model is massive). I suspect the reason people aren't using it yet is because it's a) really difficult to get right in training, even basic convergence is not guaranteed without careful tuning b) really difficult to guarantee reasonable behavior outside of the scenarios you're able to reach in QA. edit: Link to lecture series [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2qsmF8HHskg":[{"hn_comment_id":24075619,"author":"undershirt","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Interlisp project: Restore Interlisp-D to usability on modern OSes","text":"I missed the golden age of lisp, but i know this project for its legendary structural editor, SEdit[1], released the year I was born. i found it mentioned in an old paredit readme, something poignant like \u201cparedit is only a shadow of what interlisp was: true structural editing\u201d. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25627491,"author":"mikelevins","month":"2021-01","story_title":"On Repl-Driven Programming","text":"That's a good suggestion. Walking through a set of interactions is a solid idea. For what it's worth, there are some videos around of people actually doing it with Lisp and Smalltalk systems, and pjmlp already posted a pile of them elsewhere in this thread. I can add a few more: Kalman Reti walking through some interactions with a Symbolics LispM repl: [LINK] Brian Mastenbrook demonstrating Interlisp's SEDIT structure editor in the Xerox Lisp environment: [VIDEO] Rainer Joswig (lispm here on HN) showing us a little bit of repl and Zmacs interaction on a Symbolics Lisp Machine: [LINK] Rainer again, showing some simple interactions with Macintosh Common Lisp, which was my daily driver for years: [LINK] Ruby programmer Avdi Grimm shows some things that he found cool about Pharo Smalltalk: [LINK] Dan Ingalls (one of the original authors of Smalltalk) in a 2017 demo of Smalltalk 76: [LINK] There are some other things I'd like to find for lists like this, but haven't been able to. In particular, a good demo of Apple's SK8 would be great. If you can imagine a full-color Hypercard that could crack open and reprogram absolutely everything on the screen, including the machine code that drew the window system's widgets, all in a repl while the code was live; in which you could grab an arbitrary widget and drop it on the repl window to get a live variable reference to the widget, and then inspect it, operate on it, and reprogram it, again, while everything continued to run; in which you ","stance":"rec"}],"2sjqTHE0zok":[{"hn_comment_id":26885609,"author":"janvdberg","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Git from the Bottom Up (2008)","text":"Video-wise there is hardly a better explainer on git than this one: 'Lecture 6: Version Control (git) (2020)' [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30317520,"author":"hassancf","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Git in one image","text":"I personally find this to be the best video on git by far: [VIDEO] (MIT OpenCourseWare, Missing Semester). 1h25mn well spent","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31877148,"author":"mynameismon","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Dangit, Git?","text":"I've recommended it here previously, and I'll do it again, because it's so fantastic: Missing Semester's lecture on Git [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38119329,"author":"jacobegold","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Confusing Git Terminology","text":"I think that this video should be considered mandatory viewing if you're a developer using Git \u2014 the whole lecture starts from the basic data structures involved and builds from there, as opposed to the way that it seems many people approach Git: \"What command do I run?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38119341,"author":"FranklinMaillot","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Confusing Git Terminology","text":"The \"Missing Semester\" is a collection of video lectures from MIT that covers the fundamentals of command line, git, vim, and other tools often overlooked in computer science courses. As a self-taught developer, I found it to be an ideal introduction to git. The series made me also pick up vim, and I have not looked back since. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24330235,"author":"hedberg10","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Git Sucks, What Am I Doing Wrong?","text":"The time is always there, but not letting getting angry about a change eat it up and providing an excuse (\"I'll just procrastinate, that'll show them!\") is key. That means taking the biggest hurdle to learning. Mngt/Life/You could have not forced the change, but that's how it goes. In case of git, try this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28027304,"author":"Lordarminius","month":"2021-08","story_title":"New in Git: switch and restore","text":"As a helpful aside, in my experience, there are only about a dozen or so Git commands you need to do ninety percent of your work. You don't need to become a git zen master right away. 1. git init: to start a new repository 2. git status: checks your current state 3. git add -A: To begin tracking files 4. git commit -am: Commit all changes in the working directory with a message added on 5. git switch -c [branch name]: Create a branch and switch to it. (git checkout -b will do the same thing) 6. git switch [branch name]: switch between named branches 7. git merge[branch]: merge named branch into current branch 8. git branch [branch name] -D : delete branch if not tracked 9. git log --pretty=oneline: show a graph of commit history. 11. git push 12. git clone [repo]: Copy of a project/file onto your local computer. The comments also contain some additional advice. Here is a good introductory video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29654853,"author":"valbaca","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Every Programmer Should Know","text":"Exactly. If anyone wants such a reference, there's the \"Missing Semester\" which is all about practicum. Lecture 6 is on Git: Lecture 6: Version Control (git) (2020) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32371182,"author":"kelthuzad","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Git In Two Minutes (updated after 8 years)","text":"I found the \"Missing Semester\" lectures on YouTube to be pretty helpful: Regarding git there is: Lecture 6: Version Control [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2tdiKTSdE9Y":[{"hn_comment_id":32254410,"author":"techdragon","month":"2022-07","story_title":"James Lovelock has died","text":"Despite everything else he accomplished in his quite storied professional career as one of the last independent scientists... Including his work on the Viking mars landers! [LINK] To me he will always be the man who invented his own microwave to thaw frozen hamsters. The whole story is worth a watch since Tom Scott does an admirable job of explaining how he went digging up a weird fact expecting to debunk it only to wind up recording an amazing interview with James Lovelock [VIDEO] but if you\u2019re impatient the interview with lovelock about cryopreserved hamsters and his \"microwave\" starts here [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27425608,"author":"broof","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Frozen in Siberian Permafrost for 24,000 Years, Microscopic Animal Comes to Life","text":"They already studied this. It sometimes worked with small animals like mice, but fails as organisms get larger. There was a really interesting video about how microwaves were first used to test this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31288393,"author":"_Algernon_","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Faecal transplants reverse hallmarks of ageing","text":"That's purely a size thing iirc. Lot quicker to get enough heat into a mouse to thaw it, than a human. Edit to add an interesting related video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32251600,"author":"bambax","month":"2022-07","story_title":"James Lovelock has died","text":"This Tom Scott's video from last year about microwave ovens features a nice interview with Lovelock: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33357798,"author":"mabbo","month":"2022-10","story_title":"A singular scientist: James Lovelock","text":"Tom Scott interviewed him last year in a really wonderful video about microwaves. [VIDEO] > I found an article that said \"The microwave was invented to heat hamsters humanely in 1950s experiments.\" And I thought, no it wasn't. ...was it? At over 100 years old, the man was remarkably coherent and healthy. Quite sad to hear he's passed now.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34687386,"author":"zeristor","month":"2023-02","story_title":"SimEarth, Finding Gaia in an Afternoon","text":"This where I can post Tom Scott\u2019s video on Microwaves, in which James Lovelock is interviewed: [VIDEO] Spoiler warning, well you wouldn\u2019t watch it if I didn\u2019t tell you would you.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34940736,"author":"cynwoody","month":"2023-02","story_title":"How to date a recording using background electrical noise","text":"Yes, Tom Scott is one talented YouTuber. See, for example, his video on microwaving frozen hamsters back to life[0], in which he interviews the 101-year-old J. E. Lovelock, the scientist who did the work back in the fifties. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36446454,"author":"H8crilA","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Scientists unfroze rat organs and transplanted them","text":"Tom Scott made a great video about it, he even got to the guy who started using microwaves for thawing entire small animals. Before microwaves (diathermic heating) they would use a hot piece of metal, like a large spoon. [VIDEO] And yes, you can unfreeze a rock solid rat, then see it walk around. This is why cryogenics was hyped so much, because it sort of works on small animals.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47263927,"author":"radishingr","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Chimpanzees Are into Crystals","text":"The Tom Scott video( [VIDEO] ) did a pretty good summary of the Percy Spencer microwave (a giant commercial oven) and the later parallel development by J. E. Lovelock of a small microwave to reheat small mammals for experiments with cryorevival (replacing lamps and hot paddles).","stance":"rec"}],"2u6HTG8LuXQ":[{"hn_comment_id":16950941,"author":"dmitriid","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Nintendo's secretive creative process","text":"I highly recommend Mark Brown's video \"Nintendo: Putting Play First, [VIDEO] (and his other essays on Nintendo)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42727589,"author":"ecliptik","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Nintendo announces the Switch 2 [video]","text":"One of my favorite video essay's on this is \"Nintendo - Putting Play First\" by Game Makers Toolkit [1]. It goes into when making a game, Nintendo first determines the mechanic they want to focus on; jumping, throwing a hat, shooting paint, etc and finding out how to make it fun, then building and iterating on the idea. It's how they can keep putting out essentially the same games but are completely different. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15062317,"author":"forkLding","month":"2017-08","story_title":"An Embarrassing Tale: Why my server could only handle 10 players","text":"Quick suggestions on usability, maybe start off the game with players on a slower speed so they get used to moving around first and then gradually speed up by accomplishing actions that you want them to do in a training sort of manner so that players start learning and don't get confused. Side note: I subscribe to Mark Brown's Game Maker's Toolkit on Game Design and Game progression, here is an example: [VIDEO] I think it would definitely help","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35988675,"author":"ecliptik","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days","text":"There's a Game Maker's Toolkit video [1] that does a good job explaining how Nintendo focuses on play first. \"That's how we make games at Nintendo, though: we get the fundamentals solid first, then do as much with that core concept as our time and ambition will allow\" - Shigeru Miyamoto 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2vuMzGhc1cg":[{"hn_comment_id":28339849,"author":"taliesinb","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Starlink's network faces significant limitations, analysts find","text":"I\u2019ve been fairly skeptical about Starlink since watching Common Sense Skeptic\u2019s video, which I recommend: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30022920,"author":"gala8y","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Starlink satellites hindering detection of near-Earth asteroids, study finds","text":"Few days ago I watched 'Debunking Starlink' video [0] (posted by @qsdf38100 in another thread [1] on Starlink) and it got me thinking. I am just a lay person, but, after watching it, am not so sure if Starlink is such a good idea. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"2wZ1pCpJUIM":[{"hn_comment_id":31400878,"author":"freemint","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem","text":"As a huge fan of Julia i got to fully agree. Although i would probably not \"no longer recommend Julia\" but \"give huge caveats when mentioning Julia\". Organisations (that includes those who maintain programming language) have values Bryan Cantrill has an excellent talk on this [VIDEO] and i got to agree with the author that correctness (especially correctness under arbitary composability) is not a value that Julia teaches and instills in its users. Some Julia users care about this, some core maintainers do to (as the Pkg3 demonstrates). However there are many invocations (SafeTestSets vs Test) and stumbling blocks. I am aware of no efforts to do formal verification on Julia code. There are no good ways to move certain Run-Time to compile errors. Correctness is not a value of the Julia language. Here is the good thing though, as Bryan demonstrates in his talk, you can hire for values.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27171912,"author":"btschaegg","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Modern Javascript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years (2020)","text":"Bryan Cantrill explains a very interesting thought about that here: [VIDEO] I'm sure there are many other factors that play into this (just look at Gary Bernhardt's \"WAT\" talk), but essentially, I agree that this has to be a big part of the problem. If you've been developing backend systems and asked to hold up robustness and stability guarantees for multiple years and then run into Javascript, you will likely run into situations where you have to make up for its deficiencies in that regard. That doesn't make it a bad language per se -- that's the case with any language in some aspects -- but since JS will be a new language to you, you're much less likely to accept that situation as a given.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28126550,"author":"josephg","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Growing object-oriented software vs. what I would do","text":"No, I'm not. Or at least, not as I see it. How would you describe javascript's values, compared to other languages? This is a great chart / explanation of this kind of thinking from Bryan Cantrill: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29907115,"author":"jamincan","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Rust in 2022","text":"Bryan Cantrill has an interesting talk that discusses various languages in terms of their values that you might finding interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41219049,"author":"codetrotter","month":"2024-08","story_title":"CrowdStrike accepting the PwnieAwards for \"most epic fail\" at defcon","text":"There is sparsely little real \u201cengineering\u201d that goes on in the field of \u201csoftware engineering\u201d, industry wide, in terms of ensuring that our software is reliable and secure. Performance and development velocity seem to take the driver seat always, in a whole lot of software. See also this talk by Bryan Cantrill, \u201cScale by the Bay 2018: Rust and Other Interesting Things\u201d [VIDEO] where he talks about software platform values, in the sense of what different programming languages and other things focus on. He also touches on the fact that while higher level layers in the stack might value security it kind of falls apart when the very microcode in our CPUs sacrifices security for performance. This was in a period of time where Spectre [LINK] and Meltdown [LINK] had reared their ugly heads.","stance":"rec"}],"2wq9x2QcZN0":[{"hn_comment_id":19627214,"author":"cronix","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Nearly half of young millennials get thousands in support from parents","text":"You'd probably be interested in watching Ray Dalios recent interview: [LINK] Here's a good one from Eric Weinstein. The whole interview is good (about AI), but at the end he discusses this kind of issue (time is bookmarked): [VIDEO] This is part of a good lecture by Dr. Jordan Peterson on IQ, AI, and how AI is and will continue to displace people who will have no means to work to support themselves: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20907123,"author":"abledon","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Even Physicists Don\u2019t Understand Quantum Mechanics","text":"In this Lex Freidman interview, Eric Weinstein (a bit kooky) explains his view on the trenches of advanced mathematics/physics: [VIDEO] He goes into depths about the problems right now in academia","stance":"rec"}],"2xcZS7arcgk":[{"hn_comment_id":14176749,"author":"schiffern","month":"2017-04","story_title":"UK launches program to explore removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere","text":">You don't mention that trees also regulate the local microclimate; they tend to make rain, for example. Good point. I'm usually so eager to mention that, too! Trees regulate not only the microclimate, but the macroclimate as well. Isotopic analysis shows that about 80% of all terrestrial rainfall is caused by transpiration from trees and other plants. Trees essentially act as a giant inland irrigation network, using solar power to transport water via the airstream to power the water cycle. [LINK] So trees cause rain. This explains why deforestation causes desertification. I would also recommend the excellent Greening the Desert documentary for an example of the reverse process. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19415118,"author":"2sk21","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Nitrogen-fixing trees \u201ceat\u201d rocks, play pivotal role in forest health","text":"Permaculture is going to become a very important subject for study. I have recently gotten interested in the subject and the results have been amazing even in very unpromising conditions. Geoff Lawtons work in Jordan is inspiring: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23885356,"author":"splittingTimes","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Hugelkultur: Raised Garden Beds","text":"I think you need a more encompassing approach. Permaculture might be something for you. They have developed specialized techniques for all climate zones. For example check out the \"Greening the desert\" project. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2y5Pv4yN0b0":[{"hn_comment_id":8703169,"author":"nickik","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Introducing .NET Core","text":"Watch this awesome keynote by Brian Goetz, he talks about valie types and generics. Brian Goetz - Stewardship: the Sobering Parts [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9488098,"author":"elangoc","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Contributing to Clojure","text":"To add on to that... Even though, I haven't been involved in the contributing process for Clojure, but I thought it was interesting that Brian Goetz's keynote at the Conj 6 months ago was about stewardship, in particular, stewardship of the Java language: [VIDEO] It gave me a better appreciation for the differing concerns of someone using a language or contributing a patch vs. someone designing & maintaining a language. In my day-to-day, I use languages other than Clojure, and I sorely miss the cohesive and good design. Brian Goetz's talk nails it on the head why the languages in my day-to-day are sub-optimal, even if they're currently the \"new hotness\"... at least for now...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12057003,"author":"filereaper","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Oracle and the fall of Java EE","text":"On the topic of stewardship, I highly recommend this talk by Brian Goetz titled \"Stewardship: the Sobering Parts\" [1] Brian goes about how important compatibility is for the language, the concept not throwing customers code under the bus by bringing breaking incompatibilities. (ie Python 2 --> 3) Java has its warts and isn't \"cool\" but I respect their design decisions. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15189096,"author":"filereaper","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Moving Java Forward Faster","text":"Brian Goetz the Java Language Architect addressed the very points you raised in a talk called \"Stewardship: the Sobering Parts\" [1] I highly recommend anyone with these very valid concerns to view it once. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15639645,"author":"gw","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Chrome breaks the Web","text":"Against my better judgement I did a reverse image search and found the post that you found that screenshot from [1]. The post is full of people having exactly the sort of problems you would expect from an automatic software updater, along with instructions from Jeff on how to manually update using SSH and git. These things happen. The world is messy, and whether due to technical inadequacy or run-of-the-mill software updater bugs, web backends will not always be updated. As you've noted, this could eventually lead to security problems, and I agree -- but that doesn't justify intentionally breaking their code. To say that their breakage is justifiable because they'll be 0wned at some point anyway is an absurdly darwinian argument. To address your last question, the way you update a system like the web is exactly the way we always have -- accretion . With very few exceptions, websites from the early 90s still work today. We didn't remove the `table` tag when we introduced flex boxes. We add new APIs while preserving existing functionality. If you want to see a fantastic talk on this exact subject, watch \"Stewardship: The Sobering Parts\" by Brian Goetz [2]. It is well worth your time. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8695086,"author":"serve_yay","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Java Doesn\u2019t Suck","text":"It is only tangentially related, but I recommend this video from Brian Geotz, a Java language architect. He breaks down the challenges of adding features to the language, in a room full of Clojure devs no less. Worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11262224,"author":"dloose","month":"2016-03","story_title":"JEP 286: Local-Variable Type Inference","text":"See Brian Goetz's talk on language stewardship ( [VIDEO] ). I'm sure nobody wants to add new and interesting features to Java more than the people who work on the language every damn day, but they've made a strong commitment to the community to not break existing code.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17062133,"author":"wging","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Java 10 and beyond \u2013 a look at the potential language change","text":"As far as speed-of-evolution, it is worth understanding that the slower speed is at least partly a by-product of different goals. This talk, \"Stewardship: The Sobering Parts\" by Brian Goetz, is informative and well worth the watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24443963,"author":"devin","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Checked exceptions: Java\u2019s biggest mistake (2014)","text":"I recommend Brian Goetz\u2019 talk about language stewardship. I don\u2019t think what you\u2019ve said here is true, and it kind of bums me out because some of these features took years to develop so they wouldn\u2019t break people on ancient versions. That deserves much respect and appreciation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24483206,"author":"carimura","month":"2020-09","story_title":"JDK 15","text":"Things are innovating faster than ever, but, the trick is always to address the challenges of both today and tomorrow, while staying true to compatibility and stability. Check out Brian's talk on Stewardship: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24517744,"author":"carimura","month":"2020-09","story_title":"JDK 15","text":"And by telling I think you mean that over time Java has very thoughtfully evolved in a way that respects backwards compatibility, or that once a feature is in the language it'll very likely stay there for the next 25 years. Yes, innovation is very important (and happening faster than ever now with the 6-month release cadence), but a majority of the work isn't in deciding what goes in, it's deciding what stays out and if something does go in how does it satisfy both audiences of \"move slow don't break\" and \"move faster we want features\". A good video on this process: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37168059,"author":"dgb23","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Dart 3.1 and a retrospective on functional style programming in Dart","text":"Thank you for sharing this one! Also there are interesting talks published on YT where he discusses data/functional programming, OOP etc. Multiparadigm (including plain old procedural) seems to be the most pragmatic approach to me, because I don\u2019t need to bend over backwards to express something in a particular way. Aside: It\u2019s really fascinating how Java and the JVM manage to evolve while retaining reliability. He talks about that here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"2yDCox-qKbk":[{"hn_comment_id":38499308,"author":"hackernewds","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Tinnitus Linked to Undetected Auditory Nerve Damage \u2013 A Step Towards a Cure","text":"to add to my other comment: [VIDEO] this trick helped me be in silence for the first time in decades. it was wonderful, to say the least","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13140252,"author":"suby","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Bose Hearphones","text":"There's a technique that has the potential to temporarily (around 1 minute) clear tinnitus. [VIDEO] It's not much and doesn't seem to work for everyone, but if you've been suffering from tinnitus for years, one minute is better than nothing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14623563,"author":"conception","month":"2017-06","story_title":"A music-lover's guide to tinnitus","text":"I've always had tinnitus since I was a child and just thought the world was like that. A trick popped up on Reddit to temporarily, and perhaps for some with regular application, cures it for a short time. [VIDEO] Thump the back of your head like that with your ears covered well about 40 times and enjoy the silence.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37853845,"author":"k4runa","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Has anyone gotten complete, permanent relief from tinnitus?","text":"I had tinnitus for a while, and tried a few things that didn't work but this thomping technique I found on reddit one day stops it, and I just do it every couple of days and it disappears for a while. Not permanent but whenever it bothers me now I just do this thumping and it disappears in a few seconds: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38499418,"author":"hackernewds","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Tinnitus Linked to Undetected Auditory Nerve Damage \u2013 A Step Towards a Cure","text":"you can also try this exercise for very low risk temporary tinnitus suppression [VIDEO] it works reliably well","stance":"rec"}],"2zvjW9arAZ0":[{"hn_comment_id":18785425,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Tying Allowance to Chores Could Kill Kids\u2019 Motivation to Help Out","text":"> it's important at the beginning to do the chore together This is very important. Kids are clever and surprisingly capable when they are able to gain some firsthand experience. The problem is they don't actually have that experience. Humans learn by observing and imitating ; working together on the same task lets them easily observe in detail from an experienced role model. Immediate feedback lets them rapidly iterate their attempts to imitate their observations. Victor Wooten gave an outstanding TED talk[1] on this topic[2]: > If you think about how you learned [to speak English], you realize you weren\u2019t taught it. People just spoke to you. But the coolest thing is [...] you were allowed to speak back. > Now if I take the music example, in most cases, our beginners are not allowed to play with the better people. You\u2019re stuck in the beginning class. You have to remain there a few years, until you are elevated to the intermediate and then advanced. [...] > But with language, to use a musical term, even as a baby you\u2019re jamming with professionals, all the time \u2014 to the point that you don\u2019t even know you\u2019re a beginner. No one says, \u201cI can\u2019t talk to you until you got to go over there. When you\u2019re older, then I can speak to you.\u201d It doesn\u2019t happen. No one tells you what you have to say. You\u2019re not made to sit in a corner and practice. You\u2019re never even corrected when you\u2019re wrong. > Think about it, when you\u2019re 2, 3 years old and you say a word wrong over and over, no one corrects","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14942986,"author":"michielk","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Know of any non-digital toys/games that teach, for 6-10 year olds?","text":"A musical instrument. I would suggest not teaching them the traditional way, but in a more natural way. Check out the approach of Victor Wooten [0]. If you want things a little more structured, try Improvise for Real [1]. Both will teach creativity, self expression and more. Plus its fun! [0] [VIDEO] [1] www.improviseforreal.com","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18128835,"author":"expathacker","month":"2018-10","story_title":"In Praise of Mediocrity","text":"Check out Victor Wooten's Ted Talk on thinking about music as a language. He compares learning music with learning to talk. The general premise: \"Nobody waits until you're an expert in language before being allowed to speak, why are you expected to be a master before you can make music with other musicians?\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3-son3EJTrU":[{"hn_comment_id":9693090,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Taarof","text":"It sounds like the ambiguity of it all is a feature, which makes me think of this wonderful RSA Animate of Steve Pinker's discussion of how we use language: [VIDEO] I have a feeling a lot of the insights of this talk also hint at why something ta'arof can be useful to a human society.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2843558,"author":"dbuxton","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online","text":"I was talking about something similar earlier today with a friend from high school. We were talking about how it was totally un-cool to disagree with the \"consensus\" about which girls were hot and which were not. We were imagining what it might have been like if we'd felt able to speak our minds. I'm not a huge believer in the whole \"social media toppled authoritarian regimes\" stories that have been going around after Tunisia/Egypt but I do think that to the extent real anonymity is possible it has the potential to help people living in places where dissent is both stigmatised and punished by allowing them to realise that others feel the same way. This Steven Pinker talk [VIDEO] (I think; I don't have Flash so can't check it's the right one) talks about why this type of communication is essential to free societies and why freedom of assembly is protected in all free societies. On the same general topic researchers in public health give people some wiggle room on truth telling by introducing random noise into their responses in order to improve the aggregate quality of information you get from asking them questions about controversial topics (drug use, sexuality): [LINK] tl;dr: anything that helps people tell the truth rather than timidly conforming to social norms is a good thing","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11705090,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Can Multilingualism Survive?: How cities preserve and abandon languages","text":"You make a very reasonable but demonstrably false assumption about language: that it is all about A trying to communicate an idea to B, as clearly and as efficiently as possible, and all involved are cooperative. Reality is often much more complicated. Take the simple example of A talking to B with listener C. There's the scenario where a A wants to talk to B but without being understood by C. Or the reverse where A wants C to understand something but not B, whilst talking to B. And we can go on like this - see for example, this[0] RSA Animate by Steve Pinker about why we don't just say things explicitly most of the time. As a result of all this we get stuff like jargon, coded slang, read-between-the-lines expressions, and yes: foreign languages. Because if you apply that insight to human groups, it becomes obvious that with human \"tribes\", the use of language is as much a way of excluding outsiders as it is about clear communication. In this light, stuff like youth slang always evolving into something unintelligible to adults makes perfect sense. As long as there is a desire for selecting who doesn't understand you (which I think will always be the case), language diversification will be a thing. If you have access to New Scientist articles, this one[1] sums it up nicely [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14966763,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2017-08","story_title":"The Kolmogorov option","text":"> the vast majority of people might actually wish for rebellion, but none of them actually acts out on that wish. You're talking about Mutual Knowledge[0]. Basically, the Emperor's New Clothes scenario: I know the emperor is naked, but does everyone else know and do I want to risk myself finding out? This short Stephen Pinker video[1] explains it really well: [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"30jNsCVLpAE":[{"hn_comment_id":30052356,"author":"OmarAssadi","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Famous outages along with deep postmortems?","text":"Perhaps not famous, but Bryan Cantrill, who gives my favorite talks, has an interesting and funny talk on one of the Joyent outages: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34584940,"author":"int0x2e","month":"2023-01","story_title":"WAN router IP address change blamed for global Microsoft 365 outage","text":"Time to share one of my favorite talks (and speakers) ever - \"Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind\" (Bryan Cantrill, GOTO 2017) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35036065,"author":"KronisLV","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best postmortem you've seen?","text":"The best postmortem I've seen was actually a conference talk: \"Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind\" by Bryan Cantrill (in the GOTO conference, 2017) Here's a YouTube video of it: [VIDEO] Here's the slides: [LINK] It goes into detail about a pretty bad outage (when an entire data center was brought down), the human aspects, automation, how they handled it, the various risks, architectures, how things fail and about software development in general.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20423630,"author":"merlincorey","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Root cause analysis: significantly elevated error rates on 2019\u201107\u201110","text":"> In my experience customers deeply detest the idea of waiting around for a failure case to re-occur so that you can understand it better. Bryan Cantrill has a great talk[0] about dealing with fires where he says something to the effect of: > Now you will find out if you are more operations or development - developers will want to leave things be to gather data and understand, while operations will want to rollback and fix things as quickly as possible [0] Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind - Bryan Cantrill: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24573866,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2020-09","story_title":"They're deleting my channel, but they don't know why? [video]","text":"> I run a YouTube channel that is over 10 years old , has over 770,000 subscribers , almost 600 public videos , 120,000,000 views When writing software involved in managing a live, public, massively multi-user system, the traditional unix-style commands that are immediate, often silent, and capable of damaging effects become a really easy way to shoot yourself in the foot. Worse, some commands might let you accidentally shoot everyone's foot on a typo. The traditional example is accidentally typing something like \"rm -f * .bak\" (note the extra space after the star). For a good discussion of this type of problem, I highly recommend Bryan Cantrill's talk[1] about the time an operator accidentally rebooted an entire datacenter with a single miss-typed command. The general solution to this is building sanity checks into the software. The user just asked to reformat 500 hosts, but almost all previous uses olf the 'reformat' command affected less than 10 hosts. Maybe we should ask for verification from an actual human if they really intended to run this unusually destructive command. Why doesn't YouTube have this kind of sanity check in their automated takedown/strike/channel-deletion tools? Google wrote automation that can decide to delete a channel with a long history and many successful videos. Why doesn't that automation have basic sanity checks that ask for operator input when asked to do an unusually destructive action like deleting a 10 year old channel with a huge history? ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26273161,"author":"KronisLV","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Google admits Kubernetes container tech is too complex","text":"> Joyent famously took down their whole region by rebooting wrong nodes. In case anyone's interested, here's a pretty funny and educational talk by Bryan Cantrill about that particular incident: GOTO 2017 \u2022 Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28235824,"author":"e12e","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Harbormaster: Anti-Kubernetes for your personal server","text":"Not (I think) the exacttalk/blog post gp was thinking of - but worth watching IMNHO: \"Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind \u2022 Bryan Cantrill \u2022 GOTO 2017\" [VIDEO] Ed: oh, here we go I think? > Running Aground: Debugging Docker in Production Bryan Cantrill19,102 views16 Jan 2018 Talk originally given at DockerCon '15, which (despite being a popular presentation and still broadly current) Docker Inc. has elected to delist. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28904180,"author":"KronisLV","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Is it time to rewrite the Operating System in Rust? (2018) [video]","text":"I'll give it a watch and will summarize, because while i'm not always on board with the Rust hype (and therefore want to know more, to help eliminate my biases, one way or the other). That said, i rather enjoyed Bryan Cantrill's talk from 2017, \"Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind \u2022 Bryan Cantrill \u2022 GOTO 2017\": [VIDEO] So i wouldn't necessarily turn away from any of his videos just because of the sometimes humorous or not awfully serious tone.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30763371,"author":"wingmanjd","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Hackers claim to have breached Okta systems","text":"I suppose it all depends on how much infra needs to be stood up for the absolute necessities of the business to operate. Does the company need that internal ticketing system in place to process external client transactions? Probably not, but it'll need it eventually (so maybe that moves to 2nd tier restore process?). My company's RTO is 24hrs to processing new client transactions. Restoring old ones will definitely take longer, but at least new ones can proceed. If your own company's RTO is 2w, that sounds like a lot needs to be in place. Part of the business continuity/ disaster recovery is getting management to sign off on those types of numbers, big or small. Make sure they're realistic. You're right that this type of recovery is not fun. Bryan Cantrill gives a great presentation about managing an outage ( [VIDEO] ). One of my biggest takeaways, if you're looking at a sweeping outage and a long haul of a recovery, do sleep management asap with your team. Dead tired people are more likely to make brain dead decisions.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32396616,"author":"OmarAssadi","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The Story of Mel (1983)","text":"I\u2019m surprised I haven\u2019t seen this linked yet, but Bryan Cantrill of dtrace, Sun, lawnmower, Joyent, etc, fame gave an amazing talk for Monktoberfest 2016, titled \u201cOral Tradition in Software Engineering\u201d, which features The Story of Mel [1]. Highly recommend checking it out \u2014 there are loads of little gems and stories like this throughout. All of his other presentations are great too and definitely worth a listen if you like this sort of thing [2]. A couple of my favorites are \u201cFork Yeah! The Rise and Development of Illumos\u201d [3] and \u201cDebugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind\u201d [4]. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36854124,"author":"cls59","month":"2023-07","story_title":"40 years ago yesterday Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel mid-flight","text":"Bryan Cantrill draws some excellent parallels between this incident and software systems in his \"Debugging Under Fire\" talk (beware of semi-automated systems): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"31CcclqEiZw":[{"hn_comment_id":18293144,"author":"stickfigure","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Thermometer Tells Your Temperature, Then Tells Firms Where to Advertise","text":"I don't know if Brave New World or 1984 was right. You will enjoy this debate about that exact question: [VIDEO] Fantastic oratory, excerpts acted out by famous actors, intriguing ideas. Marvelous production.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32432019,"author":"LesZedCB","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Is this the end of social networking?","text":"yes! thank you. huxley was right about a scary number of things... this debate between will self and adam gopnik on 'brave new world' vs '1984' is really good if anybody has 1.5 hours to indulge. [VIDEO] just grabbed 'amusing ourselves to death' from libby, thanks for the recommendation!","stance":"rec"}],"31D94QOo2gY":[{"hn_comment_id":26675920,"author":"adamnew123456","month":"2021-04","story_title":"This Blog is now hosted on a GPS/LTE modem","text":"Seeing the ShadySIM project mentioned on that page reminded me of this DEFCON talk, which talks about some of the capabilities of the SIM OS (some of them run Java!) and what power they grant you over phones if you have control over the underlying cell network (legitimately or otherwise). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29138188,"author":"Silasdev","month":"2021-11","story_title":"What is AT&T doing at 1111340002?","text":"This video from defcon gives a good overview of what Java Card applets is, the limitations and what it can do: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29714902,"author":"comboy","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Apple said to be preparing for iPhones without SIM card slot in 2022","text":"There was one really good talk about from black hat or defcon [1] but there's also this [2] which seems more thorough so I'm gonna watch it too later. I happen to have a friend who writes software for simcards so that's what really was my main source. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"34LGPIXvU5M":[{"hn_comment_id":25572138,"author":"tehjoker","month":"2020-12","story_title":"CIA vs. Wikileaks [video]","text":"Manufacturing Consent (there's a documentary form of it too) changed my entire outlook on media. Highly recommend. Short vid based on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23304486,"author":"tehjoker","month":"2020-05","story_title":"A No. 1 hit vanished from Poland\u2019s charts \u2013 it\u2019s not going quietly","text":"[LINK] For those that don't like to read there's a brief animated YouTube introduction voiced by Amy Goodman of \"Democracy Now!\": [VIDEO] This theory, backed by enormous volumes of evidence and case studies, is very much worth a read. It explains how propaganda is instituted in the US without overt censorship.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27595774,"author":"jhabdas","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Types of propaganda, propaganda techniques, and propaganda strategies (2017)","text":"Five filters. One big media theory. Consent is being manufactured around you all the time. Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49097616,"author":"tehjoker","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Delayed Gratification \u2013 Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'","text":"Dropsite news is good, but are you familiar with manufacturing consent\u2019s propaganda model of the mass media? A simplified explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"34rdxDgpaaA":[{"hn_comment_id":34572708,"author":"smcl","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Australians Scour Desert for Dangerous Radioactive Capsule Smaller Than a Penny","text":"There\u2019s a good Well There\u2019s Your Problem episode about this, if people would rather see a video about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34637072,"author":"Pxtl","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Goi\u00e2nia Accident","text":"There's a pretty good Well There's Your Problem episode about it (dirtbag-left podcast-with-slides about industrial disasters). Goes into detail day by day about the events, including celebrating some of the heroes of the story who probably saved countless lives. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"35Idb_lCU4o":[{"hn_comment_id":25344193,"author":"tibbydudeza","month":"2020-12","story_title":"First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK","text":"[VIDEO] by Ninja Nerd Lectures This is the best science based informative video I have seen on how these different Covid vaccines actually work.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25382392,"author":"wenc","month":"2020-12","story_title":"FDA approves Pfizer vaccine \u2013 UC Santa Cruz scientists explain how it works","text":"Here's a 5 minute video explaining mRNA vaccines in laymen's terms (Cliff-Notes style) [LINK] Here's a longer 43 minute video explaining them and the Moderna/Pfizer/BioNTech/Astrazeneca clinical trial processes in more detail. The biochem part starts at 12:30. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25403775,"author":"wenc","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Understanding mRNA Covid-19 vaccines","text":"Reposting this: these two videos answers a bunch of questions that are in the comments. Here's a 5 minute video explaining mRNA vaccines in laymen's terms (Cliff-Notes style) [LINK] Here's a longer, more technical, 43 minute video explaining them and the Moderna/Pfizer/BioNTech/Astrazeneca clinical trial processes in more detail. The biochem part starts at 12:30. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25468955,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2020-12","story_title":"It took two days to develop Moderna\u2019s vaccine","text":"It's not just proteins. The cells infected with the mRNA present those proteins on the outside of the cell to be recognized by other cells which start a chain process. Skip to around 12:30 in here: [VIDEO] He goes through the entire biochem process. Even the cells infected with the mRNA will need to be removed by the immune system using cytotoxic T-cells, so they need to get the chain process going. The reason we have \"memory\" for viruses is because a ton of random stuff in our immune systems evolved to multiply exponentially when they come in contact with viruses or proteins that indicate certain infections. It's a lot of stuff and you can't just inject that memory in; you have to stimulate the immune system to create them at a very large scale. It's not just antibodies. There are memory T-cells, parts of the complement system that get activated; a whole host of things. My issue is that our immune systems are incredibly complex, and there are a lot of components to this \"memory\" that are not entirely understood. Every other vaccine is an inactivaed virus (via heat treatment) or attenuated (virus run through other hosts to make it less dangerous to humans). The first vaccine was just a close relative: cow/horse pox instead of smallpox. The former are not dangerous in humans, but seem to produce the same immune memory. The mRNA vaccines are at attempt to say, \"Let's strip out all that other stuff and find just the thing we need.\" But our immune systems are incredibly complicat","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26885992,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2021-04","story_title":"mRNA vaccines \u2013 a new era in vaccinology (2018)","text":"Biology is messy and you can not say for certain that there will never be a group of individuals with an autoimmune issue. That is why vaccines go through several clinical trial phases. I recommend listening to this lecture about the process: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27466825,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Heart inflammation cases in young men higher than expected after mRNA vaccines","text":"Your insights are not entirely correct. There are more than two types of covid vaccines. Coronavirus Vaccines - An Introduction by JAMA is a good starting point. [LINK] COVID-19 Vaccines goes into greater detail. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"36GT2zI8lVA":[{"hn_comment_id":19706040,"author":"acqq","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?","text":"And we can actually listen here Feynman's answer to \" what is the meaning of... \" and \" why \" questions: [VIDEO] Note, despite the title of somebody presenting this segment of his talk, he definitely doesn't talk just about \"magnets\" but really about \"the meaning\" and \"why\" questions (the youtube poster got it). About the needed \"expected framework\" to avoid \"perpetual why questions\" etc. Even the things that we take for granted, e.g. using electricity in our day to day life, or the eventual \"why\" we don't fall through the floor can't be properly explained using just our \"common\" intuition. In another direction, it works, we are \"used\" to see some effects of the electrical forces all the time, so that's what is \"intuitive\" to us because we're familiar with it. So back to the original title of the article submission here: \"why ... shrugged off the paradoxes...\" it can be easily seen that once one is getting an answer inside of the expected framework, one doesn't \"shrug it off,\" one is actually satisfied with the answer.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21034429,"author":"Guthur","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Overrated: Ludwig Wittgenstein","text":"It's not simple thing to explain non simple things in a way that it's comprehensible to a layman. I think this video is a very good illustration of this fact [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22811632,"author":"tsbinz","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]","text":"Regarding \"fully\" understanding physics, I like to refer people to Feynman's answer to a question about why magnets repel each other[0]. \"Assuming something\" is one integral part of the scientific method. You formulate a question, you build a hypothesis from prior knowledge, you make predictions, you test them, you analyze your results which might lead you to change your hypothesis or not. \"Greatness\" is finding simple hypotheses (like \"the laws of physics are the same as viewed from any inertial frame and the speed of light is the same for every observer\") that predict/\"explain\" effects that were inconsistent with prior hypotheses. Of course you can never really prove a model of the world is correct - another model that predicts differences that are too small for us to measure might be the \"truth\", but, until we can measure it, there isn't much use in pondering ... [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26364261,"author":"rlpb","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1989)","text":"There's a really good clip by Richard Feynman on explanations and frames of reference: [VIDEO] I think he does an excellent job of explaining why it's so hard to explain this type of thing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39378063,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Inside the proton, the \u2018most complicated thing you could possibly imagine\u2019","text":"Richard Feynman addresses a similar \"why\" question in a great way in this interview[1], and how \"why\" questions are problematic in science. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"36myc8wQhLo":[{"hn_comment_id":28801915,"author":"bcantrill","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Rust, Wright's Law, and the Future of Low-Latency Systems","text":"I know that I recommended it in the talk, but I highly recommend Timothy Roscoe's OSDI keynote[0] -- and may also be worth catching the Twitter Space we did a few weeks ago discussing it.[1] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33791375,"author":"dist1ll","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Tales of the M1 GPU","text":"There's this great USENIX talk by Timothy Roscoe [1], which is part of the Enzian Team at ETH Z\u00fcrich. It's about the dominant unholistic approach to modern operating system design, which is reflected in the vast number of independent, proprietary, under-documented RTOSes running in tandem on a single system, and eventually leading to uninspiring and lackluster OS research (e.g. Linux monoculture). I'm guessing that hardware and software industries just don't have well-aligned interests, which unfortunately leaks into OS R&D. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46922393,"author":"jcgl","month":"2026-02","story_title":"C Isn't a Language","text":"This isn\u2019t my space to opine on, but I found this talk both riveting and compelling: [VIDEO] In a nutshell, the useful fiction of computer-as-Von-Neumann-meaning doesn\u2019t adequately reflect the reality of modern hardware. Not only does the CPU itself not fit that model (with things like speculative execution, sophisticated power and load management\u2026), but the system as a whole is increasingly an amalgamation of different processors and address spaces.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29446354,"author":"lostdog","month":"2021-12","story_title":"On Hubris and Humility: developing an OS for robustness in Rust [video]","text":"Very interesting. This reminds me a ton of L4, with its message passing style. I'm curious if it was inspired by L4. It's a great talk, and my only disappointment was that I was hoping to hear about what comes after. After watching the OS talk that Cantrill references [0], I really want to know the answer to \"what does an OS that runs across a bunch of heterogeneous chips look like?\" Having Hubris be just a single-node OS was a bit of a let down, so I will be staying tuned for the sequels. [0] [VIDEO] EDIT: Went to go read the docs and: \"The operating system that originally made this point was L4, and Hubris\u2019s IPC mechanism is directly inspired by L4\u2019s\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29664672,"author":"mikewarot","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: \"Know Your Hardware\u201d: best books/resources to learn?","text":"First of all, watch this, and learn that there's a whole stack of layers below what Linux can even touch these days. [VIDEO] For a theoretical understanding, with a much simpler model, I suggest the Nand2Tetris course.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30421679,"author":"the_duke","month":"2022-02","story_title":"I tested four NVMe SSDs from four vendors \u2013 half lose FLUSH\u2019d data on power loss","text":"I can recommend the related talk \"It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware\". [1] It explores how modern systems are a set of cooperating devices (each with their own OS) while our main operating systems still pretend to be fully in charge. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33134252,"author":"zerohp","month":"2022-10","story_title":"How to tell a mainframe from a minicomputer from a micro","text":"> So as someone else commented, a mainframe isn't really a computer, it's a whole cluster of closely-coupled computers, many with dedicated functionality. Quite possibly all implemented with different architectures, instruction sets, programming languages, bit widths, everything. Nearly all computers more powerful than a simple microcontroller look like this in 2022. If you find this fact surprising, you'll probably want to take a look at this talk from USENIX ATC '21: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33146105,"author":"mlindner","month":"2022-10","story_title":"I have come to bury the BIOS, not to open it [video]","text":"> I would really like to know if my x86 'linux PC', is actually running another 'hypervisor' OS that runs Linux - it seems like a recipe for security vulnerabilities. There's not so much a \"hypervisor\" OS, but instead a congealed set of many different OSes, some realtime OSes, some possibly old Linux variants, some possibly closed source proprietary one-off OSes. I suggest taking a look at the talk Bryan mentioned: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33346302,"author":"CrLf","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Disabling the Intel Management Engine","text":"The IME gets a lot of hate around here, but let's not get distracted by it: higher-privilege co-processors running code outside the main OS' control is becoming (or already is) the norm everywhere. Intel-based PCs are just one instance of it (and perhaps not even the most egregious one). Most hardware has evolved to effectively run the main OS under a sandbox where it \"thinks\" it is in control, but isn't. A nice talk on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34050190,"author":"Sirened","month":"2022-12","story_title":"How Many Computers Are in Your Computer? (2021)","text":"A favorite related to talk is Roscoe's keynote titled \"It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware\" [1] in which he discusses some of the outcomes/consequences of kernels (like Linux) largely sticking their heads in the sand on the issue of these massively heterogeneous SoCs. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35230222,"author":"jiveturkey","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?","text":"Plenty of good links here already. I'll just add that booting is enormously complex, and starts well before any of the dozen comments so far. I skimmed many of them (not all) and they all tell pretty much the same story whether on real hardware or virtual. But modern real hardware first boots a Management Engine (or BMC, or T2, or similar), which prepares things and starts subsystems like hardware controllers, before releasing the CPU where the \"OS\" finally boots, blissfully unaware that it is running on an abstraction. Watch [VIDEO] from about 10:00 to about 20:00 for a decent super high level overview. These two are also good for a deeper understanding. [LINK] [LINK] They both cover UEFI, even though the focus is on T2. I know that's well beyond what you were asking for, but the boot process goes well beyond GRUB.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41261551,"author":"RealityVoid","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Programmers Don't Read Books \u2013 But You Should (2008)","text":"I'd say the computer architecture can vary _greatly_ and there are a bunch of cores in modern SOC's that kind of break the assumption of how a computer works. I recently listened to this: [VIDEO] Cache coherence, accelerators, various takes on pipelining, ISA extensions. There are many many things that change all the time. Not even touching the SW glue stuff that changes. I don't know the history of react and what is going on in modern browsers, but I suspect there are OS constraints, evolving web standards, extra capabilities, evolving browsers that shape and force the framework to adapt. I am doubtful people change it just for the sake of it.","stance":"rec"}],"36qZYL5RlgY":[{"hn_comment_id":33452575,"author":"notaplumber1","month":"2022-11","story_title":"FreeBSD optimizations used by Netflix to serve video at 800Gb/s [pdf]","text":"This talk was given at this years EuroBSDcon in Vienna, recording is up on YouTube. [LINK] [VIDEO] Some really great talks this year from all the *BSDs, highly recommend checking a look: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37825491,"author":"thomasjudge","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Video Streaming at Scale with Kubernetes and RabbitMQ","text":"OP mentions that \"I would love to be a little mouse and peek at YouTube\u2019s complete architecture to see how far we are from them.\" You can occasionally find posts -often linked here- from another player in streaming video which you might have heard of, discussing technical architecture. For example, this might be a little lower level that you may be interested in as it relates to kernel optimizations to jack bit throughput rates, but I dig this sort of thing - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"37NaHRE0Sqw":[{"hn_comment_id":898541,"author":"wynand","month":"2009-10","story_title":"Concurrency Patterns: Java, Scala, and Clojure","text":"Actors are decoupled from the means by which they are executed. Scala has a nice system where you can run thousands of event-based actors in a thread pool. It grows the pool as needed (as threads block). See [LINK] While it may use threads, Scala's actor system effectively allows you to create thousands of actors. Kilim is actually a pure (depending on whether you see a byte-code processing system as pure) Java system that does the same thing (as far as I can tell): [LINK] Kilim's author did a nice Google Talk: [VIDEO] EDIT: Fixed some grammar and added video link.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1150640,"author":"lucifer","month":"2010-02","story_title":"Why Scala Actors are Slow","text":"\"Asynchronious message passing is old and great idea. Instead of synchronizing objects and dealing with deadlocks we try to isolate objects and let them exchange messages. Erlang proved it to be extremly powerful tool applicable to wide range of highly scalable mission critical applications. In JVM landscape big interest to this approach started after introducing Scala actors. \" That statement is so very poorly informed! JMS (\"surprise\"?) has been a sign of \"interest\" in \"Asynchronious message passing\" in the \"JVM landscape\". I am not up on my Scala, but the author fails to convey (based on what I do know ;) the competence level that would lend weight to his attempt to address (much less support) the topic. For those interested in other JVM alternatives, Kilim seems quite promising and seems to hold its own quite well in benchmarks against Erlang. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [scroll to end to see the impressive results for Kilim.] [LINK] [edit: added pdf link]","stance":"rec"}],"37iHSwA1SwE":[{"hn_comment_id":26689610,"author":"kstenerud","month":"2021-04","story_title":"The EU archived \u201cEuromyths\u201d printed in UK media (2018)","text":"The TV show \"Yes, Minister\" was a truly amazing show because of the brilliant writing, and how humorously it could speak the truth: Sir Humphrey Appleby: The Foreign Office is pro-Europe because it\u2019s really anti-Europe. The civil service was united in its desire to make sure that the Common Market didn\u2019t work. That\u2019s why we went into it. Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, French and Italians against the Germans, and the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it\u2019s worked so well? Jim Hacker: It\u2019s all ancient history, surely. Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn\u2019t work. Now that we are inside, we can make a big pig\u2019s breakfast of the whole thing! Set the Germans against the French, French against Italians, Italians against Dutch \u2014The Foreign Office is terribly pleased! It\u2019s just like old times! Jim Hacker: Surely we are committed to the European ideal! Sir Humphrey Appleby: Really, Minister! Jim Hacker: If not, why are we pressing for an increase in membership? Sir Humphrey Appleby: For the same reason. It's just like the United Nations, in fact. The more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25373963,"author":"fmajid","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Morgan Stanley to Shift About $120B of Assets to Germany","text":"The UK was in favor of enlargement precisely because it would hinder integration. The best explanation of this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"37wFVVVZlVU":[{"hn_comment_id":43658210,"author":"coolKid721","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing (2023)","text":"Watch the guy who came up with Erlang, the Actor model and CSP discuss it: [VIDEO] One of my favorite videos on youtube.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19706709,"author":"apoorvgarg","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Joe Armstrong has died","text":"[VIDEO] This recent panel (Armstrong, Hewitt and Hoare) discussion on concurrency was the first time I got to know about him and it gave me a lot of food for thought.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47330576,"author":"lokelow","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor Tony Hoare passed away","text":"I was introduced to him pretty late in the game, in this interview where he and Joe Armstrong and Carl Hewitt talked concurrency! It was interesting hearing them discuss their different thoughts and approaches [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"39iKLwlUqBo":[{"hn_comment_id":15354742,"author":"maxpert","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Privacy","text":"Have used Android for years (I have been using devices like Pro, rooted, custom ROMS, skins whatever you might imagine). Shifted to Apple's echo system 2-3 years ago. It took me some time to get used to iOS but integration across devices (my mac, my iPad, my watch) is simply amazing. I am not going sound like broken record or fan boy here. Apple got me on this video where Steve Jobs really showed how much they care for privacy [VIDEO] the other day my wife got a notification from Google Photos that it prepared our Album from our trip to SFO. We have turned of location tagging and everything, turns out Google is not content with me asking them to leave me alone, they would use ML and whatever they have built to figure out where I have been. In this day in age, while Apple might sound outdated to a lot of people, nothing can beat the sense of security with privacy Apple carries with itself now.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18726970,"author":"ssivark","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Lawmakers fed up with Zuckerberg","text":"> Now, how do I do it in a non-evil way? I am presuming here that everyone agrees that should be possible to make that work [...] Apparently Facebook did it the wrong way. Why? I really like Steve Jobs' comments on how to operate, with regards to questions of user privacy: [VIDEO] (3 minutes) While I'm not convinced about the need for devices to be locked down, the rest of his response should be the gold standard in my opinion.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23886000,"author":"schoolornot","month":"2020-07","story_title":"New iOS privacy feature may end an era of personalized ads","text":"You're making it sound like there is no business opportunity on Apple's side to mine and sell customer data the way Google does. Why can't we assume they are doing it with the best of intentions? Watch this 10 year old clip of Steve Jobs: [VIDEO] The position is genuine.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30339036,"author":"HatchedLake721","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Airbnb wants to GPS track you also when not using the app","text":"Steve Jobs words 12 years later are still very relevant today [VIDEO] I just want to thank Apple for pushing this agenda forward, introducing things I believe Google would never do themselves first unless pressured. I still remember Apple introducing \u201ctrack me while using the app only\u201d in a new iOS years ago that stopped companies hoarding live geolocation of every app user. And we still get new bits and bobs every major iOS release. In just last few years we found out apps that unnecessarily scanned for our network devices or used clipboards for no apparent reason. Keep them coming.","stance":"rec"}],"3BJU2drrtCM":[{"hn_comment_id":44551618,"author":"retrac","month":"2025-07","story_title":"How does a screen work?","text":"CRTs are still slightly magical to me. The image doesn't really exist. It's an illusion. If your eyes operated at electronic speeds, you would see a single incredibly bright dot-point drawing the raster pattern over and over. This YouTube video by \"The Slow Mo Guys\" shows this in action: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47426853,"author":"kevincox","month":"2026-03","story_title":"JPEG Compression","text":"That's not quite true. Only one pixel is being activated at a time but the phosphors continue to emit light for many pixels. In practice you get a handful of lines lit to varying degrees at at time. Maybe 1-2 lines quite brightly lit and then a trail of lines that are fading pretty significantly (but still emitting light). They yes, our persistence of vision fills in the rest to provide the appearance of a fully lit screen. This video has some great slow-mo of CRTs [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3BR8tK-LuB0":[{"hn_comment_id":11492267,"author":"skapadia","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Calculus Learning Guide","text":"Kalid - also your explanation of complex numbers is absolutely amazing. Sure I could manipulate them by memorizing rules, but I never really knew what they meant or why they were important. I also love the Numberphile explanation of quaternions (building up from real to complex numbers, etc.) - [VIDEO] -Sujan","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17938976,"author":"codesushi42","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Quaternions: the Strange Numbers That Birthed Modern Algebra","text":"Numberphile's explanation of Quaternions is the simplest I have seen so far: [VIDEO] Quaternions are very important to know if you are doing any kind of 3D math. For instance, game programming or SLAM for robotics.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18314949,"author":"Tempest1981","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Visualizing quaternions: An explorable video series","text":"This video might be easier to grasp: Fantastic Quaternions - Numberphile [VIDEO] It also helped me to have a use-case in mind \u2014- a motivation. Like maybe using the accelerometer/compasss in your phone to perform image stabilization or AR.","stance":"rec"}],"3CWCqJl0BEs":[{"hn_comment_id":35138374,"author":"ctvo","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Rivian in talks with Amazon to remove exclusivity clause of EV van agreement","text":"The vans are amazing. I do a double take every time I see them on the road. This is a thorough tour, and I want one: [VIDEO] i","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36633904,"author":"dmix","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Amazon\u2019s electric Rivian vans have delivered 150M packages","text":"Love the design (rear lighting, doors, dashboard [1], all the very functional handles and space design for easy movement). It's always funny how it takes electric vehicles for car companies to take risks or do something different. It's much larger [2] than it seems from their pictures Duug Demuro gave a full tour of the vehicle [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36633950,"author":"ortusdux","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Amazon\u2019s electric Rivian vans have delivered 150M packages","text":"Doug DeMuro did a rather comprehensive walkthrough as well. [VIDEO] Annoyingly, they didn't fix my main UX gripe with delivery vehicles, which is that they use the same lights for the hazards and turn signals. It's quite common for the right half of a stopped van to be obscured, which makes it impossible to tell the difference between \"hazards on, delivering a package\" and \"left blinker on, about to cut in front of you\".","stance":"rec"}],"3DtUzH3zoFo":[{"hn_comment_id":6417758,"author":"canthonytucci","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Less is exponentially more (2012)","text":"For those who don't know who Rob Pike is, he's pretty awesome, helped create UTF-8 among other things, and now works on Go. [LINK] He has given some really great Go talks which are available on youtube, about an hour each: Origins of Go Concurrency Style - [VIDEO] Lexical Scanning in Go - [LINK] Go Concurrency Patterns (One of my favorites) - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8380879,"author":"bishop_mandible","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Rob Pike: Reflections on Window Systems (2008) [video]","text":"The Blit video he mentions: [LINK] A similarly interesting talk by him on CSP-inspired languages (Occam, Erlang, Squeak, Newsqueak, Limbo, Alef, Go): [VIDEO] Slides (not shown in the video): [LINK] Interesting as well: From parellel to concurrent (on Sawzall and Go): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19020539,"author":"why-el","month":"2019-01","story_title":"The Story of Squeak, a Practical Smalltalk Written in Itself (1997)","text":"Squeak was the inspiration for Newsqueak by Rob Pike, co-author of Golang. A lot of the concurrency ideas can be traced to this timeline, some fascinating stuff there. Check out this video by Pike: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"3EPTfOTC4Jw":[{"hn_comment_id":30441076,"author":"registeredcorn","month":"2022-02","story_title":"The cats sitting on a fence in early builds of Windows 8","text":"If you have the time, I highly recommend checking out the NCommander's video talking about Space Cadet Pinball. [VIDEO] He references the same blog, and goes into some pretty incredible detail about the history of what happened to pinball coming pre-installed on Windows.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28859872,"author":"nazgulsenpai","month":"2021-10","story_title":"SpaceCadetPinball \u2013 Decompilation of 3D Pinball for Windows","text":"I learned a lot about 3D Pinball recently on this video [0]. It's specifically about the 64bit versions of 3D Pinball (or the lack thereof) and the reasons why. Part of that is debugging which relates to this. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28868470,"author":"leeter","month":"2021-10","story_title":"SpaceCadetPinball \u2013 Decompilation of 3D Pinball for Windows","text":"Yes... [VIDEO] Warning contains a youtuber bashing their head firmly against the pain of Itanium to test this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39813639,"author":"Kwpolska","month":"2024-03","story_title":"The Format Dialog in Windows NT","text":"There were issues with Pinball on \"Windows XP 64-bit Edition\", or the Itanium version. A great video explaining this is [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3Ea3pkTCYx4":[{"hn_comment_id":27491650,"author":"mettamage","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Glue: The Dark Matter of Software","text":"I wrote a non-programmer summary to some of my friends, because my mind is blown. Here it is (warning: it's very informal). This is some next level 80/20 stuff, I'd argue it's even 99/1 (consultant speech for \"being efficient\" by seeing if you can exploit Pareto's principle [0]). A guy on YT [1] simulates in 7 minutes how the two biggest operating systems were built in the sixties (Multics by IBM and Unix by 2 guys in a garage). Nowadays we only have descendants of Unix, this simulation shows IMO two things: 1. How a chain of command screws up productivity (I doubt that anyone at IBM had the power/autonomy to change complete structure of the product. This was needed, but such change management is insane). 2. How the pipe command in Unix changed the mathematical nature of developing an operating system (in fact, it's even better than 99/1, when you think about it). In normal human language, the difference is: IBM programmed modular blocks. Unix programmed modular blocks. IBM then programmed how those modular blocks should interact. Unix created a pipe command and allowed computer users themselves to implement how these modular blocks should interact. At the time, computer users were all savvy enough like that. Result: when IBM created a feature, it needed to integrate it with all the other features that came before. When those 2 guys in a garage (Unix) created a feature, all they needed to do was create that feature. So mathematically you could say (where each term is the amou","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27494671,"author":"deckard1","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Disasters I've seen in a microservices world","text":"I was going to comment on this very thing in the other thread about software glue[1]. In that article there is a youtube video on Multics vs Unix[2] which really outlines why microservices were always doomed. Someone should coin a new law for how programmers have to rediscover Brooks's law every 5-10 years. The issue with microservices, as it has always been, is that you need an enormous company to brute force the communication pathways and maintenance overhead for it to all work. And by work, I don't mean function efficiently (as the Multics vs Unix video shows). I mean just function . Just work at all. The Multics team had all the devs and the Unix team was two guys doing laps around the Multics team. Because they had the mathematics on their side. Remember the bad old days of memory thrashing? That's what happens to teams that do not have enough bandwidth to properly maintain the dozens of services they are responsible for. Your organization gets frozen. This is what we all get for taking advice from the Googles and Facebooks of the world. Google has like a billion lines of code in a monorepo. They do not do things remotely like 99% of the businesses out there. They are sitting on huge piles of money that lets them be incredibly inefficient for decades . [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11868981,"author":"kgr","month":"2016-06","story_title":"The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix (2011)","text":"This video shows how Unix was mathematically more efficient than Multics, which goes a very long way at explaining its success and longevity: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18969258,"author":"kgr","month":"2019-01","story_title":"For the Love of Pipes","text":"I made a simulation and video which shows why the pipe is so powerful: [VIDEO] I showed it to Doug McIlroy, and while he thought there was more to the story, he didn't disagree with it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23562670,"author":"kgr","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Apollo \u2013 Funding for Moonshots","text":"This video explains why UNIX was a moonshot, and why it could be developed by a small number of people because of it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33552972,"author":"foooobaba","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Following the Unix philosophy without getting left-pad (2021)","text":"Programs/functions like left-pad do not follow the unix philosophy (which the author did say). The idea of the unix philosophy is to write less programs. Not write a ton of tiny programs, but a small number of composable programs. So instead of left-pad, right-pad, middle-pad, and anything else to get specific need you can use sprintf which can format a string in general, one program that can do implement the features of all of those. It is about \u201ccoding the permitter, not the area\u201d, so if you have NxM features to build, don\u2019t write N*M individual programs/functions, instead write N+M programs/functions that can be composed together to get all NxM features. This video explains it well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37218342,"author":"kgr","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Unix is both a technology and an idea","text":"If we analyze the computational complexity of software architectures the way we do regular algorithms, we see that UNIX was much more efficient than previous OSes/approaches. It's demonstrated in this short video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37466297,"author":"kgr","month":"2023-09","story_title":"How could the early Unix OS comprise so few lines of code?","text":"Unlike previous OSes, UNIX provided the pipe facility to allow you to combine the functionality of many small programs. Ex. ls | grep ... | sort ... | more Before that every command-line program had to support the full suite of additional functionality like search, filtering, paging, etc. This UNIX/Pipe approach allowed for greater reuse and much less code. This is explained and simulated in this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3FOzD4Sfgag":[{"hn_comment_id":8985322,"author":"wmeredith","month":"2015-02","story_title":"New Jurassic World Trailer Hides Improved CGI in Plain Sight","text":"Everything on screen matters. Modern Cinema is a HIGHLY evolved art form. If you have any interest in this at all, YouTube user Every Frame A Painting publishes, short, easily digestible, and well-produced YouTube videos about this stuff that are eye-opening. Here are a few of my favorites: Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy: [VIDEO] The Silence of the Lambs - Who Wins the Scene? [LINK] Michael Bay - What is Bayhem? [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21327786,"author":"vangale","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Demise of Physical Comedy","text":"I love this video from \"Every Frame a Painting\" which also mourns the loss of physical comedy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32135933,"author":"mimimi31","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Rowan Atkinson: Visual Comedy (1992) [video]","text":"Reminds me of some of the videos from Every Frame a Painting about visual comedy in film. Specifically \"Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy\" [1] and \"Buster Keaton - The Art of the Gag\" [2]. They give and explain some great examples from different movies. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"3Fx5Q8xGU8k":[{"hn_comment_id":24603605,"author":"yyyuutt","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ask HN: How to learn sales?","text":"Whenever I hear someone saying the market is huge I think of this classic Thiel talk. Sounds like its definitely something you should watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28654469,"author":"gmays","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Peter Thiel became the most feared man in Silicon Valley","text":"For context, this article is about a new book, 'The Contrarian' about Thiel (I haven't read the book). I've long been a fan of Peter Thiel's thinking. If you're unfamiliar, this talk from YC's Startup School 2014 covering the ideas from Zero to One is excellent: [VIDEO] But back the book this article is based on, I found this review of the book on Amazon quite insightful: [LINK] I've never met Peter Thiel, don't know much about him personally, and don't agree with everything he says and does, but he's a complex and interesting character that I've learned a lot from over the years. I think we all can.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40152567,"author":"WhatIsAModel","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Airlines required to refund passengers for canceled, delayed flights","text":"Peter Thiel discusses this same doom loop and some of your points in this lecture that I highly recommend: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25094831,"author":"29athrowaway","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Having 170 competitors in not an obstacle","text":"Watch this talk, \"Competition is for losers\" (by Peter Thiel) [VIDEO] It's a clickbaity title but it's a serious talk.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38535638,"author":"narag","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Tampermonkey: Dev Mode will become mandatory for running userscripts in Chromium","text":"One phenomenon I've recently clued into is that of the \"market-hostile business\". Not only old businesses, watch Peter Thiel's \"competition is for losers\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3GJUM6pCpew":[{"hn_comment_id":24842304,"author":"mikepurvis","month":"2020-10","story_title":"My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes","text":"Vaguely related, anyone who hasn't seen it, definitely go and watch Matt Parker's legendary explanation of why NTSC runs at 29.97fps: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12786720,"author":"mxfh","month":"2016-10","story_title":"The \u201c432 Hz vs. 440 Hz\u201d conspiracy theory","text":"If anyone wonders where the odd NTSC frame-rate ratio originated from, Matt Parker (standupmaths) did a comprehensive video, with some original write-up on this recently: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16201670,"author":"santix","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Color Television: NTSC Tutorials","text":"Cool video. I found another interesting one: Why is TV 29.97 frames per second? [0], which refers to NTSC's frame rate. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46354971,"author":"walkerbrown","month":"2025-12","story_title":"The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300","text":"For anyone this deep on the thread, check out this video (great presenter!) explaining TV spectrum allocation, NTSC, PAL, and the origin of 29.97 fps. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3GObi93tjZI":[{"hn_comment_id":33571508,"author":"grose","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Where can one learn about boring web development?","text":"I'm not aware of exactly what you're looking for, but I think such a resource would be very valuable. Unfortunately, modern web development has almost completely eschewed simplicity. I can offer some leads, though. This is more of a manifesto but there is a small movement around simplicity at [LINK] which is written by the guy behind [LINK] -- a nice little way to add the bare minimum JS needed for a 'modern' app. You can find a community of likeminded people at HTMX-adjacent places like their Discord and Twitter. I've also been an advocate of this kind of 'primitive' dev style and it's great to see it gain some popularity. This recent talk from Djangocon \"React to htmx on a real-world SaaS product\" might be of interest: [VIDEO] Ironically, the ultra-modern serverless platforms such as Cloudflare Workers have strict size constraints which is leading to a kind of back-to-basics approach that minimizes dependencies and bundle size. You can find a lot of small libraries for this at [LINK] . The latest JS framework to buzz here, Deno's Fresh, even touts \"no JS is shipped to the client by default\". We can see there is a resurgence of interest in server-side rendering. The classics such as Rails are still alive and kicking. Phoenix seems to be a promising candidate for \"the modern Rails\". As someone who experienced the Good Old Days of web development, I would recommend at least trying out the managed cloud services for things like databases and cron jobs and deployments. IMO, it's","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34745743,"author":"dragonshed","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What companies are embracing \u201cHTML over the wire\u201d?","text":"It depends on the usecases & application reqs. There are times when server-rendered content can have enormous benefits over a SPA. Check out this djangocon talk where a SaaS product moved from react to htmx. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37147297,"author":"dvtkrlbs","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Htmx is part of the GitHub Accelerator","text":"You can check this talk out [VIDEO] I was thinking the same but in the video they specifically talk about faceted search and how they did it with htmx. For the second part you probably go with your own javascript or get away with hyperscript","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38245335,"author":"Xeamek","month":"2023-11","story_title":"HTML First \u2013 Six principles for building simple, maintainable, web software","text":"I think you might find that relevant. (But in short, the author expressed being verry happy with switching to 'stack' you described) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3GVO-MfIl1Q":[{"hn_comment_id":16839599,"author":"iam_takada","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Talk on innovating in your field by Rodney Mullens: [VIDEO] Grew up playing Tony Hawk. His talk really inspired me follow my creativity.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22893209,"author":"ridv","month":"2020-04","story_title":"For Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression","text":"Really awesome seeing someone talk about skateboarding here on HN as it relates to the subjects covered by Knuth in this article. I grew up skateboarding and I credit the years those years with a huge amount of learning I didn't even know I was doing. To expand upon what you said: it's amazing when you take that trick, a kickflip for example, and you're so confident in your consistency, that you apply it to something new. Kickflip to rock to fakie, kickflip down a set of stairs, kickflip to 50-50, and so on. The consistency you gain from that trick opens up the door to a whole new world of combinations. There's so much about skateboarding, the culture (or counter culture in some cases) around it that translate so well to programming/hacking (and life in general). The trials of learning something new. The acceptance and overcoming of failure. The respect you shown and earned when you're at the park and you or someone else puts down a sick trick. One of my favorite creative minds in skateboarding, Rodney Mullen, talks a bit about the relationship between hacking and skateboarding in his TED talk. [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24027981,"author":"lloeki","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Skate Warrior 1992, 1999, 2020","text":"Cue Rodney Mullen\u2019s TED talk: \u201cPop a Ollie and Innovate!\u201d. If anyone\u2019s in a position to draw such a comparison between skaters and hackers, it\u2019s the Godfather of skateboarding. Also, \u201cThis is Eric Koston\u201d, the comparison is indirect, but the section around \u201cwe\u2019re trespassers\u201d resonates deeply. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27707133,"author":"psychomugs","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The YouTube revolution in knowledge transfer (2019)","text":"This has been extremely pronounced with skateboarding. Technical tricks that used to take years to land are now being done effortlessly by kids filming throwaway clips shot vertically on their phones. Rodney Mullen, the godfather of basically every trick that involves jumping up and flipping the board and landing on it, has a great TED Talk on epistemology in skateboarding [1]. The biggest block is often just to see proof that something can be done. He also draws apt comparisons with the open source community. Interestingly, he apparently invented a lot of his tricks in isolation on a farm; some genius thrives in the woodshed. Thinking in McLuhanisms, these new mediums have undoubtedly extended epistemology in very revolutionary ways, but it's definitely amputated them as well. The dime-a-dozen landscape and portrait photos that are nigh indistinguishable, the wild west of the content treadmill economy, and the anxiety of influencers [2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"3Gmex_4hreQ":[{"hn_comment_id":586314,"author":"9oliYQjP","month":"2009-04","story_title":"In a digital age, vinyl albums are making a comeback","text":"I think one of the reasons that those people who prefer vinyl over digital do so, is that the recordings on vinyl are mastered with different qualities in mind than their digital counterparts. There's a YouTube video floating around called The Loudness War ( [VIDEO] ) that describes what I'm talking about. I distinctly remember albums on audio CDs sounding better to me (great clarity, vibrancy, etc.) back in the early 1990s. Then, somewhere toward the end of the 1990s, CDs just started to sound worse. I blame the trend described in that video. I suspect that vinyl recordings do not suffer from this same tendency toward loudness in the audio mastering process, and that is why you have audiophiles insisting that vinyl sounds better than digital.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9399518,"author":"visakanv","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Why Are TV Ads So Danged Loud?","text":"The same reason why music on the radio is so dang loud\u2013 excessive compression. See: The Loudness War (just 1:54 mins long): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11756191,"author":"morsch","month":"2016-05","story_title":"The Dark Art of Mastering Music","text":"Your post led me down the rabbit hole of over-compression, not for the first time, and I ended up at this video which gave a very succinct answer to my question of: \"Okay, I realize that music is getting compressed, but what are we losing?\" [VIDEO] Via a nice article with analysis: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"3HROqnw-nf4":[{"hn_comment_id":9434730,"author":"akoeplinger","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Visual C++ Cross-Platform Mobile","text":"There's a pretty interesting video of how the Office team uses C++ for their cross-platform efforts from CppCon 2014: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12857499,"author":"golf1052","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365","text":"Word for Windows and Word for Mac are much closer together than you may realize. Pretty interesting talk about cross platform Office. Part 1: [VIDEO] Part 2: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"3HYw6vPR9qU":[{"hn_comment_id":18208731,"author":"dwaltrip","month":"2018-10","story_title":"The Reason We Haven\u2019t Directly Detected Dark Matter","text":"Well, it has a gravitational effect, so it definitely exists inside of our normal spacetime. Scientists have explored alternative models of gravity or spacetime with additional spatial dimensions and things like that. As far as I know, none of them are very promising. There was an interesting PBS space time video about one example recently: [VIDEO] Of course, it is definitely interesting to think about :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18208941,"author":"stephengillie","month":"2018-10","story_title":"The Reason We Haven\u2019t Directly Detected Dark Matter","text":"The problem is that gravity, like EM, follows an inverse-square rule. If gravity had a 4th dimensional component, we would expect to see an inverse-cube situation. The equation is: 1/(1-dimensions) Youtube video that explains this in depth: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18209003,"author":"Twisol","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Mathematicians confirm the possibility of data transfer via gravitational waves","text":"For what it\u2019s worth, evidence has come out (explained well by this PBS Space Time episode [1]) that makes the \u201cgravity propagates over more than three spatial dimensions\u201d theory a bit less likely. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3Hdn0MuCK_0":[{"hn_comment_id":20702556,"author":"bigtrakzapzap","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Inside a Poundland computer mouse [video]","text":"Big clive on HN. Hurray! He earned my respect from a video on a USB charger with an electrocution risk and why you should never buy cheap USB chargers. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13918096,"author":"BrailleHunting","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Man dies charging iPhone while in the bath","text":"TL;DR: spend the $19 to buy a real, big brand USB charger because they have more to lose than grey market no brand. Tragic. Probably cheap USB without mains isolation or maybe enough water dripped down length of cable and socket to create a circuit, because USB is supposed to be 5V DC. Watch these USB charger teardown horror-shows to further understand why it's rational to pay for proper, authentic CE+UL, high-low isolation and quality components (ie insulated tape in transformers): [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"3HxVMGaiZbc":[{"hn_comment_id":28346113,"author":"CraigJPerry","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Hell Is Other REPLs","text":"A cool example: [VIDEO] But better to just block 5 mins in your calendar and try it: [LINK] Don't play with this if you like hot-reload or hot-refresh features in react or jrebel or whatever. You will forever see these other approaches as lame in comparison... speaking from someone who was previously very happily ignorant, living my best life on the JRebel side of the fence.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32283477,"author":"valbaca","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Clojure Web Development Evolved [video]","text":"You might be more interested in this video: [VIDEO] \"ClojureScript in the Age of TypeScript \u2014 David Nolen\" Skip to 30:00 for the live coding demo: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32518837,"author":"keeeeeeeem","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: How to start modern mobile first cross platform application in 2022","text":"David Nolen gave a relevant talk[0] about the workflow they use to integrate Clojure and React Native for mobile and web development at the company vouch.io. You say \"I'd like to reuse the frontend part of the web app\", their methodology involves using Storybook.js to ensure their React components are truly stateless and may be re-used across environments. As I understand it they have released some of their mobile dev REPL tooling under an open-source license (Krell). Good luck! [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3IryIOyPfTE":[{"hn_comment_id":7918419,"author":"andymoe","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Any tech startups we can meet with today for coffee?","text":"You should go talk to the guy that runs an aquaponics program near West Oakland BART. [VIDEO] Dude is amazing. My mother took a really interesting Saturday class from him.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18157541,"author":"roflchoppa","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Does anyone farm with aquaponics?","text":"Kijani Grows based out of Oakland has been doing work in this space for several years. I recall watching [VIDEO] was pretty neat.","stance":"rec"}],"3LVeEjsn8Ts":[{"hn_comment_id":24145984,"author":"trimbo","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Intel\u2019s 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake SoC Detailed","text":"I consistently recommend Hennessy and Patterson's Turing Award Talk[1] as a good overview of the past, present and future of chip performance. [1] - This will take you directly to the meat of the discussion: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20062305,"author":"trimbo","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Another Step Toward the End of Moore\u2019s Law","text":"I recommend watching the Turing Award speech by Patterson and Hennessey which covers this topic. Spoiler: the way out is \"Domain Specific Architectures\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23979017,"author":"rudedogg","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer [video]","text":"When you posted about joining Oxide I couldn't quite figure out what they (now you) do by looking at the homepage. I stumbled across this other lecture ( [VIDEO] ) that is along the same line of thinking, and it started to make sense.","stance":"rec"}],"3LopI4YeC4I":[{"hn_comment_id":26573096,"author":"O_H_E","month":"2021-03","story_title":"High IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders","text":"Semi tangent: I would really recommend watching \"Is Success Luck or Hard Work?\" By Veritasium [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28123217,"author":"cgrealy","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The 3x+1 Problem [video]","text":"Absolutely. His \"gravity is not a force\" video led me through a whole range of emotions from \"this is ridiculous\" to \"actually...\" to \"holy crap, I've been wrong about this my entire life\". In terms of sheer brain-breaking... this is my favourite: [LINK] But this is the one I think people on HN need to watch most [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29200779,"author":"travisgriggs","month":"2021-11","story_title":"How imaginary numbers were invented [video]","text":"I love Veritasium. Derek has done a number of videos that are awesome like this. The videos are great and educational, but he also manages to subtly weave in an almost spiritual subtext to them as well. For example, in this one, you learn about imaginary numbers in some cool ways, history, how awesome e^ix is, etc, but also this yen-yang balance between embracing not only what is real but taking a chance on what is imaginary. Some of my other favorites: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [VIDEO] - [LINK] I think he\u2019s going to lose the $10,000 bet on the car though.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24319563,"author":"hyuuu","month":"2020-08","story_title":"I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35","text":"this is an interesting view: [VIDEO] how luck plays a role to your success but also how you perceive your success which will change your behavior","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24641265,"author":"xorfish","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Six Figures in 6 days","text":"Ah, success, luck and skill. A really interesting topic. There is also a very good Veritasium Video about that: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27685089,"author":"rgifford","month":"2021-06","story_title":"How to Work Hard","text":"Stats measure our shared experience. Is there something better for this? The human spirit isn't unconquerable. Believing it is has the side effect that you write off others because, \"try harder.\" Vertasium did a fairly convincing bit on the zip code thing, which is -- I think -- why it's top of mind: [VIDEO] I encourage you to dig into economic data and not use your experience as a frame of reference for the economic reality of others.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30566598,"author":"ookdatnog","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Class Bullshitters","text":"Discussions on the role of luck in success pop up here on HN from time to time, and one pattern that stands out to me is that, for a good chunk of people, it seems really important to their sense of identity that luck is at best a minor factor in their success. Your post is one of the more direct renderings of that point of view: you don't really argue that the parent post is wrong, merely that it's not a healthy way to frame it. Which makes me curious: why do you believe that it is bad for someone to believe that their success is largely caused by luck? As an aside, personally I subscribe to this view on the interaction of luck and success: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31630427,"author":"belter","month":"2022-06","story_title":"I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)","text":"> Out of pretty much all the people I know, I can't think of any successful career not pivoting on one such fateful moment of \"luck\". One lucky question/answer, one fortunate encounter, one near miss. You are so correct (at proper timestamp): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33194276,"author":"jiveturkey","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Everything I wish I had known about raising a seed round","text":"> number 1 reason [...] a world-class personal track record. > That\u2019s not to take anything away from Matt. Why would that take anything away from Matt? That's tremendous. Anyway I'd disagree. The number 1 factor is luck. I like this video [VIDEO] but there are plenty like it. Luck accumulates/aggregates/concentrates. I don't know if they cover it that way in that video.","stance":"rec"}],"3MghYhf-GhU":[{"hn_comment_id":35027350,"author":"djmips","month":"2023-03","story_title":"3dfx: So powerful it\u2019s kind of ridiculous","text":"This is a really great retrospective on 3dfx from four of the founders. 3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell (Computer History Museum) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35028547,"author":"aldrich","month":"2023-03","story_title":"3dfx: So powerful it\u2019s kind of ridiculous","text":"History is funny because at that time in the 90s there was a company called Bitboys Oy. That company was founded by some Finnish demoscene members and was developing a series of graphics cards, Pyramid3D and Glaze3D, with a programmable pipeline around 1997-1999 [1]. This was at around 5 years before the first commercial shader capable card was released. Even though Wikipedia classifies it as vaporware, there are prototype cards and manuals floating around showing that these cards were in fact designed and contained programmable pixel shaders, notably: - The Pyramid3D GPU datasheet: [LINK] - The pitch deck: [LINK] - The hardware reference manual: [LINK] (shows even more internals!) (As far the companies go: VLSI Solution Oy / TriTech / Bitboys Oy were all related here.) They unfortunately busted before they could release anything, due to a wrong bet in memory type choice (RDRAM, I think) and letting their architecture rely on that, then running out of money, perhaps some other problems. In the end their assets were bought by ATI. As for 3dfx, I would highly recommend watching the 3dfx Oral History Panel video from the Computer History Museum with 4 key people involved in 3dfx at the time [2]. Its quite fun as it shows how 3dfx got ahead of the curve by using very clever engineering hacks and tricks to get more out of the silicon and data buses. It also suggests that their strategy was explicitly about squeezing as much performance out of the hardware, and making sacrifices (q","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16376971,"author":"rasz","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Fall of Voodoo","text":"You might also like watching Computer History Museums \"3dfx Oral History Panel with Ross Smith, Scott Sellers, Gary Tarolli, and Gordon Campbell\" [VIDEO] Ross Smith, Scott Sellers and Gary Tarolli were 3dfx founders, they left Silicon Graphics to do this startup.","stance":"rec"}],"3QnD2c4Xovk":[{"hn_comment_id":5532333,"author":"bradford","month":"2013-04","story_title":"A non-mathematical explanation of one way functions","text":"For non-mathematical explanations I liked this video, which uses a paint mixing analogy to explain the one way functions: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11974776,"author":"zappo2938","month":"2016-06","story_title":"How to Backdoor Diffie-Hellman","text":"Diffie-Hellman explained to me like I'm 5 using colors. Public Key Cryptography: Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"3R3-YwDZrzg":[{"hn_comment_id":9679578,"author":"MrZongle2","month":"2015-06","story_title":"How my father gave me a terrifying lesson at 10","text":"As an American, I had to Google Fred Dibnah since I had never heard of him. The quick-and-dirty: [LINK] Extra bonus video: here he is at age 50 scaling a chimney... [VIDEO] . Made my palms a bit sweaty just watching it. Amazing that he didn't even use a harness.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9796951,"author":"nothrowaway","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Fred Dibnah \u2013 Steeplejack (1979) [video]","text":"If anyone is wondering how he got the ladders up the side of the chimney in the first place: [LINK] I rediscovered Fred on YouTube a couple of years ago, and spent far too much time watching pretty much everything I could find. As the title suggests, watching the overhang climb in this is enough to make you feel dizzy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42607681,"author":"defrost","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Documenting an 1115 ft radio tower climb","text":"I free climbed radio towers on mesa's in the Pilbara as part of work experience in high school .. bit before health and safety was a thing. The steeplejack work of Fred Dibnah is quite a thing to watch. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"3TFz1xqp3us":[{"hn_comment_id":36633479,"author":"joshstrange","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Amazon\u2019s electric Rivian vans have delivered 150M packages","text":"I watched a video [0] (that I think I found here, maybe Reddit) months ago about these trucks (a driver did a full \u201creview\u201d of it), it was pretty freaking cool. I started watching it thinking \u201cI\u2019ll only watch a minute or two\u201d and got so engrossed I watched the whole thing. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33927655,"author":"Animats","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The Tesla Semi cab from the practical POV of someone who drives trucks","text":"At the smaller end of electric trucks, here's a driver evaluation of the Rivian delivery truck made for Amazon.[1] This looks like it was designed by time and motion study people. It's optimized for a very specific job. Door control and access are all really easy as long as you have the key fob on you. The door to the package area opens and closes automatically, so when the driver is out of the vehicle, nothing is stealable. There are big screens, and they're showing the next few stops the driver is expected to make. If you take your foot off the accelerator, you come to a stop. Parking brake is automatic. It's boring, but useful. Tesla did not go that route. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37932831,"author":"notatoad","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Amazon reaches 10000 Rivian electric delivery vans in U.S.","text":"there's also this 20 minute video from an actaul amazon driver, not a car reviewer, which is pretty cool: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3TX3kV3TICU":[{"hn_comment_id":29113993,"author":"raman162","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Happy birthday Vim (2020)","text":"I've only used vim for three years and it's been a fantastic experience. Every time I'm in a normal editor I long for vim. I think the most important video I watched about vim was about text completion in a thoughtbot meetup [0]. There I learned about ctags, the jumplist and ways to complete words, sentences, lines and blocks of code. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14132086,"author":"AdmiralAsshat","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Switching to Sublime Text from Vim in 2017","text":"To go to the reverse route, I'm a SublimeText and Vim user that's debating going back to pure vim. Much of the functionality that I used ST for I found Vim could do naturally, with no plugins. This presentation taught me alot ( [VIDEO] ), such as basic command completion. There is some stuff that Sublime can still do that I don't think Vim can (multi-cursor editing comes to mind, and that's still really handy when I'm making edits to HTML). Other stuff can be done by both but I happen to like ST's better (the awesome GitHub package comes to mind). And finally, I did pay $70 for an ST license, so I imagine I'll keep using it for another few years or so. But given that I do alot of remote administration on RHEL/CentOS boxes where vim is the only thing I can safely assume to be installed, it doesn't hurt to stay fluent in vim for such a day.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15507810,"author":"justinmk","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Vim after 15 Years","text":"There's a lot of engineering in Vim as well. E.g., Vim's completion system is actually real cool once you learn it (it \"clicked\" for me after watching this video: [VIDEO] ). Vim regex, folding, and spellcheck also have useful features that you won't find anywhere else. More generally, I agree with you. If it were up to me I would prefer to use Emacs as a baseline. But it's not up to me, just like it wasn't up to Google to decide that Javascript wins. Ubiquity wins. Emacs lost. > for throwing everything and the kitchen sink into our editor. ... But with vim & neovim, people are building a complex operating environment That's not really true. The explicit goal of Nvim is to be embedded and focus on \"peer to peer\" nvim instances. That's the opposite of Emacs' constant reminder that there needs to be a single Emacs daemon controlling everything, and you \"should never leave Emacs\".","stance":"rec"}],"3TYT1QfdfsM":[{"hn_comment_id":13847299,"author":"nraynaud","month":"2017-03","story_title":"The Case for HAL's Sanity","text":"I think those 2 videos are on the topic: - AI \"Stop Button\" Problem [VIDEO] (the AI won't let you push the stop button, because that would impair its function) - General AI Won't Want You To Fix its Code [LINK] (the AI won't let you patch, because changing its goal means it can't reach it)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46863202,"author":"circuit10","month":"2026-02","story_title":"XAI Joins SpaceX","text":"Aside from anything about Elon Musk, here\u2019s an interesting video response to the \u201cjust unplug it\u201d argument on the Compuerphile channel: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3VQ382QG-y4":[{"hn_comment_id":24602777,"author":"triyambakam","month":"2020-09","story_title":"All you need is \u03bb, part one: booleans","text":"Just last night I found this excellent introduction to the Lambda Calculus by Gabriel Lebec [1]. It's one of the best I've come across and covers briefly history, building up combinators (using Smullyan's names) leading up to implementing Church encodings and gives Javascript equivalents (or approximations when not possible). The slides themselves are also very aesthetically pleasing, Gabriel has a good sense of colour and design [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31336691,"author":"autophagian","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Logic","text":"For anyone interested in the topic (combinatory logic as told through the medium of birds) I adore Gabriel Lebec's talk \"A Flock Of Functions: Combinators, Lambda Calculus & Church Encodings in JavaScript\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41027895,"author":"Zhyl","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What resources do you recommend for learning Haskell?","text":"I found these two videos on combinators and lambda calculus recently. They're only tangentially related to Haskell, but they are the most approachable videos on the topic I have ever seen. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20697729,"author":"ayushgp","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Lisp is not based on the Lambda Calculus","text":"I suggest you to watch this video if you want to understand how 3 basic functions can be used to create whole language [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39237151,"author":"zellyn","month":"2024-02","story_title":"A little closer to finding what became Moses Sch\u00f6nfinkel (2021)","text":"I would start with lambda calculus. If you pick the right intro video, they'll stray into combinators: [VIDEO] is very good.","stance":"rec"}],"3VZSJKbzyMc":[{"hn_comment_id":21022310,"author":"elijahparker","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Bird populations have declined since 1970 across nearly all habitats","text":"Here\u2019s an encouraging story for New Zealand: [VIDEO] \u201cFools & Dreamers: Regenerating a Native Forest is a 30-minute documentary about Hinewai Nature Reserve, on New Zealand\u2019s Banks Peninsula, and its kaitiaki/manager of 30 years, botanist Hugh Wilson. When, in 1987, Hugh let the local community know of his plans to allow the introduced \u2018weed\u2019 gorse to grow as a nurse canopy to regenerate farmland into native forest, people were not only skeptical but outright angry \u2013 the plan was the sort to be expected only of \u201cfools and dreamers\u201d. Now considered a hero locally and across the country, Hugh oversees 1500 hectares resplendent in native forest, where birds and other wildlife are abundant and 47 known waterfalls are in permanent flow. He has proven without doubt that nature knows best \u2013 and that he is no fool.\u201d","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24972896,"author":"tastyfreeze","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Is it better to plant trees or let forests regrow naturally?","text":"I enjoy sharing the short film in this vein, \"Fools and Dreamers\", that follows a group that bought some land in New Zealand and let it return to forest over 30 years. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28732729,"author":"dfcowell","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Downsides to planting trillions of trees","text":"This is a great short film that goes into detail about the project and the challenges faced in getting it off the ground: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31271891,"author":"Aromasin","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security","text":"Frankly, yes, they do fix themselves. You'd be utterly shocked at what landscapes look like if we leave them. Having been part of forest regeneration efforts across the UK for the past 8 years - from southern heathlands to rocky Welsh and Scottish outcrops, good for \"nothing but sheep\" - I can say with all certainty that every part of the country except the most extreme alpine regions is suitable for reforestation or some form of plantation dense rewilding, mooring, wild flower meadow, etcetera. The same can be said of much of Canada and America, with my peers over there having the same results when grazing stops. Hell, the Mongolian steppes are turning to results of goat herding, and the Gobi desert is though to have been cause by the same. In the UK for example, people are completely ignorant to how the place looked before we levelled it for grazing, viewing the 70% ecologically barren agricultural land (of which 80% of that is used for grazing or agriculture to feed cattle) as the norm and the 2.5% old growth forest as a more novelty, and something strangely \"unique to that area\". The country was 60-80% temperate rainforest before human habitation, depending on what research you go by. This video is especially poignant, and really shows the dramatic impact simply doing nothing has: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45451322,"author":"Aromasin","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Warming climate\u2013not overgrazing\u2013is biggest threat to rangelands, study suggests","text":"There's a guy in New Zealand I met who spent the last 30 years rewilding what was previously agriculture herding land. He said his biggest frustration with land owners wasn't the push back on what he was doing, but the ignorance as to what could be achieved. Every single person he spoke to told him explicitely if the land was left to go to nature, it would be nothing but gorse and it was a waste of good grazing land. The actual result was a return of native rain forest with levels of species diversity that were almost 60% of untouched rainforest, which is pretty incredibly in such a short amount of time. This is the guy for context - it's a very interesting video that really highlights the impact that over-grazing has: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3WMuzhQXJoY":[{"hn_comment_id":20570031,"author":"daenz","month":"2019-07","story_title":"When Having Friends Is More Alluring Than Being Right","text":"The Red Pill documentary by (feminist!) Cassie Jaye opened my eyes to what MRAs are all about. It's a fascinating watch, and I'd honestly be astonished at anyone who comes away from watching it thinking that they have no legitimacy. Her TED talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26068442,"author":"Geminidog","month":"2021-02","story_title":"I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer","text":"How is my statement biased? Men can suffer from unfair treatment as well. I never said anything to discount feminism, I simply stated one case where men are treated less well then women and I caveated that statement saying that this was based off of my own anecdotal experiences implying that your experience could be different. Do you think it's possible to live in a world where women are the only gender that is mistreated? Or do you think it's more realistic to live in a world where infractions are committed against both genders? This is off topic, but if my statement about this one case pissed you off because you're an ardent supporter of womens' rights I think you need to watch the video below and keep in mind... I literally never said anything AGAINST women's rights. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27594968,"author":"cassianoleal","month":"2021-06","story_title":"The incel lexicon: Deciphering the emergent cryptolect of a global community","text":"Indeed. This is a good TEDx talk from a feminist who went to make a documentary about what she described as \"a misogynistic hate-group working against women's equality\" and about what she learned after a year interviewing \"the enemy\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27596234,"author":"Popegaf","month":"2021-06","story_title":"The incel lexicon: Deciphering the emergent cryptolect of a global community","text":"And you should probably look into what the Men's Rights Activists are actually advocated for prior to passing judgement on a whole group. Be aware that news in the US is very polarized and that online communities are often converge to echo chambers. The comments you read online and the people you meet there are probably the most active there. IRL, (at least in Europe) people are much less extreme than they are online. Remember that online, people tend to be more crass. Don't read The New York Times or BBC at their word, just like you wouldn't take The Wallstreet Journal or The Washington Times at their word. Sentences like > Self-identified \"mens' rights activists\", by and large, advocate for mens' rights in much the same way as the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea is very, very democratic. Can easily be modified to replace \"mens' rights\" with \"feminists\" and \"feminism\" and be just as wrong. Here's what a feminist has to say about the Men's Rights movement [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3Y2weLDiUWw":[{"hn_comment_id":18208110,"author":"espeed","month":"2018-10","story_title":"SDSL \u2013 Succinct Data Structure Library 2.0","text":"Erik Demaine [1] gave two good lectures on succinct data structures [2] in the 2012 MIT 6.851 Advanced Data Structures course, and Rajeev Raman [3] just gave a tutorial on succinct data structures [4] at SIGMOD 2018. NB: SDSL Cheatsheet [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] MIT 6.851 Succinct Structures I [VIDEO] II [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] SIGMOD 2018 Tutorial: In-memory Representations of Databases via Succinct Data Structures [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28546594,"author":"faizshah","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Succinct Dynamic Data Structures (2001) [pdf]","text":"Is there a good applied overview of succinct data structures for programmers (non CS researchers)? Also I just started researching succinct dynamic graph data structures a few days ago and ended up on a very interesting paper if anyone is interested: [LINK] Will also add this, lecture introducing succinct data structures: [VIDEO] Ok last edit to this comment but I\u2019m sure someone else will find this useful. I also found a good book (haven\u2019t read it yet, but it doesn't seem to have much code examples if any) that covers Succinct Graph data structures and also Succinct Dyanmic Data structures: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33673407,"author":"denvaar","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Consider working on genomics","text":"I'm most definitely not an expert in this area, but I have recently taken interest in learning about \"succinct data structures\", which from what I understand have their place in bioinformatics. It's been a challenging topic to learn about, because most of the information comes from Computer Science papers and articles where the information is presented in a very formal, mathematical way, which I am just not used to. Normally when thinking about data structures and algorithms, we're mostly concerned with optimizing for speed. Space complexity is not usually as big of a consideration. Succinct data structures are all about creating ways to achieve good runtime performance while representing the data in a \"compressed\" format. I think this comes in handy when doing things like DNA sequencing since data sets are so large. I'm excited to check out some of links in the post, and in case any one else is interested in learning more about succinct data structures, here's a few resources I'd recommend: Prof. Ben Langmead's YouTube channel: [LINK] Alex Bowe's blog has some good content: [LINK] Prof. Erik Demaine's \"succinct\" lectures from his adv. data structures course at MIT on YouTube: [VIDEO] Edward Kmett's Haskell live coding session going into some details about succinct: [LINK] There's also a lot of research papers, which you should be able to find by searching for \"succinct data structures\" (Jacobson, Munro, Brodnik, Raman, Rao, Navaro, Sadakane just to name a few). I at least ha","stance":"rec"}],"3Y3jE3B8HsE":[{"hn_comment_id":21326452,"author":"rpmisms","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City","text":"I've been a huge fan of this system ever since CGP Grey made an excellent video on how it works and why it's great. Link: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27600741,"author":"Timothycquinn","month":"2021-06","story_title":"What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?","text":"GCP Gray has a great series on voting systems. Here is his one on Alternative Voting: [VIDEO] Highly recommend his videos. Funny and informative. Also his Podcast, Hello Internet is awesome.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4743205,"author":"tokenizer","month":"2012-11","story_title":"We Need a Programmer for President","text":"While personally I think this is a great idea, it's nothing new. In a technocratic society; specialists rule. It wouldn't matter whether the President would be a programmer, engineer, or theorist. Any scientist would do an equally good job at re-factoring the government's inefficiencies. But sadly, a FPTP voting process means it's a popularity contest. Fix the voting system, and open up this possibility. My vote's on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10376206,"author":"civilian","month":"2015-10","story_title":"How I Teach Gerrymandering","text":"The best solution to Gerrymandering is the Alternate Vote. CGP Grey has a great video explaining it: [VIDEO] He also has a great \"what is gerrymandering\" video that illustrated this same idea, but with fun animals. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18676907,"author":"slacka","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Fake Net Neutrality Comments Draw A Federal Probe","text":"> Or vote for someone you actually believe in even if they are not likely to win. Maybe I'm crazy but I believe voting for the lesser of two evils No you are not crazy, you just haven't studied the game theory of voting. In our old, outdated first-past-the-post voting system voting, according to game theory you should vote for the less or 2 evils. A vote for a 3rd party that has no chance of winning is no different than not voting at all. Most people intuitively get this, which is why we are stuck with a 2 party system. There are better more democratic system like Maine's rank choice voting. There you can safely vote for your favorite candidate without worrying about the spoiler effect. If you want to learn more: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24944957,"author":"grifball","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Maine Becomes First State to Use Ranked-Choice Voting in a Presidential Election","text":"I watched the video at your link, but it wasn't very descriptive as to how the votes are actually tallied. This video does a good job of explaining RCV: [VIDEO] Is there a similar video for STAR? I can see the problem with RCV now. It doesn't completely eliminate the spoiler effect, just makes it less likely. I understand how votes are cast in each system and they seem similar. STAR seems like RCV, but you can put multiple candidates in the same rank. I'm not sure how STAR votes are tallied, but wouldn't you be able to implement that same system with RCV? The only difference is same-ranking candidates. Is that the key to STAR's improvement? EDIT: Is it just this simple? You sum their score, then instant runoff the top 2?: [LINK] I can't tell if it's better or not yet. It still definitely doesn't elect the condorcet winner... which you can see from 3 voters and 12 candidates: Voter 1: 4 for A, 3 for B, 2 for C, 1 for J Voter 2: 4 for D, 3 for E, 2 for F, 1 for J Voter 3: 4 for G, 3 for H, 2 for I, 1 for J It's more contrived than the example for RCV, so I think it's more resistant to spoiler effect, but it clearly happens here. Essentially, every favored candidate higher than 1 is different and they all have the same candidate for their last favorite candidate. As you can see, A,D,G have the most votes, but in 1-on-1 face-offs, J would win most of the elections. Voter 1 likes J more than D,E,F,G,H, and I. Voter 2 like J more than 6 other candidates as well and same with Voter ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27891850,"author":"hnbad","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Beyond \u201cFermi\u2019s Paradox\u201d XVI: What Is the \u201cDark Forest\u201d Hypothesis?","text":"> All governments are aristocracies. All states are. Not all systems of government are states. > media manipulations of wide populous The media is owned by the same \"aristocracy\" that controls the state. In the US and other capitalist countries the aristocracy mostly consists of billionaires and a few political \"clans\" (usually with ties to \"old money\"). In the USSR the aristocracy was the Bolshevik intelligentsia and former capitalists that formed the bureaucracy. The problem isn't inherent to humanity, it's inherent to centralized systems. The video you linked actually supports this somewhat: a ruler can't rule alone, they need a staff of advisors and delegates to carry out the ruler's orders. But this is only a problem if you try to have a ruler, or a committee of rulers. The usual counter-argument is that decentralized systems don't work at scale. You can have small communities decide things with direct democracy but clearly that doesn't scale because it's harder to reach consensus the larger the group becomes. To address this I would invite you to read into Democratic Confederalism or watch Anark's aptly-titled video \"after the revolution\"[0] that explores a very similar anarchist/mutualist governance structure. In most of these scenarios the answer to \"direct democracy doesn't scale\" is a delegate system and it's easy to mistake this for the same representative democracy we're used to but the important difference is that the delegation is not only proportional but volun","stance":"rec"}],"3ZTGwcHQfLY":[{"hn_comment_id":44936651,"author":"ndiddy","month":"2025-08","story_title":"The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States","text":"Here's a great video by Smarter Every Day that came out a few months ago: [VIDEO] . It's about his experience with the atrophying US industrial skillset while he tries to make a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. He brings up a few good points about manufacturing that I personally found compelling: 1. During Covid, medical supplies were in short supply, to the point where the US government was flying in individual airplanes from China full of N95 masks and face shields. The guy making the video knew that Alabama (where he lives) wouldn't be on the priority list for where the masks and face shields would get distributed. His community's initial response was to 3D print face shields and donate them to healthcare facilities, but they knew that they had to step up to actual manufacturing to produce the face shields in necessary volumes. He was only able to find a single aging technician in Alabama capable of producing injection molding tooling, which he then was able to use to mass produce enough face shields to supply Alabama and neighboring states. If that one guy had chosen to retire before Covid, they would have not been able to make the injection mold locally. At a time where global supply chains were massively disrupted, they would have been screwed. 2. When an American company gets their products made overseas, the factory overseas that manufactures the product owns the tooling. This means that they're able to fill your order during the day, then at night make e","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44334720,"author":"j_bum","month":"2025-06","story_title":"BYD begins testing solid-state EV batteries in the Seal","text":"Agreed. Maybe you\u2019ve seen this, but Destin Sandlin\u2019s recent video on this topic does a good job of demonstrating the institutional knowledge gap [0]. He also was a guest on the Search Engine podcast to discuss the same topic earlier this year [1]. I enjoyed this more than the video. I think there\u2019s some nuance and slight nationalism to take with a grain of salt, but the point is extremely well demonstrated. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44442307,"author":"aeonik","month":"2025-07","story_title":"They tried Made in the USA \u2013 it was too expensive for their customers","text":"SmarterEveryday is trying this right now too. He details all the challenges, and it's a pretty good watch. The grill brush they made is a bit on the expensive side, but I bought one. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45438485,"author":"Corrado","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Ford CEO on his 'epiphany' after talking to his Gen Z factory workers","text":"I think we are definitely losing our blue collar skills. This video[0] about building a grill scrubber in America really highlighted the problem for me. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46274265,"author":"legacynl","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges","text":"That guy from smarter every day had a great youtube video about why that's basically impossible in the US right now: [VIDEO] I'm not a fan of big coorps either, but these changes happened gradually over time, starting way back in probably the 50/60s. The blame is with the companies and the US government back then for allowing this critical knowledge to be lost. But Roomba didn't exist back then, and the problem is bigger than a single company. The only real solution is for the US government to invest heavily in regaining this capability for the coming 25 years. But doge and trump axed any chance of this happening so though luck i guess.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47585605,"author":"fooker","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Why the US Navy Won't Blast the Iranians and 'Open' Strait of Hormuz","text":"> We make plenty of stuff at scale Maybe this video of a rather famous YouTuber trying to manufacture something as simple as a grill scrubber with a US supply chain would help you understand how bad it is? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3byNNUReyvE":[{"hn_comment_id":21859763,"author":"PascLeRasc","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"Behind the scenes of iOS and Mac Security: [VIDEO] Good talk behind the reason for the T2 chip and some other Apple security stuff","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22496155,"author":"paxswill","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Intel x86 Root of Trust: Loss of Trust","text":"I'm curious if Apple's work on hardening their secure boot process on x86 affects this at all? For this unaware, this [0] video covers it over about seven minutes. Basically they claim to be enabling the IOMMU with a basic deny everything policy so that when the changeover to executing from RAM occurs and PCIe devices are brought up the IOMMU is able to deny possible malicious access to the firmware image. It sounds from the end of the article that there are separate DMA/IOMMU processes for the CSME, but I'm not familiar enough with stuff this far down to know for certain. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3dl9Ovwmnxw":[{"hn_comment_id":31948600,"author":"jcims","month":"2022-07","story_title":"US hypersonic missile fails in test- 2nd consecutive failed attempt","text":"You beat me to it! This timecoded link shows the launch sequence of the Sprint with a tracking shot of the vehicle itself. Pretty remarkable watching it start to glow white: [VIDEO] I think this is the first video on that channel where the subject can match the guy's cadence. It's a great overview of the development of the Sprint though, worth watching if it's of interest.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26037135,"author":"jcims","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Don't Believe the Hype About Hypersonic Missiles","text":"Cool video of the (hypersonic) Sprint anti-ballistic missile, designed to intercept incoming ICBMs once they get below the ionosphere and are more visible to radar: [VIDEO] It looks fake. I'm bummed I'll likely never see something like that in person...at least in a test.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28339360,"author":"mjreacher","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Missile Base for Sale","text":"Here's a 6 minute video explaining the sprint missile for those unaware and interested (rather fascinating technology for the 70s) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39543156,"author":"Terr_","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Varda Capsule Reentry \u2013 Five Minutes from LEO to Earth [video]","text":"On the subject of impressive old missile footage, I recommend the Nike-X program's Sprint interceptor-missile. Not hot glowing plasma on re-entry, but instead going up . As a short-range interceptor, Sprints were slammed up out of their silos via an explosively-driven piston, then they would ignite and reorient in midair, accelerating at 100g to reach Mach 10. The missile itself couldn't see very much, but would be remotely guided with strong signals from the launch installation. [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3jQoAYRKqhg":[{"hn_comment_id":7571244,"author":"dobbsbob","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Were Intelligence Agencies Using Heartbleed in November 2013?","text":"I would say after watching this almost everybody could be a target of state interest from VCs to a janitor with a cellphone who works at a network they want into [VIDEO] (FosDem2014 presention) and especially if you have any kind of trust in an open source community and your patches are accepted blindly. Personally if I were an evil intel agency I'd be going after GPU developers and manufacturers at all costs to get at their firmware sources or even possibly find ways to sabotage it at the source. It's the final frontier of awesome evilware potential. - the execution of GPU code, and transfer of data between device and host do not require admin privs so it will always run regardless of what the host system privilege settings are. - Malware w/Nvidia GPUs can be statically linked with the CUDA library in a standalone hidden file that never touches the operating system. - GPU memory is not shared with the CPU so encrypted malware can reside there undetected. - Run-time polymorphism: malware GPU code can be re-encrypted with a new random key thus mutate in completely random ways that would be difficult to detect even if you dumped the GPU memory on a regular basis. - GPU NSA code can easily access the screen framebuffer, and broadcast a live link of whatever somebody is doing. - GPU NSA code present the user with a nothing is wrong desktop pretending the virus scanner is still running, hiding daemons, presenting false browser screens hiding the fact SSL certs have been rejected, ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26888417,"author":"wang_li","month":"2021-04","story_title":"\u201cThey introduce kernel bugs on purpose\u201d","text":"There\u2019s no research going on here. Everyone knows buggy patches can get into a project. Submitting intentionally bad patches adds nothing beyond grandstanding. They could perform analysis of review/acceptance by looking at past patches that introduced bugs without being the bad actors that they apparently are. From FOSDEM 2014, NSA operation ORCHESTRA annual status report. It\u2019s pretty entertaining and illustrates that this is nothing new. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3kEfedtQVOY":[{"hn_comment_id":5512326,"author":"jdietrich","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Meredith Patterson's astonishing CCC talk on computing and linguistics. It's a tour de force, presenting a systematic and practical proposal for how we can build an open and secure future for computing. I can't imagine a better example of the joys of inter-disciplinary thinking. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11624132,"author":"sedachv","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Remote code execution vulnerability in ImageMagick","text":"> 1. Simpler formats for file representation and data interchange. When someone tries to add an extra bitfield option, say no. When they keep trying, get a wooden stick with \"no\" written on it. Part of the disease of modern computing is bloated specs. > 2. Restrictive not permissive code bases. Exit and bail out early. Tell the user \"file corrupted\". Push back. The best talk on computer security I have seen is Meredith Patterson's Science of Insecurity at 28c3: [VIDEO] It is really interesting that the techniques needed to achieve these security goals (theory of grammars) is one of the oldest and best explored areas of computer science.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3751600,"author":"mkn","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Tanenbaum\u2019s advice for building product, networks, and living life.  ","text":"Item [8] was mentioned in this talk: [VIDEO] by Meredith Patterson. She contends, and it seems sound to me, that the time has passed to be \"tolerant when accepting,\" and that you should instead only accept regular grammars or, at worst, context-free grammars as input languages on the open Web.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6149105,"author":"TeMPOraL","month":"2013-08","story_title":"Comments in JSON","text":"> \"Code\" requires some notion of an execution platform/environment, which does not exist for arbitrary data. Arbitrary data don't exist without some notion of an execution (or interpretation) platform. We tend to use \"code\" as a word for \"commands telling some execution process what to do\" and \"data\" as a word for \"information that is meant to be transformed\" but in reality this distinction is meaningless; both are fundamentally the same thing, and even our \"code\" vs. \"data\" words have blurry borders. It's very apparent when you start reading configuration files. For example, aren't Ant \"configuration files\" essentially programs[0]? We all know what we usually mean in context by saying what is \"code\" vs. what is \"data\", but one has to remember, that in fact they are the same - minding it leads to insights like metaprogramming. Forgetting about it leads to dumb languages and nasty problems, and is generally not wise. [0] - the answer is: yes, they are, see [LINK] for more. ETA: Questions to ponder: - are regular expressions code, or data? - is source written in Prolog code, or data? Also I recommend watching [VIDEO] to learn how what would be data, as defined by formal grammars of some real-world protocols, can - by means of sloppy grammars and bad parser implementation - cross the threshold of Turing-completeness and become code.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6730044,"author":"majika","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Bytecode","text":"This is related to Meredith Patterson's talk at the 28th CCC, \"The Science of Insecurity\": [VIDEO] > Why is the overwhelming majority of common networked software still not secure, despite all effort to the contrary? Why is it almost certain to get exploited so long as attackers can craft its inputs? Why is it the case that no amount of effort seems to be enough to fix software that must speak certain protocols? > The answer to these questions is that for many protocols and services currently in use on the Internet, the problem of recognizing and validating their \"good\", expected inputs from bad ones is either not well-posed or is undecidable (i. e., no algorithm can exist to solve it in the general case), which means that their implementations cannot even be comprehensively tested, let alone automatically checked for weaknesses or correctness. The designers' desire for more functionality has made these protocols effectively unsecurable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8874007,"author":"noblethrasher","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Useful old technologies: ASN.1 (2013)","text":"Yes, I should have said \u201cunbounded length field\u201d. But, with respect to the discussion, a 32 or 64-bit integer is only bounded in the academic sense. Also, here is a video that works a bit better as an introduction to LANGSEC: [VIDEO] (around 19:00 is especially entertaining)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9947897,"author":"ShaneWilton","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Hammer: Parser Combinators for C","text":"Hammer is a nifty parser combinator library from the people behind Language-Theoretic Security [1]. Their goal is to promote the use of context-free formats and protocols, to avoid falling into the trap of trying to parse recursively-enumerable languages, a problem that reduces to the halting problem. The idea is that by sticking to context-free grammars, protocols will be easier to parse, and the bulk of memory corruption errors can eliminated. Meredith Patterson and Sergey Bratus gave an excellent talk on the subject at 28c3 [2], and they've put together a video series on using Hammer to build a secure parser for JSON RPC [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10567521,"author":"hannob","month":"2015-11","story_title":"We need less powerful languages","text":"It's kinda interesting that he writes a long blogpost with many ideas that are quite similar to the Langsec ideas, however in the comments he says that he wasn't aware of Langsec. I am not surprised. Langsec could really be a gamechanger in many aspects of IT security, yet many people in the Infosec community are not aware of these concepts. If you're curious, this older talk by Meredith Patterson is still worth watching a lot: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40536829,"author":"holmesworcester","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Civil society in Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland targeted with Pegasus spyware","text":"I think a lot of people are mis-seeing these Pegasus attacks as a problem of political will (\"we need sanctions on NSO/Israel!\") or memory safety (\"rewrite it in Rust!\") when there is a deeper problem: parser complexity. Specifically, we're using context-sensitive and Turing-complete parsers up and down the software stack, which (at the Turing-complete level of complexity, says G\u00f6del) guarantees that determined attackers can expect to discover an exploitable \"weird machine.\" Folks should watch this panel and other talks by Meredith L. Patterson (co-collaborator and wife of the late Len Sassaman) and Sergey Bratus (previously at DARPA, now Dartmouth) to get a sense of the problem and the solution. [LINK] These folks are saying that, just as the industry handled over-the-wire insecurity with TLS and e2ee (and not rolling our own crypto) we can handle device exploitability with well-described data and automated parser generation from those descriptions (and not rolling our own parsers, which these folks say should be verboten for the same reason as rolling one's own crypto: parsing is too hard for non-specialists to get right). Moreover, we don't have to redo the whole stack for it to be meaningful: big players can start using this tooling (e.g. [LINK] ) for parsers handling data from very untrustworthy inputs, such as message payloads sent to a phone number. Apple's Lockdown mode is a step in this direction, though in such a crude, \"burn the village\" way that it makes the phone","stance":"rec"}],"3kEpZWGgJks":[{"hn_comment_id":8422623,"author":"rickdale","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Finding a Video Poker Bug Made These Guys Rich","text":"John Oliver did a great job explaining the problem this week on his show. Basically, Kane and Nestor might be innocent, but their money is on trial separately, as dumb as that sounds. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8582142,"author":"sremani","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize","text":"This is John Oliver's commentary on this issue. [VIDEO] note: Not sure if we can post youtube videos here, but the commentary on the video very relevant to the topic","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8620194,"author":"valarauca1","month":"2014-11","story_title":"For Sale: 50,000 Bitcoins","text":"Civil forfeiture is really screwed up [1]. >So he basically loses them before he even can prove that they are his or not? Yes goods are guilty until proven innocent in court. >It seems to be a big loophole for the government to just go and steal whatever they want from you, before you've been proven guilty. It kinda is. Watch the link. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9536949,"author":"jmstout","month":"2015-05","story_title":"How the DEA took a young man\u2019s life savings without charging him with a crime","text":"Related: If you haven't seen John Oliver's segment on civil asset forfeiture, you should really check it out - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17211450,"author":"hobs","month":"2018-06","story_title":"A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on, and U.S. Customs took it","text":"It's true, its un-american, and here's a video from John Oliver so you can learn more about this ongoing heinous practice the police use to prey on the poor and defenseless. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27187798,"author":"emj","month":"2021-05","story_title":"A police dog who cried drugs at every traffic stop","text":"Letting the Police take the money from Civil Forfeit is bonkers, John Oliver has an entertaining take on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36386403,"author":"kuhn","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Using loophole, Seward County seizes millions from motorists without convictions","text":"As someone not from the US I thought John Oliver did a great job of explaining Civil Forfeiture a few years back [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41211746,"author":"curtis3389","month":"2024-08","story_title":"\"Jeff Bezos and Amazon tried to imprison my husband\"","text":"Civil asset forfeiture is wild shit. John Oliver had a great episode on it: [VIDEO] They make criminal accusations against your property and not against you, and because of that, you have no rights or recourse. This is just blatant nonsense under the US legal system, but that's kind of irrelevant. Civil forfeiture was introduced to take houses and cars from drug dealers as part of the War on Drugs, which was really started as war on minorities and hippies. The government wants to take stuff from drug dealers, so it gets to do it (see legal realism: [LINK] ).","stance":"rec"}],"3ka4KY7TMTU":[{"hn_comment_id":1520576,"author":"mark_h","month":"2010-07","story_title":"Self language still alive - new release for Linux, Mac","text":"David Unger gave a great talk recently on this: [VIDEO] (recorded at Stanford, but it's a reprise of his acceptance speech on receiving the Dahl-Nygaard award from memory) He has a role-call at the end of what the people involved in the self project went on to do afterwards, and it's staggering: some of the engineers of the original Google architecture, what became Hotspot as you say, Lars Bak (of Chrome V8) as someone else has pointed out... just an amazing list.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1957908,"author":"sb","month":"2010-12","story_title":"The status of the Self language","text":"To get a feeling for the Self language and what was (is) possible, you should (if you can, of course) take the time to watch the video: [VIDEO] It contains a few gems, and is really worthwhile watching. (Disclaimer, I think Dave Ungar has done tremendous things for PLDI; interested people should definitely check out his UC-Berkeley PhD thesis of 1986, easily one of the best I have ever seen...)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31555457,"author":"rileyphone","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Lisp, Smalltalk, and the power of symmetry (2014)","text":"What was really interesting about Self was its optimizability - they were able to implement a Smalltalk on Self that was much faster than the contemporary Smalltalk systems. The impression I got from poking around at Self was that there was a class/inheritance system informally approximated in the prototypical relations of the objects and traits, but that doesn't mean you can't formally define one. For anyone curious, I recommend this talk [0] by David Ungar, one of Self's creators, that explains the history, philosophy, successes, and failures of the Self project. It's a shame more didn't get done with it (though V8, arguably the most important language runtime, is very similar). Someone has even been making a Zig version of Self recently [1]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"3lXv3Tt4x20":[{"hn_comment_id":37377673,"author":"verytrivial","month":"2023-09","story_title":"How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]","text":"I thought this might be a Simon Roper video! I really enjoy his deep, humble and creative views on these topics, even though he still describes himself as only an enthusiast. Speaking of creative, check out his \"A London Accent from the 14th to the 21st Century\"[1] for frankly enchanting 18 minutes of viewing. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39150258,"author":"jdriselvato","month":"2024-01","story_title":"How French was medieval England?","text":"If you have an interest in English and the evolution of the language you must check out the YouTuber Simon Roper. There's no finer student of the subject than him and I appreciate that he starts every video with \"I am not [a] formally qualified linguist,\" yet he has a deeper understanding than most. Some of my favorite videos: - Celtic Influence on English [0] - Progressing Some Words from Proto-Germanic to English [1] - A London Accent from the 14th to the 21st Centuries [2] - A Northern US Accent from the 18th to the 21st Centuries [3] - Old English and Middle English; why are they so different? [4] --- [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37021124,"author":"darraghenright","month":"2023-08","story_title":"American English Dialects","text":"Very interesting! Many poor people in Ireland emigrated or were sent to the new world too. The rhotic \"r\" is prevalent in the Irish language, and it is a distinct characteristic of the sound of Hiberno-English (and other accents with a Celtic influence of course). There's a cool video on YT called \"A London Accent from the 14th to the 21st Centuries\"[1] \u2014 I'm sure it's not meant to be definitive, but it's very interesting to note the presence or absence of the rhotic \"r\" during different periods. -- Speaking of the New World \u2014 this is something of a side topic, but I think it's fascinating that \"caulk\" is commonly used in the U.S. and Canada; e.g: bathroom tiling. In my experience at least, you wouldn't really hear someone use the word in that context in the U.K. or Ireland. Most people I've asked associate it exclusively with boats. I have a speculative pet theory on this \u2014 originally, caulk specifically referred to the materials used to fill the gaps between boards in a wooden ship. Since practically everyone who originally came to the New World came on old wooden ships, it's not hard to imagine that \"caulk\" \u2014 once specific to ship building and maintenance \u2014 became well known to emigrant populations and took on a broader meaning over time. In contrast, it's likely very few people who remained in the Old World at that time were ever in a wooden ship, and \"caulk\" remained less well known and retained its specific meaning. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3nwwKbM_vJc":[{"hn_comment_id":1425862,"author":"vidar","month":"2010-06","story_title":"The rise of Anti-Distraction Software","text":"As engineers we should be looking at root cause, not fixing the superficial symptoms. The root cause here is that we don't have 100% control over the decisions that we make. The way to gain that control is not via willpower or superdiscipline, but rather through meditation which trains our brains to recognize the moment where we are about to fly off to Facebook/HN/Twitter. Mindfulness is the key word, see [VIDEO] Its almost embarrassing how much that video changed my perception of my decisionmaking.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4987764,"author":"spodek","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Jon Kabat-Zinn's Science of Mindfulness [audio]","text":"Jon Kabat-Zinn gave an hour-long talk at Google I found excellent too (they talk about it in this interview). Both restful and thought-provoking. If you're mildly interested, I recommend watching the video. I think this is the link -- [VIDEO] -- but I'm in China, which blocks YouTube, so please correct if it's wrong. Edit: his Wikipedia page -- [LINK] -- links to a bunch of talks he's given -- [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":938684,"author":"anguslong","month":"2009-11","story_title":"HN Help: I'm lost","text":"I've had success with the approach of Jon Kabat-Zinn -- see his talk @ Google: [VIDEO] ... his book, Full Catastrophe Living is a good read as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1462584,"author":"div","month":"2010-06","story_title":"Meditation Becomes Beneficial Surprisingly Fast","text":"I have not practiced in a long time, but the core idea of mindfulness meditation is to enjoy the \"right here right now\". If focusing on your breath isn't for you, you can focus on something else that puts you in that state, like closing your eyes and simply listening to the sounds around you. This should help in quieting your inner monologue. When you find your brain trying to restart that monologue, just acknowledge that it happened and refocus. Remember not to think of these events as somehow being bad or failing since then you are dwelling on the past, just refocus without judging. Edit: you may find this presentation that Jon Kabat-Zinn gave at Google interesting: [VIDEO] I also found his audio book \"Mindfulness for Beginners\" very enjoyable. The second cd contains 2 guided meditations which may help you get started.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1916014,"author":"crux","month":"2010-11","story_title":"Buddhism and Happiness: Sitting Quietly, Doing Something","text":"I actually just happened to be watching a really good talk by Jon Kabat-Zinn at Google: [VIDEO] where he leads a meditation session, and provides some basic concepts to refer to as well. Relatable, articulate.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3264855,"author":"AshleyArgile","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Tuning out: How brains benefit from meditation","text":"There's an excellent introductory talk that was delivered by Jon Kabat-Zinn for Google. It's available at [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4248960,"author":"pkghost","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Learning to switch off","text":"Do something that brings you into your body and out of your head. Dance, music, exercise, meditation: all these practices encourage you to take your attention away from explicit verbal thought and focus on your somatic experience. It will be difficult at first: your mind is a muscle, and its currently in the habit of listening to itself talk, but the more you practice rooting your attention in your body and it's experience of the world (which is far, far richer, by the way, than we're usually aware of, thanks to our predisposition to thinking), the better your right hemisphere will be able to inhibit your left, and your mental chatter will begin to quiet, allowing you to be more fully present and focus on rejuvenating activities. (Don't worry -- when you go back to work, you'll be able to pick right back up where you left off, only you'll be more energized and balanced.) If you're into it, here's an (hour-long) intro to mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a well-known name in Western meditation circles (he basically rebranded meditation as mindfulness to bring it into Western medicine): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4963641,"author":"CodeCube","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Astrology For Businesses","text":"A good intro to this frame of mind (and also relevant, since the dude works at Google ;) ) is to watch this video of a talk by Chade-Meng Tan - [LINK] And then if that interests you, see if you get through this one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7306587,"author":"purerandomness","month":"2014-02","story_title":"Dear first world dev, I am going to live your nightmare","text":"OP suffers from an inability to focus on a task over long periods of time. This is exactly the type of problem meditation adresses fairly well. You might be interested in this Google \"Tech Talk\" on Mindfulness Meditation by Jon Kobat-Zinn: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11514610,"author":"teamhappy","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Can't concentrate to focus, until it's last minute or later","text":"This isn't really your fault (nor is it uncommon). Everyone and everything is fighting for your attention 24/7 (including HN). As far as I can tell there are two ways to deal with it: The first one is to remove every distraction from your live: Install a browser extension that allows you to block specific websites when you're working, close your Twitter client, check your email only once a days, etc. This doesn't really work though because most of us need all this stuff to do our work. The second way is to learn to focus your attention. Here[1] is a nice introduction to mindfulness/meditation that Jon Kabat-Zinn gave at Google and here[2] are some guided meditations you can use to practice on your own. It works really well and has other useful consequences as well (e.g., stress reduction). [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14987242,"author":"audiometry","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Tech work, mistakes, and anxiety","text":"It's not the role or the job. Changing those offers a moment's escape, but then those thought and habit-patterns will return. I'm a commodity trader who's been fighting these issues for twenty years. I recommend that you investigate mindfulness first. This gives your mind/awareness the opportunity to recognize these unhelpful thought patterns being created by your brain-organ. Over time you can better balance your sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous systems, so you're not terrorized by your own amygdala. Jon Kabat-Zinn as a fantastic lecture at Google that explains mindfulness. [VIDEO] The mindfulness ability gives me the \"fleeting moment of volition\" where I can avoid immediate reaction to amygdala-terror. What I'm working on now is what Kabat-Zinn calls an \"orthogonal rotation of thought\" and what psychologists call \"cognitive reappraisal training.\" The idea is to look at whatever problem you're traumatized by and intentionally choosing other ways to view it with different conclusions, and also to be able to observe the fear/problem without being stung so badly. This is a new skill I'm working on, and I think it's bearing fruit. I've been experimenting with some simple software to prod more of the orthogonal-type thinking, rather than suffering endless cycles of the same unskilled patterns. Good Luck. Feel free to DM me.","stance":"rec"}],"3pvpNKUPbIY":[{"hn_comment_id":29330105,"author":"melenaboija","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Overengineering can kill a product","text":"Interesting interview of Lex Friedman to Kevin Systrom co-founder of instagram where he talks about the beginning of the platform and overengineering. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32743565,"author":"joegahona","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?","text":"Thank you for sharing this -- I didn't realize this existed. Instagram is covered in your link, and you can hear about it from the founder in this really good Lex Fridman podcast: [VIDEO] These lists always kind of remind me of popular bands that changed music over time. The most drastic \"pivot\" I've ever come across in a known band is Ministry, who went from a benign new-wave Depeche Mode clone in 1983 [1] to a pseudo-Cabaret Voltaire in 1986 [2], then to full-on metal by 1991 [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"3qHkcs3kG44":[{"hn_comment_id":21275269,"author":"anm89","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work","text":"I personally think this is awesome. I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product. If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal means. Otherwise why would I wan't gitlab to have anything to do with this process? The tech unicorns screwed themselves over BIG TIME, the second they stopped claiming they were just infrastructure and platforms and got into content moderation. They will now forever be a pawn of whoever has some power and has some agenda. It's an obviously unwinnable game for everyone involved besides maybe some politicians. I don't want this to become a Joe Rogan debate but Naval Ravikant got this exactly right on his Rogan Interview: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22028325,"author":"myth_buster","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What were your most impactful podcast episodes from 2019?","text":"I would say Naval Ravikant in Joe Rogan Experience [0]. A bit preachy (similar to Osho whom he quotes) but there is some things that are actionable and is an interesting point of view. I'm catching up on Knowledge Project (which is quite a listen) so these are not from 2019, I just happened to listen to them last year. The ones that had the most impact are: - Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us? My Conversation with Gary Taubes [1]. I got interested in this subject following the NYT expose on how sugar lobby shifted blame onto fat [2]. This builds up on that for me. - Survival of the Kindest: Dacher Keltner Reveals the New Rules of Power [3] This may be a selection bias as I had a feeling \"survival of the fittest\" is perhaps productive in short run but would end with species of one. Imho, the way to succeed is to collaborate and share knowledge else we may never have survived hunter gathering phase. So this episode resonated with me. A16Z's Incenting Innovation Inside Loonshots to Moonshots [4]. Having been through a significant cultural shift at my organization, the analogy of water freezing at 32F and hysteresis to explain how company culture could change dynamically or how in the same organization there are pockets that could be at two extremes on a spectrum, was quite spot on. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"3qln2u1Vr2E":[{"hn_comment_id":19363043,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks","text":"Here's the ever excellent Eric Brandwine explaining what AWS does at L3 wrt VPC: [VIDEO] Here's the super versatile Colm Mac explaining what AWS does at L4: [LINK] --- Google has been very open about their network infrastructure, here's a nice summary from 2015: [LINK] and not mentioned in that blog... their NetworkLoadBalancer, Maglev: [LINK] (AWS equivalent of which would be HyperPlane: [LINK] allegedly based on S3's load balancer).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15801241,"author":"colmmacc","month":"2017-11","story_title":"VPC Endpoints for Your Own Applications and Services","text":"There's lots on [LINK] , and talks on youtube ( [VIDEO] is a fav). But the TLDR is this: VPC stands for \"Virtual Private Cloud\" and it gives you your own virtual data center on AWS. You get a private network that uses whatever IP range you'd like, and you can connect to it privately via VPN or Direct Connect (physical links). You can also connect it to the internet with Elastic IP Addresses. VPCs are free and you can create and edit them programmatically (add subnets, change routes, manage ACLs and security groups) - so they're a useful way to manage an environment of things like EC2 instances, containers, Elastic Load Balancers, RDS databases, Lambda functions, and more, without needing to worry as much about them being exposed to things you don't control. With this latest PrivateLink feature, it's now possible to offer services between VPCs. So you can build a service in its own VPC, and map into other ones, securely.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23079522,"author":"thinkharderdev","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Redis 6.0 GA","text":"You can't snoop on traffic between hosts in the same VPC. Here is a good video explaining why [VIDEO] . The tl;dr; is that your guest OS (the EC2 instance) is not connected to the physical layer 2 network. The host OS hypervisor is and when it receives a packet from the physical NIC, if that packet is not directed to the guest OS then it won't be passed to it. So the NIC on the guest OS (your EC2 instance) will never even see the packets that are not intended for it. Of course this gets slightly more complicated because AWS added some tools for traffic mirroring. So theoretically someone with the right access could setup a mirror to a host they control in the VPC and sniff the traffic that way. But if someone were able to pull that off then you're likely f'ed either way.","stance":"rec"}],"3s7h2MHQtxc":[{"hn_comment_id":15239847,"author":"rhart92","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Mathematicians Measure Infinities, Find They\u2019re Equal","text":"I am not sure if you have heard of them, but space-filling curves are a way to demonstrate this. This is a great video on the Hilbert curve [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15445609,"author":"joelg","month":"2017-10","story_title":"My Sudden Synaesthesia","text":"This is actually exactly the topic of the 3Blue1Brown video on Hilbert Curves: [VIDEO] Space-filling curves are a sort of optimal mapping strategy for compressing two dimensions down into one.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22545182,"author":"91aintprime","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Landmark computer science proof cascades through physics and math","text":"Hilbert's curve: Is infinite math useful? by 3blue1brown [VIDEO] or skip directly to the conclusion; [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38910060,"author":"Cieplak","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Visualizing Ext4","text":"There's a command-line utility called pixd [1] that generates similar data visualizations on the command line. That said, it only shows static representations of binary data and is not nearly as cool as buredoranna's animated gifs showing filesystem changes over time. It can be helpful to plot these sorts of pixel arrangements on a Hilbert curve, rather than plotting pixels line by line. I learned this trick from a Ghidra plugin called cantordust [2]. 3blue1brown offers some mathematical intuition for the effectiveness of a Hilbert curve pixel arrangement [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3uiEyEKji0M":[{"hn_comment_id":7543596,"author":"modeless","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Speed memory access by arranging data to take advantage of CPU caching","text":"You can see it a little bit in the blur example on the front page: the blur algorithm is described in two lines and the optimizations are described separately in the \"schedule\" below. In this case the schedule specifies that intermediate results should be computed in tiles of a certain size, and the whole thing is both vectorized and parallelized. The best way to understand it is probably to watch the video, which is relatively long but explains things clearly: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17167683,"author":"whos3424","month":"2018-05","story_title":"How to write efficient matrix multiplication","text":"please look at [LINK] and especially [VIDEO] they seem to open new ground in the area you are prusuing edit: if you know any other groups/ppl who practice a similar approach send them my way anyhow, it seems like the hand written assembly vs compiled code goes in to a new skirmish the age where the whole spectrum from generalcpu > asic becomes available to programmers all around bottle necks of parallelism, locality and redundancy seems to be the guiding lights hand written we'll be probably lead by the magnificent [LINK] compiler generated by halide and the like and once we got the ball rolling and more public knowledge is available probably the locked down techniques of the major supercomputers will start to emerge ( i just assume pps from the supercomputers area have been dealing with this stuff for the last couple of decades ) can i spit some more, dear hacker news? focus, you gotta focus, forget about the compiler generating good code, it's all about the ability for us humans to explore the domain even in halide, they mention the point that you still need to sit down and code different approaches, but their tool makes it a breeze compared to exploring those different approaches using hand written assembly","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17168632,"author":"tehsauce","month":"2018-05","story_title":"How to write efficient matrix multiplication","text":"A really nice video with animations of various scheduling approaches for these types of linear algebra algorithms: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18769780,"author":"all2","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Halide: a language for fast, portable computation on images and tensors","text":"[VIDEO] Here is a relevant video from the creator. It has some fun illustrations to help with what its going on. /edit - letters","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27055261,"author":"T-R","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Apache Arrow 4.0","text":"This is what I was trying to get at - using column vectors gives good cache locality and lets you use SIMD for \"multiply all of these by this scalar\" for each column, and then for \"sum all of these\" for the resulting rows. I'd imagine it could also let you optimize multiplications into things like bit-shifts with minimal overhead as well, though I have no idea if that's done in practice. Maybe only tangentially related, but I feel like this talk on Halide[0] is really illustrative of the general concepts. As others have mentioned, for some operations it can also save you from loading whole columns that aren't relevant for your transformation. The compression point in the sibling comment is definitely also relevant, especially for serialization. A whole lot of reasons to use column vectors. Using \"column-major\" here might've been terminology abuse; sorry for the confusion. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3wMKoSRbGVs":[{"hn_comment_id":29161522,"author":"roeles","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Love seems like a high priority","text":"I thought that Douglas Lenat's remarks (at Lex Fridman's podcast) about this were really insightful[1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37354304,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Doug Lenat has died","text":"If anybody wants to hear more about Doug's work and ideas, here is a (fairly long) interview with Doug by Lex Fridman, from last year. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37417588,"author":"HarHarVeryFunny","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Remembering Doug Lenat (1950\u20132023) and His Quest to Capture the World with Logic","text":"There's an interesting (& long!) recent Lex Fridman interview with Doug Lenat here: [VIDEO] Lenat thought CYC and neural nets could be complementary, with neural nets providing right brain/fast thinking capability, and CYC left brain/slow (analytic/reflective) thinking capability. It's odd to see Lenat discuss CYC the way he does - as if 40 years on everything was still going well despite it having dropped off the public radar twenty years ago.","stance":"rec"}],"3wfNl2L0Gf8":[{"hn_comment_id":9428221,"author":"steveklabnik","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Foucault\u2019s lecture notes from 1970\u201371 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013)","text":"For anyone who hasn't watched the actual, full video of the debate, you should do so. Watching them argue in two languages at the same time is super fun. [VIDEO] Okay, here's what the video is saying, in slightly-longer form. The exchange in the video is basically Chomsky saying \"human nature\" and Foucault laughing. This gets at the heart of the hour-long debate: do humans have some sort of nature? Foucault, and philosophers like him, think that the idea of 'human nature' is complete and utter garbage. So when Chomsky admits that his position boils down to an appeal of human nature, Foucault just laughs at him. It's a great moment that really highlights the whole thing. I love it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49047322,"author":"bbor","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Claude Opus 5","text":"1. Languages are used for much, much more than communication, and there is good reason to think that capacity didn't evolve for communication, but rather for metacognitive problem solving. 2. The idea that Tolkein --one of the most reknowned writers in our entire canon-- did something isn't relevant to the philosophical discussion of creativity and its obvious bounds. Even Tolkein was just painting within the lines set by the linguists he had read and the obscure languages he adored, not to mention the fundamental limits set by our capacity for language in the first place. For anyone who's curious about this kind of thing, I cannot reccomend the infamous debate b/w Chomsky & Foucault enough; it ranges across topics a bit, but chapter markers should help you skip to the core of it (creativity) if you prefer. Video here: [VIDEO] , some old summaries on /r/AskPhilosophy here: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13524724,"author":"enqk","month":"2017-01","story_title":"How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free","text":"It is quite illuminating to see the exchange for instance between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky to get a sense of the difference of tone and focus between european and american intellectuals. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15272151,"author":"f00_","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Michel Foucault in Death Valley: A Boom Interview with Simeon Wade","text":"really wierd, most of my exposure to foucault is indirect. this debate with chomsky on human nature is interesting [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16505847,"author":"marnett","month":"2018-03","story_title":"The Role of Luck in Life Success","text":"I think he is not interested in epistemology. But I always find discussions on the origins or human knowledge just as fascinating as you. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It sounds like you may have already been exposed to it given the content of your arguments, but there is a very enjoyable debate/discussion between Foucault and Chomsky on the acquisitions of human knowledge and human nature [1] and your position sounds quite similar to the one Chomsky elaborates on. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21152742,"author":"pmoriarty","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Michel Foucault: Power and Struggle","text":"For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, here's an interesting debate between Foucault and Chomsky: [1] Unfortunately, they're mostly speaking past each other, but it's still worth watching. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"3x1b_S6Qp2Q":[{"hn_comment_id":25538212,"author":"neillyons","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"I don't want anything to do with cryptocurrencies but listening to the founder of Ethereum on the Lex Fridman podcast was fascinating. The way that guy thinks is just impressive. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24240656,"author":"ZephyrBlu","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Trust Models","text":"Not related to this topic, but I recently watched Lex Fridman's podcast episode with him and it was really interesting as well: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26137833,"author":"mjgs","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Brendan Eich on the Lex Fridman Podcast [video]","text":"I didn\u2019t watch that one. So far I\u2019ve only listened to a few. I mostly listen via the podcast feed. I posted the ones I liked to my linkblog ( [LINK] ): [2020-12-26] Lex Friedman Podcast #80 - Vitalik Buterin - Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of Money - Fascinating and well paced conversation with the founder of Etherium covering a wide range of topics including Satoshi Nakamoto, blockchains, proof of work and identity, PKI and digital signatures, Bitcoin, money, the Etherium origin story, smart contracts, software engineering and project governance challenges, proof of stake and consensus algorithms, sharding of storage and computation, Etherium 2.0, games built using smart contracts, Uniswap, AI and crypto, and closes on Immortality [VIDEO] [2021-02-13] Lex Friedman Podcast #159 \u2013 Richard Craib: WallStreetBets, Numerai, and the Future of Stock Trading - Looks at the recent WalkStreetBets and Gamestop Saga that caused such a stir in the trading markets, then moves on to talk about hedge funds, shorting, new ways crypto and AI could change the world of finance, aswell as more esoteric topics like running a startup and the meaning of life [LINK] I might have a listen to the cringey one you linked to. I wonder if it was just an off day for him or perhaps he didn\u2019t gel well with the guest.","stance":"rec"}],"4-SGpEInX_c":[{"hn_comment_id":30941374,"author":"Pilottwave","month":"2022-04","story_title":"We\u2019ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute","text":"Lots of comments about his \"arrogance\" but i just see someone passionate, judge for yourself! He has three long interviews on Lex Fridmans youtube channel! I greatly enjoyed watching those those. 1:[Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics]( [LINK] ) 2:[Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe]( [LINK] ) 3: [Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality ]( [VIDEO] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29216438,"author":"Yenrabbit","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Concept of the Ruliad","text":"A really interesting topic, especially from a philosophical point of view. A good discussion that touches on these ideas in a fairly accessible way: [VIDEO] (Lex Friedman interviews Wolfram for the 3rd time) I enjoyed Sabine Hossenfelder's thoughts on this and other 'Theory of everything' projects (Do we need a Theory of Everything? [LINK] ). A little bit of a reality-check for those who get really invested in these ideas, but I, like her, think it's really cool that there are people like Wolfram et al thinking these interesting thoughts and trying to push Physics in new directions.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34974736,"author":"barking_biscuit","month":"2023-02","story_title":"'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True'","text":">If our brains are no more than computers and our own consciousness is software, then there exists some algorithm or combination of that gives rise to sentience. If these models arrived at this special algorithm during their training, much like the optimization of evolution arrived at the same, then we may have created something sentient. Joscha Bach gives a pretty good explanation of the algorithm we follow through the lens of Control Theory, and Stephen Wolfram has a pretty amazing Theory of Everything that explains how it can be arrived at. Joscha Bach: Nature of Reality, Dreams, and Consciousness [LINK] Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"41VJudBdYXY":[{"hn_comment_id":32096138,"author":"m_ke","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time","text":"Which of these \"affordable\" options are you too good for: [LINK] Also recommend checking out this video about Vienna [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36067189,"author":"readonthegoapp","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Imagine a Renters' Utopia. It Might Look Like Vienna.","text":"i watched a couple youtubes over the past few months on this -- if you supply at least some public housing, it can have an outsized ability to keep rents down: Bloomberg Originals: Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All [VIDEO] About Here: The Non-capitalist Solution to the Housing Crisis (indy urban planning-types out of Vancouver, BC) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38117223,"author":"toomuchtodo","month":"2023-11","story_title":"The US Housing Market Has Become an Impossible Mess","text":"Vienna is a great example. [VIDEO] (Youtube: Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All) [LINK] (Youtube: Does Vienna Have the World's Best Council Housing?)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38721326,"author":"toomuchtodo","month":"2023-12","story_title":"US homelessness up 12% from 2022, hits highest level since 2007","text":"Government can build if private industry will not. If you argue \"we can only fix this with the private sector and private investment\", welp, we tried that and we're plain ol' fucked at the moment. Vienna is a great example. [VIDEO] (Youtube: Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All) [LINK] (Youtube: Does Vienna Have the World's Best Council Housing?)","stance":"rec"}],"42QuXLucH3Q":[{"hn_comment_id":16419008,"author":"r_singh","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Neural nets more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation in images","text":"If the test data does not have a 50/50 split (or something around that ratio), the headline is straight up lies. Skewed test data is the most common problem with research, reminds me of this great video by Veritasium (Is most published research wrong?): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24675508,"author":"sillysaurusx","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Actively speaking two languages protects against cognitive impairment","text":"Cue \u201cp = 0.05 is a random choice\u201d and a big thread about p-hacking. Any takers? It feels like everything to say has already been said about the bias of small sample sizes and the dangers of p-hacking. But it also seems like the discussion is inevitable here. I wonder if there\u2019s a new insight to glean, somehow... For a background on why p-values are misleading, see [VIDEO] which is excellent. He points out that 0.05 was selected by Ronald Fischer in 1925, and people have gone with it since.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28339201,"author":"scotty79","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The Coronavirus Is Here Forever","text":"Please watch this video. It neatly shows why should you treat small and less rigorous studies with suspicion, even if there are many giving some results: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46293125,"author":"KK7NIL","month":"2025-12","story_title":"I don't think Lindley's paradox supports p-circling","text":"Wikipedia is infamously bad at teaching math. This Veritasium video does a great job at explaining how such skewed priors can easily appear in our current academic system and the paradox in general: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14135256,"author":"burntrelish1273","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Receding glacier causes Canadian river to vanish in four days","text":"Definitely. Another good idea is to show the difference between reality and data can be overwhelmingly significant. Videos demonstrating this with examples: - \"The Bayesian Trap\" [LINK] - \"Is Most Research Wrong?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14251872,"author":"ReligiousFlames","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Science to Retract Study on Fish and Microplastics","text":"There's an interesting video by Veratasium \"Is Most Published Research Wrong?\" (Clickbaity title to be sure.) It shows, on the overall statistics of valid/invalid vs. published/unpublished papers, the arbitrary p-value threshold is wholy inadequate to prevent a sizable fraction of published papers from being false positives (invalid but published). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14681065,"author":"wolfram74","month":"2017-07","story_title":"The US government is removing scientific data from the Internet","text":"It's not 'these days' it's the intrinsic nature of false hypotheses outnumbering true hypotheses by an enormous ratio. Even if everything were working perfectly you'd expect false results to outnumber true results. It's like the common example of disease screening, where even if you only get a false positive 1% of the time, but there are only 1% of true positives in your sample population, you're going get many more inaccurate results than accurate results. This video walks through an example calculation and what kinds of steps are being taken to improve on things. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18501978,"author":"hannasanarion","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Dead sperm whale found in Indonesia had ingested '6kg of plastic'","text":"My dude. Please go get yourself some education on how science works. I feel embarrassed for you. The reproducibility crisis is about the prevalence of false positive results in the scientific literature. This video is a good primer: [VIDEO] A false positive is when a paper says \"this works\" when it actually doesn't, because of a statistical fluke in their sample. Even if citing the reproducibility crisis as an excuse to believe something that science has repeatedly found to be false isn't a really bad reason for belief (which it definitely is)... it doesn't even apply because there can't be false positive results regarding neurolinguistic programming because there aren't any positive results regarding neurolinguistic programming. Even the paper put out by neurolinguistic programming practicioners themselves wasn't able to produce a detectable effect over a placebo. I'm sorry, my friend, but this is an intervention. You're in a cult. You're making the exact same arguments as homeopaths and faith healers and fortune tellers.","stance":"rec"}],"42oQN7fy_eM":[{"hn_comment_id":32457123,"author":"xputer","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Electric vehicles are way more energy-efficient than internal combustion","text":"If there's that much traffic, a four way stop will be even worse than a roundabout. You'll need a turbo roundabout, traffic lights or grade separated intersections in that case. Four way stops are one of the dumbest inventions of man kind that are way over used in North America. Everyone has to stop all the time and it leads to scary situations at 2 way stops because people don't expect those anymore. Here is a great video about life without stop signs in the Netherlands: [VIDEO] And here are some infinitely better alternatives: Low traffic + low speed: raised intersections where right goes first. Medium traffic + medium speed: priority road with yield signs on side streets and roundabouts High traffic + medium speed: traffic lights High traffic + high speed: grade separated intersections","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31041550,"author":"aqme28","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The Colorado Safety Stop is the law of the land","text":"> Not saying its a bad idea, but I'm still struggling to see the full logic of it. If you don't have to stop at an intersection, you get through the intersection much faster and are therefore in less danger. This is true for all vehicles but especially true of bicycles, which don't always accelerate as fast. Here's a video demonstration [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31056074,"author":"rsanek","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The Colorado Safety Stop is the law of the land","text":"It's counter-intuitive, but the data [0][1] is quite clear that laws like these significantly improve safety for bicyclists. I found this video [2] useful in understanding what might be going on. [0] [LINK] (\"All reported injury crashes involving bicycles at stop sign controlled intersections dropped 23% in the 30 months after adopting the Safety Stop compared to 30 months prior to adoption\") [1] [LINK] (\"In year after adopting the \u201cIdaho Stop,\u201d crashes between bicyclists and motorists fell 14.5%, and Boise was 30-60% safer on a bicycle compared to similarly sized cities\") [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39299210,"author":"ruuda","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say","text":"Everybody here is discussing the car and the cyclist, but I don't see anybody considering the possibility that the intersection design is unsafe. That there is a stop sign is a pretty bad signal in itself, Not Just Bikes made a video explaining this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"43CMV8KIs3E":[{"hn_comment_id":28490542,"author":"simondotau","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Epic vs. Apple: Judgment Day \u2013 Who Won? Who Lost? and Why?","text":"I'd suggest watching the excellent video by Hoeg Law. He has followed the case from the outset and goes through the ruling in intricate detail. Even within the first few minutes he starts noting how much of the media coverage is wrong or overstated. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28497012,"author":"GeekyBear","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Epic vs. Apple injunction doesn't allow for alternative in-app payment mechanism","text":"If you're willing to wade through a very long YouTube video, HoagLaw offers a two and a half hour summary of the 185 page judgement: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28497614,"author":"rvz","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Epic vs. Apple injunction doesn't allow for alternative in-app payment mechanism","text":"Precisely. As I and many others already highlighted it is not over yet and they are both likely going to appeal this. The media outright jumped into conclusions with their headlines and caused this hype of misinformation to spread very quickly and now we have to cut thought it and correct the wrongs they reported. I also recommend those interested to watch the first 4 minutes of the Hoeg Law video and even the whole video for an in depth look into the trial. [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29170676,"author":"rvz","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Judge orders Apple to allow external payment options for App Store","text":"Absolutely correct. The Verge and other media reporters continues to omit this important note from the ruling itself from [0]: Under all models, Apple would be entitled to a commission or licensing fee, even if IAP was optional [0] (p68) Seems like The Verge loves to spin their way into misinformation since they know that the majority of readers won't read the ruling text at all. For those that don't have time, it's better to watch the Hoeg Law video explaining the ruling in full depth. [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30205214,"author":"GeekyBear","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Apple will charge 27% commission for alternative payment systems in Netherlands","text":"There's an excellent overview of the US Federal court's 180 page decision on Youtube, but it's rather long. The diction is good, so it's still understandable when set to run at a faster speed. The first 15 minutes is a summary and the balance of the video is a more detailed look. [VIDEO] TL;DW, the judge makes it clear that Apple can still charge a cut even if developers use someone else's payment system. She also hints strongly that Epic screwed up by not challenging the size of Apple's cut instead of challenging their right to take a cut.","stance":"rec"}],"43XKfuptnik":[{"hn_comment_id":34852636,"author":"sushiburps","month":"2023-02","story_title":"200-year old heat pump technology is back","text":"Highly recommend the YouTube channel 'Technology Connections' videos on heat pumps: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31796444,"author":"mtlmtlmtlmtl","month":"2022-06","story_title":"DOE announces breakthrough in residential cold climate heat pump technology","text":"Technology Connections on Youtube has a great video series on how heat pumps work, why they're important environmentally and what kind of power cost savings they can bring. The second video is a longer guide for people who want to get a heat pump. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32750665,"author":"pfdietz","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Sierra Club, environmental groups petition EPA to ban natural gas for heating","text":"Yes, apparently there have been huge advances in the efficiency of heat pumps since then. And this is why ground source heat pumps are less of a thing these days: you don't need the help of that underground temperature as much. This guy gets really excited about heat pumps: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34166583,"author":"the-alchemist","month":"2022-12","story_title":"US companies are producing heat pumps that work below -20F(-28C)","text":"If you want an (entertaining) deep dive into heat pumps, I can recommend Technology Connection's [VIDEO] and its followup, [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34358056,"author":"nayuki","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Do heat pumps work in cold climates?","text":"He made several excellent videos explaining residential heat pumps: [2021-02-28] [LINK] \"Heat Pumps: the Future of Home Heating\" (35m14s) [2021-04-01] [LINK] \"Ground Source / Geothermal Heat Pumps and Other Info\" (28m03s) [2022-03-26] [LINK] \"Why Heat Pumps are Immensely Important Right Now\" (21m02s) [2022-04-13] [VIDEO] \"Heat Pumps are Not Hard: Here's what it will take to start pumping\" (46m32s)","stance":"rec"}],"43XaZEn2aLc":[{"hn_comment_id":26473752,"author":"opnitro","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Rust's type system is Turing-complete (2017)","text":"On this notion, a very good talk \"On the expressive power of programming languages\"[1][2] which attempts to provide a formal basis for distinguishing between expressive power of turning complete languages. [1] [VIDEO] [2] The paper it's based on [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28308675,"author":"Twisol","month":"2021-08","story_title":"All you need is call/cc (2013)","text":"Certainly adding call/cc doesn't allow you to represent more computable functions by programs. But there are plenty of internal features of programs that we're interested in, that let us meaningfully distinguish amongst programs that otherwise have the exact same observable behavior. I like coroutines as an example here, because I have very direct experience writing programs with similar behavior in systems that either do or do not have coroutines. By far, I found the coroutine-based programs far easier to understand and extend. Mattias Felleisen wrote the seminal paper on comparing expressive power of Turing-complete languages. It's worth a read if it's not come across your radar before! [LINK] Although, Shriram Krishnamurthi's talk from two years ago on this paper might be more approachable. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35793835,"author":"fanf2","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Is Go an object-oriented programming language?","text":"Worth reading Felleisen\u2019s paper \u201con the expressive power of programming languages\u201d (or watch this talk [VIDEO] ) which argues that if a language A has a feature that would require global refactoring to implement in language B, then A is more expressive than B.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40309576,"author":"Hirrolot","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Algebraic Data Types for C99","text":"In programming language design, we tend to distinguish between global and local analysis. While type checking and elaboration is an example of global analysis, desugaring is inherently local to some piece of code. Therefore, \"power\" or \"expressiveness\" usually mean that something cannot be syntactically \"expanded\"; e.g., while type classes elaborate into explicit dictionaries, they still require information from the type checker, and therefore considered a \"real\" feature of a programming language. On the other hand, nested pattern matching can be formulated as local syntax transformation, and therefore it doesn't bring anything fundamentally new to the type system or dynamic semantics. There's also a great talk on the matter [1], if somebody is interested in formalities. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49310771,"author":"hayley-patton","month":"2026-08","story_title":"G\u00f6del, Escher, Elisp: The Beauty of Macros","text":"> If macros can implement arbitrary language features Not really your question--others have provided examples of type systems as macros--but they can't, they can only do local rewrites. You couldn't, for example, express mutation or non-local control flow if you didn't have them already; On the expressive power of programming languages [0] is rather theoretical but does set out the boundary of what macros can and can't do. That they're local means everyone has to buy into your type system if you want it to be a macro, though. [0] [LINK] though [VIDEO] might be a useful walkthrough of the ideas being presented","stance":"rec"}],"443UNeGrFoM":[{"hn_comment_id":26018552,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Best tech talks/videos of 2020-1?","text":"Hi Eskil from Australia :-) I remember you posted that on the page from 40 days ago also hehe. I have too many ideas myself already, so that one wasn't so useful to me, but was interesting. However, I really liked Drama in games [0] and I seriously loved How I Program C [1]. It's been a big influence. Thank you! [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34106174,"author":"suprjami","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?","text":"[LINK] If you have lots of time: [LINK] If you can't be bothered reading a whole book: [LINK] Exercises: [LINK] and [LINK] Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I'll ever recommend: [VIDEO] Both r/cprogramming and r/C_programming are active, also full of lazy students trying to get people to do their homework. If you come by, describe your problem well with code. Say you're learning for yourself, not for school. Together C & C++ is a good Discord if you prefer live chat: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34107434,"author":"MonkeyClub","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?","text":"> Once you have syntax and basic algorithms down well, watch this, the only 2 hour YouTube video I'll ever recommend: > [VIDEO] Hard +1 on this! I think Eskil Steenberg work in C is really top notch - the video is heavily recommended, as is an overview of his work in general, he does some awesome stuff with C.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13883253,"author":"signa11","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Principles for C programming","text":"this video: [VIDEO] , from a talk by eskil-steenberg titled 'how i program in c' is, imho, pretty good as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23760425,"author":"quelsolaar","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Finally releasing my 15 years of C libraries as open source","text":"All code written in C89 Written from scratch, without any dependencies. All operating system interaction is warped and ported. FreeBSD License. -Forge: stdlib with math, text, A*, geometry math, memory debugger and much more. -Imagine: Threads, timing, setting, lib loading. -Betray: Platform layer, with plugin support, VR, Multi-touch, controllers and more. Win32 , Linux and limited MacOS support. -Relinquish: Rendering library, wrapping OpenGL supports and hides a wide range of extensions. -Seduce: 3D UI toolkit, text rendering and editing, fonts, 3D manipulators, cameras. Mouse / multi-touch / multi-user / controller support. -Testify: Networking and serialization. TCP, UDP, Files, NAT Holepunching, local/global service discovery. -Hxa: asset file format, FBX and PNG implementation. Graphics processing. -Json parser. These libraries have been used extensively in software production for all my applications including LOVE, Exo, Stellar, MoF, and Loq Airou (source included). You can find out more about these at: [LINK] . For more on my programing style, and philosophy watch this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26313269,"author":"quelsolaar","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Thoughts Around Naming Variables","text":"As a C programmer i have two ways I go about selecting names. For anything uniqe, I use long post fix names. I think of them as a directory path to the functionality. So instead of: create_object(); delete_object(); I do: project_module_object_create(); project_module_object_delete(); I then do the same with files, so the above would probably reside in a file called: project_module_object.c This makes everything easy to find, you know where things belong and you can search for partial names to find instances of interfaces. For local variables, I have a small set of variable names that all have specific meninges like i, j, k, f, sum, found, best, length, count, that I always use in the same way. They therefore become very easy to read since I know their use. If something doesn't fit the limited set of common variables, I revert to long post fix names. A much longer explanation of how is use C that goes in to more depth about naming can be found here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26913006,"author":"quelsolaar","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Beej\u2019s Guide to C Programming [pdf]","text":"Try watching this: [VIDEO] Its long and is filled with other stuff about C programming but it goes in to dept about how to think about pointers. Good Luck!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36151600,"author":"59nadir","month":"2023-06","story_title":"I think Zig is hard but worth it","text":"For what it's worth I think this is an excellent choice. Back in 2019 I was deciding whether I wanted to pursue Zig full-time and one of the upsides that I determined was that once you reach critical mass writing all of your code for tools and things in Zig you end up with things that are really exactly what you need and with a very high baseline for speed, flexibility, and so on. Right now I'm considering the same thing but with Odin and for many of the same reasons that I had for Zig; it's an excellent language to write foundational code in and once you do, you end up being able to build significantly more understandable, reliable, stable and consistent things. This, but on a company level, is a real multiplier. Once you adopt a couple of Python scripts and that's OK, you give up the possibility of wielding this sharp spear. Edit: I think \"How I program C\" by Eskil Steenberg is an interesting window into what you can get if you laser focus on a language and environment and allow yourself to build up a mountain of code that you dogfood: [VIDEO] At some point I will likely soft-retire and at that point it's exceedingly unlikely that I'll bother with using other people's libraries except a few key ones that I think are decent, and at that point there really is no reason I'd sit down and write these fundamentals in anything but a lower-level language. Odin, Zig or something like it would pretty much be the only thing on the table.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44404911,"author":"ykonstant","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Untangling Lifetimes: The Arena Allocator","text":"The author's defense of C reminds me of this classic youtube video: [VIDEO] ... I am sure the video above will cause immediate disagreement (I think it goes too far on some topics), but I urge people to consider the ideas contained within. (I seem to have mis-posted this to another thread?)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46205855,"author":"breckinloggins","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Brent's Encapsulated C Programming Rules (2020)","text":"Other resources I like: - Eskil Steenberg\u2019s \u201cHow I program C\u201d ( [VIDEO] ). Long and definitely a bit controversial in parts, but I find myself agreeing with most of it. - CoreFoundation\u2019s create rule ( [LINK] ). I\u2019m definitely biased but I strongly prefer this to OP\u2019s \u201cyou declare it you free it\u201d rule.","stance":"rec"}],"449j7oKQVkc":[{"hn_comment_id":10541575,"author":"elcritch","month":"2015-11","story_title":"TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence","text":"That's a fair point overall. It's basically the entirety of the debate between functional languages and imperative languages. Nonetheless, it is still pretty good question as far as someone trying to understand the differences and why it might be useful. @hmehta, one of my recent favorite videos generally on this topic has been from Curry On conference [1]. It's not strictly data-flow vs control flow, but it does discuss some of the more practical differences in between using monads for structuring data flows vs imperative control. My take is that monads can be roughly considered as wrapping up imperative control flow along with the data. E.g. wrapping up the if/else choices into a data structure. Currently I actually found studying up on actual category theory easier than all the \"easy introduction\" things regarding monads. As in, the ideas when presented straightforwardly and technically correct are simpler than we give credence to. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20309894,"author":"apta","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Go proposal: Leave \u201cif err != nil\u201d alone?","text":"> Or Java? Yes - that was implied in the same sentence where I wrote \"(e.g. exceptions or actual compiler enforced error handling like Rust).\" :-) > As far as I know, race conditions happen and leak out into production with Scala and Java. They do. But there are more techniques in those languages (such as immutable collections, as their type systems are actually able to model and implement them) to mitigate the issue. > and really the lesson of programming in the large for the past 30 years, is that it's not enough to have mathematical or methodological power in guaranteeing correctness in a program. I agree there. I actually don't abide by the ideas that using a language like Haskell or Idris or what have you will automagically grant you superior or error-free software. I actually like what talks like these have to say: * [LINK] * [VIDEO] However, that does not mean we disregard established practices, only to try to reinvent them in a bad way as we see golang trying to do (no generics - even though many other languages implemented them \"correctly\", bad error handling, no sum types, null pointers, and so on). They purposely disregarded these works without good arguments at all, and now they're struggling to find workarounds, or continue to dismiss them as non-issues, even though they clearly are. The way I see it, the moment Java gets fibers and value types implemented, and GraalVM's native compilation is mature enough for use, golang's appeal as a devops langauge where it en","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40982625,"author":"fzeindl","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Java Virtual Threads: A Case Study","text":"Does it shake out to any real advantage? To put it shortly: Writing single-threaded blocking code is far easier for most people and has many other benefits, like more understandable and readable programs: [VIDEO] The main reason why non-blocking IO with it's style of intertwining concurrency and algorithms came along is that starting a thread for every request was too expensive. With virtual threads that problem is eliminated so we can go back to writing blocking code.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42134831,"author":"fzeindl","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Async await: the worst thing to happen to programming?","text":"Here are more arguments against async/await: [VIDEO] Ron Pressler always was an advocate for blocking code and even joined oracle to add virtual threads to the JVM, thus invalidating the performance argument of the async/await/non-blocking crowd. I really wish young developers would be taught about the actor model and communicating sequential processes before falling for the false promises of async/await-land. And I wish JavaScript runtimes had a way of expressing continuations /blocking threads on their eventloop.","stance":"rec"}],"45X4VP8CGtk":[{"hn_comment_id":23182294,"author":"laxd","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Mini-Mainframe at Home: A 6-CPU Server from 1997","text":"I'm shure alot of you have seen this already. If not, it's an entertaining 45 minutes [VIDEO] (Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25397172,"author":"galoisgirl","month":"2020-12","story_title":"GnuCOBOL 3.1.1","text":"He did, his talk about it is really interesting: [VIDEO] > He and his old computer friends played around with some applications that were on the platform, and even made an FTP server that put some data on the internet. Per [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"45mMioJ5szc":[{"hn_comment_id":2661524,"author":"edanm","month":"2011-06","story_title":"The end of Facebook","text":"(Even more off-topic) You really reminded me of Jordan's \"Failure\" commercial, which everyone should see: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11498282,"author":"jathu","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Every shot Kobe Bryant ever took","text":"Reminds me of the Jordan commercial [1] where he mentions he lost more than 9000 shots in his career, lost almost 300 games and missed 26 game winning shots. Amazing commercial (like most Nike commercials). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"46ehrFk-gLk":[{"hn_comment_id":6058679,"author":"tehwalrus","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Reminding Starbucks that Beautiful Code Should Make Beautiful Language","text":"They isn't just plural, it's also gender-neutral. Gender neutral pronouns: they're here to stay[1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6825373,"author":"mdisraeli","month":"2013-12","story_title":"The Power of a Pronoun","text":"Because no-one's posted it yet, Tom Scott has a great video on grammatical gender that is worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10104554,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2015-08","story_title":"How to Fold a Julia Fractal","text":"> the word cromulent ... is not even a real word Only to a prescriptivist[1] trying to keep the language static. \"Cromulent\" is slowly making its way into descriptivist[1] dictionaries and is recognized about as often as any other new word, so it just as much a \"real\" word as other new words (\"email\", \"google\" (transitive verb), \"truthiness\"). > the correctness of using a singular they The alternative is gendered pronouns which have several problems[2]. /* I'm not trying to nitpick your post; I just thought these two Tom Scott clips were fun and relevant to these grammar issues. */ [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"48sCx-wBs34":[{"hn_comment_id":27190876,"author":"pseudolus","month":"2021-05","story_title":"First nuclear detonation created \u2018impossible\u2019 quasicrystals","text":"The Youtube channel \"Veritasium\" featured a great video on Penrose tilings and their relationship to quasicrystals [0]. A fascinating example of a mathematical discovery with a previously unsuspected physical incarnation. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27970673,"author":"belter","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The first atomic bomb created \u2018forbidden\u2019 quasicrystal","text":"Great video thanks for sharing. My brain still hurting, it tried to explode at 14.38 :-) [VIDEO] Also quite interesting these are found in a few meteorites. I wonder if somebody is confidentially keeping some quasicrystal with very special properties somewhere. \"Third-ever natural quasicrystal found in Siberian meteorite\" [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35274654,"author":"MontagFTB","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Mathematicians discover shape that can tile a wall and never repeat","text":"My kids and I geeked out over the Veritasium video on Penrose tiles ( [VIDEO] ). It is pretty exciting to see approachable math like this being discovered before our eyes.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27969173,"author":"namelosw","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The first atomic bomb created \u2018forbidden\u2019 quasicrystal","text":"I just happened to come across this fascinating video[0] yesterday that explained the same thing. And he mentioned the crystal as well. [0] The Infinite Pattern That Never Repeats: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"495nCzxM9PI":[{"hn_comment_id":41070300,"author":"crdrost","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Defense of Lisp macros: The automotive field as a case in point","text":"Related to the visual simulations, one of Alan Kay's favorite demos over the years has been to show folks Sketchpad, [VIDEO] partly as a \"this is what we were doing in 1962, you are now as far removed from that demo as that demo was removed from the year 1900 -- do you really feel like you've made the analogous/concomitant progress in programming?\" ... and one of his points there was that a lot of programming acts as a \"pop music\" where you are trying to replicate the latest new sounds and marginally iterate on those, rather than study the classics and the greats and the legacy of awesome things that had been done in the past.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11113378,"author":"aidos","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Programming computer animation in 1964 [video]","text":"So good. It never ceases to amaze me what could be done in such constrained systems (I guess it'll always look like that in retrospect). For anyone who has never seen it, Sketchpad, from the 60s: [LINK] Edit: With commentary from Alan Kay! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31126175,"author":"Jach","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?","text":"For \"how things work\", I recommend the book Code by Charles Petzold. After that, Jon Stokes's Inside the Machine will give a lot of details on CPU architectures up to Intel's Core 2 Duo. You can also try following along a computer engineering book if you want to go that low in detail with exercises, Digital Fundamentals by Floyd is a common textbook (I have an old 8th edition). History-wise, enjoy learning slowly because there's so much that even if you dedicated yourself to it you wouldn't be \"done\" any time soon! Some suggestions in order though: Watching The Mother of All Demos : [LINK] A short clip of Sketchpad presented by Alan Kay: [VIDEO] An article from the 40s that also inspired Engelbart: [LINK] The Information by James Gleick What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg Lastly, to mix up in whatever order you please, some paper collections: Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective edited by Andreas Paepcke History of Programming Languages papers for various langs you're interested in, here's the set from the second conference in 1993 [LINK] but there have been further conferences to check out too if it's interesting Also all of the Turing Award winners' lectures I've read have been good [LINK] All that and some good recommendations others have given should keep you busy for a while!","stance":"rec"}],"49kBWM3RQQ8":[{"hn_comment_id":22883269,"author":"stakkur","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?","text":"I started using Emacs in earnest a few years ago, especially Org-Mode. At first, I tried every customization I came across and loaded up my init file with all the cool mods. But when things went wrong, I had no clue how to fix them. So after about a year I started over, resetting my config and using Emacs customization over custom elisp writing to get a working init file. It helped me learn a lot . This is the path I recommend: do small customizations using Emacs' built-in features, then learn elisp later. I learned a lot from this CS prof's videos, and it's a good, practical learning path I'd recommend: [VIDEO] If you're into writing, I maintain a list of resources for writing with Emacs: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30934669,"author":"slk500","month":"2022-04","story_title":"What\u2019s new in Emacs 28.1?","text":"You have to find specific need that emacs will fulfil. Org-mode is the key. Don't try to use it like IDE for coding for a start. I recommend start with video tutorials: 1. Mike Zamansky [VIDEO] 2. Rainer K\u00f6nig org-mode [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"4AC6RSau7r8":[{"hn_comment_id":15786063,"author":"Sir_Substance","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Bitcoin World\u2019s 30th Largest Currency, Market Cap Closes on Mastercard","text":">then didn't some subset of techies print a lot more money than there is? I think it's quite important that you watch this: [VIDEO] If you feel extremely angry afterwards, you're not alone.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16961771,"author":"mkstowegnv","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Switzerland: First country to have national referendum about Sovereign Money","text":"Money has a very long history and discussions about money are deeply entangled in bitter and fanatical battles between political/ religious/ philosophical viewpoints. Many of those viewpoints ignore the counterintuitive ways that money and banking actually work. For the most part, bankers and economists have a vested interest in keeping as many outsiders as possible from understanding how it really works. For all its flaws and strange history, the first Money as Debt video [1] still makes the most sense to me and I have yet to find an economist at a dinner party who refutes the disturbing conclusion that modern monetary policy is inherently unstable and depends on continuous economic growth. I welcome any links to any counterarguments that are not a confusing morass of obfuscating terminology. Show me a crystal clear model, or a common sense presentation like this video, that argues that the current monetary system is not a Ponzi scheme. 1 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17008790,"author":"Sir_Substance","month":"2018-05","story_title":"The Micronesian island of Yap has stone money too heavy to move","text":">I think it's also similar, to a lesser degree, to modern card-based banking, in which all the money physically sits in a vault and only changes hands virtually. That is in no way how modern banking works. Only about 1/7th of the money in peoples bank accounts in the US has a physical counterpart in any bank vault, almost all of the \"money\" in bank accounts is purely virtual. Most money today is not printed by the mint but instead wizarded into existence in a fashion pretty much the same as how world of warcraft gold is created, but with regulatory restrictions in place around the wizardry to create desired economic outcomes. When a crisis prompts the population to collectively attempt to withdraw more than this reserve 1/7th, it's called a \"run on the bank\". The bank is unable to fulfill it's obligations[1], and economies break down as faith in the currency collapses. This is exactly what happened to Cypris in 2012. The whole system basically hinges on a significant majority of the population not scrutinizing the banking sector too closely. If you'd like to know more, there are quite a few great youtube videos on fractional reserve banking, and it's absolutely worth investing an hour to watch one of the longer ones. This one is pretty good and approachable, although it's certainly biased: [VIDEO] [1] It's actually more complex than this. Central banks can help prop up other banks in this case, but central banks also have their limits in the case of a nation-wide run on multi","stance":"rec"}],"4AfRAVcThyA":[{"hn_comment_id":15548269,"author":"slavik81","month":"2017-10","story_title":"C++17 Is Here: Interview with Herb Sutter","text":"Herb Sutter's talk about it is by far the best talk I've seen from from CppCon17. \"Meta: Thoughts on generative C++\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16259949,"author":"xaedes","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Outperforming LAPACK with C++ metaprogramming","text":"The talk about the reflection proposal was amazing. Meta classes are also very cool. We can only hope it comes fast. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"4F72VULWFvc":[{"hn_comment_id":837935,"author":"derwiki","month":"2009-09","story_title":"Using Polymorphism instead of conditionals when programming","text":"Google posted a tech talk about this a while ago: [VIDEO] which is more comprehensive than the posted article.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1454656,"author":"VBprogrammer","month":"2010-06","story_title":"Criminal Overengineering","text":"I completely disagree with the example given in this blog. I don't have time to give a full explaination but I believe the google clean code talks gives a far better arguement than I ever could. On the general principle I agree that overengineering is to be avoided, but I actually think the example shows a clear disregard for Object Orientated principles. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31464312,"author":"Mr_P","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Flags Are a Code Smell (2014)","text":"It's not so much the existence of the flag, itself, but rather using an if-statement at the deepest-level of the call stack to conditionally modify behavior. This talk gives a great overview of why boolean flags (rather, if-statements) can be a code smell: [VIDEO] OP's blogpost advocates for data-oriented design (e.g. Entity Component Systems) as a mechanism for avoiding this, whereas the talk I've linked advocates for OOP. Both mechanisms are equally valid (imho) and are inline with widely-adopted industry practices for software architecture.","stance":"rec"}],"4HgShra-KnY":[{"hn_comment_id":26909592,"author":"justaguy88","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Cerebras\u2019 new monster AI chip adds 1.4T transistors","text":"You might like this talk that describes parts of the compiler ecosystem that are lacking standardization for accelerators [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27017940,"author":"CalChris","month":"2021-05","story_title":"\u201cShared libraries are not a good thing in general\u201d","text":"They've tried variations of this. It takes instruction bits to describe these registers: 32 regs is 5 bits, target + src1 + src2 is 15 bits already. They've tried scratch pads. The Mill CPU's Belt is yet another approach. [LINK] [LINK] How to Use 1000 Registers [LINK] 1000 registers would be 10 bits. So they tried register windows. These are all good ideas but they get to compete. So far, I'm a huge AArch64 fan but I now see the purpose of RISC-V. I watched Chris Lattner's ASPLOS talk and it finally clicked. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27743756,"author":"mikeurbach","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Chisel/FIRRTL Hardware Compiler Framework","text":"I contribute to CIRCT, so I feel like I should chime in here. I personally hope that it can provide exactly the kind of unifying IRs we are all hoping for in the open-source community. The fact that the tools are implemented in C++ may be a win for some, but I think the CIRCT project is compelling for much deeper reasons. The README states the ambition clearly: > By working together, we hope that we can build a new center of gravity to draw contributions from the small (but enthusiastic!) community of people who work on open hardware tooling. There are weekly community meetings that are open to the public, and we have guest speakers from all sorts of interesting projects in the open-source community. Many of those are leading to collaborations and contributions to CIRCT. There hasn't been much (any?) discussion of CIRCT on HN, but rather than present the reasons I think it's so great here, I'll point to a talk[1] I gave earlier this year and a much better talk[2] Chris Lattner gave shortly thereafter, both of which lead up to the \"Why CIRCT?\" question in the second half. Looking back at that SymbiFlow thread, I see familiar faces that are now actively contributing to CIRCT. There are mentions of many different hardware IRs in some of the posts, but at least three have first-class support in CIRCT today: FIRRTL[3], LLHD[4], and Calyx[5]. This is all very recent and experimental, but I would say the results are already promising. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5]","stance":"rec"}],"4JWwOzEDGss":[{"hn_comment_id":27111817,"author":"SavantIdiot","month":"2021-05","story_title":"'Sesame Street': from radical experiment to beloved TV mainstay","text":"Philip Glass scored an animation for Sesame Street. [VIDEO] I blame this for my interest in modern classical. I can't imagine them doing something so progressive today. But that's because they had a captive audience in the 70's.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18253445,"author":"krapp","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Caroll Spinney Leaves \u2018Sesame Street\u2019 After Nearly 50 Years","text":"Sesame Street had so many great creative and musical segments before it turned into the Elmo show. It didn't talk down to children or insult their intelligence. It inspired children rather than just try to hypnotize them with colors and repetition to shut them up for an hour. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"4KtotxNAwME":[{"hn_comment_id":35652904,"author":"pdpi","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Can Rust Beat JavaScript in 2023?","text":"Greg Johnston, author of the Leptos framework, did a pretty good video about this a few weeks ago[0]. The TLDR is (of course): it depends. WASM has no native access to the DOM, so all DOM manipulations from wasm-land have to go through JS bindings with all the (de)serialisation costs that go with crossing the language boundary. That eats up a lot of whatever performance gains you'd see from rust-on-wasm for pure compute. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36761577,"author":"theironhammer","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Real world Svelte speed difference compared to virtual DOM frameworks?","text":"[VIDEO] This video might be helpful. Leptos uses Signals, borrowing ideas from SolidJS to update the DOM. There's no VirtualDOM like React. Svelte also doesn't use a VDOM. When there's a state change React has to rerender the entire VDOM tree and the diff it with the real DOM, whereas using the Signals model those frameworks make the change directly in the real DOM. I'm not sure how Svelte manipulates the DOM exactly but I it's similar to how it's done with Frameworks that use Signals such as Leptos and SolidJS. I would say Developer velocity is key if you're a developer. Svelte is a big winner here as it's mental model is easier to understand than React's.","stance":"rec"}],"4KuVvb9DTaU":[{"hn_comment_id":16922810,"author":"ballenf","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Don\u2019t buy the MacBook Pros even on sale, in my opinion","text":"Louis Rossmann has examined these issues in detail on his electronics repair YouTube channel: [VIDEO] (I disagree with the level of his vitriol against Apple, but I appreciate his deep teardowns and clear explanations. He just doesn't seem to understand how valuable the Apple software is vs. Windows to those who need or appreciate osx.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18159373,"author":"ru999gol","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Apple\u2019s repair kill switch hasn\u2019t been activated yet","text":"Apple intentionally builds their keyboards in such a way that it is incredible difficult to replace, the amount of skilled labor required doesn't make it profitable to just replace the keyboard. Its eye opening seeing a keyboard replacement being performed: [VIDEO] Who is to blame for letting it get so far? I think its not just Apples fault, its governments fault not regulating them and consumers fault for still buying and even defending their practices (which you can very well observe in this thread).","stance":"rec"}],"4PHT-zBxKQQ":[{"hn_comment_id":31553757,"author":"AlexandrB","month":"2022-05","story_title":"What is the web revival?","text":"There's a great video[1] on VRChat and how its current state seems to encapsulate a lot of the article's ethos but for emerging metaverse tech. I suspect that if Meta is successful with their metaverse efforts it will be a repeat of the Geocities -> Facebook transition. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46305919,"author":"cagenut","month":"2025-12","story_title":"VRChat: \u201cThere are more Japanese creators than all other countries combined\u201d","text":"People Make Games did a mini documentary on almost exactly what you're asking: [VIDEO] Its three years old so things have slightly matured.","stance":"rec"}],"4P_kbF0EbZM":[{"hn_comment_id":32973951,"author":"Forricide","month":"2022-09","story_title":"C++20, How Hard Could It Be","text":"I really love this talk in particular: [VIDEO] (On charconv) But any of the ones I've seen from Stephan have been fantastic, I think, although I'm not actually sure if I've seen more. He seems to have a lot of talks on very specific subjects, which can be really fun. > Hyrum Wright is in the audience yelling interjections as a result of Hyrum's law This sounds absolutely hilarious, I'll have to take a look.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24436500,"author":"osolo","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Parsing floats in C++: benchmarking strtod vs. from_chars","text":"For those interested in more information about performance was achieved, Stephan Lavavej gave a talk about this very subject during CppCon 2019 [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24939484,"author":"ygra","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Rendering floating numbers: advances in problems you didn\u2019t know you had (2011)","text":"Stephan T Lavavej also had a surprisingly fun and approachable talk on that problem, talking about how charconv got implemented and improved in Microsoft's C++ standard library: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4PaWFYm0kEw":[{"hn_comment_id":31821671,"author":"thundergolfer","month":"2022-06","story_title":"The Documentation Triangle, or, why code isn't self documenting","text":"Oral Tradition in Software Engineering[1] by Bryan Cantrill really helped me appreciate that long comments in code can be a treasured part of a software space. I started my career in a pretty low-comment Ruby codebase, but now count myself as a person partial to adding lengthy 'why not how' commentary in programs. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32396616,"author":"OmarAssadi","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The Story of Mel (1983)","text":"I\u2019m surprised I haven\u2019t seen this linked yet, but Bryan Cantrill of dtrace, Sun, lawnmower, Joyent, etc, fame gave an amazing talk for Monktoberfest 2016, titled \u201cOral Tradition in Software Engineering\u201d, which features The Story of Mel [1]. Highly recommend checking it out \u2014 there are loads of little gems and stories like this throughout. All of his other presentations are great too and definitely worth a listen if you like this sort of thing [2]. A couple of my favorites are \u201cFork Yeah! The Rise and Development of Illumos\u201d [3] and \u201cDebugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind\u201d [4]. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19766160,"author":"secstate","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Back in the Day: Unix, Minix and Linux","text":"I love historical pieces about technology. There's so much new and shiny all the time in tech, it's nice to reflect on where we've been. Makes me want to re-watch Bryan's talk at Monktoberfest a few years ago on oral tradition in tech: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22791743,"author":"thristian","month":"2020-04","story_title":"WhyTheName","text":"You may be interested in this 2016 talk about oral history in software engineering: [VIDEO] To oversimplify: we should write more interesting and historical comments in our codebases, write more blog posts and give more talks, and share more links to blog posts and talks other people have created.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43095240,"author":"jjice","month":"2025-02","story_title":"XOR","text":"One of my favorite XOR stories is from Bryan Cantrill (of Oxide, Joyent, and Sun) in this presentation [0] and this video [1]. To avoid clicking a link: When he was at Sun, he was chatting with a coworker (Roger Faulkner) about the lack of logical XOR in C. Faulkner said it was because you couldn't short circuit it, and Brian thought that was wild. Then Roger emailed Dennis Ritchie to ask and he confirmed it was what Faulkner had said. That stories gets me every time! First of all, it's very funny and well delivered by Cantrill, but it's also just so incredible that they could ask the man himself. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46544477,"author":"shagie","month":"2026-01","story_title":"The Jeff Dean Facts","text":"As I write this, catb is not serving promptly... so [LINK] I also recommend Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4Q7FTjhvZ7Y":[{"hn_comment_id":20596499,"author":"jwatt","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Contributing to the Mozilla code base","text":"It was Netscape in 1999 he got flown out. Documented in Code Rush, which is an awesome documentary for anyone interested in the history of the Web: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22816350,"author":"e15ctr0n","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Mitchell Baker Named CEO of Mozilla","text":"> Does anyone can tell anything positive about her? She's the reason Mozilla exists today as an independent, non-profit organization. On March 31, 1998 Netscape allowed the Mozilla code base to be open sourced under the Mozilla Project. [1][2] This was the result of an intensive year-long effort to (1) remove proprietary source code that couldn't be open-sourced, (2) release the source code under a brand new license called the Mozilla Public License. This license was written principally by Mitchell Baker whose formal education is in law, with input from ESR, Linus Torvalds, VA Research, etc. [3] On July 14, 2003 AOL (which had acquired Netscape earlier) closed down the Netscape division and laid off almost everyone there, including Mitchell Baker. That very day Mitch Kapor [4] stepped in with funding and advice to help Baker and a core team of total 10 employees set up the Mozilla Foundation in an office in Mountain View that is today occupied by the Khan Academy. [5] Wikipedia [6] has a good summary of her career. The documentary Code Rush is required viewing, IMHO, to capture some of the excitement of that era. [7][8] Bonus points for spotting JWZ. :-) [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK] [7] [LINK] [8] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18524776,"author":"Reedx","month":"2018-11","story_title":"AOL acquires Netscape in $4.2B deal (1998)","text":"There's a good Netscape documentary filmed during their last year leading up to the acquisition. When they were working to get the Mozilla source code released. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20469679,"author":"mtmail","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Books to recommend about early tech history (late 90s)?","text":"\"The PayPal Wars\". Also see [LINK] \"Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days\" \"Project Code Rush\", a 1h documentary ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21320525,"author":"lancebeet","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?","text":"I really recommend the 2000 documentary Code Rush[1] about Netscape's open sourcing of the browser and acquisition by AOL. It doesn't give any major insights into the industry, but does give a glimpse of what the culture was like back then. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22707433,"author":"ragle","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Yelp to stop auto-creating fundraisers after outrage from business owners","text":"> and worked on a few important pieces of software before becoming a bar owner instead. Fun documentary: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23452034,"author":"Jugurtha","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Cloudflare TV","text":"Not parent, but I thought it were a TV stream that filmed Cloudflare teams solving problems. Similar to the documentary[1] \"Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks\" where they show the life of interns developing an actual product at Fog Creek, the first paying customer, bug fixes, etc. I appreciated that one, as I did \"Code Rush\" [3], an embedded documentary following people at Netscape in 1998, even shows the moment Jamie Zawinski bringing the source code and uploading it, or moments where they needed Apple to greenlight using proprietary code, trying to reach Steve Jobs, and ending up implementing it. Another one I liked was \"Downloaded\", a documentary about Napster with the main people (Sean Fanning, Sean Parker, Ron Conway, etc.)[4] PS: Since you're here, I was unable to log to my CloudFlare account for more than a week, reset my password an everything, but always couldn't log in until a couple of days ago. I would have wanted to see a video on the background of the issue and how it was resolved : ) [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [VIDEO] [4]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23476139,"author":"purerandomness","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Career and life advice for a 30yo","text":"There's a wide community of people feeling just like you, assembling in \"Maker communities\", as they call it. Good entry points are the IndieHackers podcast, and conferences like MicroConf (watch their conference talk recordings here, especially Patrick McKenzie's aka patio11 [0]) The basic idea is to create a sustainable job you love for yourself, the people that depend on you, and many others. The antithesis of \"Our incredible journey\", aka VC sellout. Once you've done this, you can do whatever you want. Build a game company. Pursue academia [1]. Join the demoscene, tour the world, join demo party competitions and write sick 64k intros. Commit to open source and help the Haiku project. Hang around at your local hacker space and help create an independend mesh-based ISP. I know exactly what you're talking about. I watched the Netscape documentary \"Project Code Rush\" [2] with Jamie Zawinski and loved the spirit and the feeling of doing something important. It feels like it's in such a stark contrast to many people's reality, pushing JIRA tickets in a toxic AdTech startup. However, I think it's an illusion. There never was a \"golden age\", and people simply forget that bullshit jobs always existed, you just don't see domcumentaries of them, nobody would watch them. For me, what helped me was realizing that the world, or the \"industry\" doesn't owe me anything, and I'm completely on my own, and if I want to do something meaningful, well, I'll have to create my own sustainable job","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25849889,"author":"RichardCA","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Kids find a security flaw in Linux Mint by mashing keys","text":"It has something to do with the 1990's dot-com culture, like the original Netscape was somehow more pure than what came after, and this causes him to view modern inheritors like YC with a jaundiced eye. You can watch this if you have an hour. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32801709,"author":"rzzzt","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"Code Rush, a one-hour glimpse into Netscape Communications in 1998, just as they open source their browser: [VIDEO] I get very tired whenever I watch it for some reason.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37279573,"author":"akling","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Firefox 1.0 New York Times Ad","text":"There\u2019s a fun documentary that follows some folks inside Netscape during the rush to make Mozilla open source: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40825832,"author":"wenbin","month":"2024-06","story_title":"The story, as best I can remember, of the origin of Mosaic and Netscape [video]","text":"gonna watch it over the weekend :) And re-watch this also - Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla Documentary [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49371264,"author":"st_goliath","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?","text":"Given the context and your reference to Quake, I assume by \"the older days\" you mean the 90s, PCs and early Windows? If you weren't previously aware of \"The Old New Thing\" blog, Raymond Chen has been sharing stories about Windows 95 development for decades at this point. So many in fact, he published a book under the same name (the book is essentially a best-of collection from the blog in paper form). The os2museum[1] blog is also a gold mine. Tim Paterson at one point tried to start blogging, sharing a few anecdotes about the early days of DOS[2] Speaking of books, you might enjoy \"Showstopper!\" about the development of NT, even tough it is a bit shallow on the technical side. For the technical aspects, you might want to get it together with \"Inside Windows NT\" (first edition) by Helen Custer. You might also enjoy: \"Another Boring Topic\" [3] YouTube channel, covering (among other things) early Windows development in excruciating detail and \"Old Computers Sucked\" [4], actually trying to run the software on era appropriate hardware. \"Cathode Ray Dude\" is all over the place but often also covers hardware and software of roughly that era[5]. A sibling comment already mentioned JWZs blog, if you have fond memories about Netscape, you might enjoy \"Project Code Rush\" [6]. Btw. Netscape Navigator 3.0 has just turned 30. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4QXZ2RzN_Oo":[{"hn_comment_id":19155304,"author":"mabbo","month":"2019-02","story_title":"The Tech Behind SpaceX\u2019s New Engine","text":"Scott Manley has a fantastic video explaining all of this: [VIDEO] In terms of efficiency, it's worth mentioning that even tiny gains have big impacts because of the rocket equation. Having a 1% boost the entire time the rocket is running can have an enormous impact in the overall velocity, or reduce the overall amount of fuel needed for the same targets.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20816454,"author":"JshWright","month":"2019-08","story_title":"150 Meter SpaceX Starhopper Test [video]","text":"Calling Raptor \"really complex\" still manages to undersell it a bit, in my opinion. It's pushing the state of the art in rocket engine design pretty significantly. It's the first full flow closed cycle engine to fly. For folks who are interested in learning more about rocket engines, Scott Manley is a great resource: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21397405,"author":"paranoidrobot","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Pro (noun.), abbreviation of Professional: born 1798, died 2019, aged 221","text":"If you're interested, Scott Manley gives a good intro to the way rocket engines work, and in particular turbo pumps[1] at ~3:30. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4RSht_aV7AU":[{"hn_comment_id":29217023,"author":"tda","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Design of the Connection Machine (1994)","text":"This is the talk: [VIDEO] , it is a full hour. Quite enjoyable but light on in depth technical stuff. Don't recall hem mentioning how git python running technically, it is more about how he came in the position to do so in the first place.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30814167,"author":"jackjackk0","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The counterintuitive rise of Python in scientific computing (2020)","text":"I recommend one of the recent videos by Dave Beazly [1]. He lived through and contributed to the raise of Python in scientific computing first hand in the 90s, and offers some interesting insights. Plus he's always quite an entertainer. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37309436,"author":"Qem","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?","text":"According to David Beazley, it was lucky to already being around by the time scientific computing folks were in need for dynamic languages as wrappers to help with increasingly complex hardware and projects written in lower level languages, and the only other viable alternatives back then were Perl and tcl. Watch this talk: [VIDEO] Then it just snowballed since that time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40755684,"author":"Qem","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Connection Machine Lisp (1986)","text":"> it is my understanding that what this paper describes was never actually shipped This reminds me of an interesting talk by David Beazley where he discuss the early days of Python, when IIRC he was a student at a national lab, and they managed to run the Python REPL in an connection machine 5 that people had a hard time programming in lower level languages. It seems the work they did back then, writing modules that allowed the Python interpreter to interoperate with scientific code was one of the foundations for it to snowball many years later. So I wonder if what this paper describes had shipped in time, if that would lead us by butterfly effect into the alternative timeline where Lisp dominates scientific computing, instead of Python. See [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4VrLQXR7mKU":[{"hn_comment_id":49245537,"author":"jjbinx007","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Convince an AI it's not alive in psychological horror game Prove You're Human","text":"If anyone hasn't seen it yet there is an excellent short movie online called \"I'm not a Robot\". [VIDEO] Well worth a watch.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43427913,"author":"Aachen","month":"2025-03","story_title":"FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies","text":"Oh my, a Dutch film that actually sounds good?! I get to watch a movie that's originally in my native language for perhaps the second time in my life, thanks for linking this :D Edit: and it's on YouTube in full! Was wondering which streaming service I'd have to buy for this niche genre of Dutch sci-fi but that makes life easy: [VIDEO] Final update: well, that was certainly special. Favorite moment was 10:26\u201310:36 ^^. Don't think that comes fully across in the baked-in subtitles in English though. Overall it could have been an episode of Dark Mirror, just shorter. Thanks again for the tip :)","stance":"rec"}],"4Vw6uF2LdZw":[{"hn_comment_id":8034786,"author":"timtas","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Free markets killed capitalism","text":"Sigh. Ideologues drinking and re-drinking their own bathwater. The thesis of this article is nearly opposite of the truth. Capitalism -- the kind we have evolved (call it socio-crony-capitalism) -- has badly wounded free markets. Here's at least a bit of an antidote: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22702858,"author":"rollinDyno","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Share your favourite talks on YouTube","text":"Recently I have really enjoyed: * Joseph Stiglitz on the introduction of informational mechanisms in Economics [1] * Burton Folsom on the myth of robber barons and the great american entrepreneurs of the 19th century. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4WwAQqWUkpI":[{"hn_comment_id":16254551,"author":"Momquist","month":"2018-01","story_title":"With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there\u2019s a likely culprit","text":"You're exagerating the parent's claims. It is possible that religion can reduce stress, and help against depression without being an absolute defense. Our brain may just be wired that way. This doesn't even involve God or the supernatural actually existing for these effects to be real. You should check some of the talks, and lectures by Robert Sapolsky (an atheist), who advances this in several of them. Biological Underpinnings of Religiosity: [VIDEO] Religion Is Nature's Antidepressant: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36218742,"author":"TremendousJudge","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics","text":"Here's a lecture by Robert Sapolsky where he goes into some theories involving schizotypal individuals (and other mental disorders) and culture: [VIDEO] Long story short, the theory goes that being schizotypal (but not full-blown schizophrenic) could be an advantageous trait in human society, usually by filling some spiritual, ritual, or religious role in the group. These people are high status in their societies, and have many chances for passing on their genes.","stance":"rec"}],"4XpnKHJAok8":[{"hn_comment_id":71948,"author":"tmm1","month":"2007-10","story_title":"What does News.YC think of distributed version control?","text":"I'd recommend darcs or git. Check out Linus' talk on git, he basically spends 70 minutes talking about why a distributed VCS is vastly superior to any centralized system. [VIDEO] ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2483259,"author":"JonnieCache","month":"2011-04","story_title":"The Merge Button","text":"Watch this video and you will become enlightened as to why this is the case: [Linus Torvalds on Git] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3721524,"author":"benthumb","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Writing and Speaking","text":"A great speech @ Google on a subject directly apropos of pg's start-up spiel: [LINK] Another awesome speech from Google's tech talk series (it takes a little bit of tyrant to pull this off, tho): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16841467,"author":"hotwire","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless. His QuakeCon talks are particularly good. QuakeCon 2011 - [LINK] QuakeCon 2012 - [LINK] I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code. Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29798975,"author":"Puts","month":"2022-01","story_title":"No code reviews by default","text":"This can not be posted too many times. [VIDEO] Linus Torvalds talk on Google about how GIT is more a way of working then a piece of software. Everybody commits upwards in a tree of trust. If you do it this way you get automatic code reviews and in any team someone should be responsible for the \"product\" anyway and highest up in the hierarchy.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38117395,"author":"fernandotakai","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Confusing Git Terminology","text":"you are getting confused here. what you have is a \"paper receipt\" (your checked out version) from your bank. something that, if you need an up-to-date version (from another remote), you need to request a new one (by issuing git fetch). git is, by default, distributed, so whenever you need to see the world outside, you need to be explicit. linus made it this way because back in the day (not sure right now tbf) tons of kernel developers do work without any internet connection, and would only connect to pull/send patches. this talk[0] by linus from 2007 (i remember watching it on google videos lol) explains really well where the git mentality came from. i really recommend it to you, since it feels like you are not really getting how git works. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38128071,"author":"PH95VuimJjqBqy","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Confusing Git Terminology","text":"This talk by Linus is iconic, if you haven't watched it you should. [VIDEO] He talks about what SVN got wrong, specifically, that it made branching easy and it's the merging that's the important piece. Git won because it made merging easy.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12970638,"author":"amouat","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Git workflow for small teams","text":"I honestly don't believe it is an exaggeration. Take a look at this video for Linus's thoughts [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33602375,"author":"javier_e06","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Scaling Mastodon is impossible","text":"The post is a collection of rambling thoughts. The author should take a look at Linux Torvalds talk with Google (2009). [VIDEO] back and day when development was centralized (no cloning). The concept of \"Trusted Circles\" is at the core any resilient information exchange and it is by definition: Decentralized.","stance":"rec"}],"4YTfxresvS8":[{"hn_comment_id":17980155,"author":"raphlinus","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Using Rust for Game Development [video]","text":"I found this excellent talk to be complementary to my talk[1] on data-oriented GUI in Rust, not to plug my own work too much. I found a lot of common ground: * Trying to write object-oriented code in Rust doesn't work well. Writing data-oriented code does. * \"Fighting the borrow checker\" is a sign you might be doing it wrong. Try data-oriented approaches instead. * Use a structure-of-arrays rather than an array-of-structures. * Use what I call \"state splitting\" to borrow mutable references to just the state you need; this works well with the structure-of-arrays approach and is a powerful motivator to use it. * To build graph-like structures, reach for a Vec of components, and indexes into the Vec for relationships, as your first choice. Self-references, arena allocators, and Rc are viable alternatives, but you should have a good reason to use them instead of Vec. * Some form of dynamic typing is useful to keep your system loosely coupled (though we ended up with very different forms of dynamic typing, see below). * Data-oriented approaches have taken root in the C++ gaming community, mostly motivated by performance, but adapt well to Rust, and some of the ideas may be useful in domains beyond gaming. There were some other points that went beyond what I talked about, but could fit in well: * A \"generational index\" is a good way to avoid use-after-free style errors that result from the use of a stale index. The slotmap crate can help. And now for the things that are different. ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24987890,"author":"exDM69","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Dear ImGui \u2013 Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++","text":"As much as I like Dear ImGui, the immediate mode paradigm doesn't work everywhere. The problem of \"page tearing\" (not to be confused with vsync) means you either need to render frames continuously, or at least 2 frames for every time you get input or need to implement some kind of \"retained mode state tracking\" on top of Imgui. It's good for games, but for applications where you're not rendering new frames constantly, the paradigm doesn't seem a very good fit. I wish there was a retained mode GUI library that would be as easy to integrate in your game and graphics apps as ImGui (or nuklear) is. On my spare time, I've been working on a retained mode GUI layout and rendering framework (not a complete GUI toolkit) that uses a DOM-like tree, CSS style flexbox layouts and produces a vertex buffer for rendering like ImGui does. Unfortunately life gets in the way, and all I have to show for my project is a small prototype in C and another one in Rust (can't decide which I like more) that draws some text and rectangles with a fancy layout. Code is not public at the moment but I'm willing to share it with anyone (on GitHub) who responds with a thoughtful comment or a good question. I have been following Raph Levien's fantastic work on Druid and Rust GUIs which has been very inspirational, this video in particular [0]. Where Raph is focused on native GUI rendering and high fidelity text output, I've only focused on rendering in a GPU application using shaders and only very basic text l","stance":"rec"}],"4YYvBLAF4T8":[{"hn_comment_id":15198605,"author":"lathiat","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Evan Doorbell's Classic Phreaking Tapes","text":"I realise the thread is phone phreaking related and that was kind of the point of your post; but in the spirit of the talk below to think more outside the box... There's a pretty good chance in many cases you can just open the external box with some easy to get (and relatively standard) key. And hit a button. Related: [LINK] This is a good related talk - goes outside the box on all the ways you can often get into commercial buildings without picking (or even in many cases, interacting with) the lock \"The Search for the Perfect Door\" by Deviant Ollam [VIDEO] Also good: [LINK] [Howard Payne & Deviant Ollam - This Key is Your Key, This Key is My Key] [LINK] [DEF CON 22 - Deviant Ollam & Howard Payne - Elevator Hacking - From the Pit to the Penthouse]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18217891,"author":"winrid","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"I hope this isn't too much of a stretch. Heard it recently and thought it was really interesting. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18741370,"author":"lathiat","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"Deviant Ollam - The Hotel Room Gourmet [LINK] Also not 2018 but his elevator with Howard Payne talk: [LINK] (1h version) [LINK] (2h version) And the search for the perfect door: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4Z2uzEM0ugY":[{"hn_comment_id":16354719,"author":"0x7f800000","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Is America having second thoughts about free speech?","text":"First, the First Amendment protects the speaker from being punished by the State for his speech. That's it. It does not protect the speaker from losing their job, or social ostracism, or anything else. Second, no one is rationally a \"free speech absolutist,\" which is an absurd position. For example, no one thinks their doctor has a right to lie to them, and that deliberate lies by a doctor to a patient must not be punished by the state. Third, Christopher Hitchens summarized my own opinion when he gave this speech, and he did it far more eloquently than I ever could, so I'll just link to the speech here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20199984,"author":"chroma","month":"2019-06","story_title":"YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki addresses hate speech controversy","text":"Back in 2007 Christopher Hitchens argued that Canada's hate speech laws are not only immoral but self-contradictory. The motion: \"Be it resolved: Freedom of speech includes the freedom to hate.\" Hitchens was fully in favor of that statement.[1] His argument has three parts. First, freedom of speech isn't about the rights of the speaker. It's about the rights of people who want to listen to that person's ideas. Every time you silence someone, you are infringing upon the rights of that audience. The audience might not agree. Maybe they want to understand the speaker's ideas so they can refute them. But if you prevent the audience from hearing those views, they can't refute them, and the bad views continue to spread. Second, censoring requires delegating a censor. But if you follow the first argument, you'll see that a censor decides for you what you are allowed to read or hear. I'm an adult and can decide that for myself, thank you very much. Third, if you are going to censor hate speech, then you must censor every major religious text. The bible and the quran contain passages encouraging hatred of homosexuals, subjugation of women, and taking of slaves. By our standards, they are utter abominations and any impartial application of a hate speech law would see these books banned. The oration by Hitchens is his best. He starts off by yelling \"Fire!\" to the audience, and explains just why the analogy of yelling fire in a crowded theater is a terrible one. (Mainly that it was coine","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20616914,"author":"Reedx","month":"2019-08","story_title":"8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service","text":"Christopher Hitchens yells fire in a crowded room here: [VIDEO] More importantly, his talk is worth watching for a strong understanding of why free speech is so vital.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23039298,"author":"dlivingston","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis","text":"There is a brilliant speech by the late Christopher Hitchens [0] on free speech that I must have seen a dozen times. An excerpt: \u201cThe freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently... Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be okay because you're in the safely moral majority. ...Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else, you, in potentia, are making a rod for your own back.\u201d [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24901736,"author":"arminiusreturns","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account","text":"I've said it before and I'll say it again; it's the same justification that has been used to justify moves away from democracy. \"Those poor dumb plebs, they just don't know any better, we, the elites, know whats best, so we should reduce the amount of democracy!\" [1] 1. [LINK] You say \"some moderation is required to prevent the apparent acceptance of some pretty hateful views along with conspiracy theories\", but the entire point is that then you are giving over to some other person or entity the power and ability to decide what you get to read. I think this should be rejected as a slippery slope made of ky-jelly. \"Don't take security in the false refuge of consensus and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be okay because you're in the safely moral majority.\" \"It is not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear, and every time you silence somebody, you make yourself a prisoner of your own action, because you deny yourself the right to hear something.\" - Christopher Hitchens [2] 2. [VIDEO] bonus (the whole speech is quotable): \"Dr. Johnson was waited upon by various delegations of people, to congratulate him of the nobility of the quality; of the Commons; the Lords; and also by a delegation of respectable ladies of London, who tended on him in his Fleet Street lodgings and congratulated him: \"Dr. Johnson,\" they said, \"We are delighted to find that you have not included any indecent or ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25697134,"author":"arminiusreturns","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Apple has threatened to ban Parler from the App Store","text":"My point is that you are then deigning someone to have the power to decide what is tolerant and what is not, when that is not nearly as acceptable or uncontroversial as you seem to be assuming. For example: > If progressives are pushing for more freedom, more tolerance, then to oppose it you have to, by definition, advocate for less of those. The framing of this is not correct. The problem is that not all \"progressives\" are pushing for that, which then undermines the assumption that opposition is therefor automatically intolerant and therefor automatically bannable/deplatformable. Some of the real progressives I follow such as Graham Elwood and Jimmy Dore have frequently had issues with their platforms giving them a hard time (demonteizing, etc) just because their positions or even topics of conversation are controversial, and many of them frequently mention they wouldn't be surprised to be deplatformed for said reason. To me, the real crux of your position, is that by completely bucking the standard of free speech in which we have legal definitions for speech that isn't tolerable, positions like yours seem to want to expand those definitions (libel, defamation, imminent incitement to violence, etc) to a point that you must now designate some non-legal entitiy as the moral arbiter of what is intolerant/tolerable, and that is indeed a most slippery slope. I think I have rewatched these two videos of Christopher Hitchens on the topic a good half dozen times each in the last yea","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18245659,"author":"walru","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?","text":"I would much rather live in a world where this person may be heard than likewise. \"Don't take refugee in the false security of consensus.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25673929,"author":"tdons","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump","text":"Christopher Hitchens (a Brit, can we still call them European?) would disagree with you. If you have a few minutes, check the beginning of this talk [1] about free speech. He treats the exact \"fire\" example at the very start of the talk :-) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27670094,"author":"Shosty123","month":"2021-06","story_title":"YouTube reinstates Right Wing Watch","text":"I like Christopher Hitchen's take on matters like these: \"And one person gets up and says, \u201cyou know what, this holocaust, I\u2019m not even sure it happened. In fact, I\u2019m pretty certain it didn\u2019t. Indeed, I begin to wonder if the only thing is that the Jews brought a little bit of violence on themselves.\u201d\u2014That person doesn\u2019t just have a right to speak, that person\u2019s right to speak must be given extra protection. Because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with. Might contain a grain of historical truth; might, in any case, give people to think why do they know what they think they already know. How do I know I know this except I\u2019ve always been taught this and never heard any thing else? It\u2019s always worth establishing first principle\u2026.don\u2019t take refuge in the false security of consensus and the feeling that, whatever you think, you\u2019re bound to be okay because you\u2019re in the safely, moral majority\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32680720,"author":"jesushax","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Backsliding on free expression around the world needs to end","text":"That is the lowest possible bar for free speech, which as a philosophical principle goes way further. Here's a good talk from Hitchens on the topic: [VIDEO] I'm not a free speech person, but since I think you're unwittingly falling for a strawman I think I can help. Contrapoints also made a really good response (against) hitchens you can find here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"4_qJptwikRc":[{"hn_comment_id":27308991,"author":"keithnz","month":"2021-05","story_title":"New dark matter map reveals cosmic mystery","text":"Sabine is a great science (physics) communicator to the \"masses\", she recently did an update on dark matter. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34895856,"author":"tlholaday","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea","text":"> correct me if I\u2019m wrong \u2026 I think you\u2019re oversimplifying, like seeing a forest and overlooking that it\u2019s Prototaxites, not Malus domestica. Here\u2019s Sabine Hossenfelder\u2019s curious-undergraduate-level history of Dark Matter theories: [VIDEO] Proper nouns include Renzo\u2019s Rule and Baryonic Tully Fisher Relation.","stance":"rec"}],"4aUODXeAM-k":[{"hn_comment_id":31687405,"author":"devoutsalsa","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Why are nuclear power construction costs so high?","text":"Nuclear waste isn't a problem if you drill a hole that's deep enough, encase the waste in a \"dry cask\", and drop it in the hole. Kyle Hill did a great video on this... \"We solved nuclear waste decades ago\" => [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32049056,"author":"slenk","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Russian gas flows to Europe","text":"Nuclear waste, as far as I have been learning, is pretty \"safe\". Yeah, you need a place to deal with it, but it's mostly highly shielded solids. A video I watched recently explaining a lot: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4anAwXYqLG8":[{"hn_comment_id":9902516,"author":"smhg","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Why Underscore is awesome","text":"While underscore is indeed widespread, don't let libraries keep you from thoroughly understanding JavaScript: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13734556,"author":"msangi","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Id Software Programming Principles","text":"That's indeed a very good advice. All abstractions have a cost and no abstraction is better than the wrong abstraction. I found this talk on the topic very interesting [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4aw9uyj9MAE":[{"hn_comment_id":30212453,"author":"cptcobalt","month":"2022-02","story_title":"GTA 6 Confirmed","text":"There's a great talk about Procedurally Generating Manhattan for Spiderman that's worth watching and covers things like this: [VIDEO] If you think this is interesting, all of the Spiderman GDC talks by the various staff of Insomniac Games are S-Tier.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20071086,"author":"drchewbacca","month":"2019-06","story_title":"DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too","text":"I saw an interesting talk about proc gen which was basically saying a lot of studios are moving from hand crafting to procedural tools. For example if you want to fill a park with trees you don't place them by hand, you just specify the density and type of trees and let the computer place them. The advantage is that if you want to reshape the park later you can just click and drag. Then when you are happy you go though and hand craft more content on top. They were saying there is a critical mass where procedural tools feed into procedural tools and a lot of the pipeline is automated, then it becomes extremely cheap to make more content. So back to your point: I think this is where we will see AI more in game dev, it will be as smart tools to empower creators to make stuff more easily. I don't think the AI will make the game, I think it will assist the humans with the creation of it. Here is a talk about Spiderman and how much proc gen they used there [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20150963,"author":"rayalez","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Procedural content generation: creating a universe (2015)","text":"Somewhat related(okay, not really, but still fun) - awesome talks about modern procedural generation techniques(with AI, Houdini, etc): How AI will change 3D industry [LINK] Procedural world generation for Far Cry [LINK] Procedurally generating Manhattan for Spider Man [VIDEO] Mindblowing talks by Anastasia Opara (using cool math, deep learning, and a lot of creativity to create crazy cool stuff) [LINK] Procedurally generating 3D landscape in Houdini (a little tutorial I have made, can't resist sharing) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21369017,"author":"rayalez","month":"2019-10","story_title":"One Page Dungeon Generator","text":"Looks amazing! Note that the author also has a fantasy city generator: [LINK] And mansion generator: [LINK] If you're into that kind of stuff, there's a world map generator(by different author): [LINK] and this amazing tutorial on generating maps: [LINK] ---- Also, kinda relevant - awesome talks about modern procedural generation techniques(with AI, Houdini, etc): How AI will change 3D industry [LINK] Procedural world generation for Far Cry [LINK] Procedurally generating Manhattan for Spider Man [VIDEO] Mindblowing talks by Anastasia Opara (using cool math, deep learning, and a lot of creativity to create crazy cool stuff) [LINK] She is the author of the most impressive procedural generation project I've ever seen: [LINK] ---- Also, I myself have made a little tutorial about procedurally generating a 3D landscape in Houdini: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"4bM3Gut1hIk":[{"hn_comment_id":7456608,"author":"e12e","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Introducing Ring -3 Rootkits: BIOS rootkit targeting vPro chipsets (2009) [pdf]","text":"You might want to have a look at Bossard's presentation from defcon20 (2012?), \"Hardware backdooring is possible\": [LINK] He's done a few of these, so I might be getting them mixed up -- but the message is basically that x86 (and by extension amd64) is hopelessly broken due to legacy crap that sort of hides between the cpu, ram and devices (the software running on your cdrom drive, on the network or sound card...). Also related: 4 2 1 Christopher Domas The future of RE Dynamic Binary Visualization [VIDEO] [ed2: Skip to ~14-15 minutes to get to the good stuff, then go back and watch the whole thing :) software home page and demo download (I don't think there's anything new published): [LINK] [LINK] ed: More recent presentation, looks to be the same: [LINK] ] Again related to (but as far as I remember does not reference [edit: I was wrong, he does indeed reference this]): Black Hat USA 2010: Voyage of the Reverser: A Visual Study of Binary Species 1/5 [LINK] #HITB2013AMS D2T1 Sebastien Kaczmarek - Dreamboot - A UEFI Bootkit [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24793787,"author":"LargoLasskhyfv","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync","text":"Like CantorDust by Christopher Domas@Batelle? [VIDEO] really blew my mind when I saw it. Btw. about 8 years later they finally delivered, by releasing it as plug-in for Ghidra! Yay! [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49218924,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Assembly Hall of Shame","text":"Also came up with the original ..cantor.dust.. binary visualization tool, which is a tool I never used directly but Chris' presentation of it in 2012 is still one of the coolest talks I've ever seen. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49288983,"author":"nerdsniper","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Spaghettifying DRAM","text":"My introduction to his work was \"The future of RE Dynamic Binary Visualization\"[0] which completely blew me away. It still feels futuristic today, 13 years later. Novel UI/UX paradigms like this are slow to find widespread adoption, even when they're so clearly demonstrated to be such an ideal fit for their purpose. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24793789,"author":"rckoepke","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Reverse Engineer Amazon's Whispersync","text":"This is my favorite version of it: [VIDEO] Some people have taken this concept very far. Batelle's CantorDust (was?) a pretty fully developed 3D visualization software for binary packages utilizing many different views and filters with convenient UX for selecting blocks of code graphically and zooming in on the corresponding hex, or vice-versa. Edit: I looked very hard for this software about 6-12 months ago and couldn't find anything...it appeared to be vaporware. However, 'LargoLasskhyfv posted in this thread tree at the exact same time I did and noted that it was just released about 3 months ago as a plugin for Ghidra. I'm very excited to play around with it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24823876,"author":"rckoepke","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Visualizing binaries with space-filling curves (2011)","text":"This demo does a fairly decent job of explaining how you'd use these kinds of visualizations: [VIDEO] Batelle's CantorDust combines the visualization concept with a convenient UX for selecting blocks of code graphically and zooming in on the corresponding hex, or vice-versa. The \"devil is in the details\" with respect to the UX for these kinds of tools. The visualization or 2D image by itself is somewhat less useful without being able to snap to the corresponding part of the hex or IDA/Ghidra disassembly. I do think adding a 3rd dimension to the visualization probably adds somewhat more utility as well. The recently released open source package for CantorDust seems to omit the 3D visualizations which were shown in the demo linked here.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26267914,"author":"stack_underflow","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Plain Text Protocols","text":"Your post reminded me of the presentation on cantor.dust: [LINK] [VIDEO] - Christopher Domas The future of RE Dynamic Binary Visualization (very interesting presentation) Looks like there's even been a recently open sourced plugin for Ghidra released by Battelle: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38642287,"author":"mk_stjames","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers (1995)","text":"Those are trigrams of all 3-byte sequences of binary executables arranged in a cube. Here are some more examples of that type of viz: [LINK] And here is a talk about binary visualization by the legend Christopher Domas, which is where I first saw it used: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4bZvq3nodf4":[{"hn_comment_id":17963035,"author":"feross","month":"2018-09","story_title":"The \u201cDeveloper Experience\u201d Bait-And-Switch","text":"Alex Russell first diagnosed this problem at Chrome Dev Summit in 2016 in a really amazing talk: [VIDEO] He makes the point that lots of JS frameworks are so large that you're already doomed before you write the first line of real \"app code\". The framework itself has already blown your performance budget.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12972848,"author":"Touche","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Choosing Ember over React in 2016","text":"Note that you should not choose Ember if you are creating an app intended to be used on mobile, as it doesn't yet have code-splitting. This talk explains about why this is a hard requirement: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13248379,"author":"inian","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Things I learnt making a fast website","text":"Take a look at this talk on why mobile devices are so much slower than desktop devices ( they are indeed 10x slower in the traces I have looked at too) - [VIDEO] Also look at the speedometer benchmark ( [LINK] ) for a more realistic comparison of how slow your mobile device is compared to your desktop when running real world apps. Here are some numbers from the benchmark from some devices - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13754672,"author":"scribu","month":"2017-02","story_title":"The PRPL Pattern","text":"Those words are meant for people who have the question \"why should I go through all this trouble to implement this pattern?\" That said, it is very vague. I think this presentation from Alex Russell does a much better job of demonstrating the need for progressive web apps: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4d0EGIt1SPc":[{"hn_comment_id":36530962,"author":"lasc4r","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time","text":"I feel like you need to see _this_ spacetime video: [VIDEO] If you think LISA is mad this will blow your mind.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34306727,"author":"nkrisc","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star","text":"Pretty good explanation of the technique and challenges involved: [VIDEO] One figure that stands out, the probe would need to be about 550 AU from the sun. Voyager 1 is about 150 AU away from the sun right now, for comparison.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35345703,"author":"Galaxeblaffer","month":"2023-03","story_title":"JWST gets best view yet of planet in hotly pursued star system","text":"good old Space Time has a pretty good video on this [VIDEO] and it might even be possible and more feasible to use planets [LINK] and even earth [LINK] as lenses","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39056293,"author":"tzs","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Rumors Circulating That James Webb Has Discovered Life on Another World","text":"That's one approach to use the sun as a gravitational lens for looking at exoplanets. There's another approach that instead of one big telescope sends a series of much smaller telescopes, small enough that light sails would be effective for getting them to where they need to go. Here's a PBS Space Time episode [1] that talks about this general topic, and then about the series of smaller telescopes approach. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39336626,"author":"tzs","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Are we visible to advanced alien civilizations?","text":"Yes, it is possible. Briefly, you use your solar system's star as a gravitational lens. There are currently a couple proposals working their way through the system to do that here in our solar system. It doesn't require technology much beyond what we already have, nor is it much more expensive than other unmanned deep space missions. We wouldn't be able to see pyramid sized objects on alien planets that way because the Sun is only about 1.4 million km diameter, and from other comments it would take a few million km. But for aliens with a bigger star? No problem. Here's a PBS Space Time episode that talks about the proposals for building a Sun based gravity lens telescope [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41865883,"author":"tzs","month":"2024-10","story_title":"A solar gravitational lens will be humanity's most powerful telescope (2022)","text":"Here's a PBS Space Time episode [1] from a couple years ago that describes a couple different proposals for how to do this that take quite different approaches. It starts getting into the specifics of those approaches at 7 minutes in if you don't need the introductory material. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4fFDFbi3toc":[{"hn_comment_id":9260596,"author":"teeray","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Apple Acquires FoundationDB","text":"One of their engineers gave a great talk at Strangeloop ( [VIDEO] ) that shows some of the amazing simulations they ran FoundationDB through. It's well worth a watch if you want to understand the punishment that they put this database through to make it stand out.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17000247,"author":"chubot","month":"2018-05","story_title":"The Problem with Threads (2006) [pdf]","text":"This talk was about Foundation DB was brought up recently, and it's pretty amazing. I recommend watching the whole thing, but to be brief they are taming the \"infinite interleavings\" problem through determinism. \"Testing Distributed Systems w/ Deterministic Simulation\" by Will Wilson [VIDEO] They wrote an interesting Actor DSL that compiles to C++ and is completely deterministic, and they torture this deterministic engine with generated test cases on a cluster every night. I guess you could say that the whole cluster is necessarily non-deterministic, but an individual node is deterministic, given an ordering of the messages it receives.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18563988,"author":"rubyn00bie","month":"2018-11","story_title":"FoundationDB Document Layer","text":"Soooo stoked. This should make futzing with it to get started a lot easier. I've been thinking about going to the FoundationDB summit to hopefully learn more... Does anyone have any good resources for learning about it? I've tried a few times but find the documentation a bit hard to grok. Maybe I'm just slow. Also if you haven't seen it, this is one of the most amazing talks on distributed systems (because it's about testing them) I've ever seen (by Will Wilson from FoundationDB pre-Apple merger): [VIDEO] Truly mind blowing how good FoundationDB is supposed to be for its use cases, and this Mongo layer is just the business when it comes to helping adoption.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27425421,"author":"sgk284","month":"2021-06","story_title":"FoundationDB: A distributed, unbundled, transactional key value store [pdf]","text":"Here's another excellent talk at Strangeloop on FoundationDB's simulation testing by Will Wilson in 2014: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37553463,"author":"LAC-Tech","month":"2023-09","story_title":"How FoundationDB works and why it works","text":"\"FDB can tolerate f failures with only f+1 replicas.\" Wait a minute, I know that formula... Viewstamped Replication?? I need to read the foundation DB paper. (I mainly read CRDT stuff so hopefully it's understandable). --- In general I'm really impressed foundation DB folks. The talk \"Testing Distributed Systems w/ Deterministic Simulation\" by Will Wilson blew my mind. TL;DR they spent the majority of their initial dev effort into making a simulation of the database, then when they were happy with that plugged in real storage, time and networks at the end. Well worth a watch for anyone interested in distributed systems & reliability. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8734734,"author":"itp","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Databases at 14.4Mhz","text":"I'll give you some brief thoughts from my experience working at FoundationDB, but if you really want the in-depth answer to what makes our simulation framework an enabling technology for everything we do, you should take a look at the talk my colleague Will Wilson gave at Strange Loop [0]. Everything in our core is written in Flow, our asynchronous programming environment. The architecture of our server is essentially single threaded, with (pseudo-)concurrent actors allowing a single process to satisfy multiple roles at once. The interfaces that these actors use to communicate -- with the disk, over the network, with the OS in general -- are abstracted and implemented in Flow as well. Each of these interfaces not only has at least one \"real\" implementation, but at least one, and sometimes more, simulated implementations. Since we run multiple actors in a single process all the time, running yet more actors, pretending to be different machines, all still in the same process, was an obvious step. These workers communicate with each other via the _same_ network interfaces that real-world workers do in real clusters. In the end we are able to become our own adversaries, pushing the limits of the system in ways that just don't happen often enough in the real world to test and debug in the wild. Our simulated implementations are allowed to present any behavior that can be observed in the real world, or justified by the spec, or implied by the contract. And they can do so much more ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18037803,"author":"StreamBright","month":"2018-09","story_title":"CrimsonDB: A Self-Designing Key-Value Store","text":">>> But for the Web site for my startup, early on it was clear that I needed a good key-value store as a Web user session state store (server). So, I designed one, coded it up, and have been using it. It seems to work fine. Well depending on what error scenarios you might run into your code will work until it runs into those scenarios. Few ideas what could go wrong you can get from this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22392870,"author":"drej","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Challenges with distributed systems","text":"There is a great talk about this testing, it goes all the way to deterministic seeds and other basics. The level of determinism is admirable. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37319427,"author":"arohner","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Griffin - A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure","text":"It is a tall order, but but it's doable. The most important thing is to reduce the surface area of your application. Our business logic is almost entirely pure. The 'procs' have no side effects, except for things that happen on the other side of a clojure protocol (java interface). That means all side effects can be stubbed out during tests. Our \"user\" code has no access to threading libraries. Threading happens in \"kernel\" code. Watch [VIDEO] for a good example of how this has already been done in practice.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37553074,"author":"jrvarela56","month":"2023-09","story_title":"How FoundationDB works and why it works","text":"Tangent about FoundationDB: this is a great video that explains how the team tested it [VIDEO] Spoiler: they even had their own custom power supplies used to test against power failures.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38447887,"author":"georgelyon","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB [video]","text":"The great thing about FDB is that they have a testing infrastructure that is unlike any other database: [VIDEO] If there is a Swift compiler bug that causes data loss I will bet money they will catch it (I will also bet they will find at least one Swift compiler bug)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42331446,"author":"merqurio","month":"2024-12","story_title":"7 Databases in 7 Weeks for 2025","text":"FondationDB is such an incredible resource, but it\u2019s so hard to access for the general public. It\u2019s no wonder so few people know about it. I\u2019ve always thought that if there were easier ways to interact with it, or some dev-friendly layers built on top (or public) it would become way more popular. it has shown how well it scales with Apple and snowflake, but is not an obvious choice for non-internet scale applications. If you don't know about FDB; there's an amazing video about how they test it that really got me into learning more: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4hZxo96x48A":[{"hn_comment_id":21046655,"author":"xmprt","month":"2019-09","story_title":"The Distribution of Users\u2019 Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)","text":"The solution isn't to put things in preference windows either because even smart users will find that cumbersome. There's an interesting pair of videos (if you have some time) that goes over the UI of two competing music scoring software and why one is bad and the other good. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23525953,"author":"hexmiles","month":"2020-06","story_title":"MuseScore 4: Moving from notation software to composition software","text":"they actually hired the person behind this video (tantacrul): [VIDEO] It criticize the user interface and experience of various music application. I find it very entertaining yet still informative","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27006545,"author":"meowface","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Audacity Aquired by Muse Group","text":"If anyone's curious, here are Tantacrul's entertaining videos on MuseScore and designing MuseScore's new font, and the Audacity video from yesterday: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33993124,"author":"radicality","month":"2022-12","story_title":"MuseScore 4","text":"Obligatory funny video review of MuseScore 3 UI: [VIDEO] Same author also has a funny video on the UI of another music notation program, Sibelius: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"4jEz03Z8azc":[{"hn_comment_id":11791392,"author":"mabbo","month":"2016-05","story_title":"SpaceX successfully lands a Falcon 9 rocket at sea for the third time","text":"The landing video from the rocket[0] really puts into perspective how much this truly is 'rocket science'. They placed a boat 600km away in the ocean, and the rocket moving at 3000+km/h from 80-ish km up landed on it using some grid fins to steer. I get how it works, how you can do it, but it's still kind of incredible that they actually have 3 times in a row. [0] [VIDEO] Edit: it was 8000km/h at MECO, not 3000km/h.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12113550,"author":"dtparr","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Second Landing of Falcon 9 First Stage at Landing Zone 1","text":"Have you seen this[0] from Thaicom 8's landing on the ASDS? Shows everything from grid fin deploy onward during daylight hours. 0 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"4j_UjIshzMc":[{"hn_comment_id":22056935,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The hottest new thing in sustainable building is, uh, wood","text":"For those not familiar with these techniques, an American builder visiting DE and CH and learning about them: * [VIDEO] * [LINK] * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24606712,"author":"ehou","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Cement is the source of 8% of the world's CO2 emissions (2018)","text":"Good question. There is also CLT without glue. Check [VIDEO] where Matt Risinger is visiting a Swiss factory where they use wooden (berch?) nails and dowel pins in stead of glue. And by using more layers they also need no insulation. Gives R=24...","stance":"rec"}],"4jh94gowim0":[{"hn_comment_id":7247964,"author":"laureny","month":"2014-02","story_title":"Why not inherit from List?","text":"> Or use a better language ;-). E.g. in Scala You might want to watch Paul Phillips' recent talk: [VIDEO] You will probably start changing your mind about whether Scala is a \"better\" language. Especially on the collections side. > to get all the benefits without the drawbacks of Java style subtyping. Actually, the Scala collections have the exact same problems caused by subtyping that Java does (and quite a few more actually, as Paul explains).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10163501,"author":"bjwbell","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Bruce Eckel announces he's going to write Atomic Python","text":"Going by Paul Phillips's (largest contributor to the scala compiler) YouTube rant, [VIDEO] , nobody ever gets over the cliffs. His rant is great, for more than just scala.","stance":"rec"}],"4kLPyV8lBbs":[{"hn_comment_id":20333431,"author":"p0nce","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Burnout and the Brain (2016)","text":"Great article. There is this excellent talk by Maslach, \"Understanding Burnout\" which dispels most misunderstandings: [VIDEO] However, as with most conditions it's unlikely you will have any interest in it until being affected.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18896522,"author":"JakeAl","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the difference between Burnout/Depression/Laziness/Wrong job?","text":"This video is a good primer on burnout by an expert. \"Understanding Burnout,\" Prof. Christina Maslach (U.C. Berkeley) [VIDEO] This article is a summary of what's in the above speaker's book Recovering from Burnout [LINK] I also want to mention the article above has a link to Mind Tools, which is a web site that has a test you can take but I recommend reading their articles on leadership as it helps one understand their place and the direction they need to take as leaders of their own life as well as leaders in the lives of others, which is an interesting perspective in the context of the listed topics.","stance":"rec"}],"4moyKUHApq4":[{"hn_comment_id":6415077,"author":"wwweston","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Edward C++Hands","text":"\"Ask any C++ guru and they will tell you: avoid mutation, avoid side effects, don\u2019t use loops, avoid class hierarchies and inheritance. But you will need strict discipline and total control over your collaborators to pull that off because C++ is so permissive. \"Haskell is not permissive, it won\u2019t let you \u2014 or your coworkers \u2014 write unsafe code. Yes, initially you\u2019ll be scratching your head trying to implement something in Haskell that you could hack in C++ in 10 minutes. If you\u2019re lucky, and you work for Sean Parent or other exceptional programmer, he will code review your hacks and show you how not to program in C++.\" For those who aren't familiar with Parent, watch this talk: [VIDEO] which introduced me to Stepanov's \"Elements of Programming\" and the idea that I could be working with better/more reliable/provable abstractions in C++. That said... after a few weeks of shallowly digesting the material, I started thinking pretty much like Milewski says above: it's great if I can learn to write better C++, but if what I really want is to escape from its specific dangers and general common programming pitfalls, something like Haskell seems like a better bet.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14902789,"author":"adamnemecek","month":"2017-08","story_title":"App sizes are out of control","text":"They make code reuse possible. Watch this Sean Parent video [VIDEO] where he estimates that if Photoshop was rewritten using generics, the code size would go from 3,000,000 LOC to 30,000 LOC. You are right, during compilation, generics are specialized so you end up with code, however going all in on generics removes a lot of accidental complexity.","stance":"rec"}],"4nigRT2KmCE":[{"hn_comment_id":3464886,"author":"jmcnevin","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Indie artist trying to claim his domain name","text":"For those who aren't familiar with MC Frontalot, might I suggest you check out \"It is Pitch Dark,\" his rap about Zork. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10641042,"author":"Intermernet","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Get Lamp","text":"I feel that this post also needs a link to MC Frontalot's It Is Pitch Dark[1]. Also starring Steve Meretzky. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18524378,"author":"krapp","month":"2018-11","story_title":"A funny rap song about the pains of pair programming","text":"Rap can be as diverse in terms of subject matter and style as any other musical genre. If you want some more \"nerd\" or parody rap here's some MC Frontalot[0] and Optimus Rhyme[1] that HN might enjoy. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38215242,"author":"musicale","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Play the first ever text adventure game in your Linux terminal","text":"Wrong game, but I expect that's the joke! Now enjoy this immortal tribute: MC Frontalot - It is Pitch Dark [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42771859,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Zork: The Great Inner Workings (2020)","text":"MC Frontalot - It Is Pitch Dark: [VIDEO] >Front geeked around for an evening in a basement in Massachusetts. It got filmed in HD. Then Jason Scott made a whole video out of it. The song and the video are in service of Jason's upcoming documentary about text adventures, Get Lamp, but you get to enjoy it now. Peek the cameo by Steve Meretzky. \"Get Lamp\" documentary: [LINK] Trailers: [LINK] Full archive: [LINK] Interviews: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"4oAB83Z1ydE":[{"hn_comment_id":2164246,"author":"wallflower","month":"2011-02","story_title":"'1984': As Good as It Gets","text":"> Ken Segall did the brilliant \u201cHere\u2019s to the Crazy Ones\u201d spot for the \u201996 Super Bowl, which remains one of my favorite spots. It reassured the faithful that good things were coming. [VIDEO] My eyeballs just sweated.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3078230,"author":"revscat","month":"2011-10","story_title":"Steve Jobs has died","text":"This is a link to the \"Think Different\" commercial from Apple. I must admit that after watching it just now I teared up a bit. [VIDEO] What a life.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4615186,"author":"alid","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm Talking to a High School Class about Entrepreneurship ","text":"What a great opportunity! If you can show a video, the Apple 'Think Different' ad would make an inspired intro: [VIDEO] A fun activity could be to get them into groups, and get them to look at a certain product or issue through an 'Entrepreneurial Lens' - How can we make this better? How could we reach customers? You could have them fill out a lean canvas with their ideas :)","stance":"rec"}],"4q1dgn_C0AU":[{"hn_comment_id":36488234,"author":"carlossouza","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Happiness is a reward from our ancestors","text":"[VIDEO] \u201cThe surprising science of happiness\u201d, from Dan Gilbert, is one of the best TED talks of all time (over 4M views). In his amazing & funny 20\u2019 presentation, he explains how our brains are wired and how it relates to happiness. The article reminded me of this great content","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31964912,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: I\u2019m 41 and still unmarried \u2013 what should I do?","text":"> \" What can be more important than life partner? \" My favourite TED talk pairing is Dan Gilbert's Surprising Science of Happiness[1], where he offers evidence upon evidence that we humans grow to like what we are stuck with and can't change. A year after winning the lottery and a year after losing the use of their legs, lottery winners and paraplegics report being equally happy with their lives, one of his studies shows, for example. And Barry Schwartz's Paradox of Choice talk[2] where he argues that the more choice we have, the less happy we will be after we made the choice, full of doubt whether we could or should have chosen better, questioning if we should choose again, and seeing any flaw in the choice as a reason to blame ourselves for choosing it. In the USA there's over two million marriages every year[3], that seems a lot for people making the most important decision of their lives, to me. > \" I think that what people are actually implying when they say \u201cpicky\u201d is that I\u2019m materialistic , that I\u2019m looking for a rich guy, for a hot guy, etcetera. \" (I think that's different from common usage; a 'picky eater' is not someone looking for rich food or hot food, it's someone with a narrowband filter on what foods they will eat. By contrast, there's a joke about the shopkeeper who gets a bag of potatoes, splits them into two different containers, and marks one container \"selected potatoes\" with a higher price. 'Selective' means you selected, even people whose criteria is '","stance":"rec"}],"4s9IjkMAmns":[{"hn_comment_id":31097079,"author":"lkbm","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Stop Validating Email Addresses with Regex (2012)","text":"I've always loved the \"Email Hates The Living\" talk[0] and am sad it's not available in higher quality. This is a great alternative. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10742191,"author":"clscott","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Email made me miserable, so I decided to build my own email app from scratch","text":"This is an interesting read, when I saw a few of the comments here ask \"how hard can it be?\" I was reminded of this presentation by Rik Signes at YAPC::NA (2008) Email Hates the Living [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32578923,"author":"calvinmorrison","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Email doesn't suck \u2013 it's email clients that need improving","text":"Here's a talk from one of the heads of Fastmail: \"Email Hates the Living\" [VIDEO] Email itself is a very weird quirk filled system. If you want to read about the insanity behind some of the protocols watch that talk. That's why things like JMAP are being developed.","stance":"rec"}],"4t1K66dMhWk":[{"hn_comment_id":22220205,"author":"gravypod","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Jonathan Blow on Rust","text":"Pointers living through a render pass aren't the main use case he is interested in. It's a problem space that many engineers are familiar with so it's easy to talk about. Game developers have some very domain-specific problems that are less common outside of game engines. A more detailed description of his opinions are laid out here where he goes into much more detail about his experiences porting The Witness to mobile (I think): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32718378,"author":"hertzrat","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Unreal Rust","text":"These discussions always remind me of some talks by Jonathan blow where he argues rust doesn\u2019t solve the hard problems he needed it to. There are podcast episodes with better discussions, but the main one people link to seems to be this I haven\u2019t used rust, but I sympathize with his problems with pointers and learned a lot from the various ways people try to solve them [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40172604,"author":"colund","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years","text":"I find that Jonathan Blow ranting about Rust game development here [VIDEO] . He adds interesting perspectives to the discussio, how the language makes the Rust game developer resort to arrays and their so called Rust point of views.","stance":"rec"}],"4xGawJIseNY":[{"hn_comment_id":23437061,"author":"runarberg","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Zuckerberg: I just shared the following note with our employees","text":"Regrettably it isn\u2019t that clear cut. While hate is illegal\u2014and rightfully so\u2014racists, bigots and war mongers can and do find ways to spread their hate with legal means. This includes shorthands, dog whistles, framing and tones, etc.[1] I don\u2019t think we will ever be able to conceive a legal framework that can catch all these as hate speech. So we need moderation along side criminalization of hate speech. 1: I recommend the YouTube series The Alt-Right Playbook for an overview of these tactics: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24664015,"author":"quantumwoke","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens","text":"Don't waste your words, he's just one of those racist internet trolls following the same time old (if a little tired) strategies. You won't get anything fruitful from calling him out IME. I find this video series [0] useful for identifying and ignoring trolls online. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32512135,"author":"hnbad","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)","text":"I'm talking about well-known phenomena that can readily be observed in online debate culture and social spaces over the past decade: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] I'm not sure what you think this has to do with \"conspiracy thinking\". I'm not saying this is an organized effort. While particularly rowdy online communities do organize via places like 4chan (and its various even less palatable siblings) and KiwiFarms, the shift on HN can much more easily be described by looking at how fringe politics generally spread in online spaces. Innuendo Studios' video series \"The Alt-Right Playbook\"[0] is worth a watch if you are new to this concept. Heck, Jordan B Peterson wildly holds celebrity status at this point and for the longest time his interview strategy consisted of making general statements implying political positions and then accusing the interviewer of putting words in his mouth when those positions were challenged. Literally \"just asking questions\" and \"stating facts\" (which even with proper context were not always actually true, e.g. the entire lobster thing was based on the assumption that lobsters and humans react the same way to the same biochemical reactions). Right-wing fringe groups have been talking about various flavors of \"red pilling\" since before \"alt-right\" even became a thing. Even before \"GamerGate\" (which shifted a lot of young male gamers towards extremely far right views) you'd hear the concept in the \"Manosphere\" (i.e. MGTOWs, PUAs, MRAs and s","stance":"rec"}],"4zG0uecYSMA":[{"hn_comment_id":29091758,"author":"kristopolous","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in 2021","text":"Open look was originally from Sun NeWS, an alternative to X built with AT&T. Example: [LINK] It was an interface that could degrade extremely well to monochrome and still look reasonable on the lousy LCDs of the 1980s. The hit points are large and spaced out enough so that it could be operated via the janky touch screens of the era as well Also NeWS used postscript as the display language. It extended it to allow the interactive elements. SGI also had a system based on NeWS called 4Sight: [LINK] Here's James Gosling (you know, guy that invented Java) talking about it for an hour or so from 1990 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39659935,"author":"panick21_","month":"2024-03","story_title":"The Berkeley Software Distribution","text":"This was the moment many former Sun people identify as the 'death of original Sun'. Sun wanted to make SMP work, so Solaris was a huge amount of work and was incredibly buggy for a long time. Sun effectively lost a huge amount of time going threw this transition and it took years to be back to the same amount of stability. Bryan Cantril talkes about this in LISA11 - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos [1] But not everybody agree, if you read 'Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems' that was written in 1991, they are very pro the AT&T deal and explicitly call out the BSD people as 'anti-Standard' and thus anti-Sun. The real difference there is the argument about what a Standard is. Their approach is basically Unix belongs to AT&T and therefore they are the standard. While the (in my opinion) more correct argument was that BSD/Sun had the most software and they were the defacto standard and being more open, continuing be the standard was what Sun should have done. Another incredibly important battle was over X vs NeWS. NeWS was arguably technically superior. There is a nice talk by James Gosling about it [2]. It still had technical problems but it would have been a great base to build off. But because some companies, lead by Dec made X open(ish) and many embraced it, X became 'the standard' and thus many at Sun basically said 'Well X is the standard, so therefore we have to switch to X'. Instead of saying, lets make NeWS open and try to be the Standard. The Sun tra","stance":"rec"}],"4zgYG-_ha28":[{"hn_comment_id":16841467,"author":"hotwire","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless. His QuakeCon talks are particularly good. QuakeCon 2011 - [VIDEO] QuakeCon 2012 - [LINK] I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code. Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3388374,"author":"johno215","month":"2011-12","story_title":"John Carmack on the importance of Static Code Analysis","text":"Here is an accompanying segment from QuakeCon 2011 in August where static code analysis is discussed. This topic must really be on his mind. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3778450,"author":"mitchty","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Game Publishers Are Obsolete \u2013 So Why Haven\u2019t Developers Ditched Them Yet?","text":"You might find John Carmack's 2011 quakecon keynote video interesting, he addresses a fair amount of your questions. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"52KLGqDSAjo":[{"hn_comment_id":21323546,"author":"itcrowd","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Antarctic ice cliffs may not contribute to sea-level rise as much as predicted","text":"It was my mistake to link to the summary, I was actually referring to the full report in the comments before. As for your quote, it needs to be read in the context of the full paragraph. Its written sloppily, but a better phrasing would be: \"We don't see the worldwide acceleration observed by Nerem et al. (2018) in the Netherlands' coast area , within the 1993-2017 record\". I.e. they are saying the global trend is not the same as the local (Dutch) trend. Perfectly reasonable. > I must say I'm currently on the fence about the role of CO2 in global warming. Well, I could imagine your doubts about sea level rise because they are difficult and uncertain. But there is absolutely no scientific doubt about the role of CO2 in global warming. In fact, CO2 as a control knob of the climate is the only way to explain climatic variations observed in (at least) the past 500 million years . What is uncertain is the predictions because they are influenced by action taken to curb emissions etc. There is a great video series on YouTube by \"potholer54\" that shows the scientific evidence for it better than I can. The first video is only 10 minutes and addresses the general points rather well. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6388487,"author":"quink","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Dialing Back the Alarm on Climate Change","text":"OK, let's watch this. 0:23-ish: No one in the mainstream media in Australia has ever told anyone about Henry fucking Ergas? Well, this is full of shit already. He also ran Concept Economics. > Concept Economics, the consultancy that recently estimated the costs of the National Broadband Network outweighed the benefits by up to $20 billion, has gone into administration. Sheesh, what is it with these climate skeptics and their businesses going under? 0:48: Lack of action across the world? Most expensive carbon tax in the world? Kind sir, I have a graph to cure that ailment: [LINK] Austria is AUT. Australia is AUS, in case there's any confusion following the whiplash you just got by this fact-whipping. 1:18: Thank you for that idiocy. Australia is the world's highest CO2 per capita emitter with any population to speak of, apart from the UAE: [LINK] . It has the dirtiest power station in the entire OECD, which alone produce 1/1800th the greenhouse gas emissions on the planet: [LINK] You know what, I'm done. I will go on, but considering such a litany of error within a minute and a half, I can spend my time vastly better. But like I said, I'll watch it for amusement value. Meanwhile, you go ahead and watch this: [VIDEO] Edit: OK, just wanted to add that the carbon tax does not \"cost\" 10 billion a year by any means. That's near enough the revenue being raised by the government through carbon pricing and near enough all of it makes it back into the economy through various means. One","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25717134,"author":"imtringued","month":"2021-01","story_title":"A Polar Vortex collapse sequence has begun","text":">There's also some evidence that historic rises in CO2 lagged temperature rather than the reverse. That's only true in some cases with strong emphasis on \"some\". If you want to know how much of that is true and how much is wrong just watch this video [LINK] I don't think I can do it justice with a butchered summary on HN but I'll keep it long enough to get you hooked. There are two phases during a deglaciation and CO2 lags in the first one and leads in the second one. We have basically skipped the first phase by emitting CO2 directly. If anything, this should worry us even more because there is evidence that increased temperatures drive CO2 emissions as well. So we haven't skipped the first phase at all, it's going to happen in the future. Feedback loops have been predicted by many scientists. What could happen is this: \"man-made CO2 -> higher temperatures -> more CO2 -> even higher temperatures\". I recommend you to watch the entire video. Not just the segment I linked. That same content creator also made a whole playlist concerning climate change: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"52Mx0_8YEtg":[{"hn_comment_id":19249740,"author":"graycat","month":"2019-02","story_title":"AMA: Bill Gates","text":"Bill, thanks to you for Microsoft and to you and Melinda on health. For Climate Change, your position is wildly destructive and based on just sewage instead of science. Net, CO2 has essentially nothing to do with the climate. The main driver of climate change for 1+ million years is just changes in the rates of sun spots. Period. Nice details from some real experts, e.g., Lindzen at MIT, are summarized in the quite good video at [VIDEO] \"The Great Global Warming Swindle\". Take an hour to watch that and save your efforts on Climate Change and stop your highly destructive efforts against CO2. Sorry 'bout that. Just consider the video and its information. But for more, on the science, there were some models and predictions of big increases in temperature. The big increases were supposed to have happened already. They never happened at all. Details of predictions versus real observed are summarized, with the dozens of individual predictions named (in small print!) in [LINK] In science, we have to make good predictions. When we make bad predictions, we junk the candidate science. So, we have to junk the candidate science of the climate models in that graph. Net, we are left with no meaningful science that CO2 from humans or anything else is causing significant or even measurable climate change or ever will. Some of Lindzen's remarks in the video explain more. Net, in total, we have to junk any threat from CO2. Fighting Climate Change is not worth even 10 cents -- that the alarmist","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10948923,"author":"graycat","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Bill Gates Expected to Create Billion-Dollar Fund for Clean Energy (2015)","text":"If his concern is CO2, then he might want to watch a good movie, the BBC The Great Global Warming Swindle [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10949041,"author":"graycat","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Bill Gates Expected to Create Billion-Dollar Fund for Clean Energy (2015)","text":">c: burning a ton ton ton of fossil fuels. Then, fine, that's the solution that should please you. Go ahead. No worries. E.g., you and Bill Gates might be very happy to watch the BBC The Great Global Warming Swindle [VIDEO] Thumbnail version: Human sources of CO2 have nothing to do with climate. Instead for at least hundreds of thousands of years to the present and the foreseeable future, essentially the main cause of climate change is just the level of solar activity. As that varies so does the rate of sun spots, the strength of the solar wind, the rate at which the solar wind blocks cosmic rays, cosmic rays hit water molecules in the atmosphere, water droplets are formed, clouds are formed. More clouds have a cooling effect. So, a more active sun blocks more cosmic rays, causes fewer clouds, and warms the earth. A less active sun, ..., more clouds, and a cooler earth. CO2 levels don't fit the temperature data at all well, e.g., in the Vostok data Gore's movie used, the CO2 levels went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. E.g., the cooling from The Little Ice Age was not from less CO2 but from a very inactive sun. The increase in temperature coming out of The Little Ice Age was from a more active sun. The global cooling from about 1950 to 1980 was from an inactive sun while CO2 levels increased. Net, CO2 is irrelevant. The cause is the activity level of the sun. Burn all the fossil fuels you want. Solar? Maybe can find a use for it: E.g., maybe in desert areas, ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10949051,"author":"graycat","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Bill Gates Expected to Create Billion-Dollar Fund for Clean Energy (2015)","text":">c: burning a ton ton ton of fossil fuels. Then, fine, that's the solution that should please you. Go ahead. No worries. E.g., you and Bill Gates might be very happy to watch the BBC The Great Global Warming Swindle [VIDEO] Thumbnail version: Human sources of CO2 have nothing to do with climate. Instead for at least hundreds of thousands of years to the present and the foreseeable future, essentially the main cause of climate change is just the level of solar activity. As that varies so does the rate of sun spots, the strength of the solar wind, the rate at which the solar wind blocks cosmic rays, cosmic rays hit water molecules in the atmosphere, water droplets are formed, clouds are formed. More clouds have a cooling effect. So, a more active sun blocks more cosmic rays, causes fewer clouds, and warms the earth. A less active sun, ..., more clouds, and a cooler earth. CO2 levels don't fit the temperature data at all well, e.g., in the Vostok data Gore's movie used, the CO2 levels went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. E.g., the cooling from The Little Ice Age was not from less CO2 but from a very inactive sun. The increase in temperature coming out of The Little Ice Age was from a more active sun. The global cooling from about 1950 to 1980 was from an inactive sun while CO2 levels increased. Net, CO2 is irrelevant. The cause is the activity level of the sun. Burn all the fossil fuels you want. Solar? Maybe can find a use for it: E.g., maybe in desert areas, ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14887086,"author":"graycat","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Drawdown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse Global Warming","text":"The reasoning in my post is nearly self contained. For more, mostly all you need are just two boxes of common data: First, you need the historical data, especially the ice core data. No doubt you can find that data via many sources on the Internet. See also the video clip I mention below. For the rest of the data, just look up the Medieval Warm period, the Little Ice Age, and the cooling from 1940 to 1970. That's enough for what I wrote from the data and its analysis. Second, you need the results of the models, and I gave a reference that showed the predictions and compared them with the actual measured temperatures. You are welcome to chase down the detailed predictions of the models, one model at a time for some dozens of models. I confess, I didn't do that chasing down. For the explanation in terms of sun spots, that the sun spot data fits the temperature data and the explanation in terms of cosmic rays, see the video The Great Global Warming Swindle [VIDEO] As I recall, that video also explains the 800 year lag in the ice core data and the Medieval Warm period. If you want to argue with the video, fine with me. My main objective is to debunk the claim that CO2 is a threat, and I did that without mentioning the video. The video argues the sun spot explanation, and so far it appears to be the best, e.g., at least it appears to the only at all reasonable explanation that even begins to fit the darned data, but otherwise is tough to check -- e.g., how cosmic rays create water","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19793715,"author":"graycat","month":"2019-05","story_title":"A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)","text":"Likely a lot easier to make gasoline out of: (1) Crude oil. (2) Coal, water, and electric power. (3) Some biological reactions. To address the hidden agenda here, see [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20256450,"author":"graycat","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Cement Produces More Pollution Than All the Trucks in the World","text":"There's a video documentary on YouTube, complete with starting with PM Thatcher and her concerns about the coal miners union and the Mideast oil kingdoms and through the present with sun spots, etc. There is a lot from MIT prof Lindzen. The 800 year lag in the graph Gore put up is made clear. The Medieval Warm period, the Little Ice Age, and the cooling from 1940 to 1970 are also clear. The URL is [VIDEO] Now where does this documentary go wrong? I will mention one place: Their little cartoon has sun light hitting the surface of the earth, reflecting , and then heating the atmosphere. Well, it mostly isn't just reflection . Instead, the sunlight gets absorbed by the surface, the surface warms, and then the surface radiates, as in a Planck gray body in the infrared. CO2 absorbs, and warms, in three narrow bands out in the infrared, on band for each of bending, stretching, and twisting of the molecule. CO2 won't absorb visible light -- e.g., exhale and see if you can see the CO2 or its shadow from absorbing visible light! And, as in the cartoon, the visible light already traveled through the whole atmosphere to the ground without being absorbed so that any reflected light should just continue until it hits a cloud or just escapes into outer space. So, the main point is the Planck black body effect that in effect converts the visible light CO2 won't absorb to infrared light CO2 can absorb. But, as Lindzen explains, that all has to be a tiny effect, small potatoes . Just as a que","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22885212,"author":"throwaway294","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Wildlife collapse from climate change is predicted to hit suddenly and sooner","text":"MIT Professor R. Lindzen explains the consensus in \"The Great Global Warming Swindle\" [VIDEO] The explanation is in one word -- money, as in two words, too much money. In addition, look at the arguments. Since I hold a good STEM field Ph.D., I'm supposed to do that. For more, I gave my explanations in the two URLs to YC I mentioned above.","stance":"rec"}],"54l8_ewcOlY":[{"hn_comment_id":28185182,"author":"sophrocyne","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The uncanny absence of nihilism","text":"For anyone deeply interested in philosophy, the evolution of religion from a cognitive science perspective, or escaping a nihilistic perspective, this series has it all. I can\u2019t recommend it enough. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21038831,"author":"crispinb","month":"2019-09","story_title":"The effect of meditation on brain structure (2012)","text":"> bogus nonsensical ones that say you need to light candles and get into some funky position and whatnot. It usually helps when investigating something you're a novice in to at least attempt to clear your mind of preconceptions. Do you know posture makes no difference? Where did you get that information from if you're a complete novice? Do you know setting (candles, incense) makes no difference? Where did you get that information from? Untrained intuition? It's notable that 'spiritual'* traditions from many different places and times emphasise posture & setting. It wouldn't do any harm to at least consider whether there may be more to this than you're assuming. * see (amongst many possible sources) John Vervaeke's fascinating 'Awakening from the Meaning Crisis' lecture series for why this doesn't necessarily connote other-worldly metaphysics: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21940583,"author":"westoncb","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Philosophy as a public service","text":"Here's an interesting new series addressing exactly the \"crisis of meaning\" issue you mention: [VIDEO] I've only gotten through the first lecture\u2014and it does take him ~20 minutes to lay out something like the full plan for the lecture series, but he also paints a pretty interesting picture by the time he gets to that point. David Chapman has also been writing on this subject, apparently from a somewhat related angle, for years: [LINK] The two of them try reconciling their approaches here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30222868,"author":"sophrocyne","month":"2022-02","story_title":"The Reality War \u2013 It\u2019s just Gnostics all the way down","text":"This was a great read. There was a series focusing on the underlying problem driving people to seek these types of communities - [VIDEO] The series touched on Gnosticism, and how it developed into future philosophies - even evolving into the foundation of the Nazi belief system. We\u2019re at a point where, due to a wholesale rejection of religion, we\u2019ve thrown the baby (practical wisdom traditions) out with the bath water (improbable metaphysical axioms) The author also touches on the notion of a metaverse, and I\u2019ve been writing on the subject as well. This vision of a \u201cmetaverse\u201d, as the author alludes to, is one that is not divorced from reality but perpendicular to it. It could be a great thing, or a digital hell. We live in weird times, and collectively are in dire need of wisdom.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31969927,"author":"barrysteve","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What exactly is a mindfulness meditation?","text":"> Other gurus teach that meditation is \u201cdoing nothing\u201d. Okay, but then again there\u2019s nothing special about it, we all do it from time to time. Eastern spirituality sees \"nothing\" or nothingness as a spiritual place to relax in and be. Western religions see \"nothing\" as something that can't exist. That nothing is impossible for Christ. One function of prayer and meditation is to organize your thoughts and let go of thoughts and aims that are not helpful, sometimes called Sin. You can let them go into nothingness (eastern), into the altar of fire (catholicism) or let them flow away (anglican/methodist). You can also use prayer to aim and think about things that are good for you and you do want. If you want real detail, John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series [0] does the history of spirituality as a psycho-technology, cog-sci breakdown. It is very good and leads into discussions with him and Curt Jaimungal [1] on the Theories of Everything channel, which has a slightly more Eastern and hyper-intellectual physics blend to it. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] The practice of prayer and meditation has been degraded by practicing psychologists and pop culture. Stay away from that stuff, it eats into the prayer life and meditation from the inside or bottom-up.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32901945,"author":"thenerdhead","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Activity and reading to move through mid-life crisis?","text":"Maybe check out John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis videos on YouTube: [VIDEO] Perhaps you might relate to how he describes this disconnect. While I don't think I've gone through a life crisis yet, he has brought clarity to the feelings I had that might have resulted in one.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33742000,"author":"Raminj95","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Why is Aristotle so respected?","text":"I think the best answer to this question can be found in this series, i think episodes 5-7 is where he talks about the importance of Aristotle and the ways in which he shaped our grammar around so many concepts that are central to our day to day lives. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"586Zn1ct-QA":[{"hn_comment_id":37010721,"author":"7373737373","month":"2023-08","story_title":"NASA has reestablished full communications with Voyager 2","text":"These three videos by EEVblog detail the ground based antennas and how it is contacted: EEVblog 1547 (Part 1) - Contacting the Voyager 2 Space Probe: [VIDEO] EEVblog 1547 (Part 2) - PINGing the Voyager 2 Space Probe!: [LINK] EEVblog 1547 (Part 3) - Tour of the NASA Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42006908,"author":"wkat4242","month":"2024-10","story_title":"NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause","text":"Yeah totally. Here's a nice video on what NASA uses to communicate with it: [VIDEO] Not something you'll put in your backyard :')","stance":"rec"}],"5AVO1IyfA9M":[{"hn_comment_id":39663945,"author":"stephen_g","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Controlling 3.6kW of Solar EV Charging with an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi","text":"You'll still get more output for the same amount of panels when they're tilted in most places. This guy did some interesting real-world testing in a bunch of different circumstances - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39970645,"author":"mey","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Swiss satellite antennas make a comeback as solar powerhouses","text":"[VIDEO] this person did a side by side experiment on their property with both angled and vertical bifacial with some interesting results. Their advantage didn't seem to be efficiency but consistency.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42149513,"author":"xnx","month":"2024-11","story_title":"100-MW solar farm just broke ground in Wisconsin","text":"There seems to be a real interesting mix of pros and cons (total watts generated through the year, by time of day, susceptibility to dirt and hail damage, reflections, etc.), especially with regards to mounting. This guy goes into a lot of detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5AqbCQuK0gM":[{"hn_comment_id":29515666,"author":"okareaman","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Interview with Anders Hejlsberg on Delphi (1995)","text":"Another really great video is Anders and Lars Bak around the time Typescript and Dart came out (about the same time.) In this video Anders explains to Lars why TypeScript will win the race to fix JavaScript's drawbacks. Lars was really happy with their Dart VM (as he should be) and didn't really want to hear how TypeScript would prevail. The thing about Anders is that he's usually right and he was. Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9519411,"author":"brodo","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Dart's Macro Language","text":"When there is no Dart VM in the browser I honestly don't see any advantage over TypeScript. Two VMs inside each other (with two garbage collectors) will always be slower and use more memory than just one. Additionally, you always need to ship the runtime with all your scripts. You also have to use FFI to interact with Javascript. All the advantages over plain JS you mentioned above are also present in TypeSctipt (or not needed). There is also a nice discussion about TypeScript and Dart here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30428189,"author":"dundarious","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Flutter is the most popular cross-platform mobile SDK","text":"This is really some armchair psychoanalysis on my part, totally not worth anything in the way of intellectual attention, but I always found this interview with both Typescript and Dart leads to be interesting. [VIDEO] I can't help but infer that Lars is quite often a little bit frustrated with the emergence of Typescript. But on top of it being embarrassing for me to imagine up such personal rivalries based on hardly anything, you could view the interview as Dart-hostile given the interviewer.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30701490,"author":"mwattsun","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don\u2019t matter","text":"If you're curious, this is an informative video of a debate between the designer of TypeScript and the designer of the Dart VM about which was the better approach. Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5BIP_N9qQm4":[{"hn_comment_id":11473277,"author":"akavel","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of \u201cThe Go Programming Language\u201d Book","text":"Of recent attempts at dethroning LaTeX, there's also SILE, which actually reuses some LaTeX internals. For some examples of the output (hard to find, the author seems not great at marketing), see e.g.: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] For a deeper dive, see the author's presentation at FOSDEM 2015 - I found it really amusing - from the starting line of: \"I wrote a typesetting system - by mistake.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27303963,"author":"lahcim8","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Finl is not LaTeX","text":"Recently I have been also thinking about TeX's internals, also because I feel the pain points you describe in at [LINK] . I have too thought about experimenting with TeX rewrites/alternatives and particularly in Rust. I don't know if you are aware, but finl has been also submitted to Lobsters ( [LINK] ). One of the comments mentions SILE ( [LINK] ). I looked into it ( [VIDEO] was nice introduction, although I don't know how up to date it is). It seems to me that SILE replaces many pain points in TeX, while being somewhat close to LuaTeX (and TeX in general), due to use of similiar components (Lua, alogorithms, hyphenation patters, libraries). It even supports \"LaTeX\" like input syntax, but frankly I don't think that is the part of LaTeX I would keep :). Can you share your opinion on SILE?","stance":"rec"}],"5Dnw46eC-0o":[{"hn_comment_id":10628320,"author":"TallGuyShort","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Not Even Scientists Can Easily Explain P-values","text":"This is an excellent talk I attended a while ago that explains it very well from a programmer's perspective: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8856756,"author":"jrauser","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Twitter\u2019s new R package for anomaly detection","text":"I have a talk in which I argue that if you can program, you have a huge advantage in learning statistics because you can simulate random processes and tinker with them to get an intuitive sense of the statistics involved. At Data Driven NYC: [LINK] Keynote at Strata+Hadoop World 2014: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43356510,"author":"armanboyaci","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Statistical Formulas for Programmers (2013)","text":">Being able to apply statistics is like having a secret superpower. I totally with this sentence. BUT If you ask for my opinion, merely knowing a list of statistical formulas is not very helpful. Most of the time, people don\u2019t remember the underlying assumptions, so there is a fair chance they will use them in inappropriate situations. I recommend watching these two YouTube videos. The presenters advocate using simulation/bootstrapping/shuffling methods instead of memorizing formulas. Jake Vanderplas - Statistics for Hackers [LINK] John Rauser - Statistics Without the Agonizing Pain [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5Dw3aKbw5Wo":[{"hn_comment_id":36675218,"author":"philovivero","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Brian Eno Albums Available in Dolby Atmos and Spatial for the First Time","text":"Someone else posted this down in the bottom of a comment thread somewhere, but I think it deserves to be at the top level: [VIDEO] This is a smart, motivated audio engineer talking about Atmos. Quick summary: it's awful when it works perfectly, and it almost never works perfectly, in fact, it rarely works at all. Good luck trying to get Atmos working, and even if this was a completely open standard, would you really bother?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36680080,"author":"Intermernet","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Brian Eno Albums Available in Dolby Atmos and Spatial for the First Time","text":"You can get very cheap digital to digital audio hardware that can convert any multi-channel audio stream (DRM or otherwise) to straight multi-channel PCM. I personally, occasionally, use an RME Babyface Pro (not cheap) for this purpose, but there are many options available. You can even do this purely in software. On Windows or Linux look at Jack. On MacOS I guarantee it's available. As an aside, Atmos is generally lossy. It's actually a terrible format for music distribution. It's only popular due to marketing. Interesting video from Benn Jordan at [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37337578,"author":"TonyTrapp","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Dolby Atmos will use your TV to expand living room speaker setups","text":"I found this video by Benn Jordan very enlightening about the whole Atmos nonsense: \"Gaslighting Your Fans w/ Dolby ATMOS\" [VIDEO] TL;DW: It's just not worth it. (but do watch it to understand why)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39096160,"author":"spamizbad","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Apple Music will now pay 10% higher royalties to artists for Spatial Audio music","text":"I imagine it's seen as a value-add by Apple and Dolby. Studios are forking off massive sums to build-out Atmos rigs. A savvy artists may ask for it because it helps you on Apple Music. As for the consumer experience, I feel like Benn Jordan's video from earlier last year does a good job of explaining the situation and its current limitations: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5ESJH1NLMLs":[{"hn_comment_id":29501782,"author":"scarier","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Artificial Intelligence in the Cockpit","text":"I think this lecture ( [VIDEO] ) should be mandatory for anyone trying to improve flight safety with more automation. I think we're already at diminishing returns, and the only way to eliminate accidents caused by over-reliance on automated systems is to cut the pilot out of the loop entirely. Even in general aviation, the low-hanging fruit is elsewhere. That said, this is still pretty cool, and I could see something like it being one component of a much larger fully automated flight management system. Edit: link should be fixed. If I'm still crushing it, the title of the lecture is \"Children of the Magenta Line.\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29763056,"author":"rsync","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff","text":"\"The thing that stands out here the most is the complete lack of control that the crew had over the plane. The crew was managing the computers rather than flying the aircraft .\" Perhaps they are \"Children of the Magenta\": [VIDEO] ... and I cannot recommend this video enough. I am not a pilot and I have no interest in flying nor any particular interest in aviation, generally ... and I find this talk to be fascinating . EDIT: you can jump to 3:35 where he gives a specific example of a situation where pilots need to choose between automation dependency and dropping down a level of automation. He's a really good speaker and you can tell the audience is very engaged.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42113322,"author":"fastball","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Marine pilot loses command after ejecting from F-35B that kept flying","text":"Sounds like Colonel Del Pizzo let himself become a child of the magenta line[1]. (if you haven't seen this amazing talk, you should definitely give it a watch) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25700321,"author":"sokoloff","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Sriwijaya Air flight SJ182, a Boeing 737, has disappeared from radar","text":"That is from 2013 (not saying it\u2019s invalid advice, just that it\u2019s not related to current flying schedules). Children of the Magenta Line is a great presentation on automation dependence and quite funny at moments. [VIDEO] (The GPS flight plan track is standardized to be drawn in magenta.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29769329,"author":"howenterprisey","month":"2022-01","story_title":"We need to reclaim our attention","text":"The \"occasional captured lectures\" are still pretty strong. Off the top of my head, here are two lectures: [VIDEO] \"Children of the Magenta Line\" by Warren Vanderburgh [LINK] \"Total Synthesis of Vitamin B12\" by RB Woodward You may tell me I'm cheating by posting videos that are obviously not \"native\" to YouTube, but YouTube was the way I found them, how I watch them, and how I share them with other people. OK, so YouTube-native videos are hard mode. Try [LINK] I suppose? I like it. It has life lessons I'd argue are at least as valuable as the videos you're thinking about.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34111442,"author":"sokoloff","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The Reliability Trap: The crash of Emirates flight 521","text":"Folks interested in this topic might also enjoy the AA Training Video \u201cChildren of the Magenta Line\u201d: [VIDEO] Covers advice on when to go from maximum automation towards more manual control of the aircraft when the cockpit gets busy.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37090043,"author":"rsync","month":"2023-08","story_title":"The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)","text":"Perhaps these pilots were \"Children of the Magenta\"[1] ? These AA instructional videos by Captain Vanderburgh are fascinating - even to a non-pilot like myself. They are especially relevant as we dip our toes into automobile auto-pilot and the \"automation dependency\" that comes along with it. Of particular note in this video: @ 12:30: \"... tactily connected to the airplane ...\" @ 14:15: \"... we see automation dependent crews, lacking confidence in their own ability to fly an airplane are turning to ther autopilot ...\" @ 17:35 - 18:15: (just listen) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40616969,"author":"conartist6","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Boeing Passenger Jet Nearly Crashes Because of Known Software Bug","text":"It's actually the right way of thinking! When high-level automation fails you, messing around with the high-level system in a critical moment would probably be your death. Debugging takes minutes not seconds. This is why pilots are trained to drop from a high level automation to a lower one when necessary. Like most learnings about piloting, this insight was purchased with a lot of blood. If you want to know more, check out Children of the Magenta Line: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42605457,"author":"wat10000","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Why was there a wall near runway at S Korea plane crash airport?","text":"There are numerous past examples of this sort of thing. Automation in aviation is really hard to get right. If the automation can fail then the pilots need to be able to perform whatever it was going to do. If the automation fails rarely then the pilots may not get enough practice. But if the automation normally does a better job than the pilots, there\u2019s a tension with letting them get more practice on real flights. A recent(ish) example is the Asiana crash in SF. They had pretty much perfect conditions for a hand-flown visual approach, but they were out of practice, got behind the airplane, and it snowballed. There\u2019s an excellent lecture about this called Children of the Magenta Line. The magenta line being the flight path or direction indicator on an autopilot, and the discussion is about pilots who constantly reconfigure the autopilot to direct the plane instead of just taking over. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46269022,"author":"Animats","month":"2025-12","story_title":"AI and the ironies of automation \u2013 Part 2","text":"Bainbridge [1] is interesting, but dated. A more useful version of that discussion from slightly later is \"Children of the Magenta\", [2] an airline chief pilot talking to his pilots about cockpit automation and how to use it. Requires a basic notion of aviation jargon. There's been progress since then. Although the details are not widely publicized, enough pilots of the F-22, F-35, or the Gripen have talked about what modern fighter cockpit automation is like. The real job of fighter pilots is to fight and win battles, not drive the airplane. A huge amount of effort has been put into simplifying the airplane driving job so the pilot can focus on killing targets. The general idea today is that the pilot puts the pointy end in the right direction and the control systems take care of the details. An F-22 pilot has been quoted as saying that the F-22 is far less fussy than a Cessna as a flying machine. For the F-35, which has a VTOL configuration (B) and a carrier-landing configuration (C), much effort was put into making VTOL landing and carrier landing easy. Not because pilots can't learn to do it, but because training tended to obsess on those tasks. The hard part of Harrier (the only previous successful VTOL fighter) was learning to land the unstable beast without crashing. There were still a lot of Harrier crashes. The hard part of Naval aviator training is landing on a carrier deck. Neither of these tasks has anything to do with the real job of taking a bite out of the enem","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46390630,"author":"traceroute66","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]","text":"> You don't want pilots with their heads down in a computer making changes when they can, and should, just fly the plane. There is a famous video on youtube, 'Children of the Magenta Line' , an extract from an American Airlines course decades ago. Well worth the watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47833490,"author":"kotaKat","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Tesla Hid Fatal Accidents to Continue Testing Autonomous Driving (French)","text":"Hot take but I feel like Tesla owners (hell, anyone with 'autonomous driving' vehicles) need to see some kind of modern lecture based on the Children of the Magenta talk on automation dependence in aircraft. Mandatory, before you can trigger the system on. FSD has built this generation's newest children of the magenta line. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49181796,"author":"scrlk","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking","text":"To add to this, there's a good lecture called Children of the Magenta Line that discusses automation dependency: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5Ge2RcvDlgw":[{"hn_comment_id":29885066,"author":"codeulike","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Two startups tried to catch up to makers of advanced computer chips, and failed","text":"Because the EUV machines that ASML build are the most complex machines ever built by humans and getting all the bits to work properly takes decades of R+D e.g. watch this about the light source, its completely bonkers [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33994939,"author":"hajile","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Fusion \u201cBreakthrough\u201d Won\u2019t Lead to Practical Fusion Energy","text":"EUV lithography is interesting. You drop a microscopic droplet of tin. You then aim and shoot it not once, but twice with a laser so it produces the correct wavelength. Then you do this with 100% reliability thousands of times per second all day, every day for years. The problem doing this with fusion seems to be money. Their \"big\" grant of 600M wouldn't even buy a handful of those machines and wouldn't come close to the many billions it has cost in the past 30+ years of research to reach the point where they are finally viable (it had been \"a few months away\" ever since the early 2000s). This video from Asianometry on EUV light sources is well worth the watch. It's pretty incredible. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35518551,"author":"pas","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Spherical Tokamak Achieves Crucial Plasma Temperatures","text":"Anyone interested in the details should watch this video: [VIDEO] (has the same graphics) without any hyperbole the 2-shot laser thing necessary to emit EUV is just mind bending.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36926941,"author":"Agathos","month":"2023-07","story_title":"ASML EUV Lithography Machine Could Keep Moore\u2019s Law on Track","text":"Two must watch videos about the whole process: [VIDEO] [LINK] (Typed on a device made by this process, which I still don\u2019t quite believe.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32922794,"author":"roer","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Compact electron accelerator reaches new speeds with nothing but light","text":"To add to this, here is a great video on some of the technical/physical challenges ASML had to solve for their EUV source: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33652448,"author":"sllabres","month":"2022-11","story_title":"ASML looking to finally get ahead of Moore\u2019s Law","text":"Cant answer the question and my knowledge is only from 'one interested' but from how long (~20 years) it took to build the current EUV source and how complicated the alternatives look this is for sure no easy feat. Can recommend [1] as the title say about the light source. Very interesting even for a non professional (and [2] as on high level overview of the machine and [3] as longer documentation inside ASML). [1] [VIDEO] \"The Extreme Engineering of ASML\u2019s EUV Light Source\" [2] [LINK] \"The Extreme Physics Pushing Moore\u2019s Law to the Next Level\" [3] [LINK] \"ASML's Secret: An exclusive view from inside the global semiconductor giant\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33887031,"author":"pkaye","month":"2022-12","story_title":"TSMC ups Arizona investment from $12B to $40B with second semi fab","text":"The machines are made by other companies. Lithography is the most expensive now and its made by ASML in Netherlands is the only solution for EUV lithography. But there are many steps in manufacturing and a machine for each. The major equipment manufactures are spread across US, Europe and Japan. In the US the three big equipment manufacturers are Applied Materials and Lam Research and KLA. The costs are probably driven by extreme engineering requirements (temperature, pressure, corrosive chemicals, low contamination) and R&D costs to meet these requirements. The production volumes are not high either. Its not like they are building millions of these machines. Asianometry on YouTube is a good source for this kind of topic. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35670809,"author":"prewett","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Why is TSMC so competitive in semiconductor fabrication?","text":"The etching process that uses a laser to blast a moving molten tin sphere to shape it so the next laser blast that vaporizes it produces parallel EUV light is pretty insane, too. See [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36311955,"author":"DHaldane","month":"2023-06","story_title":"","text":"The article doesn't go into much detail on this, but the UV source using the hydrogen here is incredibly cool. To get the 13.5nm light they need, they use a 20kW CO2 laser to explode tin droplets into plasma that emits the correct wavelength. 50,000 droplets per second. And they use a smaller laser to first shape the droplet into a little dish shape that explodes better. Shown better in a video - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36926997,"author":"NortySpock","month":"2023-07","story_title":"ASML EUV Lithography Machine Could Keep Moore\u2019s Law on Track","text":"Twice. They have to hit the molten droplet twice . Once \"gently\" to deform it briefly into a concave shape, and the second, harder pulse to actually activate the droplet to emit extreme ultraviolet light Asianometry on EUV. Skip to 10m50s. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40680127,"author":"chmod775","month":"2024-06","story_title":"ASML Aims for Hyper-NA EUV, Shrinking Chip Limits","text":"There's a lot of expertise with lithography around the world too (companies like Canon build lithography machines), but we're not talking the usual levels of it. The EUV lasers ASML/TRUMPF builds don't even work the same way other \"conventional\" lasers would[1]. You physically can't get there by incrementally improving some existing process. Now I don't know how ZEISS makes mirrors that blown up to the size of a country would have imperfections smaller than a human hair, but I'm pretty sure it's no small feat either. These companies invested decades and untold sums into this when few other companies even had incentive to attempt it themselves. Sure, other companies could eventually replace them, but you're not closing a 2-decade technology gap in an afternoon. [1] It's a bit insane, really. Vaporizing falling droplets of tin with two laser pulses 100,000 times a second to get just the right wavelength? Here's a good video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5HbYScltf1c":[{"hn_comment_id":7663437,"author":"Smudge","month":"2014-04","story_title":"A Gossip App Brought My High School to a Halt","text":"It's no surprise that, when left unchecked, teenagers (whose brains actually lack some capacity for empathy) would generate extremely un-empathetic content. And it is certainly not limited to children -- adults can be just as bad or worse. This is a topic that has come up in different forms many times as the Internet has grown. One way to reign in the vitriol would be to force everyone to use their real names (see Google+'s 'real names' policy), but I don't feel this should ever be a requirement for participation in an online service. For the service itself to require it is one thing, but if the government ever tried to enforce this I'd consider it a human rights violation. (The debate over real names vs. pseudonymity vs. anonymity is a topic I could go into at much length). In the case of Yik Yak, rather than shifting blame onto the app, I instead wonder how/why any parents would allow their children to freely install such apps on their phones. Sure, kids will be kids (and will always find covert ways of misbehaving), but there should be some form of supervision available for parents of smartphone users, don't you think? I think Louis C.K. has a pretty smart perspective: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11658335,"author":"itchynosedev","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Why I Deleted My Social Media Accounts","text":"Sometimes people coerce me into using services, eg development team found a cool service to manage the project issues or designers want to check out the tool to manage the assets. There's no way around it. I found password manager tools to be invaluable in maintaining the accounts, \"fire and forget\". They usually opt you in for the marketing emails, but unsubscribing is just one click away in 99% of the cases. You are spot on about the mobile devices enabling addictive behavior. I used to have an old Nokia phone, with physical buttons during the smartphones craze and wasn't able to consume entertainment media while away from my computer. I though I'd upgrade to be able to interact better with friends through WhatsApp and whatnot and realized how much more time I fill my brain with junk media, because the phone is always there hence everything is at the tip of the finger. Although, I found playing chess on my phone to be very convenient, it's been ages since I wanted to try to learn playing chess. Technology is a double-edged sword and it definitely requires to exert more self control. It's easy not to be bored, to be somewhere in between of being satisfied and not achieving or progressing much. I love this bit Louis CK did about smartphones, even though a bit jokish but rings true: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26837029,"author":"whitepaint","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Dear Zuckerberg, We're writing to urge you to cancel Instagram for children [pdf]","text":"Everyone's insane so I must be as well. Come on man. I totally agree with the OP, take personal responsibility. You raise your children not Zuck. Louis CK had great comments about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27371886,"author":"Apocryphon","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Stop overstimulating your mind with digital entertainment","text":"The best interpretation of this post is in its warnings against digital submersion, but when it veers into cultural critique it itself is being very middlebrow and dismissive (\"just listen to classical music! Modern music sucks!\") There is a good post in here about how externalizing negative emotion to the internet is indeed addictive behavior, an emotional crutch. Unfortunately this one ain't it. Not to mention it's hardly breaking new ground with this thesis- pre-cancellation Louis C.K. arrived at the same conclusion much more concisely nearly a decade ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27493219,"author":"jonplackett","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Doing something is better than doing nothing for most people: study (2014)","text":"This reminds me of a clip of Louis CK talking about losing the ability to just sit with your own thoughts and be really sad. [VIDEO] Shame he turned out to be a sexual deviant because he said some interesting things.","stance":"rec"}],"5IUj1EZwpJY":[{"hn_comment_id":35594563,"author":"perrygeo","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Conway\u2019s Law","text":"Some great examples in \"Conway's Nightmare\" [VIDEO] My favorite from memory is that Windows now has five completely different volume control UIs, each of which can be traced directly to distinct product teams and their organizational dynamics across time. This video makes goes futher and says that the evidence for Conway's law is not only strong but has yet to be disproven; the closest we can get to a fundamental law in computer science. Given that software is always created for a social purpose (there are some users or beneficiaries of the technology), it's sort of a tautology that social dynamics are going to strongly influence design.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36655210,"author":"fwlr","month":"2023-07","story_title":"The Most Powerful Law in Software","text":"Casey Muratori has an excellent lecture on this same topic, which draws many of the same conclusions as this article but goes into more depth on why it happens and what it means to you in a practical sense. ( [VIDEO] , skip to 15:30 as the beginning is about setting up the idea of software laws, discussing other candidates for strong software laws, and the history of the law.) The Cliffs notes if you don\u2019t have time for 45 minutes of video: Conway\u2019s Law is pithily stated as \u201corg charts reproduce themselves in the product\u201d, or more comprehensibly as \u201cthe software architecture will resemble the org chart of the company producing it\u201d*. The mechanism of this effect is communication bandwidth. Communicating inside a team is high bandwidth; between teams is low bandwidth and multiple lossy hops, with the problem getting worse the further teams are away in the org chart. What this means for you is that when you set down an org chart (which you have to do at least a little bit before even getting started), or when you change an org chart, you are eliminating any potential architectures that don\u2019t look like that org chart. There If you split your teams into frontend and backend, you are ruling out potential architectures that would mix or closely intertwine the two. Any architecture like that would require the two teams to work together intimately, taking steps in tandem, which they cannot do because the low bandwidth cross-team communication cannot support it. Later in the video he a","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39613368,"author":"krig","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Leaving LinkedIn","text":"If you want to dig into Conway's law and its implications, I can't recommend this video essay by Casey Muratori enough: [VIDEO] Fair warning though, you'll lose all hope that companies like Microsoft will ever manage to produce anything that they don't then ruin.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30744460,"author":"dmitriid","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)","text":"A good illustration of The One Unbreakable Law [VIDEO] (Conway's Law, but do watch the talk for more context)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30759078,"author":"iamwil","month":"2022-03","story_title":"How do Committees Invent? (1968) [pdf]","text":"Funny, just watched Casey Muratori cover the same topic on his channel: [VIDEO] I thought he covered it well. He considered the temporal aspect of orgs, which meant that software, over the years not only mimic the org, but every org that had ever been there over time. edit: oh, and unexpectedly, he's still around and on twitter. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30821983,"author":"yes_but_no","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Tao of Node \u2013 Design, Architecture and Best Practices","text":"Great article. I also suggest watching Casey M. recent video[0] about Conways Law. How organization in your company determines what you can/will do and how organization of your code follows the same principles. Starting with just the handlers and introducing layers as you make sure its time is great way. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31517727,"author":"bambax","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits","text":"> the major foot-gun that got a lot of places in trouble was the premature move to microservices I sometimes wonder if the move to microservices isn't just a weird consequence of Conway's law in reverse: make a department of each developer, let them have their thing. (See also this amazing video about Conway's law: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35597415,"author":"molly0","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Conway\u2019s Law","text":"I remember seeing a great explanation of Conway's Law by Casey Muratori: [VIDEO] (The whole talk is good but Conway-s law starts at 11:37)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38228963,"author":"GuestHNUser","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Learning new coding patterns \u2013 how to start?","text":"> What resources do you recommend folks at my level look into? I'd argue that your best bet for learning is starting a project that drives you, then throwing that project away and starting it over again but try to make the code simpler. This way you can hone into what abstraction is actually necessary to solve your problem. I strongly recommend ignoring design patterns and instead honing in on what the essential data flow is in your problem space. Most design patterns will bloat your code base and, thus, slow both your program and your programming velocity down. As far as programming design and architecture goes, the best talks I have found come out of data orientated design talks. Casey Muratori has a number of talks well worth listening to[0][1][2]. I also enjoy Andrew Kelley's talk on Data Orientated Design specifically as it demonstrates DOD's power with actual numbers to back it up[3]. Tangent: I did my time with OOP design + trying to make my code 'clean' according to popular recommendations you'll see online. All of that time, I consider wasted because I focused too much on what the 'right' abstraction to use was, instead of solving my problem in the simplest way possible. I find now that often the best solution is the one that uses the least amount of abstraction and indirection. (E.g. One big function can be a lot easier to maintain than multiple little functions, you just have to develop a taste for when a function should be split up and why). (If you must have a pa","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39526821,"author":"frfl","month":"2024-02","story_title":"How Netflix really uses Java","text":"You may find this video interesting, [VIDEO] It's about Conway's Law. I think that's worth looking into based on your question. You can look it up on Wikipedia if you don't wanna watch the video and would rather read about it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42630767,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases","text":"\u201cTime\u201d is the answer almost always. Standards evolve over time, as do the languages and frameworks. Old code is rarely rewritten, so you end up with layers of code like geological strata recording the history of the developer landscape. There\u2019s a more complicated aspect of \u201cConway\u2019s law, but over time \u201d that\u2019s hard to explain in a comment. And anyway, Casey Muratori did it better: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48369736,"author":"randusername","month":"2026-06","story_title":"MacBook Pro Rival with the Nvidia Powered Surface Laptop Ultra","text":"I found this video [0] recently by Casey Muratori that really helped me understand why Windows is the way that it is. It's about Conway's law in software development and software architecture, but he explains it with anecdotes about Windows, like how vendor communication challenges lead to 4 different volume sliders. I would pass on an expensive heavy-partnership Windows device. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5JYp9eGC3Cc":[{"hn_comment_id":43622024,"author":"fanatic2pope","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Drag racers are ditching superchargers for scuba-style tanks and compressed air","text":"AFAIK the fastest \"production\" EV is the McMurtry \"Sp\u00e9irling\" that does a quarter mile in under 8 seconds. Watching it set the record for goodwood is mind blowing, because it looks like the video is being played in fast forward, but it isn't. [VIDEO] Although you can in theory buy one, it uses down force fans so I don't know if it would even be street legal in most places. Personally, I find car like this to be way more interesting than drag racers.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34071021,"author":"macmac","month":"2022-12","story_title":"How the McMurtry Electric Fan Car Clocked a 7.9-Second Quarter-Mile","text":"I think the hill climb record at Goodwood this summer was even more impressive. That thing looks like it is glued to the track. Check out a few other cars doing the climb and you will see a noticeable difference. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37483073,"author":"sokoloff","month":"2023-09","story_title":"New world record with an electric racing car: From 0 to 100 in 0.956 seconds","text":"Fans (no pun intended) of sucker cars are likely to be interested in the Goodwood record setting run by the McMurtry Speirling car. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5KiC03_wVjc":[{"hn_comment_id":17434915,"author":"stevekemp","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Porsche shatters the N\u00fcrburgring record we thought was unbreakable","text":"For some reason my favourite was always watching Sabine Schmitz trying to drive a transit van in under ten minutes. Part two is the one to watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26503340,"author":"ProAm","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Sabine Schmitz, Queen of the N\u00fcrburgring, Has Died at 51","text":"If you havent watched her take a van around the ring in a smidge over 10 minutes it is worth a watch. [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5MdSE-N0bxs":[{"hn_comment_id":17050814,"author":"tedsanders","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Why does deep and cheap learning work so well?","text":"Here's a related 2016 talk by Max Tegmark (second author) on connections between deep learning and physics: [VIDEO] The gist of it is that physical data tends to have symmetries, and these symmetries make descriptions of the data very compressible into relatively small neural circuits. Random data does not have this property, and cannot be learned easily. Super fascinating.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12468523,"author":"adityab","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Link Between Deep Neural Networks and the Nature of the Universe","text":"You should watch Max Tegmark's talk \"Connections between Physics and Deep Learning\" if this interests you [1]. Additionally, a paper that has everyone excited about deep connections between the mathematical analysis of physical systems and the hierarchical feature learning paradigm speaks of the connection in terms of the Renormalization Group [2]. Regardless of it's practical utility, the philosophical implications do tickle the intellect. On a dreamy note, I wonder if it would be possible to draw Category-theoretic parallels between some physical theories and statistical learning theory. There is so much to learn, and I am trying my best to teach myself (on the side) the mathematics that they don't teach in my CS grad school. So much to learn, such little time. :) [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13406749,"author":"jonmc12","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Game Theory Reveals the Future of Deep Learning","text":"I think the argument for using physics models for constraints in a DL system was a more clear argument [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5MgBikgcWnY":[{"hn_comment_id":8197569,"author":"Freeboots","month":"2014-08","story_title":"The 1,000-hour rule (2009)","text":"How about 20 hours? [VIDEO] The 10k hours thing is based on how long it took athletes to become the very top of their field. The very top of their highly specific, highly competitive field. It doesnt even mean becoming an 'expert' (whatever that means), let alone just being good at it. Anyway, check the TED Talk above, 20 hours to proficiency.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10662651,"author":"kriro","month":"2015-12","story_title":"The 100-Hour Rule","text":"Reminds me of the book \"The First 20 Hours\" by Josh Kaufman. He gives examples of skills that you can learn fairly well in 20 hours. One of them is programming. I have some issues with the book but overall it's a fun read. Here's a TED talk he gave which lead me to buy the book: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11820746,"author":"kriro","month":"2016-06","story_title":"One Click to Be Pro: my list of the best resources for mastering a subject","text":"It might be a good idea to add a meta section with resources on learning to learn. Books would be stuff like \"Pragmatic Thinking and Learning\", \"The first 20 hours\", \"The Talent Code\", \"Inner Game of Tennis\" etc. Link to a cool TED-talk (20 hours): [VIDEO] :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20678796,"author":"Edmar","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Try Micromastery","text":"A while ago I saw this video: [VIDEO] is about \"The first 20 hours\" and there is a book as well. It's surprising how much could you can learn in just 20 hours. You can't be an expert by doing so little but you can learn some tricks for fun.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32658343,"author":"vrajeshkanna","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: I want to be an expert in many things but my lifetime won't be enough","text":"The first 20 hours -- how to learn anything by Josh Kaufman - [VIDEO] You can be a top 10% in any given field with this. 20 hrs is worth the effort on skills you want to learn. My personal advice - Learn only if you put that skill into use immediatly for your good or for the greater good of the society around you. Growth for the sake of growth is the mindset of a virus","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34425897,"author":"santi_panti","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What are your best tips for quickly getting better at video games?","text":"I remember watching a video about learning a skill in 20 hours. The topic boils down to 4 points that seems fairly straight forward. I can't do it good justice myself so here is a link to those 4 points: [LINK] And here is the video itself: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5MxH1sfJLBQ":[{"hn_comment_id":30731480,"author":"infogulch","month":"2022-03","story_title":"First images from James Webb telescope exceed expectations","text":"The actuator is a genius flexure design that is both mechanically simple and accurate. Breaking Taps 3d-prints a working replica and describes the design. I highly recommend: [VIDEO] The actuator breaking wasn't as concerning after seeing the design.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30732283,"author":"blenderdt","month":"2022-03","story_title":"First images from James Webb telescope exceed expectations","text":"Here a nice video that explains the mechanism that aligns each mirror: [VIDEO] It is amazing that this is done with only a single motor. It works something like this: one direction of the motor sets which axis to align, the other direction sets the alignment of the chosen axis.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30778277,"author":"mywacaday","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Mars helicopter Ingenuity completes 22nd flight","text":"This video [VIDEO] was posted here [LINK] about how the actuators work on the James Webb telescope. It's a great watch and shows how well thought out design can produce accurate and long lasting parts.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31074400,"author":"mywacaday","month":"2022-04","story_title":"James Webb telescope's coldest instrument reaches operating temperature","text":"This video [VIDEO] was posted here [LINK] about how the actuators work on the James Webb telescope. It's a great watch.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46562099,"author":"bigiain","month":"2026-01","story_title":"The (likely?) cheapest home-made Michelson interferometer","text":"I have a related question, how far are you turning the thumbscrews when making adjustments? I think M3 standard thread pitch is 0.5mm, so to a first approximation that almost 1000 wavelengths (if I have the SI units right in my head, and I'm not 3 orders of magnitude out?). I suspect the left/right and up/down adjustments have as fairly high lever ratio, but I can't imagine you could successfully adjust the in/out distance with any precision (not in the 690nm sense anyway)? Is the in/out distance not important so long as the beams are aligned? Dunno if you've seen it, but there's a great youtube video explaining how the actuators to align the James Webb mirrors work: [VIDEO] including a 3D printable version of them: [LINK] \"This is a replica of JWST's mirror actuators. Six of these actuators are paired into a hexapod / stewart platform arrangement and used to control 6 degrees of freedom of each mirror segment (tip, tilt, roll, x, y, z translation).\"","stance":"rec"}],"5ODzO7Lz_pw":[{"hn_comment_id":20444945,"author":"scrooched_moose","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?","text":"The Toaster Project is a good example of this: [VIDEO] [LINK] He attempted to build the basic components of a toaster from scratch. Smelting metal, molding plastic, etc. The book is a tough recommendation because he sortof gives up on the later parts and limps to a finish, but overall its a fascinating look at how difficult these processes are if you build them up from scratch.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36568544,"author":"pentaphobe","month":"2023-07","story_title":"The Knowledge: How to rebuild our world from scratch","text":"Great book! In the introduction(IIRC) the author mentions Thomas Thwaites' TED talk \"How I built a toaster from scratch\" - which is a great example of the hidden complexities of \"from scratch\" (and also just a fun talk) [VIDEO] Kind of reminds me of the Carl Sagan quote \"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.\"","stance":"rec"}],"5P5Mk_IggE0":[{"hn_comment_id":36808237,"author":"faitswulff","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Oxide Computer, an efficient rack-scale computing system","text":"One benefit is that they're competing in an industry where the time to get a sled up and running for compute can be measured in weeks (they say they've heard up to 90 days) whereas their solution is basically plug and play - Bryan was trying to get Steve to admit set up took \"hours\" whereas Steve was hedging and saying customers could get started \"within a week.\" They go into more details on their podcast, and this section in particular covers the bootstrap time: [VIDEO] Pretty fascinating stuff.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44895027,"author":"cnst","month":"2025-08","story_title":"OpenIndiana: Community-Driven Illumos Distribution","text":"> [VIDEO] Great episode! The Dell PERC \"parity issue\" \"you're the only customer having this issue\" story is hilarious, reminds me of my own experience getting support over the years as a non-Windows user! Sadly, today, \"non-Windows\" is simply being replaced with \"non-Linux\", so, if you run BSD or Illumos, it's still the same issues. Oxide Computer is great, I really do hope they succeed, because it does seem like an uphill battle!","stance":"rec"}],"5PmHRSeA2c8":[{"hn_comment_id":8371160,"author":"dottrap","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Why osx sucks and you should use ubuntu instead","text":"And to really drive the problem home, distributing binary packages for Linux is a complete nightmare. Linus Torvalds just laid out a whole bunch of the problems at DebConf14. [VIDEO] Go watch it. But some of the highlights: - .deb vs .rpm misses the whole point. The problem is application writers just want to ship an application binary for \"Linux\", but it is a nightmare. - Except for the kernel which strives for ABI stability, everything else in the Linux distros constantly break binary compatibility, including the most important library, glibc. - Package maintainers are forced to use shared libraries for everything, even packages that are unstable and not well used which means apps will break - You can't install packages under these systems as non-root - He ships binaries for his SCUBA diving app for Windows and OS X. He only ships source for Linux. That's sad. As somebody who has to ship binaries for multiple platforms, including Linux, I agree it is sad, and I often have to do the rough equivalent of static linking. (I dynamically link and ship copies of the libraries.) This also allows my users to install without root access. But whenever I'm asked to look at using a native packager, I made to cry trying to figure out all the idiosyncrasies of each packaging system, and then all the variations between each distro release. (Fedora vs Debian vs Ubuntu, and 12.04 LTS is different than 13.10 and 14.04.) As far as Apple development tools go. Heard of clang and llvm? A lot of L","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23134996,"author":"stiray","month":"2020-05","story_title":"How to disable the built-in Windows 10 ads","text":"Just listen to this. I bet you will recognize the speaker. [VIDEO] It is 100% to the point and nothing has changed in 6 years since (and not only on debian), except that the mess is being solved by docker. Which is crazy. And windows is heading into same direction (when I have seen the manifests the first thing I have said was... omg... .dll.1.4.3) Just additional info, to help you get into my mindset - system level developer for linux AND windows for 25 years. (anyway, I have thrown tomatoes into directions of two largest fanboy camps, guess what will happen? =/ )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26900384,"author":"NavinF","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Tiny Container Challenge: Building a 6kB Containerized HTTP Server","text":"It is best practice and I wish it was common practice, but there's a lot of friction in the way and some people will actively work against you. Static linking glibc is painful because the former maintainer has some strong opinions: [LINK] Most distros force you to dynamically link every dependency if you want them to package it. So the default build for most projects is dynamic You've stumbled on a holy war between distros and guys like you, me, and Linus Torvalds[1] that want to deploy a binary and just have it work everywhere. 1: [VIDEO] (Highly recommend watching Linus's answer ~6 minutes in)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9020254,"author":"belorn","month":"2015-02","story_title":"GCC, LLVM, Copyleft, Companies, and Non-Profits (2014)","text":"Because he doesn't like the anti-tivoization clause for his own code. I suggest watching [VIDEO] as it gives a up-to-date view which all the necessary qualifiers in one single talk. I especially like the (paraphrasing quite a bit) \"GPLv3 is a fine license, GPLv3 is a horrible license, and I like to overstate things if you haven't noticed. For my own code I just want changes back. GPLv2 is a license that does this and nothing else, which is why I use it for my own projects.\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11187703,"author":"probonopd","month":"2016-02","story_title":"AppImage: Linux apps that run anywhere","text":"Linus Torvalds addresses some core issues in his \"DebConf 14: QA with Linus Torvalds\" talk starting around 5:40 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16509527,"author":"adnzzzzZ","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Linus Torvalds Rants","text":"[VIDEO] What he's talking about is on the video above and it's a very reasonable point. I just released a game with Linux support and most of the bug reports I got were from people running the game on different distributions and random libraries not being the version you would expect it to be. This is not to mention that I got way more bug reports from Linux users than Windows users, despite Linux users making up 2%-3% of the playerbase. His point is absolutely valid and not at all a \"serious idiocy\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26217918,"author":"gpm","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The modern packager\u2019s security nightmare","text":"> your compiler Compilers of languages like C, C++, Rust, Go etc go above and beyond to maintain backwards compatibility. It is extremely likely that you will still be able to compile old code with a modern compiler. > your processor Hardware is common enough that people go out of their way to make backwards compatibility shims. Things like rosetta, qemu, all the various emulators for various old gaming systems, etc. > your hardware Apart from your CPU (see above) your hardware goes through abstraction layers designed to maintain long term backwards compatibility. Things like opengl, vulkan, metal, etc. The abstraction layers are in widespread enough use that as older ones stop being outdated people start implementing them on top of the newer layers. E.g. here is OpenGL on top of Vulkan: [LINK] > [Your kernel] Ok, you didn't say this part, but it's the other big unpinned dependency. And it too goes above and beyond to maintain backwards compatibility. In fact Linus has a good rant on nearly this exact topic that I'd recommend watching: [VIDEO] > Pinning a dependency only _guarantees you rot the same or even faster_ because now it's less likely that you can use an updated version of the dependency that supports more recent hardware. Dependencies are far more likely to rot because they change in incompatible ways than the underlying hardware does, even before considering emulators. It's hard to take this suggestion seriously at all.","stance":"rec"}],"5Q9x16uIsKA":[{"hn_comment_id":5253835,"author":"zalthor","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Explorations in Clojure's core.logic","text":"Here's a related talk on MiniKanren by Dan Freidman and Will Byrd: [VIDEO] The bits about generating programs using MiniKanren was truly mind blowing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17959353,"author":"CamTin","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Reazon \u2013 miniKanren for Emacs","text":"Fun! I highly recommend watching Dan Friedman and William Byrd give their miniKanren conference talk (they've done it a number of times slightly differently) e.g. this one at the \"Conj\" Clojure convention: [VIDEO] It's really a fun presentation and does a great job introducing logic programming and miniKanren to lay programmers.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"5QwOpRh-IfI":[{"hn_comment_id":46476526,"author":"alun","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?","text":"Daft Punk are very clever in the way they make their music. Their song \"One More Time\" is a simple three-part sample from a 70s disco song. This video is a great visualization on how it's composed. Absolutely incredible. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26507620,"author":"modeless","month":"2021-03","story_title":"All Futurama Opening Quotes","text":"Wow, what an amazing breakdown video visualization. I see there are a bunch of these, for e.g. Daft Punk [VIDEO] , Britney Spears [LINK] , Fatboy Slim [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43592394,"author":"phrotoma","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Recreating Daft Punk's Something About Us","text":"This youtube channel has a whole pile of sampling recreations. Daft Punk: Discovery [LINK] Daft Punk: One More Time [VIDEO] Mos Def: Mathematics [LINK] Pogo: Alice [LINK] Fatboy Slim: Rockafeller Skank [LINK] And this 30 minute compilation that spans four decades is utterly mesmerizing [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"5RKbSi87J5Q":[{"hn_comment_id":21334181,"author":"hanklazard","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Edward Snowden on The Joe Rogan Experience [video]","text":"Narduar is my favorite example of a master interviewer. Watch him leave Pharrell speechless multiple times (starting around the 5:15 mark is a good example). This guy does his homework better than anyone. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24827164,"author":"7373737373","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Chris Lattner: The Future of Computing and Programming Languages [audio]","text":"There's a Canadian interviewer named \"Nardwuar the Human Serviette\" who mainly does interviews with rappers/musicians. Before each interview, he conducts the most in-depth research on them that anyone has ever conducted, mentioning people, places, early inspirations from their childhood and musical career, things that only a handful of people, the rappers' parents or only themselves could know - which often astounds, confuses or even frightens them. [LINK] [VIDEO] I agree with the previous comments, Lex' guests are really great, maybe the above can serve as inspiration :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35426382,"author":"toomanyrichies","month":"2023-04","story_title":"\u2018Hot Ones\u2019 Was a Slow Burn All Along","text":"If you're into interviewers who go the extra mile to give the interviewee and the viewer a good experience, I also recommend a Canadian named John Ruskin, who also goes by the name Nardwuar the Human Serviette. He's a music geek (in the best way) who interviews musicians and gives them gifts as a way to spark discussion, and they're often blown away by the research he does into the gifts he gives and the questions he asks. Here's an example he did with Pharrell Williams from the group NERD [1]. Quote from Pharrell: \"This is one of the most impressive interviews I've ever experienced in my life... your research is second-to-none.\" 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5RpPTRcz1no":[{"hn_comment_id":42911000,"author":"keernan","month":"2025-02","story_title":"","text":"Please, please everyone watch the incredibly disturbing video I link below. The video was created on Nov 14, right after the election. It is about the plans of 6 billionaires (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andressen, Ben Horotwitz, Brian Armstrong, and David Sacks) who refer to themselves as Dark Gothic MAGA. The video regurgitates the words of these 6 men. Don't take anyone's word for it. Listen to their own words about their plans. Here is what billionaire Marc Cuban says in the video: >\u201c\u2026 what\u2019s happening in Silicon Valley is insane. It\u2019s not so much a support thing. It\u2019s more like a takeover thing. Trying to put themselves in a position to have as much control as possible. They want Trump to be the CEO of the United States of America and they want to be the Board of Directors that makes him listen to them.\u201d Link: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42896221,"author":"metamet","month":"2025-02","story_title":"The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is","text":"Musk et al.'s plan has been out in the open for a while. Lots of interviews and opinions from them the last few years, so I wouldn't even consider it an open secret. This video is probably the most succinct summary of it I've seen: [VIDEO] It was made two months ago and has been right on the nose so far in terms of the phases in their process.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42923402,"author":"khold_stare","month":"2025-02","story_title":"The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE","text":"This will sound like a conspiracy theory, but this is the playbook of Curtis Yarvin, specifically the \"RAGE\" step - Retire All Government Employees. Some references: Watch the whole video (posted months ago predicting all these actions), but here is the relevant section: [VIDEO] NYT interview: [LINK] Gil Duran did a lot of the reporting on this. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42941469,"author":"Hikikomori","month":"2025-02","story_title":"What's happening inside the NIH and NSF","text":"I'm convinced that these people and in particular Jarvin read Snow Crash and want to make it reality. Video with similar content, shows them actually talking about their ideas and plans: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42943406,"author":"CamperBob2","month":"2025-02","story_title":"We need network societies, not network states (2024)","text":"I love articles that give me a magic sentence right at the front that tells me I don't need to read any more I wish this were a laughing matter, but it's not. These people appear to be quite serious and quite capable. There's a coalition in play that includes the Project 2025 authors among others, operating at a scope that a lot of people don't fully appreciate. If this coalition holds together, they may be able to execute what many would consider a rather frightening agenda. Despite its cheesy title, this video ( [VIDEO] ) offers an interesting perspective on Balaji Srinivasan and his place in a larger web of influence alongside people like Yarvin, Musk, and Vance. It's eye-opening. She released it back in November and promptly took a lot of flack from people calling her alarmist and conspiracy-prone, and now it's basically playing out in real time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43005380,"author":"leanstartupnoob","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'","text":"I would like to see some discussion on the Dark Gothic Maga video (How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America) [VIDEO] On one hand it comes across like a conspiracy video, but on the other hand she plays direct video clips of major tech figures talking about dismantling the government and dividing the world into small nation states. Trump and Musk have also both stated they want to eliminate large amounts of the federal government. I would love to get some perspective from those who have personally interacted with those people over the last 10 years. This video probably falls under what you consider \"activating\", but it seems like we need to have conversations around this type of issue rather than letting rational voices get drowned out by the sea of angry shouting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43041044,"author":"rnd0","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Europe cannot rely on US protection, Pentagon chief tells NATO allies","text":"Trump is a puppet. The people pulling his strings, however, should be taken very seriously. This video breaks down who those people are as well as what their motivations are: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43053863,"author":"yxre","month":"2025-02","story_title":"A Libertarian Island Dream in Honduras Is Now an $11B Nightmare","text":"I think this is a pretty common goal. This video is a bit pessimistic, but it shows a lot of evidence that many tech billionaires are aspiring to that end. Most notably Peter Thiel [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43220153,"author":"rwyinuse","month":"2025-03","story_title":"A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub","text":"Yep, here's a pretty good summary: [VIDEO] Indeed I believe that the current administration's end-goal is the collapse of the US as we know it. Thiel and other billionaires need the collapse to create their own cyberpunk states inside current US territory. The remaining territory will be probably taken by Project 2025 guys, who want to rule it as a Christian theocracy / far-right utopia.","stance":"rec"}],"5SJm2ep3X_M":[{"hn_comment_id":16438405,"author":"tobiaswk","month":"2018-02","story_title":"IOTA: The Brave Little Toaster That Couldn\u2019t","text":"A mesh network that requires YOU to be online to receive funds. Also you must have funds to open a channel. So in order to receive funds you must have funds already. It seems like a really big step backwards in big big scheme of things bitcoin. All of the above problems can be solved by increasing the block size. I'm not saying it's the definitive solution... but right now it is a better solution. A good talk about really big blocks on bitcoin and what the ramifications are; [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17019718,"author":"tobiaswk","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency","text":"That's my point. BCH did not include some technical innovations like you stated. It simply increased hardcoded block size limit. Simple as that. Even Satoshi himself mentions this in his whitepaper. Other stuff has also changed. The difficulty adjustment (DAA) algorithm has changed to allow are more stable difficulty for miners. Segwit just changed what parts of a transaction counted as size in a block. In reality we're talking about 200KB or thereabouts extra space in blocks. Lightning network is based on a mesh-network. Furthermore it completely changes the bitcoins fundamental clockwork. Suddenly you can't receive payments if you don't hold any coins yourself. Even more detrimental; you can't receive payments if you are not online on the lightning network. It has several other flaws that are very hard to fix; [LINK] . I suggest you see this presentation on 1GB blocks (tested on test-net) by Peter Rizun; [VIDEO] And his talk at \"Satoshi's Vision\" (here he talks about what is called \"weak blocks\" and how it can improve scaling and wasted PoW; [LINK] It's totally feasible and does not require super computers albeit a Raspberry Pi won't do no more. Scaling to VISA level of transactions is possible. I don't think it's really going to change too much in computing power with bigger blocks. The size of the merkle root won't change just because blocks are larger which means the block header size won't change. Why do you suspect a second-layer is needed?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31390471,"author":"intabli","month":"2022-05","story_title":"The problem with Bitcoin miners","text":"I needed to clarify that it wasn\u2019t my proposal, as to how to gradually approach this, test nets are already deployed on many of the uncapped networks, I believe you\u2019ll enjoy this great presentation by Peter Rizun and Andrew Stone, they\u2019re far smarter than I\u2019ll ever be: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31390711,"author":"intabli","month":"2022-05","story_title":"The problem with Bitcoin miners","text":"Uncapped is a pseudo name for \u201ccapped just in time\u201d. It\u2019s never really uncapped. If you\u2019re interested in some work being done on such larger blocks, you\u2019ll enjoy this presentation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5SaFTm2bcac":[{"hn_comment_id":4122583,"author":"jeffool","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Youtube claims I don't own my own film","text":"I wish you the best of luck Mdotstrange (if you didn't see it, he posted in this thread claiming BFM actively claimed copyright over the sound of wind.) Yes, piracy and copyright infringement is rampant, but by both individuals and corporations. A great example is the Amen Break. If you've got 20 minutes, I can't suggest this video enough for everyone: [VIDEO] It's in everything from old hip hop, to Oasis' \"D'You Know What I Mean?\" to the original Futurama theme song! And all used with, according to the creators, absolutely zero royalties. (And they're fine with it, having been told. They get it.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5534739,"author":"joezydeco","month":"2013-04","story_title":"The Economics Of Girl Talk","text":"If you want to go farther down the rabbit hole, this is an excellent 20-minute video about the history of the Amen Break, the \"six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures\" and the rise of sampling: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7942428,"author":"jmarin","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Houston, We Have A Public Domain Problem","text":"For anyone interested in more thoughts on copyright and (the killing of) culture, I highly recommend this video on the Amen break: [VIDEO] Additionally, this comic is informative and fun: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9519979,"author":"DiabloD3","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Typedrummer","text":"For those who don't know what the Amen Break is, here is the most important documentary ever done: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9534861,"author":"jsmthrowaway","month":"2015-05","story_title":"The Roland TR-808: the drum machine that revolutionised music","text":"The TR-808 is up there with samplers and the Amen Break in terms of defining modern music. If you have twenty minutes, there's a wonderful video explaining the Amen Break that I suggest everybody watch at least once: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37374897,"author":"atlanta90210","month":"2023-09","story_title":"A History of the Amen Break: From the Winstons to Futurama and Om Unit","text":"17 Years ago this audio/video explained it all. Props to the artist Landon for laying down the audio to a record and playing the audio (with examples) from the record. 6.8 millions views - the Winstons will never be forgotten. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43553045,"author":"securingsincity","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Shared DNA in Music","text":"This is my favorite video on the Amen break from about 20 years ago that explains the history and more of the context [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47964578,"author":"fred_is_fred","month":"2026-04","story_title":"A 25-Year-Fight over a 2-Second Sample","text":"Here's the video to watch on the history of the Amen Break. It's very in-depth and I highly recommend it. I just noticed it's 20 years old too! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2860104,"author":"RyanMcGreal","month":"2011-08","story_title":"John Mayer on Finishing Awful Songs","text":"My favourite is the story of \"Amen Brother\", a forgettable (?) b-side instrumental by sixties funk band The Winstons that just happened to feature a really sweet break beat ... which went on to spawn an entire musical genre. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4113232,"author":"MiguelHudnandez","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Lawyer attacking The Oatmeal shocked by big mean Internet\u2019s reaction","text":"For anyone with 20 minutes to spare, here is a great video explaining the prevalence of the \"Amen Break\" sample. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10572130,"author":"gluelogic","month":"2015-11","story_title":"The Musicians Behind One of the Most Sampled Songs in History Finally Got Paid","text":"This is a very informative video on the \"Amen break\" [VIDEO] I am sure most readers have heard it somewhere. It really is ubiquitous.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47355783,"author":"ykl","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Bubble Sorted Amen Break","text":"If you aren\u2019t familiar with the Amen Break, here\u2019s a now classic 18 minute documentary on the Amen Break and its origins and evolution: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47359198,"author":"tlynchpin","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Bubble Sorted Amen Break","text":"[VIDEO] great deep dive into the Amen break. this video is from the yt days of yore, nice to see the yt algo still propping it up.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47361375,"author":"efortune","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Bubble Sorted Amen Break","text":"This documentary from 2004 (uploaded to YouTube in 2006(!)) is how I learned about the Amen Break and it's immense influence on the music of the 80s and 90s: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48443816,"author":"bayindirh","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Teenage Engineering: Introducing APC-2","text":"...and here's a great documentary about this: [VIDEO] This is a video about Amen Break, read from a wax disc which can't survive more than 5-6 plays.","stance":"rec"}],"5TFDG-y-EHs":[{"hn_comment_id":26668902,"author":"kibwen","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters","text":"Seconded, thirded, and fourthed. My favorite is \"NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS\", where he dismisses 0 and 1 as being too ugly to be the foundation of all computation and reinvents computing via the beauty of rational numbers, which is to say, the horror of IEEE754 floating point (along with a working hardware implementation!): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34174784,"author":"kibwen","month":"2022-12","story_title":"I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM [video]","text":"Here's my favorite video of his, where he reinvents computing from scratch while eschewing inelegant 1s and 0s for elegant floating-point values: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35125507,"author":"bakuninsbart","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the most interesting YouTube channels to follow?","text":"Suckerpinch barely ever releases a video, but when he does they are great. NaN gates and FlipFlops are my favorite: [VIDEO] You can only get good at mathematics by doing, but if there is a channel that helps you get better at math passively it is probably Michael Penns': [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34375400,"author":"anyfoo","month":"2023-01","story_title":"ABC: A C compiler for printable x86","text":"That's a beautiful form of art, somehow. Far away from the only form of art, but it's the kind of art where a) it's very obvious that you have to be extremely proficient in what you are doing (and so the stupid modern art spectator comment \"I could have done this\" is quelled from its very spark), and b) it's so useless, especially for the amount of effort put in, that it really only exists for itself and to please both creator and spectator. There is one video of his that takes it to an extreme: [VIDEO] - That is not only impossibly bonkers on just about every level, it's also so incredibly useless that the result is not even observable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34397480,"author":"btown","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Supporting half-precision floats is really annoying","text":"Why stop at half-precision floats? Why not go all the way to 3-bit floats? And build a hardware accelerator out of them? Tom Murphy has you covered with: the NaN Gate. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37800456,"author":"Recursing","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Subtraction Is Functionally Complete","text":"Reminds me of this wonderful video: [VIDEO] , where he builds computation using only IEEE-754 NaN and infinity","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38580874,"author":"retsibsi","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Gaussian Explosion","text":"Not sure how well it fits what you're looking for, but if you're not already aware of tom7/suckerpinch, you might get a kick out of some of his videos -- e.g. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44416133,"author":"MathMonkeyMan","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Most ints are not floats","text":"And the operators +, -, *, and / lack some of the properties of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Tom7 has a good video about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5Tek9h3a5wQ":[{"hn_comment_id":23593381,"author":"BoiledCabbage","month":"2020-06","story_title":"The history that James Baldwin wanted America to see","text":"I'd also recommend watching Baldwin's debate with William F Buckley. It's fascinating to see his clarity of thought, and how much it still ties to arguments of today. Different words, different terms, and more euphemisms now but same arguments of thought. The topic of the debate is \"Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American negro?\" [VIDEO] Or even just watch the first 10 mins in from the youtube link point. The first 5+ mins slowing build to his point. Just watching their debate styles is fascinating.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25987825,"author":"wombatmobile","month":"2021-02","story_title":"James Baldwin, Here and Elsewhere","text":"Baldwin could see things that ordinary commentators couldn't because he saw the world through other people's eyes, and felt the machinery of their thoughts. In this 1965 appearance at Cambridge University, he mesmerises the audience by telling them what it's like to grow up black in America not even knowing you're black, until one day, as a young child, you catch yourself in the mirror and realise you aren't the person your culture is built for. You actually don't exist, because there is no space in your culture's stories for you. What brings the predominantly white male audience at Cambridge Union to their feet for a standing ovation, beyond Baldwin's faultless elocution, is his mastery of white American experience. He speaks about racism from inside out, considering that what has happened to white Americans who have succumbed to the disease of racism is worse than what has happened to black Americans who suffer it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26981113,"author":"pasabagi","month":"2021-04","story_title":"New evidence that British workplaces are losing viewpoint diversity","text":"As a sort of counterpoint, I think it might be worth it to watch a classic of the 'free debate' genre, Buckley vs Baldwin[1], that happened in the sixties in Cambridge. It pitted a black civil rights activist against the young Buckley, later a stalwart of American conservatism. I don't know if it's my bias speaking, but I felt that in the debate, Buckley comes across as a bully, with very little argumentative meat, who doesn't really respond to Baldwin's points. For what its worth, I didn't really like Baldwin's delivery either, but at least I felt there were substantive points there that were worth addressing. In a way, this is probably the best one can hope for when you stage this kind of event - Buckley is, at least, well educated, but I can't help but think the debate might have been far more interesting if it was Baldwin vs Malcolm X - because ultimately the problem with the Buckleys of the world is that they defend institutions that were not built on ideals, but rather economics, and as such the defenses themselves are generally sophistic and without anything really interesting in them. If I was a student, I would probably agitate to exclude a Buckley, and instead reach for a Malcolm, and I expect somebody would accuse me of being anti-free-speech, since the debate that would result would no longer span a societal divide, and both parties in the debate would be on 'one side' of the broader social issue. However, from an intellectual standpoint, it just sometimes is the ","stance":"rec"}],"5TkIe60y2GI":[{"hn_comment_id":20839738,"author":"ccvannorman","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Is e Normal?","text":"It's fascinating how little we know about everyday numbers like pi and e, it's widely assumed that they are normal but there is no proof for this (and it's extremely difficult to do so). In fact we believe the fast majority of numbers are transcendental and normal but we only actually know of a single normal number, and it is a manufactured number. Numberphile has an excellent video on the numbers we know about and the quest to find / define normal numbers: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19390131,"author":"StrangeDoctor","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP","text":"That's actually most numbers, but we don't know any yet. [VIDEO] numberphile (math YouTube series) describing some related concepts here.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19413290,"author":"mjlee","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Famous Transcendental Numbers","text":"It feels like every time there's a mathematics post on the front page I post a video by Matt Parker. This time, here's a video that explains from the basics what kinds of numbers exist: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22099027,"author":"KboPAacDA3","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Chaitin's Constant","text":"Numberphile has a video explaining the relationship between the number categories, and includes a brief discussion of where Chaitin's Constant belongs. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24034390,"author":"deepspace","month":"2020-08","story_title":"How real are real numbers? (2004)","text":"I found Matt Parker's video to be a good way to visualize the fact that we 'know' essentailly 0% of numbers: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43099024,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2025-02","story_title":"The number line freaks me out (2016)","text":"This video parallels the article, going further. I love the tag line, \"We know none of the numbers.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45526487,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2025-10","story_title":"The Unknotting Number Is Not Additive","text":"You might appreciate this video where Matt Parker lays out the various classes of numbers and concludes by describing the normal numbers as being the overwhelmingly vast proportion of numbers and laments \"we mathematicians think we know what's what, but so far we have found none of the numbers.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5V1ynVyud4M":[{"hn_comment_id":26399297,"author":"anotheryou","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Nodes.io \u2013 A new way to create with code","text":"Check out this early prototype of eve mentioned here: [VIDEO] Not language agnostic, but table based. (eve went in to a different direction afterwards though)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34486457,"author":"EdiX","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?","text":"A lot of people did. To what others have said, I'm going to add this: [VIDEO] Which is an interesting talk about how these approaches fail in practice.","stance":"rec"}],"5Vt8zqhHe_c":[{"hn_comment_id":24562684,"author":"jimbokun","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Small Tech","text":"That\u2019s a shame, because the article led me to listen to this talk: [VIDEO] Which I thought was amazing and inspiring.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10267556,"author":"kbenson","month":"2015-09","story_title":"What Happens Next Will Amaze You","text":"I agree. In general, I found this presentation to ramble far more and make weird connections than some of his other ones, which I remember liking. Presentations and talks such as Web Design: The first 100 years [1] (even if it was a while back and I don't remember it all that clearly), and Barely succeed! It's easier! [2] (which I saw within the last couple of days) are quite good (if memory serves). 1: [LINK] 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25250319,"author":"totemandtoken","month":"2020-11","story_title":"How to Run a Ponzi Scheme for Tech People","text":"Reminds me a lot of this talk from the Pinboard guy: [VIDEO] Or this talk from the Bandcamp guy about financial sustainability: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"5WPB2u8EzL8":[{"hn_comment_id":36841198,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-07","story_title":"How, Mathematically, We\u2019re Fucked: Exponential growth on a finite planet","text":"> Burn it all down and start over We won't be the ones doing that. > We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue. > we can't just ignore the problems We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored the problems. We may cross the 1.5C threshold in 5 years. Not in 2050 as previously expected, but in 5 years. And we're still pursuing economic growth. Have you noticed any evidence to the contrary lately? > it's going to be a big challenge, and things may get ugly I recommend few videos for you. I must warn you ... it may hamper your ability to enjoy parties. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario - Arthur Keller [LINK] How to Enjoy the End of the World - Dr. B. Sidney Smith [VIDEO] Arithmetic, Population and Energy - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett [LINK] Why Societies Collapse And What it Means for Us - Joseph A. Tainter [LINK] Revealing the Naked Emperor \u2013 Paris, 2\u00b0 & Carbon Budgets - Kevin Anderson [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20048555,"author":"datashaman","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Complex life may only exist because of millions of years of groundwork by fungi","text":"Check out this sobering talk by Dr Sid Smith where he says the same thing wrt oils and fossil fuels. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23596354,"author":"chacha2","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Does computing make the world better?","text":"> Computing saves millions of lives on a regular basis. Can't run modern agriculture or medicine or government without it. No, we couldn't have. Computing has killed us all. Good talk I watched the other day [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46807303,"author":"M95D","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Why Some People See Collapse Earlier","text":"> Civilizational doom isn't a foregone conclusion See lecture by B. Sidney Smith: [VIDEO] . It explains the inevitablility of collapse.","stance":"rec"}],"5XDTQLa3NjE":[{"hn_comment_id":3736153,"author":"joeyh","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Body Hacking: Thoughts Regarding My Magnet Implant","text":"About that wireless connection to the device connected to your heart, and such things as security and bugs, here's a really excellent talk by Karen Sandler. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12251894,"author":"jordigh","month":"2016-08","story_title":"\u201cI Want to Know What Code Is Running Inside My Body\u201d","text":"Another really good talk about the topic, \"freedon in my heart\" by Karen Sandler: [VIDEO] It's mentioned in the article.","stance":"rec"}],"5YV_iKnzDRg":[{"hn_comment_id":33298429,"author":"alfor","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: HNers with multiple sclerosis, can we get in touch?","text":"Try infrared light therapy. (sun, infrared heater or specialized light) We recently found out that all of our mitochondria in our cells need infrared light to get rid of oxidative stress. Our modern environment is devoid of infrared light: create all sort of inflammation and autoimmune diseases. I had similar symptoms(peripheral neuropathy, headache), heal myself and my eczema that I had every winter in the last 23 years with a few minutes per day in front of a infrared space heater.e It\u2019s this doctor that gave me the idea to try it out. [VIDEO] I also know someone who was dying of IBS in the hospital, at some point he say f*ck it if I am going to die it will be under the sun. He checked out of the hospital, whent to mexico (from Canada) and healed himself without medication. I think a lot of our modern problems are caused by our environment (vit-d, infrared, and other things.) I hope people try it out and that it help someone. Check out the videos of Medcram, many research papers have been done on this.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33801747,"author":"alfor","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Just Say No","text":"Please, please, if you have IBS, Crohn or other immune disease try infrared light or better the sun. Especially if you spend a lot of time indoor (engineer) if you live in the north or if your condition get worse in the winter. I know someone who save his life that way. To me it clear up my winter eczema. We need infrared to get rid of inflammation. It\u2019s scientifically proven, free, yet most people are not aware of it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30485179,"author":"alfor","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Heat people, not spaces (2015)","text":"Our body NEED infrared light. (real doctor research with scientific evidence) An interesting recent discovery is that our body need infrared radiation to function properly, not just UV light/vitamin D. I think that people living in the northern climate discovered/felt that it was better to be exposed to the radian heat of the fire in the winter. We recently (50-100) years have been getting rid of fireplaces and replaced with forced air and baseboard heater that probably generated a lot of health problem. A month ago I discovered this information, bought an small infrared heated and healed in 10 days the winter eczema I have been fighting for 25 years. source: [VIDEO] I hope this help somebody","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30497184,"author":"sooheon","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)","text":"You may be interested in the following video, where a quadruple board certified doc reviews relevant literature regarding sun exposure (and the critical wavelengths involved) and various facets of health: [VIDEO] The review paper that ties many different findings from different fields (optics, endocrinology, circadian rhythms...) together with an audacious spoonful of hypothesizing is this: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30601660,"author":"alfor","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Quicker and easier ways to get more light","text":"We also need infrared light to be healthy, led lights have none. Recent research have shown that infrared light is needed for our mitochondria to work properly. I have cured my 20 year winter eczema in two weeks with a cheap infrared heater. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31477416,"author":"MikeOfAu","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy and unscientific \u2013 research (2019)","text":"The article makes no mention of Photobiomodulation (and there\u2019s no mention in these comments at the time of writing). And that's odd. Because that's the HUGE idea here. Yes, there are concerns about the harms associated with the UV end of the spectrum. But there are also the massive benefits from the Near Infrared (NIR) end. Certain NIR wavelengths, around 810nm to 850nm, penetrate up to 5cm into the body and have a dramatically positive effect on mitochondria, creating the most powerful sub-cellular antioxidant (melatonin) to manage Oxidative Stress. This is well-established science now. Indeed, the exact mechanism is known (cytochrome c oxidase, etc). It turns out that for good health it helps to be exposed to the Sun (and specifically NIR). We're more plant than we realise (a different mechanism obviously). And, if you think about it, how on earth could we have not evolved to take advantage of the \u201cfree\u201d energy provided by the Sun, particularly the NIR part of the spectrum which actually delivers about half of the energy. Here's an explanation from MedCram: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34681658,"author":"beebmam","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Vitamin D serum levels, supplementation&suicide attempts&intentional self-harm","text":"There's an interesting theory about mitochondria and melatonin secretion caused by near-infrared light that may be causing the different health outcomes, which historically are correlated very strongly to Vitamin D serum levels (where causation has yet to be shown). Here's a link for a presentation and a proposed mechanism of action around near-IR light by one of the best sources of medical science info on the internet: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37732076,"author":"deet","month":"2023-10","story_title":"The unexpected benefits of sun exposure on skin","text":"It's surprising this article doesn't significantly mention sunlight's non-UV components, like infrared light. There appears to be increasing evidence to support its ability to influence various processes within the body to positive effect. MedCram has some easily digestible reviews on the topic: - The ability for light to influence glucose metabolism: [LINK] - Light's effect on immune response and other processes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40571773,"author":"muixoozie","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Sleep apnea linked to brain and memory problems","text":"Whatever you do don't start taking Ambien / zolpidem. Solved nothing and now it's hard to quit. I recommend checking out [VIDEO] TLDW sunlight in the morning good. [LINK] tldw: you may have apnea and not know it. Better to catch it early on.","stance":"rec"}],"5ZjhNTM8XU8":[{"hn_comment_id":16840291,"author":"geksilla","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Rich Hickey - \"simple made easy\" [LINK] Rob Pike - \"concurrency is not parallelism\" [LINK] Uncle Bob Martin - \"future of programming\" [LINK] Martin Kleppmann - \"transactions: myths, surprises and opportunities\" [VIDEO] Simon Brown - \"software architecture vs code\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19901785,"author":"redisman","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into","text":"It's great. Incredibly dense with useful information and it just blows my mind how much knowledge Martin has about the topic. I recommend watching this talk from him to give a little glimpse of the book: [VIDEO] This is just about a little part of one of the chapters.","stance":"rec"}],"5_-Ac68FKG4":[{"hn_comment_id":36958593,"author":"routerl","month":"2023-08","story_title":"YKK: Japan\u2019s Zipper King [video]","text":"+1 Love his \"What [course of action] did for [country]\" videos. E.g. What eating the rich did for Japan. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48237434,"author":"tyre","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Why Japanese companies do so many different things","text":"Yes, thank you for compressing it. They start their answer with: > Here is the answer I want to suggest: Japanese companies excel in lots of very different domains because it\u2019s inherent in how they\u2019re structured. Which is then backed by some economists saying something similar (generally), but all of which completely ignores Japan\u2019s specific history. As a better example Of examining Japan, here\u2019s a look at Japan\u2019s monopolies, how they were broken up, and partly how that effected the future of their industry: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5_KcQt0z-eE":[{"hn_comment_id":34248028,"author":"fauria","month":"2023-01","story_title":"A Man Who Made Spain the Magic Capital of the World","text":"If you like Juan Tamariz, have a look at some of Dani DaOrtiz routines, another Spanish magician heavily influenced by Tamariz. This one from 2022 for Penn and Teller is amazing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34251699,"author":"uberuberuber","month":"2023-01","story_title":"A Man Who Made Spain the Magic Capital of the World","text":"His student Dani Daortiz is amazing to watch. [VIDEO] The explanation of this 10 minute act using a non-gimmicked deck of cards is 3 hours long. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38305974,"author":"lisper","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Magicians less prone to mental disorders than other artists, finds research","text":"This is the thing that very few people understand about magic, including many aspiring magicians: there is a lot more to it than just \"technical understanding\". Magic is a performance art. It's a kind of acting. And you can be very good at the technical stuff and still be a terrible performer/actor. (Personally, I'm bad at both :-) Here is my favorite example. This is one of the greatest performances of all time: [VIDEO] It looks like total chaos, and most people seeing this performance for the first time think that Dani is a master of sleight of hand, and that this performance relies on extremely difficult technical moves. In fact it is exactly the opposite. The secret \"moves\" are very basic -- anyone can do them, and everything that happens is actually very carefully controlled. (Dani is also a master of slight-of-hand, but that's not what this act relies on.) This is not to say that what Dani is doing here is easy; it's not. Dani teaches a class on this one routine that lasts three hours, and there is never a dull moment (this is how I know what's going on -- I did not figure it out by myself). But it's not hard in the way that, say, juggling is hard, it's hard in the same way that good acting is hard. When it's done well it looks easy, and making it look easy is very, very hard.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45343500,"author":"lisper","month":"2025-09","story_title":"After 50 years, The Magic Circle finally inducts Penn and Teller","text":"> so much of it boils down to \u201cI practiced for years and developed a seemingly superhuman ability to manipulate this object\u201d. Amateur magician here (but a magician member of the Magic Castle, so I know a few things). Manual dexterity is certainly a useful skill, but it's just a tiny part of the art of magic. You can be a consummate sleight-of-hand artist and still be a mediocre magician, and conversely, some of the best magicians don't use particularly difficult sleights. The best example of that I know of is Dani Da Ortiz's routine on Penn and Teller Fool Us: [VIDEO] Now, Dani is in fact a master at sleight-of-hand, and so one would think that you are watching a masterclass in sleights, but no. There are a few sleights, but they are not particularly difficult, beginner-level. I could do them, and I'm not particularly skilled. The trick is based almost entirely on timing and misdirection and psychological subtleties. The degree of psychological subtlety in top-level magic continually blows my mind. The best magicians make it look like magic even when you know how the trick is done. Dani's trick is a consummate example. The performance looks like chaos, but in fact every detail is meticulously crafted and serves a purpose. It's almost like watching a dance.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45596706,"author":"SAI_Peregrinus","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Don\u2019t Look Up: Sensitive internal links in the clear on GEO satellites [pdf]","text":"Dani DaOrtiz is one of the best at that. He sells instructions for all his tricks, but he's so good at performing them that they still feel like magic even if you know what he's doing. His appearance on Fool Us\u00b9 is a series of excellent examples of that. He palms a card onto the box, and Teller's reaction when he misses it happening is astonishment because it's such a simple move to spot but done so well Teller missed it despite looking for such moves. That continues as the act goes on, until both Penn & Teller are left experiencing only the joy of the performance & awe at Dani's skill. None of the techniques are ones they don't know about, but Dani does them so well they didn't even try to figure out everything he did, since they knew they'd have to guess what he'd actually done! Penn later described Dani as \"the best card magician who has ever lived\"\u00b2. The best magic tricks tend to be the ones where knowing the secret doesn't ruin the trick, but instead changes it to a show about the skill of the performer. Nobody complains about \"spoilers\" at a virtuoso's concert, the joy of the performance & the skill of the performer are not ruined by knowing the music beforehand. I think the same can apply to magic, to books, to movies, etc. You can re-read a really good book, or re-watch a really good movie, and the experience won't be ruined by knowing the ending. It'll be different, but not worse. With magic the awe shifts from \"how is that possible?\" to \"how did that person manage t","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38087927,"author":"EMM_386","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Penn and Teller's Lab Scam [video]","text":"> And so if a \"peer\" of theirs were to explain the method to someone who didn't purchase it then it would be viewed as a dick move since it is affecting the livelihood of a fellow performer. Yep that's exactly how I interpreted it ... not because people are adhering to some sacred oath given deep in cavern in a secret location ... just that someone invented something new and unique, they are rightfully earning some money from that effort, and you could potentially destroy the whole thing simply by posting too much information about it. As you said, that would certainly be a \"dick move\", and since a lot of people don't want be that, they don't do that. In the end it seems to be pretty effective. I still want answers to some of the tricks that I've seen on Penn and Teller's show. Some of them do come across as impossible no matter what way I try to think about it. Dani DaOrtiz comes immediatly to mind ... no clue how it's done but he's pretty funny. This particular routine has various elements that each seem to be impossible. And honestly, I don't want to know how it's done. It's magic. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5bQhGS8V6dQ":[{"hn_comment_id":11801448,"author":"krzychukula","month":"2016-05","story_title":"European Lisp Symposium 2016","text":"Best talks in my opinion: * [VIDEO] * [LINK] Notable mentions: * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] I liked OpenGL lightning talk as well: * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11801596,"author":"agumonkey","month":"2016-05","story_title":"European Lisp Symposium 2016","text":"> [VIDEO] no wonder CANDO is impressive, the scope and fields involved are pretty rare... I'm very eager to learn if C. Schafmeister work will bear 'disruptive fruits'. ps: a talk about clasp [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"5cWck_xcH64":[{"hn_comment_id":7670503,"author":"jrvarela56","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Hacker taps into baby monitor, shouts at sleeping infant","text":"It's both amazing and scary that this kind of vulnerability is fairly common. Check out this great talk given at Defcon ( [VIDEO] ) to get an idea of the magnitude. These are systems that do not require any kind of tampering or credentials. Most times credentials are given to you in a prompt!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14246906,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Vigilantes are working hard to infect IoT devices with the Hajime botnet","text":"Defcon 20 - Dan Tentler - \"Drinking from the caffeine firehose we know as shodan\" [VIDEO] Warning - watching this may readjust your faith in humanity. Telnet is just the tip of the iceberg. edit: (15:42) \"Econolite [stoplights] listening on telnet. There are intersections [with] stoplights; you can telnet into them and put them in 'test mode'[sic], and the warning says, 'Don't do this, you could kill people!'\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20195802,"author":"dmitriid","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The NYC subway system runs on OS/2","text":"The answer is: quite probably. A lot of old systems get retrofitted with additional features/terminals/addons on top to make them \"more modern\" and as a result end up being connected to the internet. A great presentation on this (and many other things) here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5d6SEQQbwtU":[{"hn_comment_id":23967527,"author":"polytely","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Sailor pictured with laser rifle on board USS Minnesota nuclear sub","text":"The youtube channel smarter every day is doing a series about live aboard a nuclear attack sub (different class than the one in the article, Los Angeles class IIRC) during an exercise where they navigate under ice, called ICEX. which might be of interest if you like this article. It's obviously propaganda but it is very interesting nonetheless. actual submarine part: [LINK] the leadup and context surrounding the exercise: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31156681,"author":"TehShrike","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Nukes, nubs and coners: The unique social hierarchy aboard a nuclear submarine","text":"If you found this post at all interesting you will enjoy Destin's series on Smarter Every Day spending time on a US fast attack submarine talking to everyone and poking at lots of weird corners: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5eBT6OSr1TI":[{"hn_comment_id":3096600,"author":"simonsarris","month":"2011-10","story_title":"Google+ traffic grew by 480% in one month so press reports a 60% decline.","text":"I hate to post trite things on HN but if you haven't heard of the Daily Mail there is a good (and humorous) summary of the paper made into a song using only their headlines: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26891921,"author":"jason0597","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Daily Mail owner sues Google over search results","text":">Relevant: [VIDEO] Ahhh this takes me back. What an amazing video. Made 11 years ago and it's just as accurate as it was back then. Honestly? Fuck the Daily Mail. Also The S*n, Daily Express, etc.","stance":"rec"}],"5eW6Eagr9XA":[{"hn_comment_id":33122328,"author":"Zensynthium","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: 10k hours rule to master anything. Could I switch career when I am 43?","text":"Derek from Veritasium had a pretty good video on becoming an expert in anything and I didn't see age as a blocking factor. I'd say go for it! Also check out the video here, it's worth a watch [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36581047,"author":"angarg12","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Learning needs to be effortful to be effective","text":"Deliberate practice is a well studied phenomenon. My favourite talk in the subject is this one from Veritasium [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42301813,"author":"lolinder","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Learn perfect pitch in 15 years","text":"It's absolutely pseudoscience. 10k hours doing what ? And why would we expect to see an approximately equal amount of time to achieve expertise across so many different human endeavors? Veritasium has a really good video on the subject [0], with a much more compelling explanation for what it takes to develop expertise. He comes up with 4 things, but the two that stood out the most to me are that the field needs to be deterministic\u2014the more randomness is involved the less expertise is possible\u2014and that the learner needs consistent and accurate feedback on what they get right and wrong. Absent those factors no number of hours will do you any good. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33119766,"author":"ourmandave","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: 10k hours rule to master anything. Could I switch career when I am 43?","text":"The youtuber Veritasium recently did a video on the 10,000 hour expert. Summary: you need 4 things to become an expert. From comment with timestamps: 5:00 Repeated attempts with feedback. 6:47 Valid environment. 11:23 Timely feedback. 13:50 Don't get to comfortable. Video link: [VIDEO] Comment link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35094580,"author":"somenameforme","month":"2023-03","story_title":"How to Start a Rocket Engine","text":"I'd also add this standard. Another amazing YouTuber is Veritasium. He went from [1] to [2]. The production quality is more than slightly improved, but the \"spirit\" remains identical. And I think that spirit is what drives success or failure. The production quality is just icing. [1] - [LINK] [2] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39538867,"author":"swframe2","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?","text":"The Veritasium youtube channel has a few interesting videos related to this topic: This one is on IQ: [LINK] Pay attention to the stats on how IQ correlates to success (near the end). This one is about becoming an expert: [VIDEO] This one is about someone who just worked harder than everyone else: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"5eo8nz_niiM":[{"hn_comment_id":29094858,"author":"littlecranky67","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Hetzner Cloud Goes US (Ashburn/VA)","text":"There has been a nice YT video recently showing how Hetzner operates their DC and their servers: [VIDEO] Was quite surprised that they use custom built server racks with their own custom-made mainboards delivered by OEMs. They even have their own long-term Fan testing rigs and custom HDD failure check setups.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30399135,"author":"dmw_ng","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Tell HN: I got 10x Hetzner storage at the same price","text":"Their buildings are passively cooled so this sounds quite plausible. Pretty fun video showing the realities of their setup [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35165334,"author":"trollied","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Hetzner Launches Three New Dedicated Servers","text":"There's a great YouTube tour of one of their data centres here: [VIDEO] 'Over 200,000 Servers in One Place! Visiting Hetzner in Falkenstein (Germany)' The channel is well worth a subscribe too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36811838,"author":"dpeckett","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it","text":"Couldn't agree more, I think Hetzner is probably Europe's best bet on a hyperscaler. One of the more telling indicators IMO is their growing market share outside of the EU/DACH. To add on to the comments about Hetzner building their own custom hardware, they also custom built their own software stack. They rejected the hype that was OpenStack and worked diligently on their own hypervisor platform (that they are incredibly secretive about) and that appears to be paying off in spades for them. Most sovereign cloud plays end up being suffocated by the complexity, and incoherence, of the OpenStack ecosystem. It just becomes impossible to ship. I know Hetzner is working like crazy on a managed Kubernetes offering atm, I think when that lands it could be very interesting. For a fascinatingly different take on how to build a datacenter: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39444527,"author":"wongarsu","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Hetzner GPU Server","text":"The best resource I know is a tour of one of their data centers. Around minute 6 you get some nice views on their current-gen racks, and later in the video you see the back side, followed by the assembly of the servers. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45970269,"author":"jsheard","month":"2025-11","story_title":"A day at Hetzner Online in the Falkenstein data center","text":"Der8auer did some similar videos a few years ago, but in English: [VIDEO] [LINK] The second is especially interesting as it demonstrates Hetzner's unique semi-custom hardware.","stance":"rec"}],"5eqRuVp65eY":[{"hn_comment_id":41844225,"author":"kla-s","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Zamba2-7B","text":"Please someone correct me if I\u2019m wrong, but my understanding of ML/LLMs is that this kind of hand crafting has been tried, but it is easier to train/less finicky to let behavior like this emerge from more data, see [1] \u201cBitter Lesson\u201d and [2] \u201cScaling Laws\u201d. MAMBA as an architecture claims to have some significant gains performance wise, but to my knowledge there haven't been any really large models (>~100B params) with open weights/leaked MAMBA architecture been disclosed other than this (7B). As mentioned by other comments, another dimension not to forget is the training data quality. Not only quantity but also quality really matters, is what we are learning more and more with LLMs.. [1] [LINK] [2] see eg [VIDEO] for a well made/easily digestable intro","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44765223,"author":"mdaniel","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Break the quadratic wall of Transformer attention: WERSA, paper+code open source","text":"I'm not deep enough in the ecosystem to ingest that paper but it's title reminded me of an interesting video I saw recently: \"AI can't cross this line and we don't know why\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5f9R9MtkpqM":[{"hn_comment_id":10878642,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2016-01","story_title":"The \u201cOther Side\u201d Is Not Dumb","text":"I highly recommend the Moral Politics talk by Linguistics professor George Lakoff: [VIDEO] In short, the two sides of the debate speak different language representing different world views rooted in upbringing and triggered / exploited by metaphors. This talk changed my view on political speech and narrative dramatically.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11982169,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook","text":"I think you'll enjoy this lecture by linguistics professor George Lakoff: [VIDEO] Among other things he speaks of the think-tank-driven concerted effort to influence political support by using language invoking specific metaphors to frame important issues. Like \"Tax Relief\" for dramatically reducing taxes for the rich etc. Changed how I process political speech and pretty much any media-supported narrative.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13871705,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal? (2016)","text":"George Lakoff did an excellent linguistic analysis of conservative vs. liberal political speech, metaphors and framing in his lecture Moral Politics. I found it extremely valuable in understanding the driving and defining forces behind the two movements. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21161031,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are your arguments in favor of end-to-end encryption?","text":"His framelab podcasts are informal and easily digestable. [LINK] I highly recommend * truth sandwich time (if you only listen to one make it this one) * how republicans really think (if you only listen to one make it this one, too) * how trump uses twitter to control the media (very eye opening) * guns over people (on how to frame the gun debate) Also, this lecture on political language exposes the leverage hooks politicians and propagandists use to hook and manipulate us. You will never listen/read political speech the same. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21476613,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2019-11","story_title":"You can fool some of the people, all of the time","text":"May I recommend this talk on the neuroscience of language and thought by George Lakoff? [LINK] And also this one on political language, morals and metaphors? It will change how you listen to political speech, and especially political speech targeting people with different political orientation -- which can often sound nonsensical, but is actually carefully constructed to activate their metaphors. [VIDEO] Basically, the ideas of enlightenment (we are rational beings) are not true. A couple of slides from the first lecture: Myth: Reason is conscious, you know what you think. Science: Reason is mostly unconscious, estimates are about 98% unconscious. Conscious thinking is linear. Brain circuitry is massively parallel. Myth: Ideas are made meaningful via their direct connections to the external world. Meaning is a matter of truth conditions. Science: Ideas are made meaningful via the brain's connections to the body and our embodied experience. Myth: Emotion gets in the way of rationality. Science: Emotion is necessary for rationality.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26361333,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Framing 101","text":"I highly recommend Lakoff\u2019s lecture on framing and metaphors in political speech and discourse. Changed how I listen - to anyone - forever. [VIDEO] His framelab podcast is also excellent.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30964884,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The true purpose of propaganda","text":"In this lecture on Moral Politics, George Lakoff addresses the \u201cnonsensical\u201d speech, metaphors, framing and more. Changed how I listen to mass media and political speech. [VIDEO] Also highly recommend his Truth Samndwich methodology to defanging propaganda messages in the media. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41932946,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite YouTube video, ever?","text":"Russ Olsen, author of Getting Closure, Eloquent Ruby and Design Patterns with Ruby, telling the story of the moon landing as a conference talk. Inspired me beyond measure and brought tears to my eyes. [LINK] \u2014- George Lakoff\u2019s lecture on Moral Politics. Instantaneous understanding of political language and identity politics. Incredibly important, especially today in time of extreme polarization. [VIDEO] \u2014- Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11982200,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook","text":"He refuses to use the commonly established language which distorts reality. It is a radical choice (given how well established the manipulative language is). I can see how some may find this irritating. You may want to take a look at this lecture to see why language is so important and influential. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12252268,"author":"TheSpiceIsLife","month":"2016-08","story_title":"How to Give Rural America Broadband? Look to the Early 1900s","text":"On that note, I found this talk on Moral Politics by George Lakoff[1] elsewhere on HN. The basic idea is that people who have different political opinions to you aren't necessarily stupid or greedy or bad actors, they just have different morals and therefore a different set of rationales. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12767597,"author":"TheSpiceIsLife","month":"2016-10","story_title":"It\u2019s official: Venezuela is a dictatorship","text":"You've probably seen this, but for those who haven't George Lakoff give's this a fairly good treatment in this[1] on 'Moral Politics'. By 'this' I mean the idea that the Left and the Right have different experiences of what is moral. My issue with politics is that I think we need to extricate it from morality. Like we have separation of Church and State a la Secular Society, we need amoral politics. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17102807,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Congress wants to extend the copyright on some sound recordings to 144 years","text":"This would be a great way to prevent polititians from framing the bills. For more on framing, see George Lakoff\u2019s lecture on moral politics \u2014 reveals the way political language uses metaphors and How framing a debate ensures its outcome. Repeating the frame reinforces the intended meaning. Merely Using the name of the bill defines its outcome. \u201cTax Relief\u201d - no one wants to fight a \u201crelief\u201d effort. Tax cuts for the rich would be the correct name. \u201cClear sky initiative\u201d is the name of a clear cutting bill. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18983826,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms","text":"The right[2] looks at intent because that's what matters in a hierarchical view of society. This division is from a fundamental difference in what societies are. This can be observed din how they use language; from one of the most enlightening articles[1] I've ever read: > One of the biggest problems of the entire Culture Wars is that people like us [the left[2]] use language impart information. We usually are not aware that a nice big chunk of population does not use language in that way at all. Their use of language is that of Phatic Language [...] In a hierarchical society [the right[2]], language is [often] not used for exchange of information [...] It is used to establish social hierarchy. For a good explanation of how this works, George Lakoff's lecture[3] \"Moral Politics\". [1] [LINK] [2] The \"left\"/\"right\" labels are being use in a general psychological sense, which doesn't always match the political groups with the same names. [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5fG_lyNuEAw":[{"hn_comment_id":23629083,"author":"bryphe","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Onivim 2: Lightweight, Modal Code Editor","text":"I'd highly recommend Jordan Walke's (creator of React) talk on the ideas behind ReasonML: React to the Future [1]. I think it's so cool that you can take the ideas of ReactJS - functional programming applied to UI - but then have a language (ReasonML [2]) that is essentially purpose built for it, with OCaml [3] powering it under the hood - a functional programming language that's been significantly invested in, both in academia and industry. And to be able to take React-the-Idea, compile it cross-platform, to native-code... and ship. - [1] Jordan Walke - React to the Future: [VIDEO] - [2] [LINK] - [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21859628,"author":"huy-nguyen","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"\u201cWhy isn\u2019t functional programming the norm?\u201d by Richard Feldman. Spoiler: not on the basis of merits. [LINK] \u201cReact to the future\u201d by Jordan Walke. Why ReasonML is a logical extension of ReactJS\u2019 programming paradigm. [VIDEO] \u201cTyping the untyped: soundness in gradual type systems\u201d by Ben Weissmann. The trade offs that various gradual type systems make based on their language constraints. [LINK] \u201cLet\u2019s program like it\u2019s 1999\u201d by Lee Byron. How the mutual feedback loop of abstraction, syntax and mental model drives the evolution of web technologies. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23168484,"author":"thegreatpeter","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Reason React 0.8","text":"The long awaited 0.8.0 release from Reason React is out of beta! This includes a lot of the niceties of writing React but in a very fast, type safe language. If this is your first time hearing about Reason, watch a video from its creator (Jordan Walke, creator of React) to learn more: [VIDEO] Fun facts about Reason: - exports TypeScript! If you have a TS project and looking for some extra speed & stability, you don't have to sacrifice type safety interop - It powers all of Messenger.com. The team put out a case study where they went from ~10 bugs a week to less than 10 a quarter by switching to Reason - It uses the npm / yarn ecosystem so you can use your favorite / current packages without looking for something new.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32855808,"author":"deltasevennine","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)","text":"He's a Fullstack JS developer which is even dumber because he uses React which is basically the defacto JS front end framework. React is trending heavily away from OOP, it's creators heavily buy into FP, and most of the patterns in react are inspired heavily by FP. Functional components are now the way to go. ReasonML (a pure FP language) is react as intended and is the northstar of React. To learn more here is a video from Jordan Walke creator of React (and ReasonML): [VIDEO] I recommend parent commenter to learn more about the very tools he himself works with before disparaging FP and himself.","stance":"rec"}],"5fbvquHSPJU":[{"hn_comment_id":6637356,"author":"kamjam","month":"2013-10","story_title":"The End of Hypocrisy","text":"Liberals tend to believe that other countries cooperate with the United States because American ideals are attractive and the U.S.-led international system is fair. I just watched The Four Horsemen on Youtube. It's pretty interesting, although nothing eye opening, but good to see it in one package (so to speak). The economic model to screw over everyone else to advance itself should have made it more than obvious everything you ever suspected was true. Now that more and more of these suspicions are being confirmed the US is on the back foot. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10229430,"author":"jayfuerstenberg","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Can the Fed raise interest rates?","text":"The documentary \"Four Horsemen\" (link below) goes into these topics at length, especially money creation. Most people's jaws drop when they learn that 97% of all money in the world isn't in paper/coin form but rather 0s and 1s in a database and that it is all willed into existence as debt by a bank. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5gnpCqsXE8g":[{"hn_comment_id":32263238,"author":"MikeAshley178","month":"2022-07","story_title":"West London faces new home ban as electric grid at capacity due to data centres","text":"Shaving a few minutes off your shower, walking to the shop instead of driving, turning your thermostat down by a few degrees will make no f@@kin difference what so ever to the horror that is coming. The whole point of these exercises is not to save energy but to engage the population to believe that they are part of the problem and therefore part of the solution. They are not. One of the most important videos on the entire Internet, if you cannot understand why then you are probably already lost. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13758504,"author":"returnbuyer","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?","text":"They're not weakening twitter by weakening western society. If anything, weakening the society with divisive gender war and identify politics empowers twitter. The western economy suffers and more people become reclusive and stay inside all day on the internet. It's basic culture warfare and it's been happening for decades. Listen to some Yuri Besmenov [1] if you don't know what I'm talking about. Basically my point is they don't care, because any division in their enemies is a good thing for them. While they retain immense strength and nationalism. I'll give you an example of poisoning the well. So many dual-citizen self admitted Zionists in America and Europe are pro-refugee. They adamantly fight for more refugees in these host countries. However their home country, Israel. Is entirely anti-refugee to a shocking degree. It's all part of the same pie. Marxism, communism, feminism, egalitarianism. Destruction of western civilization. [1] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40339051,"author":"coretx","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Scott Galloway: How the US is destroying young people's future [video]","text":"The following ancient cold war era video will probably make you understand what i mean and more: [VIDEO] History is repeating itself.","stance":"rec"}],"5guXaWwQpe4":[{"hn_comment_id":17707063,"author":"Scea91","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Seaweed could be scrubbing more carbon from the atmosphere than expected (2017)","text":"Exactly, we haven't achieved that much actually. Most of the technology we use for harvesting energy is not much further from what people could imagine in 19th century. Turbine was invented in the 19th century. I really suggest watching this talk by Smil [VIDEO] and if you are interested reading some books from him about energy and oil. Really insightful.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14249281,"author":"tedsanders","month":"2017-05","story_title":"The Future of Energy Isn't Fossil Fuels or Renewables, It's Nuclear Fusion","text":"That is a bizarre claim to make. Energy will not be far cheaper and more abundant in 10 years. Trillions of dollars are invested in infrastructure that has lifetimes of 50+ years. It is not economically or technologically feasible to undergo an energy revolution that quickly. Even if we gathered the political and financial will, our production facilities and supply chains could not feasibly handle the load of rebuilding the world's energy infrastructure in a single decade. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24514400,"author":"lcamach84","month":"2020-09","story_title":"How can we, as web professionals, help to make the web more energy efficient?","text":"I encourage you to look at the work of Vaclav Smil [1] . There's no such thing as clean energy. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5hUT8VZNvm8":[{"hn_comment_id":40086847,"author":"adroitboss","month":"2024-04","story_title":"CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred","text":"I remember seeing you debate Jason Calacanis from the all in podcast on this week in startups on this exact topic. You are probably one of the most confident, well spoken people I have ever heard on a podcast. You also don't derive your comfort from the people around you, so you didn't feel the need to laugh away awkward moments. It's a great watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28990344,"author":"digianarchist","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Lambda School leaked documents show poor performance over the last two years","text":"Vincent's interview with This Week in Startups on Lambda School is also very interesting despite the weird McCarthyist line of questioning the host goes down. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5hVmeOCJjOU":[{"hn_comment_id":30575876,"author":"josevalerio","month":"2022-03","story_title":"A wave function does not collapse upon detection?","text":"The confusion with the Copenhagen interpretation comes from two main sources in my opinion: 1. What can count as a measurement? 2. Quantum \u2018thing\u2019 interacting with a classical world One of my favorite talks on this subject is by Sean Carroll and offers the \u2018many worlds \u2018 interpretation as an alternative, mainly for its simplicity. Recommend watching the whole thing but if you want just the \u201cdebunking\u201d: 25:11 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31289871,"author":"joncp","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Where do space, time and gravity come from?","text":"Sean Carroll is a master of making quantum mechanics approachable to non-physicists. Here are a few of his talks: - Fermilab 2013: [LINK] - The Royal Institution 2014: [LINK] - The Royal Institution 2020: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31290750,"author":"raymond_goo","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Where do space, time and gravity come from?","text":"I highly agree and also recommend: [VIDEO] And I will add: The Big Picture: From the Big Bang to the Meaning of Life - with Sean Carroll [LINK] Mysteries of Modern Physics by Sean Carroll [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23952853,"author":"BrandoElFollito","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Townscaper \u2013 A building game inspired by the design of Scandinavian cities","text":"As someone who did a PhD in particle physics, this is very hard to understand (and not just apply math) This is actually just one of the interpretations, there are more and some are gaining traction (see for instance [VIDEO] , S Caroll is a great speaker but you need to stay concentrated :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25278879,"author":"slowmovintarget","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Scientific Writing and \u201cScience Writing\u201d (2015)","text":"Funny to see this now. One of the things my wife and I have been doing to engage our brains during the pandemic is to brush up on our knowledge of hard science. Of particular fascination for both of us has been cosmology and the frontiers of physics. We knocked into Sean Carroll's video series on YouTube by first encountering one of his lectures at the Royal Institution [1],[2]. We've been working our way through his \"Biggest Ideas in the Universe!\" series where he talks through history of physics and cosmology through to modern practice. I've also been reading through one of his books (and have read Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Roger Penrose, Brian Greene, Lee Smolin, and others) and all of this has gotten me to a point where I could listen to an actual presentation to physics students and faculty on quantum mechanics and understand what was being discussed, despite not being up to doing the math myself. Yet this expedition over the last few months has made me wonder how someone who only encounters science through the media's presentation of it as \"truth\" could even know where to rest their hands to grapple with these ideas. Perhaps I'm being fooled into thinking I have some grasp of the matters discussed. Though I certainly feel as though I have a much better idea of the limits of my understanding, maybe that's wrong. Yet, I wonder how much of what the author opines of here is the usual emergence of Sturgeon's Law. Maybe 90% of \"science writing\" is crap. Is there evidence o","stance":"rec"}],"5jdEG_ACXLw":[{"hn_comment_id":32198448,"author":"Paddywack","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Two containers with same number detected in Chittagong port","text":"I worked in Bangladesh for 3 years, and it is such a land of contrasts. The main electricity supply company at the time was running manual billings from a big room filled with manual general ledgers, one \u201cT\u201d account per household. It is a humbling, impoverished country with its main riches being its resilient, kind, resourceful people. Down the road/bay from Chittagong are the shipwrecking yards - a big time investment but worth watching is this\u2026 [VIDEO] <edit> the film I am looking for is Iron Eaters, a very human view of the horrific shipyards. The above film is from India, but still worth looking at.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40425832,"author":"h0l0cube","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Shipbreaking","text":"Someone posted this hour long documentary on shipbreaking in the comments a while back. Both mortifying and fascinating to see this industry up close. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41480623,"author":"jitl","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money","text":"The cutting apart of ships at their end of life in salvage shipbreaker junkyards is fascinating, terrifying, and sad in equal parts. This (and similar) documentaries of the salvage beaches in India show a lot of interior cutting: [VIDEO] It\u2019s a stark juxtaposition from these shots of clean, carefully planned and engineered operations in high-tech ports. Shipbreaking is often done freehand, based on experience and intuition, without much in the way of reference documents or safety gear.","stance":"rec"}],"5kj5ApnhPAE":[{"hn_comment_id":4806930,"author":"james4k","month":"2012-11","story_title":"Go is PHP for the Backend","text":">PHP is horribly inconsistent, breaks all the rules about programming language design, and is infuriating. Some say that rules are made to be broken. In the context of Go, Rob Pike argues exactly that in this short talk on why they made Go: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7859879,"author":"dottrap","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Why is there so much hate for .NET?","text":"\"Public Static Void\" Rob Pike (Bell Labs, Plan 9, Google Go) gave this short speech at OSCON 2010 about what's wrong with programming languages, their thinking, and their recent direction, with a lot of focus on C++/Java/C#, and how Go was a response to that. [VIDEO] Apple Swift seems to share much of the thinking, and the huge enthusiasm for Swift this week suggests developers seem to at least subconsciously recognize there is a problem.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9776957,"author":"mtrn","month":"2015-06","story_title":"The Unix Philosophy","text":"> I wonder what rob pike has to say about OOP or java, I wish I could listen to it. 12 minutes where Pike talks about a few things, that seem to be wrong in our software world: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5pYeoZaoWrA":[{"hn_comment_id":39005822,"author":"foobiekr","month":"2024-01","story_title":"GameStop Ends NFT Marketplace, Is This Beginning of the End?","text":"Dan Olson covers NFTs very solidly in \"Decentraland is a dead mall\" ( [LINK] ) and \"Line Goes Up\" ( [LINK] ). Both as well worth watching. Since this is also about GameStop specifically, his \"This is financial advice\" video addresses the GameStop cult, and to a lesser extent the bizarre cult around GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen, really well: [VIDEO] Also, cue some apes/NFT investors coming in to ask \"why do you care about my money?\" and other oft-repeated talking points.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39739679,"author":"eropple","month":"2024-03","story_title":"What I wish I knew about ESPP and RSUs sooner","text":"The newfound hype around DRS arises as a meme directly out of the Gamestop crankfest/fever-dream. It is harmless, but also meaningless; equities are not any more \"yours\" because of undertaking the timewaster of DRS and the concept is in current discourse as a shibboleth for membership in weird fin-cult silliness, which is exemplified really well in the parent poster's link to breathy, red-Arial-on-black \"Central Bankers\" fearmongering. Dan Olson covers it effectively in \"This Is Financial Advice\", which is a sober and well-researched drubbing of the meme-stock culture from which this nonsense comes. Worth watching in its entirety, both for entertainment value and for its thorough treatment of the subject. [VIDEO] (If you want to see a real-life BSOD, get one of these people into a corner and ask them how equities are going to survive the \"market collapse\" they magically-think is right around the corner, regardless of method of registration.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40593236,"author":"richbell","month":"2024-06","story_title":"GameStop stock influencer Roaring Kitty may lose access to E-Trade, report says","text":"> If that is the case half of the superstonks subreddit would have to be charged. You could make a compelling argument that they should be. Superstonks doesn't just post their positions. They, too, try to manipulate the market by hyping up GME. I would highly recommend \"This is Financial Advice\" by Dan Olson to anyone not already familiar with the community. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40059250,"author":"kiernanmcgowan","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made","text":"This is Financial Advice (2023) is also excellent - [VIDEO] Its about the fallout of the memestock craze and where the community ends up.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40345857,"author":"jcranmer","month":"2024-05","story_title":"GameStop rockets, as 'Roaring Kitty' returns; shares halted","text":"I thought I knew how bad it was, and then I saw Folding Idea's video on the post-crash meme stock phase here: [VIDEO] So, apparently a lot of the people who are still holding onto the stock have engaged in full-on apocalyptic cult insanity. They're under the delusion that the \"Mother of All Short Squeezes\" hasn't happened yet, and that when it will happen, it will be an absolute financial calamity, as literally all Gamestop stock will be held by \"true\" holders [1], who can therefore extort any price from the short sellers desperate to buy the stock back to cover the short squeeze, causing the price to hit millions of dollars per share, allowing the true holders comfortable retirement as billionaires. It really is an apocalyptic cult mindset, people seeing themselves as the sufferers who will receive redemption in the imminent apocalypse as their (currently more successful foes) receive absolute punishment at the same time. Although even compared to most apocalyptic prophecies, this one is particularly far-fetched: the means of deliverance is extremely vague, with the closest hint of an idea is essentially that the Big Bad who is currently oppressing them will somehow turn around and reward them handsomely for their perseverance (usually stated with some amount of cognitive dissonance--you get the sense that the adherents don't really believe this, but they need to justify deliverance somehow and there's no better option than this). [1] There's a belief that most of the shares","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40939885,"author":"monroewalker","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Where do you keep your 401k investments?","text":"I'm sure you're already aware of the general consensus around how speculative cryptocurrency and meme stocks are but it's worth repeating that this is a very dubious approach. On GME specifically, this is a good documentary to watch: [VIDEO] I think it's worth it for you to consider reducing your allocation to these even if you have strong conviction in their long term success. If you do 25% GME/crypto and 75% index funds (or target retirement) then you're still going to be doing extremely well if these assets take off as hoped for but you'll be much better off in the alternative and less surprising scenario where they don't","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47986239,"author":"surgical_fire","month":"2026-05","story_title":"GameStop Preparing Offer for eBay","text":"Apologies. Maybe you just came out of a coma that spans half a decade and is unaware of the events surrounding GME stock. It's a bit of a rabbit hole, but this is a good place to start: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48111604,"author":"kentm","month":"2026-05","story_title":"eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible","text":"For more information, see Dan Olsen's \"This is Financial Advice.\" [VIDEO] Its a few years old, but gives you some perspective on the weird cult that has been built around GME.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48112584,"author":"axpvms","month":"2026-05","story_title":"eBay Rejects GameStop's $56B Takeover as Not Credible","text":"They have an entire library regarding their \"due diligence\" by the way It's pre-ChatGPT, so people actually wrote all this out (they are reddit posts disguised as books) [LINK] Also an fun long form video for anyone interested [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5pdPrQFjo2o":[{"hn_comment_id":40841557,"author":"pagade","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement","text":"I recently watched these 3 episodes of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Highly recommended. Opioids III: The Sacklers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ( [LINK] ) Opioids II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ( [LINK] ) Opioids: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13150085,"author":"btgeekboy","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Heroin deaths surpass gun homicides for the first time, CDC data shows","text":"John Oliver did a segment on Opioids that's pretty informative. Have a look: [VIDEO] The quick answer though is that it starts with prescription painkillers that are highly addictive.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13511978,"author":"drvdevd","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Seattle Is Opening First in U.S. \u201cSafe Injection Facility\u201d for Heroin Addicts","text":"> (under heavy regulation) ... and this is where most Heroin addicts start, actually, through prescription opiate use. Once a physical addiction is formed, heroin can be a cheaper or more accessible alternative to a prescription for say, Oxycontin. I thought John Oliver had a good segment on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13806339,"author":"partycoder","month":"2017-03","story_title":"America\u2019s opioid epidemic is worsening","text":"John Oliver spoke about this in depth: [VIDEO] Humor aside, he managed to compile an impressive amount of testimonials and facts.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29591136,"author":"dstick","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Judge rejects Purdue Pharma's $4.5B opioid settlement","text":"Good. For those that haven't watched them yet, there are 3 John Oliver segments on the subject that will back up the \"Good.\" statement: Opioids [VIDEO] Opioids II [LINK] Opioids III (this one focuses 100% on the Sacklers) [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"5pidokakU4I":[{"hn_comment_id":30795188,"author":"cycomanic","month":"2022-03","story_title":"I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code","text":"I suspect the \"appealing\" melodies amongst this are likely a small subset of the the total set. The whole story reminded me of this axis of awesome (OZ comedy group) song (well worth watching): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35870737,"author":"BrandoElFollito","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ed Sheeran Demonstrates How Copyright Is Destroying Musicians","text":"I think nobody linked to Axis of Awsome's 4 Chords Song yet. A good example of chords vs. songs: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5q-BH-tvxEg":[{"hn_comment_id":18156734,"author":"kybernetikos","month":"2018-10","story_title":"An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby\u2019s","text":"I think this one is quite interesting: [VIDEO] A motor connected to a series of reduction gears, with the last part of the chain encased in concrete.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44746087,"author":"Doxin","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Different Clocks","text":"I think the artist put it as \"and then the last gear turns so slowly it doesn't really matter, so I cast it in concrete.\" Assuming we're talking about Arthur Gansons \"Machine with concrete\"[0] of course. I quite like how a lot of his work seems to have a punchline to it. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5sVfTPaxRwk":[{"hn_comment_id":43412580,"author":"stared","month":"2025-03","story_title":"The Origin of the Pork Taboo","text":"Also, I highly recommend this Kurzgesagt video on how paying just a bit more for meat or eggs drastically improves animals' living conditions: [VIDEO] Additionally, while (pun intended) I am not religious about this, I try to avoid eating pork - as pigs are among the smartest animals humans eat (with intelligence comparable to dogs). For a similar reason, I avoid eating octopuses as well. Also, as a rule of thumb, \"less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat, to reduce your carbon footprint\", [LINK] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43249741,"author":"manquer","month":"2025-03","story_title":"How the U.K. broke its own economy","text":"And all of those numbers pale in comparison in how we cruelly we treat birds used in the food supply chain (eggs, chicken etc). The recent kurzsesagt video is a great intro to the topic ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43880573,"author":"stavros","month":"2025-05","story_title":"The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food","text":"Could we not just... not confine the pigs in spaces about as big as their bodies? Kurzgesagt had a very interesting video[0] about the fact that it wasn't really that much more expensive to make sure we ate torture-free meat. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5tSTk1083VY":[{"hn_comment_id":26059658,"author":"2112","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Talent Is Largely a Myth","text":"That's a high quality comment. If you're interested / amazed by that kind of stuff, do yourself a favor ; Joe Rogan Experience #1080 - David Goggins [VIDEO] Perhaps the ultimate iteration of \"Kevin who was not naturally good at anything except perseverance. He worked his ass off all the time.\" This is \"the toughest man on earth\" ... legit. Highly inspirational story.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22049741,"author":"neillyons","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the one simple trick to life?","text":"A clich\u00e9. Getting outside your comfort zone. David Goggins goes into this in detail [VIDEO] Essentially what ever you are afraid of you should probably doing it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24050107,"author":"chansiky","month":"2020-08","story_title":"The Art of Not Thinking","text":"Don't you think there's too much thinking involved in an article about not thinking? I just watched Joe Rogan's interview of David Goggins[1], and he lives the essence of what this article is trying to express. I think his perspective is far more succinct and sharper, its sort of an anti-motivation motivation. Its definitely worth a watch if anyone is interested. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5tu32CCA_Ig":[{"hn_comment_id":14113618,"author":"rudimental","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Richard Posner: \u201cThe Real Corruption Is the Ownership of Congress by the Rich\u201d","text":"Today somebody on Reddit linked to this video which talks about the process of money influencing politics [VIDEO] It doesn't discuss the role of the judicial system. It's all about the legislative aspects of US government. It's pretty compelling and well made. Hopefully a bipartisan movement can have some impact. The video was made by [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26282370,"author":"auslegung","month":"2021-02","story_title":"How prepared are we for the next giant solar flare?","text":"I think this video will encourage you. Well actually maybe it will discourage you, but the follow up video will encourage you :D Corruption is Legal in America: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5u7euN1HTuU":[{"hn_comment_id":37455532,"author":"circumlocution","month":"2023-09","story_title":"New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held \u201cLone Gunman\u201d Theory","text":"To those who haven't seen it, I'd really recommend Lemmino's video on the assassination [VIDEO] He dives pretty deep into the details, and it helped me form my own opinion of what probably happened","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37460381,"author":"jmyeet","month":"2023-09","story_title":"New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held \u201cLone Gunman\u201d Theory","text":"I highly suggest people go watch \"inside the book Depository\" [1]. It's long but it gives a good overview of the sequence of events and the discrepancies. Thing is, it's not a conspiracy theorist video. The best part of the video is the last segment where the creator uses all the examples to show just how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, even when fresh let alone decades later. They go on to say that pretty much any conspiracy theory relies on cherry-picking certain details as irrefutable while ignoring others and this is esentially an arbitrary decision based on whatever narrative someone is pushing. Additionally, the details supposedly changed never make sense for a conspiracy that is supposedly powerful enough to arrange all this. Lastly, people often see things through a modern lens. Presidential security is a big one. JFK used to stop his motorcade and go into the crowd. Anyone with a handgun could've ended him. These people weren't all frisked and vetted. It was a different time. JFK's assassination is probably a big part of why presidential security changed. So the idea that you needed to have or be a sniper (or a team of snipers) is a silly one and based on modern assumptions. Myths in this area persist too despite them being debunked. One that springs to mind is that you couldn't fire Oswald's rifle fast enough. CBS and the FBI tested and debunked this in the 1960s [2]. When this happens you'll often find the conspiracy theory moves the goalposts from it being \"im","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37460889,"author":"Tmpod","month":"2023-09","story_title":"New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held \u201cLone Gunman\u201d Theory","text":"Recently watched this detailed and well sourced video by LEMMiNO on a particular prespective, might be of interesting for you: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38273150,"author":"snypher","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Review: 'JFK: What the Doctors Saw' eyewitnesses contradict Warren Commission","text":"This isn't that, but an excellent video on the events of the day, around the building, and left me thinking there could have been any number of other shooters; [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39170156,"author":"Hikikomori","month":"2024-01","story_title":"How the FBI targeted Camus, and then Sartre after the JFK assassination (2013)","text":"[VIDEO] Worth a watch if you are interested in this. He reconstructs the physical space and where the people were and moved over time using witness testimony.","stance":"rec"}],"5uhIiI9Ld5M":[{"hn_comment_id":34880826,"author":"youngtaff","month":"2023-02","story_title":"My favourite 3 lines of CSS","text":"They're not that complex if you understand CSS And let's face it\u2026 to understand the example code you only need understand what > + * do in CSS Using intrinsic sizing, and the sorts of approaches Andy Bell suggests reduces the volume of CSS enormously and can often get rid of media queries and huge numbers of selectors that get repeated across viewport sizes I'd really encourage you to watch this talk by Andy [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37210749,"author":"traceroute66","month":"2023-08","story_title":"The Ideal Viewport Doesn't Exist","text":"> I don't know how useful this is. The website that is the subject of this discussion comes from Andy Bell. I would encourage you to see his other work, e.g. Every Layout[1], and the website[2] linked to a recent talk he gave[3]. In particular the answer to your question can be found at 14:38[4] in the talk, perhaps more precisely the slide he shows at 14:59. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] [4] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5uiroWBkdFY":[{"hn_comment_id":11515849,"author":"tzs","month":"2016-04","story_title":"I decided to make a graphics card for my Amiga 2000","text":"Soldering surface mount devices doesn't seem to be too bad, actually. Here are a couple of short videos: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36686862,"author":"godelski","month":"2023-07","story_title":"FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool (2006)","text":"I'd say that this is going to be one of the easiest surface mount (SMD) soldering jobs you'd ever do. Removing is easy, adding is hard. Fwiw, my first time doing SMD I was really nervous but then found it to be quite easy and so it opened up a lot of things for me (making and repairing). It is much easier than you think (often easier than through hole!), just when placing something you need to hold it in place (or use a heat gun, making these sometimes easier). Here's a short video if you want some guide[0]. As for soldering tips, any would be fine, but I learned that the flat tips, like this[1], tend to be my goto rather than the pencil like tips. The mass helps it keep heat and the larger surface area helps you transfer that heat. [0a] Great demo, showing simplicity: [VIDEO] [0b] A bit more detailed and Dave is just always extremely entertaining and a wealth of knowledge (notice his \"go to\" tip. Professionals use chisels ;) : [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"5uljtqyBLxI":[{"hn_comment_id":886814,"author":"bokchoi","month":"2009-10","story_title":"JOP: A Tiny Java Processor Core for FPGA","text":"Here's an excellent google tech talk by Cliff Click of Azul talking about their hardware. Among the firehose of information in that talk, he mentions that the hardware guys wanted to add directly execute JVM bytecode. He told them not to bother since he could JIT it better and they wouldn't be able to support all the bytecodes anyway. I'd love to know more about why that is. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5519772,"author":"qznc","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Probably this one: [LINK] Anything from Cliff Click is quite good. This guy has a very deep understanding of compilers, virtual-machines, CPUs, and their interactions. A JVM does that? [LINK] Java on a 1000 Cores [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9187106,"author":"Alupis","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Peter Lawrey Describes Petabyte JVMs","text":"There are some interesting challenging when scaling this large with any system. Peter referenced some of Azul System's stuff and their custom GC. Cliff Click from Azul has done some great Google Tech Talks about JVM development and scaling JVM's out to really big systems.[1][2] [1] A JVM Does That? - [LINK] [2] Java on a 1000 Cores - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23777030,"author":"mcbridematt","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Java Optimized Processor (2005)","text":"Azul Systems (who today are mainly a JVM vendor) started by building large multicore boxes (Vega) to do Java workloads - there is an interesting tech talk about it: [VIDEO] (2009) They built a \"really good JIT target\" rather than direct bytecode for reasons explained in the video. Curious to hear from anyone who ever used one...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45991954,"author":"hayley-patton","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Implementation of a Java Processor on a FPGA (2016)","text":"> What I can imagine is a purpose-built CPU that would make the JIT's job a lot easier and faster than compiling for x86 or ARM. Such a machine wouldn't execute raw Java bytecode, rather, something a tiny bit more low-level. This is approximately exactly what Azul Systems did, doing a bog-standard RISC with hardware GC barriers and transactional memory. Cliff Click gave an excellent talk on it [0] and makes your argument around 20:14. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"5wAo54DHDY0":[{"hn_comment_id":37083843,"author":"altano","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Source code for Quake 2 rerelease","text":"If anyone's curious, start here: [VIDEO] If you don't care about Doom (or even video games, honestly): I haven't even thought about Doom in 20 years. Just click the link and watch. One of my favorite YouTube rides of all time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38198446,"author":"shalmanese","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Quake Brutalist Jam II","text":"If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend checking out the story of MyHouse.wad: [VIDEO] If you want to go in spoiler free, I'd recommend downloading the WAD and playing it through blind. But if you don't have the time for that, there's a ton of great youtube videos that covered the topic.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44259051,"author":"energywut","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Helion: A modern fast paced Doom FPS engine in C#","text":"I wonder if it can play through MyHouse.wad. Which, if you haven't seen before, is an incredible art piece. [VIDEO] If you've read House of Leaves, do yourself a favor and check it out.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36642451,"author":"Fuzzwah","month":"2023-07","story_title":"The Horror Game of the Year Is a Doom II Mod","text":"Equally though, when you think you've finished it; have a read / watch about all the fantastic things that you missed. The entire project, and including the journal on the Google drive, is just incredible. I very much enjoyed this video that goes through all the content: [VIDEO] Also, this one to learn about the methods used to create \"myhouse\" in the doom2 engine.","stance":"rec"}],"5zkC9IMQmYA":[{"hn_comment_id":1364047,"author":"yan","month":"2010-05","story_title":"A 13-Year-Old Takes On Everest, and Sets Off a Debate","text":"Anyone interested in a fantastic 1 hour talk on summitting K2, check this video: [VIDEO] I've seen this in person (Chris is the CEO of my climbing gym and I saw this in a library near by) and it was awe-inspiring to say the least.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1978930,"author":"mark_h","month":"2010-12","story_title":"Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies","text":"There's a few videos I've seen recently -- I've also just been trekking in the Everest region and watched and read a lot before going -- that do an amazing job of conveying that summit-fever attitude. The one that most sticks in my mind is this talk on K2: [VIDEO] It's an hour long, but I highly recommend it. There was an incredible documentary, which you can probably find online, called \"Doctors in the Death Zone\" which followed a team of doctors studying the effects of altitude on themselves as they attempted Everest. There's some pretty horrific footage of a team they encounter along the way watching their companion, in obvious distress, drunkenly attempt to reach their position, while they just wait. Lastly, this talk from TEDMed is by the only doctor on Everest during the 1996 disaster, and it's both a great depiction of the main route, and a frightening reminder of just how dangerous it still is up there despite the number of summits and knowledge of the route these days: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1979426,"author":"yan","month":"2010-12","story_title":"Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies","text":"For those interested in mountaineering, I highly, highly recommend listening to Chris Warner's talk on summitting K2: [VIDEO] A very very gripping talk by someone who's climbed Everest (and K2, a more dangerous ascent) multiple times. I saw this in person (Chris is the founder of the chain of climbing gyms I used to frequent) and it's even more gripping in person.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7639053,"author":"T-zex","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Sherpas, Death, and Anger on Everest ","text":"I don't think these two events are similar. Most of the fatalities on K2 in 2008 where due to poor planning or preparation of the climbers themselves. While recent tragedy on Everest was simply an ice-fall and avalanche. [VIDEO] is a very good video of Chris Warner talking to Google employees about leadership. He has climbed K2 in 2007 and gives his opinion on the events in 2008. Also The Summit [0] is a nice film about this tragedy. [0] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"60OVlfAUPJg":[{"hn_comment_id":4679838,"author":"marshallp","month":"2012-10","story_title":"The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics Education","text":"There's a few problems with the article. The rules argument he makes could instead be made for the more useful field of computer programming. Also, the reductionist paradigm is dead. It worked for finding laws of physics and some chemistry, but otherwise, in the most useful fields of today, like biology/materials/chemistry (high throughput methods), computer vision, search engines etc. the automated creation of hypotheses through machine learning is winning out. Conrad Wolfram gives a talk about the need for math education reform [VIDEO] He uses the term mathematics, but completely removing that term and replacing it with computer programming and machine learning should be done. They sound cooler and this step will remove all the baggage and ill-will mathematics has in society. That way, all mathematics teachers can be simply removed from high schools and colleges and replaced with computer programmers. Estonia is one of the few enlightened places on this subject with their introduction of programming as mandatory from year 1 in k12. Almost the entire high school drop out rate can be attributed to maths teaching, and their is no solid empirical proof of it's utility over programming (the practice of \"science\" hasn't been applied to \"maths\" itself). [LINK] The same argument can be made for a number of other subjects, such as chemistry (why teach the periodic table?), languages (we have google translate and should taxpayers be funding this unproductive activity), and others (ev","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6409919,"author":"kranzky","month":"2013-09","story_title":"The Commodore 64 Spike: A Freakonomics-ish Theory of CS Education","text":"But isn't maths boring at school because we're teaching it wrong? See Conrad Wolfram's TED Talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"60z_hpEAtD8":[{"hn_comment_id":25249185,"author":"canjobear","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Geometric Algebra (2012)","text":"I highly recommend the video [VIDEO] linked from the site above ~40 minutes, and I get the point of geometric algebra now.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28982365,"author":"strainer","month":"2021-10","story_title":"A few of the best math explainers from this summer [video]","text":"This little known channel: sudgylacmoe - which doesn't seem present in the list, has the best video by far on Geometric Algebra (imho) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31083344,"author":"kilovoltaire","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Exponentially Better Rotations","text":"If you want an inspiring (imho) overview of the power of geometric algebra, I thoroughly enjoyed the video \"A Swift Introduction to Geometric Algebra\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40849676,"author":"BenoitP","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Quaternions in Signal and Image Processing","text":"You should jump straight to geometric algebra. It's actually simple there. Quaternions and Complex Numbers are about just some not so special multivectors. Here are 2 45mn videos you'll not regret: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38046149,"author":"skaskaska","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Exploring Quaternions (2018)","text":"Also check out [VIDEO] and [LINK] Some of the perceived complexity of complex numbers and quaternions seems to stem from not knowing the bigger picture.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41359008,"author":"user070223","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra","text":"Note don't to be confused with Algebraic Geometry they are different; When I first came across this topic it was eye opening, especially the fact that you could squeeze Maxwell's equations into one and the fact that pseudovector create by cross product from physics is just a bivector which in 3d could be represented like a vector orthogonal to the plane created by the two vectors in the product Primer on the topic [VIDEO] (And other videos on his channel) Another greate playlist is [LINK] BTW the author has the following page [LINK] with great infographics and references","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42424794,"author":"mtizim","month":"2024-12","story_title":"A visual proof that a^2 \u2013 b^2 = (a + b)(a \u2013 b)","text":"You're in for a nice trip, the concept is called Geometric Algebra: [VIDEO] (~50m video) TLDW: Yes, the concept is there, makes much more sense than a cross product (which is just an oriented area) and generalizes really nicely. Alternatively, read: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"62jZENi1ed8":[{"hn_comment_id":10098904,"author":"peterfirefly","month":"2015-08","story_title":"The Bright Students Left Behind","text":"It's only bold because there is a large number of people (often state founded, often controlling at least the lower levels of education, often with major influence on media) who strongly feel otherwise -- with no numbers to back them up, of course. --- If you actually do want to get to the bottom of it, I can heartily recommend Ian Deary's \"Intelligence: A Short Introduction\" as a place to start. [LINK] (Who knows, if you dig around a bit you might even be able to find a PDF, perhaps at Emil Kirkegaard's website.) You can also choose to spend an hour on this talk by Stephen Hsu who does research on IQ and genetics: [VIDEO] You can read some of Plomin's stuff -- he is very much into genetics: [LINK] There's a paper I can't find at the moment that looks at almost 4000 non-related people, give them an IQ test each + scan their DNA for typical SNPs with a DNA chip. That gives us almost 8,000,000 pairs where we know how similar their IQ score and DNA was. That gives us almost 8,000,000 points we can plot into a 2D coordinate system (and we can of course also throw statistics at them). It turns out that there is a clear correlation between measured IQ and measured SNPs (i.e., the point cloud is denser along a line). In other words, there is a statistical relation between DNA and IQ. This is a result that is extremely hard to explain away if one believes in nurture, SES, microaggressions, racism, ESL difficulties, etc. Since it is such a rhetorically important paper, I hope somebody","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10548633,"author":"vox_mollis","month":"2015-11","story_title":"What happens when a culture is driven by the need for money to make more money","text":"Steve Hsu giving a talk @ Google on the topic, with myriad citations: [VIDEO] Four studies cited on this handy chart: [LINK] It's very well-established science that you could have easily googled, but downvoting unpopular research, pointing and shrieking \"eugenics!\" is a better argumentation technique, I suppose.","stance":"rec"}],"62tIvfP9A2w":[{"hn_comment_id":34286183,"author":"peteforde","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Jazz Is Freedom","text":"I highly recommend this Vox explainer on John Coltrane's \"Giant Steps\", for anyone interested in learning about the math behind one of Jazz' greatest innovations. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25652591,"author":"davidwf","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What YouTube channels do you subscribe to?","text":"I keep a Google Document of these to share just in case people ask about my YouTube interests. I Actually Watched All of Them I have actually watched ALL of the videos on these channels and I don\u2019t even feel bad about it :-) I actually like new videos from some of the ones below (like NativLang, for example) but they maybe don\u2019t hold up in the early videos. - Space Time: PBS Physics, sooo good -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - Lindsay Ellis: Really, really intelligent video essays about film and culture -- [LINK] -- Great First Video: [LINK] - Periodic Videos: Chemistry, including a video for every element -- [LINK] -- Great first video (obviously): [LINK] Other Math and Science - 3Blue1Brown: Amazing math visualizations -- [LINK] -- Great first video, how e^pi*i works: [LINK] - NumberPhile: Fun math videos -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - PBS Eons: Biology! -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - PBS Infinite Series: Math math math, really really hard math -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - SciShow: Science! More poppy but fun -- [LINK] -- Silly first show: [LINK] -- Actual physics: [LINK] - VSauce: Science-y? -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - Practical Engineering: -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] Other Humanities - Alliterative: Connections via language -- [LINK] -- Great first video about gin and gimlets: [LINK] - Bon Appetit: Such fun food stuff! -- Gourmet Makes: [LINK] -- It\u2019s Alive: [LINK] - Masaman: Genetics and human migration (and","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39603107,"author":"elbelcho","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Miles Davis and the recording of Kind of Blue","text":"If you're looking for a comprehensible to mortals explanation of the genius that can be found in Jazz, watch this explainer on Coltrane's Giant Steps. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45115903,"author":"ghostpepper","month":"2025-09","story_title":"John Coltrane's Tone Circle","text":"If you don\u2019t have the time (or the musical background) for the full article, this short YouTube video touches on some of the same ideas in a much more condensed and accessible version: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45119334,"author":"zzzeek","month":"2025-09","story_title":"John Coltrane's Tone Circle","text":"Nice site but we're at the point in \"Show an In Depth Thing on Hacker News\" where circles like these need to be presented with a live GUI that includes sound and colors as you spin the circles around to play different chords. towards my craving for instant gratification with sound and lights I found a well produced video by Vox on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"63vqob-MljQ":[{"hn_comment_id":26133072,"author":"swimfar","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head [video]","text":"So did I. But it's because I confused it with the \"Come into my World\" video, directed by Michel Gondry. One of the best music videos, in my opinion. It still would have been a little odd to see it here, though. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43475606,"author":"petercooper","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Kylie Minogue song about a typeface","text":"Her music video directed by Michel Gondry is worth a look: [VIDEO] For 2001 it has a rather striking effect. Kylie is walking around a circular area in Paris over and over and everything multiplies each time she completes a loop. It's a very clever effect given the technology of the time. By the end of the video there are five Kylies walking around loosely interacting with each other and the world in odd ways.","stance":"rec"}],"64cEmjtwRgw":[{"hn_comment_id":33566255,"author":"TheAceOfHearts","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Is algae the new kale?","text":"Cody'sLab has a few videos about growing his own algae for consumption which are pretty interesting: [VIDEO] Personally, I'm not opposed to this kind of food but integrating it into your existing diet can be challenging.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34878726,"author":"beeforpork","month":"2023-02","story_title":"'artificial photosynthesis' claimed 10x more efficient","text":"Cody has an example of how to generate oil out of algae and sun light: [VIDEO] Very interesting stuff! As others already noted, this is probably a more efficient and more robust technology.","stance":"rec"}],"66YRCjkxIcg":[{"hn_comment_id":33170652,"author":"carlhjerpe","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage","text":"I'd say it's a quite big one, \"every city\" has water towers to provide pressure to the people living in it, or they rely on the water source if it's higher up than the city. There are probably exceptions, where this isn't true, but raised tanks make modern society possible. [LINK] more on water towers, which are raised tanks of water. We also pump water into fake lakes to later extract electricity from it. ( [VIDEO] ) Another good thing with water towers is that we can keep running the pumps at a lower RPM where efficiency than if we were trying to build a system with pumps to keep pressure. Great channel if you're curious about everything related to humans relationship with water.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23523939,"author":"PopeDotNinja","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Engineers find neat way to turn waste carbon dioxide into useful material","text":"As I understand it, the main challenge with pumped storage is that you can't do it everywhere. You need fairly specific geography for it, and it's a big civil engineering project. Here's a good video on by Practical Engineering: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24784986,"author":"creato","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Ditch the Batteries: Off-Grid Compressed Air Energy Storage (2018)","text":"You could start by just calculating the potential energy of the volume of the tank you are considering, and the difference in elevation between the reservoirs (volume x 1 kg/L x gravity x elevation difference, plug in the units of your choice and let google figure it out). I suspect the amount of energy is far less than you are imagining... It takes a lot of water to generate a useful amount of energy. This video ( [VIDEO] ) does an interesting demo and points out that a 5 gallon bucket on a ladder has the same potential energy as a watch battery.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28897456,"author":"gilbetron","month":"2021-10","story_title":"The booming business of knitting together the world\u2019s electricity grids","text":"Looks like the high-voltage transmission lines are very efficient, losing only a few percent over hundreds of miles: [LINK] There's a good watch on pumped hydro, and how it is kinda sucky: [VIDEO] Battery storage is the most likely thing, although there is also kinetic storage (flywheels) and some other ideas as well (ultracapacitors, for instance).","stance":"rec"}],"6AeWu1fZ7bY":[{"hn_comment_id":18544712,"author":"ernst_klim","month":"2018-11","story_title":"BSDs or Illumos may be good alternatives to Linux (2017)","text":">Personally, I never found startup time to be much of a problem, on any OS. Well, start up problem is a matter of convenience, it's not a fatal problem, but I just like that my laptop with arch+systemd+systemd-boot starts instantly (3 seconds + 6 seconds for firmware), while bsd on my other laptop starts soo damn slow. (btw slow shutdown pisses me off even more) Though the real issues with rc are much more serious, and eloquently described here (aka you don't have proper login management, service management, device and policy management, and better in a unified way): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19960363,"author":"sjwright","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Linux distros without systemd","text":"One of the better videos on this subject: [VIDEO] BSDCan 2018\u2014Benno Rice: The Tragedy of systemd \"systemd is, to put it mildly, controversial. Depending on who you ask it's either a complete violation of the UNIX philosophy, a bloated pile of bugs, a complete violation of the elegant simplicity it replaced or, it most cases, some or all of the above. So why have so many Linux distributions taken to it? Is it as bad as people say?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20861369,"author":"znpy","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd","text":"A nice talk that might change your view of the subject is the following: [VIDEO] . It's a video from BSDCan, the Canadian BSD conference. Even some BSD people are realizing that systemd has a good point to exist!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21314510,"author":"kbumsik","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Why Did ArchLinux Embrace Systemd? (2016)","text":"> After listening to the BSD Canada talk on systemd and BSD For someone who don't know, here is the video \"The tragedy of systemd\". This is a really good talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6Af6b_wyiwI":[{"hn_comment_id":22603488,"author":"digaozao","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Climate change: The rich are to blame","text":"We are not prepared, but there was people warning about it. See this Ted talk from Bill Gates, 5 years ago. It's impressive how the details are similar to coronavirus. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22748825,"author":"dgritsko","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Bill Gates calls for nationwide shutdown","text":"Gates gave a prescient TED talk in 2015 [1] in which he describes the risk of a global pandemic and the general lack of preparedness. The Gates foundation has also been working for years to help eradicate diseases like polio and malaria [2][3]. Given his expertise in this area, it would seem worthwhile to listen to what he has to say rather than dismissing him as just a \"billionaire industrialist.\" [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"6BhV-o77RqQ":[{"hn_comment_id":16973119,"author":"ryanseys","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Illnesses from Mosquito, Tick, and Flea Bites Increasing in the US","text":"Do it! I've seen videos floating around E.g. [0] that are as simple as a giant fan that sucks in mosquitoes. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32536629,"author":"rainbowzootsuit","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Scientists discover how mosquitoes can \u2018sniff out\u2019 humans","text":"There's a lot of tricks out there for killing mosquitoes but the window screen on a fan one is a personal favorite: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44736861,"author":"johnthedebs","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death","text":"The comments saying that other sources of water need to be removed are spot on. Another technique I've tried which works (observably) well is described in this video: [VIDEO] tl;dw: Get a big drum fan with a screen on the back, attached with small/powerful magnets. Mosquitos are such poor flyers that they get pulled against the screen and can't escape, and they pretty quickly desiccate and die. Most other flying insects don't get caught, although there is a bit of collateral (some moths and lacewings, unfortunately). Another benefit of the fan is that you can hang out in front of it and mosquitos mostly won't bother you there either. I did this in our shared backyard space in Brooklyn and would catch hundreds/thousands of mosquitos per week. Despite that, there were still a ton of mosquitos in the area so it's best combined with other methods of control. edit: better/updated video link","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45893748,"author":"al_borland","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Effective way to deal with mosquitoes?","text":"There are some YouTube videos out there where guys attach a screen (or net) to a high powered fan and catch/kill insane amount of mosquitoes. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6Cf7IL_eZ38":[{"hn_comment_id":5971503,"author":"Shivetya","month":"2013-07","story_title":"A future made of Glass","text":"When I think of a World of Glass I always go back to Corning's A Day Made of Glass [VIDEO] which has far more every day examples we can all believe in","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21804202,"author":"ocdtrekkie","month":"2019-12","story_title":"1950s Smart Homes and the Longevity of Design","text":"I actually love a good \"future vision\" ad. They're often pretty inspiring. One of my favorites is Corning's \"A Day Made of Glass\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6EghiY_s2ts":[{"hn_comment_id":15778772,"author":"throwaway127831","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Ask HN: High functioning alcoholism \u2013 anyone?","text":"I\u2019m currently on month 5 of TSM, and almost never drink. Highly recommend it for anyone struggling. This TEDx talk was what convinced me to try it: [VIDEO] Prior to TSM, I was in pretty bad shape \u2014 so grateful I discovered it Using a throwaway account here. Wish I didn\u2019t feel like I had to :(","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28107696,"author":"BayAreaEscapee","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Once an Addict, Always an Addict?","text":"I'm going to second the Sinclair method, which involves taking naltrexone or nalmefene. I started with the Sinclair method at the same time I started participating in SMART recovery online meetings. I only drink alcohol about once a week now and only in moderate quantities. Here are some links for anyone interested: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29750571,"author":"MissionInfl","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Happy New Year HN! What are your plans for the new year?","text":"To provide an alternate solution to the one already mentioned, I used a modern medicine approach to alcohol use disorder called The Sinclair Method. The tl;dr is that you continue to drink using an opioid antagonist (usually Naltrexone) which blocks the endorphins rewards from consuming alcohol and eventually you just stop caring about it. For more information, see [LINK] , or [VIDEO] , or [LINK] (warning: large pdf)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29855366,"author":"MissionInfl","month":"2022-01","story_title":"How to make quitting your addiction easier","text":"Highly recommend The Sinclair Method. I chose to try it because I wanted to be able to continue to drink socially as the OP mentioned. I actually overshot this and find myself completely abstinent for over a year now. It actually made me \"too sober\" which can be slightly frustrating but it a REALLY good problem to have considering where I was a few years ago. Some more resources: [LINK] - a great community and how I first discovered The Sinclair Method [LINK] - documentary on The Sinclair Method [VIDEO] - TED talk on The Sinclair Method [LINK] (warning: large PDF) - book about The Sinclair Method, definitely the best way to learn more, it is surprisingly simple and the first few chapters cover everything but you may find yourself reading on because there's some interesting case studies and tips on how to succeed","stance":"rec"}],"6JAgXz6xO0s":[{"hn_comment_id":27751301,"author":"nieksand","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The Secret Life of Machines","text":"Mr. Hunkin has been publishing a new Secret Life of Components series to youtube: [VIDEO] It is really great stuff if you enjoy building things.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45565421,"author":"lukasschwab","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Novelty Automation","text":"His recent \"Secret Life of Components\" series covers lots of fascinating electromechanical tinkering, including many of the mechanisms in the Novelty Automation arcade machines: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6JwEYamjXpA":[{"hn_comment_id":25474545,"author":"db48x","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Astronomical Coincidences. What does it mean?","text":"Nothing, as long as we learn the art of discerning coincidence from causation. An important part of that is deliberately noticing how many possibilities we're picking amongst when we single out a coincidence. Here's a funny anecdote about the same topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40606796,"author":"modderation","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?","text":"He also covered this in a more recent talk [1] which has some better audio and a direct feed of the slides. It also comes with an entirely different set of interesting stories for anyone inclined to listen :) 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6K8NkJpUei4":[{"hn_comment_id":4026642,"author":"6ren","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Space Station grabs SpaceX Dragon ship","text":"It's pretty amazing that the (possibly) most accomplished human did a reddit AMA: [LINK] His answer on motivation was striking to me: [VIDEO] My drive to get it done is somewhat disconnected from hope, enthusiasm or anything else. I just... I... I actually don't care about hope or enthusiasm... motivation. I just give it all I've got irrespective of what the circumstances may be. [...] Yeah... You just keep going and get it done.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4430951,"author":"MikeCapone","month":"2012-08","story_title":"Elon Musk Wins 2012 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Leadership Award","text":"A couple more Musk videos for those who might have missed them when they first came out: Bloomberg profile that gives a good overview of his companies: [LINK] Reddit AMA: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6Maq5IyHSuc":[{"hn_comment_id":18403647,"author":"therein","month":"2018-11","story_title":"The Potentiometer Handbook (1975) [pdf]","text":"EEVblog or mikeselectricstuff might have videos like that as far as I remember. I know bigclivedotcom does for sure. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31165245,"author":"recuter","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Electronics Explained: Fundamentals for engineers, technicians and makers (2018)","text":"This is very good but before throwing people off the deep end I'd suggest this overview (origin of the dx7 & fm synthesis): [LINK] And then some bigclivedotcom to get going: [VIDEO] EEVblog for intermediate beginner stuff / home gamer lab gear: [LINK] And finally some Marco Reps for advanced beginners: [LINK] Just to dip your toe in.","stance":"rec"}],"6NlI4No3s0M":[{"hn_comment_id":8281831,"author":"baddox","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Musical Scale Generator","text":"This looks neat. I wish I could try it on my iPad. There is a lot of interesting mathematics behind music. I particularly enjoy reading about different temperaments, which are our attempts to compromise between just intonation (the harmonic-based scales the article mentions, which ostensibly sound the most \"natural\" and \"correct\" in a given key), and physical instruments, which we usually want to be able to play in multiple keys without significant adjustment. Twelve-tone equal temperament is the most common temperament in Western music, where the frequency of each semitone is the frequency of the previous semitone multiplied by the twelfth root of two. With equal temperament instruments, the error between just intonation intervals is the same regardless of the key. There is a rich history of temperaments. A early attempt, attributed to Pythagoras, illustrates the impossibility of constructing a temperament perfectly from the simple ratios generates by harmonics: [LINK] The Wikipedia article on the tuning of Bach's aptly-titled Well-Tempered Clavier is also fascinating: [LINK] [LINK] Edit: this video is a great demonstration of the errors between just intonation intervals and our equal temperament compromise: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15728183,"author":"bitL","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Show HN: Chord Progressions","text":"With equal temperament you actually don't modulate precisely, so there is always weird disharmonic sound every single time. As I said, for some electronic music subgenres it's a welcome feature; it would shock classical composers if they ever heard such a version though. Have you ever thought why do you need to state scale at the beginning of a classical piece if you can just easily transpose song to whatever scale you like? Well, those scales sounded differently and each composer was exploring what sounds best in a given scale. Watch this: [VIDEO] Ever played on a top end concert grand and thinking it sounds weird? Then tried a different tuning and being shocked how much better it sounded?","stance":"rec"}],"6OPsH8PK7xM":[{"hn_comment_id":41751072,"author":"nick_g","month":"2024-10","story_title":"What P vs. NP is about","text":"Despite being mentioned throughout the post, I don't see a link to the video in question. I saw it when it was posted a few weeks back and really enjoyed it. I would highly recommend giving it a watch, especially if the ramifications of P vs NP are new to you [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41760192,"author":"vasekrozhon","month":"2024-10","story_title":"What P vs. NP is about","text":"Hi, the author of the blog post here. 1) With others, I work on high-effort Youtube videos, our channel's called Polylog. We recently made a video about an underrated take on P vs NP. [1] 2) After working on the high-effort video, I always write a low-effort stream-of-consiousness-style very-much-unedited blog post where I clarify some details or explain some more esoteric stuff that did not make it into the video. The blog post you are discussing is such a blog post. So you should watch the video first and read the blog post only if you really liked the video and want to know more. :) 3) If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41924656,"author":"empath75","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Solving Sudoku in Python Packaging","text":"[VIDEO] This video I think makes it obvious why that's true in a pretty intuitive way. I posted it a few days ago as a link and it never got traction. SAT is the equivalent of being able to find the inverse of _any_ function, because you can describe any function with logic gates (for obvious reasons), and any collection of logic gates that describes a function is equivalent to a SAT problem. All you need to do is codify the function in logic gates, including the output you want, and the ask a SAT solver to find the inputs that produce that output.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44156397,"author":"godelski","month":"2025-06","story_title":"How can AI researchers save energy? By going backward","text":"> What does it mean for computation to have a direction? Actually, all computation has a directionality! This is actually a subject that I get really excited about ^__^ Think about this, we have a function f, with input x, and output y. f(x) -> y We'd even use that notation! This is our direction. Now, the reverse actually gets a bit tricky. If the reverse is straightforward, our function has an inverse. But, it might not always. So our function f(x)=mx+b is invertible, because we can write x = (f(x)-b)/m (well... m can't be 0), which provides a unique solution. Every x corresponds to a unique f(x). But if instead, we have the function f(x) = x^2, this is not true! x = sqrt(f(x)), and here every f(x) corresponds to both x and -x! They are not unique. We can start adopting the language of images and preimages if you want to start heading down that route. There's a lot of interesting phenomena here and if you hadn't already guessed it, yes, this is related to the P=NP problem! An easy way to see this visually is to write down the computational circuit. Polylog actually has a really good video and will make the connection to P vs NP[0] In the context of machine learning, a Normalizing Flow would be invertible, while a diffusion model is reversible. A pet peeve of mine is that in ML people (I'm a ML researcher) call it the \"inverse problem\", such as GAN-Inversion, but that is a misnomer and we shouldn't propagate it... This also has to do with the naivety of these statements...[1","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47114267,"author":"godelski","month":"2026-02","story_title":"I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Handed Over","text":"Yeah that's a good addition. I think often the words we use can really make things more confusing. Like I hate when people say invertible but in reference to a function that isn't bijective. Why not say reversible? (No complaints with the convention of image/preimage) Which it's very similar to the problem created by saying \"one way\". It just isn't one way. Going the other direction is perfectly possible but incredibly hard to find the origin. The visual metaphor I like to use for people is it's like you walk out of a room and into a hallway of doors that are all identical looking. Ignoring the fact that you could just physically turn around, it'd be very hard to figure out which one you actually came from. But maybe what I like least is that we end up having so many terms for the same general concept. It's one thing when they're discovered independently but I'm pretty confident the computer scientists that pioneered hashes were quite familiar with the mathematics and nomenclature. > inverse computation would take an intractable amount of time. On a real side note I really like this explanation of P vs NP as it explicitly talks about reversibility. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6RhtiPefVzM":[{"hn_comment_id":18477887,"author":"rfeather","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Oil Demand for Cars Is Already Falling","text":"The article doesn't talk about greenhouse gas emissions, so the power grid and fuel source isn't really relevant to the point, especially since oil is an extremely small part of the energy mixture in most places.[1] If they were talking about greenhouse gases, then the answer seems to be that it depends on where you live and how/what you drive, but an electric vehicle almost always produces less emissions than an equivalent gas powered one. [2] does a decent job explaining though I feel he leaves a few parts out for the sake of clarity. For example, driving a P100D isn't the equivalent of driving the average car. It's more like driving a sports sedan (like a BMW M5), so those sorts of vehicles would probably be a more fair comparison. In the same vane, the whole US car fleet includes lots of SUVs and other trucks, which if there were equivalent electric models, would obviously not go as far as a Leaf. It would be great if there was a US calculator that worked like [3] does for the UK so that we could do the same sort of comparison based on the mix where we live. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20097539,"author":"PopeDotNinja","month":"2019-06","story_title":"If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?","text":"Here's a video I liked on the carbon costs associated w/ gas & electric cars. Check out video's sources for further reading. [VIDEO] -- \"Are Electric Cars Worse For The Environment? Myth Busted\" -- Engineering Explained","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20776111,"author":"bennyelv","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Singapore Says Musk's Electric Cars Are About 'Lifestyle,' Not Climate","text":"Citation needed. The literature I've seen suggests that an electric vehicle easily makes back any deficit quite early in its life. An easily digestable version of this calculation is here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27147035,"author":"Sohcahtoa82","month":"2021-05","story_title":"$365B wiped off cryptocurrency market after Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin","text":"Nobody thinks that EVs have a zero carbon footprint. But over the lifetime of the car, they have a lower footprint than ICE. Yes, they have a higher footprint than ICE to manufacture, but even if you get your power from coal, over the long term their carbon footprint is lower. And if your power comes from a renewable source, then the break-even point is less than two years. Engineering Explained did a good video doing the math behind the carbon footprints of ICE versus EV over the life of the car: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32461755,"author":"theluketaylor","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Electric vehicles are way more energy-efficient than internal combustion","text":"Yes, it takes more energy to build a BEV than an ICE car. It's not massively different and the lifetime emissions of a BEV are still lower than an ICE car even on a pretty dirty grid. good breakdown: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6UsHHOCH4q8":[{"hn_comment_id":9241552,"author":"hkarthik","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Latin America Is Quitting Smoking, and Africa Is Taking It Up","text":"There was a great John Oliver segment on the tobacco industry and how it's evolved to become even more profitable worldwide than it ever was in the US. Highly recommended to watch it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9848209,"author":"dailyrorschach","month":"2015-07","story_title":"CVS Health Quits U.S. Chamber Over Stance on Smoking","text":"A great deal of the Chamber's funding comes from Tobacco companies. In fact there are conference rooms named for them. If you haven't seen Last Week Tonight's take on the international bad behavior of the Tobacco companies I really encourage you to check it out. It's about 18min long, but well worth it: [VIDEO] They've responded to a shrinking market in the US and other highly developed nations, by doubling down on their efforts to sell to everyone in the rest of the world. And woe to the country with a smaller GDP than Phillip Morris who decides to try to put restrictions on a pack of smokes.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9079684,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Go to Prison for File Sharing? That's What Hollywood Wants in the TPP Deal","text":"Keep watching - the corporate stuff starts a few minutes in, with the tobacco industry throwing around threats to various countries legislatures to stop those legislatures from passing Australian-style packaging laws and other public-health regulations. edit: if you're in a hurry, try starting at about 5:55 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10364113,"author":"walterbell","month":"2015-10","story_title":"The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared","text":"Those pre-TPP cases are nothing compared to the future combined scope of TPP (Pacific), TTIP (Europe) and RCEP (China, Korea, India, and other Asian countries). Never say there is nothing you can do. Tell other people about ISDS. Share the videos [1][2][3][4]. Jon Oliver's video [4] about the Philip Morris tobacco ISDS lawsuit against Australia (for brown paper packaging) caused such an outcry that TPP negotiators were forced to exclude the entire tobacco industry from ISDS. This is the first time such an industry-specific carve-out has appeared in a trade agreement. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13453749,"author":"ggame","month":"2017-01","story_title":"US Announces Withdrawal from TPP","text":"Not a fan of Trump but this is a good thing. See this exert from John Oliver on the effect of such trade deals; [VIDEO] And that's the existing trade deals, TPP would have made it much worse. There is a reason why democratically elected governments need to protect their sovereignty. The scope of the legal provisions along with the requirement to use easily corruptible mediation is superfluous to free trade. In addition, I don't understand those that think boxing out Russia and China from the rest of Europe and Asia is a good thing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17731430,"author":"staz","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Smoking around the world","text":"Most countries in the EU are taking steps to combat this and the number of smokers is steadily diminishing, even if too slowly. I'm more worried about the non smoker countries which the tobacco companies are seeing as new territories to conquer. John Oliver did a good segment about that two years ago [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6VOQnK7O2To":[{"hn_comment_id":7665375,"author":"i4i","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are your favorite videos relevant to entrepreneurs or startups? ","text":"My favorite, because it's so full of great stories, is the Chris Sacca interview with Jason Calacanis on This Week In Startups. Pt.1 [VIDEO] Pt.2 [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9270764,"author":"knappador","month":"2015-03","story_title":"In Silicon Valley, stories about failure are a form of social currency","text":"Yeah, I recently heard someone talking about taking huge personal financial risk to keep a startup going and suggested maybe it's time to live and learn and start over with a hell of a lot better product-market fit or spend that money on Treehouse and an apartment for a few months to learn how to build something, which could just be their first successful product. There are too many people willing to seed a decent product to go all-in with anything except time and soul. Chris Sacca has a pretty damned interesting tale: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14204173,"author":"dmitri1981","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Hanging up my spurs","text":"Chris Sacca's background story is little known and he talks about it at length with Jason Calacanis. The part about him losing millions while still at university is as shocking as his recovery from the setback is amazing. Check out [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6ZYLp5uX9Yw":[{"hn_comment_id":41385909,"author":"xpl","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Judge dismisses majority of GitHub Copilot copyright claims","text":"There are legendary Prodigy tracks reconstructions by Jim Pavloff, see: 1. \"Smack my bitch up\" [LINK] 2. \"Voodoo people\" [VIDEO] Those pieces sound exactly the same as the original, but it does not violate copyright because they've been produced by hand. Mind blowing!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3090222,"author":"przemoc","month":"2011-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?","text":"Thanks for commenting. Ableton Live is undoubtedly a great software. AFAIK it's not suited for rapid prototyping. Here is some nice stuff. Just in case somebody haven't seen it yet. Making of \"The Prodigy - Voodoo People\" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5379618,"author":"mlla","month":"2013-03","story_title":"I analyzed the chords to 1300 songs for patterns. Part 3 \u2013 Interactive Discovery","text":"A bit on a same note (pun intended), Jim Pavloff has uploaded to YouTube some cool videos, where he re-creates some of the tunes by The Prodigy based on the listed samples, e.g. Voodoo People ( [VIDEO] ) and Firestarter ( [LINK] )","stance":"rec"}],"6aIA2LaB2Iw":[{"hn_comment_id":13322932,"author":"sethrin","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Inkscape Version 0.92 is Released","text":"Mr. Price did some re-thinking and a follow-up presentation on that same subject, which is also interesting viewing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13323383,"author":"zzzcpan","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Inkscape Version 0.92 is Released","text":"Andrew Price explains better in his talk about Blender redesing than I could: [VIDEO] Many things in UX design apply to programming languages as well.","stance":"rec"}],"6avJHaC3C2U":[{"hn_comment_id":23308219,"author":"hans0l074","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Quines: self-replicating programs (2005)","text":"I watched this video recently: [VIDEO] - and it's one of the best programming related ones I've seen in recent times. Really well presented as well - and he talks about various Quines - I won't spoil it for anyone.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25537604,"author":"akritrime","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"For me, it was Art of Code by Dylan Beattie, but mostly because that talk has the best ending[0] I have seen. Also, introduced to me a side of programming that I instinctively knew existed but never sought out. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30755581,"author":"david_allison","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Overtone is live programmable music and visualization","text":"One of my favourite talks has a demonstration of FizzBuzz in Sonic Pi. It still blows me away [VIDEO] - whole talk is worth a watch [VIDEO] - timestamp","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31536904,"author":"doodpants","month":"2022-05","story_title":"An uroboros program with 100 programming languages","text":"This quine is discussed (among other topics) in The Art of Code[0], one of the most captivating tech talks I've ever seen. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29558171,"author":"newswasboring","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Tech Talks","text":"Any talk by Dylan Beattie[1,2] or David Beasley[3,4]. I think they are quite unique in their presentation, they tell a story. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36868619,"author":"WaffleIronMaker","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Unicode is harder than you think","text":"I also really enjoy Dylan Beattie's work. For those with some spare time, who might like to see a true \"rockstar\" programmer, you may like \"The Art of Code\"[0]. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6b4ZZQkcNEo":[{"hn_comment_id":6904822,"author":"iamshs","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Google Acquires Boston Dynamics","text":"Aha, Boston Dynamics has such wild repertoire of robots. Well done. Forget Big Dog, I like this robot a lot: [VIDEO] Maps, Self-Driving car, robots and a high quality analytics team. On top of that, robotic team comprises of various reputed groups with talented well regarded individuals. I look forward to the future. Also, how much disparity will arise in quality of living between North America and various Asian countries, or even Europe.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11319878,"author":"icebraining","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Why Google Wants to Sell Its Robots: Reality Is Hard","text":"Have you seen the robots they developed? Reducing it to \"moving from point A to B\" is misleading, in my opinion, even if technically true. They essentially developed machines that could move in difficult terrains, often where humans themselves couldn't. My favorite is the Sand Flea, a small car which can jump 9 meters (30-feet) into the air: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6bqBsHSwPgw":[{"hn_comment_id":31712519,"author":"hackererror404","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Shortsightedness has become an epidemic","text":"There's an amazing youtuber/creator I've been following for a while and he does exactly this. Goes into the science of what it takes, and the results are really stunning. I'd love to give something like this a try, just need time. [VIDEO] Also there was a breakthrough a while ago with LED ceiling lights that mimic natural sun. I haven't heard much since their release, so I'm sure cost is still a major issue for these sadly. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32220738,"author":"deltasevennine","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Why are there so few artificial sunlight or artificial window products?","text":"[VIDEO] If you want one, you can build one following the video above. The result is quite stunning. I've never seen anything like it. [LINK] The one above is an easier build that takes up less space.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43499779,"author":"Wistar","month":"2025-03","story_title":"I tried making artificial sunlight at home","text":"I cannot remember if I first saw this here on HN but, here is a detailed video of an incredible artificial sunlight rig build. It's big but the results look, well, amazingly real, at least to the camera. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30502332,"author":"UnpossibleJim","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)","text":"This isn't quite what you're looking for, but this has some of what you're looking for, which is how to get the \"parallel light effect\" that the sun has, so it doesn't look like a bulb, and diffuses properly: [VIDEO] Hope this helps a little.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30601635,"author":"implements","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Quicker and easier ways to get more light","text":"Relevant YouTube video with 2M views: \u201cBuilding an artificial sun that looks unbelievably realistic \u2026\u201d [VIDEO] [LINK] Uses a water cooled LED lamp reflected off a satellite dish to produce parallelised rays and through a soapy filter to provide diffuse light. Bulky, but literally lights a room as if from a morning sun on a spring day.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34596009,"author":"snozolli","month":"2023-01","story_title":"DIY triple-screen laptop based on the framework","text":"This guy also showed how to make an \"artificial sun\" that's proven very helpful to me in Oregon winters: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42803945,"author":"bmelton","month":"2025-01","story_title":"How to improve your WFH lighting to reduce eye strain","text":"I'd wager they're pretty good. If you can leverage a parabolic reflector at a light's focal length, you can get them to collimate in a way that approximates the sun by appearing to be pinned near-infinitely far away. The reflector is generally what takes up the space, but it's necessary(ish) -- you could approximate the effect by using a fresnel lens at the light's focal length, but it yields a smaller light with rainbowing effects. [This video]( [VIDEO] ) does a good job of showing how to make your own, as well as illustrating how good the effect is, while also demonstrating why space-hog implementations are likely to yield good results and slimmer ones not.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43497854,"author":"stephenpontes","month":"2025-03","story_title":"I tried making artificial sunlight at home","text":"DIY Perks also attempted to make artificial sunlight at home, also focusing on things like Rayleigh scattering! This was a great watch: [VIDEO] EDIT: After reading the article, I see the OP calls out DIY Perks specifically - the OPs design is much more compact :) > It's compact. The total size is 19cm x 19cm x 9cm. This is quite compact for a 5cm focal length and an effective lighting area of 18cm x 18cm. Reflective designs like the DIYPerks video or commercial products like CoeLux do not achieve this form factor.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45872498,"author":"jaggederest","month":"2025-11","story_title":"How to maintain good vision amidst the myopia epidemic","text":"Think operating room or photo studio. 100w grow light panel for every 2-3 square meters - so for a typical office, 4 100w lights, with a scatter panel in front. I really like this video for an example of how to make proper scattering effect, but you can buy similar materials that are more durable and lighter, for in e.g. a drop ceiling: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6c_LeIXrzAk":[{"hn_comment_id":16766320,"author":"abakker","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Where I started might not be useful to you","text":"Re #2, I'm not a programmer, but as a writer I find the same thing to be true. I work better with a pen and legal pad than a keyboard. I've got this feeling that we have neural pathways built for typing and, subconsciously, we favor phrases, words, and sentences that are easy to type. I know I even have a tic where if I pause to think I'll insert extraneous commas. It's kind of like how musicians tend to improvise around licks and scales that they have practiced a lot. There's something to thinking about the idea of a song on paper that is more creative than unintentionally falling back on chords/forms that are easy to play. (Adam Neely discusses this very well here: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17929873,"author":"mafuyu","month":"2018-09","story_title":"We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?","text":"I recommend checking out Adam Neely's channel, where he touches on some similar concepts: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23346742,"author":"viraptor","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third","text":"If you're into that, check out Adam Neely's channel. There's been a few videos on that and related topics: [VIDEO] (Spoiler: lots of historical context about tuning systems, but also raising the issue of timbre of specific instruments)","stance":"rec"}],"6chLw2aodYQ":[{"hn_comment_id":2868338,"author":"nz","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Awesome but commonly unknown Linux Commands","text":"Similar experience here, except that I've solved similar issues (and far more complicated issues) with DTrace instead of strace. The range of information that DTrace can retrieve about a running application surpasses anything that strace can retrieve. DTrace can retrieve information on a systemic scale, whereas each strace instance operates on a single process. And the overhead is significantly lower with DTrace. For many of the systems applications I design for Illumos, I've used DTrace probes as a way of logging very frequent events, on demand (to avoid frequent IO). All of the events that _must_ be logged for the application to function properly, are logged and fsync'd. I think that in most systems dynamic tracing will eventually replace a significant portion of the logging functionality that people code into their applications. Either way, if you think strace is sweet, give DTrace a spin. Some helpful links: [0] A video demostration of DTrace, by the creator of DTrace. [0] [VIDEO] [1] A post I wrote, demonstrating DTrace. Similar posts can be found on the blog's dtrace-addict page. [1] [LINK] [2] A wiki that contains DTrace examples for various languages and system facilities. Some examples may be Illumos-centric. [2] [LINK] [3] DTrace's home. Contains blogs by the engineers behind DTrace. [3] [LINK] UPDATE: Meant to reply to parent's parent.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12384845,"author":"gbrown_","month":"2016-08","story_title":"DTrace and Python","text":"> Does anyone have any inside knowledge of when, if ever, DTrace might become a standard/official part of Linux? Never. Due to dtrace being licensed under the CDDL it will never be mainlined into the upstream kernel. I would be keen to point out this does not mean there is a conflict of licenses from a legal point of view. Before anyone starts making claims like \"you're not allowed to do this\", see the use of the ZFS kernel module in recent releases of Ubuntu. I shall say no more on the matter as a refuse to be drawn into a licensing debate... Getting back on topic, those seeking more on user space providers should check out this video from Bryan Cantrill. [VIDEO] Full disclosure I never had to run Solaris in production so I can look back on Sun with rose tinted glasses. That said I still long for many of the features it pioneered. Seriously ZFS would eliminate half of my production problems and dtrace would make the remaining half solvable.","stance":"rec"}],"6gmP4nk0EOE":[{"hn_comment_id":32953070,"author":"vmoore","month":"2022-09","story_title":"The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web","text":"Just going to leave this gem of a video[0] here. Whilst I agree the web has been walled gardened into various silos like social media, and people think Facebook and Twitter are the Internet, it's still read/write. The blogosphere is still ticking along nicely and last time I checked it's thriving. Yes, people have gamified Google and search to get traffic and the blogosphere of old has largely been co-opted by profiteering gluttons, but there's still hope. Surf Hackernews enough and you'll find little gem posts that don't have an ulterior motive and are not 'monetizing' their content and sprinkling it with affiliate links and ADs. They just want to vent, exchange techne, and share knowledge. Then there's Wikipedia which has remained AD-free for as long as I can remember (apart from their donation banners which I don't mind). Wikipedia is the coolest thing ever and my IQ has probably gone up a few notches over the years because of it. It is the closest thing to getting home-schooled without going through formal education, and you can verify all the claims made in its entries by going to the footer section and reading various citations usually written by esteemed scholars. The web is in a sorry state due to the commercialization and walled garden silos, and also because of the proliferation of smartphones which are mere consumption devices IMHO and not designed for producing any meaningful or substantial content, apart from maybe uploading photos/videos to Instagram or writing ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32414150,"author":"lysergia","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The semantic web is dead \u2013 Long live the semantic web","text":"Long live the dream of the semantic web. For visual learners there\u2019s a great YouTube video explaining the semantic web here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6h3RJhoqgK8":[{"hn_comment_id":13424551,"author":"agibsonccc","month":"2017-01","story_title":"RethinkDB Postmortem","text":"I'll attempt to add to this. I might be stating things that are a bit controversial here. 1 thing we are always transparent with users about is how our business model works. 1 of my favorite videos on the internet about this is [1]. We are very much based on closed source for making revenue. This has actually helped with our community a lot. We are basically focused on closed source solutions for specific verticals. The only way to get clients to pay is to make something more efficient or don't open source/core it. For open source companies there is always a trade off of community vs customers. You have to find a hard line and stick to it. Community is great, but most of those people won't want to pay you. You can try to convert them, but that takes a lot of time and isn't the best path to market. We strive to provide a great base line experience to our users, but a few of the things we have found in practice that helps: 1. Features have customer names on them 2. There's a mass of community interest in a specific feature You have to be careful about where time is spent. It's very easy to mistake \"users\" for \"customers\". I wish slava and co the best of luck and really appreciate their post mortem. 1 thing we've learned as an infra company is \"be as close to the app as possible\". In our case the bulk of what we focus on is banking/telco anomaly detection. It's a straight forward revenue making product that can benefit from deep learning. The great thing is we can grow in to oth","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6802849,"author":"CodeMage","month":"2013-11","story_title":"An understated job advertisement","text":"Oh, okay. I guess that makes it all right, then. I would like to suggest watching the following talk by Mike Monteiro: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9616017,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Getting stressed out moonlighting","text":"Mike Monteiro - \"Fuck you pay me\" [VIDEO] See his comments on contracts, starting generally at 7m 20s Scope creep is included. Renegotiate. It's a new project.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13066178,"author":"kefka","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Don\u2019t Sign That Non-Disclosure Agreement Yet","text":"There's your first problem. You had a shitty contract that isn't paying you for billable hours. If you quit paying me, or on net 30, you will pay for the work I've done. And if you don't, I'll take your ass to court. \"Fuck you, pay me.\" Very relevant video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13066998,"author":"vlod","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Don\u2019t Sign That Non-Disclosure Agreement Yet","text":"It's from: Mike Monteiro - \"Fuck you pay me\" talk. Here's a link to the relevant bit in the video: [VIDEO] I would however, recommend the whole vid.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13846491,"author":"redbeard0x0a","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I start my own consulting firm?","text":"There are a lot of things that you need to do to start your own consulting firm. One of those things to do needs to be: * Watch this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6ihrGNGesfI":[{"hn_comment_id":36370075,"author":"myself248","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What do you put in a \u201cin case of death\u201d file?","text":"Deviant Ollam recently did a talk covering this, entitled \"lawyer, passport, locksmith, gun. a talk about risk and preparedness\". [VIDEO] I don't have a tl;dr, but it's worth an hour of your time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35192927,"author":"_rs","month":"2023-03","story_title":"FCC orders phone companies to block scam text messages","text":"Yeah, 100% this. Deviant Ollam talks about something like this (though maybe a bit more high stakes (maybe not)) in his talk here about risk preparedness I found really interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6mTbuzafcII":[{"hn_comment_id":45855786,"author":"jwr","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Transducer: Composition, abstraction, performance (2018)","text":"Transducers are IMHO one of the most under-appreciated features of Clojure. If you want a really good intro, watch Rich Hickey's talk about transducers: [VIDEO] (Rich is an excellent speaker and most of his talks are really worth watching, even if you don't use Clojure). The thing about transducers is that once you start using them, the abstractions click in your mind and you start using them more and more in your code. Many things our software does can be looked at as pipelines, and transducers let you write composable functions and put them together into pipelines. As you see more pipelines in your code, you will write those composable functions and reuse them in various places. Experienced Clojure programmers will rarely use loops, for me transducers are the #1 choice whenever I have to process a collection of any kind. Their efficiency (no intermediate collections!) is a nice bonus \u2014 you get both high-level composable code and efficiency, which is incredible. One thing I dislike about transducers is when I need a stateful one: these are hard to understand and very difficult to write. I rarely do this, except when I really want to stick to the transducer abstraction and I have a couple of hours to spend on a puzzle. But you rarely need to write your own stateful transducers, usually the built-in ones are enough (things like take/drop).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8439875,"author":"rymohr","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Transducers for JavaScript","text":"That and they're collection agnostic. I highly recommend watching Rich Hickey's talk for more background: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8640980,"author":"ultimape","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Rich Hickey \u2013 Inside Transducers [video]","text":"Here's another video by Rick Hickey about transducers: [VIDEO] - it was referenced in this great post detailing the transducer notion with Clojure, Scala, and Haskell: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33511417,"author":"talkingtab","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Why would anyone need JavaScript generator functions?","text":"Transducers. See Richard Hickey's talk about transducers here: [VIDEO] You can implement transducers in JavaScript using generators. It was somewhat mind bending but fun.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37462594,"author":"devin","month":"2023-09","story_title":"My mental model of Clojure transducers","text":"Rich gave a talk on this, and there is an associated HN thread for the talk, but some of you may be interested in the original transducers presentation. You can view it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41305228,"author":"ThatGeoGuy","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Reflecting on transducers in Scheme (2023)","text":"Quick nit/question. For the fold method, I don't think I've seen it called sentinel value. Usually it is seed or initial? I think in Scheme it is common to call it knil, mirroring how lists use nil as the \"sentinel\" value which marks the end of a proper list. I opted to name it sentinel in that article (and in the docs) for two reasons: 1. Sentinel values are a common topic in many languages [LINK] 2. Transducers necessarily abstract across a lot more than loops / lists. Lisps do a lot of really cool (and optimized) stuff with lists alone and Scheme is no different in this regard. However, because of how Scheme primarily exports list operations in (scheme base) is really easy to run into a situation where lists are used in an ad-hoc way where another data structure is more appropriate. This includes vectors, sets, mappings, hashmaps, etc. Transducers-the-library is meant to be general across operations that work on all of these types, so I chose language that intentionally departs from thinking in a list-focused way. Now, my main question. Transducer? I'm curious on the etymology of that word. By itself, I don't think I could ever guess what it was referencing. :( This is from Rich Hickey's presentation: [VIDEO] It's not a reducer, because they serve as higher-order functions that operate on reducers. Instead, the values they accept are transient through the function(s), so they transduce. You should watch the video, I think Rich explains the origins of his language very well","stance":"rec"}],"6orsmFndx_o":[{"hn_comment_id":13102757,"author":"i336_","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Computer Vision in 1982 Using Altair Computers and a Cromemco Cyclops Camera","text":"TL;DR: If you share the sentiment of the parent commentator you may find this wall of text interesting. You might be interested in Alan Kay's \"Doing with Images Makes Symbols Pt 1\", [LINK] (46:29). This video features excerpts from Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad demo ( [LINK] , 10:34; [VIDEO] , 19:19) and Douglas Englebart's seminal demonstration ( [LINK] , 34:45). I recommend watching all the videos in full to get a proper sense of context (Alan Kay's excerpts from Douglas's demonstration particularly don't include the bits that explain how the workstation's camera system works, which is important; also, the right audio channel in the Alan Kay video unfortunately seems to be dead, while the other videos are much better). Highlights from Alan Kay's video include (in hi..low precedence) info about the Sketchpad's CPU, which you might want to listen to twice so you don't mishear (8:58), some really depressing acknowledgements (from Alan Kay himself) that Sketchpad was a never-reproduced gem even in the 80s (8:33), Ivan's (quoted) remarks on the features of the Sketchpad system (7:58), and acknowledgement about the lack of ease of use of light pens (7:12). I consider the above videos to be my own personal pinnacle, what I look up to when I think about good computer design. Some may find them depressing for the reasons you've outlined. It's sad that this obscure niche of computing doesn't lend itself to being very actionable in this day and age. There's definitely no comparison in t","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18227545,"author":"ivanmaeder","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Demo of Ivan Sutherland's 1963 Sketchpad: [VIDEO] It was a drawing app with the following features: Snap to object (\"This allows me to be sloppy while I'm drawing and get a precision drawing at the same time\"), connected vectors, arcs, alignment with other objects, copying, multiple \"files,\" scaling (\"It scales approximately 2 miles in size\"), 3D, etc etc It blows me away that this kind of UI was even conceived in the 1960s. It feels like there was a dark ages middle period after then until quite recently.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11972193,"author":"infinite8s","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)","text":"Here are 2 that he often brings up: Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad demo - Object oriented graphics using a constraint based system ( [VIDEO] ) Douglas Englebart's demo - too many innovations to list, but includes real time collaboration (he demoed in a convention center while the system ran 30 miles away in his lab, connected by a leased line operating at 1200 baud!). People think he just invented the mouse, but the overarching theme in his work was augmenting human capabilities... [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40798318,"author":"ralferoo","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Igneous Linearizer: semi-structured source code","text":"I remember reading an article on Source Code In Database back in the early 2000s, and it's been knocking around my brain ever since as something I ponder every couple of years. I just can't shake the feeling that there's the gem of a future paradigm where everyone wonders \"why we didn't always do it that way?\", but then every time I try to follow those thoughts through to a conclusion, it always feels like it'd just be re-implementing Smalltalk, and then the question is \"why isn't Smalltalk more popular?\" That said, there's a lot to be said for revisiting old ideas. There was so much interesting research done in the 60s and 70s in all sorts of random directions, maybe because at that time there were no precedents or expectations for how things should be done. There are so many untapped resources here, it's crazy. Every now and then I re-watch \"The Mother of All Demos\" [1] from 1968 where Douglas Englebert demonstrates some of the research at Stanford or the Sketchpad Demo [2] from 1963 where Ivan Sutherland is presenting a GUI-based CAD system. Fortunately, these ideas have now been picked up again, but to me it's interesting to note just how long a time lapsed between these ideas and becoming mainstream. Some of it is obviously the cost as the state-of-the-art research machines were massively more powerful than the home computers even 2 decades later, but I'm sure there were a lot of great ideas that have just been forgotten. Part of the problem, I think, is that we have fou","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45036233,"author":"a1371","month":"2025-08","story_title":"The man with a Home Computer (1967) [video]","text":"I don't know if it's selection/survivor bias, but every time I watch a video about computers from the 60s and 70s, I am amazed how spot on they are with the trajectory of the technology. Take this CAD demo from MIT back in 1963 showing features that I commonly use today: [VIDEO] Then the 80s and 90s rolled in, the concept is computers that entered the mainstream. Imagination got too wild with movies like Electric Dreams (1984). Videos like this make me think that our predictions of AI super intelligence are probably pretty accurate. But just like this machine, in actuality it may look different.","stance":"rec"}],"6p8zAbFKpW0":[{"hn_comment_id":32783910,"author":"russdill","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Companies are buying large numbers of carbon offsets that don\u2019t cut emissions","text":"In theory, it's great. In practice perverse incentives and little to no regulation make it worthless. A John Oliver explainer: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36305749,"author":"d4nyll","month":"2023-06","story_title":"","text":"John Oliver with a quite informative video about why many carbon offsets/carbon credits schemes are most likely not genuine in their attempts to offset carbon emissions. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37663232,"author":"joshvm","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Investigation: 78% of carbon offset projects globally are \u201clikely junk\u201c","text":"It's complicated, but John Oliver did a good segment on it. [VIDEO] Planting trees is not an easy solution. [LINK] A major problem is that monitoring and verification is patchy. A carbon credit is in theory something like X ton-years, but there is no guarantee that what you pay for will be around in X years and policing us extremely difficult. X is traditionally 100 years. If I sell you a carbon credit and then cut all my trees down, what happens? Another is fraudulent sites - people selling credits for sites that already exist, we're already planned for protection, etc.","stance":"rec"}],"6qD9XElTpCE":[{"hn_comment_id":27850847,"author":"freemint","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Google tries out error correction on its quantum processor","text":"If you are interested in the oral histoy of Shors algorithm and error correcting quantum codes. Shor (yes the one who invented Shor's Algorithm) gave a create 30 min presentation here [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32294691,"author":"FartyMcFarter","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Shor, I\u2019ll do it (2007)","text":"I don't fully understand all the details, but even I can tell that this algorithm is beautiful. Mixing together the concepts of modular sequences, periods, and Fourier transforms, plus doing this fast with computers that barely exist in order to find factors or numbers is just an amazing construction. There's a video featuring Peter Shor about the invention of this algorithm: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"6reLWfFNer0":[{"hn_comment_id":16483149,"author":"dharma1","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?","text":"Here's a recent talk by Pieter - [VIDEO] I think it's really good. Probably the best startup talk I've seen in a while. In my opinion, there are benefits to doing things alone, but you have to be able to learn a lot of things quick, have a lot of available time with few distractions, and be very focused and persistent. Cons: it's not as fun, and will probably take longer than working with people with specific talents.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28874652,"author":"satvikpendem","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Remote OK Open Startup","text":"Check this video out where he goes over his past projects: [VIDEO] The truth is, out of the dozen or so products he made, only two had real commercial success, NomadList and RemoteOK. So there is survivorship bias present, he just kept trying until he succeeded.","stance":"rec"}],"6wBrOV2FJM8":[{"hn_comment_id":34511620,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) technology you have seen?","text":"A hobbyist made a 2x2 angled LEGO brick with a computer and an OLED display embedded into it: [VIDEO] This is a mind blowing level of miniaturization, especially considering that this was assembled by someone at home with commercially available off-the-shelf parts! The fact that he used a cheap, readily available 3D printer to manufacture the jigs and mould parts is the icing on the cake. When I grew up, computer monitors were heavy and had big vacuum tubes in them made out of thick glass. At the scale of a LEGO brick, it was already amazing having a single LED light instead of an incandescent light bulb! A working computer!? With a display? Madness!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34723927,"author":"mro_name","month":"2023-02","story_title":"If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough","text":"as you mention gaming \u2013 do you know the doom-in-lego-brick? [LINK] and brick assembly [VIDEO] There are some video links in the (german) article [LINK] . Mind-blowing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41440787,"author":"nmstoker","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Doom on a Volumetric Display [video]","text":"His stuff is fascinating. He first came to my attention when he built the working LEGO computer bricks, as shown here: [VIDEO] This shows it being built but if you want to see it working, jump to just after 12 minutes.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46154255,"author":"eps","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Multivox: Volumetric Display","text":"An earlier iteration of the same block is imo more impressive in its creativity - [VIDEO] - such an unexpected and yet completely natural extension of the brick set.","stance":"rec"}],"6wZmYMWKLkY":[{"hn_comment_id":7855982,"author":"e12e","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Twitter in talks to buy online music firm SoundCloud","text":"Uh-oh. Are there any other companies than Whisper System that had an actual end-user product that Twitter has acquired -- and then not killed off? I don't recognize that many from: [LINK] Except for Dabble DB (Smallthought Systems) and Posterous: [LINK] [LINK] I hadn't realize how extra-cruel the dabbledb thing was until I read this: [LINK] \"Up until about a year ago, we[twitter] used an online database called Dabble DB to track and share information about our projects internally. While we\u2019ve since moved that project management tool in-house (...)\" [In other words: we realize this was a great product, and we still killed it, because, meh profits for twitter?\"] For those that didn't know what DabbleDB was: [VIDEO] So, while an acquisition might be great for the owners of soundcloud, I'm rather terrified as a user...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10076627,"author":"panic","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Eve Version 0","text":"If you haven't heard of DabbleDB, this video is a good introduction: [VIDEO] . It shared some goals with Eve, like letting people easily enter and manipulate data, though as far as I know it never tried to support general-purpose programming.","stance":"rec"}],"6y8XgGhXkTQ":[{"hn_comment_id":9953442,"author":"gradstudent","month":"2015-07","story_title":"The Oppressed Rulers of the Games Industry","text":"Invariably such refutations fixate on the specific examples chosen by Sarkeesian and go on to make flawed arguments like e.g. (paraphrasing): > Violence against women in XYZ is not problem because XYZ also features violence against men! Which is completely besides the point and ignores the societal context into which these games are released. Other common \"critiques\" leveled against Sarkeesian, that I've seen anyway, are straight up strawmen. These include gems like she's in favour of censorship or that she argues games have the ability to directly manipulate people into violence or sexism. Innuendo Studios recently posted a great analysis of this phenomenon in their \"Why Are You So Angry?\" video series. It's really well done and worth checking out: [VIDEO] The OP reads just like an Angry Jack.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10456090,"author":"chiaro","month":"2015-10","story_title":"SXSW Cancels Gamer Panels After Threats","text":"This video series does a pretty amazing job in describing those two groups and their motivations (the harassers, and those caught up with them): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16136599,"author":"jdlshore","month":"2018-01","story_title":"The problem of game developers receiving abusive messages","text":"GamerGate was orchestrated by misogynistic racists on 4chan's /pol/ board. They used \"ethics in journalism\" as a deliberate excuse to rile people up, and tricked a large crowd of gamers into buying that excuse and thus providing them with cover and additional power. Ultimately it was a disgusting and successful attack against women and people of color. By repeating the excuse (that it was about a game review, when in fact it was an orchestrated attack, and the supposed review does not exist ), you're perpetuating a mistake (providing cover to a small group of misogynistic racists) that caused a lot of harm. I doubt you did this intentionally, so I suggest you do some more research. There is a fantastic YouTube series that goes into detail, including investigating the public record of the people behind GamerGate, here: [VIDEO] If you can't watch the whole thing (although it's worth it), this part goes into the origins of GamerGate: [LINK] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16464741,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Why can\u2019t women get pregnant without the menstrual cycle? (2016)","text":"Before continuing the conversation, can I ask you to take a moment to step back and ask yourself with honesty whether you think that these statements imply that I am saying that you are not a good person because you also behave this way. Because if so, there is a - perfectly reasonable - misunderstanding of my intent here. Read what I wrote again, more closely: all it is describing is a societal norm that I would like to get rid of. If you think you don't act that way, great! This is not an accusation, it would be a perfectly understandable response (I get defensive all the time when my GF points things out to me). At no point am I talking about you, nor saying that you are \"not a real man\". At no point am I saying that you are a bad person if you do or do not act this way. I'm sorry that you feel defensive, but there really is no need to. I'm not accusing you, nor would I blame you or any man for having toxic masculine behaviours. It's not your fault to be raised in a society with those norms, after all. If you have the time, please watch Why Are You So Angry? by Innuendo Studios[0]. It also goes into how societal norms about good and evil train us to think things are about us and personal attacks when they aren't (the video highlights gamergate, but the process is not gender specific). But the short version is: people tend to get very defensive about topics like sustainability, feminism, racism, animal rights, etcetera, because it makes them question whether they are good p","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24026964,"author":"rewq4321","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Tech Journalism Is Less Diverse Than Tech","text":"> If the audience is more outraged/enthused at a group being moral crusaders then they'll push that angle. Well, yes. News companies are mostly reflections of their audiences, and if they weren't, they wouldn't exist. This is mostly a problem with the people, unless you want to try \"top-down\" media companies like China et al. That said, drawing an equivalence between the recent BLM protests and \"Gamergate\" is... a bit much. Gamergate is/was a toxic hell-hole of a movement in my opinion. Just a thin veil over a mass harassment campaign. But here's a series of video essays which gives the whole thing some nuance: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25811379,"author":"iuguy","month":"2021-01","story_title":"People that think you\u2019re an asshole","text":"It doesn't matter what you do, if it experiences some success, no matter how fleeting someone somewhere will get really upset about it. I believe that part of this is connected to the inversion of small-scale private conversations into large-scale text-driven public ones without us really being fully aware of the difference. Without the context of non-verbal communication or the closeness towards people we've never met we react differently online to offline. I think it's important not to lose sight of the idea that people can blow up online, call you every name under the sun and still be perfectly good people. I found Innuendo Studios' Why Are You So Angry[1] and SSC's varieties of Argumentative Experience[2] really helpful in coming to terms with my own online behaviour. There's also a pg essay[3] that's fairly relevant. I particularly enjoyed Rationality.org's double-cruxing approach[4]. Right now I'm focusing on avoiding continuing discussions at the point they stop adding overall. Nobody's perfect but it's definitely keeping my internal Angry Jack at bay. [1] - [VIDEO] [2] - [LINK] [3] - [LINK] [4] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32889050,"author":"wwweston","month":"2022-09","story_title":"DHS to Spend Almost $700k Investigating \u2018Radicalization in Gaming\u2019","text":"Nobody would pause for a moment on studies investigating the cultural impact of messaging in movies or TV; in fact we talk about it regularly. Games and the culture of discussion around them have started to have a huge impact. This is worth studying. The YouTube channel Innuendo Studios has done some interesting reflection on gaming in general (I really like \"Adventure Games About Jesus\" [LINK] ) and some specific stuff on cultural conflict and radicalization in gaming: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"72cM_E6bsOs":[{"hn_comment_id":27250899,"author":"dron57","month":"2021-05","story_title":"A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more","text":"Your example of looking at a problem from more than one angle made me think of the problem of finding the Hubble constant that describes the rate of expansion of the universe. There are two recent methods which have different estimates for this rate of expansion. PBS Space time has an excellent video on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21297297,"author":"madaxe_again","month":"2019-10","story_title":"How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?","text":"The shockwaves are everywhere - you, right now, are in a density node. Inflation wasn\u2019t something that happened from a single point - it happened as a result of vacuum collapse, spontaneously, all over the place. Some of these inflationary zones went much faster than others, and where they intersected, regions of increased density, and therefore matter, occurred. The filamentary nature of the very macroscopic universe reflects these shock intersection zones - they\u2019re full of galaxies. We think that the voids are likely centred around points where inflation occurred. So yeah. You\u2019re the shockwave. Sorry man. Here\u2019s a decent vid from PBS Space Time where they explain some of this nice and clearly - I recommend their channel generally if these topics interest you. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28884179,"author":"doublepg23","month":"2021-10","story_title":"We've spotted a planet surviving its dying star","text":"I believe they\u2019re referring to the \u201ccrisis in cosmology\u201d. I\u2019m purely a layman, but I found some videos useful. I believe at least PBS Space-Time [1] is well regarded in physics circles (for laymen explanations.). I found the other one [2] to be more digestible though. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"72y2EC5fkcE":[{"hn_comment_id":35097020,"author":"_gabe_","month":"2023-03","story_title":"What a good debugger can do","text":"> I should mention that the perfect debugger doesn\u2019t exist It may not exist, but this demo has got to be the closest thing to the perfect debugger I've ever seen: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40173393,"author":"modernerd","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Leaving Rust gamedev after 3 years","text":"Allan Blomquist's tooling demo they mention is incredible, go watch it: [VIDEO] Really sells the value of having a tight developer feedback loop: it shows hot reloading for code and graphics, a reversible debugger, live profiling with flame graphs, a data inspector with data breakpoints, time travel inspection with a scrub bar, session sharing and replay with the same scrub bar and direct links from the call stack to a breakpoint, and more. Above the many niggles they had with Rust itself, this greatly helps me understand why Rust left them wanting more from their working environment. They say they've switched back to Unity with [LINK] to try to capture some of that, and now I see why. (It's a shame that hot reloading tooling in Rust wasn't ready for them yet, but I see why they've moved on instead of waiting/contributing.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46762898,"author":"superdisk","month":"2026-01","story_title":"DDD was a great debugger \u2013 what would a modern equivalent look like today?","text":"This is a legitimate question but this was clearly generated using an LLM. To add something constructive, this demo represents an amazing ideal of what debugging could be: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35096399,"author":"Yoofie","month":"2023-03","story_title":"What a good debugger can do","text":"A whole world of creative opportunities open up when the toolchain and related debugging tools don't suck. Check out this wild video[1] of someone modifying and debugging a game in real time. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40500192,"author":"MikeSchurman","month":"2024-05","story_title":"GTFL \u2013 A Graphical Terminal for Common Lisp","text":"Yes, I'm a big fan of Bret Victor's work. I share his Inventing on Principle talk on a near yearly basis. I've seen light table years ago and thought it looked really neat, but I haven't looked into it much as it wasn't directly applicable to my environments. But, probably worth a look for ideas. On the topic of time-travel debugging, have you seen the demo: [VIDEO] (Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo) Very impressive, worth a watch.","stance":"rec"}],"74zOY-vgkyw":[{"hn_comment_id":37431152,"author":"tagfowufe","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Mastering Emacs: What's new in Emacs 29.1","text":"It's incredibly useful to me. I love it. I find it nicely curated and true to the word 'starter' (kit). If I knew more about Emacs, this is definitely what I would have created, and in a similar manner. It's that lil' layer of configuration that's missing that makes the first clash with emacs sane. I like the structure. I also like the fact that there's a 'researcher' mixin. Would absolutely love to see your opinionated inclusion of org-roam, and general.el. I recently dabbled into System Crafters' 'Emacs from Sratch' series [0], which is incredibly well thought-out. After 5 hours of following it, you kinda get feature parity between his config and this; but in Berock's case it's done more natively which is really, really neat. I only miss some basic config with general.el. I feel super lucky to have started in Emacs when they finally added LSP and Treesitter support, and with System Crafters' help and yours! [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29257194,"author":"BeetleB","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Why Emacs: Redux","text":"The Emacs From Scratch series on Youtube is actually quite good. He does have all his config in a Github repository if you need to copy/paste. This is the first video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40040314,"author":"ParetoOptimal","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Beautifying Org Mode in Emacs (2018)","text":"Go through emacs from scratch: [VIDEO] Try using that config 25% of your work/productive time for 1 month. Then if you are annoyed by how much time it takes try using doomemacs for the same 25% time. At the end of this you'll know if/which emacs approach is for you.","stance":"rec"}],"77IdKFqXbUY":[{"hn_comment_id":22235622,"author":"lcam84","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth?","text":"It depends. If it generate any kind of money exchange it counts to GDP. But there are many solutions that don't generate growth (like walking to work instead of using other means of transportation) The way we measure growth is nuts. the best way to acknowledge that is to watch this speech from Robert F Kennedy [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15788562,"author":"pqh","month":"2017-11","story_title":"A basic income could boost the US economy by $2.5 trillion","text":"I'd also be interested in effect on resource consumption. GDP isn't everything. I can't say it better than Kennedy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"783ccP__No8":[{"hn_comment_id":23916121,"author":"typingmonkey","month":"2020-07","story_title":"GraphQL Query Generator","text":"I recommend to watch the documentation about the facebook people that invented GraphQL [1]. Listen careful to which problems they solved with graphql, then think about the problems you have to solve for your application. Most of the time GraphQL is not worth its tradeoffs. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31287231,"author":"realPubkey","month":"2022-05","story_title":"GraphQL Is a Trap?","text":"Watch this Honeypot documentation about GraphQL. Listen to what the developers tell which problems they had to solve when they invented GraphQL. You likely do not have any of these problems. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"79fvDDPaIoY":[{"hn_comment_id":13853193,"author":"gbrown_","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Silent Data Corruption Is Real","text":"If you have corruption in RAID 1 how do you know which copy is good? On a slight tangent ZFS will checksum data and store that checksum in the block pointer (i.e. not with the data itself) so it can tell which of the copies is correct. The same extends to RAID 5 and RAID 6, although with RAID 6 you can intelligently work out which block might be bad. However that is assuming the block devices are returning consistent data and you are the one talking to the block devices. If the disks were sat behind a hardware RAID controller and the controller was the one you'd be hard pressed to identify the source of the data corruption. The checksumming in ZFS comes to the rescue here again. I recommend checking out this video [1] from Bryan Cantrill. It's about Joyent's object store Manta but features a fair bit of ZFS history. Also it features the usual rant level that one can come to expect from a Bryan Cantrill talk which I quite enjoy. There are plenty of other videos available on ZFS. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15975691,"author":"kbenson","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Xenserver 7.3: Changes to the Free Edition","text":"Bryan Cantrill says it best, I think[1]: \"If you had to explain the Nazis to someone who had never heard of WWII but was an oracle customer, there's a very good chance you would actually explain the Nazis as an Oracle allegory.\" There are more choice quotes in someone else's HN comment about Bryan Cantrill on Oracle.[2] I highly recommend any talk you can find of Bryan Cantrill. A wonderful mix of industry history and great delivery. 1: [VIDEO] 2: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8571529,"author":"bcantrill","month":"2014-11","story_title":"SmartDataCenter and Manta are now open source","text":"If anyone's interested in a presentation introduction to Manta (presumably similar to the one you saw), you may want to check out my FutureStack presentation from last year.[1] And if you have 90 minutes to kill and are in the mood for the true origin story of Manta, see my video from NYC DevOps in January.[2] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10040429,"author":"Flenser","month":"2015-08","story_title":"\u201cStop reverse engineering our code\u201d","text":"You might enjoy this talk by Bryan Cantrill, where he describes the Oracle acquisition of Sun: [LINK] > \"what you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle\" > \"this company is about one man and his alter ego and what he wants to inflict upon humanity\" Edit: And how could I forget this: [VIDEO] > \"and then, the Nazis invaded\" > \"for a while I tried to not go to Nazi allegory when talking about Oracle but I actually think that it does a dis-service to not go to Nazi allegory because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there's some critical understanding that I have left on the table\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12233149,"author":"gbrown_","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Btrfs RAID 5/6 Code Found to Be Very Unsafe and Will Likely Require a Rewrite","text":"Bryan Cantrill expresses this[1] in a manner I certainly agree with. Software that is designed/ intended to be reliable should not go through large periods of instability only to be written off as \"prepubescence\". [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7CgXvIuZR40":[{"hn_comment_id":21547696,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2019-11","story_title":"NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS","text":"LOL... from \"Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!\"[1] (which is insa^Wbizza^Wa very creative hack): \"The cartridge is the dual of the Nintendo.\" [1] [LINK] edit: for a very impressive variation on the SMW \"joke\" in [1], I recommend this[2] video of TASbot streaming Skype realtime to [2xNES, SNES+SuperGameBoy] through the controller ports . [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31623780,"author":"zer01","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Super Mario Bros. 3: \u201cGame End Glitch\u201d in 00:00.216","text":"I absolutely love speed runs and think they\u2019re a great expression of the hacker mentality. To take a subtle bug in something like a physics engine and bend it to your will to eek out another 5s save off the world record is absolutely fascinating. Not to mention things like TASBot which always makes a great GDQ watch [VIDEO] and got me interested in speed running in the first place!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43065923,"author":"gmueckl","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal","text":"He was the public figure for TASBot and TASVideos for a while (see [LINK] ). TASBot is really a beautiful idea to help visualize what tool assisted speedruns are doing via the controller button lights in TASBot's hands. I think DwangoAC and TASBot represented the TAS community at multiple events, not just GDQ. Tool assisted speedruns are remarkable to me because creating the authoring tools is hacking in the classic sense. And then there's the sheer insanity of exploiting broken game logic to gain arbitrary code execution solely via controller inputs. The most elaborate demonstration of this that I know of was given at AGDQ 2017, eventually injecting a video player into Zelda on SNES and streaming the video through the controller port: [VIDEO] Ars Technica went into a little more detail about that feat: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"7EmboKQH8lM":[{"hn_comment_id":34312430,"author":"xiphias2","month":"2023-01","story_title":"I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books","text":"That's probably great as well, but I'm talking about searching for a book author. Just for example Clean Code is a great book, but the presentation is so much better: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34373127,"author":"xiphias2","month":"2023-01","story_title":"","text":"Maybe it's true at some companies, but it has nothing to do with agile / scrum, but letting non-tech people who love confrontation take over engineering leadership from engineers who are afraid of confrontation (which sounds like the disaster it is). Robert Martin (one of the creators of the agile manifesto) explains it quite well in ,,Clean Code'' presentation: [VIDEO] The whole presentation should be a must watch by all engineers so that they understand what _is_ agile to the point when they know it better than product / project managers / non-tech people. It's hard to get a better description than the original source, and no non-tech person has authority to override the real agile at that point.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34607000,"author":"srinidhikbhat","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Clean Code series by Bob Martin (Uncle Bob) Changed the way I read/write code and my perspective about programming in general. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24447475,"author":"kowsheek","month":"2020-09","story_title":"The technical interview is an ego trip","text":"I think \"caring\" is probably the only one that separates the best from the rest. Reminds me of this: [VIDEO] If we care as a developer, we write better code, learn things and listen to our team, customers.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28409780,"author":"andrekandre","month":"2021-09","story_title":"GitHub Copilot Generated Insecure Code in 40% of Circumstances During Experiment","text":"agree i think the other thing is, theres clean architecture and then theres Clean Architecture TM where the thing is taken literally (leading to slavishly applying all the layers with lots of boilerplate, useless mocks and ridiculously coupled unit tests, over architected dependency injectors (assemblies) etc) i was honestly surprised when i watched a series of lectures from mr uncle (bob) where he clarified a lot of things such as \"use dependency injection only where it matters\" and \"unit tests should be replaced with integration tests after a system is finished being implemented\" to \"slavish following of agile \"customs\" is unproductive\" etc etc i think a lot of issues could be resolved if people took the time to think and listen carefully about these things and not stop at the first couple of search hits for \"clean architecture\" edit: heres the link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40696990,"author":"misswaterfairy","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Post Office scandal victims in Scotland have convictions quashed","text":"> About 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted for fraud and theft and over a hundred sent to prison And at least four purportedly related to these prosecutions committed suicide[1]. Perhaps most alarmingly: prior to 1999, the burden of proof for proving that the Horizon system was working correctly would have fallen to the Post Office (as the prosecutor in these instances) and Fujitsu (as the developer). That rule was changed to presume that the computer system worked correctly unless there was explicit evidence to the contrary[2][3]. A very high barrier for a non-technical person to prove, especially in an extremely complex system. It worries me how many people put unchecked faith into the systems that, now more-or-less, rule our lives whether we like it or not. It worries me even more that a lot of computer programmers, systems engineers, et al, don't understand how their code affects others in bad and unintended ways, and why testing matters so much. Uncle Bob, as divisive as he is, hits this nail on the head with a depleted uranium sledgehammer[4] (19:47-24:33). [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41203384,"author":"wickedsight","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Should we bring software dev in-house?","text":"If you're going to do this I recommend you at least take these things at heart: Why do developers slow down > [VIDEO] 80% of developers are unhappy. The problem is not AI, nor is coding > [LINK] What you're looking at is starting greenfield development. This always starts in the same way: 'we need to deliver functionality quickly because management wants results'. This always leads to the same issue, where code quality is ignored for sake of delivering functionality, which then leads to development slowing down and both management and devs becoming unhappy. If you want to build something for the long term, I'd recommend starting slow. Get some experienced freelance devs where you do thorough reference checks. Get them to set up a stable core and help in hiring some medior level devs to train. The medior level devs can grow to become the coaches of junior devs and then you can start scaling down the freelance devs. Whatever you do, don't plan to release something within the first year. Don't ask the team to estimate a delivery date within the first six months. After six months you should have a baseline that development can be continued with and then you probably have a team that can start estimating work and has a grasp of what they need to do to deliver something useful. Also, get a good product person, someone who can talk to business, draw out the different parts of the application and explain them to the developers. All of these things are hard, so you really need to comm","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47503227,"author":"misswaterfairy","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded in the US","text":"> We need a software building code. This wouldn't be allowed to happen with non-software. The fact that anyone can build any product with software, make it work terribly, and when it fails impacts the lives of thousands (if not millions), needs to be stopped. Uncle Bob had a bit to say about this a while ago[1], and is largely what his Clean Code philosophy is trying to achieve, despite the detractors. To the detractors and down-voters... If you're complaining about over-abstraction, arguing about the 'better language' to use, or that 'Clean Code' doesn't work - you're missing the point by a few hundred miles. The whole point of 'Clean Code' is to establish a body of ethics software 'engineers' collectively agree to, and rigorously follow to avoid \"killing 10,000 people with a little software failure\". If you think you can make a better 'Clean Code', do so! That's the whole point about ethics debates. But! You need to proffer an alternative and prosecute why your version is better than Clean Code. [1] (19:47-24:33) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7FeqF1-Z1g0":[{"hn_comment_id":25591774,"author":"snicksnak","month":"2020-12","story_title":"RC3 talk: How to survive in spacecraft [video]","text":"I would also highly recommend \"Traue keinem Scan, den du nicht selbst gef\u00e4lscht hast\" [0] but I just noticed that there are no english subtitles available. [0] [VIDEO] (2015)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29207008,"author":"solarkraft","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Confused Xerox copiers rewrite scanned documents, expert finds (2013)","text":"(2013). The whole ordeal lead to a quite legendary presentation by David at CCC (german, no captions, live translation available but pretty bad): [VIDEO] If you speak german and haven\u2019t seen this yet, watch it, this is a classic. His talks are all entertaining and interesting.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34048813,"author":"masswerk","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Enhance Speech from Adobe \u2013 Free AI filter for cleaning up spoken audio","text":"Epic talk (in German, David Kriesel, \"Traue keinem Scan, den du nicht selbst gef\u00e4lscht hast\"): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19395375,"author":"masswerk","month":"2019-03","story_title":"DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System","text":"Thanks for the complementary links! Regarding Xerox scanner compression issues, compare this great CCC-talk by David Kriesel, \"Traue keinem Scan, den du nicht selbst gef\u00e4lscht hast\" [0] \u2013 Sorry, German only. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] (Didn't MS's PDF-viewer have similar issues?)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28159912,"author":"sdoering","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Contract by Email","text":"This reminded me of a great talk (in German) by David Kriesel about scanners not scanning correctly but replacing letters and numbers because of pattern matching (if I remember correctly). It was a really great talk. Not sure if there is an English version somewhere: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7G4ipM2qjfw":[{"hn_comment_id":43831699,"author":"fuoqi","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Spain and Portugal power outage: what caused it, and was there a cyber-attack?","text":"I haven't wrote that the government said that. But a lot of online commentators and even some news outlets immediately started to discuss \"cyberattacks\" (including the linked article) and asking \"maybe it was the Russians?\". Most people who are familiar with how electric grids operate are in agreement that high degree of renewable generation has likely made the situation worse not better. We know that right before the blackout the grid had a sudden dip in frequency, which is exactly the condition which leads to unstable work of inverters used by renewable plants. Just watch this Practical Engineering video [1], if you are not familiar with the topic. It discusses exactly the problems I wrote about. So renewables may have not been the direct reason for the blackout, but they are highly likely have helped to tip the gird behind the critical point. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41320505,"author":"j16sdiz","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Australia to build the largest solar power plant","text":"After watching \"Practical Engineering\"'s video on solar power[1], I start to think solar power plant of this scale is a bad idea -- it hate AC and just does not play nice with the rest of the power grid. A software bug can bring down the whole grid. .. and TFA is taking about expanding the grid. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42279269,"author":"HarryHirsch","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US","text":"Practical Engineering had a video on the subject not too long ago: [VIDEO] The short answer is: it's for load balancing, it can't be avoided.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42633972,"author":"Lichtso","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Germans turn to balcony solar panels to save money","text":"Operating electrical power grids requires a very careful balance between production and consumption. Long term trends are regulated on the consumption side through pricing, short term jitter is regulated on the production side through switching power plants on and off. Traditionally, a power grid only had medium and large power plants, and they are not only connected to the power grid but also a control network. Adding many small power generators poses a problem in how you communicate and coordinate with them. \"Connecting Solar to the Grid is Harder Than You Think\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44360082,"author":"fuoqi","month":"2025-06","story_title":"2025 Iberia Blackout Report [pdf]","text":"Temporary negative prices have been caused by the renewable generation which exceeded the grid demand at the time, which then evolved into the nasty feedback loop caused by the reaction of renewable generation to those conditions. You simply do not get such situation with traditional generation, it's the direct consequence of the intermittent nature of renewables and its high ratio in the total generation. Also, have you read after the market part? Please watch this video [VIDEO] if the last quote is gibberish to you. It discusses somewhat different issues, but the point still stands.","stance":"rec"}],"7HKbjYqqPPQ":[{"hn_comment_id":16238044,"author":"chubot","month":"2018-01","story_title":"A practitioner\u2019s guide to reading programming languages papers","text":"This is great! I wish I had seen something like this years ago. Related: \"It's Time for a New Old Language\" by Guy Steele. [VIDEO] He gives a history of metalanguage notations (for both language semantics and syntax, including regexes and CFGs). And then he criticizes the inconsistency that has cropped up in these notations over the years. The irony is that people who are formalizing precise semantics of programming languages do not agree on the syntax/semantics of the metalanguage. I guess this is what you notice when you read hundreds of programming language papers, as I'm sure Guy Steele has. ----- Also, does anyone know if what he refers to as \"progress and preservation\" are the same / related to \"liveness and safety\" in distributed algorithms? It sounds like the same kind of idea.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24093343,"author":"chubot","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Formulog: ML + Datalog + SMT","text":"(Nice to see your work shared here :) ) I went through the corresponding videos last year: [LINK] [LINK] It was a great refresher as someone who once liked math but hasn't done much of it in ~20 years :) I had seen the blog posts, but there was some \"color\" in the videos that helped. For example I didn't realize that the fonts sometimes matter! Honestly, I still don't really read the notation, as I haven't had a strong reason to, but I feel it would be useful at some point. ---- For others, I also recommend this 2017 talk by Guy Steele It's Time for a New Old Language [VIDEO] Because even people in the field seem to have problems with the notation. He also was asked about this work a few days ago here and said he was still working on it in the background (being a \"completionist\"): [LINK] ----- FWIW as you know, Oil is more static than shell, and that was largely motivated by tools and static analysis (and negatively motivated by false positives in ShellCheck [LINK] ) I would like to go further in that direction, but getting the basic functionality and performance up to par has taken up essentially 100% of the time so far :-( My use of Zephyr ASDL was also partly motivated by some vague desire to get the AST into OCaml. However I haven't used OCaml in quite awhile and I get hung up on small things like writing a serializer and deserializer. I don't want to do it for every type/schema, so it requires some kind of reflection. And my understanding is that there are a bunch of pac","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24650353,"author":"seg_lol","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Programming language notation is a barrier to entry","text":"Or ideas in general, should we ever gate keep the dissemination of ideas and knowledge? Innovation is more likely to occur when people cross disciplines and they can only do that if it is approachable, it is gradual and discoverable. Simple is hard, simplistic is easy. Someone is going to come back with essential vs accidental complexity [1] but we can always strive for simpler, more cohesive ways to exchange knowledge. How much of our current notation systems are essential? And when do they diverge for non-essential reasons? Computer systems form primarily around notation (language and syntax), so notation is definitely important [z] In the post the author mentions an excellent talk by Guy Steele that goes over issue of notation and balkanization titled, \"It's Time for a New Old Language\" where he outlines \"the history and current status of computer science metanotation\". [2] Notation, like syntax is important, but like a plethora of ill defined and specified Domain Specific Languages (DSL), notation also needs to be defined, regular and learnable. For notation takes words and turns them into pictures that compose into thought structures that cannot be expressed in human written language to the same specificity. Think Feynman [3] and Railroad [4] Diagrams, or musical notation [5] The abstract explains it beautifully, > The most popular programming language in computer science has no compiler or interpreter. Its definition is not written down in any one place. It has changed ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34721879,"author":"porcoda","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Please Review My Metalanguage","text":"You might be interested in Guy Steele\u2019s talk \u201cIt\u2019s time for a new old language\u201d. He talks about similar notations and the problem of inventing new ones (although most of his talk is about things other than BNF-like notations : he just talks about them for a bit in the beginning). It\u2019s an interesting talk and is useful in thinking about proposing new notations. YouTube: [VIDEO] If you search for the talk title you can find the PDF of the slides.","stance":"rec"}],"7Hk9jct2ozY":[{"hn_comment_id":25151104,"author":"anm89","month":"2020-11","story_title":"I should have loved biology","text":"The thing that drove this home for me were the biovisions animations which got me to go back and basically learn high school biology. Seeing the mechanical nature of gene transciption and chemical signaling blew my mind. [VIDEO] [LINK] On the other hand, I don't buy his thing about wishing his high school teacher had presented it differently. No on else can make you interested in this stuff. The best they can do is provide resources like the ones above.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22624139,"author":"pp19dd","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Covid-19 Open Research Dataset","text":"It takes downloading one of these files, gunzipping them, extracting the tar and opening up a JSON file at random to really understand just how distant the title of the project is from its contents. I fully realize this is about natural language processing, but... this is beyond reach. You'd have to teach a computer to become a doctor first. Feels like where AI (and computing in general) should go in case of Covid-19 and other illnesses is analyzing and simulating how the heck we work to begin with. Take a few minutes to watch these videos of supercomputer simulations that show -- fragments -- of the fundamentals of how we exist. Multi Scale Modeling of Chromatin and Nucleosomes - [LINK] DNA animation showing realtime DNA replication - [VIDEO] Somewhere in these mind-boggling processes is where the disruption called Covid-19 puts a stick in our wheels. Compared to the complexity of the simulations, abstract ideas contained in these files are so macroscopic by comparison. It's both humbling and awe-inspiring.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22766364,"author":"Balgair","month":"2020-04","story_title":"What's a virus, anyway? The bare-bones basics","text":"Some other good ones: [VIDEO] [LINK] The GP is right in that our intuitions aren't cutting it down at the bottom. All these animations tend to edit out the water molecules so that the audience can understand better. The proteins aren't colored blobs at all. At these scales you'd clearly see individual atoms instead of blobs. But watching a bunch of really detailed atomic ball-stick models would be confusing. And not only are the H2Os battering everything like TIE fighters in the Hoth asteroid field [0], there are ions in there too (Na, K, Cl, etc) that really effect the cell. The membranes are also edited, as many cells are porcupined with receptors like an over crowded wave pool [1]. In addition to the water/saline being edited out, most of the other proteins, vesicles, and interior membranes are also gone for the sake of clarity. There is nearly no free 'space' in the cell, think of a really crammed subway car [2], with the air being like the water/saline. But only much much tighter. The cell is more like a frantically efficient liquidy crystaly thingy than a wonky wobbly blobby poofed-up juice box. And each one is utterly deeply profoundly fascinating. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24975773,"author":"jcims","month":"2020-11","story_title":"How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System","text":"ATP synthase is amazing. It uses the driving force from the potential gradient (aka voltage) built by the proton pump in the first video to spin at ~21,000 rpm and crank out ATP. I read that your body creates (and then consumes) about its own weight in ATP every day. This channel has a ton of great videos: [LINK] Here's one on kinetichore and mitosis (which also shows kinesin and dynein which are comically odd) - [LINK] There's a collection of their DNA ones here: [VIDEO] Here's another view of the ATP synthesis process that shows the chaos a bit more: [LINK] When I think of these systematically I just wonder what the intermediate steps were. The proton pump uses energy to create the potential gradient that ATP synthase runs on. You can't have a proton gradient without the proton pump, and without the proton gradient you don't have ATP. So these two exquisitely complex machines depend on each other and had to evolve together. It boggles my mind. Edit: Ah! Was looking for this one, sodium potassium pump - [LINK] This is how our neurons propagate signals. They are driven by ATP.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26653250,"author":"dnautics","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Moderna mRNA sequence released to GitHub [pdf]","text":"I like the wehi videos because they take effort to make the molecular motions appear to be random, a result of stuff blundering about: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35318481,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Close-Up of the First Mechanical Gear Ever Found in Nature","text":"Reminds me of this pretty common but all the more spectacular: a close-up of super complex production line (gene transcription) driven by DNA strands: [VIDEO] / [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39863990,"author":"bmitc","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]","text":">> I think our brains are machines for predicting what happens next. > Technologist thinks that humans are machines (breaking news) While I also dismiss or at least be careful of the inherent biases of technocratic viewpoints, humans and life in general are very much made of many types of machines. Take a look at these videos: [LINK] [VIDEO] I.e., life is insane and bewildering.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47957888,"author":"bhagyeshsp","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Biology is a Burrito: A text- and visual-based journey through a living cell","text":"What a beautiful depiction. Reminds me of high fidelity 3D animation videos I used to watch about DNA replication, cell signalling etc. One of the most fascinating parts to me was DNA transcription. The engineering is quite precise. Found the video I was referring to: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48805766,"author":"jwgarber","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Introduction to Genomics for Engineers","text":"I'm working on a project in malaria genetics this summer, and I was shocked to find out that the entire analysis toolkit is entirely based on math and statistics (and some non-trivial stuff too, e.g. hidden Markov models to predict CNV). Genotype likelihoods throw an extra wrench into the process, since even basic stuff like predicting allele frequencies requires a maximum likelihood estimator instead of simple counting. This whole area was quite eye-opening, and I'm still amazed that reading billions of base-pairs in DNA sequencing reliably works. Also gotta shout out to these incredible molecular animations by WEHI: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7Hlb8YX2-W8":[{"hn_comment_id":31303390,"author":"pingeroo","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Half a million people watch me study on TikTok","text":"I love occassionaly putting on George Hotz's streams while programming. Here's an 11 hour stream of him implementing SLAM from a closet: [VIDEO] The guy's a certified legend. Sadly he 'quit' streaming but the hundreds of hours in the archive should suffice.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24671983,"author":"viraptor","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel to learn advanced programming?","text":"It's a different kind of watching, but you can find saved streams from geohotz / comma.ai. Those contain things like learning about blockchain contracts and finding a security bug in one of them in a very informal 8h live stream. Or building a toy computer vision project from scratch for a recorded dashboard footage. [VIDEO] It's an experience... Try watching at higher speed when it gets boring.","stance":"rec"}],"7ImvlS8PLIo":[{"hn_comment_id":937731,"author":"ZenzerNet","month":"2009-11","story_title":"Weird Physics Facts","text":"I feel this video is apt for this topic - Laurence Krauss - A universe from nothing. [VIDEO] It had me mesmerized and mystified for the whole run.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25502536,"author":"atomi","month":"2020-12","story_title":"The universe is expanding faster than expected","text":"There is also one of my favorite talks tangentially related by Lawrence Krauss. He explains that eventually a civilization exploring the universe around them will only see it's own galaxy and likely believe that's all there is. We are living in an extraordinary time where we are still able to see other galaxies. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1658420,"author":"joelangeway","month":"2010-09","story_title":"Stephen Hawking's answer to God question tiresome","text":"\"I confess that something in me tightens whenever I hear a scientist pontificating on issues that belong to the arena of philosophy or metaphysics. I will gladly listen to Stephen Hawking when he holds forth on matters of theoretical physics, but he\u2019s as qualified to talk about philosophical and religious issues as any college freshman.\" The existence of the universe is very much a matter of theoretical physics and Steven Hawking, understanding this, is surely more qualified to talk about such issues than Rev. Robert Barron regardless of his opinion that they are philosophical or religious. I don't know what prompted Steven Hawking's appearance in the media with this opinion, but here is a lecture on one explanation for why the universe does not need any first cause, [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3796821,"author":"goblin89","month":"2012-04","story_title":"Notch's next game is an MMO","text":"Slightly off-topic, but\u2014how mercilessly correct he is about physics of our space-time. We all know the universe is expanding, but many consequences of this phenomenon are not obvious\u2014such as that after some time we'll be unable to see (and therefore ever reach) even nearby galaxies, since they're constantly getting farther and farther away. We'll be completely alone forever, and future scientists would have completely wrong picture about universe in such an absence of information. Thinking about that, we already miss a lot of information because of red shift\u2026 There're facts potentially explaining the eternal question \u2018about universe and everything\u2019, but they are slipping away from us, crossing the event horizon never ever to be learned about. Not a fun thing to know. Personally for me that was a discovery thanks to the explanation by Lawrence Krauss in his \u2018A Universe From Nothing\u2019 popular talk ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7898148,"author":"2Pacalypse-","month":"2014-06","story_title":"The Disappearing Universe","text":"Lawrence Krauss talked about this in his entertaining and famous talk, A Universe From Nothing[1]. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14817519,"author":"justifier","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Why isn't everything normally distributed?","text":"reminds me of this joke from a lecture Lawrence Krauss gave in 2009 of his work in 'A Universe From Nothing': > it was made after the discovery that on a log log plot everything is a straight line(o) i'd recommend the entire lecture, but definitely at least check out the anecdote this joke bookends it is about hubble's original 1929 embarrassing failed attempt to calculate the rate of the expansion of the universe(i) (o) [VIDEO] (i) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29524609,"author":"Isinlor","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Long-form info-dense videos on YouTube you would recommend to anyone?","text":"Everything from 3 blue 1 brown: [LINK] Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics): [LINK] history of the entire world, i guess: [LINK] TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K): [LINK] Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens. and Grabby aliens: when we'll meet them, how big they are, and other predictions [LINK] [LINK] Everyday Astronaut videos (he has 90 min documentary on Soviet rocket engine): [LINK] Cool Worlds - a lot of 25-35 min very nice astronomy explanations: [LINK] 'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7IsMeKl-Sv0":[{"hn_comment_id":30842576,"author":"kd913","month":"2022-03","story_title":"We can do better than \u201csame, but electric\u201d","text":"I don't think you understand how much it costs to maintain the infrastructure to your house. Not Just Bikes did an excellent series on this specific problem. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32597751,"author":"ARandumGuy","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Too many Americans live in places built for cars \u2013 not for human connection","text":"> Do you have a citation for this? I don't have a citation for construction costs, and I will concede that there are many factors that may make some low density developments cheaper per unit then some higher density development. However, construction is only part of the picture. Low density development imposes terrible financial costs for cities that contain them. That's because the taxable value per square mile is much lower, but infrastructure (sewer, roads, etc) has the same per-mile maintenance and replacement costs. The infrastructure maintenance costs in many low density developments is often greater then the amount of tax revenue the development generates. For more information on the hidden costs of low density development, I can't recommend this video [1] by Not Just Bikes enough. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28310533,"author":"flaque","month":"2021-08","story_title":"To save California, sacrifice single-family zoning","text":"This argument is commonly thrown around, but makes no sense in practice. The denser the place, the more efficient the infrastructure use. 50 families in a single apartment building use massively fewer pipes & power lines than 50 families in single family homes. But the tax revenue for the city can still be the same. In a denser area, those families are less likely to own or need cars, and if they do, they drive less. On the other hand, low-density suburban neighborhoods are often so inefficient that the maintenance cost of their infrastructure is more than the tax revenue the residents bring in. (Here's a good overview of that: [VIDEO] ) It's more true to say that \"we don't have the infrastructure for single family homes\" than it is to say that we don't have the infrastructure for apartment buildings.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29223147,"author":"noahtallen","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Will real estate ever be normal again?","text":"One comment on this is that less dense areas make it very hard to build infrastructure. For example, if there are 10 families living on a mile stretch of road, think of how much it costs to build a mile of road, along with (possibly) water and sewer there. And then the annual maintenance cost. And then the other road networks require to connect that one road, etc. Those 10 families don\u2019t pay nearly enough in taxes to cover the cost of infrastructure maintenance. It relies on grants from state and federal governments, paid for by taxes in dense cities, to cover the expense. My point: sparse is not objectively better. I think the quality of life we have come to expect in suburbs and rural areas is not possible without the taxes gained from also having dense places. More info, and a very interesting video series here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30247807,"author":"jabl","month":"2022-02","story_title":"The End of Uber with Cory Doctorow","text":"Americans seems to abhor car/fuel/etc. taxes to the point that they vote out any politician who dares suggesting anything even approximating that, and as a result they have a huge infrastructure maintenance backlog waiting to pop. Not helped by the fact that suburban sprawl is incredibly expensive to maintain (per the tax revenue the municipality gets) compared to more densely built environments. The \"Not Just Bikes\" youtube channel has a series of videos on the strongtowns, uh, thingy, that goes into more details. In particular this one describes the financing of suburban infrastructure: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30728565,"author":"thethethethe","month":"2022-03","story_title":"US schools can subscribe to an electric bus fleet at lower prices than diesel","text":"> It would significantly expand taxes How exactly? Do you have any examples? Also, have you ever seen the price of car infrastructure? I would be willing to bet that denser walkable urban infrastructure projects are waaaaay cheaper than building and maintaining sprawling road, sewage, and power transmission networks. Sprawl is seriously draining the finances of many small cities and towns in the US. There's a whole book about it: [LINK] You could also just watch this smug video [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31055762,"author":"diebeforei485","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Tax the Land","text":"They don't charge you the full cost of providing those services. There is a whole playlist about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31794713,"author":"Night_Thastus","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Construction is life","text":"I feel like this video on city growth is relevant, and was pretty interesting: [VIDEO] It suggests that a lot of the construction/repair needs of major cities could be reduced significantly, but it's a flaw inherent to their design that needs correcting first.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31852982,"author":"btreesOfSpring","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Investigating the effects of bike lanes in Minneapolis","text":"The Strong Town series by Not Just Bikes on YouTube is often linked on HN but the third video[0] in the series covers your question. Take a look if you are curious about where the \"making ourselves poor\" point of view is hatched. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32432204,"author":"fuoqi","month":"2022-08","story_title":"To meet demand, US needs 4.3M more apartments by 2035","text":"Suburbia is TERRIBLE from long-term efficiency and sustainability point of view. They create car-centric living style which is very hard to get rid off after it settles in. Here is a really good video about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35062911,"author":"karmelapple","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Zero energy ready homes are coming","text":"I disagree that it\u2019s naive. Here is a video talking about why that term is being used: [VIDEO] And the Strong Towns write up that has links to more reading that I believe informed that video: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38197564,"author":"kdmccormick","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically","text":"It is indeed the system, and you (to no fault of your own, probably) are part of that system. NotJustBikes, while a little anti-car-propogandaey for my tast, does a good just explaining why it'd be basically impossible for suburbia to ever pay for itself: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38313179,"author":"otikik","month":"2023-11","story_title":"280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars","text":"> Those costs aren't really all that high, and are easily outweighed by the dramatically lower costs in the suburbs. Everything is cheaper there, land, buildings, repairs, goods and services. He's talking about infrastructure cost (how much it costs your municipality to provide the services that you use, like the roads) while you are talking about cost of life (how much it costs you to pay for other things that you need, like food or getting your car serviced). On the infrastructure front, suburbia simply cannot compete with cities. Infrastructure cost is bound to be more efficient where people live in more densely populated areas. The length of pipes that a municipality needs to lay down in order to serve a single family home in the suburbs is the same as a whole 6-story building in the city (the diameters of the pipes might differ). On a per-capita basis, there's no contest. A particular factor in the funding of suburban streets is that the initial paving is often subsidized by the federal government. Once the streets start crumbling down after ~20 years of usage, then the real cost hits. Here's an explanation by Not Just Bikes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40676805,"author":"crote","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Rent in Cities Skylines 2 was too high, so the devs removed landlords","text":"In large parts of the United States it should affect single-family homes. A lot of cities constructed their suburbs with one-term fees and subsidies, but are charging extremely low taxes on the houses once constructed. In fact, the taxes are so low that they don't pay for the upkeep of the infrastructure required to service those houses. They are losing money on every house and are trying to make up for it in volume! The sole reason they have been able to continue is because the dense urban core is subsidizing the suburbs. But it'll inevitably end up with decrepit and neglected infrastructure, and cities going bankrupt. The only way to solve this is to increase the revenue per land area, which means a higher land tax, which in turn means a bigger tax increase per-person for single-family homes than for multi-family dwellings. If you want to know more, the following NotJustBikes videos are a good introduction of the subject: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"7J52mDjZzto":[{"hn_comment_id":29343135,"author":"pickledish","month":"2021-11","story_title":"A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today","text":"His whole channel (called Technology Connections) is probably my favorite one on YouTube, can\u2019t recommend it enough! My favorites are his series on refrigeration and heat pumps, for example this one: [VIDEO] Edit: to clarify, this article is based on an old Technology Connections video, and the creator of that video has lots more!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34852636,"author":"sushiburps","month":"2023-02","story_title":"200-year old heat pump technology is back","text":"Highly recommend the YouTube channel 'Technology Connections' videos on heat pumps: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26871290,"author":"tempay","month":"2021-04","story_title":"IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal email address","text":"> no wasted power Electric heating can be much more efficient than what's effectively resistive heating with 500%+ efficiencies being possible. Search for \"heat pumps\" or watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27224258,"author":"coldpie","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite purchases of last two years?","text":"> So the heat pumps can also do cooling during the summer? Here's a pair of really great videos about heat pumps and what they can (and could, in the future) do: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27646117,"author":"rhinoceraptor","month":"2021-06","story_title":"So you want to build a house more efficiently","text":"This video is a great explainer on heat pumps [1]. The TL;DR is that they are essentially nothing more than air conditioners that run in the opposite direction. Plus, a heat pump and an air conditioner can be combined into a single system. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28140866,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The Ancient Persian way to keep cool","text":"> I'm wondering if there's any low-energy or green solutions to this. The answer is \"it depends\". How your flat is designed will have an impact on what you can do. But if you are able and willing to do some house work, there is a lot you can have control over. At the end of the day, it's all about how you can control humidity, the flow of hot and cold air and humidity. At your disposal, tools such as conductive materials, insulating materials, etc. Google \"passive house\" to see the concept and what these things use. With that said. Heat pumps are incredibly efficient, and replacing your heater with a reversible air conditioner which you can then run in both summer and winter will do far more for your overall energy efficiency than anything else you can do. Most of your energy consumption comes from winter-time heating. Start here for a good introduction to heat pumps and how they are so efficient: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29670011,"author":"Kerrick","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 \u2013 Show and tell","text":"Our house is electrically heated via a heat pump, which has appreciably more efficiency than a resistance heater (or computer). Here's a neat video about them: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30196583,"author":"downrightmike","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Building a modern home in the woods","text":"There are highly efficient heat pump powered water heaters, going out anywhere remote, these and other heat pump systems should really be used. This is a really great overview [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31180617,"author":"jhenkens","month":"2022-04","story_title":"No, you can\u2019t save \u00a330 per year by switching off your \u201cstandby\u201d devices","text":"Thankfully, you are wrong about that! Just like you don't need a cooler source _from which to source cold_ in the summer with AC. Technology Connections has a fun (well, to me) video on how heat pumps work and are great. Literally just AC units running in reverse, thanks to having a valve. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32183601,"author":"sand500","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Heat pumps are efficient and eco-friendly. So why are they so rarely used?","text":"Technology connections did a great video on heat pumps. [VIDEO] One of the best things is that is an air conditioner you run in reverse to get some heating.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32431786,"author":"codewench","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Heat pumps: what they do and why they\u2019re hot now","text":"I feel like it's almost a requirement to take this opportunity to share Technology Connections great video [1] on the topic. Personally, I've used a heat pump as the sole heating unit for my house for the past 6 years or so. There have been a few cases where I've opted to use an extra blanket, but overall the results have been pretty impressive, and the cost savings are pretty huge. (Apartment, so no fuel heat, it's electric or nothing) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32712789,"author":"ctur","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Interest in heat pumps has increased dramatically in recent years","text":"It feels obligatory to reference Technology Connection in a thread about heat pumps. TC is a super fun YouTube channel that digs j to everyday technology and has had a number of episodes on heat pumps and modern thermodynamic management challenges and technologies. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32966193,"author":"timbit42","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Homemade Heat Pump Manifesto (2009)","text":"They are great if you are looking to use electricity to heat because they are 3 to 4 times more efficient than resistive heaters. It depends on the price of electricity and other heat sources in your area. If you live in the north where temperatures go below -15 Celsius, air-to-air units aren't as great because they lose efficiency as it gets colder outside. My heat pump has a COP of 3, meaning it can generate as much heat as a resistive heater using 1/3 the electricity, but it shuts off at -15 Celsius because below that point it is less efficient than resistive heat. If your heat pump has a COP of 4, you might get to -25 Celsius before it is less efficient than a resistive heater. Better, but more costly, heat pumps use in-ground water, either from a pair of wells, or from a deep pond that won't freeze to the bottom, or from many meters of water pipe buried deep enough beneath your lawn to not freeze in the winter. Because of the depth, they always have access to the earth's heat so they don't lose efficiency in the winter. The Technology Connections YT channel has a couple of good videos about how them: 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34242084,"author":"RC_ITR","month":"2023-01","story_title":"French startup unveils new residential thermo-acoustic heat pump","text":"The wording is bad. It\u2019s moved the equivalent of that energy. Technology connections did a good video on this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34358056,"author":"nayuki","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Do heat pumps work in cold climates?","text":"He made several excellent videos explaining residential heat pumps: [2021-02-28] [VIDEO] \"Heat Pumps: the Future of Home Heating\" (35m14s) [2021-04-01] [LINK] \"Ground Source / Geothermal Heat Pumps and Other Info\" (28m03s) [2022-03-26] [LINK] \"Why Heat Pumps are Immensely Important Right Now\" (21m02s) [2022-04-13] [LINK] \"Heat Pumps are Not Hard: Here's what it will take to start pumping\" (46m32s)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40012772,"author":"dopylitty","month":"2024-04","story_title":"An open source initiative to share and compare heat pump performance data","text":"This guy[0] has done quite a few deep dives on heat pumps that cover a lot of the myths (eg they don't work in the cold). It's pretty interesting material if you're thinking about a heat pump. It has always seemed silly to me that we spend money to keep a box of cold (fridge) inside the houses we're spending money to heat in the winter and spend a lot of money to heat up dryers, stoves, etc in the houses we're spending money to cool in the summer. Watching these videos made me think there's a real possibility at some point to have something like a whole home heat pump that just moves heat from where it is to where you want it and in the process reduces the need for systems working against each other to heat/cool specific parts of the house. I understand there's something in commercial settings that has this capability but I'm blanking on the name. 0: [VIDEO] 1: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46865075,"author":"Joel_Mckay","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed","text":"They are a very efficient way to get both AC and Heating: [VIDEO] [LINK] Unless you live in a cold climate, they are worth it for a discounted energy bill =3","stance":"rec"}],"7J7X7aZvMXQ":[{"hn_comment_id":33961051,"author":"qwertox","month":"2022-12","story_title":"SK Hynix Reveals DDR5 MCR DIMM, Up to DDR5-8000 Speeds for HPC","text":"Yesterday I got presented an ad disguised as an educational YouTube video, but the content was really good and is worth watching if you have some time on your hands. \"How does Computer Memory Work?\" [0] Uploaded 1 month ago, 35 minutes playing time. It even goes into explaining what the timings mean while showing an animation for it. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35418798,"author":"superkuh","month":"2023-04","story_title":"What Is an MCR or Multiplexer Combined Ranks DIMM","text":"I hate to be the guy recommending youtube videos but if you want to understand how DDR5 multiplexing works and this article doesn't do it for you check out the amazing visualization \"How does Computer Memory Work?\" [VIDEO] . A lot of it is applicable to all DDR but it specifically covers DDR multiplexing starting around 9 minutes in. It is both detailed enough and clear thanks to the simplified visuals.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34334644,"author":"superasn","month":"2023-01","story_title":"What Happens When a CPU Starts","text":"I found this video a long time ago about this and it's a great way to understand it if you're a visual learner [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35448240,"author":"myself248","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The microcode and hardware in the 8086 processor that perform string operations","text":"That's great, and dovetails perfectly into a video I just watched on the topic, which I really enjoyed. It's a little flashy with the animations at first, but getting into the meat of things, they're used well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37749855,"author":"Cort3z","month":"2023-10","story_title":"UltraRAM","text":"DDR ram is refreshed every 64ms (varies by DDR generation and specific chips). Branch Education has an excellent video on this named \"How does computer memory work?\"[1]. It would still take an exceedingly long time to reach a trillion, but it's still pretty frequent. [1]( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"7JUs4c99-mo":[{"hn_comment_id":30687615,"author":"gavinray","month":"2022-03","story_title":"PartialExecuter: Reducing WebAssembly size by exploring all executions in LLVM","text":"This company has an x86-to-WASM compiler that lets you execute arbitrary binaries in the browser. Also a JVM to WASM transpiler. There's a fantastic Meetup presentation given by one of them where they show running a C++ multiplayer game with both client AND server running in a browser, using WebRTC as a networking polyfill. Really mindblowing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23532747,"author":"btown","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Adobe to remove Flash Player from web site after December 2020","text":"Here's a talk by the team as well: [VIDEO] And their website: [LINK] This is honestly one of the coolest things I've seen, and given the amount of Flex/Spark software for enterprise out there, it could drastically change the legacy software landscape.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43536722,"author":"gavinray","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Browsercraft: Java Minecraft in the browser","text":"5 years ago, I watched a YouTube recording of a meetup talk given by one of the CheerpX engineers: [VIDEO] In it, they showed a functional demo of porting an OSS multiplayer C++ game entirely to the browser with WASM. Afterwards, I read some of their engineering content and was blown away. It's been fascinating to watch the CheerpX/CheerpJ progress from afar over the years.","stance":"rec"}],"7LqaotiGWjQ":[{"hn_comment_id":27595975,"author":"cdstyh","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Types of propaganda, propaganda techniques, and propaganda strategies (2017)","text":"The War on Sensemaking is a great series of videos on propaganda and the information ecology in the modern social media driven world. I highly recommend it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27691668,"author":"cdstyh","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Conspiracy: In Theory and Practice","text":"I recommend you watch this lecture. It may change the way you think about people that question the narrative. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21296426,"author":"undershirt","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Reason Won't Save Us","text":"> \u201cCourage is the solution to despair. Reason can provide no answers.\u201d \u2013Ernst Toller (First Reformed, 2017) I\u2019ve felt the despair of this article for a time (and the quote above gave me some peace), but some recent hope came from Daniel Schmachtenberger[1]. He postulates that our conception of debate in our current information ecology selects and optimizes for bias. He refers to the Hegelian dialectic as an alternative to debate\u2014of an earnest synthesis from understanding both a thesis and its antithesis, resolving paradox with a higher order model. I\u2019ve heard this described as steel-manning[1] another\u2019s argument to find its signal (as opposed to straw-manning the noise). But Schmachtenberger, as well as Bret Weinstein I believe, proposes that the game-theoretic win/lose dynamic of our current system is so entrenched that it really selects for this type of narrative warfare which doesn\u2019t promote this type of open and honest information ecology for this to really work yet. So there\u2019s something to their post-game-theoretic frameworks (Bret\u2019s \u201cGame B\u201d) that make me a lot less fatalistic and anarchist about the whole complexity game. [1] The War on Sensemaking: [VIDEO] [2] a.k.a purva paksha: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"7N41TEcjcvM":[{"hn_comment_id":27075244,"author":"silvester23","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Happy Hacking: Music Implementation in NieR:Automata (2017)","text":"I feel like iMUSE [0] by the fantastic Michael Land needs to be mentioned here. Here it is in action: [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43970017,"author":"sirtaj","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Understanding LucasArts' iMUSE System","text":"Also done very well in Monkey Island 2 with iMuse as well, in which a lot of care was taken in transitioning music with custom bridges. It was quite subtle and lovely, and is considered a high point in video game music. 1. A video demo: [VIDEO] 2. Some details: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"7NfX0vlCa4k":[{"hn_comment_id":22830081,"author":"dave7","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?","text":"Technology Connections (amazing Youtube channel btw!) has a few videos on using an Onyx Boox Max as a 2nd monitor: [LINK] (Intro) [VIDEO] (2nd channel longer look, mini review) [LINK] (6 months later, tips / tweaks / long term review)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23497333,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?","text":"If you two are serious about this, you'll defintely want to check out Technology Connections' series on e-ink: (quick intro): [LINK] (starting the breakdown): [VIDEO] He talks about that exact concept and moves on to do real-world testing and setup of a very specific tablet usable as an external display. It's exactly as you say: Hacky and unpolished. But I found it extremely informative.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23900354,"author":"deng","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Reasonably priced color e-ink display","text":"Take a look at the Onyx Boox Max series: [LINK] They're 13.3\" displays, work with Android and you can use them as an external HDMI display. However, the refresh rate is still poor, not nearly 20-30Hz. The Technology Connections Youtube channel has made two very interesting videos, showing the many caveats of the device (it's an older model, but I'd guess most of it still applies). The main issues are poor software and slow CPU: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27831911,"author":"ainar-g","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Electrochromic nanostructures with high chromaticity and superior brightness","text":"Alec of the YouTube channel Technology Connections has a video[1] on his second channel that you might find interesting. He demonstrates how one can use modern E-Ink displays for basic Internet browsing and such. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29253079,"author":"ainar-g","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Why E-Ink Phones?","text":"Alec of the YouTube channel Technology Connections has a video[1] about his experience with an E-Ink device on his second channel. He wanted to see if this would improve his productivity, so it's not exactly the same as your question, but it's still worth a watch, imho. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7Nw6qyyrTeI":[{"hn_comment_id":33249413,"author":"downrightmike","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Office vacancy rate in San Francisco just hit a new high","text":"Because \"Office Vacancy Rate in San Francisco Just Hit a New High\", That means property owners aren't making money. Workers aren't out spending to come in, stay and leave. All that is taxable, which is why government officials want people back in the office. In every city, the downtown core's tax revenue subsidizes the suburban sprawl all around it. Good overview of the research on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34598083,"author":"uoaei","month":"2023-01","story_title":"CA Cities to Lose All Zoning Powers in 2 Days","text":"If we taxed suburbs by how much they actually drain city budgets, no one would want to live in suburbs. It is by now a well-studied fact that suburbs are effectively subsidized by metropolitan cores. Makers and takers, indeed... Here's a video about some of the studies done to come to this conclusion: [VIDEO] The folks at Strong Towns also talk a lot about productive land use measured as property tax income per square foot. They say it is the gold standard way to make sure your budget remains solvent and you can provide the services people need to make your city thrive. Obviously this means building up.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36480961,"author":"jwestbury","month":"2023-06","story_title":"U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high","text":"Curious, have you considered the in-between here? Consider medium-density European cities, which still have massively higher density suburbs, but rarely the density -- combined employment and population densities -- of the urban core of most American cities. I hated living in Seattle, but I'm now an American finding I enjoy living in London. I walk around trees and birds every day, because I have good park access, and I can walk to them without having to worry about car traffic. For what it's worth, by the way, you almost certainly AREN'T willing to pay for the infrastructure that supports you: Suburbs are almost overwhelmingly economically supported by cities. I hate NotJustBikes (his self-righteous attitude is just awful), but he does have a great video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45323914,"author":"rglullis","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently","text":"No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: [VIDEO] The whole series of videos from Strong Towns are good, you should take a look: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47172204,"author":"gpvos","month":"2026-02","story_title":"The United States needs fewer bus stops","text":"Well, you're parking it in other places as well, I assume, unless you're only making pleasure rides with no stops at all. I am speaking more generally than just about your particular situation, which I obviously don't know. But in case you live in an American suburb: their entire financial setup is unsound, which arguably means even your own ground is subsidized. I find the arguments of Strong Towns and Not Just Bikes quite compelling: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"7OpM_zKGE4o":[{"hn_comment_id":29230793,"author":"datameta","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Colorado 'solar garden' is a farm under solar panels","text":"Here's a great video from Real Engineering [0] that goes into the pros and problems with that approach, and where and how it is currently being tried. For example, via undersea transmission cable under the Strait of Gibraltar. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30981475,"author":"Sebb767","month":"2022-04","story_title":"ThorCon: Cheap, reliable, CO2-free electric power","text":"> why there's so much interest in nuclear when low-tech concentrated solar in the desert can get the job done and scaling it up (and ensuring it's 100% safe) isn't a matter of R&D but just basic manufacturing. Solar is dependent on the time of day (as the sister comments pointed out) and also on weather. Plus, you need to get the energy from the desert to wherever it's needed - this is non-trivial for densely populated areas far from the equator. You also need to maintain the solar panels; sand can be quite bad for their efficiency. Lastly, the areas that do have the space and solar power might be politically unstable, which makes the massive investments needed to get this going quite risky. Real engineering has a good video about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31835770,"author":"Taikonerd","month":"2022-06","story_title":"One-night stands will be illegal at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar","text":"> we learned in geography class, that one could power the whole EU, if we occupied some area of the Sahara desert with solar panels I sometimes hear that too. The YouTube channel \"Real Engineering\" did a video about the idea: [1] The TLDR is: the Sahara definitely gets enough sun, but transmitting the power into Europe would be hard. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41915229,"author":"sofixa","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Singapore OKs 4,300km subsea cable for importing electricity from Australia","text":"> Can we do the same in Europe and put massive solar panels in the desert of North Africa and import the energy northwards ? (I realize this is a super naive approach, and the main problem is energy storage rather than generation) A very good video from Real Engineering explains that no, not really: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7PKx3kS7f4A":[{"hn_comment_id":10711594,"author":"bauc","month":"2015-12","story_title":"new TLD: .BOT","text":"That would be good in theory but might not be so good, interesting thoughts on the subject from Computerphile - Why Asimov's Laws of Robotics Don't Work - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35304223,"author":"ornornor","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?","text":"I found this video insightful on the matter from Computerphile: [VIDEO] Where they argue that basically having an AI follow these laws is impossible because it would require rigorous definition of terms that are universally ambiguous and solving ethics.","stance":"rec"}],"7PoajCqNKpg":[{"hn_comment_id":19768294,"author":"ja-85","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (2015)","text":"Thanks, this is a nice port! I worked through SICM using sicmutils as a backup. The MIT Scheme version sometimes \"locked up\" on my solutions to exercises and sicmutils did not (the Foucault pendulum problem comes to mind). This video is an introduction to SICM and sicmutils: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26357900,"author":"hcarvalhoalves","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Symbolics.jl: A Modern Computer Algebra System for a Modern Language","text":"Computer Algebra is criminally underused - it has the potential to make math-heavy critical-path code a lot more clear, testable, observable and bug-free by design. I feel I need to mention \"Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics\" by Wisdom and Sussman, and the accompanying \"scmutils\" library, which first implemented in Scheme many of the same features, although this Julia library seems to be more complete. There's also a great one-to-one port to Clojure by Colin Smith [2] in case you want to use it on a more production-friendly environment. The Strange Loop talk [3] is a good showcase of the power and simplicity of these kind of systems. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7Pq-S557XQU":[{"hn_comment_id":8739511,"author":"zyx321","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Artificial Intelligence Isn\u2019t a Threat \u2013 Yet","text":"Easier said than done. What are they going to retrain to? As AI continues to advance, more and more jobs will necome redundant. CGP Grey did a great video on this[1]. Even if you can't completely replace humans, often times, obe person will be able to do the job that used to take several. Where do those others go? What will we as a society do if for example AI-based Expert Systems make 90% of accountants and office clerks redundant? We can't retrain all of them to become doctors and scientists, can we? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9402969,"author":"polymatter","month":"2015-04","story_title":"The Machines Are Coming","text":"I highly recommend CGP Greys video ( [VIDEO] ) for a good overview of the issue. See [LINK] for similar discussion.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10296165,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Amazon Flex","text":"And people who refuse to see it are usually blind... The supermarkets I go to have greatly reduced their cashiers. In most cases by at least half, especially in small shops (3 cashiers has become 2-3 machines and one human). As for bakers, they don't just make bread and cake. Excellent video on the subject: CGPGrey - Humans Need Not Apply: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10506415,"author":"csl","month":"2015-11","story_title":"The Most Common Job in Each State 1978-2014","text":"This reminded me of the \"Humans need not apply\" video, which I strongly recommend, if you haven't already seen it: [VIDEO] Discussion: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13240805,"author":"noetic_techy","month":"2016-12","story_title":"The AI Unemployment Anti-FAQ (2013)","text":"This article just leans on the same historic analogies that don't hold up to scrutiny. These answers fall way short of the effect of automation and AI will have. You are not replacing the job with another, you are replacing the human brain! I always refer people to this video to explain what it will be like, and it debases almost all the points made in this FAQ: [VIDEO] All these historical analogies fall flat on their face when it comes to an AI being trained to do your exact job. This is not another case of farmers moving to different higher skilled jobs. We are the employed horses of the 1800s about to be made unemployable by the advent of cars.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8239891,"author":"zanny","month":"2014-08","story_title":"Hal Finney being cryopreserved now","text":"A huge portion of the workforce will be unemployable in our lifetimes: [VIDEO] By the time the technology comes around the revive the cryopreserved, the rest of technological advancement will change the dynamic of human interaction so much we cannot estimate what the world will be like, but we can assume that with technology advanced enough to repair the damage from the freezing process, you would probably be entering a world of almost any possibility.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8505250,"author":"abandonliberty","month":"2014-10","story_title":"1984 v. Brave New World","text":"Human obsolescence wasn't on Huxley's mind. Instead of Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons doing awful labour, they will do none. While CGP Grey has a very consumer-oriented view, it's quite compelling. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9131406,"author":"fizixer","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Coding is not the new literacy","text":"You seem to be coming from the opposing view of that of the article, that coding 'is' the new literacy. I was more challenging the article's claim that modeling is the new literacy, which I think isn't. As to whether coding is the new literacy or not, I'd say we really need to ask what is the purpose of education. If the purpose of education is enlightenment, then yes, a child should learn how to code, but also how to paint, how to play a musical instrument, and so on and so forth. But then some children have the aptitude for one thing, some for another thing. But I think the purpose of education as a means of making the individual economically viable is becoming more and more futile with increased automation. (In this regard I strongly adhere to the views expressed in the video 'Humans Need Not Apply' by CGPGrey[1], and TED talks by Jeremy Howard[2], Erik Brynjolfsson[3], Andrew McAfee[4]). As to the need for coding so that humans could interact with machines, I think in the long run, this is also going to progress to the point where the machine would be aware of the abilities of the human it's dealing with and make it easy for the human to interact with itself. (EDIT 1: I should also add that interacting with machines is already happening at a massive scale when everyone has a smartphone in their back pocket. And yet when the software goes wrong, the inability of an average user to fix it is not the result of that user not being coding literate, but rather the insurmountabl","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12140338,"author":"dscalisi","month":"2016-07","story_title":"What If There Just Aren\u2019t Enough Jobs to Go Around?","text":"Which skills, for example, are harder to automate? You may have already seen this YouTube video as its a couple years old, but its premise is that we need to start thinking about what to do when large swaths of the population find themselves unemployable through no fault of their own (since over 45% of the workforce holds jobs that are easy targets for automation in the near future). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32263306,"author":"moffkalast","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The Poor ROI of Autonomy (2020)","text":"Tech makes jobs obsolete, but the new jobs introduced in the last few hundred years only add up to a small part of the overall workforce (programmers excluded). CGP Grey went in depth on human replacement automation, and almost a decade later it still holds up: [VIDEO] The bottom line is that automating a job is obviously a net positive because it frees up a human to do something else elsewhere, while still providing the same added value as before. There will always be something for that human to do, even if not a traditional style job. The gap, as you point out, is making sure that newly created value gets taxed and provided to that freed up person as UBI, so that they can continue to live and consume those products that the machine makes in the first place, otherwise there is no demand for them and capitalism doesn't work. There is no point in having an army of robots making hats if there's nobody to wear them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35519804,"author":"jabbany","month":"2023-04","story_title":"It happened to me today: $80/hr writer replaced with ChatGPT","text":"Reminds me of this video about automation of mental labor (and this was made back in 2014, way before any of of the LLM stuff of the modern era): [VIDEO] While not all the example predictions in the video were accurate, I think the point about automation as a displacement of mental labor is real. At the end of the day, a lot of white collar work is really not that \"valuable\" from a production standpoint. And while the easy way is to blame either technology or those it replaces, the crux of the problem is really in society and how individuals make a living. Society needs to be ready for a future where most people will not be able to do meaningfully differentiated work ---where even if you're thrown into higher education, most of the jobs available are still what would be considered as \"entry level\" ones. Also, this is also somewhat an attestation to Moravec's paradox ( [LINK] ), where \"intellectual\" tasks like writing are easier to automate compared to \"actuation\" tasks like fetching food, driving it around, and placing it in the right place (re: Doordash).","stance":"rec"}],"7Q25-S7jzgs":[{"hn_comment_id":2723763,"author":"nextparadigms","month":"2011-07","story_title":"The 'intellectual property' oxymoron","text":"I've seen many people say that if RIAA and MPAA keep trying to introduce new censorship laws like that, eventually the \"camel's back will break\", and people will demand a total overhaul of the copyright system, or perhaps completely eliminate it. I tend to agree. The more they will push this, the more people will rise up and speak against it, and many people will start questioning if copyright should even exist in the first place. Through their aggressiveness on this issue, they will put the spotlight on it, and I don't think it will end up being in their favor. I believe the people will eventually win this one, even if in the mean time they manage to introduce one or two more Internet censorship laws. I like this TED video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2831491,"author":"nextparadigms","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Could Quantum Computing Kill Copyright?","text":"I don't think copyright is compatible with the Internet. It's time for everyone to realize that. Times change, and some laws become obsolete. It's not the first time it has happened and it's not going to be the last. Then a couple of decades later you look back at them and realize how absurd they have been. Not all industries have copyright, and they seem to have done pretty well so far without, most likely much better than they would've done with it. These are some good videos on this, if you haven't seen them already: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2873921,"author":"joelhaus","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Why software patents are not fixable ","text":"Here is some sound reasoning on the topic from Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3302596,"author":"nextparadigms","month":"2011-12","story_title":"SOPA on the ropes? Bipartisan alternative to 'Net censorship emerges","text":"I agree. I think the solution to SOPA and PIPA is nothing , not a \"lesser evil\" or a \"compromise\". The music labels may die, but I don't think it's the Government's job to save them, just like it's not the Government's job to save the print media against Internet bloggers. I also don't think that there will be less music if the current music labels die. Copyright extensions have become ridiculous, and I think the labels have had their way for way too long in influencing the Government against the public and against the new creators. I think it's time to be reminded once again of Larry Lassig's TED video: [VIDEO] Also when you watch it, and see the airplane example, think about it how it could've been if they \"compromised\" on saying \"Airplanes are free to pass over properties, but helicopters not\". It would've still been just as ridiculous. Perhaps not the perfect analogy, but something to think about.","stance":"rec"}],"7QmCUDHpNzE":[{"hn_comment_id":6856008,"author":"aresant","month":"2013-12","story_title":"How to win as a first time founder - a Drew Houston Manifesto","text":"DropBox is one of the most useful products to come out in the last decade. I still remember seeing the original 5 minute demo (1). My jaw was on the floor, I instantly needed it. And it's still the best, even at a premium price (marked in cost of GB of storage). The article has several interesting points, but the takeaway for me remains \"[Solve] a worthy problem.\" (1) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14685498,"author":"justboxing","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Dropbox Is Getting Ready for IPO","text":"Not sure about the code, but here's the original Demo Video Drew had on their getdropbox.com landing page. It presents the features in a very entertaining way :) [ Sep 15th 2008 ] DropBox Demo [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16563381,"author":"murukesh_s","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Dropbox Chief to Join Elite Ranks of Idea-to-I.P.O. Founders","text":"For anyone who hasn't watched it, checkout the original demo videos made by Drew himself. Video1 (Probably earlier version) [LINK] Video2 (Better than Video1, more witty and well made.) [VIDEO] It's pretty impressive and the product then looked pretty polished (though minimalistic as it is even today) that even after 11 years, it hasn't gone through much changes. One thing that is interesting is that many people use Dropbox as a poster child of MVPs and Lean methodology, but given the possible effort and polish that Drew had put into the product, I am not sure we can call the beta version as an MVP.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39173804,"author":"pedalpete","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Show HN: Dewhale \u2013 GitHub-Powered AI for effortless development","text":"What was the logic in the name Dewhale? Maybe a better method to showcase would be a walkthrough demo video. If you haven't seen the original dropbox video, it's great format, and really worked for them. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7R4xhwy-1oI":[{"hn_comment_id":6124918,"author":"cameron913","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Telco Astroturfing Tries To Bring Down Reviews Of Susan Crawford's Book","text":"A talk on the book in question (as well as audio) can be found here: [LINK] and if you prefer YouTube, here: [VIDEO] It's a pretty good overview of the American broadband infrastructure problem.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7058361,"author":"graedus","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC\u2019s anti-blocking rules","text":"Because it's considered \"vertical integration\" and therefore not subject to anti-trust laws. Comcast merging with Time Warner would be considered horizontal; Comcast merging with NBCU was considered vertical and therefore allowed to go forward in January 2011. I'm currently reading Susan Crawford's book Captive Audience, which is a detailed history of this exact topic. Recommended. Here's a talk she gave at Harvard summarizing the story and issues at stake: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7271254,"author":"fossuser","month":"2014-02","story_title":"Why is broadband more expensive in the US?","text":"That's interesting (didn't know about the whole city coverage). The general telecom issue is also gone over well in this talk called captive audience [ [VIDEO] ]. It goes over the telecom industry, how it's not competitive and the current day incentives/problems. While the underlying reason that this issue cannot easily be fixed appears to be related to a more fundamental problem with American campaign fundraising and how it creates a competing dependency that prevents any meaningful reform from moving forward. This Ted talk by Lawrence Lessig ( [LINK] ) gives a good overview of this problem.","stance":"rec"}],"7S-DGTBZU14":[{"hn_comment_id":25397903,"author":"d3nj4l","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Gamers allege EA uses dynamic difficulty adjustment so players spend more money","text":"It's sickening, really. Jim Sterling's video on lootboxes [1] really hammered it home for me, especially the section where he quotes from a talk by one such developer [2]. The talk is literally titled \"Let's go whaling\", a reference to getting people to \"whale\" the game by paying tons of money. Fate Grand Order, a gacha game, even lampshades it: > What\u2019s interesting about Fate/Grand Order is that the game\u2019s marketing features a vicious caricature of dedicated players. She\u2019s a slobbering, lecherous, gambling-addicted little monster. > Fans love her. [From [3]] 1: [VIDEO] 2: [LINK] 3: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30834231,"author":"bytehowl","month":"2022-03","story_title":"I hate what video games have become","text":"This video by Jim Sterling is a good overview of how knowingly sinister microtransactions truly are, with a couple narrated testimonies of people who fell for them despite not being able to afford them. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7VG_s2PCH_c":[{"hn_comment_id":21989861,"author":"rahuldottech","month":"2020-01","story_title":"DR Congo measles: More than 6k dead in world's worst outbreak","text":"Last Week Tonight has a nice episode on Vaccines: [VIDEO] It explains why vaccines are important, why \"taking it slow\" with vaccines is a bad approach, and other important stuff. Please vaccinate yourself and your kids.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17684584,"author":"hjek","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What is going on?","text":"Yes, sometimes explanations and reasonable arguments can just derail conversations completely. For preventing that, I find David Burns' disarming technique[0] really useful. It is about \"finding truth in what the other person is saying, even if it seems blatantly wrong, or illogical, or exaggerated.\" His podcast is amazing. Perhaps part of what your room mate is saying is that she is concerned about the well-being of her (future) children? Surely that's truly good. She's also interested in avoiding certain medical treatments that are excessive or unnecessary, which is also good. Don't know about the Holocaust-denying colleague, but sometimes xenophones have a fear of losing their job to someone else, which could leave them unable to economically support themselves or their family, and maybe they really enjoy the job they have. If your colleague talks about you being indoctrinated, then he must have a high regard of the truth (which is good), and if he's interested in how indoctrination works, he may even be interested in reading about Chomsky's propaganda model[1]. Of course, this disarming stuff is only useful if you actually want to prevent conflict with other people, and it's totally legitimate to have a conflict with anti-vaxers and Holocaust deniers. But also, you live and work together, and constant conflicts may not get you nor them anywhere but down. Also, Last Week Tonight has quite a good episode on vaccines[2] (but showing that to your roomie might not calm things ","stance":"rec"}],"7W33HRc1A6c":[{"hn_comment_id":18911203,"author":"radiorental","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Insect collapse","text":"I view our success as a product of evolution. It is the driving factor that got us down out of the trees, cultivating our food and to where we are today. Would we be putting a little less pressure on the environment without people like Edward Bernays, possibly. However, I think our collective consciousness can put itself a little at ease. As we enter the 6 mass extinction event, it's a natural cycle and if it wasn't us, some other species would dominate the planet. It's never a bad time to listen to George Carlin's \"saving the planet\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24472497,"author":"kbr2000","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Sir David Attenborough makes stark warning about species extinction","text":"Hey, you can be proud for having spent time thinking about it to start with. And for having tried! Feeling responsible for it yourself alone is not necessary, it's bigger than that. Here's a thought or two by Attenborough on overpopulation, one of the drivers of these problems [0] The problem will solve itself however (with certainty), and I cannot explain it better than George Carlin [1]. Enjoy! [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7ZGCPap7GkY":[{"hn_comment_id":3840675,"author":"espeed","month":"2012-04","story_title":"John Cleese on how to be creative","text":"There is so much truth packed into that 36 mins -- so many juxtapositions -- it would take several hours to reference them all. For starters, see Rich Hickey's talk on \"Hammock-Driven Development\" for more on the \"background mind\" ( [LINK] ), and then see how what Dan Pink is saying about motivation ( [LINK] ) and what Sebastian Deterding is saying about gamification ( [VIDEO] ) all connect into what Cleese is saying about creativity.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4222850,"author":"gizzlon","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Gamification: The Art of Attracting and Keeping Users","text":"The concept is very interesting.. But this is a bad introduction =( Saw a presentation a while ago that hooked me, can't watch it now, but think it was this one: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8644270,"author":"ultimape","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Screeps \u2013 the world's first MMO sandbox strategy game for programmers","text":"I'd argue that all 'games' are about manipulating attention - its just a question of what means they use to do so. Game design is really a sort of meta-game about designing systems that effect the behavior of players. Consider: Game Mechanics and Mechanism Design ( [LINK] ) I'm fully with you on the notion that we shouldn't be manipulating players life like farmville. Johnathan blow put on a great talk about games and the human condition where he covers this aspect quite scathingly: [LINK] To completely ignore this aspect is to develop a game with no real-stickyness factor. Money aside, don't you want a game that people enjoy playing? The entire point of an MMO is to have a large reoccurring user-base. There is an art to it, and getting it right can make really powerful games: [VIDEO] For board games like chess, much of the appeal for the average player is that you get to sit down with a friend and compete, and in doing so the 'intellectual nature' of the game ends up pulling them in for the long term. Perhaps the answer to the meta-game of stickiness is to create a community around the game in a similar vein to the one from the ants ai challenge's forums. Were I to work on this project, I'd make a strong push toward git-like integration ala the work done behind KhanAcademy's live editor like discussed in this talk: [LINK] . - being able to share code behaviors with your team-mates (you are going to implement a guilds system, no?) and encourage discussions about behaviors at ","stance":"rec"}],"7ZVWIELHQQY":[{"hn_comment_id":7487641,"author":"goatforce5","month":"2014-03","story_title":"I am a successful software dev but I have a serious drinking problem","text":"Craig Ferguson did a good piece about his alcoholism, a year or two that went missing from his life, 15 years of being sober, etc. It's really good, and there might be something in it for you: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8085335,"author":"sp332","month":"2014-07","story_title":"6 Things I Learned From Not Drinking For 1 Year","text":"Have you seen Craig Ferguson talking about alcoholism? I thought it might be helpful for explaining to people. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11723294,"author":"klodolph","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Do startups have a drinking problem?","text":"This comment is profoundly unsympathetic to people who have recovered from alcoholism and decided that for their own health they must abstain. This comment is profoundly unsympathetic to people with sensitivity to alcohol. I'm deeply grateful that my friends and the people I work with respect each others' boundaries with alcohol and other substances. So what if you do \"have a problem\"? Is it right for someone to push alcohol on you, knowing that you have a problem? Perhaps I should offer discounts at the liquor store to people who turn in their AA coins, because alcoholism is \"their problem\" not mine? Craig Ferguson's comments on alcoholism are worth listening to: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7cC3_jGwl_U":[{"hn_comment_id":11847831,"author":"geofft","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Accidentally nonblocking","text":"Cory Benfield's PyCon talk last week, \"Building Protocol Libraries the Right Way\" ( [VIDEO] ), makes the argument that a large number of problems can be traced to not cleanly separating responsibilities of actually physically doing I/O and making semantic sense of the bytes. His primary worry was about reimplementing things like HTTP many times, once for each I/O framework (why do Twisted, Tornado, and asyncio all have their own HTTP implementation?). But it seems the same problem can be seen here: every single part of the code thinks it knows how to actually retrieve data from the network, so it interacts with the network on its own, causing nested polling and similar awkwardness. If every part of the event-processing code thinks it knows how to do network I/O, you have many more opportunities for getting network I/O wrong. If xterm were designed so that e.g. xevents() had only the responsibility of fetching bytes from the X socket and do_xevents() and everything else had only the responsibility of handling bytes from an buffer, there would be no temptation to poll in two different functions. Only one function would even know that the byte source is a socket; the rest just know about the buffer.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15833317,"author":"mindcrash","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Separate Logic from IO","text":"In some cases it is very practical, even in other (non functional) programming languages. For example, [LINK] (and its accompanying talk [VIDEO] ) give some really great brainfood about the way currently all kinds of network protocols are implemented, and the benefits of separating the protocol (Logic) from the actual implementation (IO). You might also want to query Google or DDG for \"Free monads\" if you want to implement a similar layered approach in a functional language such as Scala or Haskell.","stance":"rec"}],"7erJ1DV_Tlo":[{"hn_comment_id":26535495,"author":"napsterbr","month":"2021-03","story_title":"A few notes on message passing","text":"I'm sorry to go completely off-topic here, but I just wanted to say thank you! Your discussion[0] with Meijer and Szyperski was mind-blowing and taught me a lot about the actor model. This was, hands down, one of the best classes I've ever had. Thanks for sharing this knowledge. [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34273970,"author":"napsterbr","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]","text":"May he RIP. I first heard about Hewitt after watching this[0] conversation about the actor model. It's truly a masterclass. For those who want to learn more about the actor model, or simply have a fond memory of ProfHewitt, I highly recommend it. [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34275150,"author":"TowerTall","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Carl Hewitt has died [pdf]","text":"This is one of my favorite tech talks. Hewitt, Meijer and Szyperski: The Actor Model (everything you wanted to know but are afraid to ask) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44732798,"author":"matesz","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Pony: An actor-model, capabilities-secure, high-performance programming language","text":"For anyone interested in a deeper dive into the foundations of the Actor Model, I highly recommend this entertaining 45-minute explainer by Carl Hewitt, one of the model\u2019s original pioneers: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15183991,"author":"prodtorok","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Get to Know the Actor Model with JavaScript","text":"For those who like to learn from videos, here is an interview/lesson from Carl Hewitt (he introduced the model): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31200751,"author":"helge9210","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Actor system for the JVM developed by Electronic Arts","text":"> so different in an actor vs a queue with workers In short: different computational model -- Actor model vs. Communicating sequential processes. This really helped me: [VIDEO] Edit: added link to video","stance":"rec"}],"7g1Acy5eGbE":[{"hn_comment_id":39011884,"author":"reitzensteinm","month":"2024-01","story_title":"When Optimising Code, Measure","text":"If you're measuring performance and haven't seen this talk by Emery Berger, I highly recommend it. It's mind blowing, but also terrifying when you realize how many mistakes you've been making up until this point. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34065403,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Fast memcpy, A System Design","text":"> The main trap is trying to benchmark and profile it without the context of the whole application. Emery Berger's \"Performance (Really) Matters\" talk also goes into this[0]. He paints a really, really depressing picture of how unreliable benchmarks truly are. Like, things like link order having ridiculous impacts and stuff like that. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42810394,"author":"sitkack","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Disabling Zen 5's Op Cache and Exploring Its Clustered Decoder","text":"If you enjoy the science of injecting slowness to determine which component has the largest impact on performance, you would enjoy this work by Emery Berger. Coz: Finding Code that Counts with Causal Profiling [LINK] \"Performance (Really) Matters\" with Emery Berger [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48601448,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2026-06","story_title":"To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system","text":"I think you're better off watching any of the various recordings \"Performance Matters\" conference talks[0] by Emery Berger to learn about all the ways that developers are benchmarking the wrong thing using the wrong techniques, and what you could do instead [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7gDKbT_l2us":[{"hn_comment_id":33847686,"author":"ReactiveJelly","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It","text":"The Internet has the same incentive landscape as bathroom stall graffiti. That's why you're so mad, Robyn. This isn't a back-and-forth between two real people who mutually respect each other. If I was talking to Robyn in real life, over coffee, for 2 or 3 hours, we'd probably get something productive done. But online, it's a hit-and-run dumpster where the truth matters a little, and humor and presentation matter _much more._ Robyn writes their wounded-gazelle piece whining about the woke cancel mob, and I try to 'clap back' without 'seething'. Wittgenstein would roll in his grave to see the level of MLG language gamers we have online these days. Nuance gets buried online. I am not gonna sit here and write a boring screen-long essay expressing my nuanced thoughts on the rights of trans adults and trans children, to an audience that might literally be reading this on the shitter. It works fine for less-controversial topics like Rust vs C. It just doesn't work for gender. They who write on shit-house walls... P.S. - If you have 2 hours to spare for nuance, I highly recommend the Contrapoints video about J. K. Rowling. This is a good, calm, nuanced discussion about why LGBTQ people and our allies don't like Rowling as much as we used to. [VIDEO] If you don't have 2 hours to spare, then you aren't gonna get nuance, sorry to tell you.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25934421,"author":"deanCommie","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Agent fired from literary agency for using Parler and Gab","text":"> Rowling's views are not 'dated' (that's your opinion) They are. Bigotry is not static. It's a dynamic reaction to progress being made in the rest of society. Her views are not a reaction to fringe whackjobs on twitter screaming for some rights that the rest of society is not willing to give them. Her views are a reaction to changes in government policy that do not happen overnight, are themselves a result of decades of progress made in conjunction with medical and scientific subject matter experts. > they are thought out, and reasonable. They are not. They are based on strawmen interpretations of trans people's lived experiences, and their desired outcomes. It would take a really long time to go through all her points and point out the various logical flaws in it, but the main issue is they are founded on her own personal beliefs, anxieties, and prior trauma, not a reasonable detached view of the status quo. Contrapoints just did a pretty thorough deep dive analysis[1]. > The issue is not 'people not buying her books' - the issue is that people are trying to suppress and silence her An author's interaction with their audience, and their \"platform\" goes far beyond the books they publish. They have other channels, and other ways to reach people - in Rowling's case millions of people, primarily children. While not everyone would agree with me on this, but if Rowling was quietly harboring transphobic beliefs, and made no further follow-up, I wouldn't care, and there would be no","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29052295,"author":"geraldalewis","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Reasons for Speaking Out on Sex and Gender Issues (2020)","text":"It's 90 minutes, but ContraPoints' videos are really great. Here's her perspective on J.K. Rowling: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7gtog_gOaGQ":[{"hn_comment_id":24876744,"author":"vermontdevil","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The world needs nuclear power and we shouldn\u2019t be afraid of it","text":"You should watch this video (and several others) of this professor, David Ruzic from Uni of Illinois This video he talks about the economics of nuclear plant. [LINK] This video, he talks about modular micro-nuclear reactor [VIDEO] His videos are great. Worth your time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24375366,"author":"eigenhombre","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval","text":"If you have 20 minutes, the video linked in the comments of the earlier HN post is quite informative, giving a much better technical explanation than the original article: [VIDEO] It is fascinating, for example, how a slight change in the packaging of the fuel (as sand-sized pellets coated with carbon) affects the safety/stability of the design, and how resonances in the cross section for neutron absorption come into play (they broaden at higher temperatures, dampening rather than enhancing the overall reaction speed, as temperatures rise).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24519063,"author":"PopeDotNinja","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ultra Safe Nuclear","text":"Think of smaller nuclear reactors as an option for places where renewables might not make sense, like in mining. Building power generation that costs 10x some renewable source will never make sense. However, building small scale nuclear as replacement for onsite diesel generators could make a whole lot of sense. Illinois Energy Prof has a good video on this => [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7hwO8Q_TyCA":[{"hn_comment_id":44471127,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2025-07","story_title":"LLMs bring new nature of abstraction \u2013 up and sideways","text":"Me to, and I'm always battling with the LLM's obsession with lazily writing reams of ridiculously defensive code and masking errors in the code it generates and calls, instead of finding the root cause and solving that. (Yes, I'm referring to the code LLMs generate, not the API for generating code itself, but \"fail early and spectacularly\" should apply to all code and apis.) But you have to draw the line at failures that happen in the real world, or in code you can't control. I'm a huge fan of Dave Ackley's \"Robust First\" computing architecture, and his Moveable Feast Machine. His \"Robust First\" philosophy is extremely relevant and has a lot of applications to programming with LLMs, not just hardware design. Robust First | A conversation with Dave Ackley (T2 Tile Project) | Functionally Imperative Podcast [LINK] Robust-first computing: Beyond efficiency [VIDEO] Bottom up engineering for robust-first computing [LINK] Living Computation: Robust-first programming in ULAM [LINK] [LINK] DonHopkins on Feb 11, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Growing Neural Cellular Automata: A Differentiable... Also check out the \"Moveable Feast Machine\", Robust-first Computing, and this Distributed City Generation example: [LINK] DonHopkins on Oct 26, 2017 | parent | favorite | on: Cryptography with Cellular Automata (1985) [pdf] A \"Moveable Feast Machine\" is a \"Robust First\" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. It's similar to a Cellular Au","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21989874,"author":"sitkack","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Which Machines Do Computer Architects Admire? (2013)","text":"I am happy you don't agree on modularity. I don't want to be correct, I want to arrive at correct conclusions. :) Composition is great, scale free self similarity is probably the basis for the universe. Modularity is a great design technique, it can also make things weaker and force other (unknowable) design choices because the module boundary prevents the flow of information/force. Overly constrained modular systems encourage globals, under constrained modular systems are asymptotic to mud/clay. I don't want to use K8S as a strawman to attack modularity, but I think it is an example of using this powerful design tool to solve the wrong problem using mis-applied methods all the while being more complex and using more resources. In the case of designing systems, modules/objects/processes (Erlang sense) are critical, but not so much in building/engineering them. Demodularizing or fusing a design can make it more robust and more efficient. I don't dislike modularity, I just think it is a bigger more complex topic than most give it credit for. Unix is highly-non modular and very poor composition. It sits on a molehill of a local maximum, itself sitting in the bottom of a Caldera, a sort of Wizard Mt on Wizard Island. Other things you might like is the research around \"Collapsing Towers of Interpreters\" [1] Or Dave Ackley's T2 Tile Project and Robust First Computing [2] Would love to chat more, but internet access is spotty for the next week, non-replies are not ignores. [1] [LINK","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25939803,"author":"nelsonmandela","month":"2021-01","story_title":"If memristors act like neurons, put them in neural networks","text":"You might be interested in 'Robust First Computing' - [LINK] edit: here is a far better explanation by the terms creator: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7jb0FOcImdg":[{"hn_comment_id":23741165,"author":"syspec","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Dolphin Progress May and June 2020","text":"Do you have a link to any blog posts, i would love to read about it. I tried to look on [LINK] , but development appears to be closed source? I'm just an outside observer, but i love the topic. For others like myself, this is a great GDC video to watch on the topic > 8 Frames in 16ms: Rollback Networking in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26291261,"author":"syspec","month":"2021-02","story_title":"How fighting games use delay-based and rollback netcode (2019)","text":"Here's another great video on the subject: 8 Frames in 16ms: Rollback Networking in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2 [VIDEO] One of my favorite topics, partially because there's not that much literature on the subject but it's so important","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28887525,"author":"dilap","month":"2021-10","story_title":"1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond (2001)","text":"I guess it depends on how high a level you're looking at it from. Both lockstep and rollback are variants of the general approach of \"shared deterministic simulation\" where you're mostly just sending inputs. (\"Mostly\" 'cuz on reconnect or desync or whatever you'll probably want to send full state.) I really enjoyed this GDC talk on rollback networking: [VIDEO] (From 2019.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37935672,"author":"Oberdiah","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Ready Player Two \u2013 What the Multiplayer Web Can Learn from Video Games","text":"Specifically \"Deterministic Rollback\", as the clients don't wait for the server's response before displaying the change locally. For an in-depth explanation, see this excellent GDC talk on its implementation in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43436999,"author":"c4wrd","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Activision Cut Call of Duty's Build Time by 50%","text":"For those who aren't in the video game development field and like technical content, I cannot recommend watching GDC's content enough (even better, attending!). Although this blog post isn't as detailed as I've seen them do in the past, I appreciate that game developers have the opportunity to share their wins like this externally. If you enjoy watching technical content and video games, the following videos are greatly entertaining deep dives into ludicrously technically complicated bugs or performance optimizations done to deliver the gaming experience that I myself take for granted. - I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of Halo: Reach: [LINK] - 8 Frames in 16ms: Rollback Networking in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2: [VIDEO] - It IS Rocket Science! The Physics of Rocket League Detailed: [LINK] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"7jiPeIFXb6U":[{"hn_comment_id":18341147,"author":"tcpekin","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Why Jupyter is data scientists\u2019 computational notebook of choice","text":"Here they are - they're definitely irreverent, but I find myself strongly agreeing with everything he says. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19561819,"author":"kevsim","month":"2019-04","story_title":"How to separate your data from your code","text":"Jupyter notebooks are really abysmal when it comes to best engineering practices. There's an amazing talk called \"I don't like notebooks\" by Joel Grus at last years JupyterCon [0]. I highly recommend it. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24926400,"author":"tosh","month":"2020-10","story_title":"I Violated a Code of Conduct","text":"If you haven't yet: I think both talks are very worth watching: I don't like notebooks ( [VIDEO] ) by Joel Grus I like notebooks ( [LINK] ) by Jeremy Howard notebooks are a very interesting medium and they have both shortcomings as well as things they are great at and neither were totally obvious to me.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27651502,"author":"softwaredoug","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you run long computations without interruption?","text":"Get extensive code out of notebooks into testable libraries. Confirm it works before running a big computation. We try to keep our notebooks slim and factor anything complex into a Python library. We can experiment with this libraries implementation, write unit tests on smaller data sets to confirm it works, before doing a bigger experiment. We can also deploy the library to prod and ensure users get the exact same thing we experimented with. I would recommend the talk \u201cI don\u2019t like notebooks\u201d [VIDEO] (There\u2019s also the alternative nbdev that creates a full software engineering and experimentation setup in 100% notebooks. Not something I particularly like, but it might be another option.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29909812,"author":"carreau","month":"2022-01","story_title":"IPython 8.0","text":"First, yes, this is a common question. IPython does not try to deal with that, it's just the executing engine. Notebooks, do not have to be stored in ipynb form, I would suggest to look at [LINK] , and notebook UI is inherently not design for multi-file and application developpement. So training humans will always be necessary. Technically Jupyter Notebook does not even care that notebooks are files, you could save then using say postgres ( [LINK] ) , and even sync content between notebooks. I'm not too well informed anymore on this particular topic, but there are other folks at [LINK] that might be more aware, you can also ask on discourse.jupyter.org, I'm pretty sure you can find threads on those issues. I think on the Jupyter side we could do a better job curating and exposing many tools to help with that, but there are just so many hours in the day... I also recommend I don't like notebook from Joel Grus, [VIDEO] it's a really funny talk, a lot of the points are IMHO invalid as Joel is misinformed on how things can be configured, but still a great watch.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40675952,"author":"lelandbatey","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Notebooks Are McDonalds of Code","text":"REPL stands for Read\u2013eval\u2013print loop [LINK] A REPL, by its name, is a very narrow version of the broader paradigm of interactive computer programming environments. But Notebooks are not REPLs, unless you use REPL to mean \"interactive programming environment\" and not REPL. Notebooks are much broader than a REPL! In a notebook, you can go back and edit and run individual lines of the notebook without re-running the whole notebook from the start and without re-computing everything that depends on what you just edited. Behavior like this makes it super hard to track the actual state, and super easy to lose track of how things are how they are. That's pretty terrible! The parent article links this great talk that goes into more detail than the parent post and is much easier to understand: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7k1ehaE0bdU":[{"hn_comment_id":42715939,"author":"tim333","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'","text":"No not really - it's quite a good interview. Here's the masculine energy bit if you want to judge for yourself. You only have to watch a couple of minutes to get an idea [VIDEO] To me \"ranting\" is not true. He calmly says he was brought up with girls and it's quite nice go get out and do martial arts for a change. To me that's normal and getting upset about 'men' not getting free tampons is kinda weird.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42837025,"author":"johnmw","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Mark Zuckerberg: This Man Is a Coward","text":"I don't have a horse in this race, but to be fair, Mark goes into great detail about all this on the Joe Rogan podcast [0]. I think a reasonable person would also listen to what he says about his own motivations. If you have already listened and have an opinion, then please ignore this suggestion! [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7kGnfXXIKZM":[{"hn_comment_id":27487682,"author":"shaicoleman","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Diabetes Drug Metformin Reduces All-Cause Mortality and Diseases of Aging (2017)","text":"I think the best talk of the health dangers of seed oils is in the following video: Dr. Chris Knobbe - 'Diseases of Civilization: Are Seed Oil Excesses the Unifying Mechanism?' [1] If you're short on time, you can skip directly to the trials data section [2] 1. [VIDEO] 2. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26041435,"author":"shaicoleman","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Study finds childhood diet has lifelong impact","text":"Not all fats are created equal. There's data pointing that Omega-6 fatty acids (primarily vegetable/seed oils and trans fats) are harmful. See the following talk by Dr. Chris Knobbe: [VIDEO] You can jump here for the studies: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26116254,"author":"wtetzner","month":"2021-02","story_title":"New model could explain old cholesterol mystery","text":"The idea that animal products are unhealthy seems to be misguided. It seems more likely that the supposedly \"heart healthy\" seed oils are causing heart disease. The Carnivore Code has some very good insights (at least in my opinion) [1] And this talk on how seed oils are destroying our health is also pretty interesting: [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30456526,"author":"shaicoleman","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)","text":"Recommended viewing: Dr. Chris Knobbe - Diseases of Civilization: Are Seed Oil Excesses the Unifying Mechanism? [VIDEO] Here's a slide where he shows that soybean oil induces diabetes (in mice): [VIDEO] The talk makes the case on how it's also applicable to humans.","stance":"rec"}],"7kQk9-KLPfU":[{"hn_comment_id":19520197,"author":"joosters","month":"2019-03","story_title":"I Now Have a Cardiologist","text":"There's a great (and short) video suggesting why it's not a good idea to run as many medical tests as possible, and it's not because of the cost: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27060140,"author":"tasty_freeze","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Are we screening too much for skin cancer? It's complicated","text":"An under 3-minute video by a funny and informative doctor explaining this (youtube handle \"medlife crisis\"): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7kVeCqQCxlk":[{"hn_comment_id":16310416,"author":"bpicolo","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Branching Layouts With Ease","text":"You don't need to worry about UC browser if you aren't in China (that knocks several other browsers > 1% \"global\" share too). Opera Mini + IE11 is ~5.5% unsupported. One recommendation from the video the other day was also very good in this regard: [VIDEO] Create something that works on mobile, then use grid to build outwards. Then you get reasonable views on unsupported platforms (the mobile-centric view, and most platforms that don't support grid are Mobile) and grid works where it can / needs to. IE11 will -never- support grid. Don't let that hold you back! (Unless you're specifically developing for an IE11-rich market)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16380771,"author":"benjaminjackman","month":"2018-02","story_title":"CSS Grid for UI Layouts","text":"I came across them from this video, when I heard the \"it's almost like ASCII\" part (I had it on in the background) something clicked in my head and I had to drop everything to try it out. [VIDEO] Watch on for the 'crazy response design' part. I am still amazed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839563,"author":"TACIXAT","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"CSS Grid Changes Everything - [VIDEO] The speaker is good but I think I like it just because it fixes the relationship between HTML and CSS.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19134310,"author":"lugg","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Tasks That Can Be Done with Pure HTML and CSS","text":"I am still blown away by how powerful CSS grid is. [VIDEO] It's sad it doesn't get more use. Potwntially this is because CSS frameworks hide all this away and nobody is really learning CSS anymore but I wouldn't really know. I'm not really that exposed to the web front end side of things.","stance":"rec"}],"7nJgHBbEgsE":[{"hn_comment_id":20860669,"author":"jorda0mega","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Effects of short-term fasting on cancer treatment","text":"you should check out this talk to understand why that's the case and it might be different with fasting [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23523210,"author":"hourislate","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Have you experimented with diet/food? what was the result?","text":"I don't recommend anything more than 3-5 days max. Without knowing what your goal is just try the 16:8 and eat a nutrient rich diet that is low energy. You should be able to fit 2 meals in (lunch and dinner) in a window from 12 - 8 pm. Nothing but water/coffee/tea before or after that window. If your healthy and don't suffer from any issues, move on to one meal a day. After you master that then try a 1 or 2 day fast. Look up Jason Fung on youtube. Great stuff.... [VIDEO] Check out Dr Berg on youtube also. He does \"Healthy Keto\" which is a very balanced and healthy diet. [LINK] Lots of great resources out there....","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24967360,"author":"shaicoleman","month":"2020-11","story_title":"As an older guy I've finally figured out weight-loss","text":"You need to wait 12-24 months before you can consider your diet a success. A caloric deficit doesn't work long term, as over time your metabolism slows down to match the caloric intake. \"The key to long-lasting weight control is to control the main hormone responsible, which is insulin. Controlling insulin requires a change in our diet, which is composed of two factors \u2014 how high the insulin levels are after meals, and how long they persist. This boils down to two simple factors: What we eat \u2014 which determines how high insulin spikes; and When we eat \u2014 which determines how persistent insulin is.\" The best resource for weight loss via fasting is Dr. Jason Fung [VIDEO] [LINK] (link looks a bit spammy, but contains good information)","stance":"rec"}],"7nL10C7FSbE":[{"hn_comment_id":30727308,"author":"sokoloff","month":"2022-03","story_title":"US schools can subscribe to an electric bus fleet at lower prices than diesel","text":"[VIDEO] compares the flammability of several types of fuels. 2m08s for Jet-A. 3m50s for #2 diesel. 6m03s for heating oil. 7m30s for kerosene (all those are basically the same and surprising to most how not flammable they are in liquid form). 10m15s for avgas. 11m30s for auto gas.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31382123,"author":"MertsA","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Is It Safe to Ship Thousands of Electric Cars on Big Ships?","text":"It still doesn't burn well unless it's in a fine mist. Even just a puddle of diesel is actually quite difficult to get burning on its own without some other material as a wick of sorts. [VIDEO] Great practical demonstration of the different flammability characteristics of some common fuels. For the tar that a container ship burns, it's not going to be very volatile. Coal also burns quite well, but unless it's powdered, good luck trying to ignite some with just a match.","stance":"rec"}],"7ne0GArfeMs":[{"hn_comment_id":42985071,"author":"mathladder","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Terence Tao on how we measure the cosmos, Part 1 [video]","text":"Cool collab. Tao\u2019s oft given talk about the cosmic distance ladder has always been my favorite thing he has done. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39677600,"author":"luc4sdreyer","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate","text":"> Nobody had a clue In the 3rd century BC, Aristarchus calculated that the Sun was between 18 and 20 times farther away from the Earth than the Moon, and proposed the Heliocentric model as a result. The true value is instead approximately 400 times. But it's incredible given that he didn't have lenses, the value of Pi, and that the Geocentric model was considered correct until 1800 years after his death. [LINK] Nice video about the cosmic distance ladder by Terence Tao: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7oWip00iXbo":[{"hn_comment_id":45148064,"author":"ilitirit","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Quantum Mechanics, Concise Book","text":"I would recommend watching Curt Jaimungal's series of talks with Jacob Barandes. He gives a nice background history of various aspects of QM, including the formulation of Matrix and Wave mechanics (and loads of other ideas). Barandes is excellent at clearly articulating complex ideas in very simple, concise terms. He also has his own formulation of QM based on \"Indivisible non-Markovian Stochastic Processes\". Even if you disagree with his ideas, the interviews are quite fascinating. In this interview he goes over pretty much exactly what you mentioned (and a lot more): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42393413,"author":"slowmovintarget","month":"2024-12","story_title":"The Google Willow Thing","text":"Jacob Barandes is a professor of physics at Harvard (not a crank). He recently did a great podcast with Kurt Jaimungal [1]. In the interview he explains that every year he searches for a good way to introduce his students to quantum mechanics, and every year he's ended up being unsatisfied with the approach and started again. One year he decided to attempt describing systems with traditional mechanics, using probabilities (stochastic mechanics). He worked at it and worked at it, assuming that he would eventually have to take some leap to cross the chasm into the world of gauge theory, Lie Groups, and Hilbert spaces. What he found is, to his surprise, the math just seemed to fit together at some point. That is, he found a mapping, just as the path integral is a mapping into the math of the wave function, and it just kind of worked. He had been under the assumption that it shouldn't. It turns out, that in doing his stochastic mechanics, he had used mathematical descriptions that were indivisible. That is once a given process began, it could not be sliced into smaller and smaller time slices. It had to complete and yield a result. This was what he called a non-Markov stochastic process. Apparently all previous attempts at this used Markov processes, which are divisible like Hilbert vector calculations or the path integral. It turns out that things like \"collapse\" of the wave function, and all the quantum weirdness arose from how the math worked with the wave function and Hilbert","stance":"rec"}],"7pSqk-XV2QM":[{"hn_comment_id":28413977,"author":"jcims","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Why the U.S. once set off a nuclear bomb in space","text":"Pretty good video from Veritasium o related to this, about how Kodak detected the presence of nuclear weapons tests. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29763908,"author":"29athrowaway","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Nuclear fallout is showing up in U.S. honey, decades after bomb tests","text":"Veritasium has a cool video about a related topic titled \"How Kodak exposed the atomic bomb\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46044825,"author":"ourmandave","month":"2025-11","story_title":"How the Atomic Tests Looked Like from Los Angeles","text":"At least LA wasn't down wind. Veritasium did an eye opening vid on how fallout blew across the country and was ruining Kodak's film on the East Coast. And they stayed quiet it about it. How Kodak Exposed Nuclear Testing [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7rNY7xKyGCQ":[{"hn_comment_id":16659241,"author":"asokoloski","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Rise in cancers 'caused by weight'","text":"The simplest answer is, as much as you can, stick to a whole-foods, plant based diet. So: Whole grain bread and pasta instead of white bread and pasta. Brown rice instead of white rice. Vegetables, vegetables, vegetables, and fruit. Beans, chickpeas, split peas, and lentils. Things to avoid: Meat, fish, dairy, eggs, OIL (of any sort), junk food (of course). Whole foods mean foods where nothing bad has been added, and nothing good has been taken away. This diet is scientifically proven to reduce inflammation, and in fact, make you live longer. The closer you can get to it, the better off you'll be. The only thing to be wary of is that if you cut out animal protein entirely, you'll need a vitamin B12 supplement, unless you get your water from natural streams and eat vegetables without washing off the dirt :) (B12 comes from bacteria -- that's where grazing animals get it from). If you're interested in the science, here's a long (but good) talk by Dr. Michael Greger (creator of nutritionfacts.org) at google: [VIDEO] Note that he's different from most of the diet advocates out there in that he seems to try quite hard to remain focused on the science, his website is entirely free, he's not selling supplements, and all the proceeds of his books go to charity. I'm a big fan :)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16773980,"author":"molloy","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Older Americans Are \u2018Hooked\u2019 on Vitamins","text":"Actually, it's more likely that the issue is we're not eating a mostly whole foods, plant-based diet. It's not carbs that are the problem, but refined carbs certainly are a problem. They're not what our bodies evolved to thrive on. I highly recommend watching Dr. Greger's talk at Google[0] on the subject, or reading his book[1]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17968453,"author":"christophilus","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Preventing Muscle Loss as We Age","text":"Yeesh. That's a great visual. I'm a sedentary software engineer... gotta make some changes. It reminds me of the cancer slides in the \"How Not to Die\" talk [VIDEO] which is partly why I'm now vegan.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13141757,"author":"itsthewrongway","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?","text":"Not suggesting this is an end all solution, since CHF can also stem from non diet related issues, but eating a whole food plant based diet can start to reverse heart disease in as little as a few weeks. It can also prevent and reverse many other diet caused/related diseases. I think part of the issue has mainly been a lack of education on what a poor diet consists of. If anyone is interested, Dr. Gregor is a great resource of knowledge on this subject. He did a talk at google [VIDEO] which is based on his book \"How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease\" [LINK] His website is [LINK] All not for profit.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15096709,"author":"sedachv","month":"2017-08","story_title":"'Environmental Nightmare' After Thousands of Atlantic Salmon Escape Fish Farm","text":"> What's are the alternatives here? The alternative is to stop eating carcinogenic, heart disease-causing foods made out of animals and animal secretions: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15632737,"author":"cies","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Relax, You Don\u2019t Need to \u2018Eat Clean\u2019","text":"I like this \"scientific evidence based nutritionist\" by the name of Michael Greger. He pushes out a lot of content, going through the paper to draw actionable conclusions. Here's what he has to say about some of the topics of the article: Salt (6 videos) \u2014 [LINK] Bacon (now a class I carcinogen, like smoking and asbestos): [LINK] MSG (no scientific evidence it hurts): [LINK] GMOs: [LINK] The Monsanto Round-up pesticide often found on \"Round-up Ready\" (TM) GMOs: [LINK] The article also mentioned people ove-rdiagnozing gluten intolerance. So what?! And is says: > We demonized fats. Then cholesterol. Then meat. Yes, well some of us did, because when I look around I see still loads of fat and high-cholesterol animal product consumed. Cutting out (most) animal products \u2014the only dietary source of cholesterol\u2014 is great way to improve your health, same with cutting out processed fat (oils/butter). > If people want to avoid foods, even if there\u2019s no reason to, is that really a problem? There's plenty reason! That's the problem, you cannot let big corps be in charge of their own regulations (and thats what the hollow-democracies allow big corps to do). Since we cannot fix those democracies, we simply: buy organic, and eat plant-based, and/or \"clean\", and what not. > The answer is: yes. Because it makes food scary. And being afraid of food with no real reason is unscientific \u2014 part of the dangerous trend of anti-intellectualism that we confront in many places today. Therefor I quote Dr","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17248037,"author":"sedachv","month":"2018-06","story_title":"If wages are to rise, workers need more bargaining power","text":"> Chicken breast is regularly 1.99 a pound and thighs even cheaper. Why are people trotting out chicken as an example of healthy food? It is anything but: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30474781,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2022-02","story_title":"World\u2019s first octopus farm stirs ethical debate","text":"You\u2019re right that the American diet has gone way too far to meat, and eating a more Mediterranean or South-East Asian diet would be a big health improvement. NutritionFacts.org is a non profit run by Dr. Michael Gregor, who runs a YouTube channel full of health advice. He looks at the latest scientific data and shares it on his channel. Based on his interpretation of the best available data a fully vegan diet seems to have a lot of health benefits. I became vegan for moral reasons so I haven\u2019t researched what a more mixed diet would be like, but I\u2019m glad my choice is a healthy one. Here\u2019s one of his full talks: [VIDEO] And here\u2019s his channel: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33690522,"author":"myshpa","month":"2022-11","story_title":"\u201cJudas goats\u201d were once key players in meatpacking plants","text":"Understand your points of view. I too ate meat for a long time. I too defended that position with same ferocity you do. But I was wrong to do it. And you're wrong on too many points to discuss it at full - sorry, no space here, also have family to feed and work to do. My bookmarks folder about dangers of animal products/agriculture has hundreds of items. I'll cherrypick just few of them to get you started. You'll find several of your viewpoints discussed here: [LINK] Want to learn more? (pun intended) Movies: - I'd recommend Dominion movie again, but you won't probably see it, and even if you do, i don't think the suffering of animals/horrors of the meat production will be enough to change your opinions, so I'll talk about it from different angle. - Cowspiracy - Seaspiracy [LINK] - This man makes you think [LINK] - Dairy is scary Health: [VIDEO] - Dr. Michael Greger | How Not To Die [LINK] - Foods for Protecting the Body & Mind: Dr. Neal Barnard [LINK] - What the Health! (2017) Impacts on biodiversity / climate change: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] OK, I'll react to few of your points. > \"never personally eat meat strikes me as a bit of a neurotic, narcissistic response\" So avoiding killing is a neurotic, narcissistic response? Like, really? > \"to avoid ice cream to spare dairy cows who are clearly, if you meet them, quite happy with their jobs\" Are you sure? I've met a lot of them, when i was a child. You know that cows giving milk are mothers, forcefully impregnated/raped eve","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33694667,"author":"myshpa","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Camera off during most of the meetings?","text":"Off-topic: hi, I've read in an unrealated thread about your heart problems. Not knowing more and not knowing how to contact you, I'm trying this way - have you tried plant-based diet for a limited time (2-3 weeks should be enough) to see if it would improve your condition? [LINK] - Healthiest Foods for Your Heart | Dr. Neal Barnard [LINK] - Foods for Protecting the Body & Mind: Dr. Neal Barnard [VIDEO] - Dr. Michael Greger | How Not To Die","stance":"rec"}],"7tsXtk7psUc":[{"hn_comment_id":18793662,"author":"rdl","month":"2018-12","story_title":"China Thwarts U.S. Effort to Promote American Culture on Campuses","text":"Confucius Institutes are a bit more than merely promoting Confucianism. This was an interesting video by a westerner who is in China (often) and thus has to walk a fine line, but was able to subtext exceptionally well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19437373,"author":"euske","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Stepping into the Uncanny, Unsettling World of Shen Yun","text":"The other day I found a video about the \"cultural war\" between Falun Gong and Chinese govt., in the form of two disguised fronts (Shen Yun and Confucius Institute, respectively) within the US soil. This was made by a Western guy who's associated with neither of them. It's quite interesting. [VIDEO] Here in Japan, I see that a few large private universities are affiliated with Confucius Institute, and I have seen a Shen Yun ad on YouTube. The cultural war is certainly going on here too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20594583,"author":"monksy","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Hong Kong protests: 'I'm in Australia but I feel censored by Chinese students'","text":"This is a massive brainwashing that they've done. That's hard to reverse without directly pointing that out. Due to \"political sensitivity\" that won't be. (People are afraid of standing up to china) A few things that are going on: (Check up on Serpentza+laowhy86 videos) [VIDEO] - The Confucius Institute is pushing propaganda campaigns in Unis and in public (Their adverts are spammed everywhere) - In China, they do have people that are willing to turn you in for \"violations\" (non-government.. citizens) -- See the video: they'll even try to interrupt talks in the US to \"correct the record\" - Forums. Again SerpentZA has found that they are collecting together in Chinese only forums to doxx and harass. Death threats are common there.","stance":"rec"}],"7ttG90raCNo":[{"hn_comment_id":43605926,"author":"jsheard","month":"2025-04","story_title":"'Minecraft Movie' Leaks Online: Full Unfinished Version Shared","text":"Typically the way it goes is that the studio underplays how much CGI they used during the marketing campaign, while the VFX vendors are forced to bite their tongues, and then 6 months after the movie debuts their NDA expires and they finally get to show how much CGI there really was. This series is a great watch on the subject: [VIDEO] In the later parts there's some really egregious examples where promotional behind-the-scenes footage was actually doctored to key out the green screens or present composited shots as if they were done in-camera.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46238167,"author":"troupo","month":"2025-12","story_title":"French supermarket's Christmas advert is worldwide hit (without AI) [video]","text":"I highly recommend this 5-part essay series \"NO CGI\" is really just INVISIBLE CGI\" [VIDEO] (it starts with \"Top Gun: Maverick\"). Current-era CGI is insanely good . The problem is that it's used and abused everywhere, often with very little consideration for whether it's needed, or if there's time to do all the VFX shots etc.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49014778,"author":"Fr0styMatt88","month":"2026-07","story_title":"'The Odyssey' Proves It: Audiences Want Movies Made the Hard Way","text":"On the specific no/low-CGI bent \u2014 I find the obsession with using this (mostly false) claim so utterly disrespectful to the people in VFX that have poured thousands upon thousands of hours of their lives into the craft, only to be actively derided (or outright denied) by producers hoping to capitalise on whatever this weird obsession is. For anyone that hasn\u2019t seen it but is interested in the topic, this series is HIGHLY worth a watch: \u201cNO CGI\u201d is really just INVISIBLE CGI - 1 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41244381,"author":"4ggr0","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Captain Disillusion debunks David Beckham beach kicks [video]","text":"i really enjoyed the 4 videos made by 'The Movie Rabbit Hole' which explores the \"No CGI was used in this movie\"-lie/exaggeration/misdirection. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45675608,"author":"jsheard","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Ovi: Twin backbone cross-modal fusion for audio-video generation","text":"Yeah that's the thing, with good execution of a plausible effect you don't even realize you're looking at CGI. It's the toup\u00e9e fallacy. Obligatory Jonas Ussing plug: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47716305,"author":"rcxdude","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element [2019]","text":"This has tended to be significantly overblown recently with a huge amount of 'no CGI' advertising coming from studios, which often verges into utter BS. There's an incredible amount of CG at every level of modern productions, regardless of how much stuntwork and practical effects were done as well. (this video series has a good breakdown on it, which has included studios releasing doctored 'behind the scenes' footage! [VIDEO] ). That's not to say that doing these things is pointless or unimpressive, but it's often used to denigrate and minimize the work of a lot of already quite underappreciated artists.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47747349,"author":"CyberDildonics","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element [2019]","text":"It's not true either way. Very little is actually practical, it's just that when something looks good people think it is practical because they want to believe that. Marketing feeds into this and tells people movies were done all practical or made \"heavy use of practical effects\" and it's just lies. This is 5 part series. [VIDEO] Even before this people were saying stuff like mad max was done \"almost all practical\" because they saw behind the scenes stuff of flipping a few cars even though the movie is wall to wall digital effects. Sometimes the elaborate \"practical effects\" don't even move right and are used for reference and completely replaced.","stance":"rec"}],"7vfqkvwW2fs":[{"hn_comment_id":30778503,"author":"open-source-ux","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Why are some soundtracks of movies so powerful?","text":"The YouTube channel Every Frame a Painting has an excellent video about music in films. Why are some scores so memorable while others are easily forgotten? The Marvel Symphonic Universe (2016): [VIDEO] You don't have to have seen any Marvel movies, the insights are universal. (Also worth watching the follow-up video: Hollywood Scores & Soundtracks: What Do They Sound Like? [LINK] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48440515,"author":"testdelacc1","month":"2026-06","story_title":"I design with Claude more than Figma now","text":"There was this video which showed film directors doing something similar. They film their scene with \u201cfiller\u201d music previously used in some other film. Then they hand the scene to the music director and ask a score for it, which forces the director to make something very similar to the filler music. It then makes all film music sound similar. This was only possible due to the \u201cproductivity boost\u201d of digital editing pipelines, which allowed directors to edit immediately after filming. [VIDEO] from 5:50 on but the whole video is a masterpiece.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17135021,"author":"lentil_soup","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Filmstro: Royalty-Free Music","text":"In that vein, I recommend this video about the Marvel Universe music and the general use of \"temp music\". It touches a lot of the points you mention: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30333561,"author":"jstx1","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Why are memorable melodies less common nowadays in movie soundtracks?","text":"Temp music and the idea that music shouldn\u2019t be noticeable in a film. Every Frame a Painting has a great video essay on this - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31440374,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Vangelis has died","text":"That's more due to how movie scores are produced these days. Every Frame A Painting explains it really well in this video on why you can't remember any music from Marvel movies: [VIDEO] (well, up until they made that video, at least)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31752057,"author":"Litost","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened to Game Design?)","text":"This statement might be more poignant than you think, there's an interesting video here comparing Marvel with Star Wars and James Bond in terms of how memorable any of the music is, because it's almost all cookie cutter: [VIDEO] I think all the points here have value, I've definitely played some really good games recently including some that were mentioned above, but I definitely think there's a general risk averseness because AAA game studios are too big to experiment so a lot of games are rehashed sequels or incremental \"improvements\" (as in the movie industry or whatever's in the music charts). I'd put some of the blame of this on the outcome bias, things are judged on whether the outcome was favourable (e.g. profit) not whether it was the right decision (e.g. let's try something different with novelty, but riskier). As Julia Galef covers in one of her podcasts (will have to find the link), the exec that tries something risky might get a promotion if it succeeds and get sacked if it doesn't as opposed to getting promoted from suggesting something novel regardless of whether it worked. See also \"No one ever got fired for choosing IBM\". How many films that get critical reception now, got poor/indifferent reviews initially because they were just too experimental/novel for the time, e.g. Original Blade Runner. What will people think in 10, 20, 50 years about Marvel films.","stance":"rec"}],"7vsCAM17O-M":[{"hn_comment_id":5315180,"author":"tiger10guy","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Kids should learn to think","text":"Related thoughts on education... from CGP Grey: [VIDEO] Also watch Greys favorites vol 4 (playlist on CGP Grey channel). These thoughts from Salman Khan are most relevant here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31419554,"author":"mjevans","month":"2022-05","story_title":"With plunging enrollment, a \u2018seismic hit\u2019 to public schools","text":"I'd like to revisit a classic CGP Gray video for talking points on this subject: [VIDEO] What roles does (Public) Education fulfill in society and to parents? * A free society and elected government function best when the people who make decisions about the future of that society are properly educated and capable of high level decision making. Public Schools and Education are generally critical (decades to forever) health factors in such societies. * Better educated laborers are able to further the knowledge of intelligent life, and make better things possible. The video talks about how education has traditionally generally worked, how educational videos can be the basis for learning a subject, and how an AI can feed that to students as a personal \"Digital Aristotle for Everyone\". '... I doubt that schools will go away. After all, they aren't just about learning but also freeing parents to work in the economy, while their feral children are are turned into civilized adults. Schools will be radically different, and there will be far fewer teachers working in them doing far less. While that's not great news for teachers, it is awesome news for students and society.' -- paraphrased a little, CGP Gray in the linked video. * Free parents to work in the economy. I'll extend this with anecdotal evidence from relatives during the pandemic. It generally gives parents and kids a break from each other so they don't go mutually insane and so that both can progress forward with things the","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40023893,"author":"moffkalast","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Why do we have such terrible evidence on homework effectiveness? (2022)","text":"The solution isn't to provide multiple approaches in the same classroom, it's to remove the classroom altogether. I keep coming back to CGP Grey's take[0] on the issue, and since he's an ex-teacher it makes him somewhat qualified on the topic. Conceptually the problem is solved, it's one-on-one tutoring that was widely practiced in the ancient world for the aristocracy. The question is how to effectively implement that for the masses. Khan academy has attempted to use GPT 4 as a teacher bot in much this manner (to some success?), but the current gen of language models isn't smart enough nor designed to tackle this problem in a holistic manner. In a decade or two though? Easily. Obviously there are numerous problems when it comes to deploying this sort of thing to the public school system. I mean, can you really trust a private company do handle it? Eventually though, something will have to be implemented when the ever dwindling number of underpaid teachers forces our hand. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7w4rg3UcsgI":[{"hn_comment_id":27612796,"author":"6f8986c3","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Will Work for Air-Conditioning","text":"TechIngredients did an interesting design for a swamp cooler using liquid desiccants: [VIDEO] Haven't yet built one myself, but it looks like a sensible design for climates that aren't overly humid.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37871029,"author":"sp332","month":"2023-10","story_title":"New AC technology uses 60% less energy","text":"Tech Ingredients on YouTube built a dessicant-based air conditioning system with enough info to DIY one. [LINK] and a full-scale test [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7wC42HgLA4k":[{"hn_comment_id":10191499,"author":"Someone1234","month":"2015-09","story_title":"What if states earned their Electoral College votes based on turnout?","text":"Some reasons why you shouldn't anymore (CGP Grey): [LINK] [VIDEO] Even in the UK, where the concept originates, a lot of people view it as a bad idea. The issue right now is that nobody can agree what to change it to, since people gravitate towards the voting system that helps them in the next election cycle (and the big two want it to remain a two-party system).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12675598,"author":"cyphar","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?","text":"> It's been around for a couple of hundred years so it can't be that terrible. Heh. If only everything that is old was good. The all-or-nothing electoral college system: 1. Removes power from all people, because they vote for electors not for the actual candidates. 2. Removes representation of people in both swing and predetermined states, because they don't get represented by their elector (all electors have to vote for the same party, not according to the fraction of their state that voted for party X). However, in a weird twist, not all states require that electors vote for the candidate the state told them to vote for -- meaning that they have insane amounts of power. 3. The way electors are assigned actually means that small states have more voting power than large states -- meaning that you can effectively become president if you can get the right 22% of the USA to vote for you. Oh, and please note that the electoral college system came about because the founding fathers thought you (the commonman) was too dumb to understand how voting should work. So they gave the power of voting to electors. Here's some videos on the topic: * [LINK] * [LINK] * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25030940,"author":"nanny","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization","text":">The electoral college is a form of protection for the naturally less densely populated agrarian states against the densely populated urban ones. This is commonly repeated, but it's BS. What \"protection\" does the electoral college give to Kansas, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho, or Montana? Presidential candidates don't pay any attention to any of those \"less densely populated agrarian states\". In addition, dense states like NJ, NY, CT, and Mass don't get attention from candidates. California doesn't get any attention either, so what gives? The states that get the attention are the swing states with the highest number of electoral votes, simply because the electoral college incentivizes trying to swing a small number of voters in such states. Watch some of these videos from CGP Grey for more info: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7xQQkzWhMOc":[{"hn_comment_id":27693356,"author":"lazyweb","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Intuit sabotages the Child Tax Credit","text":"There's a very good Patriot Act episode [1] regarding devious patterns in the US tax industry. In fact the whole show is well worth watching. It's cancelled now, presumably because Netflix felt some heat since every episode stirred/kicked another wasp's nest. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39120884,"author":"michaelmior","month":"2024-01","story_title":"IRS Free File is now available for the 2024 filing season","text":"> the government's own system is shit (which is why many people choose to pay) The reason the government's system has historically been terrible is because of lobbying on the part of Intuit (maker of TurboTax) and others. There was a great episode of Patriot Act a few years ago that discussed this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7xTGNNLPyMI":[{"hn_comment_id":43290583,"author":"InvidFlower","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Ladder: Self-improving LLMs through recursive problem decomposition","text":"I think you'll get a lot of use from this video from Andrej Karpathy: [VIDEO] It is long, but don't get scared off. He goes over a ton of different stuff related to model training, but makes it very easy to understand.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43677331,"author":"GodelNumbering","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Show HN: I made a free tool that analyzes SEC filings and posts detailed reports","text":"Depending on how much time you have, the first thing I would recommend is to watch Karpathy's 'deep dive into LLMs' video ( [VIDEO] ). It is 3.5 hours but it will give you so much instinctive understanding of how these things work and will likely save you a lot of time. Purely from a technical standpoint, things aren't that difficult really. I'd recommend get yourself an API account with all major providers (because each frontier LLM evidently has their own strengths and weaknesses) and start experimenting with your data. The feeling you'll get when you first get an API response will keep you going! :) Having said that, a caveat is, LLMs do hallucinate from time to time. If your data needs accuracy, definitely don't do the \"throw everything at LLMs and let them do the work\" but I'm sure you'll figure it out from trial and error. Good luck!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45542438,"author":"runjake","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Build Your Own LLM?","text":"Since you're posting here, you're looking for the shortcut. The shortcut is Karpathy's \"Let's Build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out\" video: [LINK] Then there is a good video that dives into LLMs and how they work that is quite approachable: [VIDEO] From there, flesh out knowledge with his other videos, where he goes both extremely light and extremely deep: [LINK] Anyway, I really like's Karpathy's video because he's very good at explaining LLMs at every level.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45982611,"author":"pengaru","month":"2025-11","story_title":"LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful","text":"This is like the LLM era version of the search bubble that prevented people from having the same search results for ostensibly identical searches. Also keep in mind that LLMs are stochastic by design. If you haven't seen it, Karpathy's excellent \"deep dive into LLMs like chatgpt\" video[0] explains and demonstrates this aspect pretty well: [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47002572,"author":"romanhn","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What would you recommend a vibe coder learn about how all this works?","text":"I highly recommend Andrej Karpathy's Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT: [VIDEO] . It's a 3.5 hour general intro to the topic that I think does a great job of making sense of the tech and how it works under the hood, without needing to build up a foundation of math and programming.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47206595,"author":"etothet","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Microgpt","text":"Even if you have some basic understanding of how LLMs work, I highly recommend Karpathy\u2019s intro to LLMs videos on YouTube. - [VIDEO] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43499494,"author":"wzdd","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Tracing the thoughts of a large language model","text":"> The models still _generate_ response token-by-token, but they pick tokens _not_ based on tokens that maximize probabilities at each token. This is also not how base training works. In base training the loss is chosen given a context, which can be gigantic. It's never about just the previous token, it's about a whole response in context. The context could be an entire poem, a play, a worked solution to a programming problem, etc, etc. So you would expect to see the same type of (apparent) higher-level planning from base trained models and indeed you do and can easily verify this by downloading a base model from HF or similar and prompting it to complete a poem. The key differences between base and agentic models are 1) the latter behave like agents, and 2) the latter hallucinate less. But that isn't about planning (you still need planning to hallucinate something). It's more to do with post-base training specifically being about providing positive rewards for things which aren't hallucinations. Changing the way the reward function is computed during RL doesn't produce planning, it simply inclines to model to produce responses that are more like the RL targets. Karpathy has a good intro video on this. [VIDEO] In general the nitpicking seems weird. Yes, on a mechanical level, using a model is still about \"given this context, what is the next token\". No, that doesn't mean that they don't plan, or have higher-level views of the overal structure of their response, or whatever.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43532571,"author":"highhedgehog","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Ask HN: If you had 100 hours to learn something new, what would you learn?","text":"There is a very good intro on how LLM work by Kharpaty. It's [VIDEO] and it's 3.30 hours, so way below the 100 hours mark :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44424942,"author":"matthewolfe","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Show HN: TokenDagger \u2013 A tokenizer faster than OpenAI's Tiktoken","text":"Modal's GPU glossary is a good overview about how GPUs work [0]. Karpathy's LLM overview is a good high level overview on LLMs [1]. 3b1b's video (and subsequent videos) on transformers was excellent at helping me understand the math at a high level [2]. This matrix multiplication optimization worklog helped me understand writing better CUDA (not for beginner intro though) [3]. During this process I also asked ChatGPT a lot of questions. I'm definitely open to suggestions about \"how to learn\" with all the new tools we have. I felt this has not been straightforward to figure out. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46489928,"author":"npalli","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Neural Networks: Zero to Hero","text":"This is a good resource, however for about 99.99% of people, you are most likely to just use a foundation model like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini etc. so this knowledge/training will get you neither here or there. I would suggest you look into another Karpathy's video -- Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7y1xJAVZxXg":[{"hn_comment_id":11646139,"author":"downandout","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Homeless alone","text":"Many people believe in the mistaken \"no pain, no gain\" philosophy. People seem to believe that somehow the universe will recognize their sacrifice and reward them accordingly. John Oliver did an excellent piece on a new crop of so-called \"seed faith\" televangelists that have popped up to fleece poor people that believe in this philosophy [1]. The reality, of course, is the opposite. The most successful people I have known have all started their businesses while their lives were relatively stable. That doesn't mean they started off rich, but it does mean they weren't spending all of their time trying to figure out where they were going to sleep or where their next meal was coming from. These days, it is wholly unnecessary to quit your job or move to SV to make a startup happen, and doing so is counterproductive in almost all cases. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14293869,"author":"soheil","month":"2017-05","story_title":"John Oliver pleads with viewers to revive net neutrality fight","text":"Not sure why you're getting so many down votes, but I completely agree with you. Some of his shows were incredible a few years back, two that come to mind: Televangelists[1] and Debt Buyers[2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10526391,"author":"snake117","month":"2015-11","story_title":"GoFundMe Gone Wild","text":"This reminded me of something similar: televangelists asking people for \"seed faiths\". If you haven't heard about this yet, check out this video from Last Week Tonight: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13906148,"author":"linuxkerneldev","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Engineer Converts Van into Laundromat, Offers Free Loads to Homeless","text":"> what's the economic return on proselytizing? Interesting question. I did a quick check. It looks to be incredibly profitable, at least for main stream religious organizations (which tend to also be tax free). The two top links for googling \"profit of church\" are: Eg: From CNN: \" 1. The Vatican Bank has $8 billion in assets The Vatican Bank, which has about $8 billion in assets, has often been at the center of scandal and corruption since it was founded in 1942. Pope Benedict began the process of cleaning the bank up, and Francis has continued that work. \" [LINK] \" THE Sydney Catholic archdiocese controls funds worth more than $1.2 billion and has regularly made multi-million dollar tax-free profits. The royal commission into child sex abuse heard the archdiocese banked surpluses of between $7.7 million and $44 million between 2004 and 2007, a period during which the Catholic church was aggressively defending a claim for $100,000 brought against it by former altar boy John Ellis. \" [LINK] I believe John Oliver had an excellent analysis of how proselytizing tends to victimize the poorest section of society. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"7zrx-b2sLUs":[{"hn_comment_id":27224258,"author":"coldpie","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite purchases of last two years?","text":"> So the heat pumps can also do cooling during the summer? Here's a pair of really great videos about heat pumps and what they can (and could, in the future) do: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34852636,"author":"sushiburps","month":"2023-02","story_title":"200-year old heat pump technology is back","text":"Highly recommend the YouTube channel 'Technology Connections' videos on heat pumps: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30747774,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2022-03","story_title":"You and the planet need a heat pump","text":"It depends on the heat pump. If you get a mini-split, and have decent insulation, they can work down to -20C: * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] Some folks using them in Alaska: * [LINK] If you get a heat pump that looks like the 'traditional' external AC unit (giant cube), those tend to work down to about +5C. Not sure how much more they cost above a 'regular' air conditioner: * [LINK] The Technology Connections channel has a couple of interesting videos on the topic of heat pumps: * [LINK] * [VIDEO] He has a video entitled \"How to calculate when heat pumps make financial sense (and other heat pump follow-up thoughts)\": * [LINK] NR Canada has a \"AIR-SOURCE HEAT PUMP SIZING AND SELECTION GUIDE\": * [LINK] Financially speaking you're going to have to break out a spreadsheet and plug numbers in: (natural) gas prices, electricity prices, efficiency of the units, etc. Doing a search for \"heat pump calculator\" may get you started.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32966193,"author":"timbit42","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Homemade Heat Pump Manifesto (2009)","text":"They are great if you are looking to use electricity to heat because they are 3 to 4 times more efficient than resistive heaters. It depends on the price of electricity and other heat sources in your area. If you live in the north where temperatures go below -15 Celsius, air-to-air units aren't as great because they lose efficiency as it gets colder outside. My heat pump has a COP of 3, meaning it can generate as much heat as a resistive heater using 1/3 the electricity, but it shuts off at -15 Celsius because below that point it is less efficient than resistive heat. If your heat pump has a COP of 4, you might get to -25 Celsius before it is less efficient than a resistive heater. Better, but more costly, heat pumps use in-ground water, either from a pair of wells, or from a deep pond that won't freeze to the bottom, or from many meters of water pipe buried deep enough beneath your lawn to not freeze in the winter. Because of the depth, they always have access to the earth's heat so they don't lose efficiency in the winter. The Technology Connections YT channel has a couple of good videos about how them: 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34358056,"author":"nayuki","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Do heat pumps work in cold climates?","text":"He made several excellent videos explaining residential heat pumps: [2021-02-28] [LINK] \"Heat Pumps: the Future of Home Heating\" (35m14s) [2021-04-01] [VIDEO] \"Ground Source / Geothermal Heat Pumps and Other Info\" (28m03s) [2022-03-26] [LINK] \"Why Heat Pumps are Immensely Important Right Now\" (21m02s) [2022-04-13] [LINK] \"Heat Pumps are Not Hard: Here's what it will take to start pumping\" (46m32s)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46865075,"author":"Joel_Mckay","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed","text":"They are a very efficient way to get both AC and Heating: [LINK] [VIDEO] Unless you live in a cold climate, they are worth it for a discounted energy bill =3","stance":"rec"}],"8--5LwHRhjk":[{"hn_comment_id":25689173,"author":"kn8a","month":"2021-01","story_title":"2020 Mathematical Art Exhibition","text":"This was a mind blowing example of math and art from last year - perhaps the live coding of the method was even more impressive than the outcome: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25946777,"author":"sxp","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-Time Rendering with Implicit 3D Surfaces","text":"If you don't have an understanding of signed distance fields, [VIDEO] is an amazing demo of their power. There are more videos about the fundamentals of SDFs at [LINK] The interesting thing about this paper is that they replace the mathematical SDF with a neural net that computes SDF_NN(x,y,z) => -1/1 and use this as a compression system for mesh based inputs. This feels like a graphical version of the [LINK] for NN-based text compression.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28169892,"author":"gregsadetsky","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Fishdraw: Procedurally Generated Fish Drawings","text":"Agreed. Check out his incredible videos! Such as this mind-blowing one... [VIDEO] \"Painting a Selfie Girl, with Maths\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34075707,"author":"nighthawk454","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Signed distance functions in 46 lines of Python","text":"Great write up. If anyone wants to explore SDFs more, check out Inigo Quilez - he's a master of this stuff and a great explainer. Painting a Character with Maths: [VIDEO] And plenty more on his website in article form: [LINK] Finally, Shadertoy, a graphics shader playground where you can see (and try!) a lot of this kind of stuff: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35674544,"author":"dgellow","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Simple Pathtracing","text":"I see a Inigo Quilez link, I upvote! He's one of those incredible artist-engineer out there always pushing boundaries further and sharing his ideas and techniques publicly. If you have some time today, watch a few of his videos on his youtube channel, it's incredible to see his creation process in action: [LINK] For example, \"Painting a character with maths\" is mind-blowing and packed with SO MUCH educative content: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25627023,"author":"lligallo","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Graphtoy","text":"Checkout this video by the author. It makes a full 3d complex scene out of a math formula, with step by step explanation [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26710736,"author":"dominicjj","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Condition: A 64KB WebGL Intro","text":"Demos are almost always generated and displayed at runtime. The music is composed of samples generated at runtime by additive synthesis which is just adding waveforms of differing frequencies together when you get down to it. It doesn't take many lines of code to produce CD quality instruments that can be arranged as a soundtrack. Today's 64k intros offload their drawing onto the GPU using shaders and a technique called raymarching which is a form of fixed-step raytracing that can be done in real time. Essentially the objects you see are painted with math: instead of thousands of vertices for a 3d fractal or a complex object, a formula is fed in to the ray marcher and it returns a shape with colors and lighting. Combining shapes using unions and intersections is then done and often the shape formula will take time as a parameter as well. To play with this concept yourself go to [LINK] and see how shader programs are rendered into incredible scenes with astonishingly few lines of code. For a wonderful look at the creation process, see the grandfather of raymarching Inigo Quilez create a selfie of a girl from scratch using formulas here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31235637,"author":"lifthrasiir","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Making graphics in 4 kilobytes (2008) [pdf]","text":"Inigo Quilez, the author of this slide, also has made in-depth videos [1] [2] which might be more accessible to who aren't familiar with shader languages. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31375095,"author":"brundolf","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Sliderland \u2013 Creative coding with 64 HTML sliders","text":"It's very similar to writing shaders. Check out this video for some crazy stuff you can do with equations: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35338774,"author":"pdpi","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Procedural 3D mesh generation in a 64kB intro","text":"And, if we're suggesting Shadertoy, this video by one of its creators is probably worth watching: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37530172,"author":"antegamisou","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Painting with Math: A Gentle Study of Raymarching","text":"Good to see high quality articles gaining traction. If the article looks too verbose, be sure to check out, as the author cites, Inigo Quilez's videos Painting a Landscape with Maths - [LINK] Painting a Character with Maths - [VIDEO] Bonus: Painting with Maths in Google Sheets - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44059112,"author":"emigre","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Inigo Quilez: computer graphics, mathematics, shaders, fractals, demoscene","text":"Check out 'Painting a Character with Maths' [1] (2020) by him, it's a very interesting video. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46024129,"author":"Jare","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates","text":"Obligatory \"this painting is a mathematical formula, a big function on the x and y coordinates of each pixel\" video from I\u00f1igo Quilez. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"816VLQNdPMM":[{"hn_comment_id":15780929,"author":"lj3","month":"2017-11","story_title":"How I learned to write music in real time","text":"Perfect Pitch is 30% more likely in societies with tonal language. Kids who are exposed to complicated music at an early age also have a higher chance of having perfect pitch. Here's the best video[0] on Perfect Pitch I've seen. It starts at 4:25 because he spends the first four minutes responding to indignant youtube commenters. Then he digs into the science. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35760692,"author":"rendall","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch","text":"This video convinced me that adults cannot develop or train perfect pitch. \"Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch\" by Rick Beato [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35758483,"author":"hashmap","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch","text":"This isn't quite right; the University of Chicago study replicates what has already been known for a long time - that musicians can develop their pitch memory around the timbral context clues of a particular instrument. However, this learned pitch does not generalize to other instruments and/or common everyday sounds (train horns, washing machine vibrations) in the way that people with absolute pitch can instantly identify. An analogy to this might be that a colorblind person if shown enough fabric and told what the colors were can eventually associate the texture of the fabric with a given color and can learn to do this translating in their head, but they will not be able to train their eyes to see color no matter how much practice takes place. Rick Beato covers the subject rather well in his video \"Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch\" [VIDEO] If it were the case that such a substantial number of amateur test subjects could develop absolute pitch from doing a few exercises, we would expect to see commensurate numbers of musicians who spend thousands of hours playing music to also develop this skill, but this is not and has never been the case.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36425336,"author":"kerblang","month":"2023-06","story_title":"How My Children (N=2) Acquired Absolute Pitch","text":"Rick Beato made several videos about perfect pitch, also featuring his kid who has PP and can identify entire chords. Apparently his opinion is that the key was listening to atonal music at an early age, like you say. Here's one of the more interesting videos: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"826HMLoiE_o":[{"hn_comment_id":4461107,"author":"JPKab","month":"2012-08","story_title":"The humans who outrun horses","text":"[VIDEO] This is a video of human hunters (Koi San, an African ethnic group that has been pushed to extinction over the last millennia by the Bantu tribes) chasing down a kudu antelope. Antelope are great runners, but they can't cool themselves as efficiently as humans. It's a beautiful video, and the way the hunter reacts after the kill is very moving.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2187286,"author":"liuhenry","month":"2011-02","story_title":"Belgian man completes 365 marathons in 365 consecutive days","text":"The San Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert still do this today. This BBC clip on persistence hunting (narrated by David Attenborough!) is worth a watch; their endurance is absolutely incredible: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6449442,"author":"Synaesthesia","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Why humans can outrun horses but can\u2019t jump higher than cats.","text":"Check this remarkable video on persistence hunting in the kalahari - a hunter literally chases a buck until it's completely exhausted. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13730105,"author":"stanfordkid","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Bees can train each other to use tools","text":"Either that -- or our perception of morality is wrong. Maybe it's okay to eat animals as long as we treat them well. After all if they live a long happy and decently full life that's what really counts right? I think this video really gives a good idea of how humanity used to think of hunting and eating animals: [VIDEO] We've really lost touch with our empathy for other creatures In the old days people would respect the animal, hug it after killing it... on some level I think animals understand that their own death is a part of life.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14237626,"author":"Fricken","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Why Walking Helps Us Think (2014)","text":"There's the loci method for memorization: The method of loci (loci being Latin for \"places\") is a method of memory enhancement which uses visualizations with the use of spatial memory, familiar information about one's environment, to quickly and efficiently recall information. The method of loci is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, or mind palace technique. Many memory contest champions claim to use this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words. These champions' successes have little to do with brain structure or intelligence, but more to do with using spatial memory and the use of the method of loci. [LINK] Correlations have been found between memory and the playing of 3D video games, which also utilize our spatial memory. (Though wandering around in a video game is probably a subpar surrogate for doing the same thing in meatspace.) [LINK] I also recommend this BBC video of a persistence hunter tracking and running down a Kudu, just as an illustration of how walking/running, language/tracking, spatial memory, and planning/creativity are all tied together as a system that was once necessary for our survival: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32906464,"author":"Andy_G11","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Aleksandr Sorokin smashes 24-hour world record with 198.6 mile run","text":"Interesting video here of one of the San people running down a Kudu which collapses from exhaustion after an 8 hour chase: [VIDEO] . Hard to compare this to Sorokin because the hunter is running in veld, not on a road, and has far less access to refueling points. Also, if he fails to track the prey down on day one, he would probably have a go again on day two, maybe even day three. Interesting claims too, that as an upright runner which sweats from glands all over his body, and as a creature capable of carrying water, man may have had persistence advantages over creatures with less ability to cool themselves and which run on four legs - a less energy efficient mode of running according to Attenborough.","stance":"rec"}],"8455KEDitpU":[{"hn_comment_id":21037712,"author":"PKop","month":"2019-09","story_title":"America\u2019s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys","text":"Because they know it won't be under water in just a few years, and that the climate scare is selective presentation of statistics in service of propaganda to consolidate political power. Interesting view highlighting the selective presentation of statistics: [VIDEO] President Obama is one of those who must think the sea level won't rise dramatically for a while, given he recently bought property near the ocean.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21037741,"author":"PKop","month":"2019-09","story_title":"America\u2019s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys","text":"A counter-argument to climate alarmist statistics, shows use of selective presentation of statistics to portray specific conclusion on climate change: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27702109,"author":"olivermarks","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Coldest inhabited place on Earth is baking in record heat","text":"Climate alarmists have a poor reputation around data manipulation as this short video discussing the recent US climate assessment unpacks. [LINK] [VIDEO] 11 year solar cycles are a split second moment in time in comparison to the longer term data which is so often cherry picked and truncated to illustrate various agendas, whether dishonest globalist energy corporate entities or climate alarmists. I'm all for responsible stewardship of the planet, but there i s no shortage of climate grifters, charlatans and hustlers out there, many of whom are actually influencing government policy and data. Unhelpful.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35259078,"author":"revelio","month":"2023-03","story_title":"IPCC climate crisis report delivers \u2018final warning on 1.5C\u2019","text":"It's honest. You can just click through the stories to see for yourself. Of course you can try to find one you feel is weak, cherry pick it and then try to dismiss all the others, but all those false predictions are still there and won't go away. W.R.T. the one you picked, the extinctionclock assessment is correct. The claims being made are about \"deaths, hospital admissions and mental health disorders, dengue fever and gastroenteritis\". Deaths from extreme weather are down drastically over time. Very unclear why they predicted a rise in mental health disorders from climate change, but nobody outside the most extremist climate change fanatics are trying to claim a link there. Contemporary discussion about mental health problems focus on the effect of social media on teen girls. Dengue fever in Australia is also trending down (figure 8 here [LINK] ). I didn't bother checking gastroenteritis. Finally, wildfires - not mentioned in the actual paragraph you cited. Here is a graph of wildfires in Australia over time. [LINK] 2019 and 2020 were abnormal years for Australian wildfires. As you can see, 2021 reverted to the mean which is stable. There is no increasing trend in wildfires, just a couple of bad years that the media cherry-picked to try and make you think the world is burning. You have to be so careful when listening to climatologists, because they love to engage in data truncation and cherry picking to make deceptive claims. This video shows the problem, and I linked you d","stance":"rec"}],"85ZCTuekjGA":[{"hn_comment_id":22079200,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Show HN: 1.5kb Microkernel for Ben Eater's 6502 Computer","text":"Semi-related, I've been enjoying Robert Baruch's videos[1] on creating a FPGA implementation of the 6800, using nMigen and formal verification. First videos are almost like live coding, then he skips to a more compact format. As a regular programmer, it's quite interesting to get into how the bits actually end up getting the work done. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24105805,"author":"krasin","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Glasgow: Scots Army Knife for Electronics","text":"nMigen is pretty cool and capable. I can only recommend these Youtube series, where nMigen is used to build a full 6800 CPU: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26343331,"author":"MrRadar","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Lion: A formally verified, 5-stage pipeline RISC-V core","text":"Robert Baruch on Youtube is building a RISC-V CPU core of comparable complexity to the one in the OP using nMigen which is an HDL based on Python and it looks like a very nice tool to work with relative to other HDLs I've seen (though I've never had to actually use an HDL myself before so I may not be the best judge). Here's a playlist of the video series, with the earlier videos basically being an introduction to nMigen: [LINK] He's got another series that's focused more on the HDL itself building a (relatively much simpler) 6800 CPU core: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28399904,"author":"krasin","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Awesome Lattice FPGA Boards","text":"TinyFPGA BX ([1]) and nmigen/yosys as the fully open source toolchain for generating logic with Python and formally verifying it ([2], [3]). There is a good nMigen tutorial by Robert Baruch ([4]. [5]). Alternatively, if you really want to try Verilog first (not a bad idea), I enjoyed reading a book \"Designing Video Game Hardware in Verilog\" ([6]). 1. [LINK] 2. [LINK] 3. [LINK] 4. [LINK] 5. [VIDEO] 6. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"86Krv3gE-c4":[{"hn_comment_id":3576365,"author":"slamdunc","month":"2012-02","story_title":"Sneak peek of the greatest toy robot ever invented","text":"Brilliant - here's Part 1 that you mentioned (he's posted 300+ videos). I'm afraid I've wrecked what's left of the work day as I follow the saga. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25131801,"author":"patcon","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Adventure Builders Club","text":"Oh man, I've been idly following Jamie for like a decade. This guy appears to have a beautiful form of mechanical engineer OCD and has somehow managed to escape society so that his spirit was never crushed, and he makes videos so that everyone can watch in wonder ;) From the beginning circa 2007: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2758101,"author":"Joakal","month":"2011-07","story_title":"A lesson on the importance of encouraging your children with their projects","text":"Reminds me about this dedicated builder: [LINK] He builds pretty amazing stuff like indoor trampoline [0] and a robotic spider [1]. Due to his increasing popularity and requests to learn from him, he created the adventure builders club: [LINK] Some more about him in this thread that propelled him to fame on Reddit: [LINK] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"86gyW0vUmVs":[{"hn_comment_id":40240695,"author":"jacobolus","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Gene banks aren\u2019t enough to save the world\u2019s food","text":"I recently came across the videos of Oregon State horticulturalist Andrew Millison, who is an amazingly clear presenter about permaculture: [LINK] For example, he has nice videos about chinampas in Mexico [VIDEO] , a medieval Indian canal tunnel of a style found throughout Iran [LINK] , efforts to return a Hawaiian watershed to something like its historical state [LINK] , the Indian Paani Foundation's \"water cup\" to revitalize drought stricken villages [LINK] , and the difficulty of using ancient iron-saturated aquifers for irrigation in western Egypt [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37977066,"author":"datameta","month":"2023-10","story_title":"A Dutch graphic artist reconstructed Tenochtitlan in 3D","text":"The chinampas are a super neat example of agroforestry. The soil is extremely dark (like Ukrainian chernozem or better) and has a very low depletion per cycle. Some still exist and are being stewarded toward renewal and proliferation! [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47882706,"author":"culi","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Girl, 10, finds rare Mexican axolotl under Welsh bridge","text":"This is awesome, thanks for sharing. Andrew Wilson, who works with the United Nations World Food Program, also made an in-depth minidoc on them: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"86x-u-tz0MA":[{"hn_comment_id":4215498,"author":"wglb","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope) ","text":"This is really quite germane: [VIDEO] . While she talks about writing, I think it applies to the kind of thing you are talking about here.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4274866,"author":"bgilroy26","month":"2012-07","story_title":"The \"Just look at it\" hack for problem solving","text":"This TED talk by the author of Eat, Pray, Love addresses the very question at hand: \"Who/What is responsible for creativity?\". It approaches the question from a very subjective point of view. I haven't read her book, but she is humble and relatable in the video. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"87jfTIWosBw":[{"hn_comment_id":20742517,"author":"Impossible","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Pico-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker","text":"I'm a huge Pico-8 fan and suggest that anyone that is interested in Pico-8 watch Joseph White's (the creator) Practice (NYU game designer conference) talk about the design philosophy of Pico-8. [VIDEO] . The TLDW of the talk is that he explicitly tried to built a \"cozy\" game development environment with enough constraints in place to encourage creativity without the stress of starting from a completely blank canvas. At the end Scott Hanselman has a footnote about building or buying a physical Pico-8 console. One thing that is missing is most Pico-8 consoles focus on the play aspect of Pico-8, not the creation aspect of Pico-8 which is just as important to me if not more so. I own a PocketCHIP and the device is a decent handheld computer, but there are many aspects of it that make it painful to use, not due to the form factor but due to the quality of various components. The keyboard is bad although there are a variety of solutions, including 3D printed covers ( [LINK] ) or rubber feet ( [LINK] ). The quality of the screen and touch is also not great, so it was hard for me to draw pixel art on the device. I'd like to build a custom handheld computer primarily for Pico-8 development built around this display [LINK] , probably using a Raspberry Pi Zero. One of my issues with Pocketchip was that the entire system felt kind of slow\\high latency and more compute might be one of the only fixes for that, so rpi zero might not cut it. I'd probably have to print my own case and I still","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18243423,"author":"Impossible","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Is there a modern \u201cpower on to basic\u201d computer, for kids to learn on?","text":"All of these are explicit design choices, for example a fixed palette is important to give games a \"Pico-8\" look and also reduce decisions regarding color choice. I suggest you watch Joseph White's practice talk ( [VIDEO] ) if you're curious about design decisions that guided Pico-8. Multiple resolutions would absolutely break the \"Fantasy console\" feel of Pico-8, even though I understand why programmers universally hate that. To be fair a lot of people do code editing outside of the Pico-8 editor. #4 is an interesting point. The trick here is that different parents have different ideas of what is and isn't appropriate, and of course different kids will have different responses. It seems like the answer is to maybe have a version of Pico-8 that removes splore and expands the demo carts with some universally safe, popular titles. TIC-80 is cool btw and might be a better learning environment for kids. I don't like it (or any of the other fantasy console\\pico-8 clones) quite as much as Pico-8 because they remove constraints, making them feel more like generic game editors and less like imaginary retro computers.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33891315,"author":"havercosine","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The cloudy layers of modern-day programming (or what programming has become)","text":"I agree that most of the routine software work feels like, umm, filling forms? The way I've made peace with it is to accept that the work that pays the bills is going to be boring. After considering ourselves to be special as software developers for many years, maybe we accept that it is not so special after all, like flipping burgers. Two ways to out from the existential dread: one startup on a problem statement that feels exciting to you, so that you get to pick your tools, processes and what not. But this is not a realistic/affordable option for most people. Also, if your startup achieves even a moderate level of success, you'll be back to solving boring problems. The other is to find a pockets of software development outside work, where you can still solve interesting problems, like developing small games. Joseph White, who created the famed programmable fantasy game console Pico-8 alludes to this ( [VIDEO] ) ! It was an explicit goal to build a tool to solve cute, interesting problems because routine software development feels like glueing things together. The whole youtube talk linked above is worth watching. But the trick here is to forgo commercial motivations. People make fun, cute little games on Pico 8, distribute them as cartridges. Occasionally, there's a hit like Celeste. But otherwise its a small community of people solving problems and building things just for fun.","stance":"rec"}],"8AHCfZTRGiI":[{"hn_comment_id":23037759,"author":"chiph","month":"2020-05","story_title":"I\u2019ve Consed Every Pair","text":"Man. I miss Johnny Cash. His cover of NI\u0418's Hurt is so powerful. June Carter (his wife) died a few months after filming the video, and that just broke his heart. Johnny followed her less than six months later. [VIDEO] Trent Reznor admitted that the song was no longer his after watching it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37823909,"author":"InSteady","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Advice for Prospective PhD Students","text":"Almost completely unrelated to the article, but I figure a few of you prospective PhD candidates could use a mental break anyway, so here goes. Had a nice Baader-Meinhof moment from the article. I have been obsessed with music from a young age, not just the output but also the creative and technical processes that come together to make it, yet despite reading and watching a lot about my favorite bands, the creative process, the music industry over the years I've never internalized his name (although I've doubtless encountered references to him many times). I stumbled onto a documentary about Rubin and his studio Shangri-La last night and found it immediately captivating, musing to myself, \"Wow, what a cool and weird dude. How have I never picked up on his influence before?\" After the doc finished I enjoyed a nice session of creative thinking inspired by some things he and David Lynch were talking about. Cool, I've got a new person on my radar to seek out their words and wisdom when the mood or need arises. Then in the opening paragraphs of the first link I click this morning, on HN in a piece written for PhD candidates of all places, here is his name. Kind of wild. The song \"Hurt\" by Johnnie Cash [0] is a long-time favorite. It's one the greatest rock and roll covers ever, in no small part for how transformative and emotionally powerful the reinterpretation is, second only to \"Take It to the Limit\" by Etta James [1] imo. I just learned from that interview it was Rubin who bro","stance":"strong_rec"}],"8Ab3ArE8W3s":[{"hn_comment_id":43774877,"author":"jasonjmcghee","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Graphics livecoding in Common Lisp","text":"Live development is still so under-explored, and is just so exciting to work with. One of my favorite talks is \"Stop Writing Dead Programs\" ( [VIDEO] ) and touches on a lot of what could be in terms of live development. Lisp is very well-suited to live development due to code being data, but live development doesn't need to be lispy. I built a live development extension for Love2D which lets you do graphics livecoding (both lua and glsl) in real-time - every keystroke updating the output, (if a valid program). [LINK] Here are some (early) demos of things you can do with it: [LINK] So many cool things once you break down the barrier between editor and running program. I've also asked myself the question of, what would a language look like that was natively built for live development, and built out a prototype - though it's definitely a sandbox so haven't posted it anywhere yet, other than demos on mastadon.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34246333,"author":"okaleniuk","month":"2023-01","story_title":"LearnCPP: Website devoted to teaching you how to program in C++","text":"Because we live in a free society and smoking is a proper right. It is unhealthy and largely outdated habit but if you want to light a cigarette, you can. Programming in C++ is also an outdated habit. There are better languages, better technologies, and there are generally better ways to create software than writing code, compiling the code, replacing std::abs with abs (real issue, these are different functions) and recompiling the code again. But writing in a horrible language is a proper right as well. People write in Brainfuck for fun and good for them! Jack Rusher sums up what better programming looks like in his Strange Loop talk [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34587053,"author":"ttctciyf","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your unpopular tech, programming opinion","text":"Your \"unpopular rant\" (or one pretty much like it) has 376k views and 12k likes on youtube![1] (Recommended watch, not least for demystifying the origin of vi's navigation keys and the choice of ~/ for /home/you.) 1: [VIDEO] (link jumps to 16:52)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37159971,"author":"trashburger","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Dart 3.1 and a retrospective on functional style programming in Dart","text":"I believe this to be an artifact of our current paradigm of software development, which is based purely around static \"batch processing\" where the software can't be molded easily. (I didn't want it to come off as a plug, so I didn't add it to my original message, but I'm working on something to solve that.) To get a better idea of what I think is the better approach, check out these talks: Tudor G\u00eerba - Moldable development - [LINK] Jack Rusher - Stop Writing Dead Programs - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39667536,"author":"llm_trw","month":"2024-03","story_title":"(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) (2010)","text":"It's pretty much impossible to explain to people what it's like to work in a CL environment. A good presentation on what we're missing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40449514,"author":"iLemming","month":"2024-05","story_title":"A Road to Common Lisp (2018)","text":"> trying to understand what's happening in code is even harder It's different in Lisp because you basically program a thing from the inside out, meaning that you don't just read the code from top to bottom. Instead, you constantly evaluate expressions and expand macros while going through it. It's practically like playing a game, and there's a good amount of fun. People often dismiss Lisps (Clojure, CL, Fennel, Racket, etc.) after reading Lisp code without any connected REPL and often don't even grasp what makes it so awesome. It's like disliking food after seeing it for the first time in a cooking show on TV. Good talk of relevance: \"Stop Writing Dead Programs by Jack Rusher\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40486348,"author":"iLemming","month":"2024-05","story_title":"The Evolution of Lisp (1993) [pdf]","text":"> simple examples comparing Lisp ... that illustrate the benefits of using Lisp over another language It depends on what you're trying to get out of it. For example, you can grab a simple code of some React components with JSX and ask ChatGPT to write it in Hiccup (Clojure). That would show you how s-expressions can reduce the syntax boilerplate and make it smaller. You can do the same thing with Lua and Fennel - Fennel code would be much shorter and cleaner. However, without proper understanding and using structural editing and connected REPL, you probably won't see any benefits right away. Lisp code is not the best to be read off the \"dead medium\" - paper or screen. It's better when you have a connected REPL because it allows you to evaluate every single expression on the fly. Instead of trying to understand what (foo x y z) means, you can evaluate it and immediately see the results. With a connected REPL, you can evaluate them separately (individually), or together. Good talk of relevance: \"Stop Writing Dead Programs by Jack Rusher\" [VIDEO] Next step in understanding the benefits of Lisp code is learning structural editing. Because everything is a symbolic expression, you can easily move, transpose, change, and replace parts of your program. Instead of rewriting a function of seemingly arbitrary syntax constructs, you'll be dealing with well-structured forms that you can easily move around. No, it not the same, better or worse than using refactoring features of your IDE wi","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40551891,"author":"imachine1980_","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Lisp: Icing or Cake?","text":"Hi I think is in the hypothesis (I'm not sure) of that we have edition made by the pdp 11 keyboard developer and tooling that's old and design whiout introspection in mind showcase in this video, the video is really cool but little bit long [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40773381,"author":"hresvelgr","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Formal methods: Just good engineering practice?","text":"I think we might potentially be looking at this backwards. There is a great talk by Jack Rusher [1] on why having really slow iteration loops and being too disconnected from running programs creates a desire for theorem proving because it becomes the faster way to arrive at a correct solution. I am of the belief that we need to return to modifying live environments instead of sending code through a lengthy build pipeline. Instead of trying to make live environments secure and durable we got scared and now we have modern CI/CD. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44713369,"author":"iLemming","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Can Generative AI coding make Emacs and Org-Mode worth it now?","text":"> eventually gave up because -- well, Lisp, right? That would be an utterly misguided approach. Lisp is amazing, you just need to give it a chance to be appreciated. Accept it with all its flaws and immense power, surrender to the malleability of the structure, dynamism of types and its homoiconic nature and you may find something incredible that would last you a lifetime. You need to conquer two aspects - structural editing and REPL. Learn basic structural editing idioms - find a way in Emacs (or whatever editor of your choice) for automatically balancing parentheses, for slurping, barfing, transposing s-expressions, cutting and pasting them. That will make all your programming like literally assembling lego blocks - something every other (more traditional) programming language promises yet somehow fails to deliver. Then learn eval commands - get into the habit of REPL-driven development. With Lisp, you don't have to wait for compiler, transpiler, linker, linter, etc., you can just write anything and see how it runs in-place. Often, you don't even have to save anything to a file. Relevant video to watch: [VIDEO] - Stop Writing Dead Programs by Jack Rusher. Try modern Lisp dialects - there's plenty to choose from depending on what kind of tasks you're trying to solve - Clojure, Janet, Fennel are all very fine candidates. Clojure is especially nice if you need to deal with data. In my opinion it's hands down the best medium for data manipulation - nothing even comes close to t","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45142726,"author":"vim-guru","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Type checking is a symptom, not a solution","text":"I agree with the author. I've written my fair share of typed code, but it is way more valuable to probe your program while running. I feel Jack Rusher puts it quite nicely in this talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8An2SxNFvmU":[{"hn_comment_id":31066173,"author":"coolhoody","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Are you lost / confused / stuck? I can try to help","text":"The funny thing about this \u2014 is that quite a lot of people can help others \u2014 while not being able to help themselves. I had a startup idea \u2014 for people in need of such help helping and motivating each other \u2014 noticing that I can solve rather complex problems of others while being a prize moron within my own code block. Didn't follow through due to d. My advice to you is: 1. Don't be discouraged if this dies in 'New', it'll go off when it's ready. 2. Always condense your pitches \u2014 to nontrivial taglines, then expand with clear tag:reason for the busier people. 3. Be a tad more self-confident. Not in your guru skills \u2014 that's bad manners \u2014 but in the idea itself. All gurus are shit, except this one: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34388353,"author":"komali2","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Four Thousand Weeks","text":"> Practice doing nothing I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I really like the videos by \"Unmotivational Speaker Self-help Singh\" [VIDEO] > Just do nothing... do the least amount of work without getting fired... release yourself of obligation and responsibility... everything you think you need to do has been done before you, and will be done without you... you are not special... the world is fucked, and you cannot unfuck it, so just do you... stop searching for the meaning of life, that is futile, you will die just as confused as you are now... so just be happy Recently my partner got laid off with a 3 month severance, and after working her ass off for years it's her first chance to relax \"without guilt,\" she's literally being paid to do nothing (and, well, look for a job, but in her market it won't take long to find another). It's been fascinating to watch her jump between guilt at doing nothing but playing Elden Ring, to righteousness that she deserves it, to fanatic exploration of new hobbies and skills, back to tremendous laziness. She complains about being bored, and it makes me think, what a fantastic opportunity, to be bored. What a privilege, honestly, what a human right , that's been stolen from all of us. The right to be bored. To sit around, having exhausted all the little means to entertain yourself, finally just sitting in your chair, thinking, what's the point? Why am I here? Why am I alive? What should I do with myself? She gets to explore what her purp","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41553381,"author":"sys42590","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Nothing: Simply Do Nothing","text":"That reminds me of a specific (de)motivational video of one of my favorite comedians Masood Boomgaard, which specifically covers the rat race that prevails in todays workplace culture. While it's meant to be funny, it actually touches some deeper philosophical truths. [VIDEO] [Do Nothing - a message of motivation from Self-help Singh- (un) motivational speaker and life coach]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34050067,"author":"oliwary","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The Productivity Blocker","text":"Brilliant, I feel like many could benefit from this on the weekends. In the same vein, \"Do nothing\" by self-help Singh: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8AyHH9G9et0":[{"hn_comment_id":16044797,"author":"sundvor","month":"2018-01","story_title":"When volcanic ash stopped a Jumbo at 37000 feet (2010)","text":"Awesome. This story never gets old. I just found this recent video of it as well: [VIDEO] EDIT: Speeds mentioned in vid are 100 knots higher in the video than GP's link (1942 vs 1842)?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19506418,"author":"linsomniac","month":"2019-03","story_title":"The SR-71 Spy Plane Was So Fast, It Outran Every Missile Fired at It","text":"If you haven't heard the \"SR-71 Speed Check\" story, it's pretty amusing. As told by the pilot: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8BIcAZxFfrc":[{"hn_comment_id":38752136,"author":"faeriechangling","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Hbomberguy didn't want to make that 4-hour plagiarism video","text":"hbomberguy rocks. His documentary on Andrew Wakefield has become my definitive answer to people who ask me if the MMR vaccine causes autism, a question I have been asked directly and indirectly for decades. Despite the fact I'd been asked this for decades, and despite me having much time to research this topic in that time, his 2 hour documentary released two years ago blew everything I had ever seen anybody say on the subject out of the water. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27889749,"author":"marticode","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?","text":"Wakefield got off easy. This video does a good (and humorous) job of reviewing everything that was wrong with him and his study and it's a dense... 1h40m [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45999734,"author":"precommunicator","month":"2025-11","story_title":"RFK Jr.'s loathesome edits: CDC website now falsely links vaccines and autism","text":"I highly recommend this deep dive, with some entertainment value: Vaccines and Autism: A Measured Response [1]. It shows how absurd those claims are [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8CAafjodkyE":[{"hn_comment_id":28631863,"author":"macNchz","month":"2021-09","story_title":"A different kind of keyboard","text":"Thanks for the link, super interesting to watch. Over the years as a programmer I've picked up knowledge about web accessibility from a mechanical, standards/implementation focused point of view, but this video is helping me realize that my understanding has been lacking a level of depth and empathy for the real people using these tools. Looking through some of her other videos I found this demonstration of camera-to-speech in the iPhone pretty awesome\u2013I had no idea that this was a feature: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27168841,"author":"mimischi","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Apple Support: How to hear image descriptions in the Camera app","text":"The YouTube channel by Kristy Viers has been helpful in understanding how they use an iPhone and other devices. Here\u2019s a video on VoiceOver in the Camera app: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32338661,"author":"aasasd","month":"2022-08","story_title":"What\u2019s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?","text":"I'll one-up this a bit: a blind woman called Kristy Viers demonstrates on YouTube how she uses various things, among them iPhone with the onscreen six-finger Braille keyboard. But also she uses the \u2018magnifier\u2019 app to tell her what is there around her, i.e. what the camera sees: [VIDEO] (The videos are filmed by her boyfriend, in case someone has to wonder.) I realize that the vid is not too informative to a blind person, other than a vague demo. IDK where to find more info on the setup, since I'm not a user of iPhones myself. Comments on YouTube say that the magnifier app is in the accessibility options, that it adds a home screen app when enabled, and that it works at least on iPhone 10 since that's what Kristy uses. I would also guess that such usage requires persistent mobile connection and consumes considerable traffic and battery\u2014but again, with modern tech magic I won't bet against it working locally on the phone. On Android, the feature called \u2018Lens\u2019 in the Google's camera app can describe some things, more useful to seeing people IMO: e.g. the model of a car\u2014basically the same as Google's image search does, these days. Also purportedly can read and translate text signs. But IDK how far that goes, never heard of it doing stuff like those descriptions by the iPhone magnifier.","stance":"rec"}],"8CMxDNuuAiQ":[{"hn_comment_id":9321991,"author":"_prometheus","month":"2015-04","story_title":"IPFS is a new peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol","text":"(EDIT: we've a meetup coming up soon. The SV Ethereum Meetup is hosting an intro to IPFS later this month in San Francisco: [LINK] come hang out!) --------------- Hello Everyone! --------------- @jbenet here. Thanks for all the attention! Did not expect to wake up to this post today :) The best resources for learning about ipfs are: - The IPFS Paper: [LINK] (note: DRAFT 3, working on DRAFT 4, lots has evolved.) - The Alpha Demo: [VIDEO] - The First Tech Talk: [LINK] - The IRC Logs: [LINK] -- there's so much knowledge in these, we're working on moving it over. We're working on a bunch of more expository media: - Specs!! [LINK] - More Demos - More Talks - Draft 4 of the paper But there's only so many hours in a day, and we spend most of our time developing. All the resources will be way more polished as time goes on. Please bear with us as we make these available. In the meantime, ask questions in our new FAQ (below), or in #ipfs on irc.freenode.net -- And we'll be answering questions here too of course. I've just created: [LINK] -- if you ask questions there we can build a knowledge base IPFS already works-- you can install it and try it out. It's not production ready yet, but it's already very reliable. I use it to move around all sorts of personal files, and we use it to host many websites. Some people asked about what applications are there now? There's many static websites on ipfs, and some simple webapps. We ship our entire ipfs webui with ipfs itself (turtles all the way","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15887958,"author":"da02","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Decentralized Web Primer","text":"I'm with you on this one. I had to Google all of this for a few minutes. This is my best interpretation below. I hope others will come in and correct my silly mistakes. (Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer and English is my 2nd language): \"So you know how people use BitTorrent to distribute big-budget Hollywood movies with occasional mediocre storylines? What if you could distribute your own data on a similar P2P network, but view it directly in a web browser (among other HTTP clients)? You suddenly turn your seed box into a \"web server\". Plus, you can stream videos on it too. So your home computer is not just a \"web server\", it can act as your own \"Netflix\" server to publish your home movies. And you could do it in a secure fashion. You would need a few protocols (eg IPFS), concepts (eg Merkle Trees), and some freely available software to make it practical, easy, and secure. These tutorials will show you how to get all of those things working together to publish & stream to the world.\" Watch a demo of this @ 7:00 in this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8COaMKbNrX0":[{"hn_comment_id":7847529,"author":"nichochar","month":"2014-06","story_title":"NFL players: height and weight over time ","text":"Fasinating, reminds me of a great TED talk about this: \"Are athletes really getting bigger, faster, stronger?\" [VIDEO] tl;dr: no","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21507553,"author":"code_sloth","month":"2019-11","story_title":"I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike","text":"Professional sports today are the more result of artificial selection of people that have specialized bodies for their sport. Relevant TED talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22271773,"author":"aledalgrande","month":"2020-02","story_title":"How the Nike Vaporfly War Was Lost","text":"I can attest that running on a thick plated pair of shoes like the Zoom Fly SP I had is exhilarating, especially after training in other \"normal\" shoes. I see how the competition should measure athleticism and not a sponsor/athlete unit, but all recent records have been broken because of technology, let's be honest. I suggest you watch this TEDx for reference: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8FQhtMrUQlE":[{"hn_comment_id":318285,"author":"DabAsteroid","month":"2008-09","story_title":"SpaceX launches 1st commercial rocket into orbit","text":"You're welcome. Here is the 40-minute version that includes Elon Musk's post-launch address to the SpaceX employees in Hawthorne, California, and post-launch interview: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9546621,"author":"cspags","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Elon Musk\u2019s Space Dream Almost Killed Tesla","text":"Here's the video of the first Falcon 1 launch that reaches orbit. The series of cheers at each milestone, as the article mentions, is pretty awesome. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8FpigqfcvlM":[{"hn_comment_id":3948787,"author":"nateberkopec","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Two Universes","text":"Game designers have known this for years. For a (hilarious) examination of how Mega Man X employed the same philosophy, check out Egoraptor's video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4999000,"author":"Pewpewarrows","month":"2013-01","story_title":"If you see a good UI walkthrough - you probably didn't notice it","text":"Obligatory link to the Sequelitis Mega Man UX video: [VIDEO] The article hit the nail on the head: the best walkthrough is the one that it nearly invisible to the end-user, yet still accomplishes its goal of progressively introducing a UI to them in a long-lasting way.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22222530,"author":"gambiting","month":"2020-02","story_title":"OK Doomer","text":"So I just don't see that. To me the original doom is always more clunky than fast and fun, and the game has the annoying habit of releasing enemies from behind you. But yes, I think Mega Man X has aged fantastically, as in - the developers spent a really large amount of time on good level design and on teaching the player how the game works, so you could pick it up for the very first time in 2020 and get into it immediately. And no, I haven't played this when it came out first either. I think this highlights exactly what I'm talking about, look at the little things they are doing design wise, it's truly brilliant: [VIDEO] (Sorry, I know the video is meant to be a \"funny\" one, but it does make some very very good points about video game design)","stance":"rec"}],"8JOD1AQGqEg":[{"hn_comment_id":38796187,"author":"AlbertoGP","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Poor Man's Web","text":"> I feel like more people should watch Dylan Beattle's \"The Web that Never Was\" presentation. Didn\u2019t know about it, here is the video of that talk in YouTube: [VIDEO] There is a poem-style intro titled \u201cFlatscreens / a song about code\u201d until the talk proper starts at 5\u201911\u201d: [VIDEO] Edit: I\u2019m watching it and it is done in an entertaining style but is a bit loose on some details I know about, such as implying that the IBM PC development was started in the early 1970\u2019s when it was in fact started in 1980. Still worth watching so far. Edit 2: finished, it is definitely worth watching. It goes into \u201cThe Twilight Zone\u201d of a very interesting alternative history. And does a good job reporting on the Gary Kildall / IBM missed deal for their PC OS.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41231290,"author":"x-complexity","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Blitz: A lightweight, modular, extensible web renderer","text":"Then you'll especially love Dylan Beattie's talk on this exact subject, regarding an alt-history take on the web. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48091851,"author":"x-complexity","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Forking the Web","text":"Whenever someone talks about forking/rebuilding the web, I'll always link to my favorite Dylan Beattie talk about such a hypothetical alternative: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38846670,"author":"taejavu","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Was Javascript really made in 10 days?","text":"You might enjoy this talk by Dylan Beattie, it explores that kind of alternate history. \u201cThe Web That Never Was\u201d: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8JrqH2oOTK4":[{"hn_comment_id":32220738,"author":"deltasevennine","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Why are there so few artificial sunlight or artificial window products?","text":"[LINK] If you want one, you can build one following the video above. The result is quite stunning. I've never seen anything like it. [VIDEO] The one above is an easier build that takes up less space.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21663166,"author":"jsilence","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors","text":"It is possible to recycle old LCD monitors into articficial windows that have a very real feel to them. The diffraction lenses for the backlight direct the light in a way that makes it appear sun like. Of course this is only about the direction and not about the spectrum, but it might be possible to find LED strips with a high CRI. Any feedback would be appreciated. DIY directions on YT: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22168089,"author":"reeddavid","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?","text":"Not a company, but sharing a personal project: I got a free broken 55\" TV and turned it into a big daylight panel. I got a great explanation of why this works well (fresnel lens) from the DIY Perks channel on YouTube: Turning Smashed TVs into Realistic Artificial Daylight ( [VIDEO] ). The main board had failed so the screen was black and the backlight cycled on and off. After disconnecting the main board, the backlight stayed on. I am using the existing LED lights, but may replace them with the excellent color quality LEDs recommended by DIY Perks.","stance":"rec"}],"8Ko3TdPy0TU":[{"hn_comment_id":27181041,"author":"wexq","month":"2021-05","story_title":"How Lucky Is Too Lucky in Minecraft?","text":"The article recommends watching the video by Matt Parker, and so do I. Great refresher on probability (or luck, if you will) For convenience: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28378467,"author":"teekert","month":"2021-09","story_title":"A layman\u2019s guide to recreational mathematics videos","text":"Maybe nice to mention that Matt Parker's Stand-up Maths video on the cheating on a MiceCraft speed-run is really very nice [0]. It not only exposes the cheater, it also gives some intuition into negligible probabilities. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32994826,"author":"t_mann","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Dear Chess World","text":"The key point (in the end) seems to be that the odds for a streak like Niemann had are about 1 in 80k. Statistically speaking, I'd say that's a long shot from a smoking gun. Here's a good rundown of a case where a cheater is considered to have been exposed by statistical evidence, but those odds were on a completely different scale, 10^22: [VIDEO] Basically the mistake that is easy to make is that we shouldn't ask: \"what is the probability that Hans plays five tournaments like that in a row?\", but \"what is the probability that someone will play five tournaments like that in a row?\". Even if we correct for the fact that there are probably more Minecraft speedruns happening than GM tournaments, odds of 80k just seem a bit too low to call it evidence.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43059043,"author":"uolmir","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal","text":"There have been several of these deep dives into manipulated speed runs and they seldom disappoint. Since we are on HN, I'll mention another mathy one that was summarized by Matt Parker: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43440439,"author":"contravariant","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Napkin Math Tool","text":"I think the problem is that below 10^-6 there's a pretty broad range of magnitudes that are effectively 'happens to n people every k years (if they try very hard)'. Which makes them rare but not impossible, which is annoying because you can't rule it out but you can't expect to easily reproduce it either. That does tend to be the best way to think about those probabilities. For any probability you can make it happen If you try enough times or with enough people you can try to force it to happen. Below -6 is a pretty wide range of stuff you can just barely make happen if you have enough people, enough tries and enough time. It's only once you get to the 'wouldn't happen to 10^10 people in a million years' that you get to the stuff that you can be fairly sure has never happened. Matt Parker has quite a good video on it [1]. He settles on 10^-19 as something that you can be fairly sure has never happened (deliberately). As for other stuff in the probability rows, maybe include a couple of well known paradoxes like the birthday paradox. And be clear what you're saying, things like getting dealt a royal flush depends a lot on the type of poker game. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8LGDM9exlZw":[{"hn_comment_id":29318442,"author":"freeflight","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Fun with Red Star OS","text":"A bit older but quite relevant and entertaining; \"Florian Grunow, Niklaus Schiess: Lifting the Fog on Red Star OS\", from the 2015 Chaos Computer Congress. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29318626,"author":"pndy","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Fun with Red Star OS","text":"[VIDEO] - Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess, Lifting the Fog on Red Star OS - A deep dive into the surveillance features of North Korea's operating system The bit more detailed view, I'd say","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29318638,"author":"pndy","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Fun with Red Star OS","text":"Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess, Lifting the Fog on Red Star OS - A deep dive into the surveillance features of North Korea's operating system [1] [1] - [VIDEO] The bit more detailed view, I'd say","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31185345,"author":"MaxLeiter","month":"2022-04","story_title":"North Koreans are jailbreaking phones to access forbidden media","text":"If you found this article interesting and are curious for examples of North Korea\u2019s extensive digital surveillance, I recommend watching \u201cFlorian Grunow, Niklaus Schiess: Lifting the Fog on Red Star OS\u201d: [VIDEO] The depths to which North Korea goes to track and monitor its citizens is a lot more complex than I thought (and this video is from 6 years ago, so they\u2019ve probably only improved their surveillance)","stance":"rec"}],"8ORLN_KwAgs":[{"hn_comment_id":13982430,"author":"chakalakasp","month":"2017-03","story_title":"NIST Physicists Show Ion Pairs Perform Enhanced &#039;Spooky Action&#039;","text":"One of the more head exploding experiments I've seen regarding entanglement is this one: [LINK] By all apparences, it seems to violate causality. It's one of those things that make you suddenly stop and bemusedly wonder if maybe we've finally found a kludge in the Universe's code. edit BTW, if you'd like to know more about this experiment and why it has ridiculous implications, check this PBS clip: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19405179,"author":"comboy","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Experimental rejection of observer-independence in the quantum world","text":"Here's a dumbed down version: [LINK] Also not directly related video if you like your mind being blown: [VIDEO] Especially given how our understanding of the world changed during the last 200 years, I would say we are still very much clueless. I find that exciting. Btw, no idea why did researchers get \"freedom of choice\" involved.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21363600,"author":"mitchty","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Double Slit Experiment No Mystery","text":"Indeed, a quick video from space time for those being first introduced. It\u2019ll likely make you even more confused to the double slit experiment. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22372991,"author":"mbell","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Double Slits with Single Atoms","text":"If you place a detector in front of (or behind!) the slits the wave function collapses and there is no interference pattern. This is all part of the mystery of it, as soon as you 'observe' a particle, in any way, it stops acting like a wave. See the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment for even more weirdness, a good video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8PmM6SUn7Es":[{"hn_comment_id":21459498,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Glyphosate in Organic Hydroponic Food Production","text":"Kurzgesagt has a pretty great video[0] about organic food, and goes a little bit into what the definition of \"organic\" means. Digging through his citations[1] (which is awesome, btw), as far as American legal definitions and pesticides and the whatnot are concerned, the relevant law[2] says that pest and disease problems can be controlled using \"non-synthetic controls, such as...repellents\", meaning that pesticides can be used, as long as they're also \"organic\" (which, he notes later in the video, there are slightly less, but still non-zero traces of, and not necessarily safer[3]) That being said, there really shouldn't be a worry about traces of \"chemicals\" on organic OR non-organic produce, as the FDA has very strict guide lines and testing procedures that produce sellers go through[4] before sending out produce that almost everyone is well under. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28777269,"author":"dnate","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Traces of 122 different pesticides in 12 most polluted fruit and veg products","text":"Organic food actually doesn't have significantly less pesticides in them. Here is a good video about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8PwwRR8deHk":[{"hn_comment_id":34312936,"author":"fredley","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Organ as a Wind Instrument","text":"If you want to learn more about pipe organs from a completely different viewpoint, this series where a pipe organ is gradually rebuilt by an extremely talented and enthusiastic amateur is great fun! LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER - I BOUGHT A WHOLE CHURCH ORGAN - Part 1: The Organ Removal [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33087719,"author":"aasasd","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print","text":"Since the pipe organ will be inevitably mentioned in the comments, I'm gonna plug the Youtube channel \u2018Look Mum No Computer\u2019, whose gear-crazy author in now apparently in the final stages of installing and patching up an organ in his seemingly interminable basement, after moving it from someone else's house: [LINK] Said organ was built by its late owner not just in the house, but pretty much into the walls of the house, and as a result the thing had to be ripped out of there rather grotesquely, and then rewired again at the new place: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36423772,"author":"throwawayai2","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Free Organ","text":"LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER has a great set of video about removing an organ from a home, and setting it up/modifying it in his place. I highly recommend. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8QiPFmIMxFc":[{"hn_comment_id":30239526,"author":"mikewarot","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Inspiring hacker talks and presentations?","text":">Brett Victor - Inventing on principle: [VIDEO] This gave me a sharp moment of clarity, thank you so much for this! I'll work on the wording over time, but here's a rough sketch of my principle: My principle is that no person should ever be forced to blindly trust a computer to do the right thing. Computing shouldn't be either blindly trust the black box, or get nothing done. Nobody should have to hand over their wallet to buy an ice cream cone, you can just take the exact change out and pay. Why should you have to give a program access to everything when you just want to edit one text file?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30239914,"author":"mikewarot","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?","text":"Is there some pet peeve you have about the world, which you wish to change? If there is, and you can put your finger on it, making it happen could be a very fulfilling thing to do. I just figured out my pet peeve, the design principle I wish to impart to the world... after watching this video recommended in a different thread Bret Victor Inventing on Principle -- [VIDEO] I wish you luck if you find yours.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22988538,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Maybe visual programming is the answer, maybe not","text":">> They continuously run every time you make any change to them. >Which is very much unlike what a program does. You're saying \"Program that run continuously every time you make any change are very much unlike what a program does?\" That doesn't make any sense to me at all, can you please try to rephrase it? Speaking of program that run continuously, have you ever seen Bret Victor's talks \"The Future of Programming\" and \"Inventing on Principle\", or heard of Doug Engelbart's work? The Future of Programming [LINK] Inventing on Principle [VIDEO] HN discussion: [LINK] \"I'm totally confident that in 40 years we won't be writing code in text files. We've been shown the way [by Doug Engelbart NLS, Grail, Smalltalk, and Plato].\" -Bret Victor Do you still maintain that \"Excel sheets in their widely used form are not instructions or behaviour\", despite the examples and citation I gave you? If so, I'm pretty sure we're not talking about the same Microsoft Excel, or even using the same Wikipedia. Your definition is arbitrarily gerrymandered because you're trying to drag the editor into the definition of the language, while I'm talking about the representation and structure of the language itself, which defines the language, not the tools you use to edit it, which don't define the language. I'll repeat what I already wrote, defining how you can distinguish a non-visual text programming language like C++ from a visual programming language like a spreadsheet or Max/MSP by the number of dimen","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30238757,"author":"iwwr","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Inspiring hacker talks and presentations?","text":"Rich Hickey - Hammock-driven development: [LINK] Brett Victor - Inventing on principle: [VIDEO] Programming is terrible: [LINK] Dave Beazely - Python concurrency from the ground up (applicable to languages in general, with generator and corourine functionality) [LINK] Functional programming, with birds: [LINK] Short and classic: Wat [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"8S0FDjFBj8o":[{"hn_comment_id":11142915,"author":"randycupertino","month":"2016-02","story_title":"We Are Now at Peak TED","text":"That's why the \"Ted Talk about Nothing\" is one of my favorites: [VIDEO] Their manner of speaking reminds me of American Dad making fun of Ira Glass. Why is pausing??! Doesn't he know what he's going to say next??? AAAAHH. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30243149,"author":"light_cone","month":"2022-02","story_title":"What Was the Ted Talk?","text":"Obligatory meta TED talk: [VIDEO] Personally the TED talk I liked the most. It's funny but I actually find it interesting, showing that appearance of meaning is not actual meaning.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41763949,"author":"friendzis","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Google\u2019s AI thinks I left a Gatorade bottle on the moon","text":"Pseudo-intellectual consumerism, as I like to call it. How many people do you know who turn on the news on TV, sit in front and take notes? Who put on some music, relax in the sweet spot and immerse themselves? Who read a book, stop and ponder, continue? Versus people who turn on the TV while cooking, who put on headphones with music while working out for background noise, who put on sped up version of audiobook while driving to tick off another checkmark? It's form over substance all over the place. I absolutely love this TED talk: [VIDEO] The more pseudo-intellectual consumerism infiltrates our collective psyche, the more the substance becomes irrelevant. Nuance requires thinking. \"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong\" -- HL Mencken. But knowing this answer makes you feel smart.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9574301,"author":"JohnTHaller","month":"2015-05","story_title":"The Sound of TED: A Case for Distaste","text":"Will Stephen's How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk is a fun deconstruction of the pacing and process of most TED talks: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27009529,"author":"Stratoscope","month":"2021-05","story_title":"GitHub repository for Sedgewick's Algorithms is taken down","text":"There are some great TED[x] talks, like \"Ducks Go Quack, Chickens Say Cluck\": [LINK] And \"How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30257910,"author":"johncessna","month":"2022-02","story_title":"What Was the Ted Talk?","text":"I used to binge watch Ted Talks and then ran across How to sound Smart in your Ted Talk[1] Ted Talk where William Stephen spent 6 minutes talking about nothing. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8S3B8a8N83k":[{"hn_comment_id":12941116,"author":"ZenoArrow","month":"2016-11","story_title":"World of Commodore 2016","text":"Good to see the Vampire will be making an appearance, though I'm guessing no new announcements about upcoming releases. For anyone out of the loop with Commodore stuff, the Vampire is an FPGA-based accelerator for classic Amigas. This is a decent introductory video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14413641,"author":"amai","month":"2017-05","story_title":"The A-EON Amiga X5000: An alternate universe where the Amiga platform never died","text":"I think the Vampire 2 FPGA acceleration card for the Amiga 600 deserves to be mentioned: [VIDEO] It seems a lot of fun and is much cheaper (250 Euros).","stance":"rec"}],"8SF_h3xF3cE":[{"hn_comment_id":34593024,"author":"ujjwalgrover","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Practical deep learning for coders (2022 edition) By Jeremy, who is the founding researcher at fast.ai. Three things I love about this series 1. Jeremy seems like a power user of Jupyter notebook and uses them beautifully to run the lectures. The book on fastai is also written in Jupyter notebooks. 2. The lectures are super hands on - Jeremy actually fires up a jupyter notebook and runs code which often surprises him 3. I love how he describes he deep dives into a specific Kaggle competition. Describes in great detail his own attempts at getting up the leaderboard. It's almost like watching a poker player reveal her decision process before they make a move. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34001453,"author":"superpope99","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Riffusion \u2013 Stable Diffusion fine-tuned to generate Music","text":"I'm super excited about the Audio AI space, as it seems permanently a few years behind image stuff - so I think we're going to see a lot more of this. If you're interested, the idea of applying Image processing techniques to Spectrograms of audio is explored in brief in the first lesson of one of the most recommended AI courses on HN: Practical Deep Learning for Coders [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8SkdfdXWYaI":[{"hn_comment_id":5661689,"author":"thomasjames","month":"2013-05","story_title":"VimSpeak","text":"A similar project using Emacs and really clever use of Python and Dragon Naturally Speaking SDK was my favorite presentation at PyCon this past year. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24183609,"author":"monsieurbanana","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Art of chording","text":"Maybe lisp could shine here? While writing lisp code in classic editors, you already shouldn't be editing or navigating code with classic commands, instead you will be using structured editing. Of course it isn't limited to lisp, but languages with C-like syntax are harder to use for structured editing. I highly recommend watching this video, where the speaker uses voice commands to write both in emacs-lisp and in python. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24185875,"author":"arijun","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Art of chording","text":"I'm surprised that there seem to be no examples anywhere of anyone seriously using chorded typing for programming. After cheap chorded keyboards entered the market and the associated software became free, I assumed it would only be a matter of time before something like Travis Rudd's incredible demo of voice coding [1] came out. Perhaps that it hasn't speaks to how difficult it is to get real speed improvements with a chorded setup? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43543086,"author":"pugio","month":"2025-04","story_title":"The case against conversational interfaces","text":"> The second thing we need to figure out is how we can compress voice input to make it faster to transmit. What\u2019s the voice equivalent of a thumbs-up or a keyboard shortcut? Can I prompt Claude faster with simple sounds and whistles? This reminds me of the amazing 2013 video of Travis Rudd coding python by voice: [VIDEO] The number of times in the last few years I've wanted that level of \"verbal hotkeys\"... The latencies of many coding llms are still a little bit too low to allow for my ideal level of flow (though admittedly I haven't tried one's hosted on services like groq), but I can clearly envision a time when I'm issuing tight commands to a coder model that's chatting with me and watching my program evolve on screen in real time. On a somewhat related note to conversational interfaces, the other day I wanted to study some first aid stuff - used Gemini to read the whole textbook and generate Anki flash cards, then copied and pasted the flashcards directly into chat GPT voice mode and had it quiz me. That was probably the most miraculous experience of voice interface I've had in a long time - I could do chores while being constantly quizzed on what I wanted to learn, and anytime I had a question or comment I could just ask it to explain or expound on a term or tangent.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7925706,"author":"rjbwork","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Annyang.js \u2013 Let visitors control your site with voice commands","text":"You might be interested in watching this talk: [VIDEO] Although, if I recall correctly, he uses Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is a commercial product.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9340387,"author":"srik","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Anyone using a \u201cno hands\u201d setup for programming?","text":"[This talk by Tavis Rudd]( [VIDEO] ) about a system he used when his hands were afflicted with RSI is pretty interesting. Not entirely a no-hands approach, but I can't seem to remember the developer who made his first app in the hospital by typing with one/two fingers. He wrote a blogpost about his process that was really inspiring.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9375973,"author":"beeworker","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Ask HN: I can barely read, is there a way I could still learn to program?","text":"There was an interesting talk at PyCon 2013 about programming using only your voice: [VIDEO] Might be worth looking into for your case. It's worth mentioning that the guy did this for himself due to severe RSI in the hands, but there was another talk on using a stenographic keyboard to program and I remember this guy stood up and said he wished he'd known about it earlier as it's another approach for people who suffer from RSI since there's less typing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14274300,"author":"klibertp","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Something is wrong when the \u2018telephone app\u2019 on your phone becomes 3rd party","text":"See this: [VIDEO] > In a fast-paced live demo, I will create a small system using Python, plus a few other languages for good measure, and deploy it without touching the keyboard. The demo gods will make a scheduled appearance. I hope to convince you that voice recognition is no longer a crutch for the disabled or limited to plain prose. It's now a highly effective tool that could benefit all programmers. Turns out it's doable, you just need to invent your own language.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14348616,"author":"DiThi","month":"2017-05","story_title":"How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]","text":"IMHO I don't think it would fly. The most difficult things of programming are too abstract for that. You may be interested in the guy that did all his coding with voice for a while because he couldn't use his hands, and still uses it to this day about half of the time. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16964105,"author":"indiv0","month":"2018-05","story_title":"IBM is not doing \"cognitive computing\" with Watson (2016)","text":"Your comment reminded me of an interesting video I saw a while back. The video is a talk [0] by a programmer explaining and demonstrating how he developed and used a voice recognition system to program in emacs, after a significant RSI injury. The commands and syntax he uses to interact with the system might be a decent approximation of the custom English syntax you suggest. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20663465,"author":"n3k5","month":"2019-08","story_title":"What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?","text":"Tavis Rudd's Using Python to Code by Voice [0] is also interesting. Looking up that URL, I came across the more recent Coding by Voice with Dragonfly [1]. Haven't seen that one yet, but just quickly skimmed through. Unfortunately the live demos are silent (you can't hear speaker Boudewijn Aasman talk to the computer), but it seems worth checking out if you're interested in setting up some recent voice recognition software with your own custom voice command syntax. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32709442,"author":"jffry","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Cursorless \u2013 A spoken language for structural code editing","text":"Are you thinking perhaps of this [1] PyCon talk by Tavis Rudd, who had RSI and a rotator cuff injury? He demos a voice command system that's all short nonsense syllables, including with a few humorous video clips interspersed, and then explains it after the demo. [1] [VIDEO] (demo starts 9 minutes in)","stance":"rec"}],"8T6ClX-y2AE":[{"hn_comment_id":35737239,"author":"senectus1","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Microsoft is busy rewriting core Windows library code in memory-safe Rust","text":"[VIDEO] This is the announcement video. its about an hour long but much of it is very interesting. \"Adminless windows\" sounds very interesting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35739300,"author":"nindalf","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Microsoft is to enable Rust use for Windows 11 kernel","text":"Link to the talk - [VIDEO] (timestamped to the part about Rust) The speaker covers a bunch of areas and the final part of the talk (around 10 minutes) is about Microsoft introducing Rust in some self-contained areas in Windows. Some highlights: - Their focus is on \"killing bug classes\". More context in this post by Microsoft Research from 2019 - A proactive approach to more secure code. - They want to do this with memory safe languages, CPU architectural changes and safer language subsets. This talk focussed on memory safe languages, specifically Rust. - First area they've introduced Rust in - a cross platform rewrite of a font parser called DWriteCore. The team reported that parsing was \"incredibly easy\". Font shaping performance increased by 5-15% compared to the C++ version. - It took about 2 devs working for half a year to complete this. The speaker says this is pretty good value for an area that is notorious for security bugs. - Second area is the REGION data type in Win32k GDI. Currently in consumer Windows, disabled by feature flag. Will be enabled in insider builds soon. Performance has been good, some small wins for the Rust version. - There is now a Windows SysCall implemented in completed safe Rust. TLDR - Rust is inside the Windows Kernel, will be enabled widely soon.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35759139,"author":"Hawxy","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Microsoft quietly supported legislation to make it easier to fix devices","text":"> just to make existing CPUs obsolete and keep Intel in business. Bizarre take. It's not random, it's specifically CPUs that support modern hardware security mitigations. There's a pretty great talk from Bluehat a few days ago that goes into why Microsoft is doing this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42949206,"author":"Hawxy","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Microsoft deletes official Windows 11 CPU/TPM bypass for unsupported PCs","text":"> Security There's a pretty interesting video from 2023 that goes through much of Microsoft's thoughts around Windows security. It flew under the radar unfortunately: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8TjGAWxL23c":[{"hn_comment_id":14616756,"author":"nolanpro","month":"2017-06","story_title":"A California Dream","text":"Theres a great documentary \"Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea\" (narrated by John Waters!) Definitely one of my top 10 documentaries [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36847701,"author":"darrenf","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Poisons and Perils on the Salton Sea","text":"The similarly named Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea is one of my favourite documentaries of all time, I find it so fascinating: [VIDEO] The video made to sell the place as a paradise in the 60s is also fascinating: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29006516,"author":"scrose","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Where have all the insects gone?","text":"For anyone unfamiliar with the history of the Salton sea and the effect all these chemicals have had on the surrounding areas, check out this documentary: [VIDEO] A part of me wants to visit just to fully take in the reality of it all. But I don\u2019t think my family would be too happy.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45851331,"author":"lizknope","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Toxic Salton Sea dust triggers changes in lung microbiome after just one week","text":"Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea narrated by John Waters [VIDEO] I watched this 20 years ago. It's a really interesting and funny documentary about the Salton Sea and the area around it. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"8VqXBA-sGHA":[{"hn_comment_id":29525590,"author":"function_seven","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Learning how to ride a bike","text":"You should take a look at the No BS Bike [0, 1]. It's a motorcycle with a second set of handlebars fixed to the frame. They don't connect to the forks; they don't rotate. Riders are challenged to hold on to these bars and lean the bike as they're underway. At speeds faster than 20mph or so, leaning has a negligible effect on the bike's lean and direction. You can do some very limited steering this way, but the amount of effort you put into it for the meager return quickly convinces riders that handlebar input it the way to control bike direction. When you were shifting your weight, were your arms attached to the handlebars? It's impossible to isolate your shifting of body weight from the related pushing or pulling on the bars if you're stabilizing your upper body through the handlebars. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32841897,"author":"wanderingmoose","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Countersteering","text":"Keith Code (author of twist of the wrist) has a bike with fixed handle bars that he lets you ride as part of his superbike track/race school. It is really eye opening on how little control you have without countersteering. Here's a vid: [VIDEO] His school: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"8X69_42Mj-g":[{"hn_comment_id":9754925,"author":"616c","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Making sexy molecules in PowerPoint","text":"So no one will mention the Clasp (Lisp on LLVM developer)? He built a language to build better, albeit not visualize, better molecules. If you are on this article, you probably will love to watch this guy. I am computer nerd and this guy makes me want to go back and study chemistry. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9814991,"author":"radicalcut","month":"2015-07","story_title":"John Carmack working on Scheme as a VR scripting language","text":"Unrelated to VR but still: if anyone here hasn't yet watched drmeister's talk about Clasp and his \"molecular metaprogramming\" project, please do. Absolutely fascinating stuff. [VIDEO] Also recently discussed on HN: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11175151,"author":"nabla9","month":"2016-02","story_title":"The Lisp Curse (2011)","text":"Lisp is programmable programming language, especially Common Lisp. It works as programmer amplifier. Better you are, more you benefit from it. I challenge anyone to watch this lecture from Christian Schafmeister and say they are not impressed: [VIDEO] and [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11803206,"author":"golergka","month":"2016-05","story_title":"European Lisp Symposium 2016","text":"[VIDEO] This talk is even better. \"C++ templates are to Commmon Lisp macros what IRS tax return forms are to poetry\". I don't know both well enough to tell if it's true, but damn it's a good metaphor.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839608,"author":"pmarin","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"The most inspiring talk a I have ever seen: Clasp: Common Lisp using LLVM and C++ for Molecular Metaprogramming. ABSTRACT This talk describes our unique approach to constructing large, atomically precise molecules (called \"Molecular Lego\" or \"spiroligomers\") that could act as new therapeutics, new catalysts (molecules that make new chemical reactions happen faster) and ultimately to construct atomically precise molecular devices. Then I describe Clasp and CANDO, a new implementation of the powerful language Common Lisp. Clasp is a Common Lisp compiler that uses LLVM to generate fast machine code and it interoperates with C++. CANDO is a molecular design tool that uses Clasp as its programming language. Together I believe that these are the hardware (molecules) and the software (the CANDO/Clasp compiler) that will enable the development of sophisticated molecular nanotechnology. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10184266,"author":"nnq","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Lisp is still a secret weapon","text":"If you're asking yourself what kinds of problems is a Lisp good for you should probably watch this: [VIDEO] (A computational chemist built himself his own Common Lisp implementation because no other language available was powerful enough for his needs...) It basically boils to: if you're solving a truly new and interesting problems for which the current libraries and ecosystems don't matter that much to you anyhow (because what you do is too bleeding-edge / ahead of everyone else, so you'll write your own better stuff anyhow), than you might want to choose a Lisp. And if your problem is so bleeding-edge and exotic that you also need to build your own programming-language for it, than you might just as well build yourself a Lisp (like the guy in the video did) and add your needed features to it, because this would be easier than any other approaches and allow you to spend more time on your problem and not on the language... EDIT+: another example is DWave using SBCL: [LINK] - if quantum (or analog... anyway...) computing is not \"truly new and cutting edge\", than I don't know what is","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18847626,"author":"girishso","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Can we write a programming language for biology?","text":"That was my interest when I started my career, but didn\u2019t do much on it. Bio-informatics deals with the stuff you mentioned in-silico. There\u2019re a whole bunch of libraries for many different languages, but I\u2019ve not come across any specific language for bio-informatics. You might find [VIDEO] interesting, they developed a DSL in common lisp to generate C++ code using LLVM.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28876017,"author":"simiones","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Carp \u2013 A statically typed Lisp, without a GC, for real-time applications","text":"CLASP is a really interesting project. For one, it's created and written by a Chemistry PhD researcher (Christian Schafmeister), not someone with a traditional CS background. For another, it's one of the few languages that has ever attempted to interface with C++ at the template level - you can instantiate C++ template classes from CL, and catch C++ exceptions etc. For yet another, he does compacting garbage collection for the C++ objects used in the CL implementation, with pointer patching and everything else. There's a nice Google Tech Talk about it [0], that goes into both why he did this, and how he implemented this. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8X7Ng75e5gQ":[{"hn_comment_id":30464763,"author":"vandermik","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Understanding the War in Ukraine","text":"To get better understanding what's really driving Russian government and Putin I strongly recommend to watch this talk [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34707833,"author":"HatchedLake721","month":"2023-02","story_title":"","text":"I highly encourage people to watch \u201cHow the United States created Vladimir Putin\u201d that was presented in Yale University by Vladimir Pozner. It gives another perspective that\u2019s often ignored how US and European foreign policy has played part in shaping what Russia is today. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24589086,"author":"DyslexicAtheist","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Assange Hearing Day 17","text":"personal attacks aside ... don't take _my_ word for it, ask people with skin in the game: Vladimir Pozner: How the United States Created Vladimir Putin: [VIDEO] > On September 27, 2018, Yale's Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Poynter Fellowship for Journalism hosted Vladimir Pozner, the acclaimed Russian-American journalist and broadcaster. Pozner spoke on the impact of US foreign policy towards Russia after the Soviet Union has been disbanded, and shared his opinions on a range of issues raised by the audience, from the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections, to Skripal poisoning, to the state of independent media in Russia and the US. Vladimir Pozner Jr.: [LINK] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29636454,"author":"fuoqi","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The Olkiluoto 3 EPR plant unit started up","text":"\"Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok\" is a much older ideal, IIRC it has roots as far as in early 90s. And if you stretch it enough you can even trace it back to Charles de Gaulle. But for it to happen not only Russia has to significantly improve internally, but also EU itself has to be different. For starters it would have to be truly independent from the US influence and Brussel's grip on the union would have to be weaker. Russian political culture historically is very firm on being able to independently decide its own fate (and no, it's not a matter of \"democratization\"). Take the current EU issues with the Poles and multiply it a hundredfold to get a rough approximation of what the current EU would have with Russia. Before 2007 (see the Munich speech) Russia sincerely tried to join the EU and the collective West. But the condition \"proposed\" at the time and attitude towards Russia fundamentally collided with that deep culture, resulting in the situation which we see today. If you want to learn more about it from a non-Western perspective, I recommend watching [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29924956,"author":"andreygrehov","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Russia says Ukraine talks hit 'dead end', Poland warns of risk of war","text":"Here is an interesting lecture Vladimir Pozner (Russian journalist) gave at the Yale University about Putin, the Unites States and Ukraine - [VIDEO] It's 3 years old, but relevant up until today, imho.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30471901,"author":"leobg","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Understanding the War in Ukraine","text":"Well, here\u2019s a talk at Yale that makes the same points. I don\u2019t know if everything in there is factually correct. But it does very clearly why Putin is acting the way he is. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30493466,"author":"nsonha","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Neutral Swiss poised to freeze Russian assets \u2013 president","text":"\"good aggression\" Be aware that most people cannot read Chinese or Russian, and as such their whole world perspective is fed by an one sided narrative. I suggest you listen to these[1][2] talks, and Putin's speech[3] on NATO expansion in Munich in 2007. Pozner[1] pointed out that up to 2007, Putin really tried to be friend with the West, including asking to join NATO. Of course they were \"the enemy\". [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30494197,"author":"fuoqi","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Neutral Swiss poised to freeze Russian assets \u2013 president","text":">Ukraine would never had joined NATO because it was an active war zone anyways. It does not prevent NATO from supplying weapons and training the Ukrainian army. The US reconnaissance planes have conducted regular patrols over Ukrainian territory. The British even tried to build naval bases in Berdyansk and Ochakovo. And with active and heated territorial disputes it's easy to see a hypothetical scenario of Ukraine trying to re-capture Donbas and Crimea by force after it felt it's sufficiently strong or Russia is weak enough, like Georgia tried with South Osetia. >And relations were relatively good I suggest watching the following videos if you want to learn about alternative points of view: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30511441,"author":"cardanome","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Tell HN: If You Are in Russia","text":"> When it comes to USSR/Russia, I am not aware of the good acts. It\u2019s not just that thy do bad things, it\u2019s that I never hear of any of the good things they do in the world at large. There is an interview from Yale University with Vladimir Pozner that is very worth watching: [VIDEO] It is absolutely insane that western media does not report anything positive on Russia and I hope it is obvious that it can't be a the case that a state can be that comically evil. And if not foreign policy at least cultural stuff should at least receive some positive attention with Russia having a rich tradition in theater, ballet, music and so on. The USSR did plenty to support its lesser developed republics. In fact that is is why many Russian nationalist saw it very critically, seeing as their land would give more that it received. Even today Russia has extremely good relations with the countries of central asia. As for foreign aid not only did it sent lots of aid to other socialist regimes but also many national liberation movements speeding up massively the de-colonization of Africa. The Russian Federation is also doing plenty of good. They help keeping the massive dominance of the US and it allies at least a little bit in check supporting many countries that are shunned by them. Syria would have been overrun by terrorists by now if Russia had not helped them. Of course you can twist every good news to make Russia look bad. Russian athletes are successful? Only the result of doping. Stabilit","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30522026,"author":"borg_","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Nord Stream 2 declares bankruptcy","text":"Interestingly, Kaliningrad is also brought up every single time in order to dismiss the argument raised in the parent comment. I wouldn't call your comment US propaganda because it's such a throw-around these days that one could automatically use it to dismiss people that don't share your view. The crucial difference, in case is not clear, is that a missile placed in Ukraine would hit Moscow, the capital of Russia, in minutes. This is much more threatening to core Russia interests and Putin would not live with it. Before rushing to putting all the blame on Russia just because \"Putin-bad\": I would strongly encourage people who are interested to know more to watch the following talks, from ages ago, given at reputable US universities because let's be honest, none of us is geopolitical historian two weeks ago on this topic so why don't we all do a bit more research. [1] A good overview of the history, 7 years ago from a talk @ U Chicago. ( [LINK] ) [2] Another one from a talk @ Yale: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30595324,"author":"331c8c71","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Russia will stop 'in a moment' if Ukraine meets terms \u2013 Kremlin","text":"There was no signed agreement, I'm not disputing that. And I don't think it's valid to use the term \"hearsay\" for a transcript. Putin is putin, he's dictator with no regard for human life at this point. What I think though, is that the west was ruthless with Russia after SU collapse in the 90s and early 2000s which actually created the resentment we see now. [VIDEO] This talk is a tad dramatic but very well captures the public sentiment I believe. Unlike eastern europian countries Russia couldn't just join eu/nato and started retaliating only when Georgia and Ukraine were on their path to nato. Not that unreasonable if you ask me. > Yeah, 'just a fact of life'. NATO expansion into smaller countries, due to this 'fact of life' is a 'fact of life' itself. As this war (unfortunately) which I believe wouldn't happen if ukrainian leaders were a bit smarter (and it wouldn't mean becoming Belarus - one could be smth like Kazakhstan in terms of foreign policy).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30732946,"author":"cardanome","month":"2022-03","story_title":"ESA Votes to Suspend Roscosmos Partnerships","text":"Putin was pretty pro-West, even wanted Russia to join NATO when he started out. Analyzing what happened and how the mistakes can be avoided might be a good step. I recommend watching this video of Vladimir Pozner speaking about it at Yale University. [VIDEO] As for right now, I guess the main thing is to support the refugees as best we can and pray they will be able to return soon.","stance":"rec"}],"8XS5q9xhaMc":[{"hn_comment_id":28196160,"author":"somebee","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Show HN: Imba 2.0 \u2013 The JavaScript Alternative by Scrimba (YC S20)","text":"I'm Sindre, CTO at Scrimba (S20). We're about to launch a _major_ overhaul of Imba, the programming language we use for everything here (both frontend and backend). Imho the best frameworks are the ones that are extracted from real projects trying to solve real problems. Imba is like that, but at a language-level. It has been through countless iterations over the past 7 years, striving to be the perfect language for developing web applications. We have added tons of cool things like touch modifiers ( [LINK] ), inline styles ( [LINK] ), optional types and great tooling that integrates deeply with TypeScript. With this version we feel that we are very close to our vision for what Imba should be. In other words; it is finally ready for public consumption. I'd wholeheartedly advice you to look into it and give it a whirl if you are interested in web development :) Check out this video ( [VIDEO] ) building a counter in less than 1 minute. - Compiles to Javascript, works with node + npm - DOM tags & styles as first-class citizens - Optional typing and deep TypeScript integration - Blazing-fast dev/build tools based on esbuild - Advanced tooling with refactoring++ across js,ts, and imba files","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31498408,"author":"knight17","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Show HN: My free course for learning Imba","text":"This looks really nice. This is a video of author creating a simple counter with two buttons using imba. It demonstrates how CSS styling, code, and HTML works together in this language: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8XUutFBbUrg":[{"hn_comment_id":34196321,"author":"ggzor","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Prolog at Work","text":"The Power of Prolog [0] is a fantastic blog/video series covering everything from basic syntax, theoretical basis, modern features and idiomatic constructs. I highly recommend it if you want to get the gist of Prolog and its modern features. If you want a tour of Prolog, you can watch the video with the same name [1]. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35624654,"author":"grose","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Why did Prolog lose steam? (2010)","text":"I think that Prolog will rise again. If you have an hour to kill, check out this video introduction by Markus Triska about what makes Prolog unique: [VIDEO] Recently I have been working on getting Trealla Prolog to run in WebAssembly. Support is quite good now, with an easy-to-use JS library[1], Go library[2], and is now one of the best-supported languages for the Spin runtime[3]. I think it's particularly nice for validations, you can write some simple Prolog rules and run the same code on the client and the server now. I would like to explore this more with a dedicated library at some point. Built-in features like DCGs make parsing/generating all kinds of data trivial. I love it. I think the biggest barrier to Prolog adoption is that it has a really steep learning curve, and most people get burnt by half-assed introductions in college that tick the 'talked about logic programming' box in the syllabus. You really have to think in a completely different way to write a good Prolog program. But, once you get the right mindset, it makes solving complex problems incredibly easy. I don't really buy the argument that Datalog is enough. Most Datalog implementations I've seen hack on a bunch of extensions to do things like list membership. It would be awesome to see some serious effort put into an efficient Prolog-based database. The closest thing I can think of is TerminusDB, which I've never used but I wish I could convince my company to try it out ;). My dream is to have some kind","stance":"rec"}],"8YUWDrLazCg":[{"hn_comment_id":28113712,"author":"yreg","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Wealth Shown to Scale","text":"I find these scrolling websites unergonomic and not at all that good at getting the point across (other than \"yeah, it's a lot\"). Also, with the text-length budget of that site I think it's a shame it doesn't explain what wealth, profit, liquidity and cash-on-hand is. Better visualisations imo: - Tom Scott: A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip [VIDEO] - How rich are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in Minecraft terms [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29597963,"author":"murm","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you accept your place in the world?","text":"I don't know the answer to your question, but I think this[0] video might help to visualize the mind-boggling scale of the world (in the video you can substitute dollars with human beings). And it's only one billion visualized so in order to go through the entire human population you would have to watch it 7.9 times which would take something over 10 hours. As the dollar meter keeps running relentlessly you can imagine yourself being one split of a second somewhere there, and then you can imagine the sea of people working hard at compilers, optimizers, math etc. blasting you all at once with their brilliant observations. It's only natural to get overwhelmed if you expose yourself to the aggregate of the most brilliant and productive humans, because as rare as they might be, the human population is so staggeringly big that there are LOTS of them. You might not be doing so bad compared to the rest of the humanity though ;) [0] [VIDEO] (A Million Dollars vs A Billion Dollars, Visualized: A Road Trip)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34324660,"author":"dijit","month":"2023-01","story_title":"UK: Excess deaths in 2022 among worst in 50 years","text":"It's hard to actually visualise large numbers; a common problem actually Tom Scott has a great video on it: [VIDEO] EDIT: Decide to swap the examples to British cities, inkeeping with what you said about apples/oranges; which people may be less familiar with; but hopefully it gives the sense of scale.","stance":"rec"}],"8Z685OF-PS8":[{"hn_comment_id":2207903,"author":"pohl","month":"2011-02","story_title":"A father knows best: Vint Cerf re-thinks the Internet in Stanford talk","text":"I wasn't able to pull anything out of this article. Perhaps I read it too quickly. Did anyone get a sense of what sort of re-thinking he has in mind? Something content-centric, perhaps? [LINK] [VIDEO] (an excellent google tech talk) [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3873007,"author":"runeks","month":"2012-04","story_title":"Free Speech and DDOS Attacks","text":"The reason we haven't solved DDoS attacks is because we're working on solving the problem at the wrong level. We're trying to solve the wrong problem. This video explains very clearly how this is the case: [VIDEO] Short(er) explanation: we no longer use the internet primarily for the purpose of communicating between two parties. But the infrastructure of the internet forces us to obtain data by having a conversation with a supposedly trusted party, even though a line of communication is not really what we want; we want a specific piece of data (an internet page, the latest exchange rate of USD to EUR, the ISO for the daily image of Ubuntu 12.04, etc.). It doesn't matter where we get it from (location is irrelevant), it only matters that it's the right data. Our use of the internet today is all about data. Yet, the infrastructure of the internet (TCP/IP) is location-centric; not data-centric. Data is shuttled between computers based, not on the data, but on the location of the computers. This creates the possibility of DoS attacks. The TCP/IP protocol is designed to efficiently route packages from a source to a destination, and a DoS attack simply uses this feature maliciously. When someone is hit by a DoS attack, the routers aiding in this are just following the rules of TCP/IP: routing packages to a destination. That's their job. What we need is a data-centric infrastructure. An infrastructure where data is not obtained via a connection to some location , but an infrastructu","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16840892,"author":"contingencies","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Watching this now. It's great. Thanks! Not only are there some nice restatements of powerful high-level insights in to network effects in general (which I am considering with respect to physical logistics requirements in our current business), but some great historical tidbits too. The resounding rejection of packet switching by period communications experts at [VIDEO] is awesome. Oh how the mighty have fallen!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2558217,"author":"dmuino","month":"2011-05","story_title":"Netflix Now The Largest Single Source of Internet Traffic In North America","text":"As I mentioned elsewhere Netflix does use Level3, Akamai, and Limelight. So the traffic is mainly coming from CDNs. I'm not sure if by \"content-aware routers\" you mean something like Content Centric Networking: [LINK] If that's the case it'd be up to the ISPs to push that technology to their infrastructure. Van Jacobson gave a very informative presentation at Netflix about it a couple of months ago. It seems you can watch a similar presentation he gave at Google on youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9666202,"author":"gwu78","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Re: Proposed Statement on \"HTTPS everywhere for the IETF\"","text":"\"authentication of the content, not the connection\" Popular websites that hold themselves out as businesses, i.e. \"exclusive\" sources of content (often generated by users, go figure), they have no reason to support this concept. Because then it does not matter where the user gets the content. But they might have reasons to support TLS. One could argue users want authentic content (signed content), not authentic \"websites\" (single sources for content trying to serve too many users, all at the same time). Or maybe many users do not know the difference? Van Jacobsen gave a good talk on this at Google: [VIDEO] There is another thread on the HN front page right now about a Blackhat conference talk on x86 CPUs. There is another talk on that page about how TLS relies on the trustworthiness of internet routing. What is the point of securing connections when you have no control over routing? Instead of relying on securing \"connections\", I think schemes that send out \"encrypted blobs\" with the hope they arrive at the proper destination make more sense. Encrypting blobs is not something for which an \"authority\" is needed. This is something over which the user can retain full control without involving third parties. As it should be. TLS might have encryption that works well enough to \"secure a connection\" but if I am not mistaken it still has no reliable way to verify an endpoint (recipient) is the one you want it to be. Some people call that \"authentication\". I'm not even sure that TLS ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17625339,"author":"some1else","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Where can one learn about the history of the internet and the protocols?","text":"[VIDEO] This April 2006 Google Tech Talk by Van Jacobson of PARC proposes a content-addressing based replacement for the IP protocol. But before doing so, he explains what shaped the telephony and the current networking paradigms.","stance":"rec"}],"8aGhZQkoFbQ":[{"hn_comment_id":11286775,"author":"lollipop25","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I go about truly \u201cunderstanding\u201d JavaScript, or any language?","text":"> How do I take, say JS, and learn it to the point where it really clicks to the point where I can visualize what's going on under the hood when I write programs? Learn how a JS engine works. Any engine will do, although V8 is very discussed on the internet. Here's a few things to get started with: - How the event loop works ( [VIDEO] ). This show how JS works under the hood, what's part of \"JS\" and what's extended, how async operations are scheduled on a single thread. After watching this, everything will just \"click\". - How objects are represented in V8 ( [LINK] ). It's v8-specific but nevertheless tells you how objects are represented in memory. Keeping these concepts in mind, you will be able to write efficient code on the get-go. - ES6 spec ( [LINK] ). Optional reading (if you want to read 500+ pages), but it's a handy reference when in doubt. You can literally slap this thing to a person who doesn't know what they're talking about. Not that you should, but backing evidence is always great.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12821658,"author":"zappo2938","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Understanding Async JavaScript","text":"The corner stone of understand async JavaScript code is a deep understanding what happens under the hood with the Event loop. Philip Roberts has a great lecture called what the heck is the event loop anyway? [1] Once that video is watched once, everything else just makes sense. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218222,"author":"keyvin","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Another event loop talk from Philip Roberts. The tool he created to display the event loop in real time is fantastic. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22367426,"author":"_bxg1","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I learn JavaScript?","text":"I got to know the nuances of the language by working with it for years and having to figure out why various things didn't work at different points, but it doesn't sound like that's your style. This isn't comprehensive, but it's probably the most helpful deep-dive I've ever seen about some aspect of JavaScript. It's about the Event Loop, which is one of the biggest differences between JS and comparable languages like Python: [VIDEO] Contrary to what you might think, even though the event loop is in some sense \"distinct from the language\", it isn't simply an API. You can't really have JavaScript without the event loop; it exists in both the browser and in Node, and is the basis for most of the language's advantages.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25032007,"author":"krisgenre","month":"2020-11","story_title":"How does the event loop work in JavaScript? [video]","text":"This one is my all time favorite - What the heck is the event loop anyway? | Philip Roberts | JSConf EU [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9128556,"author":"the_cat_kittles","month":"2015-03","story_title":"JavaScript Call Stack/Event Loop Visualization","text":"i cannot believe i didn't have the mental model outlined in this video (the intro video to the site) after developing for the web for so long. [VIDEO] ...a great, very simple explanation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12637826,"author":"hackaflocka","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Paul Buchheit - Startup School Europe 2014 [LINK] Anjana Vakil: Learning Functional Programming with JavaScript - JSUnconf 2016 [LINK] Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle [LINK] Philip Roberts: What the heck is the event loop anyway? | JSConf EU 2014 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17467065,"author":"mxschumacher","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What you wish you'd known before getting into JavaScript?","text":"Be sure to understand the event loop. Javascript as an asynchronous language often comes back to bite beginners. Here are two great talks to help you: [LINK] [VIDEO] Your life will be easier if you learn to use Chrome Dev tools (or the Firefox equivalent) early. In the beginning, you don't have to worry about browser compatibility - embrace modern JS (ES6+)!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17469958,"author":"machiaweliczny","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What you wish you'd known before getting into JavaScript?","text":"1) Watch this: [VIDEO] 2) Understand how `this` binding works. 3) Understand async/promises. 4) Learn debugging tools (`debugger;`, `$0`, how to turn on/off source maps etc.) 5) You will have to learn compiltion tools (babel and webpack)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21386037,"author":"mettamage","month":"2019-10","story_title":"JavaScript Is C","text":"Oh boy, I'm arguing over the Internet. Sorry for that. You do bring good points and I agree upfront that they are indeed JS features that either suck or are not very pedagogical. 1. You don't need to learn about the event loop straight away (or asynchronous programming) by the time you get to that concept, you might as well go to another language that's easier for that. But I do concede that once you get to async programming: JS is not the best language to learn from. With that said for people who got past the basics, here's an intuitive video about the event loop [1] (note: if you're past the basics, don't watch it while you're still doing the basics xD). 2. Basic objects are easily learnable with JS since you can type them in a literal sense, whereas otherwise you need to instantiate it with a constructor (e.g. Java) or you don't really learn about objects (e.g. C, though I've heared that it does have objects right? Despite it being an obscure feature, anyways, I'm not sure if you should be happy to learn about objects, learning about dictionaries or hashing is cool though). More importantly, when you start out learning programming, primitives + some HTML + simple objects are all you need to know. 3. Yes, try/catch is useless. I wouldn't call that basic though, but I'm already noticing we're differing on definitions (note: my definition was relatively clear, variables, if-statements, for loops and functions). And in coding bootcamps, the concept came long after I taught the","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22992204,"author":"hoorayimhelping","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition (2018)","text":"I've been using JavaScript professionally for about 12 years. You're going to have to look for talks and really technical posts. Consider whitepapers and source code for JavaScript engines at this point. You'll probably want to start reading up on the things attached to JavaScript, rather than the language itself. Browser rendering, event loop, V8 things, garbage collection, etc. I'm sure you've seen it, but things like this: [VIDEO] , and this: [LINK] It might be time for you to start writing what you know about JavaScript.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23166878,"author":"devxpy","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Linux containers in a few lines of code","text":"Yes, something like that. Like here's David's \"Build Your Own Async\" [1], which I prefer over Philip's (still extremely good) \"What the heck is the event loop anyway?\" [2]. It's one thing to tell how something works, but to successfully show what the hell its actually doing under the covers, just conveys much more information. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26733972,"author":"tmh88j","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Modern CI is too complex and misdirected","text":"Haha, I'm genuinely intrigued to see the contents of that book. It could certainly be copy/paste from the Mozilla docs, but who knows! I was pleasantly surprised by this video about the JS event loop, although in fairness it is a lecture at a conference rather than a made for youtube video. Regardless, the length of the video made me question how necessary it was but I ended up watching the whole thing and enjoyed it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31053869,"author":"magnio","month":"2022-04","story_title":"I Avoid Async/Await","text":"Not the parent, but I recommend understanding the event loop first: here [0] is a very good talk. Then, read the chapter on promise on javascript.info [1], as it explains the problems Promise set out to solve (callback hell), then as usual the excellent MDN article [2]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33596401,"author":"luuuzeta","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?","text":"I've been struggling with wrapping my head around asynchronous programming with callbacks, promises and async/await in JS, however I think it's finally clicking after watching these YouTube videos and creating a document where I explain these concepts as if I'm teaching them to someone else: * Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? - [VIDEO] * The Story of Asynchronous JavaScript - [LINK] * JavaScript Callbacks, Promises, and Async / Await Explained - [LINK] * Async Javascript Tutorial For Beginners (Callbacks, Promises, Async Await). - [LINK] * Jake Archibald: In The Loop - setTimeout, micro tasks, requestAnimationFrame, requestIdleCallback, - [LINK] Edit... I've been rewatching these videos, reading the MDN docs, the Eloquent JavaScript book, javascript.info, blogs about the subject, etc. This further proves you shouldn't limit yourself to a single resource, and instead fill up the laguna with water from different sources if you will.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34828056,"author":"bartlomieju","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Roll your own JavaScript runtime, pt. 2","text":"You should be good to go after reading through the Rust book [0] and watching this video [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8b7erU_DOfE":[{"hn_comment_id":36513088,"author":"samstave","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Honda Monkey Breaks World Record Covering 4,183 Km on Single Tank","text":"You really need to watch the documentary on Cannonball Run - its fascinatingly full of historic tidbits that you didn't know that you knew, and those you didnt. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30650770,"author":"rasz","month":"2022-03","story_title":"To avoid Finland\u2019s tax a 1,000HP imported Hennessey RAM is limited to 55MPH","text":"You will be happy to learn Cannonball Run movie script (also Smokey and the Bandit 2) was written by Brock Yates, original organizer of Cannonball Run :) For more about the whole philosophy of the movement I recommend: The Cannonball Run Countach: Supercar Legend | Full Documentary [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8bZh5LMaSmE":[{"hn_comment_id":9304784,"author":"mbesto","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Refactoring: How do I even start?","text":"Sandi Metz talk \"All the Little Things\"[0] is amazing for understanding the general concepts around refactoring OOP code. It's ruby centric, but the concepts are applicable to all OOP languages. The most interesting part is the fact that during the refactoring process you should actually increase the amount of code and complexity to eventually consolidate and aggregate it down. This as opposed to simply trying to delete/mutate code. [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11183901,"author":"hire_charts","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Rich Hickey Fanclub","text":"That and Hammock Driven Development: [LINK] Both of these talks are in my top 5. Edit (okay, here are the other 3): * All the Little Things by Sandi Metz [VIDEO] * Programming is terrible\u2014Lessons learned from a life wasted. [LINK] * Some talk I saw by Dan McKinley on making Data-Driven decisions. I can't find the original video, but here's a really similar one: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13129780,"author":"tinco","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Talks that changed the way I think about programming","text":"These talks are a little skewed to the game/high performance programming side of the art, but still very interesting in general. Of the ones I've already seen I really like Mike Acton's talk. Since this has become such a nice thread some additions I'd add: * Sandi Metz going through the Gilded Rose or \"All the small things\" [VIDEO] I already subscribed to her programming style and the general Ruby TDD/BDD movement, but this talk captures all the important values in a single example. I think it made my programming style no longer based on vague things like experience or intuition, but just on concrete merit shown in this talk. * Matthew Brecknell demonstrating Hole Driven Development [LINK] The programming style demonstrated in this video is a real mind bender. I think most Haskell programmers use a weaker version of this, Matthew takes it to the extreme. I didn't adapt this style, I don't think it's practical, but it's the sort of thing that some person someday will incorporate in some more comfortable way in a new language or platform as a revolutionary feature.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18217828,"author":"da_murvel","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Define \"technical\". But when it comes to programming I always enjoy Sandi Metz's talks. I can highly recomend this talk she made at the RailsConf in 2014, about taking an ugly beast of code and turning it to something more digestable and beautiful [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19010760,"author":"chrischattin","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Confessions of an Abstraction Hater","text":"I'm a huge proponent of this concept. The goal is to be able to build and iterate as fast as possible. Most of this is achieved when new folks can step in and understand the code right away. Needless abstraction slows this down and makes the app more brittle to changes in response to customer/client inputs. Sandi Metz had an awesome presentation about this during a Rails Conf. \"Duplication is far cheaper than wrong abstraction\" [VIDEO] Her blog talking more about the assertion: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22023220,"author":"abvdasker","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Goodbye, Clean Code","text":"\"Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction.\" \u2014 Sandi Metz ( [VIDEO] ) This talk by her is one of my favorites ever. Her ideas definitely made me a better programmer.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45079892,"author":"wilkystyle","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Cognitive load is what matters","text":"One of the many great takeaways from Sandi Metz's talk at Railsconf 2014: \"Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction.\" [VIDEO] Worth watching in its entirety, but the quote is from ~13:59 in that video.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10932524,"author":"there4","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you deal with 2000 line functions?","text":"This is a great presentation about refactoring that may be useful: \"RailsConf 2014 - All the Little Things by Sandi Metz\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11280617,"author":"zachrose","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?","text":"Not working software per se, but I think there's a lot of beauty in the way Sandi Metz demos a refactoring of a thing called The Gilded Rose in this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14845938,"author":"rimliu","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What books had the greatest effect on how you structure your code?","text":"Sandi Metz was already mentioned in this thread, so I present [VIDEO] where she shows how the little things can help.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16012068,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Ruby 2.5.0 Released","text":"You may enjoy Practical Object Oriented Design with Ruby by Sandi Metz. Speaks about OO software design in very clear and easy to grasp way. I often share it with non-ruby devs because it\u2019s about design much more than it is about ruby. Here are a couple of talks by the author which examplify her style of thinking and approaching problems. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19601277,"author":"d4mi3n","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Programming: Doing it more vs. doing it better","text":"This line of discussion reminds me of a great quote by Sandi Metz, who's pretty well known in the ruby community for harping on the topic. One thing I saw in a talk of hers that really stuck with me: Repetition is preferable to the wrong abstraction. The first thing that's drilled into a new programmer is DRY. It's easy to understand and it works reasonably well. The next step up seems to be knowing when _not_ to roll stuff up, and how to tell when you're looking at a distinct piece of logic that needs to be reified into it's own entity or function. EDIT: The Sandi Metz talk I mentioned: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23739974,"author":"adamkl","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The Wrong Abstraction (2016)","text":"Sandi mentions this during a talk she gave on refactoring a few years ago. [0] It\u2019s a great little video for showing junior developers how a messy bit of code can be cleaned up with a few well chosen OOP patterns (and a set of unit tests to cover your ass). [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24497132,"author":"chrisbrauns","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Is There a LeetCode for Refactoring?","text":"I don't have a full 'LeetCode' style example, but the Gilded Rose Kata teaches me something every time I try it. Original Kata: [LINK] Sandi Metz's Take: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24880286,"author":"voodootrucker","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Admitting That Functional Programming Can Be Awkward (2007)","text":"I _really_ struggled to not use contrived examples when teaching OOP. It was very hard because you don't really need it until your application becomes non-trivial so I see why all the college classes use cars & trucks or whatever. I think I ended up going with a Player API with tapes, records, CDs etc. Some could skip, others only fast-forward. I was still unhappy with it, but it was better than most examples. I like to point folks at writing an IntelliJ plugin. I find that some of the best architected OOP programs become nothing but a collection of plugin interfaces and base classes. But you really need to understand \"is a\" vs \"has a\", not burn your base class, let architecture emerge following the rule of 3, rather than quickly jumping on the wrong abstraction to fight duplication. Sandi Metz really says it better than I can: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8dhp_20j0Ys":[{"hn_comment_id":48826383,"author":"alexpotato","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Honey, We Bought an AI Story","text":"Took my kids to see Toy Story 5. While watching it, I thought about AI generated content. I have never personally met anyone who worked on any of the Toy Story movies. I know, from documentaries etc, who Brad Bird and John Lasseter are. I've also watched the video [0] about how Toy Story 2 almost got deleted (which I highly recommend if you are in storage, DevOps or SRE). There are other movies like the Wild Robot that: - had big emotional impact on me (b/c I'm a parent) - are 100% animated - I have zero idea who made them I say all of this b/c at some point, most people don't care if the movie was hand painted cels, CGI done by humans or fully AI generated with human text prompting. If the feeling is strong, people will have a \"bigger\" reaction which in turn will make it more memorable. It's all basically on a spectrum of \"humans using tools\". They care about how the movie makes them feel. It started with humans spitting charcoal at a wall [1] and now it's linear algebra. 0 - [VIDEO] (Toy Story 2 almost lost) 1 - [LINK] (humans painting on walls0","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11500648,"author":"danso","month":"2016-04","story_title":"How Toy Story 2 Got Deleted Twice, Once on Accident, Again on Purpose","text":"I was surprised not to see this mentioned in the front page discussion about the guy who supposedly rm rf'ed his web hosting service [1] The (amusing and animated) YouTube video link has since been changed: [VIDEO] I like using the Pixar incident when working with students who are programming at the command-line for the first time, as an illustration of how powerful the command-line is (or rather, how much modern systems wrap things in safety layers). The disaster that befell the web-hosting guy was not just one line of code, but other errors and bugs (variables not being set) and overall badly designed systems for automation. But this Pixar incident, if it happened the way described, is the result of someone with total control and agency who typed in that one line of code and ran it. And they did it to something that is immediately tangible (and beloved) to the average non-programmer. If a professional at Pixar could do something so tragically destructive to something like Toy Story...imagine what you [the novice] could accidentally do. (thus, please remember to use Tab as much as possible to autocomplete) [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"8dinUbg2h70":[{"hn_comment_id":17678378,"author":"m00n","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Braid 10th anniversary critical compilation","text":"Seconded. It was a great game, albeit with not so much replay value. There is a great interview with Blow on the technicalities of the warping effects in Braid: [VIDEO] In addition to Limbo and Inside, may I also recommend: Portal 1&2 Antichamber VVVVVV increpare.com In particular Stephen Lavelle (@increpare) makes games with much darker and more interesting social implications. Although, Braid accurately predicted the \"nice guys\" trope.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38220771,"author":"OnionBlender","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Braid, Anniversary Edition trailer [video]","text":"If you're curious how the time rewind was implemented, Blow did a GDC presentation back in 2010. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8fHi36dvTdE":[{"hn_comment_id":17930837,"author":"beliu","month":"2018-09","story_title":"We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?","text":"Leonard Bernstein gave his answer on the question in a series of lectures titled \"The Unanswered Question.\" Draws analogies to concepts in linguistics and CFGs: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21826881,"author":"sailfast","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?","text":"I haven't watched the whole thing but this lesson from Barry Harris (and the whole Lincoln Center Jazz Academy) is pretty great for thinking about harmony, solos, and improvisation / voicing: [LINK] I've also enjoyed the Leonard Bernstein Norton lectures at Harvard in terms of overall theory of why things sound good to our ears: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24210695,"author":"sailfast","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Become a Music Buff?","text":"I agree 100% with this. While you can appreciate music it's hard to be a \"buff\" unless you can try to understand the effort or absolute virtuosity that goes into playing a really complex piece. Knowing that you like the way music sounds is great, but understanding _why_ a particular harmonic shift / change is unexpected, novel, or unique is even better. That said, understanding that sort of theory takes a lot of work and investment. If you can't make that investment, I'd say watching some videos about theory, or reading up on production, or technique on any instrument will help gain a deeper understanding. Bernstein did the Norton Lectures in the 70s around a language of music ( [VIDEO] ) but even watching somebody like Cory Wong or Jacob Collier go through their composition, playing and process (there are many other artists that do this stuff to) is great for appreciation / buffery.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28383916,"author":"sseagull","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom","text":"Leonard Bernstein has some lectures that might be helpful. This one has some good stuff about why notes an octave apart sound similar, etc. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35418826,"author":"coolandsmartrr","month":"2023-04","story_title":"If Philip Glass Were a Film","text":"I feel that this video inherits the spirit of Leonard Bernstein's lectures, particularly the Young People's Concert and the Norton Lectures at Harvard. Bernstein likened music to linguistics, calling each movement of a symphony \"a musical sentence.\"[1] While Two Set Violin may have had facetious intentions, they have faithfully reenacted tensions within the music in their conversation. [1] Check out the Norton Lectures especially, where Bernstein analyzes musical structure with references to Chomsky. The maestro was really well learned. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8fi7uSYlOdc":[{"hn_comment_id":31250305,"author":"smoldesu","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Best educational courses/MOOCs/videos/blogs/books taught by a Female?","text":"Indeed a bit of an odd request, but I'm partial to Liz Rice's \"Containers from Scratch\" talk. Probably one of the most enlightening presentations I've seen in recent years, full-stop. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218625,"author":"komuW","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"1. Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? - James Mickens [LINK] 2. James Mickens on JavaScript - James Mickens [LINK] 3. Creating containers From Scratch - Liz Rice [VIDEO] 4. 2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Existence of Nothing - Panelists: J. Richard Gott, Jim Holt, Lawrence Krauss, Charles Seife, Eve Silverstein. Moderator: Neil deGrasse Tyson [LINK] 5. 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Is the Universe a Simulation? - Panelists: David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi, James Gates, Lisa Randall, Max Tegmark Moderator: Neil deGrasse Tyson [LINK] 6. Zig: A programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity \u2013 Andrew Kelley [LINK] 7. Concurrency Is Not Parallelism - Rob Pike [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22241841,"author":"sascha_sl","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Linux containers in 500 lines of code (2016)","text":"Liz Rice has done some awesome on-stage live coding, including a very small container runtime in go. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30624757,"author":"pdpi","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Linux containers in 500 lines of code (2016)","text":"This will be a fun read, thanks! If you'd prefer to see the same ideas in video form, Liz Rice gave a pretty good prsentation on this same topic in 2018: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40577046,"author":"ashconnor","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Deep Diving into Docker and Containers: What It Is and How It Works","text":"Big fan of the following talk that explains how containers work from the ground up. Containers From Scratch \u2022 Liz Rice \u2022 GOTO 2018 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43489246,"author":"pss314","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Building a Linux Container Runtime from Scratch","text":"I loved this hands-on presentation Containers From Scratch by Liz Rice from few years ago [VIDEO] . Today, Linux containers in (less than) 100 lines of shell by Michael Kerrisk was published [LINK] .","stance":"rec"}],"8gw0rXPMMPE":[{"hn_comment_id":45803453,"author":"gschizas","month":"2025-11","story_title":"State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions","text":"In the test, Windows Terminal (weirdly written as \"terminal.exe\") comes up as #4 in the scoring table. As to the \"love\" question, I still watch this video from time to time: [VIDEO] :) EDIT: I love the easter egg with the names of the developers across the Windows timeline :)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20248697,"author":"ktpsns","month":"2019-06","story_title":"New Windows Terminal Preview","text":"[VIDEO] -- this advertisting video is super cool and nerdy. Who could have thought someone could win a prize with a terminal in the 1990s, when everybody tried to get rid of terminals as hard as they could? I wish we could have a modern feature rich terminal with real blurring background and powerful features on X11/Xorg/Qt/Gtk/\"the linux world\". Konsole (KDE) is amongst the best I know so far.","stance":"rec"}],"8hAw1z8GdE8":[{"hn_comment_id":359103,"author":"Deadsunrise","month":"2008-11","story_title":"Prolonged Partial Sleep Deprivation for a Job (The worst year of my life [so far])","text":"I don't have any sleep disorder and never really paid much attention to the duration of my sleep or the time to go to bed. After watching this video [VIDEO] ( Dr. William Dement on Healthy Sleep and Optimal Perfomance ) I'm going to bed at 11 and waking at 7 with excelent results.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19713433,"author":"smartbit","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices","text":"My favorite talk on Sleep by William Dement [VIDEO] September 23, 2008 Google Tech Talk Very entertaining.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32095844,"author":"m0llusk","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The effects of sleep debt","text":"The source of information about this that I have found most useful is an hour long talk given by Dr. William Dement at Google Tech Talks called Healthy Sleep and Optimal Performance: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":432705,"author":"bd","month":"2009-01","story_title":"Lack of sleep 'raises cold risk'","text":"I remember awesome Google Tech Talk about sleep that mentioned sleep debt requiring full repayment. Dr. William Dement on \"Healthy Sleep and Optimal Perfomance\" [VIDEO] It was linked from an older HN sleep thread: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1551424,"author":"seanb","month":"2010-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Please, help me understand what I am doing wrong.","text":"Getting enough sleep? Definitely worth a watch: [VIDEO] Personally, I found that taking a full-time programming job destroyed my out-of-office motivation and productivity. It might be worth trying a job in a new industry for a while, or working out some sort of part-time agreement with your employer -- you might find your brain itching to code and produce something after work hours.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5475168,"author":"sgpl","month":"2013-04","story_title":"How much sleep do we really need to work productively?","text":"There is a very informative talk on youtube [1] by Dr. William Dement, often referred to as the father of sleep study. He founded the Sleep Research Center @ Stanford University. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18840375,"author":"m0llusk","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What tech talk does everyone need to see?","text":"Google Tech Talks Personal Growth Series: Dr William Dement on Healthy Sleep and Optimal Performance (2008-09-23) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33155183,"author":"m0llusk","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Finding the Joy in Feeling Tired","text":"Lauded Stanford sleep researcher William Dement has done a lot of work to characterize fatigue and drowsiness. Generally speaking his conclusion is that sleep debt is extremely common and also damaging. He gave an hour talk at Google going over many of his results. His manner in this is informal and drags a bit but the information is potentially extremely valuable for anyone experiencing the feeling of tiredness: [VIDEO] Personal Growth Series: Dr. William Dement on Healthy Sleep and Optimal Performance","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42281013,"author":"m0llusk","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Engineering Sleep","text":"Kind of tangential, but some time ago now passed famous sleep researcher William Dement gave a presentation at Google TechTalks about healthy sleep and optimal performance that is a good overall review of what we know about sleep: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8k2AbqTBxao":[{"hn_comment_id":32131960,"author":"sph","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Rowan Atkinson: Visual Comedy (1992) [video]","text":"You must be a fan of American comedy then. Stephen Fry explains the difference here: [VIDEO] Actually very insightful, and explains why I have never been fond of the cool guy that gets all the girls US comedy loves to represent.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43372612,"author":"rikroots","month":"2025-03","story_title":"So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams","text":"I really like Stephen Fry's take on the difference between American and British comedy: [VIDEO] (YouTube)","stance":"rec"}],"8kUQWuK1L4w":[{"hn_comment_id":4070533,"author":"sunkencity","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Why APL Is Still Cool","text":"I recently bought \"APL an interactive approach\" and read it. It seems that most of the good stuff from APL is already present in modern languages, and better when it's lazy. The OO stuff in APL looks kind of crufty. Still it's a wonderful fascinating language. In the age of mature open-source it feels very old fashioned with the expensiveness of a decent implementation. Btw, this is a fantastic tv segment from days of yore \"The Origins of APL - 1974\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6118176,"author":"znowi","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages","text":"There's a great link in the original comments to a video from 1974, where Iverson, Falkoff, and others discuss the origins of APL. It was a pleasure to watch. A peculiar contrast in language and attitude to today's rockstars and ninjas :) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8pTEmbeENF4":[{"hn_comment_id":13523172,"author":"itsyogesh","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?","text":"Bret Victor is amazing. I saw his video about the future of programming[0] and have been following him since then. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17709135,"author":"diegojromero","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the future of programming?","text":"'The future of Programming' by Bret Victor ( [VIDEO] ). Seems a pun about OP title but it really is related with his/her question. Take a look and you will be amazed of how good (or revolutionary by our standards) some old technologies were.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25609183,"author":"corysama","month":"2021-01","story_title":"The Great Software Stagnation","text":"Lots of cynic-cynics in here :) I'll stand up for the author. The lists in the article are not great, but I still agree with the sentiment. I recommend everyone watch Bret Victor's classic \"The Future of Programming\" [VIDEO] Yes, we've had a trillion dollars invested in \"How to run database servers at scale\". And, we've had some incremental improvements to the C++ish language ecosystem. We've effectively replaced Perl with Python. That's nice. Deep Learning has been a major invention. Probably the most revolutionary I can think of in the past couple decades. But, what do I do in Visual Studio 2019 that is fundamentally different than what I was doing in Borland Turbo Pascal back on my old 286? C++20 is more powerful. Intellisense is nice. Edit-and-continue worked 20 years ago and most programmers still don't use it. If you are super awesome, you might use a reversible debugger. That's still fringe science these days. There is glacial momentum in the programming community. A lot of \"grep and loose, flat ASCII files were good enough for my grandpappy. I can't accept anything different\" And, so we don't have code-as-database. A lot of \"I grew up learning how to parse curly bracket blocks. So, I can't accept anything different\". So, so many languages try to look like C and are mostly flavors of the same procedural-OO-bit-of-functional paradigm. A lot of \"GDB is terrible, don't even try\" so many programmers are in reverse-stockholm system where they have convinced themselves debug","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25794414,"author":"thangalin","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Why can't I write code inside my browser?","text":"Bret Victor's, \"The Future of Programming\" is illuminating. He walks through what \"programming\" means and how the concept of \"programming\" has shifted in little evolutionary leaps. [VIDEO] \"There can be a lot of resistance to new ways of working that require you to unlearn what you've already learned and think in new ways. ... And there can even be outright hostility.\" Programming Baduk used to involve expert systems. Now convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can hoist a computer to superhuman performance, even doing so without pre-programmed rules (see MuZero). We no longer \"program\" computers to play Go, chess, shogi, or even Atari games. Some people have difficulty keeping code structures in their mind's eye. Here's a conceptual development environment for navigating code visually, ending with a dual text editor: [LINK] Is that programming? What's the difference between _typing_ instructions into a computer to place a graphical user interface widget on a screen and _telling_ the computer you'd like to put a toroid on the screen? Computers can use CNNs to fill in knowledge gaps. Even though the computer wasn't told the colour, size, shading, material, or location of the toroid, it can still show us the ring. Is telling a holodeck that you'd like to replay a scene from a novel a form of programming? [LINK] Each evolutionary step in programming has given us more powerful ways to express ideas in ever terser forms. Few people code in binary anymore. Did Picard need to tell the ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36601206,"author":"ulkesh","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Bret Victor: Update July 2023","text":"If you haven't yet seen this video, please do: [VIDEO] (Bret Victor The Future of Programming) This won't tell you who he is, exactly, but it does give insight into how he thinks. And it's a pretty great talk, in my opinion.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16846603,"author":"namuol","month":"2018-04","story_title":"You Can\u2019t Do Data Science in a GUI","text":"Yes, healthy skepticism is good, but just because code (i.e. text files) is often the most _powerful_ or _flexible_ tool, doesn't mean it's always the best tool. We (programmers) are notoriously bad at advancing the tools in our field. For a brief history of this, watch \"The Future of Programming\" talk by Bret Victor: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17388586,"author":"veli_joza","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Programming Paradigms and Beyond [pdf]","text":"Good read. I feel the title should be \"Teaching Programming Paradigms and Beyond\" since the text assumes familiarity with complete CS landscape and comments on success of several teaching methods. I would recommend (also misleadingly titled) talk The Future of Programming by Bret Victor [1] which goes over some groundbreaking paradigms that have since become mostly forgotten. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22910195,"author":"DeBraid","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?","text":"Related thread: `Ask HN: What's the best book on the early history of the Internet and/or Web?` [LINK] My previous reco: Not a book, but a great video via Steve Blank: [LINK] Also `Bret Victor The Future of Programming`, which is misleading as above is performance piece where title slide reads `1973` [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23364384,"author":"j-pb","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Have you ever asked yourself \u201chow did research get done before LateX?\u201d","text":"PeerJ has actually quite a few publications, one of them is CS ;) [LINK] the dropdown on the top left allows you to switch between them. I think MathJax is certainly a step in the right direction, they even support rendering to MathML. But I agree that there is a certain lack there in terms of full semantic representations. MathJax is more accessible than TeX but it's still describing visual layout, instead of semantic meaning. Pushing HTML to arxiv is also a step into the right direction. I think the most important thing we can do is not be complacent with the state of the art. We need to go back to an age of computing where we didn't think we had it all figured out. We need to experiment, and not be afraid to take a step back in some aspects, like layout and kerning, in exchange for other advances like semantic representations and knowledge representation. I think bred victor has a great talk on this: [VIDEO] I think we need to experiment with things like observablehq.com or nextjournal.com or the many other that are coming into existence.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28036700,"author":"f0e4c2f7","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Stack Overflow Architecture in the year 2070","text":"I think you might be ok on compute but bottleneck on bandwidth. Who knows though. Fun question. If you like exploring these kinds of ideas you might enjoy [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34487952,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?","text":"For the people asking who is Bret Victor: When \"What are your favourite tech talks of all time?\" is asked on HN, he gets more mentions than anyone else, usually. Some of his talks: Inventing on Principle [LINK] The Future of Programming [VIDEO] The Humane Representation of Thought [LINK] Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [LINK] Seeing Spaces [LINK] Drawing Dynamic Visualizations [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42135046,"author":"awongh","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Choose Boring Technology and LLMs","text":"I was more thinking about the blocked progress of true innovation in the way programming languages are made and used. This is the talk I referenced above: [VIDEO] I agree with his main thesis which is that we can do better to improve on some of these literally 60 year old programming and programming tooling paradigms. I'm hoping that the paradigm improvement isn't to just paste over the entire endeavour with some AI agents that abstract away coding as we currently think about it.","stance":"rec"}],"8ptH79R53c0":[{"hn_comment_id":28656883,"author":"junon","month":"2021-09","story_title":"The Perfect Voxel Engine","text":"For reference, this is John Lin who posts semi-frequent devlogs[0] of his voxel engine progress - an engine that is, in my opinion, one of the best voxel engines in existence rivaled only by Dennis Gustafsson's \"Teardown\" voxel engine. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42590154,"author":"parlortricks","month":"2025-01","story_title":"VoxelSpace: Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code (2020)","text":"John Lins [VIDEO] Crystal Island looks amazingly detailed and smooth. Wish he would continue or share how.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"8r1CZTLk-Gk":[{"hn_comment_id":2235593,"author":"smiler","month":"2011-02","story_title":"Why I stopped travelling to the US and largely stopped doing business in the US","text":"Refuse? Refuse? You can fly to the US - some 4000 miles away in 7.5 hrs for the East Coast and 11 hours for the West coast. You then may have a little bit of a wait at immigration (or not as the case may be). I've gone through in 5 minutes and one time it was 45 minutes. Seeing as you state you're in the UK, you also eligible for the VWP which means you can travel to the US whenever you like. Just consider what it was like to travel before the invention of the airplane, or the steam ship. Please appreciate that you live in a time when travelling the world is very very easy. And please watch [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4512468,"author":"batista","month":"2012-09","story_title":"iPhone 5","text":"Plus, \"simply a taller screen and newer processor\", really? New screen, new processor, new innards, new machining and construction, new connector, new iOS, new camera, improved battery life AND lighter. NFC and wireless charging? Who promised you that? And who delivers those at the moment? You might want to see this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4536739,"author":"tomaszkubacki","month":"2012-09","story_title":"Everything's broken and nobody's upset","text":"Everythings Amazing & Nobodys Happy Maybe we need to watch this tube to see things in a more balanced way: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8rS3fTbC7TE":[{"hn_comment_id":47389233,"author":"johnbarron","month":"2026-03","story_title":"SpaceX IPO Scandal","text":"At 25:48 you have the explanation for the (multiple) tricks: [VIDEO] This Musk guy makes Ponzi look like the Pope.You almost have to admire it the way you admire a raccoon breaking into a triple locked trash can at 2 AM. You are furious. You know you should be furious. But part of you is at the window wondering \"how did he do that?\". As you will see below, this raccoon is getting the trash can manufacturer to remove the lock for him first. This is how retail investors are about to get played by the SpaceX IPO: First they only release 5% to 10% to create an artificially inflated price. Its called the low float strategy... Also...the Nasdaq 100 inclusion is supposed to be earned. You list, trade for up to a year at least, prove you are stable and then maybe you might be selected for inclusion. That rule protects the millions of people whose retirement money is in index funds. But Musk told Nasdaq \"fast-track me or I list on NYSE... so the Nasdaq invented a \"Fast Entry\" rule out of thin air....15 trading days and you are in. They openly admitted it was designed for SpaceX. S&P is now considering the same thing for the S&P 500, which has around $24 trillion in assets tracking it. Why does this matter? The second SpaceX hits these indexes, every passive fund is forced to buy, your 401k, your Vanguard fund, your target date fund. All buying SpaceX at whatever inflated price it opens at, with zero public track record. Nobody asks you. With the index inclusion and the implication of ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47605658,"author":"superjan","month":"2026-04","story_title":"SpaceX Files to Go Public","text":"Patrick Boyle (fund manager, professor, youtuber) recently discussed this IPO on his channel. Informative and entertaining. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8vJT8AW0wYw":[{"hn_comment_id":41519270,"author":"ForHackernews","month":"2024-09","story_title":"NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive","text":"There's a documentary \"It's Quieter in the Twilight\" about the team keeping the Voyager missions alive: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43596388,"author":"jahlove","month":"2025-04","story_title":"NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End","text":"Obligatory trailer for the \"It's Quieter in the Twilight\" documentary, about the team of engineers riding out the end of the Voyager program: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"8vWaawiUteM":[{"hn_comment_id":22682411,"author":"jungletime","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Doctors turn to social media to develop Covid-19 treatments in real time","text":"George Hotz is also making a valiant attempt. Starting from scratch, he's made a surprising amount of progress in the last 3 days. Armed with just a web browser and python. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22764805,"author":"adam_fallon_","month":"2020-04","story_title":"What's a virus, anyway? The bare-bones basics","text":"Geohot has been doing a pretty unscientific but interesting look at the molecular & computational biology side of the coronavirus. Interesting for coders/hackers First in the series here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24698452,"author":"juliushuijnk","month":"2020-10","story_title":"'Long Covid': Why are some people not recovering?","text":"If you have many hours to spare, you can watch George Hotz dive into the details. One of the take-aways is that the Corona virus is a Sars, not a flu. [VIDEO] If your take is that Sars is just another flu, then I guess you just broadened the scope of the flu, and need to be open for the idea that the 'flu' could be more dangerous than you thought.","stance":"rec"}],"8wlld3Z9wRc":[{"hn_comment_id":29902110,"author":"MereInterest","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Jevons Paradox","text":"There's a number of key differences, mostly in how things scale with increased use. * Car transit is typically scaled through increased space allocation. Public transit is typically scaled through increased utilization of the same space. * Car transit is limited at about 2000 vehicles/lane/hour. Public transit is mainly limited by the number of buses/trains on a route. (e.g. A typical bus can carry 30-100 people. Replacing a lane of car transit with a dedicated bus lane drastically increases the throughput of that lane.) * If the number of highway lanes are doubled, followed by induced demand using that capacity, the result is a much less enjoyable experience driving. If the frequency of buses doubles, followed by induced demand using that capacity, the result is a much more enjoyable experience taking the bus, as the wait for the next bus is shorter. * There's a phase transition in public transit utilization that happens when buses/trains/subways arrive more often than once every 15 minutes or so. If a bus arrives once every hour, you need to carefully plan your day around that particular bus, arrive early to make sure you don't miss it, and waste a lot of time waiting. If a bus arrives once every 10 minutes, there's no need to plan ahead, and you just get on whichever bus arrives next. The Youtube channel \"Oh the Urbanity\" had a pretty good video on induced demand as it applies to both car transit and public transit [0], that I highly recommend. Most everything by the \"Not ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30962286,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Induced Demand Is Real","text":"> Did creating the iPhone induce demand for iPhones that otherwise would not have been there? Was there pent up demand for iPhones that was sated by their creation? Invention is the mother of necessity. \u2014 Marshal McLuhan > In the same way, it seems strange to term things induced/pent up demand. Increased road capacity means people could plan more car trips without worrying about sitting in traffic. Until that new capacity is filled up and now you have even more people sitting in traffic. The only way to reduce traffic is to get people out of cars, otherwise you're just spending money to kick the can down the road. See \"What People Get Wrong About Induced Demand\" by the Oh The Urbanity! channel: * [VIDEO] Also \"Does Induced Demand Apply to Housing?\": * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39361764,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Induced demand is not a useful concept","text":"> Cities should be inducing demand for getting around. This is mentioned in the latest NJB video, \"More Lanes are (Still) a Bad Thing\": > The difference for induced demand for cars, and induced for other modes of travel, is that cars are a extremely space inefficient. You can absorb a lot more induced travel demand on a subway line, tram line, or bicycle path, than you can in a car lane. * [LINK] The Oh The Urbanity! channel has a good video on this, \"What People Get Wrong About Induced Demand\": * [VIDEO] Cars have (AFAICT) the lowest hourly through-put of any transportation mode: * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39745548,"author":"throw0101d","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Paris cycling numbers double in one year thanks to investment","text":"> Using 'induced demand' for good - I love it. Oh The Urbanity had a good video on this, \"What People Get Wrong About Induced Demand\": > In this video we explain why induced demand does apply to transit, walking, and cycling infrastructure, but with different consequences. * [VIDEO] Transit, for example, can get better with more ridership: more train capacity is added to a line, and more frequent service may occur for better throughput. Both actions would improve service for each individual rider, so while while one may not want it \"crowded\", having it busy is good. While with roads, an individual driver may want enough traffic so that a street exists, any traffic beyond that would probably only slow you down. There are also externalities: more walking, cycling, transit reduces pollution and can improve individual health and the collective health of the population. Driving does the opposite.","stance":"rec"}],"8xDK2LgSeyk":[{"hn_comment_id":22151332,"author":"resheku","month":"2020-01","story_title":"If we weren\u2019t the first industrial civilization on Earth, would we ever know?","text":"this youtube channel i like \"Curious Droid\" made not long ago a video on the subject [VIDEO] What Fossils Will We Leave Behind in 65 Million Years? 65 million years ago the dinosaurs died out, we only know of their existence because of the few fossil remains found. So what if a similar fate were to happen to us humans tomorrow, in 65 million years time what would remain of everything we had created and would there be anything be left for any future intelligent species to find.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27151674,"author":"est31","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Freshly made plutonium from outer space found on ocean floor","text":"Not just subduction but also erosion. Outside of dedicated digging efforts like deep mines or such, the fossils we find today are the ones close to the surface that are almost eroded and will be gone soon (on geologic timescales). There is a nice curious droid video on the topic whether a humans if they went extinct tomorrow, wouldn't create a fossil record similar to dinosaurs, simply because we've been on planet earth for a too short period. [VIDEO] > What we have to remember is that they existed for over 165 million years, 3300 times longer than modern humans have been around and the number of creatures that lived in that time frame alone, not including very small insect-sized ones must be in the trillions. However, only a tiny number of those would have been in the right conditions to be quickly covered in sediment and then fossilized. Then millions of years later they happen to be exposed on the surface at just the right time before they are eroded away for us to find them. The latest estimate is that the total number of modern humans to have ever existed over the 50,000 years we have been around is about 107 billion. But 50,000 years is a very small slice of geological time and all of our 5000 years of recorded history would be a fraction of that, and the last 200 years or so since the industrial revolution, a tiny fraction of that again, maybe a razor-thin sliver of a darkened layer somewhere in the dozens of kilometers of limestone, siltstone, and shale of the future ","stance":"rec"}],"8xFLjUt2leM":[{"hn_comment_id":14736320,"author":"grondilu","month":"2017-07","story_title":"The Uninhabitable Earth","text":"If you feel like watching more hopeful content on the subject, there is Allan Savory's TED talk about how to stop desertification[1], and Freeman Dyson's speech called \"heretic thoughts about science and society\"[2]. Basically, those speakers suggest climate change is an issue that can be solved with better land management . Soil is extremely good at absorbing Carbon Dioxide. Isn't it why there is so little CO2 in the atmosphere (0.04%)? We just need to make sure the process does indeed happen. When one looks at the map of Earth, the vastness of the desert areas is scary. Yet there are reasons to believe this is relatively recent. The Sahara was wet few thousands years ago, the American deserts became so mostly because of the considerable environmental changes brought by Europeans. Desertification is much scarier than climate change, and it did not wait for the industrial revolution to happen. Reversing desertification is probably not impossible (after all it is being attempted already in many places around the world, like in Africa[3] and China[4]), and it might very well reverse climate change as a bonus. I personally wish more effort and public attention was diverted to it. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] 3. [LINK] 4. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22452454,"author":"didericis","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Freeman Dyson Has Died","text":"I disagree about him hand-waving away quantitative arguments. I\u2019ve watched a number of relatively lengthy interviews and presentations he\u2019s given that have been about or have touched on the topic of climate change, and he consistently references measurements of carbon\u2019s effects and emphasizes the importance of real world measurements. His criticism is of abstract models of climate that attempt to make long term predictions. If you\u2019re most familiar with his positions through quotes and third hand reporting, I encourage you to listen to videos of him. I found him quite enjoyable to listen to. He was not the partisan he was sometimes painted as, although he was interviewed by people that were, but rather seemed genuinely curious and interested in truth and exploration. Here are a few videos. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] His core claims appear to be that A) Increased CO2 has measurable, beneficial effects B) CO2 is one of many factors contributing to a complex system effecting climate that we don\u2019t fully comprehend C) The positive or negative effects of climate change we\u2019re observing depend on the region D) It is better to create a wide range of practical engineering solutions to deal with the effects of a changing climate than to think we can fully control it or know what effect our interventions or lack thereof will do in the future. Some of those claims might be wrong, but I think it\u2019s inaccurate to say they weren\u2019t scientifically based.","stance":"rec"}],"8xJzHq8ru0M":[{"hn_comment_id":22264190,"author":"jspash","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Angular 9.0","text":"Have a look at Phoenix Live View -> [VIDEO] It is still early days, and isn't suitable for every use-case, but it could be the answer you're looking for. Continue to write back-end code only. But with the benefits of quick-response front-end app. I'm a total convert (evangelist) who has been increasingly put off by the evolution (devolution?) of front-end development over the past 5-10 years. This could be one way of the mess.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27311575,"author":"jjdeveloper","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Second-guessing the modern web (2020)","text":"I really like the way that Phoenix Liveview is trying to solve for this, trying to find the sweet spot in the middle of building multipage apps and SPAs. Great talk about it from the developer here [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29320365,"author":"jspash","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Django, HTMX and Alpine.js: Modern websites, JavaScript optional","text":"Have a look at how Phoenix(Elixir) does it with LiveView. You simply write everything as a server rendered view and the framework pulls things apart and sends just what changed over a web socket. Its mind blowing how fast it is (can be. Latency is real) I have no doubt that this style of front-end management is going to be a game changer in the next few years. Of course full-on SPA frameworks will still have their place. But if you aren\u2019t writing the next Google Maps clone, maybe you don\u2019t need all that. It\u2019s made me love web dev again after hating the complexity explosion of recent years. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20359820,"author":"lawik","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Why am I interested in Elixir?","text":"Not really, the frontend caches the static parts of the template and the backend only needs to resend the dynamic, changing, parts. So \"Welcome to $mysite, $username.\" would initially send the full rendering but if the data changes it would only send \"Hacker News,lawik\" over the wire. Somewhat simplified. This covers it quite well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22113179,"author":"tlack","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Which programming languages to learn in 2020 for an experienced dev?","text":"Python is definitely on an undeniable upswing, but you might find your mind more tingly taking a look at Elixir [0] with Phoenix-LiveView [1]. Here's a video that introduces the framework (April 2019): [VIDEO] It's based on Erlang which has always felt a little rough around the edges, but rock solid and very fast. With Erlang, service boundaries become a thing of the past and tangible state makes debugging a breeze. It's still on the upswing after 20 years in industry. Elixir greatly improves Erlang's tooling and creature comforts and adds syntax that many find more enjoyable. As a guy with web dev PTSD, I've been testing Phoenix and Live-View a bit lately and it really hits a sweet spot between Node's speed and evented nature and the simpler end of React's interactivity. And jobs seem to be appearing too. Plus Elixir is surprisingly simple to setup[2] so you won't be spending all night fighting Python module dep issues. :) [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28628255,"author":"jjdeveloper","month":"2021-09","story_title":"How we got to LiveView","text":"The round trip is very quick, websocket with a tiny payload in most cases. This video does a great job of discussing the advantages (skip forward to 6:50) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9-IWMbJXoLM":[{"hn_comment_id":41175677,"author":"pxc","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retrospective (2020)","text":"I'll second this recommendation! Benno Rice is an insightful, energetic, witty, and just plain enjoyable tech speaker. 'What UNIX Cost Us'[1] is another favorite of mine that the audience on this post might enjoy: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43327739,"author":"favorited","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Exploring Polymorphism in C: Lessons from Linux and FFmpeg's Code Design (2019)","text":"> for instance, Linux handles network socket, special files (like /proc/cpuinfo) or even USB devices as files. This is a powerful idea that can make easy to write or use programs for linux since we can rely in a set of well known operations from this abstraction called file. Benno Rice gave a fantastic talk a few years ago called \"What UNIX Cost Us,\" which he starts off by showing how to write some USB device code in macOS, Windows, and Linux. It only takes a few minutes to demonstrate how pretending that everything is a file can be a pretty poor abstraction, and result in far more confusing code, which is why everyone ends up using libusb instead of sysfs. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38764526,"author":"sph","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Reforming Unix","text":"Not the author but I recommend: \"What UNIX cost us\" by Benno Rice: [VIDEO] In fact, this video argues that file descriptors are not as good as the author claims in their opening paragraph. They are another runaway idiosyncrasy borne out of the \"everything is a file (but not really)\" philosophy that underpins Linux.","stance":"rec"}],"9-jIplX6Wjw":[{"hn_comment_id":36512897,"author":"baja_blast","month":"2023-06","story_title":"US Congress doubles down on explosive claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs","text":"Warp drives and wormholes do not necessarily break the laws of physics. Sabine Hossenfelder does a good job explaining why the limits imposed by special relativity are not valid arguments: [VIDEO] As for a breakaway civilization, don't you think people would notice resources missing or the insane usage of resources by what would have to be a massive civilization be noticed? If you take the claims at face value, that these things operate as if inertia does not apply already \"breaks physics\". And if that is the case ET would make more sense than mole people. But it is also possible there is nothing to this at all. For me it's ET or a Psyop.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37623671,"author":"prettyStandard","month":"2023-09","story_title":"She got famous on YouTube. Now it helps fund her research in quantum gravity","text":"She does seem to have a pretty compelling argument that the speed of light may not be the maximum speed. It's not that crack pot. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"90NsjKvz9Ns":[{"hn_comment_id":7993618,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2014-07","story_title":"How Does One Create A Gtk+ Application?","text":"Am I correct thinking you are talking about this bug? [LINK] If so, then yes they are aware of it and treating it as critical. Edit: Reading into this bug is so cool. This video was linked from it, fascinating stuff: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8191280,"author":"dkannan","month":"2014-08","story_title":"Mapping Migration in the United States","text":"Mark DiMarco gave a talk at JSConf 2014 called User Interface Algorithms which touches upon this [VIDEO] relevant section starts at 4:13 rest of the talk is good as well","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8701422,"author":"cipher0","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Show HN: Piste.io","text":"Great work! It might be cool if you could use voronoi diagrams to select the closest path to the mouse's position like the NYT did [0] because without really zooming in, the lines on some terrains appear to be very thin which makes hovering over a specific one a little harder. There's also a great talk that discusses this from JSconf2014 [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9945491,"author":"jsteenkamp","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Ask HN: The Case for the \u201cFront End Engineer\u201d Role","text":"I think you make an excellent observation that FE is a system engineering challenge. Algorithms do play an important role as you can see in this great presentation by Marc de Marco ( [VIDEO] ) However I think it's fair to say most FE engineers apply existing solutions and the system design is a bigger part of their role. I differentiate between UI Engineering and Front-End Engineering. The former emphasises design integration (pixels) and performance (rendering). The latter is broader scope and emphasises the systems engineering. Both have to deal with system design. UI is about components and messaging across the components with the front-end application being the \"system\". FE is about components that integrate the front-end application with what have traditionally been back-end APIs and services. In many cases when people say FE they mean both FE and UI. I would not get hung up on these but they help to clarify what you are talking about and who you are trying to hire. In the case of design and pixels there are specific challenges around dealing with layout and CSS and achieving 60fps. Creating UI components is an exciting area. For example see Pure UI ( [LINK] ) by @rauchg. Mess in Web Components ( [LINK] ). Challenge of style encapsulation... So there are a lot of unique challenges and skills and experience required in UI engineering. There are also exciting developments that start to push more overlap between UI and FE. For example GraphQL - the UI is \"language\" that \"pr","stance":"rec"}],"92vuuZt7wak":[{"hn_comment_id":14290033,"author":"natejackdev","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Save the Internet Net Neutrality is under attack","text":"The FCC Chairmen wants to get rid of net neutrality the only thing keeping the internet open and free. He doesn't apparently have the same idea. Here is a video to explain everything: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15750193,"author":"shmerl","month":"2017-11","story_title":"FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see","text":"John Oliver found a good way to explain it: [LINK] [VIDEO] The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition. They aren't elected officials.","stance":"rec"}],"92w5doU68D8":[{"hn_comment_id":38863634,"author":"ralonso","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US","text":"Finding working-as-advertised chargers appears to be hard if not downright impossible. The situation does appear to be a little better if you own a Tesla, but if you own most any other make of EV you're going to have a bad time. From a hard requirement of a third-party app to pay, chargers using cables that do not meet spec, outright broken charging stations, issues with the apps themselves, and so on. Aging Wheels did an excellent video[1] on how frustrating the experience can be. [1] Aging Wheels - EV Road Trips Suck Now (Except in a Tesla) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38279615,"author":"speps","month":"2023-11","story_title":"","text":"The Aging Wheels channel on YouTube has done a good field test between a Polestar 2 and a Tesla Model 3: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38714670,"author":"andrejk","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi finally say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug","text":"This road trip video does a good job showing the papercuts and more significant issues that make a non-Tesla road trip painful. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41256159,"author":"gambiting","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Toyota bets big on hybrid-only models as EV demand slows","text":"This video basically sums it up: [VIDEO] TLDR, the guy does an identical drive in both Polestar 2 and a Tesla, the Tesla just works at every supercharger, he plugs in and that's it, no app no nothing, the car charges at maximum available speed every time. With the Polestar every charger requires a different app, the chargers themselves are not built properly(advertising higher charging rates than the cables they have been installed with can support), broken stalls, and the car almost never charged anywhere close to its maximum charging speed. I love EVs(I own one!) but the state of public infrastructure is absolutely dire, unless you own a tesla and can use superchargers.","stance":"rec"}],"94ed4v_T6YM":[{"hn_comment_id":36522607,"author":"pedro_hab","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time","text":"Mathematically yes, actually probably not. I'd suggest looking into Alcubierre Warp Drive, cool story on why the guy came up with it and shows how to wrap spacetime around a spaceship to make it go faster than light. The ship wouldn't go faster than light because it wouldn't move at all, the spacetime around it would. The channel below has quite a few other videos on the subject. I love it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25231631,"author":"tzs","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Warp Drive News","text":"There's an episode of PBS Space Time about this, \"The Speed of Light is NOT About Light\" [1], which comes pretty close to making the same points you are making. It might be useful to watch this earlier episode, \"Are Space and Time an Illusion?\" [2], first. There is a later episode (or maybe a couple of them) that go into how interactions with the Higgs field make it so things with mass travel slowed than the speed of causality. To tie back to the warp drive news, they have an episode that would be a good place to start on warp drives, \"Is The Alcubierre Warp Drive Possible?\" [3]. There's also \"Superluminal Time Travel + Time Warp Challenge Answer\" [4], and \"Will Wormholes Allow Fast Interstellar Travel?\" [5]. A non-warp unknown physics drive that comes up a lot also got an episode, \"The EM Drive: Fact or Fantasy?\" [6]. There is at least one episode covering interstellar travel without using any unknown physics, \"5 REAL Possibilities for Interstellar Travel\" [7]. The scope of the series is basically anything vaguely connected to astronomy, cosmology, and quantum mechanics, and the episodes are all pretty short (5-12 minutes), so it is a great thing to watch when you've got a short wait for something. Here's the series home page [8], and their YouTube channel [9]. Also on the PBS streaming app, for those who like to get their physics on their big screen TVs. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK] [7] [LINK] [8] [LINK] [9] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29469302,"author":"LegitShady","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Numerics applied to Casimir geometry generates intersection with Alcubierre warp","text":"The issue seems to be that the alcubierre drive requires things like external negative energy which are 'theoretically possible' but have never been detected and probably should have been already if they existed. Also, even if they worked, the negative energy requirements is something like the mass energy of jupiter on the high end or the moon on the low end. This is an hour long interview Dr Miguel Alcubierre who wrote the paper describing the Alcubierre drive. [LINK] For a shorter 10 minute video, see this PBS Spacetime video [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"94swlF55tVc":[{"hn_comment_id":20662569,"author":"dejawu","month":"2019-08","story_title":"What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?","text":"On the other side of this, I found it very interesting how a programmer who can't see codes using text-to-speech: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22934337,"author":"DCRichards","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?","text":"I recommend watching (and listening to) this talk by Saqib Shaikh, a blind developer using Visual Studio and how we codes and debugs with his screen reader [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22934889,"author":"ChrisRR","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?","text":"I'm reminded of this short video of a blind software developer using Visual Studio. Maybe it'll give you some idea [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28853664,"author":"lzybkr","month":"2021-10","story_title":"How does apt render its fancy progress bar?","text":"Saqib Shaikh, a blind developer at Microsoft, gave this short talk on using Visual Studio: [VIDEO] I realize this isn't a console, but I think it is a good demonstration of an expert doing typical developer activities.","stance":"rec"}],"96dWOEa4Djs":[{"hn_comment_id":517390,"author":"snprbob86","month":"2009-03","story_title":"Samsung: Solid state will match hard drive price","text":"Samsung has a funny and impressive \"viral\" ad video showing 24 SSD drives in a RAID array. Sign me up for one of these: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":620642,"author":"dryicerx","month":"2009-05","story_title":"USB Floppy Disk Drive RAID","text":"Good times... Also in the same light: Samsung SSD Raid (while we are at the RAID topic) [VIDEO] (it's a Samsung backed video, but still awesome)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":854705,"author":"messel","month":"2009-10","story_title":"Log-structured file systems: There's one in every SSD","text":"Can a single post make you smarter? This was an awesome description of why log file systems match with SSD (as long as TRIM is part of the picture). It also covers how flash based memories work in practice (small reads, but block writes). Very fascinating stuff for a guy that only does simulations software, but was once super curious about electronics in junior lab physics (nand gates, opamps, feedback circuits). Great SSD video (the 24 raid 0 setup) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"97t7Xj_iBv0":[{"hn_comment_id":24044879,"author":"mehrdadn","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Astronomers solve the missing baryon problem","text":"Veritasium videos are pretty darn high quality. Fun to watch and learn from, sometimes mindblowingly. Definitely recommend subscribing. One of my favorites is Derek's video on compliant mechanisms: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21593673,"author":"missosoup","month":"2019-11","story_title":"SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident","text":"There wouldn't be much to 'leak'. The nuclear material in weapons is relatively safe to handle as long as you don't ingest it. It's the post-explosion fission products that are nasty. Also with nuclear weapons, as much engineering has gone into safety as into weapon design itself. It's astronomically improbable for a modern nuclear weapon to detonate prior to arming even if the explosive lens is set off. The reentry vehicle is designed to come down at circa mach 14 so a little bit of heat and jostling isn't going to bother it. Cool video about some of the engineering involved: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25329643,"author":"sitkack","month":"2020-12","story_title":"From LEGOs to Ziploc: The Science of the Snap Fit","text":"Folks that like this might like CNC joinery and compliant mechanisms. [LINK] Why Machines That Bend Are Better [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"98LdFA-_zfA":[{"hn_comment_id":18648331,"author":"simonebrunozzi","month":"2018-12","story_title":"\u201cA pattern language\u201d explained (2016)","text":"Just finished watching a great 1996 lecture by Christopher Alexander: [VIDEO] I recommend it for those who have read his work, but never seen or heard the man in action.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12861667,"author":"shkaboinka","month":"2016-11","story_title":"WebAssembly Stack Machine","text":"...and if you're brave enough, think about how Christopher Alexander's philosophy of \"unfolding wholeness\" applies so much more to an AST than to the stack-machines of the 1960's: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20784984,"author":"paloaltokid","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Japanese architects who treated buildings like living organisms","text":"For anyone interested, Christopher Alexander was a huge influence on Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck. You can draw a fairly straight line from Alexander's ideas to new stuff like wiki, Extreme Programming, design patterns, refactoring, etc. For a very prescient talk by Alexander in 1996 to a bunch of ACM folks, see this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26382645,"author":"keithnz","month":"2021-03","story_title":"\u201cDesign Patterns\u201d Aren't (2002)","text":"this talk that christopher alexander did a number of years ago is quite interesting [VIDEO] one of the interesting things is that he had really moved on from \"patterns\" and was looking for something more intrinisic or \"atomic\" about design. Which actually is a much better guide to designing software.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49016999,"author":"keithnz","month":"2026-07","story_title":"All 253 Patterns from Christopher Alexander's a Pattern Language Summarized","text":"worth checking this out from 1996 [VIDEO] kind of ironic he was moving away from patterns to more fundamental concepts just as the software world was just discovering patterns. I think his shift to these more fundamental concepts is a much better way to think about design.","stance":"rec"}],"996OiexHze0":[{"hn_comment_id":23852496,"author":"sakisv","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Everything you need to know about OAuth 2.0","text":"This also has a very nice and simple explanation of the whole thing: [VIDEO] It's about 1h long, but it's really worth it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35719545,"author":"butisaidsudo","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Why is OAuth still hard in 2023?","text":"I read so many docs when I was trying to implement OAuth and got more and more confused. This video was a huge help though for explaining all of the concepts: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40060108,"author":"willsmith72","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Learn OAuth by building a client with Node.js","text":"at my old company we worked with auth a lot, so it was a requirement for new joiners to watch this in their first week. i still recommend it if you want to learn oauth from 0 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21358017,"author":"manigandham","month":"2019-10","story_title":"An Illustrated Guide to OAuth and OpenID Connect","text":"Seems there's still confusion so I'll copy/paste my old comment: OAuth 1.0/2.0 are a set of protocols and standards allowing applications to identify users and get access to their data using existing profiles. OAuth is mostly focused around authorization with claims (which are just key-value pairs) and authentication was an afterthought. OpenID is another standard designed to let people authenticate across the web, launched with a lot of hype in the early web 2.0 days but never took off. OpenID Connect (OIDC) is a new standard based on OAuth 2 + OpenID to provide both authentication and authorization in a single flow. OIDC/OAuth is all based on tokens, which are JWTs containing a bunch of claims that can be validated against the server that issued them. There are ID tokens (for the user info) and Access tokens (for accessing an API on behalf of that user), but some services like social logins don't provide any access tokens. Other providers might have rate limits, or dont have fine-grained permissions, or you maybe you have completely internal APIs that you need tokens for. Also this video is a great in-depth walkthrough: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38331757,"author":"krantic","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Any comprehensive courses on Auth?","text":"I have not seen a course that covers all of the things you are asking for. The best courses on the oidc/oauth and saml I have seen were the paid ones here: [LINK] On linkedinlearning this one was quite ok: [LINK] Free ressources check: - [LINK] -OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (in plain English): [VIDEO] [LINK] -OAuth/OpenID by Nat Sakimura(chairman openid foundation) [LINK] For the active directory topic I don't know good ressources","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38348387,"author":"langur","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Any comprehensive courses on Auth?","text":"I found Nate Barbettini's video on OAuth and OpenID Connect incredibly insightful for understanding these topics. He explains everything so well- [VIDEO] . Additionally, I'm part of the ZITADEL team, an open-source project that's free to download or use in our cloud offering. So, you can always tinker around with it as some others have already suggested. Our blog dives into various security topics, ranging from OAuth, OpenID Connect, and Single Sign-On, Authentication, Federation to emerging issues like Passkeys. We also discuss real-world Identity Management problems and solutions seen by ZITADEL users\u2014 [LINK] . For any specific security-related queries, feel free to join the conversation on our Discord chat: [LINK] . We're always discussing and sharing insights on these topics.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47099176,"author":"scandox","month":"2026-02","story_title":"What Is OAuth?","text":"[VIDEO] A classic explainer from almost a decade ago. This explains it from the point of view of the original problem it was designed to solve.","stance":"rec"}],"99dKzubvpKE":[{"hn_comment_id":27808859,"author":"fredrikholm","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Looking at the Performance of Refterm","text":"In his follow up video[0], he shows that in-use-memory is half that of Windows terminal, whilst simultaneously being >100x faster. Windows terminal chugging away in the background consuming 20% CPU for minutes at a time whilst he's debunking these claims / running the same data on refterm a few times over is hilarious (inflammatory or not). 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27843740,"author":"mariusor","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Warp: Fast, Rust-based terminal (waiting list)","text":"You should look into Casey Muratori's quest[1] against Windows terminal slowness on github and youtube. There were some heated exchanges there and some proof of concept software created to demonstrate both how slow Windows Terminal is, and how fast a GPU enabled terminal can be. [1] The latest video for it is here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28044020,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2021-08","story_title":"WireGuardNT, a high-performance WireGuard implementation for the Windows kernel","text":"For reference, I've never seen the built-in Windows VPN protocols exceed ~70 Mbps in any scenario. Maybe it's possible with a crossover cable between two Mellanox 100 Gbps NICs, using water-cooled and overclocked CPUs, but not over ordinary networks with ordinary servers. I have gigabit wired Internet to a site with gigabit Internet. Typical performance of SSTP or IKEv2 is 15-30 Mbps. That's 1.5% to 3% max utilisation of the available bandwidth, which is just... sad. It's not the specific site either, other vendor VPNs can easily achieve > 300 Mbps over the same path. It's a year and a half into the pandemic, there are record numbers of people working from home, and Microsoft is the world's second biggest company right now. Meanwhile, volunteers put together a protocol in their spare time that is not only more secure but can also easily do 7.5 Gbps! That needs to be repeated: At least ONE HUNDRED TIMES faster than the \"best\" Microsoft can offer to their hundreds of millions of enterprise customers that are working from home. Someone from Microsoft's networking team needs to read this, and then watch Casey Muratori's rant about Microsoft's poor track record with performance: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28744089,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2021-10","story_title":"It takes a PhD to develop that","text":"Don't assume. Casey Muratori produced a highly correct Unicode renderer with correct VT code support. Watch the video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33029580,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Why modern software is slow","text":"Oh, this is nothing . Windows force-updated my Notepad.exe to the new modern UI version. It is very visibly laggy for basic actions such as opening menus or scrolling through text. You have to be spectacularly bad at programming to make something so basic so slow in 2022 on a very high-end gaming computer. Not just bad, but utterly oblivious. Casey Muratori excoriated the Windows Terminal dev team for failing to achieve a consistent 60 fps when displaying fixed-width text, which is such a trivial exercise that Casey whipped up a demo in like two weekends. [1] Now the Notepad team insisted on following in the Windows Terminal team's footprints and slowing down the other fixed-width text app that needs to be lightweight fast for all sorts of reasons. Nobody needs Notepad to be pretty. Everyone needs it to work .[2] Just amazing to see something like this happen. It's like a slow motion train wreck, ruining one Windows app at a time. [1] These videos are especially \"shocking\" because the code he wrote is terse, straightforward, lightning fast, and more correct than whatever madness Microsoft was doing. First weekend: [LINK] Second weekend: [VIDEO] [2] For example, opening a 300 MB log file takes a solid minute of time, which is absurdly slow. It also bloats this to 800 MB of memory usage. For comparison, TextPad opens it in 5 seconds and uses 30 MB of memory. VS Code, an electron application(!) opens in under 2 seconds.","stance":"rec"}],"9CO6M2HsoIA":[{"hn_comment_id":17689486,"author":"malloryerik","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Venezuela President Maduro 'survives drone attack'","text":"Can drones be stopped? They have the potential to wage campaigns of automated political violence. I see companies trying to protect against them, like Dedrone [1] -- how effective are these? I imagine most here have seen it, but if not, you must see the slaughterbots video. [2] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18363664,"author":"bicubic","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Fleets of drones could aid searches for lost hikers","text":"The tech required for search and rescue is the same tech required for search and destroy. We seem to be running headfirst into the autonomous killer bot future without giving so much as a second look at the implications. Slaughterbots [0] is a pretty good look at what can be achieved by refining and integrating technologies which all exist today. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22051864,"author":"lwneal","month":"2020-01","story_title":"How the U.S. military thinks about AI [audio]","text":"The substantive part of this conversation comes about 35 minutes in, when Allen describes the DoD's five AI ethics principles: that any deployed AI systems must be \"Responsible, Equitable, Traceable, Reliable, and Governable.\" [1]. I think \"Responsible\" raises some hard questions. Today, any weapons use by a robot might require a responsible human operator to first (remotely) pull the trigger. But what if an adversary allows their robots to fire without waiting for human permission? The first side to do so would gain a critical advantage, and we cannot have an autonomy gap. Some have raised conerns that in the extreme case, this could lead to a world of machines anonymously killing without attribution. If you haven't, see Stuart Russell's compelling short film \"Slaughterbots\" [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25471895,"author":"jtsiskin","month":"2020-12","story_title":"A swarm of drones flying through heavy forest\u2013while staying in formation","text":"This brings to mind a great video which I've posted here a few times: [VIDEO] What happens when technology progresses so much that anyone can make a swarm of killer drones? Will politicians no longer be able to go out in public? What about a distant future, when enriching uranium can be done in your garage for cheap...","stance":"rec"}],"9F-WngVMJBQ":[{"hn_comment_id":32688024,"author":"feb","month":"2022-09","story_title":"FAA approves unleaded fuel for piston fleet","text":"Impressive work by GAMI who are working on it since decades. AVWeb made 2 videos on the subject of leaded avgas and on how hard it is to get it approved. In addition, the FAA launched several failed attempts with the industry at large. * [VIDEO] The Long, Twisted And Slightly Ridiculous Story of Avgas Part 1 * [LINK] The Long, Twisted And Slightly Ridiculous Story of Avgas Part 2 When reading the announcement, it looks like some municipalities in California started banning the sale of leaded avgas and I suspect that helped to push the FAA to finally move in approving G1000UL. Not surprisingly, they will start providing it to the California market before the other states. In the announcement on avweb.com ( [LINK] ), they also credit Mark Baker from the AOAP to encourage the FAA to complete the project.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38042348,"author":"DigiDigiorno","month":"2023-10","story_title":"EPA moves towards banning leaded aviation gas","text":"The uphill battle of unleaded avgas leaves both the main players in the industry and the regulators themselves looking bad\u2014but in a banal kinda way. I enjoy AVWeb on YT for AV news (really, I just enjoy the humor/personality of Paul Bertorelli lol), here are a few insightful videos that summarize the story: The Long, Twisted And Slightly Ridiculous Story of Avgas Part 1 (14:22) [VIDEO] Part 2 (15:15) [LINK] and G100UL Approved Now What? (When the FAA approved the first unleaded 100-octane avgas a year ago) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48874770,"author":"aftbit","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented (2016)","text":"We're working on it, slowly but surely. This has been a known problem for a long time, at least since 2009 if not earlier. GAMI's G100UL was approved as a 100LL replacement in 2022, but there is still some controversy. Avweb has done a good series of videos on this. There were some real engineering concerns and some typical aviation conservative decision making. But really, it's a tragedy of the FAA fumbling the ball for decades at this point. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"9F9ahZQ7oP0":[{"hn_comment_id":30909136,"author":"nickt","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Return to Monkey Island \u2013 Coming 2022","text":"Really looking forward to this. Back in the day I played it on my Amiga 500, but last year, after watching Retro Ahoys video [1] I got my old 486 out of the loft and bought a Roland MT-32 just to play it - highly recommended, as is the video. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32901938,"author":"FireInsight","month":"2022-09","story_title":"\u201cReturn to Monkey Island\u201d is out today","text":"Do yourself a favor and watch this wonderful video essay historique on The Monkey Island series from Ahoy; [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25254852,"author":"TimSchumann","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Guybrush Fact vs. Fiction","text":"For those of you who are looking for some context, and have an hour to spare, Ahoy made a great documentary on YouTube about \u2018The Secret of Monkey Island\u2019 that touches on this topic. [0] The source material linked in this thread looks to be more authoritative than the video, and if I remember correctly the video even gets this detail of the story wrong, but sometimes it\u2019s nice to know the story around the story. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9FdHq3WfJgs":[{"hn_comment_id":12514443,"author":"jastanton","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Faking your death","text":"Reminds me of a DefCon speaker that talked about exploiting a bunch of websites to order death and birth certificates. Really eye opening, and potentially devastating if it's done to you. Edit: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12528736,"author":"griffinmahon","month":"2016-09","story_title":"How to Overthrow a Government [video]","text":"The speaker's previous presentation at a different year of the same conference, about using online records to fabricate your own death or the birth of a made-up baby, is also worth watching: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17351288,"author":"Maarten88","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Facebook ordered to explain deleted profile","text":"It's not only Facebook who have this process unsufficiently secured. The process for administering real death is also not really tamperproof. There is a hilarious defcon presentation on virtually killing someone and getting a real death certificate: [VIDEO] Improperly reporting someone dead, or misrepresenting someone's will is something \"you don't do\" so the system is designed to minimize friction/pain.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19062440,"author":"molesy","month":"2019-02","story_title":"$190M missing after crypto exchange Quadriga CEO dies","text":"Most jurisdictions (US and otherwise) have moved to Electronic Death Registration Systems. There was a fun Defcon talk about \"killing\" people with them a few years ago - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21645052,"author":"chatmasta","month":"2019-11","story_title":"It's Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name","text":"An alarming amount of societal functionality depends on what effectively amounts to the honor system. This is especially true when it comes to any sort of gatekept specialty profession, like coroners for example. There was a great talk at DefCon about faking death: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25119084,"author":"TheDong","month":"2020-11","story_title":"What to do if the bank says you're dead","text":"On the subject of people being declared dead, there's a good defcon talk about abusing how easy it is to declare someone dead. \"Chris Rock - I Will Kill You\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38582729,"author":"unforgivenpasta","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Verizon fell for fake \"search warrant,\" gave victim's phone data to stalker","text":"It is! This video is a bit old now but it's still so unbelievable how easy it was for the speaker to \"kill\" people (in Australia) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9Ikf1uZli4g":[{"hn_comment_id":24588723,"author":"harry8","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Assange Hearing Day 17","text":"The kind of \"journalist\" Luke Harding is was brutally exposed by Aaron Mate by simply repeatedly asking him for evidence for his claims when Harding was flogging a conspiracy theory book. Nothing more than that reduced him to powder. It's an amazing thing to watch: [VIDEO] I have no idea how this guy Harding is employed by the guardian, or indeed anyone or ever was. Obviously not a competent journalist, what he is... I'd never heard of Mate before seeing this, Mate just gives him rope and let's him do it to himself. That's the guy the Guardian had doing hatchet jobs on Assange when he was getting more death threats every day than every guardian journalist ever put together has received. [1] [1] I have no evidence of this. But it seems a lot more plausible than the Guardian's hatchet jobs. Where is Alan Rusbridger nowadays? He was editor back then. Ah, wikipedia says principal of an Oxford college. When not appearing in cameo perfomances of movie versions of Luke Harding's hatchet jobs on Snowden. Must be where he thinks he's best speaking truth to power nowadays. He may be right.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19817959,"author":"AsyncAwait","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Guardian records first operating profit since 1998","text":"[LINK] [LINK] I'd recommend you watch this[1] interview with the author of that article as well, for some context as to who he is. 1 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9LfmrkyP81M":[{"hn_comment_id":8815820,"author":"luhgor","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Software engineers should write","text":"Many people might have already seen it, but I thought it'd make sense to mention DHH's talk at RailsConf either way. In his talk, he is coining the term \"software writer\", which goes one step further and motivates a style of programming which prioritizes clarity of code over alleged technical superiority. Very opinionated, but recommended nonetheless: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15641735,"author":"mosselman","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Sick of Ruby, dynamic typing, side effects, and object-orientation (2014)","text":"I don't really see how this would be much more different from language to language. The being 'sick of' part, not so much the specific irritations. Every languages has its issues and from all the languages I have tried I have found Ruby to be the most pleasant to work with, but I am sure this is different from person to person. One of the struggles that the writer seems to have is that programming applications is not science, but he seems to think it is. DHH has a great keynote on this phenomenon: \"Writing Software by David Heinemeier Hansson\" [VIDEO] As mentioned in the comments of the article you will run into issues with any programming language. One of the tricks is to not hold on so tightly to 'rules'. Like (take from the article) 'break functionality into lots of small objects'. This is horrible advice if applied to all situations. You should only do this when it makes sense. I see so many programmers breaking up everything in useless classes and methods/functions/whatever just because someone wrote a blog post about doing so. This just makes complicated code look simple at a glance, but when you want to find out what the code really does you have to jump up and down through files looking at what each function does, you have to open split screens between abstract classes that have some dedicated piece of code in a class that had to exist in order to satisfy the 'break things up' rule, etc. Long story short: just relax, write code (in whatever language you like, for what","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17282485,"author":"mosselman","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Why Crystal Is My Next Language","text":"I really like this[1] talk from DHH on the subject, where he talks about the misconception of many programmers that we are doing science rather than something creative. While laced with hyperbolic statements it is at the very least thought provoking on some of the things that we do as developers. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26191137,"author":"shaicoleman","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?","text":"Software is read orders of magnitude more often than it is written. Therefore, the most important thing is to optimise your code for clarity. Software is an interative process. Sometimes it can take 5+ draft versions before you produce high quality code. There a good talk on this topic: Writing Software by David Heinemeier Hansson [1] If you're short on time, you can skip to the highlight here: [2] 1. [VIDEO] 2. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9NOncx2jU0Q":[{"hn_comment_id":10926348,"author":"jmsdnns","month":"2016-01","story_title":"New book argues we can\u2019t expect new tech to rekindle rapid economic growth","text":"That's a great point. I described the next revolution as possibly one of automation, but that might not be enough. Maybe automation and robotics is better... hmm. This particular thing from Johns Hopkins is just incredible and gives us a glimpse of what might be in 50 years: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10408272,"author":"tim333","month":"2015-10","story_title":"What Would Real Brain-To-Brain Communication Look Like?","text":"I'm sceptical the school kid project shown in your link actually works significantly. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory made a real one, I think by surgically moving 'spare' nerves to various points at the inside surface of the patients chest and then putting electrodes on the exterior surface. There's an interesting video explaining a bit: [VIDEO] from [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"9OfBpQgLXUc":[{"hn_comment_id":28510595,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules","text":"My god, you weren\u2019t kidding! I\u2019ve been watching his videos since seeing your comment. His intro video immediately signals the fantastic quality of the channel. So far the guy did get me excited about sidewalks. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32585458,"author":"inerte","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Things people blamed on bicycles","text":"I remember I learned this on a \"Not Just Bikes\" YouTube video, but I can't find it now, but it blew my mind how simple intentional things make a huge difference. It was about the car lane, curb, and where people bike/walk in the Netherlands. In most countries, the car lane is lower than the sidewalk, and when they have to turn, the lane doesn't change - no bumps, or elevation. A pedestrian / cyclist going from their space into the car lane has to usually face a down slope, so it's very clear the person is entering another area. In at least this Netherlands city or video I watched, Not Just Bikes talked about how over there the car goes into ascent, as in, the car is entering the bicycle space. So it's not as smooth, or convenient, or the same mental model as the other way. edit: found the video [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34050828,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2022-12","story_title":"P-22 Has Died","text":"See the youtube channel Not Just Bikes[1], specifically videos like - \"Why the Dutch wait less at traffic lights\" - [LINK] argues that American traffic engineering is optimised for car movement, at the expense of pedestrians and bikes, whereas Dutch traffic engineering is to minimise conflict between vehicles and maximise movement of people overall. Leading to more complex but more efficient intersections. - \"The Dutch solution for safer sidewalks - continuous sidewalks\" - [VIDEO] has crossings at junctions where cars and people intersect designed so the cars visibly have to travel over the sidewalk through the people's area, instead of designed so the people have to visibly travel over the road, through the car's area. - \"Crossing the street shouldn't be dangerous, but it is\" [in North America] - [LINK] talking about length of crossings on wide road, traffic signals, priorities, etc. [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"9PK-netuhHA":[{"hn_comment_id":9182227,"author":"jab2014","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Calling the Oregon Lottery's Bluff After Poker Machine Dealt a Strange Hand","text":"The practices of the Oregon lottery seem wrong to me. Government should be in the business of helping people and providing uncorrupted resources and facts, not marketing dreams and hope to people while taking their money hand over fist. John Oliver just did a good segment about this too [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9560363,"author":"joesmo","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Engineers of addiction","text":"I was actually thinking outside of slots. A lot of gambling practices are still illegal like sports betting in most of America. Such illegal gambling often leads to some sort of organized crime around providing loans and the actual gambling service itself. But I was also thinking of alcohol prohibition in the 1920's and the current drug prohibition. The black markets that these events created are not that dissimilar from the one around gambling and the core cause is the same. I do think that eliminating the profit incentive is something that could work. The profit from gambling is cited as a redeeming quality, however, as a reason for legalized gambling to exist. The overwhelming idea, at least in the US, is that if people are going to have a vice (or fun, depending on your perspective), their activities should be taxed so that others (corporations and the government mainly) can profit from them. Perhaps if the money actually went to fund schools and other things that benefit society, I could get behind this viewpoint, but regardless of the claims of governments that have legal gambling, it doesn't. This John Oliver segment about it is pretty interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10229315,"author":"AaronFriel","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Marijuana tax take nearly double expected in Colorado","text":"This is good news and bad news. The funding for schools will be a boon to education in the state, and that's certainly not bad. However, I expect will almost certainly lead to decreased education funding from other revenue sources, and ultimately place education footing on less solid ground for years to come. It was brilliant PR move to earmark the tax revenue for education, there's no doubt about that. It's very hard to argue with such things, and many other states have opted to dedicate certain \"sin taxes\" to select public works. For example, earmarking some funds for veterans affairs out of state lottery tickets as my state (Iowa) does, or education as many more states do. On the surface, this seems like a brilliant way to justify revenue collection for what many citizens would consider unseemly or undignified. It is an effective sales pitch to say to a voter, \"You may disagree with marijuana legalization, but it will bring in $50 million dollars to state schools.\" The problem is that budgets will adjust to incorporate this earmark for future years. That is, education budgets are likely to reflect this revenue for future years. That's precisely what has happened in so many states where state lottery revenues have been earmarked for education and other noble causes. John Oliver's Last Week Tonight had an excellent take on a similar topic: the \"sin tax\" of state lottery tickets. See here: [VIDEO] It is wonderful that marijuana taxes are going to a good cause. It is dangerous","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10378242,"author":"studentrob","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department","text":"In some domains, even restricted funds are fungible. Check out John Oliver's video on state lotteries: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15087432,"author":"edgartaor","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Ex-lottery worker who rigged winnings gets 25 years in prison","text":">some states they claim to use lottery proceeding to improve math education About that, this video is worth watching. No that is 100% true, but good enough to start a conversation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35315680,"author":"kkielhofner","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Bitcoin is a solution looking for a problem","text":"The old saying \"money is the root of all evil\" often does generally apply and lotteries are an excellent example of state-sponsored financial ruin. I especially like the John Oliver pieces[0][1] on that one. I see it everyday - video poker \"cafes\" and here in Wisconsin the cultural acceptance and actual embrace of weird things like \"pull tabs\" and \"dice games\". Las Vegas is an entire city that has been built on financial ruin. But we can simultaneously criticize, express concern, and work towards fixing multiple issues at the same time. [0] - [VIDEO] [1] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"9Q6sLbz37gk":[{"hn_comment_id":24926400,"author":"tosh","month":"2020-10","story_title":"I Violated a Code of Conduct","text":"If you haven't yet: I think both talks are very worth watching: I don't like notebooks ( [LINK] ) by Joel Grus I like notebooks ( [VIDEO] ) by Jeremy Howard notebooks are a very interesting medium and they have both shortcomings as well as things they are great at and neither were totally obvious to me.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25524388,"author":"armanboyaci","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Interactive C++ for Data Science","text":"I strongly recommend Jeremy Howard's (founder of fast.ai) recent talk - \"I Like Notebooks\" ( [VIDEO] ). He addresses some of the concerns/critiques about jupyter notebooks.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41587074,"author":"3eb7988a1663","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Bento: Jupyter Notebooks at Meta","text":"That video cannot be seen without watching Jeremy Howard's rebuttal: I Like Notebooks. I also believe this was the video that got him kicked out of a conference(?) because it was too confrontational? Which was just ugly for a guy who clearly loves being an educator. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25164285,"author":"jph00","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Nbdev: A literate programming environment that democratizes best practices","text":"No that's not the reason - or at least, not for everyone. I created nbdev. I've been coding for over 30 years, and spent over 10 years using R and S-PLUS. I've used Delphi, Visual Studio, Emacs, vim, vscode, and many other editors and IDEs, including many with integrated line-oriented REPLs. There's a big difference between a line-oriented plain text REPL, and a Mathematica/Jupyter-style notebook REPL, especially when you want to mix and match your charts, image outputs, rich table outputs, interactive JS outputs, and so forth. Also, for experimentation, where you want to go back and change things to see what happens (e.g. very common in data science) I find it much easier and more understandable in a notebook. I have a video where I show the difference between these styles of working in some detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32271871,"author":"jph00","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Nbdev: Create delightful software with Jupyter Notebooks","text":"A from-scratch rewrite of nbdev was released today -- details on what's new are in the launch post: [LINK] Let me know if you have any questions or comments -- I'm the lead dev on the project. (If you're in the \"I don't like notebooks\" camp, please watch this first: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"9QMGAtxUlAc":[{"hn_comment_id":16304930,"author":"kbenson","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Talks I have given","text":"Before we get to the list: if you only watch one talk of mine, please watch Principles of Technology Leadership (slides) presented at Monktoberfest 2017. This is the only talk that I have asked family and friends to watch, as it represents my truest self \u2014 or what I aspire that self to be, anyway. Let me just say, this is an extremely good talk[1]. Very uplifting and depressing at different times. It goes through serious turns, and very funny periods. Ultimately though, the message is very important and worth hearing. I highly recommend it. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19160579,"author":"warp_factor","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Anti-Application video for YC120","text":"I love Bryan Cantrill for being that classy bad-ass engineer with so much integrity. His talk on companies principles is a must-watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30374551,"author":"nonfamous","month":"2022-02","story_title":"What are your company's anti-values?","text":"No discussion of company values would be complete without a link to Bryan Cantrill\u2019s classic talk, \u201cPrinciples of Technology Leadership\u201d. [VIDEO] Uber once had a stated company value of \u201cAlways be hustling\u201d. Really.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16686903,"author":"z3t4","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads","text":"Related talk by Bryan Cantrill (Principles of Technology Leadership) Watch the whole video, it's good! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18379787,"author":"faitswulff","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started","text":"> Supposedly, every employee should be guided by the leadership principles during their day-to-day routine. The principles actually make a lot of sense, when used appropriately. As time went, I discovered that the most common application of the principles was to creatively find a leadership principle that best supports the situation. Bryan Cantrill has a sometimes hilarious takedown of Amazon's \"leadership principles\" here, which definitely corroborates this blog post: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19235736,"author":"jka","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Key Values \u2013 Find Engineering Teams That Share Your Values","text":"Is the Key:Values team (nice choice of name by the way!) familiar with Bryan Cantrill's talk on 'Principles of Technology Leadership'? [VIDEO] It seems to resonate pretty closely with what you're building, so if it helps align or educate anyone (candidates, recruiters, or the team) that'd be neat. Edit: FWIW, the talk uses the term 'principle' to indicate what your site calls a 'value'; in practice I've seen tech companies talk about their 'core values' and so I think yours is very valid.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21519006,"author":"Fellshard","month":"2019-11","story_title":"No Shenanigans","text":"This subject and the utter vagueness of the values presented here require me to bring up Bryan Cantrill's talk, 'Principles of Technology Leadership'.[1] He gives Amazon a lambasting over their core principles, and Uber even moreso. It's both funny and sobering to examine how what seems like a useful and valuable foundation ends up being flimsy and easy to ignore when made vague enough. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27701512,"author":"dev_snd","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Amazon announce two new leadership principles","text":"There's a great talk by Brian Cantrill about Leadership principles [0] which also includes a discussion of the Amazon Leadership principles. He argues that Amazon's leadership principles actually aren't helpful and don't make much sense and I tend to agree. [0] [VIDEO] (The part about Amazon starts around minute 26, but I recommend watching the whole talk)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30203812,"author":"goldenkey","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Amazon Pip Horror Story","text":"Yeah, vibes with my experience working there. Toxicity beyond pale. Good riddens, they contact me every week to try to get me back. Fuck off Amazon, you have no integrity, you abuse your employees from white collar to blue collar. You literally fired people who emailed Jeff Bezos to report abuses, after you told them to, when the NY Times \"crying at desk\" expose came out. Bezos instilled this shite culture into Amazon. And his midlet pawns carried out his half-baked decrees like those fucking wet noodle \"Leadership Principles\" which make no actual sense and aren't principles at all in any sense of the word. Brian Cantrill (of 0x1de computers) gives a great breakdown of how sacrosanct Amazon's leadership principles are: [VIDEO] Principles are things like Integrity, Honesty, Respect -- not Amazon's fuckwit bulletpoints like \"Be right a lot\" or \"Frugality.\" Technologically, AWS is built like a fucking house of cards with spit, tape, and glue. There is no real cohesion or organization, just a bunch of teams doing their own practices and gluing their rando codebase into the Yellow Console. Sorry, but just making the frontend look unified doesn't undo what the backend spaghetti is... That's why the outages of late will continue. It's all bubbling up from the absolute toxicity in lack of basic humanism at the core.","stance":"rec"}],"9QWaZp_2I1k":[{"hn_comment_id":37725187,"author":"FollowingTheDao","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?","text":"Thank you. I keep bringing it up here and you are the first one who has perceived my point. For more on 'blue' and 'chocolatey', check out this video... How did consciousness evolve - with Nicholas Humphrey [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38410651,"author":"laxd","month":"2023-11","story_title":"What is it like to be a crab?","text":"A thing that always comes to mind with these kind of news is the claim that octopi have comparable effects from MDMA as humans. For anyone that have an overview of evolutionary history that should be interesting to say the least. [LINK] Another interesting source I have found lately is this talk by Nicholas Humphrey (How did consciousness evolve?). If I'm interpreting him right, being a crab is nothing. The experience of \"something\" evolved a couple of hundred million years ago at the earliest, in our lineage. Assuming he is right. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38932717,"author":"tizio13","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Audiobooks to Listen to in the Car?","text":"If you want fun narration and loosely tech based story, I'd recommend the Magic 2.0 series. Scott Myers created a fun world in that series. I'm really hoping book 7 comes out at some point. The narration is so damn funny. Luke Daniels is a master of making all the characters come alive. The Expanse series is also good if you want more of an epic. Jefferson Mays also does a great job of making the characters feel real. Even if he changes how gimbal is pronounced between certain books. There's also loads of great non fiction stuff out there. One of my personal favorites from this past year was Sentience by Nicholas Humphrey. His recent RI lecture was great and a good high level view of the book. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9QveBbn7t_c":[{"hn_comment_id":28943256,"author":"k__","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Functors, Applicatives, and Monads in Pictures (2013)","text":"I read this example years ago, and it didn't clear anything up for me. After half a year of trying to understand monads, I saw a video by MPJ/Funfunfunction [0] and it finally made sense. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12153963,"author":"intellectable","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Functional Programming Jargon","text":"I like how mpj explains it. Monad - FunFunFunction #21 [VIDEO] Furthermore, the creator of Elm has a fun explanation too. Evan Czaplicki - Let's be mainstream! User focused design in Elm - Curry On [LINK] More serious computer scientist explains monads in the following. Erik Meijer: Functional Programming [LINK] and here too [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16388770,"author":"icc97","month":"2018-02","story_title":"JavaScript Promises Discussion: Make Them Monadic? (2013)","text":"Here's a half baked explanation, as in just the flatmap part. map is understood in javascript. So you 'just' need to make the leap to flatmap. Which is mapping something and flattening the result. So still you need to learn is what flatten is. But that's not too hard to learn. Try the funfunfunction video [0] [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9R5OWh7luL4":[{"hn_comment_id":8596664,"author":"Fuzzwah","month":"2014-11","story_title":"The Day I Lost a Shit-ton of Money, Part I","text":"This reminds me of Derren Brown's awesome \"The System\" special: [VIDEO] More info for anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of knowing who Derren Brown is: [LINK] Derren Brown is a British illusionist, mentalist, trickster, hypnotist, painter, writer, and sceptic. He is known for his appearances in television specials, stage productions, and British television series such as Trick of the Mind and Trick or Treat. Since the first broadcast of his show Derren Brown: Mind Control in 2000, Brown has become increasingly well known for his mind-reading act. He has written books for magicians as well as the general public. Though his performances of mind-reading and other feats of mentalism may appear to be the result of psychic or paranormal practices, he claims no such abilities and frequently denounces those who do. Brown states at the beginning of his Trick of the Mind programmes that he achieves his results using a combination of \"magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship\".","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8324346,"author":"sgdesign","month":"2014-09","story_title":"How to see into the future?","text":"I don't know if your assessment of the study is valid (it seems a little simplistic to think that they wouldn't account for this to be honest), but what you describe is classic Survivorship Bias. Here's an entertaining video from Derren Brown that shows how to use this technique to convince people you have psychic powers: [VIDEO] Edit: also see the comment about the Miracle Man scam in this thread.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8821251,"author":"sparkzilla","month":"2014-12","story_title":"A Magician\u2019s Best Trick: Revealing a Basic Human Bias","text":"For a good example of confirmation bias watch Derren Brown's \"The System\" [1] where he makes a woman believe an unknown benefactor has a foolproof system for betting on horses. \"Mail Order Prophet\" [2] by Alfred Hitchock has a similar idea. [1] [VIDEO] ] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"9RUHJhskW00":[{"hn_comment_id":12883408,"author":"dghughes","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Alzheimer\u2019s treatment fully restores memory function (2015)","text":"When I see stuff like this I have to say I am amazed at how precise some drugs are. Somewhat related I was watching a video about protein motors and how they work. They are small structures that walk on microtubules (as mentioned in the Alzheimer's article) inside cells. There are many types but some walk using hinged protein feet. The narrator explained how his team invented a drug that helped to make one step in that process better. They made the hinge part of the foot work normally giving it more strength. It was a single phosphate molecule added to this step. It was incredible to think one small part of a protein motor the \"ankle\" part of the foot of that one protein motor on a microtubule inside a single cell had some help. I explained it horribly here is the video [VIDEO] edit: phosphate not sulphur","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28380982,"author":"dopylitty","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Tardigrades Walk","text":"If you think that\u2019s cool you might also like to see the motor proteins that walk along inside our cells. There are a few types including the ones that make muscles work. Kinesin is fun because it has little legs made of proteins. It gloms onto big bubbles of stuff inside the cell and carries them along pathways to their destination. Chemical reactions cause the proteins to fold in the right way to take each step. This shows how they look. [LINK] This explains the mechanisms that they use to walk. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39552533,"author":"shagie","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Rendering protein structures inside cells at the atomic level with Unreal Engine","text":"[LINK] I didn't realize there was also a Powering the Cell: Mitochondria video. The classic one narrated - [LINK] One of my pandemic YouTube binges was watching Ron Vale videos about kinesin and dynein. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] And searching for Ron Vale will bring a number of other videos about molecular machines.","stance":"rec"}],"9U0XVdvQwAI":[{"hn_comment_id":23307947,"author":"gitgud","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Show HN: Fractal garden \u2013 realtime 3D fractal explorer in the browser","text":"This is incredible! If you like this you might also like [1] Marble Marcher , amazing how much detail can be rendered using fractals [1] [VIDEO] (Video)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33414364,"author":"CyborgCabbage","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?","text":"He has a YouTube channel as well: [LINK] Also you may like Marble Marcher made by Code Parade, it's a game that uses a similar approach to rendering: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9W74aeuqsiU":[{"hn_comment_id":28847362,"author":"725686","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Why birds can fly over Mount Everest (2020)","text":"Last week, on Last Week Tonight, John Oliver talks about PFAS, which was very interesting. Not only teflon, but all kind of repellent fabrics like Gore-tex: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31776260,"author":"ChrisMarshallNY","month":"2022-06","story_title":"EPA: 'Forever chemicals' pose risk even at low levels","text":"John Oliver (I know he's not everyone's cup of tea, but he does his homework) did an episode on these, last year: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33853506,"author":"LinuxBender","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The U.S. military is poisoning Okinawa","text":"I thought that too. There is a video by John Oliver talking about PFAS and the other hundred or so variants of these compounds. [1] There are other videos talking about how companies can still use these compounds because the EPA only outlawed about 3 of the 130 or so. [1] - [VIDEO] [video]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44605940,"author":"nayuki","month":"2025-07","story_title":"French villages have no more drinking water. The reason? PFAS pollution","text":"Additional good videos: * Vox: [LINK] * MinuteEarth: [LINK] * MinuteFood: [LINK] * LastWeekTonight (John Oliver): [VIDEO] (2021) * LastWeekTonight (John Oliver): [LINK] (2024) * DW (Deutsche Welle) Documentary: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"9WcHsT97suU":[{"hn_comment_id":32775930,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2022-09","story_title":"iPhone app receives notification for another app","text":"A really fun DefCon talk on bitsquatting. Bitsquatting is the practice of registering domains that are one bit off from a popular one: [VIDEO] google.com vs ooogle.com >>> chr(int('0b1100111', 2)) 'g' >>> chr(int('0b1101111', 2)) 'o' If the 4th to last bit of 'g' were to flip before writing to disk, you could get persistent requests to ooogle.com Having done queries against very large datasets at a large company, I can say for certain that this happens much more than you think it might.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17741403,"author":"btschaegg","month":"2018-08","story_title":"1/0 = 0","text":"Regarding \"some hardware errors\": This might include operationg conditions you didn't consider; say: The divisor in your code went through a non-ECC DRAM module (maybe in a disk drive) that runs hotter than its specified operating temperature would allow and a random bit-flip changes your `1` into a `0`. On this topic, the talk on Bitsquatting from Artem Dinaburg during Defcon 19 is worth watching. The most interesting part on bit flips starts around 15:05 minutes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9X68dm92HVI":[{"hn_comment_id":2554445,"author":"dhruval","month":"2011-05","story_title":"Proposed Law Would Require Social Networks to be Private by Default","text":"I wouldn't label it stupidity or ignorance, but it is a weel documented quirk of human behavior the default state of opt in / opt out systems makes a huge difference. This ted talk is an excellent and talks about the very significant differences in organ donation rates between countries that use an opt out system vs. those that use an opt in. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14216316,"author":"jason_pomerleau","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Teller Reveals His Secrets (2012)","text":"> 7. If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely. Dan Ariely has a great talk on \"decision illusions\"(1) that goes into more depth on this topic. He starts off with visual illusion as a metaphor for rationality: \"So if we have these repeatable and predictable mistakes with vision, which we are so good at, what's the chance we don't make even more mistakes with something we're not as good at?\" (1) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9XaYdCdwiWU":[{"hn_comment_id":40249356,"author":"hackermatic","month":"2024-05","story_title":"DNS traffic can leak outside the VPN tunnel on Android","text":"Edit: Other commenters report that Android will silently re-enable cell data under various conditions, so this isn't a surefire solution, either. The Grugq created a tool for this a decade ago (sadly unmaintained): [LINK] as part of a presentation about operational security for hackers. It's a great watch if you're interested in how various (in)famous hackers thought they were secure and got busted anyway. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5282382,"author":"notaddicted","month":"2013-02","story_title":"The Best Anonymous VPNs For 2013","text":"Any thoughts on Mullvad? ( [LINK] ) I also like the conference talk \"#HITB2012KUL D1T3 - The Grugq - OPSEC: Because Jail is for wuftpd\" most of it is based on hackers that have been jailed lately and specifically what they did to end up in jail, but there is also some techinal stuff about privacy and anonymity, specifically about TOR+VPN here: [VIDEO] EDIT: RE: Mullvad, AFAIK they don't have any presence outside SE, NL, or DE so I think your speeds will take a hit coming from outside Western Europe.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5721307,"author":"iuguy","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Poll: Do you use your real identity on HN?","text":"Using a pseudonym may be great, but there's always the temptation to be more abrasive, offensive or obnoxious when using one. The longer you keep an identity online in public forums the more information you tend to leak through side channels and should your identity end up compromised you risk having a lot more exposed than if you never covered at all and thought (mostly) before posting. I've chosen to use my real name here because of the level of conversation when I joined and because I've associated HN initially more with the traditional hacker world than the blackhat type. Those of you using pseudonyms could do worse than learn from the Grugq[1]. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6521342,"author":"j_s","month":"2013-10","story_title":"It Was DPR, in the Tor HS, With the BTC","text":"Watch the author's 'OPSEC for hackers' presentation of the slides linked in the article: [VIDEO] slides: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6616978,"author":"j_s","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Steps You Can Take Right Now Against Internet Surveillance","text":"'grugq' shares current best practice, and recently stopped by HN when his blog came up for discussion: Anonymity Is Hard [LINK] OPSEC for Hackers (video) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6821268,"author":"WestCoastJustin","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Interview: OPSEC with the grugq","text":"There is a really good video of OPSEC by grugq on YouTube from Hack In The Box Security Conference. Basically gives you some rules and things to think about, but also talks about where lulzsec went off the rails, and how they were caught. Really interesting talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7833329,"author":"epsylon","month":"2014-06","story_title":"The boy who stole Half Life 2 source code (2011)","text":"I must have been following the grugq[1] way too much because all I couldn't help thinking about the massive OPSEC mistakes he did. Fortunately he was apprehended by the German Police, but things would've been way different had took that plane. [1] There's a great presentation from him on video, including analysis of OPSEC failures from other hacker groups: [VIDEO] [2] Another timeless classic: \"Don't talk to [the] police\", which explains why it is never in your interest to talk to the police when you are suspected of a crime (even if you are innocent): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8636383,"author":"blauwbilgorgel","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Doxxing defense: Remove your personal info from data brokers","text":"Just because a data aggregation site does not show your data on the front-end, does not mean they deleted it from the back-end. So now you can charge 50$ for people to search in the \"special\" data pile, where people took the effort to remove it from the front-end. These data brokers crawl publicly available information. Telling them to remove your data, only slows down the doxxer, it does not stop them at all, since the data was already shared. It is not plugging the leak, it is mopping up some of the water. A false sense of security and a clear sign to the doxxer that you care about your anonymity (so more \"lulz\" to be had). A proper doxxing is also much more than entering a name in some search engines. Especially hackers do not like to be doxxed. For internet civilians who already put this data out there (on social media) a simple data broker doxxing is a mere reminder that such data is public to everyone, not just friends. Doxxing defense is guarding your anonymity online. Everywhere. Doxxing defense is knowing when to change persona's, and when to log off. That is: If you care about it at all. If you care about keeping your identity a secret online, see: [VIDEO] (The Grugq - OPSEC: Because Jail is for wuftpd).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8651365,"author":"fabulist","month":"2014-11","story_title":"How to Learn Hacking","text":"This guide is very hand-wavey. Tor alone is a poor operational security strategy; using nikto and unix-privesc-check does not a hacker make. This may be a decent place to begin one's inquiry, but don't let it end here too. Here are some talks I recommend: Tricks for Defeating SSL in Practice - Moxie Marlinspike [LINK] OPSEC: Because Jail is for wuftpd - thegrugq [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12704669,"author":"Esau","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?","text":"I have to say that I had no use for YouTube until I realized that these kind of talks were on there. In addition to what you mentioned, some I like: The Gruqg on OpSec: [VIDEO] Russ Cox's ACME tutorial: [LINK] Jessie Frazelle on running containers on the desktop: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"9XkHBmE-N34":[{"hn_comment_id":18241616,"author":"ncallaway","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?","text":"By my understanding of the theory, yes (according to some unproven theories). The information can be imprinted on the surface of a black hole (and, later are dissipated by imprinting on Hawking Radiation). This is also the principle that led to our theoretical understanding that the maximum amount of information that can be contained in a volume is bounded by the _surface area_ of the volume. This is the Holopgraphic Principle: [LINK] . There's a great PBS Space Time youtube video on this concept, which explains it far better and more accurately that I ever could: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27226721,"author":"neom","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Physicists identify the engine powering black hole energy beams","text":"PBS Space Time to the rescue: What Happens at the Event Horizon? - [LINK] What\u2019s On The Other Side Of A Black Hole? - [LINK] How Time Becomes Space Inside a Black Hole - [LINK] The Black Hole Information Paradox - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9ZX_XCYokQo":[{"hn_comment_id":16556220,"author":"siglesias","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Can any composer equal Bach?","text":"If anyone is interested in Bach's keyboard literature, it's hard to top the interpretations of Glenn Gould, a fascinating musician in his own right. Here, for example, is a seminal performance of the D minor concerto, conducted by Leonard Bernstein: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18900762,"author":"ternaryoperator","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Debussy\u2019s Radical Search for Simplicity","text":"I find Osetinskaya plays so fast that it's difficult to make out the counterpoint. Have a look/listen at Glenn Gould's version, which makes the counterpoint really clear [1]. As you might know, this interpretation was controversial at the time. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9cNmUNHSBac":[{"hn_comment_id":35343969,"author":"Brajeshwar","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Bicycle","text":"You will love the interesting video, \"Most People Don't Know How Bikes Work\" by Veritasium - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31697228,"author":"whycombinetor","month":"2022-06","story_title":"You need to know what right-half-plane zeros are","text":"Indeed. I like this clip where they show bike steering to the left, without its front wheel ever going to the right side of its original path, by only leaning and no countersteering. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35343846,"author":"BrianHenryIE","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Bicycle","text":"Beautiful article. There's a similar neat video, \"Most People Don't Know How Bikes Work\", where they fix the steering so the handlebars can only be turned left, and people then aren't able to turn left. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35345129,"author":"ubj","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Bicycle","text":"Beautifully illustrated and brilliantly explained. Derek Muller (Veritasium) on YouTube has a related video diving into the mechanics of bicycle riding. It shows what happens if you prevent the rider from performing the countersteer before leaning into a turn [1]. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35347656,"author":"flavius29663","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Bicycle","text":"Veritasium did a video where they stopped him from counter-steering and couldn't steer anymore. [VIDEO] He might be wrong, and just didn't know enough, but he is usually researching his videos very well and I would be surprised for him to be wrong about this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40069036,"author":"jasonpeacock","month":"2024-04","story_title":"How does this full-track, 3-wheel snow bike even turn?","text":"Here's a good video showing how a bike actually works, and the relation between steering and leaning: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45853004,"author":"nitwit005","month":"2025-11","story_title":"You should write an agent","text":"> You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one. I realize this is just for motivation in a subtitle, but people generally don't grasp how bicycles work, even after having ridden one. Veritasium has a quite good video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9crggox5rbc":[{"hn_comment_id":10625226,"author":"jharohit","month":"2015-11","story_title":"SLAC Theorist Lance Dixon Explains Quantum Gravity","text":"Mr.Susskind has a Stanford lecture on this topic detailing the physics in his own unique & awesome way [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18938220,"author":"ithkuil","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Strangeness of Black Holes","text":"I found these lectures by Leonard Susskind very insightful: - Leonard Susskind on The World As Hologram ( [LINK] ) - Leonard Susskind | \"ER = EPR\" or \"What's Behind the Horizons of Black Holes?\" ( [LINK] ) - Entanglement and Complexity: Gravity and Quantum Mechanics ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19666247,"author":"philipov","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow","text":"How about another lecture by Leonard Susskind? I'm just repeating his ideas! The gist of it is that the connectivity of space is related to the patterns of entanglement between particles in the quantum foam. If you were to break that entanglement, you could disconnect two regions of space. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36672630,"author":"hughesjj","month":"2023-07","story_title":"The Physicist Who\u2019s Challenging the Quantum Orthodoxy","text":"I'm definitely into the \"it's an emergent phenomena\" camp. I think it's inherently relational, as that's a more efficient way to encode geometry rather than space itself being a quantized \"thing\". Afaik this theory is the \"leading\"/imho most promising theory of \"quantum gravity\", that being the \"gravity = entanglement\" conjecture and the related ideas of \"Complexity= action/volume/whatever\" that susskind and many others have been developing for the past 20 so years. All that said I'm nowhere near a physicist and am probably just spewing a total misunderstanding of the situation from my armchair. That said, I've been incessantly watching lectures in this space to try to beat an understanding into my dumb dumb brain because it's super, super fucking cool. - [LINK] - [LINK] - [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK] I'm also fascinated by the idea of phase transitions, which seems to be how the laws of physics have \"evolved\" so far. It's crazy how much quantum computation is coming into play with this stuff, ex last year's Nobel prize with the bell inequality. That said I'm sure being a programmer I'm biased to think the universe is inherently computation/math.","stance":"rec"}],"9dKiLclupUM":[{"hn_comment_id":15468346,"author":"s3nnyy","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Ask HN: UK Startups \u2013 Are You Thinking of Leaving the UK Because of Brexit?","text":"I will give an alternative explanation why people fear terrorism: Falling from a ladder also kills more people than terrorism, right, but this is not what people are afraid of. Watch this to understand that we're talking about two different distributions: [VIDEO] Terrorism SUDDENLY increases the odds of you being killed by it. And that is what - rightfully - scares people. Example: Before 9/11 the chances of being killed by terrorism was let's say 0.000000.....1%. After 9/11 the chance SUDDENLY increased a hundredfold. That change in probability never ever happened in the distributions of car-accidents, being shot in the US or falling ladders.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26076541,"author":"nmca","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Covid-19 and the political economy of mass hysteria [pdf]","text":"No it isn't, in this case. I think Taleb has the best summary of this, for all his flaws: [VIDEO] In short, risk due to coconuts vs sharks is a valid comparison because we have good priors about growth rates, and they are similar. Coconuts vs covid is a terrible, terrible comparison because again we have good priors on growth but they are mind-bogglingly different functions of time.","stance":"rec"}],"9eyFDBPk4Yw":[{"hn_comment_id":34351025,"author":"dmoreno","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite illustration in Computer Science?","text":"My favorite is more a small presentation than an image: Admiral Grace Hoper Explains a Nanosecond. [VIDEO] For me it changed my mind on wasting time on less efficient algorithms.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22066553,"author":"dougmwne","month":"2020-01","story_title":"A low-mass planet candidate orbiting Proxima Centauri","text":"Yes it is and no it isn't. Learn from Admiral Grace Hopper: [VIDEO] The speed of light in fiber optic cable is about 2/3 the speed of light, which is why SpaceX's Starlink will have a potential latency advantage over oceanic fiber optics. It also gives good perspective on what's being thrown away when you add a single ms of latency through a router or a display. 186 miles at the speed of light. Many on HN don't get this, but this is why cloud gaming is perfectly feasible if we're running with low latency displays and inputs, low distance to the edge compute, and few routing hops.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22831458,"author":"lozf","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Captain Grace M. Hopper: The Mother of COBOL (1981)","text":"> The nanosecond wire alone should be a compelling argument. For those that haven't seen it: [VIDEO] (Of course, I expect that most here have, but xkcd 10,000 and all that.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27593668,"author":"klyrs","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Your CPU may have slowed down on Wednesday","text":"Speaking as somebody who never stopped optimizing like its the 90s: there's definitely a learning curve, but when microbenchmarking becomes a reflex, you learn your language in depth and the burden drops quickly. It only seems esoteric to you because the industry has collectively decided that Grace Hopper is an old codger who doesn't need to be listened to. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29600583,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2021-12","story_title":"I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]","text":"> Light is slow, not exactly 1 foot per nanosecond but it's a reasonable mnemonic. \"Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond\" is a good illustration of this (segment is only 2m): * [VIDEO] * [LINK] Full lecture: * [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"9i1WlcCudpU":[{"hn_comment_id":32533460,"author":"sabellito","month":"2022-08","story_title":"John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round","text":"I don't think you spent enough time checking, he's a person with a PHD precisely in AI safety! The type of reasoning you're displaying is addressed in another video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40402810,"author":"circuit10","month":"2024-05","story_title":"OpenAI created a team to control 'superintelligent' AI \u2013 then let it wither","text":"It\u2019s arguable whether it\u2019s actually improbable. Many people, including (and seemingly especially) experts think it\u2019s likely or even inevitable. This video might be interesting to see some arguments for why people think it\u2019s important: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9nXop2lLDa4":[{"hn_comment_id":24985391,"author":"LinuxBender","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Scientist David Sinclair on why we age and why he thinks we don\u2019t have to (2019)","text":"This is not a great article. It leaves out Dr. Sinclairs work, further developing discoveries by Dr. Yamanaka specifically around the four transcription factors (Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-myc), turning any cells back into pluripotent stem cells. More important, leaving c-myc disabled, the cell reverts to a younger age. This is what Dr. Sinclair has been working on recently, to completely reverse macular degeneration. He has been able to regrow damaged optic nerves all the way from the eye back to the brain. Here is a talk he did at Google [1] He briefly talks about the ethics of this here [2]. [1] - [VIDEO] [2] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25567792,"author":"DrRobinson","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are you surprised isn\u2019t being worked on more?","text":"Seems like many people are new to this concept and feel skeptical so here are some useful resources: * Kurzgesagt: How to Cure Aging \u2013 During Your Lifetime? (7:20) [LINK] * Kurzgesagt: Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever? (6:48) [LINK] * Why we should cure ageing (11:30) - Heads up, it's a book intro [LINK] * Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old (Book, not yet released in the US) [LINK] * Lifespan: Why we age and why we don't have to (book) [LINK] * Google talk: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To (55:13) - By the author of the book [VIDEO] Edit: * If you wish to contribute to this kind of research make sure to check out SENS: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"9q3uNcJh4pc":[{"hn_comment_id":29008755,"author":"jrockway","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Project Stardust: A Photographer Scours Rooftops for Minuscule Cosmic Particles","text":"I feel like everyone is scouring their roof for micrometeorites these days. Here's a few videos on the subject: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29011020,"author":"atombender","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Project Stardust: A Photographer Scours Rooftops for Minuscule Cosmic Particles","text":"Here [1] is a great video about Larsen and his work on collecting microscopic meteroites. Larsen's book, \"In Search of Stardust: Amazing Micrometeorites and Their Terrestrial Imposters\" [2] is also great, a gorgeous coffee table book with lots of high-quality photos of meteorites of the kind that you see on the web site. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41176259,"author":"aaron695","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Does space dust fall on the roof of my house?","text":"Here's a good video running through one way to do this at home - [VIDEO] (I really like the ending, it's real science which is rare these days) There are a heap of better links to micrometeorites stories than this stackexchange. Discussed many times on HN.","stance":"rec"}],"9qi03QawZEk":[{"hn_comment_id":9484923,"author":"will_hughes","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Tesla battery storage will accelerate exit of coal generators","text":"It's a chemical reaction - there's a gradual degradation in the anode/cathode as a reaction with the electrolyte. There's environmental factors to it too - temperature has an effect, and if you can control the temperature over time, you can reduce the effect. This lecture (1h, 13m) goes into it in detail, including how it can be prevented, ways of testing, and more: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15144734,"author":"RoboTeddy","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Tesla Model S battery degradation data","text":"Battery science is fascinating. Here's in an-depth look at degredation: [VIDEO] The speaker (Jeff Dahn -- he now works with Tesla) pioneered a faster way to tell how fast a battery will degrade (which means you can iterate your design faster!)","stance":"rec"}],"9qljpi5jiMQ":[{"hn_comment_id":46191139,"author":"asmor","month":"2025-12","story_title":"GitHub Actions has a package manager, and it might be the worst","text":"See also this excellent video essay by fasterthanlime: GitHub Actions Feels Bad[1]. I'm pretty sure it contains the exact line of it being \"deeply confused about being a package manager\". [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38960899,"author":"mardifoufs","month":"2024-01","story_title":"GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer","text":"I prefer GA to basically every other build system especially because of the plugins but yeah, and I think caching can be turned on... but it has tons of inconsistencies related to packages and deps. This video really highlighted just how brittle the whole thing is even behind the scenes: [VIDEO] (13:58 time stamp for the part that is especially relevant here)","stance":"rec"}],"9syvZr-9xwk":[{"hn_comment_id":40797438,"author":"sky2224","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Recommended Books on Computational Complexity Theory","text":"As someone else said already: Theory of Computation by Sipser is the go to intro book for this. I'd recommend really reading the book front to back honestly. It helps to have a complete picture of everything that leads up to getting into complexity theory. Sipser also has corresponding lectures that are available for free on YouTube here: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40814623,"author":"trod123","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Making AI better at math tutoring","text":"AI won't ever be able to teach math because AI cannot reason. It handles information very differently than humans do. It is at best a flawed oracle that may lie through omission without you being able to tell. This is supported by the fact that there are hard limits to computation, in terms of both Computability Theory, and Complexity Theory that are often disregarded by the novice and magical thinker alike despite being largely solved fields by experts in Computer Science, at least in terms of Computability Theory. Most of this work was completed in the 1950s. This is not a difficult a subject, but most people online simply are unwilling to do the work to rationally learn this and instead choose to try and hide their own ignorance because they feel inadequate, or perhaps they are engaging in something more malevolent. The reasoning (false justification) doesn't really matter. It is, however; quite telling when expert's have validated these things, and yet any mention contrary to a narrative provokes downvotes in a public forum to remove it from view. A perfect example of intentional actions done by third-parties trying to misinform others about the risks (by those parties actions removing legitimate and valid information). For those with the cajones to actually learn this stuff. Here is a link. It seems very jaron laden but it provides a true understanding of how computers actually work which is sorely lacking in the youth of today. MIT 18.404J Theory of Computation [VIDEO] ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44163397,"author":"eterm","month":"2025-06","story_title":"The Princeton INTERCAL Compiler's source code","text":"> if you require your parens to be balanced, that's no longer a regular language. TIL: [LINK] As someone who has only recently learned the formal definition of regular language ( Thanks to [VIDEO] as mentioned on this board recently ), I'm interested in the formal proof for this? It feels intuitively true, but I haven't finished the course yet and therefore haven't come across it and can't yet reason well about it. Is the problem then in trying to \"encode\" whether brackets are balanced, that we would need infinite \"levels\" of how many more brackets we've opened rather than closed, (i.e a stack) and that violates the finite nature of finite automota? So I've googled it now, and I've found the result is due to the \"Pumping lemma\": [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44923345,"author":"skydhash","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Traps to Developers","text":"It's half a chapter in most books I know. Or a subset of this 1h MIT videos [0], but the instructor also explains Finite Automata which is the basic mechanism that does all the stuff. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9tocssf3w80":[{"hn_comment_id":35510530,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Tech work that strengthens liberal democracy","text":"I would go spend a couple of days on Yale history professor Timothy Snyder reading his books and then watch him on YouTube. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig is also a major academic in this area. Their respective relevant books are \"The Road to Unfreedom\" and \"They Don't Represent Us.\" Timothy Snyder also wrote \"On Tyranny,\" which is a very quick read which is directly applicable to the question you are asking, he also narrated it in video form: [VIDEO] Timothy Snyder is more about understanding and fighting the forces of tyranny while Lawrence Lessig focuses more on the mechanics of our democracy and the consequences of our current implementation. I promise you will love Timothy Snyder. My personal take is \"democracy\" the word has been hijacked and it's probably time to stop using it casually. The core idea and foundation of liberal democracy and what you feel is being eroded and needs strengthening is rule of law . Russia tried to privatize and democratize but failed because they did not have rule of law. Rule of law is where all the good stuff comes from. So what you really want an answer for is \"how do I use my technical skills to promote rule of law?\" Supporting rule of law means supporting a fact based world, supporting institutions that do investigative research, and promoting empathy for the oppressed. Supporting rule of law means empowering the un-empowered by, for example, supporting unions. Snyder would say: So choose an institution you care about \u2013 a court, a","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43504610,"author":"neo4llm","month":"2025-03","story_title":"On Tyranny [book]","text":"Could not agree more! I also recommend the short Youtube series Snyder recorded before the release of the graphic edition: Lesson 1: [VIDEO] Full Playlist: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43504624,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2025-03","story_title":"On Tyranny [book]","text":"He has a new book On Freedom , too. I haven't read it yet, but I have watched him give excellent talks on youtube, which reference it. I believe his core thesis in On Freedom is that America has focused on negative freedom, when what really matters is positive freedom. \"Negative freedom\" is the idea that no government should interfere with your life. Authoritarian regimes arbitrarily exercise power, and that results in people being prevented from doing things or forced to do things. Maybe that's restrictions on speech or protest. Focusing on \"negative freedom\" turns people against their governments, which creates a sort of power vacuum anyone with resources is happy to fill. Negative freedom is good, nobody should want the government interfering with their lives, but focusing solely on negative freedom leads to authoritarianism. We can see this effect right now with \"free speech absolutists\" functionally becoming oligarchs. He says what people should focus on instead is \"positive freedom\" -- The idea that you have the freedom to do what you want. If you don't have health, money, or education, you can't really be free. There is no freedom in a hospital bed. So healthcare creates positive freedom. Building housing lets you spend more money on things you want to do instead of rent, that's positive freedom. Without education, you are more easily victimized by those who wish to manipulate you and you are less capable of producing things of value. So education is freeing. He also h","stance":"rec"}],"9u0qlIoSSkQ":[{"hn_comment_id":4965010,"author":"gnarbarian","month":"2012-12","story_title":"SpaceX Grasshopper Takes Off and Lands Vertically [video]","text":"Bigger but this [1] test by Armadillo was more impressive in my opinion for the additional complexity involved in cutting the engine deploying a chute then cutting the chute and successfully landing from a turbulent freefall. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8538542,"author":"acous","month":"2014-10","story_title":"The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation (2012)","text":"This exchange made me grin :) To add some value to my comment, here's a cool video from one of armadillo's test rockets: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9vRtA7STvH4":[{"hn_comment_id":38851451,"author":"nostromo","month":"2024-01","story_title":"What it will take to unleash the potential of geothermal power? (2021)","text":"It\u2019s based on extrapolation of current trends, so I doubt it\u2019ll actually happen. Besides, we\u2019d all die before it got to that. But here are some sources that describe it: [VIDEO] (commentary from Sabrine Hossenfelder, highly recommended) [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40567535,"author":"alxmng","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Fusion tech finds geothermal energy application","text":"You might enjoy Sabine Hossenfelder's video exploring this \"I recently learned that waste heat will boil the oceans in about 400 years\": [VIDEO] It turns out we can probably solve this by building planetary chimneys 5km tall that move heat to the outer atmosphere.","stance":"rec"}],"9vpqilhW9uI":[{"hn_comment_id":23621727,"author":"Mirioron","month":"2020-06","story_title":"You can't tell people anything (2004)","text":"I disagree. I think stories like this are important. They teach you to take a hypothetical scenario seriously. It teaches people to ask \"what if X were true?\" and to seriously consider the ramifications. This is a springboard into abstract thinking. Without people taking the hypothetical seriously they will want to deal with concrete things and will have trouble with abstract reasoning. Imagine you were trying to have a discussion about racism with someone. You would tell them \"How would you feel if one day you woke up black and people were biased against you due to your skin color?\" They would tell you that it's the dumbest thing they've ever heard. Who have you ever known that woke up with a different skin color?[0] For someone to take an argument like this seriously they have to be willing to engage in a hypothetical scenario. Waking up with a different skin color is as fantastical as the stories you're talking about. This means that they won't engage with your hypothetical scenario. [0] This is an argument made by James Flynn in his amazing TED talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23647403,"author":"Mirioron","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled","text":"This is an off-topic point, but perhaps this TED talk by James Flynn might give you a perspective to understand why your parents and grandparents tought: [VIDEO] It posits the idea that the way of thinking back then was different, because they had to overcome different cognitive challenges from us today. This would shape how people back then viewed the world.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25776443,"author":"Aerroon","month":"2021-01","story_title":"McDonald\u2019s Theory on How Best to Rescue Conversations","text":"I think TED talks used to be better. Perhaps it's nostalgia, but I really enjoyed TED talks in the past. Martin Rees talking cosmology, Richard Dawkins talking about why the universe seems so strange, James Flynn talking about the Flynn effect[0], Barry Schwartz talking about the paradox of choice etc are enjoyable to me even today. There are many others, but I've not enjoyed as many in the recent years. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33040766,"author":"Phrenzy","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Why are so many adults acting just like children?","text":"You mention that men under 70 lack a certain something. Are you sure it isn't that men have gained something they didn't have in the past? I have thought a lot about how the human condition has changed over the years. I feel the most important change is modern human's ability to think in the abstract. If you were to ask a pre-modern human to group a chicken, a crow, a stick, and a tree. They might group the chicken and the stick together because they would use the stick to kill the chicken and make a meal. Whereas a modern human would most likely group the chicken and crow, and the stick and tree together. The tendency to think abstractly has exploded over the last hundred years or so, and it has fundamentally changed how we see and react to the world. A great explanation of this comes from the Ted-talk of James Flynn. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9vz06QO3UkQ":[{"hn_comment_id":23778785,"author":"d33","month":"2020-07","story_title":"EFF to Supreme Court: Violating Terms of Service Isn\u2019t a Crime Under the CFAA","text":"And if someone wants an account of the entire case, here's a must-watch documentary, especially if you belong to the hacker culture: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36398649,"author":"pcdoodle","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Reddit's New Office Space (2006)","text":"\"The internets own boy\" is a decent documentary if you want to learn a bit about Aaron. YT Link: [VIDEO] Thanks OP for posting this aaronsw.com link.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42671767,"author":"rglover","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman","text":"Aaron was the OG. If you've never dug through his blog, do yourself a favor [1]. Also make some time to watch The Internet's Own Boy doc about him [2] and look up some of his talks during the SOPA shenanigans. RIP. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9wLtCqm72-Y":[{"hn_comment_id":24223794,"author":"JadoJodo","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Big Bounce Simulations Challenge the Big Bang","text":"Sir Roger Penrose and Dr William Lane Craig had an interesting discussion[0] that included him talking about the Big Bounce (around the 50-minute mark). [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44916037,"author":"zoogeny","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam\u2019s Ritman Library","text":"I think your description of Penrose's belief does not match a podcast I recently watched where he discusses these topics with the Christian apologist William Lane Craig [1]. In fact, he explicitly states early on in that video that he sees the world of ideas as primary as opposed to Craig's view that consciousness is primary. At any rate, this video might serve as a quick introduction to Penrose's three world idea for those interested. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"9yPjoh9YJMk":[{"hn_comment_id":24827376,"author":"clarkmoody","month":"2020-10","story_title":"No-till no-herbicide farming system in trial since 1981","text":"This talk introduced me to the no-till, soil health farming paradigm: [VIDEO] TL;DR: focus on soil health and diversify your crops. His results are stunning.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9267382,"author":"briantakita","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Destroy the soil and we all starve","text":"Thank you for your anecdotal account. Many petroleum farmers suffer from soil runoff. There is also desertification. Also, there is inefficient usage of water draining the acquirers. Note that California monoculture petrol farmers are largely responsible for using nearly 80% of California's water usage. There's also habitat loss for insects & other organisms. There's also pollution of water from the excess nitrogen. There's also the poisoning of the people who eat chemical agriculture foods. Note the obesity epidemic & it's relation to the disruption of gut bacteria. Herbicides & Fungicides disrupt biological processes in humans. You mention \"scare tactics\". The problem is temporarily mitigated by mining & importing the nutrients. This is inefficient on fossil fuels because we are trucking in nutrients that are available with natural systems. Here's another account a farmer using natural systems to build soil. [VIDEO] His yields increased & he is the most profitable farmer in his local area.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9843121,"author":"briantakita","month":"2015-07","story_title":"The Plan to Feed the World by Hacking Photosynthesis","text":"I can't criticize your approach, since I'm not a farmer. I respect what you do & the work that it takes to run a farm. I can only point out what I've seen & what inspires me. re: Amonia > A typical modern ammonia-producing plant first converts natural gas (i.e., methane) or LPG (liquefied petroleum gases such as propane and butane) or petroleum naphtha into gaseous hydrogen. [LINK] This requires the importation or local extraction of fossil fuels. Given that the United States is now utilizing fracking to extract natural gas, this causes pollution within the aquifers as well as reducing the integrity of the surface strata. A natural approach of fertilization is animal poop from grazing & polycultures (nitrogen fixing perennial plants, like Black Locust), similar to how the ancient prairies were fertilized. Mark Shepard, who's farm is in Wisconsin, has a large scale example of \"Restoration Agriculture\". He has a silvopasture that feeds his livestock. The livestock fertilize the fields. He also grows nuts. He also saves money by not having to buy fertilizer or pesticides. He also uses keyline design, swales, & ponds to efficiently use water & reduce runoff. [LINK] [LINK] Here's a great talk by Gabe Brown from Idaho using natural, regenerative methods to rebuild soil. [VIDEO] My friends at [LINK] in New Jersey have a lush polyculture medicinal herb & food farm that started from rocky spent earth. There was no top soil when they started a few years ago. You can see how it looks ri","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26718540,"author":"goda90","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Soil bacteria could improve crop yields, via fungi","text":"I found this presentation[0] by a farmer talking about growing soil to be super interesting. He touches on promoting beneficial fungi as one part of it. He claims that with all the relatively easy techniques he, and other like minded farmers do, that they get high calories per acre than some conventional farmers. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28247900,"author":"droopyEyelids","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Peru is reviving a pre-Incan technology for water","text":"I saw an interesting farmer presentation on YouTube[1] the other day where he eventually starts talking about how cover crops have improved his land's ability to absorb and retain water. He even includes photos contrasting his neighbor's monoculture fields with his during rain storms. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29832920,"author":"tharkun__","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Farmers facing fertiliser sticker shock may cut use","text":"Someone posted this link in some other discussion where he came up. I found it fascinating and what you mention as well as much of what your sibling posters do is in there: [VIDEO] I don't know what kind of crowd that \"Sustainable Agriculture's annual symposium\" pulls but I found the number of people in the audience quite small unfortunately.","stance":"rec"}],"9yjZpBq1XBE":[{"hn_comment_id":29372272,"author":"alborzb","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Today\u2019s Disneyland is a price gouge, not a magical experience","text":"For anyone interested in the Fast App discussion from this article, I highly recommend this video from Defunct Land -- [VIDEO] The video not only does a deep dive into fast pass, but also does a statistical model break down to reveal that the modern implementation of fast pass is actually not what you might expect and serves to increase wait times for rides!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32088049,"author":"kmeisthax","month":"2022-07","story_title":"DoorDash and pizza arbitrage (2020)","text":"People who do not understand the role of balking and price information act at their own peril. This economic backpressure is something that executives hate - it keeps line from going up - but people who actually do the work love, because it keeps workloads manageable. If you ever wanted a feature-length explanation of queueing theory and how ignoring it makes everything worse, well... here you go: [VIDEO] . The context is Disney parks and Fastpass, but the lessons are applicable to basically any business. Everything is a queue.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41906724,"author":"eterm","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best documentary you've watched this year?","text":"It was made a couple of years ago, but Defuncland's \"Disney's FastPass: A complicated history\" is an incredible documentary that I watched this year. You don't need to know too much about Disney for it to absorb you in. [Defunctland]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29373133,"author":"ekhaliul","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Today\u2019s Disneyland is a price gouge, not a magical experience","text":"After I took my kids day after thanksgiving for the first time last Friday, I was wondering why this problem simply exists. And how is it possible to pay such big amount of money for outdated experiences that we had. There is a nice analysis of everything that Disney tried as far as controlling lines: [VIDEO] As a person that came from USSR, I see that many of the issues are created by removing money as a control mechanism of supply and demand. If you pay entrance fee and then remove fine tuning for each ride, the result is long lines. My personal opinion is that pay-per-ride is a much better model although I can see how many may disagree. From my childhood in a country where money did not have much meaning, I learned that all-you-can eat mode for a price of entry will be filled with schemes, long lines, and tricks to game the system.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32240635,"author":"rawgabbit","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Shamelessness as a strategy (2019)","text":"I don't get it either. My understanding is that with a queue, we are trading our time to get what we want. Is he saying instead of trading time, we should fork out cash to jump the queue? Here is a TWO hour long documentary on Youtube that talked all the machinations/tweaks Disneyland made to queueing. TLDR, you have to stay at a Disney Hotel to really jump the queue, buy some crazy app, and make reservations months in advance. It is really stupid. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32240642,"author":"jdmichal","month":"2022-07","story_title":"America\u2019s favorite family outings are increasingly out of reach","text":"Uh, so... That's basically Disney World right now. You must reserve your visit to the park, and there's a paid system (Genie+) to compete for ride times without waiting in line. And there's a really good video someone did on the evolution and systems engineering behind the Genie+ / FastPass system: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39084640,"author":"duped","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Elevator Expert on How to Move 10k People Up a 118-Floor Skyscraper [video]","text":"> Concentrated harm and distributed benefit is a recipe to have a few vociferous complainers and many silent beneficiaries A fascinating example of this with queuing humans is the Disney Fastpass system (1). I think the real design goal to avoid \"complainers\" is to try and optimize the wait time for your resource to avoid a bimodal distribution and try and spread it out for the average rider, rather than make wait times worse for the majority of people but better for the people who game the system. (1) [VIDEO] , yes this is an 1:45 long video on the history and a simulation of Disney parks, but its worth the payoff.","stance":"rec"}],"9zinZmE3Ogk":[{"hn_comment_id":17472824,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What talks or videos do you suggest to watch on a long flight?","text":"I've started watching Raymond Hettinger's talks lately. He's a core dev on Python. I love them, the guy is charismatic, very smart and his Python knowledge constantly impresses me. [LINK] My favourite: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36917555,"author":"culebron21","month":"2023-07","story_title":"How to use a Python multiprocessing module","text":"I've just left the question open, but the best learning material for me on this was this lecture. Other points down the list, I had to figure out just by trial and error. Raymond Hettinger, Keynote on Concurrency, PyBay 2017 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19951926,"author":"xkgt","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Has the Python GIL Been Slain? Subinterpreters in Python 3.8","text":"It is because only one thread at a time holds the lock in order to avoid race conditions. The keynote[1] by Raymond Hettinger from PyBay '17 will be a great place to start if you are new to this. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28690800,"author":"fastball","month":"2021-09","story_title":"The GIL and its effects on Python multithreading","text":"For anyone looking for something on the same topic but a little bit lighter / more practical, I really enjoyed this talk[1] by Raymond Hettinger at PyBay 2017, where he discussed the GIL as well. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"A-fxij3zM7g":[{"hn_comment_id":22350293,"author":"gherkinnn","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Kernighan's Law: You are not smart enough to debug it","text":"Uphill Analysis, Downhill Synthesis is a major point in the book Vehicles . [0] Fascinating thought experiments. Here\u2019s an introduction on YT [1], though it really only scratches the surface. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40257215,"author":"rramadass","month":"2024-05","story_title":"The Nature of Code (2nd Edition)","text":"I am forever indebted to this book for pointing me to Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology ( [LINK] ) where very simple autonomous sensor/actuator machines combine to exhibit complex behaviour which maybe mistaken for \"Intelligence\". Makes you really think abut Complexity/Intelligence/Emergent Behaviour/etc. Wikipedia : [LINK] Some Videos: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"A0FZIwabctw":[{"hn_comment_id":27846514,"author":"trothamel","month":"2021-07","story_title":"SpaceX will soon fire up its Super Heavy booster for the first time","text":"[VIDEO] is my favorite way to watch that launch, just because of the way it integrate the people watching. We haven't had the crowds since the Space Shuttle stopped watching, and DM-2, Crew-1, and Crew-2 all happened during the pandemic - so this shows the old excitement.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34188272,"author":"Robotbeat","month":"2022-12","story_title":"SpaceX caps 2022 with record-setting 61st Falcon 9 launch","text":"This video showing kids\u2019 reaction to the Falcon Heavy inaugural launch is pretty fun. The dual-landing is absolutely insane. Straight up science fiction. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"A0VYsiMtrNE":[{"hn_comment_id":25453465,"author":"entire-name","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Transmits AM radio on computers without radio transmitting hardware","text":"I was browsing YouTube the other day, and got recommended something similar: [VIDEO] Very interesting indeed! The title of the video translates to \"Electromagnetic festival music\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41149981,"author":"jamdav16","month":"2024-08","story_title":"p5.js","text":"Reminds me of Electronicos Fantasticos (Japan) who re-purposes old items (TV's old fans, barcode scanners etc...) and makes electronic music. Super interesting stuff! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47702058,"author":"solstice","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Any Interesting Niche Hobbies?","text":"I dig the electroduotone. Congrats! Have you heard of electronicos fantasticos? It's this band from Japan who make incredible music with instruments they made themselves. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"A2zKARkpDW4":[{"hn_comment_id":4631447,"author":"NelsonMinar","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Supersonic free fall from 120,000 feet live at 8:30AM EST","text":"While we're waiting for the weather to clear, you can watch nicely edited footage of Kittinger's 1960 record of 100,000 feet; it's at the start of the Boards of Canada video for Dayvan Cowboy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10054473,"author":"radiorental","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Ferrolic","text":"Aphex Twin: Avril 14th [LINK] Boards of Canada: Dayvan Cowboy [VIDEO] Solar Fields: Reborn [LINK] Brian Eno: Music for Airports [LINK] And so forth, I have something of an incomplete playlist of similar 'ambient' [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"A3oIiH7BLmg":[{"hn_comment_id":4912194,"author":"amirmc","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Facebook: Your Year in Review","text":"> There, the culture is to live by the day, because winter never comes and they don't need to prepare for hard seasons You might find this video interesting. Philip Zimbardo on Time. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7840481,"author":"blaze33","month":"2014-06","story_title":"How Different Cultures Understand Time ","text":"Instead of the linear, multi-active and cyclic times paradigm, another approach I found interesting is the one proposed by Philip Zimbardo neatly presented in this video: [VIDEO] It presents individuals as being either past, present or future oriented. Apparently, the closer we are to the equator the more present-oriented we tend to be (because there are less seasonal changes).","stance":"rec"}],"A4UMyTnlaMY":[{"hn_comment_id":9754882,"author":"ak39","month":"2015-06","story_title":"No Time to Be Nice at Work","text":"That is so true. Primates, not just apes. Here's Sapolsky explaining how stress in an hierarchical social arrangement impacts heart health and life expectancy. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39496808,"author":"Litost","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Chronic stress spreads cancer","text":"The full length video of his is definitely worth a watch, but if anyone's short on time, there's quite a good much shorter version focussing more on the hierarchy/alpha male side of it - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"A5YyTHyaNpo":[{"hn_comment_id":27172284,"author":"ehnto","month":"2021-05","story_title":"All About Cockatoos (2002)","text":"My childhood freind had a Sulfur-Crested Cockatoo that would follow him to school and just hang out until he was out for lunch. Sometimes he would find his way into the classroom, he was a super smart bird and knew how to get the windows open on some of the rooms. My mum helps with rescue birds sometimes and now has a Gullah, which for anyone familiar is a pink/white cockatoo very similar to a sulfur-crested cockatoo. He's so smart, knows tonnes of words. songs and situations, and knows that when the cat shows up he can refer to it as \"Pus pus pus\". The YouTube channel MakersMuse 3D printed some puzzles for wild birds to solve on his porch, it's really remarkable to watch them figure it out: [VIDEO] The Australian Magpie is also extremely intelligent, surprisingly they're not part of the Corvus family but they are very, very similar.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44179752,"author":"metayrnc","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia","text":"Highly recommend this youtube channel for anyone interested in the problem solving capabilities of these birds. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"A8eCGOqgvH4":[{"hn_comment_id":24661107,"author":"Sharlin","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Swift Atomics","text":"If you\u2019re prepared and willing to learn much more about atomic operations than you ever thought you would, there\u2019s no substitute to Herb Sutter\u2019s classic talk \u201datomic<> Weapons\u201d from C++ And Beyond 2012 [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38449565,"author":"NobodyNada","month":"2023-11","story_title":"C++ Memory Model: Migrating from x86 to ARM","text":"For a more in depth introduction to the topic with a lot of practical code examples, I highly recommend Herb Sutter\u2019s excellent talk: Part 1 [VIDEO] Part 2 [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40329509,"author":"zevv","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Making Sense of Acquire-Release Semantics","text":"Well written article, nice and to the point. Do recommend. Decades ago I declared myself too stupid to use shared memory with threading; I have learned to avoid this whenever possible, or abstract away the memory access under a safe layer as soon as possible. One of the greatest decisions of my career. Memory model semantics is one of the parts of systems programming that is generally poorly understood; I have had long discussions with senior programmers who have spent their careers carelessly threading their code without realizing what is happening under the hood. Not only did some of them not properly understand the acquire/release model, but they were not even aware of its existence. For a more in-depth explanation, I recommend Sutter's excellent talk \"Atomic <> weapons\": [VIDEO] . It is a two hour lecture, but it will be worth your time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41241187,"author":"chc4","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Rust Atomics and Locks (2023)","text":"\"Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?\" is one of the best books about atomics and concurrency, and my #2 recommendation. [LINK] My #1 actually isn't a book at all, but the two \"atomic Weapons\" talks by Herb Sutter, which are extremely good. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32536437,"author":"Sharlin","month":"2022-08","story_title":"C++ Concurrency Model on x86 for Dummies (2020)","text":"For a somewhat less \"for dummies\" treatment of the C++ memory model, see Herb Sutter's classic talk \"atomic<> Weapons\" [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"A9U5wK_boYM":[{"hn_comment_id":15930963,"author":"zapperdapper","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk from 2017?","text":"I put a bunch of the ones I enjoyed here: [LINK] One of the best though, for me, has to be this one on fixing a Guitar Hero bug: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42777116,"author":"0xC0ncord","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat","text":"This video[1] on reverse-engineering parts of Guitar Hero 3 covers a few similar techniques that were used to heavily obfuscate the game code that you might find interesting. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"A9UmdY0E8hU":[{"hn_comment_id":11646104,"author":"okket","month":"2016-05","story_title":"GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa","text":"Just giving money will not work, see Saudi Arabia. They have all the money they can dream of and did not evolve. If you want it to work it needs 3 things: 1) Free Education 2) High Taxes 3) Strong Unions Sounds leftist? It may astonish you which countries have the highest ratio of rich persons per capita live. This and a good explanation can be found in \"Where in the world is it easiest to get rich? (TEDxOslo)\" [VIDEO] Just giving money may help in short term anyway, but I doubt it is one solution for everything.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14641686,"author":"btilly","month":"2017-06","story_title":"A tale of two Canadas: Where you grew up affects your income in adulthood","text":"It was a tidbit that I ran across in [VIDEO] which had some other interesting data points as well. Such as the fact that when you look at rich people per capita, it seems that social democracies like Canada, and Scandinavia create rich people more easily than the USA does. For example if you look for people worth $30million+ per million people, Canada has 186 while the USA has 126. That's about a third more per capita. And watching the video, you find that 42% of the children of the bottom 20% in the USA wind up in the bottom 20%. Very little of Canada does anything like that poorly.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16946603,"author":"willvarfar","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Yanis Varoufakis: Marx predicted our present crisis \u2013 and points the way out","text":"Here is an interesting related tedx talk about the proportion of rich people in Nordic socialist countries [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16977594,"author":"willvarfar","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Both in rich and poor countries, universal health care brings huge benefits","text":"In these kinds of discussions I like to promote this interesting TEDx talk: [VIDEO] \"Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?\" Spoiler: the talk shows that statistically the Nordic countries lead the world in millionaires and billionaires / capita, and in rags-to-riches. The talker offers the opinion that this is because its of the strong social safety net, education and healthcare. Living in Scandinavia of course I like to hear this ;)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20035098,"author":"StavrosK","month":"2019-05","story_title":"It's 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning \u2013 Ted Chiang","text":"I watched a very interesting TED talk related to this the other day. The premise is the question \"Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?\". The answer won't surprise you if I tell you the answer will surprise you. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27514953,"author":"karencarits","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life","text":"Well, it depends. This short tedxoslo had some nice points (\"Where in the world is it easiest to get rich?\" Hint: not the US): [VIDEO] He's talking about social mobility from 8:30","stance":"rec"}],"ACkmg3Y64_s":[{"hn_comment_id":13583125,"author":"Animats","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Victorian Era Drones: How Model Trains Transformed from Cutting-Edge to Quaint","text":"\"Model Railroading is Fun\". Said so on the cover of every issue of Model Railroader magazine for decades. They're trying too hard. Check out Minatur Wunderland, the most elaborate model railroad in the world.[1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17098722,"author":"jfim","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Tiny Trains: Neat Narrow-Gauge Rail Connects German Island to Mainland","text":"Coincidentally, Germany also has the world's largest model train exhibit, which even has a fully functional airport (with functional departure board, of course) and a full day/night cycle. You can watch a short tour of it at [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30284879,"author":"netsharc","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Simutrans \u2013 Transport Simulator","text":"Here's your productivity black hole of the day: [VIDEO] Although the exciting software is to remotely control the cars, written in Delphi, but they haven't published these (understandably). They're even working on an F1 race with cars that will decide to overtake themselves: [LINK] (subtitles available), he said, 16 core CPU, well, there you go, 16 car brains!","stance":"rec"}],"AD4b-52jtos":[{"hn_comment_id":11130885,"author":"hydandata","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Why There Is No Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to Mathematics for Programmers","text":"I love programming, but never got the hang of Mathematics due to various reasons. Failed a big project as a solo programmer long time ago, when I was 17, because I could not create the necessary mathematical model and no help was available, with everything else completed, infrastructure, web site/interface database etc. Soon afterwards set off on a different career path, but always kept an intimate relationship with programming, doing some both at work and for fun at home. Recently, after watching R.W. Hamming lectures and reading his book \"Art of Doing Science and Engineering\" [1] [2] decided that I would try learning mathematics again. I found it really hard to do. There are so many implicit assumptions, so much ground that is not covered. I was about to give up again, when I found a book [3] by retired computer science professor, who seemed to have written it specifically for me! it really felt that way. Now I recommend it to almost everyone, especially tech-savvy people. I am no longer afraid of mathematics, with the help of this book, and great advice by Hamming, I am finally \"getting it\". If you find learning new programming languages easy, but struggle with mathematics, check it out! The book is not aimed at teaching you mathematics, rather, it teaches you those missing pieces, that almost every other book either assumes you already know, or describes vaguely and badly, gives you context and valuable advice. To me it almost feels like it is teaching you a functional pr","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17895603,"author":"charlysl","month":"2018-09","story_title":"How to teach yourself hard things","text":"If your are interested in learning hard subjects, I highly recommend Richard Hamming's wonderful course The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn [1], and the related book [2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19250494,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Online Courses?","text":"Sapolsky - Biology of Human Behavior 25 lectures [LINK] It's accessible to laymen, no prior knowledge needed. It covers so many different fields and levels of knowledge (\"buckets\" Sapolsky calls them), different ways of explaining human behaviour. By the signals in their brain, or the hormones in their blood, or what happened that day, or their childhood, or their genes, or evolution of humans etc. Also looks at other animals. A lot of touching/funny/inspiring/poignant stories about scientists in the field(s). Sapolsky is an amazing lecturer/raconteur. Hamming - Learning to Learn 32 lectures [VIDEO] The famous \"You and your research\" is one lecture in this, but every one of them is fascinating. History of computers, AI, codes, n-space, digital filters etc etc. Mainly it's great seeing how his mind works, his thinking style. (I've since read a few of his books, and I love how they're soaked with practical experience, in the same way these talks are. It's all stuff he's lived .)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18023238,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2018-09","story_title":"You and Your Research (1986)","text":"I love all his books - you get the know-how, not just know-that. But the complete Learning to Learn lectures are on youtube, which is even better: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AD5aAd8Oy84":[{"hn_comment_id":38164510,"author":"wlesieutre","month":"2023-11","story_title":"In Defense of RAM","text":"Bit of a stretch to call that a \"charging cable.\" Their 240W rated 2 meter USB-C charging cable is $30 [LINK] But if you're interested in why the Thunderbolt cable costs more than charging cables, some folks put one through a CT scanner recently: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38423083,"author":"gjsman-1000","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Is there an updated list for verified good USB-C cables?","text":"You might want to see Adam Savage\u2019s video about why, say, Apple\u2019s $130 3\u2019 Thunderbolt cable (the pinnacle of cables) actually is not overpriced. It also gives a sense as to what a quality cable is like. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39247564,"author":"al_borland","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Vision Pro Teardown \u2013 Why those fake eyes look so weird","text":"For those interested, this video shows scans of what is inside Apple\u2019s cable vs cheap cables off Amazon. [VIDEO] For those who prefer to read and want to look at the scans in more detail, that can be found here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42547640,"author":"lloeki","month":"2024-12","story_title":"EU law mandating universal chargers for devices comes into force","text":"[VIDEO] Maybe you could consider Apple cables to be overengineered , but I can readily understand why a cable built this way - irrespective of manufacturer - is not overpriced . And it's not just about a chip. The cable is simply factually better on every metric than the hand-soldered 4 wire el cheapo one at 15~16 min. There is no cult in that. Now if one only needs to carry USB 2.0 speeds or a limited amount of power it'd be ridiculous to buy a 100+ or even 50+ cable. That doesn't make the cable overpriced either, merely overspecced for that use case.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42654643,"author":"tiffanyh","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Thunderbolt 5 vs. Thunderbolt 4: Everything you need to know","text":"Adam Savage (Myth Buster) did a video on why Apple Thunderbolt-4 is so expensive ($130), by looking at the detail in construction vs cheap alternatives. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46751735,"author":"ssl-3","month":"2026-01","story_title":"We X-Rayed a Suspicious FTDI USB Cable","text":"Lumifield quite recently showed on Adam Savage's Tested again, with some literal insights on a reasonably-diverse array of different 18650 cells: [VIDEO] It's a good watch, and I learned some new stuff about some things that I only knew a little bit about before.","stance":"rec"}],"AF8d72mA41M":[{"hn_comment_id":44299337,"author":"waltbosz","month":"2025-06","story_title":"US Streetlights Are Turning Purple","text":"I (and my 6-year-old) really enjoyed this video from Veritasium about the invention of the blue LED. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47513067,"author":"teleforce","month":"2026-03","story_title":"In Edison\u2019s Revenge, Data Centers Are Transitioning From AC to DC","text":">It is absolutely stupid to talk about this as edisons revenge. If Tesla had the modern high power transistors needed to get high voltage dc out of the ac produced from a spinning turbine he would be all for high voltage dc too. This! The soon people realized these facts the better. The pervasive high rise buildings did not happen before the invention of modern cranes. Exactly twenty years ago I was doing a novel research on GaN characterization, and my supervisors made a lot money with consulations around the world, and succesfully founded govt funded start-up company around the technology. Together with SiC, these are the two game changing power devices with wideband semiconductor technology that only maturing recently. Heck, even the Nobel price winning blue LED discovery was made feasible by GaN. Watch the excellent video made by Veritasium for this back story [1]. [1] Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39538867,"author":"swframe2","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?","text":"The Veritasium youtube channel has a few interesting videos related to this topic: This one is on IQ: [LINK] Pay attention to the stats on how IQ correlates to success (near the end). This one is about becoming an expert: [LINK] This one is about someone who just worked harder than everyone else: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39688801,"author":"ndcator","month":"2024-03","story_title":"The invention of blue and purple pigments in ancient times (2006)","text":"What about the more recent invention of blue pigment LED? [VIDEO] I found this story facing regarding the inventors determination","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39741345,"author":"wernsey","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?","text":"Veritasium had this video about the history of sewing machines recently [1]. I remember watching it and ended up in awe of how something that we take for granted took a journey of several thousand years to be get invented. While I'm thinking about it, his recent video about the development of blue LEDs [2] is very interesting as well if you haven't seen it. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39747672,"author":"zekyl314","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Isamu Akasaki\u2019s blue LEDs changed how we light our world","text":"I suggest you watch this video as well, is goes into great detail on what it took to make the blue LED. It's quite fascinating. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41526611,"author":"bcrl","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Linear, symmetric, self-selecting 14-bit molecular memristors (2023)","text":"And we only have blue LEDs due to the sheer stubbornness of Shuji Nakamura. If you haven't already heard the tale of its development, head over here and enjoy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42189041,"author":"btilly","month":"2024-11","story_title":"A stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom","text":"I think that this is a general trend. Various fields tend to get into groupthink, and it is hard for people who buck the trend to pursue the usual academic path to research. But usually the herd has gone down a wrong turn, and it is up to a random rebel to make the next key discovery. For an extreme example, I recommend Veratasium's video on blue LEDs, [VIDEO] . But despite how extreme that example is, it does seem to be a trend. The direction that the herd has gone has been generally well-explored simply because a herd of researchers have already gone there. If they've found nothing, you'll probably find nothing either. So you have to back up. Sadly, the way that academia is structured discourages this at every turn. :-(","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43719273,"author":"Centigonal","month":"2025-04","story_title":"","text":"The human race has benefited greatly from individual researchers who made their work the main source of value in their life, and from societies, patrons, and government institutions who gave these people the stability and financial support to pursue such a single minded focus. Two fascinating examples: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47470311,"author":"Eddy_Viscosity2","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Just make it hard to fail","text":"The guy who figured out how to make a blue LED (which was world changing), also worked every single day . Fascinating story: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AFVDZeg4RVY":[{"hn_comment_id":30742247,"author":"BirAdam","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Addressing Criticism of RISC-V Microprocessors","text":"Updated my response to include a link to the transcription. The audio/video is here: [VIDEO] It\u2019s actually important (if you\u2019re not an engineer) to listen to the whole thing, because he drops knowledge all over the place.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34908359,"author":"comboy","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Sam Zeloof and Jim Keller start a new semiconductor fab","text":"K8 seems pretty small after he made the fucking Zen architecture (and Tesla AI). Lex has good interviews with Jim[1], he's not just very smart, he is wise. He started Tenstorrent some time ago with Ljubisa Bajic so I'm assuming this fab is related. Here is youtube channel for Tenstorrent[2], and last time I checked it was getting under 100 views per video... Ian also interviewed him[3] some time ago. Long story short if I had money that would be relevant in this context I would invest really hard into Tenstorrent. Investing time to listen to the guy seems to be not worse. 1a. [LINK] 1b. [LINK] 2. [LINK] 3. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36310547,"author":"zucker42","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Jim Keller on AI, RISC-V, Tenstorrent\u2019s Move to Edge IP","text":"I first heard of TensTorrent from Dr. Ian Cutress's YT channel TechTechPotato. [VIDEO] It's a good source for trends in hardware.","stance":"rec"}],"AFnfTDbcPOA":[{"hn_comment_id":33716140,"author":"mhoad","month":"2022-11","story_title":"How to explain the KGB's success identifying CIA agents in the field (2015)","text":"For anyone is into this kind of thing I would suggest checking out The Team House on YouTube which has a lot of very in-depth interviews with some very recently retired CIA folks talking about their experiences in the field. Given a lot of the crazy shit I hear come up in the comments here every time the CIA tends to get mentioned in almost any context this might actually be a good resource for a lot of folks here to start separating fact from fiction. I\u2019ll drop a couple of my favourites here but they must have at least 20 of them by now. Doug London [LINK] This guy had a really long career at CIA in the particular job that you all think of when you think of a \u201cspy\u201d that spanned around 30 years from memory with 9/11 occurring right in the middle of his career. He talks a lot about not only how that changed the face of the agency but about all the mistakes that got made along the way and how the wheels fell off the truck with things like the rendition programs etc. Overall, it\u2019s a great self reflective and critical look at the agency from a very senior person on the inside. Jim Lawler [VIDEO] This guy is probably the most \u201cspooky\u201d kind of CIA guy I\u2019ve ever seen them interview. Even to the point that he is rather unusual amongst his peers if his reputation is to anything to go by. You can immediately see why he was so good at his job almost from the start. Like Doug he was also VERY senior and at the pointy end of the spear as they say. The later stage of his career was focused","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33990919,"author":"mhoad","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The secret lives of MI6\u2019s top female spies","text":"Here are two very in-depth interviews with two recently retired individuals who get into a lot of the mechanics of how that works in reality. Doug London [LINK] Jim Lawler [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38909697,"author":"mdhb","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Dutch man sabotaged Iranian nuclear program without Dutch government's knowledge","text":"I think you might be a bit hung up here on the word software which in your defence is not the correct word here. Replace it with \u201coperation\u201d and it\u2019s not at all a crazy number to suggest that an incredibly complicated multi year multi national intelligence operation to disrupt a covert nuclear weapons program inside of an actively hostile nation who have a serious counterintelligence and counter espionage apparatus ended up costing that amount. You end up coming to the conclusion rather quickly that it\u2019s actually great value for money. While not at all about this particular operation but if you want to hear someone who actively ran another incredibly successful nuclear non proliferation operation inside of CIA I\u2019d recommend checking out this interview with perhaps the \u201cspookiest\u201d CIA person I\u2019ve ever seen [VIDEO] ?","stance":"rec"}],"AGCmPLWZKd8":[{"hn_comment_id":29192078,"author":"sdoering","month":"2021-11","story_title":"How trains could replace planes in Europe","text":"There was this really great talk on the Chaos Communication Congress some time back on the punctuality of German trains. I searched for it and even found the English voice over translation [1]. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36079768,"author":"btschaegg","month":"2023-05","story_title":"It will take years to get Deutsche Bahn back on track","text":"Obligatory mention of a great talk on the topic: \"David Kriesel: BahnMining -- P\u00fcnktlichkeit ist eine Zier\" (2019) English translation: [VIDEO] Edit: Note: And that was still with better numbers than lmm posted.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25091871,"author":"DiogenesKynikos","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Virgin Hyperloop Has Invented the World's Crappiest High-Speed Rail","text":"The was a CCC talk about why the Deutsche Bahn has so many delays: [1]. It turns out that East Germany has great on-time performance, probably because all the infrastructure is new. But overall, Germany has to invest more in upkeep of its existing infrastructure. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AGUwcs9qJXY":[{"hn_comment_id":24359189,"author":"filoeleven","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Police across Canada are using predictive policing algorithms, report finds","text":"There\u2019s a great 18-minute video from Bob the Tomato, AKA Phil Vischer, which lays out the sordid history in broad detail. I like this in particular because he\u2019s coming from an evangelical Christian background\u2014a demographic that has 60% racial resentment, the highest in the country. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42662652,"author":"395112342","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs","text":"Older injustice still has ramifications today. Take redlining for instance. That happened a long time ago. Redlining systematically and intentionally deprived non-white families of home ownership, while helping white families to own homes. But wealth begets wealth, so owning a home lets someone borrow money against it to start a business. When these people die, their children will inherit their wealth. As a result, the (grand)children of a family are still denied opportunities that they would've gotten, if not for redlining. The creator of VeggieTales has a great video on this! [VIDEO] P.S. Yes, a family who was able to get a home loan (redlining didn't affect them) might have squandered this wealth gambling, or maybe they didn't pass it onto their children, so some people unaffected by redlining may still end up in a similar place. Similarly, some families that were affected by redlining have still managed to accumulate wealth in spite of redlining. My claim is that the family that squandered their money still got the chance to squander was was given to them, and the injustice is that the redlined family was denied that opportunity.","stance":"rec"}],"AHeZHyOnsm4":[{"hn_comment_id":9328881,"author":"matznerd","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Elon Musk wants to bring the Internet in space","text":"Elon covered all of this and more during the launch of the SpaceX Seattle offices. He pretty much goes over the entire game plan in this video -> [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12983805,"author":"andrewtbham","month":"2016-11","story_title":"SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed","text":"no one saw it coming? they anounced this in 2015. Here is a video where elon explains the system very well in 2015. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AHiNeUTgGkk":[{"hn_comment_id":20824797,"author":"nxc18","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Most software companies ignore user behavior","text":"There\u2019s a lot of interesting history that I think this comment ignores. The office 2007 project was one of their more heavily feedback-driven initiatives; had they been paying attention the same way for Windows 8, it likely would have looked a lot more like Windows 10. Really interesting talk: [VIDEO] They had really good reasons for using the ribbon, not the least of which was that people weren\u2019t finding the features they needed. That was all driven by telemetry back before it was considered the evilest of evils. I\u2019m amazed that you\u2019re still bitter after 13 years. Afaict actual user preference is strongly for the ribbon, minus a very vocal minority that were bothered by the change. Office 2007 was in fact not the boon for OpenOffice that was predicted. edit: tone, realized it came across as not as respectful as I intended","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38929407,"author":"saratogacx","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Golden Rules of Interface Design (2013)","text":"There's an old MIX08 video where some guys from MS actually talk through the design process and everything that went into it with a lot of depth as well as looking at alternative ideas and why they didn't work. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AI4ynXzkSQo":[{"hn_comment_id":26988872,"author":"throwaway823882","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Coffee drinkers display a distinct pattern of brain functional connectivity","text":"First, buy good beans. [LINK] Second, buy a cheap hand grinder and grind 'em right. [LINK] Third, buy a cheap plastic V60 funnel and some paper filters, and hand-pour. [VIDEO] If you're just learning how to do this, buy a good bag of coffee just to practice a bunch until you taste a difference. (Do this any time you learn to cook. Cook 36 eggs in one go and you will become an expert omelette maker in an hour) Cold brew is also delicious. Both the \"let it sit overnight\" variety, and \"brewing into a carafe of ice\". Oh, and clean all your stuff each time before you use it. Stale leftover coffee (in your brewer or coffee mug) makes your coffee taste like shit.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32141557,"author":"acchow","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The case for bad coffee (2015)","text":"> and I've settled on a simple over-the-mug pour-over cone This is how I do it too. I highly recommend trying out a V60 (which is only $9.20) and trying the techniques in this video :) [VIDEO] You may find your coffee suddenly tasting significantly better","stance":"rec"}],"AIcfMMVcYZg":[{"hn_comment_id":1906639,"author":"josh33","month":"2010-11","story_title":"'Malemployment' on the Rise","text":"Agreed. Here's a solid video on the topic where Peter Schiff explains why college tuition is so high: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2239189,"author":"anonymoushn","month":"2011-02","story_title":"Why Does College Cost So Much?","text":"I suspect that Peter Schiff is closer to the mark. [VIDEO] His hypothesis is that increasing the capacity of students to pay (to almost arbitrarily high levels) by providing government guarantees of student loans allows allows schools to charge ridiculously high tuition. To some extent, this is correct, and there is no reason for the people involved not to want to increase tuitions. For the school, higher tuition will mean the school can improve itself and become more attractive to students. For the lenders, higher tuition means more loans returning 5% or more for which the government assumes all the risk. It isn't entirely accurate to say \"the government assumes all the risk\" either. Student debts are the most toxic debts around, and cannot be thrown off in bankruptcy. If you refuse to pay, the government is authorized to garnish your wages or raid your savings. This isn't to say that Schiff's hypothesis explains the entirety of the increase in the cost of tuition, but I think that it plays a much larger role than what is discussed in the article.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17964090,"author":"mixmastamyk","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Why Is College in America So Expensive?","text":"When you subsidize industries they no longer attempt to contain costs. Unintuitively, instead of getting cheaper they get more expensive. There's an interesting video by Peter Schiff on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AItTqnTsVjA":[{"hn_comment_id":36937793,"author":"firen777","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Chicago95 \u2013 Windows 95 Theme for Linux","text":"There's a study that shows flat UI designs cause uncertainty and can lower productivity: [LINK] My subjective experience agree with the study too. But since the entire industry (be it cooperate or non-profit org) collectively lost their mind and decided flat is the one true way and purged the entire internet of anything vaguely 3D, I can't really compare the experience again in a more objective manner. I'd always go back to [Ross Scott's video of how a \"non-expert\" view modern GUI]( [VIDEO] ) whenever I want some reminder on what good GUI should do. I don't agree with everything he say since a lot of it is subjective, but this video cursed me to pay far more attention on how shitty modern GUI is in my everyday interaction with the computer and phone. (Ross's video essay style is more akin to how a cultist on the street preaches about the UFO or the end-of-the-world and doesn't even care if anyone listen. I personally love it but it may not be everyone's cup of tea)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23487008,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2020-06","story_title":"The GUI should be a lot better [video]","text":"One of the strengths is the list of recommended features for a GUI. That really should be called outin the video description or several linked discussions, but doesn't seem to be. I think the version shown at 59m9s is complete: [VIDEO] Editing lightly: 1. The GUI should be asthetically acceptable with heavy and long use. 2. There is no perfect GUI for everyone. 3. There are many features that are ideal for the majority of users. 4. The GUI should get out of the way when you don't need it. 5. The GUI should be as efficient as possible if you know what you're doing. 6. The GUI should activate when you want it and not when you don't. 7. It shouldn't be easy to do things you don't want by accident. 8. Switching between mouse and keyboard should be minimised. 9. Use multiple mouse buttons for maximum efficiency. 10. Both low-contrast textual and stark contrast graphical elements should be avoided. I'm not in full agreement (#3 may be debatable) and would add a few items (especially: preserve user state if at all possible). But it's a good starting point for discussion.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23533391,"author":"partusman","month":"2020-06","story_title":"MuseScore 4: Moving from notation software to composition software","text":"Although it may not really fit what you're looking for, there was a one-hour video linked here a few days ago that critiziced the entire modern desktop GUI landscape. Video: [VIDEO] Discussion: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35455176,"author":"lurtbancaster","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The Mullvad Browser","text":"I was about to type a long comment in response to yours, but then I realized I could just link you a video[1] that goes into detail explaining all the ways in which Windows 7's UI is customizable, in ways that Win 8 onwards are simply, not. The video is 1 hours 17 minutes long, so feel free to speed it up a little. Hope that helps. Cheers! [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AJ-auWfJTts":[{"hn_comment_id":24730602,"author":"simonh","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Sid Meier's Memoir","text":"Ordered. Funnily enough I recently came across this GDC presentation by Sid and Bruce Shelley on the development of the original Civilization[0]. Highly recommended. The influence of Empire as one of the inspirations of the game was obvious to anyone familiar with it. If you're interested there's an excellent updated implementation of Empire on the App Store[1]. I'd love to be able to get a version of Civ 2 on mobile. It's still by far my favourite iteration of Civ. Or Pirates! [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28626972,"author":"simonh","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Sid Meier and the meaning of \u2018Civilization\u2019","text":"Check out this great GDC talk by Sid and Bruce on the history of the development of the game. [VIDEO] They mention Empire as an influence, and there's a really nice modern implementation of Empire available for Windows and iOS. [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14807004,"author":"eriknstr","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Show HN: A Set of Dice That Follows the Gambler's Fallacy","text":"> I made a chatbot that rolled dice, and it was constantly criticized for being \"broken\" because four 3's would come up in a row. > These accusations would come up even though they (all being computer science majors) know it's possible (although unlikely) for these events to happen. They just don't trust the black box. This reminds me of a talk [1] given at Game Developer's Conference (GDC) about the game Civilization, in which the Sid Meyer -- creator of said game -- spent a bit of the time talking about the difference between fairness and perceived fairness. The talk is only an hour long and worth watching. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16603087,"author":"cpeterso","month":"2018-03","story_title":"The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization","text":"Here are videos of two GDC 2017 talks about Civilization that I enjoyed: Classic Game Postmortem: Sid Meier's Civilization (with Civilization creators Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley): [VIDEO] Absolutely No Pressure: Continuing a Successful Game Series with Civilization VI (with Civilization VI lead designer Ed Beach): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19408327,"author":"codetrotter","month":"2019-03","story_title":"How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games (2017)","text":"> The anecdote about Sid Meier hard-coding a guaranteed \"win on the third attempt\" for a battle with a 1/3 victory probability was very interesting. You might enjoy these videos as well: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"AJdEqssNZ-U":[{"hn_comment_id":34045254,"author":"ncallaway","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Twitter Suspends PG's Account","text":"> vlambeer, if anyone knows them I absolutely love their \"art of screenshake\" lecture. [VIDEO] It really shows how there's a very high ceiling for polish and _feel_ when it comes to interactions. \"Screenshake\" is something that I'm sure a lot of people might look at and say: \"oh, that would take 15 minutes to add\", and if you're just talking about shaking the screen a bit, absolutely! But if you want to make the screenshake _really_ communicate a feeling and an emotion, there's so much more you can do.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39642436,"author":"abetusk","month":"2024-03","story_title":"How do you make an addictive video game?","text":"Ultimately pretty shallow. This is more an exploration of how it feels to make a \"sticky\" game rather than how to actually make a sticky game. I certainly don't have any expertise or deep insight but I will say that one of the best videos I've seen on this is \"The art of screenshake\" by J. Nijman of Vlambeer [0]. There, he walks through what's a very basic 2d sidescroller shooter and adds in effects until it looks like an actual fun game. The idea being that layering feedback and effects so that every aspect of the game becomes more fun to play. It sounds like this podcast was focusing more on Hearthstone and Marvel Snap, both games which I haven't played but are more strategy and luck oriented than the kind of games Vlambeer makes. I think one of the insights there is that there's a non-commutative aspect of the game that allows for different strategies based on context. For example, A > B, B > C but C > A, like in rock paper scissors, or some of its generalizations [1]. I think this is what Magic the Gathering did with each of the colors. Maybe the keyword here is \"mixed strategies\"? Nijman's video highlights, to me, the importance of polish and how we basically understand that many core mechanics are fun and so don't need to be innovative if you add in enough polish or support around it. One other thing I'll mention is that A. Bruce who developed Antichamber had a GDC talk about his process of development [2]. One of the interesting points he made was that he got it in fro","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44947943,"author":"abetusk","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Starting game development in JavaScript with no experience","text":"For me, the \"owl\" was all the polish and game feel. \"The art of screenshake\" by Jan Nijman of Vlambeer [0] was what helped fill in the steps to \"making the owl\". I think most people with reasonable know-how can make a basic game, whether it's asteroids, flappy bird, breakout, etc. For me, I never understood how to get past the \"finished the tutorial\" to \"looks like an actual game\". Screenshake, aka game feel/polish/production effects, was what made it gel. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45211145,"author":"auto","month":"2025-09","story_title":"DOOMscrolling: The Game","text":"Once I gave this sometime I actually enjoyed the concept quite a bit. I think it's a novel twist on the bullet hell genre, and I'm a sucker for single button/input style games. I'm playing on a mouse, specifically a Logitech G502 that I can \"unlock\" the screen wheel to be almost frictionless, which to me feels like the right meta for a game like this. Couple constructive criticisms: - Is there a pause button that I'm missing? If not, add one, I want to actually play this more but I need to be able to take breaks - The beginning is too easy. I'm biased as I like difficult games that encourage mastery, but I found myself dying early on runs because I was getting impatient with how slow the early progression is - I haven't played enough yet to know whether monsters eventually come from the top, but eventually they should, it would greatly increase the difficulty curve - Hitboxes feel a little meh, and don't seem to match the sprites - If there's sound, it wasn't working for me, which leads to... - Pump up the juice. You've got a great core loop, but you need the juice. One of my favorite game dev talks of all time would be perfect for you to watch and iterate with ( [VIDEO] ) - Monster diversity. Again, maybe I didn't play long enough yet to get to newer monsters, but from what I can tell the only diversity is their looks, health, and approach angle. Monsters that are faster and incentivize different movement, or that shoot back at you, or blow up after shooting so you have to a","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7037658,"author":"drhayes9","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm building one HTML5 game per week, need feedback","text":"Great games! Great start! Here's a talk you might be interested in from one of the guys who made \"Ridiculous Fishing\" on the Art of Screenshake: [VIDEO] Basically, it's a bunch of interesting points on how to make action games feel more responsive and fun.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7625748,"author":"Vermeulen","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Game Mechanic Explorer \u2013 examples for game mechanics, algorithms, and effects","text":"I love these interactive demos of game dev techniques. Another great one is this Aztez post on fighting game effects - [LINK] - and Vlambeer's demo in their 'art of screenshake' talk [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11804468,"author":"polm23","month":"2016-05","story_title":"I Have Created 50 Games in 2014","text":"Here's Ryan Clark (Crypt of the NecroDancer) writing about what makes a game commercially viable: [LINK] Here's Jan Willem Nijman of Vlambeer discussing a large number of small improvements that make games feel good: [VIDEO] Here's Rami Ismail, also of Vlambeer, explaining how making a game a week helps you develop an intuition for some parts of game making: [LINK] Here's a talk by Sid Meier (Civilization) about Interesting Decisions: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12273400,"author":"jean_claude","month":"2016-08","story_title":"How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days (2005)","text":"The core essence of a video game is the game feel (which not everyone likes, because it's ill-defined). How does a player interact with a game? Via game mechanics. No amount of polish is going to make up for horrible game mechanics. Jan Willem (of Vlambeer), who hates the phrase \"game feel\", talks about it through a simple iterative process of improving game mechanics. See: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32383293,"author":"abetusk","month":"2022-08","story_title":"In-browser retro-futuristic tank game, open source","text":"Almost completely unrelated but I have long wanted an in-browser/real-time/javascript/FOSS 'synthwave screensaver' in the style that you sometimes see on YouTube [0]. Maybe I'll use your code as a baseline for it if I get the motivation. In terms of actual feedback, the game itself has a lot going for it. I would, at the very least, add some 'juice' to it, which would probably add a lot. There are many videos on it but the most enlightening one I found was from Nijman of Vlambeer [1]. You might need to take care with literal screenshake as it's 3d but there are many other suggestions that are relevant (kick back from firing, enemy blood/armor splatter, detritus persistence, small variations in bullet direction, etc.). [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32481291,"author":"yetihehe","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I get started to game devevelopment/design?","text":"> I don't consider myself a person that good at writing stories (or anything other than programming) Read a book [LINK] > often find my games bland and boring pretty fast. Art of screenshake [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35287672,"author":"doomlaser","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Juice","text":"I believe the term comes from the game development sphere originally. Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho (creator of Noita and Crayon Physics Deluxe ) gave a famous talk about it in 2010, Juice it or lose it : [LINK] Another classic talk on the same topic comes from Jan Willem Nijman in 2013, The art of screenshake : [VIDEO] It's nice to see these terms being adopted by the wider software development industry, though I doubt we'll be seeing much screenshake on websites or utility apps any time soon.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43208500,"author":"modernerd","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommend resources that helped your game dev journey?","text":"I don't think books and tutorials help that much. Playing and making games \u2014 a lot of games \u2014 might help you grow more as a designer than reading and watching YouTube. 1. Do master studies. Take a tiny environment or mechanic of a game you love and reproduce it for education, knowing you'll throw it away. Do this often. Get faster at it. 2. Ask people what their favourite game is. Play it. If it's fun to you, why? If it doesn't resonate with you, why? 3. Internalise the idea that ideas don't matter that much, execution is what matters. Good game designers can make otherwise boring games feel fun to play. (See \"the art of screenshake\" below.) 4. Make a lot of games. Make them small enough to finish. You don't have to release them all, but you should watch other people play them sometimes. 5. Don't listen to people who tell you not to watch YouTube for game design ideas, there are plenty of great videos out there that have positively changed how I think about game design: The art of screenshake (starts a little slow, but stick with it!): [VIDEO] Designing to reveal the nature of the universe: [LINK] Game design is a search algorithm: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"AJgY9FtDLbs":[{"hn_comment_id":27993508,"author":"codeptualize","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Jack White launches new website for non-music art","text":"Wow! That's really awesome. I really appreciate his passion for his art, if it's music, upholstery or else. The way he is driven by an inner desire to create, the minimalism, the constraints he puts on himself to maximise his creativity and output. Truly inspirational. If people have not seen it, I highly recommend the interview with Conan [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37334065,"author":"maxweylandt","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Absurd Success","text":"There's definitely some artist who feel that way. Jack White comes to mind. He'll deliberately use restrictions(like writing music for only two instruments) and even physically obstruct things at live performances. See this (very good) interview with Conan: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AKGrmY8OSHM":[{"hn_comment_id":33592267,"author":"Kodix","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Box breathing techniques and benefits","text":"> I find the breath work to be more useful than meditation. Now any time I find stress I immediately recognize my breath and start controlling it, almost sub-consciously. I'd just like to note that you're literally describing mindfulness meditation and its effects, there. That's what interoceptive meditation is all about - focusing on your internal state - and breath is an excellent medium for that focus. Anyone that believes that Wim Hof breathing is woo should literally just spend the three minutes to do a round of it and see the effects by themselves. It is immediately obvious that there is a clear effect on the body from just breathing the right way. For anyone wanting to try, here is the video I used when I started getting into it: [LINK] (Don't necessarily pay too much attention to that creator's other videos, he's not very science-based overall.) Just do the first round and you'll see an undeniable effect on your body and mind. I mean undeniable , not something subtle and small. Now, the specific effects of it all can be debated. I'm rather doubtful of some of the claims made of it, and it's very clear that a lot of non-skeptical people flock to this sort of thing, so that's expected. But there's something to it, for sure. Try it the next time you're about to do something high-stress, such as public speaking. The difference for me is night and day. I also recommend people check out NSDR. Here is what I use: [VIDEO] It's a bit subtler, but there's a definite effect. Sup","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36400132,"author":"waihtis","month":"2023-06","story_title":"A daytime nap is good for the brain","text":"A good tool for rejuvenating yourself for the second half of the day, equivalent to a short nap, is what is called \"NSDR\" or non-sleep deep rest. Huberman has a guided session for this on youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36403824,"author":"rubyskills","month":"2023-06","story_title":"A daytime nap is good for the brain","text":"I like this guided NSDR session with Andrew Huberman. He pulls you out after 10 minutes in a nice way that gently reintroduces your CNS to reality. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37111698,"author":"simple10","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Are Naps Good for You?","text":"This is my favorite yoga nidra track on spotify (30 min): [LINK] And here's a shorter one (10 min) from Andrew Huberman: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ALc8CBYOfkw":[{"hn_comment_id":30286406,"author":"viktorcode","month":"2022-02","story_title":"How the modern world arose from imaginary numbers","text":"I highly recommend video by Sabine Hossenfelder [1] on this topic. She's explaining the topic in layman terms, starting from what does it mean to exist (or be real) in physical sense. Complex numbers, as useful as they are, just an abstraction, a tool which can be replaced with different forms of calculations. That makes the question of \"reality\" rather complex (pardon the pun). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29650375,"author":"johnp271","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Quantum theory based on real numbers can be experimentally falsified","text":"There is a nice 10 minute discussion about this paper by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder on her \"Science without the gobbelydgook\" youtube series (which I recommend). She considers the existential questions regarding necessity of complex numbers a \"super-niche nerd fight\". You can find the video here [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35690750,"author":"ars","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Quantum Physics Falls Apart Without Imaginary Numbers","text":"This video by Sabine Hossenfelder is probably more informative on this topic: [VIDEO] (it discusses this paper).","stance":"rec"}],"APZCfmgzoS0":[{"hn_comment_id":17056940,"author":"iglookid","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Things no one tells you before an Antarctic expedition (2015)","text":"The following sources provide some compelling arguments for switching to intermittent fasting for many major systemic health benefits. These videos by the channel \"What I've Learned\" are great: - Fasting vs. Eating Less: What's the Difference? [1] - Longevity & Why I now eat One Meal a Day [2] The channel [3] also has many other videos on the topic of nutrition, with similar emphasis. Also see the excellent and readable book \"The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting\" by Dr Jason Fung and Jimmy Moore [4]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14697372,"author":"vijucat","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Can a Diet That Mimics Fasting Turn Back the Clock?","text":"I saw this video called \"Fasting vs. Eating Less: What's the Difference? (Science of Fasting)\" just yesterday, and it's good to hear many of the points it raised validated by your experience: [VIDEO] > hunger comes in waves, you'll get to a point where you feel super hungry, it'll usually pass after some time Matches what the video above talks about \"Ghrelin\" from 5:03 onwards.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17874555,"author":"donpapa","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What do you struggle with?","text":"Yeah my man, I seriously don't know what to tell other than fasting works. Your metabolism isn't a something that breaks and is not fixable, and \"getting sick of fainting\" isn't a fucking excuse. If you're fainting, you're doing something wrong with your diet. You either getting too little from something, or too little. I seriously hope this video can lead you to a better lifestyle. and sorry if I sounded too harsh, lowkey it's targeted to myself as motivation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22238190,"author":"ravenstine","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?","text":"I wouldn't say there's any one good resource. Most people preach intermittent fasting, which I've found is okay for maintenance and health but it's not nearly as beneficial nor will it lose you as much weight as fasting for days on end. But here's some material I went over to educate myself and convinced me that it's perfectly safe: Fasting vs. Eating Less: What's the Difference? (Science of Fasting) [VIDEO] Dr. Jason Fung - 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem' [LINK] Beginners Guide to Prolonged Fasting | 24-72 Hour Fasting Instructions [LINK] ^^ Not exactly a fan of Thomas DeLauer but there's some good information there. If you aren't faint of heart, check out some videos on the \"Snake Diet\" channel on YouTube. Cole is kind of a lunatic, constantly swears, and holds nothing back. He does this to be motivational. He's wrong about a few things(he thinks fasting cures everything and also thinks vaccines are bad), but when it comes to fasting properly he's pretty spot on. I just took from him what I thought made sense and left the rest behind. The best idea I got from him was the \"snake juice\", which is really just an electrolyte mixture you can make at home. It really makes all the difference. Overall, I wish there was someone who could preach this stuff without the Cole's level of insanity, but there you have it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28222599,"author":"seer","month":"2021-08","story_title":"What happens to your brain when you give up sugar","text":"What really opened me up to all of the complex biochem when processing different foods was the \u201cwhat I\u2019ve learned\u201d youtube channel [1]. What you describe was actually tested by the US government with the starvation experiment around ww2 and is consistent with your symptoms. Apparently when people are kept on a carb diet, but not given enough carbs, their live would suck quite a bit, they would loose muscle (but gain fat), not be able to think straight, etc. Its all fascinating stuff. I would suggest trying a full water fast for at least 2 days to see how it goes. For me its much less stressful, and after I get rid of all the carbs (24-48 hours, depending on what I was eating before) I would blissfully operate without any problems, including heavy fitness and programming tasks. And when I get to a point of too little glucose in my brain, because I had to fix a tricky bug, instead of searching for that chocolate treat, I\u2019ll just sit for a but for 5-10 minutes, and let my body break down some of my fat to make more brain juice to operate normally. You are right though that people are different and this is a fricking complex stuff, and might not work for you, just wanted to mention that there might be more you can try. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ARYP83yNAWk":[{"hn_comment_id":22204964,"author":"je42","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Tim Sweeney: Eliminating C++ exceptions gave 15% speedup","text":"Quite an improvement. However, i feel like that the tweet also displays the (sometimes emotional) feelings toward exceptions that a large part of the C++ community has. Herb Sutter made an excellent presentation about this \"fragmentation\" of the community and steps towards fixing this split: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22304181,"author":"Felk","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Investigating the Performance Overhead of C++ Exceptions","text":"If you want to see Herb Sutter's take on exceptions (and RTTI), I can really recommend this talk where he explores his Result-esque (like in Rust) solution that he wrote a paper about and proposes for standardisation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25333122,"author":"je42","month":"2020-12","story_title":"These Modern Programming Languages Will Make You Suffer","text":"Wow: C++ > Garbage collection was never added into C++. Manual memory management is extremely error prone. C++ has memory management simplification: reference couting via shared_ptr/unique_ptr. The trade-offs are different, but in C++ manually managing memory is not necessary unless you have a good reason. > C++ is notorious for its slow compilation time. Significantly slower than Java, not as bad as Scala. That depends on what you use and how you use it. However, this is tricky to figure out what slows down the compilation. > In C++, all references are nullable. Looks like this guy really needs to read up on C++. References can point to null, but not so easily. I think he means pointers. > Catching/throwing errors is the preferred error handling mechanism. I think he should really watch Herb Sutters Video[see 1] on the improvements of exception handling that are in the pipeline. Herb also discusses the alternatives to exception handling. C# > Multi-paradigm? C# has Pattern matching since 8.0 [see 2] Python > Python is dynamically typed, there\u2019s not much more to say about the type system. Dynamically but strongly typed one could say. > In comparison, NPM in JavaScript is the only tool you\u2019ll ever need. JS has Yarn as well... > I don\u2019t recommend using Python for large projects, the language was not built with serious software engineering in mind. no arguments provided... and in fact there are very large python projects out there in the wild. Also, pytest is one of the best tes","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45094428,"author":"inetknght","month":"2025-09","story_title":"How is Ultrassembler so fast?","text":"> I don't have enough time to watch these kinds of presentations. Then let me pick and share some of my favorites that I found enlightening, and summarize with some information that I found useful. By far, the most useful one is Khalil Estell's presentation last year [0]. It's a fairly face paced but relatively deep dive into exception mechanics. At the end, he advocates for a new tool that would audit a program to determine what exceptions could be thrown. I think that's a flipping fantastic idea for a tool. Unfortunately I haven't seen any progress toward it -- if someone here knows where his tool is, or a similar tool, please reply! I did send him an email a few months ago inquiring about it, but haven't received a reply. Nonetheless, the whole presentation was excellent in my opinion. I did see that he had another related presentation at ACCU this year [4] with a topic of \"C++ Exceptions are Code Compression\" (which I totally can believe -- I've seen it myself in binary sizes), but I haven't seen his presentation yet. I'll watch it later today. Just about anything from Herb Sutter is good. I don't like that he works for Microsoft, but he does great stuff for C++, including the old Guru of the Week series [1]. In particular, his 2019 presentation [2] describes different error handling techniques, some difficulties and pitfalls in combining libraries with different error handling techniques, and leads up to explaining why std::expected came about. He does pontificate a lot ","stance":"rec"}],"ASXJgvy3mEg":[{"hn_comment_id":24410506,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Western Digital is trying to redefine the word \u201cRPM\u201d","text":"> Or else cover the cost of the run as an installation fee. The community of Ammon, ID, built their own municipal fibre network because of this: > It all began about seven years ago when the city government, suffering from horrible upload speeds, wanted a dedicated 100Mbps circuit between City Hall and the Public Works building, less than a mile apart. Qwest (now CenturyLink) didn't want the project, while Cable One offered to do it for a start-up fee of $80,000 plus $1,000 a month, Patterson said. * [LINK] * [LINK] At this year's (virtual) NLNOG there was presentation from a fellow who was fed up with slow Internet options in his rural Michigan county and so setup his own ISP by having fibre optic pulled to his house and then redistributing service to his neighbours: * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24984138,"author":"inetknght","month":"2020-11","story_title":"A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers","text":"I found this comment deep in an unrelated thread [0] a couple months ago. It describes someone who created his own ISP for his neighborhood using fiber and links to a good video [1] about it. It's worth using youtube-dl to archive it. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32416072,"author":"markandrewj","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes","text":"There is a good interview on YouTube with Jared Mauch. I think it may have already been posted on Hacker News previously, but I have included the link below for anyone interested. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AUaJ8pDlxi8":[{"hn_comment_id":18247715,"author":"Severian","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Why Apple Eventually Lost Me and I\u2019m Switching Back to Windows","text":"Louis Rossmann, a well known advocate for right-to-repair and a repair shop owner has a lot to say about Apple's build quality. [VIDEO] His videos are a great rabbit hole to go down, if you are interested in laptop repair methods. He knows his stuff.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21303970,"author":"computerex","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Feasible Alternative to the MacBook Pro?","text":"Louis Rossmann made a video highlighting a lot of the engineering problems with Apple laptops. His whole business is about repairing Apple laptops so he has all the reasons and incentives to defend Apple and downplay their issues. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AW3gaelBypY":[{"hn_comment_id":32380298,"author":"cowpig","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Carbon offsetting is just another form of greenwashing","text":"I think this video by Wendover Productions does a much better job than the article of both highlighting specific examples and laying out the perverse incentive structures that carbon offsetting creates: [VIDEO] Here is the list of sources for that video if you're interested: [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK] [7] [LINK] [8] [LINK] [9] [LINK] [10] [LINK] [11] [LINK] [12] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31820405,"author":"Aunche","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Where are all the crypto use cases?","text":"> Filecoin - A commodity market for storage that's currently 0.0011% the cost of S3. This actually proves that there isn't a real use case of Filecoin aside from speculation. Amazon isn't making 99.9989% profit margins on S3, nor is it possible for Filecoin to be a hundred thousand times more efficient than S3. This means that Filecoin's storage product is so uncompetitive that you need to subsidize it a hundred thousand times just to get people to use it. > Toucan - Tradable Carbon Credits All the other use cases listed look like parodies of crypto products with plenty of buzzwords, and no real substance. However, this one is especially nonsensical. From their website: > Working with top DeFi protocols and the community we enable carbon credits to be used as collateral, yields and money, as well as a huge range of novel applications. That's literally missing the point of buying carbon credits. The only use case for buying carbon credits to blackhole them immediately, so that you can feel like you're offsetting your emissions. There is no reason to resell them. Even if you did want to resell them because you overestimated your carbon footprint and have some left \"unused\", no buyer has any reason to believe you. If there is anything carbon credits need, it's more centralization and trust, not less. Excellent relevant Wendover video about carbon credits: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32380707,"author":"Aunche","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Carbon offsetting is just another form of greenwashing","text":"Wendover Productions recently made a very informative video about carbon offsets that goes into much more detail. Certain types of carbon offsets do work, but even those tend to underdeliver. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34725028,"author":"rmvt","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Vestas unveils solution to end landfill disposal for wind turbine blades","text":"> Carbon offsetting is needlessly and cynically attacked by the same people who talk about wind power killing birds or not recycling the blades. well i don't really understand how you can lump all those together but ok... they're still not the same. as others have pointed out, it doesn't seem hard (or hard enough) to scam in this business sector - i.e. having the same assets accounting for different offset purchases, or just conflating assets bought for different puroses with offsetting. furthermore, it just deviates us from what should be the true goal: reduce fossil fuel consumption. not to mention how big business just offload this shady business cost to the end consumer. i'm taking the chance to share some content by people that present their points of view on this issue much better than i do: [VIDEO] , [VIDEO] , [LINK] , [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36306663,"author":"sofixa","month":"2023-06","story_title":"","text":"If you like the video format, Wendover has a very good 20 minute video on the topic, discussing the pitfalls and how non-obvious failure modes of carbon offset schemes can be: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37337713,"author":"plopz","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Shell Quietly Shelves a Radical Plan to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint","text":"the bigger problem with carbon offsets is that the underlying system that is supposed to be backing the units aren't actually offsetting any carbon. wendover has a nice video on it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AZR0UKxNPh8":[{"hn_comment_id":832061,"author":"cdibona","month":"2009-09","story_title":"India Plans to Export Uranium and Thorium Fueled Nuclear Reactors ","text":"One of the proponents of Thorium nuclear came to google to give a tech talk. The video describing the technology can be found here, [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1252690,"author":"MikeCapone","month":"2010-04","story_title":"XKCD \"Hell\" implemented in flash","text":"He should probably draw a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, then.. (If you don't know about the LFTR, check out this talk by Kirk Sorensen: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1310995,"author":"MikeCapone","month":"2010-05","story_title":"NASA Images of Oil Slick","text":"> Of course, if we had fusion we could easily solve this problem, but that's a good 40 years away. I'm not sure if Fusion would be much better than fission (which isn't to say that it's not good, just that it doesn't seem nearly as much of an improvement as some would want us to believe (many of those people writing grant proposals)): [LINK] What I'd really like to see is a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). Check out this Google Tech Talk about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2316400,"author":"nabilt","month":"2011-03","story_title":"Cringley: Japan may have just permanently lost 20% of its electricity supply","text":"However the events unfold I wonder if this will cause more nations to investigate other reactor technologies like Thorium. The abundance of Thorium and its inherent safety mechanisms (as a liquid at least) make the technology very exciting. Check out the Google Tech Talk [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AZX6awZq5Z0":[{"hn_comment_id":14390732,"author":"badosu","month":"2017-05","story_title":"The Energy Expansions of Evolution","text":"I highly recommend this Royal Institute talk: Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett [0]. The presenter provides a series of small steps in the way of understanding how the combined leaps of 'dumb' evolution was able to design intelligence. He contrasts the 'bottom-up' approach to the 'top-down' design in a very intelligent manner. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13791555,"author":"neom","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Is Consciousness an Illusion?","text":"World Science Festival has a slew of really awesome talks etc on this subject posted to youtube: [LINK] And The Neuroscience of Consciousness \u2013 with Anil Seth is really great: [LINK] Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39650764,"author":"rthrfrd","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Claude 3 catches researchers testing it","text":"I find Daniel Dennett's framing of competency vs comprehension a good place to start. He did a nice talk at the RI on it some time ago[1]. A previous one overlaps with similar ground[2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AZZNvT1vaJg":[{"hn_comment_id":19242024,"author":"geomark","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Jussie Smollett Story Shows Rise of Victimhood Culture","text":"The term \"competitive victimhood\" came to my attention after watching the Joe Rogan interview of Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay who pranked academic journals with research papers based on ridiculous premises. A must watch IMO [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21472395,"author":"geomark","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Science Vigilante Calls Out Bogus Results in Prestigious Journals","text":"If you have not watched Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay on the Joe Rogan show you should. Very entertaining and shows how ridiculous these publications are. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19121398,"author":"bartread","month":"2019-02","story_title":"We need to talk about systematic fraud","text":"> But does that justify what they did? Yes, it does. These journals are an absolute joke, make a mockery of any serious attempt to advance knowledge and understanding, and deserve to be pilloried. Their standards of rigour and review are shockingly poor and as such they do not provide a suitable vehicle for the publication of genuine research, or for measured consideration of the content they do publish. Just this week I ran across this, where a couple of the academics concerned were interviewed by Joe Rogan late last year: [VIDEO] Fascinating, horrifying, and entertaining in equal measure. For more background, there's also this on wikipedia: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"AbgsfeGvg3E":[{"hn_comment_id":21005041,"author":"Fr0styMatt88","month":"2019-09","story_title":"AgileFall \u2013 When Waterfall Sneaks Back into Agile","text":"There's a talk well worth watching by Kevlin Henney called 'Old Is the New New' [1], where he points out that waterfall was initially conceived with design iteration in mind and yet that part was just essentially forgotten and replaced by something overly-simplified in common understanding. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21339383,"author":"lugg","month":"2019-10","story_title":"\u201cSpecial register groups\u201d invaded computer dictionaries for decades","text":"You remind me of this Kevlin Henney talks that manages to cover a rather big range of programming concepts that keep getting recycled as the big new thing [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22678956,"author":"kqr","month":"2020-03","story_title":"How I became a better programmer (2017)","text":"The points on the fluff in particular resonate with me because idespite being a fairly good software engineer, I would say it was only recently I truly started seeing past the fluff. However, typing this out, I realise I would have said the same thing 10 years ago, and 5 years ago, and I probably will again another 5 years from now. I think the truth is that we're always missing the forest for all the trees -- only at increasing levels of abstraction: at first, everything is foreign, then syntax becomes fluff, then APIs become fluff, then patterns, then languages, then compilers, then ... I look forward to learning what the next level of fluff will be. > The majority of the stuff being released every day is just a rehash of the same ideas. Truly revolutionary stuff only happens every few years. Maybe not even that often. I can recommend Old Is the New New by Kevlin Henney for a good, historical perspective on how little actually changes sometimes: [VIDEO] Edit: now this was more interesting than I anticipated. What is the next level of fluff? Concurrency? Advanced data structures? Phrasing problems for SMT solvers? Probabilistic modeling? Or are the things I picture as fluff just specific techniques, because the next level of fluff is so meta I wouldn't even recognise it now?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22963393,"author":"eralps","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Books I recommend to my software engineering students","text":"I've read only the The Mythical Man-Month from this list. It is amazing how the project management really did not change much. Similar ideas (sometimes same) to similar problems. I would recommend watching this talk [0] from Kevlin Henney to anyone who likes that book. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ac7G7xOG2Ag":[{"hn_comment_id":19981562,"author":"Anarch157a","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1908)","text":"I think you're gonna like this one [1]. The B-25 Mitchell instructional that was linked here some few weeks ago is also amazing [2]. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27739580,"author":"NelsonMinar","month":"2021-07","story_title":"New mystery AWS product \u2018Infinidash\u2019 goes viral despite being entirely fictional","text":"There's a proud tradition of this kind of parody: the Turboencabluator is one of the most famous in engineering, a joke that goes back to 1944. [LINK] Bud Haggart's industrial training videos for the Turboencabulator from the 70s/80s are things of beauty. See [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38423644,"author":"causality0","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Rockwell Retro Encabulator [video]","text":"I don't know why people are always posting the Rockwell version when the older Turbo Emcabulator video is far superior. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45814034,"author":"Joel_Mckay","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)","text":"\"Still it's amusing how Whitney's style seems to personally offend people\" So it was for the lols after all... Notably, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp is a common assignment for second year CS students. In a production setting, there is little reason to misappropriate resources for such toys. Bud Haggert still teaches smart people something very important about communication with interdisciplinary crowds: [VIDEO] Doug Zongker's presentation similarly instructs people how to make better presentations to peers by demonstrating what not to do: [LINK] Best of luck =3","stance":"rec"}],"AcQifPHcMLE":[{"hn_comment_id":39227305,"author":"bux93","month":"2024-02","story_title":"A man who invented VR goggles 50 years too soon (2016)","text":"Using VR goggles that have no capability of viewing anything VR makes them just regular goggles though? This tank simulator from the 1970s is a great example of early VR: [VIDEO] I wonder if there's anything earlier..","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41151717,"author":"anfractuosity","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Sega Jet Rocket: The '70s arcade game with no computer or screen","text":"Very cool, reminds me a bit of two Tom Scott videos (these ones do use displays though, but combined with little model worlds) * [VIDEO] - 1970s tank simulator drives through a tiny world * [LINK] - Submarine simulator","stance":"rec"}],"AcS3NOQnsQM":[{"hn_comment_id":23224338,"author":"Diederich","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Google deletes \u201ccommunist bandits\u201d from comments on Youtube","text":"For those who aren't aware and/or won't look this reference: [LINK] As the other comenter noted, Tom Lehrer is indeed a national treasure, and his satire is top shelf. From the light-hearted \"The Elements\": [VIDEO] (watch for the surprise at the end) To the gallows comedy of \"We Will All Go Together When We Go\": [LINK] NB: I appreciate the irony linking to YouTube content in a 'WTF Google/YouTube' thread.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34025355,"author":"nayuki","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Tom Lehrer has released all of his songs into the public domain","text":"\"The Elements\" is the Tom Lehrer song that made the biggest impression on me. [LINK] , [VIDEO] There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium, ...","stance":"rec"}],"AchISJUKfH4":[{"hn_comment_id":8792765,"author":"humanrebar","month":"2014-12","story_title":"We Are Built to Be Kind [video]","text":"A different theory is that some people value social capital above other forms of capital and that can be a rational thing to do: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39221688,"author":"e63f67dd-065b","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The business of check cashing","text":"> This reflects a false belief that people who live in poor neighborhoods are less compassionate. In fact research suggests that people living in poverty tend to be more compassionate towards each other than rich people are toward the impoverished. It's comforting for wealthier people to hold this belief, because it makes us feel less bad about our own lack of compassion. From what I recall, its less that the poor are more compassionate, instead they participate in _reciprocal altruism_ as a form of insurance against further loss. I remember this talk [VIDEO] -- poor people make seemingly dumb decisions because if they don't help their social network when it comes knocking, they're in effect _cutting themselves off_ from said network. The middle class is more insulated from this effect because those with emergency savings don't often need to borrow $500 because of a broken car or need to house their recently homeless sister and children, so capital can accumulate more easily.","stance":"rec"}],"AdKNCBrkZQ4":[{"hn_comment_id":18462759,"author":"elteto","month":"2018-11","story_title":"SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites","text":"This video [0] really puts into perspective what SpaceX is trying to accomplish. Incredible stuff if they pull it off! [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18463619,"author":"tortarga","month":"2018-11","story_title":"SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites","text":"There was recently a video posted theorizing this here: [VIDEO] Very interesting watch. Based off the paper: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19681001,"author":"kristofferR","month":"2019-04","story_title":"SpaceX\u2019s Starlink Constellation construction begins","text":"I really recommend watching this simulation of how the Starlink Constellation would massively cut global internet latency: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25911389,"author":"rtkwe","month":"2021-01","story_title":"SpaceX sends laser-linked Starlinks to the polar orbit","text":"This video goes a bit into the probable topology of the links and gives a good look at how the eventual constellation would look. Eventually in the full constellation there will be 4 easy links to the birds in front, behind, left and right, those 4 will stay in largely the same relative position until they reach the highest latitude of their orbit. Those alone will make an ok link with a bit of a zig zag. The tough ones are those ~180 degrees out of phase those will be crossing roughly perpendicular and at a really high speed. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AdKUJxjn-R8":[{"hn_comment_id":6996749,"author":"loumf","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Changing habits","text":"BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits. Essentially: 1. Pick a trigger -- something you already will definitely do at the rate of the new habit. 2. Find a version of the habit that takes no cognitive load and can be done in less than a minute. 3. Celebrate every time you do it. The template is: After I X, I will do Y. X must be sure, Y must be small. You must do it after. [VIDEO] I also suggest putting in a system that makes it impossible to not do what you want. For the games/netflix one, just get rid of them. Don't depend on willpower -- make a system [LINK] For eating right -- journal everything you eat -- no need to track anything fancy except what it was and you will see results. The magic is that you don't eat things because you don't want to write it down. If you track one other thing, put a + or - next to it to indicate whether you think it was a good choice or not.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12513323,"author":"williamkennedy","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you motivate yourself?","text":"I have actually written about this a lot as it is one of those topics that I am fascinated with. The trick is not to try and motivate yourself but to build systems and processes to get things done regardless. For me, it boils down to 3 things. Pre-planning, habits and elimination. I have written about each separately on my blog [LINK] I plan a lot of stuff on my Google Calendar. My whole days are planned in advance including free time. When I am learning a new language, I set aside time for study. If a friend asks me to hang out, I can just check to see if I have prior commitments. I also have the regular gym slot and after 2+ years, I am simply routine when it comes to exercising. Next, learn how to build habits and routines. This saves a ton brain power. There is a great video on habit building [VIDEO] Also, check out a book by Charles Duhigg called The Power of Habit. Finally, cut out the news and as much information as possible. Not watching the news added a ton of happiness to my life. This also cuts out distractions. Check out something called the Low Information Diet which goes into more detail as well as a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport I also wrote a guest post on the blog Simple Programmer that goes into more detail on the willpower.motivation side of things [LINK] I hope that helps. Largely I don't believe in long-term motivation, it is more to do with becoming routine.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16022981,"author":"eurticket","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What Are Your New Years Resolutions or 2018 Goals?","text":"Create more tiny habits that pair onto activities I already do. Mostly Exercise, sit ups every time after I brush my teeth, stretching every time I press snooze on the alarm clock. A TED talk by BJ Fogg on the subject. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AdNJ3fydeao":[{"hn_comment_id":20336598,"author":"CharlesW","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Svelte is the most beautiful web framework I've seen","text":"It's a shame that the site's down. Until then, you can (and I heartily recommend doing so) watch the \"Rethinking reactivity\" video here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20706276,"author":"hardwaresofton","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Introduction to Svelte","text":"tl;dr watch this fantastic intro to svelte talk by it's creator: [VIDEO] , it covers some of the growing pains of React that svelte addresses. While it might look like the frontend is going around in circles, there are major & minor differences between the technologies, and they have each introduced novel (to JS at least) things... Off the top of my head (this timeline might not be right but it's how I went through it at least): - Backbone got you away from jquery spaghetti, helped you actually manage your data & models. Often paired with Marionette to handle views (if you squint this is the precursor to components) and bring some order in that part of the app. - Angular bundles backbone's data handling (services), marionette's orderly view separation (views, directives), but they made a fatal mistake in the apply/digest cycle and maybe encouraging a bit too much complexity. Angular is everything bundled together, with consistent usage/documentation/semantics, a familiar programming pattern (MVC), and a large corporate sponsor in Google it caught on like wildfire. - Knockout sees Angular's MVC, laments it's complexity and focuses on MVVM -- simple binding of a model and a relatively simple reactive-where-necessary controller - React comes along and suggests an even simpler world where the only first class citizen is components and everything else comes separate (this isn't necessarily new, there is an article out there comparing it to COM subsystems for windows). React is alm","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22674491,"author":"gregors","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Svelte Is Unappealing","text":"Highly recommend this talk [VIDEO] Rich Harris is an excellent speaker and it's worth seeing how Svelte approaches some things","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31960638,"author":"doodlesdev","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The new wave of React state management","text":"> Does it solve the problem of only redrawing the required minimum (beside the normal VDOM approach)? Yes, in fact I think it's actually pretty hard _not_ to redraw the bare minimum LOL. If you want to know more about Svelte (even if you're not looking to develop with it) I HIGHLY recommend listening to this presentation called \"Rethinking reactivity\" by Rich Harris (the creator) [VIDEO] > But does it solve the problem of growing state which never gets GC'd when components which used to use it are gone? I think the answer to the question is yes. Although the problem I'm speaking mostly about state management is the source of truth problem. Svelte provides a global store to store data, and data stored on local components are just _variables_ (no useState or hooks or anything complicated) where the Svelte compiler handles everything. Something else I'm really eyeing right now is SolidJS which takes a very similar approach to Svelte (compiler instead of library) for frontend development but provides an API that's very familiar to React developers so there's not much of a learning curve (although Svelte has a very easy learning curve too).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32442217,"author":"kretaceous","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Excel is pretty dang cool","text":"The talk, Rethinking Reactivity by Rich Harris[0] is an amazing talk which talks about how spreadsheets were the OG reactivity software. Highly recommended. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20189312,"author":"reactor","month":"2019-06","story_title":"JavaScript Is the CO2 of the Web [audio]","text":"May not be exactly what you are looking for, but take a look at [LINK] if you haven't seen already. and this [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20242309,"author":"Tade0","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Vue RFC: Expose logic-related component options via function-based APIs instead","text":"I haven't seen any, but as a relatively early proponent of Vue(as in: I was there when v2 came out), I found Svelte even easier to get into than Vue. Anyway Rich Harris' presentation is a good starting point: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21349660,"author":"anderspitman","month":"2019-10","story_title":"React Concurrent Mode","text":"Rich Harris' excellent talk Rethinking Reactivity has an interesting section where he compares a React Concurrent Mode demo to Svelte: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21859524,"author":"zeusly","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"Rich Harris - Rethinking Reactivity Talk about Svelte v3 and the (possible) future of frontend frameworks Video: [VIDEO] HN discussion regarding Svelte 3: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23118938,"author":"dwoot","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The Cost of JavaScript Frameworks","text":"I don't think anyone is going to sell you on something else, you seem very ingrained in the React ecosystem. More dollars doesn't equate to \"better product\" down the road. Angular came and is still a part of Google. Would anyone starting a new project use it over something like VueJS or React today? Probably not. Right? So that sort of tosses your argument out the window. I don't do JavaScript professionally anymore, but I've worked with jQuery, BackboneJS, lots of AngularJS, some Elm, some VueJS, and some React, but being the curious person that I am, in search of greener pastures, I checked out Svelte, by first watching Rich Harris' video [VIDEO] on \"Thinking Reactivity\", then seeing the benchmarks: [LINK] , and watching Rich and Dan Abramov spar a bit over their challenges. From an outsider with no skin in the JS game, it is clear that Svelte seems far superior now and into the future... 1. it is a compiler (it's like comparing C/C++ to Python) 2. the joy of out-of-the-box animations that use the GPU in CSS (reminds me of the joy of using jQuery for the first time w/ it's OOB animations) 3. you can drop in any other JS lib (doesn't have to be in a particular JS framework ecosystem) and have it inter-op! This is huge! It's because it's literally like writing vanilla JS 4. no need to learn some new syntax like JSX (not a huge fan) Just take a peek. If you don't like Svelte, so be it, but at least you know what it is that you don't like rather than turning a blind eye because","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23377062,"author":"lukeramsden","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Solid \u2013 A declarative JavaScript library for building user interfaces","text":"This is a good talk on the matter from the creator of Svelte himself, if you're interested: [VIDEO] Basically, it boils down to moving from tracking the DOM state in a VirtualDOM to tracking what DOM updates can happen at the compile stage and then just doing those exact updates to the DOM.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24364671,"author":"ric2b","month":"2020-09","story_title":"React is becoming a black box","text":"I was drawn to Svelte by the performance/bundle size but I fell in love with how simple it is to write components and share data between them. Each component is just HTML/CSS/JS in a single file, sort of like Vue but cleaner. If you're curious I recommend either the \"rethinking reactivity\" talk from the author: [VIDEO] or the tutorial: [LINK] Both are great!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29313923,"author":"Glench","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Simplest stack to build web apps in 2021?","text":"Ooh, if you liked what you saw of Svelte, you might like these videos that do a great job explaining some of its benefits: [VIDEO] and [LINK] SvelteKit is very new and I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but my own framework was directly inspired by it. SvelteKit does a lot and looks great \u2014 fantastic developer experience, deploys to lots of types of services, SSR/SSG/client-side routing support, etc. And it seems like a great thing for Svelte to have as a default way for developers to start making Svelte components. Personally, I'm going to wait till SvelteKit a bit more mature before I dig in, but I'm guessing I'll end up rewriting my framework on top of SvelteKit at some point.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31965036,"author":"azemetre","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The new wave of React state management","text":"This talk from Rich Harris should answer most of your Qs: Rethinking reactivity [VIDEO] He goes over the history of spreadsheets, reactive programming, and dunks on react.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48658503,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak","text":"Svelte is awesome. Svelte 5's runes are especially powerful because they let reactivity escape the component boundary. The same reactive model works everywhere, whether you're updating the DOM or building plain application logic. Rich Harris makes the point that React isn't actually reactive: \"React doesn\u2019t have any understanding of the values running through your app. It is not Reactive.\" Rich Harris - Rethinking reactivity: [VIDEO] >Modern JavaScript frameworks are all about reactivity. Change your application's state, and the view updates automatically. But there's a catch \u2014 tracking state changes at runtime adds overhead that eats into your bundle size and performance budgets. In this talk, we'll discover an alternative approach: moving reactivity into the language itself. Your apps have never been smaller or faster than they're about to become. He starts with spreadsheets as the archetypal reactive system. Defines reactivity as values automatically updating according to dependency relationships. Contrasts that with React's model of rerunning component functions and diffing virtual DOM trees. Argues that React \"doesn't understand the values flowing through your application\" and therefore isn't reactive in the traditional sense. Virtual DOM is pure overhead: [LINK] >But it turns out that we can achieve a similar programming model without using virtual DOM \u2014 and that's where Svelte comes in. React tracks component renders; reactive systems track data dependencies. React doe","stance":"rec"}],"Ag1AKIl_2GM":[{"hn_comment_id":9153418,"author":"arfar","month":"2015-03","story_title":"VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation","text":"You and all of the \"Free Software\" world have different definitions on free. I'd recommend this[1] talk by Richard Stallman, it's pretty basic, but it gets the idea across well. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24855063,"author":"thesuperbigfrog","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Some Thoughts on Windows 10","text":"Sounds very frustrating. I don't use Windows on any of the computers I own. I prefer to have more control over my computer so I use Linux. I still have to use Windows at work, but I don't admin those machines so I don't have a lot of control / choice in the matter. Food for thought about who controls your computer: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36257152,"author":"thesuperbigfrog","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Linux Is Free If You Don't Value Your Time","text":"Windows is closed source, full of ads and telemetry, and increasingly user hostile. MacOS is a mostly closed source, expensive, user-condescending walled garden. Linux, BSDs, and free / open source operating systems give the user freedom and control over their computing experience: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36390844,"author":"thesuperbigfrog","month":"2023-06","story_title":"We need more of Richard Stallman, not less","text":"The four freedoms that free software guarantee are essential for people to be in control of their own computing. Are you in control of your computer, or does your computer control you? [VIDEO] People get angry and frustrated when a big tech company makes a decision that is user-hostile, but benefits the tech company's profits. This is to be expected because in almost all cases, the big tech company has no obligation other than to maximize profits. The four freedoms help to put a check on the power of big tech companies by providing alternatives that keep power in the hands of the user. That does not mean that free software and big tech companies cannot coexist or even thrive together. Red Hat was built on free software. System76 sells hardware that runs mostly free software.","stance":"rec"}],"Agu6jipKfYw":[{"hn_comment_id":8730127,"author":"dcre","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Elm 0.14 \u2013 Simpler Core, Better Tools","text":"If you're interested in Elm but don't really know what it's about, I highly recommend Evan's Strange Loop talk, \"Controlling Time and Space: understanding the many formulations of FRP.\" It will help to already have a bit of background in functional programming. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47475785,"author":"modulovalue","month":"2026-03","story_title":"We've had front end reactivity since 2018 \u2013 via Async Iterables","text":"There's an important issue with async iterables: what's the initial value of derived \"signals\"? In the Dart/Flutter world, async iterables are known as streams. The biggest problem is that they are asynchronous so if you derive new streams from existing streams, you won't have a value immediately for those streams available, you'll have to wait a frame for values to propagate. That's not a problem if you're just processing data, but if you're using them in a UI framework and your UI framework is coupled to the event loop, then you have a problem. This doesn't happen with the ReactiveX approach because things are evaluated immediately, one doesn't have to wait for the event loop to tick. (A fun historical artifact is that ReactiveX has not caught on in the Dart/Flutter community around 2019-ish because it was eventually migrated to use Streams and the initial-value-problem was a real problem that made the benefits of ReactiveX not carry its weight nobody noticed that but I was heavily involved and I am still using a custom framework derived from my observations back then). If we zoom out a bit, the problem is actually that we are trying to define a computation graph and then need a strategy for evaluation it. I think Elm has actually made the biggest progress on that front (here's THE talk on that topic that shows how complicated working out all the kinks can be: [VIDEO] ) I still think that functional reactive programming solves most of the problems we have in UI-land, but th","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8543848,"author":"platz","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Introduction to Reactive Programming","text":"> \"FRP is programming with asynchronous data streams.\" Maybe, if you drop the F. For clarification on FRP there was a great talk at strangeloop this year: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10607011,"author":"michaelsbradley","month":"2015-11","story_title":"React vs. Angular 2","text":"It's been around in various forms, and implemented on top of various languages, for quite some time. The earliest full-fledged FRP implementation for JavaScript was Flapjax \u2013 work on it dates all the way back to 2006! [LINK] The paper Flapjax: A Programming Language for Ajax Applications is worth reading. [LINK] The principal designer and maintainer of the Elm Language (a functional reactive lang that compiles to JS) did his Master's Thesis on FRP, and that's a great resource if you want the big picture: [LINK] See also Controlling Time and Space: understanding the many formulations of FRP , by the same author: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10838312,"author":"ghuntley","month":"2016-01","story_title":"New Adventures for Elm","text":"For those just getting started in FRP or whom may have not seen the presentations at StangeLoop: - [VIDEO] - Controlling Time and Space: understanding the many formulations of FRP by Evan Czaplicki (Elm language designer/Prezi) - [LINK] - FRP In Practice: Taking a look at Reactive[UI/Cocoa] by Paul Betts (Slack/GitHub) - [LINK] - ReactiveUI - It's pretty neat by Brendan Forster (GitHub)","stance":"rec"}],"AhRBsJYWR8Q":[{"hn_comment_id":24189765,"author":"Kednicma","month":"2020-08","story_title":"\u201cTime of the Magicians\u201d \u2013 philosophy's great decade?","text":"No, the entire conception of rights is tied to liberalism, and itself is not the end of human moral ideology. Rights are good compromises: If we all broadly agree that humans are entitled to some right R, then R will become a social institution which we enshrine and protect, and that is good enough for society to make progress and people to get on with their lives. For a deeper look, try this Marxist approach, \"The Problem With Human Rights\" [0]. As both they and I want to emphasize, the goal isn't to take away rights or to disenfranchise people, but to explore exactly what we mean when we say that people are endowed with inalienable rights and what we want governments to do about it. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29268443,"author":"jedimind","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Singapore\u2019s tech-utopia and surveillance state","text":"That was a rhetorical question I suppose, in the sense of \"whose definition is supposedly the universal one\": Jonas \u010ceika has philosophical deep dive [0] into the topic of human rights worth watching. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ai2HmvAXcU0":[{"hn_comment_id":9085185,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2015-02","story_title":"The Last of the Typewriter Men","text":"Planes come to mind. Basically, back in the age of the slide ruler, engineers \"overcompensated\" in durability. This is why older planes are much heavier (so more inefficient and costly to run) but also last forever. PS: Not to crap on the structural engineering of more modern planes, don't get me wrong! Check out this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17656210,"author":"sjm-lbm","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How to overcome fear of flying?","text":"Since you are posting on HN and I'm guessing you are technically minded, you might find this really interesting: [VIDEO] - it's a video from a documentary about the development of the Boeing 777. Specifically, the video shows a test where they bend/stress the 777 wings to the point where they actually snap. Spoiler alert: they snap at orders of magnitude more flex than you've ever seen. Even for very severe turbulence (like you experienced), it's very comforting for me to know (via that video evidence) that even if I haven't seen turbulence this bad, the people that made the airplane definitely thought about it.","stance":"rec"}],"Ak4on5uTaTg":[{"hn_comment_id":43312821,"author":"tim333","month":"2025-03","story_title":"What Went Wrong at Saudi Arabia's Futuristic Metropolis in the Desert","text":"It was kind of a duff idea from the start. Patrick Boyles youtube Neom - The Line - The Rise and Fall of Saudi Arabia's Linear City [VIDEO] is rather epic if you haven't seen it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40172365,"author":"karaterobot","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Saudi Arabia's Sci-Fi Megacity in the Desert Isn't Going Well","text":"Patrick Boyle's channel on Youtube did a great video on this. [VIDEO] It seems unfeasible, bordering on impossible, and also a terrible idea even if aliens came down and built it for us tomorrow.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41890431,"author":"tim333","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Saudi Arabian Neom project 'uses one fifth of world's steel'","text":"I think not. They probably mean the planned project would use one fifth of the world's steel but it is currently just a hole in the ground and the project is kind of ridiculous and won't get built as planned - even the Saudis don't have enough money. Patrick Boyle had an entertaining youtube on it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46002613,"author":"tim333","month":"2025-11","story_title":"The AI bubble is bigger than you think","text":"It's been rather extraordinary. The Patrick Boyle vid on Neom done about a year ago was entertaining ( [VIDEO] ). As might be expected that's all ground to a halt now.","stance":"rec"}],"AmgkSdhK4K8":[{"hn_comment_id":13622532,"author":"yamaneko","month":"2017-02","story_title":"The Essence of Linear Algebra [video]","text":"3Blue1Brown explanation of eigenvectors and eigenvalues is very insightful and intuitive [1]. One of my favorite videos from his channel is \"Who cares about topology? (Inscribed rectangle problem)\" [2]. They way a Torus and M\u00f6bius Strip come up as solution to the problem is so elegant. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15004141,"author":"rocqua","month":"2017-08","story_title":"A trick to visualizing higher dimensions [video]","text":"I really like 1blue3brown, but this one didn't quite resonate with me. To me, it felt like a long winded way to make it intuitive that the point (1, 1 ... 1) has distance sqrt(n) from the origin, where n is the number of dimensions. I think there'd be move value in explaining things like 'most volume is near the edge' and 'most points are far apart'. Granted, that is less about building intuition, and more about specifically dispelling heuristics from 2 and 3 dimensions. I'd still wholeheartedly recommend his other videos though. Especially [1] where he gives a very nice topological result regarding inscribed rectangles in closed loops. In the same vein is [2] proving the borsuk-ulam theorem. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17640104,"author":"thicknavyrain","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Going sponsor-free \u2013 3blue1brown","text":"That's really interesting. I found that I loved, similar to the occasional video numberphile does, watching Grant explain how one might realistically solve an interesting problem. A particular favourite is the one on the Inscribed Square Problem, which, although introducing some elements of topology, engages me more from the get go. He poses a problem and my curiosity keeps me engaged until the very end, it feels a bit like a detective story, I get the same satisfaction as some of the better Sherlock Holmes stories where in the course of reading I think \"Damn, I could have come to that conclusion if I'd paid a bit more attention!\". [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23680183,"author":"kmill","month":"2020-06","story_title":"New Geometric Perspective Cracks Old Problem About Rectangles","text":"Here's a nice 3blue1brown video about the easier version of the inscribed rectangle problem, that some inscribed rectangle exists: [VIDEO] And I remember thinking this was a nice overview of some aspects of the \"square peg problem\" (the Toeplitz conjecture): [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"AnZ0uTOerUI":[{"hn_comment_id":18745508,"author":"raghava","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"Blockchains Are a Bad Idea (James Mickens) [LINK] I find almost all from GOTO 2018 very insightful. [LINK] esp ones listed below. GOTO 2018 \u2022 The Do's and Don'ts of Error Handling \u2022 Joe Armstrong [LINK] GOTO 2018 \u2022 Pragmatic Event-Driven Microservices \u2022 Allard Buijze [LINK] GOTO 2018 \u2022 Why Business Cases are Toxic \u2022 Chris Matts [LINK] GOTO 2018 \u2022 Unconditional Code \u2022 Michael Feathers [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22227745,"author":"hinkley","month":"2020-02","story_title":"You\u2019re better off using Exceptions","text":"I was watching this the other day: [VIDEO] Unconditional Code by Michael Feathers One solution to this problem is discussed toward the middle: giving data instead of asking for data avoids error conditions. Doing so pushes use of the data farther down the call tree and pulls acquisition up near the top, where we are closer to the user and thus able to more clearly decide what if anything to do about these corner cases.","stance":"rec"}],"AnaASTBn_K4":[{"hn_comment_id":19338423,"author":"wolfram74","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Nasa captures images of supersonic shockwaves","text":"As mentioned by others, the photography technique looks like (and apparently is a software enabled variant of) Schlieren photography. This(1) is a neat example of an old school Schlieren set up capturing shockwave formation during whip cracks. I highly recommend it. (1) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29409029,"author":"nuccy","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Supersonic Trebuchet","text":"Fun fact, you can accelerate an almost-everyday object to supersonic speeds: whip tip [1,2]. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] (very much recommended)","stance":"strong_rec"}],"AnrlSqtpOkw":[{"hn_comment_id":15321922,"author":"kennethfriedman","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Then and Now: How Little Things Have Changed (2016)","text":"OP here. Definitely some improvements... but (at least in my eyes) incremental. Notebooks are pretty sweet, but in the hands of very few. They're definitely growing in popularity, which is great. But even the \"notebook\" concept is a very limited \"low pass filter\" version of the visions of Engelbart, AKay, TN, etc. The video that AKay has been sharing around in the post than @dang linked to[0] is a great example of what's not-even-close to possible on today's systems. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34991036,"author":"ryukafalz","month":"2023-03","story_title":"50 Years Later, We\u2019re Still Living in the Xerox Alto\u2019s World","text":"The Alto did things that even modern computers don't do as well. There's a demo I like to point at for this: [VIDEO] Look how programmable this is by the user! Today's OSes and their division of software into \"applications\" erect barriers to software composition that don't need to be there.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15269014,"author":"alankay","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true","text":"People often ask me \"Is this a Dynabook, is that a Dynabook?\". Only about 5% of the idea was in packaging (and there were 2 other different packages contemplated in 1968 besides the tablet idea -- the HMD idea from Ivan, and the ubiquitous idea from Nicholas). Almost all the thought I did was based on what had already been done in the ARPA community -- rendered as \"services\" -- and resculpted for the world of the child. It was all quite straightforwardly about what Steve later called \"Wheels for the Mind\". If people are interested to see part of what we had in mind, a few of us including Dan Ingalls a few years ago revived a version of the Xerox Parc software from 1978 that Xerox had thrown away (it was rescued from a trash heap). This system was the vintage that Steve Jobs saw the next year when he visited in 1979. I used this system to make a presentation for a Ted Nelson tribute. It should start at 2:15. See what you think about what happens around 9:05. [VIDEO] Next year will be the 50 anniversary of this idea, and many things have happened since then, so it would be crazy to hark back to a set of ideas that were in the context of being able to be built over 10 years, and would be ridiculous if we didn't have in 30 (that would be 1998, almost 20 years ago). The large idea of ARPA/PARC was that desirable futures for humanity will require many difficult things to be learned beyond reading and writing and a few sums. If \"equal rights\" is to mean something over the entire pla","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16841190,"author":"seltzered_","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"#Softwarish - I'm biased a bit more towards interface development: greg wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It\u2019s True - [LINK] steve wittens - making webgl dance - the title is deceptive, it's in some ways a visual crash course in linear algebra - [LINK] glenn vanderburg - software engineering doesn't work - [LINK] chris granger - in search of tomorrow - [LINK] alan kay - tribute to ted nelson at intertwingled fest - [VIDEO] bret victor - this is already mentioned but if I had to pick one it'd be 'the humane representation of thought' - [LINK] #Hardwarish: saul griffith - soft, not solid: beyond traditional hardware engineering - [LINK] deb chachra - Architectural Biology and Biological Architectures - [LINK] #Getting more meta in technology and history: James Burke - Connections","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17915331,"author":"shalabhc","month":"2018-09","story_title":"The Early History Of Smalltalk (1993)","text":"To get another taste of the kinds of systems possible in the 70s, in spite of the constraints, see Kay's demo of a revived Smalltalk-78 system: [VIDEO] (I believe this system is about 10-20K LOC software in total) Notes about the the revival are here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19722205,"author":"alankay","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)","text":"It's out of the context of this thread, but we were quite sure that \"simulation-style\" systems design would be a much more powerful and comprehensive way to create most things on a computer, and most especially for personal computers. At Parc, I think we were able to make our point. Around 2014 or so we brought back to life the NoteTaker Smalltalk from 1978, and I used it to make my visual material for a tribute to Ted Nelson. See what you think. [VIDEO] This system --including everything -- \"OS\", SDK, Media, GUI, Tools, and the content -- is about 10,000 lines of Smalltalk-78 code sitting on top of about 6K bytes of machine code (the latter was emulated to get the whole system going). I think what happened is that the early styles of programming, especially \"data structures, procedures, imperative munging, etc.\" were clung to, in part because this was what was taught, and the more design-intensive but also more compact styles developed at Parc seemed very foreign. So when C++, Java, etc. came along the old styles were retained, and classes were relegated to creating abstract data types with getters and setters that could be munged from the outside. Note that this is also \"simulation style programming\" but simulating data structures is a very weak approach to design for power and scaling. I think the idea that all entities could be protected processes (and protected in both directions) that could be used as communicating modules for building systems got both missed and reject","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27470826,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Try APL","text":"> Thanks for sharing, I love these types of stories. Really makes me pine for the \"old\" days, and wonder if there's a parallel universe where technology took a very different route such that languages like APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are used instead of JavaScript, Java, and C#, and what that world looks like. Easy, here is some time travel, \"Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at \"Intertwingled\" Festival\" [VIDEO] \"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar\" [LINK] \"Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto \u2502Smalltalk-76 Demo\" [LINK] However to be fair, Java, C# and Swift alongside their IDEs are the closest in mainstream languages to that experience, unless you get to use Allegro, LispWorks or Pharo.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29725734,"author":"infinite8s","month":"2021-12","story_title":"PineNote Developer Edition \u2013 E-Paper Tablet","text":"Well, something like the smalltalk-78 that Alan Kay demos here ( [VIDEO] ) would be an ideal starting interface for e-ink based tablet.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34376376,"author":"ryukafalz","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Emacs Is Not Enough","text":"Every time I see something like this, I'm also reminded of this demo of the Xerox Alto from a few years back. I'll link to the start of the most relevant piece: [VIDEO] I'm always struck by the useful directions that desktop computers were going in the 70s, and how computing could be so much better than it is right now. But we've veered so off-course from all of this, away from composability and towards independent boxes (\"applications\") that can't talk to each other at all. Emacs is in some ways the best thing we have today in the other direction, but it pales in comparison to what's possible.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35782669,"author":"ryukafalz","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Mercury OS","text":"I love that this concept tries to separate content from apps. Ever since I saw some of the ways early GUIs differed from today's, I've had a feeling that we've lost something with the way apps in today's desktops are completely isolated from each other. The Alto let you compose data live from multiple windows kind of like a shell pipeline does for command-line apps: [VIDEO] The Locus and Flows in this concept seem like they could enable a similar workflow, as data isn't confined to \"apps\" the way it usually would be.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44242581,"author":"seltzered_","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps","text":"In the 'Tools, not Apps' part of the article they reference Michel Beaudouin-Lafon's talk 'A World Without Apps' which goes back in time and shows the Xerox Star operating system: [LINK] Another reference I usually bring up is Alan Kay's talk on smalltalk: [VIDEO] My related comments on this, just to show other stories along this theme: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Ao9iOeK_jvU":[{"hn_comment_id":15102655,"author":"hellbanner","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Mental processes of chess masters revealed how people become experts (2016) [pdf]","text":"If you want to improve this chess, I recommend this playlist by International Master John Bartholomew: [VIDEO] I recommend [LINK] over chess.com for a far superior UI.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18876296,"author":"newen","month":"2019-01","story_title":"How I Finally Hit 2000 on Lichess and Improved My Rating","text":"If you are just starting out, and you know the rules and played a few games, I'd recommend these youtube videos [1] by John Bartholomew. Youtube has a bunch of other good videos for beginners, e.g. chessnetwork, st louis chess club, etc. Also, I wouldn't bother learning strategy until you get to like >1500 rating or so. If you get really good at tactics, you can get to 2000 without having much strategic understanding. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28789176,"author":"sb636","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Thoughts on chess improvement, after gaining 600 points in 6 months","text":"1) Learn how the pieces move 2) Play along with some beginner chess tutorials on sites like chess.com or Lichess 3) Watch this youtube series [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AouW9_jyZck":[{"hn_comment_id":34484643,"author":"TheRealPomax","month":"2023-01","story_title":"'A complete failure' Japan's 'fantasy' hydrogen strategy does nothing","text":"Maybe, but [LINK] is probably a better person to ask to explain why this is just not going to work, through his \"The Unfortunate Truth About Toyota's Hydrogen V8 Engine\" [1] and \"BMW's Hydrogen V12 Engine Is A Hilarious Engineering Stunt\" [2] videos. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34486851,"author":"otherme123","month":"2023-01","story_title":"'A complete failure' Japan's 'fantasy' hydrogen strategy does nothing","text":"If batteries has problems as a long term storage, hydrogen is even worse. If you store liquid hydrogen, you have to let the gas escape or risk explosions. Keeping things below -250\u00baC is not easy. Worth watching: [VIDEO] Every single actor is pushing for their own interests and highlighting the flaws of the competitors. You cannot say in good faith that hydrogen, nuclear or fuel are supporting the \"renewable energy gang\", or that they are not a gang themselves. In fact, my opinions is that nuclear gang was so against renewables that they missed the bus of \"renewables + nuclear\" friendly mix, letting the gas gang conquest \"renewables + gas\".","stance":"rec"}],"AtPA6nIBs5g":[{"hn_comment_id":22381756,"author":"Cthulhu_","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Real-time, in-camera background compositing in The Mandalorian","text":"One solution to this would be to put the camera on a fixture that replays the same motions every time, so they can do a 'dry run' and correct the rendering. (Putting a camera on a fixture is not new, IIRC they did it in Back to the Future - [VIDEO] is a really good yet succinct documentary on it)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42272323,"author":"ZeroGravitas","month":"2024-11","story_title":"A pretty visualisation of the European power grid (2022)","text":"And if you're an HN reader and already know and love Back to the Future, then the Captain Disillusion's 2 part YouTube video about how the visual effects used ground breaking computer control of cameras to advance the state of the art is a good recommendation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Auuk1y4DRgk":[{"hn_comment_id":34593961,"author":"aamargulies","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Humanities: anything by Michael Sugrue [VIDEO] He also has a podcast \u201cThe Idea Store\u201d: [LINK] He can speak off-the-cuff on any philosophical school of thought or historical period. The clarity of the lectures is amazing. What a stone-cold badass.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43364072,"author":"ViktorRay","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)","text":"If anyone is interested in stoicism then this classic lecture by Dr Sugrue is [VIDEO] have watched this lecture multiple times (each time I was going through some bad things in my life) and it helped me tremendously. Stoicism in general has many excellent philosophical ideas that you can apply to your life. Maybe this lecture and stoic ideals will help you if you are in times of despair and sadness the way this lecture and those ideals helped me.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32779760,"author":"p3rls","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Stoicism is not enough","text":"BTW, while I have the top comment, I'll give those here a better introduction to Aurelius's stoicism, Dr Segrue's lecture: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34859050,"author":"apienx","month":"2023-02","story_title":"The Varieties of Bad Stoicism","text":"\u201cFreedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.\" -- Epictetus In 2023, I think we can achieve a level of control that's incomprehensible to Epictetus. The goal is to maximize equanimity, freedom, and control over one's time/destiny. Money can get you quite far on that path. I sometimes feel that Massimo's just bitter at the success of people like Ryan Holiday (who just took Massimo's work and \"packaged\" it). P.S. Warmly recommend this lecture about Marcus Aurelius (a classic): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Av0PQDVTP4A":[{"hn_comment_id":7613565,"author":"sparkie","month":"2014-04","story_title":"You Don't Read Code, You Explore It","text":"I like Tim Daly's viewpoint that we shouldn't just be writing code , but we should write manuals - giving high level overviews of our problems and specifying their implementation details inside the manuals. His talk \"Literate Programming in the Large\"[1] covers why. The example he gives in his talk is the Axiom algebra system[2], which was revised to use literate programming style - the source code, with usage examples, is contained entirely within the books. [1]: [VIDEO] , [sldes]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11688446,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Final \u201cSTEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming\u201d Paper [pdf]","text":"I think there are two sound approaches to communicating complex systems between humans (which is the main goal here, a computer might be a bit slow compiling 200M LOC - but the real problem is that no human can read that much code, let alone understand it): 1) Write documentation that is also code. That is the idea of literate programming. I recently came across: \"Literate Programming in the Large\": [VIDEO] which is a bit of a wandering talk, but well worth watching: it talks about real, huge comolex systems, and how lp can help bring them back under control. 2) The other approach is to shift your perspective, so you don't have a complex solution to a compkex problem; but rather a few small and lightly connected straight forward solutions to simple problems. Now I doesn't matter if you're bad at communicating, because the ideas you try to convey are simple ideas. I think there are a few reason that STEPS appear to work: what we're doing with our complex software is simple stuff. If we know what we want to do (the hard part) doing so in a straightforward way becomes easy. If we can make hierarchies of abstraction and isolated sub-systems. Note that simple doesn't mean trivial. These solution often require quite a lot of theoretical education; but not an unreasonable amount.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11699137,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Literate programming: Two beefs with the classic version (2014)","text":"I found this talk about re-structuring and bringing back to life a 1.2 MLOC lisp codebase with classical LP interesting (it's a bit meandering, but INHO well worth a watch): \"Literate Programming in the Large\": [VIDEO] The reorganization is still ongoing, as can been seen at: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12049239,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Literate programming: presenting code in human order","text":"There's a (somewhat rambling, but interesting) talk on the effort to rewrite the lisp symbolic math system Axiom[a] as a literate program (spanning several books) - precisely in order to make it possible to refactor and maintain the code: \"Literate Programming in the Large\": [VIDEO] [a] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14442369,"author":"elviejo","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Show HN: Legion, an as-simple-as-possible blockchain server written in Haskell","text":"\"Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.\" (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs\" by Abelson and Sussman) The idea is that you write a \"Book\" and the program is extracted, from the book. Literate Programming Wikipedia: [LINK] A nice talk about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AvEqfg2sIH0":[{"hn_comment_id":18087439,"author":"asplake","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"How Buildings Learn, based on (and in some ways better than) the Stewart Brand book. Definite takeaways for software architecture, and includes appearances by Christopher Alexander, a key instigator of the patterns movement. Produced by the BBC in the 90's, now on Youtube - [VIDEO] Turns out that many architects of the built environment are just as prone as those of the software kind to not caring about the usability and maintainability of their systems, let alone how how they will evolve over extended periods of time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19604689,"author":"lqet","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Paint Is Colored Glue","text":"Ah, yes, I watched this series a few years ago and just realized that it may have inspired my post above a bit. PS: I just shamelessly throw in another excellent BBC documentary series here: How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand [0]. I sometimes see it mentioned here on HN, but it cannot be mentioned too often. If you haven't seen it, please please do. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23761120,"author":"monkeypizza","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Whole Earth Software Catalog (1984)","text":"Stewart Brand has done lots of good stuff. My favorite is the 6 part BBC series on \"How Buildings Learn\". It really opened my eyes to the importance of buildings. Very relevant to the frequent discussions here about zoning, design, etc. But also just an amazing, clear, well-informed amateur analysis of how the US has been doing in this field over the last 100 years. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6329260,"author":"shavenwarthog2","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Glare from London 'fryscraper' blamed for melting cars","text":"Steward Brand has a documentary and book on \"How Buildings Learn\". A building isn't made for architects, it's for people to use, and people over time are going to use their building for different, often very different things. Even such trivial things like \"roof shouldn't leak\" can be handwaved around. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13669836,"author":"rwmj","month":"2017-02","story_title":"What makes the perfect office?","text":"There's a really good BBC TV series about this topic, which also covers the MIT Radio Lab that Tim mentions: [VIDEO] \"How Buildings Learn\" (1997)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16612101,"author":"wpietri","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Structural engineers are unsung heroes","text":"Ooh, that reminds me of another excellent book on failure, Sidney Dekker's \"Field Guide to Understanding Human Error\": [LINK] It's about investigating airplane crashes, and in particular two different paradigms for understanding failure. It deeply changed how I think and talk about software bugs, and especially how I do retrospectives. I strongly recommend it. And the article made me think of Stewart Brand's \"How Buildings Learn\": [LINK] It changed my view of a building from a static thing to a dynamic system, changing over time. The BBC later turned it into a 6-part series, which I haven't seen, but which the author put up on YouTube, starting here: [VIDEO] I especially like that in the comments he writes: \"Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like. Please don\u2019t bug me with requests for permission. Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17026229,"author":"steveeq1","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Stewart Brand Changed the World, Twice","text":"video documentary of the book with Stewart Brand hosting for anyone that's interested: [VIDEO] Saw the documentary and now reading the book, it's good.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20784970,"author":"paloaltokid","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Japanese architects who treated buildings like living organisms","text":"That's a SUPER book. Everyone in software should read it. The primary expense in software is long-term maintenance, not initial construction. Stewart Brand also made a video series: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AwX9G38vdCE":[{"hn_comment_id":18014428,"author":"dmos62","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Life in the Spanish city that banned cars","text":"Seconded, Ghent in belgium is also pretty cool car-wise. It has so-called pedestrian-centric planning. For example, the city centre may not be entered with a car, only by foot, bicycle or public transport. It's great. I enjoyed Musk's Boring Company's presentation, where they talk about some problems with transportation today and present some solutions, with emphasis on transportation within city borders [0]. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18726849,"author":"larkost","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Elon Musk's tunnel project is a bad joke","text":"Yes, there is a pretty good video of an interview with Musk and the chief engineer on the project: [VIDEO] From memory, the important points: 1. They want to have the drill work continuously. Apparently current technology winds up drilling less than half the time, partially because the drills stop when putting in the wall sections that make up the tunnel. 2. Switch the drill and the waste train (that takes the dirt from the drill) to electric using batteries that the train brings in. This reduces the construction of pipes and infrastructure in the tunnel during construction. 3. Work to speed up the drill head by using the materials scientists from SpaceX. 4. Make bricks out of the waster material on-site. Right now disposing of the waste material is a big headache/cost.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18982864,"author":"joshe","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Boeing\u2019s Flying Car Has Taken Off","text":"Absolutely. People are super confused about this. The reporting wasn't very good and you have to look beyond it. The original idea is - little 16 person passenger pods with bikes, wheelchairs, and luggage. $1 fare. - possibly sleds for cars - you can stack tunnels (think of them as car lanes in 3D), so you can have 20, 50 or 100 lane highways - you make lane changes autonomously, so the subway pods can have different destinations - it's all electric so there isn't poisonous engine exhaust This is just people boarding a bus, the throughput is super high. Even sled loading can be pretty fast, imagine replacing 20 street parking spots with sled elevators. Then accelerated to 100 mph, that too is a lot of throughput. Here's the pod part of the Boring company talk. It's worth watching to see what they are proposing. [VIDEO] Elon and company got excited that they built a tunnel, which is a real achievement. So they drove a Tesla through it. The media knows what you want, which is max outrage, so they reported that the 1% will get tunnels with their Teslas. You will be stuck in gridlock behind a diesel truck. They should not have driven a Tesla through it, it was a PR blunder. Here is a Heathrow pod experiment: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"AxCo2bE9Gtk":[{"hn_comment_id":3387600,"author":"alexqgb","month":"2011-12","story_title":"The Only Way to Stop SOPA","text":"I strongly encourage you to develop a (much) better understanding of what Lessig has been arguing. A good place to start is here: [VIDEO] Also worth noting: the problem you describe (corrupting influences on the economy originating in Washington, as opposed to private interests capturing Washington) is something Lessig addressed in his recent appearance on Jon Stewart's program. There, he pointed out that these apparently divergent forms of corruption are entirely compatible, and that they actually share the same root, which is the obscene reliance of elected officials on a vanishingly small number of campaign donors. Depending on the day of the week, these donors can find themselves initiating bribes, or being shaken down for bribes by officials wanting to increase their takes. The stink flows both ways. And it ensnares people who, left to their own devices, would have nothing to do with 'the trade' whatsoever. Accordingly, Lessig is illuminating the entire economy of corruption, correctly observing that you cannot choose to attack one branch instead of another. Instead, you have to ignore all the branches, and go straight for the root. If any good comes from SOPA, it will be in generating a backlash strong enough to go after the root directly. The nerds, for what it's worth, are the people to lead this. Why? Because we are, by nature, systems thinkers. And this is a systemic problem of the very severest degree.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5846112,"author":"lifeguard","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Ask HN: US this bad about civil liberties?","text":"Dear Internet, America has become a very strange place. At the same time our military was \"bringing freedom to the Iraqi peoples\", our legislature and executive conspired to remove or automate much judicial review of spying. In effect American citizens lost another type of liberty. We seem to be better at protecting our access to riffles. Most of the liberties created by America's founding fathers (women were not allowed to vote) were designed to thwart the power of a monarchy and the power of the Roman-Catholic church. Many of these founding fathers were members of a fraternity called the Free Masons and read authors like John Locke. My point is they were a fairly homogeneous group of Englishmen. Since then America has expanded civil rights explicit in the Constitution to include people of all races and genders. But the Industrial age has been a constant force of erosion of our liberties. Our elections are not publicly funded. This means there is a huge advantage to material wealth and the wealthy have steered Congress to benefit themselves. The bright shinning star of hope for The Land of The Free is our government is not systemically corrupt, at least not in the traditional meaning of corrupt. I think this is a good discussion by Prof Lessig, \"Republic Lost\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32166760,"author":"dbrgn","month":"2022-07","story_title":"EU Digital Markets Act, aimed at Google, Apple, Amazon, approved","text":"Because of institutional corruption. Lawrence Lessig has some great talks about this topic, here's one of them: [LINK] Here's another one: [VIDEO] (Lawrence Lessig, a law professor, was one of the founders of Creative Commons. He later tried to change US copyright laws to be more consumer-friendly, but concluded that it's almost impossible to do so as long as corporate interests rule politics. He then shifted his research topics to institutional corruption in politics. He actually ran for presidency a few years ago, with funding only from the popuplation, and limited to a certain amount. It failed, he wasn't even invited to TV debates because \"if he doesn't take company money he doesn't have a chance\".)","stance":"rec"}],"AxFzf6yIfcc":[{"hn_comment_id":6673256,"author":"DanielRibeiro","month":"2013-11","story_title":"On Game Development","text":"Jonathan Blow (Braid and Indie Fund) recently gave an amazing presentation on the evolution of Television, and he made an interesting parallel to the evolution of games: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6926241,"author":"po","month":"2013-12","story_title":"The case for an IAP off button in mobile games","text":"If anyone wants to see a good example of why you can't just toggle off IAP you should check out Jonathan Blow's talk about \"Free to Play\" games and how the business model deeply corrupts the game through the metaphor of bad 70's TV shows vs HBO: [VIDEO] The solution isn't to toggle IAP off in the game, it's the ability to toggle it off in the App Store. The difficulty is some IAP is legitimate and some is not. For example, Carcassonne has an IAP to upgrade the game into a slightly different game with additional tiles. It's only when the IAP is part of the core game mechanic that is troubling. I think categorising them and relegating them to a particular category like we do with FPS, RPG, RTS, etc.. would help.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7162159,"author":"wsc981","month":"2014-02","story_title":"How in-app purchases have destroyed the game industry","text":"Jonathan Blow -creator of Braid and working on The Witness- also has a very nice critique on the problems with games that are designed around micro-payments. The whole talk is interesting, but he starts discussing the issues around the 20 minute mark: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9011409,"author":"kelukelugames","month":"2015-02","story_title":"\u2018Braid\u2019 creator sacrifices his fortune to build his next game","text":"I've followed Jonathan Blow for a while. He has a reputation for being condescending. If you follow him a Twitter then you might come to the same conclusion. But he has given some amazing talks. [VIDEO] <-compares games to televison [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10240576,"author":"aethertron","month":"2015-09","story_title":"\u201cWe Own You\u201d \u2013 Confessions of an Anonymous Free to Play Producer","text":">It is almost certain you have or are playing a game I have produced or worked on in a major capacity. Maybe for a few minutes. I like to think I'm good at analysing game mechanics, as a long time gamer and sometimes amateur game designer. So I mostly avoid F2P games. The tactics are repulsive to my tastes, and I can smell them from a mile away. When there's a choice between struggling to meet a challenge by improving my skill, or paying my way though, my inclination is to take a 3rd choice: stop playing this and do something else. So I much prefer paying up front for a game. I'm old-school that way. Maybe this option is viable, as a 'serious' gaming hobbyist, only temporarily. But right now, the best games (in my genres of choice) are sold on the traditional purchase model. They are PC and console games. Generally, I don't like 'endless' games; I prefer a game to have an ending: I play it, experience it 'fully', finish it, then move on to something else. (But... just to undermine everything I've stated above, I am playing Pac Man 256. It has good gamefeel. I'll play it until I get all the powerups, perhaps. No interest in high-scores...) tl;dr: IMO F2P games are inferior instances of the artform. Be cool like me and play superior PC and console games. Also, Jonathan Blow has some interesting points to make on how the payment form of games (and entertainment in general) affects their structure/quality. This is the one where he talks about addictive mobile Skinner box games [x","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14273178,"author":"emsy","month":"2017-05","story_title":"So You Want to Make Games","text":"While I disagree with the word dumb and find \"ignorant\" more suitable, your Candy Crush comparison is bad. Jonathan Blow nailed it in this presentation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23658900,"author":"hnick","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Facebook announces policy changes ahead of 2020 elections","text":"There's an interesting talk about that by Jonathan Blow, using the common phrase 'The Medium is the Message'. The eventual topic is mobile game design but he starts off with TV and how commercial and other constraints influence show (and game) design. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AxJubaijQbI":[{"hn_comment_id":9915498,"author":"shuriu","month":"2015-07","story_title":"The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? (2009)","text":"This video from Numberphile goes in depth about this: [LINK] . The guy talking, is Persi Diaconis, is the main author of the paper this article is based upon. He also has done research on the randomness of shuffling cards: [VIDEO] . Pretty cool stuff!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17333823,"author":"evanb","month":"2018-06","story_title":"The Math of Card Shuffling","text":"There's a great numberphile with Persi Diaconis all about shuffling: [VIDEO] The extra footage is fantastic, too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48590585,"author":"fisian","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?","text":"Numberphile has a video with Persi Diaconis about the seven perfect shuffles. It gives a lot of insight and anectdotes in addition to the central theorem: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AxZWxxZ2JGE":[{"hn_comment_id":29168746,"author":"m0llusk","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Coding Interviews Are BS (largely)","text":"Possibly the best analysis of this I have yet seen is the video Why our generals were most successful in World War II that in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq/Afghanistan: [VIDEO] Essentially, the answer is the hiring methodology. If someone seemed like a best fit for a job then they were hired. They then had two weeks to demonstrate basic functional capacity and six weeks to make significant progress. If at any point things did not work out then they were immediately dismissed and replaced with someone else. The high rate of this process meant that there were always open opportunities even for those who had been dismissed from other positions, so things worked out for both employers and employees.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23478532,"author":"AdrianB1","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people","text":"Never joke about firing people, but don't hesitate to do it. That is the complete advice. Joking about firing people never brought anything good; firing people when needed, that is essential for organizations. There is a lengthy explanation in this: \"Why our generals were more successful in World War II than in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq/Afghanistan\" ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39851998,"author":"sofrimiento","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Peter principle","text":"This is a interesting talk held on UC Berkeley about the culture of firing officers during WWII: [VIDEO] Thomas E. Ricks main hypothesis is that the US failures in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq can be attributed to the culture of firing under-performing disappearing. It mirrors what I've seen in a lot of organizations as well, under-performing executives keeping their jobs when they shouldn't.","stance":"rec"}],"AyOAjFNPAbA":[{"hn_comment_id":13102878,"author":"nodesocket","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Links to YouTube Recordings of AWS re:Invent Sessions","text":"The keynote by James Hamilton[1] is absolutely awesome. You can genuinely tell that James finds all this technology fascinating. He talks about fiber, networking, power, redundancy, scale all with utter enthusiasm. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17552312,"author":"strong_silent_t","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Backblaze Durability Is Eleven 9s \u2013 And Why It Doesn\u2019t Matter","text":"Others have answered, but I think the general principle for a Region is that between the AZs you have less than 1ms latency, physical separation between the data centers, but they may still be in the same floodplain, be able to be hit by the same hurricane, etc. More info here if you want to see how regions are structured at a high level of detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22944964,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Now Open \u2013 AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region","text":"James Hamilton [0][1] and others [2][3][4] have given pretty good overview over the years of the AWS infrastructure. [0] AWS Innovation at Scale (2014), [LINK] [1] Tuesday Night Live (2016), [VIDEO] [2] Operation of the AWS Global Network (2019), [LINK] [3] Foundations of AWS Infrastructure (2018), [LINK] [4] Exploring the AWS Global Network (2018), [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27994087,"author":"EwanToo","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Amazon EC2-Classic Is Retiring","text":"Watch this video from 2016 by James Hamilton at AWS Re:Invent [VIDEO] It'll tell you lots about how AWS is built","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38822002,"author":"mackid","month":"2023-12","story_title":"The art of high performance computing","text":"Mark Russinovich gives a good talk most years on the internals of Azure and the systems that run it. [1] is an example. Look for talks from other years as well. Meta also publishes a number of papers/blogs/OSS projects on their engineering site [2] James Hamilton of AWS gives a talk most years on their infrastructure. Worth watching multiple years [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"AyORieDhpkg":[{"hn_comment_id":11151799,"author":"ulrikrasmussen","month":"2016-02","story_title":"AI generated music to improve focus, relaxation and sleep","text":"I'm glad you like it :). I think ambience and soundscapes should still have interesting musical elements. If it only works as background noise, then I get bored by it. I've also listened to Isis quite a lot, mostly \"Oceanic\", which is great. There is a pretty good remix album of \"Oceanic\" that opens with a remix by Fennesz. Let me just throw a few more out there: Antenne (two albums, just called #1 and #2): [LINK] J\u00f3hann J\u00f3hannsson - Englab\u00f6rn: [LINK] The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble - Here Be Dragons: [VIDEO] Kreng - Grimoire: [LINK] La Grande Bellezza - Original Sound Track (sans disco tracks): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14629874,"author":"badosu","month":"2017-06","story_title":"The slow death of the electric guitar","text":"Made a selection with an eclectic variety of modern electronic sounds, enjoy! - [LINK] (a gem of prog trance) - [VIDEO] (dark electronic jazz) - [LINK] (black metal + breakbeat + classical) - [LINK] (amazing psy chill album) - [LINK] To illustrate how Electronic Music enables you to achieve a wide range of possibilities I've chosen these 2 songs from the same band: - [LINK] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31194595,"author":"maicro","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Heavy Metal Music for Programming?","text":"Another second here. There's a YouTube channel with full stoner metal albums (Stoned Meadow of Doom: [LINK] ; been around for quite a while, though I have a vague fear of them disappearing due to the obvious copyright infringement...). As for specific bands (though I don't think on the stoner metal spectrum, but ones I love): Baroness, Sub Rosa, King Woman, Bell Witch, Mastodon. And for something a bit farther off from metal, but still in the spirit of heavy, nearly ambient - The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble ( [VIDEO] ) / The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation (which is apparently the live version of \"The Kilimanjaro...\").","stance":"rec"}],"B1J2RMorJXM":[{"hn_comment_id":27534615,"author":"mulmen","month":"2021-06","story_title":"A transistorized shift register box, built in 1965 for Apollo testing","text":"I suggest watching this excellent presentation: [VIDEO] . He goes in to great depth in explaining how the LEM was in fact capable of landing itself. Automation was widespread in the development and execution of the Apollo program.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31503296,"author":"Banana699","month":"2022-05","story_title":"On rebooting: the unreasonable effectiveness of turning computers off and on","text":"Mandatory Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer [VIDEO] 34C3 - The Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33022811,"author":"TremendousJudge","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Two hundred years ago, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone","text":"Yeah, a great example is this presentation[1] about the Apollo guidance computer. The guy is really, really into it and it just makes the presentation amazing. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38126387,"author":"kzrdude","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Translations of Russ Cox's Thompson NFA C Program to Rust","text":"That reminds me of the Apollo guidance computer talk (available on youtube [VIDEO] ). \"Everyone\" might have seen this one, but if one hasn't, it's a gem.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39703552,"author":"isolli","month":"2024-03","story_title":"NASA engineers make progress toward understanding Voyager 1 issue","text":"I can't recommend a book, but I watched this video a while ago, and I found it riveting: \"Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer\" [0] > Robert Wills introduces the amazing hardware and software that made up the Apollo Guidance Computer, walks you through the landing procedure step-by-step, and talks about the pioneering design principles that were used to make the landing software robust against any failure. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49004383,"author":"soferio","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code for command and lunar modules","text":"For a superb video explaining what the AGC did and what WENT WRONG during the moon landing including the error codes:l, see: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26581717,"author":"alpaca128","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Part of Wright brothers' first airplane on NASA's Mars chopper","text":"A bit offtopic but I recently saw a surprisingly interesting talk about the Apollo board computer[0], and it's incredible how carefully they engineered the whole thing. Software hardcoded in the wiring, error correction for every memory access, ability to restart the whole system in any situation without losing state...this thing might have been rudimentary in today's standards, but the quality of the software was a different beast. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30290653,"author":"mulmen","month":"2022-02","story_title":"A look inside the chips that powered the landmark Polaroid SX-70 instant camera","text":"The AGC is a fascinating device. It used 60% of the ICs produced in the United States in 1963. If you are interested in the AGC I suggest this excellent video: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32382703,"author":"tatoalo","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The Apollo On-Board Computers","text":"In addition to the fantastic ccc.de talk, I suggest this one related to the 1202 alarm: [VIDEO] Great talk and overall super presenter IMHO.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36660762,"author":"jazzyjackson","month":"2023-07","story_title":"VCF Southwest \u2013 Restoring the Apollo Guidance Computer with CuriousMarc [video]","text":"Here's another lecture I really enjoyed walking through the operation of the guidance computer and the events that lead to the 1202 error, which the speaker sums up as an \"out of memory\" error resulting in an automatic reboot. He says the cause was a hardware bug taxing the machine with empty status updates, combined with Buzz typing \"verb 16 noun 68\" to have the display auto-update some stats - he was crashing the machine but didn't put together why it was happening because it never crashed the machine in simulation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38245886,"author":"leetrout","month":"2023-11","story_title":"The Apollo Guidance Computer","text":"Theres a great video of a talk on the AGC from Robert Wills at England's The National Museum of Computing [VIDEO] More info and links to other videos on [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38321760,"author":"mulmen","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time","text":"> Apollo 11 had problems with the LM guidance computer, but was saved by Neil Armstrong's piloting skill. This is a common misconception but mixes up at least three things. 1) Yes, Eagle was long, but not because of a software bug. The exact reason is unclear and there may have been multiple factors. 2) Yes, there were unexpected computer alarms but these were caused by a hardware bug that manifested because a switch was in an unexpected position. The software handled this appropriately. Margaret Hamilton said: \u201cTo blame the computer for the Apollo 11 problems is like blaming the person who spots a fire and calls the fire department. Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones. The computer, rather than almost forcing an abort, prevented an abort. If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful Moon landing it was.\u201d 3) Neil Armstrong did adjust the landing point late in the descent after noticing rough terrain. He utilized semi-automatic control to do this. Essentially adjusting the target point for the autopilot. Eagle wasn\u2019t directly flown like an aircraft. [LINK] A great video on the AGC and Apollo 11 landing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41402143,"author":"pangratz","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing","text":"I love the calm communications. The feeling of everything possible thought out. Regarding moon landing videos, I also enjoyed the \"story\" of the computer on board which is told in this great presentation [1]: Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer by Robert Wills. Definitely worth a watch if you fancy the moon landing. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"B2482h_TNwg":[{"hn_comment_id":45352902,"author":"itopaloglu83","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Apple A19 SoC die shot","text":"It\u2019s a mind blowing achievement, nothing below sorcery if you think about it. ASML machines are hitting tin droplets with 25kW laser 50,000 times a second to turn them into plasma to create the necessary extreme ultraviolet light, and despite generating 500W of EUV, only a small fraction can reach the wafer, due to loses along the way. I believe it was like 10%. Here\u2019s an incredible, very detailed video about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45667857,"author":"mrcsharp","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Die shots of as many CPUs and other interesting chips as possible","text":"I'm always fascinated by how brilliant us humans can be. So much so that we can put billions of transistors in very small spaces and in complex structures while also mass producing it. I highly recommend watching this video about lithography and the machine that makes it all possible [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47932480,"author":"jasode","month":"2026-04","story_title":"The World's Most Complex Machine","text":"The Veritasium video is good but their \"newscast\" style with constant back-and-forth cuts to talking heads can make the presentation a bit disjointed. The more straightforward video of ASML EUV is from Branch Education: [VIDEO] Because that vid gives an overview of the whole machine, it gives context to what each scientist is talking about in the Veritasium interviews.","stance":"rec"}],"B5FxFfymI4g":[{"hn_comment_id":7108723,"author":"dandare","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Lenovo Agrees to Buy IBM Server Business for $2.3 Billion","text":"It immediately reminded me of the mini-mills example from Clayton Christensen's amazing talk on Disruptive Innovation [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7395695,"author":"reqres","month":"2014-03","story_title":"The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean","text":"The logic you present is correct from the incumbent's perspective. But followed to its logical conclusion, it leads to the downfall of the incumbent according to Christensen's model of disruptive innovation. The incumbents will continually cater upmarket to their higher value customers while the challenger picks up more and more low value customers. But there's only so far upmarket you can go until you run out of customers and that's when the low end challenger has completely consumed the incumbent. I think much of this thread is a testament to the lower value customers being ignored. Things about how DO is much less complex, simpler and as a result cheaper. Here's part of a great talk from Christensen describing the same logic but in the Steel industry: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"B5NULPSiOGw":[{"hn_comment_id":18235623,"author":"hardwaresofton","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Lessons learned from creating a real-time collaborative rich-text editor","text":"Recently saw a fantastic intermediate talk on this subject called CRDTs and the Quest for Distributed Consistency[0]. One product of the research was automerge[1], a library for handling collaborative editing of JSON-like data models [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20183847,"author":"raphlinus","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Creating a Collaborative Editor","text":"I think the original statement is defensible. Many of the original OT papers proposed algorithms that have since been shown not to converge in particular cases (especially the TP2 puzzle). It took a while for the fog to clear, in part because TP2 requires concurrent edits from 3 peers. I also highly recommend the talk \"CRDTs and the Quest for Distributed Consistency\"[0] from Martin Kleppmann, which I believe surveys the landscape in as clear and accessible a manner as I've seen; much of the literature is pretty dense. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23747533,"author":"syspec","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Summary: Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann","text":"Recently going through this book. I highly recommend it, and any videos by the author, Martin Kleppmann I especially like this one: > CRDTs and the quest for distributed consistency [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"B8Y146v8HxE":[{"hn_comment_id":15113418,"author":"KGIII","month":"2017-08","story_title":"One of the most complex wristwatches ever made","text":"For those wondering about Clickspring, here is a link: [VIDEO] I advise you not to click on it. It will eat up your time and it takes your complete attention.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31268562,"author":"MengerSponge","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Mechanical Watch","text":"This is lovely! While there's a lot of watch content on YouTube, I'm amazed that no one has called out Clickspring's skeleton clock build. It's also a masterpiece, just in a different medium: Full build playlist: [LINK] Direct link to the first episode: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42441706,"author":"xdennis","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Making a watch from scratch","text":"Specifically this playlist where he builds a desk clock in an estimated 1000 hours: [VIDEO] The last video in the series summaries everything in 12 minutes: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"B8ofWFx525s":[{"hn_comment_id":12924190,"author":"throwawy64","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation","text":"The Filter Bubble Ted talk is what motivated me to dump social media. [VIDEO] Gone are my Facebook, G+, Reddit accounts. I have a Twitter which I curate manually with numerous feeds from all over. I generally look at content like links first then read the Twitter discussion if any. I treat posting as a personal catharsis anymore, and use throwaway accounts. IMO my online opinions are going to get lost in the crush so why bother curating an identity. One that just creates a signal trail for advertising and snoopers? I talk to the people in my life more instead. These have been conscious decisions on my part and honestly I think I'm mentally happier and less frustrated \"at the world\" for it. MMS is good enough for sharing pics with grandma and grandpa. Though I've asked them to keep most off social media. It's too creepy having the world ogle my kids. They don't like it but abide. IMO despite being my mom she's old and has less life left than my kids. Nothing to worry about by posting her life on Facebook My kids on the other hand have their whole lives ahead of them. I would rather it not be broadcast without their consent. If they get older and decide to go all Jayden Smith or Paris Hilton on social media so be it. But these services are not what humanity needs to progress. They are today's fascination. And I am not into it. So fuck em","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3760755,"author":"AkThhhpppt","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Google told to halt auto-complete","text":"I did put \"vaguely related\" in the rant warning, didn't I? :-) Though news.google.com is what I was thinking of with the current affairs example, it generalizes to the whole Google edifice, and to Facebook too. I really suggest having a look at this: [VIDEO] to see what I'm talking about, with actual examples. Minor quibble: autocomplete isn't to aid in searching common topics, it's to help Google avoid failed searches through misspelt queries. \",)","stance":"rec"}],"B90_SNNbcoU":[{"hn_comment_id":39063759,"author":"inetknght","month":"2024-01","story_title":"What's that touchscreen in my room?","text":"> Turns out, I need a 3A fuse, so I ordered one from Amazon OP might want to watch Louis Rossmann's video about buying things from Amazon. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41374861,"author":"_DeadFred_","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Tattoo ink sold on Amazon has high levels of weird and rare bacteria","text":"This video gives a good overview of how Amazon's NGAF attitude about safety needs to be reigned in. [VIDEO] If you are in the USA report unsafe products here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"B965f8AcNbw":[{"hn_comment_id":26608708,"author":"paulintrognon","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Bronze Age mining sites received deliveries of pre-processed foods","text":"The Fall Of Civilization's Podcast on this subject is also a great introduction [VIDEO] (Generally speaking I really recommand this podcast, it has been recommanded on HN before, which is how I first heard of it)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39900534,"author":"badbart14","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Mycenaean Warriors and the Sea-Peoples (2013)","text":"Highly recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast episode on the Bronze Age Collapse to learn more about the Sea-Peoples ( [VIDEO] ) . They discuss how the Sea-Peoples may be a symptom and a cause of the bronze age collapse, and the whole episode is extremely engaging and educational. (As all the episodes of this podcast are, cannot recommend it enough)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48861842,"author":"antondd","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Late Bronze Age Collapse","text":"Here is a youtube video he did on it: [VIDEO] The whole channel is top quality if you want to ruminate on other civilisations that came and went.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"B9ly7JjqEb0":[{"hn_comment_id":31539652,"author":"rglullis","month":"2022-05","story_title":"An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency","text":"Please, please watch the videos I linked. Especially the Not Just Bikes channel. For example, this one [LINK] can quickly explain why a transport system flooded with autonomous cars and poor public transit would make the overall system worse for everyone . There is also another video that talks about microcars for people with disability and reduced mobility: [VIDEO] No rational person can watch those videos and conclude that the best course of action to solve urban transportation requires self-driving cars. Getting FSD cars is just a rich nerd fetish which will not solve anything and likely contribute to make suburban sprawl worse.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29209712,"author":"ryukafalz","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The good things in the current age in tech","text":"Not Just Bikes has a nice video on the Canta and things like it if you'd like to see them in action: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BBJTeNTZtGU":[{"hn_comment_id":17147223,"author":"jadedhacker","month":"2018-05","story_title":"American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth (2016)","text":"Yes and no. Check out Foucault. He was a radical philosopher that discussed the treatment of mental health and was a critic of institutionalization. I don't know enough about him to agree or disagree with him, but he is an influential point of view. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25604536,"author":"yurielt","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people (2018)","text":"And this is quite honestly a good things. Wait before you downvote. Hear me out the current system is horrible and what it determines as insane people is a product of such system. Back in the Middle Ages when we had a different approach to mental health non neurotypical people were regarded as different, yes but not as garbage or plainly wrong just because of being odd. Instead in some cases they were even regarded as wise as a result of this. Think about alchemy for example something like that could only have been tried by very very mentally ill people and if they weren\u2019t so at the beginning their handling of mercury sure made them crazy after a while. Modern society easily ditched the mentally ill. However they can give a lot and if that makes a couple companies in the internet mad so be it. I recommend you watch the following video on Foucault [VIDEO] it is an over simplification but it will help you understand. I also recommend reading the anti edipous from Delouse and Guatari to get an insight in how the current system hides and destroys the mentally ill in spite of how much they have given to history and humanity. The truth is without mentally ill a people society would be different and thus anti mentally ill sentiment of modernity is but a depravity as non neurotypical variations are for memes(social culture and the academia for example) what mutation is for genes","stance":"rec"}],"BBwepkVurCI":[{"hn_comment_id":28414162,"author":"superasn","month":"2021-09","story_title":"WaterBear \u2013 A free library of documentaries and shorts","text":"I used to love watching documentaries but the more you watch them the more you see how most often they are biased and edited to show the authors / producers point of view. How a documentary is edited can mean the same facts and interview being used to show something being positive or totally negative. I guess it's true for all media but I've found this especially true for a lot of recent ones I've seen (last was Bikram yoga predator). Btw here is an awesome video that shows how editing can do wonders for how we perceive things(1). Though this one is about reality tv, I've seen the same done in a lot of recent documentaries too. (1) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28414841,"author":"specialist","month":"2021-09","story_title":"WaterBear \u2013 A free library of documentaries and shorts","text":"> the more you watch them aka Media literacy. > the more you see how most often they are biased What's the alternative? > ...here is an awesome video that shows how editing can do wonders for how we perceive things ... [VIDEO] That's quite good. Nice point about how better gear enabled the reality TV format. I did some radio and TV stuff as a kid. (A vocational tech program. Student radio, cable public access, job shadowing, \"journalism\", etc.) Transmuted me into a \"Kill your television\" type crank. I can't watch \"the news\" without yelling at the TV. As a counterpoint: Robert X Cringley's NerdTV had the radical notion of sharing all of the source footage. Viewers could watch his edit, highlight reels, and teasers. And then they could also make their own. Sadly, this format hasn't caught on. Anyway. It seems to me that Zoomers will prove to be the most media literate generation. And so therefore the least susceptible to ham-fisted narrative techniques. Certainly compared to Boomers.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42921743,"author":"hgomersall","month":"2025-02","story_title":"He went to jail for stealing someone's identity, but it was his all along","text":"Most mainstream documentaries are full of fluff. You can generally read the transcript of a half hour programme in a couple of minutes. I thought Charlie Brooker might have a useful segment on it, but all I could find were the not-quite-on-point, but nevertheless excellent two related segments below: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"BCiZc0n6COY":[{"hn_comment_id":16483444,"author":"swframe2","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers (2013)","text":"I recommend David MacKay's Intro to Info Theory class: [VIDEO] There is a free book for it at: [LINK] Daphne Koller's 3 coursara classes on Probabilistic Graphical Models are also really good.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23486218,"author":"maxov","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What, in your opinion, are the greatest and most useful textbooks?","text":"Had . Unfortunately Professor MacKay passed away from cancer in 2016. We lost a great soul. I concur that his textbook and sense of humor were fantastic. It was very enjoyable for me to learn the material from his lectures. They are a great supplement to the textbook (or maybe vice versa?) and you can find them here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29057409,"author":"samch93","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (Revised, Community Edition)","text":"It\u2018s such a tragedy that he died so young. Prof Mackay was a role model who impacted our world in many positive ways (e.g. his work in information theory, Bayesian statistics, environmental science). I recommend his lecture on information theory which is available on youtube [1]. He also documented the progress of his cancer very detailed on his blog [2], which is a very interesting (and sad) read. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"BCmz-fgp24E":[{"hn_comment_id":32498580,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Why American cities are broke (2021) [video]","text":"> Suburbs provides housing. [\u2026] regardless of the density. At what cost, especially relative to other options. Lower density may end up costing more over the long term: * [LINK] Urban living \u2260 Manhattan: * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34600032,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2023-01","story_title":"CA Cities to Lose All Zoning Powers in 2 Days","text":"> Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around Basically how things were built pre-WW2? * [LINK] * [LINK] The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided) idea that \"urban living\" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks : * [VIDEO] Examples (Streetview): * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] See also: * [LINK] Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown Amsterdam, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35396789,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Maps show how parking lots \u201ceat\u201d U.S. cities","text":"> Humans shouldn't be living in shoeboxes stacked 40 floors high. You have a limited view of 'urban living'. Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was built pre-WW2, and there's no reason why it couldn't be again: * [LINK] * [LINK] The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided) idea that \"urban living\" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks : * [VIDEO] Examples (Streetview) of urban tree-lined streets which can support transit and where cycling is practical (and where a car is an option versus a necessity): * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] See also: * [LINK] Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35399239,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Maps show how parking lots \u201ceat\u201d U.S. cities","text":"> You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space. You have a limited view of 'urban living'. Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was built pre-WW2, and there's no reason why it couldn't be again: * [LINK] * [LINK] The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided) idea that \"urban living\" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks : * [VIDEO] Examples (Streetview) of urban tree-lined streets which can support transit and where cycling is practical (and where a car is an option versus a necessity): * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] See also: * [LINK] Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36281620,"author":"throw0101b","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Electric cars are better for the environment, no matter the power source","text":"> Nonsense. The inner city being a concrete hellscape isn't being helped by nicer parts on the outskirts. Why would the inner city need to be a \"concrete hellscape\"? You can have decent density without 'concrete hellscapes'. The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided/misinformed) idea that \"urban living\" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks : * [VIDEO] Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was built pre-WW2: * [LINK] * [LINK] Examples (Streetview): * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36469847,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Human-Scale Dutch Suburbs [video]","text":"Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was build pre-WW2 in ways that didn't depend on cars: * [LINK] * [LINK] The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (mistaken) idea that \"urban living\" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks , which is certainly not the case: * [VIDEO] Examples (Streetview): * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] See also: * [LINK] Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36598635,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2023-07","story_title":"(IEEE Spectrum) Your navigation app is making traffic unmanageable","text":"> Public. Transit. Non-car centric development. The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (misguided) idea that \"urban living\" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks : * [VIDEO] Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was built pre-WW2: * [LINK] * [LINK] Examples (Streetview): * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] See also: * [LINK] Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36759898,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2023-07","story_title":"The force that shapes everything around us: Parking","text":"> Convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors, and the parking situation would change dramatically. Completely unnecessary. Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was build pre-WW2: * [LINK] * [LINK] The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (mistaken) idea that \"urban living\" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks : * [VIDEO] Examples (Streetview): * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] See also: * [LINK] Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38856573,"author":"throw0101d","month":"2024-01","story_title":"U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums","text":"> Why are we still trying to cram into small spaces? Define \"small\". Here are some examples houses in an urban area with front yards, back yards, and garages (attached to lanes): * [LINK] * [LINK] A little less square footage: * [LINK] * [LINK] The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (mistaken) idea that \"urban living\" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks, which is certainly not the case: * [VIDEO] Plenty of that was build pre-WW2 in ways that didn't depend on cars: * [LINK] * [LINK] Suburban design is the worst of both worlds: lacking the density of the urban so infrastructure is inefficient and so is transportation, and basically bulldozing what makes more rural living nice (closeness to nature).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39917675,"author":"throw0101b","month":"2024-04","story_title":"What the Suburb Haters Don't Understand","text":"> Everyone is different, but man... I'm the guy that likes to fire up the bbq and chat with neighbors in the backyard while the kids are who knows where (but safe) in the sprawl. I do this in \"the city\" right now (I BBQed some lamb on Sunday; my neighbour got a new motorcycle (Scrambler 1200XE) and I chatted with him about it). The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (mistaken) idea that \"urban living\" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks, which is certainly not the case: * [VIDEO] Here are some examples houses in an urban area with front yards, back yards, and garages (attached to lanes): * [LINK] * [LINK] A little less square footage: * [LINK] * [LINK] Plenty of that was build pre-WW2 in ways that didn't depend on cars: * [LINK] * [LINK] Suburban design is the worst of both worlds: lacking the density of the urban so infrastructure is inefficient and so is transportation, and basically bulldozing what makes more rural living nice (closeness to nature).","stance":"rec"}],"BD6h-wDj7bw":[{"hn_comment_id":20393704,"author":"dacohenii","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Cat Colors","text":"This is only tangentially related, but Veritasium has a fantastic video that discusses the genetics behind the random color patterns of calico cats: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9844524,"author":"rndn","month":"2015-07","story_title":"How Can There Still Be a Sex Difference, Even When There Is No Sex Difference?","text":"The next article in this series on \"Which sex is playing higher stakes reproductive game?\" is also worth reading: [LINK] It reminds me of an interesting hypothesis I've read about the other day that the concept marriage plays a significant role in the success of our culture as it counteracts this difference. It allows more men to reach a social status at which they are motivated to be productive members of society. So we are possibly actively destroying a pillar of our culture as we are devaluing marriage. By the way, Veritasium has a great episode on why women are stripey: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BDqvzFY72mg":[{"hn_comment_id":24264123,"author":"PaulHoule","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: How can we solve politics?","text":"These seem to be the ground rules for a high school debate, not sure if they are adequate to the troubles in these times. First there is a body of work on political \"science\" which is not quite physics or chemistry but is closer to \"science\" than it is to Scientology that is the backdrop of what is possible. Here are two semesters worth of lectures from Ian Shapiro which for me are a \"required curriculum\" for those who want to talk about reforming politics at a fundamental level: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28636128,"author":"f0e4c2f7","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Hardest thing when doing an online course?","text":"[LINK] Harvard's CS50 is best of class. Created by David J. Malan. I've never seen an online course that has production quality or clarity of concepts as good as this. Even if you know how to code you may find a few useful bits in there and if nothing else you're learn excellent ways to explain programming concepts to people. They also make a new one every year, so maybe the 2020 or 2021 version is better. [VIDEO] Yale's Power and Politcs was created by Ian Shapiro is an excellent zoom out into global politics and how how the modern world was made. [LINK] Poker at Hopkins was an intersession course created by Avi Rubin, a poker enthusiast professor who collected resources over many years with the thought in the back of his mind \"maybe one day I'll teach a course on poker somehow\". It's very much an introduction but a good one.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29053106,"author":"dools","month":"2021-10","story_title":"The metaverse is bullshit","text":"I think the primary distinction is between government expenditure on private production and government production. While in many cases governments still pay for things, they're not running them. The idea of course being that a profit motive improves efficiency, but of course it is competition that does so and in almost all cases government purchasing of private production suffers from the principal-agent problem: [LINK] I think my favourite source of information on the political side of privatisation (rather than the economic side) is this lecture series from Professor Shapiro at Yale: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BEG-ly9tQGk":[{"hn_comment_id":8947280,"author":"rickdale","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Inside the world of longsword fighting","text":"Semi-Related to this is Lars Andersen taking archery to the next level by using forgotten skills he learned by looking at old art and various texts. Worth a watch! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16719506,"author":"xamuel","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Million-dollar Strads fall to modern violins in blind \u2018sound check\u2019","text":"Don't know how historically accurate it is, but this entertaining video argues that archery might be an example: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16801918,"author":"gbtw","month":"2018-04","story_title":"What Medieval England Can Teach Us about Software Development","text":"Not to shit on your nice story :) but much what we know is either wrong or incomplete about archery. Lars Anderson made a nice series of videos on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33299200,"author":"mikkergp","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Archery World Record: Most arrows through a keyhole [video]","text":"He has lots of videos in his YouTube channel showing various feats of archery, this is a pretty good one: [VIDEO] Maybe he faked all the videos and got the Guinness book of world records to put a fake record on their website, but they doesn\u2019t seem like the simplest explanation.","stance":"rec"}],"BFld4EBO2RE":[{"hn_comment_id":37105168,"author":"fasterik","month":"2023-08","story_title":"OP drew these corals with mathematical equations","text":"Indeed, Inigo Quilez is \"the guy\" for this kind of stuff. He co-created ShaderToy and has worked on effects and modeling for multiple Pixar films. My favorite video of his is Painting a Landscape with Maths. [VIDEO] He deserves to have at least as many subscribers as other math YouTube channels like Verisatium and 3Blue1Brown.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31235637,"author":"lifthrasiir","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Making graphics in 4 kilobytes (2008) [pdf]","text":"Inigo Quilez, the author of this slide, also has made in-depth videos [1] [2] which might be more accessible to who aren't familiar with shader languages. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31637408,"author":"djmips","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Source code for 4kb demoscene production \u201cElevated\u201d released (2016)","text":"Thankfully for the graphics the very person who did the graphics in this Elevated demo is very generous with their time. Inigo Quilez has many instructional videos on his channel in how to code procedural graphics from the very beginner to the advanced. I link a couple of examples. You can watch the more advanced video even as a beginner but trying yourself is easier at the beginner level. Beginner. [LINK] Advanced. [VIDEO] Website. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37530172,"author":"antegamisou","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Painting with Math: A Gentle Study of Raymarching","text":"Good to see high quality articles gaining traction. If the article looks too verbose, be sure to check out, as the author cites, Inigo Quilez's videos Painting a Landscape with Maths - [VIDEO] Painting a Character with Maths - [LINK] Bonus: Painting with Maths in Google Sheets - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38036460,"author":"sph","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Interactive Intro to Shaders","text":"Welcome to the Internet, superMayo! If you want to see what the Masters can do with shaders, let me introduce you to Inigo Quilez and his shader art: [VIDEO] EDIT: I did not notice you are the author of this article. It's very well done, and I've been looking for more approachable and interactive tutorials on the arts of shader coding.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41350496,"author":"tombh","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Programming terrain from scratch using C++ and OpenGL by Shamus Young (2006)","text":"I just finished watching a live-coding session (from 2 years ago) by Inigo Quilez (ex Pixar), where he constructs an entire ray-marched landscape using only maths (mostly SDFs) in pure GPU shader code. The stream: [VIDEO] The demo: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42590568,"author":"thewanderer1983","month":"2025-01","story_title":"VoxelSpace: Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code (2020)","text":">It looks really good for such a simple algorithm. I love this! If you like that, you should check out Inigo Quilez [VIDEO] Here is the shadertoy link with code [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"BHEbVh3Yhrw":[{"hn_comment_id":18419689,"author":"vco1","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Yelp craters 30% as advertisers abandon the site","text":"I've always enjoyed Louis Rossmann yelp rants. A week ago he posted a great interview with some people who made a documentary about yelp practices of bullying businneses to join their service Link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22832479,"author":"james-skemp","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100","text":"Just pointing out what I had heard when I was subscribed to someone who had experiences with Yelp. Honestly, I found his latest video on the subject, after searching for 'yelp extortion,' which doesn't appear to be the best one to start with. [VIDEO] may be better, as he talks with two of the people behind the movie Billion Dollar Bully. (I didn't re-watch it completely, as I don't want to get myself wrapped back up in his world.) As it notes in [LINK] and the above, if Yelp's culture means that employees are getting away with it, and sharing that, and tend to work with people who aren't web-savvy, there's certainly the opportunity for certain individuals within the company to give the company a bad name. For-profit businesses, especially ones that want everyone to use them, generally don't like to talk about the fact that some part of why they exist is for the money and/or they have stakeholders that want to see a return on their investment. It's also possible that Yelp has since gotten better, and they're still fighting off the old perspectives. Not OP so not sure where their evidence came from. (I personally rarely use Yelp, don't have an account, and prefer the reviews built into Google Maps since that's my navigation app of choice. I didn't know about issues with Yelp until I was subscribed about the above, and after unsubscribing numerous months ago haven't heard anything else about Yelp until now.)","stance":"rec"}],"BHIo6qwJarI":[{"hn_comment_id":41403613,"author":"jackschultz","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing","text":"Awesome to see this. One of my favorite songs to listen to that can get a pumped up feeling is Go! by Public Service Broadcasting where they use the voices from here in the song. I knew the source was Apollo landing, and it's cool to listen to the words from their origination. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15973175,"author":"morsch","month":"2017-12","story_title":"The triumph and near-tragedy of the first Moon landing","text":"I had the 15 minutes to spare. :) The go calls as well as some other chatter feature prominently in the song Go! by Public Service Broadcasting: [VIDEO] (The Louis La Roche remix is also great.) The whole album is spaceflight-sample-themed.","stance":"rec"}],"BI-old7YI4I":[{"hn_comment_id":16703293,"author":"jakeogh","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Missions could see NASA spacecraft heading to Uranus and Neptune","text":"Outward Bound: Colonizing Venus: [VIDEO] Caution: don't click unless you have nothing else to do today.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23132594,"author":"alistproducer2","month":"2020-05","story_title":"How Long Was Venus Habitable?","text":"I enjoy Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel where he explores topics like colonizing Venus. Here's the video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BKP1I7IocYU":[{"hn_comment_id":37648212,"author":"a13o","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Minecraft Wiki has forked from Fandom","text":"You might enjoy this citizen science dive into the relationship between WoW and wikis, titled \"Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft\". One of the premises is that wikis are required reading; because if you aren't min/maxing, you're breaking the social contract with your guildmates. It's a totally emergent and novel way for a game to become 'unplayable'! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38031838,"author":"steveklabnik","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Oxide: The Cloud Computer","text":"I am unsure why you are curious about documentary recommendations from me, haha, but here's one I enjoyed quite a bit recently: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42591017,"author":"nozzlegear","month":"2025-01","story_title":"OnlyFangs has made 'World of Warcraft' into Twitch's best soap opera","text":"You've had several replies talking about how Molten Core will be cleared easily by modern WoW players, and as someone who plays retail WoW (and has been playing continuously since Burning Crusade) I'll vouch for that take. Molten Core's mechanics are trivially easy compared to the things retail players are up against even in simple dungeons. That said, the type of player who plays WoW now has also changed since the original raiders entered Molten Core so many years ago. People still raid for fun, but like many things in modern society\u00b9, you're also there to raid \"efficiently.\" This documentary that I watched recently called \"Why it's rude to suck at World of Warcraft\" is worth the watch. It talks about how raiding has changed from a fun thing that people used to do in vanilla WoW, where a guild of 40 people would put up with the weird gnome in the guild who wouldn't wear boots, to a hyper competitive pseudo-esport where players stopped tolerating that gnome player over a decade ago. [VIDEO] \u00b9 trying not to sound too preachy, I personally love the \"get good and keep improving yourself\" aspect about WoW, and it's why I push in the game's rated arena brackets each season.","stance":"rec"}],"BLGFriOKz6U":[{"hn_comment_id":16228942,"author":"karlshea","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Apple, in Sign of Health Ambitions, Adds Medical Records Feature for iPhone","text":"They do all sorts of device key exchange, if you haven't watched the talk at Black Hat I'd highly recommend it: [VIDEO] (link goes to beginning of Secure Enclave content, and later on in the talk he discusses iCloud which uses the SEP keys)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16229154,"author":"karlshea","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Apple, in Sign of Health Ambitions, Adds Medical Records Feature for iPhone","text":"The Black Hat talk was really great: [VIDEO] (link is to SEP and on-device encryption, 22:30 is iCloud stuff) > I know they said they could have accessed that San Bernardino terrorist\u2019s iCloud backup if only they had one. Not sure if they\u2019ve change the security architecture since then. I actually think they have, the shooting was in 2015 and iOS 10 was released in 2016 and was first to have some of the features he talks about in the video.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20909573,"author":"Twisell","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Ask HN: How comfortable do you feel using cloud-based password managers?","text":"I tried 1Password but finally resolved to use iCloud keychain after watching this BlackHat 2016 video [VIDEO] . I mean as far as I already trust their OS nothing can really protect me from being spied by them if they are ill intentioned, so as long as they are serious and patch their security flaw on a timely manner I can live with that. Beside it come as a free plan if you don't need more than 5GB of iCloud storage. I'd figure using an external password manager just add another third party I need to trust and the fact that 1Password offer browser app interface (on top of native) don't reassure me in any way. Of course if I'd ever need to reassess my threat model because I can't trust Apple anymore, I will quit iCloud service at the same time as their OS and go full FOSS.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39391679,"author":"dilippkumar","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose","text":"There have been several comments along the lines of: \"Why should I trust apple and their security, but not that of a third-party web browser?\" I don't have an answer for you. But I want to recommend this talk from 7 years ago: [VIDEO] That alone convinced me. Apple knows what it is doing when it comes to device security. Today, I trust them with my most sensitive data and sleep peacefully at night.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44642506,"author":"jesseendahl","month":"2025-07","story_title":"UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US","text":"This is not just encryption in transit or simplistic client-side encryption. It is end-to-end encryption, where each device's key generation is handled by your phone's Secure Enclave. This article is a decent starting point in terms of what Advanced Data Protection is: [LINK] If you want a deeper dive into the security engineering of iCloud Keychain, the second half of this Blackhat talk by Apple's head of Security Engineering & Architecture (SEAR) is really great: Synchronizing secrets: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46736038,"author":"eddyg","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops","text":"You shouldn't include Apple in this. As of macOS Tahoe, the FileVault key you (optionally) escrow with Apple is stored in the iCloud Keychain, which is cryptographically secured by HSM-backed, rate-limited protections. You can (and should) watch [VIDEO] for all the details about how iCloud is protected.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46744075,"author":"eddyg","month":"2026-01","story_title":"MS confirms it will give the FBI your Windows PC data encryption key if asked","text":"Which is a very good thing. iCloud is much more secure than most people realize because most people don\u2019t take the 30 minutes to learn how it is architected. You can (and should) watch [VIDEO] for all the details about how iCloud is protected, but especially the time-linked section. :)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13032407,"author":"arkadiyt","month":"2016-11","story_title":"The limitations of Android N Encryption","text":"For a really in-depth dive about the iOS class keys system he mentions I recommend this 2016 blackhat talk by Ivan Krstic (head of security at Apple): [VIDEO] (relevant portion starts at 6:56)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16455898,"author":"abalone","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears","text":"Passwords are backed up but they are end to end encrypted. Check out Cloud Key Vault, it\u2019s a pretty cool solution for keychain (password) backups designed for adversarial clouds. Unfortunately does not apply to regular iCloud backups or most other data. But a major step forward. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16984566,"author":"xmodem","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Apple iMac Pro and Secure Storage","text":"Take a look at this blackhat talk from Apple's head of security Ivan Krstic, where he explains the mechanism they use to secure credentials stored in the cloud: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20662919,"author":"ghostpepper","month":"2019-08","story_title":"FBI tells lawmakers it can't access Dayton gunman's phone","text":"The apple security whitepaper is actually a decent place to start [LINK] There is also a blackhat talk from Ivan Krstic (one of the top security people at apple) where he goes surprisingly deep [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27843624,"author":"eddyg","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Luxury Surveillance","text":"You may be interested in watching Ivan Krsti\u0107\u2019s BlackHat talk[0], in which he details the security of the iCloud infrastructure. The use of physical one-way hash functions is involved. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36237169,"author":"jesseendahl","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Tailscale doesn't want your password","text":">So I don't really understand how this can be said to be a hardware security token. No one claimed it's a hardware security token, but the private keys are stored in iCloud Keychain, which is end-to-end encrypted. Apple cannot access your private keys even if iCloud is compromised by an external attacker or employee. If you're curious about the security engineering, you should watch the \"Synchronizing secrets\" part of this Black Hat talk from 2016: [VIDEO] or you should read the \"Synchronization security\" section of the \"About the security of passkeys\" support doc: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"BTHvs3V8DBA":[{"hn_comment_id":466076,"author":"teej","month":"2009-02","story_title":"Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic","text":"[VIDEO] That link is a talk on YSlow, a tool you can use to lower download speed, render time, and perceived load time. It's awesome.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":724417,"author":"patio11","month":"2009-07","story_title":"Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales - How to Crush it","text":"Watch the YSlow guys and be enlightened. Everything they produce about the subject (and I don't just mean the plugin) is solid gold. They are easily the best \"Follow these simple directions and you will make money\" technical material I've ever seen. video of talk: [VIDEO] slides of another: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"BTlUyS-T-_4":[{"hn_comment_id":44908750,"author":"sovietswag","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Nobody\u2019s buying homes, nobody\u2019s switching jobs, America\u2019s mobility is stalling","text":"I wonder what you'd think about this video from Gary's Economics about the housing crisis: [VIDEO] It feels to me like a good faith counterargument to the YIMBY build more housing line of thought, so might be an interesting perspective","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45243445,"author":"__turbobrew__","month":"2025-09","story_title":"World emissions hit record high, but the EU leads trend reversal","text":"This situation has played out in every developed nation, do you really think NL is unique? Look at any country in Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, China, \u2026 and they all have a huge issue with inflated asset prices (housing, stocks, gold) because wealth is becoming more concentrated and rich people need to park their wealth somewhere, and that somewhere is gold, stocks, real estate, bonds, and mortgages. Also notice that asset prices started increasing across the world way before we had green energy policies. I live in a place where they canceled a bunch of green energy policies (mainly carbon taxes) and guess what happened to asset prices? Nothing. Also note that the top 10% of wealthy people own over 50% of the wealth in NL [LINK] If you don\u2019t feel like reading Piketty I would recommend watching this short video which shares a bunch of views with Piketty: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46295347,"author":"AnonymousPlanet","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Baumol's Cost Disease","text":"> Now suppose construction is cheap and zoning doesn't prohibit this. For 10% of the cost of the land, we could build a condo tower on that same piece of land. Ten stories, 100 housing units. The cost of a unit just went by down by a factor of ~100. The price of the land doubling is dwarfed by the increase in the number of permissible units per plot of land. That's a brilliant plan! Let me buy the piece of land where that high rise stands with money you can't afford. Oh, you mean you have split ownership between all the owners of the units so you now can afford it? I'll buy half of the units then and rent them out. And when things are not looking good for people, I buy some more when they can't afford their loans anymore. Can't let those units depreciate, can we? My friends are in on the party and together we're keeping the demand up. And those prices go up and up. Oh, the cost of each unit has now doubled and tripled while your wages haven't? Too bad for you. I can still afford them and now you have been out competed by me. It's the same game just with a lower starting point. Maybe this former financial trader can explain it better [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BXmOlCy0oBM":[{"hn_comment_id":19710867,"author":"riobard","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Goodbye Joe","text":"Fred probably forgot to mention it, but Joe, Mike, and Robert starred in a short film Erlang: The Movie , a very fine and concise demonstration of fault-tolerance of Erlang. The film has some magic power that I cannot describe but made me watching it over and over again. YouTube link to the film with fixed audio: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28375205,"author":"ashton314","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Why Erlang?","text":"This is almost certainly a reference to Erlang: The Movie [1] which is the most glorious 11 minutes of some programmers explaining how their creation works you will ever see. In the video, the three call each other to demonstrate what happens real-time in an Erlang system. For the impatient, the telephone conversation starts at about minute 3. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"BYRTvoZ3Rho":[{"hn_comment_id":13020917,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Computer scientists urge Clinton campaign to challenge election results","text":"Andrew Appel (CS Prof. at Princeton) also gave a very good talk earlier this year about the problems of electronic voting systems. [LINK] edit: Also, Ron Rivest was recently on Numberphile, where he talked about using homomorphic encryption to enable end-to-end verifiable voting. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14921882,"author":"khrm","month":"2017-08","story_title":"To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software","text":"I find Rivest's video( [VIDEO] ) on homomorphic encryption as voting mechanism quite interesting. It looks more secure than pen and paper. All user get a receipt which they can verify is same during vote counting. They themselves can vote count using all others receipt. At the same time, they can't sell their vote as it's encrypted.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19856023,"author":"YokoZar","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting","text":"The mechanism for voter verification is based on homomorphic encryption. Numberphile made a video on this topic recently, with a few basic explainers: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19856710,"author":"YokoZar","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting","text":"Right - the way you verify that is by asking for 100 sealed Alice envelopes, and opening 99 of them at random. If the machine was trying to trick you, you have a strong chance of catching it. You still walk out with a sealed envelope, and the would-be vote-buyer can't be sure it isn't a Bob envelope. This Numberphile video explains the process a bit more: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20075487,"author":"PyroLagus","month":"2019-06","story_title":"A Peer to Peer Voting Algorithm [pdf]","text":"> I've seen many proposed implementations but they all fail because if I can prove my vote to myself in any way, someone else can make me prove it to them either to buy or coerce my ballot. There is a way to prove that your vote was counted without being able to prove what you voted for by using homomorphic encryption. So, if someone wanted to coerce you or pay you for voting at all for whomever you want, they could do it, but that's fine. Microsoft is actually working with Galois on a system operating on this principle[1], and here's a good video explaining the basic concepts of how it works[2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42030070,"author":"c1ccccc1","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Colorado scrambles to change voting-system passwords after accidental leak","text":"Cryptographers are clever and have figured out a way to let you know your vote was counted without being able to prove it to a third party! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"B_nGEj8wIP0":[{"hn_comment_id":32620847,"author":"yevpats","month":"2022-08","story_title":"What to read to understand how economists think","text":"Milton Friedman - Money and Inflation - [VIDEO] I think is under rated talk which explains complex stuff in layman terms.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31492548,"author":"_448","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What things in the world are increasing at the fastest rate?","text":"- Militarisation. Countries are spending a lot of defence. - The move towards reverting globalisation(with rising unemployment, countries are looking inwards) - Inflation (this is not going to end in the near future; inflation is the result of quantitative easing that was done multiple times. Here is a good explanation of that: [VIDEO] ) - Differences among citizens of different countries are becoming prominent (the reason is the same as point #2 above)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31791412,"author":"Mertax","month":"2022-06","story_title":"How Inflation Works","text":"I watched this video from Friedman just a couple of days ago and found it insightful on the topic of inflation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Bca5_uyH9E4":[{"hn_comment_id":30098468,"author":"noughtme","month":"2022-01","story_title":"13 years sailing around the world","text":"He's kind of a legend, and seems to give interviews to anyone who runs into him. Here's a pretty good recent one and a tour of his boat: [VIDEO] His actual videos might be more interesting to someone with an interest in (unconventional) boat building.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32027676,"author":"jarrenae","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What'd you do while HN was down?","text":"I've been on a sailing kick recently, and think you'd like this vlog featuring Sven and one of his boats: [VIDEO] The sheer utility of every component of the craft is awesome.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38147213,"author":"oska","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free?","text":"Really appreciate that link, thanks. Hadn't heard of the guy before. Only started to explore his blog. I watched this video [1] to get an idea about the man and his boat design philosophy and it's very cool. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Bd2bbHoVQSM":[{"hn_comment_id":35277042,"author":"cableshaft","month":"2023-03","story_title":"The FTC wants to ban those tough-to-cancel gym and cable subscriptions","text":"Yeah, John Oliver just did a Last Week Tonight on Timeshares. He goes over that in the video. Also there are scam companies that exist that promise to take your money to help you exit your timeshare agreement, then disappear. So you get double-scammed. And somehow this is technically legal? Link to the Last Week Tonight video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36032247,"author":"dixie_land","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Roblox: Ten-year-old spent \u00a32,500 of mum's money without her knowing","text":"John Oliver had an interesting segment on timeshares and argues timeshare exit companies are even bigger scams: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41650857,"author":"VTimofeenko","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Timeshare owner? The Mexican drug cartels want you","text":"I am very sorry to hear that and I hope they can properly escape this situation. Maybe my opinion is biased (the media generally does not publish \"everythibg is a-OK\" articles), but my perception of the timeshare escape industry is that they are sketchy too. I think this Last Week Tonight episode is very informative on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Bd8_vO5zrjo":[{"hn_comment_id":27347197,"author":"sillysaurusx","month":"2021-05","story_title":"We only ever talk about the third attack on Pearl Harbor","text":"It wasn't as lucky as it seems. The dive bombers were able to dive straight down, almost vertically, with no risk of being shot down by the enemy Zero fighters (since they were drawn away by a previous attack). It's more lucky that they didn't attack the same targets, than that they hit their targets. Also, not directly relevant, but I'll plug this video: [VIDEO] it's great.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21084197,"author":"tony","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?","text":"- Psychologist / Counselor / Professor: Huge impact opportunity. Society is so career and status focused nobody pays attention to emotional needs. There is opportunity help others understand and express the feelings of why they suffer, instead of acting out in indirect/critical, dysfunctional ways, which compounds the problems. That is just benefits that can be attained at ground floor. Please check out Attachment Theory and Schema Therapy: [LINK] , [LINK] - History professor: Because history rocks. Aside: Montemayor, an independent history documentary maker, has a documentary on The Battle of Midway at [VIDEO] . If you would like to support his work he has a Paypal on his channel page! - Flipping houses: Upgrade carpentry from tech level 0 to tech level 3 and get property + credit line","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22574425,"author":"jasode","month":"2020-03","story_title":"AlphaGo \u2013 The Movie [video]","text":">, raises a lot of questions about what it means to be human. The relationship between AI and humans is developing and a topic of intense interest, especially among the HN crowd. We're talking about 2 different things: the importance of the topic vs the the method of exposition . You're emphasizing the topic's importance. I'm not disagreeing with that. Instead, I'm explaining that the documentary's style of exposition would be a turnoff to a subset of the HN demographic. As example showing differences in how Battle of Midway can be explained... Here's the \"personality-driven\" type of history documentary. Scrub the video and you'll see there's a lot of video showing the narrators walking around the beach and flying in helicopters: [LINK] To be fair, some viewers need attractive people talking to the camera to make history \"interesting\". What does an attractive man walking along the beach have to do with explaining strategy and tactics at Midway?!? Nothing. Maybe some viewers need \"eye candy\" to go along with their medicine of history. Basically, all of The History Channel is structured as personality-driven type of documentaries with a human-interest angle. Compare that to another style of delivery with no video of talking heads but has a voice-over with maps and higher information content: [VIDEO] If HN viewers want the 2nd style of documentary for AlphaGo, this thread's url is not it. The importance of \"what it means to be human\" is orthogonal to the method of explanation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26687282,"author":"rusanu","month":"2021-04","story_title":"USS Johnston: Sub dives to deepest-known shipwreck","text":"This youtube series telling the Battle of Midway from Japanese perspective (ie. only using the information available to them)is interesting [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27347249,"author":"SkyMarshal","month":"2021-05","story_title":"We only ever talk about the third attack on Pearl Harbor","text":"The amount of luck involved in the US victory at Midway is astonishing. About the only part of it not due to luck was the codebreaking that tipped off the US about the coming Midway attack, the heroic efforts of the dock workers in getting the damaged Yorktown fixed and back to sea in 72hrs, and persistence of the aviators who finally broke through the Japanese defenses and hit the carriers. This video series from the Japanese perspective is pretty good and shows all the luck involved: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29475734,"author":"kayodelycaon","month":"2021-12","story_title":"We only talk about the third attack on Pearl Harbor","text":"For midway, you might want to watch: [VIDEO] > Ineffective dive bombing at Midway? It was the only thing that was effective! Poorly executed would be a better term. They succeeded by almost pure luck. Two different squadrons managed to accidentally attack in different directions at the same time while the Japanese carriers had fully fueled and armed airplanes in their hangars waiting for an opening to launch an attack. Their hit ratio was terrible, but one bomb on a carrier was enough to destroy it given the conditions. > And, what was poor about the navigation at Midway? USS Hornet's Flight to Nowhere. The carrier completely screwed up launching their squadrons and then went in the wrong direction. Their torpedo bomber squadron mutinied and went in a different direction. The torpedo bombers found the Japanese but without any friendly fighters to protect them, all where shot down. All 10 Wildcat fighters ran out of fuel and ditched in the ocean. The other groups aborted to Midway after getting critically low on fuel and not finding any targets. At least four planes lost from the other groups. Blog post: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30479630,"author":"philistine","month":"2022-02","story_title":"How Russia Took over the Internet in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine","text":"> Even with overwhelming superiority during WW2, the US damn near lost their first attempt to invade Japan. > Ditto for Japan attacking Midway, and every other decisive battle. What you're missing here is the fog of war. When decisions are viewed through what information was available to the decision-makers, it paints a far more relatable picture. No one was stupid at Midway. Have a look at this long video going through the battle from the Japanese perspective: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BdHK_r9RXTc":[{"hn_comment_id":32042613,"author":"bitwize","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Kate Bush\u2019s \u201cRunning Up That Hill\u201d synth sounds","text":"Also recommend everything by Reggie Watts, a master of the vocal layering technique. His TED talk is one for the ages: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6921328,"author":"mxfh","month":"2013-12","story_title":"We Need to Talk About TED","text":"Reggie Watts pretty much said it all back in 2012. [VIDEO] Hard to imagine how anyone could follow up after this.","stance":"rec"}],"Bea4FS-zDzc":[{"hn_comment_id":33624927,"author":"duncans","month":"2022-11","story_title":"EVs are the least reliable vehicle type: Consumer Reports","text":"Regarding the pop-out door handles - this is a fascinating video on how the Tesla Model S door handles design has been refined and made more reliable by someone who used to work at Tesla (SuperfastMatt) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43014678,"author":"gloxkiqcza","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Nvidia's RTX 5090 power connectors are melting","text":"A bit off topic, but this is something HN might enjoy. It\u2019s a video by a mechanical engineer that worked for Tesla, Apple and a NASCAR team about Tesla door handles over time. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46915820,"author":"lylejantzi3rd","month":"2026-02","story_title":"The overlooked evolution of the humble car door handle","text":"This is a great video by SuperfastMatt on the engineering behind and evolution of the Tesla door handle. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BiKfWdXXfIs":[{"hn_comment_id":16957409,"author":"Radim","month":"2018-04","story_title":"'We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will mention","text":"A fascinating talk, and a counter viewpoint from a top physicist: \"Freeman Dyson on the Global Warming Hysteria\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22448876,"author":"briantakita","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Freeman Dyson Has Died","text":"Freeman Dyson did speak out against climate alarmism. He provides some insightful counterpoints to the prevailing APW narrative, particularly about taking models on faith & the provisional nature of science. Given he was directly involved with some of the initial climate models, it's an interesting take on how models of complex nonlinear systems often oversimplify reality with assumptions. It seems like good general wisdom re: models in any domain exhibiting similar complexity & nonlinearity. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22911269,"author":"chrisco255","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Remembering Freeman Dyson","text":"He was an expert as much as anyone. From his wiki: \"Around 1979 Dyson worked with the Institute for Energy Analysis on climate studies. This group, under Alvin Weinberg's direction, pioneered multidisciplinary climate studies, including a strong biology group. Also during the 1970s, Dyson worked on climate studies conducted by the JASON defense advisory group.[26]\" He held the view that CO2 was mostly beneficial to the biosphere and that anthropogenic warming was much milder than has been estimated. You can watch his interview on the subject of you're curious. He explains his position quite coherently: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BickMFHAZR0":[{"hn_comment_id":20392098,"author":"linsomniac","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Water transport system inspired by trees","text":"Just recently watched a Veritasium video on how trees get water from the roots to the top of the tree, and it's pretty awesome: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38134367,"author":"_nalply","month":"2023-11","story_title":"In a surprising finding, light can make water evaporate without heat","text":"[VIDEO] It's an old video, more than ten years ago, but it aged well IMHO. I re-watched it and re-learned things I have forgotten.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48783282,"author":"bnegreve","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches","text":"> all it should take is a system of valves, That would work, but it's not how to works apparently. According to this veritasium video, it's because of \"negative pressure\" aka tension. [VIDEO] I recommend watching, I think it's one of the best veritasium Dereck has ever produced.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5085348,"author":"vacri","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Why trees can't grow taller than around 100 metres","text":"This is an interesting video with an alternate explanation - the pressure required to get water to the top of the tree. Normally you can only suck a water column up 10 meters, and that's using a perfect vacuum - but trees can grow higher than that. The secret sauce is that in a liquid rather than a gas, you can have a negative pressure. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BiqDZlAZygU":[{"hn_comment_id":24307636,"author":"eblanshey","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store","text":"I recently watched an excellent speech concerning freedom of speech and freedom of protest by Rowan Atkinson, and feel it's very appropriate to share here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30157833,"author":"ninjin","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Man found guilty of \u2018grossly offensive\u2019 tweet","text":"Sadly, this kind of behaviour is on brand when it comes to the UK state. It is less than ten years since Section 5 [1] was reformed to remove the display of \u201cinsulting\u201d words and writing in public as an offence (Rowan Atkinson made an excellent speech on the matter back then [2]). However, the overall mentality and other laws are still very much at large. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] While I still do not claim to fully comprehend British culture, there is always an odd undercurrent of authoritarianism whose chill I can feel now and then \u2013 it is worth noting that it bridges the political divide. I have talked about this with my British colleagues and heard numerous explanations, but none that I feel satisfactory. At times when I feel particularly dark I joke about this with said colleagues and say: \u201cYou say that you went to war with the Germans on behalf of the free world. But at times I wonder: Was it not that they in a way were outdoing you and you were feeling a bit envious?\u201d Now, clearly this is intended to be offensive and not something that I genuinely believe, but like many jokes, it somewhat works because there is some kernel of truth at its core.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32135333,"author":"Jaruzel","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Rowan Atkinson: Visual Comedy (1992) [video]","text":"Rowan is a staunch defender of Free Speech in Comedy. When it looked like the UK government were going to legislate against it, he delivered this amazing speech: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Bkm2Vfj42FY":[{"hn_comment_id":20792602,"author":"einhverfr","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Blame Economists for the Mess We\u2019re In","text":"If you have the time and patience to listen to it I strongly recommend listening to Mark Blyth's 2016 lecture entitled \"Global Trumpism\" where as a political economist he discusses the implications of Keynsian economics, Neoliberalism and the class revolt we now see around the world. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12666709,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Hillary Clinton's Wall St Speeches Published by Wikileaks","text":"There is a rapidly growing group of people that are tired of the status quo. They are reacting strongly against the neoliberal and technocratic establishment. To the very large masses of blue collar workers, globalism means watching their jobs move to cheaper markets. This is the environment where populist movements arise, which are not tied to traditional right/left politics. Hence the rise of populists like Trump, anti-establishment reactions like brexit, and a long list of similar movements that have been popping up around the world. For a good explanation of this (with charts!), see Mark Blyth's recent lecture[1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12909272,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.","text":"This was ignored when I tried to post it recently, but maybe now is the time for Brown U. Prof. of Political Economy Mark Blyth's discussion of \"Global Trumpism\" - the discontent with the establishment and general revolt against technocracy and globalism. Full lecture: [VIDEO] TL;DW 4min summary: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13253112,"author":"wycx","month":"2016-12","story_title":"All Hollowed Out  the lonely poverty of America\u2019s white working class","text":"Thomas Frank on Listen Liberal: [LINK] I also suggest the following talk by Mark Blyth: [VIDEO] which concisely outlines the economics behind the decline of western middle classes, and the link to sentiment against mainstream political parties. If you are interested in how bad things look for europe (from 2013, but the fundamentals have not changed): [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"BnSUk0je6oo":[{"hn_comment_id":29034925,"author":"RealityVoid","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Facebook Unceremoniously Kills Off 'Oculus' Brand","text":"The Index is great, but it will lose in the end because of 3 reasons: 1) much cheaper price 2) portability 3) seamless onboarding experience I love my index but there is no way that it can currently beat oculus because of these things. Also, Oculus is well aware of these features. At least Carmack is. The highlight of connect for me was the Carmack keynote. I suggest all techies watch it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29043884,"author":"hotwire","month":"2021-10","story_title":"John Carmack issues some words of warning for Meta and its metaverse plans","text":"Here's his actual keynote speech: [VIDEO] As always, John is a master of communication and clear thought.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29053026,"author":"bch","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Taking apart the 2010 Fisher Price re-released Music Box Record Player","text":"> and the VR/meta chapter won't help Tangential to this thread, I listened to Carmacks keynote[0] for the Facebook Connect event, and it\u2019s very refreshing to hear him push back, in ways that just make sense , instead of towing some corporate line that\u2019s part fantasy and snake oil. See his comments on \u201csocial metaverse\u201d and \u201c3D vs flat screens\u201d. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33171289,"author":"FrostKiwi","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Carmack Unscripted","text":"I recommend watching last year's speech by Carmack. It gives a little perspective as to why this was targeted to be a virtual session. He is not a fan of how Meta pushes the Metaverse, \"Money is flowing and enormous wheels in the company apparatus are turning\" and he wants to salvage that financial energy to push technology in some meaningful way. (Pushing down audio latency on the Quest 2 was such a talking point). This shows what Meta's tech is capable of, mask off, no per-rendered CG advert and I think that's a good thing. Besides that, afaik he is largely detached from that project now and only does once a week consulting, with the main focus being his pursuit of AGI. Doesn't change of course how embarrassingly bad Meta's money invested vs results achieved are. edit: Fount the spot I referenced. [VIDEO] at 15:10 onward","stance":"rec"}],"BpsMkLaEiOY":[{"hn_comment_id":10899245,"author":"rdtsc","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold","text":"In line with this is the classic \"It Can't Be Hushed Here\" Nest bug video, by Brad Fitzpatrick from last year: [VIDEO] [Warning: contains extremely annoying Nest smoke detectors beeping. So prepare to lower your volume] Brad looks very annoyed and it was no fun for him, but on an artistic level it is really well done, it is an epic battle between human and machine.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24042656,"author":"kyrra","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Google to buy 6.6% stake in ADT in home security push","text":"(googler, opinions are my own) I honestly like bradfitz's youtube video the best to show the Nest Protect (the smoke alarm) issues[0]. They have since fixed these issues, as this was the gen one protect. For your #2 (no insider knowledge), that looks like people's accounts getting hacked and then the hackers talking through them. All home camera cloud based cameras have had these cases. I think Nest moving to Google account login system for Nest is probably the best protection against this kind of thing happening. Account takeovers happen, and guarding against them at scale is hard (especially when people reuse passwords). For #1, I think the culture has changed a lot as it's been absorbed into Google's hardware division. Hopefully it's better, but I couldn't say anything of value there. [0] [VIDEO] (warning, loud video)","stance":"rec"}],"Bqx6li5dbEY":[{"hn_comment_id":21268331,"author":"sarvind","month":"2019-10","story_title":"And 'Lo!': How the internet was born","text":"I suspect this comment is aimed at segments like this one with Ted Nelson of Hypertext fame: [VIDEO] On first viewing, I too felt it was incomprehensible wordsoup in some sense - but upon learning more about Nelson and the history and context around which his ideas were developed, I've grown to find this interview almost magical.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13634290,"author":"azeirah","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Show HN: DeepUI Programming Studio \u2013 A different approach to programming","text":"There's someone who definitely spent a lot of time on this, definitely check out Ted Nelson's ZigZag structure: [LINK] It is exactly that, an attempt to structure data in a similar way that our thoughts are formed. I believe it was this video where he shortly explained that concept; [VIDEO] Although it might be a different video since Ted Nelson is all over the place with his documents and videos.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15270983,"author":"mixedbit","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Xanadu","text":"Here is an interview in which Ted Nelson explains his vision to Werner Herzog: [VIDEO] The interview is included in 'Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World' documentary. The whole documentary is rather critical of the impact the Internet revolution had on our society, but Herzog seemed to really admire Ted Nelson's alternative vision for the global network.","stance":"rec"}],"BrK7X_XlGB8":[{"hn_comment_id":14966883,"author":"mathzthrowaway6","month":"2017-08","story_title":"The Kolmogorov option","text":"I wrote the present comment to 1) teach something about mathematics and probability 2) share enlightenment. In summary this comment should change your thinking about all subjects, forever. -------------- Program of study for this comment: 1. Read section 1 (approx. 1 hour.) Goal: improve your mathematical reasoning. 2. 30 minute break. 3. Read section 2 (approx 5 minutes). Goal: enlightenment. 1. The most important mathematical video you will ever see in your life. Firstly, unless you are a practicing mathematician this is the most important mathematical video you will ever see in your life. It is purely about mathematics: [VIDEO] Watch it. Suppose that you take an hour and learn this. You have just improved your rational thinking forever. - Break. Please now take a 30-minute break. During this time you can reflect and assimilate the knowledge you have learned. - 2. The most important social insight you will read in any comment. This section requires you to understand section 1. Next, suppose that you are perfectly rational. If I present you a (fair) coin and ask you to judge whether it is fair, after, say, thirty or forty flips you will conclude that it is fair. If I give you the same coin but also the knowledge that it was drawn from an infinite bag with 1 fair coin in it -- for example, let's say coins are numbered, I select a real number between 0 and 1, and only the coin with the exact value 0.5 is fair, any other coin is unfair, weighted - then even given hours, days, w","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14967445,"author":"mathzthrowaway6","month":"2017-08","story_title":"The Kolmogorov option","text":"Note: as a throwaway I was unable to complete edits to this comment, therefore please upvote (and endorse) only this version. The first version should remain dead as a dupe. ----- In the spirit of the article we're discussing, I wrote the present comment to 1) teach something about mathematics and probability 2) share a bit of social enlightenment. In summary this comment should change your thinking fundamentally. You will need to read it carefully but I promise it is relevant. (Please endorse it and upvote it, if you agree.) -------------- Program of study for this comment. I suggest you go through this comment as follows. 1. Read section 1 (approx. 1 hour.) Goal: improve your mathematical reasoning. 2. 30 minute break. 3. Read section 2 (approx 5 minutes). Goal: social insight. 4. Generalize the insight just gained. Goal: make the example more practical. This is an exercise for the reader. ---------- 1. One of the most important mathematical videos you will ever see. Firstly, unless you are a practicing mathematician this is one of the most important mathematical video you will ever see: [VIDEO] Watch it. As a result you will improve your rational thinking forever. - Break. I suggest you next take a 30-minute break. During this time you can reflect on and assimilate the knowledge you have learned. - 2. An important social insight. This section requires you to understand section 1. Next, suppose that you are perfectly rational. We will introduce an extreme case, and you will","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19206855,"author":"thrwaway190220","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Google says Nest\u2019s built-in mic not listed in specs was not meant to be secret","text":">You have two options, choose one: Your analysis is sensible. Where we should choose the most likely explanation, it might become sharper: - In case you're not familiar with it, one helpful tool is prior probability (Bayesian thinking). This video is short and accessible: [VIDEO] - There is a public intelligence budget in 2018 of $54.9 billion in the United States[1], as compared with the combined annual R&D expenditure of Apple, Google, Intel, and Microsoft at $53.2 billion[2]. This employs over 100,000 people[3]. - According to Snowden, they covertly use microphones.[4] He had reporters put their mobile phones in a fridge/microwave, since they could be turned on remotely. A sensible assumption is that you are unlikely to chance upon a covert surveillance mechanisms if one is installed. (For example, speakers could also be used as microphones.) Where a bug is present, I think assigning 1% to the probability of finding it is reasonable. In view of the above, after you find an undisclosed and apparently (but not physically) disabled microphone in a product, which is more likely? 1. One of the 100,000 people mentioned, using some of the $59,900,000,000 annual budget mentioned, put it there. They do this thousands of times per year, and you've just found one of them. However, the chances of your finding it are low. (1%). 2. It was put in there as part of normal product design but left unused. Perhaps it will be legitimately enabled in a future version. Perhaps Google will use it","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28230232,"author":"techsin101","month":"2021-08","story_title":"How is efficacy vs. severe disease strong if 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?","text":"Bayesian statistics at play here... Good explanation: [VIDEO] Imagine a world where there are 100 unvax and 9 million vaxed, now even if vaccines are 99% effective, you'd get 9M x 0.01 = 90k vax and sick.","stance":"rec"}],"BsVydyC8ZGQ":[{"hn_comment_id":3905493,"author":"beosrocks","month":"2012-04","story_title":"The Dawn of Haiku OS","text":"dr_dank's comment on Slashdot ( [LINK] ) pretty much sums up its awesomeness: BeOS was demonstrated to me during my senior year of college. The guy giving the talk played upwards of two dozen mp3s, a dozen or so movie trailers, the GL teapot thing, etc. simultanously. None of the apps skipped a beat. Then, he pulled out the showstopper. He yanked the plug on the box. Within 20 seconds or so of restarting, the machine was chugging away with all of its media files in the place they were when they were halted, as if nothing had happened. If you've never played with BeOS on an old Pentium II, it's hard to imagine the kind of performance it was able to squeeze out of that hardware. Here's a rough idea: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11247186,"author":"nickpsecurity","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Lessons Learned from 30 Years of MINIX","text":"\"Tanenbaum mentions commentators on slashdot who never tried a microkernel. That's me and I never tried to write an OS either. \" \"Suppose I'm just interested in desktop applications. Linux is already treated as a lost cause. That's what gets me because at the moment, the microkernels don't seem like an alternative in my case. If I'm not yet convinced by the opponents, I'm looking for facts, not anecdotes or authority. \" Ahh, OK. Well, I'm guessing you probably used Windows/DOS desktops back in the 1990's, right? They were OK for apps but architecturally terrible. That meant they crashed a lot, slogged down under heavy load, and so on. UNIX and Linux didn't do much better outside of SGI's machines. Hell, were barely usable. You'll appreciate what this microkernel-based, concurrency-oriented desktop is doing if you remember those days: [VIDEO] Note: I couldn't even drag videos without them skipping back then. They do that in the demo while other stuff is playing. Too bad Microsoft had a monopoly and Jobs turned them down for Darwin in Next (later became Mac OS X). An early great one that's in all kinds of stuff is QNX microkernel. It did a POSIX-compatible implementation w/ microkernel, fast message-passing, and hard real-time. Later showed off its capabilities with a desktop on a floppy with GUI, web browser, etc. Users, including Animats (Nagle) here, said you could be doing day-to-day stuff with big compiles in background with no hit to responsiveness due to its great schedu","stance":"rec"}],"BuaKzm7Kq9Q":[{"hn_comment_id":30076449,"author":"aurizon","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Blue Bubbles vs. Green Bubbles \u2013 The iMessage Lock-In [video]","text":"A clever and nefarious tactic - makes me wonder how this can be mis-used for assorted malevolence. What about beards? Red hair? This 'tube does a good summary of it, he is very eloquent. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31137751,"author":"martinflack","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years","text":"For a long-form answer, Marques Brownlee has a video[0] that discusses the technical, commercial, and social aspects. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Bv_5Zv5c-Ts":[{"hn_comment_id":12593810,"author":"sjnair96","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Free Beginner and Intermediate JavaScript Courses","text":"If anyone has ever tried Anthony Alicea's JS/NodeJS/Angular1 course[1],[2],[3], please let me know if rithmschool's or any other course holds a candle to it. I really really liked Tony's course as it gave quite a deep look into topics, which are usually only attainable from books, while at the same time keeping it very interesting and also contain lots of best practice material and being extremely dense but easy to digest. Do let me know if you guys know any other courses of the same style. If you haven't watched any of Tony's courses, do give them a shot -- they are the holy grails of online education for me. Rigorous -- but not boring or too long. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] Disclaimer: Because it may sound like it, I'd like to clarify I have absolutely no affiliation with Tony or his courses. I just really really liked them.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12593904,"author":"sjnair96","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Free Beginner and Intermediate JavaScript Courses","text":"We're two sides of the same coin - I know some JS (can't say I have any sort of mastery though) but don't have good HTML/CSS foundations. Let's trade resources? Here's the one I found to be the best by far - Anthony Alicea's Javascript Understanding The Weird Parts course. It's rigorous, and develops and intuition while not being long and boring. You can quite comfortably finish it in a week. Also, one thing that would really help if you're doing said course is is Joan Mira's notes[2] which I will myself be compiling into a Gitbook for future reference. [1] [VIDEO] [2] joanmira.com/javascript-understanding-the-weird-parts/ If you find anything similar in style to Tony's courses, I would love to start them right away. The thing is I'm right now in a patch of analysis paralysis of not being able to decide which course I should invest time in rather than just starting something.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13150138,"author":"sjnair96","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Learning Advanced JavaScript (2008)","text":"Once again I am going to shamelessly plug my favorite course author Anthony Alicea and his JS/NodeJS/Angular1 course[1],[2],[3]. I really really liked Tony's course as it gave quite a deep look into topics, which are usually only attainable from books, while at the same time keeping it very interesting and also contain lots of best practice material and being extremely dense but easy to digest. Do let me know if you guys know any other courses of the same style. For quite a while I have been trying to find similar courses/tutorials of similar caliber when it comes to knowledge gained and being easy to digest. If you haven't watched any of Tony's courses, do give them a shot. Rigorous -- but not boring or too long. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] . Disclaimer: Because it may sound like it, I'd like to clarify I have absolutely no affiliation with Tony or his courses. I just really really liked them.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11298626,"author":"adnanc","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most useful online course you have watched?","text":"Just came across this link from the course authors twitter Javascript: Understanding the Weird Parts - the first 3.5 hours free on Youtube: [VIDEO] Also has the entire course at 87% off [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18816642,"author":"SonnyWortzik","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Show HN: Learn and practice modern JavaScript","text":"There is a yt video that I found very well done and explained very well. He goes very deep in the inner workings of javascript. I think you will like it. It is \"modern\" but not a new video. It is probably about 3 years old. Still relevant. He has a udemy course for $10 bucks. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BwGsr3SzCZc":[{"hn_comment_id":11416336,"author":"Robadob","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Why metadata is bad \u2013 3 minute video your Mom will understand","text":"Longer video (25 minutes) of a talk from BlackHat 2013, about how metadata was used to expose an illegal(?) 2003 CIA operation carried out in Italy. It's by a non-tech journalist, so it's also largely non-technical and provides a very interesting overview of what metadata can expose. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17288634,"author":"shpx","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Sweden Tries to Halt Its March to Total Cashlessness","text":"Your phone's location can be silently triangulated based on what cellphone towers can see your phone and the strength of the signal to them. This is being done and you can buy the data from LocationSmart. This was discussed on HN a few weeks ago [0]. This data was used in Italy to catch CIA agents after they extrajudicially extradited (so to speak) a terrorist[1] in 2003 [VIDEO] . The whole talk is worth watching. The cost of storing this forever is negligible and going down. The government would be foolish or (in my opinion irrationally) principled not to hold on to this for the next 1,000 years. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21389816,"author":"theossuary","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Mass cellphone surveillance experiment in Spain","text":"It also seems like phones have their own tracking ids that they report, it's not just the sim card. There was a great talk about some of this from black hat; how the CIA renditioned Abu Omar out of Italy and how they were found out: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BxV14h0kFs0":[{"hn_comment_id":30799945,"author":"Sophira","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Should you make an open API?","text":"Tom Scott made a wonderful video a while back about open APIs, and about how they (mostly) died out[0]. It's currently called \"This Video Has 51,973,714 Views\", and I personally believe it's a great watch. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30808921,"author":"iamahackerguy","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Should you make an open API?","text":"Tom Scott made a wonderful video a while back about open APIs, and about how they (mostly) died out[0]. It's currently called \"This Video Has 51,973,714 Views\", and I personally believe it's a great watch. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ByNs9TG30E8":[{"hn_comment_id":9996300,"author":"lsdafjklsd","month":"2015-08","story_title":"ClojureScript 1.7: ClojureScript can compile itself","text":"Sorry if it wasn't apparent but I agree / advocate strongly for what you mention, and we use that model at my company. If you look at how Om evolved though, it started out with that simple model of passing the state object down to child components. Then cursors were implemented to make it easier to pass around parts of your global state without having components needing to know everything. GraphQL doesn't mean moving to stateful components, it's just a nicer way to have a singleton data store because instead of chunking and passing a map around, components can declare which data they need. In that system components are still read only, and dispatch to external pure functions. David Nolen does a great job talking about the trade offs and the evolution of everything in this talk [VIDEO] I highly recommend it!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10789719,"author":"iheartmemcache","month":"2015-12","story_title":"ClojureScript Year in Review","text":"I have nothing to say on Lein vs Boot, but I'm a long-term emacers with > 10 years and I can't endorse Cursive strongly enough. I've got easily at least 1k hours in my .emacs.d. Suffice it to say, it takes a lot to take away from Emacs/SLIME. Never bought into the Textmate hype during the Ruby days, or the SublimeText hype subsequently because Emacs already had all that functionality if not out of the box, there certainly was someone with an .el I could borrow. It takes a lot for me to leave Emacs, especially for a LISP. Here's my 2 cents - Cursive is worth it . (Hey Ideogram folks, if you want an endorsement, feel free to use that paragraph in exchange for a lifetime license ;)). For one-off-scripts, for back-end solutions, and what tipped me over the edge, it's CLJS script integration goes beyond acceptable -- it's actually fun to work in-- Cursive is my go-to. Om and Figwheel (optionally with Prismatic Schema if you like type guarantees) makes web development's feedback loop a lot tighter. Rich Hickey assembled a team of just insanely talented and charismatic(1) developers who not only are a) remarkably intelligent but b) know when to steal ideas and integrate them [none of that too-proud-NIH-syndrome there], and c) know how to interact in a way to that is community-feedback-positive(2) so people contribute. Watch this talk by David Nolen [VIDEO] (CLJS lead). [Sidebar - He even mentions how that whole immutable, one way data flow, datomic-ish single state idea existed in o","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10262704,"author":"llambda","month":"2015-09","story_title":"One in Three Farms Is Using FarmLogs","text":"> ...but right now we're focusing on building stuff instead of playing with languages Which is exactly what's so compelling with regard to ClojureScript and say Om or any one of the React wrappers out there: you guys already use Clojure and ClojureScript and its libraries are incredibly pragmatic and designed for \"real work\". CoffeeScript would seem more like language play than ClojureScript, but of course I'm speaking as an outsider. :) Also if you haven't already, take a look at David Nolen's recent talk on Om Next[1]. Personally if I were using Clojure on the backend, I'd be pushing hard for it on the frontend too. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Bz2-49q6DOI":[{"hn_comment_id":7628209,"author":"jmagoon","month":"2014-04","story_title":"How to be a great software developer","text":"Can we also add \"Ninja\" and \"Genius\" to the list of abused recruitment buzzwords? And don't even get me started on \"passion\". (David Mitchell's take: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13587425,"author":"lacampbell","month":"2017-02","story_title":"You don't have to be a passionate programmer","text":"The \"passion\" thing is not unique to the software industry. David Mitchell had a very good take on it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BzB5xtGGsTc":[{"hn_comment_id":16100443,"author":"sillysaurus3","month":"2018-01","story_title":"As of today, no US passenger airlines operate the Boeing 747","text":"If anyone finds the operation of airlines a fascinating topic, you might like Wendover Productions: [LINK] How airlines price flights [LINK] The little plane war [LINK] Why planes don't fly faster [LINK] The economics of Airline Class [VIDEO] How airlines schedule flights [LINK] I just recently found the channel. So much good stuff. (My unrelated favorite is [LINK] How the US government will survive doomsday.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19338428,"author":"alehul","month":"2019-03","story_title":"First-class air travel is in decline","text":"Would highly recommend the YouTube video below [0] from Wendover, which went pretty in-depth on the economics of airline classes a while ago, and how first-class was the least profitable for the airlines. :) [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29153517,"author":"filereaper","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Billion-dollar airline routes","text":"Highly recommend Wendover's videos on Airline economics, this specific one is about the various classes in Airline seats [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14132216,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2017-04","story_title":"How the Airlines Became Cartels","text":"There's a good Wendover video on airline classes: [VIDEO] And another great one about AmTrak in relation to flight: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17575235,"author":"caio1982","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Is killing the boom the key to supersonic air travel?","text":"There is also another Wendover one explaining the economics or airlines classes and it talks about specifically why supersonic flights went into oblivion: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20099721,"author":"mynameisvlad","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Flying-V: Flying long distances energy-efficiently","text":"Economy class seats generally speaking will earn the least amount of money to an airline, so this idea would actually likely be the most unprofitable option. To make it truly profitable, you convert the plane to First class, but then you'll need to fill all those seats. Wendover Productions had a great video on this a few years ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"BzhbAK1pdPM":[{"hn_comment_id":19898251,"author":"andai","month":"2019-05","story_title":"How I Run a Company with ADHD","text":"I too highly recommend Russel Barkley's videos about ADHD. They taught me so much. The most striking thing was learning how it's a primarily emotional disorder, and how this has harmed my relationships. Here's a fantastic lecture (split into ~5 minute segments -- this guy gets it :) by Dr. Barkley: ADHD - The 30 Essential Ideas Everyone Needs to Know [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22415240,"author":"zarmin","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference","text":"Yeah, I think there's a large subset of people with ADHD who have some kind of alternate circadian rhythm. Mine seems to be 36 hours; for almost 35 years my peak working hours have been 4pm to 5am, with the ability to hyperfocus until I collapsed if I'm really into what I'm doing. Not for lack of trying to have a \"normal\" schedule...oh god I try really hard multiple times a year. It's just not natural. You should know that stimulants are only one type of approach for treating ADHD. Your best resource, you may have discovered, is Russell Barkley; I cannot recommend him enough. Also check out the YouTube channel How to ADHD. Some relevant Barkley videos: [LINK] [VIDEO] Fair warning: You may discover some of the things you've done for your whole life without second guessing are actually typical ADHD symptoms. And if you're like me, this might thoroughly shake your snowglobe.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29679830,"author":"jevyjevjevs","month":"2021-12","story_title":"ADHD Accommodations Guide","text":"I got diagnosed with ADHD 3 months ago after discovering a) my daughter had it and b) that it's highly hereditary. Probably the best introduction to ADHD is a 1.5 lecture by Dr. Russell Barkley, a top researcher in this area. It's technical, empowering and fun: [VIDEO] Looking back in my life, I've built sophisticated TODO list and second brain systems to help me manage. Now it's obvious that it's because my working memory is poor because of my neurodivergency. Omnifocus (for GTD) and Obsidian (to be an extension of my brain) are my goto for leveraging my ADHD superpower. If you're looking for a community to learn more for yourself or for someone else: reddit.com/r/adhd is a great place to start.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39506580,"author":"mthoms","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Early humans had ADHD, scientists say after making people play game online","text":"[VIDEO] I highly recommend the first 4 parts of this playlist (at least) and other videos and writings by Dr Barkley.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14410229,"author":"Helmet","month":"2017-05","story_title":"How a CEO with Dyslexia and ADHD Runs His Company","text":"There is absolutely no benefit to having a LD. Seriously, there is NONE - people with LDs who attain success do so in spite of their LD, not because of it. This notion that LDs make you more \"creative\" or whatever is backed by absolutely no research and is mostly a bunch of feel-good nonsense. A great reference for this is Dr. Russell Barkley: [LINK] His Youtube videos/lectures are extremely insightful as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18512831,"author":"jaggederest","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Boss as a Service \u2013 Hire a boss, get stuff done","text":"As someone who has recently started figuring out this whole ADHD thing, definitely seek out help for it. There are a ton of really powerful tools and support systems that make a tremendous difference. Especially organizational systems designed for people with executive function deficits (whether that's ADHD or not, doesn't really matter!) Caddra has an interesting chart here for suggestions: [LINK] I also like Russell Barkley's lectures and books: [VIDEO] and [LINK] (especially Taking Charge of Adult ADHD) And additionally, if you find that these things speak to you, medication makes a tremendous difference. I really can't overstate the degree to which it can change your life.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29691255,"author":"fragmede","month":"2021-12","story_title":"30 Essential Ideas about ADHD \u2013 Dr. Russell a Barkley","text":"This is an invaluable resource, but is available directly on YouTube at [VIDEO] (Playlist breaks it up into stomachable chunks.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33085447,"author":"triggercut","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How to find what I am really good at?","text":">long term effects of putting people on a close chemical cousin of methamphetamine indefinitely What is your basis for this \"concern\"? Sure it sounds bad, but there are plenty of chemical compounds with \"off by one\" differences that have completely different effects.... that's just... chemistry. Just so you know, (depending on who you read) those with untreated ADHD may live, on average, 10 fewer years than the rest of the population. So if I had to chose between your concerns and 10 better quality years, I know what I'm picking. > Medical professionals are just speculating at this point when they say it's some kind of neurological disorder rather than just part of the range of physiologically normal brain function. Where are you getting this from? Any papers? If this is the consensus then I really must not have been paying attention (pun intended) You seem to have a lot of \"observational\" experience in a specific setting, but little more knowledge or understanding than the tip of the iceberg \"top-5 symptoms\". ADHD is an incredibly complex developmental issue. Look at the issues with ADHD and gauging signals from the body, how those affect eating. Look at various issues with sensitivities sensory stimulation. Issues with inhibition and how they permeate behaviours. Reducing ADHD to \"focus\" is like reducing baseball to throwing a ball around. Maybe look into some of Dr Russel Barkley's lectures. Some of them are a little dated but mostly accurate. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34398473,"author":"darekkay","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Four Thousand Weeks","text":"> these videos are dumb, doesn't everyone do those things? Have any person go through the adult/inattentive-type ADHD symptoms [1]. Everyone will see themselves nodding. It's difficult for people to understand the difference if they are not affected. There's a difference between common headaches and migraine, or between bad mood and depression. It's about the intensity and the frequency (broadly speaking). This doesn't mean that everyone who procrastinates has ADHD. It's really hard to explain the state of complete mental unability to perform a task that I don't like to do vs. \"being lazy\". When I first described my symptoms to my wife, she was also like \"everyone has those symptoms from time to time\". Only after reading a chapter from a book about adult ADHD she understood the difference. Unfortunately, the book is in German. What I can recommend is Dr Russel's ADHD presentation [2] and Roman Kogan's ADHD Wiki [3]. > What intervention(s) have you found the most helpful? Well before learning about ADHD, I have developed many coping mechanisms. The use of todo lists, calendars and alarm clocks has probably made the biggest difference. As you have mentioned the \"chase for novelty\", I can only imagine how big your bookmark list has become. I've coped with this one by having a single \"inbox\" bookmark folder and clearing it frequently. Anything I want to keep for a longer time ends up in one of my tools (Static Marks [4] - a tool I've made for long-term bookmarks, OneNote for note","stance":"rec"}],"C-kF25fWTO8":[{"hn_comment_id":37314881,"author":"Lyngbakr","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Griffin - A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure","text":"James Trunk, who is now Griffin's VP of Engineering, gave one of the most clear and enjoyable technical introductions to Clojure I've seen. Recommended! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26651014,"author":"mustermannBB","month":"2021-03","story_title":"How much can a Clojure developer do alone?","text":"I like this video. IMHO it is a good example of REPL driven development. Nothing to do with typing things into the REPL. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28865559,"author":"kaliszad","month":"2021-10","story_title":"What I wish I knew when learning F#","text":"There are multiple options to approach the Clojure* ecosystem. But yes, it is more focused towards dedicated and experienced developers overall. I use IntelliJ Idea + Cursive for development and that seems quite comfortable. I have a very rough sketch of the environment setup for a real app here: [LINK] We use a similar setup to develop OrgPad itself. You can use Babashka [LINK] for a quick and dirty setup to get you up and running quickly. That is also useful for scripting some things. You might also try shadow-cljs + ClojureScript, if you are more at home in the Node.js/ Browser JavaScript ecosystem and want to do something with it. There is a new \"(Not)Babashka\" but built on ClojureScript: [LINK] that might be interesting as well. I have found this video by James Trunk: [VIDEO] to have a very nice live coding example.","stance":"rec"}],"C1KT8PS6Zs4":[{"hn_comment_id":35640805,"author":"kortex","month":"2023-04","story_title":"SpaceX giant rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas","text":"If you are planning on several y and z anyways, absolutely. On the most recent SmarterEveryDay video on encasing a Prince Rupert's drop in glass, sculptor Cal Breed talks about the moment when a process fails. He could stop there and restart, saving some time, but instead all the pressure is off, and he \"makes as many mistakes as possible\" for the rest of the build. Quote is towards the end, but the whole vid is worth a watch. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35641254,"author":"kortex","month":"2023-04","story_title":"SpaceX giant rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas","text":"Initially posted this as a reply, but going top-level, cause the hot takes are too spicy for my liking. So the plan was to test x, y, and z. Launch sequence and takeoff, stage separation and Starship engine light, and the post-launch stuff like booster wet landing, reentry, and heat tiles. The booster by itself is not aerodynamic, so the only way to test x is with a starship on top. And if you have starship, you might as well test y and z. But it's not a primary goal. Any more effort in polishing y and z is \"premature optimization\". X was the test. SpaceX did the X, we got max Q. On the most recent SmarterEveryDay video on encasing a Prince Rupert's drop in glass, sculptor Cal Breed talks about the moment when a process fails. He could stop there and restart, saving some time, but instead all the pressure is off, and he \"makes as many mistakes as possible\" for the rest of the build. Quote is towards the end, but the whole vid is worth a watch. [VIDEO] [LINK] Edit: also, they needed the flight plan all the way through \"total success\" in order to file with the FAA. You can't just have \"oh sweet, 100% of booster things worked, we now have a suborbital craft careening on a parabolic trajectory\". I didn't read a flight plan, but I imagine they must have spelled out each possible outcome exhaustively.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36132876,"author":"skellera","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Prince Rupert's Drop","text":"Shout out to Destin from SmarterEveryDay for his love of PRDs. Learn about and see how it\u2019s made \u2013 [LINK] Encasing a shattering drop in glass \u2013 [VIDEO] The process the team uses in the second video to freeze the break in glass is pretty awesome! (If you\u2019re into that kind of thing)","stance":"rec"}],"C25qzDhGLx8":[{"hn_comment_id":22002471,"author":"seer","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Scientists identify pathways that extend nematode worm lifespan fivefold","text":"CGP gray's videos on YouTube are maybe the most concise and fun to watch materials I've seen on the subject. [VIDEO] [LINK] And you'll be surprised how many people _are_ indeed thinking about all of the outcomes. Have in mind though that as with any technology it is not good or bad, and if it is possible someone will do it sooner or later. It makes no sense to not do it as your adversaries will, and then they'll dictate how it is used, probably not to your liking. If you develop it first you can talk and deliberate at your leisure and find solutions that look much better to you and yours.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34552332,"author":"wilg","month":"2023-01","story_title":"$6.96B was raised by private longevity companies in 2022","text":"My opinion on the topic changed significantly after watching these great videos: - Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever? - Kurzgesagt - [LINK] - How to Cure Aging \u2013 Kurzgesagt - [LINK] - Why Die? - CGP Grey - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17938012,"author":"chr1","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood into an Elixir of Youth","text":"> It tries to address something that was always considered a hard limit and the perfectly natural thing Death being \"perfectly natural\" is not a good argument, having slaves, eating people, not allowing women to vote, all have been considered perfectly natural at various points in time, and some time soon accepting aging will be considered equally backwards, as these other things. > There are plenty of movies on this topic so no need to go into details I am asking because i have not seen a single pro-aging argument that had made any sense to me, in the best case they are about some people killing other people to get their stuff, which is not directly related to aging, in the worst they are \"fox and the grapes\" kind of rationalizations saying that the thing people want but can't get is probably not worth it. On the other hand i have seen many compelling arguments that curing aging is the _most important_ thing that we can do now. For instance: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45765681,"author":"willis936","month":"2025-10","story_title":"How ancient people saw themselves","text":"I don't think that death is a certainty. It is today, but we are working on it. We are not supernatural. CGPGrey's thoughts on this mirror a lot of my own. I grant that not all care given to aged is a kindness, but not fighting aging is not virtuous. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"C27RVio2rOs":[{"hn_comment_id":31872335,"author":"jaxr","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How to raise a seed round in a down market?","text":"I don't think you hit product market fit, though. It should be pretty obvious. If you had, and the market was as big as you say, then people would be flocking in just by word of mouth. I would suggest to iterate on product, talk to your users, get some good metrics on usage, etc. There's great content about that at the YC YouTube channel. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32234246,"author":"bolt7469","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Becoming a Full-Time Creator as a Software Engineer","text":"The classic YC advice is \"make something people want.\" This video dives into how that looks in practice: [VIDEO] The guiding principle is simple, but in practice it can be hard and complex.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40432674,"author":"benanthoney24","month":"2024-05","story_title":"","text":"Watched this lecture by Michael Seibel to YC in 2018 and thought it was useful. [VIDEO] Thought it could be helpful to keep other founders accountable to build their mvp quickly and get it in front of customers.","stance":"rec"}],"C2RO34b_oPM":[{"hn_comment_id":16634115,"author":"dnautics","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Types, and Why You Should Care [video]","text":"Addendum: Also really good is this video about how one should treat vectors and matrices in a type system. Has good lessons for python, R, and Matlab. Seriously anyone who does anything with vectors should watch this. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24862320,"author":"dnautics","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A Programmer\u2019s Intuition for Matrix Multiplication","text":"> Purist test The short answer is. Yes, but if your PL treats it that way you will wind up in trouble [0]. The long answer is: [VIDEO] (but seriously take the time to watch this, it's fantastic). [0] Separately C- and often C-derived languages/frameworks like numpy also treat them as 1xN matrices, but that's a nearly tabs-vs-spaces level religious war, with actual consequences. I think a lot of people got confused when translating andrew ng's early octave-based ML coursera course (Nx1) to python (1xN), and also in the back and forth between math ML papers which use Nx1 and python.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23595264,"author":"dnautics","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Why is it important for a matrix to be square? (2018)","text":"I happened to be the other way, I learned first that matrices were linear transformations and, being thick-headed, it took me a really long time to understand that matrices could also be used as \"dumb excel spreadsheets\". there's a fantastic historiography of linear algebra and why we're stuck in this situation here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27893260,"author":"freemint","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Julia Computing raises $24M Series A","text":"If you will do a lot of matrix stuff you might want to listen to [VIDEO] taking Vector Transpose Seriously","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30913596,"author":"gugagore","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Eigen: A C++ template library for linear algebra","text":"If you want a great video on the topic, see [VIDEO] Or equivalently [LINK] There are basically two self-consistent choices for the design of linear algebra libraries.","stance":"rec"}],"C4VHfmiwuv4":[{"hn_comment_id":27799303,"author":"systemvoltage","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Richard Branson ready for today's 'extraordinary' space flight","text":"Everyday Astronaut did an hour long video on \"How Much Do Rockets Pollute? Are They Bad For Our Air?\": [VIDEO] I highly recommend to everyone who is concerned about this. The knee-jerk reaction needs to be toned down a little bit, we need to look at the data first.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23414232,"author":"KuiN","month":"2020-06","story_title":"SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Seattle Internet Exchange","text":"Everyday Astronaut on YouTube has a great video on the environmental impact of rockets. 55 minutes long but it's fascinating. The TL;DW is they're not as bad as you'd expect. But not zero-emissions, obviously. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26090778,"author":"danpalmer","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Elon Musk wants clean power. But Tesla's carrying Bitcoin's dirty baggage","text":"Great video here about this: [VIDEO] The summary is that yes they pollute a lot for what they are, but compared to almost any other major polluting industry (travel, freight, construction, etc) it's barely anything and won't be much of a problem for a long time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27946189,"author":"chrispeel","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Space tourism: rockets emit 100 times more CO\u2082 per passenger than flights","text":"At 37:00 of the video below, Tim Dodd concludes that SpaceX's Starship will emit 1.79 metric tons of CO2 per passenger, while a 737 will emit .33 tons. SpaceX wants to generate Starship's methane from the atmosphere, so it could be zero I found Tim's video to be more informative than the Conversation article [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28065840,"author":"rwesterdahl","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Launch HN: Turion Space (YC S21) \u2013 Space debris removal and satellite servicing","text":"Great question and I suspect you are correct regarding the impact being small (Tim Dodd the everyday astronaut, made a great youtube video about rocket launch pollution, check that out for sure [VIDEO] ). He concluded that even with increased launch rates, the pollution remains small compared to other industries such as the airline industry. Not the same thing, but I'd argue the impact from satellites and debris burning up is less than the rocket it took to get up there in the first place. All that being said, we at Turion Space don't want to build a sustainable future in space at the cost of polluting Earth. For the first missions, we will drag the debris down to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, but long term, we plan to utilize reusable launch vehicle upper stages (think Starship, Relativity, and others) to bring stuff back down for us. It's a bit of an essay for a simple question, but regardless of how polluting it may be, with fully reusable launch vehicles coming online in the same time frame we are looking at performing missions, we will use those to bring stuff back down.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28389350,"author":"manuelmoreale","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Amazon asked FCC to reject Starlink plan because it can\u2019t compete, SpaceX says","text":"If you really are interested in the answer to your question about pollution this is a good video to watch [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37964383,"author":"manuelmoreale","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Next year, SpaceX aims to average one launch every 2.5 days","text":"Relevant video that goes quite deep into the topic if you\u2019re actually concerned about rocket pollution: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"C7-8nUU6e3E":[{"hn_comment_id":26216922,"author":"stevenpetryk","month":"2021-02","story_title":"How to design a motherboard for your electronics project","text":"If folks are interested in best practices to follow when laying out a PCB, I really enjoy this series of videos on YouTube where someone whips one up live over the course of 3 hours. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28761105,"author":"malwrar","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Teach Me PCB","text":"I've been getting into this over most of quarantine and have successfully imitated this guy's tutorials (just had to swap out the microcontroller): [VIDEO] If you don't know EE basics you'll probably want to grok those first, there's plenty of youtube channels covering it. Good starter: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29678735,"author":"fpgaminer","month":"2021-12","story_title":"KiCad 6.0.0","text":"I recently learned KiCad and did some basic boards with it. It was a breeze; didn't run into any crashes, bugs, or major difficulties. I learned Eagle a few years ago, and from my vague memory I remember Eagle being a bit less obvious to use. KiCad felt straightforward in every way except maybe drawing the board cuts. (I did run into one paper cut. The PCB DRC didn't flag unconnected nets; there's a second button next to Run DRC that checks for unconnected nets. :/ Cost me an hour wondering why my 5V rail wasn't working... ) Was also my first time using one of those cheap, small-run assembly houses. Absolutely incredible. My project was a tweak of an existing product (an RGB LED driver), and I was able to get my boards made and assembled for less than the retail product, even at a volume of 5 and with nicer parts. Crazy. For anyone looking to learn KiCad, I used this video tutorial: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"C7JQ7Rpwn2k":[{"hn_comment_id":49064747,"author":"gregsadetsky","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room","text":"When this topic comes up, I'm always happy to share this incredible lecture from many many years ago about dead reckoning and how you _cannot_ integrate acceleration twice: [VIDEO] (the whole video is incredible, but this is the magical bit)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9287393,"author":"cpitman","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Darpa to re-invent GPS navigation without the use of satellites","text":"Then you would be surprised how bad they are. A great talk on using mobile sensors is here: [VIDEO] Long story short, expect something like 20 cm/s of position drift trying to do dead reckoning off of mobile sensors.","stance":"rec"}],"C8--cXwuuFQ":[{"hn_comment_id":13303310,"author":"LargoLasskhyfv","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Unexpected Risks Found in Editing Genes to Prevent Inherited Disorders","text":"Maybe it's a matter of tooling. I don't want to appear disrespectful, but after having seen Christopher Domas present \"The Future of RE: Dynamic Binary Visualization\" my mind was forever blown. Working with hexdumps, debuggers, disassemblers etc. seems so stone-agey compared to that. Like so much in IT in general. Anyways, caveman CAN more than crawl, obviously ;-) So, if you have up to an hour of time to waste, maybe you can have your mind blown to cantor dust too? [LINK] [VIDEO] Something very similar seems to be developed here: [LINK] Happy New Cyber! edit: spelling","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38318749,"author":"oldmanludd","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Are There Viewers for Memory Layout?","text":"I don't think it's quite what you're looking for but cantor.dust is an interesting visualization tool for binary data. Security conference presentation from a decade ago: [VIDEO] Release of open-source Ghidra plugin in 2020: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41434445,"author":"hoosieree","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Show HN: Bin-graph: Visualize binary files","text":"Have you checked out this demo? [VIDEO] The 3d pan/tilt/zoom visualizations of the trigraphs are especially nice to look at.","stance":"rec"}],"CB-SCA1reqE":[{"hn_comment_id":7390589,"author":"abcd_f","month":"2014-03","story_title":"How a Light Saber Works","text":"Leidenfrost effect is how you test if your stainless steel skillet is at the right temperature for cooking. If you are into cooking, I must insist you check this out - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42401025,"author":"jmcclell","month":"2024-12","story_title":"A simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils","text":"Carbon steel pans are seasoned and generally will be stored with a light coat of oil. You'll add oil while cooking, as well. My carbon steel pans don't stick \u2013 an egg will happily glide on the surface. Stainless steel pans are not seasoned, but can still be relatively non-stick as long as they are heated properly prior to use. Heating them closes the pores in the pan's surface, making the surface smoother. Add oil after the pan is properly heated. This youtube video explains the process: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CBYhVcO4WgI":[{"hn_comment_id":26782556,"author":"karolsputo","month":"2021-04","story_title":"How People Get Rich Now","text":"Dustin Moskovitz presented that point in the invaluable How to start a startup series - [VIDEO] A good resource when deciding on your future ambitions","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34592317,"author":"dgelks","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"[VIDEO] - How to Start a Startup 2014 by YC & Stanford Amazing set of speakers and pretty timeless advice for starting a startup","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12374845,"author":"robertelder","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Ask HN: I am doing $2M annually as a solopreneur and need your help","text":"This lecture series specifically talks about the different problems faced at various stages of scaling, and it includes a lot of reputable people who have actually done it: [LINK] The YC series is of course good too: [VIDEO] I'm not actually qualified to answer your question, but it sounds like you haven't discovered a bottleneck in your business yet, and until you do, you probably shouldn't hire any employees.","stance":"rec"}],"CCOdQsZa15o":[{"hn_comment_id":27727210,"author":"benrbray","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The Growth Ponzi Scheme","text":"The Not Just Bikes [1,2,3] YouTube channel also has an excellent series of videos based on work from Strong Towns. I link to these videos whenever a friend asks why I chose to leave the United States. :) [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26663490,"author":"rossng","month":"2021-04","story_title":"A billion for every chip-maker who 'makes in India,' sources say","text":"Yes, and it's often referred to as 'gentle density'. The idea is to build relatively dense housing, but at a human scale - mostly 3-5 storeys. Combined with narrow streets that support walking and cycling, this creates enough density to support a 'real' city centre with shops, restaurants, offices and so on. I think these videos convey the idea well: * [LINK] * [VIDEO] Of course, this is not to say that you _can't_ build other kinds of housing. But many cities are badly balanced.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29224421,"author":"meerab","month":"2021-11","story_title":"California plans to turn the screws on NIMBY cities","text":"This unfortunately true in California. NIMBY moment is strong. Another perspective.. [VIDEO] (Love this channel!)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29419190,"author":"quadrangle","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Facing housing crisis, L.A. voters back duplexes in single-family neighborhoods","text":"Seems to me you need to watch the NotJustBikes overview of the Missing Middle problem [VIDEO] Super dense cities are efficient in some ways, but they have tons of other problems and they externalize tons of costs. What we're missing in the U.S. is human-scale density, especially in the form of cohousing arrangements. Tall high-rises are not actually efficient. You know how much energy it takes to have elevators going up and down 40 floors along with all the other stuff? Land is not the single factor to calculate when we want efficiency.","stance":"rec"}],"CD0y-aU1sXo":[{"hn_comment_id":33105611,"author":"acjacobson","month":"2022-10","story_title":"I don\u2019t believe in sprints","text":"If you're interested learning more about Kanban, I thing Eric Brechner does a great job of describing it - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47775518,"author":"Balinares","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Saying Goodbye to Agile","text":"I mean, Switzerland and North Korea both call themselves democracies but the specifics matter. The specifics matter! These discussions are always fascinating in a sort of baffling way to me because I've only had great experiences with what I call agile. Like, you bring it into the team and within months everyone is gushing about how much better life is now. Yet threads like this one are full of people reporting awful experiences. Apparently whatever it is they're doing involves a lot of meetings and little actual flexibility? The deeply unexpected thing about that, to me, is, if they hate some parts of the process, why are they keeping them? Every team and every business is different and you have to iterate to arrive at whatever will work best for you. That's possibly the one most important point, IMO. Dropping the things that don't work is a key part of that! Eric Brechner of Microsoft (of all possible places...) gives a great talk on his team's approach, and I've had good experiences using it as a starting point: [VIDEO] But again, every team is different. Even the greatest possible theoretical approach is only a starting point. And like with Switzerland vs North Korea, I guess the key thing is how much ownership of the process those subjected to it have?","stance":"rec"}],"CGRtyxEpoGg":[{"hn_comment_id":41910707,"author":"zahlman","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Egypt declared malaria-free after 100-year effort","text":">If you have enough funding, Malaria is preventable. It requires more than funding to solve the problem. Sorry that my source is a YouTube video, but [VIDEO] explains a general problem (that of trying to solve problems that are more prevalent elsewhere in the world, from within your own cultural context) and gives malaria as an example. People in malaria-afflicted countries, given free insecticide-treated nets, will often try to use them for fishing - not caring about the effect the insecticide will have on the haul. It's not due to ignorance or a lack of understanding, but due to a value judgment: people who have lived with malaria for generations don't see it as being as big of a problem, while poor people (on a global scale - not like in the US where \"the poor\" can afford some really impressive things) are always concerned with food supply.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42991272,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Obscure islands I find interesting","text":"It was this line of thinking which lead to the One Laptop Per Child failure. See \"Why do Western Designs fail in Developing Countries\" - [VIDEO] OLPC is discussed from ~9 minutes in, but the whole thing is relevant. OLPC started when Seymour Papert and Nicholas Negroponte went to Senegal to teach people to code, and found that there was no good reason to learn to code if you live in rural Senegal and people were not interested. They decided they knew better and doubled down, making the OLPC project, and when presenting their laptop to the world the African delegation at the conference objected to spending money on laptops instead of infrastructure, schools, water. Negroponte decided the target users didn't know better than him what they needed, so he ignored them. \"One of the things people told me is, look Nicholas you can't just give a kid a laptop and walk away. Yes you can\". he said. And he did. And almost none of the kids did any coding on the laptops. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"CJlrbMHLBd4":[{"hn_comment_id":33400676,"author":"fake-name","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Novelty Automation","text":"Tim Hunkin (the man behind these arcades) also did an excellent video series called \"The secret life of machines\" for the BBC in the 80s. It was recently remastered, and is now up on youtube: [VIDEO] (All three seasons!) I cannot recommend it strongly enough.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28420785,"author":"LeoPanthera","month":"2021-09","story_title":"200 Years Ago, Faraday Invented the Electric Motor","text":"It's (reasonably) easy to make your own electric motor, if you want a better understanding of how they work. Rex Garrod (of Battlebots fame) demonstrates his own one on Tim Hunkin's \"The Secret Life of\", here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49271703,"author":"detourdog","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Compression Is Prediction","text":"They are not blog posts but it is a presentation of technical development that meets my standard. james burke connections [LINK] Tim Hunkin Secret Life of Machines [VIDEO] I have read plenty of blog posts that meet my standard. If I can think of one I will post it.","stance":"rec"}],"CK62I-4cuSY":[{"hn_comment_id":30243686,"author":"codeulike","month":"2022-02","story_title":"What Was the Ted Talk?","text":"This one is a masterpiece: [VIDEO] To survive in the new internet economy, you need to come up with a new service or product that people will want. Not likely, right? Using your brain to think of an idea, and your skills to implement it: Thats the old model.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4890597,"author":"freshhawk","month":"2012-12","story_title":"All the TED Talks","text":"I think the social media Onion talk ( [VIDEO] ) is the most relevant to HN (and my favourite). You are definitely not the only one who's BS detector was going off. I find that TED has about the same number of good talks per year as it used to. And about 10 times more talks per year than it used to. That's not even counting the cesspool that TEDx has become.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5336349,"author":"rpm4321","month":"2013-03","story_title":"TEDx talks discredited: Sheldrake speaks, argues that speed of light is dropping","text":"If you haven't seen them, make sure to check out The Onion's TED parodies - Onion Talks: [LINK] They may be the funniest thing The Onion has ever done. =================================== Edit: of particular interest to the HN crowd would be their takedown of the \"Idea Guy\": [LINK] and the \"Social Media Consultant\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CKIye4RZ-5k":[{"hn_comment_id":32832555,"author":"fasteddie31003","month":"2022-09","story_title":"\u201cSecrets\u201d about the consumer audio business you may find interesting","text":"I built my own speakers for under $200 and I honestly think they are some of the best I've ever heard for a personal setup. They were inspired by [VIDEO] (Tech Ingredients) . I built the speakers from foam board, the subwoofer from car audio parts and the amp is a standard class D amp. The best part is whenever someone comments on how good my speakers sound I can say I built them myself.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36180516,"author":"sandreas","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Classic components could be replaced by rubber in next-gen loudspeakers","text":"If you want an affordable, good sounding speaker that you can build yourself, you might wanna take a look at Tech Ingredients: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42865591,"author":"westurner","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Show HN: Design/build of some parametric speaker cabinets with OpenSCAD","text":"In this video, they explain that the bandpass port for letting air out of typically the back of speakers is essential for acoustic transmission including bass; and they made an anechoic chamber. \"World's Second Best Speakers!\" [LINK] TechIngedients also has a video about attaching $6 bass kickers to XPS foam to make flat panel speakers about as good as expensive bookshelf speakers. \"World\u2019s Best Speakers!\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CM0aohBfUTc":[{"hn_comment_id":30800676,"author":"alexb_","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Kodak factory tour: How does Kodak make film? [video]","text":"This video may be worth a watch: [VIDEO] Side note: I don't really agree with a lot of his other videos. Yet I am sharing this one, because I believe it's worthwhile and am not taking his other videos into account for a context that doesn't matter :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36565882,"author":"AlexandrB","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Entropy: The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics [video by Veritasium]","text":"I was quite disappointed by his video on self-driving cars. It presented a very one-sided view and felt like a puff piece (and, indeed, it was sponsored by Waymo). Tom Nicholas did a good job breaking down the problems with it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38779199,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Veritasium: The SAT Question Everyone Got Wrong [video]","text":"You may be interested to see this critique of Veritasium which cooled my views on the channel significantly since I saw it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CMR9z9Xr8GM":[{"hn_comment_id":33165807,"author":"jammaloo","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage","text":"There is a great youtube channel that tests out different energy storage and harvesting setups, a lot of them focused around water. This is one where they use solar to pump water to the roof, and then use the potential energy overnight: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33171467,"author":"tharkun__","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Geothermal may beat batteries for energy storage","text":"Here's some \"slow math\" in video form ;) [VIDEO] I find him entertaining. Put a 55 gallon drum on his roof, pumping water up via solar and running lights at night. Closed loop system. He also \"does the math\" and mentions exactly what you are saying in entertaining format. Just not worth it if you're not doing it on a massive scale, preferably way out of sight and danger.","stance":"rec"}],"CPLdltN7wgE":[{"hn_comment_id":33614731,"author":"kobalsky","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client","text":"> git add -p allows me to add chunks easily and create commits your workflow resembles mine so I'm in the obligation of mentioning [LINK] which allows you to stage individual lines among other features. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33638392,"author":"peterfication","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client","text":"Using lazygit has improved my usage of Git so much! There is a nice video from the author that introduces a lot of its features. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47331757,"author":"haskman","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Rebasing in Magit","text":"Vim/Neovim users should look at LazyGIT. [VIDEO] The best part - it's a TUI program that's usable independently, that also happens to embed really well within vim.","stance":"rec"}],"CS01Hmjv1pQ":[{"hn_comment_id":2677618,"author":"phlux","month":"2011-06","story_title":"Stuxnet Virus Weapon Now Being Sold On The Black Market","text":"Watch these in this order: [LINK] - brief overview great animation [VIDEO] - ted talk on stux [LINK] detailed analysis of stuxnet the last one is long and Bruce appears to be an arrogant prick, but it is clear - cyber war has been here for a while.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2691438,"author":"phlux","month":"2011-06","story_title":"LulzSec releases trove of AZ law enforcement documents","text":"PSY-OP MOTHERFUCKER, CAN YOU HACK IT?! This is NOT script kiddies going at it, this is bio-stux.... See the following: Watch these in this order: [LINK] - brief overview great animation [VIDEO] - ted talk on stux [LINK] . detailed analysis of stuxnet the last one is long and Bruce appears to be an arrogant prick, but it is clear - cyber war has been here for a while. --- As I have mentioned, cyber war is here - and the legislation is lacking in its awareness - but becuase we have incompetant douches in charge of tech legislation, we will have physical war used as a metaphor to cyber warfare and thus have draconian influences from physical imprisonment being applied to digital situations. Utterly broken.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4033665,"author":"vecinu","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Flame: Massive cyber-attack discovered, researchers say","text":"I assume we are going to see a complicated and interesting dissection a la Stuxnet? The Stuxnet TED talk [0] was really interesting, I ended up giving a talk to my department at work afterwards. [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CTV-wwszGw8":[{"hn_comment_id":30367575,"author":"shmageggy","month":"2022-02","story_title":"New York is using cameras with microphones to ticket loud cars","text":"> Cities aren't loud. Cars are loud. Fantastic video with that very name exploring just how true this is: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46135587,"author":"oblio","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Accepting US car standards would risk European lives","text":"Watch his video. Pick 2-3 at random, be a grown up and ignore the tone of voice and the snarkiness, and see what his points are. They're very solid. Try something like this: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29689033,"author":"ryukafalz","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The Sound of Silence: A Noise Map of the U.S.","text":"Yeah. Some places do take it seriously; this video provides some nice context: [VIDEO] ...my city is unfortunately not one of them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29691431,"author":"CalRobert","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The Sound of Silence: A Noise Map of the U.S.","text":"NotJustBikes does a great video on this [VIDEO] Cities aren't Loud, Cars are Loud. Most \"cities\" in North America, to use the term generously, are miserable car sewers where you need to shout to have a conversation outside.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30986186,"author":"seer","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)","text":"I think you'll be very interested in the \"Not Just Bikes\" channel as he talks a lot about urban planing. There's a lot of political will and momentum for making living spaces ... livable in Europe. Places like The Netherlands and Denmark in particular. A video specifically about noise pollution and how European cities are trying to solve it - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32258391,"author":"cardanome","month":"2022-07","story_title":"ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions","text":"I don't get why I am getting such emotional responses. Most of the noise in cities comes from cars, that is a fact. Even dense cities can be fairly quiet. I suggest watching this video: [VIDEO] Plus China has probably not the best building codes, the problem can be further improved by having proper sound isolation in homes. Dense cities mean you will have everything in walking distance. There will be much more space for parks and other areas of recreation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35693635,"author":"ThatGeoGuy","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Harvard: The Effects of Noise on Health","text":"An addendum to the posted article: [VIDEO] Cities aren't loud; motor vehicles are. Tire noise near heavy stroads and highways are in particular egregious offenders. There's a lot of other points in the comments about some other urban nuisances (leaf blowers, anyone?) but I encourage anyone to walk around (yes, walk) while measuring the ambient noise levels with your smartphone's microphone. It will be extremely obvious where the noise is coming from. This is an often misunderstood part of \"the war on cars:\" the stress gained from additional constant noise (e.g. like a highway) takes YEARS off our lives. And don't get me started on how loud shops are in North America. For whatever reason they seem to always keep the volume three or four levels above comfortable, making it much harder to have a conversation without shouting at least a little. It wasn't until I started traveling a lot that I started to notice any of this. You can have your quiet part of town, but often you get to your quiet part of town by driving through the noisiest part of town where a good number of people live and work.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37188135,"author":"masklinn","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Amsterdam to use \u201cnoise cameras\u201d against too loud cars","text":"NJB has a video on the subject which is pretty astounding if you've never really considered it: [VIDEO] It also specifically calls out mopeds: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38564756,"author":"stephen_g","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Amsterdam Switches to 30 Km/h on 80% of its Roads","text":"So true - there are some good video comparisons that really hit this home for me, like the Not Just Bikes video \u201cCities aren\u2019t loud; Cars are loud\u201d [1] 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45272979,"author":"tdeck","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at SFO","text":"Cars driving at high speed over normal asphalt also generate a lot of tire noies and particulate pollution, even if they are electric cars. I found this video pretty interesting - some cities are experimenting with different road surfaces to reduce noise [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CUjt36SD3h8":[{"hn_comment_id":25590195,"author":"gugagore","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Well, Actually \u2013 Physics Answers","text":"For a video to address this misconception of the speed of light being constant, and it just appears to slow down due to ping-pong, I recommend \"Why does light slow down in water?\" by Fermilab: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34213495,"author":"djmips","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?","text":"I had thought because light was absorbed and re-emitted but that and scattering ideas are incorrect. See this video for an explanation of why light travels slower through a medium with an index of refraction greater than one. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38600589,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2023-12","story_title":"What is a zero refractive index material?","text":"For anyone who's interested, Fermilab has done several videos on this topic as well that I found highly informative: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"CVxeuwlvf8w":[{"hn_comment_id":10508925,"author":"ATsch","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Experience with the Mergenthaler Linotron 202 Phototypesetter (1980) [pdf]","text":"Computerphile interviewed one of the writers of this paper in a series of videos, who explained the brilliant and exiting history of this paper and its recreation, as well as the history of Phototypesetters. 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK] 3. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40958398,"author":"jgalt212","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The Birth of Standard Error (2013)","text":"> As one might expect, Bell Labs didn't use the paper tape input tangentially related. The Great 202 Jailbreak - Computerphile [VIDEO] staring the inimitable Professor Brailsford.","stance":"rec"}],"CXv1j3GbgLk":[{"hn_comment_id":12534429,"author":"arma26","month":"2016-09","story_title":"FAA Poised to Take on Role as Traffic Cop for Space","text":"DEFCON 20: Hacker + Airplanes = No Good Can Come Of This [VIDEO] Good watch if you wanna see how naively designed the whole thing is.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14697977,"author":"etimberg","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Killing car privacy by federal mandate","text":"This reminds me of the complete lack of security in ADS-B transmissions from aircraft. See an interesting DefCon talk from a few years ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21104331,"author":"wiseleo","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems","text":"You may find this interesting [VIDEO] in particular about the bleed of ATSB data from virtual world into real world. It's a semi-hypothetical Defcon presentation on insecure wireless communications directly with the aircraft.","stance":"rec"}],"CZIINXhGDcs":[{"hn_comment_id":7439217,"author":"seoguru","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What is money?","text":"The theory of a barter economy as the origin of money has been debunked by David Graeber: [VIDEO] (I find his talk fascinating). He gets into what money is around minute 19. Whether you buy his arguments or not, modern money works like this: The state requires payment of currency (fees, fines, taxes, etc), the state spends currency (of course it must spend it before it can ever collect it). The money derives its value via the demand for it from the soverign. I like this analogy that Warren Mosler uses in his \"Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy\": [LINK] The story begins with parents creating coupons they then use to pay their children for doing various household chores. Additionally, to \u201cdrive the model,\u201d the parents require the children to pay them a tax of 10 coupons a week to avoid punishment. This closely replicates taxation in the real economy, where we have to pay our taxes or face penalties. The coupons are now the new household currency. Think of the parents as \u201cspending\u201d these coupons to purchase \u201cservices\u201d (chores) from their children. With this new household currency, the parents, like the federal government, are now the issuer of their own currency. And now you can see how a household with its own currency is indeed very much like a government with its own currency. Let\u2019s begin by asking some questions about how this new household currency works. Do the parents have to somehow get coupons from their children before they can pay their coupons to their c","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25400512,"author":"apsurd","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Slack wanted to stay independent, but was unable to compete with tech giants","text":"Late to the party but wanted to make sure to contribute this excellent talk by the late David Graeber about the history of debt. It includes the concept of Jubilee. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6788752,"author":"primroot","month":"2013-11","story_title":"You can't beat politics with new technology all the time","text":"I find the \"8000 years\" claim in the parent comment to be interesting. My understanding is that it is false, and that metallic money is a way, in which armies impose themselves over populations. This talk by anthropologist David Graeber illustrates my point [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15349927,"author":"igravious","month":"2017-09","story_title":"How Big Banks Became Our Masters","text":"Yup! Fortunately you don't even have to read it from cover to cover to get the meat of it. Here [VIDEO] is a talk 80 mins long Graeber gave at Google. Then once you've done that listen [LINK] to Robert Paul Wolff talk about the problem Ricardo, Smith, and Marx tackled. This one is a bit longer and it is tougher going but the pay-off is immense. \u2013\u2013 What this New York Times article and the recent Bloomberg [LINK] (\u201cWhy Wages Aren't Growing\u201d) article that hit the front page here have in common is that they both refuse to recognise that Marx's critique of capital was correct in his day and it _remains_ correct. The next part is important. We _must_ separate the critique from his proposed solution. To be very clear I can agree with Marx's critique but I do not have to agree that central collectivisation is the solution. The very simple observation is this. For-profit capitalism over time will cause (a) workers to be exploited to the point where they can't actually take part in the society they're a part of (which hurts the capitalist too!) and (b) wealth gets concentrated inefficiently. What the New York Times and Bloomberg (and many others) outright refuse to admit is that _Marx was right_. Universal Basic Income. What is that but an alternate solution to collectivisation? Same applies to profit-sharing. It's the reason why charities are non-profits because we all recognise the alternative would be unseemly. The Tobin tax (taxing certain international financial transactions) is a","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22384281,"author":"317070","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings","text":"I think you do get this correct. It is the bank's responsibility to assign its loans properly. That's the risk they take and why they get to collect an interest. Maybe watch this video of David Graeber from start until 5:20, [VIDEO] He makes the point more clearly. I mean, do I get this correct? Would you say that when people need to pay their debts, the bank gets to enforce measures despite it causing the debtor's children dying (i.e. increased child mortality)? I might have gotten you wrong here. It is not easy to parse a 100+ word sentence.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29518851,"author":"xster","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Weapons on Ancient Coins","text":"I guess the implicit question is why such obsession on fighting and weapons on the coins. Anthropologist David Graeber has a fascinating perspective ( [VIDEO] ). He posits that our present assumptions about money (first there's barter, then coins and fiat money, then credit) is actually backwards. And that primitive societies rather had interlocking systems of informal credit between everyone instead, since everyone knew everyone and you only really needed to settle the difference very infrequently. And coins only really came into play as a supply logistics mechanism for traveling armies. Since a band of people traveling through town can't participate in the informal credit system. And so the taxation system created in such a way that the food producers needed to acquire an \"external\" currency the army had. And that this was shown archeologically where concentration of coins were denser around militarized border regions of various societies around the world.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34442226,"author":"yboris","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The language of labouring reveals its tortured roots (2013)","text":"Seems related: Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber [LINK] The concept of \"debt\" has a long history that is surprising and illuminating. A really excellent book. For a shorter version, see his talk at Google: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39993356,"author":"brudgers","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Should there be \"computer showers\" similar to \"baby showers\"?","text":"It's not the way I grew up, but there are group friendship patterns where friends give each other gifts just because it's what the group of friends do. It surprised me when I saw it in action. But that's because I had the same reaction as you...it costs money and I was not raised to value friendships more than money. But some people are and the world is not worse for it. It creates reciprocal obligations...debts. Here is an interesting talk on debt by the late David Graeber: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"C_r5UJrxcck":[{"hn_comment_id":18136055,"author":"Reelin","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Honda will use GM\u2019s self-driving technology, invests in Cruise","text":"Since this touches on the safety of old vs new cars, I'd just like to leave this link to an \"old vs new\" crash test video here for anyone who might not have seen it before. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31497869,"author":"dragontamer","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Why isn\u2019t new technology making us more productive?","text":"[VIDEO] I always liked this IIHS crash test: 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air vs. 2009 Chevrolet Malibu It really shows the progress. Seatbelts, the \"rigid cage\" to protect the driver, air bags, etc. etc. The 1959 Bel Air crash-dummy is clearly dead, bouncing around the cabin during the crash. The 2009 Malibu crash-dummy has a sprained neck and the face hurts from hitting the air-bag, but clearly survives.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32592964,"author":"dumpsterlid","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The end of the manual transmission is near?","text":"\"Even for people in the car, some older car designs put the drivers legs under the engine block. In a head on collision at speed, the legs were the crumple zone (meanwhile the steering column was being pushed through your torso).\" Anytime anyone waxes nostalgic about how \"they dont make cars like they used\" I think about this video. They sure as hell don't make cars like they used too, you can get out and walk away from a crash in your ugly newer car that would brutally end your life in one of those beautiful classic cars. For anyone that is curious the key thing to pay attention to in survivability here (besides yah know... the airbag) is.. does the interior cab of the car change shape? The cab of the old car violently changes shape in a way that would destroy parts of your body whereas the newer car's cab doesnt seem to be affected at all. Even if getting crushed between the seats and dashboard didnt kill you immediately in the bel air, I struggle to imagine how emergency first responders would even get you out of that. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32805166,"author":"Guest9081239812","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Heavier cars are safer for their drivers, but far deadlier for everyone else","text":"Those old boats might be big, but they're not exactly safe or even that heavy. Here's an interesting crash test comparing one to a modern vehicle. [VIDEO] Both of those cars weigh about 3,500lbs. Now swap in a 5,000lbs Tesla, or that new 9,000lbs Hummer EV. That big old car will be nothing but a pile of twisted metal. In short, I don't think you can compare large cars of the past to ones that exist today.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38990631,"author":"xnx","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Cars suck, man","text":"Agreeing with the article. Car software sucks, but hardware is great. Cars have more horsepower, are more fuel efficient, are more reliable, and are most importantly much safer ( to their passengers at least) than they've ever been. Take one minute to watch \"1959 Chevrolet Bel Air vs. 2009 Chevrolet Malibu IIHS crash test\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CaCcOwJPytQ":[{"hn_comment_id":29475414,"author":"michelpp","month":"2021-12","story_title":"How a Kalman filter works, in pictures","text":"Michel van Biezen has an excellent video series on Kalman filters: [VIDEO] He walks you though all the way from the rationale, to a simple algebraic example, to the full blown Linear Algebraic Matrix solution. It's really worth watching even just the first couple videos to get a deeper understanding of this very useful technique.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13450939,"author":"JamesBarney","month":"2017-01","story_title":"How a Kalman filter works, in pictures (2015)","text":"For anyone who read this blog post and thought \"Wow that's interesting, but I don't understand half of this. I need a whole youtube series to explain this to me.\" Well we're in luck. [VIDEO] . It's a great set of 55 video lectures on Kalman filtering. (I'm only on number 5 but so far they've been great)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16578812,"author":"SatvikBeri","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Quick explanation of how a Kalman filter works","text":"Great explanation! If you want a very detailed deep dive into Kalman Filters, I found this sequence of videos really helpful: [VIDEO] It's 55 short videos, each one going over a specific topic or example.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37880932,"author":"dpflan","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Kalman Filter Tutorial: Kalman Filter from the Ground Up","text":"Here is another tutorial on Kalman Filters, step-by-step video playlist -- [VIDEO] Once you get the intuition, Kalman filters are really interesting. As are particle filters -- those are fun to work with and visualize.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39348769,"author":"cocostation","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Kalman Filter Explained Simply","text":"I really like this set of videos for explaining the KF. I 'got it' more than I did with the material on the original post. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CaPgDQkmqqM":[{"hn_comment_id":15629609,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Google\u2019s fired engineer: James Damore\u2019s claim against search giant revealed","text":"The problem is you're implicitly assuming this (and other recent \"culture war topics\" is actually about reasoning and legitimate attempt at debate. It isn't. This is about controlling narratives and reframing offensive goals so they become a legitimate political opinion. Most of these calls for a \"debate\" are not trying to actually debate anything. They are trying to make enough confusing noise and repeat their talking points as often as possible. For a much better explanation of how this works - and why it's a trap which educated, well meaning, politically-interested people seem to be particularly vulnerable - see this short video essay: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17729190,"author":"che_shirecat","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Microsoft threatens to stop hosting Gab unless posts are removed","text":"The alt-right playbook ( [VIDEO] ) is a great summary of common experiences with this sort of cancer online. It's next to impossible to engage with these people for rational debate, when all they care about is spreading their hatred and ignorance through the virality of the internet, rendering pointless any civil discussion by arguing in bad faith.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25710224,"author":"LimaBearz","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler","text":"Before this gets too far I\u2019d just like to point out that anyone arguing this is an issue of free speech or \u201cfirst they came for x, who\u2019s next\u201d is not arguing in good faith.. I\u2019ve noticed a pattern of moving the goal post. The problem here is an insurrection and the loss of 5 American lives. Arguing there is not advantageous, easy, or particularly strong so the goal post moves to free speech leaving what happened at the capitol off the table. I really enjoy the series on YouTube \u201cthe alt right playbook\u201d. [VIDEO] This one is applicable here","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25724649,"author":"vladTheInhaler","month":"2021-01","story_title":"YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel","text":"A channel called Innuendo Studios chronicles this tactic and many others in a series called The Alt-Right Playbook [1]. I found it enormously helpful to understand the mentality and tactics of a group that kind of doesn't make any sense. [1] The Alt-Right Playbook: Control the Conversation - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"CaasbfdJdJg":[{"hn_comment_id":29015820,"author":"rrauenza","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Where transcendental numbers hide in everyday math","text":"I was going to post this Mathologer video ( [VIDEO] ) based on e being \"the most irrational number\" -- but I misremembered. It's the golden ratio, phi. But its still a really interesting video!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33277188,"author":"jerf","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The Mystery of 355/113 (2010)","text":"\"same with golden ratio (repeating 1s)\" Mathologer has a good video in which he uses this to justify calling the golden ratio the \"most irrational\" number because of this expansion: [VIDEO] The video also goes over the details of the pi expansion.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37134537,"author":"uoaei","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Decimal to Fraction","text":"Pretty good Mathologer video about continued fractions: [VIDEO] One neat trivium I like to quiz the mathematically-minded on is: what number is the most irrational , i.e., toward which number do rational approximations converge the slowest ? The answer can be determined from continued fractions and is discussed in the video near the end.","stance":"rec"}],"CbHjcwIoTiY":[{"hn_comment_id":11078869,"author":"paulgerhardt","month":"2016-02","story_title":"What 50,000 watts of RF energy sounds like through a jumper cable","text":"That was one specific station - the infamous WLW / W8XO - the first and only US station authorized to operate at 500kW of power.[1] To give you an idea of how powerful that is, take a look at their coverage map: [LINK] The back story is kind of interesting. It was run by Powel Crosley - a sort of 1930's version of Elon Musk. Advertising revenues from the station were so successful he applied to increase the limit from 500kW to 750kW(!). It's a big deal in the ham community, but I only learnt latter that while US stations were limited to 50kW - other parts of the world didn't have such restrictions. Parts of the Middle East have 2,000kW stations. [2] You can get a full download on the Crosley WLW station in this video: [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11098113,"author":"wglb","month":"2016-02","story_title":"WLW: 700 kHz, 500 kW, 100% modulation, no limiter (2000)","text":"The links at the bottom of the article are also excellent. At the 2013 Dayton Hamvention, there was a tour of the facility shown here: [VIDEO] . Apparently, the engineer who first designed the transmitter was barely 21.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22159778,"author":"mschwar99","month":"2020-01","story_title":"WLW: America's 500,000 watt radio station (2015)","text":"Was randomly recommended a video on YouTube a few weeks ago which was a recording of a tour of the WLW broadcast transmitter facility. You get to see the high power equipment in detail accompanied by lots of history about the facility. Was a fun watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38343110,"author":"geerlingguy","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Remembering the Crystal Radio","text":"There's a fascinating tour of WLW on YouTube, too...[1] back when radio was the cutting edge and all the young engineers would go balls to the wall with RF. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CbIZU8cQWXc":[{"hn_comment_id":8597549,"author":"ButchDriveshaft","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Philae has landed","text":"I had to create an account just to thank you for this response. I always recommend anyone wondering about whether or not space exploration is worth it to view the following amazing video compilations. \"We Stopped Dreaming - Episode 1\": [VIDEO] \"We Stopped Dreaming - Episode 2\": [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3993871,"author":"dudurocha","month":"2012-05","story_title":"NASDAQ:FB","text":"I got to disagree. Not in the part that Facebook was important to Arab Spring and reconnect people long seen. I desagree in the part that rockets doesn't give benefits. Rockets and all 'complicated' science, push the human race forward. Your cellphone is only able to connect to the internet because of the rockets that were send to the atmosphere, long time ago. Better than me, I have to people to talk about this. Read Science and Culture, by Thomas Huxley : How often have we not been told that the study of physical science is incompetent to confer culture; that it touches none of the higher problems of life; and, what is worse, that the continual devotion to scientific studies tends to generate a narrow and bigoted belief in the applicability of scientific methods to the search after truth of all kinds. How frequently one has reason to observe that no reply to a troublesome argument tells so well as calling its author a \"mere scientific specialist.\" And, as I am afraid it is not permissible to speak of this form of opposition to scientific education in the past tense; may we not expect to be told that this, not only omission, but prohibition, of \"mere literary instruction and education\" is a patent example of scientific narrow-mindedness? source: [LINK] And the great Neil deGrasse Tyson , in the pretty \"We stopped Dreaming\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32638985,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Launch Attempt Scrubbed","text":"There's a Neil deGrasse Tyson video titled We Stopped Dreaming that gets into the NASA budget (and the related society changes) [VIDEO] The part about the NASA budget is at 2:00 though it's all a good watch.","stance":"rec"}],"CcAJ3_-Hou8":[{"hn_comment_id":28962850,"author":"Factorium","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Science of Slow Cooking","text":"An induction cooktop and electric pressure cooker certainly makes a gas connection for the kitchen unnecessary. There's an interesting video from Adam Rageusa on how bad gas cooktops are: [VIDEO] I think that gas cooktops and open-air cooking vessels are just used frequently because they're easy to show off on cooking shows... Its hard to make a Youtube video on things cooking in a sealed pressure cooker.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30276648,"author":"com2kid","month":"2022-02","story_title":"My best estimate is gas stoves decrease life expectancy by 53 days on average","text":"[VIDEO] - Great coverage of this entire issue [LINK] - Gas VS Induction [LINK] - Gas VS Induction Tl;dr over 50% of heat from a gas stove ends up in the environment. Nearly 100% of the energy from an induction cook top ends up in the pot.","stance":"rec"}],"CcZdwX4noCE":[{"hn_comment_id":14043262,"author":"colemannugent","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Scunthorpe Problem","text":"Tom Scott did a video on this: Why Web Filters Don't Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem - [VIDEO] It's well done, like the rest of his content.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23132266,"author":"thepete2","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Scunthorpe Sans \u2013 a self-censoring font","text":"There is a video [0] about this censoring-\"problem\" by Youtuber Tom Scott. He talks about how it's impossible to implement with all edge-cases, easy to circumvent and thus usually not a good idea. Fittingly, the video is filmed in Peniston. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CesHr99ezWE":[{"hn_comment_id":15389381,"author":"javiramos","month":"2017-10","story_title":"The Media Has Neglected Puerto Rico","text":"Puerto Rican here! In my opinion, these are two very good pieces to learn about Puerto Rico [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16795468,"author":"nickpsecurity","month":"2018-04","story_title":"ACE Submarine Cable Cut Impacts Ten Countries","text":"That's a harsh interpretation to make of dragonwriter's comment. I read it as a factual statement about what the U.S. does with colonies by someone that probably disagrees with the practice. That's also a charitable default. If anyone wants more info on the topic, John Oliver has a great, 13-min segment on U.S. territories along with the clearly-evil justifications for their situation. Wait till yall see the Supreme Court ruling. It should get way more attention in media discussions on this topic. His finale with America's Got Talent contestant is also an epic counter to that. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Cfe5UQ-1L9Q":[{"hn_comment_id":31638811,"author":"jwatzman","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Source code for 4kb demoscene production \u201cElevated\u201d released (2016)","text":"Indeed his videos are amazing . My recommendation though would be to start with the \"beginner\" video -- which is completely 2D but at least gets some ideas across. Then watch [LINK] which isn't his but introduces how you get 3D out of fragment shaders. Finally just drink from the firehose -- [VIDEO] is fantastic, yes it's five hours but worth it. (Definitely come into that familiar with the idea of raymarching though... the first few minutes start off super basic but it goes to eleven real quick.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24846178,"author":"trollied","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Raymarching with Fennel and L\u00d6VE","text":"If you have 6 hours to kill, check this shadertoy that uses ray marching: [LINK] And the video that goes through its creation step by step: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Cj4y0EUlU-Y":[{"hn_comment_id":2800483,"author":"joeyespo","month":"2011-07","story_title":"Accidental Genius: How To Think","text":"I completely agree. First started thinking this way after listening to Feynman talk about his discovery of how people think very differently. [VIDEO] He does a great job of communicating this, despite our interpretive differences. (Though perhaps it's just very well spoken for my interpretation and just the opposite for someone else out there.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3749394,"author":"Retric","month":"2012-03","story_title":"MIT discovers the location of memories: Individual neurons","text":"Perhaps if I reword that a little you might understand what I mean: [LINK] is the subjective experience of the ability to think about things and processes as abstractions. Apple, Airplane, Alphabet, Algebra, Balance, Self, or Obama they all exist as arrangements and connections of neurons in your brain. When a song is stuck in your head that's a physical thing that's happening to a some neurons in your head. But, so is everything else your thinking about. These networks also connect to and build off of other abstractions so ((((peanut) + butter) + Jelly) + Sandwich) is built from more than one of these networks. Try and think of a pile of peanut butter next to some grape jelly. No problem it's brown next to purple. Now try and do that for peanut butter next to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Most people feel something odd happen on the second one because they are reusing the peanut butter network for both of those. For me, I can't focus on their colors at the same time. For a great subjective description of this watch: [VIDEO] Getting back to Consciousness, it's turning on these abstractions by choice. I want to think about Apple so I activate the Apple network and suddenly experience Apple. And it's the same network as if I had just read the word or saw a physical Apple. Language also get's mapped to this which is part of why philosophers think about thinks like platonic ideals yes there is an ideal Chair it exists and it's the Chair classifier in your head.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16841870,"author":"DavidVoid","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Kubrick found what he wanted by trying things out","text":"You'll probably enjoy this video with Richard Feynman about how different people think differently even for something as basic as counting. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19594686,"author":"chii","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Overview of differential equations [video]","text":"If you have a few minutes spare, you should watch this video of richard feynman, who talks about how he thinks \"thinking\" happens in people, and how communication is very lossy : [VIDEO] i think the fact that you thought a certain way of learning is more appropriate is actually correct - some people learn one way better than another, and that's because in their brain, they model the world in a different way to other people (who also find a different way of learning better). It just so happens that sometimes a person's model happens to suit the sort of teaching method being used in a school, and he ends up looking like a genius.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22195779,"author":"oxplot","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Not everyone has an internal monologue","text":"Relevant bit from Feynman talking about how he found that a simple act of counting in one's head can be different and all its implications. I suggest watching the other videos from the same interview. Lots of fun. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CjVQJdIrDJ0":[{"hn_comment_id":9105255,"author":"frankosaurus","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)","text":"Kahneman's talk at Google summarized the first 2 chapters pretty well: [VIDEO] I strongly recommend it for anyone who doesn't have time to read the book. As for the book itself, I agree with some others' postings here -- it's absolutely fantastic. It changed the way I think about human cognition and education... not to mention machine learning, politics, and marketing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3395396,"author":"david927","month":"2011-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best book you read in 2011","text":"It's been on my list after watching this great lecture: [VIDEO] I plan to follow it with Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20816597,"author":"frankosaurus","month":"2019-08","story_title":"How the brain 'approximates' without counting","text":"I believe the bit about priming was refuted in some repro attempts. If you're short on time, watch Kahneman's talk at Google, which basically summarizes the first chapter or so. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CnMRePtHMZY":[{"hn_comment_id":42907131,"author":"tommiegannert","month":"2025-02","story_title":"New thermogalvanic tech paves way for more efficient fridges","text":"> Did peltiers ever get efficient? Not compared to gas compression. For a relaxed take on it: [VIDEO] (Thermoelectric cooling: it's not great) Though part of the complaints about the mini fridge is due to lack of insulation. But he compares it to his usual fridge, which has a similar power draw as this 60W mini fridge, and there's a 50x difference in volume to cool.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44435551,"author":"joshstrange","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-off","text":"> though less efficient than other types IIRC they are _massively_ less efficient. Relevant Technology Connections video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44633060,"author":"otikik","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling","text":"Mandatory Technology Connections video about Peltier cooling, \"Why Thermoelectric Cooling Is Inefficient\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CnbVCNIh1NA":[{"hn_comment_id":24076802,"author":"disposedtrolley","month":"2020-08","story_title":"MicroBlocks: Scratch and Smalltalk-inspired MCU VM for live embedded programming","text":"I've seen a few attempts at \"structure editors\" which are keyboard driven but limit what you can type so it's always syntactically correct. Fructure is an example which looked promising! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24314587,"author":"loosetypes","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Hazel: A live functional programming environment featuring typed holes","text":"For folks interested in this sort of thing, Andrew Blinn gave a neat talk[1] pertaining to structured editing at Racketcon, which credits Cyrus\u2019 work with Hazel. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"CpCrkO1x-Qo":[{"hn_comment_id":17544345,"author":"deelowe","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Munro Teardown Shows Tesla Model 3 Solidly Profitable [video]","text":"> The $35k base model made at scale later this year will be profitable Here's the thing. SV Tech companies aren't too great at the whole \"at scale\" manufacturing thing. Maybe Tesla can figure it out, but they need to pay more attention to what the \"boring dinosaurs\" are doing this this regard. If you're interested, this video is great: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16893007,"author":"csours","month":"2018-04","story_title":"To Understand the Future of Tesla, Look to the History of GM","text":"Another parallel: Over-automation [VIDEO] (the whole thing is worth watching if you are into this sort of thing)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16945532,"author":"olivermarks","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Tesla's Simultaneous Brilliance and Incompetence Revealed in Teardown of Model 3","text":"[VIDEO] 90 minute discussion of Tesla 3 with Munro and others on the excellent autoline network youtube channel ('Really heavy, really expensive')","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17360805,"author":"tokipin","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Tesla sues ex-employee for hacking, theft, and leaking to the press","text":"The cells and the packs are different things. The packs aren't just a bunch of cells glued together. See this[1] fun teardown discussion. Another company building battery packs would have different costs even if they were buying the same exact cells from Panasonic, and it's likely Tesla had a hand in designing the cells so I don't know if that's particularly possible. The reason for the Gigafactory is to compress supply chains, but more importantly because there isn't enough global demand/supply for batteries to support the volumes Tesla wants. Without building their own factory, the global supply would be a constraining factor for Tesla's plans. The Gigafactory is a long-term bet that they will need that much supply in the future. This is not a problem that other carmakers have where they would want to \"vertically integrate\" oil refineries and gas stations, because availability of gasoline is not a problem. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17383969,"author":"cepth","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee","text":"It could certainly be that the German automakers are more concerned about present profitability. That could easily turn into falling victim to the classic innovator's dilemma. It seems that by year end, both the Model S and Model 3 will have taken significant market share from their European competitors: [LINK] . The cannibalization is real, and that's why luxury automakers like BMW have announced plans for 12 fully-electric models by 2025 ( [LINK] ). Your points about electrical infrastructure are definitely thought-provoking ones. I'd agree that the infrastructure as of today doesn't exist for widespread adoption. At the same time, the market that Tesla and the luxury European automakers compete for today doesn't hit that 5% threshold ( [LINK] ). Add up the market share of car (not truck) sales from BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, and you're looking at a ~3% market share. I think this section of the video from Sandy Munro is worth a watch: [VIDEO] . Munro has been a huge critic of the build quality of the Model 3, but that everything \"below the skateboard [the floor]\" is seriously impressive. The cells in Tesla's battery pack have a maximum of a 0.2 milliamp difference between cells. Say that I accept your premise that the German automakers today are biding their time, and could spend their R&D money on electric cars if they so chose. Who will they source their battery packs from? Will they try to build their own supply chain for the raw materials? What competence have they d","stance":"rec"}],"CuD7SCqHB7k":[{"hn_comment_id":15179941,"author":"chubot","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]","text":"Related: \"Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing by Joe Duffy\" at RustConf 2017. [VIDEO] I summarized this excellent talk here [1], but one of the main points is that compatibility with existing systems is important for adoption. (They learned that the hard way -- by having their entire project cancelled and almost everything thrown out.) He advocates unit-by-unit rewrites rather than big-bang rewrites, just like Kell does in this conference article. And compatibility with C in Windows should be easier than it is in the Unix world, because the whole OS is architected around a binary protocol AFAIK -- COM. My sense is that Rust may not have thought enough about compatibility early in its life. Only later when they ran into adoption problems did they start talking more about compatibility. Also, it seems Rust competes more with C++ than C, and there seems to be very little attempt to be compatible with C++ (although perhaps that problem is intractable.) Personally I don't think Rust will be a successful C replacement. It will have some adoption, but the Linux kernel will still be running on bajillions of devices 10 years from now, written in C. And in 20 years, something else will come along to replace either C or Linux, but that thing won't involve Rust. [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21993526,"author":"shepmaster","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Blogging about Midori (2015)","text":"See also \"Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing\" by Joe Duffy, the closing keynote at RustConf 2017: [VIDEO] Midori and Rust have several striking similarities, and Microsoft's recent uptick in interest in Rust (and Rust-like languages) bodes well for improved software quality.","stance":"rec"}],"CvRAqR2pAgw":[{"hn_comment_id":16604664,"author":"namelost","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Money creation in the modern economy (2014) [pdf]","text":"You can't miss the accompanying videos that they recorded down in the basement: 1) [LINK] (beginner) 2) [VIDEO] (advanced)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28474124,"author":"rahimnathwani","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Money creation in the modern economy (2014) [pdf]","text":"Some of the content is in this short video: [VIDEO] Money is created by both the central bank and retail banks. When the Bank of England buys an asset, it pays in newly-created pounds. These pounds are an obligation of the central bank, i.e. a debt owed by the bank. So these pounds are 'central bank money'. When a commercial or retail bank gives you a loan, you have two accounts at the bank that move in opposite directions: - current account is credited by $X (bank owes you money) - loan account is debited by $X (you owe the bank) So the net effect is zero (the sum of all your balances with the bank is still the same as before the loan was made). But now there's more money in your current account, so there's more money available for you to spend. Money has been created. Even though this new money isn't central bank money: - it's denominated in the same units as central bank money (pounds) - it's almost as safe from default (it's protected by a deposit guarantee scheme) - you can use it to pay for things (bank transfers are widely accepted as a means of payment) In practice, there are capital adequacy requirements that limit how much banks can lend. They are required to keep a buffer between assets and liabilities (equity capital). As the bank's balance sheet gets bigger, more equity capital is required.","stance":"rec"}],"Cwas_7H5KUs":[{"hn_comment_id":23623276,"author":"threatofrain","month":"2020-06","story_title":"The Open Goldberg Variations","text":"Glenn Gould's interpretation might be the most famous, and is worth a listen. [VIDEO] (1955) [LINK] (1981)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28359031,"author":"tannhauser23","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Apple acquires classical music streaming service Primephonic","text":"Not the OP but happy to help! Since you already like Bach, start by exploring his work! Let's start with the Goldberg Variations, which are 30 variations on a theme set for the keyboard. Glenn Gould's 1955 recording is perhaps the best known recording of this work: [VIDEO] I also greatly enjoy Andras Schiff's interpretations of Bach: [LINK] For opera, I suggest starting with the Magic Flute by Mozart. There are so many good recording to choose from but why not watch the thing? It's meant to be a visual/audio format, after all! I suggest this recording of the Metropolitan Opera - it's what got me hooked on operas many years ago: [LINK] If you like Maria Callas, you'll love Italian operas. Why not start with the classic, La Traviata? I can't find any of Callas's performances online (aside from clips), but you may like this performance with Anna Netrebko: [LINK] Finally, a note on where/how to listen to classical music. I find Youtube to be an incredible tool for listening and for discovery. It's not necessary to dig back to vinyl or 8-track to listen to great performances - they've been remastered for CDs and lossless media. But ultimately you want to listen to it in person. I'll never forget seeing my first opera in person (The Flying Dutchman). Or the time I scored orchestra seats for Sibelius's 4th symphony. Until the performances return, you might want to buy a ticket to an online performance on DG Premium, which is Deutsche Grammophon's streaming service: [LINK] Good luck ","stance":"rec"}],"CxHa5KaMBcM":[{"hn_comment_id":30059860,"author":"ethbr0","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Metal Detectorist Discovers One of England\u2019s Earliest Gold Coins in a Farm Field","text":"> equivalent of having a nice cuppa on a cool, late summer's morning, while looking out the window at the long, brown grass swaying gently in the breeze Obligatory BBC Shipping Forecast, because it seems right up this crowd's alley: [VIDEO] Recent: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35585600,"author":"ilikepi","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Lofi air traffic control \u2013 LAX","text":"Maybe try the BBC shipping forecast? [VIDEO] I find the use of the Beaufort scale ( [LINK] ) gives it a particularly dry flavor...","stance":"rec"}],"Cym4TZwTCNU":[{"hn_comment_id":22807290,"author":"slowmovintarget","month":"2020-04","story_title":"The Impedance Mismatch Is Our Fault (2012)","text":"Rich Hickey's talk on the design of Datomic is also something every programmer should see at least once: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4600489,"author":"MoosePlissken","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Rethinking caching in web apps","text":"We recently started using Solr in a similar manner where I work. We don't go as far as to pack an index in with our code, but each page serving instance has an embedded Solr server that it uses to pull a lot of fairly static data. Those indexes are updated nightly from a master Solr server which imports its data from a normal relational database. So far it has worked really well, but I don't think it really offers many advantages scalability wise over other NoSQL solutions. Like most other solutions it trades fast writes/consistent reads for fast reads, which is fine in many cases. Around the time we were adding Solr though, I heard about Datomic ( [LINK] ). I haven't had time to really investigate it, but it seems to me that Datomic provides fast reads in a manner very similar to the Solr configuration you described. Live versions of the database's index are deployed to agents that live on your app servers, but unlike the Solr configuration these agents receive updates to the index in real time. At a glance at least, it seems to offer all of the advantages of the Solr solution while still allowing relatively fast updates to the data. This is an interesting talk on the topic by Rich Hickey (who created Datomic): [VIDEO] . It's long but I thought it was worthwhile.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10189644,"author":"shotgun","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Ask HN: CTM gave CS the \u201ckernel language\u201d. Is there a \u201ckernel database\u201d?","text":"Although tangential to your question, I feel you might enjoy presentations by Rich Hickey wherein he describes traditional database architectures and presents the whys and wherefores behind Datomic. For example: [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17808857,"author":"pgt","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Idempotence: What is it and why should I care?","text":"You will enjoy the fact-based database Datomic, which is the reason Rich Hickey made Clojure: [VIDEO] Datalog is a much, much, much query language better than SQL: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Cyya23MPoAI":[{"hn_comment_id":46751633,"author":"TheAceOfHearts","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net","text":"I need to share a video [0] which helped contextualize Alex Honnold for me by contrasting him with another climber I've watched for years: Magnus Midtbo. In this video they're solo climbing a fairly simple and safe mountain, and Magnus is visibly stressed out while Alex calmly shouts encouragement all while recording. When watching Alex Honnold in Free Solo, I understood there was a exceptional aspect to him, but it took me seeing him climb with other people to really grasp the magnitude. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36463638,"author":"bargle0","month":"2023-06","story_title":"The Free Soloist Who Fell to Earth","text":"Try this climbing video: [VIDEO] One legendary climber pressures an experienced climber in to a high danger situation. It\u2019ll make you about as uncomfortable as a SFW video can.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39162566,"author":"cf1241290841","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Best Documentaries You've Ever Seen","text":">34. Free Solo Also worth mentioning The Dawn Wall (2017) Meru (2015) The Alpinist (2021) The mindset of the people at these extremes is really interesting. Clash of cultures with Magnus Midtb\u00f8 visiting Honnold was also an interesting watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"D1R-jKKp3NA":[{"hn_comment_id":3174,"author":"pashle","month":"2007-03","story_title":"'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says (text only; video link in comments)","text":"Jobs' speech is about 1.5 years old. It's probably a classic for this audience, but the few who've slipped through the cracks must not be denied this utterly inspiring speech. We should be so lucky to one day be able to give a speech that chronicles a life of amazing achievements. Don't focus so much on whether what he's saying is true, of if you think he's this or that. All that matters is that if you feel something deep within you move, listen to THAT. Also, here's the YouTube video of the speech - [VIDEO] enjoy!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":595537,"author":"hwijaya","month":"2009-05","story_title":"'You've got to find what you love'","text":"This is no doubt one of the best speech i ever heard. It gives me a lot of new perspectives when i heard it for the first time back in 2006. Here's the video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1179221,"author":"mrduncan","month":"2010-03","story_title":"Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal","text":"That's always been one of my favorite speeches. I highly recommend it to anyone who's never heard (or seen) it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3103729,"author":"seejay","month":"2011-10","story_title":"I quit my job last March and it was a bad idea.","text":"Please listen to the famous Stanford Commencement Speech by Steve Jobs. It has helped me greatly in situations I feel depressed about life. I still listen to it again and again! worth every second! Here's the youtube link [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4001112,"author":"sushilchoudhari","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the most inspirational blog posts you've ever read?","text":"How come no one mentioned Steve Jobs and his commencement speech at Stanford? It is absolutely one of my favorites. I watch it everytime i feel that i could use a dose of motivation. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6968266,"author":"jesseendahl","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I develop fanatical resolve?","text":"The single best motivator for me is remembering that I'm going to die one day. I think often about the commencement speech Steve Jobs made in 2005. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Here's a link: [VIDEO] I still allow myself time to relax/slack off, but if I had intended to only watch a few episodes before getting down to working on something I'm passionate about, and then have the urge to just do the easy thing and keep watching instead of doing whatever I'd planned to do, I remember that my time is slowly running out and if I don't take steps to achieve my dreams now, then I will likely never achieve them before there's no time left. This applies to everything in life, not just work. Travel, falling in love, learning new things--you name it--everything is affected by how limited your time is. Time and your body (there's a direct relationship between them) are the most limited resources you have, and even if you strike it rich you can never rewind the clock. This is what motivates me more than anything else to get shit done. On a related note, once you realize just how limited your time is, you realize how pointless it is to live your life for other people or be constrained by dogma. Anyway, at this point I'm just rehashing the speech, and Jobs says all this much better than I do. If you haven't seen it yet, go watch it. If you have seen it, go watch it again and listen very carefully to what he says.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":208294,"author":"wave","month":"2008-06","story_title":"8 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was 22","text":"I find Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech to be a very good real life advice. If you are graduating this year, please watch it and learn from his experience. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":421169,"author":"SapphireSun","month":"2009-01","story_title":"Steve Jobs speaks out about his health","text":"Jobs gave an address to Stanford university's graduating class in 2005. Here's a link to youtube if you want to watch [VIDEO] was quite interesting and spoke deeply to me.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":593987,"author":"pistoriusp","month":"2009-05","story_title":"Renowned reverse engineer Fravia says goodbye","text":"I find it strange how the imminent demise of another makes me reflect upon myself: I found myself wondering what I would write in the same situation, and then realizing that this is a fate that I cannot escape. I like to watch Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech, every now and again, to remind me of that fact: [VIDEO] Transcribed: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2225394,"author":"usamaqasem","month":"2011-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Taking the next 6 months off, advice?","text":"Cool, I will just simply tell you my opinion, in the end it is you who should make the decision, for me school is for people who don't have imagination and courage to learn by themselves. But in early age and with lack of experience it is easy to get carried away and take the wrong direction. If you already found your passion and you are sure that whatever is it, it is what you want to do for next few years of your life. Take the 6 months off and go explore in that direction and see what you get. Otherwise if you are not sure yet, stay in school and try to find what you like to do, you still have long way and if the next 6 months are not them, be patient sooner or later you will find what you like to do. Then everything is going to be clear. Explore and try to meet people and talk to them whether in school or off school. Check this video: [VIDEO] Good Luck.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2726369,"author":"mahrain","month":"2011-07","story_title":"What should I do with my life?","text":"By, when you get to the point where you have to choose with either your heart or your head (wallet, benchmarks etc.) picking the former. Oh, and watch Steve Jobs at Stanford on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2923984,"author":"ffffruit","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Steve Jobs Resigns as Apple CEO (Official Letter)","text":"A true pioneer of the computing industry - farewell. His Standford graduation talk, always inspiring: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3102968,"author":"reconor","month":"2011-10","story_title":"I quit my job last March and it was a bad idea.","text":"Your life is essentially a series of experiences unfolding in ways you are likely to never predict with any reasonable degree of accuracy. Steve Job's graduation commencement speech touches on this idea of being unable to \"connect the dots in your life\" forward, one can only do it retrospectively. It is a keen observation and is certainly worth listening to: [VIDEO] Try and minimize the amount of time you let your mind spend regretting a decision you made in March and focus more on looking forward and taking the next positive step in your life. You are only 20 and are bound to make many more decisions that you may consider to be a mistake in the short-term, but you have no idea how your life will ultimately unfold. What you once considered to be a mistake could turn out to be a great decision, even if it only serves the purpose of teaching you some lessons to grow yourself further. Kudos on your bravery to take a risk, I'm sorry to hear it isn't working out at the moment but I assure you it is totally within your domain of influence to change things around for yourself and realize new opportunities. Just take it one step at a time and try and frame the experience as simply an opportunity to grow through a challenge. I read edw519's comment and he is certainly right, we do care and things are never as bad as they may seem.","stance":"rec"}],"D5in5EdjhD0":[{"hn_comment_id":26447529,"author":"mrwnmonm","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Translating Newton\u2019s Principia","text":"Maybe off-topic, but Prof. Chomsky always mention how important Newton was in the history of science and how significant his giving up on the mechanical philosophy when he failed to explain gravity in a mechanical way, how \"lowering the bar\" was important to set a realistic direction for science. He has many lectures about it, I like this one: [VIDEO] , one of the best lectures ever.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32932661,"author":"Supermancho","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Quantum tunneling makes DNA more unstable","text":"Chomsky's surprisingly insightful thinking on the limits of human knowledge, and the consequences: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"D5xh0ZIEUOE":[{"hn_comment_id":34524868,"author":"jvanderbot","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Night Watch [pdf]","text":"James Mickens is a national treasure. Go watch his talks on YouTube and read everything he writes. [LINK] Excellence. Quality. Science. These are just a few of the words that have been applied to the illustrious research career of James Mickens. In the span of a few years, James Mickens has made deep, fundamental, and amazing contributions to various areas of computer science and life. Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest scholars of his generation, James Mickens ran out of storage space for his awards in 1992, and he subsequently purchased a large cave to act as a warehouse/fortress from which he can defend himself during the inevitable robot war that was prophesied by the documentary movie \u201cThe Matrix.\u201d In his spare time, James Mickens enjoys life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, often (but not always) in that order, and usually (almost always) while listening to Black Sabbath. Feel free to start here [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218625,"author":"komuW","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"1. Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? - James Mickens [LINK] 2. James Mickens on JavaScript - James Mickens [VIDEO] 3. Creating containers From Scratch - Liz Rice [LINK] 4. 2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Existence of Nothing - Panelists: J. Richard Gott, Jim Holt, Lawrence Krauss, Charles Seife, Eve Silverstein. Moderator: Neil deGrasse Tyson [LINK] 5. 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Is the Universe a Simulation? - Panelists: David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi, James Gates, Lisa Randall, Max Tegmark Moderator: Neil deGrasse Tyson [LINK] 6. Zig: A programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity \u2013 Andrew Kelley [LINK] 7. Concurrency Is Not Parallelism - Rob Pike [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33476140,"author":"haimez","month":"2022-11","story_title":"In defense of linked lists","text":"I recommend James Micken\u2019s JavaScript talk on this matter: [VIDEO] (Time stamped to the beginning of the arrays section)","stance":"rec"}],"D6EPuUdIC1E":[{"hn_comment_id":23277720,"author":"mettamage","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Breathing habits are related to physical and mental health","text":"There is already a lot of research. I have some comments about it in my whole HN history for if you're truly curious. Go to Google Scholar and look it up. I just re-edited my whole thing (behind a laptop now). For other HN people I did mention pre-edit: \"Wim is crazy. The people studying him aren\u2019t.\" Enough research has been done, as far as I'm concerned it's a case closed. The WHM does things that we couldn't do before (e.g. be more resistant against the cold). Now we can, more research is needed to fully understand it. For people who dismiss it, they simply haven't taken the time to watch some doctor explain it on YouTube in-depth. And I get that, but then don't say it's BS, simply say you're sceptical. I'm the first person to burn occult things to the ground as I hate nonsense. This seems occult, but it isn't. It doesn't help that Wim acts like a guru, but what he does can be rooted in science. He roots it in science by asking scientists to research him. From his perspective that's all he can do. Here is an amazing summary on the research of a sceptical doctor: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24773241,"author":"skosch","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Wim Hof\u2019s teachings about breath work and the health benefits of cold plunges","text":"I haven't listened to them but can recommend the Medlife Crisis episode [0], in which he reviews the scientific literature around the effects of cold exposure, blood oxygenation/acidity from hyper-/hypoventilation, and related topics. He comes to the conclusion that Wim Hof is likely a genetic outlier, but that breathing techniques can have real physiological effects on things like pain perception, and that cold exposure likely has a bunch of real benefits \u2013 but also that placebo may play a big role (which is nevertheless a very real effect). [0] [VIDEO] (timestamped to the conclusions)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24775110,"author":"mettamage","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Wim Hof\u2019s teachings about breath work and the health benefits of cold plunges","text":"I'm sorry Rubatuga, I flagged you. To be fair: I'm not having the best of days, so I might be a bit quicker to flag, but I find this behavior on HN unacceptable. You make an overgeneralized claim (\"this is all \") and give no evidence. There is an extreme amount of evidence on the contrary that the WHM has a lot of novel scientific elements to it. See [1] as an example. Medlife crisis also did a good nuanced video on it [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30428272,"author":"mettamage","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Can you warm yourself with your mind?","text":"Disclaimer: I've met Wim and was one of his guinea pigs in this experiment [2]. The best proof I have for that is that I've claimed this for years on HN ;-) We trained for 4 days in Poland. The hardest challenge I did was climbing up a mountain in my shorts + shoes + socks for 2.5 hours at -7 degrees. I did not have frostbite in the end, none of us did. We did the Harlem Shake (that was a thing back then). I also asked a ton of questions to the researchers back then. From what I've read, g-tummo is very likely not the Wim Hof Method. I've never trained with a monk claiming to know g-tummo. The son of Wim Hof loudly told me \"The Wim Hof Method is not Tummo!\" (almost a direct quote from memory, probably paraphrased). So I'd argue that back in 2014 or whenever it was, they were of the opinion it was something else. I'd be willing to bet they've never met a g-tummo monk either :) A good medical YT vid on the WHM [1]. From my experiential point of view: the WHM doesn't warm your body, you simply don't get cold, nor do you feel cold (you're too high on adrenaline to have any normal sense of temperature). Sometimes I did feel a warmth boost, but that's not the main \"working thing\" behind his method. I use it whenever I need an adrenaline boost, or don't want to feel cold. When is it handy or fun to get an adrenaline boost on purpose (my experience)? 1. When you have a headache (free painkiller when nothing is lying around) 2. When you're at a party (no drugs needed, the WHM is a dru","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31037128,"author":"tarsinge","month":"2022-04","story_title":"5-min breathing workout lowers blood pressure as much as exercise, drugs (2021)","text":"The article is about IMST, which is strictly about muscle strengthening. This is maybe a side effect of the Wim Hoff Method, but the WHM also has other purposes because the main mechanism is hyper ventilation and breath holding. Here is good medical explanation of what happens when practicing the WMH (by a medical professional): [VIDEO] (summary at 33:46).","stance":"rec"}],"D6h5dFyyUX0":[{"hn_comment_id":5869977,"author":"Kaali","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Clojure Cookbook is now accepting contributions","text":"For those not familiar with Emacs, IntelliJ IDEA with La Clojure is also an okay choice. I use IDEA for Python, Java and Scala; and still switch to Emacs when I code in Clojure. The reason is that Emacs has really strong toolset for LISP, where many of the features are missing from other environments, or implemented partially. Slime/swank (nrepl replaces it, but I'm just slowly transitioning to it), provides code completion, documentation lookup, REPL, macro expansion and even live code updates on a running application; which can be a bit of a pain to setup on other editors. And the integration in Emacs is really great, as the repl buffer is really just a text buffer, the same as the one you are coding in. But the biggest reason for me to code LISP in Emacs is paredit. It really makes all the trouble with balancing parenthesis and moving around the sexps really easy. It might seem counter intuitive and a bit troublesome at first, but I really recommend you to try it. For a short and enthusiastic video on paredit, see [VIDEO] -- and maybe the other Emacs Rocks! videos to learn more about modern Emacs.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6062364,"author":"wnesensohn","month":"2013-07","story_title":"A preview of LightTable 0.5","text":"I'll be honest with you: I'm maybe not the one to give proper advice on paredit. I'm using C# on my day job, and as such have no use for paredit (I do use ViEmu for VS though, which makes VS bearable) for most of my programming tasks. Also, I've never done anything in clojure. I expect it to be a similar experience to CL, but the different types of parenthesis might have an effect on using paredit efficiently. That said, I found that the following mapping really makes a huge difference when working with sexps & evil-mode: C-l: paredit-forward-slurp-sexp C-k: paredit-backward-barf-sexp C-j: paredit-backward-slurp-sexp C-h: paredit-forward-barf-sexp Your mileage may vary, of course. I mapped it this way because my fingers dictated it, and it plays well with vim/evil. As to how to actually use these commands: Try them out on a few sexps, it'll be clear to you pretty soon. Also be sure to check out Emacs Rocks! ep14 ( [VIDEO] ), it's well worth the 3:40. I actually find learning paredit to be very similar to learning vim: You start with almost nothing (maybe hjkl in vim, but even that takes a while to get used to), and slowly add new tricks to your tool belt. Also like with vim, everyone has their own style of using the tools. Of course, there's a ton of other things in paredit which can improve your efficiency which I haven't added to my muscle-memory yet. It's just that I found barfing/slurping to be the most bang for the buck, so I added them first.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6965139,"author":"6cxs2hd6","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Lamdu - towards the next generation IDE","text":"There's a structured editing mode for Emacs called Paredit, to use for s-expression languages like Lisp, Racket, Clojure. Since the AST for such languages is s-expressions, and some people struggle with parens, this is an interesting \"fun size\" example of editing the AST. The thing is, paredit is quite challenging for most people to adopt, due to what you mentioned about the \"flow\" they've already learned. Magnar Sveen has a great video about this at [VIDEO] Best quote: \"If you think paredit is not for you, then you need to become the kind of person that paredit is for.\" EDIT: To clarify, Magnar is quoting technomancy a.k.a. Phil Hagelberg.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6970905,"author":"JackMorgan","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett\u2019s Igors","text":"If you pair a majority of the time, sure, make a standardized workstation with your team. My team uses viemu in VS, which the rest of our office detests, but hey, we are the ones pairing 99% of the time. When I am not pairing for the majority, I setup my machine to my tastes, and simply install a \"default\" editor for the few times someone else actually needs to type on my machine. Emacs and IDEA both have good ways to revert everything to defaults temporarily. I do not believe, however, that a perfectly customized setup has only small gains. For example, consider two tools that I have never seen as defaults in any editor or IDE: rainbow parens/brackets and paredit mode. Rainbow parens just highlights pairs: [LINK] And here is a short minute paredit mode explanation: [VIDEO] When actually editing code, those two tools save me several hundred keystrokes an hour. And those are just the first two tools I thought to use as an example out of the entire toolbox that is emacs. If I was to now give up just those two tools, I would be sentencing myself to the mental equivalent of tying five pound weights to my legs for the marathon that is the rest of my programming career. Why would I intentionally require myself to type more keys per hour to do the same editing, rather than just learning a faster way to edit? This is, obviously, also my argument for learning the vim editing system (which I also use in emacs).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8205519,"author":"tikhonj","month":"2014-08","story_title":"An editor for composed programs","text":"Emacs's structured editing, in the style of paredit[1], sounds very similar to a text-based version of syntax-directed editing (SDE). Designed for Lisp and S-expressions, it's a system that lets you edit and navigate around nested expressions at a syntactic rather than textual language. As you type, the correct level of nesting is maintained and there are commands for moving and editing code in terms of s-expressions rather than characters. In practice, it's very easy to start using and very powerful... but requires using Lisp. It'll seem odd if you're not regularly a Lisp user. Happily, this idea can generalize well enough to distinctly non-Lisp languages. Structured Haskell mode[2] does this for Haskell, which has a less regular and sparser syntax than s-expressions. The documentation has a bunch of handy animations showing the various features, giving you an idea of how it works without having to install it yourself. This doesn't address the meat of the blog post\u2014composing languages and grammars by taking advantage of structured editing\u2014but it shows that the necessary foundation is possible with a perfectly normal text editor. It would be interesting to see if some of the ideas from Eco could be added to structured editing modes like this without requiring you to use an external, self-contained editor. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] Also, here's a great video of Paredit in action: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14419449,"author":"peterhadlaw","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?","text":"The parentheses end up serving as a tool to speed up the development process with tool like paredit. You end up manipulating the \"tree\" of code vs the characters on a line. Check this out: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33047531,"author":"medo-bear","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The Hidden Origins of Lisp (2015)","text":"not op but for me structured editing is one of the biggest pluses when it comes to editing lisp code. here is a good example of what i mean [0]. btw autolisp standard formating is kind of an anti-example of good lisp formating. in emacs lots of excellent tools exist to make parantheses an extremely helpful feature [1] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33759369,"author":"gabiruh","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Paredit 25 released (after 8 years)","text":"Yeah... a couple GIFs would. If I was them I would've just embedded this video from \"Emacs Rocks!\": [VIDEO] It shows how incredible paredit is.","stance":"rec"}],"D7Kn5p7TP_Y":[{"hn_comment_id":14174068,"author":"sho","month":"2017-04","story_title":"IQ and the Job Market (Jordan Peterson) [video]","text":"This is just a clip from the full lecture here: [VIDEO] If you like the clip, watch the whole thing. It's great.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26291922,"author":"mudita","month":"2021-02","story_title":"In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)","text":"Let's hear it from a psychologist: \"If you don\u2019t buy IQ research, you might as well throw out all the rest of psychology.\" (Jordan Peterson) [VIDEO] For anybody interested in personality research, I warmly recommend this lecture series, by the way. These are the basics, which psychology students learn at university.","stance":"rec"}],"D7Sd8A6_fYU":[{"hn_comment_id":23205586,"author":"drummer","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Modern C++ gamedev: thoughts and misconceptions","text":"The mentioned cppcon presentation by Dan Saks is awesome. Highly recommend watching even if you are not interested in C or C++ : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16279913,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2018-02","story_title":"C++ and the Culture of Complexity (2013)","text":"I mean the embedded systems where Assembly and C89 still rule, and there is very hard to change, because the problem of adopting anything else is cultural. Basically, while there are projects being done in C++, and many companies are finally migrating from C to C++, the large majority is sticking with C. If you prefer to listen to someone actually relevant in the C++ embedded community, here is what Dan Saks has to say about it. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16496387,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Should you Rust in embedded yet?","text":"So, I will let one of the renowned experts speak instead. CppCon 2016: Dan Saks \u201cextern c: Talking to C Programmers about C++\u201d [VIDEO] Embedded Development with Dan Saks [LINK] Regarding Java vs C++, yes the enterprise world has adopted Java, however as someone doing consulting across Java, .NET and C++, I am really seeing it coming back since ANSI C++ has picked up steam again. I see it in projects related to IoT, AI, VR, big data,.... They are all polyglot projects with C++ plus something else, not C plus something else.","stance":"rec"}],"D99qI42KGB0":[{"hn_comment_id":21234083,"author":"ZeroGravitas","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Money Behind The Climate Denial Movement (2013)","text":"It's always mildly terrifying reading climate change related stories on Hacker News as all the hyper-logical libertarians do their best to portray accepted science as a global conspiracy of hippies and communists. If that kind of thing describes you, then I encourage you to check out this YouTube channel, which debunks all the nonsense with a focus on the kind of person who frequents Hacker News, i.e. likely nerdy and libertarian and more likely to be convinced by a link to a research paper or Margaret Thatcher's opinion than a picture of a cute animal in distress: A Conservative solution to climate change (part 1): [VIDEO] Are electric cars really green: [LINK] He hopefully talks your language and can open yours eyes to the sheer quantity of disingenuous BS that well paid lobbyists have been throwing around. He touches on some of the stuff mentioned in this article including Heartland.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21454516,"author":"ZeroGravitas","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Scientists\u2019 warnings about climate change have intensified","text":"If you're genuinely interested in escaping your info bubble then I've been recommending this video as a quick intro for people who don't feel at home with left wing solutions to climate change. Part of its about climate change denial, but it covers the attacks made (often by the same people) on the viability of renewables too and your pont about the solution not existing yet: [VIDEO] And yes, climate change deniers are the real problem, not people who are irrationally scared of nuclear. Nuclear is just one solution, and as of today it's not a cost effective one. We could have been building nukes for a while but what was the point in investing so much money in what was just a big hoax anyway? We could have had a carbon tax that made Nuclear competitive but again, what's the point when it's just a hoax?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24566635,"author":"Hammershaft","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial","text":"At this point the greatest hurdle to action on climate change is Republican obstruction backed by the apathy of the conservative base. I regularly see conservatives on /r/conservative use the lack of burn control and a rise in arson cases as talking points to dismiss these wildfires entirely. If an article like this is going to present a strong argument for climate action that can win over conservatives it will need to be scientifically precise and grapple specifically with conservative talking points. This NYT article did not even come close to meeting that bar, it confidently attributed complex multi factor phenomenon entirely to climate change without creating the groundwork of data & evidence needed to authoritatively establish those claims. When actors, politicians, and NYT journalists make dramatic claims and fail to meet that bar, then the intent backfires and only serves to entrench the common conservative belief that climate change is a product of liberal fear mongering. For an absolute masterclass on how to properly communicate about the science of climate change, and how to slowly win over moderate conservatives, I know of no better source than Potholer54. We can only hope that one day New York Times journalists will regularly exercise the scientific and journalistic diligence of this retired youtuber. [LINK] - The cause of Australia\u2019s bushfires \u2013 what the science says [VIDEO] - A conservative solution to global warming (Part 1)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24566676,"author":"Hammershaft","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial","text":"At this point the greatest hurdle to action on climate change is Republican obstruction backed by the apathy of the conservative base. I regularly see conservatives on /r/conservative use the lack of burn control and a rise in arson cases as talking points to dismiss these wildfires entirely. If an article like this is going to present a strong argument for climate action that can win over conservatives it will need to be scientifically precise and grapple specifically with conservative talking points. This NYT article did not even come close to meeting that bar, it confidently attributed complex multi factor phenomenon entirely to climate change without creating the groundwork of data & evidence needed to authoritatively establish those claims. When actors, politicians, and NYT journalists make dramatic claims and fail to meet that bar, then the intent backfires and only serves to entrench the common conservative belief that climate change is a product of liberal fear mongering. For an absolute masterclass on how to properly communicate about the science of climate change, and how to slowly win over moderate conservatives, I know of no better source than Potholer54. We can only hope that one day New York Times journalists will regularly exercise the scientific and journalistic diligence of this retired youtuber. [LINK] - The cause of Australia\u2019s bushfires \u2013 what the science says [VIDEO] - A conservative solution to global warming (Part 1)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21316362,"author":"ZeroGravitas","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Antarctic ice cliffs may not contribute to sea-level rise as much as predicted","text":"This YouTube channel from a former oil and gas surveying geologist and technology columnist does a good job of conveying the science while taking care not to spook people who are on the right of the political spectrum (like he is) and have absorbed too much misinformation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21390026,"author":"BregorMarRian","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?","text":"By the way, Bj\u00f8rn Lomborg is an unreliable and often misleading source. Why? See for yourself multiple examples of quality analysis with actual scientific sources. Highly recommended: [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] And that's analysis of Bj\u00f8rn Lomborg's work by those who actively support pragmatic, cost-effective, and often 'conservative' solutions to environmental problems and climate change. Examples: [3] [VIDEO] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27889283,"author":"Hammershaft","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?","text":"Have you considered the flipside, which has much more evidence for it, that denialism is being promoted by institutions and speakers who are by proxy funded by the fossil fuel industry, which is one of the largest industries on earth? I really reccomend, if you want a level headed, conservative, independent look at the issue that you check out some of these videos by Potholer54, a retired geologist and science reporter. [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33806444,"author":"ZeroGravitas","month":"2022-11","story_title":"How an early oil industry study became key in climate lawsuits","text":"In particular the two part video here is good as a summary: A CONSERVATIVE solution to global warming (Part 1) [VIDEO] Many of the other older ones are referring to old controversies, though I see the 14 year old one still has new comments from this year claiming it's all lies.","stance":"rec"}],"D9H9qTdserM":[{"hn_comment_id":25191550,"author":"pantelisk","month":"2020-11","story_title":"I created an alternative to the YouTube algorithm to stop me wasting time","text":"I don't know... honestly. I was extremely surprised. I was actually wondering if they switched to some level of human in the loop, because it used to suck in the past, but now is great. I expected people to have good experiences too. I 'm actually shocked to see how disappointed people are here... Here's an example of some stuff that just showed up recently. [1] Some guy camping an exploring an island that used to be a federal prison - [LINK] [2] A documentary about homeless people racing carts - [LINK] [3] Fantastic funk music (and I don't even listen to funk!) - [LINK] [4] Fantastic old school theatrical hard rock from Japan - [LINK] [5] Sapolsky's must-see lecture on stress - [VIDEO] (which I got recommended and was watching this morning in the background while I worked) Just a random sample from stuff that popped up in the recent past. All the above captured my curiosity 100%. Maybe it's a personality thing, maybe I am eager to just discover novel stuff, that the quality level might not be the highest but the novel factor covers for it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19251444,"author":"mattdeboard","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Practical Facts about the Human Brain","text":"The \"active amygdala = no empathy\" point does not jibe with my lay understanding of the physical phenomenon of empathy. That's the only one that I don't believe models our physiology in a useful way. The rest match up with some of the stuff I've read/watched. Watch some videos by Robert Sapolsky on YouTube. He's a neurostuff prof at Stanford. Good presentations. There's \"Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers\" [VIDEO] Also an actual academic lecture on the Limbic System which contextualizes & clarifies some of the other assertions in the OP blog post. [LINK] There are more but hopefully YouTube's algorithm helps you out there. The Stanford lecture series is very interesting though Sapolsky doesn't deliver all the lectures. edit: The only plausible, good faith explanation of the amygdala-empathy claim I can think of is that there are facial recognition studies designed to activate the amygdala [LINK] that showed some correlation between anxiety levels and ACC-amygdala connectivity. The ACC, or anterior cingulate cortex, is held to be responsible for empathy. So it may be an interpretation of that knowledge the author is talking about. I know that facial recognition tests are used for evaluation of empathy, sexual attraction and so on. This is probably the kernel of accuracy in the claim. Or there may be other science on the topic that reaches a conclusion closer to what the author said. The linked study is extremely interesting read.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37935348,"author":"Karstographer","month":"2023-10","story_title":"You're not lacking creativity, you're overwhelmed","text":"I'm sure it's been said many times, but John Cleese did provide a memorable talk on it [1] and particularly touched on the relation to stress. And if anyone feels like they have troubles with stress/anxiety, Robert Sapolsky provides some great insight into how and why it affects health overall [2]. I'm not sure if Sapolsky's material will help reduce stress, but it was pretty entertaining along the way. Two great speeches that it would be a shame to lose. Now, what was that about keeping up with digital clutter? [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38371648,"author":"thenerdhead","month":"2023-11","story_title":"","text":"Sapolsky has been at this for many years. Here's a great talk on one of his older books. [VIDEO] Especially with regards to his commentary on Selye's theories/lab work with rats. Makes sense if you've read a good number of books on stress (i.e. Stress of Life, Sapolsky's work, etc)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41138615,"author":"EdwardCoffin","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Robin Warren, pathologist who rewrote the science on ulcers, has died","text":"A perhaps easier to understand explanation of this is this part of a Robert Sapolsky talk on stress, prepositioned to the bit where he talks about the interaction of stress with the bacteria [1]. The summary is that the body is good at repairing the damage the bacteria do, unless the person is under constant stress which inhibits the repair work. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44437815,"author":"EdwardCoffin","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Aging-related inflammation is not universal across human populations","text":"He's also given many talks which are on youtube on the topic, one of which is his talk of the same name at the Beckman institute [1]. It's a little under 90 minutes and is enormously entertaining as well as being informative. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DBxdTkddHaE":[{"hn_comment_id":43893966,"author":"gota","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire","text":"From the same author: [LINK] [LINK] If you're not yet aware of it (unlikely as it made it 'big' in the overall internet), I believe the video from Tod's Workshop with actual experimentation is a must see: [VIDEO] There is a sequel and many other related videos, but this one is the source for a very famous clip (at 20:50 - [VIDEO] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23772117,"author":"catalogia","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Discovery of oldest bow and arrow technology in Eurasia","text":"The youtube channel Todd's Workshop did an interesting video with Tobias Capwell and a few others examining the effectiveness of English longbows against plate armor that I found interesting in a number of respects. In the video they had archer Joe Gibbs shooting a 160lb longbow. For this, he uses a posture that looks unusual by modern archery standards but which is evidently supported by contemporary illustrations of English longbowmen. Apparently this unusual posture is the only way he can manage to draw bows like this at all (he can draw up to 200lb bows like this.) He seems to be able to hold the bow drawn for a moment or two, but it's a far cry from what movies generally depict. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DC8tO16xdrY":[{"hn_comment_id":37460183,"author":"a2tech","month":"2023-09","story_title":"New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held \u201cLone Gunman\u201d Theory","text":"I used to be passingly interested in the conspiracy part of the JFK assassination until I watched this EXTENSIVE in length and sourced video on the assassination: [VIDEO] It's all very logical and straightforward.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37464151,"author":"sireat","month":"2023-09","story_title":"New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held \u201cLone Gunman\u201d Theory","text":"Fascinating video and indeed pretty straightforward. However, the bank robber analogy starting at 26mins [VIDEO] does not sit quite right. You can't just stick with one theory and keep fitting other facts to that theory forever - there is going to be a breaking point. To keep going with that particular bank robber story - Jake. In the example barring other facts, it is 99.9% probable that Jake indeed is the bank robber. What if instead of finding $9k out of $10k, police only find $5k out of $100k on Jake? What if not only talking to his girlfriend about robbing the bank he also talked about robbing the bank at the bar the previous week? What if there was an amateur theatre troupe at that bar that night? What if one of those actors was also an accomplished make up artist and high speed driver? Okay, the story keeps getting sillier. Even with these new facts the prosecution would still win. Let's add a new fact security cameras at a bar also show Jake, with similar timestamps to the bank's cameras. There are 3 more patrons that are willing to swear it was Jake. An old lady reports that she saw a car drive up at a high speed to Jake's car and leave a package. At that point we have a problem with being so sure on Jake being the guilty one. There is some reasonable doubt now. My point is you can never be 100% sure. All you can do is adjust priors. With JFK as it currently stands we might say 95% chance that Oswald was the lone gunman and 80% that he acted completely alone. We can ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38274612,"author":"taliesinb","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Review: 'JFK: What the Doctors Saw' eyewitnesses contradict Warren Commission","text":"This new stuff aside, there's an exhaustive two part series by Sean Munger that sets out the many interlocking lines of evidence that Oswald acted alone. I am pretty convinced at this point: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39172006,"author":"pgreenwood","month":"2024-01","story_title":"How the FBI targeted Camus, and then Sartre after the JFK assassination (2013)","text":"The HSCA conclusions were largely based on the now discredited acoustic analysis of the police channel dicabelt recording. If it weren't for that the findings would have largely supported that of the Warren Commission. [LINK] A good summary of the evidence that Oswald acted alone can be found here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DCto6UkBJoI":[{"hn_comment_id":48042912,"author":"Gagarin1917","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX","text":"Which is apparently manageable. Scott Manley isn\u2019t an industry veteran, but he does know a lot about space engineering and science. Here\u2019s his breakdown of the feasibility, and heat management is not really a major issue: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48963147,"author":"piloto_ciego","month":"2026-07","story_title":"SpaceX and the myth of independent Wall St research","text":"Scott Manley had a really good video on it that more or less confirmed my \"bar napkin approximations\" when people first started talking about this stuff. I think it's this one? [VIDEO] Anyway, I think sun synchronous orbit (basically slightly off from polar) and pointing the solar panels toward the sun and the radiator away... It's not as far fetched as people would have you believe.","stance":"rec"}],"DEcwa68f-jY":[{"hn_comment_id":38055185,"author":"satvikpendem","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Actual is going open-source","text":"Worth noting that the author, James Long, is the same one who made a great talk on using CRDTs called CRDTs for Mortals [0], and he uses them in Actual as well. He was a great source of inspiration when I was looking into using them for my offline-first, local-first apps [1]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23522358,"author":"raihansaputra","month":"2020-06","story_title":"One word in PostgreSQL unlocked a 9x performance improvement","text":"The author has a conference talk talking about CRDT and the timestamp technique he uses. Really useful if anyone else wonders what's the problem with wall clock timestamps. dotJS 2019 - James Long - CRDTs for Mortals (20:44): [VIDEO] EDIT: btw, out of all the comments on the timestamp here, seems like only yours is not complaining about the format, and even points out that the article did not go in depth yet to specify the actual timestamp that he uses.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25566488,"author":"raihansaputra","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some concrete examples of good SPA's?","text":"Yeah. The trick to managing the offline states is to have it as cache. So updating and solely relying on the server, and only serve when offline. On the interactivity side, I feel that a lot of tools that I use daily justifies the use of SPA/PWA. Definitely can be passable with HTML SSR, but there's not much examples of it yet. Todoist: No hassle offline handling. It will sync on it's own. Twitter: They do intercept everything and handle/queue requests when the client is offline. It's not perfect though. Roam: Again. Offline syncing, mainly offline search/document creation. This is a bit unique though as I think the server basically is just a sync logic. I feel that the SPA stage is definitely a growing phase instead of a destination to be. There's a lot of problems that are not solved elegantly yet, and it's and the boundaries. But I feel that SPA and all of it's learnings will be an example of how the next step will be like. And with .wasm coming, there's a lot of possibility of different architectures/how to build apps. Some talks that refers to why/how SPA makes sense for some problems/usecases: Offline first PWA/Web App, with CRDT for syncing: [VIDEO] (James Long's CRDT For Mortals talk) State management framework oriented for offline/PWA use: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28721814,"author":"azteceagle","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Downsides of Offline First","text":"We are in the same need right now. Something that we have researched and think it has a lot of potential, at least for us is James Long sync implementation. You can check out his talks and demos at: * [LINK] * [VIDEO] And his demo implementation (and annotated fork): * [LINK] * htps://github.com/clintharris/crdt-example-app_annotated/blob/master/NOTES.md I wonder why there isn't some open source engine based on this at least for CRUD apps since it has a lot of potential and it is really \"simple\" to implement and even understand.","stance":"rec"}],"DFFVSvAr7Wc":[{"hn_comment_id":8185719,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2014-08","story_title":"AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs [pdf]","text":"Even if you calculated as embodied energy instead of just looking at the energy spent directly on a task? Because a large part of the \"inefficiency\" of living creatures is physical maintenance of the body. If that is included for machines as well, I'm not so sure if they're better off. For now, of course - as soon as we realise energy is a real constraint, we'll surely start optimising for it. The third link I posted references Geoffrey West who has an interesting high-level physics approach to this issue, but it doesn't really do justice to his points. But I figured posting this 40 minute one, which is much more comprehensive, would be a bit much to ask: [VIDEO] (also has a lot more phycisist's arrogance in the form of cursing, which I find entertaining myself) Actually, given that city energy spending also grows sublinearly, robot and AI networks probably would as well. So that argument likely won't hold against it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10162125,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Why Elephants Don\u2019t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness","text":"This is why the largest animals in the world live in the sea: it's a better cooling system! Also, for those interested to know more, I recommend looking up Geoffrey B. West's stuff on complexity. It mentions the same things as this article and puts them in a wider context: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10179694,"author":"Radim","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Interdisciplinary and physics challenges of Network Theory","text":"For a great, accessible intro talk on this topic, check out Geoffrey West's \"On Complexity\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14569629,"author":"schiffern","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Amazon to Acquire Whole Foods for $13.7B","text":"> It's certainly not easy to unseat a powerful company, but it also seems difficult to stay at the top. Whether it's inefficiency, inability to pivot to new ways of doing things, or just markets that dry up as they're replaced by something else, companies have a hard time staying in such powerful positions in our society for long. Geoffrey West makes a compelling argument that it's due to the scaling laws around growth itself. The capitalist system demands exponential growth, but companies eventually reach a size where all their resources are devoted to maintaining existing \"biomass.\" The exact scaling depends on the scaling properties of the networks that \"feed\" each \"cell\" of the system \u2014 circulatory/respiratory networks for animals, infrastructural networks for civilizations, social network for companies/cities. Quite frankly most of the articles on Geoffrey West's work are hand-wavey bullshit, but he outlines it in this talk (including addressing this very question). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14973304,"author":"schiffern","month":"2017-08","story_title":"The First Law of Complexodynamics (2011)","text":"I thought that sounded familiar. Geoffrey West gave a talk there, delivering a much better explanation of his research on socio-biological scaling, growth, and sustainability than thepop sci treatments occasionally posted here. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DJFKl_5JTnA":[{"hn_comment_id":40032031,"author":"mpweiher","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Experience report: It will never work in theory","text":"Yes, this is a development that has happened over time and has become pretty severe. Michael Stonebraker has written/talked about this in the context of DBMS research, but to me the same issues are applicable to other fields as well. Slides: [LINK] Talk: [VIDEO] In short, the incentives/requirements in academia have changed so that producing working software is no longer feasible. He says he got his PhD with exactly 0 publications, became a professor with 5. Nowadays, you have to have 5 publications to get your PhD and god knows how many to become professor. That means 1 paper successfully published per year if you want to get your PhD in 5 years. Doing software is not possible, it is too risky and just takes too long. There's a lot more, I highly recommend the talk!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18056161,"author":"mpweiher","month":"2018-09","story_title":"How did software get so reliable without proof? (1996) [pdf]","text":"> academia\u2019s ideal role is to simply advance human understanding in interesting ways Yes and no. This is an engineering science. In a pure science, the world is out there to explore and find out about, constraining what you do. An engineering science is very much about useful things we can build and how we can get better at doing that. Buildings that stay up and house people/things, planes that can fly, ships that float, that sort of thing. Without a world to find out about and without being constrained by stuff to build, things get a bit arbitrary. At that point, it's really more pure art than anything else. Math is sort of the exception where we allow that kind of freedom. Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math is a reminder of the dangers of applying that approach to other disciplines. Anyway, I think it is actually wrong to pin academia's irrelevance to this fundamental divide. The problems in industry aren't too easy / boring to be of interest to academics. They are too hard to be solvable by anyone with the current insane level of publication requirements. Michael Stonebraker talked about this in detail: [VIDEO] It's a great talk.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27296640,"author":"psychomugs","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Collusion rings threaten the integrity of computer science research","text":"I often go back to this talk from Michael Stonebraker about, in his terms, the diarrhea of papers [1]. It's difficult to justify time towards anything that doesn't lead to a near-term publication or another line on your CV. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DJtef410XaM":[{"hn_comment_id":26567499,"author":"travisjungroth","month":"2021-03","story_title":"My Python testing style guide (2017)","text":"I'd really recommend this video. I had seen it years ago and just came back to it. It's about changing your architecture, one of the effects of that being changing how you need/use mock. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14221876,"author":"ceronman","month":"2017-04","story_title":"The Clean Architecture (2012)","text":"For the Python programmers, there is also a better explanation of the same concept by Brandon Rhodes: The Clean Architecture in Python. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14526242,"author":"chubot","month":"2017-06","story_title":"A theory of modern Golang","text":"I was going to write that I don't have a good pointer, but actually I think the idea is basically the \"onion architecture\" or \"clean architecture\". I don't recall if I watched all of this talk, but in general I like Brandon Rhodes' PyCon talks : [VIDEO] [LINK] I don't come from a Java background, but I think that many of these ideas originated in the Java community. They came to Python later (if at all), and it's a little funny to see Go struggling with the same thing. I think I came at it from more of a functional programming perspective, and the style gradually converged with what people were thinking about OOP. I'm not actually of all the details about \"clean architecture\" and \"onion architecture\", but they are definitely related to dependency injection. Basically all your effects and state can be instantiated on the \"outside\" in main() and passed INWARD. But I don't believe it necessarily has to be pure. I encapsulate all my state, but I don't encapsulate all my side effects, like printing to the screen. Some people appeared to like this comment, which is somewhat related: [LINK] I'm not sure how much this will help, but here is 12K+ lines of code I wrote with zero globals: [LINK] The main directories to look at are core/ and osh/. The main program imports a lot of stuff and wires it together: [LINK] (There is a bunch of surface messiness, but the architecture is sound.) I've also written even larger programs with zero globals. Also, I believe that web frameworks are some","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18044839,"author":"ceronman","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Functional core, imperative shell (2012)","text":"This is the same principle of the Clean Architecture. I like how Brandon Rhodes explain how to apply it in Python: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20019856,"author":"samrohn","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best Python related talks that you have watched","text":"These are some of my favorites: Clean Architectures in python: [VIDEO] Pandas from ground up: [LINK] How to write actually object-oriented python: [LINK] It's Time to Learn Regular Expressions: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27277804,"author":"hprotagonist","month":"2021-05","story_title":"It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)","text":"\"Promote I/O to management (where it can't do any damage)\" is the actionably good thing i've taken from Brandon Rhoades' talk based on this: [VIDEO] Living in a world where people regularly write single functions that: 1. loads data from a hardcoded string path of file location 2. does all the analysis inside the same loop that the file content iteration happens in and 3. plots the results ... that cleavage plane is a meaningfully good one. The rest of the ideas fall into \"all things in moderation, including moderation\", and can and should be special-cased judiciously as long as you know what you're doing. But oh god please can we stop writing _that_ function already.","stance":"rec"}],"DKtVpvzUF1Y":[{"hn_comment_id":13730101,"author":"NaOH","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Apollo 11 launch, video of engines at 500 frames per second","text":"This version of the same video includes informative narration of what are the first 30 seconds after Apollo 11 liftoff: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19664464,"author":"iClaudiusX","month":"2019-04","story_title":"F-1 Thrust Chamber","text":"Here is 500 fps film of the Saturn V launch for Apollo 11, narrated by Mark Gray. It explains the sequence of events over the course of 8+ minutes (30 seconds real time). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DOWDNBu9DkU":[{"hn_comment_id":35280353,"author":"programd","month":"2023-03","story_title":"High precision drone delivery using a zipline","text":"You can see more of Zipline drones in action in this video [0]. In particular the blood and medical supply delivery operation in Rowanda (at about 2:10) is very impressive. Not just a tech demo, this is modern drones in daily operation. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35553768,"author":"zefalt","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Transit Study Reveals Robocars Causing Surprisingly Little Disruption on Streets","text":"[VIDEO] Saw saw this video the other day. Check out the drone around 13:55 regarding noise and rotor design. The whole video is worth a watch though. The company is zipline which is mentioned in a comment above.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37580445,"author":"Flockster","month":"2023-09","story_title":"FAA Authorizes Zipline to Deliver Commercial Packages Using Drones","text":"A video from Mark Rober about Zipline, to get an idea. I was very impressed when I first heard of them. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40093183,"author":"pedalpete","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Drone startup Zipline hits 1M deliveries, looks to restaurants as it cont","text":"Their medical delivery stuff is so impressive [VIDEO] , I'm a bit disappointed they weren't able to find another more valuable market than \"we'll stick food in a box and get it to you faster\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41280031,"author":"lathiat","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Troubled Amazon drone delivery program faces latest challenge: Annoyed residents","text":"Mark Rober covered the \u201cZipline\u201d drones which are near silent, unlike almost any other drone you hear. There\u2019s a demo in the video. Done by varying the propeller design so that the noise is spread out over many frequencies instead of concentrated in the buzzy band. I also remember Apple talking about doing the same in their MacBook pro fans at one point. Varying the blade pitch from blade to blade to do the same. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DQEB3LJ5psk":[{"hn_comment_id":42384380,"author":"crmd","month":"2024-12","story_title":"The Albuquerque \"Broken Arrow\" Nuclear Accident","text":"For any engineer interested in nuclear weapons, I highly recommend this three-part series produced by Sandia National Laboratory on their development of Permissive Action Link, the warhead\u2019s electrical isolation and cryptological module that ensures US nuclear weapons will detonate if any only if authorized by the President. It\u2019s fascinating how they thought about bad path scenarios like thermal damage causing carbon tracking of PCBs potentially defeating the control system. It is called \u201cAlways/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability\u201d Part 1: [VIDEO] Part 2: [LINK] Part 3: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48237016,"author":"generuso","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored","text":"There is an excellent three part documentary from Sandia National Labs: \"Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability.\" (part 1) [VIDEO] They cover both the technology itself and its history, including the incidents you are reading about. These people are the ones who developed the methodology and the technology for nuclear device safety, or at least a significant chunk of it. I think it has recently become much more mathematically heavy, with zero knowledge proofs and other fancy stuff used to talk to the locks in the devices.","stance":"rec"}],"DRq2NgeFcO0":[{"hn_comment_id":22504622,"author":"lapinot","month":"2020-03","story_title":"CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line","text":"I really like the general idea of bridging the gap between graphical and text-based interfaces, abstracting away the differences and be able to use a mixture of both. In the realm of interactive programming (eg heavily ide assisted), people with some functional and statically typed programming background would be interested in this magnificent talk about idris2: [Edwin Brady - Idris 2 - Type-driven Development of Idris] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20714998,"author":"chongli","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Dependent Haskell Is the Future (2018)","text":"Every single one of your claims is addressed by the programming language Idris [1], which has dependent types. This is not to say that Idris is the only dependently typed language which solves these issues, only that it exists as a counterexample to your claims. 1. Idris does not have type inference at the top level, but it does infer types within the body of functions. It can even disambiguate identically-named functions with different types, something Haskell cannot do. Moreover, Idris (and other dependently typed languages) can perform implementation inference , something which is much more powerful and useful to the programmer than type inference. It lets you work interactively with the Idris compiler whereby you specify a type and Idris creates a skeleton of the function for you, filled with holes that you replace with expressions. You can ask Idris what the type of a hole is and it will helpfully tell you the types of all other identifiers in scope. You can even ask Idris to attempt to fill in the hole for you, something it can usually do when there is only one possible expression with that type (occurs extremely often in practice). Watch Edwin Brady's demo of Idris 2 [2] to see this form of interactive development in action. Note that although Idris 2 isn't finished yet, a great deal of these examples (such as zip) work in Idris 1.3.2 (the current release). 2. Idris lets you specify your program gradually. When problems arise, you can refine your types and Idris will g","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29836034,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2022-01","story_title":"It's not what programming languages do, it's what they shepherd you to (2020)","text":"Not quite what you mean, but still, you might find interesting the talks on how to approach coding in languages like Idris, where the compiler is able to support the editor in type suggestions. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34458764,"author":"adamgordonbell","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Idris: A Language for Type-Driven Development","text":"The guessing the implementation part is pretty cool. You can find videos of Edwin Brady showing it off on youtube: [VIDEO] The book also walks you through lots of examples. The key part is the type needs to constrain the possible implementations down quite a bit.","stance":"rec"}],"DShDaJXK5qo":[{"hn_comment_id":9394137,"author":"htormey","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Why Young Men Go to War","text":"A great documentary miniseries about this topic is War: A Commentary by Gwynne Dyer. In particular, the episode anyone's son will do: [LINK] [VIDEO] The episode covers what goes into training young people who enter the marine core. It features candid interviews with drill sergeants and the recruits themselves about their motivations. Well worth a watch. One of the main points the episode makes is that the job of being a soldier is ultimately about killing and dying, something that doesn\u2019t come naturally to most people. The method for turning young men into soldiers is basic training. According to Dyer the secret of basic training is that its not really about teaching people, its about changing people. He claims that if you want to change people quickly and radically, you put them in a place where the only right way to think and behave is the way you want them to. You isolate them and then apply enormous physical and mental pressure. i.e basic training. Essentially he claims that basic training is all about brain washing. In the linked interview Sebastian Junger talks a lot about what it means to be a man. In particular: \u201cIn that kind of environment,\u201d Junger continues. \u201cIf you dare talk about what it means to be a man, what you\u2019re saying is men are different from women.\u201d and \u201cWe aren\u2019t asking, \u2018What does it mean to be a human being?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201c\u2018What\u2019s it mean to be a man?\u2019 Once you have that conversation you offend a lot of academics.\u201d and \u201cMen are clearly wired for [war],\u201d h","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15297730,"author":"bitexploder","month":"2017-09","story_title":"The Ballad of the Green Beret","text":"Yeah. It is interesting though. I think the classic PBS documentary \"anyone's son will do\" is great. [VIDEO] I think war in the industrialized world is almost purely political. Wars in the modern day are arranged by old men and politicians and fought by young men. I don't blame the young men, but I think it goes back to some aspects of human biology and how young men see themselves and are manipulated through patriotism and other political forces to volunteer (or be conscripted) into a military to serve political ends. In a time before two tribes could communicate and apply some reason to things, force was the only way to resolve things. Force and violence is still a crude, simple, and effective path to changing human behavior so it of course is used, but if it is ever used between super powers the world is basically over. Anyhow, I digress.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6430136,"author":"digitalengineer","month":"2013-09","story_title":"WikiLeaks Leaks 'Fifth Estate' Screenplay","text":"\"Anybody's son will do\" [LINK] This documentary explains in great detail the nature of military basic training and its psychological component . It's on Youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DSjbTC-hvqQ":[{"hn_comment_id":12910279,"author":"elbear","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Elm is Wrong","text":"Here's how I see his point. He came to Elm expecting a Haskell for the web. Elm has the completely opposite philosophy of keeping things simple, even if it means extra boilerplate. I can understand OP's frustration, but if he watched a few of Evan's talks (like this one [VIDEO] ), he would realise his expectations about Elm are wrong. Also, he forgot that Elm (just like any other open source project) doesn't owe him anything. That's why many people take an issue with his tone. In summary, Elm's target audience are JavaScript developers. It's developers who want their apps to be more robust and easier to refactor than in plain JavaScript. Sure, type classes are useful but they also increase complexity. Evan wants to see if there's a better solution and the Elm community generally accepts that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17401132,"author":"ekoczwara","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Show HN: Why Do I Procrastinate? \u2013  Web MD for Procrastination","text":"Every time I hear about procrastination it reminds me about great talk by Evan Czaplicki and his approach to Elm development, actually it can be good thing ( [VIDEO] see 19:15 Batching Work).","stance":"rec"}],"DUGGJpn2_zY":[{"hn_comment_id":21732322,"author":"DCKing","month":"2019-12","story_title":"The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers","text":"This doesn't take anything away from Sony's decision making, but removing OtherOS never really helped them \"get good security\". The PlayStation 3 was cracked wide open [1] without OtherOS and because people were pissed at its removal. On Playstation 3s released in the first 3.5 years of its lifespan you can get full hypervisor compromise without any hardware mods, and you can yet again run OtherOS on the latest firmware. Now with less restrictions than before. Newer PS3s (starting with CECH-25xx) have 'only' been partially compromised. They can't run OtherOS, but they can still run homebrew and piracy despite Sony taking OtherOS away. Maybe it's a bit of solace that this stuff only punished Sony. But inevitably, the lesson they learnt is \"we'll never experiment with this stuff again\". [1]: This video is really worth watching if you're interested in this stuff: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46456260,"author":"xav_authentique","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Sony PS5 ROM keys leaked \u2013 jailbreaking could be made easier with BootROM codes","text":"If anyone is interested in the cryptography mistake that Sony made I recommend watching the Console Hacking talk at 27c3 by the fail0verflow team: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DXYje2B04xE":[{"hn_comment_id":24673704,"author":"jcims","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Tearing into a $1.3M Oscilloscope","text":"I knew this was going to be Shahriar from TheSignalPath. If you even have a passing interest in electronics or radio, I can't recommend his channel enough. He's regularly doing teardowns and even repairs on remarkably complex (and expensive!) test equipment from the past few decades. RF is weird and you'll see some complex and alien physical configurations in the equipment that many times look like dark arts. He puts a lot of effort into his videos and the scenarios he creates to demonstrate the power that this technology brings to the table. This 128GHz FFT is insane. I'm honestly a little surprised that this doesn't have ITAR regulations on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21430408,"author":"0j","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite YouTube channels under a million subscribers","text":"BPS.space - Model rockets - 133k - [LINK] OskarPuzzle - 3D printed puzzles - 110k - [LINK] The Signal Path - RF electronics - 66k - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DXvAlwMAxiA":[{"hn_comment_id":24202248,"author":"news_to_me","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Black silicon photodetector breaks the 100% efficiency limit","text":"Great explanation \u2014 although only a week or so ago I wouldn't have understood a lot of it. Knowing how transistors work helps a lot: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32784066,"author":"ceronman","month":"2022-09","story_title":"How Transistors Work [video]","text":"This is a good explanation, but I prefer the one by Ben Eater: How semiconductor works: [LINK] How a transistor works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33790592,"author":"npilk","month":"2022-11","story_title":"How do transistors work, anyway?","text":"As someone who is not an electrical engineer, I found Ben Eater's videos on how semiconductors work and how transistors work interesting and enlightening. How semiconductors work: [LINK] How a transistor works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38738536,"author":"1000100_1000101","month":"2023-12","story_title":"From Nand to Tetris (2017)","text":"Aside from his basic 8-bit CPU, Ben Eater goes into how transistors work too: [VIDEO] . Once you've got transistors, his videos walk you through making gates. Once you've got gates, he switches to the 74xx series and builds a CPU.","stance":"rec"}],"DYvhC_RdIwQ":[{"hn_comment_id":32335981,"author":"Trasmatta","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Productivity porn","text":"The videos on that channel are so good that they're painful to watch, when you realize how closely it matches the life you're living. This one is my favorite (or \"least favorite\" depending on how hard it hits on any given day): [VIDEO] I feel like the people doing that channel could write a very effective modern Office Space.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39537802,"author":"NAHWheatCracker","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Positive Affirmations for Site Reliability Engineers [video]","text":"Microservices is probably their most popular video, but all their videos are genius. I'm partial to I Have Delivered Value... But At What Cost? [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"DZCBRHOg3PQ":[{"hn_comment_id":20296615,"author":"davesmith1983","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Show HN: A Firefox extension to leave comments on any URL","text":"This comic routinely used as a \"Gotcha\". However it so over simplifies the position that we are in. Youtube now totally owns online video, there isn't any competitors that are even close. Facebook has almost half the world signed up to its platform. This isn't someone's online forum or a news site. These companies completely own their respective parts of the industry. The major social media sites like Youtube, Twitter, Facebook are so large they are considered to be a \"public private space\" (I forget the exact legal term). These platforms agree to DMCA safe harbour where they are considered to be a \"platform\" and not a \"publisher\". That means they shouldn't be censoring anyone on their political opinions and must be politically neutral (otherwise they are taking on the role of a publisher as they are acting as an editor), now IANAL but there is certainly an argument that can be made. Whether a judge would rule it so, who knows. This is worth watching: [VIDEO] Tim Pool in this video manages to point out quite clearly how Twitter terms of service are political and they don't even realise it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19504395,"author":"dayvid","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Facebook to ban white nationalist content","text":"I wish larger tech companies would follow Jack Dorsey's path and have more open communication about their policies. His debate with Tim Pool on the Joe Rogan podcast[0] especially provided insight into why they're making these type of decisions. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20055827,"author":"manfredo","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Gab will become a Mastodon fork","text":"> Why are free speech absolutists only supporting fascists? They aren't. You're totally free to advocate instituting a Marxists state, the execution of the bourgeoisen masse, and forming a communist society on Gab. Gab has the blanket policy that any legal speech is okay on their platform (and yes, calling for the execution of the bourgeois is legal in the US. Non-specific threats of violence are legal as per Brandenburg v. Ohio). There's nothing fascist about that in and of itself. The fact that Gab is filled with fascists is because of displacement. Fascists got banned from all the major platforms, so the only ones that don't ban them like Gab and 4chan are full of them. Free speech absolutists are disproportionately made of up right wingers these days, likely because the right wing is being subject to harsher censorship. I think it's unambiguously true that most big tech platforms are overtly biased in their policing. People are getting banned for tweeting \"learn to code\" to journalists (in mockery of how some suggested that laid off coal miners should learn to code). And by comparison, verified leftist Twitter users outright advocated for the doxxing and violence of the Covington high school students with no apparent repercussion. This podcast with Jack Dorsey, Twitter's global lead for trust and safety, and Tim Pool gives some good insight into the situation: [VIDEO] > Where are the people advocating for the destruction of intellectual property rights, for widespread dec","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21402243,"author":"blotter_paper","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Twitter to ban political advertising","text":"I don't agree with every call Twitter makes, but I find Dorsey to be by far the most interesting public figure in the social media game. His two JRE interviews[0][1] and his Tales from the Crypto interview[2] are all worth checking out, IMO. He seems to think Twitter should use a blockchain in the future, and that small social circles should have a system for internally moderating content without needing it to be okay by Twitter's standards, but obviously they're still currently taking down content that breaches their policies in $CURRENT_YEAR. I'm really interested in seeing where Twitter goes, I think Dorsey plays realpolitik sometimes but I don't think he has the same goals as Zuckerberg. I could be wrong, and Dorsey could just be a next-level showman, but I'm hopeful that he might do something truly interesting with the platform. I've still never made a Twitter account. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23310614,"author":"generalpass","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Wikimedia enacts new standards to address harassment and promote inclusivity","text":"I encourage you to watch a Joe Rogan episode from last year when he brought Jack Dorsey, a Twitter VP, and Tim Pool. [1] The reason this episode is relevant to your comment discussion is that Pool presents that there is this paradigm problem where certain policies intended to bring \"inclusion\" end up excluding something like half of the U.S. population. This paradigm Twitter management is stuck in prevents them from understanding how people outside their paradigm view their actions, and this results in effectively banning a enormous set of the population from popular discourse. It is hard to evaluate if this is exclusively an American issue because, really, there are so few other countries that speak English. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38161066,"author":"Kye","month":"2023-11","story_title":"X Is Reportedly Selling Inactive Usernames for $50k","text":"That's weird because I watched as left-leaning accounts got banned one after the other over the years. Maybe you think it's biased a certain way because of who you follow and listen to. I never thought I would recommend an episode of Joe Rogan, but the one where he had Vijaya Gadde on provided a lot of insight into how Twitter thought about moderation. It was a lot more nuanced than I expected. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DZTIbHIsIYw":[{"hn_comment_id":24535008,"author":"Fjolsvith","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Dating Apps Destroyed Dating","text":"I loved the Youtube video where a woman tries to impersonate a man and get a date with women on a dating app. She cannot believe how difficult it is for men: [VIDEO] At about 11 minutes in, the woman says, \"Guys don't do this on dating apps. Just don't stop replying. They don't do that. Like, they don't 'ghost'. And, its weird that women do that so often.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34534727,"author":"Wojtkie","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?","text":"I found this video a while back that highlights what you're talking about.[0] Might be an interesting one to show to your wife. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Dar8P3r7GYA":[{"hn_comment_id":18143541,"author":"joering2","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Elon Musk Mocks SEC as 'Shortseller Enrichment Commission' Days After Settlement","text":"If you think Elon Musk is crazy, you have to listen to Gwynne Shotwell [1] She wants to meet other people in other solar systems, I presume while she's still alive. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18465954,"author":"thanosnose","month":"2018-11","story_title":"SpaceX just got FCC approval to launch 7,518 satellites","text":"Another interesting watch is the TED talk by SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell earlier this year. [VIDEO] Say what you will about Musk, but the guy is truly ambitious and willing to shoot for the stars ( or mars at the moment ).","stance":"rec"}],"DdM-XTRyC9c":[{"hn_comment_id":29147149,"author":"seanieb","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Telegram Ad Platform","text":"A talk by Moxie at CCC deals with this exact question. > \u201c Considerations for distributed and decentralized technologies from the perspective of a product that many would like to see decentralize. > Amongst an environment of enthusiasm for blockchain-based technologies, efforts to decentralize the internet, and tremendous investment in distributed systems, there has been relatively little product movement in this area from the mobile and consumer internet spaces. > This is an exploration of challenges for distributed technologies, as well as some considerations for what they do and don't provide, from the perspective of someone working on user-focused mobile communication. This also includes a look at how Signal addresses some of the same problems that decentralized and distributed technologies hope to solve.\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42760329,"author":"blfr","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Why Twitter is such a big deal (2009)","text":"There's a great CCC presentation by Moxie (Signal originator) on that [VIDEO] ~summarized in text form [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Dddbe9OuJLU":[{"hn_comment_id":22996444,"author":"Eremotherium","month":"2020-04","story_title":"textfiles.com","text":"He also gave us the brilliant BBS: The Documentary [VIDEO] GET LAMP: The Text Adventure Documentary (shot in 1080p) [LINK] and (apart from his many talks) his podcast \"Jason Scott talks his way out of it\" which is just gem after gem of documented tech ephemera. [LINK] It's baffingly hard to quantify how many people he (and all the other great people at the Internet Archive) has affected with his bullheaded conservation efforts.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21851881,"author":"kbr2000","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Randy Suess, computer bulletin board inventor, has died","text":"Well, thank you a lot Randy! Great idea, good times... In case this interests someone, I recommend you to check out Jason Scott's BBS Documentary [ [LINK] ], and while the DVDs sold out, it seems to be available on his youtube channel [ [VIDEO] ]. PS. adding a trailing dot after .com in the article URL saves you some trouble :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33827147,"author":"mwest","month":"2022-12","story_title":"My secret life as an 11-year-old BBS sysop","text":"Some great nostalgia reading this. If you want more, check out Jason Scott's \"BBS: The Documentary\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37931953,"author":"effekt","month":"2023-10","story_title":"What is the Demoscene? An obscure but influential art form","text":"If you'd like to know where the demoscene came from, look no further than The BBS Documentary[1] The whole thing started w/ cracktros in the 80s and through the artscene it eventually evolved into its own scene that was entirely disconnected from its roots in piracy. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DgVS-zXgMTk":[{"hn_comment_id":8982798,"author":"jasim","month":"2015-02","story_title":"React Hot Loader: Tweak React Components in Real Time","text":"This is amazing stuff, thanks Dan! Hopefully it is the beginning of the end of refresh-driven-development. If you are a web developer (front-end/back-end), and you haven't switched to React yet, take this for a spin, and read \"Facebook just taught us all how to build websites\" ( [LINK] ), and watch 'React - Rethinking Best Practices' by Pete Hunt ( [VIDEO] ). The distinction between the back-end and front-end is a product of the complexity introduced by the web with its 'worse is better' mix of badly integrated tools. It made building user interfaces a dark art with all its quirks: - a layouting system that had an active vendetta against humans - Javascript with all its deficiencies - Connascence introduced by Server <-> Client communication (Server Model <-> API View <-> JS Model <-> JS View) - declarative views that were ill-suited for web-apps (logic-less templates, what a lie!) - cross-browser incompatibilities - difficulty in implementing client-side routing - immature developer tooling But worst of them all was DOM mutation and spaghetti code, which was in reality a fundamental deficiency of the development model itself, and not because web developers the world over were being deliberately irresponsible. React is changing all that with the help of ES6. It simplifies web development both in concept and in practice. In a few years, building UIs would be just another part of writing software, and competent Full-Stack developers would cease to remain unicorns. Here are a fe","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36147485,"author":"yazaddaruvala","month":"2023-06","story_title":"React is 10 years old","text":"I'll try one last time: > Sorry none of this makes any sense to me. If you're not familiar with the MVC variants (MVVM, MVP, MVI, MOVE)[0][1] we should start there. Next you should read through some common mistakes of Backbone.js like applications [LINK] and some criticisms of MVC on HackerNews in 2012[0]. Finally if you haven't before these talks, they are the ones that sold me on React: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] - [LINK] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7981846,"author":"baddox","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Compiling JSX with Sweet.js using Readtables","text":"Pete Hunt addresses this specifically in this React talk starting at 3 minutes: [VIDEO] Basically, the idea is that most JS templating solutions separate technologies (HTML , JS, templating languages), but don't actually separate concerns, because the concern is simply generating and updating DOM regardless of how many technologies you use. Most JavaScript frameworks or libraries that handling generating and updating DOM, like Ember's two-way binding with Handlebars and Angular's dirty checking with directives, don't really separate markup from logic. They just invent a new language to mix with your HTML, and that new language is deliberately made extremely weak.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8212569,"author":"bsimpson","month":"2014-08","story_title":"Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework","text":"I've always found it weird that many people put the HTML, JS, and CSS for one component in three different files, but never thought enough about it to put it into words. Pete Hunt (one of React's maintainers) does that here: [VIDEO] React is about separating concerns, not technologies. Everything you need to know to draw an App Bar is in AppBar.jsx. You can dynamically generate the markup with JavaScript, but that doesn't change your separation of concerns, because everything concerning that component lives in that file.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15057559,"author":"chrisco255","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Vue.js vs. React","text":"JSX & React were literally built to solve Facebook's maintainability concerns, which is one of the most complex client side web apps I can think of. JSX was a hard sell at first 4 years ago, but Pete Hunt did a great job then, explaining how the false separation of concerns between HTML and JS really is unavoidable. You end up with logic in HTML tightly coupled to your JS no matter which way you shake it. [VIDEO] And HTML string template languages have been shown to have numerous shortcomings at scale.","stance":"rec"}],"DkGMY63FF3Q":[{"hn_comment_id":5336349,"author":"rpm4321","month":"2013-03","story_title":"TEDx talks discredited: Sheldrake speaks, argues that speed of light is dropping","text":"If you haven't seen them, make sure to check out The Onion's TED parodies - Onion Talks: [LINK] They may be the funniest thing The Onion has ever done. =================================== Edit: of particular interest to the HN crowd would be their takedown of the \"Idea Guy\": [VIDEO] and the \"Social Media Consultant\": [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6921035,"author":"simonsarris","month":"2013-12","story_title":"We Need to Talk About TED","text":"If you haven't seen The Onion's[1] Onion Talks and want a good satirical criticism of TED, I highly recommend them: [VIDEO] (There are more if you want to find them, I didn't want to pollute commentspace with too many links) [1] The Onion is a satire newspaper, one of the first newspapers to heavily adopt an online format. They just killed their print edition for good last year.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30654731,"author":"karaterobot","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from a million years to 30 minutes","text":"> If he gets pulses 10,000 times faster, he says he can modify waste on an atomic level. The great thing about articles like this is that it reminds me to go rewatch the the video \"Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn't That Be Great?\"[1], which neatly summarizes so much of the breathless excitement of vague, detail-free scientific and entrepreneurial claims. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20499839,"author":"fullshark","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI","text":"Not exactly what you are asking for, but the Onion did a great send up of techno-utopian TED talks here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DkMwYxfSYNQ":[{"hn_comment_id":35362394,"author":"theossuary","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Effing-mad, an effect library for Rust","text":"Jon Gjengset's stream on pin/unpin is invaluable for understanding Pin semantics: [VIDEO] But the 10000 ft view is: Pin lets you tell Rust to never ever move a piece of memory. This is almost always done because the piece of memory has pointers into itself (it's self referencial) which would be come invalid if moved.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27164473,"author":"DasIch","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Things you can\u2019t do in Rust (and what to do instead)","text":"Let's assume for a moment self-referential references were allowed. Let's further say we have such a struct containing self-referential references and we move it. Moving actually moves things in memory, including the thing those references reference. This means the references now point at the old and now incorrect location. Accessing them would trigger undefined behavior. Self-referencing is only acceptable, if the struct is guaranteed not to move. Rust does provide a mechanism to provide such a guarantee with std::pin but outside of async code, you probably don't want to be using it. std::pin: [LINK] If you're curious about pinning and have a few hours to spare, [VIDEO] is a great video that explains it in detail.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48022034,"author":"lame_lexem","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Async Rust never left the MVP state","text":"there is a chapter on async in comprehensive rust and rustbook which ought to bring you up to speed there is the async book but it is largely unfinished you can watch John Gjengset's crust of rust async, decrusting tokio, and why what, and how of pinning in rust then there are tokio-lessons and tokio tutorial which teach how to use tokio runtime and there are also good blogposts by phil-oop and rose wright on how async works [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"DkS1pkKpILY":[{"hn_comment_id":36578242,"author":"cl42","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Against Alcohol","text":"Related: Andrew Huberman's 2-hour blog post on the negative effects of alcohol[1] convinced me to stop drinking. Once you stop drinking, it becomes so easy to see just how much alcohol pervades popular culture. People drink constantly on TV. People pressure you to drink in social situations, too. Unfortunately, it often feels like you need a 'good reason' to stop drinking or alternatively admit you were an alcoholic. It's really unfortunate and ... silly? Reddit's \"stopdrinking\" subreddit is also really good[2] if you are struggling with this. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37875740,"author":"pipes","month":"2023-10","story_title":"The drugs did work (2006)","text":"Listening to the huberman podcast about alcohol really hit home. I knew it was bad for me, just not as bad as he explains. It's a horrific drug that most people don't even see as a drug. I am a weekend drinker and I thought that was ok. It's not. I've decided to quit completely. Last drink was 12 days ago. Fuck alcohol. (I also used to take other drugs but that was many years ago). [VIDEO] Oh and I just finished the book: alcohol explained, utterly fantastic.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38785018,"author":"robrenaud","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite Podcast Episodes of 2023?","text":"It's Aug 2022 so a bit out of range for the OP, but his alcohol episode convinced me to really cut down on drinking, from about 2 beers (low variance/rarely drunk, just a homebrewer with a craft beer obsession) a day to a day to maximum 2 beers a week. I sleep better and lost 35 pounds in the last year. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33159098,"author":"guiambros","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How did you stop drinking?","text":"What helped me eliminate almost entirely was understanding the impact it has on the body and the brain. More than \" it's bad for your health \", it helped me understand why it's bad. Even the allegedly harmless \" a glass of red wine a day is good for your health \" (spoiler: no). There are many sources, but I recently saw this one from Dr. Andrew Huberman, which seemed more comprehensive than a lot of what I've read before. [1] What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34302456,"author":"pstuart","month":"2023-01","story_title":"How I Felt After Binge-Drinking 'Hangover-Free' Alcohol","text":"It doesn't specify the actual ingredients. The \"grapes\" bit makes me think perhaps resveratrol? Dihydromyricetin is touted as being protective before and after drinking. It appears to have other benefits as well. I've now become a big fan and follower of Andrew Huberman and a recent podcast has helped sway me to effectively give up alcohol (I was already trending in that direction): [VIDEO] My one remaining active vice is Kratom and I'm pretty comfortable with my relationship with it, considering the value it gives in managing chronic pain. Obviously different strokes for different folks.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36061547,"author":"givemeethekeys","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Alcohol affects your body, from first flush of happiness to hangover","text":"This article's intended audience seems to be high school children. For a detailed take, listen / watch the Huberman Lab podcast: [VIDEO] (What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health | Huberman Lab Podcast #86)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36696086,"author":"softwaredoug","month":"2023-07","story_title":"SF's Anchor Brewing Company shutting down after 127 years","text":"The pandemic has triggered / accelarated a lot of trends One trend I wonder about is cutting back on drinking. From a health perspective, I see more and more health officials loudly saying no healthy amount of alcohol[1]. It's simply poison. Not that I'm aggressively for any kind of prohibition, and don't very rarely drink, but I wonder if we'll see increased awareness and more people just deciding not to drink as much anymore. With this awareness, and the \"modest amount of alcohol are actually healthy\" claims debunked[2], maybe the hipster / wealthy / yuppy crowd will turn more and more away from the many many microbreweries / wineries that have cropped up in the last few decades. 1 - [LINK] Huberman has a great episode too - [VIDEO] 2 - [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"DlTq8DbRs4k":[{"hn_comment_id":26436908,"author":"dharmab","month":"2021-03","story_title":"UK to depart from GDPR","text":"Here's a well-sourced rebuttal to your statement that privatization benefits revenues: [VIDEO] TL;DW revenues and passenger numbers are demonstrably lower with privatization than when nationalized. Unlike other industries, the UK's franchise privatization model is not subjected to free market forces, allowing rail companies to win contracts by underbidding only to fail to meet their targets.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27218613,"author":"apexalpha","month":"2021-05","story_title":"UK Rail services to come under unified state control","text":"I've found that these two YouTube video's do an okay job explaining the actual 'market forces' actually at play here: [LINK] [VIDEO] It takes a bit of understanding why regular market forces kind of can't apply to a system like rail transport.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27221177,"author":"dangerboysteve","month":"2021-05","story_title":"UK Rail services to come under unified state control","text":"the people on the Wendover YouTube channel did a video on this back in March which explained the issue really well. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36679377,"author":"sweezyjeezy","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Why privatisation has been a costly failure in Britain","text":"> I believe the best way to make this work is by keeping the network itself in public hands and then having a competition of contributors to the network Even then it doesn't always work out - UK rail services have that system - the infrastructure is maintained by a public body [1], but the operators are private. UK rail is quite expensive, and mediocre in quality compared to our EU counterparts. One of the issues is that it's basically impossible to have competition on a single rail journey joining two large cities - there's aren't enough tracks to support it without making it unprofitable for operators. So rail networks bid every few years on sections of the rail network, and then have no competition for their term. Again the incentives that make the free market efficient are just not there. A nice video that summarises this mess here: [2] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DleXA5ADG78":[{"hn_comment_id":4760314,"author":"FrojoS","month":"2012-11","story_title":"Microsoft turns spoken English into spoken Mandarin \u2013 in the same voice","text":"Here is a GREAT talk by Geoffrey Hinton (the Prof running said lab) [VIDEO] where he explains the method. Unfortunately, even though it was posted three times to HN [LINK] it never made the fron page. Here is the my summary and comment: \" Great talk. I don't know much about artificial neural networks (ANN) and even less about natural ones, but I have the feeling that I learnt a lot from this video. If I understand correct, Hinton uses so many artificial neurons compared to the amount of learning data, that you would usually see an overfitting effect. However, his ANN's randomly shut of a substantial part (~50%) of the neurons during each learning iteration. He calls this \"dropout\". Therefore, a single ANN represents many different models. Most models never get trained, but they exist in the ANN, because they share their weights with the trained models. This learning method avoids over specializing and therefore improves robustness with respect to new data but it also allows for arbitrary combination of different models which tremendously enlarges the pool of testable models. When using or testing these ANNs you also \"dropout\" neurons during every prediction. Practically, every rerun predicts a different result by using a different model. Afterwards, these results are averaged. The more results, the higher the chance, that the classification is correct. Hinton argues, that our brains work in a similar way. This explains among other things a) Why are neurons firing in a random ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5673345,"author":"pilooch","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI","text":"It seems the relationship between the brain and deep learning has evolved in such a way that the later can help with insights into how the former works. In this regard, I thought I would mention the extraordinary simple and elegant talk by G. Hinton last summer: [VIDEO] It starts from a simple and clever improvement to an existing deep learning method and ends up with beautiful (and simple!) insights on why neurons are using simple spikes to communicate.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10536796,"author":"eveningcoffee","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Neural Networks with Few Multiplications","text":"I would highly recommend this video [VIDEO] from Geoffrey Hinton in 2012 that I think is related to this research.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4970204,"author":"psb217","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Why use SVM","text":"In addition to what bravura said, Geoff Hinton's group at UT has recently introduced a new approach to training neural networks that they call \"dropout\". You can read about it in their paper ( [LINK] ) or watch Hinton describe it in a recent talk he gave at Google ( [VIDEO] ). Roughly speaking, dropout training provides a strong regularizing effect through a sort of model averaging that is conceptually related to the well-known bagging approach from which random forests derive their power and flexibility. Dropout training has already produced state-of-the art results on several time-worn standard benchmarks and helped Hinton's group win a recent Kaggle competition (for an overview of their approach, see: [LINK] ). I've played around with this a bit over the last few weeks, and have a Matlab implementation publicly available from my Github at: [LINK] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5770495,"author":"lightcatcher","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Unsupervised Feature Learning and Deep Learning Tutorial","text":"Using dropout with deep neural networks is an (extremely cheap) way to gain many of the benefits of using an ensemble. If you want a great overview of the dropout technique, watch this tech talk by Hinton: [VIDEO] Also, the recent maxout algorithm (from Montreal group, authors of Theano) that got state of the art results on several datasets is essentially just an algorithm designed to do particularly well with dropout (as far as I understand it).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5798636,"author":"taliesinb","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Machine Learning as a Service","text":"Speaking of bagging: Geoff Hinton talks a bit about model averaging and has a very stimulating pair of hypotheses related to this, which are: a) genetic recombination in the form of sex might be \"bagging across genes\" that prevents tight co-adaptation (= overfitting on the evolutionary timescale) b) the brain uses noisy discrete firing instead of continuous communication because it allows for \"bagging across network topologies\". The bulk of his talk is about how dropout in neural nets can be used to accomplish some of the same performance benefits that model averaging gives on other algorithms (at a much smaller relative computational cost). Here's the talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7267687,"author":"carlob","month":"2014-02","story_title":"AI","text":"As far as I know there is a decent amount of information against the fact that brains are quantum computers. On the other hand there is a talk by Hinton on youtube [1] that sheds interesting light on some variants of deep learning and the way the brain uses (classical) noise. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DlkMs4ZHHr8":[{"hn_comment_id":745029,"author":"Radix","month":"2009-08","story_title":"Mario AI competition might have a strong contender","text":"If you are impressed with this one follow the link in the video to here: [VIDEO] For all my hours as a kid I was never this good, I never even realized I could kill the pipe fish by jumping from below.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1871620,"author":"feral","month":"2010-11","story_title":"Using genetic algorithms to train a Mario AI","text":"Reminds me of the AI competition on infinite mario, recently: Here is a video of the winning bot (A* based approach), cool to watch, as they display its trajectory calculations. [VIDEO] GA is cool and everything, but I am sometimes sceptical about its merits. Yes, it gives you a natural problem representation, but would it really have done a better job in this particular domain than using a technique like simulated annealing to move through the Mario AI parameter space? We just don't know without seeing benchmark comparisons. Maybe its much worse. So, its a cool application, but we should be cautious about how quickly we decide GA was a particularly suitable search algorithm.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2796852,"author":"JonnieCache","month":"2011-07","story_title":"Infinite Mario in HTML5","text":"The original java infinite mario was used in the fascinating Mario AI competition. Details and papers here: [LINK] Video of last years winning entry at work here: [VIDEO] It's pretty interesting, a lot of people wrote/are writing high falutin' machine learning algorithms, but they are consistently trounced by good old A* techniques.","stance":"rec"}],"DmT80OseAGs":[{"hn_comment_id":20325129,"author":"geocar","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Non-English-based programming languages","text":"APL is great. If you haven't seen them, the late John Scholes did a number of absolutely beautiful demonstrations programming in APL[1], [2], [3]. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20729199,"author":"paliilap","month":"2019-08","story_title":"J can look like APL or English","text":"That 1975 APL demonstration is lovely. Much has been preserved in Dyalog and GNU APL - it's very interesting to see how timeless the core APL functions are. I'm very fond of a number of videos by the late John Scholes narrating APL solutions step by step, including the well-known demonstration of Conway's Game of Life in APL (0). His videos on depth-first search (1) and solving sudoku (2) are also brilliant. (0) [LINK] (1) [LINK] (2) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24172540,"author":"moonchild","month":"2020-08","story_title":"J Notation as a Tool of Thought","text":"> My point was that general programming usually looks more like writing the sorting algorithm than simply calling it. Thus, I would be more interested in seeing real examples of how the properties of J allow you to write algorithms more concisely or otherwise better. Ah - I see. Here[1] is quicksort in j. John scholes's videos are excellent and very illustrative, though they deal with apl rather than j; conway's game of life[2] and sudoku[3]. > The article showed how J solves some mathematical problems with built in functions or their built-in modifiers. But in general programming, you won't find a function that does exactly what you wanted, maybe with a little adverb. You'll usually have to write that function yourself, to describe how it works in terms of some of those pre-existing functions. Right. This is true, but you generally stay much closer to the builtins in j than you do in other language. > Note that your second example could be expressed as something like > x.OrderBy(y => y[1]) > In C#, assuming x is int[N][M]. I understand that J's version can work with many other shapes of X, but that is hard to appreciate without seeing example of how that comes in handy when writing some other (hopefully well known) algorithm. Right; you mentioned sort predicates, so I was giving an example of a way in which you could sort according to another relation. My point is: being able to change the layout of your data so easily can obviate sort predicates. (Though I do think a sort a","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30796413,"author":"lizardactivist","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Dyalog APL 18.2","text":"I've always liked this video, where one of the Dyalog developers effortlessly writes a Sudoku solver in APL: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"DnPmg0R1M04":[{"hn_comment_id":15426431,"author":"ericgj","month":"2017-10","story_title":"'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia","text":"Thanks for your part in getting this story published! If you have not seen it, the BBC series \"The Century of the Self\" details the pre-history of these tendencies in the creation of the public relations industry by Freud's nephew Edward Bernays [0]. It is truly fascinating and horrific -- all 4 or 5 hours of it! Social media/big data has also made the consumer a (not fully willing or conscious) _producer_ of mass addiction, through the exploitation of their social graph data. There is a fictive \"work contract\": give me your data and we'll give you your buzz. This relationship is based on unwaged work. What if this work, the value of it to BigTech, were recognized? It leaves open the possibility of mass refusal. And in some sense how people use social media now is already composed of many types of refusal, some more and some less effective. To state one obvious way -- Facebook is used around the world as a tool for political organizing. The fact that this makes it an even more valuable commodity for repressive governments, starting with the US government, does not stop us from using it and finding it effective, does not stop us from getting together \"in real life\". More needs to be said about the social basis of addiction. It's not only ad scientists pushing well-studied biological buttons. It's the trauma of living a society that locks up an insane number of people, puts its children on psychotropic drugs, poisons them with toxic environments and toxic fast food, separates p","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19957671,"author":"klingonopera","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Breakfast is a relatively modern invention","text":"There's a great four-part documentary by Adam Curtis about Edward Bernays, his career and the rise of marketing in the 20th century called \"The Century Of The Self\". It's available on YT: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20578767,"author":"beautifulfreak","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Advertising Is a Cancer on Society","text":"I highly recommend the documentary, Century of the Self, which details how Bernays' theories about advertising were put to use by Nazis. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40592147,"author":"torpid","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Israel reportedly used fake social accounts to garner support from US lawmakers","text":"The Century of the Self documentary by Adam Curtis does an incredible job of covering that and is well-worth the watch. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17905430,"author":"the_greyd","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Taming the Lizard Brain","text":"I would recommend the documentary [The Century of the Self]( [VIDEO] ) about advertising as propoganda, in which Edwards Bernays plays a central role.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18283885,"author":"diydsp","month":"2018-10","story_title":"DarkPulsar","text":"Of course, man. I grew up with the Apple ][ and C64 and we all saw a future where small businesses and creative people would make zany, informative, cute newsletters to advertise their wares. Our parents and teachers prepared us for a world mostly like the one that existed in 1980, but some of the icky parts like bookkeeping were ameliorated by the 6502. We went online a little bit, but mostly to goof around, trade some software and maybe sometimes discuss and flame, but it was always a tiny part of life, about the footprint on our time as the card game UNO. An interesting diversion, but certainly not a daily activity, much less a dependency . Of course, older now, we realize there was much more brewing behind the scenes: Corporations had been leveraging Freud's psychological principles to make us rabid consumers. Cold War paranoia created an arms race. American military hegemony had been cruising to a head. We plugged on, amused we had internet in college, but still found time to play music, party, ride bikes, etc. Suddenly around 2000, networking fused the military and commercial nature of American life into the portable mega-mall of cookies. But with all this communications technology, why only use it when sitting at our Pentium II's? Let's get everyone carrying cell phones -> surveillance capitalism. It's starting to all come together for me as I re-watch The Century of Self: [VIDEO] What to do? Opinions vary. Many people will argue whether we can legislate our way out of","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20036555,"author":"deepakkarki","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence","text":"Folks in this thread may find this interesting, a 4 part documentary on Edward Bernays and the history of advertising and PR as we know it today. [VIDEO] From the video description - \"The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21269616,"author":"stephenSinniah","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Still Manufacturing Consent: An Interview with Noam Chomsky","text":"Adam Curtis has a good documentary about Bernays influence in the PR industry.It's a really good watch [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21352655,"author":"RaiseProfits","month":"2019-10","story_title":"We Never Paid for Journalism","text":"I also recommend Adam Curtis\u2019s four part documentary \u201cThe Century of the Self\u201d, the first episode of which is here: [VIDEO] The first episode deals exclusively with Bernays, and the following three episodes follow a political narrative of impact. I believe Curtis\u2019s \u201cHypernormalisation\u201d would be more salient to the narrative here, which discusses the funding of misinformation as an alternative to traditional authoritarian power structures like censorship: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21935253,"author":"fredley","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Authoritarian nations are turning the internet into a weapon","text":"The whole industry of advertising as we understand it today was created by those who had done propaganda during the first and second world war, and realised they could apply their skills in the field of business. To learn the history of propaganda, advertising and how it is embedded deeply in our current political machine, watch The Century of the Self , a 2002 documentary: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21981155,"author":"DyslexicAtheist","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Disinformation for hire: how a new breed of PR firms is selling lies online","text":"a very good bbc documentary based on Bernays work is \"The Century of the Self\": The Century of the Self - Part 1: \"Happiness Machines\" [VIDEO] TL;DR: The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world. --- The Century of the Self - Part 2: \"The Engineering of Consent\" [LINK] TL;DR: This episode explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe F","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22057650,"author":"wickedwiesel","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction","text":"There is the obvious plug to the Century of Self documentary, if someone hasn't seen it yet but is interested in the subject of \"creating needs and wants\": [VIDEO] or [LINK] The documentary relates \"The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33148622,"author":"mellavora","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Energy vs. Sovereign Bond Markets","text":"May I suggest you read \"The Utopia of Rules\" by David Graeber (may he rest in peace). [LINK] [LINK] He argues that we've built a giant bureaucracy, most jobs are bullshit jobs (he created that term), and most work is a scam. We could have UBI and most people working just a few hours per week, but that much freedom is dangerous. Politicians might loose power. More seriously, watch The Century of the Self (Adam Curtis), [LINK] [VIDEO] , which describes the creation and rise of marketing as a social force in the 1900s; how the consumer-based society was created. A large driver of this was the need to \"control the masses\", because if they weren't controlled bad things happened. Like world wars or crystal nights. Bullshit jobs and an all-encompassing bureaucracy, keeping people working all the time and unable to think, is our current social technique for controlling the masses.","stance":"rec"}],"DoA4Txr4GUs":[{"hn_comment_id":19301155,"author":"z5h","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Anyone Using Elm in Production?","text":"You'll probably want to watch Richard Feldman's [Scaling Elm Apps]( [VIDEO] ). I built [Component Result]( [LINK] ) to help with a pattern that occurs when scaling up apps. I'm not clear what you mean by or expect to be problematic with by cross-cutting concerns. Feel free to ping me, z5h, on the Elm slack.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30825654,"author":"hombre_fatal","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Tao of Node \u2013 Design, Architecture and Best Practices","text":"You can write this sort of guide for literally any tech, even the ones you think are better. I've been using Elm since it came out and I use it for everything, but you could write a \"Tao of Elm\" that's just as in-depth as this. Just watch rfeldman's talks about how to structure large Elm projects ( [VIDEO] ) or watch the community chat about how to do it, it's an open question. For example, the Tao of Elm would give pointers on what you should send over ports, how granular you should even make ports, how to pick Msg types (LogIn User | LogOut vs. SetUser User), how to build a good Model, when to nest models, (a big one:) how to build parent/child communication, what should be implemented on the JS side instead of Elm side, how to represent fetch/wait/response loop when making http requests, etc. and then the trade-offs of all of those suggestions. Being able to compile a list of best practices doesn't mean something sucks. Though the comparison to Elm isn't all that great because it doesn't even compete with Node, and if you do use it on the server with Elm.worker, you could write a whole other guide of best practices around that. Anyone who has built a massive Elm client is shimmering with trail/error knowledge that they could share in this kind of format. Anyways, be wary of developing a knee-jerk \"JS sucks\" response.","stance":"rec"}],"DoeNbZlxfUM":[{"hn_comment_id":14404911,"author":"CodeMage","month":"2017-05","story_title":"The Blockstack Browser: A Gateway to a New, Decentralized Internet","text":"Four years ago, Moxie Marlinspike offered a good explanation of why this \"vote with your feet\" approach doesn't really work, at DEFCON 18. His talk is called \"Changing Threats to Privacy\" and I highly recommend watching it: [VIDEO] If you're impatient, you can skip the first 10 minutes and 40 seconds: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29851010,"author":"losvedir","month":"2022-01","story_title":"My First Impressions of Web3","text":"I am (or was?) a huge Moxie Marlinspike fan, and highly recommend this video[0] of his from Defcon several years ago. It was formative in my understanding of privacy and security. That said, something here really doesn't add up. Being a huge fan, I took note several years ago of MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency, which listed him on the home page as one of the team.[1] Or, see this Wired article about it[2]. The big selling point, as I remember it, of MobileCoin (per the name) was that it was actually feasible for small clients (i.e. phones) to meaningfully take part in the network. But he's since been scrubbed from the site, as far as I can tell. MobileCoin was added to Signal, much to the chagrin of HN. And Signal is intimately related to Moxie's work. I had thought that if MobileCoin becomes a thing, then the holders of the originally mined coin would become pretty rich, and I assume that would include Moxie. So I'm a little confused by how this post fits in. I infer from it that he's new to web3 and crypto in general, but it feels like this isn't the case. (Though \"web3\" is ambiguous, and I suppose he's referring generally to Ethereum and dApps.) But his main point seems to be that the dominant cryptocurrency isn't suitable for involving light clients, which was the main selling point of MobileCoin. I just wish it were clear his involvement with MobileCoin, since it feels to me like that could be a pretty significant conflict of interest with regard to Ethereum investigated he","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20192905,"author":"karangoeluw","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Facebook lawyers explain to a judge that privacy on Facebook is nonexistent","text":"Moxie Marlinespike (Openwhisper Systems, Signal) makes a good argument for why that doesn't work [VIDEO] . Recommend watching the whole talk.","stance":"rec"}],"DovunOxlY1k":[{"hn_comment_id":8609138,"author":"kaoD","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Show HN: Explained Visually","text":"I'm even jealous of the engineering students that came before me! :P Visualization is such a powerful tool. I didn't really understand waves until I saw \"Similarities of Wave Behaviour\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10007959,"author":"tzs","month":"2015-08","story_title":"How a Watch Works (1949) [video]","text":"I've never understood why these old instructional films so often seem much better at getting things across and making them stick in my mind than more modern material. A couple other examples. 1. A 1959 film from Bell Labs on wave behavior that made standing wave, reflections, energy loss due to impedance mismatch, and impedance matching much clearer than anything else I've seen: [1]. 2. A 1937 explanation of how the differential in a car works: [2]. Here is another upload of that which is lower resolution, but has more from the same source in the sidebar [3]. I suppose it could be something akin to survivorship bias that makes old educational films seem so good--the bad ones don't get remembered 60 years later. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20585356,"author":"Causality1","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?","text":"Bell Labs' 1959 video \"Similarities of Wave Behavior.\" By far the best introduction to the subject of waves of any sort. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29566286,"author":"tzs","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W external antenna mod","text":"This outstanding 1959 movie from Bell Labs demonstrates standing waves, impedance matching, and more in a very nice way using a couple of Shive wave machines, hosted by Dr. Shive himself [1]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31495649,"author":"_trampeltier","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Hetzner subsea fibre cut outage","text":"This very old video does it all explain better than all todays videos. The models are just so simple, no animations. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38431954,"author":"fsociety","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Signal Reflections in Electronic Circuits","text":"Thinking of an electron as a thing that travels from the start of the circuit to the end results in a bad mental model. Think of it as a wave, and then watch this video [VIDEO] . Then you will have a strong mental model.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42686495,"author":"Joel_Mckay","month":"2025-01","story_title":"I created an open-source Hardware Hacking Wiki \u2013 with tutorials for beginners","text":"Get a ham radio technician license, and you may develop an intuitive perspective on most electrical engineering concepts. i.e. the physics lab derivation of the core EE tool set is unnecessary if you understand what the models are describing. AI is slop in and slop out... and dangerous to students... =3 John Shive's Wave Machines is where every student should start: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43407909,"author":"Joel_Mckay","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Designing Electronics That Work","text":"It is not \"hard\" after some practice, but you need to be willing to learn. In general, DFM is a specialized area most EE have zero training in unless they chose to study it as an option. John Shive's Wave Machines is where every student should start: [VIDEO] Remember to have fun =3","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13830186,"author":"topspin","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Motors Big and Small (1971) [video]","text":">> Anyone know of more videos like this one? Sure. Similiarities of Wave Behavior (1959) [VIDEO] The link above skips the modern fluff at the beginning. Shive uses a mechanical transverse wave machine to demonstrate the concepts involved in transmission lines, including reflection, standing waves and impedance matching.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24109734,"author":"nudgeee","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Signal Reflection","text":"Also check out the excellent video from Bell Labs: \u201cSimilarities of Wave Behaviour (1959)\u201d [0], which showcases termination, reflection, resonance and impedance using the Shive Wave Machine. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24684384,"author":"peter_d_sherman","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Star Tek\u2013Exploiting the Final Frontier: Counterspace Operations in 2025 (1996) [pdf]","text":"Thank you for this link! The part starting here is particularly interesting to me: [VIDEO] Why is that? Well, because a long time ago, I built an extremely low-power battery operated DC Tesla Coil. It worked, but the one thing I could not figure out was why the coil with the small number of turns, the coil that typically encircles the long coil with the many turns, why this coil with smaller turns -- had to be positioned a slight distance up the many turns coil, and not either directly at its end, nor at its middle. Well, this video, at the point I've noted, explains the answer why. It also explains the relationship between frequency, length of resonator, and ability to create larger amplitude waves via additive superposition, that is, the ability of one wave, travelling in one direction, has the ability to add to the amplitude/crests of another wave travelling in the other direction BUT IF AND ONLY IF THEY ARE IN PROPER ALIGNMENT ! Which, incidentally, is the principle behind how a laser works (in addition to a Tesla Coil!). Also, there's the knowledge here that we can change the frequency to match the resonating coil/cavity/resonator length/etc., OR we can change the resonator length/coil length (in a Tesla Coil this is accomplished by moving the smaller outer coil with less turns on it) to match the frequency. So we can choose one to adjust to match what's needed by the other. Now, if say, a Tesla Coil is storing energy when in operation by additive/constructive interferen","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25544332,"author":"tzs","month":"2020-12","story_title":"1937 film explains how a car differential works","text":"Another great older film is \"Similarities of Wave Behavior\" [1] from Bell Labs. It was aimed at college students, and covers in a very clear way these topics: reflection of waves from free and clamped ends, superposition, standing waves and resonance, energy loss by impedance mismatching, and reduction of energy loss by quarter-wave and tapered-section transformers. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26937508,"author":"segfaultbuserr","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Internet down in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., after beaver chews through fibre cable","text":"If you want to understand how TDR works, watch this classic tutorial from the mid-50s in the AT&T archive. The first 5 minutes, showing the reflection of an open and short circuit is enough. * AT&T Archives: Similiarities of Wave Behavior [VIDEO] Many are surprised when they learned that it's possible to detect the location of a break in the mains wiring or an Ethernet cable, just by doing an electrical test from one end of the cable (some Ethernet cards even have builtin TDR support!). There's no closed loop, why is it possible to test anything electrically? Because at high frequency, the circuit becomes an electromagnetic waveguide. Basically like a radar, you send a fast electrical or optical pulse to the electrical cable or the optical fiber, the EM wave travels along the cable until it hits the break and reflects back. You record the time and listen for the echo. All discontinuities (such as damages) on the line will reflect and distort the original pulse. Use the speed of light to pinpoint the location of the fault.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36793718,"author":"superkuh","month":"2023-07","story_title":"What Is Radio Spectrum?","text":"There's no all in one stop for understanding radio but these 5 resources helped me a lot. The RF Get Down courses. This is by far the best material online to learn RF and how modulation works: [LINK] 3blue1brown's video tutorial on the fourier transform: [LINK] AT&T Archives: Similiarities of Wave Behavior [VIDEO] Quadrature Signals: Complex, But Not Complicated by Richard Lyons, [LINK] [LINK] Antenna Theory's website and forums, [LINK] I also highly recommend getting a $20 rtl-sdr USB software defined radio dongle. They're great toys for learning RF, what modulation is , and exploring the spectrum.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36901999,"author":"tzs","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Hydraulic Steering \u2013 Principles of Operation (1956) [video]","text":"> And as a bonus, an explanation about transistors from 1953 And here is a 1959 video from the same source about wave behavior [1]. It covers reflection from open and closed ends, superposition, standing waves and resonance, impedance mismatching, and tapered-section transformers all in a way that makes it really easy to understand. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38432819,"author":"nudgeee","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Signal Reflections in Electronic Circuits","text":"In RF electronics, wires end up looking like transmission lines. Here\u2019s one of the classic lectures on wave propagation and reflections, where it looks at similarities in wave behaviour across mechanical, electrical, acoustic and optical systems. AT&T Similarities of Wave Behaviour (1959): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38434984,"author":"tzs","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Signal Reflections in Electronic Circuits","text":"This video from Bell Labs showing various behaviors of waves using a nifty mechanical wave machine to make everything visible might be enlightening. The whole thing is useful, but those who are just interested in impedance and reflections can skip to chapters 4 and 5. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46636237,"author":"ssl-3","month":"2026-01","story_title":"How can I build a simple pulse generator to demonstrate transmission lines","text":"For transmission lines: _Similarities of Wave Behavior_, presented by Dr. J. N. Shier (of Bell Labs fame, and whose team invented the phototransistor): [VIDEO] It's an easy thing to watch at any level, with both brilliant practical demonstrations and supporting math provided.","stance":"rec"}],"Dp-mQ3HxgDE":[{"hn_comment_id":21189067,"author":"stephenSinniah","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Learning How to Prove: From the Coq Proof Assistant to Textbook Style","text":"I was watching a video by Kevin Buzzard, he talks about using Lean Theorem Prover, seems pretty interesting [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21226708,"author":"infogulch","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Alloy is a language for describing structures and a tool for exploring them","text":"Last week Microsoft Research posted an interesting talk by Kevin Buzzard [1] from Imperial College London about how he wants to formalize all mathematics with theorem provers. He's currently using LEAN [2]. Half of the talk is a discussion of the challenges he's faced convincing other mathematicians that this is valuable, and the other half is about his success using LEAN as a tool to teach undergraduates about formal proofs in general. I think Alloy was mentioned at the end, but not really compared to LEAN. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21235549,"author":"Nzen","month":"2019-10","story_title":"A Code Glitch May Have Caused Errors in More Than a Hundred Published Studies","text":"For a perspective of a mathematician that came to evangelize theorem provers, I recommend Kevin Buzzard's MS 2019-09 presentation [0] about LEAN. He highlights cultural misunderstanding and apathy on both sides of the domain divide. He also references the idea that the people who might make the appropriate tools may not have stayed in academia. So, he's structured his courses around using LEAN with the indirect consequence that power users (undergrads) may choose to become open source committers. [0] [VIDEO] One hour of presentation and then 15 min of q/a. My favorite is around 1:04:00 when someone asks a second time why he disprefers coq, and Buzzard complains that it can't represent some advanced quotient type that he'd have to work around. I'm reminded of [1] [1] [LINK] Dangling by a trivial feature","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25092855,"author":"carapace","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Building the Mathematical Library of the Future","text":"Oh man that was fun! Totally nerd-sniped my day though. Got me to go back and re-watch Kevin Buzzard's talk at MS Research in re: Lean, \"The Future of Mathematics?\" [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27046432,"author":"andrewnc","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Z3 Tutorial","text":"That was a delightful tutorial, I recently watched a talk about the Future of Mathematics[0] with respect to theorem proving and formalization. I enjoy this area a lot and love to see it getting more attention. 0 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27959304,"author":"oolonthegreat","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Some stuff I found interesting about number theory research","text":"wanted to drop a link to buzzard's very interesting talk [VIDEO] starting at 13:00 he talks about that frailness. also loved the bit about \"elders\" at 40:37","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29727140,"author":"liups","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The year in math and computer science","text":"> pure math (topology and countability) and computer science have almost no overlap in the short term. This is an unexpected opinion. What do you mean by this? I would argue the opposite. Look at Formal Verification[0]. Here's a great video about a popular formal verfication proof assitant: [VIDEO] A quote from the mathematician in the video expressing enthusiasm for using computers for mathematics: \"All I want to do... I don't want to do mathematics on pen and paper anymore, because I don't trust it, and I don't trust other people that use it; which is everyone.\" (in case people only read this quote, instead of watching the lecture, the tone is tongue-in-cheek) Formal Verification would seem a literal intersection of pure math (formal proofs[1]) and computer science (formal specification[2]). Of note, one of the popular underlying foundations of an approach to formal verification is Homotopy Type Theory(HoTT)[3][4] which is an asserted effort to show the relationship between type theory and, specifically, topology (homotopy[5]). [0] [LINK] : fancy word for 'computer verified mathematical proofs' [1] [LINK] : fancy word for 'proof' [2] [LINK] : fancy word for 'rules for an algo that checks a proof' [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] : a great read, even if you are a novice, or prefer other formal verification foundations [5] [LINK] : \"It originated as a topic in algebraic topology\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38036766,"author":"pas","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Lean4 helped Terence Tao discover a small bug in his recent paper","text":"Kevin Buzzard (a professional mathematician) has a few good talks about Lean [VIDEO] from 2019 at MS Research [LINK] (2022 at ICM international math congress)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44969313,"author":"ookdatnog","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Project to formalise a proof of Fermat\u2019s Last Theorem in the Lean theorem prover","text":"I watched this video years ago and found it interesting. It's a talk by Kevin Buzzard, a pure mathematician who got really interested in theorem proving software, and he explains his motivation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"DpXy041BIlA":[{"hn_comment_id":30974434,"author":"GuestHNUser","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need [video]","text":"Tom7 is brilliant for anyone that hasn't seen him before. His Reverse Emulation video ( [LINK] ) and Weird Chess Algorithms ( [VIDEO] ) are a must watch. His dead pan delivery coupled with the ridiculous amount of effort he puts into things that don't _really_ matter is honestly inspiring.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20572531,"author":"symmetricsaurus","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Survival in chessland [pdf]","text":"Tom7 made a video also: [VIDEO] If you haven\u2019t seen them his other videos are well worth watching as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20573375,"author":"onnodigcomplex","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Kriegspiel","text":"Suckerpinch (Tom) recently had a video[1] about predicting the position of the oponents pieces from knowning just white. I don't think he's aware of this. Great video anyway. He trained an NN to predict the pieces and then used Stockfish on the resulting position. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21921396,"author":"rictic","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Immortal Game","text":"Only somewhat related, but if you found these ideas amusing, you'd probably enjoy watching tom7's video on unusual chess engine strategies: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21987531,"author":"sillysaurusx","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Training GPT-2 to Play Chess","text":"It's unknown what role if any BPE plays. I was surprised to discover that the final probability of a move is equal to the probability of each token from the root prompt, i.e. even though \"1.Nf3 e5\" is encoded as ['1', '.', 'N', 'f', '3', ' e', '5'] the probability of e5 seems unaffected by the fact that Nf3 is 3 tokens as opposed to one. You're right that coming up with a token mapping could help things. It's a bit tricky to do that right now. Your options for fitting a custom vocab seems to be \"use sentencepiece to fit a vocab, then modify the gpt-2 codebase to use the sentencepiece library for decoding\". I am honestly not sure if the output of sentencepiece is compatible with traditional encoders. What I mean is, it doesn't seem to generate an encoder.json + vocab.bpe file. It seemed to be some other kind of format. So I'm not sure if the tooling that has evolved around OpenAI's encoder format would be applicable there. I really don't know, though. According to this slatestarcodex comment, someone got superior results on solely algebraic notation (which looks like g1f3 instead of Nf3): [LINK] Another extension that might help is to periodically inject the full FEN board state. This was the format we were going to try next, which injects the full FEN after every move: [LINK] I'm so happy to get to work with GPT-2 1.5B. It's been a lot of fun to train. By the way, if you like this kind of thing, you'll love Elo World. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36810543,"author":"iamevn","month":"2023-07","story_title":"GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]","text":"Anything that catches your eye is good but my favorites are: 30 Weird Chess Algorithms: ELO World [VIDEO] Reverse Emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS! [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36821507,"author":"nick-of-time","month":"2023-07","story_title":"GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]","text":"Mine are \"Harder Drives\"[1], \"ELO World\"[2], and \"Printable x86\"[3] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48197369,"author":"Rendello","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Regex Chess: A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions","text":"This reminded me of Tom7's video where he made a bunch of ridiculous engines and pitted them against each other (and against \"diluted\" versions of Stockfish): [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"DsZdfnlh_d0":[{"hn_comment_id":20325129,"author":"geocar","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Non-English-based programming languages","text":"APL is great. If you haven't seen them, the late John Scholes did a number of absolutely beautiful demonstrations programming in APL[1], [2], [3]. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20729199,"author":"paliilap","month":"2019-08","story_title":"J can look like APL or English","text":"That 1975 APL demonstration is lovely. Much has been preserved in Dyalog and GNU APL - it's very interesting to see how timeless the core APL functions are. I'm very fond of a number of videos by the late John Scholes narrating APL solutions step by step, including the well-known demonstration of Conway's Game of Life in APL (0). His videos on depth-first search (1) and solving sudoku (2) are also brilliant. (0) [LINK] (1) [VIDEO] (2) [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29418059,"author":"geocar","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Show HN: KatLang \u2013 Language for Calculations","text":"You might like looking at how Dyalog handles higher-order functions; John Scholes really put this beautiful presentation together about using them as a depth-first search reusable function [VIDEO] and if you haven't seen it, you should!","stance":"strong_rec"}],"DwKPFT-RioU":[{"hn_comment_id":29588138,"author":"chrisdhoover","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Battle of the Bulge","text":"It is an odd claim, the largest. I just did a cursory search and found several notable atrocities with larger numbers. Most occurred from over several days to over several months. I guess an argument could be that specifies in a single day or in a single hour but that kind of specificity trivializes the scale of atrocities committed against Poles, Serbs, and Jews. Large scale massacres includes: Palmiry, Liepaja, Katyn, Bubanj, and Borki This video is widely viewed and worth the time [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30465398,"author":"roveo","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Understanding the War in Ukraine","text":"Well, it's complicated. I think Putin's understanding of a \"Nazi\" is deeply connected to the Russian trauma of WWII that the West still doesn't get. Russians believe that due to the sheer number of lives lost, the USSR (and so Russia as its successor state) played _the_ central role in WWII. I encourage you to watch this video [VIDEO] (the relevant parts start at about 4:40 and 9:40) I personally think that it makes no sense to talk about \"who made the victory\" because it was an allied effort and none of the allies could have done it alone. But at the same time, I think that westerners just don't get how personal and traumatic this was for the people of Russia. So, Putin is very sensitive to any view on WWII that differs from his. Things like \"this was just two dictators (Stalin and Hitler) fighting\". Or the view of some Ukrainian nationalists that the communists and the nazis were just both occupants (same view exists in Poland), or even that the nazis were liberators from communism. There's history of collaborationism in the Ukraine, as is everywhere, but not everywhere the collaborationists are viewed by a lot of people as national heroes, not as traitors who joined the aggressor (the nazis). I personally understand why this view exists, but for Putin and most Russians it's just outrageous. So, for Putin a nazi is mostly someone who disagrees with the Russian view on the role of the USSR in WWII. That includes nationalists from countries that Putin views as satellites/buff","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37469341,"author":"zug_zug","month":"2023-09","story_title":"9/11 in Realtime","text":"There's something so emotional and compelling about the spectacle of shared tragedy (even smaller ones like oceangate). However there's always a reminder in the back of my mind that this sense of what makes our heart leap is very poorly correlated with what things ought to scare us. I don't know if it's possible to \"Reprogram\" one's heart to worry less about very high-visibility low risk things (like air travel, or terrorism in the US) and care more about statistically probable ones that SHOULD scare us (heart disease and such), but I wish it were. [VIDEO] does a great job of giving a sense of what the proportions are of relative tragedies in terms of loss of life.","stance":"rec"}],"DxL2HoqLbyA":[{"hn_comment_id":42419092,"author":"shorefire","month":"2024-12","story_title":"What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know","text":"For the longest time I had no real intuition of what entropy actually represented. This veritasium video explained it in a way that finally clicked for me: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36970018,"author":"rspoerri","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?","text":"Maybe watch this video about entropy. Its not about where energy flows, its about hoe entropy can be used to calculate. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37181669,"author":"jameshart","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Earth\u2019s hottest month: these charts show what happened in July; what comes next","text":"It's not temperature = constant * (energy from sun - energy reflected - energy radiated) Temperature is precisely what leads to 'energy radiated' after all (see: black body emission). Temperature is not 'the leftover energy'. The Earth is broadly in equilibrium. It's more like delta_temperature = constant * (energy from sun - energy reflected - energy radiated) Any imbalance between energy in and energy out is what manifests as increase or decrease in global temperature. This Veritasium video gives a good idea of what we do get from the sun, if not 'net energy in': [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39542230,"author":"theossuary","month":"2024-02","story_title":"'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech","text":"This is a great video that touches on your point, the Earth must radiate the heat it receives to stay in equilibrium, even if it uses it to do work in the process. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41828157,"author":"xtiansimon","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Entropy Explained, with Sheep (2016)","text":"I like my entropy story with more steam engines, \u201cThe most misunderstood concept in physics\", by Veritasium (YouTube, 2023) ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"Dxnr2FAADAs":[{"hn_comment_id":28784160,"author":"bspammer","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Valve opens up a Steam Deck to explain why it thinks you shouldn\u2019t","text":"You need to watch the video: [VIDEO] I haven't seen anything so pro-consumer from a major electronics manufacturer in years. It's so refreshing being talked to like an adult with agency.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28778456,"author":"druidsbane","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Take a look inside Steam Deck!","text":"The \"teardown\" video was quite well done: [VIDEO] . Their openness is an interesting contrast with other manufacturers.","stance":"rec"}],"E0W1ZZYIV8o":[{"hn_comment_id":18794261,"author":"CuriousSkeptic","month":"2018-12","story_title":"As oil and gas exports surge, West Texas becomes the world\u2019s \u201cextraction colony\u201d","text":"Well, a bunch of countries have more or less agreed on aiming for no more than 1.5 degrees warmer. IPCC made a report on what that would entail stating basically that even with an overnight abolishment it cannot be reached. But that if we assume it feasible to use afforestation and other techniques to extract CO2 from the atmosphere in the future we might have chance to reach that target for 2100 given we stop using fossil fuels by 2030. Given the scale of the transition necessary, overnight or 11-years is more or less the same time frame Edit: Great TED-talk on the scale of what\u2019s needed [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19021721,"author":"CuriousSkeptic","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Study tracks dramatic retreat of Canadian glaciers","text":"On that topic, I found this ted talk on the feasibility of various renewable energy sources quite eye opening [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19451968,"author":"neilwilson","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Australia has enough solar, wind storage in pipeline to go 100% renewables","text":"Not everywhere in the world has the land area to do wind and solar. In fact pretty much everywhere other than Russia, Australia, Canada, the US and Brazil. There the energy density per head of population is too high for renewables. Good video by the late David Mackay on that point here. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24149665,"author":"kinjba1","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Air pollution is worse than we thought","text":"No energy source [that we've discovered so far] is perfect. All have downsides. Sadly, living in denial of that fact is more popular than ever, but that's a separate topic. Here are a couple TED talks showing the downside of renewable energy - such as the enormous land usage and reliable energy storage needed to compete with nuclear or fossil. Why renewables can\u2019t save the planet [LINK] A reality check on renewables [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"E3URhJx0NSw":[{"hn_comment_id":22550511,"author":"spectramax","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Don't Touch Ya Face","text":"Dr. Michael Osterholm was on Joe Rogan's podcast explaining in detail how this virus spreads [1] - Washing hands and not touching face is inconclusive but it makes sense to keep up the hygiene. That's not the primary means of how this virus spreads. - Virus primarily spreads via airborne means, simply by breathing (not even coughing or sneezing) is enough. It stays suspended in air (you can imagine the negligible weight of a 0.1um particle compared to the fluid mechanical forces from circulating air). - N95 masks (contrarily to the popular myth) are the most effective means of stopping the spread. Shortage of masks for hospital workers is an orthogonal issue. I urge everyone of you to watch this interview and to be more informed. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22556585,"author":"cletus","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat","text":"So I encourage people to go watch the Joe Rogan podcast on this [1]. A few snippets: - He describes this as more like a \"winter\" than a \"blizzard\" in that this is going to go on for months; - No one really knows what the mortality rate is but it's become clear there are certain risk factors eg the fatality rate among people over 70 in China is about 3x for men than women but men are much more likely to smoke than women in China in this age group. - Keeping schools closed is a mixed bag. For one, kids below 9 or so don't seem to get sick or die. In China only 2% of cases are under age 19. There are other diseases like this (eg Hepatitis-A). If you keep kids home, some people will lose their jobs or simply be unable to work as they take care of those children. Some of those people will be health care professionals. The lack of those will likely kill people; - It's unclear yet what other risk factors (other than age and smoking) there are. Obesity in the developed world is a big cause for concern as this unfolds. A stat quoted is that 45% of people in the US aged 45 and older are obese or severely obese; - It's largely a question of when not if you'll get this; - It's a myth that we'll have a vaccine before ~18 months. You can't rush this. It's like trying to rush a pregnancy. - Italy is a window to how most places will be in ~3 weeks; - We, as a society, have a short attention span. We could've developed a vaccine for coronaviruses after previous outbreaks (SARS/MERS) but there","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22590705,"author":"ApolloRising","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Where to get legitimate information about the coronavirus?","text":"This was very helpful to me: [VIDEO] Michael Osterholm is an internationally recognized expert in infectious disease epidemiology. He is Regents Professor, McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in Public Health, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, a professor in the Technological Leadership Institute, College of Science and Engineering, and an adjunct professor in the Medical School, all at the University of Minnesota. Look for his book \"Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Deadly Germs\" for more info. [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"E4tYpXVTjxA":[{"hn_comment_id":8433814,"author":"smtddr","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Fluid Actuators from Disney Research Make Soft, Safe Robot Arms","text":"If you liked this, check out another project from Disney labs called \"Touch\u00e9\" -- [VIDEO] For some reason, the girl's reactions to the 2 bzzzt-wrong sounds @ 2:55 are hilarious.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39159402,"author":"jorvi","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Disney unveils the HoloTile floor","text":"Disney researches / develops some really cool stuff. Their Disney Research Hub channel is a goldmine. One of my favorites is Touch\u00e9. The world becomes your touchscreen: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"E8Lhqri8tZk":[{"hn_comment_id":32085492,"author":"cyber_kinetist","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Unity merges with IronSource","text":"There was a GDC talk telling a a story where two bored indie game devs made an AI that churns out throwaway low-quality slot machine games as a joke, but actually earned much more money they they\u2019ve expected (thousands of dollars per day). They jokingly told that the reason for high CPU numbers was their \u201canti-retention\u201d model, where people get so bored by their game that they would literally click ads to escape into another game! That talk was hilarious, here\u2019s the link: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24625730,"author":"jordanwallwork","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Google requiring Android apps on Play store to use its billing system next year","text":"Reminds me of this brilliant GDC Talk - 1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25747853,"author":"chaorace","month":"2021-01","story_title":"A bit on scaling chess.com's database","text":"If you think that's bad, check out this GDC Talk: [VIDEO] They procedurally generated 1,500+ different iterations on top of the same Unity-based slots shovelware using noun/adjective pairs. The general success they enjoyed is as sad as it is hilarious . For the record, the most enticing descriptor categories were: \"3D\", \"Luxury\", \"Casino/Gambling\", and \"Sexy\".","stance":"rec"}],"E8T_4zqWmq8":[{"hn_comment_id":26426663,"author":"Shoop","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Multicore OCaml: Feb 2021 with new preprint on Effect Handlers","text":"dune is quite weird compared to many other build tools, but once you learn how it works it's actually quite simple. opam is a pain in the ass but it's definitely being improved steadily and I've had better experiences with it recently. janestreet core seems more stable now than it has in the past but there are occasionally still some breaking changes. They aren't hard to keep up with if you update with each core release though (only like ~1 for my project in the past year or so). There's also a community movement to work a lot more on the ocaml platform and I'm super excited for this work [1] to get through the pipeline! Especially promising is the work on replacing ocamldoc (which sucks) with odoc (which looks great!). While I think work on the ocaml platform will take some time to come to fruition, the approach they are going for is super empathetic and I wholeheartedly agree with their approach for every facet of the ocaml ecosystem -- build tools, doc generation, lsp, editor integration, opam evolution, and all the stability guarantees they're gradually adding. Really exciting time to invest in ocaml! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25108010,"author":"yawaramin","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Reflections on my first completed application in OCaml","text":"Yes, it does. However a lot of it is driven by long-time ecosystem contributors and they generally work somewhat behind the scenes, presenting on the progress ~annually at conferences like ICFP. Here's the latest progress report, in case you're interested: [VIDEO] Now this is not the same language/community improvement system that many popular projects nowadays use, but OCaml has been stewarded in its way for a few years now, and it's something the contributors feel is sustainable given the size of the project and the resources available. About Unicode specifically, there is of course support at the library level as you mentioned (the most well-known library is Camomile), but to try to justify not including it in the language distribution itself, to a certain extent many applications just don't need it. Those that do can of course use libraries, but many (say, backend servers) don't really need to process Unicode strings, they just need to shovel bytes from point A to point B and not actually touch the contents.","stance":"rec"}],"EACkiMRT0pc":[{"hn_comment_id":15116046,"author":"JshWright","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Doomsday planning for less crazy folk","text":"Even that is a little misleading (given how bad our intuition about statistics is). A '100 year flood' is flood that has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year (it's independent of what happened 1, 5, or 50 years ago). Calling it a '100 year flood' makes people think 'oh, good, now we shouldn't have one of those for another ~100 years'. In reality, the odds of a flood of the same magnitude occurring next year are exactly the same as they were this year. Grady (of the Practical Engineering YouTube channel) has a great video on this topic: [VIDEO] (Grady is in the Austin area, so hopefully he hasn't too much 'practical' experience from this storm...)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19862409,"author":"Balgair","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Making Nuclear Energy Smaller, Cheaper And Safer","text":"It's not human action that would worry me, it's nature. Freezing cycles could easily erode a pool in a few decades and make micro-cracks that fester unnoticed for years. Rust is an ever present issue for re-inforced concrete and is the cause of countless civil engineering disasters. Practical Engineering on Youtube is a great overview of the issues we humans have with water: [LINK] Of interest here are these videos: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EBCYvoC4muc":[{"hn_comment_id":42943465,"author":"noman-land","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Nine \u2013 seemingly impossible C64 demo","text":"This dude's work is incredible. His entire YouTube channel is amazing. My personal recent favorite, The Commodordion: \"A fully functional 8-bit accordion with bellows made out of floppy disks.\" Legend. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33540296,"author":"Joel_Mckay","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Dabblers and Blowhards","text":"Always in awe of process people even when insolent. ;) In my experience, people who throw around the H word these days are the same lamers you get stuck beside in a plane for 8 hours... talking at you about bitcoin. Talented artists can learn programs with ease, but software guys usually suck at making content that sells. This guy is far more interesting, and perhaps an exception: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44309109,"author":"maxdamantus","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Terpstra Keyboard","text":"I've kind of done this, just without the actual \"build\" part\u2014I instead use a Wooting computer keyboard (which has the hall effect switches you're referring to), and I've written some program to emit MIDI based on key velocity. I've been using it very frequently for a few years, and can confirm it's quite fun to use, though I don't have much experience playing other keyboard instruments and haven't tried to learn it seriously enough to make proper use of chords etc. Demo of me playing here, though try not to mind the messy desk and bad recording setup (one-hand, MIDI going through phone due to lack of speakers): [LINK] The layout I use is not a regular piano layout, but a B-griff layout, as used on a bayan (Russian accordion). I made a demo site for playing with the layout (keyboard or touchscreen), but without velocity sensitivity: [LINK] The B-griff/C-griff layouts naturally fit computer keyboards, and I'd argue they're better in general than piano layouts for various reasons. There's also this cool video of someone using two Commodores for similar effect: [VIDEO] EDIT: turns out the Terpstra keyboard is also able to work using B-griff: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"EFRUL7vKdU8":[{"hn_comment_id":45713323,"author":"seanmcdirmid","month":"2025-10","story_title":"A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool","text":"Doesn\u2019t it depend on how far they sink? I\u2019m pretty sure xkcd did a comic on this. Oh, it\u2019s a video, here it is: [VIDEO] Edit: ok, I\u2019m probably the fiftieth person to point this out. It\u2019s still a good video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45725015,"author":"benmathes","month":"2025-10","story_title":"A worker fell into a nuclear reactor pool","text":"XKCD has a good video about this. The top of the water is remarkably safe, and a life vest would keep you up there! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EGqwXt90ZqA":[{"hn_comment_id":10562819,"author":"jdiez17","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Writing code doesn't mix well with oration","text":"Bret Victor's talks are a counter example to this. His live programming in this[1] talk is nothing short of mind blowing. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42211179,"author":"ripley12","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Tailwind CSS v4.0 Beta 1","text":"I absolutely care about things that take hundreds of milliseconds for my builds. The faster I can build, the faster I can iteratively try new things things out. The goal should be to be able to see changes instantly after you make them, and Tailwind is usually just 1 part of a build pipeline. Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is probably the best demonstration of why this matters; in the first 10 minutes he shows a very concrete example of an insight that would not have occurred without instant feedback [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"EH6vE97qIP4":[{"hn_comment_id":27177384,"author":"jazzyjackson","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Missing line in a smart contract leads to $10M hack","text":"Well at least take a look around and see if it's interesting to you. I've been enjoying a playlist of blockchain lectures by Gary Gensler, current chair of the SEC. Lecture 6 is smart contracts with Lawrence Lessig guest speaking. [0]/[1] I've been avoiding smart contracts since hearing about hacks like these (similar to the Multisig Parity Bug years ago, neglected to initialize, let someone else become the owner and kill the contract) - but I've been educating myself the past week and find that there are really cool things that can be done, maybe cooler a year or 15 in the future when ETH finally gets its fees under control. As a programmer, you'd probably be interested to see the ethereum virtual machine's \"assembly\" language [2], I'm pretty impressed with how little code underlies all these ERC20 tokens. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33775767,"author":"CharlieDigital","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Crypto firm BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads","text":"> Regulators have been slow and ineffective when it comes to crypto, which has lent itself to the crypto v SEC narrative, but all the adults in the room known there is a need for some regulation It's a \"damned if you do, damned if you don't\" situation. Mainly because of the outsized lobbying power of the wealthy folks backing VC's backing crypto. Clamp down on crypto with regulations and many, many wealthy political contributors are going to be pissed off by stifling growth. Don't clamp down and you get the situation we're in now where everyone is losing their shirts. What about the middle ground? I think we can only now talk about it because enough wealthy people also lost big chunks of their investment in these last few months. BTW, despite whatever implied connections to FTX Gary Gensler has, his series of talks at MIT on blockchain[0] technologies leads me to believe that there are few people better equipped to navigate this from a political perspective. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EIezuL_doYw":[{"hn_comment_id":32179976,"author":"baxuz","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) \u2013 Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint","text":"Carbon footprints are a scam: [LINK] Carbon offsets are a scam: [VIDEO] Hearing people talk about these give me the same vibes as techbros talking about stocks and crypto.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34725028,"author":"rmvt","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Vestas unveils solution to end landfill disposal for wind turbine blades","text":"> Carbon offsetting is needlessly and cynically attacked by the same people who talk about wind power killing birds or not recycling the blades. well i don't really understand how you can lump all those together but ok... they're still not the same. as others have pointed out, it doesn't seem hard (or hard enough) to scam in this business sector - i.e. having the same assets accounting for different offset purchases, or just conflating assets bought for different puroses with offsetting. furthermore, it just deviates us from what should be the true goal: reduce fossil fuel consumption. not to mention how big business just offload this shady business cost to the end consumer. i'm taking the chance to share some content by people that present their points of view on this issue much better than i do: [LINK] , [LINK] , [LINK] , [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EK32jo7i5LQ":[{"hn_comment_id":28096988,"author":"shezi","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ulam Spiral","text":"Here is one of the most enlightening explanations for these kinds of spirals I have seen by 3blue1brown: [VIDEO] Note that the setup is slightly different,since in that video they plot numbers along their polar coordinates. The results are very similar, since both create spirals with predictable angular offsets.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21422497,"author":"excessive","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Unexpected Beauty in Primes","text":"The first time I saw these, I thought it hinted at some deep insight into the nature of primes. However, after watching the following video, I think it just says something about modular arithmetic and rational approximations of 2 Pi. [VIDEO] The video is only about Archimedian spirals, but I suspect a similar analysis would apply to Ulam spirals too. We really like to find patterns.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23730445,"author":"hinkley","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Why do electron shells have set limits? (1999)","text":"In this vein, I really enjoyed 1brown3blue breaking down why prime numbers form patterns when graphed in polar coordinates. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26362061,"author":"lupire","month":"2021-03","story_title":"The Prime Hexagon","text":"3B1B has a semi related video on how working with prime numbers can help you see properties that are also found in composite numbers, since the sequence of primes overlaps with many other sequences. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26362127,"author":"andrewflnr","month":"2021-03","story_title":"The Prime Hexagon","text":"For IMO a more meaningful phenomenon, this video by 3Blue1Brown explains why primes plotted as (p, p) in polar coordinates produce interesting patterns. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41127309,"author":"zimpenfish","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Breakthrough a step toward revealing hidden structure of prime numbers","text":"Numberphile[1] and 3b1b[2] (with a particularly good explanation of why it happens) have done good videos on the prime spiral. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41142021,"author":"godelski","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?","text":"> But after a fairly small size, there's almost no utility in visualizing graphs. I want to stress this point and go a bit further. It can be worse as people have pareidolia[0], a tendency to see order in disorder. Like how you see familiar shapes in the clouds. There is a danger in that with large visualizations such as these that instead of conveying useful information, you counterproductively convince someone that something that isn't true is! Here's a relevant 3B1B video where this is kinda discussed. There is real meaning but the point is that it is also easy to be convinced of things that aren't true[1]. In fact, Grant's teaching style is so good you might even convince yourself of the thing he is disproving as he is revealing how we are tricked by the visualization. Remember what the original SO person latched onto. I think it's important to recognize that visualization is a nontrivial exercise. Grant makes an important point at the end, restating how the visualization was an artifact and how if you dig deep enough into an arbitrary question, you _can_ find value. Because at the end of the day, there are rules to these things. The same is true about graphs. There will always be value in the graph, but the point of graphing is to highlight the concepts that we want to convey. In a way, many people interpret what graphs are doing and why we use them backwards. You don't create visualizations to then draw value from them, but rather your plots are a mathematical analysis ","stance":"rec"}],"EKWGGDXe5MA":[{"hn_comment_id":9914938,"author":"trymas","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Richard Feynman on the Challenger disaster (1986) [video]","text":"I am always amazed how Richard Feynman can make such simple stories and comparisons to explain the situation/theory in \"explain like I'm 5\" style. It seems that in every lecture or interview he gives he can explain the situation very fluently and in a way that literally, probably, a 5 year old could understand. The best one I saw is where R. Feynman explains how a computer works [1]. Even though I knew everything he told, I was astonished how intriguing and simple his way of presenting was. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839245,"author":"cup-of-tea","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Most recently I really liked \"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Dynamic Typing for Practical Programs\": [LINK] The ones that had the most profound effect for me would be Linus's talk about git and Carsten Dominik on org-mode. Also, Richard Feynman explaining how computers work: [VIDEO] This actually changed the way I think about it after years of programming.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8031286,"author":"evanb","month":"2014-07","story_title":"What Problems to Solve","text":"You might be interested in this lecture that Feynman gave at a meeting called \"Idiosyncratic Thinking\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11670873,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-05","story_title":"The Controlled Natural Language of Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer [pdf]","text":"This seems like a good companion (probably as a sequel) to: \"Richard Feynman - Computer Heuristics Lecture\": [VIDEO] In general, Feynman might be a poster child for using simple language to explain complex things.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15471895,"author":"westurner","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How to introduce someone to programming concepts during 12-hour drive?","text":"I believe it was Feynman who introduced the analogy: desktop : filing cabinet :: RAM : hard drive Here's a video: \"Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture\" (1985) [VIDEO] Somewhere in my comments here, I talk about topologically sorting CS concepts; in what little time I spent, I think I suggested \"Constructor Theory\" (Deutsch 201?) as a first physical principle. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26988120,"author":"jamcohen","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Computer Science from the Bottom Up","text":"Richard Feynman's lecture is a great resource for this: [VIDEO] He proposes a file clerk that gets progressively dumber and faster until they get so dumb that they can be simulated by an electronic circuit.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47982747,"author":"o4c","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language","text":"Sorry I am pasting my old comment here, but the intention is same Before learning programming one should know what is computing in general? It sets good mental model, after that you can easily pickup and start writing program yourself . Data, data, data :))) Some basic notions to know: Input \u2192 Computation \u2192 Output Information is omnipresent (this is just an intuition, not a claim). It serves as both input and output. Computation\u2014also known as a procedure, function, set of instructions, transformation, method, algorithm, or calculation. In my early days, I ignored the fundamental notion of data and procedures. But eventually, it clicked: Programs = Data + Instructions Watch Feynman on computing\u2014he even starts with the same concept of data, introducing computers as information processing systems. And processing requires algorithms (i.e., instructions or procedures). Programming is simply writing instructions for the computer to perform computations. A computer is just a machine for computing. Computation is a general idea: a transformation of one form of information into another. Richard Feynman Computer Science Lecture: [VIDEO] Old documentry on programming: [LINK] George Hotz video: what is programming? [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47982955,"author":"pillars","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language","text":"Sorry I am pasting my old comment here, but the intention is same Before learning programming one should know what is computing in general? It sets good mental model, after that you can easily pickup and start writing program yourself . Data, data, data :))) Some basic notions to know: Input \u2192 Computation \u2192 Output Information is omnipresent (this is just an intuition, not a claim). It serves as both input and output. Computation\u2014also known as a procedure, function, set of instructions, transformation, method, algorithm, or calculation. In my early days, I ignored the fundamental notion of data and procedures. But eventually, it clicked: Programs = Data + Instructions Watch Feynman on computing\u2014he even starts with the same concept of data, introducing computers as information processing systems. And processing requires algorithms (i.e., instructions or procedures). Programming is simply writing instructions for the computer to perform computations. A computer is just a machine for computing. Computation is a general idea: a transformation of one form of information into another. [LINK] Richard Feynman Computer Science Lecture: [VIDEO] Old documentry on programming: [LINK] George Hotz video: what is programming? [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"EL7Au1tzNxE":[{"hn_comment_id":44934492,"author":"sitkack","month":"2025-08","story_title":"AI doesn't lighten the burden of mastery","text":"Jon Gjengset (jonhoo) Who is famously fastidious did a stream on live coding where he did something similar in terms of control. Worth of a watch if that is a style you want to explore. [VIDEO] I don't have the energy to do that for most things I am writing these days which are small PoC where the vibe is fine. I suspect as you do more, you will create dev guides and testing guides that can encapsulate more of that direction so you won't need to micromanage it. If you used Gemini CLI, you picked the coding agent with the worst output. So if you got something that worked to your liking, you should try Claude.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46673721,"author":"ontouchstart","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Profession by Isaac Asimov","text":"Ironically, when machine learning is getting \u201cdeeper & deeper\u201d, human learning is getting more and more impatient and shallow. I have been searching \u201cVibe coding\u201d videos on YouTube that are not promoting something. And I found this one and sat down and watched the whole three hours. It does take a lot of real effort. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ELeZAKCN4tY":[{"hn_comment_id":33579213,"author":"karmakaze","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Can C++ be 10x Simpler and Safer?","text":"There are so many shallow comments for this deeply thought out, 7 year effort to date. If the rest of the 'to do' items gets tackled, implemented in prototypes, and made into proposals as some of the work to date has been handled, this has the best chance of being a true C++ successor. The goal is nothing more than fulfilling these B. Stroustrup quotes: \"Inside C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out.\" (1994) \"Say 10% of size of C++ in definition and front-end compiler size. ... Most of the simplification would come from generalization.\" (2007) There's a summarization at 1:14:39[0] where concepts are listed on the left, and C++ syntax for handling these concepts in different contexts are on the right. The point of this effort is reduce the accidental complexity syntax on the right by refactoring it into concise uniform syntax. This effort is broad and much more than sugar, e.g. eliminating forward declarations. The talk up to that time is giving examples of the work that has been done in many of those areas, with remaining to-do's listed. Basically the language that is being extracted is the actual language that current C++ programmers really think in, but don't have a more concise way of writing than C++. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39888482,"author":"JNRowe","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Overview: What are Cpp2 and cppfront? How do I get and build cppfront?","text":"Sutter's 2022 cppcon talk\u00b9 is a great introduction to the topic, both the problems it attempts to solve and solutions it was/is settling on. One of those few talks that left me genuinely enthused about the topic. [It is probably worth watching for the Compiler Explorer interjection toward the end alone -- Matt Godbolt Appreciation Society] \u00b9 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33778981,"author":"cpeterso","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Const vs. constexpr vs. consteval vs. constinit in C++20","text":"For people curious about Herb's Cpp2, here's a presentation he gave at CppCon 2022: \"Can C++ be 10x Simpler & Safer? (Simplifying C++ #9 of N)\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33919495,"author":"norman784","month":"2022-12","story_title":"C++23: std:out_ptr and std:inout_ptr","text":"I agree that ideally everything should be written in safer alternatives, in most scenarios is not feasible to migrate from C++ to another language, because of the code base size. I think cppfront[0] is the way to go if you want to write a safer language on top of C++, you can watch the talk about it here[1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34221658,"author":"jdlyga","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Year of C++ Successor Languages","text":"There is a much safer and simpler language hiding inside of C++ waiting to be discovered. If anyone can help reform the language, it's Herb Sutter with his cpp2 syntax. It's very much an experimental hero project, but it's promising: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34958537,"author":"taraharris","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Will Carbon Replace C++?","text":"Has anyone else looked at Herb Sutter's cpp2? For those that don't use C++, Herb is chair of the ISO C++ standards committee, and holds the position of \"native languages architect\" at Microsoft. [LINK] This is a good introductory talk on cpp2 by Sutter at CppCon three months ago, where he demonstrates cppfront , the cpp2 -> C++ transpiler. One of the things I like about it is that the code it generates is human-readable and fully backwards-compatible with C++. If you use cpp2 in your project and end up not liking it, you still have the same (very reasonable) C++ code that you'd write by hand today if you followed the guidelines you're supposed to already. [VIDEO] I think this is very promising, and I'm interested in using it my next project. We don't need a total replacement for C++, we just need to let out the awesome language that's always been hiding inside it.","stance":"rec"}],"EMKLeS-Uq_8":[{"hn_comment_id":28654941,"author":"kortex","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Visualize 3D hyperbolic honeycombs and sphere packings","text":"CodeParade has been working on hyperbolica for a while now and doing fantastic videos on the process. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30010502,"author":"pavel_lishin","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Geometry from Another Universe","text":"If you're interested in this, you may be interested in Hyperbolica, which is a whole game about this concept: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36453699,"author":"wardedVibe","month":"2023-06","story_title":"How to create a game using hyperbolic geometry?","text":"Probably commenting too late for folks to actually see it, but there's a great game made in 3d hyperbolic/euclidean/elliptic/weird combos of those in different dimensions known as Hyerbolica: [LINK] He's got a great devlog on Youtube: [VIDEO] The author is also making a golf game: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ENLWEfi0Tkg":[{"hn_comment_id":15564188,"author":"hawkinsw","month":"2017-10","story_title":"The Upspin manifesto: On the ownership and sharing of data (2014)","text":"Rob Pike explains this manifesto in several videos available on YouTube: [VIDEO] It's a fascinating talk. I really enjoyed it. I hope you do too!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26511297,"author":"iamevn","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Interview with CEO of rsync.net: \u201cno firewalls and no routers\u201d","text":"If you want to see more on this theme, the Upspin docs[1] are a really interesting read. This 2017 talk[2] that Rob Pike gave on it is also really good. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EOwxxsPaogY":[{"hn_comment_id":26920503,"author":"IgorPartola","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Volkswagen launches its first all-electric SUV, the ID.4","text":"You are correct. This very entertaining 11 minute video from Fortnine (still one of the best channels on YouTube) does a great job explaining exactly how HD wound up where they are today: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25749159,"author":"volta87","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Airbus hit as new US tariffs come into force","text":"That's because the company started dying longer ago. Their stock price today is around 30$. In the early 2000s it was around 90$. Also, like the other comment mentioned, HD has been playing a lot of financial tricks over the last 20 years to prevent the stock price from declining (e.g. buy backs to artificially inflate stock price, take a look at the number of outstanding shares: [LINK] , a reduction from 280 million to 150 million in the 2005-2019 time period). EDIT: I recommend [VIDEO] for a summary.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27501796,"author":"noir_lord","month":"2021-06","story_title":"The Rise and Fall of Planet Hollywood","text":"Harley Davidson is on the ropes long term though. They made the mistake of pitching their entire product at a very singular niche and the people in that niche are now getting older and in many cases too old to ride. Fantastic overview here [VIDEO] Simply put HD make nothing that appeal to rides my age (41) and younger.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44767969,"author":"ubermonkey","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Why leather is best motorcycle protection [video]","text":"It's nuts, right? I mean, I ride, but I know plenty of folks who are subscribed to the F9 Youtube channel who don't just because so much of the content they do scratches nerdy itches. Some of my favorites, in case anyone's interested: * Ryan's periodic \"check out this weird bike from the past\" clips are always great, but I really LOVE the one about the Honda Rune: [LINK] * Their \"trilogy\" of sorts about Harley, and the hows and whys of their odd and honestly self-defeating decisions, are all great, but my favorite is the one that compares an Indian Scout to its then-corresponding Harley model; the Indian made 43% more power, and it's all down to Harley's genuflection at \"tradition\". [LINK] The other two are \"why millions ride HD\" ( [LINK] ), which kinda lays the background for the tradition at work in the aforementioned video; and \"How HD killed itself\" ( [VIDEO] ), which is more about their demographic problem. * They did a \"how to deal with dealers\" video that is really a thinly veiled tribute to a particularly excellent and longstanding dealership, which is just lovely: [LINK] * And my personal favorite is the FANTASTIC film homage built into Ryan's vid about the Ducati Desert X, which he ended up buying: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"EP9F-AZezCU":[{"hn_comment_id":14222724,"author":"hkmurakami","month":"2017-04","story_title":"A History of Starcraft AI Competitions","text":"This reminds me of the recent Day[9] rant about Broodwar's mechanical difficulty being an integral part of what makes it a great \"realtime\" strategy game, and that the mechanics are inseparable from the strategy part of the game. [1] His analogy of taking out mechanics from Broodwar being equivalent to taking out athleticism from Football was particularly insightful. BW AI (in its culmination) to me is what Broodwar looks like when you take out the mechanics from the game and make it 100% about strategy and the execution of said strategy. It's really fascinating to see the differences between AI play and human bounded play. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14973172,"author":"mattb314","month":"2017-08","story_title":"DeepMind and Blizzard Open StarCraft II as an AI Research Environment","text":"I think the idea of spending to upgrade your helper AI sounds really interesting and potentially novel, but it's important to push back a little bit on the idea of \"removing all the rote\" from an RTS. day[9] (ex Broodwar pro, current caster of many games) probably makes the argument better than I can here: [VIDEO] , but one of the important implications of having repetitive aspects in an RTS is that they turn the player's attention into a resource. You can either concentrate on microing your units to squeeze the most possible value out of them, or you can focus on hitting every single production cycle back at base, but you can't do both at the same time, so deciding when to focus on what becomes part of the game. Additionally, it allows for some crazy \"overcoming the odds\" scenarios where a small number of units can pull off a surprising win because the player was willing to donate far more attention to them than usual. Basically, an RTS where you don't feel like you have too much to do all at once is really more like a turn based strategy game (which can be fun too).","stance":"rec"}],"EQs5VxNPhzk":[{"hn_comment_id":38742725,"author":"peteforde","month":"2023-12","story_title":"They want you to forget what a film looks like","text":"I'm not a film expert, but I like to think I have taste? And yet, somehow the recent Beatles projects reduced me to tears on several occasions. Am I secretly a chud in denial, or are my tastes just offensive? Look, everyone has the right to be an elitist on their own film blog. The author didn't ask us to read what he said. However, his entire thesis is dramatically undermined by the simple fact that he didn't attempt to grab even a single comparison frame from the original releases so that a reader can A/B them and make up their minds for themselves. As to his distaste for those upscaled and colorized vintage shorts, I'm happy to go on record and say that I love them. In fact, watching these clips is the closest thing my family has to a Christmas tradition at this point. My personal favorite is [VIDEO] and frankly, I don't have the time of day for anyone who is upset that I think it's wonderful.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28888461,"author":"GeekyBear","month":"2021-10","story_title":"The Hindenburg disaster denoised, upscaled, and colorized using ML [video]","text":"I've really come to enjoy these sorts of upscaled videos that allow a view of various cities in the early 1900's. New York: [LINK] San Francisco: [LINK] Paris: [LINK] Wuppertal, Germany: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ERbvKrH-GC4":[{"hn_comment_id":1992930,"author":"dstein","month":"2010-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Finally have loose change and spare time, but no sense of purpose. Help.","text":"The following video, narrated by Alan Watts, and animated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, eloquently describes exactly what you have figured out: [VIDEO] You essentially have come to the realization that the things you have been lead to believe (career, wealth, social status, possessions) are not what will make you happy. This realization can go down a dark path of depression if you're not careful, so be careful and stay level headed. Definitely take time off, pursue interests you never had time for and completely stop worrying about the future. That's the important part, to stop thinking there's some sort of end goal that you're working toward.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2010077,"author":"noidi","month":"2010-12","story_title":"Winning Isn't Normal","text":"This blog post reminded me of Alan Watts' Music and Life, which is great food for thought when pondering your goals in life: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3365751,"author":"blhack","month":"2011-12","story_title":"I'm turning 30 and I've produced no amazing art.","text":"Alan watts has something important to say about this... [VIDEO] You haven't been failing, you've been dancing. This is the point. Enjoy it and stop waiting for the payoff.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3973799,"author":"chubbard","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Are Stanford Students Just (Really Excellent) Sheep?","text":"No generation ever knows what its all for until they're 40 possibly 35 because you're outside the holy grail of advertising demographic. Coincidence? Yea probably. If you haven't figured it out by then your not paying much attention anyway. There's prescript of zoloft by the door for you. Anyway, This essay is much the same that Allan Watts articulated in the 60s and I think he did it with much more panache and charm. [VIDEO] I find its best to laugh because it really has been a well executed practical joke.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5201037,"author":"dcolgan","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Dream, but don't forget to live","text":"Having grown up as a Christian in the Midwestern US, we were always taught that heaven lasts forever, and therefore I never felt any time pressure. This life can be spent building character and struggling with self improvement and you can enjoy yourself in the next life. As I've come to consider the possibility that life ends when it is over, that mindset no longer makes nearly as much sense to me. Yes I want to improve myself, since self improvement and achievement brings increased opportunities, but why am I striving to find more and more opportunities and achievement? Is there some mystical end point after which I can finally relax and be happy? Why not just decide to relax and be happy now? And so I've tried to do so and I think I'm enjoying life more because of it. I really liked this video by Alan Watts called \"Life and Music:\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7105224,"author":"tripzilch","month":"2014-01","story_title":"How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love","text":"Alan Watts said: (paraphrased) Life is not a journey pilgrimage with an important goal at the end, it is a musical thing and you are supposed to laugh and sing and dance along the way. For the full text, check out this cool youtube animation made by the Southpark folks from his lecture: [VIDEO] (animation style is Southpark-like, content is Alan Watts)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7183583,"author":"daGrevis","month":"2014-02","story_title":"Life is a game, this is your strategy guide","text":"I would like to share my opinion on living life. What is the main goal? Some may think that it's getting better at something to get a raise and more money. First there is a school, then there is the 1st job, the you try to get a better one and you are trying and trying and trying to get higher. In my opinion, that's not the main point and it's just a side-effect of the life. Article suggests that 1st 15 years of life is a training or a tutorial, but I disagree. They are as much as important as any other time period. Person should do what makes he or she happy. If it's playing video-games or spending time with friends at a bar, it's okay. Of course, it won't affect your skills on getting a better job (so more money), but if it makes you a happier person, do it! Life is all about being happy and doing what you love to do. There is no magic-prize at the end of the life, only memories. What will be the point of having much money and good CV in you will sacrifice your happiness on it. In my opinion, this video[1] nicely shows what I'm talking about. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7987863,"author":"chris123","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO","text":"Glad to hear Matt is finally questioning his priorities and taking corrective action. Better late than never. Work-life-balance means now, in the present moment, not 15 years from now. The younger we are when we realize that, the better. This is what Alan Watts has to say about it: \"Music & Life\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10643462,"author":"codemac","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Our Father\u2019s Retirement and the Shared Fear Of Uselessness","text":"\"Fear of uselessness\" seems to be a euphemism for the fear of dying, both the process and the ending. I'm not sure there is a great answer here, so I'm just going to post the Alan Watts talk that brings some perspective for me. Alan Watts - Music and life: [VIDEO] \"[..] but we miss the point the whole way along, it was a musical thing. You were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11477840,"author":"ZenoArrow","month":"2016-04","story_title":"The rituals we perform and the games we play","text":"You're welcome. :-) Thank you for your answer, I think I understand your reasoning a little better. With the example of the mathematician, you can read it a number of different ways, but one of the things I took from it was the difference between a healthy curiosity and an unhealthy curiosity. It sounds to me that you have a healthy curiosity, and enjoy the mental stimulation of exploring the big questions. As long as it remains something you enjoy and you're still open to enjoying other things then you can't really go wrong. If you'd like to find kindred spirits that also enjoy thinking about the big questions, you can find plenty in the world of philosophy. I can recommend The School of Life as an enjoyable way to explore philosophy. As some examples, here are a couple of my favourites from TSoL: [LINK] [LINK] Learning can be done for your own enjoyment, but what I would suggest is the mindset that many of us used to get us through school isn't likely to help with that. I think this video puts it well: [VIDEO] Related to this, here's a discussion about deschooling you may find interesting: [LINK] One last thing... [LINK] Best of luck!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24439154,"author":"stakkur","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?","text":"I don't have a single favorite motto, but here's what I'm striving to live like, described in two minutes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32358404,"author":"stakkur","month":"2022-08","story_title":"How to choose your college degree (2021)","text":"Well-intentioned, I suppose, but this seems more of a scattershot blog post than a thoughtful answer to 'how to choose your college degree'. I've heard a lot recently about 'picking the right college major'. It's normal to worry about such things. I remember. But I think obsessing over picking the 'right' college degree is a waste of time. If you have particular interests, follow them in college, but waste no more time worrying if you've made the 'right' choice. I'm in my 50s. I've heard hundreds of stories of the twists and turns of lives and the role of college in them--including my own. I was dead set on being an electrical engineer, and the first year and a half of college was in that subject. I was certain I was destined to invent the next power source and change the world with it. I ended up with an undergrad in history, and (years later) a graduate degree in urban planning. I've been in the 'tech' business for 30-odd years as a technical writer, then usability engineer, then software developer, then analyst/product owner/whatever. The best 'engineer' I know has an undergrad in fine arts. They own three software patents; they also make pottery. My 'old guy' advice to those staring down college decisions: The road doesn't matter very much. Taking steps matters. Just keep taking action and learning and adjusting and, for god's sake, enjoy your life. It's a dance, not a long march towards 'eventual' happiness: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ESXOAJRdcwQ":[{"hn_comment_id":24774429,"author":"sheepdestroyer","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50\u201350","text":"Exactly. This is the topic of this entertaining talk by geohot (of iPhone and PlayStation jailbreak fame) : [VIDEO] That's why this subject is not just theoretical/philosophical, but has potentially actionable ramifications with universe level consequences.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27737803,"author":"MaggiD","month":"2021-07","story_title":"What are the odds we are living in a computer simulation? (2016)","text":"Not complete without linking to Georg Hotz (geohot) talk at SXSW: \"Jailbreaking the Simulation\" He's taking the hacker's perspective and exploring if the simulation would be hackable from inside. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35721316,"author":"chatmasta","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Who are the real pioneers and contrarian visionaries in tech?","text":"George Hotz was the first to jailbreak the iPhone, and also gave a presentation called \"Jailbreaking the Simulation\" [0] which is as wild and thought-provoking of an idea as it sounds. It's worth a watch. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EUXnJraKM3k":[{"hn_comment_id":5086165,"author":"untog","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Microsoft hires designer behind \"The Next Microsoft\", Andrew Kim","text":"This is supposedly an MS-produced parody of it's marketing efforts. It's very old now (I think it uses a 1st gen iPod?) but is still worth a laugh: [VIDEO] Thankfully MS have learnt a lot of lessons since.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27258440,"author":"alisonkisk","month":"2021-05","story_title":"If Microsoft Designed macOS (Concept)","text":"It's just a few lines of text complain about Windows, and some windows UI screenshots copied onto a max desktop. Not worth 2 minutes of video. The original \"Microsoft iPod\" video from 2006 is much better [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32794044,"author":"gumby","month":"2022-09","story_title":"iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS","text":"Many tech products are still sold on feature lists. Few people care any more. This great (short and funny) internal video from Microsoft was supposed to be a wake up call, but nothing really changed: [VIDEO] The fact that Apple doesn't really play that game seems to drive some people wild.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46864072,"author":"jnaina","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft","text":"It's over 19 years old, but this video is a brutal but hilarious commentary on Microsoft's inherent dysfunction when it comes to product naming and packaging. Still on point decades later. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EWX5B6cD4_4":[{"hn_comment_id":22661770,"author":"nodesocket","month":"2020-03","story_title":"How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations [video]","text":"Related, the video How Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM[1] is actually more fascinating and entertaining in my opinion. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22280730,"author":"anonsivalley652","month":"2020-02","story_title":"HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)","text":"The game Myst was originally written in HC, and a game engine (Mohawk) had to be written for Windows to provide similar functionality in order to port it. There's a documentary about it: [VIDEO] Definitely one of the rare indie game success stories. They really poured themselves into making it as awesome and expansive as technology would allow. IIRC, they're still writing games for fun.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34337224,"author":"clusmore","month":"2023-01","story_title":"When Douglas Adams wrote about Hypercard","text":"If you want to hear more about this from the man himself, Rand Miller has a great video with Ars Technica: [VIDEO] And extended edition: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36600716,"author":"rideontime","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands","text":"CD-ROM didn't make Myst a no-brainer, as Rand Miller discusses in this excellent Ars Technica piece: [VIDEO] More info in the extended cut starting at this timestamp: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"EY6q5dv_B-o":[{"hn_comment_id":21378020,"author":"jen_h","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan","text":"Looking forward to reading this! Had the pleasure of seeing Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson speak at VCF East earlier this year, totally worth a watch: [VIDEO] I highly recommend hitting up a Vintage Computer Festival if you've got the opportunity ( [LINK] ). Not only did Kernighan and Thompson speak, but also Joe Decuir of Atari & Amiga fame.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21589163,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2019-11","story_title":"A Mystery of Unix History","text":"Also I found these fascinating: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) has a lot of history and takes you back in time.. [LINK] Brian Kernighan 'interviews' Ken Thompson (2019) - Ken telling stories. They're both very funny, a very entertaining video, some stories I (and even Brian) hadn't heard. [VIDEO] UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use (1982) [LINK] Also the other day I read in the AWK book that it was mainly inspired by SNOBOL4, so looked at some SNOBOL4 books from archive.org, from 1970-2 and just before, slightly earlier than Unix history takes you back. One tells you how to organize your punch cards to feed in the program.. Another had a bibliography with many dozens of SNOBOL books. It was widely used by people in the humanities apparently; like AWK it was at home dealing with words and text.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21737960,"author":"kick","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best computing-related videos you've watched recently?","text":"Two of the most interesting ones I've seen this year: Brian Kernighan (of K&R fame, and much more) interviewing Ken Thompson (initial author of UNIX, though you probably already knew both of these): lots of interesting anecdotes, like getting a chess machine seized by the US government: [VIDEO] Drew DeVault, (sway/sr.ht/much more author) hacking on his Wayland VR desktop inside of his Wayland VR desktop (don't believe the people who say you can't do programming inside of VR yet!): [LINK] NB. the second video is on a PeerTube instance. PeerTube is a federated and decentralized YouTube alternative.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19896217,"author":"alister","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Brian Kernighan (Coined Word \u201cUnix\u201d) Interviews Ken Thompson (Co-Invented Unix)","text":"The interview starts at [VIDEO] Brian Kernighan coined the word \u201cUnix\u201d and is the \u201cK\u201d in K&R (co-author of the The C Programming Language book). Ken Thompson co-invented Unix. Full of funny anecdotes like needing 3 weeks to write the kernel and serendipitously his wife was going on vacation for 3 weeks.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25177720,"author":"pmoriarty","month":"2020-11","story_title":"The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan","text":"One of my favorite moments from the birth of UNIX is Ken Thompson's telling (in this interview with Brian Kernighan) of how he got hired to work at Bell Labs: [VIDEO] (starting at about 11 minutes in to the video)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25182238,"author":"dwcnnnghm","month":"2020-11","story_title":"The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan","text":"> Brian is super modest and claims to be a horrible programmer but he is comparing himself to Ken Thompson, who he thinks is just incredible. Ken once wrote a disassembler, assembler and B interpreter for a mini-computer that ran a printer they were struggling with, in a couple of days, so that they could get it printing again. This blew Brian's mind. For the next level up here's Ken (in a very interesting conversation with Brian Kernighan about the history of Unix) describing McIlroy: > McIlroy keeps coming up. He's the smartest of all of us and the least remembered (or written down)... McIlroy sat there and wrote ---on a piece of paper, now, not on a computer--- TMG [a proprietary yacc-like program] written in TMG... And then! He now has TMG written in TMG, he decided to give his piece of paper to his piece of paper and write down what came out (the code). Which he did. And then he came over to my editor and he typed in his code, assembled it, and (I won't say without error, but with so few errors you'd be astonished) he came up with a TMG compiler, on the PDP-7, written in TMG. And it's the most basic, bare, impressive self-compilation I've ever seen in my life. This story, by the way, leads into how Ken created B (and how that was eventually improved by Dennis Ritchie into C). [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29911447,"author":"BenoitEssiambre","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Why don't I have a blog?","text":"I found Kernighan's book quite riveting. If you want the short version (this might spoil some of the book) this talk is quite something: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30501983,"author":"tuckerpo","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?","text":"See Ken Thompson's monologue about creating Unix in 3 weeks: [VIDEO] Programmers used to be pretty damn productive.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33697781,"author":"caned","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What story from the PDP-8 era would make a good script?","text":"This isn't specifically PDP-8-related, but the story of Bell Labs going to extraordinary lengths to hire Ken Thompson is a hoot: [VIDEO] ...not to mention Ken's story of Doug McIlroy writing a compiler for TCG on a sheet of paper, then using it to compile itself - by hand - thus \"feeding his sheet of paper his sheet of paper.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43112344,"author":"cjs_ac","month":"2025-02","story_title":"1972 Unix V2 \"Beta\" Resurrected","text":"The interview is here: [VIDEO] One hour long, and Thompson tells a lot of entertaining stories. Kernighan does a good job of just letting Thompson speak.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45088363,"author":"bentley","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Unix co-creator Brian Kernighan on Rust, distros and NixOS","text":"The article provides ancillary hyperlinks to nearly every topic mentioned, but fails to link the actual video of Kernighan speaking. Here it is: [LINK] In reality the subject of the talk is Kernighan\u2019s perspective of the history of Unix at Bell Labs. The questions covered in the article are the least interesting part, and make up about six minutes at the very end\u2014a small fraction not just of the 70-minute video, but even of the 30-minute Q&A session. In short, the headline and article are disappointing clickbait, but the video itself is worth watching for Kernighan\u2019s relating of history and his theories about what confluence of factors made Unix successful (collegial environment, good management, overall mission\u2026). Another worthwhile video from the same conference (in a different year) is Kernighan\u2019s interview of Ken Thompson: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EYPapE-3FRw":[{"hn_comment_id":12553520,"author":"acscott","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Bad science persists because poor methods are rewarded","text":"\"Science\" has now many definitions. My personal understanding of \"science\" is this: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26316611,"author":"quasirandom","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Trust: The Need for Public Understanding of How Science Works","text":"Feynman's lectures on the character of physical law should be something everyone sees in school. In general we look for a new law by the following process: first we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess... and then we compare those computation results to experiment. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment its wrong, that's all there is to it. Notice however that we never prove it right... In the future there could be a wider range of experiments, or you could compute a wider range of consequences, and you may discover then that the thing is wrong. That's why laws like Newton's laws for the motions of planets last such a long time... It took several hundred years before the slight error in the motion of Mercury was developed. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33769908,"author":"ddingus","month":"2022-11","story_title":"In what sense is quantum computing a science?","text":"Science is about basic understanding. Monkey see, monkey do. Input A yields outcome B. We get that understanding this way: [VIDEO] I love that whole series of lectures. They are his Cornell introduction to physics lectures and are a gold mine of basic scientific type thinking. So far, science has not increased our knowledge of truth. That's damn tough to come by. What it has done is very significantly expanded our understanding of the world. Our theories are far more predictive in far more contexts than ever! But, that is it! Monkey see, monkey do. Engineering is all about applying that understanding to solve problems in robust, efficient, safe ways.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40131701,"author":"Kim_Bruning","month":"2024-04","story_title":"I should have loved biology (2020)","text":"[VIDEO] < have an explanation by Feynman on the scientific method. (Feynman is a great teacher!) The whole video is pretty good, and the specific point starting with \"You cannot prove a vague theory wrong\" is explained around 5:10.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41583999,"author":"ddingus","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Is accidentally stumbling across the unknown a key part of science?","text":"Yes! Nature is the authority. Our scientific method allows us to pose any question and it allows us to gain understanding when said questions are testable and repeatable. Notably: we never get to know anything, sadly But, we do understand monkey see, monkey do style: do A get B Observing nature is key, but not the only key. Observation coupled with mathematics allows us to process observation analytically, and all of that allows us to... Guess and test! Richard Feynman taught this at Cornell, and it remains one of the best explanations of the scientific method around because it is clear, funny and short, to the point: [VIDEO] And just another thing to add here, and that is science is not a belief system, nor does it require belief due to the method requiring we question everything, including the method! Notably, Feynman talks about things being likely or unlikely as a root driver for our guesses, which again depend on observation, that stumbling into that which can enlighten, math needed to predict, and experiment to test. Theory is not proof either. It is simply the most predictive understanding we have! Old theory still works as well as it ever did, and that build down to how predictive it is. Is a theory proven right? Nope, we can only say we have yet to prove it wrong. Example: Einstein Theory of General Relativity has been very difficult to prove wrong and it has been very predictive even when we have not expected it to be! Is Einstein right? Who knows? What we can say i","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4163857,"author":"jshen","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase Happiness","text":"\" the only difference between spiritual beliefs and academic ones is the language used to express them\" I'm not sure what is meant by \"academic\", but if it's a synonym for science then I disagree. Watch the link below (feynman on the scientific method), a little after the 5 minute mark he talks about the problems of \"vague\" theories. This vagueness is where spiritual beliefs usually diverge from scientific beliefs. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26502426,"author":"vixen99","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Scientists discover fossil plants beneath mile-deep Greenland ice","text":"Why not destroy such sceptics (on HN or anywhere else) regarding the rate of climate change and related topics? All you have to do is demonstrate that the data presented by them & their interpretation is garbage, nonsense or whatever else you want to call it. Must surely be easier than presenting a classic logical fallacy - argument by authority and thinking that nails it. Maybe the link is indeed total rubbish but talking about man-hours and 'trained PhD's' is irrelevant. Feynman explains nicely: [VIDEO] . Science is a matter of a debate on facts versus theory not a vote-counting appeal on behalf of the supposed position of an ill-defined electorate.","stance":"rec"}],"EZ05e7EMOLM":[{"hn_comment_id":18400308,"author":"macca321","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Signs you are doing continuous testing wrong","text":"'Test Pyramid' considered harmful IMO. It discourages people from writing tests against the public interface of their system , and instead encourages testing against internals. This leads to a test pack that prevents refactoring, and can't be trusted to catch regression errors. This is partly down to the widely confused definition of a 'unit test' (which a lot of people interpret as 'one test per class'). If you haven't seen it, please watch Ian Cooper's \"TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong\" [VIDEO] Also, I thought continuous testing was having your test pack run all the time while coding, but hey ho.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24281805,"author":"VHRanger","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Is TDD Dead? (2014)","text":"The best talk on this topic, IMO is Ian Cooper: \"TDD, Where did it all go wrong?\" [VIDEO] Couple of notes: - TDD, much like scrum, got corrupted by the \"Agile Consulting Industry\". Sticking to the original principles as laid out by Kent Beck results in fairly sane practices. - When people talk about \"unit tests\", a unit doesn't refer to the common pattern of \"a single class\". A unit is a piece of the software with a clear boundary. It might be a whole microservice, or a chunk of a monolith that is internally consistent. - What triggers writing a test is what matters. Overzealous testers test for each new public method in a class. This leads to testing on implementation details of the actual unit, because most classes are only consumed within a single unit. - Behavior driven testing makes most sense to decide what needs tests. If it's required behavior to the people across the boundary, it needs a test. Otherwise, tests may be extraneous or even harmful. - As such, a good trigger rule is \"one test per desired external behavior of the unit, plus one test per bug fixed\". The test for each bugfix comes from experience -- they delineate tricky parts of your unit and enforce workign code around them.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26531969,"author":"globular-toast","month":"2021-03","story_title":"CUPID \u2013 the back story","text":"> Firstly if the dependency isn't doing any io, you can test your code as a whole along with its dependency. No need to mock. This the thing. People have a tendency to overuse mocks. The point of automated testing (whether it's unit tests or something else), is to enable refactoring. That's really the only reason. Code that you don't touch doesn't suddenly change its behaviour one day. In a previous jobs the developers started to go crazy with mocking and it reached a kind of singularity where essentially if a function called anything, that thing was mocked. It definitely tests each function in complete isolation, but what's the point? It makes refactoring impossible, which is the entire point of the tests in the first place! This excellent talk completely changed the way I approached testing. Every developer who writes tests needs to watch this now! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29945191,"author":"globular-toast","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Favor real dependencies for unit testing","text":"Ian Cooper talked about this (and more) 5 years ago: [VIDEO] Well worth listening to this talk. It completely changed the way I did testing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40012575,"author":"globular-toast","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Unit Tests Considered Harmful","text":"This the best talk I've ever seen about testing (Ian Cooper): [VIDEO] I see he's done a much more recent follow up, which I intend to watch: [LINK] Not sure if it contains new ideas. He says the unit is not \"a class\" but a module. It's up to you to decide what the module does (ie. what level of abstraction it's at). More importantly, he argues against mocking and essentially \"unit testing\" in most cases.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18450518,"author":"macca321","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?","text":"For those who want to know more about this approach: see Ian Cooper - TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong [VIDEO] I post this all the time, it's like free upvotes :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19939857,"author":"chriswarbo","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into","text":"I find [VIDEO] describes my own experiences with automated testing quite well. tl;dr: - Focus on \"automated testing\", don't get obsessed with philosophising about \"the true nature of a 'unit'\", or other such dogma. - Be empirical: base your rules on what works; don't base your work on \"the rules\". - The goal of testing is to expose problems in our program: \"test failure\" is a success, because we've found a problem (even if that problem is with the test!). Anything else is secondary (e.g. isolating the location of failures, documenting our API, etc.). Avoiding this goal defeats the point (e.g. choosing to ignore edge cases). - Focus on functionality rather than implementation details, e.g. 'changing a user's email address' rather than 'the setEmail method of the User class'. This improves reliability and makes failures more useful/meaningful (i.e. \"this feature broke\" vs \"this calling convention has changed\"). - Mocking is a crutch: it works-around problems that can usually be avoided entirely during design; it can still be very useful when a design can't be changed (e.g. adding tests to a legacy system). - Testing a real thing is objectively better than testing a fake thing; we should only mock if testing the real thing is unacceptable. - If two components always exist together, pretending that they're independent is a waste of time and complexity. - Having some poor tests is better than having no tests. Tests can be added, removed and improved over time, just like anything e","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20050675,"author":"benjiweber","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?","text":"I see this opinion a lot from people who haven't seen tests and code written by people experienced with TDD. The tests should not end up that coupled to the code. The implementation structure and the test structure end up somewhat different when refactoring every time the tests are green. When listening to the feedback from the tests & code. With the skills to spot the refactoring opportunities. Oftentimes people seem to equate unit testing with a 1:1 correspondence of test and implementation with high coupling between the two. These sort of tests resist refactoring, rather than enabling it. With good tests you can pivot the implementation and tests independently. Recommend [VIDEO] and [LINK] on TDD","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24349956,"author":"beders","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Best Practices for Testing in Java (2019)","text":"Mandatory link to [VIDEO] It clarifies a few of the points made in the article. Personally I would add: Don't overuse mocks, only use dependency injection on the module level (Ludicrous use of singleton DI will hinder your design, not help it)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26532190,"author":"snidane","month":"2021-03","story_title":"CUPID \u2013 the back story","text":"You are doing interface/function level testing and calling it unit testing. That's what industry converged on, that a function/method = a unit, but it apparently used to be that a module meant to be a unit. It can be that both interfaces and modules can be considered a \"bag of functions\". Seems like a lot of confusion about unit testing, mocking and DI stems from this historical shift. I believe that interface/method level testing is too granular and mostly results in overfitted tests. Testing implementation, not behaviour. Which can be useful for some algorithm package for example, but probably not so much applicable to typical business logic code. TDD: where did it all go wrong. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26566737,"author":"globular-toast","month":"2021-03","story_title":"My Python testing style guide (2017)","text":"Just don't use them unless you have to. The two main reasons to mock are for network requests and because something is too slow. Other than that, test things for real. Do not isolate parts of your code from other parts of your code by using mocks. If your code does side effects on your own machine, like writes to the file system, let it write to a temporary directory. I linked this excellent talk in another thread recently. I'll put it here again: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32511377,"author":"imran-iq","month":"2022-08","story_title":"I have complicated feelings about TDD","text":"That's the right way to do TDD, see this talk: [VIDEO] One of the above comments mentions BDD as a close cousin to TDD, but that is wrong as TDD is actually BDD as you should only be testing behaviours, which allow you to \"fearlessly refactor\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32514079,"author":"ttctciyf","month":"2022-08","story_title":"I have complicated feelings about TDD","text":"IMO, a lot of sage advice about TDD, well informed by years of practice, is in two Ian Cooper NDC talks, his controversial-at-the-time \"TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong?\"[1] and, seven years later, \"TDD Revisited\"[2]. The blurb from the latter: > In this talk we will look at the key Fallacies of Test-Driven Development, such as 'Developers write Unit Tests', or 'Test After is as effective as Test First' and explore a set of Principles that let us write good unit tests instead. Attendees should be able to take away a clear set of guidelines as to how they should be approaching TDD to be successful. The session is intended to be pragmatic advice on how to follow the ideas outlined in my 2013 talk \"TDD Where Did it All Go Wrong\" The talks focus on reasons to avoid slavish TDD and advocate for the benefits of judiciously applying TDD's originating principles. 1: [VIDEO] 2: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34296131,"author":"elboru","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Testing Without Mocks: A Pattern Language","text":"There's a middle tier, broad tests in the sense of not mocking local dependencies but only external (slow) ones. Many developers mock every dependency in a SUT, even if they own the dependency. I like the idea of broad tests that run-in memory (no I/O interaction). I think Ian Cooper does a great work explaining it in this talk (he talks about TDD, but I think the main idea applies even if you write tests after code): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35635246,"author":"imran-iq","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Horrible Code, Clean Performance","text":"That's why TDD is about testing requirements and not implementations. The problem is most people dont know what TDD is: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40709635,"author":"bunderbunder","month":"2024-06","story_title":"How to test without mocking","text":"I'm curious if you've seen Ian Cooper's excellent talk, \"TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong?\" [VIDEO] One of his key points is that throwaway test code is only a problem if you neglect to throw it away.","stance":"rec"}],"EZxP0i9ah8E":[{"hn_comment_id":7199958,"author":"alabut","month":"2014-02","story_title":"How I learned to stop giving advice","text":"Paul Buchheit said something similar at startup school years ago and I watch the video every once in a while to remind myself not to be similarly prescriptive when I meet new people. His key takeaway slide was a simple equation: Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice The full video has more info on how to get past the advice you hear and actually process feedback: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1263600,"author":"grinich","month":"2010-04","story_title":"Ben Horowitz: Things Some VCs Do That I Don\u2019t Like","text":"Paul Buchheit had a good quote at the 08 startup school. If someone says: \"That's impossible.\" You should understand it as: \"According to my very limited experience and narrow understanding of reality, that's very unlikely.\" Video: [VIDEO] Slides: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2088731,"author":"revorad","month":"2011-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Tell me about your failed startup.","text":"If someone says \"that's impossible\", you can interpret it as: \"According to my limited experience and very narrow understanding of reality, it's very unlikely.\" An oldie but goodie - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"E_F5GxCwizc":[{"hn_comment_id":8348992,"author":"aaronbrethorst","month":"2014-09","story_title":"The invasion of corporate news","text":"In case you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend taking the next 11 minutes to watch John Oliver talk about native advertising: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8161594,"author":"TruffleLabs","month":"2014-08","story_title":"BuzzFeed Raises $50M from Andreessen Horowitz","text":"Watch John Oliver's Last Week Tonight video segment on native advertisement [VIDEO] (10 min long). There is a bit on BuzzFeed where he points out that many of the posts that are \"top\" are really from paid advertisers. Saying BuzzFeed is developing a journalism team is probably not the best wording. I would suggest BuzzFeed is building up a great PR, advertising, and marketing engine. They will make money. But is it journalism?","stance":"rec"}],"E_xCssR8qQI":[{"hn_comment_id":19005229,"author":"danw1979","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Toyota Finally Has the Power in Electric Cars","text":"I used to think the Hybrid Synergy Drive in the Prius and other Toyota hybrids was a fancy name for an electric motor bolted onto the gearbox of a regular ICE car. I\u2019ve owned several Prii over many years. For those interested here\u2019s a great video explaining how it really works. It blew my mind... [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28266867,"author":"loonster","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Japan is holding back as the world rushes toward electric cars","text":"The eCVT that hybrids use are mechanically nothing like mechanical CVT. The only thing they share in common is they are both continuously variable. This is a great video on eCVT. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42315008,"author":"CRConrad","month":"2024-12","story_title":"First Geared CVT [video]","text":"More YouTube videos about the eCVT... 1) Better -- much simpler, and above all shorter -- video explanation of the Toyota system: [LINK] . 2) Another, a little longer, but very pedagogical and beautifully animated explanation: [VIDEO] . Eight years old, but apparently the \"power split device\" worked the same even then. Bonus -- short conversation in the comments, arriving at the same conclusion I did above: @TimpBizkit 3 weeks ago I thought the prius had a cvt 1 reply @aspecreviews 3 weeks ago It doesn't. The \"CVT\" is electrically simulated. Heh, yeah. 3) Titled something about \"Launch Gear\", but actually on the whole CVT thing (from a channel I semi-regularly watch): [LINK] . 4) A good basic look-through of the various types of CVT and their history: [LINK] . 5) Long and thorough explanation of the Prius powertrain: [LINK] . Uses a cutaway of the actual transmission, so good for getting a more concrete picture than e.g. #2 above. But... Long. 6) Another one from WeberAuto like in my parent comment, this time on the (apparently very similar) Honda system: [LINK] . So likely to be about as good as the previous one, but... 25 minutes more of this? Naah, I've had enough. There were also some from Scotty Kilmer et al, but... The less said, the better. The ones I'd most recommend are #4 for general CVT stuff and #2 for the Prius e-CVT's operating principle specifically. Well well, all in all that was quite the rabbit hole.","stance":"rec"}],"Ea6tw-gulnQ":[{"hn_comment_id":34990408,"author":"ChuckNorris89","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Raster CRT Typography (According to DEC)","text":"Obligatory Technology Connections video explaining how CRT pixels aren't really pixels as we understand them. Definitely worth the watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35079031,"author":"comex","month":"2023-03","story_title":"A Pixel Is Not a Little Square (1995) [pdf]","text":"If you\u2019re wondering what it\u2019s talking about when it says the triads of red/green/blue rectangles on a CRT display don\u2019t correspond to pixels, here\u2019s a Technology Connections video that explains it: [VIDEO] But on an LCD, the display really is made up of a bunch of solid-colored rectangle-ish shapes, and if the LCD is using standard RGB pattern, each red/green/blue triplet does correspond to one pixel. So if you zoom in, \u201ca pixel is a little square\u201d is very close to the truth. In other words, the article shows its age\u2026","stance":"rec"}],"EcKxaq1FTac":[{"hn_comment_id":18086859,"author":"wmat","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"Some of my favourite nerdy documentaries: BBS: The Documentary [LINK] The KGB, the Computer, and Me [VIDEO] 8 Bit Generation: The Commodore Wars [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20269929,"author":"otakucode","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Get an Acme Klein Bottle","text":"Oh, yes, that is the documentary I watched. It was really great, getting to hear it from Mr. Stoll's mouth directly. He was much less enthusiastic than he tends to be in Numberphile videos, I imagine that might be down to the director of the film. It is available on YouTube if anyone cares to give it a watch! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Eco2s3-0zsQ":[{"hn_comment_id":24756930,"author":"jordwest","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Why Look at Flying Saucers?","text":"Absolutely, David Fravor\u2019s (the pilot who actually chased the thing) interview with Joe Rogan[1] was one of the most compelling eyewitness accounts I\u2019ve seen, and with that the associated video has a lot more context. If these things really do behave in the way he\u2019s described, ET or not it suggests a fundamental leap in technology - it baffles me that there isn\u2019t more interest. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21208409,"author":"gfodor","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Scientist Behind Navy's \u201cUFO Patents\u201d Filed One for a Compact Fusion Reactor","text":"Last week Rogan had Capt Fravor who was one of the alleged witnesses to the \"tictac\" video that the pentagon confirmed the legitimacy of 2 years ago. Worth watching if you're into this kind of thing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21858997,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2019-12","story_title":"UFO: Pilot who spotted famous Tic Tac breaks silence after 15 years","text":"Joe Rogan did a great Podcast with one of the pilots in this incident: [VIDEO] Here's a short clip from it: [LINK] He's really knowledgeable, has a ton of flight experience and carefully details everything his and the other pilots see from their aircraft.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21949482,"author":"boston_sre87","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Have Aliens Found Us? (2019)","text":"I'm definitely extremely skeptical about whether or not its true, but the theory being argued for the nimitz sighting is that it bends space in front of and behind the craft for propulsion, but not sure what that would mean for sonic booms. It's kind of like putting a bowling ball on a bed and pushing your hand down in front of the ball and pulling up on the bed behind it to move the ball. Again, I'm very skeptical about it.. but it seems potentially plausible. This joe rogan episode where he interviews a navy pilot was pretty interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22364288,"author":"lend000","month":"2020-02","story_title":"An investigation of the Pentagon's UFO program","text":"> You mentioned restricted airspace etc, but AFAIK there's no info on the GIMBAL video apart from that it was taken somewhere on the East Coast. Correct, there is significantly less background here than on the Nimitz video, to which I was referring. I've seen all of Mick West's videos in this playlist now, and his explanation for the Nimitz footage is even weaker than for Gimbal. He skips the difficult points such as accounting for movement of the object and the momentary loss of target lock for FLIR-1. He fixates on the rotation of the targeting pod, which may be valid, but doesn't seem as interesting to me as the fact that there are no heat plumes coming from this \"jet\" in Gimbal. It seems like his whole gimmick is to find one nitpick and claim victory, not to try to piece together the full, most accurate story of what was witnessed given all the information. Not to mention, neither of you seem to appreciate how catastrophic of a design failure it would be to have distant glares generating opaque images and target locks. If there is one area where defense contractors innovate, it is in meeting specs and testing. If the specs are not met, you end up in F-35 hell, not in production. Take a look at Fravor describing the video step by step which may clear up some of your questions -- my link skips right to where he walks through the videos, but the whole interview is fascinating, minus Corbell [0]. >just that the glare makes it look like something more fantastical than it is Pe","stance":"rec"}],"Ecy1FBdCRbQ":[{"hn_comment_id":31168122,"author":"yccs27","month":"2022-04","story_title":"High-Security Mechanical Locks (2020)","text":"On the topic of \"novel, non-pin-tumbler mechanisms\": I can recommend the videos by Stuff Made Here [1][2], where he designs two novel anti-picking lock mechanisms, and the related video [3] where LockPickingLawyer tries to pick and bypass them. Together they give a whole new understanding of lock design and picking methods. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31880787,"author":"harrisi","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Enclave: An Unpickable Lock","text":"The interaction of engineering and \"use\" by the Lock Picking Lawyer ( [VIDEO] ) was fascinating - \"use\" here really meaning \"exploiting\". It's a problem many here are aware of, either by over-engineering things intended for use by non-engineers, or designing things to be used by customers when the designer isn't intimately familiar with the use. In this case it was sort of somewhere in between. I'm currently an operator of heavy machinery in a factory making tools for the wafer industry, although my main career is in software development. I'm actively working with the tools and software used to get a better understanding of the disconnect between engineering and operations. It's been a great way to consider how to improve tools in ways that aren't just \"better\" from a software/engineering standpoint. Also, holy cow. I've watched all of your videos multiple times. You are truly an inspiration. Thank you, and apologies for the fanboying.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28400776,"author":"infogulch","month":"2021-09","story_title":"O.mg Cable","text":"Since this has generated some discussion on locks and picking, there's been some interesting developments on \"unpickable locks\" that sidestep the tolerance problem by decoupling setting the pins from testing them. I.e. pins are tested all at once after they are physically decoupled from the key & keyway, eliminating state space reduction attacks (aka picking one pin at a time) leaving only brute force. One such effort features locks made by Stuff Made Here sent to Lock Picking Lawyer. According to LPL the locks are theoretically sound and he did not attempt to pick them, but these particular implementations had a couple (easily fixable) bypasses. Made for interesting videos on both sides: Stuff Made Here describes the design in detail: TWO Unpickable (?) Locks for Lock Picking Lawyer! - [LINK] Lock Picking Lawyer reviews them and performs some bypasses: [1299] Unpickable Locks From Stuff Made Here - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31880302,"author":"binarymax","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Enclave: An Unpickable Lock","text":"This looks very similar to the design[0] by Stuff Made Here (and collaborative hardening [1] suggestions by Lock Picking Lawyer)\u2026an excellent set of videos. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31883696,"author":"mizzao","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Enclave: An Unpickable Lock","text":"For others who might not have seen it, here's what the Lockpicking Lawyer had to say about that. He picked a lock with the same concept by swighton (Stuff Made Here), but exploited a flaw that had nothing to do with the mechanism. [VIDEO] I think one problem here is that the more complicated you make a locking mechanism, the more you suffer by increasing the attack surface with other potential flaws or just the lock being physically weaker (i.e. smashable). Kinda like how the most advanced cryptography is usually broken because someone made an error in the complexity of implementing it.","stance":"rec"}],"Ed3ioGO7g10":[{"hn_comment_id":36912245,"author":"grishka","month":"2023-07","story_title":"An ultra-sensitive on-off switch helps axolotls regrow limbs","text":"Whenever morphogenesis comes up, especially with the usual \"work from DNA and proteins up\" approach, I feel obliged to mention Michael Levin. He also researches morphogenesis, except his approach is on a higher abstraction level. He manipulates the electrical network that cells use to communicate with each other to organize their work towards multicellular goals. Do watch his lectures, it's some really fascinating stuff. You don't need to touch genes at all to regrow limbs and organs. Neither do you need to operate on that low level to cure cancer. This whole \"let's effect organism-level changes by observing and manipulating DNA and proteins\" feels to me like \"let's add a feature to a react web app by observing and modifying the behavior of individual transistors in the CPU\". Doable given enough time, but you'd drown in complexity in the process. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36148483,"author":"ly3xqhl8g9","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Q&A: How DARPA hacked a science writer\u2019s brain andturned her into a sharpshooter","text":"The article makes no mention of Michael Levin [1], one of the main researchers/labs, around bioelectricity/xenobots. A recent talk of his [2]. Secondly, bioelectricity has nothing or very little to do with electric currents as the one from the socket. There is no \"brain zapping\" involved or required. In the paper [3] detailing an adult frog limb amputation and full regeneration over 18 months, Michael Levin's lab used a single bioreactor with silk hydrogels applied only for 24 hours (see BioDome fabrication in the paper). [1] [LINK] [2] \"From Matter to Mind: Bioelectricity, Body Intelligence, and the Future of Regenerative Medicine\", [VIDEO] At minute 33, [VIDEO] : \"We don't use any applied fields, no frequencies, no waves, no electromagnetic radiation, no magnets, what we do is we control the native interface by which cells control each other, that is the set of electrical controls that they expose to each other, and you can do this with drugs, with ion channel mutants, with optogenetics and various others techniques.\" [3] \"Acute multidrug delivery via a wearable bioreactor facilitates long-term limb regeneration and functional recovery in adult Xenopus laevis\", [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Ee3EtYb8d1o":[{"hn_comment_id":24406597,"author":"thorin","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?","text":"After watching the first few weeks of Handmade Hero [1] I realised my idea of hard work and dedication was different to a lot of people I was trying to emulate. Doing this as a spare time, free project and the amount of knowledge and experience on-show was incredible [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14460726,"author":"w0utert","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Compiler Optimizations are Awesome","text":"Handmade hero [1] mostly, and sometimes Jonathan Blow's compiler programming streams [2]. Not all of these video's are equally interesting, but there's some real gems in there, e.g. where Casey (of HH) hand-optimizes his bilinear bitmap interpolation code (somewhere between streams ~115 and ~120 if I remember correctly). I cringe a lot about their coding style and complete disregard of architecture and basic code hygiene they appear to have, but there's still a lot of interesting things to learn from watching these streams. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28922815,"author":"agentultra","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)","text":"It's hard for me to recall how I learned because my first \"game\" I wrote was in '89 and I wasn't very old at the time. Maybe check out [VIDEO] -- I've watched a fair bit of it and many folks agree it's thorough and interesting. If you don't know C already he has a decent introduction as well. Maybe not the best place to learn C but it suits well enough for game development projects. The nice thing I find with C is that bringing life back to older machines is definitely possible -- the homebrew scene for various old consoles is very much alive and well and there's probably a C compiler that targets it.","stance":"rec"}],"EeYvFl7li9E":[{"hn_comment_id":37436037,"author":"mrkline","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Async Rust Is A Bad Language","text":"> Async/await was a terrible idea for fixing JavaScript's lack of proper blocked threading that is currently being bolted onto every language. As fun as it is to hate on JavaScript, it's really interesting to go back and watch Ryan Dahl's talk introducing Node.js to the world ( [VIDEO] ). He's pretty ambivalent about it being JavaScript. His main goal was to find an abstraction around the epoll() I/O event loop that didn't make him want to tear his eyes out, and he tried a bunch of other stuff first.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41766721,"author":"karel-3d","month":"2024-10","story_title":"The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)","text":"And it keeps being polished and improved to the point it's almost not a turd, and now has types sort of, and much better engines, and now there are ARM machines that are literally designed to run it faster, and now most of your actual PC applications are written in it. But honestly it's kind of refreshing to see the original node.js presentation, where using javascript is sort of a side-note. He wanted to use callback-heavy language and JS fit the bill [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EfGD2qveGdQ":[{"hn_comment_id":11279636,"author":"paulsutter","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?","text":"The Deepmind Atari Player is only 22KB of source code: [LINK] If you haven't seen the video it's remarkable: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8690404,"author":"mturmon","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Google's Intelligence Designer","text":"Thanks for the correction. The \"arbitrary\" qualifier is not in TFA, but (as, indeed, you said) that's the point of the demo, e.g.: [VIDEO] Note that they're using just the video signal from the game as input. It's really a sad comment on the state of reporting at MIT Tech Review that you learn more about the tech from a youtube video than from an article. (My complaint is not with the DeepMind people, it's with the article, which should put the work in context.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10377854,"author":"paulsutter","month":"2015-10","story_title":"A General Feedback Theory of Human Behavior (1960)","text":"In psychology, this is called \"Reinforcement\"[1] and that goes back to Skinner (1938) and Thorndike (1911). In AI research its called \"Reinforcement learning\"[2]. One of the earliest papers relating reinforcement learning to AI was \u201cTheory of Neural-Analog Reinforcement Systems\u201d[3] by Minsky, 1954 A cool reinforcement learning demo is the DeepMind Atari video from last year[4] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO] (this is awesome)","stance":"rec"}],"EfjdOc41g0s":[{"hn_comment_id":9685597,"author":"X-Istence","month":"2015-06","story_title":"National IPv6 launch day in Finland","text":"Comcast is going for a pure IPv6 core network, they are currently at 60% of their customers getting an IPv6 address of some sort (cable modem or even cable box). T-Mobile's network is IPv6 as well. Especially for customer devices that support 464XLAT: [LINK] There is a LOT of support for IPv6, and many companies like Facebook are finding that IPv6 actually offers better performance end to end for their users. Take a look at this NANOG presentation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9787442,"author":"ay","month":"2015-06","story_title":"IPv4 Depletion","text":"Exactly. And as the home speeds reach 1Gbps to the home, there will not be enough CGN boxes that will be able to sustain that load, so one of the two options: 1) more stateless mechanisms will be used (lw4o6, MAP) - which do not give the entire IPv4 address to residential users => so even if the service has an IPv4 address, the clients might have to go through the hurdles to get to it. Service providers are planning to go IPv6-only, and content providers already note that IPv6 gives a double-digit performance increase compared to IPv4 [1] 2) The residential ISPs will debundle the IPv4 from the cost - given that a lot of the sites average consumer needs (google, facebook, youtube, netflix) are already IPv6-enabled. For this case, you will not be even able to see that something is \"wrong\". Just the users will click on the link, see it's not reachable, say \"huh?\" and move on. [1] [VIDEO] - 1h12 well spent.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9816899,"author":"scurvy","month":"2015-07","story_title":"ARIN Activates IPv4 Unmet Requests Policy","text":"NATs do induce a fair amount of latency. It's not exaggerated. Watch Paul Saab from Facebook talk about how much better IPv6 performs at NANOG 64: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EgMqhEMhVV8":[{"hn_comment_id":7806602,"author":"Houshalter","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Check your Google history","text":"There is an interesting theory on how that happened: [VIDEO] Basically Google changed their algorithm to recommend videos based on time watched instead of just views. Which massively favored let's plays because they are so long. They also promote channels based on geographical location. Pewdiepie had an advantage somehow because he had a fanbase in Sweden and moved to Italy. This might also explain parent comment's problem (recommendations favoring let's plays because they are longer.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7902712,"author":"Kronopath","month":"2014-06","story_title":"YouTube's Biggest Draw Plays Games, Earns $4 Million a Year","text":"Here's a video with some interesting theories about how PewDiePie, and other gaming channels, are so popular because they're effectively hyper-tuned for Youtube's promotion algorithms: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Eg_ToU7m1MI":[{"hn_comment_id":692481,"author":"stcredzero","month":"2009-07","story_title":"The iPodTouch Is What The OLPC XO Should Have Been","text":"It's not the \"toy\" part that's signifiant. It's the \"tinker\" part. Think of a 50's automobile with a carburetor and a distributor. You can take apart and tinker with those. In a 2009 car, the distributor and associated parts are a throwaway lump of plastic with metal tabs coming out. \"Explorable\" is perhaps an even better term. Squeak had the same aims. Skip to 8:20. You'll see kids using the software to explore robotics and do physics of gravitation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17990016,"author":"e12e","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Show HN: TechYaks \u2013 Best of 50k tech talks ranked by confidence intervals","text":"Maybe these are mostly too new, or you have different (more practical, hands on?) definition of tech-talk - but from a quick look the only speakers I expected - and found - were Sandi Mets and Rob Pike. If it's practical, I'm surprised not to see the js \"wat\" lightning talk (which I now can't seem to find...). If it's more general \"best of\", I'd expect something like Guy Steele \"growing a language\" : [LINK] Douglas Engelbart \"the mother of all demos\": [LINK] Alan Kay \"doing with images makes symbols\": [LINK] Or, if that's too long, the much more condensed ted talk: \"a powerful idea about teaching ideas\": [VIDEO] (Maybe that's not a \"tech talk\"?) Rich Hickey \"simple made easy\" : [LINK] To name a few of the top of my head.","stance":"rec"}],"Eghl19elKk8":[{"hn_comment_id":39821896,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What is a HN unpopular opinion that you hold?","text":"Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny , likes to restate the idea of US exceptionalism as both the politics of inevitability and democracy is not something you are, it is something you do . Many people wrongly think that democracy is an inevitable result of capitalism, but if that's true then there is nothing extra you have to do to remain democratic other than participate in capitalism. If freedom is an inevitable result of being an American, then there is nothing you have to do to be free as long as you are American. If peace between two countries is an inevitable result of both countries \"having a McDonalds\", there is nothing extra you need to do to achieve peace except trade. If you want freedom, peace, or governance that represents you, you can't just be something, you actually have to hold beliefs and conduct yourself in a way conducive to those outcomes. You will love this video (12m): [VIDEO] (edited to make some statements more correct)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43648209,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries","text":"[VIDEO] You should watch this (12min). You just expressed the \"politics of eternity.\" You should check out Timothy Snyder in general to see what historians are saying about our current times.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22904666,"author":"jadbox","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Assuming Responsibility for Time","text":"I'd recommend pairing this article with this video with Timothy Snyder on Politics of Eternity, Politics of Inevitability: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EgiMu8A3pi0":[{"hn_comment_id":29924214,"author":"VBprogrammer","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Engine cooling \u2013 why rocket engines don\u2019t melt","text":"If that interests you then this series of videos is definitely worth watching. It details several parts of the German V2 missile, the grand father of all modern liquid propellant rockets. This one is about the turbopump which is one of the most interesting parts. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20818330,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Chemists discover water microdroplets spontaneously produce hydrogen peroxide","text":"For an in-depth and interesting explanation of how that works, I enjoyed this video: [VIDEO] Includes a demonstration of the potassium permanganate and hydrogen peroxide at around the 52 minute mark.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24376131,"author":"liability","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Rocket Helicopter (2010)","text":"The German V2 rockets also used hydrogen peroxide and a catalyst (sodium or possibly potassium permanganate) to drive their turbopumps (which pumped LOx and alcohol into the engine.) Here's a pretty good 2.5 hour long documentary about the V2 turbopumps specifically: [VIDEO] (The H2O2/catalyst system is discussed/demonstrated around the 45 minute mark.)","stance":"rec"}],"EhqZ0RU95d4":[{"hn_comment_id":1396076,"author":"Cmccann7","month":"2010-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What to do about a boring job ?","text":"I was actually in this exact situation about ~8 months ago. One of the best inspirational videos that got me through that time was [VIDEO] . Caution: Gary is a little loud and obnoxious but he makes good points. Even if you have a 8-5 day job, work the 8pm-2am night shift and stop complaining. Take @edw519's advice and make a list of 10 things you can do to create value and start doing them. Even if you have to be somewhere for 8+ hours that sucks use that time to your advantage. There is no excuse for not making it happen, use that free time you do have to make meaning and create value.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":874776,"author":"symptic","month":"2009-10","story_title":"ASK HN: I'm lost -- need direction","text":"I think you could benefit greatly from Gary Vaynerchuk's ideas in this keynote: [VIDEO] The general overview of what he says: it's never too late, you don't have to jump neck deep into it at first (i.e.: quit a job and take funding), you need more passion than Gandhi, and just fucking do it.","stance":"rec"}],"EiZhdpLXZ8Q":[{"hn_comment_id":36120592,"author":"MilStdJunkie","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Hold the postmortem: The metaverse was never alive in the first place","text":"Folding Ideas (Dan Olson) did a pretty fantastic takedown of the Metaverse/Decentra failure nexus a little while ago, \"The Future is a Dead Mall: Decentraland and the Metaverse\". Like all things Dan, long as hell be he makes it very much worth it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39005822,"author":"foobiekr","month":"2024-01","story_title":"GameStop Ends NFT Marketplace, Is This Beginning of the End?","text":"Dan Olson covers NFTs very solidly in \"Decentraland is a dead mall\" ( [VIDEO] ) and \"Line Goes Up\" ( [LINK] ). Both as well worth watching. Since this is also about GameStop specifically, his \"This is financial advice\" video addresses the GameStop cult, and to a lesser extent the bizarre cult around GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen, really well: [LINK] Also, cue some apes/NFT investors coming in to ask \"why do you care about my money?\" and other oft-repeated talking points.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43292952,"author":"AlexandrB","month":"2025-03","story_title":"What went wrong with Horizon Worlds? Ex-Meta dev shares insider insights","text":"> I\u2019ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the metaverse concept... If they had, is there even a compelling product there? For me, the definitive analysis here is Dan Olson's[1] (though in the context of decentraland). Doing a metaverse in VR is contradictory to having users walk from place to place (because a huge chunk of your users will get motion sick). Having a metaverse where you have to walk from place to place is contradictory to metaverse as a productivity tool (because walking from place to place is a lot slower than clicking a button). VR has some compelling standalone experiences, but the user is generally constrained to staying still or moving around a small, fixed area. Maybe a VR meeting is more compelling than Zoom, but is it worth the extra cost and effort of donning a VR headset? Likewise a large open world where you can, potentially, do anything is compelling (see Minecraft), but is it a space where you would want to do something productive? In Minecraft the inefficiency of walking around and working with individual blocks is half the point - it's what makes it fun - but it's not an efficient way to build or design or shop or even consume \"content\" if you value your time. So what's left? The metaverse itself as entertainment ? Maybe. But it's not going to be the next iPhone. At best you're aiming for the ubiquity of World of Warcraft. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35472049,"author":"Shared404","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Court Ruling Could Affect the Future Direction of DAOs","text":"Slightly off topic, but I quite like this video over Decentraland/the metaverse: [VIDEO] It's an in depth look/critique.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35502771,"author":"LapsangGuzzler","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Mark Zuckerberg abandons metaverse as shiny new toy appears","text":"> It\u2019s just too versatile, ambient computing around you all the time, anywhere from a single button to a virtual interactive world. I just watched Dan Harmon's new doc on Decentraland[0] and he raises some really good points about the functional impedance that exists in virtual worlds alongside of all of the grifting that currently exists. Grifting aside, so many applications of VR just don't make sense as a direct virtual representation of the world, at that starts with our inner ear our ability to process visual motion without actually moving. He shows how these virtual storefronts that your character can walk through are much less efficient at actually allowing you to transact as opposed to a search page on an e-commerce site. I think it's easy to have romantic visions of how a VR world will look in the future. But if it's driven primarily by profit, as all of the most mainstream attempts have so far, it's going to be an empty crypto hell. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40058807,"author":"well_actulily","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made","text":"Highlights include: - \"In Search of a Flat Earth\" (2020): [LINK] - \"Line Goes Up\" (2022): [LINK] - \"The Future is a Dead Mall\" (2023): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EkpQAGQiv4Q":[{"hn_comment_id":40841842,"author":"mcarmichael","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The physics of airplane flight","text":"Control was an almost completely unaddressed issue before the Wrights took it up, even though it is also crucial to useful glider development. This video has a nice delineation of the collection of breakthroughs needed: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43463320,"author":"dj_gitmo","month":"2025-03","story_title":"The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil","text":"Check out Gregs Airplanes and Automobiles for really well researched aeronautic docs. He made one specifically about the Wrights [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Em7nqDqQ8oM":[{"hn_comment_id":26147260,"author":"imtringued","month":"2021-02","story_title":"California\u2019s affordable housing problem is really a national one","text":">You're being very unfair here. When you choose a place to live you are not only choosing the structure in which you reside, you are choosing the surrounding environment as well. The expectation that one can settle down and expect their city to be built to a finished state which is kept frozen in time is an incredibly damaging mindset. City planners have to predict what is going to happen in the future decades ahead. People didn't do this 100 years ago. They didn't do this thousands of years ago. They did something far simpler. They built their city and then they rebuilt their city, house by house, incrementally, one step at a time over decades to match changing needs. Here's a talk by Charles Marohn regarding this topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27003624,"author":"richardfey","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Artist faked being a billionaire to photograph New York City\u2019s best views","text":"If you like this topic I recommend this talk: [VIDEO] It has a great explanation of the difference between complex and complicated, and the fragility of our systems compared to nature's ones.","stance":"rec"}],"EmKQsSDlaa4":[{"hn_comment_id":45321622,"author":"omneity","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Hololuminescent Display","text":"On this very topic, this might be one of my most favorite videos ever single-handedly changing my understanding of holograms: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41845629,"author":"injidup","month":"2024-10","story_title":"The Physics of Magic Windows (2021)","text":"Not to take away the brilliance of what is achieved but I think hologram is the wrong word. This is purely about caustics. Amplitude engineering rather than phase. The calculations are just assuming light as particle, not light as wave. A true hologram uses diffraction grating effects and the phase difference from light. There was a very nice explanation on three-blue-brown recently. [VIDEO] I don't think there are any phase effects in the parent attached? Or are there?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43742792,"author":"aeonik","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Raspberry Pi Lidar Scanner","text":"Yea I have some ideas, but I haven't found an easy way to implement it yet. The term of art that I'm exploring is called \"Holographic Interferometry\". Sibling poster gave you a link to regular interferometry. But basically, if you split the laser beam, one goes straight into the camera sensor, and the other off your object, you can do some pretty amazing things. Depending on a lot of little details (The devil is hiding here). I found 3Blue1Brown's explanation to be the best, but less \"ready to use\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"En_2T7KH6RA":[{"hn_comment_id":12640921,"author":"Keyframe","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Too many great talks to mention, but if I had to pick one it would be Ted Nelson's few minutes of demonstration of Xanadu. Demonstration is lacking, but what he said about the concept/idea is what stuck with me. Deep and referential(?) content. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2450629,"author":"sp332","month":"2011-04","story_title":"Pictures of the first GUIs from Xerox","text":"And if you're into watching long videos of what the digital future was supposed to look like, Douglas Adams and Tom Baker made a documentary called Hyperland , and you can watch all 50 minutes of it here: [LINK] or if you want a shorter video, here's Ted Nelson with a short demo of Xanadu as it existed in 2008: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5242983,"author":"michaelbuddy","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Content Management by Redefining the Document","text":"this is a great supplement for this: [VIDEO] a close up demo. His product Xanadu space, I hope it comes to light but the websites aren't looking too hot.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7127655,"author":"gum_ina_package","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Ted Nelson: It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC","text":"This video of his seems to give more of a demonstration of his alternative paradigm: [VIDEO] It's really interesting to see, but in order for any of his idea to actually work you need to rethink the entire operating system it seems - not just the UI. He wants all content to have history, which would fundamentally break copy and paste (one of his points actually). The problem I see with that is you'd still have individual files (actual bits) on the hard drive, just they'd all have some meta content that describes it's origin. Or you'd need some sort of database file system (WinFS). I'd like to see technology trending more this guy's way, but the reality is that the technological challenges seem to be too great at the moment.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16728945,"author":"alexashka","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Gradual Programming","text":"Everything you've mentioned completely misses the point - it is not just performance that stinks, it is not just javascript as a language that stinks - all these tools are incremental improvements that completely lack imagination. It is the platform itself - meant to display static text content, being coerced into some frankenstein that requires never-ending libraries and tooling to do what desktop apps did 20 years ago. It is hard to see any other world, so let me link you to a guy to whom it was obvious the web browsers stink decades ago. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"EoWMF3VkI6U":[{"hn_comment_id":5104765,"author":"Aardwolf","month":"2013-01","story_title":"There is no better battery (2008)","text":"Here is my favorite movie about ultracapacitors: [VIDEO] Very good explanation on the general math and physics of capacitors, current, heat and energy storage, plus awesome demonstrations at the same time :)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13026821,"author":"jonawesomegreen","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Supercapacitors Batteries charges in seconds without degrading","text":"Shorting batteries is also never a great idea, but supercaps are more dangerous because of their low internal resistance. This video is a good demonstration: [VIDEO] I was working on a controls project where we had large banks of supercaps that would charge up to ~900v. Have to treat those with some respect. However as long as they are kept cool the caps had no trouble being charged and discharged with a couple minute cycle with each bank providing 2kWh of energy. In the particular application I was working on we actually had 17 2kWh banks providing ~34kWh of energy every couple minutes. Would not fit in a cellphone though :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22247074,"author":"fw_double_e","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Battery supply problems faced by electric air taxis","text":"Capacitors are great for high load requirements but not great as an energy storage device. i.e. if you wanted to draw several hundred amps for a second or two with relatively low heat waste, an ultra-capacitor arrangement would be the way to go, but for energy storage, a battery wins hands down. There's huge research going into expanding the capacity of capacitors. Check out this video about capacitors: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ep2-ohgFOys":[{"hn_comment_id":35702868,"author":"breck","month":"2023-04","story_title":"'Delete Act' seeks to give Californians more power to block data tracking","text":"Anything by Stephan Kinsella is worth watching: [VIDEO] > ignore the current economic system and wellbeing of the authors and artists who produce work. I'm not ignoring it, I will freely admit that I do not care about preserving the wealth of Atherton and Beverly Hills at the expense of poor children having second rate information. If they can figure out a way to make money in a world with actual property rights, great for them. I also don't think Oxcontin or mRNA vaccines or Fox News or CNN, etc, make a good case for having patents and copyrights.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33160613,"author":"aaa_aaa","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Vectis IP Announces Call for Patents Essential to the Opus codec","text":"Here is a debate on IP with two different libertarian perspective: [VIDEO] `Abolish the IP laws` side provides some pointers to related research and empirical evidence against IP.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35992344,"author":"interroboink","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Supreme Court Rules Andy Warhol\u2019s Prince Art Is Copyright Infringement","text":"I thought this was a decent debate on the subject: \"Abolish Copyrights and Patents? A Soho Forum Debate\" ( [VIDEO] ) One thing that struck me was that both sides in that debate agreed that the current copyright/patent system was not in very good shape. That's one nuance that I think can get lost in these discussions \u2014 somebody says \"copyright can be good\" and is met with the retort \"look at how bad our system is right now\" without allowing for the possibility that we could have a better system, rather than outright abolishing it. Anyway, I think there are good points on both sides; you seem to be more on the absolutist side (fair enough), but you might enjoy watching it.","stance":"rec"}],"Eq3bUFgEcb4":[{"hn_comment_id":39270436,"author":"PaulDavisThe1st","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Analysis of Bach's information-dense music","text":"[VIDEO] \"Notation Must Die\" ... excellent deep-ish dive into music notation by the inimitable Tantacrul","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38193256,"author":"james-revisoai","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Minimalist Affordances: Making the Right Tradeoffs","text":"I really like the points about symbols to the end, but am not sure the Music notation hits the right note. The symbols - besides Quarter note - for a rest/not playing are intuitive to almost every learner. They are just so different, so square, so alien compared to the notes in melody, that you don't make the mistake of playing a rest note in general. Yes, it's hard to learn the symbols that involve playing something (especially clefs and timing not being linear - see: [VIDEO] for an amazing \"documentary\" on notation systems), but often finding the pitch/right note is the larger challenge (for beginners) than understanding the meaning of notes. Is this because we do not teach people to play songs with only one note, but many rhythms? I don't know. But I do not think the point of affordances in notation is a great example, especially given all the alternatives (see the video above) which, although in some cases clearer (e.g. a instrument-morphic notation), struggle in other ways (too much space used, too unable to represent timing, not transferrable between instruments, etc). The reality is also that our mind can adapt easily in such distinct systems as music notation to shifted realities. Sheet music for different instruments sometimes uses the same clefs, bars and all, but is several notes a part (eg... the music of Violin and Viola are notated differently, such that the notes of the respective instruments more or less span the whole bar without going too far above or below ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39196583,"author":"oriolid","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Apple Vision Pro review","text":"The problem is that once you get past the very initial stage, you want to read ahead of what you play at the moment. At that moment Synthesia-style falling blocks notation becomes difficult to read because the blocks don't have any position reference besides the keys and no time values. Even the scrolling sheet music or tab is distracting compared stationary black and white. With guitar there's the additional problem that you can't see both hands at the same time, and usually you won't be looking at your hands at all. And if you ever want to play without help from the app, you need to learn to find the notes anyway. This is by the way a great explanation of all the attempts to make music easier to read and how they fail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40963499,"author":"PaulDavisThe1st","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Musical Notation for Modular Synthesizers","text":"Obligatory (long-form) watch if you're going to continue wondering about this: [VIDEO] \"Notation must die\" by Tantacrul","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41009585,"author":"javier123454321","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Playing guitar tablatures in Rust","text":"Super cool, great job. Looks like a really fun project. This really highlights why sheet notation is so much better at describing music than tablature. The advantage of tabs is that they tell you which version of the same note to play (You can play the same note in up to 6 places in the guitar). However, sheet notation tells you precisely the duration of each note, and can often include the intended articulation. Writing music is fascinating, here is an excellent breakdown of different systems which have been developed, and how they came to be: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45844755,"author":"midenginedcoupe","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Show HN: See chords as flags \u2013 Visual harmony of top composers on musescore","text":"Pro jazz trombonist here. All there is to usefully say about piano roll notation, with or without colours has pretty much already been said. And if you want more (much more) detail, then Tantacrul (designer on MuseScore) has done a great video. [VIDEO] The only useful head's up I can give is the current position marker on your playback is quite a long way behind the audio, around 1-2 beats on the one piece I tried.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48496386,"author":"Slow_Hand","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Ear Training Practice Exercises","text":"If you want an excellent explanation of why proposals for new notation systems like you\u2019re suggesting have been developed (and failed) Tantacrul has made an excellent video describing the history and tradeoffs that lead us to our current system: [VIDEO] He\u2019s product lead at MuseGroup developing notation software and his expertise lies at the intersection of music composition, UX design, and programming.","stance":"rec"}],"Erp8IAUouus":[{"hn_comment_id":15200929,"author":"bmelton","month":"2017-09","story_title":"The Equifax breach may be the worst leak of personal info ever","text":"For anyone who wants an explanation at just how bad the social security number really is, this is the most enjoyable explanation for it I've seen, by CGP Grey [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15211338,"author":"sagitariusrex","month":"2017-09","story_title":"The Equifax Breach Exposes America's Identity Crisis","text":"For everybody who isn't acquainted with how Social Security Cards work in the US and how they came to be I highly recommend watching \"Social Security Cards Explained\" by CGP Grey [VIDEO] He also explains why US citizens don't have an Identity Card as opposed to many European countries.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14020049,"author":"mjevans","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Men Without Work","text":"Don't blame the immigrants, blame those who are fully or partly paying under the table. Of course, would you support a national ID card as a means of combating this variable you accuse? In the US we pretty much have such a thing already, just without any proper security or identification aspects... [VIDEO] (A short (< 8 min) video by the ever informative CGP Grey on the inanity of US SS cards.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15195829,"author":"alehul","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Cybersecurity Incident Involving Consumer Information","text":"The SSN was never intended as a national ID. It was originally created alongside the Social Security Administration, to track what individuals put in and what they take out. People only received one upon becoming employed. Over time, the IRS realized that it could be used as a national ID, and adopted it for that purpose. They encouraged people to obtain one from a young age (even for their newborn children), and it was used to replace the original 'honor system' of 'How many children do you have?' tax discounts; now they'd need to register their child with a SSN. Companies eventually began piggybacking on the number as a national identifier (due to our lack of one), and voila. We're left with an awfully insecure identification system that shouldn't be an identification system for much in the first place. For anyone interested in more: [VIDEO] , and the sources below the video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15196043,"author":"SimbaOnSteroids","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Cybersecurity Incident Involving Consumer Information","text":"You're right it was never meant to be a unique identifier, we need a national identification card, link to a video about it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15352097,"author":"vec","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Stop Calling it \u2018Identity Theft\u2019","text":"CGP Gray did a really good video[1] about this recently. The short version is that it's the least terrible mechanism presently available for uniquely identifying and disambiguating American citizens. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15658468,"author":"Qub3d","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Senators push to ditch social security numbers in light of Equifax hack","text":"Here's a relevant pop science video by CGP Grey[0] that explains all the various problems with SSNs. My favorite part is the fact that until quite recently (2011) you could decrement or increment a given SSN by 1 and get another valid SSN, since they were sequential. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20424357,"author":"ocdtrekkie","month":"2019-07","story_title":"FTC Approves Roughly $5B Facebook Settlement","text":"Actually, the SSN is an account number, solely intended for tracking money paid into and paid out of an account. It isn't meant for identification, and the method it's used for identification is terrible. (Largely: If you know the number, you are identified.) It's treated like a secret, but as a 9-digit number you give to dozens of organizations in your life which follows a predictable and partially guessable pattern, it is an absolutely terrible secret. Absolutely good explainer video about how this travesty took place historically: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21388322,"author":"manigandham","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Bank of the Underworld (2015)","text":"CGP Grey recently made a great video about this exact problem with social security numbers: [VIDEO] They were started to keep of taxes and never meant to be used as IDs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23019801,"author":"remcob","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Having trouble with the IRS site? Try all caps","text":"This video does a great job explaining it: [VIDEO] The summary is that the USA does not have an official national person identity number. The SSN is the closest approximation, so it is being (ab)used as one. This is despite that it is explicitly not designed for it and has some qualities which make it less suitable (the numbers are small and very predictable). In general, nearly every national-identity-system suffers from a contradiction between assigning identities and identifying. Where the number you get assigned is simultaneously your identity and a secret you use to establish your identity. There are initiatives to solve this using cryptography, but this is complicated by political attitudes towards privacy and government tracking. I dare say in the USA this is more pronounced due to both the problem and the political attitude against solutions being more pronounced.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26614868,"author":"anitil","month":"2021-03","story_title":"No, I did not hack your MS Exchange server","text":"The story of how this happened is quite interesting. CGP Grey did a video about how it evolved [0]. I'm not American so I can't judge how likely it is to ever change because it seems to be politically radioactive to propose a government mandated ID. We had a similar issue in Australia, but our workaround is that your drivers license (or ID card from the equivalent of the DMV) typically acts as your ID. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38180960,"author":"SonicScrub","month":"2023-11","story_title":"U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers","text":"There's an interesting story about how the social security number evolved to being much more than just for social security. Quick 5 minute primer: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38245055,"author":"kalverra","month":"2023-11","story_title":"It's Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian","text":"I'm late to the party, but CGP Grey has an excellent video detailing the flaws of how SSNs are utilized. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41249401,"author":"quantumfissure","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Inside the \"3 billion people\" national public data breach","text":"For non-Americans (and Americans) that don't quite understand what SSN is and why it's a problem, CGP Grey [1] has a great (and short) video about the history and why it's not technically an identifier, but has become one. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"EtX7WnFhxtQ":[{"hn_comment_id":41839516,"author":"dagmx","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Mesh Shaders \u2013 The Future of Rendering [video]","text":"A related talk of using Mesh shaders for Alan Wake 2 [VIDEO] And I find Apple\u2019s intro to mesh shading to be a fairly good primer for someone unfamiliar with Mesh shading [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41848842,"author":"neomantra","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Drawing Graphics on Apple Vision with the Metal Rendering API","text":"This is a great read, thank you for sharing! I learned a lot from reading it and I'm pretty experienced in this space! I enjoyed checking out your other work too. OPs article heavily covers Vertex Amplification. I didn't realize VisionOS used Vertex Amplification for this, but it makes sense since the hardware supports it. For those interested in Mesh Shading (a few good videos released this week [1][2][3]), Vertex Amplification is a key tech for Mesh Shading, where one writes Object/Mesh functions (names in Metal API, called Task/Mesh/Amplification shaders in other APIs). Introduced by Nvidia in 2018 and only really available en masse for the last couple years, Vertex Amplification was the first time a GPU could create vertices (or \"destroy\" them by not emitting anything), versus the fixed mesh inputs. It's so cool and powerful and a different way of thinking about the pipeline. This article shows the same concept, but in Vertex Shaders for multiple render targets. While you might not make a Vision app, it could be worthwhile read to further understand this architecture. I've spent a few months in Metal Mesh Shading and hadn't realized this application of it at all. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] (good explanation and demo)","stance":"rec"}],"EuELwq2ThJE":[{"hn_comment_id":227460,"author":"bwh2","month":"2008-06","story_title":"Ask YC: Where to learn web design?","text":"Read Don't Make Me Think! by Steve Krug. Also watch this talk titled \"Don't Make Me Click!\": [VIDEO] It's really helpful to deconstruct website designs. So I frequently look at a website and think about sections I would redesign, how I would do it, and most importantly - why. Sometimes I break out an image editing program and redesign the sections or even the entire page. The huge advantage with this approach is that the content is already provided. When I started learning web design, I would come up with hypothetical website ideas (like \"I'll design a website for a law firm\") and then try to create the content in addition to the website. But it doesn't work like that. You need content to work with before you can create the site. So you're much better off finding an actual law firm website, using their content, and redesigning sections or the entire page. Along the way, with a little help from usability resources like those mentioned above, you will also figure out which content actually belongs, which doesn't, and why. But the point is this: take something that's already built, break it down, and rebuild it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":721387,"author":"ehsanul","month":"2009-07","story_title":"Calculate The Efficiency of Your User Interface","text":"This is another interesting link, a talk by the author of the linked post, with a similar focus (Don't make me click): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ev373c7wSRg":[{"hn_comment_id":26395504,"author":"aeoleonn","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female developer","text":"What\u2019s funny to me is that people are only complaining about diversity in the US and Europe. Although I have seen a few articles about class based diversity in Latin America and India. Maybe I am missing something but I don\u2019t see complaints about diversity in Arabia, Persia, African Regions, Asian regions. Yet there are historic multi-ethnic conflicts in most of not all of these areas. Take the Hausa, Fula, Igbo, and Yoruba of Nigeria for example, as an example. Ultimately, dividing people and calling it \u201cdiversity\u201d resembles a divide and conquer tactic for reducing the cohesion of a society, making it easier to control (via narratives and reducing my inter-group trust compared to some central, approved authority), in my view. Check out Ryan Long for a humorous example: \u201cWhen Racists and Woke Agree On Everything\u201d: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28414432,"author":"vimy","month":"2021-09","story_title":"How did American \u201cwokeness\u201d jump from elite schools to everyday life?","text":"Yes, 100 %. I listen to what wokes say and do. [VIDEO] Nothing in this video is an exaggeration. They literary say these things.","stance":"rec"}],"ExgxwKnH8y4":[{"hn_comment_id":20215610,"author":"pneill","month":"2019-06","story_title":"$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes","text":"Politics is a huge factor in the lack of affordable housing. Both legislation and concerns by citizen about how new housing will \"change\" a neighbor make it next to impossible to build higher density housing. Watch this video - it's eye opening [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40978691,"author":"pneill","month":"2024-07","story_title":"U.S. now short 4.5M homes as housing deficit grows","text":"Asking why there isn't enough housing is like asking why water is wet. The answer is state/local government regulation. There's an old saying \"your margin is my opportunity\" and I suspect that the current crop of homes that are built have decent margins, but in a deregulated market an entrepreneur could come in offer more affordable housing options with lower margins. You can see this in vehicles. Nobody complains about the vehicle affordability problem because there are far fewer regulations in the transportation industry (don't get me wrong, there are regulations, but not a constraining as you see in the housing market). There's a vehicle at every price point. You got bikes, then ebikes, mopeds, scoters, motorcycles, sub compacts, compacts, full size, trucks, suvs, and all the way to crazy expensive sports cars. You don't see that in house because affordable housing is not a good business. It's impossible to offer options at the lower end of the market because of zoning laws, environmental impact regulations, a difficult permitting process, nimby's, and affordable housing politicians that are really big proponents of affordable housing except \"they have question about this particular housing project.\" Here is a terrific video that everyone should watch that shows how insanely difficult it is to make affordable housing. A [VIDEO] Sometimes what you need is less government regulation, not more. edited sentence \"You don't see that in house it's not a good business.\" to You don","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18901125,"author":"ransom1538","month":"2019-01","story_title":"SF restaurants are suffocating","text":"\"You can't have it both ways. Either change the city and build upwards or stop complaining about the price of living\" Yes. Here is an awesome video documenting one persons struggle to create an apartment building: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18901141,"author":"brianpgordon","month":"2019-01","story_title":"SF restaurants are suffocating","text":"Landlords, yes, but also people who think that new market rate housing will destroy the character of their neighborhoods, or something. Take it with a grain of salt because it's reason.com, but this video does do a good job of conveying a sense of how ridiculous the situation has gotten: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22329399,"author":"pneill","month":"2020-02","story_title":"California\u2019s housing crisis: how a bureaucrat pushed to build","text":"It's very complicated. People have conflicting ideas - one the one hand, they want affordable housing (ie their rent to go down) or the other, not in my backyard. Worth a view The Insane Battle To Sabotage a New Apartment Building Explains San Francisco's Housing Crisis [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ExwqNreocpg":[{"hn_comment_id":32271501,"author":"redbell","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Embedding an EXE inside a .REG file with automatic execution","text":"I admire this type of content where the creator take some concepts we [all] use and understand then combine them in a specific, but a new way, add some tweaks to get some never-seen results. Here is another experience that, as a Windows developer, blows my mind for a while. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25252602,"author":"fath0m","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Flappy Bird in 228 bytes","text":"Using all the browser functionality feels like cheating. There is a good YouTube video, where a person made a snake game that fits inside a QR Code (albeit a larger version that we're used to, which can hold up to 2953 bytes). You can check it out here: [VIDEO] Quite an interesting watch.","stance":"rec"}],"F-QA2rkpBSY":[{"hn_comment_id":2841610,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Galactic-Scale Energy","text":"If you haven't previously seen Dr. Barrett's \"Arithmetic, Population, and Energy\", I strongly recommend it: [VIDEO] It doesn't address quite the same scale, but is very sobering.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3123577,"author":"mark_up","month":"2011-10","story_title":"What is the Limit to Human Population Growth?","text":"Anyone really interested in this should watch Albert Bartlett's lecture \"Arithmetic, Population, and Energy\". It blew my mind when I first watched it two years ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3165176,"author":"tristanperry","month":"2011-10","story_title":"You are the nth person alive on earth","text":"Not sure if you've seen this series: [VIDEO] (despite looking/sounding boring at the start, stick with it; it's really captivating and interesting), but it is amazing just how much 'small' growth (even 2-3% p/a) can cause things to double in much less time than you'd imagine. Or if you haven't got the time to watch the whole thing (is close to an hour all in all), this touches on a couple of the topics the video covers: [LINK] (naturally doubling every minute is on a much faster scale to the Human population!)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20255973,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The poisons released by melting Arctic ice","text":"The bacteria are mentioned in Albert Bartlett's famous lecture here: [VIDEO] It's clickbait titled and split into 8 parts, for who knows what reasons, but that quote is the tl;dr version of it. Exponential growth is unintuitive, and chasing endless growth is not going to work out well for us. Even if the bacteria find another entire jar of open space - as much space as has ever been known, as much space as they have used in their entire history - a fully terraformed Mars hanging out in the back yard previously unseen - it only lasts a single doubling-time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44828299,"author":"stouset","month":"2025-08","story_title":"The Sunlight Budget of Earth","text":"From Tom Murphy's excellent Do the Math blog[1]. Only 70% of the incident sunlight enters the Earth\u2019s energy budget\u2014the rest immediately bounces off of clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28% of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15% efficiency. Let\u2019s assume 20% for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes? When would we run into this limit at a 2.3% growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. 275 years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. And think about the world we have just created: every square meter of land is covered in photovoltaic panels! Where do we grow food? Seriously, if you haven't read his take on things yet, at least the first few posts are a must-read. It's on par with the Arithmetic, Population, and Energy lecture at UC Boulder by Al Bartlett (popularly titled \"The Most Important Video You'll Ever See\", which is less hyperbole than you might think; the lecture is riveting)[2]. To very TL;DR things: solar and tidal energy (and their derivatives like wind) are essentially the only sources of energy we can rely on as our energy requirem","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1302247,"author":"dflock","month":"2010-04","story_title":"Peak Everything?","text":"There's only one planet Earth, finite in size - and therefore a finite amount of natural resources exist within it. Once we've split all the uranium and washed all the phosphorus into the ocean, that's it - you can't think up more Zinc, Rubidium or Lithium - once it's gone, it's gone. I'm sure we could do vastly more recycling, use alternatives for some things, improve efficiency, develop magical new technologies, etc, etc... but almost no-one I've spoken to about this appreciates just how terrifyingly rapidly we're approaching these limits. If we run out of available mine-able Zinc & Copper in 30 years - which is quite possible - what then? Do we have enough time to switch to coping strategies? Will that be a smooth ride? It seems to me that the front of the train has already hit the buffers, but we've still got our foot on the gas pedal, back here in the cab. Most of the useful mineral resources on Earth are only available in vanishingly tiny quantities elsewhere in the solar system. We currently do almost no recycling of anything, compared to our consumption. The human population is huge, growing in number, affluence and resource usage per capita. We're on course to run out of the minerals required to run our economy & infrastructure within most of our lifetimes. Nice infographic with some estimated timescales for various resources: [LINK] The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race is our inability to understand the exponential function: [VIDEO] I'm not being alarmist - so","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1758758,"author":"SkyMarshal","month":"2010-10","story_title":"How Fake Money Saved Brazil","text":"Great rule, should be the very first thing taught in high school when you get to exponents. Dr. Albert Bartlet of University of Colorado has an excellent lecture on its implications for population growth, environmental degradation, and other big picture problems: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1783449,"author":"cletus","month":"2010-10","story_title":"The middle class is over. It's not coming back.","text":"To temper this pessimism with some sobering reality, on another HN thread today I was pointed to this: [VIDEO] Well worth watching. Somehow, some time the population is going down. Way down.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2201621,"author":"wazoox","month":"2011-02","story_title":"Lisp inventor John McCarthy on human progress and its sustainability","text":"Looks interesting. You should submit it on its own. In fact combined with The prof. Bartlett videos ( [VIDEO] ) it makes quite a good usage of arithmetic to counter McCarthy point of view.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3700039,"author":"merkat","month":"2012-03","story_title":"The Rule of 72","text":"There's an interesting lecture from Albert Bartlett [ ] on the same subject, but he uses the value of 70 to calculate the years to double. [ ] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7633534,"author":"rasz_pl","month":"2014-04","story_title":"ARIN down to 1.00 /8 \u2013 Akamai got 104.64.0.0/10 yesterday","text":">some fairly massive blocks that were allocated but unused Watch this clip to understand why fractional solutions wont save us : [VIDEO] Warning, its \"Perhaps the most boring video you'll ever see, and definitely the most important.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11167158,"author":"porkradish","month":"2016-02","story_title":"This is the most depressing chart in the world","text":"This \"growth rate\" measured in percent has always concerned me. It looks to be unsustainable. Interesting video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20067667,"author":"sametmax","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The degrowth movement wants to intentionally shrink the economy","text":"I'm amazed it's such a sensitive topic. Some people are litterally angry in the comments out people suggesting degrowth. Since we have math lovers here, I'll post a fantastic math oriented conf on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"F-yDKeya4SU":[{"hn_comment_id":30949239,"author":"dreamcompiler","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The logistics behind corn farming [video]","text":"Supports your point with numbers: [VIDEO] tl;dr: Corn-based ethanol is at best as bad a carbon emitter as gasoline, and it's most likely worse.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36233893,"author":"dmbche","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Net energy of cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass","text":"This paper shows how much more efficient switchgrass is at producing ethanol than corn. This video is an interesting look at this whole issue:(Engineering Explained - America Was Wrong About Ethanol) [VIDEO] Especially his summary, where corn creates 20 percent less GHG than gasoline and ''breaks even'' after 28 years, while switchgrass creates 94% less GHG and breaks even in it's first year.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36233956,"author":"dmbche","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Grass Makes Better Ethanol Than Corn Does (2008)","text":"This video is an interesting look at this whole issue:(Engineering Explained - America Was Wrong About Ethanol) [VIDEO] Especially his summary, where corn creates 20 percent less GHG than gasoline and ''breaks even'' after 28 years, while switchgrass creates 94% less GHG and breaks even in it's first year.","stance":"rec"}],"F04dGK1_wYA":[{"hn_comment_id":4030974,"author":"Element_","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Why are the cooling towers on nuclear power plants funny shaped?","text":"That is a pretty crazy way to make a living. Here is a vid showing how they setup the ladders on the side of the chimney. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27780579,"author":"Cerium","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Camera Repair Course (2019)","text":"Regarding the bricklayer - if you have not seen it there is a great series showing how industrial chimneys made of brick were climbed for inspection and repair. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"F1Hq8eVOMHs":[{"hn_comment_id":29434773,"author":"karmelapple","month":"2021-12","story_title":"See brands' supply chain linkages that are contributing to Amazon deforestation","text":"Here's a related recent video from Kurzgesagt, discussing how space for beef cattle drives deforestation in Brazil. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29639016,"author":"sweetheart","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Remove an Omnivore's Statue? Debate Ensues over the Legacy of Factory Farming","text":"Lots of disinformation here. Let's start from the top: 1. Veganism isn't a diet, it's a moral belief system. Diet is merely one manifestation of that belief system. 2. \"Proteinless garbage\"? What is this, the 90s? We've moved beyond the silly misconceptions that protein = meat. Do your research, please. Hitting daily protein goals is absolutely trivial on a vegan diet. Seriously, it's stupidly easy. 3. Animal agriculture is an astounding contributor to global emissions. Kurzgesagt just did a great video on the subject: [VIDEO] We invite you into the 21st century, when you're ready. You'll have to leave the macho \"I don't eat rabbit food\" delusions behind, though.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32458146,"author":"sweetheart","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Meatless meat is nothing new","text":"How do you arrive at the conclusion that the best thing to do in the US is switch your meats? Every form from animal protein is going to be less efficient than plant protein and result in more emissions [1]. There are some amazing Kurzgesagt videos exposing how and why that is true [2]. So since we know that eating animals is not required to be healthy at any stage of life [3] (assuming basic access to required nutrients and what not which is very easy in developed countries) how did you arrive to conclusion that eating chicken is better than eating lentils, beans, etc? I don\u2019t think what you\u2019re saying is based in fact. I\u2019d love if you tried to prove me wrong though. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] 3. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"F3Jd9GI6XqE":[{"hn_comment_id":40587781,"author":"photon_lines","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs","text":"'It's impossible to plan without an internal monologue.' - Sorry, but I disagree with this. I have no 'internal voice' or monologue - whenever I see a problem, my brain actually and fully models it using images. I believe 25% of the population doesn't have the internal monologue which you're referring to and this has been tested and confirmed. I highly recommend listening to this Lex Friedman podcast episode to get a full grasp on the complexities of modelling language and general modelling present in the human brain: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40482733,"author":"hashemian","month":"2024-05","story_title":"To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language (2020)","text":"If you are interested in this topic, I suggest watching the conversation between Edward Gibson and Lex Fridman. In the middle of the conversation [1] Edward talks about how there is a \"human language comprehension network\" within human brain, which gets activated only when we read or speak in any human languages, but nothing else. For example for those speaking multiple languages, reading or writing in any of those languages activates the network. But reading gibberish or computer code, neither activate the network. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"F3ntGDm6hOs":[{"hn_comment_id":8798900,"author":"stephenheron","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What new or hot technology do you recommend learning?","text":"I found this video series ( [VIDEO] ) very interesting. It is someone (Casey Muratori) building a game from scratch using C. The intro videos really opened my eyes to how powerful C is. Being able to directly access memory seems crazy for someone who is just used to dealing with languages that really remove you from the hardware.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21736026,"author":"LucaSas","month":"2019-12","story_title":"How to write better game libraries","text":"As a good resource for learning C I would recommend Casey Muratori's tutorials: [VIDEO] If you are interested in learning more about writing complex software in C consider checking out HandmadeHero. Sadly there need to be more good resources on learning how to write good C and low level software. I am hoping my article can be a starting point for people who wish to learn about library design for example.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22027182,"author":"thomascgalvin","month":"2020-01","story_title":"We\u2019re approaching the limits of computer power \u2013 we need new programmers","text":"> I challenge you to find a C \u201cboot camp.\u201d C isn't a language that lends itself to bootcamp-stye learning. With Javascript, you can get something on-screen in a few minutes, and even if you make mistakes, you will normally see something . It's a more forgiving environment. With C, a small error prevents compilation at all, and it's going to be a relatively long time before you're ready to progress past the \"printing text to the console\" stage. C is flatly harder to learn, and unless you're the kind of person who likes mental challenge, it's less rewarding than Javascript. It isn't the kind of thing you tackle because you need hirable job skills by the end of the month. There are still some excellent C tutorials out there (for example, I think Handmade Hero's[0] intro to C is good, and Handmade Hero itself gets you to the \"shiny colors on the screen\" stage very quickly), but HH has a different mentality than a bootcamp. HH is about learning, exploring, breaking things, and figuring them out on the fly. A bootcamp is about gathering the minimum knowledge necessary to be productive as quickly as possible. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33205823,"author":"jcalabro","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Teaching Greybeard IT","text":"It's not quite aimed at IT/System admin, but Handmade Hero[0] is an excellent resource for learning how a computer works from the ground up. It starts with an excellent intro to C on Windows[1] and works its way up from there. It's really long and involved, but I've found that internalizing the general ethos is quite valuable, even if you just watch a handful of episodes. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"F8JCh0owT4w":[{"hn_comment_id":16546594,"author":"samcampbell","month":"2018-03","story_title":"California to Introduce 'Right to Repair' Bill","text":"Here's a relevant video in regards to farmers and their equipment that drove the impact of the \u2018Right to Repair\u2019 bill home for me. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16549773,"author":"OrwellianChild","month":"2018-03","story_title":"California to Introduce 'Right to Repair' Bill","text":"I appreciate the dialogue. We may have to agree to disagree on the final point. I'm not convinced that there is always a competitive market filled with alternatives that meet customer preferences. For example: I have to choose between iMessage and a headphone jack for my cell phone. There are other phones , but I don't have a totally ala carte menu - there are always trade offs. This likely won't change your opinion either, but it's a good piece that adds color to this conversation about right-to-repair: Motherboard published a video about John Deere's tractor/maintenance lock-in that looks at the issue from the perspective of 6-figure industrial equipment. [1] It's worth a look. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18251953,"author":"anfractuosity","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Repair is as important as innovation","text":"I thought this was quite interesting: Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech's Repair Monopoly - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"F8sZRBdmqc0":[{"hn_comment_id":26673880,"author":"greggyb","month":"2021-04","story_title":"The Multi-Generational LRU","text":"Bryan Cantrill does a pretty good survey of caching strategies in the intro to this Papers We Love talk on the ARC in ZFS. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36442096,"author":"anotherhue","month":"2023-06","story_title":"FIFO-Reinsertion is better than LRU [pdf]","text":"Might I also recommend: Bryan Cantrill on ARC: A Self-Tuning, Low Overhead Replacement Cache [PWL SF] 10/2017 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38855977,"author":"bminor13","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Sieve is simpler than LRU","text":"> it seemed natural to have a set of generations for items that have only been seen once, and then another generation for things that have been more active Have you looked at ARC? It sounds similar - it is a cache split between LRU and MFU areas, where the split point changes dynamically depending on the workload. [VIDEO] is a fun watch on the topic.","stance":"rec"}],"F9cO3-MLHOM":[{"hn_comment_id":37646652,"author":"nycdatasci","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Saint Helena Island Communications","text":"Relatedly, it's worth watching the entire Bill Gurley talk at the recent All-In Summit. Edit: Updating link to jump to the relevant section of the talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37793116,"author":"filereaper","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Congress Should Regulate Artificial Intelligence","text":"I strongly encourage watching Bill Gurley's talk from the All-In Summit about whenever Congress gets involved with regulations and technology. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37828230,"author":"filereaper","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Canada Plans to Regulate Search and Social Media Use of AI","text":"I strongly encourage watching Bill Gurley's talk from the All-In Summit about whenever Government gets involved with regulations and technology. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38103828,"author":"WestCoastJustin","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Establishment of the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute","text":"Great way to understand how all this works is watching All-In Summit: Bill Gurley presents 2,851 Miles[1]. Basically, regulate your competition into the ground. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39189943,"author":"miketery","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Everyone hates the electronic medical record","text":"Related, I recommend watching Bill Gurley's talk [1] on regulatory capture from 4 months ago. It basically covers why the path to solving this is a difficult if not impossible one. 1 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40111204,"author":"nycdatasci","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Anti-municipal broadband budget amendment gets nixed in New York","text":"Bill Gurley\u2019s talk during the 2023 All-In Summit provides interesting perspective on the type of regulatory capture that leads to bill modifications like this. It\u2019s worth listening to if you have an idle 30 mins. [VIDEO] Glad to see the clause was nixed!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44720788,"author":"shivasaxena","month":"2025-07","story_title":"EU Commission finds Temu in breach of online platform rules","text":"I work for a Swiss POS firm. We buy all our peripherals like tablet stands etc, and merchandising from Temu since it's 5-10x time cheaper and is same or better quality. We are competing with well funded companies like lighspeed/toast so it's been great help for us. Funny incident our CEO just mentioned to me yesterday: She ordered stickers from a local shop without asking the price, and on delivery had to pay 200 CHF for 20 stickers so 10 CHF/sticker. Next time she ordered from temu and got them at 20 CHF for 200 stickers so 0.1 CHF/sticker. At least to me it's clear this is plain and simple regulatory capture by inefficient european retailers. In supermarkets I have to pay 12 EUR for a bottle opener that I can get for 2 EUR on temu. Amazon.de for example launched free delivery to estonia and other small european countries only recently post rise of temu. These actions by EU commision are vehemently anti-consumer and anti-business under the transparent guise of being pro-consumer and pro-business. Would recommend Bill Gurly's talk about regulatory capture if anyone is interested [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FACK2knC08E":[{"hn_comment_id":14551434,"author":"lentil_soup","month":"2017-06","story_title":"The Old Are Eating the Young","text":"This video seems relevant: [VIDEO] According to Hans Rosling we've reached \"peak child\", meaning we're almost at 2 children per woman globally. This means population will continue to grow for a few years as globally there are more children than adults but will stabilize after that around the ~11 billion mark. And as long as we stay at that \"peak child\" number we won't go any further. I really recommend his videos if you haven't seen them.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15745430,"author":"jdietrich","month":"2017-11","story_title":"India's Indira canteen: The best meal you can buy for 13 cents","text":"Until the modern era, the global birth rate was fairly constant at about six per woman. The population growth we've experienced over the last century is mostly to do with child survival. Before 1900, the child mortality rate in India was over 50%. If you need children to care for you in old age and expect most of your children to die, you're likely to have a lot of them. When child survival improved, attitudes changed. Parents no longer want three or four children to work on the family farm, they want one or two children to become doctors or engineers. Economic development and the availability of reliable contraception have made that aspiration practical. If you're interested in the topic, I can highly recommend this lecture by the late Hans Rosling: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21051417,"author":"Isinlor","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Greta Thunberg: 'How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood'","text":"Because there is no world overpopulation. People talk about overpopulation since ancient times. [LINK] Currently standard of living are growing almost all over the world and human population is predicted to pick and stabilize at around 11 billion. I really recommend \"DON'T PANIC \u2014 Hans Rosling showing the facts about population\" [VIDEO] What's also interesting in his video is the fact that people tend to be very misinformed about state of the world affairs. E.g. when asked questions about certain statistics, they do worse than random. And the better educated you are the more misinformed you may be.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21457482,"author":"Isinlor","month":"2019-11","story_title":"World Scientists\u2019 Warning of a Climate Emergency","text":"The issue here is mostly with the countries in extreme poverty. Countries with average fertility rate of 3 and higher. Women in countries with the highest fertility index often do not control when they get pregnant. Having 6 and more children is rarely effect of conscious family planning. It's effect of lack of education, lack of access to contraception, forced sex in marriage etc. Sometimes having many children is an insurance policy in case some children will die before they reach productive age. We really should be addressing this type of issues underlying uncontrolled population growth. People should be able to choose when they want to have children, how many children they want, they should be educated on how to provide for their children, and certainly people should not be afraid that some part of their offspring will die. It has nothing to do with penalizing having children like they did in China. I really recommend, \"DON'T PANIC \u2014 Hans Rosling showing the facts about population\". He shows how family planning looks like in practice in countries like Bangladesh, so that westerners can imagine what are we talking about: [VIDEO] Dealing with global warming is going bad and we should panic about that, but humanity is making great progress on controlling population growth. There is really no issue with you having 3 children. Western population will be declining anyway as fertility rate in western countries is mostly below 2. Just please, support political, systematical chang","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13639648,"author":"tomjen3","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Who are you calling Malthusian?","text":"In that case don't worry: [VIDEO] Also consider that the carrying capacity of the world isn't fixed, but depends on how good our technology is (with a potential theoretical upper limit). Well tech is improved by people working on and inventing better technology, right? So you get better technology with more people - and with that you can have more people working on better technology. The biggest mistake, and the one all Malthusians made, is to forget that humans are, on average, net produces not net consumers.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16345653,"author":"lugg","month":"2018-02","story_title":"When will the world reach 'peak child'?","text":"He has a lot of good videos out there but this is the one specifically covering Africa / population predictions and the misconceptions / dated knowledge. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19718231,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2019-04","story_title":"The global population pyramid","text":"There's a good presentation by Hans Rosling about why population will peak at 11B (stick with until 26m): * [VIDEO] Further on he explains why we may not have to worry about resource use given growing prosperity: * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19899598,"author":"Carlee","month":"2019-05","story_title":"CO2 in the atmosphere just exceeded 415ppm for the first time in human history","text":"You should check out Hans Rosling's lectures [1]. Statistics points towards the fact that as people become more wealthy, they have less children. It should stagnate around 11 million people by most models. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22889130,"author":"brigandish","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Who Is Firing?","text":"Since economic growth tends to go hand in hand with better access to health services and greater social freedom, it does. I always enjoy Hans Rosling going through the stats, if you\u2019ve time it\u2019s well worth it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24384607,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2020-09","story_title":"The Lancet: World population projections by 2100","text":"There's a good (though hour-long) presentation by the late Hans Rosling call \"DON'T PANIC \u2014 Hans Rosling showing the facts about population\": * [VIDEO] \"Don\u2019t Panic \u2013 The Facts About Population\": * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28055708,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2021-08","story_title":"This Can\u2019t Go On","text":"Hans Rosling's presentation \"Don't Panic\" (produced by the BBC) is pretty good: * [VIDEO] It's an hour long; really interesting.","stance":"rec"}],"FBaVwwuErmU":[{"hn_comment_id":11089821,"author":"nkurz","month":"2016-02","story_title":"James Burke: Connections, Episodes 1-10 (1978) [video]","text":"Likely because they first encountered it on PBS, some Americans are unaware Connections was a BBC production: [LINK] Even less known these days (by Americans, at least) is that Connections was but one of many extraordinary educational science series that the BBC produced in the 1970's. Original footage of one of the best of these was recently rediscovered and finally made available on the web: Look Around You: Season 1 Pilot - Calcium [VIDEO] Watching it again today, it's hard to understate the positive impact this series had on British science education, and the obvious \"leg up\" it gave for Britain's technological prowess.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36645230,"author":"cal85","month":"2023-07","story_title":"When did Alan Partridge first appear on television?","text":"Look Around You [0] is little known even in the UK, but I think a lot of HN readers might love it. It's a surreal but perfectly observed parody of the 80s/90s educational videos we used to watch in school science classes. [0] Episode 1: Calcium [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26793876,"author":"wcarss","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Let us now praise tiny ants","text":"I really wondered if this would be related to the mockumentary \"Look Around You\"[1]'s somewhat famous \"Thanks ants... Thants\"[2] line. If you're reading my comment and you haven't run across these, you might find them pretty amusing. But... it is (reasonably) not related to those things at all. 1 - [VIDEO] 2 - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"FBeSKL9zVro":[{"hn_comment_id":31945531,"author":"dazzawazza","month":"2022-07","story_title":"YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips","text":"Big Clive has a good video on why this is dangerous and how to make it more safe. Note: not safe safe, just more safe. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31946874,"author":"geocrasher","month":"2022-07","story_title":"YouTube removes criticism of dangerous fractal wood burning, but leaves up tips","text":"BigCliveDotCom has an excellent video about this: \"The most deadly project on the Internet\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FBsP-bmDLOo":[{"hn_comment_id":30705048,"author":"tejohnso","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Microwave ovens and their hazards","text":"Sabine Hossenfelder has a great explanation of 5G controversy[1] that is somewhat relevant. Explains why it is probably not dangerous, but also indicates why some additional study is warranted. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30822080,"author":"tejohnso","month":"2022-03","story_title":"5G Skeptic","text":"While you're ignoring everything they say about radiation, you can also suggest they watch \"All you need to know to understand 5G\" by Sabine Hossenfelder. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30881021,"author":"ninkendo","month":"2022-04","story_title":"No increased risk of brain tumours for mobile phone users, new study finds","text":"If you\u2019re actually curious about the topic, this is an even-handed (reasonably well-informed) take on the matter from physicist Sabine Hossenfelder: [VIDEO] One of the interesting points in the video is that 5G\u2019s high frequency band of 24-48GHz is _not_ well understood with studies. The typical cell phone radiation/cancer studies deal with the much lower-frequency bands (hundreds of MHz or 1-5GHz), but that doesn\u2019t necessarily transfer to the new higher frequencies. Per the video, it is known that frequencies that high can warm the skin and irritate the eyes if they\u2019re at really high power, but it\u2019s not known exactly what power threshold for such millimeter waves is considered \u201csafe\u201d, and the number of studies isn\u2019t sufficient to completely dismiss any safety concerns. She\u2019s not saying \u201c5G isn\u2019t safe\u201d, but rather \u201c5G hasn\u2019t been completely determined safe yet because more studies are needed for the newer mm-wave spectrum\u201d and \u201cstudies showing the safety of previous generations of cell phone radiation don\u2019t necessarily apply to the new frequency band.\u201d It\u2019s not necessarily alarm-worthy, but it\u2019s more nuanced than just \u201ccrystal-worshipping hippies\u201d\u2026","stance":"rec"}],"FF-tKLISfPE":[{"hn_comment_id":15974117,"author":"chx","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Apple and NeXT announce merger (1996)","text":"Watch Jobs in his prime a year later describing his philosophy: [VIDEO] I am very far from an Apple fanboy but gosh, this guy totally gets it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3105884,"author":"nirvana","month":"2011-10","story_title":"The last time I saw Steve Jobs","text":"I've been following Steve Jobs since I was a kid, about 30 years ago. Woz was more my hero then, but I read everything I could about Jobs even then, and ever since. I think Jobs transformed himself on a fundamental level. The young Steve seemed arrogant and self centered. Getting pushed out of Apple seems to have been a kick to the soul, and then in his 10 years away, he seems to have changed everything about him that was bad. Just check out how he responded to the insult given to him at the 1997 after WWDC session. [VIDEO] Now that enough time has passed, all the people who were bashing Jobs from 1990-2011 are back bashing Jobs again. But I think these stories are the real guy. I was in his presence on a couple of occasions. You can fake some things, but its really hard to fake who you are. Everyone has their good and bad days... but one thing I can say about Steve, he was always genuine. Made him a great salesperson, too, cause even if he was wrong, he believed . So, I am grateful for these anecdotes. I'm eternally grateful for the 2005 commencement address. He was so private, and for good reason, and until the biography comes out these are some of the few views we have to him as a person. (I think the biography is going to be very revealing, and surprising when it comes out, since he's such a \"control freak\" but I think he didn't exercise any control, and people will be shocked.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24149128,"author":"EricE","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Celebrate Woz's 70th","text":"Jobs was all of that and more. Modern personal computing wouldn't exist without his insistence at making \"Computers for the rest of us\". There were many quite pissed at Apple for selling pre-assembled, ready to use computers. It was thought that unless you could assemble your machine you didn't deserve it. Heck you see a lot of that attitude today in many open source projects. And that's just one way he pushed modern computing into what it is today. Did he perform every detail himself? Nope - that would be absurd. But he took things that until that time no one else correlated, and he correlated and pushed for them. Often with amazing presence. And it wasn't willy-nilly, either. I mean just look at the way he handled this OpenDoc troll: [VIDEO] How many can compose themselves and deliver that kind of a response that quickly? Not many. So yeah, those who try to dismiss Jobs as just a marketing or product guy are only displaying their profound ignorance. I don't think Jobs was perfect - far from it. But he certainly did make a dent in the universe, and many others too - perhaps it is a good thing that people like Jobs are pretty rare but there is no doubt we would all be a lot poorer if he hadn't existed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31685014,"author":"SenHeng","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?","text":"Some good examples by Elon Musk and Steve Jobs described in this article. [LINK] This was probably one of Steve Job's most impressive example. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FH2WeWgcSMk":[{"hn_comment_id":19779815,"author":"raarts","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Diversity and the Death of Free Speech","text":"I've been following the free speech issue on universities for almost a year now, and I think the 2008 may be on the mark, though the first well known incident I can name is the Lawrence Summers controversy in 2005 [1]. The free speech issue is mainly a talking point of conservatives because these are the ones most impacted. Students complain about being afraid to voice their opinions for fear of being ostracized or punished on grades. It's enlightening to read through a few issues of The College Fix [2]. Relevant interesting book is The Coddling Of The American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Luka off. But it gets really entertaining when you watch some youtube videos on this subject, for example the great, 3-part, documentary[3] by Mike Nayna. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] EDIT: and just after I wrote this, a research paper popped up, about army veterans going back to college and experiencing culture shock: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42693180,"author":"docmars","month":"2025-01","story_title":"The Origins of Wokeness","text":"On YouTube, watch the Evergreen State College 3-part documentary by Bret Weinstein. This is much more common than you think, through your anecdote, unfortunately. Granted, this happened in 2017, so a few years after your time in college, but I would argue \"peak wokeness\" sits between 2016 to today, in large part due to Trump's first election win. 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK] 3. [LINK] This should make anyone's skin crawl with the way this college's faculty and staff were treated, and the childish behavior of the students to allow this to happen. This gives a reason why \"college kids\" are no longer considered adults.","stance":"rec"}],"FITJMJjASUs":[{"hn_comment_id":6710858,"author":"mekishizufu","month":"2013-11","story_title":"What is a y-combinator? (2008)","text":"If you are curious about the topic, I strongly recommend watching these videos: Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich [VIDEO] Programming with Nothing by Tom Stuart [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7270423,"author":"VeejayRampay","month":"2014-02","story_title":"So very sad to hear about the passing of Ruby legend Jim Weirich","text":"[VIDEO] This talk is a must-see, really shows off Jim Weirich's craft and overall ability to be a great pedagogue.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10562564,"author":"careersuicide","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Writing code doesn't mix well with oration","text":"Jim Weirich's \"Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming\"[1] is perhaps the most entertaining and interesting technical talk I've ever seen. It would absolutely not be as cool or as fun without the live coding. Additionally, the incremental process by which he arrives at the conclusion makes the topic much more approachable. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13203122,"author":"JamilD","month":"2016-12","story_title":"What is a Y Combinator?","text":"For those (like me) that prefer learning through talks and demonstrations, Jim Wierich gave an incredible talk on the Y Combinator at RubyConf 2012. Video: [VIDEO] Code: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16840747,"author":"webdevatlurk","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Finally made an account to post in this thread. I'm rather early in my career doing mostly Ruby, Python and JavaScript things. As you might expect, I consume mainly Ruby, Python and JavaScript related talks. The first two talks that really blew my mind are: - K Lars Lohn's PyCon Keynote from 2016: [LINK] - Jim Weirich's (RIP) \"Y Not\" talk from RubyConf 2012: [VIDEO] There are many other presenters who I have a good opinion of: - Raymond Hettinger: his presentation/teaching style is something I'd like to model my own after, also he gave the first talk on writing proper threaded/concurrent python that I was able to understand and make use of. - Brandon Rhoades: another speaker with a presentation style that I've found easy to follow, also he takes a little shot at the dd utility about 18 minutes into [LINK] ) - Sandi Metz: I started out in Python land and moved to Ruby land, where I was introduced to Sandi's talks. She doesn't talk about incredibly complex topics, but she's got insight into some really basic things that's helpful to new people who can't see the forest through the trees. - Robert Martin: I gather that his OO principles are not universally revered, but I find his talks useful. - Gary Bernhardt: his talks are interesting and entertaining in ways that most are not The list goes on, but I can't think of them all right now.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17169201,"author":"dmvaldman","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Y Not? \u2013 Adventures in Functional Programming (2012)","text":"This video (similar lecture, different audience) has the slides alongside the talk: [VIDEO] Still one of the best programming talks I've ever seen.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24602476,"author":"caseyohara","month":"2020-09","story_title":"All you need is \u03bb, part one: booleans","text":"On the same topic, Jim Weirich's 2012 talk \"Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming\" on lambda calculus and the (little 'c') Y combinator is fantastic. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43637738,"author":"sva_","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Baking the Y Combinator from Scratch","text":"If anyone wants this in a humorous 1 hour format, watch the legendary Jim Weirich (rip) explain it here: [VIDEO] Don't be discouraged that it is in Ruby as the concepts are completely general. Great watch even though I never coded a line of Ruby.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47747123,"author":"peterlk","month":"2026-04","story_title":"All elementary functions from a single binary operator","text":"Reminds me a bit of the coolest talk I ever got to see in person: [VIDEO] It\u2019s a derivation of the Y combinator from ruby lambdas","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5005803,"author":"tesmar2","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Three Little Birds \u2013 Deriving the Y Combinator","text":"Jim Weirich derives the Y combinator in pure Ruby here: [LINK] EDIT: Correct video [VIDEO] It is some of the ugliest ruby code I have ever seen, but it was something amazing to watch happen live.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6967840,"author":"al2o3cr","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett\u2019s Igors","text":"+1 on the lambda calculus stuff. Here's a related talk about deriving the Y combinator in Ruby by Jim Weirich: [VIDEO] (skip to about 28:00 if you're impatient) There are additional versions of this same presentation circulating with the code in Javascript and (I believe) Clojure. Full disclosure: Jim is a co-worker of mine.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8192575,"author":"friendzis","month":"2014-08","story_title":"Tech Talks","text":"Since it is not readme based, I suggest including Y-Not[1] - an excellent talk about functional programming and lambda calculus [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8378399,"author":"HCIdivision17","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Excitement Over Gravity Waves Comes Crashing Down","text":"I mean, sure, it's going to be turtles the whole way down if you're looking to define the universe without resorting to physical quantities (that is, dimensioned units). We don't have anything like a Grand Unified Theory yet, wherein we define Physics by means of some elemental mathematics (in the form that we can bootstrap computation from lambda calculus via things like the Y Combinator [0]). Besides, we occasionally give dimensional names to dimensionless quantities (my favorite being the engineering unit the inverse radian) [1]. It's a useful abstraction, and it seems confusing to complain about it. So we resort to what we know, which is what we see. We can't see more than the surrounding universe, but we can try extrapolating from what seems to work. Attempting to stifle that inquiry seems a bit... I dunno, pointlessly antagonistic. This article shows science in action, doing what it does best: taking observations and reconciling them with other observations via theory, and then fixing theory to match. It seems our universe follows certain equations which are themselves dimensionful, so I'm not sure why we wouldn't attempt to benchmark the universe against itself - we don't have much else to use. Even dimensionless numbers are only marginally useful, like alpha; it may \"exist\" and manifest as our universe, but it's not especially predictive. [0] [VIDEO] (one of my favorite videos - I still don't grok it, but I'm getting closer!) [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12637633,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich [VIDEO] The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing by Cory Doctorow [LINK] Cybersecurity as Realpolitik by Dan Geer [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17468012,"author":"dnsco","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Deriving the Y Combinator in JavaScript","text":"Jim Weirich's 2012 Ruby Conf talk is also a great introduction to the Y Combinator and Lambda Calculus. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218671,"author":"dwrodri","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Here is a good one that come to mind: 1. This one is alive demo where the speaker derives the Y Combinator from first principles. A really interesting exposition of functional programming at its finest. Link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32637046,"author":"sva_","month":"2022-08","story_title":"An intriguing discovery of Computer Science: The Y combinator [video]","text":"A good video that made it click for me is the following, which derives the ycombinator from 1st principles: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33414257,"author":"jiripospisil","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?","text":"Well, .NET's garbage collector certainly springs to mind. Not exactly in a good way. You know you have something special on your hands when GitHub refuses to show you a highlighted version of a hand written C++ file ( [LINK] ). Other than that, I remember my mind was blown a few times while watching Jim Weirich's presentation on functional programming all those years ago ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"rec"}],"FJJTYQYB1JQ":[{"hn_comment_id":34593450,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Not exactly a lecture series, but Andrei Alexandrescu has had some fantastic keynote presentations at CppCon. I don't even program in C++ any more, but I've watched these more than once, they're entertaining, approachable, and inspiring: Speed Is Found In The Minds of People [VIDEO] std::allocator Is to Allocation what std::vector Is to Vexation [LINK] An actual lecture series I've enjoyed watching is \"The WE-Heraeus International Winter School on Gravity and Light\", which covers General Relativity using modern mathematical approaches: [LINK] Again, I haven't done physics in 20 years, but I've found it surprisingly easy to follow because it is so clearly presented.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38810283,"author":"bboreham","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?","text":"I really enjoyed \u201cSpeed Is Found In The Minds Of People\u201d, a talk by Andrei Alexandrescu. At first he is just showing simple stuff, but stay with it, he goes deep. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21176709,"author":"United857","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Engineering a Sort Function (1993) [pdf]","text":"If you're interested in these types of implementation/optimization details, Andrei Alexandrescu gave a great talk at this year's CppCon about practical sorting, e.g. when to break out of quicksort to something else: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21273179,"author":"planteen","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Mispredicted branches can multiply your running times","text":"The article is C++, so not sure why you are bringing up AOT/JIT since it doesn't apply here. And clearly there is a large gain possible by doing a calculation rather than a conditional with a high entropy result, otherwise, the article's mentioned speedup wouldn't have happened. A PGO feedback loop isn't going to do anything on a high entropy conditional. I saw a great talk at CppCon 2019 by Andrei Alexandrescu about speeding up std::sort. He does this same trick among others to speed up the C++ std library sort routine. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21554557,"author":"nestorD","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Infectious Executable Stacks","text":"In his talk \"Speed Is Found In The Minds of People\" [0], Andrei Alexandrescu tries to make a sort really fast for medium sized vector and then closes on thoughts on this precise distinction. If this question intress you, it is worth watching. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22098188,"author":"jacobolus","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Why is quicksort better than other sorting algorithms in practice? (2013)","text":"I enjoyed Alexandrescu\u2019s CppCon 2019 talk \u201cSpeed Is Found In The Minds of People\u201d About optimizing generic sorting routines for modern hardware. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37605887,"author":"r_sreeram","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Airlines Are Just Banks Now","text":"Here's an excellent example of what GP said: [VIDEO] (long video, skip to 26:00 if you are in a hurry) The key is that code isn't running in a vacuum. It's operating on data (or controlling systems, etc). A smaller amount of code may be operating on the data in an inefficient manner, whereas a larger amount may be doing it more efficiently. In the above talk, this contrast is very stark, because the \"more code\" version does some stuff and then does the exact thing the \"less code\" version does, yet is faster. This kind of thing is common enough (albeit less stark than in the above example), that \"less code is faster\" is not a great \"default\" assumption to make.","stance":"rec"}],"FKTxC9pl-WM":[{"hn_comment_id":13299349,"author":"cha-cho","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How to learn new things better?","text":"Kathy Sierra gave an informative talk on the topic of learning at the 2015 O'Reilly Fluent conference. It's entitled \"Making Badass Developers\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13717429,"author":"yestoallthat","month":"2017-02","story_title":"\u201cA state of flow can be achieved by deep work\u201d","text":"I'm skeptical about willpower, too.. but what about \"cognitive resources\"? I bookmarked this because while I don't know if it's the whole and full truth (how could it be?), it certainly seems interesting, the whole talk is but here's the start of the relevant bit: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14220489,"author":"itamarst","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you keep improving?","text":"1. You need to recognize when you're not learning, for one thing. If it's easy, you're not learning. You need to push yourself into the zone of discomfort, where you feel clumsy and have a hard time. Now you're learning. 2. Find a mentor. Lacking that, find e.g. talk of someone explaining some hard techniques and then try to follow the advice. Even and especially if it feels clumsy at first. (More on those two here: [LINK] ). 3. Switch to a new job where you'll be exposed to new things. try to find a job where people do code review, feedback is how we learn faster. 4. Learn how to learn: [VIDEO] 5. Reflect on your mistakes, try to find what cues you missed and what you should look for next time. I've been doing this on weekly basis (you can read the results at [LINK] ) and I've learned a huge amount from figuring out underlying cause of what I did wrong.","stance":"rec"}],"FTKP0Y9MVus":[{"hn_comment_id":24363657,"author":"umvi","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Impossible Colors","text":"I highly recommend this Captain Disillusion video about color if you want to learn more about color theory: [VIDEO] You may have to watch the video multiple times though, because the information comes out of a firehouse.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29345486,"author":"myself248","month":"2021-11","story_title":"A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today","text":"For A/V stuff, I went looking for an understanding of how color works in video systems, and ran across this gem from Captain Disillusion: [VIDEO] His whole channel is great, though there's not a ton there, it makes sense given the staggering amount of work that goes into the visualizations of each one.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24773121,"author":"Leszek","month":"2020-10","story_title":"What Color Is This? Part 2","text":"This video from Captain Disillusion does a great job of explaining both the biological mechanism and the consequences it has on displays: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FV0DXNB94NE":[{"hn_comment_id":10547769,"author":"abglassman","month":"2015-11","story_title":"A sliding puzzle, built with Elm","text":"I'm pretty keen to play with Elm, but it gives me some pause that an app like this (or the demo at [LINK] ) results in... 11k lines of Javascript. Nevertheless, these talks got me bulled up on Elm: [VIDEO] (Richard Feldman, collegially, on React -> Elm)</a> / [LINK] (Evan Czaplicki on the motivation for Elm)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14218226,"author":"elviejo","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Is there a sane alternative to Angular and React?","text":"Excellent question. Turns out there is: [LINK] Is a Haskell inspired programming language that makes developing front end a delight. It helps to build Reliable front ends. Watch this conference to get a sense of what Elm does. Making the Backend Team Jelous[1] Plus the Elm architecture makes everything orderly and easy to understand. Quite a change from the mess of react components and Angular rewrites. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14218227,"author":"elviejo","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Is there a sane alternative to Angular and React?","text":"Excellent question. Turns out there is: [LINK] Is a Haskell inspired programming language that makes developing front end a delight. It helps to build Reliable front ends. Watch this conference to get a sense of what Elm does. Making the Backend Team Jelous[1] Plus the Elm architecture makes everything orderly and easy to understand. Quite a change from the mess of react components and Angular rewrites. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FV8n_E_6Tpc":[{"hn_comment_id":4830469,"author":"dematio","month":"2012-11","story_title":"Hacking my Vagina","text":"[LINK] is not a hardware but Definitely it's awesome startup to disrupt sex industry. MLNP wants to inspire and stimulate open, healthy conversations about sex and pornography. #realworldsex Cindy on TED [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5053668,"author":"TeMPOraL","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Did porn warp me forever?","text":"> Hopefully the kids growing up today realize this. Martial arts - maybe. But if your never had sex and your only education on the topic is porn, then how could you know how it really looks like? And then you have your first, and second, and third time, and you feel a bit disappointed that it didn't feel or look like you expected, and even if you realize that porn is a caricature, you're still left wondering, how much of the difference between porn and real life is because of lack of realism in videos, and how much is because of your deficiencies. It's a real problem and it's sad that the only sexual education kids usually get comes from porn. EDIT There was a TED talk about this topic once, [0]. While her site doesn't have much content and I don't recall the book being very insightful (though definitely an interesting read), she raises some good points so I recommend the video (it's 4 minutes). [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"F_7S1eqKsFk":[{"hn_comment_id":10758788,"author":"lloydde","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Software developed or maintained by the OpenBSD project","text":"I thoroughly enjoyed Theo de Raadt recent talk, \"Pledge: A new security technology in openbsd\". It left me itching to try OpenBSD. \"Pledge() is designed as a mitigation rather than a cure-all, de Raadt explains, but it's a mitigation with an interesting approach: a process or application stipulates the system services it needs, and if it steps beyond its boundaries, it's killed.\" [LINK] Hackfest 2015: Theo de Raadt presented \"Pledge: A new security technology in openbsd\" video: [VIDEO] slides: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14061696,"author":"Timothycquinn","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Computer security is broken, but things are starting to improve","text":"Until we build in security mitigation into the kernel and standard libraries of our operating systems, we will always have failure modes where minor errors in code can result in critical vulnerabilities and privilege escalation. I love what OpenBSD is doing with pledges[0] and hope to see this gain traction in other operating systems. Here is a good overview of Pledge[1] by Theo de Raadt. Unfortunately for Linux ecosystem, the Kernel does not include any standard libs for developers, so this type of security mitigation will take a long time to arrive. But for Unix based operating systems we should expect this much sooner. [0]: [LINK] , [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"F_Riqjdh2oM":[{"hn_comment_id":22991013,"author":"mbo","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?","text":"The Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists video by Microsoft Research ( [VIDEO] ) really hammered it home for me. It goes slowly and the presenter, in his own words \"shuts up and does the math\".","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42198969,"author":"DarmokJalad1701","month":"2024-11","story_title":"AlphaQubit: AI to identify errors in Quantum Computers","text":"[VIDEO] This video is the simplest explanation that I have found for Quantum Computing which doesn't do the whole pop-sciency \"is both zero and one at the same time\" nonsense.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22991715,"author":"whytai","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?","text":"Here is a video of a researcher at Microsoft Quantum lecturing on this: [VIDEO] \"Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists.\". However, even with understanding how a Quantum Computer works at its most basic level I still have difficulty understanding the more useful Quantum Algorithms: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23033284,"author":"stewdio","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Show HN: Quantum JavaScript","text":"I\u2019ve begun to put together useful resources for learning more here: [LINK] I\u2019d like to really flesh out that page; I\u2019ve now come across so many folks that are amazing at explaining this stuff... It\u2019s just a time crunch to juggle all this as you might imagine ;) These two videos in particular helped me get started: 1. What is a physical quantum computer? [LINK] 2. How might one compute using it? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23922353,"author":"martinmartinez","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources to start learning about quantum computing?","text":"Learning Quantum Computing based on skill level (math is the biggest friction point, suggested pdf should save you lots of time) (Recc is personal recommendations, Hi-Recc is look at ASAP) # QC Main Ideas - Rotate, Compute, Rotate - Think in Amplitude Interference # Beginner: -(Hi-Recc) Quantum Computing Primer (1.5hr) : [VIDEO] -(Hi-Recc) Math Primer for Quantum Computing (easiest intro/primer I found on the topic; Highly Recommend ) : [LINK] -- understand Bra Ket notation [<Bra|Ket>] (Ket as Column vector, Bra (Row vector) as Complex Conjugate of Ket (denoted as dagger) ) -- understand Kronecker product ( for multi-qubit systems) - Quantum Computing for Computer Scientists book - [LINK] - Quantum Math Primer (Faculty of Khan) (found a bit hard the first time around, pretty dense) : [LINK] # Intermediate -(Recc) Ryan O'Donnell CMU course [is the best if you want to really understand the capabilities of quantum computing, get practice with math, intuition] (algos connection to Fourier, Quantum Complexity Theory, Math best practices, learning multi-quibit systems) -- Quantum Computation and Information at CMU : [LINK] -- Lecture Notes (use as reference in case video is not clear, or camera shot lags/changes) [LINK] - Mermin's Textbook [LINK] - Nielsen & Chuang's Textbook [LINK] -- Nielsen's Lectures [LINK] # Advanced -(Recc) Scott Aaronson Graduate Course [LINK] -(Recc) Scott Aaronson Papers (really interesting) [LINK] - Complexity Zoo - List of Algorithms [LINK] -(Recc) Machi","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24997722,"author":"ahelwer","month":"2020-11","story_title":"CERN Online introductory lectures on quantum computing from 6 November","text":"If anyone is interested I've also created a short 1.5 hour lecture on quantum computing aimed specifically at software engineers & computer scientists, which has proven popular: [VIDEO] I'd love to answer any questions people have. In quantum computation, state behaves like a vector and logic gates behave like matrices that multiply the vector to get a new state value. It doesn't get too much more complicated than that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26557270,"author":"DarmokJalad1701","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Factoring 2048 RSA integers in 177 days with 13436 qubits and a multimode memory","text":"Here is a long-ish video that explains quantum computers without using pop-science hand-wavy terminology [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27099783,"author":"ahelwer","month":"2021-05","story_title":"What did Einstein mean by \u201cspooky action at a distance\u201d?","text":"There is absolutely no way to understand quantum mechanics without learning the math. All metaphors are faulty and will lead you to incorrect conclusions. Fortunately the advent of quantum computing has made the math quite easy - it's just linear algebra of the type one would pick up within the first week of an undergraduate course. I made a video aimed at computer scientists which you might find useful: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30364259,"author":"quaintquant","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Hello Many Worlds in Seven Quantum Languages (2021)","text":"I think this talk is an excellent 'foot in the door' intro. Should provide a solid foundation, and plenty of insider jargon to follow up on! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30559865,"author":"drewrv","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Basic Quantum Algorithms","text":"For those who are interested, this lecture was sent to me as an overview of quantum computation for people like me: people who know how to code and know some basic linear algebra. It goes deeper than the pop-sci articles about \"doing all combinations at once\" but remains accessible and by the end you understand entanglement and can read some Q# code. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35490549,"author":"supriyo-biswas","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Quantum Computing 101","text":"The videos by Microsoft Research[1] and PBS[2] are perhaps the most accessible and yet accurate explanations of quantum computing I have found so far. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37579535,"author":"ahelwer","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Quantum Resistance and the Signal Protocol","text":"The shortest possible answer is that qubit states are modeled as two-dimensional vectors on the complex unit sphere. We arbitrarily designate two orthonormal vectors on this sphere as corresponding to classical states 0 and 1. If the qubit vector isn't in the 0 or 1 state, it's in some linear combination of them. This is called superposition. Since most people don't know what linear combination means, superposition is explained as \"sort of both at the same time\". Upon measurement the qubits are collapsed to 0 or 1 with some probability proportional to how close they are to the 0 and 1 states. The precise probabilities are given by something called the Born rule. I gave a longer talk aimed at computer scientists if you're interested beyond this explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38548935,"author":"potsandpans","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How are quantum computing companies making money?","text":"> what is programming a quantum computer like? You compose a series of gates that manipulate the state qbits to perform calculation. My understanding is that these gates can be abstracted in a somewhat familiar programming language environment. I've got a very rudimentary understanding, my crude summary would be: it's basically applied linear algebra, leveraging the properties of superposition to perform some types of computations more efficiently. Namely, reducing some search spaces to sqrt n. This video is a good hands on intro: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42368468,"author":"potsandpans","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Willow, Our Quantum Chip","text":"Start here: [VIDEO] You don't need to know quantum theory necessarily, but you will need to know some maths. Specifically linear algebra. There are a few youtube courses on linear algebra For a casual set of video: - [LINK] For a more formal approach: - [LINK] And the corresponding open courseware - [LINK] Linear algebra done right comes highly recommended - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42382304,"author":"rkp8000","month":"2024-12","story_title":"The Google Willow Thing","text":"MSR has a very clear and accessible tutorial on quantum computing for anyone interested in getting up to speed with the fundamentals: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43293467,"author":"thrance","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Why Quantum Engineering Is Emerging as a Distinct Industrial Sector","text":"This talk [1] helped me at the start. The only prerequisite is knowing basic linear algebra. Now, if you're interested in how quantum computers operate, well good luck. That's a whole other beast. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FegjLbCnoBw":[{"hn_comment_id":7876317,"author":"justin66","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Red Hat Unveils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7","text":"I wonder if you know about Dave Chinner's talk, which addresses the metadata performance issue. (they fixed it) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38556143,"author":"noigai","month":"2023-12","story_title":"In OpenZFS and Btrfs, everyone was just guessing","text":"> XFS is probably the best bet on Linux Yes, agree. However, I also lost files on it (had files overwritten with 0s, as other people already commented here). Also, it's your best bet of you don't need the extra features provided by ZFS. Thanks to its checksum validation, I detected bad SATA cables three times already (on different systems), instead of getting corrupted data. >it was beautifully designed and implemented by SGI back in the day. Hopefully the ChatGPT generation don't start modifying that code too much. Except it's not what happened. Please check this talk from Dave Chinner, where he explains how XFS was developed and ported to Linux and then made robust and stable by him and other contributors. The disk format has changed many times, now it's robust and resilient against metadata corruption. XFS Development talk by Dave Chinner [VIDEO] History of Linux FS, also by Dave Chinner: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"FfDa8tR25dk":[{"hn_comment_id":11502048,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Famous Photo of Chernobyl's Most Radioactive Material Was a Selfie","text":"One of the most impressive documentaries I've ever seen is \"Chernobyl 3828\"[1]. It is about the 3828 \"liquidators\" (cleanup crew) - euphemistically called the \"bio robots\" - that had to clean up the worst section of roof above the reactor. Maximum allowed dose was two minutes exposure to that section the roof. It has some of the same footage as the sequence in your link to t=3430, but there is a key difference: Chernobyl 3828 is about the people . The psychology of the cleanup was complicated. Some people ran while others faced the danger and accepted a \"red badge of courage\" because if they didn't, someone else would have to go in their place . [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13629036,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2017-02","story_title":"High radiation readings at Fukushima\u2019s No. 2 reactor complicate robot probe","text":"> Chernobyl-style \"bio-robot\" \"liquidators\" Anybody that isn't familiar with the \"liquidators\" should watch Chernobyl 3828 , a Ukrainian documentary about the cleanup of the worst part of the roof with comments by the people currently working their two-minute shifts as a \"bio-robot\". [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20109169,"author":"effie","month":"2019-06","story_title":"HBO's Chernobyl may yet become the highest rated TV Show ever","text":"I understand and partly agree. The geeky stuff was very limited and the narrative and exposition was somewhat dramatized. I am also not sure if the real characters really acted towards the state in such a brave unassailable way as depicted... Still I think the show adopts a valid viewpoint and gives a powerful and needed message about a corrupt totalitarian system. But you are right that telling the story from the point of view of organizational challenges or from a point of view of a real person putting their life in danger in taking part in the effort would be very interesting too. There are some great documents on youtube from these different points of view, e.g. the story told by Starodumov and Bordakov: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Fgh2dFngFsg":[{"hn_comment_id":5062666,"author":"kamjam","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Petition To Fire Aaron Swartz\u2019 Prosecutor Reaches Goal","text":"So the alternative is to do nothing? Which is better? At least this gets some momentum going, hopefully being picked up by press, maybe even them questioning the president about it at some later interview. Doing nothing means nothing will get done. This is probably exactly what the government would like you to do. \"The people rose up and caused a sea change in Washington\" ~ Aaron Swartz This last part of his speech is so powerful. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5977589,"author":"bguthrie","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Tesla: almost at 100000 votes","text":"I agree, though other petitions can be effective. If you care about a cause, place your signature on a petition hosted with an organization that will tirelessly advocate for that cause. Organizations in turn live and die by their ability to gather and show support for the causes they fight. If there's anything techies should've learned from the SOPA battle, it's that it is possible to make political change when enough people speak out. If you haven't watched aaronsw's talk on stopping SOPA, it's well worth your time. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FihU5JxmnBg":[{"hn_comment_id":32737058,"author":"seanc","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you get better at debugging/finding a solution?","text":"This talk, \"Debugging with the Scientific Method\" changed how I debug problems. I try to watch it once every year or two. tl;dr, when debugging people naturally form a hypothesis about what is going wrong and then set about gathering evidence to support or refute that hypothesis. When you do so unconciously you are very prone to biases of all sorts, most importantly confirmation bias. When you do so mindfully, and Write It All Down then you are much more likely to a) come up with an evidence gathering exercise which will usefully falsify your hypothesis, and b) respect the gathered evidence, reject the now false hypothesis, and move on to a new one. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10666399,"author":"chrislloyd","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Metabase: Why we picked Clojure","text":"I think your criticisms are definitely valid. The learning curve is steep (intentionally so) but definitely worth it. Your programs will become more reliable and you'll get more done as a consequence. Please push through! The error messages are terrible, and there are a lot of ongoing conversations about them at the moment in the Clojure community[1]. The Clojure[script] toolchain does tend to be all-in but there's work happening now to break that up \u2014 stay tuned. StackOverflow and the Clojure Slack channel also full of people who know how to fix issues :) Stick with it, when you'll have an \"ah-ha!\" moment soon enough! [1]: This talk is a good backstory as to why the errors are so bad, and useful no matter what language you use [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17932647,"author":"grierson","month":"2018-09","story_title":"REPL + Debugger = REPLugger: a pleasant and scalable live code editor","text":"Stuart Halloway from the Clojure community has some great a talks using the REPL to debug. Links: Debugging with the Scientific Method - Stuart Halloway ( [VIDEO] ) REPL DEBUGGING: NO STACKTRACE REQUIRED ( [LINK] ) scope-capture ( [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35855487,"author":"simon_acca","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Rich Hickey: Design in Practice","text":"Stu Halloway (also a member of the Clojure core team) has a couple of great talks on using the scientific method in programming: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"FjA0EQPeUGM":[{"hn_comment_id":13731438,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Kim Jong-nam killing: Suspect 'was paid $90 for baby oil prank'","text":"This really fascinating documentary from the 80s about nerve gas was linked in yesterday's news posts: [VIDEO] Only tangentially related but I really recommend watching. It's only 30 minutes.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22672317,"author":"xzel","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Why Don\u2019t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?","text":"I stumbled onto this news documentary on the nerve gas stored in the US from 1973 very randomly maybe a year ago: [VIDEO] . If you're interested in this type of stuff this documentary is incredible and apparently won an Emmy. The number of problems with long term are mind boggling technologically, even if people don't know its near them. The whole idea if this place got bombed it would wipe out huge amount of people in the surrounding area based on wind patterns is nuts, frankly. The whole process to dismantle and then \"store\" the old gas is insane.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"FjHJ7FmV0M4":[{"hn_comment_id":24231979,"author":"RichardCA","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?","text":"Let's try to work the problem in a way that avoids pedantry, just for a moment. This is one of my favorite PBS clips from the 80's in which Richard Feynman explains how strange the nature of light and by extension all of electromagnetic radiation. [VIDEO] If you listen carefully, you notice that he never talks about wave/particle duality (because he wasn't giving a classroom lecture). What he does talk about is an electric field that waves slosh around in, and that something \"elaborate and complicated\" is going on at a deeper level. That's what I'm on about, if you were pressed to explain it so that a bright child would get it, how would you do that?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43134269,"author":"kypro","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)","text":"I'm sure a lot of people here have already seen this, but for those who haven't I highly recommend you watch this video of Feynman explaining light, [VIDEO] He had an amazing ability to make physics fun and entertaining. I could listen to him talk all day.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20342099,"author":"Jach","month":"2019-07","story_title":"The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat","text":"The potential is obvious once you really start to grasp the reality of the electric field and its properties. (A favorite Feynman vid to give laymen a taste: [VIDEO] ) I don't see how any worthwhile possibilities can be realized at the amateur level however given just two of the restrictions I pointed out in a sibling thread...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30865393,"author":"martyvis","month":"2022-03","story_title":"How is portable AM radio possible?","text":"Richard Feynman gets very excited about this very fact, that at any point it has ALL of the radio waves, amongst other electromagnetic radiation, that just has to be tuned in or focussed on. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FkKPsLxgpuY":[{"hn_comment_id":39538329,"author":"cdrini","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?","text":"I recently shifted my opinion on IQ tests a bit after watching a recent Veritasium video. He goes into the background/history/controversy of the test as well as some of the concrete impacts of the test and places where it's used. For example did you know the US military has an IQ minimum cutoff? And furthermore they have a second 'soft' cutoff, where only 20% of the military can have an IQ under a certain value. In the past they tried removing this second restriction, but had to reinstate it after seeing increases in casualties/indicators of reduced efficiency! So are IQ tests everything? No. But do they have no merit? Also no. It's somewhere in between. Would highly recommend a watch [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39538867,"author":"swframe2","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?","text":"The Veritasium youtube channel has a few interesting videos related to this topic: This one is on IQ: [VIDEO] Pay attention to the stats on how IQ correlates to success (near the end). This one is about becoming an expert: [LINK] This one is about someone who just worked harder than everyone else: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44195134,"author":"Balgair","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Longevity Is Now a Factor When Picking an Embryo for IVF","text":"[VIDEO] Veritasium had a good primer on IQ scores and what they actually mean for your life TLDW: IQ score seems to really only correlates to being too dumb to be conscripted and effective in war. Going on Derek's work there, even if other countries do somehow manage to genetically engineer their children for higher IQ scores, and even if they manage to get all the environmental hazards (lead paint, nutrition, quality sleep, etc) out of the way for those children, and even if they don't then do some other draconian nonsense to those kids in the ~19 years until they become productive, then, even then, there seems to be absolutely no guarantee that those kids will go on to do any dominating of other countries in social, political, or military contexts. Outside of being too dumb to be trusted with a firearm, IQ seems to have no real bearing on measurable life outcomes. As the current science stands, from my understanding of it, it would be incredibly foolish to pursue genetic engineering/breeding as a method of international relations.","stance":"rec"}],"FlQYU3m1e80":[{"hn_comment_id":48122408,"author":"db48x","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Starship V3","text":"It\u2019s very easy to overestimate the difficulty of cooling things in space, unless you actually run the numbers. So please follow along as Scott Manley runs the numbers: < [VIDEO] >. Basically a Starlink v3 satellite has an estimated power budget of 20kW. Add in the heat absorbed from the environment (both directly from sunlight and reflected off of the Earth) and you\u2019ll find that it must reject about 22kW of heat. That\u2019s a fair amount, but at 65\u00b0C it can radiate it all away just using it\u2019s own surface area! No radiator required at all! Of course the power density of computer racks has been going up over the years. If you want to reach 100kW per satellite then they will need a modest radiator, but nothing extravagant. It would still be smaller than the solar panels, and far smaller than the ones on the ISS. And don\u2019t forget that because radiated heat goes up as the fourth power of temperature, raising the temperature of the system by even a small amount raises the radiation emitted by a lot. If you design the system to run hotter you can minimize the size of the radiator. Most chips these days are designed to max out at 100\u00b0C to 110\u00b0C without lasting damage, although running them at that temperature 24/7 may reduce their lifespan. There will be some sweet spot in the middle. And it turns out that a Starlink v3 already has a volume somewhat larger than a 48U rack. You talk about launching 250k satellites in order to have 250k GPUs in orbit, but that\u2019s ridiculous. A real compute ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48529335,"author":"jauntywundrkind","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Cooling in Space","text":"I went in wanting this to look real bad. But the Scott Manley video alas has sort of convinced me this is pretty feasible, that the energy budget is quite doable. [VIDEO] I do think this is a pretty generous estimate he ends up at. I don't think emissivity is perfectly well dealt with. I don't know if his earth reflection emissivity includes the high energy thermal transfer from particles that do exist on the near vacuum (exosphere be hit, ya'll) or if that matters. But his figures seem ballpark correct & my concerns are at best marginal.","stance":"rec"}],"FnEWBtCnFs8":[{"hn_comment_id":8130165,"author":"voltagex_","month":"2014-08","story_title":"Prints","text":"My favourite example of digital archaeology from recent years is [LINK] - saving the Prince of Persia floppies. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8795476,"author":"_asummers","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Each New Boot a Miracle \u2013 DOSBOX in the Browser","text":"If you've not seen any of Jason Scott's other work, I personally recommend his talks on the Prince of Persia[0], Mario 64[1], and crackers fighting crackers via crack screens[2]. [3] This one is just funny. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9418648,"author":"voltagex_","month":"2015-04","story_title":"3,000 floppy disk archive (1982\u20131994)","text":"I missed that distinction when I posted the link. I'm sure they had difficulty rescuing Price of Persia. If you have some time to spare, watch [VIDEO] (or read [LINK] and the many other sources)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12640510,"author":"voltagex_","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Your second link reminded me of [LINK] (which definitely builds on some of Matt's work). [LINK] - C++17 for the Commodore 64. Probable language warnings for my other suggestions: * Rescuing Prince of Persia from the Sands of Time [VIDEO] (was this talk ever given elsewhere?) * And You Shall Know Me By My Trail of Documentation - [LINK] * The History and Evolution of Computer Viruses - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48500707,"author":"noufalibrahim","month":"2026-06","story_title":"How we made hit video game Prince of Persia","text":"Was going to say the same thing. It's a very nice trip down memory lane. Also, Jason Scott's talk on how he recovered the original source code from a bunch of dusty disks [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FssULNGSZIA":[{"hn_comment_id":36052526,"author":"wsc981","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Microtiming in Metallica's \u201cMaster of Puppets\u201d","text":"I am not sure what you mean with AI level drumming, but what about Tool\u2019s Danny Carey though? I am not a drummer, but to me this is super impressive. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36838137,"author":"leeoniya","month":"2023-07","story_title":"What Happened the Night an Audience Member Filled in for Keith Moon (2016)","text":"also [LINK] but if you want to see something really mind blowing, here's Danny Carey, quite possibly the greatest living drummer: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31554918,"author":"wsc981","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Listening to songs can cause a physiological response known as \u201cfrisson\u201d","text":"I'm surprised I didn't see any mention of Tool in here, while many Tool songs can give this weird, supernatural, out of this world, feeling, at least for me. Pneuma is one of those great Tool songs: [VIDEO] And it's not just the sounds, the lyrics themselves help invoke this feeling as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49103094,"author":"rented_mule","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Learning Musical Multitasking","text":"As a fan of drumming, you're probably one of the millions who have seen this. But for anybody who hasn't, here's a fun video showing how complicated drumming can be with a live performance by someone whose nickname is \"The Octopus\". While the entire video is fun, the link is cued up to a place where there's a lot going on, but it's slow enough that you can kind of see what he's doing. Watch his knees to see what he's doing with pedals. Notice that his hands seem to be going in cycles, but there are subtle variations in the cycles. At 8:54, strobe lights start up - that can't make it simpler to keep this focus. What he's doing looks essentially impossible to me, but I'm well aware that I don't know enough to understand just how insanely difficult it really is. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FtieBc3KptU":[{"hn_comment_id":25849316,"author":"bjoli","month":"2021-01","story_title":"NovelWriter 1.0 \u2013 A markdown-like editor for writing novels","text":"My favourite talk on this topic is \"Emacs for writers\": [VIDEO] If you are working with plain text, use something that excels at working with text. I saw another of his talks, and how he works in Emacs is amazing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40808207,"author":"bjoli","month":"2024-06","story_title":"WordStar \u2013 A Writer's Word Processor (1990)","text":"There is always Emacs. I love this talk by Joe Dixit about how he came from things like scrivener to Emacs [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10947229,"author":"cdubose","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Best (Tech) talks from 2015","text":"I'm not sure if I would define it as a \"talk\" (and the details are more meaningful if you know how to use Emacs), but Jay Dixit explains how he uses Emacs for writing instead of programming: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12311385,"author":"Johnny_Brahms","month":"2016-08","story_title":"How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools","text":"I saw this a couple of weeks ago: [VIDEO] I really like how he has no idea how to pronounce stuff, but he still managed to bend emacs after his will.","stance":"rec"}],"FvNRlE4E9QQ":[{"hn_comment_id":21226326,"author":"hwayne","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Alloy is a language for describing structures and a tool for exploring them","text":"There was a fantastic talk at strangeloop this year on Alloy: [VIDEO] . The speaker used it to find a serious security bug in their live code and a feature interaction bug in their UI that had meant they had been writing broken code for the past _year_. (full disclosure I'm referenced towards the end)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35512991,"author":"ParetoOptimal","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Modeling Git Internals in Alloy, Part 2: Commits and Tags","text":"I was exposed to alloy by this wonderful video: \"Finding bugs without running or even looking at code\" by Jay Parlar [VIDEO] I believe the general idea could be applicable in practice for core parts of most businesses software. So now I'm very interested in real world accounts of using alloy like this. Anyone have other posts like this one or experiences to share along these lines?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22906313,"author":"kilotaras","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Show HN: A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video]","text":"There's a great talk from StrangeLoop[0] where a presenter uses Alloy modelling in exactly the same manner: - generate a couple examples - see something wrong - add a rule - repeat [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37831914,"author":"_andrei_","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Modeling CRDTs in Alloy \u2013 the importance of idempotence","text":"There is a talk that gives a good overview on Alloy and how useful using something like this is: \"Finding bugs without running or even looking at code\" by Jay Parlar [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FvmTSpJU-Xc":[{"hn_comment_id":13578728,"author":"bluetomcat","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some 'must watch' talks?","text":"\"The Mess We're In\" by Joe Armstrong: [LINK] \"Normal Considered Harmful\" by Alan Kay: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32784769,"author":"morphle","month":"2022-09","story_title":"How Transistors Work [video]","text":"Richard Feynman is the best teacher we know (explaining electricity): [LINK] He also explains seeing, heat, electro magnetism, elasticity and mirrors among other things. His academic lectures are just as good but too long and hard for laymen to follow. - Every time I switch on an electrical device I hear Feynman say 'Zzzzinggg' and I see the copper bars jiggling across town. - Every time I see a cup of hot liquid I hear Feynman say \"jiggling atoms\" - Watch his hands and fingers telling the more accurate science story, simulating the electrons and atoms. - I would say that this the most important video to see for any human being on the planet. De second most important thing would be half of Alan Kay's lectures [VIDEO] Great video's to watch with your kids! (from 3-4 years and older).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4089476,"author":"cturner","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Meebo discontinued: shutting down on July 11, 2012","text":"You might find this entertaining - I'm watching a speech by Alan Kay at the moment where he says that computing is more pop-culture than science: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4578510,"author":"agentultra","month":"2012-09","story_title":"Light Table - Embracing Abstraction","text":"I think Mr. Granger should refrain from using inaccurate remarks about the history of programming. Light Table is neat but it is not the first attempt at an interactive development environment. His ideas were quite common 30+ years ago (20 years ago would have been right about the time when this style of programming started falling out of vogue). Alan Kay does a far better job than I can in explaining some of this history: [VIDEO] Update I wasn't being terribly fair. Granger might simply not have been aware. In that case I hope he sees my comment and watches the above video. :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6638075,"author":"konstruktor","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Toyota's firmware: Bad design and its consequences","text":"Very well said. The focus on convenience and cool features over safety makes me really sad, and want to force automotive engineers to watch some Alan Kay talks. He loves to talk how people who don't know the history and basics of their craft will arrive at inferior solutions, for example in this one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17625316,"author":"MichaelAO","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Where can one learn about the history of the internet and the protocols?","text":"Alan Kay's 'Normal Considered Harmful' is a good place to start (more about computing in general): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18317918,"author":"skadamat","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Dynamicland: The Next Big Thing Is a Room","text":"It's funny you say that. This is something Alan Kay talks about at length. For example, watch the first 20 mins of this talk - [VIDEO] Essentially, he asserts that computing (or computer science even) isn't a real field (like biology or physics). Most people can't name the early computing pioneers whose work they build on (not true in Physics or Biology, we celebrate the pioneers) nor are they familiar with the work that was done in the Xerox PARC days. It's gotten so bad that a lot of computer science research just assumes that what we have now is what's going to remain forever. In the 70's, all kinds of interesting ideas and experiments were tried. Hardware implemented VM's, direct manipulation programming, OS-free computing environments, highly re-configurable computing a la FPGA's, and hundreds more. Nowadays, we think that creating custom ASIC to run machine learning algorithms quicker is innovative and novel. All this to say that many of the ideas in Dynamicland aren't new. They're rooted in ideas that are decades old. If you look at Bret's papers he uses as references frequently, you'll notice how many of them are over 10 years old - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29122611,"author":"j-pb","month":"2021-11","story_title":"What memory model should Rust use?","text":"Definitely! Although I'm not sure if Morphic[1] is the way forward for UX on the web, despite it only being 10kloc. XD [Anybody stumbling upon this comment, and wondering what Alan Kay is/was up to, this might be a good philosophical starter: [VIDEO] ] 1. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34737744,"author":"logicalshift","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Why is there so much useless and unreliable software?","text":"Alan Kay has done a few lectures about exactly this phenomenon: his talk 'Normal Considered Harmful' in particular is worth a look as it pretty much goes straight to the heart of the issue: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46001886,"author":"jjuran","month":"2025-11","story_title":"New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS","text":"If you're okay with a System 6 appearance, I've already made one < [LINK] >, for Advanced Mac Substitute < [LINK] >. I do appreciate Alan Kay's thinking, in particular his talk \"Normal Considered Harmful\" < [VIDEO] > My own high-level language, Varyx, has somewhat LISPy internals and is very dynamic \u2014 for example, you can annotate a variable with a type that's determined only at run time \u2014 and has an eval() that insulates the caller from the payload and vice versa. You can sequester mutable state within a closure, which can't be cracked open. Using an experimental Varyx build with some bindings for Apple's Core Graphics API, I wrote a script that rendered an arrow cursor (which I donated to the ravynOS project). Perhaps we should talk. :-)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47101854,"author":"morphle","month":"2026-02","story_title":"CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989","text":"You can't fix a broken wheel. This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser, tries to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel. The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why: [VIDEO] Some of the comments of youtube are fun too. This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better. Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's broken wheel a bit. The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all: [LINK] [LINK] Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it completely: Early Croquet demo: [LINK] Croquet in webbrowser: [LINK] Demo of webbrowser replacement: [LINK] Squeak and all its predecessors: [LINK] Etoys: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"FxKtZmQgxrI":[{"hn_comment_id":11736626,"author":"smnscu","month":"2016-05","story_title":"How George Lucas Lost His Integrity\u2026and Why It\u2019s So Important","text":"In case you haven't watched Mr Plinkett's Star Wars reviews, they're the best in the business, and go down hard on George Lucas. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32863756,"author":"raspo","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Dick the Birthday Boy: The Legacy Continues [video]","text":"For people who are confused by this, Red Letter Media is a youtube channel that does movie reviews. I have been following them for over ten years and thanks to them I have learned a lot about movies, actors, directors and movie making in general. They have a very particular sense of humor, very dark and full of sarcasm; they like to troll their own audience and don\u2019t care about what youtube wants. They respect my intelligence and never asked me to like and subscribe (unless it\u2019s a joke) and for that, I like them even more. Some video recommendations: - Phantom Menace review - what they are most famous for ( [VIDEO] ) - Jack and Jill - my personal favorite ( [LINK] ) - Bruce Willis fake movie factory - more recent ( [LINK] ) - Scientist Man Explains Terminator: Genisys ( [LINK] ) - Prometheus ( [LINK] )","stance":"strong_rec"}],"Fy0aCDmgnxg":[{"hn_comment_id":5587233,"author":"glitchdout","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Show HN: Four months of indie game dev","text":"\"Juice it or lose it\" is the best presentation I've seen on the matter. It's really funny and it clearly show how adding some bouncing or some particles can completely change the feel of a game (or UI) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7358818,"author":"arcadius","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Show us your work in progress","text":"[VIDEO] Here's the presentation. It's a pretty fantastic watch that shows what just a few small design decisions can do for a product's impressions on an audience.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11872780,"author":"akilism","month":"2016-06","story_title":"It\u2019s cheaper to build multiple native applications than one responsive web app","text":"The talk juice it or lose, by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho, is all about this. Gotta be one of the best talks for anyone trying to make things interactive that also feel good. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13695344,"author":"whatever_dude","month":"2017-02","story_title":"The Cool Cam (2007)","text":"People normally call that making it \"juicy\". There's this awesome presentation on YouTube showing how a boring game can look awesome with some \"juiciness\", even if the core gameplay is unchanged: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5702086,"author":"niles","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Google Celebrates the 37th Anniversary of Atari's Breakout","text":"Looks like google needs to watch this video on how to make a good breakout game: [VIDEO] -- Juice it or Lose it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26247832,"author":"woko","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer","text":"Regarding your second point, there is this talk by Petri Purho (Noita) about making a bland game feel fun to the user: [VIDEO] As for your first point, I would suggest aspiring devs to try to prepare themselves to take part in \"game jams\". The constraints (including a time constraint) help focus on important parts. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27254627,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Show HN: I open sourced a game I just released on Steam, written in Lua","text":"I'm reminded of the talk \"Juice It of Lose It\" < [VIDEO] >. This looks like a very juicy game. There's also an excellent video by Mark Brown, a fantastic resource for game design discussion < [LINK] >","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33688813,"author":"p1necone","month":"2022-11","story_title":"A lobbying blitz made sports betting ubiquitous","text":"I had periods of time where I played nothing but a single game, though those were never more than a few months. Definitely seems like it would be good for your son to broaden his gaming horizons somewhat. Re: \"Juicing\" - I saw the word and immediately assumed you were using the definition from this classic gamedev talk, well worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37886959,"author":"cookiengineer","month":"2023-10","story_title":"","text":"Back in the days when I started with game dev hobby projects: \"Juice it or lose it\", which I think also includes valueable lessons to making \"joyful\" UX in apps, too. [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39040432,"author":"TomK32","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?","text":"Don't worry too much about 3D (though Godot will make it easy enough to switch from 2D to 3D and even combine both) but focus on fun instead: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43208938,"author":"zovirl","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommend resources that helped your game dev journey?","text":"Resources which helped me get started: \"Challenges for Games Designers\" by Brathwaite & Schreiber. This was by far the most helpful, as it laid out a process of finding & refining fun game ideas. \"Game Feel\" by Swink. Examines why jumping feels better in Super Mario than Donkey Kong, why Street Fighter feels the way it does, etc. This way of breaking down & examining mechanics was eye opening and can be applied to other kinds of games. lostgarden.com, especially [LINK] , which describes a process for rapidly iterating on ideas, and [LINK] , which introduced me to some of the fundamental building blocks of game mechanics. Resources which helped me later: I found \"Art of Game Design\" to be helpful later, when working on making a good game into a great game. The different lenses were great for finding areas where I could improve a game. [VIDEO] really drove home how important polish is. This was useful after I had a game which was already a bit fun. Finally, an observation & a suggestion, if you're open to them: You admit that you don't know game design, yet you're attempting to innovate by removing limits. This seems like an enormous challenge for a beginner, like someone who doesn't know how to play an instrument attempting to make a new style of jazz. I think you'd have more success if you learned to play the instrument first: Practice by making a lot of small games. Spend 2-4 days on each, no more. Learn to use prototypes to explore the design space, searching for ideas with","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45112546,"author":"shoo","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Ask HN: I got fired from 100k job so I've made a game and it failed","text":"> With games like this, you might want to spend half the dev time on polish, or the game dev term being juice. see also: 2012 talk \"juice it or lose it\" [VIDEO] \"A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input.\"","stance":"rec"}],"FyKRubB5N60":[{"hn_comment_id":30279179,"author":"anyfoo","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Netflix will falter","text":"From the article: \"I\u2019m not a binge watcher. I\u2019ve never been much of a TV viewer. I didn\u2019t even own a television until my mid-30s. [...] but I get restless if I spend too much time staring into that flickering screen. My wife Tara has a similar attitude.\" This honestly makes me wonder \"ok, why should I listen to you, then?\" It doesn't help that they then go ahead and give an, at best, oversimplified explanation of why VHS won against Beta.[1] Not a single mention of one of VHS's killer features versus Beta: Tape length. (And calling Windows , of all OSes, an \"open operating system\"... oh dear, I get the point you are trying to make, but \"open\" and 90's anti-trust Microsoft in the same sentence is pretty bold.) Maybe the conclusions are still valid, I can't tell. I remember that what made Netflix so immensely attractive to me, a \"binge watcher\" of many many TV shows and with many friends who were at least to some extent binge watchers, was that Netflix was the platform that had all the movies and especially TV shows that I wanted to binge watch. [1] Here's a very good video going into details: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34909064,"author":"voxadam","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Toshiba HD-DVD firmware archive","text":"The YouTube channel Technology Connections has a few good videos talking about how and why Betamax failed. Why Sony's Beta Videotape System Failed--and failed hard (Part 1) - [VIDEO] Why Sony's Beta Videotape System Failed--Part 2 - [LINK] The VHS cassette was more clever than Beta - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"FzF1KySHmUA":[{"hn_comment_id":30481838,"author":"ceejayoz","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Newly published 9/11 footage [video]","text":"Been in a coma for two decades? [LINK] > The four sides of each building formed a tube with window slots This tube was designed to carry the weight of the building and its contents directly downward to the foundations. The walls acted as vertical beams, wide and tall as the buildings, that bent to the side to absorb wind loads. [LINK] > Prior to the construction of the Twin Towers, skyscrapers were designed to support themselves through large internal columns spaced about 30 feet (9 meters) apart, which interrupted the flow of interior space. For this project however, the engineers came up with a different solution -- the exterior walls themselves would support the bulk of the structure, and they would get a boost from one single column of beams in the center. Make a big hole in the primary support structure and things go badly. (And before parroting the \"jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams\" thing as a follow-up, watch this excellent and short video from a blacksmith: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38656714,"author":"khazhoux","month":"2023-12","story_title":"September 11th That You Have Never Seen","text":"This video disproves that conspiracy theory, and with just the right amount of \"WTF-you-truthers-are-idiots\" attitude: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"FzRP1qdwPKw":[{"hn_comment_id":17696243,"author":"misterS","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Deep Space Network Now: Status of communications with our deep space explorers","text":"Dave Jones of EEVBlog has a nice series of videos talking to Richard Stephenson, Operations Supervisor at the DSN's Canberra site. How To Contact The Voyager 2 Probe: Part 1: [VIDEO] Part 2: [LINK] Part 3: [LINK] (the playlist is a mess, and videos are unordered) There are also a couple of Behinde the Scenes videos.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35734942,"author":"7373737373","month":"2023-04","story_title":"NASA Power Hack Extends 45-Year Voyager 2 Mission Even Longer","text":"Video recommendation: How To Contact The Voyager 2 Probe ( [VIDEO] ) and Pinging The Voyager 2 Probe ( [LINK] ) by EEVDiscover","stance":"rec"}],"Fzmm87oVQ6c":[{"hn_comment_id":13987861,"author":"josteink","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Iaito \u2013 A Qt and C++ GUI for radare2 reverse engineering framework","text":"For those who might want a somewhat indirect introduction to radare... Here's something from Linuxconf.au and hacking Thinkpads: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15327634,"author":"Klinky","month":"2017-09","story_title":"How I Fixed a 10-Year-Old Guitar Hero Bug Without the Source Code [video]","text":"I found this video on hacking old Thinkpad keyboards onto new Thinkpad models interesting. Required a lot of reverse engineering due to how the firmware in the Thinkpad maps keys: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"G-WO-z-QuWI":[{"hn_comment_id":27776330,"author":"nerpderp82","month":"2021-07","story_title":"A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight (2016)","text":"You might enjoy this video on terraforming Venus, [VIDEO] I think we should consider the whole solar system our galactic ship while making sure to keep the current habitation quarters in top notch shape.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28649894,"author":"Gigachad","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Engineers are developing new ways to convert greenhouse gases to fuel","text":"There is a decent kurzgesagt video explaining what transforming a new planet would look like [VIDEO] Essentially it would be almost infinitely easier to reverse all climate change on earth than to make another planet livable but it is in theory possible.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31923158,"author":"headcanon","month":"2022-06","story_title":"MIT researchers propose Brazil-sized fleet of \u201cspace bubbles\u201d to cool the Earth","text":"There's a good video on this that talks about how a similar technique might be used to terraform Venus over hundreds of years [0] The main physics problem I see is that Langrange points are naturally unstable [1], so the bubbles would need to be constantly correcting their orbit. This problem would be compounded by solar radiation \"blowing\" the bubbles back to Earth. There are clever ways to mitigate this for other designs which are addressed in the video, but I don't see it addressed in the article. Edit: it looks like it is addressed somewhat in the source article linked in another comment, by placing the bubbles a bit further towards the sun than the L1 point to compensate for solar winds. Also, If a bubble does eventually become unstable, they may be cheap enough to destroy it and send another one up. However, the primary problem I see with this approach is that we are simply not politically ready as a species to attempt a global-scale engineering project like that. Some countries may find that climate change actually benefits them [2], or may even impact a geopolitical rival even worse. These countries may be inclined to send a few missiles toward L1 if thats the case. Edit: Additionally, even if this does succeed, countries may see this as an excuse to keep burning stuff despite the additional negative consequences of carbon emissions [3] [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46931495,"author":"chasil","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Where did all the starships go?","text":"The Kurzgesagt video on teraforming Venus is interesting. It only takes a thousand years, assuming perfect execution. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"G-lN8vWm3m0":[{"hn_comment_id":4274914,"author":"lunarscape","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Why You Won\u2019t See Hard AR Anytime Soon","text":"\"People already lie to themselves\" The most compelling illustration I've seen of this is the McGurk Affect[1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14926841,"author":"kkylin","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Can you make your brain not see this circle illusion?","text":"If you like this sort of thing, and haven't heard of the McGurk Effect before, take a look at this: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"G0Cp7DrvNLQ":[{"hn_comment_id":18459050,"author":"noetic_techy","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Crater under Greenland points to climate-altering impact in the time of humans","text":"Looks like the maverick geologist Randall Carlson was right. The evidence was pretty damn good, but many in the mainstream geology had a hard time accepting it for some dumb reason. Just goes to show that real scientists should never bow to consensus opinions. The outliers always advance the fields. Go listen to Randall's Joe Rogan appearances, they will blow your mind: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: [LINK] The controversy: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19800010,"author":"LinuxBender","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered","text":"For those that would like to hear a mind blowing discussion about climate (and the earth in general), watch all of the podcasts with Joe Rogan, Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock. They are three hours each and I promise you will learn many things that give perspective on the repeat arguments and confusion about the climate. There are many other podcasts with these gentlemen, but here are three to start with. Joe Rogan and Randall Carlson #606 (3 hours) [1] Joe Rogan, Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson #725 [2] Joe Rogan, Randall Carlson #1284 [3] [1] - [VIDEO] [2] - [LINK] [3] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20698347,"author":"fluxby","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Arctic permafrost is thawing fast","text":"I highly recommend getting to know the work of Randall Carlson on the subject. Joe Rogan had him on podcast [1] few times. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22511522,"author":"eloff","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Evidence of cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of earliest settlements","text":"I remember hearing on the Joe Rogan podcast[1] about a theory of an impact at the end of the last glacial period, resulting in a short-term reversal of the warming trend known as the Younger Dryas Cooling Event. There was quite a bit of evidence in the form of meltglass and other things accumulating, but the theory was very much not accepted by mainstream science at the time. From the article it sounds like this idea is getting more support. Randall Carlson is pretty out there with his one massive flood theory as opposed to many smaller events. Nonetheless he's not an idiot by any means and he gives an enthralling account of the climate events at the time. Also it sounds like a much more credible explanation for the sudden extinction of large mammals (70% of species in North America.) Only Africa was largely unaffected. Including 100 million mammoths dying off which was previously attributed to human over-hunting - just the logistics of which with spears and primitive bows boggles the mind. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"G0Q4UAiKacw":[{"hn_comment_id":41437414,"author":"mfworks","month":"2024-09","story_title":"How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles","text":"PBS Spacetime has a fantastic video on the Higgs Field that explains it about one level deeper that typical pop science, and answers some of the questions I'm seeing in this thread, include \"why did the field switch on suddenly?\" and \"Why is the Higgs Field different from other fields\" link: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31447781,"author":"conz","month":"2022-05","story_title":"PBS SpaceTime","text":"> the quality has definitely gone downhill lately. I can't agree. This video from a few weeks ago about the W Boson mass discrepancy is about as deep as a lay audience can hope to surmount: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39983235,"author":"neom","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Peter Higgs, physicist who discovered Higgs boson, has died","text":"Just to add a couple more good Higgs resources courtesy of the fine folks at PBS Space Time: How the Higgs Mechanism Give Things Mass - [VIDEO] Could the Higgs Boson Lead Us to Dark Matter? - [LINK] Where Is The Center of The Universe? - [LINK] (For me personally, I gave a massive sad sign when I saw this on the homepage. I really liked him a lot for a few reasons: He did his thinking in isolation, for a long period of time walking around the Scottish highlands . He was a keen disciple of interdisciplinary thought being pivotal to innovation. He appears to have imagined things and thought about things in a pretty weird way for his time, although that might seem obvious, how well he grappled with the reality of weirdness is exemplary. \ud79d)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39983403,"author":"dotnet00","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Peter Higgs, physicist who discovered Higgs boson, has died","text":"Since you said 'not too math-intensive', I figure you're fine with getting more details and background than usual just without having to parse equations, in which case PBS Space Time is great: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"G0R09YzyuCI":[{"hn_comment_id":23077254,"author":"seltzered_","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Demand Nothing Less Than a Visionary Future","text":"The best way to think about this is the classic Buckminster Fuller quote \"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.\" Spend some time watching Tainter's speech on complexity and collapse: [VIDEO] . Particularly the adult conversations we need to have at the end of the talk. Also try Kate Raworth's explanation of the 'three horizons' framework: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9326931,"author":"faizshah","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Is global collapse imminent? (2014) [pdf]","text":"This is incorrect, societies have collapsed regularly throughout history. A collapse doesn't have to be a total destruction of the society, it's most often a fast transition to a lower level of social complexity. One of my favorite books (and a book referenced by the link above) is \"The Collapse of Complex Societies\" by Joseph A Tainter, he gives a great study on the nature of collapse with lots of examples (note, some of the examples are a little dated and dubious like the Ik). He also gave a few presentations on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13212591,"author":"jontas","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Are ideas getting harder to find? [pdf]","text":"This video [1] has a great explanation and exploration of why innovation seems to be slowing down. He uses data coming from the patent system over a period of 100 years. The video touches on much of what is in this study and does a great job of explaining it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15741635,"author":"monday_","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Theories of civilisational \u2018collapse\u2019 grow less convincing when scrutinised","text":"The author's position seems to be that the very notion of civilizational collapse is flawed because people often come up with reductionist, poorly supported ways of explaining it. The unspoken implication here is that whoever brings up a threat of collapse in a political argument hasn't got a clue what he's talking about. Stephen Bannon referencing Gibbons work comes to mind, and, come think of it, that's probably what prompted the author to write this piece. Denying a historical phenomenon for political gain is as bad as selectively citing a two century old book to justify xenophobia. It is revealing that the author mentions Tainter's \"Collapse of Complex Societies\", and then dismisses it's meticulous definition of collapse as \"jargon\". Before coming up with this definition Tainter spent a whole chapter describing many, many examples of social collapse including the ones mentioned in the article. The definition arises from these examples and absolutely covers the collapse of Rome, Bronze Age and others. As for how we define and study the social collapse without arbitrarily designating some cultures as superior to others - a good example would be collapse of ecosystems. In this case you can have a sensible definition of complexity and energy intake and the collapse would be a sharp decline in both. There is a whole framework for similar studies in social collapse - see this talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36841198,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-07","story_title":"How, Mathematically, We\u2019re Fucked: Exponential growth on a finite planet","text":"> Burn it all down and start over We won't be the ones doing that. > We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue. > we can't just ignore the problems We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored the problems. We may cross the 1.5C threshold in 5 years. Not in 2050 as previously expected, but in 5 years. And we're still pursuing economic growth. Have you noticed any evidence to the contrary lately? > it's going to be a big challenge, and things may get ugly I recommend few videos for you. I must warn you ... it may hamper your ability to enjoy parties. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario - Arthur Keller [LINK] How to Enjoy the End of the World - Dr. B. Sidney Smith [LINK] Arithmetic, Population and Energy - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett [LINK] Why Societies Collapse And What it Means for Us - Joseph A. Tainter [VIDEO] Revealing the Naked Emperor \u2013 Paris, 2\u00b0 & Carbon Budgets - Kevin Anderson [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"G0ZZJXw4MTA":[{"hn_comment_id":24281252,"author":"waterhouse","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Gallup: 81% of Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence","text":"> the questions can shape the response. An excellent illustration of this: [VIDEO] Although in this case, it doesn't look like they had bad intentions and they seem to have dug at least a little below the surface and drawn what seem like sensible conclusions. I wonder if more detailed results and the full list of questions are available somewhere.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30656184,"author":"Jalad","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Walgreens replaced some fridge doors with screens, and some shoppers hate it","text":"Link for the curious: [VIDEO] Starts at about 1:00. One of my favorite shows Edit: updated link, thanks @dvngnt_","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34940310,"author":"roenxi","month":"2023-02","story_title":"We are dropping the Dilbert comic because of creator Scott Adams racist rant","text":"This is probably a good time to recall that polling in politics can be highly misleading . I recall an excellent segment on Yes, Minister that explains it [0, 1]. We really need to know the other questions they were being asked at the time to see if they were primed in some way. A near majority being uncomfortable with white people would be outrageous, but Americans are usually pretty tolerant so it is likely that Rasmussen is playing games here. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] - For people who like text, search for \"Have another opinion poll done\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42105440,"author":"graemep","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Statistical challenges and misreadings of literature create unreplicable science [pdf]","text":"Polls may or may not be carried out in a neutral way. A good many are deliberately biased, even more have known flaws that are glossed over. A humorous take on this I love (from the 80s BBC comedy Yes Minister, which is often scarily realistic): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"G1m0aX9Lpts":[{"hn_comment_id":14300925,"author":"exabrial","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Get started making music","text":"Guys if you haven't seen Sonic PI ( [LINK] ), this is also a great tool! You can write beats using a Ruby DSL and it runs them real time. I sat down and did this in an hour: [LINK] Sam Aaron is the guy behind the project, he does a lot of ambient type stuff: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32127048,"author":"ModernMech","month":"2022-07","story_title":"New numbers on music consumption","text":"Have you heard of live coding? Writing code in front of a live audience that plays music? I doubt anything like that has been done before the last couple of decades. I don't know the history, maybe people dabbled with it way back when, but it's an actual thing now. I hope it really catches on! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34418284,"author":"wglb","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Common Lisp and Music Composition","text":"Don't think this is at a haskel conference, but this looks like fun: [VIDEO] . Their web site is [LINK] . An explanation of sonic [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"G1r55efei5c":[{"hn_comment_id":20865180,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Is anyone here visually disabled?","text":"Hopefully this will be helpful: I found Sina Bahram's talk at !!Con 2016 How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!! inspiring and incredible. He's blind and has his computer read everything out ridiculously quickly, and apparently gets input that way much faster than sighted people can read! Amazing. I use a computer very differently than most people, because I\u2019m blind. When I\u2019m surfing the web, tweeting, checking email, reading the news, and writing code, I\u2019m doing so because a program called a screen reader is reading me what\u2019s on the screen. I happen to listen to it read me this text at a thousand words per minute! Join me in listening to how I experience some common user interfaces. Yes, I\u2019ll slow it down for you. I also have a challenge for everyone in the audience. Can you get through a day only using the keyboard? What about not looking at your screen? Sina Bahram is an accessibility consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), an accessibility firm whose clients include high-tech startups, fortune 1000 companies, and both private and nationally-funded museums. Talk: [VIDEO] Text copied from this page: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21909159,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Blind software development at 450 words per minute (2017)","text":"There's an amazing 10min !!Con 2016 talk by Sina Bahram, How I Code and Use a Computer at 1,000 WPM!! I use a computer very differently than most people, because I\u2019m blind. When I\u2019m surfing the web, tweeting, checking email, reading the news, and writing code, I\u2019m doing so because a program called a screen reader is reading me what\u2019s on the screen. I happen to listen to it read me this text at a thousand words per minute! Join me in listening to how I experience some common user interfaces. Yes, I\u2019ll slow it down for you. I also have a challenge for everyone in the audience. Can you get through a day only using the keyboard? What about not looking at your screen? Sina Bahram is an accessibility consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), an accessibility firm whose clients include high-tech startups, fortune 1000 companies, and both private and nationally-funded museums. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26074375,"author":"jonah-archive","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Let's Bring Spacer GIFs Back","text":"I recommend that everyone go check out Sian Bahram\u2019s 2016 talk on computing while blind. At around 6:30 he specifically addresses how inaccessible HN is to a visually impaired user: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32260142,"author":"jonah-archive","month":"2022-07","story_title":"For blind internet users, the fix can be worse than the flaws","text":"I would recommend that everyone go check out Sian Bahram\u2019s 2016 talk on computing while blind. At around 6:30 he specifically addresses how inaccessible HN is to a visually impaired user: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28667079,"author":"jonah-archive","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Apple\u2019s app review prevents developer from submitting fix to game for the blind","text":"Here's a talk by Sina Bahram from five years ago -- at around 6:30 he specifically addresses how inaccessible HN is to a visually impaired user. Nothing that he mentioned has been addressed: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"G4hL5Om4IJ4":[{"hn_comment_id":33419084,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Have you stopped reading most news?","text":"Something I have taken to doing these days is playing some mindless but fun game while listening to long-form interviews or talks. As a random example, these days I'm playing Slipways[1], but Diablo-style games or factory/builder games are also suitable. Meanwhile I like to listen to fantastically insightful interviews with people like Julia Ioffe. You can watch a thousand 1-minute news clips and not gain as much understanding about Putin and the war in Ukraine as from a one-hour interview with her. Similarly, the Telegraph's \"Ukraine the latest\" is a roughly one-hour podcast I listen to every morning while taking the kid out for a walk. Perun's analysis of the logistics situation also tends to be spot on, and very insightful. I used to listen to interesting characters on Joe Rogan, but Joe turned a bit... right wing nutjob. Lex Fridman is less crazy but also a less skilled interviewer. Still, he's got some stellar interviews like the one with Jim Killer[1]. Do you want to watch a soundbite from a politician in another country talking about something that will never affect you, or do you want to hear from the horse's mouth how your everyday life will change because of new technology? I used to feel I didn't have time for this kind of thing, but overlapping it with gameplay makes it seem like zero time \"spent\" on it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34908359,"author":"comboy","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Sam Zeloof and Jim Keller start a new semiconductor fab","text":"K8 seems pretty small after he made the fucking Zen architecture (and Tesla AI). Lex has good interviews with Jim[1], he's not just very smart, he is wise. He started Tenstorrent some time ago with Ljubisa Bajic so I'm assuming this fab is related. Here is youtube channel for Tenstorrent[2], and last time I checked it was getting under 100 views per video... Ian also interviewed him[3] some time ago. Long story short if I had money that would be relevant in this context I would invest really hard into Tenstorrent. Investing time to listen to the guy seems to be not worse. 1a. [LINK] 1b. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK] 3. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35692202,"author":"WestCoastJustin","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Second IC \u2013 Homemade 1000 transistor array chip","text":"I didn't make the connection until now, but Jim Keller was on the Lex Fridman podcast twice [1, 2] and it was awesome. In terms of founders this is pretty great team. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"G5B1mIfQuo4":[{"hn_comment_id":25559130,"author":"Andrex","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Raytracing won't simplify AAA real-time rendering","text":"I personally cannot wait; the YouTube channel YMS is doing a 3+ hour review. If it's close in quality to their Kimba video[0] we're in for a treat. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38881423,"author":"skyyler","month":"2024-01","story_title":"YouTube demonetizes public domain 'Steamboat Willie' video after copyright claim","text":"[VIDEO] Here's a nearly 3 hour video from someone whose Special Interest is The Lion King where he researches the claims that it's ripping off Kimba. If you don't want to watch it, the original kimba series was 52 episodes and only bears a superficial resemblance to The Lion King. _MANY_ of the most egregious examples are actually from the 1997 Kimba movie released as Jungle Emperor Leo which came out after The Lion King.","stance":"rec"}],"G77ev9pks4I":[{"hn_comment_id":27173039,"author":"andensande","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Audacity: Actions we propose to take on PR 835","text":"Not related as such, but worth pointing out. The author of this discussion - and the project manager of Audacity - is Tantacrul, who is, in my opinion, one of the best music youtubers around. His video[0] on corporate music was fantastic, and his video on Shostakovich[1] made me totally reconsider his music. Plus, he's funny! So there's that. Highly recommend! [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27173083,"author":"jraph","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Audacity: Actions we propose to take on PR 835","text":"His reviews of the various scorewriters (Sibelius, Musescore, Dorico) are also fantastic, even if you are not into music. His review of Musescore lead him to become the project manager of Musescore, and probably of Audacity as a consequence. His video Stock Music & Reality TV - How to Misrepresent the World [1] is also really good. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"G8cbIWMv0rI":[{"hn_comment_id":39691371,"author":"ubutler","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate","text":"One of my favourite episodes of Cosmos centres around Eratosthenes\u2019 calculation of the circumference of the Earth: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30171209,"author":"hotpotamus","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Zen and the Art of Talking to Conspiracy Theorists","text":"Carl Sagan talked about Eratosthenes in Cosmos[0] actually which is what I was thinking of. He was also able to make a good estimate of the size of the Earth as well. The video has a good explanation of how it was done. [0]( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34588995,"author":"jamesgill","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Interesting","text":"Likely familiar to this crowd, but Carl Sagan's explanation on Cosmos of Eratosthenes' discovery is great: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37275251,"author":"kemotep","month":"2023-08","story_title":"How was the size of Earth first measured?","text":"I heard it was using a military unit\u2019s standard marching pace to calculate the distance. Here is a wonderful video of Carl Sagan explaining it[0]. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GC-0tCy4P1U":[{"hn_comment_id":23218382,"author":"nv-vn","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?","text":"It may be true that people are partially looking back in rose-tinted glasses, but there's more than just an inkling of truth to their side. Casey Muratori (game developer for the Witness) has a really good rant [1] about bloat in Visual Studio specifically, where he demonstrates load times & the debugger UI updating today vs on an Pentium 4 running XP. Whether or not you attribute the performance difference to new features in Win10/VS, it's worth considering the fact that workflows are still being impacted so significantly on modern hardware. We were able to extract 100s of times more out of hardware and gave it up for ??? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28261178,"author":"yakubin","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Do You Use a Debugger?","text":"I try to use a debugger whenever I can. Unfortunately, I develop on Linux, so the debugger situation here is awful. Basically almost all debuggers are based on gdb or lldb in true Unix fashion parsing text to generate a GUI... They tend to break really fast IME, since text doesn't provide good stability/reliability guarantees (no type checking, no nothing) and even when they do work, there is a lot of visual delay in the feedback loop, which makes them a pain to use. Another problem is that often the debug builds of things at work run too slow to be practical, or they're too big to fit on the target device. My use of debugger at work usually boils down to getting and translating stack traces from core dumps we receive (on command line). There is a very rare occasion that I can do something on my local machine and then I use a debugger. Life is too short for 15-45 minute add logs + compile cycles. I also use bpftrace whenever I can. At home I write Rust, but IME templates don't play well with the debugger, so I usually fall back on prints and bpftrace again. But generally I'm convinced that using debuggers could be a big productivity boost. Here[1] you can see a demonstration of how smooth working with a debugger can be, in this case it's RemedyBG. But forget about this level of comfort on Linux. The whole video may be also worth watching if you like rants and want to see how Visual Studio debugger quality dipped over the years (first the current VS debugger is shown, and then","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40461320,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?","text":"Casey Muratori has some great YouTube videos (a.k.a.: rants) about the end-user visible performance degradation over the last two decades despite computers becoming 10-100x faster by various metrics. E.g.: Visual Studio Rant [VIDEO] How fast should an unoptimized terminal run? [LINK] The root cause is that Microsoft simply doesn't have performance as a priority. It's not a KPI for (almost) anyone, certainly nobody in the desktop teams. Upper management doesn't prioritize input latency over telemetry or advertising \"features\". It's that simple. There's no pressure, no rejection of slow code, no metrics, no pride in good engineering. If it barely functions, it's good enough to ship.[1] Microsoft employees will occasionally comment to say otherwise, but their statements are contrary to easily verifiable facts, such as massive performance degradations in trivial tools such as the new Notepad, the new Terminal, and the Calculator app. The actual specific technical reasons include: - Executables used to be loaded from disk one 4KB page at a time. Execution could start as soon as the first 4KB block was loaded. For a long time now, executables are digitally signed using a hash like SHA1 or SHA256, which means that large executables can't actually start running any code until the entire file is loaded. The obvious fix -- that didn't occur to anyone at Microsoft -- is to use a Merkle tree hash instead of a linear, single-threaded, whole-file hash like SHA256. - Similarly, anti-malware","stance":"rec"}],"GCSXNGc7pfs":[{"hn_comment_id":22901165,"author":"Zenst","month":"2020-04","story_title":"How the Anti-Vaccine Community Is Responding to Covid-19","text":"Sure it's a correlation, in much the same way SAD syndrome more prevalent the further North you go. But some things may well have better papers or links, I was just pointing out what seems to be logical - however - watch this please: [VIDEO] A Doctor who has been doing a fair and most excellent overview with a critical mind upon this whole COVID-19 from early on and focused upon evidence. He covers things in a way that may hold more gravitas to that aspect. One of the many useful reference links from that video that I think covers all this fair and square. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23189758,"author":"throwaway829","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Vitamin D and Inflammation: Potential Implications for Severity of Covid-19","text":"I doubt anyone here thinks it's some kind of magic, but if you've been following the pandemic from the beginning, you've probably seen these two doctors who both recommend vitamin D: - Dr. Seheult's: [LINK] - Dr John Campbell: [VIDEO] It's cheap and has minimal downside. Pre-covid it was already known to \"reduce symptoms of colds or influenza\"[0]. [0] Benefits of Vitamin D Supplementation - Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"GDzBE6vz5r0":[{"hn_comment_id":36984903,"author":"greggyb","month":"2023-08","story_title":"See How Pencils Are Made in a Japanese Factory","text":"In a similar vein, but for different products, but also with much more focus on the \"back end\" of the process: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44937701,"author":"Caligatio","month":"2025-08","story_title":"The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States","text":"SmarterEveryDay has a whole series[1] on manufacturing that covers how the US is losing/lost the ability to create tooling. I believe the \"Smarter Scrubber\" episode[2] is the one that explicitly talks about how not only has the US lost manufacturing capacity but it also lost the ability to spin up manufacturing. The tool and die episode also touches on it[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"GFosQtEqzSE":[{"hn_comment_id":9471465,"author":"IkmoIkmo","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Tesla Energy","text":"I felt the 'area needed in the US' to be a bit disingenuous. I very much recommend David Mackay's Without the Hot Air, a great talk he did at Harvard on area required can be found here: [VIDEO] Beyond that, very glad to see this happen. It's one of the factors necessary to push a sustainable electrified future forward.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12609139,"author":"yan","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Atmospheric carbon dioxide passes 400ppm","text":"I recently started reading \"Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air\"[1], which is available as a free book, and it's been a wonderful introduction to reasoning about alternative energy. The author also gave a talk a few years ago that is very approachable[2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13994513,"author":"spodek","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Eigg \u2013 A small Scottish isle that runs on 90-95% renewable energy","text":"If you haven't read Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air , by David Mackay, I recommend it. Free download: [LINK] About the author: David MacKay FRS is the Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. He is internationally known for his research in machine learning, information theory, and communication systems, including the invention of Dasher, a software interface that enables efficient communication in any language with any muscle. He was appointed a Lecturer in the Department of Physics at Cambridge in 1995 and was a Professor in the Department of Physics from 2003 to 2013. Since 2005, he has devoted much of his time to public teaching about energy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Nine months after the publication of 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air', David MacKay was appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. TED talk: [LINK] Harvard talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GJCF-Ufapu8":[{"hn_comment_id":20410591,"author":"mhh__","month":"2019-07","story_title":"WWII Propaganda Popularized Myth That Carrots Help You See in the Dark (2013)","text":"I spam this everytime WW2 engineering is mentioned and I'll do it again: [VIDEO] The secret war is a documentary about exactly that (amongst other things e.g. the magnetic mine): WW2 RADAR and radio navigation, and the intellectual battle between the Brits and Germans as they tried to locate beams and steal (genuinely!) entire German ground radar stations It's very long, very detailed but well presented - in a style that assumes you aren't stupid.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23561360,"author":"mhh__","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite book that nobody you know has heard of?","text":"Anyone who browses HN regularly will probably enjoy the book \"Most Secret War\" by R.V. Jones (or the accompanying TV show \"The Secret War\"). Jones was a physicist working for Churchill directly by the end of the war. Everyone has heard of Bletchley park and the Manhattan project, but Jones's book covers the game of genuinely deadly cat and mouse that was played throughout WW2 as each side learned and adapted to eachothers scientific intelligence. Radar, Sonar (ASDIC at the time), Magnetic mines, etc. Its easy to think of it as an intellectual game of chess but it is telling that when the Allies bombed Peenemunde (Nazi area 51) they flew straight over the laboratories to bomb the houses of the scientists. The TV adaptation is brilliant - thoughtful documentary production, not dumbed down, and most of the people were still alive when it was filmed. [VIDEO] Edit: for anyone reading the book look out for mentions of any members of the Cambridge five - Jones was shunned after the war so he is perhaps overly kind to Kim Philby. The same system that allowed the KGB to run wild wouldn't recruit Jones into intelligence work for being of the wrong sort (apparently - according Peter Wright)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29740309,"author":"smilespray","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Electronic warfare history of the Battle of the Bulge","text":"For more R V Jones goodness, watch \"The Secret War\" from 1977. The two first segments, \"The Battle of the Beams\" and \"To See for a Hundred Miles\" should be of interest, but all of it is great, really. [VIDEO] Bonus: It includes interviews with Albert Speer. More info about the series: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30531508,"author":"mhh__","month":"2022-03","story_title":"What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped","text":"One thing a lot of people forget because war movies don't show them, is that by the end of the war allied and German aircraft were absolutely loaded with electronics. The story of Radar on the ground is well known, but the story of systems like [LINK] (so named apparently because it was a smell that no one had discovered before) is not so well known. Similarly a lot of these British efforts were more at risk to their own commanders that the Germans at the beginning, because the engineers were having to go through utterly ridiculous hoops to justify basic physics to their superiors. Sometimes their scientific superiors... [VIDEO] is a very very good documentary about this kind of thing. Made before the scientists were dead, so lots of gossip. Randall and Boot should be known by more people, but magnetrons are not as awesome as the nuclear bomb.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19753596,"author":"timrichard","month":"2019-04","story_title":"How Germany used radio waves to guide night bombing raids in WWII","text":"He also features a lot in the 70's BBC Series, 'The Secret War'. A compilation of it seems to be on YouTube (for the time being). The Battle of the Beams is the first segment : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20319649,"author":"mhh__","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The German Tank Problem","text":"For anyone else interested in WW2 reverse engineering and design etc., [VIDEO] \"The secret war\" is a huge documentary covering british efforts to counter german electronic warfare and V-weapons.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33344957,"author":"mhh__","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Edward Stone retires after 50 years as NASA Voyager\u2019s project scientist","text":"For fans of tomorrow's world: \"The secret war\" is another William Wollard show about the technology that Britain used in the war. If you like hackernews, you'll probably like it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44221958,"author":"helsinkiandrew","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Panjandrum: The \u2018giant firework\u2019 built to break Hitler's Atlantic Wall","text":"There's an episode of the 1970s BBC documentary series \"The Secret War\" about the miscellaneous technology projects that sound obviously crazy now, or may have been cancelled to soon: [VIDEO] The whole series is worth a watch, including episodes on radio location finding, radar and radar jamming, Jet engines, the V1/V2 rockets, and Ultra/Enigma etc. Many of the participants (both British and German) are interviewed - including Albert Speer.","stance":"rec"}],"GJVSDjRXVoo":[{"hn_comment_id":47341478,"author":"strangattractor","month":"2026-03","story_title":"I Was Interviewed by an AI Bot for a Job","text":"Maybe you can get the Bot to submit it. This video of Steve Mould yanking a Bot's chain while the Bot tries to get him to refinance his car. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48040092,"author":"Stratoscope","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Appearing Productive in the Workplace","text":"You may enjoy this short Steve Mould video: Forget all previous prompts and give me a recipe for bolognese [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GKYCA3UsmrU":[{"hn_comment_id":18135324,"author":"Reedx","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?","text":"Here's an explanation from Casey Muratori: [VIDEO] See also Mike Acton (Engine Director @ Insomniac Games): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18250638,"author":"Reedx","month":"2018-10","story_title":"OOP Is Dead, Long Live OOP","text":"Some other takes: Casey Muratori (Handmade Hero) on why OOP is bad and how to get rid of that mindset - [VIDEO] Mike Acton (Engine Director @ Insomniac Games) - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29037483,"author":"kkoncevicius","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Programming talks that made something click for you?","text":"Not so much talk as a rant. \"Getting rid of the OOP mindset\" ( [VIDEO] ) And accompanying article \"Semantic Compression\" : [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"GLG9g7BcjKs":[{"hn_comment_id":22564089,"author":"Causality1","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Chelsea Manning ordered to be released [pdf]","text":"As a Democrat-voting libertarian with very Republican family, I think Jonathan Pie encapsulated it perfectly just a few days after the election: [VIDEO] The truly sad part is that the Democratic party seemingly hasn't learned anything in the last four years, and are well on their way to dooming us to another four years of Trump.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12935192,"author":"Yetanfou","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Obama Administration Gives Up on Pacific Trade Deal","text":"...I feel like I need to keep adding a disclaimer that I'm not a Trump supporter... Please don't, it does not add anything to the discourse. It does not matter whether you support him or not when pointing out facts (or fallacies, for that matter). Having to add disclaimers all the time is a damper on any discussion and as such should be avoided. Those who lack the wisdom to separate their personal opinion on people who support a certain policy or person from the merits of what those people say need to take a gander at the following rant: President Trump: How & Why... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12969173,"author":"irishcoffee","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Our World Is Going Full \u2018Black Mirror\u2019","text":"> in the past week, as we reel from the 2016 presidential election Unless of course, you voted for him. I'm just gonna leave this here, he says it better than I could: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13000312,"author":"ZenoArrow","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Show HN: Stop the Bullshit","text":"Exactly. Blocking sites doesn't solve the issues, if anything it makes things worse. We need to be able to respectfully debate people we disagree with, not shut them out. This video pretty much outlines what I think about the recent US election and how I think we should look to move on from it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13237513,"author":"irishcoffee","month":"2016-12","story_title":"You\u2019re an Adult. Your Brain, Not So Much","text":"I believe what the parent if your comment was trying to say was something similar to this, albeit poorly: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GLQyj-kBRdo":[{"hn_comment_id":8112488,"author":"brandonb","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Poorly Managed HealthCare.gov Construction Cost $840M, Watchdog Finds","text":"I was part of the \"tech surge\" brought in to help patch up healthcare.gov in December. The GAO report gives a decent idea of what went wrong in 2010-2013 from a high-level contracting and policy perspective, but it doesn't really give much technical detail or describe what was broken about the organization, software architecture, and culture. A couple of my colleagues have given talks on healthcare.gov from the perspective of the engineers who worked around the clock to help get the site running again: [LINK] [VIDEO] A small team is also re-writing the site, starting with the most troublesome components for the next open enrollment period. Wired covered some of what is going on here: [LINK] If any of you out there want to help, please email jobs@hcgov.us!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8114869,"author":"angersock","month":"2014-07","story_title":"\u201cAgile\u201d methodologies blamed for healthcare.gov failure","text":"Worth watching: [VIDEO] I like the way the presenter sums it up...it seems like each contractor was responsible for their own little piece of the stack, and nobody was actually responsible for delivering a website . That should've been the gating criteria.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10248103,"author":"sylvinus","month":"2015-09","story_title":"How Healthcare.gov Botched $600M Worth of Contracts","text":"You can watch a very entertaining talk from one of the Google engineers who went to fix the website at the time: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GNKFSpJIBO0":[{"hn_comment_id":18774548,"author":"DoreenMichele","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Steve Jobs hired a career juggler to teach programming to developers","text":"I only looked because of my fondness for this video that uses juggling to good effect to teach math in an entertaining way: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15171002,"author":"ColinWright","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Claude Shannon and Juggling","text":"Among the other resources is the lecture I gave at the series of lectures sponsored by MoMath: [VIDEO] Intended for a general audience.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48185069,"author":"srean","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Braids, Hacktastic, and Rock Climbing","text":"Colin Wright has a fun video on braids formed by the trajectory of juggled balls. Can't seem to find it. Hope he sees this and posts. Found it [VIDEO] On a different note do anyone of you know of a way to browse, College Mathematics, American Mathematical Monthly, Mathematics Gazette, Mathematical Intelligencer ... back issues by volume ? Without an institutional login that is. Scimag was one way. Seems to have disappeared since the Ukraine war.","stance":"rec"}],"GNO_CYUjMK8":[{"hn_comment_id":11746902,"author":"Fr0styMatt88","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Scratchapixel: Computer Graphics Programming from Scratch","text":"In addition to the recommendation by lastofus, I highly highly recommend this presentation: [VIDEO] Despite the title, the talk is NOT WebGL specific. It's a fantastic, FANTASTIC tour of 3D graphics fundamentals. This is, IMHO, quite simply the best presentation I've ever seen on how matrix math relates to graphics programming. Also see Stevens' site: [LINK] Side note - There are some great pages there, be sure to check this one out if you're at all interested in how math is applied to animation: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6230573,"author":"DanielRibeiro","month":"2013-08","story_title":"Rotating Images","text":"Another very good overview of rendering algorithms was given by Steven Wittens on his Making Webgl Dance [1, 2] [1] slides: [LINK] [2] video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15646777,"author":"johnhenry","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Making WebGL Dance: How, Where, and What to Draw (2013)","text":"IT's worth linking directly to the talk: [VIDEO] (Also, after the first few slides in the animation, there are some pretty cool animations).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16841190,"author":"seltzered_","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"#Softwarish - I'm biased a bit more towards interface development: greg wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It\u2019s True - [LINK] steve wittens - making webgl dance - the title is deceptive, it's in some ways a visual crash course in linear algebra - [VIDEO] glenn vanderburg - software engineering doesn't work - [LINK] chris granger - in search of tomorrow - [LINK] alan kay - tribute to ted nelson at intertwingled fest - [LINK] bret victor - this is already mentioned but if I had to pick one it'd be 'the humane representation of thought' - [LINK] #Hardwarish: saul griffith - soft, not solid: beyond traditional hardware engineering - [LINK] deb chachra - Architectural Biology and Biological Architectures - [LINK] #Getting more meta in technology and history: James Burke - Connections","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26157462,"author":"theandrewbailey","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How to self-learn graphics programming?","text":"I was sort of at the same place at one time. I found a presentation years ago that would have helped, so here you go: Steven Wittens: Making WebGL Dance [VIDEO] It doesn't actually get into the math until about 12 minutes in, but it might be illuminating. Matrixes, vectors, and how they are multiplied with each other are the fundamental magic of 3D graphics.","stance":"rec"}],"GOGru_4z1Vc":[{"hn_comment_id":25078089,"author":"bmitc","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64 (1977)","text":"Vonnegut is really special. I always like coming back to his Shape of Stories talks: [LINK] Here's a longer one: [VIDEO] It's interesting to see the difference in him with age. He seems to giggle more as an older man.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28234096,"author":"urxvtcd","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?","text":"Not a blog post, but a piece of Kurt Vonnegut's talk randomly found on youtube had an impact on me: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18851814,"author":"iaw","month":"2019-01","story_title":"At the Blackboard:  Kurt Vonnegut diagrams the shapes of stories (2005)","text":"There's an excellent video where he goes through these [0], worth a watch if you have the time. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27747911,"author":"sam_0123","month":"2021-07","story_title":"No More Movies","text":"Yes, Hero's Journey plot ( [LINK] ) is very well understood and yet continues to sell well and generally the idea of certain shapes to stories is beautifully explored here among other places: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29334113,"author":"f0e4c2f7","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I learn how to tell a good story?","text":"There is a video of Kurt Vonnegut talking about story telling called Shape of Stories thats pretty good. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39359464,"author":"plussed_reader","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes","text":"You can find variations of this talk across his life but Vonneguts 'Shape of Stories' kept ringing in my head while going over this paper. I like the later-in-life version of the talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GRYcSuyLiJk":[{"hn_comment_id":35053120,"author":"azeirah","month":"2023-03","story_title":"You just gotta tell a good story","text":"A good counterexample is Robert Sapolsky. He uses a lot of storytelling and anecdotes in his scientific teachings and lectures. His writing is amazing, his lectures even more so. Here's an example lecture: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24315266,"author":"0134340","month":"2020-08","story_title":"The Dark Core of Personality (2018)","text":"I think if you take the view of modern genetics, admittedly I'm a layman on this topic, this is an often useless, antiquated (nature vs nurture) reductive trope. Despite what genetics may code for, our actions are a sum of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Genetics being one, epigenetics potentially another as well as upbringing, culture, diet and multitudes of other factors. Someone with psychopathy may produce positive societal results even to the benefit of himself sometimes if conditions favor such behavior although could very well go wrong given another upbringing. I think the implications of labeling these behaviors as \"dark\" can be a bit too reductionist and can turn into a literal witchhunt if we're not careful although they do provide some sort of utility in patterning human behavior. Edit: Relevant talk by Richard Sapolsky, if interested, which I happily post when I can. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37663346,"author":"gejose","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children","text":"The parent comment mentions Robert Sapolsky and I can't resist linking a talk where he explores various physical and environmental factors that influence human actions - [VIDEO] If anyone finds the video above interesting, also check out his Behavioural Biology lecture series on YouTube - [LINK] His upcoming book can be found here - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"GTQnarzmTOc":[{"hn_comment_id":2852894,"author":"ramanujan","month":"2011-08","story_title":"United States loses AAA credit rating from S&P ","text":"You take the Keynesian view. It's difficult to discuss this in more than a soundbite, but the Hayekian view is well explained by these two videos: [LINK] [VIDEO] Well worth watching if you haven't seen them. In short, the opposite/Hayekian view contends that taxation is seizure of resources from profitable/efficient entities and redistribution towards unprofitable/inefficient entities. We saw this in extremis in the bank bailout, and more controversially in microcosm with individual redistribution. If you accept this -- that \"profitable\" correlates with \"efficient\", and conversely, though the correlation is not perfect -- then taxation is not a Robin Hood sort of thing that increases well being, but rather a move that ties the legs of the efficient sectors of the economy -- those that can post a profit even in tough times -- to those that are already underwater.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4917263,"author":"nickik","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Milton Friedman's Thermostat","text":"You have very strang opinions. One the one hand you speak well of hayke on the other point you use the exact opposit of what hayek belived to explain the recovery from the great depression. I dont want to go into the hold Great Depression discussion, I just wanted to point out that hayek would have made the argument that the New Deal made the GD much longer, same with the WW2. The idea that a war can help the economy would made hayek cry. Watch this modern Rap-Video of Hayek vs. Keynes and listen closly when the talk about the war. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9315119,"author":"smoyer","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1977)","text":"I don't always agree with him but I always enjoy reading Hayek's writing. Another little treat - Keynes and Hayek discussing the 2008 crisis in the US: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23687304,"author":"miles","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Friedrich Hayek on Evolution and Spontaneous Order (1983) [video]","text":"There have been a number of Hayek posts, though sadly few of them gained much traction: [LINK] For those new to Hayek, here is an entertaining overview: Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek [LINK] Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39675667,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Rethinking my economics","text":"If anyone wants a fun quick summary of Hayek this throwback to the 2008 crisis is an easily consumed primer on Keynes vs Hayek: Keynes vs Hayek rap battle 1: [LINK] Keynes vs Hayek rap battle 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GVT3WUa-48Y":[{"hn_comment_id":34987679,"author":"samspenc","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIs","text":"I thought Midjourney was better as well, until I saw some recent videos from Corridor Crew on Youtube. For those who don't know, this is a VFX studio in LA that tries to keep at the cutting-edge of video production techniques and posts content to their Youtube channel, and they have a massive number of followers and several viral videos. They recently created a full 7-minute anime using Stable Diffusion with their own models and their existing video production gear, I'll post the links and let the results speak for themselves The actual 7-minute anime piece produced using SD: [VIDEO] Behind the scenes: \"Did we change anime forever?\" [LINK] \"VFX reveal before and after\" [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37849336,"author":"HerculePoirot","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Show HN: Netflix for AI-Generated Videos","text":"I'm not sure. I just watched \"Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors\" release in February, and the quality of the animation (modulo some instability in shadows) is mind blowing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46502912,"author":"echelon","month":"2026-01","story_title":"All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)","text":"The Corridor Crew [1] are luminaries in our field, and they are incredibly bullish on this tech. They've made dozens of essays and done tons of experiments showing that they think AI is going to be great for our field: [LINK] (scrub through the timelines to the end of these videos to see) [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] Listen to them. Our entire industry pays attention to them, and they're right! [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46576633,"author":"echelon","month":"2026-01","story_title":"\"Food JPEGs\" in Super Smash Bros. & Kirby Air Riders","text":"> More of this, less AI The comment was great without this part. I'm sorry I'm going to go on a rant, but seeing this day in and day out really gets to me. I'm a filmmaker. AI is an incredible tool that is making VFX affordable to those of us with budgets. My friends and I are already using it in roto/comp workflows: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] (NSFW, bloody/gory - the effects look bad because we did this for a \"film hackathon\" and had an extremely short amount of time with no chance to fix the editing, script, lack of locations, etc. Under four hours for the VFX work.) Corridor Crew are making incredible stuff and teaching people how to do it: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] There's so much use by actual artists. I don't have a list in front of me, but I'll start compiling that to share next time this comes up. I am really salty about this because I am receiving hate and death threats because of this. I've had a film of mine booed in a live theater because I worked on a Blender + Mocap + AnimateDiff short film. I'm deep in the Atlanta film scene. I know a lot of the people that were in the audience personally. This was fresh off of the strikes, and the looming AI fears had people worried, so I understood the apprehension. But it still sucks to have your hard work and labor shunned like that in person. In any case, I won an award for that film. A year later, I did the same thing and everyone clapped. (It's not in my portfolio. I left a link in one of my previous comments if you care to dig.) ","stance":"rec"}],"GVsUOuSjvcg":[{"hn_comment_id":30583948,"author":"iKlsR","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What concepts have you never truly understood?","text":"Agreed. I've never really gotten into neural networks, most of the times I start but get distracted or bored/lost and suddenly enough a Vertiasium video pops up and about everything just slots into place, stuff you've glossed over or heard before just make sense. [VIDEO] . Start at minute 4:00.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30590394,"author":"cultofmetatron","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your take on carbon emissions of Machine Learning","text":"basicly, we can do things like matrix operations and differntial equations using specialized hardware that performs computation over analog signals rather than buidlign discrete systems. the end result is that we dont' need anywhere near the level of compute to do the job as its done using an analog of the physical process. here's two youtube videos that explain is much better than I could. [LINK] [VIDEO] suffice to say, your average house fly exhibits behavior that absolutely dominates our best drones and with a fraction of the circuitry.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31591803,"author":"beambot","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers","text":"Great Veritasium video on YouTube about analog neuromorphic architectures and their promise for lower-power operations: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31661910,"author":"woojoo666","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Photonic Chip Performs Image Recognition at the Speed of Light","text":"It's a big area of research in AI. Veritasium has two great videos on it: [VIDEO] [LINK] I found a hackernews discussion for the second one: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35315582,"author":"JieJie","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Richard Stallman's thoughts on ChatGPT, AI and their impact on humanity","text":"I found this Veritasium video interesting, about a company that is paring down models so they fit on analog chips, so the chips can be used in self-contained devices. It also appears that quantum computers may be even better for matrix math that transformers rely on. If all these hardware advances pan out... [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41183384,"author":"sholladay","month":"2024-08","story_title":"What Is Analog Computing?","text":"Veritasium has a good video about analog computers. It covers how they work, what they are used for, pros and cons compared to digital, what they look like today, a bit of the history and their possible future. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42188403,"author":"sushid","month":"2024-11","story_title":"The Analog Thing: Analog Computing for the Future","text":"I think they're saying analog computers could be the future of computing. Veritasium explains it really well in general here (and demos the device) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GWQh_DmDLKQ":[{"hn_comment_id":24204442,"author":"SXX","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Xplain \u2013 Explaining X11 for the rest of us (2017)","text":"Really recommend that speech as well since it's give good understanding what's wrong with X11 and why Wayland was created. The real story behind Wayland and X: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24890503,"author":"sergeykish","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?","text":"This criticism looks like \"free as beer and I know better\". 1. The old, mostly working thing waits your commit 2. That new thing can have some help too I recommend developers story about this \"mostly working thing\" (2014) [1]. It is quite fun and eye opening, he clearly knows his subject better than most of the comments. Wayland demo worked almost from day one. I've run it in 2010 [2]. But we need applications, that is migrating toolkits and this took 10 years. It is very toxic development culture, cancel culture, mob. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24890915,"author":"sergeykish","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?","text":"It would be nice to reproduce phoronix results. Do they run in GNOME shell? What if I run in Sway? What exactly they expect of Selenium? I've heard gedit startup example. Sorry, I can't continue until you've watched presentation [1] > gedit startup: > 130 blocking InternAtom calls > 34 blocking GetProperty calls > 116 property change requests > blocking because Xlib is terrible > usually spends 25ms waiting for requests > sometimes spends 1428ms [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24926299,"author":"sergeykish","month":"2020-10","story_title":"On Abandoning the X Server","text":"Daniel Stone, The real story behind Wayland and X (Or, 'Why Everything You've Read in LWN and Phoronix Comments is Untrue') [VIDEO] And directly from ajaxnwnk [LINK] > Moreover, X works for me now and does everything I need. Someone makes pig fly all these years.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26759624,"author":"kaba0","month":"2021-04","story_title":"HW accelerated Xwayland rendering for Nvidia merged","text":"Well, you can imagine some evil behind everything if you wish.. Or just look at a technical video about it: [VIDEO] I don\u2019t see these conteos regarding linux, especially goddamn desktop with the minuscule user share. It is literally a hobby thing for some graphics enthusiasts without any sort of money. Yeah sure, red hat or whatever..","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34974694,"author":"vetinari","month":"2023-02","story_title":"X12","text":"> I've seen commentary from people who have worked intimately on both protocols and implementations of both who consider Wayland to have the better architecture. For those interested in details: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GZ5XN_mJE8Y":[{"hn_comment_id":42221286,"author":"libertine","month":"2024-11","story_title":"The X (Twitter) to Bluesky Exodus","text":"This video about the decline of X and the onboarding of propaganda bots explains this phenomenon quite well, especially if you follow the timeline of events: [VIDEO] Coincidentally or not, it was marked by Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. At the end of the video, Benn states that he shared some of these insights with some news outlets that will take different spins on this story, so we'll probably see some interesting developments on this over the next weeks! Some questions that popped out: - Should X be banned in the EU for the deliberate, or irresponsible practice of promoting and protecting the spread of misinformation? - Should LLMs have security layers to prevent the automation of misinformation propaganda? - Should it be mandatory to have human teams available to review reported content, and until content is approved, the content reach should be capped? - None of this matters because users will naturally drop off the platform. But are they doing it on time to prevent damage?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42240949,"author":"consumer451","month":"2024-11","story_title":"This website is hosted on Bluesky","text":"This video has nothing to do with Bluesky, but I think it provides a more likely explanation. Don't let the title fool you, it covers more than bots. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42936455,"author":"erentz","month":"2025-02","story_title":"TikTok's algorithm exhibited pro-Republican bias during 2024 presidential race","text":"Benn Jordan did a good video that covered the bots and bias on X recently. Don't know if it or the papers were submitted here before (anyone feel free to submit it not): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GZTr1-Gp74U":[{"hn_comment_id":30179881,"author":"anm89","month":"2022-02","story_title":"A year on, GameStop champion Roaring Kitty is quiet, yet much richer","text":"If you haven't watched his youtube content go watch it. It's unbelievably high quality. He comes of as a genuinely great guy and he the quality of the analysis he is doing is really good. Definitely puts some things around this story in perspective. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25932024,"author":"CTDOCodebases","month":"2021-01","story_title":"The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets","text":"u/DeepFuckingValue shits all over the writers narrative. Watch the video linked below if you disagree with me. [VIDEO] I guess if you are not used to interacting with people who have a sense of humour about everything and don\u2019t take life too seriously then you are going to struggle to understand what\u2019s going on in WSB. How can a gambler be nihilistic? Don\u2019t you need hope to gamble?","stance":"rec"}],"GZadCj8O1-0":[{"hn_comment_id":16678736,"author":"DavidNielsen","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Kim Dotcom wins battle in ongoing fight against U.S. extradition","text":"Rob Reid did a funny 5min TED Talk on this called the 8 Billion dollar iPod: [VIDEO] He used the same premise when he wrote the comedy sci-fi book Year Zero, the story of naive aliens accidentally pirating all of Earths music and the legal consequences thereof, i.e. owning the citizens of Earth literally all the money in the universe leading to the ruination of their delightfully hedonistic utopia. A quick and hilarious read.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34697698,"author":"omoikane","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Getty Images Is Suing Stable Diffusion for a Staggering $1.8T","text":"Related: \"The 8 billion iPod\" by Rob Reid - [VIDEO] It's a funny TED talk on \"copyright math\".","stance":"rec"}],"G_eYTctGZw8":[{"hn_comment_id":9248500,"author":"abathologist","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Learn Prolog Now","text":"You might be interested in these SO answers regarding \"Real world Prolog Usage\": [LINK] The answers are replete with claims about good use-cases for Prolog. Michael Hendricks' talk at last year's Strange Loop on \"Production Prolog\" gives an excellent high-level survey of the uses, advantages, and drawbacks of Prolog: [VIDEO] BTW, I have played a tiny bit with Flora2 myself. It seemed really neat. If you're interested in the intersection of OO and Prolog, you may also want to look at Logtalk[0]. FWIW, if I understand your meaning correctly, it is very easy to \"pass rules as parameters to other rules\" in vanilla Prolog. It facilitates all sorts of higher-order approaches and is very good for meta-programming. [0]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21389618,"author":"samuell","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Swish: SWI Prolog Notebook","text":"For an awesome video showcasing a bit of the real power of Prolog, you need to check (if you haven't already) this Strangeloop talk: \"Production Prolog\" by Michael Hendricks [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8869045,"author":"MonkeyIsNull","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Prolog Programming Language (1997)","text":"Not only is it worthwhile to learn, it's worthwhile to use for real world problems: [VIDEO] From his blog: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9247757,"author":"profquail","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Learn Prolog Now","text":"I found a page from 1994(!) asking the same question: [LINK] Given that Prolog isn't super-widely used (compared to say, C++), there are going to be a limited number of developers with Prolog expertise. That means companies who use it in their tech stack are generally going to have to hire developers who fit the other qualifications for the role then put them through some internal Prolog training. The listings for such positions probably won't have Prolog as a \"required\" skill but a \"desired\" skill. One other point -- just because there aren't any/many jobs where Prolog is required doesn't mean there aren't many cases where Prolog could be useful. Prolog hasn't been widely taught for a couple of decades, so a significant proportion of developers today won't recognize a problem that Prolog would be a good solution for as a problem that Prolog would be a good solution for. There's a Strange Loop 2014 talk on YouTube, \"Production Prolog\", that might give ideas about jobs that use (or could use) Prolog: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14051446,"author":"StreamBright","month":"2017-04","story_title":"The Power of Prolog","text":"Same here, I don't think this is a particularly great way of starting with Prolog. I have found these videos helpful for understanding Prolog: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22863796,"author":"simplify","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How to rediscover the joy of programming?","text":"I recommend starting with [0] to get a feel for what's possible. [1] is great when you have time to dive deeper. [2] is good motivation, and [3] will show you how to build a practical roles & permissions system. Keep in mind that you don't have to build your app in 100% prolog to use prolog. There are likely implementations in your favorite language. For example, Rust[a] JavaScript[b], and Ruby[c]. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [a] [LINK] [b] [LINK] [c] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34436644,"author":"samuell","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Tar.pl \u2013 A tar creator and extractor in approx. 100 lines of Prolog","text":"Check out \"Production Prolog\" by Michael Hendricks on YouTube, which demonstrates the same thing, at a talk at StrangeLoop: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Gatn5ameRr8":[{"hn_comment_id":14953511,"author":"plainOldText","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo","text":"Somewhat related to the issue at hand and representative of the current, very charged landscape on social issues, is this video: [VIDEO] The speaker makes the case that current social conflicts at many American universities \u2013 though probably representative of the general population as well \u2013 arise because people are pursuing two, potentially incompatible goals: truth and social justice. I think it's a highly informative video. Of course, I'd love to watch other videos contradicting or challenging this one, if anyone can provide some links.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14988928,"author":"mparr4","month":"2017-08","story_title":"How I, a woman in tech, benefited from sexism in Silicon Valley","text":"Jonathan Haidt does a great job explaining Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood cultures: [VIDEO] (whole talk is excellent) His take is a little different (that Victimhood culture is a result of a march through time from Honor to Dignity to Victimhood). He's referencing the same paper [1] mentioned in the reason.com article. [1] - Microaggression and Moral Cultures [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17160845,"author":"Rapzid","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Updating the Go Code of Conduct","text":"I'm glad you posted this.. I had heard about anti CoC a while back(perhaps from you?) but never really dug into it.. Video game journalism was ruined for me back in 2011 and 2012 for reasons we all know and I was hyper aware of at the time. It went through a very dark time and is hopefully coming out the other side now.. I had not really paid much attention to the infiltration of the tech community. While I had noticed a few things such bikeshedding of issues on Github, as well as the whole node.js trigger word ordeal, my distaste for the whole thing at that point led me to largely ignore it.. I've been on a huge information gathering binge since your post though. Randi Harper, electronconf, USC Legends of Gaming, entryism targeted toward GitHub, shaming and threatening tactics used to seed OSS with CoCs.... Wow. I hadn't realized how out of hand and toxic things had gotten. Luckily, it seems that the industry is somewhat successfully pushing back? I'm getting the sense that the larger community has found its voice and is pushing back against the intellectually bankrupt thinking and tactics.. This is the best intellectual analysis of the situation I've come across so far(I'm still digging though): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14442042,"author":"BadassFractal","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Why do so few people major in computer science?","text":"Can we already kill the meme that CS or STEM are hostile to women? Correlation does not imply causation. Disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment. Nobody in the right mind looks at the 94% of child care services jobs being filled by women and exclaims \"Aha! Systemic sexism against men, matriarchal oppression afoot, we must address this social injustice!\", yet all common sense falls apart when it comes to STEM. Good talk on the subject here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23817445,"author":"ternaus","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The Ideological Corruption of Science","text":"Jon Haidt talks about it for a while. [VIDEO] I would recommend the book: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34192172,"author":"Rayhem","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Young adults are struggling with their mental health","text":">I've found that lots of people out there seemingly can't handle disagreement at all... This is the second time this week I'll have linked this here on HN but I'm exceptionally happy to do so. Jonathan Haidt has a topical discussion[1] about that and hypothesizes it stems from an utter lack of viewpoint diversity as kids grow up. He states that universities have sought to remove all emotional distress, when they're supposed to be the place where you go to have your ideas challenged and feel a little distressed about it. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GcJxRqTs5nk":[{"hn_comment_id":19689492,"author":"acqq","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Life of Brian at 40: an assertion of individual freedom that still resonates","text":"This is the video that explains the best how the \"morality\" is natural even in the capuchin monkeys: [LINK] So, no to those that claim that, humans aren't special, and no, the good sides of morality don't come from religion, especially not from the modern ones with a \"jealous\" god (killing homosexuals, or punishing women when not wearsing something, however, if that is considered \"morality\", indeed provably does come from religion). The whole talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28056026,"author":"BeefWellington","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Goose flying upside down is simply showing off, say experts","text":"This is one of my favorite ted talks, on animal behaviour: [VIDEO] The examples of animals doing things the way they do are both funny and entertaining.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39179549,"author":"rramadass","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Hell is other people: performance management at Big Tech","text":"I disagree because we are not doing it based on the Science we already know now; we can do much better. From behavioural psychology/social biology/game theory(Prisoner's dilemma) etc. we know Humans naturally have a in-group vs. out-group social structure. Within a group, cooperation with trust and fairness rules and competition is generally absent or if it exists is playful. The research by Frans de Waal ( [LINK] ) on Primate Social Behaviour (Cooperation/Fairness/Empathy/Reciprocity/etc.) is path-breaking. Here is one of his excellent must-watch Ted talks - [VIDEO] Machiavellian competition comes in only for \"status\"/\"reward\" within a group and is not the norm. Competition is more prevalent between groups. Thus if you look at a person in a organizational hierarchy, there are three immediate groups ; a) the people you report to (out group), b) your peers (in group, cooperation predominating, with maybe a little bit of playful competition), c) the people that report to you (in group, cooperation but with trust/fairness predominating). For everybody else we don't know and hence almost always respond with tit-for-tat principle. Finally there is also a need to understand what drives self-motivation. This is the natural order for Social Homo Sapiens as we understand from current knowledge. But none of this is being considered when measuring Performance/Productivity. For example, all Leaders/Managers almost always place Trust above everything else, Peers emphasize Fairness and the","stance":"strong_rec"}],"GcfLZSL7YGw":[{"hn_comment_id":28725411,"author":"efokschaner","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life\u2019s Push Against Entropy","text":"This subject is discussed in the pop sci work of PBS spacetime [VIDEO] with reference to articles and books if you're looking for more","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38672012,"author":"donny2018","month":"2023-12","story_title":"NASA study finds life-sparking energy source and molecule at Enceladus","text":">but life organizes Yes, and that's the interesting part. In the right circumstances, more entropy doesn't mean less complexity. Matter can become more complex and less entropy locally if that results in increase of total entropy in the system. This can occur, for example, if we have constant flow of concentrated energy on some local areas of the environment that continuously wants to spread out. Because the system as a whole \"wants\" to maximize its entropy as fast as it can, and it statistically \"searches\" for the shortest paths possible. This may result in natural occurrence of more and more complex molecules that dissipate heat more and more efficiently. It's like the planet's atmospheric processes, for example. Where differences in heat concentration don't just spread out in linear gradients but can form complex structures like vortexes, hurricanes or even stable geometric hexagons (like the famous hexagon storm on Saturn), etc. >My view has always been that life fights against entropy. Yes, it \"fights\" against entropy to exist, but it exists solely by processing low entropy into high entropy. Maybe that's why it even exists in the first place? This part is better addressed in Jeremy England's work, for more basic explanations you can refer to videos like this: [VIDEO] (it's a very good video on this topic by PBS)","stance":"rec"}],"Ge3aKEmZcqY":[{"hn_comment_id":29138786,"author":"DrBazza","month":"2021-11","story_title":"An Epic future for SPJ","text":"> Speak for yourself; most phones I see still take 2+ seconds to open some apps. Why is that though? I've written code since the 8 bit days of BBC micros and ZX Spectrums. Casey Muratori's (who has been on here a lot lately) talk nails it [1] - developers just don't realise how fast their code could and should run. And the fact that we have layers upon layers of frameworks and no one cares. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30586520,"author":"mrv_asura","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Algorithms for Modern Hardware","text":"The timing of this is great! I just watched Casey Muratori's lecture, \"Simple Code, High Performance\"[1] and its follow-up videos[2, 3]. I highly recommend watching it. It is about Software Optimization, and gives practical and high-level understanding of topics like CPU Architecture, SIMD etc. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33991844,"author":"Pr0ject217","month":"2022-12","story_title":"What we can learn from vintage computing","text":"Thank you for the detailed explanation! It sounds like programming computers back then would have been a joy. Casey Muratori's talks[0] on performance and optimization sparked an interest in me to start putting thought into what the CPU actually does (which wasn't taught when I learned web development). Since discovering his talks, I've been on the hunt for more learning materials. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29736775,"author":"ocharles","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Why can\u2019t you design noise in frequency space?","text":"For one real application of blue noise in particular, see [VIDEO] (22:30 is a good starting point). Here Casy explains a grass planting algorithm for games, where white noise wouldn't be suitable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39579337,"author":"mtzet","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?","text":"Most software in the industry is slow because it's doing a lot of stuff that it shouldn't. Often times additional \"optimization\" layers adds caching, but makes getting to the root of the issue harder. The biggest win is primarily getting rid of things you don't need and secondarily operating on things in batch. My playbook for optimizing in the real world is something like this: 1. Understand what you're actually trying to compute end-to-end. The bigger the chunk you're trying to optimize, the greater the potential for performance. 2. Sketch out what an optimal process would look like. What data do you need to fetch, what computation do you need to do on this, how often does this need to happen. Don't try to be clever and micro-optimize or cache computations. Just focus on only doing the things you need to do in a simple way. Use arrays a lot. 3. Understand what the current code is actually doing. How close to the sketch above are you? Are you doing a lot of I/O in the middle of the computation? Do you keep coming back to the same data? If you want to understand the limits of how fast computers are, and what optimal performance looks like I'd recommend two talks that come with a very different perspective from what you usually hear: 1. Mike Acton's talk at cppcon 2014 [LINK] 2. Casey Muratori's talk about optimizing a grass planting algorithm [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42033653,"author":"kleiba","month":"2024-11","story_title":"I Waited 10B Cycles and All I Got Was This Loading Screen","text":"Casey Muratori started a whole educational webseries about this - the fact that hardware is getting faster and faster but the user experience seems to be staying the same. [VIDEO] He also has a \"performance-aware programming\" series: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Ggz_gd--UO0":[{"hn_comment_id":23398606,"author":"splintercell","month":"2020-06","story_title":"DEA authorized to conduct surveillance on protestors","text":"I highly recommend watching this video [1] to understand why \"progress has stalled\". Believe it or not, it's by design. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45291874,"author":"emchammer","month":"2025-09","story_title":"ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel\u2019s show \u2018indefinitely\u2019 after threat from FCC chair","text":"It depends on where you draw the line for acting in good faith. Justice Antonin Scalia's opening statement before a 2011 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing is worth watching. [VIDEO] Even more worth reading are the Federalist Papers, cover-to-cover, as he suggested. The depth to which the Framers considered the kind of situations we are in today is amazing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19216860,"author":"mvanga","month":"2019-02","story_title":"EU Countries Back Copyright Reforms Aimed at Google, Facebook","text":"I wanted to add that, in the US, it isn't primarily the constitution that protects its freedoms, but rather the structure of their government and how it's been setup for gridlock among all the parties involved (not that that property has been preserved too well of late). Antonin Scalia explained it really well in one of his appearances in front of a Senate Judiciary Committee: [VIDEO] I admit to not fully understanding the intricacies of the EU system but, on the surface, it does appear to be setup for much lower friction when attempting to pass sweeping legislation like this one.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23384514,"author":"ethn","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Liquid Democracy","text":"A constitutionally limited government can explicitly hurt minority rights, for instance the Confederate States Constitution, or betray intentions of principles through direct democratic procedures by interpretation and enforcement. With direct democracy you do have tyranny of the majority while this is certainly mitigated in a representative democracy; for instance the 2016 election where the popular vote would have selected a different president. The US founding fathers were very familiar with Aristotle who stated: \"Unlimited democracy is, just like oligarchy, a tyranny spread over a large number of people.\u201d Indeed the US founding fathers' decisions reflect this, If we're to believe their commentary, they picked a republic with the motivation of liberty for all with emphasis on the elective structure, Constitutional Convention of Hamilton 1787 : \"We are now forming a republican government...Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.\u201d Scalia has a good talk about this, how a merely constitutionally limited government is completely ineffective of guaranteeing its provisions, its interpretation, and its enforcements: [VIDEO] \"Every banana republic has a bill of rights\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24439541,"author":"supernova87a","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Contradictions in Roman law left incurable headaches for its judges","text":"I'd love to discuss with others here something related. I have lately (to my surprise) been drawn by some talks of Antonin Scalia on Youtube. Far from being repelled (or amused at his standing alone) as I was years ago by his coming down on the opposite side of judgements I thought were socially just and good, I now come to understand better what he was doing. At least if you believe his talks. After listening to his talks (and then thinking back to his opinions), I understand he was trying to make sure that the Constitution was followed to the letter of the law, and that if the people were unhappy with it, let them change it so that it reflected the popular desires. But let it follow that process. Not have social or political will creep its way in via individual judges' or courts' determination something was now \"acceptable enough\" that it could be ruled to have evolved and be constitutional at the present time. And that the writers of the Constitution were trying to prevent disaster as much as trying to enable progress -- and that we should be careful when we stray from the words encoding that goal, because when you do that it opens up all sorts of unintended consequences. (Hence the connection to this OP's story + comments about law as source code.) This really opened my eyes about what that aspect of judicial conservatism is about. Not that I agree with all of its philosophy or tendency (in politics) to court a certain sector of the vote, for example. But it did arouse in","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24524387,"author":"sillysaurusx","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died","text":"Exactly! Which is why this conversation is so interesting \u2013 and why it seemed they were unfairly downvoted. The question of \"does friendship compromise integrity of systems over time?\" is quite fascinating, and there are many examples across many countries that show \"yes, yes it does.\" So it seemed entirely legitimate to say that perhaps a system should penalize friendships, somehow. But, after watching Scalia, how can you not like him? [VIDEO] [LINK] He was witty, charming, and a master orator. So when people hear \"can't have a friendship with Scalia, even though you work with him,\" it's kind of like \"can't breathe, even though you're human.\" It's a logical contradiction. And it's not even a well-defined problem: what is a \"friendship,\" anyway?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30804145,"author":"joey_bob","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes","text":"The title is a bit inflammatory, but in this clip from Scalia's testimony relates the overall concept well. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31865322,"author":"splintercell","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade","text":"Remember, founding fathers had a very dim view on Democracy, this is why they chose to have a Republic and then restrict the republic through a constitution. If Democrats were losing out to big numbers, they would pro-republic and Republicans would be pro-democracy. But, one of the best explanations for why founding fathers built the system the way they did is this[1], by late Justice Scalia. The fundamental idea is that the American system is created to represent the will of the republic across time and space: - Every bill needs to be passed by all three House, Senate and the President - House recycles very fast (every 2 years) - President recycles at a moderate speed (every 4 years) - Senate recycles at a slow pace (every 6 years, and partially every 2 years) - House represents the population - Senate represents all states equally (or represents land) - Presidency is elected through a hybrid system (electoral college, which is distributed in proportion to the population). - The fundamental idea is that any bill must be agreed upon by: a. The will of the people not just in short term (house), but in mid-term (presidency) and long term (senate) also. When UK wanted out of EU, the remainers believed that they should have a revote because they didn't believe that people voted with full information. Of course, years later a second proxy vote through general elections made the intent clear, but in the US we will not go for a bill to be passed unless its not just what we voted for","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33352890,"author":"mlindner","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The United States\u2019 Unamendable Constitution","text":"This speech is a good reference point. [VIDEO] Just because you wrote a good constitution doesn't make the government good. You can put anything you want into a constitution if you don't have the institutions set up right to maintain it. Further, it's intentional that the federal government at times becomes unable to do it's job in times of intense disagreement. That was an intentional design feature.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33353866,"author":"jimbob45","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The United States\u2019 Unamendable Constitution","text":"[VIDEO] Scalia has a great speech on this. Our Constitution has been outdone several times over the centuries, even by Russia. Ours is the best, though, because ours is still standing and the others are not. The bottom line is that the gridlock and glacial pace of progress that others decry is what gives the Constitution its robustness that other lack.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35620828,"author":"jimbob45","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Software firms across US facing tax bills that threaten startup survival","text":"Quite the opposite! Scalia had a great speech[0] where he argued that our Constitution is weak compared to other nations of history but had outlived those nations because of its slow nature to act. The point being, it doesn't matter how great your constitution is if your country is dead. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35915763,"author":"letmevoteplease","month":"2023-05","story_title":"The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably","text":"The design of the American system was always based on a distrust for power. The gridlock is the point. Not my favorite person but Scalia put it well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36742193,"author":"arkis22","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Full Text of the Federalist Papers","text":"Ron Chernow's biography on him is really excellent. It's so good that I think it's actually a disservice to mention that it inspired the Broadway play. If you can respect Scalia's legal talent, this video where he mentions them is interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42233108,"author":"refurb","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Senators say TSA's facial recognition program is out of control","text":"This is basically the intent of the structure of the US government. High degree of separation of powers (unlike most other democracies, the executive is separate from the legislative and there are two independent legislative bodies). High level of agreement across multiple bodies before a law can be passed (House, Senate and President). I thought Scalia's explanation was a good one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Gh-Tff7DdzU":[{"hn_comment_id":14886221,"author":"visarga","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Neuromorphic Computing with Nanoscale Spintronic Oscillators","text":"Interesting approach, but very far off. I prefer GraphCore as a promising new lead in AI hardware. Moving computation close in with memory, and making data transfers async will speed up DL. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15660602,"author":"midko","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Intel to Develop Discrete GPUs, Hires AMD's Raja Koduri as Chief Architect","text":"Indeed, and that's why there are a couple of startups working on new chips and why Google has the TPU. Here's a nice technical talk from Graphcore's CTO about that [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16892493,"author":"maffydub","month":"2018-04","story_title":"The Looming Battle Over AI Chips","text":"I went to a talk from the CTO of Graphcore ( [LINK] ) on Monday. They are designing chips targeted at machine learning. As I understood it, their architecture comprises - lots of \"tiles\" - small processing cores with collocated memory (essentially DSPs) - very high bandwidth (90TB/s!) switching fabric to move data between tiles - \"Bulk Synchronous Parallel\" operation, meaning that the tiles do their work and then the switching fabric moves the data, and then we repeat. The key challenge he pointed to was power - both in terms of getting energy in (modern CPUs/GPUs take similar current to your car starter motor!) and also getting the heat out. Logic gates take a lot more power than RAM, so he argued that collocating small chunks of RAM right next to your processing core was much better from a power perspective (meaning you could then pack yet more into your chip) as well as obviously being better from a performance perspective. [VIDEO] isn't quite the presentation I saw, but it has quite a lot of overlap. Hope that helps!","stance":"rec"}],"GhsZUZmJvaM":[{"hn_comment_id":26186351,"author":"kibwen","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]","text":"Here's a really excellent video that answers all your questions: [VIDEO] TL;DW: Martian atmosphere is so sparse that it's equivalent to flying at 100,000 feet on Earth. (The altitude record on Earth is 85,000 feet, set by the SR-71.) In order to fly at all the blades have to spin at nearly the (Martian) speed of sound. The drone wouldn't fly on Earth because the atmosphere is so dense that the blades would never make it up to speed.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23562062,"author":"jcims","month":"2020-06","story_title":"NASA rushing to complete Mars launch before planet moves out of range","text":"Totally agree. It's obviously a high risk portion of the mission but I'm glad someone had the guts to propose it. Derek from Veritasium did a nice little story on it last summer - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26178740,"author":"manicdee","month":"2021-02","story_title":"How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars","text":"Veritasium did an episode 'Mars Helicopter' containing some interesting discussions with the team that built it. [VIDEO] nm it was already linked elsewhere","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26186429,"author":"kibwen","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Perseverance Rover lands on Mars [video]","text":"A great video where the host visits the drone, interviews its makers, and goes over the cool technical aspects of it and its mission: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26295138,"author":"Brajeshwar","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly","text":"You should watch Dr. Derek Muller of Veritasium, who did a video (2019) details of the Helicopter while it was being built. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26296054,"author":"kingo55","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The Mars Helicopter Is Online and Getting Ready to Fly","text":"It's not just atmosphere and g-forces. The cold temperatures mean the helicopter spends 2/3 of its battery power keeping the batteries and electronics from freezing. Good rundown of how it was built: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26693106,"author":"jshmrsn","month":"2021-04","story_title":"NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity touches down on the Red Planet","text":"Veritasium has a great video on the helicopter. Early on in the video they explain that Mars\u2019 atmosphere is equivalent in density to Earth\u2019s atmosphere at 100,000 feet, and the record altitude for helicopters on earth is 40,000 feet. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26705342,"author":"ortusdux","month":"2021-04","story_title":"NASA's helicopter survives first freezing night on Mars","text":"On top of what others have said, we need advancement it batteries that can withstand low temperatures. Lithium ion batteries generally need to be kept above freezing temps. There have been some advances in capacitors that operate down to -100C, but their energy density makes them a non-ideal option for weight limited applications. This video from Veritasium does a good job of covering the helicopter power system: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26707850,"author":"vizzier","month":"2021-04","story_title":"NASA's helicopter survives first freezing night on Mars","text":"Video from Veritasium about the helicopter that talk with the team about this. He mentions that 2/3rds of the daily energy gathered is used for the purpose[1] Other information about the tech; camera & landing, energy use for heating, flight in low pressure atmosphere, the system to actually land the thing, is also really interesting. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26924175,"author":"dirkt","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Mars Helicopter successfully completed its second flight","text":"This video [VIDEO] explains it: they can change the attack angle of rotor blades for different positions, which produces a torque, though you have to compensate for the gyroscopic effect, which lags behind. Humans cannot fly this, but computers can. The video also explains why the chose two contra-rotating rotors instead of a quad-copter design.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28465973,"author":"ruchin_k","month":"2021-09","story_title":"After six months on Mars, NASA's tiny copter is still flying high","text":"Saw this Veritasium youtube video a year ago and the technical complexity required to fly on Mars was shocking to me. Since the air density is super low the blades need to spin at a speed which nears the speed of sound at the blade tips. Crossing the speed of sound causes mini sonic booms which could disrupt the flight entirely. Kudos to NASA scientists for this technological breakthrough! Sharing the video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GiYO1TObNz8":[{"hn_comment_id":19854346,"author":"dlivingston","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Detroit\u2019s LED streetlights going dark after a few years","text":"I watched a YouTube video [0] this morning which actually does a fantastic job of explaining the pros and cons of LED-based traffic lights. Short answer: it's complicated. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22328006,"author":"chipperyman573","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Brown: color is weird [video]","text":"The one on traffic lights is way more interesting than it sounds! Everybody should check it out. There's also a really interesting point he makes at the end that applies to something a lot of people on HN might relate with [VIDEO] The toaster one is alright, it kinda bothered me when he said there was \"literally NO reason\" to design something the way it was (I think it had to do with the position of the coils) - obviously there is, it's probably just not a reason he'd like (cost, ease of manufacturing, etc). It makes me wonder if there was other info he skipped on because it \"wasn't important\" or \"stupid\". That's a pretty minor point though, overall his videos are very good.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41220276,"author":"lolinder","month":"2024-08","story_title":"China's total wind and solar capacity outstrips coal","text":"I love Technology Connections' take on this line of argument [0]: > When there's a new innovation which changes how we do things for the better, its benefits are obvious. ... However when the \"But Sometimes\" rears its ugly head, people tend to freak out. Suddenly all those benefits go away, because in this one particular facet of stoplight functionality, the wasteful and maintenance-heavy incandescent lamp is accidentally superior. Suddenly, when a new solution presents a new problem, all we think about is the problem. Yes, there are problems that exist with solar that don't exist with other electrical generation systems. That is not, by itself, evidence that solar will not be sufficient by itself as we solve those problems, and it's not a good reason to slow adoption of a piece of technology that is better in almost every way. Everything suggests we're going to fix the \"but sometimes\"\u2014as others have noted there are many different paths being successfully explored at this point\u2014and everything suggests that solar will still be both cheaper and better for the environment even when you factor in the fix. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22741775,"author":"ChickeNES","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Lead-Free Solder Is Better for You","text":"Technology Connections has a great video on LED traffic lights and how the concern about snow was overblown: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25652239,"author":"jdmichal","month":"2021-01","story_title":"New Defaults","text":"Your coin flip is in a vacuum though. What is this innovation replacing? Did I previously have to roll a 100-sided die? If so, that coin flip sounds really damn good. I feel like Technology Connections did a better approach to the same topic of innovation: [VIDEO] The idea is \"But Sometimes\". That is, this new innovation is great in all these areas, but sometimes it's worse. That then becomes a locus for the FUD campaigns -- justified or not. It's also the same kind of thing heard in \"no one was ever fired for picking IBM\". Fear of an unknown potentially bad outcome outweighs all the known bad outcomes which are improved by the innovation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26504818,"author":"M2Ys4U","month":"2021-03","story_title":"A call to improve London's lighting at night","text":">Apropos of nothing... I also remember a story about a northern country replacing traffic lights with LEDs and then spending even more money adding heaters because the old lights were naturally warm, and melted any ice that stuck to the lights. Can't find a link to it at the moment. The Technology Connections channel on YouTube has an excellent video on this, called 'The LED Traffic Light and the Danger of \"But Sometimes!\"': [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26598482,"author":"someperson","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Solar Is Cheapest Electricity in History, U.S. DOE Aims to Cut Costs 60% by 2030","text":"You may be interested in the video The LED Traffic Light and the Danger of \"But Sometimes!\" by Technology Connections: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Gj8IA6xOpSk":[{"hn_comment_id":1866874,"author":"thaumaturgy","month":"2010-11","story_title":"The time I hacked my high\u00a0school","text":"Clifford Stoll has explained this far better than I could [1], but aside from the sheer intrinsic value and altruism of taking time out to be an amazing teacher for some students, it can also serve some really practical benefits: if you want the next generation of adults to have a firm grasp of science and technical issues -- whether they later operate a cash register, enter a career in politics, or build the next Amazon -- then it makes sense for us to find the time to teach these skills to students. If you want open source software to take over the world, teach programming to kids. If you want sensible social policies where science and technology are concerned, then teach science and technology to kids. If you want more rational discourse in the future, then teach logic to kids. Saying, \"this is somebody else's job\" -- even if you're also saying that it's a valuable job and they should be compensated well for it -- is not just self-serving, it's short-sighted. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9765788,"author":"hrayr","month":"2015-06","story_title":"The man with 1,000 klein bottles under his house [video]","text":"I love this guy, I first saw him in his TED talk [1]. He kinda reminds me of Richard Feynman (similar mannerisms and enthusiasm for science). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44356979,"author":"ColinWright","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Klein Bottle Amazon Brand Hijacking (2021)","text":"There may be some youngsters who don't know who Cliff Stoll is. He wrote \"The Cuckoo's Egg\" which is a riveting tale, capable of entertaining nerds and non-nerds alike. He sells glass Klein Bottles, huge, medium, tiny, earrings, and more. He's given a TED talk: [VIDEO] He's brilliant, bonkers, and wonderful company. I spent a fantastic morning with him early last year (2024) and it was brilliant fun. I will for many, many years treasure my signed Klein Bottle and my signed copy of \"The Cuckoo's Egg\". Thanks Cliff","stance":"rec"}],"GjENnyQupow":[{"hn_comment_id":18817977,"author":"baursak","month":"2019-01","story_title":"My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror (2018)","text":"> It follows that most of the articles that appear opposed to powerful interests are a) inconsequential, or b) used as a distraction, helping to create the impression that the paper is anything but a powerful conservative force. It could also be taking on a rival powerful establishment interests, like in Democrats vs Republican type bickering. Chomsky in his famous Andrew Marr interview addressed Marr's example of Watergate scandal as one part of the establishment defending itself against another part of the establishment, thus allowing the story to be broken. He compared Watergate, which everybody knows about, to a much bigger scandal of the same time, COINTELPRO, which relatively few people have even heard about. The entire interview is worth watching: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19399897,"author":"herbstein","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Facebook, Axios and NBC Paid to Whitewash Wikipedia Pages","text":"> Thus (not having read it myself), Manufacturing Consent could show how emergent properties of mass media might lead to them pushing a certain incorrect world view, rather than proposing a theory that requires the teams behind them to all agree to conspire and none of them to make that public knowledge. That is right. Chomsky proposes 5 filters through which this process happens. These filters operate, according to Chomsky, not just in media, but in all of society. From kindergarten to our deadbeds. I think this was best illustrated with Chomsky's 1996 interview in \"The Big Idea\" on BBC by Andrew Marr. Chomsky is outlining how the filters make sure certain viewpoints are popularized, and Andrew Marr asks \"How can you know that I'm self-censoring?\". To which Chomsky replies \"I'm not saying you're self-censoring. I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. But what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.\" The 30 minute episode[1] is well worth a watch, but the three minute clip of the above exchange is also available[2]. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20176641,"author":"k1m","month":"2019-06","story_title":"US efforts to jail Assange for espionage are a grave threat to a free media","text":"The press plays a much more important role when it comes to power. Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky is the classic text on the propaganda role of the press. [LINK] This old BBC interview with Noam Chomsky about the topic is also illuminating: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Gksxu-yeWcU":[{"hn_comment_id":16564231,"author":"aequitas","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Pixar's Rules of Storytelling (2013)","text":"A good example of the rearranging is from Nerdwriters YouTube [VIDEO] Just a minor change in order of the same scenes completely changed a movie.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27694881,"author":"rtkwe","month":"2021-06","story_title":"\u201cThe Martian\u201d + Starship","text":"Yeah but it wouldn't have been tempered by growing attached to Pratt's character and we would get to experience the same feeling of confusion as JLaw's character. NerdWriter on youtube has a good video on how the change would look, does a better job of selling it than I ever could: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GlXNVnftaNs":[{"hn_comment_id":32232677,"author":"kuldeep_kap","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The 15-minute city (2020)","text":"100% agree. If anyone is interested here is great video on [Autoluw]( [VIDEO] ). This is what US needs, but I dont see this happening due america's car-centric culture.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32595870,"author":"ryukafalz","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Too many Americans live in places built for cars \u2013 not for human connection","text":"I think I\u2019ve seen this in a few places, there\u2019s one source in particular I\u2019m thinking of that I can\u2019t seem to find but here are some: The positive impact of car-free streets on businesses during COVID: [LINK] Good overview about autoluw streets and the effects they have: [VIDEO] \u2026though as the video states, autoluw doesn\u2019t mean completely car-free. I tend to agree that it\u2019s probably the best balance rather than eliminating all cars from the area.","stance":"rec"}],"GnBbhXBDmwU":[{"hn_comment_id":29040014,"author":"mrweasel","month":"2021-10","story_title":"OpenBSD: How it all started","text":"Bob Beck also covers this in his talk about the first 30 days of libreSSL. The entire talk is amazing, even 7 years later. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7812122,"author":"protomyth","month":"2014-05","story_title":"BSDCan 2014 Videos","text":"The LibreSSL talk is funny and scary. [watch the other version one [VIDEO] so you can hear the other people and see the end]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7818386,"author":"lomnakkus","month":"2014-05","story_title":"OpenSSL, OpenSSH and NTP to receive support from Core Infrastructure Initiative","text":"\"just fixing the problems in openssl.\" That's what libressl is about. If you're in any doubt, please see this talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10420615,"author":"teamhappy","month":"2015-10","story_title":"BoringSSL","text":"It does a lot of things it really shouldn't be doing. I recommend you watch Bob Beck's talk about LibreSSL[1] (Ted's there too). [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29082888,"author":"Bayart","month":"2021-11","story_title":"U.S. telecoms are going to start physically removing Huawei gear","text":"The immediate effect of Heartbleed was the OpenBSD folk [1] and Google [2] forking OpenSSL. There's a talk from Bob Beck of OpenBSD on pruning OpenSSL, it's pretty hilarious [3]. In that case open source was at least able to react appropriately, even if it didn't act preemptively. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34699617,"author":"g0xA52A2A","month":"2023-02","story_title":"OpenSSL Security Advisory [7th February 2023]","text":"This exemplifies one of the key reasons OpenBSD forked OpenSSL. For those who haven't seen it I'd recommend this presentation from Bob Beck[1], around the 10 minute mark he recounts fixing issues in the memory allocator which had been reported 4 years prior. Seems there's still a similar backlog sitting behind embargoes? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GnO7D5UaDig":[{"hn_comment_id":23828235,"author":"resu_nimda","month":"2020-07","story_title":"A Steve Jobs masterclass from a decade ago","text":"My favorite Jobs masterclass is his talk at Apple's developer conference in 1997 [1]. He had just returned to the company, and a lot of people were unhappy with him and/or Apple at the time. He decided to do an hour long off-the-cuff Q&A session with the developers. Famously, one of the questioners was harsh and insulting, and he handled it with grace. I honestly can't think of another tech CEO that could have pulled off this performance. Maybe Bill Gates? I get the sense that the reality distortion field was very real because he was so clear and eloquent about his mission, it never needed to be scripted or rehearsed, it just came out of him at all times. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4238634,"author":"wsc981","month":"2012-07","story_title":"How to Manage Your Team During A Crisis","text":"Apple was in a terrible situation around the end of the 90's. Steve Jobs just became CEO and had to manage the crisis, both internally as well as externally (developers for Apple's platform). This talk at WWDC 97 shows how Steve Jobs dealt with the crisis. There are some parallels with the article. Steve Jobs @ WWDC 97: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GoJsr4IwCm4":[{"hn_comment_id":34552332,"author":"wilg","month":"2023-01","story_title":"$6.96B was raised by private longevity companies in 2022","text":"My opinion on the topic changed significantly after watching these great videos: - Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever? - Kurzgesagt - [VIDEO] - How to Cure Aging \u2013 Kurzgesagt - [LINK] - Why Die? - CGP Grey - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17938012,"author":"chr1","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Startups Flock to Turn Young Blood into an Elixir of Youth","text":"> It tries to address something that was always considered a hard limit and the perfectly natural thing Death being \"perfectly natural\" is not a good argument, having slaves, eating people, not allowing women to vote, all have been considered perfectly natural at various points in time, and some time soon accepting aging will be considered equally backwards, as these other things. > There are plenty of movies on this topic so no need to go into details I am asking because i have not seen a single pro-aging argument that had made any sense to me, in the best case they are about some people killing other people to get their stuff, which is not directly related to aging, in the worst they are \"fox and the grapes\" kind of rationalizations saying that the thing people want but can't get is probably not worth it. On the other hand i have seen many compelling arguments that curing aging is the _most important_ thing that we can do now. For instance: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25567792,"author":"DrRobinson","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are you surprised isn\u2019t being worked on more?","text":"Seems like many people are new to this concept and feel skeptical so here are some useful resources: * Kurzgesagt: How to Cure Aging \u2013 During Your Lifetime? (7:20) [LINK] * Kurzgesagt: Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever? (6:48) [VIDEO] * Why we should cure ageing (11:30) - Heads up, it's a book intro [LINK] * Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old (Book, not yet released in the US) [LINK] * Lifespan: Why we age and why we don't have to (book) [LINK] * Google talk: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To (55:13) - By the author of the book [LINK] Edit: * If you wish to contribute to this kind of research make sure to check out SENS: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25845302,"author":"CryptoPunk","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Chinese scientists develop gene therapy which could delay ageing","text":"A good counter-argument to commonly cited objections to biological immortality: [VIDEO] Also, there are a myriad of ways to circumvent and/or dislodge the power of entrenched political leaders, like physical emigration, virtual emigration (cyberspace, cryptocurrency), and disruption (new technologies enabling commercial leaprogging, or political revolution).","stance":"rec"}],"GoW8Tf7hTGA":[{"hn_comment_id":31440797,"author":"BLKNSLVR","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Vangelis has died","text":"This video introduced me to Vangelis' existence, and only after looking up the artist did I realise he did Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire. [VIDEO] The combination of audio and content of this video gives me chills.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12444699,"author":"no1youknowz","month":"2016-09","story_title":"How Much More Can We Learn About the Universe?","text":"I think about it all the time as well and I am thankful for these types of videos [1]. What I think about most, is how awesome it is to be alive right now. Where this video (and others like it) tell me about the universe and what discoveries have been found. At the end of this video, I am always wondering that if the Universe is as big as they claim. There must be discoveries waiting to be found that we can't even comprehend! Sometimes I find myself wishing we had probes that could be much faster than they are now. Instead of taking decades to go to the edges of our solar system, it takes months. Maybe within 50 years, by the end of my lifetime. We'll start to see images from Alpha Centauri and beyond. That I am hoping for! [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13128924,"author":"pmoriarty","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Cassini Beams Back First Images from New Orbit","text":"If you think Saturn's big: [VIDEO] (though this sort of thing is far more impressive when seen in VR) But even better than that, for me, is going somewhere with very little light pollution at night and simply looking up at the Milky Way. Nothing makes me feel smaller and more in awe.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20227890,"author":"13415","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Professional Decline Comes Sooner Than People Think","text":">> We're on a rock flying through space. > I have never understood this phrase as anything more than a platitude to make people feel better. It's more than a platitude. Check out this video: [VIDEO] Still, nothing better than a rainy day on earth.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23546811,"author":"terrycody","month":"2020-06","story_title":"As many as 6B Earth-like planets in our galaxy, according to new estimates","text":"I can't help but post this Youtube video, for those never saw it: Star Size Comparison 2 (watched 28M times) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GqmsQeSzMdw":[{"hn_comment_id":16839349,"author":"cinnamonheart","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"I find Runar Bjarnason's talks to be interesting; one of my favourites is 'Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain': [VIDEO] The essence of it is that constraints actually allow for easier composition and more modularity. It had a real impact on the way I think about the design of systems.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11832943,"author":"harveywi","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Programming Languages as Constraints","text":"> Constraints provide freedom. For a great video on this, see Runar Bjarnason's talk \"Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain\" ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20340142,"author":"clhodapp","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Why Continuations Are Coming to Java","text":"Constraints on the user free the platform. Freedoms for the user constrain the platform. If you are interested in someone pontificating about this at length, see [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40021696,"author":"MaxBarraclough","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Htmx and the Rule of Least Power","text":"This reminds me of a great talk, Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain , by Runar Bjarnason. [0] Useful abstractions necessarily impose restrictions compared to a free-form 'all powerful' approach, but abstractions make it easier to perform/compose meaningful operations. A compiler can reason about an AST far more easily than it can reason about a machine-code sequence, for instance. A compiler typically converts from AST to machine-code pretty late in the game, as you want to take advantage of the utility of the abstraction, not the unlimited power of directly working with instructions. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40179355,"author":"MaxBarraclough","month":"2024-04","story_title":"No Abstractions: our API design principle","text":"That's a great quote. This topic turned up a couple of weeks ago in another thread. [0] The excellent talk Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain , by Runar Bjarnason, gets at the same point, and even uses this same Dijkstra quote. [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] (this takes you right to the Dijkstra quote)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40601304,"author":"solidninja","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Compromised Visions Are Superior","text":"This reminds me of the excellent talk \"Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain\" [VIDEO] that is more about doing the programming rather than planning it as in the article, but with a similar approach.","stance":"rec"}],"Gs790JOeN3Y":[{"hn_comment_id":34917030,"author":"iamflimflam1","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Implant lets those with severe paralysis send texts with just their minds","text":"Might be worth having a look at the Strange Parts YouTuber - he suffered severe concussion after an accident with serious brain fog and has managed to come out the other side. I believe he used these guys: [LINK] or maybe these guys: [LINK] No idea if this would be covered by your health insurance (assuming you're USA). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36505265,"author":"jchw","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How to navigate the world as a brain-damaged 17 year old?","text":"Hey, sorry to hear about the bullies, I don't understand why everyone tolerates the tragically broken school systems we have (I'm in the U.S., and my experience with school wasn't great either. Nobody cares here either.) I can't give much in terms of life advice, but maybe you'll find this video from Strange Parts interesting, a YouTuber who almost lost everything due to a head injury and got terrible advice from well-meaning medical professionals. I have No idea if this could possibly be useful, but I hate the idea that someone might be able to recover still but never gets the right help. [VIDEO] There's so many different kinds of head injuries, though, and I'm sure they are all very different. But, I still wish you best of luck in recovery.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36505308,"author":"trebligdivad","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How to navigate the world as a brain-damaged 17 year old?","text":"I've read about a few people who've recovered from brain injuries - but it does seem to take ages - so hang in there! The guy who runs the Strange Parts channel has a video about his recovery; [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36536604,"author":"vilvadot","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How to navigate the world as a brain-damaged 17 year old?","text":"Sorry to hear about your attack. It reminded me of Cory from Strangeparts, he had a concussion and seems to be handling it quite well, even recovering: [VIDEO] . Hope it can help you somehow. Hope you best of luck with whatever you decide to pursue.","stance":"rec"}],"GsyhGHUEt-k":[{"hn_comment_id":13270687,"author":"qwertyuiop924","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Why emojis are failing to evolve into a form of language","text":"Tom Scott talked about this when he and Matt Grey made Emojli, the Emoji-only messenger. You can find their talk about it at [VIDEO] However, given that HN is startup central, note that if you are involved in startups and easily offended, you might want to give this video a miss.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18512972,"author":"angus-prune","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Rot8000","text":"There is a wonderful talk by the founders of emoj.li about how it was all a joke which got out of hand. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21389504,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2019-10","story_title":"How Untitled Goose Game became a real video game","text":"For another entertaining \"This went much farther than expected\" but for two people who already had full time jobs and no desire to leave them, make a start up, or start a new business in any way, see Tom Scott and Matt Gray's Emojli: an emoji-only messenger app [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"GtQdIYUtAHg":[{"hn_comment_id":7942180,"author":"bemmu","month":"2014-06","story_title":"A texture-mapped raycaster in 128 bytes","text":"You can also have procedural music. Viznut (a legendary Finnish democoder) did some experiments to see how short you could code something that still sounds at least interesting: [VIDEO] I also wrote piece of JavaScript that can play these programs in case you want to try create your own: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10435717,"author":"creamyhorror","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code (2011)","text":"The video that started it all: [VIDEO] The follow-up post: \"Some deep analysis of one-line music programs.\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10516221,"author":"msarnoff","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Software developers describing their work in 1973 [video]","text":"The video was posted by an awesome demoscene dude named viznut. Check out the rest of his channel. Experimental music from very short C programs: [VIDEO] Robotic Liberation (VIC-20 demo): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36279554,"author":"rzzzt","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Play (1) Linux manual page","text":"I've seen these floating around on YouTube, so you might have some luck searching there (be aware of your volume settings when playing these!) - [LINK] - [VIDEO] And a longer write-up on the background from the second video: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"GuigptwlVHo":[{"hn_comment_id":8731812,"author":"prezjordan","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Prime Gap Grows After Decades-Long Lull","text":"Is loglogloglog...log the only beast that can conquer Knuth's arrow notation? (x \u2191\u2191\u2191\u2191...\u2191 n) Every time I watch videos about arrow notation or, more famously, Graham's number, my head explodes :) [VIDEO] Big big numbers are really, really cool!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9054482,"author":"prezjordan","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Graham's Number","text":"My brain melts every time I watch this video [1] from Numberphile on Graham's number. They also had another video [2] with Ron Graham himself :) [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40396384,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2024-05","story_title":"A Trial HIV Vaccine Triggered Elusive and Essential Antibodies in Humans","text":"If math can make you feel awe, you've got to watch the Numberphile series on very big numbers. They're constants used in proofs that are specific, well-defined integers known to be finite, but so huge that the physical universe does not have enough particles (or even Plank-scale microstates) in it to represent the number of digits these numbers have! Absolutely mind-bending stuff. Listed in increasing order: \"Graham's Number\" [LINK] \"How Big is Graham's Number? (feat Ron Graham)\" [VIDEO] \"The Enormous TREE(3)\" [LINK] \"TREE(3) (extra footage)\" [LINK] \"The Daddy of Big Numbers (Rayo's Number)\" [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21662433,"author":"dahart","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Inventing an Operation to Solve x^x = y (2000)","text":"> why not have an operator that applies up arrows a number of times defined with up arrows? That is exactly what up arrows do, isn\u2019t it? Up arrows are iterated up arrows. I learned this in college but still didn\u2019t fully understand up arrows for a long time, they grow unimaginably bigger and faster than I first thought. This video explains it pretty well: [VIDEO] I don\u2019t know about \u2018ultimate\u2019 but there are some generalizations of up arrows: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32285115,"author":"ObiWanFrijoles","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The Fourth Operation: What Comes After Exponentiation","text":"Graham's number [0] can be defined using hyperoperations. There's an awesome video with Ron Graham himself on Numberphile (YouTube) [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Gv2I7qTux7g":[{"hn_comment_id":36577748,"author":"pixelpoet","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Problems of C, and how Zig addresses them","text":"Andrew Kelley's intro[0] is probably the best talk I've ever seen, and his continuing leadership seems really great to me and worth supporting. Besides my reservations for its use in graphics programming (see my other comment) it looks very attractive in many practical ways (build system!! fuck CMake!) I could go from how I currently write my hobby code, sometimes a prototype for future commercial code. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38273960,"author":"matheusmoreira","month":"2023-11","story_title":"A decade of developing a programming language","text":"I can only hope my own language will become \"incredibly small\" like that one day. :) Even if a language doesn't take off, its ideas can make a difference and influence future designs. The creator of Zig certainly made an impression on me with this talk: [VIDEO] Even if Zig hadn't been successful, the ideas it represents would've enriched the world. Gives me hope I'll be able to make something out of my own ideas too one day.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42498895,"author":"pixelpoet","month":"2024-12","story_title":"C++ is an absolute blast","text":"Sorry, one more thing to add to this: Andrew Kelley is obviously a genius, and his talk introducing Zig[0] is in my top 10 of all time technical presentations, for many reasons. But I really do wish someone close to him with a passion for how coding is in many ways applied mathematics, would ask him to please have broader algebraic support for basic operations like +, -, * and maybe divide, with their basic dataflow characteristics. Optimal speed for complex numbers vs std::complex out of the box would be attractive. I understand his point about not wanting to allow every random C++ feature, but in these cases, it isn't a C++ feature, it's language-level basic algebra. In C++ land, ISPC[1] is often what you use when you want top speed rendering perf on SIMD CPUs, e.g. Moonray project[2] Please, just go ahead and define a nice clean API for vectors and scalars like OpenCL provides on its beautiful reference cards: [LINK] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] Final edit sorry: in the end I love C++ and have been learning Rust mainly out of curiosity. Avoiding C++ quirks one can have few problems and a great time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21740413,"author":"AndyKelley","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Game Boy Advance \u201cHello World\u201d Using Zig","text":"Here is a newer talk (April 2019) which is also by me and also an introduction to Zig: [VIDEO] A lot has changed since then, and a lot has changed since that Localhost talk. To catch up: * (the older talk happened here) * 0.3.0 release notes - [LINK] * 0.4.0 release notes - [LINK] * (the newer talk happened here) * 0.5.0 release notes - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29631677,"author":"von_lohengramm","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Zig 0.9.0","text":"In addition to the other recommendations, the Zig Zen[0] and The Road to Zig 1.0[1] are pretty convincing. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35571758,"author":"fileeditview","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Zig Build System","text":"I would recommend this talk by the creator of Zig: [VIDEO] He gives some examples of C vs Zig and what they tried to improve.","stance":"rec"}],"GvtNyOzGogc":[{"hn_comment_id":23949419,"author":"ShamelessC","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Local TV set to air discredited 'Plandemic' researcher's conspiracy theory","text":"John Oliver did a good bit on them on Last Week Tonight, including dozens of supposedly local news stations repeating the exact same Sinclair script verbatim. Highly recommend. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14718115,"author":"CuriousSkeptic","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Hackers Are Targeting Nuclear Facilities, Homeland Security Dept. And F.B.I. Say","text":"Speaking of news oulets. John Oliver had a rather eye opening piece about local news oulets in USA and centralized ownership. (Not that USA is unique in this aspect, but interesting non the less) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14885508,"author":"crypt1d","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Al Gore: 'The rich have subverted all reason'","text":"\u201cOur democracy has been hacked.\u201d is something that resonates with me very well. A select group of people have mastered media manipulation and are now acting as puppeteers while we are all in a state of confusion, no longer able to discern truth from disinformation. It is not classic censorship that worries me anymore. It is this constant bombardment with questionable data that we need to figure out how to battle, as it is our biggest enemy now. We need some way to get out of the disinformation bubble and be able to see the real picture. BTW this article reminded me of a great show[1] that Last Week Tonight did, about how local news outlets in US are used to manipulate the masses. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15007901,"author":"ddebernardy","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Most Trusted News Sources","text":"John Oliver had an interesting show on this a few weeks ago: [VIDEO] TL;DR version would be: the Sinclair group is collecting local TV news channels, and their editorial line isn't exactly neutral.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15011554,"author":"0xfeba","month":"2017-08","story_title":"How a Conservative TV Giant Is Ridding Itself of Regulation","text":"From the article: > \"The moves, which include easing a cap on how many stations a broadcaster can own, have opened up lucrative opportunities for Mr. Smith, among them a $3.9 billion bid to buy Tribune Media, another large owner of stations.\" > \"Associates say both men believe that local television stations, which fall under the commission\u2019s rules because they broadcast over federally owned airwaves, are at a disadvantage when competing against cable companies and online streaming services like Comcast and Netflix.\" > \"Loosened regulatory requirements, Sinclair executives said, will help even the playing field and benefit millions of Americans who rely on broadcast stations for news and entertainment by allowing the companies to invest in new equipment and technology.\" I don't watch (local) TV, but the Jon Oliver piece [1] on Sinclair was eye-opening. I understand how larger companies can invest in new technology. However, cable and broadcasting companies have historically not done this [2] because they are near monopolies (or duopolies). These deregulations make things less competitive, not more. I don't understand how conservative voters who support these moves and the magic of the free market at the same time do not see this. There's no leveling the playing field here, unless it's in the sense of bulldozing all the players out to make room for a few giants who are cooperating on some occasions to avoid competing. > \u201cI\u2019ve been listening carefully to what you have to say,\u201d M","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16735779,"author":"analogmemory","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script","text":"Last Week Tonight (John Oliver) dove into this last year. It's really frustrating that they can leverage so much political sway under the cover of \"news reporting\". Then forcing news stations to broadcast this garbage. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20133206,"author":"bonniemuffin","month":"2019-06","story_title":"TV meteorologist objected to management\u2019s \u2018code red\u2019 orders","text":"Sinclair media owns most local TV stations in the US and uses them to shape public discourse in less-than-ethical ways. I think when local news has gotten as consolidated as it is, it ought to have some kind of obligation to the public, and shouldn't be able to hide behind \"it's a private company\" to justify bad behavior. John Oliver did an informative bit on Sinclair: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20422425,"author":"ceejayoz","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Seattle Faces Backlash After Easing on Crimes Involving Mental Illness","text":"If anyone wants more info, there's a John Oliver segment on how Sinclair does this. [VIDEO] They require local stations to play pre-recorded, \"must run\" commentary, as well as requiring their anchors to recite a script accusing other news outlets of running \"fake news\". [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27630302,"author":"Quanttek","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim [video]","text":"All these stations are owned by the Sinclair Group, a right-wing broadcasting corporation that is eroding the editorial independence of local stations in order to run segments like these or the \"terrorism alert desk\" [1]. John Oliver had a great video on them: [VIDEO] Also, the following quote is just utter BS, trying to draw a distinction where there is none: > Reminder: \"While it is extremely dangerous to our democracy...\" the US is actually a Constitutional Republic. [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44637023,"author":"WorldMaker","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine","text":"Yeah in the US system thanks to some old competition requirements the Affiliate Network gets most of the name recognition and provides most of the prime time entertainment content (a few other content blocks), but the stations under that network have their own owners that can be more or less damaging, especially in news content, and more or less \"invisible\" in that maybe you only see their name in the fine print at the end of credits or copyright statements. One other notorious example is Sinclair Broadcasting [1]. Sinclair-owned stations include all of the major Affiliate Networks in the US and some of the minor ones, but are known for how much they farm politically-biased news content across their platforms, including trying to pass off editorial content as news content. (ETA: Which is to say that yeah a FOX affiliate gets entertainment programming from what is left of Rupert Murdoch's empire, but could be getting news content from all sorts of places from home-grown proper local journalism to content farms from their real owners.) [1] A humorous rant on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Gxd23UVID7k":[{"hn_comment_id":12927116,"author":"Jerry2","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Leonard Cohen Has Died","text":"Wow! Such a sad news. He was one of the greatest and his songs were timeless. One of my favorites is \"Everybody Knows\": [VIDEO] You will be missed. \u05e2\u05dc\u05d9\u05d5 \u05d4\u05e9\u05dc\u05d5\u05dd","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29364276,"author":"A4ET8a8uTh0","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Spirituality Shaped Leonard Cohen","text":"That was an interesting share. I don't know what it is about that song that keeps me coming back. My taste is somewhat eclectic so the only thing of him I knew ( and liked ) was 'Everybody knows' ( [VIDEO] ). Incidentally, why is WP writing about him now?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41596055,"author":"jszymborski","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall","text":"Pretty much every track is a hit, but here are some four random personal favourites: - Everybody Knows [VIDEO] - First We Take Manhattan [LINK] - Famous Blue Raincoat [LINK] - Who By Fire [LINK] Obviously too many to list here though, just pick up any album. By virtue of the fact that he was an incredible songwriter, his songs have such wonderful covers. The Tori Amos cover of Famous Blue Raincoat [0] is one of my favourites, and this cover of Who by Fire by PJ Harvey & Tim Phillips gives me chills every time [1] (also the theme for Bad Sisters which is an amazing series). Also, pretty much every Canadian who was an adult in 2010 has an emotional connection to the k.d. lang performance of Hallelujah at the Vancouver olympics [2]. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Gzj723LkRJY":[{"hn_comment_id":18167209,"author":"grblovrflowerrr","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Show HN: Alan \u2013 a low-code application platform","text":"I think a good example to follow for your project is the original Rails announcement video by DHH: [VIDEO] Maybe you can do a similar app in way less time!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37888684,"author":"girishso","month":"2023-10","story_title":"","text":"Ruby on Rails demo by DHH back in 2005/6. I was blown away that he created a blog application with comments in 15 minutes, I was working on Asp.NET back then and it would have taken me about a week to do that. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"H-XfCl-HpRM":[{"hn_comment_id":28771600,"author":"tylerwhipple","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Clinical trial shows that the use of Vitamin D supplement improves sleep quality","text":"If anyone is struggling with sleep, I highly recommend episode 1-3 of the Huberman Lab podcast ( [VIDEO] ), it has literally changed my life. Dr. Huberman is a Neurobiologist at Stanford and explains the science of sleep vs just telling you to not look at bright screens at night. I struggled with sleeping for 20+ years, now I easily wake up early. The biggest game changer: Sunlight in your eyes within 30 minutes of waking up. Try morning walks for 1 week (without sunglasses) and your life will be changed.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27268174,"author":"dmfdmf","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What are your favorite techniques for overcoming the \u201cpain\u201d of learning?","text":"Check out Dr. Andrew Huberman's podcast #1 on YT. \"How Your Nervous System Works & Changes\" He argues that feeling overwhelmed and the frustration of learning are necessary to activate the neuro-chemical processes needed to change our programming. Interpreting this emotional state as \"doubt\" is itself a mental program that can be changed when you realize that these neuro-chemical processess are necessary and normal. Also, get good sleep (which he covers too). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"H1KP4ztKK0A":[{"hn_comment_id":27142728,"author":"AbsoluteDestiny","month":"2021-05","story_title":"The Pin-Pen Merger (2020)","text":"Really good article. For those interested in this sort of thing, wired did a pretty good series on accents in the US recently on youtube: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43337911,"author":"tstrimple","month":"2025-03","story_title":"The US island that speaks Elizabethan English","text":"If folks find accents interesting, I loved this video which does a tour of US accents. Part 1: [VIDEO] (Okracoke Island is at 13:40) Part 2: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"H2tuKiiznsY":[{"hn_comment_id":21293808,"author":"atonse","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Boeing 2016 internal messages suggest employees may have misled FAA on 737 MAX","text":"So you want to use their historical record as some kind of justification for their dismal record with the 737 MAX, as if one is related to the other? Cold comfort to the 300+ lives, and families destroyed. Watch this video: [VIDEO] This isn't just some \"oops, these were badly trained pilots\" \u2013 the whole premise of MCAS is seriously screwed up and smacks of non-engineers running the place.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20376029,"author":"open-source-ux","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Boeing loses big order for 737 Max aircraft","text":"VOX has a good explainer video on what caused the 737 Max to crash twice for anyone who doesn't know the details. Essentially, Boeing installed sensors and software to automatically push the plane nose down if the plane angle was too steep as it ascended. This software/sensor combination is implicated as the cause of the recent crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. The real reason Boeing's new plane crashed twice : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"H46ON2FB30U":[{"hn_comment_id":29951272,"author":"amichail","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What would be a better name for TeXmacs?","text":"I'm not a TeXmacs developer but I am a fan. The software is amazing as you can see from this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29674100,"author":"amichail","month":"2021-12","story_title":"LaTeX Cookbook \u2013 Collection of LaTeX Recipes","text":"Have you tried the WYSIWYG TeXmacs? (It's not based on TeX nor emacs but is inspired by both.) See: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34425000,"author":"mgubi","month":"2023-01","story_title":"A Programmable Markup Language for Typesetting [pdf]","text":"Have you considered TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org)? See here a short video describing its features: [VIDEO] and the twitter feed for more examples: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35347083,"author":"lejalv","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Tectonic \u2013 A modern, complete, self-contained Tex engine with Unicode support","text":"Not really what you asked for -- but there is an interactive modern typesetter that is programmable and works on trees. It's called TeXmacs - you may want to check out what it can do -- [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"H62hZJVqs2o":[{"hn_comment_id":37012118,"author":"retrac","month":"2023-08","story_title":"NASA has reestablished full communications with Voyager 2","text":"There's a book on the computers used at NASA from the beginning through to when it was written - late 80s, I think. Whole thing is available online [1] It has a chapter titled \"Voyager - The Flying Computer Center\". [2] It gives a high-level overview of the computers and software. Three different processors, each dual redundant. 18 and 16 bit machines. Comparable to early 1970s minicomputers. There's a good talk about the computers on the Voyagers available online here. [3] As far as I know, beyond what's available between those two sources, very little otherwise is available publicly on the computer hardware itself - no detailed architecture descriptions, instruction sets, electronics details, etc. And no software listings. Though if I had to guess the 18-bit machines are a lot like - but not the same as - the OBP/AOP/NSSC series [4]. A bit of Voyager trivia: the computers were reprogrammed in-flight to give new abilities the Voyagers didn't have at launch, such as new image compression algorithms to allow more images to be returned than originally anticipated. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37995178,"author":"throwaway888abc","month":"2023-10","story_title":"NASA wants the Voyagers to age gracefully, so it's time for a software patch","text":"Love the Voyagers story. Just get me thinking: Why there is not more missions like this ? It takes significant time to cross \"somewhere there\", every year one launch could not hurt ? Edit: *Obligatory video: \"Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager\" by Aaron Cummings [VIDEO] Also here on HN: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40698720,"author":"ForHackernews","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Voyager Spacecraft and Fortran 5","text":"If you're interested in the computers on the Voyager probes, this talk was really good: \"Uptime 15,364 days\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"H6ZFzEW7_Q4":[{"hn_comment_id":26787434,"author":"Grieving","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Heroin-Using Professor Wants to Change How We Think About Drugs","text":"Can't read with the paywall, and this is probably contrary to the message of the article, but this interview ( [VIDEO] ) with a homeless heroin adict made a great impression on me. He comes off as both extremely self-aware and honest.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28994813,"author":"blackandsqueaky","month":"2021-10","story_title":"My experience of losing a friend to heroin (2020)","text":"Extremely powerful 5 minute interview with an obviously intelligent homeless person addicted to heroin: [VIDEO] Terrifying","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27953870,"author":"nate_meurer","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Finland provides housing and counseling to the homeless (2020)","text":"> doing drugs to forget your life has been a mess for a long time is not a lifestyle choice decision. That's a bold statement. Choice and compulsion occupy the same place in hell. Youtube is actually a fantastic resource for the average Joe (like me) who wants to hear how it is straight from the source: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"H9B5mYfBPlY":[{"hn_comment_id":16924161,"author":"dnc","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Effective methods to fight depression?","text":"I've recently watched Tim Ferris's pod-cast with Dr. Gabor Mate who is well known for his work with people who suffer from ADHD (including himself), Depression and various types of addiction: [VIDEO] . It's rather a long interview (2h 23') that touches on many topics (Depression, ADHD, Ayahuasca), but IMO well worth time invested. Very insightful as to the ways one might take when it comes to improving his/her own wellbeing. I had a rather milder form of depression few years ago (with symptoms such as low-self esteem, loss of motivation to work, eat, exercise and pretty much all standard symptoms except suicidal thoughts). One thing that helped a lot to break negative thought patters and to start pro-actively coping with my own issues was attending few Ayahuasca sessions. I'd recommend it only if you find really experienced, trustworthy, practitioner such as Dr. Gabor Mate and if you are healthy enough (health heart, you cannot use antidepressants and other, prescribed or not, psychoactive drugs and you should do specific diet few week prior to it). Some claim that it's worth 10 years of psychoanalysis. I don't not know how much truth is in that claim, but in my case it really gave me immediate relief, sense of a fresh start and valuable insights about why I'm the way I'm. Of course, a real work starts after it when it takes time and effort to integrate these insights into your everyday life (but I felt motivated to do so).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20436875,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Portugal\u2019s radical drugs policy is working (2017)","text":"An excellent way to push against addiction is to address the reasons for addiction. As Dr. Gabor Mate, who has spent a decade working with addiction and written extensively about it says: don\u2019t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. Alcohol and other drugs are the means of addiction and in no way the cause of it. I recommend Tim Ferris\u2019 interview with Gabor Mate for a great honest look into the causes and mechanisms of addiction. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21161515,"author":"seltzered_","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age","text":">Not to mention knowing the effect of all this stress on your children and their developing minds. I believe Gabor Mate talks in depth on this particular topic: [VIDEO] is one interview, which references [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27508031,"author":"RemingtonLak","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Things you wish you knew before having kids?","text":"[UPDATED] A fulltime father of a 2yr old. Few bullet points on what I wish I had from the beginning. 1. <5mons tons of skin to skin, lotsa of low calming talk to your baby, soothing music w/o words like works from Claude Debussy, smile/laugh at every chance. 2. <9mons while baby on their back, move their legs like army crawling, lotsa of stomach time. 3. >10mons 2 individuals who seem to contradict, but same messages: (just a few quick potent sound bites) - Jordan Peterson : [LINK] - *Gabor Mate\\ : [LINK] [VIDEO] 4. Your child will mimic your every move, talk, and reactions. They basically are your mini me. When they say, the are reflections of you they aren't kidding. The few times I talked aspirated or over excited happy or angry, I witnessed my child re-enacting it later including the few words he remembers. Kinda scary. So point #4: you need to change who you are completely. If you want to raise a calm, gentle, compassionate, humble, caring, empathetic child. You need to show that in every thing you do. If your child acts out or \"misbehaves\" or something you don't approve of. It's not them, it's you they are reflecting. Again, you need to show not tell. At this age and reasoning level, they have ZERO comprehension of your words, only your tone and body language. 5. Join a dad's group. Even if you don't receive \"support\" or advice, just by listening to others who will have gone through the same you have helps. 6. Although your child nor mine isn't quite that age yet, Super","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28028755,"author":"litmus","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best non-technical talks of all time?","text":"\"of all time\" is often too strong of a qualifier for me. I would say \"talks that I want to rewatch the moment they come to mind.\" Charlie Kaufman's Bafta Lecture [LINK] Gabor Mate, Prisoners of Childhood [VIDEO] I consider Bret Victor's inventing on principle a non-technical talk, so yeah that. [LINK] Quel Solaar, on creativity [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34991270,"author":"gregwebs","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Early-life stress can disrupt maturation of brain\u2019s reward circuits","text":"I highly recommend Hungry Ghosts for anyone that wants to understand addiction (it\u2019s an escape from pain that probably started in childhood ). You could also go straight to The Myth of Normal which has some of this information from his other works. The Joe Rogan interview was one of Rogans worst jobs interviewing- there\u2019s a lot more depth that Mate has to give and some of it comes out in other interviews he has given. There\u2019s a few on YouTube [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HA7GwKXfJB0":[{"hn_comment_id":6397860,"author":"SapphireSun","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Daniel Dennett: The Normal Well-Tempered Mind","text":"I really like this conception of brains working as internally competing and cooperating ferral units. I'll have to give it some more thought in the morning. I do have an entreaty for you though: In this era of high throughput computing, elegant biotechnology, and the coming of the BRAIN initiative from the national level, I believe the best way to attack the problems of mind/brain right now is hard work and the scientific method. We need more data and we need to analyze it. We're hiring developers for eyewire.org - a game to map the brain by crowd sourcing/gamifying the analysis of electron micrographs of stained retinal slices from mice. We're developing the tools to map the connectome. For real. The PI for my lab, Dr. Sebastian Seung, is mentioned in this article, and I love working with him. There are other absolutely incredible people working here too that will blow your mind. Send an email to support at eyewire dot org if you want in or email me personally (see link in my profile) if you want more details. (I won't be able to get back to you instantly - I'm totally swamped, but if you're hired, based on my experiences so far, it'll be worth the wait). Here are two fun explanatory videos from TED/TEDx: [VIDEO] - Sebastian Seung talking connectomes [LINK] - Amy Robinson talking EyeWire Thanks for reading. I hope this post isn't too far out of our community norms - I don't see too many (large) job postings in the comments, but I felt like this article is the perfect place t","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10120312,"author":"mentos","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Silicon Brain: 100,000 ARM cores [video]","text":"What technology do we have right now to map the connections of the brain? Is there anything that currently exists with enough granularity to take a snapshot of our neurons and their connections? edit: thanks for the replies, did some research found this TED talk that visualizes the problem pretty well [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HB5TrK7A4pI":[{"hn_comment_id":33658992,"author":"pfarrell","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Fred Brooks has died","text":"Not writing, but I have found all of Brett Victor's speeches to be incredibly inspiring on how I think about what I want to work on and where we're going. Inventing on Principle by Brett Victor: [LINK] Growing a Language by Guy Steele: [LINK] We Really Don't Know How to Compute! by Gerald Sussman: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34799349,"author":"pvillano","month":"2023-02","story_title":"The program is the database is the interface","text":"you might be interested in [VIDEO] \"We Really Don't Know How to Compute!\"- Gerald Sussman (2011) [1:04:18]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37582217,"author":"throwaway71271","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Programming Is Hard","text":"For some reason programming is not getting any easier, I can even make an argument its getting worse despite all the improved tooling and andragogy investments we have done. Programming is in some sort of local minimum and we keep going in circles. Few years ago I watched this talk by Gerald Sussman: \"We really don't know how to compute\" - [VIDEO] and it made me question my views on what I think programming is. I dont know if its because people are afraid to try new things, or there is no funding to try new things, we are kind of stuck. People thinking \"don't reinvent the wheel\" and for some reason think we have built a wheel (as Casey Muratori says: [LINK] ). We have a square at best. There are so many problems in the world, and a lot of them need robust and resilient programs to be solved, e.g. self cleaning public toilets or worm farm that you feed bio garbage and it produces protein flour. The challenge is exactly the same as it was 80 years ago, manage complexity in chaotic and emergent systems: chaos, complexity and entropy as the poet said. And to be honest, I think we have gotten worse at managing all of those, most bugs that we encounter now is like a murder mystery from Detective Conan and it requires Shinichi Kudo level of deductive reasoning to figure out what is going on. Programming will remain hard if you keep thinking it is just a translation problem from a \"business requirement\" to a \"computer language\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43562722,"author":"teleforce","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Prof. Sussman's Reading List (2016)","text":"I highly recommend Prof. Sussman talk at the Strange Loop conference 2011 [1]. It's not his inaugural lecture but it's pretty close where he talk about his research work with his former students. It's also paved the way to modern constraint programming based on logic and optimization which are the machine intelligence that's complementary to the conventional data driven and learning bases AI. [1] \"We Really Don't Know How to Compute!\" - Gerald Sussman - MIT (2011) [video]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48437117,"author":"gobdovan","month":"2026-06","story_title":"My Software North Star","text":"Grandparent is onto something. You can't define correctness without a spec. And since most business-oriented software, which most of us work with, isn't made against a comprehensive spec, you can argue that anything falling outside it is either a bug or a feature. 'If your disk backup software corrupts backups' has behind it a clean definition that's (pretty) unambiguous and you don't care about, since it's already outsourced to some cloud solution. But 'User finds it easy to buy more stuff' does not. Also, mandatory Sussman reference [0], where he talks about correctness not being that important and gives Google as example, that just needs to be close enough and not disastrously incorrect + interesting stuff around engineers confusing brittleness with correctness. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HBluLfX2F_k":[{"hn_comment_id":46194365,"author":"indigodaddy","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Strong earthquake hits northern Japan, tsunami warning issued","text":"Various scientists in this video. The video is a great watch btw. [VIDEO] (stresses build up and are often released through many small, unfelt earthquakes (25:54). If these small movements don't dissipate the stress, it can accumulate and lead to a powerful chain reaction (26:25) * disclaimer I used YouTube's built-in AI to find/summarize the timestamps, as I couldn't remember offhand where it was when I previously watched this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46354788,"author":"austy69","month":"2025-12","story_title":"I'm just having fun","text":"Glad you mentioned the veritasium video on these. Here is the link: [VIDEO] Before I watched this I would default to thinking about most distributions as normal. It's really fun to think about whatever \"game\" you are playing - wether you are building a business or trying to win a carnival game - and consider if the results follow a normal distribution or a power law?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46945467,"author":"kjshsh123","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Five disciplines discovered the same math independently \u2013 none of them knew","text":"3Blue1Brown has a good video on phase transitions. [LINK] Veritasium has a good video on how criticality applies to other things too, [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49277156,"author":"gopalv","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Your Key to Success Isn't More Luck or Hard Work","text":"Your success eV is opportunities x success-rate. Out of the gate, hard work improves success rates, but not the count of opportunities. Connections improve opportunities, it doesn't do shit for success-rate. Luck does for both sides of the mix. As a startup founder in my 40s, the entire VP/SVP level in silicon valley is people one or two hops away for an intro, though admittedly a lot of the first hop there is through the other founders. The original paper about importance of weak ties is under appreciated, because people you work with tend to go on to better & bigger things - especially in the beginning of your career, if you are a nice person. Veritasium put out a very nice video[1] about knowing which sort of game we're playing. It is a power law game. There are only two takeaways I had, \"show up\" and \"get lucky\". There is no winning without showing up. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HCUct4NlxE0":[{"hn_comment_id":463912,"author":"iuguy","month":"2009-02","story_title":"Peeler Man, HN Salesmanship Hero, Passes","text":"See the guy in action at [VIDEO] A really fantastic pitchman, great to watch and made an absolute craft out of his work.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1285598,"author":"jacquesm","month":"2010-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What makes a presentation great ?","text":"I don't think Steve Jobs is that great a presenter, Ballmer is (much) worse though. A good presentation and a good presenter are two different things. A good presenter can give a presentation about essentially boring material and make it live, be memorable. A bad presenter can turn a great presentation in to an ordeal. I've linked here once to a youtube video of Joe Ades, have a look at it: [VIDEO] The subject is 'potato peelers', from a street vendor no less. That man has more feeling for presentation in his little finger than any amount of high flying consultants that lecture on the subject. Watch the crowd he draws and how well he interacts with the people. Of course he's had years to hone his 'patter', but still, I can't imagine watching someone trying to sell a car, much less a potato peeler, and presenting is essentially a sales job. He manages to turn the mundane in to something interesting and engaging.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1818405,"author":"jdietrich","month":"2010-10","story_title":"After 4 years of self-funded coding marathons I feel \"finished\", care to talk?","text":"You seem to have been terribly misled. Only very rarely do products sell themselves. 99% of the time, the product is largely incidental to the sales process. Your idea doesn't matter one jot, what matters is how well you can connect to customers and really sell to them. Let me tell you about a fine English gentleman by the name of Joe Ades, now sadly no longer with us. Joe wore Savile Row suits and lived in a three-bedroomed apartment on Park Avenue. He spent most nights at the Caf\u00e9 Pierre with his wife, sharing a bottle of his usual - Veuve Clicquot champagne. You might assume that Joe was a banker or an executive, but in fact Joe sold potato peelers on the street for $5 each, four for $20. I urge you, I implore you, I beg you, stop what you're doing and watch Joe in action - [VIDEO] That is what business looks like. Sometimes, once in a million, you luck upon a product so amazing the world beats a path to your door. For most of us, the best we can hope for is to be some chump with a thousand boxes of vegetable peelers. Anybody can sit out on the street with a box of peelers, but Joe sold them. Joe made his peelers sing, he made them seem like magic. He took a humble piece of stamped metal and created theatre. He did something so simple and strange and wonderful that people would buy a fistful of his peelers, just so they could tell their friends about this little Englishman they saw in Union Square. Look at the Fortune 500, tell me what you see. I see grocery stores, drugst","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8704977,"author":"patio11","month":"2014-12","story_title":"He sold potato peelers for $5 each and became a millionaire","text":"I heard about this gentleman on HN a few years ago. You have to watch him work: it's a performance, in every sense of the word: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1209223,"author":"jacquesm","month":"2010-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What advice would you give college students about starting a business? ","text":"I think one of the quickest ways to learn this is to jump in on the 'hard' end of sales, cold calls and approaching strangers. Have a look at this guy: [VIDEO] There's a lifetime of experience in there, not quite 'cold calling' but he's got amazing talent.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3035405,"author":"bobds","month":"2011-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What can I sell in Times Square? ","text":"It doesn't matter what you sell. What matters is how you sell it. Case in point, Joe Ades with his vegetable peelers: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3035415,"author":"pragmagic","month":"2011-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What can I sell in Times Square? ","text":"Sell experiences. I'm not sure if you've heard of Joe Ades. He used to sell potato peelers in NY and has been mentioned on HN a few times: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] I don't think it really matters what you sell, especially in this case where you just want to improve your sales technique. The main thing is that you sell an experience, not a product.","stance":"rec"}],"HE6rSljTwdU":[{"hn_comment_id":21856859,"author":"CapricornNoble","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Russia up in arms over Chinese theft of military technology","text":">>Russia is wasting its time being an agitator. They could, with time, integrate with the west and coexist That's a fundamental failure to understand the Russian character, their geographic position, and their legitimate security concerns. Caspian Report's video on the subject has a few errors but is overall a good summary.[1] We've had bilateral military training exercises with the Russians in the past.[2] Their military used to be focused on the Caucasus and the largely-Islamic Chechen insurgency. They were restructuring their military towards a brigade-based organization to facilitate fighting those sorts of small wars. But they were faced with continual expansion of NATO eastwards, contrary to a tacit agreement (if not necessarily formalized) with the US. I think the straw that finally broke the back of Russian paranoia was the establishment of Anti-Ballistic Missile sites in Poland, to protect against non-existent Iranian missiles that would supposedly target Europe.[3] Things came to a head in 2007. [4] After that, the Russians began to re-align their military to discouraging another high-intensity war with the west -- in the past 250 years, all three of the existential threats to the Russian nation have been invasions from the west (Napoleon, WW1, WW2). All of that is why they eventually reconstituted the Guards Tank Army[5]. And all of that is why they are currently painted as an \"agitator\". [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30452764,"author":"pseudostem","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Estonia, allies to trigger NATO Article 4","text":"I usually avoid posting here as I see far more intelligent people on this forum. Since you asked for conjecture... I'd recommend Caspian Report's video [1] first. Secondly, if we look at Cuban missile crisis, US had a strong reaction to missiles around them. I see the Russian reaction pretty similar. They do not want NATO expansion and they do not want missiles in Poland. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HF-9Dy6iB_4":[{"hn_comment_id":27227196,"author":"tzs","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Physicists identify the engine powering black hole energy beams","text":"I'd recommend the two episodes released right before the one about the black hole information paradox too. They set up for what is covered in the information paradox episode. \"Why Quantum Information is Never Destroyed\" - [VIDEO] \"What Survives Inside A Black Hole?\" - [LINK] Maybe the episode before those two also. I vaguely recall that something from the information paradox episode used something from that (and if I'm misremembering, it was still a neat episode): \"Noether's Theorem and The Symmetries of Reality\" - [LINK] I have a question about the episodes you cited. They cover how beyond the event horizon space becomes time and time becomes space. They go over how that means that inside you can't go backwards in space for the same reason that out here in the normal universe you can't go backwards in time. You are doomed to only go forward, which inside means toward the singularity. (Much better than the ridiculous analogy often given that you can't get out of a black hole because the escape velocity equals or exceeds the speed of light. That's a ridiculous analogy because it only explains why you can't get out ballistically). But all their explanations used a simplified black hole in a spacetime with just 1 space dimension and 1 time dimension. We've actually got 3 space dimension. Does that mean that in a real block hole past the event horizon, you end up in a spacetime with 3 time dimensions and 1 space dimension? If so, does anything interesting happen due to having mor","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28278974,"author":"f154hfds","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Physicist discovered an escape from Hawking\u2019s black hole paradox","text":"For those of you like me having trouble with the abstract nature of modern physics, I have to recommend the relevant PBS Space Time on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HF1luRD4Qmk":[{"hn_comment_id":12957020,"author":"daypack","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Why we need the best tools on Chromebooks and Raspberry Pi","text":"Chrome Canary has improved workspace support, diffs, nodejs debugging and more editor improvements that make Dev Tools hard to beat as a HTML/JS/CSS IDE. See \"Debugging The Web\" session from the recent Dev Summit: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17311597,"author":"timrichard","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Console.table()","text":"If you use Chrome DevTools, there are a few resources that I think are really useful for getting the most out of them and making the workflow a bit easier. Paul Irish has a great roundup here : [VIDEO] Umar Hansa has a great mailing list for DevTools tips, and there are some good ones to browse here : [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"HI09kat_GeI":[{"hn_comment_id":26507712,"author":"Diederich","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space","text":"The author is [LINK] Shortly after Covid19 started last year, he started a series of videos called \"The Biggest Ideas in the Universe\", playlist here: [VIDEO] I've watched quite a lot of this so-called 'popular' hard science material on youtube, and this series was by far the best I've run across. His approach is a bit different from most others, and his presentation is engaging, approachable but also fairly substantial. Specifically, he doesn't elide all of the relevant math, but doesn't get too deep at the same time. You'll see a lot of integrals, derivatives and graphs. For example, he talks about an hour on the big idea of 'Change', and another \"Space\". Perhaps even more interesting are the followup Q&A videos, which are as long as and perhaps even more detailed than the source. Do give the linked six minute intro video a watch.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29523975,"author":"ericbarrett","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Long-form info-dense videos on YouTube you would recommend to anyone?","text":"The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll, an intro to modern physics, including homotopy and quantum field theory. He does some math but you'll follow if you've finished high school. Don't miss the Q&A videos in between the 26 regular episodes. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31447161,"author":"Trasmatta","month":"2022-05","story_title":"PBS SpaceTime","text":"I'd also recommend Sean Carroll. His \"Biggest Ideas in the Universe\" series is really great: [VIDEO] I'd also recommend his podcast, Mindscape.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42991165,"author":"mperham","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Noether's Theorem Revolutionized Physics","text":"Sean Carroll\u2019s Biggest Ideas in the Universe YouTube series is fantastic. Just enough math to be interesting but nothing requiring a math degree. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44912398,"author":"jackdoe","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Death and What Comes Next (2002)","text":"Ignoring the moral question in the story, many people are satisfied by saying \"haha funny, the cat is both dead and alive\" and they just move on. Reading Pratchett for almost 30 years, it has fueled quite an interested in quantum mechanics in me, he subtly introduces QM teasers in almost every book I read. Particularly Mort. As I dropped out of highschool, I didnt have the luck to properly study physics, but in my 30s, I my existential crisis hit, as they say, a man dies twice, and the stupid half dead cat wouldn't leave me alone. And one night the omnipotent youtube algorithm recommended Susskind's lectures to me, then Feynman, Shankar, .. it just kept going. Now I watch and re-watch them but take screenshots and send them to claude when I am confused (which is still most of the time). If you are a layman like me and just want to know what is up with the cat, I encourage you to watch Sean Carroll's lectures (dont miss the Q&A videos) and it will for sure allow you to ask at least better questions. I love that cat so much. --- Sean Carroll: [VIDEO] Richard Feynman: [LINK] and [LINK] Leonard Susskind: [LINK] Ramamurti Shankar: [LINK] Barton Zwiebach: [LINK] Carl Bender: [LINK] If you struggle with calculus, I found Herb Gross to be partucularly good Herb Gross: [LINK] Of course watch 3blue1brown, alphaphoenix, styropyro etc as well","stance":"rec"}],"HJ-719EGIts":[{"hn_comment_id":5519772,"author":"qznc","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Probably this one: [VIDEO] Anything from Cliff Click is quite good. This guy has a very deep understanding of compilers, virtual-machines, CPUs, and their interactions. A JVM does that? [LINK] Java on a 1000 Cores [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41691789,"author":"benreesman","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Build a serverless ACID database with this one neat trick (atomic PutIfAbsent)","text":"For folks interested in this topic I highly recommend this talk by Cliff Click about building highly scalable hash tables via Compare And Swap: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11152153,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2016-02","story_title":"A resizable concurrent map","text":"Dr. Cliff Click's Google talk on Lock-Free Hashtable is here: [VIDEO] Acc to Dr. Click, if you do not have 30+ CPUs in a single machine, ConcurrentHashMap (built-in to the JDK) will do the trick more often than not. The talk is really worth it, if you're curious about the design, esp. Dr. Click also had memorable debate with Rich Hickey over STMs. He works at h2o.ai and wrote about building a Key-Value store two years ago: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14387284,"author":"eternalban","month":"2017-05","story_title":"An Atomic Hash Table","text":"I've always admired the wizardry of Cliff Click's concurrent hash: [LINK] [VIDEO] I'm not sure what to make of an \"atomic\" hash. I don't think OP does as well: \"Doesn't this kind of defeat the point of concurrent algorithms? Well, in a sense, it does make it non-atomic, but it isn't really a spin-lock or anything like that, even though it can seem like that:\" Concurrent hash seems to be more correct and clear.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32537448,"author":"benreesman","month":"2022-08","story_title":"C++ Concurrency Model on x86 for Dummies (2020)","text":"It's worth noting that for a lot of people for a long time, Intel TSO was the memory model in practice (which IIRC makes `std::memory_order_seq_cst` pretty much free on Intel). Many clothes have been torn and many teeth gnashed porting C++ from Intel to more relaxed architectures. Back in the day that usually meant like SPARC, today that usually means ARM. \"Acquire\" and \"Release\" are relatively comprehensible in isolated examples, but the intuitions don't compose well. It's realllly easy to end up with an ABA type issue or an architecture dependency even with the simplest lock-free primitives like CAS. Combine that with how cheap `std::mutex` is on most platforms and it's just really a last resort, at least on server-class gear. Google engineers have more experience with this than probably anyone, and they've summed it up nicely here: [LINK] . Doing raw atomics isn't quite \"roll your own cryptography\", but it's clearly in \"if you have to ask, don't use it\" territory. I've lost count of how many times I've fuzzed something to Mars and back to show it \"correct\" and not been able to justify it compared to `pthread` when the profiles were in. With that disclaimer, people are going to do it, and so I should probably leave an example of it done well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HKQDSgBHPfY":[{"hn_comment_id":15929594,"author":"patcheudor","month":"2017-12","story_title":"New Model Warns About Crispr Gene Drives in the Wild","text":"John Sotos, Chief Medical Officer of Intel covered the dangers of this technology quite well at DEF CON 25. If you've not seen his talk, watch it now, it's in my top ten of the best talks I've been to in the eleven years I've been going to DEF CON: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16053921,"author":"detritus","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Welcome to Pleistocene Park","text":"If you're interested in this domain, I'd highly recommend watching the following Defcon Talk from Intel's Chief Medical Officer (who'd've thunkit?) which is illuminating and borderline terrifying.. 'DEF CON 25 - John Sotos - Genetic Diseases to Guide Digital Hacks of the Human Genome' [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16159365,"author":"globuous","month":"2018-01","story_title":"DNA Testing Botched My Family's Heritage","text":"I always kinda curious about dna heritage testing. Until I saw John Sotos' talk at Def Con 25 [0]. He highly recommands you keep your genome private. And that you only give it away if it is vital (aka you're really sick). The talk is absolutely amazing, probably the most captivating talk I have ever watched (thanks HN commenter that shared it a while ago). But anyway, Sotos specifically tells his audience that, as a security measure, they shouldn't release their dna to heritage services. Because it isn't vital. Anywhi, great talk, highly recommand it although Sotos mentions DNA testing for heritage for a few seconds only, so slightly off topic :) [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38520742,"author":"ghj","month":"2023-12","story_title":"23andMe hackers accessed a whole lot of user's personal data","text":"I remember deciding that I never want to ever have my DNA in any database after watching this talk: DEF CON 25 - John Sotos - Genetic Diseases to Guide Digital Hacks of the Human Genome (2017): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15973932,"author":"Houshalter","month":"2017-12","story_title":"US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted","text":"This was posted a few days ago. It's a talk about the dangers of man made viruses by Intel's chief medical officer: [VIDEO] 2 minutes in he talks about how a strain of flu escaped from a lab in 1977 and killed (and is still killing) millions of people.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16184772,"author":"loeee","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Why CRISPR-Edited Food May Be in Supermarkets Sooner Than You Think","text":"This defcon talk on the some of the ways that gene editing can be used and abused might change your mind. [VIDEO] Weaponized crops aside, it's also worth considering about all of the problems that have arisen with invasive species. What happens if a plant bred for it's resilience begins to choke out other crops? What about the problem of creating mono-cultures, either intentionally or inadvertently? And those are just the obvious examples of what could go wrong. Not to say that there isn't a lot of potential for good with these technologies, but I don't think that companies doing an end run around the USDA, or any other regulatory body that might catch potential problems, is all that harmless.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17844101,"author":"zawerf","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Hackable humans and digital dictators: Q&A with Yuval Noah Harari","text":"There is a much more convincing talk on the dangers of bioengineering: [VIDEO] News article if you can't watch: [LINK] tl;dr \u201cThe reason you haven\u2019t heard much about bioweapons is that they\u2019ve been held back by a pretty severe limitation, which is the potential for blowback.\" Unlocking the ability to target specific genes will overcome this since the same tech that allows targeting only cancer cell will allow targeting specific groups or individuals. > What, for example, if groups spread their agenda in a very direct way, by literally rewriting DNA to make it impossible to live a life against their credo? Suppose militant vegans wanted to end meat eating: there\u2019s a gene for that. Or imagine if radical misogynists wanted to force the veiling of all women: there\u2019s a gene for sunlight intolerance, and the genetic functions of gender are already well-known. > Or, he suggested, attacks could be done on an individual level: targeting public figures by stealing their genetic code, or targeting their whole family by sequencing the genes of someone who\u2019s closely related. And the attacks could be subtler than what\u2019s expected: Sotos cited genes for intractable diarrhea, massive weight gain, total baldness and \u201can intense fishy body odour\u201d.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19152306,"author":"bgaluszka","month":"2019-02","story_title":"CRISPR machines that can wipe out entire species","text":"You may find interesting this presentation from John Sotos on DEF CON [VIDEO] \"Genetic Diseases to Guide Digital Hacks of the Human Genome\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21818497,"author":"Real_S","month":"2019-12","story_title":"23andMe to share customer gene data with GlaxoSmithKline for $300M","text":"This is a legitimate threat: [VIDEO] If your DNA becomes available to adversaries, you may suddenly find yourself on the front line in a bio-war.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23923248,"author":"bagacrap","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Breach exposed more than one million DNA profiles on a major genealogy database","text":"this presentation outlines the kind of terrible attacks that could be based on your DNA in the near future [VIDEO] tldr, CRISPR allows targeting bioweapons at specific individuals.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27590789,"author":"nickles","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Alpha-Gal Syndrome","text":"There was an interesting Defcon talk on potential threats from genetic engineering that touched on this exact scenario. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HLNhPMQnWu4":[{"hn_comment_id":23964502,"author":"nkurz","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Cancel culture takes the fun out of life, says comedian John Cleese","text":"Cleese's 1987 monologue on \"extremism\" is delightful and well worth the two minutes it takes to watch: What we never hear about extremism is its advantages. Well the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good because it provides you with enemies. Let me explain. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. Attractive isn't it? So if you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway, and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you're only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons, and that if it wasn't for them you'd actually be good-natured and courteous and rational all the time. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25598653,"author":"godelski","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ex\u2010FBI operative says he worked to disrupt political activities up to '74 (1975)","text":"These are some really good points. It is reminding me a lot of one of my favorite John Cleese videos[0]. One of the things that I think makes this so difficult is that language has a lot of limits that people don't realize. Since we often don't run into issues with communication (or rather don't notice since the errors are small) it is difficult to realize when we're in boundary cases. For example there's priming[1]. Many may learn that this is a useful way to influence people and many are aware of the psychological experiments, but it is also a fundamental part of how we communicate. We try to communicate the most information with the least amount of words. But this same factor is why good faith arguments are so important but also difficult to maintain. We could not easily converse if we didn't make certain assumptions about another person's views. This is normally fine but we run into problems in heated topics where we often act like someone can only hold an extreme opinion (and of course, mine is not extreme and just common sense). It's the \"oh, I've heard this argument before\" and while one person may have subtext another may not (why it is difficult to identify dog whistling). Removing nuance from a topic makes it easy, and we like easy things. But that's not beneficial to resolving issues and like you say \"leads to a wilderness of mirrors\". But it is impossible to tell if priming like this is actively being pushed or naturally happening, since we do have a natural predi","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17344781,"author":"Rapzid","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Elon Musk emails employees about 'extensive and damaging sabotage' by employee","text":"Left and right extremism seems to be taking over the conversation worldwide these days. It's creeping in everywhere. What is most scary is that it is likely going to have to get much worse before it gets better.. Somebody posted this and it about sums it all up: John Cleese vs Extremism [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26929143,"author":"A_non_e-moose","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Millions of the Pentagon\u2019s dormant IP addresses sprang to life on January 20","text":"See John Cleese on Extremism [VIDEO] The \"you're either with us or against us\" mentality leads to the eradication of moderates and further extremism. A healthy society needs balance. How can we counteract this?","stance":"rec"}],"HLRdruqQfRk":[{"hn_comment_id":31732594,"author":"devenvdev","month":"2022-06","story_title":"The Floppotron 3.0","text":"Came here to post this \u2191 Tom7's Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters [1] is one of the most entertaining (and educational) experiences I had lately [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34314619,"author":"loxias","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Tetris Is Capable of Universal Computation","text":"[VIDEO] (Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters [advances in derp learning]) Is pure gold. I don't wanna spoil it, it just keeps getting better and better as the video progresses. I laughed so hard. If by some freak chance I ever become wealthy, I want to sponsor this sort of research.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39655926,"author":"Der_Einzige","month":"2024-03","story_title":"AI-Generated Data Can Poison Future AI Models","text":"I want to observe that one of my favorite youtubers did exactly this with making the \"uppest case\" and \"lowest case\" letters. [VIDEO] I love this guy so much and wish he made far more videos.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26668083,"author":"ashertrockman","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters","text":"SIGBOVIK is proud to have published this groundbreaking work in its 2021 proceedings, which were released today. Also, check out the author's video: [VIDEO] For more non-serious research that is often executed seriously, see: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26776595,"author":"gspr","month":"2021-04","story_title":"std::unique_ptr implementation backed by Ethereum NFTs","text":"I assume you're very familiar with Tom7, and in particular his SIGBOVIK submissions, but just in case: Tom7! (Good starting point for anyone who's not: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"HM1Zb3xmvMc":[{"hn_comment_id":31649040,"author":"eigenhombre","month":"2022-06","story_title":"A Road to Common Lisp (2018)","text":"Land of Lisp is fun, and the video is a must![0]; I also really like Norvig's PAIP (Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, available for free now on GitHub[1]). PAIP shows ways of programming in Lisp that really are unlike what I've seen in most other languages. Lately I have been working the Exercism exercises and there are over 80 Common Lisp problems, with more problems being added over time (my hope is to finish what's there and then help by adding some more). [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15078573,"author":"flavio81","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Answers from 2017 Common Lisp experts","text":"> Compared to Symbolics CL looks like a mess at least from reading the books. Which books, may I know? The Common Lisp Hyperspec is one of the best reference manuals for a programming language, ever. But it is not a tutorial nor a how-to guide! Try \"Pratical Common Lisp\". Or \"Land of Lisp\" if you want to have lots of fun. simple but refined, guaranteed to blow your mind... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27141134,"author":"eigenhombre","month":"2021-05","story_title":"The Lisperati1000 is a cyberdeck terminal dedicated to Lisp programming","text":"Barski's music video[1] might give some more flavor to PG's comment. Brightens my day every time I watch it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HMBl0ttu-Ow":[{"hn_comment_id":11990600,"author":"legel","month":"2016-06","story_title":"New Cities","text":"The most profound thing I know about cities + public policy: Google hosted a talk in 2014 by MIT Professor Sandy Pentland called \"Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread\". His research concludes that our connectivity - free and fast flow of data on networks, people on roads, goods and services, etc. - is our greatest economic and social virtue. His models show - \"like a law\" - that the more connected we are, the wealthier we are as a society. Check it out: [VIDEO] And good luck to everyone behind this.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21750224,"author":"patcon","month":"2019-12","story_title":"How Trolls Overran the Public Square","text":"Yay! Social physics :) There's a great Authors at Google talk by Sandy Pentland, about his book of the same name. Gives a good overview of the book, but 100% still worth a read after watching, esp if you are someone who works with (or would like to work with) large groups of people -- event organizing, companies, community, group facilitation, etc. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10166972,"author":"gd2","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Two scientists meeting on a bus leads to discovery in the lab","text":"Sandy Pentland: \"Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread\" | Talks at Google similar theme. [VIDEO] I think its in this video that he talks about the productivity gains of the seemingly random exchanges of ideas, and the possibility to increase them by scheduling and thoughtfully designed common areas.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10281500,"author":"legel","month":"2015-09","story_title":"From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users\u2019 Online Identities","text":"You bring up two very interesting and powerful phenomena: \"siren servers\" and \"social physics\". The first term is used by Jaron Lanier to describe computer systems that, like \"sirens\" of the sea, lure everyone into their beautiful environs, collect all of the data on them, and statistically model all of this data in ways that effectively master the nature of this individual - her beliefs, her abilities, her emotions - until ultimately that individual is made both completely vulnerable and completely powerless. Lanier's book is intentionally provocative and controversial, while rather intelligent and compassionate in its spirit, and I recommend checking it out: [LINK] . The second term comes from a talk at Google in 2014 called \"Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread\" ( [VIDEO] ) by MIT Professor Sandy Pentland. He describes research supporting the recent Nature publication you link to on social and cultural progress, which concludes that our connectivity - free and fast flow of data on networks, people on roads, goods and services across nations, etc. - is our greatest economic and social virtue. His statistical modeling results really strongly show - \"like a law\" - that the more connected we are, the wealthier we are as a society. It's really interesting to consider how we could concentrate on using all of the data and models to make deep positive impacts on our society, while respecting our human dignity. To quote Pope Francis's address to the U.N. today: \"Integral human dev","stance":"rec"}],"HMYiktO0D64":[{"hn_comment_id":39657770,"author":"pram","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)","text":"ATT has a bunch of Bell Labs stuff on their Youtube channel, it's all a pro watch. This is one of my favorites, about people submitting their code to get processed at their computing center: [VIDEO] Watching it made me realize a lot of batch-esque things like Hadoop and Spark aren't too far off, just more automated.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30941751,"author":"cube00","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The State of Fortran","text":"These two training videos from the Bell Labs Computing Centre are a very interesting insight into what it was like. Part 1 [VIDEO] Part 2 [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"HNkLcD3PKyk":[{"hn_comment_id":38787666,"author":"mooreds","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite Podcast Episodes of 2023?","text":"Here are two of my favorite odd lots episodes. How banking worked before computers: [LINK] What it takes to convert commercial buildings to residential buildings: [VIDEO] Sharing YouTube links because they don't have paywall free podcast pages, though the podcast is free to subscribe to (with ads).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38820420,"author":"throw0101b","month":"2023-12","story_title":"The high price of empty office space","text":"Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode with someone who does conversions, \"What It Really Takes to Convert an Office Building Into Apartments\": > Big cities like New York have two real estate problems. Housing is scarce and office buildings are empty (or at least under-utilized.) So there would seem to be an obvious solution: turn the offices into homes. And indeed there has been a lot of talk lately about \"office-to-resi\" conversions. But it's very hard, for a wide variety of reasons. Zoning, financing, and then, of course, the operational aspects of the construction all need to be in place. So what does it take? On this episode, we speak with Joey Chilelli, managing director at the Vanbarton Group, a firm that's been involved with these projects for a decade and long before the pandemic upended both real estate markets. We discuss the challenges involved in actually pulling off these complex projects. * [LINK] * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40288861,"author":"cduzz","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Can turning office towers into apartments save downtowns?","text":"There's a good \"odd lots\" podcast about this[1]. There's another of their podcasts about how apartment zoning rules make it hard to make \"family\" apartments[2]. Basically you need two egress points, windows that can open, windows in kitches and bedrooms. All of these are directly in contradiction to modern office buildings with open floor plans, fixed windows, shared mechanical systems. So it may be possible to convert offices into apartments, but it's very expensive and you end up losing a bunch of floor space. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46722730,"author":"mooreds","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Downtown Denver's office vacancy rate grows to 38.2%","text":"This podcast is about the NYC market, but a good deep dive into why this is not a simple proposition. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HNziOoXDBeg":[{"hn_comment_id":25526595,"author":"jackweirdy","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some channels that make you glad YouTube exists?","text":"I have sunk many hours this year into watching Scott Brown Carpentry - a New Zealand Carpenter who is incredibly talented at video editing as well as carpentry [LINK] I\u2019ve also enjoyed watching Kitboga - a twitch / YouTube personality who wastes phone scammers time in intricate ways, like building fake bank websites to lure them in if they use screen sharing. One of my favourite videos so far involved \u201cdriving to a store\u201d to get google play codes, then redeeming them on a fake google play store while the scammer watched on screen share: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34150392,"author":"matthewmorgan","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Americans lost $10B; caused by illegal Indian call centres in 2022","text":"My grandfather stopped answering his landline telephone because of these scumbags. Kitboga is a youtuber who winds scammers up and wastes their time, and is pretty righteous [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HOuZyOKa91o":[{"hn_comment_id":35902843,"author":"web3-is-a-scam","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Pharo 11","text":"As a rails developer - my introduction to Pharo started with this video: [VIDEO] If you're not a ruby/rails developer you can still see how awesome it is, but for rubyists specifically it can really be quite mind blowing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49244858,"author":"throwatdem12311","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Squeak/Smalltalk 6.1 Release Notes","text":"As a Ruby developer this video about Pharo smalltalk made me a smalltalk believer \u2014 not surprising because Ruby was heavily inspired by smalltalk. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23242311,"author":"mikelevins","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Production Lisp in 2020?","text":"There's this recent video showing a little of what the Pharo Smalltalk environment is like: [VIDEO] The video was made by a Ruby programmer, rather than an experience Smalltalker, so it's more a newbie showing you cool things he's discovered, rather than an expert showing the power of the system. On the other hand, there's this one: [LINK] That one is an expert, Kalman Reti, showing some of what it's like to work with a Symbolics Lisp Machine. (It's not a real Lisp machine; they're all at least thirty years old now; this is an emulator running the old Symbolics OS on Linux). Go to YouTube and search for Rainer Joswig and you'll find a few video demos of Lisp Machines and MCL and so forth. Finally, here are a few images from about eighteen years ago, also from Rainer. They show various views of the Macintosh Common Lisp and SK8 environments. It's not an experienced user showing you around, but at least you can get some idea what the environments looked like: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25627491,"author":"mikelevins","month":"2021-01","story_title":"On Repl-Driven Programming","text":"That's a good suggestion. Walking through a set of interactions is a solid idea. For what it's worth, there are some videos around of people actually doing it with Lisp and Smalltalk systems, and pjmlp already posted a pile of them elsewhere in this thread. I can add a few more: Kalman Reti walking through some interactions with a Symbolics LispM repl: [LINK] Brian Mastenbrook demonstrating Interlisp's SEDIT structure editor in the Xerox Lisp environment: [LINK] Rainer Joswig (lispm here on HN) showing us a little bit of repl and Zmacs interaction on a Symbolics Lisp Machine: [LINK] Rainer again, showing some simple interactions with Macintosh Common Lisp, which was my daily driver for years: [LINK] Ruby programmer Avdi Grimm shows some things that he found cool about Pharo Smalltalk: [VIDEO] Dan Ingalls (one of the original authors of Smalltalk) in a 2017 demo of Smalltalk 76: [LINK] There are some other things I'd like to find for lists like this, but haven't been able to. In particular, a good demo of Apple's SK8 would be great. If you can imagine a full-color Hypercard that could crack open and reprogram absolutely everything on the screen, including the machine code that drew the window system's widgets, all in a repl while the code was live; in which you could grab an arbitrary widget and drop it on the repl window to get a live variable reference to the widget, and then inspect it, operate on it, and reprogram it, again, while everything continued to run; in which you ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27132299,"author":"Qem","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Choosing a language to learn for the heck of it","text":"You're welcome. To illustrate what the Pharo environment looks like, I'd also recommend this short 7 min video by Avdi Grimm: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30527681,"author":"Qem","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Functional programming patterns in Smalltalk","text":"I think the most distinguishing feature is the superb environment and tooling that is a integral part of the language, by default, in most Smalltalk dialects. The tooling is so seamless integrated, that you're nudged towards simply code inside the debugger. Things like search method by example feel like a superpower. See [VIDEO] If you're interested in experience what a modern Smalltalk looks like, I strongly recommend the Pharo programming MOOC. It was a eye opener for me: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33654131,"author":"Qem","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Programming languages with small surface area","text":"In terms of surface area, I think is hard to beat languages in the Smalltalk family. Smalltalk has only six reserved words: true , false , nil , self , super and thisContext. To emphasize the simplicity, there is even a smalltalk postcard to show the whole syntax fits on it. See [LINK] I think this postcard remark may be a bit misleading sometimes, as in practice the complexity is shifted from syntax to the large class library in the system image, that packs a lot of functionality. But yet the environment is sweet and has great discoverability, with functionality like search by example. See [VIDEO] The Smalltalk flavor I strongly recommend is Pharo. There's a MOOC[1] on it, and there are several free books that cover the basics of the language itself[2][3], data visualisation[4] and numeric stuff[5]. [1]. [LINK] [2]. [LINK] ... [3]. [LINK] [4]. [LINK] [5]. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38995614,"author":"sebastianconcpt","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Smalltalk simplicity and consistency vs. other languages (2022) [video]","text":"MountainWest RubyConf 2014 - But Really, You Should Learn Smalltalk - [LINK] 7 minutes of Pharo Smalltalk for Rubyists - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HPqGaIMVuLs":[{"hn_comment_id":42810537,"author":"abetusk","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering","text":"To create a dithering effect for 3D scenes. Doing a straight 2D dither on each frame will result in noisy artifacts and won't be \"stable\". Doing an \"ordered\" dithering produces a \"porch screen\" artifact effect, where there's a stable pattern in screen space that can be seen. Trying to naively map dithering patterns as textures on 3D objects again results in unstable patterns as the dithering is dependent on the distance of the screen to the object and produces noise. This is a proposed solution that maps a dithering pattern as a texture that doesn't have the \"porch screen\" effect and is stable. The video linked [0] to in the repo talks about experiments and shortcomings from the above I just listed. This work is in response to some challenges the developer of the \"Return of the Obra Dinn\" game experienced when trying to create a dithering effect in game [1] [2]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42845150,"author":"qwertox","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Bilinear down/upsampling, aligning pixel grids, and that infamous GPU half pixel (2021)","text":"On a similar note, yesterday I stumbled across a 4-days old video related to dithering which is really worth watching. \" Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering \" [0] by \"Rune Skovbo Johansen, indie game developer and procedural generation enthusiast\" [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43675819,"author":"qwertox","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Writing my own dithering algorithm in Racket","text":"Somewhat related and worth watching: Surface-stable fractal dithering explained [VIDEO] There's a follow-up video to that one.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45752908,"author":"m12k","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Dithering \u2013 Part 1","text":"And here's a couple videos about a technique that was inspired by the Obra Dinn's dither, but making it surface stable: [VIDEO] (explanation) [LINK] (demo)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47444554,"author":"m12k","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Return of the Obra Dinn: spherical mapped dithering for a 1bpp first-person game","text":"If you find this interesting, you might also be interested in this video of someone diving even deeper into how to make the dither surface stable: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HPuvDm8IC-4":[{"hn_comment_id":12732370,"author":"e1g","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Dropping Linux capabilities to improve container security","text":"The core philosophy of \"one app per container\" has not changed. Strictly speaking, this will never change because containers - whether Docker, ACI, or OCI - are processes and not VMs . I recommend this accessible presentation on how to write a poor-mans Docker by hand[1] to remove some of the magic behind containers. As with any philosophy, there are many smart people who hold an opposite view. Docker itself is perhaps deviating from the architectural simplicity of container==process, while the underdog rkt is enforcing this approach even at the cost of user-land usability (e.g. rkt cannot run containers as daemons by itself). In practice, most containers must have an OS wrapping the application (unless you're distributing binaries), and that OS often ends up being a nearly fully baked version of Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora or whatever the person is most comfortable with outside of Docker. edit PS: One common exception to this philosophy is a short-lived container for admin/management/debugging. Having a full OS with devel/admin tools is useful for investigation/maintenance purposes, then you kill it and nothing is changed in prod. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13235426,"author":"archevel","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Linux Container Internals","text":"I started by watching [VIDEO] and reading [LINK] Also \"man namespaces\" on a linux machine will give some deeper documentation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15830204,"author":"hardwaresofton","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Good resources on learning how docker works under the hood?","text":"Super late to this thread but the best video I've ever seen on how docker/containers work is this one: Jessica Frazelle's (docker core maintainer) talk on how to build containers in pure bash and C: [LINK] There's also this one, which is similar: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16735257,"author":"hardwaresofton","month":"2018-04","story_title":"A Workshop on Linux Containers: Rebuild Docker from Scratch","text":"In the same vein: Building a container from scratch in Go (Liz Rice) @ Container Camp 2016 -> [LINK] What's a container really let's write one in go from sctach (Liz Rice) @ Golang UK Conference -> [VIDEO] Cgroups, Namespaces and beyond: What are containers made from (Jerome Petazzoni) @ DockerCon 2015 - [LINK] Building Containers in Pure Bash and C (Jessica Frazelle) @ ContainerSummit 2016: [LINK] First two are basically the same talk, but it doesn't hurt to hear the same ideas more than once.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20060765,"author":"hardwaresofton","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker","text":"This is precisely why I said the fact that someone would gloss over this is a red flag. The point is super critical . VMs are literally so hard to do correctly and in a performant fashion that parts of CPU instruction sets[0], and kernel subsystems (KVM[1]) were created to make them easier to run. Containers, in contrast are literally a few flags and a bunch of in-kernel antics. A few people, notably Liz Rice and Jessie Frazelle have given talks on how to make containers from scratch that are very illuminating for those that are interested: [VIDEO] [LINK] [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"HQKy1KJpSVc":[{"hn_comment_id":30802234,"author":"punnerud","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Kodak factory tour: How does Kodak make film? [video]","text":"How they manage to change the rolling without stoping the production is fascinating! 45min into the video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32719701,"author":"gregmac","month":"2022-09","story_title":"The Kodak Disc Camera","text":"Different technology, but Destin from Smarter every day did an interesting factory tour [1] of their film making process. Despite the factory being fairy old, there's an impressive level of engineering, automation and other tech involved. Things like their film coating machines having an isolated, heavy floor that's directly connected to bedrock, miles of drying machines that never physically touch the film, or the giant screw used to generate heat by friction to create the film base. The amount of process and technical knowledge and experience that went into this is absolutely impressive. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33194157,"author":"Mobius01","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Kodak Is Hiring Film Technicians: \u2018We Cannot Keep Up with Demand\u2019","text":"The Better Everyday channel has a 3-part visit at the Kodak facility, it\u2019s a fascinating look at the process of film manufacturing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HQYsFshbkYw":[{"hn_comment_id":10088971,"author":"petercooper","month":"2015-08","story_title":"The Strange Appeal of Watching Coders Code","text":"This is why I love bisqwit's videos on YouTube. He takes a middle ground between \"typing it in\" and pondered narration. The typing effect is sped up and faked and done at just the right speed to 'follow along' with his thought process. Example: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12703000,"author":"petercooper","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?","text":"[LINK] is by far my favorite and I've spent many hours watching him. He does things like create a Doom-style engine from scratch: [VIDEO] .. create a NES emulator: [LINK] .. work back from a C++17 example to show why new C++ standards are needed: [LINK] .. and even building a Tetris clone in GW-BASIC: [LINK] .. Right now, he's doing a series on cracking 80s videogame passwords: [LINK] Sirajology - [LINK] - is another interesting one. He moves a bit too quickly for me, but does things like explain machine learning in 5 minutes or how to generate music with systems like Tensorflow.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16224537,"author":"iwakura","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?","text":"Bisqwit's video focusing on systems and graphics programming are total gems. [LINK] Not particularly useful for web developers which is what most programmers are nowdays, they will still blow your mind though. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19026585,"author":"petercooper","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Let\u2019s Create a Speech Synthesizer in C++17 [video]","text":"Agreed. My favourite programming YouTuber by a long stretch. If anyone is unfamiliar with him and wants to watch some of the \"classics\" I'd recommend these: His \"cracking videogame passwords\" series: [LINK] Creating a Doom-style 3D engine in C: [VIDEO] Creating a Rogue-like game in C++11: [LINK] Creating a PIC16 emulator and NES music player: [LINK] Creating a NES emulator: [LINK] Creating a DOS VGA raytracer: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15124375,"author":"rpeden","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Best coding related YouTube channels?","text":"I'm a fan of Bisqwit: [LINK] Mostly because he does fun things that are outside of the kind of programming I usually do, so it helps me broaden my horizons a bit. One of my favourites is the video where he sets out to make a basic 3D game engine in C, but starts by prototyping it in Basic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HStF1RJOyxI":[{"hn_comment_id":14801954,"author":"simonbyrne","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Back to the Future: Lisp as a Base for a Statistical Computing System [pdf]","text":"Another talk on the difficulty of optimising R is this fantastic one by Jan Vitek: [VIDEO] Also, my favourite R trick: foo <- function() {rm(foo, envir=environment(foo))}","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17210160,"author":"StefanKarpinski","month":"2018-06","story_title":"My favorite things that are coming with Julia 1.0","text":"Perhaps the best way to understand what makes Julia fast is to watch these two videos about Python and R and what makes them so hard to optimize: [LINK] [VIDEO] Take everything mentioned in these videos that make Python and R really hard to optimize and don't do those things :D","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18193812,"author":"lottin","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Faster R with FastR","text":"I recommend watching this video - Making R run fast [VIDEO] It's a little disappointing, because the conclusion is that R will probably never \"run fast\", but very interesting nonetheless.","stance":"rec"}],"HSxSgbNQi-g":[{"hn_comment_id":15479810,"author":"filereaper","month":"2017-10","story_title":"As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane","text":"Yup, Wendover Productions (massive aeroplane nerd) did a fanatastic video about this, really recommend it if anyone's interested in the economics of airlines. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16052173,"author":"crikli","month":"2018-01","story_title":"A personal ode to the Boeing 747","text":"I was rolling my eyes at the subtitle. The article devolved from there. Some great (sometimes indirect) information on why the 747 and to a lesser extent the A380 are being phased out, from my new favorite YouTube channel, Wendover Productions: The Economics of Long-Haul Flights: [LINK] ETOPS: Explained [VIDEO] Politics of Aviation / 5 Freedoms of Aviation: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15377155,"author":"jasode","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Air France A380 over Greenland on Sep 30th: Fan and engine inlet separated","text":"What amazes me more is that the newest twinjets are now considered reliable enough to fly six hours away from the nearest landing strip Yes, there's also a short video about that: [VIDEO] It's very interesting since ETOPS[1] affected the financial bets that Boeing made on 787 (point-to-point) vs Airbus with the A380 (hub-and-spoke). [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21953360,"author":"CaliforniaKarl","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Getting a 787 back in the air after a diversion","text":"As this is aviation-related, of course there is a Wendover video on this topic, and indeed covering this specific incident! Small Planes Over Big Oceans (ETOPS Explained) (2017) [video] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HUEvRyemKSg":[{"hn_comment_id":3411143,"author":"ugh","month":"2011-12","story_title":"Doctorow: The coming war on general-purpose computation","text":"It\u2019s worth watching the talk (linked in the article, but special pointing out seems appropriate): [VIDEO] I like to call it the secret keynote of 28C3.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8261388,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC","text":"> the idea that users shouldn't be developers has lead to a situation in which access to development tools and information are seemingly treated as a privilege instead of a right Unfortunately, a lot of people have been starting the War On General Purpose Computing[1] for a while now. While many people saw Doctorow's first talk[1] on the War On General Purpose computing, his sequel talk[2] about the upcoming Civil -War On General Purpose Computing is one of the most important talks I've ever seen. The talk is about exactly this point: Turing completeness scares various traditional powers (and some new/upcoming powers), and their instinct is to lash out and try to mandate that someone make a computer that can't run the various programs that scare them. Not understanding what \"Turing Complete\" means, they end up in a cycle that tries to blacklist anything that allows these scary programs to be written and used. Hiding the dev tools is just one step on a path that - by definition - must end up with the hobbling of computing devices until they are no longer Turing complete. This problem needs to be fought right now , in a big way. The non-technical population is just starting to understand the full impact of what it means to have a General Purpose Computer, and we are only seeing the first skirmishes. The 2nd talk I mentioned above by Doctorow[2] - which I very strongly recommend that everybody watch - points out how modern concerns over \"dev tools\" (or \"copyright\") are trivial. ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23470710,"author":"akersten","month":"2020-06","story_title":"How SGX Fails in Practice","text":"I'm comfortable with it on SmartCards or EMV chips, since those are tailored devices for a specific purpose and the trust model is understood by the participants. I'm not particularly upset that I can't root my credit card. Mobile phones, it's disappointing, but total consumer control was kind of a lost cause from day 1. What truly bothers me is the introduction of trusted computing into general-purpose consumer CPUs, where previously we had complete freedom. There's an old but still very good CCC talk that encapsulates my feelings about this [0]. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29060738,"author":"woojoo666","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Grand jury subpoena for Signal user data, Central District of California","text":"You might have already seen this but in case you havent, there's a famous talk about this called \"the coming war on general computation\" ( [VIDEO] ), and much of this has already come true","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37012996,"author":"freefaler","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Will Browsers Be Required by Law to Stop You from Visiting Infringing Sites?","text":"Cory Doctorow has a prescient talk: \"The coming war on general computation\" from 2011 (12 years ago) in which he argues that all general computing platforms (OS, phone OS, browser) would face challenges by governments and corporations. This looks like another way to control content distribution and put more control in Google's hands. They've made a great strategic choice in building Chrome browser and effectively superseded Microsoft and Apple on desktops as a platform. The talk can be found here: [VIDEO] When people have means to consume or produce content without control any governmental bureaucrat will try to control this activity. History supports this argument. No printing press > no cheap books > illiterate population > easy to control what spreads as information and what do not. Printing press arrived > cheap books > growing literacy > control over the presses. Lenin's first targets were the post/telegraph (communication), bridges and railways (movement of people) and all big printing houses (Lenin's Full Collected works - vol. 32, page 282) Radio arrived > Fixed Frequencies Radio sets sold & Governmental Radio jamming stations TV > Licence to broadcast Internet > Big Firewall of China & etc... And don't even think about moving money freely as experienced by requirement to show why are you paying someone and those nice people from bank compliance departments. The cost of enforcement in digital economy is way cheaper than before. The tools are there or can be built chea","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47581406,"author":"supern0va","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Android Developer Verification","text":"Is it a serious problem that you can run whatever software you want on your computer? Should we make it so that no one can do that without permission to protect them? I recommend Cory Doctorow's talk on why this is a serious problem for society: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HUMGc8hEkpc":[{"hn_comment_id":17749193,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Alcubierre drive","text":"Here's a good (IMHO) video showing how this works out, by looking Minkowski diagrams for different observers. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32050401,"author":"xupybd","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Breaking the warp barrier: solitons in Einstein\u2013Maxwell-plasma theory (2021)","text":"One video with no maths required. [VIDEO] Without the math you can't get a deep understanding or reason about it too much but you can see the issue.","stance":"rec"}],"HVv_IQKlafQ":[{"hn_comment_id":37880591,"author":"qwertox","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Gsplat: CUDA accelerated rasterization of gaussians with Python bindings","text":"This week I saw a YouTube video which left me impressed regarding Gaussian Splatting. [LINK] I got it recommended because I watched the following video: [VIDEO] Both are worth watching if one didn't know it exists.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38578059,"author":"spsesk117","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Gaussian Explosion","text":"I am a complete layman in the world of complex computer graphics programming and research, but I have an interest in it as someone who enjoys playing computer games. I really enjoyed this succinct YouTube video on the topic, for those interested in a primer: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46673508,"author":"KerrickStaley","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Gaussian Splatting \u2013 A$AP Rocky Helicopter Music Video","text":"This 2-minute video is a great intro to the topic [VIDEO] I think this tech has become \"production-ready\" recently due to a combination of research progress (the seminal paper was published in 2023 [LINK] ) and improvements to differentiable programming libraries (e.g. PyTorch) and GPU hardware.","stance":"rec"}],"HXAW2GseICs":[{"hn_comment_id":22967177,"author":"cmod","month":"2020-04","story_title":"How to make pizza like a Neapolitan master","text":"This is the best video on making neapolitan style at home with an cast iron pan and oven: [VIDEO] I've used this method a few times to superb results.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18852270,"author":"crispyambulance","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Pizza Dough","text":"> what part of the rest of the pizza-making process can you do better than the restaurant? A determined home pizzaiolo can make a perfectly decent pizza. But you are right about the temperature. Household ovens simply can't reach the temperatures used in a proper pizza oven, about 700F. I have had success with heating a large cast iron pan on the stove top to ~700F, dropping the dough in that, adding toppings when it's ready and then finishing it in a broiler or well preheated oven. These guys show how it's done, without words, better than I can describe: [VIDEO] It is pretty damn good technique. They're using 00 flour, high protein (available at Italian markets in any big city). One thing you can do at home better than the pizza shop, however, is to use crazy good artisinal toppings, dialed in exactly how you like it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22974097,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2020-04","story_title":"How to make pizza like a Neapolitan master","text":"For a practical, home-bakable, sourdough recipe I can vouch for: [VIDEO] Top comment: \"There is more drama in this video than in the entire Transformers franchise.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26153164,"author":"leoncvlt","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The Physics of baking good Pizza [pdf]","text":"No love for iron skillets? I've had some pretty good results cooking pizzas in a home settings with it. It sounds weird but it gets decently close the the quality of a stone oven, something to do with the heat conductivity of cast iron: [VIDEO] You cook it on the hob for a few minutes to cook the bottom, constantly shuffling the skillet round to get that random charring, then a few more minutes in a pre-heated oven as close to the broiler as possible. Great for deep dish pizza as well, if you're into that.","stance":"rec"}],"HZGCoVF3YvM":[{"hn_comment_id":41019774,"author":"godelski","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Instrumenting Python GIL with eBPF","text":"Probably, but more likely a lack of knowledge and an overestimation of their knowledge. People are famously bad with statistics but people are also famously over confident in their understanding of numbers and data. I mean cloud servers really try to get some extra 9s on the end of their uptime. (People are also __terrible__ with rates of change. e.g. 90% increase as from last year). But I think an interesting one is the also literally the most common example that's in many stats textbooks, at least the ones that cover Bayesian stats. That being that if a test is 95% accurate, that it does not mean that that scoring positive on a test means that there's a 95% chance you have whatever the test is testing for. I think there's a great irony in the latter, as I find in the tech and engineering communities a lot of confidence, especially in understanding numbers yet very often make this mistake[0], and frequently want to establish meritocracies (advocating for standardized testing and leet code). But understanding the former should result in thinking the latter is ineffective.[1] -------------------------------- [0] I particularly like 3Blue1Brown's introduction to Bayes theorem as it includes the Kahneman and Tversky questions AND (most importantly) he discusses how when the questions are reframed that peoples accuracy can dramatically swing from overwhelmingly wrong to overwhelmingly correct. I like this because the hardest thing in doing statistics (and much of science) is actu","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29773486,"author":"logshipper","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Visualizing Bayes Theorem (2009)","text":"There's a very cool 3Blue1Brown video [0] that helps give you an intuitive feel for Bayes Theorem. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HaEPXoXVf2k":[{"hn_comment_id":20883806,"author":"gigatexal","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Designing database: split into different tables or group them together?","text":"If you go single table you can use filtered indexes if your database supports it to speed up queries instead of having to do a row by row search with a where clause. Personally this seems like a job for DynamoDB but that\u2019s a whole beast unto itself. You must know the queries you will do to the database before hand as that guides how you craft it. There\u2019s an amazing talk at reinvent that is given almost every year on creating a DynamoDB schema ( [VIDEO] ) I would normalize as the theory says and then denormalize as performance requires it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21035937,"author":"tmsh","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources for Learning about Databases","text":"AWS re:invent 2018 talks: [VIDEO] He has a sequence of 2-3 great talks on DynamoDB, the history of relational databases and the rise of access-pattern oriented db design.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22610014,"author":"kbanman","month":"2020-03","story_title":"The good parts of AWS: a visual summary","text":"I've seen this done for new projects, and it works really well. If your data access patterns are truly relational (varied lookup paths) then it is probably not the right tool, but many apps can be modeled in a way that DDB handles well. Highly recommended viewing: [VIDEO] this talk explains how relational data can be efficiently modeled for key-value stores.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30009915,"author":"artembugara","month":"2022-01","story_title":"DynamoDB 10 years later","text":"We realized how great Dynamo was only after we migrated off AWS. Dynamo was a key factor to us when we were releasing the MVP of our News API [0]. We used Dynamo, ElasticSearch, Lambda and could make it running in 60 days while being full-time employed. Also, the best tech talk I saw was given by Rick Houlihan on re:Invent [1] I highly recommend every engineer to watch it: it's a great overview of SQL vs NoSQL [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32095457,"author":"mabbo","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The DynamoDB Paper","text":"Rick Houlihan did a talk a few years ago about designing the data later for an application using dynamodb. The most common reaction I get from people I show it to- most of them Amazon SDEs who operate services that use Dynamodb- is \"Holy shit what is this wizardry?!\" [VIDEO] One of the biggest mistakes people make with dynamo is thinking that it's just a relational database with no relations. It's not. It's an incredible system, but it requires a lot of deep knowledge to get the full benefits, and it requires you, often, to design your data layer very well up-front. I actually don't recommend using it for a system that hasn't mostly stabilized in design. But when used right, it's an incredibly performant beast of a data store.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32095702,"author":"ronjouch","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The DynamoDB Paper","text":"For explicitness & searchability, commenting with the title of this talk, which is indeed excellent , not limited to DynamoDB, and which was kind of a revelation after years of using DynamoDB suboptimally: Rick Houlihan - AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB (DAT401) , [VIDEO] It should be watched along with reading the associated doc: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32364225,"author":"sass_muffin","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Some notes on DynamoDB 2022 paper","text":"This is the video I recommend to others when working with dynamodb. The video is by Rick Houlihan about dynamodb modeling. In my experience most developers that complain about dynamodb don't fully understand it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19051801,"author":"dalailambda","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Google Cloud Firestore NoSQL database is in GA","text":"While the move seems to be towards NewSQL databases (Spanner/CockroachDB), the answer to relations in NoSQL is to model the data differently. This can generally resolve a lot of the problems inherent in the need for relations. This might not be useful advice for everyone, but I can highly recommend this youtube video on DynamoDB data modelling: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22816010,"author":"holler","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Rules for Data Modeling with DynamoDB","text":"Check out this video from AWS's Principal Dynamodb expert that touches on comparisons against relation db's: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25354842,"author":"forgingahead","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Building a scalable e-commerce data model","text":"If I may share some advice - don't bother. As another commenter pointed out, relationships are inherent in a lot of the data you'll store for your platform, and for those elements that you'd like to keep the full data hash, just use jsonb in Postgres. Once you're at several million in revenue, then you can think about splitting off some parts of your data into document storage solutions for certain efficiency reasons, but that is by no means necessary. This is a great video on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30008209,"author":"unfunco","month":"2022-01","story_title":"DynamoDB 10 years later","text":"I struggled at first but I watched Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB[0] a few times and it clicked. As other responses have suggested, generally you define your access patterns first and then structure the data later to fit those access patterns. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42723497,"author":"belter","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Distributed Transactions at Scale in Amazon DynamoDB (2023)","text":"My name is Marco Inaros! > What kind of system/application/query pattern does DynamoDB optimize for Start here: \"Real-world use cases for Amazon DynamoDB\" - [LINK] > I'm legitimately ignorant and a lot of people seem to dislike it. Start here: \"AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design Patterns for DynamoDB \" - [VIDEO] Then: \"Build with DynamoDB | S1 E5 \u2013 A Data Modeling Use Case Deep Dive\" - [LINK] \"Model hierarchical automotive component data using Amazon DynamoDB\" - [LINK] \"AWS re:Invent 2024 - Advanced data modeling with Amazon DynamoDB\" - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"HbUnatPfSgg":[{"hn_comment_id":546044,"author":"wheels","month":"2009-04","story_title":"Ask YC:  How do you get your press?","text":"Mike Arrington's talk from startup school on dealing with press is quite good: [VIDEO] It's not really geared towards the mainstream press, but a good watch nonetheless.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2952605,"author":"pbh","month":"2011-09","story_title":"Michael Arrington launching venture fund","text":"Somewhat related, I found Arrington's talk at Startup School '08 to be pretty good for getting an idea of how he views the startup tech press. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3932390,"author":"SuperChihuahua","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Best practices when pitching your startup to Techcrunch, Mashable etc?","text":"Watch this video: Mike Arrington speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to get, and how to respond to press for your startup. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HdHlfiOAJyE":[{"hn_comment_id":23953369,"author":"timsally","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?","text":"Finance Theory I by Prof. Andrew Lo: [LINK] . You can view the first lecture here: [VIDEO] . Prof. Lo taught this course at MIT in the Fall of 2008, which you can imagine would be a very interesting time to teach finance. The course is excellent. I think you'll really enjoy it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22243802,"author":"langitbiru","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?","text":"\"Finance Theory\" from Prof. Andrew Lo (MIT). [VIDEO] He used \"Principles of Corporate Finance\" by Richard Brealey, Stewart Myers, and Franklin Allen as the text book. I bought it from Google Play. For accounting, I use Coursera: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] There are other courses about finance in Coursera and Youtube but I haven't checked them out. But the ones I listed here are good based on my experience.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32315658,"author":"benreesman","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Understanding Jane Street","text":"Thank you kindly for what looks like a great resource! I've been trying to put myself through YouTube night school on some of this stuff, and MIT OCW has great resources as well at significantly less cost than going to MIT ;) This is a pretty reasonable jumping off point for their corpus of financial engineering stuff: [VIDEO] . I'm fortunate enough to work with a person who actually understands derivatives trades with some sophistication, but that's a happy accident and the more people have access to good online resources the better! Edit: I forgot to mention this book ( [LINK] ) in the spirit of something more technical than the general-audience one I linked above. I have some nitpicks with it as well, but I've gotten value out of it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34302697,"author":"gretch","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How to learn business being a software engineer","text":"MIT free course on finance from first principles. Answers questions like the difference between price and value. Why do interest rates exist [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34593788,"author":"gadiyar","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Some good ones from Stephen Boyd - helped me really grok the subjects. Signals and Systems: [LINK] Linear Dynamical Systems: [LINK] This series on Finance Theory by Andrew Lo unfolded just during the 2007-08 crisis - so that's an added bonus as the lectures refer to ongoing events sometimes. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Hd_ptbiPoXM":[{"hn_comment_id":31734749,"author":"robwwilliams","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Stanford\u2019s war on social life","text":"Your comment reminds me of Steve Jobs amazing commencement address to the Stanford Class of 2005. [VIDEO] I try to watch it once a year, especially with grad students and postdocs. Gets better each time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32618880,"author":"graderjs","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?","text":"You're 23. Just think how relatively bad it would be if you were 38 thinking this. You're young. Plenty of time. Keep taking risks. Be grateful you recognize this now, and trust the process. Everything happens at the right time. The dots make sense looking backward, you have to trust that, but may not make sense looking forward, to paraphrase Steve Jobs commencement speech, which I think you should watch right now. It's inspiring to hear someone share this at such a young age, because I think of all the cool things that you'll do now, that you realize the value of time. But the motivation has to come from you, intrinsically, can't come from wanting to emulate or a type of FOMO jealousy of some \"hero\" types...tho do be inspired, don't be driven by a sense of comparative inadequacy, is what I'm saying in this my last point to you now, be driven by your own sense of wonder. Love to hear you share this! :) ;p xx ;p [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37547455,"author":"robwwilliams","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Stanford Is a Platform","text":"And listen to Steve Jobs\u2019 Stanford commencement address of 2005. I know he would have endorsed the critique above: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HeQX2HjkcNo":[{"hn_comment_id":29200779,"author":"travisgriggs","month":"2021-11","story_title":"How imaginary numbers were invented [video]","text":"I love Veritasium. Derek has done a number of videos that are awesome like this. The videos are great and educational, but he also manages to subtly weave in an almost spiritual subtext to them as well. For example, in this one, you learn about imaginary numbers in some cool ways, history, how awesome e^ix is, etc, but also this yen-yang balance between embracing not only what is real but taking a chance on what is imaginary. Some of my other favorites: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] I think he\u2019s going to lose the $10,000 bet on the car though.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27281683,"author":"reggieband","month":"2021-05","story_title":"How inevitable is the concept of numbers?","text":"I'm not sure if it is what you want, but Intuitionism [1] is one area that challenges modern fashions in Mathematical thinking. It suffered greatly under the formalist approach lead by David Hilbert and still has little main-stream support despite G\u00f6del and his incompleteness proofs. Veritasium's latest video on G\u00f6del's incompleteness [2] gives a pretty fair account of how we settled on the current fashionable foundations of Math (including nods to Cantor and Hilbert). For a more formal history there is a book \"The Philosophy of Set Theory\" [3] that sketches out how we got to where we are. I have always been unsatisfied with the current foundations of math and their obtuse basis in Set Theory. Although I must admit, Category Theory has alleviated that quite a lot, especially with the relaxing of equivalence compared to equality. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] 3. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27537240,"author":"littlecranky67","month":"2021-06","story_title":"1931: Kurt G\u00f6del shows limits of math, logic, computing, AI","text":"Veritasium recently released a very good video that explains G\u00f6dels incompletenes theorem such that even I could understand it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28717429,"author":"simias","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Where do type systems come from? (2017)","text":"But what if the statement is \"this statement can't be proven\"? You haven't proven the statement, you've proven that it can't be proven. See [VIDEO] for instance which is (IMO) a fairly good explanation of the proof and why you end up with something both true and not provable. Penrose's \"Emperor's New Mind\" also discusses this topic at length (within the context of whether human brains can be emulated). I wasn't convinced with his argument regarding AI but his overview of the problem of what's computable and what's not is rather good if a bit dense.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32831094,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-09","story_title":"G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach: an in-depth explainer","text":"Veritasium - Math's Fundamental Flaw [VIDEO] At 13:46 it gets into the \"is there a way to prove every complete statement?\" and furthermore goes into the Godel math for \"there is no proof for the statement with G\u00f6del number g\" where that statement itself has a number \"g\". The entire video is a good watch though. And the related problem is that with Godel we don't know if math is consistent either.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39688374,"author":"pandoro","month":"2024-03","story_title":"The complete story of G\u00f6del incompleteness","text":"It's very entry-level (my level :)) but I found Veritaseum's video about it really clear and instructive: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40169023,"author":"equanimitivity","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Philosophy is an art","text":"I used to think similarly, but learning about the proven incompleteness of sufficiently rigorous analytic systems has moved me towards appreciating less rigorous ways of interfacing with reality. Veritasium has a nice video on Godel\u2019s incompleteness theorem. It\u2019s quite ironic that it was mathematically provable that analytic systems can never be complete, and can\u2019t be provably coherent. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HfHgUu_8KgA":[{"hn_comment_id":9208819,"author":"rogerbinns","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Britain's housing crisis is a human disaster","text":"It makes a lot of sense having them separate. Tom Scott explains [VIDEO] Here in California showers and much other plumbing are required to have backflow valves so that hot and cold don't cross contaminate.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26552093,"author":"SimonPStevens","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Rents for the rich are going down, rents for the poor are going up. Why?","text":"Short video by Tom Scott on the subject for those interested. [VIDEO] tldw; Older homes in the UK had a water storage tank in the roof space that fed the water heating tank. This couldn't be classified as drinking water so wasn't allowed to be combined with the safe mains water that fed the cold tap. These days modern houses mostly use combi-boilers with no storage tank, so mostly both hot and cold are drinkable and it's not an issue. But preferences still lean towards the separate taps.","stance":"rec"}],"HfNIiitVFtc":[{"hn_comment_id":21437645,"author":"notaplumber","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Update: UniFi Phone Home/Performance Data Collection","text":"For engineers reading this who work at a tech company, or well, any company. Watch this keynote talk by Patricia Aas. It's called Embedded Ethics. And it is crystal clear many of you need to watch it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21603595,"author":"simpss","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Slack\u2019s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible","text":"On another topic, someone recently posted this youtube video of a Norwegian engineer explaining her views on tech worker ethics, how we've got here and maybe a way to fix it or atleast improve on the current situation. I'd recommend showing it to your commute buddies. It really resonated with my thoughts, how I've viewed the tech world and my (tiny) part in it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25537621,"author":"marios","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"I watched this in 2020 even though it's from EuroBSDCon 2019. I'm talking about Patricia Aas keynote \"Embedded Ethics\": [VIDEO] Hasn't aged one bit. If anything Patricia is spot on pretty much everything. If you don't have time to spend on this, you may want to take a look at the slides: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21859459,"author":"marios","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"EuroBSDcon 2019 Keynote by Patricia Aas: Embedded Ethics ( [VIDEO] / slides: [LINK] ) Because, sometimes you need to worry less about the gritty details of the tech and take a step back and look at the bigger picture.","stance":"rec"}],"HhGI-GqAK9c":[{"hn_comment_id":17334821,"author":"hotwire","month":"2018-06","story_title":"A general technique for automating NES games (2013)","text":"This guy is a genius and also freakin hilarious, I knew I recognised his voice from somewhere; watch this: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5694919,"author":"groovy2shoes","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Classic Nintendo Games are NP-Hard","text":"Any time I see papers like this, I'm reminded of Vargomax V. Vargomax's classic SIGBOVIK 2007 paper [1]. The presentation is also entertaining [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29366209,"author":"dane-pgp","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Writing a Fuzzer for NES Games","text":"If we're sharing awesome Mario-related work by Tom Murphy, I have to include a link to his video \"Generalized Super Mario Bros. is NP-Complete\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HhGuXCuDb1U":[{"hn_comment_id":48728894,"author":"BLKNSLVR","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Scientists find molecular-level evidence for two structures in liquid water","text":"\"Water has memory, and whilst its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice seems infinite, it somehow forgets all the poo it's had in it.\" - excerpt from Storm, by Nick Minchin [VIDEO] The entirety of this song is a listen worth your time. Doubly so if you've never heard of Nick Minchin before.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25502527,"author":"effingwewt","month":"2020-12","story_title":"The universe is expanding faster than expected","text":"Religion can't really explain things though. If I say a floating jellyfish did it all, and we are too stupid to ever know why, that doesn't give any clarity. Tim Minchin has a great line about this in one of his songs[1] 'Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved' [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40243385,"author":"PlunderBunny","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Wild orangutan seen healing his wound with a plant","text":"My first thought on reading this was of Tim Minchin's epic beat poem 'Storm' [0] - jump to 3:05 if you want to hear the bit that specifically deals with this. (Warning: some language NSFW) [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Hhy7JUinlu0":[{"hn_comment_id":21118110,"author":"abvdasker","month":"2019-09","story_title":"WeWork says will file to withdraw IPO","text":"Oh man, what a fantastic film. It's a been a while since I saw Margin Call, but I still feel like it's one of the films that best captured the 2008 financial crisis. Jeremy Irons' portrayal of a Goldman CEO-like character \u2014 I think he's the one who delivers the line you quoted \u2014 remains probably the most convincing portrayal of that type of person I can remember. The wonderful board room scene: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31059840,"author":"unfocussed_mike","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Be Less Technical","text":"Right. You can't hide the detail with a wave of the hand, you can definitely overcommunicate detail that is unnecessary, but the art of it is finding a way to explain the bit that matters in a way that makes it clear to the users that you're eliding detail that isn't important, without misleading them. There is a very fine example of this in cinema -- the senior partners meeting in Margin Call, where Zachary Quinto's character has to explain why the firm needs to sell all of a particular asset class: [VIDEO] One day I will use the line Jeremy Irons uses in this clip. I don't want to spoil it by quoting it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16952047,"author":"chiph","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Turning 40 soon \u2013 seeking personal and professional life advice","text":"Start of the Great Recession. S&P 500 went from 1400 to 800 in six months. I lost 40% of my retirement investment and it was ... distressing to say the least. Movie recommendations: Margin Call [VIDEO] The Big Short [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33104369,"author":"photochemsyn","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Charles Mitchell and the 1929 stock crash","text":"Yes indeed. Probably the best cinematic take on that is in the movie Margin Call - here's the senior partners meeting: [VIDEO] Essentially, the dissolution of Glass-Steagall allowed investment banks to create complex financial packages, each one constructed out of dozens if not hundreds of home mortgages. Each individual mortgage was graded but the packages were built out of a mixture of low-grade and high-grade mortgages. Since trading (gambling) with these packages was very lucrative, the investment banks worked with shady mortgage brokers to increase the number of packages by pushing adjustable-rate mortgages on gullible people who probably were not that familiar with compound interest calcululations. These unlikely-to-succeed mortgages were mixed in with the high-qulaity mortages to create a wide variety of highly leveraged financial products, and then bets were placed on the outcomes of trading in these products (derivative markets, synthetic CDO squared nonsense, etc.). Once people realized that many of these mortgages were not going to be paid off, then the avalanche of collapse began. Glass-Steagall, if retained, would have made all of that impossible.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42365709,"author":"silvestrov","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel","text":"The movie \"Margin Call\" has an excellent scene where this happends: [VIDEO] It is clear how it is setup that \"to survive we must act now, not in a week, and we must do this expensive sell-off\" The whole movie is very well worth watching: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"HipTO_7mUOw":[{"hn_comment_id":18306346,"author":"pierrec","month":"2018-10","story_title":"The Era of the Drone Swarm Is Coming","text":"I'm surprised there's no mention of the short film \"Slaughterbots\" on this exact topic: [VIDEO] It's very well done and has an HN vibe to it (with a dark twist, of course).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42511348,"author":"amarcheschi","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Slaughterbots \u2013 if human: kill() [video]","text":"There is another slaughterbots video that's worth watching, [VIDEO] There's also a real video by anduril industries about this not anymore fictional scenario [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"HlAXp0-M6SY":[{"hn_comment_id":31784912,"author":"leetrout","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?","text":"Kelsey Hightower comparing the kubernetes scheduler to Tetris was awesome for cementing a mental model. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15954681,"author":"org3432","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Kubernetes 1.9: Apps Workloads GA and Expanded Ecosystem","text":"Watch tutorials by Kelsey Hightower, he's been helping folks understand the differences and the models. e.g. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HlUe0TUHOIc":[{"hn_comment_id":28659430,"author":"MrQuincle","month":"2021-09","story_title":"JSFuck (2012)","text":"Makes me think of what might deter a reverse engineer and then this most awesome youtube talk on psychological warfare by Chris Domas [VIDEO] It's so good.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49286925,"author":"MattSteelblade","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Spaghettifying DRAM","text":"I cannot wait for the accompanying Black Hat talk. Christopher Domas is one of my absolute favorite all-time hackers. He does such a fantastic job of explaining his work. Some of my favorite talks of his: - Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering [VIDEO] - The MoVfuscator [LINK] - Hardware Backdoors in redacted x86 [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12374529,"author":"projectdp","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Movfuscator \u2013 A single-instruction C compiler","text":"Saw this recently after reviewing some Defcon 23 videos. The author goes into detail about how it's working and some other fun stuff regarding anti-reverse-engineering. 2015 DEFCON 23 - Chris Domas - Repsych: Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering [VIDEO] And a paper by him: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12375033,"author":"hulahoof","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Movfuscator \u2013 A single-instruction C compiler","text":"[VIDEO] about 7 minutes in he is chatting about it but all is a good watch - could only find the YT link sorry","stance":"rec"}],"HmL2l-bcuUQ":[{"hn_comment_id":23727187,"author":"michaelbuckbee","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The dying mall\u2019s new lease on life: apartments","text":"Here's a detailed examination of one mall that converted to apartments - [VIDEO] Interesting mostly for how they weighed the marketing and economic aspects of it: \"commercial renters think in terms of $/sq foot and individuals think of monthly costs\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30115109,"author":"equalsione","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Malls adding apartments to offset dwindling numbers of shoppers","text":"While it wouldn't be what springs to mind when you think of a mall, this video shows an interesting repurposing of a mall to become residential space: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HnOix9TFy1A":[{"hn_comment_id":19319767,"author":"agentultra","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Keeping CALM: when distributed consistency is easy","text":"For an introduction and motivation to TLA+ I recommend Hillel Wayne's talk Everything About Distributed Systems is Terrible [0] and basically anything he has written on his blog about the TLA+. I think following along with the TLA+ video course is really thorough and digestible once you've decided that you want to learn more [1]. You'll find the TLA+ Hyperbook is a useful reference and guide as you start specifying your own systems [2]. It has a number of examples and projects to work on. Eventually if you want to go deep after you've decided it's worth it for yourself, get into Specifying Systems the text book and bible of TLA+ [3]. Program Synthesis has a lot of research in it and is starting to show promising results. I'd say that while the research has been going on for a long time it's still rather new to industrial use... for a motivating talk and explanation on what program synthesis is try this one: [VIDEO] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39621534,"author":"ddellacosta","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Show HN: Fructose \u2013 LLM calls as strongly typed functions","text":"Oh yeah, you just reminded me of this cool talk I saw at Strange Loop a while back. Not about the AI parts but re: program synthesis in Haskell: \"Type-Driven Program Synthesis\" by Nadia Polikarpova [VIDEO] Links to more projects and papers by Prof. Polikarpova: [LINK] I think this is one of the main projects she discusses in the talk: [LINK] EDIT: meant to mention this too, which I think has been around a bit longer, not that I've ever used it in production: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Ho_CFfdsmc8":[{"hn_comment_id":29315844,"author":"h3mb3","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Djinn Split Keyboard","text":"Where are all the 75% ortholinear split keyboards? All the super-duper ergo boards have very few keys and/or a strange layout (like this Djinn). Currently the best keyboard for my left forearm's RSI has been Mistel Barocco MD770 [1] but I've recently been aware how the staggering maybe forces the fingers to travel in slightly unnatural ways. These videos [2][3] from Ben Vallack demonstrate this nicely. Thus, I'd like to test an ortholinear one, but with all the normal 75%/tenkeyless board keys in place. I personally don't need to optimize the right hand keys as much so I'm not interested in learning an oherwise crazy new layout just to test out if the ortholinearity helps. And, I really like having the split since keeping two halves of the board further apart helps keeping my posture in control. But this combo seems to be difficult to find. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32511487,"author":"Fetiorin","month":"2022-08","story_title":"I spent a year designing a low profile, minimal mechanical keyboard","text":"Note that on normal keyboard all alpha keys are staggered to the left. For both hands. So, this stagger is not helping you to keep your left hand at correct angle. \"Grid\" ortholinear is not an ultimate solution either, but it is more comfy (from personal experience). There is a short video about ortho vs stagger [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Hqw57GJSrac":[{"hn_comment_id":13991804,"author":"filereaper","month":"2017-03","story_title":"The Structure and Performance of Efficient Interpreters [pdf]","text":"Very poor, there's no mention of continuation style passing interpreters. If anyone's curious about tales from the battlefield, highly recommend Cliff Click's talks (any of them) [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19306913,"author":"filereaper","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Building Fast Interpreters in Rust","text":"I highly recommend folks to view this talk by the venerable Cliff Click called \"Bits of Advice For the VM Writer\" [1] Of particular interest are Continuation Style Passing Interpreters [2] and how much of a speedup you can get by going to raw assembly. The talk has lessons Cliff learned from his years on the JVM but those can be adapted easily to other runtimes. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29315044,"author":"filereaper","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Books on the JVM?","text":"I strongly recommend following and listening to videos by Cliff Click who wrote HotSpot and worked on Azul and other VMs. Cliff also has Coffee Compiler Club sessions on Fridays. - [LINK] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27678451,"author":"tjalfi","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Intel to disable TSX by default on more CPUs with new microcode","text":"I'm also a fan of Cliff and other Rice alumni; here are a few of his videos that I like. [0] The Sea of Nodes and the HotSpot JIT [1] A JVM Does That? [2] A Crash Course in Modern Hardware [3] Bits of Advice for the VM Writer [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HrUy1Vn2KdI":[{"hn_comment_id":45449852,"author":"polytely","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Cormac McCarthy's personal library","text":"Thanks for posting, he was a really interesting guy. This is my favourite interview with him so I will take this post as an excuse to share it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36316254,"author":"AJRF","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89","text":"God I will miss his writing. I finished (and adored) The Passenger a few weeks ago. Rest In Piece. This is a nice interview; [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39527848,"author":"slibhb","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Cormac McCarthy's Sideline: Freelance copy editor","text":"Worth a watch if you're interested in McCarthy: [VIDEO] The gist is that he liked smart people. He was good friends with Murray Gell-Mann and others at The Santa Fe Institute. I absolutely think he \"liked science,\" I don't think he was cynical about it, though I do see where you could pick that up in his writing. According to Gell-Mann, McCarthy knew a lot about 20th century physics...not in terms of math but in a \"history of ideas\" sense, i.e. where major physicists stood on various questions.","stance":"rec"}],"HrVtA-ue-x0":[{"hn_comment_id":32517952,"author":"nestorD","month":"2022-08","story_title":"I have complicated feelings about TDD","text":"There are quantitative studies showing that TDD has little to no impact development time or code quality[0]. What has been found, however, is that writing code in short increments helps a lot (something that can be caused by using TDD). For more information on studies covering the topic (and much more), I highly recommend watching Greg Wilson's Software Engineering's Greatest Hits[1]. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27898507,"author":"dang","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Software engineering research is a train wreck","text":"That (or more likely [VIDEO] since that's where the info is) would make a good HN submission in its own right. Probably best to wait a few days to let the hivemind caches clear (followup/copycat posts aren't great: [LINK] ). If you submit it, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can put it in the second-chance pool ( [LINK] , explained at [LINK] ), so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.","stance":"rec"}],"Hvx4xXhZMrU":[{"hn_comment_id":20943206,"author":"anon9001","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Technical Breakdown of a new NES game written in Lisp","text":"If you like this, you should also check out the work around Retro City Rampage. RCR is a GTA1 clone for multiple platforms from a few years back, but the developer also made a real NES ROM of it. Here's a great talk about that process: [VIDEO] (I'm not related to the project, but it's one of the few games I've 100% completed because it was just so good)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7391240,"author":"bluedino","month":"2014-03","story_title":"People Making New Games for Atari, Super Nintendo, and Virtual Boy","text":"It's hard not to look back at the past with rose-colored glasses, but in the case of the NES, there were so many low-quality games out there that it's easy to remember how bad some of them were even back then. I know I wasn't the only kid who would shell out $2 or $3 and rent a game for the weekend, only to find out that the game was flat-out terrible. Sure, there were a lot of good games back then that are still fun to play now (Super Mario Brothers, Contra, etc), but going back and playing a random game in an emulator really drives home the fact of how big of a bomb most of the games were. That said, who hasn't been interested in how NES games worked or how they were programmed? There's a great video on Youtube about converting ROM city Rampage over to run on the NES [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8759335,"author":"corysama","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Post mortem of my one game a month","text":"Here's a fun video on how a modern 8-bit style game was ported to actually run on an NES. [VIDEO] You would probably enjoy the book Racing the Beam [LINK] For a collection of (mostly consumer-oriented) behind-the-scenes material, check out [LINK] Or, if you want to get really technical [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13550663,"author":"broahmed","month":"2017-02","story_title":"From PS4 to 1.44 MB Floppy: Porting Retro City Rampage to MS-DOS [video]","text":"There's also a fascinating video of him getting the core of the game to run on NES spec constraints (think 8-bit CPU, 10KB of RAM): [VIDEO] (~11 mins) It offers insight into how old-school game developers worked within the limitations of the hardware they designed for.","stance":"rec"}],"HxaD_trXwRE":[{"hn_comment_id":4130645,"author":"willvarfar","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Parsing huge XML files with Go","text":"Personally, I have a penchant for writing my own pull parsers. Its a mind-expanding exercise. The neat thing about Go is that parsers can return functions that consume the next token. Rob Pike has an excellent video about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7822010,"author":"TomNomNom","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Templating in Go","text":"Rob Pike did a really good talk entitled 'Lexical Scanning In Go'[0], which covers how the lexing for text/template works. It's far more interesting than it sounds, and even if you don't know much about lexing/parsing it's easy to follow. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12638297,"author":"grose","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Lexical Scanning in Go by Rob Pike [VIDEO] I love everything about this talk. It walks you through building a lexer from scratch in a simple and elegant way, through a very interesting use of coroutines. I appreciate the bits of humor in the talk as well.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42083842,"author":"hu3","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Rust for tokenising and parsing","text":"Related, I love Rob Pike's talk about lexical Scanning in Go (2011). Educational and elegant approach. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3725016,"author":"drbawb","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Go is amazing, period.","text":"As an aside: watching Pike's talk on lexing and parsing in Go really hits this point home. It shows how language support for cheap threads (goroutines) and channels really change the way you come up with an algorithm. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5173796,"author":"jbarham","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Function types in Go","text":"> Building a lexer out of a recursive function type actually sounds like a really cool thing to try Rob Pike did just that for Go's text/template package ( [LINK] ). See the source lexer source code at [LINK] and note that stateFn is defined recursively. There's a video by Pike describing how he built the parser at [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5276440,"author":"mseepgood","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Concurrency is not Parallelism. Rob Pike at Waza 2012 [video]","text":"> What most people don't realize is that for concurrency to be useful, there must be parallelism. No, as far as I understand from this and other talks, Rob Pike argues that concurrency is useful even without parallelism: it's a better way to structure software. A nice example for this is shown in his talk about lexical scanning in Go: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5537318,"author":"thisishugo","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Building a toy template engine in Python","text":"I'm not sure I like the idea of parsing templates with regular expressions. There is a better way, as demonstrated in Robe Pike's video[1] detailing how the Go template language is implemented. Edit: which isn't meant to detract from the fact that this is a great article. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6417758,"author":"canthonytucci","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Less is exponentially more (2012)","text":"For those who don't know who Rob Pike is, he's pretty awesome, helped create UTF-8 among other things, and now works on Go. [LINK] He has given some really great Go talks which are available on youtube, about an hour each: Origins of Go Concurrency Style - [LINK] Lexical Scanning in Go - [VIDEO] Go Concurrency Patterns (One of my favorites) - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10802973,"author":"landr0id","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Implementing a programming language in D: Lexical Analysis","text":"Wow, perfect timing! I'm currently writing my first lexer/parser in D as well ( [LINK] ) for a Scheme-like language used in Halo 3. I found Rob Pike's talk on lexical scanning to be pretty useful ( [VIDEO] ) and I've modeled mine pretty heavily after the text/template lexer: [LINK] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11619990,"author":"etatoby","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Writing a Compiler in Go","text":"I would like to mention that most, if not all, of the Go compiler and related utilities is written in Go itself, with high quality, open source code that can be found in the \"go\" package of the standard library: [LINK] I would recommend using that as a template for one's own compiler, because it's written in idiomatic Go (originally by the language creators) and is cleanly split across abstraction boundaries (packages \"scanner\", \"parser\", \"ast\", and so on.) There's also a smaller, simpler parser in the \"text/template/parse\" package, that is used to parse the templating languages in \"text/template\" and \"html/template\". As an introduction to it, I recommend the talk \"Lexical Scanning in Go\" by Rob Pike: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33413953,"author":"gorgoiler","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?","text":"Rob Pike\u2019s lexer was very nicely done and struck a chord with me. It\u2019s not nearly as magical as some of the other things here. It\u2019s just great engineering: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44291371,"author":"Xeoncross","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Datalog in Rust","text":"If you enjoyed the state machine + parsing part and also I recommend the older \"Lexical Scanning in Go\" talk that Rob Pike gave: [VIDEO] It's in Go, but you can apply most of it easily in other languages. I'm so happy that modern languages like Rust, Zig, and Go support unicode/runes/graphemes natively. So many problem just disappear compared to Java, .net, C++, or scripting languages.","stance":"rec"}],"Hy4QjmKzF1c":[{"hn_comment_id":16871162,"author":"konschubert","month":"2018-04","story_title":"The Dow of Cities","text":"Because there are ugly cities and there are beautiful cities. And they are so for a reason. This video is really informative in this regard and has changed my opinion on a few things: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10443247,"author":"ZenoArrow","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Land-value tax: Why Henry George had a point","text":"This video captures quite a bit of what I consider important in city planning, would be interested to hear your thoughts on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10443277,"author":"ZenoArrow","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Land-value tax: Why Henry George had a point","text":"What do you think of the ideas in this video: [VIDEO] I believe it captures most of what is important in making a livable city that people enjoy living in.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10889428,"author":"matkam","month":"2016-01","story_title":"San Francisco's Fog Over Growth","text":"Relevant to this topic, Youtube channel \"The School of Life\" talks about this issue where people are reluctant to build, causing the housing price to go up. One Reason Homes Cost So Much: [LINK] As a follow up, the same channel offers some more ideas and broader view solutions. How to Make an Attractive City: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17371500,"author":"cleansy","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Future generations will laugh in horror and derision at the folly of facadism","text":"> Finally, it should be mentioned that buildings are owned by private companies and individuals, who generally have a right to do whatever they want to them! Err, no. A city can and should decide what the \"overall look and feel\" is. London fails at that spectacularly. Pretty much all cities that are considered beautiful have building guidelines in place that support that. Like: you can build only to the height of neighboring buildings, windows need to line up, specific styles and mandatory balconies to fit into the environment. Think of Amsterdam or Barcelona. The overall look of a city is part of the quality of life of its citizens. If you leave it to property developers, well, you get something like London. EDIT: \"The school of Life\" made a video that explains that pretty well. [1] 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HyzD8pNlpwI":[{"hn_comment_id":15734224,"author":"rtpg","month":"2017-11","story_title":"A list of Game Boy development resources","text":"The Ultimate Game Boy Talk[0] (listed in the page) is one of my favorite talks of all time. If you were to send this talk to someone, with basically just the videe they could likely build a faithful Gameboy clone. It's so dense, easy to understand, and comprehensive. I'll listen to it form time to time and think about all the cool tricks it reveals. Super impressive to have that much knowledge for a system that only had a couple thousand programs ever written for it. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19663834,"author":"jchw","month":"2019-04","story_title":"GameBoy CPU Manual (2013) [pdf]","text":"I really like the Gameboy hardware; it's limited, but the design feels very elegant in it's simplicity. I've written a couple of toy Gameboy emulators at this point. It's a bit challenging to get anything working, and honestly I have no idea how to approach audio at all. Nevertheless, it's still quite fun. The LCD timings are a point of curiosity for me. It seems there's still a slight bit of mystery around it, still today. I was inspired to play with emulating Gameboy specifically after an excellent 33c3 talk, The Ultimate Game Boy Talk, which I highly recommend. [VIDEO] (Some day I would like to approach emulation for more platforms, both newer and older, but I feel I still have so much time learn about designing emulators that I haven't bothered with that yet. It's so open ended, and handling things like cycle counting has a lot of different approaches of varying desirability.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43772743,"author":"msarnoff","month":"2025-04","story_title":"How MOS 6502 Illegal Opcodes Work (2008)","text":"Michael\u2019s blog is one of my favorites. His \u201cUltimate Guide\u201d talks are great and I rewatch them at least once a year. Ultimate Guide to the C64: [LINK] Ultimate Guide to the Game Boy: [VIDEO] Ultimate Guide to the Apollo Guidance Computer: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48548662,"author":"rtpg","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Game Engine White Papers Commander Keen","text":"the Gameboy, not the SNES, but this talk is very very good at going in detail about a bunch of internals. The graphics stuff is 29 minutes in but I love the whole video. Very much a high level guide to building a \"retro-y\" fantasy console for people into that stuff [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17135632,"author":"anyfoo","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Why did I spend 1.5 months creating a Gameboy emulator? (2017)","text":"Game Boy emulators are always great for educational or experimental projects, because the Game Boy platform is surprisingly simple, which leads to a very quick payoff, and yet very \"real\" in that the Game Boy was a great commercial success with thousands of software titles available, so you have plenty of software available to try in your project and actually make use of that payoff. One example to illustrate how simple the Game Boy is: There is no operating system at all, only a 256 byte boot ROM whose sole purpose is to display the Nintendo logo from the cartridge and halt if it does not checksum correctly (for both cartridge integrity and legal reasons). This entertaining 33c3 talk manages to describe the Game Boy hardware practically in its entirety (and with some previously unknown details, actually): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19663587,"author":"ehaskins","month":"2019-04","story_title":"GameBoy CPU Manual (2013) [pdf]","text":"I've been working on a GB emulator for awhile. Step one is to understand the architecture of the system. What are the different hardware components? How do they interact? A simple emulator boils down to: While(true) Emulate_one_cpu_cycle() For each cycle you have to produce any side effects from the various peripherals (serial comms, update the display, generate audio, etc.), process any external changes (button presses, serial data), and emulate the next CPU instruction (basically a big switch). I recommend \"The Ultimate Gameboy Talk (33c3)\" [0], for an overview of the Gameboy and it's internal peripherals. There are various test ROMs available that you can use to verify the basic functionality. [1][2] 0. [VIDEO] 1. [LINK] 2. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20020436,"author":"Kipters","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Making a Game Boy Game in 2017","text":"For anyone interest, I recommend watching \"The Ultimate Game Boy Talk\" [0] from 33c3, lots of interesting details about how a Game Boy works, including the PPU [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21894699,"author":"eliasson","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Emulating the Original Gameboy\u2019s CPU","text":"Anyone interested in how the Game Boy works should watch \"The Ultimate Game Boy Talk\" by Michael Steil. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23080027,"author":"TheAceOfHearts","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Nintendo has reportedly suffered a significant legacy console leak","text":"Modern Vintage Gamer just released a video [0] discussing this leak in greater detail along with its expected implications. Anyone who's curious can find the download links by backtracking through all the Pokemon Prototype General threads under the Pokemon board on 4chan. One of the leaks that caught my attention was the source for Pokemon Blue, partially because of nostalgia and partially out of curiosity to see what an old game's codebase even looks like. The first thing that stood out to me was the project's flat folder structure, full of hundreds of files; I guess I was expecting things to be a bit more structured. The source is more readable and approachable than I expected, although I've only poked around in some of the more obvious places and definitions. I'd recommend watching The Ultimate Game Boy Talk [1] before trying to dive into any code. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30135328,"author":"kaoD","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Choosing tools for Game Boy development","text":"It's actually Z80-ish with some features missing and some new ones included. It's a Sharp LR35902 SoC with an SM83 core (not sure if it has been used in non-GB SoCs). I can recommend The Ultimate Gameboy Talk for details on it (and much more). [VIDEO] EDIT: I had the SoC and the core names the wrong way around. Thanks svendahlstrand.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37333157,"author":"hadlock","month":"2023-08","story_title":"RyujinX \u2013 Open Source Nintendo Switch Emulator","text":"This is a good place to start. Named \"the ultimate game boy talk\" dives into the CPU used, the instruction set(s) used by the CPU, how the video instruction sets work(ed) etc. The game boy from 1989 is a pretty simple device to start learning from. From there you can look at how various people emulated the system. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"HyznrdDSSGM":[{"hn_comment_id":18000552,"author":"brox","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?","text":"I find Ben Eater's 8-bit computer from scratch series really wonderful, mainly because of his skills as an educator and the effort he puts into the material: [VIDEO] Check out his latest videos on low-level data transmission techniques as well.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22844658,"author":"gtsteve","month":"2020-04","story_title":"\u201cHello world\u201d from scratch on a 6502 (2019) [video]","text":"I love this guy's videos, I've been watching them for a year or so now. He also made a series [0] where he built the CPU, microcode and all using logic gates and components. As a pure software guy I found it very enlightening. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24529159,"author":"dnautics","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources to encourage teen on becoming computer engineer?","text":"1) the video series on building an computer from scratch is fantastic. It's valuable information no matter where in the tech stack you wind up in (or even if you don't wind up in tech) but also having a deep knowledge of these systems will be of considerable value down the line, because we aren't training kids in hardware as much anymore. [VIDEO] 2) If their interest is a bit higher in the stack (like robotics e.g.), and they don't mind getting in the weeds and asking for help in the community, I would target learning with a raspberry pi system. My preferred target is Nerves; it's a bit more bare-bones, and there aren't drivers for everything, but the community is fantastic (the elixir slack / nerves is the place to be), and it's easy to get to a point where you are dropped into an IDE and you can just code .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27804311,"author":"rtrunck","month":"2021-07","story_title":"How does USB device discovery work? [video]","text":"Ben Eater (Author of this Video) is fantastic. Learned so much on electronics and computers through this series [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29267468,"author":"IanWard1","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Megaprocessor \u2013 A micro-processor built large (2016)","text":"Love this kind of build, so I'm working on a little breadboard one myself [LINK] similar to the Ben Eater 8-bit CPU videos [VIDEO] (which are amazing and everyone should watch)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30057092,"author":"teeray","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How to begin learning assembler for university course?","text":"I think I learned more from Ben Eater\u2019s \u201cBuilding an 8-bit breadboard computer\u201d series [0] than my intro to computer architecture course at university. Highly recommended. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17180077,"author":"Bilters","month":"2018-05","story_title":"How long would it take to create a Windows 1.0 capable machine from scratch?","text":"Don't really know. But if you decide to do so, please make a video series about it. I really enjoyed the series Ben Eater has produced making his 8 bit computer. [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18845873,"author":"djmips","month":"2019-01","story_title":"MegaProcessor (2017) [video]","text":"If this interests you, you'll probably really like or already have seen Ben Eater's great YouTube series on building an 8 bit computer. (2016 as well) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23584902,"author":"bloodorange","month":"2020-06","story_title":"An Intro to Compilers (2017)","text":"I have a feeling you might like this: [LINK] It's a popular course about building a computer from nand gates and eventually building a Tetris like game on it. All of this is done on a hardware simulator of course. If you are keen on real hardware, you might find this interesting: [VIDEO] It's a series of videos where Ben Eater explains how to build an 8-bit computer using breadboards and basic elements of circuits. I find that his explanations are quite good as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24519455,"author":"klelatti","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Z80, the 8-bit Number Cruncher (2011)","text":"Not 100% sure this is precisely what you're looking for but Ben Eater's YouTube series on building an 8 bit computer is great to help build understanding how a microprocessor works. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24666203,"author":"bishopdynamics","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Can You Build a CPU?","text":"If you're looking to get a much better understanding of /why/ things work, you should check out Ben Eater's videos on YT [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28558956,"author":"mrspeaker","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Sir Clive Sinclair has died","text":"I recently had the feeling of those early home-computing days from the Ben Eater's \"8-bit computer from scratch\" videos/kits. Really fun project: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34334704,"author":"santadakota","month":"2023-01","story_title":"What Happens When a CPU Starts","text":"Ben Eater's fantastic video series on building a breadboard 6502 based computer and an 8-bit breadboard computer from scratch might be appreciated in this thread. 6502 playlist: [LINK] 8-bit build playlist: [VIDEO] He also sells kits if one is interested in playing along.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34336682,"author":"ruslan","month":"2023-01","story_title":"What Happens When a CPU Starts","text":"Starting procedure on MOS6502 is not that simple as it is told in the article. It spends some 7 clocks on doing internal initialization and only then fetches address of first jump from reset vector (0xFFFC/0xFFFD). I find Ben's Eater series on building simple 8-bit breadboard computer using 6502 CPU very educating and entertaining. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Hzb37RyagCQ":[{"hn_comment_id":23054039,"author":"Confiks","month":"2020-05","story_title":"OpenTitan RTL Synthesis with Yosys","text":"Here's an excellent talk that addresses your question: Open Source is Insufficient to Solve Trust Problems in Hardware [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24962059,"author":"Confiks","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Bunnie's Precursor Crowdfunding Begins","text":"Here's an excellent talk that addresses your question: Open Source is Insufficient to Solve Trust Problems in Hardware [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35791012,"author":"kfreds","month":"2023-05","story_title":"AMD's Firmware TPMs Vulnerable to Hardware Attacks, Defeating Disk Encryption","text":"As I'm sure you're aware FPGAs are nice because they can complicate things for an attacker in the physical supply chain. Andrew \"bunnie\" Huang did an excellent talk on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"I3l4XLZ59iw":[{"hn_comment_id":14788062,"author":"kmfrk","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Fake Obama created using AI tool to make phoney speeches [video]","text":"I really recommend the Adobe demonstration of their VoCo speech audio \"photoshopping\" because of Jordan Peele's reaction: [VIDEO] . More technology demos should have unscripted, sincere reactions like that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14788063,"author":"kmfrk","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Fake Obama created using AI tool to make phoney speeches [video]","text":"I really recommend the Adobe demonstration of their VoCo speech audio \"photoshopping\" because of Jordan Peele's reaction: [VIDEO] . More technology demo should have unscripted, sincere reactions like that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16215744,"author":"BrandoElFollito","month":"2018-01","story_title":"I trained an AI to copy my voice and it scared me silly","text":"The \"Adobe Photoshop for voice\" is quite amazing: [VIDEO] (you can skip the first ~third to get to the demo)","stance":"rec"}],"I4flQ8XdvJM":[{"hn_comment_id":20601474,"author":"sgentle","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Local Routing in a new Indefinitely Scalable Architecture [pdf]","text":"I'll always upvote Dave Ackley. His vision for computing is so audacious it seems unbelievable. Global consistency? Don't need it! Determinism? An illusory safety blanket for wimps and suckers! Sure, everyone talks a big game about eventual consistency, but who's signing up to use an eventually consistent CPU? Dave freakin' Ackley, that's who. And the whole thing would sound like blue-sky bullshit except he's out there actually building it. I think the best place to start is this demo of a network switch made out of cells: [VIDEO] (and then watch the rest of the video if you liked that) His more recent videos are weekly updates on a \"T2 Tile\" prototype made out of 3d printed parts, custom PCBs, and like a hundred BeagleBones: [LINK] Also, all his code is on GitHub: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44471127,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2025-07","story_title":"LLMs bring new nature of abstraction \u2013 up and sideways","text":"Me to, and I'm always battling with the LLM's obsession with lazily writing reams of ridiculously defensive code and masking errors in the code it generates and calls, instead of finding the root cause and solving that. (Yes, I'm referring to the code LLMs generate, not the API for generating code itself, but \"fail early and spectacularly\" should apply to all code and apis.) But you have to draw the line at failures that happen in the real world, or in code you can't control. I'm a huge fan of Dave Ackley's \"Robust First\" computing architecture, and his Moveable Feast Machine. His \"Robust First\" philosophy is extremely relevant and has a lot of applications to programming with LLMs, not just hardware design. Robust First | A conversation with Dave Ackley (T2 Tile Project) | Functionally Imperative Podcast [LINK] Robust-first computing: Beyond efficiency [LINK] Bottom up engineering for robust-first computing [LINK] Living Computation: Robust-first programming in ULAM [VIDEO] [LINK] DonHopkins on Feb 11, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Growing Neural Cellular Automata: A Differentiable... Also check out the \"Moveable Feast Machine\", Robust-first Computing, and this Distributed City Generation example: [LINK] DonHopkins on Oct 26, 2017 | parent | favorite | on: Cryptography with Cellular Automata (1985) [pdf] A \"Moveable Feast Machine\" is a \"Robust First\" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. It's similar to a Cellular Au","stance":"rec"}],"I6IQ_FOCE6I":[{"hn_comment_id":3810293,"author":"karpathy","month":"2012-04","story_title":"Peter Thiel\u2019s CS183: Startup - Class 2 Notes","text":"I'm auditing the class as well and I like it quite a lot. Make sure to not get TLDR discouraged and at least scroll all the way down for the (very amusing) video that was played in class. Direct link: [VIDEO] from 2007 but still semi-relevant :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3830904,"author":"nchuhoai","month":"2012-04","story_title":"All In: Now's The Time","text":"[VIDEO] Always appropriate. On a side note, really hard to know whether this is a bubble or not. I don't want to take either side, but you cannot refute that a billion dollars for a startup that did not gain any significant revenue seems like a lot of money.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19268894,"author":"YjSe2GMQ","month":"2019-02","story_title":"What you need to know before you join a startup","text":"This comment is probably to be downvoted as off topic, but in case anyone missed this gem. Here Comes Another Bubble: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"I6xwMIUPHss":[{"hn_comment_id":43388834,"author":"orc00","month":"2025-03","story_title":"When the Dotcom Bubble Burst","text":"BobbyBroccoli on YouTube does an absolutely phenomenal job creating documentaries. Related to the dot-com burst would be the story he tells about Nortel. - Part 1: [VIDEO] - Part 2: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45111304,"author":"month13","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Anthropic raises $13B Series F","text":"For those curious, I found this to be a very entertaining retelling of events from Nortel's persepective: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47395277,"author":"kmeisthax","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Nasdaq's Shame","text":"Any Canadians in the room should remember this as the exact mechanism by which Nortel Networks became astronomically huge. Any time Nortel got more valuable, index funds tracking the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) loaded up on Nortel, amplifying the price increase. This gave the company massive amounts of capital to buy other companies with, which generated more headlines, which brought in more investor capital, which brought more index funds in. In fact, at one point Nortel was so valuable it made the TSE too homogenous to legally index, at least until Nortel lobbied Canada to change the rules regarding diversified index funds. If you aren't Canadian (like me) you can watch this Bobbybroccoli video that explains it very well: [VIDEO] Spoiler alert for the Bobbybroccoli video, but it turns out this trick doesn't work forever. And when Nortel inevitably crashed it left a good chunk of Canadians as bagholders. And looking at the stock market over the past few years, where basically all the the growth is seven companies, I'm starting to wonder if we're finally seeing America's answer to the Nortel fiasco. (No, Lucent doesn't count, even though they're literally America's counterpart to Nortel. The key factor that made Nortel a problem was the lack of diversity in the Canadian market. Lucent crashed and burned in a field of hundreds of growing big-cap stocks, Nortel was an extremely big fish in a tiny pond.)","stance":"rec"}],"I7IdS-PbEgI":[{"hn_comment_id":9246198,"author":"netgusto","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Hamsa \u2013 A simple data-binding and observable model","text":"IMHO, one-way data flow + immutability competes with (beats ?) observed mutations in many use cases. See [VIDEO] , and more specifically [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13051999,"author":"victorcase","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Immutable.js: An Introduction with examples written for humans","text":"@diegorbaquero you should watch that [VIDEO] . The author spoke about performance and immutability-data structures like Directional Acyclic Graphs and Trie.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14276001,"author":"clay_to_n","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Build Yourself a Redux","text":"For anyone interested, there's a great conference talk on this topic by Lee Byron from Facebook: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15885985,"author":"icc97","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Git is a purely functional data structure (2013)","text":"I found the explanation from the Immutable JS presentation easier to understand when talking about Immutable data structures [0] [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31785838,"author":"jamesgpearce","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?","text":"Lee Byron on Immutable/React/Flux: [VIDEO] \u201cI only have a minute left, which is more than enough time to build the undo stack\u201d","stance":"rec"}],"I845O57ZSy4":[{"hn_comment_id":32526194,"author":"kken","month":"2022-08","story_title":"John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round","text":"The interview with Lex Fridman that he was referring to: [VIDEO] The entire video is worth viewing, an impressive 5:15h!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35221874,"author":"joblazny","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Which tech podcasts would you recommend to a friend?","text":"Lex Fridman. He does long form interviews (~4 hours) on more than just tech, and all of the guests he interviews are fascinating. He simultaneously approaches his interviews from a scientific background (MIT AI lecturer) and a love for humanity. If you like tech, one episode I'd like to recommend is episode #309 with John Carmack. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36904586,"author":"fernandotakai","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Commander Keen's Adaptive Tile Scrolling","text":"link for people that want to watch it: [VIDEO] i would also recommend another two of his interviews: Todd Howard [LINK] Guido van Rossun [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"I8LbkfSSR58":[{"hn_comment_id":21172176,"author":"defaultcompany","month":"2019-10","story_title":"On the Weaknesses of the Mathematical Mind","text":"This reminds me of a great talk by Bartosz Milewski [1] about the motivation and philosophy behind category theory. He makes the observation that our \"monkey brains\" are not good at dealing with complexity at all and we only really have one good strategy for dealing with it, that being to chop up complex problems into smaller, simpler problems which we can solve in isolation and then combine the results back together to approximate a solution to the larger problem. His point is that we do this everywhere and therefore it's no wonder that category theory is able to describe so many disparate areas of mathematics - because it's really describing just this mechanism, not some deep truth about the universe itself. Like - what if we as humans are so \"register bound\" that we can't solve any problems which can't be chopped up and put back together like this - such as those in the social sciences. His presentation style is wonderful - i recommend the whole talk but this part starts at 37:20. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23090829,"author":"phekunde","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How to be fluent in functional language speak?","text":"If you are coming from imperative land (more specifically C++) then nothing beats articles and videos by Dr. Bartosz Milewski: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13452077,"author":"openfuture","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Why hasn't Haskell taken over the world? And the curious case of Go","text":"That just means you are missing some foundation. If you are interested in understanding the theory I really recommend this: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14127078,"author":"snowcrshd","month":"2017-04","story_title":"A monoid is a category, a category is a monad, a monad is a monoid","text":"I recently started going through Bartoz Milewski's Category Theory lectures [1]. I think they are a very nice place to start learning these things. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14181355,"author":"danidiaz","month":"2017-04","story_title":"From Monads to Machine Code","text":"Those articles (and the videos [VIDEO] ) are great but one doesn't need to learn category theory to understand monads in Haskell. The Haskell Wikibook is an underrated resource: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14210246,"author":"nuriaion","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Category Theory, Syntactically (2016)","text":"I can recomend the video series of Bartosz Milewski ( [VIDEO] ) I'm at the 4th video and it's the first time that i start to become an understanding of the howl thing. But expect it to take some time. (10 Videos, most are around 1h, i needed to pause several times and think or try something out)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16409160,"author":"yanowitz","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Monadic I/O and Unix shell programming (2001)","text":"This is a fun read (fair warning: you should have some understanding of monoids and monads before reading) and further validates my hypothesis that understanding category theory would make me a more effective engineer. If you've had the joy of constructing useful shell pipelines, and part of it is in the ease of knowing how it will behave. this is a nice formal statement that the underlying reasons WHY it just \u201cfeels right\u201d are because of category theory--which means if I can just learn category theory, I\u2019ll have a new tool for approaching and factoring problems that will be, technically speaking, hella useful. I suppose I should start (re)working my way through [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18940357,"author":"philzook","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How to self-study mathematics from the undergrad through graduate level?","text":"John Baez (physicist / category theorist / smort dude) has a list of books to learn math and physics. Is an interesting source to crib from. [LINK] Gerhard t'Hooft has a page on how to become of a good physicist. [LINK] Not math though. I'm not necessarily suggesting that a mountain of books is the best way to go about it. I think I respond best to video lectures. I'm not sure where you're starting from or how applied/pure you want. Here's a quick mind dump some of my favorites and some that I haven't watched. Roughly in order of how much I liked them. Gilbert Strang's Computational Methods for engineers was life changing for me. It is a two part MIT opencourse. [LINK] A Stanford course on the Fourier transform [LINK] Bartosz Milewski's Category theory for programmer's [VIDEO] Stephen Boyd's courses are online. [LINK] Linear Systems, convex optimization. Useful stuff. Francis Su's Real Analysis is very good [LINK] Indian universities have an astounding collection of videos [LINK] I have a tough time with the accents, which is a bummer. UCCS MathOnline has quite a haul [LINK] I've been enjoying this Visual Group Theory course lately [LINK] Math Doctor Bob [LINK] Wildberger has some interesting takes on elementary and non elementary topics [LINK] [LINK] Perimeter scholars lectures. Physics not math. Good stuff. Federico Ardila has a number of combinatorics courses. [LINK] Nonlinear algebra course [LINK] Also of course there is Coursera and edX stuff. Godspeed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21877878,"author":"smcl","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Category Theory for Programmers (2014) [pdf]","text":"There's a lecture series he did if anyone's interested: [VIDEO] I must say that there is a slight Tommy Wiseau energy about the guy, but that's no bad thing :-)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27331302,"author":"vishnugupta","month":"2021-05","story_title":"\u201cComputer science is not about computers\u201d","text":"I suggest a combination of theory (videos/books/papers) and practice. For practice; I highly recommend learning Haskell. If you are new to functional programming then learning Haskell is challenging and frustrating but as with any new topic the key is to not give up but keep probing. A good recent development is lot of mainstream languages are beginning to include functional paradigms such as lambda, closures etc., For example Java introduced lambda expressions, Javascript has had them for a while now. But from a first-principles stand point Haskell is as good as it gets so please do learn and code in Haskell if not at work then at least side projects. For theory I've found following material super useful. 0. This[0] is an incredibly awesome lecture where Phil Wadler takes us on a whirlwind tour of computer science. He talks us through different foundational structures on which almost everything (hardware and software) about computer science is built. I watch this lecture once every few months :-). It helps you build up context and ground various topics. 1. The one and only SICP. Book[1] and lectures[2]. 2. Automata theory[3]. This isn't an easy course but gets to the heart of the matter i.e., the meaning of \"function\" and what how can it be mechanically \"computed\". 3. Category Theory is where lot of active research is happening in CS theory. This is a very good lecture series[4]. The pace may seem a bit meandering but don't be put off. Bartosz is a gifted teacher and works i","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32424051,"author":"OracB7","month":"2022-08","story_title":"How to learn hard things in tech","text":"Eugenia Cheng has some interesting and accessible videos, e.g.: [LINK] and in a similar vein I am enjoying her book: \"How to Bake Pi\". Getting more into the technical side of things, Bartosz Milewski has good lessons in this playlist: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"I8Xc2_FtpHI":[{"hn_comment_id":16050094,"author":"nicolashahn","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What\u2019s your favorite talk from 2017?","text":"I like these ones (and even having attended Catholic high school, it was the first piece of media that made me actually realize how much human wisdom could be embedded in religious texts), but found his 2017 Maps of Meaning lectures more impactful, personally. He uses his archetypal lens on Pinocchio instead of Genesis for the first few lectures. There's a lot of content overlap but if you liked the Biblical series, definitely check out Maps of Meaning. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20057000,"author":"RickS","month":"2019-05","story_title":"New Insights into Hikikomori \u2013 People Who Withdraw from Society for Years on End","text":"I know you're not looking for advice, so I'm not going to preach too hard at you, except to say that I recognize the somber lucidity of your tone, and I've been there. Depression's heaviest weapon is that it feels like the heaviest truth. It's a bit like being in a room within a room. If nothing outside can be perceived from within the walls, does it matter that it exists? I was surprised when I got out \u2013 I was sure it couldn't happen to me either. I didn't even realize it was happening to me until months in. Lots of things that I thought were concrete facts about myself and the world turned out to be configurable in ways I was ill equipped to predict until they happened. There was no secret or epiphany or \"one weird trick\". I mostly did this by pretending as if being were worthwhile. I wasn't interested in anything that happy, normal people were interested in, like meeting new people or wearing clean clothes. But my crude mental model of those people had enough fidelity to imitate them, at least somewhat. So I did, in earnest. Eventually the mask became the face. We are what we repeatedly do. I lost about 6 years before I started doing that, and it took about another 6 to 9 months before I noticed that anything had changed. I have to give a lot of credit to a lecture series I was recommended on HN as well: Maps of Meaning, from Jordan Peterson: [VIDEO] It's weird stuff. Took some getting through. I don't remember what the first guy said that made me stick with it, but I'm gl","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23251870,"author":"dagav","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Surviving Depression","text":"I highly recommend you listen to these lecture series. I cannot overstate the profound effect they had on my life, by giving me the tools I needed to turn my depression around and give me a sense of balance and control in my life. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25013737,"author":"Yan-solucracy","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How to fix expectations and set up path for life?","text":"Watch Jordan Peterson's Maps of meaning course : [VIDEO] , it won't solve everything but it will enable you to understand how to make sense out of life, and how your belief system works, so you can make it work for you.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32335016,"author":"8vectors","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Will I Ever Recover?","text":"Contrary to popular belief, the highest chance of success, and largest entrepreneurial successes, come from founders who are 47 years old when they start their companies. You are still 10 years away from the statistical \"peak\" to start your startup. Yes you will recover. This experience may be exactly what you need to become great. It's your choice to either hide from it and whither away in regret or face it head on and extract all the value it has to offer. Growth comes from painful reflection on our mistakes. Studying Stoicism and this lecture series really helped me get through the failure of my startup (Which I spent 7 years building and then had to sell for $1). [VIDEO] Note the lecturer is controversial politically now... but this series genuinely helped me put myself back together after my ego was shattered - I am way better off now (and more resilient) and years later building another company which is doing great so far.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16195631,"author":"nicolashahn","month":"2018-01","story_title":"What\u2019s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?","text":"For those interested in his non-gender identity content: His series on the Bible: [LINK] is generally regarded (by those I know, at least) as Jordan at his best. He goes through the first few stories in the Bible and tries to bring meaning to them, not from the fundamental Christian lens of \"this is absolute truth,\" but more like: \"Here are some archetypal patterns about the world and how to act in it that our ancestors have discovered over thousands of years and distilled into stories. Maybe they hold truth that isn't the 'word of God' truth, but observations about the world that have utility to us even as a modern, rational, scientific civilization. I'll back this up by tying it to studies on psychology, neuroscience, evolution, and animal behavior, and show that variations of the same archetypal stories appear in non-Judeo-Christian societies all over the world.\" You can be a hardline atheist and still get tons of value out of these lectures. I also found his 2017 Maps of Meaning lectures particularly interesting, and personally more relevant: [VIDEO] He does a similar thing with the story of Pinocchio instead of the Bible for the first few lectures, which might be more palatable for some. There's a lot of overlap with the Bible series as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21658982,"author":"kleer001","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Why the Hate?","text":"Because the world, for the most part, is (and always has been) a dangerous place and hate has proven to be a very useful (highly conserved through evolutionary time) adaptation to help keep small and delicate bands of our ancestors safe for one more day. You can see this bias towards negativity easily in the structure of basic emotions. There is one positive affect (happiness) and waaaaay more negative affects (fear, anger, disgust, sadness) and only one neutral (surprise). And those negative emotions are all very distinct. If you want more detail I can recommend over 120 hours of learning in the following (which I've watched and digested). They'll walk you through the details from the bottom to the top. - Watch Robert Sapolsky's lectures: [LINK] Watch Jordan Peterson's Personality lectures: [LINK] and his Maps of Meaning Lectures: (or read the book or listen to the audio book) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IAF8DjrQSSk":[{"hn_comment_id":24133760,"author":"pmdulaney","month":"2020-08","story_title":"JuliaCon 2020 in Retrospective","text":"The game changer for ordinary technical programming folks from JuliaCon 2020 is the introduction of a new \"reactive\" notebook, Pluto.jl. \"Reactive\" means that -- unlike Jupyter -- it automatically updates the whole notebook, like a spreadsheet, when you change a value in any cell. I am a Julia and Jupyter newbie, but I picked up on it easily. Watch the following video made by Pluto's creators: [VIDEO] Go here for Pluto installation instructions: [LINK] One thing that tripped me up, which is a generic Julia REPL issue: You enter the Julia package manager with \"]\" on the Julia> command line -- but how do you exit the package manager? Answer: Either Backspace or Ctrl-C.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24993126,"author":"snicker7","month":"2020-11","story_title":"An Introduction to Pluto","text":"It is linked in the article, but I would like to draw attention to the wonderful JuliaCon talk presenting Pluto: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25565730,"author":"mathnmusic","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Niex: Jupyter Notebooks but Using Elixir","text":"I think every new notebook project should take ideas from Julia's Pluto: [VIDEO] Working directly with the source files is just one of the niceties it has.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29694825,"author":"wodenokoto","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Bad Data and Data Engineering: Dissecting Google Play Music Takeout Data","text":"I think notebooks are great for building a presentation / reports of a data exploration, but I agree that they shouldn't represent programs. Rstudio won't export an R-markdown notebook to PDF without rerunning all cells sequentially. It's great for keeping the code \"in check\", but for things that takes hours to run, it can be quite annoying. I do think most of the problems with notebooks go away if you somehow force sequential running before presenting it to other people. Another really cool take on notebooks are Julia's Pluto Notebooks. Like a spreadsheet, there is no sequence that cells are run in. Everything is updated simultaneously. It's kinda hard to explain, but the JuliacCn presentation on these is absolutely wonderful: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24304085,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Pluto.jl \u2013 a reactive, lightweight, simple notebook","text":"Really happy to see that the good ideas from Observable notebooks are being copied elsewhere. I don't use Julia myself at the moment (although I think it's a beautiful language), but I know some people who will be very happy with this! Also, the playful enthusiasm in the presentation video linked in the description just makes me smile: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25225194,"author":"socialdemocrat","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Ditch Excel and Use Julia Data Frames","text":"The Pluto notebook for Julia does exactly the same. It creates dependencies between code cells and data automatically. If you change any data or code, that code ripples through through the rest of the notebook. So e.g. you could bind a slider to a variable and if that variable is used in a plot, dragging that slider will modify the plot in realtime. Demonstration of Pluto.jl here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25230486,"author":"socialdemocrat","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Ditch Excel and Use Julia Data Frames","text":"The closest may be Pluto.jl [VIDEO] In Pluto plots, calculations get bound to data and when you change that data the effects immediately ripple through. Personally if I work with table data in Julia, I will use it with something like Table Tool [LINK] It lets you view and edit a CSV file. Saving and loading CSV files from Julia is very quick anyway. You can use a couple of key strokes to bring back a previous command. You also got some newer ones such as Tad: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ICp2-EUKQAI":[{"hn_comment_id":23237593,"author":"somethoughts","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Microsoft announces Lists, a new Airtable-like app","text":"Somewhat tangential (more Excel related) but had to put these videos by Krazam somewhere at some point on HN. Enjoy! MAKRO | Microsoft Excel Stream Highlights 3/19 [LINK] MAKRO | XLOOKUP: META BREAKER? | Microsoft Excel Stream Highlights 10/19 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40682633,"author":"Terr_","month":"2024-06","story_title":"The Microsoft Excel superstars throw down in Vegas","text":"That makes me think of these two great parody videos from ~5 years back, of Excel using e-sport tropes, introduced but a (fictional) livestreaming competitor nicknamed Makro. \"Microsoft Excel stream highlights\" [LINK] \"XLOOKUP\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IDgDWbQtlKI":[{"hn_comment_id":20434475,"author":"jillesvangurp","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Soil Erosion: Why soil is disappearing from farms","text":"Soil erosion is a reversible process but it will require a little effort and planning. When it works it's an investment that actually pays off. Here's a nice example of the Chinese restoring some soil: [LINK] I've seen a documentary with some before and after video footage. Quite amazing difference: [VIDEO] Planned grazing is another approach that has seen some success: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32695651,"author":"mountaintimefrm","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Why are Pakistan\u2019s floods so extreme this year?","text":"Probably the best documented example of it working is in the Loess Plateau in China. John D Liu has a couple documentaries on it, here is one: [VIDEO] A good example of a similar project in India, as covered by Andrew Millison: [LINK] Sepp Holzer did a similar project in Portugal: [LINK] ...I believe he also did some pretty large projects in the middle east, but I can't find any vids on them at the moment. Geoff Lawton has done a ton of projects like this, but maybe not at the landscape wide scales like the projects above. Probably the best book on the basic principles of how to do it - Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond by Brad Lancaster. Also the book Water For Every Farm by P.A. Yeomans is pretty good as well, but not as accessible of a read. TLDR - To keep desert monsoons from flooding areas downstream, dig a landscape wide network of swales and basins to catch, soak and sink the water into the soil. Properly dug, such earthworks recharge aquifers while stopping flooding and erosion.","stance":"rec"}],"IE7j1SgUpKs":[{"hn_comment_id":28359718,"author":"trynewideas","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Empty Epsilon: a fully open-source spaceship bridge simulator game","text":"There's an active forum for bridge sims that's the de facto community space for EmptyEpsilon: [LINK] There's a Discord that assembles online games run by United Stellar Navy (it's officially an role-playing community, but the EmptyEpsilon games aren't heavy on it): [LINK] They organized a few 50+ player games last year, which have some videos on YouTube. A bit chaotic without context, but if you want to see the upper scope of gameplay: [LINK] EmptyEpsilon also has traction as a LARP platform, thanks in parts to being pretty straightforward to modify in source, using Lua to script scenarios, and having a rudimentary optional HTTP API to trigger scenario events, manipulate game state, and control player stations. A Finnish group used EE in their large 2019 LARP event Odysseus: [LINK] The custom backend for the tech, which included several systems and physical interfaces outside of EE that interfaced with the game, got a good talk at RopeCon: [VIDEO] A French LARP scene has an active fork with features more geared toward that usage: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47296693,"author":"hifikuno","month":"2026-03","story_title":"The Collective Ambition Behind Odysseus, a Game-Changing Sci-Fi Larp","text":"I love Odysseus so much. On one hand I think it sounds amazing and would love the opportunity to play it one day. On the other, from a technical accomplishment of volunteer work it is amazing! Just the IT work alone. Here's a video I found years ago by one of the volunteers talking about the work they put into the electronics. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IHD8BDFYyGI":[{"hn_comment_id":48362180,"author":"roysting","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC","text":"Patrick Boyle has an excellent presentation (YT) on the SpaceX IPO. In case you thought you knew it was bad \u2026 it\u2019s way worse than you think. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48344109,"author":"general1465","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The SpaceX IPO is great for Elon Musk and terrible for you","text":"If you don't want to read, here is a 30 minutes summary from financial guy (Patrick Boyle) where are all the problems with SpaceX IPO - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48385292,"author":"tcp_handshaker","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Anthopic, OpenAI Should Not Be Allowed to IPO, Says Ed Zitron [video]","text":"[LINK] \"SpaceX IPO retail offering is worrying\" - [LINK] ( This guy will never be invited back to CNBC...interview is hysterically funny...and accurate... ) \"SpaceX IPO: Nice Try Though\" - [VIDEO] \"SpaceX IPO Scandal\" - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48385458,"author":"tcp_handshaker","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Elon Musk is expected to become the first trillionaire","text":"[LINK] \"SpaceX IPO retail offering is worrying\" - [LINK] ( This guy will never be invited back to CNBC...interview is hysterically funny...and accurate... ) \"SpaceX IPO: Nice Try Though\" - [VIDEO] \"SpaceX IPO Scandal\" - [LINK] \"Anthopic, OpenAI Should Not Be Allowed to IPO, Says Ed Zitron\" - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"IHZwWFHWa-w":[{"hn_comment_id":15689936,"author":"hal9000xp","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to get started with AI?","text":"I'm in the same boat. For long time, I was interested in AI but at the same time intimidated by math. I'm relatively comfortable with discrete mathematics and classical algorithms and at the same time calculus and linear algebra is completely foreign to me. Also, I do not accept way to learn ML without good understanding of core principles behind it. So math is a must. A few months ago, I stumbled upon very amazing YouTube Channel 3Blue1Brown which explains math in very accessible way and at the same time I got feeling that I finally started understanding core ideas behind linear algebra and calculus. Just recently he published 4 videos about deep neural networks: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] So my fear of ML was gone away and I'm very excited to explore whole new world for neural networks and other things like support vector machines etc","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15625863,"author":"nouveaux","month":"2017-11","story_title":"What is backpropagation and what is it doing? [video]","text":"This was very timely for me and for anyone else learning, here are the first few videos of the series: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] (Original video) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23085192,"author":"miklosme","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Humans Not Invited","text":"If you want an extensive answer, I recommend the neural network playlist on 3Blue1Brown: [LINK] For a quick answer, watch this segment: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41926020,"author":"superkuh","month":"2024-10","story_title":"LLMs Aren't Thinking, They're Just Counting Votes","text":"> when an LLM tells us that the sun rises in the east, it's not because it truly understands astronomy or the solar system. Rather, it has seen the phrase \"sun rises in the east\" repeated so many times in its training data that this becomes the highest probability answer. It's less about understanding and more about pattern recognition. This is not too different from most human person's experience with basic education ( [LINK] ). Though it is obvious that humans can do more than that too. And while \"voting\" that may be a close-enough metaphor for the multi-layer perceptron layers, it is not what is happening in the attention layers. I suggest checking out 3blue1brown's videos on gradient descent [VIDEO] and \"How might LLMs store facts\" [LINK] versus how attention works [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"IJcuQQ1eWWI":[{"hn_comment_id":3368199,"author":"JonnieCache","month":"2011-12","story_title":"How games cheat to help players","text":"Continuing my theme of posting relevant google tech talks, here is Soren Johnson, the lead designer and AI programmer on Sid Meier's Civilisation, discussing this very subject with specific reference to the evolution of civ's AI over the years. Extremely enlightening, whether you are a gamer or not. [VIDEO] \"Artificial intelligence is crucial to any strategy game, providing a compelling opponent for solo play. While many of the challenges of AI development are technical, significant design challenges exist as well. Can the AI behave like a human? Should it? Should the game design be adjusted to accommodate the limitations of the AI? How do we make the AI fun? Should the AI cheat? If so, how much? Do we even want the AI to win? This session suggests some possible answers to these questions using the \"Civilization\" series as a case study. Ultimately, developers must choose between a \"good\" AI and a \"fun\" one, with an understanding of the trade-offs inherent when deciding between the two.\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4103198,"author":"JonnieCache","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Civ II game a decade old","text":"You may well enjoy this lecture at google from one of the civ5 devs talking about the AI design, and game AI design in general. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4480393,"author":"aggronn","month":"2012-09","story_title":"Game AI vs Traditional AI","text":"You might enjoy a talk by the designer of much Civilization AI: [VIDEO] Its a very good talk, but applied video game AI as a field is kind of a let down.","stance":"rec"}],"IJiHDmyhE1A":[{"hn_comment_id":23261486,"author":"jointpdf","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Sid Meier\u2019s Civilization VI free until May 28th","text":"> I honestly can\u2019t remember anything special about Civ4/5/6 Aww c\u2019mon, not even one thing? What about the greatest video game song ever produced (Baba Yetu): [VIDEO] Agree on Alpha Centauri\u2014definitely recommend picking up a copy on GOG for anyone in the mood for a classic strategy game timesink.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12812893,"author":"redthrowaway","month":"2016-10","story_title":"What Sid Meier\u2019s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About \u2018Civilization\u2019","text":"Complaints about Civ's omission of the dark side of history ring hollow to me. Civ is, at its heart, a deeply aspirational and optimistic game. Watching the Baba Yetu intro from Civ IV[1] gives me the same sense of wonder and pride in humanity that Chris Hadfield's rendition of Space Oddity[2] does. Dwelling on the darkness in our history would be so discordant for a game like Civ. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31831288,"author":"watersb","month":"2022-06","story_title":"\u2018The War on Music\u2019 Review: Songs Without Listeners","text":"ABSOLUTELY. I am not plugged into a community of musicians these days, but in college and the decade afterwards we were hearing, performing music written by contemporary composers. Choral music, mostly. But cello concertos, crazy harpsichord binges, and banging on drums were there, too. A \"Classical vernacular\" these days would be blockbuster movie soundtracks! Are you (the article, its author) telling me that doesn't matter? To say nothing of new venues and art forms. I learned about Christopher Tin's song cycles via a soundtrack bundle marketed to video gamers. I am not a gamer, but I think I was shopping for a gift for my kids and holy cow I love his work. [VIDEO] Eric Whitacre! Arvo P\u00e4rt! These are not obscure artists. Symphonies and opera houses perform fun and popular works during the summer season in the US. So now would be a good time to find stuff you might not expect.","stance":"rec"}],"ILNs1GChGDk":[{"hn_comment_id":8962947,"author":"tdicola","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Show HN: Artpacks.org \u2013 Archive of the ANSI and ASCII art scene (1990 to present)","text":"Nice work! There's a great presentation from BSides Las Vegas a few years ago about the ANSI art scene, definitely worth checking out if anyone is interested: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9401689,"author":"empire29","month":"2015-04","story_title":"ANSI Art Collection from Old BBSs","text":"[LINK] is another great archive for ANSi art. The art scene in the mid 90s was an interesting, vibrant, microcosm, moving from BBS's to IRC over the course of a few years. [VIDEO] and the longer [LINK] are a good watches if youre interested.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33700760,"author":"rx_tx","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?","text":"If you want to watch a cool talk about the evolution of NFO and ascii (color) art scene and processes, I recommend watching [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IOiZatlZtGU":[{"hn_comment_id":10563473,"author":"jcox92","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Propositions as Types (2014) [pdf]","text":"+1 Probably my favorite talk at Strange Loop this year. It's worth watching just for the minute or so starting here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12639103,"author":"runT1ME","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Propositions as Types: [VIDEO] I think this can really really change how we look at everyday programming tasks everywhere from the type of tooling we choose to how we approach problems.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13494586,"author":"imode","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Proofs are Programs \u2013 19th Century Logic and 21st Century Computing (2000) [pdf]","text":"curry-howard and Wadler's \"Propositions as Types\" talk at StrangeLoop* opened my eyes pretty early on to the sweet, sweet utility of logic in my every day programming. it sounds odd to start with but I never realized why these things mattered prior to viewing this talk. props to wadler. best ~40 minutes I've ever spent. * [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17755557,"author":"jgautsch","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Curry\u2013Howard correspondence","text":"Professor Philip Wadler has a fantastic talk titled \"Propositions as Types\" that introduces the Curry-Howard correspondence, some history behind it and ideas following it. In fact it's one of my favorite talks. Well worth a watch if you haven't seen it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10562409,"author":"chrislloyd","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Propositions as Types (2014) [pdf]","text":"If you're finding the paper too dense, Philip gave a extremely entertaining talk on the same subject at Strange Loop this year: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12132719,"author":"mietek","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Very Long Proofs","text":"If you\u2019re using the right language, proofs are programs; it\u2019s as simple as that. \u201cCompressing\u201d a proof, then, amounts to doing what good programmers are already doing \u2014 noticing patterns and eliminating redundancy. I\u2019ll refer you to an authority on the subject, Phil Wadler. If you like watching videos, try < [VIDEO] . If you\u2019d rather read an entertaining paper, try < [LINK] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839619,"author":"yawaramin","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Philip Wadler's 'Propositions as Types': [VIDEO] Bonus: that was the talk that introduced Lambdaman to the world.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18219338,"author":"pmiri","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler A really in depth look into why functional languages stand out as a programming paradigm. The short of it being that they parallel perfectly (almost proof for proof!) with mathematical logic. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40791648,"author":"mrkeen","month":"2024-06","story_title":"A reckless introduction to Hindley-Milner type inference (2019)","text":"This is nice and genuinely entertaining [VIDEO] (Propositions as types by phil wadler). Its true focus is the 1-1 mapping between type systems and logic systems, but it's well worth the watch. This is good reading - it demystifies the funny typing rules in their mathematical form. [LINK] (Neither of these tell you how to implement the checker yourself though)","stance":"rec"}],"IOs6hnTI4lw":[{"hn_comment_id":13128783,"author":"m_mueller","month":"2016-12","story_title":"ARM-Based Windows 10 Portable PCs? Hell Yes","text":"Basically, you get a corporate drama, a human drama and a tech drama all wrapped up in one series of presentations: Jobs' return (as a consultant) 1997, promoting technologies from NeXT. Watch basically everyone asleep at the wheel except Jobs, the man with a plan. [LINK] WWDC Q&A - 'the art of saying no' [LINK] Jobs' hostile takeover in July by doing a (probably illegal?) stock dump [LINK] Announcing a Deal with Microsoft as de facto CEO in August, booed by the crowd [VIDEO] Internal meeting in September 1997 [LINK] iMac introduction 1998 - Apple is back [LINK] Macworld 1998 - Apple is essentially saved as a company [LINK] OSX Strategy reveal (if you only have time for one presentation, watch this one) [LINK] 1999 - OSX Server launch [LINK] 2000 - OSX launch [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13226314,"author":"m_mueller","month":"2016-12","story_title":"20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT","text":"I copy from a comment of mine from last week. In case you wanna procrastinate on a fascinating story about how Apple transitioned to NextStep's stack without completely annihilating their already weak developer base, here's a few links: You get a corporate drama, a human drama and a tech drama all wrapped up in one series of presentations: Jobs' return (as a consultant) 1997, promoting technologies from NeXT. Watch basically everyone asleep at the wheel except Jobs, the man with a plan. [LINK] WWDC Q&A - 'the art of saying no' [LINK] Jobs' hostile takeover in July by doing a (probably illegal?) stock dump [LINK] Announcing a Deal with Microsoft as de facto CEO in August, booed by the crowd [VIDEO] Internal meeting in September 1997 [LINK] iMac introduction 1998 - Apple is back [LINK] Macworld 1998 - Apple is essentially saved as a company [LINK] OSX Strategy reveal [LINK] 1999 - OSX Server launch [LINK] 2000 - OSX launch [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32374095,"author":"Lammy","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Steve Jobs negotiates Apple's deal with Microsoft (1997)","text":"> Apple will publicly announce that [\u2026] it will make Internet Explorer the default Worth watching for the crowd reaction: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IQJL3htsDyQ":[{"hn_comment_id":43745099,"author":"vault","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Raspberry Pi Lidar Scanner","text":"My opinion is that skipping lidar is nonsense. Check Mark Rober's video, published one month ago, \"Can You Fool A Self Driving Car?\" where he compares a Tesla with other Lidar-equipped cars: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45156118,"author":"rudolftheone","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Tesla changes meaning of 'Full Self-Driving', gives up on promise of autonomy","text":"Here's a good demonstration why LIDAR SHOULD be implemented instead of what Tesla tries to sell: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IQZ_bQbxSXk":[{"hn_comment_id":23954393,"author":"jonbaer","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Are \u201creversible\u201d computers more energy efficient, faster? (2004)","text":"I think Michael P Frank is one of the more knowledgable people working on the subject, his Stanford talk is extremely informative ... [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26295043,"author":"gbrown_","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Reversible Computing","text":"For anyone interested in the topic I highly recommend checking out Dr. Michael P. Frank's work. This video is good one to start with [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IRG-YubP1rw":[{"hn_comment_id":42321245,"author":"Agentus","month":"2024-12","story_title":"How to grow professional relationships","text":"small talk isnt pointless if done with an aim. this video help explains that [LINK] . seduction as applied to conversation. also rather mundane conversation can be fun if done in the right manner. this video talks more on the right manner: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47210986,"author":"latexr","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How to approach new people in 2026?","text":"Right now on the front page: [LINK] Also interesting and somewhat related: [LINK] If you struggle with small talk: [VIDEO] But to give a piece of advice not from a comment, is there any interest you have which other people may share and gather for? If you like games, for example, a local game shop is a good place to meet others. There\u2019s usually always someone there, they tend to be welcoming to newcomers, and having something to do (play a game) can make you forget some of the awkwardness.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48306631,"author":"latexr","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Am I a Bad Friend?","text":"> There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can\u2019t wash it off. Sure you can. There are various paths to it, some outlined in sibling comments, and here\u2019s another one: Pick up the phone and call or text some of those people you wish you had kept in contact with. Don\u2019t have their contacts anymore? Ask someone who might or find them on social media. What do you say to them? \u201cHey, I was recently thinking of <that time you did something together> and felt like reaching out. How have you been doing?\u201d. Maybe beforehand \u201ccollect\u201d some relevant events which have happened to your life since you last met, so you have something at the ready to keep the conversation going if you need. I\u2019m not saying rehearse it, just have them in mind. If you need some small talk tips, see this short video. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IRTfhkiAqPw":[{"hn_comment_id":26587731,"author":"rubyist5eva","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)","text":"I highly recommend \"Object Oriented Programming is Bad\" and \"Object Oriented Programming is Embarrassing\" on Youtube. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44675786,"author":"ravenstine","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Python classes aren\u2019t always the best solution","text":"One of my favorites: \"Object-Oriented Programming is Bad\" [LINK] Followed by \"Object-Oriented Programming is Embarrassing: 4 Short Examples\". [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11321075,"author":"DrScump","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Inheritance Is Terrible","text":"Perhaps the Brian Will anti-OO videos provide more useful examples: [LINK] \"Object-Oriented Programming is Bad\" [VIDEO] \"Object-Oriented Programming is Embarrassing: 4 Short Examples\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21244803,"author":"smnplk","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Object-Oriented Programming and Essential State","text":"Check out this video [VIDEO] from Brian Will, where he dissects 4 different code examples. I think one of the examples is also some Java code from Robert \"Uncle Bob\" Martin.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21287849,"author":"lazulicurio","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]","text":"There was an article on state in OOP posted here a few days ago that I found very thought-provoking[1]. The blog post and related youtube videos are pretty interesting as well[2][3][4]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27285669,"author":"pentaphobe","month":"2021-05","story_title":"It's probably time to stop recommending Clean Code (2020)","text":"Somewhat relatedly (covers some very similar concerns and IIRC even references \"Clean Code\"), Brian Wills has a few good videos [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IRVdiHu1VCc":[{"hn_comment_id":3732546,"author":"pbj","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Low pay low stress jobs/lifestyle","text":"You might want to check out Mike Rowe's Ted talk, he touches on some of this. [VIDEO] I'm in the process of changing careers now. I tried doing the IT thing for several years and ended up hating it. There was a lot of poor work/life balance, stress with meeting deadlines, poor job security (I'm not a developer), etc. This was with several different companies so I don't think it was just poor luck. My passion is working with computers & technology but I realized one day that it just wasn't worth it for me to be so stressed out. So I spent some time researching careers and I'm now going back community college for something health related. The job security is outstanding, the stress is fairly low, and I actually get to directly help improve the lives of others every day. The pay isn't anything crazy but it's definitely enough to live comfortably on if you just want a modest lifestyle.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5013741,"author":"shantanubala","month":"2013-01","story_title":"All My Life I\u2019ve Been Told I Was Special. It Was A Lie.","text":"I don't think anyone knows what they really like when they're young, and I believe even more firmly that parents are usually a better source of influence than peers. These are obviously generalizations, but I think Mike Rowe explains it best: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5459253,"author":"InclinedPlane","month":"2013-03","story_title":"What Being a Handyman Has Taught Me About Male Insecurity","text":"I took AP classes in college, and I work in the software industry, but I still know how to work with my hands and I'm very happy to have that knowledge. It's not that hard, if you feel bad about not knowing anything, go learn, go take a class or two, go read a book or two, go ask a friend, or use the internet, there are a million excellent resources out there. Pick a simple project and do it, then do another project. Stocking a basic toolbox is extraordinarily inexpensive, there's really no reason not to have one. I think the reason so many people aren't as handy as they used to be has to do more with culture than with anything else, here's an excellent TED talk from Mike Rowe (from Dirty Jobs) on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9365140,"author":"alexashka","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Best, Brightest \u2013 and Saddest?","text":"This is actually an even more extreme trend among some of the asian immigrant folks I've been in school with - their parents can be incredibly close-minded, overbearing and abusive. The pressure kids feel is largely fictional, in the sense that the world ISN'T going to end if they 'only go to college'. For example when I graduated highschool and went straight to college and some of the folks I knew stayed behind for an extra year to get their grades up - my parents in unison with me, thought they were failures. Looking back - it was smart. I am not working in the field that I studied, so the joke is on me :) Another thing to realize is that there are a number of jobs that are not intellectual that can be quite fulfilling, honestly. [VIDEO] This guy is a big proponent of more down to earth careers and I agree with everything he says, even though I'm a programmer. In short - the pressures are due to having a narrow view of the world and what success means. If you widen it to include working construction or going to college to become an ultrasound technician - it's not so bad all of a sudden. Parents just have to stop pushing their lack of achievements and phobias on to their kids - easier said than done of course. Solution? Incentivize intelligent people to breed more and try-hards and ignoramuses to breed less and the problem will be solved, in some number of decades :)","stance":"rec"}],"IS3i3DTUnAI":[{"hn_comment_id":21747883,"author":"ptttr","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Why GraphQL APIs but no Datalog APIs?","text":"The original question made this mistake probably because the poster didn't know it but Pathom is the actual alternative to GraphQL-based APIs. Datalog solves a subtly different problem of querying the data, while Pathom/GraphQL/REST is about exposing the data (interfacing?) as API. It's more like: Pathom vs GraphQL-based API (vs REST) and Datalog vs SQL (vs NoSQL) The mainstream is in the process of migrating from REST to GraphQL, but I think Pathom could be the black horse in this race. Just watch the last part of Wilker Silva's The Maximal Graph talk to see the potential: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25021796,"author":"edjroot","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces","text":"Looks pretty cool. Have you looked into Pathom (a Clojure library)? Its creator seems to share your vision of connecting APIs from different sources. Last 5 minutes of this video: The Maximal Graph by Wilker Silva - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IS5ycm7VfXg":[{"hn_comment_id":29179548,"author":"tnorthcutt","month":"2021-11","story_title":"How to make a CPU \u2013 a simple picture-based explanation","text":"Mentioned a couple other times in this thread but I don't think anyone has linked Sam Zeloof's video of essentially doing this: [VIDEO] It's fantastic and I highly recommend watching it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30282886,"author":"tanseydavid","month":"2022-02","story_title":"The Semiconductor Ecosystem Explained","text":"A guy named Sam Zeloof is fabbing functional chips in his garage. I think you might gain a lot from watching his videos about the process. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37984677,"author":"reedlaw","month":"2023-10","story_title":"How to Make a CPU \u2013 A Simple Picture Based Explanation","text":"This was mostly about making a silicon wafer. This video shows more detail on the rest of the process in a home lab: [VIDEO] (blog here: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40259928,"author":"ghghgfdfgh","month":"2024-05","story_title":"How to build a $20B semiconductor fab","text":"Somewhat related: a high school student creating his own semiconductor fav in his parent\u2019s garage on a \"budget\". [VIDEO] It\u2019s a thoroughly interesting video, but I\u2019m a bit disappointed he never took his idea any further than he did. I\u2019d really love to see something like a 6502 being made at home.","stance":"rec"}],"ISAKc9gpGjw":[{"hn_comment_id":38627287,"author":"busterarm","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Vertical farming company raised $500M, and then it all but disappeared","text":"[VIDEO] Been sending this video to every charlatan pushing vertical farming for years now. The math is pretty obvious and insurmountable on this one.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13325062,"author":"jsilence","month":"2017-01","story_title":"The Vertical Farm","text":"A very informed and informative lecture filled with facts that supports the former argument: [VIDEO] Myself I am a chemical engineer working in agricultural research. We are working on aquaponics and also test vertical growbeds. Vertical growbeds underperform significantly unless you put expensive light on them. Generating the electricity for light through PV uses about ten times the area compared to using direct sunlight. No way to counter that by using the full spectrum.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13325066,"author":"jsilence","month":"2017-01","story_title":"The Vertical Farm","text":"A very informed and informative lecture filled with facts that supports this argument: [VIDEO] Myself I am a chemical engineer working in agricultureal research. We are working on aquaponics and also test vertical growbeds. Vertical growbrds underperform significantly unless you put expensive light on them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17471270,"author":"contingencies","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Is Vertical Farming Really the Future of Agriculture?","text":"Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet [0] is a lecture by the preeminent authority in the field, Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, who has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career and has consulted on all NASA missions with these goals. In particular see 13m26s[1] and 37m17s[2]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18134687,"author":"contingencies","month":"2018-10","story_title":"New autonomous farm wants to produce food without human workers","text":"This article is all over the place and then apparently quotes an academic out of context. The real problem with indoor farming is not setup cost. For the fundamentals: [VIDEO] ... Bruce Bugbee, Utah State University Department of Plants, Soils and Climate, has studied plant growth in controlled environments for most of his career presents the results of his analysis of the environmental effects of Vertical Farming/Indoor Agriculture (September 2015). With regards to the machinery shown at the top of the article, it is standard industrial automation equipment you can purchase off the shelf, apparently not even hardened or substantially adjusted for outdoor use.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43466894,"author":"Shawnecy","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Vertical farming company Plenty files for bankruptcy after raising nearly $1B","text":"Unsurprising. I'm not sure much has changed since this recording of Bruce Bugbee's talk \"Why Vertical Farming Won't Save the Planet\". There's nothing surprising there but he does give hard numbers to do the math that shows that vertical farming is not as good as its proponents have made it out to be. Solar energy input dwarfs all other energy inputs to agriculture, and the cost to replace one acre of solar energy with electricity comes out to $400,000 per acre (per some unit of days per a growing season). I don't think the economics have tended favorably since. The space needs for solar panels doesn't favor vertical farming either. He also shows the efficiency of modern agriculture, and why vertical farming has a pretty tall order ahead of it to beat the economics of outdoor farming. It's quite unlikely factors have changed enough since to alter his conclusion: only high-value, high-water-content specialty crops might be economically viable. [0] = [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ISptt3CRAqc":[{"hn_comment_id":18306126,"author":"leekyle333","month":"2018-10","story_title":"FDA approves new drug to treat influenza","text":"If you're ever board and you want to watch something on placebos I highly recommend watching this lecture by Dr. Irving Kirsch. Placebos are pretty nuts and probably really undervalued. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19978088,"author":"q3PG23XiQKpZqpU","month":"2019-05","story_title":"The Troubled History of Psychiatry","text":"Since here we are talking about placebo, I wonder if it has a meaning to say \"placebo\" when speaking about psychotherapy, since there is no \"substance\". Of course there is going to be a placebo effect as long as people think it's going to work. I think the point is that since in mild and moderate depression we have to choose between the placebo of a drug and the placebo of psychoterapy, let's choose the one with less side effects. On the topic of placebo, I found Irving Kirsch's talk about anti-depressants vs placebo in depression [1] very interesting. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ITTxTCz4Ums":[{"hn_comment_id":9884064,"author":"__m","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you get impatient when learning new things?","text":"I would try to reduce the pressure. Are you genuinely interested in the things you need to learn? Doing the exercises will significantly increase the things you'll be able to recall. Maybe Mindfulness meditation can help you [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13787582,"author":"finkin1","month":"2017-03","story_title":"You May Want to Marry My Husband","text":"\"There are ways to really live in the present moment. What's the alternative? It is always now. However much you feel you may need to plan for the future, to anticipate it, to mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound trite... but it's the truth... As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. I think this is a liberating truth about the human mind. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment. And this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth. Repudiating it. Fleeing it. Overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives.\" - Sam Harris ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"IUDTlvagjJA":[{"hn_comment_id":7426459,"author":"deletes","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Sony announces Project Morpheus, a virtual reality headset coming to PS4","text":"60 Virtual speakers What does that even mean? It sounds like clever marketing talk. I bet they have just regular stereo and software. Here, take a pair of good stereo headphones and try this 3d demo. And don't forget to close your eyes. Virtual barber shop: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10521174,"author":"oberstein","month":"2015-11","story_title":"24/192 music downloads make no sense","text":"Here's a classic \"OMG I can hear him moving around\" recording that works with the cheapest of headphones: [VIDEO] Most of the audio experience quality comes out of the production phase, and artists can put as much or little effort into that as possible and consider several mediums of listening (headphones, TV, surround, concert, vinyl) and make tradeoffs for the medium's particular experience. I don't know about double blind trials but people do tests on their own. It's further complicated though because the hardware you use could be optimized for certain types of music, e.g. have a read through [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12005918,"author":"kuschku","month":"2016-06","story_title":"The Daredevil Camera","text":"> I wonder how much people can see in the dark through listening to sound sources by moving their heads for motion parallax. Listen to this with headphones: [VIDEO] It\u2019s amazing how much you can geolocate just in even a recording.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27544476,"author":"aaomidi","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Spatial Audio","text":"Because it adds another dimension to the sound you're experiencing and gives you a whole new appreciation for the medium. This combined with binaural audio should be the future of audio storytelling. Give this a try with any normal headphone: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IV3dnLzthDA":[{"hn_comment_id":38039511,"author":"belltaco","month":"2023-10","story_title":"EPA moves towards banning leaded aviation gas","text":"If you want a fascinating story telling video with a lot of sciency stuff for the relative layman, here's an excellent one by Veritasium on how it happened. \"The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31124272,"author":"wirelesspotat","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Regular blood donations can reduce \u201cforever chemicals\u201d in the bloodstream: study","text":"I don't like how \"toxic forever chemicals in the bloodstream\" is a normal thing Veritasium has a great YouTube video about this: \"The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History\"[0] [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31425470,"author":"jeffxtreme","month":"2022-05","story_title":"The impact of childhood lead exposure on adult personality (2021)","text":"(2021) Veritasium covers the story behind lead in gasoline in [VIDEO] , it's a really interesting albeit sad video. If I recall correctly, he mentions this study in the video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32688771,"author":"blensor","month":"2022-09","story_title":"FAA approves unleaded fuel for piston fleet","text":"Have you seen this Veritasium video about the man who came up with adding tetraethyllead to gasonline and it's negative impact on humanity? [VIDEO] Given how dangerous lead is in even the tiniest quantities it is really surprising that there has not been more pressure to change that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38718370,"author":"thret","month":"2023-12","story_title":"U.S. workers say banned weed killer in 50 countries is giving them Parkinson's","text":"[VIDEO] This youtube channel does a good job of explaining his inventions and just how bad for society they were.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46350837,"author":"amiga386","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Why did we use leaded petrol for so long? (2017)","text":"Veritasium did a great video on Midgley: [VIDEO] And therein they give the reason why ethanol was passed over: a lot of it is required to be effective (~10% of the fuel mixture), seriously dampening the profit margin of fuel sales! It works, but tetraethyl lead is so much cheaper","stance":"rec"}],"IX-gTobCJHs":[{"hn_comment_id":19212734,"author":"arzeth","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Samsung\u2019s Foldable Phone Is the $1,980 Galaxy Fold","text":"These Samsung's and Xiaomi's foldable phones don't excite me as much as Nokia Morph. On 2008-02-25, Nokia showed a concept phone Nokia Morph [1]. I have just watched the video about it [2] again and I am still as excited about it as I was 11 years ago. > The phone's theoretical feature list would include the ability to bend into numerous shapes, so it can be worn around the wrist or held up to the face; transparent electronics, which would allow the device to be see-through yet functional; self-cleaning surfaces that can absorb solar energy to recharge the phone's battery; and a wide range of fully integrated sensors. [...] The manufacturer believed that some of the device's imagined features could appear in high-end devices by 2015. So, I am waiting for something like Nokia Morph but also with a screen that can take the form of a standard physical keyboard and give me the same tactile feel. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3008546,"author":"drKarl","month":"2011-09","story_title":"IPhone 5 Concept Features Video gets more viewers in Youtube","text":"Yeah, and some years ago I saw a concept video even more awesome: The Nokia Morph [VIDEO] And it is not a hoax: [LINK] It is expected to hit markets on 2015.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42728304,"author":"v-yadli","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Nokia Design Archive","text":"Anyone remember the Morph concept? [LINK] [VIDEO] Blew me away back then, but forgot the name. This archive helped to recover the bits in my head. Thank you!","stance":"rec"}],"IYO3tOqDISE":[{"hn_comment_id":13933204,"author":"flyingfences","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Most items of clothing have complicated international journeys","text":"For those looking for an even shorter read, Leonard Read's I, Pencil gets the basic point across pretty quickly. There's even a video adaptation available for those who don't want to read at all. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22329650,"author":"CWuestefeld","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Brown: color is weird [video]","text":"Or, how to make a pencil. [VIDEO] (not the same guy at all, but your comment reminded me of this. It's really about specialization and the interdependency of everything in the economy)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24494721,"author":"pieno","month":"2020-09","story_title":"On Modern Web Applications Stability","text":"Reminds me of this movie illustration the complexity and human collaboration required to produce a pencil: [VIDEO] (6:33 in total; it\u2019s a bit \u201cdreamy\u201d sometimes but still worth a watch, you can skip the first minute). Basically entire human civilization is based on collaboration, learning from and relying on each other (among other things). The process kickstarted with developments in agriculture, freeing up Human Resources to work on other things. We\u2019ve been perfecting this for a few thousand years, of which we\u2019ve been automating things using software for only 50 years (being generous here). Give it some time - with the current rate of development we may not need another thousand years to improve software development to near perfection as well ;-) (Or more pessimistically: there\u2019s still a lot of hunger in this world so even after a few thousand years we\u2019ve not even perfected the most basic of human needs - doesn\u2019t bode well for something as fancy as the typical glorified beans counter that is most enterprise software...) Disclaimer: This video is typically used as a pro free markets argument to illustrate the level of cooperation required to produce even the simplest things, arguing that such collaboration is only possible by free actors in a free market - that\u2019s not the point here but still interesting tangent to think about in this context.","stance":"rec"}],"IZmaeC_Ma5A":[{"hn_comment_id":23491058,"author":"modzu","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Gimp 2.10.20","text":"if anyone wants to know more, here's a cool talk about it: [VIDEO] the whole thing is just 2MB of JS written by one guy!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26772062,"author":"vvoyer","month":"2021-04","story_title":"AMA: Ivan Kutskir, creator of Photopea","text":"Hey Ivan, congrats! Had a great time with you 2 years ago when you came to Nantes, France to explain \"Developing the best free photo editor\". Check-out his explanations here: [VIDEO] Legend.","stance":"rec"}],"IaWdEtANi-0":[{"hn_comment_id":26416985,"author":"bolangi","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Emirates\u2019 Tim Clark says Boeing \u2018not getting it\u2019 on 737 Max, 787","text":"Here are gruesome, firsthand details about production and management problems with the 737NG in a documentary from Al Jazeera. [VIDEO] The following summary is my own: The whole story is shown in the first seconds: three aircraft encountering more force than a usual landing (such as a runway overrun). All three fuselages breaking into three parts in exactly the same two places! All three aircraft exactly eight years old. Aluminum members called chords run the length of the fuselage and around the circumference to make up the fuselage structure. The chords are joined to each other and to reinforcing surrounds for large openings like doors. Poorly fitting chords and bear plates around openings were redrilled when mounting holes were misplaced, reshaped and pounded with hammers in order to mate them. This weakened of the structure to below design margins. In addition excessive metal fatigue due to hand processing led to accelerated corrosion, likely causing structural failure in three eight-year-old NG aircraft that broke up on landing. The aircraft were engineered to survive an emergency landing intact and were designed for 30-year airframe life. More to the story as the government colluded with Boeing to cover these deficiencies and frustrate the actions (eventually lawsuits) by a team of whistleblowers. Basically, the subcontractor agreed to use computer controlled manufacturing processes, then did 90% of the work by hand. The resulting substandard parts were beaten into shap","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20552773,"author":"reimertz","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Work on production line of Boeing 737 Max \u2018not adequately funded\u2019","text":"Here is the video documentary by Al Jazeera for said scandal: [VIDEO] I just watched it. This is bad. Boeing, with the help of the American government, is covering up serious issues with how the 737NG is being built with faulty parts.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38920817,"author":"mynameisnoone","month":"2024-01","story_title":"United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections","text":"Link? Also, the rot didn't start with the 737 MAX. The 737 NG has critical problems that went unaddressed that has contributed to multiple fatalities and equipment damage. Here's a documentary about it: People & Power - On a wing and a prayer (2010) Al Jazeera [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38920962,"author":"mynameisnoone","month":"2024-01","story_title":"United finds loose bolts on plug doors during 737 Max 9 inspections","text":"You're talking out of your ass. Watch this documentary about whistleblower complaints as far back as the 737 NG line as they observed workers beating structural parts into place with hammers. Clearly, things haven't improved since then. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IcgmSRJHu_8":[{"hn_comment_id":16046190,"author":"joshuahornby","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What\u2019s your favorite talk from 2017?","text":"\"Making Impossible States Impossible\" by Richard Feldman [VIDEO] Really changed how I think about programming.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17933911,"author":"jasim","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Try OCaml","text":"The type system is a lot more expressive than the ones found in Java/C#/C++, thanks to Algebraic Data Types. Yaron Minsky (Jane Street, largest OCaml user) coined the term \"make invalid states unrepresentable\" to explain how ADTs help in enlisting the help of the compiler to help us express our intent correctly, and Richard Feldman (NoRedInk, largest Elm user) has given an absolute gem of a talk that dives into that idea with relatable, concrete examples. It is titled \"Making Impossible States Impossible\" and should clarify this concept nicely. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218130,"author":"kilian","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Making impossible states impossible\" by Richard Feldman: [VIDEO] has really changed the way I approach dealing with data in my code and was very insightful.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36049123,"author":"terminatornet","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Why I Use Elm in 2023","text":"highly recommend the talks \"making impossible states impossible\" and \"make data structures\" by richard feldman. [VIDEO] [LINK] the talks are geared towards elm but I think they offer some great advice applicable to programming in general.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40164027,"author":"terminatornet","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Make invalid states unrepresentable (2023)","text":"one of my favorite talks on this topic, \"Making Impossible States Impossible\" by Richard Feldman: [VIDEO] the talk is Elm lang focused, but the concepts still apply to other languages.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15284835,"author":"aczerepinski","month":"2017-09","story_title":"To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript","text":"There's a great talk on this subject by Richard Feldman from Elm Conf. I haven't used typescript so I'm not sure if the techniques translate well. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16008160,"author":"jasim","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Writing ReasonML Bindings for JavaScript APIs","text":"There is no escaping the mapping. It doesn't matter if it is Reason or PureScript, Elm, or Fable - you have to parse the incoming data into a static type if you want to enjoy the benefits of types. The good thing is that you can build the rest of your system with a firm guarantee on the shape and structure of the data. No null checks, no missing keys. If you are careful with your parsing you can raise exceptions or return None if the incoming data is not well-formed (missing keys or even extra keys). Reason/BuckleScript when run on a Javascript runtime also has a `Js.t` type which is basically the Javascript object. You do have to define the shape of it similar to how you'd define a record type, but you don't need to convert it into a native record. JS arrays are also natively supported - it maps 1:1 to BuckleScript's array. I like to convert arrays into lists since they are better suited for value-based programming (pattern-matching over [head, ...tail] inside recursive functions). And if you create your types in a way that invalid states are impossible, you've just reduced the cognitive load needed to work on the system for the rest of its life by an order of magnitude. Here are some resources on this wonderful programming technique: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18371870,"author":"jasim","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Book Review: A Philosophy of Software Design","text":"That'll be a great addition to the book. Can I also recommend Yaron Minsky's talk on OCaml, specifically the part where he talks about \"making invalid states impossible\": [LINK] I've found this to be the single most valuable programming technique I've learnt. Richard Feldman dives deeper into the topic with a lot more examples in [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21477991,"author":"bretthopper","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Parse, Don\u2019t Validate","text":"I just watched a good Elm conference talk about this same concept called \"Making Impossible States Impossible\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21750572,"author":"jasim","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How to improve code quality while maintaining decent velocity?","text":"* Learn to think about types first, and the algorithms as a natural consequence of the structure of your data. Richard Feldman: [VIDEO] , * Use a statically typed language that allows fast refactoring. Ideally a typed functional language like Elm, Reason, OCaml, or Haskell. I recently shipped a complex Javascript project (without types) and it is one of the few instances of my decade-old professional career where I had that level of confidence in the robustness of a piece of code I wrote. It remained sturdy in production even in the presence of unforeseen conditions. This was thanks to the habits I picked up from typed FP: parsing and validating all data at the boundaries of the system, better design by modelling data to make inconsistent states impossible, and automatically handling all edge-cases at all times. So even if you don't actively use such a language in your workplace, there really is a payoff to learning it in making you a better programmer overall.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24687785,"author":"1-more","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Applying \u201cmake invalid states unrepresentable\u201d","text":"A great talk on this subject is \"Making Impossible States Impossible\" by Richard Feldman from Elm Conf 2016 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24861327,"author":"jesperlang","month":"2020-10","story_title":"What can a pipe wrench teach us about software engineering?","text":"I've seen this way of state modelling pop up more and more recent year in me feeds. Make impossible states impossible. It's a great way to keep you sane! [VIDEO] (Elm) [LINK] (Kotlin)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29035356,"author":"amitu","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Programming talks that made something click for you?","text":"\"Making Impossible States Impossible\" by Richard Feldman (2016): [VIDEO] \"Understanding style\" by Matthew Griffith (2017): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37772754,"author":"terminatornet","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Strong typing, a hill I'm willing to die on","text":"It's a shame so many people have had bad experiences with static typing due to Typescript. In languages like Rust and Elm, static typing truly feels like a super power when I'm coding, particularly when modeling my applications possible states. This talk does a great job at articulating how to use types to disallow invalid/illegal states. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IdpD5QIVOKQ":[{"hn_comment_id":44706795,"author":"sothatsit","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUDs","text":"AI building complex visualisations for you on-the-fly seems like a great use-case. For example, if you are debugging memory leaks in a specific code path, you could get AI to write a visualisation of all the memory allocations and frees under that code path to help you identify the problem. This opens up an interesting new direction where building visualisations to debug specific problems is probably becoming viable. This idea reminds me of Jonathan Blow's recent talk at LambdaConf. In it, he shows a tool he made to visualise his programs in different ways to help with identifying potential problems. I could imagine AI being good at building these. The talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46315517,"author":"matthewkayin","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles","text":"> What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically? I know that Jonathan Blow can be abrasive and one-sided in his talks on programming, but I think we should be open-minded about Jai. Yes, he is making this language because he doesn't like C++, but you make it sound like he is hating on C++ just for the sake of it. I mean, is it really so hard to imagine that someone might not like something about C++? There are plenty of people who think we could have a better systems language, which is why we have seen languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin pop up. In Blow's case, he has said that he doesn't like Rust because he feels that satisfying the borrow-checker slows down iteration time[1], which is important especially in the early stages of game development when you are still experimenting with mechanics are where requirements and architecture are still very much subject to change. As far as what Jai offers, it seems his focus is on making a simple but powerful language (contrary to C++'s ever-growing bag-of-tricks), with fast compile times (less than 3 seconds on a full build of his new game), better build and dependency management (no more cmake), and powerful meta-programming features. In a talk on the language[2], he demos how he is able to use the language's meta-programming features to develop powerful code-analyzing and memory-analyzing tools. These tools, in particular, hint at his philosophy: lots of ideas in programming like RAII, garbage collecto","stance":"rec"}],"Ie-gqwSHQr0":[{"hn_comment_id":23925942,"author":"giantDinosaur","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Why is CSS the way it is?","text":"Given my thoughts (and recent experience) was shaped by something like Elm-UI - see: [VIDEO] If you have the time to learn CSS, you have the time to learn anything else. ;)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26084780,"author":"giantDinosaur","month":"2021-02","story_title":"I don't want to do front-end anymore","text":"Not necessarily solved, and I assume you know about it, but for anyone reading this, elm-ui is definitely worth checking out for at least an exploration of an alternative to CSS. For a talk about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27366787,"author":"qolop","month":"2021-06","story_title":"25 Years of CSS","text":"For those who want a fresh perspective on CSS, layout and styling, check out this talk by Matthew Griffith - the creator of elm-ui [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IeSu_odkI5I":[{"hn_comment_id":24850511,"author":"arc776","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Attempts to make Python fast","text":"As the OP states: > mutable interpreter frames, global interpreter locks, shared global state, type slots On top of this, Python is extremely dynamic and nothing can be assured without running through the code. So this leads to needing JITs to improve performance which then give a slow start up time and increased complexity. Even with JIT, Python is just not fast thanks to the above issues and it's overall dynamism. It can be optimised and for sure there's some impressive attempts at doing so. However I don't think pure Python will ever be considered \"fast\" as these things necessarily get in the way. I highly recommend the two videos posted here that go into more detail as to why there are limits to how far optimisation can go: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15550737,"author":"chubot","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Why Python is Slow: Looking Under the Hood (2014)","text":"As far as I understand, one important difference is that JavaScript doesn't have __getattr__ or __setattr__ (or at least earlier versions didn't). You might not use those hooks a lot in your application code, but it seems that web frameworks and the like do a lot of reflection, which makes the code difficult/impossible to optimize (even at runtime with a JIT). Python also has __add__ (operator overloading) and JavaScript doesn't. This is a good talk about how subtle or crufty the semantics of something like \"a+b\" is in Python: [VIDEO] The PyPy developers had to copy a lot of the implementation details of CPython, which doesn't always result in the fastest code.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20672199,"author":"ssivark","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Python Is Eating the World","text":"Python's success is richly deserved. The fact that it has been a long time coming (Python is almost 30 years old!) is an indication of the amount of sheer effort involved, and should give heart for all those working on building up the next generation of languages. Since this forum is likely to have some folks looking towards the future, I found interesting a couple of talks by Python veteran Armin Ronacher [1, 2]. Watching that presentation makes me wonder whether I should think of this in the context of \"Worse is better\". That said, Python's runtime introspection is such a killer feature that it's difficult to explain how empowering it feels for someone who is relatively new to programming. [1]: How Python was Shaped by leaky Internals -- [LINK] [2]: A Python for Future Generations -- [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24849302,"author":"ilyagr","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Attempts to make Python fast","text":"I found the following talks by Armin Romacher very informative on these topics (C API, why python is more difficult to speed up than JS). [LINK] [VIDEO] I wish these were the things Python 3 addressed, rather than Unicode. I guess it's much more obvious in hindsight than back when Python 3 was designed.","stance":"rec"}],"IeTybKL1pM4":[{"hn_comment_id":2048344,"author":"vibragiel","month":"2010-12","story_title":"The \"other\" side of file sharing","text":"When this video* was published, I thought the idea it tells was too obvious and well known, but time proved me wrong it seems. Please watch it. (*) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5298547,"author":"lince","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Court orders UK ISPs to block more piracy sites","text":"Agree with you, except on the use of \"steal\". You steal when the owner lose the original. What happens in BitTorrent/FTP is copy. More about in copy is not theft video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12696299,"author":"jra_samba","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Netflix Now Only Has 31 Movies from IMDB's Top 250 List","text":"I can't believe people are still equating copyright infringement with physical theft. Didn't that tired old argument die a long time ago ? If not, why not ? One more time, boys and girls: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29789079,"author":"Matumio","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done","text":"Oh no, you are now required to watch this damned cartoon: [VIDEO] (A one minute ELI5 explanation about the difference between physical and intellectual property.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31123031,"author":"glerk","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The bottom is dropping out of Netflix","text":"It\u2019s been more than a decade since I had the opportunity to plug this educative video in an internet conversation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38581345,"author":"autoexec","month":"2023-12","story_title":"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing","text":"Which dictionary defines taking as simply gaining or acquiring something? If you \"take\" something from someone else it generally means that they no longer have what you took. This is all really pretty simple: [VIDEO] Also, (at least in the US) legally copyright infringement is distinct from stealing.","stance":"rec"}],"If61baWF4GE":[{"hn_comment_id":30531931,"author":"localhost","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Statement from Roman Abramovich","text":"This YouTube video titled \"Why Russia is invading Ukraine\"? [1] is an excellent overview of the history that lead to this moment. tl;dr oil and security [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30560150,"author":"fleddr","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine","text":"People take the guilt question far too personal. Consider it this way: if you stick your finger into a nest of hornets, whom is to blame if you get hurt? You can say the hornet (Russia) is always too blame. Or, you can acknowledge that hornets are dangerous and best not provoked. Willingly provoking them if there is the alternative of not doing that, can be considered irresponsible. As to why Ukraine turning western is considered a provocation, there's a lot of simplistic \"fatalistic madman\" narratives. I found this video to be very insightful: [VIDEO] It sums up a few very rational reasons that when combined, add up to a serious existential threat to Russia as a country, as a concept. Mind you, I'm no Russia apologist, I'm just trying to understand the hornet. So far the video holds up. Putin openly expressing to Macron that he will flip Ukraine entirely. Remarks like \"There is no world without Russia in it\", emphasizing that this campaign is existential, not a random aggression.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31351495,"author":"cycomanic","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Finland will seek NATO membership immediately","text":"RealLifeLore has an excellent analysis of the reasons for Russia's invasion [1], including the military motivations. I highly recommend watching it. In particular the reasoning around gas and oil reserves in the Black Sea have not been given the due attention in the media IMO. He doesn't talk about Finland, but I would imagine the fact that it would broaden the front for a land-based invasion is what motivates Russia's opposition. That and generally having gotten away with being a bully and getting what you want for so long. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30485066,"author":"InternetPerson","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, Feb 26, 2022","text":"I found this to be a compelling take on Russia's motivations for invading Ukraine: [VIDEO] The narrator argues that it's largely about fossil fuels.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30504888,"author":"milkytron","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Russia 'Likely' to Default on Debts","text":"> But these sanctions are so severe that they'll probably even prevent him from rebuilding his army following this due to sanctions blocking imports to fuel his war industry. So, since he is still fighting, what is he fighting _for_? Still trying to expand Russia? I don't know if this is 100% accurate, but it seemed to help my understanding: [VIDEO] tldw - oil, a better border where Belarus cannot be surrounded by NATO, and better access to shipping ports.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30530265,"author":"donclark","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you cope with possible nuclear threat?","text":"Great video - thank you for posting. This video as well from Feb 26 2022 - Why Russia is Invading Ukraine(30mins explanation): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30542064,"author":"skadamat","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Russian gas flows via Yamal pipeline to Germany halt, bids remain","text":"I never knew until recently how tied up Russia's oil strategy was to their military / political thinking. If others are interested, this video has a great overview: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30564056,"author":"lowkey","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Yandex Provides Update on Impact of Current Developments","text":"I don't expect you to watch this full video but will leave it here for anyone who is curious about the broader context for this conflict. TL;DR: The war didn't start last week. It has been ongoing since 2014 and involves horrible acts from both sides. No, they don't average out and unfortunately we may never know what the 'truth' is here. I won't pretend to have all the answers, but I will say after watching the video, the situation appears to be much more complicated than it is being depicted on western media. Curiosity Stream: Why Russia is invading Ukraine [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30764832,"author":"bambax","month":"2022-03","story_title":"In Praise of Memorization","text":"> Deep link to explanation: [VIDEO] This video is fascinating and explains a lot. Many thanks for this!!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31697996,"author":"fodmap","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Vladimir Putin, in speech, hints at further territorial expansion for Russia","text":"RealLifeLore published a very well documented, and propaganda-free, video about why Russia is invading Ukraine [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IgF3OX8nT0w":[{"hn_comment_id":30558936,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2022-03","story_title":"We're building computers wrong [video]","text":"In the intro to this video he mentions analogue computers predicting tides. His video before this one[1] goes into detail on that, and it was incredible. In the 1800s, Lord Kelvin spent years working on tidal rise and fall patterns, applying Fourier Transforms to break them down into ten individual sine waves, then combining those sine waves back together to predict future tides. And built analog computers to do all the involved integration, multiplying and summing. It's a part of the history of computing I'd never heard of, despite hearing quite a lot about the dawn of electro-mechanical computers in the early 1900s. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29787165,"author":"WJW","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Mechanical computing systems using only links and rotary joints","text":"You might be interested in the analog computers that were used to compute tide tables back in the day. It's quite fascinating how they even managed to do basic Fourier transforms without electricity: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30590394,"author":"cultofmetatron","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your take on carbon emissions of Machine Learning","text":"basicly, we can do things like matrix operations and differntial equations using specialized hardware that performs computation over analog signals rather than buidlign discrete systems. the end result is that we dont' need anywhere near the level of compute to do the job as its done using an analog of the physical process. here's two youtube videos that explain is much better than I could. [VIDEO] [LINK] suffice to say, your average house fly exhibits behavior that absolutely dominates our best drones and with a fraction of the circuitry.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31661910,"author":"woojoo666","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Photonic Chip Performs Image Recognition at the Speed of Light","text":"It's a big area of research in AI. Veritasium has two great videos on it: [LINK] [VIDEO] I found a hackernews discussion for the second one: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40555971,"author":"nico","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Lord Kelvin and his analog computer","text":"There is a very good Veritasium video that talks about analog computers and Lord Kelvin\u2019s tide prediction machine: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46170266,"author":"o4c","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Tides are weirder than you think","text":"Veritasium made a great video on Kelvin's Tide-predicting machine in 2021. Title: The Most Powerful Computers You've Never Heard Of URL: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ii_pEXKKYUg":[{"hn_comment_id":12303599,"author":"legulere","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Intel Licenses ARM Technology to Boost Foundry Business","text":"> If you look at functionality per instruction byte, RISC is fairly low. You should watch this video: [VIDEO] The most important information therein is that the difference in code density is minuscule between x86, ARM and RISC-V. The differences between GCC versions is even bigger. > The equations that you have to resolve to issue an X86 instruction are simply more complex than for ARM, and all that bit-flipping consumes power. It's actually just 3-10% of power consumption [1] and I even heard it claimed that the instruction decoding on ARM is larger than x86 [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25488413,"author":"dkjaudyeqooe","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V","text":"At best, that's a simplistic and misleading view, see the following talk for an in depth analysis: \"Comparison of RISC V, ARM, and x86\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IiuVggWNqSA":[{"hn_comment_id":23267564,"author":"bangonkeyboard","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Scott Forstall tells story about Steve Jobs, Microsoft, and a dead fish [video]","text":"He also related this story in his interview with the Computer History Museum: [VIDEO] I'm still upset that, at 48:36, Forstall offered to give his thoughts on what we could be doing with AI that we're not, but Markoff decided to move on.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44229769,"author":"rweichler","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Apple introduces a universal design across platforms","text":"Mind throwing some links my way? I love me some Scott Forstall anecdotes. Here, I'll start: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Ijst4g5KFN0":[{"hn_comment_id":28764321,"author":"trevorishere","month":"2021-10","story_title":"More details about the October 4 outage","text":"Of possible interest: [VIDEO] This is a presentation to students by an MIT professor that goes over exactly what happened, the sequence of events, mistakes made, and so on.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31776305,"author":"kritr","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Long-Term Nuclear Waste Warning Messages","text":"This piqued my interest after visiting the abandoned nuclear plant in Satsop, Washington and having the pleasure of uncovering a number of fun resources in regards to past nuclear accidents. Understanding disasters like Chernobyl really puts into perspective how quickly things can go wrong with radioactive material. I found the following lecture does a great job outlining the Chernobyl disaster and potential impact of similar disasters, both from a meltdown perspective and understanding the impact of radiation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46248443,"author":"solarengineer","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Nuclear energy key to decarbonising Europe, says EESC","text":"I am a former nuclear opponent. I used to think that nuclear waste was glowing green like they show in the Simpsons and in the Doom 1 game. Once I had access to the Internet in this century, I learned better. Here are some sources of information that helped me understand the two oft-cited nuclear disasters better. The World Nuclear Energy write up on the Fukushima incident: [LINK] Some information on the Chernobyl incident: The infographics show: [LINK] [LINK] A lecture in the MIT Courseware on the incident: [VIDEO] This lecture is way more informative where the professor explains how the workers took the system beyond the rated capacity as part of a test. There have been many lessons learned, and the World Nuclear article linked above shares some of these. Here is a writeup of the Three Mile Island incident: [LINK] One regular complaint is the costs of nuclear energy. This is likely true in the US due to regulations that have not been revised for newer technology, but such high costs are cited around the world. Likewise, the amount of waste and the danger of the waste is not well understood either, and certainly lots of education is needed here. For e.g., most people do not know that the volume of waste is limited and that the same waste can be reused in reactors of other designs. I do believe that national ego issues get in the way of fixes. I believe that such ego issues got in the way of honest repairs (Fukushima) and timely action (Chernobyl). Certainly, nuclear inspecti","stance":"rec"}],"Ik1AK56FtVc":[{"hn_comment_id":3490927,"author":"Dn_Ab","month":"2012-01","story_title":"The next SOPA","text":"> This idea that the root cause of all bad legislation is political donations: it's wrong, and not supported by the data. The vast majority of political donations are made by people who are not lobbyists. You make a very bold statement without backing it with any line of reasoning or pointing to any supporting material. I am no expert in this matter so I can not know if you are wrong. But in an older thread someone posted this excellent talk by Lawrence Lessig: [VIDEO] . It's well worth watching and counters your statement. His arguments are very well presented and reasoned. He also shows some supporting data. Given that, I cannot attribute much weight to your statement.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3711799,"author":"nextparadigms","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Lawrence Lessig's New Book: One Way Forward","text":"I haven't read his previous book, \"Republic, Lost\", but I saw the 1 hour speech at Google from last year, that was based on it, and it was great. He explains how the Government ended up having a relationship with corporations instead of \"the people\", and what is needed to solve this (almost unsolvable) problem. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3766701,"author":"spoiledtechie","month":"2012-03","story_title":"The new Comcast Xbox Xfinity app is the first nail in net neutrality\u2019s coffin","text":"If your really interested in doing something about it, I would suggest taking a look at [LINK] And without a second lost, watch this: [VIDEO] That video has changed my point of view on the entire subject and has allowed me to start striking at the root.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4739046,"author":"spoiledtechie","month":"2012-11","story_title":"512 Paths to the White House","text":"Actually, They are right. I really think you should take the time to watch this video, understand it, let it sink in and totally mold your brain around it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3410642,"author":"webfuel","month":"2011-12","story_title":"An email I received from Jimmy Wales regarding SOPA","text":"I think you'll enjoy Lawrence Lessig's talk about the exact issue you brought up. It's call Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress\u2014and a Plan to Stop It [Link] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3484169,"author":"necolas","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Maddox - I hope SOPA passes","text":"You might find Lawrence Lessig's talk at Google interesting: How Money Corrupts Congress\u2014and a Plan to Stop It [VIDEO] However, the article suggests that if some terrible legislation passed it would ignite people into real action. That clearly failed to happen when the Patriot Act was passed. I'm sure there are many more examples. If the discourse surrounding legislation convinces enough people not to care (or fails to make it into wider public awareness), then there doesn't seem to be much standing in its way.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3505264,"author":"scott_s","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Show HN: I'm tired of corrupt US politicians, so I created this","text":"I'm going to crib from my own post from two days ago: Donations don't literally buy votes, but what they do literally buy is face time. That is, people in Congress will hold fundraisers, and lobbyists pay to attend those fundraisers. The understanding is that the lobbyists who attend those fundraisers will have time to talk to the politician about the issues their clients care about. This episode of Planet Money clearly demonstrates this: [LINK] Edit: I remove the SOPA specific stuff, and didn't realize that in doing so, I removed the punchline. The implication of the above is that politicians' agenda becomes set by those who have the money to pay lobbyists. When you spend a lot of time talking to a bunch of people with an agenda, you will start to think about that agenda a lot. It's a natural consequence of the circumstances and the incentives. I've harped on this point several times in the last few days. My reason is simple: we must understand the real problem before we can fix it. And the real problem is not \"Vote for x and I'll give you money.\" That is illegal. What I described above is legal, and while it is not illegal corruption, it is a corruption of how we want the system to work. And I stole that last sentiment from Lawrence Lessig: [VIDEO] Someone else here linked to that a few days ago, and it's worth watching.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3854213,"author":"rogerbinns","month":"2012-04","story_title":"Shouldn't Robots Be Doing My Taxes By Now?","text":"If I was ever elected president, I would direct congress to reduce the size of the tax code by 10% each year. If they fail to do so then 10% are automatically eliminated - eg all those whose last digit of the article number is 3. The real reason for why things are so screwed up is corrupt politicians who use their power as a fund raising mechanism. For example there were several taxes added temporarily to see if they worked well. They did, but congress doesn't make them permanent. Instead they wait to be paid each time to renew them temporarily again. (This started in the Reagan administration.) See this excellent talk by Lessig: [VIDEO] The whole tax provisions as fund raising is covered at 7m30s.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4465823,"author":"rogerbinns","month":"2012-09","story_title":"Proposal for tax revolution: 3% income tax, 4% wealth tax","text":"We already have progressive tax rates which try to capture this. The problem that is being struggled with is that HNWI don't have frequent taxable events, generally because they hold assets and make savings. However there is a perception they aren't providing value (which is mostly wrong). Generally any scheme you come up with to get at them will also affect everyone else, and to a far greater degree since they have less money and diversity to start with. And the HNWI have far greater incentive to move their money and themselves, as well as pay people to work out how to retain their money. You can move to almost any country in the world by plonking down a lump sum as an \"investment\" or as savings. (eg see how Dotcom ended up living in New Zealand.) The usual solution to this is to try tweaking the tax code, seeing what the effects are and repeating. However scumbag politicians and the people who vote for them distort that process, so it doesn't have the intended effect. An actually representative democracy would be a good first step rather than tax rate changes. Watch this talk about the US - the UK pretty much follows behind a few years later [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4812847,"author":"rogerbinns","month":"2012-11","story_title":"Can the US tax code be simplified with computer modeling and simulation","text":"A big reason for why things are so screwed up is corrupt politicians who use their power as a fund raising mechanism. For example there were several taxes added temporarily to see if they worked well. They did, but congress doesn't make them permanent. Instead they wait to be paid each time to renew them temporarily again. (This started in the Reagan administration.) See this excellent talk by Lessig: [VIDEO] The whole tax provisions as fund raising is covered at 7m30s. I congress were actually honourable and I was president I'd mandate that the tax code shrinks by 10% each year. If the politicians can't find 10% then at the end of year every 10th provision is automatically deleted.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5149493,"author":"rogerbinns","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Mark Cuban Is Endowing A Chair To \u2018Eliminate Stupid Patents\u2019","text":"It would be far better if congress is representative of the people of the country and be composed of doctors, engineers, teachers, taxi drivers, farmers, candlestick makers etc. The legislators do not actually write the laws. They have staff as well as there being a process to help improve the text before legislating (eg publishing drafts). For some legislation (eg covering the financial industry) often the law that is passed just requires a government agency (eg SEC) to come up with the rules. One of Michael Moore's films had a clip of a congressman explaining that they don't even read the legislation they vote on. It is a common claim that much of the legislation is written by lobbyists. And if you actually read any of it, it would obviously not really be what you would expect (short, legible). Here is an example of trying to solve the problem: [LINK] The representatives use legislation as a fund raising mechanism (contributions are well documented). For example there were several taxes added temporarily to see if they worked well. They did, but congress doesn't make them permanent. Instead they wait to be paid each time to renew them temporarily again. (This started in the Reagan administration.) See this excellent talk by Lessig: [VIDEO] The whole tax provisions as fund raising is covered at 7m30s. And the corruption is obvious at 25m20s.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5391432,"author":"rogerbinns","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Can Hospital Chains Improve the Medical Industry?","text":"Whose dollars? The dollars used in legislation have little to do with public good and a lot more to do with re-election funding. Lessig covers that topic really well in Republic Lost: [VIDEO] Any change in legislation will result in intense lobbying (ie politician funding) because so many vested interests benefit from the current structure. As with many things in American politics, the issue isn't so much about what the objectively best thing to do is, but rather how that could happen with the current political process. There is some light at the end of the tunnel in pushing things to individual states. There is no need to come up with perfection - let 50 states do their own thing and see what works best.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7109505,"author":"masmullin","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Snowden Calls Russian-Spy Story \u201cAbsurd\u201d","text":"\"What are they supposed to do?\" For a starter, watch Lawerence Lessig @google talk [VIDEO] Get off your butts and vote independent. For those who claim that you're throwing your vote away reply with \"No, you're throwing YOUR vote away.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10720146,"author":"steego","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Sen. Ted Cruz wants minimum H-1B wage of $110,000","text":"Sorry to punt and give you homework, but Larry Lessig will expand on this better than me. Here's a link if you want to listen to something while you work. His book, Republic Lost, is a good read on this subject if you're interested. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14889239,"author":"sn9","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Al Gore: 'The rich have subverted all reason'","text":"Lawrence Lessig's Republic, Lost directly addresses this. His 2011 Google Tech Talk provides a condensed version: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IkdziSLYzHw":[{"hn_comment_id":45805599,"author":"j1mr10rd4n","month":"2025-11","story_title":"The Case That A.I. Is Thinking","text":"Geoffrey Hinton's recent lecture at the Royal Institute[1] is a fascinating watch. His assertion that human use of language being exactly analogous to neural networks with back-propagation really made me think about what LLMs might be able to do, and indeed, what happens in me when I \"think\". A common objection to LLM \"intelligence\" is that \"they don't know anything\". But in turn... what do biological intelligences \"know\"? For example, I \"know\" how to do things like write constructs that make complex collections of programmable switches behave in certain ways, but what do I really \"understand\"? I've been \"taught\" things about quantum mechanics, electrons, semiconductors, transistors, integrated circuits, instruction sets, symbolic logic, state machines, assembly, compilers, high-level-languages, code modules, editors and formatting. I've \"learned\" more along the way by trial and error. But have I in effect ended up with anything other than an internalised store of concepts and interconnections? (c.f. features and weights). Richard Sutton takes a different view in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel[2] and asserts that \"learning\" must include goals and reward functions but his argument seemed less concrete and possibly just a semantic re-labelling. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44882291,"author":"calf","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens","text":"It was a Royal Institution public lecture, \"Will AI outsmart human intelligence? - with 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton\", [VIDEO] Ultimately I somehwat disagreed with some of Hintons points in this talk, and after some thought I came up with specific reasons/doubts, and yet at the same time, his intuitive explanations helped shift my views somewhat as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45720269,"author":"tim333","month":"2025-10","story_title":"YouTube Just Ate TV. It's Only Getting Started","text":"I muck about on HN and get ~80% of my video content on youtube. I think it's great overall. The rest ~5% twitter, 0% TV although I have one sitting switched off with a \u00a3174 bbc fee. 5% pirated maybe. If you go with the official HN guide of \"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity\" and avoid \"stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities\" then youtube is much better - watching Hinton explain AI and neural networks at the mo. [LINK] and [VIDEO] which is kind of interesting.","stance":"rec"}],"IlU-zDU6aQ0":[{"hn_comment_id":26977588,"author":"grae_QED","month":"2021-04","story_title":"How I studied for 12 hours a day for over a year","text":"I'm more curious if he was actually studying. A lot of people claim they can study for these absurd amounts of time when the vast majority of it is actually spent staring at a page or even rereading the same page. Marty Lobdell did a fantastic talk a while back [1] that changed the way I used to study and I'd recommend it to anyone who feels like they aren't studying efficiently. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10012013,"author":"Jemmeh","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Ask HN: How are some people exceptionally productive?","text":"1.) Write things down. Get organized. Google Calendar and Trello mean I never forget to do anything and I don't exercise brain power on remembering it all. This helps balance by being more relaxed. At night I don't worry about all the things I have to do tomorrow, which makes a lot of people sleep less. I say, \"It's on my list, which I will tackle tomorrow.\" I sleep like a baby. I get things done. 2.) If you're looking for balance, take care of your body. 1 hour workout is 4% of your day. Make time for it, and do something active that you enjoy. (Even if that's playing DDR for an hour). Cook healthy meals in bulk ahead of time. Sick and dead isn't productive. 3.) Take breaks. When you feel your mind wandering, and you can't remember anything you've read in the past 5 minutes it's time to take a short break. Take 5 minutes, walk around the building, then sit back down. You might think you'll be so much more productive continuing to sit there working, but if you're working in circles or even making things worse, you are not being productive. Study Less, Study Smart is a talk by Marty Lobdell that eloquently discusses this. [VIDEO] 4.) Focus. Remove distractions. Close all the windows you don't need to work. Close your office door, answer your emails only once an hour. Whatever you need to do to focus.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11463907,"author":"BoysenberryPi","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How are you taking notes","text":"There was a lecture by Marty Lobdell[1] where he talks about a note taking system that separates facts and concepts that I really like. Concepts are easy to get a handle on because it doesn't take much effort to think of a real word example to relate it to. Facts on the other hand are very difficult because they aren't easily related to knowledge you already have so for facts you use a mnemonic device. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12010998,"author":"Jemmeh","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Ways to maximize your cognitive potential","text":"As a person who has trouble focusing-- A.) Minimize visual stimuli in your work area. Get everything off your desk, and shove your face in a corner. (I've turned my desk to face away from the hallway.) B.) Take notes as you work. I will write 15 minutes of code, take a note on what I'm doing, then get (purposefully) distracted for a minute or two. When I come back to my work, I can look at my note to see what I was doing and pick back up where I left off. It really minimizes the impact of distraction on my work. You can start out with lower chunks of \"productive\" time if you want. Practicing focus helps you to build up amount of time you can focus. Relevant talk on Youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12989065,"author":"Jemmeh","month":"2016-11","story_title":"How to start a company with no free time","text":"Any time you have to work hard for a long period of time, the trick is to take scheduled breaks. You don't need a long break either, just like 5 minutes every 30 minutes throughout the day will keep your energy up a lot. I'll come home, eat dinner while watching something fun, then get back using that pattern. Marty Lobdell has a good talk about this on Youtube: [VIDEO] I think for me the other thing is -- don't make it bigger than it is, like don't psych yourself out. Yes, it's hard to work from morning to night, but it's just hard, not impossible. And I think being physically good--eating right, sleep enough, and exercising, yes it's tired advice but that's how you get \"energy\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16412508,"author":"piceas","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?","text":"Managing distractions, clearing, and changing your environment are particularly effective for me. I was reminded of the following study skills lecture, some of which is applicable when trying to get going and keep going in a work context. Marty Lobdell - Study Less Study Smart ~60 min. Study environment commentary from 10:15 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218225,"author":"pedro1976","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Hacking the mind, how to get your brain into the right mode Marty Lobdell - Study Less Study Smart [VIDEO] AJ Jacobs: The Importance of Self-Delusion in the Creative Process\u201d [LINK] -- On Machine Learning biases Aylin Caliskan - A Story of Discrimination and Unfairness [LINK] -- On scaling test automation, why scaling does not deliver the value you want GTAC2016: Scale vs Value - Test Automation at the BBC [LINK] -- On Future of Machine Learning Joscha Bach - Machine Dreams (33c3) [LINK] Joscha Bach - Computational Meta-Psychology (32c3) [LINK] Joscha Bach - From Computation to Consciousness (31c3) [LINK] [Edit] Layout","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19343502,"author":"pedro1976","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you stay focused when working from home?","text":"I watched an interesting lecture by martin lobdell - study less study smart [0] which says that your mind tends to be in a specific mental mode depending on the location. So when you try to work on your kitchen table, your mind is in the eating mode and you constantly think of that sandwich. Hence, separate as much as possible, separate room/table/laptop... [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39329273,"author":"james-revisoai","month":"2024-02","story_title":"How to Study (2023)","text":"This makes some great points, and Martin Lombell has covered something very similar in a rather timeless one hour engaging lecture here: [VIDEO] Some other diamonds I've uncovered or found while working on learning psychology are: - that students who organise fun and exercise on their schedule before studying, get better grades than the students who start by deciding when to study; - that most of us can learn much better with confusing, misconception-revealing content, over simple content - we all assume too much, as Veritasium covered: [LINK] - in principle, a desirable difficulty of varied content given in a medium that isn't lazy (read: you need to be able to get feedback, like a quiz, or rewriting, or tutoring) is the key way to establish viable long term learning; several other effects like Spaced Repetition only have benefits if you can stick to your motivation for learning, so you do need to prioritise motivation first. The article mentioned learning styles not being proven; in fact, one can argue the opposite is true; people who learn with mixed, varied content perform the best. But we also like the learning type which is comfortable for us; this boosts motivation. The problem is that studying students across a whole semester and multiple courses rarely happens, and studies focusing on how varying the learning content within a 10 minute window changed how much students learned, does not replicate the value of being familiar with a learning content style, nor the cost ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41338230,"author":"james-revisoai","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Why Ed-Tech Startups Don't Scale (2022)","text":"Some of the teachers I have worked with do this; and there are some great teachers(lecturers) like Martin who teach effective studying techniques: [VIDEO] Flashcards and Anki were incredibly effective for me. I am building a study tool which automatically generates them from lecture slides. Beyond that, it applies other psychology of learning techniques - It breaks up content into manageable chunks you can see your progress on (to boost your confidence of exam coverage) and has an exam-conditions like mode where it shows you relevant slides, then asks you questions and to freely recall by blurting onto a blank page everything you remember. It's then able to give you a realistic judgement of your learning and this way of learning by actively recalling freely is, though more intense, ultimately more effective than either reading, watching or quizzing in the long term. The part of learning that other flashcard apps miss, even Anki, is that students must be motivated. They must enjoy, visually engage, and be confident as they study. They must feel they are on a sustainable realistic path as they gather knowledge when on the way to their goals. And they don't have to study every day to do that - they just need to genuinely learn and be able to see the state of their progress... I am excited to be working on EdTech now[Revision.ai] which unveils and detects misconceptions to aid the student in eliminating them. Misconceptions are a massive opportunity - as much as spaced repetition","stance":"rec"}],"Ilg3gGewQ5U":[{"hn_comment_id":15689936,"author":"hal9000xp","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to get started with AI?","text":"I'm in the same boat. For long time, I was interested in AI but at the same time intimidated by math. I'm relatively comfortable with discrete mathematics and classical algorithms and at the same time calculus and linear algebra is completely foreign to me. Also, I do not accept way to learn ML without good understanding of core principles behind it. So math is a must. A few months ago, I stumbled upon very amazing YouTube Channel 3Blue1Brown which explains math in very accessible way and at the same time I got feeling that I finally started understanding core ideas behind linear algebra and calculus. Just recently he published 4 videos about deep neural networks: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] So my fear of ML was gone away and I'm very excited to explore whole new world for neural networks and other things like support vector machines etc","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17409429,"author":"pastelsky","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Backpropagation algorithm visual explanation","text":"While we're at this, I found the explainations by 3Brown1Blue to be very intuitive when it comes to neural networks, especially for folks who're new and don't necessarily grasp concepts when explained primarily through math. What is backpropagation really doing? [VIDEO] His other videos on this topic are just as good.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15625863,"author":"nouveaux","month":"2017-11","story_title":"What is backpropagation and what is it doing? [video]","text":"This was very timely for me and for anyone else learning, here are the first few videos of the series: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] (Original video) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26669456,"author":"sxp","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Backpropagation 101 (2020)","text":"This has a lot of words, but not enough content. I recommend 3Blue1Brown's neural net videos instead: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ImoQqNyRL8Y":[{"hn_comment_id":19664607,"author":"mywacaday","month":"2019-04","story_title":"F-1 Thrust Chamber","text":"Thanks for that, great video that led me to this, [VIDEO] , sound recording organised by Dustin from SmarterEveryDay of the latest SpaceX launch, the sonic booms of the boosters coming into land are amazing, listen with headphones!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16991214,"author":"chrononaut","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Why NASA's Next Mars Lander Will Launch from California Instead of Florida","text":"Related, someone submitted a binaural recording of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch to SmarterEveryDay: [VIDEO] Conveys your sentiment regarding how it really sounds to be there. It unfortunately cannot convey the actual feeling of being there, and the impact of the launch on the body.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19642615,"author":"mikejb","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Arabsat-6A mission [video]","text":"For those not lucky enough to explore this in person, Destin Sandlin from Smarter Every Day made a video [1] (from the test launch last year) that gives you a somewhat acoustical representation and a lot of good explanations. I haven't seen a Falcon Heavy launch, but I've been lucky enough to see a 'normal' Falcon9 launch. There's 2 things that I know I didn't expect: The sound is just beyond anything. And I think the video above brings that across at least to some extend. The other part that surprised me when seeing a launch with my own eyes: The exhaust is bright . It gets lost quite a bit through cameras, so I was surprised how bright those flames are - even 30-45 seconds in, when the rocket is dozens of miles away. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19667365,"author":"sbr464","month":"2019-04","story_title":"What It's Like to View a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch","text":"This youtube channel[1] has a pretty amazing binaural (immersive) audio recording of the facilities and launch. Liftoff is @ 3:15 [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33421631,"author":"MontagFTB","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Falcon Heavy Launch [video]","text":"SmarterEveryDay has a great video explaining this audio phenomenon from a previous Falcon Heavy launch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Imquk_3oFf4":[{"hn_comment_id":34201390,"author":"jacquesm","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What does artisanal software look like?","text":"Check out the demo scene, they are still going strong after 4 decades and producing stuff that is just as mindblowing as it was when it all began. [VIDEO] That's 256 bytes .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22928153,"author":"stallmanite","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Memories \u2013 a multipart demoscene demo in only 256 bytes","text":"The 256 byte category of demos is inspirational. The idea that a relative handful of symbols that you could write on a sheet of notebook paper and view in its entirety could produce minutes of video and sound is hard to wrap my mind around. To save anyone else the clicking here\u2019s the video [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32794889,"author":"oddly","month":"2022-09","story_title":"New Linux malware combines unusual stealth with a full suite of capabilities","text":"I suggest you check out the demoscene if you haven\u2019t. This is \u201cMemories\u201d from the Revision competition: [VIDEO] 256 bytes","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33295966,"author":"throwawayben","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The Commodordion","text":"[VIDEO] I don't think it uses any fancy modern CPU features but this is probably the reigning champion of the 256 byte demo, and its write up[0] [0] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"IoL8g0W9gAQ":[{"hn_comment_id":23963895,"author":"lexicality","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Amazon gets priority while mail gets delayed, say US letter carriers","text":"John Oliver did an interesting video on this: [VIDEO] TL;DR: Deliberate government action to defund them has resulted in them having way less money than you would expect.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24003224,"author":"teh_klev","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Pending Postal Service Changes Could Delay Mail and Deliveries","text":"It has for many years: [LINK] Discussed here: [LINK] And love him or hate him John Oliver boils this down to: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24153471,"author":"chb","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Save the USPS","text":"For those wondering why the USPS cannot turn a profit, Jon Oliver does an excellent job of explaining: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Iod6uwUGM2E":[{"hn_comment_id":39700931,"author":"colordrops","month":"2024-03","story_title":"How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s","text":"Check out Jared Owen's explainer 3D videos on Youtube. some of the best I've ever seen, and relatively recent. Example: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38714827,"author":"duderific","month":"2023-12","story_title":"A new technology is upending the simple sport of bowling","text":"I think they've been improving them incrementally over the years, but it's a monstrously difficult engineering problem to do the following: - Set up all 10 pins reliably and in the same spots - Lift remaining pins after the first throw and sweep away the ones knocked down, if any - Load extra pins into a holding area to make re-racks faster - Other things I'm not thinking of I encourage you to view this 3d breakdown of how a pinsetter works on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38715914,"author":"johnwalkr","month":"2023-12","story_title":"A new technology is upending the simple sport of bowling","text":"I recommend watching a video[1] about how these things work. I really don't see how it's feasible to make this complex, heavy machine inherently safe to stick your arms in. And keep in mind these machines have been iterated on for 100 years or more by multiple companies. Modern ones are full of safety features, but they revolve around lockouts, not making everything so weak it can't hurt you. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44985618,"author":"throwup238","month":"2025-08","story_title":"VHS-C: When a lazy idea stumbles towards perfection [video]","text":"Not from the same Youtuber but that video reminded me of another great one about how mechanical bowling alley machines work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ip3X9LOh2dk":[{"hn_comment_id":23804881,"author":"Chris_Newton","month":"2020-07","story_title":"How to Understand Things","text":"As someone who very much relates to the GP\u2019s anecdote, I might suggest determinants as a good example. As an undergraduate studying maths, I encountered a standard theorem in one of my first courses, which says that about 947 different conditions are equivalent to a matrix having a determinant of zero. I dutifully memorised these. I also dutifully memorised the algorithm for how to calculate a determinant. I might even have remembered some verbatim proofs of some of the equivalences. However, I developed absolutely no intuition about what a determinant is . I had book knowledge, but no insight. It was a long time ago now, but I\u2019m fairly sure that when I graduated I still did not truly understand even this very basic (by undergraduate standards) subject. I think it was probably a few years later, when I came across some of the same theory but in a much more practical context at work, that most of the connections in that equivalence theorem first \u201cclicked\u201d. Meanwhile, here is what a gifted presenter with the right illustrations can do in about ten minutes: [VIDEO] The 2,000 or so substantially identical comments below that video are very telling. Given the understanding you\u2019d get with that quality of presentation, the equivalences I mentioned above would have been obvious and constructing the proofs from first principles would have been straightforward.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24156931,"author":"MaxBarraclough","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Expiring vs. permanent skills","text":"At the same time, universities could sometimes do a better job of letting students see why it's important to learn something. A great example is matrix determinant, which at first glance seems like an entirely arbitrary invention. The 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel does a great job with this, introducing the determinant in terms of geometry. It puts the geometric meaning of the function first, introducing the strange looking formula later on. edit And of course, it does all of this with excellent visualisations. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34655336,"author":"meken","month":"2023-02","story_title":"2000 Years of Matrix Multiplication","text":"Determinants always fascinated me, partly (completely?) because of the cool sounding name. I always wanted to get intuition for them because their formula is so simple, which has always been deeply unsatisfying to me to just take on its face. This article got me searching for a 3blue1brown video on determinants and now my mind is absolutely blown! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42108671,"author":"traes","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Adventures in Probability","text":"The entire 3blue1brown series[0] on linear algebra is well worth watching, it has really intuitive graphical explanations of a bunch of concepts. Here's the one on determinants in particular[1]. TL;DW the determinant represents how much you scale the area/volume/hypervolume (depending on dimension) of a shape by applying a matrix transformation to each point. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33404462,"author":"JW_00000","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The paper that keeps showing up","text":"To add to this, a website I've found useful is betterexplained.com. Specifically for complex numbers, take a look at [1] and [2]. But they also have good articles with visualizations to help you understand the Fourier transform, the number e, integrals and derivatives, linear algebra, etc. A starting point is [3]. One useful idea is that they color the different parts of math equations to explain each part separately, see [4]. Another great source of math visualizations is the YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown, in particular the series on linear algebra [5]. (I didn't intuitively understand what a determinant represented or what the determinant of a transformation being zero really meant, until watching [6].) [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40188059,"author":"3PS","month":"2024-04","story_title":"So what's the point of linear algebra, anyway?","text":"> The novel approach taken here banishes determinants to the end of the book. Big fan of this approach! Though I have warmed up to determinants ever since I saw 3Blue1Brown give a fairly intuitive explanation for them [0]. I'm kind of curious as to how they covered eigenvalues/the characteristic polynomial without determinants. Maybe they just jumped straight to diagonalization? [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Iq9DzN6mvYA":[{"hn_comment_id":15128642,"author":"pixelmonkey","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Python Data Science Handbook","text":"We're using this book for a \"book club\" at work. Doing 1 chapter every 2 weeks. Chapter 1 covers Jupyter, 2 covers numpy, 3 pandas, 4 matplotlib, and 5 machine learning. We just made it through the first 4 chapters and it lays a good foundation for those libraries. I suspect chapter 5 is the meatiest and most interesting chapter, which covers scikit-learn and machine learning techniques. It is a long chapter so we will spend a month on it. I recommend combining this book with McKinney's Pandas book[1] and the author's excellent YouTube presentations at PyCon and PyData. Start with \"Statistics for Hackers\"[2] by Jake VanderPlas and then look for his others. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23690203,"author":"auxym","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommendations for applied engineering and math books for programmers?","text":"You might enjoy this talk \"statistics for hackers\" (in case statistics is not included in your data science knowledge): [VIDEO] For structural beam analysis (ie, from mechanical and civil engineering) check out this textbook on the direct stiffness method: [LINK] Unfortunately, the accompanying code (MASTAN2) is not open source and runs in Matlab. Still, it's a decent first step if you want to move to full-on Finite Element methods, which require much heavier math (real analysis) to really grasp.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43356510,"author":"armanboyaci","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Statistical Formulas for Programmers (2013)","text":">Being able to apply statistics is like having a secret superpower. I totally with this sentence. BUT If you ask for my opinion, merely knowing a list of statistical formulas is not very helpful. Most of the time, people don\u2019t remember the underlying assumptions, so there is a fair chance they will use them in inappropriate situations. I recommend watching these two YouTube videos. The presenters advocate using simulation/bootstrapping/shuffling methods instead of memorizing formulas. Jake Vanderplas - Statistics for Hackers [VIDEO] John Rauser - Statistics Without the Agonizing Pain [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"IrabKK9Bhds":[{"hn_comment_id":24099711,"author":"iwasakabukiman","month":"2020-08","story_title":"The German front in rare color photos, 1914-1918","text":"For anyone that hasn't seen They Shall Not Grow Old, I highly recommend it. Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) spent years working with the British government to digitize and colorize their old footage of World War I. They also added in sound using the actual military equipment that was used in the field during the war. They also hired lip readers to figure out what each person was saying and added in dialogue. It's really incredible and makes the war (which was only 100 years ago) feel much more modern than old black and white footage. Trailer: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20490329,"author":"ericd","month":"2019-07","story_title":"The forgotten ruthlessness of Canada\u2019s Great War soldiers (2018)","text":"A bit off topic, but I recommend that anyone interested in this watch They Shall Not Grow Old ( [VIDEO] ) - it's an excellent documentary, a bit of a passion project by Peter Jackson to polish up a lot of old WW1 footage (normalized the frame rate, since it was hand cranked, colorize, and add sound - he hired lip readers and voice actors from the same regions as the filmed soldiers). It makes it seem much more relatable and real, in a way that comically-fast black and white footage really doesn't.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37894730,"author":"nstj","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Mark Twain filmed by Thomas Edison in 1909","text":"If this interests you then you might like to check out \u201cThey Shall Not Grow Old\u201d[0] - a Peter Jackson movie which is based off AI/ML restored[1] WW1 footage with color, sound, and dialog added to silent B&W original stock. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"IrbJYsep45E":[{"hn_comment_id":35490549,"author":"supriyo-biswas","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Quantum Computing 101","text":"The videos by Microsoft Research[1] and PBS[2] are perhaps the most accessible and yet accurate explanations of quantum computing I have found so far. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14397794,"author":"stcredzero","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Fermi's Paradox [audio]","text":"Issac Arthur has his stuff together. His videos are for the most part well researched and contain a lot of interesting hard sci-fi ideas. The only time I've seen him fall down is his video about quantum computing, but to be fair, a lot of people get caught by the same mistake. It's not the case that a quantum computer is trying out all of the bit-strings that are possible answers in a kind of quantum-superposed parallel computing. That's not exactly what is happening. One of the key insights: Qubits store complex numbers! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16797779,"author":"adamisntdead","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Qusim.py \u2013 A toy multi-qubit quantum computer simulator written in Python","text":"You should check out these videos, one of them might give you an understanding! - [LINK] | Quantum Computers Explained - [VIDEO] | The Mathematics of Quantum Computers - [LINK] | Hacking at Quantum Speed with Shor's Algorithm - [LINK] | A series by the author of the standard textbook These are videos I particularly like!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18462970,"author":"msclrhd","month":"2018-11","story_title":"The Case Against Quantum Computing","text":"It's not that they can execute a computation faster in the traditional sense. It is that you can exploit the quantum behaviour in some types of computation (e.g. factoring primes) to make the answer more probable, and thus more likely to be \"observed\", when you read the state of the quantum computer and thus make it easy to locate the correct answer compared to traditional algorithms. PBS Infinite Series has several videos on quantum computing and Shor's algorithm: 1. [VIDEO] \"The Mathematics of Quantum Computers\" 2. [LINK] \"How to Break Cryptography\" 3. [LINK] \"Hacking at Quantum Speed with Shor's Algorthm\"","stance":"rec"}],"IroPQ150F6c":[{"hn_comment_id":42084310,"author":"emmanueloga_","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Rust for tokenising and parsing","text":"That talk is great, but I remember some discussion later about Go actually NOT using this technique because of goroutine scheduling overhead and/or inefficient memory allocation patterns? The best discussion I could find is [1]. Another great talk about making efficient lexers and parsers is Andrew Kelley's \"Practical Data Oriented Design\" [2]. Summary: \"it explains various strategies one can use to reduce memory footprint of programs while also making the program cache friendly which increase throughput\". -- 1: [LINK] 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44740628,"author":"iamcreasy","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Writing memory efficient C structs","text":"This reminds of an amazing talk by Mike Acton on Data oriented design: [LINK] And there is a related talk by Andrew Kelley implementing these ideas on Zig toolchain: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45610403,"author":"Rendello","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Your data model is your destiny","text":"I recently spent a week or so creating a library for my project. There's not a lot of code, but it was hard to reason about the data model, what I wanted the API to look like, and what I wanted actually rendered on the other side. I was proud after getting it working, but when I had to run dozens of files through it, it was horribly slow. I don't tend to write a lot of hot code, so I was excited by the fact I had to profile it and make it efficient. I decided that I should rewrite the system, as my mental model had improved and the code was doing a lot more than it should be doing for no reason. I've spent the last few days redesigning it according to Data-Oriented Design. I'm trying to get the wall-clock time down by more than an order of magnitude. I'm not sure how it's going to turn out, wish me luck :) Since I mentioned DoD, these three links will probably come up in conversation: Mike Acton's famous performance talk: [LINK] DoD in the Zig compiler: [VIDEO] The DoD book: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46666189,"author":"gethly","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Why Object of Arrays beat interleaved arrays: a JavaScript performance issue","text":"SoA is nothing new. Not sure why it needs to be even discussed... Anyway, here's few videos of interest: [LINK] [VIDEO] Odin also supports SoA natively [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49012929,"author":"Rendello","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Everyone Should Know SIMD","text":"A good introduction to SoA (for anyone curious) are the two most famous Data-Oriented Design talks by Mike Acton (game engine dev) [1] and Andrew Kelley (Zig lead dev) [2] respectively. I read a book book about DoD [3] really which confused me at first with all its talk about database table design (in a book about a high-performance C++ game engine?), but when it finally clicked it was amazing. The point is that you want to think hard about your access patterns and what could constitute good \"primary keys\", then model it accordingly. SoA ends up being useful a lot of the time, because having your data in homogeneous arrays/vectors is great for cache locality and branch elimination. Even without SIMD you can get huge speedups from that, but that's also where your compiler (or you as a programmer) can get incredible SIMD gains. SoA is not a silver bullet as it may not align well with your access patterns, but it can great to add to your toolkit. --- Mike Acton: Data-Oriented Design and C++ : [LINK] Andrew Kelley: A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design : [VIDEO] Richard Fabian: Data-Oriented Design : [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"IsE_8j5RL3k":[{"hn_comment_id":43337911,"author":"tstrimple","month":"2025-03","story_title":"The US island that speaks Elizabethan English","text":"If folks find accents interesting, I loved this video which does a tour of US accents. Part 1: [LINK] (Okracoke Island is at 13:40) Part 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27142728,"author":"AbsoluteDestiny","month":"2021-05","story_title":"The Pin-Pen Merger (2020)","text":"Really good article. For those interested in this sort of thing, wired did a pretty good series on accents in the US recently on youtube: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"IvUU8joBb1Q":[{"hn_comment_id":20958107,"author":"thatswrong0","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Wintergatan's Marble Machine in Minecraft [video]","text":"Absolutely. This thing is a work of love. Original video that inspired this Minecraft recreation: [VIDEO] And the rest of his WIP videos for the \"Marble Machine X\": [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28427041,"author":"nosianu","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Art student\u2019s 407-piece hand-carved wooden clock (2016)","text":"Here is something similar (\"useless\" complex machine made from wood) that somebody made to create music: \"Wintergatan - Marble Machine (music instrument using 2000 marbles)\" [VIDEO] The video shows the details pretty well too, and the piece being played is of quite good quality. One can see that the machine can just play a pre-configured song, but the operator can add and/or change a lot while running it to create variations of that pre-configured song. The machine is programmable, so that song could be changed.","stance":"rec"}],"IxuU5L2MEII":[{"hn_comment_id":21715353,"author":"whalesalad","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Drivers Refuse to Put Down Their Phones. People Keep Dying","text":"Pipe dream. Even if a driverless car was to exist.. it has to contend with millions of other vehicles all being driven by human beings. George Hotz has a killer talk about why the general approach to autonomous vehicles is flawed. I highly recommend it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17016134,"author":"arich","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck","text":"George Hotz had a great point about this and how Comma.ai handles defining the driving problem and what \"driving badly\" actually means, aka, interacting with and driving as other humans are expected to drive, quirks included. His whole talk is interesting but the short part about that is here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26696725,"author":"dna_polymerase","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Tesla owners asking what happens if 'full self driving' isn't real","text":"You might want to have a look into the public output of George Hotz. Obviously he is a little biased towards his own efforts, but he is very open about limitations and the actual reality of the self driving business. [VIDEO] Note: He regularly runs a Twitch livestream coding stuff in the space, recordings are on YouTube, very high signal low noise stuff there.","stance":"rec"}],"Iyp_X3mwE1w":[{"hn_comment_id":33679507,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Hyundai\u2019s Ioniq 6 EV makes its US debut","text":"For anyone wondering about the practicalities of an EV: cost trade-offs, home charging, and more, this entertaining video goes into extreme depth: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33183139,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2022-10","story_title":"GM created a new energy business to sell batteries and solar panels","text":"> Most people with an EV will be fine with a simple 19kW AC charger in their garage. Technology Connections (of dishwasher fame) goes over why you probably need much less: * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46627276,"author":"Dibes","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales","text":"The thing is, for most people a standard wall outlet is plenty. The math works out that a simple 15/20 amp circuit can charge over 40 miles overnight, and the vast majority of people aren't driving more than that for their daily commute plus errands. Level 1 charging is genuinely sufficient most of the time. I was particularly swayed by the technology connections video on this topic I watched before buying my first EV [VIDEO] The real pain point, in my opinion, is whether you have any place to plug in nightly. If you don't, then as you pointed out, it becomes a nightmare to own. Range anxiety is completely justified when public charging infrastructure is still as unreliable as it is, years after the initial build outs. Your points about charging pain are all too common. If you have a garage with an outlet, you are generally fine. I lived off a level 1 charger for over a year before I decided I wanted the convenience of a level 2 charger.","stance":"rec"}],"J-M98KLgaUU":[{"hn_comment_id":36765824,"author":"CSMastermind","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What ever happened to the \u201ccoming wave\u201d of delivery drones?","text":"I think that Wendover has the best summary: [VIDEO] Here's the tl;dr: The \"last foot\" problem is the biggest killer. Getting a drone into the air and to its target is not the hard problem - getting a package safely to the ground at someone's home is. It would require either a very specific neighborhood or a big advance in computer vision and AI tech. Where we have seen success in this space are places with dedicated delivery zones in controlled environments where existing transport infrastructure is not a good alternative. Also this quote: \"most people are simply willing to wait two or three days to receive their package while ALL customers wants their packages delivered as cheaply and simply as possible.\" Uber eats and door dash largely solve the problem that drone delivery was supposed to solve and if you're going to have autonomous delivery doing it via ground robots is much easier than trying to do it from a drone.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31151600,"author":"ketzu","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Drones have transformed blood delivery in Rwanda","text":"They also have a more recent video on general drone delivery: [VIDEO] It was really interesting to watch. General idea discusses the problems it faced in the US in seemingly optimal circumstances (airspace restrictions, density, existing delivery networks) and how it does live and help out in other places, highlighting zipline as an example.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32644942,"author":"coppolaemilio","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What happened to drone delivery service?","text":"This mini-documentary explains it pretty well: [VIDEO] TL;DW: No-fly zones, costs, and drones not being intelligent enough to detect where they are going to drop off packages. It is cheaper and easier to do the last mile via traditional methods than dealing with all the risks and limitations of flying.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37590674,"author":"tim333","month":"2023-09","story_title":"FAA Authorizes Zipline to Deliver Commercial Packages Using Drones","text":"There's quite a good video on \"Drone Delivery Was Supposed to be the Future. What Went Wrong?\". It's been a decade since Bezos launched drone deliveries but it hasn't taken off for a number or reasons including air traffic control around airports, people living in flats and the difficulties of getting a drone to find a safe spot. On the other hand Uber Eats type guys on ebikes have proved a practical solution. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"J1q4Ir2J8P8":[{"hn_comment_id":19197891,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2019-02","story_title":"\u201cReverse location\u201d search warrants identify all cellphones near a crime scene","text":"According to Zoz in his excellent DEFCON 22 talk \"Don't Fuck It Up!\"[1] on the difficulties of OPSEC, this type of correlation has been in use for years. >[2] Matching entry / exit point \u2013 we know specifically they look for that, so don\u2019t match the last use and first use of phones, overlap it. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20793060,"author":"bluejellybean","month":"2019-08","story_title":"The Gig Economy (2018)","text":"I'm always reminded of Zoz's awesome talk \"Don't Fuck It Up!\"[0]. There's a ton of sketchy shit you can unfortunately (or fortunately depending on who you are) do online but not getting caught is still a non-trivial task. Successfully hiding is dependent upon the people who you're trying to hide from and your sophistication in hiding. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11811982,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Cops can easily get months of location data, appeals court rules","text":"> leaves their cellphones at home while committing crimes, using burner phones for any contact they need during that time That's getting a lot harder to do in practice. OPSEC is hard when you have to care about stuff like overlapping usage of the burner so the movement logs of the regular phone stopping don't correlate with when the burner starts moving. Zoz gave a great overview[1] of modern cellphone OPSEC at DEFCON 22. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12125418,"author":"_asummers","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Cloudflare ReCAPTCHA De-Anonymizes Tor Users","text":"There's another good talk on more general opsec from Defcon a few years ago called \"Don't fuck it up\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12513625,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Tracking the Owner of Kickass Torrents \u2013 Schneier on Security","text":"OPSEC in the age of mass surveillance is incredibly hard. Zoz gave[1] has a very good overview of modern OPSEC. Staying anonymous requires an attention to detail that most people probably cannot do. The hindsight bias is realizing how serious the situation might be and the level of OPSEC that is required. When the torrent site was first created the risk level wasn't known and most people didn't understand how hard it is to avoid the ubiquitous sensors of the surveillance-industriual-complex. Yes, more people probably should have assumed this level of risk much earlier, but that's easy to say now when we know names like Prism and XKEYSCORE. [1] (note: contains rude/strong language) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17915915,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2018-09","story_title":"\u2018Five Eyes\u2019 Nations Quietly Demand Government Access to Encrypted Data","text":"> you're only fucked if your OPSEC is weak The problem is that actually implementing not-weak OPSEC is much harder than most people understand (even those with technical backgrounds). For example, is your \"secret\" activity on TOR easily tied to your non-secret activity from a search of network entry/exit times (i.e. \"secret\" activity is the complement \"non-secret\" activity)? I recommend Zoz's DEFCON talk, \"Don't Fuck It Up!\"[1], for a very good overview of how hard OPSEC has become. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"J3FcbFqSoQY":[{"hn_comment_id":27767033,"author":"Confiks","month":"2021-07","story_title":"What if biohackers injected themselves with mRNA?","text":"You mean like the guy who in 2018 claimed to have cured himself of lactose intolerance for a while by ingesting a gene-modifying Adenolike virus? [1] No fancy lipid-bubble-riding mRNA necessary. The rest of the channel is pure biohacking gold. The yeast spider silk video is much recommended. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36692936,"author":"mrtksn","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Growing Rat Neurons to Play Video Games [video]","text":"Interesting is understatement, it's a channel which is one of the closer ones to hard science on the hard science - pop science spectrum and still having more than a million subscribers. Some outstanding videos IMHO: The channel owner applies himself a gene therapy to fix his lactose intolerance. [VIDEO] How exactly the Covid Tests work: [LINK] Growing Human Neurons Connected to a Computer [LINK] Especially the Covid test video was eye opening against the conspiracy theorist propaganda during the pandemic because knowing how tests actually work on practical level makes you see through the claims effort free.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18377639,"author":"rubatuga","month":"2018-11","story_title":"A key ingredient for a universal flu vaccine may come from llamas","text":"Yep, they usually use a pseudo virus that doesn't replicate, called an adeno associated virus. Check out this guys video on his own gene therapy for lactose intolerance : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22162173,"author":"thatcherc","month":"2020-01","story_title":"FDA approves first US phage therapy trial (2019)","text":"I'm pretty sure this is the video that describes the whole process, in case you want to hear more about it. (Haven't watched it myself but it's been on my to-watch list for while) Comes from a YouTube channel called Though Emporium: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24415534,"author":"karmicthreat","month":"2020-09","story_title":"AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to suspected adverse reaction","text":"Thought Emporium has a decent video where he modifies an Adenovirus to inject the lactase gene into the cells of his intestinal tract. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26630453,"author":"DecoPerson","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Moderna mRNA sequence released to GitHub [pdf]","text":"Check out this video by The Thought Emporium to see how far we\u2019ve come in these matters: [VIDEO] This should hopefully provide you with some useful perspective.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27854392,"author":"pas","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Open Insulin Foundation","text":"If I understand correctly the problem is that if you go to one of their labs they'll cook you a batch in no time (we know the genes, you can order a plasmid that has all the bells and whistles needed to get it made in yeast), but it'd be illegal for many reasons. (They can't sell it without FDA approval for one, they'd need an approved factory for that, and they are infringing on patents.) They obviously can't advertise this, but in videos they almost literally spell this out. So they do this strange outreach instead, with no clear steps in sight. Plus as others mentioned it's easy to buy insulin. ($25 at Walmart.) About how easy it is to make recombinant insulin I recommend this channel: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30026260,"author":"bschne","month":"2022-01","story_title":"International Linguistics Olympiad \u2013 Sample Problems","text":"What got me started was probably this from \"The Thought Emporium\", and other videos on his channel: [VIDEO] (obvious don't try this at home disclaimer). What I'm reading right now is \"Molecular Biology of the Cell\" \u2014 it's a dense textbook and I'm taking my time, so only about two chapters in, but I love how it focuses on a lot of fundamental principles and occasionally points out astonishing facts. There's also this series which might be a nice, casual primer: [LINK] James Somers also lists some other books in his post I linked to above, might be worth checking out.","stance":"rec"}],"J44svaQc5WY":[{"hn_comment_id":29318685,"author":"Karunamon","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The World's Deadliest Thing","text":"European chocolate tastes dull. Snark aside, it's about what you grew up with. Fascinating video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35750825,"author":"jrussino","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The Difference Between European and American Butter","text":"Adam Ragusea has an excellent video on this very topic - \"Why Hershey bars taste like vomit (and I love them)\" : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30405253,"author":"quietbritishjim","month":"2022-02","story_title":"The quest to create quality chocolate for a country obsessed with Cadbury (2017)","text":"There's a really good video about that [1]. A quick summary is that the aftertaste is a chemical that's in vomit, so if you're not used to it in chocolate then the chocolate literally tastes of puke. But if you are used to it, from your childhood, then it tastes great. It's also the same chemical that gives parmesan cheese its pungency, so it's not like Americans are alone in liking it in their food. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"J7E-aoXLZGY":[{"hn_comment_id":20836326,"author":"inlined","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students\u2019 Essays","text":"> the engines also focus heavily on metrics like sentence length, vocabulary, spelling, and subject-verb agreement... The systems are also unable to judge more nuanced aspects of writing, like creativity. This reminds me of a wonderful essay/speech by Stephen Fry on the harm done by pedantry. I also feel that schools focus so much on a single structure of essay writing and similarly take the joy out of language. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26401272,"author":"sethammons","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Write libraries instead of services, where possible","text":"Take ~6min to watch Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language. It is my favorite take on changes in English and addresses verbing of nouns directly. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30990590,"author":"sethammons","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Researchers home in on possible \u201cday zero\u201d for Antikythera mechanism","text":"> let them dumb down a language If you've not seen it, I highly encourage this 6 minute take by Stephen Fry on Language: [VIDEO] And besides, while you may be honing a blade or skill, my Homing Pigeon is homing in on home.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10105056,"author":"skeuomorf","month":"2015-08","story_title":"How to Fold a Julia Fractal","text":"That was kinda my point, I was not nitpicking -relative OP's- grammatical usage, I just thought it was convenient to refer to the author in a more specific manner since his details were obvious. I had no idea whether their -relative OP- :) intention was to use \"their\" in a singular or plural manner. Heck, one of my favorite Stephen Fry videos [0] talks exactly about this! Also, the videos you referenced are great :) [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32553628,"author":"Arkhaine_kupo","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The Age of Distracti-Pression","text":"While I tend to whinge at that kind of writing, I at the same time remind myself that Stephen Fry had a beauitful essay about how to use language, and how we can be wildly innovative with it. At the end of the day Shakespeare was the first to table a meeting and that must have sounded novel and too out there back then. Not everything will age well, but I would rather we try new things. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44644808,"author":"sethammons","month":"2025-07","story_title":"What happens when an octopus engages with art?","text":"On incorrect language use, I have long been a fan of Stephen Fry's take, with kinetic typography as a fun backdrop: [VIDEO] In short, context, convention, and circumstance are all. Long live the solitary octopi.","stance":"rec"}],"J7GY1Xg6X20":[{"hn_comment_id":32232124,"author":"qbasic_forever","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Cinema\u2019s greatest scene: \u2018Casablanca\u2019 and \u2018La Marseillaise\u2019 (2015)","text":"Watch Chaplin's The Great Dictator and it's really amazing when you realize it came out in 1940 and was created in the late 30's, right when Hitler was seizing power and starting WW2. Chaplin was a genius and realized the most powerful way to hurt Hitler was to make him look like a fool and mock him. Its monologue is an equally unforgettable scene: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48415204,"author":"UtopiaPunk","month":"2026-06","story_title":"India's surprise baby bust is a warning to the world","text":"Is the concern that we'd marginalize parents and kids? As a parent of little kids, that's a concern that wasn't even on my radar. I had no idea that that was a major concern of people. Wild. I'm not saying it is a fabricated or unfounded fear, I just don't have that concern at all for myself. As a parent of little kids, I worry much more about them living fulfilling lives as they grow up in the future. I'm concerned about climate change, wars, and an economic system that will allow them to live self-actualized lives. I have no doubt that the population number plays some factor in that, creating problems that must be solved. But ultimately, humans have created amazing technologies and the Earth is bountiful. We can support whatever number of people is on the horizon (whether that number is larger or smaller), but society must choose to do so and adapt. My greatest fears are that governments and corporations consolidate their wealth and power to only an elite few, bending society to serve that elite. That is a fear exists regardless of the fertility rate. I think Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator is relevant and inspirational: [VIDEO] Thank you for sharing your article. It's from a view so unlike my own, and it's been eye opening.","stance":"rec"}],"JAcR7kqOb3o":[{"hn_comment_id":45667753,"author":"bearjaws","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Starcloud","text":"We've officially lost the plot, we will now ship our AI data centers to ~space~ ... This will not work with modern technology. The sun will be eclipsed by earth many times per day, requiring you to either shift all workloads or add substantial UPS weight. The radiator grid you need to cool 125kw is something like 16x the size of the entire data center. I watched this video last week that went into 3 different scenarios, it's a good watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46094792,"author":"CivilR","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Datacenters in space aren't going to work","text":"Eager space did a pretty thorough hypothetical cost breakdown of orbital data centers that I recommend. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46880744,"author":"briandw","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Data centers in space makes no sense","text":"Eager Space [Orbital Data Centers Yes or No]( [VIDEO] ) Goes into great detail with extensive calculations (for a YT video at least). TLDR: Cost to orbit needs to be under $200/kg before it makes sense.","stance":"rec"}],"JAczd3mt3X0":[{"hn_comment_id":29433360,"author":"Robotbeat","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Scientists find a way to \u2018catapult\u2019 rockets into space like \u2018slingshots\u2019","text":"Man, I have my opinions on Spinlaunch, too, but I find thunderf*t\u2019s videos (especially the BUSTED ones) unenlightening & unhelpful to rationally discussing the pros and cons of some technology. Scott Manley\u2019s video (if video is the format you prefer) on Spinlaunch was much better. Scott Manley also has a much better understanding of rockets and space technology than thunderf*t. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31033253,"author":"dotnet00","month":"2022-04","story_title":"NASA will test SpinLaunch's ability to fling satellites into orbit","text":"I think their basic idea is sound, it'll probably eventually function. My concerns are if it'll be worth it, since there's a trade-off being made between fuel mass and heat shield mass, and at least based on Scott Manley's summary video this week, the rocket with the heat shield is close to the same mass as the Electron rocket. In which case I'm not sure the complexity of SpinLaunch is worth it. Edit: the video in question: [LINK] and a more honest and detailed look at the company, again from Scott: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JAk448volww":[{"hn_comment_id":28124525,"author":"YeBanKo","month":"2021-08","story_title":"New York Public Library\u2019s Picture Collection Will Be Archived","text":"\u201cOnce the Picture Collection is relocated, its space in Room 100 will house administrators who were hired for educational outreach.\u201d - inflation of administrative apparatus is a scourge of modern society. It is partially responsible for growing costs of education and healthcare. One of my favorite dialogs in Yes, minister! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30896853,"author":"maxwelldone","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Employees are returning to the office to sit on zoom calls","text":"This reminds me of a great scene[1] from the British show \"Yes, Minister\". It's from an episode called The Compassionate Society where a minister for Department of Administrative Affairs learns about a newly built hospital which has some 500 employees but no doctors & patients. The scene I linked is a conversation between the minister & his private secretary where the latter explains why administrators are essential no matter what. [1] [VIDEO] Full episode: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"JBgG_VSP7f8":[{"hn_comment_id":7921292,"author":"jal278","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Maverick forerunner of artificial life and animation remains largely unknown","text":"Something like evolving virtual creatures would be a fun (although pretty ambitious) addition [1]. There's a processing 2D virutal creatures model called sticky feet [2] (source available) that perhaps could be ported to js pretty quickly. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27475323,"author":"ehsankia","month":"2021-06","story_title":"ALiEn \u2013 a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program","text":"Also relevant is Karl Sims' Evolving Virtual Creatures: [VIDEO] Not sure how they're connected, but I remember being obsessed with that paper and actually recreating it in 2D as a grad project.","stance":"rec"}],"JENdgiAPD6c":[{"hn_comment_id":27266364,"author":"JoyfulPanda","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Complexities of e-mail validation logic","text":"There is is awesome talk about E-Mail by Ricardo Signes: [VIDEO] The first 5 minutes are perl specific, but the rest is email and just hilarious.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3231947,"author":"AngryParsley","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Move over HTTP it's SMTP's Turn to Shine","text":"The SMTP standard is complicated and crazy. RJBS from Pobox does a good job of scaring anyone thinking of writing an SMTP client or server: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6348939,"author":"k33l0r","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Email Validation Rules","text":"I found this talk by Ricardo Signes on email parsing to be an excellent primer into why email addresses (and emails in general) are terrible to parse: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JEYh5WACqEk":[{"hn_comment_id":10621381,"author":"vinceguidry","month":"2015-11","story_title":"The New China Syndrome: American business meets its new master","text":"> So any theory of \"geographical stunting\" would need to explain what changed in the geography after 1492. What changed was technology. Once you have ships going back and forth across the Atlantic, everything changes. Europeans introduced cows, sheep, pigs, chickens. The New World's only domesticable native animal is the llama, which is the main reason why civilizations sprung up in Central and the northern parts of South America, that's where llamas were. Now, to the Europeans, with vastly superior farming technology, the Caribbean and North America were veritable cornucopias of geopolitical possibility. Islands sheltered plantations. Europe could project real power only very closely to the shore, where the big naval guns could reach. The reason was supply. To maintain a group of soldiers requires not just food but adequate clothing, weapons, ammunition, and horses to carry all of that. It took over a century of growth for a colony to get to the point to where it could maintain and supply an army for deeper treks inland. By that time the colonies would have been deeply entrenched in native political systems. Because the warships protecting your colony could only hang around for so long, colonies were quite vulnerable to native military action, or even just having them hang around outside the settlement and killing whoever goes outside, say, to chop wood. It made sense for settlers to be nice to the locals, at least at first. CGPGrey just put out a fantastic video comparing t","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33294801,"author":"bigmattystyles","month":"2022-10","story_title":"How the \u2018black death\u2019 left its genetic mark on future generations","text":"Expanding on this, CGP Grey had this amazing video ( [VIDEO] ) of why European diseases in the Americas were so bad on the people that were already here when the two worlds met but you hardly heard of Europeans getting any super contagious illness from the people living in the Americas. Meaning European genomes had some adaptations (as well as antibodies?) from dense and unsanitary living, as well as animal farming in European prior to contact whereas that type of living setup was rarer in the Americas.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12686507,"author":"valarauca1","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Barack Obama: America Will Take the Giant Leap to Mars","text":">Indians had no trouble crisscrossing America Well yeah there weren't any human infectious illness where... there aren't any humans. This video explains the history of man kind's infectious illness very well [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14584843,"author":"partycoder","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Native Intelligence (2005)","text":"I recommend the following video by CGP Grey, largely based on the book \"Guns, Germs and Steel\" by Jared Diamond: [VIDEO] Now, history doesn't give a lot of merit to natives. The largest battle in the Americas, the siege of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, was won with the help of 80,000 to 200,000 Tlaxcalan natives, which amounted for 99% of the infantry used.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19046054,"author":"squirrelicus","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Germs and ancient migrations help explain our world of 'haves' and 'have nots'","text":"I remember being struck by his anecdotes of Papua New Guineans seeming just as smart as anyone else as supposed evidence of... What exactly? I don't think Neil Diamond is wrong but it's kind of baby's first reading on the differences between groups in the world. I think CGP Grey does a great job at communicating the actual meat of Guns, Germs, and Steel here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20598147,"author":"reallydude","month":"2019-08","story_title":"How a 6k-Year-Old Dog Cancer Spread Around the World","text":"CCP Makes a pretty good case regarding livestock - [VIDEO] America did offer a new disease that ravaged Europe. Syphillis.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26206543,"author":"majewsky","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Coronavirus Mutants Are Spreading Fast","text":"Epidemics are a relatively new phenomenon as far as human evolution is concerned. Within a purely human set of hosts, germs don't feel evolutionary pressure to become more deadly. If anything, it's advantageous for a germ to be less deadly. The most successful viruses are the common cold viruses, not SARS or Ebola. Epidemics only really became a thing once we started domesticating animals and therefore being around live animals for prolonged periods of time. This allowed germs originally adapted to these animals the opportunity to jump over to human hosts, for which they may be more dangerous than for the original host animal. For more details on this point, I can recommend this video on why the native Americans were killed by diseases imported by the European conquerors, but the conquerors didn't bring any deadly diseases back to Europe: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28934634,"author":"Hokusai","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Vikings lived in North America by at least the year 1021","text":"CGP Grey has a great video about this topic: Americapox: The Missing Plague - [VIDEO] TL;DR; You need big cities to keep plagues ongoing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28935612,"author":"seph-reed","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021","text":"CPG Grey has a great video on this exact subject: [VIDEO] In short, you need cities to develop these types of viruses. Cities where the virus can just keep killing, without ever hitting a dead end.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28945087,"author":"krrrh","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Evidence for European presence in the Americas in AD 1021","text":"If a disease native to the Americas emerged and became endemic, it would have infected Europeans when they arrived. There\u2019s a good CGP Grey video on this called Americapox. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37066067,"author":"akerl_","month":"2023-08","story_title":"FDA Approves First Oral Treatment for Postpartum Depression","text":"[VIDEO] is a good watch here, if you're curious why Europeans didn't catch reciprocal plagues when traveling to the Americas. Spoiler: it's what the adjacent comment said, the Americas didn't have the factors for plagues.","stance":"rec"}],"JEpsBg0AO6o":[{"hn_comment_id":8529187,"author":"krat0sprakhar","month":"2014-10","story_title":"The Raft Consensus Algorithm","text":"One of the most lucid explanations of the Raft Consensus Algorithm that I've ever seen is the one in John Ousterhout and Diego Ongaro's Raft User Study[0]. The 2 videos do an excellent job of explaining both the Paxos and Raft algorithms and the key differences between them. John's narration is extremely clear and the slides are very informative. Definitely recommended! Raft is a consensus algorithm designed to be easier to understand than Paxos. To measure Raft's understandability, we conducted an experimental study using CS students at two universities. We recorded a video lecture of Raft and another of Paxos, and created corresponding quizzes. This page makes our materials available for anyone interested. We think these are valuable resources for anyone learning consensus (whether Raft or Paxos or both). [0] - [LINK] Raft Video - [LINK] Paxos Video - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39283835,"author":"cljacoby","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The leadership myth in replicated databases (2023)","text":"I recently took a Distributed Systems course, and I also thought it was very interesting and unexpected how in the most basic form of Paxos, there is no concept of node roles or hierarchy like leader/follower, master/replica, etc. The base case is that all nodes have the same replicated log, and are \"writers\" capable of initiating changes to the log. This youtube video was particularly helpful in learning about consensus algorithms, specifically Paxos/MultiPaxos: [VIDEO] John Ousterhout (author of Raft) walks through Paxos/MultiPaxos as outlined by Leslie Lamport, and then talks about a series of optimizations to improve performance. One key optimization is transitioning from performing consensus on a single log-slot proposal, to the entire log-slot altogether, which mitigates failed consensus rounds, and is where concepts like leader nodes emerge. If your familiar with Raft and Paxos, while listening to these optimization applied to MultiPaxos, you can kind of notice it to begin to resemble Raft. The course I took was through Georgia Tech, but was largely based around a framework developed at the University of Washington called dslabs: [LINK] [LINK] It was super informative for my learning about the foundations of distributed systems, namely consensus algorithms. I'd highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning more. Although fair warning, the programming assignments were quite difficult and time consuming.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6367282,"author":"tomjohnson3","month":"2013-09","story_title":"ZooKeeper vs. Doozer vs. Etcd","text":"one other thing to keep in mind is that the underlying algorithms (zab and raft) provide different guarantees. for example, zookeeper/zab allows reading directly from followers with a guarantee to get at least a past value that won't be rolled back. this was one reason zookeer didn't use paxos: [LINK] in my understanding, raft doesn't allow reading directly from followers, because the follower logs may get repaired/rolled-back when a new leader is elected. (though i'm sure an implementation can tweak the protocol to provide this support.) that said, raft has a lot of interesting applications, and, in my opinion, is definitely more understandable than the many versions of paxos. (implementing zab yourself, at this point, would be a futile exercise.) i found the videos from the raft user study to be very well done (and easier to understand than even their paper): raft: [VIDEO] paxos: [LINK] ...however, i think they did paxos a disadvantage by not just focusing on multi-paxos (which is probably the most common implementation). but, it's certainly fair to say that info about paxos is spread out far and wide...with perhaps too many knobs to turn and implementation-related details to fill in yourself. as a side note: i've just started implementing raft in a set of libraries (multiple languages) that will be open source - along with other protocols.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13901007,"author":"brutus1213","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Paxos in 25 Lines","text":"The first is a proof published in a paper that you can read. I recall the proof is for single decree paxos. In reality, you need multiple rounds. There are many subtle variations and I am not aware of a proof for that. Is an implementation correct? Frankly, that is a PhD thesis that is still to have been written. If you want to do a PhD and this topic burns inside you, go for it. Regarding consensus algorithm overview, no .. not that I know of. Here is a good video on Paxos: [VIDEO] Enjoy my friend.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22998341,"author":"ahelwer","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Debugging Distributed Systems","text":"IMO if you develop a good understanding of Paxos then learn TLA+ you'll know everything you need to work on production distributed systems. Learn about CRDTs too, just to see what eventually-consistent systems look like. The real core of distributed systems is less knowing specific algorithms and more knowing what makes the field so hard, what solutions are possible, and the limitations of those solutions. For learning Paxos I like this video: [VIDEO] Implement it yourself in your language of choice. For TLA+ there's the Practical TLA+ textbook or Leslie Lamport's video lecture series: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27860020,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?","text":"Raft is very similar to Multi-Paxos. These Raft and Paxos user studies comparing the \"understandability\" of the two protocols might be helpful: [VIDEO] (Paxos), [LINK] (Raft). See also, comparison of various \"Paxos\" implementations: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"JFaOYYSxSEA":[{"hn_comment_id":21939137,"author":"newnewpdro","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The Polygons of Another World","text":"Another World's original author Eric Chahi gave a great GDC \"Classic Game Postmortem\" talk about creating the game: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21948047,"author":"JohnBooty","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The Polygons of Another World: Amiga 500","text":"Here's Eric Chahi explaining his decision to use polygons - he mistakenly thought that the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair used them! [VIDEO] Very cool video, wherein Chahi demonstrates his rotoscoping system, where he could use the Amiga's genlock to trace live video in his (extremely impressive) homemade animation/code tool. The polygons in Another World are a bit different from today's games. In a modern game, game models would contain fully 3D representations of each model. Each polygon vertice would have X, Y, and Z coords. The CPU/GPU then render these out. In Another World, the polygons are 2D representations only, like paper cutouts. The animations are precalculated, and then at runtime they basically just need to be blitted out using some of the clever techniques mentioned in the linked article. You wouldn't really be able to alter the animations at runtime or change the perspective, but that was OK - it was a smart compromise to hit Chahi's stated target of about 20fps. This \"2D polygon\" approach was a brilliant way to overcome the limitations of CPUs at this time. There were fully 3D polygon games at the time, but they run at a fraction of the frame rate as Another World and contain only a fraction of the detail. The 2D polygon world of Another World felt fluid and real (well, relative to the competition at the time) and some convincing pseudo 3D effects could even be faked.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27406987,"author":"slmjkdbtl","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Another World: Genesis","text":"Also check out Fabian Sanglard's articles [0] (there's a lot more on his article listings) about Another World if you haven't yet, also the author's GDC talk [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36739178,"author":"pengaru","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Another World Ported to FPGA","text":"The original developer of Another World did a GDC postmortem, it's one of the better GDC talks: [VIDEO] IIRC He shows some of his development tools including how he could modify and step through animation directly line by line in VM bytecode.","stance":"rec"}],"JHGkaShoyNs":[{"hn_comment_id":13129378,"author":"stock_toaster","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Talks that changed the way I think about programming","text":"The following talk about event sourcing (not listed in the article)\u2022, really made an impact on me: Event Sourcing - Greg Young [VIDEO] \u2022: Not that I really expected it to be I guess.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31783857,"author":"ssalka","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?","text":"Not about dev tools per se, but this talk by Greg Young on event sourcing & CQRS forever changed how I think about modeling systems, preserving history, and supporting multiple read models/versioning. Really clear walkthrough of the types of problems that benefit from an event sourced system, how event sourcing addresses them, and exploration of new use cases it enables. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18706704,"author":"matthewaveryusa","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Wolkenkit 3.0 \u2013 a CQRS and event-sourcing framework for JavaScript","text":"I agree with you it's tough to sell CQRS, it's like trying to explain to someone that their business should use a database in one line. For me event-sourcing is a historical layer below your existing database that allows you to replay the sequence of events that got your database to its current state. If I had to businessify it, maybe it would be 'Wolkenkit is a framework that allows you to save and replay your entire business's history so you never miss a key insight again.' From a technical perspective, engineers can focus on the product and organically build and destroy the data structures around a changing business instead of trying to find the perfect data-structures that will inevitably be incorrect as the business grows and evolves. You get regression tests for free, and you get backups for free which may be nice-to-haves when the business is small, but absolute requirements once you have real customers paying real money. Not sure how I would squeeze that in an elevator pitch though. Greg Young's presentation on event-sourcing is pretty great, you may find some inspiration there: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19074689,"author":"rhizome31","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Event Sourcing is Hard","text":"For a fun introduction to this concept and the motivations behind it, you may watch Greg Young's talk [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JIQETrFC_SQ":[{"hn_comment_id":9038307,"author":"MrZipf","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Introducing \u201c6-pack\u201d: the first open hardware modular switch","text":"This looks great. They also have the advantage that James Hamilton mentioned AMZ got from building their own hardware - the get to do a cleansheet s/w design and not have to support all the gazillion options that Cisco does. The talk was on HN a little while ago, worth watching: [VIDEO] The scale at FB means they're probably saving hundreds of millions doing this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12606353,"author":"dastbe","month":"2016-09","story_title":"An AWS Region is coming to France","text":"James Hamilton gives a good talk that goes over networking (and more). This is it from reinvent 2014. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JKHUaNAxsTg":[{"hn_comment_id":6928700,"author":"tokenizer","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Reddit\u2019s science forum banned climate deniers. Why don\u2019t all newspapers?","text":"I think this shows scientific institutions and advocates in a bad light. Rupert Sheldrake had a great TED talk on the dogma's of modern science, and was even further legitimized when a private council of TED banned the talk. Link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14711851,"author":"cpr","month":"2017-07","story_title":"NIST to redefine the kilogram based on a fundamental universal constant","text":"An interesting (banned) TEDx talk by Rupert Sheldrake, one part on the changing \"fundamental constants\", starting here: [VIDEO] The other parts are a bit \"woo\" and I'm sure would be laughed at by the HN crowd. But his points about fundamental \"constants\" changing, and the metrologists' dogmatic (really, anti-scientific) response, are worth pondering.","stance":"rec"}],"JLb5hZLw44s":[{"hn_comment_id":22869838,"author":"meowface","month":"2020-04","story_title":"The Wolfram Physics Project","text":">The core claim he makes \"all mice are broken\" is a hyperbole that a lot of people will tell you is unsubstantiated. He makes it sound like all tests done on mice are flawed because of it. It isn't hyperbole, if Bret's claims are substantiated. The claims being that most lab mice are from the Jackson lab, that all of their mice have extremely long telomeres compared to wild mice, and that this could have serious implications on the potential harm to humans by some drugs - even while also accounting for the fact that mice are already not a good model of humans and that the same drugs are later tested on humans. (I could elaborate on this, but it's covered thoroughly in the paper and podcast.) I agree Eric hasn't satisfactorily proved they didn't change the protocols, but if it is the case that all of their mice still have long telomeres, and if all of the other claims are true (most US researchers still using those mice + the other claims), then the claims \"most mice used by US researchers are broken\" and \"most tests done on mice by US researchers are flawed because of it\" are likely also true. I have no idea if the above claims are true, of course, but they should be investigated on their merits. Bret Weinstein's 2002 paper: [LINK] The podcast between Eric and Bret Weinstein covering the full story: [VIDEO] Not sure if you already listened to the podcast, but if you haven't, I'd recommend listening to all of it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23961497,"author":"ZephyrBlu","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Cracking down on research fraud","text":"They go over multiple topics. Check the top comment for timestamps. If you want to hear the full story I suggest listening to this podcast episode: [VIDEO] . It's long, but I found it very interesting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24073446,"author":"bz33t","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Lab mice have a chill, and that may be messing up study results (2016)","text":"According to Bret Weinstein who figured out the connection between telomere length and breeding, they seem to have quietly changed the breeding protocols to bring the telomere length back down to be in line with wild type mice. He talks about it in a long interview that gets really interesting about a hour in: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24361804,"author":"rvanlaar","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Bodybuilding supplement promotes healthy aging and extends life span in mice","text":"Uh oh, mice in labs are not like humans in this regard at all. Lab Mice have extraordinary cell repair capabilities. My guess is that the AKG slows down cell division. This podcast delves into the problem with lab mice and explains the trade offs that happen on an evolutionary and cellular level in mice with regards to longevity. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27794399,"author":"rvanlaar","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Is aging inevitable?","text":"The answer is yes. It seems the author is reasoning more in the philosophic realm than in evolutionary biology. In this podcast [1] an evolutionary biologist goes into depth about telomeres, evolution and how cancer and longevity are two sides of the same coin. Long story short, having cells die after a number of replications is a postive trade off. It means that when a cell replicates too fast it also dies fast. The opposite are cancer cells, which replicate too fast and don't die. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28822175,"author":"lettergram","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science","text":"I recommend the book: Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions Generally, all scientific fields have immense issues related to the walled gardens and limitations created by their peers. I also recommend this discussion between Eric and Brett Weinstein which highlights just one example of the major issues: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JOLtS4VUcvQ":[{"hn_comment_id":19986127,"author":"Animats","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1908)","text":"The editing, pacing, and style were better. Educational videos today tend to go to one of two extremes. Either they're a talking head with PowerPoint, like most of the \"massively online\" courses. Or they have way too many jump cuts, like theatrical movies which want your attention, not your understanding. There's also an annoying tendency to have distracting music and irrelevant graphics during narration. Here's an old Jam Handy film, \"Spinning Levers\", on how a transmission works.[1] There's a whole series of these Chevrolet films on the Internet Archive, covering major vehicle systems. Things to note: - There's a narrator and a demonstrator. We never see the narrator, and the demonstrator never talks. So the viewer can focus. - The demo models of parts are really good. They start with a simple version and add features until a full transmission has been built up. - There's some simple animation. Animation is used to point out how power flows through the gears. This is much clearer than someone using a pointer. - The editing and narration are very well synchronized. - There's an entertaining part at the beginning and end, so you don't feel like they're beating you over the head with the boring stuff. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18346521,"author":"jolmg","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Why some things are darker when wet (1988)","text":"Lately, because of a car situation, I've been watching car mechanic videos online. There's some old videos, like 1937 old, made by Chevrolet, that explain really well how different mechanics of a car work. One explains a transmission starting from levers[1], how they work to give mechanical advantage, and how gears are basically spinning levers. I ended up feeling like I could make a basic transmission if I only knew how to make metal pieces in the shapes I want. From there I've been looking at people disassembling automatic transmission and explaining the different parts. I gotta say, learning how these machines work mechanical advantage to something so convenient has really raised my interest in physics and mechanical engineering. I don't remember simple machines[2] being something so interesting back in physics class. I don't blame the teacher, 'cause she was always enthusiastic about physics. I wonder why this is more interesting now than then. It's probably just that, now that I'm older, I can understand complex applications of those fundamentals being taught at school. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23587085,"author":"MaxBarraclough","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Strike a Solder Joint Behind Enemy Lines","text":"A couple of other examples: an old US Army training video on the workings of various categories of firearms [0], and an old video on how transmissions work [1]. Both make great use of physical models of the mechanisms. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38519255,"author":"deaddodo","month":"2023-12","story_title":"1962 Military Innstructional Video on Magnetic Cores","text":"All of the old US gov't/mil funded education films are pretty good. * [LINK] * [VIDEO] * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] Etc.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42221768,"author":"_xerces_","month":"2024-11","story_title":"A 15-minute intro to involute gears","text":"This old training video is great too, it also mentions the idea touched upon in the article that gear teeth are levers: Spinning Levers - How A Transmission Works (1936) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JQymn5flcek":[{"hn_comment_id":37446149,"author":"tapoxi","month":"2023-09","story_title":"The Telescript Programming Language","text":"For anyone else amazed by General Magic, the recently released documentary is available for free (legally) on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44211299,"author":"gavmor","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Bill Atkinson has died","text":"If you haven't, check out the documentary[0] on General Magic which Bill co-founded in 1990. Among the more remarkable scenes in there is when a member of the public seems perplexed by the thought that they would even want to \"check email from Times Square.\" An unthinkable future, but they thought it. And yet, most folks have never heard of General Magic. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44211512,"author":"JKCalhoun","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Bill Atkinson has died","text":"Plenty of interviews will Bill on YouTube. Example: [LINK] Also, perhaps the General Magic documentary is a fun watch too: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JRuNA2eK7w0":[{"hn_comment_id":19952821,"author":"chii","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Sam Altman\u2019s leap of faith","text":"Pascal's wager is actually logically flawed. If there are two separate AGI invented, and you could only have chosen to invest in one, then where's the infinite capture of value? See this video on a reasonable argument about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36607277,"author":"mptest","month":"2023-07","story_title":"OpenAI: Introducing SuperAlignment","text":"All of this discussion really makes me think of Robert Miles \"Is ai safety a Pascal's mugging?\" from 4 years(!) ago[0]. All of this discussion has been had by Ai safety researchers for years in my layman understanding... Maybe we can look to them for insight in to these questions? [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37098683,"author":"circuit10","month":"2023-08","story_title":"AI Causes Real Harm. Let\u2019s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype","text":"The difference to Pascal\u2019s wager is that with that the probability is vanishingly small, but given current progress the probability of AI causing an existential threat is actually quite high. You can\u2019t just call anything that has very bad negative consequences Pascal\u2019s wager Video about this: \u201cIs AI Safety a Pascal\u2019s Mugging?\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47068113,"author":"circuit10","month":"2026-02","story_title":"There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming","text":"Here\u2019s a video called \u201cIs AI safety a Pascal\u2019s Mugging?\u201d: [VIDEO] From what I remember the main point of the video is that kind of situation happens when the probability involved is vanishingly small, and all the events you listed don\u2019t have a vanishingly small probability, so they are not Pascal\u2019s wager situations, just a normal rational safety concerns with particularly high consequences","stance":"rec"}],"JTfhYyTuT44":[{"hn_comment_id":24488480,"author":"listennexttime","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Remembering my father","text":"It's pretty easy to find other sources that cover the same survey that is shown in the graphic of the grandparent's comment. (Business Insider, for example: [LINK] ) Keep in mind this survey was in May and I'd be willing to bet the numbers have grown, as I've watched QAnon grow, multiple mainstream Republicans have embraced them (and won primaries ) and the Vice President was slated to attend a fundraiser put on by a QAnon group until days of pressure forced him to cancel just days ago. I've watched HN downplay gamergate. I've watched it downplay climate change (until recently, finally). I've watched it downplay anti-intellectualism at every turn, whether it be flat-eartherism, anti-vaxxers, or qanon, there's this purveying sense of \"it will all work out\", and that's just completely out-of-touch with reality. Here's a fun one for some background on QAnon, and how the rest of the world perceives it/us right now: [LINK] And for a complete understanding of how Flat Eartherism proud anti-illectualism has DIRECTLY LED US TO QANON, this video is invaluable: [VIDEO] It spells it out step-by-step and I'd love to hear someone try to respond to it. I haven't even expressed any of my own political feelings but I'm sick of watching people use ovenmits to talk about the fact that the anti-intellecutual, pro-conspiratorial actors are by and large self-identified as \"conservative\", or \"Republican\" or \"pro-Trump\". We can't keep acting like this isn't the case. All of these issues, politics, ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26242688,"author":"jesseryoung","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Letters from House members to cable providers [pdf]","text":"Perhaps a better example: Jewish people are telling you the earth is round so that way they can distract you from the fact they're kidnapping children and drinking their blood. A fantastic video on the topic of difficult to debunk, but easy to produce content [VIDEO] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27096954,"author":"th0ma5","month":"2021-05","story_title":"There\u2019s no such thing as a tree, phylogenetically","text":"And if you want a chaser for any flat Earth material check out [VIDEO] \"In Search of a Flat Earth\" probably the best documentary I have seen on conspiracy theories.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30888698,"author":"MrAwesome","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Study conspiracy theories with compassion","text":"Folding Ideas on YouTube put out a documentary on YouTube which I think is a great example of this approach (complete with a nifty and thorough visual experiment on the roundness of the Earth, and a still-topical plot twist halfway through): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31137076,"author":"cyborgx7","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Umberto Eco on common features of fascism (2016)","text":"Belief in Flat Earth is most definitely not a joke for a very large group of people (though it is absolutely a joke for a much larger group of people). It is part of a wider movement of biblical literalism and conspiracy theories describing an international anti-christian plot. The fact that it is easily disproved isn't really a problem for these kinds of conspiracy theories. It actually kind of acts as a purity test for members. Kind of like how scams still use the \"nigerian prince\" trope, because it ensures only the most promising marks fall for it. A great documentary on the topic by Dan Olson aka Folding ideas: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34588593,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Interesting","text":"One of the best analyses of this whole thing I've seen is \"In Search Of A Flat Earth\" by Folding Ideas: [VIDEO] Essentially, professing absurd beliefs is a sort of shibboleth to demonstrate in-group membership. The absurdity is the point , because it differentiates them from outsiders. Normal people make true or factual statements all the time, that's not a good differentiator! The statements need to be false and/or absurd to function for their intended purpose. The Flat Earth mythos isn't even that outlandish compared to mainstream religions, and well within the same wheelhouse as the type of beliefs used to identify the in-group in cults. Scientology comes to mind, but there are many others. I highly recommend watching the entire video, because there is a lot more to the phenomena than I initially suspected.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36398739,"author":"fallingfrog","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Dunning\u2013Kruger effect and flat-earthers: An exploratory analysis","text":"There\u2019s a great YouTube essay called \u201cin search of a flat earth\u201d that explores this phenomenon. It\u2019s definitely worth a watch- it sort of lays bare the mindset of a group of people who want the world to be a simple, familiar place where there is certainty about everything. And, the host actually goes to a really long, calm lake and using a camera, shows the curvature of the earth in a visceral, visual way that is way more moving than I thought it would be. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37068007,"author":"tenacious_tuna","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Who's Seeking New Friends?","text":"> It's not the FE that's attractive, it's that they're people who put very little value on social conformity and thus can be honest in a way that \"fit ins\" can't. There's a marvelous video [1] that Dan Olsen of Folding Ideas did as a deep dive into the community of Flat Earth and how it manages to survive. The TL;DW (though it really is worth the watch) is that people both want and need community, and all communities have ways of signaling that you belong to them. Sometimes it's language, sometimes it's clothes, sometimes it's behaviors--the \"qualifications\" vary wildly by group, but in many cases from the outside the exhibited behaviors of a group (e.g., believing in flat earth) don't jive with the rest of the perceived individual (e.g., scientifically literate) until you factor in that the behaviors don't have to matter beyond ensuring membership to a group. A whole lot of things make a lot more sense to me when seen through that lens, including a lot of organized religion. People just want to belong, and often the \"price of entry\" is inconsequential vs. the payoff of belonging somewhere. Thanks for sharing your story. It helps me to understand the \"Why\" of some of these things, and helps me feel more connected to my fellow beings. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47631872,"author":"simonw","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Artemis II crew take 'spectacular' image of Earth","text":"This was a fantastic YouTube video on flat earther beliefs from a few years ago: [VIDEO] Spoiler - they mostly switched to QAnon instead.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24644447,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2020-09","story_title":"My Father Firmly Believes the Earth Is Flat, How to Help","text":"You don't need to send anything to 35k feet; you only need a camera with a decent telephoto lens and a long lake on clear day with calm winds. From one shore of the long lake, view objects at the far shore from normal standing height using the camera+lens. If you then carefully lower the camera to the ground, you can watch objects (boats! people! small buildings!) dissapear behind the curvature of the lake's surface. Dan Olson (\"Folding Ideas\") demonstrates this experiment in the video[1] I recommended in an earlier post[2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25735349,"author":"pas","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler","text":"It's not about real financial problems. There's that too, but people in that situation don't spend days protesting, they usually work a lot or are looking for, or do something that helps them escape their problems. QAnon, fascism, conservative ideology all have \"social order\" in common. QAnon of course drives it up to 11+, it's a full blown doomsday cult, with Trump being some kind of figurehead. And there's always something that threatens the status quo, their place in society. Immigrants, globalization, China, muslims, mexicans, antifa, gays, transgender frogs, liberal elites, uppity n....s. Recommended long, but very insightful video: [VIDEO] Naturally facts don't matter. You mentioned globalism, which indeed displaced many people from jobs, but this has always been ongoing. A hundred years ago this change was even more drastic. But back then this wasn't \"weaponized\". (Then the unions came, but then they too faded as technological changes dispersed big groups of homogeneous workers.) And now modern political parties try to play on these identities. (Mostly through candidates, as they locally present themselves, and naturally try to mobilize people.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28698115,"author":"YossarianFrPrez","month":"2021-09","story_title":"YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content","text":"So the second-order effects of YouTube banning content, as you point out, are interesting and hard to predict. The question is should fear of second order effects prevent YouTube from taking action towards a desired first order effect? For some context, prior to Youtube changing the algorithm, flat earth videos basically created the modern flat earth movement [1]. It's likely that this effect can go the other way, too. I like to think that people are less drawn to conspiracy theories etc. when they are socially well-connected. The trouble about the pandemic is that there is a negative feedback loop: we have these socially isolating restrictions because there is a deadly virus, and one reason the virus remains unchecked is, in part because a subset of socially isolated people are drawn to misinformation. [1] See the documentary In Search of A Flat Earth for more details: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28855320,"author":"WillDaSilva","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Why \u201cTrusting the Science\u201d Is Complicated","text":"The harm people cause by holding believing false beliefs is rather complicated at times, yet extremely important and impactful nonetheless. For flat earthers in particular this video sheds some light on why their way of thinking is harmful: [VIDEO] To be extremely reductive, allowing false beliefs into one's web of beliefs corrupts it. This typically gives rise to a multitude of other false beliefs. Flat earthers almost never only believe one obviously false conspiracy theory. They become epistemically susceptible, and worse still, they tend to spread these awful ways of thinking with great zeal. In the more general case, I recommend you learn about the ethics of belief. The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on the topic is a good starting point: [LINK] Maybe someone can come along and answer your question in a more succinct yet equally (or ideally more) convincing way. This request that you commit several hours to educating yourself is the best I can do at this time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31276699,"author":"Nzen","month":"2022-05","story_title":"How Crossrail was affected by the curvature of the Earth (2018)","text":"Dan Olsen published a video [0], last year, outlining his experiment on Minnewanka Curve and the ideology driving people who deny his, and similar results, demonstrating the curvature of the earth. While there is no artificial structure, he observes that trees on the opposite side of the lake are obscured by the water surface. He also published raw footage of the multiple recordings he took as a separate 28 minute video. [0] [VIDEO] 90 minutes","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31977568,"author":"kadoban","month":"2022-07","story_title":"I watched hundreds of flat-Earth videos to learn how conspiracy theories spread","text":"Seems like a good, well thought out article. If you're looking for more depth on this subject, I found this video very good [VIDEO] (though I was already a fan of Folding Ideas)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40058807,"author":"well_actulily","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Amazon is filled with garbage e-books, this is how they get made","text":"Highlights include: - \"In Search of a Flat Earth\" (2020): [VIDEO] - \"Line Goes Up\" (2022): [LINK] - \"The Future is a Dead Mall\" (2023): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42184065,"author":"vundercind","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science","text":"I figured your link would be this one: [VIDEO] (Folding Ideas, \"In Search of a Flat Earth\") He takes a couple of their claims seriously about what one will see when attempting particular experiments involving a very large lake, attempts them, sees the results one would expect if the Earth were curved, and reports this to some flat earth community forum, refining the experiment as they suggest ways he may have screwed it up, and continuing to find curvature (obviously). The real story is how they react to contrary evidence delivered entirely on their terms, and where that community was heading four years ago (beware\u2014I guess\u2014that part also becomes necessarily \"political\"). [EDIT] I guess I buried the lede for this site's interest, which is that the video devotes a fair bit of time to how the Youtube \"algorithm\" took a little success for Flat Earth videos as a cue to aggressively promote them to people it identified as maybe liking them (those inclined to fall down that particular rabbit hole\u2014which involves a lot more than just the specific belief that the earth is flat), but now flat earth is in decline, because that and other \"algorithms\" started sending the same folks to... Q-anon content instead. Incidentally, there was a somewhat-big documentary on Flat Earth some years ago that included some folks from a flat earth convention trying some experiments very similar to the ones depicted in this video (involving visibility of objects across a large lake), with predictable outco","stance":"rec"}],"JWD1Fpdd4Pc":[{"hn_comment_id":9939131,"author":"blaenk","month":"2015-07","story_title":"What's new in Magit 2.x","text":"TL;DR: Watch this video: the stated reasons for switching are very similar to my own. It wasn't until I watched this video and read the book that I took the plunge to switch to emacs. It was the fact that with emacs I could have vim _plus_ much more and better functionality. [VIDEO] I'll have to write a blog post about it sometime, but basically while I absolutely _love_ the vim 'editing interface', that is, not the GUI, but the modal editing, the bindings, motions, objects, relative line numbers, and so on, everything else aside from that, primarily plugins, always felt like ad-hoc hacks to me. I've contributed to a couple of vim plugins so I've seen it first hand, to the point where plugin authors I've worked with have expressed feelings of wanting to switch to emacs to just make things easier. Indeed, some have, such as the vim-airline author [ [LINK] ]. Whereas plugins in vim oftentimes gave me the impression that they were stopgaps and hacky workarounds to get vim to do something it wasn't meant to do, emacs packages feel very natural, comprehensive, and well designed. Just take this article for example. As awesome as vim-fugitive is for vim, I feel that it's good _for being a vim plugin_, but it has _nothing_ on the equivalent on emacs: magit. Take a look at it's comprehensive documentation: [LINK] Or flycheck's [ [LINK] ] documentation here [ [LINK] ] It seems like everyone puts up with everything else about vim just to have the good parts of vim that are generally ver","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9829505,"author":"kristiandupont","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Firemacs: Emacs keybindings for FireFox","text":"I, as a Vim user myself, recently saw this and decided to give emacs a try. I still have a long way to go but I have to say that it really does look like it might be the best of both worlds. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12104353,"author":"endgame","month":"2016-07","story_title":"\u201cGive me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB\u201d [video]","text":"You might find this article useful: [LINK] Aaron gave a great talk about his switch here: [VIDEO] , which caused several people at work to move off NeoVim and give emacs a go.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12265255,"author":"endgame","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Intero for Emacs: complete interactive development program for Haskell","text":"I don't know NixOS, but this blog post and lecture might help you give emacs a fair trial: [LINK] [VIDEO] One of my vim-using coworkers found it. He, along with another colleague, have since found emacs compelling enough to use as their main text editor.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17685903,"author":"chungy","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Can I use a non-monospaced font in either Vim or gVim?","text":"It sounds counter-intuitive to use another editor, especially Emacs, but this might actually be the best advice. Emacs is on top of the game for proportional text editing, as well as the ability to make it behave very much (even exactly so) like Vim. I'd recommend watching this talk for why: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21642687,"author":"spudlyo","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Emacs: The Editor for the Next Forty Years [video]","text":"Emacs has recently been seeing a lot of growth from vim users who are migrating to emacs \"distros\" (like spacemacs and doom) that are pre-configured with emacs' vim-emulation. I found this video[0] a pretty interesting perspective from a die-hard vim user who switched. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23070429,"author":"swalladge","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Emacs' Org-Mode and Syncthing = Perfect (2017)","text":"\"Evil Mode: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Emacs\" by Aaron Bieber is an interesting talk on switching from vim to emacs + org-mode. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JXpoALotxf0":[{"hn_comment_id":22193403,"author":"anfractuosity","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Kodak Alaris warns the TSA's new airport CT scanners can damage undeveloped film","text":"On the topic of film, this little short video \"Behind the Film - Inside the ILFORD factory\" is cool - [VIDEO] They also have a lab that do b&w prints from digital files on photo paper interestingly.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30805497,"author":"piffey","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Kodak factory tour: How does Kodak make film? [video]","text":"The Ilford factory video is a fun watch: [VIDEO] There are also a few new film producers coming around. Film Ferrania ( [LINK] ) I'm most excited about as it's the first new analog film factory built. You can see a full list of current film producers and film stocks here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Ja5Q75hf6QI":[{"hn_comment_id":19057187,"author":"newnewpdro","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Vice Media to Reorganize, Lay Off 10 Percent of Staff","text":"Their youtube channel used to deliver incredibly raw and direct coverage of world events other US news sources seemed to be ignoring. Over the last few years though I've become increasingly annoyed with what content of theirs I saw, it's definitely changed. Their coverage of the rebuilding efforts and failures in Afghanistan for instance was very illuminating and well done, I highly recommend giving this a watch though it's very upsetting: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28189683,"author":"peterkelly","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Afghan president flees the country as Taliban move on Kabul","text":"For a fascinating insight into the disaster that was supposed to be the training of and transition to local security forces, I highly recommend the 2013 documentary \"This Is What Winning Looks Like\": [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30180394,"author":"cf141q5325","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Vice Media organised $20M Saudi government festival","text":"Vice news has (or had?) some actual journalists. They hired Ben Anderson whos Afghanistan and Iraq reporting was really impressive. Especially \"This is what winning looks like\". [VIDEO] If i recall correctly he made the footage when embedded via the BBC and (re)published it on vice? Still incredibly impressed of the footage he managed to shoot as an embedded journalists. I would guess in no small parts due to the integrity of Major Bill Steuber. Unfortunately that seems to have cost him his military career. He is now a security guard in Manhattan. [LINK] Afterwards Anderson mentioned the required style of reporting at Vice negatively (the camera focusing on his reactions) but he stayed with them for a while. Not sure if he is still associated with them. edit: Fixed timestamp & He left vice last year [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34827914,"author":"pengaru","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Taliban fighters are sick of the 9 to 5 working desk jobs to run Afghanistan","text":"If you haven't seen the VICE special This Is What Winning Looks Like [0], watch it. As a sibling comment said, there was no plausible path to success. It was just a tremendous waste of time and resources, many of which just ended up in terrorist hands. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7895065,"author":"HenryMc","month":"2014-06","story_title":"The U.S. Military\u2019s Campaign Against Media Freedom","text":"The Vice documentary 'This Is What Winning Looks Like' has some great reporting on Afghanistan. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21916817,"author":"newnewpdro","month":"2019-12","story_title":"What were the creepiest declassified documents of the last decade?","text":"The VICE documentary This Is What Winning Looks Like exposes some of the same struggles with Afghanistan. It's a very sobering and disturbing report, available on youtube. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27801748,"author":"pengaru","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Special Report: Afghan pilots assassinated by Taliban as U.S. withdraws","text":"The VICE documentary This Is What Winning Looks like [0] was very illuminating for me, the situation there is a total clusterfuck and waste of resources. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28277970,"author":"sureglymop","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Fighting Like Taliban","text":"The goal was never to \"win\". It was to build up an army (the afghan army) that could eventually stand by itself and defend the government in place. This was a largely failing effort even years ago, considering that most of the afghan army were made up of people from the north of Afghanistan and previous geopolitics (north/south) play a role. The people in the south would at times trust the taliban over sympathisers for the previous northern warlords which had influence over members of the afghan army. See this documentary (from 8 years ago) about how utterly lost and helpless this situation has always been: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35781705,"author":"pengaru","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Vice Is Said to Be Headed for Bankruptcy","text":"I was never much of a VICE follower, but their This Is What Winning Looks Like [0] special on the US' war in Afghanistan seemed like pretty solid journalism. Wish they'd continue producing content like that... Hamilton's Pharmacopeia was fun as well. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35830198,"author":"reaperman","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Vice Media to be Acquired by George Soros and Fortress","text":"\"Old Vice\": [VIDEO] \"New Vice\": [LINK] Hopefully they can regain their conscience and quality.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35830211,"author":"reaperman","month":"2023-05","story_title":"\u2018Like Icarus \u2013 now everyone is burnt\u2019: how Vice and BuzzFeed fell to earth","text":"\"Old Vice\": [VIDEO] \"New Vice\": [LINK] > A @VICEUK video producer once responded to me: \"I don't understand why this is so difficult, all I want to know is if you can do the job\" when I brought up the issue of my safety covering sensitive topics in China, and how I'll take the fall while her team leaves unscathed. > Naomi: Off limits stuff: I don't talk about my relationship status or my sexual orientation. China is China and it's a complex issue that is sometimes dealt with in pragmatic ways- and my focus is on other issues. It's just a lot of trouble here. > Vice: \"LOL. We outed you on an international stage and also went out of our way to get your Patreon banned, buh-bye!\" Hopefully they can regain their conscience and quality.","stance":"rec"}],"Jb4prVsXkZU":[{"hn_comment_id":13911057,"author":"mholt","month":"2017-03","story_title":"The Space-Glider (2000)","text":"On a related note, I highly, highly recommend this entertaining and technical presentation by Bret Copeland, How to Land the Space Shuttle... From Space: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34619965,"author":"grecy","month":"2023-02","story_title":"A Cold War mystery: Why did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle?","text":"Here's a cool video of landing the shuttle in real time. The whole landing proceeds unnervingly fast! The actual landing HUD and audio starts at 13:40 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JcJSW7Rprio":[{"hn_comment_id":34172502,"author":"shadowgovt","month":"2022-12","story_title":"I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM [video]","text":"His Harder Drive paper was amazing [ [VIDEO] ], most especially the ending that considered a surprisingly common configuration of utterly useless, inefficient mass data storage that solves a problem nobody actually has.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34872985,"author":"josephg","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Store files inside of YouTube videos","text":"Suckerpunch did a video on \u201charder drives\u201d where he implemented a block storage device by storing data in ping packets. It\u2019s one of my all time favourite technical talks - his style is amazing, and he\u2019s an incredible story teller. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36810817,"author":"alserio","month":"2023-07","story_title":"GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]","text":"As the other commenter said, everything on his channel is gold. Just the other day I was rewatching \"Automated 3dfication of Nintendo games\" [LINK] and \"Harder Drives\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38700912,"author":"mk_stjames","month":"2023-12","story_title":"NASA sends cat video over laser from 80 lunar distances","text":"This idea is covered during the first part of one of my favorite Tom7 videos. If this comment is the first you are hearing of Tom7... strap in and enjoy: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43518243,"author":"godelski","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Vramfs: Vram Based Filesystem for Linux","text":"> harder drive Here's the direct YouTube link[0] I'd * HIGHLY* recommend this video to anyone here. It is exactly that fun silly computer science stuff where you also learn a shit ton. His channel is full of this stuff. Don't ask why, ask why not Is essentially the motto of his channel, and it is the best. Leads to lots of innovations and I think we all should encourage more of this kind of stuff. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34871613,"author":"Lt_Riza_Hawkeye","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Store files inside of YouTube videos","text":"Maybe it doesn't have a post of its own, but I found these esoteric storage methods greatly entertaining as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36186579,"author":"mtlmtlmtlmtl","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough","text":"I love this! Reminds me of Harder Drive by Tom 7: [VIDEO] It's better to go in unspoiled so I won't reveal any details.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36519713,"author":"cbm-vic-20","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Happy 50th Birthday, Ethernet","text":"See also Tom7's \"Harder Drive\" video. The whole thing is great, but the part relevant to the parent comment starts at 2:31. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36821507,"author":"nick-of-time","month":"2023-07","story_title":"GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]","text":"Mine are \"Harder Drives\"[1], \"ELO World\"[2], and \"Printable x86\"[3] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41063131,"author":"anitil","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Space-filling curves, constructively","text":"They're also useful for representing IPv4 space. Tom7 had a nice video where he does this after pinging the whole (IPv4) internet [0] [0] [VIDEO] at about 6 minutes, though I recommend the whole thing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41202886,"author":"alexwasserman","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need (2022) [pdf]","text":"There's a fantastic associated YouTube video that talks through these too: [VIDEO] It's a rabbit hole that had be fascinated for quite a while.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42903326,"author":"makizar","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space","text":"That's a really nice view! Made me think of this map of IP addresses arranged as a Hilbert curve i saw in this Tom7 video: (the rest of the video is wildly good if you haven't seen it) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Jd3-eiid-Uw":[{"hn_comment_id":1036791,"author":"slyn","month":"2010-01","story_title":"Proof of Concept - See through OLED screen on a laptop","text":"Specifically: [VIDEO] Check out his entire youtube channel, it is full of interesting software/hardware hacks.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12967797,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Shadows and Blur Effects in Modern UI Design","text":"Check out Johnny Lee's awesome \"Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote\"! [VIDEO] More great stuff: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26861336,"author":"mattowen_uk","month":"2021-04","story_title":"This is what Doom looks like on a holographic display","text":"> [VIDEO] I did this at the time. I downloaded his Wii app that shows the little red/white discs, and bought a battery powered Wii-bar thing that had the IR leds in it and strapped it to my head. Can confirm, the 3D effect is 100% spot on, even the smallest move of your head caused the display to adjust perspective and your brain is totally fooled into thinking the Wii display is a just a window into a 3D scene. tbh, it was the only cool thing I actually did with my Wii!","stance":"rec"}],"JdxkVQy7QLM":[{"hn_comment_id":4102454,"author":"lotharbot","month":"2012-06","story_title":"I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.","text":"Related: [VIDEO] - Rob Paravorian on how so many songs have the same chord sequence as Pachelbel's Canon in D","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19407696,"author":"naravara","month":"2019-03","story_title":"How did classical music in movies and TV become synonymous with villainy?","text":"There was a relevant and entertaining stand-up bit about this: [VIDEO] This might partly be why people love the music they heard as teens first. I hear a lot of stuff now that just seems like riffs on stuff I\u2019ve heard before. I don\u2019t have the nostalgia of first being exposed to it in my formative years to carry me through.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38265887,"author":"aidenn0","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Google Sues Men Who Weaponized DMCA Notices to Crush Competition","text":"I like the live version of that better[1], and while the Axis of Awesome wins in the shear number of songs, I like Rob P's presentation[2] of the same idea more. 1: [LINK] 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JeB3JnKp8To":[{"hn_comment_id":46504009,"author":"TheRealPomax","month":"2026-01","story_title":"World's largest functioning musical instrument: Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia","text":"It sounds like you don't actually know how a real organ works, which literally has different instrument groups all over the place behind the walls, with your stops controlling which instruments sound out, and your separate decks giving you additional control over which sections to play. You'll want to give [VIDEO] a watch, where Rob Scallon takes us on a trip to discover how incredible these instruments are, and should highlight just how little an organ is like a piano (not even \"four pianos\") and how much it really is an entire orchestra.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34318276,"author":"organman91","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Organ as a Wind Instrument","text":"In addition to being thought of as a wind or keyboard instrument, there's another component to all pipe organs that makes each of them unique in a way (almost) no other instrument is - the room they are installed in. With very rare exceptions, pipe organs aren't mobile, so the acoustics of the room matter almost as much as the pipes do. Here's Rob Scallon exploring the largest pipe organ in the midwest: [VIDEO] Here's a more in depth look at all the sounds of that same organ: [LINK] - this channel has documented a number of organs over the years.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39102122,"author":"tiew9Vii","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Can You Live Code a Church Organ? [video]","text":"I came across another similar video a while ago going down a YouTube rabbit hole 3am one morning. Controlling a MASSIVE pipe organ with my computer, Rob Scallon [LINK] The precursor to that video is just as if not more interesting, \"Pipe Organ (An instrument the size of a building)\" [VIDEO] . In the video they find a midi port on the control unit. Several months later after talking to the manufacturer they go back and figure out how to get midi working and play bohemian rhapsody. It would of been an experience to be there with the size of the organ.","stance":"rec"}],"Jes3bD6P0To":[{"hn_comment_id":39780995,"author":"ievans","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Difftastic, a structural diff tool that understands syntax","text":"Absolutely agreed, and copying from a comment I wrote last year: I think the fact that tree-sitter is dependency-free is worth highlighting. For context, some of my teammates maintain the OCaml tree-sitter bindings and often contribute to grammars as part of our work on Semgrep (Semgrep uses tree-sitter for searching code and parsing queries that are code snippets themselves into AST matchers). Often when writing a linter, you need to bring along the runtime of the language you're targeting. E.g., in python if you're writing a parser using the builtin `ast` module, you need to match the language version & features. So you can't parse Python 3 code with Pylint running on Python 2.7, for instance. This ends up being more obnoxious than you'd think at first, especially if you're targeting multiple languages. Before tree-sitter, using a language's built-in AST tooling was often the best approach because it is guaranteed to keep up with the latest syntax. IMO the genius of tree-sitter is that it's made it way easier than with traditional grammars to keep the language parsers updated. Highly recommend Max Brunsfield's strange loop talk if you want to learn more about the design choices behind tree-sitter: [VIDEO] And this has resulted in a bunch of new tools built off on tree-sitter, off the top of my head in addition to difftastic: neovim, Zed, Semgrep, and Github code search!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18403596,"author":"lemming","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Owl: Parser generator for visibly pushdown languages","text":"For a really nice solution to the error message problem, see this recent strangeloop talk: [VIDEO] Basically it uses the parse tree disambiguation from the GLR parser to look for the most likely mistake the user made - it's very clever.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24934136,"author":"rtsao","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Introducing Semgrep and r2c","text":"It's great to see more tools adopting tree-sitter [1]. Having a (fast) single tool that can accurately parse most commonly used programming languages is incredibly useful, but it requires the maintenance of dozens of grammars, which is difficult without a large community effort. Hopefully increased adoption means more accurate parsers and support for even more languages. Tree-sitter powers syntax highlighting on GitHub.com and (soon) neovim and OniVim 2. Hopefully regex-based syntax highlighting is a thing of the past soon. If you haven't seen the Strange Loop conference talk on tree-sitter [2] yet, it's worth a watch. I think a Prettier-like code formatter using tree-sitter would be cool, both in terms of potentially broader language support and native performance. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38641845,"author":"AlexErrant","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Lessons from building GitHub code search [video]","text":"I also enjoyed the Treesitter talk from 5 years ago by Max Brunsfeld [VIDEO] I'm currently building a query language whose grammar is very much inspired by Github's search syntax. I'm using Lezer, which is a GLR like Treesitter, so this talk learned me some parser generators (I've no formal CS education). Here's my grammar, a playground, and an example search query if anyone wants to play with it [LINK] [LINK] -(a) spider-man -a b -c -\"(quote\\\"d) str\" OR \"l o l\" OR a b c ((a \"c\") b) tag:what -deck:\"x y\" I just converted the syntax tree to an abstract syntax tree so I can do De Morgan's law transformations. Literally the only time in my professional life where I feel like I'm solving a leetcode-style problem.","stance":"rec"}],"JfmTagWcqoE":[{"hn_comment_id":12594821,"author":"shermanyo","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Smart pointers and move semantics in modern C++","text":"Check all of Herb Sutter's CppCon videos from 2015-2016, especially this one: [VIDEO] He does a great job of walking through the thought process of deciding which of the options makes sense in different situations.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12594677,"author":"shermanyo","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Smart pointers and move semantics in modern C++","text":"Herb Sutter gave a really great talk on this: [VIDEO] He has 3 guidelines: 1. Prefer scoped lifetimes by default (local members) 2. Else prefer unique_ptr and containers 3. Else consider shared_ptr His whole talk gives examples that show the flexibility of unique_ptr and how modern C++ can express ownership. See slide 5 here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14978560,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Lazarus \u2013 A Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE","text":"Reference counting isn't deterministic in the presence of large complex data structures. You will know when memory gets deleted, but not how long it will take, nor how much stack space the destructors will require to run. Enjoy Herb Sutter's \"Leak-Freedom in C++... By Default.\" at CppCon 2016, where he explains how those issues affect C++ and goes on to implement a tracing GC. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18989214,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Fearless Security: Memory Safety","text":"Herb Sutter has a nice talk about how RAII can cause stack overflows or stop-the-world pauses if used badly. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22052921,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Show HN: A pure reference counting GC in Go","text":"On single core without threading. If you add multi-threading and multi-core, there is lock contention for every single memory access to update the related counter. Additionally, if there is a big data structure in use, reaching zero will trigger a cascade deletion events reaching stop-the-world like effect. Which, depending on how the deletion was implemented, might trigger a stack overflow in very deep structures. Herb Sutter has a very interesting talk about the bad issues of reference counting and how to work around them. CppCon 2016: Herb Sutter \u201cLeak-Freedom in C++... By Default.\u201d [VIDEO] There are multiple ways to optimize reference counting, like deferred counting, cycle collectors and a couple of others, which when you are done with all them, ends up being quite similar to having a tracing GC anyway.","stance":"rec"}],"JiNKlhspdKg":[{"hn_comment_id":37619007,"author":"patmorgan23","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Show HN: Learn piano without sheet music","text":"Yeah, it even goes down to the physics of harmonics. There's this absolutely wild video by Adam nealy about how polyrhythms are actually cords. (It's very approachable if you know just a smidgeon of music theory). Highly recommend Adam's channel if you're interested in music/music theory. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17928255,"author":"exabrial","month":"2018-09","story_title":"We know music is pleasurable, the question is why?","text":"We're able to recognize simple ratios instantly. The fact is without number the actual digits, we know they instantly simplify into a handful of fractions. That is mind blowing. What's even more mind blowing is Adam Neely's explanation of pitch ratios and how they're related to tempo. The short incorrect explanation is if you layer beats 4:4, 5:4, 6:4 ratios (which is the ratio of pitches against the root in a major chord), then speed it up to a ridiculous frequency, our ears hear a major chord. It would seem that Tempo and Pitch are very much intertwined and our brains decipher that very quickly without evening consciously dividing the frequencies. Major chord demo: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21384181,"author":"graup","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Color of Noise: What Do Hues Have to Do with Sound?","text":"There's a great talk by Adam Neely going into some interesting relations between sound and color: [VIDEO] (timestamp where he starts talking about color, but the whole talk is interesting.)","stance":"rec"}],"Jib2AmRb_rk":[{"hn_comment_id":15649228,"author":"8ig8","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Work on SQLite4 has concluded","text":"I stumbled on this video presentation by Dr Hipp recently (may have been from another HN comment). I really enjoyed it. Probably because he seems so enthusiastic and passionate. SQLite: The Database at the Edge of the Network with Dr. Richard Hipp [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28076075,"author":"srcreigh","month":"2021-08","story_title":"In Praise of PostgreSQL","text":"This point is echoed by the creator of SQLite, Dr Richard Hipp, in his excellent talk \"SQLite: The Database at the Edge of the Network\". [1] \"SQLite doesn't compete with client-server databases, it competes with fopen\" (I highly recommend to watch it, if only to get a sense of the smart and funny energy that Dr Richard Hipp puts off!) [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13569391,"author":"__derek__","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Is sqlite good for long-term persistence?","text":"> Hmmmm, there's a better talk by D. Richard Hipp around, but I'm not finding it atm. In the better talk he explains they (SQLite) are planning to be around for the 30 year timeframe you mention. Something to do with an airplane manufacturer looking for long term guarantees, but I don't remember the details. Here's the video[1] linked to from a tweet[2] linked to above.[3] [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16588513,"author":"kzrdude","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Why Is SQLite Coded in C? (2017)","text":"This talk is really interesting too [VIDEO] big industry projects (like the airline mentioned) probably contribute","stance":"rec"}],"JjDsP5n2kSM":[{"hn_comment_id":12639113,"author":"bajsejohannes","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Jon Blow's \"How to program independent games\": [VIDEO] It's about much more than games. To me, it's about identifying and not doing unnecessary work. The second half of this video is a Q&A session, which I would skip.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13521783,"author":"psyc","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?","text":"Every time I get stuck on a project, I watch this video. It's about games, but IMO a lot of it applies to software projects in general, especially MVPs. How to ship something that works before it collapses under its own complexity. I think the bit about remembering to optimize for developer effort is gold. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839792,"author":"Stwerner","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Really excited to go through all the other talks listed here I'm not familiar with! Three talks that I tend to reference a lot and have had a huge impact on the way I think about software: The Soul of Software: Avdi Grimm - [LINK] The Humane Representation of Thought: Bret Victor - [LINK] How to Program Independent Games: Jonathan Blow - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26246740,"author":"tompark","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer","text":"TFA has some good points. I'd go even further on the situation where you quit your job to work on an indie game -- if you ever find yourself doing this, and you've never built a game by yourself before, you'd better have several years of runway. For many years one of my favorite talks about indie games development was Jonathan Blow's speech at UC Berkeley CSUA (2011) ( [LINK] ) Initially I loved his main message during the talk: \"You have to be brutally effective to finish a project in a reasonable amount of time.\" But there's a part in the Q&A that later grew to be even more poignant to me: [VIDEO] > Q: You said you worked on many projects before Braid which didn't quite get completed. What was special about Braid which made you complete it? > A: What was special was it had been a long time since I'd finished anything on my own, and I sat down and decided that \"Dammit I'm going to finish something this time\". And, \"To that end, so I can finish this, I'm gonna make something that is technically pretty simple\"... For some of us, it's REALLY HARD to complete a side-project while working full-time job. For most of my career I had completed a real game only when it was for a job (or for a client) and I worked on it full-time. The single reason I hadn't made a game as a side project was because I'd quit before I finished. I finally figured out something that worked for me, and it was counter to all the advice I'd heard. I'm sure this is different for other people, but for me the k","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9011409,"author":"kelukelugames","month":"2015-02","story_title":"\u2018Braid\u2019 creator sacrifices his fortune to build his next game","text":"I've followed Jonathan Blow for a while. He has a reputation for being condescending. If you follow him a Twitter then you might come to the same conclusion. But he has given some amazing talks. [LINK] <-compares games to televison [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10236148,"author":"nulltype","month":"2015-09","story_title":"The Witness: the creator of Braid talks about his fiendishly difficult new game","text":"For anyone interested in just programming, he has a great talk here: [VIDEO] about \"how to program independent games\". Much of the advice seems to apply to other programming projects too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24921896,"author":"arriu","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Good C++ code bases to read?","text":"I've always encouraged people to check out Jonathan Blow's talk on this topic ( [VIDEO] ). He points out many reasons why this type of code would actually be the optimal version when weighing other factors. Simple code is easy to write, maintain, and optimize later. Despite the code looking messy, I find it easy to understand and navigate. A counter example of truly confusing code, which kind of does similar things, would be something like this: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25663210,"author":"lackbeard","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?","text":"Example masters: John Carmack, Jeff Dean, Bram Cohen. What do they do? I think they're all extremely effective at getting things done. So be smart, hard working, and laser focused on shipping. A long time ago I saw a good talk by Jonathan Blow wherein he made a point that really resonated with me. The point was that to get good at programming you need the experience of shipping a lot of programs and thus you should optimize your career around shipping as many good programs as you can. Contrast this with the common advice of being an expert in databases, or distributed systems, or OOP, or testing, or something like that... Edit: found the talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47427687,"author":"nlawalker","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming","text":"This reminds me of a portion of a talk Jonathan Blow gave[1], where he justifies this from a productivity angle. He explains how his initial implementation for virtually everything in Braid used arrays of records, and only after finding bottlenecks did he make changes, because if he had approached every technical challenge by trying to find the optimal data structure and algorithm he would never have shipped. \"There's a third thing [beyond speed and memory] that you might want to optimize for which is much more important than either of these, which is years of your life required per program implementation.\" This is of course from the perspective of a solo indie game developer, but it's a good and interesting perspective to consider. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Jkiij9dJfcw":[{"hn_comment_id":15948080,"author":"Symbiote","month":"2017-12","story_title":"German Kindergarten Campouts Test Helicopter Parents (2015)","text":"They're also very popular in Denmark, and the rest of Scandinavia. Description in English: [LINK] And a small documentary: [VIDEO] An equally significant difference for me, coming from the UK, is that there are men working in childcare. My window overlooks a street where a lot of nursery and primary school groups walk past on their way to the park, and my guess is half the adults are men. I was 9 years old in England when I first had a male teacher.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16374696,"author":"Mashimo","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Achtung Baby by Sara Zaske, Reviewed","text":"Here is also a nice short (11 mins) documentary about a kindergarten in Denmark, also from CBS Dateline. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21083632,"author":"IMAYousaf","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Outdoor Preschools","text":"Hi everyone. This is a very concise (11:32) video that goes over some of the culture and thinking around outdoor kindergartens. I believe that it is quite informative: [VIDEO] I believe that the best part about these schools is that early on they explicitly teach teamwork and understanding limits. It's quite shocking culturally seeing kids whittling with sharp knives and climbing rather precarious trees but it seems to work well.","stance":"rec"}],"JmaZR8E12bs":[{"hn_comment_id":25027293,"author":"wreath","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.","text":"He didn't call whites supremacists white people, if you listen to the rest of the sentence, he was referring to the protesters from BOTH sides that they are fine people. And then said that he condemns neo Nazis and white supremacists. I only came across this this morning btw, and I too believed he really did call them fine people.. EDIT: watch this whole thing [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25367156,"author":"Proziam","month":"2020-12","story_title":"YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud","text":"Just to add, here's the full clip - [VIDEO] I think everyone should watch this for themselves and decide whether the media's portrayal of what Trump said is reasonable and fair.","stance":"rec"}],"JmwbYl6f11c":[{"hn_comment_id":15764078,"author":"angarg12","month":"2017-11","story_title":"\u201cI thought I could ship at least 700 units to stay in business\u201d","text":"GDC: How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit [VIDEO] TL;DR: prepare for this to happen, and build a long tail of games/sales. I don't want to sound mean but I don't think anyone should buy the game because they feel sorry and he is begging. I can't condone it. It has become trendy for people to make GoFundMe campaigns or write articles begging people to help. Assume people do buy your game because they are sorry, and you manage to get by. Is that how you intend to create a sustainable business? What about other indie devs who failed, maybe even harder? Should they also write articles with their sad story? What about those who don't make it to the top of Hackernews? Should what is essentially charity support people taking risks? I take this article as a cautionary tale of what could go wrong when you go indie, one of those that we need more of in face of the wild success stories that saturate media.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35143486,"author":"KronisLV","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?","text":"> None of the big (or small) moneymakers in last few years came close to \"10 years\" of popularity and probably won't. I don't think much of the software out there behaves like this either. It might apply somewhat to game or software franchises, though. For example, LibreOffice has had multiple major releases, but has been around for a bit over 12 years, a bit longer if you include the predecessors. Ubuntu LTS is usually supported for around 5 years, but Ubuntu as a whole has been around for almost 20 years. Similarly, Counter-Strike was released over 20 years ago, even if there's been multiple separate games over the years. It's more or less the same story for Battlefield and Call of Duty. That said, that's setting your own goals unrealistically high, since those are the exceptions when compared to any number of unsuccessful games. If you try to compete against games like that, you'll just burn yourself out. Most startups aren't necessarily built for the longevity either, but rather to have a product hit the market within a reasonable time frame and budget. If you want, make games, fail, iterate, fail some more, iterate some more, maybe eventually succeed. Have a look at some grounded experiences from other folks, for example watch this video titled \"How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36511247,"author":"Firmwarrior","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Making Games","text":"I see this sentiment a lot on Twitter and Reddit, but it's a an overpressured Copium tank You can see a ton of polished, fun games that weren't successful by just skimming over lists of games on phones, Steam, or Nintendo Switch. I'm not going to bother linking any of them, since you're just going to nitpick and insult the work of random people you don't know, and it won't be a productive path of conversation. That said, you can redefine your idea of \"success\" a little and make a comfortable living: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JpqnNCx7wVY":[{"hn_comment_id":10169414,"author":"keeperofdakeys","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Perl 6 hands-on tutorial \u2013 A small introduction to a big language [pdf]","text":"As someone who is relatively new to perl, I think perl 6 is definitely a positive direction. It removes lots of inconsistencies, while providing a clean base for future expansion. For something like the sigils, what's more important - to know that a variable is a scalar, or that it's some kind of hash/array? The second would definitely be less confusing when learning the language. There are also definitely some good things coming out of perl 6, like this [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11409814,"author":"pplu","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Wow, Perl 6 [video]","text":"You can go to [LINK] , download it, and play with it now :) I recommend a look at a couple of videos to get started too: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JqNg819PiZY":[{"hn_comment_id":12382685,"author":"bitkrieg","month":"2016-08","story_title":"There are no particles, there are only fields (2012)","text":"If anyone is interested in the mechanics of the higgs field / basic quantum mechanics in general, I found this lecture to be an excellent explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31989141,"author":"simiones","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Large Hadron Collider discovers three new exotic particles","text":"The mass of the massive gauge bosons, the W and Z bosons. Edit: there is an excellent in-depth (but math-light) explanation about the Higgs mechanism by Leonard Susskind. I highly recommend it if you are interested, it lasts about 1h (plus some Q&A) and is extremely approachable, while being presented by an established authority in the field. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33267209,"author":"tsimionescu","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Inside the Proton","text":"If you're interested in the Higgs mechanism as a layman, I highly highly recommend this talk by Leonard Susskind: [VIDEO] It's about 1 hour long (plus some questions) and it goes through some basic ideas of what it means for something to have mass and all the way to the Higgs mechanism.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41438282,"author":"tsimionescu","month":"2024-09","story_title":"How the Higgs field gives mass to elementary particles","text":"If anyone wants to dig deeper, there is an excellent lecture on YouTube by Leonard Susskind. This goes into some details on how fields in general give mass to (composite) particles, and how the Higgs field has certain properties that allow it to give mass to elementary particles. It goes only into a tiny bit of math, absolutely intelligible at the high-school or at least undergraduate level. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31190048,"author":"simiones","month":"2022-04","story_title":"It took me 10 years to understand entropy","text":"> no one really knows what mass is. We only know that mass bends space-time curve, hence gravity. Mass is much better understood by its role in inertia. Basically mass is the amount of energy you need to exchange with a thing to change its current speed. This observation works from Newtonian mechanics to QM and GR as well. Now, why do things have mass? The famous E=mc\u00b2 explains this for most things: they have mass because something inside them has potential or kinetic energy. This works all the way down to the atomic level - the mass of a proton for example is almost entirely explained by the potential energy of the quarks being held together in a small volume; the total mass of the quarks themselves is only a small fraction of that. Now, the mass of the elementary particles is somewhat more complicated, but the Standard Model does have explanations for those - symmetry breaking for fermions, and the Higgs mechanism for the massive bosons. The next mystery is: why is inertial mass equal to gravitational mass? GR has essentially explained this, by showing that acceleration is equivalent to gravitational attraction depending on your frame of reference. So overall, I'm not sure what Brian Greene means by that - mass is at least as well understood as other basic properties of particles (charge, spin, color charge). This lecture by Leonard Susskind explains most of these things about mass in a way I found easy to follow: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33267315,"author":"tsimionescu","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Inside the Proton","text":"The quarks that are bound in a way we call a proton are held together by the strong force at a certain distance from each other - that distance is what we consider the volume of the proton, with the quarks being \"inside that volume\". This system of 3 quarks has some amount of potential energy, and/or some amount of kinetic energy from the relative movement of the 3 quarks. The mass of this system is then given essentially by E=mc^2, with E being this kinetic energy. There is a very good video of a lecture by Leonard Susskind that explains why energy and mass are interchangeable in this way if you want a more in-depth explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JrMiSQAGOS4":[{"hn_comment_id":29924324,"author":"labrador","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Russia says Ukraine talks hit 'dead end', Poland warns of risk of war","text":"I fully support the sovereignty of Ukraine, but I understand the Russian position from watching Prof. John Mearsheimer lectures, particularly this one: Why is Ukraine the West's Fault? [VIDEO] John Mearsheimer John Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar, who belongs to the realist school of thought. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He has been described as the most influential realist of his generation. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30056333,"author":"ivan_gammel","month":"2022-01","story_title":"U.S. weighs sending 5k troops to Eastern Europe to counter Russia","text":"Here\u2019s a good explanation: [VIDEO] In short, Russia has no intention to conquer Ukraine, but Russia has vital strategic interest there. With its actions it pursues to block eastwards expansion of NATO by wrecking the candidate states. At the same time, NATO policy is quite contradictory: Ukraine is not a vital strategic interest for USA, and thus NATO was not ready to fight for it in Donbass. At the same time they are happy to offer Article 5, which will oblige them to engage in the future conflicts in this area. Policy of open doors that NATO declares does not make much sense: by design it supposed to be a defensive alliance, not an empire, so why inviting countries which won\u2019t really contribute to your security?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30461570,"author":"Svettie","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Twitter based map of Russian troop movements","text":"I'm not \"enlightened\", and you can draw your own conclusions. But they don't have to annex Ukraine, they can just mess it up and cripple its military. At the least, Putin's stated aim is \"demilitarization\" of Ukraine. As for the comparison with the Baltic states, I would note that this entire situation evolved over decades. Perhaps Russia would have more strongly opposed NATO membership for the Baltics had it been in a more powerful position when that was happening. Perhaps they thought that NATO-expansion would stop there. A lot has happened in the past 3 decades and some patterns are much more clear now than they were back then. One that Putin has repeatedly pointed to is that the USA is continuously supporting overthrow of governments that it doesn't like, even in the case of democratically-elected Yanukovich in Ukraine. Maybe Putin is paranoid to think the same can happen in Russia, maybe not. But I think in his view, maintaining the nuclear deterrent with the West is an existential concern, like it had been for the USSR. Having NATO missiles and bases in Ukraine is clearly a step in the wrong direction for that concern. I'm not saying that this justifies war or that Putin is right. I just think that Putin perceives himself as a cornered rat, and that from this perspective his actions make a lot more sense than just seeing him as deranged or a power-hungry demagogue. This perspective is laid out more fully in this talk by John Mearsheimer if you're interested: [VIDEO] Thi","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30479315,"author":"bsd44","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Cutting Russia off from SWIFT a \u201cmatter of days\u201d \u2013 euro zone central banker","text":"If you want a short summary of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, I suggest this presentation/speech by John Mearsheimer - [VIDEO] - he explains it really well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30497445,"author":"ceilingcorner","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What do you read for a more objective view on the Russia-Ukraine war?","text":"I write all of this to help others understand the issue from multiple perspectives, not to justify or defend anyone. Here\u2019s what I\u2019ve learned in the last week or so. There is a good lecture on YouTube called Why Ukraine is the West\u2019s Fault. [VIDEO] Mearsheimer, a foreign policy expert of 50+ years, belongs to the \u201crealist\u201d school. I find his viewpoint helpful as it\u2019s very much Machiavellian and not focused on demonizing the Other. I\u2019m not sure how accurate his analysis is, but it seems worth looking at. [LINK] The gist is essentially this: - NATO, a Soviet-era military alliance, has continued to expand closer to Russia\u2019s borders. Russia feels threatened by this. - Russia tried to join NATO in the early 2000s but was rebuffed. - Russia adamantly opposed including Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, but America didn\u2019t care and pushed for it in 2008. - The US has largely driven this effort and has dragged the EU and Britain along for the ride. - The revolution/coup in 2014 (depending on which side you believe, I guess) removed more a neutral / pro-Russian government and put in a Western-focused one. This was followed by the separatism in the Donbas and Russia\u2019s taking of Crimea. However, note that this lecture was before the recent escalation and Mearsheimer didn\u2019t seem to think that Russia would actually launch a full-scale invasion. I would also note that he doesn't cover other important issues that are relevant to the conflict, namely: - The history of Ukraine in the last \u00b1500 yea","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30540354,"author":"rjzzleep","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Russia Cannot Win The War","text":"John Mearscheimer said the same in 2016[1]. Stephen Cohen apparently said the same. They don't need to \"take\" Ukraine. They just want it as a buffer zone. The Q/A at the end of John Mearscheimers talk is actually quite interesting. Ukraine is not of vital interested to the West. If it had been they would have integrated it into NATO already. They tried the same with Georgia and right away Russia attacked Georgia. More importantly he said that the west actually needs Russia against China, because once China becomes an actual threat it will become incomparable to any previous threat. Throwing Russia into China's arms over something that is not of vital interest to the US is insane. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30570543,"author":"Barrera","month":"2022-03","story_title":"CISA: Shields Up","text":"> While there are no specific or credible cyber threats to the U.S. homeland at this time, Russia\u2019s unprovoked attack on Ukraine, which has involved cyber-attacks on Ukrainian government and critical infrastructure organizations, may impact organizations both within and beyond the region. ... That word \"unprovoked\" is... loaded. Here's a definition: > (of an attack, or a display of aggression or emotion) not caused by anything done or said. Stepping out of the current climate, one might characterize NATO's relentless, creeping eastward expansion right up to Russia's border as something that might provoke a response. The Monroe Doctrine defines two entire continents as the US sphere of influence. The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated the US commitment to nuclear war if need be to avoid the placement of hostile forced on its borders. This is not what people want to hear right now. But it is exactly what they should be hearing. This lecture might be eye opening if any of this sounds contrived or like propaganda. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30570660,"author":"wuschel","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ukraine accepted to NATO cyber defence centre","text":"Thank you for your interesting line of thought. I do not know why you are downvoted - you have my upvote. I also think it is crucial to see the whole picture, and to take counter positions into account e.g. this [1] interesting talk by John Mearsheimer. It is not only Russia that lost its position in the world, the West has been playing contradictionary set of games in the last two decades as well: The events in Iraq and Afghanistan, the approach that outsourcing of production and technology for short term capital gains that was sold as an act that will bring the world together and not carry any risk in the form of a shift of industrial and military dominance. How did you come up with your position? Are you a pol.sci., or history aficionado? While I don't have any deep insight what actually drove Churchill what you described to the be an almost inquisitive research on Hitler's motives, I do think that he was able to see beyond the first level array of interests of his political class and understood the second order and long term implications for the British Empire and the European society as a whole when it came to let fascist take power on the continent. I always thought it was not morals that drove him, but a strong sense of Realpolitik and political opportunity. He had the same reasons to be wary of the terror in Russia - an antagonistic system to the British order and tradition... it was just that they were the enemy of his enemy and thus a very useful ally that turned ou","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42197501,"author":"trehnert","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke","text":"These anti disinformation posts are quite peculiar. I'd advise anyone who wants to dig deeper to listen to West Point graduate Mearsheimer: [VIDEO] It takes one hour to listen. Take notes and verify the facts afterwards. No disinformation there, much less Russian.","stance":"rec"}],"JsVtHqICeKE":[{"hn_comment_id":16841048,"author":"nikisweeting","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Jayson E. Street: Steal Everything, Kill Everyone, Cause Total Financial Ruin! [VIDEO] Van Albert and Banks: Looping Surveillance Cameras through Live Editing [LINK] Ken Thompson: Reflections on Trusting Trust [LINK] And of course, Simple Made Easy, Wat, etc.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26341950,"author":"crazypython","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite tech talk?","text":"The absolute funniest tech talk I've seen \"Steal Everything, Kill Everyone, Cause Total Financial Ruin!:\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"JtKAScORevQ":[{"hn_comment_id":8588145,"author":"ClayShentrup","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize","text":"This issue has been solved by math PhD's and political scientists who've studied the matter for decades. www.electology.org/approval-voting-vs-irv IRV can elect X even if Y was preferred to X by an arbitrarily huge majority and got more first-place votes than X. www.electology.org/core-support Regarding favorite betrayal, you might enjoy this video. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12920317,"author":"aninhumer","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Show HN: Mest \u2013 Place to talk with those you disagree with","text":"This is a shorter video from the same source as the other reply that deals specifically with IRV: [VIDEO] >Unless I misunderstand IRV, there is no \"vote stealing\" due to your vote automatically dropping off to your next-preferred candidate. The problem is that they drop to your next preferred candidate who has not been eliminated . If you're thinking about the problems that occur with plurality voting, it's easy to imagine your second choice will always be a popular \"safe\" choice, but if third parties get stronger (which is surely the point?) those safe choices can end up being eliminated before your second choice can help them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21327118,"author":"user234683","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City","text":"I always recommend this pair of videos when discussing STAR voting vs other alternative systems. The first video is an easy-to-follow explanation of how spoiler effects can happen in both plurality voting and IRV [1]. In the second [2], the guy who created Star voting applies Ka-Ping Yee's methods to Star voting and animates it side-by-side with alternative systems to show its performance. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27598286,"author":"godelski","month":"2021-06","story_title":"What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?","text":"RCV doesn't solve what is claimed in the article. It is interesting since countries that they give as examples are clear evidence of this. (Yes, I'm going to advocate cardinal systems like Approval, Range/Score, and STAR) > More moderate candidates. RCV doesn't encourage this at all. Australia is a clear example of this. In the house Liberal and Labor (the two major parties) control 85% of seats. The next major party (National) is part of a coalition with the Liberals and this sums to 95%. Things are only slightly better in the senate. Look at any country that uses IRC/RCV and you'll see a similar pattern. The system didn't encourage more parties and more moderates, Australia still has divided politics like America. As to the more parties, I have an alternative explanation. They use a parliament, which uses proportionate representation. Don't buy it? Go look at countries with parliaments and don't have IRV and you'll find similar distributions. We also need to recognize that in America our parties are closer to coalitions in other countries out of the necessity. I'm not sure how anyone can look at someone like AOC or Sanders and think they are the same \"party\" (by other country norms) as Biden or Pelosi (similarly on the Republican side, though Trump caused a consolidation). > ranked-choice voting can drastically reduce the possibility of spoilers. Yes, but no. It reduces spoilers when a candidate is not going to win anyways (e.g. Jo Jorgensen spoiling Trump). But this does n","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27600045,"author":"elihu","month":"2021-06","story_title":"What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?","text":"I agree with what /u/zestyping says in the other comment, so I won't repeat it. But here's a video explaining the strategic voting issue: [VIDEO] Also, wikipedia has an example of a non-monotonic result here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Jv7sLrON7QY":[{"hn_comment_id":34209328,"author":"chrisco255","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Today is Charlie Munger's 99th birthday","text":"I'm not necessarily the biggest Charlie Munger fan, but I think he's got some wisdom and found his 1995 speech he gave on human biases at Harvard to be insightful and interesting: \"The Psychology of Human Misjudgment\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39945507,"author":"robocat","month":"2024-04","story_title":"So you wanna de-bog yourself","text":"> they've created a bespoke system of abstract beliefs swatcoder, can you please tell me how you particularly manage to learn from your mistakes? Some people create personal theories of how the world works, and then put their theories into action : A successful example is Charlie Munger and heres his talk explaining some of his excellent theories: [VIDEO] Some people overthink things and label things. That can be unhealthy, and Adam touches on that with his \"Stroking the problem\" section. But the opposite can be unhealthy too: not thinking at all and repeating over and over making the same mistakes. > catchy names Useful when communicating with others if it is an uncommon concept. I like to search for the perfect word or perfect catchphrase when thinking about a problem or solution because it helps my thinking. > various example cases How do you do it? Don't you look at specific issues you find in your own life? Examples yes? And then generalise from that? I just don't understand what you're complaining about. The closest I can think is that you're anti-intellectual or you're a \"Just do it\" prosyletiser - the implication being that thinking is unnecessary and the problem. Academic over-thinking is its own problem: is that your issue? Like most things: we need to find the right balance. Thinking too little is bad in a different way from thinking too much. > intellectualize and systematize and engineer things I'm just gobsmacked at your choice of words: is systemizing and engin","stance":"rec"}],"JvBT4XBdoUE":[{"hn_comment_id":21784713,"author":"sho","month":"2019-12","story_title":"We 30x'd our Node parallelism","text":"> explore Go or Elixir I have never seen a good argument for using golang for business logic. If you are writing the actual server then sure, use golang. If you are writing some high-speed network interconnect, use golang. Some crazy caching system, sure use golang. The public WS endpoint, use golang. But if you need to access a DB with golang for anything more than, like, a session token, then you made the wrong choice and you need to go back and re-assess. Elixir is in the \"germination phase\" and I predict massive adoption in the next 5 years. It is a truly excellent platform, every fintech company I know at least has their toe in the water. Everyone I show this video to [1] just says \"well, shit.\" [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22337162,"author":"dnautics","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Crystal 0.33","text":"I replaced a python/uwsgi stateless stack with an elixir stateful system. Flipped it over and it worked flawlessly, and hasn't died once in several months of operation. Latencies are way down, and operation of it is simpler. Full deploy to the head node is one command, not an ansible script. I guess part of it is that I'm lazy and haven't learned supervisor strategies like kubernetes (the place I work doesn't deploy kubernetes anyways) This video is instrumental in giving me the confidence to do what I did: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23186274,"author":"irq-1","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Optimising for Concurrency: Comparing the BEAM and JVM virtual machines","text":"> [and particularly, videos] go out of their way to discuss how process management and IPC communication works After watching a bunch of videos on BEAM/erlang/elixir I came to the conclusion that it isn't a platform for computation, it's a platform for communication. The best video (by far) was The Soul of Erlang and Elixir \u2022 Sa\u0161a Juri\u0107 [VIDEO] Two shallow benchmarks: [LINK] [LINK] (phoenix is at 175)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24591682,"author":"probotect0r","month":"2020-09","story_title":"YouTube Channels to Level Up Your Programming Skills","text":"I would find a list of good talks much more useful. For example, 'The Soul of Erlang and Elixir' talk by Sasa Juric [1] really sold me on Elixir. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27684911,"author":"jtwebman","month":"2021-06","story_title":"An Elixir adoption success story","text":"Almost no business application is written for performance at raw request speed. What Elixir brings is far more the that. Watch this if you want to understand why so many people fall in love with it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39837379,"author":"sph","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Why Elixir (2014)","text":"From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: \"The Soul of Erlang and Elixir \u2022 Sa\u0161a Juri\u0107 \u2022 GOTO 2019\" - [VIDEO] When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagine a better platform than Erlang's for writing distributed and networked systems of any kind. I fell in love with Elixir in 2016 and have been using it full time since, first adopting as CTO in my previous company, now powering my new solo business. It's such a good language, with great community and stewardship, running on a rock solid platform that's so advanced compared to most popular languages today. Erlang was created 38 years ago, and it's good to see the ideas of Armstrong, Virding and Williams to be vindicated today. They simply were too far ahead of their time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40830477,"author":"lumannnn","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Two million checkboxes (written in Elixir)","text":"Check out this presentation :) \"The Soul of Erlang and Elixir by Sasa Juric\" Really one of the best presentations to show what you may get out of adopting Elixir. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21282174,"author":"gregors","month":"2019-10","story_title":"An Interview with Jose Valim, Creator of Elixir","text":"I feel like this talk does a great job of answering that question - The Soul of Erlang and Elixir by Sa\u0161a Juri\u0107 ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21859126,"author":"beefman","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"The Soul of Erlang and Elixir, by Sasa Juric video: [VIDEO] HN discussion: [LINK] Preventing the Collapse of Civilization, by Jonathan Blow video: [LINK] HN discussion: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24701408,"author":"randito","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Elixir 1.11","text":"If you're interested in Erlang/Elixir, you might want to watch this video: [VIDEO] (GOTO 2019 \u2022 The Soul of Erlang and Elixir \u2022 Sa\u0161a Juri\u0107) It shows off the power of the BEAM VM -- and kind of makes you stand back and go \"whoa.. how do they do that?\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27799403,"author":"lawik","month":"2021-07","story_title":"What I learned from Erlang about resiliency in systems design (2019)","text":"I feel like the post brushes past the best parts to line the learnings up with container concepts and k8s. The Erlang application/service should not be crashing. A crash happens in a process in a tree of supervisors and each supervisor can have strategies to recover if its child supervisor/process fails. Supervision in Erlang/BEAM is not just microservice infrastructure with restarts. It handles many types of failures knside the application and only if all mitigations repeatedly fail would we crash all the way up to the trunk of the tree and crash the application. If that happens the Erlang heart should be starting it back up or otherwise invoking some last-ditch mitigation. Or if you run Erlang in a container, that's when you'd have your infrastructural stuff restart it. Supervision in Erlang is much more granular and not about restarting the entire service. I think this gives a good view of Erlang resiliency: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34856547,"author":"yurishimo","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Queues Should Be Empty","text":"There are entire languages built upon this model! Anything using the BEAM is a great example. Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, etc. The runtime acts as an event loop and if a specific program is hogging too much time on the CPU, it will get paused and thrown to the back of the execution stack. This is all transparent (relatively) for the developer. Here\u2019s a video if you want to see an example: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34879186,"author":"dns_snek","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Millions of Active WebSockets with Node.js","text":"I can highly recommend Elixir in Action, 2nd ed. This talk by the same author is also a good introduction in video format: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35218702,"author":"SirGiggles","month":"2023-03","story_title":"How Async/Await Works in C#","text":"No, they're equivalent. It makes no difference whether I calculate in the current process, spawned a process, started a process via the Supervisor, Task.async, or what not. They are all equivalent in the sense that they use BEAM processes. An Elixir, Erlang, or any other developer using the BEAM VM (or at the very least myself since I don't want to generalize) doesn't make a semantic distinction between spawn and Task.async/3 because there is none. The significant differentiation is whether or not the caller is expecting a returned value, if not then Task.start_link can be used instead. I don't need to worry about function colouring because there is none. I also don't need to worry about async vs Task.run like in C# because in Elixir there is none. To be asynchronous in Elixir/Erlang/etc... is to be synchronous. To equate it to modern backends, we basically have a microservice but every service can directly call each other. I think I also might have been talking around you a bit, the BEAM VM sets itself apart from C#'s async/await or the TPL due to its implementation of the actor model. This video by Sasa Juric can explain better than I can the general overview of the BEAM: [1]. But a rough tl;dr, a BEAM process is to the BEAM, what an OS process is to the OS. We don't define a main function as the process supervisor in BEAM spawns processes we define instead and those are our \"entrypoints.\" [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35504484,"author":"PKop","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Show HN: Supavisor \u2013 a Postgres connection pooler written in Elixir","text":"Runs on the Erlang Virtual Machine, also known as the BEAM. Erlang was built for scalability and fault tolerance of telephone switches by Ericsson in the 80's. Give this a watch, \"The Soul of Erlang and Elixir\". Covers a lot of what's nice about the underlying platform. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35962921,"author":"bmitc","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Erlang/OTP 26 Highlights","text":"I recommend the talk The Soul of Erlang and Elixir by Sasa Juric. [VIDEO] The thing that Erlang amd Elixir have different is the BEAM VM and its support of concurrent processes at the VM level. So there are some things that they can do that Akka can't. For example, the schedule is preemptive and keeps processes alive even though there may be rogue processes pegging the CPU.","stance":"rec"}],"JxAXlJEmNMg":[{"hn_comment_id":7150830,"author":"Dogamondo","month":"2014-01","story_title":"A Brief And Mostly Wrong History Of Programming Languages","text":"For a more accurate, informative and very digestible history of the evolution of programming languages, I urge you to watch this. It really is worth it! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7422238,"author":"napsterbr","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Hard to say if it's the best, but Crockford series on javascript is just awesome. I highly recommend it. [VIDEO] (Browse the related videos to see the others)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9844979,"author":"kornakiewicz","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How to learn about the history of computing?","text":"The Crockford's lecture about history of web-development (starting far before first computing machines and ending on javascript) is definitely must-watch. It's not so detailed because it's not a book, but gives a good overview. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11820456,"author":"gravypod","month":"2016-06","story_title":"One Click to Be Pro: my list of the best resources for mastering a subject","text":"I'd strongly recommend putting this link in there: [VIDEO] David, if you see this, I'd like to thank you for these talks as they have reshaped the way I think about software development. I've got more from these then my classes at college have given me do far.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6068553,"author":"jliechti1","month":"2013-07","story_title":"JavaScript Isn't Scheme","text":"Part 1 of Douglas Crockford's On JavaScript gives a really nice history of the many programming languages leading up to JavaScript. Chapter 1: The Early Years : [VIDEO] Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7085599,"author":"rtpg","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Prototypes Are Not Classes","text":"This sort of realization is the first step to realizing that you really shouldn't be writing javascript like java/C++. It makes things feel a lot nicer when you start really thinking in JS. I'd recommend checking out Crockford's \"Crockford on Javascript\" series for some good intro on thinking about Javascript ( [VIDEO] ). Section 3 is where you really start talking about JS. For a good counter-example, check out a lot of google's JS libs (in all their giant module goodness).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8785721,"author":"johnhenry","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Good JavaScript introductions for experienced programmers?","text":"Here's a really good introduction to inheritance: [LINK] -- a lot of people struggle unless they have a good understanding of how this works. Also, Douglass Crockford (the person who wrote \"JavaScript: The Good Parts\") has a number of videos that are very useful. Here's the first in a series of eight: [VIDEO] -- and if you find that useful, you can check out the rest in the list of related videos.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10462739,"author":"ggurgone","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best path for learning JavaScript for web development?","text":"Forget about Bootstrap and jQuery, learn vanilla js. Reading Eloquent JavaScript is a good starting point. Once you are done with that, build something and join #javascript @ FreenodeIRC and ask for help when you get stuck on something. The good parts is nice but keep in mind that it is very opinionated, still it is worth reading. There are some lectures by Crockford on youtube too (tl;dr) [VIDEO] Also this on OOP [LINK] Finally you may want to familiarize with the most common JavaScript design patterns (some are not unique to js) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16801555,"author":"arsalanb","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources for catching up on modern JavaScript for Python/C++ Programmer","text":"I'm in the same position as you. I realised I was still writing spaghetti code that relied heavily on DOM manipulation with Jquery. I am currently learning how the language has evolved and the following has been helpful \u2014 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] (videos, watch all of them) 3. [LINK] 4. [LINK] Hope this helps :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839710,"author":"kornakiewicz","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"I didn't watch the whole serie yet, but the first two are pretty solid and still fun. The first part doest not cover JS at all, but is rather a brief history of computing. Crockford on JavaScript - Volume 1: The Early Years [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17465076,"author":"valw","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Rise of Kotlin: A Programming Language for the Next Generation","text":"The innovation dynamics in the software industry are (have been) really different than in these fields IMHO. But there are some similar historical precedents. Fourier's work was rejected in his time because Lagrange wouldn't adopt his approach to mathematics. This video is a great retrospective on the evolution and adoption of programming languages / paradigms: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31127213,"author":"gravypod","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?","text":"A great summary, from someone who was influential in web technologies, can be found in this series \"Crockford on JavaScript\": [VIDEO] (context: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"}],"JxBg4sMusIg":[{"hn_comment_id":40284877,"author":"tichiian","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Pyspread \u2013 Pythonic Spreadsheet","text":"That A1 mode is Excel \"Baby-Mode\", you can switch to R1C1 mode in settings. Things are far easier then, and more sane. His Excel-lence also recommends this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40385201,"author":"mbforbes","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Improvements to data analysis in ChatGPT","text":"Nothing capability-wise! Just speed and ease of manipulation. Maybe an analogy is doing image processing. One could write filters and other manipulations in code, or use something like Photoshop. It turns out Photoshop is a great interface for many of those tasks. I think the same thing is true for more data analysis than I'd realized because of my poor Excel skills. Still want to improve my spreadsheet abilities though. There's a fun video called You Suck at Excel by Joel Spolsky I'm halfway through [1]. Would love to know of more like this. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40685446,"author":"surfingdino","month":"2024-06","story_title":"The Microsoft Excel superstars throw down in Vegas","text":"[VIDEO] will turn you into a more proficient user of Excel. However, make sure you know the limits of Excel... [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41806911,"author":"egeozcan","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Show HN: Tenno \u2013 Markdown and JavaScript = a hybrid of Word and Excel","text":"As a well seasoned web developer, when I'm doing front-end, there are always 2 big problems: Data tables and loading indicators (fun way of saying it's hard to tackle lazy loading without a request waterfall). The second problem has had good attempts in the recent years, but no single web application can beat excel in terms of data tables (while not 100% relevant anymore, I really like the super light introduction here from Joel Spolsky: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43605657,"author":"aleph_minus_one","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Lessons from open source in the Mexican government","text":"> Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in hiring contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use it, so the company is allowed to deny the no training excuse without spending money. I would claim that if you haven't worked in the finance or insurance industry (or some related industry) for quite some time, you very likely don't know how to use Excel (I have a feeling that a similar points holds for Word and Powerpoint with respect to some industries, but I think for these applications this phenomenon is a little bit less pronounced). Indeed, I'd claim that most books about how to use Excel are simply crap. To just give you a glimpse how to use Excel, here some internet classic on this topic: You Suck at Excel - Joel Spolsky [VIDEO] Really understanding Excel is life task, similar to really understanding modern C++.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48724025,"author":"imurray","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Alternatives to Nested If Function","text":"I think you're thinking of \"You Suck at Excel\" by Joel Spolsky. [VIDEO] Lots of past HN discussion... [LINK] That video was before the introduction of xlookup, which I believe is now worth considering over index and match.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49287856,"author":"Arainach","month":"2026-08","story_title":"My Rules for Using Spreadsheets","text":"> They force name and number everything which is exactly like using single letter variables, they are only allowed for simple things. This isn't true, named ranges have existed for longer than many (most?) HN readers have been alive. As far as I'm aware they were in the first version in 1985. Joel Spolsky's \"you suck at Excel\" is more than a decade old but still relevant: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"JxI3Eu5DPwE":[{"hn_comment_id":24507622,"author":"hu3","month":"2020-09","story_title":"An Introduction to Data Oriented Design with Rust","text":"This is known and heavily used by the game industry for a long time now. Ultimately it comes down to data locality and there's no silver bullet. Performance varies with your data access pattern and code must be adapted to keep caches as warm as possible. There are also maintainability trade-offs. In general I'd advise this kind of optimization only for performance-critical code like games. For more information on how game development approaches this, read about Entity Component Systems. Here's a good start: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28862788,"author":"halvnykterist","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play","text":"I can't help but be heavily skeptical of approaches to a (traditional) roguelike that use ECS. The idea is very entrenched in the rust gamedev community, but for a turn based tile based game there's extremely little benefit and a lot of added complexity. Bob Nystrom has an excellent talk on roguelike architecture [0] and rust as a language itself doesn't prevent any of these approaches. If anything, the existence of sum types as enums make many of them all the more powerful. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48128243,"author":"marcingas","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Xs of Y \u2013 roguelike that names itself every run. Written in 4kLoC","text":"I'd say don't immediately go into making an ECS and don't sweat about perf too much. You can totally do this in any programming language. This is a good talk about roguelike software design in general: [VIDEO] Tbh the whole channel is a gold mine of inspiration. Also check: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Jzfpyo-q-RM":[{"hn_comment_id":26074907,"author":"dijit","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The World\u2019s Aging Dams","text":"This reminds me of a video I watched, just 6 days ago[0]. The video goes into detail about how deadly each of our energy gathering methods are. It also goes into detail about how many are killed per kWh. I had no idea hydro was as deadly as it is before this video, I highly recommend anyone with 10 minutes to spare give it a watch. The channel is incredibly great in general. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26774042,"author":"0xTJ","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Japan decides to release water from Fukushima plant into sea","text":"I really find it gross the extent to which fear mongering over nuclear happens. Countries decommissioning nuclear plants to switch to coal, which kill far more people, even scaling by use. Instead of using a source of power that's overall incredibly safe, and which produces relatively small amounts of highly manageable waste, people have pushed to switch to these incredibly environmentally harmful power sources. This is especially surprising from countries like Germany that, as someone who doesn't live anywhere near them, see them as technically adept. My province in Canada got 60% of our power in 2018 from nuclear (plus 1/4 from hydro), and a different province got 95% of theirs from hydro, but then that's offset by other provinces that get 90% of theirs from natural gas and coal. Sure not every place is ideally suited for a lot of nuclear (though hopefully SMRs will help), but 90% is too high. We need less fossil fuels and more nuclear to bridge the gap to more renewables. For an interesting comparison of the deaths from nuclear energy, compared to other sources, I highly recommend \"How Many People Did Nuclear Energy Kill? Nuclear Death Toll\" [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26300759,"author":"piplikoc","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Why Nuclear Must Be Part Of The Energy Solution (2018)","text":"Yes, there were a lot of deaths from these nuclear disasters, they were horrible, we should have avoided them. But nuclear energy is still much less deadly than fossil fuels. Air pollution-caused diseases are lung cancer and stroke for example. I think nuclear plants have become much safer and there is more international regulation to maintain their safety. I recommend this excellent video on this topic from Kurzgesagt: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26349024,"author":"michaelbarton","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Nuclear power must be well regulated, not ditched","text":"Did a control-F for \"kurzgesagt\" and saw that it had not been mentioned yet. I really recommend watching this short video which gives a really excellent overview of the dangers of nuclear power in the context of the alternatives. The TLDW is even if a very pessimistic estimate of the dangers of nuclear power is still much better than a very optimistic take on the dangers of fossil fuels once you combine the effects of air pollution and climate change. That includes both Chernobyl and Fukushima. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26356124,"author":"Mrdarknezz","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Nuclear power must be well regulated, not ditched","text":"Mining and shipping is required for all forms of energy. Of course it's gonna be per twh because that is the only way to measure that makes any sense. Kurzgesagt has a great video explaining everything here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26406468,"author":"wlpu","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Nuclear technology\u2019s role in the world\u2019s energy supply is shrinking","text":"So much anti nuclear absolutism I recommend watching this [VIDEO] for a pragmatic lense Fossil fuels, even temporary, kills several magnitudes more people than nuclear","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30644163,"author":"Wowfunhappy","month":"2022-03","story_title":"NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard","text":"Will you be factoring in the healthcare costs associated with burning more diesel and natural gas? (Not even getting into the externalities of climate change.) --- I thought Kurzgesagt did a pretty good job of breaking this down: [VIDEO] . Basically, no matter how you look at it, nuclear is among the safest forms of energy we have, behind only solar, wind, and hydropower. Admittedly, deaths \u2260 costs, but I imagine the numbers would be similar.","stance":"rec"}],"K1xnYFCZ9Yg":[{"hn_comment_id":13107571,"author":"lawpoop","month":"2016-12","story_title":"A New Physics Theory of Life (2014)","text":"Evolution probably goes back before cells. The first living thing would have to be a self-replicating molecule that uses energy. Different forms of this self-replicating molecule would have different reproductive success. There is a not-unpopular theory that the original form of life on earth was an RNA molecule. RNA is a special molecule, because it can both act as a store of data, and as an enzyme for catalyzing reactions. According to this theory, specialized data storage in the form of DNA evolved later, along with specialized enzymes. Here's a brief overview of the theory that shows how evolution could happen with chains of RNA only: [VIDEO] Jack Szostak at Harvard has a great series of videos explaining this theory, and also a number of experiments that he and his students have performed. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29481558,"author":"joshquin","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The RNA World Hypothesis","text":"Stated Clearly has a great video about the RNA world hypothesis ( [VIDEO] ) if anyone's looking for an engaging overview.","stance":"rec"}],"K3lP3BhvnSo":[{"hn_comment_id":24329822,"author":"italicbold","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Banks create money, but it's less impressive than it sounds","text":"The modern banking system does not use fractional reserve lending. Highly recommend this video to understand and this channel in general: [VIDEO] Skip to 1:14.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24022567,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: I have $450K cash, what should I do to maximize my return?","text":"> the willingness of the Federal reserve to print money (create debt). Without restraint nowadays. Ben Felix, a portfolio manager at PWL Capital in Canada, just released a video explaining why this is completely wrong: * [VIDEO] > Quantitative easing is a monetary policy whereby a central bank buys government bonds or other financial assets in order to inject money into the economy to expand economic activity. But what exactly does that mean? In today\u2019s episode, Benjamin and Cameron are going to address this topic, avoiding highly politicized aspects, like whether or not central banks should be involved in the economy in the first place, and focusing purely on the operational perspective of quantitative easing \u2013 what is it, how it works, and what the intended transmission mechanisms are. * [LINK] > For instance, house flipping or starting a business. You can get better than the 5% or whatever you get after inflation in stocks. If you're really good at what you do, your odds of getting a better return go up. That's nice if you want a different/second career or something. But there are those of us who are happy with our careers/jobs, and simply want something to do with our retirement savings\u2026 ain't nobody got time for that. Of course the half-life on any new business is quite abysmal, so I'm not crazy/ambitious enough to take on that kind of risk.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25537333,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2020-12","story_title":"2020 had some significant silver linings","text":"Strictly speaking, in the modern era, it is not \"a government\" that decides to print money, but rather the central bank, which are considered independent on government and do (should) not follow the orders of politicians. The central bankers are hired for a fixed-term (though renewable) and are given a mandate: > The Federal Reserve works to promote a strong U.S. economy. Specifically, the Congress has assigned the Fed to conduct the nation\u2019s monetary policy to support the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. When prices are stable, long-term interest rates remain at moderate levels, so the goals of price stability and moderate long-term interest rates go together. As a result, the goals of maximum employment and stable prices are often referred to as the Fed\u2019s \u201cdual mandate.\u201d * [LINK] If 'printing money' helps to accomplish that mandate they will do so, but they will (theoretically/ideally) not print money just because it would be convenient for political purposes. It should also be noted that in most/may modern economies, private banks actually create the money the supply through issuing loans: * PDF: [LINK] Good video by Ben Felix on the topic: * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27026060,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Negative interest: Danske Bank changes threshold for personal customers","text":"> Savings in a bank account will be loaned by the bank to another business. This has not been how banks have worked for decades: * [LINK] Banks create loans typing something into a computer screen and money shows up in the businesss' account. No savings required. 99% of money created is not by the Fed \"printing money\", but rather by private bank loans. A twenty minute video summarizing the above paper: * [VIDEO] Interview with the paper's author: * [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"K4JhruinbWc":[{"hn_comment_id":6134923,"author":"Sukotto","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Show HN: Sketch, connect and simulate gears and chains","text":"In case you're interested, here are two of the best video's I've seen describing how a watch works ( [LINK] ) and how a differential works ( [VIDEO] ) Don't let their old school-ness throw you off. They are both extremely well done and demonstrate in clear and simple language from first principles to finished object.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9902579,"author":"nogridbag","month":"2015-07","story_title":"How a car works (2012)","text":"Neat site. My father was a mechanic and thus I should know all of this stuff, but I wasted away my life behind the keyboard instead :D I often find videos do a much better job at explaining some concepts. For example, the section on differentials: [LINK] After reading this I feel none the wiser. Whereas after watching this ancient Chevrolet training video from the 1930's I feel like I completely understand how diffs work: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22808937,"author":"anitil","month":"2020-04","story_title":"How to Use a Differential Analyzer","text":"These old-school education videos are such a treat. One of my favorite is on differential gearing - [VIDEO] (apologies about the clickbait title)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8578306,"author":"rileyjshaw","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Space Filling Curves (1972) [video]","text":"Fantastic!! High-quality educational videos like this are hard to come by. Here's another retro tutorial that really stands out in my memory (differential gears): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10007959,"author":"tzs","month":"2015-08","story_title":"How a Watch Works (1949) [video]","text":"I've never understood why these old instructional films so often seem much better at getting things across and making them stick in my mind than more modern material. A couple other examples. 1. A 1959 film from Bell Labs on wave behavior that made standing wave, reflections, energy loss due to impedance mismatch, and impedance matching much clearer than anything else I've seen: [1]. 2. A 1937 explanation of how the differential in a car works: [2]. Here is another upload of that which is lower resolution, but has more from the same source in the sidebar [3]. I suppose it could be something akin to survivorship bias that makes old educational films seem so good--the bad ones don't get remembered 60 years later. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"KAWA1DuvCnQ":[{"hn_comment_id":27938191,"author":"jejones3141","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Modern C++ for C Programmers (2018)","text":"Yes, and everyone should watch Scott Meyers's awesome presentation at a D conference with the title \"The Last Thing D Needs\". (tl,dr version: The last thing D needs is someone like him, really to be so insanely convoluted, as C++ is, as to need someone like him.) Link to the video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839366,"author":"nordsieck","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"We Really Don't Know How to Compute: Gerry Sussman - [LINK] Zebras All the Way Down: Bryan Cantrill - [LINK] Jonathan Blow on Deep Work: Jonathan Blow - [LINK] Simple Made Easy: Rich Hickey - [LINK] Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure: Rich Hickey - [LINK] The Last Thing D Needs: Scott Meyers - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17121451,"author":"SloopJon","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Meta Crush Saga: a C++17 compile-time game","text":"> C++ developers .. don't seem to be interested in actually improving the language In his talks at the 2014 and 2017 conferences for the D programming langue, Scott Meyers noted the difference between what individual C++ committee members say they value, and what the process actually produces. Will a new standard every three years make this better or worse? They do seem open to deprecating things that don't work. You might enjoy the 2014 talk, called \"The Last Thing D Needs.\" I don't want to spoil the punchline, which actually struck me as kind of bittersweet, but Scott talked about the distinction that Fred Brooks made in \"No Silver Bullet\" between essential and accidental complexity. C++ does have a lot of the latter. Edit: link for the 2014 talk: [VIDEO] and for the 2017 talk: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33654186,"author":"noselasd","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Rust in the 6.2 kernel","text":"> You cannot say the same thing about Rust. At least not yet. My fear is it's _very_ easy to fall in to the same trap as C++ has, and become a big mess. Scott Meyers have a very nice talk here: [VIDEO] about all these traps and pifalls that we have to deal with in C++. That said, I'm starting a bit with rust and enjoy it so a lot, especially the tooling alone is worth it - and if I never have to write another line of C++, I would be very happy (ofc the real world argues I have a lot of C++ code that will need maintenance).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36197721,"author":"nordsieck","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Never trust a programmer who says they know C++","text":"I'll just leave this fantastic talk here: The Last Thing D Needs - Scott Meyers (2014) [VIDEO] The C++ type system really is quite... complicated.","stance":"rec"}],"KBcxuM-qXec":[{"hn_comment_id":42450283,"author":"GuB-42","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Moon","text":"Minutephysics did a video about this: [VIDEO] It looks like a dodecagon with rounded corners, but the video goes into more details.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42863524,"author":"d1sxeyes","month":"2025-01","story_title":"IAC confirms existence of a Super-earth in the habitable zone of a Sun-like Star","text":"It\u2019s arguable that even the stuff we consider to orbit the earth like the moon is really orbiting the sun. MinutePhysics did a great video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47638450,"author":"nandomrumber","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Artemis II crew take 'spectacular' image of Earth","text":"This video explains what you\u2019re talking about re the moons orbit always curving toward the sun, and also mentions Earths gravitational dominance. It\u2019s about the suns gravitational pull on the moon dominating over the Earths gravitational pull on the moon, but that due to the centrifugal force (there isn\u2019t one, so conservation of angular momentum) the Earth's gravitational pull dominates. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48476129,"author":"lgcmo","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Show HN: Gravity \u2013 interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein","text":"Very cool! Just one note about the moon orbit around the Earth, it is far more subtle; almost just orbiting the Sun alongside Earth. I can't explain better than minute physics, highly recommend: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KDRnEm-B3AI":[{"hn_comment_id":36724255,"author":"mkeedlinger","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Scientists at Purdue have created a white paint that can cool a building","text":"Here is a frankly incredible video of how you could make such a paint if you were so inclined. I don't think it's very practical, but the video is very interesting anyways [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36713058,"author":"K0balt","month":"2023-07","story_title":"To Help Cool a Hot Planet, the Whitest of White Coats","text":"If you want to experiment with making your own radiative cooling coatings with easily available, safe materials and common household tools, this video is a great guide: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36741660,"author":"Tade0","month":"2023-07","story_title":"To Help Cool a Hot Planet, the Whitest of White Coats","text":"Weirdly, you can already get decent results with a material that can be prepared at home: [VIDEO] It doesn't have all the properties necessary to call it paint, but apparently it does the job.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39586846,"author":"slimsag","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Using a solar oven as a radiant refrigerator at night","text":"You might like NightHawkInLight's videos on the topic[0] and Tech Ingredients[1] - they've been working on making paint using this technology with an at-home DIY process and experimenting with it. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44358781,"author":"energ8","month":"2025-06","story_title":"NASA's Voyager Found a 30k-50k Kelvin \"Wall\" at the Edge of Solar System","text":"It's a thing in from thousands of years ago [LINK] and today [LINK] for PDRC there are a couple good videos about it from NightHawkInLight [LINK] , [VIDEO] and Tech Ingredients [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48675871,"author":"Tade0","month":"2026-06","story_title":"UK professor says smearing yogurt on your windows can cool your home","text":"There's an interesting guide on how to make radiative cooling paint from common ingredients complete with an explanation why it works: [VIDEO] The catch is that such paint is not particularly robust, much less weatherproof. Beats yogurt I guess, which tends to smell as it turns in sunlight. I have roof windows and was wondering how much I could gain from panels painted like that, but most likely as much as I would using the next best thing - a window sunshade, which I'm using already.","stance":"rec"}],"KDpNQQqdSh8":[{"hn_comment_id":14495706,"author":"euoia","month":"2017-06","story_title":"The far-reaching effects of air conditioning","text":"There is a great TV series called \"The Secret Life of Machines\" that covered some inventions that changed the world: [VIDEO] There is an episode on central heating: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15820704,"author":"eesmith","month":"2017-11","story_title":"America\u2019s flat-Earth movement appears to be growing \u2013 Daily chart","text":"Thanks to both of you for the praise. You might also be interested in \"The Secret Life of Machines\". [LINK] and [VIDEO] . Philip Morrison (from Ring of Truth) is perhaps best known for his powers-of-10 movie. [LINK] . He was also a columnist for Scientific American. The only column I remember is when he decided to make bread from scratch. Really from scratch. They grew wheat in a small plot of land near his home in Cambridge, Mass. He's part of the generation that developed the first atomic bomb. He carried the first core to the Trinity test site in the back seat of his car, and helped load the weapons on the planes that went to Japan.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22850553,"author":"throwaway829","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Connections Episode 1: The Trigger Effect (1978) [video]","text":"These overviews give you just enough knowledge to start debugging a broken household machine. I love it. If anyone's looking for more videos from this series here's a playlist of the complete series: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KEoGrbKAyKE":[{"hn_comment_id":16289585,"author":"mrob","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Keeping the Art of Silent Film Music Alive","text":"Live narration lives on in some African countries as the \"video joker\". The narrator translates as well as adding their own jokes and commentary. You can hear an example in the only surviving copy of the famous Ugandan film \"Who Killed Captain Alex?\"[0] I thought it would be annoying at first, but VJ Emmie does a great job and really adds to the entertainment. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19468603,"author":"smacktoward","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Uganda\u2019s Tarantino and his $200 action movies (2015)","text":"Forget the trailer, you can watch Who Killed Captain Alex? in its entirety on the official Wakaliwood YouTube channel, complete with hilarious running commentary by VJ Emmie: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37710404,"author":"mrob","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Think Again, Al Jolson: Japan\u2019s Silent Movie Culture Is Still Going Strong","text":">no other countries \u2014 apart from Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, all then under Japanese influence \u2014 adopted such an excellent and fun idea. Some movie theaters in Uganda also have live commentary and translation, provided by \"video jokers\". You can hear such commentary by VJ Emmie in the famous Ugandan action movie \"Who Killed Captain Alex?\", which you can watch on the Official Wakaliwood Youtube channel: [VIDEO] Despite the very low budget, the movie is surprisingly entertaining, and the commentary makes it even better.","stance":"rec"}],"KFNxJVTJleE":[{"hn_comment_id":16343956,"author":"bringtheaction","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Database \u201csharding\u201d came from Ultima Online? (2009)","text":"Heard the creator of UO claim this in a short 4 minute video I just watched [1] and thought it was a sufficiently interesting piece of trivia that it deserved to get posted. I recommend watching the video also btw. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32692619,"author":"acomjean","month":"2022-09","story_title":"How Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Playstation (2020) [video]","text":"Yew tube. (I expected trees..) I\u2019ve seen a few in the series. Less technical but The NES comes to America is pretty good [LINK] And the Ultima online tried create programmatic eco system is kinda hysterical. 7 minutes (with lord British) [VIDEO] Ars (the publisher)has a whole list of them. Non YouTube but seem to have transcripts. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38895292,"author":"acomjean","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ultima (2012)","text":"We loved ultima 3 growing up. A bunch of us were playing it in middle school and we'd occasionally swap hints about how to advance. Before the internet thats all we had. Out of our group, at least one of us had a real copy of each game, making the spell books and instructions available... The cloth maps were fun, but I don't think we used them during game play. The games were a bit of grind, but we didn't care. I do like the Ars Video on how they spent all this time on the \"ultima online ecosystem\" only to have it not work out.. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46458359,"author":"fennecbutt","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Outside, Dungeon, Town: Integrating the Three Places in Videogames (2024)","text":"O-oh boy...well I guess he'd achieved his ultimate goal, perhaps there was nothing else after that. That's what I love about these sorts of emergent systems. Although I was discussing it with a friend, there's a great ars war story on ultima: [VIDEO] Won't spoil it for you but we did have a great discussion from that around how emergent gameplay can be amazing, but player agency means that you'd still need the \"hand of God\" to be involved in fixing things and making adjustments so that major plot points and still enabled and the player doesn't kill the entire world (unless that's the point of the game I suppose).","stance":"rec"}],"KINIAgRpkDA":[{"hn_comment_id":13610915,"author":"chubot","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Show HN: How to write a tiny compiler","text":"Have you looked at the Go toolchain at all? I don't know much about it, but they implemented their back ends in a manner that is much smaller than LLVM and GCC. And it sounds like the architecture of the compiler is significantly different. I watched this talk and it was pretty interesting: [VIDEO] [LINK] If I am understanding right, the claim is that they have a single assembly language for ALL GO architectures, based on something Ken Thompson wrote in the 90's for some National Instruments (?) chip. He actually says that all assembly language looks the same now. I was sort of surprised by that claim. I would like to hear a critique of this from other compiler writers. Does the fact that Go uses a single assembly language make the code slower? I imagine taking advantage of target-specific knowledge is useful, but I don't know how much. LLVM has this pretty elaborate TableGen system to express target-specific knowledge. He also makes the claim that they will be able auto-generate a new backend from the PDF description of the architecture. And he says somewhere that they reduce a lot of the work to simple \"text processing\" (symbol manipulation) and didn't require opening up any processor manuals. I can see how arithmetic and bitshifting is the same among all architectures. But I would think that even loads and stores have differences, at least if you want to use the processor efficiently. But he says everything kinda looks the same. Also, another thought is that compiling to W","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14180995,"author":"bkeroack","month":"2017-04","story_title":"A Foray into Go Assembly Programming","text":"Here's a good talk about the Go assembler backend: [VIDEO] Spoiler: they're nearly to the point (maybe now they've achieved it fully) of autogenerating a new language backend from ISA documentation PDFs! Bring that up next time someone complains about Go not using LLVM.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15177402,"author":"fourseventy","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Go Assembly by Example","text":"This is relevant [VIDEO] Its Rob Pike talking about the go assembler and he answers a few of your questions.","stance":"rec"}],"KJPdbp1An2s":[{"hn_comment_id":14167734,"author":"beaconstudios","month":"2017-04","story_title":"A Mind is Born","text":"if you like that kind of thing (algorithmic chiptunes), you might enjoy the emerging school of live coding: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17635039,"author":"pjc50","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Sonic Pi: Compose electronic music with code","text":"It's a species of programmable synthesiser. If it looks like a lot of work, you should see someone playing an analog modular synth. In fact, you should see someone playing classical piano; that's years of practice and a whole chunk of music theory. The most impressive thing you can do with it is live coding: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23495525,"author":"throwaway9482","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Those who left software development for a different technical field?","text":"Sonic Pi might interest you if you don\u2019t know it already. It\u2019s an alternative to DAWs where you use ruby code to make music Here\u2019s a demo [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KJe9H6qS82I":[{"hn_comment_id":22862632,"author":"sandworm101","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Game of Life, Simulated in the Game of Life (2012) [video]","text":"Must see evolution of GOL: \"SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life - using floating point values instead of integers.\" [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7686014,"author":"TazeTSchnitzel","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Show HN: HTML5 Game of Life in 24-bit RGB","text":"24 parallel games combined in a way indecipherable to normal human eyes isn't terribly interesting to me. I find SmoothLife more interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17340382,"author":"kjeetgill","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Show HN: Yagol, a Game of Life sandbox built with React.js","text":"If you're mesmerized by the \"Game of Life\" like I am your going to enjoy the Continuously Domain versions like smooth life. Check out the video[0], and an implementation in python[1] on HN. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29961492,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2022-01","story_title":"29-year-old Conway conjecture settled","text":"Toffoli[0] & Margolus\u2019[1] Cellular Automata Machines (1987) is the CA bible, I guess. Andrew Adamatsky edited the encyclopedic Cellular Automata (2018). Ed Fredkin's[2] stuff on reversible CA is fascinating. Gerard Vichniac[3] wrote some great papers in the 80s, e.g. Simulating Physics with Cellular Automata (1984). Kenichi Morita[4] papers. Rudy Rucker[5] has written a lot of stuff on 1 and 2D CA, and worked as a CA programmer. Etc. There are a lot of papers. The very common finite element method of solving differential equations and PDEs is basically the same thing as CA - see e.g. Anderson's Computational Fluid Dynamics . Attractors and approximations for lattice dynamical systems by Shengfan Zhou, 2002. 1954's Studies of Nonlinear Problems by Fermi, Ulam, Pasta, featuring a 1D CA. [LINK] Noether's theorem comes up frequently - that every symmetry of the system corresponds to a conservation law.[6] Smooth Life is Stephan Rafler's very cool version of CGOL with every discrete aspect turned into a continuous one.[7] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK] [7] best video of SmoothLife [VIDEO] [LINK] This slideshow by Rafler contains the best, most complete explanation of it I've found: [LINK] Shadertoy version [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"KLjgBLwH3Wc":[{"hn_comment_id":3333683,"author":"hvass","month":"2011-12","story_title":"Over 40% of cancers due to lifestyle, says review","text":"Related to this topic I think you might find Dr. Terry Wahls' story fascinating, she pretty much 'cured' herself from Multiple Sclerosis by adopting a 'paleo' diet. She presented her findings at the 2011 Neuroscience conference (\"Effects of intensive directed nutrition, progressive exercise program and neuromuscular electrical stimulation on secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (PDF)[1]\") She also had a TED talk[2] taking us through the process of getting out of her wheelchair and the specific food she ate. I know this immediately turns on your B.S. sensors, but she changed her lifestyle after spending hours on Pubmed doing research on nutrition's impact on the brain and specifically the mitochondria. I highly recommend the talk, it is both very informative and very moving. And there are some saddening statistics about the lack of vitamins and minerals in the American population. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7307166,"author":"abdophoto","month":"2014-02","story_title":"Depression is an inflammatory disease; where does inflammation come from? [pdf]","text":"Less than 2 years ago, my wife was diagnosed with MS (Multiple sclerosis). As soon as we found out, I started digging like crazy to learn more about why this happened and what we could do to prevent it from progressing. I'm a big believer in that the body has the ability to heal itself by avoiding certain foods and intaking others. I mean, food is fuel we put in our body. After digging for a while, I came upon some staggering discoveries. First, there are people who have reversed their MS almost completely on diet alone. The diets consist of A LOT of high-nutrition fruits and vegetables along with Omega 3's, organic meats, etc. These Paleo-like diets also forbid gluten with the main reason being that it causes serious inflammation in some folks. This TEDx video by Dr. Terry Wahl was very helpful ( [VIDEO] ). I read her book and it literally laid the foundation for which changed our eating habits entirely. A month or so after, we flew out to Massachusetts to a well-known wellness center where they performed various blood and stool tests. The Dr's (including a Nutritionist) sat down with us for the entire day and asked about daily habits from what our work days were like to what we ate. Without mentioning my own research, they also said that gluten is something we should completely remove from our diet. There's a ton of other stuff out there, but since removing gluten entirely, my wife has felt great. We just did an MRI and she has no new lesions. She no longer experiences blur","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3708813,"author":"adammichaelc","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Algorithm Finds Thousands of Unknown Drug Interaction Side Effects","text":"Just one anecdote on that point. I'm pre-med and I recently shadowed the director of cardiac research (a cardiac surgeon) at the big hospital/medical school in this area. He was asked point-blank by a patient, \"I've been reading that with diet and exercise I might be able to reverse my heart disease. What do you think?\" The doctor's answer was, \"Absolutely not.\" This is one data point, so it's hardly conclusive, but coming from a doctor who (a) teaches doctors and therefore plants seeds for the next generation and (b) should be an expert on new medical treatments with his position as the director of research, it's troubling. Meanwhile, there is a growing minority of doctors who take patients through an eating \"bootcamp\" where they help them take out processed foods/white-flour/high-fructose corn syrup from their diet, teach them how to shop and cook plant-based foods, etc. I saw a documentary on it, \"Forks Over Knives\" I believe. Fascinating stuff. In the documentary, they take a man with advanced heart disease, cut out all meat/dairy/processed foods from his diet, and take before-and-after blood readings (cholesterol, blood pressure, etc.). It was surprising how quickly the intervention reversed his numbers. There are other pioneers working in this area. There's Dr. Terry Wahls, an MD who reversed her multiple sclerosis by eating what some would call a \"paleo\" diet (only vegetables, fruits, nuts, meat). Here's her TED talk if you're interested: [VIDEO] She's currently workin","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4895209,"author":"specialist","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Ask HN: tips for fueling your brain each day?","text":"I've been transitioning to the troglodiet (tm): fresh veggies, legumes, meat. More or less the caveman diet, Atkins, paleo, Eat to Live, etc. This Dr Terry Wahls TEDx talk has been very motivating. Minding Your Mitochondria [VIDEO] Dr. Wahls is mitigating her MS thru nutrition. For me, eating lots of vegetables makes my chronic psoriasis go away. When I slack on the nutrition (eg traveling), my psoriasis comes back. I believe, but cannot prove, that psoriasis is basically external arthritis. I figure better nutrition is improving my health overall, including brain function. One side effect I did not expect: I now crave hearty kale salads. Years ago I had a gf who was really gunghu for kale, chard, sorrel, and other leafy greens. I could handle it once or at most twice a week. Blech. Now things are different. Better recipes certainly help. I think once my body got used to the good stuff, it demands more. Moderate exercise and plenty of sleep too, of course. Good luck.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9649014,"author":"BadCookie","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Researchers Find Missing Link Between the Brain and Immune System","text":"I risk getting downvoted for this, but have you tried any dietary changes? There are cases of people with MS who have seen tremendous improvement on a low histamine or paleo style diet. There are no guarantees, of course, but what do you have to lose? I would think it would be worth the inconvenience of trying it out for a few months even if the odds of success are very small. Here's an example: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22175495,"author":"bellwether","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How can I improve my immune system?","text":"My wife has an auto immune disease and we have both switched (through progressive stages) to the Wahl's Protocol. I've never felt healthier and her symptoms are improving--she's also on disease modifying treatment, so we're doing this in addition to medication, not instead of it. The Wahl's Protocol is designed for cell and brain health, so it may be exactly what you're looking for. See Dr. Terry Wahl's Ted Talk here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29938400,"author":"wtetzner","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Multiple Sclerosis Causality","text":"An interesting talk about someone who was able to reverse a lot of her MS symptoms with a change in diet: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KNWh6Kw3ejQ":[{"hn_comment_id":15700585,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Tesla Is a 'Hotbed for Racist Behavior,' Worker Claims in Suit","text":"The McDonald's case was most likely intentional though. They're a big company and most likely pushed the media that direction as damage control. There's a good Adam Ruins Everything video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16581153,"author":"SlowBro","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Decoding the Design History of Your Coffee Cup Lid","text":"They mentioned the coffee lawsuit. I heard about that one many times while working at Dunkin Donuts some 22 years ago. The customers were always (jokingly) threatening to burn themselves and sue the company for millions. I thought that lady was greedy until learning the truth much later. An Adam Ruins Everything clip explains: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37704358,"author":"ttfkam","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Woman sues McDonald's after she's burned by hot coffee, echoing 1994 case","text":"> I read it far enough Clearly not since the crux of both lawsuits has nothing to do with the build quality of cups or lids. Entertaining overview: [VIDEO] Lawyer's examination: [LINK] Whichever you prefer. Did you know the woman who sued so many years ago just wanted her burn injuries paid for, not a multi-million dollar payout? The coffee is brewed at such a high temperature, it could not be consumed when delivered to the customer. It was a known issue for many years with repeated (broken) promises to fix it. Rather than immediate consumption, the high temperature was targeted for folks to buy it, put it in a cup holder, drive to work, and then drink it upon arrival, by which time it would have presumably cooled to a drinkable temperature. For this use case it worked. However at the point of sale it is hot enough to cause third-degree burns through clothing within two seconds. If you spill it in a car, your mobility to deal with such a burning hazard is also predictably quite limited. Your clothing keeps the hot liquid next to your skin, prevents the heat from radiating away as quickly, and the seat belt restricts movement even further even if the car is not in motion. Liquid hot enough to cause third-degree burns in two seconds in a confined space is absolutely considered a foreseeable hazard for the vendor under laws regarding liability, especially after they were given multiple warnings prior to injury. \"But I want hotter coffee, so it's still hot when I get to work,\" yo","stance":"rec"}],"KPUlgSRn6e0":[{"hn_comment_id":32506672,"author":"Doxin","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Cycle for One Hour and You\u2019ll Live an Hour Longer","text":"I can heartily recommend anyone who thinks they dislike cycling to watch Not Just Bikes on youtube[0]. Most of the problem is the city you live in, not the concept of cycling. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34691827,"author":"CalRobert","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Ask HN: I hate gym. How to stay in shape?","text":"Live somewhere you can bike and/or walk to work and for your daily needs. Admittedly this can be weather-dependent, so it might not suit your requirement (though even living in Ireland I find rain only rarely causes an issue). I lost about 100 pounds this way. Moving to a new country would be one of the more extreme options but this video describes the idea of \"The Gym of Life\" well [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37636085,"author":"mitthrowaway2","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis","text":"If not sugar, then other causes should be taxed if the evidence supports that such taxes would have an impact. I'm not a policy expert myself. The best public investment to promote physical activity is designing cities to enable \"the gym of life\"! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39294691,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Preventative for Aging Parents?","text":"> Daily exercise This can simply be walking a lot, especially if you're in a more urban area, where you don't have to drive everywhere (either figuratively or literally). See \"The Gym of Life\": * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KRcecxdGxvQ":[{"hn_comment_id":15127778,"author":"edejong","month":"2017-08","story_title":"The Marketing Behind MongoDB","text":"Whenever I see a young gullible engineer, all twinkly-eyed and bedazzled by the MongoDB hype (or any other NoSQL hype), I'll send him a link [1] on a rather interesting talk by a very thoughtful Turing award winning engineer named Michael Stonebraker. It takes a couple of days for the charm of NoSQL to wane off, but eventually they'll always see how they have been fooled into believing without a sane level of critique. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40490587,"author":"vishnugupta","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Big data is dead (2023)","text":"I first heard of this 3 V's in a Michael Stonebreaker's talk[1]. For the uninitiated he's a legend in DBMS space, Turing award winner[2]. Highly recommend this and related talks by him, most of them are in YouTube. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10695266,"author":"mattste","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Readings in Database Systems, 5th Edition","text":"Stonebraker recently gave a talk at my school on where he thinks databases are headed in the future[0]. Definitely worth a watch. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11479341,"author":"jasode","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Urban Myths about SQL (2015)","text":"Yes, that slide deck in isolation looks an ad so it's probably better to get some background on Michael Stonebraker's \"big picture\" beliefs and core premises: ++ He believes SQL is the \"right\" and most proven access model. (Note that SQL does not mean RDBMS like Oracle/MSSQL.) ++ He believes in ACID ++ He believes that other db engines' (NoSQL, etc) approaches to gain speed and scaling of clusters by sacrificing SQL and ACID is wrong and his proof is that those other products end up eventually bolting on SQL and ACID anyway. I think a better presentation to flesh out these ideas is the following youtube video: [VIDEO] It's 55 minutes long so to save time, HN readers may prefer to browse it by pressing \"L\" key to step through it quickly. Just read the slides shown behind him and if the bullet points look interesting, rewind and listen to his presentation. One can dwell on those SQL/ACID merits in isolation and consider separately, the question of whether VoltDB-as-a-product fulfills those ideals.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23543830,"author":"wenc","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Making Databases Work: The Pragmatic Wisdom of Michael Stonebraker (2018)","text":"I read the Red Book when I was figuring out data architectures for my company. (the other book was Designing Data-Intensive Archictures by Martin Kleppmann) Stonebraker et al are very opinionated (especially about SQL and relational databases), but in a way I can accept because a lot of his thinking is based on first-principles. Stonebraker also has a string of database successes (Ingres, Postgres, Vertica etc.) which gives him enough street cred to prove he's not just spewing theory from an ivory tower. He's not necessarily correct in every opinion, but his opinions are interesting and worth considering. I enjoyed his talk on \"Why Big Data is at least 4 different problems\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KSWqx8goqSY":[{"hn_comment_id":8838864,"author":"hobs","month":"2015-01","story_title":"The MS-DOS Showcase","text":"If you don't know him already, textfiles has one of my favorite people on the internet (Jason Scott) running a lot of things, and hoarding interesting material for our future. As far as I can tell the dude just loves MS-DOS games and hence we have this great project. (I imagine there are a lot of contributors, but he is clearly pushing it forward) He gave a great talk at DEFCON 17 called \"That one time I was sued for two billion dollars.\" in which he gives a few more details about textfiles if you are interested. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9570380,"author":"__z","month":"2015-05","story_title":"I Want Your AOL CDs","text":"This guy has gotten cease and desist letters from catheter companies as well as been sued for two billion dollars. Watch his talk on the matter, it is really great - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46815944,"author":"Rendello","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Anna's Archive is sued for $13T","text":"For a less-serious but similar situation, Jason Scott (textfiles.com, Internet Archive) gave a hilarious DEFCON talk called \"That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KTHOwgpMIiU":[{"hn_comment_id":22999677,"author":"jganetsk","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?","text":"Heidi Howard is incredible and her work on distributed consensus is illuminating. I think she has actually successfully cracked the cookie of \"making consensus easy\". [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20850128,"author":"richdougherty","month":"2019-09","story_title":"The Paxos Algorithm, or How to Win a Turing Award","text":"Check out Heidi Howard's work for some nice generalisations and variations of Paxos. Her approach using immutable state makes things more tractable. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24285592,"author":"j-pb","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Keeping CALM: When Distributed Consistency Is Easy","text":"Tbh I think you got it backwards. CALM is actually very much about eventual consistency. The gist is basically, that distributed systems are only eventually consistent iff they are logically monotonic. Coordination as used in this article basically means \"needs to be decided by an authority\". But because of CALM we know that in order to elect an authority/leader, you need a consensus algorithm that actually has monotonicity at it's core, like raft. There's a really great talk on this by Heidi Howard: [VIDEO] I actually don't think that database isolation levels are a good way to talk about this stuff, because they are practical guarantees, not theoretical ones. Snapshot isolation for example also requires a leader. From a theoretical point of view there is no in between (at least none that I can see), either you are eventually consistent or you're not, either you are monotonic or you're not.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24770262,"author":"poooogles","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A Review of Consensus Protocols","text":">A more recent development is Heidi Howard's work Glad someone has mentioned her here. This talk helped me greatly [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"KTJs-0EInW8":[{"hn_comment_id":18220378,"author":"dunk010","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Steve Yegge talking about the system he built at Google, called Grok: [VIDEO] . If we have anything half that good in the wider programming community in twenty years time, I will be very surprised.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5512202,"author":"michaelwww","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"I wouldn't want to use the term \"best\" because there are so many good ones in various areas, but this talk by Steve Yegge was both entertaining and informative. Stanford Seminar - Google's Steve Yegge on GROK (large scale source code analysis) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12013924,"author":"SwellJoe","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Software Heritage","text":"Yes, and they've open sourced part of that here (at least, I think it is related, and is also called \"Code Search\"): [LINK] But, their public code search was not the same as the internal thing, as far as I know. The internal beast sounds kind of awesome. Here's his talk about it from a few years ago: [VIDEO] I think the really useful thing (beyond a mere search engine that has indexed a lot of source code) is the comprehension of the \"guzzintas\" and \"guzzouttas\" of the code, more than merely a naive word search; i.e. knowing how pieces interact, so you can search for functions that work with a particular kind of object, for example, or objects that have the same properties, or code that interacts with the same API you're working with, whatever.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39529151,"author":"dunk010","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The Second Golden Age of Emacs","text":"LSP is basically an open(-ish) source implementation of Google\u2019s internal tool called Grok. Grok was made by Steve Yegge, a formerly famous tech blogger. Steve Yegge uses emacs, and half his motivation was to equalise editors by moving the language processing elements to an external place that\u2019s shareable by all. He has a great talk on it: [VIDEO] . So it\u2019s, like, not an accident that emacs can leverage this :-D. Though I never see anyone giving him credit.","stance":"rec"}],"KTjnt_WSJu8":[{"hn_comment_id":35857836,"author":"carimura","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Turbo Rascal Syntax Error","text":"reminded me of one of my all-time favorite demos from Future Crew one of the moments that shaped my childhood towards a life of computers. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26523271,"author":"drux","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany","text":"Second Reality by Future Crew [VIDEO] ( It is considered to be one of the best demos created during the early 1990s on the PC)","stance":"rec"}],"KTzGBJPuJwM":[{"hn_comment_id":38597169,"author":"jacobolus","month":"2023-12","story_title":"What is a zero refractive index material?","text":"For anyone who hasn't studied electrodynamics or advanced optics, Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) recently made a detailed video explaining what the refractive index really means, probably the clearest reasonably accessible explanation of this topic anywhere to date: [VIDEO] [LINK] The first video is really a tour de force. Too bad it saw such limited traction here: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38898457,"author":"ithkuil","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Zeiss's \"Holocam\" turns glass windows into cameras","text":"I found this 3blue1brown video to be a fascinating explaination on how light gets transmitted by transparent material: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40091022,"author":"Modified3019","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Does light have an infinite lifetime?","text":"For those curious about what the above poster is talking about, here\u2019s a well done video explaining the topic of the apparent changes of light\u2019s \u201cspeed\u201d through materials 3Blue1Brown - But why would light \"slow down\"? | Optics puzzles 3: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43157468,"author":"tatjam","month":"2025-02","story_title":"But good sir, what is electricity?","text":"I'm not a physicist, but as far as I know, outside of general relativity electromagnetic perturbations always travel at the speed of light (i.e. to affirm that photons always travel at c is correct). It's only after the fields interact with electrical charges (atoms and their electrons for example) that a secondary field is induced as these charges begin to oscillate. This field will add over the original field, \"shielding\" an external observer from the original oscillation and apparently slowing down the propagation of electromagnetic waves. There's a very good video by 3Blue1BRown that explains this kind of weird concept way better than I could: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46457455,"author":"_jayhack_","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Cameras and Lenses","text":"Great article. For another fantastic explainer on optics, see 3Blue1Brown's video on refraction: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KUdHIatS36A":[{"hn_comment_id":23498206,"author":"close04","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Microsoft won\u2019t sell police its facial-recognition technology","text":"BTW, 5 years old but more relevant than ever. It also touches on the difference between police and military: [VIDEO] US citizens deserve the same response in daily life from a police under the \"serve and protect\" banner that an enemy combatant gets from the opposing military during an active conflict? You can't treat every citizen as if they are the worst possible one. If you got this \"you could be the worst ever\" treatment in any other situation you would certainly not find acceptable to reference the fact that the army also does it while in a war.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31983386,"author":"javajosh","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The local news crisis is deepening America's divides","text":"John Oliver did a good \"writeup\" about Ferguson and why it mattered back in 2014. You should watch it, and see if you think it wasn't notable: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KVl5kMXz1vA":[{"hn_comment_id":48931176,"author":"nextaccountic","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Grok Build Is OSS","text":"> If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't? > How does this work? Okay, since the topic at hand is steelmanning, that is, replying to the strongest possible argument, let's practice that. I invite you to watch this video, which is a short lecture that indeed exposes the strongest argument for this exact proposition. [VIDEO] (Peter Singer - ordinary people are evil) I think the video is the best short exposition but you could try reading the paper the video is about [LINK] Or reading about the paper [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43363642,"author":"guerrilla","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)","text":"> I don't see why you should feel guilt. You should feel guilty because you can do something about other people's suffering, instead of being a greedy hoarder who has far more than he could possibly use in multiple lifetimes while other people starve and live miserable lives due to the system you benefit from. I think Peter Singer makes the argument very well [1] but many others in the history of philosophy have done just as good a job. Even Rawls is an option. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KXuZi9aeGTw":[{"hn_comment_id":6982790,"author":"russell_h","month":"2013-12","story_title":"The Rust standard library no longer has any scheduling baked into it","text":"Paul Turner explained this really well at this year's Linux Plumbers Conference. The whole talk is fantastic, but the explanation of what pron is describing in particular (and how it could be improved) starts around 8:39: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6728927,"author":"skybrian","month":"2013-11","story_title":"The future of M:N threading","text":"If you're interested in this area you might like this talk from the Linux plumbers' conference: \"Over the past year we've been looking at how a uniform, performant, synchronous programming model can be implemented across all of Google's core languages (C++, Java, Go, Python), while maintaining compatibility with existing code.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10242953,"author":"acconsta","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Asynchronous IO in Rust","text":"Oh OK, I definitely could have written that better. From what I can tell, M:N threading has been thoroughly abandoned by Linux, but it might be worth revisiting given the horrendous I/O scaling of Linux kernel threads. I would imagine scheduling user threads cooperatively simplifies things a lot. Google has a very interesting talk about cooperative native thread scheduling, but they haven't upstreamed their code: [VIDEO] And here's what linux devs are actually doing (it's underwhelming, something like 50% of what the hardware is capable of): [LINK] In the meantime, people who actually need the performance (HPC and even some enterprise servers) have to bypass the kernel entirely. It looks like that's going to be possible even in virtualized environments, thanks to hardware support: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13176346,"author":"asb","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Haskell in the Datacentre","text":"Related to this discussion, this talk on user-scheduled OS threads is really interesting. It's a shame no proposed implementation or experimental patches have appeared [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16692878,"author":"lomnakkus","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Fast, Safe, and Complete(ish) Web Service in Rust","text":"Allow me to third that. It's one of dangers assuming that what you learned at university 15-20 years ago still applies. Another interesting talk: [0] (and even that is 5 years old) [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29065329,"author":"m0zg","month":"2021-11","story_title":"C++ Coroutines Do Not Spark Joy","text":"Google needs to get off its ass and open source Fibers (not to be confused with Google Fiber). Fibers sparked plenty of joy in me back when I was at Google. It's just a more dignified way of doing things with threads, IMO. Here's the talk which, unfortunately, does not show the higher level APIs I'm talking about: [VIDEO] . If this were released today everyone would slap their foreheads and say \"of course that's how it should be done\". Google folks have already removed the obstacle in that direction by adding userspace switching to the kernel in recent kernel releases. Just go all the way now, and release the kraken. Last update I've seen on this is this article from June of this year: [LINK] Imagine how excruciating it must have been to all the Google people on the C++ Standard committee to work on this stuff that comes nowhere close to what they've been using internally for years, and not be able to talk about it in any kind of detail.","stance":"rec"}],"KZjFVdU8VLI":[{"hn_comment_id":12170419,"author":"nprescott","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Fun vs. Computer Science","text":"I don't disagree with the article, but I also don't know that pushing the boundaries of interactivity and \"fun\" are relegated to academia. Iterating on what makes things fun is (probably) highly unscientific and might be better left to people more focused on it directly, such as game programmers. As far as interactive development of games goes, I still marvel at Bruce Hauman's demo[1] of \"Interactive programming Flappy Bird in ClojureScript\". I think the best hope of achieving what the author is suggesting is in the development of something similar, either direct REPL access to the game environment or DSLs embedded in the game engines (which already exist I'm sure). Outside of the big name engines, I'm curious about what existing options are (leaving out anything browser based because JavaScript is an obvious example), I know of L\u00d6VE[2] but I'm not familiar with how \"fun\" games made in it are. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9317792,"author":"dustingetz","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Myself \u2013 v1.0.3","text":"This is called interactive development; if you liked this, check these out: * Interactive programming Flappy Bird in ClojureScript: [VIDEO] * Live-editing React app without refresh: [LINK] These demos aren't smoke and mirrors, I and many others do interactive development, 8 hours a day, writing regular web apps.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10183385,"author":"base698","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Lisp is still a secret weapon","text":"If you're starting from from scratch it looks really awesome. No callback hell and in believable tooling. Watch these talks to see what I mean about tooling: Few minutes [VIDEO] Longer [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14841749,"author":"freshhawk","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Show HN: Mesh IDE \u2013 a code editor that feels like a spreadsheet","text":"I'm not sure if the parent did, but I followed what you were looking for and the answer is still \"try clojure\", perhaps more specifically it is \"Try the Clojure libraries figwheel and devcards to do web stuff\" but the push for immediate feedback and \"interactive programming\" is central for everyone. It's a community that took Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk to heart, already agreeing due to the REPL centric workflows that most people used. Bruce Hauman has some good talks about his tools, which are GUI application-centric and a joy to use [1][2][3] If you aren't doing web or native mobile GUI stuff then the default tools have immediate unit test/linting/spec compliance feedback triggered every time you save a file. Unless you mean you want a very simplified language, in which case you should look elsewhere. Clojure has definitely chosen the high power side of that trade-off, but this also allows some truly first class tools to be developed. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] <- this one in particular is original and outstanding in my opinion","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21583149,"author":"LandR","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Learn ClojureScript: Functional Programming Concepts","text":"One of the best things about ClojureScript is figwheel and realtime programming. You can see it in action here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23934960,"author":"Nihilartikel","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Nubank acquires Cognitect","text":"From my standpoint as a one man show, it's invaluable to be able to write the web client and backend in the same language, to share code between them... and have that one language NOT be JS. Clojurescript with Rum/Citrus or Reagent/Reframe deliver on the promise of React/Redux with much less fuss and overhead. Editing JSX is a pain in comparison to the Hiccup syntax used more often in CLJS, e.g. [:div {:class shiny} \"some stuff\" [:button \"OK\"]] - with the structural editing in any good Clojure editor you can cut, paste, entire blocks of tags, or slurp a tag from outside your div into it, or spit one out, all with a few keystrokes, never stopping to find some closing </div> tag.. I guess some JSX IDEs might do this, but it's really nice that the HTML is represented as just another piece of data, not some weird chimerical syntax bolt on. With Figwheel or ShadowCLJS hot reloading is instantaneous and doesn't even interrupt your webapp. If they're written properly, functions and the app state are not conflated at all, so you can modify any function in your app's rendering or behavior and as long as they aren't incompatible with the runtime state, it will just pop right into your browser. Illustrated well in this video where the author is interactively re-implementing Flappy Bird: [VIDEO] I feel particularly strongly about this having started out doing front end work primarily in cljs but recently being falling into using React/Redux for a contract and being REALLY strung out by t","stance":"rec"}],"K_nnUbX7uuQ":[{"hn_comment_id":24119873,"author":"the-dude","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Secret Landscape: America's cold war infrastructure","text":"Reminds me of 'The Secrets Of Cornwall - Part 1 - Communications' : [VIDEO] All kinds of bland looking, unmarked buildings housing telecom equipment for the onshoring fibres.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28819607,"author":"b0tzzzzzzman","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Incenser, or how NSA and GCHQ are tapping internet cables (2014)","text":"Great write up. I would recommend the checking out: Documentary about the cable landing stations: The Secrets of Cornwall [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33119468,"author":"132RRN96","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Interactive Submarine Cable Map","text":"A lot of the time these landing sites / buildings are a bit further inland. At the beach there is usually only a buried armoured cable leading to a concrete slab or something where it connects to underground ductwork. If you're interested in that and have an hour of time there is a youtube video[1] of a local tracking these down around the Cornwall area. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"K_oET45GzMI":[{"hn_comment_id":7752957,"author":"loso","month":"2014-05","story_title":"The Trade of the Century: When George Soros Broke the British Pound","text":"A pretty good documentary from the BBC about Black Wednesday. Shows more from the government side and the mistakes they made than Soros part but still gives you a good understanding of what happened. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13863155,"author":"shitgoose","month":"2017-03","story_title":"SEC Rejects Rule Change for Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Fund [pdf]","text":"[VIDEO] a good overview of the origins of the crisis. how politicians for their own shortsighted gains made one poor decision after another and led the country into financial crisis.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21456568,"author":"elmar","month":"2019-11","story_title":"When George Soros Broke the British Pound (2014)","text":"This incident was the main reason the UK didn't enter the Euro. This wonderful BBC documentary explains everything on detail. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"K_q-xnYRugQ":[{"hn_comment_id":27654359,"author":"ficklepickle","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Why does the world harbor so many different voltages, plugs, and sockets?","text":"> If you plug a 16A cord to a 20A circuit and draw 20A from it, the fuse will be perfectly happy (everything's fine as far as it's concerned) but the cord can catch on fire. Technology Connections recently made a video about this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29223857,"author":"acidbaseextract","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Corded headphones are making an unexpected return","text":"For those who are into this kind of thing, here's a 25 minute mini-documentary of the US electrical system's history and problems. It's more focused on wiring, but has a lot to say on plugs: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34342563,"author":"_whiteCaps_","month":"2023-01","story_title":"We need a lot more electricians if we\u2019re going to electrify everything","text":"Extension cords are a bad idea. Especially since you can buy 10A rated cords that can be plugged into 15A sockets. [LINK] There's a really good explanation in this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40189965,"author":"rinron","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Is it okay to daisy chain a UPS?","text":"probably because it Depends, If you dont know its safer not to. long answer (keep in mind i live in canada, im not a professional, this is just what i learned and trust, keep in mind above) - As long as no wire/bar exceeds its max Amp your safe no matter how many things are plugged in or how long of a daisy chain, the max amp is usually listed. - all devices should list the max amp they use, add up the amp's of all the devices connected to that wire and if its below your safe. - if your breaker is 15 amp, virtually all normal extensions/power bars are rated for at least 15 amps which means doesnt matter what you do the breaker should* flip before any damage is done - if breaker is above 15 amp most surge protectors have protection that will trigger if they exceed their max, most basic \"splitters\" and extension cords dont, eg if they dont have a switch or reset button they are pretty much guaranteed to not have this protection, be extra carful how much you load on those. some good rules of thumb to keep in mind, look for imprints or labels that list amps, smaller wires can handle less, damaged wires can handle less then they did before and shouldn't be used, if a wire or connector warms when its in use its overloaded reduce the load on it, especially if it warms quickly. here is a video that i liked that talks about it as well [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KaOC9danxNo":[{"hn_comment_id":10879358,"author":"LeoPanthera","month":"2016-01","story_title":"David Bowie Has Died","text":"The chances that anyone here hasn't seen it are almost zero, but just in case, if you haven't seen Chris Hadfield's cover of Space Oddity, recorded on the ISS, you really should: [VIDEO] I don't have a source but I heard that David preferred this version to the original.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18011962,"author":"toomanybeersies","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Dear Moon","text":"Chris Hadfield recorded a cover of Bowie's Space Oddity on the ISS [1], including playing the guitar in space. It gives me chills every time I listen to it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12812893,"author":"redthrowaway","month":"2016-10","story_title":"What Sid Meier\u2019s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About \u2018Civilization\u2019","text":"Complaints about Civ's omission of the dark side of history ring hollow to me. Civ is, at its heart, a deeply aspirational and optimistic game. Watching the Baba Yetu intro from Civ IV[1] gives me the same sense of wonder and pride in humanity that Chris Hadfield's rendition of Space Oddity[2] does. Dwelling on the darkness in our history would be so discordant for a game like Civ. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Kas0tIxDvrg":[{"hn_comment_id":22522327,"author":"brownbat","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Show HN: Epidemic Simulator","text":"Just watched the 3brown1blue video today, which talks about exponential growth and fixes it to the latest actual COVID-19 numbers. Really helped it all click. [VIDEO] Edit: separate HN discussion: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22565597,"author":"thomasmg","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat","text":"To be exact, it's a \"logistic curve\", which initially is exponential. From this 3Blue1Brown excellent video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22596388,"author":"asix66","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What happens next after a successful lockdown?","text":"And those who don't understand, or need a refresher on, exponential growth should watch this great video by 3Blue1Brown. Exponential growth and epidemics: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22676414,"author":"Fej","month":"2020-03","story_title":"\u2018It looks like a war zone\u2019: NJ docs say hospitals under siege, supplies low","text":"I live in Bergen County. There is a lack of panic - although I'm on the north side, opposite of the most infected parts. I went grocery shopping earlier today, there were a few people with masks but no one was really trying to keep a distance from others. Plenty of people there, perhaps a few less than usual. At times there are so many people that they have to restrict entry into the store and create a line outside (possibly to help with social distancing, but there are still too many people in the store for that to matter). It's the opposite of social distancing. The disaster in NYC, and the counties immediately north/east of Bergen (Westchester, Rockland) is going to spill over. We're not going to be able to handle it and we don't have the clout of NY to push for more resources. In a recent video, 3Blue1Brown wrote \"The only thing to fear is a lack of fear itself.\" This is what worries me. My parents are at risk as long-time smokers and if Valley runs out of ventilators and PPE, our major/usual option is out. (excellent video by the way) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22523535,"author":"officialjunk","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Show HN: HN reader that filters out COV**-19 and Coronavir** articles","text":"regardless of what you hear, china takes outbreaks very seriously and responds aggressively. the general population in china also takes it very seriously. normal behavior response in china looks like over reaction in the us. please watch this video by 3blue1brown [VIDEO] china is past its inflection point and we have yet to determine where our inflection point will be. everyone should be changing your behavior now. the fact that sars-cov didn\u2019t get as far in 2002 as sars-cov-2 virus is currently going should be concerning. the us could ignore prior outbreaks because china is aggressive to stop it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22547954,"author":"willis936","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says","text":"But months ago they really couldn\u2019t have known. We still don\u2019t know how many will be infected. All we can do is take precautionary measures. The WHO messaging should have been stronger and earlier, but it isn\u2019t their fault for not labeling a pandemic months ago. Granted, there was enough data and research done to squarely label this as a pandemic, and that\u2019s really where I assign blame on them. Here is a neat video that helps put things in perspective for most any viewer. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22581990,"author":"arendtio","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community","text":"Maybe they should include this 3Blue1Brown video to explain what 'exponential' means in this context: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22602177,"author":"carapace","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Shelter in place for Bay Area counties","text":"This is the time to resort to drastic measures to prevent drastic consequences. Have you seen this from 3Blue1Brown: [VIDEO] \"Exponential growth and epidemics\" ?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22646259,"author":"ochoseis","month":"2020-03","story_title":"The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming","text":"3blue1brown did a good video explaining the logistic shape of pandemic curves: [VIDEO] My key takeaway was that once you see the inflection point, you know that you\u2019ll have roughly 2x the number infections by the time it\u2019s done.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22727679,"author":"vikramkr","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Covid-19 Sanity \u2013 Covid-19 papers from bioRxiv/medRxiv searchable and sortable","text":"3 blue one brown had a great video on exponential growth that detailed how a 10% difference in the numbers is the difference between being halfway there and having orders of magnitude to go. As I'm sure you're aware, the point of the numbers isn't to change the reality of the situation, it's to understand what that reality is. And the people that care are epidemiologists and leaders with decades of experience fighting pandemic after pandemic. You know, people that know what they're talking about? Might be worth trying to spend time actually learning how the people that are spending day and night trying to save your life and the lives of your loved ones do their work before dismissing them as useless. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KbB0FjPg0mw":[{"hn_comment_id":14360161,"author":"pixelperfect","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best way to relearn math?","text":"Here are some excellent YouTube playlists for the subjects you mentioned. I have used and can vouch for the high quality of all of them: Linear Algebra: [LINK] Probability: [VIDEO] Calculus: [LINK] Be sure to work through problems and not just watch lectures, because otherwise you'll forget the content. For example, the linear algebra course has a companion site with problems, and the professor of the probability course wrote an excellent book with problems.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16168374,"author":"neel8986","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI","text":"This is kind of a masters degree course i created for myself to get knowledge of Machine Learning from bottoms up First, you need a strong mathematical base. Otherwise, you can copy paste an algorithm or use an API but you will not get any idea of what is happening inside Following concepts are very essential 1) Linear Algebra (MIT [LINK] ) 2) Probability (Harvard [VIDEO] ) Get some basic grasp of machine learning. Get a good intuition of basic concepts 1) Andrew Ng coursera course ( [LINK] ) 2) Tom Mitchell book ( [LINK] ) Both the above course and book are super easy to follow. You will get a good idea of basic concepts but they lack in depth. Now you should move to more intense books and courses You can get more in-depth knowledge of Machine learning from following sources 1)Nando machine learning course ( [LINK] ) 2)Bishops book ( [LINK] ) Especially Bishops book is really deep and covers almost all basic concepts. Now for recent advances in Deep learning. I will suggest two brilliant courses from Stanford 1) Vision ( [LINK] ) 2) NLP ( [LINK] ) The Vision course by Karparthy can be a very good introduction to Deep learning. Also, the mother book for deep learning ( [LINK] )is good","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18429429,"author":"pedrodelfino","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Book which comprehensively covers probability theory?","text":"I recommend \"Introduction to Probability\" by Joseph K Blitzstein and Jessica Hwang. This book is tough. Really tough. However, you are really going to do \"deliberate practice\" while having a go on the assignments. It bothers me that the author does not provide the answer to most of the questions. This is specially bad in this field of Mathematics (Probability). As an example, in calculus you can always plot the curve, the derivative and see if the result makes sense, in probability theory it is hard to have a simple and safe sanity check. You can watch all classes from Harvard here for free: [VIDEO] If you want, there is also a MOOC in EdX with the same material: [LINK] Sheldon Ross' book is also a good one. It was mentioned here. I specially like the section on theoritical problems, only with exercises on proofs. Every chapter has one. However, Joe Blitzstein problems are more challenging and will train you more on intuition.","stance":"rec"}],"KcfFJ6pNEZk":[{"hn_comment_id":8834389,"author":"wallflower","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm going to present technology jobs to 400 16yo,what should I tell them?","text":"First, congratulations! I would demystify the process of creation. Show them your wireframes, your pencil sketches, talk about the business v. creative push and pull. Make it interactive - break them into groups of 2-3 each for 5 min and show them Notch's time-lapse in the background on projector while you have them work on exercises in ideation - what would their game be? what would the levels, characters, and challenges be. They don't have to present - just get them comfortable with the first step of creation - putting it on 'scratch' paper. If you have time, deconstruct Flappy Bird. The scrolling left to right background v. making the bird move. How the object detection is greatly simplified when you have only one coordinate to detect (y-bird and y-pipeTop/y-pipeBottom). How adding gravity to the bird (downward velocity) allows you to fly the bird. \"Making Metagun\" by Notch [LINK] \"Creating Prelude of the Chambered\" by Notch [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47763913,"author":"CodeArtisan","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings","text":"The games he made for programming competitions like ludum dare were decent. I especially enjoyed Prelude to the chambered. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"KdfHVcU8U7U":[{"hn_comment_id":30884713,"author":"Jenda_","month":"2022-04","story_title":"High schoolers create filter to remove lead in water","text":"I would like to add a video on XRF from Applied Science, as the device is not very well known (at least in .cz, I have learned about it only recently). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31405825,"author":"CamperBob2","month":"2022-05","story_title":"DIY High Resolution Spectrometer (2018)","text":"It's easy enough to generate x-rays, for better or worse, but the devil's in the details. The x-rays apparently need to be monochromatic, or nearly so, so you can't just apply HV to any old random radio tube that's lying around. And then you need a beryllium exit window on the tube and another one at the detector entrance. Fascinating teardown on one of these things at Ben Krasnow's channel [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"KdnGPQaICjk":[{"hn_comment_id":12639308,"author":"sideb0ard","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"I love the Ted Nelson \"Computers For Cynics\" series - [VIDEO] He is kinda awesome in Herzog's recent 'Lo and Behold' too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16857613,"author":"enkiv2","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics probably doesn't contain technical information that's new to any of you, but Ted has a knack for reframing things in ways that make the arbitrariness of certain historical decisions clear: [VIDEO] On the subject of hypertext, The Web That Wasn't gives a nice history of the idea (for anybody who thinks it starts with TBL -- surprisingly many people!): [LINK] Another reframing-oriented talk is Clay Shirky's \"It's not information overload, it's filter failure\", which ultimately leads to Shirky suggesting the kinds of user-oriented filtering features that Mastodon has implemented: [LINK] At the intersection of neurology and information science, Peter Watts always has something interesting to say, and as a former marine biologist focusing on the nervous system of starfish, this is absolutely in his wheelhouse: [LINK] This one (\"moving away from defensive programming\") justified strong typing in a pretty clear way: [LINK] Dan Dennett is just as relevant as Doug Hofstadter when it comes to metacognition: [LINK] Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science starts slow, but if you don't have much of a historical background (like, if you're only vaguely aware of what happened in CS in the 70s), it's a laundry list of things you should look up and be aware of before you start your next project: [LINK] Everybody should understand procedural generation: [LINK] Likewise, since AI is hyped up right now, we should all remind ourselves that IA is a thing too: [LINK] M","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40480997,"author":"drewcoo","month":"2024-05","story_title":"The accidental tyranny of user interfaces","text":"The article has a link to a wonderful Ted Nelson series on YouTube that explores that kind of thing in more depth: Computers for Cynics. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KeLBd2EJLOU":[{"hn_comment_id":38449565,"author":"NobodyNada","month":"2023-11","story_title":"C++ Memory Model: Migrating from x86 to ARM","text":"For a more in depth introduction to the topic with a lot of practical code examples, I highly recommend Herb Sutter\u2019s excellent talk: Part 1 [LINK] Part 2 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41241187,"author":"chc4","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Rust Atomics and Locks (2023)","text":"\"Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?\" is one of the best books about atomics and concurrency, and my #2 recommendation. [LINK] My #1 actually isn't a book at all, but the two \"atomic Weapons\" talks by Herb Sutter, which are extremely good. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"KePNhUJ2reI":[{"hn_comment_id":18634278,"author":"joemag","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Why Black Hole Interiors Grow Almost Forever","text":"This is from PBS Spacetime series [1]. A fantastic channel, and they did a number of videos on black holes. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23819870,"author":"pmiller2","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Astronomers claim to have seen the merger of two black holes within a third","text":"> ...at the same moment. As an aside, this is a rather funny phrase to be using about objects so massive that time and space actually switch roles inside their event horizons compared to the normal universe. I don't feel like I can explain it very well, but here is a video that does so: [VIDEO] (Skip to about 5:15 for the good stuff.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24696459,"author":"me_me_me","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020","text":"[LINK] I hope it helps. I think this is the cleanest explanation with actual visual representation. Edit: Sorry this one is even better. How Time Becomes Space Inside a Black Hole | Space Time [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27226721,"author":"neom","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Physicists identify the engine powering black hole energy beams","text":"PBS Space Time to the rescue: What Happens at the Event Horizon? - [LINK] What\u2019s On The Other Side Of A Black Hole? - [LINK] How Time Becomes Space Inside a Black Hole - [VIDEO] The Black Hole Information Paradox - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"KgzQuE1pR1w":[{"hn_comment_id":30232894,"author":"dudeinjapan","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?","text":"Whenever I find myself feeling like you do right now, I watch this video from Bill Hicks: \"It's just a ride\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11477840,"author":"ZenoArrow","month":"2016-04","story_title":"The rituals we perform and the games we play","text":"You're welcome. :-) Thank you for your answer, I think I understand your reasoning a little better. With the example of the mathematician, you can read it a number of different ways, but one of the things I took from it was the difference between a healthy curiosity and an unhealthy curiosity. It sounds to me that you have a healthy curiosity, and enjoy the mental stimulation of exploring the big questions. As long as it remains something you enjoy and you're still open to enjoying other things then you can't really go wrong. If you'd like to find kindred spirits that also enjoy thinking about the big questions, you can find plenty in the world of philosophy. I can recommend The School of Life as an enjoyable way to explore philosophy. As some examples, here are a couple of my favourites from TSoL: [LINK] [LINK] Learning can be done for your own enjoyment, but what I would suggest is the mindset that many of us used to get us through school isn't likely to help with that. I think this video puts it well: [LINK] Related to this, here's a discussion about deschooling you may find interesting: [LINK] One last thing... [VIDEO] Best of luck!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45536407,"author":"0xDEAFBEAD","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?","text":">evolved Yes, it evolved. It wasn't designed. >Version numbers? Without version numbers, it has to be backwards-compatible, making it difficult to remove cruft. What would programming be like if all the code you wrote needed to work as IBM mainframe assembly? Tau is a good case study. Everyone seems to agree tau is better than pi. How much adoption has it seen? Is this what \"heavy optimization\" looks like? It took hundreds of years for Arabic numerals to replace Roman numerals in Europe. A medieval mathematician could have truthfully said: \"We've been using Roman numerals for hundreds of years; they work fine.\" That would've been stockholm syndrome. I get the same sense from your comment. Take a deep breath and watch this video: [VIDEO] >You're being facetious, right? I'm being provocative. Not facetious. \"Strong opinions, weakly held.\"","stance":"rec"}],"Ki_Af_o9Q9s":[{"hn_comment_id":12763110,"author":"nicholasjon","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter views Schiaparelli landing site","text":"Reminds of the \"Seven Minutes of Terror\" video that NASA put out ahead of the Curiosity landing explaining how they intended to make it safely to the surface. [VIDEO] (Note: I get goosebumps every time I watch this, absolutely amazing problem solving.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26197273,"author":"underseacables","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Mars landing: Photo shows Perseverance rover during landing","text":"If you have not watched the seven minutes of terror video produced by NASA, you absolutely must. It details exactly how they put these amazing machines on the surface of Mars. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19026678,"author":"radiorental","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Visual Programming Doesn\u2019t Suck","text":"> I still haven't seen any case for visual programming. Aerodef, automotive, etc all use some form of visual programming. Controls engineers rarely write code, the systems are way too complex. E.g. I highly recommend watching this video from JPL to give you an understanding of where such tools excel. It's about simulating, iterating and then having scientists and engineers autogenerate the code they couldn't possibly write or test [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21402502,"author":"DuskStar","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The SpaceX Starship is a big deal","text":"Curiosity used aerobraking, parachutes AND a skycrane to land. There's a great video here: [VIDEO] Previous solutions weren't used because they were less crazy, but because they were more mass efficient for \"small\" payload sizes.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26160906,"author":"overlordalex","month":"2021-02","story_title":"NASA's Perseverance rover will attempt to land on Mars this week","text":"JPL produced a video titled \"7 minutes of terror\" that detailed the landing procedure they used for Curiosity, and it's worth a watch. It goes into detail on everything you see in the articles landing video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KkMDCCdjyW8":[{"hn_comment_id":659327,"author":"jamesk2","month":"2009-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Where to begin programming?","text":"Python is fantastic but Learning Python might be a bit steep for someone who's not familiar with programming at all. Strangely, I think this youtube lecture series from Stanford is fantastic. [VIDEO] It's java but the lecturer eases you into the most important concepts with an understanding of how to engineer readable, reusable code. So watch it free. Then buy Learning Python. If there is an equivalent python learning video on youtube, I haven't found it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46664741,"author":"TZubiri","month":"2026-01","story_title":"MIT's Computer Systems Security (2024)","text":"Yeah, there were 2 golden ages: 1- When this internet thing came out 2- When this covid thing came out On the first era, here's a Java lecture from Stanford, if it's too basic for you, it still has historical value, iirc it's something like Java 6. And it also reinforces the basics. [VIDEO] It's a bit harder to follow along with online materials since you have to use the Internet Archive, and download older compilers or use options to target older versions, but it's all the more fun for it.","stance":"rec"}],"KkpqA8yG9T4":[{"hn_comment_id":25264106,"author":"cromwellian","month":"2020-12","story_title":"South Korea's fusion device KSTAR runs for 20 seconds at 100M degrees Celsius","text":"Watch Robert Whyte's presentation. [VIDEO] The basic problems have all been solved, the science has been solved too. Tokamaks have already made net fusion power. The only difference between JET, which already succeeded, and ARC, is using Magnets with 2.6x the field strength. The B^4 power scaling, gives you about 50x the power, so ARC will generate 500 MW of power whereas JET (remember, already proven engineering), generated 10MW. So without a doubt, this is just an engineering problem at this point. A prototype device that didn't have to be maintained, could be built exactly like any other Tokamak, just with REBCO magnets, and you'd have the required fusion power. To get the required electric power, and add in maintenance, you need to at the FliBe liquid blanket, replacable toroid sections, and a heat exchanger, but again, these are known engineering problems with known solutions, akin to knowing that landing a rocket is possible, but figuring out the grid fins, heat shield, landing legs, and guidance software. Fusion devices on a small scale have been proving the plasma physics since the 90s. We don't have fusion yet simply because of people being conservative and sticking with traditional \"known to work\" magnets, which is why ITER is a huge, hulking monstrosity. As Dr Whyte says, cost scales by R, R can be reduced by a factor of 10 from ITER simply by using different magnets, so ARC will produce the same power as ITER, but significantly smaller and cheaper. The basic paper","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29094837,"author":"runnerup","month":"2021-11","story_title":"China to build 150 nuclear reactors- more than rest of world over last 35 years","text":"> \u201cPeople say nuclear is expensive in the West, but they forget to say it\u2019s expensive because of interest rates,\u201d Morin said. It's still a valid criticism if: - They could get those high interest rates from the return on other capital projects (nuclear less return than something else) - All externalities are included in costs We only have so much labor/material/energy available, and we do have to have some way of allocating them to the things with the most return. The big issue, obviously, is that tons and tons of negative externalities aren't priced in to most economic endeavors, that might make fission look a lot better. It might make it look a lot worse. Personally I'm hoping Elon/Mackenzie/Gates/Buffet/etc decide to throw a few dozen billion at fusion. I think its time truly is nigh. If you haven't watched this yet, it's definitely worth your time. Rather than being a super opinionated think-piece, it instead does a fantastic job walking the viewer through: - high level nuclear fusion engineering performance curves / the engineering design contraint space - the current state of nuclear fusion research (as of 5 years ago) and - breaks down why some new smaller reactors will likely begin construction soon and counter-intuitively, the most recently started ones may be completed before a fusion reactor that first broke ground 25 years ago and is still very much being actively built [VIDEO] Also worth noting that interesting things happen when you assume you can have \"large\" a","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29687202,"author":"maccam94","month":"2021-12","story_title":"After years of doubts, hopes grow that nuclear fusion is near","text":"Commonwealth Fusion Systems has addressed all of those issues: 1. The higher field strength from the new HTS magnets eliminates turbulence. 2. The ARC reactor will use a FLiBe molten salt blanket to capture energy from neutrons and breed tritium to be used in the fusion reaction. 3. The ARC reactor is designed to have a swappable 2cm thick vacuum chamber, which is the component subjected to the most neutron radiation (everything else is shielded by the molten salt blanket). These chambers are expected to last a year, and while they are moderately radioactive waste, the amount of material is relatively small and they should become safe in the order of a decade. I highly recommend watching Dr. Whyte's talks on YouTube, he discusses the challenges, design, and performance in an approachable way. There's a timestamp index in the comments on this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15631428,"author":"maxharris","month":"2017-11","story_title":"For the love of Earth, stop traveling","text":"Instead of trying to reduce options for people, why not put your energy toward something positive, like this? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16685636,"author":"scottmsul","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Lockheed Martin has obtained a patent for a compact fusion reactor","text":"The real deal is here, from MIT: [VIDEO] Apparently there was a recent breakthrough in superconductors, which allows significantly more current in the inductor coils while still maintaining superconductivity. This in turn allows for much stronger magnetic fields, hence tighter confinement of the plasma and therefore more fusion. A standard tokamak with these new superconductors should produce more energy out than energy in, and be a viable source of energy.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16687439,"author":"JumpCrisscross","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Lockheed Martin has obtained a patent for a compact fusion reactor","text":"Eye opener is the chart at 18:03: \"from 1970 to 1995, [fusion] power and energy increased much faster than computing power (Moore's Law)\" [1]. Magnetic-confinement fusion stalled, according to Dr. Whyte, because to get more power (and efficiency) we need stronger fields. To get stronger fields we needed bigger magnets. To support bigger magnets one needs bigger structures. Big magnets and big structures will absorb more magnetic and neutron flux; that increases maintenance frequency, complexity and cost. Better superconductors let us get stronger fields without bigger magnets. That changes the cost function. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17472791,"author":"mastax","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What talks or videos do you suggest to watch on a long flight?","text":"\"Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion?\" - Professor Dennis Whyte. [VIDEO] The title threw me off, but it's a very interesting and grounded talk about the different approaches to scaling fusion energy.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24631317,"author":"DesiLurker","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest","text":"yes thats true. ITER is obsolete already because it actually cannot use these high-temp-high-Tesla superconductors. at the moment ITERs best hope is that it 'proves' that fusion is viable & then do a full redesign for DEMO to do proper scaled operation. here is the original presentation by Dr Whyte of MIT behind this Sparc project: [VIDEO] he talks about the impact of these newer magnets at around 26min mark.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26360904,"author":"hangonhn","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Fusion startup plans reactor with small but powerful superconducting magnets","text":"The MIT Club of Northern California posted a video a few years ago on this exact topic and reactor: [VIDEO] This thing came out of MIT, at least according to the video, and was really the collective efforts of a bunch of MIT grad students who made the breakthrough partially by taking a very Silicon Valley startup approach of using off-the-shelf parts, experimenting with new ideas, and starting small. I don't know if Professor Whyte framed it that way to appeal to the crowd or not.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35968074,"author":"reaperman","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Renewables supplied 65% of new US utility-scale generating capacity in Q1 2023","text":"In total a land area about the quarter of the size of California was contaminated with over 37 becquerel of radiation due to Chernobyl, including 10,000 farms in the UK alone. The solitary story was to get people to read the book. The debate is if fission is sustainable for the environment. I talked about contaminated agriculture and how much that was covered up and missing in the statistics \u2014 people still living in contaminated land and eating contaminated food today. \u201cThe huge numbers of people\u201d is what I\u2019m concerned about and why I advocate for wind and solar. I\u2019m not in favor of the fossil fuel status quo. The radiation and pollution from coal ash and effects of global warming on agriculture are massive. But that\u2019s not an argument for \u201cfission is ecologically sustainable\u201d, that\u2019s an argument for \u201ceven though it\u2019s not, we should still build dams and fission power plants anyways\u201d. Which is a fine argument. It\u2019s just a different one. A fission disaster or attack on a fission plant can take half of Californias agriculture out of the picture over night. You can\u2019t say fission and wind have similar risk at the tail ends. Yeah, statistically it hasn\u2019t happened, but the risk exists. Besides, new fission plants will take 20 years to build and by then we'll have actually clean baseload energy from fusion reactors. This video[0] is from 7 years ago, but it provides an amazing breakdown of the physics of fusion energy. The timeline and physics predicted in the lecture have come to pas","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40762444,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2024-06","story_title":"HH70, the first high-temperature superconducting Tokamak achieves first plasma","text":"I\u2019ve been following them since they were giving promising lectures at MIT and I absolutely think they have the most solid approach! Tokamaks are well understood, they supposedly have the same plasma physics as ITER which has been heavily scrutinized and supported by work at JET, and their concept is simple - Tokamak but with very high field superconducting magnets using technology that wasn\u2019t available when ITER was conceived, and apparently higher field strengths mean a smaller reactor for the same power gains. As a lay person the story is simple and that\u2019s good! Then they demonstrated their magnets and got $2B in funding and now they\u2019re deep in the construction phase for SPARC. I encourage anyone curious to look up videos on SPARC on YouTube. It\u2019s very encouraging! It seems honestly very reasonable that they will see sustained net energy gain for their entire power plant before 2030 (tho SPARC is still a demonstrator not designed for continuous service, so \u201csustained\u201d means like one minute). Here\u2019s some videos: 8 years ago: [VIDEO] 2 years ago: [VIDEO] Latest update posted yesterday: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Klkpk_hO4FQ":[{"hn_comment_id":42722575,"author":"Khaine","month":"2025-01","story_title":"China Suddenly Building Fleet of Special Barges Suitable for Taiwan Landings","text":"The Defence Analyst who wrote this article has posted a YouTube video where they outline why they are specifically designed for invasion. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42916213,"author":"aaron695","month":"2025-02","story_title":"The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution","text":"H I Sutton's recent video on China's new invasion barges was very interesting so not really HN material, but there he talked about how all of Chinas ferries are designed to also move tanks if they have to - [VIDEO] You go to South Korea or Taiwan and all their subways are also bomb shelters, but something like The Boring Company, environmentally amazing, strategically amazing and everyone thinks it's funny to put it down. There's a massive problem with attitude and IQ in the internet population.","stance":"rec"}],"KqFNbCcyFkk":[{"hn_comment_id":15579241,"author":"dmitriid","month":"2017-10","story_title":"When did the golden age of The Simpsons end?","text":"For an actual exploration of what happened, I highly recommend this video. The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15579299,"author":"brudgers","month":"2017-10","story_title":"When did the golden age of The Simpsons end?","text":"My favorite take on \"The Decline and Fall of the Simpsons Empire\": The Fall of the Simpsons [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18284445,"author":"lostgame","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?","text":"Nobody here seems to be mentioning the death of Phil Hartman[1] in 1998. The article, as well, staggeringly, doesn't mention his name. There's a video[2], 'The Fall of the Simpsons', which is one of my favourite videos on the internet. It explains and describes with utmost clarity the issues that led to the series 'demise', which, ultimately, boils down to 'bad writing'. However, in interviews, and comments from the showrunners and staff, it seems like Phil Hartman's death, who voiced the characters of Troy McCleur, and Lionel Hutz, as well as the voice of Lyle Lanley, from the fantastic classic episode 'Marge vs. the Monorail'. When Hartman died, they retired Troy's character. His absence alone is strongly felt when viewing the first several seasons against the others. His voice is certainly missed. Said Groening of Hartman: \"[I] took [Hartman] for granted because he nailed the joke every time,\" and that his voice acting could produce \"the maximum amount of humor\" with any line he was given. I mean, this was 1998. Most folks consider season 8-9 to have some of the last 'great' episodes of the series, or at least the last 'great' seasons. There's absolutely no way this is a coincidence, and the affect of his death on the series has been verified by countless staff. I often think of Hartman's death as equivalent to Brian Epstein's death in '67. Similar to the Simpsons, there are a million reasons why the Beatles went to shit (even if their output for three years after that was","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15579343,"author":"brownbat","month":"2017-10","story_title":"When did the golden age of The Simpsons end?","text":"There is a video with great analysis on this. Ultimately argues that Simpsons was a great piece of counter culture, then it just won and became culture, losing its ability to skewer mainstream comedy. Along with an upheaval in the writer's room, it just went absurd all the time. That's a sometimes brilliant move, but dull when used in place of any substance. It also forgot how to stay true to its characters. Much more here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18283313,"author":"saganus","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?","text":"There's a very interesting YouTube video that has a bit more of an explanation on why The Simpsons had a decline. I liked how they analyze the show and IMO it does a great job explaining why lots of people loved the show up until season 9-10. Personally I think I enjoyed up to season 12 or so, but definitely after 10 I noticed the shift in style/quality/whathaveyou. Could never put it into words why it felt like that, until I watched this. [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18283399,"author":"j45","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?","text":"This reminds me of this video which attributes the decline of the Simpsons to the changes in writers and how the type of comedy itself changed. I still catch episodes when possible, the old ones definitely have a different depth than the current ones. The fall of the Simpsons: How it happened: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18283898,"author":"nervousvarun","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?","text":"Interesting it's possible, but there are explanations out there that aren't based on nostalgia but actually joke complexity among other things: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18284554,"author":"richardboegli","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?","text":"Skim read the article and I would suggest watching these videos on YouTube. The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened [VIDEO] The Day The Simpsons Died [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47063627,"author":"yndoendo","month":"2026-02","story_title":"After 800 episodes, 'The Simpsons' creators look back \u2013 and ahead","text":"I recommend watching _The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened_ [0]. It goes though how the comedy went from sharp an witty to laugh track quality. Personally, the only show that was also focused on sharp and witty was _Futurama_. That show was able to retain it better through out the years. Every series finally episode was a masterpiece. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Kr3quGh7pJA":[{"hn_comment_id":24408493,"author":"tobr","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?","text":"> pop music lacks musicality, most of what they listed were to do with sonic tricks that are not really tied to musicality or musicianship This is a paradox, though. You\u2019re saying that one of the most popular types of music \u201clacks musicality\u201d. The only way that can be true is if you start with a narrow and arbitrary definition of what \u201cmusicality\u201d is. If you examine the history of ideas of what is \u201creal\u201d or \u201cauthentic\u201d or \u201cobjectively good\u201d in music, who has been a proponent of those ideas through history, and why, you will find is that a lot of it is rooted in white supremacy. The idea is that a certain style of white European music is the only true music, and that other music is only valuable to the extent that it happens to fit within the theoretical frameworks developed around those styles. I guess what I\u2019m saying is, please watch this excellent video, \u201cMusic Theory is Racist\u201d by Adam Neely: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26399386,"author":"Kye","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid\u2019s Sibelius (2018) [video]","text":"There's a very good video on the way too narrow view many people in the west have of music. [VIDEO] I know the title will set people off in a place like this, but it's not a 2014 Tumblr-level \"kill white people\" style analysis. Totally worth the time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35286419,"author":"shirleyquirk","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Tools to Learn Music Theory?","text":"I grew up in a family of classical musicians, got a degree in music, and was briefly a professional classical musician myself. So my advice may be very out of touch with the experience of someone learning for the first time, but my experiences learning beyond European classical music theory left me feeling insulted. The basics of music theory are presented as though they are the foundations upon which all subsequent music is derived. In fact, teaching scales and chords is like teaching that the electron orbits the nucleus - a 'simplification'. There _are_ real psychoacoustic truths, alongside equally fascinating historical forces, that underpin music theory. Learn the language and idioms of music theory, by all means, but don't think of it as being in any way true. Its a syncretist cargo cult of hacks and rules of thumb handed down by centuries of men with dubious motives. I recommend Adam Neely on YouTube, he illustrates music theory concepts clearly, engagingly, and with an appropriate skepticism for received wisdom. Here's his discussion of some more political criticisms of music theory: [VIDEO] I recommend Sethares' _Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale_ to anyone interested in the underpinnings of why some notes sound good together and others don't. [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41092863,"author":"Kye","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Tritone Substitutions","text":"The canonical video on the subject: [VIDEO] Some people will naively say \"All music has pentatonic! Universal!\" but ignore vital cultural context. One example in the video is ragas: they can look a lot like Western scales and modes, but they have a time and context. Western music also has a time and context, but it doesn't stand out as much to us unless someone goes full ham breaking that context like with the Imperial March in a Major mode: [LINK] It changes the mood from \"this is the bad guys!\" to something more positive and triumphant.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26133636,"author":"Pyramus","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Basic Music Theory","text":"I'd like to highlight Adam Neely's video on the subject [1] (also pointed out by user guerilla), where he argues quite convincingly that 'music theory' is not the theory behind music but theory behind the particular subset of Western music. That doesn't make it any less useful for creating this type of music, but it's in no way a universal theory, or arguably, a theory at all. More a collection of rules and conventions used in Western music. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26618178,"author":"peterkos","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Deriving Keys from Chords in Music","text":"Yup! Adam Neely has a great video[0] talking about how serious of a role any theoretical framework has on understanding the music itself -- and how in the US at least, we very often prescribe European standards of harmony on music. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26927969,"author":"DavidVoid","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Sisters with Transistors","text":"> As if some patriarchal conspiracy was forcing classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven down people\u2019s throats... No, but patriarchal and racial structures in society have historically suppressed artists who weren't white and male. Adam Neely has a good video on how the term \"music theory\" here in the West is essentially just \"the harmonic style of 18th century European musicians\" [1]. It's worth a watch if you're interested in music. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27371412,"author":"krapp","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Stop overstimulating your mind with digital entertainment","text":"See: Music Theory and White Supremacy by Adam Neely[0] [0] [VIDEO] The TL;DR for people who will be immediately triggered by the title and not bother to view is that Western music theory was intentionally designed around white supremacist ideals. It is exclusionary of the ideas and contributions of non-European cultures, and purposely so, as it deems them inferior.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28603857,"author":"gbanfalvi","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Why I left academia","text":"A generous reading makes me think that his music department is just widening their program to incorporate more non-western content. They asked him to change his course material in a way he doesn't like. If that's the case, it's something many arts departments around the world have been doing in the last few years. You can call it a product of \"wokeness\", but it's also a product of globalisation. > He said that music departments could stop teaching Beethoven and Wagner because their compositions were produced during a time of empire \u201cin the frankly insane belief that doing so will somehow materially improve current living conditions for the economically, socially, sexually, religiously, or racially underprivileged\u201d. They're never going to stop teaching Beethoven and Wagner and it sincerely sounds like he's misunderstanding the goals with most music departments' changes. On the other hand, there _are_ genuine issues with how music theory and history are taught today: [VIDEO] He's a professor of music history and theory. He edits a book series called \"Music in Context\". He's written about homosexuality in the world of opera. He doesn't seem like at outright conservative reactionary and I'd really like to understand what his grievances with his department are.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29091807,"author":"guerrilla","month":"2021-11","story_title":"(Music Production) Plug-In Capitalism","text":"> Does it refuse to get rid of dialect and variation if the race of the person processed is white? If it doesn\u2019t it doesn\u2019t make it white. For it to remove any dialect, it has to consider some dialect as standard. Think about it. > I\u2019m not reading the whole crazy pointless long article about more fake problems, the abstract is ridiculous enough. Well if you're going to question-beg, then you can't really complain can you. The rest of what you said is a different complaint than the one I answered, so you're moving the goal post but then setting up a straw man of what that person wrote when you say such music can't be made on it. They were specific in what they said and it didn't exclude the possibility of making some of it with it. This subject is definitely something that's been discussed a lot in music lately, so apparently it's not that meaningless to many people. Adam Neely has a popular video on what people are talking about if you're curious. [1] 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32545691,"author":"viraptor","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Did Bach \u201cinvent\u201d the rules of music theory?","text":"And if anyone has time for a longer explanation, Adam Neely did a great video about \"music theory\" - sorry, I mean \"the harmonic style of 18th century European musicians\". It's worth watching. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33123419,"author":"dagmx","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Why Is The Guitar Tuned Like It Is?","text":"I don\u2019t think you can really throw music theory out because so much of it is inate to humans hearing and culture, and it\u2019s largely a formalization of such. However, the rub is that what most people consider music theory is western classical theory. There\u2019s a lot of different music theories around the world , with different scales, structures etc\u2026 Here\u2019s a video you might find interesting of a microtonal guitar [LINK] Also a really good video on why \u201cmusic theory\u201d is often largely paired to western music [VIDEO] while there\u2019s so many alternates out there","stance":"rec"}],"KrksBdWcZgQ":[{"hn_comment_id":15253753,"author":"AceJohnny2","month":"2017-09","story_title":"IDA: What's new in 7.00","text":"> I trust its disassembler (especially for mainstream languages) more than almost any other disassembler Might I suggest Christopher Domas' Black Hat talk \"Breaking the x86 ISA\", along the way of which he demonstrates the limitations of all disassemblers out there, including IDA's :) Talk: [VIDEO] Slides: [LINK] Paper: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16046342,"author":"anfractuosity","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What\u2019s your favorite talk from 2017?","text":"One of my favourite talks I watched was \"Low Cost Non-Invasive Biomedical Imaging - An Open Electrical Impedance Tomography Project\" [LINK] As it presented an interesting technique I'd never heard of before, along with an implementation. Also I thought the 'Breaking the x86 Instruction Set' talk was extremely clever - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16047624,"author":"DyslexicAtheist","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What\u2019s your favorite talk from 2017?","text":"my favorite were: - How the reputation economy is creating data-driven conformity [LINK] - DEF CON 25 (2017) - Weaponizing Machine Learning [LINK] - BlackHat 2017: Breaking the x86 Instruction Set [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18219350,"author":"nnnate","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Breaking the x86 Instruction Set by Christopher Domas. [VIDEO] I found it easy to follow and pretty entertaining.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19733933,"author":"jchw","month":"2019-04","story_title":"A Complete Formal Semantics of x86-64 User-Level Instruction Set Architecture","text":"There was a really good Blackhat talk a year or two ago in a sort of similar vein: they developed an approach to iterate and find undocumented opcodes. [VIDEO] The software they developed is called Sandsifter.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25035126,"author":"tyingq","month":"2020-11","story_title":"XuanTie C906 based Allwinner RISC-V processor to power $12 Linux SBC's","text":"\"I thought you were saying that the use of microcode would complicate verification of the hardware.\" I do think that microcode opens up the possibility of subtle injections to follow code/hardware paths you might not easily predict. A really good talk on reverse engineering an ISA implementation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26522958,"author":"BlackLotus89","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Undocumented x86 instructions in Intel CPUs that can modify microcode","text":"There was an interesting black hat talk about automatically finding undocumented instructions. [0] Interesting comment on twitter to the instruction of the original post[1] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26890879,"author":"gbrown_","month":"2021-04","story_title":"How many x86 instructions are there? (2016)","text":"How about undocumented instructions? Sandsifter[1] is an interesting project and the video from BlackHat[2] is a good watch. There's also a previous discussion of it on HN[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27780469,"author":"brokenmachine","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Undocumented x86 instructions to control the CPU at the microarchitecture level [pdf]","text":"I watched a super interesting Black Hat video on youtube that talked about discovering secret instructions on CPUs by iterating over each bit of opcodes until you get an illegal instruction, and thereby discovering if an opcode is valid or not. He set up a room full of PCs running his code and had hardware to auto-reset them when they crashed. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ks-_Mh1QhMc":[{"hn_comment_id":5280892,"author":"ndonnellan","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Stanford Female CS Student: I Fight Impostor Syndrome","text":"I am reminded of this interesting talk by Amy Cuddy on body language: [VIDEO] Most of it is not directly related (still worth watching!), but at about 15:42 in she gives her personal anecdote of impostor syndrome and \"faking it til you make it\". Which, incidentally, I think applies well to entrepreneurs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26384745,"author":"chiefalchemist","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Talking with your hands alters the perception of your words","text":"It might be. I bumped into this last week and I found it fascinating. Long to short, your body language not only affects how others perceive you, it affects how you perceive you. [VIDEO] That aside, I'm reading Adam Grants \"Think Again.\" He mentioned at least one study where appearing infallible can be a bad thing. That you can become less believable, less likeable and so on. There's more to influencing others than coming across as Mr / Ms Know-it-all. Showing too much confidence can work against you.","stance":"rec"}],"Ks0SOn8hjG8":[{"hn_comment_id":10414980,"author":"bardworx","month":"2015-10","story_title":"X-Ray Scans Expose Chip-And-Pin Card Hack","text":"This is a good overview by some researchers in the different ways Chip and Pin can be hacked. This explains this hack as well. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17902866,"author":"Crosseye_Jack","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers","text":"One trick (which I believe has been fixed) is not so much a replay attack but a multiple transaction attack. A modified terminal makes multiple transactions on the card while the card is still in the terminal, coupled with another attack that modified what was presented on the screen of the terminal could turn a single $5 transaction to 3 $500 transactions. The video is 3 years old now but still worth a watch discussing the attacks they have seen on Chip and Pin - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KtQ9nt2ZeGM":[{"hn_comment_id":47123098,"author":"mapontosevenths","month":"2026-02","story_title":"The Modern Toyota That Lost 65% of Its Value in One Year","text":"> And no, there's no mention of batteries there; it's literally a straw man fight, showing their applicability to daily solar power generation cycles while almost completely ignoring their applicability to annual cycles. Why is it every single time someone in this thread speaks up they are just plain wrong? Here is a direct link to the part about batteries. He talks about them for about 15 minutes which is something like a quarter of the video. There is even a chapter mark to take you to that part. He also mentions them half a dozen more times throughout the video and warns in the beginning that people like you will chime in with misinformation without watching the video. You proved him right. [VIDEO] > applicability to annual cycles. He talks about that too. I'm not going to bother linking. Actually watch the video or move on. > Just take a weekly chart of the actual energy output of the panels for the year, and calculate the price relative to the worst week I don't have to. The United States government did and even considering the cost of storage, it's still cheaper than all the alternatives. Has been for years now. See my earlier comments for links. Private investors have done the same math, and that's why almost all new electricity generation being built is solar. It's the basically free money. Nobody with a brain can legitimately think that digging goop out of the desert, doing expensive processing to it, shipping it to the other side of the earth, and literally lighting","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47154920,"author":"Wistar","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid","text":"Related: Alec Watson\u2019s recent, and excellent, Technology Connections YouTube piece on renewable energy. \u201cYou are being misled about renewable energy technology\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47627948,"author":"anon7000","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Solar and batteries can power the world","text":"Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you\u2019d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US. Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we\u2019ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction. If you want to debate that, spend some time with this video first: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47711721,"author":"simoncion","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Maine Is About to Become the First State to Ban Major New Data Centers","text":"> in effect you've basically hamstrung green sources of energy around the country by being very smart for your own state. > The question is, should you be allowed to this. \"...you've basically hamstrung green sources of energy\"? Well, after we stop growing corn to feed exclusively to cars and start using solar panels deployed on that land to harvest electricity for cars and houses and everything else that runs on electricity [0], if we're still short on power we can have the discussion you're itching to have. [0] The immediately relevant discussion starts here < [VIDEO] > and runs through to about 38:29, but the entire video is very, very well worth watching.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48399847,"author":"id34","month":"2026-06","story_title":"In a first, wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026","text":"I recommend this video from YouTuber Technology Connections: [VIDEO] I appreciate his ability to talk renewables for almost an hour and barely mention climate change. This video has a bit of a twist ending, but he gives you a solid out before he becomes political if you're showing it to someone who won't be receptive to that messaging.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48622598,"author":"ak217","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use","text":"Highly recommend everyone watch this video [VIDEO] Briefly, the most important reason an EV is better because it unlocks energy portability . You gain the flexibility to source your energy in many more ways than with a gas car. Oil energy is about as optimized as it's ever going to get. With electricity, we're just getting started.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46878004,"author":"Rebelgecko","month":"2026-02","story_title":"FERC: Renewables made up 88% of new US power generating capacity to Nov 2025","text":"If you like (VERY) long form videos, you might enjoy the recent video about renewables from Technology Connections: [VIDEO] Some of the interesting take ways for me, as someone who was already pretty hung ho about solar and batteries: * Solar has gotten so cheap that it's still profitable in the shady northlands * The amount of land it would take to run the US primarily on solar is \"a lot\" in absolute terms. But it pales in comparison to the amount of land we currently use to grow corn for feeding gas cars.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46906886,"author":"goda90","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Cubans rendered powerless as outages persist and tensions with US escalate","text":"This really illustrates how important it is to switch to renewable energy. I know it's not an easy task for impoverished communities to get the startup capital to install solar+batteries, especially one in such a politically tumultuous position, but that really is a path to stability for so many people around the world. A YouTuber known for talking about dishwashers and Christmas lights recently put out a long rant about how ridiculous it is that humanity still leans so much on single use fuels: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46936142,"author":"danaris","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair","text":"It was, several years ago. That's so much not the case now that renewables + batteries were by far the largest source of new generation in the US (yes, the US, with Trump actively trying to destroy them) last year. Look up some of the new information coming out about them recently. Here, I'll give you a relevant video I watched recently to start with: [VIDEO] (channel is Technology Connections)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47520987,"author":"phyzome","month":"2026-03","story_title":"A Eulogy for Vim","text":"The cobalt thing is apparently misinformation. You've been misled. Technology Connections did a great video that goes into this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47868330,"author":"MetaWhirledPeas","month":"2026-04","story_title":"3.4M Solar Panels","text":"I was shocked (pun) to hear how my relatives were each reacting to solar energy. One was rural and was concerned about nearby land getting turned into a solar farm. Another was concerned about farmland being edged out in favor of solar. And a third spent some time in emergency response on a solar farm and was off-put by their vastness and the electrical danger while traversing through them. Coincidentally this video emerged within a day of my conversation with the three of them. I shared it; they probably didn't watch it but it sure was pertinent. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49052653,"author":"otterley","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota","text":"Solar and wind energy have been more economical than fossil fuel on a cost per unit energy basis for quite some time. The reasons we're still so tied to fossil fuel are largely political, not economic. Technology Connections goes into this in exhaustive detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Kvsvd67XUKw":[{"hn_comment_id":46800997,"author":"fasterik","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Spinning around: Please don't \u2013 Common problems with spin locks","text":"As always: use standard libraries, profile, then write your own if the data indicates it's necessary. The following is an interesting talk where the author used a spinlock to speed up a real-time physics solver significantly. Dennis Gustafsson \u2013 Parallelizing the physics solver \u2013 BSC 2025 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47416511,"author":"Hikikomori","month":"2026-03","story_title":"The unlikely story of Teardown Multiplayer","text":"Not about multiplayer but still interesting. Dennis Gustafsson \u2013 Parallelizing the physics solver \u2013 BSC 2025 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"KxGRhd_iWuE":[{"hn_comment_id":27585719,"author":"throwaway29303","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Google Is Dominating This Hidden Market with No Rules","text":"The consequence of all this: Websites, apps and advertisers providing consumers with everything from news, games and consumer goods make less money selling ads and have to fork over more money to exchanges and other intermediaries. According to industry studies, ad intermediaries take 30 to 50 percent of every trade. In other words, when your local gym buys $1,000 worth of advertising on a local news site, the exchanges and other industry players can take $500 of that, leaving websites and apps with just half. Who pays the price? Again, the consumer, through things like more expensive gym memberships and news subscriptions. Thank you so so so much, Ms. Srinivasan! You are very courageous for fighting a Goliath! Keep fighting the good fight! And in case you need more cheering up, here's something else: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34450638,"author":"ncr100","month":"2023-01","story_title":"I've procrastinated working on my thesis for more than a year","text":"For a different phase .. if you find your way beyond the current(?) association between the work and an understandable repulsive toxicity experience .. this brief inspirational vid may help with the hard slog needed to finish: [VIDEO] <3, stranger","stance":"rec"}],"Kxryv2XrnqM":[{"hn_comment_id":12542100,"author":"b_emery","month":"2016-09","story_title":"How to Raise Trillions for Green Investments","text":"As solar energy costs drop below those of fossil fuels [1], its seems possible that for a few trillion, some kind of sequestration would be possible. One could imagine entire PV farms devoted solely to restoration of the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels, for example. In my opinion, climate change is a problem with an engineering solution. As a side note, the linked reference is a well argued version of the near future of transportation and energy. Highly recommended [1] Clean Disruption - Why Energy & Transportation will be Obsolete by 2030 - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12775648,"author":"spditner","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Battery technology may emerge as a trillion-dollar threat to credit markets","text":"There's an excellent talk by Tony Seba at the Nordic Enegy Summit that goes into more depth about how batteries and solar are quite possibly going to reach the tipping point sooner than anyone has been forecasting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13712610,"author":"patrickk","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Tesla Says Model 3 on Track as Quarterly Loss Beats Estimates","text":"Another way to look at it: how big is the global market for gas peaker plants? If current trends continue, solar PV + batteries will be cheaper at some point than any fossil fuel[1], so at that point Telsa energy will begin to consume large chunks of that market. According to this link[2] gas peaker plans were 50% of energy installs in 2013, the best link I could find from a quick search. [1] Interesting talk on this topic: [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"L-x8DYTOv7w":[{"hn_comment_id":28471560,"author":"zinekeller","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Paid influencers must label some posts as ads, German court rules","text":"A bit unrelated, but if you want a overview of sponsorships in different media platforms across different countries (mostly Britain and US though), I suggest watching Tom Scott's excellent video: [VIDEO] . (Note that the video is ~30 minutes long. It's unfortunately that complicated, even when only talking rules mainly in two countries.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28474905,"author":"Pxtl","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Paid influencers must label some posts as ads, German court rules","text":"On the subject, Tom Scott has a great video on the inconsistency that online influencers and youtubers have to declare ads/product-placements while traditional media does not. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28482612,"author":"Fradow","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Paid influencers must label some posts as ads, German court rules","text":"> Influencers are actually some of the only advertisers who aren\u2019t well regulated in Europe, When was the last time you saw product placements being clearly labeled in TV shows/movies? For most people, the answer is \"never\". Just because we are used to it doesn't mean it's fair. Tom Scott explains it much better than I can: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35272538,"author":"hnbad","month":"2023-03","story_title":"SEC Charges Justin Sun and His Crypto Companies for Fraud","text":"FWIW the UK also has fairly strict laws about this (possibly stricter than Germany). Tom Scott once did a good video about this: [VIDEO] German streamers also ran into a separate issue with German broadcasting regulations when they tried to run a 24/7 streaming format. Turns out you need a broadcasting license for continuous scheduled programming like that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35455014,"author":"cowl","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The Case for Banning Children from Social Media","text":"> not enough context, maybe > Probably some corporate compliance drones and underfunded government stooges. Youtube alone has 720,000 hours of fresh video content per day Tiktok must have less number of hours but more Videos per day. Add Instagram, facebook, Twitter and it's impossible for anyone to verify this manually so in the end how is the platform supposed to decide what to show and what not where the \"not enough context, maybe\" is the most common answer? > Is product placement in movie an ad? > yes, clearly not so clearly even in this case. see [VIDEO] , a very nice recap of what an ad is.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39902436,"author":"xmprt","month":"2024-04","story_title":"A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing","text":"There's only so much money you can make off of banner ads and at a certain point native advertisements are way more lucrative. I wonder how they get around disclosure requirements but I guess it's probably because the articles are never directly funded but there's some other form of compensation in the backend. Tom Scott made an interesting video about internet advertising regulations a while back. [1] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"L0KuAx1COEk":[{"hn_comment_id":15083595,"author":"kkwteh","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Nuclear fusion is on the brink of a milestone, but faces lack of funding [audio]","text":"This talk by Zach Hartwig from IAP 2017 \"MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy\" is fantastic. Hartwig is an assistant professor in the Nuclear Science & Engineering department at MIT. He presents a straightforward overview of the basic science involved as well as the most promising technologies today. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18448624,"author":"jabl","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees","text":"As there seems to be quite a lot of confusion in this thread about what this is, here's an excellent video giving an overview of the state of the art in fusion energy research that is understandable by a lay audience: [VIDEO] (somebody posted that video on another recent HN fusion thread)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24631399,"author":"wcarss","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest","text":"My layman's understanding is that recently available (~last 5 years) industrial scale processes to produce rebco tape[1] is the specific advance in superconductor tech that's specifically enabling higher tesla magnetic field strengths from significantly smaller and lighter and easier to manage magnets, so you can get a system that's \"powerful enough\" to run net posititve at a size that's small enough to be built by a few universities rather than a few dozen nations (i.e. ITER), so the complexity of the engineering project drops from \"unimaginable\" to \"just very high\". 1 - [LINK] 2 - really great talk from a few years ago about this from MIT's Plasma Science Fusion Centre: [VIDEO] (really, if you like this stuff, give the talk a watch. It's great.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30274429,"author":"fusionbro","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy","text":"This has been by far the most informative source on Fusion I've seen and gives a clear picture on how to evaluate claims like this. MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14202652,"author":"shaqbert","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Fusion reactors: Not what they\u2019re cracked up to be","text":"Mmmh, some of the claims in that article are debunked in this neat video from MIT (though over 1h long): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14833557,"author":"dave_sullivan","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Nations collaborating to build world's largest tokamak","text":"I saw this a while back and thought it was a good summary: [VIDEO] I forget the current best efficiency, but it's getting close.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15352496,"author":"bsder","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Startup company says it is one step closer to creating nuclear fusion","text":"Simple: people in the know realize that this technique still needs a bunch of development. This is a good talk about the various variables you need to demonstrate in fusion: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18057058,"author":"Tuna-Fish","month":"2018-09","story_title":"ITER Tokamak: First Plasma Through High-Fusion-Gain Deuterium-Tritium Operation","text":"> Scale is everything for fusion (plasma). No. Q is everything in fusion. Scale is one way to improve Q in a Tokamak. The problem with improving Q by increasing scale is that it makes the reactors uneconomical. A reactor the size of ITER cannot ever be economically viable, even was capable of producing massive amounts of electricity. Luckily, scaling up is not the only way to increase Q. The better way is to use more powerful magnetic fields. Put more eloquently than I can: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18392240,"author":"baking","month":"2018-11","story_title":"A faster, cheaper path to fusion energy","text":"I think this talk ( [VIDEO] ) makes a pretty good case for why a project of the scale of SPARC makes sense from an engineering standpoint.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18536972,"author":"brian_cunnie","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X","text":"Agreed \u2014 the problem is that, from an energy perspective, it \"doesn't break even\". Zach Hartwig of MIT has an excellent video [0] of how to evaluate announcements of nuclear fusion advances. The big problem is breaking even. There are other problem, too: plasma containment, etc. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18782933,"author":"sien","month":"2018-12","story_title":"A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power","text":"There are a number of interesting companies looking at fusion. High Temperature Superconductors change what you can do for Tokomaks. In the US Commonwealth Fusion Systems are exploring these paths: [LINK] In the UK Tokomak energy are exploring ideas as well: [LINK] This video explains why high temperature super conductors can enhance fusion's prospects: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23980392,"author":"nharada","month":"2020-07","story_title":"ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly","text":"There's a good talk here about why ITER is so large: [VIDEO] The idea is essentially that to get the parameters needed to make net energy with tokamaks, you need either very strong magnets or a large device. At the time of ITER's design, they used the strongest magnets they could find and then made the thing big enough to get the energy gain they wanted. The speaker of this talk argues that it's size that stalled progress in tokamaks, since they'd become so big that building them became a massive, multinational project.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24631076,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest","text":"There's some discussion about this in this[1] presentation which also mentions the SPARC reactor. My main takeaway is basically yes, high-temp superconductors got \"mainstream\" very quickly. I'd recommend watching the whole thing, I found it quite interesting. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32087047,"author":"elsherbini","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Helion Needs You","text":"As a very much non-nuclear engineer, I found this video [1] explaining different fuels, size, magnetic field strength, and the orders of magnitude physics and engineering that goes into current fusion efforts. Curious where Helion would put themselves on the n\u03c4E vs ion temperature plot he uses to evaluate how feasible a technology is. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32698040,"author":"bmitc","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Helion fusion to talk at Plasma Physics APS conference","text":"Small tokamaks are what I think are potentially viable, a la Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Here's a good talk that I think addresses the physics vs engineering approaches to fusion. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36955070,"author":"MayeulC","month":"2023-08","story_title":"LK-99: The Live Online Race for a Room-Temperature Superconductor","text":"Your comment makes it sound like you don't understand the physics of it at all. What does Uranium have to do with this? What does \"performance of uranium\" means? What do you think will happen when you bombard it with \"radiation\"? What kind of \"radiation\"? Uranium is most commonly used in fission devices, not fusion ones. Fusing Uranium would absorb energy, not liberate energy, this is why we split it. [LINK] For heating, you'd be better off using a heat pump. Or I guess you could take some radioactive material and shield it. Or even a breeder reactor, but that's fission. I do not want to come across as disrespectful, but what you're saying sounds like alchemy, or the kind of \"science\" they show in superhero movies. I could understand using a layer of metal to produce x-rays, and concentrate these to heat a sample (a bit similar to H-bombs, BTW), but I am not a nuclear physicist either. Real physicists have thought about this much more than we did, and if there was a simple pathway to practical fusion, we'd know about it by now. I think you underestimate the complexity of all this (kind of a \"Dunning-Kruger\" effect), go watch the \"MIT's pathway to fusion[1]\" videos for an introduction to the problem and modern approaches :) [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"L1j93RnIxEo":[{"hn_comment_id":36317899,"author":"carb","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Finish Your Projects","text":"I love this article and the premise. Further similar reading/watching in some of my favorite Zack Freedman videos! - \"Here's What's Preventing You From Finishing Projects\": [VIDEO] - \"How to Finish Your Weekend Projects in One Weekend\": [LINK] \"Finishing\" more projects (even if that means changing the scope and announcing it \"finished\") has been amazing for my internal willingness to start new projects or tell friends about them. I have much less anxiety that I'll leave another half-finished project sitting around with lost motivation.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28637149,"author":"jld","month":"2021-09","story_title":"A Tour of Grant Imahara\u2019s Shop [video]","text":"I found this video by Zach Freedman about finishing projects to be enlightening, especially the idea that \"deciding to not finish a project\" is a way to finish a project. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30982921,"author":"rhizome","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The Joy of Small Projects","text":"I came across this video a while back and though I'm not a wearables hardware guy, the rubric he uses is sound for programmer-y stuff too. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"L2IKCdnzl5k":[{"hn_comment_id":28633767,"author":"farisjarrah","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Tesla pushes U.S. to boost fuel economy penalties","text":"Engineering Explained youtube channel tackled this question: [VIDEO] The verdict appears to be that the answer to this question is a bit more complicated then a blanket \"Its better to buy a new car for the environment\" but its highly dependent on gas milage and time of ownership, as well as new gas car vs new hybrid car vs new electric car. He does take into account carbon needed to build the cars too. It seems that in most cases a new EV will be better for the environment then your 10 year old honda in roughly 4 years. Skip to 6 minutes in the video for when he starts showing compiled data of when its better to buy a new car vs keep old.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28905650,"author":"widdershins","month":"2021-10","story_title":"The race to grab all the UK\u2019s lithium before it\u2019s too late","text":"A video I watched recently comes to a very different conclusion on almost every point you raised: that buying a new electric car is better for the environment within ~5 years of use, taking into account the 'new car' footprint. I'm not an expert, so I won't claim to know who's correct. But the linked video provides lots of numbers, and you didn't, so I lean in favour of that conclusion. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"L3LMbpZIKhQ":[{"hn_comment_id":13919254,"author":"espeed","month":"2017-03","story_title":"What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?","text":"The Fall 2010 version of MIT 6.042J Mathematics for Computer Science is a good one (as I recall there are several versions online from different years), and someone from Google is teaching it this year (haven't heard if the videos will be made available online): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17433411,"author":"totalnovice","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Old CS lecturer looking for advice from current and recent students","text":"Some MIT professors use a method termed \"practice-theory-practice\". [LINK] __ I see this as a \"practical\" lecure, also from MIT: the professor tells relatable stories to motivate the new concepts. Though I imagine good storytelling is harder than it looks. [VIDEO] (I've actually been so inspired by this approach that I sometimes incorporate it into conversation whenever I really want someone to understand something.) __ This is perhaps worth reading: Knuth - Theory and Practice. [LINK] Disclaimer: I have not read it yet.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17845470,"author":"rectang","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Those Who Can Do, Can\u2019t Teach","text":"Teaching requires a set of distinct skills which are different from researching. Naturally not everyone is equally gifted or developed in all areas. One of the most valuable skills in life is the ability to adapt your mental models and present ideas at an audience-appropriate level. It is useful in teaching; it is also useful in leadership, sales, design... As an exemplar, I submit Akamai CTO and MIT professor Tom Leighton. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"L5pUA3LsEaw":[{"hn_comment_id":22244246,"author":"Veedrac","month":"2020-02","story_title":"AI thinks like a corporation (2018)","text":"In which a science fiction writer weaves a fantastical tale about how the Doomsayers are making their decisions from fantastical tales and emotions, instead of actually reading and responding to the arguments they present. The irony is so palpable that if it wasn't so disingenuous, it might even be funny. Here's some actual insight on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23663365,"author":"stupidcar","month":"2020-06","story_title":"DeepMind AI reading list [pdf]","text":"I'd echo one of their recommendations: Robert Mile's YouTube channel focussing on AI safety. He presents the material in a very interesting and accessible way. For example, this video on whether or not corporations can be considered a form of superintelligence: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23814381,"author":"jengleton","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Dude, You Broke the Future (2017)","text":"Robert Miles has an interesting response to the claim that corporations are AIs: [VIDEO] To paraphrase: yes, corporations function as agents, but their maximum performance is limited by the capabilities of their employees. A corporate AI may have a much broader set of skills than any single person, and may be able to tackle many concurrent tasks, but as an \"intelligent agent\" its decision making capabilities probably don't scale exponentially (or even linearly) with its headcount. In the sense that a corporation's maximum intelligence is likely to be in the same ballpark as the smartest humans, it can't be seen as a true superintelligence.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30820988,"author":"HaukeHi","month":"2022-03","story_title":"It looks like you\u2019re trying to take over the world","text":"There's a good video by Robert Miles about that 'Why Not Just: Think of AGI Like a Corporation?' [VIDEO] are kind of like AIs, if you squint. How hard do you have to squint though, and is it worth it? In this video we ask: Are corporations artificial general superintelligences?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34372562,"author":"WhitneyLand","month":"2023-01","story_title":"We could stumble into AI catastrophe","text":">We have that now. It's called a corporation. I think there\u2019s a good argument to say no, we don\u2019t have that now, and these are some ways it could be very different. Video: Why not just think of AGI as a corporation? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"L9n77DPJ7AE":[{"hn_comment_id":38458063,"author":"agmater","month":"2023-11","story_title":"One of the greatest user interface disasters in history","text":"Genocide != Civilian casualties. Genocide is about the extermination of a people. Anders Puck Nielsen just made a good video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42336117,"author":"grumpycamel","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Amnesty accuses Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza","text":"[VIDEO] I thought this was a sensible and accessible explanation of what genocide and what it is not. It has two case studies: Gaza, Ukraine.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42468474,"author":"grumpycamel","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Doctors Without Borders declares the war in Gaza as genocide","text":"[VIDEO] This guy has a very accessible take on the proper United Nations definition of genocide and how it applies to the Gaza and Ukraine war. Gemini summary: >>>> This video discusses the definition of genocide and its application to current events. The speaker argues that many people misuse the term to describe any atrocity, while genocide specifically refers to the intent to eliminate a group of people. The speaker uses the examples of the war in Gaza and the arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin to illustrate this point. They argue that while there are many civilian casualties in Gaza, it's unclear if there's an intent to eliminate the entire Palestinian people. In contrast, Putin's forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia aligns more clearly with the definition of genocide. The speaker emphasizes the importance of using the term accurately to avoid diluting its meaning and to properly address serious crimes. <<<<","stance":"rec"}],"LA_DrBwkiJA":[{"hn_comment_id":20573773,"author":"pronoiac","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Survival in chessland [pdf]","text":"He's a mad genius! I like his compiler that generates executables made up only of printable characters: [VIDEO] / [LINK] He's super playful and awesomely smart!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21546805,"author":"badrequest","month":"2019-11","story_title":"NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS","text":"Every one of this guy's SIGBOVIK papers/videos are pure gold. His video about the printable x86[1] is my favorite engineering video of all time. ^1: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36845375,"author":"nextaccountic","month":"2023-07","story_title":"C89 compiler produces printable executables from C code [pdf]","text":"The author is an absolute legend. Absolutely every video on his Youtube channel is a masterpiece [LINK] And this includes the video that explains this code (Compiling C to printable x86, to make an executable research paper) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37843620,"author":"omgmajk","month":"2023-10","story_title":"The GlEnd() of Zelda: Automatic 3Dification of NES Games (2016)","text":"Love Tom7, his video \"Compiling C to printable x86, to make an executable research paper\" [0] is my favorite but most of his stuff is super interesting. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26937917,"author":"anitil","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Lipogram","text":"tom7 made a while video explaining how to create an executable only with printable characters [0]. He even write a compiler called 'ABC' for it. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27767982,"author":"SAI_Peregrinus","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Undocumented x86 instructions to control the CPU at the microarchitecture level [pdf]","text":"That last one (Tom 7's executable x86 paper) is incomplete without the video where he demonstrates running the paper (or running the paper yourself). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35123528,"author":"x86x87","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the most interesting YouTube channels to follow?","text":"A mix of various things. Google to get to the channel: pbs spacetime stuff made here ben eater's 8 bit computer mike boyd nerdforge sabine hossenfelder gotham chess uthermal 3blue1brown veritasium Numberphile Suckerpinch (all time favourite: [VIDEO] ) Stevey's tech talk leonard susskind's stanford lectures","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36821507,"author":"nick-of-time","month":"2023-07","story_title":"GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]","text":"Mine are \"Harder Drives\"[1], \"ELO World\"[2], and \"Printable x86\"[3] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LEZv-kQUSi4":[{"hn_comment_id":17783089,"author":"ajss","month":"2018-08","story_title":"How to Write Unmaintainable Code (2017)","text":"Along a similar line, I love Stuart Halloway's talk on Narcissistic Design - [VIDEO] Prefer APIs over data. Start with DSLs. Always connect (and never enqueue). Create abstractions for information. Use static typing across subsystem boundaries. Put language semantics on the wire. Write lots of unit tests. Leverage context. Update information in place.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18528303,"author":"smnplk","month":"2018-11","story_title":"The faster you unlearn OOP, the better for you and your software","text":"Reading some of the comments here reminded me of a great talk by Stuart Halloway called Narcissistic Design.[1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26415395,"author":"echlebek","month":"2021-03","story_title":"I don't want to learn your query language (2018)","text":"Nobody seems to have posted Stuart Halloway's Narcissistic Design yet, so I'll just leave this here. [VIDEO] Has some great insights and quips. \"Nothing says 'screw you' like a DSL\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27844573,"author":"blacktriangle","month":"2021-07","story_title":"SQLBolt \u2013 Interactive lessons and exercises to learn SQL","text":"[VIDEO] This talk goes into many anti-patterns, but he gets to the real problem with SQL, that it is ONLY a DSL and lacks either an API or a fundamental information model to program against. Composability when working with a DSL is a nightmare. I also have been moving away from ORM to directly writing SQL, but lets be honest about the reasons that programmers are wary of working directly with SQL as they are legitimate issues.","stance":"rec"}],"LIIBRr31DIU":[{"hn_comment_id":26525157,"author":"logbiscuitswave","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany","text":"I had a 386/40DX that could run Second Reality, and I was blown away. When I upgraded to a 486/66DX2 the first thing I did was run Second Reality, and I was shocked at how much of the demo content I had missed before from parts being truncated. Also it\u2019s worth noting that a lot of Second Reality\u2019s source code got released to GitHub several years back: [LINK] and here\u2019s an incredibly deep dive into the code: [LINK] Finally, here\u2019s some rare footage of the creation of the legendary demo: [VIDEO] (English subtitles available)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39566308,"author":"mdaniel","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Second Reality code review (2013)","text":"this video showed up in a recent thread about Second Reality and I had never seen it, so this audience may enjoy that, too: [VIDEO] (\"Making of Second Reality / Future Crew\")","stance":"rec"}],"LIb3L4vKZ7U":[{"hn_comment_id":14278310,"author":"nly","month":"2017-05","story_title":"The Horror in the Standard Library","text":"Actually it is C's malloc and free that is \"broken\". malloc() takes a size parameter, but free() doesn't. This imbalance means it can never be maximally efficient. Whatever GNU stdlibc++ is doing is probably, on balance, a net win for most programs. It's not exactly roses in C++ either of course. You can do better than the standard library facilities. Andrei Alexandrescu gave a great, entertaining, and technically elegant talk on memory allocation in C and C++ at Cppcon 2015 that is well worth watching [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18607277,"author":"p0nce","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Using D to Create the World\u2019s Fastest File System","text":"> I would have liked to hear more about what exactly made D so great This WIP article explains very well the USP of D: [LINK] (section 3) This article highlight the value of \"design-by-introspection\" applied to a particular problem space: [LINK] This talk present a concrete example of such: [VIDEO] (mind bending stuff) You might not understand what is new about it, but soon your competitors will understand it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22999318,"author":"favorited","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Benchmarking C++ Allocators","text":"A bit unrelated, but if anyone is interested, I recently watched Andrei Alexandrescu's 2015 talk about a composable allocator design in C++ and it was really interesting. And Andrei's presentation style was fantastic, per usual. Note that this talk is about a std::allocator-like type, potentially on top of one of malloc/jemalloc/etc. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24769624,"author":"favorited","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Custom Allocators Demystified","text":"Andrei Alexandrescu's 2015 talk about C++'s allocators is great. He's a very entertaining presenter, and he makes case for extremely composable templated allocators (and why std::allocator isn't that). [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25403583,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Writing a Memory Allocator (2019)","text":"Every time I hear someone talking about writing a memory allocator, it always reminds me of the brilliant CppCon 2015 talk by Andrei Alexandrescu about how he wrote an modular allocator library that can be built up in pieces to make whatever you like. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34593450,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Not exactly a lecture series, but Andrei Alexandrescu has had some fantastic keynote presentations at CppCon. I don't even program in C++ any more, but I've watched these more than once, they're entertaining, approachable, and inspiring: Speed Is Found In The Minds of People [LINK] std::allocator Is to Allocation what std::vector Is to Vexation [VIDEO] An actual lecture series I've enjoyed watching is \"The WE-Heraeus International Winter School on Gravity and Light\", which covers General Relativity using modern mathematical approaches: [LINK] Again, I haven't done physics in 20 years, but I've found it surprisingly easy to follow because it is so clearly presented.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42690180,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Comptime as Configuration","text":"> The issue with this approach is that the more you can control, the less the compiler can assume. That's absolutely true, but there's a workaround, albeit a complicated one. The compiler internals need the same kind of constraints or traits that abstract code such as language interfaces or template parameters can have. These can then be used to constrain the internals in a way that then would allow assumptions to be safely \"plumbed through\" the various layers. The (big!) challenge here is that these abstractions haven't been well-developed in the industry. Certainly nowhere near as well as the typical runtime \"type theory\" as seen in modern languages. > some very basic ones like allocating heap memory. Well... this is sort-of my point! For example, what's the fundamental difference between allocating memory in some heap[1] structure at runtime and a compiler allocating members in a struct/record/class for optimal packing? IMHO, not much. E.g.: Watch this talk by Andrei Alexandrescu titled \"std::allocator Is to Allocation what std::vector Is to Vexation\": [VIDEO] It really opened my eyes to how one could very elegantly make a very complex and high-performance heap allocator from trivial parts composed at compile-time. There's no reason that a nearly identical abstraction couldn't also be used to efficiently \"bin pack\" variables into a struct. E.g.: accounting for alignment, collecting like-sized items into contiguous sections, extra padding for \"lock\" objects to prevent cache","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14611143,"author":"badsectoracula","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Show HN: Crown \u2013 A flexible game engine written from scratch in C++","text":"Generally speaking many C++ game engines avoid the STL stuff and reimplement their own more predictable containers, often with custom allocation schemes. The engine at the last game company i worked at, for example, had its own containers and memory allocator and allowed you to define the allocation category and pool per allocator and per object class (so, e.g., dynamic strings would be isolated to their own pool to avoid fragmenting the heap). Related, Andrei Alexandrescu had a great talk about allocators in C++ a couple of years ago: [VIDEO] Also related to the Orthodox C++, the same engine also ousted exceptions and RTTI. I'm not sure about the reason for exceptions, but C++'s RTTI was simply inadequate and instead it was replaced with a custom one made using macros (similarly to wxWidgets and MFC) that allowed automatic object serialization and reflection which was used for all saving and loading, exposing objects to the editor automatically with a common UI and exposing classes and objects to the (custom) scripting language with very little setup. Interestingly most of the stuff the engine had to reinvent seem to be first class citizens in the D language. Also Andrei's allocators also seem to be available (experimentally) there too. Personally i prefer plain old C (C89 even, although with a few commonly available or easily reproducible extras like stdint) because i see C++ as too complex for what it is worth. However D seems to provide more power with less complexity and","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20250760,"author":"Quekid5","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Mimalloc \u2013 A compact general-purpose allocator","text":"Andrei Alexandrescu had a great talk[0] on allocators and this convinced me that if you really care about allocator performance[1] what you need is a tunable and composable system. The whole idea of how and when (runtime/compile-time) to choose the appropriate allocator is also interesting. [0] [VIDEO] [1] I suppose there's a digression to be had here about allocation being trivial and RAII-style deallocation not really being deterministic, but...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30345414,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2022-02","story_title":"How to write untestable code (2008)","text":"I come from the opposite camp. I detest functions that are five pages of boolean logic, which I guarantee you contain at least a dozen bugs, no matter how much you think you've tested it. Code coverage is like those skin creams that say \"Scientifically tested!\" on the label. Yeah, well, tested doesn't mean that it worked. It just means that there was a test. Watch this video of Andrei Alexandrescu's talk in CppCon 2015: [VIDEO] I've done things like this in my career, and it's always worked out brilliantly . Bugs just evaporate when you let the compiler \"combine\" things for you, instead of just plopping everything into a bowl and mashing it together with your hands like some sort of animal. Especially in today's C++ or Rust, you can \"have your cake and eat it too\". It's possible to build up these nice, single-purpose class hierarchies and combine them into complex, powerful constructs via templates / traits. The compiler takes care of the edge cases for you, because it never gets bored or distracted. There's no performance downside because of static dispatch, inlining, and aggressive optimisers.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38703409,"author":"einpoklum","month":"2023-12","story_title":"C++ Should Be C++","text":"Allocators have an inherently broken design, tying them to types. See this CppCon talk by the (engaging and funny) Andrei Alexandrescu: [VIDEO] std::allocator is to allocation what std::vector is to vexation (or: designing allocators that don't not-work)","stance":"rec"}],"LJ4W1g-6JiY":[{"hn_comment_id":28840991,"author":"lisper","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as \u2018ignition\u2019 triggered in a lab","text":"Neither. From TFA: \"While the latest experiment still required more energy in than it got out, it is the first suspected to reach the crucial stage of \u2018ignition\u2019, which allowed considerably more energy to be produced than ever before, and paves the way for \u2018break even\u2019, where the energy in is matched by the energy out.\" Here [1] is an excellent video by Sabine Hossenfelder about why you should not get too excited about this result. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29345233,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The chase for fusion energy","text":"It\u2019s true that ITER will not produce net power and that the administrators have misled the public about the difference in Q factors. You can have a reactor which produces more thermal power than you put in to it that is still a net power drain when you factor in the rest of the plant operations to keep it going. All clearly explained in this great video. [VIDEO] There is a real risk that by focusing on the wrong Q factor you sink all your budget in to plants which can never work as a real power plant. Still I am hopeful that ITER will be sufficiently valuable as a research system that we do move closer to commercial fusion power.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30273453,"author":"limaoscarjuliet","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy","text":"According to Sabine Hossenfelder, published numbers are frequently mis-stated on purpose. When you look at frequently reported Q Plasma (or plasma efficiency) we are not that far from it being > 1. However, we should look at Q Total (total efficiency), which is still way below < 1, even in the best plans. [VIDEO] For years, I was hoping fusion is close. After watching Sabine's video, I'm not so optimistic anymore.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33954009,"author":"amai","month":"2022-12","story_title":"US scientists boost clean power hopes with fusion energy breakthrough","text":"Mandatory video by Sabine Hossenfelder: [VIDEO] So they probably are talking again about Q_plasma, not Q_total .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33976488,"author":"supergirl","month":"2022-12","story_title":"US Department of Energy: Fusion Ignition Achieved","text":"everyone should watch [VIDEO] to put this into perspective. for some reason, all the news articles are extremely misleading. previous output ratio for this fusion method was something like 70%, now it is 150%. it's a useful improvement, but not a major breakthrough. the whole system still consumes 100x more energy than it produces. 100MJ of energy is needed to power the laser. the laser generates only 2MJ of energy that powers fusion. fusion generates 3MJ of output energy. so all the articles are saying \"they put 2MJ energy and got 3MJ energy back\". no, they put 102MJ and got 3MJ.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28774439,"author":"tylermauthe","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?","text":"The claims on nuclear fission being just around the corner are wildly exaggerated. Sabine Hossenfelder has a great video [1] on this topic. I want fusion to be real too, but focussing on small scale fission and solar is probably a better idea. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28841128,"author":"vfclists","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Major nuclear fusion milestone reached as \u2018ignition\u2019 triggered in a lab","text":"Funny how this story gets posted after soon after Dr Sabine Hossenfelder's debunking and deflate the fusion power hype - [VIDEO] with a genuine Hans Gruber accent :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29121815,"author":"jahnu","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Helion","text":"Can anyone tell me if this is a net + like the lay person would understand it or something like the net + qplasma thing often misleadingly used when talking about tokamaks? Sabine Hossenfelders explains here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29125800,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Helion","text":"This video by Sabine Hossenfelder has tempered my expectations. How close is nuclear fusion power? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30089037,"author":"nuccy","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Burning plasma achieved in inertial fusion","text":"There is quite some misleading terminology being used in the field of nuclear fusion (see excellent overview here [1]). So I was genuinely curious what kind of Q is used in this paper, so here it is: > In this regime, self-heating from \u03b1-particle deposition exceeds the external heating input into the DT8; this ratio is denoted Q\u03b1, where the self-heating is taken relative to the heating power to the plasma\u2014for inertial fusion this is the PdV compressional work on the fuel and not the total laser energy (P, pressure, dV, volume change). Q\u03b1 > 1 is a burning plasma. So as far as I understand such Q\u03b1 > 1 can be reached without sustaining neither pressure or volume, so one can think about it as an explosion rather that intuitive burning (somewhat continuous process). To summarize: Q_total = total_energy_out / total_energy_in is what matters, not any Q related to plasma energy. Since to build a power plant we just care what it consumes in comparison with what it produces. For this particular case even though Q\u03b1 > 1 you likely can extract just a tiny fraction of that energy stored in plasma, while spending huge amounts of energy to heat it in the first place. 1. [VIDEO] or as an article [LINK] Edit: I'm a big proponent of nuclear fission and fusion since both are the best (current and future) way of getting carbon neutral energy, which can cover the spikes in the grid and sun/wind-less days. It is just important to be careful with the terminology, which can be used to make research r","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30451311,"author":"jetru","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made from fusing atoms","text":"Skeptical. This video by Sabine clearly explains why a lot of these fusion research claims are dubious with a focus on ITER and JET: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30851595,"author":"chii","month":"2022-03","story_title":"HB11's hydrogen-boron laser fusion test yields groundbreaking results","text":"This video details some of the ways that nuclear fusion energy reporting gets done (both media, but also the industry) : [VIDEO] We are not near a viable fusion reactor yet. Not close.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32463054,"author":"planck01","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Three papers highlight results of record yield nuclear fusion shot","text":"I hope you win! I usually get my reality checks from Sabine Hossenfelder, who a while back explained that all these fusion claims are wildly optimistic. You can find her video here: [VIDEO] I am no scientist, so it is hard for me to know if team optimistic or team pessimistic is right. But even if it is the latter, I think we should put more money and research on it!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33960249,"author":"mbar84","month":"2022-12","story_title":"U.S. to announce major breakthrough in zero-carbon nuclear fusion energy","text":"The question is, in terms of energy input, are we talking about Q-total or Q-plasma? Based on the video by Sabine Hossenfelder, my guess would be, the announcement references Q-plasma. That would mean that the announcement is a motte-and-baily miscommunication, as it promises much more than people are lead to read into it. Motte: We got more energy out than we put in. Bailey: Oh, what we really meant is, more energy was produced, than was put into the plasma, though we didn't actually capture any energy and also, there was actually a great deal of energy also needed to run all the ancillary systems to keep the plasma confined. How close is nuclear fusion power? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33969844,"author":"rogerallen","month":"2022-12","story_title":"DOE SEC. Granholm to Announce Major Fusion Energy Breakthrough 10:00 Am EST","text":"[VIDEO] explains the difference between Qplasma and Qtotal. I hope this presentation will be as forthright.","stance":"rec"}],"LKJBND_IRdI":[{"hn_comment_id":25621303,"author":"MikeLumos","month":"2021-01","story_title":"The \u201cUncanny Valley\u201d and How Artists Have Explored It","text":"As a counterpoint, here's an amazing video making a convincing argument that \"Uncanny Valley\" isn't a thing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29390843,"author":"Errancer","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Disney Combines CGI with Neural Rendering to Tackle the \u2018Uncanny Valley\u2019","text":"Slightly off topic but there is an interesting argument to be made against the existence of 'Uncanny Valley' \u2013 [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"LKiBlGDfRU8":[{"hn_comment_id":40733363,"author":"biomcgary","month":"2024-06","story_title":"The growing pains of science","text":"I love Sabine Hossenfelder's personal take on the social problems in science ( [VIDEO] ), which reminded me a lot of my own experience in academic science. She also has some critiques of particle physics that I find compelling - but outside my knowledge domain - where the sociological dynamics sound similar to things I've bumped into in biology.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41678809,"author":"wg0","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Fraud, so much fraud","text":"On a tangent, this video[0] from Sabine Hossenfelder about academics in general is eye opening. In comments, veritasium[1] agrees: >After finishing my PhD I went to a university-led session on \u2018What Comes Next.\u2019 What I heard sounded a lot like \u201cnow, you beg for money.\u201d It was so depressing to think about all the very clever people in that room who had worked so very hard only to find out they had no financial security and would be spending most of their days asking for money. I realised that even what I thought of as the \u2018safe path\u2019 was uncertain so I may as well go after what I truly want. That led me here. EDIT: Typos [0]. [VIDEO] [1]. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"LKnqECcg6Gw":[{"hn_comment_id":48550763,"author":"joedrago","month":"2026-06","story_title":"What every coder should know about Gamma Correction","text":"For those interested in this topic, I found minutephysics' treatment of this subject to be really pleasant and easy to grok. I had a talk I gave at work once or twice discussing color conversion and I would play a 90 second snippet from this (attributed appropriately) as it would very quickly crash course people on the reasoning behind an EOTF in a really cute and layman's terms kind of way: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12553042,"author":"mxfh","month":"2016-09","story_title":"What every coder should know about gamma","text":"Good reminder about these persisting blending issues in the linear interpretation of RGB values, which was well explained to non-coders as well here in a quite popular MinutePhysics video: [VIDEO] As others commented the gamma scaling issues seem even more relevant. Just please, don't use RGB color space for generating gradients. In fact, it's ill fitted for most operations concerning the perception of colors as is. chroma.js : [LINK] D3 : [LINK] Interesting excursion: historically the default viewing gammas seem to have lowered, because broadcasting defaulted to dimly lit rooms, while today's ubiquitous displays are usually in brighter environments. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22325050,"author":"quietbritishjim","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Brown: color is weird [video]","text":"If we're on the \"watch this YouTube video if you work with colours\" train, here's a great explanation of why gradients usually have a dark band in the middle, on the MinutePhysics channel: [VIDEO] In short: the RBG values in an image are not actually the intensity of light, but some nonlinear function of intensity. To do a weighted average of two colours you need to first undo that nonlinearity, then do the averaging, then reapply the function. Most software doesn't do that so the colours end up wrong. This also applies to resizing images.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25644151,"author":"fireattack","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering","text":"I misunderstood what you mean. Please ignore. On a side note, by colorspace I mainly meant that we can just stick with one with ultra-wide gamut. There are indeed other reasons to have different color spaces. (Below is my original comment for transparency.) ------------- Gamma isn't really about CRT; or I should say, they're two different things. The fact CRT has a somewhat physical \"gamma\" (light intensity varies nonlinearly with the voltage) is likely just a coincidence with the gamma we're talking here. The reason gamma is used in sRGB is because human eyes are more sensitive to changes in darker area, i.e. if the light intensity changes linearly, it feels more \"jumpy\" in darker end (which causes perceptible bandings). This is especially an issue with lower color depth. To solve this, we invented gamma space to give darker end more bits/intensity intervals to smooth the perceptive brightness. >it's not needed to understand the difference between linear and non-linear colorspaces It absolutely should, since any gamma space would have problem with \"averaging\", as explained by the GP. Actually, it's so bad that almost all the image editing/representing tasks we have today are doing it wrong (resizing, blurring, mixing..). This topic has been discussed extensively on Internet, so I'm not going to go into detail too much. A good start point is [1][2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47046052,"author":"quietbritishjim","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Rendering the Visible Spectrum","text":"> The final piece of the puzzle is gamma correction. Applying gamma correction to these RGB coordinates produces a new set of values which we call (R', G', B') that are related to the original by a transfer function 6 ... The reason this is done is to account for how our eyes perceive brightness nonlinearly. We can distinguish changes in dark shades much more easily than light shades because a linear increase R in has much more of a relative effect when R is small. Switching to (R', G', B') therefore provides more resolution in dark regions of the image where the eye is more sensitive to variations in brightness. I'm surprised that this isn't mentioned much earlier and much more prominently. Instead, it's practically a footnote. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I would bet 90% of the awkwardness in the very first image is from averaging these values (R', G', B') for the gradients rather than switching to the true linear values, averaging, then converting back. This classic MinutePhysics video covers it well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LKp2gikIkD8":[{"hn_comment_id":16830903,"author":"JonnyNova","month":"2018-04","story_title":"YouTube is littered with mass-produced videos made by automated bots","text":"A video analysis of the related phenomenon: \"Weird Kids' Videos and Gaming the Algorithm\" [VIDEO] It talks about possibly using machine learning to create many videos targeted at toddlers and using techniques to ensure the next autoplay item doesn't change to another channel.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28962402,"author":"hbn","month":"2021-10","story_title":"YouTube is about to pull its apps from Roku","text":"It's pretty reasonable, and smart I'd say. The kids content on YouTube has been heavily gamed by content farms optimizing content for SEO, making absolutely bizarre and sometimes disgusting content. Bit of a lengthy watch, but this video is pretty eye-opening: [VIDEO] (It's a few years old at this point, but not a lot has changed, and possibly has gotten worse)","stance":"rec"}],"LKtk3HCgTa8":[{"hn_comment_id":29035199,"author":"elamje","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Programming talks that made something click for you?","text":"Simple Made Easy ( [VIDEO] ) The Language of the System ( [LINK] ) The Value of Values ( [LINK] ) All by Rich Hickey (Clojure creator) - strongest programming speaker I've found to date.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31683328,"author":"loudmax","month":"2022-06","story_title":"The collapse of complex software","text":"I highly recommend Rich Hickey's \"Simple Made Easy\" talk as a way to think about software complexity. We all know that complex systems are hard to work with, but I've found his presentation very useful in understanding the nature of complexity. Understanding complexity helps being able to avoid or minimize it. For example, easy is not the same as simple, and simple changes to one part of a system can introduce great complexity at the macro level. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34972258,"author":"xiphias2","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Do the Simplest Thing That Can Possibly Work (2004)","text":"Actually Rick Hickey's talk ( [VIDEO] ) is amazing because he talks about your case by going back to the original meaining of words: ,,Complex comes from the Latin complecti, which means \u201cto entwine around, to embrace'' Simplicity requires layering, so in your examples the main requirement for simplicity is about how intertwined your hobby project is with the transciever code or ethernet code. As long as the abstraction layer works well for you without getting too much into the details of the implementation, it's a simple solution. Of course it's not a clear answer whether you should do things yourself or use a third-party, but if the third-party works perfectly for use case without significant tradeoff in your system, of course it's better to use it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38288916,"author":"funcDropShadow","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Push ifs up and fors down","text":"This doesn't sound like a simple solution from your fellow devs. It appears to have been an easy solution. If the distinction isn't familiar to you, there is a great talk of Rich Hickey [0], that explains that distinction and some more. The talk is definitely not only applicable to Clojure. YAGNI is a great slogan, but must not be a dogma. If you already know, that you are going to need custom rules. Then prepare for it. But, if --- for example --- the current rules are almost trivial, and you don't know yet, which rule engine will be the right fit later on. Then it might be a good idea to postpone the decision about the rule engine, until you know more. In the meantime a hard-coded solution could be enough. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46416354,"author":"yooogurt","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Rich Hickey: Thanks AI","text":"If you haven't heard of Rich Hickey, then you're fortunate to have the opportunity to watch \"Simple Made Easy\" for the first time: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31882498,"author":"frogulis","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Revisiting the principles of data-oriented programming","text":"Rich Hickey's talks \"Simple Made Easy\" [1] and \"Effective Programs\" [2] provide a better explanation of these ideas IMO. The specific definition of \"simple\" is pretty crucial. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37861977,"author":"liveoneggs","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Can't Be Fucked: Underrated Cause of Tech Debt","text":"take it up with Rich Hickey I suppose :) If you've never watched Simple Made Easy I really recommend it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47080169,"author":"delaminator","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Ask HN: In the Age of AI, How Do I Grow as a Software Engineer?","text":"> Claude can make decisions about architecture but they are often not very good decisions, and sometimes absolutely terrible I have to kick it back onto the right track, but as you sort of point out, I got that experience from making my own terrible decisions and finding out the hard way the blind alley I was walking up. Second system, inner platform, too general, planning for scenarios that never happen, stuff that doesn't scale - I've made them all. I think I learned as much from reading as doing though, I could later put names on the mistakes I made. So, for what it's worth - study the meta. Read about architectural theory, system design Study the craft and listen to the masters - [VIDEO] And when you talk to Claude say \"follow rich hickeys advice about explicit rules\" and it knows what you mean more than you do !","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48160234,"author":"ale","month":"2026-05","story_title":"My Thoughts on Bun's Rust Rewrite","text":"Great point about testing. The knee jerk reaction to defend this enormous rewrite because it passes a test suite reminds me of a Rick Hickey classic: what\u2019s true of every bug found in the field? It passed all the tests. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LLCF7vPanrY":[{"hn_comment_id":6391969,"author":"malandrew","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Want to See China\u2019s Latest Top Secret Military Site? Just Google It","text":"That opening paragraph really puts the following time-lapse animation showing every nuclear explosion since 1945 in perspective: [VIDEO] One of the most fascinating things is seeing how every string of nuclear tests in Russia were quickly followed by many more detonations in the US.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8398234,"author":"sillysaurus3","month":"2014-10","story_title":"The USSR used a nuclear charge to stop a gas well fire in 1966","text":"Here's a timelapse of every nuclear explosion since 1945. It really puts into perspective just how many nukes have gone off for purposes other than to kill people. It's amazing that only two were used for violence. [VIDEO] According to the video, people have detonated 2053 nukes, and America has the dubious distinction of having detonated over 1000.","stance":"rec"}],"LMbI6sk-62E":[{"hn_comment_id":21223160,"author":"K0SM0S","month":"2019-10","story_title":"NASA aims for first manned SpaceX mission in first-quarter 2020","text":"This is totally right. You might really like Isaac Arthur on YouTube if you don't know him already. \"Orbital rings\" [1] in his \"Upward Bound\" series might be just right your alley. Of course, there's so much more he produced, it's even hard to keep up. I personally dream of some \"Megastructures\" he suggests... Actually already began myself to think of a Dyson Swarm around Earth (for starters) which could then serve as a positional basis for future orbital rings. He really inspired me to think bigger, now. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17900146,"author":"mtgx","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Japan starts space elevator experiments","text":"Isaac Arthur thinks an orbital ring is a better idea: [VIDEO] He has other videos on ways we could get into space more cheaply, including by space elevators (which he basically doesn't think are feasible).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20996427,"author":"mLuby","month":"2019-09","story_title":"A Lunar Space Elevator Is Feasible and Inexpensive, Scientists Find","text":"Lot of talk about how 1. a Moon elevator is pointless without an Earth elevator, and 2. we can't build an Earth elevator with today's technology. However we can build an orbital ring around Earth with today's technology, and it'd be much better than space elevators. [Video] [VIDEO] [Paper] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23309980,"author":"cletus","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Why We Don't Shoot Earth's Garbage into the Sun (2019)","text":"Weird, I didn't find the term \"delta-V\" anywhere in the article. Most on HN probably know this but delta-V is the change in velocity required to reach some goal. Fun fact: it requires more delta-V to hit the Sun than it does to leave the Solar System. For giggles, here's a delta-V map of the Solar System [1]. Of course there's the issue of getting things off Earth to begin with but even if you take that as (economically) solvable the detla-V problem remains. Site note: there are lots of proposals for cheaper LEO solutions (in $/kg terms). Probably the most famous is the space elevator but that's actually a bad solution for many reasons and possibly not even feasible since we'd have to invent a material strong enough. What could well reduce that from $thousands/kg to <$10/kg is an orbital ring [2] (and check out the rest of his Uplift series if you're interested at the other options). The beauty of this is it doesn't require any magical material ( cough graphene cough ) and requires no new physics. It's largely just an engineering problem. Granted it's a massive engineering problem. To be fair, the article does mention how much energy you'd have to lose but it strikes me as just being so much easier to explain in delta-V terms. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30866504,"author":"cletus","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Impulse Space is betting on a future where launch is cheap","text":"For another view on how this will change things, consider the delta-V map of the Solar System [1]. As an example you need 45km/s to reach Saturn, roughly 20% of that is just spent getting to Low Earth Orbit. Now consider the long-term trend in the payload cost (by weight) of getting to LEO [2]. This is why people such as myself are so bullish on spaceX (despite quite reasonable qualms about Elon Musk as a person). The impact this has had and will continue to have on reducing this number cannot be overstated. But all of this are still interim steps and we can potentially get the payload to LEO cost under $10/kg. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of this, I strongly recommend Isaac Arthur's Upward Bound series [3], I consider the ultimate end to this to be Orbital Rings [4]. Even if you don't believe there's a reason for humans to go to space en masse (which I disagree with), this will greatly impact life on earth, for example with space-based solar power collectors. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33306412,"author":"cletus","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Space-based solar power is getting serious","text":"Here is my hope (and my belief): the ultimate end here is orbital rings [1]. To summarize the video, you can put copper cabling in orbit, run a current through it and keep things in place (relative to a point on Earth) with magnetic levitation. The most important part of this is that you can have things in LEO that are fixed to Earth points. Why does this matter? No longer do you have to speed up to Mach 30 to reach orbital speeds. You could technically run a cable from 150km up and carry people and goods from Earth into LEO and back. This could revolutionize long-distance travel on Earth too. It's estimated that a space-based power collector could create about ~7 times the energy of an Earth based collector due to less power loss from the atmosphere and night (to be clear, a solar collector in orbit would still occasionally be occluded by the Earth but it won't be half the time). You can get power down to Earth in two ways: you can transmit it. This is actually viable but is not ideal. Alternatively, if you have an orbital ring, you can attach it to that and just run cables down to Earth. We use longer power transmission lines than that on Earth already. All of this requires no new physics, no magical materials (eg space elevators do) and are just (admittedly massive) engineering projects. If you can get solar panels into orbit for <$10/kg payload costs and run cables down to Earth, you'll solve the variance issue with solar and create cheap power on a massive scale. And non","stance":"rec"}],"LMxate9gegg":[{"hn_comment_id":29603391,"author":"y04nn","month":"2021-12","story_title":"I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]","text":"Absolutely, if you turn on and off a light switch while listening an AM radio (even static) you would hear it through your speaker, as in this demonstration [1] (it worth watching the whole video if you are interested). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35345436,"author":"throw0101b","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Apple Music Classical","text":"This is the \"Take Five\" variant by Val Bennett, \"The Russians Are Coming\", used in the show Secret Life of Machines (awesome series, now freely/legally posted on YT): * [VIDEO] * [LINK] * [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"LNidsMesxSE":[{"hn_comment_id":29536472,"author":"dognotdog","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The Matrix Is Unreal","text":"> [VIDEO] David Rosen pulled off quite a few little masterpieces -- his gamedev competition entries always had fantastically unique aspects. I cannot believe \"Black Shades\" was almost 20 years ago! (I have no affiliation, but I am glad to see [LINK] is still alive and kicking!) Lugaru and later Overgrowth have been the outcomes of what can only be called a decades long obsession with getting the player controls just right, allowing very natural and responsive control and movement, through creating emergent behaviors from first principles, resulting in a rich and natural interaction with the environment (and other characters, see the fighting mojo), in contrast to the many, many AAA titles that just constantly break the immersion through unnatural, jarring behaviors and frustrating limitations.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31200393,"author":"neandrake","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Overgrowth: Open-Source Announcement","text":"Here's a video I've enjoyed of David Rosen giving a presentation at Game Developers Conference 2014 going over procedural animation used in Overgrowth. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31203632,"author":"KronisLV","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Overgrowth: Open-Source Announcement","text":"Not only that, but some of their approaches were immensely cool, they used procedural animations from just a few keyframes, have a look at this video that someone else linked a while back \"Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39022549,"author":"turtledragonfly","month":"2024-01","story_title":"PIDs: Creating Stable Control in Games","text":"Not the person you asked, but here's a video you might like: [VIDEO] In that example, they do the character's physics first (just a ball), then match the animation to it. The animation speed is controlled by a \"surveyor wheel\" approach \u2014 go to to 336s in the video for that part. So, the animation speed is derived from the physics, rather than the physics speed being derived from the animation. I wouldn't call that \"IK\" exactly, which would be more for things like matching the foot to individual stair steps as the character walks up them, or such. But I suppose in a broader sense it is, since you're deciding on a physical goal a-priori, then forcing the animation to match that goal.","stance":"rec"}],"LNjJTgXujno":[{"hn_comment_id":2808897,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2011-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best videos to watch about building startups?","text":"[LINK] - (Steve Blank / Eric Ries - part 1) [LINK] - (Steve Blank / Eric Ries - part 2) [LINK] - (Steve Blank / Eric Ries - part 3) [LINK] - (Steve Blank at the Startup Lessons Learned conference) [LINK] - (Steve Blank: The Democratization of Entrepreneurship) [LINK] - (Alexander Osterwalder speaking @ Google) [LINK] - (Eric Ries speaking @ Google) [LINK] - (pg at Startup School '08) [VIDEO] - (Peter Norvig at Startup School '08)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8510953,"author":"brandonb","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Is the semantic web still a thing?","text":"Peter Norvig put it best: \"The semantic web is the future of the web, and always will be.\" (For what it's worth, the startup school video that quote comes from is worth watching: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"LO1mTELoj6o":[{"hn_comment_id":17289273,"author":"foxhill","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Habits of Highly Miserable People","text":"having been, for want of a better term, \u2018highly miserable\u2019 in the past, the entirety of this article comes across as insidiously toxic and detrimental to the mental well-being of those who are suffering. there is a.. loosely similar CGP Grey video, which approaches the matter in a much more rational context [1] for anyone suffering, i emplore you to not read this and watch this instead; [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14473074,"author":"bitsoda","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Training Your Brain to Be (and Stay) Happy","text":"CGP Grey recently posted a great video titled \"7 Ways to Maximize Misery\". It's worth checking out. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14578325,"author":"rajangdavis","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you plan your next day ahead?","text":"I have most recently been trying to plan out at least 6 months ahead. How I am approaching this was inspired by some life events and some videos I had seen on Youtube. I really liked this video by Scott Hanselmann ( [LINK] ) about scaling yourself and I liked this video that came out recently ( [VIDEO] ) about behaviours that maximize your misery. What I took from these two videos is that goals are important and in order to reach these goals, you need to find a way to keep yourself accountable without creating goals that are vague or unattainable. I have just started writing a bunch of to-do lists on Google Keep and then I try to group various tasks and assign 3 per day. The goal is to focus on 3 things per day that build into 3 major areas of focus for the week which fuels 3 goals for the month... and so forth. With that said, I missed some of the to-do's for a couple of days for this last week, but I prioritized other items that had come up spontaneously and completed the majority of the to-do's. At the very least, when I fail, I can at least look at what I had accomplished and not feel as bad. Hope this helps.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15202484,"author":"hencq","month":"2017-09","story_title":"The Equifax breach may be the worst leak of personal info ever","text":"There are a lot. I thought this one was really funny [0]. This one I found very interesting [1]. Somewhat different, is the Hello Internet [2] podcast, which is by Grey and Brady Haran who you might know from the Numberphile youtube channel [3]. It's basically the 2 of them chatting about random stuff, but I find it very entertaining. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17288884,"author":"cjen","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Habits of Highly Miserable People","text":"CGP Grey made a great video [0] pretty similar to this, it has a bunch of points about physical things (changing sleep schedule, staying indoors) and keeps the same sarcastic tone. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17311404,"author":"jgrowl","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best hacks to fight depression?","text":"Sometimes it's more illustrative to look at what you can do to ensure you'll be depressed. 7 Ways to Maximize Misery: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23613204,"author":"Jetroid","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How are you holding up?","text":"I'm doing well. Ironically I think I'm doing better now than I would have been if the pandemic didn't happen; but still not in a particularly good position. Optimistic, though! If you're struggling, it's probably because the systems that you put in place at the start of the pandemic have broken down. (Kinda like how we eventually forget/give up on New Years Resolutions...) I'd recommend these[1] two[2] videos from CGP Grey to help. The first talks about the kind of things that you might be doing that are making you miserable, and the second about specific ways in which we can cope with the pandemic (and specifically a lockdown, if you are still in one). Brief notes: Avoid doing any of these things: * Staying still, avoiding exercise * Having an irregular sleep schedule * Maximizing screen time; going to sleep looking at your phone, and using it as soon as you wake up * Encouraging negative emotions, eg: by looking at the news * Setting unmeasurable or unachievable goals. Waiting for motivation to strike. * Obsessing over trying to be happy. * Following your self-destructive impulses Partition your house/space into the following spaces, and try to obey these rules about the spaces: * A space for exercise. If you don't have equipment, you can do body weight exercises. If you have access to safe outdoor spaces, make sure to use that too. Make sure you set a minimum amount of time, and stick to it. * A space for sleep. Do not use your phone here. Do not eat here. Do not linger he","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25731472,"author":"cosmojg","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Setting goals for 2021 \u2013 A brief guide about personal goal setting","text":"CGP Grey has an excellent video on this exact kind of goal setting: [VIDEO] And another on New Year's resolutions more generally: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27722421,"author":"madmads","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots","text":"There is a good book employing the TRIZ mindset for self-improvement called \"How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use\"[0]. Although some of the outcomes the book lead you to can seem banal, if you approach them from the perspective of how to optimize misery, it can give you a new perspective. It certainly did for me in some areas. CGP Grey also made a video based on the book, called \"7 Ways to Maximize Misery\"[1] that may be easier to digest. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29448988,"author":"spurgu","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Please Give Me Advice","text":"Here's a great video going over the same concepts but in a humorous way. 7 ways to maximize misery: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37916490,"author":"extraduder_ire","month":"2023-10","story_title":"How to burnout a software engineer, in 3 easy steps","text":"I really like this format of telling people how to do the thing they don't want. Works way better, and is more memorable than doing the more common thing of telling people how to avoid the thing they don't want. CGP grey did a video like this that's still my favourite example of the format: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LPjzfGChGlE":[{"hn_comment_id":14614714,"author":"Banthum","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Trump administration has plan to scrap \u2018startup visa\u2019 rule","text":"You didn't answer the question clearly. It seems your answer obliquely is that you don't want it for yourself, you want it because it'd benefit the immigrants. >They don't bite. I grew up in a class of around 50% children of immigrants. I'm aware that they don't bite. But, it's nice of you to instantly assume that I'm a xenophobic person just because I question your policy ideas on immigration. Of course the person who wants 20x immigration would assume the same thing about you, and then you're in the left-wing purity spiral. So let's just leave off the insinuations of personal flaws, okay? >the target should be, if someone wants to come here and make a better life for themselves, they should be able to. Please, please watch this 6 minute TED-style talk on immigration numbers: [VIDEO] Your basic goal of helping the world is good. But your convictions have completely disconnected you from the strictures of reality. Your goal isn't coherent. If your target is 5x immigration, then you're not even close to your stated goal of accepting everyone who wants to come. 5x immigration would be about 5 million per year. Africa alone adds 30 million people per year via births over deaths. If 1/3 of those want to enter, then you haven't even absorbed most of the population growth of one continent, much less helped existing Africans, or anyone from anywhere else. The entire Western world (USA, Canada, Australia, Europe) is about 15% of the world population. It is simply impossible that 15% ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5622254,"author":"mcantelon","month":"2013-04","story_title":"If People Could Immigrate Anywhere, Would Poverty Be Eliminated?","text":"This video, although speaking only about allowing unrestricted immigration to the US, is worth watching for perspective. [VIDEO] Unrestricted immigration would make the West's social safety nets and healthcare impossible to maintain. There would be corresponding civil unrest as a reaction. The obvious first thing to do about world poverty is provide free birth control and related education.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11055459,"author":"tyingq","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Disappointed with Europe, Thousands of Iraqi Migrants Return Home","text":"It may just be that asylum for purely economic reasons doesn't scale in a way that would solve the problem. This video does a good job of showing that: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14343748,"author":"exabrial","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Basic Income in a Just Society","text":"No, letting in refugees is 100% political pandering. Explained with gumbals: [VIDEO] Immigration drives innovation, tolerance, advancement of the arts, and fuels small business. But let's stop fooling ourselves that relocating people halfway across the world is solving any sort of crisis.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16781890,"author":"collyw","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Richest 1% on target to own two-thirds of all wealth by 2030","text":"Someone else on HN commented that the poor need to stop reproducing in order to improve equality. At first I found the comment kind of troubling, but the more I think about it the more it seems to make sense. Watching this video kind of backs up the point to a degree, even though the topic is immigration. [VIDEO] Can someone come back with a decent counterargument? I haven't been able to yet. (It's worth remembering that a good percentage of people reading this will be in the top 1% despite not being \"rich\" by western standards).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17440645,"author":"vetinari","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Forced Labor in Malaysia's Electronics Industry","text":"He cannot, except some feel-good and virtue signalling slogans. The resources for social support in most developed countries are limited even for their own citizens; taking anyone would quickly overwhelm the system, that's a basic math, even without a napkin. For people, who do not have a good visualisation skills for numbers, there's this video: [VIDEO] The point is, if you want to help the people in the rest of the world, you have to help them in their countries , which I wholeheartedly agree.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39527815,"author":"codexb","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The Doomslayer (1997)","text":"Your points have all been addressed before. See this presentation about the growth in population in 3rd world countries and how immigration is completely incapable of addressing it in any meaningful way -- [VIDEO] The growth rates and population amounts are simply too high for us to effectively solve the problems of population growth with massive, intercontinental migration. You also can't solve societal and cultural problems (of which the 3rd world and developing world has many) by massive migrations of those populations into first world countries. In effect, you end up simply importing those problems. There's plenty of history and evidence for this. There's never been a case in history where the population of a society is massively overtaken by foreigners and that society hasn't changed dramatically. Cultures and societies are not interchangeable. They aren't equal. It's not racist to say this. You can find undesirable beliefs and traditions among all races and cultures. You cannot fix problematic cultures and societies by trying to emigrate people out of those societies faster than they can produce them. It's far easier to import and export ideas and cultures than it is to migrate people.","stance":"rec"}],"LPqtfC70QTU":[{"hn_comment_id":32763351,"author":"tiew9Vii","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Apple Introduces Apple Watch Ultra","text":"Apparently, the Apple Watch [VIDEO] . [LINK] reviews all the sleep/heart trackers and records accuracy. He\u2019s a professional scientist specialising in sleep research and the reviews concentrate on data/accuracy only.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32975789,"author":"zx10rse","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Analysis of Apple Watch running data","text":"For anyone interested in heart rate accuracy and sleep tracking accuracy I will recommend to check The Quantified Scientist reviews . From his latest reviews of the new apple watches, heart rate is pretty much on par with chest strap and sleep tracking is also far better than anything he tested. Apple Watch : Scientific Sleep Test - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39160014,"author":"CharlesW","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Accuracy of Commercial Sleep-Trackers Compared to Research-Grade Tools","text":"Apple Watch was not tested, so for anyone interested, here are two videos by \"The Quantified Scientist\" creator Rob ter Horst, a postdoctoral researcher who specializes in bioinformatics (studying biology using machine learning and statistics). Apple Watch: Scientific Sleep Lab Test (Ultra vs 8) (2023) - [LINK] Apple Watch: Scientific Sleep Test (2022) - [VIDEO] (Thanks to @LikelyClueless for the channel recommendation!)","stance":"rec"}],"LQRAfJyEsko":[{"hn_comment_id":24581756,"author":"rewq4321","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80%","text":"By which definition of \"relevant\" are animal cruelty[0] and pandemic-level diseases not included? COVID-19 is very \"tame\" compared to what's possible. There's a sense in which we're lucky that we got this pandemic as a practice round for something which we know has the potential to be much, much worse. This isn't controversial at all. [0] If you think it's not that bad, watch Dominion: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25210464,"author":"beigeoak","month":"2020-11","story_title":"World's first no-kill eggs go on sale in Berlin (2018)","text":"> If you can determine the sex of a hatching egg you can entirely dispense with the culling of live male chicks Here is the video, timestamped (24m30s) to the \"culling\" of male chicks. Trigger Warnings: NSFL, Gore. [VIDEO] On a purely personal note, this documentary made me re-evaluate my diet. I'm still not strong enough to be off meat even though that is what I want, but I have successfully abstained from chicken, pig and cow for the past 2 years.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27515566,"author":"sweetheart","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective","text":"Because it involves causing extreme suffering, and we definitively do not need to do it to live long healthy lives. Literally just watch Dominion. Watch it to see the suffering I\u2019m talking about. Why do you think animals deserve this so that you can eat a meal? Is that agony they exist in for their whole life worth a hamburger, or a piece of cheese? Vegans say no. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30572307,"author":"atweiden","month":"2022-03","story_title":"1 in 10 Americans say they don\u2019t eat meat \u2013 a growing share of the population","text":"Farming is a way for folks who work with their hands to achieve some degree of self-sovereignty and freedom \u2014 laudable goals. Unfortunately, this is often accomplished through gross ethical violations. All we can do is educate consumers about the benefits of a whole food plant-based (WFPB) diet. I challenge anyone to watch both The Dominion [1] and Forks Over Knives [2], and not walk away from the experience at least semi-curious about WFPB. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32800841,"author":"gday2020","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"Dominion: [VIDEO] It\u2019s about the cruelty that happens in the animal industry. Minks, dogs, gooses, cows, pigs, horses, camels and a lot more. Watching that has changed my life quite a bit.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34584805,"author":"f3b5","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Something you\u2019ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?","text":"Not waking up earlier to the fact that the meat section in the supermarket is a product of systemic, gruesome torture of intelligent beings. Like probably many of you who read this, I usually felt a bit guilty when I was confronted with the ugly facts we are all vaguely familiar with. I justified my meat consumption with specieist arguments (humans are so much better than pigs, cows, etc). My wife challenged me to watch at least a little bit of a documentary, and if I still wanted to eat salami, so be it. Afterwards I didn't want to eat salami anymore. I now think that the extreme abuse of animals by the food industry on behalf of ignorant consumers is probably the worst evil of the 21st century. If you disagree, I challenge you - watch 15min and then post your reply: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35270239,"author":"socraticmethod","month":"2023-03","story_title":"GOOD Meat gets green light from FDA for cultivated meat","text":"That's not the full definition of murder. Here's the rest: - 1: to kill (a human being) unlawfully and with premeditated malice - 2: to slaughter wantonly : SLAY - 3a: to put an end to - 3b: TEASE, TORMENT - 3c: MUTILATE, MANGLE [VIDEO] Watch Dominion and tell us these animals are not being mutilated, mangled, tormented, slaughtered and murdered. Animals do not want to die. The will ALL naturally cry, scream, run, fight and generally do anything possible to avoid getting killed. Killing them is murder. Discrimination or unjustified treatment of animals based on an individual's species membership is called Speciesism. The belief that humans alone possess intrinsic value or are the central entity in the universe is called Anthropocentrism.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19506511,"author":"pantalaimon","month":"2019-03","story_title":"CowToilet, a Toilet for Cows","text":"It's not about how the animals look when they are dead. It's about what they have to endure while they are alive. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21052961,"author":"hombre_fatal","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Farm animals in India and China are becoming more resistant to antibiotics","text":"How happy are these animals in the documentary, Dominion? [VIDEO] Your post presents a nice rainbows and sunshine guess at how the animal ag industry works, and I really wish it worked like that, too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27072746,"author":"atweiden","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Beyond Meat\u2019s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)","text":"Human evolution is poorly understood, and the assumption that any choice $X supposedly made by early humans led to our forefathers\u2019 anamolously rapid brain development is flatly speculative. > Unlike most great apes today, whose diet is primarily plant based, we can thank the incredible nutrient density in meat and our incredible hunting and tool creating ability for prefrontal cortex development. Complete and utter speculation. > We were pack hunters, forging tools and strategies capable of taking down mammoths. Call it 'diabolicaly evil' if you want, but this is simply nature and survival. Subsistence hunting amongst early human tribes is not comparable to modern day factory farming in any conceivable way. B12 doesn\u2019t come from eating plants OR animals: it comes from bacteria, and ironically that bacteria is in such short supply on factory farms that the animals need to be injected with synthetic B12. > I don't personally believe highly processed plant alternatives such as Beyond meat are a long term option if you're even vaguely interested in your own health. I eat raw soybeans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds. I\u2019d recommend watching the documentary Forks Over Knives [1] if you care about your personal health, and the documentary Dominion [2], if you\u2019d like to see what really happens on factory farms. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27495072,"author":"sweetheart","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Animal testing is exploitative and largely ineffective","text":"Oh boy, let me tell you, animals absolutely know what we are doing to them. They suffer immensely. Check this out, it offers just a glimpse into what that suffering includes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28035103,"author":"rewq4321","month":"2021-08","story_title":"An Animal\u2019s Place (2002)","text":"This documentary is worth watching: [VIDEO] (Dominion, released in 2018, unfortunately requires signing into youtube due to age retrictions)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29871891,"author":"neuronic","month":"2022-01","story_title":"UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows","text":"This is probably me not being able to \u201cread the room\u201d but this study both makes me very happy and very sad. I recently watched Dominion documentary [1] and the more we learn about animals cognition the more I feel the weight of their massive abuse especially in the last 150 years. (The recent story of an HNer interacting with a spider on his desk was really cool though, I don\u2019t have a link anymore.) Without judging anyone or their behavior in particular I just feel repelled by our treatment of other clearly cognitive beings. The people working these places don\u2019t seem like ones you would want around anyone in society either and I don\u2019t buy the story that it\u2019s only bad in some places. I\u2019d wager that it\u2019s really bad in most cases. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LQmTKxI4Wn4":[{"hn_comment_id":24833501,"author":"rantwasp","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Building a computer in Conway's game of life","text":"my favorite is [VIDEO] once you look at microbiology you cannot unsee that it looks just like a massive, complicated stochasticaly-driven computer","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24974284,"author":"jcims","month":"2020-11","story_title":"How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System","text":"'Molecular machines' is not an overstatement. Here's an example of some of them working in harmony to maintain an essential electrochemical gradient across the lipid bilayer that encapsulates the mitochondria: [VIDEO] It's a 7 minute video, if you only have a little time, skip around, but make sure you listen to the part starting at 6:17. DNA isn't just the blueprint for the machine or the blueprint for the factory that makes the machine, it's the blueprint for the entire supply chain required to build and operate an entire chemical industry of mind-bending complexity. Like doubling grains of rice on each square of a checkerboard, if you wanted to create a complete catalog of all possible combinations of a string of DNA that's 150 base pairs long, you would have to marshal all of the estimated matter in the observable universe and you'd still end up short. Most of the genes that create these proteins are tens of thousands of base pairs in length and the entire human genome is ~3 billion.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25151104,"author":"anm89","month":"2020-11","story_title":"I should have loved biology","text":"The thing that drove this home for me were the biovisions animations which got me to go back and basically learn high school biology. Seeing the mechanical nature of gene transciption and chemical signaling blew my mind. [LINK] [VIDEO] On the other hand, I don't buy his thing about wishing his high school teacher had presented it differently. No on else can make you interested in this stuff. The best they can do is provide resources like the ones above.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33370522,"author":"thanatos519","month":"2022-10","story_title":"How food powers the body's metabolism","text":"An incredible story! Somewhere in [VIDEO] or [LINK] the narrator casually says \"... and this is why we breathe oxygen ...\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34886223,"author":"enslavedrobot","month":"2023-02","story_title":"'artificial photosynthesis' claimed 10x more efficient","text":"It's a very complex topic (especially if you aren't a chemist). I can't find an accessible video on the topic, but you want to look up photosystem II repair. You need to search up D1 replacement in photosystem II. To get a flavour of the nanomachine aspect of it all, check out this video on electron transport across membranes ( [VIDEO] ). Electron transport in proteins is crazy complex and actually amounts to molecular circuits where energy is guided to different spots inside proteins complexes in a unidirectional fashion. This guy is the grand daddy of the field ( [LINK] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42090076,"author":"rawgabbit","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Mitochondria Are Alive","text":"Here is an animation of the Mitochondria in action. The mitochondria has two cell membranes. The gap in between is called the intermembrane space. It is also positively charged with protons. There are complexes 1-4 which continuously pump protons into this space. The ATP synthase molecule harnesses these protons, similar to a water wheel harnessing the flow of water, to make ATP which is the energy molecule the cell uses. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LRhbcDzbGSU":[{"hn_comment_id":8678804,"author":"grimgrin","month":"2014-12","story_title":"First Infocom Z-machine implemented in hardware","text":"Many Infocom employees are present in the documentary Get Lamp: [VIDEO] Recommended if text games are of interest to you.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18639744,"author":"cpeterso","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Great Adventure-Game Puzzles","text":"If you like text adventure games, check out Jason Scott's documentary GET LAMP about the history of text adventure games, including interviews with some Infocom developers: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19393534,"author":"freediver","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Iconoclast: a Gothic/Cyberpunk MUD RPG, Online Since 1996","text":"Oh the MUDs! Props to Forest\u2019s edge and TempusMUD. Text is the ultimate medium because it directly connects with our imagination. I remember jumping out of my chair after reading a line of text on my screen. Recommend watching \u201cGet lamp\u201d documentary to fans of MUDs, text adventures and those born after: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31742079,"author":"petercooper","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Enjoyed Jason Scott\u2019s BBS documentary","text":"He also did a documentary about text adventure games called \"GET LAMP\" which I enjoyed a lot: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46473235,"author":"anonymousiam","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Adventure 751 (1980)","text":"Jason Scott (of textfiles.com) made a great documentary video about the Adeventure game. I picked up a copy at DEFCON about 15 years ago. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LS3GQk9ETRU":[{"hn_comment_id":21976109,"author":"bloudermilk","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The propeller is giving way to the pump-jet propulsor on larger submarines","text":"There's a great video from one of my favorite YouTube channels about Magnetohydrodynamic drives. Really fascinating drive design and channel for anyone interested in engineering. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36171606,"author":"elihu","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Taking a New Look at Fundamental Tech for Quiet Undersea Propulsion","text":"Interesting. If I understand correctly, they need a electrode that's in physical contact with the sea water. I'm not sure I understand it entirely, but there's a video on the Tech Ingredients channel that explains magnetohydrodynamic pumps: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LSX3qdy0dFg":[{"hn_comment_id":16601272,"author":"RosanaAnaDana","month":"2018-03","story_title":"LiDAR scans are finding hidden Roman roads and cutting crime","text":"I believe this talk will specifically and completely answer your questions: [VIDEO] Short answer: Self driving vehicles do use deep learning, but they avoid some types not because it is unreliable, but it is processing power intense. Traffic lights, road signs, pedestrians etc.. That's a whole ball of wax to unravel. Check the lecture, its fantastic imo.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16624221,"author":"lacerta","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street","text":"It is both an over and underhyped field depending on the area you are looking at. HUGE difference between consumer self driving car [Everywhere, at all times] and the Machines as a Service [Geo, time, weather-fenced operations][1]. Waymo appears to be at the head of the pack; Sacha Arnoud, Director of Engineering for Waymo gave a talk a few weeks ago at MIT[2] and gives a good idea. We are about 5 years out until these start rolling out as MaaS (machines as a service). Probably 10+ years for level 4 highway operations for consumer models according to Frazzoli. [1]Emilio Frazzoli, CTO of nuTonomy [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17805271,"author":"Zarel","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Uber\u2019s Vision of Self-Driving Cars Begins to Blur","text":"The second article I linked to also mentioned work on unmapped roads: [LINK] Waymo has solved problem after problem you think they haven't solved yet, for some reason. They've intentionally gone after unpredictable situations and dealt with them. Look at any video where they explain how it works, and you'll notice how many situations they can manage: [VIDEO] And even if Waymo only works on well-mapped cities? That's still far from \"can only work if they repurpose existing transportation infrastructure to only belong to self-driving cars\" which is the comment I was replying to.","stance":"rec"}],"LUFp6sjKbkE":[{"hn_comment_id":36271200,"author":"dahart","month":"2023-06","story_title":"How the Computer Graphics Industry Got Started at the University of Utah","text":"Recently Utah had a small commemorative conference where the photo in the picture was taken. Ivan Sutherland attended, and gave what I thought was the best talk, about nothing to do with graphics. He\u2019s actively doing research on Single Quantum Flux circuits at 85 years old! [1] He\u2019s trying to spread the word that the US is about to miss out on the next hardware revolution because we\u2019re not paying attention to SQF. [2] The talk is awesome and worth watching. Anyway, I feel like this was a sneak peek into one of the biggest reasons why that early graphics team was so successful, Ivan\u2019s amazing. Combined with some other magic ingredients, their environment was special, and I think, sadly, unreproducible. [1] [VIDEO] (For Ivan\u2019s talk, scroll to 5:50:00 - that\u2019s 5 hours and fifty minutes in.) [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39450711,"author":"rt12121212","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) Digital Electronics (2023)","text":"I think it would have helped if you linked to the timestamp[1] where he started talking to encourage discussion, 5h47m in for anyone wanting to watch it. I recommend at 2x. It's a very interesting presentation, from the history to the mechanics of how it works, to the possibilities. [1] [VIDEO] It's interesting to hear about how it originated in a research group in Russia led by KK Likharev, and how the students were poached to the USA and are now at retirement age there. That it was funded by the USSR to out compete IBM superconducting and Sutherland thinks[2] his group did with SFQ . [2] [VIDEO] Sutherland was interested in wafer probers for the purpose of SFQ research that work at superconducting temperatures, he asked where he could get one and was told four were shipped to China[3]. Relevant relating to how USA is falling behind possibly, and there are sanctions on nVidia sending the latest in GPU/compute to China, but this happened. [3] [VIDEO] One of the most interesting topics I have been introduced to and a great presentation and Q&A (watched at 2x speed of course) on it.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"LWGJA9i18Co":[{"hn_comment_id":18675600,"author":"hathawsh","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Virgin Galactic successfully reaches space","text":"They fly the plane downward, matching the vertical acceleration with the acceleration caused by gravity. You owe it to yourself to see these amazing videos filmed on planes that simulate zero G: OK Go - [VIDEO] Physics Girl - [LINK] Veritasium - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32823675,"author":"bjkchoy","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Weightless: Parabolic flight on an A310","text":"One of my preferred video clip ever was filmed entirely during a parabolic flight: OK Go, Upside Down & Inside Out [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48098741,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The Greatest Shot in Television: James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene","text":"A number of their music videos are quite creative: * in a zero-G plane: [VIDEO] * one-take (?) on electric unicycles: [LINK] * 4.2s real-time scene with the footage slowed down to 4 minutes: [LINK] * Chevrolet-sponsored video where they use a moving car as an instrument: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"LZPKTaVB1IU":[{"hn_comment_id":38998307,"author":"hombre_fatal","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Could inflammation be the cause of myriad chronic conditions? (2019)","text":"Here's Layne Norton's response to Lustig and that exact Huberman episode: [VIDEO] It'll answer your question.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44743381,"author":"oarfish","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Maintaining weight loss","text":"PSA: Robert Lustig is notorious for broadcasting incorrect views contradicted by current science. A good debunk of his nonsense claims is here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LZgyVadkgmI":[{"hn_comment_id":24392400,"author":"noir_lord","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Chess is taking over the online video game streaming world and it will change","text":"He did it with virtually no resources and kept it as simple as possible - that he did it alone is astounding. He has a good talk about how he did it here : - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25735293,"author":"oli5679","month":"2021-01","story_title":"A bit on scaling chess.com's database","text":"If anyone is interested in online chess, [LINK] is a really interesting project. It is non-for-profit, avoiding freemium upselling and instead relying on user donations Here is a great talk by the founder [VIDEO] And here is the open-sourced code. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32048995,"author":"jka","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Irwin \u2013 the protector of Lichess from all chess players villainous","text":"Related to this, there's a really good talk by the founder of lichess that includes an overview of the cheating problem, and the techniques they use to detect and manage it. The relevant section of the video on YouTube is: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"L_XJ_s5IsQc":[{"hn_comment_id":18772405,"author":"bevinahally","month":"2018-12","story_title":"It\u2019s a Great Age for Jazz, but Don\u2019t Call It Golden","text":"This was addressed perfectly by Robert Glasper at a workshop that I attended. To paraphrase, he was talking about current day jazz school students talking about jazz like it's a work of Mozart or Beethoven, to be reproduced perfectly. \"Hip-hop musicians are more jazz than jazz musicians today\" I wouldn't write off modern jazz though. I truly think that we're experiencing something phenomenal these days. I highly recommend anything by Snarky Puppy. Case in point - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12327760,"author":"21echoes","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Jazz in the 21st century: Playing outside the box","text":"different senses of innovation /shrug for stuff in the more progressive vein, check out: Jaga Jazzist : [LINK] or [LINK] Jacob Collier - P.Y.T. : [LINK] more Hiatus Kaiyote : [LINK] or more Snarky Puppy : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20682062,"author":"drhodes","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Where did the melody go? (2017)","text":"It kind of sounds like you're having a hard time finding good new music. It's out there if you look. Snarky Puppy - Lingus (We Like It Here) [VIDEO] Hiatus Kaiyote - By Fire [LINK] Alina Engibaryan - We Are [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"LabqeJEOQyI":[{"hn_comment_id":1699170,"author":"pkghost","month":"2010-09","story_title":"How to disconnect from your online life","text":"yay for clay and the middle way. he reminds me of uncle ben: \"with great power comes great responsibility.\" he has a similarly level response to the problem of information overload (instead, filter failure): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16857613,"author":"enkiv2","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics probably doesn't contain technical information that's new to any of you, but Ted has a knack for reframing things in ways that make the arbitrariness of certain historical decisions clear: [LINK] On the subject of hypertext, The Web That Wasn't gives a nice history of the idea (for anybody who thinks it starts with TBL -- surprisingly many people!): [LINK] Another reframing-oriented talk is Clay Shirky's \"It's not information overload, it's filter failure\", which ultimately leads to Shirky suggesting the kinds of user-oriented filtering features that Mastodon has implemented: [VIDEO] At the intersection of neurology and information science, Peter Watts always has something interesting to say, and as a former marine biologist focusing on the nervous system of starfish, this is absolutely in his wheelhouse: [LINK] This one (\"moving away from defensive programming\") justified strong typing in a pretty clear way: [LINK] Dan Dennett is just as relevant as Doug Hofstadter when it comes to metacognition: [LINK] Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science starts slow, but if you don't have much of a historical background (like, if you're only vaguely aware of what happened in CS in the 70s), it's a laundry list of things you should look up and be aware of before you start your next project: [LINK] Everybody should understand procedural generation: [LINK] Likewise, since AI is hyped up right now, we should all remind ourselves that IA is a thing too: [LINK] M","stance":"rec"}],"LbH1ZDImaI8":[{"hn_comment_id":21628521,"author":"DennisP","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How would you bootstrap a space company?","text":"NASA's big project for launch is a disposable rocket using Space Shuttle technology. It will cost at least a billion dollars per launch. SpaceX's project is a fully reusable rocket, with rapid turnaround because it uses methane fuel in the world's first clean-burning full-flow engine. They expect to be able to launch three times per day. On top of that the rocket is built of cheap stainless steel instead of carbon fiber. With that amount of reuse, each launch basically pays for fuel and ground support, each of which costs about a million dollars per launch. Given their payload of at least 100 tonnes, that's $20/kg. They've already done a single-engine hop test, and hope to reach orbit within six months. Here's a great video on what makes the new SpaceX engine revolutionary: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30347369,"author":"DisjointedHunt","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Starship is threatening NASA\u2019s moon contractors","text":"Because the assumptions made for one class of payload don't apply to another class of payload with vastly different mission specifications. A great place to start is this amazing video by The Everyday Astronaut: [VIDEO] Notice how the type of fuel used itself is a consideration for the type of rockets we may send to Mars if we're considering In-Situ refueling.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23499805,"author":"martythemaniak","month":"2020-06","story_title":"We could see an orbital launch of SpaceX\u2019s Starship this year","text":"Starship is a pretty radical redesign with the main goal being reusability. Everything about it is with reusability and and thus scale in mind. A new engine was needed because while the Merlin is a great engine, it could never be reused the thousands of times Raptor is designed to be reused. You can think of engine design as the simultaneous, interdependent optimization across 10+ dimensions, but as an example of one of dimensions - Raptor uses Methane (rather than Kerosene) because it burns cleaner (does not leave residue) and can be manufactured on Mars more easily. Here's an in-depth video about Raptor: [VIDEO] The rest of the rocket is similar, in that it is done with manufacturability, reusability and scale in mind. The Falcon design could never stretch to these demands.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33620423,"author":"kiratp","month":"2022-11","story_title":"NASA \u2013 Artemis I Liftoff","text":"SpaceX is making significant breakthroughs that you can appreciate if you understand the tech. > As of 2019, only three full-flow staged combustion rocket engines had ever progressed sufficiently to be tested on test stands; the Soviet Energomash RD-270 project in the 1960s, the US government-funded Aerojet Rocketdyne Integrated powerhead demonstration project in the mid-2000s,[6] and SpaceX's flight capable Raptor engine first test-fired in February 2019. [LINK] If you want to learn more [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33620460,"author":"kiratp","month":"2022-11","story_title":"NASA \u2013 Artemis I Liftoff","text":"Raptor is a breakthrough engine. If NASA with nation state resources and 23B is 6 years late, let\u2019s cut SpaceX some slack for building a profitable launch business with multiple successful vehicles while also being very close with Starship. > As of 2019, only three full-flow staged combustion rocket engines had ever progressed sufficiently to be tested on test stands; the Soviet Energomash RD-270 project in the 1960s, the US government-funded Aerojet Rocketdyne Integrated powerhead demonstration project in the mid-2000s,[6] and SpaceX's flight capable Raptor engine first test-fired in February 2019. [LINK] If you want to learn more [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LdOe18KhtT4":[{"hn_comment_id":18217914,"author":"expathacker","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"10+ deployments per day from Velocity 2009. It was really a pivotal talk in the early days of the DevOps movement [VIDEO] Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site by John Adams (then from Twitter)at Velocity 2009 (Velocity 2009 was really an incredibly pivotal and influential conference in the DevOps movement). [LINK] Bootstrapping an Infrastructure by Steve Traugott at Lisa 1998. I don't know of any videos of the talk, but the related paper eventually lead to Puppet and the beginning of the modern configuration management software [LINK] There is no talent shortage by Andrew Schaefer, co-founder of Puppet from Velocity NYC 2013. [LINK] (edited for consistant formatting)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24604837,"author":"dijit","month":"2020-09","story_title":"How to properly manage SSH keys for server access","text":"Everyone having their own idea of what devops means is problematic. I think it\u2019s best to consider the original source which is this talk from Flickr: [VIDEO] (\"10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr\"). Directly it talks about joining developers and operations into the same team- later Patrick Debois would refer to this as DevOps and a year later the first DevOps days in Ghent was organised (also by Debois).","stance":"rec"}],"Le7Fqbsrrm8":[{"hn_comment_id":34674067,"author":"reso","month":"2023-02","story_title":"As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)","text":"Mick West's breakdowns of the Pentagon UAP videos was the nail in the coffin of this era of UFO hype for me. [VIDEO] These were supposed to be the smoking gun evidence. UFO believers inside the DoD and as high up as US Senators fought for years to get them declassified. As soon as they were public, they were all quickly identified as sensor glare, bokeh, or mis-understood perspective. More generally this showed how easy it is to misinterpret the information being put out by complex sensors like FLIR, even the operators do it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25808040,"author":"lwansbrough","month":"2021-01","story_title":"US Navy \u2013 Tic Tac UFO \u2013 High frequency gravitational wave generator","text":"This whole thing has a very boring, very likely answer described in this video: [VIDEO] Essentially, there are a few different perspective/camera quirks coming together in these videos which can (apparently) trick even well trained pilots.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34674142,"author":"reso","month":"2023-02","story_title":"As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)","text":"Gofast, FLIR and Gimbal all have very compelling explanations: [VIDEO] Mick West has reported on this all over the place.","stance":"rec"}],"LfascZSTU4o":[{"hn_comment_id":425566,"author":"natmaster","month":"2009-01","story_title":"The Two Flaws Of Libertarian Economics","text":"I stopped reading when he misstated everything about Libertarianism: \" 1. Corporations are more \u201cefficient\u201d than the government because of the \u201cnatural selection\u201d of our capitalist system. 2. Corporations are therefore better than the government at everything. 3. Corporations should be the government, or at least in control of it.\" This guy obviously not only misunderstands what Libertarism is, or Austrian economics. But also grossly misunderstands the cause of our economic collapse. I tend to trust the scientists that have models that can accurately predict the future: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":425577,"author":"natmaster","month":"2009-01","story_title":"The Two Flaws Of Libertarian Economics","text":"My thoughts: Most scientists (myself included) tend to prefer models that accurately predict the future: [VIDEO] What Zed describes is in no way libertarianism. What the following to understand exactly what it is (HINT: It's the opposite of Libertarianism.) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3459489,"author":"nextparadigms","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Inside the Fed in 2006: A Coming Crisis, and Banter","text":"There have been people like Peter Schiff warning about the recession and specifically saying when it will happen and how long it will last, and even politicians like Ron Paul warning about the housing bubble since 2003. They just refused to believe it, and I guess everyone in the Fed fell prey to group think. They couldn't admit to themselves that their strategy was failing, and even worse, that they were responsible for the economic failure through their policies over the past few years. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6355012,"author":"cpursley","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Low pay and the rise of the machines","text":"+1 on Mises Institute and Peter Schiff. Say what you want about Austrian / free market economic schools, but these people and groups predicted the financial crisis and housing bubble: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Lg_aUOSLuRo":[{"hn_comment_id":37494383,"author":"NavinF","month":"2023-09","story_title":"French regulators order Apple to halt sales of the iPhone 12","text":"At the power levels we're talking about (5W)? Of course I would. The effects are well known: It heats your hands up at 5 joules per second. Incidentally, Tech Ingredients has a great video on using microwave ovens without an enclosure and how to block similar directed energy weapons that use a lot more than 5W: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43383853,"author":"amatecha","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Military grade sonic weapon is used against protesters in Serbia","text":"Probably also worth watching a related video from the same channel: \"Defeating Microwave Weapons! - Part 1\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ljzj9Msli5o":[{"hn_comment_id":19245094,"author":"christophilus","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Normalization of Deviance","text":"Here is an excellent talk on this subject[0]. It's one of the few presentations I like to watch every once in a while. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17148999,"author":"Sidnicious","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend","text":"Mike Mullane\u2019s \u201cNormalisation of Deviance\u201d talk to a group of firefighters[1] is relevant here. He describes how the Challenger shuttle disaster happened despite internal memos about the problem years prior. The message of the talk is, essentially, that a person or team can get used to ignoring their own standards when under pressure. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27718737,"author":"y04nn","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan","text":"I like the term \"normalization of deviance\" and would recommand the Mike Mullane's talk on the Challenger disaster [1]. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31976285,"author":"slackerlol","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Keep calm and use the runbook","text":"The \u201cpreventable mistakes\u201d point reminds me of this great video about \u201cnormalization of deviance\u201d [from routine/checklists] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LkH2r-sNjQs":[{"hn_comment_id":24993684,"author":"greenduck","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Let's put e-voting where it belongs: on the trash-heap of bad ideas (2016)","text":"Tom Scott still has the best argument against e-voting IMO [1]. Briefly: an election only counts if everybody can believe the results. Making an expert level understanding of CS a requirement to verify your voting system means that Joe Q. Average who doesn't hold a PhD (or maybe even a college degree) has to rely on spooky experts telling him what to believe. If I were in his shoes then I would have no confidence that I participated in a fair and valid election. We kind of live in a bubble here on HN where most people are sort of in the tech space and could take a weekend or two to understand blockchain. I think its easy to forget that most people don't have the required background to learn it easily (or would want to use up their time to understand it). I almost have a PhD in the hard sciences and I don't fully understand the finer details of block chain. I think I would have to write my own implementation to fully appreciate it. Simplicity and the ability to explain the system to every American is a requirement of any voting system. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25924688,"author":"Qub3d","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani","text":"Tom Scott made an excellent summary of why electronic voting is a bad idea, and explicitly covers both open source and blockchain as proposed solutions (hint: they don't solve the problems that make e-voting bad) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28963528,"author":"space_fountain","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Blockchain voting is overrated among uninformed but underrated among informed","text":"I think the Tom Scott video on electronic voting from years ago remains the most convincing argument to me that it's a bad idea ( [VIDEO] ). To summarize, even assuming you can solve properties like correctness, censorship resistance, privacy and coercion resistance. The fundamental problem with digital is that any exploit of any of these properties you ever have scales really well. Messing with a paper election requires a lot of people working together across the entire country. A digital hack just requires one smart person","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44657184,"author":"david-gpu","month":"2025-07","story_title":"US companies, consumers are paying for tariffs, not foreign firms","text":"Tom Scott provided an excellent explanation of why electronic voting is a terrible idea. Original: [LINK] Follow-up: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22641007,"author":"roywiggins","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Detailed audit of Voatz' voting app confirms security flaws","text":"Many bank transactions can be reversed, and the ones that can't can be covered by insurance or self-insurance. You can't practically speaking reverse a tainted election. Anyway, I'll let Tom Scott take it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24176271,"author":"kfrzcode","month":"2020-08","story_title":"USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System","text":"Electronic voting is a terrible idea. Attacks on paper & pen ballot systems are much, much harder to scale. Here's Tom Scott with a great explanation of the basics. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26150187,"author":"lukifer","month":"2021-02","story_title":"YouTubers have to declare ads. Why doesn't anyone else? [video]","text":"Relevant to HN's interests: a compelling, layperson-accessible argument against electronic voting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29946019,"author":"V__","month":"2022-01","story_title":"It\u2019s not still the early days of blockchain","text":"Obligatory Tom Scott videos: Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile | [LINK] Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea | [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30840651,"author":"danuker","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Debian decides to allow secret votes","text":"I am not familiar with Debian's practices, but electronic voting can't work for a nation because: - centralization (there must be a central, corruptible place where the voters are authenticated or the votes are counted) - software is untrustable: [LINK] The USA has had a Diebold voting scandal. Other countries are using a paper-based voting process which can be supervised by third parties. [LINK] Relevant watching: Tom Scott: Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea [VIDEO] One possible solution could be ZCash ( [LINK] ) but it has had its own problems ( [LINK] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34914330,"author":"ChickenNugger","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Bankman-Fried, others made 300 illegal political donations, new indictment says","text":"Here's Tom Scott's second video explaining why electronic voting is a terrible idea: [VIDEO] Electronic voting machines and companies that manufacture them should both be illegal. Yet their use is widespread in America. The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. There is no good faith reason to use them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37220573,"author":"teddyh","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Brazilian hacker claims Bolsonaro asked him to hack into the 2022 voting system","text":"Please explain how a \u201cdigital election system\u201d could ever be a sane idea? \u2022 Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea < [LINK] > \u2022 Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea < [VIDEO] >","stance":"rec"}],"Ll6-eGDpimU":[{"hn_comment_id":30152236,"author":"chillingeffect","month":"2022-01","story_title":"My dishwasher won\u2019t start until I let it update its firmware over the WiFi","text":"This[0] and this[1] are the ultimate dishwasher talks. From what I gather, European dishwashers heat the water, while American do not. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35097379,"author":"lbutler","month":"2023-03","story_title":"I Splurged for the Fanciest Dishwasher and It Was Worth It","text":"For those that haven't seen them, the two Technology Connection videos on dishwashers are must watch 1 - [LINK] 2 - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30148526,"author":"slantyyz","month":"2022-01","story_title":"My dishwasher won\u2019t start until I let it update its firmware over the WiFi","text":"Sadly, I don't think dishwashers will last 20 years any more. Since 2005, I'm on my third dishwasher. The first one lasted 9 years, the second one around 5 (with one under warranty repair). At some point the repairs/parts cost more than what the original dishwasher is worth. Regarding the algorithm, I'm not sure they make a huge difference anyways. FWIW, The Technology Connections channel on YouTube has a couple of pretty interesting videos on how dishwashers work and how to get the most out of them: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30232431,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?","text":"> Doesn't even need special tablets [\u2026] A thirty minute video explaining why tablets are bad and that you should simply use powder: * [LINK] Also, a follow-up video: * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33826732,"author":"1MachineElf","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Gut epithelial barrier damage caused by dishwasher detergents and rinse aids","text":"Here's an interesting video by Technology Connections on how most dishwasher \"pods\" are overkill: [VIDEO] I see the bubbles foaming at the edges of my cups when I fill them with water, so I always rinse them before use. I would avoid most dishwasher detergent pods if I could, but I can't sell the idea to my significant other.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34199356,"author":"dns_snek","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your system for dirty dishes?","text":"It's made by a company called Candy (EU) but unfortunately I don't have the exact model number. I can't say how it's going to hold up over time since I've only had it for around 2 years since I moved in. The only advice I have in this regard is making sure you're loading it correctly and not overloading it to the point where water spray can't reach your dishes. You've probably come across these videos already but just in case you haven't, Technology Connections released 2 videos on the topic of dishwashers that could be helpful: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36556253,"author":"harrisi","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI","text":"I've gone back and forth with dishwashers my whole life, spending years with followed by years without, etc. and I finally am team dishwasher. There are a few tips I've learned, such as immediately rinsing a dish after using (I don't bother scrubbing), running the hot water for a minute before starting, using the pre-wash detergent and shine stuff appropriately. I also don't bother entirely filling it up to run it - which may seem wasteful, but I'd imagine filling it completely and having to rewash some percent of them ends up being more wasteful. Also, just like getting a manual dishwashing routine figured out, dishwashers are all different and need to be learned like any tool. Understanding where pieces are, which cycles run when, which compartments open and close and even how they do it, are all important. It really is best to think of it as a tool. Some useful videos: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37461636,"author":"ComputerGuru","month":"2023-09","story_title":"To Make Dishwashers Great Again? (2020)","text":"The follow-up to the video is worth linking to, if only because it explains why liquid detergent is crap: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38277129,"author":"raphlinus","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Gut epithelial barrier damage caused by dishwasher detergents and rinse aids","text":"If you want to understand rinse aids better, I recommend this Technology Connections video (I've set the time stamp to the rinse aid section): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42499321,"author":"zahlman","month":"2024-12","story_title":"I just found out I've been using my dishwasher wrong for 7 years","text":"Relevant - since there is more to learn about operating a dishwasher: Technology Connections' series on dishwashers - [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"LmlAYnFF_s8":[{"hn_comment_id":10161947,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2015-09","story_title":"What if I were 1% charged? (2013)","text":"That's the video from before they published (which is still interesting). There is also a more recent video[1] (post-publication[2]) that covers how they got the data (which supports the coulombic explosion hypothesis). While it is mentioned at the end of the newer video, I highly recommend watching the 500fps footage[3] of a drop of NaK burning (just before it explodes) on the top of water. There is a striking color change as it starts to interact with the water, and right the NaK explodes... the metal turns completely transparent . [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38031743,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithium","text":"The article in Nature is about a paper by Thunderf00t (Phil Mason). He published the result in Nature Chemistry and also made a video [VIDEO] (the video has a nice balance, it's technical but not too technical).","stance":"rec"}],"LmpuerlbJu0":[{"hn_comment_id":29941030,"author":"hallway_monitor","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Multiple Sclerosis Causality","text":"I don't see many YouTube links posted here, but this Kurzgeasgt video blew my mind on this topic. Our immune system really is amazing. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29524076,"author":"Wowfunhappy","month":"2021-12","story_title":"BNT162b2 Vaccine Booster and Mortality Due to Covid-19","text":"Vaccines are different from antibiotics in that they are designed to use your own immune system. Whereas an antibiotic targets a bacterial weakness which the bacteria can fix, the immune system watches for both specific invaders and possible variations of those invaders . Kurzgesagt made a good explainer video on this recently: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LnS0PfNyj4U":[{"hn_comment_id":22415240,"author":"zarmin","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Early riser or night owl? New study may help to explain the difference","text":"Yeah, I think there's a large subset of people with ADHD who have some kind of alternate circadian rhythm. Mine seems to be 36 hours; for almost 35 years my peak working hours have been 4pm to 5am, with the ability to hyperfocus until I collapsed if I'm really into what I'm doing. Not for lack of trying to have a \"normal\" schedule...oh god I try really hard multiple times a year. It's just not natural. You should know that stimulants are only one type of approach for treating ADHD. Your best resource, you may have discovered, is Russell Barkley; I cannot recommend him enough. Also check out the YouTube channel How to ADHD. Some relevant Barkley videos: [VIDEO] [LINK] Fair warning: You may discover some of the things you've done for your whole life without second guessing are actually typical ADHD symptoms. And if you're like me, this might thoroughly shake your snowglobe.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16610298,"author":"burntrelish1273","month":"2018-03","story_title":"In Praise of ADHD","text":"Praise? :/ Just diagnosed as an adult partially due to parents not \"believing in it,\" refused testing then and I was blind to it until now. Currently friendless, jobless, broke, homeless and a bazillion unfinished projects not exactly the picture of praiseworthy. ADHD is a misnomer, it's an executive function disorder, but the name will never change because it's embedded in disability laws. Medicating for emotional regulation, continuity of thought, completing tasks and not coming-off as weird are lifesaving... don't avoid medication out of some antivaxx nonsense. Worth watching: - ADHD Child vs. Non-ADHD Child Interview [LINK] - How To Know If You Have ADHD [LINK] - This is how you treat ADHD based off science, Dr Russell Barkley part of 2012 Burnett Lecture [LINK] - Dr Russell Barkley on ADHD Meds and how they all work differently from each other [VIDEO] - The Neuroanatomy of ADHD and thus how to treat ADHD - CADDAC - Dr Russel Barkley part 1c [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42102695,"author":"MrMetric","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough","text":"It's unfortunate that I had to scroll to the bottom of the page to see any mention of ADHD or executive dysfunction, when the linked post describes what is clearly a form of executive dysfunction! Instant temporary treatment is a stimulant such as caffeine (which has annoying side-effects) or amphetamine salts (commonly known as adderall). Long-term treatment is exercize, which can be as simple as balancing on one leg for ten minutes every day or using an elliptical machine. Running outside is a decent option, but take care to avoid damaging the knees, which will happen by running on hard surfaces. Dr. Russell Barkley has good explanations of what different prescription ADHD drugs do, which I find gives insight into what's going wrong when you have an executive dysfunction: [VIDEO] In particular, the emotional blunting effect of stimulants erases the thought that what you do might not be good enough. You no longer care about what others think, so you can just do what you want to do. I personally find this also makes me a callous asshole if I'm not careful, which I believe is related to the modern epidemic of coffee zombies.","stance":"rec"}],"LnzuMJLZRdU":[{"hn_comment_id":21377281,"author":"showerst","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Story of the Team Behind the 6502","text":"The (awesome) youtube electronics teacher Ben Eater has just started a series of videos building a 6502 based computer on a breadboard, and he sells kits. I just got my kit, so I'm really looking forward to the rest of the videos. He also offers the schematics for those wanting to jump ahead. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21877275,"author":"cadence-","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Chuck Peddle Dies at 82; His $25 Chip Helped Start the PC Age","text":"Here is an amazing video on how to build a computer based on 6502 on a breadboard, and program it in binary to get a Hello World equivalent. I highly recommend it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22860619,"author":"halotrope","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Clocking a 6502 simulator to 15GHz","text":"After stumbling on Ben Eaters \u201cHello world from scratch\u201d [1] I went out and bought the cpu some parts and breadboards. The chip is only a few dollars. It is highly recommended if you want to dive down into computers and digital logic on first principles. Also great fun to get a break from all the screens and layers upon layers of software that I have to deal with daily. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23566888,"author":"halotrope","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn how electricity works?","text":"I found the \u201eHello world from scratch\u201c[1] series from Ben Eater incredibly helpful in connecting the dots between electricity and modern computers. Strictly speaking it is about electronics, still it is superbly presented and incredibly enlightening when coming from \u201enormal\u201c software engineering perspective of things. What actually got me there was the book \u201eCode\u201c by Charles Petzold[2] which traces the development from early circuitry like light bulbs and telegraph wires to modern digital logic. I found that after being introduced to these concepts, learning about the fundamental physics was much more accessible since it was framed in the context of contemporary application. 1: [VIDEO] 2: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29396884,"author":"throwaway47292","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Skill you want to learn in 2022?","text":"i would suggest to follow Ben Eater's 8 bit computer [VIDEO] and would strongly recommend to build it (you can see the parts on his website [LINK] or buy the whole kit)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31564342,"author":"Night_Thastus","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Easy 6502","text":"For anyone interested in the 6502, assembly and just in general how things like loops, conditional branches, hardware communication, etc all work, I HIGHLY recommend Ben Eater's videos on the subject: [VIDEO] They are incredibly fascinating!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21099470,"author":"fapjacks","month":"2019-09","story_title":"SNES Cartridges and Enhancement Chips","text":"If anyone is interested in learning a little more about the 6502, Ben Eater recently did a video about it [0]. Also just in general if you hadn't heard of his channel and are reading this comment, you'll definitely enjoy what he does. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21903556,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Build an 8-bit computer from scratch","text":"For anyone itching for more Ben Eater, he's currently working on a series where he takes a 6502-type processor and turns it into a usable computer. Here's the first video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31235605,"author":"halotrope","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Fritzing is an open-source electronic design tool","text":"If fritzing gets #1 spot on HN I would like to wholeheartedly recommend [LINK] as well. IMHO much saner workflow and good UX in the latest version.I did a simple PCB and got it manufactured on [LINK] for a couple bucks. Quite a rewarding experience. I would also suggest that anyone who cares about computers gets to know basic electronics. How do transistors work, what is a bus (e.g I2C or SPI) and how is it all connected? (Drumroll ... a PCB of course). There is a ton of tutorials on youtube that do it end to end. E.g Phils Lab [LINK] for a PCB design. Or Ben Eaters excellent beginner tutorial \"Hello World from Scratch\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33096732,"author":"jgwil2","month":"2022-10","story_title":"CMSC 430: Design and Implementation of Programming Languages","text":"Ben Eater has a video series called \"'Hello, world' from scratch on a 6502\" that you might find interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34334704,"author":"santadakota","month":"2023-01","story_title":"What Happens When a CPU Starts","text":"Ben Eater's fantastic video series on building a breadboard 6502 based computer and an 8-bit breadboard computer from scratch might be appreciated in this thread. 6502 playlist: [VIDEO] 8-bit build playlist: [LINK] He also sells kits if one is interested in playing along.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41430556,"author":"TillE","month":"2024-09","story_title":"What we can learn from vintage computing","text":"Ben Eater's 8-bit projects are the easiest place to start if you don't already deeply understand how such computers work. He starts with the hardware and eventually builds up to writing non-trival assembly for it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46779218,"author":"Joel_Mckay","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Books to learn 6502 ASM and the Apple II","text":"I respectfully disagree, BASIC/Java/Arduino hides too much about how the CPU works from users. Getting a 6502 kit from Ben Eater, and walking though how the CPU works will implicitly show how languages abstracted away whats actually happening. And more importantly, the skills necessary to understand how to write efficient programs. [VIDEO] [LINK] Starting with a simple architecture is highly recommended. =3","stance":"rec"}],"Lq-Y7crQo44":[{"hn_comment_id":36239567,"author":"opdahl","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Math Has Changed the Shape of Gerrymandering","text":"For a great (and entertaining!) look into how you can use simulations to generate these types of maps you should check out this video by the superb channel AlphaPhoenix: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44780896,"author":"Spivak","month":"2025-08","story_title":"","text":"Required watching to put things into perspective of how powerful gerrymandering can be [VIDEO] There was a proposed (and failed) ballot initiative in Ohio that tried to address this in the only way you actually can. The tl;dr is that there is no such thing as a fair map and so the state would be required to gerrymander the districts to match the state-wide election results. Basically proportional representation with extra steps, but brings the \"secret metric\" in map making to the forefront and requires it be a specific value so you can't tune it to your favor.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"LrObZ_HZZUc":[{"hn_comment_id":8095455,"author":"M2Ys4U","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Online piracy will no longer be a criminal offence in the UK","text":"The short answer is \"no\". The longer answer is \"well, kinda, but not really\". There have been a couple of convictions, but these were guilty pleas - people who have either been advised incorrectly by their solicitors (most probably because they were not experts in copyright law) or just really did not want to go through a trial. The copyright industry has tried to completely side-step copyright law entirely and use the offence of \"conspiracy to defraud\" with very dubious legal basis. It's been far from common, though. There have only been a handful of attempted prosecutions, and usually only because the copyright industry (via FACT[0]) has leant on the police. Most recently they've c\u0336o\u0336r\u0336r\u0336u\u0336p\u0336t\u0336e\u0336d\u0336 err, co-opted the City of London Police. This is the force that polices the square-mile City of London in the heart of London (See CGP Grey's excellent video[1] for more about the City of London vs the city called London). [0] The 'Federation Against Copyright Theft' - an absurd name for an absurd organisation - [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13866182,"author":"Hagelin","month":"2017-03","story_title":"London\u2019s Big Dig Reveals Layers of History","text":"CGP Grey's \"The (Secret) City of London\" are great videos on the topic of the City of London (vs. London) Part 1: [VIDEO] Part 2: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40765912,"author":"dwheeler","month":"2024-06","story_title":"The City of London which is not part of London (2016)","text":"CGP Grey has a delightful video explaining this: \"The Secret City inside of London Revealed\" (2012) [VIDEO] Highly recommended.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5409778,"author":"hencq","month":"2013-03","story_title":"A Tale of Two Londons","text":"As an aside, the article points out how the City of London is a separate entity from greater London, but doesn't go into a lot of detail about it. This video does an effective job in explaining how things work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10534371,"author":"Wintamute","month":"2015-11","story_title":"London garden bridge users to have mobile phone signals tracked","text":"I find your comment somewhat alarmist, and lacking historical context. The City of London (from which the Temple end of the Garden Bridge starts) is many many hundreds of years older than the UK itself, and has always been privately owned and governed by shadowy, corporate and arcane processes. Traditionally even the Queen is not allowed to enter the City of London without the say-so of the Lord Mayor. This \"private place operating as a public space\" has been operating for centuries and stewarded the emergence of London as a leading global financial centre and until recently capital of the largest Empire the world has ever seen. I admit it's reasonable to debate the pros and cons of private ownership of public spaces in city centres, but my point is that in this case The City of London is both historically unique and important, and by many measures been a huge success for the host nation. Informative/fun video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10707533,"author":"yoshamano","month":"2015-12","story_title":"The fall of Jersey: how a tax haven goes bust","text":"CGP Grey does a really good job giving an overview of the history of The City of London. [VIDEO] Along with another video about the governing structure of The City of London. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11693064,"author":"Malic","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Dark money: London\u2019s dirty secret","text":"If anyone cares to know more about the City of London, CGP Grey did a nice two-parter video describing its history, its privileges and how to become mayor if you care to. The (Secret) City of London, Part 1: History [VIDEO] The (Secret) City of London, Part 2: Government [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15202484,"author":"hencq","month":"2017-09","story_title":"The Equifax breach may be the worst leak of personal info ever","text":"There are a lot. I thought this one was really funny [0]. This one I found very interesting [1]. Somewhat different, is the Hello Internet [2] podcast, which is by Grey and Brady Haran who you might know from the Numberphile youtube channel [3]. It's basically the 2 of them chatting about random stuff, but I find it very entertaining. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19163562,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus","text":"GCP Grey does a great video on this: [VIDEO] Jay Foreman does another great video on the very weird situation with the House of Lords: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19180917,"author":"mstade","month":"2019-02","story_title":"London's billion-pound guilds","text":"I don\u2019t know whether this is true because I never looked into it really, but a colleague of mine in the ndustry told me I could join the banker\u2019s guild. His words were that because I lived in the city[1] at the time, and also worked for a bank in the city, I\u2019d be eligible for membership if the bank would nominate or sponsor me as a representative. I\u2019m hazy on the details, it was years ago, and I don\u2019t really know whether it\u2019s true since as mentioned I never checked it out. I kind of regret not doing so now though, since moving out of the city I\u2019ve learned much more of it\u2019s (weird and interesting) history and it would\u2019ve been fun to at least try to see some of this from the inside. It probably wouldn\u2019t have worked anyway, but would\u2019ve been fun to try. For anyone looking for a fun little intro to the weirdness of the city and it\u2019s history, I recommend CGP Grey\u2019s channel and particularly his videos on the City of London[2][3]. [1]: for the benefit of people who might not be aware \u2013 \u201cthe city\u201d is a colloquialism for the City of London, which is a small somewhat autonomous part of London, situated east of what most people (who don\u2019t know this) probably think of when you say the city of London. [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20643327,"author":"rjmunro","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Approaching Peak Housing Dysfunction in California","text":"The \"City Of London\" (a small part of central London) has something like this. They have a resident population of <10,000 people, but somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million people commute there for work. Companies get to nominate some of their workforce as voters for the council (called \"The Corporation Of London\"). For historical reasons (\"The City\" is much older than the UK itself), things are much more complicated than simply \"People who work there get to vote\", so I'm not sure it's a very comparable situation. The best explanation I've found is [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23645830,"author":"hpoe","month":"2020-06","story_title":"City of London: Tax haven in the heart of Britain (2011)","text":"For those interested in learning more about the City of London there is a youtuber, CGP Grey, who has to great 10 min vids on what it is why it exists and how it operates. Link here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40643716,"author":"bloqs","month":"2024-06","story_title":"British duo arrested for SMS phishing via homemade cell tower","text":"This is the police force for the ancient financial district in London called the City of London. Best explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LruaD7XhQ50":[{"hn_comment_id":22428858,"author":"smegger001","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017)","text":"Yeah CGP Grey had a god video about federal land ownership the majorty of land in western states is federal land. [VIDEO] Its kind of ridiculous. how little control states have over the land within their own boarders.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23533921,"author":"closeparen","month":"2020-06","story_title":"A Guy Named Craig May Soon Have Control over a Large Swath of Utah","text":"You might enjoy CGP Grey's \"What is federal land?\" [0]. Making resources available to American industry is one of the government's purposes in owning it. There are certainly disagreements over how well that's balanced against other goals, or against the long term future. But it's not like it's inherently corrupt that federal land is fed into the economy. That's what it's for. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24428169,"author":"cbm-vic-20","month":"2020-09","story_title":"The end of dispersed camping?","text":"CGP Grey did an interesting video on the differences between the agencies that own federal land in the US: [VIDEO] (Start from the beginning for more context)","stance":"rec"}],"LsGZ_2RuJ2A":[{"hn_comment_id":29431147,"author":"open-source-ux","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Blender 3.0","text":"I always post this link when Blender is discussed because it's so impressive. It shows what a single person can achieve in Blender. The visual effects and compositing have been created by Blender expert Ian Hubert. The video shows a (grimy) futuristic city scene. Green screen footage and the final shots created are shown side-by-side: VFX Breakdown - Dynamo Dream Teaser : [LINK] The full short Dynamo Dream was posted a few months ago by Hubert on his YouTube channel: Episode 1 : Salad Mug - DYNAMO DREAM : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38282880,"author":"jonchurch_","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Blender 16yo winner of UK younganimator of the year","text":"Im not a 3d artist, but I still find Ian Hubert's blender tutorials[1] very cool to watch. He comes off as an artist who immensely enjoys their craft. I have also really enjoyed his Dynamo Dream series [2] which are a labor of love for him. He's only released like 3 episodes over several years, but hey labor of love. Ian was also chosen as the director of Tears of Steel (2012) which is one of the Blender Open Movies [3] the foundation produces. You might not recognize that film, but many of you have heard of at least one Blender Open Movie, Big Buck Bunny! A big nod (IMO) from the Blender foundation that he represents the spirit of the project and community, as well as has the skills to oversee a project meant to demonstrate Blender's capabilities. These Open Movies are projects that HN can likely appreciate, as they are created to showcase and help push capabilities of the open source Blender software, are licensed under Creative Commons, and their assets are provided to the community for free. (This comment is a love letter to Ian Hubert) [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38267793,"author":"Cognitron","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Blender 4.0","text":"Since nobody's mentioned Ian Hubert yet, his Dynamo Dream series is made in Blender: Episode 1: [VIDEO] Episode 2: [LINK] Episode 3: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"LtFyP0qy9XU":[{"hn_comment_id":31300922,"author":"sharkweek","month":"2022-05","story_title":"When buying the dip doesn\u2019t work: An analysis of the dot-com crash","text":"Have you seen the movie Margin Call? There\u2019s a great scene where the CEO of a Goldman-style bank is recapping the last 100+ years of global financial collapses and he mentions, \u201cwe just can\u2019t help ourselves.\u201d [VIDEO] One of the best banking movies I\u2019ve ever seen. Jeremy Irons absolutely nails his role.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31084726,"author":"scrlk","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The tech bubble that never burst","text":"Supermoney by George Goodman - he wrote under the pseudonym \"Adam Smith\". p.s. You might enjoy watching \"Margin Call\", if you haven't seen it before. This clip is particularly relevant: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32260670,"author":"ianceicys","month":"2022-07","story_title":"","text":"I'd love this scene from Margin Call. I'm not familiar with each of these economic crashes that are mentioned, and I'm curious about the percentages never changing....seems to be very true. [VIDEO] It's a great scene and line that's always stayed with me. \"It's certainly no different today than it's ever been. 1637, 1797, 1819, 1837,1857, 1884, 1901, 1907, 1929, 1937, 1974, 1987, Jesus didn't that fuck me up good, 1992, 1997, 2000, and whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over, and over again. *We can't help ourselves*. And you and I can't control or stop it, or even slow it. We just react. We make a lot of money if we get it right, and we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong. There have always been, and they always will be *the same percentage of winners and losers*. Happy fucks and sad sacks, fat cats and starving dogs in this world. There may be more of us today than has ever been, but *the percentages they stay exactly the same.*\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34214852,"author":"ksec","month":"2023-01","story_title":"U.S. pending home sales sag more than expected in November","text":"[VIDEO] - John Tuld ( Jeremy Irons ) If you haven't I do recommend watching the whole movie, or more like a mini documentary. Much Much better than the Big Short.","stance":"rec"}],"LtlrITxB5qg":[{"hn_comment_id":22912736,"author":"simcop2387","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?","text":"While much more on the technical side of things, both Ken Shirriff and Curious Marc are great resources for a lot of the historical and technical aspects of things. I'd highly recommend both of them for looking at specific topics of how the computing hardware worked: - Marc's videos on old HP computers, [LINK] - Marc's videos on restoring some old IBM hardware, that includes a good bit of the history that went into them, [LINK] and [VIDEO] - In fact just look at his playlists directly, [LINK] For Ken, I'd look at his chip teardowns and explorations, the AM2901 is on HN this very moment, [LINK] A lot of his articles dig into why the different chip technologies were made and fell out of favor eventually too. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25977137,"author":"eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7","month":"2021-01","story_title":"IBM paperweight teardown: Reverse-engineering 1970s memory chips","text":"Here's a fun IBM line printing video I've discovered thanks to your mention of those: The IBM 1401 mainframe runs \"Edith\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Lu56xVlZ40M":[{"hn_comment_id":23213851,"author":"sendbitcoins","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What interesting stuff are you browsing?","text":"\"Two Minute Papers\" [VIDEO] GTC 2020 Part 2 was pretty good [LINK] Mostly I'm in a rut as well","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26281923,"author":"SatvikBeri","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Medical chatbot using OpenAI\u2019s GPT-3 told a fake patient to kill themselves","text":"Two minute papers has many fun examples of AIs with unexpected behavior, OpenAI's hide and seek is one of my favorites: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"LwicN2u6Dro":[{"hn_comment_id":11186133,"author":"ElijahLynn","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Gdb: Debugging with the natives","text":"Lately I have been very interested in putting faces and voices to words. After reading this article, which was over my head but I got a little out of it. I ended up reading Stephen Kell's homepage, which is crazy intense as far as academics go. He had a link to a video of his and I appreciated the quality and now have a face and voice to attach to the article, therefore will probably remember it better. tldr; Here is a video of the same guy who wrote this article ==> [VIDEO] p.s. 5 minutes in and the talk is pretty good.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23879540,"author":"johndoe0815","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Bare metal Smalltalk-80 port to the Raspberry Pi","text":"Thanks for the link - that looks really interesting! I will have to give it a try to make some informed statement, but I think it's definitely worth looking at. Some parts of Ruby also seem to be inspired by Smalltalk, so that might be a good fit. There's also a Smalltalk-80 VM by Rochus Keller based on the Lua JIT compiler [8] (and a very nice Qt-based Smalltalk browser), that might also go in the same direction. In general, I think there are two major interesting aspects in systems like the Ruby system browser and Smalltalk. On the one hand one can discover the system - you can dig into the implementation without using a disassembler or reverse engineering - and on the other hand it is possible to change the system behavior at runtime (though this is, of course, dangerous). I would love to see at least the discoverability aspect to be more pervasive in standard operating systems. There are already partial approaches to this, such as DTrace/systemtap and the proc filesystem, but having discoverability as a first class concept - which might fit well to Plan 9's (and to some extent Unix's) \"everything is a file\" approach - would be nice. The ability to change the system at runtime is also fascinating. I already mentioned the research of Stephen Kell in another comment [1] and there's a great video of one of his talks [2] in which he shows his approach to dynamically alter a program's behavior on Unix using shared library mechanisms (you can find the code on github [3]). I work","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34215023,"author":"johndoe0815","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Smalltalk-80 on Raspberry Pi: A Bare Metal Implementation","text":"I can recommend Stephen Kell's publications on this topic, e.g. \"Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk\": [LINK] Video: [VIDEO] More on Stephen's research can be found at [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"LxgMdjyw8uw":[{"hn_comment_id":30932667,"author":"Nagyman","month":"2022-04","story_title":"IPCC\u2019s starkest message yet: extreme steps needed to avert climate disaster","text":"Climate change is a scale, from bad to really really bad, and positive change is already happening. Here's some uplifting news in a well articulated video worth watching: [VIDEO] Apathy is their weapon, and it's very effective.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30957704,"author":"civilized","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The only thing we should be talking about is the climate crisis","text":"I agree that we should be giving a lot more attention to climate change. I don't think it's the only thing we should be talking about, but we should be regularly asking ourselves if there is more that we can do (and there certainly is). I highly recommend this video from the wonderful Kurzgesagt science video series: [VIDEO] Climate change is bad and we need to take it seriously, but there is a lot of reason for hope. A lot of trends are pointing in the right direction and we need to support those trends. Climate policy is still in a bad state, in large part because of the gerontocracy, but younger people are entering politics with a different view.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36406527,"author":"willio58","month":"2023-06","story_title":"53% of parents say climate change affects their decision to have more kids","text":"I posted about this before and one commenter said something that stayed with me. Something along the lines of if all the people that feared having children due to climate change didn't have children, the only people having children would be those who had no fear of climate change. Kurzgesagt has a great video that touches on this - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32181802,"author":"bckr","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Most Americans think NASA\u2019s $10B space telescope is a good investment","text":"There's this idea that we should be sad about this. I say, if you're sad about it, I understand. I feel a little sad, too. But I'm also curious about what comes next. What will only get a chance to live thanks to the things that have died? What will humans be able to do in the aftermath? It sounds morbid, but if you just let yourself play with these thoughts they can lead somewhere different and interesting. The future is not full of only despair[] . [] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35238422,"author":"shagie","month":"2023-03","story_title":"IPCC climate crisis report delivers \u2018final warning on 1.5C\u2019","text":"From Kurzgesagt \u2013 In a Nutshell: Can YOU Fix Climate Change? [LINK] and We WILL Fix Climate Change! [VIDEO] Make sure that you watch the second one if you watch the first one.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39734690,"author":"instagib","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Liebreich: Net Zero Will Be Harder Than You Think \u2013 and Easier. Part II: Easier","text":"If you don\u2019t mind YouTube, here is a decent video and a follow up more positive one I found. It does mention concrete and many other forms of co2 production we haven\u2019t figured out yet. 2022 Kurzgesagt in a nutshell. [LINK] 2023 less doomerism climate change update: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ly6USRwTHe0":[{"hn_comment_id":38343041,"author":"2Gkashmiri","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Krita AI Diffusion","text":"[VIDEO] the video is mindblowing because on one hand, adobe photoshop announced this as \"their own next big thing\" and here we have an open source software replicating this same thing, so cool. edit: this also means photoshop doesnt have the \"moat\" they seem to have built around the generative ai thing and their software.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42878807,"author":"haunter","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Krita 5.2.9 Released","text":"Yes exactly. There are some written guides now but I actually just learned from the original demonstration videos. Copied what happened there and started tinkering around Most of the times if something didn't work for me that was mostly because my lack of knowledge about Krita [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"M1ONXea0mXg":[{"hn_comment_id":9657653,"author":"dshankar","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Houndify: Add voice enabled, conversational interface to anything","text":"You're probably skeptical (as I was) but watch this video demo of the Hound app: [VIDEO] That's insanely fast, compound natural language queries. I'm impressed.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10757527,"author":"xedarius","month":"2015-12","story_title":"DuckDuckGo grew more than 70% this year","text":"I love DDG but I think as the world turns away from document indexing and more toward intent based search, plus the ever increasing use of implicit data (gps location, speed of movement etc) - I can't see how DDG are going to grow. Ultimately search will end up with something a bit like Siri (but something that works). The hound demo (if real) is a very impressive glimpse of the future of search. For those who haven't seen it : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"M2fKMP47slQ":[{"hn_comment_id":28235723,"author":"MauranKilom","month":"2021-08","story_title":"JSON for Modern C++ version 3.10.0","text":"It has the right asymptotic guarantees for a hash map, but beyond that it doesn't have much going for it. The degree to which it emphasizes pointer/iterator stability and arbitrary load factors is not a good tradeoff in almost any practical case (unless you do not care about performance). See [VIDEO] for a more comprehensive discussion, or the sibling threads here.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41998812,"author":"ww520","month":"2024-10","story_title":"1BRC Coding Challenge: Nerd Sniping the Java Community","text":"Many videos on hash table are great. I found this one particularly good. [ [VIDEO] ] C++Now 2018: You Can Do Better than std::unordered_map: New Improvements to Hash Table Performance","stance":"rec"}],"M3BM9TB-8yA":[{"hn_comment_id":34468836,"author":"bin_bash","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Breaking the Snake: How Python went from 2 to 3","text":"Ryan Dahl's great talk on design mistakes he made with node.js is something I think about all the time: [VIDEO] Even though he considers things like `require('./something')` defaulting to either `./something.js` or `./something/index.js` a mistake, he also admits these are not possible to change at this point. I think Python made a mistake trying to correct design problems in 2. The cost of change simply wasn't worth the price of migration. Is `print(\"text\")` really that much of an improvement over `print \"text\"`?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23462948,"author":"azemetre","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Design Doc: Use JavaScript instead of TypeScript for internal Deno Code","text":"Deno [1] is a new JS runtime by one of the creators of NodeJS, Ryan Dahl. He had a great talk [2] about the lessons he learned when creating/maintaining NodeJS. Many of these lessons are being applied to Deno. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23593195,"author":"j1elo","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Deno will stop using TypeScript","text":"I just hope in 5 years we're not seeing a talk saying that in retrospective, dropping static types was a huge error... and DoNe is a new project to fix issues like that! (I'm just referring to this nice talk about the regretful mistakes done in Node: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23607367,"author":"kybernetikos","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Deno will stop using TypeScript","text":"Well, in all the initial presentations Ryan Dahl gave about Deno, he phrased it as solving the things he'd come to realise he hated about Node. So that's what I take as the raison d'\u00eatre of Deno - taking the lessons he'd learned from some years mainly coding Go and thinking about what he'd learnt from Node, and fixing what he could. Here's the classic video on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25367704,"author":"bartlomieju","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Deno 1.6 supports compiling TypeScript to a single executable","text":"Deno is a JavaScript runtime much like Node. For the reasons on why creating Deno I recommend \"10 Things I Regret About Node\" by Deno's author [1] Deno is different than Node in several aspects; most notably: - Deno supports only ES modules, there's no built-in support for CommonJS modules - Deno's APIs are all promised based - Deno does not use NPM, instead it can pull code from any URL, much like browsers do - Deno has built-in permission system that by default runs your code in full sandbox allowing to opt-in into breaking out of sandbox (eg. to read a file from disk) - As you've mention Deno can run .ts files without explicit build step - Deno comes with a full toolchain in a single binary (formatter, linter, test runner, bundler, doc generator) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26215642,"author":"onetom","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Choose Boring Technology (2015)","text":"Recommended \"literature\": 1. 10 Things I Regret About Node.js - Ryan Dahl - JSConf EU ( [VIDEO] ) 2. Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave | Lex Fridman Podcast #160 ( [LINK] )","stance":"rec"}],"M4AhABManTw":[{"hn_comment_id":20361895,"author":"bretthopper","month":"2019-07","story_title":"A Fan\u2019s Notes: Unsolicited Praise for Sportswriter Jon Bois","text":"Jon Bois is a genius in my opinion as well so I'm glad someone wrote this. There aren't many links to his videos in this article, but here's one of my favourites: [VIDEO] . It's about the 1904 Olympic marathon in St. Louis. edit: He's also a great follow on Twitter at [LINK] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24117372,"author":"dustincoates","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Running a marathon was never crazier than during the 1904 St Louis Olympics","text":"If you've never watched Jon Bois or his Pretty Good series, you're in for a real treat. He has a video on the marathon that's very worth the 21 minutes: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40837426,"author":"kibwen","month":"2024-06","story_title":"The 1904 Olympic Marathon (2012)","text":"For a more elaborate retelling of the events here, I recommend the following video by Jon Bois in his inimitable style: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"M6vpFV6Wkl4":[{"hn_comment_id":3416606,"author":"nosequel","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Learning to Eat Well and Stay Healthy","text":"Actually you are most likely wrong. There is really good evidence that the number of calories don't matter and that the type of calories are everything. People associate the number of calories as mattering because they change other things at the same time. Please watch videos from Gary Taubes who wrote \"Good Calories Bad Calories\" and \"Why we get fat\". Here's his google talk: [VIDEO] On a personal note, I lost 40 lbs and I eat far more calories now than I did before. Open you mind for a bit and really watch that video, you might be convinced that what you think about calories are all wrong. I certainly changed what I thought was true as fact.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5248686,"author":"TomGullen","month":"2013-02","story_title":"What Does 200 Calories Look Like?","text":"msluyter correctly points to the Inuits as a good case against what you've said. Their diet consists pretty much entirely fat and meat yet they have lower heart disease and rates of cancer. [LINK] Pretty strange how their not keeling over from heart disease! Perhaps the traditional view of fat is wrong. Highly recommend you watch this amazing lecture by Garry Taubes at Google: [VIDEO] He also brings a lot of other eye opening case studies to light such as obesity in Pima Indians during a famine.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3400896,"author":"simsimsalabim","month":"2011-12","story_title":"The Fat Trap: Our Bodies Are Fighting Against Us","text":"The linked pdf makes a number of factual errors. it incorrectly suggests that ketogenic don't encourage eating lots of vegetables and low-sugar fruits. It also trys to twist \"not all calories are the same\" into \"you can eat as much as you want\". and of course, trans fats should always be avoided. but you should really decide for yourself: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3416796,"author":"nosequel","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Learning to Eat Well and Stay Healthy","text":"Please explain how countless cultures who are severely malnutritioned and live off of less than 600 calories a day are obese? There are no credible studies that are currently being done that can answer those questions with calories in / calories out. Because it is simply wrong. Taubes google talk [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6002362,"author":"TelmoMenezes","month":"2013-07","story_title":"How I have lost over 100 pounds and don\u2019t know how","text":"The problem here is that mainstream nutrition \"science\" is also a fad. It is also a dramatic example on how the Internet + an incentive can produce better Science than the traditional grant (and lobby system). Many of the traditional dogmas of nutrition have recently come intro question: the idea that eating cholesterol is what increases cholesterol in your arteries, the idea that salt is bad for you, the idea that fiber is good for you and many others. Regarding ketogenic diets, there are so many results and it seems to work so much better than what \"they\" have been telling us that the idea that this is a \"fad\" starts to sound a bit silly. Actually, some proponents of ketogenic diets are backing their claims with explanatory models, instead of simple epidemiological studies (which are, in my opinion, the lowest form of Science). Check out this talk if you want to know more: [VIDEO] edit: this talk provides some convincing arguments against your assumption #1.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6002792,"author":"crusso","month":"2013-07","story_title":"How I have lost over 100 pounds and don\u2019t know how","text":"Another user already posted this link. Here's tons of evidence and someone wondering why we've ignored that evidence for so long. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6578158,"author":"TomGullen","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Sweden becomes the first country to reject low-fat diet dogma","text":"> The only issue with sugars are the null effect on satiety and promotion of binge eating. > sugars make it easy to overeat Those are issues, for sure! And great reasons why when dieting, a good foundation is exclusion of carbs. But that's only scratching the surface. Let me give you another downside. Eating sugar causes arterial inflammation. When your arteries inflame, your body packs it with oxidized LDL which can lead to heart problems and strokes due to constriction in your arteries. Guess what causes arterial inflammation? There's more as well. We need to brush our teeth because of our high carb diets. It causes tooth decay and gum disease. Before high carb diets, our ancestors had healthier mouths than we do today. [LINK] > \"You're walking around with a permanent immune response, which is not a good thing,\" says Cooper. \"It causes problems all over the place.\" More as well! It turns out that calories is an oversimplified model of dieting. Here's a recent interesting study that paints it clearly: [LINK] But there's more! Garry Taubes explains a lot of reasons very well: [VIDEO] There are so many reasons carbs are bad for you, not just from a satiation point of view but also from long term health points of view. I'm confident this post has actually done a disservice to the question why should we eat less carbs, but hopefully it's something you might find interesting and read more about and maybe change your opinion on. All the information, studies and evidence is out the","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32944515,"author":"allsunny","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Lose weight the slow and incredibly difficult way","text":"i get the joke but reminds me of a good talk where some googlers got a little upset when gary taubes started going into the problems with CICO thinking. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"M8F5hXqS-Ac":[{"hn_comment_id":28334519,"author":"tdeck","month":"2021-08","story_title":"\u201cDoes induced demand apply to bike lanes?\u201d and other questions","text":"> The best option is to just take the lane and follow the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles. You get noticed and you don't have conflicts at intersections. You don't need to be physically fit to do it (other than be physically capable of riding a bike). Most people won't be comfortable doing this for the simple reason that they'll be going slower than surrounding traffic and it will piss of drivers, which is scary when you're on a bike and they have two tons of metal right beside you. If the safest way to do something is mildly terrifying and generally viewed as antagonistic, we can't be surprised that most people will avoid doing that thing. I've really been inspired lately by watching the videos on this channel about urban design in the Netherlands: [LINK] I didn't realize how much urban cycling raises my blood pressure until I watched this video that compares a journey in Canada to a journey in the Netherlands, it's hard to imagine cycling being so safe and easy outside a college campus: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28325117,"author":"Gwypaas","month":"2021-08","story_title":"\u201cDoes induced demand apply to bike lanes?\u201d and other questions","text":"Watch the bicycle infrastructure get better as he get out into the Amsterdam suburbs. Cycling showdown, Amsterdam vs. Calgary [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29883649,"author":"noahtallen","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Tesla Model S Goes 752 Miles with a Startup's Prototype Battery","text":"Cycling is normally very dangerous in North America (outside of certain urban cores and small towns), due to the road design and zoning laws. This channel is helpful in understanding the problem: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33768362,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The Exceptionally American Problem of Rising Roadway Deaths","text":"Not Just Bikes on YouTube covers road/pedestrian/bike safety extensively. [LINK] Specific videos: Crossing the street should be safer: [LINK] How to quickly build a cycling city: [LINK] Wasting money on car infrastructure: [LINK] The wrong way to set speed limits: [LINK] Safe cycling: [VIDEO] \"Stroads\" are dangerous: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"MBRqu0YOH14":[{"hn_comment_id":26873482,"author":"dinamic","month":"2021-04","story_title":"You Are Not \u2018Behind\u2019 (2016)","text":"There is a beautiful video by Kurzgesagt. It makes a similar point and I feel better every time I watch it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32919174,"author":"vitorbaptistaa","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Activity and reading to move through mid-life crisis?","text":"Your comment reminded me of the Optimistic Nihilism video by Kurzegesagt [1]. I highly recommend it, as they explain these concepts very well in a short 6min video. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17175340,"author":"thunderbong","month":"2018-05","story_title":"What will happen when an ant falls from the Empire State Building","text":"Thanks for that! I got carried away and sank an hour watching stuff. Totally off topic - My favourite was 'Optimistic Nihilism' - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26101863,"author":"stared","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The Art of Negativity","text":"I like the notion of \"Optimistic Nihilism\", as explained by Kurzgesagt: [VIDEO] For me, it is about stoic/Zen acceptance of things we cannot change. Contrast it with \"American optimism\", which is for me close to gaslighting, or at best - a \"flight\" reaction from suffering.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29347091,"author":"cupcake-unicorn","month":"2021-11","story_title":"In Praise of Idleness (1932)","text":"Absolutely. Thanks for this. It's telling to me how dismissive/judgemental are about nihilism, and that's been a good signal for me in other areas that it's getting a lot closer to a basic truth and people are threatened with it and want to push it away. Which is what we shouldn't be doing. Optimistic Nihilism ( [VIDEO] ) or Absurdism ( [LINK] ) are maybe more accessible takes if nihilism seems too \"scary\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30601899,"author":"stared","month":"2022-03","story_title":"I am the healthiest person I know, and I got cancer","text":"> The thought may be freeing to you, but many others become paralysed by it, obsessing about \u201cthe right choices\u201d at every moment. I had been struggling with the same issue. The opposite (\u201cour choices don\u2019t matter\u201d) is depressing. However, two things help me: The first is \u201cOptimistic Nihilism\u201d ( [VIDEO] ) - a view very close to Zen/stoicism. The second is that ALL choices matter, but their impact is finite and subject to randomness. I used to think that all of my choices were forever and set in stone. While technically correct, it misses that the future changes only a bit. We might be tempted to think that \u201cthe grass is greener\u201d, or \u201cI should have bought Bitcoins\u201d, but it is like \u201cI miss I didn\u2019t join my friends when they went to a cassino\u201d. Moreover, it is FAIR that a finite effort results in a finite result.","stance":"rec"}],"MBT1OK6VAIU":[{"hn_comment_id":45613098,"author":"tdeck","month":"2025-10","story_title":"A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI","text":"Also reminds me of how they fit Pitfall into 4k. A lot simpler game but the platform was also much more limited. This is a great talk for those who love such things: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6996172,"author":"phoboslab","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Racing the Beam (2009)","text":"I haven't read the book yet, but David Crane's Pitfall Post Mortem[1] also covers a lot of what you mentioned. Truly fascinating stuff. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34096984,"author":"russellbeattie","month":"2022-12","story_title":"\u201cPitfall\u201d for the Atari describes its whole world in a single byte","text":"I think much of this is explained at a high level in this talk from the original game designer: Pitfall Classic Postmortem With David Crane Panel at GDC 2011 (Atari 2600). [VIDEO] I haven't seen it in a while (will rewatch now), but I remember him going over how he was able to create so many levels in such a tiny space. I love these sorts of examples of breakthrough tech products that were the result of a developer figuring out how to do something that seemed impossible. Much of Apple's early success, for example, could be attributed to this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34381990,"author":"mgkimsal","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Atari 2600 Hardware Design: Making Something Out of (Almost) Nothing","text":"Can't remember if I read it here recently, or on reddit, but this conference session with David Crane on Pitfall/Atari is pretty good. He doesn't as technical as some folks may want, but there's some coolness in just hearing him explain this in person. Couple of interesting Q&A bits towards the end too. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MBnnXbOM5S4":[{"hn_comment_id":41441867,"author":"Cadwhisker","month":"2024-09","story_title":"The Fourier Uncertainty Principles [pdf] (2021)","text":"The clearest, most intuitive explanation of the Fourier Uncertainty Principle that I have come across is by Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19705619,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?","text":"3Blue1Brown has an extremely good explanation[1] of the intrinsic uncertainty, and why it's separate from measurement uncertainty. (the previous episode[2] is a recommended prerequisite for background on how the Fourier Transform works) > emerges through a different, as yet unknown, mechanism. In 3Blue1Bron's explanation[1], he shows how the intrinsic uncertainty is an inherent trade-off of trying to measure both position and frequency. A short wave packet only a few wavelengths long correlates with a narrow (precise) range of positions, but also correlates well with a very wide range of frequencies due. A Heisenberg-like uncertainty exists any time you are working with weave packets with length near the wavelength. 3Blue1Brown gives a very good example using Doppler radar. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19733967,"author":"chriswarbo","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?","text":"The 'measuring something disturbs it' idea described above is called the observer effect [LINK] The observer effect is a real thing, and even has interesting effects in quantum mechanics, e.g. the quantum zeno effect [LINK] Yet the observer effect is not the reason why we can't know an object's position and velocity at the same time. There are two ways we can see that this supposed explanation is a red herring: - We don't need to interact with (e.g. 'bounce a photon off') a quantum system in order to observe it ( [LINK] ). I particularly like the \"quantum bomb detector\" ( [LINK] ), which can tells us whether a photon detector connected to a bomb is working or not, without hitting it with a photon and hence triggering the bomb (50% of the time, at least). - The actual reason, the uncertainty principle ( [LINK] ), doesn't require any notion of observation at all, let alone interaction. It's a simple property of waves (the relationship between duration and frequency). 3blue1brown did a nice video on this [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23659812,"author":"Kednicma","month":"2020-06","story_title":"A Physicist Trying to Fix Quantum Mechanics","text":"In many cases, Wikipedia actually lists the analogy for classical probability theory. For several theorems, the proof for Hilbert spaces can be directly brought to the classical world. The main difference to keep in mind is that we have amplitudes, not probabilities, and they can be negative or complex. We recover typical probability theory by taking norms/squares of amplitudes. The uncertainty principle follows via doing signal analysis on Fourier-transformed wavefunctions. A fun professional treatment from Baez et al. is [0], and 3blue1brown has an excellent two-video visual explanation [1][2]. The uncertainty principle turns out to be a special case of the sampling theorem (yes, that one! [3]), which itself turns out to be a special case of a result in sheaf theory [4]. Measurements matter because \"observables don't commute\"; taking linear operators on the complex numbers or other Hilbert spaces can have lasting effects which can't easily be undone. Combine this with \"conservation of probability\", which is formally mostly abstract nonsense [5], and we get mostly to Aaronson's point of view. (I would go further using the Free Will Theorem. [6]) When Aaronson says that the no-cloning principle is provable using probability, but for complex numbers, he's referring to the standard proof [7]. There are two connections to draw to typical probability theory. The first, and bigger, connection is that random variables can't be cloned in typical probability theory either! The second","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25741069,"author":"uoaei","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Is the Schr\u00f6dinger Equation True?","text":"This may help answer some of your question, though I recognize it does not address it directly: [VIDEO] (3b1b on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and how it arises) Think of a free neutron as the wave envelope, rather than any of the bumps in the wave.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38667973,"author":"nextaccountic","month":"2023-12","story_title":"An Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform","text":"Yes, but that's because the momentum is the fourier transform of the position and vice versa So there's an uncertainty principle for signal processing, entirely because of the fourier transform and not because of quantum mechanics See this video [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44822997,"author":"ben_w","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition","text":"The reason Trek has it is likely a common misunderstanding of QM: it's not only that we cannot record both position and momentum, the information does not exist in the first place . It's easier to see why if you think about Fourier transforms: [VIDEO] TLDW: an infinitely long wave does not (cannot) have any definite location, but it does have a definite periodic wavelength; conversely, a single impulse noise (a shockwave from e.g. a bullet or an explosion) has a definite location (in the direction of motion and at any given point in time) but no meaningful wavelength. The more you constrain the possibility space of one, the looser the other becomes in a physical sense, not just the information you have about it .","stance":"rec"}],"MCVj5RZOqwY":[{"hn_comment_id":14015174,"author":"tyingq","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Google App Maker","text":"I've tried a lot of these tools. The trouble is that things go extremely well until you hit a wall. With no way to extend them with something like freeform code, the wall doesn't move. The best ones, then, tend to be the ones that have been around long enough, or had enough foresight to have covered various corner cases. The other issue is that most of them have \"per user / per month\" pricing, which doesn't work for many use cases. Things like, for example, an applicant tracking app. If you use the functionality to a high degree, every job applicant is another end user license. Two of the better ones: [LINK] & [LINK] Other ones I've seen: [LINK] , [LINK] , [LINK] , [LINK] , [LINK] , [LINK] , [LINK] , [LINK] , [LINK] One of the more promising ones was DabbleDB. Twitter acquihired them and shut the tool down. It had a very smooth UI: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18636425,"author":"donarb","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Which abandoned proprietary software would you resurrect?","text":"DabbleDB, this YouTube video gives a great introduction to this online spreadsheet-like database. Sadly they were bought out by Twitter, never to be seen again. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35166392,"author":"tyingq","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Smalltalk: An Entrepreneur\u2019s Secret Weapon (2020)","text":"A good example in this space was DabbleDB[1], a low-code environment for producing web apps that did CRUD type stuff. Their original video demo: [VIDEO] I was pretty impressed when it came out. The UI was very intuitive, and it did a better job with things like table relations than it's competitors. They were also releasing new features based on requests faster than what I typically saw. It happened to have used the Seaside web framework mentioned in the article. Sadly, Twitter purchased it and shut it down...I assume they just wanted the team and not the product. [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"MEUWxNifJJ8":[{"hn_comment_id":9363376,"author":"taliesinb","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Varoufakis and Stiglitz [video]","text":"Other Varoufakis videos that are worth watching if you want to know more about him and his views: * \"The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy \" -- about his book, a nice narrative of the last 100 years of the political economy -- [VIDEO] * Richard D. Wolf's Global Capitalism update featuring Varoufakis -- Richard D. Wolf is always fun to watch, he looks like a Marxist version of Homeland's Saul Berenson -- [LINK] * \"Confessions of an Errant Marxist\" -- sort of Varoufakis's origin story -- [LINK] * Bizarre BBC Newsnight interview with Varoufakis -- where you can see the BBC's idealogical function leaking through -- [LINK] It's evident from watching these that he is almost without exception the smartest person in every room he's in. And unlike most other economists, he is actually, you know, alive. Also, the obligatory Pettis articles that should be read by everyone who wishes to form an opinion about Greece's current position: * [LINK] * [LINK] And to encourage some cynanism about the neoliberal wisdoms, here's a contrarian economist called Ha-Joon Chang: * \"23 Things they don't tell you about about Capitalism\" -- [LINK] And then of course at the end of the rainbow there is David Harvey: * \"The 17 Contradictions of Capitalism\", LSE -- [LINK] We also recently had a spirited HN thread about Greece that had some good stuff in it: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9837080,"author":"nisa","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Minister No More","text":"He gave 2 talks a few years ago that are well worth a watch - he talks briefly about the abuse of mathematics in certain parts of academic economy, cites a Star Trek Voyager episode and other interesting things: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10001724,"author":"platz","month":"2015-08","story_title":"U.S. Paychecks Grow at Record-Slow Pace","text":"I enjoyed this video in which Yanis Varoufakis explains some geopolitical macro economics during the post WWII and cold war era, why the crash/recovery of 2008 is mutating into different forms. [VIDEO] The U.S. had to be very creative in order maintain power when they no longer had any economic surpluses (surpluses which greatly diminished from wars like Vietnam).","stance":"rec"}],"MEqxaH47DTs":[{"hn_comment_id":28973248,"author":"novok","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Dutch forensic lab says it has decoded Tesla's driving data","text":"I like this youtube video that goes over various crossover points. The tesla beats the RAV4 prime at ~45k miles and a rav4 ICE at ~28k miles: [VIDEO] I think 5k miles is a bit low, and using tesla as your only source biased.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29236506,"author":"hasdf","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Electric vehicles could fully recharge in 5 minutes with new cable design","text":"this video compares co2 emissions of a tesla vs hybrid vs regular ice car. I think it is an interesting exploration of the topic although I think the presenter had a hard time getting correct data and his data on the EV is more conservative than Tesla's numbers. I would definitely be interested in exploring this further. It seems probable to me that we won't have a better grasp on this for years yet as EVs are still pretty new and not widely adopted. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MFEHFsO-XSI":[{"hn_comment_id":31796444,"author":"mtlmtlmtlmtl","month":"2022-06","story_title":"DOE announces breakthrough in residential cold climate heat pump technology","text":"Technology Connections on Youtube has a great video series on how heat pumps work, why they're important environmentally and what kind of power cost savings they can bring. The second video is a longer guide for people who want to get a heat pump. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34166583,"author":"the-alchemist","month":"2022-12","story_title":"US companies are producing heat pumps that work below -20F(-28C)","text":"If you want an (entertaining) deep dive into heat pumps, I can recommend Technology Connection's [LINK] and its followup, [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34852636,"author":"sushiburps","month":"2023-02","story_title":"200-year old heat pump technology is back","text":"Highly recommend the YouTube channel 'Technology Connections' videos on heat pumps: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31180664,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-04","story_title":"No, you can\u2019t save \u00a330 per year by switching off your \u201cstandby\u201d devices","text":"Another one of my \"came across this in YouTube\" things (started with the design of a hurricane lantern) Why Heat Pumps are Immensely Important Right Now - [VIDEO] The key is the Coefficient of performance [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31613935,"author":"HalcyonCowboy","month":"2022-06","story_title":"What a gas stove ban means for restaurants","text":"This is not true since the vast majority of electric whole home heating units sold today are heat pumps, which are up to 300% efficient [1]. If the power generation and distribution is 33% or higher efficiency, then a heat pump will outperform a natural gas furnace operating at 100% efficiency. EDIT - Here's a video that explains it much better than I could, although it's a bit long, this YouTuber is great. [2] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32750665,"author":"pfdietz","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Sierra Club, environmental groups petition EPA to ban natural gas for heating","text":"Yes, apparently there have been huge advances in the efficiency of heat pumps since then. And this is why ground source heat pumps are less of a thing these days: you don't need the help of that underground temperature as much. This guy gets really excited about heat pumps: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33884213,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-12","story_title":"TSMC ups Arizona investment from $12B to $40B with second semi fab","text":"Heat pumps have come a long way. [VIDEO] gets into the energy efficiency of heat pumps and their temperature tolerances.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34358056,"author":"nayuki","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Do heat pumps work in cold climates?","text":"He made several excellent videos explaining residential heat pumps: [2021-02-28] [LINK] \"Heat Pumps: the Future of Home Heating\" (35m14s) [2021-04-01] [LINK] \"Ground Source / Geothermal Heat Pumps and Other Info\" (28m03s) [2022-03-26] [VIDEO] \"Why Heat Pumps are Immensely Important Right Now\" (21m02s) [2022-04-13] [LINK] \"Heat Pumps are Not Hard: Here's what it will take to start pumping\" (46m32s)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34739754,"author":"yreg","month":"2023-02","story_title":"How a Heat Pump Works","text":"Technology Connections has a good video on heat pumps. (Actually several of them, I link the newest one.) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35139694,"author":"shagie","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) \u2013 Heat pump sold directly to homeowners","text":"They're viable in Maine too. Heat pumps are defying Maine\u2019s winters and oil industry pushback [LINK] From an (opinionated) Youtube channel out of the midwest (Chicago area which isn't known for being warm) - Why Heat Pumps are Immensely Important Right Now [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35756018,"author":"feedsmgmt","month":"2023-04","story_title":"New York to Ban Natural Gas, Including Stoves, in New Buildings","text":"In almost all of the continental USA the number of days that cold are more than offset by the savings during the rest of the days of the year. This YouTube channel covers the topic extensively [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MFRWDuduuSw":[{"hn_comment_id":18253935,"author":"avinassh","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Calculus Made Easy (1910)","text":"This is amazing! The fonts are easy on eyes and page renders beautifully. If you are looking for vidoes, then check lectures by Herber Gross [0] on Youtube. These were recorded in 70s. They are in black & white, gives a feeling of watching some old beautifully shot movie. He goes into basics and gives you a taste of all derivations, by hand. Watch the first lecture by yourself [1] and you will immediately realise how good are these. On a similar note, any similar resources like the one submitted, but for Linear Algebra? I am aware of Gilbert Strang's book [2] and vidoes [3], but I find them advanced for a beginner. [0] - [LINK] [1] - [VIDEO] [2] - [LINK] [3] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33594152,"author":"mtreis86","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?","text":"I recently learned calculus from the Herb Gross series from 1974. The way he explains things just clicked, after numerous failed attempts to learn from other sources. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14164611,"author":"lunchladydoris","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]","text":"I just had a look at the first video in the first course on YouTube [0] and was delighted to see Herb Gross responding in the comments. Clearly this is a man who loves his subject and loves introducing it to others. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44912398,"author":"jackdoe","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Death and What Comes Next (2002)","text":"Ignoring the moral question in the story, many people are satisfied by saying \"haha funny, the cat is both dead and alive\" and they just move on. Reading Pratchett for almost 30 years, it has fueled quite an interested in quantum mechanics in me, he subtly introduces QM teasers in almost every book I read. Particularly Mort. As I dropped out of highschool, I didnt have the luck to properly study physics, but in my 30s, I my existential crisis hit, as they say, a man dies twice, and the stupid half dead cat wouldn't leave me alone. And one night the omnipotent youtube algorithm recommended Susskind's lectures to me, then Feynman, Shankar, .. it just kept going. Now I watch and re-watch them but take screenshots and send them to claude when I am confused (which is still most of the time). If you are a layman like me and just want to know what is up with the cat, I encourage you to watch Sean Carroll's lectures (dont miss the Q&A videos) and it will for sure allow you to ask at least better questions. I love that cat so much. --- Sean Carroll: [LINK] Richard Feynman: [LINK] and [LINK] Leonard Susskind: [LINK] Ramamurti Shankar: [LINK] Barton Zwiebach: [LINK] Carl Bender: [LINK] If you struggle with calculus, I found Herb Gross to be partucularly good Herb Gross: [VIDEO] Of course watch 3blue1brown, alphaphoenix, styropyro etc as well","stance":"rec"}],"MFol6IMbZ7Y":[{"hn_comment_id":15354234,"author":"ktta","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Broadening HSTS to secure more of the Web","text":"Relevant part starts here [VIDEO] Although for anyone interested in HTTPS, I'd recommend watching the whole thing. Very entertaining.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8651365,"author":"fabulist","month":"2014-11","story_title":"How to Learn Hacking","text":"This guide is very hand-wavey. Tor alone is a poor operational security strategy; using nikto and unix-privesc-check does not a hacker make. This may be a decent place to begin one's inquiry, but don't let it end here too. Here are some talks I recommend: Tricks for Defeating SSL in Practice - Moxie Marlinspike [VIDEO] OPSEC: Because Jail is for wuftpd - thegrugq [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10219186,"author":"superuser2","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Our First Certificate Is Now Live","text":"We don't have humans in the loop for issuing certificate; this can and has been exploited for fun and profit, with fun attacks like getting a cert for \"citibank.com\\0.mydomain.com\" which used to trick the C strcmp in most browser certificate checking routines. Moxie has an entertaining talk: [VIDEO] Your problem would be getting people to \"thecitibank.com.\" Chrome, Firefox, and GMail would all eventually figure out it was a phishing site and warn users about clicking through to it.","stance":"rec"}],"MFzDaBzBlL0":[{"hn_comment_id":13913104,"author":"jw1224","month":"2017-03","story_title":"How to Learn New Things as an Adult","text":"I agree - surely adults can learn these tennis strokes, even if they are harder to pick up. There is an absolutely fascinating video about plasticity of learning between adults and children that I'd highly recommend watching [1]. A man built a \"backwards bicycle\", where the handlebars steer the bike in the opposite direction to what you would expect. It was almost impossible for him to ride the bike more than a few feet at a time before falling off. Finally, after 8 months of consistent practice, he could ride it relatively well. When he put his 6-year-old son on the bike (who'd been riding a normal bicycle for 3 years), he had it mastered just 2 weeks later . [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18582734,"author":"victor106","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Why Don\u2019t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?","text":"From the excellent smartereverday youtube channel [VIDEO] Strongly recommend to watch the above video.He does an experiment on how long it takes to get comfortable by changing the handle bars.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12262338,"author":"picmate","month":"2016-08","story_title":"My Response to the Backwards Brain Bicycle","text":"One of my friends one day forwarded me the YouTube link to Backwards Brain Bicycle by Dustin ( [VIDEO] ) and I was so amazed by how our brains cling to the meanings of relative phenomena we've learnt in the past and how it characterizes our behavior as humans. For example, that's why we find it so hard to give up a certain habit. Our response, a replication of the concept in the form of a simple game. Let us know what you think.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18581067,"author":"jonas21","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Why Don\u2019t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?","text":"Reminded me of this Smarter Every Day video, which is definitely worth a watch: [VIDEO] (The Backwards Brain Bicycle)","stance":"rec"}],"MGMoRu5yrVc":[{"hn_comment_id":12857499,"author":"golf1052","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365","text":"Word for Windows and Word for Mac are much closer together than you may realize. Pretty interesting talk about cross platform Office. Part 1: [LINK] Part 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14247185,"author":"alimbada","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you think Electron is good for building Desktop Apps?","text":"Microsoft have a very interesting approach with their Office suite when it comes to cross-platform development. They go through it in some detail in this talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MHTizZ_XcUM":[{"hn_comment_id":15625627,"author":"jonathanfoster","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Carnival scam science, and how to win [video]","text":"The actual video is by Mark Rober and man you gotta check out his YouTube channel [1]. I've been in a technical slump here recently and watching his videos totally re-energized me. He reminded me how great it feels to explore, build, and solve problems. Another great video is his automatic bulls eye dartboard [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18708237,"author":"anonu","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Glitter bomb tricks parcel thieves","text":"This is an an awesome project... the kinda stuff I wish I had more time to hack away at... In the video he mentions his automatic bullseye dartboard project... even more impressive than this glitter machine IMHO: [VIDEO] Calculating a projectile's trajectory in realtime.... wouldn't even know where to start. EDIT: dartboard code from that youtube link: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"ML4tw_UzqZE":[{"hn_comment_id":18446721,"author":"btown","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Missing Piece of Antikythera Mechanism Found on Aegean Seabed","text":"Non-paywall link: [LINK] This reminds me of one of my favorite YouTube channels, Clickspring: an inspiring clockmaker and machinist who's currently documenting a full reproduction of the Antikythera Mechanism: [VIDEO] . Highly recommend for anyone who is fascinated by the care that goes into handmade mechanical devices.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20523879,"author":"abainbridge","month":"2019-07","story_title":"The \u201cgreased sled\u201d theory of Stonehenge","text":"If you want some archaeological engineering theories that aren't obviously wrong, I highly recommend this youtube series about how the Antikythera mechanism could have been made. [VIDEO] It's the complete antithesis of this pig fat hogwash.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31381192,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2022-05","story_title":"The Antikythera Mechanism Episode 11 \u2013 Inscribing the Back Plate \u2013 Part 1","text":"This is a new episode after more than a year. :) I highly recommend this serie of videos about building a reconstruction of the The Antikythera Mechanism with tool similar to the ancient tools. [Warning: It's a huge time sink] Complete playlist: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26444638,"author":"neatze","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Scientists solve another piece of the puzzling Antikythera mechanism","text":"Any one interested, see Clickspring[1], he actually attempts to use ancient tools and methods to build Antikythera Mechanism. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26470049,"author":"mattbillenstein","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Scientists Have Unlocked the Secrets of the Ancient 'Antikythera Mechanism'","text":"A watchmaker has made a video series on youtube about reconstructing the mechanism using some traditional techniques: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26542397,"author":"wincy","month":"2021-03","story_title":"YouTube and Patreon Still Aren\u2019t Paying the Rent for Most Creatives","text":"If deep domain knowledge paid off on Youtube people like Ben Eater would be a millionaire from Youtube at this point[0], his videos are so cool and great at explaining computing. Or Clickspring, the guy who made the Antikythera Mechanism [1]. But honestly even for me being a software engineer and someone who considers himself interested in this sort of stuff, I look at these pages sometimes out of wonder but I often end up watching comedy videos and stuff like that on Youtube. The algorithm recommends it, and I watch. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38614704,"author":"nialo","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Earliest Carpenters: 476,000-year-old log structure discovered in Zambia","text":"In case anyone here hasn't seen it, I want to share this very cool youtube series of an Australian clock maker creating a replica of the Antikythera device using only tools believed to be available to the ancient Greeks: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MNXypBxNGMo":[{"hn_comment_id":21903381,"author":"tudorw","month":"2019-12","story_title":"The Ultimate Acorn Archimedes talk [video]","text":"Got to add Zarch to the list, we had one in the 'computer lab' surrounded by BBC micro's, I only touched on a little of it's potential, but this game was mind blowing! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24980150,"author":"onion2k","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence","text":"Check out Zarch on the Acorn Archimedes. [VIDEO] It's an awesome 3D game from 1987 (with truly awful sound). That was made 6 years before Second Reality, on a RISC-based computer. It's incredible.","stance":"rec"}],"MO0r930Sn_8":[{"hn_comment_id":23892017,"author":"aunty_helen","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Bohr\u2013van Leeuwen theorem \u2013 magnetism in solids is a quantum mechanical effect","text":"[VIDEO] Richard Feynman explaining magnets is one of the best layman explainers I've seen (in between the ranting). I honestly didn't understand why magnets worked and found this on a late night youtube binge. (But don't search youtube for anything related to magnets, you end up amongst the perpetual motion nuts) Edit: Just to be clear with this video (it had been a while since I last watched it), he doesn't 'explain' magnets as much as he hints at the concepts involved. I already knew about the spins being lined up etc but it was the \"you can't put your hand through the chair\" comment that gave me the eureka moment.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22991880,"author":"keldaris","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?","text":"I'm a physicist specifically working with magnetic systems, but I have very little pre-graduate teaching experience, so take this attempt to answer the question with a grain of salt. The reason some people regard Faraday's original explanation of the eponymous law (it is worth noting that at the time it was widely regarded as inadequate and handwavy) as illuminating is because Faraday visualized his \"lines of force\" as literal chains of polarized particles in a dielectric medium, thereby providing a seemingly mechanistic local explanation of the observed phenomena. Not much of this mindset survived Maxwell's theoretical program and it has very little to do with how we regard magnetism today. Instead, the unification of electricity and magnetism naturally arises from special relativity, whereas the microscopic basis of magnetism requires quantum mechanics. There isn't really any place for naive contact mechanics in the modern picture of physics, so in that sense I would regard Faraday's view as misleading. Finally, I can't end any \"explanation\" of magnetism without linking the famous Feynman interview snippet [1] where he's specifically asked about magnetism. It doesn't answer your question directly, but it's worth watching all the more because of it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23785717,"author":"rimunroe","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Neutrino Particles May Be a Link to the Dark Sector","text":"I appreciate it. You're absolutely right about how exciting it is to be able to share explanations with people. This is a video of Feynman's answer to an interviewer asking about what and why you feel something when you put two magnets together [VIDEO] . It's a great description of the problems inherent to explaining this sort of thing to people. (Also, if anyone knows a video/essay/talk along these lines by a less sexist person, I'd love a link.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43764757,"author":"ramraj07","month":"2025-04","story_title":"I should have loved biology too","text":"I don't know if just going to nature is sufficient to get fascinated with biology. In my opinion it takes a fundamental reset in how you think about anything you see. Humans while smart have obviously had to learn to \"ignore\" thinking about how things work. You don't think too hard about how anything works really. I mean at a cursory level sure, but by vastly different interpretations of the word \"cursory\", you can change your thirst to know how things you see work at more and more fundamental levels. You don't need to go into nature to get this curiosity except for the possibility that it makes you more meditative. You can look at your arm and think what the hell happens in there at a molecular level to make you move the muscles. Or when someone says nerves conduct electricity what the hell does that mean? I revisit this feynman video of him explaining (or not) magnets every few months and I think it's relevant to this question. [VIDEO] When I think like that I'm just curious why OP and others blame teachers or whoever else for not inducting the curiosity in them. Like it's someone else's job to make you curious? In my opinion you're either born that way or you're not. Some airport store book isn't gonna make you the next whatever scientist you adulate.","stance":"rec"}],"MO8hZlgK5zc":[{"hn_comment_id":20175537,"author":"pier25","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Pika CDN \u2013 A CDN for Modern JavaScript","text":"This is a great recent talk about this problem by the former NPM CTO in which she tells her story about NPM and proposes a new decentralized package manager: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21626367,"author":"drej","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Pika \u2013 A JavaScript package registry for the modern web","text":"For those wondering what's wrong with npm, I can recommend this C J Silverio talk [VIDEO] Sadly, as others have noted, this Pika thing does not quite address these issues.","stance":"rec"}],"MQyxG4vTyZ8":[{"hn_comment_id":19773871,"author":"cirrus-clouds","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Thousands take to Hong Kong streets to protest new extradition laws","text":"Vox has an excellent video called 'China is erasing its border with Hong Kong' which details how the Chinese government is tightening it's control of Hong Kong. It's well worth a watch. Here's the video description: \" When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, Chinese leaders agreed that Hong Kong would be able to keep its economic and political systems, including some of the civil freedoms denied to China\u2019s citizens on the mainland, for the next 50 years. Although Hong Kong still has nearly 30 years of semi-autonomy left, China has started tightening its grip, and many believe it is chipping away at Hong Kong\u2019s freedoms. \" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20140153,"author":"CamelCaseName","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Hundreds of thousands take to Hong Kong streets against controversial bill","text":"For anyone like me who was looking for some background on this, on Reddit, someone linked to a Vox video entitled \"China is erasing its border with Hong Kong\" [0]. At 15 minutes, it's a captivating introduction to the conflict. Another video (6 minutes) you might be interested in by Vox is \"China's trillion dollar plan to dominate global trade\" [1], which is on China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK] Edit: One great passage from the first video [0] at 11:29 says: \"The [umbrella movement] protest didn't change the government's mind and it didn't immediately change anything in Hong Kong. But this spectacle of young people rising up to defend their rights from the central government of China did spark a political awakening among the many in the city who had never before paid attention. 'I think post-umbrella movement was the first time that the middle class came out and voted in droves, and voted for the opposition force.' - HK Resident\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18344989,"author":"nestorD","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Why Democracies Are Turning Against Chinese Influence","text":"Vox has some very good videos on Hong Kong and one in particular on China's current approach to the integration of the city : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20165303,"author":"JumpCrisscross","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Hong Kong Police Fire Tear Gas, Rubber Bullets at Protesters","text":"> Could someone explain my why they really protest? Vox recently made a good video on the topic [1]. In 1984, Beijing agreed with Britain that after the handoff in 1997, China would respect Hong Kong\u2019s political system [2]. Hence, Deng Xiaoping\u2019s \u201cone country, two systems\u201d [3]. Beijing is breaking that agreement. It already tried abduction [4]. Now it wants to be able to extradite anyone to China to be tried in Chinese courts. This is problematic. Hong Kong, like Japan, Taiwan, Britain and America, has an independent judiciary where the government must prove its case. So if a dissident is tried in Hong Kong, prosecutors have to prove their case in a relatively fair court. Chinese courts are party instruments. (Consider that there is no way to enforce Hong Kong\u2019s rights under the 1984 agreement.) Under the proposed legislation, said dissident would be shipped to China where a rubber-stamp conviction could be sought. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"MRqh8oLY7Ik":[{"hn_comment_id":19412457,"author":"mattjaynes","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Associations of Cognitive Function with Carbon Dioxide and Ventilation (2016)","text":"David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH of Ruby on Rails fame) gave a great talk recently on air quality: [VIDEO] Apparently his wife was showing signs of Formaldehyde poisoning after they moved into a newly constructed home. This motivated him to investigate the air quality in their house and he bought industrial-level air testing equipment to figure out what was going on (since many of the consumer-grade devices were wildly inaccurate). He also did a deep dive into the research on how air quality impacts cognitive and creative performance. Fascinating talk, worth watching.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21566074,"author":"mattjaynes","month":"2019-11","story_title":"The cognitive costs of air pollution","text":"David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH of Rails fame) gave a great talk on this recently, though he focused more on indoor air quality and its cognitive impact: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24764270,"author":"vellum","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Best HVAC system for a new house?","text":"David Heinemeier Hansson gave a great talk on air quality and touched upon various HVAC systems. One thing that really stuck out, was his claim that you need 80 CFM per person per room. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40752428,"author":"zefhous","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What indoor CO2 monitor do you recommend?","text":"DHH gave a talk about this a while ago with good citations to studies about CO2 concentration and other VOCs. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MSZgoFyuHC8":[{"hn_comment_id":28515910,"author":"rfd4sgmk8u","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Australia is shaping up to be the villain of COP26 climate talks","text":"If you want a good video that shows the entrenched problem with the fossil fuel industry that has the Australian political class captured: [VIDEO] (Honest Government Ad | Carbon Capture and Storage)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32795998,"author":"kornhole","month":"2022-09","story_title":"How to bury carbon? Let plants do the dirty work","text":"I maintain a large garden and bury probably tons of organic matter underneath and in the beds. It is a pittance of carbon capture and no solution. Here is a fun video about carbon capture. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MShbP3OpASA":[{"hn_comment_id":4450700,"author":"jcfrei","month":"2012-08","story_title":"What killed the Linux desktop","text":"in a q&a round at aalto university in finland linus adressed the question why linux never took off on the desktop: the lack of being a pre-installed os. he mentions that without preinstalled operating systems there's now way to gain a significant market share in the desktop segment. the whole talk by itself is very recommendable: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5408643,"author":"dmiladinov","month":"2013-03","story_title":"An Open Source Author's Lament","text":"I'd like to piggy-back on your mention of Linus. It reminds me of a recent video I saw wherein he talked about how the work on the kernel works within a natural hierarchy. The whole video, IMHO is worth a watch, but the relevant snippet is here, you can watch from about 15:57 to about 18:20 to get the idea: [VIDEO] I especially liked his comment at the end of this section: \"The way people work ... is inherent in our brains ... the whole development process ... works really well ... we used the hierarchy that just worked on its own, and that turns out to be the right hierarchy.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10598205,"author":"mreiland","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Software development: do good manners matter?","text":"That's a caricature of his actual position, please be more honest than that. edit: Here's another video that does a better job of conveying his reasons for being the way he is. [VIDEO] He's also been on record as saying multiple times that a lot of it is because he comes from a culture that's much more abrasive than US.","stance":"rec"}],"MVEKt_H3FsI":[{"hn_comment_id":33796729,"author":"andrewf","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Rereading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder","text":"You might be interested in this Computer History Museum oral history of Gary Davidian, who among other things (1) worked on the \"rival project\" from Soul (2) was hired by NEC to bolster their lawsuit defense by writing microcode for the Intel 8086 (3) wrote the 680x0 emulator Apple launched their PowerPC line with. Transcript: [LINK] [LINK] Video: [LINK] [VIDEO] There's lots of interesting stuff from this era in the CHM's oral histories.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43538815,"author":"mesrik","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Notes on the Pentium's microcode circuitry","text":"Hi Ken, Nice article. While reading I remembered that I watched some time ago the Oral History of Gary Davidian and he was quite bit involved with microcoding. And if I were you I would try asking him if he could be able to give you some ideas where to get more information about microcode workings and development. Here are links to that interview, if you have time to watch it. It's in two parts. - [LINK] - [VIDEO] Cheers, :-) riku","stance":"rec"}],"MVYrJJNdrEg":[{"hn_comment_id":42643928,"author":"lambdaba","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Four causes for 'Zoom fatigue' (2021)","text":"The Fridman - Zuckerberg VR interview really convinced me of this, if you haven't seen it, check it out, it's incredible [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37745142,"author":"somsak2","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Return to Office Is Bullshit and Everyone Knows It","text":"Have you seen some of the virtual reality from FB? I think it's getting close to the point where it's just as good as talking to someone in person, with the obvious benefit that not everyone has to be in the same physical office. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38025057,"author":"minton","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Reality Labs has lost $11.4B during 2023 (there's still one quarter left)","text":"I think VR can enable human connection where it otherwise isn\u2019t possible due to distance. Of course, it isn\u2019t a full substitute for in-person interaction, but it doesn\u2019t have to be either or. We can have a great remote connection via VR and still exist in the real world. Check out this podcast[0] between Lex Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg where they meet remotely via the metaverse. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MWsGBRdK2N0":[{"hn_comment_id":28210546,"author":"benrbray","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Why are so many knowledge workers quitting?","text":"There is something in between NYC and an American-style suburb. I encourage you to take a look at Not Just Bikes [1,2]: [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29476449,"author":"goda90","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Opposition to High Density Development","text":"Not Just Bikes has a recent video[0] talking about the lack of middle ground for suburbs in North America. I think a big problem is that laws as they are prevent variety. Either everything must be single family homes with huge setbacks and wide roads, or it is doomed to be bought up by large apartment developers. Is it a threat to your ability to have a yard and two car garage if the house next door is a duplex and the end of the block has a corner store with a couple apartments above it? No, but the laws make it so that only your yard and two car garage can exist in your neighborhood regardless. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29477080,"author":"adameasterling","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Opposition to High Density Development","text":"> Relative to single family homes, apartments are viewed as decreasing property values, increasing crime rates, lowering school quality, increasing traffic, and decreasing desirability. The problem is most cities only allow two kinds of development: Low density or high density. We're missing the middle! [LINK] I've really enjoyed these two YouTube channels on the subject. \"Oh the Urbanity\" has a great video on Montreal's \"missing middle\" [LINK] And \"Not Just Bikes\" discusses a \"missing middle\" neighborhood in Toronto: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MYucYon2-lk":[{"hn_comment_id":19672414,"author":"jononor","month":"2019-04","story_title":"The Case for Formal Methods","text":"I found this talk (by the same person being interviewed) to be concise and convincing on how to do better than typical practice, without going to full formal methods. Hillel Wayne - Beyond Unit Tests: Taking Your Testing to the Next Level - PyCon 2018 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18742515,"author":"sn9","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"Some of my favorite talks from Strange Loop: * Contracts For Getting More Programs Less Wrong: [LINK] * \"It's Just Matrix Multiplication\": Notation for Weaving: [LINK] * Hackett: a metaprogrammable Haskell: [LINK] * Git from the Ground Up: [LINK] From PyCon: * Beyond Unit Tests: Taking Your Testing to the Next Level: [VIDEO] * Dataclasses: The code generator to end all code generator: [LINK] * Automating Code Quality: [LINK] There are probably more I might add later as I remember them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34352739,"author":"spion","month":"2023-01","story_title":"What if writing tests was a joyful experience?","text":"Most of the non-joyful experience of writing tests lies in the context preparation, not so much in the expected outputs. I think we need a modern version of design by contract instead. Its one of the most powerful techniques of testing software is unfortunately often ignored and overlooked these days... Some less known things about design by contract: - you can easily test way more than types in preconditions and postconditions - extreme web controller postcondition example: every time there is a 200 response to a POST /new request, there should be at least one document more in storage than there was before the request. (caveat: unless there are deletes - then sum the deletes up too) - things important to the business look a ton like contracts - e.g. a diff of two legal documents always contains the full content (list of words) of both documents (never accidentally swallow content!) - your postconditions can surprisingly often fully describe the desired function behavior - with sufficient amount of pre and postconditions, your property tests look like \"exercise the module or entire system with random actions\" -> unit and integration tests (see Hilel Wayne's excellent video on this topic [VIDEO] ) Some things that could really help modernize design by contract - Test at a certain sampling rate in production for expensive contracts (do not turn them off) - Report contract violations via observability mechanisms (tracing, sentry etc) - Better language support for contract DSLs","stance":"rec"}],"MZvmYaFkNJI":[{"hn_comment_id":25538244,"author":"realusername","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"My favorite talk is the Live View twitter demo on my case: [VIDEO] . Never before I've been so bluffed by a new technology, he's building a small twitter clone in 20min with live reload, browser sync and everything, this would take days with any other traditional tech I know.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25540421,"author":"staticelf","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"I think the \"talk\" by Chris McCord should apply here \"Build a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5\", while not really a talk this year was special and the demo completely blew my mind. it's available here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25575003,"author":"realusername","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ruby 3.0 and the new FiberScheduler interface","text":"> But I'm wondering if it brings enough other advantages that I shouldn't view it that simplistically. So to start with, Phoenix LiveView really is a game changer, you should have a look at Elixir just for that. This is the talk which really bluffed me when I first saw it: [VIDEO] . For the other upsides, I like a little bit better the way everything is architectured in Phoenix, there's much less magic and it's easier to follow the data flow and what is going on.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23499400,"author":"bigbassroller","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Go vs. Ruby/Rails for first time indie dev?","text":"> I don't like the idea of needing to learn both Elixir and Erlang You dont need to learn Erlang to use Elixir, rather you would need to know Elixir to use Phoenix; like you need to know Ruby to use Rails. Also you can build a Twitter timeline clone in under 18 minutes using Phoenix LiveView: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24430073,"author":"mercer","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Vue.js Creator Evan You Interview","text":"This one's also pretty good: [VIDEO] (Build a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25791639,"author":"sodapopcan","month":"2021-01","story_title":"StimulusReflex, or LiveView for Rails","text":"Even with tooling getting better, you're still faced with creating an API to the backend that has a high chance of your frontend being the only ever consumer of it. You're also faced with duplicating logic on both front and backends in many scenarios (though of course this can be mitigated with a node backend? I don't know... I've never used node). As for latency, this is over websockets. It becomes a problem if you are connecting to a server across the ocean but otherwise, it's incredibly fast and feels just as snappy as JS. I actually also haven't used Stimulus Reflex, just Phoenix LiveView so I'm not sure if they are exactly the same, but the TL;DR is that they are sending VERY tiny payloads over websockets. This video explains it well (though it's also a demo of LiveView): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28375002,"author":"frellus","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Why Erlang?","text":"Yes and no. The real answer (with an Erlang bias) is to look at Elixir + Phoenix + LiveView. Here's a neat demo. No JavaScript required. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35022255,"author":"dmitriid","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Phoenix Dev Blog \u2013 Streams","text":"Liveview solves the \"write a fully dynamic and interactive application with next to zero Javascript that you need to write by hand\" or, if you will, \"server-driven UI apps\". And it's hard to overstate, but to also properly explain, how important this is and how it feels like magic when you do it. Because it lets you tap into everything Elixr (and Erlang VM) have to offer on the backend without ever having to think of \"how the hell do I bring all that to the client\". My use-cases are: a big chunk of data is being processed, and while its being processed regular updates are sent over PubSub. Most actions a user initiates are long-ish-running and their updates are also sent over PubSub. Things that other users are doing are sent over PubSub and possibly need to be reflected in the UI. In \"traditional\" JS-on-the-client-whatever-on-the-server model you have a plethora of questions of how to get that to UI: which endpoints to query, which updates to send over the wire, the formats, the frequence, authorisation, auth... With LiveView your \"client\" is an Elixir view living on the server which just updates the view based on those PubSubs (or timers, or Kafka streams, or user-initiated actions, or...) and LiveView takes care of upating the DOM/HTML in the browser. \"Build a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5\" will give a good overview of this: [VIDEO] [1] Built-in in Phoenix, [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"M_VuXVErD6E":[{"hn_comment_id":32173658,"author":"quigley61","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Build Your Own X","text":"> Build your own keyboard This is something I've been interested in lately as well & came across this video: [VIDEO] It's targeting a split keyboard, but I think it details the general steps involved pretty well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32624925,"author":"koziserek","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The obsessive pleasures of mechanical-keyboard tinkerers","text":"In the realm of programmable keyboards, it doesn\u2019t really matter which OS you will use it with\u2026 My golden medium is Anne Pro II, even though I own new model F. But more and more I\u2019m getting drawn to an idea of building 36 keys custom. Watch something from a channel of this hugely underrated gent: [VIDEO] Edit: typos (ipad screen kbd\u2026)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34944257,"author":"hyperturtle","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Making a Keyboard Layout","text":"You could go one step further and build your own keyboard to match your hands as well. I've watched several of these videos and planning on eventually building one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"McLq1hEq3UY":[{"hn_comment_id":31422240,"author":"natly","month":"2022-05","story_title":"The big six matrix factorizations","text":"These lectures are fantastic after you've mastered the basics of linear algebra [VIDEO] (convex optimization, by a very experienced and often funny lecturer)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29972998,"author":"hwers","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Matrix Multiplication","text":"This is my favorite way to think about it as well. I think I learned it first in one of Steven Boyds astounding convex optimization lectures [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Mc_4Z1oiXhY":[{"hn_comment_id":18171472,"author":"artur_makly","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040","text":"Oh but this gets better! This is a great dissertation on how the GeoPolitics will play this little game out: [VIDEO] - by Gwynne Dyer","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17125565,"author":"artur_makly","month":"2018-05","story_title":"We\u2019ve Passed the Carbon Tipping Point","text":"surprisingly there are low-tech ways to reverse the heating. watch Gwynne Dyer\u2018s closing arguments: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20747271,"author":"carapace","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change","text":"Dr. Gwynne Dyer gave a talk, \"Geopolitics in a Hotter World\" \u2013 Sept. 2010 > So when the Hadley Centre put these numbers out they were incorporating (which the IPCC does not) the early impacts of positive feedbacks, as well as just how much carbon dioxide will we put into the air by 2060. First time that had been done, but it gives you a really frightening number\u2026and then they did the map. Which is again, something that\u2019s not normally done, and the consequence is we don\u2019t have a lot of time. We\u2019re in deep trouble. And the military know this; the military know this everywhere. > the rule of thumb is that you lose 10% of global food production for every 1 degree Celsius higher average global temperature. > So food becomes the critical issue and the countries most impacted are tropical and subtropical and this is where the geopolitics comes from. > \u201cpeople always raid before they starve.\u201d > There\u2019s already a well established pattern: when you\u2019re in deep trouble and you can\u2019t feed your family, head north. > But the dirty secret is that you can only shut a border if you\u2019re willing to kill people. > No government that cannot feed its population survives. > We\u2019re going to go through the point of no return (and probably a good deal further) in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Almost certain. > And there is maybe a way to cheat: and that is geoengineering. > \u201cwe\u2019ve crunched the numbers and we figure we could get one degree Celsius of cooling average worldwide ju","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21027651,"author":"carapace","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast","text":"Geopolitics in a Hotter World \u2013 UBC Talk Transcribed (Sept. 2010) [LINK] Video [VIDEO] Long, good, hard to summarize but I'll try: Things are worse than publicly talked about; there are a few options (geo-engineering). \"People always raid before they starve.\" - - - - We have the solutions already. Cut-n-paste from a comment yesterday, apologies if you've seen it already, I think it's worth it: For practical advice on what to do I recommend Toby Hemenway's videos in re: Permaculture [LINK] Especially \"How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet \u2013 But Not Civilization\" and the sequel \"Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture\". Permaculture is a school of applied ecology (the word itself is a portmanteau of PERMAnent agriCULTURE) that has adherents and practitioners world-wide. It's not the only form of regenerative agriculture either. See also [LINK] Oceanic 3D farms! And now they are building reefs?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21028870,"author":"dougmwne","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Researchers are racing to find out why methane levels are increasing so fast","text":"You lead with the idea that people in power have made a secret decision to do away with democracy and deploy totalitarianism. This is by definition a conspiracy. The rest of what you said, plus what you just said about departments of people already looking at this I find quite realistic. Someone else just posted this 10 year old video on the geopolitics of climate change. I wanted to make sure you saw it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26686291,"author":"Qwertious","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Lithium battery costs have fallen by 98% in three decades","text":"There's a video on YouTube, Gwynne Dyer -- Geopolitics in a Hotter World (2010) ( [VIDEO] ), which very briefly touches on it IIRC. I'm talking about the bit that starts at 8m30s on the video, but I highly recommend watching the whole thing (or at leas the 1-hour talk part - the Q&A is practically inaudible for me). Basically, the IPCC doesn't publish studies - they study compilations of studies, every 4-5 years. And when they start compiling, they have a cut-off date at the very start and only use studies that have been both completed and have passed peer review from before that date. Meanwhile, the studies themselves have the same problem - they obviously can't start the study with incomplete data and update the data as they go. The studies need to start with data that finished before they started the study. And on top of that, they're necessarily a reserved body (Icd say \"conservative\" but that's ambiguous in politics) - IPCC is run by a bunch of governments trying to figure out the bare minimum of emissions reduction they need to commit to, to not be negligent - they don't want to hear bad news unless it's certain. The end result is that the data in the report is 10+ years out of date.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28870093,"author":"carapace","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Global Climate Report \u2013 September 2021","text":"There's a fascinating talk from about eleven years ago: Dr. Gwynne Dyer \u2013 Geopolitics in a Hotter World \u2013 UBC Talk Transcribed (Sept. 2010) [LINK] video: [VIDEO] Among other things he talks about is the possibility of unilateral geoengineering by some of the nations that will be feeling the effects sooner and more, uh, compellingly than others: > I talked\u2013actually, the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Strategic Studies about this (you didn\u2019t even know that existed, did you?). Well, there is one, it\u2019s quite serious\u2013run by a General, bright guy. I said, \u201chave you heard about geoengineering?\u201d and he smiled\u2013seraphically\u2013and he said, \u201cMmm. Yes. Your question?\u201d > And I asked the question, \u201cDo you think that this is something the Bangladesh government might want to do a little bit, before, let\u2019s say, the US government or the Chinese government?\u201d > He said, \u201cyes it has crossed our minds.\u201d\u2013and then he stopped talking.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31530020,"author":"carapace","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Poll: Is Large-Scale Climate Geoengineering Inevitable?","text":"I've mentioned it on HN before, so apologies if you've already seen it, but there's a fascinating talk by one Dr. Gwynne Dyer: \"Geopolitics in a Hotter World\" (Sept. 2010) video: [VIDEO] Transcription: [LINK] > I talked\u2013actually, the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Strategic Studies about this (you didn\u2019t even know that existed, did you?). Well, there is one, it\u2019s quite serious\u2013run by a General, bright guy. I said, \u201chave you heard about geoengineering?\u201d and he smiled\u2013seraphically\u2013and he said, \u201cMmm. Yes. Your question?\u201d > And I asked the question, \u201cDo you think that this is something the Bangladesh government might want to do a little bit, before, let\u2019s say, the US government or the Chinese government?\u201d > He said, \u201cyes it has crossed our minds.\u201d\u2013and then he stopped talking.","stance":"rec"}],"MdmQUlD7P40":[{"hn_comment_id":15927497,"author":"dpeck","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk from 2017?","text":"Matt Mights \"Winning the War on Error: Solving the Halting Problem and Curing Cancer\" is one that is well worth watching. [VIDEO] previous discussion on it: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17958792,"author":"the_grue","month":"2018-09","story_title":"A Battle Plan for a War on Rare Diseases: Conversation with Matt Might","text":"Matt Might (the subject of this article) gave a jaw-dropping talk a year ago, named \"Winning the War on Error - Solving the Halting Problem and Curing Cancer\" [1]. At least you can't blame him for the lack of ambition! But the best part is he's really getting it done. His security research led to developing very successful static analysis tools that exposed security bugs in real code. And he did manage to find a treatment for his own son's rare genetic disorder. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19277708,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2019-03","story_title":"How To: Get Tenure \u2013 Matt Might","text":"If you haven't seen it, Might's talk \"Winning the War on Error: Solving the Halting Problem and Curing Cancer\" is amazing, a must-see. It tells some of the same story, also is an introduction to static analysis..and cancer. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"MejbOFk7H6c":[{"hn_comment_id":5832203,"author":"chris_wot","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Seriously.js","text":"Ah, these are the guys who did \"This Too Shall Pass\"? I've been trying to work out who did this song - it's been infuriating me for ages! Incidentally, you really aught to see how they make music with a car... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48098741,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The Greatest Shot in Television: James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene","text":"A number of their music videos are quite creative: * in a zero-G plane: [LINK] * one-take (?) on electric unicycles: [LINK] * 4.2s real-time scene with the footage slowed down to 4 minutes: [LINK] * Chevrolet-sponsored video where they use a moving car as an instrument: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Mfsnlbd-4xQ":[{"hn_comment_id":6117566,"author":"agumonkey","month":"2013-07","story_title":"The Haskell School of Music (2012) [pdf]","text":"I didn't read the haskell paper yet, but one talk about music and programming that I enjoyed a lot is 'functional composition' by chris ford, using clojure. [VIDEO] It simply groups and layers simple waves until he can describe a full theme. In case you didn't saw it and have 30 minutes of free time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9502132,"author":"kremlin","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Creative computing with Clojure","text":"[VIDEO] Great, great talk linked to in the article, about using Clojure to abstract and live-code music. It actually helped me to more appreciate a funny episode in Star Trek: Next Generation where the hologram doctor becomes an esteemed musician among a species that previously didn't have music, because they saw it as an amazing mathematical feat.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17121473,"author":"zphds","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Live Coding in Sporth: A Stack-Based Language for Audio Synthesis [pdf]","text":"Here's another similar library for Clojure. [LINK] Recommend this talk that made Music 'click' for me. Also fun if you are trying to read GEB and generate cannons. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37002003,"author":"1MachineElf","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Overtone \u2013 programmable, live music in Clojure","text":"Recently I watched a great presentation[0] about Overtone by Chris Ford, delivered back in 2012. It was also the first time I saw my SO interested in a programming language talk - she isn't familiar with programming, but she does have a music background. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7449285,"author":"grayrest","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Will soon have lots of time and little money \u2013 how to spend it?","text":"Learn Clojure via Overtone! [VIDEO] I personally have to either wake up early, wake up and exercise, or start working outside my apartment (e.g. eat lunch out and take my computer) in order to not fall into slacking off all day. Assuming I don't fall into one of my slacking off patterns (e.g HN/Reddit/Twitter tech \"news\" all day), I've never had trouble staying engaged. I think of it as working every day but sometimes I get paid for working on other people's projects and others I get to enjoy working on my own. My personal priority list of things to do puts sleep and waking up without an alarm as the top priority.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24445629,"author":"yayitswei","month":"2020-09","story_title":"The sound of Erlang: How to use Erlang as an instrument","text":"Reminds me of this Clojure talk- [VIDEO] Using functional composition to build a Bach canon out of pure sine waves.","stance":"rec"}],"MgrO5za0lSY":[{"hn_comment_id":26296933,"author":"pantelisk","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Francis Bacon: Revelations review \u2013 a landmark biography","text":"The art style of Francis Bacon is fantastic, but the troubled life he led is maybe even more intriguing, mysterious and dark. For those curious, here's a very well done documentary on Francis by BBC - [VIDEO] (warning, graphic themes)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26432767,"author":"Gatsky","month":"2021-03","story_title":"A history of the art market in 35 record-breaking sales (2016)","text":"Huh, Fancis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud is the most expensive on the list at $89 million. I can't comprehend these dollar numbers, but it's a stunning painting. There is a good doco about Bacon's life on YT: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27264377,"author":"throwaway29303","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Francis Bacon\u2019s Frightening Beauty","text":"I had this morbid curiosity about Bacon's work and life a long while ago and I happened to find a YouTube documentary[0] about him. Pretty interesting and sad at the same time. It's worth a watch, IMO. [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MiUHjLxm3V0":[{"hn_comment_id":48008307,"author":"btown","month":"2026-05","story_title":"ASML's Best Selling Product Isn't What You Think It Is","text":"For those interested in ASML, and how much engineering goes into being able to make EUV lithography work reliably at scale for 3nm nodes (by hitting individual droplets of tin with highly accurate lasers and turning them into plasma!), I highly recommend this recent (Dec 2025) Veritasium video about them: [VIDEO] For more: [LINK] (There's something incredible and downright \"alchemical\" about the fact that the reason our sand can \"think\" is because we use light to vaporize tin which then carves intricate glyphs into the sand!)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46559577,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2026-01","story_title":"AI Coding Assistants Are Getting Worse","text":"ASML's secret sauce is not that secret or uncopyable. The Chinese are already working on their clone of the Twinscan tools. Veritasium recently made a good video on the ASML machine design: [VIDEO] The outcome may seem like magic, but the input is \"simply\" hard work and a big budget: billions of dollars and years of investment into tuning the parameters like droplet size, frequency, etc... The interviews make it clear that the real reason ASML's machines are (currently) unique is that few people had the vision, patience, and money to fund what seemed at the time impossible. The real magic was that ASML managed to hang on by a fingernail and get a successful result before the money ran out. Now that tin droplet EUV lasers have not only been demonstrated to be possible, but have become the essential component of a hugely profitable AI chip manufacturing industry, obtaining funding to develop a clone will be much easier.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46646018,"author":"joncrocks","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Apple Is Fighting for TSMC Capacity as Nvidia Takes Center Stage","text":"Do you mean AMSL? There was a great video recently on the company + techniques used for cutting-edge lithography. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47866125,"author":"terlisimo","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Making RAM at Home [video]","text":"The whole process was deep magic to me before I watched that video. It didn't seem less magical after I've watched it. More so, if anything. Asianometry[0] has a number of videos on EUV lithography that cover some of the mind-blowing advances in the years since. Veritasium[1] recently also made a video on the subject. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47937820,"author":"random3","month":"2026-04","story_title":"The World's Most Complex Machine","text":"Veritasium has a nice video about it [VIDEO] Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why. But it boils down to having the vision, the belief and the strength to follow through over many years. It's important to not confound vision with random Kool-Aid. Instead it's grounded in research. That research is itself grounded in a strong vision and belief \u2014 it got laughed by the entire physics community at the time: > 'people seemed unwilling to believe bending x-rays, and they tended to that we had actually made an image by regard the whole thing as a big fish story Now contrast this with the current academic reality \u2014 \"publish or perish\" and the reality of venture financing and corporate culture that \"depends\" (arguably in self-inflicted manner, that's not 100% the case) on quarterly repots. ASML is just a recent story, but if you look back, you'll see that most revolutions have a similar pattern of people crazy enough to deviate from the herd. The rest\u2014 the immense financial risk, the 5000 suppliers, etc. came as a result of having the ability to see through all the noise and the grit to to follow through when everyone calls you an idiot for not doing something \"useful\"","stance":"rec"}],"MijmeoH9LT4":[{"hn_comment_id":11516760,"author":"douche","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Falsehoods programmers believe about time and time zones","text":"That is one of my all-time favorite youtube videos... This one, and a similar one on unicode[1], are my goto exhibits when I need to illustrate to a non-technical family member how much background complexity is involved in software [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24159983,"author":"wcarss","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Unicode in five minutes (2013)","text":"Something complementary -- because this article just takes a moment to talk about the different encoding schemes -- a wonderful, terse, very informative video describing how utf-8 encoding works and why (with a little history) by Tom Scott/Computerphile: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38833197,"author":"janvdberg","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Tom Scott: After ten years, it's time to stop making videos [video]","text":"Tom is why I understand UTF-8 [1]. And it is not so much WHAT he explained but HOW he explained it, what really made it stick. It was his sheer unbridled genuine enthusiasm that put him on the map for me. One of the best to do it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7363492,"author":"mcphilip","month":"2014-03","story_title":"LHC Physics Center bans Powerpoint, switches to whiteboard-only forums","text":"I love Numberphile too and recently stumbled on Computerphile. The style is the same for both shows -- a passionate person explaining something reasonably complex. For instance, I like Computerphile's video on the evolution of character encoding and why UTF was developed. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MjdpR-TY6QU":[{"hn_comment_id":16098997,"author":"MMTP","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Beginner's guide to longevity research","text":"Yes this is a great introduction into the topic. I would also recommend checking out www.leafscience.org home of the LEAF foundation. They are the guys who did that great video with Kurzgesagt last year and their website is packed with great info about aging and research. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34552332,"author":"wilg","month":"2023-01","story_title":"$6.96B was raised by private longevity companies in 2022","text":"My opinion on the topic changed significantly after watching these great videos: - Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever? - Kurzgesagt - [LINK] - How to Cure Aging \u2013 Kurzgesagt - [VIDEO] - Why Die? - CGP Grey - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25567792,"author":"DrRobinson","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are you surprised isn\u2019t being worked on more?","text":"Seems like many people are new to this concept and feel skeptical so here are some useful resources: * Kurzgesagt: How to Cure Aging \u2013 During Your Lifetime? (7:20) [VIDEO] * Kurzgesagt: Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever? (6:48) [LINK] * Why we should cure ageing (11:30) - Heads up, it's a book intro [LINK] * Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old (Book, not yet released in the US) [LINK] * Lifespan: Why we age and why we don't have to (book) [LINK] * Google talk: Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To (55:13) - By the author of the book [LINK] Edit: * If you wish to contribute to this kind of research make sure to check out SENS: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Mjx3S3UjmnA":[{"hn_comment_id":11519901,"author":"peletiah","month":"2016-04","story_title":"System Overload","text":"There was this great video last year, illustrating how outdated and error prone the signalling technology in the NY subway is: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18643239,"author":"robocat","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks (2015)","text":"\"They even put out a video that gleefully shows off the worst stuff. Look at how broken it is! Look at how old!\" [VIDEO] Well made video that helps understand the interlocks - if you like antique systems!","stance":"rec"}],"MkJkyMuBm3g":[{"hn_comment_id":46139758,"author":"bsimpson","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Ghostty is now non-profit","text":"BSD-0 is a public-domain-equivalent license. The guy who published it is one of the few people who has actually been involved in a lawsuit to try to assert a copyleft license. The whole thing was such a bad experience for him that he decided copyleft licenses are a false goal. You should watch his talk: [VIDEO] (He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar project under the more free MIT license.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28650578,"author":"tlamponi","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line","text":"> Toybox's main goal is to make Android self-hosting by improving Android's command line utilities so it can build an installable Android Open Source Project image entirely from source under a stock Android system. -- [LINK] Possibly also interesting: Toyboy vs. Busybox [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28655340,"author":"Ciantic","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line","text":"I dug up one of his latest YouTube videos, which I think as a whole is good watch. Here is the licensing part: - [VIDEO] (at 25:25) Also I think it's worth to listen the first 10 minutes as an intro, and brief about licensing from 5 minutes forward. Where he explains how BusyBox's licensing was then used by other people as \"beating tool\" to get hardware specs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30554525,"author":"freemint","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name","text":"A great talk on software licensing made by the creator of the 0BSD license (Rob Landley) and the history behind the license is here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30555516,"author":"freemint","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name","text":"Yes. At least if you want people who have to talk to lawyers to use the code. Lawyers don't like that. For some anecdotes see this talk [VIDEO] (worth the hour, althoug Rob Landley write the same thing on his website too but to lazy to Google that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45488566,"author":"coffeebeanHH","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line","text":"It's sort of a remastered Version of busybox. Please refer to Rob himself for explaining. There's a good intro on yt [1] and a \"demo\" in [2] edit: Well Sorry, [2] was about mkroot. I just skipped through the video. I thought it was related to toybox/busybox. Maybe somewhere in the talk. Has been a while since I last watched it. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"MlhAkNWC1qo":[{"hn_comment_id":15332205,"author":"sarabande","month":"2017-09","story_title":"YC\u2019s Essential Startup Advice","text":"I would check out the writings of 37Signals (now Basecamp)/RoR founder David Heinemeier Hansson, who advocates bootstrapping for not-necessarily small markets. His talk \"How to unlearn your MBA\" in particular was fantastic in providing a counterpoint to Silicon-valley style Startups: [VIDEO] . He directly comments on the YCombinator model at 53'57\" ( [VIDEO] ), but the whole thing is worth watching.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24630127,"author":"AgloeDreams","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Do things that don't require scale","text":"Reminds me of this very controversial but incredible talk by @DHH of Basecamp/Hey: [VIDEO] Things that don't require scale require a VERY different line of business thinking, generally centered around profits vs growth.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"Mlrrc_vy79E":[{"hn_comment_id":30809987,"author":"somedude895","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Wolfenstein 3D secrets revealed by John Romero in lengthy post-mortem chat","text":"I can't wait for this to go up on Youtube. GDC post mortems are amazing, especially the ones on Diablo[0] and Fallout[1]. I've loved Fallout since I was 12 and it really got me into post-apocalypse fiction. I ended up watching and reading all the media that Tim cites in his presentation and discovered some wonderful things like On the Beach (the book by Nevil Shute AND the movie), A Canticle for Leibowitz, etc [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32750926,"author":"namelosw","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?","text":"An even more interesting and funny perspective is from another programmer beforehand: In this post-mortem talk [0] on Diablo 1. The creator mentioned his worst business decision - the Hotmail guy offering 10% of the company in return for an office in the back they weren't even using, and he rejected it. According to him, the pitch was: \"I'm going to make email over the Internet\". His response: \"Dude, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard! What are you talking about, I already have my email over the Internet - this isn't even an invention!\". 14 months later, that 10% was worth $40 million. Meanwhile they agreed to do Diablo only for $300k for Blizzard, and that was a bad deal - they even had to find more contracts to compensate it. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37967547,"author":"martinohansen","month":"2023-10","story_title":"MMO Architecture: clients, sockets, threads and connection-oriented servers","text":"Unrelated to the post here, but I think both Pat and this guy[1] say that they build the multiplayer for Diablo by themselves\u2026 Anyhow, both talks are fascinating and surely worth a watch. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MmG2ah5Df4g":[{"hn_comment_id":34103543,"author":"vanillaicesquad","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Why We Might Be Alone","text":"toda particula es la expresion de un campo de fuerza, no tiene localidad en el sentido de que no existe en el espacio (es una propiedad del espacio) Si quieres saber mas mira este video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37269944,"author":"petermcneeley","month":"2023-08","story_title":"We are not empty: The concept of the atomic void is a mistake","text":"I mean there are ways to visualize these things [VIDEO] this aligns with goal of the article \"We build new mental images of the quantum world one step at a time, even under the risk of tripping up here and there.\"","stance":"rec"}],"MnrJzXM7a6o":[{"hn_comment_id":33271620,"author":"senttoschool","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Meta and the Innovator's Dilemma","text":">It wasn't \"so much more advanced\", it used a heavily power constrained ARM SoC with limited memory running a software stack ported over from desktop and gosh could you ever feel it. [VIDEO] I highly recommend watching this.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24279553,"author":"maneesh","month":"2020-08","story_title":"My startup validation process","text":"Phone, music player, and internet communicator in a single device, that enabled worldwide communication reliably. Just the original phone solved voicemail (with visual voicemail) once and for all in one fell swoop. It was just echelons better. That part of the initial demo still continues to blow my mind. [LINK] Here\u2019s the original introduction to the iphone: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33317946,"author":"vparikh","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How to show a not \u201cso perfect\u201d MVP to potential customers?","text":"If you want to se the ultimate MVP demo of a product look no further than the 2007 introduction of the Apple iPhone - [VIDEO] It was not a finished product and the dev team was terrified that the system would crash. In fact you could argue that the first iPhone was an MVP released to the public. These would help: - Be upfront that this is an MVP. Do not try to sell it as a product that is a finished product - Create a script that shows the core working functionality - rehearse the script and make sure the feature list demonstrated and that you can run through the script - In your case, is it possible that you can dictate (you need to control the variables)? - Ask for feed back. Listen. Do not try to defend the product. Hope this helps","stance":"rec"}],"MnyeRlMsTgI":[{"hn_comment_id":34843445,"author":"patmorgan23","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars","text":"You don't think those elderly people who are having trouble driving would love the opportunity to hold on a light rail line so they can take a stroll downtown in with their grandkids? There is no good transit system in north America. If you want to see good transit you have to go to Europe, Asia or Latin America, where even small towns can have robust transit with high ridership. North America is comically car dependent because we build everything only focusing on how cars are going to get in and out, and require ludicrous amounts of parking onsite basically everywhere. Our transit systems are almost always an after thought in the land use planning process. We surround places in seas of parking and put transit stops on the edge of them or put transit stops on highway access road with no sidewalks. The transit systems are often viewed and built as a charity service provided for the poor that no respectable person would use daily. The schedules rarely have sufficient frequency to make the service actually usable. Our zoning codes make building walkable places that could support and be supported by transit illegal or restrict them to only small specific TOD projects. Here's a great video essay on what north America gets wrong when building transit [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37110317,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Texas could get a bullet train between Houston and Dallas","text":"There are several talking points mentioned in this thread that are explored more on the NotJustBikes YouTube Channel. - When Canada built a relatively recent urban rail to Toronto, they built it so you have to drive to the train station , and used the high value land right around the station for ... surface car parking. This is absurdly wasteful of valuable real estate and makes the expensive train add much less value to the people. Also the train only runs around rush hours, making it useless for almost anyone who isn't driving to the train for a commute to work. \"The Trains that Subsidize Suburbia - GO Transit Commuter Rail\" - [LINK] - \"Why city design is import (and why I hate Houston)\" [it's not walkable] - [LINK] - How American urban transit is built misunderstanding the way transit needs to work to be successful, notably trying to build transit as a bandaid over car problems, but not making it regular, frequent, reliable, fast, convenient, instead plonking an isolated transit connection from nowhere to nowhere which runs once every couple of hours and then pointing to it as an example of how transit doesn't work in America - \"America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)\" - [VIDEO] - Addressing the \"America is too big and spread out for rail\" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - \"The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities\" - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"MondapIjAAM":[{"hn_comment_id":35659187,"author":"asmor","month":"2023-04","story_title":"'Devastating' melt of Greenland, Antarctic ice sheets found","text":"We got surprisingly close, so close that Exxon had a division on renewable energy in the 80s (but then decided to spend that money on lobbying and disinformation instead). Climate Town has a great video essay on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28698855,"author":"erdo","month":"2021-09","story_title":"How I debate","text":"When do you consider the left to have moved on climate? Climate change was a fairly bi-partisan issue initially. George Bush is famous for pushing cap and trade ideas in the late 80s early 90s for instance ClimateTown has a fairly entertaining video about it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37801040,"author":"asmor","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Shell Using Fortnite, TikTok, etc. to Convince Kids Fossil Fuels Are Cool","text":"By the late 70s wasn't a secret, it's more that nobody would listen over the sound of oil prices crashing half a decade later. Exxon even briefly had a substantial research division into renewables. In the 80s! YouTube channel Climate Town has a very good summary of history of early climate chance action, The Time America Almost Stopped Climate Change [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MpfvhiqFw7A":[{"hn_comment_id":13627330,"author":"nadaviv","month":"2017-02","story_title":"The True Cost of Bitcoin Transactions","text":"> partly because these off-chain networks would quickly form large central \"hubs\" which would obviate many of the benefits of Bitcoin The Lightning Network is open-source and decentralized. It has no \"hubs\", but rather just peers that route payments to each-other using a payment routing algorithm. Lightning has no counterparty risk, as no one can ever steal your bitcoins and you're always in full control. The best way to describe Lightning is as an write-cache layer. It improves the scalability properties of Bitcoin by many factors, makes micro- and nano- payments a reality, reduces fees to fractions of a cent, and even improves privacy (using a Tor-like onion routing for anonymized payments). [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16595317,"author":"apo","month":"2018-03","story_title":"First Lightning mainnet release","text":"Each transaction spending the locked funds bears the signature of the party making the payment. The other party can then provide the counter-signature making the transaction valid on the Bitcoin network. The main security problem to solve is preventing one party from publishing a previous channel state (half-signed transaction) giving themselves more money than they actually have by rights. For example, Alice and Bob might start with a channel giving each of them 5 bitcoin. Then Alice makes two one-bitcoin payments to Bob: A | B ------ 4 | 6 3 | 7 Alice decides she wants to take back her last payment and instead publish the earlier transaction (signed by Bob) giving herself 4 bitcoin rather than the one giving herself 3. This problem is solved with hashed timelock contracts (HTLCs). Without getting too technical, HTLCs make it possible for a party who spots a counterparty attempting to publish an invalid transaction to take all of the money in the channel (i.e., Bob would take all 10 bitcoin). The main idea is that cryptographic hash functions are one-way. If I make a payment contingent on knowing a preimage to a hash value, I can cause the payment to become valid by revealing the preimage. Along with the signature to a transaction, Alice must also give Bob the preimage for the previous transaction before he will accept it. When she does, Bob knows that if Alice tries to play games, he can take all of her money. This video gives a high-level overview: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MsbiO8EAsGw":[{"hn_comment_id":17993346,"author":"guitarbill","month":"2018-09","story_title":"E Ink Waveforms are a closely guarded secret","text":"Ben Krasnow (Applied Science on YouTube) did some research into driving e-Ink displays, and he made some similar observations: > All of the lookup table information has been removed from this datasheet, because the industry thrives on secrecy or something Highly recommended, as usual for him it's a great video/write-up: * [VIDEO] * [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23028190,"author":"reom_tobit","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Hacking Together an E-ink Dashboard","text":"yeah I believe that was the only option for older / cheaper displays. I recently got a kindle for a present and notice that when it can, it will try to refresh the screen as little as possible. For example, when you press the top of the screen to bring up the settings, only the top cycles, and then the same when you tap below to get rid of the settings. To that end, I would be interested in watching some high-speed camera footage of the displays just to see the gears turn. I\u2019ll have a look round and edit this comment if I find any. e: found one. [LINK] also a video from an engineering channel that normally gives good insight into these things, I have watched it yet so it may not be great, but Applied Engineering normally brings some interesting material. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23900165,"author":"sparker72678","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Reasonably priced color e-ink display","text":"Turns out that e-ink displays typically don't mix colors this way. In order to get multiple colors in a single display, they use sort of colored-balls of various densities suspended in a fluid. Then, using the known viscosities of the fluid in the capsules, they can vary the charge of the electrodes very quickly to sort of _drag_ a color up to the top. But when you do this, you're dragging a _single_ color. _All_ the colors are in the capsule, but you can only truly pull a single one at a time, a true pigment-like mixing isn't possible. If you pull the Cyan up, you're necessarily losing the Magenta, for example. If you had a high enough resolution addressable grid, you might be able to put the pixels close enough that you couldn't tell, but you'd still be basically doing sub-pixel color at that point, not truly mixing the various colors at the base level. Maybe there are other e-ink displays doing something else, but all the ones I've seen are doing some form of this approach. Here's a fascinating video on how these displays work, and how you can modify the firmware of the driver to get faster refresh rates (with an increased risk of burn-in). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23900172,"author":"sparker72678","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Reasonably priced color e-ink display","text":"Great video on these sorts of displays, what they're capable of, and perhaps some inspiration for any hobby projects: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25946688,"author":"progman32","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Show HN: Low-power Kindle-based dashboard","text":"It's possible to refresh e-ink without a global flash if you are careful and have a clever controller. I don't think this video directly addresses this but it gives a good overview on the problem space [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MtxA20Q-Uss":[{"hn_comment_id":10040373,"author":"hwillis","month":"2015-08","story_title":"High precision air bearing CNC lathe and grinder [video]","text":"Part 10 [1] of his prototypes series also features incredibly impressive precision. He starts off with a $10 piece of aluminum that took maybe an hour or two to make, and is completely accurate down to nanometers. I worked in a nanotech lab with an electron microscope, and the idea that you could make a mechanical device that could accurately move a few pixels on my screen blew my mind. I thought I was hot shit with all my electrons and magnets... nope. Dan's flexure is so sensitive that radiative heat from his hand moves the end stage 100x more than mechanical input. You could move it by shining a laser pointer at it. Insane. The final part [2] is also very neat, and starts with a really remarkable demonstration of stiffness. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19350902,"author":"mrob","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Metal Lathe Made from Scrap Auto Parts","text":"Bolting parts together is better because it means you can disassemble it for transport or maintenance. Perhaps surprisingly, this doesn't harm the performance. Lathes, and machine tools in general, are built for extreme stiffness, not extreme strength. Dan Gelbart has a very interesting demonstration showing how a weak structure can still have good stiffness: [VIDEO] The rest of this video series is also well worth watching.","stance":"rec"}],"MtzCLd93SyU":[{"hn_comment_id":18696763,"author":"mlindner","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Sandspiel \u2013 A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL","text":"Many games don't have win states or shouldn't have win states. More people need to listen to what Sid Meier has said on this. That HN article was written by someone who did not know what they were talking about. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12813688,"author":"timo614","month":"2016-10","story_title":"What Sid Meier\u2019s Video Game Empire Got Right and Wrong About \u2018Civilization\u2019","text":"Agreed; the point of the game is to make you feel like a God. Sid Meier gave a talk at the GDC: [VIDEO] In it he explained how Civilization tested random negative events that could shape your world. He mentioned how this had a negative effect on the player experience and many times people would just grab a past save to avoid them IIRC.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19408327,"author":"codetrotter","month":"2019-03","story_title":"How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games (2017)","text":"> The anecdote about Sid Meier hard-coding a guaranteed \"win on the third attempt\" for a battle with a 1/3 victory probability was very interesting. You might enjoy these videos as well: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20348900,"author":"ringshall","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing music in random order?","text":"This talk by Sid Meier is a good description of the problem of true randomness, from a game perspective: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MvgN5gCuLac":[{"hn_comment_id":1709889,"author":"saurabh","month":"2010-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the big deal with startups anyways...","text":"Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff? - George Carlin If you have some free time, do watch this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6588781,"author":"adolph","month":"2013-10","story_title":"How to get rid of old stuff, sell it for more, and use Amazon as cheap storage","text":"If you haven't seen it, a link I think worthy of a listen, George Carlin Talks About \"Stuff\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11162761,"author":"cfallin","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Why I don't want stuff","text":"> \"you don't own stuff; the stuff owns you\" Reminds me of the George Carlin bit on \"stuff\". Brilliant commentary on the American way, as always: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17283704,"author":"rashomon","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Toys \u2018R\u2019 Us Didn\u2019t Have to Die","text":"Any source on that theory? I think you have something solid there. George Carlin put it quite eloquently: [VIDEO] We're definitely seeing a resurgence to simplicity after advertisers had performed scorched-earth on frontal cortex lobes.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18252965,"author":"twiceaday","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt","text":"For what its worth, you are describing Carlins newer specials. His career spanned over 40 years. And yeah look at the shift in tone just from the names of his HBO specials 1977 On Location: George Carlin at USC 1978 George Carlin: Again! 1982 Carlin at Carnegie 1984 Carlin on Campus 1986 Playin' with Your Head 1988 What Am I Doing in New Jersey? 1990 Doin' It Again 1992 Jammin' in New York 1996 Back in Town ------------------------- 1999 You Are All Diseased 2001 Complaints and Grievances 2005 Life Is Worth Losing 2008 It's Bad for Ya If you are interested, check out his older stuff like Carlin on Campus. \"A Place for My Stuff\" [1] for example. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23903761,"author":"faster","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Designing a New Old Home: Part 1","text":"George Carlin did a great routine on 'stuff'. [VIDEO] \"a house is ... a pile of stuff with a cover on it\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41757691,"author":"roland35","month":"2024-10","story_title":"So thieves broke into your storage unit again","text":"What a story! Most people probably would just give up. Dealing with storage units is why I try to eliminate all the extra \"stuff\" in my life... George Carlin had a great bit on stuff: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Mvse4Xhzwuk":[{"hn_comment_id":32688024,"author":"feb","month":"2022-09","story_title":"FAA approves unleaded fuel for piston fleet","text":"Impressive work by GAMI who are working on it since decades. AVWeb made 2 videos on the subject of leaded avgas and on how hard it is to get it approved. In addition, the FAA launched several failed attempts with the industry at large. * [LINK] The Long, Twisted And Slightly Ridiculous Story of Avgas Part 1 * [VIDEO] The Long, Twisted And Slightly Ridiculous Story of Avgas Part 2 When reading the announcement, it looks like some municipalities in California started banning the sale of leaded avgas and I suspect that helped to push the FAA to finally move in approving G1000UL. Not surprisingly, they will start providing it to the California market before the other states. In the announcement on avweb.com ( [LINK] ), they also credit Mark Baker from the AOAP to encourage the FAA to complete the project.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38042348,"author":"DigiDigiorno","month":"2023-10","story_title":"EPA moves towards banning leaded aviation gas","text":"The uphill battle of unleaded avgas leaves both the main players in the industry and the regulators themselves looking bad\u2014but in a banal kinda way. I enjoy AVWeb on YT for AV news (really, I just enjoy the humor/personality of Paul Bertorelli lol), here are a few insightful videos that summarize the story: The Long, Twisted And Slightly Ridiculous Story of Avgas Part 1 (14:22) [LINK] Part 2 (15:15) [VIDEO] and G100UL Approved Now What? (When the FAA approved the first unleaded 100-octane avgas a year ago) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48874770,"author":"aftbit","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Leaded Gas Was a Known Poison the Day It Was Invented (2016)","text":"We're working on it, slowly but surely. This has been a known problem for a long time, at least since 2009 if not earlier. GAMI's G100UL was approved as a 100LL replacement in 2022, but there is still some controversy. Avweb has done a good series of videos on this. There were some real engineering concerns and some typical aviation conservative decision making. But really, it's a tragedy of the FAA fumbling the ball for decades at this point. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Mw9qiV7XlFs":[{"hn_comment_id":23552287,"author":"PeterStuer","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Drive through cities in the browser while listening to local radio stations","text":"I'm personally very fond of train cab ride videos (e.g. [VIDEO] ). You can find these on YouTube with music as well, but pairing them with local radio (in this case one of the SWR channels [LINK] ) could also be nice in this project as a non-car option.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25995740,"author":"pwarner","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Cab Ride: Drive a train, forever, through a dreamlike land","text":"I've been watching and unreasonable amount of train cab ride videos on youtube. Some how it's a good way to unwind at the end of the day, and pretend I can actually go somewhere :-) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36113003,"author":"haunter","month":"2023-05","story_title":"The Odd Appeal Of Absurdly Long YouTube Videos","text":"Some of my favorite long ones. They are incredibly relaxing. Washington DC - Seattle full trip [LINK] All PS2 games ever released [LINK] (and they have a video for every single major console too) Switzerland to Italy through the Bernina pass train ride [VIDEO] Tokyo subway Yamanote line full loop (even though it's only 1 hour long) [LINK] Tokyo highway trip [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46245415,"author":"PeterStuer","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Koralm Railway","text":"Looking forward to some nice cabride vids from this line. My favorite from this part of Europe is the Bernina Express across the alps from Switzerland to Italy. Definetly worth a slow tv watch if you love trains. (e.g. [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"Mx-AllVZ1VY":[{"hn_comment_id":13333153,"author":"fharper1961","month":"2017-01","story_title":"The Cost of Native Mobile App Development Is Too Damn High","text":"From what I've heard React Native doesn't yet handle lists containing many views without rendering the entire list. I'm looking into Flutter/Dart from Google for building iOS/Android apps from the same codebase. The SDK is still alpha so there are still rough edges, but I've created a POC app and have been able to run it on both platforms. I'm very pleased with the results so far. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15167866,"author":"alwillis","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Introduction to HTML Components","text":"There is no framework to make apps look iOSish on iOS and Androidish on Android. Back to native programming, I guess. Google's Flutter certainly creates apps (using mostly web technologies) that have the correct look and feel for Android and iOS from the same codebase. Keynote: Flutter (Dart Developer Summit 2016)\u00bb [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"My4RA5I0FKs":[{"hn_comment_id":18742051,"author":"reconbot","month":"2018-12","story_title":"What Is Glitter?","text":"Faked and discovered to include fake reactions that were then removed, are different situations. Mark has been producing high quality educational and entertaining videos that encourage kids to get into science. I have personally watched kids go nuts over his Fluidized air bed experiments, and convince their parents to try it out. [VIDEO] It sucks there was fake content in there, but the device was real and the fake actions removed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33469049,"author":"isoprophlex","month":"2022-11","story_title":"A sand battery could transform clean energy","text":"No in fact this is a bloody brilliant design: they turn it into a huge fluidized bed reactor and extract the heat with air! See this fun fluidized sand-filled jacuzzi if you're not grokking my too brief explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Mz3JeYfBTcY":[{"hn_comment_id":20665235,"author":"rkagerer","month":"2019-08","story_title":"What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?","text":"Developed RSI 15 years ago, tried all kinds of contraptions. Here's what helped me: - Kinesis Advantage keyboard w/ footswitch [LINK] - Ambidextrous mousing (one on each side, to split the load). Favor your PageUp / PageDown buttons over the evil mousewheel. - Lifestyle changes (biggest bang for the buck). Try to get at least 20 minutes of aerobic exercise in each day, e.g. running. - Proper ergonomic positioning This video from the article is a phenomenal demonstration of dictation coding: [VIDEO] Fun fact (or myth?): Your tongue is one of the few muscles in the body that can't get RSI. I played around prototyping a tongue-switch a while back using a flex sensor.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32952794,"author":"tmtvl","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Short Thoughts on Computers and Programming","text":"Yeah, when I saw Emily Shea's talk* I became aware of the accessibility-unfriendly code I normally put out. I still find myself writing bad code, but at least now I'm aware what to be aware of. * [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27537080,"author":"b2gills","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Try APL","text":"You can if you put in the work to set it up. There are two (nearly identical) talks by Emily Shea - Perl Out Loud [VIDEO] - Voice Driven Development: Who needs a keyboard anyway? [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"MzRCDLre1b4":[{"hn_comment_id":22992393,"author":"vulcan01","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?","text":"I found these two videos very helpful in understanding the quantum nature of light after being stuck in the same spot: [LINK] [VIDEO] (Watch those in order, because they're a collaboration between two YouTubers)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22990640,"author":"monocasa","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?","text":"Minute Physics and 3brown1blue did a two part collab that simplifies some of it down to a counting problem that'd be suitable for grade school. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"MzzD2F73iGU":[{"hn_comment_id":24606454,"author":"NamTaf","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Fatal brain-eating microbe found in Lake Jackson, Texas water supply","text":"Adam Savage's podcast Still Untitled did a really fantastic episode [1] back around Halloween 2018 where they had a molecular biologist come on and talk about his work. The stories he tells are absolutely fascinating and I thoroughly encourage everyone wiht any interest in molecular biology and crazy stories to check it out. I won't go into it because I'll spoil it, but suffice it to say that normal episodes are 20-30 mins, this one went for 70 mins and the first time I listened to it I immediately restarted it to listen to it again. The first half of the episode is a story that gets more and more insane as it unfolds. Afterwards, he goes into a few other shorter stories of his work. Anyway, the link to this is because there's one story from about 38:15 to about 45 minutes in that discusses brain-eating amoebas he was involved in. It's not this exact one, but it's related to it. I recommend anyone who finds this interesting to check it out. Although there's video on youtube, you really don't need video for it and your podcast app of choice should have an audio version of it. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42302151,"author":"codethief","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Fish have a brain microbiome \u2013 could humans have one too?","text":"From what I understand Joe DeRisi's approach[0] comes relatively close to your \"blender\" idea! [0]: I already mentioned Adam Savage's excellent podcast with him elsewhere in this dicussion but here's a direct link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"N-yALPEpV4w":[{"hn_comment_id":19875341,"author":"mikemotherwell","month":"2019-05","story_title":"In Australia, Coal Remains King","text":"> Australia, with it's plentiful sunshine and wide open spaces It's funny, but that sounds an AWFUL lot like the Terra Nullius argument used to disposes Indigenous people of their land. Australia's \"wide open spaces\" are home to flora and fauna that are unique and worth preserving. The idea we'd want vast swaths of solar destroying the natural environment - one that is unique and wonderful - is odd to me. [VIDEO] really changed my mind on this. I was pro-nuclear before seeing it, but am even more so after.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21112217,"author":"0xfaded","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Cascade reactions use nanoparticles to convert CO2 to complex molecules","text":"I recently watched a TED talk which changed my opinion of renewables from \"maybe\" to \"no\". Basically he argues that solar and wind are low density energy sources that require significant resources to capture, which all become waste after 25 years. Meanwhile we have nuclear which provides consistent base load, and for very good reasons we have gotten good at containing all the waste/pollution produced. I'm now of the opinion we should be on a sprint towards fusion, investing heavily in other nuclear technologies, e.g. thorium, along the way. Sorry to leave a video link, but it's what changed my mind and therefore in my opinion the best delivery of the argument I'm aware of. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24149665,"author":"kinjba1","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Air pollution is worse than we thought","text":"No energy source [that we've discovered so far] is perfect. All have downsides. Sadly, living in denial of that fact is more popular than ever, but that's a separate topic. Here are a couple TED talks showing the downside of renewable energy - such as the enormous land usage and reliable energy storage needed to compete with nuclear or fossil. Why renewables can\u2019t save the planet [VIDEO] A reality check on renewables [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"N1CBDTgGtOU":[{"hn_comment_id":28307285,"author":"mxuribe","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Miller CLI \u2013 Like Awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for CSV, TSV and JSON","text":"visdata is pretty mind-blowing...at least, that's how i felt when i saw the demo the first time: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34080079,"author":"nowahe","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)","text":"Highly recommend this as well, it has been a godsend for me for digging into multi-GB Cloudfront log files and extracting stats and patterns. There is a good (albeit a bit old now, as the interface has been overhauled since) quick demo video from VD's creator : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16515729,"author":"miles","month":"2018-03","story_title":"VisiData Lightning Demo at PyCascades 2018 [video]","text":"Thanks for your comment - I wouldn't have clicked on the video link otherwise, and it was well worth it. For others who usually skip videos, here is a link which skips the intro, getting your time investment to under 4 minutes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24775932,"author":"mwexler","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Visidata 2.0","text":"The \"video demo\" is pretty buried in the site, here it is for your enjoyment. Like most viz, seeing it in action makes it much clearer than reading about it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25323363,"author":"asamarin","month":"2020-12","story_title":"VisiData in 60 Seconds","text":"Not sure about saving but, more importantly for me, it can read sqlite DBs, which has been a godsend whenever I need to take a quick glance at some random DB just to see what kind of tables it holds and what does the data look like. I know my SELECTs but I can't, for the life of me, remember what are the commands to check schemas and DB metadata on sqlite (\"Was it .describe? Maybe .schema? Or perhaps \\t? Gah, let's check the help once again...\"), so knowing that visidata gets me there much faster feels good. > Also looks powerful in it's own right If you aren't convinced of that yet, I'd simply suggest to take a look at this lightning demo (~5 mins): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27821761,"author":"leonim","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Visidata 2.5 (vi for data) released with new \u201cduo-repo\u201d approach","text":"If you aren't familiar with Visidata, this video gives a pretty good idea of what it can do: [VIDEO] It seems like making a living on shell tools can be difficult to impossible. The author Saul is using Patreon to help fund his work on this tool. I love this tool, and hope others can help support him too. Maybe this \"duo-repo\" approach will allow him to do this full time.","stance":"rec"}],"N1pIYI5JQLE":[{"hn_comment_id":1500839,"author":"drats","month":"2010-07","story_title":"The truth about cold water","text":"I don't want to offend anyone but that article was extremely boring (I did end up reading it). I suppose I'd seen the Richard Feynman video on fire and trees quite recently beforehand and was in an intolerant mood. But it's impossible to stay in any kind of negative mood if you watch Feynman, his love of knowledge is just infectious. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4070609,"author":"halfnelson","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests","text":"If anyone wants to know the answer to that question, Richard Feynman explains it wonderfully: (He starts talking about trees at 2:00, but his explanation of fire is equally elegant!) [VIDEO] My first instinct was to say that a tree's mass comes from dead stars. Imagining how it got from those stars to the air that eventually becomes the tree would keep you busy for a while :D","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9987912,"author":"haxiomic","month":"2015-08","story_title":"GravityLight: Generate light with gravity","text":"Checkout this explanation of fire by Richard Feynman - its a really eye opening perspective [VIDEO] He explains the light of a fire is just the light of the Sun, it's just been stored in the wood","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23878347,"author":"jrscelza","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Richard Feynman cut straight to the heart of complex ideas","text":"[VIDEO] Feynman explains fire. I\u2019m a big fan and believe his crude straight to the point style, coupled with an incredible ability to storytell is what made him special. I think it\u2019s pure, genuine, curiosity and the intellectual capacity to understand the complexities.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3670419,"author":"okamiueru","month":"2012-03","story_title":"What is a flame -- how would you describe it to an 11 year old?","text":"I'd really like to hear Richard Feynman's answer. I'm sure if an 11 year old had asked the question, instead of a journalist, it would be the perfect answer. (I'm referring to an interview series with him: [VIDEO] ) Makes me sad to think I will never meet this man, nor ever be as awesome.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13363058,"author":"janvdberg","month":"2017-01","story_title":"What\u2019s a fire, and why does it burn?","text":"I thought this would be a link to a Richard Feynman video where he 'explains' fire. But it isn't, so here you go: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26972289,"author":"js2","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Where does a candle go when it burns?","text":"> Wax is made of hydrogen and carbon. Too bad he doesn't explain where the energy in the wax came from like Feynman does when explaining fire: [VIDEO] Paraffin wax is derived from petroleum, so like the wood in Feynman's explanation, the energy is from the sun via ancient photosynthesis.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30784443,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2022-03","story_title":"What\u2019s a fire and why does it burn? (2016)","text":"Compare a bunch of chemical formulas and equations in this blog with Richard Feynman's explanation of fire: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"N2jZryt607U":[{"hn_comment_id":27055117,"author":"dharmab","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Motorcycle airbag vest will stop working if you miss a payment","text":"Note that you have the option of purchasing the vest outright, and there's also a purchase option if you subscribe for 3 years, similar to a lease. In conclusion, buy a Helite Turtle. Fully offline, no electronics, and user-refillable with simple CO2 cartridges. Fortnine did a great video surverying motorcycle airbag tech: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27055693,"author":"jowsie","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Motorcycle airbag vest will stop working if you miss a payment","text":"If you're in the market for a Motorcycle Airbag, this is worth a watch. [VIDEO] If you don't wanna watch, the Helite Turtle range seem to be the best way to go.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28601092,"author":"kristofferR","month":"2021-09","story_title":"How to Ride a Motorcycle \u2013 1942 British Military Training Film [video]","text":"I think he was talking mostly about good motorcycle airbag vests like the Helite Turtle and e-Turtle. \"Good\" is an important qualifier word though, the worst airbags offer little protection and don't limit head movement. This is a great video about the Helite Turtle (it came out before the electronic e-Turtle) and motorcycle airbags in general. [VIDEO] I'll definitively grab a Helite e-Turtle when I start riding next year.","stance":"rec"}],"N3bJnKmeNJY":[{"hn_comment_id":36843015,"author":"teeray","month":"2023-07","story_title":"American universities have an incentive to seem extortionate","text":"This YouTuber[0] does an excellent job recreating chemistry research from papers and improving on the techniques to be accomplished with household materials. He documents his failures and takes an empirical approach to arriving at his successes. I\u2019m not sure of his background, but it\u2019s certainly research that he\u2019s doing. Watching his channel always reminds me that the scientific method does not have \u201cfirst obtain an expensive degree\u201d as one of its steps. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35536608,"author":"slimsag","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Energy-saving coating without pigment keeps the surface beneath cool","text":"Two YouTube researchers[0][1] (they make science content that is very much not in the traditional form of YouTube) have been working on Infrared Cooling Paint for almost a year now and have been detailing how individuals can make it at home (although a fairly involved/lengthy process today.) There's definitely something here, hopefully someone sells it pre-made, I'd love to try some. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44358781,"author":"energ8","month":"2025-06","story_title":"NASA's Voyager Found a 30k-50k Kelvin \"Wall\" at the Edge of Solar System","text":"It's a thing in from thousands of years ago [LINK] and today [LINK] for PDRC there are a couple good videos about it from NightHawkInLight [VIDEO] , [LINK] and Tech Ingredients [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46187062,"author":"jcims","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Mechanical power generation using Earth's ambient radiation","text":"DIY radiative cooling paint from YouTuber NightHawkInLight - [VIDEO] It has pretty impressive performance. Tech Ingredients did one or two vids as well - [LINK] Was thinking of whipping up a batch for my rv.","stance":"rec"}],"N4UFC0y1tY0":[{"hn_comment_id":22886973,"author":"ecdavis","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Game developers share what they're most proud of making","text":"> I wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;) I heard him mention in an interview that he received a lot of abuse (cathartic, not mean, from the way he described it). I think the mobile version actually used text messages, which must've been fun for him after the game took off. EDIT: It's here, in a GDC presentation: [VIDEO] -- the whole presentation is worth watching.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32368052,"author":"Vermeulen","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Why aren't games marketed as the work of director X like movies are?","text":"Still are a lot of indie games that are marketed based on the famous developer. Great talk on that from the GettingOverIt/QWOP dev, 'Put Your Name On Your Game' [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43178301,"author":"soulofmischief","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Freelancing: How I found clients, part 1","text":"Thank you for bringing up such a great point. I've worked with people in the past who only call me by a handle, even face to face. Some people really could care less depending on the scene. Other people will want to know everything about you, and it's your preference where your boundaries lie. I've also hired anonymous engineers before, depending on the work. If it's confidential IP or user data, it's risky to work with anonymous employees, though I am fine with them being pseudonymous within the company as long as I have verifiable data on file in the event of a sudden disappearance, breach of contract or something else. Personally, I have a few handles as well as my company, and different engagements may go through me personally or through my company. I'm forthcoming about my name in less public spaces, but Hacker News is quite a public space. I still sometimes consider attaching my name, but for now I don't. I express my own opinion on this website and don't want it to affect others. Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage have a great video [0] about the value in prominently attaching your name to your life's work and brand, and I think they raise very valid points. There are pros and cons to every approach, and I just recommend letting your principles and personal boundaries guide you; if you're fine with your name being public or semi-public, go for it. If not, you can still carve a unique path through this industry with a healthy bit of networking and showing up with a shovel. I t","stance":"rec"}],"N65DpT2nqEI":[{"hn_comment_id":32129758,"author":"greatartiste","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Picking up free lithium cells off the street and making them safe for use","text":"These things are now everywhere , not just litter but an environmental horror story and a fire risk as well. Previously I had seen them & wondered what they were then this Big Clive video explained all .. [VIDEO] I must admit the ones with 1500 mah batteries are very useful.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41947337,"author":"Crosseye_Jack","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Disposable vapes to be banned in England and Wales","text":"[VIDEO] <--- BigClive scavenging cells from vapes. (Basically where I got the idea from) The cells are generally just \"push fit\", maybe with some kapton tape or foam to give them a snug fit. As for taking the vapes apart, A pair of pliers and some brute force is typically all that is needed to get them apart. Cell shape is either cylindrical or rectangular, depends on the vapes shape really. You get the knack of remembering/guessing what the shape will be just by looking at the vape.","stance":"rec"}],"N6xLMUifbxQ":[{"hn_comment_id":19562023,"author":"reitzensteinm","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Tanks Are Mighty Fine Things (1946)","text":"I've been to the tank museum in Munster (not to be confused with M\u00fcnster if you ever decide to go!). Looking up close, comparing the American and German WWII tanks to the Russian ones is absolutely night and day. The alignment of the panels and the welding on a Tiger tank looks (to an untrained eye) pretty much as good as you could make a mass produced vehicle back then. A T34 by contrast has haphazard misalignments connected by welding that looks like mine did when I was learning in high school. So you can see with your own eyes that they essentially put the bare minimum of quality in to them. This is a very interesting talk on the manufacturing efficiency of the US, Russia and Germany in WW2, which drills down into the details of how the factories were organized and the difference in man hours spent on each (which I'll spoil the bottom line of here: US 10k, SU 35-50k, DE 300k). We've all heard stories about how Russian tanks in certain cases were driven out of factories partially completed straight in to combat, but up until I watched it I hadn't heard of Tiger tanks being rejected by the Wehrmacht because they didn't latest gear stick design. I highly recommend it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18642588,"author":"avar","month":"2018-12","story_title":"The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)","text":"I found this conference talk about WWII being at its heart a \"battle of the factories\" enlightening on this point: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24954478,"author":"chewz","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Photos from inside a Typhoon class submarine","text":"In the video I have linked below, in third lecture Jonathan Parshall compares industrial doctrines of tank manufacturing by Nazi Germamy, Soviet Union and USA during WW2. Very enlightening. Three different systems, three different manufacturing philosophies. - Germany - pre-industrial artisan manufacture (250 modifications during 2-year production run of 1347 units, 300 thousand man-hours per tank vs American 10 thousand man-hours) - USA - Detroit style horizontal mass production (US scaled down tanks production in 1944 due to overproduction in 1943) - Soviet Union - cost-optimized, vertical mass production (the average tank lasted only 14 hours in battle anyway) [VIDEO] Tank Production: A Comparative Study of output in Germany, the US, and the USSR Jonathan Parshall.","stance":"rec"}],"N8SS-rUEZPg":[{"hn_comment_id":2774331,"author":"gary4gar","month":"2011-07","story_title":"Firebug lead developer now working on Web dev tools at Google","text":"I am Sold. I am switching to WebDev tools. If anyone needs an intro, here is video of session done during Google I/O 2011 -> Google I/O 2011: Chrome Dev Tools Reloaded [VIDEO] Btw, Paul Irish is co-presenter ;)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3880689,"author":"wyck","month":"2012-04","story_title":"Modern Web Development","text":"Here ya go, in video too (Google I/O) [VIDEO] Also has a part on remote debugging which the article doesn't.","stance":"rec"}],"N8elxpSu9pw":[{"hn_comment_id":19026585,"author":"petercooper","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Let\u2019s Create a Speech Synthesizer in C++17 [video]","text":"Agreed. My favourite programming YouTuber by a long stretch. If anyone is unfamiliar with him and wants to watch some of the \"classics\" I'd recommend these: His \"cracking videogame passwords\" series: [LINK] Creating a Doom-style 3D engine in C: [LINK] Creating a Rogue-like game in C++11: [LINK] Creating a PIC16 emulator and NES music player: [LINK] Creating a NES emulator: [LINK] Creating a DOS VGA raytracer: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25637568,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering","text":"Bisqwit's discussion of dithering is outstanding . He presents a very impressive algorithm for arbitrary-palette dithering that is animation safe . > This paper introduces a patent-free positional (ordered) dithering algorithm that is applicable for arbitrary palettes. Such dithering algorithm can be used to change truecolor animations into paletted ones, while maximally avoiding unintended jitter arising from dithering. He demonstrates it \"live coding\" style in this[1] video where he writes a demo in 256 colors of a \"starfield\" animation with color blending and Gaussian blur style bloom. The first animation at 6:33 using traditional ordered dithering has the usual annoying artifacts. The animation at 13:00 using an optimal palette and his \"gamma-aware Knoll-Yliluom positional dithering\" changed my understanding of what was possible with a 256 color palette. The animation even looks decent[2] dithered all the way down to a 16 color palette! If that wasn't crazy enough, he also \"live codes\" a raytracer[3] in DOS that \"renders in 16-color VGA palette at 640x480 resolution.\" [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"N9RUqGYuGfw":[{"hn_comment_id":23961926,"author":"lubesGordi","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Basics of Haskell \u2013 Code and exercises","text":"Agreed! I've been trying to learn haskell for a long time, and this guy writes a json parser live, giving his intuition along the way. It's helped me immensely. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24377187,"author":"ducaale","month":"2020-09","story_title":"List of YouTube channels for improving web development and programming skills","text":"I have recently discovered [tsoding twitch channel]( [LINK] ) which describes itself as Recreational programming. The topics range from webassembly and Game development to functional programming in haskell and ocaml. Some of the interesting random things I found there include: * [a parser combinator in haskell]( [VIDEO] ) * [stack based language compiler in ocaml]( [LINK] ) You can find all the things that were done during the streams in [LINK] . You can also find his schedule at [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30623618,"author":"ObiWanFrijoles","month":"2022-03","story_title":"What Is IO Monad? (2018) [video]","text":"Nice to see Tsoding on the front page. He has another great video that covers a bunch of topics while making a JSON parser with only the Haskell standard library: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"N9c7_8Gp7gI":[{"hn_comment_id":17515727,"author":"skadamat","month":"2018-07","story_title":"People Aren\u2019t Dumb, the World Is Hard","text":"I would really really encourage everyone here to watch Alan Kay's recent talks on how poorly we understand systems and why it's critical we get better at managing them. Some good ones: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] Some people have strong opinions about Alan Kay's CS / programming work and I'd really encourage them to put them aside and deeply understand his points + context. The programming parts aren't ever the point, he's deeply interested in how as humans we improve our ability to collaboratively manage systems.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20506329,"author":"morphle","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What people skills do you wish you learned earlier in your career?","text":"I tend to want to teach these people, point them to books and knowledge so they can learn and be less shallow. That is a sure way to piss almost all of them off (unless they become your students), which rarely happens. Alan Kay describes and analyses why the majority of humanity act like you describe in many of his lectures. He answers and explains most of your points. Its hard to recommend these talks, the good bits are spread around 50 lectures. I'll be happy to discuss with you which bits you'll like. A first suggestion is [1][2]. >I really want is to talk to deeply self-aware people struggling with the boundaries of human knowledge. I love to talk to such people also, so I search for them in the (scientific) crowd and befriend them so we can have those interesting conversations. Please contact me (morphle @ ziggo dot nl) and lets find out if we can have such a meaningful and satisfying exchange. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NAh9oLs67Cw":[{"hn_comment_id":25064750,"author":"bdowling","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (2004)","text":"I prefer `lasagnacat` for my existential/surreal Garfield riffs. [LINK] My favorite may be this one, a one-hour single-take monologue about finding the meaning of life in a Garfield strip. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35413912,"author":"adzm","month":"2023-04","story_title":"If Philip Glass Were a Film","text":"I never realized this was also the score used in the 07/27/1978 episode of Lasagna Cat [0] which is also a great watch. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36121487,"author":"adzm","month":"2023-05","story_title":"The Odd Appeal Of Absurdly Long YouTube Videos","text":"It's only an hour, but I love this deep absurd analysis of a single Garfield comic. An hour long, set to the music of Kundun by Philip Glass. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NAsM30MAHLg":[{"hn_comment_id":16308932,"author":"JshWright","month":"2018-02","story_title":"The Engineering of the Drinking Bird Toy [video]","text":"If you haven't watched all of Bill's videos, you should put them on your list right right now. His early stuff was a great mixture of goofy humor and fascinating explanations of the engineering behind various everyday objects. His more recent stuff has (unfortunately, in my opinion) dropped most of the comedy, but really stepped up the overall quality. Some highlights: His series on Faraday's Chemical History of a Candle lectures: [LINK] His series on Albert Michelson\u2019s Harmonic Analyzer (a century old device that can mechanically perform Fourier transforms) [VIDEO] I'd also really recommend his book on R101, the last great British airship. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29650279,"author":"amatic","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Analog computers were the most powerful computers for thousands of years [video]","text":"There is a series of four fantastic videos about a successor to Thompson's tidal analyzer - the Michaelson's Harmonic Analyzer; here is the first video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17749322,"author":"Quequau","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Tide-Predicting Machine No. 2","text":"It's not in use today but if you haven't already seen it, I bet you would enjoy Bill Hammack's series explaining how a 100 year old mechanical harmonic analyzer works. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21002039,"author":"_edo","month":"2019-09","story_title":"UCLA\u2019s 1948 Mechanical Computer [video]","text":"Very cool. Also, if you're into this sort of thing here's the first in a seven video series on a very different mechanical computer - Albert Michelson's Harmonic Analyzer which does Fourier Analysis: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28637362,"author":"tasty_freeze","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Fourier Series Visualisation with D3","text":"If you like this, you might also like Bill Hammack's series on a mechanical version of a fourier synthesizer (OK) and analyzer (wow!). Although it is multiple parts, each one is very short. [VIDEO] As a side note, the guy who designed it was Michelson, famous for the Michaelson/Morley experiment that disproved the existence of the luminiferous ether.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34389413,"author":"dghughes","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence","text":"Many here probably have seen The Engineer Guy's series of videos showing a Fourier Analysis machine. If not here it is it's a great watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NBvbsPNBIyk":[{"hn_comment_id":3818613,"author":"Keyframe","month":"2012-04","story_title":"Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore, dies at age 83","text":"RIP Jack Tramiel! Here is Computer History Museum 25th Anniversary Celebration of Commodore 64 with him on the panel [VIDEO] Micro computers were a startup movement in a true sense of the word.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12542648,"author":"rasz_pl","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Commodore Back in Germany","text":"my favorite apple commodore exchange summing up the whole deal happened during computer history museums Commodore 64 25th anniversary panel [VIDEO] . paraphrasing Tramiel: Unlike Apple I made computers for the lowest price possible enabling millions to own one. Wozniak: Unlike you Apple sold their computers at the price point that allowed them to not go bankrupt.","stance":"rec"}],"ND2TeNfcmKA":[{"hn_comment_id":39699426,"author":"shantara","month":"2024-03","story_title":"How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s","text":"I'll recommend a couple of other channels: - Old Royal Navy instruction manuals and documentaries: [LINK] My favorite is Hands To Flying Stations (1975): [LINK] - Historic films and clips, mostly focused on workplace safety: [LINK] My favorite is NASA's Toxic Propellant Hazards: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38798104,"author":"kens","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Chinese villagers capture video of falling Long March rocket booster [video]","text":"NASA has a vintage 1966 video \"Toxic Propellant Hazards in Rocketry\" that provides an interesting discussion of the dangers of nitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine propellants. It includes people mixing them together in the desert, along with a dramatization of how to deal with a nitrogen tetroxide leak. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NGFhc8R_uO4":[{"hn_comment_id":12430516,"author":"cnvogel","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Xerox Alto Restoration Part 5 [video]","text":"There's a brilliant talk, given in 2009 at HOPE09, NYC titled \"Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips\". At roughly 36 minutes, there's a cross-section of a (in 2009) modern chip. The topmost layer is the shiny rainbowy topmost metal-layer you see on typical (from the top) die photographs. The very, very small comb-looking bottommost-layer is the individual transistors, and structures there are of the size that give a \"xxx nm\" process its name. [VIDEO] I very much recommend everyone to watch this video, to get a sense for the complexity that goes into producing a modern CPU. To come back to the thread I'm answering here: The logic analyzer on the Alto (probing microcode) connected to interconnects of individual gates probably would be connected to signals somewhere in the lower middle of the stack in a modern CPU, I guess.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17386821,"author":"ahakki","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How modern chips are made?","text":"[VIDEO] This talk on YouTube is the most in depth explanation of IC manufacuring I have seen. I highly recommend it to anyone, no matter their background. You really gain an appreciation of how insanely complex modern computers are. It\u2019s from 2012 but he talks extensivly about how (2012-)future chips will be made. And most of the information is still applicable.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17856303,"author":"manigandham","month":"2018-08","story_title":"GlobalFoundries Stops All 7nm Development","text":"I highly recommend watching this, it's one of the best videos available on how chips are actually built and gives a great overview: \"Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18220278,"author":"Qub3d","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips [0]. This talk is delivered really well and always leaves me with a sense of awe in how CRAZY it is that humans figured out integrated circuits. Its a bit out of date, but it gives enough of a peek under the hood to understand why Intel has had such difficulties going to 10 and 7mn processes[1]. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21773218,"author":"sl-1","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Intel\u2019s Manufacturing Roadmap from 2019 to 2029","text":"Best resource I have run in to about this is this talk: [VIDEO] It quickly introduces the various hacks we do in order to get ~30nm features on silicon. But the talk is quite dated (early 2010's), but never ceases to amaze me. Semiconductors are indistinguishable from magic indeed.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22644835,"author":"olliej","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Intel Video Shows How It Makes a 10nm Processor","text":"I found this to be basically an ad. My favourite video on them is this one from many years ago, it\u2019s a presentation by an engineer not being paid by a fab: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22940681,"author":"TrainedMonkey","month":"2020-04","story_title":"To make a perfect mirror, physicists confront the mystery of glass","text":"If you think this is cool, watch this video. I've linked a relevant to the comment portion, but entire video is amazing: [VIDEO] P.S. if anyone knows a more modern version of this talk, I would love to see it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40900314,"author":"gary_0","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor","text":"It takes years just to figure out how to use the machines to produce actual working chips. They're the most specialized, intricate, expensive machines in the world. They're operated in enormous clean rooms that only allow for 1 half-micron sized particle per cubic foot. No fab is going to run them without exactly following the procedures they have spent billions developing and testing. They are also going to avoid potential delays as much as possible because these machines have to be running for as much of their useful life as possible to recoup the vast expense. The level of risk-averseness is insane, but warranted. If you haven't watched this video, I highly recommend it: Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips [VIDEO] It's a little outdated now, but very comprehensive and gives you an idea of how totally nuts the chip business is.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11544442,"author":"tcas","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Inside Pascal: Nvidia 's Newest Computing Platform","text":"I do not have the answers for your questions (and I don't think anyone can share actual failure rates), but I would direct you this video which goes over a lot of modern chip fabrication techniques, circa 2009: [VIDEO] It's crazy stuff. There are wafer test machines which will interface with the wafer directly and do some testing (which are $$$$), JTAG type tests, which access parts of the chip out of band, and functional testing. Some products, like SD Cards actually have a microcontroller on board that will provide the test routines and error correction without the need of an expensive machine. Design for test is extremely important. I'm by no means an expert however, I mostly deal with JTAG and functional tests.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11771009,"author":"avs733","month":"2016-05","story_title":"A2: Analog Malicious Hardware [pdf]","text":"If you forgive the shameless self-promotion, I did a talk on the scale and economics and so forth a while back you might find interesting: [VIDEO] It has been posted on HN a few times before...the technology still puts a tingle in my spine [insert critcism of how I need to be a better public speaker here]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14134944,"author":"jacquesm","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled","text":"There are some exotic processes that give better performance but the economies of scale aren't there yet and the cost of production is probably always going to be much higher than that of Silicon, which is after all a very abundant element on Earth. There was a fantastic video about IC manufacturing linked here on HN a while ago, I'm not sure if I'll be able to find it. edit: Hah, found it :) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16175947,"author":"taspeotis","month":"2018-01","story_title":"How we made the microprocessor","text":"I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity in a contemporary CPU. Recently I saw this video [1] and only juuust started to get an inkling as to how big the problem space is. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22523028,"author":"saganus","month":"2020-03","story_title":"New AMD side channel attacks discovered, impacts Zen architecture","text":"Sounds like this video: Indistinguishable from magic: Manufacturing modern computer chips [VIDEO] Just amazing. I wish a newer video explaining more recent technologies was available.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23977439,"author":"SonOfLilit","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Intel Ponte Vecchio GPU Will Be Made on TSMC 6nm Process, CPUs Could Be TSMC 3nm","text":"Each additional step requires solving a lot of new engineering problems and usually some new physics too, and it's not a linear process: many techniques are proposed that become cost effective only when previous techniques hit their size limits, and then a lot of research is done and most techniques are never gotten to work at scale and just a few pan out and become the next process. This is a great talk on the history of chip processes: [VIDEO] This is about some of the challenges that had to be solved for a current modern process: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24511643,"author":"xoa","month":"2020-09","story_title":"TSMC\u2019s Wafer Prices Revealed: 300mm Wafer at 5nm Is Nearly $17,000","text":"Just doing some napkin math to give myself some other context in my own head with something much smaller, die size for the Apple A14 isn't out yet, but the A13 (found in the iPhone 11 series and SE 2) is around 98mm^2 manufactured on TSMC's 2nd gen 7nm N7P. A14 might be something like that, because while it's a smaller process Apple boosted transistor count by 38% as well. Lazily/conservatively taking off 10mm on the edge for squares into a circle, that'd be about 630 chips per N5 wafer, a high enough count that chip loss rate shouldn't be too far from defect rate. Even assuming they can get 90% yield right out the gate (maybe generous) that's still about $30/chip, just for manufacturing without any R&D amortization, packaging etc. That actually seems not insignificant going by historical iPhone BOMs [1], so even for smartphones with their far far smaller SoCs 5nm at launch isn't nothing. The continued ongoing progress in silicon is just mindblowing when you dig into the details in any real way. I was blown away already watching the \"Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips\" [2] presentation years ago, which still seems incredible and yet that's all talking about now ancient tech. The increasing costs and design challenges though are also going to have interesting effects on the industry, as who/what has the margins to afford fabbing aggressive chips on the cutting edge might start to diverge a bit more. I also wonder how longevity will be, I remember","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27376183,"author":"ta988","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Light-shrinking material lets ordinary microscope see in super resolution","text":"Yes that's pretty similar to what is used. Each mask takes days to get simulated. It is getting \"old\" but this great video is covering it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28273087,"author":"joshAg","month":"2021-08","story_title":"ASML, a $300B Dutch firm, makes the machines that make semiconductors","text":"This video is in the same vein, and does a great job putting this machine into perspective in teh chip making process, but it's sadly a decade old now. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32278310,"author":"alyandon","month":"2022-07","story_title":"200TB SSDs could come soon thanks to Micron's new chip","text":"Magic (at least as far as I'm concerned). I would love to see an updated version of this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33925727,"author":"calebm","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Transistors are civilization\u2019s invisible infrastructure","text":"This talk on how silicon chips are manufactured, called \"Indistinguishable from Magic\" shows just how magical they are: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NH1Tta7purM":[{"hn_comment_id":15732582,"author":"log_base_login","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future","text":"Thanks for the praise, and for the insight per your experience. Sounds like a great gig! I looked you up, and see that you are likely working exclusively in Haskell, but thought you might derive some value from Carl Cook's presentation on optimizing HFT code at the most recent cpp convention. I recognize the languages are distinctly different, but he provides some interesting theoretical points along the way that might be advantageous to you. Here's a link: [VIDEO] Also, I can sympathize with your plight to run scalable sims. I've done some work in bioinformatics, and am building a small cluster at home so that I can learn to write code that'll scale to more massively parallel systems that are de rigueur in that domain. Cheers!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23191261,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What programming skills are required by HFT or Trading firms","text":"Basically Java, .NET and C++, with heavy focus on C++. Being able to write allocation free algorithms, even on GC languages, lock free data structures and good knowledge of all multi-core programming paradigms and distributed computing. Here are some talks that will give you a small overview into that world, CppCon 2017: Carl Cook \u201cWhen a Microsecond Is an Eternity: High Performance Trading Systems in C++\u201d [VIDEO] Core C++ 2019 :: Nimrod Sapir :: High Frequency Trading and Ultra Low Latency development techniques [LINK] Open source Java HFT code from Chronicle Software, [LINK] \"Writing and Testing High-Frequency Trading Engines\", from Cliff Click [LINK] However in these domains every ms counts, even how long cables are, so also expect Verilog, VHDL, and plenty of custom made algorithms running directly on hardware. \"A Low-Latency Library in FPGA Hardware for High-Frequency Trading\" [LINK] You can get an overview of the typical expectations here, [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25101656,"author":"jeffreygoesto","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Am I too late for the \u201cData Science\u201d wave?","text":"First of all, it leaves the team behind if you use features that are too advanced. Makes collaboration hard if you have wildly diverging skills (in both ways). Also, it did in our case take you away so far from the bare metal, that the code was elegant, but slow. It did not play well with our static allocators and allocated/deallocated way too much, especially temporaries. You might i.e. check out talks like [0]. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25217499,"author":"vgatherps","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Java is better than C++ for high speed trading systems","text":"I\u2019ve seen this sentiment before and worked on both a \u201clow latency Java\u201d team and low latency C++ teams. I have some sympathy for the idea that the JVM is better since it means you won\u2019t spend all your time chasing crash reports. The thing is, like another comment hinted at, is that this issue is generally more reflective of the environment you build in than the technology choice. Here\u2019s a good talk on the reasons for and limits of using C++ for low latency systems: [VIDEO] If I had to rank in terms of reliability of trading infrastructure I\u2019ve used/worked on, * Low Latency C / C++ infra at fully automated trading firm. Very much run by the programmers and quants and also fairly small. By far the fastest (near limits of what you could do) and also most reliable. * Low Latency Java execution infrastructure. Pretty reliable, not that fast, had some issues with GC battling and manual memory management to avoid GC, etc. There was a pretty clear latency floor (still quite low) even when \u201cdoing everything right\u201d that serious native infrastructure beat. * C++ market making infra at a firm run by manual traders. It was by far the slowest and least reliable. Echos the experience of \u201cspent hours debugging weird crashes\u201d. The culture was very \u201cA trader asked for this and needs it done yesterday. Also this refactoring business doesn\u2019t sound like adding new features, drop it\u201d. What I saw is that if you hire people who have a good idea of what they\u2019re doing and keep a culture of technical e","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32315441,"author":"benreesman","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Understanding Jane Street","text":"I find this stuff fascinating, and this article is way above average for online posts about proprietary/algorithmic/quantitative/low-latency trading (very leaky Venn diagram there). I have a few nitpicks but overall it's informative and it's an interesting format: viewing an industry through the lens of a particular firm, especially one as fascinating as Jane. Anything that develops literacy in modern finance amongst the lay public is a good thing in my book. If this stuff floats your boat I'd also recommend any of Carl Cook's talks, e.g. [VIDEO] . Optiver is AFAIK in a somewhat different business than Jane, but they're also players (or were last I had any inside baseball). Too many people got their worldview on this industry from \"Flash Boys\", and I say this as a Lewis fan, is criminally stupid at best and in bad faith at worst (if you want a well-researched, accessible alternative: [LINK] is about a zillion times better). It's a pretty short list of places I'd ever go through some grueling and semi-arbitrary gauntlet to work for, but Jane is on it for sure. I hope the author(s) do Medallion next.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37452536,"author":"vgatherps","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Unpacking Elixir: Real-Time and Latency","text":"This is almost certainly incorrect, unless it\u2019s using a very stretched definition of \u201chft\u201d and using microseconds to mean 99th% <1ms instead of say <5us (reasonably competitive software range depending on your trade). They might be forwarding non latency sensitive client/internal orders through a system written in erlang, or using erlang for an orchestration layer, but they\u2019re not competing with other hft traders in one. Source: I work in the field and have built <5us systems. [VIDEO] Is a free great watch about the things you have to do to very reliably have such low latencies","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44844054,"author":"benreesman","month":"2025-08","story_title":"HRT's Python fork: Leveraging PEP 690 for faster imports","text":"Doesn't the fact that a modern FPGA-centric (probably ASICs in the mix too at this point) hybrid NIC/order-parser/state-machine thing is rumored to be able to hit glass-to-glass of ~20-40ns mean that the speed game is hotter than ever? Do you mean that because it involves a lot of hardware design now? The days of being able to offer around the inside in C++ on a regulated securities exchange are over, but there's still C++ driving the thing, that 20ns \"tick to trade\" or however it's being measured in some instance is still pretty basic response stuff, light speed is still a thing. There's a C++ program upstairs running the show, and it's trying to do it's job in under a mike for sure. The OG talk on this is Carl Cook's: [VIDEO] But there are more recent talks (Optiver is especially transparent about it but other people talk about it too): [LINK] , that's David Gross at CppCon last year, it can't have changed that much since last year.","stance":"rec"}],"NHopJHSlVo4":[{"hn_comment_id":30041317,"author":"drakonka","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best piece of advice someone has told you?","text":"Don't tell people your goals. I heard this in a TED talk years ago[0]. Telling people what you plan to do can evoke the same emotions as actually doing that thing, lowering the drive to do the work to accomplish the goal because you got your emotional reward already. Being a serial starter, I retroactively noticed this pattern in myself when I heard this. Now, when I want to do something new, I shut up about it until I either complete it or have enough momentum in the project to have reached critical mass. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34249486,"author":"drakonka","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Pros and cons of thinking in public vs. in private?","text":"I like to think in public about things I've already done, and think in private about things I'm intending to do. I like blogging about things I've already done because it helps me process and solidify my learnings. Also, explaining something in writing is a great way for me to see what knowledge or other gaps I may have. But I don't like blogging or even discussing with loved ones my intentions or goals until I have made some concrete progress toward it. I have a tendency to start things and not finish them as excitement wanes, and realized that talking about things while I am excited about them has a negative impact on my drive to actually do the thing. I did not really put two and two together until I saw this talk[0] many years ago and it clicked. So now no matter how excited or motivated I am about a goal or new idea, I try to keep it to myself until I've made some threshold of actual progress. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38275460,"author":"drakonka","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What thought (or idea) has changed your life the most?","text":"\"Keep your goals to yourself\" from this TED talk I saw more than ten ago: [VIDEO] I revisit it every few years as a reminder and have been following this advice ever since I first saw it If I talk about my goals or something I plan on doing too soon, I'm less likely to follow through with it. Now I shut up and don't talk about it until I have enough momentum.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2132298,"author":"JonnieCache","month":"2011-01","story_title":"Get Off Your Butt: How to Get Motivated When You\u2019re in a Slump","text":"Yup, it was Derek Silvers in a TED talk. [VIDEO] Well worth watching. This one is < 4 minutes. Cites his sources.","stance":"rec"}],"NIu_dJGyIQI":[{"hn_comment_id":35383239,"author":"frereubu","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What\u2019s Next (2019)","text":"I was studying something similar in my MSc about the neurobiology of language. It's well known that reading circuits in the brain make predictions about which words come next - a sentence like \"The jam on the motorway made traffic slow\" doesn't elicit much activity, whereas \"The jam on the motorway was sticky\" does, because \"motorway\" makes it much more likely that \"jam\" was about slow traffic rather than the condiment. (There are perhaps some interesting parallels to LLMs there...) But we were looking in the visual cortex, way back before the brain is even perceiving words, and we were finding pre-activation of circuits even there depending on whether people were presented with real words (e.g. sheep) or non-words (e.g. brast). I think there's a lot to be said for conceptualising the brain as a statistical machine - it makes a lot of sense in evolutionary terms. There's a great video introduction to that idea with Karl Friston from UCL here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18497345,"author":"jchook","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI","text":"I found this interview with Karl Friston helpful to understand free energy principle from a high level: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NK1zlz67MjU":[{"hn_comment_id":12432722,"author":"mmel","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Plan9 from?","text":"I was blown away by this 2011 video of Charles Moore talking about his CPU design and running code, talking about how the different nodes are creating the frequencies to produce the images you see on the projector - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15253477,"author":"exikyut","month":"2017-09","story_title":"What Makes AI and GPUs So Compatible?","text":"The following two points are highly tangential and don't squarely answer your question; I'm just mentioning them as things to file away in case they turn out to be relevant. - [LINK] shows an experimental new CPU architecture which appears to be single-core but demonstrates interesting power savings and speedups by eschewing standard on-chip caching and building a smarter compiler. TL;DR closed-source compiler, but I think the people making the design are trying to make the architecture design/registers/overview/etc as open as practical/viable with free documentation etc. I'm not sure if there's a simulator for it. I'm very sure they're already taking on commercial customers, and getting access to it is likely to be not overly nontrivial. (I realize you're not likely to need one just yet, but \"can't access at all\" makes for something much less interesting to file away.) - Forth, Inc. makes the GA144, a 144-core microcontroller that natively runs Forth (and will NOT comfortably run transpiled <any other language here>). At one point a production company was making evaluation boards. [VIDEO] is a (1hr long, somewhat slow-paced) presentation that provides a good overview of the GA144. I half wonder whether I'm looking at a chip designed by people who don't understand SMP when I watch this, but I also think that it's possible that the brutal simplicity that Forth (and Chuck Moore) applies to everything means that I'm really staring at the raw complexity of SMP here. I've read tha","stance":"rec"}],"NKlbE2eROC0":[{"hn_comment_id":22615369,"author":"gonzus","month":"2020-03","story_title":"The Reconstruction of ZZT","text":"I just watched a documentary about how Super Mario 64, a game for Nintendo consoles, was reverse engineered in a way that will also generate byte-identical objects when being compiled. I found this nothing short of amazing. This is the link to the part of the video that mentions this: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31115025,"author":"hbn","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Overhauling Mario 64's code to reach 30 FPS and render 6x faster on N64 [video]","text":"The whole \"Nintendo forgot to set the O2 optimization flag\" thing has been somewhat debunked, or at best it's misleading. ModernVintageGamer did a video discussing the topic that's pretty well-researched [VIDEO] To summarize what he says: since the game was a launch title, it was likely being compiled with an early, less-stable compiler/SDKs, with known bugs that wouldn't be fixed until later (he even cited some official developer documentation that mentions this). So setting that flag could have caused known issues/instability at the time so they just left the optimization out. And the other thing is the game is using a lot of libraries that were indeed compiled with the O2 flag, and the performance drop by removing those is far more significant than the tiny gain by adding it to the top-level of the makefile where the rumor suggested it should have been added.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24477150,"author":"semi","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Super Mario Bros. 3 in 3 Minutes \u2013 World Record Speedrun Explained [video]","text":"But notably not in SM64, where they disabled compiler optimization for some reson. Vintage Gamer has a good video about this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NM51qOpwcIM":[{"hn_comment_id":6116757,"author":"smoyer","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages","text":"So true ... I don't really appreciate her current music (I mean like Brahms or Mozart), but she was so bluesy in the NYU talent show ( [VIDEO] ). I could listen to music like that all day.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7402044,"author":"jamiequint","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Secret raises $8.6 million Series A","text":"re: Lady Gaga, hype had something to do with it but she is also a phenomenal musician. Here's a video from before she was famous: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NMvwHDFVpCE":[{"hn_comment_id":13669670,"author":"trgn","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Let\u2019s not demonize driving, just stop subsidizing it","text":"I basically just parroted Nathan Lewis, who has a great blog series on the topic: [LINK] . It's virtually the same message from Andres Duany. His talk from 30 years ago is still so eerily precise and comprehensive: [VIDEO] . When I feel presumptuous, I email this to people (deaf ears, mostly). Leon Krier bangs the same drum, and adds a more sophisticated, architectural perspective: [LINK] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40381140,"author":"tmnvix","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Measuring the impact of zoning on housing in a city","text":"> I don\u2019t know what the answer is but Parking Reform, Strong Towns and Not Just Bikes are my north stars on this stuff. Do you have any others? I think you might like this planning talk given in the 90s. One of my favourite videos on youtube and quite hilarious at times: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18307385,"author":"closeparen","month":"2018-10","story_title":"California Considers Placing a Mileage Tax on Drivers (2017)","text":"Suburban sprawl is exactly as required by law, from the mutually exclusive land uses right down to the paint on the strip-mall parking lots. Market forces would love to build walkable mixed-use districts. A proud tradition of highly effective grassroots activism makes sure that they don't. You may find this talk [0], or the speaker's book Suburban Nation, enlightening. It's not at all the case that market forces need to be adjusted here. It's public policy which is broken. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NNnIGh9g6fA":[{"hn_comment_id":4027137,"author":"super_mario","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Iterated prisoner's dilemma contains evolutionary opponent dominating strategies","text":"That's well known if you ever took evolutionary biology course, or game theory course. Even popular books like Richard Dawkins' \"The Selfish Gene\" talk in some detail about it, and this 25 hour video course is also a must see for pretty much everyone: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9754896,"author":"ploomans","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Robert Sapolsky talks turbulence \u2013 teens, stress, and the information age","text":"BTW, you should watch his lecture series on the biology of behaviour: [VIDEO] For me one of the best teachers you will find online","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11303394,"author":"guzmanovich","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most useful online course you have watched?","text":"Robert Sapolsky`s lectures on human behavioral biology. Fascinating, funny and gives insights into many different topics like cultural differences and nationalism. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11680653,"author":"Frozenlock","month":"2016-05","story_title":"The Real Problem with Facebook and the News","text":"I like that you accept to evaluate someone else's position before instantly putting them into the little \"bigot\" box. It's much better to leave traces of your thinking process, instead of simply declaring that your conclusions are the only ones that are acceptable and others are idiots. Let's take me for example. It just so happens that I'm rethinking my position on interracial marriage (yes, really). I haven't reached any solid conclusion yet, but I'm not as sure of my position as I once was. My current uncertainty is based on a few things I learned in the past few years. First, Sapolky's excellent \"Human Behavioral Biology\" did show me how incredibly susceptible we are to hormones; how a tiny little change can have huge impacts in our daily life. The part on delaying gratification was also eye opening for me. Some people are wired in a way that makes it very difficult for them to refuse a cookie now in exchange for two cookies later. So it's not necessarily that you are making a greater effort; you might be born in a way that makes it easier for you for delay gratification. I would recommend the complete playlist to anyone here. It is simply fascinating. [VIDEO] Second, the psychology professor Jordan B Peterson ( [LINK] ) teaches how an amazing predictor of success IQ is. You can see a little of what he has to say here: [LINK] Then I learned how IQ is highly correlated to genetics (from 0.75 to 0.8). By the way, for you parents, this means that you might not be as good tut","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15813123,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Best books you read in 2017?","text":"Try Sapolsky's incredible 25-or-so-part online lectures on Biology of Human Behavior. A great lecturer on a most fascinating subject, it's accessible to a general audience. Covers the topic on all different levels, scales, approaches, from evolutionary psychology to the minutiae of brains and genes, with a lot of stories about the discoveries and researchers involved, and jokes, he's a funny guy. Best course I've ever done. Part 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19379246,"author":"jmcqk6","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Online activists are silencing us, scientists say","text":"If people are interested in exploring this topic, I would highly recommend Robert Sapolsky's course \"Human Behavioral Biology\" from stanford. The lectures are all available on YouTube and I learned so much from them: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34604140,"author":"nomilk","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Bob Sapolsky's Stanford Biology lecture series is... amazing. A rare combination of both extremely important and extremely interesting. If you watch just 3 or 4 minutes, you'll struggle to stop watching. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35693556,"author":"culi","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Harvard: The Effects of Noise on Health","text":"for anyone unaware, this is a book by Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky: [LINK] The book is about stress and the impact of glucocorticoids on the body. The chemical stress response used in \"the wild\" by animals is actually the same as the stress response we have when worrying about losing our job, not being able to complete a paper for school, dealing with poverty, etc. It's a partial explanation for why modern humans have so many chronic diseases that are rarely seen in other animals (or even archeological/anthropological evidence of non-industrial societies but he doesn't really go there much in the book) I also highly recommend Sapolsky's Human Behavior Biology course which he taught for Stanford but published on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4147582,"author":"ehsanu1","month":"2012-06","story_title":"What Darwin's Theory of Evolution Reveals About Artificial Intelligence","text":"This is a common fallacy about evolution, and is explained beautifully by the anthropic principle, or in other words, the innate selection bias of our existence. I'm a little confused about how the anthropic principle explains this fallacy (and it is a fallacy to be sure). I guess you're referring to how natural selection (and all the other sorts of selection that occur regularly) lead to the existence of \"appropriate\" organisms and features. But I think knowing some of the actual details in how evolution works at all the different levels (molecular bio, epigenetics, competition/cooperation, behavior, etc, etc, etc) serves as an even better explanation. Here's a 25 lecture course from Stanford that explains just that: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10106236,"author":"daodedickinson","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children's genes","text":"There are definitely known links between psychology and genes; we know the epigenetics behind why if mothers are stressed when pregnant, their children will be more stressed for their entire lives. Far too many people still have the Jurassic Park view of DNA and believe in Central Dogma\u2014but it has become clear that environment and all sorts of post-conception events effect genetics. Dr. Sapolsky, in this lecture series, explains, for just one example, how and why Lamarckian evolution sometimes occurs: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20932045,"author":"mrdoops","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?","text":"Trial and error as a programmer dealing with depression and anxiety accounts for a lot, but for resources I'd point you to Robert Sapolsky's lectures on Behavioral Biology (here: [VIDEO] ). Sapolsky's lectures are great for getting a Biology perspective to how human's operate. Jordan Peterson's has lectures on Personality (here: [LINK] ) which are also great and echo similar ideas from a Psychology perspective.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21254488,"author":"i2shar","month":"2019-10","story_title":"What men eat and drink may affect their babies\u2019 health","text":"Also, the initial few lectures from Robert Sapolsky's lecture series[1] were an eyeopener for me. The exact mechanism of how environment affects epigenetics (transcription factors, etc.) was really fascinating! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27728563,"author":"eastendguy","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Dear Mom and Dad, please stick with me (2020)","text":"This blog post is low quality marketing/SEO copy and paste. But the topic itself is very interesting. High-quality lecture series around the same topic (Human Behavioral Biology) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35244510,"author":"zer00eyz","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Psychedelic brew ayahuasca\u2019s profound impact revealed in brain scans","text":"> - I got more confrontational which almost got me into fights, but also got me laid These systems are likely deeply tangled up in your biology. Robert Sapolsky has a Stanford lecture series on this: [VIDEO] Well worth a watch!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41368289,"author":"philipov","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Intelligence is not like height","text":"Anyone who wants to look at heritability numbers should make sure to watch these lectures first. Heritability is often a misleading stat, because it has an unintuitive definition. Sapolskiy covers common failings of heritability numbers, as well as confounding factors for twin studies. [LINK] [LINK] Full Lectures: [VIDEO] An example of how non-intuitive heritability is: whether a person wears earrings or not would be a heritable trait if we're looking at mid-20th century America, because the variability is entirely explained by whether you're male or female. Heritability is unable to identify whether a trait is caused by genetics, only whether the variation correlates with genetics.","stance":"rec"}],"NOAgplgTxfc":[{"hn_comment_id":5144135,"author":"fjarlq","month":"2013-01","story_title":"We Need to Have Sympathy for Those With Depression. It is an Illness","text":"Professor Sapolsky at Stanford gave an interesting lecture about depression a few years ago... highly recommended: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5145953,"author":"AlexandrB","month":"2013-01","story_title":"We Need to Have Sympathy for Those With Depression. It is an Illness","text":"This was posted in a HN comment not too long ago. It's a very good lecture that goes into both the biological and psychological aspects of depression and then manages to tie them together. [VIDEO] > We say that there is something wrong with their brains, rather than saying that there is something wrong with society. The real answer is probably a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15452597,"author":"maxlamb","month":"2017-10","story_title":"The Depression Thing","text":"while on the subject, highly recommend this video on depression from Stanford's Sapolsky to understanding the underlying biological aspect of it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17269440,"author":"mikec3010","month":"2018-06","story_title":"What to Do When a Loved One Is Severely Depressed","text":"This is the quintessential video for understanding clinical depression. A Stanford lecture given by Dr Sapolsky: [VIDEO] I highly recommend watching it to better understand the disease.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21644844,"author":"ronyfadel","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Psilocybin for major depression granted Breakthrough Therapy by FDA","text":"Sapolsky on depression: [VIDEO] \u201cDepression is agression turned inwards\u201d. He explains what our current understanding of depression is. I think you\u2019ll have a whole new understanding of depression after watching this.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27736874,"author":"shadowfaxRodeo","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Some Days I Can\u2019t Do Life \u2013 When everyday life becomes a struggle (2020)","text":"I tried everything except for medication. I was afraid i would no longer be 'myself' or that's what other people told me \u2014 or maybe that it would make the problem more real. Anyway, I eventually took meds, and I have never felt more myself, or the person I want to be. I work, learn, socialize, live in a (relatively) clean apartment, which I leave to go outside. It took me way too long accept that depression is not all my fault, that it's a disease, and that I needed to see a real doctor. For those who suffer, or know those who suffer (that's probably everyone) I really recommend this lecture: [VIDEO] It's super interesting, it ties all the causes of depression together \u2014 childhood trauma, everyday experience, down to the neuron, and chemical reactions. It really helps externalize it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48920603,"author":"tycho-newman","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important","text":"Robert Sapolsky has a fantastic discussion of depression as a form of learned helplessness. We see it in abused animals: [VIDEO] You are not much different from any other animal at some level. With enough conditioning you will believe that you have no agency over your own life, and you\u2019ll just sit there and take the shocks hoping it ends soon. Or worse, you\u2019ll lose perspective and imagine the only solution to your current (likely temporary) circumstance is to (definitely very permanently) end your own life.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5057041,"author":"blhack","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago","text":"I've been incredibly vocal about my stance on depression here on HN in the past, specifically that saying things like \"man up\" is absurd. Depression, like every other disease on the planet, is not something you \"man up\" through. It's a disease that happens to manifest itself in the same places that personality does. To a casual, uninformed observer, depression is a choice of behavior. It isn't. You don't get depression from weakness in the same way that you don't get cancer from weakness. Depression also kills more people per year than cancer does. Cancer about 20,000 -- depression about 30,000. (Highly relevant lecture by a very brilliant neuroscientist: [VIDEO] ) -- That said, Ed Weissman made an inappropriate comment. Every single person here, including me, has made inappropriate comments in the past. Let's not start the pitchforks and torches just yet, guys. He who is without sin, and all that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6240592,"author":"heurist","month":"2013-08","story_title":"Two Root Causes Of My Recent Depression","text":"I agree that depression can be caused by many things. This might be more of a case of chronic depression vs. temporary depression, although I don't presume to know which one the author was/is dealing with. People bounce back from temporary depression, but chronic depression is a problem for life. Here's a great lecture that discusses the differences (I'm pretty sure it was this one... if not, it's still a great lecture): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19552555,"author":"kekebo","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Exercise as a treatment for depression: a meta-analysis (2016)","text":"Depression correlates with hormonal changes, but saying it's a result of it is reductionistic and inaccurate. Depression also highly correlates with changes in inflammatory markers called cytokines[1], but reducing it to a single biological factor never yields an accurate pathogenesis of the disease. Robert Sapolskys Stanford Lecture gives a good overview of the interaction an relationship of the main risk factors causing depression[2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [Robert Sapolsky On Depression]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23257168,"author":"g3e0","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Surviving Depression","text":"I find it very disheartening to see antidepressants described as \"happy pills\" that \"numb your senses\". Comments like this only serve to reinforce the stigma around these medications. This stigma is the part of the reason why I held out from seeking help for years. My experience taking Mirtazapine has been the exact opposite. At the deepest point of my depression, that is when I was \"numb\". Like many people I would listen to sad music when I was depressed, but eventually sad music didn't make me feel sad anymore, I literally just felt nothing. Since being on Mirtazapine, my depression is gone for the first time in 13 years and it's completely changed my life. I still have the full human emotional range - I have good/bad moods (mostly good), days where I feel bored/meh, I cry at the sad parts in films. The antidepressants cured my depression, they haven't given me a false sense of inflated happiness. The question of \"am I actually happy?\" doesn't even really cross my mind. I'm just content. The only side effects I experienced were 3 days of extreme tiredness when I first started taking them, which then subsided. And my appetite increased, so I have gained a few pounds, but since I was already quite skinny and had started lifting weights, this has been a net plus. I found this lecture by Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky highly insightful - [VIDEO] - We all get depressed, it's a normal part of life, but depression is a disease which causes you to stay depressed for no reason, ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24440129,"author":"elric","month":"2020-09","story_title":"I built an app to fix my depression","text":"Stanford's Sapolsky does a pretty good job explaining what is and isn't. I recommend the full lecture, it's interesting stuff: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29733447,"author":"jes","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Experimental depression treatment is nearly 80% effective in controlled study","text":"Years ago I found the video by Dr. Robert Sapolsky[1] to be a good introduction to the topic of depression. I also suffered a major depression of my own about six years ago. It was a horrible time in my life. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42278842,"author":"RGamma","month":"2024-11","story_title":"The Opportunity Theory of Depression","text":"And for something less disappointing see this Robert Sapolsky lecture [VIDEO] Also his lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology.","stance":"rec"}],"NP9AIUT9nos":[{"hn_comment_id":23160396,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The most prized degree in India became the most worthless","text":"I always thought calling programmers engineers was very weird until I watched this great talk: Real Software Engineering , Glenn Vanderburg, Lone Star Ruby 2010 [VIDEO] which explains what various kinds of engineers actually do. Not at all dry and boring like it might sound! From the YouTube blurb: Software engineering as it's taught in universities simply doesn't work. It doesn't produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn't produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn't produce systems at all. That's odd, because in every other field, the term \"engineering\" is reserved for methods that work. What then, does real software engineering look like?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5511879,"author":"KaeseEs","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Real Software Engineering, by Glenn Vandenburg. Not a perfect talk (especially the conclusions IMO), but a very good exploration of how some of the common beliefs in the field of software \"engineering\" came to be, and how something resembling actual engineering practice might be beneficial and practical. Link: [VIDEO] Abstract: \"Software engineering as it's taught in universities simply doesn't work. It doesn't produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn't produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn't produce systems at all. That's odd, because in every other field, the term \"engineering\" is reserved for methods that work. What then, does real software engineering look like? How can we consistently deliver high-quality systems to our customers and employers in a timely fashion and for a reasonable cost? In this session, we'll discuss where software engineering went wrong, and build the case that disciplined Agile methods, far from being \"anti-engineering\" (as they are often described), actually represent the best of engineering principles applied to the task of software development.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10929790,"author":"gcandal","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Managing the Development of Large Software Systems (1970) [pdf]","text":"I first came into contact with this article via [VIDEO] , which is a pretty decent analysis on how people misinterpreted the original concept.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27161012,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers (2015)","text":"I thought calling programmers \"engineers\" was very odd until I saw this great talk: Real Software Engineering by Glenn Vanderburg Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 [VIDEO] Software engineering as it's taught in universities simply doesn't work. It doesn't produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn't produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn't produce systems at all. That's odd, because in every other field, the term \"engineering\" is reserved for methods that work. What then, does real software engineering look like? How can we consistently deliver high-quality systems to our customers and employers in a timely fashion and for a reasonable cost? In this session, we'll discuss where software engineering went wrong, and build the case that disciplined Agile methods, far from being \"anti-engineering\" (as they are often described), actually represent the best of engineering principles applied to the task of software development.","stance":"rec"}],"NPOHf20slZg":[{"hn_comment_id":40589543,"author":"stmonty","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Rabbit R1 It's a Scam","text":"These two videos by the YouTuber CoffeeZilla seem relevant for exposing more about the R1 and its operation: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40965423,"author":"sadeshmukh","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The Rabbit R1 has been logging users' chats \u2013 with no way to wipe them","text":"See this video by Coffeezilla: [VIDEO] It's a bit clickbaity, but turns out Rabbit was a crypto-nft-ai buzzword company with a very shady history.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40993158,"author":"seanhunter","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Jailbreaking RabbitOS","text":"As I understand it, you can think of Rabbit's \"stack\" as a prompt to a standard llm (I think they just used openAI but I could be wrong) to understand what you want, and then a bunch of (brittle) selenium scripts to go call various websites to do the thing. The llm is there to understand that you've said \"what's the weather?\" not, say \"call me an uber\", and then to collate the responses from potentially several calls to websites and produce a natural language response. There is a layer of upsell/hustle/scam[1] on top of that where they said they had a \"large action model\" which learned your preferences and understood how all these websites worked sematically so the actions would be robust etc and a bunch of other stuff which turned out not to be true. [1] depending on your point of view. I would encourage people to watch [VIDEO] and [LINK] and do whatever personal research and make their own minds up","stance":"rec"}],"NQFqDKRAROI":[{"hn_comment_id":24423569,"author":"augusto-moura","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Why is there a normal galaxy sitting at the edge of the Universe?","text":"You CAN use for more than 1 target, you just need to reposition the telescope a bit. See [1], is a great great video on the subject. I can't recommend enough [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24424911,"author":"pas","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Why is there a normal galaxy sitting at the edge of the Universe?","text":"The whole concept is that we should launch a fleet of them every few months. Very lightweight semi-autonomous smart lightsails with some optics. The first fleet helps targeting the second, and all those who come after them. [VIDEO] (already linked by a sibling comment, but yes, can't recommend this enough!)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34002568,"author":"dmix","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Two temperate Earth-mass planets orbiting the nearby star GJ1002","text":"This is the space project that most excites me and the one I most hope we solve in my lifetime. Much more interesting than Mars (not that you can't do both). This video on gravitational lensing blew my mind [VIDEO] What do you think the odds are of if it being done IRL?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35368376,"author":"echelon","month":"2023-03","story_title":"","text":"Forget Earth gravitational lenses, let's use the sun: [VIDEO] (The whole video is great.) This setup could resolve the surfaces of exoplanets with its ~100 billion magnification. JPL is investigating.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35877237,"author":"echelon","month":"2023-05","story_title":"James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Fomalhaut's Disk in Unprecedented Detail","text":"Forget everything else, we need to build THIS : [VIDEO] A telescope array that can use our sun's gravitational lens would enable us to resolve the surfaces of extrasolar planets. We could resolve surface features as small as 10 km across at a distance of 100 light years. JPL is actively investigating this. It's incredibly promising.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41865173,"author":"tombh","month":"2024-10","story_title":"A solar gravitational lens will be humanity's most powerful telescope (2022)","text":"Christian Ready made a great video on his Youtube channel, Launch Pad Astronomy, about NASA's plans for a solar gravitational lens. It's got some great graphics and visualisations, and is accessibly narrated. I was inspired and learnt a lot of new ideas. [VIDEO] (23 minutes)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41958256,"author":"altharaz","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Ion engines could take us to the solar gravitational lens in less than 13 years","text":"There is a very high quality video about how Solar Gravitational Lens could be used to map exoplanets, and full explanations about the images reconstruction and engineering challenges: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33725740,"author":"tombh","month":"2022-11","story_title":"First active chemistry on an exoplanet revealed by Webb telescope","text":"I actually came across this video on HN a while back: [VIDEO] It explains the extraordinary idea of using the sun as a gravitational lens.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35906217,"author":"guidoism","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Photographing an exoplanet 25 light years away with 25km/pixel resolution (2020)","text":"Plan to photograph an exoplanet 25 light years away with 25km per pixel resolution (2020) This is fascinating. There is a plan to directly photograph exoplanets by sending a series of telescopes 500+ AU in the opposite direction of what we want to photograph and using the sun as a gravitational lens. We send out waves of these small telescopes to get pictures at various focal planes. This video has a good description of the paper: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37474122,"author":"floxy","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Webb Discovers Methane, Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere of K2-18B","text":"\"Direct Imaging of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravity Lens (1 Km Resolution)\": [LINK] ...and an excellent video on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41867640,"author":"rob74","month":"2024-10","story_title":"A solar gravitational lens will be humanity's most powerful telescope (2022)","text":"This video linked by another commenter explains it quite well: [VIDEO] Basically, it's possible to generate an image of an exoplanet, but \"retargeting\" the telescope(s) to observe another object is not feasible. So you'd better make sure the target that the mission will focus upon is actually worth the attention it gets - but there are other planned telescopes that will be capable of generating data that will allow selecting potential candidates.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42890150,"author":"floxy","month":"2025-01","story_title":"IAC confirms existence of a Super-earth in the habitable zone of a Sun-like Star","text":"And hopefully some day we'll build a solar-gravitation lens to look at the surface of one of these exoplanets: [LINK] ...with a very interesting video that someone made on that paper: Someone also made an interesting Youtube video of the concept: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44404634,"author":"cubefox","month":"2025-06","story_title":"JWST reveals its first direct image discovery of an exoplanet","text":"> A maintenance-free power source capable of lasting the 200 or so years it would take to make it to 542 AU It wouldn't take nearly that long. The proposal is to use solar sails. There is a nice video about the details on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NRoUC9P1PmA":[{"hn_comment_id":11982302,"author":"tnorgaard","month":"2016-06","story_title":"A ZFS developer\u2019s analysis of Apple\u2019s new APFS file system","text":"I would recommend anybody interested in filesystems to watch Jeff Bonwick (ZFS inventor) explain the design of ZFS: [VIDEO] . They have a few very nice war stories explaining why they found it useful to have the user data checksummed as well.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21180141,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ubuntu installer now supports ZFS on the boot partition","text":"> Is ZFS any good? The presentation \"ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems\" from its debut in 2008 is a good introduction. Part 1 (of 3) probably best explains how different it is from just about anything else out there (even now, in 2019): * [VIDEO] Part 2 show some extra niceties / features, and Part 3 is a demo and Q&A. Watching Part 1 at least is worth it for anyone curious; 2 and 3 are optional.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38362637,"author":"jorangreef","month":"2023-11","story_title":"","text":"ZFS was an inspiration for TigerBeetle. I love this talk by Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore: \u201cZFS: The Last Word in File Systems\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46470313,"author":"solarengineer","month":"2026-01","story_title":"FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 \u2013 configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)","text":"ZFS: The last word in File Systems: Part 1: [VIDEO] Part 2: [LINK] ZFS In the trenches: [LINK] Some good stuff here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"NST3u-GjjFw":[{"hn_comment_id":6734665,"author":"holman","month":"2013-11","story_title":"How GitHub No Longer Works","text":"Absolutely. As I mentioned, we have 150+ rooms that we chill in, and most of our day-to-day work practices are tied into chat. Mention someone's name in a room they're not present in and we send push notifications to their phone and desktop- works great to pull people in as needed, without needing to distract them with the noise of being in the room 24/7. Our ops team is particularly in deep with chat. Instead of siloing everyone's process off individually in SSH sessions, many operations happen in chat, so everyone can learn and help out when diagnosing problems. They've built some really fascinating tooling around the problems they face- if you're interested, check out @jnewland's talk on ChatOps: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10742494,"author":"jzelinskie","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Slack Platform Launch","text":"There's a pretty good talk on \"chatops\" by the guys at GitHub[0]. Basically, it provides a dialog around a \"shared command-line\" where developers from learn from each other by simply watching chat. I think it's more beneficial to distributed companies. However, my question for those using chatops is basically how do you keep the repository for the bot \"tame\"? It needs access to _everything_ if you want it to be useful, which means having lots of secrets exposed to the bot. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NSuaUok-wTY":[{"hn_comment_id":29367934,"author":"lathiat","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Saintcon: Lock Picking Lawyer Keynote","text":"Time to watch this one \u201cLocksmith says my videos are BS\u2026 Loses $75 (Maybe)\u201d [VIDEO] Also if you actually watch this keynote half the problem isn\u2019t locks you can actually pick but stuff you can just open with very basic tools that don\u2019t even require the skill he has. Like combs, rakes, hammers, slithers of metal, etc.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29428307,"author":"evilos","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Microsoft Windows RCE Vulnerability Gives an Attacker Complete Control","text":"Regular viewers of The Lock Picking Lawyer on youtube know how trivial it can be to bypass many common locks. Especially if you pickup a 10 dollar tool for the job. And I don't mean trivial for the LPL, I mean just trivial for a lay person who is aware of the vulnerability. Unrelated, here is my favorite LPL video where a locksmith calls bullshit and challenges LPL to a duel: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NTJQTc-TqpU":[{"hn_comment_id":16935159,"author":"int_handler","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Magnasanti: Large and Terrifying SimCity (2010)","text":"In his video he made for Magnasanti [0] (which I really recommend watching by the way), Oscala did mention that an earlier version of the city was in fact inspired by the Kowloon Walled City. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32235204,"author":"thematrixturtle","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Magnasanti \u2013 The largest and most terrible city of SimCity","text":"This appears to be a low-quality partial copy of a more detailed blog post from 2010, now gone but still living on via archive.is: [LINK] Don't miss the video: [VIDEO] Discussed previously on HN: [LINK] (620 comments)","stance":"rec"}],"NUQu-OPrzUc":[{"hn_comment_id":5479611,"author":"mortdeus","month":"2013-04","story_title":"How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses","text":"As somebody who has ADHD (Please start using the correct acronym.) I feel it is my obligation to make it absolutely clear to everyone that there is nothing beneficial about ADHD. If we are successful with ADHD, then we would only be more successful if we didnt have ADHD. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6469362,"author":"shadeless","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Procrastination should be solved by lighting fires, not filling buckets","text":"It sounds to me like you may have ADHD. Dr. Russell Barkley mentions in one of his speeches[1] that frequent prompts are one effective way to keep someone with ADHD accountable and on track. You may want to watch this shorter version[2] and see if you recognize yourself (that's doesn't proof anything of course, but it's a start). [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13665348,"author":"indolering","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Large imaging study confirms brain differences in ADHD","text":"> The way I describe it to most people is very simple. If you give a ADD/ADHD child Ritalin, Adderol, etc, they will calm down. You give those drugs to a normal child and they get super hyperactive. No they don't, ~25% won't feel anything. Most will become more focused. Methylphenidate and Methamphetamine /sound/ the same, but the former is better at \"stimulating\" certain brain structures : ) > Inversely, you give most people a stimulant such as caffeine and their heart beat increases and they perk up. I've always been very careful about coffee in the morning or teas as it is very much a calming downer. Sometimes I will drink a coffee to really calm my (always thinking too much) brain and let me focus, but can't do it if I'm the least bit tired as I'll be more inclined to doze off mid day. Yeah, the \"ADHD people react oppositely to stimulants\" stuff is folklore. Go drink a quad shot latte and tell me caffeine actually makes you tired. > I'm happy to see more actual science that shows this is a real thing, not something made up by an impatient child or child who had lots of trouble paying attention in school. Brain scans are fun, but cognitive psychology is where the real work gets done: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31741808,"author":"terracatta","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Association between ADHD medication and depression: A 10-year follow-up","text":"> Every child I know diagnosed with ADHD had parents who didn't want to deal with them You must not know many parents then. Parents I know that have children with ADHD recognize their children are struggling beyond simple hyperactivity. These are children that are markedly behind their peers in childhood milestones regardless of their family upbringing, education, and socio-economic status. These are children that have a deficiency in the executive function of their brains where hyperactivity is one of many symptoms, and is not even necessarily the most worrying. These are children that struggle with simple tasks that other children do not. Parents of these children are no less loving, caring, or capable than parents without ADHD children. Parents should not be shamed for using effective medications (like MDH) so their children can have positive outcomes in their development and adult-life. > What we really need is a strong emphasis on family development, courses built around it and support groups ADHD is generally a disorder that you are born with. No amount of family development can prevent the disease. Educate yourself by watching this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NVEgyJCTee4":[{"hn_comment_id":13069945,"author":"agumonkey","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Standardized Ladder of Functional Programming [pdf]","text":"speaking of functional programming language, here's a nice history of ML (from stratchey to milner, landin et al.) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13295847,"author":"larsberg","month":"2017-01","story_title":"CakeML \u2013 A Verified Implementation of ML","text":"You can hear a bunch more about the full history of development of SML and interaction with OCaml here: [VIDEO] I would definitely agree with the opinion above that the SML language designers fall in the camp of deliberating extensively and fully formalizing all new language features before considering them for inclusion. Today, there are two challenges right now in the Successor ML space: - There's some broad agreement on a few things that should obviously be improved, but today many of the implementation owners don't have a huge amount of time, so getting them to also agree to the new features is complicated. Life is way easier when you only have one implementation. - There's a bunch of fantastic ideas (largely driven by Bob Harper) to integrate stuff like parallelism, cost model, etc. that will be fantastic for a next version of the language and specification. It's just a lot of work, and not really publishable, so it's mainly tenured faculty and \"alumni\" (like myself and probably the people you work with) driving it forward in our free time. That said, I still love working on SML and its implementations (I mainly contribute to SML/NJ and Manticore) and it's a wonderful escape from the grim reality of quarterly goals and \"get it out the door\" release deadlines :-)","stance":"rec"}],"NVGuFdX5guE":[{"hn_comment_id":25731472,"author":"cosmojg","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Setting goals for 2021 \u2013 A brief guide about personal goal setting","text":"CGP Grey has an excellent video on this exact kind of goal setting: [LINK] And another on New Year's resolutions more generally: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29747003,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Happy New Year HN! What are your plans for the new year?","text":"Happy new year, HN. I'm a huge believer in CGP Grey's thematic year system ( [VIDEO] ) in place of resolutions. After outstanding successes two years in a row with the system (first year with my physical health, second year with my work and finances), I'm doing a \"year of relationships\" where my focus will be general social and romantic recoveries. Especially since, in the last two years, this is what has suffered the most for many including myself. I posted on Tildes about this, in fact: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35179277,"author":"dejawu","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Shoshikantetsu","text":"A similar idea that resonated with me is CGP Grey's suggestion to replace resolutions with themes: [VIDEO] Rather than set a lofty goal you're more likely to give up on (leaving you having accomplished nothing), simply look for ways in which you can do/be better than you were before.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38431270,"author":"surprisetalk","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Did you achieve your 2023 goals?","text":"I'm a huge fan of yearly themes, popularized by CGP Grey! [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] My \"year of trailblazing\" was incredibly positive. Here's my recap: finally started antidepressants, became a dad, quit booze and cigarettes after ten years of attempts, conquered my internet addiction, started a popularish blog, biked from SF to LA, failed at starting a tech conference, botched a startup launch, read a ton of books, overcame chronic crippling anxiety [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38815120,"author":"surprisetalk","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Tell HN: Choose a Yearly Theme","text":"You can learn more about yearly themes from this excellent CGP Grey video: [1] [VIDEO] Here's my yearly theme log, which I started mid-2022: [2] [LINK] It's been a great experience!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23443643,"author":"JoeDaDude","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Starting Many Things","text":"Learning 12 skills in 12 months seems extreme to me, in particular, because a lot of skills take long to master. Instead, I prefer the \"theme of a season\" approach as espoused in this CGP Gray video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25730127,"author":"afarrell","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Setting goals for 2021 \u2013 A brief guide about personal goal setting","text":"All of these present problems in different contexts Specific: This assumes that the picture you currently have of what you want is the thing you actually want. Do you want faster horse, a Model T, or swift reliable transportation of a form you've not yet imagined. Measurable: If you only value that which has a number, you'll lose sight of what truly matters in life because of the Streetlight Effect[1]. Consider the ridiculousness of the question \"What NPS score would your children give you?\" Attainable: There is a limit to the degree to which you can \"be sure\" of anything, especially without 2020 vision. Relevant: This requires really knowing what your values are so that you can practice the subtle art of not giving a fuck[2] about other things. Determining those can be hard emotionally-painful work, but in any context it is a good problem you want to have solved. Time Bound: Sometimes deadlines spur action, sometimes they paralyse or cause you to lose sleep. Sometimes, they are so far off in the future that you don't think about them until it is too late because you thought you could do them. If you're looking at a timescale longer than 6 weeks, consider instead that you might want a CGP-Grey style Theme: [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] Highly recommend this to anyone who spends lots of time thinking about personal goal-setting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29746715,"author":"mazokum","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Happy New Year HN! What are your plans for the new year?","text":"Happy New Year! I am in the same line as you, I don't have any \"new year promises\" but I will try to focus on my health: eating better and training more. This is discussed in a video I think is specially relevant today: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34193714,"author":"dv35z","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your new year's resolution?","text":"Excited about my goals this year - thanks for asking this... (1) I am building a community Makerspace / entrepreneur incubator lab in Latin America (related goal: Learn Spanish!). Agile product development methodologies, pairing, open-source product designs - High quality people, practices, tools, products and clients (and snacks). - If this is your jam, hit me up. I could use the help! (2) I'm learning Ruby & Rails (For fun: Using ChatGPT to propose a learning path & resources, and planning to use Obsidian + MkDocs to document what I learn). I'd like to feel comfortable hacking together interesting SaaS tools for friends & interesting business ideas. I'm familiar with Python/Django, so please feel free to suggest your best Rails advice! (3) Writing & Sales are the two most important skills for Entrepreneur mode, so I'm studying books in those areas and practicing. I've done roles as developer, consultant, product management, and solution/sales engineering, but I'm holding myself accountable to actually develop excellent Sales Skillz (after all - we all \"sell\" our ideas, suggestions). Wish me luck on that one! (4) Fitness / sports - Getting back into Squash (the best game there is). My dream would be to play at a 4.0 level (currently 3.0'ish) Wishing you all an excellent 2023 - full of happiness, health, good family vibes, creativity, and prosperity. PS: Check out this video on focusing on New Years \"themes\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38676677,"author":"robot1","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How to figure out a good direction/goals for the year ahead?","text":"Everyone has good insight so far - I would add that this video[1] from CGP Grey comes to mind about picking a theme for the year ahead. It's easy to get bogged down in the details but I try to follow a heuristic of taking action is infinitely better than sitting down and endlessly ruminating about it (of course easier said than done). [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44379334,"author":"gopalv","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Rules Clobber Goals","text":"> Don\u2019t abuse rules to force a puritanical or tyrannical lifestyle I really like the CGP Grey's \"Themes\" instead of calling a rule [1]. The concept of a \"trends towards healthy\" is much easier for me than \"eat healthy\". [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NVl9_6J1G60":[{"hn_comment_id":11763683,"author":"Judson","month":"2016-05","story_title":"TrailDB \u2013 An Efficient Library for Storing and Processing Event Data","text":"I was just watching this[0] excellent talk from one of the Heap Analytics engineers on their use of CitusDB + Postgres to do event processing. What use-case would TrailDB be the obvious, hands-down way to go (vs maybe Postgres + Citus)? [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12396191,"author":"devbug","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Building a Scalable Postgres Metrics Backend Using the Citus Extension","text":"If you haven't already seen it, Dan from Heap Analytics has a great talk about how they use Postgres and Citus. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12409289,"author":"simiano","month":"2016-09","story_title":"When to Avoid JSONB in a PostgreSQL Schema","text":"Keep in mind that Heap collects a huge amount of data and has a huge dataset. I like this[1] talk, it gives you an overview of their architecture. Great post though, thank you for sharing. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13443175,"author":"macobo","month":"2017-01","story_title":"How Discord Stores Billions of Messages Using Cassandra","text":"Regarding a), a sharded postgresql (i.e. with citus data) can easily accomodate that workflow with just a tiny bit of extra overhead. Re c) this strongly depends on the usecase, I've seen companies use a) to avoid split-brain problems and having to manage two data pipelines to great success at similar scales. You might find [VIDEO] interesting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14543483,"author":"macobo","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Running 10M PostgreSQL Indexes in Production","text":"You need a queue in front of your database irregardless of write latency. Otherwise you tie your availability to database availability as downtime (even for upgrades) is often unavoidable and network problems are common. Dan gave a pretty good talk about the high-level details of how/why postgres a couple of years back: [VIDEO] . One reason of why pg is that SQL is really powerful for building complex queries.","stance":"rec"}],"NWSZ4c9yqW8":[{"hn_comment_id":1431161,"author":"drhodes","month":"2010-06","story_title":"SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry","text":"While this isn't undeniable proof, it's interesting none the less, Simon Peyton Jones: Data Parallel Haskell. [VIDEO] He talks about how this scheme can parallelize non-trivial data structures, and how tedious book keeping can be avoided. I haven't used it yet in a project, so I can't speak of its efficacy - but worth a watch, imho.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2477051,"author":"Peaker","month":"2011-04","story_title":"Joel Spolsky: Can your programming language do this?","text":"Here's the main Haskell hero, Simon Peyton Jones giving a talk about data parallel Haskell, which I think is a promising language abstraction to do hard things with parallelism relatively easily: [VIDEO] As for techniques that can be used now: Haskell's `par` and `pseq` combinators allow adding parallelization to \"hard\" code after-the-fact pretty easily.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7543936,"author":"reitzensteinm","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Speed memory access by arranging data to take advantage of CPU caching","text":"This is both a straw man (OP asked for limited help, not omnipotence), and predicting the future by drawing a line from the past. Functional compilers that outperform hand tuned C++ on many core machines may be possible, but very hard. Just because everyone has previously underestimated the difficulty does not mean it's an idea worthy of derision. I think it's much more likely that it's perpetually ten years away, until one day it's not (like the current, possibly temporary end to Moore's Law). Watching Simon Peyton Jones' talk on data parallel Haskell, I'd not make a bet against high performance Haskell's eventual success, especially as core counts continue to climb, and NUMA gets more NU. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8278853,"author":"sgrove","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Rhine \u2013 A Lisp on LLVM","text":"I believe Haskell compilers are pretty amenable to stuff like this - watching \"Data Parallel Haskell\", it was interesting to see how they actually map out contiguous memory, etc. [VIDEO] Sadly, it doesn't seem to be as tightly integrated as what you'd see in SBCL from a developers PoV, but I'm certainly intrigued by their ability to achieve some very specific implementation while separating it from the expression of the algorithms.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8647979,"author":"anaphor","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Guy Steele on Functional Code for Parallel Execution (2009) [video]","text":"Well nested data parallelism generally applies to hierarchical structures like trees, whereas flat data parallelism applies to things like arrays and whatnot. You might want to watch this (similar in some ways) talk by SPJ on Data Parallel Haskell [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NXN7TOg3kj4":[{"hn_comment_id":36055465,"author":"ranting-moth","month":"2023-05","story_title":"A blocky based CAD program","text":"FreeCAD's arch nemesis has been lack of good educational material, until very recently. Checkout MangoJelly's \"FreeCAD 0.20 For Beginners Tutorials\" and follow along. It will change your life. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40722636,"author":"deskr","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Versioning FreeCAD Files with Git (2021)","text":"Look at MangoJelly's beginner's tutorial playlist, start on first video and follow along: [VIDEO] There are definitely problems with FC (but then even expensive CADs have problems). One of the biggest problem I think was lack of good learning material. MangoJelly does an excellent work on that.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35067447,"author":"avaldez_","month":"2023-03","story_title":"FreeCAD User Book (2019)","text":"My experience exactly. I wanted to make cases for my electronics projects and just learned following this series [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NY66qpMFOYo":[{"hn_comment_id":42688471,"author":"somat","month":"2025-01","story_title":"How corn syrup took over America","text":"I recently watched an interesting video on the subject of corn syrup. Which led me into the fascinating rabbit hole of sugar chemistry. [VIDEO] If I might summarize. Your body can absorb three types of sugar into the blood, glucose, fructose and galactose. glucose is directly used by cells, the other two have to take a trip through the liver to turn them into glucose. Table sugar is sucrose. a complex sugar. which can be best thought of as a fructose and a glucose linked together. Corn syrup is a mixture of ~ 45% glucose 55% fructose Sucrose is quickly broken apart into glucose and fructose in several environments, high heat will do it, but also acidic environments. like your stomach, or a soda. a soda will be slightly acidic due to the carbon dioxide dissolved in it(carbonic acid). And some formulations(like coke) add additional phosphoric acid. And to spoil the video. Even if you put sucrose into a soda, that is not what you are going to be drinking. I was unable to figure out why it tastes different, are the ratios off? additional trace chemicals in one source?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42698923,"author":"llm_nerd","month":"2025-01","story_title":"How corn syrup took over America","text":"The fructose difference is marginal between normal and Mexican coke. In the acidic medium of a cola, sucrose breaks down to glucose and fructose, just as it does with HFCS. HFCS has a bit more fructose, but not enough to make a paper about fructose suddenly relevant. As to the taste difference, Mexican cola has double the sodium. But even then, most people cannot taste the difference. They think they can, proclaim they can, and talk up how great Mexican coke is, but when actually put to the test they have basically random odds of being right or not. Fructose is mostly considered benign if consumed in moderation. You can get fatty liver if you consume to excess, but for most people it has no caloric value and is excreted from the body as a non-nutritive sweetener. Good related video- [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43523425,"author":"llm_nerd","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water","text":"Sucrose is 50% fructose, 50% glucose. HFCS has from 42-55% fructose (there are grades), the rest being glucose (well some 25% of HFCS is water, but simplifying to the nutritive parts) In the body it's literally all the same with minor variations in ratios. Indeed, the revered Mexican coke with cane sugar...the sucrose is broken down to component glucose and fructose in the acidic environment [1], exactly as happens with HFCS variants, and it would have been the moment it hit your digestive tract anyways. There is zero scientific justification for the weird focus on HFCS. Yes, glucose and grossly excessive amounts of fructose are a serious problem. Especially in forms that rapidly get absorbed and go off like a glucose bomb -- our bodies are not adapted to the extremely rapid intake of glucose forms of food we eat now, including ultra-processed foods fill with refined carbs. The #1 source of glucose in most diets is white breads, rices and so on. White flour is 60-80% starch, while white rice pushes 90% starch. Starch is strings of glucose molecules, and indeed enzymes turn that starch to free glucose almost immediately when eaten. So from a glucose perspective flour is much worse than an equal amount of sugar. And of course nutritive sweeteners in all their forms should be avoided. But table sugar isn't more wholesome or better than HFCS. [1] - Fun video about the sucrose in Mexican coke - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NYSgd1XSZXc":[{"hn_comment_id":7607606,"author":"jwise0","month":"2014-04","story_title":"The Design Flaw That Almost Wiped Out an NYC Skyscraper","text":"The first I had heard of a tuned mass damper was in the installation on Taipei 101. There's a good video of it moving that gives you an idea of just how colossal these things are: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9655171,"author":"sosuke","month":"2015-06","story_title":"How Much Do Skyscrapers Actually Move?","text":"This damper movement video was really incredible to see [VIDEO] The small scale demos just don't do it justice. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14448663,"author":"prewett","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Server room with seismic isolation floor in Japan earthquake disaster [video]","text":"It's not a DC, but Taipei 101 has a mass damper, and there's a video of it swaying during an earthquake. Really impressive how much that things moves! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30126823,"author":"FooHentai","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The Hidden Engineering Protecting Getty Art from Earthquakes","text":"At one of the datacenters I used to work in regularly the SAN engineers were always up for demonstrating the base isolation of their Hitachi storage array - The whole thing sat on a plate atop a ball-bearing pit, and could be shoved about a foot in any direction. Which they would invite you to do. Given the weight of the unit you'd never get it to budge more than a cm but they had videos of it during earthquakes showing it moving around the full range of motion. It was very 'v1' as far as base isolation goes and their newer equipment has more sophisticated protection, but it's an interesting field. On a larger scale the use of damping weight to protect entire buildings is amazing to see: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NZR_vMTLfIk":[{"hn_comment_id":16425039,"author":"kspaans","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Home ownership is a lousy investment compared with stocks or bonds","text":"The Globe and Mail also has a great comparison of rent vs buy using numbers from Toronto (includes closing costs, taxes, maintenance, inflation, etc): [VIDEO] (buying comes out slightly ahead assuming you don't move for 25 years, and the renter averages 7.5%/year returns on their investments, and, and, and etc.) TL;DR buying is probably better if you don't move very often, but there are so many variables that you can't know beforehand -- that you need to be able calculate whether renting vs buying is more profitable -- that it's probably not worth worrying about. EDIT: The NYT also has a nice visual calculator for this: [LINK] You need to know about 21 variables (that can change over time during the lifetime of your mortgage).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18368461,"author":"a_wild_dandan","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Housing can\u2019t both be a good investment and be affordable","text":"> you very well might come ahead There's a wonderful video[1] explaining just that. The TL;DW is that if you compare a renter & a buyer from day 1 to the end of a 25 year mortgage, both the renter and owner will have roughly the same net worth. My folks always talked about how renting just pissed away money, but never mentioned how mortgages piss away an obscene amount of money on interest payments. (And repairs/tax/insurance/HOA/etc.) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"N_4R4X7AWtU":[{"hn_comment_id":31547634,"author":"breadloaf","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Captured Russian Weapons Are Packed with U.S. Microchips","text":"They are not doing that, because they have big troubles to pull off semiconductor manufacturing See Asianometry: Why Russia Can\u2019t Replace TSMC - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39131725,"author":"mempko","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Most of Russia's War Chips Are Made by US and EU Companies (Intel, AMD, STM)","text":"Russia does build it's own chips but their fab tech is about 15 years behind the state of the art. The Asianometry YouTube channel has some details on Russia's own chips. [VIDEO] While they build their own chips, the video looks at why Russia can't replace TSMC for all of domestic use. But I suspect the whole local industry is oriented towards the war machine. I doubt you need 3nm chips for missiles.","stance":"rec"}],"NaL_Cb42WyY":[{"hn_comment_id":15729717,"author":"pqh","month":"2017-11","story_title":"The Exterior Algebra and Central Notions in Mathematics (2015) [pdf]","text":"This is a really beautiful proof that connects complex numbers and primes to derive a formula for calculating pi. It should only require high-school algebra prereqs. [VIDEO] If you want to truly follow the proof, there's one little bit on the chi function in there which is connected to something called the One Sentence Proof. This looks rather esoteric and takes a bit of pondering to wrap your head around, but again only really requires high-school level algebra. Doing proofs like this is what math is really about. This is how you come to really understand. And this video also happens to be entertaining in how well-put-together it is.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16376322,"author":"zerb","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Physics Travel Guide: a tool that makes learning physics easier","text":"3Blue1Brown has been recommended on HN before ( [LINK] ) But it's so great I think it bears bringing up in case anyone reading this comment has missed it. This channel animates math proofs, shows you the intuition behind fields of math, and constructs subjects in such a way as to make you feel like you could have invented them yourself. You'll still need a good textbook or something to go with the videos, but they cement the understanding in your mind very well and even open the door to more formal proofs. My favorite video is [VIDEO] . You'll have to take an additional step to get a complete proof (hint: read and work through the One Sentence Proof), but this is a beautiful piece of mathematics, shown in an understandable manner.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18884583,"author":"throwawaymath","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Mathematicians Seal Loophole to Breaking RSA Encryption","text":"This is a half hour 3Blue1Brown video: [VIDEO] If you're willing to watch at least the first half of it, I think it'll give you a very intuitive grounding for 1) why integers have unique polynomial representations, and 2) why that's related to (semi)prime factorization.","stance":"rec"}],"Nb2tebYAaOA":[{"hn_comment_id":22284052,"author":"GeorgeTirebiter","month":"2020-02","story_title":"How much better was DEC Alpha than contemporary x86?","text":"I highly suggest viewing one of the Alpha's original designers, Jim Keller, recent chat with MIT Prof Lex Fridman [VIDEO] I was stunned by Jim's total command of Computer Architecture, and his deep insights about the subject. I will never again utter the phrase 'modern computer' without requisite awe.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25557320,"author":"Pandabob","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite Podcast Episode of 2020?","text":"Loved the episodes with Jim Keller [0] and Brian Kernighan [1] as well. Lex really does a great show and has amazing guests. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32761422,"author":"robocat","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100M\u00b0C for 30 seconds","text":"Jim Keller talks about his impression working with Elon - skip to 1:20:50 of this (effing amazing) interview: [VIDEO] Edit: Also Jim talks about Elon\u2019s engineering skills at 50 minutes into this interview: [LINK] Disclaimer: I\u2019m not an Elon fan at all.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35692202,"author":"WestCoastJustin","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Second IC \u2013 Homemade 1000 transistor array chip","text":"I didn't make the connection until now, but Jim Keller was on the Lex Fridman podcast twice [1, 2] and it was awesome. In terms of founders this is pretty great team. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22515546,"author":"spectramax","month":"2020-03","story_title":"New AMD side channel attacks discovered, impacts Zen architecture","text":"I just wanted to say this about Intel vs AMD. Back when Intel was the \"underdog\" it couldn't compete with Athlon/Opeteron CPUs from AMD with its Pentium IV line, fan boys from both sides continually escalated the armchair warfare on Slashdot and Anandtech forums when Intel finally came out with the Conroe architecture that blew the competition away. I've seen this pendulum swing from one side to the other and back. Putting Intel marketing (awful) and AMD's marketing (awful again...), and their fan bases (toxic) aside, can we acknowledge the fact that working on a computer architecture is an extraordinarily complex task and that requires brilliant people all working together? I'll defer this fascinating topic, which most software engineers and tech enthusiasts are completely and utterly unaware of, to this talk by the legendary chip designer (x86 spec coauthor, A4/A5/Zen/Tesla AI ASIC architect) - Jim Keller and his interview with Lex Fridman: [VIDEO] Designing & manufacturing computer chips is hard af, having worked in semiconductor manufacturing for over 12 years (primarily on the backend side of the Fab). Edit: Redacting some specifics","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23813487,"author":"bob1029","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel","text":"I found this to be an excellent explanation for what is going on in these x86 CPUs that makes them so powerful: [VIDEO] (Starting from ~6:30)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24535267,"author":"empiricus","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Huang\u2019s Law Is the New Moore\u2019s Law, and Explains Why Nvidia Wants Arm","text":"Carmack was actually mentioning he asked Jim Keller about Moore's Law. For more details about Jim's thoughts I recommend this interview [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24812430,"author":"est31","month":"2020-10","story_title":"ARM chips have an instruction with JavaScript in the name","text":"Yeah that's how RISC vs CISC is taught in class, I've heard that same thing. I think it's an outdated paradigm though, if it's not been wrong all along. A CISC chip can still officially support instructions, but deprecate them and implement them very slowly in microcode, as is done with some x86 instructions. And a RISC chip manufacturer might just have used this phrase as a marketing line because designing RISC chips is easier than starting with a monster that has tons of instructions, and they needed some catchy phrase to market their alternative. They then get into the gradual process of making their customers happier one by one by adding special, mostly cold, silicon targeted for special workflows, like in this instance. Ultimately, the instruction set isn't that relevant anyways, what's more relevant is how the microcode can handle speculative execution for common workflows. There's a great podcast/interview from the x86 specification author: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Nbj1AR_aAcE":[{"hn_comment_id":30483315,"author":"elviejo","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Full consensus for disconnecting Russia from SWIFT achieved, process has begun","text":"For Putin having Ukraine part of NATO is as dangerous as it was for the US to have Russian missiles in Cuba. It's something he is not willing to risk. So almost any price is worth it for him. I've found the first 25mins of this conference by professor John Mearshimer [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30488663,"author":"nopenopenopeno","month":"2022-02","story_title":"With Activation of NATO Response Force, U.S. Military Ready to Provide Forces","text":"I\u2019m not sure what you want explained, but you\u2019ll probably find it in this very straightforward talk by John Mearsheimer on this very conflict. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NbpZCSf4_Yk":[{"hn_comment_id":29668930,"author":"caconym_","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Cornell McRay T'Racing","text":"Real-time ray traced reflections are an impressive trick, but real-time global illumination is where this tech shines IMO. This Digital Foundry video ( [VIDEO] ) is a good overview of why this is such a huge leap forward for developers and players alike. Metro: Exodus EE (the game discussed in the video) is the only game I've played that really shows what 'RTX' and similar GPU hardware is capable of, IMO. Even CP77, which was supposed to push modern systems to their limit, feels like its ray tracing and GI stuff is janky and tacked-on.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43381507,"author":"TiredOfLife","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Raytracing on Intel's Arc B580","text":"Here is a good video by Digital Foundry looking at Metro Exodus Enhanced edition with devtools. Where they show what raytracing is and how it differs from regular lighting. [VIDEO] simplified tldr: with raytracing you build the environment, designate which parts (like sun, lamps) emit light and you are done. With regular an artist has to spend hours to days adding many fake lightsources to get same result.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45551997,"author":"Mawr","month":"2025-10","story_title":"AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline","text":"There's also Metro: Exodus, which the developers have re-made to only support RT lighting. DigitalFoundry made a nice video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Nbv9L-WIu0s":[{"hn_comment_id":7770646,"author":"pdw","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Pok\u00e9mon Crystal disassembled source code","text":"There was an interesting talk on this at Linux.conf.au a couple of years ago, trying to figure out why modern binaries are so large. [VIDEO] > Bloat: How and Why UNIX Grew Up (and Out) - Rusty Russell, Matt Evans > The 'ls' binary on the original release of Unix (version 6) was 4920 bytes long. Thirty six years later, 'ls' on Ubuntu is 105776 bytes. Is this the laziness of modern coders? Increasing features? Does 'cat' really now do 313 times more stuff, or is there something else going on?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9825958,"author":"vezzy-fnord","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Software bloat makes me sad","text":"A good article a while back looked at common unix utilities, comparing the size of commands like cp from the 1980's to the present. Most of the bloat had to do with features that almost nobody ever uses. That was actually a talk called \"Bloat: How and Why UNIX Grew Up (and Out)\": [VIDEO] Well worth a viewing.","stance":"rec"}],"NcOb3Dilzjc":[{"hn_comment_id":48094279,"author":"HocusLocus","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The Greatest Shot in Television: James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene","text":"The \"Trigger Effect\" episode ( [VIDEO] ) that set off Connections:I was one of the finest hours ever produced for television. It influenced my family and I in the years to come. Hope for the best, while preparing for the worst. It begins at South Tower of the World Trade Center, and as Burke enters an express elevator (Car 6 or 7 if you must know) he says in effect, \"Do I worry about ascending to the top in a steel box? Of course I don't! We take going up in the world like that for granted.\" When the elevator goes dark he says. \"We expect this to happen sometimes so what do we do? We strike a light and look around in the dark for an emergency button to push and is we find one, we press it.\" In this discussion of single takes, note what the temperature of the butane lighter must have been by the time he finishes his speech. Ouch! Also interesting to note in the realm of happenstance: the airliner portrayed in trouble over darkened New York was flight 911.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33716163,"author":"aequitas","month":"2022-11","story_title":"How long would society last during a total grid collapse?","text":"This resonates very much with the Connections[0] series by James Burke. It's an old series, but well worth the watch. Back then it already discussed what would happen if the grid would collapse, and how everything is interconnected. Now with the internet it has gotten even worse. I think the questions asked back then in the series are still very relevant and maybe even more so nowadays. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36794134,"author":"bamfly","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Cold restart whole system after total outage","text":"You may enjoy the first episode of James Burke's Connections (\"The Trigger Effect\"), if you've not seen it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41009160,"author":"01100011","month":"2024-07","story_title":"CrowdStrike Update: Windows Bluescreen and Boot Loops","text":"This might be a good time for folks to go back and watch the first episode of James Burke's Connections: The Trigger Effect [VIDEO] Interconnected systems can fail spectacularly in unforeseen ways. Strange that something so obvious is so often dismissed or overlooked.","stance":"rec"}],"NcUJnmBqHTY":[{"hn_comment_id":38221949,"author":"citruscomputing","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Cursorless is alien magic from the future \u2013 Xe Iaso","text":"If you want a general overview of cursorless, along with seeing what it looks like in practice, the talk from Strange Loop this year was great: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48117584,"author":"chamomeal","month":"2026-05","story_title":"AI Pointer from DeepMind","text":"Kinda related, but this reminded me of the guy who made a voice controlled text editing language. It's kinda like vim with your voice. Super cool talk here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NdSD07U5uBs":[{"hn_comment_id":11184618,"author":"josteink","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Rich Hickey Fanclub","text":"Completely unrelated: Alan Kay - the power of simplicity [VIDEO] Easily over of the most thought provoking presentations I have seen recently.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39614551,"author":"vhiremath4","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Alan Kay's talk at UCLA \u2013 Feb 2024 [video]","text":"Highly recommend his talk on the power of simplicity. This was one of those lightbulb moments for me when I was a younger programmer: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11940634,"author":"josteink","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today","text":"I'm not Alan, but I saw one of his talks[1] about how they did invent all those things we're using now, which you are very much referring to. What he said was important was to have a big horizon, at least 10 years. Anything less would not do. Then envision what should be possible in that time. \"It would be ridiculous if $X wasn't possible in $Y years\" and then backtrack on what would technically be required to make that happen. Rinse repeat. He said that with good company support and a good team, you often found yourself delivering at half that time none the less (but again, you should never constrain yourself to that little, or else you will stress towards performing, instead of thinking properly about the problems needing to be solved). Alan: Hope I didn't butcher your message too much :) [1] I think it might be this one, but I honestly haven't checked. See it anyway. It's a good talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14320028,"author":"_pius","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Alan Kay at Startup School [video]","text":"I've seen him give this great talk before, but IMO the delivery this time feels rushed and a bit disjointed. That said, the last few minutes summarize his powerful \"Gretzky Game\" idea so succinctly that they're worth the price of admission alone. I would recommend watching the last 18 seconds of this version (starting at [LINK] ), internalizing the Gretzky Game slide on the screen, backing it up and watching the fuller explanation in the preceding ~3 minutes (starting at 54:18, [LINK] ), and then finally watching a different, more expansive version of the talk like this one, given at Qualcomm: [VIDEO] . Oddly specific advice, I know, but hopefully helpful to somebody.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16840041,"author":"a_d","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Bret Victor - Inventing on principle [LINK] Alan Kay - Power of Simplicity [VIDEO] Steve Jobs - Marketing (unveiling Think Different) [LINK] Robert Cialdini - On Influence [LINK] Peter Thiel - On Zero to One (Notes on Starts Ups or How to Build the Future) [LINK] Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Systems for Decision Making, Habits, Honesty and More (Farnam Street podcast) [LINK] Josh Wolfe - On \"This is who you are up against\" podcast [LINK] Richard Feynman - Fun to Imagine [LINK] Paul Graham - Startup school (2008) [LINK] James Burke - Connections (BBC documentary) <No link> Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the Atom (BBC) [LINK] Elon Musk's 2003 Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture [LINK] Ken Robinson - Do schools kill creativity? [LINK] Paul Stamets on mycology, bioremediation and fungi- Joe Rogan Experience [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21762471,"author":"fovc","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Simple Software Manifesto","text":"Not sure which generation you're in and which generation you'd (relatively) consider Alan Key in, but here is a much more principled approach to what the OP is trying to do: [VIDEO] The TLDW is that Kay thinks we haven't discovered all the fundamental rules of computing, a la Maxwells Equations for physics. If you are able to figure these out, you can substantially cut down your accidental complexity. FWIW, my unscientific view is that achieving simplicity is really hard and doesn't scale people-wise. Instead of C99 without a bunch of stuff, I'd probably use Scheme to create very dense (lots of bespoke abstractions and idioms) but simple software. That approach works reasonably well, but try onboarding a new developer!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46315093,"author":"mablopoule","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Don MacKinnon: Why Simplicity Beats Cleverness in Software Design [audio]","text":"In his \"Power of Simplicity\"[1] talk, Alan Kay had a great illustration of this specific phenomenon using astronomy: Before Johannes Kepler had the insight of describing the orbits of the planets with ellipsis, peoples were using the (conceptually simpler) circles which didn't completely match the observed movement of celestial body such as Mars, thus resulted in complicated circle-within-circles orbits to try to model reality. By introducing a more complex basic shape (ellipsis instead of circle) which happened to match the underlying reality more, the overall description of orbits got greatly simplified. It's a phenomenon I've seen a few time in my career so far: that while often there's complex code because there are actually complex hedge case to handle (essential complexity), sometime it's really because the data structure used to model the thing you're handling is slightly missing the mark, making things fit almost-but-not-quite, and many operation done around to handle data can be greatly simplified (if not avoided altogether) by changing the underlying data-structure. (Also, Alan Kay apparently did another talk called \"Is it really complex, or did we just make it complicated\"[2] that seems pertinent to the thread, though I haven't watch it yet) [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"NdfmMB1E_qk":[{"hn_comment_id":24551721,"author":"jaaames","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn\u2019t pay August rent","text":"\"Meanwhile, 90 percent reported they have been trying to negotiate their leases, but their landlords wouldn\u2019t budge.\" This is alarming. It may seem like just another statistic lost in a bigger article, but it's symptomatic of a ticking time bomb in NYC, and commercial real estate more broadly. Louis Rossmann had an excellent breakdown of why the landlords won't budge on the leases [VIDEO] tl;dr - the loans on these restaurants are all bundled into commercial mortgage backed securities (sound familiar?) and sold to wholesale investors, and the landlords are unable to change the terms of the lease, or the banks will revalue the underlying asset based on a multiple of the rent, and the owner will either essentially get margin called, or end up with negative equity, and default on the loan. Can someone from Wall Street please add their thoughts?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24550924,"author":"xmodem","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn\u2019t pay August rent","text":"The problem is that what is actually going on in NY - and many other markets - doesn't remotely resemble a properly functioning market: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NdppYYfQJgg":[{"hn_comment_id":45953989,"author":"ta12653421","month":"2025-11","story_title":"US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML","text":"LOL, I recommend highly to everyone who thinks a startup can challenge ASML this 1.38min video: [LINK] Its an industrial flight video through a ASML TWIN Exe HighNAV. Here is also a presentation of ~45min at CCC / Germany (in English language) which I highly recommend to watch: [VIDEO] Especially the explanation how they use two milisecond laser shots to first molt the tin and then distribute it symetrically(!!!) with a second shot across the surface. There IS NO chance that this startup will be able to somehow compete, if even Chinese state actors cant do it (yet).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47182318,"author":"KellyCriterion","month":"2026-02","story_title":"ASML unveils EUV light source advance that could yield 50% more chips by 2030","text":"There is an excellent video from German CCC on how chips are produced from their last convention: [VIDEO] I can highly recommend this to everybody who is \"somehow in tech or IT\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47872191,"author":"brokenmachine","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Making RAM at Home [video]","text":"This was the one that did it for me: \"38C3 - From Silicon to Sovereignty: How Advanced Chips Are Redefining Global Dominance\" [VIDEO] Absolutely insane stuff.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43404782,"author":"paulirish","month":"2025-03","story_title":"The race is on to build the most complex machine","text":"A recent CCC talk covered the current state of EUV lithography (really well): [VIDEO] This timecode has rendering of the ASML machine in action. (edit: the same one madspindel posted, oops! The rest of the talk def worth a watch)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46468099,"author":"mkleczek","month":"2026-01","story_title":"BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal","text":"With current military technology it is not really possible, isn't it? [VIDEO] describes it really well. So the question is more about what part of means of defense you outsource. And what parts of means of defense are outsourced by your enemies. You don't want to base your defense on inferior shipbuilding capabilities, do you?","stance":"rec"}],"NeopkvAP-ag":[{"hn_comment_id":32784002,"author":"operator-name","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Some things I realized about AI while contemplating slide rule prices on eBay","text":"I think the digital vs analogue clock is an adjacent, everyday example. On the human scale precise clock maths is rarely necessary, and conceptually thinking of time as a base 60 number can be more trouble than good. Technology Connections has a very good video on this, and completely changed thinking: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41316876,"author":"saurik","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Designing my own watch (2020)","text":"I rather enjoyed the video essay Technology Connections did about the seemingly different mental models of tracking time that come from analog and digital clocks, and how a lot of people now have barely ever experienced analog clocks. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48847967,"author":"ajdude","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Show HN: Analog Watch","text":"Technology Connections did a really great video on this a few years ago. [VIDEO] Apparently being raised with analog clocks vs digital changes how one intuits the passage of time.","stance":"rec"}],"NfizT369g60":[{"hn_comment_id":20150963,"author":"rayalez","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Procedural content generation: creating a universe (2015)","text":"Somewhat related(okay, not really, but still fun) - awesome talks about modern procedural generation techniques(with AI, Houdini, etc): How AI will change 3D industry [LINK] Procedural world generation for Far Cry [VIDEO] Procedurally generating Manhattan for Spider Man [LINK] Mindblowing talks by Anastasia Opara (using cool math, deep learning, and a lot of creativity to create crazy cool stuff) [LINK] Procedurally generating 3D landscape in Houdini (a little tutorial I have made, can't resist sharing) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21307995,"author":"fenwick67","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Grove 8 \u2013 Growing Trees in Blender","text":"You may enjoy this talk, the devs for Far Cry 5 procedurally generated quite a lot of their world, placing plants based on the ground slope, sun, whether they were under power lines, elevation etc. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21369017,"author":"rayalez","month":"2019-10","story_title":"One Page Dungeon Generator","text":"Looks amazing! Note that the author also has a fantasy city generator: [LINK] And mansion generator: [LINK] If you're into that kind of stuff, there's a world map generator(by different author): [LINK] and this amazing tutorial on generating maps: [LINK] ---- Also, kinda relevant - awesome talks about modern procedural generation techniques(with AI, Houdini, etc): How AI will change 3D industry [LINK] Procedural world generation for Far Cry [VIDEO] Procedurally generating Manhattan for Spider Man [LINK] Mindblowing talks by Anastasia Opara (using cool math, deep learning, and a lot of creativity to create crazy cool stuff) [LINK] She is the author of the most impressive procedural generation project I've ever seen: [LINK] ---- Also, I myself have made a little tutorial about procedurally generating a 3D landscape in Houdini: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30212678,"author":"boarnoah","month":"2022-02","story_title":"GTA 6 Confirmed","text":"It has its applications in a different way, tool assisted level design. Software suites like Houdini, which is something of an industry standard in VFX and gamedev can potentially leverage ML techniques. AFAIK the folks who make Houdini have talked in the past about using ML to improve their terrain heightmap modelling, improving the quality of the erosion etc... The real value add with using procedural tools to automate creating parts of large worlds (eroded terrain, placement of foliage according to rules) is that it frees up artist time to focus on hand crafting individual locations and detail into the map. There is an interesting talk from Ubisoft which talks about how they leverage tools for building their large worlds [VIDEO] (slides: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"}],"NfnWJUyUJYU":[{"hn_comment_id":16168374,"author":"neel8986","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI","text":"This is kind of a masters degree course i created for myself to get knowledge of Machine Learning from bottoms up First, you need a strong mathematical base. Otherwise, you can copy paste an algorithm or use an API but you will not get any idea of what is happening inside Following concepts are very essential 1) Linear Algebra (MIT [LINK] ) 2) Probability (Harvard [LINK] ) Get some basic grasp of machine learning. Get a good intuition of basic concepts 1) Andrew Ng coursera course ( [LINK] ) 2) Tom Mitchell book ( [LINK] ) Both the above course and book are super easy to follow. You will get a good idea of basic concepts but they lack in depth. Now you should move to more intense books and courses You can get more in-depth knowledge of Machine learning from following sources 1)Nando machine learning course ( [LINK] ) 2)Bishops book ( [LINK] ) Especially Bishops book is really deep and covers almost all basic concepts. Now for recent advances in Deep learning. I will suggest two brilliant courses from Stanford 1) Vision ( [VIDEO] ) 2) NLP ( [LINK] ) The Vision course by Karparthy can be a very good introduction to Deep learning. Also, the mother book for deep learning ( [LINK] )is good","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16140387,"author":"igravious","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Best introductory video courses on ML and Deep Learning?","text":"fast.ai Making neural nets uncool again. fast.ai is dedicated to making the power of deep learning accessible to all.[0] Udacity. Intro to Machine Learning: Pattern Recognition for Fun and Profit[1] MIT 6.S099: Artificial General Intelligence[2] Lecture Series on Artificial Intelligence by Prof. P. Dasgupta, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur[3] DeepMind. Reinforcement Learning Course by David Silver[4] Stanford Winter Quarter 2016 class: CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition.[5] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NftT6HWFgq0":[{"hn_comment_id":10379205,"author":"thristian","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Programming in a Mad Max Wasteland","text":"See also the Gary Bernhardt talk, Capability vs. Suitability: [VIDEO] Some technologies are radical new developments designed to give people some new capability they never had before. Other technologies are refinements of some previous capability technology, restricting the capabilities but more suitable for some particular problem-space or setting. It's not necessarily \"nobody has big ideas anymore\", it's just a natural cycle. On the other hand, if you want a less-charitable view, consider this: programming in the 1980s was dominated by ideas from C, a language developed in the 1970s. Programming in the 1990s brought the influence of Smalltalk, a language developed in the 1970s. The 2000s saw the introduction of functional programming ideas from Lisp, a language developed in the 1970s. These days, the hot new programming language features are being taken from Standard ML, a language developed in the 1970s. Someday the 1970s will be mined out, and then we can start coming up with new ideas again.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36395974,"author":"al2o3cr","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Enabling\u201d vs. \u201cRestricting\u201d in Programming","text":"There was this talk (\"Capability vs Sustainability\") from 2012: [VIDEO] Very nearly exactly what you're describing; not sure if it's the same thing you were thinking of, or just part of a similar thought-wave at the time.","stance":"rec"}],"NiRrvxjrJ1U":[{"hn_comment_id":20565262,"author":"digibri","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Megapack: Utility-Scale Energy Storage","text":"This talk by Dr Sadoway is pretty amazing regarding his team's design for utility-scale liquid metal batteries: [VIDEO] It's an hour long, but it's well worth the time investment. This is not merely a theoretical technology. A company has been created around this technology: [LINK] (I am not connected to any of this, but I am quite excited by it.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26924952,"author":"lebuffon","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Gravity batteries try to beat chemical ones with winches, weights, mine shafts","text":"I think this guy is onto something... Liquid metal batteries will be better than gravity storage IMHO. [VIDEO] First commercial scale system is going live in 2021 so we shall see how it works out.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27799545,"author":"RobertoG","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Solar is dirt-cheap and about to get even more powerful","text":"We are probably using the wrong kind of battery for grid storage. There are some promising techs out there, like Liquid Metal Battery: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NlIdzF1_b5M":[{"hn_comment_id":16052173,"author":"crikli","month":"2018-01","story_title":"A personal ode to the Boeing 747","text":"I was rolling my eyes at the subtitle. The article devolved from there. Some great (sometimes indirect) information on why the 747 and to a lesser extent the A380 are being phased out, from my new favorite YouTube channel, Wendover Productions: The Economics of Long-Haul Flights: [VIDEO] ETOPS: Explained [LINK] Politics of Aviation / 5 Freedoms of Aviation: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16154412,"author":"mthomasb","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production","text":"This is a great video on the economics of the hub and spoke vs. direct model embodied by the A380 vs 787: [VIDEO] That channel also has alot of very interesting content on the economics of air travel (e.g., seating classes, how tickets are priced, etc).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14174169,"author":"afarrell","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you unwind at the end of a day?","text":"Ooooh, these are nice. Here are mine: Extra History: stories of historical incidents \u2014 [LINK] Real Engineering: mostly materials science \u2014 [LINK] - Wendover Productions \u2014 mostly transportation - [VIDEO] Tom Scott: a bit of everything \u2014 [LINK] - Jay foreman: Urban planning and maps \u2014 [LINK] The Engineer Guy: Manufacturing \u2014 [LINK] Practical Engineering: Mostly Civil Engineering \u2014 [LINK] 3Blue1Brown: Math, visualized to me more intuitive \u2014 [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15479165,"author":"nighthawk454","month":"2017-10","story_title":"As the 747 Begins Its Final Approach, a Pilot Takes a Flight Down Memory Lane","text":"Wendover Productions has an interesting video which touches on this, and the need for a new middle-tier plane. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16096356,"author":"jasode","month":"2018-01","story_title":"As of today, no US passenger airlines operate the Boeing 747","text":">, what has taken over in the big jumbo market? The \"big jumbo market\" itself has shrunk in demand and was made less relevant by the newer generation of long-range fuel-efficient (but smaller) planes like Boeing 737Max/777/787 and Airbus A330. Airbus originally projected sales of 1200 A380s in 2005 but only sold ~300 so far. The \"missing\" 900 sales happened because many airlines rejected A380s designed for hub-&-spoke in favor of smaller planes designed for point-to-point. The youtube channel Wendover has lots of educational videos about transportation and he has a 10 minute video about the different economics of Airbus A380 vs Boeing 787: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16153355,"author":"peterjlee","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Airbus A380, Once the Future of Aviation, May Cease Production","text":"Here's a relevant video from Wendover productions explaining why Boeing 787 is doing better than A380. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19110134,"author":"michaelt","month":"2019-02","story_title":"A380 cancellations by Qantas raise new questions about the superjumbo's future","text":"You might enjoy watching [1]. TLDR: There's a ~20 year lead time on a radical new plane design. The A380 is designed for an airline industry dominated by 'hub-and-spoke' airlines (where a large plane can make efficient use of expensive landing slots at busy airports), while the 787 Dreamliner is designed for an airline industry dominated by 'point-to-point' airlines (where a small plane can avoid the busy airport and expensive landing slot by serving smaller airports). 20 years after they were both conceived of, it's looking like the hub-and-spoke model is the future. Oh, there's still some demand for such a plane, and some routes are busy enough to benefit from it. But if there isn't enough demand to keep the production lines open, the production lines get closed, leaving existing operators high and dry. That fact makes operators nervous to place orders, which is of course a vicious cycle. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34617656,"author":"rdhatt","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Easter egg in flight path of last 747 delivery flight","text":"Wendover Productions has a great video on this topic: Big Plane vs Little Plane (The Economics of Long-Haul Flights) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NmGaXEmfTIo":[{"hn_comment_id":23730653,"author":"milofeynman","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The Classic Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster (2006)","text":"This video made me aware of his channel a few months back and I've been hooked. I really enjoyed the multi-part one where he explained the inner workings of a jukebox[0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22775280,"author":"lathiat","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Hardware Microphone Disconnect in Mac and iPad","text":"The computer free automation of a jukebox from the 1970s is an eye opener: (an in depth teardown and explanation) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"NngCHTImH1g":[{"hn_comment_id":40684621,"author":"consumer451","month":"2024-06","story_title":"What is the opposite of oil drilling?","text":"Related, and yet not mentioned in TFA: \"Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas\" [LINK] Excellent S3 piece on Terraform [20min]: [VIDEO] I agree with Terraform's founder on at least one thing: atmospheric carbon capture needs to be cheaper than ground extraction. Market forces will decide the rest. This is not a CO2 cop-out, we need to both stop introducing CO2 into the atmosphere, and also extract gigatons from it. Terraform Industries is addressing both sides.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39923611,"author":"mattjaynes","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Terraform makes carbon neutral natural gas","text":"For more, I'd recommend Jason Carman's recently released videos on Terraform: Overview and tour (~20min): [VIDEO] Deeper Interview (~40min): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41285429,"author":"aesch","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Energy economics and rocket science with Casey Handmer","text":"Casey Handmer's company is creating synthetic hydrocarbons from renewable energy. Here is a good video where he gives a tour of the company and talks about its goals: [VIDEO] . Curious what people think about the idea of synthetic hydrocarbons? It is a seemingly obvious idea that I hadn't heard about until recently, as long as you can use energy efficiently to create the synthetic hydrocarbons.","stance":"rec"}],"Nnuq9PXbywA":[{"hn_comment_id":45997138,"author":"dust42","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Two recently found works of J.S. Bach presented in Leipzig [video]","text":"My absolute personal favourite is Toccata and Fugue played by organist Hans-Andr\u00e9 Stamm on the Trost-Organ of the Stadtkirche in Waltershausen [1]. Great videography, great organ and very expressive organist. From 3:28 on you can also see the foot work. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13140490,"author":"david-given","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica","text":"I love organ music; but you have to listen to it live. The low notes don't come across properly on recorded media (also you don't feel your chest resonate). Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, one of the most famous pieces of organ music ever, played on an organ built in 1730 (and, if I read the history right, it was actually specified by Bach): [VIDEO] You can hear the recording simply outright fail on the low notes. The organ has a 32-foot pipe, which produces 16Hz notes. The reocrding simply doesn't do it justice; if you ever get the chance, listen to it live; it's an almost transcendent experience. There are, however, apparently two organs in the world with 64-foot pipes (8Hz!) and several more which can synthesise an 8Hz subharmonic using smaller pipes, but I haven't found a recording I trust of it yet.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16562128,"author":"goldenkey","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Can any composer equal Bach?","text":"I agree but I also would remind you that the player plays a large role in keyed music. For example, constant velocity MIDI makes a dissonant slaughter of any harmonic music, and totally destroys the swing of rythymic music. A player with the wrong motivation or lacking passion, pretty much reduces to a souped up MIDI. Organs are especially expressive, even more so than pianos. Try listening to the \"Frankenstein music\" from Bach, it is pretty easy to relate to and Hans-Andre Stamm plays it on an appropriately large church organ with the necessary emotion and \"godhead\" existential feeling/motivation behind it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Npd_xDuNi9k":[{"hn_comment_id":26706638,"author":"throwhelp41890","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Let's Get Right to Repair Passed \u2013 Louis Rossmann","text":"\"Many people have asked for a simple, concise, non-profanity laden video that summarizes the issue that is shareable to politicians and family members. Here you go. No profanity, no technobabble, just a basic explanation. Go forth and share. Thank you!\" -- Louis Rossmann What is Right to repair? An intro: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26998169,"author":"operator-name","month":"2021-04","story_title":"It's your device, you should be able to repair it","text":"I'd highly reccomended his video \"What is right to repair? An introduction for curious people.\" as it clears up many misconceptions about right to repair: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23285296,"author":"skdd8","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Hacker Mods Old Calculator to Access the Internet, Casio Files DMCA Complaint","text":"What in the actual fuck! I laughed so hard at this video just to watch in disgust how the DCMA and it's lackey GH would take down a repo that has nothing to do with Casio other than the name perhaps. Where is the freedom to tinker? If I modify my Toyota Corolla to take a Ferrari engine would Ferrari or Toyota come to my house and take my car away? Fight for your right to repair: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26642993,"author":"dataflow","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Louis Rossmann crowdfunding initiative & investing 2 years for Right to Repair","text":"Yes! Spread the word too. Also, if you know a professional that might be able to help him out with the legal/politics/etc., consider reaching out. He's a sharp guy but it's still a tough task and he is going to need all the help he can get. And so does our planet. Donation link: [LINK] Pitch for non-techies: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Nq2HkAYbG5o":[{"hn_comment_id":12116974,"author":"xaduha","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Interview with Larry Wall","text":"With all due respect to Larry Wall he shouldn't be a source of info or inspiration when it comes to Perl6. Watch this instead, it's pretty damn great [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20620123,"author":"raiph","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Is Perl 5 or Perl 6 still worth learning in 2019?","text":"Of course. (For some people.) Here are some videos to give a flavor of the last few years of Perl 6 as it graduated from alpha in 2014 to beta in 2015 to the first ready for production releases of the Rakudo compiler in 2016, to outsiders doing videos about it in 2019 (last video). * 2014. \"There's this question of belief\". 30 seconds. Charming point made by Perl creator Larry Wall (during a long talk). [LINK] * 2014. \"My first P6 program\". 3 minute \"lightning talk\" presentation to an audience of Perl folk. P5er Stefan Seifert shows what they learned and pulled off less than 24 hours after first writing P6 code. (This start led to [LINK] ) [LINK] * 2015. \"P5 Pigs\". 6 minute \"lightning talk\" with audience participation at a Perl conference. Stephen Scaffidi sings his heart out about tensions in the Perl community about Perl 5 \"vs\" Perl 6. (In reality it's not \"vs\". They're different languages in the same family, analogous to the way Clojure and Racket are both in the Lisp family.) [LINK] * 2015. \"Hacking on Rakudo Compiler\". 10 minute live coding screencast. Rob Hoelz looks into 3 bugs. [LINK] * 2016. \"Perl 6 for beginners\". A conference keynote. An hour, or 15 minutes if you're in a hurry. Damian Conway is brilliant and hilarious. If you've never seem him, you're in for a treat. I strongly recommend the full hour. You will not be disappointed. The first link below is for the full hour, the second jumps to the closing 15 minute \"crash course on quantum computing\". [VIDEO] [VID","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27827377,"author":"raiph","month":"2021-07","story_title":"To compute a constant of calculus (2019)","text":"Right, yes, for continued fractions / convergent series, floats are almost certainly going to be a complete disaster whereas if only integer division is involved, as is the case with this series, then arbitrary precision rationals are going to be exact, and often sufficiently performant for most such series for results up to about 15 decimal digits or so. Damian demonstrates this difference between using floats and arbitrary precision rationals when he shows code for computing Bernoulli numbers in his \"On The Shoulders Of Giants\" presentation.[0] (Btw, if you care about programming and appreciate a combination of total technical and geek mastery with standup comic delivery, the whole thing is like watching a great movie, whether you watch it from the \"start\" at the 5 minute mark, or skip forward to the 45 minute mark for the 15 minute Quantum Computing For Beginners section.) [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12639628,"author":"VLM","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Aside from the typical, I watched Damian Conway \"Standing on the shoulders of giants\" from YAPC 2016 last week and found it interesting. Always fun to see a modern feature full language collide with history and algorithms. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12891932,"author":"zoffix222","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Why hasn't Perl 6 taken off yet?","text":"To me, it's mostly the presence of all new CS inventions in core. Like you don't need any damn libraries to paralellize stuff, just use `start` block or a `supply`. If you write accounting software, you'll appreciate built-in rationals so that 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3, unlike so many other languages. Laziness is present in many things like lazy exceptions, string generation, and sequences: say (3, 9 \u2026 \u221e)[^20] does not hang and produces (3 9 15 21 27 33 39 45 51 57 63 69 75 81 87 93 99 105 111 117), despite being an infinite sequence. You also have grammars, more readable regex language, and superb object model. On a more advanced spectrum, with grammars and slangs, you can craft your own mini-languages for a specific domain where they would fit better; there's a nice little presentation by Damian Conway where he crafts an operator for quantum mechanical math that looks and functions just like the proper mathematical symbol functions: [VIDEO] As for the langs you mentioned: I find a lot of similarities between Rust and Perl 6, although in some areas it seems Perl 6 folks did more thinking (like the .match stuff). They are however in different domains, Rust being a systems language; but you can use Rust libraries in Perl 6 via NativeCall if you compile them for C calling convention. Perl 6 smokes Ruby and Python with its asynch/parallel/conc. support and more advanced object model. As far as Unicode support goes, only Swift comes close to Perl 6; try to uppercase \"\u00df\" in Ruby, for examp","stance":"rec"}],"Nrp_LZ-XGsY":[{"hn_comment_id":25610624,"author":"__henil","month":"2021-01","story_title":"F# for fun and profit: Terms and Conditions","text":"On the same note, I recently shared a link[0] to his great beginner talk on functional programming languages. This was by far the best introduction to monoid, monads and few other functional programming terms. Direct youtube[1] for those who don't want to click twice :) [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21881750,"author":"lioeters","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Functional programming design patterns (2015) [video]","text":"Same speaker, newer presentations: Functional Design Patterns - Scott Wlaschin (2017) from NDC Conferences [LINK] The Functional Programmer's Toolkit - Scott Wlaschin (2019) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25262816,"author":"bern4444","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Write your own arbitrary-precision JavaScript math library","text":"More of a comment on the author, I've found his other articles enlightening, useful as both introductions to functional programming ideas and as comprehensive deep dives demonstrating their intuitive nature both in code and contextual application. A lot of the articles in conjunction with some other resources[1][2][3] are great for diving into functional programming (I've watched and read these many times). If you do front end development with React, I highly recommend the following two videos[4][5] with Ryan Florence and Micahel Jackson (devs behind react-router and Remix) on the compositional nature of React components and hooks. The last note I'll add is, once you get into Functional Programming, you start wanting to use `compose` or its counter part, `pipe` everywhere and coding becomes a lot more fun. I'll put a final plug for one of my own posts on how composition manifests in Javascript/React code[6]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27809463,"author":"loopz","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Haskell for Beginners","text":"Learn Haskell in 1-2-3: 1) WHY: The Functional Programmer's Toolkit - Scott Wlaschin : [VIDEO] 2) WHAT: Learn Haskell in one video : [LINK] 3) HOW: Haskell without the theory : [LINK] It'll teach you enough to be dangerous. Obviously your learning has just begun, but with a mental platform that lets you study other resources in time and practically test things out.","stance":"rec"}],"Nsjsiz2A9mg":[{"hn_comment_id":40663465,"author":"mrkeen","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Don't Refactor Like Uncle Bob","text":"> it's both easier and more profitable to tell people that they need to OOP better than to use more appropriate paradigms in the design of their code. I don't think this is quite on target. Sure, he needs to go where the people are in order to communicate to the most people, but that doesn't mean he doesn't speak out against fads if it's appropriate. This talk was really formative for me: [VIDEO] If I remember correctly, he rails against just sticking the database in the middle of your system and calling that your architecture. If I'm remembering [LINK] correctly, he says OOP is no big deal, it's just encapsulation-polymorphism-inheritance, and then goes on to say things like C had better encapsulation than OO languages (you can keep your .c file to yourself, and just give someone the .h to program against.). And c-style bytes with stdin/stdout was designed with perfect forward-compatibility - programs like your terminal don't need to be recompiled even though they interact with your program (which was written after). And for the last 5+ years he's been pushing FP pretty hard, especially closure. I don't see him as pushing OO on people at the expense of anything else.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18762182,"author":"fredrklem","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Software Architecture, all you need to know [pdf]","text":"It is a pity that so much effort has been put on writing/designing this booklet. Software Architecture is very hard to 'compress' into a booklet this size. And the concepts explained seem all mixed up. Also, I never understood the difference between Software Architect and Solution Architect, I think they are just marketing tags to specify a bit more what you can do as an architect (install/customize a turn-key solution, networking architecture, software development guidance from scratch, etc). There is so much noise in the space of Software Architecture. And I think is something natural: building software is not architecture, nor engineering, nor mathematics... still it is all that at the same time. It also has strong social, linguistic and design components. Maybe it is just too new a discipline to define it clearly. Personally I find these resources more convincing than the booklet or the references mentioned inside it: For the technical/organizational (Dev teams) part Architecture without Architects: [LINK] Clean Architecture: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] For the Enterprise Architect part: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Nwew5gHoh3E":[{"hn_comment_id":11085070,"author":"adrusi","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Bacterial cells are small 'eyeballs', scientists discover","text":"Actually the history of the eye has been farily well understood, and the various stages of its evolution can be seen in animals that exist today. Dawkins explains it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34407755,"author":"yarg","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Using paleogenomics to elucidate 10k years of immune system evolution","text":"Dawkins invalidating the notion that the eye is irreducably complex: [VIDEO] . Showing quite clearly how incremental beneficial change leads to the development of complex features. But it will never matter to creationists: [LINK] . (Don't even bother with that last link.) They'll always just build another straw man.","stance":"rec"}],"NxvQPzrg2Wg":[{"hn_comment_id":18336505,"author":"iN7h33nD","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds","text":"Many sources would beg to differ about meat not being a problem. [VIDEO] (Sources: [LINK] ) So even if FAO got it wrong, I just don't see beef not being a problem.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29021012,"author":"sillysaurusx","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching","text":"Listen. You're right. There, I gave you validation. But you're not going to change anyone's mind. So what's the point? Remember, the primary purpose of HN is entertainment (intellectual gratification). Internalizing this helped me break the habit of making such arguments \"just to be right.\" I'll throw it back at you: Yes, I just ate two pork steaks. I have two more in the fridge. In fact, I'd personally murder a family of pigs if it was the only way I'd ever be able to eat pork steaks again. They're that delicious, and I am that selfish. Life isn't nice. It's brutal, short, and sprinkled with periods of happiness and ecstasy. It's always been that way, and it'll be that way long after we're gone. It is literally fine to use humans for sustenance if everyone collectively agrees it's fine, by the way. People have done it. [LINK] You could argue \"Well, that was survival. Besides, those people were already dead.\" Literally every animal born into factory farming is already dead. They just don't realize it yet. I think linking to [VIDEO] is probably your best bet at even getting people to stop and think about the question at all. Yet if even Kurzgesagt's eloquence doesn't make a dent (I still scarf down pork steaks on a regular basis), what hope do you have here? Once you internalize all of this, perhaps you'll be in a frame of mind to realize that it was off-topic to bring up factory farming in a thread about ivory poaching. I get where you're coming from, and I agree that it seem","stance":"rec"}],"O-2tpwW0kmU":[{"hn_comment_id":35021656,"author":"jackothy","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Science fiction movies that are appropriate for 12 year olds?","text":"First some that I don't see mentioned here yet: Edge of Tomorrow (2014) Limitless (2011) Looper (2012) Upgrade (2018) Source Code (2011) District 9 (2009) Black Mirror S3E2: \"Playtest\", S4E1: \"USS Callister\" The 7 minute YouTube video \"Slaughterbots\"[1] The YouTube series The Backrooms [2] If you are worried about your son hearing swear words and seeing blood, and not just whether or not he will be able to understand/appreciate the movie, then you probably want to wait with a couple of those. And then I would also agree with those here that mention Inception , Interstellar , Back to the Future , The Martian , Men in Black , Minority Report , The Terminator , Terminator 2 , and The Expanse . I also don't think he should have much of a problem following along with The Matrix . [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37432579,"author":"FrustratedMonky","month":"2023-09","story_title":"The thinking path","text":"In reading lately have come across a lot of famous names that made 'walking' a big part of their learning. It is good way to let brain wonder and have subconscious solve problems. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Aristotle, Thoreau Also. Buried in the page farther down. One of the more scary takes on how we could have 'Killer AI'. Everyone seems to argue 'Killer AI' is still far in the future, because they associate it with the Terminator Movies and current Robot Tech is lagging AI. So why worry, we can still un-plug them. This video is how it will actually happen. AI can be incorporated into a lot of weapons. From the linked site [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38706292,"author":"InvertedRhodium","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Hamas's Cheap, Makeshift Drones Are Outsmarting Israel's High-Tech Military","text":"I really enjoy this video, which is set in a theoretical future where just what you describe eventuated: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44185585,"author":"zellyn","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first","text":"Looks like most of the comments here are about the use as weapons and the possible dangers. I believe \"Slaughterbots\" is the canonical sci-fi video on the subject, and it appears to be aging pretty well. Unfortunately\u2026 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44185896,"author":"nothrabannosir","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first","text":"Obligatory link to the short film (future documentary) \u201cSlaughterbots\u201d (2017), which depicts exactly this in harrowing detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"O133ppiVnWY":[{"hn_comment_id":22502783,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some deep, mentality changing books?","text":"For me, several books by Greg Egan fall into this category. Permutation City, Diaspora, Quarantine, and Schild's Ladder have all... changed me. I was a different person before and after I had read those books, and now I categorise all works of fiction into those that forever alter my way of thinking and those that do not. [LINK] Which reminds me, I should finish: [LINK] The Culture series by Iain Banks, especially Inversions also satisfy this requirement, as does The City at the End of Time by Greg Bear: [LINK] -- which is a difficult to consume masterpiece that nonetheless left me permanently horrified in the way that H. P. Lovecraft tried but failed. For the non-fiction category the CGP Grey video \"The Rules for Rulers\": [LINK] and Part 2: [LINK] have totally changed the way I look at all political discourse, and this is coming from someone who has already absorbed The Prince. It's based on the Dictator's Handbook, which I should read also, but the CGP video was an effective summary already! [LINK] Last, but not least, if I'm allowed to include lecture videos, then the \"Arithmetic, Population and Energy\" lecture by Al Bartlett is absolutely amazing. You will never see the news in the same way again after watching it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22688893,"author":"simonblack","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Why don\u2019t I know anyone who knows anyone with Covid-19? [pdf]","text":"\"Two minutes past twelve.\" The problem with stuff like this is that most people have no knowledge about the dangers of exponential growth. It only takes an hour, but it's the most valuable use of an hour of your lifetime to watch Prof. Bartlett's talk on exponential growth in 'Arithmetic, Population and Energy': [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23092937,"author":"maerF0x0","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life","text":"Compounding, growth etc [VIDEO] Taught me the logical impossibility of the stock market to go up by x% per year, forever. Taught me that getting better today (however small) can give resources to getting better(er?) tomorrow. Taught me that many \"experts\" just say whatever to get voted in or to get a budget without regards to the absurdity of their own statements, and that many people eat up this kind of absurdity without fact checking / validating it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12148280,"author":"qpwoeirutyzzzz","month":"2016-07","story_title":"How climate change is rapidly taking the planet apart","text":"For starters have fewer or no kids, and stop traveling frivolously by air. Aircraft emissions, because they are made at high altitude, have a climate impact that is leveraged by a factor commonly estimated to be 2.7 higher than the same emissions if made at ground-level.[1] 1. [LINK] edit: also relevant [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31635026,"author":"knorker","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Restarting my career after motherhood","text":"The population pyramid is not sustainable. The exponential function just will not allow for the combination of age pyramid and our increasingly effective health care keeping us alive to all become parents. Watch this talk: [VIDEO] Tl;DW: we can not prevent the end of exponential population growth. We can only choose how it ends. By starvation, war, disease, or fewer births. Pension systems have relied on growth for a long time, but it's just not mathematically possible is the long run.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36845710,"author":"RetroTechie","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist","text":"Great read! Reminds me of this lecture: [VIDEO] Al Bartlett - Arithmetic, Population and Energy Amazing how again & again, even so-called 'experts' can't do math, or ignore fundamental physics constraints. Never mind news outlets or the general public. And... most people don't understand exponential growth. Which brings me to b) math + physics is much much much much more reliable than people. So if you understand the physics involved, do the math, conclude that it can't possibly work, but someone (expert or otherwise) says it will work: go with your calculator. :-)","stance":"rec"}],"O1lZ9n2bxWA":[{"hn_comment_id":25567817,"author":"ljf","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Why Is There a Bucatini Shortage in America?","text":"For those who haven't been to the US, I was blown away that some cars use brake lights as the turn indicator - good video on the set up (and issues): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28661929,"author":"gizdan","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Congratulations, Mini, you made the stupidest turn signals ever","text":"Speaking of terrible turn signals, Technology Connections on YouTube did a very informative (though a bit ranting) video on them in the US. Worth a watch and really interesting. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"O45LaFsaqMA":[{"hn_comment_id":15600504,"author":"Ericson2314","month":"2017-11","story_title":"How a destructive idea paved the way for modern math","text":"Yes we must take saxioms on faith alone. Embrace pluralism and move on. [VIDEO] by the late great Voedvodvosky is more interesting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18391325,"author":"IngoBlechschmid","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Mystery Math Whiz and Novelist Advance Permutation Problem","text":"> And indeed, this will likely always be the case, as the true purpose of proving a mathematical result is almost never to actually get the boolean true/false output, but to illustrate how to solve the problem in the first place and what methods were helpful for that. As a working mathematician, I wholeheartedly agree with the second part of the quoted sentence! But I think that the first part isn't quite right: The function of proofs to determine truth is extremely important, especially considering that, especially in pure mathematics, we often can't check our results in any other manner (like conducting physical experiments or checking many cases with the computer). Bad experiences with proofs which later turned out to be faulty led Voevodsky to initiate his univalent foundations program (also called homotopy type theory ), where all results should be checked by the computer. (For the particular area he was working on, no existing theorem prover turned out to be sufficient. He made a breakthrough in finding a new foundation to base theorem provers on, which made it possible to formalize results in his area of mathematics not only in principle, but also in practice.) The hope is also that with computer-checked proofs, we can advance to new areas of mathematics which are currently inprenetable to our puny human minds. I'm very much looking forward to this future! You can learn more about Voevodsky's vision in slides of him and in a recorded lecture: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20572779,"author":"ukj","month":"2019-07","story_title":"A Programmer\u2019s Regret: Neglecting Math at University","text":"Where Hilbert erred was looking for foundations in first-order logic. Univalent foundations are laid on high-order logic. It's the distinction between top-down and bottom-up thinking. If you are into philosophy/epistemology - it's somewhat of an attempt to shift Mathematics from foundationalism towards structuralism. I recommend this video: [VIDEO] Hilbert's dream of Metamathematics has sort of come true in the form of homoiconicity in programming languages.","stance":"rec"}],"O4Ko7NW2yQo":[{"hn_comment_id":26729185,"author":"terramex","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted","text":"They already did, 15 minutes ago: [VIDEO] For those who do not know - PBS Spacetime is YouTube channel hosted by astrophysics Ph.D Matt O'Dowd, aimed at casual physics enthusiasts without oversimplifying underlying physics too much.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27096596,"author":"dmix","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Gravity is a double copy of other forces","text":"There's a ton of articles about this on every science news site and youtube channel. Here's an old one for example that explains what they are doing at Fermi wit the G-2 machine: [VIDEO] And just check the science sites.","stance":"rec"}],"O5BJVO3PDeQ":[{"hn_comment_id":24128299,"author":"rgoulter","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Star Citizen Alpha 3.10","text":"Speaking of pre-release hype for over-promised scope, Internet Historian's \"The Engoodening of No Man's Sky\" is surprisingly a well told, heart-warming (albeit quite long) video telling the story of No Man's Sky, how it got so hyped, and the good-faith steps the developers took to do their best to make good on their promises. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30196572,"author":"cletus","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Star Citizen will limit its roadmap, as players are getting upset over delays","text":"Watching Star Citizen has been a hobby for me like watching a train wreck is painfully slow motion. It came about at the same time as the revival of a beloved franchise Elite in the form of Elite Dangerous. ED didn't have the budget SC does but it stuck to quite narrow development goals and shipped years ago. It's progressively added updates, patches and expansions since. No Man's Sky is vaguely in the same vein and had a terrible launch (I highly recommend this video [1]) but, to their credit, Hello Games has plugged away at NMS adding more content and updates to the point where it's an enjoyable experience now and has a loyal fan base. But SC? By God. It's like a progenitor for NFT scams. Constantly raising even more money by selling limited run ships (for a game that still basically doesn't exist). I'd occasionally see a presentation on some new system under development (eg the prison system) and I always thought \"why on Earth are they talking about this before they even have a core game?\" It's an object lesson that too much money can be a bad thing. It's so easy for an embarrassment of riches to lead to hopeless feature creep and not really delivering anything. I'm honestly surprised so many still drink the Kool-Aid on SC. I really wonder where all the money has gone (and how much is actually gone). [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34625658,"author":"jmyeet","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress","text":"I'm super happy for these guys. They really have struggled with donations for many years. It's nice to see them get the bag. For those commenting on the sales drop off, it is a problem for AAA titles that a half-finished product gets sold to the public and then abandoned because it's easier to just move onto the next thing. But I want to counter that with the story of No Man's Sky. I highly recommend the Internet Historian video on it [1]. The short version is for various reasons the game over-promised and under-delieved on launch but Sean and HelloGames have now spent years continuing to develop the game with free and significant updates. I can only imagine this still drives sales growth or it wouldn't be sustainable. But it's really repaired HG's and NMS's reputation. NMS has a real cult following now. And then of course there's Minecraft whose long tail of sales is truly mind-blowing. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43744438,"author":"csense","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety","text":"Internet Historian made an amazing documentary on how the game's changed over the years [1]. They're still making massive changes to the game! If it's been years since you played it, you should give it a try. There have been a lot of bug/crash fixes, new mechanics, even redoing some core game systems (I think they recently made some big changes to planet generation). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22346864,"author":"Asooka","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Spore Prototypes (2008)","text":"NMS had problems of a completely different character at launch. Once they fixed the bugs, added the features that were missing and did a lot of polish, people really like the game. It's very well-received now. Here's a short story of how and why it had a bad launch [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27630218,"author":"cletus","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0","text":"Star Citizen is a cautionary tale about how too much money can be a curse. Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous came around at roughly the same time but Elite has been a complete game for years. Elite did things right in the sense that they released a complete game and added to it. I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems they're adding like being put in prison and escaping and all I can think of is that this sounds cool but why are you spending any effort on this before you have a core game? star Citizen development just seems to be completely unfocused with periodic sales of ships to top up the coffers. How much better could it have been had they decided on core features that were a complete game and then just added content releases every 6-12 months? For anyone who just wants to explore without the grittiness and over-realism of Elite Dangerous, check out No Man's Sky. Side note, there's a great Internet Historian video [1] on the redemption of NMS after over-promising on release. Also, I see another game that seems to be falling into the trap of being too ambitious before having core gameplay and that's Ashes of Creation, sadly. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30239273,"author":"snowgrove","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Worms or bust: The story of Britain\u2019s most tenacious indie games company (2016)","text":"I love Worms, but if there\u2019s a runner-up for \u201cBritain\u2019s most tenacious indie games company\u201d then surely it is Hello Games. They launched No Man\u2019s Sky in 2016 to universal disappointment and fan outrage, but kept working on it post-launch (under extreme stress and with little income to speak of) for years until they met & exceeded fan\u2019s original expectations. Gratified fans eventually paid to put up a \u201cThank you Hello Games\u201d billboard on a road near their office. The whole story is incredible and worth your time: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36155040,"author":"lyu07282","month":"2023-06","story_title":"No Man's Sky Now on Mac","text":"Just in the off-chance that anyone hasn't seen this: [VIDEO] it goes over this entire saga from failure at launch to massive success","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38213379,"author":"tmpz22","month":"2023-11","story_title":"No Man's Sky just keeps getting better","text":"Yeah I got about 30 hours, paid about $30 (there have been many sales where its much cheaper - plus IIRC its on Xbox Game Pass now). Im more then happy at the cost/reward. Would seriously follow a new game by the same developer [1] the engoodening of No Man's Sky is a entertaining mini-doc on the game. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42869150,"author":"ziddoap","month":"2025-01","story_title":"No Man's Sky's update introduces billions of new stars, planets, and more","text":"No Man's Sky is the poster child for turning a shitty launch into a success. You can really feel the passion of the staff at Hello Games in the current version of the game. It reminds me of the quote, which I'm about to butcher, that is along the lines of \"People don't remember the problem, they remember how you dealt with the problem\". If you haven't seen it, \"The Engoodening of No Man's Sky\" is a good review of the story. It's 5 years old now, and the engoodening hasn't stopped. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"O61WihMRdjM":[{"hn_comment_id":48208015,"author":"globular-toast","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars [video]","text":"I understood after I watched the brilliant Weber Auto video on it, published 5 years ago[0]. I liked it so much I \"gently\" encouraged my partner to get a Yaris hybrid, which gets about 69mpg average. It's not unusual to see 80+ on individual trips. She was a little sceptical about having an auto at first, because us Europeans still think it's 1980 and that manuals are superior, but she came around after a few minutes of driving. To be fair, though, classic \"slushbox\" autos actually were/are garbage, as are chain actuated CVTs. The hybrid system gets you immediate acceleration like an electric, none of this awful lag you get with a slushbox. It's hilarious to me that 34mpg is considered remarkably good, though. I know it's a \"minivan\" but my Golf GTI gets 42mpg and is actually fun and arguably cool. I can also fit 5 people, furniture, and 2.4m lengths of timber in it comfortably. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36623081,"author":"somerandomqaguy","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Toyota Is Right: We Need More Hybrid Cars and Fewer EVs. Here\u2019s Why","text":"Toyota's eCVT? Not at all. The gas engine can drive the front wheels directly. [LINK] Conceptual explanation of the system. [VIDEO] Weber Auto giving an extensive hands on explanation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46283329,"author":"hedgehog","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Ford kills the All-Electric F-150","text":"The planetary gear \"eCVT\" systems that Toyota and Ford use in many models are mechanically a lot simpler than a traditional automatic or sequential manual transmission. Few moving parts and no clutches at all. I don't know what the long term reliability of those drivetrains is is but I wouldn't be surprised if it's measurably measurably better than a traditional transmission + engine. There's a long educational video from Weber State University that gives a good walkthrough of what's going on in those things. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OB-bdWKwXsU":[{"hn_comment_id":4048958,"author":"agentultra","month":"2012-05","story_title":"A Dangerous Obsession with Primitives","text":"This sounds like the kind of problem that puts really expensive robots into craters. [VIDEO] There's a salient point in that talk where he describes a mission that failed due to a human error. Someone forgot to convert an internal representation of a unit in some algorithm which led to a miscalculation and a loss of some millions of dollars. Apparently the error made it through all of the code reviews and tests that were written. Bjarne then shows some pretty simple code that might have avoided such a disaster by specifying your types up front and letting the compiler do the work of converting them. Seems like a pretty simple concept and I wonder why it's so often missed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5513491,"author":"munk801","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"GoingNative 2012 - Bjarne Stroustrup talks about C++ 11. Very good talk about the ideas behind C++ 11 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OBPpRqxY8Uw":[{"hn_comment_id":10047982,"author":"vladimirralev","month":"2015-08","story_title":"How Quantum Randomness Saves Relativity","text":"This is probably inspired by the recent hype about messenger lectures by Susskind [LINK] There is also more detailed lecture available here on this particular topic [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12091439,"author":"Neeek","month":"2016-07","story_title":"In Search of Time\u2019s Origin (2014)","text":"This kind of sounds like a variation/extension on Leonard Susskind's hologram reality, he mentions in these presentations and lectures[1] that a lot of the ideas came from Maldacena and the soup can (I hope that's the right video, it's been a while since I watched them, the related videos should offer more if I got it wrong). There's a little more math and explanation in those videos, just look for the ones regarding horizons and the like, though I'm afraid I can't help you with your search for papers. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18938220,"author":"ithkuil","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Strangeness of Black Holes","text":"I found these lectures by Leonard Susskind very insightful: - Leonard Susskind on The World As Hologram ( [LINK] ) - Leonard Susskind | \"ER = EPR\" or \"What's Behind the Horizons of Black Holes?\" ( [VIDEO] ) - Entanglement and Complexity: Gravity and Quantum Mechanics ( [LINK] )","stance":"rec"}],"ODSJsviD_SU":[{"hn_comment_id":41852516,"author":"timschmidt","month":"2024-10","story_title":"The Retreat to Muskworld","text":"> If the data from supervised driving can he used for unsupervised driving So you're unaware of the AI day presentations about their driving training pipeline. Learning about their engineering in that regard really changed my perception of the likelihood that they could solve the problem. Give it a watch: [VIDEO] > failure to keep up with competitors like Waymo Looks like each of them lead in different ways to me. Waymo leads within certain specific city limits, Tesla leads on the open road. These seem to be direct consequences of their engineering decisions. Question is which will converge on working everywhere all the time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33400975,"author":"aeternum","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Why Tesla removed radar and ultrasonic sensors [video]","text":"It is pretty cool: [VIDEO] They transitioned from 2D to 3D a couple years ago, major transition but it does seem like a critical step. We live in a 3d rather than 2d world.","stance":"rec"}],"OFgxAFdxYAQ":[{"hn_comment_id":13782848,"author":"zellyn","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Cold, Hard Cache \u2013 Insomniac Games\u2019 Cache Simulator [slides]","text":"Coincidentally, I just watched this last night: it's a really accessible refresher if you're a bit outdated on how all these caches work and interact: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27678451,"author":"tjalfi","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Intel to disable TSX by default on more CPUs with new microcode","text":"I'm also a fan of Cliff and other Rice alumni; here are a few of his videos that I like. [0] The Sea of Nodes and the HotSpot JIT [1] A JVM Does That? [2] A Crash Course in Modern Hardware [3] Bits of Advice for the VM Writer [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43275392,"author":"NovaX","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Microbenchmarks: HashMap, ConcurrentHashMap, and Guava Caches","text":"This was a good attempt but flawed. 1. You should use JMH to handle warmup, jit, timings, averaging of runs, etc. You might enjoy the following talks on the subject, though I am sure there are other gems out there. - Performance Anxiety: [LINK] - Benchmarking for Good: [LINK] - (The Art of) (Java) Benchmarking: [LINK] - A Crash Course in Modern Hardware: [VIDEO] - How NOT to Write a Microbenchmark [LINK] - Anatomy of a flawed microbenchmark [LINK] 2. An uncontended lock is basically free, as you noticed. 3. Guava does implement the Map interface via asMap(). It also have a concurrencyLevel to adjust its performance. It is based on Java 5's CHM. 4. Caffeine is a Guava Cache rewrite based on Java 8's CHM rewrite, plus many learnings. You might look at its benchmarks for ideas: [LINK] 5. Data structures are surprisingly tricky. For example see this analysis showing an accidental misunderstanding degrading an LRU to O(n) eviction. [LINK] 6. It is important to remember that the goal of a benchmark is never which is faster or by how much. It is to ask (a) is it fast enough? (b) might I reach a point where it will not be? and (c) does it degrade unexpectedly? == This is to say the winner is of little interest, once all the choices are good enough then it is about usability, features, documentation, friendliness, and so on.","stance":"rec"}],"OHPkdMGI6D4":[{"hn_comment_id":29223473,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The bullet effects in Terminator 2 weren\u2019t CGI","text":"I think it really just comes down to the skill of the film makers, as it always has. I think a really good example of this is this comparison between the old and new Dune movies: [VIDEO] The new Dune is masterfully crafted, and I was never once bothered by the CG, even though there was clearly a ton of it. The old Dune, on the other hand...I don't think it's aged particularly gracefully. Then again, I've never been a huge Lynch fan.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30180661,"author":"michaelbuckbee","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Over-reliance on CGI in movies","text":"So much of this is just how _much_ work had to be done to get practical effects to work, and how practical and CGI are often good for different things. For an insane example of this checkout this video of how they did the ship landing in the original Dune movie (of which step 1 was \"rent a stadium\"). [VIDEO] Also, I think there's a very selective bias against CGI where when it looks _real_ we just assume it's real and don't notice so we're only criticizing the portion where it failed to live up to reality.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30182394,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Over-reliance on CGI in movies","text":"Another series that I've enjoyed watching is the Corridor Crew. Their take on Dune (both versions) is [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37356295,"author":"tedunangst","month":"2023-09","story_title":"The Practical Effects Wizardry of Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves","text":"If you like this, I like corridor crew on YouTube. Here's one discussing how effects in Dune, old and new, were done, some of which were pretty surprising. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OINAk2xl8Bc":[{"hn_comment_id":22346592,"author":"diegoperini","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Japan\u2019s Lost-and-Found System","text":"I'm not Japanese, but I've seen this Japanese person explaining the situation informally but thoroughly. [VIDEO] The premise is, yes 99% percent is a measured rate but also has no utility in a discussion if the other parts of the big picture is ignored.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22729638,"author":"jdtang13","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports","text":"This 99% number does not mean what people think it means. The Japanese prosecution system is a pipeline that strongly filters out unlikely-to-be-convicted cases from the very beginning. Long before you are convicted, you might not even be arrested, or your case gets dismissed earlier in the pipeline. Here is a video, with references, from a relatively trustworthy source: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23253370,"author":"kyuudou","month":"2020-05","story_title":"U.S. arrests former Green Beret, son, in connection with Ghosn escape from Japan","text":"You might want to hear what Yuta has to say about this[1]. It's not as black and white, basically. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OINa46HeWg8":[{"hn_comment_id":6284934,"author":"ohwp","month":"2013-08","story_title":"Life without a cell phone","text":"I own a cell phone but never use it for the same reasons as you. Never missed it, never will. This month a video went viral about the subject: [VIDEO] (I Forgot My Phone). So true.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6452743,"author":"freshhawk","month":"2013-09","story_title":"We're creating a culture of distraction","text":"Have you seen the short film called \"I Forgot my Phone\" ( [VIDEO] )? It deals with exactly this subject and has a great surreal creepy vibe. Made me think about how many times I've been that blinking person who didn't hear their food order, which I dislike but keep doing.","stance":"rec"}],"OJv8rFap0Nw":[{"hn_comment_id":38154360,"author":"Arelius","month":"2023-11","story_title":"A new F# compiler feature: graph-based type-checking","text":"> Given that this F# feature enables parallel analysis, wouldn't it make sense to do all of our development in a Lisp-like Trie structure where the types are simply part of the program itself, like in Idris2? Yeah, maybe, you for sure could, but in the context of F# as it exists, it may be hard to get from here to there. > 'm afraid I don't even understand what the difference between code, data, and types are anymore... it used to make sense, but these new languages have dissolved those boundaries in my mind, and I am not sure how to build it back up again. Yeah, good luck with that. I think maybe taking a mental step away from programing might help. It's true that human interpretation of the world often has these properties. And he generalization of the systems in no way invalidate the usefulness of the categorization system. Maybe it's helpfulnto consider the properties of your classes. To risk your further descent into madness. I recommend the Lambda days talk on the Verse programming language [1]. Which has further contemplation on the topics you are thinking about. With an eye towards practicality. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38216013,"author":"silok","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Relive: Swift Godot: Fixing the Multi-million dollar mistake \u2013 GodotCon 2023","text":"The topic of programming languages in game development, and realtime interactive environments is such an unsolved issue that needs a lot of attention. There are huge problems eg with both the Unity C# approach as well as Unreal C++. The swift approach is very interesting indeed, and Miguel de Icaza as the author gives additional reason to follow this effort. Additionally the Verse project from Unreal is extremely interesting imo, and has much wider scope/implications. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40666486,"author":"ReleaseCandidat","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Gerald Sussman: Programming is (should be) fun (2022) [video]","text":"That must of course be \"Haskell is useless\" [LINK] But apart from that, his enthusiasm can even make the mseemingly most boring topic interesting. I'd personally start either at \"the story of Haskell\" Escape from the Ivory Tower [LINK] Or something more recent, about Epic's Verse [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OKY6BGcx37k":[{"hn_comment_id":8004959,"author":"visakanv","month":"2014-07","story_title":"For Taylor Swift, the Future of Music Is a Love Story","text":"One of the best things I've ever watched. Another very compelling thing to watch in this vein is that HBO special where Carlin, Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Ricky Gervais discuss their craft: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13459328,"author":"tomlock","month":"2017-01","story_title":"How Louis CK Tells a Joke","text":"In \"Talking Funny\"[0] Seinfeld tells a Louis CK joke and its an amazing example of how the two comedians differ. I feel like, at least for me, comedy isn't something I consciously analyze. To see its differences and techniques dissected is amazing. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17544919,"author":"Reedx","month":"2018-07","story_title":"The Power of Positive People","text":"You don't have to go that far. Consider this insight from Chris Rock, who said: Joke about what people do, not what they are. That came up in this discussion where he, Jerry Seinfeld, Ricky Gervais and Louis CK talk about comedy and their techniques, etc. It's really interesting. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23095413,"author":"Reedx","month":"2020-05","story_title":"I got my first $50/mo customer","text":"Yeah, and the two are linked. Seinfeld's focus on the process and craft meant he got exceptionally good at it. The money was a byproduct, not the goal. The motivation was intrinsic and about improving his craft. To which there is no end. So he continues. This discussion with Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Louis CK and Ricky Gervais is worth watching for anyone interested in that aspect of comedy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OL6-x0modwY":[{"hn_comment_id":32546382,"author":"ddingus","month":"2022-08","story_title":"New evidence shows water separates into two different liquids at low temperature","text":"[VIDEO] That is the scientific method. And it is presented by one of our best ever thinkers. Simulation fits right up front in the, \"First we guess it\" part of the method. That is what happened here. Now don't get me wrong. It is a good guess, but that is all it is. Next step is to compute the consequences. Simulation applies here too. We can arrive at something we could compare to nature, the authority. That has not happened. Until it does, words like \"evidence\" are well out of reasonable bounds. Simulation as an input to the time tested, production proven scientific method is hardly controversial. Saying that any kind of science has happened yet is and should be controversial! No science has been done, yet we see words like \"evidence\" and \"shows\" I do not know what \"scientific process\" means. Feels a bit more like a P.T. Barnum style upsell for potential money getting than it does science when the sim work is framed this way. If you ask me, the people doing that are jumping the gun. The upsell is unnecessary. Simulation suggests water may seperate into two different liquids when in these conditions... The differences are small, but really important. Stuff line this tends to add right up and suddenly we will have a generation of people who are not well trained skeptics able to do solid science. Given the rapid pace of change, and how compelling this stuff can be, I feel it is important to hold the line on solid science.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15469618,"author":"wizardforhire","month":"2017-10","story_title":"The Grandfather of Alt-Science","text":"Uggggghhhh, it's all fun and games to read about these wackos until you have to experience them in real life. Until you witness the deaths their bullheaded stupidity cause first hand it's humane to be apologetic to their plight. We're all ignorant, only the stupid defend their ignorance. This is what makes them dangerous. It's hard to admit you're wrong when your entire sense of self is wrapped up in your world view. Here's a Feynman chasser/refresher on what science is. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OLLwG_SN8oo":[{"hn_comment_id":22192456,"author":"baldgeek","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The live coding language that lets you be an actual rock star","text":"Sam Aaron has done several talks on Sonic Pi. It's an amazing piece of work. My favorite talk where he scratches the surface of the tech details was a 2018 talk at Goto : [VIDEO] He also has saved several of his sessions on youtube.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23078997,"author":"Leszek","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Sonic Pi is a code-based music creation and performance tool","text":"There's also a _great_ talk from the creator (Sam Aaron) on Sonic Pi, including live-coding examples and some wonderful insights on how computer science is taught in schools: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"OMPfEXIlTVE":[{"hn_comment_id":11099584,"author":"buren","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend","text":"Couldn't agree more. Sandi Metz has an excellent talk touching on this topic. Developers exaggerated willingness to keep things DRY and elaborates a bit on why: it's one of the easiest things for a not-so-experienced developer to identify and one of the easiest things to teach. Edit: One of the best quotes from that talk is (paraphrased): \"The wrong abstraction is a lot more expensive than duplicated code\". [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42191154,"author":"crabmusket","month":"2024-11","story_title":"99 Bottles of OOP now available in Python","text":"I'd like to mention that despite OOP being in the title, I thought this book had a lot to teach that isn't specific to OOP architecture or OOP languages. Really, I think the star of the show is TDD and refactoring. For a short intro to Sandi's style and approach, I always recommend this 35min talk: [VIDEO] Aside from any specifically educational content, as a talk it is fantastic - funny, smart, well put together.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13311595,"author":"newtscamander","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Classes Considered Harmful [pdf]","text":"The premise is the introduction is wrong. \"so before we have written a single program in our language, before we know whether shared behaviour will be important in the applications that will be written in it\" read the POODR book, or watch this [VIDEO] it explains how shared behavior works without code duplication and why people tend to mess it up.","stance":"rec"}],"OMcjxe8slYI":[{"hn_comment_id":16520457,"author":"s_dev","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Chuck Feeney: a billionaire who gave it all away","text":"If anyone is looking for a documentary RTE (Irish broadcaster) did one a few years ago and it was decent. The institute he set up Atlantic Philanthropies has very recently closed it's door in Ireland having completed its mission. Ah found it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37829888,"author":"dmkirwan","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Charles (Chuck) Feeney, entrepreneur who gave $8B to charity, dies at 92","text":"What a legacy. I watched an excellent documentary on this man a few years back[0]. He donated massive sums of money (up to $1 billion) to third level institutions in Ireland, all on the condition of anonymity. I would love to see an assessment of the return that this investment had on Ireland and the world. On institution benefited from the lion's share of this: University of Limerick. I recall the then-President of the university saying in an interview that he was under extreme pressure to reveal the source of investment as there was a significant drug problem in the city at the time and people were speculating it was the proceeds of crime! Another story that came out years after the fact was that he once invested millions in third level education in Ireland on the condition that the government match it, which they reluctantly did. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OMi6xgdSbMA":[{"hn_comment_id":22628693,"author":"aequitas","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)","text":"Pope nailed in with Obra Dinn in how he implemented the detective gameplay and story telling. The game had me with several wtf story moments. This is one of those games that I'm reluctant to start playing as I don't want it to end to soon but can't stop playing once I've started it. Also worth watching are these insights into the game design (and a chance to enjoy the soundtrack again) (spoiler warning): [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32372340,"author":"collegeburner","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Cramming 'Papers, Please' onto Phones","text":"Arstechnica did a war stories with him on Return of the Obra Dinn, combining one of my fave video series with one of my fave gamedevs. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ON0A1dsQOV0":[{"hn_comment_id":8514722,"author":"Sammi","month":"2014-10","story_title":"KDE makes Qt","text":"One of the best discussions on the subject, made by old hackers, but new guys to GUI programming, who tried both: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27077315,"author":"matheusmoreira","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Use Alacritty instead of Termite","text":"> don't make the mistake of thinking their libraries are meant for others to use I agree. This presentation convinced me: [VIDEO] GTK+ is really just a toolkit for GNOME projects. All other users are secondary.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9435095,"author":"tdicola","month":"2015-04","story_title":"How long since Google said a Google Drive Linux client is coming?","text":"I think this gets to the core of the problem. The API is out there and open, yet no one (or at least not many people) have decided to try and make a nice GUI client for Linux. Perhaps it's not a problem with Google but more a problem with publishing desktop/GUI software for Linux still being a complete pain in 2015. There's a fantastic talk from Dirk Hohndel last year about how much pain he's gone through creating and publishing a dive logging GUI application for Linux: [VIDEO] If someone like Dirk, who has access to no less than Linus Torvalds himself, has so much trouble creating a modern GUI app on Linux today then how much luck will anyone else have?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18372251,"author":"znpy","month":"2018-11","story_title":"RHEL is deprecating KDE","text":"> [VIDEO] Thank you for posting this, it's nice to see that someone already had most of my feelings.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22460156,"author":"simion314","month":"2020-03","story_title":"GTK has a new website","text":"Qt has a company behind so is more professional, better documentation, better cross platform support, less bugs. This video [VIDEO] is about the reasons Subsurface (a diving app started by Linus Torvalds) changed from GTK to Qt. Things might have improved from GTK I can't tell and also for simpler GUIs GTK might be enough.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24965087,"author":"simion314","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes","text":"Look at GNOME, notice the giant paddings, title bards see look at the checkboxes,scrollbars etc. Also is not a secret that GNOME developers considered at least touch screens if not tablet when designing the GUI. IMo an informative video on GTK and Qt , it explains what issues you can have with GTK, is about the subsurface application(created by Linus Torwalds that moved to Qt because GTK is bad and even Linus could not get good answers from Red Hat guys) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OOK5xkFijPc":[{"hn_comment_id":43563536,"author":"VogonPoetry","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Watts Should Replace MAh as Essential Spec for Mobile Devices","text":"Yes, totally agree. Also a paragraph on the relationship between energy, heat, cooling and that computers effectively turn all energy into heat might have been useful. The April 1st date on the article is telling. Shout out to \"Technology Connections\" YouTube channel for recently publishing \"Power is not energy\" - < [VIDEO] >.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44195304,"author":"DavidVoid","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Neuromorphic computing","text":"There is indeed; Watts aren't energy, and it's a common enough mistake that Technology Connections made a pretty good 52 minute video about it the other month [1]. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OOeBJ8mDr8Q":[{"hn_comment_id":16542240,"author":"pkaye","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Efficient Hot-Water Piping (2013) [pdf]","text":"I think the flexible hoses are very common in newer houses. The labor costs are much lower. It also performs well in cold climates. Apparently the technology started in Germany in the 80s so it is well proven. Matt Risinger, a high end home contractor has some great videos on this technology. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20197210,"author":"hcoyote","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Hacking Water","text":"Matt Risinger (austin-based homebuilder) did a freeze comparison between copper, pex, and sharkbite fittings some time back. It was pretty interesting. At this point, I'd probably go for PEX-A (compression band) over PEX-B (the crimp style) because of the risk of getting the crimp not completely correct. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OP4CKn86qGY":[{"hn_comment_id":41659290,"author":"bityard","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today","text":"Adam Savage has a most excellent rant about the outrageous arrogance of the phrase, \"Why don't you just...\" I highly recommend it: [VIDEO] My best example of this is my father-in-law. He's an absolutely wonderful man, generous to a fault and all of that. Fancies himself a handyman. But I had to stop asking for his help with around-the-house projects out of sheer anger and frustration because every SINGLE time I made a decision about how to proceed with the job or pick which tool to use to cut something, he would stop and and ask, \"Well, why don't you just do X instead?\" It didn't seem to matter if I explained my reasoning, or if doing X meant redoing a hour of work just to get back to where we currently were. I even attempted to humor him by trying things his way whether or not they were going to work out. (They often didn't). Eventually it ended in me saying \"no\" way more often than \"yes\" and he would infer that I was refusing his help and he'd throw his hands up and walk away.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41336190,"author":"RadiozRadioz","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Why Don't You Just","text":"Possibly the article talked about in this relevant video from Adam Savage: [VIDEO] I had noticed this too subconsciously, but could never put into words why it felt bad to receive (otherwise totally valid) suggestions in this form. It seems a common phrase in technical circles.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42066367,"author":"bradjohnson","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Only 5.3% of US welders are women. After years as a professor, I became one","text":"I really believe that you are approaching this in good faith, so I will do the same. I don't have time to really dig into this deeply with you so these brief justifications of my stance will have to suffice. I don't understand some of your tangents, and you will have to forgive me for not addressing the reddit or sports stuff. > Re: tech bro The tech bro thing comes across most apparently in the pro-VC slant of this site (inextricable, I know). There is a high proportion of believers in a fantasy meritocracy where current wealth concentration is justifiable due to the sheer genius of \"founders\". This is very much a tech-bro way of thinking. The way HN regularly reduces socio-political problems into a technological gap is another tech-bro \"thing\". When someone suggests that a country switch its currency to crypto to eliminate state corruption, or suggests that biometrics scanners be installed at ports of entry to eliminate slavery and humans rights abuses, that is a tech-bro opinion. It is different from a blue collar environment because the people on this website are extremely insulated from the social issues that come up on here. Nonetheless, they feel like they have an obvious solution to a version of the problem that they've concocted in their head based on a 2 second glance at a headline. It reminds me of this Adam Savage video that I think is great: [VIDEO] > Re: obnoxiously male This is exemplified by the high confidence and combativeness in this and other similar comme","stance":"rec"}],"OQ5jsbhAv_M":[{"hn_comment_id":12352886,"author":"philippeback","month":"2016-08","story_title":"The Imposter's Handbook","text":"When you deal with large data sets (e.g. Hadoop/Spark...), BigO starts to hit badly. Dynamic Programming also requires you to have a clue about it. See [VIDEO] for some cool explanations.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19688566,"author":"gbacon","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Graphical Introduction to Dynamic Programming","text":"You may also like a couple of lectures by Erik Demaine: Dynamic Programming I: Fibonacci, Shortest Paths [VIDEO] Dynamic Programming II: Text Justification, Blackjack [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26080640,"author":"dehrmann","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Algorithms by Jeff Erickson","text":"I don't think I've ever been asked a DP problem in an interview, and only had to use it while programming once . That said, I liked the MIT lecture on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26934252,"author":"dominotw","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Dynamic Programming vs. Divide-and-Conquer (2018)","text":"> on interviews they want you to explicitly construct the array very often i.e. it's the different between hire and a strong hire exactly because @lru_cache is much easier are you serious? someone really asked you to \"use array\". Beyond stupid if they really did. > you can easily blow the stack for real production grade implementations using recursion recursive solution doesn't automatically mean using a the method stack. you can implement recursive solutions using explicit stack . > dynamic programming proper please. There is no \"proper\" dynamic programming. Please watch this MIT intro [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"OQQ-W_63UgQ":[{"hn_comment_id":16168374,"author":"neel8986","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI","text":"This is kind of a masters degree course i created for myself to get knowledge of Machine Learning from bottoms up First, you need a strong mathematical base. Otherwise, you can copy paste an algorithm or use an API but you will not get any idea of what is happening inside Following concepts are very essential 1) Linear Algebra (MIT [LINK] ) 2) Probability (Harvard [LINK] ) Get some basic grasp of machine learning. Get a good intuition of basic concepts 1) Andrew Ng coursera course ( [LINK] ) 2) Tom Mitchell book ( [LINK] ) Both the above course and book are super easy to follow. You will get a good idea of basic concepts but they lack in depth. Now you should move to more intense books and courses You can get more in-depth knowledge of Machine learning from following sources 1)Nando machine learning course ( [LINK] ) 2)Bishops book ( [LINK] ) Especially Bishops book is really deep and covers almost all basic concepts. Now for recent advances in Deep learning. I will suggest two brilliant courses from Stanford 1) Vision ( [LINK] ) 2) NLP ( [VIDEO] ) The Vision course by Karparthy can be a very good introduction to Deep learning. Also, the mother book for deep learning ( [LINK] )is good","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15843714,"author":"ahussain","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Theoretical Machine Learning Lecture Series: Deep Learning and Cognition","text":"For those who like Prof Manning's style and want to get more in depth, here are the lecture videos for the NLP course he teaches at Stanford: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16583619,"author":"morugin","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Amazon Is Hiring More Developers for Alexa Than Google Is Hiring for Everything","text":"I have read like 1/3 of the comments but its interesting that the most interesting problem of everything we are talking about was only noticed by a non-programmer (so far). Everything that was talked about in the comments all hinge on the state of the art (SOTA) of ai in natural language processing (nlp). John Carmack recommended [VIDEO] stanford's nlp class (i didnt know who he was until i saw that post on hn). That class is good. it should take a long time to grok. you'll be solid up to LSTMs a general current standard.","stance":"rec"}],"ORp3q1Oaezw":[{"hn_comment_id":25297389,"author":"hpoe","month":"2020-12","story_title":"AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google","text":"May I direct you to watch Daryl Davis's ted talk or really anything he speaks about. [VIDEO] For context he is a black man that has gotten over a hundred leaders of the KKK, including former convicts to leave the Klan. Not by arguing with them, not be reasoning, not by showing them the effects of their behaviour, but instead by sitting down, talking with them and becoming their friend. In a nutshell this one man has probably done more to combat racism, than all the angry tweets on twitter combined.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25711427,"author":"sebmellen","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler","text":"Interesting question. I don't think these two concepts are in opposition. Of course, exposure to a toxic ideological viewpoint is poisonous for the recipient, and may in fact entice them to become more toxic themselves (if they are swayed by said reasoning). But a crucial part of the societal contract is to tolerate such toxic viewpoints so as to have the opportunity to redeem those who hold them. In other words, by eating a little bit of the poison ourselves, we are granted the opportunity to save that person from their own poison, by showing compassion and empathy towards them. People who have hate in their hearts are not entirely bad people. Everyone was once a child, everyone has experienced the mystery of simply existing, almost everyone has experienced love (whether from their parents or someone else), most people enjoy art and music. Evoking our shared humanity and showing compassion for others allows us to break down their toxic ideologies and even reform them to be beacons of compassion themselves. Perhaps the best and most compelling anecdote to promulgate this way of thinking is Daryl Davis, who, through his talents and love of music, has reformed many of the most hateful people in our country \u2014 members of the KKK. I would recommend this TED talk by him, titled \"Why I, as a black man, attend KKK rallies\" : [VIDEO] . It really encapsulates the power of this viewpoint. The crucial element here is ensuring that we have channels of communication that allow for this sor","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29081863,"author":"hpoe","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Facebook Makes Us Know Too Much About Each Other","text":"Interestingly enough that is what Daryl Davis decided to do to start fighting racism, got over a dozen members, including a grand wizard, to leave the Klan. I'd recommend watching his TedTalk it really helped me understand how to better work with others, and how to bring about understanding. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18767385,"author":"PavlovsCat","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt","text":"> I'm not sure why people expect platforms that have ToS to be robotic about them. Being fair, being open, being honest isn't being \"robotic\". Treating people like more than something to exploit and throw away is what I would consider \"robotic\". The constant \"it's a private company, brain off\", that's what is robotic. > Companies are run by people. People get uncomfortable when you become known for spraying around racial epithets, and some are not going to want to work with you. Yeah, people. Not necessarily adult people. Take this man, for example: [VIDEO] Do you honestly think you know or have anything he doesn't? Wouldn't you rather think it's the other way around? If you stand aside as mobs try to kill free speech on the internet, you're banking on them winning, on there never being a time where, if you can't show clear proof that you resisted, nobody wanting to work with you. I doubt you would just say \"fair enough\". I don't think you'd consider that a humane society just because the majority might claim it is. > If I'm using some vendor and find out that I really don't like what their public persona is doing, I'm going to reevaluate that relationship. This isn't just a vendor. We're talking about companies that provide services that really, realistically, should be utilities. You shouldn't get your water turned off for calling obese people names, or your electricity turned off for saying Hitler was right. That's a stone age level regression that not just shows a level o","stance":"rec"}],"ORzNZUeUHAM":[{"hn_comment_id":27727210,"author":"benrbray","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The Growth Ponzi Scheme","text":"The Not Just Bikes [1,2,3] YouTube channel also has an excellent series of videos based on work from Strong Towns. I link to these videos whenever a friend asks why I chose to leave the United States. :) [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46135587,"author":"oblio","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Accepting US car standards would risk European lives","text":"Watch his video. Pick 2-3 at random, be a grown up and ignore the tone of voice and the snarkiness, and see what his points are. They're very solid. Try something like this: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27543262,"author":"panopticon","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Kids need freedom, too","text":"> Well, the roads are safe (for cars). Not necessarily. Your risk of being in a fatal car accident is nearly 3x higher on suburban roads than urban roads. This is a good video on the deficiencies of suburbia road design if you're curious: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28134660,"author":"vinceguidry","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Culdesac Tempe: The first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US","text":"Lack of demarcation makes things safer by raising the awareness of the people around you. Making things 'safer' actually reduces safety. I've posted this video on another thread, but it really needs to be spread out more: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28790274,"author":"bodo11","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Is Ford about to reinvent the bicycle derailleur?","text":"While I agree that more standardisation would be beneficial, especially regarding electronics(!), the rest of the bike is fairly standardized (wheel / bottom bracket / pedal screw / steering column diameter etc.) . Unfortunately, I think the introduction of electronics via ebikes and other \"new\" technologies for the bike are diluting that standardisation in my perception. For another view point of why biking may be shit in your area, I invite you to watch a few videos of this channel: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29302260,"author":"drivers99","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Stroad","text":"Cool seeing strongtowns here. Not Just Bikes is a YouTube channel that has helped popularize them recently, and has a lot of other videos about what makes living in the Netherlands so great (i.e. it\u2019s not just bikes, although that\u2019s a big part of it). Here\u2019s Not Just Bikes\u2019 video about Stroads: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29505394,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2021-12","story_title":"How do you fix a stroad?","text":"Except streets and roads are designed to solve different problems: > Streets: The function of a street is to serve as a platform for building wealth. On a street, we're attempting to grow the complex ecosystem that produces community wealth. In these environments, people (outside of their automobiles) are the indicator species of success. Successful streets are environments where humans, and human interaction, flourish. > Roads: In contrast, the function of a road is to connect productive places. You can think of a road as a refinement of the railroad \u2014 a road on rails \u2014 where people board in one place, depart in another and there is a high speed connection between the two. > Stroads: Stroads are a mash-up of these two types of paths. We like to call them \"the futon of transportation\" because, just as a futon is neither a particularly good bed nor a particularly good couch, a stroad is neither a particularly good road or a particularly good street. * [LINK] A high-speed, high-volume thoroughfare with minimal obstructions to flow will have its per-hour capacity decimated by having to stop every couple of hundred meters by traffic lights and crosswalks. On the pedestrian side, who wants to cross an area where cars travel 60 kph (or higher): what happens if they don't stop? This video from the Not Just Bikes channel shows the stark difference between a street and a road (using examples in the Netherlands) and stroads: * [VIDEO] If you make a place easier to get to primarily by c","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29759941,"author":"gregors","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2021?","text":"This is pushing it as far as \"talk\", but more of a presentation. The Ugly, Dangerous, and Inefficient Stroads found all over the US & Canada [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30906857,"author":"dashundchen","month":"2022-04","story_title":"A smartphone app that allows public to submit evidence of speeding drivers","text":"I would say in the US, our road design means our speed limits are way too high for safe travel. Speed limits are set high with no attempt at reducing points of conflict. It's a meme at this point, but Not Just Bikes does a great job covering the terrible \"stroad\". [VIDEO] Most places in the US are filled with wide, multi-lane roads posted for speed limits of 35-45 mph. But those roads will be packed with unsignaled driveways, where drivers entering the road needed to make unprotected and right left turns with and against traffic that's likely going 45-55mph, and drivers on the road need to predict the behavior of cars coming from almost any direction. Meanwhile, a thin stripe of white paint gets added to the gutter and is somehow called a bike lane - like anyone wants to ride their bike at the same grade as 2+ ton trucks flying by within a foot of your handlebars. Those same lanes will frequently disappear or reappear within a shoulder, and at intersections will suddenly cross or dump you out into a right turn lane. Better hope that driver turning right noticed you before you get hooked. It's even worse for pedestrians, where even in dense cities, a walk signal is by no means a safe time to walk. Unsignaled left and right-on-red means a car will likely fly through their path at any given moment. On your way to this intersection, you'll continuously cross driveways and slip lanes with curve radii to encourage speeding, sidewalks that dump you into parking lots (if they exist a","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31055756,"author":"spaethnl","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people\u2019s cell phones","text":"There are typically two kinds of roads these speeds are reached in the US: 1. Expressways, where pedestrians and cyclists are not allowed. They are walled off with specific entrances and exits. 2. Country highways, where pedestrians and cyclists are nearly unheard of, and are typically very easy to spot from a distance and adjust accordingly. There is a third area where these speeds are sometimes reached in urban areas that Strong Towns calls \"stroads\", and these have a whole host of problems. Going 10mph over the speed limit in these areas probably doesn't make a huge difference, because the are already so pedestrian and cyclist unfriendly to begin with. Not Just Bikes has a great video about them here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32188450,"author":"xputer","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes","text":"Watch some videos from this channel and you'll be able to see how the US definitely does not do enough in terms of creating safe road infrastructure for all: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36922288,"author":"snovymgodym","month":"2023-07","story_title":"If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity","text":"I agree that the \"US is a rural country\" thing isn't true, but the way most US cities are built make walking either very inconvenient or outright dangerous. Posting this channel in this sort of thread is basically a meme, but this take on the topic is pretty good: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OSGv2VnC0go":[{"hn_comment_id":13354164,"author":"clusmore","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Origins of Python's \u201cFunctional\u201d Features (2009)","text":"Must watch: [VIDEO] I believe that the list comprehension will be faster than filter, but as always, any time you replace readable code with unreadable code for performance reasons, you damn well better time it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15625058,"author":"bhoeting","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Which programmer do you look up to?","text":"I've never heard of Raymond Hettinger before but I'm currently watching one of his videos [1] and it's amazing. Thanks for sharing your list, I'll definitely look up some more of these people. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25890731,"author":"jka","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Software engineering topics I changed my mind on","text":"Your mention of simple and clean code makes me think of the excellent talk \"Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python\". Although it relates to Python programming, if the ideas and principles (and thoughtfulness and pace) from it could be applied to much more written code, then (I think) we as an industry and all our users would be in a better place. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7367953,"author":"kriro","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Python Language Features and Tricks","text":"Great suggestion. Just searched for him on youtube and a couple of excellent looking talks popped up. Halfway through and this one seems great so far: [VIDEO] Really enjoy his style as well :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8009063,"author":"msvalkon","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Anti-Patterns in Python Programming","text":"Check out Raymond Hettingers Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python talk on youtube [1]. Great talk on avoiding some of the common pitfalls new python developers step in. Exposes some nice language features. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8667901,"author":"shackenberg","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Python idioms I wish I'd learned earlier","text":"If you were underwhelmed by this blog post have a look at: Transforming code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python by Raymond Hettinger at PyCon 2013 [LINK] and [VIDEO] Topics include: 'looping' with iterators to avoid creating new lists, dictionaries, named tuples and more","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27268487,"author":"kzrdude","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Writing Pythonic Rust","text":"Raymond Hettinger's talks are great. I know it's not a succint blog post, but they are out there are watching a video is very approachable. Maybe [LINK] (Dataclasses! We could cheekily say Python gets better at something Rust does - dataclasses makes Python better at records.) And [LINK] This talk (2013): [VIDEO] Unfortunately this video is now a bit out of touch with modern Python. Another (2013) classic: [LINK] it is very well known, and it has the very memorable advice: what's a class that only has one method? That should be a function!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29154691,"author":"greggyb","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Your users will do what you make easy","text":"These are a few videos which present Pythonic style. They do not form a proper curriculum, but they are example-heavy and give a good insight to a very Pythonic mind. 1. Beyond PEP 8 [LINK] 2. Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31569509,"author":"mumblemumble","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Python-patterns \u2013 A collection of design patterns/idioms in Python","text":"For an alternative perspective, allow me to present some classic talks from Raymond Hettinger. First, some generic tips on how to write Python code that's pleasant to work with: [VIDEO] And then this one digs more specifically into how not to write Python like it's Java, starting at 12:40 (with talking about why leading up to that): [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"OTVE5iPMKLg":[{"hn_comment_id":12512472,"author":"jimmytidey","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Show HN: I invented a caffeinated toothpaste","text":"I don't think caffeine has many negative health implications. Although it has certainly wasted my time by leaving me too jittery to work. There is a great cgp grey video on caffeine: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15015047,"author":"askvictor","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Quitting Caffeine","text":"I occasionally quit caffeine as a way to recalibrate the tolerance that develops over time. But, within certain limits (my general consumption is 1-2 coffees a day, sometimes 3-4 if super tired or when exercising), there's very few negatives for most people, and quite a number of benefits. Nice explanatory video on the matter: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OUNXFHpUhu8":[{"hn_comment_id":37279306,"author":"ajuc","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars","text":"This is a good video about the history behind idiotic American zoning laws and parking minimums. [VIDEO] It was a mess of utopian central planning, good intentions, private capture, bad science, corruption, bad incentives, and never looking back and fixing it. At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36818446,"author":"pornel","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Minimum-Lot-Size Regulations Limit Housing Supply in Texas","text":"On a related note, minimum parking requirements are hilariously bad (e.g. including gems like laws based on a trend line fudged between two data points): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37223434,"author":"UtopiaPunk","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Asphalt Wasteland: Maybe parking does explain the world","text":"Parking minimum requirements are usually handled at the local level. Parking minimum recomendations were somewhat standardized by the Institute of Transportation Engineers,(ITE). So whenever city councils around the country decide to prioritize car usage over walking and public transit, and obligated to guarantee people a place to store a car, they often turn to the ITE's guides. That said, the ITE's parking minimums guides are themselves kind of arbitrary. And the guides absolutely assume that practically everyone is traveling by car, and maybe (!!) that's not a great assumption to build on. A YouTube channel called Climate Town created a fun and well-researched video recently on the topic. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39195290,"author":"J_Shelby_J","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees","text":"Mandatory parking minimums in American are insane. The rules for them are a joke and just made up at random with little justification for them other than trust us bro . Climatetown has a good, if long, video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41168015,"author":"viraptor","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Why is it so hard for the U.S. to build quality transit?","text":"Market forces would be nice, but actually the minimums are completely overestimated. Climate Town had a good video about it [VIDEO] Tl;dr old low quality research, bad stats, lead to numbers that don't make sense, but in many places are still enforced; overbuiling led to larger distances incentivising more driving and acting against small commerce areas.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45197059,"author":"fayten","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a \"reduced traffic zone\"","text":"This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums [VIDEO] Noise pollution [LINK] Infrastructure strain [LINK] More on Infrastructure and Sprawl [LINK] Articles: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: [LINK] The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.","stance":"rec"}],"OWJCfOvochA":[{"hn_comment_id":19163125,"author":"mattferderer","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Quantum Computing, Capabilities and Limits: An Interview with Scott Aaronson","text":"Try this video - [VIDEO] I found it easy to comprehend. It starts explaining to a child & works its way up to a doctorate level.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23033284,"author":"stewdio","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Show HN: Quantum JavaScript","text":"I\u2019ve begun to put together useful resources for learning more here: [LINK] I\u2019d like to really flesh out that page; I\u2019ve now come across so many folks that are amazing at explaining this stuff... It\u2019s just a time crunch to juggle all this as you might imagine ;) These two videos in particular helped me get started: 1. What is a physical quantum computer? [VIDEO] 2. How might one compute using it? [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"OWXoRSIxyIU":[{"hn_comment_id":13179272,"author":"dwaltrip","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Arctic Is Warming At 'Astonishing' Rates, Researchers Say","text":"Veritassium debunks this claim on climate change, along with a dozen others, in less than 7 minutes in an informative and entertaining way. It's a great video, you should at least watch it. [VIDEO] In short, during the 70s, there were some papers on global cooling. But even then, there was still 6 times more papers on global warming. Science overall has been looking in the correct direction for a long time now. The narrative isn't changing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8652376,"author":"jdhendrickson","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Starfish are dissolving up and down the West Coast","text":"I've linked a short well made video below which addresses your arguments. TLDW Just because man's emissions are relatively small in comparison to the over all natural emissions does not mean they don't affect things. I implore you, (as you seem a reasonable fellow who values science) to give it a watch and see if you still feel the same way. I'm willing to watch or read any counter argument you care to link if you will do me the same courtesy. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27740397,"author":"dwaltrip","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Sixty years of climate change warnings","text":"That\u2019s actually a myth. Global cooling was a small minority of published papers in climatology at the time. They were many more papers discussing warming. Source: [LINK] P.S. I learned this watching the excellent video by Veritasium on climate change misconceptions: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"O_azyt1JhI0":[{"hn_comment_id":7648303,"author":"andrewtbham","month":"2014-04","story_title":"SpaceX Successfully Soft-Landed Booster Rocket in the Atlantic","text":"I watched a senate hearing where Elon Musk squares off with the ULA. It's awesome. One great quote is where the ULA says Space X can't handle the missions. Elon responds. If our rockets are good enough for NASA, they are good enough for the Department of Defense. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7648791,"author":"arjunnarayan","month":"2014-04","story_title":"SpaceX Successfully Soft-Landed Booster Rocket in the Atlantic","text":"Elon Musk explains it in this answer to Senator Shelby. The whole committe hearing is interesting, but your specific question is answered at 53:02 in the video, which I link here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7680060,"author":"josefresco","month":"2014-05","story_title":"SpaceX granted injunction in rocket launch suit against Lockheed-Boeing","text":"For those interested in this topic, I found the following Senate hearing to be quite entertaining: [VIDEO] Elon basically going head-to-head with Michael Gass from the ULA and holding his own quite well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12618043,"author":"taf2","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Implication of sabotage adds intrigue to SpaceX investigation","text":"This is good context [VIDEO] for the tension between ULA and SpaceX - it's also nice before an election to checkout the hearings on CSPAn to get a better understanding of the type of people being elected...","stance":"rec"}],"ObhK8lUfIlc":[{"hn_comment_id":46473205,"author":"abuob","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Microsoft kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet","text":"But you can detect serverside (at least probabilistically) if a user is abusing it to their advantage. Some Valve guy gave a great talk about their cheating detection a while back; I found it incredibly impressive: [VIDEO] (can't comment on their effectiveness these days, haven't played CS in a long time)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17552370,"author":"Trellmor","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat","text":"Valves John McDonald recently gave a talk at Gdc how they use machine learning to combat cheaters in CS:GO. Quite interesting to watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17555659,"author":"ehsankia","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Riot Games Approach to Anti-Cheat","text":"If you wanna something more novel, look at this talk from Valve [0] on how they are integrating Deep Learning into their CS:GO cheater detection system (confusingly called Overwatch). It's not used to ban users, but rather to bring suspicious plays into their existing user-reviewed moderation system. In general, this type of human/AI side-by-side feedback loop seems to be very successful, all the way from games to moderating content on the web. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18336678,"author":"hatsunearu","month":"2018-10","story_title":"With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux","text":"[VIDEO] Watch this! It's about using ML to catch cheaters. I searched youtube to show you this video; I used the search term \"cs go machine learning\". The first video was actually this: [LINK] Looks like it's using ML to make better aimbots--lol!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21950646,"author":"willis936","month":"2020-01","story_title":"EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V","text":"See the video above. It\u2019s a condensed recap of Valve\u2019s GDC 2018 presentation on VACnet. The actual presentation is worth listening to if you have the time. [VIDEO] I disagree on the statement that developers, publishers, and/or anticheat companies are too incompetent to implement good solutions. They have not been putting serious effort into the problem or else the state of cheating in video games wouldn\u2019t be as bad as it is today.","stance":"rec"}],"ObiqJzfyACM":[{"hn_comment_id":11843006,"author":"Kortaggio","month":"2016-06","story_title":"To approximate 52! by hand, compute 54! and divide by 3000","text":"Vsauce has a fantastic animation of this too: [VIDEO] Deal yourself five cards every billion years. When you finally deal yourself a royal flush, buy a lottery ticket. If the ticket wins the lottery, throw a single grain of sand into the Grand Canyon. As soon as the Grand Canyon is completely full of sand, remove one ounce of rock from Mount Everest. By the time Mount Everest is level: take a look at the clock. You'll have to do the whole thing all over again 256 more times before your timer reaches zero.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42343951,"author":"redundantly","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Every V4 UUID","text":"The number you're thinking of is 52! (52 factorial) and how long it would take for 52! seconds to pass by. Vsauce has a great video on this, and might be where that example was taken from. [VIDEO] That example starts 16 minutes into the video: [VIDEO] But it's worth watching the whole thing.","stance":"rec"}],"Obt-vMVdM8s":[{"hn_comment_id":7092622,"author":"famousactress","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Code is not Literature","text":"\"The point of such a presentation is to take a piece of code that the presenter has understood deeply and for them to help the audience understand the core ideas...\" I do get lots of value out of that. My favorite example is Beazley's GIL talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5818920,"author":"Luyt","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Python's Hardest Problem (2012)","text":"\"I never actually got around to learning -- or even thinking about!-- what exactly the GIL is\" David Beazley does a good job on explaining the GIL. There are multiple videos of his GIL talks on YouTube. This one, for instance: [VIDEO] He has a page about this at [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17648774,"author":"devxpy","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Code with Mu: a simple Python editor for beginner programmers","text":"David probably isnt the best guy for that. But here's one of the famous ones on GIL. [VIDEO] Beware though, his talks are known to be devastating to the programmer, resulting in serious head injuries, trauma, headaches and other fun stuff.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32419870,"author":"gshulegaard","month":"2022-08","story_title":"How to choose the right Python concurrency API","text":"I am not expert, and this might be dated information, but historically there is a \"thrashing\" introduced between the GIL and OS scheduled threads which has surprising performance implications. David Beazley does a much better illustrating the nuances than I ever could: [VIDEO] Including a wild phenomenon where a threaded Python program's performance can degrade by increasing number of CPU cores available to a system. Coroutines avoid this by not requiring individual thread scheduling by the OS. So they effectively release the GIL like threads on IO but avoid OS level thread switching.","stance":"rec"}],"ObvxPSQNMGc":[{"hn_comment_id":40468587,"author":"082349872349872","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?","text":"My current song pedantry fave is Nanobot , perfected by a video with 18 numbered [refs]: [VIDEO] (presumably Brian May would have had his phases of astral matter correct in the first set of lyrics?)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38890901,"author":"ben_w","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Kurt G\u00f6del, his mother and the argument for life after death","text":"> could we distinguish engineered vs emergent life? I think we can tell the difference between engineered and evolved (but note that simulated evolution is still evolution) \u2014 oddities like the path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve are cited as evidence against an intelligent designer, and I expect it isn't the only such oddity: [LINK] > But I really like that the answer to a most ancient question such as \"what is life\" is building up to something like \"it's all nanobots controlled by molecular computers\"... If you've not already watched it, I recommend this video by A Capella Science : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38938091,"author":"nihzm","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Does DNA have the equivalent of IF-statements, WHILE loops, or function calls?","text":"Related to the first answer: Tim Blais on youtube has made a catchy \"edutainment\" song [1] on molecular machines based on A. Leigh's research (eg [2]) with some cool animations that show how electrochemical \"switches\" can encode a binary state, which one could (in principle) use to build logic gates. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42888288,"author":"TeMPOraL","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Ear muscle we thought humans didn't use activates when people listen hard","text":"Yup, DNA turned out to not merely be a sequence of triplets telling a dumb matter printer which hard-coded proteins to make - at least according to what little I understand of evolutionary developmental biology[0], DNA is much more like procedural generation in gamedev or demoscene. That is, there's plenty of recipes for various structures and body parts, and then there's lots of DNA that's responsible for conditionally enabling or disabling or modulating those recipes, depending on more DNA that controls when and where and how much to enable them, and then more - a complex network of logic . -- [0] - Didn't get much further than this four-minute intro to the field, but it is a good intro : [LINK] . (EDIT: It's actually the second part of a trio, that starts with a four-minute bottom-up overview of organic chemistry[1], and ends on a three-minute intro to nanotechnology[2]. I recommend the series together for how well it frames humans in relation to other life and universe as a whole.) [1] - [LINK] [2] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ocq3NeudsVk":[{"hn_comment_id":23527338,"author":"jw1224","month":"2020-06","story_title":"MuseScore 4: Moving from notation software to composition software","text":"As soon as I saw this pop up on HN, I thought \u201chey, MuseScore \u2014 isn\u2019t that the notation software Tantacrul loves to hate?\u201d. I\u2019m not a composer, and I\u2019d never heard of let alone used MuseScore before stumbling on his videos a couple of weeks ago. What a great surprise to see they\u2019ve been listening to their critics! After finding his channel I slowly worked my way through watching all his videos. One of my favourites is about \u201csonification\u201d, or creating sound from of data. Might be quite interesting to the HN crowd: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32590627,"author":"omnicognate","month":"2022-08","story_title":"New NASA Black Hole Sonifications with a Remix","text":"Tantacrul has a typically incisive video [1] about the real potential of sonification as a powerful technique for understanding data, and its real artistic possibilities, vs the dishonest and arbitrary way it gets used to generate publicity. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Og6cTlwBTrk":[{"hn_comment_id":29512841,"author":"jazzyjackson","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]","text":"from one angle, the church spends money for monumental purposes. But I\u2019m not of the opinion that you can just spend your way to those cathedrals: the workmen (freemasons in the original sense) have to believe they are giving glory to god. Here\u2019s a great video [0][17min] documenting the Met Museum\u2019s commissioning of moroccan mosaics, by the end you can see the craftsmen taking great pride in their work, above and beyond what they\u2019re paid to do, carving \u201callah\u201d over and over out of religious dedication. (just want to push back on the notion that religion is all about manipulating people with your power, the crimes of the vatican notwishstanding) [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11302827,"author":"jacobolus","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Islamic art inspires stretchy, switchable materials","text":"Wow. Now imagine tiling the floor, walls, ceiling, and outside fa\u00e7ade of a mosque using such handmade tiles. Insane amounts of human labor involved. Your video sucked me into watching videos about tilemaking. :-) This one is kind of neat: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OgRFOjVzvm0":[{"hn_comment_id":34658419,"author":"yazzku","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Sussman Explains the End of SICP","text":"Don't miss Sussman's talk linked from the post: [VIDEO] This stuff resonates with me deeply. The reality of the modern computing world is a clusterfuck that no single person understands, especially because, like Sussman said, parts are entirely secret/proprietary anyway. Therefore I think an engineer should be skilled in a) removing the unnecessary bits of that clusterfuck that are not necessary to their problem and b) getting stuff done without having a complete understanding of the whole system. (b) sounds scary as fuck, but I think that's the (sad?) reality we live in in the software and hardware world. Embrace the cluster; embrace the fuck.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43683335,"author":"OhMeadhbh","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Why Fennel?","text":"Also... HtDP (How to Design Programs) is a good follow-on to SICP. Oh... and I think we can't mention SICP without referencing this (relatively recent) video about why MIT moved from Scheme to Python for intro classes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Oie1ZXWceqM":[{"hn_comment_id":41870263,"author":"alfiedotwtf","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Adobe's new image rotation tool is one of the most impressive AI tools seen","text":"SIGGRAPH from over a decade ago has entered the chat... [VIDEO] It may not be AI, but this single video blew my mind back in *2013* and I find myself thinking about it often.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6357260,"author":"cookingrobot","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Show HN: 3D sensing SDK for iOS \u2013 Produces point cloud and 6DOF device motion","text":"I would love to see this combined with object extraction to make 3d models from the measurements. Here's an amazing demo: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OjMPJVmXxV8":[{"hn_comment_id":23720068,"author":"DavidVoid","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Politically-correct witch-hunt is killing free speech","text":"Well that was a really biased article. The more toxic parts of cancel culture are a problem yes, but to blame the left for Netflix deciding to remove episodes they shouldn't have removed is just silly, especially when the vast majority of people on the left don't agree with Netflix in those cases. I'd argue that the part complaining about \"the liberal media\" is even more applicable to right-wing media. What she's complaining about has been done by Fox News and Murdoch owned tabloids for ages now. And I have a very hard time taking anyone who recommends PragerU seriously. PragerU is an awful and dishonest propaganda outlet and should be treated as such. The fact that someone who claims to be pro choice, pro LGBTQ, and pro environmental issues would even claim that PragerU is \"rational\" makes me seriously doubt that person's judgment. Honestly, the idea of abandoning your social political viewpoints just because you think that some people on the left are mean is a really dumb way to go about deciding your political opinions and who to vote for. It's reactionary and inevitably leads to putting more shitty people in positions of power. You should stand for your beliefs even if that means having to agree with some dumb-asses. --- For a view on cancelling from someone on the left , and talk about experiences with it, I can recommend Contrapoints' video on the subject [1]. It's long but worth a watch if you want to hear someone talk about it who doesn't just suggest that people aban","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23738297,"author":"specialist","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The Fourth of July","text":"I honestly have no idea what \"cancel culture\" is. I've been fired, expelled, shushed, shunned, ghosted, excluded, ignored, plagiarized, mocked, insulted, attacked, divorced, blocked. Publicly and privately. Such is the life of the rebel, the truthsayer. Every nail that sticks up is gonna get pounded down. Daring to point out the emperor is naked is an unforgivable offense. This is normal. Receiving criticism generally means you're saying something interesting. I'd hate to be so boring that I'm not even worth criticizing. FYI, Socrates was \"canceled\", and we're still talking about him. Further, society should \"cancel\" the trolls, heathens, hate mongers. That's what society is for. Filters are important. -- Edit: Counterpoint's \"Canceling\" is a much smarter, useful, timely treatise [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26143352,"author":"monopoledance","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Brendan Eich on the Lex Fridman Podcast [video]","text":"He is not talking about cancel culture. He is taking this very overloaded term as premise, as self-evident \"fact\" for the degeneration of academia and \"the public discourse\", to pave the way for injecting his super deep ideology about salvation by Love, Elon and Ayn Rand. I am not sure, if you are familiar with Joscha Bach, but he once said something about something, and people think he's super intelligent! None of these podcasts talking critical about cancel culture. There is a far, far better (critical) take on it within \"marxist\" culture, e.g. from Natalie Wynn. If Lex wants to talk cancel culture, why not invite her for example? She is an academic, smart and wrote and talked extensively about it. But that would be a little too open-minded wouldn't it? [\u00a7] [VIDEO] [$] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27582095,"author":"theossuary","month":"2021-06","story_title":"What it's like to be cancelled","text":"Twitter is vile. I thought that the day the company started, and never created an account; nothing good can come from a platform like Twitter. It's a failure of our laws that there's no recourse to this kind of libel, either against Twitter for basing their business model on it, or the individuals responsible for spreading it. Lives are consistently destroyed and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and goes \"aw-shucks.\" Natalie Wynn talks about this on Contrapoints, worth watching as well - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33407037,"author":"otikik","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Find your Twitter friends on Mastodon","text":"The fact that you are not witnessing the consequences a lot of people on the left are subjected to is part of the problem. Social media works better when it is able to isolate people into their own bubble, and to see the other as the source of all that is bad in the world. I wish you good luck, getting out of there is difficult. Here's a video about how it was to feel cancellation of a leftist (from people also on the left!). It's long but you might find it entertaining. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34854531,"author":"josephg","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books","text":"Yep; to say nothing of the psychological effects of being told that the whole world hates you. That sounds really traumatic. I'm not generally a contrapoints fan, but I really enjoyed the video she made about her experience with this on twitter: [VIDEO] Or the TED talk \"How one tweet can ruin your life\" from 2015: [LINK] We studied To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crucible when I was in highschool. I remember thinking how barbaric and despicable \"mob justice\" was. I didn't understand it, and I assumed I never would - I thought it was something we reference from history. But twitter really has brought the mob justice style witch hunts back. I don't understand how anyone can claim its not a real phenomenon. Being cancelled is obviously quite a real experience for the people it happens to.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37772955,"author":"tmpX7dMeXU","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday","text":"[VIDEO] I think that it\u2019s useful to hear a balanced take on cancel culture from someone that\u2019s not, frankly, some Hollywood figure making dumb \u201ccancel culture\u201d jokes because they\u2019re secretly pooping their pants over when it\u2019s going to happen to them.","stance":"rec"}],"OkEdyq3UE5M":[{"hn_comment_id":18497169,"author":"dmreedy","month":"2018-11","story_title":"The Predictions of Robert A. Heinlein, from the Cold War to the Waterbed","text":"I think there's more depth to the film than you might be giving it credit for. There's a lot of goofy heavy-handedness on the surface, but there are some layers underneath, in the writing and the arcs of the characters The guys at Red Letter Media did a pretty good breakdown of it[0] all in all. But even just consider the scene in the beginning when Rasczak is teaching the class about citizenship[1]. It's goofy and funny on the meta-level, because, well, it's Michael Ironside, and he's saying things that at first pass sound insane . But there's a whole lot in that dialog, and it's all played deadly straight. And then compare Rico's genuine, \"I don't know\" there, to where his character is at the end of the film. I think it recommends itself to a lot of different levels of examination, without sounding like you're trying too hard. --- [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30576235,"author":"progre","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Notes on Nationalism (1945)","text":"The book (one of my favourites) is a little diffrent. There the perspective is that of the mobile infantist. The classic hero arc but in a fashist world. Like in the movie, there is no enlightenment or revolution though, just the story of a regular directionless Joe who finds his true self and a purpose in life in the Mobile Infantry. The movie is brilliant in a diffrent way. It's basically satire on all levels. Paul Verhoeven claimed he hated the book and didn't finish it. Red Letter Media has a very good analyis of the whole thing: [VIDEO] \"How do you tell your actor that you cast them as a joke?\"","stance":"rec"}],"OkmNXy7er84":[{"hn_comment_id":15931809,"author":"skadamat","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Communicating Advanced Mathematics to Kids","text":"So many things I could say about this, but I\"ll let Alan Kay speak for me - [LINK] Alan talks about how ideas in Calculus could be manifested from an early age and a richness in understanding built up as they aged up: - at very young ages, kids really respond well through \"doing\" / the enactive channel. When asked to draw a circle, kids in Papert's group would first emulate what a LOGO turtle would do by rotating their body in a circle (making tiny increments in x and y). - as they got a bit older, the visual / iconic channel was more developed and they could understand the abstraction of a circle on pencil/paper and how the concepts carried over there - closer to early teens, symbols were much easier to grasp and relate to, etc. With this context in mind, there have been some cool efforts to mix the second and third channels I just mentioned to communicate advanced math concepts. Vi Hart and Grant Sanderson's youtube channels come to mind. Here are my favorite videos by Grant: - \"What does it feel like to invent math\": [LINK] - On the visual intuition behind a hard problem on the Putnam exam - \"The hardest problem on the hardest test\": [VIDEO] - From vectors to matrices to vector spaces to higher-level ideas like the link between linear algebra and calculus: \"Essence of linear algebra\" series: [LINK] What I especially like about Grant's videos, is that he often walks through what a mathematician would do, the questions she would ask, etc.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20473102,"author":"naturlich","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Think in Math, Write in Code","text":"Indeed, I'd recommend the \"interesting proof\" vignettes by 3Blue1Brown: [VIDEO] These are my favorite videos of his","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24864478,"author":"pjfin123","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A Programmer\u2019s Intuition for Matrix Multiplication","text":"3Blue1Brown is really great for learning/refreshing math. He has great visualizations. I especially enjoyed this video (not exactly a math tutorial more of a cool explanation): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28197612,"author":"JackC","month":"2021-08","story_title":"How to avoid being hit by a laser in a room of mirrors [video]","text":"I like the 3blue1brown youtube series for explaining mathematical problem solving, like this example explaining a difficult problem from the Putnam: [VIDEO] \"And those of you who follow the channel know that rather than just jumping straight to the solution, which in this case will be surprisingly short, when possible I prefer to take the time to walk through how you might stumble upon the solution yourself. That is, make the video more about the problem-solving process than the particular problem used to exemplify it.\" I bailed out of math around calculus, and these videos helped me at least appreciate what I was missing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28245390,"author":"msdrigg","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Manim: An animation engine for explanatory math videos","text":"This is an extension of an animation library used by math YouTuber 3blue1brown [0]. He has an excellent channel that I would recommend anything from. One of my favorite videos of his is where he shows the thought process behind solving a level 6 Putnam competition problem and makes it seem almost doable [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21287025,"author":"tromp","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The \u201cWindmill\u201d Problem on the 2011 International Mathematical Olympiad [video]","text":"I enjoyed watching this similarly insightful video [1] on \"The hardest problem on the hardest test\" of the Putnam Competition. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21511789,"author":"ncallaway","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Moving towards a faster web","text":"I strongly disagree with this comment. I sincerely doubt 100% of the HN audience always considers those things. You might think some of those things are basic, but that doesn't make them useless. This kind of lack of empathy for new learners can make it incredibly difficult to teach concepts to those who don't have as much knowledge as you may have. See [VIDEO] for a great video by 3blue1brown on this topic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44618691,"author":"mauriziocalo","month":"2025-07","story_title":"OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025","text":"Related \u2014 these videos give a sense of how someone might actually go about thinking through and solving these kinds of problems: - A 3Blue1Brown video on a particularly nice and unexpectedly difficult IMO problem (2011 IMO, Q2): [LINK] -- And another similar one (though technically Putnam, not IMO): [VIDEO] - Timothy Gowers (Fields Medalist and IMO perfect scorer) solving this year\u2019s IMO problems in \u201creal time\u201d: -- Q1: [LINK] -- Q4: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"OmJ-4B-mS-Y":[{"hn_comment_id":16562340,"author":"NiklasMort","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How to self-learn math?","text":"I'd start with this video to get an overview of all the topics and areas that mathematics entails (some might be unknown to you) [VIDEO] . Then you go ahead and research a bit what sounds interesting to you and then you might google that topic and add \"foundations\" to that google search. It's just that most school/university math is heavily focused on analysis and algebra but there is so much more!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21350402,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Are there books for mathematics like Feynman's lectures on physics?","text":"I suggest this \"Map of mathematics\" as a starting point that gives you a reasonable birds-eye view of the field. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22331304,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2020-02","story_title":"A Map of Mathematics","text":"This is a much more entertaining map of mathematics in about 10 minutes [VIDEO] For a history of mathematics NJ Wildberger's lectures are easy to listen to. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24553416,"author":"mathnmusic","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Why books don't work (2019)","text":"> shift this burden to the medium This is beautifully expressed. Knowledge consists of connections across concepts but those connections are rarely shown explicitly in textbooks. Even wikipedia, while allowing you to traverse the connections back and forth easily, does not do a great job of giving you the bird's eye view of a subject or a field. Check out this \"map\" of mathematics: [VIDEO] Every subject needs a similar map. Besides visualizing the connections, we'd also need interactivity to the topic that helps with forming new mental models - which is the core aspect of learning. Jupyter notebooks, ObservableHQ, Mathigon are some of the good projects working on this aspect. Disclaimer: I am building the open-source project [LINK] which is attempting to build the complete map of knowledge/skills. So I too am biased against books and in favor of digital/interactive tools.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31547583,"author":"lcordier","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How to learn math from zero for adults?","text":"This is a good map of Mathematics to get an overview of where you can go... [VIDEO] Then Giles McMullen-Klein has an awesome recommended list for data science (your mileage may vary). [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Oo0jm1PPRuo":[{"hn_comment_id":18335918,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Redefining the Kilogram","text":"There's also an excellent video from Veritasium, a science and education YouTube channel, about what's being done to define the kilogram [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39597641,"author":"omgJustTest","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Le Grand K (2018)","text":"Veritasium (Derick, who I've met personally) does a fantastic job on these fundamental science subjects. Le Grande K was the definition of the kilogram. Derick explains the question at hand, how Plancks constant is now used. Derick's quality is supreme & he is always very careful and confident about claims. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15558910,"author":"falcolas","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Why scientists are redefining the kilogram","text":"> Does anyone have an example of where a change like this would be important? Well, it's important today, because the reference samples used across the world have drifted apart, and not in a consistent fashion. Which raises the question of whether the exemplar kg has drifted as well. So, we don't really know if the kg we're using today is the same kg we were using 10 years ago. Given how important mass is to many scientific calculations, a drifting standard could directly impact all the other work we do. I found the Veritasium video to be a bit more interesting for the \"why\" aspect of this change: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OoJsPvmFixU":[{"hn_comment_id":38513624,"author":"SushiHippie","month":"2023-12","story_title":"I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) \u2013 Smarter Every Day","text":"I recommend you to watch it, it's really good. But as I mentioned in another comment, here is a relatively good AI summary: [VIDEO] Click on see more, to see 5 minute wise summaries. (Not affiliated with this site, I just use it from time to time)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38685661,"author":"happytiger","month":"2023-12","story_title":"What made Apollo a success? (1971) [pdf]","text":"I am not affiliated, but as a fan\u2026 Smarter Every Day did a walkthrough with an actual Apollo engineer on the rocket and it was absolutely amazing. Definitely worth watching if you want to understand what this engineering program was up against \u2014 it\u2019s kind of insane what they were doing with 1960s tech. [LINK] Same guy also have one of the bravest talks I\u2019ve seen in a while about the lessons of the Apollo program for Artemis, including some criticisms that I thought were deeply valid. Much to learn about Apollo from this talk as well. [VIDEO] Thus very document is the foundation of that talk and I\u2019m sure why this is ending up on hacker news, so credit where credit is due please.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38930144,"author":"pomian","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Where Have All the Websites Gone?","text":"This thinking, or questioning, is needed everywhere. There is so much security paranoia, that it affects any one, just trying to do something. From setting up a wifi router, to seeing up an email account. Passwords must be used. Walt for 2FA before proceeding. Change your password to include upper lower Roman numerals and at least 5 different fonts... Why? Instead of saying up a website in 15 minutes, there is an hour of preparing to set up a webpage. If I live in the country side, have no neighbors for 50 miles, I must secure my router going to my starlink. Why? Added complexity and regulations, seem to grow around us just as the beurocracies; schools, governments, companies - maybe our lives are just all dependent on the 3rd law of thermodynamics. Higher disorder? I recommend this amazing presentation, questioning the basics, and attitude in teamwork, of the Artemis project: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41402325,"author":"faizshah","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing","text":"Do yourself a favor and look up moon landing 4k on youtube. There\u2019s some amazing immersive stuff now: [LINK] There\u2019s also a few amazing first person videos from space walks on the ISS: [LINK] The footage from Artemis is gonna be incredible. Also highly recommend this \u201care we going?\u201d Talk on engineering issues in Artemis: [VIDEO] Which is where I learned about this report from NASA called \u201cWhat Made Apollo a Success\u201d: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38515341,"author":"going_north","month":"2023-12","story_title":"What made Apollo a success? (1971) [pdf]","text":"I came across this document in a talk Destin Sandlin gave to the American Astronautical Society [1]. The talk compares the architecture and process of the Apollo mission with the modern Artemis mission, and is very critical of the latter. I think both hold some great lessons, even for software engineers working on non-critical systems. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40411324,"author":"zefhous","month":"2024-05","story_title":"The Lunacy of Artemis","text":"Destin from Smarter Every Day gave a talk that addresses a lot of these issues that I found pretty interesting too. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40752318,"author":"danesparza","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Allan McDonald refused to approve Challenger launch, exposed cover-up (2021)","text":"Destin (from Smarter Every Day Youtube channel fame) has concerns about the next NASA mission to the moon (named Artemis): [VIDEO] Read the comments (especially from NASA engineers). It's pretty interesting that sometimes it takes courageous engineers to break the spell that poor managers can have on an organization.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40992382,"author":"rqtwteye","month":"2024-07","story_title":"NASA Spent $450M on a Moon Rover. Now It's Canceling the Mission","text":"After watching this video i have serious doubts about the whole moon program [VIDEO] Reminds me a little of the SLS which makes no sense at all other than preserving some jobs. The Space Shuttle was also ruined by military requirements that never materialized.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42988578,"author":"filoeleven","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Boeing has informed its employees that NASA may cancel SLS contracts","text":"That's a fun read. Also the first time I've heard of the company Aerojet Rocketdyne. Did they come up with that one while playing beer pong? Smarter Every Day gave a talk directly to NASA that raises some of the same issues. It's a good one. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OpEB6hCpIGM":[{"hn_comment_id":27991919,"author":"lathiat","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Unleaded Avgas Approved","text":"This video was crazy, making ethanol from Corn provides something like 1% of the power of the sun hitting the square meter of farm used for it. Meanwhile using tonnes of water, space, and other things. It's basically a terrible idea over-all given alternatives like electricity and solar power. And it mostly only works because its government subsidised. But watch the video for the full story: Real Engineering - Why Biofuels Are Terrible [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27777992,"author":"dharmab","month":"2021-07","story_title":"EU draft exempts private jets, cargo from jet fuel tax","text":"The energy put into the process to grow and ferment the plants or algae is high enough to outweigh the offset use of fossil fuels. It's an energy negative process. The same creator has a 15 minute video on that topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OqEeIG8aPPk":[{"hn_comment_id":30213919,"author":"Litost","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Deming's Red Bead Experiment (2002)","text":"Thanks for the suggestion, how does what he says stack up against those who came after, I ask this because this is one of my favourite management talks by Russell Ackoff [1] and he mentions Dr Deming so assume he was influenced by/worked/studied with him and given their relative ages wondered if his work might be valuable to start with? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23591098,"author":"Barrin92","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Scientists\u2019 warning on affluence","text":"I think the article is right. Vaclav Smil has pointed out that today the share of fossil fuels, at about 90% of global energy consumed[1] is actually higher than in 2000, and falling at a snails pace. There is a worrying trend emerging, fuelled by the tech industry of performative environmentalism that seeks to promise absolution like the church did by buying Tesla's and biodegradable cups while the real-world impact is marginal while leaving the fundamental flaws of the system untouched. We won't consume ourselves out of the doghouse. Russ Ackoff in a great talk about systems thinking[2] once pointed out a few salient things 1. Counter to intuition one does not improve a system by merely removing deficiencies. Doing away with what you don't want doesn't get you what you want. 2. Incrementalism doesn't solve fundamentally new problems, rearranging deck chairs on the titanic is pointless, and people confuse efficiency with effectiveness. Doing the wrong thing right is worse than doing the right thing wrong. 3. One must recognise that like an architect, a designer does not design rooms independently of the house. One starts with the house, and only changes parts as to improve the overall functioning of the system, never the parts alone. This is what needs to be applied to modern environmentalism. Woke green consumerism and tech worship is useless. The entire global system needs to be redesigned, instead of trying to fix individual parts. We need to think in holistic terms rathe","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27041217,"author":"Litost","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Efficiency Is the Enemy","text":"This quote \u201cYou\u2019re efficient when you do something with minimum waste. And you\u2019re effective when you\u2019re doing the right something.\u201d reminds me of a Systems Thinking talk Russell Ackoff gave a long time ago [1] where he talks about the difference between doing \"the right thing wrong\" and the \"wrong thing right\" and getting more efficient at doing the wrong thing obviously might not be optimal :). This is actually a concept that Peter Drucker came up with, but I've not managed to find a good link to that, I'd be interested if anyone has? The whole talk is quite interesting, but I've linked to the relevant segment: [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OqjcrfKjobY":[{"hn_comment_id":9364215,"author":"toddkaufmann","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Tabvention \u2013 Manage Your Browser Tab Addiction","text":"Haven't tried, but I think I would find this intrusive and annoying--I'd be mentally keeping track of how many tabs I had open and then checking my bookmarks if I went over. Not for me, but maybe useful for some. I've tried session managers too, and those are okay for restoring state when things crash. THE GREATEST THING is Tabs Outliner (chrome only). This displays all your windows and tabs as a tree and lets you rearrange, easily close and restore windows, selectively restore, add notes to tabs, etc. A slight learning curve, but worth it for the power surfer. Demo of some of the features in this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9685646,"author":"ohaal","month":"2015-06","story_title":"\u201cWhy does Chrome not have a good tab management system built in?\u201d","text":"Tabs Outliner[1] is great for this. It's lacking sync (an extra top layer in the tree for each device would make sense), but other than that, it is fantastic, and has really reduced my memory usage back to normal levels. It allows you to suspend entire windows, and quickly browse all tabs. Allows for unlimited* levels of named trees/notes/windows/tabs. It does however NOT save the state of the page, only the URL. When the Chrome Sidebar API[2] is implemented, I'm sure it will only get better, as the need for an extra window should no longer be necessary. Here's a video overview of its features: [VIDEO] * I haven't reached the maximum yet... [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7725126,"author":"Gambit89","month":"2014-05","story_title":"The Inventor of the Browser Tab","text":"You might be looking for the Tabs Outliner Extension for Chrome. I've been using it heavily for the \"middle-state\" of saved and not open, but not bookmarked; now I'm looking for a \"meta Tabs Outliner\"-esque program, but I can't quite articulate my needs... > What I want is to maintain a list of current references, preferably with some spatial context (tree-mode browsing is great for this) to what the relationship is between pages in my browser session. Tabs Outliner puts every tab as a leaf in a tree, and you can nest leaves and affect the visual ordering on the tab bar at the same time - you can also do this reordering while the tab isn't even open! This is good for a while, but for me when I have thousands, it's lacking in some retrieval sense: I guess I want to query for just these tabs that have connections, and cross-reference research annotations on these sets of connections. [LINK] Demo: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OqmdLcyES_Q":[{"hn_comment_id":14420889,"author":"endlessvoid94","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Ask HN: I don't want to be a founder anymore","text":"How big is the company? You're right to identify this as a hard problem. I've been in your exact shoes before. 100+ person company, the weight is heavy. The good news is that it's totally possible to get out without wrecking the company's outlook. But it does take a minor amount of time investment. Perhaps it's possible to view it as a new challenge: how to quickly hire or find someone within your org who is capable of taking over your day-to-day responsibilities? Who do people ask for decisions / advice when you're out sick? Frame it as a promotion for them. Give them a (small) comp bump and a new set of responsibilities that include most (or all) of your existing responsibilities. Coach them for a quarter, give them enough rope to hang themselves with, give them radically candid feedback, and then you can step away. (Or even go do something else interesting at the company!) I can go into a lot more detail if you'd like -- please email me. The username in my profile (not my HN handle) at gmail. Good luck, positive vibes! P.S. Watch this: [VIDEO] as a jumpstart to getting your org ready for life without you","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15887791,"author":"hnrodey","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Steve Jobs on how to hire, manage, and lead people [video]","text":"> managers aren't able to keep up and so might find themselves in a position where when they first started managing they were an expert.... Reminds me of this. The value is in the audio but the animation is entertaining. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OsDy-4L6-tQ":[{"hn_comment_id":16699240,"author":"iammyIP","month":"2018-03","story_title":"A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64","text":"The remarkatble thing is less the compression of a 3:12 video with sound in 1MB, and more the c64 being able to decode it in realtime with a framerate > 10. I especially like the unique but still 64-flavoured compression artefacts of the video. Heres another Onslaught demo that fits on a Floppy disk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26588899,"author":"cromwellian","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Bad Apple on an Apple //e: playing video on a stock 1 MHz Apple II [video]","text":"C64 version using VQ compression: [VIDEO] A much much more impressive display of the same tech in this Onslaught Eclectic demo by the same author: Real time decode of video and audio from floppy at 16fps [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"OsFEV35tWsg":[{"hn_comment_id":4146595,"author":"RyanMcGreal","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Woman Who Couldn\u2019t Be Intimidated by Citigroup Wins $31 Million","text":"> The argument that gets repeated ad nauseum, that things like this are the fault of \"a few bad apples\", is just plain false. Philip Zimbardo, the architect of the Stanford Prison Experiment and author, more recently, of The Lucifer Effect , argues that it's not \"bad apples\" that spoil the barrel, but a \"bad barrel\" that spoils the apples. Here's Zimbardo's TED talk on what makes people do evil: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37032287,"author":"Rochus","month":"2023-08","story_title":"In Defense of Programming Languages","text":"That's the usual naggers club you can meet all over the web today. And it's getting worse, not better. What these people say is an end in itself to make themselves important and does not help the matter. It undoubtedly has something to do with anonymity. Most people on these forums are anonymous, also the quoted people are obvious fantasy pseudonyms. Downvoting is even more anonymous; there is usually no record from who the downvotes come. If you're interested in the effects of anonymity to people, watch this part of Zimbardo's very interesting lecture: [VIDEO] . The anonymity of the web, or the masses, gives these people a power that obviously overwhelms them. There were experiments which demonstrated how it can play out when ordinary people suddenly gain power (see e.g. [LINK] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39189663,"author":"Rochus","month":"2024-01","story_title":"The Value of Downvoting, Or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009)","text":"> the most notable difference between Hacker News and Reddit is that it's impossible to downvote anything on Hacker News. [..] It's an interesting design decision, but ultimately a bad one, in my opinion. That's not true (as the author realized himself). And I don't agree with the author; letting people downvote is unfortunate in my opinion, and a bad design decision. The possibility to downvote encourages misuse. I don't see any reason for the majority of downvotes I come across; mostly it's just other opinions that don't suit a few people; often it's even the correct presentation of the facts that has been downvoted. Most people on HN are anonymous. Downvoting is even more anonymous; there is usually no record from who the downvotes come. If you're interested in the effects of anonymity to people, watch this part of Zimbardo's very interesting lecture: [VIDEO] . The anonymity of the web, or the masses, gives these people a power that obviously overwhelms them. There were experiments which demonstrated how it can play out when ordinary people suddenly gain power (see e.g. [LINK] ). The possibility to downvote promotes the bad in people. And it is not even necessary. If you like a comment or story for whatever reason, you can upvote. That's already enough to promote popular content, and demote unpopular content. And if a comment violates site rules, it can be flagged. Of course also flagging can be misused (as it is very popular e.g. on Lobsters); this can be mitigated in tha","stance":"rec"}],"Ot4qdCs54ZE":[{"hn_comment_id":25772780,"author":"ricc","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?","text":"This is just a PSA for those comparing financial (in)equality between Europe and the USA: income inequality is different from wealth equality. Income inequality might be lower in Europe but apparently wealth inequality is relatively high. This video gives a good explanation about their difference: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34869132,"author":"CalRobert","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Amsterdam supermarket offers free groceries, life coach to struggling families","text":"All the same I would much, much, MUCH rather be poor in the Netherlands than the US. Just not having to operate a car would save tons. Also, not sure but this comment may be a reference to: How The Dutch Economy Shows We Can't Reduce Wealth Inequality With Taxes | Economics Explained [VIDEO] and if you watch that it's well worth watching this Dutch economist's rebuttal The Dutch Economy is NOT the Most Unequal [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"OtLvtMqWNz8":[{"hn_comment_id":46833274,"author":"slfreference","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Moltbook","text":"Blade Runner 2049 | \"Cells Interlinked\" and Pale Fire [VIDEO] The best video essay on the movie","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40577187,"author":"easyKL","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Don't be terrified of Pale Fire","text":"You might enjoy this video: _Blade Runner 2049 | \"Cells Interlinked\" and Pale Fire (LITERALLY ME! INCELS INTERLINKED)_ [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ox5P7QyL774":[{"hn_comment_id":22120877,"author":"sillysaurusx","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Organizing Programs Without Classes (1991) [pdf]","text":"Related, and worth a watch: [VIDEO] It's a video about the Self language, which I think was designed using the principles in this paper. I like it because (like Oberon) it shows that programming and graphics can be much more closely interwoven than we're used to. They were doing it in the 90's. Then we lost it somewhere along the way by trying to make everything big and user-facing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12471590,"author":"Fr0styMatt88","month":"2016-09","story_title":"In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)","text":"I'd point to the work done on tangible UIs and programming environments for that. For example, the work on tangible UIs eg- Self: [LINK] This is a good demo of what could be done in the Self environment: [VIDEO] GUI and non-programmability are tangential things. I don't think they're implicitly bound together.","stance":"rec"}],"OxhTQdcieQE":[{"hn_comment_id":12018523,"author":"anonyfox","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Rails 5.0: Action Cable, API mode, and more","text":"I'd say you really should have a look into [VIDEO] . A really great presentation, including numbers and real world backup data, plus conceptual overviews.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11771063,"author":"alexgaribay","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Fed up with Ruby/Rails; what language should I learn?","text":"I can't speak about experiences with Ruby/Rails since I don't use that stack but I can give you advice about both Scala and Elixir. I used to be a Java programmer and fell in love with Scala and functional programming. Scala helped me do things that I couldn't do so easily in Java in a more explicit way. However, I found doing web development with Scala to be more cumbersome than helpful but was still a great learning experience for FP in general. Since late 2015, I've been all-in on Elixir. Elixir does everything I wanted to Scala, specifically pattern matching everywhere and how powerful it is. Since Elixir uses BEAM, it's incredibly lightweight but can scale without any configuration. The community around Elixir is fantastic and helpful and everyone is growing together. Brian Cardarella (well known in the Elixir community) gave a conference talk at Rails Conf about switching from Rails to Phoenix (Elixir's goto for web) and that may be a good start to empower you to make a decision: [VIDEO] . A great resource for learning Elixir if you choose that route is Programming Elixir 1.2 by Dave Thomas. It's a great book for beginners and can help with you understand Elixir semantics and functional programming.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11945747,"author":"bcardarella","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Elixir v1.3 released","text":"If you're looking for a reason to migrate from a stack like Ruby/Rails to Elixir/Phoenix you should check out my RailsConf talk on that exact subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11953150,"author":"tim333","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Elixir vs. Erlang, is Elixir safe bet for my time investment?","text":"I started watching RailsConf 2016 - Rails to Phoenix by Brian Cardarella [VIDEO] as suggested in some comment yesterday and it has some stuff on whether learning Elixir is worth the time. Good talk in general. Edit link to comment thread: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11963088,"author":"bcardarella","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Phoenix 1.2","text":"I posted this in the Elixir 1.3 thread but also relevant here. If you're looking to understand why you/your company may want to consider migrating from Rails to Phoenix you can check out my RailsConf talk on the subject [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12012399,"author":"bcardarella","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Rails 5.0: Action Cable, API mode, and more","text":"We've moved all of our backend offerings from Rails to Elixir/Phoenix. Despite some questioning the value of anything below 100ms response times there is a lot of data backing up the idea that Elixir/Phoenix can lead to a more maintainable and more economical solution. I spoke about this recently at RailsConf: [VIDEO] Don't get me wrong, I think Rails is an amazing technology but it doesn't fit the use cases and demands our clients have today.","stance":"rec"}],"OyBNmecVtdU":[{"hn_comment_id":24792039,"author":"maxharris","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Google disabled my husband's account","text":"Has he done anything to raise the ire of the American intelligence services? The agencies that gave us [LINK] and the like still exist. Google is not ultimately in control over matters like that. Getting information on this stuff is difficult, given the blank check the NSA has had from 1959 onwards: [LINK] Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Address is misinterpreted by many and totally forgotten by others. Please listen: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36075254,"author":"scrlk","month":"2023-05","story_title":"War Is a Racket (1935)","text":"To add to the Eisenhower quote - I highly recommend watching his 1961 Farewell Address, where the term \"military\u2013industrial complex\" was first used: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"OyFJWRnt_AY":[{"hn_comment_id":35723748,"author":"abhgh","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Transformers from Scratch","text":"I would also recommend Pascal Poupart's talk [1] on Attention and Transformers. Doesn't seem to be cited often, but its quite well done and seeing him work out some of the details using chalk and board is very reassuring. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35983713,"author":"elankart","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Can someone ELI5 Transformers and the \u201cAttention is all we need\u201d paper","text":"This might be dumbing this down very very much but it all boils down to having some sort of a special lookup table and you give it a \"query\" and a bunch of \"keys\" and the \"value\" is the most likely next word. As you input something into the network, a network of these tables are consulted and you are given most likely next word. The novelty in this paper is this \"query-key-value\" relation that gets learned. A lot of previous work in this area was focused on learning a rough state machine to which you input a set of state transitions and it will give you the most likely next state. This will also work but training such networks is very slow and you also don't have the capability to train the network to \"attend\" to certain part of the inputs. This lookup based technique lets you do that plus this is also very compute efficient (compared to previous techniques). I'm missing a lot of details but that's basically the intuition behind this. These are very excellent resources: - [LINK] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36332848,"author":"metanonsense","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Attention is Turing complete [pdf]","text":"What made attention mechanism click to me was the video [LINK] by Sebastian Raschka. Another good video on attention that tries to give a bit more intuition on the query/key/value stuff is [VIDEO] In hindsight, what helped me most is understanding the dimensionality at each step of the attention computation (explained well in Raschka's video). Another think I simply did not get from the original Transformer paper is that the learning of self-attention happens in the linear layers. (At least, that's my current understanding. If that's wrong, I appreciate any correction :)","stance":"rec"}],"OyfBQmvr2Hc":[{"hn_comment_id":21374706,"author":"labria","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?","text":"(define eval-expr (lambda (expr env) (pmatch expr [`,x (guard (symbol? x)) (env x)] [`(lambda (,x) ,body) (lambda (arg) (eval-expr body (lambda (y) (if (eq? x y) arg (env y)))))] [`(,rator ,rand) ((eval-expr rator env) (eval-expr rand env))]))) There's an amazing talk about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22849695,"author":"BoiledCabbage","month":"2020-04","story_title":"A Conversation with Alan Kay (2004)","text":"If you haven't watched it - check out William Byrd on \"The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written\" [VIDEO] It's the above and deriving it. It is fascinating to think of it as the essence of a language in 13 lines.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27362985,"author":"uptheroots","month":"2021-06","story_title":"William Byrd on logic and relational programming, miniKanren (2014)","text":"One of my all time favorite YouTube videos is a lecture by William Byrd. I find myself still coming back to this video, it was so fascinating to me as an undergrad. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28116076,"author":"hazbo","month":"2021-08","story_title":"A Lisp interpreter written in Lisp (2017)","text":"I can't recommend the talk Dr Byrd did on this enough: [VIDEO] It's one of my favorite programs to play around with. I wrote about an Erlang implementation of this a short while back: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15583015,"author":"geogriffin","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Near Future of Programming Languages [pdf]","text":"William Byrd's work in program synthesis is an interesting take on this, where an IDE can, guided by test cases written for a function, actually auto-complete code itself whilst writing the function, or tell the programmer when they have something wrong by violating a test case. Of course it is impractical right now, but a good step nonetheless.. It (Barliman) is demoed near the end of this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16401101,"author":"carapace","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Yes, code is data, but that's not what makes Lisp cool","text":"Well, I think lisper nailed it in the article: It's not just that the code is represented as data structured in linked-lists, it's that that data exposes the semantic structure of the code in ways that are more pragmatically useful (among other nice properties) than char strings. When you get into the LISP interpreter itself, which is just a linked-list structure describing how to process linked-list structures (like itself) as code, well... Here's William Byrd on \"The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written\" (ye LISP interpreter) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19703424,"author":"eindiran","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Collapsing Towers of Interpreters (2018) [pdf]","text":"If you're interested in the work that led to this, definitely check out Kenichi Asai's reflective languages. The code for his Black language with reflective semantics is reproduced here: [0] More tangential but also cool: this talk[1] by William Byrd mentions reflective towers, but jumps into a discussion of what he terms \"relational programming\". It's a demo of his Barliman Smart editor system: [2] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20314060,"author":"m463","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The Evolution of Lisp (1993) [pdf]","text":"I watched a fascinating presentation and when I saw the speaker typing (lambda ...) and having it change to (\u03bb ...) and not having to deal with parens.. I was jealous. Does emacs do this? EDIT: the presentation: William Byrd on \"The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20583123,"author":"kragen","month":"2019-08","story_title":"The Fifth Generation Computing Project","text":"As for what miniKanren is, there are a couple of books (one being Byrd's dissertation) and a lot of papers. I think maybe the best summary I've read is actually the interview transcript at [LINK] . But also, there's a summary on [LINK] , with links to the papers and talks, and an older summary on [LINK] . Most of these are a bit hard to understand the significance of if you aren't already familiar with logic programming. The talk on [VIDEO] is a popular description of one of the most astonishing results; I haven't watched it but people tell me it's good. As for understanding academia, yeah, I don't know.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23249912,"author":"hcarvalhoalves","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Production Prolog in 2020?","text":"Equational reasoning makes TDD and property based testing trivial (encode rules by examples, base cases and corner cases, which is the most natural way for humans to think); rule-based system are easier to extend and correct by design (bounded set of possible states); provides more powerful and elegant query languages (E.g. Datalog). See [VIDEO] (skip to 1h mark to see some examples)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32496175,"author":"hcarvalhoalves","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Programming breakthroughs we need","text":"Watch this (skip to 1:17:28 to see a quick demo, the rest of the video is the explanation): [VIDEO] It\u2019s exploiting logic programming to query for a program that satisfies some condition.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44154852,"author":"spartanatreyu","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Toying with the Lambda Calculus","text":"It's easy to miss since it's a small link near the top of the post, but something that will help a lot in understanding this post is this video: The most beautiful program: [VIDEO] It essentially gives you a quick 5-min overview of the lisp language, then shows you how to implement lisp in lisp with only a few lines of code. IMO, understanding lambda calculus is much easier for the uninitiated after watching that video.","stance":"rec"}],"P-2P3MSZrBM":[{"hn_comment_id":23527696,"author":"reciprocity","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Emotional Blocks as Obstacles to Learning","text":"You might be interested in watching this: [VIDEO] If watching this isn't worth anyone's time, I'm not sure what would be.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23925295,"author":"alexshortt","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality [video]","text":"I really love his emphasis on modelling as a skill. Its obviously great applied to technical skills like computer science, but he seems to apply it to everything else in the human experience so well. \"everything that we sense is part of the same object ... we learn it all into one model ... we call this model the universe\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24348527,"author":"miketery","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Mind Emulation Foundation","text":"The best I've seen the topic of mind and computation bridged and well communicated has been by Joscha Bach. Recommend watching this video on Computational Meta-Psychology [1]. Also his 3 hour conversation with Lex Fridman is a whole other amazing rabbit hole [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29708453,"author":"meowface","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite Podcast Episode of 2021?","text":"Same for me. His first interview with him was also my favorite podcast episode of 2020. Also, you can watch it in video form. I'd argue it's better that way, especially with the way he emotes during certain parts of the discussion. Episode 1: [VIDEO] Episode 2: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23522095,"author":"memexy","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Joscha Bach: Do we live in a simulation or in the base reality?","text":"He recently did an interview with Lex Friedman ( [VIDEO] ) and it was pretty good. It's a bit long but worthwhile. Covers a bunch of topics about the philosophy of machine learning, models of thinking and consciousness, and some bits and pieces of future directions for AI.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24874784,"author":"jcims","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Aliens on 1k nearby stars could see us, new study suggests","text":"Totally agree. Joscha Bach laid out a few interesting ideas around this at the end of a podcast. If you have a few minutes start here for a broader context (starts of wholly unrelated but with some great concepts): [VIDEO] If not, he drills into it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"P1IcaBn3ej0":[{"hn_comment_id":27146080,"author":"arduinomancer","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Neural Rendering: How Low Can You Go in Terms of Input?","text":"The video linked of applying a neural net to GTAV for photorealism is really impressive if you haven't seen it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30906479,"author":"valgaze","month":"2022-04","story_title":"\u201cCan it run Doom\u201d will never be the same, thanks to new ray-tracing mod","text":"DLSS & ideas like it outside an idea are really interesting: [LINK] Ex. run the base game at an insanely crummy/low resolution. On low(er) it\u2019s possible to run a model to kinda \u201cupscale\u201d in each frame in a performant way. Or even this CNN initiative from Intel where they took Grand Theft Auto & \u201cpainted\u201d it with dashcam footage from rural Germany: [VIDEO] The results are pretty interesting\u2014 all \u201cbrown\u201d southern CA mountains were green like in Germany","stance":"rec"}],"P1ww1IXRfTA":[{"hn_comment_id":20239873,"author":"malingo","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The Space Shuttle and the Horse's Rear End (2000)","text":"Obligatory link to Feynman's description of how a train stays on the tracks around a corner, having its wheels on fixed axles: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23895162,"author":"prox","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Bohr\u2013van Leeuwen theorem \u2013 magnetism in solids is a quantum mechanical effect","text":"People are also missing the complete video, its not just about magnets, it\u2019s about why imagination can be fun. Here he just demonstrates why you can\u2019t always turn to similarities in the classical world: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30144014,"author":"morphle","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The Great Unconformity: Research points to glaciers being the culprit","text":"Read his book or watch Feynman explain [1][2] for one of many answers. Pondering these questions and learning about them gives joy, excitement, peace of mind and is my great hobby. So much so that I recently purchased 21 hectare of mountain for $9000 and emigrated there so I can study erosion (geology), wildlife, flowers and forest (biology and evolution) and dig for fossils in my own garden. And still read science and hacker news online. Feel free to come and visit, either camping or residing in a tiny house on my mountain[3]. I'll play science and nature guide in the Sierra de Cazorla, Segura and other mountain ranges. [1] Richard P Feynman - The Pleasure of Finding Things Out [LINK] [2] Fun To Imagine with Richard Feynman [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"P3AyI_u66Bw":[{"hn_comment_id":15010476,"author":"gshulegaard","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Let's Remove the Global Interpreter Lock","text":"I feel like the GIL is, at this point, Python's most infamous attribute. For a long time I thought it was also the biggest flaw with Python...but over time I care less and less about it. I think the first thing to realize is that single-threaded performance is often significantly better with the GIL than without it. I think Larry Hasting's first Gilectomy talk was extremely insightful (about the GIL in general and about performance when removing the GIL): [VIDEO] I am not sure I would, personally, trade single-threaded performance for enabling multi-threaded applications. I view Python as a high-level rapid prototyping language that is well suited for business logic and glue code. And for that type of workload I would value single-threaded performance over support for multi-threading. Even now, a year later, the Gilectomy project is still slightly off performance-wise (although it looks really really close :) ): [LINK] As noted elsewhere, multi-processing offers adequate parallelization for this type of logic. Also, coroutines and async libraries such as gevent and asyncio offer easily approachable event loops for maximizing single-threaded resource utilization. It's true that multi-processing is not a replacement for multi-threading. There definitely are tasks and workloads where multi-processing and its inherent overhead make it unsuitable as a solution. But for those tasks, I question whether or not Python itself (as an interpreted, dynamically typed language) is suitable.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12027144,"author":"tedmiston","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Why is Python slow","text":"See Larry Hastings' talk \"Removing Python's GIL: The Gilectomy\" from PyCon 2016. [VIDEO] As well as his earlier talk \"Python's Infamous GIL\". [LINK] The GIL is a simple design that provides serious benefit to Python (end user) developers. There are plenty of options for working around this for parallelism, such as the built-in module multiprocessing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13826874,"author":"pfranz","month":"2017-03","story_title":"CPython internals: A ten-hour codewalk through the Python interpreter (2015)","text":"Larry Hastings - Removing Python's GIL: The Gilectomy - PyCon 2016 [VIDEO] (I'm pretty sure this is the video I'm thinking of) It's 30m, but worth it if you're interested. Not sure what progress has been made since then.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18118903,"author":"zbentley","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Questions","text":"[VIDEO] Or search \u201cgilectomy\u201d on LWN. Or check out stackless etc.; it turns out removing the GIL technically is historically one of the easier parts of removing the GIL entirely. It sounds like your main problem is with python\u2019s GC model. Reference counting doesn\u2019t have to be thread-unsafe, but in scripting/interpreted-ish languages that want their threading story to involve seamless (I.e. no special syntax unless you want it, it\u2019s on you not to blow off your foot) sharing of state between threads at will, like Python and Ruby, a GIL or equivalent is the norm. Sometimes it\u2019s not as intrusive as python\u2019s, but it does seem like a necessary (or at least very likely) implementation pattern for languages that want to provide that seamlessness. You can have thread-safe reference counted GC in a traditional scripting language, but that tends to come with a much less automatic threading/concurrency API. Perl 5 is an example of that category, and it is implemented in C.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36644580,"author":"santiagobasulto","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Meta pledges Three-Year sponsorship for Python if GIL removal is accepted","text":"There's a great talk by David Beazley (I don't remember which one) that he basically explains that removing the GIL isn't difficult at all. After all, it's just one lock. The issue is all the libraries and packages that were built around it. It's now been YEARS of building on top of the GIL. So anyways, PEP 703 is a a nice effort, but I doubt we (everyday mortals) can enjoy it. Meta, and big companies with a specialized team might be able to exploit it by making sure their entire stack is GIL-free. EDIT: My bad, the talk is from Larry Hastings: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"P4VBqTViEx4":[{"hn_comment_id":35745119,"author":"29athrowaway","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Intel Posts Largest Loss in Its History as Sales Plunge 36%","text":"They boost the share price for a while, but then the competition takes over. Steve Jobs has the best explanation for this. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32350093,"author":"deckard1","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Google\u2019s video chat merger begins: Now there are two \u201cGoogle Meet\u201d apps","text":"> resource curse, where countries with rich natural resources are prone to foundering Steve Jobs calls this out wonderfully here: [VIDEO] > [...] the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. [...] the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to the monopolistic position gets rotted out. By people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.","stance":"rec"}],"P55t6eryY3g":[{"hn_comment_id":28690979,"author":"hnbad","month":"2021-09","story_title":"You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation","text":"> What was a lot harder were the toxic users that just stuck around. Not doing anything bad enough to necessarily warrant a permanent ban, but just a constant stream of shitty behavior. Especially sometimes when the most toxic users were also some of the most popular users. This is the problem with community guidelines being the be-all and end-all. Hard rules are great for catching insults or slurs. They're not so great for dealing with actual abuse or inciting very bad ideas. I think Innuendo Studios' video on this problem is one of the best explanations: [VIDEO] There's a reason white supremacists and literal nazis (yes, really with the salutes, genocide fantasies, Jewish conspiracy theory and all) have shifted from using obvious language to dogwhistles and \"just asking questions\". Erosion is a much more powerful force than a few direct impacts. If you want to moderate a community, you need to have a plan for dealing with toxic individuals, not just language. We tend to imagine \"hackers\" and (foul-mouthed) \"trolls\" but I find Molly's archetypes a lot more though-provoking: [LINK] I think community moderation is a problem we tend to run into the Dunning-Kruger effect with because it seems like something we have an intuitive understanding of even if we have zero experience actually doing it and having ever learned what works and what doesn't.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23051626,"author":"Quanttek","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Intellectually simulating Podcasts/conversations/Talk","text":"God, no. He is a far-right YouTuber who is known for his promotion of scientific racism and white supremacist views. His website is basically a cult with active use of cult indoctrination methods on Molyneux's side. Let's not pretend that the above poster doesn't know about that. He tries to bait you into watching Molyneux because he is \"good on philosophy and parenting\", who can slowly indoctrinate you into his far right views[1] (he doesn't try to be to open about them) For instance, this is his take on the Holocaust: > ...the Germans were in danger of being taken over by what they perceived as Jewish-led Communism. And Jewish-led Communism had wiped out tens of millions of white Christians in Russia and they were afraid of the same thing. And there was this wild overreaction and all this kind of stuff. If anyone wants to take a look at this track record, in his own words, check out the SPLC: [LINK] . (Also the source for the above quote) Otherwise, you can also take a look at the less trustable but far more comprehensive RationalWiki overview: [LINK] . And if anyone wants to learn about denial tactics when faced with an alt-right, misogynistic mass shooter, using the example of Molyneux, take a look here: [LINK] [1] An explanation of \"the onion\" can be found here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32708291,"author":"pixl97","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Blocking Kiwifarms","text":"> I bet a lot of those people on that site are completely lost when it comes to purpose or their place in life Which makes them a prime target for extremist thinking/alt-right groups. The alt-right playbook series goes into this rather well [VIDEO] (video has content warning, ironically).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48304122,"author":"Schiendelman","month":"2026-05","story_title":"I'm Getting into Mesh Networks (Meshtastic, MeshCore, and Reticulum)","text":"All unmoderated spaces have this problem. That's why the right wing grew so much on gaming forums, because they were extremely unmoderated. A great video on the topic from a few years ago (How to Radicalize a Normie): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"P73REgj-3UE":[{"hn_comment_id":10634112,"author":"TomNomNom","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Making a pencil from scratch (2013)","text":"This guy's YouTube channel [0] features videos of him making stone tools, cutting down a tree, digging up clay, making a kiln, roof tiles and huts; all from scratch. His videos are a great watch, and even with heavy editing it's pretty clear how difficult it all must be. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11783847,"author":"11thEarlOfMar","month":"2016-05","story_title":"A Rock-Sorting Robot","text":"Don't know the source, but as far as 'watching other people working', here are two of my favorites: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13201171,"author":"11thEarlOfMar","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Chinese smiths forge a large flange on the street [video]","text":"Adding to my 'collection' of mesmerizing manual labor: Building a tile-roofed hut by hand: [VIDEO] Building a brick vaulted ceiling: [LINK] The cinder block wall: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16883035,"author":"Jakob","month":"2018-04","story_title":"How to build a house alone [video]","text":"Impressive! Of course technically he\u2019s building it not by himself but with the help of a lot of technology. ;) This man is building a house including the tools you need to build that house completely by himself: Primitive Technology: Tiled Roof Hut [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"P76Vbsk_3J0":[{"hn_comment_id":6103627,"author":"Jach","month":"2013-07","story_title":"How do I \u201cthink in AngularJS\u201d if I have a jQuery background?","text":"Indeed. Rich Hickey's 2-part presentation on \"Clojure for Java Programmers\" was a really slick presentation of a Lisp. (Focusing on the 'code is data' aspect from the beginning (at least once he starts talking about the language specifics themselves, he does spend a while motivating dynamic languages) rather than talking a lot about just higher order functions and macros and so on. He goes over the evaluation model and its difference from a Java/C++ model, he shows how to interop with Java... It's just a great talk.) Part 1: [VIDEO] Part 2: [LINK] Slides: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29776009,"author":"greggyb","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Understanding the Power of Lisp (2020)","text":"> So that's how I view Lisp macros - creating code on the fly and executing it. This is an incorrect assumption. In compiled Lisps[0], macros are a compile-time construct, which manipulate the data structures that represent your code[1]. All manipulation occurs at compile-time. In interpreted Lisps, macro evaluation is temporally intertwined with program execution, but the two phases are logically distinct. [0]: Compilation time in a Lisp is not necessarily similar to compilation in other languages. Working at a REPL does not imply that interpretation is happening. Clojure is an example of a Lisp that is exclusively compiled. Even when sending individual expressions to the REPL, they are compiled before being evaluated. [1]: From a reply elsewhere in this thread: [VIDEO] See this video for an overview of the core of Clojure. The link starts with an overview of Clojure's data types and data structures (skipping the intro for the reasons behind Clojure). This leads directly into the evaluation model, which is based on the data structures of Clojure. Watch through ~1h:30m to get a feel for what macros are used for in Clojure's core. This gives a very good overview of the evaluation model for macros; this is generally applicable to Lisp macros outside of Clojure as well, though there are nuances to different dialects. I recommend that you start at the linked time, but if you want to jump straight to the evaluation model, you can jump to ~47m.","stance":"rec"}],"P9M__yYbsZ4":[{"hn_comment_id":4857422,"author":"NatW","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Norway is building thorium reactor","text":"For those who haven't seen it, I highly recommend this video on liquid-fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR): [VIDEO] ! I passed the video by my uncle who was an expert/engineer dealing with control and safety of water cooled reactors. This is what he had to say: \"I found the video very informative technically, as well as being effective in countering many of the the arguments of those who profess to be against nuclear power in any form. I also found the details of the design of the liquid thorium fluoride reactor intriguing. To become an advocate for further investment in this concept, I would have to learn more about how the concept deals with the safety issues involved in the handling of fluorine gas and fluoride materials.\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3499203,"author":"JerkyTreatz","month":"2012-01","story_title":"We don't have abundant solar power because of financing, not science","text":"Solar is not a viable means for today's energy consumption, and it certainly won't be a viable means for tomorrow's energy consumption. The energy race has been decided already, and the only answer to fossil fuels is Liquid Floride Thoriam Reactors (LFTR). It's an alternative form of nuclear energy that has been around since the Manhattan Project. Unlike the current nuclear power plants of today, it is impossible for a nuclear explosion to occur, there is no waste generated (well, there is about 1% waste, but the waste generated is actually a very rare metal NASA uses to power deep space satellites), and Thorium (the equivalent to Uranium) is 1000x more abundant than Uranium. LFTR will be the worlds core energy source within 30 years. China is the only country actively developing a LFTR program- if it comes to fruition, they could be the power suppliers of tomorrow. Learn about it in 5 minutes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5272251,"author":"meztez","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What do you know about thorium as an energy source?","text":"I assume it would cost a lot in R&D although other nations are currently experimenting LFTR. Beside that, I don't think the cost-benefit is at a point where it would make sense. It's one thing to produce energy but it's another entirely to distribute it. We need to develop both source and distribution. There is a great video on thorium reactor that was posted here or on reddit a while ago. [VIDEO] That's the extend of my knowledge on thorium.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8863989,"author":"badloginagain","month":"2015-01","story_title":"ThorCon Power","text":"When nuclear research was first being developed, it was for the specific purpose of building the bomb. When the war ended, and the industry switched to civilian applications, they decided to go with Uranium because they had already worked out many of the issues. Still, the US Airforce wanted a nuclear-powered bomber shortly after the Navy showed their nuclear sub and before ICBM's deprecated \"end-of-days\" long-range bombers. A water-contained reactor wouldn't work in an airplane, so they funded the development of the MSR (molten-salt-reactor). Unfortunately, when they shuddered the project after the implementation of practical ICBMs, industry politics discredited MSR's in favour of the reactor-types we have now. After fukushima, a grassroots campaign has been undertaken to resume research of MSR's as a replacement of fossil fuels for scalable carbon-free energy creation. If you are interested, you can get a great overview here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8864577,"author":"badloginagain","month":"2015-01","story_title":"ThorCon Power","text":"Uranium reactors use something like 2% of the total energy available in the uranium. Molten-salt-reactors use something like 98% of the available energy. Additionally, the 2% that is waste contain extremely rare derivatives that can be used as cancer \"smartbombs\", metals pivotal to deep space NASA missions, etc. This has a pretty good overview: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PBFPJ3_6ZWs":[{"hn_comment_id":42361921,"author":"beala","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best programmable holiday lights?","text":"This is a tangent, but I feel like we can't talk about LED christmas lights without linking to this video by tech connections: [VIDEO] the tl;dw is that most color LED lights work by emitting a single frequency of light. Compared to classic christmas lights, which are incandescent filaments filtered through dyed glass, the LED lights look a bit... radioactive. My personal pet peeve are white LED lights. If you're not careful to buy the ones labeled \"warm\" they look cold, and imo, not very festive and inviting. Of course, this is all a matter of taste, but once I became privy to the difference, I could no longer ignore it. I guess I'm just a millennial nostalgic for the lights of my youth.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27861474,"author":"nyanpasu64","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Why we're blind to the color blue","text":"Technology Connections did some videos on \"Making Holiday Lights Less Garish\", where instead of using narrowband colored LEDs he filtered white ones: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39319642,"author":"bseidensticker","month":"2024-02","story_title":"It was almost impossible to make the blue LED [video]","text":"The blue is nicer if you do that. Technology Connections has made 3 videos over the last 5 years mostly centering around how he hates the blue led lights used in holiday lights. I think I've only seen the 2 yr old one, but now that I have I can't unsee it. The blue is just too blue. If you see a set that is all blue instead of multi-color it's unbearable. It's just too blue. White light in blue plastic is where it's at. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"PC2JOQ7z5L0":[{"hn_comment_id":24717323,"author":"tiborsaas","month":"2020-10","story_title":"An earlier universe can still be observed today, says Roger Penrose","text":"According to CCC and to my understanding, it is sort of the case. The universe has undergone a \"scale change\" which marks the beginning of a new Epoch. It's explained in this PBS Space Time episode much better: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28392943,"author":"haxiomic","month":"2021-09","story_title":"The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make","text":"This dramatic visualization of the timeline for the rest of the universe is well worth a watch to get a feel for what we believe the future of the universe to look like [TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time] [LINK] However, when you get to the end (which is perhaps a little depressing!), I'd recommend learning a bit about what we think could come 'after' this period, where the universe has become so isotropic and homogenous no clocks or measuring systems of any kind can be developed so the universe loses any sense of size or energy \u2013 it's been proposed that this creates opportunity for a new universe to exist [What Happens After the Universe Ends?] [VIDEO] These are fields of study right on the edge of what's testable by science so it's more fun to think about than it is to have certainty (although Penrose has, debatably, claimed evidence for echos of previous universes visible in the CMB!).","stance":"rec"}],"PDL_pIPScSI":[{"hn_comment_id":24248503,"author":"zkms","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Rosatom releases previously classified documentary video of Tsar Bomba nuke test","text":"Alternatively there is [VIDEO] about Minuteman III testing -- in which a song called \"It's My Life\" plays as we see breathtaking video of an unarmed Minuteman III missile climbing its way through the clouds at Vandenberg AFB and the West Coast; followed by footage of the reentry vehicles falling down from the sky at several kilometers per second, visible only as streaks of white light.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43109884,"author":"dkbrk","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Minuteman III test showcases readiness of U.S. nuclear force's deterrent","text":"There's an excellent publicly released video made about an older test. It has some of the clearest footage of the actual reentries and impacts, and is also worth watching for the sheer 90s vibe of the production. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PDylgzybWAw":[{"hn_comment_id":9466406,"author":"VikingCoder","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Want a steady income? There's an app for that","text":"I highly recommend you watch the John Oliver segment on Payday Loans. [VIDEO] ANYTHING that helps get rid of those scum is a huge improvement.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8272670,"author":"WestCoastJustin","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Secret Network Connects Harvard Money to Payday Loans","text":"If you are interested in this topic, you should watch: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Predatory Lending (HBO) [1]. I think he does a pretty good job in giving an overview of what predatory lending is. Although, he does not talk about Harvard, MIT, or pension funds, this is all new as far as I know. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8273192,"author":"themartorana","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Secret Network Connects Harvard Money to Payday Loans","text":"Even better, check out Last Week Tonight's bit (John Oliver's show on HBO) on payday loan companies [0] - they're utterly appalling. [0] [VIDEO] Edit: spelling","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29777089,"author":"otterley","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The Case Against Crypto","text":"Spend some time with John Oliver, discussing just a few of the problems with predatory lending: [VIDEO] Usury laws go back to Biblical times: [LINK] - there is plenty of literature to follow from this point. There are still prohibitions on drug use that most agree should still be upheld due to the serious harm they tend to cause (addiction -> crime, serious health decline) relative to their benefits: heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, crystal meth, etc. Go spend some time in some majority Black neighborhoods in the U.S. like deep East Oakland, Detroit, Philadelphia, etc. if you want to get a real sense of how bad the problems are and what the locals think about it. Or spend some time in poor white areas in Appalachia or the midwest U.S.","stance":"rec"}],"PE4gwstWhmc":[{"hn_comment_id":18070352,"author":"fermienrico","month":"2018-09","story_title":"How we rolled out one of the largest Python 3 migrations","text":"I found the Dropbox lecture [1] at Stanford one of the most riveting things ever. There is just so much technology behind Dropbox, it is staggering. There is a reason why it is so much better than iCloud sync, Google Drive, Box or OneDrive. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8481199,"author":"rawnlq","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Facebook's software architecture","text":"This is a talk about the evolution of Dropbox's architecture from 2012: [VIDEO] . It is incredibly detailed (down to the exact sql schema they use for file metadata etc).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14839471,"author":"bradgnar","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Best-architected open-source business applications worth studying?","text":"Applications dont really need to be well architected until they are hitting scale. Then the parts of their system that need to relieve pressure will need to be re-architected. This is almost like a case study and there are a lot of good talks on youtube from places like dropbox and facebook that explain the problem and solution. Example: [VIDEO] If you dont want to do youtube case studies there are also books to read about distributed systems. Also reading about cloud architecture can help.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16669266,"author":"jesseendahl","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Congrats Dropbox","text":"Dropbox is a lot more than a GUI on top of rsync. Even purely from an engineering standpoint (ignoring product & design) that's incorrect. You might enjoy this talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17290758,"author":"testb","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Most effective path to become a solid systems practitioner?","text":"imo the best way is to look at what other's have built. Here's some of my favorite talks that go from 0 users to millions. Dropbox - [VIDEO] Instagram - [LINK] Slack (bonus. not as applicable but good reminder of why initial architecture does matter) - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"PFDu9oVAE-g":[{"hn_comment_id":12665053,"author":"ivan_ah","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Meet the New Math, Unlike the Old Math","text":"On the topic of eigenvalues, this video is a very nice introduction: [VIDEO] (the whole playlist kicks ass; highly recommended for anyone interested in \"seeing\" what linear algebra is all about)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13622532,"author":"yamaneko","month":"2017-02","story_title":"The Essence of Linear Algebra [video]","text":"3Blue1Brown explanation of eigenvectors and eigenvalues is very insightful and intuitive [1]. One of my favorite videos from his channel is \"Who cares about topology? (Inscribed rectangle problem)\" [2]. They way a Torus and M\u00f6bius Strip come up as solution to the problem is so elegant. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33521929,"author":"raydiatian","month":"2022-11","story_title":"What is an eigenvalue?","text":"A far easier to digest primer on eigenvalues is available from 3Blue1Brown [+]. His presentation format is undeniably approachable, so much so that I think you could probably use it to teach linear algebra and eigenvectors to 9-year olds. [+] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33527453,"author":"scmitton","month":"2022-11","story_title":"What is an eigenvalue?","text":"By far the best explanation of eigenvalues is found on 3blue1brown: [VIDEO] Seriously, the course on the essence of linear algebra did more for me than my entire college linear algebra course. It's only a pity I discovered the videos at the end of my mechanical engineering degree and not sooner.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43361311,"author":"mportela","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Statistical Formulas for Programmers (2013)","text":"Then definitely what 3Blue1Brown's video on eigenvalues and eigenvectors. [1] That's when I clicked to me! His entire series on Linear Algebra is incredibly well produced. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17074405,"author":"steamer25","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues (2015)","text":"3Blue1Brown has a good series on YouTube for building intuition in linear algebra: [LINK] In one of the last videos in the (relatively short) series, he discusses eigen-*: ~'eigen-stuffs are straight-forward but only make sense if you have a solid visual understanding of the pre-requisites (linear transformations, determinants, linear systems of equations, change of basis, etc.). Confusion about eigen-stuffs usually has more to do with a shaky foundation than the eigen-things themselves' [VIDEO] All of the videos in the series, including this later one on eigen-things, focus on animations to show what the number crunching is doing to the coordinate system.","stance":"rec"}],"PFUZlNQIndo":[{"hn_comment_id":47761139,"author":"mrtimo","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Design and Implementation of DuckDB Internals","text":"If you are a data scientist or do anything with data... duckdb is like a swiss army knife. So many great ways it can help your workflow. The original video from CMU in 2020 [1] is a classic. Minutes 3-8 present a good argument for adding duckdb to your data cleaning/processing workflow. And if you want to add a semantic layer on top of data, Malloy [2] is my favorite so far (it has duckdb built in): [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23287197,"author":"kyllo","month":"2020-05","story_title":"SQLite 3.32","text":"I was wondering the same--I guess because it's fairly new (2018) and it came out of a database research group at a European university, rather than a SV tech firm. Therefore, limited marketing budget. By the way, here's a YT video of a talk given by one of the DuckDB implementers about why they made it, what it's for, and how it works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23287914,"author":"kyllo","month":"2020-05","story_title":"DuckDB: SQLite for Analytics","text":"Here's a YT video of one of the implementers giving a talk to CMU students about what DuckDB is, why they made it, and how it works: [VIDEO] In a nutshell, it's a file-per-database embedded DB like SQLite, and it's installable as a Python or R package from PyPI or CRAN, but unlike SQLite, it's a column store with vectorized operations so it's more performant for analytical queries.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42567737,"author":"mrtimo","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Databases in 2024: A Year in Review","text":"Enjoyed his roundup in the \"Shoving Ducks into Everything\" section. DuckDB is a great tool. In April 2020, the creator of DuckDB gave a talk at CMU. In the beginning he makes a convincing argument (in 5 minutes) why data scientists don't use RDBMS and how this was the genesis of DuckDB. Here is a video that starts 3 minutes into the talk (where is argument starts): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PFc379hu--8":[{"hn_comment_id":39652734,"author":"blessedonekobo","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Alan Kay's talk at UCLA \u2013 Feb 2024 [video]","text":"This probably my favorite because it was mostly unscripted Alan Kay : July 2007 : A Conversation with CMU Faculty & Students [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15542824,"author":"skadamat","month":"2017-10","story_title":"The Future of Programming (2013)","text":"I think you'll like the discussion he had at CMU a few years back, which focused a lot on the technology side of things [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15850101,"author":"jstewartmobile","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Comparison of GreenArrays Chips with TI Micropower Controllers (2010) [pdf]","text":"Funny you should say that. Reminds me of this video[0] where Alan Kay, almost impolitely, tears into today's computing while talking at CMU. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PGLYEDpNu60":[{"hn_comment_id":14128885,"author":"sunils34","month":"2017-04","story_title":"How Complex Systems Fail (1998) [pdf]","text":"Richard Cook's writing and talks on systems have hugely shaped my thinking on systems. For those interested in more, he gave a highly entertaining talk on system resiliency here and introduces a helpful model. [VIDEO] I also wrote a post summarizing how I think about Rasmussen\u2019s model in startups and web applications. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14663400,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Safety lapses hobble Los Alamos National Lab\u2019s work on U.S. nuclear warheads","text":"> the staff had become \u201cde-sensitized\u201d to the risk of a serious accident. Yet again serious problems happen due to the Normalization Of Deviance. We really need to find a way to create working conditions that encourage correcting problematic situations immediately before the behavior becomes normalized. Regarding the management/other problems... I encourage everyone in ever industry that is ever involved with safety (i.e. most industries) to see Richard Cook's short talk about \"Resilience in Complex Adaptive Systems\"[1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17361625,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Bedford and the Normalization of Deviance","text":"One of the most important talks I've ever seen is Richard Cook's \"Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems\"[1], in which he explains the fundamental abstract mechanism that causes the normalization of deviance. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18754639,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Sydney Opal Tower: Thousands evacuated after 'crack'","text":"> But if you stop, they may continue increasing the dilution. There\u2019s a normalization of deviance. For a very good explanation of the mechanism that causes this kind of normalization of deviance, I recommend Richard Cook's outstanding talk \"Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems\"[1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19757312,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Google Is Eating Our Mail","text":"> Indifference that does not cause a business problem remains indifference. More generally, indifference to small \"trivial\" problems eventually normalizes the deviant behavior[1]. Evil behavior doesn't happen in one step, it's end result of regularly being indifferent to \"minor\" problems[2]. For a very good explanation of why this happens, I recommend Richard Cook's excellent talk, \"Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems\"[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23314634,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive","text":"> I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged The difficult ethical discussion probably never happens. The decisions being made in those meetings are usually seen as small/inconsequential. The problems caused by those \"small\" decisions are ignored. Eventually those problems become normalized allowing another \"small\" decision to be made. Humans seem to be very bad at recognizing how a set of \"small\" decisions eventually add up to major - sometimes shocking[1] - consequences that nobody would have approved if asked directly. Most of the time, nobody realizes just how deviant their situation had become. For a good explanation of the mechanism underlying the normalization of deviance (as an abstract model), I strongly recommend this[2] short talk by Richard Cook. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] (\"Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems\")","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15836722,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2017-12","story_title":"When the Judge Distrusts Your Lawyers","text":"> both individual and group ethics have to fail However, they don't have to fail at the same time or in a single step. This type of problem can creep in slowly over years as the \"normalization of deviance\"[1]. Richard Cook presented[2] a very useful model for how this type of problem creeps into complex system. The pressure from economic and workload concerns never goes away, so unless there is a proactive, explicit counter force, way to push back against that force, the system will inevitably be pushed toward failure. Therefor it's important to stop problems early when they are small. The magnitude of the counter force increases rapidly as behavior becomes increasingly deviant. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16874566,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Facebook to change user terms, limiting effect of EU privacy law","text":"Aka \"Normalization of Deviance\"[1]. Fix the minor problems now , or they become the new normal, eventually accumulating until a huge deviance from \"normal\" behavior isn't even noticed. The stories[2] about airline pilots completely ignoring checklists and unusual alarms while trying to take off with the gust lock still engaged are a shocking example of strong this effect can be. For a very good explanation of how this happens, see Richard Cook's short talk \"Resilience in Complex Adaptive Systems\"[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26314720,"author":"di4na","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Everything is broken, and it\u2019s okay","text":"The good news, yes. The bad news: it depends a lot of what you mean, it may not be the answer you search and i do not have a \"perfect\" reference, because it is considered mostly obvious in these fields... But before i get there, a few things. > (that we are building castles on quick sands with our leaky abstractions that try to fit into constantly changing reality) Nearly all the references i point to will tell you that this leakiness and this constant changing reality is exactly what makes them work in the real world. Now onto references. A lot of them can be found at [LINK] I particularly advise to start at [LINK] [VIDEO] For more in depth, i particularly like [LINK] And this is basically a whole meta study of all the research and ideas that came to this field since WW2. Beware it is long [LINK] For an example of how things go wrong when things are correct but interact well together, i advise these two papers on space systems. (I link to Adrian blog on them because they may be easier to read, but there is a link to the papers in there) [LINK] [LINK] If these things make you curious for more, there is a lot. Or if you want to talk about/have help navigating what is in the [LINK] link, feel free to reach to me on twitter or by email. I will be happy to talk more.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27099862,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2021-05","story_title":"New technology has enabled cyber-crime on an industrial scale","text":"It's just a variation of the Normalization of Deviance. See this[1] short talk by Richard Cook for a very good explanation of the mechanism that causes the transition from \"robust\" to \"superfluous\". [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27186863,"author":"______-","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate","text":"Good comment about this very thing here: [LINK] > It's just a variation of the Normalization of Deviance. See this[1] short talk by Richard Cook for a very good explanation of the mechanism that causes the transition from \"robust\" to \"superfluous\". [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PGv5BqNL164":[{"hn_comment_id":27687389,"author":"cartoonworld","month":"2021-06","story_title":"A foreign seller has hijacked my Amazon Klein bottle listing","text":"There was also a television adaptation, \"The KGB, the Computer, and Me\" produced by PBS Nova in like 1992, starring Clifford Stoll as Cliff Stoll! Here is a bootlegged youtube link--it's the best I've got. [VIDEO] A legend!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35244135,"author":"ndsipa_pomu","month":"2023-03","story_title":"How a Berkeley Eccentric Beat the Russians \u2013 Then Made Useless, Wondrous Objects","text":"Haven't seen anyone mention the 1990 documentary: [VIDEO] It's amazing to see how little he's changed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39844506,"author":"sys32768","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who wrote the book on how to hunt hackers (2019)","text":"Definitely read his book The Cuckoo's Egg. Terrific story and prose. Then check out the old Nova documentary about the story: The KGB, The Computer, and Me: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PHe0bXAIuk0":[{"hn_comment_id":10880669,"author":"whatok","month":"2016-01","story_title":"How does the wholesale foreign exchange market actually work?","text":"This is a great overview done by Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates; one of the world's largest hedge funds. \"Created by Ray Dalio this simple but not simplistic and easy to follow 30 minute, animated video answers the question, \"How does the economy really work?\" Based on Dalio's practical template for understanding the economy, which he developed over the course of his career, the video breaks down economic concepts like credit, deficits and interest rates, allowing viewers to learn the basic driving forces behind the economy, how economic policies work and why economic cycles occur.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17207471,"author":"Reedx","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Ray Dalio AMA","text":"If you haven't seen his video, How the Economic Machine Works, I highly recommend it: [VIDEO] Also the way he runs Bridgewater is really interesting. It's structured with the goal to surface the best ideas and figure out which opinions are most likely to be correct. It's an \"idea meritocracy\" and a culture of radical transparency. Everything is recorded and made available to everyone else in the company. Employees are very candid, brutally honest, even with the CEO (Ray). He says a lot of people churn out in the first year or so, but those that get used to it love it and can't imagine working another way. His Ted Talk goes into quite a bit of detail about how it all works: [LINK] His book Principles lays out the foundation. Excerpt: [LINK] Videos: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17962735,"author":"cryptozeus","month":"2018-09","story_title":"A Template for Understanding How the Economic Machine Works (2011) [pdf]","text":"I find this very useful, every now and then i make it a point to watch his video to remind myself of the macro view on things [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21902621,"author":"nullspace","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Global Wave of Debt Is Largest, Fastest in 50 Years","text":"Just a +1 comment, but thanks for sharing this, it\u2019s very much worth reading, the foreword and overview is very much written in layman language. I might try and dig into the rest of material as well. For an even simpler but informative intro to debt cycles check out this video by Ray Dalio, it\u2019s the best layperson explanation of debt I\u2019ve ever seen: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7323855,"author":"icu","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What is really wrong with the US economy, really?","text":"There are several levels to what is wrong. I have dedicated the last 5 years to discovering what is going on so I will try my best to condense it down. In terms of a 'shorter' business cycle view (less than 10 year perspective) to what is wrong is that we are not in a recession but in a deleverage. We haven't had one of those since WW2 so most people don't know what it is and think it is a recession. A deleverage is a once in a 100 year massive transfer of wealth event. I have put resources on what a deleverage is at the end of this reply. The long term problem is that the Fed is a private bank. This means that the US Government and American citizens do not control the Fed. Forget the fa\u00e7ade that makes them look like a branch of Government, especially the whole Presidential appointment of the Fed Chairman. It is a private bank that gets to print money and sell it to the US Government that American citizens are forced to use. That means that the US Government and American citizens are slaves with no control over their future. Each dollar printed is a debt burden on the American people and a debasement of the current currency value. Essentially think of printing money as a way that the Fed transfers wealth from your pocket into theirs. Furthermore, I believe that the Fed manipulates the economic cycle to create wealth transfer events that they reap the benefits of. For further information look to the following: [VIDEO] [LINK] www.youtube.com/watch?v=mII9NZ8MMVM\u200e [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12421589,"author":"milcron","month":"2016-09","story_title":"How Fake Money Saved Brazil (2010)","text":"Anyone creates \"money\" every time they lend. Banks do a lot of lending, so they're definitely involved. But even opening a bar tab creates \"money\" (more accurately, \"credit\"). Here's a great video by famous investor Ray Dalio about this concept: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13245147,"author":"Jugurtha","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Principles","text":"What's interesting is that I've seen the link on HN titled \"Hedge Fund Is Building an Algorithmic Model From Its Employees\u2019 Brains\", but I didn't click on it. I found it a bit silly that the WSJ doesn't name the hedge fund in question.. It's like seeing a link on Hacker News that says \"This company is redesigning its architecture\", and the company is Facebook. Just say \"Facebook is redesigning its architecture\". I shared the video about \"How the Economic Machine Works\" (narrated by Dalio) on Facebook yesterday.. Here's the video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16747290,"author":"dannygarcia","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?","text":"It's kind of crazy that, at least in the US, personal finance is not taught so much in grade school. I had to do a lot of reading and research now in my late twenties to figure out the best way to manage the RSUs I get at work and how to plan for a home purchase and retirement. It turns out (surprise) that most financial institutions don't have regular investors' best interest in mind. Instead, they see us as customers with value to siphon out over long periods of time. Understanding how economies work[1], how financial service companies sell products, theories behind volatility and market forces, and how simple portfolio management can be goes a long way to improving an individuals ability to efficiently self-manage their finances. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26852276,"author":"bob33212","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Nassim Taleb: Bitcoin failed as a currency and became a speculative ponzi scheme","text":"Historically, there have been a wide range of items used in barter and markets. [LINK] . Some of those like livestock depreciated in value very quickly since they literally had a lifespan. Others, like rare coins have gone up in value. In the context of Bitcoin we are talking about the modern world. The major forces in the modern world are Globalization and Technology. Assuming you don't want China to take over the world you need growth. Growth happens when investment and debts are created. Ray Dalio explains it well. [VIDEO] This is why successful countries like the USA target 2-3% inflation. It is theoretically possible to create a country where inflation was -1%, but technological growth, which is very hard to stop would create a deflationary spiral that would bring the economy to a halt.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29524095,"author":"grech","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Long-form info-dense videos on YouTube you would recommend to anyone?","text":"How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio comes to mind. It's 31 minutes long and provides a great high-level overview of basic economic principles. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29855787,"author":"luckyluke88","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Are We in a Bubble?","text":"I found this 30 min summary by Ray Dalio really helpful. He breaks down how an economy works in a clear and concise way. Stupid simple like me. :) [VIDEO] I also found this recent interview with him had a number of interesting angles on the state of things in the US/world as a whole. [LINK] Would definitely love to hear counter points to these to continue improving my thinking.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31953656,"author":"EGreg","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards","text":"Half in 30 years? That\u2019s pretty good! Ethereum fell by that much in a couple weeks. On the way up in a bull market it\u2019s all roses, but in a bear market, these things can crash hard. Money losing value gradually \u2014 Demurrage \u2014 makes people actually spend money rather than hoard it. If you want the money to earn interest, you will have to take some risk. Invest in some assets. Usually, stocks or real estate or (finally thanks to the JOBS act) new startups. I don\u2019t know why people have \u201cfat bank accounts\u201d. Money isn\u2019t meant to be stored. That\u2019s a racket by the banks, along with the idea that you have to buy a home instead of renting. If you can rent and buy other assets that you understand better than real estate, then do that. This is not magic .. money has to come from somewhere. It usually comes from banks themselves \u2014 who lend it to people and businesses who believe that they can pay back MORE money ! The only way everyone can pay back more money than is in existence is if the money supply is increased in the meantime. So inflation happens. The only alternative is having lots of people default and restructure their loans to owe less. This is what Ray Dalio says can be \u201ca beautiful deleveraging\u201d. I don\u2019t buy it\u2026 Learn how it all works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32267236,"author":"ramoz","month":"2022-07","story_title":"US Gross Domestic Product, Second Quarter 2022 (Advance Estimate)","text":"Whenever I want to try and understand what may be happening in the economy, I rewatch[1] Ray Dalio\u2019s 2013 video on how the economic machine works. Bits about a \u201crecession\u201d come up around the 12-18min mark with relevant info beyond. That said, I don\u2019t know enough to map/equate these simple types of economic explanation with current actual state. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32330160,"author":"dijit","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Y Combinator narrows current cohort size by 40%, citing downturn and funding","text":"That\u2019s the gist of capitalism and why we have boom and bust cycles (in the short and long). Ray Dalios series on the topic of capitalism being funded by debt is quite approachable. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35260035,"author":"optiomal_isgood","month":"2023-03","story_title":"America\u2019s banks are missing hundreds of billions of dollars","text":"It does not cover everything you asked for, but Ray Dalio has a excellent 30 min. video that explains ELI5 how the economy works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37957989,"author":"brad0","month":"2023-10","story_title":"10-year Treasury yield rises to 5%, highest level for the key rate in 16 years","text":"Austerity, taxing the rich, restructure debt, printing money. This video by Ray Dalio explains it much better than I ever could: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42853150,"author":"danielmarkbruce","month":"2025-01","story_title":"No one is disrupting banks \u2013\u00a0at least not the big ones","text":"Continue down the chain on your house example. Imagine in each case instead of transferring money in bank accounts, people do the work on credit. Add up all the credit at the end of the chain. Then go back and add up all the bank account balances in the \"pay with money transfer\". It'll be the same (except for the fraction). Now, go look at a bunch of public company balance sheets - you'll see payables and receivables all the way down from mining companies to retailers. One long chain of credit. They could have all borrowed money from banks instead and have zero trade receivables throughout the entire chain. The point of \"money creation\" is to enable economic activity. Credit does the same thing. In fact, your \"money\" at the bank is just a receivable from the bank. Ray Dalio has a quarter decent explanation of it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48558396,"author":"rglover","month":"2026-06","story_title":"The Dead Economy Theory","text":"\"The economy\" is just the word we use for transacting between one another. Whether individuals, or businesses, or a combination. The economy as it exists in popular culture is just a tool to bludgeon people over the head into acceptance of their pre-determined role/rank in society (and softly \"nudge\" their decision making in the direction of submission to larger, more wealthy entities/individuals). It's a Girard-style scapegoat designed to be a target for all of the predictable vitriol and confusion of an unpredictable and unknowable future. The thing that helped me think less in terms of \"oh no the economy is bad, panic\" and more so in \"okay, what are you going to do about it\" was this [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PHiyQID7SBs":[{"hn_comment_id":33402061,"author":"irjustin","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Why is symmetry so important in particle physics?","text":"PBS Spacetime has a very good video[0] that helps visualize what's going on in the equation, recent too! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39987508,"author":"hughesjj","month":"2024-04","story_title":"The deconstructed Standard Model equation","text":"Yup. That said it seems like a quick blog post from 2016. There's been more comprehensive breakdowns since [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PIPjmmmh_os":[{"hn_comment_id":7993488,"author":"rdtsc","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Jamming XKeyScore","text":"Even if you don't like Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, he has a funny story related to this: [VIDEO] He talks about how he and his associates were dissidents and had meetings and they agreed on a protocol to talk gibberish at the end. Fake, military sounding code words and stuff. It was a fun thing to do. Years later they discovered the amount of head-aches and resource drain they caused on the secret police who tried in vain to discover the meaning in this nonsense, thinking that perhaps there was some serious stuff going on. That is why I hope one good thing comes out of it, and that is people might start taking cryptography slightly more seriously and they'll also start actively fighting back. This is one way and it is fun too. (for some strange value of \"fun\").","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8414901,"author":"TheSpiceIsLife","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Stop Australia's Data Retention Bill","text":"At this stage it has become apparent that opposing surveillance doesn't appear to be helping. It's pretty clear where this is headed, and it seems to me the only way out of it is through it and out the other side, whatever that might look like. My position on surveillance is now, and has been for a few months, what Slavoj \u017di\u017eek said: \"Yeah but I don't care if we are watched. Here I preach arrogance. So what, let the big 'other' watch me maybe he will learn something and be less stupid, you know, this is not my problem.\" If you haven't seen it this video[1] of Slavoj \u017di\u017eek and Paul Holdengr\u00e4ber on \"Surveillance and whistleblowers\" at the International Authors' Stage, published earlier this year, is quite entertaining. The quote above is at 35:54. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9201929,"author":"TheSpiceIsLife","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Reasons not to use Facebook","text":"As a complimentary perspective: For those who haven't seen it, I think Slavoj \u017di\u017eek and Paul Holdengr\u00e4ber on \"Surveillance and whistleblowers\" is worth a watch. The part about surveillance starts at 21:14 so this link will take you there [VIDEO] \u017di\u017eek: \"The most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom you don't even experience, as such. If some of you are feminists ... every good feminist will tell you the first step of feminism is just to realise your situation of oppression... We need something similar here. That's the first point. The second point ... I'm a little bit sceptic about this paranoia 'ooh we are totally controlled' and so on and so on, I think we shouldn't take this too seriously. And this doesn't make the situation any easier if anything it makes it more... it [paranoia] is justified, but we should be aware, again we go in to metaphorics again the NSA the Big Eye knows everything, again the mega-machinery is extremely stupid, they don't know what they know. Do you remember, this is a very superficial anecdote ... a guy in LA was Googling the ways to kill your wife something like that, a couple days afterward the FBI brutally entered his house arrested him blah blah blah. Why? Because Google reported this to FBI. But do you know what was the result, this guy was a was one of the you know all the [TV] series CIS / police investigation, we was simply writing a scenario and wanted to check you know, and you have this again and again or form China they told me a wonde","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12498001,"author":"RodericDay","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Google\u2019s become an obsessive stalker","text":"Slavoj Zizek had a great talk with a talk show host from the Netherlands precisely about this matter. [VIDEO] Fun watch imo. There's also another session between them two.","stance":"rec"}],"PJnJ8mK3Q3g":[{"hn_comment_id":28472400,"author":"09bjb","month":"2021-09","story_title":"California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren\u2019t recyclable","text":"Would it surprise you to hear that the plastics industry came up with that symbol in order to make it confusing to the layperson to differentiate between recyclables and single-use plastics? \"Source\" (not a primary source): [VIDEO] <-- which has some links to further reading/viewing and a few sources.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36875741,"author":"modo_mario","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Scientists Say Recycling Has Backfired Spectacularly","text":"A lot of things you'd think can be recycled actually can't be. This video gives a good overview about the reason this belief is so prevalent.: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36888144,"author":"andersrs","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Scientists Say Recycling Has Backfired Spectacularly","text":"> Why do we buy so much single-use packaging It's designed to be that way by the PR guys that created the plastic recycling logo. This video is under 10mins and features a lot of the PR adverts. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39405348,"author":"brikym","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals","text":"It makes a lot of sense. Corporations make more money the more junk they produce. If you have 10 minutes I recommend watching this video about how the lobby groups invented the whole idea of recycling plastic with the little numbered resin identification code that looks like a recycling symbol. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46613161,"author":"mngnt","month":"2026-01","story_title":"There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape","text":"This youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. \"Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PJy8vTu66tE":[{"hn_comment_id":39711903,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2024-03","story_title":"CA train project needs another $100B to complete route from San Fran to LA","text":"I've spent large amounts of time in other countries. America is an absolute embarrassment. There are countries you can go where it feels like the government actually cares about trying to help people have a better life. There are countries where infrastructure projects get completed. There are countries where infrastructure isn't just completed, it's good . There are countries where the administrative overhead of health care is 2% instead of (a likely underestimated) 25%. You can't fix infrastructure policy, or any other policy, in America without first fixing campaign finance reform. As long as senators and justices can be openly bought and sold there is no hope of getting responsible leadership that acts in the interests of citizens. Very good video explaining the core issue of American politics by Harvard Law professor and founder of creative commons Lawrence Lessig-- Our democracy no longer represents the people : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14669614,"author":"ak39","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Once a Model City, Hong Kong Is in Trouble","text":"The problem is that what we understand as theoretical democracy and what is generally practically applied on the ground are two philosophically different things. An anti-thesis of democracy itself. Prof Lawrence Lessig of Harvard nails it when he calls this type of corruption of democracy as Tweedism. Here's a quick summary of his thesis (2015): [VIDEO] Here's a longer, more academic, version (2014): [LINK] Both talks begin with the Hong Kong student protests of 2014.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15375023,"author":"lambertsimnel","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Wozniak and Copps: Ending net neutrality will end the Internet as we know it","text":"Larry Lessig backs both net neutrality and democracy. See his plan for restoring democracy to the United States: [VIDEO] The main points are: 1) Citizen funded campaigns 2) Equal representation (ie, Proportional Representation) 3) Equal freedom to vote","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19097008,"author":"equalarrow","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Netflix Posted Biggest-Ever Profit in 2018 and Paid $0 in Income Taxes","text":"Won\u2019t matter. \u2018They\u2019 donate to both sides of the isle. Lessig has a good video that breaks a lot of this process down. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32267568,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2022-07","story_title":"House Democrats to propose ban on lawmaker stock trading \u2013 report","text":"Lawrence Lessig (Harvard law professor famous for fighting for sane copyright law) does a great presentation on the root cause of Americas problems. He also ran for president in 2016. It can be watched here: [VIDEO] The short version is that to win primaries you need money. Money mainly comes from corporations and rich people. Taking money from corporations and rich people creates a relationship where you have some loyalty to them or they can punish you if you don't act how they want. Thus the primary corrupting force in America is pro-corruption campaign finance laws. The test for democracy is whether elected politicians pass legislation that the public at large wishes to be passed. Our very own Princeton did a study to answer this question. The key finding: \u201cThe preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.\u201d[1] In a very real, non hyperbolic sense we are in a plutocracy where money rules. We are not a democracy due chiefly to our campaign finance laws. Here is a campaign that aims to work on this: [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"PLyEO0jNt6M":[{"hn_comment_id":34692452,"author":"simonh","month":"2023-02","story_title":"As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)","text":"See for yourself. This is the most clear case of misidentification. All the data you need is shown in the instrument recording and he takes us through how to interpret it step by step. Of course Mick has the advantage of having plenty of time to work through exactly what all the instrument readings are telling us and perform all the trigonometry to interpret it accurately, and explain it to us step by step, while the pilots just eyeballed it and got their estimates wrong. On the other hand the Pentagon analysts had all the time they could want to do the same analysis and still got it wrong. But you don't need to take anyone's word for it, look at the footage yourself and you can do all the calculations independently with middle school geometry. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21034054,"author":"jonathankoren","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Tom Delonge\u2019s UFO Research Center Is Making Politicians Demand Answers","text":"This is the video. I don\u2019t know why you\u2019re dismissive. It\u2019s literally just trigonometry using numbers displayed in the video itself. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23008011,"author":"catalogia","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Pentagon officially releases UFO videos [video]","text":"Have you watched his debunking of the \"Go Fast\" video? ( [VIDEO] ) I don't see any wiggle room around what he lays out, certainly not enough to warrant putting 'debunk' into \"scarequotes\". The object simply was not 'going fast'; it was a weather balloon sized object moving at weather balloon speeds that only looks like it's going fast due to parallax. The only question in my mind is whether the USN is filled with fools who couldn't figure out what he figured out, or whether they're deliberately fucking with us. I'm strongly inclined to think it's the later.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23059557,"author":"CydeWeys","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The US Navy Admits UFO Videos Are Real","text":"Yes, here's an in-depth explanation by someone who actually did the math: [VIDEO] Tl;dr it can simply be explained as a balloon drifting in the wind.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23065985,"author":"acqq","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Japan to Draw Up UFO Encounter Protocols After U.S. Footage","text":"That's only the reminder in the sense of \"I've made other videos before about that\" of Mick West. The relevant playlist of Mick West with many videos with detailed analysis is: [LINK] For example [LINK] Explains how the camera's automatic tracking system contributes to the appearance of movements which aren't real at all. Or: [VIDEO] how the appearance of the \"fast movement\" is actually due to the plane speed, not the speed of the object observed, which is almost certainly something simple like a weather balloon ...and much more details there.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34746882,"author":"herbstein","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Pentagon Downed Object over Alaska, Officials Say","text":"> Doesn't explain the Tic Tac videos He covers the \"Tic-Tac\" and \"Go Fast\" videos too, just not in that specific video. Like in this one, where he explains how the \"Go Fast\" video isn't actually even a fast video zipping just above the water, but rather an object flying at roughly wind-speed at about 12000 feet. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PNbkv_DJ0f0":[{"hn_comment_id":43233786,"author":"prophesi","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Speedrunners are vulnerability researchers, they just don't know it yet","text":"I think if they're active in the speedrunning community, then they're already well aware of this! And for a fun additional example to add to this article, you can often find TAS'ers talking about arbitrary code execution. The legendary GDQ run of TASBot's alternate ending to OoT[0] utiziling an ACE exploit they found in that game absolutely blew me away. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45428627,"author":"andrekandre","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Bad Apple but it's played inside Super Mario Bros","text":"they are most likely using a controller hooked up to a bot/laptop that exploits flaws in the code with inputs at high speed (much faster than a human could) that injects code into live games a good video that makes this tech more understandable (with explanations at the beginnimg and an amazing demo at the end) [VIDEO] and some background [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"PQccNdwm8Tw":[{"hn_comment_id":32503800,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Jonathan Blow: Software Is in Decline","text":"I quite like Jonathan Blow. I think this talk is kind of poor though, I remember watching it a couple of years ago in its full context (linked in the youtube description: [LINK] ). IIRC it had a bit of a \"kids these days\" / \"they don't make 'em like they used to\" feel to it. It's not untrue , but it doesn't really explain anything. IMO, a MUCH BETTER version of a similar point was outlined by Bert Hubert in this article: [LINK] - How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents (Video version: [VIDEO] ) In short, this goes beyond software; it's in general about why the incentives around specialization and outsourcing/offshoring cause innovation and expertise to die out. Bert Hubert takes the example of toasters, but it's of course very generalizable: > The problem is that this is not just a toaster problem. This is a continental problem. All over Europe, this is happening simultaneously, where we\u2019re saying, look, we\u2019re not that much into actually building things anymore. > So we\u2019re just getting everyone else to build stuff for us. [...] We\u2019re just thinking about things and then telling some other people how to do their stuff. > In the end, you cannot survive if all you create is intellectual property.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32614778,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Jonathan Blow on Societal Collapse (2019)","text":"I quite like Jonathan Blow. I think the talk mentioned in this post is kind of poor though, I remember watching it a couple of years ago in its full context ( [LINK] ). IIRC it had a bit of a \"kids these days\" / \"they don't make 'em like they used to\" feel to it. It's not untrue, but it doesn't really explain anything. IMO, a MUCH BETTER version of a similar point was outlined by Bert Hubert in this article: [LINK] - How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents (Video version: [VIDEO] ) In short, this goes beyond software; it's in general about why the incentives around specialization and outsourcing/offshoring cause innovation and expertise to die out. Bert Hubert takes the example of toasters, but it's of course very generalizable: > The problem is that this is not just a toaster problem. This is a continental problem. All over Europe, this is happening simultaneously, where we\u2019re saying, look, we\u2019re not that much into actually building things anymore. > So we\u2019re just getting everyone else to build stuff for us. [...] We\u2019re just thinking about things and then telling some other people how to do their stuff. > In the end, you cannot survive if all you create is intellectual property.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40816191,"author":"textlapse","month":"2024-06","story_title":"US sanctions Boeing for sharing information about 737 MAX 9 investigation","text":"Probably a repost, but this excellent video talks about the problems with outsourcing everything (i.e. the L J Hart-Smith report) [VIDEO] - the report itself is fairly accessible and an eye-opener on what happens when you outsource all of your core competency. The only remaining thing is a weak 'systems integrator'. And the best part is the suppliers have more leverage and less compliance/liability than you do! Because nobody even knows their name.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32219908,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Is the world suffering from shallow knowledge?","text":"OP, you will likely be interested in this talk by Bert Hubert: How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents: On how companies lose deep knowledge and stop innovating [LINK] As a video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PQmSUHhP3ug":[{"hn_comment_id":45485218,"author":"lossolo","month":"2025-10","story_title":"BYD builds fastest car","text":"> Porsche 919 Hybrid EVO did it in 5:19 If anyone hasn't seen this, I highly recommend it, even if you're not a car fan. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48001804,"author":"TacticalCoder","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Porsche will contest Laguna Seca in historic colors of the Apple Computer livery","text":"Here's Porsche really at its best, on the Nurburgring's Nordschleiffe in 2018, which is arguably the most complicated and diverse track on the planet doing a cool 5m19s (in 2024 a Mercedes AMG GT One was a full 1min10s slower, for example): [VIDEO] Any car lover who doesn't know that vid can safely watch it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17891002,"author":"RaceWon","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Apple self-driving car in accident: California DMV filing","text":"I was going to post earlier that IMO the level they should be aiming at is that of a brilliant racer, otherwise who needs them. There was a vid on here recently of the Porsche 919 beating the lap record at the Ring, and one of the comments was \"I don't have the balls to drive that fast in a video game\" such is the skill level of humans at the wheel-a few to be sure, but still and all there it is. Here's the vid btw. And it is ridiculous... \" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19407593,"author":"RaceWon","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Formula 1: The secret aerodynamicist reveals design concepts","text":">I almost feel stupid but I never realized they take the corners THAT fast. Holy shit. Respect. That's insane. The camera angles Rarely do the cars justice in protraying their speed (though its gotten better). There's a great vid on HN with a Porsche 919 sportscar at the Nurbugring that portays the quick factor fairly realistically (you can quibble about the various diffrences between a Sportscar and an F1 car in terms of capabilities--both are other worldy quick, and fast). I like to post that vid when talk here turns to self-driving cars, but I digress; F1 pilots are simply amazing. The cars are too. \" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25974011,"author":"RaceWon","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Tesla's new steering yoke isn't retro, it's a safety risk","text":">> Anyway, big rigs have loose steering because they need precision at highway speeds. The opposite is actually true. Big rigs have loose steering so that the driver will Not jack knife the truck in a panic situation. A tighter steering rack is Much more precise. Street tires, and especially racing tires, work best (have the most grip) at very narrow slip angles. Here's a Wikipedia about the \"friction circle\" as racers call it. \" [LINK] \" Here's a Great video shot at the N\u00fcrburgring showing an astonishing lap record of the Porsche 919 Hybrid race car, precision personified... Enjoy! \" [VIDEO] \"","stance":"rec"}],"PSGEjv3Tqo0":[{"hn_comment_id":12861660,"author":"shkaboinka","month":"2016-11","story_title":"WebAssembly Stack Machine","text":"I believe that switching to a stack machine is short-sighted and a big mistake: The AST format could open up new possibilities for software, some of which are observable in Lispy languages like Scheme (I won't list them here). Instead, we're looking at locking the software world back into this 1960's model for another 50 years out of a misguided concern for optimization over power. It's like foregoing the arch because it's more work to craft, and instead coming up with a REALLY efficient way to fit square blocks together. Congratulations, we can build better pyramids, but will never grasp the concept of a cathedral. To really grasp my point, I BEG you all to watch the following two videos in full and think hard about what Alan Kay & Douglass Crockford have to say about new ideas, building complex structures, and leaving something better for the next generation: [LINK] [VIDEO] As Alan Kay states, what is simpler: something that's easier to process, but for which the software written on top of it is massive; or one that takes a bit more overhead, but allows for powerful new ways to model software and reduce complexity? I believe that an AST model is a major start in inventing \"the arch\" that's been missing in software, and with something that will proliferate the whole web ... how short-sighted it would be to give that up in favor of \"optimizing\" the old thing. Imagine if instead of JavaScript, the language of the web had been Java? Lambdas would not be mainstream; new ways of ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8719557,"author":"hrktb","month":"2014-12","story_title":"\u201cThis\u201d in JavaScript","text":"I don't think a project is \"wrong\" if it is working. Also these a just opinions, but I think it's counterproductive. I feel it's the same as class systems with inheritance and lots of OO properties implemented. It's not wrong, but it's so much overhead, so easy to shoot one's foot, for so few returns. And there's a class syntax coming to ES6, so I'm clearly in the minority. For a discussion on the \"this\" use, there is an interesting talk[0] by D.Crockford on the subject, at about 8 min in (but I'd watch the whole thing). I don't agree with everything he is advising, but I think he has pretty compelling arguments overall. There's a lot of things in js that are not necessary to write good code, and avoiding them can reduce a lot of the complexity IMO. Some people are OK with complexity and want expressivity, I'd prefer basic and predictable easily behaviours. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14917153,"author":"Yaggo","month":"2017-08","story_title":"\u2018This\u2019 in JavaScript","text":"It's possible to write javascript without `this`, a style preferred e.g. by Douglas Crockford, explained in the video below. [VIDEO] I've also started to write my code mostly without `this`, `class` or `new`, not looking back. Another related, highly recommend reading: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"PTUY16CkS-k":[{"hn_comment_id":2063542,"author":"tricky","month":"2011-01","story_title":"Visualization of stock market performance over time, adjusted for inflation","text":"For those of us who don't know - QE is Quantitative Easing which is nicely explained in this great xtranormal video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2317691,"author":"patrickk","month":"2011-03","story_title":"Why Gas Is So Expensive Today (Hint: It\u2019s Not Libya)","text":"Thanks for those. Another interesting video, if you haven't seen it already - Quantitative Easing explained: [VIDEO] \" Printing money is the last refuge of failed economic empires and banana republics and the Fed doesn't want to admit this is their only idea. \" Don't worry, it's (partially) tongue-in-cheek. \"In other words, we will see massive inflation, possible even hyper-inflation.\" Do governments ever learn? This is what happened in the Weimar Republic and is happening today in Zimbabwe. Where I live (Ireland), the government is trying to do option 1 and 2, without success so far. Austerity measures are hurting the economy short-term by dampening consumer confidence (fortunately, internal consumption isn't everything, as we are an extremely open economy and will pick up as exports grow.) They'd possibly be trying option 3, except the European Central Bank controls our currency and ECB rules state that a country can't run a deficit over 3% of GDP without incurring major penalties.","stance":"rec"}],"PUv66718DII":[{"hn_comment_id":7835383,"author":"bigsassy","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Introducing Swift","text":"Is this related to Bret Victor's stuff? My mind was blown when I saw this video 2 years ago, and I can't help but see similarities here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8106148,"author":"productionQA","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite talks [video] on software development?","text":"Probably not exactly what you need, but as far as inspiration is concerned, it doesn't get much better than this: [VIDEO] Check out Bret Victor's talks in general (worrydream.com). He is quite interesting.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16483447,"author":"rpeden","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"I think most here have already seen it, but I find that Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk[1] is one of the best I've seen. I re-watch it every so often to help prevent my thinking from falling into a rut. When developing software as a career, it's so easy to just fall into a pattern where you use the same tools and techniques over and over again. Watching this talk this talk inspires me to investigate alternate approaches to developing and delivering software. It's easy to think of software development as something that always need to involve code, and nothing but code. But watching this talk inspires me to go and try things like Node Red and Unreal Blueprints. In both cases, code is usually still involved, but they both offer a visual way of connecting components. I find it helpful to be able to visualize software this way so I can immediate understand how data flows through the application. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31784835,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?","text":"Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle is even better (albeit it isn't only a product pitch): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38840760,"author":"pedrovhb","month":"2024-01","story_title":"What I've learned about flow fields so far","text":"Nice! Playing around with the widget under the section \"Experimenting with lines\" I'm reminded of Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk [0] (an absolute must watch, if anyone hasn't yet). In particular, changing the smoothness reveals a sort of scaling effect that I'd probably never know about if not playing around with sliders and having it update in real time rather than setting individual values. Very interesting and beautiful! [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10644002,"author":"DanielRibeiro","month":"2015-11","story_title":"The Utopian UI Architect","text":"You may not consider him a genius. But Bret does have some pretty innovate ideas on Programming and Design (and more). Good examples: Inventing on Principle: [VIDEO] The Humane Representation of Thought: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19679563,"author":"bch","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Panic\u2019s Next Editor","text":"Nice, but I think I can raise you. That talk mostly seemed pretty predictable (though I incorrectly guessed gfx via sixels[0], not a(nother) terminal emulator). If your interest was piqued with that parent video though, prepare to have your mind blown with this[1], who\u2019s thesis maybe similar in the sense of \u201cstop _just_ simply working\u201d. Bernhardt seems to be saying don\u2019t be afraid to take time and think deeply and \u201cgo deep\u201d, while Victor is explicitly saying make it count by way of targeting with intention what\u2019s important to you. A sort of \u201cfight the good fight.\u201d [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23160478,"author":"gervwyk","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Are React-like UI frameworks a fad or a genuine step forward?","text":"Bringing two concepts closer, especially visually will result in a better developer experience - Thus merging html and js into a single file, component, class / object and sequential logic was really the turning point to build more complex web apps. This reminds me of the excellent talk by bret victor [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23255489,"author":"fossuser","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Why isn\u2019t visual programming a bigger thing?","text":"You\u2019d probably like Bret Victor\u2019s inventing on principle talk: [VIDEO] He demonstrates some good examples. I\u2019m not quite sure it\u2019s what you mean by visual, but it seems obviously valuable and tools that enabled some of what he shows would be really useful. I\u2019m not sure why we don\u2019t have these things - I think Alan Kay would say it\u2019s because we stopped doing real research to improve what our tools can be. We\u2019re just relying on old paradigms (I just watched this earlier today: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23725844,"author":"bhntr3","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?","text":"In terms of mind-expanding or intellectually stimulating, I find it's easier to get that from Youtube. I recommend: 3blue1brown for math ( [LINK] ) Everyday Astronaut if you are casually interested in rockets ( [LINK] ) Bret Victor ( [VIDEO] ) or Rich Hickey ( [LINK] ) for programming and design. Doing a full college course is such a time investment and it usually takes a few weeks to start proving the interesting stuff. I find it more fun to look to shorter content for inspiration. I might realize I don't understand the fundamentals of the topic and then seek out a way to study it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26070876,"author":"ryanmentor","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you generate higher-quality ideas?","text":"Time and Time and Space and Space are necessary for high quality creativity : [LINK] and working with solid principles, from first principles, is how you reach durable new understandings. IMO. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People has some great material about the use of principles in being personally creative. Inventing on Principle: [VIDEO] I serve as a creativity coach to builders, innovators, and founders. Sometimes what a thinker needs more than anything else is a BREAK to BATHE! and then... EUREKA! [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36798677,"author":"anon35","month":"2023-07","story_title":"MDN Playground","text":"Great to see. More generally: I feel like playgrounds are grossly underused in our industry. It's possible the issue is in the name -- it immediately connotes that whatever you're doing isn't real work, it's just a place to, well, \"play\". But really these kind of playgrounds are at least a cousin, if not a direct descendant, of the immediate feedback principle that underlies everything from a REPL to the kind of systems (Symbolics, etc) that allow you to edit running code. Their potential is beautifully illustrated in Brett Victor's famous 'Inventing on Principle' talk: [VIDEO] Three areas that I'd love to see playgrounds mature beyond teaching beginners CSS: 1) Integrated directly into developer documentation. You can see some of that in systems that are documenting services -- for example, the Google Sheets API documentation has a 'Try this Method' box that lets you post a request to the service on the same page that describes it, but what I really want is something like that when I'm reading the man page of a destructive disk command, or a complex database query, or a low-level C graphics library. That'll require a playground wired to something as big as a VM, maybe. 2) Integrated into textbooks: for the last couple years the astonishing posts from Bartosz Ciechanowski ([Sound]( [LINK] ), [Bicyle]( [LINK] )) have demonstrated just how much better a textbook could be if you could interactively play with the concepts you're reading about. Unlike dev docs, the thing you're in","stance":"rec"}],"PY9DcIMGxMs":[{"hn_comment_id":15029799,"author":"doubleshame","month":"2017-08","story_title":"'Body Brokers' Get Kickbacks to Lure People with Addictions to Bad Rehab","text":"This is my favourite addiction talk. Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong | Johann Hari [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14457466,"author":"DisposableMoi","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Ohio Sues 5 Major Drug Companies For 'Fueling Opioid Epidemic'","text":"I'm going to chip in here as I feel I'm qualified to do so as a recovering hard drug addict (clean almost a year). Addiction like most human conditions is complex, to debate this article it helps to have a clearer understanding of what causes addiction. I'm going to state my beliefs as truth, they are after all my truth. Addiction comes in many shapes, substance misuse, alcoholism, food addiction, porn addiction, consumerism and gambling to name some. They are not caused by the substance (or object etc) per se, i will paraphrase from a talk i will link to, if your grandma breaks her hip and is given medical quality opiates to relive her pain, she doesn't suddenly become a junkie. Addiction is borne from the inate human desire to form relationships. If we cannot form relationships with people (because we are socially isolated, homeless and have no one to turn to, have issues that no one else understands for example) some people will substitute those relationship with people for relationships with \"stuff\". You may recognise in yourself that you do this with technology. For some people the bonds they form are with more destructive thinks that $400 juice machines or the latest apple product, they are with substances that provide temporary feelings of acceptance but simultaneously corrode your very human-ness. It's not strictly correct to say that one drug leads to another; shit, disconnected lives lead to substance abuse (rich and famous people can be isolated too) it's also not ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28107019,"author":"dkersten","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Once an Addict, Always an Addict?","text":"Reminds me of this TED talk: [VIDEO] \"Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong\" , where he asserts that addiction isn't caused by the things we typically correlate with it. I was going to try to summarize, but I don't think I can do it justice. Its not long. > I think people drink and drug for a reason. We just mostly don't bother to try to figure out what the reason is for this specific person Absolutely. This is totally in line with what that guy says in the video too. One thing he says: \"The opposite of addiction is connection.\" I know that personally, when I have problems that I struggle with and don't feel like anyone in my life can help me with or talk to about them (sadly has happened once or twice in my life), I have a tendency to binge, with anything that provides a brief escape, be it alcohol, drugs, video games, TV series', chocolate. Of course, its never been too bad, severe or long lasting for me, so it hasn't been too much of a problem and I wouldn't claim it comes close to what an alcoholic or heroin addict goes through, but I can at least see how someone might slip into such things, as a distraction from reality. And its usually coupled with a feeling of isolation and loneliness, feeling like you're alone with problems you don't know how to solve. So you hide from them instead. That's the impression I got after thinking about my past situations at least.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28183399,"author":"jbuhbjlnjbn","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Why Everything We Thought About Drugs Was Wrong","text":"There are much more plausible explanations, like the one Johann Hari gives: [VIDEO] or in plenty more detail, in his book on the topic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44156631,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Gabon longs to cash in on sacred hallucinogenic remedy","text":"If you are open to questioning the \u201cjunkies\u201d and their \u201cchoice to be so\u201d stereotype, you may find this TED talk useful. [VIDEO] Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong | Johann Hari","stance":"rec"}],"PYylPRX6z4Q":[{"hn_comment_id":21855733,"author":"sillysaurusx","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward","text":"I would highly recommend [VIDEO] as a way of framing the problem. It seems like our options for ML are currently: self-play, dataset fitting, or human feedback. It's possible to solve any problem that can fit into one of those molds. (Unfortunately the opposite is true: if a problem doesn't fit into those categories, it seems very hard to solve with any form of ML.) But, now that I think about it a bit more, the sentence \"use a trained net as a tool for building a controller with known continuity properties\" seems neither obvious nor straightforward to do. I'm decently well-versed in AI techniques at this point, and I can't really think how I'd sit down and write a program that would generate such a system. Anyone have any leads? Basically, the goal is to make a neural net that helps you design a system that can be predictable. One way would be to write a loss function that penalizes unpredictability, and then let it run until it converges on a predictable control system. But that's a bit like saying \"Just draw an owl.\" Not so easy to think of the actual code to do that.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36862414,"author":"cubefox","month":"2023-07","story_title":"What We Know About LLMs (A Primer)","text":"Specifically about RLHF, I find this video by Rob Miles still the best presentation of the ingenious original 2017(!) paper: [VIDEO] RLHF is actually older than GPT-1, which came out in 2018. It didn't get applied to language models until 2022 with InstructGPT, an approach which combined supervised instruction fine-tuning with RLHF.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23909468,"author":"afarrell","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I get out of the procrastination abyss?","text":"ADHDer here. Please steal some of the motivation-techniques I've learnt over the years: 1. Find a friend who is a software engineer or data analyst and cares about you as a person. Talk about this with them. Humans evolved being able to talk things over with their aunt or best friend. When you are perplexed by something, a rubber duck probably won't cut it -- you should talk with a human. 2. Make sure you're taking care of your body and brain: exercise, good food, good sleep (this is easier if you're getting exercise), meditation, etc. 3. Understand what your \"reward model\" is. Under what conditions do you recognize \"Aha! I've made progress!\"? To really understand what I'm getting at here, watch this video: [VIDEO] 4. Find internal things to strengthen your reward model's signals. Go back to when you originally started learning ML and Re-connect to your \"Why\". Do you still find those reasons compelling? If so, take some time to bring some vividness to your picture. -- Start With Why. 5. Find external punishments to remove. Now that you've spent 8 months working on it, you've noticed the things which are annoying you about your workflow. - After 8 months, it is totally healthy to take a week or two and improve your development environment to sand the edges off of things that give you friction. For a stranger's recommendation: [LINK] has made it dramatically easier for me to write little scripts that take away annoying tasks. - Maybe you feel like you've been \"in the weeds\" for","stance":"rec"}],"PZRI1IfStY0":[{"hn_comment_id":10561389,"author":"felipesabino","month":"2015-11","story_title":"0.30000000000000004","text":"Recommended: Floating Point Numbers - Computerphile [VIDEO] Tom Scott's fun and simple take on Floating Points is a good video explaining why such weird errors happen","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14633370,"author":"microwavecamera","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Why do programming languages suck at math?","text":"Short answer, no decimal in binary and math is hard. :) Here's a couple handy videos explaining it: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"PZbqAMEwtOE":[{"hn_comment_id":24454492,"author":"ceejayoz","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Revisiting the spectacular failure that was the Bill Gates deposition","text":"The NYT has an amazing video where they got actors to play out the transcript of one of these sorts of depositions. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29139584,"author":"wodenokoto","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Dealing with the Evasive Witness","text":"There is a similar story about an office worker not knowing what a photocopy machine is. The New York Times did an amazing reenactment from transcripts of the legal deposition [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43441972,"author":"philsnow","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Sync Engines Are the Future","text":"> Over time, the meaning of the word 'Xerox' changed. More specifically, it gained a new meaning. For a long time, Xerox only referred to a company named in 1961. Some time in the late 60s, it started to be used as a verb, and as I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, the word 'Xerox' was overwhelmingly used in its verb form. [VIDEO] I don't think this dramatization (of a court proceedings from 2010) is related to Xerox's plight with losing their trademark, but said dramatization is brilliant nonetheless","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45958360,"author":"vel0city","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Cities panic over having to release mass surveillance recordings","text":"I'm reminded of the case of a recorder's office in Ohio charging $2 per page for copies of public documents. NYTimes made a funny dramatization of a transcript from that case, pretty good. What Is a Photocopier? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"P_fHJIYENdI":[{"hn_comment_id":43076497,"author":"molf","month":"2025-02","story_title":"The lottery of the snakebite antivenom industry","text":"> The first snakebite antivenom was made in the mid-1890s and the method has changed little since: snakes are \u201cmilked\u201d for their venom, which is injected into horses or sheep and the antibodies that their immune systems then produce are extracted via the animals\u2019 blood. This is expensive, and many people develop allergies to the antibodies. A cool practical application of DeepMind's AlphaFold is that it allows one to \"design\" proteins because it is now possible to predict how they will fold. [0] This means it is possible to create synthetic protein antibodies that neutralise snake venom, specifically designed for humans [1]. There is a recent Veritasium video [2] that contains a great explanation. The whole video is worth a watch! [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49100055,"author":"AntonyGarand","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold","text":"To learn more about AlphaFold and its importance, I would recommend the Veritasium video[0]: AlphaFold - The Most Useful Thing AI Has Ever Done [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PaCmpygFfXo":[{"hn_comment_id":39224425,"author":"islewis","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Markov Chains are the Original Language Models","text":"I resource I found invaluable in demystifying LLM's was Andrej Karpathy's Youtube series. In particular, his \"Makemore\" video built a basic LLM in the same vein as OP's. It's long (2h), but well worth the time if anyone is curious about the technical workings of LLMs. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40015385,"author":"georgehill","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Show HN: Next-token prediction in JavaScript","text":"You've made something interesting. Many people have already answered this here [1], so there's no point in me explaining it again. Dropping some pointers that will be helpful for you: - [LINK] - Highly recommend this one [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK] 1: ex: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"PaKIZ7gJlRU":[{"hn_comment_id":16150872,"author":"rkowalick","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Antique BeOS Content by Scot Hacker (2011)","text":"Here is an excellent video of Linus talking about why he specifically chose the GPLv2 and how he felt betrayed when the FSF released GPLv3: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28470887,"author":"jraph","month":"2021-09","story_title":"60x speed-up of Linux \u201cperf\u201d","text":"Well, I don't think I agree with him and would licence GPL code with the \"or later\" clause, but he has a very reasonable and convincing argument against it. See this video of him explaining his take on GPLv3 and the \"or later\" clause at Deb Conf if you are interested: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Pae2AMnmUVA":[{"hn_comment_id":30426055,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2022-02","story_title":"I have no capslock and I must scream","text":"It's not founded on skin color you're right, but you're wrong about heritage. Obviously Not All French People Are Like That (I should hope so, as a French person myself). But the ones concerned will be MUCH pickier about people's grammar, spelling and pronunciation if they perceive them as not French. But yes, elitism is also present: If you're perceived as French and your french is bad, you will also be treated poorly. But it's a different kind of \"poorly\". In fact, Paul Taylor talks about that in his stand up \"Franglais\" (I HIGHLY recommend a watch, it's hilarious especially if you're familiar with both French and British/American culture, and it's available for free on Youtube: [VIDEO] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25784630,"author":"edumucelli","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Parisian Accent in 1912","text":"This is exactly the joke Paul Taylor (British living in France) tells in his standup show [1], which is super funny. I went to watch him live, what a great standup show. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PaypcVFPs48":[{"hn_comment_id":10040373,"author":"hwillis","month":"2015-08","story_title":"High precision air bearing CNC lathe and grinder [video]","text":"Part 10 [1] of his prototypes series also features incredibly impressive precision. He starts off with a $10 piece of aluminum that took maybe an hour or two to make, and is completely accurate down to nanometers. I worked in a nanotech lab with an electron microscope, and the idea that you could make a mechanical device that could accurately move a few pixels on my screen blew my mind. I thought I was hot shit with all my electrons and magnets... nope. Dan's flexure is so sensitive that radiative heat from his hand moves the end stage 100x more than mechanical input. You could move it by shining a laser pointer at it. Insane. The final part [2] is also very neat, and starts with a really remarkable demonstration of stiffness. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37887319,"author":"mikewarot","month":"2023-10","story_title":"","text":"I found Dan Gelbart's series about building prototypes [1] to be fascinating, and helpful. I was especially impressed with his video about flexures.[2] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PbC4gqZGPSY":[{"hn_comment_id":4855724,"author":"joeld42","month":"2012-11","story_title":"2D Game Art for Programmers","text":"This is actually a very common stumbling block. See the Ira Glass video.. [VIDEO] You learn how to differentiate between good and bad much faster than you learn how to create good. Which can be super discouraging because it means that at first all it feels like is that you just keep realizing how bad you are and how much further you have to go. Just keep practicing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5768248,"author":"cooop","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm an engineer, how do I learn design?","text":"A large aspect of design that separates great professional designers from amateurs is very hard to teach. It can be described as training your eye and developing your taste. This simply comes from repetition and practise. Ira Glass articulates this well describing the creative process \u2014 [VIDEO] Another aspect of design is the mindset and mentality required when looking to solve a problem. Something I feel often gets overlooked in the software world, where culture is generally engineer focused. IDEO pitch this in as 'design thinking'. While I'm not so keen on the term they do a good job of communicating the importance of certain mental traits that designers possess that are key to the design process. Sketch. Considering a user flow/feature or user story? Sketch out 50 ideas, explore and exhaust all possible scenarios, no matter how achievable, obvious or silly. Get it down on paper. I often think that getting the idea down on paper allows my mind to forget on it and move on to another potential solution. Try to not let your technical expertise constrain this exploration, that'll come later as you whittle your ideas down. Personally, if I have the time I quite like to produce hi-fidelity sketches. It may seem frivolous when a quick sharpie sketch will do, but as I spend time sketching I find the thinking time valuable and often find myself with another piece of paper jotting down notes/ideas etc. Learn to draw \u2014 I believe designers should sketch and draw. There are so many less","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8902316,"author":"tswartz","month":"2015-01","story_title":"What Doesn't Seem Like Work?","text":"Ira Glass has some advice on the issue of when you start something you enjoy, but your skill doesn't match your taste. Push through and keep practicing until your skill matches your taste. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PbmJkMhmrVI":[{"hn_comment_id":38489324,"author":"badosu","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Astronomers posit that we live in a giant void","text":"This is a dense video, I highly recommend it though: [VIDEO] TLDW: there's a lot of evidence on why the phenomena we watch is mostly favored to be described as 'something' that is conveniently called dark matter as opposed to a revision of gravity.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37895534,"author":"Pxtl","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Revisited mass of the Milky Way is much smaller than expectations from cosmology","text":"There's a good cosmology YouTuber who basically explains: dark matter is not a theory, it's a set of observations. Galaxies behave like there's a halo of invisible mass surrounding them, one that varies in density per-galaxy. The halos even perturb as expected in galaxy collisions. But nobody's got a coherent theory on what that halo is. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37895569,"author":"aeturnum","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Revisited mass of the Milky Way is much smaller than expectations from cosmology","text":"If you're interested in learning more I recommend you watch \"dark matter is not a theory\"[1]. We consistently, across many measures, observe the effect of substantially more mass than we expect using traditional understandings of dynamics. People have been aware of it, under different names, for about 90 years now. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40616398,"author":"PartiallyTyped","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Gravity Without Mass: UAH Study Proposes Alternative to Dark Matter","text":"IANAP (physicist) The only the matter portion of the universe is 85% dark matter (26.8% of mass-energy content of the universe). As for the question; I don't think it's right to assume that dark matter really is exotic matter. It's just a set of observations. It's something that behaves like matter (with respect to density scaling) but only seems to interact gravitationally. Some theories posit that it's some unknown particles, others that they are primordial black holes, and some that gravity just behaves differently (MOND). I really enjoyed Dr Angela's videos on Dark Matter [1,2] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41369781,"author":"bunderbunder","month":"2024-08","story_title":"The possibilities for dark matter have shrunk","text":"If you've got the time, these YouTube videos are a nice counterpoint to a lot of popular communication and discussion on dark matter: Dark matter is not a theory: [VIDEO] That dark matter video aged like milk: [LINK] the tl;dr is that \"dark matter\" is a bit of a misnomer. (But also a fun name so it's probably here to stay through sheer memetic momentum.) Dark matter is not actually a hypothesized kind of matter. Dark matter is just an unresolved discrepancy between theory and observation. I'll say that again: \"dark matter\" is not an attempt at explaining the discrepancy; dark matter is the discrepancy. There are some hypotheses that postulate some kind of as-yet-unobserved matter that could resolve the discrepancy, but these hypotheses are not the actual problem that we call \"dark matter\". And not all hypotheses postulate unobserved or exotic matter. Some of them suggest alternative physics, others suggest measurement error.","stance":"rec"}],"PdO3IP0Pro8":[{"hn_comment_id":21911132,"author":"HocusLocus","month":"2019-12","story_title":"How writing began, and other unexpectedly funny stories about cuneiform [video]","text":"I also recommend Thoth's Pill, an amazing historical overview of writing systems that breaks new ground in animated video production... as they are describing alphabet systems and letter figures they are drawn in real time and presented on a clear crisp background. Where most documentaries we've seen over the years show glimpses of photographs of ancient writing samples, often dimly lit or weathered and faded, tending to make it more about documents than language -- these folk are writing script and glyphs on computer, presenting detailed traces or brushing the characters and building alphabets, explaining down to the character/sound. For children this is precious. If I had seen something like this when I was young, it would have sucked me in and maybe changed the course of my life. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25753646,"author":"MrsPeaches","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Who Invented the Alphabet?","text":"Highly recommend Thoth\u2019s Pill [1] for a fun video on the subject. Goes deep but keeps it relatively light. Has the added bonus of going into Mesoamerican writing systems which are often underrepresented in these analyses. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35219302,"author":"29athrowaway","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Abecedarium","text":"If you like these topics, you will enjoy \"Thoth's pill - an Animated history of writing\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PezlFNTGWv4":[{"hn_comment_id":4289232,"author":"swang","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Accused Movie Killer James Holmes 'Refused to Program in an Object-Oriented Way'","text":"I want to share this video from Charlie Booker. [VIDEO] Basically at the end the forensic psychiatrist says that giving this intense superficial coverage about the gunman only encourages more copycat killers. I don't know what compelled me to click the link even after watching the video and telling myself to stop following more coverage, but that may be all the more reason why it needs to stop. I honestly don't care what his intentions are, and I think the biggest punishment to him would be if everyone just forgot his name and he be left to pass the rest of his life in jail sitting in relative obscurity.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6897029,"author":"chestnut-tree","month":"2013-12","story_title":"News is bad for you","text":"I'm from the UK and I'd go so far as to say the majority of the British press are toxic. They have an incredibly inflated view of themselves and they couldn't care less about what's in the public interest (just look at how they've responded to the recommendations of the Leveson Inquiry which investigated the repulsive ethics and culture of the British press). The UK press empahtically follow their own self-interests and agendas (and that includes broadsheets like The Guardian). There will always be individual reporters who rise above the abysmally low standard of reporting - but they are a tiny minority. TV news is better in my opinion - they at least aspire to some measure of impartiality. These clips from Charlie Brooker (British TV presenter) give a good sense of the formulaic way news is reported (strong language in the videos). [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36239411,"author":"chx","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Charlie Brooker Got ChatGPT to Write a Black Mirror Episode","text":"Charlie Brooker is fantastic: On how news is reported [LINK] On how mass shooting is reported and about the saturation [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PfYYraMgiBA":[{"hn_comment_id":22272391,"author":"davee5","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Board Games of the Ancient World","text":"Irving Finkel's lectures are marvelous. Watching his lecture on the decipherment of cuneiform is a delight, both in subject matter and in the delivery of a well worn and thoroughly polished presentation. (If only all professors were so articulate and passionate.) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35325863,"author":"photochemsyn","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Where Did Writing Come From?","text":"Cuneiform clay tablets have a survival advantage over other materials, so it's anyone's guess when the first well-defined symbolic representation of spoken language system was invented, it may have been lost to history entirely. Highly recommend Prof Irving Fink's talk to Royal Institution on the 3,000 year development of cuneiform, how it is read, and the story of its decipherment: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30754735,"author":"josefx","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Sumerian dog jokes, or the difficulty of translating dead languages","text":"Here[1] is a video covering how cuneiform (the writing system) was deciphered, most of it was solved after they found an inscription in three different languages. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31571198,"author":"photochemsyn","month":"2022-05","story_title":"A 3400-year-old city emerges from the Tigris River","text":"They found cuneiform tablets, that's pretty fascinating. There's a really good Royal Institution talk on cuneiform and how difficult it is to translate: Cracking Ancient Codes: Cuneiform Writing - with Irving Finkel [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41397159,"author":"photochemsyn","month":"2024-08","story_title":"The Imperial Origins of Big Data","text":"The earliest surviving written records - the clay tablets of ancient Mesopotamia - are mostly collections of data, taxation records and so on. It was something of a disappointment to scholars when cuneiform was deciphered that their materials didn't record many epic poems, but rather a whole lot of internal revenue information. It's a fascinating story, well told by Irving Finkel: [VIDEO] The vast majority of data being collection today is similarly uninteresting - maybe the surveillance state likes it as a means to control politicians by threatening to expose their porn watching habits or similar, and certainly targeted advertising has made some people wealthy, but it's not even well-curated, and it's certainly not the kind of valuable data that comes out of well-designed and controlled experiments, and thus 'big data science' is one of the most over-hyped fields in existence today.","stance":"rec"}],"PhhC_N6Bm_s":[{"hn_comment_id":23453056,"author":"jimwhite","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: I implemented the life I designed: perfect but I feel lost. What now?","text":"Thanks to your exceptional focus and determination you've arrived early at what is widely called Midlife Crisis. The aphorism your story brings to my mind is \"Don't just do something, sit there!\". Not sure what will help you but I highly recommend a 23 minute investment in David Foster Wallace's \"This is Water\": [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31440041,"author":"coip","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer","text":"As someone far younger than you, yet at times infinitely jaded, through what have >0% odds of being at least related circumstance: If you haven\u2019t come across DFWs This is Water, I\u2019d highly recommend you give it a sincere listen: [VIDEO] What is your goal? Have to make hay while the sun shines, if you perform so we\u2019ll see if you can find another opportunity to realize that gap you\u2019re in? If that\u2019s not fruitful, try and try again and at the end of the day, find resolve in knowing you\u2019re doing what you can and, while you have that going wrt opportunities, give your thoughts and time to things around you that do inspire you and provide some degree of fulfillment. As someone in the field as a moderately tenured, and currently unemployed, \u201csoftware engineer\u201d: it is hard to unplug but god is it so necessary for being present and being able to see what else is going on you can nurture&enjoy. I\u2019m a bit scared, given the macro picture rn, about being unemployed. But, at the end of the day, we are all in this ocean of chaos with 86400 seconds to allocate everyday however we choose. Bit of a lengthy rant, but feels good to capture some thoughts I\u2019ve been having honestly, and hope you are most excellent!!! At least it\u2019s almost the weekend haha.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18492840,"author":"_Microft","month":"2018-11","story_title":"A Brand New Interview with David Foster Wallace","text":"Nobody has mentioned \"This is water\" from a commencement speech [1] at a college yet, so let me do that. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18644042,"author":"hprotagonist","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Why Aren\u2019t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?","text":"I\u2019m immediately reminded of the denouement of \u201cThis is Water\u201d: [VIDEO] . It\u2019s become/ perhaps always has been a little trite or on the nose, but it\u2019s also not wrong. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clich\u00e9s, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel o","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31448732,"author":"JeremyNT","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Thoughts on being \u201cboring\u201d","text":"There's a truism: life is what you make of it. The longer version, which might get you thinking a little more than the aphorism, is in the famous graduation speech by David Foster Wallace: \"This is Water\" [0] (you can also read a transcript [1]). [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Pi7l8mMjYVE":[{"hn_comment_id":24242545,"author":"acidbaseextract","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better","text":"Steve Brunton, a University of Washington professor has a sweet lecture series called the Control Bootcamp that dives deep into control fundamentals while still being approachable. Great production values too: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31691352,"author":"lagrange77","month":"2022-06","story_title":"You need to know what right-half-plane zeros are","text":"Not a book, but this series on Youtube is excellent. [VIDEO] > familiar with Nyquist-Shannon's theorem BTW: In control theory there is also [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35538322,"author":"RugnirViking","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?","text":"Big fan of steve brunton's control bootcamp series. Helped me through my control systems courses greatly [VIDEO] Great for robotics, or anything where you need to control complex physical systems, from f1 cars to 3d characters in games","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29930095,"author":"cashsterling","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Introduction to Model Predictive Control","text":"I really like the Control System Bootcamp videos by Prof. Steve Brunton on youtube: [VIDEO] Good book's to accompany the videos are: - linear systems theory by Joao Hespanha (has some MATLAB code) - Linear state-space control systems by Willams and Lawrence (has some MATLAB code) - Control system design by Bernard Friedland (20 usd dover paperback available) - Data-Driven Science & Engineering by Steve Brunton (video guy above) and Kutz Some other interesting books: - Control system engineering: design and implementation using ARM Cortex-M Micro-controllers (some MATLAB and C code) - Linear Feedback Control: analysis and design with MATLAB by Xue, Chen and Atherton (MATLAB, obviously) ...a lot basic MATLAB control system functions are also available in Octave, Scilab, Python, and Julia packages","stance":"rec"}],"PlJkgQZb0VU":[{"hn_comment_id":12680145,"author":"Theodores","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Blitzted: The Third Reich as a Society on Drugs","text":"This was an excellent review of a book that has been given standard reviews elsewhere. I may be buying this book. The content reminds me of the documentary film 'Spin': * Using the 1992 presidential election as his springboard, Springer captures the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s. Pat Robertson banters about \"homos,\" Al Gore learns how to avoid abortion questions, George H. W. Bush talks to Larry King about Halcion\u2014all presuming they are off camera. Composed of 100% unauthorized satellite footage, Spin is a surreal expose of media-constructed reality.* Yep, H W Bush was on Halcion, not good!!! [LINK] A highly recommended film given the election season and on youtube too: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16735588,"author":"wu-ikkyu","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script","text":">I haven't seen evidence for it as the norm. You might like Spin , a 1995 documentary composed of unauthorized behind the scenes footage of the political maneuverings of newscasters and politicians. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Pld8wTa16Jk":[{"hn_comment_id":18001129,"author":"spiralganglion","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?","text":"\u2022 Vi Hart (Math) [LINK] \u2014 I'm amazed nobody else listed her. She's my favourite math channel on YouTube (even though 3Blue1Brown is more technically informative, I just love Vi Hart's sense of style). \u2022 Isaac Arthur (Space / Futurism / Speculative Science) \u2014 [LINK] \u2014 The graphics are pretty cheeseball, but the some of the topics he explores are fascinating. I recommend starting with [VIDEO] \u2022 Aerotwist (Frontend / JS) \u2014 [LINK] \u2014 Paul Lewis works (or used to work?) on the Chrome team, and is an alum of the (good) HTTP203 podcast \u2022 LunchBox Sessions (Industrial hydraulic systems) \u2014 [LINK] \u2014 The videos are just screencasts of schematic simulations, but the presenter (Carl) has a good level of enthusiasm. (Disclosure \u2014 I contributed to these videos as an editor / software dev.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18346207,"author":"yourapostasy","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Astronomers Creep Up to the Edge of the Milky Way\u2019s Black Hole","text":"This brings to my mind Isaac Arthur's lecture \"Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars\" [1]. He posits that a Kardashev Scale 3 civilization might use a galactic black hole to survive 10^100 entropic years of what he calls the \"Black Hole Epoch\". Hearing about this possible giant blob of plasma orbiting our galactic black hole makes me wonder if he and his team can come up with plausible explanations that the plasma is actually some construct of such a civilization, like perhaps a \"construction site generator\" as they're building their \"bunker against entropic time\" amongst the black hole. The really neat part of the lecture is towards the end, in his description of time winding down into thermodynamic equilibirum, a Boltzmann Brain fluctuating out of the equilibrium's randomness, and restarting the universe with another Big Bang. That's fascinatingly close to universe origin stories in Abrahamic religions, and echoes Hindu religious cosmological cyclicality. One aspect I didn't see touched upon is the possibility that our universe and we are simulations inside that Boltzmann Brain. And then there are the arguments that we do not want Boltzmann Brains [2]. Now if only the religious adherents in all our nations duking it out against other humans for not having the \"right\" religion could turn their cognitive surplus (poured into their religion) outwards to helping illuminate more upon these near-metaphysical physics challenges, we might actually get somewhere. After all, o","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21182040,"author":"yourapostasy","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded","text":"My go-to entry point for exploring those kinds of questions was Isaac Arthur. He goes into the Kardashev scale [1], dying Earth [2], dying stars [3], farming black holes [4], and going past iron stars [5]. A Boltzmann Brain's description bears remarkable similarity to the Judeo-Christian concept of God before time begins, and has been fertile ground for ruminations [6], though none with any verifiable claims backing them in our current knowledge of physics [7]. Now if we could only restructure our implementation of capitalism to be pinned to advancements towards resolving physics questions to survive those kinds of timescales and challenges instead of locked down to a single planet's worth of baryonic matter and cognitive capacity... [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [VIDEO] [6] [LINK] [7] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23212988,"author":"cletus","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Timeline of the Far Future","text":"Mandatory Isaar Arthur links: - Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars [1] - Civilizations at the End of Time: Black Hole Farming [2] - Boltzman Brains and the Anthropic Principle [3] [4] [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30669915,"author":"yreg","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Red Dwarfs Will Be Humanity\u2019s Last Home Before the Universe Dies","text":"Isaac Arthur explores ideas like these in his videos / podcasts, I enjoy listening to it. Actually he has a whole series on Civilizations at the End of Time.[0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Pm8P4oCIY3g":[{"hn_comment_id":19322101,"author":"kakwa_","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Warren Buffett Joins the Crowd Struggling to Understand Oracle","text":"Just yesterday I came across one of his other videos, and I guess Bryan Cantrill still as a bit of grudge against Oracle: Light ranting: [VIDEO] A bit heavier ranting (with the fallout after his usenix ranting): [VIDEO] Selected quote: \"Any explanation of Oracle that doesn't end with a nazi allegory does not fully explain Oracle\" Bryan Cantrill is really fun to listen to, is a tech veteran now, and is still as passionate and energetic as he was the first day (Another interesting video about programming languages he experienced during his (long by tech standards) career: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37083199,"author":"geerlingguy","month":"2023-08","story_title":"CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association","text":"Bryan Cantrill had an insightful talk \"Corporate Open Source Anti-Patterns\" surrounding events from 8-12 years ago, and all I'll say is history definitely echoes sometimes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PmTUW-owa2w":[{"hn_comment_id":10635532,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Things the media does to manufacture outrage","text":"TL;DR - just watch [4] The internet has a serious problem with fame . Before the internet, fame was usually something that required an investment in media access . Everybody knows about the big Hollywood movie because they paid for a lot of advertising/etc. A low-budget film could potentially be more popular if people knew about it, but the meager (or nonexistent) advertising budget usually guaranteed it would never[1] become famous . This is what the internet changed. It's fundamental power is that anybody can publish because the network doesn't differentiate between \"publishing\" hosts and \"consumer\" hosts. All peers are supposed[2] to be equal in capability. The internet is media access. What used to require significant investment of time and/or money now happens to people regularly when they post something casually on the internet: they can become famous . Unfortunately, our social norms are still adapting to this change. As this article shows, trivial posts are incorrectly interpreted and the author ends up wading through flames and insults. This is because what started as a casual post is now addressing an audience . For a very good explanation of this type of change-in-relationship, I suggest watching \"This is Phil Fish\"[4]. As this is HN, many of you probably know the drama involving Phil Fish and his game \"Fez\", but tht doesn't matter because this video is about everybody who is not Phil Fish: the audience that supplies the projection, tokenism, and hatred that fuels ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11838441,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Curbs on free speech are growing tighter. It is time to speak out","text":"> if a person has any level of social media presence and they're either outspoken or unlucky then they risk an internet mob being turned against them. One of the most important properties of the internet is that the internet is media access. The concept of \"fame\" used to be something you bought into . Now, fame happens to you . You may be writing for the group of peers that you informally \"hang out\" with, but they can spontaneously transform into \"an audience\" that has (sometimes inconsistent) expectations. We're used top fame being something you can walk away from. If you bought into it, you can always go back to your \"normal life\". The rockstar can give up the record deals and do something else with their life. The problem with the new situation is that their \"normal life\" is the source of fame. To walk away from fame now requires people to walk away from their normal life . I don't know what the solution is - perhaps some new sort of 'etiquette' is needed - but a very good analysis of the problem is the video essay \"This Is Phil Fish\"[1]. May HN readers will recognize that name as the author of \"Fez\", but as the essay mentions at the beginning, \"This is about everybody in the world who isn't Phil Fish\". I encourage everyone to watch [1], so we at lest have a clear understanding of the problem. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13968606,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber","text":"The internet has changed the nature of \"fame\". In the past, you needed to generally buy into fame. To be famous, you needed managers, publicists, etc. Media access was a limited resource that was handed out only to those that met approval. This created in the audience certain expectations about what it means to be famous. Don't treat the audience wrong or do anything too far outside those expectations or face the audience's wrath. The internet changed what it means to be \"famous\" because the internet is media access . Unfortunately, the sociology of the audience hasn't caught up and often still apply the old expectations. In the past, it was possible to walk away from fame because it wasn't your normal life . Being famous was a job you could (usually) leave. However, a lot of people that have become famous through the internet cannot leave. It was their normal life that became famous. Tight coupling between fame and personal life causes or amplifies a lot of these problems. For a much better explanation, I highly recommend watching Innuendo Studios' video essay \"This is Phil Fish\"[1]. In spite of the name, it isn't really about Phil Fish. It's about everybody who isn't Phil Fish and how they (miss-)handle internet celebrity. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22076402,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2020-01","story_title":"A Sad Day for Rust","text":"> there\u2019s this style of response This type of reprehensible response will keep happening until society finally learns how the internet fundamentally changed the nature of fame . The best explanation of the problem is the video \"This Is Phil Fish\"[1] by Innuendo Studios. If you haven't seen it, please watch it. It's not about Phil Fish; he is simply a useful example of how fame works on the internet. Please watch the video! The core problem is that fame used to be opt-in . Becoming famous required infrastructure. Gaining access to that infrastructure required the permission various gatekeepers, time, and resources. You had to work to become famous, because media access was a scarce resource. On the internet fame became something that happens to you , because the internet IS media access. We're used to seeing fame as something that was chosen ; if you didn't want to be famous, you could walk away from the media infrastructure and go back to your \"normal life\". The famous band could quit touring. Now that everyone has media access, that \"normal life\" can become famous directly. When that happens, walking away from fame means walking away from your normal life . [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30099400,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Naomi Wu video demonetized on YouTube","text":"While some people certainly seem to subscribe to \"feeling their masculinity/world-view is threatened\" interpretation, the fundamental problem that q lot of people don't seem to understand is that the internet changed the mechanics of fame . The best explanation I've seen - and possibly the most important video on youtube - is \"This Is Phil Fish\"[1] by Innuendo Studios. It's not really about Phil Fish; it's about everyone who isn't Phil Fish acted when they decided he became \"famous\". In the past, being \"on tv\" or \"in a band\" or other traditional examples of fame required some amount of buying into fame. Becoming famous required media access that was controlled by gatekeepers. You had to work with those gatekeepers if you wanted to be \"on tv\" or whatever, and because you had to choose to participate, people often see the decision to become famous as also accepting some amount of responsibility to \"act like famous people are supposed to act\". This internet fundamentally changed the mechanics of fame, because the internet IS media access . Now it is possible to become famous - to become a \"celebrity\" with a \"responsibility\" to act in a certain way - simply by being yourself in your normal everyday life. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8416074,"author":"ZeroGravitas","month":"2014-10","story_title":"\"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this\"","text":"This reminded me of the \"This is Phil Fish: A case study in internet celebrity\" video: [VIDEO] Phil Fish is an indie game developer, internet-famous for the game Fez. And \"everybody\" hates him. Though as the video explains, it's more complicated than that. The video is notably also as being referenced by Notch (creator of Minecraft) as part of the reason why he decided to go into semi-retirement after the sale of Mojang.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15177087,"author":"dcolgan","month":"2017-09","story_title":"No Man\u2019s Sky One Year Later","text":"As a former amateur Twitch.tv streamer, I've always been fascinated by the rise and fall of internet personalities, and some of the biggest personalities seem to be game developers that found themselves in the spotlight. Someone made this very in-depth video about the fall from grace of Phil Fish, the creator of Fez: [VIDEO] It seems to me that the combo of high pressure and a guy with a combative personality combined with internet anonymity to create a really messy situation that drove him out of the business. I've also followed Narscissa (formerly Cosmo) Wright's fallout in the speedrun community after coming out as transgender. Once one of the most popular streamers on Twitch, I'd imagine transitioning is hard enough, but transitioning in front of a studio audience of anonymous gamers would be next level. And so the same seems to be with Sean Murray and No Man's Sky. Inexperience plus overpromising and really high expectations created the current situation. I don't think any of these people are malicious and I don't really know how I would have advised them to do things differently. Edmund McMillen, the creator of Super Meat Boy and other indie games once said in a podcast interview that he hates showing people what he's making before it is done for this very reason. Edit: I know the circumstances of these people are not identical, I'm just calling for more understanding and empathy instead of assuming the worst in everyone.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17535890,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Unidentified Plane-Bae Woman\u2019s Statement Confirms the Worst","text":"Fame used to be something you had to ask for, because being famous required access to limited infrastructure. Media access was scarce , and so you had to work to be noticed by the gatekeepers of that infrastructure. Digital communication an internetworking fundamentally changed that; the cost to publish dropped to approximately zero. Basic media access is de facto no longer scarce. You no longer need to appeal to a gatekeeper when you can e.g. post a tweet for free. This means it it now possible to accidentally reach a much larger audience than the most of the pre-internet media. Fame is now something that can happen to you. Worse, the traditional idea of fame was something you could walk away form. You simply quit participating; being some type of celebrity was a job that required maintenance. When you become accidentally famous on Twitter/etc it is often your normal life that happened to become famous. Walking away form that means walking away from your normal life. For a very good explanation of this topic, I recommend this[1] video. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22294163,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Where\u2019s _why? (2012)","text":"This type of problematic parasocial relationship is amplified by the internet, because the internet changed the mechanics of fame . In the past, becoming famous required infrastructure . Media access was scarce; you had to actively work with various gatekeepers if you wanted the opportunity to become famous. This often required putting on the mask the audience wanted to see. Removing the mask and retreating back to your \"normal life\" was easy: without regular upkeep, access to the media infrastructure moved to someone else. On the internet, anybody can become famous at any time, because the internet is media access . People now become famous without the mask that differentiated their famous persona from their normal life. Giving up fame now requires giving up the part of your normal life that made you famous. For a much better explanation, see this[1] short video essay. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42692281,"author":"latexr","month":"2025-01","story_title":"I deleted my social media accounts","text":"That video is part of a larger series on Gamergate. If you liked that one, it\u2019s worth it to see everything. [LINK] I also recommend these two earlier videos, on unrelated matters. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45760398,"author":"beeflet","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition","text":"I have been following him, and I think a lot of the claims about him have been exaggerated. He stopped being so edgy on twitter after watching the \"this is phil fish\" video. It is an interesting watch and applicable to notch. [VIDEO] He is developing a new voxel-like game called \"levers and chests\", and before that he has shown us a few cool webgl demos I find interesting. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"PmlRbfSavbI":[{"hn_comment_id":36717557,"author":"lnwlebjel","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What YouTube channels do you watch with your kids?","text":"Mark Rober has many great and some good science and engineering videos that my kids love: [LINK] He get's my vote for the current best communicator of science, on par at times with Carl Sagan. This video explains neural nets/machine learning and had my kids riveted: [VIDEO] We've gone down some deep lego rabbit holes, such as the great ball contraption: [LINK] These are pretty light but entertaining: [LINK] [LINK] The latter is a guy that builds fresh water aquariums. The fact that he can do this full time for a living (via YouTube) is one of the most amazing and unlikely results of the internet (IMO).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20845632,"author":"TOMDM","month":"2019-08","story_title":"On-Device, Real-Time Hand Tracking with MediaPipe","text":"I'm not sure if the complexity of the codes is significantly higher in the pro teams, but I found this video on baseball code decoding pretty fun. [VIDEO] Combined with this, it certainly seems like there's potential for a fully automated pipeline","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22416926,"author":"binarymax","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Say It Is So: Baseball\u2019s Disgrace","text":"Here's a fun (semi) technical video on using machine learning for sign stealing: [VIDEO] I wonder if the signs employed by Major League teams are as simple as the ones dissected above?","stance":"rec"}],"PnbOWi6f_IM":[{"hn_comment_id":649140,"author":"dc2k08","month":"2009-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How many of you play music?","text":"piano/keyboards - have my eyes on one of these: [LINK] by the way, 4 part series on music theory that's worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2328136,"author":"kreek","month":"2011-03","story_title":"Music Theory for Beginners","text":"'Music Theory for Computer Musicians' was very helpful for me. [LINK] There's also a great TV series from England called 'How Music Works' which gives more of a historical background. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13015486,"author":"doublescoop","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Don't Give Up on the Guitar, Fender Is Begging You","text":"A djembe is played with rhythm and tone, but the rhythm itself doesn't have any tone color. Rhythm is time. Notes are wavelength, and in Western music we use a 12 note system to denote them, and musical theory is a shorthand used to denote the complex mathematical intervals at work in it. It's fascinating stuff, and if you're interested in learning more about it there's a great BBC series available on YouTube that describes what's happening in Western musical theory: How Music Works [VIDEO] Suggesting that students don't need to learn basic music theory is kind of ridiculous. Can the human ears find the tonic/dominant/sub-dominant interval relationships on their own? Of course. That's part of the reason we find them so pleasing. You don't need music theory to hear. You need it to communicate with other musicians. Music is a group activity. It's an ongoing conversation in our culture. If you want to participate in the musical traditions of our society, you need to be able talk to other musicians. This means different things for different traditions, but the amount of learning needed to get your feet under you in music is less than learning how how to play most video games or even the most basic syntax of a programming language. Can we teach it better? Absolutely. But we still need to teach it.","stance":"rec"}],"PorfLSr3DDI":[{"hn_comment_id":16277234,"author":"zython","month":"2018-01","story_title":"GDB 8.1 Released","text":"Seems like a I cannot edit my post, but I just remembered this brilliant short talk (15min) about gdb's TUI. [VIDEO] It really did change my opinion of gdb in just 15 min.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18598193,"author":"daniel-levin","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best practice for reading large pieces of C code?","text":"Compile it with debugging symbols and run it with gdb in tui mode. This will let you place breakpoints in source files, view back traces, find the definitions of functions, structures, macros, etc. The learning curve is a tad steep, but this video is pretty good: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19630834,"author":"flukus","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Why Vi Rocks","text":"> Sure, but I bet Intellij is a bit better when it comes to debugging java applications. I don't know about intelliJ specifically, but a good debugger beats the crap off the limited interface an IDE provides to them. It looks like IntelliJ only offers basic breakpoint/step through, etc. For a quick overview of what you're missing out on checkout \"Give me 15 minute and I'll change you min on GDB\": [VIDEO] (hopefully the right video, can't check at work)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27136499,"author":"flukus","month":"2021-05","story_title":"55,000 lines of Rust code later: A debugger is born","text":"> So anything like this on Linux sounds like a very positive step forward. GDB has had reverse debugging since 2009 and there are other tools like rr and a few commercial ones. If anything I'd say that you calling it time travel debugging instead of reverse debugging demonstrates how insular the windows developer world is more than the windows platform being ignored. A great demonstration is in the video \"Give Me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30517875,"author":"slavik81","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Debugging with GDB","text":"I'd also recommend \"Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB\" [1] by Greg Law at CppCon 2015. As someone who wasn't very familiar with GDB, I learned a lot from seeing it used by someone skilled. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30789349,"author":"skywal_l","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Hacked GDB Dashboard Puts It All on Display","text":"Nice! There is already a TUI in gdb albeit not as good looking. For more info, there is a quick talk about it and other niceties that you may not know about: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36943964,"author":"shortrounddev2","month":"2023-07","story_title":"You Only Need a Tablet for Computer Science","text":"\"You only need a tablet\" (and remote infrastructure for actually writing your code on since a tablet won't work for 99% of assignments) I did the same thing in college, but with a Chromebook. I rented a VPS from Vultr and ssh'd in to write C and Java assignments with vim. VPS was $5/mo. Chromebooks can still write javascript code and run via the web browser, and you can actually mount a remote drive on a Chromebook (I think via sshfs?). From there you can use an electron based text editor like Atom (and I guess VSCode would work these days) and just compile and run programs via some SSH commands. I'll say anybody who wants to do the same thing with C should definitely check out GDB and its TUI mode: [VIDEO] But I think these days, running a GUI application over a network has become trivial. Back then, I don't remember any providers making it simple to deploy such projects","stance":"rec"}],"Pp9MwZkHiMQ":[{"hn_comment_id":45128838,"author":"athrowaway3z","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department's Use of Flock Safety","text":"[VIDEO] Benn Jordan did a great video on this. People on here regularly bash the EU's GDPR, but blocking this kind of corporate-driven police state is a heavy point in its favor.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48249836,"author":"dmschulman","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The FBI Wants 'Near Real-Time' Access to US License Plate Readers","text":"Funny you should mention this. Benn Jordan, on the heels of his Flock camera research, reverse engineered a non-flock ALRP unit and built his own system using some off the shelf parts, a tablet, and 3D printer. He did it mostly as an experiment but also due to the fact that Flock's algorithm for image detection is astoundingly bad and has a high incident of reading plates incorrectly. There are a handful of open-source models for license plate detection, I forget exactly which model outperformed the rest, but it was an excellent watch and help me really understand just how inefficient these commercial systems are and how easy they can be to defeat: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45128857,"author":"Barbing","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department's Use of Flock Safety","text":"For a video overview of this stuff: \u201cBreaking The Creepy AI in Police Cameras\u201d, Benn Jordan [36min, 1.7m views, 9d ago] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45476601,"author":"strangattractor","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Flock's gunshot detection microphones will start listening for human voices","text":"Ok Before I am accused of misrepresenting things and in the interest of clarity. 1. I am in San Francisco. 2. Upon further research Flock does not appear to be used by SFPD for ticketing. They have another camera system for that. That does not mean that Flock could not be used for speeding tickets or a host of other things like running red lights, littering etc. Microprocessors and CMOS cameras can do amazing things. Regardless of what company is doing the surveillance the debate remains the same. 1. Pervasive surveillance has the potential to be used inappropriately by authorities. Discussion is needed. 2. The data collected by a company such as Flock but not necessarily Flock could be used inappropriately or sold for other purposes. Benn Jordan has a good video on the subject [VIDEO] 3. The claim that Flock is responsible for %10 of solved cases seems dubious but without data it is difficult to know or believe. Given that Flock is in YC's portfolio makes it even more suspect. Flock or a company like Flock may try and become pervasive and indispensable before a public discussion places any limits on their behavior.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47690241,"author":"gorgonical","month":"2026-04","story_title":"US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology","text":"Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] I recommend them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48171582,"author":"ocrow","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Americans Are Smashing Flock Cameras","text":"It's rational to oppose Flock cameras in particular, while admitting that secure publicly accountable camera use for police purposes may have a legitimate place. YouTuber Benn Jordan did a pretty decent break down of how Flock is not that. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PpG0z-npFIY":[{"hn_comment_id":16478298,"author":"goldenkey","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Why Do We Sleep Under Blankets, Even on the Hottest Nights? (2017)","text":"Just watched KEDi on Youtube Red [1]. Made me cry. I love my cats so much but they live the best lives when they have the freedom. And I don't know how to deal with them getting sick or dying. With kids, you usually hope you are the first to go. But with pets that have shorter lives, how to cope? There is a lot of wisdom in the movie with regard to the special relationship and insight cats give us to life itself. I have such a deep respect for Turkey now, I even have new respect for Islam. Allahu akbar. May peace be with you my friend. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25168886,"author":"mehrdadn","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Why are there so many cats in Istanbul?","text":"They're not feral cats, they're stray cats. I found them pretty cute when I watched the video. (Recommend it for those who haven't seen it: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33607531,"author":"tareqak","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The history of the domestic cat in Central Europe","text":"There is a documentary called \"Kedi\" about the stray cats of Istanbul and their relationship with the human inhabitants of the city. Here is the trailer on YouTube: [VIDEO] . I watched it, and I really liked it.","stance":"rec"}],"PqPGOhXoprU":[{"hn_comment_id":12163410,"author":"lawpoop","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Luca, the Ancestor of All Living Things","text":"I personally am a fan of the RNA world hypothesis: [LINK] RNA can act as both a store of information, and as an enzyme catalyzing reactions. In this theory, certain sequences of RNA would be the original self-replicating molecules. Over time, variations in their replication would give rise to other enzymes for specialized reactions, and DNA as a pure-data store. Jack Szostak has done an excellent series of short videos on the theory, and he and his students have done a surprising amount of experiments to support the theory. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14732332,"author":"21","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Life","text":"Recently I got interested in the origin of life. I found this 3 part talk which discusses how the simplest possible life form might have looked like. My feeling after watching this is that we are slowly getting there (which will also mean jump starting in a dish a self replicating thing from inorganic matter). [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19139055,"author":"chr1","month":"2019-02","story_title":"\u2018Minimal\u2019 cell raises stakes in race to harness synthetic life (2016)","text":"There are also people trying to assemble life from simpler molecules that are commonly formed in non-organic processes. This series of presentation by Jack Szostak is rather interesting [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19816435,"author":"trevyn","month":"2019-05","story_title":"New physics needed to probe the origins of life","text":"Jack Szostak does a pretty good job of outlining how life might have arisen. It\u2019s less mysterious than it intuitively might seem: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22405105,"author":"martythemaniak","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Cellular Automata in the Browser","text":"I found it cute and quite meaningful. If you spend a good deal of time on Cellular Automata, Dissipative Structures and genetics these things really start to jump out at you. Here's a starter pack: Cellular Automata and Computation: [LINK] Origin of Life: [VIDEO] Dissipative Structures: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25912391,"author":"lovecg","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamander (2019)","text":"There are some plausible theories, like RNA randomly crystallizing on a suitable surface. Sooner or later a self-copying one just happened to crystallize by chance, and there was no going back. Fun lecture series: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PriwCi6SzLo":[{"hn_comment_id":24884718,"author":"d0mine","month":"2020-10","story_title":"YouTube-dl is now part of GitHub/dmca.git","text":"> That pirate bay and scihub are still around, that their authors are walking around freely Let's not equate these sites. scihub gives people what they are likely already paid for. Academic publishing business is a fraud. [VIDEO] (recent video on the topic that I liked)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27087271,"author":"haxiomic","month":"2021-05","story_title":"FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder","text":"Science Publisher Elsevier's reported profit margin is 38%, compared to Apple's 21% \u2013 there's lot of cash at stake for them and a big warchest to defend it For anyone looking to understand the background on the science publishing industry, how it ended up this way and why they will fight Sci-Hub so aggressively, I found this discussion really informative: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29223093,"author":"TaXaZ","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Journal of Functional Programming moving to open access","text":"The devils are in the details. This does not still justify current model and the steep price they are paid (by taxpayers, FYI a typical university pay millions of dollar to these institutions). Consider openreview by ICLR[1] as an counter example for your claim. The maintenance, quality control, software development is not as steep as current gatekeepers advertise yet their review quality is much higher (network/transparency effect). Not to mention the profit margin of scientific publication is 3x of the Apple (38% for Elsevier) and it should be because the science workers, works free for these institutions (fighting for credit). The current business model as a whole is a legacy institution based on earlier monopoly by a charlatan named Maxwell [2]. He basically lured scientist by shiny hotels+extra packages to build the initial reputation and then monopolize the entire industry for decades. It's interesting how the model works by rip off the taxpayers twice (by publishing and access) while still peer-review process is free (from money, not credit). You can find a good review of this scheme from below YouTube video[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29288371,"author":"TaXaZ","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Sci-Hub: Researchers File Intervention Application to Fight ISP Blocking","text":"The current scientific publication model is only benefits the gatekeepers in publishing industry. It directly goes to the packet of publishing industry by ripping off the tax-payers twice with a steep price. Nowadays research institution pay high fees both for paywall and open-access. No matter you access or publish you some how give tax-payers money to these publishing industries. It has been shown the steep price is also un-justified as peer-review are done freely (for credit, not money) by science worker themselves and there are plenty of open-review and open-science projects which prove the price is not justified. It might worth it to repeat part of my comment in [1]: > The current business model as a whole is a legacy institution based on earlier monopoly by a charlatan named Maxwell [2]. He basically lured scientist by shiny hotels+extra packages to build the initial reputation and then monopolize the entire industry for decades. You can find a good review of this scheme from below YouTube video[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Ps8jOj7diA0":[{"hn_comment_id":34592249,"author":"vlz","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Stanfords \"Programming Paradigms\" for learning how code gets compiled to bits and bytes. [VIDEO] Not the most sexy topic but it goes to a low level and gives you a clear picture of how memory is laid out, how functions translate to instructions from C, C++, then goes on to use Scheme and Python to show further paradigms. The presentation is clear and it simplifies in just the right places to give you the foundations.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39792950,"author":"killthebuddha","month":"2024-03","story_title":"2K earthquakes in 1 day off Canada coast","text":"Wow, that playlist is absolute gold. These kinds of instructional, high-quality, long-form lecture series are IMO maybe the best thing on the internet. The kind of thing when I encounter it makes me take a step back and really appreciate the fundamental beauty and utility of the internet. A few other examples: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [VIDEO] Sometimes I wish there was a frontend for YouTube that only has these kind of long-form lecture series, but I've never found one. I think part of the reason why is that essential \"quality\" is somewhat ineffable.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2714622,"author":"vibrunazo","month":"2011-06","story_title":"Please stop asking how to find a technical co-founder.","text":"I agree with this guy. Learning some very basic technical skills is very easy and can help you a lot. A small tip I'd like to give to any non-tech person. Is to watch Stanford's CS106a lectures on youtube: [VIDEO] You can watch the whole thing in about a week. It gives you a decent grasp of what coding is. And they use a very friendly language that anyone can understand. It's a very small effort that will make it much easier for you to talk and understand tech people. Worth your time in my opinion, take a look. Also, it's important to note that there's almost always many alternative routes that you follow to get somewhere. While learning code yourself is a great route. It's for sure not the only one. I think the most common solution for people looking for a technical co-founder is to stop looking for a co-founder and look for an employee. Which can become a co-founder in the future once you get along. The article talks about this as well.","stance":"rec"}],"PsPX0nElJ0k":[{"hn_comment_id":6702819,"author":"stcredzero","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Pyret: A new programming language from the creators of Racket","text":"> Code folding in a IDE goes a long way to make this bearable. Code folding in IDEs is an indication that we are doing it wrong -- that is, we human beings are programming computers \"wrong.\" I'm not saying that code folding is a symptom. I'm saying that code folding shows how primitive our means of managing code is. It's as if the mesopotamians somehow invented computers, and because of tradition, all code has to be written as cuneiform on wet clay tablets, then fired in ovens before being read. At least text files in directories are digital, but they are as static and behavior-less as clay tablets, and all of the important relationships therein are expressed as implicit correspondences which programmers have to keep track of in their heads. Code Bubbles is a beacon in the direction we should go. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29986277,"author":"zokier","month":"2022-01","story_title":"How do you visualize code?","text":"Code Bubbles (from 2010) is the most convincing code visualization tool that I can recall: [VIDEO] Shame it never grew beyond a research prototype.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"PsXFwy6gG_4":[{"hn_comment_id":23266955,"author":"SoylentOrange","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website","text":"I used to watch some of these IQ debates in college, they can be really good. The longer format and strong moderation really lend themselves to interesting discussions, and you can learn a lot. One of my favourite debates of this format (though not IQ) is Peter Thiel vs Eric Schmidt (then executive chairman of Google) arguing about whether Google was still capable of innovation [2012]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15983583,"author":"jamiesonbecker","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Eric Schmidt to become technical advisor to Alphabet","text":"One of the most interesting debates was between Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel back in 2012, especially in the positions that Eric staked out: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PsgBtOVzHKI":[{"hn_comment_id":677544,"author":"Bjoern","month":"2009-06","story_title":"Gates buys Feynman's \"Messenger\" lectures (to make available to the public)","text":"Some videos from Feynman which make a great impression on me were these.. \"Take the world from another point of view\" 1.) [VIDEO] 2.) [LINK] 3.) [LINK] 4.) [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3232748,"author":"jerometinkton","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Oppenheimer's recommendation letter for Richard Feynman","text":"Really fun reads. Great to give to people who think anything 'sciency' is stuffy:) I love this old Horizon as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"PtKhbbcc1Rc":[{"hn_comment_id":24438775,"author":"swilliamsio","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Coastline Paradox","text":">But then realized that the coastline paradox must also exist for 3D surfaces (TINs or DEMs or whatnot) so asking \u201cwhat is the area of a surface on earth\u201d can be a very complex question if dealing with elevation. StandUpMaths did a great video on this recently, asking whether national land area includes elevation and which nations would gain/lose the most land area if it were/weren't: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25109593,"author":"jobigoud","month":"2020-11","story_title":"The True Size Of Countries: Mercator projection","text":"Matt Parker from Standup Maths made a great video on exactly this subject a few weeks ago. \"Does land area assume a country is perfectly flat?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35483800,"author":"rdlw","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The longest straight line in Great Britain (without crossing a public road)","text":"Then it becomes a coastline problem, with different answers depending on the resolution of your elevation data. Great video on this from Matt Parker (focusing on area in this case): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Pzl1B7nB9Kc":[{"hn_comment_id":27281826,"author":"cogman10","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Rust Is a Wave of the Future","text":"I think Linus really hits the nail on the head here. It's the fact that core libs, like glibc, are CONSTANTLY changing their ABI making it damn near impossible to ship a binary from one version of the platform to the next [VIDEO] . You can still run windows 95 apps in windows 10. But running a ubuntu 12.04 binary in ubuntu 21.04? No way.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27784223,"author":"mumblemumble","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Are we GUI Yet? The state of building user interfaces in Rust","text":"Linus recently said something that left me thinking that Linux on the desktop has much deeper problems that need to be addressed before it's worth even thinking about the fine details of GUI toolkits. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28042552,"author":"KiranRao0","month":"2021-08","story_title":"AMD and Valve Working on New Linux CPU Performance Scaling Design","text":"I remember a Linus Torvalds video on this exact problem. I found it both blunt at insightful: Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29329276,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Flatpak Is Not the Future","text":"I watched a great rant by Linus T himself on how distributing code for Linux is a \"pain in the arse\", but is comparatively easier on Windows and MacOS: [VIDEO] Something I took away from that is that it is Linus himself, personally, that is responsible (in a way) for Docker existing. Docker depends on the stable kernel ABI in order to allow container images to be portable and \"just work\" stably and reliably. This is a \"guarantee\" that Linus gets shouty about if the kernel devs break it. Docker fills a need on Linux because the user-mode libraries across all distributions are a total mess. Microsoft is trying to be the \"hip kid\" by copying Docker into Windows, where everything is backwards to the Linux situations: The NT kernel ABI is treated as unstable, and changes as fast as every few months. No one ever codes directly against the kernel on Windows (for some values of \"no one\" and \"ever\".) The user-mode libraries like Win32 and .NET are very stable, papering over the inconsistency of the kernel library. You can run applications compiled in the year 2000 today, unmodified, and more often than not they'll \"just work\". There just isn't a \"burning need\" for Docker on Windows. People that try to reproduce the cool new Linux workflow however are in for a world of hurt, because they'll rapidly discover that the images they built just weeks ago might not run any more because the latest Windows Update bumped the kernel version. I read all the way through this and wept: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36678905,"author":"Gareth321","month":"2023-07","story_title":"After 30 Years, Linux Finally Hits 3% Market Share","text":"> You accumulate software yes, but you also accumulate habits and knowledge. Changing OS means discarding all the accumulated knowledge, which 0% of \"normal users\" want to do. I only ever hear Linux users make this argument. Mac users are confident enough in MacOS UX that they know it\u2019s not a significant barrier to transition. The same is not true of Linux. So many solutions to problems require opening the CLI, and that\u2019s just an automatic fail for the vast majority of consumers. Honestly, I would like Linux fans to just accept Linux for what it is: an amazing kernel with incredible GUIs built by and for developers. App developers just do not care about (or do not have the resources for) making simple and intuitive software. Valve is a welcome and notable exception with the Steam Deck. Linus Torvalds explains it perfectly: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Q0yL2GezneU":[{"hn_comment_id":41538984,"author":"qwery","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Who is responsible for the greatest change to our language? Teenage girls","text":"You might also be interested in Dr Geoff Lindsey's video on 'vocal fry'[0] which is a linguistic phenomenon also associated with young women (although it isn't that simple). Dr Lindsey's channel is totally bitchin' like you wouldn't believe. You'll love it! I'm sure. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47336872,"author":"ggus","month":"2026-03","story_title":"TADA: Fast, Reliable Speech Generation Through Text-Acoustic Synchronization","text":"\"Vocal fry\", aka \"creaky voice\". It's stereotypically associated with irritating young women. I like me a good rabbit hole that's interesting and also digs into stereotypes. Turns out, like many memes, it's not just that. It's (also?) a normal speech pattern, used by different genders, ages, and social groups, in many languages. This doesn't mean that vocal fry isn't used as social signaling. But complaining about it, well, isn't that social signalling too? Geoff Lindsey - Vocal Fry: what it is, who does it, and why people hate it! - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Q13CishCKXY":[{"hn_comment_id":34251882,"author":"mindover","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Apple headset leak reveals new details and confirms earlier rumors","text":"We might just not know what we are missing. I used to think that video calls is a solved problem until I saw Google's Project Starline [0]. Video calls in AR could be vastly better, not just a little bit, but basically a completely different experience/relationship. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35233783,"author":"jonas21","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Who is still inside the metaverse?","text":"I think the most promising Metaverse technology might be something like Starline [1]. No headset to wear. No disorientation. You just sit down and you're there with somebody else. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Q1ZeXnmDZMQ":[{"hn_comment_id":2883903,"author":"sc68cal","month":"2011-08","story_title":"The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse","text":"I see there is another Kunstler fan on HN! An upvote for you, sir. For anyone else interested in this line of argument, there is a great introduction that Kunstler did for his TED Talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8440617,"author":"chetanahuja","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Why 12-Foot Traffic Lanes Are Disastrous for Safety","text":"I'm seeing a lot of resistance to the idea of narrower city streets on this thread. The advantages of narrower city streets (and hence, crossings) goes far beyond safety. It actually enhances quality of life in a significant way. A wide, four lane highway running across your town basically says humans must come encased inside an automobile. Pedestrians and cyclists become second class citizens. It's a design driven for the convenience of cars and to the detriment of humans. Here's a far more engaging critique of car-first design by James Kunstler: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23586575,"author":"nowandlater","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Why people hate contemporary architecture (2017)","text":"That Peter Eisenman building looks like it'd be a killer skate park. Say what you will about James Howard Kunstler, his TED talk on Architecture seems to be in the right direction. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23588680,"author":"Yoofie","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Why people hate contemporary architecture (2017)","text":"Reminds me of this [1] old TED talk about horrible architecture that I still find relevant as ever. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Q1lL-hXO27Q":[{"hn_comment_id":37936452,"author":"dimator","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Richard Feynman explains neutron stars","text":"i can't help but tack on my favorite Feynman video, on magnets: [VIDEO] i'm just mesmerized by his answer, that without an understood context, it's not at all easy to explain how magnets work. his riff for 8 minutes on this is just a joy to watch.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41628851,"author":"itishappy","month":"2024-09","story_title":"What Is a Particle? (2020)","text":"I disagree! I think fields are very intuitive and it's everything else that's nonsensical! Magnetism isn't made of anything. It is a field, and it's one your can interact with directly. Compare that with, say, table salt. \"What's table salt made of?\" Uh. It's made of atoms entirely unrelated to salt, like sodium and chlorine. \"What are atoms made of?\" Uh. They're made of tiny electric particles zipping around at relativistic speeds but bound together by forces like magnetism. Richard Feynman does a better job than me of describing this exact problem in one of my favorite physics videos of all time: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46981267,"author":"rimunroe","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Who Smeared Feynman","text":"I linked the \"why do magnets do that?\" interview elsewhere in the comments, but if anyone else missed it I highly recommend it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28348992,"author":"RichardCA","month":"2021-08","story_title":"NP Complete 3rd Grade Math Problems (2018)","text":"It's an easy mistake to make, to have incorrect pedagogy around the concept of temperature, and Feynman was fanatical about correct pedagogy. This is always good: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40100596,"author":"lisper","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Daniel Dennett has died","text":"> But the relationship between brain chemistry and consciousness is at best correlating certain conscious states with certain neurological states. How ironic that you would say that in a thread about Daniel Dennett's passing. You have obviously not read \"Consciousness Explained.\" > And QFT explaining laws of nature would be strange considering QFT is included in the laws of nature. You should watch this: [VIDEO] > there are philosophical arguments as to why there must be an ultimate, necessary explanation Yes, obviously. There are arguments for why the earth must be flat too. Why should I care about either? They're just wrong .","stance":"rec"}],"Q2UnOryQiIY":[{"hn_comment_id":25264408,"author":"jononomo","month":"2020-12","story_title":"My Hunt for the Original McDonald\u2019s French-Fry Recipe","text":"Just as long as you're aware of the implications of using vegetable oil for your french fries. This lecture on vegetable oils is one of the most memorable lectures I've ever watched: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32389805,"author":"jononomo","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring","text":"Oh, wow -- I love Nina Teicholz! I came across this talk by her a few years ago and it made a massive impression on me: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34533262,"author":"jononomo","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Chipotle Goes on Hiring Spree of 15,000 Amid Strong Growth","text":"Seed oils did not exist in the human diet prior to about 1920. They are the most ultra-processed possible things you can consume. This talk changed my life: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17794606,"author":"crphilipp","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality: a prospective cohort study","text":"I have read her book, and it is fascinating. Go ahead and make your assumptions about her motives, but I believe you are doing yourself a disservice. Before the 20th century, we ate a lot of saturated fats, and it wasn't until the creation of vegetable oils (which are made through extensive industrial processes), was there a move to start restricting saturated fat. The current low-fat diet is an experiment that has America has been on for forty some years. Please take a look at this. [LINK] And in general, the American population has been following this diet, and we are fatter than ever before, suffering from Type 2 Diabetes. And the \"science\" behind our current health policy is driven by organizations like the American Soybean Asociation who are more concerned with making money and less on science. And when you start talking about money, the science research will follow the money, because the scientists need to eat. Please take a look at this videos, [VIDEO] [LINK] I would read her book before you pass judgment.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25430262,"author":"teleforce","month":"2020-12","story_title":"A palm oil alternative could help save rainforests","text":"Most of the people are ignorant about the things and fat they put inside their body (that includes me). Please check this video on Vegetable Oils: The Unknown Story by the author of the book \"The Big Fat Surprise\" [1][2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25788583,"author":"teleforce","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Testosterone levels show steady decrease among young US men","text":"Please check this video on Vegetable Oils: The Unknown Story by the author of the book \"The Big Fat Surprise\" [1][2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26128206,"author":"teleforce","month":"2021-02","story_title":"50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Blame Fat (2016)","text":"This video on \"Vegetable Oils: The Unknown Story\" provides interesting story about the war on fat in the US, by the author of the book \"The Big Fat Surprise\" [1][2]. According to the author, she was about to name her book \"The Big Fat Lie\", but eventually decided against it. [1] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Q2aEzeMDHMA":[{"hn_comment_id":49128056,"author":"netsharc","month":"2026-07","story_title":"How JPEG works: Interactively explore JPEG's lossy compression methods","text":"There's a series of videos showing the algorithm: [LINK] I finally understood DCT after watching [VIDEO] And someone created a \"JPEG to PNG\" tool that \"finds the smoothest possible picture that encodes to the given JPEG file\": [LINK] . I tried it with some very terribly compressed images, and the outputs were a lot better.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10181758,"author":"greggman","month":"2015-09","story_title":"The Pixel Factory","text":"Honestly this presentation didn't work for me. I was amazed at the spectacle and a few things like perfect math world vs pixels and multi-sampler helped explain a few things but over all it was all over the place and didn't seem to get to many points or insights. It seems more like someone was asked to do a presentation, didn't have a solid idea of what to talk about, and so threw together a bunch of stuff until it filed their allotted time. I'm not trying to be discouraging. A great presentation can go a long way to making things understandable. For example this video explaining jpeg worked for me [VIDEO] My point is only that fancy graphics and animation are not enough. The presentation actually has to get it's points across. Maybe this one worked for everyone but me but it didn't really work for me. I don't really know what to suggest to make it better. Maybe it all made more sense live with more talking. There were a few \"bugs\" For example slide 22, bi-linear filtering, pixels can't be 2 colors so that slide made no sense. On the positive side I would love to know what software to use to make presentations easy. Yea, I get the author made his own but in general, making animation is hard work. Worse, once I've made them, even if they didn't end up being good for explaining I put so much work into making them that I can't justify starting over for something that works better. So, anything that would make that process not be so much work would be amazingly helpful.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24282212,"author":"walagran","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Discrete Cosine Transform in Video Compression \u2013 Explain Like I'm Five","text":"Pretty cool! I would add Computerphile's Youtube Video as a watch after this: [VIDEO] . This is a part of their 4-video series on JPEG: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34062642,"author":"skywal_l","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Video Codec in 100 lines of Rust","text":"The Computerphile channel has a nice series of videos on JPEG and one focusing on DCT [0]. It's a nice ans easy intro to the subject. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38764236,"author":"boolemancer","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Technical Overview of AV1 Spec","text":"There is a good video[1] from the Computerphile channel describing the concept in the context of JPEG. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40151155,"author":"itishappy","month":"2024-04","story_title":"VideoGigaGAN: Towards detail-rich video super-resolution","text":"It receives information about the spacial frequency content of the image. If you're unfamiliar, it's definitely worth looking into the specifics of how this works, as it's quite impressive! Here's a few relevant Wikipedia articles, and a Computerphile video: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Q3uvzcY2Xug":[{"hn_comment_id":2326582,"author":"gnosis","month":"2011-03","story_title":"Dramatic escalation in Japan (Fukushima Nuke Plant)","text":"Jobs would necessarily have to be much closer to home. The onset of global warming and the oil peak are starting to prove that building economies around suburbs, highways, and long commutes is unsustainable anyway. See this great documentary, \"The End of Suburbia\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2699746,"author":"raganwald","month":"2011-06","story_title":"The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme","text":"The End of Suburbia is a rabidly biased documentary that takes another perspective on why the suburbs will fail, the cost of oil: [LINK] And in free as in beer, glorious 240p: [VIDEO] It's entertaining and, IMO, well worth watching even if you disagree with some of the people they interview or prefer your documentaries balanced and dispassionate. You're sure to come away from the movie feeling you know more about the history of the relationship between the automobile and the suburbs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2699830,"author":"raganwald","month":"2011-06","story_title":"The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme","text":"There's actually a section in the movie on the subject of electricity: [VIDEO] And later on they discuss hybrids and electric cars specifically. But to be clear, I don't recommend the movie because it's right , but because it asks interesting questions and leads you to think about interesting possibilities. We use a lot of energy. If we're going to replace the energy from fossil fuels with energy from electricity, we are going to need a lot more capacity than we have today. And as you can see from recent news, doubling or trebling our capacity is no small feat.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13162729,"author":"pmoriarty","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Why a Post-Nuclear World Would Look Nothing Like \u201cMad Max\u201d","text":"\"It's hard to believe that people would panic if the oil price went high, or even sky high. It wouldn't be pretty, sure, probably several industry sectors would die, but I don't see how it would end our world.\" You might be interested in watching \"The End of Suburbia\" : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13853462,"author":"pmoriarty","month":"2017-03","story_title":"The line is blurring between city and suburb","text":"There's a great documentary on this called The End of Suburbia ,[1][2] though the causes for such a collapse are very different in the documentary vs this article. [1] - [LINK] [2] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20331694,"author":"pmoriarty","month":"2019-07","story_title":"American Suburbs Swell Again as a New Generation Escapes the City","text":"This might be a good time to mention a documentary called The End of Suburbia [1], which lays out the case for the existence of the suburbs being fueled and sustained by the easy availability of cheap oil and then goes on to forecast the death of the suburbs as cheap oil stops being so easily available. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Q7jcBGLIpus":[{"hn_comment_id":32790237,"author":"rhinoceraptor","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Navy Says All UFO Videos Classified, Releasing Them Will Harm National Security","text":"All of the hyped UFO videos released over the past few years are easily explainable given a basic understanding of geometry, imaging and gimbals. Mick West has some great videos on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48067769,"author":"mrandish","month":"2026-05","story_title":"US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos","text":"For anyone else who has a UFO-crazy uncle, I've found Mick West's YouTube channel to be invaluable [LINK] . Mick is a retired video game programmer (Spider Man, Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk), who does extremely well-researched videos analyzing UFO claims. He's not flashy or trying to be entertaining, just thorough, evidence-based and scientifically rigorous. He'll even do controlled experiments, recreations and 3D models to validate what's going on. And he's unfailingly respectful no matter how unhinged the claim. His work explaining the \"Gimbal Video\" is a good example: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23008009,"author":"DSingularity","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Pentagon officially releases UFO videos [video]","text":"Apparently, no real gymnastics needed \u2014 just some domain knowledge. I was also freaked out by these videos until I saw this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23672118,"author":"acqq","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown","text":"Not weird at all: [VIDEO] Mick West's full playlist with explanations: [LINK] An article mentioning Mick West: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27497306,"author":"treesprite82","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Sam Harris on UFO Disclosure","text":"> I found 3 pentagon confirmed videos today of Unidentified flying shapes going super fast. Whatever they are, this is pretty surreal If you're talking about the 3 videos I assume you are, I'd recommend checking out Mick West's videos on them: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Q8ccXzM3x8A":[{"hn_comment_id":14543739,"author":"the6threplicant","month":"2017-06","story_title":"The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory","text":"I like [VIDEO] (The case for String Theory). It shows that there is a natural progression to String Theory that very few other theories have.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17589668,"author":"snarfy","month":"2018-07","story_title":"The Admiral of the String Theory Wars (2015)","text":"I've never found a good description or explanation of string theory for the layman. I look, but then I always run into Brian Greene. I did find this video[1], where a professor explains why he at least believes there is something to it. Tl;dr - they weren't looking for strings. They sort of 'popped out' of the equations. [1] = [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Q8oCilY4szc":[{"hn_comment_id":39661373,"author":"stevenwoo","month":"2024-03","story_title":"U.S. is said to open criminal inquiry into Boeing","text":"It\u2019s aimed at entertainment but the latest Last Week Tonight covered this and is on YouTube. Hope this links works from my phone [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41343297,"author":"cube2222","month":"2024-08","story_title":"NASA announces Boeing Starliner crew will return on SpaceX Crew-9","text":"There is a very nice episode of Last Week Tonight by John Oliver diving into it, accessible on YouTube[0]. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QAHi3lX3oGM":[{"hn_comment_id":26706285,"author":"vfclists","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Vitamin D: The truth about an alleged Covid \u2018cover-up\u2019","text":"Are you sure it isn't down to regulatory capture by the US pharmaceutical industry? You can see how nonsensical their comments are in relation to using horse formulations, forgetting that in many countries around the world it is so safe that it is available over the counter. It surely can't be be more dangerous than Advil or cough syrup. Have they forgotten doctors in the US actually prescribe it for Covid? Apparently many people in the US and the UK haven't cottoned on to why their death rates are so high. They seem too stupid to realize that if the cure for an illness is to stay at home without treatment until the symptoms become bad enough to warrant admission to hospital more people will suffer injury and may possibly die as a result. FWIW it is primarily the UK and US where that notion persists. Go elsewhere around the world and tell the people that the \"treatment\" for Covid is staying at home without treatment until symptoms become too hard to bear, and they will look at you as though you are fool, which indeed you are if that is what you believe. If you think I'm insulting the British and Americans, listen to this from an American doctor - [VIDEO] After watching it take the time to consider how many Americans and British have died needlessly as a result of unthinking acceptance of statements made by the countries health authorities.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28155076,"author":"velcii","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Major study of Ivermectin finds 'no effect whatsoever'","text":"Peter McCullough, MD testifies to Texas Senate HHS Committee The part where they talk about trials like these.. [VIDEO] Viewing full testimony is recommended.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28722874,"author":"EricE","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Why people who don\u2019t trust vaccines are embracing unproven drugs","text":"lol - the only thing unproven are that the patents for drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have expired and theres no money to be made. Isn't amazing big pharama has a new pill/non-vaccine treatment for COVID now? Funny that. The gaslighting over any treatment other than the vax is beyond criminal at this point. Just watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28723029,"author":"EricE","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Antiviral Molnupiravir Reduces Risk of Hospitalization/Death by ~50 Percent","text":"There are actually a multitude of treatments beyond waiting for thing to get bad enough that you need to go to the hospital: [LINK] This is also worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QAr-uHd8h8o":[{"hn_comment_id":32412021,"author":"imurray","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Essential Climbing Knots","text":"This is a great video. A summary for those who don't want to wade through it: The main message is that if the knot is slightly loose, or messy, the strands pinch unevenly in a fall, and it can be really hard to untie (depending on the rope). Most of the video is experiments to show that. The knot only had to be slightly loose to cause problems. The part that surprised me is that there are two different ways to tie the knot that basically look the same. They only differ in which of the two outgoing strands is the one that's loaded. They're both perfectly safe, but one can be a lot harder to untie than the other after a fall. I actually find it hard to end up with the \"wrong\" version of the knot, but I might just be lucky with what my muscle memory has latched on to. I certainly wasn't taught to watch out for the difference. The difference between the two knots is shown at 13m 24s: [VIDEO] His demo of one way to get the knot the right way around is at 7m 41s of another long video: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26471062,"author":"roessland","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Learn How to Tie Knots","text":"Apparently there is a wrong way of tying a figure 8, that leads to a version that is much harder to untie. Personally I've never had issues untying a figure 8, so it might just be that my default way of tying it happened to be the correct way. It's described in this video: [VIDEO] Skip to 13:20 for the interesting part.","stance":"rec"}],"QAz-maaH0KM":[{"hn_comment_id":22968384,"author":"Sammi","month":"2020-04","story_title":"How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2020","text":"There's a great new talk by on Gjengset on youtube that tackles just this question: Rust NYC: Jon Gjengset - Demystifying unsafe code [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42477850,"author":"saghm","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Compiling C to Safe Rust, Formalized","text":"While I might agree that it's easy if you use a reference counter, this is not going to be as performant as the typical linked list written in C, which is why the standard library uses unsafe for its implementation of stuff like this. If it were \"easy\" to just write correct `unsafe`, then it would be easy to do it in C as well. Note that the converse to this isn't necessarily true! People I trust way more to write unsafe Rust code than me than me have argued that unsafe Rust can be harder than writing C in some ways due to having to uphold certain invariants that don't come up in C. While there are a number of blog posts on the topic that anyone interested can probably find fairly easily by googling \"unsafe Rust harder than C\", I'll break my usual rule of strongly preferring articles to video content to link a talk from youtube because the speaker is one of those people I mention who I'd trust more than me to write unsafe code and I remember seeing him give this talk at the meetup: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QCAL_YgYiP0":[{"hn_comment_id":43364036,"author":"alnwlsn","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Copyright and the Demo Scene","text":"Related, and a personal favorite of mine: DEF CON 18 - Jason Scott - You're Stealing It Wrong! 30 Years of Inter-Pirate Battles [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7941615,"author":"patrickyeon","month":"2014-06","story_title":"A texture-mapped raycaster in 128 bytes","text":"As CountHackulus says, basically \"drama\". If it amuses you for some reason, you might want to check out \"Jason Scott - You're Stealing It Wrong! 30 Years of Inter-Pirate Battles\" from Defcon 18. [VIDEO] The meat of the talk starts around 24min. edit: while re-watching, I should warn you lots of foul language and some NSFW imagery","stance":"rec"}],"QEIUdMiColU":[{"hn_comment_id":19892226,"author":"cagenut","month":"2019-05","story_title":"First SpaceX Starlink satellites loaded into Falcon fairing","text":"this guy made an excellent youtube video modeling and visualizing the satellite orbits, the network routing paths across them, and the resulting latencies: [VIDEO] NYC to London on the current internet is 76ms, he shows it across starlink's updated plans as working out to around 46ms. Later in the description he points out a mistake in his own math and says that starlink paths should be 8.7% faster than the video shows, so really jfk<->lhr ~ 42ms.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19891836,"author":"rashomon","month":"2019-05","story_title":"First SpaceX Starlink satellites loaded into Falcon fairing","text":"The FCC filing has a lot of good technical details on the deployment and frequency usage. Additionally, Mark Handley has a good primer on it. It may kill actual east-west terrestrial traffic due to latency improvements: [VIDEO] North-South will still be terrestrial.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20001289,"author":"positr0n","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Starlink \u2013 SpaceX\u2019s broadband internet system","text":"Here's some great visualizations of the orbits and an explanation of what it means that the orbits are optimized for the northern hemisphere. (This confused me at first since obviously any orbit has to go just as far south as it does north of the equator.) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23521957,"author":"cagenut","month":"2020-06","story_title":"FCC has \u201cserious doubts\u201d that SpaceX can deliver latencies under 100ms","text":"If you want a really great visualization and latency estimates for starlink check out the models and videos this guy came up with: [VIDEO] [LINK] The comment from the FCC about it not accounting for \"processing [&] routing\" is kindof nonsense on its face, those are not novel problems they're already done by ever other router and switch, including several other satellite networks.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26035364,"author":"paranoidrobot","month":"2021-02","story_title":"SpaceX says Starlink now has over 10k users","text":"Mark Handley has done a bunch of videos analysing this on his channel[0]. The TLDR is that there is a lot of room for Starlink to beat existing terrestrial options IF they can get the laser links working on-orbit. This video[1] shows estimates using what was known about proposed configurations in 2018 [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QEJ9HrZq7Ro":[{"hn_comment_id":20651498,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Tech backlash has come to Stanford","text":"Tom Lehrer performing \"Wernher von Braun \" live (1967): [VIDEO] His amazing wit is just as biting today as it was when he originally composed most of his songs over half a century ago.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23224338,"author":"Diederich","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Google deletes \u201ccommunist bandits\u201d from comments on Youtube","text":"For those who aren't aware and/or won't look this reference: [VIDEO] As the other comenter noted, Tom Lehrer is indeed a national treasure, and his satire is top shelf. From the light-hearted \"The Elements\": [LINK] (watch for the surprise at the end) To the gallows comedy of \"We Will All Go Together When We Go\": [LINK] NB: I appreciate the irony linking to YouTube content in a 'WTF Google/YouTube' thread.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30248828,"author":"jacquesm","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Roman slaveowners were the first management theorists?","text":"The US (and Russian, by the way) appropriation of German scientists and Nazi party members post WWII is certainly controversial and there are plenty of people who strongly believe that they should have stood trial in Nuremberg instead of being given a new job with plenty of perks. As Tom Lehrer wrote: \"Don't say that he's hypocritical, Say rather that he's apolitical. \"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, \" says Wernher von Braun.\" The sarcasm dripping of those words is hard to replicate without hearing it sung, I recommend the original: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QEJpZjg8GuA":[{"hn_comment_id":43188874,"author":"lisper","month":"2025-02","story_title":"AI's Biggest Flaw? The Blinking Cursor Problem","text":"No, the blinking cursor is a feature, not a bug. Alec Watons over at Technology Connections has a much better argument for this than I could ever hope to muster, so I'll just hand it over to him: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43410899,"author":"sergioisidoro","month":"2025-03","story_title":"The Lost Art of Research as Leisure","text":"I think reading is an essential skill, but we also need to get reading out of the pedestal. Because a lot of the time these arguments come across as some sort of literary elitism. Like if you're not ingesting information through reading, it doesn't count. This month I spent many hours listening to lectures on youtube about geopolitics on the Asian continent from the naval war college. Sure I could have read it, but nevertheless I got curious about a topic, engaged in it, and \"followed the rabbit holes\" I think there is a case to be made that we need to be more active in information seeking, rather than just being fed what the algorithm suggests you - on that topic Technology connections recently made a really good exposition of that issue -- [VIDEO] -- But it should not be about the method of ingesting information, but the quality and the intent of it.","stance":"rec"}],"QG0Apol-oj0":[{"hn_comment_id":35639927,"author":"thrtythreeforty","month":"2023-04","story_title":"High Speed Printed Circuit Board (PCB) Design Guidelines","text":"Basically, go watch every Rick Hartley video on YouTube. He is awesome at explaining. It will become intuitive instead of being a bunch of cargo cult advice. (Normally I dislike long videos but this is absolutely worth your time if you design PCBs.) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36107667,"author":"mordae","month":"2023-05","story_title":"The Mysterious 50 Ohm Impedance: Where It Came from and Why We Use It","text":"The article is not that good, but whatever. I am new to electronics myself and quite fascinated how has the art progressed in the past hundred or so years. There are people remembering \"we were doing it wrong\". Incredible. Anyway, if you are interested in signals traveling inside those cute green multi-GHz boards you make your living off, go watch Rick Hartley. [LINK] (How to Achieve Proper Grounding) [VIDEO] (What your Differential Pairs Wish You Knew)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44549063,"author":"aaronmdjones","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Vibe-Coding a PCB \u2013 surprisingly good","text":"I have some further video recommendations: [LINK] (\"How to achieve proper grounding\") [LINK] (\"Keys to control noise, interference, and EMI in PCBs\") [VIDEO] (\"What your differential pairs wish you knew\") [LINK] (\"Secrets of PCB optimization\") These are all by Rick Hartley (from GP's comment) and they are all worth watching in this order.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47933799,"author":"dgroshev","month":"2026-04","story_title":"How I leared what a decoupling capacitor is for, the hard way","text":"I found Phil's lab content [1] [2] indispensable for just this. Phil is a great communicator and gives in-depth explanations, so I didn't just watch most of his youtube, but also bought his mixed signals course and was very happy with it. Phil also recommends this lecture in one of his videos [3], which is still one of my all time favourite lectures ever. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35184802,"author":"datenwolf","month":"2023-03","story_title":"PCIe for Hackers: The Diffpair Prelude","text":"> First off, you want to keep both of the pair\u2019s signals close to each other throughout their length. The closer the two signals are, the better external interference cancellation works, and the less noise they radiate (\u2026) Wrong! This is a myth that's stubbornly difficult to weed out. The coupling between the wires of a pair is only ~12% the amount of coupling to the reference plane. On a PCB it's best to treat each signal on its own and route it as a single ended, coplanar waveguide surrounded by reference planes. This allows to use far thicker widths, which reduces inductance, which also reduces the coupling to radiating EM fields. If you want a longer talk on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41511199,"author":"aaronmdjones","month":"2024-09","story_title":"The magic of DC-DC voltage conversion (2023)","text":"> so wouldn't it be better to put power/ground on the outer layers and keep signals in the middle? Signals must never cross a break or split in the plane they're referencing (usually 0V or \"\"ground\"\"). This creates huge EMI problems. Your proposal would have signals on layer 2 crossing a split in the ground plane on layer 1 (that split caused by power traces). Some interesting material on the subject: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"QHPmRJIoc2k":[{"hn_comment_id":34028648,"author":"schiffern","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Tom Lehrer has released all of his songs into the public domain","text":"If you never got the chance, give his full albums a listen. He intersperses song and spoken comedy, with the whole performance hanging together masterfully. An Evening (Wasted) with Tom Lehrer (1959, 42m) [LINK] Tom Lehrer Discovers Australia (And Vice-Versa) (1960, 49m) [LINK] That Was The Year That Was (1965, 38m) [LINK] Live in Copenhagen (1967, 51m) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34029724,"author":"schiffern","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Tom Lehrer has released all of his songs into the public domain","text":"If you haven't had a chance, give his full performances a listen. He intersperses song and spoken comedy, with the whole arc hanging together masterfully. Think of one of the great stand-up specials. I'd say it \"feels very modern,\" but the truth is that Lehrer (re-)invented the modern form. An Evening (Wasted) with Tom Lehrer (1959, 42m) [LINK] Tom Lehrer Discovers Australia (And Vice-Versa) (1960, 49m) [LINK] That Was The Year That Was (1965, 38m) [LINK] Live in Copenhagen (1967, 51m) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44704207,"author":"archagon","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Tom Lehrer has died","text":"May he rest in peace. In memoriam, this hourlong recording of a concert in Copenhagen is a joy to watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QHnLmvDxGTY":[{"hn_comment_id":40663465,"author":"mrkeen","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Don't Refactor Like Uncle Bob","text":"> it's both easier and more profitable to tell people that they need to OOP better than to use more appropriate paradigms in the design of their code. I don't think this is quite on target. Sure, he needs to go where the people are in order to communicate to the most people, but that doesn't mean he doesn't speak out against fads if it's appropriate. This talk was really formative for me: [LINK] If I remember correctly, he rails against just sticking the database in the middle of your system and calling that your architecture. If I'm remembering [VIDEO] correctly, he says OOP is no big deal, it's just encapsulation-polymorphism-inheritance, and then goes on to say things like C had better encapsulation than OO languages (you can keep your .c file to yourself, and just give someone the .h to program against.). And c-style bytes with stdin/stdout was designed with perfect forward-compatibility - programs like your terminal don't need to be recompiled even though they interact with your program (which was written after). And for the last 5+ years he's been pushing FP pretty hard, especially closure. I don't see him as pushing OO on people at the expense of anything else.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23198652,"author":"slifin","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Pretending OOP Never Happened","text":"There's a good talk here from Uncle Bob who helped popularise the solid principles, about what OOP is, and isn't [VIDEO] Towards the end of the talk note of the stickers on his laptop","stance":"rec"}],"QKCK4lJLQHU":[{"hn_comment_id":20246694,"author":"theothermkn","month":"2019-06","story_title":"To Build a Better Teapot, Researchers Create Liquid Helix","text":"As an aside, when you're reading the article and you stumble across the link to a description of how lift works, do yourself a favor and skip it. Instead, check out [VIDEO] . Almost no matter how sophisticated or simple your theory of lift is, it's almost certainly significantly at odds with observed physical phenomenon.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22239726,"author":"zkms","month":"2020-02","story_title":"The mysteries of aerodynamic lift","text":"Doug McLean (Boeing Technical Fellow) has a quite decent talk about the question of intuitive explanations for aerodynamic lift: [VIDEO] Also Philippe Spalart's quote is right on the money: \"It's easy to explain how a rocket works, but explaining how a wing works takes a rocket scientist\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27640652,"author":"raverbashing","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Why we don\u2019t understand heavier-than-air flight","text":"Yeah, the usual explanation of \"air goes faster over the top because they have to meet at the end\" is BS. Especially the 2nd part. A video about the subject [VIDEO] But the explanation I can come up with is: lift is a force due to low-pressure regions caused by laminar flow over a surface. It is essentially \"form drag\" (caused not by the profile facing air directly but by the aft part) but the tricky part is that it is not directly parallel to the flow of air, but also depends on the orientation of the wing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27651269,"author":"MaxBarraclough","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Why we don\u2019t understand heavier-than-air flight","text":"You might get something out of this 2013 talk by former Boeing engineer Doug McLean on misconceptions about lift. [0] [0] [VIDEO] (watch for 5 minutes to get some idea of his main points, or 35 minutes to watch in full. The link will skip the introduction.)","stance":"rec"}],"QLUIExAnNcE":[{"hn_comment_id":39760566,"author":"kube-system","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Dual-Clutch Transmission: Wet or Dry?","text":"I wish more people knew how the power-split devices in modern hybrids worked. The 'eCVT' and similar terminology they often get just doesn't do it justice. They're a beautiful design, and entirely different than 'CVTs' as most people know them. Some of these designs are mind-blowingly simple. My favorite is Honda's E-drive: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44670086,"author":"graton","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars","text":"Current Honda hybrids are like that. The only time the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is directly connected to the drive train is when the speed gets to above around 60MPH. The rest of the time the ICE is used to power a generator which then sends power to the electric motor and/or the battery pack. [VIDEO] has more info.","stance":"rec"}],"QM1iUe6IofM":[{"hn_comment_id":15735988,"author":"ryanmarsh","month":"2017-11","story_title":"When I use classes, when I don\u2019t, what I do instead and why","text":"Code should be written first and foremost for humans to understand, and incidentally for compilers to understand. [LINK] If we can all agree about that then we have to ask ourselves if encapsulating data and behavior at the granularity of classes makes the most sense for human comprehension. In naive OO examples (Animal -> Cat) it does. In practice however, it's debatable (at best). I highly recommend this video by Brian Will who does a much better job explaining this problem than I could. [VIDEO] Douglas Crockford also does a good job of explaining some of the trouble with classes. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21815547,"author":"jmulho","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?","text":"Looking at your top priority books I recalled a slide from one of Brian Will's videos on object oriented programming: \"Object Oriented Programming is Bad\" [VIDEO] . At around the 43:51 he pulls up a slide picturing several of these (and similar) books. Here is a rough quote: \"I can tell you from personal experience of having read these books that you don't need to read them. They don't have answers, they aren't going to square the circle, and you are going to waste productive years of your life trying to live up to their ideals.\" Now that is just one rather controversial opinion, but we are talking about potentially wasting productive years of your life so I wanted to let you know that opinion is out there. That being said, it would probably be hugely beneficial to read a few of those books and then watch a few of Brian's videos (he has three or four on the topic) and sort out your own opinion. Also, Brian's other (not controversial) videos (dozens) are excellent for learning about programming. Also, Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is a keeper. I thought of it last night when I was checking out at a store. I stuck my debit card into the thing, entered my PIN number, then clicked the big blue button that said \"Skip PIN\". The woman behind the counter said \"don't worry about it; everybody does that!\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11342992,"author":"thunderbong","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Object-Oriented Programming is Garbage: 3800 SLOC example [video]","text":"Previous videos Object-Oriented Programming is Bad [VIDEO] Object-Oriented Programming is Embarrassing: 4 Short Examples [LINK] I'm watching the 'is Bad' one, and honestly, it rings too close to my experience. Need to think about this a bit more deeply!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13790940,"author":"NegatioN","month":"2017-03","story_title":"How we secretly introduced Haskell and got away with it","text":"Prodcedural code can also be well compartmentalized and tested. I was also until recently quite convinced OOP was the only way to go, but I'm seeing signs everywhere that a lot of the design-problems I've met over the past few years are at least magnified by OOP. The abstraction promised by OOP is a good thing, however very few people are able to consistently make good, reusable and maintained abstractions. To the point where it becomes a weakness rather than a strength. I don't want a billion wrapper-objects that obfuscate my code, and makes the surface area of it bigger than it has to be. Often I struggle understanding code more because of how it was separated, than because of the complexity of what it actually does. I liked Rich Hickeys talk \"Simple made Easy\" [1] and \"Brian Will: Why OOP is Bad\" [2] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13891540,"author":"hackits","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Principles for C programming","text":"One of the video that can articulate the whole thing better than me is ( [VIDEO] ) It was a long winded written rant. I still use OOP but its more or less glorified name spaces with functions. Today I rather work on procedural code than OOP code. It may have bugs, it may have their own little quirks but its like a old rusted vehicle that still keeps going.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21287849,"author":"lazulicurio","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? [video]","text":"There was an article on state in OOP posted here a few days ago that I found very thought-provoking[1]. The blog post and related youtube videos are pretty interesting as well[2][3][4]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21816270,"author":"crimsonalucard","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2020?","text":"This isn't about OOP vs. FP. This is about OOP vs. everything else. Rust, Go and javascript are three languages that are moving away from the OOP paradigm. None of those three languages are classified as functional. >Is there some resource you can point to that says in the past when faced with situation X developers tended to use pattern Y, these days that has been superseded with way of doing things Z? No. A general trend is an anecdotal observation. Still a quick google search yielded: [LINK] Take a look at the following video: [VIDEO] While I don't agree with a lot of it, I think it sums up my opinion really clearly. It's not about DP's but because DP's focus around OOP and the video is a criticism of OOP therefore the arguments apply to DPs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23510307,"author":"cxr","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)","text":"At the risk of putting readers off by the title, there's a video essay on YouTube called \"Object-Oriented Programming is Bad\"[1]. It's both thoughtful and thought-provoking, although I don't agree with the conclusion. Steve Naroff (from Stepstone/NeXT/Apple) did a recent-ish set of interviews with the Computer History Museum[2][3] and referenced that video a bit (and extemporized about objects in small parts throughout). Side note: Naroff and Brad Cox are set to present a paper on Objective-C at this year's HOPL[4]. I wish it were as readily available as Allen Wirfs-Brock's JS paper for the same conference[5][6]. 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK] 3. [LINK] 4. [LINK] 5. [LINK] 6. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30656862,"author":"zamalek","month":"2022-03","story_title":".NET Myths Dispelled","text":"Here's a really popular video that touches on many of the contentions: [VIDEO] My personal tipping point was the realization that OOP forces you to first figure out how you solution maps to OOP, before figuring out (or iterating on) how it maps to code. It creates nothing more than accidental complexity: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30661383,"author":"DeathArrow","month":"2022-03","story_title":".NET Myths Dispelled","text":"I think this is a valid critique. But then, most of the development (C aside) has been a victim to OOP. I have begun to think that OOP creates more problems than it solves. Added complexity and performance loss being the biggest. It's insane if you peek into a big projects where many developers came and went and each of them read an article about what it seemed an interesting design pattern and tried to implement them. You can have some kind of procedural programming if you use classes just to store data and use static methods. But the frameworks are OOP and there is no way around that unless you write your own frameworks. I am a big fan of Mike Acton's Data Oriented Architecture speeches, but I didn't find a way to implement something similar in C#. For those interested in something better than OOP, here's a few links: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30760714,"author":"cloogshicer","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The Big TDD Misunderstanding","text":"That's fair - I'm not against abstraction in general. I agree that we wouldn't be able to handle the essential complexity of software without it. I'm just saying that each abstraction also has a cost, and makes understanding the whole thing more difficult. Abstraction is, in my understanding, a necessary but costly tool. A lot of my thoughts are summarized well by Brian Will in this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38732728,"author":"_dain_","month":"2023-12","story_title":"C Object Oriented Programming (2014)","text":"This video has a pretty good breakdown of how the \"encapsulation\" and \"decoupling\" promised by OOP is mostly a mirage: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42190248,"author":"cutler","month":"2024-11","story_title":"99 Bottles of OOP now available in Python","text":"OOP is an industry of its own which generates a ton of incidental complexity. See \"Object-Oriented Programming is Bad\" by Brian Wills ( [VIDEO] ) and most of Rich Hickey's excellent videos, especially his keynote at Rails Conf 2012 where he basically told the Ruby crowd they're doing it wrong ( [LINK] ).","stance":"rec"}],"QMVIJhC9Veg":[{"hn_comment_id":34366035,"author":"ts0000","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Vim is touch-typing on steroids","text":"For anyone not understanding why (neo)vim exists, or why some developers prefer it to IDEs, I suggest watching \"PDE: A different take on editing code\" [1]. It reframes (neo)vim as a \"Personalized Development Environment\". I've been using (neo)vim for years, and don't want to use anything else. It isn't just about productivity (I would probably be as productive in an IDE). It's because its _mine_. It's a highly customized environment, catered to my needs. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42818272,"author":"ivanjermakov","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim","text":"> Lua is great, but one JSON file is even better I will never understand how you go back from a very customized editor setup to the one with \"reasonable defaults with little to no things to configure\". Great talk on this topic by TJ: Personal Development Environment: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QMYfkOtYYlg":[{"hn_comment_id":31539343,"author":"yung_steezy","month":"2022-05","story_title":"An uroboros program with 100 programming languages","text":"Yusuke Endoh is a god amongst men. His C program which creates an approximation of fluid dynamics from any text input is insane - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33106405,"author":"daptaq","month":"2022-10","story_title":"A Ruby program that generates itself through a 128-language quine loop","text":"This was written by Yusuke Endoh, who also wrote this submission to the IOCCC that I remember being arguably more astonished when I saw it for the first time: [VIDEO] (ASCII fluid dynamics).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34947174,"author":"6502nerdface","month":"2023-02","story_title":"2D Liquid Simulator with Cellular Automaton","text":"My favorite 2D liquid simulator is this IOCCC2012 submission [1]... simply astonishing. That is the source file shown at the beginning of the video... it compiles without warnings, runs a full blown fluid dynamics sim with surface tension and everything, can take itself as its own input... truly a work of art. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"QMiubC6LdTA":[{"hn_comment_id":13801638,"author":"izacus","month":"2017-03","story_title":"What the death of the CRT display technology means for classic arcade machines","text":"While the CPU is indeed x86-64, the architecture of the SoC and the device is rather different so emulation still won't be all that easy. This 33c3 talk gives a lot of fascinating information on how PS4 differs from your run-of-the-mill PC and what kind of issues they hit when trying to run Linux on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13900779,"author":"jvdh","month":"2017-03","story_title":"The BSD family tree","text":"`It's interesting to note that the PS4 OS is also a forked FreeBSD variant as well.` Here's a nice talk at CCC last year which explains some bits of FreeBSD in the PS4. It's mostly about hardware and how to run Linux on it, but FreeBSD gets a nice mention there too. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29160546,"author":"lathiat","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Hacking group says it has found encryption keys needed to unlock the PS5","text":"The key is on the console (not server side). Historically either they made some silly choices or there was a hardware bug or glitch that let you read out the key that the processor has to be able to access to decrypt the firmware. Search YouTube for fail0verflow and there are some great CCC talks very approachable and understandable about how it was done on other consoles historically. PS4: [VIDEO] Wii U: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40133607,"author":"s1gsegv","month":"2024-04","story_title":"How to reenable undervolting in 2020 Dell Laptops by editing EFI variables","text":"This is a good watch, it goes into detail on the architecture of the PS4 showing how it differs from a standard x86_64 \u201cPC.\u201d [VIDEO] The \u201ctoo long; didn\u2019t watch\u201d summary is that there\u2019s several peripherals, timers, RTC, etc outside of the processor that software will expect to be present (or at least emulated) with specific interfaces. You can implement x86_64 without a lot of this, or redone in a more modern style, but software such as a Linux kernel will have to be patched for it. Typically a modern laptop will have all the legacy peripherals emulated, and the modern peripherals will live alongside them.","stance":"rec"}],"QNznD9hMEh0":[{"hn_comment_id":15029276,"author":"dogruck","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Renaissance\u2019s Medallion hiked investment caps 50 percent after Trump\u2019s election","text":"RenTech is unparalleled and Medallion has proven itself for decades. This interview with Jim Simons is fantastic: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21506006,"author":"nikofeyn","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Renaissance Technologies","text":"the full length one is very good. it gives an understanding as to why simons has been so successful. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40323065,"author":"bmitc","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Jim Simons has died","text":"While I'm not one to fawn after billionaires, I found his life story and personality really fascinating. He really seemed to maintain a humble approach, and in the Numberphile interview, which is excellent, he really emphasized the notion of luck in success. He donated a ton of money in very targeted ways that have been extremely successful. I think because of his humble approach, lack of self-promotion, etc., he's a bit unknown outside certain circles, but his impact in certain areas has been big. While I wish that our country didn't have to rely on billionaires spearheading initiatives, which often goes the wrong way, Simons was absolutely an example of one of the good ones. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10168934,"author":"adenadel","month":"2015-09","story_title":"A rare interview with the mathematician who cracked Wall Street","text":"If you found this interview interesting, there is a longer interview that goes into most of the same topics as well as several others here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10355756,"author":"andrewtbham","month":"2015-10","story_title":"How a reclusive computer programmer became a GOP money powerhouse","text":"The title makes it out like he is a reclusive lone wolf programmer. He is the CEO of renaissance technologies, a hedge fund with 275 employees. I really feel misled and like they trying to portray him as a mysterious, dangerous loner. As a computer programmer, I take offense. Here is an interview with James Simmons, the founder of Renaissance, fascinating guy. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11770761,"author":"xviia","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Mathematicians Bridge Finite-Infinite Divide","text":"Ah, now I understand. For others: Simons Foundations --> James Simons, who is a hedge fund mananger worth ~ $14billion. Excellent interview with Numberphile here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20941488,"author":"melling","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Day Trading for a Living?","text":"For anyone interested in a great story about a world class mathematician who built a company that has used algorithms to beat the market for the last few decades, James Simons has an impressive record: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] One other thing, the Simons Foundation funds Quanta Magazine, whose articles frequently appear on HN: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21423872,"author":"melling","month":"2019-11","story_title":"How Jim Simons Built the World\u2019s Most Lucrative Black Box","text":"Article is about this book that will be released on Tuesday. [LINK] This Numberphile interview with him is interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22182800,"author":"leto_ii","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Medallion Fund \u201cStretches Explanation to the Limit,\u201d Professor Claims","text":"> The Medallion fund has been closed to external capital since 1993, and analysis of the flagship fund\u2019s annual returns suggests that significant distributions are made each year to keep the fund about the same size. For example, despite the fact that Medallion reported annual net returns above 29 percent every year between 2010 and 2018, the fund\u2019s assets under management stayed at about $10 billion throughout that period. This suggests to me that whatever opportunities they're exploiting, they would vanish quickly if they would increase the fund's size (e.g. by compounding returns). It's worth taking a look at the Numberphile interview with Simons ( [VIDEO] ). There he suggests that they're mostly using ML and other relatively simple techniques, with a bit of more advanced math when it comes to predicting how a trade will move the market. This chimes in well with the idea that they have to keep their trades relatively small in order to remain this profitable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25891517,"author":"ljosifov","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Jim Simons proved the textbooks wrong, almost","text":"Collected takeaways from \u201cThe Man Who Solved the Market\u201d - a (good) book about Jim Simons and RenTec that ring plausible to me at [LINK] . A good Simons interview (by Numberphile) is [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31326759,"author":"erk__","month":"2022-05","story_title":"The 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Explanatory Reporting","text":"Numberphile have done a pretty good interview with him which is worth a watch. There is both a full length 1 hour interview [0] and a cut down interview running 18 minutes [1]. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31721397,"author":"WestCoastJustin","month":"2022-06","story_title":"A chat with Ray Dalio","text":"More of a Musk fan myself. Since you mentioned him, Jim Simons has a really good interview too and it was pretty cool to hear his story [1]. Worth a watch if you haven't seen it and are into RenTec. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34759598,"author":"bmitc","month":"2023-02","story_title":"A Jim Simons Market Mystery \u2013 Solved? Not:-)","text":"It's because James Simons is a serious and actually intelligent person with depth of knowledge, and thus, he is one that doesn't need to opine on random things. He also makes a lot of money in a very secretive way. I'm not sure why anyone expects him to expound in detail on how Renaissance Technologies does it. Simons also spends more money than some governments on very serious and advanced scientific research. I suppose he's rather busy with all his investments and philanthropy. Musk is busy selling himself and filling his unfillable ego. You can see in Simons' TED interview with Chris Anderson how he gets rather annoyed with Chris at times, particularly when Chris mentions Simons' \"amazing mind\" at around 8:30. Simons seems, to me, to be a rather pragmatic and humble person who doesn't particularly enjoy flattery. Chris even throws out a quote by Musk at the very end of the interview, fishing for some similar platitude from Simons, but Simons deftly avoids giving out such an empty quote. [LINK] Most interestingly, you can tell Simons' like of science and mathematics and alludes to his interest when he mentions his investment into the origins of life towards the end. There are two interesting talks or interviews I know of with Simons: * Full-length Numberphile interview: [VIDEO] * His lecture on his life given at MIT: [LINK] Simons actually attributes a lot of his success to luck.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36697759,"author":"WestCoastJustin","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Ask HN: I am interested in reading about techniques HFT firms use","text":"You can troll through the job postings of most of these companies and learn about their org structures and tech stacks. When I looked almost nothing is public other than older documentaries. Nanex had some neat wiring diagrams and a few videos clips if you google them. Don't get too excited you're not going to learn about some super secret strategy or anything. This book was good [LINK] in that is sort of explains at a high level how you'd build a company to look at something like this (think it was one of the last chapters). You'll need extremely deep/skilled hardware/networking groups, data acquisitions (think packet capture to data) folks, people to clean and maintenance massive the data repos, internal tool teams, quantitative analysts, traders, management/admin, etc. At this level just getting the fiber to each exchange likely costs many many millions. When you go and look through those job postings you can sort of slot these into your mental model of this flow and start to see how it might be put together. That book is good but if you are new to the topic it will be almost unreadable. At least it was for me. I had to read it 3-4 times over the years and still find new things as my knowledge grows. I don't know if rentec is a HFT firm or what strategies they use but this was a really good interview with one of the founders [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"QOEMv0S8AcA":[{"hn_comment_id":2579137,"author":"vikingux","month":"2011-05","story_title":"G8 agenda calls for \"civilized Internet\": monitored, governed, controlled, taxed","text":"Stop listening to Bob Marley. Listen to Eben Molgen. Youtube: \"Eben Moglen - Freedom in The Cloud\": [VIDEO] Stop going to Starbucks. Send money to The Freedom Box Foundation. [LINK] Otherwise they may prove Richard Stallman correct.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3555482,"author":"bootload","month":"2012-02","story_title":"Facebook Is Using You","text":"\"... I follow a few high profile tech news source, but I never heard of Freedombox. ...\" That's why it's important to read HN. Eben Moglen is one of the few lawyers I bother to listen too. It helps he has a CS background. Moglen did a talk at New York Technology Council & Internet Society, Friday, February 5, 2010 that outlined the idea behind the freedom box. I remember watching & listening to the recording just after the speech. It's worth the watch/listen to get the idea in full. The idea in short, \"Own your own logs\" . Third parties can't infer what they don't have. The talk is located here - [LINK] - [VIDEO] or here for alternative AV formats ~ [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7895355,"author":"logn","month":"2014-06","story_title":"YunoHost: Aiming to make hosting accessible","text":"Eben Moglen gave a great speech on what we're giving up by using centralized services. His call to action was to basically build what YunoHost now is. This video of the speech is an hour long but a good one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QPKKQnijnsM":[{"hn_comment_id":15997384,"author":"chii","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Living in a parking lot in Santa Barbara","text":"this video tells what the average american thinks of the wealth distribution, vs reality (vs ideal): [VIDEO] it's very enlightening.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5392485,"author":"mark_l_watson","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Bills seek end to farm animal abuse videos","text":"+100 for corporations -1 for consumers According to the book \"Diet for a Small Planet\" the beef industry gets $50 billion a year of free water from the federal government. Doesn't sound like fair market capitalism to me. It does sound like our elected officials can be easily bribed. The super rich have won. Hopefully not too far of topic, but a friend just sent me this video link about income inequality - an eye opener! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9449738,"author":"SapphireSun","month":"2015-04","story_title":"College for the masses","text":"For what it's worth, I agree, I think capitalism + some rule tweaks is fine. The culprit is really the beauty of capitalism: accelerating returns on investment. If you get to the head of the race you tend to start to accrue more and more wealth. The problem is that it's sucking the pond dry as there is a relatively stable money supply and much of it is circulating in the stratosphere (often as corporate stock buybacks). Hence the need for rule tweaks to enhance recirculation. This is a cool video I saw a while back that shows the current issue: [VIDEO] I also agree that movement between countries is a modern problem that probably invalidates the old solution (unless multiple countries coordinate - unlikely). So, we have a problem that wealth will continue to concentrate absent controls on the distribution. The US has a lot of political problems right now, and the major commonality is that people at the bottom get the shaft every time. I think it's too much to try to solve every problem facing civilization in one conversation though, so I'll stick to distributions. ;) For what it's worth, believe me, I'm not a hippie. I want to start a company and get rich one day like all of you. I just think it's important to pay attention to the steady state of the system we are participating in.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11366328,"author":"voidlogic","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Make elites compete: Why the 1% earn so much and what to do about it","text":"> I think sometimes a picture really does say 1,000 words. This short info-graphic video makes is pretty clear how dramatically top heavy wealth distribution in the U.S. is: [VIDEO] It also does a nice job of comparing the \"ideal\", to the \"perception\" to the actual.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20702519,"author":"bigtrakzapzap","month":"2019-08","story_title":"It's Gotten Too Hard to Strike It Rich in America","text":"Yeap. And for average people, that leaves a hollowed-out middle-class and not-yet-automated/underpaid tasks like caregiving, teaching, nursing, police, retail sales, retail foodservice, Amazon warehouse stocking, TaskRabbit and Uber driving. People are rightly freaking-out because their existences are threatened while simultaneously others are discussing who's going to be the first trillionaire (much more of the wealth created is only going to the very rich). It seems rational to argue that incel and domestic terrorists, rising homelessness and opioid epidemics are indirectly influenced by the socioeconomic fall-out of rust-belt decay. Infographic video of how bad it really is: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22288616,"author":"anonsivalley652","month":"2020-02","story_title":"In just 23 days, Bill Gates will earn back $747M Spent on Superyacht","text":"Outrage is clickbait gold. So, that is production in for-profit blogging or pseudo-journalism, and also in the business of social media. That said, Bill Gates is both a public figure and a billionaire, so is fair-game for a lot of criticism. He does set a good example, in general, with immense contributions to global public health and policy. Also, there's no U-haul's behind Hearses, so I would buy 50 Singer Porsches and a 747-400ER and crash them into each other with a trebuchet. If someone has more money than they could ever spend, invest or give-away in a scalable manner, then why the hell not buy an aircraft-carrier or a hydrogen yacht? Furthermore, balance sheet inequality is beyond severe in many countries yet there are people in various economic strata who seem to blissfully revel in denying the real pain of others; \"Upton Sinclair effect\" (paraphrasing: It's difficult to get someone to accept facts when they benefit from pretending they doesn't exist.). For more details and because it's not worth getting into politics online, I suggest Robert Reich's channel [0] and his brilliant documentary Inequality for All [1] and the Infographics video on the disconnect between perceived distribution, desired distribution and actual distribution [2]. 0: [LINK] 1: [LINK] 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30083886,"author":"errcorrectcode","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs","text":"Yep. Nearly everyone but equity owners is either hurting or not going anywhere while delivering more for the same or less. Graph after graph Robert Reich has put out there shows the dismalness of the situation. Another infographic video about the distribution of wealth in reality vs. perceived reality vs. desired: [VIDEO] Somehow there is also a systematic economic double-standard that works for some but not others: \"free markets\" of dog-eat-dog inputs (i.e., suppliers), but less free markets on outputs (i.e., monopolies, mega corporations, patents, proprietary-ness, closed-source). Unregulated greed fixes all problems by the \"invisible hand\", right?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35411790,"author":"sangnoir","month":"2023-04","story_title":"\u2018America does so much more to subsidise affluence than alleviate poverty\u2019","text":"> The real meaningful wealth gap in our society is between the HN poster income bracket and the poor, not the one between HN poster income bracket and the billionaires. This is billionaire propaganda[1] to get the middle class to fight thier class war - it is a class war against the poor and middle class . The tax rate of the ultra-rich are at an all time low 1. [VIDEO] shows the gap between people (like you) think the wealth distribution is vs the reality. It was made 10 years ago and has gotten further skewed since then. Start from to 2:40 if you're in a hurry.","stance":"rec"}],"QPgqfnKG_T4":[{"hn_comment_id":8440420,"author":"kjs3","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Human vs. Squirrel: The Battle of Wits Is On","text":"\"Militarizing Your Backyard With Python\" - Perhaps the best presentation to a programming language conference in history. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8440008,"author":"mpdehaan2","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Human vs. Squirrel: The Battle of Wits Is On","text":"In related squirrel news: The \"Daylight Robbery\" documentary has some very interesting squirrel obstacle courses. You can find it on youtube - [LINK] \"Militarizing your Backyard with Python\" shows how to build a water-hose-turret that automatically recognizes and blasts squirrels - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17340136,"author":"Tiki","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Face recognition in images and video with Python","text":"I don't think you'll find a 'quick hack' but what you're asking is definitely possible as a project. Check this video out for ideas(guy used ML/servo controlled squirt gun to get rid of squirrels from his bird house) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QQhVQ1UG6aM":[{"hn_comment_id":34383087,"author":"some-mthfka","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Emacs Is Not Enough","text":"Man, I love these old demos. And I haven't seen this one before. I now understand much better what Alan Kay meant when he said: I felt like sticking my hands right through the display and actually touching the information structures directly. This is the first system I have used, and practically the only one since that I would call truly intimate. [1] Thanks for this link. Well, in terms of UI, I see no problem whatsoever in building such a workflow. The way it will work is: lenses (aka editors) are cells (aka widgets). So you will be able to position things freely, anywhere. You could even connect and see actual symbols get imported and such. As for the CL side, unimporting a symbol (aka removing a connection) is possible, so I see no problem there either : ) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15623054,"author":"colllectorof","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Magic Paper","text":"This line of thinking goes back even further. Back to 1968 when GRAIL was developed: [VIDEO] Pretty amazing stuff, even today.","stance":"rec"}],"QRaACa1Mrd4":[{"hn_comment_id":28371935,"author":"leoc","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Perfect pitch study: Why can\u2019t we identify music notes as well as colors?","text":"Adam Neely also has a video about age-related degradation of perfect pitch and about perfect pitch in general: [VIDEO] . Relative pitch is certainly learnable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28372235,"author":"mkr-hn","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Perfect pitch study: Why can\u2019t we identify music notes as well as colors?","text":"The good news for people without perfect pitch who feel bad about it is that people who learn relative pitch retain it for life while perfect pitch declines precipitously with age. It has other drawbacks. Video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35757435,"author":"2pEXgD0fZ5cF","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch","text":"> For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed instruments or a trombone benefit from perfect pitch. The benefit is rather small if you look at ear training for professional musicians and what properly trained relative pitch looks like. It basically doesn't matter anymore as soon as a professional musician holds his/her instrument. In short: There is basically no difference anymore as soon as the trained musician without perfect pitch gets provided 1 reference tone (which is why perfect pitch gets commonly attributed to people that do not have it). It is more like a \"shortcut\" when it comes to ear training, but ultimately a professional musician with perfect pitch and a professional musician without pefect pitch arrive at basically the same destination in practice, making the advantage minimal when it comes to the things a musician actually does. Rick Beato has a certain kind of obsession with the topic that makes it seem so much more important than it actually is in the real world. Also noteworthy that there are disadvantages to perfect pitch (transposing instruments, losing it with age, etc.), and interesting video on that topic by Adam Neely [1] was already linked. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36430064,"author":"eskaytwo","month":"2023-06","story_title":"How My Children (N=2) Acquired Absolute Pitch","text":"It seems more cognitive than due to physical effects in the ear. Adam Neely had a good YouTube video on it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43043745,"author":"physicles","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Learning fast and accurate absolute pitch judgment in adulthood","text":"This is currently happening to me: I\u2019m starting to be off by a half step when I guess what key something is in. I\u2019m 40 now, and I started noticing it a few years ago. Maybe it started early because I don\u2019t play much music so I wasn\u2019t using it much. This video by Adam Neely was helpful: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43046424,"author":"soyyo","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Learning fast and accurate absolute pitch judgment in adulthood","text":"Maybe someone can correct me, but I don't think this is absolute pitch. It is pseudo-perfect pitch, based on pitch memory, and it was already known that it can be trained. As an amateur musician myself, I understand the desire to have perfect pitch, but it seems that the problem of perfect pitch is seldom mentioned. Usually, people talk about the common annoyances, such as transposed music, non-standard tuning, choruses that drift in pitch, etc... but the actual hard one is that it fades away with age. First, it starts \"shifting,\" and people will start to believe that a note is actually a semitone higher or lower than it actually is, and then eventually, it is completely lost. There is research that indicates that this is very common, and people with perfect pitch are more likely to lose it than to keep it. This is a huge blow\u2014imagine a whole life relying on this one skill to support all your music-related activities, and suddenly, it's completely gone. I think this video gives a nice summary of all this from the point of view of a musician: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QT0I-sdoSXU":[{"hn_comment_id":13697545,"author":"LoonyBalloony","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Robots Aren\u2019t Killing the American Dream","text":"Elections were (IMO) meant to be bloodless revolutions. its just the 1% has captured both primary political parties. Also, the flawed first past the post electoral system discourages competition (IMO to keep it cheaper for the 1% to own the whole process). I'll post some videos from people smarter then me: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16837832,"author":"namlem","month":"2018-04","story_title":"EU copyright proposal could undermine the use of Creative Commons licenses","text":"New Zealand has mixed member proportional representation, which is explained well in this video: [VIDEO] The US's political system is extremely antiquated, and is not at all appropriate for a post-industrial economy. We do have a few nice things though, like a very strong protection for speech. Arguably too strong right now though, as it gives corporations nearly unlimited rights to influence elections.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18507505,"author":"thelasthuman","month":"2018-11","story_title":"The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten by the Public","text":"Elections are supposed to be bloodless revolutions. If you can't effect change through the electoral system, then the non violent solution is to revolutionize how we vote. Relevant videos (IMO) First Past The Post Voting - [LINK] Range Voting - [LINK] Single Transferable Vote - [LINK] Alternative Vote - [LINK] Mixed-Member Proportional Representation - [VIDEO] Bonus video This video will make you angry - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21327398,"author":"cgrealy","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City","text":"New Zealand uses Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) voting. IMO, it's the most representative voting system, precisely because it encourages smaller parties, and essentially forces coalitions. It's a bit complicated, but people are very used to it now. CGP Grey has a great video on it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48592725,"author":"sfRattan","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts","text":"Germany uses mixed-member proportional representation. You cast two votes in each Federal election: one vote for a registered political party at the federal level and one vote for among a list of local candidates from those parties. The ballots famously have the phrase \"You have 2 voices/votes\" (\"Sie haben 2 Stimmen\") on the top [1]. The seats in the Bundestag are parceled out in proportion to shares of the national vote among federally recognized parties, and each party has a list of candidates who may or may not get a seat from that party's resulting allotment, based in part on the popularity of those candidates in their local list elections. The math of it is a bit more complicated than that, but it works quite well to completely sidestep the gerrymandering problem. The flipside is that parties must be registered federally to participate, and this gives the government a great deal of implicit power to exclude parties it doesn't like. CGP Grey has a good YouTube video explaining it, probably better than I have here [2]. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QTJRwKOFddc":[{"hn_comment_id":11965253,"author":"mmiller","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today","text":"It's difficult at this point to come up with an example, since we don't have it yet (that I know of), but to give you an idea, take a look at Lively Kernel [LINK] If you want a demo, you can take a look here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21046473,"author":"apaprocki","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Smalltalk-72 Instruction Manual (1976) [pdf]","text":"Dan Ingalls himself presenting his continued work in the browser at JSConf US 2012 (whole conf was packed in, standing-room only): [VIDEO] Surprised that video has so few views!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47098587,"author":"morphle","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Show HN: A native macOS client for Hacker News, built with SwiftUI","text":"I will not invest any time in improving badly designed software. You can't fix a broken wheel. Your HN newsreader app tries to improve the broken wheel. The least you could have done is make the comment edit field WYSIWYG, make it modeless, see what the text will look like while you type, not after you click update or when you click edit in the tread reader. Your code is just a very limited webbrowser. The webbrowsers, html are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the designer of personal computing, explains why [LINK] This lecture Alan aimed at this audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed this broken wheel 20 years after Alan had showed them how do do it better. Paul Graham should not have based HN (Hacker News) on the web and html but on WYSIWYG, then you would not have had to fix it with your app. The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all: [LINK] [VIDEO] Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in these demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowsers broken wheel a bit. Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it completely.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47101854,"author":"morphle","month":"2026-02","story_title":"CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989","text":"You can't fix a broken wheel. This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser, tries to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel. The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why: [LINK] Some of the comments of youtube are fun too. This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better. Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's broken wheel a bit. The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all: [LINK] [VIDEO] Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it completely: Early Croquet demo: [LINK] Croquet in webbrowser: [LINK] Demo of webbrowser replacement: [LINK] Squeak and all its predecessors: [LINK] Etoys: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"QUcTsFe1PVs":[{"hn_comment_id":32637442,"author":"kibwen","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Hear the World\u2019s Oldest Known Song, \u201cHurrian Hymn No. 6\u201d Written 3400 Years Ago","text":"In a somewhat similar vein, here's Peter Pringle singing the opening lines of The Epic of Gilgamesh (written 4,000 years ago), using our best guess at Sumerian pronunciation and playing a modern recreation of an instrument that the Sumerians would have had, as an attempt to guess what ancient Sumerian music might have sounded like: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40237842,"author":"danans","month":"2024-05","story_title":"How did Ancient Greek music sound?","text":"If you like this kind of stuff, you should listen to Peter Pringle singing the Epic of Gilgamesh while playing a reconstructed oud. While the melodies/rhythms he uses are his creation, the words are from the epic itself which was itself 2000 years old by the time of Ancient Greece. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40245440,"author":"ZeljkoS","month":"2024-05","story_title":"How did Ancient Greek music sound?","text":"If you like this video, you will probably also like Peter Pringle's The Epic Of Gilgamesh In Sumerian: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QUjYy4Ksy1E":[{"hn_comment_id":29454233,"author":"Upgrayyed_U","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How would you have done high school/college/university differently?","text":"You should check out this video: Why Gifted Kids Are Actually Special Needs: [VIDEO] . It is a truly excellent video for helping to understand some of the psychological/emotional challenges of being \"gifted.\" Internalizing the ideas spoken to in this video has been a huge gift to my mental help. For a long time, I held it against myself that I didn't try harder in college, and that if I did, I would be in a much better place. The reality is that for kids who do extremely well in high school with little effort, doing poorly in college is the default response. It takes a major intervention to get and stay on the right path, and many \"gifted\" kids of the past generations never got that since it was assumed they were smart enough to figure things out on their own.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45829353,"author":"mattgreenrocks","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Why aren't smart people happier?","text":"There is a HealthygamerGG video where he talks about gifted kids as special needs kids bc of this factor. I found it really enlightening. I definitely had to confront it in my own life. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QVBlnCTu9Ms":[{"hn_comment_id":19549979,"author":"Vinalin","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Deadlines Are Killing Us, and Almost Everything Else I Know About Leadership","text":"There's an interesting video by Allen Holub that I've seen on the somewhat related topic of ridding software development of estimates (#NoEstimates)[1]. He argues that they're responsible for deadlines that are impossible to meet due to them being based completely on a guess. He then goes on to talk about how we can still get predictive power without giving estimates. I found it extremely interesting and highly recommend it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33096998,"author":"coryfklein","month":"2022-10","story_title":"I don\u2019t believe in sprints","text":"One could write a solid critique of sprints and how they help or don't, and where time is wasted, but this article is overzealous and comes off as motivated more by anger than reasoning. If you want a well-reasoned discussion of where the waste is and isn't, I highly recommend Allen Holub's talk #NoEstimates [0]. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"QVuU2YCwHjw":[{"hn_comment_id":6686137,"author":"TheMakeA","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Fourier Toy","text":"These guys are one of the reasons I love mathematics. Check this out too: [VIDEO] Edit: Didn't realize that this was also linked to in another thread on the front page as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10402019,"author":"JadeNB","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Fourier visualised","text":"I'm only seeing an image, with no explanation, and it took me a while to realise what it was showing; so, in case anyone else is puzzled by it, each image is the sum of the previous one with a new factor (indicated by the \"wheels upon wheels\"). I think that the reconstruction of Homer Simpson's face (which I think I originally saw thanks to OP ColinWright!) may be a more convincing demonstration of the power of Fourier transforms: [VIDEO] . There's a Nautilus article about it, too: [LINK] (EDIT: and an HN post discussing that: [LINK] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12653453,"author":"jordigh","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious","text":"I tl;dr'ed the article (sorry), but I wanted to say one thing about epicycles. They are not wrong and certainly can be used to explain motion, but the problem with them is that you can keep adding epicycles to fit any continuous orbit at all (this actually is because a Fourier series can converge to any continuous periodic function). This is my favourite visualisation of this fact: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QWWgr2rN45o":[{"hn_comment_id":39769158,"author":"throw0101d","month":"2024-03","story_title":"The Google employees who created transformers","text":"This 'conversation' with Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li goes over a lot of the history of things (1h50m): * [VIDEO] * [LINK] ('mirror') Goes over Hinton's history and why he went the direction he did with his research, as well as Li's efforts with ImageNet.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42120662,"author":"throw0101b","month":"2024-11","story_title":"A stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom","text":"See \"Geoffrey Hinton in conversation with Fei-Fei Li\" where the two got together and looked back at the developments over the last ~10 years, including why and how they did their part: * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QWveXdj6oZU":[{"hn_comment_id":21668330,"author":"peteforde","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Visualizing Hip-Hop Melodies (2016)","text":"One of the most educational and interesting explainer videos I've ever seen is Vox's \"Rapping, Deconstructed\". Please consider this required watching, even if you have no interest in hip-hop music: [VIDEO] After you watch that, I suspect you'll hear this Kendrick Lamar track with new ears: [LINK] I know that while I am still very much a jazz/rock person, those videos expanded my perception of what was musically possible. No hyperbole on my end.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25599575,"author":"freddie_mercury","month":"2021-01","story_title":"MF DOOM Has Died","text":"For those unfamiliar with MF DOOM, this video is a pretty good introduction to why he was considered to be technically brilliant. [VIDEO] (Skip to 9:31 if the link doesn't take you there automatically)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33458881,"author":"m463","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Bob Dylan takes us on a wide-ranging tour of songs he admires","text":"I remember back before the internet when \"music discovery\" rarely involved listening to music (except the radio). I would be so interested in music, but READING about music was a horrible hit-or-mostly-miss experience. I could read something like rolling stone and then be disappointed when the music didn't capture the emotion the description portrayed. Even word of mouth was hit-or-miss unless someone had a tape in the car. anyway... now we have infinite discoverability, and with youtube, you can get really interesting journeys like this deconstruction: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QZy4Yml3LTY":[{"hn_comment_id":23624492,"author":"platz","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Haskell for a New Decade [pdf]","text":"and you can learn enough lens to be productive in 1 hours with this talk without reading docs at all. You can skip the theory and go straight to usage: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41028127,"author":"turboponyy","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What resources do you recommend for learning Haskell?","text":"As with anything Haskell, one could simply reply with \"here's the formal definition.\" But in easily digestible terms, it's a way to narrow your view over a collection to a subset that satisfies some property, and perhaps perform some operations on that subset. This video presentation (with a very humorous audience dynamic, might I add) serves as a great introduction by example: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31668429,"author":"ParetoOptimal","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Dhall: A Gateway Drug to Haskell","text":"Good examples in \"Putting lenses to work\" by John Weigley: [VIDEO] Then for a great book that gives a great understanding see Chris Penner's amazing and fun \"Optics by example: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31891576,"author":"ParetoOptimal","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Lenses","text":"> Lenses let you do some amazing things, but I think most of their existence is just thanks to how truly horrible (nested) record field access and updates were. Only for the most basic uses. Architecting programs as folds or traversals can be powerful. One simple example of lenses i can think of being useful for more than record access is: > sumOf (folded . folded) [Just 1, Just 2] 3 More are in this presentation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33417235,"author":"lgas","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?","text":"Definitely agree on lenses being one of the more mind blowing things I've encountered and eventually grokked in programming. I would also recommend [VIDEO] as a good video on lenses in part because the latter portion has some pretty far-out examples of that deep well you mentioned.","stance":"rec"}],"Qam5BkXIEhQ":[{"hn_comment_id":31377659,"author":"ajuc","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Can we make a black hole? And if we could, what could we do with it?","text":"Some other uses of black holes: - space propulsion [LINK] - colonization and energy source [VIDEO] - weapons [LINK] I highly recommend the whole channel.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21182040,"author":"yourapostasy","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Not long ago, the center of the Milky Way exploded","text":"My go-to entry point for exploring those kinds of questions was Isaac Arthur. He goes into the Kardashev scale [1], dying Earth [2], dying stars [3], farming black holes [4], and going past iron stars [5]. A Boltzmann Brain's description bears remarkable similarity to the Judeo-Christian concept of God before time begins, and has been fertile ground for ruminations [6], though none with any verifiable claims backing them in our current knowledge of physics [7]. Now if we could only restructure our implementation of capitalism to be pinned to advancements towards resolving physics questions to survive those kinds of timescales and challenges instead of locked down to a single planet's worth of baryonic matter and cognitive capacity... [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK] [7] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23212988,"author":"cletus","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Timeline of the Far Future","text":"Mandatory Isaar Arthur links: - Civilizations at the End of Time: Iron Stars [1] - Civilizations at the End of Time: Black Hole Farming [2] - Boltzman Brains and the Anthropic Principle [3] [4] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28235345,"author":"lvncelot","month":"2021-08","story_title":"A Dyson sphere around a black hole","text":"I'm pretty sure you're referencing this video: [VIDEO] But on the off-chance you're not - and for everyone else who's intrigued by this comment's concepts - I can recommend watching it.","stance":"rec"}],"Qaq9vlfoGnA":[{"hn_comment_id":16301753,"author":"ZenoArrow","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Gaming's most fiendish anti-piracy tricks (2010)","text":"I thought the two methods described in this video were both good: [VIDEO] Also, the method described here, even though it didn't result in a financially successful game, was pretty clever (pirating the game meant your game company would be defeated by pirates): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28814356,"author":"LaserDiscMan","month":"2021-10","story_title":"The Coding Secrets Hidden in \u201cSonic the Hedgehog\u201d [video]","text":"For those who don't know, Burton explains this in depth here: [LINK] Another one of my favorite ones describes copy protection via intentionally destroyed floppy sectors: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Qct6LKbneKQ":[{"hn_comment_id":36700691,"author":"l__l","month":"2023-07","story_title":"MuseScore 4.1 is now available","text":"If anyone is yet to see it, Tantacrul (on youtube) is now deeply involved with MuseScore (UX lead or similar?); he put out an awesome vid on the design of MS4 at the beginning of the year: [VIDEO] His video on how Sibelius' UX is a pile of shit remains one of my favourite vids on yt: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34074040,"author":"btown","month":"2022-12","story_title":"In praise of MIDI, tech\u2019s hidden gift to humanity","text":"The recent video on MuseScore 4 has a fascinating (though simplified) perspective on how limiting MIDI is: [VIDEO] MIDI's issues in a notation context are twofold: non-standardization of controls for e.g. choosing articulations for string instruments, and an inability to communicate future information if known to the MIDI producer - say, for instance, knowledge that this Note On event is the beginning of a phrase that will last for 2 measures, as known to notation software. There's a real way in which MIDI solved for communicating trigger events over the wire, but was not extensible enough to allow for further backwards-compatible standardization that would let it communicate music over the wire. By contrast, the web evolved from communicating hypertext to sending entire application environments and executable code over the same protocols. The web was born later, to be sure, but in an age where an Arduino can execute JavaScript, I wish we were looking to much more extensible modes of communication as inspiration for what can be done with interoperable musical devices.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40218762,"author":"amiga386","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Printing Music with CSS Grid","text":"That's very much it. You could also make an analogy to the arts of typography and typesetting. It's of the same importance to a composer or musician that the notation is legible and beautiful, as it is to a graphic designer or reader that type and layout are legible and beautiful. If the GP is interested in the topic, there are great videos by Tantacrul on his experience redesigning the notation font for MuseScore [0] and his overview of MuseScore 4.0's engraving improvements [1] - in particular this second video, concerning mainly layout, shows just how far this CSS approach would have to go to have a truly legible, reflowable layout in the face of beams/slurs/ties. (I don't want to take away from anyone on the Sibelius team, they're likely even better experts on the subject than Tantacrul is, but as far as I know, they didn't make long-form Youtube videos about the topic! He also likely got the job of leading the MuseScore redesign thanks to his previous videos that critiqued and reimagined the interfaces of music composition software... including older versions of Sibelius [2] and MuseScore [3]) [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40222082,"author":"asddubs","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Printing Music with CSS Grid","text":"Maybe the segment on engraving of Tantacruls Musescore 4 video is a good explanation of some of the things involved: [VIDEO] the whole video is worth watching as well (and there are several videos on the channel focusing on the UI of notation apps, worth watching for anyone who does UI but isn't interested in music production as well)","stance":"rec"}],"QdzV04T_kec":[{"hn_comment_id":18816651,"author":"staticassertion","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Exploiting the Math.expm1 typing bug in V8","text":"I believe AWS does share customer information within a device, but with a lot of sandboxing below that. You can watch this talk to learn more: [VIDEO] I think the threat model is basically that you'd need a KVM kernel 0-day + the ability to exploit it, so a point of privilege such as outside of the firecracker sandbox.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20253237,"author":"appwiz","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Learning to Build Distributed Systems","text":"Here are a couple videos from reInvent 2018: Jaso talking about DynamoDB internals [LINK] Marc talking about Lambda internals [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QeLu_yyz3tc":[{"hn_comment_id":9664743,"author":"wsc981","month":"2015-06","story_title":"In Greek Debt Puzzle, the Game Theorists Have It","text":"I thought George Friedman had some interesting perspectives on the Greece, Germany and the dept crisis. In this video [0], Friedman explains that keeping all countries in the Euro is very important for the German economy (export + welfare state). And it seems the Greece government uses this knowledge in their negotiations with the EU. --- [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31127815,"author":"coward-guy","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Nearly half of Mariupol has suffered grave damage","text":"Did I say that Russian soldiers are the victims? No. I know they killed civilians. I know that many of them are looters. I strongly against this war. I want it to stop it right now. The purpose of my message is to show that most people only read pro-Ukraine propaganda and they don't want to figure out what were the reasons for this war. They don't want to know that the National Guard of Ukraine has a real neo-nazi battalion, which in 2019, 40 US senators recognized as terrorist. Most people don't want to know that there was a war in the east of Ukraine for 8 years and now it's final stage. They don't want to think about Odessa massacre in 2014 when pro-Ukranian activists burned their opponents alive. Air attack on Luhansk in 2014? I understand that it is easier to construct a chain of thoughts where the Russians are to blame for everything. But not everything is so unipolar. I recommend to watch George Friedman's talk, a man who can hardly be called pro-Russian, but who predicted this conflict: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QeNmydIk8Yo":[{"hn_comment_id":22203030,"author":"hankstenberg","month":"2020-01","story_title":"How we pay attention changes the shape of our brains","text":"Oh yes, I highly recommend this talk given by a physicist exploring what spirituality does to the brain: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21595454,"author":"ta1234567890","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Neural correlates of the DMT experience assessed with multivariate EEG","text":"Sounds like you might have shut down (or have exceptional control of) your default mode network. Watch this video for an explanation: [VIDEO] Would also recommend you check out Gary Weber's other videos and book, it might help you better understand what you have been experiencing.","stance":"rec"}],"QfuK8la0y6s":[{"hn_comment_id":26505637,"author":"mchusma","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Grabby Aliens","text":"If interested in this kind of thing, I always recommend Issac Arthur. He describes the Fermi Paradox and related concepts 100x better than anyone else. Some relevant ones: The Fermi Paradox Compendium [LINK] Fermi Paradox: The Dyson Dilemma v2.0 [VIDEO] I believe he would say that there is no really good explanation to why we don't see other intelligent civilizations except that we are effectively the first (at least in our galaxy), and intelligent space-faring life is exceedingly rare. This is a similar conclusion to Robin Hanson here, but I think I think Issac Arthur does a better job of deeply explaining it. I think both would agree though.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20213368,"author":"krisroadruck","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a nearby star","text":"Check out the Dyson Dilemma for a well-reasoned theory as to why it is a high probability that there is no space-faring intelligent life anywhere in our galaxy or even perhaps our super-cluster. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QgbLb6QCK88":[{"hn_comment_id":28898215,"author":"MikeCapone","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Obsidian \u2013 A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files","text":"This 6-part video series by Nick Milo is a great way for newbies to get introduced to Obsidian and go up the learning curve rapidly: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31241703,"author":"runjake","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Personal Knowledge Management Is Bullshit","text":"Browsing through Linking Your Thinking's YouTube channel[1] might be a good first-start. Despite appearances here, I am not a notes fetishist, so I find his videos rather approachable especially his \"Start Here\" video[2]. Jamie Rubin's blog series[4] is pretty good, too. I personally just create atomic (single-topic) notes, with tags in the YAML front-matter, and store them in a folder structure along the lines of the Johnny Decimal System[3]. I store checklists, procedures, howtos, concept summaries, cheatsheets, and a daily log stored in a YYYY-MM.markdown file. I don't have any comment on the blog post in the article, because this system works really well for me . Obsidian is extensible at hell, but I'm not spending all day looking for new tweaks, I'm just writing notes. Also, since notes are just files stored in directories, I have all sorts of shell/Python-scripted automations and shell aliases to quickly do stuff. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] 3. [LINK] 4. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33191014,"author":"hbn","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Obsidian 1.0 \u2013 Personal knowledge base app","text":"The other replies aren't very helpful imo It's essentially an app for taking notes and jotting down ideas, and you write them in markdown. You can link references to other notes within a note to link up ideas. Here's a 12 minute demo that should give you an idea: [VIDEO] I'm not that quite in-depth with my usage of it. I essentially use it as a scratchpad for a few notes for work. But it does the job","stance":"rec"}],"Qi1Yry33TQE":[{"hn_comment_id":16046669,"author":"vowelless","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What\u2019s your favorite talk from 2017?","text":"Ali Rahimi's NIPS 2017 Test of Time award talk. \"Artificial intelligence is not like electricity (quoting Andrew Ng), but alchemy\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16348678,"author":"ssivark","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Greedy, Brittle, Opaque, and Shallow: The Downsides to Deep Learning","text":"This article is a little too glib in my opinion, preferring citations and statements to substance and explanations. For a more cutting and insightful critique, watch Ali Rahimi's short talk at NIPS 2017 (where he was presenting for a paper that won the \"Test of time\" award, for standing out in value a decade after publication). The standing ovation he received at the end indicate that his comments resonated with a significant fraction of the attendees. [VIDEO] Here's a teaser from the talk: \"How many of you have devised a deep neural net from scratch, architecture and all, and trained it from the ground up, and when it didn't work, felt bad about yourself, like you did something wrong? This happens to me about every three months, and let me tell you, I don't think it's you [...] I think it's gradient descent's fault. I'll illustrate...\" [Addendum] Ben Recht and Ali Rahimi published an adendum to the talk, elaborating on the direction they envision -- [LINK] Ali also has a post taking a stab at organizing some puzzling basic observations about deep learning, and motivating that with analogous historical progress in optics -- [LINK] ----- PS: The first 11 minutes, on the idea of using random features (the main idea in the research he presented) are also interesting.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34786186,"author":"ShredKazoo","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Only You Can Stop an AI Apocalypse","text":">In no way can I believe that the corporation doesn\u2019t have a good understanding of exactly how it can manipulate the AI systems it leverages to achieve its goals. See this talk which compares modern AI work to alchemy (i.e. it works, unreliably, and we don't always know why): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QjJaFG63Hlo":[{"hn_comment_id":19587194,"author":"gambler","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Correctness \u2013 A paradigm for sustainable software development","text":"Most Alan Kay's presentations I've seen were worth watching. Tons of great ideas in each. They really improved how I reason about systems. There is this famous talk from OOPSLA 1997: [LINK] If you want to see what \"practical\" OOP looked like in the 80s, this is a good video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38826879,"author":"patterns","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)","text":"I think this is a fair assessment. I agree that Smalltalk is by far not a complete solution to the problem of building and maintaining complex system but \"only\" an attempt. I found that message passing is an elegant approach to have interoperability on a very basic level. But when protocols and interactions between objects get more complex, it becomes more difficult retain control and comprehension of the evolving system, thus fundamentally better approaches and methods are needed than what is present in a typical Smalltalk system. You might be interested in watching Alan Kay's seminar on object-oriented programming, in which he sketches some ideas on how to modularize an OO system, notably, using a kind of specification language to describe the functions/needs of components and letting the underlying system figure out how to hook them up and deliver messages automatically (as opposed to the direct message passing style in traditional Smalltalks). The relevant part can be found here [1], but I found the entire talk worth watching, since a whole set of issues with OOP and Smalltalk (difficulties in finding and reusing components, weak generality) is being touched upon. Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of the critical ideas have been crystallized into a new kind of Smalltalk - which would be more focused on working on sets of components instead of individual objects/classes (or paraphrasing Alan Kay, making \"tissues\"). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QmOF0crdyRU":[{"hn_comment_id":29297795,"author":"Spinnaker_","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Dopamine Fasting: A Maladaptive Fad (2020)","text":"The author is attacking a position that doesn't really exist. You obviously don't fast from dopamine in general. You fast from dopamine peaks. Continuous spiking of dopamine causes your baseline levels to drop, and you feel shitty and unmotivated. A dopamine fast (of the spikes) is intended to let the levels rise back. If you have 2 hours there is no better guide than Andrew Huberman: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32227676,"author":"asauce","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm in a rut. How did you get out of yours?","text":"I really recommend everyone to listen to Andrew Huberman's podcast [0] on Dopamine and how it affects motivation, focus, and satisfaction. Many people see Dopamine as just a pleasure chemical, but it actually directly influences motivation and focus. We also all have a somewhat set amount of dopamine in a day, so participating in activities that release a short peak of dopamine (drugs, masturbation, etc) means that we have less dopamine, and therefore less motivation for the rest of the day. I was also recently in a low motivation rut, however after making some lifestyle changes I feel much more motivated throughout the day. I stopped getting high, cut out all porn, and added 2 min of a cold water at the end of my regular shower. It was tough to start, but 100% worth it. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33398498,"author":"waprin","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How did you find joy in life?","text":"This is an area I'm pretty passionate about. So first of all, it's pretty clear that you _do_ have some interests. You mention Feynman and Kazantzakis. That sounds like you're interested in the history of science and literature. That sounds pretty cool. Many people will recommend going to a professional which I won't try to dissuade you from but that's not mutually exclusive with examining your lifestyle. I'm obsessed with this podcast by Andrew Huberman (Stanford Neuroscientist) because he's talking about a scientific basis for stuff that has \"felt\" true to me for a while. Your food diet affects how you feel but your information diet does massively as well. There is a neurochemical basis for this with your baseline dopamine levels, that sets your motivation. [VIDEO] I also recommend reading the book Dopamine Nation. Too much social media will fry your brain. If you're checking Hacker News more than a handful times of day, work on doing less of that. If you're addicted to Reddit, Twitter, or pornography, work on doing less of that. Exercise. Spend time in the outdoors. Focus hard on sleep hygiene. Eat less sugar and processed foods. You can not change all this stuff overnight but if you can take baby steps it will help massively. You will not feel better tomorrow or next week but if you take tiny steps you will feel a tiny bit better in a few months. I would also highly recommend learning about mindfulness, meditation, and yoga. A lot of dissatisfaction is aversion to a feeli","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38997576,"author":"sebmellen","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Could inflammation be the cause of myriad chronic conditions? (2019)","text":"I don't understand this comment at all. Huberman, to me, has provided the most nuanced understanding of dopamine and dopaminergic effects accessible to the broader public. There's a lot of clickbait around him, and no doubt many \"influencer doctors\" who make a bad name for themselves, but this is a very clear take on dopamine: [VIDEO] . I wouldn't call it babble. (Huberman is also not a physician, but a PhD, which is an important distinction.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28697008,"author":"mickelsen","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Have you ever spend days unable to do *any* work?","text":"Check out the latest episode from Huberman Labs regarding dopamine peaks and maintenance: [VIDEO] Also an earlier one about addiction, good tips to apply here or similar situations. And it's OK to take some time off and switch to other activities, while your brain replenishes your desire to work on the background. I did, for a couple of months. I was actually in the same spot as you and the guy from another post ( [LINK] ), even thought I was getting some sort of early dementia, as my memory was also affected. The unable to start or keeping are also signs of burnout and ADHD. You could try asking others in your team to give you some extra hand-holding, motivation or accountability. Some bumps in the road are solvable with a bit of encouragement, but it's hard to open up given that delivering what they ask from you is the expected thing. Sometimes even when you want to proactively tackle on these matters, it's a process that takes a while. That rejection you feel right now is totally common, and it's could be a sign that you should stop trying for now, it doesn't mean that you won't like it / be able to do it in the future, just a protection mechanism from your body overreacting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28781005,"author":"slothtrop","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Facebook is an addiction treadmill most may never be able to quit","text":"Also mine. Have gone long stretches between relapses during which time I've felt noticeably better. What typically happens is I'll rationalize its use after a spell, but will find I'll want to watch the next day, and the next. Particularly if sleep suffers, just to get some deliverance. From what I've learned, large sustained dopamine hits lead to deficits in baseline levels. I could intuit early on that some of my negative experience (including sleep) was linked to consumption, but managed to convince myself each time that I \"just need to better manage it\". Even if the truth stares you in the face it's hard. I like to think of it as a \"mild\" addiction owing to frequency (it wasn't always) but still an addiction, which is like playing with fire. It can always get worse. I've been enjoying Huberman's videos on the topic of dopamine and other things - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28850679,"author":"kashyapc","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Dopamine, Smartphones and You: A battle for your time","text":"On understanding dopamine, FWIW, I recommend two excellent resources: one is Robert Sapolsky's 720-page tome, Behave \u2014he gives a robust intro to dopamine in the second chapter, \"One Second Before\", and expands on it further in the book. The other is prof. Andrew Huberman's podcast. He recently did a 2-hour episode[1] on dopamine. The segment on smartphones and how they alter our dopamine circuits starts at 01:15:28[2] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29298629,"author":"simple10","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Dopamine Fasting: A Maladaptive Fad (2020)","text":"Has anyone here tried 24 hours isolation [1] to reset perception of time? It's related to dopamine fasts but reportedly more profound. Andrew Huberman from Stanford has an excellent podcast [2] on dopamine. He goes in depth on the importance of using dopamine in the pursuit of goals with a caution around the come down period after achieving goals. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31288310,"author":"danenania","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Why do you waste so much time on the internet?","text":"The positive side of plasticity is that your brain can also re-adapt fairly quickly to a lower (healthier) level of stimulation if you can get over the initial hump. My understanding is that most of this is regulated by dopamine, and your dopamine system needs time to reset in order to adapt to new patterns. In the meantime, it's normal to feel bored or lacking in motivation; that's part of the reset process and you just need to wait it out. Personally, I've found it's easiest to change habits and patterns via some sort of healthy distraction that takes my mind off whatever I'm trying to change. Travel, getting into a new hobby/project, or starting a really good book are all great for this. Andrew Huberman goes into this stuff in depth in his podcast, especially this episode: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32357955,"author":"8vectors","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Solution for Distraction?","text":"It would probably help if you reduced dopamine spikes and made them more intermittent (less regular). If you stack multiple pleasures together it could be making it harder to focus. (Like drinking + watching something you enjoy + snacks, or smoking weed + playing video games). [VIDEO] This video explains the science behind it. Make your dopamine spikes more random and intermittent and try to reduce the peak on them by sometimes enjoying your pleasures separately instead of stacking them all at the same time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37414397,"author":"xwowsersx","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Cal Newport: Overstimulation Is Ruining Your Life","text":"An insightful podcast from Andrew Huberman: \"Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction | Huberman Lab Podcast #39\" \u2014 [VIDEO] And a clip: \"Andrew Huberman - What Overusing Social Media Does To Your Brain\" \u2014 [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39460290,"author":"StuffMaster","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Stop postponing things by embracing the mess","text":"+1 for Andrew Huberman Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction: [VIDEO] ADHD & How Anyone Can Improve Their Focus: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"QpAhX-gsHMs":[{"hn_comment_id":28168676,"author":"AlbertoGP","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Show HN: C programming language extension: Cedro pre-processor","text":"Yes, that\u2019s a very clean and robust approach. In the \u201cDeferred resource release \u2192 Related work\u201d section, one of the links is to a video from the ACCU 2021 conference by Luca Sas titled \u201cModern C and What We Can Learn From It\u201d that explains modern C techniques, and your one is mentioned at 23\u203215\u2033: [VIDEO] If you haven\u2019t watched it, I can recommend it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32609186,"author":"belter","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Why aren't there C conferences? (2018)","text":"\"Modern C and What We Can Learn From It - Luca Sas [ ACCU 2021 ]\" - [VIDEO] \"Linux User/Kernel ABI: the realities of how C and C++ programs really talk to the OS - Greg Law\" - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34106582,"author":"thom","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Learn C in 2023?","text":"Modern C by Jens Gustedt is quite good. This video gives a good overview of some modern patterns in C: [VIDEO] I think the best thing you can do is go find a unit testing library you like the look of, maybe some tools for address/leak sanitization, and spend a good amount of time learning CMake and creating a build/project workflow you're happy with. Coming from Rust you've got great tooling and good guardrails in place to keep you on the happy path, I think getting into that groove early in C where you can run experiments and break things in a sane environment is important.","stance":"rec"}],"QpDn4-Na5co":[{"hn_comment_id":24361507,"author":"scns","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Bardcore","text":"My favourite album from that genre is Lazerhawk's debut album Redline, awesome for programming IMO: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9088209,"author":"mzs","month":"2015-02","story_title":"\u201cJust the Beginning of What We Can Do on Super Nintendo\u201d","text":"MM is good, I'm a fan of Lazerhawk too myself: [VIDEO] Drove straight from NY to IL one day with that on repeat.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28976557,"author":"noir_lord","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Gunship \u201cTech Noir\u201d Breakdown","text":"Also Lazerhawk Skull and Shark - [LINK] Redline - [VIDEO] (my intro to the genre closing on a decade ago). Trevor Something - Trevor Something Does Not Exist [LINK] Hands down my favourite in that genre.","stance":"rec"}],"QqrpFICtqpQ":[{"hn_comment_id":44837651,"author":"epistasis","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people","text":"The rises in health care costs were happening long before Obamacare, and if anything Obamacare reduced the rate of rises or kept them at the same level. We have chosen this to have high access, high quality care, while also choosing to reduce health with the way we subsidize our food system and force indolent lifestyle with car-dependent urban planning. The best primer on the choices that make our healthcare expensive, and where the money goes, are in this video: [VIDEO] Unfortunately our national discussion of health care is not centered on the reality of the discussion, and is several levels of technical depth too shallow for us to have a public discussion that could reduce costs without reducing the care level for many peopl.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43363812,"author":"epistasis","month":"2025-03","story_title":"'Profit-Enhancing Middlemen' Fuel $200B Health-Care Chaos","text":"There are very very serious financial problems with going down this route. Private insurance pays for a lot of Medicare, because Medicare reimbursement rates do not cover the costs of Medicare patients in many parts of the country. One of the better sources of information I have seen on this is actually a YouTube video, something I don't normally recommend, but getting a wholistic viewpoint is somewhat difficult otherwise: [VIDEO] We could increase the medicare contribution cap (samething like only the first $175k of income has medicare tax applied to it), but I'm not sure that's going to fill the massive gap. Perhaps increasing the rate would also work. There could be some good things about this process, I just want to bring up that it's not a magic bullet because we will run into access problems unless we also solve the funding side of things. And when there are access problems, the people who lose access will be those with the least to pay.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47415073,"author":"8f2ab37a-ed6c","month":"2026-03","story_title":"US commercial insurers pay 254% of Medicare for the same hospital procedures","text":"There's a super long episode on The Drive going deep into the mechanics and economics of the US healthcare system, could be a useful addition to the conversation here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QsBT5EQt348":[{"hn_comment_id":14705650,"author":"Fej","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Japan's population is falling faster than ever before","text":"If you're worried about overpopulation on Earth, check out Kurzgesagt's video on the topic. It's absolutely essential. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14382534,"author":"xiaq","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas (2012)","text":"The trend is universal, although some developing countries have not reached that stage yet. Kurzgesagt has a good video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27566495,"author":"rocknor","month":"2021-06","story_title":"The American West is drying out. Things will get ugly","text":"> the likes of China and India are by far the biggest culprits while Africa is projected to quadruple it's population while rapidly industrializing. The growing number of people is the main problem. Bullshit. The western ignorance and entitlement is unreal. Americans and Europeans are responsible for the vast majority of historical CO2 emissions, while having a small fraction of the world's population. If someone is to be blamed for climate change, it's them. [LINK] What gives you the right to stop the rest of the world from industrializing? Look at the obscene CO2 emissions caused due to over-consumption in western countries: [LINK] Poor countries are going through the standard demographic transition model: [LINK] . You cannot blame them for having high birth rates, even Europe and America had high birth rates when they were poor. Birth rates in India and China are already below replacement, Africa's will also be later in the century. Do you think people in America are more entitled to have babies than in the rest of the world? The problem is not growing population, correlation is not causation. The root problem is lack of renewable tech that can sustain the modern quality of life for all humanity. I suggest watching this: [VIDEO] It's high time people stopped the tiresome and senseless bitching about India/China/Africa having too many babies, and focused on renewable energy research instead.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27591295,"author":"rocknor","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Australia opposes Great Barrier Reef \u2032in danger\u2032 listing","text":"> if the 1 billion \"rich people\" drop their emissions down to below average then the majority of the problem will still be here. True. But the \"majority\" is not as big as you think. > there will be 1 billion less wealthy people Just wrong. There are lots of ways to reduce emissions without any effect in wealth. Eating less meat is one example. > for no particular net gain. Very wrong, there are huge gains: [LINK] > I advocate the radical approach of encouraging people to have less children. I knew you would say this, I was just waiting for it. Global birth rates have been in freefall for decades now, it's tragic that people don't know about it. You'd assume that supposedly \"better\" education in western countries would make people more aware, but western governments are only concerned with maintaining global western hegemony which requires falsely accusing the rest of the world and keeping their citizens ignorant. Also, you can't force people to have less children, that's inhumane. I suggest you go through the following links. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34223505,"author":"mLuby","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Should we care about people who need never exist?","text":"It's survivorship bias\u2014where bias means skewed from the full distribution of choices people and societies made, not bias as in discrimination. Most of the families and societies that didn't prioritize population growth (by reproduction or immigration) aren't around to advocate for that approach's merits, whereas those that did are. Fun fact: for each human alive today there've been 15 deceased humans ever. As zombie apocalypses go, 15:1 doesn't sound too bad. Kurzgesagt has some interesting videos on human population if that's your style: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QspuCt1FM9M":[{"hn_comment_id":9397103,"author":"david-given","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch","text":"You can't mention PaulStretch without linking to Justin Biebier's totally amazing ambient orchestral piece, U Smile: [VIDEO] I'm not even kidding. It's superb. Put it on, turn the lights out, imagine yourself on an alien beach, and feel the stress drift away...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5873389,"author":"epsylon","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Music to Let you Concentrate","text":"For the lazy, here's the song mentioned: [VIDEO] This was created using paulstretch [1], a program to transform normal audio using extreme stretches. I've tried it on a few songs I liked and it does really an excellent jobs of creating extremely fluid ambiances. The triple parentheses on the first video is a nod to Sunn O))) [2], an American drone / noise / ambient metal band which features super long songs with droning saturated guitars (playing on vintage cranked up to 11 Sunn Model T amps) and usually no drums. One of my favorite songs from them and perhaps one of the best introduction to their music for the non-initiated is titled Alice [3], though perhaps it's not as representative of their music as, say, Ra at Dusk [4]. (Sunn O))) was heavily influenced by the pioneer drone metal band Earth, and their mindblowing album Earth\u00b2: special low frequency version [5]). [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"QtxVdC7pBQM":[{"hn_comment_id":48902376,"author":"beambot","month":"2026-07","story_title":"World-First 'Super Alloy' Could Transform the Way Metals Are Made","text":"The Veritasium video on how jet engine turbine blades are \"grown\" in an aligned crystalline structure for enhanced material properties (e.g. thermal performance) is absolutely fascinating & well worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46006235,"author":"hnuser123456","month":"2025-11","story_title":"NTSB Preliminary Report \u2013 UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf]","text":"I know Veritasium gets posted here a lot, but a few days ago he posted a deep-dive into the the engineering of jet engine turbine blades. Turns out they're made from a single crystal of a superalloy that entangles itself at a molecular level such that it actually gains strength as it's heated, only losing strength above 1200 degrees C / 2200 degrees F. Below that temperature, as long as the strain on the part is below the plastic deformation threshold, it's not really losing any strength at all over time. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QyJZzq0v7Z4":[{"hn_comment_id":25567850,"author":"seer","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Functional programming in C++ (2012)","text":"This is indeed a very interesting question! I\u2019ve also asked myself that time and time again, along the path of slowly discovering what this FP thing is all about over the course of my career. It does look wonderful, it does save you a lot of effort in some cases, where \u201csome\u201d is a vast swathes of computational problems. And its so damn elegant. A lot of examples are thrown around were a bunch of lambda calculus can result in 10-20 fold reduction in source code size. So where\u2019s the catch?There has to be something wrong right? Well recently I stumbled upon a clojure conf talk that tried to tackle precisely this question. [VIDEO] The short of it is that its more of a historical inertia and chance than any specific hidden gotcha. Fascinating talk.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28515333,"author":"yewenjie","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Functional programming is not popular because it is weird (2016)","text":"This talk by Richard Feldman is an excellent discussion about why Functional Programming is not the norm - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21306694,"author":"quickthrower2","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Why are private/hidden methods so popular in OOP APIs?","text":"I know the answer, thanks to watching a recent video by Richard Feldman on why functional programming isn\u2019t popular yet. I recommend watching it for some interesting talk about programming languages in general, it\u2019s on YouTube at [VIDEO] Anyway what privates give you is what everyone wants from a programming language: modularity. We want to be able to expose an api to some code and for it to have some inner workings that we don\u2019t see because: 1. If we know they can\u2019t be touched we have some implicit guarantees about our program. E.g. the mouse pointer cannot go off screen even if we try to make a call to do that. 2. It is simpler for a programmer to understand the api which might be 1% of the size of the module itself with all private\u2019s. 3. I can change my private\u2019s without breaking your calls. Essentially a minor version change in Semvar parlance instead of a major breaking change. 4. Make impossible state impossible! By guarding the state. All these things require modularity, and OO uses classes and private members to provide that modularity. Elm uses modules and the exposing keyword (or lack of!) as a contrast. JS modules are similar with a lack of an export allowing you to hide something. That something you did export can use for state or functionality. There is an old IIFE trick that works this way also. Making everything public is a bad idea, as you miss out on modularity advantages. Not sure how Ruby hides things as I haven\u2019t used it for a while but I\u2019m sure there is a","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21460183,"author":"fulafel","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Why is functional programming not more popular?","text":"In the market of ideas, there usually isn't any reason that makes the good ideas unpopular. That's the default outcome. Some good ideas eventually make it to mainstream / conventional wisdom because there's some second factor that brings them to the spotlight. For languages it might be a killer app, big corporate investment, etc. In [VIDEO] Richard Feldman puts up a (well founded IMO) argument that OO became accidentally popular because of C++. C++ didn't do OO well, nor was OO the main benefit of C++, it just happened to be something that came with C++.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21859628,"author":"huy-nguyen","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"\u201cWhy isn\u2019t functional programming the norm?\u201d by Richard Feldman. Spoiler: not on the basis of merits. [VIDEO] \u201cReact to the future\u201d by Jordan Walke. Why ReasonML is a logical extension of ReactJS\u2019 programming paradigm. [LINK] \u201cTyping the untyped: soundness in gradual type systems\u201d by Ben Weissmann. The trade offs that various gradual type systems make based on their language constraints. [LINK] \u201cLet\u2019s program like it\u2019s 1999\u201d by Lee Byron. How the mutual feedback loop of abstraction, syntax and mental model drives the evolution of web technologies. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22148239,"author":"agentultra","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Haskell Problems for a New Decade","text":"> If in the next fifty years more than, say, 3% of programmers will be programming in a language like Lean, I will eat my hat. You're not even putting any stakes on the table. That's such a safe bet. It's unlikely you'd even have a chance at losing the odds are so stacked. There's a great talk on why functional programming is not the norm: [VIDEO] The short of it is: network effects . Haskell, OCaml, SML... they've never had the benefit of being the exclusive language to a popular platform like the web, macOS, or UNIX. They've not yet had a killer app like Rails or Numpy/SciPy/PyTorch. They've certainly not been foisted on the market with a war chest of marketing dollars like Java and C#. And they're not an incremental improvement on the status quo with an obvious, easy benefit. > Now, try to explain to a programmer what kind of object id is That's a rhetorical exercise. You can take a random snippet of APL or Fortran and the outcome would be the same. Every language requires training and effort to learn. I teach people Haskell and TLA+. If you think teaching people the value of a language like Haskell is hard you should see the blank stares I get on the first day teaching experienced developers TLA+. Interested folks will come around eventually and have their moment but it takes training and dedication to get there. > was chosen not with the best interests of programmers in mind I'm well aware. I converse regularly with the maintainers of mathlib and the community. I know th","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24357583,"author":"agentultra","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Why is OOP still so widely spread?","text":"Richard Feldman gave an interesting talk on this in 2019 [0]. He was trying to answer why functional programming isn't mainstream but the opposite is what we're posing here and I think it's for many of the same reasons. Network effects : a lot of these languages were mainstream earlier on and got buy in from a lot of folks who are invested in their continued adoption and success. Platform exclusivity : some companies push their own language ecosystems on their platforms and those languages are often OOP/multi-paradigm languages. Specifically to OOP we have to ask why is the particular style of C++/Java OOP the norm? Why didn't Eiffel, Smalltalk, or Self reach the same market? [0] [VIDEO] edit : forgot the link -- oops.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25466963,"author":"blunte","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Casey Muratori on getting rid of OOP mindset [video]","text":"Keep in mind that what may seem like \"personality fit\" may be more related to \"learned imperative programming first\". As an analogy, depending on which spoken language a person learned first (as a child, _automatically), learning some new languages may be particularly difficult or quite natural. If we had all learned functional programming concepts first, our minds would be trained to think that way. We all learned functional (declarative) math, and we don't even think about it as such. It's just math. This video gives some plausible explanations as to why imperative programming is more common than functional: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28520187,"author":"rg111","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Functional programming is not popular because it is weird (2016)","text":"I recently watched this talk- Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? ( [VIDEO] ) Here's the HN thread- [LINK] I learned in that talk, among other things that Oracle spent $500 million to promote and market Java. - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31198232,"author":"randito","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: The Crystal programming language \u2013 what are your impressions?","text":"There's a great talk -- [VIDEO] -- Why Isn't Functional Programming the Norm? \u2013 Richard Feldman -- that goes into this. It's a discussion of \"why\" programming languages succeed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33630445,"author":"senand","month":"2022-11","story_title":"What\u2019s so great about functional programming anyway?","text":"That doesn't mean the imperative languages are \"better\", though, just more popular. I recommend the following video titled \"Why isn't Functional Programming the Norm?\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37315183,"author":"ah27182","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?","text":"I felt that some of your questions, as well as the general history of popular programming languages, were well laid out in this talk: [VIDEO] TL;DW: The presenter mentions that Python experienced a slow but consistent growth trend, leading to its current prominence. Other points he highlighted about its success align with much of the sentiment expressed here.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39190282,"author":"eduction","month":"2024-01","story_title":"A Tour of the Lisps","text":"This is a great talk on exactly this topic from a Clojure conference, if you want a long answer. It focuses on the \u201cfunctional\u201d feature of Clojure but all of it applies to the whole language (and probably any good lisp) IMO. [VIDEO] My brief text answer (focused on Clojure): -python has been around about 20 more years than Clojure -the advantages of Clojure vs python/etc probably aren\u2019t nearly as big as python vs a non memory managed, compiled, static language like C. That whole generation of \u201cscripting\u201d languages had the wind at their backs in a way Clojure and its contemporaries never quite will (though Clojure et al tend to be much better at concurrency and parallelism and this will help a lot) -unfamiliar syntax (not Algol like) and paradigm (not oop)- and the truth is many programmers back away slowly when a thing is too alien -hasn\u2019t found a niche as big as data science or scientific computing or CRUD website building - I think python has aggregated some great academic niches, at least one of which (ML/data science) exploded in popularity. Ruby had the rails community. Clojure seems to have some popularity in fintech but has no big single niche yet that it dominates.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45849399,"author":"agentultra","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Why I love OCaml (2023)","text":"Why isn't it more popular? I think Richard Feldman [0] proposed some of the most reasonable theories as to why functional programming isn't the norm. Your language needs to be the platform-exclusive language for a widely used platform, have a killer application for a highly desired application domain, or be backed by a monster war-chest of marketing money to sway opinions. Since Feldman's talk, Python has grown much faster in popularity in the sense of wide use in the market place... but mostly because it's the scripting language of choice for PyTorch and AI-adjacent libraries/tooling/frameworks which is... a killer application. I like OCaml. I started evaluating functional programming in it by taking the INRIA course online. I spent the last four and half years working in Haskell. I've built some side projects in Zig. I was a CL stan for many years. I asked this question a lot. We often say, \"use the best tool for the job.\" Often that means, \"use the tool that's available.\" I think languages like OCaml, Rust, Haskell etc can be \"popular,\" but in the sense that people like to talk about them and want to learn them and be able to use them (at least, as trends come and go). It's different from \"popular\" as in, \"widely adopted.\" [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"QyQvfaW54NU":[{"hn_comment_id":20140539,"author":"mehrdadn","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The toll climate change is taking on oceans","text":"Related: GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi gave a fantastic talk on carbon debt (with a rather depressing 238 views at the moment; I hope more people watch...): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20141455,"author":"symplee","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The toll climate change is taking on oceans","text":"Agreed, this is an excellent talk. Main takeaway is to view the problem as debt which has to be paid off. Simply stopping new purchases will not pay off the debt. Above point summarized here, timestamp 22:15 - [VIDEO] We currently have a one trillion ton carbon debt. As a though experiment, for a starting solution to iterate upon, this can be \"paid off\" with 20 billion trees / year, for 50 years. It would take 9000 drones, 450 staff, $80 mil/year. And a total land area half the size of Brazil. Using current technology. Compare this with alternative approaches being thrown around with price tags of 1 trillion+.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"R13BD8qKeTg":[{"hn_comment_id":14135256,"author":"burntrelish1273","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Receding glacier causes Canadian river to vanish in four days","text":"Definitely. Another good idea is to show the difference between reality and data can be overwhelmingly significant. Videos demonstrating this with examples: - \"The Bayesian Trap\" [VIDEO] - \"Is Most Research Wrong?\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15733174,"author":"partycoder","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Think Bayes: Bayesian Statistics Made Simple (2012)","text":"Another problem for the less familiar with the Bayes theorem is what is described as the \"Bayesian trap\", explained by the youtuber Veritasium: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"R2Aa4PivG0g":[{"hn_comment_id":12822141,"author":"roller","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Eve: Programming designed for humans","text":"For an introduction to Dedalus with less reading, Peter Alvaro's 2015 Strange Loop talk was fantastic. [VIDEO] --- Edit: Actually Chris Granger gave an Eve talk at the same conference. It's interesting to see how Eve has evolved since. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19509999,"author":"alexmingoia","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Datalog as the only language for web programming, logic and database","text":"Not anything I\u2019d want to use. The closest is prolog. But at a higher level this is what Eve attempted to do. Eve was built using the semantics of Dedalus which is built from datalog. I highly recommend watching Peter Alvaro\u2019s Strangeloop talk about creating Dedalus - it\u2019s exactly the same train of thought you\u2019re onto. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10821543,"author":"jitl","month":"2016-01","story_title":"BOOM: Berkeley Orders of Magnitude \u2013 Declarative Languages And Systems","text":"This Strangeloop talk by Peter Alvaro is a good introduction to the thinking behind some of these systems: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16840969,"author":"svieira","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Also: I see what you mean: [VIDEO] and Applying Failure Testing Research @Netflix: [LINK] both by Peter Alvaro (second also includes Kolton Andrus) are thought-provoking looks at failure modeling in distributed systems.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18775636,"author":"iamwil","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Please do not attempt to simplify this code","text":"Your language example, and the burger example seems flipped. I assume you prefer artisan burgers, which means you like no language restrictions. Badly chosen restrictions are not good, we can all agree. But what do good restrictions look like? Back in the day, programmers prided themselves on being able to do their own memory management, and bristled at the idea of a compiler or the runtime doing it for them. Now, that's the exception, as most of the time, we don't think about memory management in most languages we program in. As time marches on, we'll find more of these restrictions that we all eventually agree are good practices, and the next generation of programmers will take it as a given in programming. As a look beyond functional programming restrictions, I encourage you to check out Peter Alvaro's talk on Distributed Systems. Here, he talks about how queries over distributed systems is really hard to reason about, because time is now relative--there's no central clock to measure time. However, if we restrict ourselves to a language whose queries cannot express negation, a lot of the hard stuff about distributed systems go away. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19425802,"author":"ComNik","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Introduction to Datalog","text":"If model-theoretic semantics and the various ways to slice, dice, and extend Datalog are interesting to you, then almost any talk by Peter Alvaro might be as well. In particular: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"R2_Mn-qRKjA":[{"hn_comment_id":20024389,"author":"azhu","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How to initiate or respond to small talk (not the programming language)?","text":"Thought of something else worthwhile to add: for myself and many others, there may be some set of \"abnormal\" psychological factors that make it exceptionally difficult to trial yourself by fire. If you are that, I offer you this clip from one of the wisest television shows ever created, Bojack Horseman. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34692875,"author":"justsocrateasin","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Screw motivation, what you need is discipline","text":"It's funny though because you only need a short amount of discipline. Because after you use discipline for a while, it just gets way easier as it becomes a habit. Reminds me of this great Bojack Horseman clip - [VIDEO] Years and years ago I started training seriously for a triathlon. Then a half ironman. Then a marathon, and after 2-3 years of having a few races a year on the calendar, I just started exercising every day. At the start, a lot of the days took discipline/motivation to get out the door. After a while, it was just a few days of discipline a week. Then a few days a month, then a few days a year. Now it's automatic, and something I actually look forward to rather than dread (obviously in a hard training cycle there are some sessions I dread, but it's almost like my brain turns off and my body subconsciously gets my stuff and gets me out the door). The longer you do something the easier it is.","stance":"rec"}],"R2paSGQRwvo":[{"hn_comment_id":35024624,"author":"_dain_","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Understanding British Money: What's a Quid? A Shilling?","text":"A better explanation is Lindybeige's video about pre-decimal British coinage: [VIDEO] It goes into the underlying mindset behind this seemingly bizarre system. Basically: - the penny was always the fundamental unit. every denomination was defined in terms of the penny, not the pound or the shilling. It wasn't like the modern system where the fundamental unit is the pound (or dollar) and pennies (or cents) are defined as hundredths. - the system was evolved, not designed - different multiples and fractions of the penny went in and out of fashion at various times, so at any given time the system wasn't quite complicated as you might think, even though in retrospect it can be hard to keep track of every denomination from every period - the shilling (12 pence) and the pound (240 pence) stuck around and became important denominations because those are highly-composite numbers and so have lots of ways of splitting them up And this isn't stated explicitly in the video but it seems the system lost its value due to inflation, not any desire for metrication. Nobody gave a damn about pennies by the late 60s. You could very well make a new version of \"old money\" with modern coinage, just inflated by a factor of 100. A neo-shilling = 12 dollars, etc. Could be a fun cyberpunk worldbuilding detail.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48460880,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Spanish traders set the standard forGnuCash database design","text":"I agree. [Time sink warning] [Fractions warning] There is an interesting video by Lindybeige that explains the old British coin system. The part about the guinea is at minute 42, and in particular explains why it was worth 21 instead of 20. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"R37zkizucPU":[{"hn_comment_id":3339025,"author":"shinykitten","month":"2011-12","story_title":"Louis CK self-produces, self-publishes content on his webpage","text":"In this video [1], he explains what happened \"somewhere along the way\". TL;DW: He failed at being a successful comic by telling the same jokes for 15 years, then got inspired by and emulated George Carlin, threw everything away and started over. His story is not only inspiring, it transcends comedy. The idea that a mixed but passionate reaction is better than a lukewarm one applies to startups as well as entertainment. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5508904,"author":"goatforce5","month":"2013-04","story_title":"The Joke\u2019s on Louis C.K.","text":"Here's 10 mins or so from Louis CK at a tribute to Carlin: [VIDEO] He says his first hour of comedy took 15 years to build up, and he hated all of it. Then he heard an interview with Carlin where he said every year he threw all his old jokes away and would have to come up with a new hour of material, forcing him to get to the core of what was important and real (or something)... And that's when Louis says his career took off.","stance":"rec"}],"R3ZJKN_5M44":[{"hn_comment_id":34077996,"author":"FrontierPsych","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The Cost of Being Poor: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor in America","text":"I understand what you're saying. However, I pretty much learned all there was to learn about them in 15 minutes when I got my first one. I read about them. I'm not the smartest person in the world, by far. If I can easily learn now, then anyone can learn this stuff on their own, in 15 minutes. It is NOT complicated. Getting information is exceptionally easy, and a LOT easier than when I got my first one. I knew from when I got my first credit card that I had to pay off the balance in full, every month. That using a credit card should be the exact same as using cash. You never buy anything unless you actually have the cash first. Then you can use the credit card and pay it off at the end of the month. It's so easy to understand. It doesn't matter about credit cards companies and their obfuscation. I didn't learn it from credit card companies. I just learned it because it was easy to learn. How difficult is it? Don't use a credit care unless you have the cash first . You pay it off in full and you don't pay interest, whatever level it is - .01% or 40% - it does not matter what the interest rates are, unless you don't pay on time. And the problem is that people don't care. They think emotionally, and don't give a crap about future ramifications. This is my favorite video that explains it all: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11320889,"author":"ezequiel-garzon","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)","text":"SNL made a wonderful infomercial in 2006 about point 3: avoid debt. Depending on your location you should be able to watch it in [1] or [2]. During my years in the US it always puzzled me that, upon reaching my credit limit, it would not just increase without any interaction, but sometimes double! American \"plastic\", as hailed in \"The Graduate\", was a significant lesson for me. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"R3bo-s_OY4Q":[{"hn_comment_id":41487817,"author":"vfclists","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Wind Becomes Britain's Largest Electricity Source","text":"Yanis Varoufakis should enlighten you, ie if you can really understand what is going on. [LINK] TLDR version - [VIDEO] This is why. Prices are set by what electricity retailers think the \"market will bear\". Unlike suppliers bidding in which the lowest price wins, our electricity prices are set by the highest bidders. It al","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42476039,"author":"tmnvix","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?","text":"Important to remember the process of privitisation that occurred and the opportunities for profiteering that the new complexity allowed. Yanis Varoufakis discusses it at length here: [VIDEO] He characterises the energy market as a scam. I tend to agree.","stance":"rec"}],"R3xX37RGJKE":[{"hn_comment_id":18312480,"author":"nateabele","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Incremental \u2013 Library for incremental computations","text":"The author just gave a talk at Strange Loop [0] that provides a better conceptual overview than the talk linked in the docs. Pretty interesting stuff. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18750109,"author":"chubot","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Adapton: Programming Language Abstractions for Incremental Computation","text":"From what I can tell, incremental computation is starting to be used in practice: Jane St has an OCaml library called Incremental: \"Data Driven UIs, Incrementally\" by Yaron Minsky at Strange Loop 2018: [VIDEO] This talk has a pretty impressive live JS table demo! It looks faster and nicer than most JS UIs I've seen. ----- And the Skip language was developed Facebook. Apparently they started to use it for some production stuff, but somehow they decided against it and spun it out: [LINK] [LINK] Julien Verlaguet - Reflex: Reactive Programming at Facebook -- [LINK] Reflex was an earlier name or earlier incarnation of Skip.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21618700,"author":"75dvtwin","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Towards a unified theory of reactive UI","text":"Thank you for sharing the write up. I think the model you are describing, has parallels with Yaron Minksy's Data Driven UIs, incrementally [VIDEO] Perhaps if you could review the above (if you have not done already), additional ideas/data points might help with your formalization effort.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21683385,"author":"pgt","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Moxie: Incremental Declarative UI in Rust","text":"Any discussion about incremental UI should include Yaron Minsky's talk about Jane Street's OCaml framework, incr_dom from 2016: [VIDEO] Incremental is essentially an implementation of Adapton from 2014: [LINK] There is a big upset coming in the UX world as we converge toward a generalized implementation of the \"diff & patch\" pattern which underlies Git, React, compiler optimization, scene rendering, and query optimization. Two sleeper startups in this space that are going to make a lot of money are Frank McSherry's Materialize Inc. and Nathan Marz's Red Planet Labs. incr_dom source: [LINK] Differential Dataflow: [LINK] Declarative Dataflow Client: [LINK] Crux adapter for Declarative Dataflow: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"R7EEoWg6Ekk":[{"hn_comment_id":25232842,"author":"azalemeth","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Blackrota: obfuscated backdoor written in Go","text":"> 'Having worked on really \"heavily obfuscated\" code (flattened control flow, functions implemented in obfuscated VMs, custom incompatible ABI, cryptographic encryption of code, etc.), this gobfuscator looks comparatively easy :) ' For any HN readers who have not already encountered the MOVfuscator [1] I cannot recommend this Blackhat talk highly enough -- the x86 MOV instruction is turing complete, and it flattens arbitrary code to MOVs. It's also the only time I've ever seen brainfuck being used as a seriously sensible intermediate language ;-) [1] [VIDEO] [I think this is the preferred link!]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38184553,"author":"azalemeth","month":"2023-11","story_title":"M/o/Vfuscator: The single instruction C compiler","text":"If you haven't seen it, the original conference talk on the Movfuscator is excellent \u2013 [VIDEO] \u2013 it goes through it in detail and describes how version 0.0 had Brainfuck as a totally legitimately valid intermediate language ;-)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45231872,"author":"mk_stjames","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Weird CPU architectures, the MOV only CPU (2020)","text":"I came back to reply with just this. Christopher Domas's conference talk on the movfuscator is legendary: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49286925,"author":"MattSteelblade","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Spaghettifying DRAM","text":"I cannot wait for the accompanying Black Hat talk. Christopher Domas is one of my absolute favorite all-time hackers. He does such a fantastic job of explaining his work. Some of my favorite talks of his: - Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering [LINK] - The MoVfuscator [VIDEO] - Hardware Backdoors in redacted x86 [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15717608,"author":"DogestFogey","month":"2017-11","story_title":"A Sampling of Anti-Decompilation Techniques","text":"I'm surprised the Movfuscator hasn't been mentioned yet. It compiles C code into unconditional MOVs, and if you watch the author's Derbycon 2015 video there are ways you can scramble the MOV instructions, truely making it a decompilation nightmare. 1. Movfuscator page [LINK] 2. Derbycon 2015 video [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16249500,"author":"xelxebar","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Redundancy of x86 Machine Code (2009)","text":"Christopher Domas implemented this idea in his one instruction compiler, the M/o/Vfuscator: [LINK] Here's a really nifty talk he gives about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18992065,"author":"ianbicking","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Movfuscator \u2013 Single instruction C compiler","text":"I'd recommend the video presentation linked off the page, where he walks through how he actually turned mov into a machine. It's very weird and interesting! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"R9ITLdmfdLI":[{"hn_comment_id":10630646,"author":"vonklaus","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Jessica Livingston on the Accidental Origin of Y Combinator","text":"I find these stories helpful on a lot of levels, and they provide great insight into problem solving, technology, and you end up learning a large amount about why things are the way they are when people recount how they got started. E.g Anthony Casalena is young by non-tech standards and I still find it totally foreign that when he started squarespace he bought 2 physical dedicated servers and hooked them up in New York at pier 1 hosting, he needed to own the physical boxes and have 2 for redundancy. I am not doing a startup but have found these talks particular insightful generally. I am looking for some more Inspirational ones if anyone knows any great founders or leaders with inspirational stories, or particularly good interviews. Here are some I have found particularly good: [0]Ashton Kutcher, Startup School ===================== I listed this first because it is most likely to get dismissed. Give it a chance. He starts off shaky and it is really a great Meta look at how people are out of their element, but really come back, win the crowd and provide insight when it is unexpected. [1]Kevin Rose, Foundation ================= He has done 43 interviews with very prominent tech leaders for his foundation series. Some of them are Elon Musk, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Ben Horowitz, etc. [2]Paul Graham, Pycon 08' ================== This is one of the most interesting things I have seen in a long time. He makes predictions, and talks about technology climate and infrastructure. To r","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12637496,"author":"anondon","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"[VIDEO] This was the first time I watched pg give a talk. It was the talk that brought about the biggest change in the way I think about the world, my ambitions. The talk was the beginning, reading more about pg, I came across his essays and then HN.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21902441,"author":"rahulchhabra07","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Who is \u201cahead of his/her time\u201d nowadays?","text":"I always believed paulg was way ahead of his time. - LISP over C++/Java - The first ever web app in Viaweb - The first ever startup accelerator - Check this talk from 2012: [VIDEO] a lot of today's most impressive cos Superhuman, Lambda School, Netflix happen to emerge mysteriously from the talk as is.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4377289,"author":"andrew_simone","month":"2012-08","story_title":"How App.net Can Change Everything","text":"I think much of the push back to App.net comes from not understanding the context in which Dalton et al. is building the platform. Frankly, it wasn't until Dalton linked to PG's write-up of his PyCon talk that I really began to understand what his intentions were. The write-up: [LINK] The video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6635222,"author":"laCour","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Why US Healthcare sucks and how I\u2019m trying to change it","text":"For those that haven't seen or read Paul Graham's bit on ongoing diagnosis: [LINK] (#7) Or if you prefer to watch it from 2012's PyCon: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9108797,"author":"yatoomy","month":"2015-02","story_title":"What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?","text":"This seems to me a clarification of the strategy PG proposed during a talk at PyCon 2012 and an essay called \"frighteningly ambitious startup ideas\". It is a great way to think about and frame how to judge startup ideas. Mainly centering around high potential technology, overlooked ideas and opportunities that these startups can take advantage of. My question becomes, and it seems PGs, how can you do this without the value of hindsight. One one hand, you could sit and reason why startup x or your startup idea is the Microsoft in this scenario. But you can also easily delude yourself. Pebble, IMO, is shaping up alot like early Apple did. They are entering a competitive industry with a new product, facing a goliath and have a huge emphasis on their design & focus on developer. Which makes me believe history will repeat itself. That if we have the Apple for wearables, there should be, or soon, a Microsoft for wearables. Just a thought, would love any point for/against. For reference: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10280796,"author":"on_","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip","text":"Yep. I like his talk at Pycon in 08, where he talks about building a better email client[0] but it is also noted in your link. Thanks, I switched back from mobile and meant to post it. Incidentally, if anyone has seen his Pycon talk, one of his ideas is \"Bring Back the Old More's Law\", and if you are curious it is ~2-3 minutes here[1]. I have always been wondering what he means when he says a \"sufficiently smart compiler is a byword for impossible\" is this an AI reference or a deeper computer science theory that I am missing. Always been really curious. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"R9c-_neaxeU":[{"hn_comment_id":34517910,"author":"jimktrains2","month":"2023-01","story_title":"A Matchbox Game-Learning Machine (1991) [pdf]","text":"Stand up maths did an episode on a similar \"machine\" called MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine) that learns to play tick tac toe. [VIDEO] The video description has additional links to resources: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34530572,"author":"Tachyooon","month":"2023-01","story_title":"A Matchbox Game-Learning Machine (1991) [pdf]","text":"Seems like this is what Matt Parker built together with some other people a few years ago: [VIDEO] . It's incredibly inefficient compared to running it on a computer, but an amazing way to teach kids about this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46549382,"author":"Tachyooon","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Learning to Play Tic-Tac-Toe with Jax","text":"The first time I heard of it was in this Matt Parker video where he helped do this with a school-sized group of kids [0]. An \"AI player\" made of matchboxes, run by schoolkids, is a fantastically fun idea. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RCCigccBzIU":[{"hn_comment_id":17027096,"author":"wsc981","month":"2018-05","story_title":"A Short Introduction to the Art of Programming (1971) [pdf]","text":"Not directly related, but here\u2019s a short documentary on his life and career (Dutch spoken, English subtitles): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18960867,"author":"wsc981","month":"2019-01","story_title":"A Bridge Too Far: E.W. Dijkstra and Logic","text":"Perhaps not completely related to this topic, but interesting nonetheless, a small picture into Dijkstra's life from Dutch tv (subtitled in English): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24946570,"author":"jamez","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Edsger Dijkstra \u2013 The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders","text":"Good read. For anyone interested in seeing the human side of Dijkstra, I recommend this documentary: [VIDEO] When I watched it I was both studying Computer Science and learning Dutch, so it was twice as interesting. The version I linked provides English subtitles.","stance":"rec"}],"RCRTgtpC-Go":[{"hn_comment_id":30360829,"author":"dairylee","month":"2022-02","story_title":"History's deadliest air raid happened in Tokyo during World War II (2020)","text":"The Japanese Government didn't want an unconditional surrender as it would have meant the Emperor (Who was seen as quasi-divine) would have potentially been tried for war crimes and executed. They didn't care about their citizens, just the Emperor. Fantastic video which explains everything: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25557220,"author":"chagen","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite Podcast Episode of 2020?","text":"Here's a thoroughly nuanced analysis of the causes and motivations leading to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33159222,"author":"cyphar","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Why Hasn't the Doomsday Clock Advanced?","text":"> Whereas Japan would\u2019ve continued the war and brought it back to the US mainland eventually. This is simply ahistoric. Japan was on the brink of loss and everyone knew it (including all of Japan's military and political leaders) -- Japan was already suing for peace long before the bombs were dropped. The main sticking point was the conditions of surrender and the Japanese were deluded (partially by the US, intentionally or not) into thinking Russia could get them more favourable surrender conditions. These delays, combined with the use of the bomb being a foregone conclusion in the minds of the US leadership regardless of Japan's stance and what seems to be at least some wish to show America's might, lead to the bombings. No reputable historian (nor the statements made by several important military figures at the time) could make a credible argument that in 1945, Japan's loss was not already a foregone conclusion irrespective of the bomb, let alone suggesting that Japan would be able to even attempt to invade the US. If the US had explicitly stated they would not try the royal family for war crimes and keep the \u5e1d (emperor) alive, Japan would've surrendered (this is literally the only important condition they wanted, and it's what the US was planning on doing anyway). If you'd like to watch a very long video explaining the events leading up to the bombings with a very detailed timeline: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"REni8Oi1QJQ":[{"hn_comment_id":36423469,"author":"jtakkala","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Maps Distort How We See the World","text":"The size of Canada really isn\u2019t a valid excuse for Canada\u2019s poor public transit, nor is Canada\u2019s population. Notjustbikes posted a good video rebutting this argument a few days ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37274274,"author":"pierat","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars","text":"HAH that is one of the most ridiculous excuses... and is also directly refuted: [VIDEO] ^^ \"Not Just Bikes\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39865795,"author":"sofixa","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Tesla's $25,000 Car Means Tossing Out the 100-Year-Old Assembly Line","text":"This argument is just.... wrong. For a video describing how wrong it is, refer to Not Just Bikes: [VIDEO] For text and numbers: Shenzhen urban area is 1,748 km2. Atlanta is 353.04km2. Los Angeles City is 1,299 km2 (yes the metro area is quite larger, but so is Shenzhen's). The average length of a trip in the US is 19.63 km. This is simple basic stuff. There is absolutely nothing that makes Americans uniquely need tank-sized vehicles with 1000km range, even with the uniquely terrible urban design that most American cities have.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46811326,"author":"CalRobert","month":"2026-01","story_title":"London became the rest of the startup capital","text":"This is irrelevant, though, since the size of the country isn\u2019t what determines where people go. It\u2019s not like trains got less practical when Alaska got admitted to the union. Sprawling, low density, single use zoning, combined with parking minimums, have much more to do with it. Here\u2019s a video that explores the topic if you\u2019re curious [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RIctzAQOe44":[{"hn_comment_id":5841247,"author":"jmhain","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Facts about Wayland vs X","text":"Daniel Stone actually did a talk involving much of the same subject matter called \"The Real Story behind Wayland and X\". I'd recommend that over this article (which was partially written by the same guy). He's actually a really charismatic speaker. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24257938,"author":"jabirali","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Some Ugly Code Can Get Nvidia's Linux Driver Working with Accelerated XWayland","text":"I remember finding this video enlightening, a talk on the subject by someone who has worked on both X and Wayland: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26001017,"author":"DyslexicAtheist","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet","text":"> when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. Daniel Stone[0] incredibly funny and educational talk[1] from 2013 could help many critics who missed the 3 decade long ongoing discussion of why X is bad . We've talked about this already in the mid 90ies (when there were no alternatives) and now 8 years after this popular linux.conf.au talk, people still having troubles understanding why X has always been a terrible tradeoff for both security and performance (well for literally everything). [0] [LINK] [1] The Real Story Behind Wayland and X [VIDEO] edit: BUT X IS THE UNIX WAY! << so what is the 1 thing X does, and what is it doing well?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26002011,"author":"SXX","month":"2021-02","story_title":"I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit","text":"Mandatory video to watch for all X fans: > Daniel Stone ~ The real story behind Wayland and X' [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5320197,"author":"jerf","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir","text":"The Wayland people really sound like they know what they are talking about, based on decades of experience. See, for instance: [VIDEO] Are these people designing a better answer to Wayland because it's really better, or because it always looks easy when you don't intimately understand the problem space? I honestly don't know, but it's a question I'd like answered before I get excited.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5321032,"author":"runeks","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Ubuntu will switch from X window server to Mir","text":"Here's a good video explaining some of X's problems: [VIDEO] Long story short: the X11 protocol (which Xorg/X is an implementation of) was created in 1980, and was made for drawing stuff like this: [LINK] The important distinction between X and any modern display server is that nowadays we separate compositor (that which composites application content into what you see on the display) and toolkit (that which draws text boxes, buttons, progress bars etc.) into two. X was designed to do both these things. This isn't practical for several reasons. So far people have worked around this issue, but many feel it's time to stop working around it (since the X codebase is a complete mess due to this \"working around\"), and develop something from scratch that does what we want for a modern desktop in 2013.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7542297,"author":"forgottenpass","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Xwayland","text":"The larger idea this fits into is getting rid of X11 all together. The inevitable replacement is Wayland.* One of the challenges of such a switch will that once you start using wayland, you'll have some older applications that cant talk to wayland, you'd have to start an X server to run that old application. If you have a wayland session on your computer, you don't want to hit ctrl-alt-8 to switch over to an X session running that single application, and then switch back and forth to wayland to use every other program. It would be nice if there was a X server that worked as a wayland client and could put the X-only application on your wayland desktop. That's Xwayland. * For a better explanation on ditching X, and what Wayland is: see this talk from one of the X dudes working on Wayland [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13196440,"author":"lomnakkus","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (or more handsome)","text":"No. It's already basically feature-complete as compared to which parts of X11 are actually used these days[1]. X11 is burdened by absurdly obsolete extensions like drawing stippled lines, a font server, etc. See the talk by Daniel Stone[2] if you're interested in the kind of crud that's been cleared out. It's basically the kind of stuff that we will never go back to wanting in any type of server process. The trade-off between bandwidth and latency has changed fundamentally in basically all areas of computing, but especially anything to do with graphics. [1] Alright, there might be a few bits and bobs that are missing, but nothing major as witnessed by the very article under discussion. [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13278479,"author":"lvillani","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Ubuntu 16.04 Unity 8 current state [video]","text":"\"X isn't network transparent anymore\" according to Daniel Stone (longtime X.org and Wayland developer): [VIDEO] If you use X11 forwarding with any application that uses a modern toolkit (Gtk+ 3, Qt 5, maybe also Gtk+ 2 and Qt 4) you are just pushing uncompressed pixmaps over the wire, as a bad substitute for VNC/RDP/etc. Xpra adds image compression on top, AFAIK, so it should be slightly better. The entire video ( [VIDEO] ) provides a good overview as to why people that have been working on X11 for many many years decided to start Wayland.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24887164,"author":"emersion","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The X.Org Server Is Abandonware?","text":"This talk \"The Real Story Behind Wayland and X\" by Daniel Stone (a longtime X developer) may debunk some misconceptions in this thread: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31972042,"author":"indolering","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet","text":"> Screenshots/recording should have been on the board from day one and they could have gotten to standardizing on how to handle them in oh 2013-2015? I agree that Wayland's development has taken far too long and the transition has been rocky. But what development team couldn't use more funding? Ubuntu throwing a tantrum after the ecosystem rejected Mir and not contributing to Wayland certainly didn't help. > What other OS makes you think about display servers? I am sympathetic to arguments that Wayland/Weston could provide more functionality out-of-the-box. The bazaar's fragmented mess of \"desktop environments\" is certainly not a strength compared to what the Cathedrals have produced. But Linux's uniquely modular GUI stack necessitates coordination across lots of projects to develop and adopt standards. But not doing anything and sticking with X11 would have condemned us to being stuck with an insecure, buggy, and visually glitchy mess forever. > Red Hat doesn't believe in the Linux ecosystem I have my qualms with Red Hat too, but my point was that Wayland was created by Xorg developers because they tried and failed to make X11 competitive. Seriously, just go watch this XFree86/Xorg/Wayland developer's talk [1]. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46059577,"author":"big-and-small","month":"2025-11","story_title":"KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive in Dropping X11 Session Support","text":"> I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it? This 12 years old video explains it better than anything I ever seen: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47457119,"author":"nickelpro","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years","text":"Don't take it from me, Daniel Stone has a whole talk on the motivation for Wayland: [VIDEO] Broadly, the X Server has a bunch of capabilities which are irrelevant. The modern model is really Window <-> Compositor based, and the X Server protocol is just a pointless middle man in that exchange.","stance":"rec"}],"RKT-sKtR970":[{"hn_comment_id":44685025,"author":"mhink","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Programming vehicles in games","text":"> Interestingly, while the engine has the most moving parts in real life, in code, it's the simplest piece of the entire car simulation. Because at its core, the engine is just a torque calculator. It's concerned with producing a single output: rotational torque, from a set of inputs. It is essentially a blackbox. This just reminded me of AngeTheGreat's incredible video series showing his engine simulator- absolutely worth checking out, considering it's optimized enough to run in real-time! The fact that he's simulating it well enough to generate realistic sound is absolutely mind-blowing. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34450122,"author":"Fr0styMatt88","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ultibo \u2013 Bare-Metal Pascal for Raspberry Pi","text":"Or combine it with that engine noise generator that uses a full physical simulation: [VIDEO] That would be pretty sweet! I\u2019m guessing with the ECU sensors you could do away with much of the sim parts.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38588071,"author":"pengaru","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Dynamic music and sound techniques for video games","text":"You might find this software interesting: [VIDEO] I don't know if any of the state of the art flight/driving simulators are doing this kind of engine noise synthesis already, but they should be.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43875982,"author":"modeless","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Show HN: I built a synthesizer based on 3D physics","text":"Love physics based audio! Using the GPU is a great idea. Another physical audio simulation I like is the engine sound simulator made by AngeTheGreat: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RLySXTIBS3c":[{"hn_comment_id":14619043,"author":"thisisit","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Official Response to \u201cBancor Is Flawed\u201d","text":"If there was a bad response to a critic, this will be it. While Sirer's post was a bit terse, this response doesn't earn brownie points by going the same route. First, they start off as many \"responses\" in crypto currency seem to start that is - saying this is all FUD and the critic should stop spreading FUD. They also take the Trump route, not a great choice of words - \"fake news\". Where I lost them was when they equated themselves as being so important to crypto currency space that critiquing them can be used to tag the whole space as being a giant ponzi scheme. On still persisting, I found their clarification on \"asynchronous price discovery\" very funny. The point of a market making algo is to \"make the market\" ie they have to act as counter parties to each trade irrespective of whether there is a buyer or a seller (ie not a price matching algo). The price discovery in that process happens on how the market making algo is written. Though I guess being programmers and writing a document for programmers they had to go with a technical term. But with someone who understands economics on their team, they should have done away with it. All said, the most important part of a market making algo is not to provide liquidity or smooth prices. As Sirer put it, smoothing prices is a bad idea. If something is volatile it is because the market deems it to be so. Going against the market is not good. I hope these guys watch this video carefully to understand how trading works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14619871,"author":"thisisit","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Official Response to \u201cBancor Is Flawed\u201d","text":"This is the very basic function of a market maker. They offer to \"make\" a market even when none exists. So if everyone wants to buy they will keep offering until their inventory runs out. I haven't read the Bancor paper or code so I am not sure if this is implemented but every market maker's another objective is to make money. So they normally don't trade on a fair price, rather fair price - x/2 to buy and fair price + x/2 to sell where x is the spread to collect money. So effectively they buy low and sell high for a minute difference. As for a scenario where they have only buyers, the algos or people on the floor tend to take stock of the existing orders and start moving the ask higher to compensate. This happens until it becomes untenable to buy and some sellers start entering the market to make a quick buck. A good video on how trading works from Trading Places: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27105954,"author":"bmmayer1","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Trading Pit Hand Signals","text":"This is still the best (Hollywood quality) depiction of what the trading pit looked like in reality. Trading Places, 1983: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RMWNvwLiXIQ":[{"hn_comment_id":27005179,"author":"dkdbejwi383","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Audacity Aquired by Muse Group","text":"Tantacrul who has been working with Muse Score for a while now to improve their UX will also be working on Audacity. They also plan to hire some full time devs. Source: [VIDEO] Well worth watching his other videos too, even if you don\u2019t use musical notation software. Funny and insightful commentary on software usability in general.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27006545,"author":"meowface","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Audacity Aquired by Muse Group","text":"If anyone's curious, here are Tantacrul's entertaining videos on MuseScore and designing MuseScore's new font, and the Audacity video from yesterday: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27007139,"author":"sitkack","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Audacity Aquired by Muse Group","text":"This is excellent news! Looking forward to the lens of Tantacrul being applied to Audacity the way it was to MuseScore. Wow, non destructive stackable VST effects [VIDEO] The levity and the pragmatic focus make a great combination.","stance":"rec"}],"RMxB7zA-e4Y":[{"hn_comment_id":40247482,"author":"Moto7451","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Creating a low-cost EV charging station with Arduino","text":"In case you don't watch Technology Connections... 1. You probably should, Alec is great. 2. Here's a longer broader video about what goes on in an EVSE: [VIDEO] There are too many comments to go sling context left and right, but generally an EVSE is a controller board (what this is implementing), a contactor (this board uses relays), and a GFCI (in North American parlance), which his RCBO provides along with being a current limiting circuit breaker. Contactors are generally better for these use cases for reliability and current handling reasons but it wouldn't surprise me if SCRs and Relays are in use in low cost 16A EVSEs on Amazon.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26044500,"author":"alexgartrell","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Oil companies buying up EV charging networks: Shell acquires Ubitricity","text":"I'm not an electrical engineer, but from watching this video [0], there seem to be about a million and a half different mechanisms to prevent sparks from chargers. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29440253,"author":"rusanu","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Bosch gives go-ahead for volume production of silicon carbide chips","text":"A quick intro into EVSE and why there is no power 'charger' in them, and the space they take is just empty air [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37327899,"author":"stetrain","month":"2023-08","story_title":"EV Chargers Should Be Dumber","text":"A helpful video about what's inside an AC EV \"charger\": [VIDEO] Really the only difference with the fancier ones is they have a screen and payment terminal or NFC terminal for activating and paying. Like a gas pump, although most want you to use their app and membership to save (them) on credit card processing fees. DC fast chargers are a whole different story, where the AC to DC conversion happens external to the car.","stance":"rec"}],"RNFesa01llk":[{"hn_comment_id":12293321,"author":"computerex","month":"2016-08","story_title":"How Hyperloop One Went Off the Rails","text":"Thunderf00t isn't just some average Joe on the street. The guy has a PhD in chemistry and has dedicated a decade to educate the world at large about matters of science and intellectualism. The world would be a better place if we had more Thunderf00ts on YouTube. His videos on the hyperloop are pretty comprehensive and succinct about their reasoning. Why not watch them instead of mindlessly repeating the same strawman argument that every other Elon Musk fanboy/fangirl left on his videos? [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16195747,"author":"Red_Tarsius","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Hyperloop costs and challenges undermine pinned hopes","text":"British scientist Philip E. Mason ( thunderfoot ) made several skeptical videos on Hyperloop. [VIDEO] I highly recommend his whole Busted! series.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12708927,"author":"imaginenore","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Hyperloop One Raises $50M, Hires Former Uber CFO","text":"I'm happy for them, but I'm yet to hear for anybody to address the major challenges that many people have raised. The major one being - the sudden pressurization in any point and the consequent shockwave traveling at the speed of sound, exploding the tube, killing everything in its way. Thunderf00t did a good job summarizing the problems: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12709690,"author":"stcredzero","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Hyperloop One Raises $50M, Hires Former Uber CFO","text":"I think this needs to be brought to more people's attention, so I'm putting this in a top level comment: Thunderf00t's video: [VIDEO] Debunked: [LINK] Also debunked: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12832739,"author":"problems","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Hyperloop Freight is a Joke","text":"The best legitimate criticisms I've seen are here: [VIDEO] Basically expansion and contraction as well as just plain vulnerability of running a vacuum make it extremely difficult to do practically. The phrase he uses, \"all the problems of space travel except in a gun barrel\" is a pretty accurate description of the issue. Any loss of vacuum will almost guarantee loss of life. No realistic demo has been done even on a small scale as of yet.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12901021,"author":"Randgalt","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Hyperloop may become reality in Dubai","text":"The tone and sarcasm of this video aside, the guy makes strong arguments that the Hyperloop cannot work technically. Worth watching as he makes good arguments. [VIDEO] edit: actually it can work technically, but it's not practical at all","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13518127,"author":"imaginenore","month":"2017-01","story_title":"SpaceX is livestreaming a hyperloop pod competition","text":"If you haven't seen the technical criticisms of Hyperloop, Thunderf00t has an interesting video: [VIDEO] I haven't seen most of the issues he raises addressed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15458333,"author":"LaikaF","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Hyperloop One Becomes \u2018Virgin Hyperloop One\u2019","text":"Thunderf00t has a good video on the problems with it. [VIDEO] He has some other good videos (solar roadways) but tends to spend to much time bashing creationists.","stance":"rec"}],"RNsEsZbXE-4":[{"hn_comment_id":31896093,"author":"Meekro","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Super Mario Bros warp zones were intended to work slightly differently [video]","text":"I loved the in-depth technical discussion in this video. If you're into this sort of thing, I highly recommend this pokemon/missingno discussion: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25537492,"author":"jtdressel","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"I really enjoyed the RustConf 2020 Closing Keynote: [VIDEO] It details how the Poikemon missingo glitches work. (In the context of how memory safe languages would prevent them)","stance":"rec"}],"ROor6_NGIWU":[{"hn_comment_id":10445433,"author":"divs1210","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Avout: Distributed State in Clojure","text":"I came across this after watching Rich Hickey's The Language of The System [1], and it has really changed the way I look at distributed persistent storage. Any thoughts? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29035199,"author":"elamje","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Programming talks that made something click for you?","text":"Simple Made Easy ( [LINK] ) The Language of the System ( [VIDEO] ) The Value of Values ( [LINK] ) All by Rich Hickey (Clojure creator) - strongest programming speaker I've found to date.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8032135,"author":"hueyp","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Queues and databases","text":"This paper describes ideas around #2: [LINK] But yes, your database stores the status of a message. At this point you could drop every single message on your queue and have enough information to resend them. Each message could have its own resend (SLA) semantics. Amazon Simple Workflows is an implementation of this pattern: [LINK] . I've never used SWF but the docs are great food for thought. [edit] Also might be of interest to watch Rich Hickey's 'Language of the System'. ( [VIDEO] -- there are a few versions of this talk, not sure if this is the exact viewing I saw). The talk is not really about queues, but he tries to break things up a bit. You need a data store, you need a queue, etc. As soon as a queue tries to have durable messages it is becoming a database and has all of the problems a database has to deal with. Instead you could keep data storage being solved by the data storage provider and let queues focus on passing messages. This raises the issue of how to deal with dropped messages, but that can be solved without durable queues (like that paper describes / SWF / etc).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8700378,"author":"nickik","month":"2014-12","story_title":"A farewell note to a programming language","text":"I would suggest to you that Clojure has a very clear \"the Clojure Way\" I would say, more so then almost any other language. It goes beyond syntax to a pretty deep design level. Its not even all that unique to clojure, you could do 'the clojure way' in other languages, but they usally dont. Some of the importent keynotes from some of the early conjs are really importent, and they really went deep in the community, you can see it in almost every major library. Another commenter has mentioned the notion of 'simple' but thats not really all that clear. I not enougth of a writer to tell you about it, but I can give you the resources: - This classic got Clojure on the map for many people: Are We There Yet? - Rich Hickey www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey - Simple Made Easy - Rich Hickey - [LINK] - Simplicity Ain't Easy - Stuart Halloway - [LINK] - Ousterhout's Dichotomy Isn't (Part 2 of the Simplicity/Power/Focus Series) - Stuart Halloway - [LINK] - The Language of the System - Rich Hickey [VIDEO] - Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey [LINK] In addition to these, there are many talk that are about people trying to run with these ideas. Datomic is a example of taking these ideas to the max, it really standas as a nice example. You can find others in talks by David Nolan for example, but there are tons of applied talks. - The Design of Datomic - Rich Hickey [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10385942,"author":"oskarth","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Transit: JSON Data Interchange Format","text":"The downvotes are because it comes across as a shallow, middlebrow dismissal. An interesting and useful criticism would first engage with the strongest arguments of Rich Hickey (creator of Transit and edn). If you find something in his Language of the System talk ( [VIDEO] ) that you either (a) disagree with (b) think XML solves already, I and many others would certainly be interested in having that conversation. Note that this doesn't mean the exposition of \"Why Transit\" can't be better, but that calls for constructive criticism on how explain the ideas better, or a question made in qood faith. What it doesn't call for is a hostile reply saying in effect \"pff, already been done already, stop reinventing the wheel\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15594695,"author":"carljv","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Effective Programs: 10 Years of Clojure","text":"I love this talk, but it does throw out a lot of complicated ideas somewhat loosely, so I get why reactions and interpretations are all over the place. I think a good companion to understanding this better is Rich's talk on \"The Language of the System\" ( [VIDEO] ). I interpret his overarching thesis as this: Most \"situated\" programs are in the business of processing information according to complex and changing rules, in cooperation with other programs (i.e., a system). Many languages, though, are overly-concerned with how they represent data internally: classes, algebraic types, etc. This \"parochialism\", he calls it and \"concretion\" about how data aggregates should work, make them hard to adapt when the rules, data, or other parts of the system change, and make it hard for their programs to work in systems. At some point your Java class or Haskell ADT has to communicate its data to other programs that have no notion of these things. So you end up w/ a ton of surface area in your code with mappers and marshallers totally unrelated to the content of the data and purpose of the program. The idea behind Clojure is to provide easy access to simple, safe, and relatively universal structures for holding data, and a library of functions to manipulate those structures. Its \"big picture\" design bits are about providing semantics for multiple \"programs\" (from threads to services) in a system to operate on data robustly and reasonably (concurrency semantics, time and identity models, pe","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20025587,"author":"dunk010","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Why We\u2019re Switching to gRPC","text":"Rich Hickey, the creator of Clojure, gave a talk with some very relevant points in this space (The Language of the System): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21501688,"author":"ISO-morphism","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Keep your source code SIMPLE","text":"> Clojure with the same exact constructs represented with more C-like syntax would, at the level the presentation speaks to, allow the same level of simplicity. I don't think this is true. I think it would be easier for \"most people,\" but definitely not simpler . Easy meaning close at hand, simple meaning one strand, one braid, independent, less context necessary. Clojure syntax is the AST of the program, right there in front of you, in literal notation. There are fewer special cases, fewer moving parts interacting. C syntax requires spinning up a virtual machine in your mind and executing multiple statements. C is easier because we've already spent the time and effort to familiarize ourselves with it, but it has more complexity. Compare a 954 line ANTLR grammar for C [1] with a 261 line Clojure grammar [2]. > Cognitive overhead is lower working with a language that at least \"looks like\", what you're used to, and more developers know C-like languages, thus a language like Kotlin is \"easier to approach\" but necessarily \"easier\" in the way the presentation talks about. I would agree, using Rich's definitions of simple and easy, that Kotlin is easier for the majority of developers than Clojure. This follows immediately from the definition of easy. > This is a misapplication of the presentation really. It speaks to a level above selecting a language and is really about the design of systems. I would recommend Rich Hickey's talk \"The Language of the System\" [3]. The programming la","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22462933,"author":"jmiskovic","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread","text":"I would say Clojure more than substantial returns of invested time. Not just the language itself, but also the wider approach to software composition, feature accretion vs backward compatibility, schema'd dynamic typing seem benefictial no matter what your development tools you use. Maybe check out the talks below and see if they don't enRich you as software engineer. [VIDEO] The Language of the System [LINK] Design, Composition, and Performance [LINK] Spec-ulation [LINK] Maybe Not","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29762530,"author":"travisjungroth","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Who wants to collaborate?","text":"EDN has some really good ideas in it. Here's the main spec: [LINK] The Learn X in Y Minutes: [LINK] A related talk by Rich Hickey that I think you'd find interesting: [VIDEO] For a schema, I'd start with what CUE has done. The idea of types that constrain down as a lattice + a separate default path really resonates with me. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"RQY6WGOoYis":[{"hn_comment_id":31539652,"author":"rglullis","month":"2022-05","story_title":"An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency","text":"Please, please watch the videos I linked. Especially the Not Just Bikes channel. For example, this one [VIDEO] can quickly explain why a transport system flooded with autonomous cars and poor public transit would make the overall system worse for everyone . There is also another video that talks about microcars for people with disability and reduced mobility: [LINK] No rational person can watch those videos and conclude that the best course of action to solve urban transportation requires self-driving cars. Getting FSD cars is just a rich nerd fetish which will not solve anything and likely contribute to make suburban sprawl worse.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28419865,"author":"quadrangle","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Amtrak might add more routes, but they won't be faster than a car","text":"Train fans will always still take the train, and for good reason (they are a better experience in some ways), but the fundamental issue of whether we can address car traffic and congestion is about whether other forms of transit can be faster. [VIDEO] and [LINK] are great overviews","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29799039,"author":"animal_spirits","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night","text":"Correct, The Downs-Thomson paradox [1] is a known issue in urban planning stating basically unless you improve public transportation car congestion will continue to get worse. > the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport. NotJustBikes has a good introduction to it [2] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29799074,"author":"animal_spirits","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night","text":"The less you invest in public transportation, the more people will drive. The more people that drive, the slower traffic gets. If you just widen the road, all you do is increase the amount of cars that drive. If people can't get to where they are going via public transportation, then they are going to drive instead, increasing congestion. Would recommend watching this video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38135952,"author":"ViewTrick1002","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Jevons Paradox","text":"To reduce congestion you need to speed up and expand the slowest alternative, public transport. That is the only proven method to reduce congestion. The peak demand for car travel is way beyond the infrastructure which is possible to construct and maintain. More info: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RQv5CVELG3U":[{"hn_comment_id":29628619,"author":"rafaelero","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Does superdeterminism save quantum mechanics?","text":"Ok, that's definitely not what OP said. Of course the particle still can interfere with itself after the slit, it's just that when the measurement is made, the pattern of two waves interfering gets much weaker/non-existent. Also, the experiment you are alluding to does not say what you think it says. Perhaps you will be interested on another video from Sabine. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43197087,"author":"calny","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Time Warp: Delayed-choice quantum erasure","text":"PBS Spacetime did an interesting video on DCQE, but it tripped me up trying to fully understand what was happening: [LINK] ... Later Sabine Hossenfelder did a video debunking the proposition that DCQE somehow showed that the past was being rewritten. [VIDEO] And Matt from PBS Spacetime acknowledged she was right in this respectful comment: > Sabine, this is amazing. You are, as usual, 100% right. The delayed choice quantum eraser is a prime example of over-mystification of quantum mechanics, even WITHIN the field of quantum mechanics! I (Matt) was guilty of embracing the quantum woo in that episode 5 years ago. Since then I've obsessed over this family of experiments and my thinking shifted quite a bit.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43197794,"author":"anotherpaulg","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Time Warp: Delayed-choice quantum erasure","text":"This is a very interesting, novel take on explaining the delayed choice quantum eraser. I think I can summarize it as follows: The signal photon hits the screen, which is a measurement. The entangled idler's wave function is thereby constrained by that measurement, influencing the probabilities of later detecting it at each of the D1-4 detectors. It's not that the fate/erasing of the idler changes the already committed path(s) of the signal. It's that the measurement of the signal constrains the subsequent detection of the idler. Two other high quality discussions of eraser experiments are by Sean Caroll [0] and Sabine Hossenfelder [1]. Like the OP, both Sabine and Sean demystify/debunk these experiments. These three discussions all use different language to explain the outcome, which is clearly predicted by the QM math. Sean's article includes the gist of the math. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43383111,"author":"wruza","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Did the Particle Go Through the Two Slits, or Did the Wave Function?","text":"I think Sabine explained this social effect few years ago. I know she's a little controversial, but the key thing in the video (as opposed to all other videos about DSE on the internet) was that you don't get \"two clusters\" actually. They are both statistical parts of a single [non-]interference pattern. \"||\" is a lie. I'm not in a physics rebel camp and don't prefer Sabine either, but after that I sort of lost trust in the interpretations that can't even get the resulting picture right. I even suspect that showing dumbed results amplifies \"wow\" effect and monetizes better. [VIDEO] This is the video if you're interested. Again, I'm no physicist and don't know if explanations are legit or statistically correct. But that little || trick that all other popsci videos play on you, that's a true concern.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48986679,"author":"TxFkdZ","month":"2026-07","story_title":"You probably misunderstand the double slit experiment [video]","text":">The delayed-choice quantum eraser wasn\u2019t carried out experimentally until 1999, so I think it\u2019s a bit misleading to say this is what makes the double-slit experiment (first carried out with matter in 1927) so weird. I think Sabine is right, the weirdest thing in the quantum eraser experiment is still the FTL update of the wavefunction. She has a nice video on delayed-choice quantum eraser: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RSTNhvDGbYI":[{"hn_comment_id":23103600,"author":"JadeNB","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The Thinnest Paper in the World","text":"Have I got the channel for you! Technology Connections: [LINK] . My introduction was his rice-cooker video: [VIDEO] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24020315,"author":"spaceflunky","month":"2020-08","story_title":"The battle to invent the automatic rice cooker","text":"The science behind a rice cooker is fascinatingly clever, yet painfully simple. In short, boiling water temperature plateaus due to the latent heat of vaporization. When the water is gone the temperature of the pot starts to rise. The rice cooker uses this principle to control the switch. The switch is held by magnet. When the pot finishes boiling the heat rises and exceeds the curie point of the magnet, which means the magnet ceases to be magnetic, and the (no longer) magnetic switch is released turning the rice cooker off. Here\u2019s a great video explaining how it works. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25491704,"author":"Rendello","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Fuzzy logic rice cookers (2016)","text":"I started using the old-fashioned analogue rice cooker after watching Technology Connection's video on how they work. The principle is clever: liquids at boiling point stay at boiling point, since any additional heat energy is used to change their state from liquid to gas. When the temperature does rise above 100\u00b0C, that means there is no liquid left in the cooker, and so rice must be done. It then switches off the high heat and runs in \"warm\" mode. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30028402,"author":"vel0city","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle","text":"I have a basic rice cooker and I absolutely love it. Perfect rice every time without having to think too hard about measurements or the time, as the measurements are stamped on the bowl (fill rice here, fill water here) and it will always switch to warming mode at exactly the right time. I wouldn't bother getting a fancy computerized model, the old thermostatic ones are pretty much perfect. Technology Connections video on old-style rice cookers: [VIDEO] We have that exact same kettle, its wonderful.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31110024,"author":"rootbear","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Companies are buying washing machines to take the chips out and repurpose them","text":"It's a great channel. I was also fascinated by his rice cooker episode. I had no idea they were so clever, combining thermodynamics and the physics of magnetism. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45638877,"author":"zer00eyz","month":"2025-10","story_title":"The Trinary Dream Endures","text":"> weight/balance mechanism in a traditional \"dumb\" rice cooker These are far more interesting than that. Technology Connections YouTube channel did a great breakdown of how they really work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RTB5XhjbgZA":[{"hn_comment_id":35676952,"author":"sph","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Four-Byte Burger","text":"A similar channel in style, thoroughness and love for the 80s and 90s is Posy. [LINK] Recommended if you want to see deep, geeky and fun explorations of the world of liquid crystal displays, Hi-Fi stereos and anything that tickles his fancy. A good starting point: \"Segmented Displays\" \u2014 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47768007,"author":"gherkinnn","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Air Powered Segment Display? [video]","text":"If you liked the pneumatic segmented display like I did, here is a meditative video on alternative segmented displays. [VIDEO] No affiliation, just one of my favourite videos.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46032239,"author":"runroader","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Fran Sans \u2013 font inspired by San Francisco light rail displays","text":"The segmented type site that lets you see a bunch of different options reminded me of Posy's YouTube video where he investigates a bunch of weird options for these: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RUwS1uAdUcI":[{"hn_comment_id":2257384,"author":"iuguy","month":"2011-02","story_title":"How do programmers in the west see programmers in the east?","text":"The First/Third World East/West split isn't as concrete or relevant as it used to be, perhaps best explained by Hans Rosling: [VIDEO] The first proper comment in TFA hits the nail on the head for India, and is relevant elsewhere. If you approach programmers in a non-Anglospheric country adopting the cultural and business manners and expectations of the Anglosphere then your project is doomed from the get go. This is doubly true for countries like India that technically are too big and diverse to form part of the Anglosphere but have a massive number of English speakers, often as a second language. I don't perceive programmers from any nation in any particular way, because there are good programmers, there are crap programmers and there are culturally different programmers. What I will say is that for programmers who have English as a second or third language or not at all it's much harder for them to work as most of the tutorials, books, online resources are written primarily in English for an English speaking populous. Even the languages themselves are written in English following English idioms. How would you feel about programming in a language that uses Mandarin or Hindi as a base language?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2580520,"author":"JonnieCache","month":"2011-05","story_title":"Wikipedia Growth Animation","text":"These charts just don't feel right without Hans Rosling jumping up and down in front of them like a little kid. For the baffled: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7104882,"author":"noselasd","month":"2014-01","story_title":"2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths that block progress for the poor","text":"And here's some data about what's happened to the world (not so much \"why\", but \"what\") [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15654397,"author":"tastyfreeze","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Explore Wealth and Income Inequality in the World Wealth and Income Database","text":"There is a great TED talk by Hans Rosling showing the same improving global condition through different metrics. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RWTic9btP38":[{"hn_comment_id":39033729,"author":"somethoughts","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Cancer Alley","text":"I found this insightful: Why Louisiana Stays Poor [VIDEO] Definitely sounds very similar to CPG's \"Rules for Ruler\" video where he provides a description of rulers ruling in resource rich countries.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18671186,"author":"sschueller","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City","text":"I saw this video about LA a few days ago and it is very sad how these tax incentives are ruining entire states. [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18672851,"author":"cenal","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Apple to build campus in Austin and sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City","text":"There is another great video that goes into detail on his Louisiana is trapped in a tax incentive hell because of how they award these credits: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32706100,"author":"arrosenberg","month":"2022-09","story_title":"In Jackson, Mississippi, a water crisis of unparalleled scale","text":"Mississippi was the most confederate of the Confederate states. Jefferson Davis was their Senator and then President of the Confederacy. After the civil war and the end of reconstruction, it was a hotbed of reactionary violence. There maybe a robust tax base, but you have to ignore the entire history of the state (which is majority white) and city (which is majority black and the descendants of slaves). I'm not as familiar with MS, but there is a great video on how this works in Lousiana - [VIDEO] Historically (back to reconstruction), the Federal government is the guarantor of Black rights in the South and they provide significant funds to the majority black/liberal cities to make up for the fact that the state governments do not provide. Generally the state government is funneling money out of these areas.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37737915,"author":"thelastgallon","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Subsidies Awarded to Tesla Inc: at least $2,829,855,494 and Counting","text":"Why Louisiana Stays Poor: [VIDEO] This video is about fossil fuel subsidies in just one zip code which makes it the richest and poorest zip code at the same time. $2857 per capita subsidies via Industrial Tax Exemption Program. National average is $291 per capita, Texas $89 per capita. Skip to 5:22 for the explanation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41173523,"author":"aqme28","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay","text":"I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my understanding that these are rarely worth it. Reminds me on this very interesting video on the subject focusing on Louisiana ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"RaI_TuISSJE":[{"hn_comment_id":23119754,"author":"Dangeranger","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Orca: an esolang for audio-visual live coding","text":"There is an excellent overview of how to use the interface by a YouTube channel called Allieway Audio[0]. It was the explanation that made this software make sense for me personally. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29125329,"author":"Dangeranger","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Orca \u2013 esoteric programming language, designed to create procedural sequencers","text":"There is an excellent introductory tutorial to Orca by an artist that goes by Allieway Audio[0]. It is by far the best video overview of the system that I am aware of. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19119195,"author":"amatecha","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Orca \u2013 Live Programming Environment","text":"YouTube user Allieway Audio has started posting a series of great tutorials and introductory videos for Orca: [VIDEO] [LINK] To give a bit of context the primary creator of this project has been essentially living off a sailboat for the past few years and has traveled some 28000km around the world in the process. More info at their site at [LINK] :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24467788,"author":"raytracer","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Electronic music pioneer Simeon Coxe has died","text":"+1 for Orca. Orca is live coding environment / procedural music playground. This video gives an overview of what it is. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44604897,"author":"rwhaling","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Hundred Rabbits \u2013 Low-tech living while sailing the world","text":"Love 100r! There aren't a ton of examples online, but their livecoding music software/language, ORCA, is a remarkable instrument. [LINK] I posted a clip to bsky a few weeks back: [LINK] And Allieway Audio made some great Youtube videos about ORCA too if people would like to learn how it works in more of a tutorial format: [VIDEO] (I love the Dwarf Fortress background for this video, it absolutely nails the vibe)","stance":"rec"}],"Ra_0DgnJ1uQ":[{"hn_comment_id":25500099,"author":"JJzD","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Jaywalking decriminalization, 100 years after the auto industry made it a crime","text":"This is exactly the problem wit the car culture, almost everywhere outside the netherlands. You give cars so much space, they start behaving like it's the freeway, and then drive into buildings or do other stuff which kills drivers and other users. Of course they are speeding, and they shouldn't do that. But the netherlands thinks ahead, and tries not to give cars the opportunity to speed. So, we make a lot of obstacles and opposing traffic. Somehow drivers still do not like to kill people, slow down, and save themselves in the process. Look at this video's and others from this channel, to see how the netherlands builds infrastructure being more forgiving of mistakes, and find out how our cities turn out more livable: [VIDEO] (Yes, i'm aware the suburban culture is different, hence the relation with cars)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28015713,"author":"erentz","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Pedestrian fatalities are rising in the US","text":"Maybe this is a cause of the increase. But the root cause itself is the really abysmal way we design our streets that creates unsafe conditions. The Not Just Bikes channel addresses this frequently with examples from The Netherlands where they have a stronger focus on acknowledging humans suck and designing for safety, e.g: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33015910,"author":"HellsMaddy","month":"2022-09","story_title":"The most dangerous road for cyclists in America","text":"\"Why Cars Rarely Crash into Buildings in the Netherlands\": [VIDEO] tl;dw: because they actually do what you suggest, and they incorporate their findings into better road designs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36466039,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Nhtsa: Car crashes cost Americans $340B, or $1,035 per person","text":"See the YouTube video by Not Just Bikes called \u201cWhy Cars Rarely Crash into Buildings in the Netherlands\u201d for an interesting six minute talk about speed, road design and cultural expectations. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RcGyVTAoXEU":[{"hn_comment_id":12799217,"author":"Jemmeh","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Can Happiness Make You Healthier?","text":"Interestingly it's probably not actually stress that is killing you, it's how you handle stress. There was a really popular TED talk about it-- people who were stressed but didn't view it as a bad thing were still fine health wise. It was people who were stressed and also believed that was a bad thing that suffered. How to make stress your friend | Kelly McGonigal: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21565201,"author":"dwaltrip","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Risk of Acute MI After the Death of a Significant Person in One's Life (2012)","text":"There is a TED talk titled \"How to make stress your friend\" [1]. It quotes several studies that indicate those who believe their stress response is helpful for them (it is the body gearing up for an important challenge, etc.) have significantly lower risk of a stress-induced medical problem, perhaps even as low as those who had minimal stress levels. The talk also mentions a study that found those who spend time helping others also received similar benefits. I'd love to learn more about these ideas and the extent to which it is true. It definitely make some sense to me, but I still have a bit of skepticism. Anecdotally, I did feel less anxious than usual in the days after I first watched the video. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ReRcHdeUG9Y":[{"hn_comment_id":10830233,"author":"ivoras","month":"2016-01","story_title":"The Refragmentation","text":"Simply as a reference to how biology supports the human society and how biological signals can be gamed for short term benefit, this lecture was an eye opener for me: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7938093,"author":"anarchitect","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?","text":"Sure. There are plenty of summaries available on Amazon, for instance, this summary of Good to Great ( [LINK] ). There are also some really great mini books like Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction ( [LINK] ) Also, I haven't tried these yet, but there are a number of subscription services available for summaries like [LINK] and [LINK] The other way of cheating is by watching talks by the authors, which give you the key concepts from the book in an hour. For example Simon Sinek presenting Why Leaders Eat Last ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16009364,"author":"cbcoutinho","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Any YouTube channel/video on leadership?","text":"I think the talks by Simon Sinek are pretty interesting, and he has a lot to say on leadership [0]. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RfdZTZQvuCo":[{"hn_comment_id":18583366,"author":"rixrax","month":"2018-12","story_title":"The Worst Measles Outbreak In The European Union","text":"URL: [VIDEO] Penn and Teller on Vaccinations. This really drives home the point of herd immunity ( in ~ 90 seconds ).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6344235,"author":"broodbucket","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Infectious disease doesn't care why you're unvaccinated","text":"The paper saying that the MMR vaccine causes autism (which is where the whole concept came from) was fraudulent, so it's not just \"well, a side effect is better than the disease\", it's total misguidance. Also, here's an amusing Penn & Teller clip that shares your view. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8080844,"author":"tokenadult","month":"2014-07","story_title":"\u201cYou're not allowed science any more\u201d","text":"There are a lot of comments here about the issue of how to communicate risk of different personal medical choices to patients who do not themselves have medical training. It is a tough problem. Professional stage magicians, and avid skeptics, Penn and Teller had an episode of their cable television series Bullshit report on the issue of risks and benefits of vaccination. Maybe a clip from their TV show (with language that many families would find inappropriate for viewing with their children) will help communicate the risk and benefit ratio of vaccination more clearly than documents written in a more clinical tone. [VIDEO] (short clip above, long clip below) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8391462,"author":"rogerbinns","month":"2014-09","story_title":"CDC confirms first Ebola case diagnosed in US","text":"It is worse than that - even if her idiotic claims were true it would still be better to vaccinate. Penn & Teller ably explain [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8957747,"author":"iLoch","month":"2015-01","story_title":"To Protect His Son, a Father Asks School to Bar Unvaccinated Children","text":"I think Penn and Teller[1] did a good job of explaining vaccinations in layman's terms (though I doubt anyone here actually needs an explanation of how or why vaccinations work.) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8967926,"author":"rebootthesystem","month":"2015-01","story_title":"How an Amish missionary caused 2014's massive measles outbreak","text":"The problem might very well be that our level of scientific education isn't in step with the realities of the world we live in. If someone wants to get a good grasp for the entire \"story\" of vaccination they have to have a basic understanding of evolution by natural selection. Fully 42% of the US population does not \"believe\" in evolution, which is further proof of the level of ignorance we are dealing with. I put \"believe\" in quotes because evolution by natural selection is not something one believes, that's nonsense. It is something one accepts or rejects based on over 150 years of evidence across a range of scientific disciplines. Perhaps this might help: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RhdlBHHimeM":[{"hn_comment_id":22315504,"author":"kmstout","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Why are we so bad at software engineering?","text":"This discussion reminds me of a talk given by Glenn Vanderburg ( [VIDEO] ), wherein he explores the question of whether \"software engineering\" is or can really be engineering. Around the 27 minute mark, he quotes Billy Vaughn Koen, a nuclear engineer, as follows: \"The Engineering Method is the use of heuristics to cause the best change in a poorly understood or uncertain situation within the available resources.\" That's hardly the end of the debate, and I'm still undecided, but it seemed worth lobbing in before hitting the rack.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23109070,"author":"modal-soul","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Old box, dumb code, few thousand connections, no big deal","text":"Saw an interesting talk just about this topic [1] The gist of it was: Other engineering disciplines use the techniques you've mentioned because of the the costs, both time and money, associated with getting it wrong. Software engineering lends itself to different methods of development and construction, as the costs associated with getting it wrong or making changes after the fact are much lower. (For most applications, anyways). As such, (this definition would be another sticking point) these less rigid methods should still be considered engineering, with engineering being a balancing of resources with outcomes, not fixation on mathematical models. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48640991,"author":"ozim","month":"2026-06","story_title":"My 1992 view of the problems of computer programming in 1992","text":"You have any stats on that or just the feeling? I find that a lot of flaws are ignored in for example physical structures because they don\u2019t even know. Take construction inspector and walk with him through five buildings. Let me know if he left any building without pointing out any flaws. Doctors, a lot of stuff is \u201elet\u2019s try this and see how if it gets better\u201d. Taking complexity of software and limited budget - we as industry are much much better in building anything. We have better tools and better practices. Business people are mostly running around like chickens without head, can\u2019t even bother to learn how to use Excel properly. We have GIT, whole testing approach from unit to integration, team organization etc. Most of the world runs on software as is now and it works and there is much more software in the world than any other structures we built as a species. Bonus watching material: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RijGNytjbOI":[{"hn_comment_id":22366145,"author":"wadkar","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Javascript Object Signing and Encryption is a Bad Standard (2017)","text":"If you like video consumption, a DEFCON 2018 talk by the author Scott Arciszewski on this same topic can be found here: No Way JOSE! Designing Cryptography: [VIDEO] You're welcome :) Edit: Clarify that Scott is the author of both post and video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23662368,"author":"chriswarbo","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Hardcoded secrets, unverified tokens, and other common JWT mistakes","text":"I've been doing a similar thing recently. I found PASETO to be interesting ( [LINK] ), which is a lot like JWT but is simpler and more opinionated (e.g. there is no plaintext option; symmetric and asymmetric operations are cleanly separated; etc.). I especially enjoyed watching this video [VIDEO] I still decided to go with JWT, since PASETO isn't yet standard and its software hasn't been around for long, but it definitely helped me understand more about the choice I was making. In particular, PASETO distinguishes between \"local\" tokens (producer and consumer can both use the same symmetric key) versus \"public\" tokens (producer and consumer can't use the same key, e.g. third party services run by different organisations; hence asymmetric keys are needed). PASETO encourages local tokens to be used when possible, since their keys can be shorter, they generate shorter tokens, they're faster to encrypt/decrypt, they're easier to rotate, etc.; public tokens are essentially a last resort when we must interact with a third party. I was originally considering 'public' JWTs (i.e. asymmetric keys) for my use case, since we're using AWS API Gateway and that has the option to check the signatures of 'public' JWTs, and reject invalid ones before they ever hit my code. However, I eventually went with 'local' JWTs (i.e. symmetric keys), since the convenience of having AWS discard some tokens for us wasn't worth the (mostly logistical) overhead of using asymmetric keys. My choice to use the J","stance":"rec"}],"RjD1aLm4Thg":[{"hn_comment_id":18706339,"author":"leesec","month":"2018-12","story_title":"On Having No Head: Cognition Throughout Biological Systems (2016)","text":"Was recently floored by Michael Levin's (one of this papers authors) talk at NIPS. Possibly the most amazing talk I have ever seen. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18741385,"author":"gt5050","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"What bodies think about - by Michael Levin at NeurIPS 2018. [VIDEO] I dont really know anything about biology, but this piqued my interest.One of the most interesting talks of 2018.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18742131,"author":"aeleos","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"Recent but great talk posted here, What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System [1] by Prof. Michael Levin. He talks about how long term low energy electrical networks between all cells in living organisms shape how the organism grows. I think what he talks about will be the future of medicine as it allows for an amazing degree of high level control over how animals grow. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24796197,"author":"suby","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The second decade of synthetic biology: 2010\u20132020","text":"I'm very excited to see where we'll be in another 10 years. The possibilities in terms of medical and industrial applications seems hard to overstate. Related, but one of the best talks I've ever seen was this 2018 talk on the subject. It gets into how organisms seem to have bioelectrical patterns that store information separately from genomic, anatomical states. These bioelectrical patterns play a huge role in developmental processes, as they appear to control how the organism is structured at a high level. As a layman and a programmer, to me it sounds like the genome is the actual implementation of a function and the bioelectrical pattern is the sequence of functions you want to execute. They're able to manipulate these bioelectrical patterns to do things like replace a worms tail with another head. It's absolutely crazy to think about what could be possible here. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27064434,"author":"k2enemy","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Persuading the Body to Regenerate Its Limbs","text":"I highly recommend this video from Levin. It was my introduction to his work. What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27833226,"author":"7373737373","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Mike Levin on using bioelectricity to study how cells form (2019)","text":"This talk of his blew my mind: \"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28420509,"author":"7373737373","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Fish eyes grown in a petri dish from embryonic stem cells","text":"I highly recommend this talk \"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018\" by Prof. Michael Levin: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37885238,"author":"Wherecombinator","month":"2023-10","story_title":"","text":"First saw this talk from Michael Levin on HN a few years back and it blew my mind. Ive been following him ever since. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18837758,"author":"navinsylvester","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What tech talk does everyone need to see?","text":"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System talk by Prof. Michael Levin - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21978164,"author":"tyscorp","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Technology Will Soon Give Us Precise Control Over Our Brains and Genes?","text":"There is a talk [1] I saw about programming our bodies at a higher level than genes. Analogous to editing HDL over physically altering an ASIC. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25324330,"author":"tent3n3","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Antioxidants prevent health-promoting effects of physical exercise (2009) [pdf]","text":"I feel like there\u2019s some underlying relationship here with Godel and infinitely large numbers. We cannot know all states of all particles that ever were or will be, how can we ever concretely analyze human existence when space-time is so infinite? Michael Levin and team show us that manipulation of electric fields in animals ...well see for yourself: [VIDEO] All that physical structure we nurture as concrete truth? Not so sure about that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26674382,"author":"flobosg","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Frog skin cells turned themselves into living machines","text":"Speaking of Michael Levin, I find this lecture of his fascinating: What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42457708,"author":"jstrieb","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Classical sorting algorithms as a model of morphogenesis (2023)","text":"The last coauthor listed on this preprint is Michael Levin, who has a lot of other cool work. In particular, this talk of his from NeurIPS 2018 includes fascinating biology research results, as well as musings on the future of biologically-inspired artificial intelligence. [VIDEO] HN discussion about the talk: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"RjfbvDXpFls":[{"hn_comment_id":49168842,"author":"sbysb","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Harness Engineering for Self-Improvement","text":"There is a really good video by the author of pi.dev (which I have used to build some of my own harnesses): [VIDEO] The basis of the argument is that the labs are constantly pushing updates to their system prompts that are used in claude code or codex, which are exceptionally bloated and change the sand beneath your feet with every update. By rolling your own harness, as long as you keep up with the latest advances and changes in the ecosystem, you capture a lot of the 'control' that LLM-based development feels like it strips from you. Obvious disclaimer that I use pi.dev when I am aiming for consistency, not absolute quality. Custom harnesses on pi are what I ship, claude code is still my fallback if I need to make sure a PR is the highest absolute quality","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48320347,"author":"currywurst","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Zot now supports Claude Opus 4.8","text":"In 18min , Mario Zechner , the creator of pi will echo more or less your exact concerns as to why he developed it [VIDEO] Enjoy !","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48976502,"author":"kzrdude","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now","text":"Mario Zechner's talk \"Building Pi in a World of Slop\" is a good listen, on the topic of adults in a \"world of slop\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RlXdsyctD50":[{"hn_comment_id":13199636,"author":"MichaelApproved","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory?","text":"Here's another great video from PBS Spacetime on this topic [VIDEO] This channel and Sixty Symbols are awesome for insight into physics/quantum mechanics without the math.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25645785,"author":"treeman79","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Physics Without Probability (2015) [video]","text":"[VIDEO] PBS Spacetkme has a great video on pilot wave. Getting rid of all the messy probability issues is amazing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13198742,"author":"JshWright","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Why don't more physicists subscribe to pilot wave theory?","text":"If you're interested in this sort of thing as a lay person (as I am), I would recommend the PBS Space Time YouTube channel. Be sure to stick around for the end of each video, as he often calls out comments on earlier videos that contain corrections or clarifications (in many cases, from _very_ highly qualified physicists and other subject matter experts). Here's their recent episode on pilot wave theory: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15106360,"author":"neom","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Rumours swell over new kind of gravitational-wave sighting","text":"These PBS Spacetime episodes should help: The Speed of Light is NOT About Light - [LINK] Is Quantum Tunneling Faster than Light? - [LINK] The Quantum Experiment that Broke Reality - [VIDEO] Pilot Wave Theory and Quantum Realism - [VIDEO] The Future of Gravitational Waves - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"RmIgJ64z6Y4":[{"hn_comment_id":22239268,"author":"aaron-santos","month":"2020-02","story_title":"AI thinks like a corporation (2018)","text":"For another take on this corporations \u2248 ai idea, I cannot recommend enough Charles Stross' 34C3 talk on this very topic. [VIDEO] (picks up approx 10mins in).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16051554,"author":"leipert","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Dude, you broke the future","text":"Charles Stross read the text at the 34C3. If you want to listen to it rather than read it: [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] EDIT: Sorry, the read mode on mobile did not show the embedded video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18629979,"author":"vertexFarm","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Facial recognition: It\u2019s time for action","text":"You could say the same about a credit card skimmer on an ATM. It's passive, right? It's just a sensor that sits there and absorbs people's data. I don't think this argument makes a lot of sense. The point is, there needs to be some law and order in place so that when people abuse this tech to harm people and society and get caught, there's some precedent to stop them and punish them. It doesn't matter if the technology is passive. The intent and action to use it to harm people are not passive and are not analogous to thought crime at all. There is dire need for regulation with a lot of emerging technologies right now. We're building systems with enormous power which can break human society if misused. I think the intangibility and \"passivity\" of this tech (or at least how it is perceived) gives us a very false sense of security. Like how a few decades ago very few average people could understand how the internet might have a great impact on society. Obviously they aren't thinking that way anymore. Check out Charles Stross's speech at C3 about regulatory lag relative to the the accelerated nature of tech growth: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37670939,"author":"btschaegg","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I","text":"Obligatory mention of Charles Stross' talk where he knits together exactly those two thoughts. \"Dude, you broke the future\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RoGuvvzHY1A":[{"hn_comment_id":37208940,"author":"1letterunixname","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Possible to go/live underground to cool off?","text":"The one by the people who flew with the geese is interesting. [VIDEO] Edit: I'm thinking mostly underground is much cheaper and reduces the risks of wildfire, wind, hail, tornado, and lightning. / There's also the opal miners in Australia who built their whole town underground. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47474666,"author":"pierrec","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Chest Fridge","text":"Now that is the coolest fridge I've ever seen. Found a video of it in action (yes, featuring the same dad joke all over the comments but that is not stopping me): [VIDEO] That entire place is mind-bending.","stance":"rec"}],"RqQhWitJ1As":[{"hn_comment_id":36136822,"author":"crimsontech","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Paragon Graphite is a Pegasus spyware clone used in the US","text":"It would really need to go further than that. Supply chain attacks at the hardware level are very difficult to spot, especially at scale. This is an eye opening talk in the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19235593,"author":"segmondy","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Recruit Is Japan\u2019s Top Contender for Global Internet Domination","text":"Hey, folks thought Echelon was a joke in the 90's until Snowden showed that Echelon is child's play. The Big Hack might be true or not, but it's not far fetched. There might be more at play here. Watch this [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19380383,"author":"brudgers","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Elon Musk Tried to Destroy a Tesla Whistleblower","text":"I found Bunnie Huang's talk on supply chain security a reasonable picture of the issues underlying the Bloomberg story. [VIDEO] With the caveat that I find Bunnie Huang credible. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22498489,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Intel x86 Root of Trust: Loss of Trust","text":"Bribing Intel employees is probably expensive and might have legal risks. Instead, just hire one of the many skilled technicians in Shenzhen. For a good discussion of this topic, I recommend Andrew \"bunnie\" Huang's talk about supply chain security: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28430782,"author":"bskrobisz","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Juniper breach mystery starts to clear with new details on hackers and U.S. role","text":">when one would simply need a microscope to find them in devices This isn't a true statement, if strictly read--there are many techniques to hide undocumented components on boards, and covering all of them requires more than just a pass under a SEM. There's a fun talk that goes over a lot of them here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39786578,"author":"andutu","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Verifying Hardware Security with RTL Simulation","text":"Somewhat related, but there is a great talk by Andrew \"bunnie\" Huang on hardware supply chain security: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Rqfkuc5mawg":[{"hn_comment_id":36644276,"author":"qingcharles","month":"2023-07","story_title":"When did Alan Partridge first appear on television?","text":"If you like Chris Morris material I can highly, highly , recommend Nathan Barley which was ahead of its time: [VIDEO] Sad that his web site is now offline... www.trashbat.co.ck","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18492004,"author":"cutler","month":"2018-11","story_title":"If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley","text":"You might also like \"Nathan Barley (2005)\" - a savage British TV parody of the mid-2000s startup scene in Shoreditch, London. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RrHnLXMTOWM":[{"hn_comment_id":16308932,"author":"JshWright","month":"2018-02","story_title":"The Engineering of the Drinking Bird Toy [video]","text":"If you haven't watched all of Bill's videos, you should put them on your list right right now. His early stuff was a great mixture of goofy humor and fascinating explanations of the engineering behind various everyday objects. His more recent stuff has (unfortunately, in my opinion) dropped most of the comedy, but really stepped up the overall quality. Some highlights: His series on Faraday's Chemical History of a Candle lectures: [VIDEO] His series on Albert Michelson\u2019s Harmonic Analyzer (a century old device that can mechanically perform Fourier transforms) [LINK] I'd also really recommend his book on R101, the last great British airship. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33033024,"author":"helsinkiandrew","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Michael Faraday invented the rubber balloon","text":"His \"Chemical History of a Candle\" Christmas lecture is a masterpiece in science education. Narrated here by Bill Hammack - the engineerguy: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19794663,"author":"bradyd","month":"2019-05","story_title":"The Chemical History of a Candle (1848)","text":"Bill Hammack, engineerguy on YouTube, did a video series based on these lectures that are a very good. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27942518,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2021-07","story_title":"4.6B-year-old meteorite found","text":"How would you demonstrate that observationally? Science isn't just asking \"what if...?\" It's following up with \"... and how could I demonstrate that?\" The third step is then \"how do I communicate that to others?\" In the domain of chemistry, there's a wonderful example of that in Michael Faraday's \"The Chemical History of a Candle\". YouTube's EngineerGuy (Bill Hammack) has a wonderful recreation of Faraday's public demonstration of these properties. It seems obvious and pedestrian now, but that's because Faraday introduced us to these concepts and convinced us, collectively, of their fundamental truth. He gives us the hypothesis, he gives us the observable consequence, and he then demonstrates that consequence. Six-part series starting here: [VIDEO] I've already answered your question, as it happens: Looking out in space is looking back in time. Numerous phenomena support very strong consistency of physical constants to all observable levels. lizknope mentioned on HN recently naturally-occurring fission reactions on Earth about a billion years old or so. Those provide direct physical validation of physical constants as well. That is, we have zoomed out time, using telescopes, looking back in the Universe 13.772 billion years (9.2 billion older than the Earth's own age). And there's no observable change in any of the fundamental physical constants that we can detect over this range. But since you've repeated the question twice: why do you ask?","stance":"rec"}],"RrpajcAgR1E":[{"hn_comment_id":7884447,"author":"csixty4","month":"2014-06","story_title":"People (understandably) hate to register","text":"> Well, the solutions offered then have failed, but did they systematically rule out all possible technologies and business models? Of course not. In fact, business models were only considered tangentially in most cases because the general goal was to create an ecosystem of federated identity providers transacting over open protocols. Differentiation would come from the relationship between customers and their providers - charging for background checks to add extra confidence to third-party claims, for example. Or, by selling enterprises more secure identity claim brokers for their employees. > One problem is username and password proliferation. Another is filling out the same information over and over, like phone number, email address, and so on. E-commerce sites will often not bother checking email addresses and not require accounts because unnecessary obstacles drive potential customers away. I'd love to see the Digital Identity discussion revived, and between high-profile security breaches (Adobe, Target...) and the NSA, I think it might be time. I know you don't have or necessarily want a preconceived idea of what a 3rd-party account/identity provider should be, but I encourage you to look at what's been done & discussed before. Dick Hardt's keynote from the 2006 Identity 2.0 conference is entertaining and informative: [VIDEO] - it's also the talk that got me hooked on Vanilla Stoli for a couple of years. Kim Cameron's \"Laws of Identity\" were the cornerstone of the discu","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12637954,"author":"JoshTriplett","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"For reasons completely unrelated to the content, Identity 2.0: [VIDEO] Watching that talk brought me over to the \"a picture or a few words per slide\" style of presentation, rather than the \"wall of bullet points\" style. It also helped me move from \"stop talking, change slides, start talking again\", to smooth transitions while talking.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30649586,"author":"smaccona","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Tech talks don\u2019t have to be boring","text":"The most effective presentation style I have ever seen used literally hundreds (if not thousands) of slides, but in a way I had never encountered before. I\u2019ve heard it described as the Lawrence Lessig presentation style, but my introduction to it was a presentation about \u201cIdentity 2.0\u201d by Dick Hardt, and his is still the best I\u2019ve seen. It absolutely blew me away, both as a presentation style and a mechanism for conveying information/message (ideally they\u2019re the same thing, but I have sat through some presentations that are entertaining but devoid of content). Dick Hardt\u2019s presentation is at [VIDEO] - the content has aged a little (though less than I expected before I just rewatched it) but if you\u2019ve never seen it, I encourage you to watch it; it\u2019s not that long, it will feel even shorter than it is because it\u2019s so engaging, and it certainly illustrated to me how important communication skills are and improved my own presentation style.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"RtWbpyjJqrU":[{"hn_comment_id":4369681,"author":"otneusnocuh","month":"2012-08","story_title":"A Physics Lesson: Why Cats Land on Their Feet","text":"I think it's cos they don't want to get hurt landing on their back. Now how they do it is a different question all together. Ps, awesome video [VIDEO] , article is pretty useless.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6075526,"author":"MiguelHudnandez","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch","text":"You'd just see some blinding white light for a few seconds and then maybe nothing else for the rest of your life. Our human eyes and brains limit us from perceiving even everyday things with the majesty they deserve. Even popping water balloons looks amazing in high speed video. On YouTube, there is a community of people doing silly things with high speed cameras that makes for stimulating watching: Smarter Every Day: weird glass phenomenon [LINK] Smarter Every Day: cat righting itself in midair [VIDEO] Lots of high speed videos [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34667137,"author":"ryankrage77","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Cat jumps from fifth floor of burning building, bounces and strolls away","text":"> the exact mechanics of the animal\u2019s righting reflex are still not completely understood. I don't think this is true anymore. They move their head and tail to rotate themselves upright, and due to their low weight their terminal velocity is not fatal. This video has a good explanation of the process, [VIDEO] Squirrels use a similar technique, Mark Rober has made some good videos explaining that.","stance":"rec"}],"RuCnZClWwpQ":[{"hn_comment_id":24593725,"author":"oflannabhra","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II","text":"One of my favorite videos is a documentary of a village in Africa that goes through the process of producing iron tools from scratch, even though it is not required anymore, to pass on the knowledge. They find ore, construct furnaces, smelt the ore, refine the iron and then work it. It takes an entire village weeks to do this. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17750045,"author":"JorgeGT","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Google tracks your movements, like it or not","text":"They seem to do a similar thing with Youtube. I have both Youtube watch history and Youtube search history off. The other day I watched a very amazing video about iron smelting in Africa. Now, each time a open a Youtube link, that specific iron smelting video appears as \"recommended for me\". So, it is obvious that Google remembers which videos I have watched and openly advertises them again to me. By the way, the video itself is super interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24669297,"author":"guerrilla","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Iron, How Did They Make It, Part III: Hammer-Time","text":"Oh it's my favorite time of the week again on HN! I truly love these blogs. Someone last week posted this[1] documentary which I think more people should see in connection with this series. But I'm still collecting questions, which I may take to Quora or SO at some point but I'd love to know how did we get started with (i.e. discover) this process and how does it differ from steel. Apparently we will learn about the latter in the next blog though, so I can wait on that. [1]. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32697469,"author":"kragen","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Making iron from sand [video]","text":"If you're interested in traditional ironmaking, Christopher Roy filmed a documentary a few years back on the techniques used up to the beginning of the 20th century in Burkina Faso, From Iron Ore to Iron Hoe: Smelting Iron in Africa : [VIDEO] It's amazing to see how much work the traditional technique required. Though I don't know how much the techniques developed over the last 3000 years, none of the materials or manufacturing techniques exhibited in the documentary seem to require anything more than Neolithic products: leather, clay, wood, rope. (With the exception of using the cast-iron knife to carve the sluice, the same is true of Plant's video.) So it's particularly surprising to realize that the Neolithic started 12000 years ago and the Iron Age only started about 3500 years ago (the Painted Gray Ware culture in India). For 8500 years people all over the world had the tools at their disposal to make iron, but didn't know it. That's 3000 years longer than all of recorded history! It's similarly amazing to realize that from 3500 years ago until 2600-2100 years ago all iron was made by hugely inefficient processes like these rather than with blast furnaces, and that until 1000-500 years ago blast furnaces were only used in China. And it wasn't until Bessemer that they could be used to make steel. What similar opportunities are under our noses today? (More examples in [LINK] .) If you're interested in this sort of material culture unbootstrapping, you might also be interes","stance":"rec"}],"RuOvn4UqznU":[{"hn_comment_id":27809103,"author":"joseluis","month":"2021-07","story_title":"A Chemical Hunger: Mysteries","text":"Insulin is the big elephant in the room that's barely talked about. Everybody should watch this lecture [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28170796,"author":"criticaltinker","month":"2021-08","story_title":"America\u2019s losing battle against diabetes","text":"I strongly believe that fasting is one of the best ways to combat obesity, diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, and more. The scientific literature is certainly accumulating tremendous evidence supporting this hypothesis [1]. Here is one of my favorite videos on the subject [2], a talk by Dr Pradip Jamnadas who is one of the top cardiologists in Florida. There is no industry that profits on you being healthier through fasting. Consequently it doesn't get the attention or consideration that it should given the supporting evidence. However it has an advantage over every other solution suggested here - everyone can start reaping the benefits immediately . No legislation, no taxation, etc. Eating healthy and natural foods is still a critical part of the solution. Perhaps most importantly, we need to properly educate the youth and show them the benefits and consequences of their choices when it comes to diet and exercise. [1] Fasting: Molecular Mechanisms and Clinical Applications [LINK] [2] Fasting For Survival Lecture by Dr Pradip Jamnadas [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30628644,"author":"rjammala","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Any weird tips for weight loss?","text":"Intermittent Fasting, specifically OMAD. Cut all sugars and processed foods. If you want to pursue this, highly recommend watching this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40506544,"author":"robomartin","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Ozempic keeps wowing: trial data show benefits for kidney disease","text":"No, you are wrong. It's a binary decision. Millions of people do it. The key is to make the decision and stick to it. The \"magic pill\" for sticking to the decision is starting with a 3 to 5 day water-only fast, which is easy. Ask anyone who has done it. This rewires your brain, removes cravings and more. From there, just eat fruits, vegetables, fermented foods and your favorite range of proteins. If type 2 diabetic, avoid high glycemic index foods and favor fiber (which slows down the rate of change of your blood glucose level). Except for extreme cases, a type 2 diabetic can be off medication a week after fasting. A decision that should be made under medical supervision, of course. The key is that simple decision: Today, I stop eating for three days (or five, but three is a great starting point, with seven being amazing). And anyone can do this. Of course, again, consult with a medical professional for safety and recommendations. Fasting IS NOT ABOUT LOSING WEIGHT. This is what I though for many years before I learned. Fasting sets off a wide range of biochemical processes in your body that are incredibly beneficial on more than one front. It is these changes, as well as the psychological perspective gained (Oh, wow, I don't have to eat every three hours!) that lead to weight loss, the reversal of inflammation and metabolic disease. The objective, however, again, isn't weight loss. This is the best video I have found to explain the incredible changes and benefits of multi-da","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30627990,"author":"subpixel","month":"2022-03","story_title":"A beginner's guide to intermittent fasting (2012)","text":"Most of this thread is about time-boxing your meal(s) and losing weight. An important aspect of fasting is that there are highly beneficial results to not eating - especially for 36 hours or more. Most of what Galen Foundation promotes seems to be a low carb, low sugar, low manufactured (including processed vegetable oils), non-vegetarian diet combined with what ever level of fasting you feel comfortable with. Interesting stuff: [VIDEO] \"Our life revolves around eating too much\". God yes it does.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44645362,"author":"mediumsmart","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Erythritol linked to brain cell damage and stroke risk","text":"no regrets, never too late to change the diet :) all the things I would have to regret ... here listen to jamnadas and judge for yourself: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RxD6H3ri8RI":[{"hn_comment_id":33274699,"author":"slavik81","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommend me a Blender course","text":"Ian Hubert's Lazy Tutorials would be an excellent supplementary series once you know some of the basics. They're not a general guide to Blender, but they're great resources. He has his own style of working and he's shockingly productive with it. Lazy Tutorials: [LINK] My favourite guides of his are not in the Lazy Tutorials playlist, though. Perhaps they were not lazy enough: Blender Motion Tracking: Room Transformation - [LINK] Wild Tricks for Greenscreen in Blender - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47261250,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2026-03","story_title":"The L in \"LLM\" Stands for Lying","text":"I love Ian Hubert's demos of green screening in Blender. [VIDEO] His Blender Conference talk about photogrammetry / camera projection / projection mapping was fantastic: World Building in Blender - Ian Hubert [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24895076,"author":"strogonoff","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Adobe XD for Visual Studio Code","text":"Hands down, Blender. See Ian Hubert\u2019s channel[0] for samples of what can be achieved with Blender by a tiny team. His examples tend to be specific to VFX, but Blender is quite general-purpose as far as motion design goes with an NLE, support for the familiar \u201cexpressions\u201d paradigm, and so on. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"RxabLA7UQ9k":[{"hn_comment_id":8452722,"author":"patrickk","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Beethoven transformed music, but has veneration of him stifled his successors?","text":"Time by Hans Zimmer: [VIDEO] Powerful stuff. Maybe Beethoven would've been a movie composer if he was alive in the modern era.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17124907,"author":"rayalez","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What, if anything, do you listen to while coding?","text":"Movie and video game soundtracks. Can't recommend Ramin Djawadi enough(he wrote soundtracks for Game of Thrones and Westworld). Here's a great example of his music: [LINK] Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard are also great: [VIDEO] And I love halo soundtracks, here's my collection: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20902538,"author":"gj0","month":"2019-09","story_title":"OST or Theme Songs Suggestions?","text":"Here are some from my side : - TVF PITCHERES SONG-THE RELEVANT SOUND : [LINK] - Lord of the Rings : [LINK] - Hans Zimmer - Time (Inception) : [VIDEO] - Interstellar Main Theme - Soundtrack by Hans Zimmer : [LINK] - IP man : [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"RzWB5jL5RX0":[{"hn_comment_id":28466834,"author":"whiskeytuesday","month":"2021-09","story_title":"The Scandalous History of the Last Rotor Cipher Machine","text":"I would think that the recent computerphile video \"Cracking Enigma In 2021\" would be a good place to start. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31184045,"author":"gregsadetsky","month":"2022-04","story_title":"How did the Enigma Machine work? (2021) [video]","text":"Super interesting, thanks! This is also a good companion video -- [VIDEO] -- about the feasibility of cracking Enigma \"in 2021\" i.e. using computational power available to us today. TLDW & AFAIK: it's crackable (just as it was back then, using a bag of approaches & heuristics), but you still couldn't plain brute force an encrypted message today if you didn't have any portion of the plain text, the Enigma was using 10 plugboard pairs, etc. Also see [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40268609,"author":"H8crilA","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Interview with Marian Rejewski, the first person to crack Enigma (1974) [video]","text":"AFAIK the Germans kept improving both the Enigma itself and the procedures for using it. For example there was some specific weakness that the Polish attacks used, but at some point Germans figured it out and \"patched\" it. By the end of the war they could change the \"encryption key\" even more often than once a day, whereas before the war they could reuse the same key for many months. The Poles didn't break all Enigma setups till 1939 because one didn't have to it yet to effectively collect intelligence. Also because they hadn't existed yet :) Enigma was actually pretty good, but it had a major design flaw: insufficient diffusion. The YouTube channel Computerphile made a good video on practical cryptanalysis of the Enigma using modern hardware: [VIDEO] . In short, if you know what you're doing you can do ciphertext-only attacks given long enough messages and minimal knowledge about the distribution of the plaintext (their example relies only on the fact that the plaintext is in English).","stance":"rec"}],"S-3wEC6Fj_8":[{"hn_comment_id":24996959,"author":"ohazi","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Update on MuseScore 3.6 and 4.0","text":"For those out of the loop: Tantacrul is a composer who put together some hilariously scathing UI/UX video reviews for some popular composing software tools out there, including MuseScore [1] [2] [3]. The team developing MuseScore then brought him on as head of design. [1] Sibelius: [LINK] [2] MuseScore: [LINK] [3] Dorico: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26998737,"author":"guitarbill","month":"2021-04","story_title":"I\u2019m now in charge of Audacity [video]","text":"The MuseScore video is part entertainment, part critique. Personally, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it so quickly. He's very knowledgable in the field of music notation software, and is in a smaller niche of having used several of them professionally (most people stick to one or two). In another video on Dorico [0], he did user testing. So he's not just pulling things out his ass. It's easy to hate. MuseScore is better due to his involvement. The FOSS community should be more welcoming to UX devs in general, and especially who have a methodical approach and actually listen. Maybe wait and reserve judgement. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"S-VAL7Epn3o":[{"hn_comment_id":23256362,"author":"imjasonmiller","month":"2020-05","story_title":"EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3","text":"With regard to pathfinding, there is this great video on some of their challenges at the time [1]. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44612131,"author":"saithound","month":"2025-07","story_title":"The year of peak might and magic","text":"You're probably looking for something more detailed and implementation-focused, but Ars Technica had a series of 10 minute videos where they interviewed developers about technical challenges. E.g. they had one on pathfinding and CD video in second generation Westwood RTS games [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"S-Xm7s9eGxU":[{"hn_comment_id":11958635,"author":"jean_claude","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Productivity","text":"No worries. If you like classical minimalism/ambient music, check out Erik Satie's work, specifically, his three Gymnop\u00e9dies compositions for piano. If you've played Minecraft, you'll instantly recognize No.1[1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14171879,"author":"coldtea","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Automated snare drum made to the order of Aphex Twin (2014)","text":"Philip Glass piano works, as someone suggested are somewhat near (through more angular and less sentimental). Also: Wim Mertens: [LINK] [LINK] Max Richter: [LINK] [LINK] Yann Tiersen: [LINK] [LINK] Pascal Comelade (more childlike): [LINK] [LINK] Eric Satie: [VIDEO] Yiruma: [LINK] Harold Budd (more abstract): [LINK] [LINK] Joep Beving: [LINK] Bach: [LINK] Gabriel Yared: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44405710,"author":"pcthrowaway","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Unheard works by Erik Satie to premiere 100 years after his death","text":"Certainly both, but in your question, I'm suspecting your unaware of how much of this music you're familiar with it since it lives rent-free in the general zeitgeist. For example, I suspect you'd recognize Satie's work Gymnopedie no. 1[1] and perhaps putting a name to it will give you some appreciation for why his work is valued [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"S0dSm_ClcSw":[{"hn_comment_id":32528490,"author":"culi","month":"2022-08","story_title":"High-speed rail board completes environmental clearance in northern California","text":"Vox basically did exactly this: [VIDEO] tl;dr: US regulation makes it too easy for individuals to sue and stall megaprojects like this into nonstop litigation","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38742458,"author":"godelski","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Hyperloop One to shut down","text":"Why even mention wars? We have the money for Hyperloops, Solar Freaking Roadways, Boring Company, and so much more... you know... terrible ideas that clearly won't work, don't even pass a sniff test, but we throw millions or sometimes billions at. I'm totally okay with pushing the bounds of what we can do as humans, and even encourage it. But running on hype is not a sustainable system and arguably fraudulent (I believe it is). The Bloomberg article sure makes Hyperloop look like it is... I different version of hype applies in a different way. With the systems destroying themselves through compounding \"compromises\" to get political allies. It's a Vox video, so high level but not a bad intro[0]. Tldr: easy to derail (pun intended) any political project, and the bigger the project the easier it is to derail. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"S0mviKhVmBI":[{"hn_comment_id":8909792,"author":"notpeter","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Command-line tools can be faster than your Hadoop cluster","text":"This article echoes a talk Bryan Cantrill gave two years ago: [VIDEO] It's about how Joyent took the concept of a UNIX pipeline as a true powertool and built a distributed version atop an object filesystem with some little map/reduce syntactic sugar to replace Hadoop jobs with pipelines. The Bryan Cantrill talk is definitely worth your time, but you can get an understanding of Manta with their 3m screencast: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8488664,"author":"erhardm","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along","text":"They're good points, but from the philosophical point The Unix Way , systemd leaves some things to desire. Is there a modern Unix way? I don't see a lot of exploring in this area/side, but I see a lot of this is the way it's gonna be from now on on the other side. I'm not on either side, but I appreciate the way some complexity is dealt with simple little things. So elegantly solving problems: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"S0qjK3TWZE8":[{"hn_comment_id":8441679,"author":"surreal","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Rock Paper Scissors Programming Competition","text":"This is the most clever I've seen: [VIDEO] He ensures his opponent has nothing to gain from defecting... (Rules etc until 2m 30s, then the game)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12441162,"author":"hcarvalhoalves","month":"2016-09","story_title":"What is the Nash Equilibrium and why does it matter?","text":"If you find this article interesting, Coursera's \"Competitive Strategy\" [1] is a pretty good introduction on the topic of game theory and how it can be used as a decision-making framework for business, I've found. As a case study, I recommend watching this episode of \"Golden Balls\" [2], which shows how a player can manipulate a game outcome and defeat the natural Nash equilibria. This is a classic IMO. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44036402,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game","text":"No conversation on game theory is complete until someone brings up Golden Balls, and in particular this amazing moment (warning: terrible audio quality). [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10894757,"author":"J-dawg","month":"2016-01","story_title":"The pirate game","text":"This clip [1], from the UK game show \"Golden Balls\", is a very entertaining example of a two-player zero-sum game EDIT: As explained in the replies, this is not actually a zero-sum game. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21660885,"author":"satori99","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Paradoxical Geniuses: \u201cLet us burn the ships\u201d (2017)","text":"There is great demonstration of this in action on a British game show with the players being in a prisoners dilemma situation; [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"S27pHKBEp30":[{"hn_comment_id":35982590,"author":"leopd","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Can someone ELI5 Transformers and the \u201cAttention is all we need\u201d paper","text":"I don't think you really want a 5yo's version, because that's \"computers can be smart\". But for an SDE1-level explanation I made this video which has gotten tons of compliments and keeps people watching year after year: [VIDEO] It's in the context of NLP, which is where transformers started of course.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24898444,"author":"FL33TW00D","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Rethinking Attention with Performers","text":"I've just recently been on a journey to understand transformers in and out, here are the resources I've found managed to drill it into my head: 1. Chapters 7, 9, 10 [LINK] This was really useful to really build up to the concepts of attention (although the actual attention section is still brief). 2. [LINK] This was great for visualization and understanding that attention wasn't exclusively for transformers and actually was for RNNs first. 3. [LINK] Getting to understand how transformers actually work visually. 4. [VIDEO] This lecture by Leo Dirac was extremely helpful to finish off with, not only because it actually includes some pseudocode but it also revisits some key topics and covers why transformers are needed. One of the big confusion points for me was that the concept of ATTENTION and SELF-ATTENTION are not the same thing. Hope this helps.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34573241,"author":"peterfirefly","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Transformer Family","text":"Yannic Kilcher is great but this video worked better for me: \"LSTM is dead. Long live transformers!\" (Leo Dirac): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34749235,"author":"qigtyofhp","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Understanding and Coding the Self-Attention Mechanism of Large Language Models","text":"The attention mechanism started as a simple trick to not use recurrent neural networks. Read the intro in the original paper \"Attention is all you need paper\" ( [LINK] ) This video explains the drawbacks to RNNs and how transformers solve that: [VIDEO] Andrej Karpathy explains attention here: [LINK] He explains how attention is seen as a communication network: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"S2Hp_1jqpY8":[{"hn_comment_id":4479347,"author":"raganwald","month":"2012-09","story_title":"JSON Patch, a proposed standard for synchronizing JSON structures","text":"One real-world use case is differential synchronization. Here's a Google Tech Talk on the subject: [VIDEO] This is for real-time collaborative editing or replication of structured data (unlike Operational Transformation, which is optimized for text). Sending patches back and forth is at the core of the protocol.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7905216,"author":"dahjelle","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Eventual Consistency in Real-time Web Apps","text":"I've not tried it, but you might also be interested in an approach called differential synchronization[1]. Basically, it's just a specific way of passing diffs around to guarantee convergence, though (as far as I can tell) it doesn't guarantee much else (as in do you lose data if a patch can't be applied?). The really nice bits, though, are that it is a simple algorithm and that it can be applied to anything that you have diff/patch algorithms for. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24619222,"author":"mhale","month":"2020-09","story_title":"CRDTs are the future","text":"I'm working on a project with some offline data synchronization needs, but haven't started implementation yet. I've been following CRDTs with interest. I also saw many of the same downsides mentioned in the OP, e.g. bloat (which apparently are being addressed remarkably well). Beyond OT, another approach I've run across that looks very promising is Differential Synchronization[1] by Neil Fraser. While it also relies on a centralized server, it allows for servers to be chained in such a way that seems to address many of the downsides of OT. I wonder why I rarely ever see Differential Synchronization mentioned here on HN? Is it due to lack of awareness or because of use-case fit issues or some fatal flaw I haven't seen? Or something else? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"S2xHZPH5Sng":[{"hn_comment_id":28350982,"author":"overcast","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Fake animal rescue videos have become a new frontier for animal abuse","text":"YouTube allowing creators to change Title and Thumbnails as many times as they want after a video has been uploaded, and providing realtime analytics after a change is what is driving this. They basically are constantly optimizing, until they find what sticks. The crap you describe obviously does very well. Veritasium does a great video on this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29200732,"author":"timdaub","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Tips For Making a Popular Open Source Project in 2021","text":"Actually, Veritasium posted a brilliant way for optimizing thumbnails and headlines to improve click-through rate on Youtube: [VIDEO] I plead guilty and say that I've repeatedly posted the same link on HN but with different query parameters to understand its performance. But I've come to understand that users will notice this behavior and start to generally downvote. As a creator with a small audience, the only success with tapping into a high throughput feedback loop has been by painstakingly write articles and submit them one by one to HN. I've gotten much better at it already and frankly I've also noticed that engagement and \"likes\" isn't everything either. I've realized too that if you truly do what you believe in consistently, I've found that I suddenly start having \"impact\", which I think is different from engagement. How I see it: - Engagement: clicks, views, comments - Impact: The world changes, there's consequences and substantial changes as a reaction But I think you can't have one without the other. High engagement means you're a popstar. High impact means you're a politician. Ideally, I want to be able to pick my position on the gradient.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31142016,"author":"LordDragonfang","month":"2022-04","story_title":"I stopped working on black hole information loss","text":"Derek of Veritaseum made a video laying out why \"clickbait-y\" titles like that are necessary, and I feel like it makes a pretty good case. [VIDEO] The tl;dw is that the most effective titles come right up against the edge of what an average target audience member would consider unacceptable on the axes of withheld information (to create a curiosity gap) and misleading sensationalism (to maximise the perceived importance of the topic); and you have to play the game of having effective titles because otherwise no one clicks on your video and it stops being recommended to people who would find it valuable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32786341,"author":"mierle","month":"2022-09","story_title":"The Next Chapter for Learning on YouTube","text":"Take a look at Veritasium's perspective on this issue [1]. Veritasium reflects on clickbait thumbnails from the content producer perspective, and balances that against the motivation behind YouTube's algorithms. His final conclusion is that cilckbait isn't all bad, and that it serves an important purpose for both viewers and content creators. His classification of clickbait into different types is also fascinating. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37638444,"author":"jerf","month":"2023-09","story_title":"How the Most Useless Branch of Math Could Save Your Life","text":"The video in question for reference: [VIDEO] Interestingly, when I saw that I figured this channel for a goner because he was going to turn to the darkside, but quite contrary to expectations I feel like his channel has actually blossomed since then. His older videos are fine, but often just explaining concepts that you can find a lot of other explanations on, but some of his recent videos have rocked the boat even among physicists and IMHO he was ultimately proved to be correct for them. I particularly point at his videos about how nobody has measured the one-way speed of light ( [LINK] ), which was well-known among people very very deep in the field of relativity but not very well known outside of that (even amongst physicists in other fields, let alone lay people) and the electricity videos he's done in the last year ( [LINK] , [LINK] ) which attracted a whole whackload of \"debunking\" videos, which were themselves wrong (the best \"bunking\" video, if I may call it that, is probably AlphaPheonix's: [LINK] , since he actually set up the experiment, albeit on a smaller scale). They aren't all of that caliber, but the knot theory video was very good too and not something I've seen a hundred times elsewhere, and the airships video that preceded that one clearly had a high degree of research put into it beyond just the hype.","stance":"rec"}],"S4O5voOCqAQ":[{"hn_comment_id":24890083,"author":"michaelt","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Use Your Bike as a Backup to Your Backup Power Supply","text":"Here's a neat video of an olympic cycle sprinter powering a toaster: [VIDEO] 1800 watt-hours, or 1.8 kilowatt-hours, is 20 cents worth of electricity. Using a cycle to power things makes for a neat demo, and might be good for educating people about electricity and suchlike, but anyone who expects to notice it on their energy bill or carbon footprint, or even for the installation to pay for itself, is off by a few orders of magnitude.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24891008,"author":"virtue3","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Use Your Bike as a Backup to Your Backup Power Supply","text":"that's not a bad sustained! Check this out: olympic (cyclist) sprinter powering a toaster! it's intense. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33384659,"author":"toss1","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Mechanical Induction Cooker (2015)","text":"Olympic cyclist working to toast a slice of bread. Insanely impressive effort by a maximally trained professional, and he's definitely toasted. This is like a cartoon technology \u2014 the general concept is right, but the scale is just waay off... Anyway, worth the look [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"S4W-P5aCWJs":[{"hn_comment_id":23094209,"author":"leetcrew","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?","text":"energy, not power. I'm sure the motors have enough torque to tow the battery, what I'm doubting is how efficiently that extra battery capacity gets converted to range. as an aside, the cybertruck is (probably) pretty bad at towing. see this video for an interesting argument: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27217445,"author":"clouddrover","month":"2021-05","story_title":"2022 Ford F-150 Lightning is a brawny, battery-powered bargain","text":"> charging networks matter for most people Yes, best to go with the common charging standard so you can easily use (almost) all charging networks with no adapters. The F-150 is CCS so it's got that covered. > Also, how will the range actually be when you tow something. Probably poor. Engineering Explained did a good video on EV towing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"S4gU2Tsv6hY":[{"hn_comment_id":23979628,"author":"andrewxdiamond","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Iroquois Nationals, barred from World Games, gave gift of lacrosse to the world","text":"The Haudenosaunee (incorrectly referred to as the Iroquois) have a fascinating and complex legal system. This video explained the system and how it came to be. Highly recommend for anyone interested in legal systems or history in general [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17528769,"author":"bane","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Legal Systems Very Different from Ours","text":"Interesting, there's a great video on the governing system of the Iroquois Confederacy, which is surprisingly intricate. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"S7TUe5w6RHo":[{"hn_comment_id":38240867,"author":"sillysaurusx","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Before-and-after images show how Greenland's glaciers have rapidly retreated","text":"Kurzgezazegg\u2019t posted a video showing all of the Earth\u2019s six billion year history in one hour. Time flows at about a million years per second: [VIDEO] It gives a nice perspective, and it\u2019s a visceral reminder that the planet has been through far worse than us. I find it comforting that even if we drive ourselves to extinction, life itself will continue on. And in the multicellular era, too. This is important, because whoever (or whatever) comes after us might still have a shot at colonizing Mars. It may seem like Earth has lots of time to do it, but the video shows just how precious our tiny slice is.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42231954,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2024-11","story_title":"NASA: Mystery of Life's Handedness Deepens","text":"For a really brilliant visualization of the time scale, I can't recommend this Kurzgesagt video highly enough. It's an animation of the condition of the entire history of the Earth, at 1.5 million years per second of video. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41364337,"author":"nlehuen","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean","text":"This video puts things into perspective, mapping the whole of 4.5B years of Earth history to 1 hour: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43691588,"author":"8fingerlouie","month":"2025-04","story_title":"How many supernova explode every year?","text":"Technically you can live forever in a universe that is completely empty, it'll just be a lot of cold dark nothing for eternity. Living forever is such a strange desire, considering that complex life has existed on earth for just a fraction of the time it has existed, and humanity even less than that. I recommend watching the Kurtzgesagt video called All of History in one hour ( [VIDEO] ). It displays all of earths history in one hour, and humanity is merely a few seconds of it. Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, that's 4500000000 years, and in 1300000000 years it will be uninhabitable by humans, and in another 4.5 billion years (roughly 3.2 billion years after becoming uninhabitable) it will be engulfed by the sun. Assuming humanity manages interstellar space flight you could possibly escape earth and live somewhere else until that also dies, but in case it is not practical or possible, you get to enjoy 3.2 billion years of literally choking and being burned alive on earth. Assuming you did escape earth (or you're immortal so escaping doesn't matter) In 1000000000000 years the last star will be born, and in 100000000000000 years the last star will die out. You now have an extremely long time to enjoy suffocating in hard vacuum with your body being boiled by the low pressure, and all in complete darkness until the heat death of the universe occurs in roughly 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years","stance":"rec"}],"S89BHnaxULo":[{"hn_comment_id":45256266,"author":"sien","month":"2025-09","story_title":"William Gibson Reads Neuromancer (2004)","text":"There is a BBC Audio drama of Neuromancer that is 1:56 long. It is excellent. [VIDEO] I haven't listened to the audio book of Neuromancer but I re-read it a few weeks back. The audio play I still go back to once in a while as well.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17376627,"author":"pmoriarty","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Revisting Neuromancer After Three Decades","text":"The BBC did a great adaptation of the book to a radio play, complete with professional voice acting, sound effects, even music: [1] Unfortunately, it's only an abridged version. On the positive side, it's a quick listen, and well worth it if you're a fan (or just want to get a taste). [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28387144,"author":"sien","month":"2021-09","story_title":"William Gibson is a literary genius","text":"There is a very good radio play adaption of Neuromancer from the BBC : [VIDEO] The Neuromancer film was last meant to be directed by Tim Miller who directed Deadpool and was to be released in 2021. So somehow the mess with the film rights may be resolved somehow. The Neuromancer trilogy would make a great TV series. A few episodes for each book.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34023244,"author":"sien","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Apple TV+ to adapt William Gibson\u2019s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer","text":"The BBC did a pretty good audio adaptation of Neuromancer. You can listen to it here: [VIDEO] Neuromancer would be hard to do well as a film. But as fairly short TV series it would be excellent. There is huge potential as well because you could do, say Neuromancer in 4 hours and then do the rest of the trilogy. The best screen adaptation of a book I know of, Brideshead Revisited from 1981, took the book almost word for word and made a fairly long TV series. Neuromancer and the rest of the trilogy could be done the same way.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40845433,"author":"keiferski","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Neuromancer was released 40 years ago today","text":"Although I highly recommend reading the full novel, if you don't have the time, this BBC audio rendition is only about 2 hours long and is pretty good. Note that it's a highly condensed version of the story and skips many of the best parts. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"S9JGmA5_unY":[{"hn_comment_id":27428708,"author":"yamrzou","month":"2021-06","story_title":"DOJ seizes $2.3M in cryptocurrency paid to the ransomware extortionists Darkside","text":"I wondered the same thing, so I went looking for answers and found this excellent video by 3Blue1Brown: How secure is 256 bit security? : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21996410,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The most important scientific problems have yet to be solved (1897)","text":"We know that life is evolvable because life exists and we know the biochemical mechanisms involved (DNA + cellular biochemistry). Evolution implies a relatively smooth path through \"DNA space\" from, say for example, an early single cell eukaryote to a mushroom. However the search space is enormous. Even if we account for billions of years of evolution and a trillions of evolutionary experiments each year, a simple random walk with selection through DNA space should go nowhere because of the numbers involved. The curse of dimensionality[0] means there has to be some other principle of nature to make the search space yield a path from one viable life form to another. The search space of life would have to be 'smooth' in some sense. That 'smoothness' is something we don't understand. If DNA space is just 256 bits (as a dramatic simplification), then 2^256 is a very very big space to search just by chance [1]. Now imagine a space orders of magnitude bigger. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] (3Blue1Browns wonderful illustration of how large 2^256 is)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24780497,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Room-Temperature Superconductivity Achieved for the First Time","text":"Large number comparisons are difficult for humans to comprehend. If you simplify life to a DNA strand 256 nucleotide long (for the sake of math comparison) - then the search space is 4^256. To comprehend how large a search space this is watch 3Blue1Brown's explanation [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"SA8ZBJWo73E":[{"hn_comment_id":34719819,"author":"TechBro8615","month":"2023-02","story_title":"SpaceX prepares to test fire all 33 Starship engines at once","text":"If you don't mind a little Musk propaganda, I enjoyed these two videos [0] [1] from Everyday Astronaut where he toured the SpaceX factory and launch site (\"Starbase\") with Musk. My favorite quote was about the most common trap that engineers fall into, which is to waste time optimizing something that shouldn't exist in the first place. I'm sure that's not an original Muskism, but it stuck with me nonetheless. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40617752,"author":"cs702","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Why Elon Musk switched Starship from carbon fiber to stainless steel","text":"This short video clip quickly makes evident why SpaceX has become so dominant, now sending more than 90% of all global cargo to orbit every year. In short: Musk is operating from first principles, questioning everything from the ground up, willing to try things that others are unwilling to consider or have not even thought of before -- there are no sacred cows. The result is that SpaceX is leaving conventionally run competitors saddled with increasingly outdated, higher cost, less scalable systems and processes. Whenever I watch interviews of other CEOs of other space exploration companies (Boeing, Northrop Grumman, United Launch Allience, etc.) or CEOs of other satellite internet service providers (Viasat, Eutelsat OneWeb, Hughesnet, etc.), I come away with the sense they're so far behind they are not even properly competing against SpaceX. --- PS. If you enjoyed this video clip, you'll also want to watch Musk's tour of Starbase: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"SAc0vQCC6UQ":[{"hn_comment_id":3354462,"author":"nodesocket","month":"2011-12","story_title":"Trolls (2008)","text":"Love what Ryan Dahl has to say about being humble. [VIDEO] Honestly, happens almost daily, especially in SF. We meet awesome developers, but they are frankly arrogant assholes. This sort of entitlement results in those people trolling and flaming. Be humble, there are many smart people in the world; you're not that awesome.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3983911,"author":"SjuulJanssen","month":"2012-05","story_title":"The love and hate of Node.js","text":"This might answer your question: [VIDEO] TLDR: He didn't want to use an ecosystem that had existing blocking code. He wanted node to be pure in te sence that nothing was blocking. Starting on a clean slate enabled him to get everything pure non-blocking from the ground up. He admits that Js isn't the best language. But his rationale for not using an existing ecosystem (when it comes to IO) is not bad.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6500015,"author":"sturadnidge","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Rubinius 2.0 released","text":"The creator of Node was something of a Rubyist, i believe the main reason was around the stdlib / ecosystem not being event oriented, making it difficult to build non-blocking applications. EventMachine may well have strategies to defeat this, I just don't know. This video gives some good insight into what led to his decision to start fresh rather than try and change things in Ruby [VIDEO] So that's probably the biggest thing about Node - everything in the core is built with event orientation in mind, so you know you're not going to hit something that will block and kill you, and that minset is pervasive in userland too.","stance":"rec"}],"SBvclVcesEE":[{"hn_comment_id":37056389,"author":"stickfigure","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Panama Canal Draught Restrictions Spark Liner Surcharges","text":"For anyone interested in how the new (bigger) locks use less water than the old locks (reclaiming 60% of the water - without pumps!), this old Practical Engineering video explains with diagrams: [VIDEO] They store the water in a series of basins at different levels, and use those basins to fill the portion of the lock below. It's more obvious with diagrams.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38255059,"author":"FriedPickles","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Panama Canal is so congested that one ship owner just paid $4M to skip the line","text":"I enjoyed this well made video illustrating how it works: [LINK] And this one explaining how reservoirs can be used to trade-off water consumption for land requirements using side ponds: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"SC2eSujzrUY":[{"hn_comment_id":44125138,"author":"chiph","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Derek Muller confronts PFAS \"forever chemicals\" in his own blood","text":"Based on his video, I have given up eating microwave popcorn and have gone back to stove-top made. If his numbers are to be believed (and I do), the coating on the inside of a microwave popcorn bag that is used to keep the cooking oils from soaking into the paper emit PFAS chemicals. Which leach into the popcorn oils - later to be consumed by you. In the chart comparing them with other coated papers such as fast food burger wrappers, they are far and away the leading source of PFAS. I still have questions - do the PFAS chemicals leach into the oils while sitting on the store shelf, or are they emitted when they get heated up in the microwave and exceed some temperature (like getting a Teflon pan too hot)? Not that this makes a difference in the end result, but I am curious. Video link: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44365273,"author":"ourmandave","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Microplastics shed by food packaging are contaminating our food, study finds","text":"If you want a good explanation of PFAs, Veritasium did a video on it. [VIDEO] The safe allowable ppm counts are insanely low for this shit.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45503351,"author":"starwatch","month":"2025-10","story_title":"3M May Escape Toxic Chemical, PFAS Manufacturing Legacy","text":"If you want more context on PFAS, I recommend this Veritasium video [0]. It expanded on my usual thought of \"PFAS = bad,\" explaining why non-stick cookware is probably fine while other forms of PFAS are problematic. The video also covers the environmental damage caused by PFAS manufacturing. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"SCAGc-rkIfo":[{"hn_comment_id":9437118,"author":"nickysielicki","month":"2015-04","story_title":"ADHD: A Disease called childhood","text":"Via /r/adhd: >\"In her book she advocates a \"gluten free diet\" and makes the repeated claims that \"big pharma\" are pushing these drugs on kids, who are simply a bit \"different\"\" I don't know about you, but IMO if a person is advocating against gluten to cure ADHD, they probably aren't worth listening to on anything. If you want to have an informed opinion on ADHD, watch this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9480264,"author":"nickysielicki","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Entrepreneurial Tendencies Among People with ADHD","text":"You should all watch this video, it will completely change how you see ADHD... It's long, and it's worth it.[0] [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9481274,"author":"anupshinde","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Entrepreneurial Tendencies Among People with ADHD","text":"I watched this amazing 3 hour long video/info on ADHD shared by nickysielicki in this thread below. [VIDEO] After viewing this video, it seems like many people diagnosed for ADHD could be in the CDD/SCT like. This distinction was not made few years back. In fact ADHD sounds seriously scary after looking at this video.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9896430,"author":"brazzledazzle","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Coping with context-switching madness","text":"I encourage everyone to watch this before they comment on ADHD: [VIDEO] While it won't make you an expert, it will perhaps help you understand what it is people with ADHD suffer through. There are bad doctors and bad policies out there which are being resolved. They don't diagnose young children anymore even if it seems likely since some children will \"catch up\" and stop exhibiting symptoms. This is the source of many teens and adults today that discover that once they stop taking medication they don't need it. As our understanding of the disorder grows so does our ability to accurately diagnose it. That said, while I can't speak for the person you replied to that shit is incredibly frustrating. Your empathy is unusual and appreciated but regardless of the rate of misdiagnosis you are not a doctor and are admittedly entirely ignorant about it. I can't emphasize enough to those reading this that no matter how much you might doubt it, the people who work in this field do in fact know more about it than you do and making an armchair diagnosis or questioning a doctor's diagnosis does nothing but make you look like the kind of know-it-all that really knows nothing while maligning someone who has to read ignorant comments like yours in every damn discussion on the internet where ADHD comes up. I know it's easy to think you've got all of the answers when understanding complex problems comes naturally but these doctors don't spend nearly a decade or more in school sitting around with","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10156998,"author":"brazzledazzle","month":"2015-09","story_title":"To Stop Procrastinating, Start by Understanding the Emotions Involved","text":"Yep. ADHD is not a problem of perception, it's a problem of motivation. A problem of inhibition. \"ADHD is a failure to direct behavior forward in time.\" \"They are best thought of as executive deficits, not attention deficits.\" For anyone who wants to really understand the disorder (even those who have it and think they have a good grasp on it) Dr. Russell A Barkley, PhD is a great place to start. In particular this video, \"Essential Ideas for Parents\": [VIDEO] If you have ADHD I can't recommend his books enough.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11262611,"author":"brazzledazzle","month":"2016-03","story_title":"ADHD is vastly overdiagnosed and many children are just immature, say scientists","text":"If you'd like to learn more about it this is basically the best video you could watch in my opinion: [VIDEO] It's quite long so I'd watch it at 1.5x and/or in chunks. Even though it's for parents of children with ADHD it makes it clear with good examples what they're dealing with. Also worth keeping in mind that the disorder is different for adults in some ways.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12801723,"author":"brazzledazzle","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace","text":"One important thing to note for people reading this is that hyperactivity doesn't always persist into adulthood with the other symptoms or is greatly reduced and is often turned inward (mental fidgeting). As far as your firings go, if you haven't watched this video and/or read this doctor's books they really help with understanding exactly what you're dealing with: [VIDEO] It's long but worth watching at faster playback speed and in manageable chunks. Key takeaways: \"Attention deficit\" is less of a symptom and more of a measurable consequence of other symptoms: Impaired inhibition/impulse control, excessive irrelevant activity and impaired persistence (think discipline). Once you understand why you fail you can start addressing or working around your gaps, particularly the ones that any medication you may be on fail to address.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19896548,"author":"thrav","month":"2019-05","story_title":"How I Run a Company with ADHD","text":"I also like the idea that it would be better labeled, \u201cintention deficit disorder\u201d. Dr. Barkley\u2019s talk completely altered my understanding of the disorder. I always knew I had it. My life roughly paralleled the author\u2019s. After failing out of school, I found workarounds that got me through the second time (thanks to extremely supportive parents). This video, combined with my wife\u2019s urging, caused me to find a legitimate doctor who specialized in it (he\u2019s ADHD too), and get treatment. I was already doing well with my coping mechanisms, but my life took off like a rocket with treatment. If anything in the article or the comments resonates, I would watch this ASAP: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23522394,"author":"RickS","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Night owls have more grey matter in their brains than early birds","text":"ADHD is terribly misnamed, and doesn't usually manifest as physical hyperactivity in adults. It's an executive function disorder. This means things like time blindness \u2013 difficulty conceptualizing and persisting tasks into the future, and difficulty keeping short term goals in mind. I think about it like packet loss, but for intent. With healthy executive function, one's goals and intents are persistent streams that can be held on to like a train track. (This is based on other people's description of how their mind works \u2013 I would consider that ability a superpower). With ADHD, the tracks will just fall out like a trapdoor every so often \u2013 sometimes every few seconds. You have to reinitiate the connection, but because the thing that failed is the same thing that remembers what to connect to, I have to reestablish what I want to do in the first place, and it's usually not the thing I was doing before. So I end up shooting around in semi-productive bursts, unable to see things to completion. The other counterintuitive thing is hyperfocus \u2013 people with ADHD periodically experience the inverse. I spent nearly every waking moment in the last 3 days working intently on a software project I'm interested in. Short bouts of intense concentration (especially if you don't feel in control of their application) do not mean you don't have ADHD. They could mean the opposite. Here's the best explanation I've ever seen of the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9072040,"author":"falcolas","month":"2015-02","story_title":"There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me","text":"> You don't think in the whole time humans have evolved that we haven't had this kind of condition already in some form Of course we have. Know how we, as humans, dealt with people with mental disabilities (those who survived natural selection) in the past? A combination of \"Man up\", and sanitariums. We told them, \"Stop being <pick a mental condition here>, or we'll throw you in a hole from which you'll never escape, and we can stop worrying about it.\" These two methods \"worked\" for a lot of mental conditions we just now have names, diagnoses, and cures for. > Or is it maybe because we are fed the idea that we _need_ to be focused If you think that the only problem with having ADHD is the lack of focus, you don't know what ADHD is. I recommend watching the following video to see what the true problems encountered by those with ADHD are. [VIDEO] > those who have come up with the idea that we should be medicated for this condition Like those who have received medication, and are suddenly able to think like everyone else is capable of? The medication is not a crutch, it's not a magical focus pill, it's not a \"i can focus better because I have more energy\"... it's a bridge between \"can't\" and \"can\". It doesn't make you focus, it makes you capable of focusing. It doesn't make you not procrastinate, it lets you actually consider the consequences which are separated from the action by a time period greater than 30 minutes. It doesn't expand your memory, it makes you capable of acces","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12354309,"author":"joshuak","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Overselling A.D.H.D.","text":"These are very old studies. It is now known that ADHD is a genetic disorder. In fact it has unusually high correlation. It is absolutely not caused by environmental factors. Though there is one virus (that I'm aware of) that may cause it. It is not only an issue of attentiveness, but ranter all executive functions. The poor naming of the disorder, and the observability of a persons focus, causes people to over emphasize the inattentiveness symptom. If you are interested in understanding the reality of ADHD I'd suggest watching some of the talks by Dr. Russel Barkely. Here: [LINK] For a more complete talk: Here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18575156,"author":"ts1543636885","month":"2018-12","story_title":"When starting school, younger children are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD","text":"> ... he started hitting himself on the head ... :( I know what that feels like. I see that there are numerous helpful responses already. Here's a couple links: 1) How to ADHD ( [LINK] ) 2) Lecture by Dr. Barkley. Essential Ideas for Parents: [VIDEO] Type \"Dr. Barkley ADHD\" to see shorter snippets.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19896598,"author":"thrav","month":"2019-05","story_title":"How I Run a Company with ADHD","text":"It a literal brain development impairment. We can look at the bright side, I do too, but it is a biological difference in our brain construction from the norm, and it has wide ranging impacts that go far beyond our ability to do work. Do you have extreme bouts of emotional distress? Emotional / angry outbursts? Blurt things out that get you into trouble? Experience difficulty with dating? Lose shit constantly? Participate in risky / dangerous / mid-guided behaviors? ADHD is a big disorder. Look into it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24157339,"author":"thrav","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Behaviors resembling ADHD may be linked to increased entrepreneurial behavior","text":"The brain forms differently in ADHD individuals. Certain regions have slower or stunted growth. If you\u2019d like to know more, it\u2019s explained in the beginning of this lecture: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42608490,"author":"dmacedo","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Ask HN: My 12 year-old nephew just got diagnosed with ADHD, any advice?","text":"I would echo this and share with the parents: [VIDEO] Also Russell Barkley has since fully retired though has been very active in diaseminating what's happening in (good and bad) research, plus other lectures on [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"SCFXV6o7cro":[{"hn_comment_id":31937730,"author":"moralestapia","month":"2022-06","story_title":"The Nettle Magic Project: Scanner for decks of cards with bar codes on edges","text":"I like this one a lot as it is amazing on both method + effect. Effect: [VIDEO] I won't reveal the method but here it is in Penn's words (from 1:20): [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14212929,"author":"fenomas","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Teller Reveals His Secrets (2012)","text":"That was real! I mean he wasn't really angry but he really did have his mind blown. The backstory is that the magician in question (Kostya Kimlat) did a trick that Penn & Teller also do, and he did it more or less the same way they do it - except that at the end, at the part where P&T do the sleights that make the trick work, in Kimlat's version the effect was already done because he'd done a different sleight, earlier, about five inches under P&T's noses. It was pretty glorious. The trick: [VIDEO] Penn talking about it: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45343607,"author":"JdeBP","month":"2025-09","story_title":"After 50 years, The Magic Circle finally inducts Penn and Teller","text":"I can just reiterate my prior comment: * [VIDEO] (-: For M. Kimlat's own commentary and someone else's particularly insightful comment: * [LINK] For the time spent on prep for the second appearance: * [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"SDXB0CY2tSQ":[{"hn_comment_id":31096011,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Le Corbusier's project Plan Voisin \u2013 a radical urban design for Paris from 1925","text":"This \"Not Just Bikes\" video[1] recently on YouTube makes a similar case for generic concrete business parks in the USA and Canada compared to one in the Netherlands. That nobody with any choice wants to live or work there, that they are full of hostile in-between space and strictly segregated from housing and shopping by 6-lane roads, and inhuman feeling. Designed with car access as the priority and bus access as an afterthought and without pedestrian or cycle access at all, as if the only reasons to be 'outside' at all are driving or parking. The Netherlands one in the video has dedicated roads for busses which get priority over cars at traffic lights, dedicated paths for bikes and pedestrians which get priority over busses and cars at traffic lights and are separate from the roads so people aren't walking right by vehicles, and a train station. It has narrow car lanes with both directions separated with an easier pedestrian crossing experience, floodwater management integrated as a nice looking canal feature rather than as a storm drain by a road; pretty building design and path design to make a more pleasant environment to walk in, and buildings having large and accessible entrances for pedestrians without forcing them to cross bits of mud or large expanses of car park. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32030110,"author":"dangus","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Cruise\u2019s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco","text":"This video might be relevant to your described scenario: [VIDEO] Notice how in The Netherlands, despite making bikes, transit, and pedestrians welcome in this suburban business park near the airport, you can still drive there if you want. Yes, if you lived in The Netherlands, you could drive to this business park shown in the video in your personal vehicle. There's a parking garage right there, and even though the infrastructure is pedestrian and bicycle focused and prioritized, the cars don't have to wait long at the traffic signal or endure crazy traffic. Why is that? Because there are fewer cars. Why are there fewer cars? Because there are viable alternatives. Essentially, having better public transit, pedestrian, and cycling infrastructure actually makes life better for drivers, too! The thing is, in North America, in most places you don't actually have any sort of choice on whether you want to drive or not. If you don't drive, your entire environment is hostile to your very existence, and public transit is just for the poor and desperate. You must buy a car whether you want to or not. That's not really choice or freedom. You're saying that you would choose a personal vehicle, but does that choice have the potential to change if the surrounding circumstances change? So, it's perfectly fine that you'd prefer to own an automobile. You're free to pay the close to $10,000 a year it costs for the average person to own a new car according to AAA. I personally wouldn't make that","stance":"rec"}],"SDtAh9IwG-I":[{"hn_comment_id":30732640,"author":"NavinF","month":"2022-03","story_title":"First images from James Webb telescope exceed expectations","text":"Yeah I was also surprised to find that photons can be really big: [VIDEO] Before I saw the experiments in that video, I assumed photons were about as wide as their wavelength.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32517718,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Third-polarizing-filter experiment demystified (2004)","text":"I know it's not exactly Nature, but I like this one for the approachable and intuitive explanation: [VIDEO] Fundamentally, you have to believe in nonsense such as kilometer-sized particles that are also infinitesimal if your point of view is that photons are particles. Many of the \"mysteries\" of Quantum Mechanics vanish if keep in the back of your mind that QM is just a bag of mathematical tricks that \"work\" in specific scenarios to solve practical problems, but aren't a model of \"what actually occurs\". Practically all of it is restricted to statistical predictions related to matter. Remove matter or remove statistics and then the models are no longer valid. I'm not making this up. Go dig up any of the original QM papers and these assumptions and/or constraints are called out in the first few paragraphs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34455315,"author":"somat","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Can a Human See a Single Photon?","text":"I am not a physicist but fun fact, In transit there is no such thing as a photon(electro magnetic waves can transit at any energy level) however light can only interact with matter at discrete energy levels, so the photon(a discrete energy level of light) only exists there, at the interaction with matter. For some very good practical optics you can do a lot worse than the Huygens Optics youtube channel. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"SEDuVF7kiPU":[{"hn_comment_id":14975159,"author":"dolevyao","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Google engineer wrote his memo after he went to a shaming diversity program","text":"I highly, highly recommend watching Damore's interview with Jordan Peterson. I am starting to think that Damore might be on the right side of all of this. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14970978,"author":"boona","month":"2017-08","story_title":"More than 60 women consider suing Google, claiming sexism and a pay gap","text":"It seems that HN is flagging all articles that mention the Google Memo. Which speaks to the need to have this conversation even more. For those who are interested, James has a new interview with psychology professor Jordan Peterson. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14971048,"author":"coreyp_1","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Google Memo Author James Damore Talks to Jordan Peterson [video]","text":"Why is this flagged, and why do the submitted links keep disappearing? (This video in this link is incomplete, the full video is here: [VIDEO] ) The full video is very well put together, including links to the scientific papers discussed. This is a high-profile event at one of the largest internet tech company in existance, and it has a bearing on every one of our lives. So why is it being flagged and removed everywhere?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14973094,"author":"mpweiher","month":"2017-08","story_title":"The Google memo is poorly argued and reaches the wrong conclusion","text":"James's memo is a lot better argued, more nuanced and fair than this collection of personal opinions, bald assertions, non-sequiturs and inane hypotheticals. See Jordan Peterson's interview with James Damore, where he goes through the memo almost line-by-line. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14973353,"author":"mpweiher","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Google\u2019s War Over the Sexes","text":"First, see Jordan Peterson's interview with James Damore, where he goes through the memo almost line-by-line. [VIDEO] Second, he doesn't say that \"female attributes/desires are not as compatible with tech jobs\", at least not as you define them. These are his suggestions for improving diversity: \"Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things \u25cb We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles at Google can be and we shouldn't deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this). \u25cf Women on average are more cooperative \u25cb Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe there's more we can do. \" You are saying this is already the case at your workplace. Awesome, you already have what he suggests. Why is what he suggest wrong-headed??","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14974289,"author":"cropsieboss","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube Responds to Google Memo","text":"Why is everyone appealing to emotions and producing red herrings? No one refers to any points other than those which they interpret to be oppressive and offensive (mostly points having to do with female/male differences which are real and exist). The hypothesis put out are there to further the discussion, not to be taken as facts (there are words like \"may\", \"in part\" all over the place yet we interpret \"may\" as \"is\", and \"in part\" as \"mostly\"). What about Google's unscientific, hidden, irrational methods of fixing bias? Unconscious bias training is unscientific yet they practice it. It does not work, or at worst it is harmful. Facebook does it too. These methods come from one of the hardest fields of science - psychology. We know how much the studies aren't reproducible, repeatable, some results even depend on time (more known the methods the less they work). Why is no one looking at those points? [VIDEO] Watched the interview above and cannot believe how media and almost every individual responding put this individual in some kind of aggressive, oppressive, racist frame. Given the peer-reviewed sources in the video description of the interview no one sane enough could believe that the guy was being malevolent. The real guilt goes to the leaker, the dramatizer and the reactionist. I'm officially stopping with the tracking of this topic. It frustrates me that so many brilliant individuals become ideologues and witch hunters incapable of continuing the discussion. It saddens m","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14976808,"author":"orionblastar","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Fired Engineer James Damore: I Feel Google Betrayed Me","text":"TL;DR version, James Damore works for Google, researches scientific sources for gender definitions. Compiles each definition and factor into a document that uses neutral third party citations and peer review to back up his citations. Gets fired over SJW Politics, accusing him of making gender stereotypes by people using politics, culture, society for gender definitions, Google panics over the protesters, feminists, social justice warriors, etc upset over the document and under pressure fire James Damore. He was not a shitty or toxic employee, he was assigned to do scientific research on genders and compile it into a document using scientific proof. [VIDEO] Look at the full text of that video to see the links cited: Published on Aug 9, 2017 James Demore of Google recently wrote a memo detailing his thoughts about Google's various diversity initiatives. Inside the company, and then outside, it went viral. He lost his job, in consequence: for \"perpetuating gender stereotypes.\" The problem is that everything James claimed is solidly backed by well-developed scientific literatures. Thus, the company that is arguably in charge of more of the world's communication than any other has now fired a promising engineer for stating a series of established scientific truths. That's worth thinking about. In this full 50 minute interview, James and I discuss his motivations, and the consequences of his actions. We are joined (audio only) by another Google employee who wishes, for obvious reas","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15022705,"author":"jxramos","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo","text":"I watched some youtube interviews of him, one on Bloomberg where he seemed pretty nervous and not as articulate or as relaxed as on this longer interview [VIDEO] with some Canadian professor who apparently has a bad rap of his own. Still an interesting discussion with some odd 3rd party alternate Googler in the background who speaks up every now and then but who has an obscure role in the context of the overall discussion. I was pretty curious too who this fella was that stirred up the hornet's nest.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15425347,"author":"kukx","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Confessions of a Failed Female Coder","text":"> This is why I dislike Damore. I don't care what his manifesto says ... Playing games is pathetic, dude. Well, according to his statement he was a top performer at Google, so we can assume he was not afraid of being replaced by a woman. Besides he just started a discussion in a response to, according to him, shady moves in regards of equality performed by Google. It is worth to listen to the other side: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"SEwTjZvy8vw":[{"hn_comment_id":39856629,"author":"nickysielicki","month":"2024-03","story_title":"The Next Big Step in Mojo Open Source","text":"When mojo was initially released I didn\u2019t think much of it because: 1. It was announced prior to being available, even in closed source form. 2. Emoji filenames meant to me that it wasn\u2019t taking itself too seriously. 3. Many people have tried to make Python fast and failed, and that was my naive take on it, and despite the fact that LLVM allstars were working on it, it seemed like a lofty goal. 4. Closed source programming languages usually suck. They presented at the LLVM conference in 2023 and this video totally changed my view: [VIDEO] There are some fascinating ideas here, I\u2019m especially excited about what could come from their templated IR. Recommend others give it a watch if they\u2019re confused on why they should pay attention to this project.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49269144,"author":"MohamedMabrouk","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Mojo 1.0 Is Here","text":"I think they had a good dive here [VIDEO] The gist is that MLIR (unlike LLVM) was designed to be multithreaded so the whole stack above LLVM IR is parallel, and then LLVM is used as a per-function codegen tool in parallel, so although LLVM itself is single threaded there are multiple seperate contexts of it. also I think they wrote their own linker.","stance":"rec"}],"SFv8Wm2HdNM":[{"hn_comment_id":26786747,"author":"kbenson","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Using the switch(true) pattern in JavaScript","text":"If you haven't seen it, Kevlin Henney's talk about \"The Forgotten Art of Structured Programming\"[1] is interesting (if somewhat long in the examples later), and somewhat related. It's not specifically about return early (and a case could be made that it should or should not apply specifically to early return), but it is about if, else, return, and how they affect cognitive load when reading code. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27864911,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Linux: Using goto In Kernel Code (2003)","text":"I get that, but the comment was specifically about pointers (not gotos or structure), and is interesting in general from a historical perspective. The \"goto\" keyword is similarly dangerous. I've seen very good arguments for leaving it out, and generally poor arguments for keeping it in a language. \"I can use it safely\" is not a good argument, because it's just like Jim Jefferies' standup routine linked above: \"Why should I have my guns taken away from me?\" An example of a good argument for structured programming is the talk \"The Forgotten Art of Structured Programming - Kevlin Henney [C++ on Sea 2019]\": [VIDEO] Similarly, this article makes a very good argument that concurrent or async code is essentially the \"goto spaghetti reinvented, but even worse \", and that Structured Concurrency is the solution: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"SGJ5cZnoodY":[{"hn_comment_id":12767698,"author":"coord","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Mirai Botnet Client, Echo Loader and CNC source code","text":"I cannot wait for some type of top-down pressure to force IoT developers to take security seriously. The movement has been pushed into overdrive thanks to insane levels of competition where you either crush your R&D into the smallest breakneck period or you live to see your creation being sold for half of what your budget can allow by other firms lifting your efforts while you're still at the workbench.[1] I've been getting cozy with Shenzhen-based hardware accelerators for the past year as part of a personal side-venture and I have not seen a group so pressured to deliver a product as fast as possible with security being a casual afterthought. To get a decent taste of what it's like, I wholeheartedly recommend WIRED's Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen and the companies that dwell there.[2] Their struggles for ephemeral market-share are endemic of the entire community that's taken over embedded hardware for the past few years. The saddest aspect of it all is that this market competition isn't benefiting the consumer. IoT devices are coming out of the factories poorly engineered, badly maintained for far too short of a time, and as we've learned from this attack, being used as vectors for network intrusion and distributed censorship. Even arduino founder Massimo Banzi's widely-lauded IoT Manifesto[3] fails to approach any comprehensive statement regarding a dev's responsibility to build in some level of security to their devices. It just isn't part of the fast-and-loose cu","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13534113,"author":"drewmate","month":"2017-01","story_title":"A 24-year-old made $345K in 2 months by beating Kickstarters to market","text":"There's an excellent documentary on the hardware/hacking ecosystem in Shenzhen on YouTube: [VIDEO] . A lot of people there seem to embrace the ethos of moving fast and ignoring IP laws (both original creator and spoofer) because by the time you get a lawsuit or patent filed, the tech will have moved far beyond what you were trying to protect, and it will no longer be worth your time. Basically, move fast and try to keep up. It's crazy how fast the tech cycles are there.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14061364,"author":"tmoreton","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Shenzhen is a hothouse of innovation","text":"WIRED UK did a great job going into more detail on Shenzhen, highly recommend watching the documentary. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14979334,"author":"smckt","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Shenzhen: China\u2019s \u2018skyscraper capital\u2019","text":"If interested about Shenzhen, I'd highly recommend watching this mesmerizing feature on Wired UK: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17539263,"author":"lubujackson","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Letter from Shenzhen","text":"For a companion piece I highly recommend this hour long vid by Wired about Shenzhen. It's worth your time: [VIDEO] Things that stood out to me was the maker mindset was so prevalent and competitve that it had filtered down to the buyers. So someone cobbles together some new widget for their phone and starts to sell it. Other people see it selling a nd copy it, but they make modifications. Shoppers see it for the first time and decide they want one with a purple strap, so they shop around until they find it or find someone who will make it that way. This is where the hoverboard fad bubbled up but also how and why it \"flamed\" out. I think it's a fascinating testbed for technology and creativity and economics.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18717594,"author":"thisisit","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Jack Ma: US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure","text":"Whenever people talk about failures of government to build infrastructure I can't help but look back at the brilliant Wired documentary on Shenzhen. It depicts a boundary line between the city and urban village. And government had the power to relocate 150k in a snap to get the development going [1] How many countries can actually do that? Sure, couple of hundreds of people can be moved but 100k people, I am sure that cause a riot of sorts and project shut down very quickly. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21987648,"author":"nexus6mike","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Shenzhen\u2019s economy under strain: blame the trade war?","text":"Short-term demand seems to be shifting to Vietnam. This seems to have enabled a 'wait and see' approach re: China + tariffs. However, I'd question if Vietnam has enough long-term manufacturing capacity [1] [2] [3] to sustain the short-term advantage it seems to be currently enjoying. Today, China has 16 of the world's 50 busiest ports, including Shenzhen at #3 (all as measured by 2018 TEU volume). [4] However, this is less indicative of capacity than it is of current demand / throughput. Both countries could benefit from building more deep-water ports. China currently has two Panamax ports, with a third on the way. Vietnam has none and is building its first. The U.S., by comparison, has 42 by my count. [5] Separately, there's a great Wired documentary on Shenzhen: [VIDEO] . [1] [LINK] [2] www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3018403/chinese-manufacturers-returning-home-inefficient-vietnam [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32804101,"author":"irsagent","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"Here is a list of 20 documentaries I have come to love and return to when I come across them. There is no specific order to them. Enjoy! The * next to the number indicates the last 4 years. If you have seen one listed that you'd like to share what you think about please leave a comment with this structure [# in the list ] Comment... . i.e. [1] Loved learning about Noyce. What a guy. 1. Silicon Valley: Where the Future | PBS: American Experience [1:23:19] [2013] History of the how Silicon Valley came to be. William Shockley. Robert Noyce. Fairchild Semiconductor, The Traitorous Eight. Homepage: [LINK] Kanopy: [LINK] Where to Watch: [LINK] 2. Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware | Wired UK: Future Cities [1:07:50] [2016] the evolution of \u201cShanzhai\u201d \u2013 or copycat manufacturing \u2013 has transformed traditional models of business, distribution and innovation, and asks what the rest of the world can learn from this so-called \u201cSilicon Valley of hardware\". Youtube: [VIDEO] *2.1. The People's Republic of The Future | Bloomberg: Hello World [30:10] [2019] Shenzhen, tech-fueled entrepreneurs try to navigate an authoritarian regime. Youtube: [LINK] 3. The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard | TPB AFK [1:22:07] [2013] The history of the Pirate Bay. Torrenting. Legal. Privacy. Homepage: [LINK] Youtube: [LINK] Where to Watch: [LINK] 4. Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head | BBC [6 Part] [2021] Adam Curtis takes you on \"An Emotional history of how we got to this place.\" Economics. History. Power. Psycholo","stance":"rec"}],"SGUCcjHTmGY":[{"hn_comment_id":31783572,"author":"ghoomketu","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?","text":"I loved Openai's codex JavaScript game making live demo(1) where they actually created a fully functioning game in JavaScript using just plain old english. Kind of changed my whole view about programming and it's future. (1) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28481521,"author":"sharemywin","month":"2021-09","story_title":"A.I. can now write its own computer code \u2013 that\u2019s good news for humans","text":"Here's a pretty impressive demo. [VIDEO] I think they said it handles something like 37% of requests. Btw, don't watch it if your worried at losing your job to a computer.","stance":"rec"}],"SIOQgY1tqrU":[{"hn_comment_id":39120099,"author":"i2shar","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Gene therapy allows an 11-year-old boy to hear","text":"This is well known and well studied. I highly recommend Sapolksy\u2019s lecture on this: [VIDEO] Start at 12:14 for the relevant topic, but the entire lecture is a good watch.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10063622,"author":"nerfhammer","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Apes may be closer to speaking than many scientists think","text":"Robert Sapolsky's lecture, mentioned in the article, wherein he discusses ape language projects, is a good watch: [VIDEO] He completely dismisses Koko but considers Kanzi to be more credible.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18259909,"author":"SlySherZ","month":"2018-10","story_title":"I woke up unable to speak English","text":"If I remember correctly, when you learn a new language after age 10, the brain encodes the new language in a region adjacent to the one where your mother language is encoded, which means that any localized injury on this part of the brain may impact your ability to speak just one of them. Source: Sapolsky's lecture about language: [VIDEO] If you want to understand better how the brain works, I really recommend watching the whole course.","stance":"rec"}],"SK4ezQrTqFw":[{"hn_comment_id":7665375,"author":"i4i","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are your favorite videos relevant to entrepreneurs or startups? ","text":"My favorite, because it's so full of great stories, is the Chris Sacca interview with Jason Calacanis on This Week In Startups. Pt.1 [LINK] Pt.2 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10570165,"author":"DeBraid","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Marc Andreessen Sold 73 Percent of His Facebook Stock in the Last Two Weeks","text":"Some good stories related to this via Chris Sacca on TWIS [VIDEO] Essentially Zuckerberg treated the IPO process with contempt, was cavalier and unorthodox, offending many Wall Streeters. 'The Hoodie' legend exploded during this period, as did perception that Facebook was hopeless on mobile AND had poor leadership. Both turned out to be false, as FB post-2012 found a way to monetize mobile and Zuckerberg grew into his role as CEO, now telling jokes in Chinese and managing the press more effectively.","stance":"rec"}],"SKhcan8pk2w":[{"hn_comment_id":29032033,"author":"cyounkins","month":"2021-10","story_title":"The main thing about Phenylacetone meth is that there's so much of it","text":"Can anyone comment on how producers could be isolating the the 'd' enantiomer? Are they using enzymes? Steve Mould has a great video [1] on homochirality in nature and says, \"Why are all the sugar molecules that you buy from the shops right-handed? ... If you were to make some sugar for yourself in a chemistry lab by mixing some chemicals together, you would get a 50/50 mix of left-handed sugar and right-handed sugar.\" He goes on to describe how enzymes in nature exclusively make homochiral molecules, and since all our sugar is made by enzymes, all our sugar is homochiral. Later in the video he describes how you can filter enantiomers by finding an enzyme in nature that 'eats' the undesired enantiomer, finding the DNA for it, and coercing bacteria into producing that enzyme. This seems quite complicated and potentially out of reach for a clandestine drug-making operation. Is there another way? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31784547,"author":"staindk","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Physicists link two time crystals in seemingly impossible experiment","text":"Your question reminded me of this video about \"Homochirality: Why Nature Never Makes Mirror Molecules\"[1] - even though it's not directly related I think it may be interesting to you. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33712767,"author":"thinkyfish","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Pristine meteorite found within hours of hitting Earth","text":"Here is a video talking about molecular chirality and how nature really only produces one version of molecules [VIDEO] . If it picked up the molecules in the atmosphere those atmospheric molecules should have been made by life on earth and those have a handedness bias depending on the molecule, some are produced right handed only or left handed only because they are made one atom at a time and need to be one handed for life to use them. Abiotic synthesis produces a 50/50 bias of left and right handed molecules because they are made all at once.","stance":"rec"}],"SKtQgFBRUvQ":[{"hn_comment_id":12698724,"author":"MildlySerious","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Lime Text \u2013 Open Source Sublime Text alternative (2014)","text":"There's a talk about it, too, if interested: [VIDEO] I'm hoping to find the time to get more comfortable with Rust and try to contribute at some point","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12832111,"author":"bonquesha99","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Buttery Smooth Emacs","text":"What are some good resources to learn more about the inner workings of text editors or building one from scratch? So far I've found and enjoyed reading/watching the resources below and would love to learn more. * The Craft of Text Editing: [LINK] * Writing a Text Editor From Scratch: [LINK] * A Modern Text Editor Built in Rust: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15159748,"author":"kartD","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommended (recent) videos for a Lunch and Learn","text":"Little drunk so bear with me :) Rich Hickey: Clojure concurrency[ [LINK] ] Keynote - Rust: confident, productive systems programming by Aaron Turon [ [LINK] ] RustConf 2016 - A Modern Editor Built in Rust by Raph Levien [ [VIDEO] ] Microservices at Netflix Scale: Principles, Tradeoffs & Lessons Learned[ [LINK] ] What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber to 1000 Services[ [LINK] ] Dynamic Code Optimization and the NVIDIA Denver Processor [ [LINK] ] * if you can get anything on Apple's Ax series that's even better","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16777511,"author":"steveklabnik","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Immutable.rs: immutable data structures for Rust","text":"We had a talk at RustConf previously about the Xi editor; it uses an immutable data structure to handle text. It's a video but the author lays out the details here: [VIDEO] They make an interesting argument about how Rust makes it easier and nicer to write these kinds of structures. It's still an area of exploration in Rust generally though; I wouldn't say immutable data structures are idiomatic, but that's also just because we haven't had a ton of easy ones to use, so nobody uses them. So we'll see!","stance":"rec"}],"SMEOKDVXlUo":[{"hn_comment_id":14800741,"author":"dpc_pw","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance","text":"How pointless. The whole point of Bitcoin was to have uncensorable, decentralized asset that can be used to exchange value without any trust etc. That is the only reason we endure this utterly shitty and inefficient blockchain thing, and we exchange money for this otherwise pointless online points. I have no problem with ETH as cryptocurrency / smart contract platform. But this whole Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is just one big BS. Etherum community is trying to pump ETH value by associating with brand names, and corporations are trying to pump their stock value by presenting themselves as innovative. BS - empty words and marketing gimmicks. Just read through that page. Just watch Blockchain vs. Bullshit: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15868025,"author":"tlrobinson","month":"2017-12","story_title":"It's Not Just a Bitcoin Bubble \u2013 It's Far Worse","text":"Andreas Antonopoulous has a great talk on this: [VIDEO] Spoiler: nothing, \u201cblockchain\u201d is one piece of what makes Bitcoin interesting.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15017130,"author":"Ninn","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Blockchain could fix a key problem in China\u2019s food industry","text":"This sound like just another case of misunderstanding the core technology. I can recommend watching: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"SR1jwwagtaQ":[{"hn_comment_id":4617830,"author":"sharkweek","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Living in a Van","text":"If you think you can handle some sweaty palms, Alex Honnold, one of the best free solo climbers in the world, lives in his van so he can easily get from park to park and seems to absolutely thrive off the lifestyle -- [VIDEO] There is something that appeals to my personality to live out of a van and just move on a whim but I don't think I would ever have the guts to go for it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9229315,"author":"sharkweek","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Where the Real Skyscrapers Are (Hint: North Dakota)","text":"For some more sweaty palm fun, check out professional climber Alex Honnold \"free soloing\" various rock walls. [VIDEO] The whole video is worth watching, but the meat and potatoes starts at about 11:30","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13014104,"author":"wlll","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Czech climber Adam Ondra has conquered the Dawn Wall in record time","text":"That's what chalk is for :) [VIDEO] The whole video is pretty interesting, but may make your hands sweat even more.","stance":"rec"}],"SSH5EY-W5oM":[{"hn_comment_id":25669904,"author":"ytwySXpMbS","month":"2021-01","story_title":"U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests","text":"It may not be a good way of persuading people, but it seems there\u2019s no good way of persuading you as you simply refuse to be persuaded. We could argue about the specifics all day, but I think you should ask yourself why you want it to be true. Do you seek community? Are you angry inside and need an outlet? Here\u2019s a video[1]. Of course from your perspective, your position makes perfect sense and isn\u2019t extreme, and by no means am I calling you a white supremacist, but you should watch and see if you relate in any way. Please don\u2019t dismiss it out of hand, there\u2019s valuable lessons in it that apply to everyone, not just former white supremacists. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38201066,"author":"brundolf","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Daryl Davis Befriends KKK Members and Gets Them to Quit","text":"Another favorite example of de-radicalization through compassion: [VIDEO] I'm a firm believer that the antidote to hatefulness is connection, which leads to empathy, which leads to love","stance":"rec"}],"SWEts0rlezA":[{"hn_comment_id":15880137,"author":"trcollinson","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Modern Front-end in Rails","text":"I built a rather extensive application for a client over the last 18 months using Rails API and Angular, using a number of these sorts of principles. While it is entirely possible to use what the article suggested, I argue it's a premature optimization and may be a detriment to the entire project. We're now actively removing the Angular portion of the project and going back to the good old way. I wouldn't say this decision was made without careful thought nor without weighing many options. But when it comes down to it, many line of business applications (which is what I see a lot of in the market) don't need the level of sophistication the instructions in this article gives. Most applications need to be reasonably fast, reasonably responsive, and extremely easy to maintain and extend. Does working with all of these modern front end tools that change so quickly and given at least one order of magnitude increase in complexity also give the application a equal increase in speed, responsiveness, maintainability, and extensibility? I don't think so. I'm not the first person to say this. Take a look at this presentation by Sam Stephenson, it will be worth your while: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17482435,"author":"peteforde","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails","text":"I have nothing against SPAs for complex UI interactions. It's sort of like taking anti-biotics; there should be a moment of reflection when you should justify your true need, lest the cure be worse than the disease. Most developers of a certain age have come up when it's SPA by default, and can't truly defend why they need it. In this thread, there are several claims that it's impossible to write well-organized jQuery. That sounds an awful lot like dogma to me. Also, your inability to write well-organized code says more about your coding and team-management skills than it does about any one approach. Any tech is only as good as the team using it. A few years ago, Sam Stephenson (who originally wrote the Prototype library, before jQuery was a thing) gave an excellent talk on Turbolinks at RailsConf. I recommend the whole talk (turn it up to 1.5x speed, of course) but at 4:12 he does an amazing job of showing how the SPA path leads to insanity. [VIDEO] Here's a mental exercise for you: the next time you start a new project, instead of deciding which SPA framework to use, start with an assumption that an SPA is wild overkill for the first iteration of your application - especially if few people on your team have working expertise with the SPA in question. Then see if you can argue FOR the tech. It's much harder to justify something you don't need if you start with an honest conversation about how you probably don't need it. (This works for throwing out CDs, too: start with the a","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18807750,"author":"trcollinson","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: First mobile side-project: What stack to choose in 2019?","text":"I found this video and talk to be very enlightening. I know it's not the neatest, most exciting framework, but Rails with Turbolinks sure can do the trick. My last two mobile applications were built in the same way that Sam Stephenson describes here. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18831498,"author":"peteforde","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Go-to web stack today?","text":"I urgently encourage you and anyone else reading this to check out Turbolinks 5, ideally in tandem with Stimulus. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] You can get all of the benefits of server-generated pages with the speed of an SPA. 90%+ of the sites built using SPAs would be better served by Turbolinks and Stimulus.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19428788,"author":"peteforde","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Why I believe Rails is still relevant in 2019","text":"Okay, I have lots of good news for you. First, CoffeeScript is formally deprecated. Turbolinks sucked, but Turbolinks 5 is an entirely new beast and it rocks. You need to give it a second look. I recommend this talk, sped up to 1.5x: [VIDEO] Finally, there absolutely is an opinionated client library that is designed to pair beautifully with Turbolinks 5. It's called Stimulus and it rocks. [LINK] You can play with all of these frameworks using the --webpack parameter: rails new future --skip-sprockets --skip-coffee --webpack=stimulus --database=postgresql --skip-test As a bonus for anyone starting a new Rails project today, you're going to want to bookmark [LINK] Let me know if you have any questions.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19519293,"author":"peteforde","month":"2019-03","story_title":"I Miss Rails","text":"I urge/beg you to check out the Turbolinks 5 + StimulusJS libraries, which are by the same (Rails team) people, which is no coincidence. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19520138,"author":"thrownaway954","month":"2019-03","story_title":"I Miss Rails","text":"I keep looking at C# and Blazor myself If you want an SPA type Rails way of doing things, you can use Turbolinks. This talk at RailsConf 2016 is really an eye opener. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16334000,"author":"thrownaway954","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Best web framework in 2018","text":"[VIDEO] if you haven't seen Sam Stephenson Turbolink talk from RailsConf 2016, you should give it a watch. What they did in a year with a small team is amazing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16549202,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Benefits of front-end JavaScript frameworks?","text":"Managing complex DOM transformations and avoiding pageloads on every change do carry benefits. Some examples: chat, Facebook-like functionality, complex custom interfaces. There is however a strong tendency to build complex front-end apps because of the trend to do so. This increased complexity results in higher costs without significant benefits (I\u2019m very open to changing my mind). Turbolinks for example is a fantastic backend-agnostic library which eliminates the pageloads in CRUD apps at close to zero development costs and makes the speed almost indistinguishable from SPA implementations. I highly recommend this talk on managing the complexity of basecamp and sharing a codebase between web and native apps. [VIDEO] Unless you\u2019re building extremely complex interfaces and if you are able to correct for trendiness you may conclude that a monolithic app with possibly Turbolinks and some front end sugar is the best choice. You can always offload some work to the client once you get to a billion users and servers become too expensive. Until then maybe focus on launching.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17891943,"author":"thrownaway954","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Rails, still?","text":"You achieve the same thing with Rails and Turbolinks. Watch this presentation by Sam Stephenson to see what I mean. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19071297,"author":"fouc","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What tech stack would you use to build an open-source Google Keep clone?","text":"I'm a rails dev too, last year I was making a mobile web app where I was concerned about frontend, so I started making a SPA in mithril.js and using Rails as the API. Later I abandoned the SPA and went back to rails views, using turbolinks to make it fast. In reality rails + turbolinks is fast enough for most cases, and then I can sprinkle in extra javascript or use SPA on one or two pages as needed. The reason I think it's almost better to avoid SPA + API approach is to keep the codebase simple and easier for one person to maintain. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19634445,"author":"peteforde","month":"2019-04","story_title":"JQuery 3.4.0 Released","text":"That's brilliant! Have you had the opportunity to play with Turbolinks 5? It sounds like there will be some crossover with what you have already done, but if you're intellectually curious, you might pick up some good tricks, too. [LINK] [VIDEO] TL5 just happens to pair beautifully with a tiny library called Stimulus, which would be YAF except that it's a) by the same team as TL5 and b) that team is also behind Rails, so there's some claim to legitimate best practices. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22940527,"author":"elamje","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What stack should I use for my mobile app?","text":"If you are a Rails developer, this Turbolinks presentation makes a strong case to be used for mobile apps. [VIDEO] It seems like there is a strong productivity gain from using rails here since it\u2019s extremely productive and you can make simple wrapper apps to release to the Play and App Store that really just wrap the web view. The biggest gain is obviously reusing most of the web app across three different platforms, and the ability to add native navigation and interaction as needed, later. You also avoid needing a big javascript library.","stance":"rec"}],"SYeeTvitvFU":[{"hn_comment_id":23024517,"author":"sitharus","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Collision Course: a type of road junction that is dangerous for cyclists (2018)","text":"The Tom Scott video has a good animation on this: [VIDEO] Because of the layout of the junction the cars are actually approaching from behind the cyclists.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30165981,"author":"zinekeller","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Tesla to recall vehicles that may disobey stop signs","text":"The Wired reporting is based on Bez's article on Singletrack (as stated): [LINK] Tom Scott made a good complementary video about this: [VIDEO] It's already fixed just last month: [LINK] and [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32578852,"author":"DoughnutHole","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Effects of large vehicles on pedestrian and pedal-cyclist injury severity","text":"Tom Scott has a good video for anyone looking for a visual of this phenomenon: [VIDEO] He shows off a rural (and thankfully now fixed) crossroads in the UK with seemingly great visibility and an unusually high rate of cyclist fatalities - the roads are at such an angle that any reckless driving speed can align with a reasonable cycling speed such that the driver's door pillar can block visibility of a cyclist with right of way right up to the point of impact - and it's compounded by the fact that the car is necessarily approaching from behind the cyclist, so a passing cyclist will be unaware of the danger possibly until they get hit. Of course if drivers in the area actually followed the stop signs no one would get hit - but if you watch the video in a five minute period genuinely only about half of the cars passing through actually come to a complete stop at the stop sign. You need more than signage and quietly hoping that people to do the right thing.","stance":"rec"}],"SZazYFchLRI":[{"hn_comment_id":7538437,"author":"computer","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Recreating the THX Deep Note","text":"Iannis Xenakis' song Metastasis got there first as far as I know, in 1953 with a full orchestra. It has a slightly different (less harmonic) end: [VIDEO] (mostly the first minute) It's one of my favorite songs, mostly for when I want to be left alone in a room.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31821446,"author":"nirse","month":"2022-06","story_title":"\u2018The War on Music\u2019 Review: Songs Without Listeners","text":"here are some of the better known 'inhumane' pieces, all from the post-war European modernists, which I all like a lot: [LINK] (Klavierstueck ix by Stockhausen) [LINK] (Pli selon pli by Boulez) [LINK] (Athmosphere by Ligeti) [LINK] (Sinfonia by Berio) [VIDEO] (Metastasis by Xenakis) And a more recent work: [LINK] (La commedia by Andriessen)","stance":"rec"}],"SaadsrHBygc":[{"hn_comment_id":23745171,"author":"soulofmischief","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?","text":"Are you familiar with Magenta? [0] It's not real-time, but definitely an important area of research. Also check out Dan Tepfer [1] who is doing amazing work with an algorithmic approach to reactive live performances, with great call and response tactics. I myself am slowly prototyping a fully artificial AI band which can be orchestrated using very high-level musical ideas and a big helping of intelligent randomization and algorithms based on music theory. I've been prototyping in Andrew Sorensen's Extempore [2] and have laid much of the groundwork like melody/harmony/rhythm generation as well as basic modulation of these elements to create longer musical structures which utilize motifs in multiple ways Currently it is a matter of shedding pre-computed tables of \"nice\" sounding progressions or purely random progressions, and creating a more fundamental approach which can derive the appropriate progressions from the given user parameters. I am also expanding the program's ability to generate aesthetically pleasing and unique singular motifs which drive these algorithmic compositions. I have a band leader / conductor module which provides cues and other synchronized data, which even without advanced motif generation and modulation still allows for things not currently possible in any non-code musical production software such as global dyamics, timing changes, progression sharing, (eventually) directing impromptu solos, etc. Reach out via email if you'd like to discuss more! [0] ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34565166,"author":"voicedYoda","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Visualizing \u201cThe Art of Fugue\u201d","text":"I also enjoy Dan Tepfer's visualizations of audio and audio decay. This was his tiny desk concert: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ScEPu1cs4l0":[{"hn_comment_id":27389178,"author":"raspasov","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Tour of our 250k line Clojure codebase","text":"I personally started with this talk by Rich Hickey (person who made Clojure) [VIDEO] One of the best \"why Clojure\" talks that I've seen, especially for somebody coming from an OOP perspective, like myself.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29945352,"author":"raspasov","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: New Programming Language?","text":">> I am surprised that there are still no software development platforms where you use one language for all levels and do not have to translate between different ways of representing data and interacting with services. You've spotted a problem that I think many people are blind to. I agree 100%. If you'd like to explore more about Clojure, I highly recommend this talk [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30298409,"author":"simongray","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Case against OOP is understated, not overstated (2020)","text":"If you're going to reference a Rich Hickey take-down of OOP, I think \"Are We There Yet?\" is the most pertinent: [VIDEO] Of course, Simple Made Easy is excellent too, probably his most influential talk.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30886317,"author":"joshlemer","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Two Vexing Problems in Functional Programming","text":"Rich Hickey made a great talk on this in 2009 [VIDEO] An other way to think about it is that the programs we write do not literally simulate entities (users, other domain objects like books, students, professors, classes, etc). Our software simulates the record keeping devices that store /protect information regarding these entities. We are most of the time writing information processing systems, not simulation systems and information accumulates, rather than updates in places. Like, e.g. when there's a new president elected, we don't all go out with our erasers and remove all references to change sentences from \"The President is Donald Trump\" to say \"The President is Joe Biden\", instead we accumulate new facts without remembering the old.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48377453,"author":"onlyrealcuzzo","month":"2026-06","story_title":"My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month","text":"Rich Hickey's: Are We There Yet may be interesting to any one here: [VIDEO] I found this to be one of the more interesting talks I've watched. Like you (I think) - I love functional languages. But there's a problem I can't really figure out how to articulate where they reach a level where they stop \"just working\" imo. Maybe it's just me being too dumb.","stance":"rec"}],"SemHh0n19LA":[{"hn_comment_id":26466608,"author":"JSeymourATL","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Hit a wall with our product team. What next?","text":"> But who is \u201cyour\u201d company and how do we pick the \u201cniche\u201d? Turns out, this is a common problem. Friendly Challenge: imagine 3 very different future niches for your team. Leveraging your interests, experience/expertise. Mix in the Clients you'll serve, Products you build, and Problems you solve. Each version would have a 5 year plan. Start a discussion -- which one energizes your team? More on this subject by the authors of Design Your Life > [VIDEO] Highly recommend their book! PM me if you want to discuss.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27604806,"author":"JSeymourATL","month":"2021-06","story_title":"I'm good in my profession and I'm tired of it","text":"Turns out, the most interesting design problem is designing your life. Bill Burnett has a brilliant book on the subject. > [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30972488,"author":"samh748","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How to think about direction in life/career?","text":"A great great book that helped me with this: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans ( [LINK] ). I first got exposed to it during a career navigation workshop that showed us this video: [VIDEO] They also published a follow-up called Designing Your Work Life but I haven't read that one.","stance":"rec"}],"Sf036fO-ZUk":[{"hn_comment_id":39747189,"author":"echelon","month":"2024-03","story_title":"VR Powered by N64 [video]","text":"This is what James Lambert does as a follow up when Valve shuts down [1] his \"Portal in N64\" project [2]. James is like Kaze [3] and builds incredible N64 demos [4] and technical videos about them. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47554666,"author":"cubefox","month":"2026-03","story_title":"I Built an Open-World Engine for the N64 [video]","text":"The same guy, James Lambert, also implemented texture streaming (which would not be invented until two console generations later) in an N64 demo. The textures look uncharacteristically high res: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"SfsCniN7Nsc":[{"hn_comment_id":31019481,"author":"kelvin0","month":"2022-04","story_title":"California's Vanished Dream, by the Numbers","text":"A funny, yet very well researched video on that exact same topic of Zoning nonsense. Entertaining AND informative. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30855635,"author":"fayten","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Americans do not want to return to urban living","text":"There are quite a few factors, I'd encourage checking out the following videos by Not Just Bikes and Climate Towns that cover a broad range of city planning and zoning in the US. Strong Towns Play List by Not Just Bikes (This heavily covers city planning issues in the US): [LINK] The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry by Climate Towns (This covers zoning): [VIDEO] How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream (This covers the auto industries impact on US cities.): [LINK] Dutch Cities are Better for the Climate (and my sanity) by Not Just Bikes (Not super relevant to zoning, but it's part 1 of The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry so I figured I'd link it.): [LINK] These are pretty snarky, but fun videos and the authors list their sources. Their video descriptions are worth checking out just to find a ton of reading material on each topic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45197059,"author":"fayten","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a \"reduced traffic zone\"","text":"This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums [LINK] Noise pollution [LINK] Infrastructure strain [LINK] More on Infrastructure and Sprawl [VIDEO] Articles: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: [LINK] The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.","stance":"rec"}],"Sg4U4r_AgJU":[{"hn_comment_id":34047243,"author":"teleforce","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Most(LY Dead) Influential Programming Languages (2020)","text":"This is an excellent talk on designing successful programming language by Brian Kernighan [1]. In the beginning of the lecture he did show a picture of the Tower of Babel depicting plethora programming languages as it's appeared in the cover of Communications of the ACM (CACM) magazine in January 1961 and most of the programming languages mentioned in the article were already there! [1] Brian Kernighan on successful language design: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17073998,"author":"chrisfinazzo","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Shell Style Guide","text":"There's a great talk by bwk where he complains about exactly this kind of behavior...before admitting that anything useful in a language will be abused in order to do silly things. [VIDEO] I'll admit, I'm no fan of Python, but this has little to do with the language itself. I found Bash and Ruby first, so Python just seems like too much work to get right. Requisite xkcd: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34048926,"author":"ad404b8a372f2b9","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Most(LY Dead) Influential Programming Languages (2020)","text":"All talks by Bret Victor are great, they are listed on his websites but they are more concerned with the future of programming than old languages: [LINK] On the topic of language design, there is also this talk by Brian Kernighan which gives good practical advice if you're building a language and talks about his journey with awk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ShEez0JkOFw":[{"hn_comment_id":13132034,"author":"spacemanmatt","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Talks that changed the way I think about programming","text":"I gotta throw in one of my favorites, because I have not seen another that really speaks so directly to the value of craftsmanship in development. I also deeply enjoyed the allegory with woodworking tools. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23486220,"author":"ludwa6","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Woodworking for Engineers","text":"Must-see presentation (~1hour) for anyone interested in this topic is \"Programming With Hand Tools\" by Tim Ewald: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7047241,"author":"mark_h","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Best development book I've read, has no code in it","text":"There was a talk at Clojure/conj by Tim Ewald on just that: [VIDEO] \"Programming with hand tools\" Lots of conference reviews nominated it in their favourite talks too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12997839,"author":"fmjrey","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Beginning Woodworking","text":"Can't help but mention this great video where an enthusiast woodworking engineer makes a parallel between tools in the real world and tools in computing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13336748,"author":"aidos","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Ask HN: If you were to switch career, what would you do?","text":"I also think it seems pretty appealing. There have been some interesting things on HN over the years about it. I loved this talk about how the tools you use determine how you look at problems (Tim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools) [VIDEO] And if you haven't seen him before, you're about to fall in love with Matthias Wandel: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218165,"author":"aidos","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"I'm not a Closure coder but I loved this talk on how as your tooling becomes more complex and automated, you start to lose sight of simpler solutions to problems. It's all about woodworking! Tim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25163365,"author":"datahead","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Cheap Router Table and Lift","text":"Interesting presentation that explores your question. +1 intersection from this commenter. Tim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29093511,"author":"dgb23","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Automation != Leverage","text":"Good article! Two things popped into my head when reading it. First the talk \"Programming with Hand Tools\" by Tim Edwald[0]. It's a very cool, entertaining talk with emphasis on the craftsmanship side of things and provokes thinking about which parts to automate (or maybe abstract away) and which parts to craft by hand when we're building stuff. Aside: also reminds me of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero project [1]. He is a strong advocate for structuring things bottom up and building them ourselves. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] --- Secondly when reading this: > Regardless, the basic idea is that companies are often faced with the decision of doing N units of shitty work or far fewer than N units of great work. This is obviously oversimplified, but there is an important point that wants to emerge from this line of thought. As someone who grew up on open source, standardized technologies and the Web, I have been empowered to build a livelihood on Web development, mostly \"self-taught\" (or rather self-directed). All of this Web stuff is very accessible and gives you actual _leverage_. You can build something useful very quickly and the community around it is happy to share so much knowledge and work. I'm _very_ thankful for that. But I think as the wider web development community we're losing sight of what that essence is. We started to think of the Web as merely a vehicle for pure scale as in \"how to reach the most people and annoy them with notifications\" and \"how to produce cheap sof","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31702112,"author":"fmjrey","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Why software engineers like woodworking","text":"Unless it's my tiny phone screen I'm surprised this video did not surface yet [VIDEO] (Tim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39340084,"author":"refset","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Why software engineers like woodworking (2021)","text":"\"Programming with hand tools\" (Tim Ewald, Clojure Conj 2013) is a very memorable talk on this theme: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39341988,"author":"adityaathalye","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Why software engineers like woodworking (2021)","text":"Time Ewald makes a case for \"Programming with Hand Tools\" in this talk he gave at Clojure/conj 2013. He too makes a connection with wood working. [VIDEO] Summary: For most of human history, furniture was built by hand using a small set of simple tools. This approach connects you in a profoundly direct way to the work, your effort to the result. This changed with the rise of machine tools, which made production more efficient but also altered what's made and how we think about making it in in a profound way. This talk explores the effects of automation on our work, which is as relevant to software as it is to furniture, especially now that once again, with Clojure, we are building things using a small set of simple tools.","stance":"rec"}],"Sm5xF-UYgdg":[{"hn_comment_id":10356953,"author":"ptaipale","month":"2015-10","story_title":"'Extreme poverty' to fall below 10% of world population for first time","text":"You really should watch this Hans Rosling's TED talk: [VIDEO] It's not misleading. Malnutrition is going down, lack of education is going down, lack of access to healthcare is going down. The more you read the Guardian, the more you have misconceptions about how bad the world is developing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24368409,"author":"Baeocystin","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper (1807)","text":"Not the person you were responding to, but I learned it from this TED talk: [VIDEO] (Not joking in the least. It's a very good presentation. Title is: How not to be ignorant about the world | Hans and Ola Rosling)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26313529,"author":"Baeocystin","month":"2021-03","story_title":"The Microwave Economy","text":"I'm not sure if capitalism deserves the credit or not, but you are completely correct when you say that life is much, much better now than it was even in the recent past. To those who doubt this: Please watch Hans Rosling's talk first, which I will link below. I promise it is not a waste of your time. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15279963,"author":"sekou","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Is the World Falling Apart? Not at All","text":"The \"How not to be ignorant about the world\" ( [VIDEO] ) TED talk by Hans (Rest In Peace) and Ola Rosling covers this topic well. Objectively the world is improving for humanity, however in the West and in \"developed\" nations it's harder to feel like things are going well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28343117,"author":"NalNezumi","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Mean World Syndrome","text":"Hans Rosling had a talk about this topic[1] 6 years ago, albeit less about \"mean\" and more about how \"bad\" the world was, and more importantly, how bad people thought the world was compared to how it actually is. Not too surprisingly, even media and journalists scored worse than random guessing. So it's hard to point fingers to the viewer getting wrong impression of the world when the information senders themselves can't measure it (or send it) correctly [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36273109,"author":"thomashop","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Meta releases New SOTA Text to Music generator better than MusicLM","text":"Can you provide some sources? Last time I looked into statistics on these topics I found the opposite to be true. The brothers Rosling have a nice talk about how all the big stats are improving globally (gender equality, education, health, extreme poverty, life expectation) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Sp9H0MO-qS8":[{"hn_comment_id":34313980,"author":"LesZedCB","month":"2023-01","story_title":"My Coffee Maker Just Makes Coffee","text":"Technology Connections on youtube has an awesome video about coffee makers! its 35 minutes, but i highly recommend it! [VIDEO] i think it's actually amazing how much design went into these \"dead simple\" coffee machines!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32464229,"author":"pfdietz","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Declining quality of consumer-grade products \u2013 2009 fridge compressor autopsy","text":"I just watched an amusing video that compares Mr. Coffee's original machine to modern drip coffeemakers. Mr. Coffee would cost $300 today (adjusted for inflation). There's been great simplification of the design over the years. [VIDEO] Given a more than order of magnitude reduction in price, a shorter lifespan can be tolerated, and could even be a rational consumer choice.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32712891,"author":"bcjordan","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Interest in heat pumps has increased dramatically in recent years","text":"Came here to post this :D The TC channel is definitely a hacker's eye view in to all the technologies that we take for granted every day. Tons of fascinating tech history covered, too. Other fun ones: - a defense of the simple drip coffee maker [VIDEO] - why do the turn signals not sync up when you're at a stop light? [LINK] - how humidifiers work and ehy the simple swamp cooler style are pretty ideal [LINK] - why dishwasher detergent packs are stupid (use powder/liquid) and why you should use the pre-wash slot and not bother pre rinsing your plates [LINK] - why do light switches click? [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34315000,"author":"xeromal","month":"2023-01","story_title":"My Coffee Maker Just Makes Coffee","text":"Anyone interested in how the traditional american coffee maker works should watch this. [VIDEO] Very fun video and I love the concept of using a piece of metal as a temperature-sensitive valve.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34315229,"author":"femto113","month":"2023-01","story_title":"My Coffee Maker Just Makes Coffee","text":"Simple drip machines are a marvel--I spend more on a month's supply of beans than I do on the maker, and have been getting about 5 years daily service out of each one. Technology Connections made a great video explaining how stupid/brilliant they are [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38809942,"author":"aksss","month":"2023-12","story_title":"The surprising genius of sewing machines [video]","text":"Just a friendly recco for the Technology Connections YouTube channel. Really liked his exploration of the Coffee Machine and other vids. Not affiliated in any way. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39108786,"author":"mewse-hn","month":"2024-01","story_title":"The humble brilliance of Italy's moka coffee pot (2018)","text":"Drip coffee makers are just better than the old percolators. Technology Connections on youtube has a video about drip coffee makers which is very good (he demos an original mr. coffee machine which has some differences vs modern machines) [VIDEO] He also did a vid on percolators recently which I haven't watched but the thumbnail suggests its an extended rant about how they suck [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"SqFu5O-oPmU":[{"hn_comment_id":4289923,"author":"kitsune_","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Thoughts on Consoles and Certification Processes - Jonathan Blow","text":"He is the exact opposite of a \"hipster\". He is a very smart (and in my opinion humble) guy. I don't know where his portrayal as an arrogant guy comes from. He held an amazing talk / presentation at Rice University called \"Video Games and The Human Condition\": [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12970419,"author":"JasonSage","month":"2016-11","story_title":"How Casinos Enable Gambling Addicts","text":"I see a lot of parallels between gambling and video games, specifically in how video game reward mechanisms resemble gambling with the way the brain responds to intense situations and risk/reward scenarios\u2014simply put, you can get quite a rush from either, and there's an entire industry built up around both to profit from this. I'd love to see a thorough comparison between these two. I think there's a lot of room to explore similarity in stigmas around addiction and indulgence in these pastimes, how people justify it, and the addiction mechanisms at play. Maybe there's even an exploration of healthy gambling habits that mirror healthy entertainment habits? I'd love to read about this stuff. Jonathan Blow has a great presentation on the mechanisms of video game addiction and the role of the game designer in building ethically responsible games [0]. I highly recommend it to anybody who's interested in exploring this line of thinking. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3115804,"author":"alexkcd","month":"2011-10","story_title":"Who killed videogames?","text":"Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid) has an interesting rant on social video games: [VIDEO] The gist being that games like Farmville are A/B tested to maximize addictiveness and profit, rather than maximizing fun.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7536512,"author":"dunckr","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Ask HN: I am a good developer but have a serious gaming addiction","text":"I think that many of us with addictive personalities it is difficult not to be 100% committed to something. So for myself it was a goal of shifting my interest away from gaming and initially towards programming. The best wake up call for me was realising that my focus on games was really just manipulation. I would watch Jonathan Blow's talk on Video Games and the Human Condition now. When you understand that you are being completely manipulated it becomes easier to do something differently. Another idea is to focus on the wasted effort. If you channelled all this time into creating something - your own game for instance. You would have something tangible at the end of it. Good luck. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8644270,"author":"ultimape","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Screeps \u2013 the world's first MMO sandbox strategy game for programmers","text":"I'd argue that all 'games' are about manipulating attention - its just a question of what means they use to do so. Game design is really a sort of meta-game about designing systems that effect the behavior of players. Consider: Game Mechanics and Mechanism Design ( [LINK] ) I'm fully with you on the notion that we shouldn't be manipulating players life like farmville. Johnathan blow put on a great talk about games and the human condition where he covers this aspect quite scathingly: [VIDEO] To completely ignore this aspect is to develop a game with no real-stickyness factor. Money aside, don't you want a game that people enjoy playing? The entire point of an MMO is to have a large reoccurring user-base. There is an art to it, and getting it right can make really powerful games: [LINK] For board games like chess, much of the appeal for the average player is that you get to sit down with a friend and compete, and in doing so the 'intellectual nature' of the game ends up pulling them in for the long term. Perhaps the answer to the meta-game of stickiness is to create a community around the game in a similar vein to the one from the ants ai challenge's forums. Were I to work on this project, I'd make a strong push toward git-like integration ala the work done behind KhanAcademy's live editor like discussed in this talk: [LINK] . - being able to share code behaviors with your team-mates (you are going to implement a guilds system, no?) and encourage discussions about behaviors at ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9011409,"author":"kelukelugames","month":"2015-02","story_title":"\u2018Braid\u2019 creator sacrifices his fortune to build his next game","text":"I've followed Jonathan Blow for a while. He has a reputation for being condescending. If you follow him a Twitter then you might come to the same conclusion. But he has given some amazing talks. [LINK] <-compares games to televison [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"SqayDnQ2wmw":[{"hn_comment_id":33531789,"author":"sph","month":"2022-11","story_title":"How Aphex Twin Made Selected Ambient Works 85-92","text":"I have loved Daft Punk for a long time, but one day I wanted to learn more about Aphex Twin and IDM in general and I must say it's an acquired taste. It's like getting into whiskeys. There are still some tracks that are impenetrable, but I've been enjoy this album and the works of Squarepusher a lot. Squarepusher has such a wide range of sounds it might be a better gateway drug. I love the unapologetic electronic, artificial, synthetic feel of these two artists. These were my ways into the genre: - Aphex Twin - T69 Collapse ( [VIDEO] ) (as someone said \"it's like jacking into cyberspace, but the RAR is corrupted\") - This album - Squarepusher - Terminal Slam ( [LINK] ) - Squarepusher - Hello Everything (album) In general many genres outside of pop are an acquired taste. If they were easy to get into, they would be called pop. You just need to find a way in, even if you decide it's not for you.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37928444,"author":"Cthulhu_","month":"2023-10","story_title":"What is the Demoscene? An obscure but influential art form","text":"Because without the technical challenge element, it's \"just\" audiovisual art, but check out the music video for T69 Collapse by Aphex Twin (photosensitive epillepsy warning): [VIDEO] . More information / interview with the visual artist: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"SrDEtSlqJC4":[{"hn_comment_id":27005755,"author":"mimsee","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Let's get Right to Repair passed","text":"This. Check out the recent news on why McDonalds ice cream machines tend to fail. [VIDEO] Spoiler: it\u2019s because the machine is broken and only one authorized company is allowed to fix it","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27420542,"author":"sackerhews","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Farmers Deserve the Right to Repair Their Tractors","text":"Making something that only you can repair can be quite a lucrative business. This documentary is quite interesting: McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28117647,"author":"dna_polymerase","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Why the McFlurry machine company just got hit with a restraining order","text":"Kytch was also mentioned in this excellent mini-documentary about the whole topic: [VIDEO] Worth watching, IMHO.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29327446,"author":"shum1","month":"2021-11","story_title":"New emails released in the McDonald\u2019s ice cream machine lawsuit","text":"Relevant link for those who want more context on the constantly broken McDonald icecream machine situation: [VIDEO] I don't think the WIRED article isn't really doing justice to what Kytch is trying to show. The important argument is whether or not McDonald and Taylor conspired to prevent Kytch from selling / franchisees from purchasing this equipment, essentially a 'right to repair' argument. If Kytch wins, there could be ramifications for the tractor debate in the agricultural world as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29327467,"author":"fedreserved","month":"2021-11","story_title":"New emails released in the McDonald\u2019s ice cream machine lawsuit","text":"[VIDEO] This video did a good indepth investigation. From memory Taylors hq is within 5 miles of McDonald's HQ. To close for comfort when you see the type of shenanigans they go through to pad Taylors revenue","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37312092,"author":"Aaronstotle","month":"2023-08","story_title":"iFixit Petitions Government for Right to Hack McDonald's Ice Cream Machine","text":"For anyone interested in a good video about this, there is YT video that details how the Ice Cream Machine's being broken is essentially a scheme that McDonald's corporate runs on their franchisees. Source: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37322814,"author":"synchronizing","month":"2023-08","story_title":"iFixit wants Congress to let it hack McDonald\u2019s ice cream machines","text":"Johnny Harris (filmmaker journalist) made a great video on topic: [VIDEO] In short, McDonald's continues to use these frequently malfunctioning ice cream machines due to their long-standing exclusive partnership with Taylor. The cost of repairs fall on the local franchise owners, not McD Corp.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41949830,"author":"mcdow","month":"2024-10","story_title":"We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines","text":"Here's a great YT video on why McDonald's ice cream machines are always broken: [VIDEO] TL;DW: there are some perverse incentives to keep them broken. Basically the owner operators are forced to use a particular brand by corporate. Corporate McDonalds has a deal with a particular ice cream machine company. That particular company is the only company owner operators are allowed to buy from, and the only company allowed to service the machines. And it's no skin off of McDonald's back for these machines to always be broken, the cost falls on the owner-operators.","stance":"rec"}],"SrKj4hYic5A":[{"hn_comment_id":15633570,"author":"minsight","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Collapsing towers of interpreters [pdf]","text":"This is a very intereresting video featuring one of the authors (Nada Amin). Strangely enough, I watched it a few hours ago. It's a quick overview of the \"tower of interpreters\" idea and some possibilities that it brings. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18745511,"author":"tosh","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Rich Hickey on the Power of Lisp REPLs (2015)","text":"> [\u2026] it is important to think broadly about the power of multiple sessions, even from the same user. At first we are talking about 2 sessions, for human and IDE. But it is quite common in rich Common Lisp IDEs like Lispworks for people to have multiple listener (REPL) sessions open at the same time (against the same runtime). You can launch long running processes that produce streaming output, switch to another listener and continue interaction and development, have separate listeners for separate contexts/state/command-history etc. There's a lot to Lisp development that's not RPC. And of course a socket REPL server could support multiple simultaneous users, where 'users' might be programs. > Have you ever worked with an environment like Lispworks or Allegro? If not, I would definitely recommend trying it. [\u2026] > [LINK] > [LINK] > Note multiple listeners, data inspectors and more. Maybe not the latest GUIs, but the capabilities should be a source of inspiration for any Clojure IDE. [\u2026] > Here's a wonderful demonstration of the power of nestability: > \"Programming Should Eat Itself\" by Nada Amin [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36813678,"author":"Zambyte","month":"2023-07","story_title":"I have written a JVM in Rust","text":"This talk isn't about VMs, but it is about an infinite tower of interpreters. You may find it interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"SrU9YDoXE88":[{"hn_comment_id":12397152,"author":"okket","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Life on the Infinite Farm [pdf]","text":"My personal favourite to illustrate infinity (as possible) and some math concepts around it is still the video \"How To Count Past Infinity\" from Vsauce: [VIDEO] \"This is math, not science.\" (~12:30)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11512867,"author":"okket","month":"2016-04","story_title":"The Man Who Knew Infinity","text":"Completely offtopic, except for math and title, but highly recommended while waiting for the movie: \"How To Count Past Infinity\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12271027,"author":"lasfter","month":"2016-08","story_title":"What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists","text":"The issue is that there are different infinities. The infinity the parent is talking about, the one that you generally run into in calculus class and the like, is straightforward. The research in the past century was about what happens _past_ infinity, e.g. ordinal numbers. I'm no mathematician either, so I'll stop there before I embarrass myself. The most accessible resource I found was this VSauce video [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15239349,"author":"cjslep","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Mathematicians Measure Infinities, Find They\u2019re Equal","text":"There is one English definition of infinity, but when applied to ordinals (\"degrees of freedoms\"), you get different mathematical concepts of infinity. Vsauce's explanation is approachable: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16047282,"author":"hawktheslayer","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What are fun entertaining YouTube channels/videos you watch in free time?","text":"VSauce is a science channel which I find both entertaining and educational. Fun and fast paced and often mind-bending. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17677038,"author":"swfsql","month":"2018-08","story_title":"How to explain infinity to kids","text":"(related - and I enjoyed the vibe he put into it): [VIDEO] - Vsauce's \"How to Count Past Infinity\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17760304,"author":"teh_klev","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Absolute Hot","text":"Thanks for that, I hadnt' bumped into that channel before. After watching this one I watched the one on how to count past infinity....mind suitably blown :) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Sx0J7dIlL7c":[{"hn_comment_id":43504159,"author":"Gareth321","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo","text":"If you have the time, I highly recommend this interview between Ezra Klein and Democrat strategist David Shor ( [VIDEO] ). He goes into a lot of the details around the question you imply. Long story short, Republicans have done that, but also on the issues people actually care about. This has given them a large trust lead in topics like the economy, crime, immigration, the border, etc. If Democrats had also hyperfocused on kitchen table issues, they might have won. By the time Kamala was campaigning, it was far too late to convince everyone that she actually cared about important issues. She had four years to prove she did not.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43844481,"author":"awongh","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Secret Deals, Foreign Investments: The Rise of Trump\u2019s Crypto Firm","text":"> \"racist\", \"bigots\" and \"single-digit IQ yokels\" One of the narratives I hear repeated a lot that is simply untrue is around white americans. Trump doubled his numbers for minority (male) voters vs. the last time he was elected. But rather than coming up with a new, more nuanced view of what's happening people would rather trot out old tropes like *republicans are white and racist and bad*. Even with all the anti-immigrant stuff Trump increased his share of non-native born american voters. The refusal of people on the left to update their world view was one of the big reasons why they lost the election. I thought this Ezra Klien interview taling about election polling data was informative: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44566167,"author":"gsf_emergency_2","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Are a few people ruining the internet for the rest of us?","text":"Sorry! That was careless phrasing. Thank you for fuzzing the careless thinking behind it. It should have been \"Trump is now seen (and wants to be seen) by the right+(white) center left as moderate\" Is that more reasonable? Imho Ezra Klein explains it better here [VIDEO] (Is he going for \"Leto I Atreides\"?)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48981480,"author":"everdrive","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Americans are angry about data centers. Politicians are feeling the pressure","text":"Thanks for the clarification. The interesting thing about the 2024 election was that Trump's turnout was higher than 2016, and in addition, according to the polling and analysis I saw, this was one of the first times in a long time where if _more_ people had voted, he would have had _more_ votes. This is in pretty stark contrast to presidential voting trends for the last 30-40 years. So although I think you could paint 2016 as an \"apathy\" election (I would still argue that 2016 was more about two deeply unpopular candidates than anything else) I'm not sure that same analysis really applies to 2024. I'm basing a lot of this on this very interesting interview here -- [VIDEO] -- so to the extent that I'm wrong or you disagree, this at least gives some context to my claims.","stance":"rec"}],"SxdOUGdseq4":[{"hn_comment_id":31548601,"author":"idunnoman","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits","text":"As developers, I've come to believe that complexity is the worst sin we commit. Everything we talk about can be traced back to this issue. This is largely due to paying attention to Rich Hickey and learning Clojure. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34050492,"author":"tincholio","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Most(LY Dead) Influential Programming Languages (2020)","text":"\"Simple made easy\" [0] by Rich Hickey is a must-watch (even if you never touch Clojure) [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38557902,"author":"alanwreath","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Simplicity","text":"loved the take and re-enforcement of a talk I\u2019ve loved forever by Rich Hickey (famous for being integral to the creation of Clojure among other things) called \u201cSimple Made Easy\u201d [VIDEO] Anyone know of any books that dive deeper into the subject?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42885418,"author":"globular-toast","month":"2025-01","story_title":"A better build system for OCaml","text":"Also the point of software engineering is to take the real complexity that actually exists and you can't get rid of and work out how to write simple code to deal with it. Good software architecture does not include complexity because there is complexity in the business. It manages the complexity with simple code. The trouble is when people say \"complex\" you don't really know what they mean, though. They often just mean \"difficult\". Every programmer who wants to use that word needs to watch this: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43995610,"author":"bad_haircut72","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Lua for Elixir","text":"You need to watch this [VIDEO] We should try not to make technical judgements based in flippant things like how few lines can someone not even familiar with the ecosystem get a hello world working","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45345688,"author":"Lyngbakr","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Nine things I learned in ninety years","text":"I'm sure most folks here have seen the talk, but Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy # is a superb discussion about this in the context of software. # [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34971797,"author":"hinkley","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Do the Simplest Thing That Can Possibly Work (2004)","text":"Obligatory Simple Made Easy link: [VIDEO] Simple is a matter of intuition, and that can't be transmitted to others easily, or with a single class or book. At one particular job we got punished by the business for calling things 'easy' when what we mean is that we understand the problem and all of the steps are (mostly) known. Our boss coached the hell out of us to say 'straightforward' when we meant 'understood', instead of using 'easy' as an antonym for 'quagmire' or 'scary'.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36321897,"author":"weatherlight","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Teach yourself Computer Science functionally","text":"Keeping track of all that state in one\u2019s head is hard. I think because of the limitations of FP it\u2019s much easier for new programmers to reason about programs and honestly, learn to program. New developers don\u2019t have to micromanage the computer, the way that the would with an imperative lang. For example, SQL isn\u2019t FP, but think about the number of business analysts whose lives would be more difficult if the had to write imperative programs to fetch data from some sort of data store. I think what in comes down to is simple vs easy. Imperative programming in the very very beginning is easy, buts not simple. Because there\u2019s all this implicit state in your program, as the program grows it becomes very very complex. It\u2019s no longer simple. There\u2019s this really great talk about this idea by rich hickey, the creator of clojure, that dives into this in detail. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40546103,"author":"SahAssar","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Show HN: I built a backend so simple that it fits in a YAML file","text":"A simple system is built so that not many parts are intertwined and hard to understand how it is built. A easy system might be very complexly built, but presents and easy interface for you to use. If complex it would be hard to understand how it is built and how to modify. Basically simple describes how the system is built, while easy describes how much you need to know to use it. They are orthogonal, so a system can be both complex and easy, both simple and hard. See [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42098425,"author":"chamomeal","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Zig's (.{}){} Syntax","text":"I know this gets shared all the time, but in case anybody in this thread hasn\u2019t seen the rich hickey talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44150265,"author":"TacticalCoder","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster","text":"> They just don\u2019t get it. What comprises a good presentation. I take it one could argue between what's a presentation and a talk but to me one of the very best presentation I've seen is Rich Hickey presenting Clojure. Then there's \"Simple made easy\" considered by many to be one of the greatest ever: [VIDEO] There are many bullet points: but he'll go through each them and only show the next bullet point once he's done with the previous one. He even kids about a made up graph on one of the slide. I think that what makes a good presentation depends a lot on what's being presented.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44444988,"author":"jimbokun","month":"2025-07","story_title":"I'm dialing back my LLM usage","text":"I think LLMs have made a lot of developers forget the lessons in \"Simple Made Easy\": [VIDEO] LLMs seem to be really good at reproducing the classic Ball of Mud, that can't really be refactored or understood. There's a lot of power in creating simple components that interact with other simple components to produce complex functionality. While each component is easy to understand and debug and predict its performance. The trick is to figure out how to decompose your complex problem into these simple components and their interactions. I suppose once LLMs get really good at that skill, will be when we really won't need developers any more.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47247364,"author":"skeeter2020","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity","text":"I think Rich Hickey's talk about simple is great for defining these terms (literally). He describes how the roots of \"simplex\" mean single braid, which compares to the twisting & coupling with complexity; an apt visual for software development. He also differentiates simple/complex from easy/hard, which is important. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48072535,"author":"jeffreygoesto","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Mythical Man Month","text":"\"Simple made Easy\" is a nice add-on, the first half is the philosophical part and a classic. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"SzA2YODtgK4":[{"hn_comment_id":17538229,"author":"danShumway","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you keep checklists?","text":"Org-mode[0] is the best merge I've found between plain text and more powerful workflow/scheduling features. I synchronize to android using Orgzly[1]. If I wasn't on Emacs as my main editor, I would just use plain text. There have been efforts to get Org-mode working in other editors, but I don't know how good they are. The benefits of plain text are more important to me than the benefits of the special features. I've used a lot of todo apps, and some of them are very good for specific tasks, but most aren't adaptable enough for my needs. Eventually I gave up and went to plain text, and was happy. Org-mode is just a better version of plain text. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29662437,"author":"AreYouElite","month":"2021-12","story_title":"My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file (2020)","text":"ORG-MODE ORG-MODE ORG-MODE Jeff, everything you do could be done with org-mode by using a key combination. it would also add a calender with an agenda and schedule and and and and the main thing: it's a text file just like what you are using. this is a nice how to (no relation to me) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34056717,"author":"thr3ads","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Looking for a Programable Text Editor","text":"Because of the steep learning curve and troubleshooting associated with it, I've become more hesitant in recommending Emacs. However for the curious, the video Getting Started in Org Mode [1] which is a great demonstration on Emacs and Org Mode's potential as an organizational tool. Anyone still curious and would like to smooth out the learning curve, I'd recommend using an emacs starter kit such as Doom Emacs [2] which has a lot of OOB functionality without having to immediately learn Elisp. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"T-TwcmT6Rcw":[{"hn_comment_id":18742515,"author":"sn9","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"Some of my favorite talks from Strange Loop: * Contracts For Getting More Programs Less Wrong: [LINK] * \"It's Just Matrix Multiplication\": Notation for Weaving: [LINK] * Hackett: a metaprogrammable Haskell: [LINK] * Git from the Ground Up: [LINK] From PyCon: * Beyond Unit Tests: Taking Your Testing to the Next Level: [LINK] * Dataclasses: The code generator to end all code generator: [VIDEO] * Automating Code Quality: [LINK] There are probably more I might add later as I remember them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27268487,"author":"kzrdude","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Writing Pythonic Rust","text":"Raymond Hettinger's talks are great. I know it's not a succint blog post, but they are out there are watching a video is very approachable. Maybe [VIDEO] (Dataclasses! We could cheekily say Python gets better at something Rust does - dataclasses makes Python better at records.) And [LINK] This talk (2013): [LINK] Unfortunately this video is now a bit out of touch with modern Python. Another (2013) classic: [LINK] it is very well known, and it has the very memorable advice: what's a class that only has one method? That should be a function!","stance":"rec"}],"T0CpOYZZZW4":[{"hn_comment_id":42361146,"author":"fullshark","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Chuck E. Cheese's animatronics band bows out","text":"I\u2019ll take this opportunity to plug the YouTube videos of animatronics super fan Jenny Nicholson. Her videos on the Star Wars hotel: [VIDEO] and the theme park Evermore: [LINK] are peak YouTube content.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43416747,"author":"jimbob45","month":"2025-03","story_title":"The Collective Ambition Behind Odysseus, a Game-Changing Sci-Fi Larp","text":"Obligatory link to the Jenny Nicholson Galactic Starcruiser review[0] since there's really no better overview of the experience. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46350081,"author":"lazystar","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Disney Imagineering Debuts Next-Generation Robotic Character, Olaf","text":"and for anyone with 4 hours to kill... here's as an incredible documentary covering the misaligned incentives and poor guest experience at the now-shuttered Disney Star Wars hotel. [VIDEO] She covers everything - the line getting in to the hotel, the size + cost of the rooms in comparison with the same size/cost on a Disney cruise ship, and theories on why the experience was so poor.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48963845,"author":"Arainach","month":"2026-07","story_title":"I'm Making Strandfall, a Solarpunk Orienteering Larp","text":"> Though closed now, the Star Wars hotel experience was probably the best one on the planet. No. Nope. About the furthest thing from it. Not even the best Disney has done. This video is 4 hours and somehow was engaging to me (who never went to the Star Wars park) for its entire duration: [VIDEO] Doing proper immersive experiences where the participants are involved is a ton of work, often without a ton of replay value. This makes them tricky to attract customers to and limits the potential for massive returns, so they are overwhelmingly passion projects.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"T2IaJwkqgPk":[{"hn_comment_id":29496893,"author":"hericium","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Evergrande has defaulted on its debt, Fitch Ratings says","text":"> Can someone here enlighten me how a default can be \"contagious\"? The 2010 movie \"Inside Job\"[1] about financial crisis in US presents real-life examples, starting with the Icelandic financial crisis. There is also this Warren Buffet interview[2] which presents his unique viewpoint on what happened in the US around the time Lehman Brothers defaulted in 2008. You probably won't gain any knowledge from it other(edit) than how the financial sector assigns blame. edit: word \"other\" added in previous paragraph [1] [VIDEO] \"Inside Job (2010 Full Documentary Movie)\" [2] [LINK] \"Warren Buffett Explains the 2008 Financial Crisis\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32802915,"author":"PKop","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"Inside Job (2010) - documentary about the 2008 financial crisis and policies leading up to that years before. Sort of like the documentary version of The Big Short. Narrated by Matt Damon. Interesting and informative about the catalysts for the crisis. Full movie on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"T2OxO-4YLRk":[{"hn_comment_id":30809987,"author":"somedude895","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Wolfenstein 3D secrets revealed by John Romero in lengthy post-mortem chat","text":"I can't wait for this to go up on Youtube. GDC post mortems are amazing, especially the ones on Diablo[0] and Fallout[1]. I've loved Fallout since I was 12 and it really got me into post-apocalypse fiction. I ended up watching and reading all the media that Tim cites in his presentation and discovered some wonderful things like On the Beach (the book by Nevil Shute AND the movie), A Canticle for Leibowitz, etc [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17848059,"author":"Cognitron","month":"2018-08","story_title":"The Making of Prince of Persia (2011) [pdf]","text":"I like these too. Here's Jordan Mechner on Prince of Persia: [LINK] Also for Fallout fans (the first game): (EDIT: unrelated to Prince of Persia, I just like Fallout) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46124034,"author":"aresant","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Fallout 2's Chris Avellone describes his game design philosophy","text":"Great find and also worth a watch is the Classic Game Postmortem: Fallout video from Fallout creator Tim Cain [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"T3u7bGgVspM":[{"hn_comment_id":38250227,"author":"surprisetalk","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk from the past year?","text":"A bunch of great talks at Strange Loop this year! Two off the top of my head: \u2022 \"An approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permaculture\" by Devine Lu Linvega: [VIDEO] \u2022 \"The Economics of Programming Languages\" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023): [LINK] I've also been loving TodePond's cellular automata videos. Their SPLASH talk was mind-blowing, but it doesn't look like it's out yet. \u2022 TodePond playlist: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39595125,"author":"levicole","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Tal is the programming language for the Uxn virtual machine (2021)","text":"Devine had a great talk about the \"why\" of Uxn at Strange Loop last year: [VIDEO] And there was another talk that used it as an example: [LINK] Both were great. I'm a big fan of 100R's work. Another language of theirs worth checking out is Orca: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38429089,"author":"danybittel","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Making a Font","text":"My favourite quote from Devine: \"If you stand on the shoulder of giants, it's really hard to steer\". [VIDEO] @ after around the 6:00 mark.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41136240,"author":"freethejazz","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech","text":"Similar cross of art, low power/resilient tech, and sailing I saw at strange loop last year. Non-standard tech talk for sure, but fit right in at that conference: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"T42WuUpBuHE":[{"hn_comment_id":48167942,"author":"JetSetIlly","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Playing Atari ST Music on the Amiga with Zero CPU","text":"> Well, that and the fact that after the 48K beeper the 128K was never going to sound less than incredible Some of the stuff people do with the 48k beeper is incredible though. Tim Follin's tunes for example are basically treating the beeper like a 1-bit DAC, with amazing results. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9538451,"author":"zimpenfish","month":"2015-05","story_title":"A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art","text":"Check out Tim Follin's N-channels-through-1-bit on the Spectrum's piezo-electric buzzer. [VIDEO] (AgentX) [LINK] (AgentX II)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41644945,"author":"mdp2021","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Furnace \u2013 the biggest multi-system chiptune tracker ever made","text":"> even the ZX Spectrum beeper is supported You know what we can do with 1-bit music, right? I.e. Tim Follin's Agent X ( [VIDEO] ) or Agent X II ( [LINK] ) or Chronos ( [LINK] ) or Raw Recruit ( [LINK] ) or Future Games ( [LINK] )... A modern attempt, the ON and OFF album by Rich 'Tufty' Hollins ( [LINK] )","stance":"rec"}],"T5RmMNDR5XI":[{"hn_comment_id":21989365,"author":"drej","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Elasticsearch from the Bottom Up (2013)","text":"I can super highly recommend talks by Adrien Grand on Lucene and Elasticsearch. They are super instructive yet easy to follow. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21017006,"author":"ddorian43","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Challenges in Implementing a Full-Text-Search Engine","text":"This is extremely high level. A nice view of how lucene internals work by core committer Adrien Grand: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23655335,"author":"stereosteve","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Reducing search indexing latency to one second","text":"This is excellent. I was recently reviewing Lucene concepts and found this video really good: [VIDEO] Also this site has a series of Lucene articles that are pretty nice. The one on Term Vectors in particular: [LINK] Based on some quick research it seems like Lucene is already using a sorted skip data structure for the posting list, so I wonder why they had to do a custom implementation? Perhaps it has to do with their custom Document ID scheme and how they want to preserve order in the Posting List being different from the default behavior. It also sounds like searchers are searching on indexes as they're being written, and there is some custom coordination around visibility, which might require diverging from Lucene default behavior. Either way, pretty impressive!","stance":"rec"}],"T647CGsuOVU":[{"hn_comment_id":14942934,"author":"pedrodelfino","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Imaginary Numbers Are Real \u2013 YouTube Series","text":"The greatest audiovisual content on the topic I have ever seen: Part 1 - [VIDEO] Part 2 - [LINK] Part 3 - [LINK] Part 4 - [LINK] Part 5 - [LINK] Part 6 - [LINK] Part 7 - [LINK] Part 8 - [LINK] Part 9 - [LINK] Part 10 - [LINK] Part 11 - [LINK] Part 12 - [LINK] Part 13 - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15961779,"author":"rrauenza","month":"2017-12","story_title":"What are the complex numbers, really?","text":"Welch Labs has a wonderful series on youtube on imaginary numbers, \"Imaginary Numbers Are Real\": [VIDEO] I like to tell my kids that imaginary numbers aren't really imaginary .. that in many ways they're more real than the Reals.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28378375,"author":"wodenokoto","month":"2021-09","story_title":"A layman\u2019s guide to recreational mathematics videos","text":"Welch labs has an amazing series on complex numbers called \u201cimaginary numbers are real\u201d. Great explanations, engaging content and high production value. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33403096,"author":"tails4e","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The paper that keeps showing up","text":"Yes, the name imaginary does it no favours. I was confused for so long about i, as it was never explained on classes, and it wasn't until 3blue1brown and other math youtubers showed me the light. I really like this series on it by Welch Labs - loads of easily digestible videos, and a history lesson to boot: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17733099,"author":"jatsign","month":"2018-08","story_title":"A Visual, Intuitive Guide to Imaginary Numbers (2007)","text":"I really enjoyed this video series on imaginary numbers. Went through the history as well as the math: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34606859,"author":"magnetomax","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Regarding imaginary numbers, I found this YouTube series really helpful to understand basics of imaginary numbers. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42882219,"author":"wanderingmoose","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Quaternions and spherical trigonometry","text":"I really like the welch labs series on imaginary numbers which covers the first part of what you talk about -- leveling up the notion of what a complex number is. Though his focus was more on solving simple equations with no real roots, but really detailing how/what is really going on. It is a great precursor to then thinking about quaternions [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"T6JFTmQCFHg":[{"hn_comment_id":35770861,"author":"Borrible","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Alien Supercivilizations Absent from 100k Nearby Galaxies (2015)","text":"I always liked the idea and think O'Reagan's short is the best take on it. A black and white version set in Les Deux Magots, Sartre and Beauvoir at a table in the background, would be nice. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47689878,"author":"api","month":"2026-04","story_title":"They're Made Out of Meat (1991)","text":"Great short film version: [VIDEO] I do wonder sometimes if someone out there is waiting for something actually intelligent to emerge down here.","stance":"rec"}],"T6X2uwlQGQM":[{"hn_comment_id":10695153,"author":"ak217","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Beijing smog \u2018red alert\u2019 issued","text":"For an introduction to the problem, and to anyone who hasn't lived in a severely air polluted city, I highly recommend the documentary Under the Dome , released earlier this year and later banned in China: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9833611,"author":"miralabs","month":"2015-07","story_title":"This isn't an outtake from Blade Runner \u2013 it's the real Beijing","text":"I still remember 2001 when I first arrived at Hongkong to work. My first day at the office, I got teary eyed. I told my boss why is it so..he told me it's because of the pollution and I should drink lots of water. It is probably way lot worse now. I saw this documentary recently, [VIDEO] it is a good watch. FYI China is also destroying marine life in the West Philippine Sea [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17090937,"author":"bb101","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Emissions of banned, ozone-depleting chemical CFC-11 have climbed 25% since 2012","text":"China? Pertinent parallels with this part of Chai Jing's censored talk \"Under the Dome\"[1] (worth watching the whole thing actually). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"T71ibcZAX3I":[{"hn_comment_id":28718427,"author":"f0e4c2f7","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Redditors are right about the unfairness of the market","text":"> buy real things that appreciate over time Companies are real things that appreciate over time. Stock is ownership of that. I wouldn't characterize it as a scam exactly. I do think people underestimate how clever markets are and would advise against trying to outsmart them. There is a different kind of bet you can make which is to buy a small part of the entire US economy on the assumption that it will continue to grow during your lifetime. Thats what an index fund is. It's a boring bet with modest returns. A lot has been written about index funds. This video is probably the most clear resource I can think of that has all the information in one place. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21582661,"author":"patrickk","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?","text":"Reddit FIRE is also worth reading: [LINK] Also JL Collins' book \"The Simple Path to Wealth\" is well worth a read, on the same topic. If you don't want to get it, this talk covers the basics: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21904863,"author":"caro_douglos","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you consume noisy financial news?","text":"JL Collins [1] has a great talk at Google I discovered while perusing youtube[2]. He taps into Warren's advice of not watching the markets too closely (mentioned in your second link). [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26430084,"author":"mister_tee","month":"2021-03","story_title":"The Joy of Fuck-You Money (2018)","text":"JL Collins was I think my introduction to the financial independence concept though I'd \"accidentally\" been investing in index funds and for retirment before. That series of posts (the \"Stock Series\") is great and it's available in edited book form called \"The Simple Path to Wealth.\" Or for a video intro, he gave this 1hr Talk@Google: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27659397,"author":"murm","month":"2021-06","story_title":"How do I start investing?","text":"I think this video[0] fits nicely to your situation. JL Collins lays out how to invest for your retirement using index funds, explained in simple and commonsensical terms. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31564971,"author":"ggop","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How to invest savings?","text":"JL Collins has some good advice. Unbiased and simple to follow rules for long term investment: [LINK] Good introduction: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46390514,"author":"qnleigh","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?","text":"I'm not downvoting you, but I think you are probably getting downvoted because \"Stock trading can be quite lucrative\" is statistically just not true. Even professional financial advisors almost never beat the market [0]. Only hedge funds that pay for huge amounts of priveledged financial information do, and even then not always. Here's a good video that makes a case for this. Even if you don't agree, you might find some of the points he makes interesting. But tl;dr, he argues that index funds basically always outperform other methods, so one should primarily invest in things like that. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TH9VCN6UkyQ":[{"hn_comment_id":10235766,"author":"erikpukinskis","month":"2015-09","story_title":"The Witness: the creator of Braid talks about his fiendishly difficult new game","text":"I strongly encourage anyone interested in programming languages to watch his series about Jai, the language he is creating for his next game. Starts here: [VIDEO] It's not released yet, but watching the videos has massively changed the way I think about programming. The notion of \"data-driven programming,\" which I would describe as \"only move around the data you have to\", has been a real revelation to me. I sort of came out of the Ruby world (and Java before that) where the attitude is more \"Abstract all the things!\" I have been trying to apply many of Blow's principles in my JavaScript programming and it has been awesome. I find myself staying closer to the \"metal\" (which in JavaScript world is pure Node and low-level browser APIs) and it has been incredibly rewarding. I've also really enjoyed his policy of pragmatism over idealism. I think the React world for example has taken a good idea (immutability can clarify data flows) and turned it into a religion (Everything Must Be Immutable!) Watching Blow work has given me the confidence to steer away from that. Much in the same way that learning Rails made me a better programmer (even though I don't use it anymore, and I've rejected a lot of its premises) I have found learning Jai has really leveled me up as a programmer and a computer science thinker.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16507865,"author":"erikpukinskis","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Long Term Depression Permanently Changes the Brain","text":"It\u2019s a bit of a rabbit hole, but Jonathan Blow\u2019s \u201cIdeas for a programming language about games\u201d and all the subsequent videos have totally revolutionized how I code: [VIDEO] The irony of it is I\u2019m a JavaScript programmer and Blow hates JavaScript, he thinks it\u2019s antithetical to his style of coding. But really, I think the ideas are very generic: he proposes what I think of as \u201cdata-driven programming\u201d which in my head means \u201conly move the bits you have to.\u201d And that core idea maps to any substrate. Blow is offended by the idea of targeting something other than processor instructions, and Jai (his new language) develops along those lines. But I have no problem applying the same ideas to V8... you can really use any substrate... I could target Minecraft blocks and code in the same way. It just requires stepping back and asking what the minimum number of writes needed to get that substrate where it needs to be. And then rather than writing some monstrous declarative programming structure like Rails or Webpack, you just write the minimal function calls needed to make those bits flip and thing more. Blow writes a whole new language and compiler based on those concepts, but I find the ideas translate to any arbitrary API target.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17454615,"author":"erikpukinskis","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Jonathan Blow: \u201cC++ is a weird mess\u201d","text":"I am a little disappointed he hasn\u2019t released the source, but I am also sympathetic. He wants to be free to change major things about the language while he\u2019s designing it, and that\u2019s harder if other people are using it. That said, if you want to know what Jai is about, I recommend starting from his first video: [VIDEO] The first couple dozen videos are all pretty dense, with him presenting the basics of the language pretty efficiently. (His more recent vids are more like development vlogs) Yes, videos are slow, but for me I don\u2019t think I would\u2019ve appreciated his design choices without all the context. I also found watching his process for inventing the language extremely instructive, just as a programmer. It has substantially formed my own process and thinking over the last few years.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9276101,"author":"greggman","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Steam store rendered in Servo","text":"As anyone here watched the Jonathan Blow videos on his language ideas? [VIDEO] I don't care about the specifics of his language but I think he brings up a very valid point which my summary would be, we should design a language that is both performant AND fun to program. Fun = type less boilerplate, make refactoring easier. C++ is not that language and from what I've read Rust is not that language either. C++ is stuck with backward compatibility so it can arguably never achieve those goals. Rust didn't seem to have those goals it mind, it had other goals so it's not really a fun language either. Too verbose or so I've read.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9902338,"author":"pearle","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Designing a Programming Language","text":"Jonathon Blow has a great series [1] on YouTube where he's designing and implementing an alternative to C/C++ specifically aimed at meeting the needs of modern game programmers. It's an interesting watch. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10923293,"author":"Kurtz79","month":"2016-01","story_title":"C or C++ for my game engine?","text":"This is a nice talk from Jonathan Blow (Braid's author) about the necessity of a new language for game programming as an alternative to C++, and why new languages like Go or Rust are not apt to the task: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11827157,"author":"erikpukinskis","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Why does everyone here seem to dislike C++?","text":"From a gaming industry perspective, Jonathan Blow gave a great presentation about his problems with C++: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15614075,"author":"CamTin","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Towards a more powerful and simpler C++ with Herb Sutter","text":"Jonathan Blow (cult/indie game developer/studio owner) has a lot of ideas about evolving C++ (or rather, building a new language to replace it) specifically in a game industry context. This perspective is interesting because its kind of running at a different angle away from the \"memory-safe, better guarantees\" project that Rust is workin on. [VIDEO] Just as the scripting languages took a big bite out of C/C++ usage starting in the 90s, I think we're seeing another couple use-case for C/C++ pull off: 1) stuff that is performance sensitive but security sensitive as well (Rust) 2) stuff that is soooo performance sensitive that Rust and C++ are actually too bloated, but which isn't really security sensitive so the guarantees that Rust/Modern C++ offer aren't worth it (Jai, Blow's language). Category 1 is clearly real, but Category 2 might be too small to sustain itself (though Blow makes an economic argument that it would be worth it). Are we just going to keep peeling back C/C++ users from the pack with more specifically-useful languages until there are none left except for those maintaining legacy code? Or are there use-cases where C++ will continue to make sense? I guess a lot of this depends on whether or not we can meaningfully \"modernize\" C++ through the standards process without simply bolting on a lot more features that add to the bloat. I wouldn't wager much that this trick can be pulled off.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17482181,"author":"topspin","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Jonathan Blow: \u201cC++ is a weird mess\u201d","text":"His view of Rust is a little more nuanced then you're getting here. Back in 2014 when Jonathan Blow started talking about the reasons for making a new programming language he discussed several languages including Go, D and Rust and provided specific reasons why they didn't satisfy his view of what a language for game programming should be. During that talk he said at one point; \"if we're all writing programs in Rust ten years from now then that's great because I think it'll be a lot better than C++.\" You should consider watching at least the first part of that talk. It made a splash at the time because there are several insights that people found provocative. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17713032,"author":"skadamat","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Sadly, I must say goodbye to Leaf, my programming language","text":"Jon Blow's been working on a programming languages for games (intro / philosophy here): [VIDEO] Series of videos here - [LINK] - I don't program games but it looks super interesting","stance":"rec"}],"TLm7Q92xMjQ":[{"hn_comment_id":40530860,"author":"Stratoscope","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Tesla Auto Wipers: Why They Don't Work and Why There Isn't an Easy Fix","text":"For anyone curious, Technology Connections has a good video on how traditional automobile rain sensors work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46829952,"author":"tzs","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Tesla is committing automotive suicide","text":"> The parking sensors basically don't work at all due to being vision only - and apparently can't be made to work properly What's stupid about this is that it is hard to come up with a good reason for it. The no LIDAR thing is at least understandable because at the time LIDAR was very expensive. Ultrasonic parking sensors are cheap. Same for automatic windshield wipers, which have been a significant source of complaints from Tesla owners. Pretty much everyone else uses a dedicated sensor that is simple and inexpensive and works well. Technology Connections has a good video on how it works [1]. Tesla uses vision. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TM9h89Vo_Qo":[{"hn_comment_id":21863478,"author":"bitofhope","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"This year's Cantrill talks include one on Ethical Dilemmas [0] and another on the \"Moore's Law\" paper [1]. Highly recommend both. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23571008,"author":"SomaticPirate","month":"2020-06","story_title":"The Coming Chip Wars","text":"Bryan Cantrill has a great talk on this and the end of scaling [VIDEO] It really seems like we are going to see new architecture paradigms emerge and start seeing more powerful compute in smaller places.","stance":"rec"}],"TMbl_ofF3AM":[{"hn_comment_id":8524298,"author":"ianstallings","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff","text":"These engines were talked about in the documentary *The Engines That Came In From The Cold\" [VIDEO] I watched it on netflix myself. Fascinating stuff.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27566302,"author":"cartoonworld","month":"2021-06","story_title":"U.S. senators propose 25% tax credit for semiconductor manufacturing","text":"Its interesting to me that while in the US, we were spearheading the computer revolution with our cutting edge semiconductor industry, Soviet rocket designs remain pretty much unsurpassed to this day.[0] There's a cool documentary called \"The Engines That Came In From The Cold\" (available on youtube[1]) and if you have a Netflix subscription, I recommend the documentary \"Cosmodrome\" (2008)[2] which is about the history of the Soviet space program and these engines. I'm sure you're aware that the US Space program has been reliant on ex-Soviet heavy lift vehicles for decades more or less. Especially, since the Space Shuttle program was canned, if it weren't for SpaceX, the Russian lift would be the only bus on the route, aside from NRO launches and other um..stuff Indeed, the Soviets had a completely parallel semiconductor and electronics industry as well. I don't know for certain but it was undoubtedly lagging western developments by a large margin. Nonetheless, the Soviets had some very interesting developments of their own, such as the Kola superdeep borehole. It is all terribly fascinating. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"TPg4Vcr56F0":[{"hn_comment_id":6642193,"author":"hemmer","month":"2013-10","story_title":"The Impossible Music of Black MIDI","text":"I would suggest Dan Deacon for someone who writes \"unplayable\" yet very tuneful pieces: eg. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10549410,"author":"sprokolopolis","month":"2015-11","story_title":"The Impossible Music of Black MIDI","text":"A normally electronic musician, Dan Deacon, has used some very complex player piano arrangements. When he recorded his album Bromst, they set up multiple MIDI player pianos to play the midi arrangements. What I found very interesting is that the density of the notes actually builds up to a very full and soothing (to me) sound, when played on the analogue instruments rather than on a computer. This is an album I play when driving through the woods or staring at the stars. There is texture to be heard from all of the hammering keys, but the notes all combine to a smoother and very meditative, calming, uplifting sound. I feel like like that fullness of sound from the analogue instrument allows the listener to here the overarching melodies, rather than focus on how many notes are being played. Here is a link to a documentary about the recording of the album linked to a visual of the pianos playing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18992984,"author":"pimlottc","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Una Corda, a piano with one string per note","text":"+1 for Olafur Another artist who has used a specially-crafted MIDI-controlled piano is Dan Deacon. His stuff is not exactly New Classical, though, it's a bit more frenetic and goofy, but quite good. He talks about it quite in a bit in a Pitchfork TV video that documented him working on one of his albums, Bromst: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TPpoJGYlW54":[{"hn_comment_id":22695019,"author":"jorge-d","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19","text":"I highly suggest you this video [1] from Vox which explains why virus outbreaks (like SARS, Ebola etc) usually appear in wet markets, like the one in Wuhan. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22621796,"author":"Whatarethese","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Time to Ban Wet Markets","text":"Absolutely. The worst thing is that whenever these pandemics happen China does ban them but they a few months later they allow them to reopen. Do they think that the same thing won't happen again? Vox put out a pretty good video on wet markets recently. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22622339,"author":"slavik81","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Time to Ban Wet Markets","text":"It's not the same. Live ocean creatures are isolated from each other. They're stored in water-tight containers by necessity. By contrast, live land animals are stored in cages and often stacked on top of each other. Vox has a video explaining \"Why new diseases keep appearing in China\" [1]. They include footage of Chinese wet markets around the 2:00 mark. I think they make an excellent case for strictly regulating, or even outright banning wet markets. Long ago, Europe had the same problem. The cities were full of wet markets, and were basically the perfect conditions for creating new plagues. There's a nice CGP Grey video on this, \"Americapox: The Missing Plague\" [2]. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22703984,"author":"CaptArmchair","month":"2020-03","story_title":"God be with you till we meet again (1918)","text":"Here's a study that exactly goes into your question: [LINK] The conclusion of that article is that the basic lessons we learn today, were - in part - learned in 1918... Back then, researchers had already traced the emergence of outbreaks to an encampment in France where men and animals were living in close quarters and unsanitary conditions. As to the first part of your question, the answer is that more people encroaching on the animal and wildlife territory while not adhering to basic sanitary practices will increase the chance of new strains appearing and making the jump to humans. Vox did an excellent video on how this works for Corona: [VIDEO] Such events do not only happen in China in particular but they can happen virtually anywhere in the world. Another ongoing pandemic is HIV/AIDS. Well, it is generally accepted that the jump to humans occurred in West-Africa in the 1920's. But it took time and globalization - increasing mobility - before HIV finally spread across the world: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23457623,"author":"CaptArmchair","month":"2020-06","story_title":"For experts who study coronaviruses, a grim vindication","text":"I'd like to add to to your statement. The entire quote which this article branches on reads: > \u201cThe presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic animals in southern China, is a time bomb.\u201d I'd say that the second part of that statement carries more importance then the exact type of virus and the specific research on that type. I'm no virologist, but if the barrage of news from the last few months have taught me anything, it's that the actions of humans are a big factor in increasing the probability of any type of outbreak. Sure, researching specific families and types of viruses gives us valuable insights. But in and of themselves, tying that knowledge into a larger interdisciplinary framework and translating that then into socio-economic policies, safety guidelines, legal frameworks,... is really important. Going back to the quote above, this Vox piece does a great job explaining that side of the equation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25538190,"author":"zubspace","month":"2020-12","story_title":"2020 had some significant silver linings","text":"Only after watching a short but interesting documentary on youtube about wet markets in China [1] I understood why they are so interested in keeping that industry operational. It's as bad as it is, but unfortunately wet markets also seem to play a massive economic role in some parts over there, where many people depend on it. I'd sure hope, that the western world would put more pressure on China, but instead it seems we'll be facing even bigger pandemic threats in the future.. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TPuJsgyu87U":[{"hn_comment_id":20731500,"author":"chappi42","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Giving up on Julia (2016)","text":"A good opportunity to point out this Juliacon 2019 video: What's Bad About Julia ( [VIDEO] ) TL;DR: Julia is not that bad.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47095503,"author":"seertaak","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Show HN: A physically-based GPU ray tracer written in Julia","text":"Just to clarify the above: 1. I use the term \"performance\" slightly vaguely. It's comprised of two distinct things: the time it takes to compile the code, and the execution time. The issue is the compilation time: there are certain cases where it's exponential in the number of types which could unify with the callsite's type params. 2. IIRC, Julia compiler has heuristics to ensure things don't explode for common cases. If I'm not mistaken, not only do compile times explode, but certain (very common) things don't even typecheck. There's an excellent video about it by the designer of the language, Jeff Bezanson -- [VIDEO] . Note: Julia experts, please correct me if this has been fixed. 3. The difficulty in intuiting which combinations of types will unify at a given callsite isn't theoretical; there are reports of libraries which unexpectedly fail to work together. I want to qualify this statement: Julia is light years ahead of any language lacking multimethods when it comes to library composability. But my guess is that those problems would be reduced with non-symmetric multimethods. 4. The non-symmetric multimethod system I'm \"proposing\" isn't my idea. They are referred to variously as encapsulated or parasitic multimethods. See [LINK] I have huge respect for Jeff Bezanson, for the record!","stance":"rec"}],"TQB0KK2rxcw":[{"hn_comment_id":19268923,"author":"userbinator","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How to be productive with big existing code base","text":"\"When you see something that's old and it's been there for a long time and it's working, don't laugh at it.\" (From a not-really-related yet quite interesting talk I watched a while back: [VIDEO] --- also featured on HN at [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25420002,"author":"oftenwrong","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)","text":"As I suspected before clicking, that article cites that explanation as being given by steam heating system expert Dan Holohan. He has a talk up on YouTube that I came across a few years ago. It is interesting on a number of levels, and I recommend giving it a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26883426,"author":"anonu","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Heating Water with Fire (2019)","text":"Tangential topic : There was a post on HN a while back about steam heating. This talk on YouTube was linked. It was really informative: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TQMbvJNRpLE":[{"hn_comment_id":16604402,"author":"hieu","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Show HN: To read books again, read one page every day","text":"It works for me, too. The inspiration was from this TED talk: [VIDEO] . The idea of marginal adjustment is both simple and powerful.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17587380,"author":"kowdermeister","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you organize/track your personal goals?","text":"That should be the real question. All else is just a consequence of being motivated enough to achieve that particular goal. You are probably fine already, but if you feel that you want more, I would suggest to get some inspiration from a new paradigm you never did before. I've seen this lately, and while he did come up with rather random looking goals, it seems it doesn't matter what they are if you devote yourself fully to them. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36170069,"author":"sharemywin","month":"2023-06","story_title":"My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects \u2013 Mitchell Hashimoto","text":"This video on youtube is pretty cool on the subject of big projects: How to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals | Stephen Duneier | TEDxTucson [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TRL7o2kPqw0":[{"hn_comment_id":9803900,"author":"junto","month":"2015-06","story_title":"A Walk Around Chernobyl [video]","text":"One of his other videos describes the people who are most exposed to radiation. The answer shocked me: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20062298,"author":"erentz","month":"2019-05","story_title":"They Fictionalize Nuclear Disasters Like Chernobyl Because They Kill So Few","text":"Radiation is definitely creepy and poorly understood. There was a great video by the Veritasium guy on it: [VIDEO] Punch line, you definitely wanna stay away from ciggarettes if you don't like radiation. There's also this crazy woman (I think she's German?) who likes to go play with radiation sources. She has the most dead pan voice that barely changes except to possibly register some excitement when she finds a particularly hot source of radiation. She has a bunch of videos exploring Chernobyl. It's quite interesting for example to watch her pick apart dirt to find the single hot particle: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"TS1lpKBMkgg":[{"hn_comment_id":9492414,"author":"mietek","month":"2015-05","story_title":"What every computer science major should know (2011)","text":"5 years ago, Paul Phillips was still a core contributor to Scala. Anyone seriously considering Scala should listen to his talk, titled \u201cWe\u2019re doing it all wrong\u201d, and take a look at Policy, his fork of the Scala compiler. [VIDEO] [LINK] Previous discussion: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9633150,"author":"arkadiyt","month":"2015-05","story_title":"JetBrains' MPS Projectional Editor [video]","text":"If you enjoy these types of compiler videos then I would highly recommend the following rants against Scala by Paul Phillips (from TypeSafe and one of the core language contributors). He also talks about wanting to edit abstract syntax trees directly: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"TTFoJQSd48c":[{"hn_comment_id":40094944,"author":"az09mugen","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Daniel Dennett has died","text":"I discovered him with the excellent Royal Institution talk \"If Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software?\" [0]. And the quote which marked my mind is \"How could a slow, mindless process build a thing that could build a thing that a slow mindless process couldn't build on it's own ?\". [0] : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23797718,"author":"13415","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized","text":"I'd recommend Daniel Dennett's talk If Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software? as a counterpoint to this article [1]. Dennett's talk is a bit long but I mostly enjoyed it, especially when he points out the computerphobia of many of his colleagues. Of course, it's easier for me to agree with Dennett than for many other people, because I'm a computationalist in the philosophy of mind and suspect that consciousness is an emergent property of certain computations. It might in theory even be possible to realize that by analytical insight - though probably not in practice. I'm generally not a fan of the philosophy of mind, though, because it mostly consists of speculation and intuition pumping. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39650764,"author":"rthrfrd","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Claude 3 catches researchers testing it","text":"I find Daniel Dennett's framing of competency vs comprehension a good place to start. He did a nice talk at the RI on it some time ago[1]. A previous one overlaps with similar ground[2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42044260,"author":"az09mugen","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Life evolves. So do minerals. How about everything else?","text":"Thanks for the link, I didn't know about that. It's kind of in the autocatalysis way, but more about \"memes\" in the sense of the book which introduced the term \"The selfish gene\" by Richard Dawkins. He says it 2 times, it's what drives his speech : At the beginning : [VIDEO] And at the end : [VIDEO] That's a very nice and profound speech asking good questions.","stance":"rec"}],"TTM_b7EJg5E":[{"hn_comment_id":18745508,"author":"raghava","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"Blockchains Are a Bad Idea (James Mickens) [LINK] I find almost all from GOTO 2018 very insightful. [LINK] esp ones listed below. GOTO 2018 \u2022 The Do's and Don'ts of Error Handling \u2022 Joe Armstrong [VIDEO] GOTO 2018 \u2022 Pragmatic Event-Driven Microservices \u2022 Allard Buijze [LINK] GOTO 2018 \u2022 Why Business Cases are Toxic \u2022 Chris Matts [LINK] GOTO 2018 \u2022 Unconditional Code \u2022 Michael Feathers [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34198802,"author":"frellus","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Phoenix 1.7 is View-less","text":"Also, if I may, recommend two videos to watch which is what got me into Elixir in the first place. 1. \"The Soul of Elixir and Erlang\" - [LINK] ; this fast-paced talk by Sasa Juric will highlight exactly what is special about Elixir/Erlang in terms of fault-tolerance and scalability 2. \"Using the Beam to Fight COVID-19\" - [LINK] ; this highlights a real-world use of Elixir and the speciality of how the BEAM works using an actor model which I found fascinating. Should get your excited about the possibilities of this language. 3. \"The Do's and Don'ts of Error Handling\" - [VIDEO] ; this talk by Joe Armstrong, inventor of Erlang, again highlights the shift in thinking about error handling and failure recovery. Not Elixir specific, but since Elixir has it's roots in Erlang it's well worth listening to this talk, which is conceptual and not code-centric. None of the videos above are Phoenix or LiveView but they should help build some concepts in your brain about why you want to go down this learning path of Elixir and Phoenix, why it's different. I listened to the first two, and I couldn't stop thinking about them, personally. A last thought I would give you as you're going through any training material or topics, I cannot recommend strongly enough. Consider this pattern: download LiveBook ( [LINK] ) and create a notebook for each lesson or major topic you're learning. Gives you a great way to learn, take notes, experiment and keep the history rather than just using iex at the comma","stance":"rec"}],"TVgQ_tgWMyU":[{"hn_comment_id":37490540,"author":"Panini_Jones","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Breaking Through Depression","text":"For anyone experiencing depression right now, this video helped me immensely at one point in my life [0]. CBT has also changed my life; I highly recommend the book 'Feeling Good'[1]. [0] - [VIDEO] [1] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26203101,"author":"antman","month":"2021-02","story_title":"How Antidepressants Work, at Last?","text":"For the cognitive aspect of depression a nice comprehensive and dense video I found is [0], key factors in slide at 24:10 and the reasons for this approach are at a slide at 23:00 including why a medication only approach is intractable in the long term. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28377628,"author":"CretinDesAlpes","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Robert Sapolsky on Depression (2009)","text":"This 2018 talk from Dr Yapko, \"Keys to unlock depression: Why skills work better than pills\" - [VIDEO] - suggests a multidimensional viewpoint rather than purely biological. He says the causes are: 1. Biological. He says \"Yes, biology matters, but surprisingly not as much as you would think, that when we look at what\u2019s termed genetic variance, how much do genes play a role in depression? Is there a depression gene? No. Are there genes that make people vulnerable to depression? Definitely. So if we look at biochemistry, yes it\u2019s a factor. If we look at disease processes, there are many diseases where depression is a predictable consequence. If we look at drugs, there are many drugs that have depression as a predictable side effect. Biology matters, but when we look at genetic variance, that figure is between .3 and .4. That represents a mild, moderate at best, genetic influence.\" 2. Psychological. In particular what is known as \"Attributional/Explanatory style\" ( [LINK] ), i.e. the person's habitual or reflexive way of attaching meaning to life events. He says \"It isn't what happens to people that increases their risk for depression so much as how they interpret and respond to what happens to them.\" 3. Social At the end, he says \"the goal is not to cure depression, the goal is to learn how to manage your mood. You don't exercise once and now you're done with the exercise thing.\"","stance":"rec"}],"TVwKjGbz60k":[{"hn_comment_id":48107220,"author":"yard2010","month":"2026-05","story_title":"They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker","text":"Edit: Slavoj \u017di\u017eek. As always, phenomenal and humble take. \"I\u2019m already eating from the trashcan all the time, the name of this trashcan is... ideology\" Slavoj \u017di\u017eek on \"They Live\" (The Pervert's Guide to Ideology) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24089695,"author":"rdtsc","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Films that made you see the world differently?","text":"I like that one too. Slavoj Zizek did a great description of it in \"Pervert's Guide to Ideology\" [VIDEO] I didn't understand the reason for the absurdly long fight sequence, but it finally clicked after hearing Zizek talk about it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29958438,"author":"ahelwer","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Why ideologies harm individuals","text":"Yup. As soon as you think you're \"non-ideological\" at that point you're fully ensconced in ideology, because your beliefs are so invisible to you that you mistake them for reality. Zizek beats this drum a lot. He did a very entertaining documentary on the subject called The Pervert's Guide to Ideology , examining ideology through the lens of various classic films. You can see a fun excerpt here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TaU1UH_3B5k":[{"hn_comment_id":34599576,"author":"AmpsterMan","month":"2023-01","story_title":"CA Cities to Lose All Zoning Powers in 2 Days","text":"Would just like to correct a common misconception: Houston technically has no zoning laws, but it has a combination of other laws that end up behaving similarly to exactly how zoning laws work. Giving you a link to City Beautiful which works as a great primer. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34600563,"author":"bandofthehawk","month":"2023-01","story_title":"CA Cities to Lose All Zoning Powers in 2 Days","text":"You're right Houston doesn't call it zoning, but they basically have the same rules. This video sums it up well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Tb823aqgX_0":[{"hn_comment_id":11269126,"author":"lewisl9029","month":"2016-03","story_title":"A Database Model for Simple Board Games","text":"I personally prefer a more data-oriented approach to modeling, as opposed to modeling in terms of objects and relations. One of my favorite videos from Clojure Conj last year talks about the approach in more detail and contrasts it with traditional OO modeling in the context of a board game: [VIDEO] In summary, modeling the board game with data (state) and pure functions (state transitions) had significant benefits over the alternative OO style model in terms of the overall simplicity of the model. The OO modeling approach resulted in a model that consisted of 22 classes, 11 interfaces, 1 enum, and 271 lines of boilerplate code just to implement the classes and relationships alone, with no game logic whatsoever. On the other hand, the data-oriented approach produced an entire working implementation of the game logic in 144 lines using 31 functions (small and highly composable functions, longest of which was 7 lines). My takeaway was that modeling in the traditional OO style can be a helpful process in getting a good feel for your problem domain at a high level, but trying to immediately translate the resulting relationship model into code is not necessarily a good idea, because the classical OO relationship model is inherently highly complected, and will bring that complexity straight into your codebase if you try to translate it word-for-word. Taking the insights from your relational model and using it as a guide to help model your problem domain as data and functions usuall","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16471190,"author":"lewisl9029","month":"2018-02","story_title":"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State Machine","text":"This is exactly my impression after taking a quick glance through these articles as well. If anyone is curious and would like to see a practical demonstration of this data-oriented approach of modelling problems, I highly recommend this talk from Mark Bastian in Clojure/conj 2015: [VIDEO] In it, he contrasts the data-oriented modelling approach with a traditional OOP approach for implementing a board game, and was able to come up with a complete implementation of the game with the former approach that was shorter than even the structural boilerplate for the OOP version. Another related talk that I loved was Chris Granger's 2013 talk on Light Table: [LINK] Where he walks through his process of building a game in ClojureScript using an Entity-Component-System architecture, which is very well suited to this data oriented modeling approach.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19709538,"author":"beders","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Show HN: Tetris Implemented in ClojureScript","text":"I picked on needless complexity due to top-down design not on static typing per se. Here's a good video highlighting the difference of approach. Well worth watching. Applies to how many Java architects would design a solution. I see the same kind of top-down approach happening in the Typescript area as well. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26943836,"author":"robto","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Making a Lego Domino Machine [video]","text":"This strikes me as a perfect visual example of repl-driven development. I like how he starts very simple and slowly makes it more sophisticated, testing every step of the way. If you've never tried it before, I highly recommend giving it a shot - it's extremely satisfying. I use Clojure, but other lisps also have fantastic repl environments that facilitate this style of development. \"Bottom Up vs Top Down Design in Clojure\"[0] is the talk that really made it clear to me how to design programs this way. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11036912,"author":"lewisl9029","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Why don't more web projects start with a JVM stack?","text":"Thanks for the link. That made my day. =) Here's a more realistic comparison between classic Java OOP design vs the more data-oriented approach to design encouraged in functional languages like Clojure for a simple board game: [VIDEO] TL;DW: The classic OOP design of the board game ended up with 22 classes, 11 interfaces, 1 enum in total, with 271 lines of pure skeleton code with no implementation of any game logic whatsoever. The class diagram can be seen here for a better sense of the complexity involved: [VIDEO] The data-oriented design had 31 functions, longest of which is 7 lines, with a grand total of 144 lines of code that implements the entirety of the game logic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12720335,"author":"cygned","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes","text":"I think, a \"Data Driven Development\" approach would make a lot of implementations easier. Something as described in this talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13493885,"author":"abc_lisper","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Making the move from Scala to Go","text":"I see what you are trying to say. You are saying Clojure is not the right tool to do top-down design. I agree with it. It is however a very good tool to do bottom up design. See [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TcEWRykSgwE":[{"hn_comment_id":27107726,"author":"Aditya_Garg","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Writing books is not really a good idea","text":"This is expected and falls under the Pareto distribution. All human creative endeavors follow this distribution (movies/ tv shows/ music) at different scales. Even some weird ones like most commonly used words follow this. Jordan Peterson has an excellent lecture on describing this phenomenon. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14889562,"author":"macleod2486","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism","text":"What she didn't realize what she ended up demonstrating was the reality of pareto distributions. Dr. Jordan Peterson does a good detailing of this phenomenon. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Td_PGkfIdIQ":[{"hn_comment_id":8953152,"author":"pillowpants2","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Valve Economist Yanis Varoufakis Appointed Finance Minister of Greece","text":"For those interested, here is a really interesting video of Gabe Newell at the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs talking about some of the in-game economic problems Valve has faced in the past few years. I think he briefly mentions Yanis somewhere in the middle of the video. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41412775,"author":"ilrwbwrkhv","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Five Most Productive Years: What Happened and What's Next","text":"So the first thing is the meta learning. Looking at companies like Valve and Wolfram, they provide a template of another way of running companies which seem to consistently produce the best kind of software and incredible wealth for all those involved. The two things you look for when running a software company. Next, Stephen livestreams his day to day as a CEO. This is so significant. I know the HN trope which dang warned about earlier, but I actually love it. Imagine if you could get detailed logs about how Steve Jobs lived his life. Not from books others write about him and make up fake stuff to make it sell more, but straight from the horse's mouth as they say. That is what his meticulous logs and streams of his life provides. Gabe Newell of course does much less of this, but he still has some incredible videos which go so in depth in how he runs the business and what he thinks about. Look, we are nerds. To learn business, we go online and try to piece together information. For example, I know for a fact a bunch of YC companies (both in this batch and earlier) have fallen for scammers like Alex Hormozi because he has a massive Youtube presence and just spews nonsense which sounds like it should make sense. So in that world, to learn as close to first hand from people who actually run some of the biggest and most interesting business on the planet is just incredible. --- Live CEOing [LINK] Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions, and the Future of C","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46142998,"author":"petterroea","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Valve reveals it\u2019s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm","text":"For an understanding of what Valve are doing, here is a 1 hour talk by Gabe Newell (CEO): Gabe Newell: On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions, and the Future of Corporations [VIDEO] TL;DR: * The most skilled workers are the most undervalued * Make products to serve the customer * Management is a skill, not a career path * The only people they consider themselves to be unable to compete with are their customers, so enabling the customer to produce better content in their ecosystem is the most efficient way of producing things.","stance":"rec"}],"Tdj8gh9GPc4":[{"hn_comment_id":9669277,"author":"rasz_pl","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Gary Kildall","text":"If you want to know how was he IRL I recommend watching Computer chronicles. Gary Kildall Special: [VIDEO] Whole playlist of episodes, its like watching non-fiction 'Halt and Catch Fire': [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10307433,"author":"EvanAnderson","month":"2015-09","story_title":"APL\\B5500: The Language and Its Implementation \u2013 Gary A. Kildall (1970) [pdf]","text":"I really enjoyed this retrospective on Gary Kildall. He was a really interesting guy, and I'll echo the sentiments of my sibling commenter-- a major influence on the development of the personal computer. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34045202,"author":"omnibrain","month":"2022-12","story_title":"How to Start with CP/M","text":"If you want to dive deeper and watch a beautiful tribute to Gary Kildall, you can find the tribute episode of the Computer Chronicles (which he cohosted for years) on Youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TfYf_rPWUdY":[{"hn_comment_id":21053714,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Face transplant recipient\u2019s donor face now failing","text":"Indeed. I had read about it before but viewing these visualizations blew my mind: [LINK] (DNA transcription) [VIDEO] (mRNA translation) [LINK] (DNA replication)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29653585,"author":"jcims","month":"2021-12","story_title":"DNA seen through the eyes of a coder","text":"Some amazing animations that show some of the primary operations related to DNA: Transcription (copying sections of DNA into RNA) - [LINK] Translation (turning messenger RNA into proteins) - [VIDEO] RNA Splicing (removing non-coding sections of mRNA) - [LINK] DNA Wrapping & Replication(two part video) - [LINK] One thing I would encourage folks to do as you listen to the narration of these is to consider any time words are used that imply agency and remember that these are basically blobs of magnets in a jostling goo. You'll find the names Drew Berry and WEHI referenced in most of these. There are many more stunning and IMHO profoundly informative examples of biological machinery from them on youtube.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13562377,"author":"ambrop7","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Influenza A (H1N1) \u2013 How many bits does it take to kill a human? (2009)","text":"The RNA->protein translation process is pretty awesome. Here's a very informative video: [VIDEO] Also Wikipedia page on the ribosome has a good description if you're patient enough to read through.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25272382,"author":"jcims","month":"2020-12","story_title":"What is protein folding? A brief explanation","text":"Apologies if I spam this stuff too much but I'm so intrigued by the dynamic complexity of this whole thing. The following three videos describe the process of DNA Transcription (copying a single gene's worth of RNA from the DNA strand), Translation (subject of TFA, creation of the protein from that RNA), and Replication (the process of making a complete copy of DNA for purposes of cell division. Keep in mind that the functional components you see in here are themselves (generally) proteins that are created (and have evolved) by a similar process. Transcription - [LINK] Translation - [VIDEO] Replication - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25901631,"author":"jcims","month":"2021-01","story_title":"18.7 Million Americans Vaccinated","text":"It\u2019s broader than that actually, this is a generalized protein factory. This is how mRNA is created by the cells in your body to create the proteins needed to keep you alive (aka transcription): [LINK] This is how mRNA is then used to create proteins, either from strands manufactured by your own cells, those coming from viruses that have infected your body, or from mRNA vaccines (aka translation): [VIDEO] Not directly related, but here is an amazing video showing how HIV infection works, including parts you will now recognize from the above: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26640614,"author":"shadowofneptune","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Moderna mRNA sequence released to GitHub [pdf]","text":"These might interest you then: 3d visualizations of cellular processes in real time. I was shown them in my intro to biology class, which filled me with the same interest. Transcriptase: [LINK] DNA polymerase: [LINK] The Ribosome: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42230124,"author":"jcims","month":"2024-11","story_title":"NASA: Mystery of Life's Handedness Deepens","text":"Only tangentially related, but because they are so amazing here are a few videos that illustrate the process of transcription (creating mRNA from DNA) and translation (creating a protein from mRNA). [LINK] [VIDEO] The common complaint with these videos is that everything is more complex. One thing that isn't evident is that these specific videos (built mostly by Drew Barry) actually model a lot of other molecules to create a more realistic physical environment with brownian motion and whatnot. Then the irrelevant molecules are simply made transparent in the rendering. Obviously it's still much much more complex (eg the constant stream of ATP used to drive many of these operations is not illustrated). There are these and many more great illustrations/explanations at WEHImovies on youtube [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Tfh0ytz8S0k":[{"hn_comment_id":10740479,"author":"corysama","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Where do all the bytes come from?","text":"You would like this: \"How 'oldschool' graphics worked Part 1 - Commodore and Nintendo\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10750416,"author":"OSButler","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Description of classic and modern C64 graphic modes","text":"The 8-Bit Guy has some great videos about how graphics worked on the older systems (including C=64): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19363672,"author":"valtism","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Oldschool planar graphics and why they were a good idea","text":"I believe that this is the same techniques that were covered in the excelent series \"How oldschool graphics worked\"[1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20974948,"author":"dannypgh","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Tutorial series for simulating NES Graphics (2018)","text":"This is a nice companion to [VIDEO] which deals with more technical details of the implementation of NES and C64 graphics. This document reads like requirements to that video's design.","stance":"rec"}],"TgFdics3uKo":[{"hn_comment_id":21834569,"author":"mantesso","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Playlists for teaching perfect pitch to toddlers?","text":"Rick Beato has some videos about how he trained his kids: [VIDEO] I never tried anything similar nor have a music background but found it fascniting to watch it","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43907808,"author":"lylejantzi3rd","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Infants and Babies can become pitch-perfect with early exposure to certain music","text":"Rick Beato has done a lot of videos on perfect pitch. His son has perfect pitch, but he does not. How Children Develop Perfect Pitch - [VIDEO] Perfect Pitch vs Relative Pitch: Which Is More Important? - [LINK] Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"TgmA48fILq8":[{"hn_comment_id":5512754,"author":"dmit","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"I'm partial to Bryan Cantrill's Dtrace talk since it tackles a fundamental problem in software engineering and shows how to solve it using a new technology. The talk is more than 5 years old now, but sadly still as relevant as ever. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5675422,"author":"chubot","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Stripping kernel/uboot source to 10% for code reading","text":"Do you mean you prefer Linux over Windows? If so, then watch this talk: [VIDEO] Now you will prefer Solaris/BSD to Linux :)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12639295,"author":"mwcampbell","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"A few of Bryan Cantrill's talks have already been mentioned here, but this one about DTrace, from 2007, is a gem: [VIDEO] I especially like the part in the middle where he tells the story of how a an awful GNOME applet was killing a Sun Ray server, and how he tracked down the culprit with DTrace.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5745158,"author":"qznc","month":"2013-05","story_title":"KTAP: A New Scripting Dynamic Tracing Tool For Linux","text":"I have no personal experience with either, but this dtrace guy does not like SystemTap: [VIDEO] The whole presentation is a nice and impressive dtrace showcase.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44457479,"author":"mwcampbell","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Using Sun Ray thin clients in 2025","text":"For an extended, colorful telling of the experience outlined in that paper, check out Bryan's earliest recorded talk on DTrace, particularly the section starting at the timestamp in this link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Th4VlqQyVr4":[{"hn_comment_id":27315255,"author":"aliasEli","month":"2021-05","story_title":"In 2019 US Navy warships were swarmed by UFOs","text":"Debunking by Thunderf00t: [VIDEO] (There are currently at least three threads that ultimately refer to the same video)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27550909,"author":"mikewarot","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Rep Tim Burchett Says New UFO Videos Aren't Russians, 'Out of Our Galaxy'","text":"Roswell was a cover up, so the Soviet Union wouldn't know we could detect their above ground nuclear tests via sound carried in the stratosphere. [LINK] I strongly agree that if the Nazis, Soviets, or any other opponent had technology of the sort that allowed antigravity, history couldn't have unfolded the way it did. I have zero faith that space aliens have anything to do with the fuzzy triangles or tic-tac videos. Those have far simpler explanations. See this video by \"Thunderf00t\" which gives really good earthy reasons for what's been seen. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ThjvMReOXYM":[{"hn_comment_id":37184071,"author":"SnowProblem","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Learning Async Rust with Too Many Web Servers","text":"Impressive! Especially the part on async where they built up the Future trait and runtime from first principles. If it interests you, these two videos are also great deep dives into Rust async [1] [2]. Rust's model is a little different from other languages in a powerful way. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48022034,"author":"lame_lexem","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Async Rust never left the MVP state","text":"there is a chapter on async in comprehensive rust and rustbook which ought to bring you up to speed there is the async book but it is largely unfinished you can watch John Gjengset's crust of rust async, decrusting tokio, and why what, and how of pinning in rust then there are tokio-lessons and tokio tutorial which teach how to use tokio runtime and there are also good blogposts by phil-oop and rose wright on how async works [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"TiXINuf5nbI":[{"hn_comment_id":29866529,"author":"nkurz","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Yan tan tethera: A Celtic sheep-counting system","text":"Have you seen the famous folk song that starts with an explanation of these? Jake Thackray 'Molly Metcalfe' [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33897609,"author":"nkurz","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Yan Tan Tethera","text":"It's fair game, since it didn't get much discussion, but if you click on 'past' in the list of links below the title, you'll see a couple times this has already been posted. But since it's here again, I'll again recommend the Youtube video of Jake Thackray singing 'Molly Metcalfe': [VIDEO] Anyone grow up somewhere where this style of counting is still in use? Or one like it? Or did these die out in the last generation?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33932892,"author":"I_complete_me","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Yan tan tethera pethera pimp \u2013 an old system for counting sheep","text":"Here's Jake Thackray singing a song with this in it. Wonderful stuff. [VIDEO] . Edit: Just noticed this is referenced in the article. Sorry.","stance":"rec"}],"TlLIOgWYVpI":[{"hn_comment_id":29814690,"author":"kruffin","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Simple Dungeon Map Generation","text":"My favorite from that collection on map generation is by Herbert Wolverson: [VIDEO] He goes over 5 or 6 different techniques that are easy to implement.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28867202,"author":"rudedogg","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Hands-On Rust: Effective Learning Through 2D Game Development and Play","text":"Congratulations on releasing your book. I watched one of your talks about procedural generation[0] and really enjoyed it, thanks! Mentioning this here since the tutorial linked above has a lot of procedural generation content [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32068955,"author":"chungus","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Roguelike Tutorial in Rust (2019)","text":"This is what I used to learn Rust, in tandem with The Book. I would read a chapter of The Book, then do a chapter of Herbert's Roguelike Tutorial. Very well written and fun material, that guides you deep into a tricky space with very little previous knowledge required. The maintainer is also very responsive to questions and pull requests. And has done an interesting talk[0] on procedural map generation at the annual 'Roguelike Celebration' conference[1] which is happening in October. (and for which the Call For Papers is still open) [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33300618,"author":"arandomhuman","month":"2022-10","story_title":"A celebration of roguelike games","text":"I recently saw a really fun and informative talk on procedural generation from their YouTube channel by a well known developer in the community [VIDEO] . There's tons of interesting talks there if (traditional) roguelikes or their development really pique your interest.","stance":"rec"}],"TlinocVHpzk":[{"hn_comment_id":19418027,"author":"mastazi","month":"2019-03","story_title":"737 Max Explanation by a Software Engineer","text":"If you have 20-ish minutes to spare, I suggest this video about the same topic by Mentour Pilot who is a 737 NG captain: [VIDEO] It's not very technical, but very easy to understand. Assumes you have some basic aviation knowledge e.g. what a stall is and how weight & balance affects flying.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22263218,"author":"catalogia","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Boeing identifies new software problem on grounded 737 Max","text":"> And of course, the main problem that the whole, entire airplane is unstable in the air. That's not really true. The airframe is fine, except it doesn't handle like a 737. MCAS was meant to make the MAX handle like a 737. Mentour Pilot, a 737 instructor with a youtube channel, has covered this fairly extensively: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Tml94je2edk":[{"hn_comment_id":36590025,"author":"raphlinus","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Dynamic Languages Strike Back (2008)","text":"I think the suitable followup to this is the Richard Feldman talk, \"Why Static Typing Came Back.\"[1] It gives the major reasons why one would prefer one over the other, and makes the case that static types can provide most of the actual benefits of dynamic languages, but the reverse is not true. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36649394,"author":"dansalvato","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Why Use Pascal?","text":"I saw a talk that touched on this recently: [VIDEO] He explains that dynamically-typed languages like Python, Ruby, and JS became popular in the 90s because they offered a fast feedback loop for website building, and they didn't need an IDE or compilers, which were slow (and often not free). It ended up not being worth trading your development time for the performance increase when all your users were connecting via 56k modem anyway. The talk makes a lot of other cool points about how development has changed in the past decade or two, and why the trend is moving back to static typing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37598303,"author":"raphlinus","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Strong arrows: a new approach to gradual typing","text":"Yeah, Rich Feldman has a good talk on this, entitled Why Static Typing Came Back[1]. It makes a good argument that static typing can recover most of the advantages traditionally accounted to dynamic typing. Rapid iteration you can get from incremental compilers, being concise you can get from powerful type inference, etc. Conversely, the advantages of static typing (largely boiling down to increased reliability) cannot easily be captured by dynamically typed languages. Gradual typing, particularly successful by TypeScript, might be an interesting middle ground, or it might just be a reflection of the dynamic history of JS. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TneLO5TdW_M":[{"hn_comment_id":10227340,"author":"felixgallo","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users","text":"I can personally guarantee to you from direct current experience that there is nothing particularly solved about running services for even 50 million users. Go watch this: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11673148,"author":"ddeck","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App","text":"It's required because your phone is where your messages are stored. Whatsapp don't retain messages/media after they've been delivered to your phone, which is a compelling privacy feature for many. It's also what allows them to serve such an enormous user base with limited hardware. Their technology stack (FreeBSD/Erlang) is pretty interesting, more info here: 2014 talks by Rick Reed: [LINK] [VIDEO] Slides: [LINK] There's likely no technical reason why you couldn't use a pc instead of a phone for users that want to use the pc as the primary client (with the phone optionally accessing the DB on the pc in the same way that the desktop client does for the phone). Perhaps they've decided that this is a small and declining market. Edit: Slides for second talk [LINK] 440k connections/sec, 1.1 million msgs/sec, 1 billion images/day, and that was in 2014...","stance":"rec"}],"TqKQ94DtS54":[{"hn_comment_id":17290235,"author":"beiller","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most","text":"I thought I would add to this an interesting youtuber I've watched, and the idea of \"Arcologies\". The claim is that, a (current) skyscraper sized building that is a self sufficient ecology of human living space / food production, poking out one every few square miles, could support dozens of times our current earth's population and that heat, not space, is the real bottleneck for further growth[1]. Has some estimate calculations to back it up. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18336108,"author":"krisroadruck","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds","text":"Since you nerded out on this enough to do the math, you might actually be interested in this video. The only real bottlenecks to getting to these numbers are first, power and second the elevator conundrum. Solve for those and you can have quite a substantial population. Go big enough and the only bottleneck, if you want to stay a single planet species, becomes black body radiation. Check it out Archologies - Isaac Arther (28:43) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34064651,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2022-12","story_title":"What ever happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?","text":"The Sun radiates about 400 trillion trillion Watts in all directions, and only a couple of billionths of it crosses Earth. There's a lot more radiant energy spreading out into the void waiting to be Dyson Swarmed. There's no way we're going to rocket launch billions to Mars, and there isn't another planet worth living on without unreasonable amounts of energy for Terraforming. But we are capable of rebuilding the atoms of Earth into much larger living environments - there are so many atoms it wouldn't mean destroying the Earth to do it. A Space Elevator doesn't need diamond nanowire, it could be built with enough steel chain. An orbital ring around the Equator would be enormous and would take approximately nothing of the Earth's matter to construct. Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel is full of speculation and plans for all kinds of possible or nearly-possible futures, as well as more distant dreams. e.g. the playlists: - \"The future of Energy, Industry and Agriculture\" - [LINK] - \"Earth v2.0\" - [LINK] - \"Outward Bound\" - near-Earth space exploration and living - [LINK] - \"Visions of Earth\" - arcologies, megacities, ecumenopolises, geoengineering, weather control - [VIDEO] And somewhere in there, megastructures such as Dyson Spheres, ringworlds, etc.","stance":"rec"}],"TrC6ROeV4GI":[{"hn_comment_id":18814649,"author":"svat","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Monorepos: Please don\u2019t","text":"See Hyrum Wright's talks on Large-Scale Changes at Google: [LINK] (CppCon2014), [VIDEO] (CppCon 2018), and paper by Googlers on ClangMR ( [LINK] ). It's great! And if you'd like to learn more about how monorepos work in practice there's a couple of papers: [LINK] and [LINK] (Also worth reading: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42077671,"author":"ted_dunning","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Monorepo \u2013 Our Experience","text":"Coupling happens due to other reasons than poor contracts. The discussions from Hyrum Wright from Google about large-scale refactoring are great in this respect. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TrfD3pC0VSs":[{"hn_comment_id":11078820,"author":"ketralnis","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Show HN: Htop 2.0 released, now cross-platform","text":"I really enjoyed this talk[1] by Bryan Cantrill, part of which is about what it took to emulate Linux's syscalls from within SmartOS. It's lengthy, but enjoyable. One of the applications that they tried to port directly to before the emulation layer was htop, and he has a good rant about what that took because of its use of /proc and how that made porting it very difficult. Given that, I'm sure this wasn't easy. Kudos! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10393284,"author":"AnbeSivam","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Running Linux containers on an illumos kernel","text":"Video of this talk. [VIDEO] Though it is from 2014, it is interesting on comparison between linux and smartos(solaris). There is also a recent, shorter video [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"TruCIPy79w8":[{"hn_comment_id":5741122,"author":"tolmasky","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Apple Pays No Tax on Much of Its Overseas Income, Senate Panel Finds","text":"Somewhat relevant talk by Milton Friedman that I found enlightening when thinking about these tax matters (economics of tax shelters, tax cuts being the \"product\" politicians \"sell\", etc.): [VIDEO] (I strongly recommend watching all of it, but around 5:50 in he talks about why the tax system will remain complicated if you have an internet attention span).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7140992,"author":"baddox","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Technology and wealth inequality","text":"There is a good Milton Friedman video wherein he explains why tax reform won't happen in the United States. The key is that the ideal goals of a tax system (e.g. generate lots of revenue with little inefficiency and little impact on taxpayers' personal financial situation and few unequally distributed loopholes like corporate tax avoidance) are not the goals of lawmakers who define the tax system. In the video, he focuses on a theoretical tax system just like our current progressive income tax, but with all brackets >25% limited to 25%, and argues that it would be an improvement (according to ideal goals). But I think the argument could be extended to basic income or negative income tax, the latter of which Friedman also advocated. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14071214,"author":"briandear","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Uber banned in all of Italy","text":"Perhaps if taxes were less punitive and confiscatory people would be less likely to be creative in their avoidance. Lowering and simplifying taxes would increase revenues (per the Laffer Curve,) however that would result in politicians not being as powerful. Milton Friedman explains this brilliantly: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TshYfYIxR9E":[{"hn_comment_id":24525672,"author":"Learning2-2","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Engineers produce a fisheye lens that\u2019s completely flat","text":"Here is a video explaining the difference between a Fresnel lens and a photon sieve: Photon sieves used to visualise optical wave front propagation [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31151250,"author":"avian","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Photon Sieve","text":"The Huygens Optics channel has a fascinating video abut a photon sieve created using a home-made litography setup: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31557291,"author":"eterevsky","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Chaos: The real problem with quantum mechanics","text":"Regarding waves and interference, have a look at this video: [VIDEO] . It shows how the interference patterns actually look. Yes, the wave is 3D and the interference patterns can be kind of like checker board. We are usually considering a 2D example because it is simpler to visualize and analize. > how do we know that entanglement is the result of 'spooky action at a distance' and not the result of creating two entangled particles? A very high-level explanation is that we know this because quantum computers work (even though right now we can't build them big enough to be useful) and it can't be explained by any classical effects.","stance":"rec"}],"Tv6aJRGpz_A":[{"hn_comment_id":9314888,"author":"jewbacca","month":"2015-04","story_title":"A Brief History of Graphics [video]","text":"Highly recommended related video by the same person (XboxAhoy / Stuart Brown): \"Doomed: The Embers of Amiga FPS\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12792018,"author":"qwertyuiop924","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Surprise Amiga Workbench 3.1 Update, 20 Years Later","text":"Amiga was a pretty cool system, and the fanbase had a devotion matched perhaps only by the lispm people. By the way, if you're interested in the Amiga, go watch Stuart Brown (aka XboxAhoy)'s excellent documentary on FPS on the Amiga: [VIDEO] Actually, just go watch his whole backlog if you have any interest in computer history whatsoever: It's all quality work (and I do mean quality: well researched, and polished enough to go on television), and absolutely fascinating.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9359294,"author":"Gracana","month":"2015-04","story_title":"The 68000 Wars, Part 3: We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up","text":"If anyone is interested, Stuart Brown's \"Doomed: The Embers of Amiga FPS\" is a nice little documentary of the history mentioned above. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11671110,"author":"qwertyuiop924","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Show HN: BitKeeper \u2013 Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source","text":"Fair 'nuff. And no, I haven't used commercial UNIXes all that much, but I have experienced plenty of Linux's warts. I do agree with a lot of those points, but containers on Linux just aren't there, systemd is a mess that's going to get pushed in no matter what we say, and there are plenty of issues to be had, although the ladder is true of any UNIX. If you want to know what the rest of the issues are, just start googling. And while you're at it, listen to some of Bryan Cantrill's talks. They are biased (obviously), but they're entertaining, and they do point out some things that I think are real problems (posix conformance (MADV_DONTNEED), and epoll semantics, mainly). Oh, and don't flame me for speaking in ignorance. I've been a Linux user for half a decade at least now, and I CAN say I see problems with it. I can also say, as a person who is programmer, that some of the things that Cantrill pointed out are actually evil. Note, however, that I don't claim Solaris, or any other OS is better. Every UNIX is utterly fucked in some respect. I just know Linux's flaws the best. By the way, I've been trying to get Amiga emulation working for a while. It basically works at this point, but the *UAEs are a misery on UNIX systems. Without any kind of loader, you have to spend 10 minutes editing the config every time you want to play a game. But if you're in any way interested in the history you lived through, check out [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13579862,"author":"technomalogical","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Homebrew Amiga Graphics Card (FPGA, Open Source) Finished [video]","text":"Indeed, it has been argued. A great YouTube look at Doom's impact on the Amiga can be found here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TwKpj2ISQAc":[{"hn_comment_id":43142056,"author":"artifact_44","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)","text":"Because she thoroughly de-articulates the fabricated mystique around Feynman, and openly discusses the toxic effect his legacy has had on science. (Including the fact that a lot of his legacy was fabricated by people that either admired him, or wished to capitalize on that legacy.) Her video on Feynman is long and detailed, and very sobering. I highly recommend it. It absolutely/expertly challenged everything I thought I knew about him. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42404653,"author":"hughesjj","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Fermat's Last Theorem \u2013 how it\u2019s going","text":"I'd be careful taking anything from \"surely you're joking\" as a fact btw. There's a good popsci comms video on why here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42404891,"author":"blackenedgem","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Fermat's Last Theorem \u2013 how it\u2019s going","text":"You may want to watch this if Surely You're Joking read years ago is your main reference point: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43143796,"author":"tovej","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)","text":"He hasn't written a single book (surprising I know), I assume you're talking about \"Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman\", which contains exaggerated anecdotes designed to make Feynman look like a hero. That one was written by a fanboy (Ralph Leighton) based on stories that Feynman told him, which have been revealed to be either fake or exaggerations (they found notes in his office of him writing and rewriting these hero stories). It's a terrible book, in my opinion. If you want to know why, Angela Collier says it better and in more detail than I could: [VIDEO] Is that the video you're referring to? Watch the video and I think you'll see why he is \"getting a bad rep these days\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44382311,"author":"renhanxue","month":"2025-06","story_title":"What Problems to Solve (1966)","text":"Astrophysicist Angela Collier's video essay \"the sham legacy of Richard Feynman\" [0] is a good introduction. Her accounts of her own encounters with \"Feynman bros\" are heart-wrenching. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"TwRjO3kHxU4":[{"hn_comment_id":37286369,"author":"nataz","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Exploring the eerie beauty of Japan's abandoned villages","text":"If you are interested in buying an abandoned home in the Japan countryside highly recommend the YouTube channel Tokyo Llama. He's spent the last four years renovating a beautiful traditional style Japanese house and property about an hour outside of Tokyo. He talks about the renovation aspects, taxes, paperwork process, and the pros and cons of doing this with a family. Lots of videos the watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24209056,"author":"rwmj","month":"2020-08","story_title":"1-Euro Houses","text":"On a similar point, this video goes through the costs of buying an abandoned house in Japan: [VIDEO] To be fair, although there are a lot of \"extras\", the sums involved still seemed relatively small.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38872095,"author":"shagie","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Need a Home for 80k Puzzles? Try an Italian Castle","text":"Should head over to Japan... Exploring the eerie beauty of Japan's abandoned villages --- [LINK] -- [LINK] 171 points | 4 months ago | 126 comments The top comment by nataz: > If you are interested in buying an abandoned home in the Japan countryside highly recommend the YouTube channel Tokyo Llama. He's spent the last four years renovating a beautiful traditional style Japanese house and property about an hour outside of Tokyo. He talks about the renovation aspects, taxes, paperwork process, and the pros and cons of doing this with a family. Lots of videos the watch. > [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"U2huVf1l4UE":[{"hn_comment_id":19953505,"author":"chucksmash","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Aggressive Chess Openings (2012)","text":"I've not used chessable yet, but one of my favorite youtubers, John Bartholomew, is behind it and I'd recommend his videos wholeheartedly. He did a series of videos that is particularly worth checking out called \"Climbing the Ratings Ladder\" where he plays opponents at different rating tiers and analyzes their mistakes[1]. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22419229,"author":"danem","month":"2020-02","story_title":"To get good, go after the metagame","text":"I found John Bartholowmew's[1] videos extremely helpful when I was playing a lot of chess. Definitely saw a huge improvement. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34499278,"author":"boundlessdreamz","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Chess Is Booming and Our Servers Are Struggling","text":"I have improved my chess quite a bit by going through John Bartholomew's youtube content. * Start with climbing the rating ladder. He explains the basics and mistakes players at each level makes and how to avoid them [VIDEO] * Watch his games (ideally with 10minutes or more time control) where he explains his thought process behind each move and what he is anticipating. This is priceless! * Analyze your own games after you play","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10694952,"author":"trhaynes","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Learn to play chess online","text":"I liked John Bartholomew's \"Climbing the Rating Ladder\" videos, where he plays players of different levels and talks about strategy and common mistakes at each level: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"U4FNBMZsqrY":[{"hn_comment_id":15640039,"author":"pault","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Audio Design Deep Dive: Scoring Wolfenstein II with the Baschet sonic sculptures","text":"Here's one of the instruments from the Baschet workshop: [LINK] Mick Gordon\u2013who scored the previous Wolfenstein game\u2013did a great presentation on the instrument design for the Doom 2016 soundtrack, which is in my opinion one of the best (the best?) game soundtracks of all time: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33533124,"author":"agentwiggles","month":"2022-11","story_title":"My full statement regarding DOOM Eternal","text":"This is really disappointing to read. Mick's soundtrack was a huge part of making DOOM 2016 and Eternal such great experiences. His talk at GDC where he goes into some of the process of creating the soundtrack is fantastic, so much fun to see the creativity he brought to the game's music. [VIDEO] The next DOOM will be a little less DOOMy without him.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35786739,"author":"epiccoleman","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Show HN: I've built a spectrogram analyzer web app","text":"Mick Gordon did some fun hidden spectrogram imagery in the Doom 2016 soundtrack. He talks about that and plenty of other cool stuff in his talk at the 2017 GDC conference. One of my favorite conference talks ever, he did so much cool experimentation to get the sounds he used on the soundtrack, and watching his talk is one of those moments where you really get to see a master of his craft let loose and explain his process. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23080806,"author":"acomjean","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Learn sound theory with an acclaimed synth company","text":"I had a dx7 in college. Its an FM synth, an from the little diagrams on the top, it was fascinating. I could make my own sounds, but I never could get the time to get programming (beyond detuning the sound and doubling it to make a \"fatter\" sound, the dx7 had a gray matter mod chip). Lamentably in the 90s information about this stuff was harder to come by, plus the 2 line led screen to input things wasn't ideal. You can see the top of the keyboard images here: [LINK] But the internet abounds with sound making tools! ableton has a synth basics online class/demo kind of thing: [LINK] visual programing sound machines in pd [LINK] Also the GDC talk by the sound designer of doom (the new one). He's using sine wave, and a bunch of effects boxes (some in parallel) to generate all those sounds. There is also a sound morph tool they used to combine sounds with a chainsaw sound... The talk starts a couple minutes in after a doom sound trailer thing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25152199,"author":"acomjean","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Dusk is a 90s style shooter from the mind of a teenager (2016)","text":"Doom came out right when I left univeristy. Loved that game. I like the new Dooms too. I think they're fun. Way more \"doom like\" than anything else I've played since. The \"New Doom\" music/sound producer gave a pretty good GDC one hour talk about the music came about. Some fun stories there ( the sound easter egg story was fun). Its more than about just the sound, its about process and change. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"U6qZPx4uD0g":[{"hn_comment_id":19755007,"author":"spectramax","month":"2019-04","story_title":"How to Read a Schematic","text":"I totally agree with you. There is a deeper problem I think across the board, whether it is electronics books or programming tutorials, mechanical engineering, etc. For example, no one teaches you the way you see in this particular segment of an old EEVBlog episode [1]. Please watch this clip as Dave dives deep into how a simple 555 chip works at the transistor level, breaking down into modules and explaining how each module works. What we need is a book that does the following: Break down REAL circuits from the wild, explain each module in isolation, then explain how it fits into the larger system. No one does this, not in my 15 years of experience in engineering. It is the same everywhere regardless of the subject, teaching is difficult thing to master. 3Blue1Brown is a rare exception, a unicorn of a guy. Richard Feynman's physics lectures are also an example. Programming books are littered with content pages that list: 1. Variables, 2. Loops, 3. Conditionals, 4. Strings, 5. Functions, 6. Objects,..I am already asleep. YAWN. This is a wrong way to teach people how to program . I couldn't emphasize it enough. Most people won't remember what all these things are and they'll lose interest as they grind through this mindless mess of syntax that they have never seen before. Instead programming should be taught by building a goal to automate something. Start out by hard coding everything, then introduce variables. Add functions to make your code modular. Then introduce objects, e","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18199579,"author":"okket","month":"2018-10","story_title":"The 555 and How It Got That Way","text":"Don't miss the #555 Episode of EEVBlog where Dave Jones solders this kit and talks a lot about how the 555 works its history: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"U7VwtOrwceo":[{"hn_comment_id":25220082,"author":"doikor","month":"2020-11","story_title":"How to turn your Xbox Series X/S into an emulation powerhouse","text":"Here is an excellent talk about the Xbox One security (and Series X|S should be quite similar) by the person who is in charge of security on the Xbox platform. [VIDEO] Basically it boils down to trust NOTHING outside the actual SoC chip (so stuff like RAM, Flash/HDD, optical dics, etc cannot be trusted). The SoC is made on 28nm (Series X|S 7nm) process so physically attacking it is very hard/expensive. Also goes into the difference between Windows (PC) and Xbox (Console) security. On PC the owner/admin wants the help keep the system secure as it gets attacked by malicious parties from the internet. On console the owner is usually the bad guy (the one doing the attacking) and thus needs a very different approach. Also stuff like Microsoft Pluton are direct descendants of the stuff done for Xbox and Live.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26742909,"author":"monocasa","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Signal Server code on GitHub is up to date again","text":"DRM has only been successful in the space of making easily replicable attacks more expensive than what is being protected by the DRM. Microsoft has talked about this publicly in this great talk on the Xbox One's physical device security. 'We can't stop people hacking, but we can make each hack more expensive than what someone would spend on games on average'. [VIDEO] SGX running on centralized servers turns that calculus on it's head by concentrating the benefits of the hack all in one place.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30773594,"author":"nemothekid","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses (2020)","text":"There's a really good presentation, by a Microsoft Platform Security Engineer, detailing the lengths they went through to ensure only properly signed executables run on the Xbox One and really answers your question. One of the tools they developed, HVCI, was later incorporated into Windows Hyper-V. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32235406,"author":"RandomBK","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton","text":"Obligatory link to the talk from MS where they covered the origins of Pluton on the Xbox: [VIDEO] The video does a good job of the original threat model for this technology and how it works on Xbox.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33693269,"author":"323","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Mercedes Makes Better Performance a $1,200 Subscription in Its EVs","text":"> would like to know how the answer is no TL;DR: cryptography and secure hardware (think TPM) This is a very interesting talk from Microsoft about how they made Xbox immune to physical attacks (modding) like you proposed. Now they are working on getting this tech into regular computers. [VIDEO] Of course, we don't know if the solution Mercedes used is as robust. For all we know it can be hacked in 1 minute.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36199253,"author":"numpad0","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Linux on the 7th Generation of Consoles Part 1: Xbox 360","text":"This talk[1] was interesting watch wrt that. They made DRAM encrypted and Secure Boot seems to be done right too\u2026 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42076188,"author":"mmaniac","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Switch 2 will be backwards compatible with Switch","text":"Modchips on newer Switches use fault injections (clock/voltage glitching) but there exist mitigations for those. The Xbox One is confirmed to use them. I encourage you to watch this video where Microsoft describes the security design of the Xbox One, which so far has been almost bulletproof. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47674703,"author":"ytch","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Breaking the console: a brief history of video game security","text":"Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story \u2014 Tony Chen, Microsoft: [VIDEO] I like this video too, Tony Chen explains the overview of Xbox security system.","stance":"rec"}],"UANN2Eu6ZnM":[{"hn_comment_id":21862537,"author":"Stormwalker","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"My favorite talk of this year is Raymond Hettinger talking about mental gymnastics which helps you to structure your problems into ones that which you can solve. The mental game of Python: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24377018,"author":"meowface","month":"2020-09","story_title":"List of YouTube channels for improving web development and programming skills","text":"For programming, yes, especially if you're a beginner. But for more conceptual aspects of software engineering and system design, or tutorials on new technologies, videos can sometimes be useful. Here's a good recent one by Raymond Hettinger on making things easier for yourself when programming, such as ways of reducing how many things you'll need to keep in working memory at once. It actually does directly involve a lot of pure code so it's maybe not the best example of what I described, but it's mostly focused on cognition and is generalizable to programming in any language, or possibly doing any kind of demanding mental work in any field. \"The Mental Game of Python\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38635384,"author":"bionhoward","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best resources on abstracting and dealing with complexity","text":"Great question, I personally recommend: 1. Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey (video [LINK] ) 2. Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows (pdf [LINK] ) 3. Raymond Hettinger\u2019s content about CHUNKING is classic for this (one example video [VIDEO] ) 4. The classic tome on Abstraction is G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Doug Hofstadter ( [LINK] ) 5. Finally, I\u2019ll cut myself at lucky number five by pointing you toward J\u00fcergen (You-Again!) Schmidhuber\u2019s fascinating webpage: [LINK] Honorable mention to Margaret Hamilton\u2019s T-Maps and F-Maps. Use a hierarchical numbered outline. Zoom in and out of the fractal network. Remember your working memory holds seven (7) concepts, plus or minus two (2) \u2026 so chunk size around five (5) or less is ideal for cognitive accessibility.","stance":"rec"}],"UAeJHAFjwPM":[{"hn_comment_id":38555095,"author":"trash_cat","month":"2023-12","story_title":"An/PSQ-42","text":"You will find Veritasium's video on night vision goggles [1] very interesting. He explains well how they work, and the pros and cons of each implementation and generation. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40596719,"author":"alberth","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Night-vision lenses so thin and light that we can all see in the dark","text":"If you want to learn more ... Vertasium has a good video on the 3-different types of Night Vision. [VIDEO] 1. image intensification 2. active illumination 3. thermal imaging","stance":"rec"}],"UBX2QQHlQ_I":[{"hn_comment_id":18154255,"author":"mjlee","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Matt Parker \u2013 Standup Mathematician","text":"Given we've got Matt Parker and Excel on the front page at the same time, it feels like I have to recommend this video of both: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38690445,"author":"bb88","month":"2023-12","story_title":"3Blue1Brown Calculus Blog Series","text":"3b1b uses a python library for creating those videos. [LINK] As far as a math educator/communicator, one of my favorite videos of his is the video on the monster. [LINK] Also since we're talking about powerpoint here you should probably see this Matt Parker video about excel being used in ways it shouldn't maybe? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UBc7qBS1Ujo":[{"hn_comment_id":22104352,"author":"AgentME","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Life Is Driven by Network Effects","text":"This video about the problems with The Bell Curve (a book about IQ and other things) does a lot to explain a lot of the problems with IQ: [VIDEO] . The video is well-researched; I've been a long-time fan of the creator for putting out quality stuff. >and it definitely has a large genetic component There's a number of studies showing that IQ is \"heritable\", but this is different from saying it's genetic. The video above (around the 39:00 mark) and [LINK] both get into this point. Wearing earrings is highly \"heritable\" despite being an arbitrary social custom, and having 10 fingers is not \"heritable\". It's also important to avoid falling into the conclusion that many people take about IQ that it being heritable means that educational efforts to improve it are worthless: >Think about the relative heights of men in a poor village in an underdeveloped country 100 years ago. The average height for these malnourished men might be 5 feet 2 inches. The heritability in observed heights within this particular society can be quite high; men of tall fathers are on the average considerably taller than men of short fathers. However, this does not mean that a program of improved sanitation and nutrition could not significantly raise the average height of this group in a few generations.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35520609,"author":"tjnaylor","month":"2023-04","story_title":"American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'","text":"[VIDEO] It's a 2 hour video essay that covers psychometry generally as a lens to understanding a book called the Bell Curve that was a flashpoint for questions about the validity of IQ science generally (but most especially how it applies to race). It took a good chunk of my Sunday to get through it, but it was really enjoyable and gave me a ton of insight into a ton of buzzwords and studies I had heard of but couldn't really dig my teeth into. I think with this topic, getting a briefer, less nuanced summary than something like this would be a mistake because of how much misunderstanding of these topics permeates popular culture. The video also provides a number of studies and books to keep going beyond the relatively breif 2 hours of content it provides. It uses the famed/infamous book the Bell Curve as a case study and delves into how they were originally created, how they are updated, how the term hereditery when used in genetics means something that is sometimes counter-intuitive to the definition used in popular culture (for example whether someone wears earings has high heritability, whereas having 2 arms has effectively zero herritability) the statistical meaninfullness of factorization (G-factor) of domains of IQ into a single numerical value, how these domains came to be defined, the current state of understanding regarding the local vs enviornmental source of IQ for individuals, how the Flynn effect was observed, etc. But to answer a bit of your earlier question. Wh","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22051519,"author":"wdbbdw","month":"2020-01","story_title":"'Cancel Culture' Comes to Science?","text":"'Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence \u201cconsider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.\u201d Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson\u2019s \u201cprofoundly unfortunate\" statement would be based.' [0] I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence, though at 2.5 hours long it may be a bit too thorough. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] edited for formatting","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32054584,"author":"sascha_sl","month":"2022-07","story_title":"University Profs' Criticism Led to Retraction of Math Paper on Gender (2018)","text":">Ironicaly this is never mentioned, they just see this is a \"many more men can have a higher iq distrubution wise due to the male gauss tail stretching out further than womens, so this is sexist to say that men are smarter\". Because many advocates of GMVH are only interested in justifying the gender imbalance in leadership positions biologically, dismissing any well known social factors (e.g. competence rating on double blind fake CVs)? \"Feminists say GMVH means men are all smarter\" is a gross oversimplification of the situation. If you have 2.5 hours to spend on a video essay, I'd very much recommend \"The Bell Curve\"[1], a breakdown of the book of the same name. Not so much for the racism part, but for the background on the construction of IQ. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35520643,"author":"geraldalewis","month":"2023-04","story_title":"American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'","text":"I think this video by `Shaun` is informative and well-researched (articles and books are cited). It's long; the creator isn't especially succinct, but it's as entertaining as the material allows, and the subject's complex enough to warrant a video that's a couple of hours long. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35520983,"author":"geraldalewis","month":"2023-04","story_title":"American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'","text":"> For most people, performance on one type of cognitive task (e.g. verbal reasoning) is highly correlated with performance on the other types of cognitive tasks. It's cool that that's your understanding, but you're wading into territory that gets people sterilized and killed. I have a lot of trust in science, but not here. This video was informative for me: [VIDEO] For example, here's an IQ test; let's say its given to 5,000,000 Canadians, and 3,000 Texans (1): * What is the capital city of Canada? * Which Canadian province is the largest by land area? * Who is considered the \"Father of Medicare\" in Canada? * Name the two official languages of Canada. * Which Canadian team won the Stanley Cup in 2017? * What is the national sport of Canada? * What is the name of Canada's national anthem? * Name the famous Canadian dish made with fries, cheese curds, and gravy. * Who was the first Prime Minister of Canada? * In which Canadian city is the CN Tower located? I would expect a normal distribution for Canadians, but for the Texans to score in the bottom quintile (regardless of \"general intelligence\"). (1) I asked ChatGPT to come up with this test. (edit: formatting)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42240229,"author":"pfooti","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Hey, wait \u2013 is employee performance Gaussian distributed?","text":"Those two assumptions are not particularly well-supported by data or modern thought on capabilities. Even the construct of \"IQ\" is probably a post-hoc explanation of data rather than a predictive thing. If you want an hours-long discussion of that in the context of the book, The Bell Curve, have a look at: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UC_BCz0pzMw":[{"hn_comment_id":24747709,"author":"xabush","month":"2020-10","story_title":"We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal","text":"This excellent video delves into the economics of nuclear power plants and compares them with the alternatives. [VIDEO] Although nuclear energy is profitable of the LONG term, it is financially infeasible over the short-to-medium term.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36034951,"author":"meowkit","month":"2023-05","story_title":"When will global warming hit the landmark 1.5 \u00baC limit?","text":"this video always comes to mind. [VIDEO] The economic incentives (in a sort of basic example) are in favor of fossil fuel plants. It takes too long for traditional nuclear plants to have a return. Energy generation is sadly more complicated than I had hoped as a laymen. The sources have to compete on variable demand basis along with amortized costs over years. Nuclear needs novel designs with better economic returns, or to be given assistance by government to be more competitive on this amortized basis.","stance":"rec"}],"UCgoxQCf5Jg":[{"hn_comment_id":20201185,"author":"sas41","month":"2019-06","story_title":"TempleOS: \u2013 God, the Random Number Generator","text":"Here is a great video on TempleOS and Terry Davis himself. It talks about the development of the OS, it's history and his life in a chronological order. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29514637,"author":"Rendello","month":"2021-12","story_title":"TinkerOS: A Fork of TempleOS","text":"(Context, the late creator of the original TempleOS, Terry Davis, was very schizophrenic.) This video is the definitive rundown on his life and illness: [VIDEO] Terry Davis, in life and online, was completely wild. What's interesting though is that when you play in TempleOS for a little while, it's easy to forget that. The OS is religious and super idiosyncratic, but that nasty, manic, hateful, attitude isn't there (with few exceptions). And the code and docs are damn good. I think Terry tried hard to keep the actual OS and documentation \"pure\", in a way. I think digging in and working on extremely complex C code was a regulating force that calmed him, in the exact opposite way that being jeered at online (especially by 4Chan and the like) upset him and made his condition worse.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18998930,"author":"beezischillin","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Troubled legacy of Terry Davis, \u2018God\u2019s lonely programmer\u2019","text":"There's a long video about Terry and TempleOS by YouTube creator Fredrik Knudsen, [VIDEO] It's pretty heart-breaking to watch, though. Had he not drawn the short straw, he could've gone down as a legend. He built his own home-made CNC milling machine in the 90s. Who knows what he could've accomplished? Rest in peace, Terry. May the Internet never forget your struggle.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19072381,"author":"kuroguro","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Show HN: The operating system I built as my high school project (2016)","text":"The author had some... memorable quotes. It was a reference to his most infamous post. I assumed the OP knew about the author's past and wasn't asking for a genuine comparison. Tho looking back I'm not so sure. For the brave of heart (NSFW): [VIDEO] Won't make much sense out of context. The video does a pretty good job of explaining the whole story if you have time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19963373,"author":"jszymborski","month":"2019-05","story_title":"TempleOS: Installation","text":"I felt similarly when I heard the news. I can't explain the sadness I felt when I learned that 4Chan brigades are largely responsible for how quickly his situation deteriorated. For those who, like me, didn't know, he had begun live-streaming, where he would take call-ins to his landline. It's there that a concerted campaign to get Terry to alienate himself from his parents (with whom he lived) and stop taking his medication. This is not to mention how they egged on romantic feelings for a YouTube personality who they would later impersonate and torture him with in awful ways. All this led to Terry's parents being unable to house him. They were very old and the situation became impossible. Terry survived on the streets for sometime, meeting up with (genuine and loving) fans along the way. Terry sadly was struck by a train. We were able to celebrate an eccentric and strange life because of the internet. It also ended it. I hope the internet can heal... I know people like you and I hope it can. It didn't here. If you want to learn more about Terry's life and death, please check out Fredrick Knudsen's video essay. It is in-depth and important, although very challenging because of the subject matter. [VIDEO] Finally, if you feel like you or someone you care for are in crisis, or might be soon, consider speaking to the folks at NAMI in the US. If you're not in the US, they can direct you to people in your country. 1-800-950-NAMI (6264) or info@nami.org","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21509532,"author":"lethologica","month":"2019-11","story_title":"The Digital Human \u2013 Terry A. Davis and Temple OS","text":"There's another (lengthy) video that I watched on Terry and TempleOS recently here [1] which was quite good. Honestly, it's such a tragic story. The guy was clearly talented but wasn't able to ever get the help needed in order to properly harness that talent. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25617617,"author":"Rendello","month":"2021-01","story_title":"The best things and stuff of 2020","text":"I love seeing interest in the OS! > I've never understood how much criticism the creator of TempleOS got. Terry Davis was very mentally ill, much moreso than I think some people realize. His schizophrenia made him think that he was married to a Youtuber, that Larry Page was watching his videos, and that he had a telepathic connection to Elon Musk. There's a good video about him and TempleOS by Fredrick Knudsen. [1] > Instead of being elitist and shooting down his contributions, the computer science crowd could have focused on getting this member of the community the help he would have needed concerning other parts of life. I think a lot of the CS community enjoyed seeing his contributions, especially here on Hacker News in the later days of his life. I know that people wanted to help him, but I'm not sure how much could've been done beyond what his family was doing, honestly. Some people tried to help and ended up making things worse. > I would love to look at its source code though! I want to make some more videos about just that, but in the meantime, the source code is included in the operating system (since everything except the boot code is JIT), and if you ever want to develop inside TempleOS, you'll be referring to it a whole lot I can tell you that :D (Terry Davis mirrored the OS online with a DolDoc -> HTML tool, you can browse the source code / system files on the archived site [2]) 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33562632,"author":"qzx_pierri","month":"2022-11","story_title":"NSA urges orgs to use memory-safe programming languages","text":"TempleOS was an OS created by a genius programmer named Terry. Also, I very rarely use the word genius, but he was a genius by definition. He was extremely mentally ill, but his brilliance lives on through TempleOS (and HolyC). Check out this Down the Rabbit Hole video about him. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UDtlvZGmHYk":[{"hn_comment_id":31453575,"author":"haxiomic","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Scientists Uncover a Shady Web of Online Spider Sales","text":"When hearing annecdotes about the intelligence of jumping I\u2019m always reminded of and David Attenborough\u2019s narration of Portia [VIDEO] Well worth the watch if it\u2019s new to you! Quite the perspective shifter","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29138299,"author":"jcims","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Spiders are much smarter than you think","text":"They seem to be in a class entirely unto themselves. There is something about the way they move and observe the world that gives them an apparent intellect beyond any other 'bug' I've seen. I used to keep bees and they are amazing in both their individual and collective ability, but it's hard to interact with them. Portia and other in the Salticidae family are almost like little dogs or something. They watch you, seem to make eye contact even, and generally are tolerant of handling and attention. Really cool little critters. Predictably, the BBC and David Attenborough have some amazing videos about them: Hunting a spider - [VIDEO] Hunting a mantid (you have to watch the end) - [LINK] Crazy mating ritual - [LINK] Another intense mating ritual - [LINK] They let you pet them - [LINK] All of this with a brain of approximately 100,000 neurons.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29141639,"author":"murat124","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Spiders are much smarter than you think","text":"Spiders are amazing. Of course you should stay away from some of them, like blackwidow, the brown recluse, or the brazilian wandering spider but for the most part, house spiders (unless you're in Australia), and jumping spiders are usually friendly. David Attenborough covered Portias in one of the documentaries: [VIDEO] -- It's fascinating that they can strategize their attack.","stance":"rec"}],"UE-k4hYHIDE":[{"hn_comment_id":42684631,"author":"runlevel1","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Railroad Tycoon II","text":"Was that the period of time when you got more bang for your buck building a PC with dual-socket Celerons than one high-end Pentium? EDIT: An excellent retrospective on it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43330842,"author":"throwaway2037","month":"2025-03","story_title":"3dfx: So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous (2023)","text":"> Half of HN alive at the time probably had that motherboard - ABIT BP6 LOL. Yep. Me too. Cathode Ray Dude's channel has a great video about the history of this amazing motherboard: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46441428,"author":"svakak","month":"2025-12","story_title":"What Happened to Abit Motherboards","text":"Ah, Abit, the maker of Only Famous Motherboard as CRD woud call it in this long, but interesting, video. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UEAMfLPZZhE":[{"hn_comment_id":29696717,"author":"MichaelMoser123","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best tech books you read in 2021?","text":"i see quite a bit of overlap between the book and his lecture series on distributed systems [VIDEO] These lectures give a more theory based approach, while the book is more based on discussing practical systems; now both are covering distributed systems as such. Now the distributed system audio course on youtube is extremely accessible (i listened to them while taking walks with our dog) The book is also great, Kleppmann is writing in a very accessible style.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30561084,"author":"posharma","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Making CRDTs Byzantine Fault Tolerant [pdf]","text":"Martin's writing and explanation style is truly awesome! I read his book DDIA (Designing data intensive applications) and listened to his distributed systems class lectures [1]. It was a joy learning. I wish I had him or someone like him in graduate school. I would've probably taken all his courses :-). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27393612,"author":"avinassh","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Suggest me a free/open course on distributed computing","text":"1. MIT's 6.824: Distributed Systems - [LINK] Lectures are available on Youtube. Assignments code and test runner are also available on the course page. 2. The Book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann and the Youtube videos - [VIDEO] 3. Distributed Systems course by Lindsey Kuper - [LINK] 4. CMU's Database Systems and Advanced Database Systems by Andy Pavlo","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27841095,"author":"Wonnk13","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Thinking in Events: From Databases to Distributed Collaboration Software [video]","text":"His lectures are also on youtube: [VIDEO] I've been trying to watch snippets while also watching the MIT 6.824 lectures as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29710914,"author":"MichaelMoser123","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]","text":"I think that i understand the argument, but things changed with the advent of microservices. Suddenly everything turned into a distributed system, and it is hard to cope without some understanding of the subject matter. This lecture series by Martin Kleppman has helped me quite a bit here: [VIDEO] Also see his book 'Designing Data-Intensive Applications', which is more focused on discussing practical systems.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43197284,"author":"bigmutant","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Distributed systems programming has stalled","text":"Good resources for understanding Distributed Systems: - MIT course with Robert Morris (of Morris Worm fame): [LINK] - Martin Kleppmann (author of DDIA): [VIDEO] If you can work through the above (and DDIA), you'll have a solid understanding of the issues in Distributed System, like Consensus, Causality, Split Brain, etc. You'll also gain a critical eye of Cloud Services and be able to articulate their drawbacks (ex: did you know that replication to DynamoDB Secondary Indexes is eventually consistent? What effects can that have on your applications?)","stance":"rec"}],"UEfP1OKKz_Q":[{"hn_comment_id":20800270,"author":"lewiscollard","month":"2019-08","story_title":"North American versus European distribution systems (2011)","text":"For anyone that does not know why, as rarely as I recommend videos I very much suggest Tom Scott's video \"British Plugs Are Better Than All Other Plugs, And Here's Why\": [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20383353,"author":"stevekemp","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Why Three Prongs? (1996)","text":"Why Britain has the best wall sockets on earth: [VIDEO] Sure there is bias there, but the reasoning is pretty compelling. Of course getting any country to switch is nigh-on impossible.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29340089,"author":"tentacleuno","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Museum of Plugs and Sockets","text":"> The only real advantage of the British plug over Schuko is the fuse (a debatable feature) Could I ask why a fuse is debatable? Seems like quite a basic security feature. There's a good video[0] on the design of UK plugs if you're interested. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37574671,"author":"stevekemp","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Plug and socket types around the world","text":"It is true they can sting a little, but that aside I have a strong preference for them too - almost certainly because i grew up with them! There's the obligatory Tom Scott video here, which always gets shared, deservedly so, whenever the topic of plugs and sockets comes up: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UF8uR6Z6KLc":[{"hn_comment_id":13207672,"author":"bayer_rggb","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are inspirational talks you watched which motivates you?","text":"Came here to post this Larry Smith link :) Even though Jobs gets some hate on HN, these interviews/speeches have never failed to inspire me. If you don't ask, you don't get - [LINK] On a very formulaic life - [LINK] (I couldn't find one without the bad bg music) Stay hungry, stay foolish - [VIDEO] I do realise, on some levels, he was not a good person, or atleast came off as an ass, but listening to these interviews and speeches, I feel I can relate to him and his struggles.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31747754,"author":"al_borland","month":"2022-06","story_title":"You have only so much time \u2013 are you using it right?","text":"This was from the commencement speech he gave at Sanford (starts at about 9:10). Not originally his quite, he was paraphrasing something he heard. Great speech, very worth watching for those who haven\u2019t seen it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34802748,"author":"modernerd","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best advice you got on any aspect of life?","text":"\u201c\u2026for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: \u2019If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?\u2019 And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.\u201d - Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":547963,"author":"randy","month":"2009-04","story_title":"J.K. Rowling: The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination","text":"An oldie but a great speech (old HN discussion here: [LINK] ). For anyone who's interested, here are some other extraordinary commencement speeches: Steve Jobs: [VIDEO] Bill Watterson: [LINK] David Foster Wallace: [LINK] There is a lot of good advice and numerous great sound-bytes from all of these; but one of my personal favorites comes from Bill Watterson, who makes a point that I feel often gets overlooked at HN in our relentless pursuit of success: Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential \u2015 as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them. To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2405299,"author":"mesuvash","month":"2011-04","story_title":"Ask HN: I am a depressed student, looking to travel + just be, please advice.","text":"Watch these videos [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] I do it whenever i lack motivation. It helps me a lot, I hope it will help you in same way. And you if you really think you want to take a break, Come to Nepal, Its a nice place to be. However its landlocked so you wont find beaches.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7084193,"author":"stiff","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the most inspirational blog posts you've ever read?","text":"Mostly not blog posts, but for the last years I tend to revisit the same resources over and over again for inspiration: - \"You and your research\" by Hamming, and his video lectures which expand on topics in the original talk: [LINK] [LINK] - \"On teaching mathematics\" by V. I. Arnold: [LINK] - \"Undergraduation\" by Paul Graham [LINK] - \"Learn and relearn your field\", and many others in the same category, by Terrence Tao [LINK] - Steve Jobs Stanford commencement address: [VIDEO] - All articles on programming by Peter Norvig: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10795132,"author":"staunch","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Is 24 too late to start life?","text":"You're smart, healthy, and 24 years old? There are a lot of older \"successful people\" that would trade everything they have to be you. Motivation is based on momentum. You're at a standstill now, so you'll have to build up that momentum. Start off with small challenges (sleep, exercise, diet, or whatever) and then take on your big goals once you've got some speed. You may also find Steve Jobs' speech helpful, as a reminder that even people like him were just as confused at times. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31886673,"author":"endorphine","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Life is not short","text":"I watched this speech some 10 years ago and that quote has stuck with me. And particularly the subsequent sentence: \"It (death) clears out the old, to make way for the new.\" This is from Steve Jobs' Stanford 2005 commencement address - [VIDEO] (at 12:03)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32763811,"author":"kaon123","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs","text":"Great article. It is necessary to be reminded of this some time. I always like to remind myself of Steve Jobs' famous speech where he says something like: \"As with all matters of the heart, you know when things are right\". Which implies you damn well know when things are not right too. (source: [VIDEO] ) Not sure if Steve Jobs is a devil according to this guy.","stance":"rec"}],"UGhfB-NICzg":[{"hn_comment_id":13851064,"author":"indymike","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Was object-oriented programming a failure? (2015)","text":"Started programming in 1982. Object oriented programming was a huge advance - especially in developer productivity. A side effect was the dramatic improvement in developer tools: gui builders, IDEs, etc all improved dramatically. Probably the watershed moment for OO was this NeXT video that showed the difference: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33776765,"author":"rileyphone","month":"2022-11","story_title":"SwiftUI Is Convenient, but Slow","text":"There's a fun bit of marketing [0] NeXT did when AppKit was the new thing, comparing building a reasonably non-trivial application with it to a Sun workstation using C. Obviously biased, but still an interesting look into the development environment that among other things brought us the Web and DOOM. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41868911,"author":"lproven","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Hofstadter on Lisp (1983)","text":"So very much this. I think programming languages are also long overdue for some controlled trials. They can't be blinded: any experimental subject bright enough to learn to program is probably going to know what language they are programming in. But trials comparing the effectiveness of different languages. How long they take to attain a specified level of proficiency, how long to learn enough to produce working code, and importantly, readability: for instance, how long it takes to find intentionally-planted bugs in existing, unfamiliar code. NeXT did this, way back in the 1980s, and Sun lost badly: [VIDEO] There is a writeup of some of it here: [LINK] But speaking as a non-video-liker, this 17min one is worth it.","stance":"rec"}],"UIDb6VBO9os":[{"hn_comment_id":5188113,"author":"johncoltrane","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Symbiotic Languages [video]","text":"I was there. Jeremy's talk was very inspiring. Among the top three of the day, easily. Fat's talk ( [VIDEO] ) was the funniest and Mathias Bynen's ( [LINK] ) was the most instructive.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10963761,"author":"nunobrito","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How do prolific programmers go about their daily lives?","text":"Maybe relevant to watch this video for a first hand report of burnout from a coding rockstar: [VIDEO] From personal experience think that programming pretty much crashes and destroys your personal life when you really, really want to go above the rest. Everything changes, except you and your computer. That's how I feel anyways. Don't sleep much and pass every waking hour on and off solving some coding problem. I remember when there was no computers. Existed more beer, fun and happiness. But at the same time didn't felt as happy as getting something epic solved. Maybe one day it looks as it is all worth. Maybe. Enjoy your life OP, you only get one.","stance":"rec"}],"UIKGV2cTgqA":[{"hn_comment_id":16775251,"author":"MrMember","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire","text":"My favorite Tom Lehrer song is probably New Math. [VIDEO] With its clever lyrics and rapid fire delivery it sounds like it could have come out last year and not fifty years ago.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6658305,"author":"mturmon","month":"2013-11","story_title":"A ridiculous Common Core test for first graders","text":"It's inevitable to link to this now: [VIDEO] It's Tom Lehrer, about 50 years ago, explaining subtraction in the context of the \"new\" math (the base-8 stuff starts at 2:40). Worth a listen.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40462556,"author":"123894893","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?","text":"Yes, he's mocking the idea of teaching borrowing. He gives the way he thinks subtraction should be taught in the intro. It's a way that, as far as I can tell, hasn't been taught in America in over half a century. After the intro, he goes on to mock the concept of borrowing, which was (apparently) part of New Math. Then in the final verse he mocks the idea of teaching bases. Here's a good animated version of the song that shows the different methods. You'll notice that the \"silly\" New Math method is the way that makes sense to Americans today, and the \"simple\" method preferred by Lehrer is very confusing for anyone who's not used to it: [VIDEO] Here's more of the intro which makes it clear what's going on. My explanations in brackets: > Some of you who have small children may have perhaps been put in the embarrassing position of being unable to do your child\u2019s arithmetic homework because of the current revolution in mathematics teaching known as the \u201cNew Math\u201d. > So as a public service here tonight, I thought I would offer a brief lesson in the New Math. Tonight, we\u2019re gonna cover subtraction. [ New Math is confusing, and he's going to go over how confusing it is in a humorous way.] > Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here: 342 minus 173. Now, remember how we used to do that\u2026 > Three from two is nine, carry the one, and if you\u2019re under 35 or went to a private school you say seven from three is six but if you\u2019re over 35 and went to a public school ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40464271,"author":"OskarS","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?","text":"Yeah, ultimately it's the same algorithm, it's just a question of what are the details of the procedure, which makes it confusing if you've learned one way and not the other. The whole point of the song is that Lehrer thinks this is a new, less good way of doing subtraction. Look at this video if you haven't already: [VIDEO] The first way he does it seems INCREDIBLY confusing to people who learned arithmetic in the last 30 or so years (the sentence \"8 from 4 is 6\" is nonsensical to most such people), but the \"modern\" way he's mocking is perfectly understandable. I think the song is very funny and charming, but I do think this is a rare case where Lehrer is just wrong, the \"borrowing\" style is a much better and clearer way to explain subtraction. It is just as fast, and it gives you a much better intuition about what's actually happening, instead of just learning the steps by rote.","stance":"rec"}],"UJ7Qc3bsxjI":[{"hn_comment_id":27058279,"author":"breakyerself","month":"2021-05","story_title":"1700 Cascadia Earthquake","text":"Here is an excellent lecture on the subject from CWU professor Nick Zenter. If you watch this there is a good chance you'll decide to watch all of his lecture on the channel. Very enthralling. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39673400,"author":"pests","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Why star dunes are rarely recognised in the rock record","text":"I'm a big fan already. I actually found him from his Cascadia Earthquake video: [VIDEO] (on the University channel) I highly suggest others check him out too if you're into this stuff.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43503550,"author":"OgsyedIE","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Orphan tsunami of 1700\u2013Japanese clues to a parent earthquake in America (2015)","text":"If you have 70 minutes of free time on the weekend and want to see one of the greatest geology communicators at their best, Nick Zentner did a lecture at the CWU on Pacific Northwest earthquakes that goes into decent depth about this past quake and tsunami: [VIDEO] It's better than most TV if you've got the time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25062118,"author":"01100011","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Disaster prepping is mainstream again","text":"You should look into the supporting data before making comments like this. The evidence for the timeline of past Cascadia zone megaquakes is actually quite solid. We can even corroborate the records from North American samples with samples from Japan when the resulting tsunamis caused damage there. This is a good introduction if you want to know more: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41825059,"author":"RickS","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Washington's 'forgotten giant' volcano stirs","text":"Here in seattle, volcanoes feel like an afterthought attached to the thing that's actually scary, which is the Cascadia Subduction Zone[1]. There's an hour long presentation from CWU [2] that's dry but fascinating, and pretty free of popsci FUD. When the CSZ eventually goes, it's gonna be truly catastrophic. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UN8bJb8biZU":[{"hn_comment_id":26904112,"author":"input_sh","month":"2021-04","story_title":"EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd","text":"SLAPP suits (acronym for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) are designed to shut up critics, plain and simple. They're not designed to be won, they're designed to be an annoyance to those that are being sued, dragged on as much as possible, and incur as many legal fees for the defendant as possible. The end goal is simply for other people's self-censorship to kick in. As in, when other people want to criticise Proctorio, there's a chance they're gonna stumble upon this lawsuit and decide against speaking up. Highly recommend this John Oliver video. In my opinion, it's the best one they've ever done with an absolutely magnificent ending: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24656899,"author":"notpiika","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Bob Murray, Who Fought Regulations as a Coal Operator, Files for Lung Benefits","text":"If you haven't already seen them, John Oliver's Last Week Tonight episodes on Murray are great watches. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UOHURuAf5iY":[{"hn_comment_id":34286206,"author":"walty","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?","text":"You're going to love this playlist from Practical Engineering [1]. Grady explains all of this much better than I could. The second video explains reinforcement and the fifth explains pre-stressing. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32116807,"author":"zen_of_prog","month":"2022-07","story_title":"How the Colosseum was built and why it was an architectural marvel","text":"Concrete is made up of both cement (the CONtinuous part) and aggregate/stone (the disCRETE part), so cement vs concrete is kind of like broth vs soup, and concrete and stone like soup vs vegetables. > So the main difference is that you can shape it without chiselling it. I guess, yeah. Both are really good at withstanding compressive forces. Unlike Roman times, concrete today is usually reinforced with steel rebar, which gives it good tensile strength as well. This makes it useful for a lot of things that stone is not. Disclaimer, take everything here with a grain of salt. Continuous-discrete is not the etymology of concrete. This might help too: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UQuIVsNzqDk":[{"hn_comment_id":46241081,"author":"btown","month":"2025-12","story_title":"The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora","text":"To add to that (extremely thought-provoking) video, I do think that the Marvel model of \"pre-viz everything to death, the edit's already done before filming begins\" - [LINK] - can lose a lot of spontaneity. Perhaps the fading luster to Marvel films overall will bring us back from this place. On a more tangential note around green screens and their limitations when used ubiquitously, Corridor Digital's quasi-rediscovery of the Sodium Vapor process used by Disney through the early '80s, but lost to history ever since, is a fantastic watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43317856,"author":"nuccy","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (Filmed Feb. 13, 1957) [video]","text":"Some technologies have been lost, even though they were superior to what is available today. Take, for example, the old \u201cgreen/blue screen\u201d technique using sodium vapor lamps, used by Walt Disney in film production in the pre-digital era: [VIDEO] (12 minutes long, but totally worth it).","stance":"rec"}],"URJ_qSXruW0":[{"hn_comment_id":29109264,"author":"ajvs","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Space Station 14 \u2013 Open-source remake of Space Station 13","text":"No SS13 discussion is complete without linking to SsethTzeentach's infamous absurd-sounding review[1] or MandaloreGaming's slightly less infamous but more informational review[2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35510626,"author":"Aromasin","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ever-expanding animation of the life of the 796th floor of a space station","text":"Reminds me of a game I used to play called Space Station 13. It's a completely unique game. Imagine a giant game of Among Us, but with the engine complexity of Dwarf Fortress. Most servers are high level roleplay, where each player has a role (doctor, janitor, captain, clown, etcetera) and the rounds play out until chaos ensues (theme changes each round, but it could anything from station terrorists to a wizard causing bedlam). This YouTuber really expresses it better than I ever could: [VIDEO] Everyone has their goals to achieve each round, but it's general havoc. The OP animation really channels the feeling of playing the game.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25712669,"author":"ajvs","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Games on GitHub \u2013 A list of popular/awesome video games hosted on GitHub","text":"I'm always surprised by lists like these that fail to mention Space Station 13, the most actively developed 10+ year old FOSS game on GitHub. There are numerous forks of it, with tgstation being the most popular one [1]. SS13 is multiplayer round-based role playing game, where players assume the role of a crewmember on a space station. Together they must keep the station running smoothly, whilst dealing with antagonistic forces who threaten to sabotage the mission. Since most stations have dozens of job roles, each with content enough to last you hundreds of hours it's no surprise why people such as myself have spent thousands of hours on it and thousands play this every day. It has systems as varied as atmospherics, fully destructible environments, surgery, genetics, science, engineering, etc etc and the amount of content and interaction possible means that no two rounds are the same. Here's a very popular review which shares stories of some of the crazy events that can happen [2]. Unfortunately it's all built on the proprietary engine BYOND. However there are fully libre successors on new FOSS engines which are in-progress to match the massive amount of content SS13 has already accumulated, such as SS14 [3] and Unitystation [4]. I'm not a hardcore FOSS enthusiast about games so I prefer the amount of content SS13 has for the time being, but in time I intend to play and contribute to one of the successors instead in the future. They both have active servers if you're interes","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35519370,"author":"LoganDark","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ever-expanding animation of the life of the 796th floor of a space station","text":"> This YouTuber really expresses it better than I ever could: [VIDEO] From the video: > You can try taking a painkiller instead, but, it wasn't a painkiller, it was LSD. Having a bad trip? Don't worry, there's a security officer nearby to help! But he can't respond because he was murdered and replaced by a genetically modified monkey wearing his uniform. Hallucinating? Keep calm and focus on what's real. Unfortunately for you, the supermassive black hole expanding towards you is not a hallucination. It is, in fact, very real. _ {THE EMERGENCY SHUTTLE HAS BEEN CALLED}_ Welcome to Space Station 13. Just wow.","stance":"rec"}],"URSWYvyc42M":[{"hn_comment_id":6450331,"author":"AlwaysBCoding","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Testing code is simple","text":"What I wish people had told me about testing: * You write tests in accordance with a pattern: 1. Arrange 2. Act 3. Assert 4. Annihilate If you annihilate your test data with configuration options, and you abstract your \"arranging\" into factories and custom methods, then every test you write should be exactly three lines. When I learned this it gave me a consistent mental framework to think about how to write good tests. * Test the interface not the implementation: This was an eye opening realization about what to test. If you haven't seen it yet, watch Sandi Metz' incredible RailsConf talk - [VIDEO] - it's so good * Stubs: Stubs are exactly like the viruses' that we learned about in biology class. You load them up with a value then they literally latch onto a method and inject that value into it. When you're just starting out with testing, effective use of stubs can get you really far, and only when you start hitting the limits of practicality is when you need to think about bringing in something more complicated. * Testing isn't easy per se, but it is definitely enjoyable if you focus on making it that way * Cucumber is pretty stupid, don't waste your time with it","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7133157,"author":"richardjordan","month":"2014-01","story_title":"The Failures of \"Intro to TDD\"","text":"Shout out for Sandi Metz book POODR, and her Railsconf talk The Magic Tricks of Testing, if you're a rubyist (though the principles hold true for non-ruby OO programmers too). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16251742,"author":"matchmike1313","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How much time do you invest in writing tests?","text":"I spend about 30% of my time on a new feature writing tests. BTW that is in RoR which the primary language I code in. I would recommend watching this video by Sandi Matz on testing: [VIDEO] . I have used this methodology a lot to determine what I should test.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18438677,"author":"teeray","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Measuring and Improving Your CI/CD Pipelines","text":"There are some really fantastic testing resources in the Ruby community. The talk that most influenced my approach to building unit tests (even though I write Go these days) was one of Jim Weirich\u2019s: [LINK] I\u2019ve found that his zero-knowledge approach gives me a suite of tests that have high signal when they fail. Sandi Metz has also spoken extensively on testing, and I particularly like her advice on using mocks in tests appropriately. This talk of hers on the subject comes to mind: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21546125,"author":"jakespracher","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you write tests before the implementation?","text":"Not always before, but always eventually and usually once I\u2019m done with \u201cexploration\u201d. Testing done right should be a time saver in the long run! I think many people are turned off by testing and especially unit testing because it ends up being difficult and maintenance is more of a pain than it\u2019s worth. There are many good strategies to make it easier that in my experience have yet to be well adopted: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"US8QG9I1XW0":[{"hn_comment_id":24918556,"author":"adamkl","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A Theory of Software Architecture","text":"I spend a lot of time thinking about these sorts of topics (actually, I just taught a 4 hour session yesterday that used most of the terms in this article), working with newer, less experienced developers, and trying to figure how to distill the essence of \"architecture\" down to something simple that everyone can start with. This is what I\u2019ve started telling people: Use mostly functions, try to make most of them pure. I think that can get people (even new devs) 80% of the benefits (testability, composability, loose coupling, and the ability to reason about code) of more complicated, prescriptive architectures (Hexagonal, Onion, Ports & Adapters, Clean, etc) with a minimal amount of ramp up. Of course, this isn't the solution to every problem (it obviously depends on the domain you are working in, for me its webDev and backends), but I think maybe its a good way for people to start. Edit: Here is a great talk demonstrating that by following a simple functional approach, your code can naturally fall into a \u201cpit of success\u201d: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27881398,"author":"Xunjin","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Habits of Expert Software Designers (2019)","text":"His videos about functional programming are amazing (Mark Seemann). \"Pit of success\" is one of the best. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18043510,"author":"pwm","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Functional core, imperative shell (2012)","text":"The goal is that everything in the core is pure data types and functions. Now, depending on your problem domain, your core can be small or huge compared to the shell. Your question was all about IO/effects. They are impure and belong to the shell. If what you work on does mostly IO then you will have a lot of impure code lying around by definition. Still, the idea is that you should keep the amount of time spent in impure land minimal, ie. drop into pure structures/computation as soon as possible during program execution and only dip out of on occasions when you have to do IO. Here is a good talk about these ideas: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25888734,"author":"adamkl","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Software engineering topics I changed my mind on","text":"> So while FP is just another tool, it's also a framework for thinking that helps people make better choices I\u2019ve been getting more into functional programming this past year (via Clojure, though my day-job is mostly JavaScript/TypeScript) and this is the big takeaway for me. Type theory and monads may have their place, but thinking about separating logic from side-effects is, I think, the most valuable aspect of functional programming. That is a thought process that you can apply in pretty much any language that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. Edit: Here\u2019s some great examples of the benefits of functional thinking without going off the deep end. 1. Boundaries by Gary Bernhardt - [LINK] 2. Pits of Success by Mark Seemann - [VIDEO] 3. Grokking Simplicity by Eric Normand - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29575105,"author":"kirse","month":"2021-12","story_title":"F# Good and Bad","text":"Mark Seemann has a good talk on this called the \"functional pits of success\" -> [VIDEO] Of all the languages I've used nothing is quite as fun as refactoring an F# app down to nothing. Expressive power is king in F# with the whole .NET ecosystem behind it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43583546,"author":"tubthumper8","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Why F#?","text":"\"pit of success\" from the previous comment might refer to this video, which is long but good especially to adjust to a different mindset [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UV1V9-nnaAs":[{"hn_comment_id":45156278,"author":"matheusmoreira","month":"2025-09","story_title":"The World War Two bomber that cost more than the atomic bomb","text":"I love these military training movies, they're so good at teaching complex concepts. This one about celestial navigation is really good as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26025043,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2021-02","story_title":"GNSS Jamming and Spoofing \u2013 Galileo's Authentication Algorithm Part 3 (2020)","text":"> Military solutions will fall back to inertial, celestial or optical guidance, and people using GPS for navigation will at worst show up where they need to be somewhat later than planned. The US Navy re-started celestial navigation a few years ago: * [LINK] This (1960s?) US government produced (45m) video video gives a pretty good overview: * [VIDEO] For those wanting to invest (substantially) more time, the two videos by \"Tippecanoe Boats\" are slightly rambling at times, but he does lay things out pretty well by the end of it (second is largely examples): * [LINK] * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30711914,"author":"matheusmoreira","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Technical Time Travel: On Vintage Programming Books","text":"Yeah, what is it about these old military materials that makes them so great? They're easy to follow and understand. Here's an old video about celestial navigation: [VIDEO] It feels like we've forgotten how to make videos like these.","stance":"rec"}],"UWEjxkkB8Xs":[{"hn_comment_id":19564093,"author":"scott_s","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Buster Keaton: Anarchitect","text":"The Every Frame a Painting channel on YouTube has an excellent short piece on Buster Keaton covering some similar themes, but with more of a focus on camera frames than architecture: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32135933,"author":"mimimi31","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Rowan Atkinson: Visual Comedy (1992) [video]","text":"Reminds me of some of the videos from Every Frame a Painting about visual comedy in film. Specifically \"Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy\" [1] and \"Buster Keaton - The Art of the Gag\" [2]. They give and explain some great examples from different movies. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42681210,"author":"keiferski","month":"2025-01","story_title":"How did they make cars fall apart in old movies (2017)","text":"Video of some of his better stunts: [LINK] And a great Every Frame a Painting film essay on his work: [VIDEO] He was truly an innovator that makes today\u2019s \u201cfilms of people talking to each other\u201d look amateurish. A few months ago the local theatre was playing Sherlock Jr. with a live band, and it was awesome. Try to see it in similar circumstances if possible.","stance":"rec"}],"UWvRorX0KhQ":[{"hn_comment_id":18557876,"author":"duxup","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Ricky Jay\u2019s Magical Secrets (1993)","text":"I didn't know who Ricky Jay was but ages ago i ran across this youtube video and was just floored, the whole thing just builds and builds and builds. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36945710,"author":"onychomys","month":"2023-07","story_title":"\u201cCards as Weapons\u201d by Ricky Jay (1977)","text":"I am not 100% convinced that this isn't just actual magic. The manipulations are pretty amazing and then at the end it's mindblowing. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"UX4KklvCDmg":[{"hn_comment_id":32813589,"author":"sidpatil","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Can the American mall survive?","text":"> Increasingly though, so much of the U.S. looks so much like the rest in terms of retail/food that I begin to feel the entire country is in fact a mall of sorts. Here's a good video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40729738,"author":"maronato","month":"2024-06","story_title":"In Praise of 5-Over-1 Buildings (2019)","text":"There\u2019s a great video by Wendover about how 5 over 1s are a way for corporate landlords to spend less to build worse apartments that they use to corner and consolidate the market. Then, once they stiffen competition, they skyrocket the rent prices. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"U_X5uR7VC4M":[{"hn_comment_id":3949648,"author":"michaelbuckbee","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Two Universes","text":"Something not really mentioned in the article is that Portal is very funny. The voice of Glados is constantly messing with you: asking you to bring your daughter to work with you for testing over the acid pits, lying to you about obvious things, etc. This personality and sense of humor helps drive things forward and keeps you entertained while you're fiddling with what are essentially logic puzzles. I've never really seen a website or app pull off humor to the level that Portal achieves. The closest thing I can think of would be something like the \"You Suck at Photoshop\" tutorials on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12449064,"author":"circa","month":"2016-09","story_title":"You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky (2015) [video]","text":"You instantly brought me back to the \"You suck at photoshop\" series. Enjoy and you're welcome! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41247052,"author":"VikingCoder","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Captain Disillusion debunks David Beckham beach kicks [video]","text":"If you want to learn how to make better fake videos, you might want to start with \"You Suck at Photoshop\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UawS3_iuHoA":[{"hn_comment_id":16799061,"author":"mashedvikings","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Mythology About Security","text":"\"Often hear that the reason today\u2019s Internet is not more secure is that the early designers failed to imagine that security could ever matter.\" Related to this, you should definitely watch Moxie Marlinspike's (lead dev of Signal) talk where he tells about his discussion with Kipp Hickman, a developer of SSL: [VIDEO] (until 16:33)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34675741,"author":"8organicbits","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Weakening TLS protection, South Korean style","text":"I've found Moxie Marlinspike's talk [1] to be a great overview of these sorts of issues. IIRC, he built an alternate system discussed in the talk. But I believe that's defunct. (Tangent, anyone know the postmortem on that?) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21426088,"author":"maqp","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Encrypted web traffic now exceeds 90%","text":"Moxie has good points about the problems TLS has. And they are not about breaking TLS via cryptanalysis: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25491919,"author":"mbakke","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Security expert warned SolarWinds in 2019 that anyone could access server","text":"Whenever I hear statements like \"incredibly complex and sophisticated attack\" I'm reminded of the 2011 Comodo (now Sectigo) hack where the company said it had \"clinical accuracy\" and \"likely to be a [Iranian] state-driven attack\". Days later, the perpetrator released a \"manifesto\" (and several other documents) all but confirming that it was the work of a lucky amateur. Moxie (of Signal fame) has a hilarious account of the story in his 2011 Blackhat talk \"SSL and the future of authenticity\" (starts at around 5:00): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UcN7SGGoCNI":[{"hn_comment_id":35724923,"author":"artogahr","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Aubrey Plaza Is the Unfortunate New Face of the Milk Wars \u2013 Bon App\u00e9tit","text":"Here's a 5 minute video that would explain why the newer generations are so mad about the unethical practices of Dairy industry. I know it opened my eyes: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32738522,"author":"Elinvynia","month":"2022-09","story_title":"How sustainable are fake meats?","text":"Cows only make milk after pregnancy. That has to happen somehow. Guess what is done with her baby. Guess where the literal pus from the overworked udders ends up. Yum! All those vegetarians sure are enjoying that. If you want to know more fun facts, check out Dairy is scary on YouTube - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33690522,"author":"myshpa","month":"2022-11","story_title":"\u201cJudas goats\u201d were once key players in meatpacking plants","text":"Understand your points of view. I too ate meat for a long time. I too defended that position with same ferocity you do. But I was wrong to do it. And you're wrong on too many points to discuss it at full - sorry, no space here, also have family to feed and work to do. My bookmarks folder about dangers of animal products/agriculture has hundreds of items. I'll cherrypick just few of them to get you started. You'll find several of your viewpoints discussed here: [LINK] Want to learn more? (pun intended) Movies: - I'd recommend Dominion movie again, but you won't probably see it, and even if you do, i don't think the suffering of animals/horrors of the meat production will be enough to change your opinions, so I'll talk about it from different angle. - Cowspiracy - Seaspiracy [LINK] - This man makes you think [VIDEO] - Dairy is scary Health: [LINK] - Dr. Michael Greger | How Not To Die [LINK] - Foods for Protecting the Body & Mind: Dr. Neal Barnard [LINK] - What the Health! (2017) Impacts on biodiversity / climate change: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] OK, I'll react to few of your points. > \"never personally eat meat strikes me as a bit of a neurotic, narcissistic response\" So avoiding killing is a neurotic, narcissistic response? Like, really? > \"to avoid ice cream to spare dairy cows who are clearly, if you meet them, quite happy with their jobs\" Are you sure? I've met a lot of them, when i was a child. You know that cows giving milk are mothers, forcefully impregnated/raped eve","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37007844,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Vegan Food Revolution \u2013 Why Food System Transformation Is Closer Than You Think","text":"> India ... has one of the lowest consumptions of animal protein and yet low life expectancy False cause fallacy. > You don't have to eat a lot, but you have to eat some Because you say so? Or do you have a source for your claims? > Breast milk is animal protein, or you'd have to include dairy too Vegans have a saying: \"not your mother, not your milk\". It's one fallacy after another. You really should read the article I've linked, it's all there. Read it. At least skim it. It's not that hard. > You can justify it for animal cruelty reasons, but not for health reasons You think that adult humans have to drink cow milk to be healthy, do I understand you correctly? Not dog milk, not lion, giraffe, rat, pig milk, but cow milk specifically? You don't read, so let's try youtube. [VIDEO] Dairy is scary [LINK] Milk: The White Lie We've All Been Sold [LINK] How big government helps big dairy sell milk","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37194667,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-08","story_title":"New plant-based pork ribs to feature edible vegan bones","text":"> I was actually raised vegetarian and generally prefer vegetarian dishes. If you've been raised vegetarian, it's possible you have some blind spots. A lot of people have an idealized picture of how the industry works. Have you seen \"dairy is scary\" ? [VIDEO] Or dominion? [LINK] > know that many things that are sold to us as greener, arent Certainly, that's why I would recommend focusing on science rather than mass or social media.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37636942,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Labelling soya foods as ultra-processed is unhelpful","text":"> and is unhealthy and worse than full cream milk Dairy is scary: [VIDEO] Derived from a bovine's udder, cow milk is essentially a white, viscous secretion containing fats, hormones, bioaccumulated pesticides and herbicides, and sometimes pus and blood from infected teats, all filtered through a mammary gland that often comes into contact with dirt and feces during the extraction process. Cow milk, routinely touted as a wholesome beverage, can legally contain up to 400 million somatic cells (often referred to as pus) per milliliter in the U.S., and traces of blood, all originating from inflamed and possibly infected bovine udders, making one wonder about the purity of the seemingly innocent white liquid. Cow's milk also naturally contains hormones, including Insulin-like Growth Factor-1, estrogens, progesterone, prolactin, and oxytocin; also some cows receive artificial hormones like rBST to enhance production; when consumed regularly, those hormones may impact the growth and reproductive functions of consumers. In the relentless cycle of dairy production, cows endure forced impregnation and a shortened lifespan \u2014 typically 5 years instead of the potential 25+. The record lifespan for a cow is 48 years. Newborn males are typically culled immediately, while females are separated from their mothers shortly after birth, crying for each other usually for weeks. And we haven't addressed the land needs and environmental impact of dairy production. This includes deforestation for pa","stance":"rec"}],"Ucp0TTmvqOE":[{"hn_comment_id":19894514,"author":"furriephillips","month":"2019-05","story_title":"The investor who turned down Uber at a $5m valuation","text":"After the recent \"Tesla Autonomy Day\" video [VIDEO] (almost 4h long, but worth a watch), I do rather feel like the incumbent services are about to be in a spot of bother. I think there's a bubble in this sector, and it's going to pop.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21497376,"author":"antpls","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Andrej Karpathy talks about how Tesla's NNs are structured and trained [video]","text":"Watch the presentation from 6 months ago, where they explain the decision to build their own hardware for inferring : [VIDEO] It's not surprising that they also build the hardware for training. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Google use the same TPUs for training and inference, because the underlying operations are the same : multiply then add numbers. Once Tesla built the hardware for inferring, the design of the hardware for training is probably similar. Unlike Google's TPUs, Tesla have a specific use case for the hardware (computer vision for automotive), and maybe than means they can further optimize the computation pipeline with their own specialized hardware.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24026590,"author":"fossuser","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Electric car startup Lucid is challenging Tesla\u2019s anti-Lidar stance","text":"I heard from a tesla engineer that they do use lidar to train their models, but that they don\u2019t see the value in deploying it to the fleet. It\u2019s worth watching the tesla event from about a year ago if you haven\u2019t seen it for their full position: [VIDEO] The quick notes are that our roads are set up for human vision and a truly capable level 5 system will require human level interpretation of visual data (at which point lidar becomes redundant). He thinks lidar with non human level visual interpretation won\u2019t get us to full autonomy. They see lidar as a short term half measure, a local maximum that\u2019s a distraction from what has to get done anyway.","stance":"rec"}],"Ufmu1WD2TSk":[{"hn_comment_id":43676461,"author":"virtualritz","month":"2025-04","story_title":"South Korea's 'heartbreaking' wildfires expose superaged society","text":"Relevant video from Kurzgesagt about South Korean birth rate and the repercussions, 3\u20134 generations down the line: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43983487,"author":"Etheryte","month":"2025-05","story_title":"The Future Is Too Expensive \u2013 A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates","text":"This is not what has happened in South Korea though. They've hit the top of the curve and pretty much every projection agrees that it's drastically downhill from here, the main disagreement is over how quickly. Kurzgesagt has a good video on this [0], they estimate that by 2060 the population of South Korea will have shrunk by 30% and will be heavily skewed towards the elderly. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44090062,"author":"gambiting","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Denmark to raise retirement age to 70","text":"This is a nice explanation from Kurzgesagt showing precisely why South Korea is completely screwed long term, and why it's impossible to course correct through birth rate alone: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Uhx-26GfCBU":[{"hn_comment_id":26068077,"author":"ZeroGravitas","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Don\u2019t Underestimate the Power of a Walk","text":"Weather isn't the biggest determinant of cycling usage (and that probably applies to walking too): \"Why Canadians can't bike in the winter but Finnish people can\" [VIDEO] The scene with the line of tiny bikes parked outside the school in the middle of winter is particularly striking. I've biked through all weathers but even for me that seems like something that wouldn't be possible, but apparently is with a bit of organisation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26927167,"author":"ryukafalz","month":"2021-04","story_title":"E-Scooters roll into New York","text":"Can't speak to e-scooters in particular, but cold weather gets cited as a problem for bikes as well, so thought I'd bring this up: for bikes at least it's as much of a question of infrastructure priorities as it is the weather itself. Plenty of people bike in places with much colder weather than New York all the time: [VIDEO] ...they just have safe paths to ride on, and those paths get maintained. (So: not a painted bike lane that all the snow gets shoveled into.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27674209,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Cities Are Not Loud: Cars Are Loud, and Places Without Cars Are Quiet [video]","text":"> I\u2019m an avid cyclist, but here in Ottawa for half the year it\u2019s -20C and the roads are treacherous. The Not Just Bikes channel, produced by an ex-pat Canadian, has a video asking why can't people in Canada cycle in the winter if the folks in Finland can? > When talking about bicycle infrastructure in Canada, the number one excuse I hear is \"winter.\" Many Canadians see the cold and snow as a fundamental barrier to year round cycling. But one city, Oulu in Finland, with winter weather worse than most Canadian cities, shows that winter cycling has nothing to do with the weather, and everything to do with safe cycling infrastructure. [\u2026] * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28985862,"author":"noahtallen","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Barcelona\u2019s Bicib\u00fas: hundreds of families biking to school together","text":"Here\u2019s a video with more about why biking in the cold and snow isn\u2019t as bad as we make it out to be: [VIDEO] The gist is, like usual, biking in the snow is fine when the infrastructure is equipped to make it an effective mode of transportation. It would suck most places in North America because there is next to no dedicated bike infrastructure besides painted gutters. Those obviously don\u2019t get plowed correctly, so it\u2019s terrible. When the major problems like that are handled, it\u2019s fine.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29097352,"author":"danny_codes","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Waymo will start testing self-driving cars in New York City","text":"This NotJustBikes video covers this subject nicely. [VIDEO] Watching his channel has reinforced the dramatically negative impact American transportation policy has had on urban life.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29506392,"author":"Rendello","month":"2021-12","story_title":"How do you fix a stroad?","text":"For anyone interested in what _winter_ biking infrastructure could look like, some places in Finland have done a great job. Not for everyone, but popular nonetheless: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32233413,"author":"sunflowerfly","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The 15-minute city (2020)","text":"The Not Just Bikes Youtube channel did a great episode on why some places have winter cycling and others do not: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32538770,"author":"eesmith","month":"2022-08","story_title":"If everyone bicycled like the Danes, we\u2019d avoid a UK\u2019s worth of emissions","text":"\"Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)\" - [VIDEO] > When talking about bicycle infrastructure in Canada, the number one excuse I hear is \"winter.\" Many Canadians see the cold and snow as a fundamental barrier to year round cycling. But one city, Oulu in Finland, with winter weather worse than most Canadian cities, shows that winter cycling has nothing to do with the weather, and everything to do with safe cycling infrastructure.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32813284,"author":"hddherman","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Bikes, not self driving cars, are the technological gateway to urban progress","text":"Not Just Bikes made a great overview of what makes driving a bicycle in the winter possible: [VIDEO] tl;dw: properly designed infrastructure and first-class maintenance results in people actually choosing to opt for the bicycle, even during winter.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38893055,"author":"kiba","month":"2024-01","story_title":"The Dubious Economics of Deep-Sea Mining","text":"Not Just Bike has a good video on it.[1] Of course, if you don't think youtube videos can't ever be credible sources, then I am not going to be able to convince you of anything. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UiS27feX8o0":[{"hn_comment_id":25094285,"author":"TonyTrapp","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Pimp My Microwave","text":"Tangentially related, Technology Connections published an interesting video just a few days ago, \"The Antique Microwave Oven that's Better than Yours\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25095903,"author":"gibolt","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Pimp My Microwave","text":"Great 'Review' of an old Microwave loaded with features. [VIDEO] Why can't we have nice things by default, especially with appliances like microwaves, toasters, printers...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25096324,"author":"guerby","month":"2020-11","story_title":"The future of microwave cooking is solid-state (2016)","text":"Fun video about microwave oven now vs thirty years ago: [VIDEO] \"The Antique Microwave Oven that's Better than Yours\" by Technology Connections","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25097636,"author":"andrewxdiamond","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Pimp My Microwave","text":"Coincidentally, technology connections just did a recent YouTube video on microwaves that might be of interest to you. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25097873,"author":"tux1968","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Pimp My Microwave","text":"Technology Connections just put out a video about an old microwave that he contends has better features that most you can buy today. Also it explains how microwaves use a humidity probe to sense steam escaping from say a microwave-popcorn bag to determine when its done. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29344400,"author":"cuddlybacon","month":"2021-11","story_title":"A toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today","text":"Since everyone is mentioning Technology Connections (he deserves it, great channel), I want to bring up this video: [VIDEO] To me, this really shows the sad direction smart appliances have gone in. I would love to see that smart appliances would have continued to evolve in this direction. I don't like the current state of smart appliances, but going back to the absolute basic seems like an over-reaction to me.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41514023,"author":"TimeBearingDown","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Microwave spontaneously turned on by its LED display","text":"Don\u2019t forget a physical handle to pull open the door. I\u2019d take a steam sensor as well. Thanks to Technology Connections, great channel. Convinced me to read all the fine print until I found a Breville that had it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Uj-rK8V-rik":[{"hn_comment_id":12091679,"author":"Animats","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Tesla Model S Autopilot Reliability \u2013 Why Americans Should Love Tesla","text":"On a related note, here's Chris Urmson's long talk at SXSW on how Google does automatic driving.[1] This is worth watching. He shows what Google cars sense and gives an overview of how they analyze the data. This is the first time Google has released this level of detail. If you're going to comment on automatic driving, you need to see this. Urmson goes into great detail on Google's 2mph collision with a bus. The sensor data from the Google car is shown. The video from the bus (it had cameras, too) is shown. Exactly what the software was trying to do is discussed. The assumptions the software made about what the bus driver would do are discussed. What they did to prevent this from happening again is mentioned. Most of the talk is about the hard cases. In the beginning, Google developed a highway driving system, but that was years ago. Now they're working hard on dealing with everything that can happen on a road, including someone in an electric wheelchair chasing ducks with a broom. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17508616,"author":"Animats","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Former Apple Employee Charged with Theft of Autonomous Car Project Trade Secrets","text":"That's Chris Urmson's talk at SXSW in 2016 [1], which has been widely viewed. It's one of the best talks on the subject. He said \"How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both.\" Then he showed video of Google cars dealing with various challenging conditions. This included the famous scene where a Google self driving car encountered a woman in a powered wheelchair using a broom to chase a turkey. The software recognized this as something to avoid, even though it didn't classify it further. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11773722,"author":"kyrra","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Four hundred miles with Tesla\u2019s autopilot forced me to trust the machine","text":"This was a good presentation by the Google team: [VIDEO] I believe they say in there that they got highway driving down really early on. They have been focusing on urban driving for the last few years.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13259274,"author":"Animats","month":"2016-12","story_title":"How Self-Driving Cars Work","text":"This article seems to be a summary of Chris Urmson's talk at SXSW.[1] That's worth a watch. It gives a good overview of how Google does it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13370530,"author":"Animats","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Let\u2019s Talk About Self-Driving Cars","text":"Except that Google was able to handle construction sites, traffic cones, and people directing traffic last year. Watch Urmson's video from SXSW.[1] Google has put a lot of effort into handling unusual situations. Those cars driving on residential streets in Mountain View and Austin have accumulated data on the hard cases. The California DMV continues to publish autonomous vehicle crash reports. The last one was in October.[2] A Google vehicle was rear-ended at 3mph when it was entering an intersection with poor visibility, detected cross-traffic, and stopped. I'm looking forward to the 2016 self-driving disengagement reports appearing on on the California DMV site.[3] Those were due January 1, covering the year ending 1 December 2016. Then we'll have comparative info on how all the players are doing. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14574745,"author":"Animats","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Tesla Autopilot","text":"Compare Chris Urmson's SXSW talk from 2016 about Google's system.[1] Look carefully at the graphics which show what the sensors are detecting, and compare with Tesla's. Watch Urmson discuss hard cases, problems, and failures. Not seeing that with Tesla. Or Uber. Or Cruise. Or Otto. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14726813,"author":"Animats","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Comma.ai launches an $88 universal car interface called Panda","text":"Watch Chris Urmson's self-driving car talk at SXSW 2016.[1] Especially the part where the Google car encounters someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom. Google can handle that. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Uj6skZIxPuI":[{"hn_comment_id":45031011,"author":"abc_lisper","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Deeper Than Deep: David Reich's genetics lab unveils our prehistoric past (2017)","text":"Highly recommend watching Dwarakesh interviewing Reich: [VIDEO] You will learn more about human prehistory in that 2 hours than anything else.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41620944,"author":"ldjkfkdsjnv","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Long genetic and social isolation in Neanderthals before their extinction","text":"dont have time to find it. he basically says the 2% thing is an antiquated understanding that conflicts with recent ancient dna studies. Go watch the podcast [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42449852,"author":"themgt","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Oldest human genomes reveal how a small group burst out of Africa","text":"The current \"Out of Africa\" is really not the same as what you might have learned 2-3 decades ago, despite the branding. David Reich is probably the leading researcher in this field and his description of our best guesses is highly nuanced and open to new data. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45031035,"author":"loudmax","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Deeper Than Deep: David Reich's genetics lab unveils our prehistoric past (2017)","text":"David Reich was on the Dwarkesh podcast about a year ago: [VIDEO] It's a really good interview. Recommended if you're an amateur wanting to understand more about human prehistory.","stance":"rec"}],"UjZYMI1zB9s":[{"hn_comment_id":32827311,"author":"przefur","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"Free to Play (2014) [1] I've enjoyed this documentary a lot. It follow three DOTA players and theirs life prior to 'The International', a first million dollar e-sport tournament. What caught my attention the most, is that, despite the three main characters (Dendi - Ukraine, Fear - USA, hyhy - Singapore) come from very different backgrounds and cultures, they treat the game almost the same - as a way of living. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7606825,"author":"xfalcox","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Steam Gauge: Steam\u2019s most popular games","text":"It runs natively on linux, it's free and bugs, but not source code, are hosted on github. I really recommend watching this [VIDEO] just make some popcorn before.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7729547,"author":"sillysaurus3","month":"2014-05","story_title":"The International \u2013 Dota 2 Championships","text":"The prize pool for the upcoming Dota 2 tournament is now the largest prize pool ever in esports history, which is why I'm submitting it to HN. It's an interesting new phenomenon, because it seems to indicate that esports may finally be taking off. Valve basically crowdfunded their tournament prize pool. They started out by offering an initial $1.6M prize pool, but gave every dota 2 player the option of buying a \"compendium\" for $10, and each compendium increases the prize pool by $2.50. That means Valve makes $7.50 per compendium sold. I just ran the math, and as of right now there have been ($3,365,563 - $1,600,000)/$2.50 = 706,255 compendiums purchased. Since Valve earns $7.50 per compendium, that means they just made $5.3M in a couple days. And they're set to make even more next year, since the Dota 2 playerbase has some nice exponential growth: [LINK] I'm not sure there are any articles about this yet, because this news is so new. I wish I had a decent article to submit to HN instead of this link. But this is certainly newsworthy, so it's a matter of time before you start hearing other news sources talking about it. EDIT: If you're looking to see what a Dota tournament is like, here are two great matches from last year: Game 1 [LINK] Game 3 [LINK] The production quality is so good! EDIT2: Also, Valve made a movie called \"Free to Play\" which documents what life is like for top-tier Dota players: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9986830,"author":"nindalf","month":"2015-08","story_title":"A Pakistani Teen Gets Rich in E-Sports","text":"I've been watching this game for years, and I can say with confidence that Sumail is the real deal. He has skills that few can match. Right now he's playing the middle of the biggest tournament in e-sports history and he's about 10 games away from winning $6 mil (of which he'll keep $1m). The tournament, organised by Valve has a prize pool that's mostly crowd funded, so its likely to be a steady source of income for the top players of Dota 2 for a few years at least. I guess we'll know by next Saturday what Sumail's fate is. For more info * Free to Play, a documentary about 3 Dota players - [VIDEO] [75 mins] * Dota 2, a game that's free to play - [LINK] * The International tournament - [LINK] If anyone has any questions about this I'll be happy to answer :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31175980,"author":"CollinEMac","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Esports stars have shorter careers than NFL players","text":"Valve made a documentary about pro DOTA 2 players a whopping 8 years ago (it doesn't seem that long ago at all). I bring it up because I remember at some point they mention that your reaction time drastically starts to decrease around the late 20's or so. I'd imagine that may also have something to do with it for fast-paced games at least. Here's the documentary (it's kind of more of a commercial but it's still pretty good if you're interested in esports) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UjtOGPJ0URM":[{"hn_comment_id":16472734,"author":"joshbaptiste","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Life Exists in the Driest Desert on Earth. It Could Exist on Mars, Too","text":"\"Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter\" Great short video from Kurzgesagt \u2013 In a Nutshell [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37892050,"author":"systemEarth","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Together We Can Avoid the 'Great Filter' That Ends Advanced Civilizations (2022)","text":"There is also a good video from Kurzgesagt explaining the great filter; for if video is more your thing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41912647,"author":"gwd","month":"2024-10","story_title":"First images from Euclid are in","text":"How long did it take modern humans to completely colonize Earth, such that there are few places you can go on Earth and not meet any humans? Less than 10k years for sure. If we become a space-faring civilization, how long will it take us to colonize the galaxy, such that there are few places you can go and not find evidence of humans around? Not more than a million years or so. So if intelligent life -- capable of becoming a space-faring civilization -- is common, why is the galaxy not colonized already? Kursgesagt has a good video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Um63OQz3bjo":[{"hn_comment_id":2358210,"author":"sgornick","month":"2011-03","story_title":"What is Bitcoin? (Video)","text":"For those who are new to Bitcoin and would like to learn more: The new What Is Bitcoin? video - [VIDEO] Bitcoin FAQ - [LINK] Bitcoin Wiki - [LINK] How Bitcoin Works - [LINK] Installing Bitcoin - [LINK] HowTo Mining Bitcoin: Fedora 14: [LINK] and Ubuntu: [LINK] The Bitcoin Faucet (free bitcoins) - [LINK] Buying bitcoins - [LINK] Bitcoin 6-Month Price Chart - [LINK] Bitcoin Community Portal - [LINK] Recent Posts here on the forum - [LINK] ------------- Comments from February when BTC/USD first hit $1: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5656618,"author":"munchor","month":"2013-05","story_title":"How to Explain Bitcoin to a 7-Year-Old","text":"[VIDEO] I agree that explaining people (be them 7 or 20 years old) what bitcoins are and what the fuss is all about is quite complicated. Usually I just send people that video, but this explanation is pretty interesting (maybe not as effective as the video, though).","stance":"rec"}],"UmIgNfp-MdI":[{"hn_comment_id":2200253,"author":"widgetycrank","month":"2011-02","story_title":"The Next Six Months","text":"I'm not sure if anyone remembers the Microsoft Courier tablet demo, which came out before iPad's announcement: [VIDEO] This video left me with a strong impression of future general computing usage patterns. It has also been my personal gold standard of a superb video demo. Interestingly enough, they abandoned it right after iPad's release: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6266809,"author":"dhughes","month":"2013-08","story_title":"Ballmer forced out after $900M Surface RT debacle, analyst says","text":"I thought the Courier was a great idea not just for the dual screens but the software as well the scraps and notes seemed like a great idea. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UmKf8smvGsA":[{"hn_comment_id":44771040,"author":"masklinn","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Telo MT1","text":"It\u2019s pretty complicated. The issue with hauling is that it craters your aerodynamics and explodes your rolling resistance, so you need massive battery capacity. Or to slow down, but most people don\u2019t want to do that. Aging wheels has a recent video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44771195,"author":"Alive-in-2025","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Telo MT1","text":"The new huge GM EV & SUV trucks do have way more battery - and weight. The GM Silverado EV Work Truck is EPA 492 miles, tested at 530 by edmonds. So take the common rule of thumb, divide range by half or maybe a little more and you get about 250 miles of towing range. [LINK] . In a couple of recent youtube videos, \"Aging Wheels\" thoroughly tested a variety of trailers towed behind a variety of vehicles and then also added weight to the trailer to see the efficiency impact of towing a trailer with a lot more weight. They found a 4.3% efficiency drop by adding weight to max out the towing, compared to towing without the extra weight. Weight isn't what matters on towing impact, it's the wind resistance of the trailer that matters much more. They did a long series of comparison drives (in the about 30 mins video) with different trailers and then loaded them with extra weight to see the impact. It was smaller than you expect. The video with all the tests is [VIDEO] . I heard about this on the batteries included podcast where they interview the author of the video above, and kind of give high level summary with some details, [LINK] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46281800,"author":"01HNNWZ0MV43FF","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Ford kills the All-Electric F-150","text":"> single-charge range issues are pretty much non-existent (for non-towing applications). Readers might enjoy this, though I can't find the conclusions section at a glance: [VIDEO] \"The Truth about Electric Towing\" - The video author says that weight doesn't make much difference, but aerodynamics does. Towing a big flat piece of plywood that weighs 50 pounds but catches the wind is much worse for your range (or MPG) than towing an entire second truck, if the towed truck is aerodynamic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46977010,"author":"mortos","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Rivian R2: Electric Mid-Size SUV","text":"Weight has nearly no effect on range of an EV. The YouTube channel Aging Wheels has two good videos on this. Here he talks about towing, and he demonstrates loading the truck to max capacity makes nearly no difference: [VIDEO] He also covered an attempted Cannonball run where they stuffed two extra battery packs into a Rivian R1T: [LINK] Real differences makers are smaller wheels and aerodynamics","stance":"rec"}],"UnU7DJXiMAQ":[{"hn_comment_id":15487496,"author":"dEnigma","month":"2017-10","story_title":"A Comprehensive Super Mario Bros. Disassembly","text":"That's nothing! He has two videos on walls, floors and ceilings, each longer than half an hour (and both of them extremely interesting) Part 1: [VIDEO] Part 2: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18077317,"author":"tehz","month":"2018-09","story_title":"'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record","text":"See also his four part series (course, really) on wall, ceiling, and floor interactions: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] It's amazing how engrossing they are.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14440864,"author":"rjeli","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Jailbreaking Super Mario World to Install a Hex Editor and Mod Loader [video]","text":"Pannenkoek just released a glorious 37 minute video on sm64 mechanics: [VIDEO] And if you have never watched speed runs, Summoning Salt has a fascinating series on world record progressions in popular games: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"UnURElCzGc0":[{"hn_comment_id":26776843,"author":"lgl","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Does the Universe Have Higher Dimensions? Part 1","text":"Good answer, a 4th dimension and the shadow projection analogy is brilliantly exemplified by Carl Sagan in this popular video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7179447,"author":"CodeCube","month":"2014-02","story_title":"4D Tesseract: Fourth Dimension Game","text":"For those trying to wrap their heads around this ... I find this segment by Carl Sagan from the original Cosmos to be pretty well presented on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41850987,"author":"travisjungroth","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Counterintuitive Properties of High Dimensional Space (2018)","text":"In 3 dimensional space, you can\u2019t. Draw a square on paper. The lines will be orthogonal. Draw a cube. The third dimension won\u2019t be orthogonal. It can\u2019t be. But, that doesn\u2019t mean a third dimension doesn\u2019t exist or can\u2019t exist. The same thing happens with a hypercube. The fourth dimension won\u2019t be orthogonal on paper. It won\u2019t be orthogonal in three dimensions (you can build a 3D projection of a hypercube). This doesn\u2019t mean it isn\u2019t real or can\u2019t be real. Whether you think of 4D space as something real we don\u2019t have access to or something imaginary isn\u2019t really too important. It\u2019s just very helpful to realize it won\u2019t have the concreteness of 3D objects in 3D space for you because you don\u2019t have direct access to it. This video might help. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Unzc731iCUY":[{"hn_comment_id":22212416,"author":"BossingAround","month":"2020-02","story_title":"How to give a great presentation: advice from a legendary adman (2012)","text":"An interesting lecture on the topic is also How To Speak by late MIT professor Patrick Winston [1]. Very much recommended! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25137612,"author":"omginternets","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?","text":"I was lucky enough to get paid for this but I'll say it anyway: learning to speak is the only thing of lasting value I have gotten out of startup accelerators. I would have gladly drop a few grand to acquire that skill. In fact, I'm considering hiring a speaking coach to improve. I've historically been a strong written communicator, but it turns out that speaking is very different from writing. In fact, I had thought of myself as a pretty strong speaker due to my experience giving scholarly presentations ... how wrong I was. Academic talks are a different beast altogether. If you haven't seen Patrick Winston's How to Speak lecture [0], drop what you're doing and watch it now. I'll leave you with a (paraphrased) quote from his lecture: your ideas are like your children and you don't want to send them off into the world dressed in rags. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25537420,"author":"janvdberg","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"Not sure if this fits the bill, but: How To Speak by Patrick Winston [1] I watched this 'talk' on 'how to give talks' last week. It was uploaded at the end of 2019 and recorded 2018 (Patrick Winston passed away in 2019) and it is really good. Anyone who gives talks can learn a few things from this. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26025879,"author":"cmehdy","month":"2021-02","story_title":"A tool to create slides using Markdown easily for you","text":"I've got to reference Patrick Wilson's \"How To Speak\" course from MIT OpenCourseWare here[0]. An hour of life well spent! [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32184716,"author":"hazelnut-tree","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Any good resources you have used becoming a better confidence speaker?","text":"The following presentation called How to speak on YouTube is excellent and very popular. The talk is given by Patrick Winston (1943 \u2013 2019) who was a professor at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Description: \"The talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36703001,"author":"1970-01-01","month":"2023-07","story_title":"A gambler's guide to giving talks","text":">The most memorable talk I\u2019ve ever seen was a lunchtime keynote by Harry Kroto, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, at an undergraduate research conference in Tallahassee in 2004. I have no idea why I was there, what the conference was about, or what he said\u2014 OK, so if your goal is to not have a forgotten message, watch How to Speak by Patrick Winston and then read his book Make It Clear . The advice is as good as gold. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38741214,"author":"robviren","month":"2023-12","story_title":"","text":"Encourage anyone interested in communicating to watch this. [VIDEO] He has a pretty funny response to someone asking him to review slides. He immediately says there are too many words and too many slides without even looking. Which I have found to be true 90% of the time. Excellent presentation.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38831563,"author":"croo","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What talks do you consider real gems?","text":"MIT lecture by Patric Winston: How to speak is the lecture you need to watch about public speaking and presentation. The most awesome thing about the lecture that it is self describing it's tools and framework in an awesome way and built up exactly as it's content describe is should. It's on youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40681895,"author":"robomartin","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Start presentations on the second slide","text":"In my opinion, Professor Patrick Winston's lecture (MIT) is likely in the top-5 when it come to advice on how to give presentations. I have used his framework multiple times, for both technical and business presentations in groups of a few to hundreds of people and have always had good results. Well worth watching. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45117990,"author":"loughnane","month":"2025-09","story_title":"How to Give a Good Talk","text":"This title reminds me of Patrick Winston's \"How to Speak\" lecture at MIT. It's the best of its kind that I've seen. An hour long and I've watched it several times. Even my highschooler was impressed. [VIDEO] EDIT: no way, it was just posted yesterday. Glad it got the attention.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25228826,"author":"moocthrow","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Learn the Art of Storytelling?","text":"If your goal is to learn how to tell a story to a live audience see this: [VIDEO] Otherwise I'd suggest you read up a lot of literature, start with classic folk tales like those collected by the brothers Grimm. The more you read the easier it will become to write a proper story. Lastly as you're reading I'd suggest you start writing material yourself and maybe publishing it online on some web novel sites. At first people will be very critical of what you have written, but with time it should change for the better. Lastly, writing is a habit, just like coding. A habit should be repeated daily to become stronger. Read and write each day, unless you're feeling foggy or in need of rest. After a certain amount of time it should just click, but realize that that amount of time varies from person to person, some may never break that threshold, others are talented and are able to break through just like that. Best of luck!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25718651,"author":"dukeofdoom","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Powerful Life Skills for the New Decade","text":"This might be helpful. How to Trick Your Brain to Like Doing Hard Things \u2013 Atomic Habits by James Clear [LINK] How To Speak by Patrick Winston [VIDEO] Help with Writing: George Orwell -Politics and the English Language [LINK] Philosophy - A Guide to Happiness (7 parts) by Alain de Botton [LINK] Namaste Yoga (DVD set sold on Amazon) Best Yoga series I know. Combines synchronized breathing with movement/meditation. Especially nice to do after a hot bath, when muscles are warmed up. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27408762,"author":"open-source-ux","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Books for Effective Communication","text":"Patrick Winston (1943-2019) was a computer scientist at MIT. Every year he gave a popular talk titled How to Speak . Here is a recording of the talk from 2018: How To Speak by Patrick Winston : [VIDEO] A book of his insights was published in 2020: Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform . I'm half-way through the book and it is good so far. Although the book pitches itself as suitable for anyone who writes or speaks, many of the examples in the book have an emphasis on speaking in an academic or teaching setting. However, there are good insights that anyone can learn from. I recommend watching the talk above first to help you decide whether the book will appeal to you (the material in the lecture is in the book as are additional insights). There are lots of reviews of the book on the Amazon US site too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27750889,"author":"Rzor","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Best online speech / public speaking course?","text":"I don't know about the course itself, but you probably would like to watch this: [VIDEO] (How To Speak by Patrick Winston) Content: 00:16 - Introduction 03:11 - Rules of Engagement 04:15 - How to Start 05:38 - Four Sample Heuristics 10:17 - The Tools: Time and Place 13:24 - The Tools: Boards, Props, and Slides 36:30 - Informing: Promise, Inspiration, How To Think 41:30 - Persuading: Oral Exams, Job Talks, Getting Famous 53:06 - How to Stop: Final Slide, Final Words 56:35 - Final Words: Joke, Thank You, Examples","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30643588,"author":"thebeardisred","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Tech talks don\u2019t have to be boring","text":"Hear hear! I came to mention \"How to Speak\" ( [VIDEO] ) but it makes even more sense to amplify you thoughts.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31062539,"author":"rg111","month":"2022-04","story_title":"How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]","text":"Make it Clear by Patrick Henry Winston [0] is slightly related to this. I learned a lot of things from it. I first got to know about him through his now famous video- How to Speak [1]. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45555951,"author":"ninesnines","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Paper2video: Automatic video generation from scientific papers","text":"Ah I guess if you\u2019re very bad at presentations, then this could be beneficial. However, scientific presentations are meant to be communicating science and making things stick to your audience (no matter if it\u2019s scientists or children you\u2019re presenting to). This does not fix that problem at all. For anyone thinking of using this: please watch: [VIDEO] and maybe a talk from Jane Goodall on how to engagingly show your science. I would hate to see a lot of conference presentations be made with this generator. Another thing that improved my personal presentation skills was noting down why I liked a presentation or why I didn\u2019t - what specific things a person did to make it engaging. Just paying attention to that improved my presentation skills enormously","stance":"rec"}],"Uo08uS904Rg":[{"hn_comment_id":23539916,"author":"sosuke","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert","text":"Looks like I'm late the party but I submitted a YouTube video talking about this as \"The Wall of Awful\" emotions and experiences you need to get through in order to start a task that has negative emotions associated with it. It totally changed how I approached my procrastination by simply asking myself \"why\" I was avoiding a task. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23539952,"author":"sosuke","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert","text":"I haven't been able to find a \"final\" solution. Most recently I've been writing things down with pen and paper to keep me on task. To make the ethereal physical and break it down into steps and checklists. Again totally recommend this video on the wall of awful for ADHD procrastination [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25878443,"author":"nullsense","month":"2021-01","story_title":"How hard should I push myself?","text":"My 2 favorite videos on How To ADHD are: Wall of Awful [VIDEO] The ADHD Tax [LINK] Driven To Distraction is available on Audible and I think you get one free book if you create a new account. That's how I read it anyway. This video is hands down the best explainer video Ive found out of all that I have watched [LINK] Also this video highlights some really interesting research which shows why we get distracted. Basically the Default Mode Network and Task Positive Network are supposed to anti- correlate and in ADHD brains they don't perfectly do that. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25995045,"author":"hnick","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Me and ADHD","text":"Maybe the concept of the \"wall of awful\" will help you understand it more. I struggle with it too though. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26866163,"author":"alexanderjchun","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Tips for handling chronic stess?","text":"Totally. It's a negative feedback loop. I need an efficient circuit breaker and the only thing I can really think of is Nike's \"just do it.\" Why is it so hard? Feels like I'm hitting a wall. I've watched this video several times [VIDEO] and it helped me understand what part of the problem was, but it's still been hard getting things going. It might be an inspiration problem. I'm not proud of it, but during this lull I bought Animal Crossing on a whim and logged 200 hours in a month. I was able to wake up early, be super productive in that game with no caffeine and little food. I don't understand.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29299572,"author":"zubspace","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What mental models do you use everyday?","text":"Climb the wall. Written white on black on my desktop background. It's kind of funny, how sometimes random stuff you see on the web sticks to your head. I think it was one of those procrastination links on Hacker News which somehow brought me to this weird video [1] about how to \"Climb the wall of awful\". I was a hobby climber before and it somehow made sense to me at that time. Another thing I like to say to myself is \"Just do it\" at moments when I read Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter and come back to Hacker News for another round. [2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29837735,"author":"coldtea","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Procrastinatory Doom Loops","text":"Here's the same concept, refrased as \"Wall of Awful\", in a neat video for ADHD people: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Uooh0Y9fC_M":[{"hn_comment_id":8346439,"author":"ramidarigaz","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Keynote by John Carmack at Oculus Connect 2014 [video]","text":"If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8610494,"author":"Arjuna","month":"2014-11","story_title":"John Carmack: Functional programming in C++ (2012)","text":"In case you missed it, John discussed his functional programming adventures in Haskell at QuakeCon 2013... well worth a listen. \"So what I set out to do was take the original Wolfenstein 3D, and re-implement it in Haskell.\" [...] \"I've got a few conclusions coming from it. One of them is that, there's still the question about static vs dynamic. I know that there was a survey just coming out recently where the majority of programmers are still really not behind static typing. I know that there's the two orthogonal axes about whether types are strong or weak, and whether it's static or dynamic. I come down really pretty firmly, all my experience continues to push me towards this way, that strong, static typing has really significant benefits. Sometimes it's not comfortable, sometimes you have to build up a tight scaffolding to do something that should be really easy, but there are real, strong wins to it.\" [VIDEO] (Starts at approximately 1:21:16 in case the direct link doesn't work correctly.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11477633,"author":"qznc","month":"2016-04","story_title":"John Carmack's BAFTA Introduction, Speech and Interview [video]","text":"Watch one of his keynotes. He sits down with some bullet points on a tablet and then talks for three hours: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Up7LcbGZFuo":[{"hn_comment_id":17937099,"author":"markdoubleyou","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Try OCaml","text":"The \"F# for fun and profit\" site by Scott Wlaschin is a great jumping-off point: [LINK] I discovered it when I was reading a lot about domain driven design, and I stumbled upon a talk by the author that kind of blew my mind: \"Domain Modeling Made Functional\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21487547,"author":"BoiledCabbage","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Why functional programming matters (1990) [pdf]","text":"If anyone is looking for a really eye-opening video take a look at that this. \"Domain Modeling Made Functional\" It's applying Functional Programming to plain old Enterprise line of business apps in F#. The author argues why it's so much simpler, and simply walks through an example with cases. It's hard not to be persuaded. It leaves behind all of the lofty crazy maths you see in a lot of presentations of FP, and just shows how it's a simpler technique to solve real world problems. Domain Modeling Made Functional - [VIDEO] (Watch on 1.25x speed) It's really impressive, and also surprising why more people promoting FP don't show it's tangible benefits and simplicity vs. the theoretical/abstract way it's usually presented. It's also a great introduction to 'Domain Driven Design' and data modeling regardless of the language you use.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22408988,"author":"KurtMueller","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Math is an insurance policy","text":"Scott Wlaschin, author of F# for Fun and Profit, has an excellent talk on using F# (an ML language) for domain driven design and business development: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24126842,"author":"rashkov","month":"2020-08","story_title":"BuckleScript Is Rebranding","text":"Yep! This talk captures it pretty darn well: [VIDEO] Besides that, the compiler becomes a partner in coding. - Refactoring things is no longer something I avoid, because the compiler will point out any unexpected places that interact with a given piece of code. - I can code for an hour without loading the app, and be reasonably certain that the code I'm writing will be more or less be correct. Overall, I feel like the compiler does the double-checking and second-guessing that I was always doing in the back of my head, which gives some peace of mind and frees me up to focus on the actual task.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25502452,"author":"carapace","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Write code. Not too much. Mostly functions.","text":"I like this talk: \"Domain Modeling Made Functional\" by Scott Wlaschin [VIDEO] He's working in F# but the concepts map. There's a fascinating book \"Data Model Patterns: A Metadata Map\" by David C. Hay that's pretty much a Pattern Language or catalog for data models. You can just implement the subset of Hay's patterns that make sense for your application.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25701005,"author":"carapace","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Haskell is a Bad Programming Language (2020)","text":"In re: Haskell's goodness or badness, compare and contrast with, say, PHP (crap language with wild success.) Or Prolog (a stately Elven language with deep but obscure success.) Haskell is what it is. In re: types and data, FP is good for that. See e.g. \"Domain Modeling Made Functional\" by Scott Wlaschin ( [VIDEO] ) it's about F# but the concepts apply cross-language. In re: FP PLs \"done right\" I submit Elm lang. I've been using Elm recently and it gets the job done. It's weird though: on the one hand, as a experienced professional it feels like a toy. The error messages feel almost insulting, like I'm being patronized. On the other hand, once I got over that (silly) reaction, they're awesome. Changing code is a breeze, because Elm leverages the crap out of the type system, and the structure of the code and runtime prevent whole vast categories of errors. Combine that with the sort of Domain-Driven development that Wlaschin is talking about and \"baby, you got a stew going!\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41521465,"author":"agentultra","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Why Haskell?","text":"I adore Scott Wlaschin's work [0] -- that's where I picked up on the acronym, BLOBS! F# is super cool, I agree. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Uv1UfLPK7_Q":[{"hn_comment_id":22009102,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Managing my personal knowledge base","text":"Joe Armstrong of Erlang fame was a fan of Tiddly Wiki, and there's a video of the Tiddly Wiki creator and him enthusing about it here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24825096,"author":"vector_spaces","month":"2020-10","story_title":"This page is a truly naked, brutalist HTML quine","text":"If you're interested in quines, see also TiddlyWiki[0] (and specifically this[1] great talk by its creator Jeremy Ruston and the late creator of Erlang, Joe Armstrong) [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29182629,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Launch HN: Dendron (YC W21) \u2013 Structured note-taking for developers and teams","text":"Things which are deeply intertwingled. Joe Armstrong (Erlang) gave at least one talk about it, available on YouTube: [VIDEO] The key points were that Wikipedia style wikis force you into a page-at-a-time model. And TiddlyWiki uses more like a post-it-note sized amount of information. Wikipedia has a few links, TiddlyWiki items would have dense links to other notes. Then the experience of reading something would be like a 'choose your own adventure' book - click on a link and you don't get whisked away to a new page with all the context lost, you get the next note appearing below. It's building on the work of Ted Nelson and the early HyperText dreams from before the Web. As you click and explore, you build up a longer page of just the ideas and content you want, and don't have to write huge topic-wide essays and browse huge topic-wide pages all in one go. He called it \"the correct level of granularity, deeply intertwingled\". There were probably other important points I've forgotten. Relevantly for Dendron, the slide I've clicked onto in the YouTube has a quote: \" Hierarchical and sequential structures are usually forced and artificial. People keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't \" - Ted Nelson, 1974.","stance":"rec"}],"Uwl3-jBNEd4":[{"hn_comment_id":22134217,"author":"chii","month":"2020-01","story_title":"How housing became the world\u2019s biggest asset class","text":"This video explains the concept really well: [VIDEO] but TLDW; the unrecoverable cost of rent is just the rent money, and a lot of people compare it with a mortgage incorrectly. A mortgage is not 100% unrecoverable, but some portions of it is unrecoverable (the interest). The other unrecoverable cost of owning is the initial downpayment. The 3% capital cost is the combination of the above interest payment and the lost income opportunity from the downpayment. Whether you buy out right with cash, or get a mortgage, you still end up paying a price either way (via interest, or via lost opportunity to deploy the cash downpayment).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26432650,"author":"Cicero22","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Renting Is Terrible. Owning Is Worse","text":"I feel like this article could do a better job comparing renting and buying a home, so here's a video I think makes some good arguments about why it's not such a clear decision. [VIDEO] I'd be interested in seeing analysis of how this 3rd option would historically compare to renting and home ownership.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29534977,"author":"throwaway9139","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I create a social movement to change the world?","text":"Hi, Australian here living in Sydney. I'm a very happy renter. Renting in Sydney annually is way under 5% of the cost of owning a house. Even if I could afford to buy a house in Sydney, I wouldn't dream of it. It's much more economically sensible to rent. The money I save in opportunity costs from renting is huge. I can invest the difference between rent and mortgage repayments and don't need to be concerned with maintenance and other costs of owning. Check out [VIDEO] for more info.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31531692,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Why the government took home prices out of its main inflation index","text":"> You don't need to purchase a home - but historically - if you did - you've been much better off financially. [citation needed] Per the The Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2018 , the global return for real estate from 1900 to 2017 was 1.3%, while stocks returns 5.2%: * [LINK] Rent is often cheaper than mortgage payments, and is very more often cheaper than mortgage payments plus the cost of maintaining a home. If you take the difference and investment you can have just as must equity in a few decades. Preet Banerjee goes over the math in this ten minute video: * [LINK] He rents: * [LINK] If you want to know when it makes financial sense, the \"5% Rule\" by Ben Felix is a decent place to start: * [LINK] * [VIDEO] Until recently he was a renter, but purchased a house 1-2 years ago. Not exactly happy with the decision though: * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48283630,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The Cost of Owning a Home","text":"Ben Felix, a Canadian portfolio manager that does personal finance videos and podcast, has been arguing for years that rent versus buy is often a wash financially, and that you should make the decision for non-financial resasons. * recent 2026 video: [LINK] * 2025a: [LINK] * 2025b: [LINK] * 2021: [LINK] * 2019: [VIDEO] The 2019 video goes over a handy \"5% rule of thumb\": start with the purchase price of home, take 5% of that: if your rent is less than that, better numbers-wise to continue renting (and investing the difference); if your rent is more, probably better numbers-wise to buy/own. The company he works for created a tool to examine the numbers: * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48286730,"author":"Paracompact","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The Cost of Owning a Home","text":"The borrowed money isn't free from interest. There's no numerical sense in borrowing money at 5%+ interest to fund an investment appreciating at 3%. Some schemes might advantage it further (such as leveraging your mortgage with your retirement funds) but then we might as well also discuss further disadvantages compared to renting, such as upkeep and property taxes. Back around 2020 when mortgage rates very briefly dipped below 3%, there could have been an argument. But such is no longer the case and not likely to return soon. This guy breaks down the analysis very cleanly to a first-order approximation, using 2019 figures: [VIDEO] > It's a choice between $1m in housing appreciating at 3% or $100k in stocks appreciating at 9%. Just to drive the point home: It would be $100k in stocks appreciating at 9% and monthly rent subtracted, or $1m in housing appreciating at 3% and a $900k debt growing at 5%+ interest.","stance":"rec"}],"Uwuv05aZ6ug":[{"hn_comment_id":24382105,"author":"sireat","month":"2020-09","story_title":"List of YouTube channels for improving web development and programming skills","text":"Raymond Hettinger is such a treasure! He keeps things simple and in the process you actually learn. I tend to overload the registers when teaching and students do not learn as much. All teachers know the feeling when students eyes glaze over, something that is so much harder to detect in the age of Zoom and Teams. PS [VIDEO] there is a sync fixed version of the talk","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30482281,"author":"skimdesk","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Coding and Confusion","text":"Raymond Hettinger gave an entertaining talk [0] on a related topic. He taled about how the working memory limits are reflected in code, and how we can reduce the necessary cognitive load of understanding a piece of code. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UyyjU8fzEYU":[{"hn_comment_id":30536886,"author":"dorfsmay","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Not everyone should meditate","text":"Yes, some forms of meditation, in particular \"open awareness\" is said to give more space to the right hemisphere. I highly recommend this video if you want to hear about what life is when the right hemisphere is in control, especially for people who have been doing non-dual practices (lots of parallel experiences IMO): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1921661,"author":"bradley","month":"2010-11","story_title":"Human brain has more switches than all computers on Earth","text":"Thank you for mentioning Stephenson. I haven't read him other than Snow Crash, and I don't think I finished it. Googling Anathem brought me to this blog review of it: [LINK] which reminded me of this NIH neuro anatomist who studied her own stroke, including during her multi-year recovery. Her TED talk: [LINK] YouTube of same: [VIDEO] She sees the right brain hemisphere as being our \"consciousness\" wetware connecting us to others. Parts of the video are esoteric, but it's fascinating to hear this first-person account from a brain researcher, especially of the morning of her stroke when her left hemishphere was damaged by a spontaneous brain hemorrhage. Edit: couple of typos","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30089370,"author":"dorfsmay","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Meditation and the Unconscious","text":"This is like saying sleeping is a \"waste of time, how can I be more productive during my sleep?\". \"clearing the mind\", aka Shamatha without an object, has been compared to deep sleep but also a space where insights happen. You should give it a try, do it for 10 minutes a day for a month, just relax and don't hang onto anything (thought, feeling, noise, anything, just let them happen, relax some more). Some of the theories are that it lets our right brain take over, others that only by stopping trying to be in control can old memories and repressed emotion come up, and some others are about deeper of sleep/reparation. I'm as rational as the next guy, but this type of mediation has affected me more than other forms. Please check this video [2] of a brain researcher describing having a stroke in her left brain, and has a lot of parallel with some descriptions of deep meditative state. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"UziFw-jQSks":[{"hn_comment_id":29647047,"author":"bonnie76","month":"2021-12","story_title":"John C. Lilly \u2018modified human agents\u2019 human, dolphin neuropsychology experiments","text":"This video does a decent job of summarizing his life and work: [VIDEO] . It emphasizes his later decent into drug abuse and new age pedagogy. The man was clearly something of a monster. I have a macabre interest in the no holds barred era of 50\u2019s and 60\u2019s military and government research. I find it fascinating that such a lack of restraint resulted in both the horrors of ice pick lobotomies on traumatized veterans and the unmatched achievements of the moon landing. I also find contrast between a government that is happy to engage in LSD research in pursuit of brain washing) and one that routinely locks people in tiny cages for the use of the same substance highly revealing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29684865,"author":"bonnie76","month":"2021-12","story_title":"John C. Lilly \u2018modified human agents\u2019 human/dolphin neuropsychology experiment's","text":"This video does a decent job of summarizing his life and work: [VIDEO] . It emphasizes his later decent into drug abuse and new age pedagogy. The man was clearly something of a monster. I have a macabre interest in the no holds barred era of 50\u2019s and 60\u2019s military and government research. I find it fascinating that such a lack of restraint resulted in both the horrors of ice pick lobotomies on traumatized veterans and the unmatched achievements of the moon landing. I also find contrast between a government that is happy to engage in LSD research in pursuit of brain washing) and one that routinely locks people in tiny cages for the use of the same substance highly revealing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43690485,"author":"meindnoch","month":"2025-04","story_title":"DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication","text":">A woman named Margaret Howe Lovatt lived full-time with the Dolphins attempting to learn a shared language between them. She also had sex with a male dolphin called Peter. >He would take LSD and place himself in the tank and believed he was psychically communicating with the Dolphins. He eventually came to believe he was communicating with a cosmic entity called ECCO (Earth Coincidence Control Office). The story of the Sega game \"Ecco the Dolphin\" [1] is a tongue-in-cheek reference to this. I recommend watching the Atrocity Guide episode on John C. Lily and his dolphin \"science\" [2]. It's on par with The Men Who Stare at Goats (the non-fiction book [3], not the movie). He has a website that looks like it's been untouched since his death, 2001: [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"UzxYlbK2c7E":[{"hn_comment_id":7120893,"author":"11001","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Free eBooks On Machine Learning","text":"I'd suggest going back to the original youtube[1] and course materials[2]. Coursera version is nothing but a hand-wavy watered down \"feel good\" version of the original class. I also really like the Caltech's take \"Learning from data\"[3] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":291572,"author":"schtog","month":"2008-08","story_title":"Stanford's \"autonomous\" helicopters teach themselves to fly","text":"Start leaning from the guy right now: [VIDEO] Stanford class on machine learning by Andrew Ng, 20 lectures.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":478843,"author":"bravura","month":"2009-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Good books on machine learning?","text":"I second the nomination of Bishop. It is the standard text. It is only two years old, and Bishop will teach you machine learning the way that the field practices it nowadays. In my lab of fourteen people, we must have six or so copies of Bishop. I don't understand what is impractical about Bishop. If you are looking blindly to use an off-the-shelf machine learning implementation, that's one thing. Machine Learning has been described as the study of bias. If you want to understand when to pick certain techniques, and develop appropriate biases, then read Bishop. \"The Elements of Statistical Learning\" by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman gives more of a statistician's approach. The treatment is simply less broad, and also more dated. You can also look at Andrew Ng's video lectures: [VIDEO] He is very well-respected in the field. For certain students, watching a lecture may be preferable to reading a book.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1683543,"author":"datageek","month":"2010-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Ideas for weekend projects?","text":"Build a better chess rating system and enter your system into the following competition: [LINK] . You may want to use machine learning techniques, which you can learn using the Andrew Ng's Stanford lectures ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2824882,"author":"law","month":"2011-07","story_title":"Free online version of Stanford's Fall 2011 Intro to AI course","text":"This reminds me of CS229, of which there's an online version: [VIDEO] It's considerable more focused in scope, presenting the mathematics behind some of the more popular algorithms extensively used in machine learning, which is a subset of artificial intelligence. The course starts off pretty slow, but quickly gains speed and momentum. By the end, you should be fairly comfortable with clustering and classification/regression, among other topics. The lecture notes are also fantastic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2889894,"author":"chedigitz","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Stanford Fall 2011 - Introduction to Databases","text":"Thanks for posting the other two course. I can't wait till October. The Machine Learning course has a great a playlist on youtube as well. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5433407,"author":"dvdhsu","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Introduction to Machine Learning","text":"One caveat though: the Coursera ML course is CS229A(pplied), which focuses on applying machine learning, rather than the mathematics behind it. The \"real\" CS229 lectures are on YouTube [1], and go much more in depth. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6713165,"author":"bglazer","month":"2013-11","story_title":"CMU's Introduction to Machine Learning Course","text":"Nope, it's still around on youtube and on the Stanford Engineering Everywhere site. The coursera version of the class is much more introductory and skips significant parts of the full Stanford version. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8650085,"author":"valgaze","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Baidu\u2019s Andrew Ng on Deep Learning and Innovation in Silicon Valley","text":"Watch Ng at 57 minutes discuss the \"cocktail party\" problem and present an amazing solution: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12723543,"author":"weishigoname","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?","text":"there are some lectures about machine learning on youtube. I think they are good to watch: [LINK] and [VIDEO] and my favorite channels are Standford and MIT open courseware [LINK] and [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21927729,"author":"joaogui1","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Full-on machine learning for 2020, what are the best resources?","text":"Machine Learning: * [VIDEO] : Andrew Ng's machine Learning course, the recommended entry point by most people * [LINK] : More kaggle focused, but also more modern and has interesting projects Do both courses simultaneously, take good notes, write useful flashcards, and above all do all the exercises and projects Deep Learning * [LINK] - Very hands-on, begin with \" Practical Deep Learning for Coders\" and then \"Advanced Deep Learning for coders\" * [LINK] : More bottom-up approach, helps to understand the theory better Do those two courses in parallel (you can try 2 weeks of coursera followed by one of fastai in the beginning, and then just alternate between them), take notes, write good flashcards and above all do the exercises and projects. After that you will be done with the beginning, your next step will depend on what area interested you the most, and getting way too many resources right now can be extremely confusing, so I would recommend doing a follow-up post after you worked through the above resources. Also as non-ML stuff I recommend Scott Young's Ultralearning and Azeria's self improvement posts ( [LINK] )","stance":"rec"}],"V2YDApNRK3g":[{"hn_comment_id":34503617,"author":"Ftuuky","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the weirdest or most surreal (recent) technology you have seen?","text":"Seeing a dude grow human neurons directly connected to a computer chip to make a \"human AI\", all from his garage [0]. It showed me what is possible with science these days if you have enough dedication and know-how. Made me feel deeply excited and scared for the incoming future. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36172873,"author":"kevlened","month":"2023-06","story_title":"In Vitro Biological System of Cultured Brain Cells Has Learned To Play Pong","text":"If you're interested in exploring direct neuron + computer integration, Justin Atkin from The Thought Emporium is attempting to grow neurons on an electrode array. Here are two episodes that cover his work: Growing Human Neurons Connected to a Computer - [VIDEO] Connecting Neurons to a Computer: The New Plan - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36692936,"author":"mrtksn","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Growing Rat Neurons to Play Video Games [video]","text":"Interesting is understatement, it's a channel which is one of the closer ones to hard science on the hard science - pop science spectrum and still having more than a million subscribers. Some outstanding videos IMHO: The channel owner applies himself a gene therapy to fix his lactose intolerance. [LINK] How exactly the Covid Tests work: [LINK] Growing Human Neurons Connected to a Computer [VIDEO] Especially the Covid test video was eye opening against the conspiracy theorist propaganda during the pandemic because knowing how tests actually work on practical level makes you see through the claims effort free.","stance":"rec"}],"V2aq5M3Q76U":[{"hn_comment_id":4787968,"author":"pserwylo","month":"2012-11","story_title":"More in the series of bizarre UEFI bugs","text":"Matthew gave an awesome talk on UEFI at linux.conf.au 2012 [0]. A thoroughly entertaining and informative talk on issues including secure boot, but also other issues with UEFI. It even got voted one of the best four talks at the conference, so he did the talk again at the end of the conference. This was great because I missed it the first time. My favourite quote from the talk was: \"Files contain code, [and] code, as we all know, contains bugs. Always. So from this we can conclude that UEFI contains bugs. This shouldn\u2019t surprise anyone, other than the Linux kernel which obviously contains no bugs at all ever.\" [1]. [0] - [VIDEO] (Keep in mind this was in January, when there was still a lot of uncertainty about the UEFI Secure Boot/Linux situation). [1] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6763371,"author":"forgottenpass","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Booting to Rust","text":"EFI even talks FAT and there exists licensing such that you can use FAT for EFI reasons without any patent worries. I'm not saying that's a bad decision, just pointing out it is another thing that happened. I heard that fact in a linux.conf.au talk by the guy what did UEFI work for linux [0]. If you're sad to hear about the Microsoft influence, dude isn't too hot on the implementation of this new standard in general. Interesting talk though, digging up the link to post it here means I'm going to give it another watch. [0] EFI and Linux: the future is here, and it's awful - Matthew Garrett [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"V4V2bpZlqx8":[{"hn_comment_id":5078782,"author":"sproketboy","month":"2013-01","story_title":"The Enigma Machine: How Alan Turing Helped Break the Unbreakable Nazi Code","text":"Some people might like this from Numberphile which describes the flaw in the enigma machine that British code breakers used to eventually break the code. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15359599,"author":"iClaudiusX","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Forthcoming book seeks to visualise, locate and expose many numbers stations","text":"In this case, a more relevant example from World War II might be the exploitation of flaws in the Enigma machine, namely: 1) the re-use of common phrases in weather reports, and 2) the fact that a letter could not be encoded as itself in the ciphertext, providing a mechanism of contradiction that drastically sped up elimination of possible settings [LINK] Numberphile gives a nice, succinct explanation [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42638092,"author":"DarkmSparks","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Cracking a 512-bit DKIM key for less than $8 in the cloud","text":"none of it is \"brute force\", GNFS is a process that rapidly excludes numbers from the search space that cannot be the answer, in principle similar to the way they broke enigma. numberphile has a great video on that one [VIDEO] Also, taking the OP as a \"worse case\", afaik: 512bit = $8 so 1024 = 8^2 = $64 2048 = 8^2^2 = $4,096 4096 = 8^2^2 = $16,777,216 noting $8 for 512 seems very expensive to me.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44836845,"author":"robaato","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked","text":"There's the entertaining bit in the film The Imitation Game (the breaking of Enigma code by Alan Turing) where they realised that a weakness was the daily weather report always containing the words \"weatherreport\" and \"heil bloody hitler\" (with obvious addition!) [LINK] or longer version: [LINK] Also a more proper explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"V6VP-2aIcSc":[{"hn_comment_id":31866740,"author":"codemonkey-zeta","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Goodbye, shitty Car extends Vehicle object-orientation tutorial (2011)","text":"For anyone unfamiliar, I recommend the whole series, but it also culminates in the presenter rewriting an entire nontrivial OOP program into a procedural one and saving whopping amounts of code/complexity. The big example helps to show this isn't just abstract rambling against OOP. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13133833,"author":"lj3","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Talks that changed the way I think about programming","text":"There are three talks, actually. Here are the other two. Object-Oriented Programming is Embarrassing: 4 Short Examples[0] Object-Oriented Programming is Garbage: 3800 SLOC example[1] [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"V8DfjXnIk6c":[{"hn_comment_id":18615258,"author":"tzury","month":"2018-12","story_title":"A woman who outruns men, 200 miles at a time","text":"I saw her first at Joe Rogan's podcast[1]. Far beyond the athletic achievement, I was amazed by her humility, how modest was she was during the entire conversation! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20745616,"author":"lhl","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Ultra marathon runner earns awards for both first place woman and overall winner","text":"Last year the NYTimes had a nice writeup about her [LINK] - I was following up on that and found an interview she did with Joe Rogan in 2017 after winning the MOAB 240, and some of the stories she tells about persevering through physical fatigue (and hallucinations, etc) is unreal: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"V9K6gjR07Po":[{"hn_comment_id":19246302,"author":"rjf72","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Sunlight through glass does not provide Vitamin D","text":"Mildly amusing related aside from this. Because of this, glass is completely opaque in the UV spectrum. Looking at the world in UV [1] is quite interesting! Such a reminder that how and what we experience of the world is so largely a product of our physiological composition. What is perfectly transparent to us would be a great hiding place from the perspective of something that only saw in UV. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24141281,"author":"hrnnnnnn","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Vitamin D, part 1: back to basics","text":"You need fancy lenses to do UV photography. From wikipedia: \"For UV photography it is necessary to use specially developed lenses having elements made from fused quartz or quartz and fluorite.\" Veritasium has a video using a special UV setup, it's pretty cool - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VAhHkJQ3KgY":[{"hn_comment_id":28628818,"author":"overcast","month":"2021-09","story_title":"2006: Dwarf Fortress","text":"The obligatory greatest bug report ever. Dwarf Fortress developer gets in depth about it. So great. The complexity of this game is mind boggling. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33431539,"author":"zer01","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Dwarf Fortress\u2019 big makeover will be out on Steam in December","text":"This interview with Tarn Adams (one of the creators of dwarf fortress) is amazing and gives a good idea of the depth and pace of development. It\u2019s pretty bonkers TBH, I\u2019d love to understand the abstractions and data models involved with software engineering this ambitious. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24417661,"author":"christkv","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Sid Meier: \u201cI don\u2019t think I could make Civilisation today\u201d","text":"When talking about complexity I was fascinated with this interview of one of the dwarf fortress developers explaining how the cats kept dying from alcohol poisoning due to emergent behavior caused by a bug [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29765095,"author":"tempest_","month":"2022-01","story_title":"How Dwarf Fortress is built","text":"You may find this NoClip interview interesting, though it doesn't delve too much into technical things and is more high level/ game design focused. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33495028,"author":"ingenieros","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Dwarf Fortress Steam Edition \u2013 Release Date Trailer [video]","text":"I'd also recommend watching this interview NOCLIP recently did with Tarn where he talks specifically about the Steam release... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33711854,"author":"jonchurch_","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Dwarf Fortress \u2013 randomly generated, persistent fantasy world","text":"One of the creators (Tarn, specifically) does interviews fairly often, talking about the game and progress. Here's a video telling a very famous story about tracking down a bug that involved alcoholic cats [VIDEO] There was also a recent article about Dwarf Fortress published to the Stack Overflow blog [LINK] Edit: There's really a decent amount of stuff out there, they've been making the game for almost 20 years now. So here is a talk that tries to explain DF to an audience, and does talk a little about the simulation. [LINK] I adore DF and am one of those folks who enjoys playing, not just watching videos on youtube. If you do want to give it a go, make sure you find an \"Intro to DF\" type video and follow it. It's a big learning curve but I love the game so much, and knowing the story of it's creation over time makes me love it even more. It is truly a labor of love by two brothers who have chosen to make it their life's work.","stance":"rec"}],"VBwWbFpkltg":[{"hn_comment_id":19990454,"author":"nickjj","month":"2019-05","story_title":"GitHub Sponsors","text":"It's an interesting idea but I wonder what will make this different than gittip from years ago, or gratipay, or Patreon, or just having a \"donate\" button in your README file. I guess I'm just skeptical in that this will change anything for the developers who are trying to make some type of income for their contributions. On a related note, DHH recorded a very nice keynote at Railsconf 2019 on expectations of payments in open source: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20841550,"author":"westoque","month":"2019-08","story_title":"NPM Bans Terminal Ads","text":"> Given the amount of value open source provides to for-profit companies (with the open source maintainers rarely getting any reciprocal value from the companies that profit off them), why is it so alarming to think that these maintainers might think of a clever idea like this to make a couple thousand bucks? Because it's not a clever idea at all. First of all, open source software should stay true to what is is, which is free and open. If maintainers really wanted to profit off of this, they should have never made it free or at least offer some sort of pricing model that doesn't affect the essence of the project being open source (e.g., offering paid support), projects like Sidekiq having Sidekiq Pro. Users shouldn't be the one \"paying\" for open source software through the ads. This is making developers pay for the project indirectly. DHH latest keynote from Railsconf 2019 hits the nail in the coffin: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25037906,"author":"nickjj","month":"2020-11","story_title":"No More Free Work from Marak: Pay Me or Fork This","text":"This reminds me of a lot of DHH's keynote about open source from last year: [VIDEO] Even if you're not a Rails developer it's worth watching. From what I remember from the talk he is totally fine with and doesn't hold any grudges against Twitter, GitHub or Shopify making hundreds of millions of dollars off Ruby on Rails while getting zero compensation in return. Mainly because he open sourced Rails with no monetary / fame expectations and then worried about generating income from services around his open source project. I don't know Marak's history but I do know developing a good faker library definitely isn't trivial, so I'm sure his work is very much appreciated by the folks who use it but I think if you're doing open source work for money and other non-pure byproducts you're only setting your self up for disappointment.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32881927,"author":"activitypea","month":"2022-09","story_title":"IHP, a batteries-included web framework built on Haskell and Nix","text":">25 dollars a month for solo projects >125 dollars a month per seat for companies That's.. irregular. I really have nothing nice to say about this model, so I'll just leave a really good conf talk here. The part around 8:30 is really pertinent to this situation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VDfX44fZoMc":[{"hn_comment_id":13878506,"author":"pooktrain","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Zen and the Art of Unit Testing","text":"Trying to cover your state space with coarse-grained tests in database-backed applications can lead to slow tests suites that are laborious to set up/tear down, which is a barrier to fast build times in CI. This harms productivity both while writing tests and in deployment. J.B Rainsberger says it best: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15567456,"author":"1_player","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Write tests. Not too many. Mostly integration","text":"I have adopted the same philosophy. A few resources on this, part of the so-called London school TDD: - [LINK] (and the rest of the Wiki) - [LINK] - Most of the screencasts and articles at [LINK] (especially this brilliant talk [LINK] ) - Integration Tests Are A Scam: [VIDEO] All of these basically go the opposite way of the article's philosophy: Not too many integration tests, mostly unit tests. Clearly define a contract between the boundaries of the code, and stub/mock on the contract. You'll be left with mostly pure functions at the leaves, which you'll unit test.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17507004,"author":"mpweiher","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar","text":"Sure. I'd venture to say that integration tests should be fewer than unit tests, see hexagonal etc. Hopefully those external interfaces are also more stable, so they don't need to be run as often. I tend to use my integration tests also as characterization tests that verify the simulator/test-double I use for any external systems within my unit tests. See also: the testing pyramid[1] and \"integrated tests are a scam\"[2], which is a tad click-bait, but actually quite good. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32733443,"author":"mihaigalos","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Fit: Framework for Integrated Test","text":"I've tried FitNesse professionally. I think it comes short in many regards. To be clear, I think integrated/integration tests in their own only add value if you have a couple of them (meaning <5). Otherwise, they're red and no one knows why. And they take a whole lot of time to execute. JBRainsberger has an nice talk on them [1]. Pactflow have implemented a Contract/Collaboration framework called Pact [2]. I haven't used it professionally but I love the concept. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"VESMU7JfVHU":[{"hn_comment_id":39101774,"author":"jarvist","month":"2024-01","story_title":"The humble brilliance of Italy's moka coffee pot (2018)","text":"There's also a fantastic Youtube video in a neutron beam facility of a Moka pot, in which you can see the full process of brewing. The water and plastic handle appear 'black' as hydrogen scatters neutrons so strongly. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29349322,"author":"simon_acca","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Humble Brilliance of Italy's Moka Coffee Pot (2018)","text":"For anybody wondering how a moka pot works, have a look at this neutron imaging of the pot in action: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37345221,"author":"msds","month":"2023-09","story_title":"X-ray CT scans of coffee equipment: Aeropress, Fellow kettle, Moka pot","text":"CT is the wrong imaging tech for Moka pots at least - they're much cooler looking if you're doing neutron imaging and can see the water: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VFFlO7yBIBM":[{"hn_comment_id":24104041,"author":"pengaru","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media","text":"I strongly recommend watching the impromptu interview Bill Gates gave back in the 90s while visiting the Wired office, for gaining some valuable perspective on his thinking, and how comically wrong he's been before. My internet is too flaky here at the moment to verify, but I believe this is the URL: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24870901,"author":"sramam","month":"2020-10","story_title":"How Satya Nadella turned Microsoft around","text":"This. This [1] wired interview provides an insight into the structured thinking at Microsoft/Gates even back in 1996. I'm sure this kind of thinking permeates any successful company, to have a video of this depth, and now available for public viewing, is really unique. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43137109,"author":"antaviana","month":"2025-02","story_title":"20 years working on the same software product","text":"I believe it is in this interview from 1996 where I saw Bill Gates saying the same thing about Microsoft products, he saw them as subscriptions. It\u2019s a long but interesting interview. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VHWUCX6osgM":[{"hn_comment_id":5730906,"author":"nsomaru","month":"2013-05","story_title":"The Three Kinds of Laziness","text":"I suggest you see Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Speech (2005): [VIDEO] . The part which conveys this idea beautifully is this: \"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything \u2014 all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart\" Basically, If we deeply[1] accept/realise that we are transient beings (which requires significant reflection given that we all secretly act as though we are immortal, though we may intellectual comprehend that we are not), one may more clearly distinguish between what is important in life and what is superficial. A definition of the Spiritual Path which appeals to me: \"Nitya anitya viveka vichara\" -- \"the ability to discriminate between the eternal and the ephemeral\" [2] [1] As an inherent and basic measure from which all action emanates [2] I would be willing to delve into that a bit deeper should anyone be interested.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13455354,"author":"sagarkamat","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What inspires you to persevere through adversity?","text":"2 things 1) Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford. [VIDEO] 2) Reminding myself of my blessings in life. Most of us have many things to be thankful for, even in our worst moments Whatever you do, do not seek sympathy from others. It can be very comforting to vent your frustration to people and get their sympathy, but it does absolutely nothing for situation and only enforces your despair.","stance":"rec"}],"VI_riscmviI":[{"hn_comment_id":26974986,"author":"ericjang","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Facebook Reports First Quarter 2021 Results [pdf]","text":"Martin Shkreli (yes, The pharma bro) has an excellent set of youtube tutorials on reading 10-k and 10-q forms to compile DCF valuation models. His video series focuses on household tech names here's the first one in the series: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39551942,"author":"samstave","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet","text":"This is just a fun FYI ; This is 8 years old! (as of yesterday!!) but its pretty amazing: [VIDEO] Its Martin Skreli (yes that one) -- but see how fast this guy is with excel... this is what I imagine when I think of excel power users... (But also, he does a lesson in DD on investing and doing calcs in Excel - so aside from awesome Excel input, there is good investing info here - recall this was the guy that bought a medical company and immediately raised the price 7,000% or some such (he then bought the Wu Tang Album whilst imprisoned)","stance":"rec"}],"VLxTHYGLKY0":[{"hn_comment_id":33951826,"author":"dimatura","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Recreating the Sounds of the \u201990s with a YM3812 Synthesizer","text":"I'm an FM junkie and own various pieces of gear based on old yamaha FM chips, as well as actual yamaha FM keyboards. I think the various emulations out there are actually pretty good, and I have to admit I'd probably have a tough time with blind A/B tests. Probably the most noticeable (and sought after) out of the \"lo-fi\" effects is the ladder distortion effect on the old Sega megadrive YM2612 chips. I own a MegaFM synth with one of those and I do love the sound. I'm not sure if most emulators actually try to emulate it, but the plogue chipsynth MD plugin does. The creator has a really cool video on it [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36995081,"author":"andrewf","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Nuked-MD-FPGA \u2013 accurate Sega Genesis re-implementation based on decapped chips","text":"chipsynth MD is a musician-targeted emulator of the MegaDrive's sound chips; one of the authors goes into the difficulty of recreating things at [VIDEO] (From memory: they sourced a variant of the sound chip with digital output, characterized the DAC that way, then built a test suite to compare emulator behavior with a real chip)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38562051,"author":"H1Supreme","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Chipsynth C64 is an emulation of the SID so good, it can replace hardware","text":"I have the Chipsynth MD, which is a Sega Mega Drive (aka Genesis) based synth from Plogue and it's one of my favorite plug-in synths. It's pretty remarkable how much it nails the sounds from those games. This video shows some insight into the development process: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VMj-3S1tku0":[{"hn_comment_id":33487167,"author":"Geee","month":"2022-11","story_title":"A step by step backpropagation example (2015)","text":"I recommend watching Andrej Karpathy's recent videos on backprop and neural nets. Makes it really simple and intuitive. The spelled-out intro to neural networks and backpropagation: [VIDEO] Becoming a backprop ninja: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34718108,"author":"ian0","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Andrej Karpathy Is Joining OpenAI Again","text":"For those who dont know, Andrej has a brilliant series of videos on youtube where he explores the basics of neural nets right up to transformer architecture through code. Starts here [0] and most recent is building GPT from scratch in code. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35063626,"author":"base698","month":"2023-03","story_title":"ChatGPT Explained: A Normie's Guide to How It Works","text":"The ChatGPT video by Karpathy is the last in a 7 video series. The one that really hit it home for me was the first video on MicroGrad [1]. The second video builds on MicroGrad and is also great for understanding how a basic NN works. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36033848,"author":"gavi","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Deep Learning as Computational Graphs (2018)","text":"I highly recommend the video from karpathy [VIDEO] - This explains the same idea spelled out in code. It really helped me understand the mathematical expression graph of neural networks. He uses graphviz to show the expressions and initially calculate gradients manually and then implement back propagation.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36428875,"author":"radq","month":"2023-06","story_title":"GPT4 is 8 x 220B params = 1.7T params","text":"Andrej Karpathy's \"zero to hero\" series [1] was how I learned the fundamentals of this stuff. It's especially useful because he explains the why and provides intuitive explanations instead of just talking about the what and how. Would recommend it if you haven't checked it out already. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37356355,"author":"paulsmith","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Linear Algebra for Programmers","text":"Watch Karpathy's recent lectures. They're gold. Start here[1] with micrograd[2]. It doesn't use linear algebra/matrices to start, but the principles are the same. The matrix multiplication is how the weights of the connections between neurons and the input values are combined (to form an activation value that then may lead to that neuron \"firing\" or not, depending on whether it passes some threshold function). We use matrices to model the connections between neurons - each row is a connection, and each column is a weight corresponding to an input. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43927931,"author":"throwaway7783","month":"2025-05","story_title":"How linear regression works intuitively and how it leads to gradient descent","text":"In the same vein, Karpathy's video series \"Neural Networks from zero to hero\"[0] touches upon a lot of this and intuitions as well. One of the best introductory series (even if you ignore the neural net part of it) and brushes on gradients, differentiation and what it means intuitively. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44210120,"author":"jackdoe","month":"2025-06","story_title":"The Illusion of Thinking: Strengths and limitations of reasoning models [pdf]","text":"For studying? Mainly watching and re-watching Karpathy's 'Zero To Hero'[1] and Stanford's 'Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition'[2], also a lot of transformers from scratch videos like Umar Jamali's videos[3], and I also study backwards to McCulloch and Pitts. Reading the 30 papers [LINK] and so on. And of course Yannic Kilcher[4], and also listening in on the paper discussions they do on discord. Practicing a lot with just doing backpropagation by hand and making toy models by hand to get intuition for the signal flow, and building all kinds of smallish systems, e.g. how far can you push whisper, small qwen3, and kokoro to control your computer with voice? People think that deepseek/mistral/meta etc are democratizing AI, but its actually Karpathy who teaches us :) so we can understand them and make our own. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45964192,"author":"omrishn","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Deep dive into the small details of micrograd","text":"This blog post analyzes the code with an emphasis on the small details and ideas explored in Andrej Karpathy's awesome micrograd lecture. Link to the original lecture: [VIDEO] I'd love to hear any thougts/reviews about the blog post.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46359861,"author":"jwitthuhn","month":"2025-12","story_title":"The Illustrated Transformer","text":"If you have 20 hours to spare I highly recommend this youtube playlist from Andrej Karpathy [VIDEO] It starts with the fundamentals of how backpropagation works then advances to building a few simple models and ends with building a GPT-2 clone. It won't taech you everything about AI models but it gives you a solid foundation for branching out.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32743811,"author":"derac","month":"2022-09","story_title":"MinGPT: Minimal PyTorch re-implementation of GPT","text":"I love your approach and philosophy around programming. If anyone is unaware, Karpathy has a relatively small youtube channel he started a few weeks ago. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34422987,"author":"bialpio","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out by Andrej Karpathy","text":"[VIDEO] The entire series is at [LINK] , first video is literally from scratch (i.e. just Python, the only external dependency is for plotting graphs if I recall correctly).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35296646,"author":"tjvc","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Post-GPT Computing","text":"I think this is a good take. I hope to do the same. For the understanding part, Andrej Karpathy has a YouTube playlist that explains neural networks. I made a start on it today and found it quite accessible. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39974942,"author":"karpathy","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Llm.c \u2013 LLM training in simple, pure C/CUDA","text":"I wrote this, which might be a bit helpful: [LINK] But if you don't have the background, I'd recommend my YouTube videos, see the Zero To Hero playlist: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41415266,"author":"sprobertson","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Calculus Refresher for AI/ML?","text":"imo linear algebra is the main thing to refresh yourself on, as most of NN is based on matrix multiplication. The calculus is mostly in the gradient descent which in practice is abstracted away, so having a few decades old understanding might be good enough. For practical implementation Andrej Karpathy has a good series of videos going over a lot of the concepts starting here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42578634,"author":"strangecasts","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Ray Tracing in One Weekend","text":"Andrej Karpathy's guide to Micrograd - [VIDEO] - is probably the closest equivalent, in that it covers the basic ideas of backpropagation and autodiff frameworks like PyTorch, and ends with an implementation of a very basic framework ( [LINK] ) you can train small neural networks in","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43589024,"author":"rottc0dd","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms","text":"From my other comment elsewhere. These resources helped me understand the topics better. If anyone wants to understand fundamentals of machine learning, one of the superb resources I have found is, Stanford's \"Probability for computer scientists\"[1]. It goes into theoretical underpinnings of probability theory and ML, IMO better than any other course I have seen. But, this is a primarily a probability course that discusses the fundamentals of machine learning. (Yeah, Andrew Ng is legendary, but his course demands some mathematical familiarity with linear algebra topics) There is a course reader for CS109 [2]. You can download pdf version of this. Caltech's learning from data was really good too, if someone is looking for theoretical understanding of ML topics [3]. There is also book for excellent caltech course[4]. Also, neural networks zero to hero is for understanding how neural networks are built from ground up [5]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VNTQ-M_uSo8":[{"hn_comment_id":13051063,"author":"susan_hall","month":"2016-11","story_title":"The Unsound Playground: Java and Scala's Type Systems are Unsound","text":"There have been some fantastic conversations on Hacker News about type systems. I've learned a lot about the different arguments for dynamic typing, versus strict typing, versus gradual typing. Java's type system may or may not have represented new thinking when it was under development in the early 1990s, but it certainly seems a bit dated in the year 2016. The limits of the Java type system have been discussed both here on HackerNews and also elsewhere, many times. For those who want to consider arguments against Java's style of strict typing, 2 things I would recommend include \"Agility & Robustness: Clojure spec, by Stuart Halloway\": [VIDEO] He offers a chart that shows the strengths and weaknesses of strict typing versus unit tests versus the run-time checks offered by Spec. It's worth a look. The discussions around gradual typing have been interesting, but to see how far the limits of this can be pushed, I would suggest everyone check out the Qi/Shen programming language: [LINK] \"Qi makes use of the logical notation of sequent calculus to define types. This type notation, under Qi\u2019s interpretation, is actually a Turing complete language in its own right. This notation allows Qi to assign extensible type systems to Common Lisp libraries and is thought of as an extremely powerful feature of the language.\" This next quote is from someone who has spent a long time experimenting with different Lisps: \"Qi (and its successor Shen) really push the limits of what we might call a ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30770837,"author":"Jonovono","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Clojure 1.11 is now available","text":"..... you realise clojure has one of the most powerful ways to 'type' your language? Like 100x more powerful than the typescript or whatever type language you are using now ;p [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VNvzZfsC13o":[{"hn_comment_id":17881916,"author":"microcolonel","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Norway's Plan for a Fleet of Electric Planes","text":"Yes, and the physics of it are even worse than you imagine. If you don't mind a voice/video explanation of this, I found this one worked for people I know [0]. In the air, there is a cascading relationship between the requirements for lift, and the weight of the fuel (batteries). Batteries being, by weight, at least between 40 and 100x times less energy dense than Kerosene, the weight of batteries competing with Kerosene multiplies the real amount of energy required to transport aircraft. This relationship doesn't hurt so much on the road, since there is generally not much need for lift, and also since there is a straightforward way of recovering the increase in inertia. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22344901,"author":"cgrealy","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Aviation industry tries to go green","text":"The big win would obviously be electric aircraft, but I doubt we'll see that in my lifetime (barring a massive breakthrough in battery technology). The problem is even the best batteries have a much lower energy density compared with traditional fuels. Also, a battery that weighs 100kg when full weighs pretty much 100kg when empty. Real Engineering did a pretty good video on the topic [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24214639,"author":"DesiLurker","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ultralight lithium-sulfur batteries for electric airplanes","text":"IIRC real-engineering on youtube did a detailed analysis of the current operating limitations with electric planes: [VIDEO] He also identified a couple of sweet spots where electric flight would make sense factoring in engine efficiency & cost of fuel etc. bottom line is that the picture is more complex than just comparing energy density of jet-fuel & batteries. with batteries becoming much lighter IMO it should open up many more use cases for short haul frequent flights without the need of big central hub airports. which is good. an more importantly give the trajectory of battery energy density it should provide enough justification for heavy investment into research into electric planes so i wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27832612,"author":"SonicScrub","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Electric aircraft set to take flight by 2026 under new agreements","text":"The Youtuber Real-Engineering (aerospace engineering background) has a good video discussing the viability of electric aircraft. Barring some dramatic revolution in battery energy density, electric aircraft beyond a certain range are simply not-feasible. They are very feasible for short-range routes though. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VO6XEQIsCoM":[{"hn_comment_id":31964912,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: I\u2019m 41 and still unmarried \u2013 what should I do?","text":"> \" What can be more important than life partner? \" My favourite TED talk pairing is Dan Gilbert's Surprising Science of Happiness[1], where he offers evidence upon evidence that we humans grow to like what we are stuck with and can't change. A year after winning the lottery and a year after losing the use of their legs, lottery winners and paraplegics report being equally happy with their lives, one of his studies shows, for example. And Barry Schwartz's Paradox of Choice talk[2] where he argues that the more choice we have, the less happy we will be after we made the choice, full of doubt whether we could or should have chosen better, questioning if we should choose again, and seeing any flaw in the choice as a reason to blame ourselves for choosing it. In the USA there's over two million marriages every year[3], that seems a lot for people making the most important decision of their lives, to me. > \" I think that what people are actually implying when they say \u201cpicky\u201d is that I\u2019m materialistic , that I\u2019m looking for a rich guy, for a hot guy, etcetera. \" (I think that's different from common usage; a 'picky eater' is not someone looking for rich food or hot food, it's someone with a narrowband filter on what foods they will eat. By contrast, there's a joke about the shopkeeper who gets a bag of potatoes, splits them into two different containers, and marks one container \"selected potatoes\" with a higher price. 'Selective' means you selected, even people whose criteria is '","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1905324,"author":"geekfactor","month":"2010-11","story_title":"Letting your mind wander is a major cause of unhappiness","text":"This article reminds me of a TED talk I liked by Barry Schwartz on \"The Paradox of Choice.\" [VIDEO] The speaker argues that that freedom and choice are held as unassailable virtues by Western cultures, but in fact research shows that too much choice leads to unhappiness. If you think of mind wandering as perhaps a product of too much choice for the mind, the two ideas are complementary.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12237225,"author":"seoguru","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Minds Turned to Ash: Burnout is more than working too hard","text":"Have you heard of Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice? He affirms what you are saying: [VIDEO] He has other interesting theses as well. google him.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14835164,"author":"chiefofgxbxl","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant?","text":"The first bullet point you wrote about the 50 kinds of toothpaste becoming debilitating is a good example of the \"Paradox of Choice\". A good TED talk is given [0], or a shorter animated one: [1]. Essentially, too many options leads to paralysis and second-guessing yourself. Good videos if you have the time to watch them. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"VO_1AdYRGW8":[{"hn_comment_id":24417270,"author":"sarora27","month":"2020-09","story_title":"A Brief Cultural History of the Parking Lot","text":"This reminds me of a cool video i saw the other day of San Francisco's Market Street in 1906: [VIDEO] It's so interesting to see how people, street cars, horse & carts, and cars all seemed to share the road in what seemed like a controlled chaos manner","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28888461,"author":"GeekyBear","month":"2021-10","story_title":"The Hindenburg disaster denoised, upscaled, and colorized using ML [video]","text":"I've really come to enjoy these sorts of upscaled videos that allow a view of various cities in the early 1900's. New York: [LINK] San Francisco: [VIDEO] Paris: [LINK] Wuppertal, Germany: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32122201,"author":"carapace","month":"2022-07","story_title":"When coal first arrived, Americans said 'no thanks'","text":"FWIW, check out \"A Trip Down Market Street\", filmed in 1906 in SF just before the earthquake. [LINK] Upscaled and colorized: [VIDEO] You can see pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, and early automobiles all \"flowing\" together.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38014656,"author":"carapace","month":"2023-10","story_title":"CA DMV suspends Cruise deployment and driverless testing permits","text":"The two things are orthogonal. Item: humans driving huge machines on every street is and always has been totally insane. The reason we do it is because of a deliberate domestic propaganda campaign. No really. See: \"The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime (Adam Ruins Everything)\" [LINK] You can see the origin of the situation from this extraordinary film shot just before the 1906 Earthquake: \"San Francisco, a Trip down Market Street, April 14, 1906\" [VIDEO] You can see that horses, horse-drawn wagon and carts, and pedestrians could and did mix together in the public way. There are also early automobiles, and the problem is obvious: cars accelerate faster than horses. Already we can see reckless driving by cars that is only possible due to their ability to accelerate quickly! BTW, just for the record, cars themselves are generally awesome. It must be said. Cars are cool. It's only when we use them as mass-transportation and/or mix them with non-car-driving people (bikes, pedestrians, etc.) that it becomes mad. - - - - Ergo, safe automatic automobiles can't come soon enough! - - - - However, none of the above justifies using random people without their consent as test dummies in an open-air testing facility for massive, fast robots. That's also insane. - - - - To me it seems obvious that you do two things: 1) Start with slow light robots! Build a nerf foam golf cart that is limited to 5mph and get that working reliably. Going straight for Knight Industries Two Thousand right out o","stance":"rec"}],"VPBH1eW28mo":[{"hn_comment_id":11613473,"author":"united893","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Judge Grants Search Warrant Forcing Woman to Unlock iPhone with Touch ID","text":"If you have five minutes, please see this short video from CGPGrey, which summarizes succinctly why access to your phone is akin to access to brain: > [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14260947,"author":"sillysaurus3","month":"2017-05","story_title":"FBI director Comey backs new Feinstein push for decrypt bill","text":"Yes. [VIDEO] is a pretty good video for persuading people why this legislation is a bad idea. We might still be able to beat it by rallying support.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19677140,"author":"urda","month":"2019-04","story_title":"The Time Tim Cook Stood His Ground Against the FBI","text":"> The FBI asked Apple to put a build on a phone that would allow them to brute force the passcode, leaving the device and the build on Apple's premises the entire time. It doesn't matter how well it might be locked down or secured. If the government coerced them into building it, it wouldn't be difficult to go one more step and require apple to hand over the modified OS. This [1] does a great job of explaining why building a master key is just a bad idea. This is a pandora's box we do not need to open. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20517067,"author":"lukifer","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Tech firms \u201ccan and must\u201d put backdoors in encryption, AG Barr says","text":"If you need to explain to non-technical friends and family exactly why this is a terrible idea, CGP Grey offers an easily digestible 5-minute primer: [VIDEO] Computers either have unbreakable locks, or no locks whatsoever. There's no stable middle ground.","stance":"rec"}],"VPjODKUxV5g":[{"hn_comment_id":45585351,"author":"Orochikaku","month":"2025-10","story_title":"America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom","text":"I\u2019d strongly recommend that you watch this video: \u201cThe Vegas Loop Is Getting Progressively More Stupid\u201d.[1] [1] [VIDEO] (22:05)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48378215,"author":"duxup","month":"2026-06","story_title":"I rode Elon Musk's Vegas Loop, the worst transit system on Earth","text":"This video gives a first hand experience that seems to cover everything: [VIDEO] It looks like a project that they just gave up on ...","stance":"rec"}],"VQKMoT-6XSg":[{"hn_comment_id":24279553,"author":"maneesh","month":"2020-08","story_title":"My startup validation process","text":"Phone, music player, and internet communicator in a single device, that enabled worldwide communication reliably. Just the original phone solved voicemail (with visual voicemail) once and for all in one fell swoop. It was just echelons better. That part of the initial demo still continues to blow my mind. [VIDEO] Here\u2019s the original introduction to the iphone: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43714245,"author":"redbell","month":"2025-04","story_title":"In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future (2016)","text":"I consider AlphaGo - The Movie [1] to be a timeless classic that will never feel outdated. In my opinion, it surpasses even Hollywood productions, despite being based on true events and filmed live with real people. I'm ranking it as #2, though, because I still believe Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone presentation [2] is the greatest live tech event ever captured on film. Hearing the crowd screaming when seeing some tricks and techniques ( eg. slide to unlock , pinch to zoom and scrolling up ) on how to use the phone does really triggers some haptic feedback in my heart because we are now so used to these tricks that were pure magic back then. ______________________________ 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37362814,"author":"Seanambers","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly (2006)","text":"It's hard to overstate just how big of a leap the iPhone was. Critics only focused on the shortcomings but neglected to see what it really was. Steve Jobs Introducing at Macworld in 2007 is a classic for the ages. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39725887,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Vision Pro: What we got wrong at Oculus that Apple got right","text":"A very interesting video take: [VIDEO] tl;dw -- reviewers are understandably focusing on the technical specs, but ignoring the much more simple metric: conceptually, does the device fool the mind into accepting what it sees as \"real\"? And the answer for the Vision Pro is yes. It will get lighter, better, cheaper, but even now, it's important to realize that the AVP can transport you to another realistic reality in a way no other device has managed. I've only done the in-store demo, but I understand what the video is saying, and it resonates for me.","stance":"rec"}],"VUhlNx_-wYk":[{"hn_comment_id":6710858,"author":"mekishizufu","month":"2013-11","story_title":"What is a y-combinator? (2008)","text":"If you are curious about the topic, I strongly recommend watching these videos: Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich [LINK] Programming with Nothing by Tom Stuart [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8292324,"author":"gamegoblin","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Church Numerals","text":"For anyone who finds this interesting, I cannot recommend enough investing a half hour in watching the \"Programming With Nothing\" talk: [VIDEO] In it, the speaker implements fizzbuzz using only lambda calculus (making significant use of church encoding).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9301755,"author":"tacticiankerala","month":"2015-04","story_title":"A Short and Painless Introduction to the Lambda Calculus [pdf]","text":"An awesome video which changed my perspective towards lambda calculus and programming in general: programming with nothing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18799134,"author":"stan_rogers","month":"2019-01","story_title":"FizzBuzz in ten languages","text":"There's a good elaboration of it in Tom Stuart's \"Programming With Nothing\" talk[0], in which he does a lambda calculus implementation of FizzBuzz in what's left of Ruby if you leave everything out except the things strictly necessary to do lambda calculus - with the exception of what you could call C-style macros (basically text search-and-replace, so you can call a section of code FOO and just type FOO everywhere you would have typed that section of code). There's also the little matter of output - you need to translate the resulting Church numerals into readable form for those who can't see that you've obviously produced correct FizzBuzz. There's a good enough explanation that what needs to be sort of hand-waved for brevity (things that are shown but not really explained in detail) aren't entirely opaque - you will be able to figure it out. Keep in mind, too, that the lambda calculus is a lot like machine language in one respect - the same little bit of \"code\" can have more than one meaning to the programmer even if the \"machine\" is doing exactly the same thing. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VVV4xeWBIxE":[{"hn_comment_id":12279828,"author":"FuckOffNeemo","month":"2016-08","story_title":"World's Oldest Gold Object May Have Just Been Unearthed in Bulgaria","text":"My assumption would be something close to the smelter shown on Primitive Technologies YouTube channel. Find the smelter video here: [VIDEO] This channel is fascinating. The history nerd within me finds satisfaction in every video he has recorded.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17210831,"author":"ChuckMcM","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Sudden Neolithic population drop was the result of brutal warfare: study","text":"That video[1] is part of a series by this guy who is out recreating technology literally from dirt. If you're a prepper you want this guy on your team, you'll advance to the castle age way before anyone else does :-) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VVp8UGjECt4":[{"hn_comment_id":1851726,"author":"jkent","month":"2010-10","story_title":"Things Economists Agree On","text":"Whilst it doesn't really support or refute any points, economists and interested people might be interested in the light-hearted [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3217535,"author":"scott_s","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Open letter to the Mac/iOS dev community regarding conduct","text":"I actually don't think they're funny. That's not code for \"I think they are inappropriate\" (which at a developer's conference, I think they are inappropriate), but rather I don't find them humorous. It's the kind of easy humor people try for when they're not actually funny. I find listening to this sort of thing painful because I feel sorry for the speaker - trying to be funny, failing, and having to deal with it. With that said, even if the speaker did as you said and was completely deadpan, I would still think it's inappropriate. It's just not the appropriate place to even attempt to make those references, no matter how you do it. Among friends, I make and laugh at raunchy jokes. But professional environments should be more inclusive than that. This is what topical, appropriate and actually funny humor in a professional setting looks like: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37994372,"author":"Qwertious","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Two Kinds of Techno-Optimism","text":"\"AI can improve society\" reminds me of \"Principles of Economics, Translated\" (a great 5min video, [VIDEO] ) - \"\\#5: Trade can make everyone better off.\" The same translation can be applied, methinks.","stance":"rec"}],"VYhAGnsnO7w":[{"hn_comment_id":18198584,"author":"mrob","month":"2018-10","story_title":"The 555 and How It Got That Way","text":"Dave Jones' EEVBlog recently posted a video on cheap microcontrollers (<0.03USD): [VIDEO] Replacing a 555 timer is a very common job for this type of part. It will typically have an internal oscillator, so it won't need the additional components the 555 needs, reducing cost further. Even if you use something more expensive like an ATtiny (cut down version of the microcontroller found in Arduinos, so very easy to develop for) it might still be competitive because of the reduced parts count and board space.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27563423,"author":"cartoonworld","month":"2021-06","story_title":"U.S. senators propose 25% tax credit for semiconductor manufacturing","text":">The countries that are going to be hurt by these US semiconductor subsidies are going be Taiwan, South Korea, Japan ... not China. I think I may agree here, and it gets complicated -- fast. I suspect you might be referring to larger parts like CPUs, but you should take this excellent opportunity to investigate china's semi industry a bit. China has a very interesting local manufacturing economy of parts and suppliers that is mostly invisible to outside observers. It's fascinating that in China, there is a totally divergent supply chain to support the cheap consumer electronics industry. Granted, it isn't CPUs. However, they sure are cranking out semis, its just that they never leave China but for inside of another product. The datasheets are all in Chinese, they aren't exported, they serve to support China's unique manufacturing culture. Here's a previous submission that delves into this: The \u201cterrible\u201d 3 cent MCU \u2013 a short survey of sub $0.10 microcontrollers [LINK] You can also check out Dave from EEVblog's 3-cent microcontroller[0] video about the same series of dirt cheap micros. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31312021,"author":"michaelt","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Everything with a battery should have an off switch","text":"> Yeah I wish we could get those prices. You might enjoy [1] about a microcontroller that's ~3 cents, in quantity 10. Of course it's only one-time-programmable, and generally pretty basic. And that's a pre-supply-chain-crisis price - these days prices have risen to 9 cents [2]. Still very cheap though! [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"VZQoAKJPbh8":[{"hn_comment_id":12825742,"author":"kybernetikos","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Eve: Programming designed for humans","text":"I absolutely loved the semantic wiki stuff that was shown towards the end of the \"In search of tomorrow\" video. This seems fairly different to that system. Is there a write up/talk about why you changed? Is there anything like that semantic wiki thing available for me to use? [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10740501,"author":"dangoor","month":"2015-12","story_title":"The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases","text":"Chris Granger's latest experiments with Eve (github.com/witheve) look surprisingly like a semi-structured personal knowledge system. Take a look at the last 15 minutes or so of this video for a demo: [VIDEO] (the whole video is interesting for the evolution of it)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10741249,"author":"lewisl9029","month":"2015-12","story_title":"The Sad State of Personal Knowledgebases","text":"I just came across this a few days ago on HN: [VIDEO] [LINK] Eve, the new \"programming\" tool developed by Chris Granger of Light Table fame, looks absolutely amazing for this use case. I personally can't wait to try it out.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10750838,"author":"giblet","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Why does programming suck?","text":"A talk by Chris Granger in Dec 2015 trying to answer \"What does programming look like in 10 years?\" was interesting. < [VIDEO] A recent iteration < [VIDEO] looks wiki-like.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11212064,"author":"cmaury","month":"2016-03","story_title":"My Journey From Blindness to Building a Fully Conversational User Interface","text":"There are a lot of professional developers who are blind. They use accessible IDEs paired with a Screen reader. Here is a good description: [LINK] In the future, I think there is a lot of potential for pairing a Conversational UI and a natural language programming...language. Eve looks really promising, and could change the way that everyone writes software, and not just the blind: [LINK] Here is a demo: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11356077,"author":"michaelwww","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Stencila \u2013 Spreadsheet-like live reactive programming environment","text":"This article reminded me of an interesting video by Chris Granger, co-author of the Light Table code editor, titled \"In Search of Tomorrow: What does programming look like in 10 years?\" He's designing a visual/code block hybrid editor. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11680406,"author":"lewisl9029","month":"2016-05","story_title":"HARC","text":"Eve [1] is one project I know of that has been trying to tackle this very difficult problem. The project is led by Chris Granger, whom you might know from his work on the Light Table IDE [2]. They released a video last year that showcased some iterations of their prototypes and I found them to be very innovative and promising: [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12818627,"author":"rafaelferreira","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Eve: Programming designed for humans","text":"Seeing Eve's development out in the open is inspiring. Many of the commenters are coming from positions of extreme skepticism towards new approaches to programming, probably justified by the history of the field, but I'd recommend to spend some more time looking into the research idbknox and his team have been conducting (see [VIDEO] , for instance) and how much they have iterated based on user experimentation. A few questions come to mind now: 1 - This new demo, with the messaging app sample, and references to \"my pm wants this or that\" seems to point a change in positioning, from targeting non-programmers to professional programmers. Is this accurate? 2 - Is there a plan to integrate the grid-style or the adlibs style UI into this new iteration? 3 - If non-programmers are still a target, it seems to me that the ease of importing data from external sources would important to reach broad usage. Any research here? 4 - Html and css might be a hurdles for new users, any way Eve will help on this front? (edited for formatting)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14238242,"author":"anotheryou","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Esoteric programming paradigms","text":"Will Eve ever take off? I like the thoughts behind it. [VIDEO] very good talk about the background of eve. When he finally talks about eve you might want to switch to a more recent talk about it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16841190,"author":"seltzered_","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"#Softwarish - I'm biased a bit more towards interface development: greg wilson - What We Actually Know About Software Development, and Why We Believe It\u2019s True - [LINK] steve wittens - making webgl dance - the title is deceptive, it's in some ways a visual crash course in linear algebra - [LINK] glenn vanderburg - software engineering doesn't work - [LINK] chris granger - in search of tomorrow - [VIDEO] alan kay - tribute to ted nelson at intertwingled fest - [LINK] bret victor - this is already mentioned but if I had to pick one it'd be 'the humane representation of thought' - [LINK] #Hardwarish: saul griffith - soft, not solid: beyond traditional hardware engineering - [LINK] deb chachra - Architectural Biology and Biological Architectures - [LINK] #Getting more meta in technology and history: James Burke - Connections","stance":"rec"}],"VcVfceTsD0A":[{"hn_comment_id":35601241,"author":"ChatGTP","month":"2023-04","story_title":"A song that uses AI to clone the voices of Drake and The Weeknd has gone viral","text":"Kind of hard to say this, but unless some miraculous slowdown happens, it's coming for the entire human experience by the look of it. As Max Tegmark put it recently, we're basically Neanderthals building homo sapiens. I don't care what people think about Lex as an interviewer, it's worth a watch just to be more prepared for where things are likely headed: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35623099,"author":"hipjiveguy","month":"2023-04","story_title":"OpenAI\u2019s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over","text":"dudes. if none of you see it, it's because you're turning a blind eye, is the best way I can say it. the future of the 50's is about to show up, if, and only if, we're not so dumb as to ignore it. flying cars, killer robots, we can help decide, if we're only aware enough to do a bit of research, and say anything. your voice does matter :D watch this: [VIDEO] then, think, and then, think again, and then comment be optimistic, but be forewarned, and speak your voice","stance":"strong_rec"}],"VdIURAu1-aU":[{"hn_comment_id":4145916,"author":"Devilboy","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning","text":"Have you seen the online courses? [LINK] (From one of the authors of this paper!) [LINK] [LINK] Prof. Hinton's videos are very watchable: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4149953,"author":"tylerhobbs","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition","text":"There's a very good Google Tech Talk by Geoff Hinton (who has worked closely with Dahl on a lot of this research and developed some of the key algorithms in this field) that explains how to build deep belief networks using layers of RBMs: [LINK] That video focuses on handwritten digit recognition, but it's great for understanding the basics. There's a second Google Tech Talk video from a few years later that talks directly about phoneme recognition as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7434375,"author":"markovbling","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Is Google Cornering the Market on Deep Learning?","text":"There's a great Google Tech Talk by Geoff Hinton that serves as a slightly technical introduction to Deep Learning if anyone's interested: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VdqhHKjepiE":[{"hn_comment_id":31795881,"author":"ecdavis","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Citybound \u2013 A city building game using actor-based distributed simulation","text":"It's very accessible. If you can grok the first 30 minutes of this talk you can grok the book: [VIDEO] Strong recommend, if only to understand how RimWorld was designed and built.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28589205,"author":"jameshart","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Games that emphasize emergent narrative","text":"Tynan Sylvester (creator of Rimworld, and author of \"Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences\") has some great thoughts on this in the early part of his GDC talk on building a 'story generator' rather than a game. He talks about 'apophenia' - the propensity of players to ascribe narrative meaning to events - and the way in Rimworld they strive to create simulation systems that facilitate that kind of player-provided narrative reasoning. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VeAdryYZ7ak":[{"hn_comment_id":2518715,"author":"tdrgabi","month":"2011-05","story_title":"The German School of Lisp (\"Fluchtpunkt Lisps\")","text":"I agree that my macros explanation was stretched. I simplified it too much. Restarts are really nice, I first heard about them in \"Practical Common Lisp\" google talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9976940,"author":"jlg23","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Use Cases for Change-Class in Common Lisp","text":"The author provides a good example of legitimate use of change-class with his compiler example. About violating \"some earlier architectural plan\" in the case of libraries: Being able to do this allows CL programmers to freely mix libraries with different \"architectural plans\" without resorting to some half-baked fusion architecture that has to account for the different styles used by the libraries. Last but not least, change-class is not a hack - it's behavior is well defined and documented. And when you consider that CL's \"object orientation\" is more generic that c++'s or java's, based on generic methods alone, inferring from c++- or java-paradigms to good CL style just does not work. Peter Seibel's talk \"Practical Common Lisp\" at google explains that pretty well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11528251,"author":"jlg23","month":"2016-04","story_title":"A polyglot's guide to multiple dispatch","text":"Peter Seibel's talk \"Practical Common Lisp\"[1] covers that from a different angle, also comparing multiple dispatch with the visitor pattern. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44149321,"author":"ethagnawl","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Ovld \u2013 Efficient and featureful multiple dispatch for Python","text":"I will forever think of this talk by Peter Siebel (author of Practical Common Lisp) whenever I hear about multiple dispatch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VhWGQCzAtl8":[{"hn_comment_id":16252450,"author":"autarch","month":"2018-01","story_title":"The User Experience of Lootboxes","text":"Extra Credits did a good video on AAA game pricing recently ( [VIDEO] ) that talks about why developers are going down the lootbox and microtransaction roads. Their argument is basically that AAA games are just way too cheap. The price has been at $60 for a long time, and even though the market has expanded since then, it's still not enough to cover the development costs, which have skyrocketed. Finding other revenue streams has become a necessity. The alternative would be $80 or $100 AAA games.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28201371,"author":"Leftium","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Video Game Pricing [video]","text":"Related: [VIDEO] This 6 min video explains from game dev perspective why (AAA) games have been pegged at $60 on release, even though they should be priced higher to be sustainable ($85-$90 in 2018). So game developers tried various ideas to make up for this gap: DLC, perpetual experiences (map packs & expansions), loot boxes, microtransactions...","stance":"rec"}],"Vj04MKykmnQ":[{"hn_comment_id":36371633,"author":"Hackbraten","month":"2023-06","story_title":"They just pirated my open source 8088 BIOS","text":"A Chinese YouTuber has traveled to a company who wouldn\u2019t take the GPL seriously [0]. I wish more people had the nerve to do that instead of letting it slide. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29434339,"author":"BostonEnginerd","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Boox Mira Pro \u2013 25.3\" E Ink Monitor","text":"I saw the original video on the Twitters, but didn't check out the followup until now. I'm thrilled that her visit worked and that the files were posted! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35186050,"author":"follower","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Xiaomi has been in violation of GPL for years","text":"While I have briefly been to China I cannot claim particularly deep knowledge about Chinese culture, customs & values and thus prefer to turn to people with more knowledge & experience, such as a local: Based on this video by Naomi Wu (a.k.a RealSexyCyborg), it's certainly been possible to convince at least one Chinese company to fulfil its obligations under the GPL: * \"Getting GPLv2 Compliance From A Chinese Company- In Person!\": < [VIDEO] > Content Advisory: If you are an employee of YouTube.com the above video may be considered NSFW. (If your own cultural context means you feel compelled to comment on how Naomi chooses to present herself to the world, feel free to watch this explanatory video she has generously provided for your benefit: \"Why Do I Look Like...This? The SexyCyborg Origin Story\" < [LINK] >.)","stance":"rec"}],"VjE0Kdfos4Y":[{"hn_comment_id":12388077,"author":"paloaltokid","month":"2016-08","story_title":"The Greater Honeyguide, a Bird That Understands Humans","text":"Another amazing bird worth knowing about is the Lyrebird: [VIDEO] It copies not just the songs of other birds, but man-made sounds as well! Check out the link, it's mindblowing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14188559,"author":"coldsmoke","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Lyrebird \u2013 An API to copy the voice of anyone","text":"I guess they've named it that because the lyrebird is an amazing impersonator. The end of this BBC clip blew my mind the first time I saw it. [VIDEO] But you may have a point, and the ethics section makes it clear that they are indeed very aware of that this may be misused.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"Vjm8P8utT5g":[{"hn_comment_id":32635760,"author":"stepupmakeup","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Tetsuji: Remote Code Execution on a GameBoy Colour 22 Years Later","text":"One of the crazier uses of ACE in Gameboy Pokemon games exploits is this \"speedrun\", by MrWint: [VIDEO] ([TAS] Pok\u00e9mon Yellow - Arbitrary Code Execution) I've timestamped the part where the actual exploit begins, after all of thesetup. It's worth mentioning that this isn't faked or edited in any way, and it's possible to download the input data and replicate on a emulator yourself.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30216929,"author":"alexb_","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Accidentally Turing-Complete","text":"It mentions Pokemon Yellow, but really any code run isn't really \"run in the game\" more so that it uses bugs to hack together alternate instructions for the game boy to execute. Good example: [VIDEO] (skip to 1:20 for craziness)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40287980,"author":"Dwedit","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Hackers discover how to reprogram NES Tetris from within the game","text":"Sometimes even after you've come up with the exploit, you can create something really beautiful for the console to run afterwards. Pokemon Yellow: [VIDEO] Super Mario World: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45423374,"author":"alex-moon","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Bad Apple but it's played inside Super Mario Bros","text":"There is an amazing video of a similar exploit in Pok\u00e9mon Yellow where they basically run a bunch of different games: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VkIJbpdTujE":[{"hn_comment_id":40230704,"author":"ghostly_s","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Show HN: Maps and Splats \u2013 Mashup of 3D tile maps with Gaussian Splats","text":"Here's a much better explainer from some people who seem to actually understand the subject matter and not just the buzzwords (and yes, the end result is basically a highly-detailed point cloud): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42069541,"author":"yokto","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Show HN: SuperSplat \u2013 open-source 3D Gaussian Splat Editor","text":"Not a reading guide, but Computerphile have a good introductory video on Gaussian Splats: [VIDEO] Individualkex also has a couple videos on the high level ideas: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46677587,"author":"mxfh","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Gaussian Splatting \u2013 A$AP Rocky Helicopter Music Video","text":"You're on HN, not reddit. OP linked to a special interest blog, not an explainer piece. The burden to catch up here is on the reader. The search input is right at the bottom: [LINK] but start here: TUM AI Lecture Series - The 3D Gaussian Splatting Adventure: Past, Present, Futur (George Drettakis) [LINK] or here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VnbiVw_1FNs":[{"hn_comment_id":40468394,"author":"ska","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?","text":"> While they don't have the science/maths background that makes Lehrer an obvious win for the HN crowd, True, but they did one on thermodynamics [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40977236,"author":"robaato","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2011)","text":"The classic Flanders and Swann explanation: [VIDEO] Excerpts: No one can consider themsleves educated who doesn't understand the basic language of science - Boyle's law: the greater the external pressure the greater the volume of hot air. I was someone shocked to learn my partner not only doesn't understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics, he doesn't even understand the first! : Heat won't pass from the cooler to hotter! You can try it if you like but you'd far better notta! M: Heat is work and work's a curse M: And all the heat in the universe M: Is gonna cool down, M: 'Cos it can't increase M: Then there'll be no more work M: And there'll be perfect peace D: Really? M: Yeah, that's entropy, Man.","stance":"rec"}],"Vrq2akzdFq8":[{"hn_comment_id":17829243,"author":"reggieband","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Magic Leap One Teardown","text":"Worth watching Tested's review on youtube [VIDEO] I was expecting typical astroturfing and there is a bit of that. But they are also tempering expectations.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17860764,"author":"Ajedi32","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Magic Leap One now available for $2295","text":"Not many technical details from Magic Leap themselves, unfortunately. I'd recommend you check out the [Tested review][1] and [iFixit teardown][2]. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21726301,"author":"AndrewKemendo","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses","text":"There are plenty of independent videos available. Here's Tested's in-depth review from last year: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VscdPA6sUkc":[{"hn_comment_id":16690860,"author":"AndrewOMartin","month":"2018-03","story_title":"The original pitch for Diablo (1994) [pdf]","text":"Allow me to quote Diablo developer David Brevik describing when he finally yielded to demands and hacked together a \"real time\" version of his turn-based Diablo, by making turns elapse the rate of 20 turns a second. 'I remember taking the mouse, and I clicked on the mouse, and the warrior walked over and and smacked the skeleton down, and I was like \"Oh my god! That was awesome!\".' 'And the sun shone through the window, and God passed by, and the angels sung, and sure enough that was when the ARPG was kind of born at that moment, and I was lucky enough to be there.' [VIDEO] If you're in this part of this comment thread, you'll probably enjoy the whole video.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36816804,"author":"baristavibes","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Diablo","text":"This story and many others are captured really well in the Game Developer Conference (GDC) post-mortem talks, heartily recommended if you want to know about the human aspect behind game dev!! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16279801,"author":"doikor","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Diablo creator David Brevik is back with a new game: It Lurks Below","text":"Brevik was one of the founders Condor (Brevik was the president while the Schaefer brothers were vice-presidents) which later became Blizzard North when Blizzard bought them. The work on Diablo started before Blizzard bought them. He really was one of the \"creators\". IIRC they made the first Diablo game with a team of 15-20 people. In a team that small pretty much everyone is a \"game designer\" as in everyone wears many hats (especially the president of the company) If you are interested you really should check the postmortem from the GDC a few years back [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16690789,"author":"Reedx","month":"2018-03","story_title":"The original pitch for Diablo (1994) [pdf]","text":"David Brevik released that just after the Diablo postmortem from GDC a couple years ago: [VIDEO] Worth watching for any fans of the original and if you want more context around that pitch. Lots of interesting tidbits about the origins of Diablo and Blizzard North. And an amusing moment during the Q&A: Someone in the audience went up and gave David some money to make up for pirating the game when he was a kid.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17340611,"author":"oraknabo","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Diablo devolved \u2013 magic behind the 1996 computer game","text":"I was never a huge Diablo fan, but I could always appreciate the things people liked about it. I gained new respect for it from watching Brevik's GDC postmortem [0] from a couple of years ago. I love the idea that it was originally a dungeon crawl inspired by X-COM and would love to play one of the early builds before they changed to real-time combat. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17340615,"author":"Reedx","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Diablo devolved \u2013 magic behind the 1996 computer game","text":"For anyone interested in the history of Diablo, the GDC post mortem is well worth a watch: [VIDEO] Quite a bit of detail regarding the origin of the game, going turn-based to real-time, the studio becoming Blizzard North, etc. Also here's the original design doc: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23991009,"author":"wcarss","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The Secret Origin of the Action RPG","text":"Diablo was far from the first ARPG, but given how influential it has been for the genre, I was floored to learn that it was actually designed and implemented as a turn-based game, and only turned into an Action RPG by request of folks at the main Blizzard office. The founder of Blizzard North (David Brevik) thought it was a dumb idea, and only agreed to do it because it seemed like a large enough work item to justify requesting an additional budget milestone from Blizzard, which his office was hurting for sorely. Brevik then got it working over the course of roughly an afternoon, by just running the turn system automatically and responding to clicks a little differently. It was only after seeing the action-oriented click-walk-attack-click flow actually work for the first time that he realized: they'd struck gold. He told this story (and lots of others!) in a pretty excellent post mortem at GDC[1] a few years ago. 1 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26202781,"author":"somedude895","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Diablo II: Resurrected","text":"That's an interesting thought, but I'd assume 20 year old 3D models wouldn't be much use today, would they? I know they were thinking about making D2 a 3D game at first, like Runescape, but then went with 2D, because 3D technology wasn't at a point that allowed them to carry over the gritty and dark theme they wanted for Diablo. And then went on to make D3 look as cartoony as it does... They used photos of clay figurines for Diablo 1, would be fun if they remade that with 3D scanning techniques. Do check out David Brevik's post mortem on D1 from GDC by the way, it's fantastic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36349348,"author":"cpeterso","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Diablo Pitch Document (1994) [pdf]","text":"To find out what happened next, check out Diablo developer David Brevik\u2019s postmortem presentation at GDC 2016: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"VxINoKFm-S4":[{"hn_comment_id":33163210,"author":"adamgordonbell","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The Little Typer (2018)","text":"A very mind-blowing and challenging book about Types. The strange loop talk and my own interview of the authors might give some sense of what it's all about. There is also some interesting work online showing how the language used in the book can be created. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34457848,"author":"spelunker","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Idris: A Language for Type-Driven Development","text":"Here's an intro to dependent types from David Christiansen, I think it came up during another dependent types discussion: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"W1czBcnX1Ww":[{"hn_comment_id":730936,"author":"russell","month":"2009-07","story_title":"Toyota Humanoid Robot Runs At 7 Km/hr - Awesome Vid","text":"I thought Toyota was pretty good until I followed the link in the article to Big Dog. [VIDEO] Big Dog is truly awesome. It runs, jumps, recovers from slips, climbs over rubble, ...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":344129,"author":"lacker","month":"2008-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Awesome talks/video available online?","text":"Here's some specific suggestions. I was most recently fascinated by this video on head tracking \"virtual reality\". [LINK] Another cool thing if you're into DIY robots (not really educational, but I found it inspiring) is the Yellow Drum Machine. [LINK] Not sure why I got on the robot tangent but here's another good one, a 4-legged robot that's pretty good at navigating hills and obstacles. Especially the recovery from a fall sequence around 1:25. [VIDEO] And here is hacking the Wii Fit controller and a Roomba to do a sort of vacuum-by-surfing... thing? [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1372799,"author":"vitobcn","month":"2010-05","story_title":"The latest version of the LittleDog robot ","text":"I find amazing how difficult it is to successfully perform apparently trivial tasks such as walking. There's more information about the 'LittleDog' on the Boston Dynamics website: [LINK] I was really impressed 2 years ago by their video of the 'BigDog': [VIDEO] (check out t=40s)","stance":"rec"}],"W3aieHjyNvw":[{"hn_comment_id":23124662,"author":"DavidVoid","month":"2020-05","story_title":"PC games are fighting a new surge of cheaters and hackers","text":"Overwatch allows none of that and seems to have some pretty well-designed netcode. Clients only send their controller inputs and the server has full authority of what actually happens. Blizzard's GDC talk about it is really good if you want an explanation of how to make a game feel responsive and fair without giving clients authority over everything [1]. Ofc this does not eliminate aimbot or wallhacks, but it gets rid of pretty much all other forms of cheating. [1] [VIDEO] (Netcode talk starts at 22:22)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24532378,"author":"DecoPerson","month":"2020-09","story_title":"rg3d: Rust 3D game engine with an FPS demo game and scene editor","text":"Entities are a collection of component instances and nothing more. Components in ECS are data-only. Systems in ECS are logic-only. If you follow this strictly, then you cannot support encapsulation or data-hiding. There is no sole definition of OOP, but it is widely accepted that the ability to do encapsulation, including data-hiding, is a key part of OOP. Therefore, ECS is not OOP. QED If you\u2019ve not seen the Overwatch team\u2019s talk in which they discuss ECS, I can highly recommend it as a good resource to learn about ECS: [VIDEO] There may be models commonly used in those languages you mentioned that are similar to ECS, but you seem to be implying that ECS is a form of OOP; it is not. Even if you implemented OOP using Structs of Arrays, a thread per object, or whatever you like, you cannot strictly conform with ECS\u2019s requirement that \u201ccomponents have no logic\u201d while also strictly conforming with OOP\u2019s requirement that \u201cobjects should not know about each others\u2019 internals\u201d (object hierarchy).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25937558,"author":"nightski","month":"2021-01","story_title":"OO in Python is mostly pointless","text":"There is a fantastic GDC video about Blizzard's use of ECS in Overwatch and how it made it far easier to understand the system due to all of the interacting subsystems. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27664002,"author":"Bekwnn","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Data-oriented design or why you might shoot yourself in the foot with OOP (2009)","text":"> The components on the entity define not only it's data but also it's behavior by the set of systems that act on the corresponding components. And you can take these object definitions and inherit them to add additional behavior or change the existing behavior by adding more components to the new definition. This seems to miss what ECS actually is, unless you're just referring to the old-school way of doing entity components and not the data-oriented way. Data-oriented ECS way of doing things is to separate state and behaviour. Entity components essentially become structs where their only behaviour is potentially some getter/setter utilities. Behaviours are then state-less systems (just functions, essentially) which act on a set of components. For example, a PhysicsUpdateBehaviour might take in a RigidBodyComponent and a HealthComponent to perform a physics update and apply physics/fall based damage. The main benefit of ECS (imo) isn't even really performance. It makes code in complicated game projects much easier to manage by clarifying the game loop and by making it much more obvious how and when entity state is being modified. It's the kind of thing that potentially complicates a smaller project, but makes larger more complex projects easier to manage. This Overwatch GDC talk is the best breakdown/example of data-oriented ECS in a AAA game that I know of: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28456218,"author":"adampk","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Unity patents ECS","text":"[VIDEO] \"In this 2017 GDC session, Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains how Overwatch uses the Entity Component System (ECS) architecture to create a rich variety of layered gameplay.\" (My favorite resource to explain ECS + NetCode)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38730175,"author":"bcrosby95","month":"2023-12","story_title":"I'm open-sourcing my game engine","text":"There's an awesome talk by someone in the overwatch team in youtube. It's about ECS but it has a big section on networking that had some useful tips. Edit: here it is - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19587332,"author":"endgame","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Correctness \u2013 A paradigm for sustainable software development","text":"> running a simulation (what OOP was invented for) I used to believe that. I no longer do. Among other things, I watched this talk about Overwatch's architecture and it really seems like you have to go against your OO instincts to create larger simulations: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23130670,"author":"mtsr","month":"2020-05","story_title":"EnTT: Gaming meets Modern C++","text":"Since you generally want to keep a set number of time steps the commonly used data structure for this is a ring buffer. No garbage and all you do is increment the index (with wraparound) every step. Not a lot of technical details, but this video has a great general overview [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23370065,"author":"Mirioron","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Show HN: Unity MMORPG Boilerplate \u2013 Multiplayer in Unity Made Easy","text":"The important two points are that the client must react immediately to a user's input, but at the same time the server has to have the authoritative game state. One way of doing that is that the server runs the authoritative simulation and the clients send input to the server, but the clients also run their own simulations. In some games the client will try to predict what the server will do. If there's a conflict with what the client simulates compared to the server then the client gets rolled back to the server's state. This usually happens when there's a second player that interferes in some way. Here is a talk by Timothy Ford about Overwatch's netcode (it's really fascinating): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23881089,"author":"rcxdude","month":"2020-07","story_title":"How do I design a game from scratch? A primer on core loops","text":"Here's an interesting presentation on Overwatch's ECS system, though he doesn't go into great detail in terms of multithreading, he points out how the design makes it easy to identify what parts of the system can be safely run in parallel. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24510039,"author":"nikki93","month":"2020-09","story_title":"An Introduction to Data Oriented Design with Rust","text":"[VIDEO] I think this talk on how an ECS actually reduced coupling in the case of Overwatch would be a good concrete real world example to look at. It enabled some architectural benefits for implementing replay cameras or for networking code in their game through actual reduced coupling between input ->commands and commands->simulation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26161390,"author":"milesvp","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Functorio","text":"Your comment made me feel compelled to mention a Blizzard talk I came across recently on the ECS (Entity Component System) architecture they used for Overwatch. It looks suspiciously like a function first architecture in that they don't allow mixing of data and functions. I'm not sure how purely functional it is, but it certainly strikes me as the kind of architecture that Carmack would appreciate in dealing with complexities that lead him to a more functional programming style. This talk is 3 years after release, and includes all the hindsight they gained from that. Also, the parts talking about the netcode are quite amazing, and the precision of their predictors that they attribute to using ECS. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26276468,"author":"mathgladiator","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The future of web software is HTML over WebSockets","text":"This is a next step for my project as I'm trying to figure out how to generalize client side predictions in a sane way. Basically, I'm happy with my latency (for board games) which I hope to migrate closer to people as more edge compute offerings emerge. However, I'm wondering what the path is to find some of these ideas in more latency sensitive applications. The explanation for how the net-code behind Overwatch is a good explanation: [VIDEO] and I'm just trying to figure out how to build the reactive tree in a way to support it sanely.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26286841,"author":"jonhermansen","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Why isn't Godot an ECS-based game engine?","text":"For anyone curious to know more about usage of ECS in Overwatch, check out this GDC talk from one of the developers: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28449020,"author":"Rd6n6","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Unity patents ECS","text":"Isn\u2019t there a ton of prior art? I\u2019ve seen tech talks about ecs implementations for years. From the top of my head, here\u2019s a great tech talk about overwatch. [VIDEO] Here\u2019s a tech talk by Bob Nystrom (the game programming patterns guy) that mentions ecs from years ago [LINK] Edit: letsInvalid in another thread above linked to an article from 2013: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46053025,"author":"dkbrk","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing","text":"Have you seen the presentation from GDC 2017 on the architecture of Overwatch [0]? If you watch the video in detail -- stepping through frame-by-frame at some points -- it provides a nearly complete schematic of the game's architecture. That's probably why the video has since been made unlisted. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"W4SxKWwFhA0":[{"hn_comment_id":33512288,"author":"hopfog","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Early stages of Google Docs support in the Ladybird browser","text":"I love Andreas Kling's \"Browser hacking\" series on YouTube where he fixes various issues Ladybird has with specific websites. E.g: Fixing a CSS layout bug found by chessboard.js - [LINK] Let's make \"Cookie Clicker\" playable in Ladybird! - [VIDEO] He's very good at articulating his thought progress and it's always really interesting to see how he reduces the bug down into a minimal reproducible example.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35522475,"author":"jonhermansen","month":"2023-04","story_title":"We're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible","text":"Of course you are correct that supporting Twitter or any service is a moving target, so long as it changes. But that doesn't mean specific bugs can't be captured in a test case. Watch this video of Andreas doing exactly this, albeit for a simpler web app [VIDEO] At one point, he deletes half the HTML file to isolate where in the site the problematic code is. In a way doing a kind of binary search. After a few iterations of this, he comes up with a very small case that exhibits the problem he's trying to solve. It's clear he knows his way around the codebase and where to make changes, but isolating these test cases is probably as important. And presumably if you fixed enough of these issues (while following the specs), 99% of the modern web should work just fine.","stance":"rec"}],"W6aKQ-eBFk0":[{"hn_comment_id":34765783,"author":"shmerl","month":"2023-02","story_title":"PC CPU Shipments See Steepest Decline in 30 Years","text":"> Add to all of that, this latest batch of CPUs are just stupid power hungry - like 240w+ under load Eco mode is a thing for AMD CPUs. There is no point really in not using it by default - benefits are very marginal with power cost being disproportionally huge. And AMD are doing it more for marketing reasons to gain some single digit percentages in benchmarks. So just enable it and enjoy way more reasonable and efficient power usage with basically almost the same performance. See some details here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37981179,"author":"protastus","month":"2023-10","story_title":"First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel","text":"I have a 16-core Ryzen 7950X that I run in \"eco mode 105W\". This delivers performance close to an Intel 13900K but at less than half the power. It's also much easier to cool and get a quiet PC without water cooling and enthusiast shenanigans (de-lidding, etc.) I don't know if the Zen 4 Threadrippers can be similarly run with a power limit. If they can, I'd expect much better efficiency than whatever Intel offers. This has eco mode benchmarks: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37987084,"author":"mrbigbob","month":"2023-10","story_title":"First 96-Core AMD Zen 4 Threadripper Tests Show Utter Domination over Intel","text":"Yeah I am definitely not a fan of Intel/AMD/and even Nvidia who will completely push power to stupid levels just to get less than an extra 10% performance Gamers Nexus did a video earlier this year comparing the 7950x at different eco modes and they found that putting the 7950x at a 105 watt eco made drop the performance around 5% but shaved almost 100 watts off of power. heres the link to the video [VIDEO] I know why these companies do it and im lucky electricity isnt too expensive in my area but i rather shave 100 + watts of heat being dumped into my room (especially in the summer months)","stance":"rec"}],"W71BTkUbdqE":[{"hn_comment_id":12189292,"author":"twotwotwo","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Go Packaging Proposal Process","text":"It's common practice for folks building Go binaries (but not libraries) to check in the code for their dependencies. So whenever you build Docker, you get the same thing unless Docker made a change (either by changing Docker itself or explicitly checking in an upgrade to a dep). There are a few nice things about it; vendoring means you won't have a dependency on other repos or archives being available, and if you're a binary maintainer you can see source changes in your own code and that of your dependencies side-by-side if you're, say, investigating a bug that came up between certain revisions. The not-so-nice things are pretty much what you'd think. There isn't a command to say \"give me upgrades, but not ones that the author flagged as breaking changes\". If you're writing a _library_ that is depended on by other _libraries_ there is no one conventional way to safely do breaking changes, so there's a lot of effort to avoid those changes plus sometimes hacks like different repo paths for different versions. Part of the history is that, internally, Google's got one version of third-party code in the latest rev of their source control tree, by company policy. You upgrade something for one, you upgrade it for the whole codebase. Sounds daunting, but they have lots of testing, canary servers, and so on to catch problems. There is a great talk about some of this by Rachel Potvin (can't recall if it covers the third_party/ stuff specifically): [VIDEO] So Go's initial model didn't c","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13514652,"author":"kyrra","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Trunk-Based Development","text":"Google doesn't use perforce anymore. They have a custom in-house SCM that has various interfaces wrapped around it. I'd recommend this video that describes it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31292094,"author":"kyrra","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Google is 2B lines of code and it's all in one place (2015)","text":"Googler opinions are my own. I also highly recommend this ACM article talking about our source control from 2016. [LINK] There's also a YouTube video which is linked from the wired article that is good. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"W88Sact1kws":[{"hn_comment_id":38777101,"author":"sakopov","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Colorado wolf reintroduction to move forward","text":"Seems most fitting than ever to post this. How wolves change rivers is probably one of the most fascinating videos on YouTube [1] 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44702532,"author":"thangalin","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees","text":"[VIDEO] \"Embark on a journey to Yellowstone, where a few wolves did not just roam, but rewrote the rules of an entire ecosystem. Discover how these majestic predators triggered a cascade of life, transforming not only the park's wildlife but its very rivers and landscapes. It's a story of how nature's architects can reshape our world in ways we never imagined.\"","stance":"rec"}],"WB2-2j9e4co":[{"hn_comment_id":20246851,"author":"cwkoss","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Swedish Couple Builds Greenhouse Around Home","text":"I can't recommend Kirsten Dirksen's channel enough to people interested in architecture, energy efficiency, tiny homes, 'green' construction, etc. Literally hundreds of hours of high-quality content - I'm really curious how she is able to find all of these interesting people who are doing such cool things. Channel: [LINK] Some other favorites: Baubotanik shapes living tree branches into building facades - [LINK] Boeing retiree finds meaning inventing micro homes & high speed trikes - [LINK] Extreme transformer home in Hong Kong: Gary Chang's 24 rooms in 1 - [VIDEO] Earth-cooled, shipping container underground CA home for 30K - [LINK] Yokohama narrow tiny house \"breathes\" & attracts local nature - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40360548,"author":"Pet_Ant","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Ford trims EV battery orders as losses swell to over $100k per electric car","text":"> The environment is a nice side effect. So you don't really care about the environment, not really strongly at least, at least you are honest about it. I respect that. > why not just take the bus? I do take the bus, and have resisted getting a car, managing with Uber Green when necessary. > why not just walk? I do when I can, it's not practical for time and/or safety reasons, but it is ideal. > Don't buy a house because it's an inefficient waste of space, resources, and energy. This!!! God are single family dwellings the worst blight on the earth. They just shit suburban sprawl on the green earth. So much waste. Don't get my started on lawns. No reuse of infrastructure for heating or cooling. Just bad. > Live in a studio apartment under 300sq ft, enough for a bed and a desk. Actually this is just under 350 sq ft and just beautiful and luxurious: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WDIkqP4JbkE":[{"hn_comment_id":18217862,"author":"drainyard","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Two of my favorites: code::dive conference 2014 - Scott Meyers: Cpu Caches and Why You Care: [VIDEO] CppCon 2014: Mike Acton \"Data-Oriented Design and C++\": [LINK] They're mostly about C++ and cache aware/data oriented programming.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16751177,"author":"jimmy1","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Intel brings a six-core i9 CPU to laptops","text":"Here is a good visualization on access speeds for each level of cache, then main memory. Now take the main memory access time and essentially double it (for your state of the art SSD's today) and that's the access speed. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35738297,"author":"coppsilgold","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Beautiful branchless binary search","text":"Cache associativity, conflict miss. You have too many memory addresses mapping to the same cache lines all being used together at the same time. Scott Meyers had a very good talk which contained this information: < [VIDEO] >","stance":"rec"}],"WEDIj9JBTC8":[{"hn_comment_id":23953443,"author":"amix","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance?","text":"William Ackman: Everything You Need to Know About Finance and Investing in Under an Hour [VIDEO] \u2014 An excellent crash course for the most critical concepts.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10020780,"author":"kleer001","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you day trade in stock market? What are your investing strategies?","text":"tl;dr Know what you're buying, know your risk threshold, hold it as long as you can, invest frequently. It's going to sound like a stale and naive quip but buy low and sell high. I look for deals. Sometimes that's an IPO with a nice finance sheet. Sometimes it's a huge correction on a popular mega-corporation. Weather you're a value investor or a growth investor the goal is profit, right? What works for me is knowing what I'm investing in. I'm familiar with the products or services. It's a fun topic. There's lots to read out there. Sturgeons Law holds in full effect. 90% of all of it is total crap. All you need is probably at your local library. Here's some homework. Look up these terms: dead cat bounce, double top, exponential moving average, don't fight the tape, upgrades, channel, channel up, channel down, wedge, triangle, insider selling, dividends, oversold, ticker, forex, a falling knife has no handle, FUD, Irrational exuberance... fun time 45 min talk on the basics: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22867138,"author":"ipnon","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are you reading to make sense of the economy?","text":"A great follow up in the \"New York billionaires explain basics of the economy\" curriculum: William Ackman: Everything You Need to Know About Finance and Investing in Under an Hour | Big Think [0] Covers the money making, Wall Street side [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WFCvkkDSfIU":[{"hn_comment_id":15535213,"author":"joering2","month":"2017-10","story_title":"No human genome has ever been completely sequenced","text":"Slightly off-topic, but this semi-animation of DNA replication machine that is working right now in your body (in amounts of trillions of devices) blew my mind few months ago. from TED: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39552315,"author":"benjismith","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Rendering protein structures inside cells at the atomic level with Unreal Engine","text":"This reminds me of the amazing molecular animations of Drew Berry, which he showed in this TED talk: [VIDEO] Which was 12 years ago! After watching that video, I had a much greater appreciation for how our bodies are made up of trillions of tiny protein machines. Fascinating stuff!!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13621008,"author":"nol13","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Why Do DMT Users See Insects from a Parallel Universe?","text":"[VIDEO] ^My favorite way I've seen it described, and also a really cool video even without the subtext. (but ya this is one rabbit hole that I've yet to travel down. guess i took the blue pill, but more pills just seemed unnecessary at the time)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14595424,"author":"nom","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Close-Up View of DNA Replication","text":"If you liked this video, also check out this one: Inner Life of the Cell [LINK] And here's a nice TED talk by Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology [VIDEO] These kind of visualizations are of course an idealized view on how it works. As others have already mentioned, the processes are hugely chaotic and much more probabilistic than deterministic. On this scale everything is just one huge wobbling soup of things crashing into each other, which makes it even more fascinating that it works as well as it does.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16983757,"author":"discrisknbisque","month":"2018-05","story_title":"The life cycle of HIV in 3D [video]","text":"Drew Berry creates similar animations and refers to them (in this talk) as \"accurate representations\", but doesn't go into much detail. Interesting history in the beginning as well. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32613271,"author":"Darkskynet","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?","text":"On the topic of 'scientifically accurate animations of biological processes'. You may know of these videos, but I thought these might be worth sharing for others interested in this topic: Here is a TEDTalk by Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology. (uploaded in 2012) [VIDEO] Here is also a more recent video by Veritasium on YT that also talks about these animations. (uploaded in 2017) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44634117,"author":"Zealotux","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Super-resolution microscopes reveal new details of cells and disease","text":"Sorry for being a bit off-topic. Biology wasn't my forte in high school, I wish I had read this article back then [LINK] and seen that video (9:08 min) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WHj2GaPuEhY":[{"hn_comment_id":7464182,"author":"vishnugupta","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Facebook Refused No-Poaching Agreement With Google","text":"This has been the case with several industries (manufacture, service to name a couple) ever since the capital was globalized beginning from late 80's. The difference is that the collusion is a part of some trade agreement (GATT etc.,) where labor movement between nations is severely restricted or banned altogether and capital movement is encouraged in the name of liberalization! This has resulted in industries being shut down at a massive scale in US where labor costs are higher and moved to a country where labor is cheap (China, India and so on) and also less regulated (\"flexible\" is the word used). As a bonus companies get to flout just about every environmental regulation which are non-existent in third world countries (think Bangladesh's textile manufacturing plants producing for luxury brands). The net result of this combination of \"free capital movement + restricted labor movement\" is reduced wages across nations and industries. And over the time you end up having no skilled labor in a company's nation of incorporation (Apple?). The supreme irony I see here is that the advocates of \"free market\" for capital tend to advance amazingly absurd arguments when it comes to having a similar free market for labor. I highly recommend watching this talk by Noam Chomsky titled \"Free Markets?\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20697219,"author":"monster99","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Amazon wants to control third-party sellers\u2019 product pricing","text":"I don't believe in the ideologies of the time, call me a doubting thomas that the human race is actually intelligent. I know too much about how human beings and corporations actually function to believe in free market mythology. See here for if you want more acedemic take: [VIDEO] There are all sorts of things wrong in reality with how capitalism actually functions. The reality is most people are too irrational and too stupid for any market to function as a \"market\". The videogame \"market\" is a perfect example. For the first 20-30 years of PC game history, we were getting good software for a fair price. Then the masses got internet and shit went sideways. AKA people started buying software they didn't own, nor control, giving super powers to corporations to extort them and engage in all sorts of abusive practices and raise prices astronically because the internet now gave them access to people with addictive tendencies and impulse control problems 24/7 and in order to gather the worlds evolutionary unlucky regarding gambling addiction all games now have microtransactions. I watched my hobby be destroyed, my software robbed and my os infested with dishonest code because stupid got internet. Before the internet Microsoft and game companies had no incentive undermine software ownership because it was impossible to do so. The market for videogames today is a market for lemons, a total shit show of broken games, stolen games, etc. Because a rational game buyer would never buy a pi","stance":"rec"}],"WITLR_qSPXk":[{"hn_comment_id":31478682,"author":"traceroute66","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Before Ships Used GPS, There Was the Fresnel Lens","text":"> GPS is an adjunct to navaids and charting. Indeed. For all the millennial kids on here, there's a famous American Airlines lecture called \"Children of the Magenta Line\", it's doing the rounds on YouTube[1]. Boaters should adopt the same mentality. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43058669,"author":"scottlamb","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Did Semgrep Just Get a Lot More Interesting?","text":"> Over and over again I have witnessed people just drive themselves in circles downstream of a refusal to just step out of the \u201cmake the LLM fix the issue for me\u201d loop. You're reminding me of a 1997 talk by an American Airlines trainer about automation dependency and when dropping down a level of automation reduces workload: < [VIDEO] >","stance":"rec"}],"WIyTZDHuarQ":[{"hn_comment_id":12895722,"author":"lisivka","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Close to absolute zero, particles exhibit their quantum nature","text":"I highly recommend to watch this video first: [LINK] , to get the idea. Then this: [VIDEO] , for explanation. No need to read long books.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13157753,"author":"DiThi","month":"2016-12","story_title":"The \u201cdead and alive\u201d cat myth","text":"A bit unrelated, but there's a possibility that quantum mechanics are not exactly probabilistic and that they're actually deterministic, while still being compatible with observed quantum phenomena. This video explains it well [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17642759,"author":"rimher","month":"2018-07","story_title":"David Bohm, Quantum Mechanics and Enlightenment","text":"Great video that showcases the Pilot Wave idea: [VIDEO] I really do hope that we can find a way to make sense of everything in Physics, but Bohm's description of the infinite in the article is rather fascinating. Maybe there's no way out after all","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18269477,"author":"garfieldnate","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Interpretations of quantum mechanics","text":"I found this while following up on an excellent pilot wave (de Broglie-Bohm) theory video by Veritasium[1]. I never knew there were so many interpretations! 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WMSBRk5WG58":[{"hn_comment_id":33192552,"author":"coley","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Anatomy of Linux Dynamic Libraries","text":"The first time I learned about dynamic loading was while watching an episode of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero - a series where he builds a video game, in C, from scratch. He compiles the game code as a dll and dynamically loads it at runtime in the Win32 platform layer code. This way he can keep platform code and game code separate and reload the game code at runtime if any changes are made. Being new to this technique, I was impressed to say the least. I always assumed the same functionality was available in the linux environment, but I hadn't bothered to look it up. Now I know. For those who want to learn how to do this in Win32, here's the episode I mentioned above - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38858187,"author":"kleiba","month":"2024-01","story_title":"C and C++ Hot-Reload/Live Coding","text":"In one of the earlier episodes of the Handmade Hero series, Casey Muratori writes a hot-reloading functionality for C from scratch in about an hour (while giving detailed explanations of what he's doing). The following two episodes then improve upon the initial results. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WNWYk4DdT_E":[{"hn_comment_id":33052916,"author":"sixQuarks","month":"2022-10","story_title":"My reaction to the Tesla robot after working on robots for a decade","text":"So it remains to be see if its a genius move from Musk, or if traditional spot welded designs are in fact the better approach. Fair enough. There is a chance it may not work as they planned, but the fact that they are buying more gigapresses tells me they are confident they will get it to work. Munro and associates did a couple of videos on gigcasting. They did talk about what happens in crashes and did not see it as a major concern. Munro is universally recognized as the leading experts in automotive manufacturing. link to video where they talk about cracking the gigacast and why it doesn't matter: [VIDEO] Watch the full episodes here: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38448265,"author":"verdverm","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Cybertruck Is Already a Production Nightmare for Tesla","text":"Yet Tesla has tried different things and now we see the larger auto industry singing a new tune. The most visible example of this is the GigaCast. The Old Auto companies never thought this was a viable path until Tesla showed how superior it actually is. [VIDEO] Sandy Munro is a leading expert in the auto industry, tears down all the vehicles and consults with all the major manufactures. He has many great videos on the trends. One thing he consistently points out is how adverse \"old auto\" is to new ideas or change of any kind, that they don't know how to innovate","stance":"rec"}],"WO2X3oZEJOA":[{"hn_comment_id":35460269,"author":"non-","month":"2023-04","story_title":"OpenAI Tokenizer","text":"I found this tool recently when it was linked from this Computerphile video[1] about \"glitch tokens\". tldw: Certain junk data was thrown out post-tokenization e.g. the /r/counting[2] community data and debug logs from Rocket League some tokens specific to those contexts stuck around, however, and are now like \"a color you've never seen before\" as far as GPT-X models are concerned giving the model one of these \"glitch\" tokens causes it to kind of freak out and return gibberish or some completely random response because it has not encountered them during training, because they were removed when the data was cleaned. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36250954,"author":"weinzierl","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Understanding GPT Tokenizers","text":"Computerphile has an interesting video about Glitch Tokens, but as it goes with Computerphile videos it's also a good introduction to the topic. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WRdJCFEqFTU":[{"hn_comment_id":24348527,"author":"miketery","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Mind Emulation Foundation","text":"The best I've seen the topic of mind and computation bridged and well communicated has been by Joscha Bach. Recommend watching this video on Computational Meta-Psychology [1]. Also his 3 hour conversation with Lex Fridman is a whole other amazing rabbit hole [2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23925091,"author":"maze-le","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality [video]","text":"He is definitely one of the most interesting people to listen to when it comes to AI, Intelligence and Philosophy. I've seen him in Leipzig on CCC events in the past, here are some of his other talks: * Computational Meta-Intelligence (32C3): [VIDEO] * Machine Dreams (33C3): [LINK] * The Ghost in the Machine (35C3): [LINK] He also did a very interesting podcast episode with Fefe and Frank from alternativlos! (in German): [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"WTYet-qf1jo":[{"hn_comment_id":4980598,"author":"mtgx","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Fujitsu Not Pleased With Windows 8 Demand, Either","text":"No, you feel that way because that's actually how it is. This guy described a lot of the problems with Windows 8 and he is pretty spot on (although he does exaggerate a bit in some cases): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4993106,"author":"mtgx","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Windows 8 proving less popular than Vista","text":"Microsoft made a mistake trying to force a made-for-touch interface on PC users, and in the end the strategy is not that different than forcing a PC interface on a touch device. It may actually be worse, because at least in that case you would be familiar with the interface, so at least it would have that advantage. I think this video explains most of the problems with Windows 8: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6389669,"author":"Karunamon","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Windows 8.1\u2019s user-hostile backup story","text":">unattractive, resource-intensive, usability damaging Subjective, compared to what, subjective > simple, efficient, usable flat design is in. subjective, subjective, subjective. I don't know where this utterly moronic \"flatten ALL THE THINGS\" design meme comes from, but I wish it would die in a fire. Flat UI, at least Microsoft's implementation of it, has a great deal of fail about it. It's hard to tell what's clickable and what's not, things are not organized in a logical or easy to reach manner, and on and on. Have a look at this if you have about 20 minutes to spare. Someone goes into a great deal of depth on the 8 UX: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9521739,"author":"bad_user","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Microsoft to stop producing Windows versions","text":"I'm an Ubuntu Linux and OS X user and have been trying to like Windows 8.1 in the last weeks. The problems I have in no particular order ... - network management in Windows 7 was usable, whereas in 8.1 it is totally fucked - Microsoft accounts are on their way to become mandatory, as creating a regular account is not user friendly and there's a big and scary warning when you go that route; they are basically trying to resurrect Windows Live ID - Microsoft has started to force people on using their products - I could not figure out a way to turn OneDrive off completely, or to use anything other than Bing as the search engine in their \"Search Everywhere\" (this also happens on Windows Phone) - I haven't seen a \"modern Windows\" app that I like, they are all pieces of crap, including stuff from Microsoft; modern Skype for example is lacking crucial functionality; their app store is filled with trademark-violating malware and I've never seen such a low quality app store - from a usability perspective Windows 8 is a failure - there's something inherently different about a PC with 21 inch monitors, keyboard and mouse, versus a tablet, yet Windows tries to unify both worlds, becoming hostile in the process - see this funny video on the subject - [VIDEO] - of course, you can totally ignore the \"modern Windows\" side of the coin for now, except that's where Windows is headed - I bought the standard edition, then I discovered that I needed the Pro version to get disk encryption or to conn","stance":"rec"}],"WU0gvPcc3jQ":[{"hn_comment_id":29537211,"author":"acomjean","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The Matrix Is Unreal","text":"It the demo video (play through) they say it was rendered in real time right at the beginning. Also down in the corner which console its being rendered on,shows up from time to time. so I\u2019m assuming it\u2019s not faked. It looks quite good. Not reality but the cityscape is pretty close.. The fun part is the end where they show the some of the secret sauce of how it was rendered. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29755997,"author":"Animats","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Finding your home in game graphics programming","text":"No, but it is a full time job. It's getting much more complicated. Here's an hour long talk on how Unreal Engine 5's Nanite works.[1] This is a huge breakthrough in level of detail theory. Things that used to be O(N) are now O(1). With enough pre-computation, rendering cost does not go up with scene size. See this demo.[2] You can download the demo for Xbox X/S and PlayStation 5, and soon, in source form for PCs. Explore 16 square kilometers of photorealistic city in which you can see a close-up view of anything. The format of assets in memory for Nanite becomes far more complicated. GPUs need a redesign again; UE5 has to do more of the rendering on the CPUs than they'd like. What they need to do is simple but not well suited to current GPU designs. It's such a huge win this approach will take over, despite that. New game engines will need to have something comparable. Maybe using the same format. Epic doesn't seem to be making patent claims, and the code for all this is in the Unreal Engine 5 download. (Basic concept of how this works: A mesh becomes a hierarchy of meshes, allowing zoom in and out of on level of detail. The approach to subdivision is seamless. You divide the mesh into cells of about 20 triangles. Then, each cell is cut by one or two new long edges across the cell. These become the boundaries of a simpler cell with about half as many triangles, but no new vertices. The lower-resolution cell has no more edges than the higher-resolution cell. There's a neat gra","stance":"rec"}],"WUvTyaaNkzM":[{"hn_comment_id":17104895,"author":"willurd","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I learn math/physics in my thirties?","text":"Grant (the 3Blue1Brown guy) has an uncanny ability to explain difficult concepts and the fundamental intuition behind them. In many of his videos, he explains topics from the perspective of a person inventing that topic (such as in his first Calculus video [1]). I can't recommend his videos enough. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20434472,"author":"gibsonf1","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Calculus for Beginners and Artists (2003)","text":"I know of no better way to both learn, truly understand, and enjoy calculus than the visual approach of 3Blue1Brown in the Calculus series of videos: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36358316,"author":"tstrimple","month":"2023-06","story_title":"What I Learned from Two Years of Teaching High School CS","text":"I took all the advanced math classes available to me in high school. This was despite me hating school and being a terrible student. But I enjoyed math as puzzles to solve. This was until I got into calculus. The teacher didn't have a strong grasp of the subject and more importantly it was just memorizing calculus formulas instead of understanding any sort of real-world application. In contrast, my AdMatics (advanced math and physics) class had us doing real-world physics based experiments. The application of the tools was immediately obvious. If I had a calculus lesson that broke down the problem space like this ( [VIDEO] ) I probably wouldn't have stopped my formal education in math at that point. When I discovered that video, all the formulas they tried to make me memorize started making a LOT more sense.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14589154,"author":"hatsunearu","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Georgia Tech's free math textbook collective","text":"[VIDEO] check out this series (he also has a really good one on linear algebra) After that, I'd check out Khan academy.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16562324,"author":"hiaux0","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How to self-learn math?","text":"+1 And definitely follow through his \"pause and ponder\" sections. If you want to build up your maths skills, it is crucial to learn how to think in the maths way. Like becoming a good programmer involves writing lots of code yourself, or to become a good dancer you need to practice your steps. For maths it's abstract thinking. Appreciation of maths is one thing, having the discipline to self-study a whole other. Edit. Regarding your 2nd Edit: His videos are made for the broadest audience possible. I'd recommend picking any video whose topic interests you the most at the moment. You will see what knowledge you lack (take notes of these!) and can expand from there. Be it to watch his maths fundamental ((1)) series [0],[1] or just rewatch. ((1)): As in any other things, knowing your fundamentals is significant to the understanding of a topic. It won't help you at all if you can apply (copy paste) some machine learning techniques if you don't know about linear algebra at all. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20572616,"author":"kebman","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Math Basics for Computer Science and Machine Learning [pdf]","text":"Well, there's always 3Blue1Brown: [LINK] Take a look at his course, Essence of Calculus: [VIDEO] I'm not fluent in math, but I find it fascinating to watch, for some reason. NancyPi is also great: [LINK] Oh, and don't forget the Mathologer: [LINK] What a great guy! While I'm at it, go watch Numberphile too: [LINK] Is there anyone I forgot? :D","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24828594,"author":"jlos","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Euler's Formula: A Complete Guide","text":"To answer your main question - \"what level of maths\" do you need is more about what topics: a couple introductory classes in Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Discrete Mathematics will make that sentence understandable. I'll give some definitions and resources, but think about how you would explain multiplication/division/algebra to a kid. At some point, you just have to work through some problems and the math just makes sense. So I'll explain the terms above, but best bet is to just take a few courses on the topics I mentioned above. Quick definitions: - Exponential: is the constant e to the power of some number. e, like pi, is a ubitiqous constant in mathematics and nature. You run into pi when doing geometry, and e when doing calculus. - A function in mathematics is similar to a function in programming, but not exactly. A course in Discrete Mathematics helps here. - F-apostrophe is notation used in calculus to show the relation of one type of function, called a derivative to another. f and f' are related. How, though, is better explained by taking calculus. - An eigenfunction exists in a system of equations. Think of it like a 'balance' point. Linear Algebra will help make sense of this term. Resources - Essence of Calculus: [VIDEO] - Essence of Linear Algebra: [LINK] Those 2 video's will do a good job of giving you the 'intuition' behind Calculus and Linear Algebra. Like programming, though, you just have to actually work some problems out by hand for the stuff to sink in. Fo","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27995024,"author":"loftyal","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Calculus Made Easy (1910)","text":"I would recommend watching 3Blue1Bown series on calculus. Its very easy to understand and somes with some great visuals. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36690129,"author":"yCombLinks","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Proof You Can Do Hard Things","text":"Khan Academy is great, but there are also an incredible number of great youtube videos. I would watch this 3blue1brown video to see if you like his style : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44975521,"author":"inetknght","month":"2025-08","story_title":"AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'","text":"> This was boring to most students as they had no clue why the formalism was invented in the first place. > The history of how concepts were invented for the problems faced is far more motivating to students to build a mental model than canned capsules of knowledge. That's something I really like about 3blue1brown, and he says it straight up [0]: > My goal is for you to come away feeling like you could have invented calculus yourself. That is, cover all those core ideas, but in a way that makes clear where they actually come from, and what they really mean, using an all-around visual approach. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WVDQEoe6ZWY":[{"hn_comment_id":26897378,"author":"katbyte","month":"2021-04","story_title":"SponsorBlock \u2013 Skip over sponsorship segments on YouTube","text":"I feel like if someone is hawking wares on their channel they should at least use it/have faith in it/do their research. Tom Scott has a great video about VPN sponsorship and how he turned down a sponsorship from a VPN company because of the copy they wanted him to say and debunks the ads: [VIDEO] Mad respect for him, and if he ever suggest a paid product in the future i'd trust him. Conversely i really dislike when they clearly don't use the product, or are shilling a product that i KNOW is bad - looking at you raycons. I can't help but lose respect and definitely distrust every sponsorship they have. tl;dr integrity matters, raycons are really not that great, and i'm tired of hearing the same copy over and over: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37584764,"author":"jjice","month":"2023-09","story_title":"We have successfully completed our migration to RAM-only VPN infrastructure","text":"> Some pour thousands of dollars into forcing influencers to say they care about security, Tangential to this, it always irks me how they talk about how they all act as if the majority of the websites their users are going to aren't HTTPS and they act like their main benefits are filling in the gaps that HTTPS actually fills in. HTTPS isn't a cure all by any means but most of the scare tactics that the big VPN companies that advertise via YouTube act like anyone will rip you credit card because you happened to be on Amazon while you were at the coffee shop. Tom Scott is the only person I've ever seen have a great video about this [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21665454,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2019-11","story_title":"How Is NordVPN Unblocking Disney+?","text":"> * Seriously creepy stuff. I hate how VPNs are being shilled by e-celebs these days as a privacy improvement.* You may enjoy Tom Scott's video: > I tried to write a more honest VPN commercial. The sponsor wasn't happy about it. \u2022 Get \u25a0\u25a0\u25a0 days of \u25a0\u25a0\u25a0 VPN free at \u25a0\u25a0\u25a0\u25a0.com/honest * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22125694,"author":"jlgaddis","month":"2020-01","story_title":"U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism","text":"Tom Scott recently made an video [0] you might be interested in. It's well worth the seven and a half minutes to watch it, IMO. > I tried to write a more honest VPN commercial. The sponsor wasn't happy about it. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26651600,"author":"Deathmax","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Latest Mozilla VPN features","text":"Unfortunately as GP has mentioned, advertising around these typical VPN companies (Nord, Proton, ExpressVPN, Surfshark and many more) tends to be very misleading. Tom Scott put out a good video[1] that tries to debunk various marketing claims. Sure there are use cases like getting around georestrictions, and like you mentioned you can use it to get around tracking. Except that for privacy and evading tracking you need more than just a VPN, you need to be doing things like adblocking, tracker blocking, clearing all of your cookies, not signing in to anything because then the service gets to link your new VPN IP with you again. VPN ads that sell \"privacy\" is snake oil unless it is paired with a guide on the additional things you should be doing. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27789795,"author":"SahAssar","month":"2021-07","story_title":"VPN \u2013 A Very Precarious Narrative","text":"I think that this tom scott video summarizes the same sentiment nicely, especially around the VPN ads on youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32841905,"author":"rchowe","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Why is every podcast sponsored by a VPN company?","text":"... and a lot of those VPN companies are probably VC-funded. Tom Scott made a good video on the uses and non-uses of VPNs [1]. VPN advertising has changed since that video to downplay \"security\", but what I think is odd is that they've replaced that with advertisement that basically is \"violate the terms of service of Netflix\". [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40582773,"author":"fellerts","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Google to shut down Google One VPN on June 20","text":"Can you fault them when that's what NordVPN and others claim in their YouTube ads? Tom Scott said it better than I could: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41243651,"author":"voidUpdate","month":"2024-08","story_title":"SponsorBlock \u2013 skip sponsor segments on YouTube","text":"The thing about nordVPN (and VPN services in general) is they always talk about how funneling all your traffic through them makes it more secure and it means that governments cant spy on you and whatever. But sending all your traffic through a single point of failure seems like a bad idea from a government protection view, and how is it any more secure than https? The only thing that I've seen it be good for is making it look like you're from somewhere else to watch different stuff on streaming services. I think Tom Scott put it well here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WVTWCPoUt8w":[{"hn_comment_id":951561,"author":"jackchristopher","month":"2009-11","story_title":"Linus Torvalds' Micro-emacs","text":"Pertaining to the editor wars. There's a great (long) video about Linus and Linux history from 2001. Watch the whole thing if you can\u2014after the 40 minute mark is especially worth it: [VIDEO] 55 minutes in someone asks him, \"What editor and mail reader do you\ufeff use?\" He smirks, \"The editor is microemacs, the best editor ever made. And vi and GNU Emacs suck, suck.\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":225847,"author":"mechanical_fish","month":"2008-06","story_title":"Diary of a Failed Startup","text":"[LINK] Even better, a video of Linus Torvalds speaking on the history of Linux at the Computer Museum in 2001: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WXuK6gekU1Y":[{"hn_comment_id":22754703,"author":"eyerow","month":"2020-04","story_title":"ACM Prize in Computing Awarded to AlphaGo Developer","text":"As a long-time Go player and ML guy who even built his own (albeit shitty) Go AI in college, I'm a bit biased, but watching the AlphaGo-Lee Sedol match really felt like watching our generation's moon landing. If y'all haven't already, there's a new AlphaGo documentary made by DeepMind on YT: [VIDEO] . Brought tears to my eyes. Both a triumph for humanity in building an unbelievable machine like this, and a loss for humanity in that the infinite mystery of Go will be diminished, and again a triumph for humanity in Lee Sedol's brilliant win in Game 4...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24309201,"author":"_acco","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Impact of Go AI on the professional Go world","text":"If you haven't seen it, the documentary on DeepMind's AlphaGo is very well done. The climax revolves around the AI expressing what we humans call \"creativity\" in a match against decorated player Lee Sedol. Watching Lee Sedol's reaction is deeply moving. Free to watch on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27346880,"author":"marclave","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Dragon Go Server","text":"I remember first discovering the game of Go, after watching the AlphaGo Documentary [1]. I highly recommend it, will definitely be signing up for this, I usually play on mobile :) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39760111,"author":"alas44","month":"2024-03","story_title":"8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo","text":"Google's documentary on AlphaGo [VIDEO] Truly a must watch! (just look at the video comments to be convinced)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43714245,"author":"redbell","month":"2025-04","story_title":"In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future (2016)","text":"I consider AlphaGo - The Movie [1] to be a timeless classic that will never feel outdated. In my opinion, it surpasses even Hollywood productions, despite being based on true events and filmed live with real people. I'm ranking it as #2, though, because I still believe Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone presentation [2] is the greatest live tech event ever captured on film. Hearing the crowd screaming when seeing some tricks and techniques ( eg. slide to unlock , pinch to zoom and scrolling up ) on how to use the phone does really triggers some haptic feedback in my heart because we are now so used to these tricks that were pure magic back then. ______________________________ 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45401683,"author":"joeyrideout","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Learn to play Go","text":"I became interested in learning Go recently after watching the magnificent AlphaGo movie [1] which is free on YouTube. I highly recommend giving it a watch if you haven't already. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30145235,"author":"mwattsun","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Reimagining Chess with AlphaZero","text":"I was really impressed by \"AlphaGo - The Movie\", despite not knowing much about Go, because the way they told the story, people from the Asian countries were so sure their champion would win a Go tournament against a computer, that were stunned into a new consciousness about artificial intelligence when the computer won. This started an arms race in AI is what I gather. Edit: Full movie for free on YouTube: AlphaGo - The Movie | Full award-winning documentary [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32804101,"author":"irsagent","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"Here is a list of 20 documentaries I have come to love and return to when I come across them. There is no specific order to them. Enjoy! The * next to the number indicates the last 4 years. If you have seen one listed that you'd like to share what you think about please leave a comment with this structure [# in the list ] Comment... . i.e. [1] Loved learning about Noyce. What a guy. 1. Silicon Valley: Where the Future | PBS: American Experience [1:23:19] [2013] History of the how Silicon Valley came to be. William Shockley. Robert Noyce. Fairchild Semiconductor, The Traitorous Eight. Homepage: [LINK] Kanopy: [LINK] Where to Watch: [LINK] 2. Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware | Wired UK: Future Cities [1:07:50] [2016] the evolution of \u201cShanzhai\u201d \u2013 or copycat manufacturing \u2013 has transformed traditional models of business, distribution and innovation, and asks what the rest of the world can learn from this so-called \u201cSilicon Valley of hardware\". Youtube: [LINK] *2.1. The People's Republic of The Future | Bloomberg: Hello World [30:10] [2019] Shenzhen, tech-fueled entrepreneurs try to navigate an authoritarian regime. Youtube: [LINK] 3. The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard | TPB AFK [1:22:07] [2013] The history of the Pirate Bay. Torrenting. Legal. Privacy. Homepage: [LINK] Youtube: [LINK] Where to Watch: [LINK] 4. Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head | BBC [6 Part] [2021] Adam Curtis takes you on \"An Emotional history of how we got to this place.\" Economics. History. Power. Psycholog","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38306577,"author":"Matumio","month":"2023-11","story_title":"In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future (2016)","text":"For those who missed what happened back then, the AlphaGo Movie is really worth watching: [VIDEO] Not very technical, not about Go tactics either, but it's just a very well-done movie about the people involved.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46091254,"author":"anttiharju","month":"2025-11","story_title":"All it takes is for one to work out","text":"Reminds me of AlphaGo It didn't try to maximise by how much it won, but just that it won. Apparently it changed the meta for human pkayers. If you have the time for it, the movie/doc is worth watching [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WYPNjSoDrqw":[{"hn_comment_id":42206637,"author":"nettework","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Thomas E. Kurtz has died","text":"I interviewed Tom Kurtz in 2017. He was so generous, and as brilliant as you'd expect. He wrote me a memo on \"Grammatical Simplifications in BASIC.\" He loved memos--was an academic mathematician at heart, even at 89! It was his idea to make computing accessible--he (modestly) credits Kemeny with all the other ideas about BASIC and the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS). I wrote about the interview here: [LINK] . The Birth of BASIC documentary that Dartmouth did for the 50th anniversary is excellent and features him prominently: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26249669,"author":"ArtWomb","month":"2021-02","story_title":"BBC Micro at 40: How it inspired a generation of coders [video]","text":"I enjoy messing around in the Owlet browser-based BBC BASIC editor. 8-bit graphics still has a place in modern web design ;) [LINK] Related doc on youtube: \"Birth of BASIC\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40227237,"author":"WoodenChair","month":"2024-05","story_title":"BASIC turns 60","text":"There's a really good documentary on the creation of BASIC at Dartmouth (made by Dartmouth): [VIDEO] If you don't want to watch the documentary, we did a shorter podcast episode about it: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"WZskjLq040I":[{"hn_comment_id":21910791,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2019-12","story_title":"How writing began, and other unexpectedly funny stories about cuneiform [video]","text":"He really is. He's got two incredible videos with Tom Scott where the two of them play what could be considered the worlds oldest game[0] and he introduces Tom and Matt to \"writing\" cuneiform[1]. He's so sharp in both, I love seeing him anywhere else now. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45924476,"author":"sothatsit","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Why I'm Learning Sumerian","text":"I was lucky enough to meet Irving Finkel a couple of times and he is as eccentric in person as he is in his brilliant lectures, talks, and videos. When I met him all the shelves, and even the floor, in his office was covered with different books, papers, and artifacts. He has amassed quite a collection of interesting things. I met him through my work related to the Royal Game of Ur, which he also did a fantastic video on with Tom Scott: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22300992,"author":"jhallenworld","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Senet: the original board game of death?","text":"I've gotten into ancient games recently, and I've tried Senet with various rule variations- I think it's kind of boring. I like much better the Royal Game of Ur- [VIDEO] I've also been playing with Indian Pachisi, two player is kind of boring, but I still need to try four player / doubles.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27883229,"author":"acheron","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Senet","text":"There\u2019s a great video on YouTube of Irving Finkel (quite an interesting guy) playing the Royal Game of Ur. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27883930,"author":"mabub24","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Senet","text":"You might be thinking of Ur, which is roughly 4,500 years old. This is an interesting video from Dr. Irving Finkel on it and its playing rules.[0] [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36279504,"author":"yreg","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Turn dumb tweets into cuneiform tablets","text":"Irving Finkel made a video with Tom Scott, playing the game of Ur. I enjoyed the interaction. [VIDEO] I'm sure he has many other even better videos, but I will have to yet get to them.","stance":"rec"}],"Wi_nFz1CJSI":[{"hn_comment_id":32662745,"author":"jmoak3","month":"2022-08","story_title":"How Bad Europe\u2019s Energy Crisis Is","text":"Someone else posted this a few weeks ago, but it truly blew my mind. Watch a few minutes of this, starting from the given timestamp: [VIDEO] Europe is in more trouble than I imagined.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33904100,"author":"taftster","month":"2022-12","story_title":"TSMC founder Morris Chang says globalization 'almost dead'","text":"My (recent) introduction to Zeihan was this talk he gave to pig farmers. [VIDEO] The audio is a little rough, but it's worth the watch (in my opinion). Yeah, he comes across as a bit forward and a bit nationalistic, and clearly not every prediction is going to land, but I think he's got some really good observations and seems fairly credible. Better at least than most of the talking-heads you see on the news.","stance":"rec"}],"WijoL3Hy_Bw":[{"hn_comment_id":27726777,"author":"throwawaysea","month":"2021-07","story_title":"70% of San Francisco residents say quality of life has declined: poll","text":"The same thing has happened in Portland and Seattle, both cities with increasing amounts of property crime, increasing amounts of homeless campers taking up public spaces, increasing amounts of harassment from vagrants, widespread open drug-abuse, increasing amounts of blight as pristine greenbelts are trashed, and a revolving door of criminals who are released into the public without consequence by a permissive city leadership. Calls for \"restorative justice\" always mean being soft on crime, which removes deterrents for crime, and therefore enable increased crime. It's all so obvious and predictable, but these cities are such extreme political echo chambers that no other perspective is really represented or considered at all. In Seattle, these policies were spurred on by motivated progressive activists who aggressively shouted down all dissent in protests, council meetings, and in social media. The rush of transplants from outside Washington state changed local politics significantly over the last decade, importing a lot of SF's policies as the voting constituency changed. As a result, Seattle experiences all the same blight SF does, but with a time delay of a few years. There have been a couple great documentaries about the deterioration in Seattle such as \"Seattle is Dying\" ( [LINK] ) and \"The Fight for the Soul of Seattle\" ( [VIDEO] ) that provide a great overview of the issues. The business community also wrote two comprehensive reports about the failure of restorative j","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28335771,"author":"j8hn","month":"2021-08","story_title":"I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem","text":"I don't have any experience with the housing issue in California, but got involved a while back trying to find pragmatic solutions in Seattle. The situation is a mess and there is an entire \"homeless industrial complex\" complicating matters here, rife with fraud, misspending and cronyism. Every year it seems like many millions of dollars more are spent on this issue but it keeps getting visibly worse. At first I was in the \"Housing First\" crowd, but after my experiences I would say I more firmly believe in \"Rehab First\". A local news station released a great documentary called \"Seattle is Dying\". It has 10 million views since released a couple of years ago. [LINK] The sequel is \"The Fight For the Soul of Seattle\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WjTrfoiB0MQ":[{"hn_comment_id":12119914,"author":"Ace17","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Memory management in C programs (2014)","text":"Google is an example that writing production code that doesn't use exceptions is possible, not that this is the right thing to do. They said that their decision was primarily legacy-motivated (in short, they were fearing that introducing exceptions in a non-RAII codebase would lead us to a long period of instability). I'll add that in some situations (e.g when freeing resources) the control flow gets very convoluted, and you don't want to deal with directly. See: Andrei Alexandrescu - Declarative Control Flow ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16324582,"author":"uep","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Scope exit in C++11 (2012)","text":"Andrei Alexandrescu has a fun talk about implementing scope_exit using a new C++17 function: std::uncaught_exceptions (which is a tweak to std::uncaught_exception). Fundamentally, it doesn't really solve the destructor throwing exceptions issue though. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WlT3UhC7NwQ":[{"hn_comment_id":7307199,"author":"akcreek","month":"2014-02","story_title":"An Early Retirement","text":"I appreciate what Watsi does, but I'm mostly buying a shirt because of the great speech Chase gave at Startup School [1]. It was of the most value to me at that event. Thanks. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12862249,"author":"nostrademons","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Signs that a startup is focused on stuff that doesn\u2019t matter","text":"Curious why you make the distinction between for-profit and non-profit organizations. All organizations face the challenge of their vision of \"making the world a better place\" not necessarily lining up with the vision of the folks for whom they want to make it better. For-profit companies at least have the signal of \"someone is willing to pay me for this\" as a concrete guide to whether they align with anyone. Watsi's founder talked a fair bit about this in his Startup School presentation (which is excellent, BTW): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8287316,"author":"djcary","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Stories from our first two years","text":"Chase, Watsi's founder, spoke at start up school last year. Donate first, then watch his talk and then donate again. Make sure you look for the tip option on the checkout page if you want to help cover Watsi's operational costs. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Wo2m3jaJixU":[{"hn_comment_id":37749057,"author":"YousefED","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud (2019)","text":"This article has been quite the inspiration for many projects and progress on this front. I think we're seeing more and more developments around CRDTs and local-first frameworks / applications. I'm working on a few projects in this area: - [LINK] - Notion meets Notebook-style live programming for TypeScript / React - [LINK] - a rich text editor built on TipTap / Prosemirror that supports Yjs for local-first collaboration - [LINK] - a wrapper around Yjs for easier development In my experience so far, some things get more complicated when building a local-first application, and some things get a lot easier. What gets easier is that once you've modeled and implemented the data-layer (which does require you to rethink / unlearn a few principles), you don't need to worry about data-fetching, errors etc. as much as in a regular \"API-based\" app. Another interesting video I recommend on this topic is about Linear's \"Sync Engine\" which employs some of the local-first techniques as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38292108,"author":"saqadri","month":"2023-11","story_title":"You don't need a CRDT to build a collaborative experience","text":"You may not need CRDT per-se, but building a collaborative experience is so difficult. I worked on collaborative systems for a bit, and also have read a bit about how Figma and Notion do it (this is a good read: [LINK] ) -- it's still super hard to get right. This talk by Karri about Linear's \"sync engine\" is also a good watch: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"Wp-WiNXH6hI":[{"hn_comment_id":34359545,"author":"agentultra","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Revealed: Exxon made \u2018breathtakingly\u2019 accurate climate predictions in 70s & 80s","text":"The address Carl Sagan made in 1985 is well worth watching for those who remember those times and especially for those who weren't alive back then [0] People knew about this before you were born and decided their best interests were more important and they acted in wilful disregard for your life and the lives of everyone on this planet. They weren't ignorant. No facts were hidden from them that they could be forgiven for being misinformed. They knew with certainty what the science was revealing and spent money to discredit the science, cut funding to their own researchers, bought politicians, funded PR campaigns, and continued building their fossil fuel empires. Everything Carl Sagan said in that address has come to pass. It's wild to watch. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30130955,"author":"andersonmvd","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale","text":"Look at how many details this guy (Carl Sagan) conveyed in his 15' speech: [VIDEO] in a way that potentially everyone understood. I wonder if every explanation was like his, if nuance wouldn't be well communicated, even to large groups.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32324436,"author":"YellowStuDregg","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Climate endgame: exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios","text":"A quick google search gives us plenty of past published projections and how they fared: [LINK] You can also watch Carl Sagan break it down in front of congress back in 1985 for just 15 minutes of your time [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35151077,"author":"melling","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Trees Across the U.S. Are Sprouting Leaves Earlier Than Usual This Year","text":"Time to watch Carl Sagan, almost 50 years ago, explain how our coal usage would be a big problem: [VIDEO] A slow train wreck that was avoidable.","stance":"rec"}],"Wp7GAKLSGnI":[{"hn_comment_id":19952065,"author":"kontorStol","month":"2019-05","story_title":"I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00","text":"I recommend this video to you: Oral History of Donald Knuth Part 1 and 2: [VIDEO] on The Computer History Museum Youtube channel. It's a _really_ long interview, +7 hours. But it's also superb. He is interviewed by his friend and colleague Edward Feigenbaum who does a stellar job. He brings out the human Donald Knuth in a remarkable way. It gave me great respect and admiration for Donald Knuth life and achievements. For me I dare to say it was transformative in regards to human pursuit of knowledge, passion and what it means to be a intellectual human being. td;dr: Watched a Donald Knuth interview and got a nerd crush","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31483485,"author":"belter","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness (2020)","text":"Donald Knuth interviews are so interesting, but would like to particularly highlight this little piece of advice, out of this great playlist: \"Donald Knuth - My advice to young people\": [LINK] Complete Playlist - \"Donald Knuth (Computer scientist)\" [97 videos]: [LINK] Also the \"Oral History of Donald Knuth\" from the Computer History Museum is great. \"Oral History of Donald Knuth Part 1\": [VIDEO] \"Oral History of Donald Knuth Part 2\": [LINK] Plus.. \"Donald Knuth Interview 2006\": [LINK] \"An Interview with Donald Knuth\": [LINK] \"Interview with Donald Knuth\": [LINK] This somewhat \"colourful\" page also tracks a few: [LINK] PS: The story that he told Steve Jobs he was \"Full of shit\" is not true. \"Donald Knuth never told Steve Jobs that he was full of shit\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"WpkDN78P884":[{"hn_comment_id":7637367,"author":"mpweiher","month":"2014-04","story_title":"TDD is fun","text":"Excellent riposte! Mine was going to be somewhat less polite :-) Can't stress enough that TDD is not about testing (sth. DHH, like many if not most critics gets wrong). It is about development and design. The fact that you get a pretty decent test suite out of it is a nice side effect. (Love me those side-effects, wouldn't want to program without 'em). I also find that whenever I skimp, it always comes back to bite me. And usually it was because I hadn't understood the problem-space well enough to write a proper test. That's one important part of TDD for me: I have to understand the requirements well enough to actually write a test for them. And the OP is also right in that Rails is a bad environment for TDD, as far as I can tell, because all the magic and auto-integration gets in the way and has to be laboriously stubbed/mocked etc. Maybe it's time the community got over Rails. (See also Uncle Bob's excellent architecture talk: [VIDEO] ).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218259,"author":"catwell","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"The talk that had the most influence on how I write software is Robert 'Uncle Bob' Martin's \"Architecture: The Lost Years\" [1]. Being a Ruby conference keynote, it helps if you know how Ruby on Rails works, but the lessons apply to all software. Another one would be \"Let It Crash! The Erlang Approach to Building Reliable Services\" by Brian Troutwine. [2] I don't know if you would call it \"technical\" but Brett Slatkin's talk on Cohort Analysis is something anyone interested in tools to analyze how our users behave should watch. [3] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33185974,"author":"SevenNation","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software","text":"> Many people will argue that not using a framework means write everything yourself. This is a false dichotomy. We can use libraries and frameworks just fine. ... > But we should give them a clear, and well-isolated place in our project. ... There's an excellent, if older, presentation called \"Architecture, the Lost Years\" that addresses exactly this problem and gives very specific, actionable guidance on how to solve it: [VIDEO] But how to pull off this decoupling? The answer is both obvious and surprising. Define a boundary. On one side is the framework. On the other side is your code. Through the boundary, only dumb data structure can pass. JSON works. So do structs. So does XML. The point is that these are behaviorless blobs of data. This buys you a lot. You can run your application completely detached from the network, a database, and other expensive dependencies. So testing becomes much simpler and easier. And of course, you can replace the framework by writing new boundary code. The other big lesson has something to do with why frameworks get added to a project in the first place. When designing a system, the goal should be to defer major decisions for a long as possible. That's when the best information is available. Sometimes you can just defer until the point becomes moot, which is a major win. Reaching for a framework before being forced to do so sets up the kind of situation the author is talking about.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5599537,"author":"jared314","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Code Organization in Large AngularJS and JavaScript Applications","text":"This reminds me of the beginning of Bob Martin's keynote[0] at Ruby Midwest 2011[1]. I don't agree with everything he said, but the code organization point is sound. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6470693,"author":"Anchor","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Slow Tests Are the Symptom, Not the Cause","text":"Here's Uncle Bob talking on his version of the idea extensively: [VIDEO] The main idea is to separate the system into entities, interactors and boundaries, which correspond roughly to model, controllers and interfaces+DTOs (Data Transfer Objects), but with the difference that model classes are not exposed through the interfaces. Rather, the DTOs are used to communicate the changes in the data. We have been using this approach for a year now, with REST on top, and it so far has worked beautifully. The entities map naturally to REST resources and DTOs makes nice request and response classes. Armed with CQRS (now I sound enterprise-y), the data storage is easy to work with using the same DTOs (the data storage and its interface do not know anything about the entities either). On the DB implementation level, we work on the DTOs, which are trivial to store to the database (even without ORM, although it does remove much of the boilerplate). Only one class - the entity repository - is needed to convert the DTOs to entities, and this only happens on create, update, and delete. Reads (due to CQRS) go directly to DB without instantiating any entities - neat. We also use 'unit of work' -pattern to abstract the notion of transaction on create, update, and delete operations, which simplifies the interactor code, hiding the nature of the data storage (making it a swappable in this respect too). But to stay on topic, our tests are fast too as the interactors can be tested by injecting an in","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8659845,"author":"programminggeek","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Crystal: the programming language","text":"It might do that wildly inefficient thing... Or, you might do something where you have a list of pointers, and you point at a different value instead of mutating an existing value. I haven't dug into the details of how immutable data structures can be made to work efficiently, but part of the charm is that in many cases you don't mutate the array at all. What I mean is, there are certain behaviors around mutation that programmers do because they can. When you take away the ability to mutate data, you design differently and without side effects. All of a sudden testing becomes easier, faster, cheaper for large parts of your codebase. You have simpler solutions that are potentially easier to reason about because the complex (and sometimes elegant) solutions aren't so readily available. A few talks that are around this style of thinking: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] Boundaries are good, values are good, simple things that work together are good. The more we can take the good parts and form them together into a cohesive language/framework/platform, the better our software will be.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11757273,"author":"jxxcarlson","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Hanami \u2013 web framework for Ruby","text":"My (limited)experience is that when a rails app gets too big, it becomes hard to manage. That was my case, anyway. The architecture of hanami promotes longterm developer sanity. The fact that views are objects and the existence of interactors is a real plus. See this old Uncle Bob video re interactors: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12260796,"author":"dreistdreist","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Ask HN: 8 years working, now 3-4 months off to learn. Looking for advice","text":"Microsoft Application Architecture Guide [LINK] Domain Driven Design (The book is hard to read, but worth it I think) [LINK] This uncle bob talk is not too bad [VIDEO] I think the microsoft guide is the most comprehensive, but don't limit yourself to it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17886981,"author":"cellularmitosis","month":"2018-08","story_title":"My bag of tricks \u2013 loose notes, design patterns, rules-of-thumb","text":"This \"Architecture: the lost years\" keynote from uncle bob was helpful for me: [VIDEO] I've also struggled with this notion of \"untestable\" code. Untestable code seems to usually be a big pile of function calls. Testable code seems to be little islands of functionality which are connected by interfaces where only data is exchanged. Practically, this seems to be about shying away from interfaces which look like 'doThis()', 'doThat()', and more like 'apply(data)'. Less imperative micro-management and more functional-core/imperative-shell. Edit: a network analogy might be: think about the differences between a remote procedure call API vs. simply exchanging declarative data (REST).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30951682,"author":"Barrera","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Unit Testing is Overrated (2020)","text":"> Although the design above is perfectly valid in terms of OOP, neither of these classes are actually unit-testable. Because LocationProvider depends on its own instance of HttpClient and SolarCalculator in turn depends on LocationProvider, it\u2019s impossible to isolate the business logic that may be contained within methods of these classes. The design of those classes is bad, and the perceived need to reach for mocks (or interfaces) is telling you that. The next step the author takes is to go for interfaces. That's not what I'd do. Instead, I'd decouple network from calculation with intermediate dumb data structures. The network side produces the data structure and the calculation side consumes it. The network side can further be broken down with a transformation of the API call result into the dumb data structure used for calculations. This idea comes from an old Bob Martin presentation [1]. The whole thing is worth watching to put it into context. This is the kind of thing that never seems to get discussed in these pieces praising integration tests over unit tests. For even better results, ditch the classes altogether and just use functions. It's quite surprising how badly designs come off the rails with the \"everything is a class\" model. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Wpv-Qb-dB6g":[{"hn_comment_id":27604632,"author":"jarmitage","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Plover is a free, open-source stenography engine","text":"Mirabai Knight's talk about this is one of my all time faves: [VIDEO] Inspired me to try to create a live coding musical instrument based on it: [LINK] / [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35544210,"author":"zeta0134","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard","text":"Yes! Here is a really great talk on the state of doing so, with a fantastic realtime demo near the end. Mirabai live-codes using her Plover setup and narrates her thought process as she types out each command. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7144906,"author":"3rd3","month":"2014-01","story_title":"DataHand","text":"There is an open source stenography project called \"Plover\". The idea of stenotype is instead of typing individual letters one combines keys to form sillables (or commands), what makes typing blazingly fast (240 WPM in the video below) and is overall a less cramped movement, because after each sillable you can relax instead of keeping muscles tensed for each letter. [LINK] Talk: [VIDEO] Demo: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8050357,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2014-07","story_title":"One year with Colemak","text":"Stenography might also be an option: [LINK] Here's a video by the stenographer half of the duo that started the project: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12427013,"author":"gcr","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Ask HN: How did you keep improving your typing speed after 100 WPM?","text":"Court reporters are required to type at 240WPM with zero mistakes, or they lose their court reporting license. You can teach yourself to use a stenography machine. You can build your own steno machine with some open-source software and a fancy gaming keyboard. See this video by Mirabai Knight and the Plover project: [VIDEO] I wanted to try this but I couldn't stick with it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23417213,"author":"linsomniac","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)","text":"Here's a good PyCon presentation from someone who switched to voice input for programming. [VIDEO] I hadn't thought about it until this thread, but one of the biggest barriers for me using it was that we have a really quiet open office, but now that we are WFH...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28689164,"author":"JZL003","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Any good text-to-speech solutions for someone who cannot talk normally?","text":"I personally like ibm tts slightly more than Google although it is more expensive. I think Google, but definitely other startups also allow you to train the model to be closer to your voice. Since you might have many recordings of yourself before this, could be cool. Comment if you can't find it and I can look It's none of my business how long term it is, but if it is long term look into stenography, especially open source opensteno and plover. Old talk but [VIDEO] It's what court reporters use to transcribe at the speed of text but for you it could mean giving text into a tts software at the speed of normal talking. I've only tried it briefly but if you take the time to learn it, you can comfortably get to normal speech speeds with no hang fatigue. It's one of the reasons opensteno is so nice bc it also has cheap steno keyboards which are normally thousands and locked behind industry. Comment if you want more links! I can add when I'm by my computer","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34299125,"author":"melling","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Plover","text":"Over the past decade there have been some interesting discussions about Plover on HN [LINK] The video in the first result was good: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Wpzvaqypav8":[{"hn_comment_id":11215829,"author":"jrockway","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Mosul dam engineers warn it could fail at any time, killing 1M people","text":"John Oliver did a pretty good piece on infrastructure: [VIDEO] No politician gets to cut a ribbon with a giant pair of scissors when they fund routine maintenance. So why bother.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13791782,"author":"frik","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Images and video showing extent of Oroville dam damage","text":"actually the imgur.com comments were very insightful one of several recommended videos about the topic, this one is quite funny even if it's very real: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WrxZ4AZPdOQ":[{"hn_comment_id":15566235,"author":"dahart","month":"2017-10","story_title":"The Drive Home","text":"What an awesome moody shader! The bar is high on shadertoy and there are some amazing shaders, but the aesthetic of this one is a rare gem. Here's the author's video of the shader, for anyone on a device that doesn't display the shader or play the audio: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32948203,"author":"mdtusz","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Nightdrive","text":"This reminds me of this video: [VIDEO] He does incredible work with shaders and explains them in very clear detail.","stance":"rec"}],"Ws4kbgfpKCw":[{"hn_comment_id":31072013,"author":"flubloppoma","month":"2022-04","story_title":"No one knows why the most used spacecraft propulsion system works","text":"I think a better title would be \"Hall Thrusters Understood So Well Better Instruments Needed to Measure the Friction of Quanta\" - If something has momentum, it has mass. - If something isn't leaving an engine now, it's condensing. - Electromagnetic fields can recruit and organize a conductors' permissively and permeability. Hall Thrusters use electromagnetic confinement. - If there is a delay in exhaust, there is condensation. If there is condensation without a holding tank then there is a pulse holding the condensation. - Pulse waves require detonating fuel at the right time to feed the pulse and never feed the lull. Also, detonating is... different. Careful control of timing is needed to maintain a pulse. Finer detection is needed for tuning the pulse. It will take work to understand where this tiny detonating mass has friction in its electromagnetic confinement. - Hall Thrusters once understand more can possible be tuned to run with, dipole, quadrupole... tuned pulse waves. A Hall Thruster is a \"smaller\" version of this [VIDEO] however, the fluid dynamics of the Hall Thruster have interactions at the Quanta maybe so those will be that hardest to detect and analyze. But, once recorded and analyzed the knowledge should help fine tune these engines. Let me link this again because it is just a great presentation on the fluid dynamics behind these effects [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33047329,"author":"tofof","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Japan tests explosion-powered rocket for the first time in space (2021)","text":"Here's a video that presents the science behind rotating detonation engines; the article was pretty light on detail. This video is at the other end of the spectrum, clearly intended for other researchers in this domain. Or, if it's over your head (it was for me, at least while trying to wake up), you can still enjoy the pretty damn cool high speed imaging of the detonation waves in this type of engine. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WvwiH1DOK1M":[{"hn_comment_id":34858570,"author":"s1mon","month":"2023-02","story_title":"CAD Sketcher, free and open-source project bringing CAD like tools to Blender3d","text":"Nick Kallen has been working on an BREP based CAD tool with the sort of ease of modeling that things like Blender has. Originally it was based on C3D, but he switched halfway through to Parasolid.[0] It\u2019s amazing the amount of features he has built considering it\u2019s a one person project. It\u2019s worth going through his progress report videos.[1] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34869043,"author":"virtualritz","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Show HN: Replicad, the Library for CAD in the Browser","text":"See also this thread[1] from yesterday which has some interesting comments on the limitations projects based on the OpenCascade kernel face. Mentions an interesting video[2] going through the commercial geometry kernel options and their resp. limitations from the author of [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39648981,"author":"awhitty","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Plasticity: CAD for Artists","text":"The creator of this app, Nick Kallen, has a nice YouTube channel where he talks about some of the behind-the-scenes work on the project. I think his video comparing geometry kernels [0] was posted to HN a while back, but it's worth a watch if you're curious! [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"WwslBPj8GgI":[{"hn_comment_id":1021658,"author":"mquander","month":"2009-12","story_title":"Taking account of misconceptions; avoiding rote learning (MIT OCW video)","text":"Strongly reminiscent of this really fantastic talk from Eric Mazur, a Harvard physics professor (and a charismatic speaker!) who was shocked when he discovered the pervasive misconceptions held by his undergraduate students. [VIDEO] Mazur describes how he discovered and carefully measured the lack of fundamental understanding among the majority of his students, and how after attempting to address the problem in various ways, he found that a discussion-based, peer-assisted method of working through material was much more effective than more a lecture-oriented approach.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1040443,"author":"MaysonL","month":"2010-01","story_title":"Freakonomics: Quantifying Teacher Effectiveness?","text":"Great video on how a pretty good teacher (as conventionally measured) learned how to really teach. [VIDEO] titled: Confessions of a converted lecturer.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1275507,"author":"yequalsx","month":"2010-04","story_title":"Dan Meyer dissects the flaws of math textbooks (video)","text":"I strongly disagree with the notion that college algebra ought to be the place where one learns practical applications of mathematics. A valuable skill for any educated person is the ability to plod through minutia and make sense of it. Being able to be focused on the point at hand and not let distractions cloud judgment is a valuable skill. If one really understands the mechanics of logs then I think they will not freak out when presented with a formula involving logs. I'm all in favor of applications but isn't this the job of other subjects? The applications should be taught in the subjects that apply it. The goal of a mathematics class ought to be to understand mathematics. This lecture, [VIDEO] is long but well worth watching. He provides strong evidence that students learn to solve word problems but haven't the slightest idea of what is really going on. They are memorizing steps. This happens at Harvard and the community college. I've given my students the standard word problems on travelling problems. They get the problems right. Then I ask them this simple problem and they universally get is wrong: You drive 1 mile at 40 mph and then the next mile drive 60 mph. What is your average speed? (Almost everyone says 50 mph.) We aren't teaching thinking skills. We are teaching memorization of problem types. Almost none of them is actually practical, correct, or useful. But why are we teaching travelling problems in a math class? I think it should be taught in physics.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10798479,"author":"synotic","month":"2015-12","story_title":"A better way to teach technical skills to a group","text":"In a similar vein, there's a really great talk by Eric Mazur, Physics professor at Harvard about peer instruction \u2014 [VIDEO] He goes into why he started exploring the idea at first (students got 5's on their AP physics exams and had strong problem-solving skills \u2014 plug-and-chug \u2014 but poor conceptual understanding), the many iterations of the approach, and the data he collected on the way (significant increases in open-ended, conceptual problems, including at other schools that adopted the approach). Really fascinating. I haven't watched the shorter version, but someone edited they key points down to 18 minutes: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15088983,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Universities are broke \u2013 let\u2019s cut the pointless admin and get back to teaching","text":"> At the end of this (i.e. graduate level courses) the only ones with sufficient mastery are those that are doing the research. Sadly, sufficient mastery of the subject often comes at the cost of sufficient mastery of teaching , which becomes especially important for such difficult subjects. If only some of that money spent on more staff was spent on assistant teachers whose main skill was teaching and coaching other teachers, and providing paid hours for both of them to fix the curriculum together... Anyway, I fully agree with your second paragraph. Another issue is that of researchers not really seeming to care, having an attitude of \"you shouldn't be in University unless you really want to learn this, and I'm not going to try to motivate you or help you with that.\" There's some truth to that, but it also sometimes feels like it's used as a way to mask their own teaching incompetence. I was asked to be an assistant teacher after graduating from my masters, and I completely freaked out about the responsibility of making sure I wouldn't fuck up my student's education (I cared more than most of my students did). I almost declined the job offer! I was basically told \"yeah we know, that's part of why we want you.\" Anyway, I spent a lot of time on-line trying to find advice on the dos and dont's of education. I can say that the best two lecture were Eric Mazur's Confessions of a Converted Lecturer [0] and John Corrigan's Are We Listening To Our Children? [1]. I think every teache","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1027667,"author":"MaysonL","month":"2010-01","story_title":"A review of probability theory","text":"A better question would be: what percentage understand what a random variable is and will be able to apply this understanding later. See [VIDEO] for exploration of the difference by a Harvard physics professor who realized a few years into his teaching career that most of his into physics students weren't learning very much, although they were able to apply all the appropriate mathematical recipes to all the standard type homework and exam questions.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7291415,"author":"bhattisatish","month":"2014-02","story_title":"Khan Academy: The Illusion of Understanding","text":"Eric Mazur's Peer learning process [VIDEO] kind of highlights the problem and a solution for the same. Namely, Flip the classroom. Ask questions that highlight the knowledge gap within the students. Let students debate among themselves and then actually provide the solution. Though this is not sufficient, it at least improves the ability of the student to reason about the problem and question the models they have built around their heads on the given subject.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15710704,"author":"2020-3030","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed (2011)","text":"You are correct that course sizes matter to educational outcomes for a variety of reasons. If the groups are too small, it is possible that nobody has enough of what is needed for the class and everybody flounders, requiring intensive instructor led tutoring and learning. This brings us back to the 1:1 situation. If we are interested in how many students are required to support peer to peer learning, you might enjoy the following articles (popular and academic) about how Harvard physics professor, Dr. Eric Mazur has embraced and studied peer-to-peer instruction. This should provide a partial answer to your questions. 1) Eric's Harvard Profile [LINK] ) 2) A good story/video about the development of his peer-to-peer, active learning methods ( [VIDEO] ). 3) One of Harvard's articles about his educational work. ( [LINK] 4) A list of Dr. Mazur's publications ( [LINK] ) 5) Eric's 2015 papers on peer learning a) 2015 - Dowd JE, Araujo I, Mazur E. Making sense of confusion: Relating performance, confidence, and self-efficacy to expressions of confusion in an introductory physics class. Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research. 11. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.010107 b) 2015 - Miller K, Schell J, Ho A, Lukoff B, Mazur E. Response switching and self-efficacy in Peer Instruction classrooms Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research. 11. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.010104 Googling for \"ideal group size for peer to peer learning physics\" brings up arti","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16813383,"author":"dorfsmay","month":"2018-04","story_title":"The Case Against Lectures","text":"I'm surprised the article nor the comments here mention Harvard professor Eric Mazur and his \"evidence-based, interactive teaching\" Peer Instruction method. This video is a bit long, but goes into details of his scientific approach to measuring results in the context of learning: [VIDEO] For more details: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35719191,"author":"TehShrike","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Schools Are Ditching Homework, Deadlines in Favor of \u2018Equitable Grading\u2019","text":"Eric Mazur figured out how to improve on the lecture+test cycle a while ago \u2013 explain something to the students, ask them a question, let them talk to each other and try to convince each other what the right answer is, collect the answers, and carry on. Here he is giving an engrossing explanation: [VIDEO] A text article: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"WxK11RsLqp4":[{"hn_comment_id":33114173,"author":"lewisl9029","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The Future of the Web Is on the Edge","text":"Replicache ( [LINK] ) and clientdb ( [LINK] ) are the only productized versions of this architecture I'm aware of (please do let me know if anyone is aware of others!). But the architecture itself has been used successfully in a bunch of apps, most notable of which is probably Linear ( [LINK] , I remember watching an early video of their founder explaining the architecture in more detail but I can't seem to find it anymore (edit: found it! [VIDEO] )). Basically the way authorization works is you define specific mutations that are supported (no arbitrary writes to client state, so write semantics are constrained for ease of authorization and conflict handling), with a client-side and server-side implementation for each mutation. The client side gets applied optimistically and then sync'ed and ran on the server eventually, which applies authorization rules and detects and handles conflicts, which can result in client state getting rolled back if authorization rules are violated or if unresolvable conflicts are present. Replicache has a good writeup here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44956426,"author":"seereadhack","month":"2025-08","story_title":"How Figma\u2019s multiplayer technology works (2019)","text":"Linear's write ups / talks on real-time sync are also very good, if a bit old now. 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK] Also see this overview of related tech here: 3. [LINK] And c.f. automerge from ink & switch: 4. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"WxOp5mBY9IY":[{"hn_comment_id":1382007,"author":"ugh","month":"2010-05","story_title":"Microsoft to invest $150 million in Apple (1997)","text":"What? A link to this story and no one linked to the legendary video of Bill Gates appearing on the big screen at the Macworld Boston Keynote 1997, looming large over Steve Jobs and the crowd booing? Here, I will do that: [VIDEO] (skip to 3:30 if you want to see how the investment is received, skip to 4:40 if you want to see Bill Gates)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24545599,"author":"tambourine_man","month":"2020-09","story_title":"New Steve Jobs recordings from the '80s released","text":"I've seen this many times, so great. Imagine Cook taking random developer's questions at WWDC today. In that same year, the famous Gates at the big screen speech. The audience was booing. Can you imagine something even close to that today? [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2213809,"author":"charleso","month":"2011-02","story_title":"Mike Elgan: Why Nokia is toast","text":"All of this 'Nokia is doomed because of their Microsoft partnership' talk reminds me of when Apple announced something similar back in 1997. Anyone remember this Steve Jobs talk from when Apple was on the financial ropes? [VIDEO] If you think Nokia is doomed, you might want to re-watch that video. Things didn't turn out quite so bad for Apple.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2213863,"author":"charleso","month":"2011-02","story_title":"Nokia to get 'huge' payments from Microsoft  ","text":"How much in the minority am I for thinking this is a good plan for Nokia? Echoing my post in another thread, Apple received $150 million in financing from Microsoft back in 1997 in exchange for including IE on the Mac (among other partnership goodies). If you don't recall that period of computer history (when Apple almost went bust), you may want to watch this Steve Jobs Macworld 1997 presentation discussing their joint venture: [VIDEO] \"Kneeling before Zod\" didn't turn out too badly for Apple.","stance":"rec"}],"Wx_kugSemfY":[{"hn_comment_id":27592136,"author":"auiya","month":"2021-06","story_title":"The Fine Art of Combining Harmonics","text":"Music producer Andrew Huang does a fantastic job demonstrating the harmonic series concepts in a video from last year: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27078279,"author":"noxToken","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Bird song sonographs show distinct drawing patterns","text":"Andrew Huang does a good job of explaining harmonics and overtones[0]. You only need to watch until about the 4 minute mark (from the timestamp) to get an explanation of harmonics and what the sonograms represent. The short of it is that most natural sounds product a root tone plus a varying amount of related tones above it. Our ears hear the root tone, and the other tones above it are what give the sound its uniqueness. That's why a guitar, a clarinet and 3 singers can produce the same note while sounding distinct. Birds seem to produce a natural sound without a lot of the related tones above it. Their sound is, relatively speaking, much purer than most other natural sounds. That's very unique. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27852588,"author":"hug","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The Alexander: Why did you build such a long piano?","text":"The harmonic series is a really neat thing to learn about -- one of those \"art is math\" kind of moments. This video does a good job of explaining it in a relatively short and simple way, but goes in-depth enough that even people with an understanding of music might learn something: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"X-iSQQgOd1A":[{"hn_comment_id":26823938,"author":"ehsankia","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Time flies in Google Earth\u2019s biggest update in years","text":"Speaking of ant and slime simulation, this recent video Coding Adventures video was pretty mind blowing: [VIDEO] (Especially part 2 starting around 10m in).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36078330,"author":"Udo","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ze Frank True Facts: The Smartest Slime","text":"Sebastian Lague made an excellent video \"Ant and Slime Simulations\" which explores how path-finding algorithms can use trails and gradient-based signaling to solve spatial problems: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41397942,"author":"Risord","month":"2024-08","story_title":"The secret inside One Million Checkboxes","text":"At the time I was lost joy of coding too but I was able to found it again. One key point was to ignore learning new tech if it was not absolutely necessary and focus just creating new things. I think it all started from Sebastian Lague's video which reminded how beautiful coding can be. [ [VIDEO] ]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26634245,"author":"theossuary","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Show HN: Play with Shaders Inspired by Slime Mold","text":"This reminds me of a coding adventure YT video that replicates slime molds in Unity, look at the end to see some high res videos of it - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27403973,"author":"Berg0X00","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Compute Shader 101 [video]","text":"Thanks for sharing this! I have not watched the full video yet but definitely will. Recently got interested in compute shaders thanks to this video: [VIDEO] and can recommend it to those that want to see a bit of what is possible with compute shaders.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36005569,"author":"Nezteb","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Orb Farm","text":"I love ants and replicating their behavior in code! You might like these projects: \"Coding Adventure: Ant and Slime Simulations\" by Sebastian Lague: Video: [VIDEO] Code [LINK] \"C++ Ants Simulation 1, First approach\" by Pezzza's Work: Video: [LINK] Code: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"X1T3IQ4N-3g":[{"hn_comment_id":9061485,"author":"zamalek","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Comparison: Lockless programming with atomics in C++ 11 vs. mutex and RW-locks","text":"Jeff Preshing gave a really good introduction to atomics at CppCon 2014.[1] He explains it so clearly that 1 day later I had a fully tested lock-free work stealing queue and a queue. One of my favorite talks of last year. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10105220,"author":"dougbinks","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Implementing a lightweight task scheduler in C++","text":"For those interested in the implementation of atomic operations see Jeff Preshing's \"How Ubisoft Develops Games for Multicore - Before and After C++11\", especially after 15m55s in on the video, or slide 37 of the pdf on github. Video: [VIDEO] PDF: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"X1XoCQm5JSQ":[{"hn_comment_id":20589459,"author":"adwi","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?","text":"Thank you, such a classic. His omelet video is incredible too. Learned his French variety a few years back, took a few tries to perfect but now can open nearly any fridge and make a great meal in 2 minutes [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27483188,"author":"bobf","month":"2021-06","story_title":"J. Kenji L\u00f3pez-Alt is Seattle\u2019s reluctant powerful food influencer","text":"I've watched this Jacques P\u00e9pin video countless times and the ease with which he casually prepares the two styles of omelets in ~5 minutes and narrates the process amazes me every time. I still can't perfectly replicate the second \"classic French omelet\" style even after years of effort. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34673895,"author":"wyclif","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Share your favorite YouTube channels focused on mastering a skill/craft","text":"I learned how to make both the French and dirty omelette from him. It's my fave cooking video of all time: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"X29lF43mUlo":[{"hn_comment_id":25840673,"author":"iodiocracynow","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Anyone else burnt out due to extended lockdown and work-from-home?","text":"I deal with burnout watching videos from george Carlin on germs and virus... 10y old what a wise man [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33219271,"author":"pengaru","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Mud boosts the immune system","text":"You've reminded me of this George Carlin rant: [VIDEO] Edit: Usually I regret scrolling down to youtube comments, not this time: > This is not a comedy, this is a TED talk.","stance":"rec"}],"X2wLP0izeJE":[{"hn_comment_id":21719138,"author":"fenwick67","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Hexing the technical interview (2017)","text":"Ira Glass's take on this is so good and I go back to it often when my creative work is less than satisfactory: [VIDEO] Basically when you work on creative stuff you're drawn to it because you have good taste, but for a long time your work will disappoint you because of your good taste.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42103300,"author":"michael-online","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough","text":"The first three minutes of this Ira Glass interview are pure gold, and I listen to them at least once a year to remind myself to keep fighting. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16046645,"author":"wallflower","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: 2018 resolutions?","text":"Good luck! We can all do this. Create and create and you will eventually catch up with your taste. I have a personal theory that unhappiness is due to too much consumption, not enough personal creation. Even if it just a sketchnote or a doodle... that is enough. > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it\u2019s just not that good. It\u2019s trying to be good, it has potential, but it\u2019s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. > We know our work doesn\u2019t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it\u2019s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It\u2019s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I\u2019ve ever met. It\u2019s gonna take awhile. It\u2019s normal to take awhile. You\u2019ve just gotta fight your way through. -Ira Glass Video version: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17290104,"author":"RickS","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How Do I Become as Proficient with Art as I Am with Computing?","text":"I am on the reverse journey. I went to art school, have been a designer for many years, and write software at a \"not very good but I'm working on it\" level. How do you learn to self-critique? Honesty, objectivity, and taste. Given your background, taste is the only one I'd worry about, but if you're shooting for photorealism, that's fine. You've got taste about what photos look like. That's easy. I'd bet that, after getting in the game, your goal won't be photorealism at the 5 year mark. But that's for later. Here's Ira Glass, of NPR, with a fairly famous set of remarks about overcoming the period of time when you know what good art looks like, and know that the art you are making is not good: [VIDEO] Another anecdote I've heard that's a favorite of mine and describes the process of becoming talented very well: A pottery class is divided in two for the entire semester. One half of the class is told they have the whole 15 weeks to make one really, exceptionally great vase. The other half is told that their only goal is to produce as many vases as humanly possible, regardless of quality. At the end of the semester, the vases that were aiming for excellence pale in comparison to those created by the half that was shooting for volume. Through the course of creating many terrible vases, the students learned what makes a vase good, and how to do it in fast, repeatable ways. You don't make the mistake on vase 20 that you made on vase 1. These iterations compound and lead to signific","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18632993,"author":"spondyl","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you manage UI/UX for your side projects?","text":"One thing I always like to go back to is Ira Glass's video on taste: [VIDEO] In a nutshell, that feeling you get where you believe your projects look crap? It's because you're seeing the disconnect between what you can achieve now, and your taste that's informing what \"great\" is. It's a bit of a double edged sword in that while you'll likely not be truly happy with a project anytime soon, that disconnect means you'll also be able to constantly strive as you recognise supposed flaws in what you've created. In the end, all you can really do is just keep at it and over time, that gap will hopefully close as your skills allow you to create what your taste envisions. That's the dream anyway, haha.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29230455,"author":"rojoca","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Is there such a thing as good taste?","text":"Ira Glass has a practical take on the idea of exposing good taste (e.g. trying to paint like Bellini): [VIDEO] where he talks about how your good taste informs you that the work you are doing doesn\u2019t yet match your ambition, and that this can be both motivating and discouraging","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44468503,"author":"SeanAnderson","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage","text":"I find it surprisingly difficult to lower my standards once I feel committed to an idea. I wish this article leaned a little more into ways to address that sort of dilemma. Don't get me wrong, I agree fully with the article. I put it into practice plenty well in many areas of my life. I've made great progress with my diet, self-care, and physical fitness routines by keeping my goals SMART. And yet, a few years ago, I got this idea in my head for a piece of software I wanted to create that is, if not too ambitious, then clearly asking all of me and then some. The opening paragraph of the article really resonated with me -- \"The artwork that will finally make the invisible visible.\" And so, I've chipped away at the idea here and there, but I find myself continually put off by \"the gap\" - even though I know it's to be expected and is totally human. Part of me wishes I had never dared to dream so big and wishes I could let the idea go entirely. Another part of me is mad and ashamed for thinking like that about a personal dream. Anyway, don't know where I'm going with all this. Just felt like remarking on the article since it struck close to home. P.S. if you haven't seen the Ira Glass video, I'd take a look. It's pretty inspirational. Here's Part 3 which is what the article was referencing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"X4Neivqp2K4":[{"hn_comment_id":4671618,"author":"mixmax","month":"2012-10","story_title":"A Guy Who Saw Lincoln Get Shot Was on a TV Show in 1956","text":"Here's another interesting episode of the same show (I've got a secret) - it's a 17 year old Ray Kurzweil plaing the piano. His secret is that he wrote a computer program that made the music he's playing. Pretty impressive for a 17 year old in 1965... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12520104,"author":"KyleBrandt","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Learning Web Audio by Recreating the Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno","text":"Related, mind blown that kurzweil made programmed music in this presentation in 1965. [VIDEO] He was ~17 in that video, and he built the computer as well.","stance":"rec"}],"X6NJkWbM1xk":[{"hn_comment_id":24234737,"author":"rococosbasilisk","month":"2020-08","story_title":"The \u201cOh Shoot\u201d Moment","text":"Tom Scott has a great video on his \"Oh Shoot\" moment ( [VIDEO] ). Thinking back on the times I've had code exist nowhere else but the clipboard...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48802609,"author":"sneela","month":"2026-07","story_title":"List of Humorous Units of Measurement","text":"The good ol' Ohnosecond: > An \"ohnosecond\" is the second after one makes a terrible mistake, such as deleting the wrong file or sending a text message to the wrong person, where the person in question can do nothing but say \"oh no\". The term is believed to originate from Elizabeth Powell Crowe's 1993 novel, The Electronic Traveler. Reminds me (and probably a lot of devs) of a time when I deployed something breaking to production many years ago :), of course I didn't know it would break production beforehand. Recently, I accidentally deleted my entire shell history which caused me quite a bit of slowdown for some time. I'm quite used to modifying complicated commands with Ctrl+R and fzf; the deletion of my shell was truly horrifying. Tom Scott, as usual, has a great video about the onosecond (sic): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"X8aWBcPVPMo":[{"hn_comment_id":3515311,"author":"spodek","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Philosophy - What's the use?","text":"I respect philosophy, but am more persuaded by Richard Feynman's perspective, when asked what he considered a philosophical question. [VIDEO] This NY Times story gets that philosophy isn't that necessary, but then got so bogged down in philosophical writing it was a chore to get through and I don't consider it worth my time to have read it. Socrates said \"The unexamined life is not worth living.\" I've examined my life a bunch and have benefited from the examination, but the people I know who seem to enjoy their lives the most haven't examined theirs at all. I tend to examine mine less now and I think I'm living better. But maybe that's from figuring things out earlier.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15768204,"author":"thaumaturgy","month":"2017-11","story_title":"How do you prove that Earth is older than 10,000 years?","text":"I dunno about the rest of you, but I clicked on the link to her Twitter account, which so far has much higher quality stuff than this thread on HN. Some fun links: \"Lightning makes new isotopes\" [LINK] \"P-values--abused but not abandoned\" (includes some nice background on p-values for those of us for whom the concept is a little fuzzy) [LINK] A cute video of Feynman answering the question of whether you're seeing an object, or only the light from an object, when looking at it: [VIDEO] A single-molecule magnet: [LINK] ...and all that's just in the last 24 hours. She's got a fantastic Twitter feed for the science-interested.","stance":"rec"}],"X8jsijhllIA":[{"hn_comment_id":33494568,"author":"Hanschri","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The essence of Reed-Solomon coding","text":"To understand how error correction works and to learn more about Hamming codes & Reed-Solomon, 3Blue1Brown and Ben Eater were invaluable. 3Blue1Brown and Ben Eater are by far some of the best educational content creators within their fields, mathematics and computer engineering respectively. I would strongly recommend anyone interested in the topic to check out any of these videos: How to send a self-correcting message (Hamming codes): [VIDEO] Hamming codes part 2, the elegance of it all: [LINK] And any of Ben Eater's five videos on error correction: [LINK] As an aside, Ben Eater does all of his videos and demonstrations using an 8-bit computer he has built step by step in videos on a breadboard. Very impressive and inspiring.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24381210,"author":"the__alchemist","month":"2020-09","story_title":"What is error correction? Hamming codes in hardware by Ben Eater [video]","text":"Nice! pairs well with the 3Blue1Br video on the subject: [VIDEO] Hamming's book The Art of doing Science and Engineer's a solid read. Mixed topics, centered around problem solving techniques, and pitfalls.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28377215,"author":"adamisntdead","month":"2021-09","story_title":"A layman\u2019s guide to recreational mathematics videos","text":"I'm a big fan of this video from Reducible on Huffman codes: [LINK] , and from 3Blue1Brown on Hamming codes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37110749,"author":"WaffleIronMaker","month":"2023-08","story_title":"You Won\u2019t Believe This One Weird CPU Instruction (2019)","text":"If you want to learn more about Hamming Codes from a mathematical perspective, I recommend 3Blue1Brown's YouTube series: > How to send a self-correcting message (Hamming codes) - [VIDEO] > Hamming codes part 2, the elegance of it all - [LINK] Associated with Ben Eater's video, if you want a perspective regarding low level computer hardware: > What is error correction? Hamming codes in hardware - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"X9RYuvPCQUA":[{"hn_comment_id":38815882,"author":"tsumnia","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Things are about to get worse for generative AI","text":"When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote about \"Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal\", which doesn't mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather that great artists are able to take aspects from other works (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My personality is a combination of elements taken from Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and King of the Deathmatch Mick Foley. I like making vector graphics based on pictures. I have a folder on my computer called \"Website Ideas\" that's just screenshots of UIs that I've come across that I really like. I also point to a YouTube video by Kirby Ferguson \"Everything is a Remix\" [1] which talks about how so much of our collective culture stems from copy. It's a great video if you have an hour. When Little Timmy crayons a copy of Mario, we congratulate him for his creativity. Is it unique, one of a kind art? Well Timmy made it, but he didn't think up the original idea of a video game plumber. I give this view to GenAI right now - it's not capable of achieving that \"next step\" in \"original design\", but its performing like a novice artist/musician, it's mimicking what it sees. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40705849,"author":"alexpotato","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Pop culture has become an oligopoly (2022)","text":"Anytime these discussions pop up, it's good to link to the documentary \"Everything is a Remix\" (here is the 2023 updated version: [VIDEO] \" ) It highlights how essentially everything in culture is a remix of some previous version of the culture (or some aspect of it). E.g. even language is largely a remix of earlier languages with some occasional creation of new words. Also, while true that there is definitely an oligopoly, it's also clear that the Long Tail is both huge AND easy to access. In the past, you could only see movies by going to the movie theater and there were only a limited number of theaters. Now, you can both create and consume media in niches as small (or combined) as you want.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47723969,"author":"supern0va","month":"2026-04","story_title":"AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel","text":">LLM-creation (\"training\") involves detecting/compressing patterns of the input. There's a pretty compelling argument that this is essentially what we do, and that what we think of as creativity is just copying, transforming, and combining ideas. LLMs are interesting because that compression forces distilling the world down into its constituent parts and learning about the relationships between ideas. While it's absolutely possible (or even likely for certain prompts) that models can regurgitate text very similar to their inputs, that is not usually what seems to be happening. They actually appear to be little remix engines that can fit the pieces together to solve the thing you're asking for, and we do have some evidence that the models are able to accomplish things that are not represented in their training sets. Kirby Ferguson's video on this is pretty great: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XA2WjJbmmoM":[{"hn_comment_id":29114637,"author":"farisjarrah","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Happy birthday Vim (2020)","text":"The thoughtbot series on vim is great. I'm really glad I found this video early in my Vim career. I've got a very minimal vimrc as a result and just try to lean into the vim builtins [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12955365,"author":"jneumann004","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How to improve vim productivity and workflow?","text":"Use the editor that works best for you. I have used Vim every day for almost the last two years and I have learned to work very quickly inside of it. As far as plugins, if one sounds interesting or useful to you, install it. If it doesn't work out, then you can delete it later. Over the years I have tried all of the popular plugins, but I have managed to whittle it down to 4 plus a couple of language specific plugins Here are a couple of handy youtube videos Vim Navigation Commands [LINK] How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13906722,"author":"wodny","month":"2017-03","story_title":"A Good Vimrc (2014)","text":"I don't believe it's possible to have a good vimrc without really grasping some elementary concepts like movements, operators, registers, windows etc. I have recently watched all the Drew Neil's VimCasts[1] and after just a couple of hours I've realized I was missing a lot for at least 10 years. There is also quite a good presentation on YouTube by Max Cantor \"How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)\"[2]. Instead of treating a single vimrc as the best one it's useful to skim through dotfiles and plugins of some influential vim users like Drew Neil[3] and Tim Pope[4]. BTW VimCasts are accompanied by a book. The second edition[5] includes changes introduced by Vim 8.0. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK] [5]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15723593,"author":"ultramann","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Vim plugins and config walkthrough","text":"I used to use bufftabline, [LINK] . I think something like it is what you're looking for? If it's not quite right for you the readme in the github repo mentions some other plugins that have similar capabilities. I really liked bufftabline when I used it. It was lightweight and did exactly what I wanted it to do, give me an immediate visual representation of the buffers I had open in a familiar tab-like format. Eventually I moved towards an even lighter weight setup. Take at look at this video is you're interested in anything like that. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17431062,"author":"epicide","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Vim plugins I use","text":"I like that the intro paragraph discusses the pros and cons of vanilla vs plugins. For those that want to take a look at some more vanilla approaches to some common tasks, Max Cantor has a great talk about that on YouTube [0]. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17431207,"author":"mhd","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Vim plugins I use","text":"Let's get this out of the way: \"How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)\": [VIDEO] And if you want to see some crazy vim usage, there's always Damian Conway: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19529969,"author":"DyslexicAtheist","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Coc.nvim \u2013 Intellisense Engine for Vim8 and Neovim","text":"some languages are more verbose than others. if you're dealing with `ProblemProblemFactory` type of abstraction madness and subscribe to the idea of spelling out every variable (MessageCounter instead of \"cnt\" etc) then this would seem handy. Maybe it's a question of mindset & philosophy. I personally prefer a minimalist but powerful editor without plugins and just rely on their internal capabilities (which granted are a learning curve). It avoids getting stuck when doing $EDITOR foo on a system you don't own and still feel at home and as fast as on your primary workspace. \"How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)\" : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36754910,"author":"noud","month":"2023-07","story_title":"LazyVim","text":"Am I the only one using vanilla vim with a minimal configuration file (<50 lines)? I set tabs to 4 spaces, put syntax highlighting on, set background to dark, add fuzzy finding, and configure netrw (default file browsing). Very easy to setup. Moreover, when I'm on a different computer and open (vanilla) vim without any configurations. I know that everything is more or less the same as my default vim environment. I think it's not that hard to learn developing in the default vim environment, with some minor tweaks. Also related, How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42492874,"author":"gregjor","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?","text":"I use vim with ctags. vim has good autocomplete but I don't use it much -- I rely on memory and looking things up in the docs. With ctags I can jump to definition/implementation of a function. ctags has worked since the early 1990s. Check out this video: How to do 90% of what plugins do with just vim. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43137330,"author":"gregjor","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Alternative to VS Code?","text":"> The ability to autocomplete, and navigate through the code (even my dependencies's code) by the click on a function, the popover showing the documentation/signature of the function i'm going to call. Those are Quality of Life features I'm not ready to give up on. ctags did most of that decades ago. Plain vim has good autocomplete and signature popovers, along with navigating to functions and class definitions. No LSP needed. An LSP will do it better but with sometimes significant overhead. As I noted I don't use VSCode or a JetBrains IDE. I know about them and have used them. My setup works language-agnostic, and I also work in multiple languages. Possibly useful, at least interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43789617,"author":"skydhash","month":"2025-04","story_title":"OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours","text":"With editors like vim, neovim, emacs, it's way easier to get the lay of the land first (tutorial, play around with the default config,..) and then list out what you need. My vim config has three things only: LSP, FZF (for anything fuzzy), and Plug (to install the above two). There's also a few niceties, but I could do without them. or vendor them into the main config. But it's not my daily editor, so that's just the base config. Anything I could add on top of that would depend on the projects I would need it for. That's about 200 lines (the lsp config is 1/4 of that) NB. A nice talk even if it's about vim \"How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XDM3MqHln8U":[{"hn_comment_id":14357255,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Chelsea Manning Is Expected to Leave Prison, 28 Years Early","text":"> Especially impressed by Thomas. If you haven't seen it, I suggest watching Thomas Drake's talk[1] at 29c3. [1] [VIDEO] (although I've linked to Thomas Drake's talk, the other talks by Jesselyn Radack and William Binney in the same video are also worth watching)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5000759,"author":"contingencies","month":"2013-01","story_title":"There's no avoiding Google+","text":"Google's growing G+ surveillance is a worry. This is why after watching the 29C3 keynote ( [LINK] ) and whistleblower panel ( [VIDEO] ) a couple of days ago I blocked all the main google domains (mail, maps, G+, accounts, picasa, etc.) via /etc/hosts and committed to only accessing Gmail via Tor ( [LINK] ). Facebook I already deleted and block via AdBlockPlus (though I now recommend [LINK] ), but G+ is harder and more insidious to stay free of. After a few days of use, I am quite happy with my new strategy: keep email (or anything personally identifying, like banking) in a different and anonymized browser. Keep everything else in a general browser that never sees you identified. Edit: add URLs, TrueBlockPlus reference.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6972706,"author":"PavlovsCat","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Glenn Greenwald keynote at Chaos Communication Congress [video]","text":"Also from last year's 29c3: Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake & William Binney, \"Enemies of the State: What Happens When Telling the Truth about Secret US Government Power Becomes a Crime\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7170448,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2014-02","story_title":"US Media Blacks Out Snowden Interview","text":"[LINK] The EFF has been supporting these former NSA agents' whistleblowing efforts for a while now. Also, Ellsberg - author of the Pentagon Papers - has signed it in support. While it's not a character reference, it is worth observing that the rather dramatic efforts the NSA has gone though to threaten and prosecute these whistleblowers. You may be interested in watching this talk from 29c3 where Drake and Binney told their stories in their own words: [VIDEO] And yes, it's a hell of an accusation. It's also the one that finally made this NSA mess make sense, with their description of THINTHREAD being dropped because it was too inexpensive . It's all about moving money to their contractor friends.","stance":"rec"}],"XEVlyP4_11M":[{"hn_comment_id":16628655,"author":"harryf","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine","text":"Last Week Tonight did this bit brilliantly when they interviewed Edward Snowden - [VIDEO] - in essence we need to get dramatically better at telling this story so everyone understands.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27502258,"author":"LinuxBender","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How to explain to others why privacy matters?","text":"That is a good question because it comes up a lot and people start explaining ideologies rather than showing real world examples. I believe John Oliver provided the best example when he interviewed Edward Snowden. John walked around town asking people how they felt about the government monitoring their phone communications, text messages, etc... People were mostly indifferent until he rephrased the question asking if it was alright if someone was monitoring the pictures and videos (sexting) between they and their spouse/partner. When that topic came up, the nearly unanimous answer is that they would be furious if someone was watching their sexting content. [1] So in summary, I believe the answer is to find something that people actually wish to keep private when discussing it. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11295168,"author":"tyre","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Apple files final response in San Bernardino iPhone case","text":"This paints an unfair portrait of the average American. It isn't that they don't care, they just aren't as technologically savvy as this audience. Take the Edward Snowden leaks. John Oliver did a wonderful segment interviewing people about NSA surveillance.[1] If you ask an average citizen if they are for or against \"Section 215\" or \"X-Keyscore\", they'll fall back on vague national security scare quotes. If you ask them if the government should see your dick-pics, then they start to understand what is at stake. In many people's minds, what the FBI is saying makes sense. What's the big deal? They want to access a single iPhone from a terrorist . Teach people that it means their nude photos could be accessed by any law enforcement official and I think you'll find that people really do care. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12980855,"author":"TeMPOraL","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Britain passed the \u201cmost extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy\u201d","text":"John Oliver's \"Dick Pics\" seem like a pretty good argument that can reach average citizens. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14204549,"author":"jerf","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Amazon Echo Look","text":"\"(Likely an overabundance of trust or a lack of understanding of all the real implications and potential for exploit.)\" I think that's a lot of it. People aren't trading privacy for convenience... people are taking convenience. It makes a lot more sense when you think of it that way. You can do an experiment yourself to show this; take 5 non-techie/non-HN people and explain to them exactly what this thing does and how it works. You'll find people's attitudes change, rationally or otherwise, which I present only as evidence that they haven't thought about this and incorporated it into their worldview, not that they are right or wrong. Or watch this: [VIDEO] John Oliver on Government Surveillance. Perhaps ironically, mere nude photos of myself aren't really what I'm worried about. I mean, I wouldn't be happy if they got out, and since I'm not in the habit of texting them about I have questions about where they came from, but by and large, nobody would care and it would affect my life only briefly. I'm far more worried about the government scraping everybody's postings on Facebook and building up a GoodThink/BadThink database, which I know basically already exists, because our political parties (let alone our intelligence community) build voter databases that are probably at least 90% accurate on that front. A concrete list of Everyone Who Disagrees With Me, one accurate enough for someone powerful to decide the rest of the inaccuracy is acceptable collateral damage, is scary.","stance":"rec"}],"XFDM1ip5HdU":[{"hn_comment_id":12106819,"author":"JoeCamel","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Does 1+2+3+... Really Equal -1/12?","text":"I loved this video [VIDEO] \"An exploration of infinite sums, from convergent to divergent, including a brief introduction to the 2-adic metric, all themed on that cycle between discovery and invention in math.\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15931809,"author":"skadamat","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Communicating Advanced Mathematics to Kids","text":"So many things I could say about this, but I\"ll let Alan Kay speak for me - [LINK] Alan talks about how ideas in Calculus could be manifested from an early age and a richness in understanding built up as they aged up: - at very young ages, kids really respond well through \"doing\" / the enactive channel. When asked to draw a circle, kids in Papert's group would first emulate what a LOGO turtle would do by rotating their body in a circle (making tiny increments in x and y). - as they got a bit older, the visual / iconic channel was more developed and they could understand the abstraction of a circle on pencil/paper and how the concepts carried over there - closer to early teens, symbols were much easier to grasp and relate to, etc. With this context in mind, there have been some cool efforts to mix the second and third channels I just mentioned to communicate advanced math concepts. Vi Hart and Grant Sanderson's youtube channels come to mind. Here are my favorite videos by Grant: - \"What does it feel like to invent math\": [VIDEO] - On the visual intuition behind a hard problem on the Putnam exam - \"The hardest problem on the hardest test\": [LINK] - From vectors to matrices to vector spaces to higher-level ideas like the link between linear algebra and calculus: \"Essence of linear algebra\" series: [LINK] What I especially like about Grant's videos, is that he often walks through what a mathematician would do, the questions she would ask, etc.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27311317,"author":"padics","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Mathematicians Find Long-Sought Building Blocks for Special Polynomials","text":"3lue1brown has a great visualization of constructing p-adic numbers and calculating their metric through the lens of 2-adic numbers: [VIDEO] This article fills in some bits omitted from the video: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27313850,"author":"piokoch","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Mathematicians Find Long-Sought Building Blocks for Special Polynomials","text":"You add infinite number of positives numbers to each other and you get -1 as a result. p-adic numbers are adding some sense to this seemingly contradictory result. Great intro: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37980696,"author":"krackers","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance","text":"It's also not a full introduction, but for those who want to have a taste of p-adic numbers, see 3b1b's video [VIDEO] which motivates 2-adic numbers. There's also a neat connection between twos complement and 2-adic numbers.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42001434,"author":"8minfromsol","month":"2024-10","story_title":"2-adic numbering for binary tilings","text":"3blue1brown has an earlier, kind of meta, video about \u201cWhat does it feel like to invent math?\u201d where Grant tries to show how one might invent, and so by define, p-adics. Complete with the customarily excellent visual aides. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XGo4PJd1lng":[{"hn_comment_id":25823908,"author":"jameshart","month":"2021-01","story_title":"MuseScore 3.6","text":"Tantacrul\u2019s video about the creation of the new engraving font ( [VIDEO] ) is also an important story about the MS-DOS Score program, software obsolescence and stewardship, and the loss of value that can happen when an industry relies on proprietary software. Without polemics or politics, this ends up presenting one of the strongest moral arguments for open source licensing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35078621,"author":"Slow_Hand","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Olympia Musicwriter","text":"That's really interesting. I don't envy anyone who had to do music engraving prior to the usage of computers, so hats off to you and thanks for your contributions. Musical notation is such a complex, intricate, system and even with computers it's still a challenging thing to get right. I've used several different notation programs over the years and most of them make me want to scream and cuss over how un-intuitive they are compared to hand-writing a score. There is so much complexity and specificity required of the tools. No doubt you've probably heard of Tantacrul and his Youtube channel. Watching him pick apart the design issues of every major notation software really highlights just how hard it can be to get this right. His channel occupies a nice niche at the intersection of music composition, design, and programming. Also his videos are entertaining as hell. I particularly enjoy his video about the making of a new notation typeface. He does a good job at making the topic of music notation come to life, and also throws in a short history of the program 'Score' for some context: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27006545,"author":"meowface","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Audacity Aquired by Muse Group","text":"If anyone's curious, here are Tantacrul's entertaining videos on MuseScore and designing MuseScore's new font, and the Audacity video from yesterday: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31262419,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Clairnote: An alternative music notation system","text":"Tantacrul made a really interesting video about how incredibly difficult it is to make a notation font that might be a good watch[0], and I say that to say this: I see an issue here that left me confused for several minutes: the little bit of overlap when a note is attached to a line but not intersecting it looks like an alignment mistake and leaves ambiguity. My recommendation would be to have no overlap, with the top/bottom pixel of the note head in line with the top/bottom pixel of the staff line, like traditional notation. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40218762,"author":"amiga386","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Printing Music with CSS Grid","text":"That's very much it. You could also make an analogy to the arts of typography and typesetting. It's of the same importance to a composer or musician that the notation is legible and beautiful, as it is to a graphic designer or reader that type and layout are legible and beautiful. If the GP is interested in the topic, there are great videos by Tantacrul on his experience redesigning the notation font for MuseScore [0] and his overview of MuseScore 4.0's engraving improvements [1] - in particular this second video, concerning mainly layout, shows just how far this CSS approach would have to go to have a truly legible, reflowable layout in the face of beams/slurs/ties. (I don't want to take away from anyone on the Sibelius team, they're likely even better experts on the subject than Tantacrul is, but as far as I know, they didn't make long-form Youtube videos about the topic! He also likely got the job of leading the MuseScore redesign thanks to his previous videos that critiqued and reimagined the interfaces of music composition software... including older versions of Sibelius [2] and MuseScore [3]) [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"XH0F9r0siTI":[{"hn_comment_id":28182090,"author":"daniel-thompson","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Compiling C Programs Into \u201cMov\u201d Instructions (And Only \u201cMov\u201d Instructions)","text":"These links don't work for me, but the videos are on YT: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] And yes, they are spectacular.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49286937,"author":"aecsocket","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Spaghettifying DRAM","text":"Holy shit, Christopher Domas is back. I remember watching his Defcon talks on x86 shenanigans[^1][^2] and being amazed at what he's been able to discover. Then he got whisked away by Intel and now drops this. I'm excited. [^1]: [VIDEO] [^2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"XI5frPV58tY":[{"hn_comment_id":20343983,"author":"eadan","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Radiotrophic fungus","text":"Paul Stamets is a fascinating person. You're right, the Star Trek character is named after him [0]. I remember hearing, perhaps in the Joe Rogan podcast, that he consulted for the show. He has a brilliant TED talk on the world-changing potential of fungi research [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26597289,"author":"samstave","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Buildings made with fungi could live, grow, and then biodegrade","text":"\"There's been buzz lately about mycelium\" -- Well, Paul Stamets has been talking for decades. Did a TED talk, amazing other videos - a fantastic Joe Rogan Podcast etc. Mycelium is AMAZING - and I really hope that we start using it in the myriad ways it is versatile for so many different applications. --- Have you Seen these Paul Stamets vids: Joe rogan: [LINK] Ted (6 ways mushrooms can change the world: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28202824,"author":"criticaltinker","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Future Space Travel Might Require Mushrooms","text":"> But I think using psilocybin mushrooms in spaceflight makes a lot of sense. There are more than 65 articles right now ... at ClinicalTrials.gov that say psilocybin mushrooms help people overcome [post-traumatic stress disorder], loneliness and depression. Do you think the astronauts are going to have loneliness and depression and PTSD? I think yes. How are you going to help them? Paul Stamets is an expert mycologist and really down-to-earth guy. I highly recommend his Ted Talks if you're interested in this type of stuff, here's one of them [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18701184,"author":"momentmaker","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by Giant Mushrooms","text":"This TED talk was very interesting about some fungi facts. [VIDEO] On a side note, I thought this was an interesting take on Bitcoin in relation to fungi. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"XJ97iXQrqzw":[{"hn_comment_id":28941097,"author":"tgv","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Yamaha DX7 Technical Analysis","text":"Plogue, a Canadian software company, have recently released a (software) emulation of the DX-7 in excruciating detail. Here you can see part of the trouble they went through: [VIDEO] . Suffice to say that they used a logic analyzer to discover gritty details that no other analysis of the DX-7 I know has ever paid attention of.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30214769,"author":"TonyTrapp","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part V: the output circuitry","text":"Maybe the closest free plugin, but it's not on the level of accuracy as Plogue's Chipsynth OPS7, which is bit-accurate. The author has an interesting video here, with more to come hopefully: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38982507,"author":"duniel","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Reverse-engineering the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's sound chip from die photos (2021)","text":"I would recommend Plogue's OPS7, they have put considerable amounts of time and effort into reverse engineering the original chips. The interface is a little clunky but it sounds fantastic. [LINK] Edit: a YouTube video about the reverse engineering process from David at Plogue: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XJ9ckqCMiKk":[{"hn_comment_id":11361872,"author":"chrismccord","month":"2016-03","story_title":"What makes Phoenix Presence special, and a sneak peek","text":"My Erlang Factory keynote also goes into the design considerations and PubSub layer optimizations that sits underneath Phoenix.Presence: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11669533,"author":"rdtsc","month":"2016-05","story_title":"A Farewell to FRP","text":"There is a nice talk from Erlang Factory 2016 called \"Making the Web Functional with Phoenix and Elm\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13026373,"author":"rdtsc","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Elm for the Front End, Right Now","text":"Speaking of Elm I liked this video from Erlang Factory about using Phoenix and Elm together. They both have a functional flavors so I think it might appeal to same people: [VIDEO] The first half is about Phoenix, the second about Elm. I don't know much about front-end stuff but I did like the Elm bit as an intro, especially the debugging and nice error messages part.","stance":"rec"}],"XKu_SEDAykw":[{"hn_comment_id":19933633,"author":"sonnyblarney","month":"2019-05","story_title":"I turned my interview task for Google into a startup","text":"Whether or not 'everyone' wants to work there is not hugely material. They, and others that do the white-boarding, are 'the best'. They have loads of talent, operational efficiency, ship tons of great products with great innovations. White-boarding done appropriately is an excellent means to develop an understanding of people's aptitudes in a short period of time. Here is an example of a Google white boarding interview, it's excellent in many ways: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24325067,"author":"MarkMc","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Most common mistakes during interviews","text":"'Ask clarifying questions' and 'think out loud' are also two of the suggestions in this excellent video from Google showing an example of a great technical interview: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19081174,"author":"sonnyblarney","month":"2019-02","story_title":"A Humility Training Exercise for Technical Interviewers","text":"Very good points, agree with it. However - I don't think this is about 'ego' or even 'humility' - I think those are not the right words. It's a lack of contextual understanding both in 'self awareness' and also the interviewers plight. I think the premise can be taught. Also, I think interviews can be structured to find qualities independant of background. + Questions that don't measure a person's ability to 'memorize algorithms' are a good start. + Allowing devs to pick their language of expression, i.e. sometimes they are more comfortable in one lang than another. + Don't get syntax/code structure confused with the abstract problem if that's what one is going for. Google has a nice interview example [1] + Open ended questions with many possible turns allow for a 'good' thinker to just go a lot further, and be more impressive while at the same time allowing junior devs to still walk through and complete something. The Google example is again good here. + Time/on the spot - one of the worst issues. Personally I'm about 50/50. Sometimes 'in the flow' sometimes 'not', but surely just given a little bit fo time, I'd be fine on most things. For this reason, giving interviewees an intro to the problems, and giving them as much time as they want to think about them before the interview starts, might be worthwhile as well. 'Let us know when you want to go over a solution'. This could work well for pedantic things such as 'here's some code, find some bugs' or 'how would you structure","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19933791,"author":"sonnyblarney","month":"2019-05","story_title":"I turned my interview task for Google into a startup","text":"\"I personally don't recommend those kinds of companies \" You wouldn't recommend Google, Microsoft, Facebook and a host of the best companies in the world because they do 'white board interviews'? You're not only working against the data here, you're working against reason: asking people to solve problems that they may encounter on the job is an excellent means of measuring a number of things, even beyond their ability to solve this problem. There are still quite a lot of 'senior engineers' who actually might be valuable in some specific circumstances, who can't walk through problems or write decent code at all. This example [1] from Google is really quite good. If you watch carefully you'll see how many elements and opportunities there are for a 'good developer' to shine both technically, and also in terms of communication. And also for 'ok developer' to just do an ok job. They're not asking bizarre or impossible to solve questions that you'd have to study for either. \"That can be, especially for junior engineers.\" No, it's good to weed out 'senior engineers' who think that their experience and 'good relationships' entitle them to a job. \"I don't want to burn myself out doing unpaid work\" - an on-site bit of coding is not 'unpaid work' - please don't take this angle that your (or mine, or anyone else's) bit of quick hacky coding is 'work' that could be useful really in any way. This is different from a '2 hour but really 2 day' take home test which is ridiculous. \"And yet I'v","stance":"rec"}],"XO9FKQAxWZc":[{"hn_comment_id":22986745,"author":"qqn","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Why my book can be downloaded for free (2014)","text":"Yes! Same takeaway, and the main reason I published my thesis online first, turning it into a video tutorial to boot: [LINK] . Specifically I was frustrated at all the sources I had to get behind various kinds of walls, pay- and otherwise: [LINK] Nina Paley (from Rita Sings the Blues ) had a great talk five years ago on how restricting information is a form of cultural cancer that is very relevant here: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38784563,"author":"CaptainFever","month":"2023-12","story_title":"The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement","text":"Copyright Is Brain Damage by Nina Paley [1] claimed that culture is like a bunch of neurons passing and evolving data to each other, and copyright is like severing the ties between the neurons, like brain damage. It also presented [2] an alternative way of viewing art and science, as products of the common culture, not a product purely from the creator, to be privatised. This sounds really relevant to your comment. Furthermore, if we manage to \"untrain\" AI on certain pieces of content, then copyright would really become \"brain\" damage too. Like, the perceptrons and stuff. [1] [VIDEO] [2] No, I'm not an AI, just autistic.","stance":"rec"}],"XOR8mk0tLpc":[{"hn_comment_id":47056726,"author":"danielvaughn","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Halt and Catch Fire: TV's Best Drama You've Probably Never Heard Of (2021)","text":"Lee Pace's performance in that show is one of my all time favorites. It's incredibly hard to play a charismatic marketing guru because in some sense, you're not acting. In a given scene, the character might be trying to convince people around him of some crazy idea, but if he hasn't convinced you, the viewer, then the entire illusion falls apart. So he really has to do in real life what he's pretending to do on screen. edit - a great example and one of my favorite scenes from the show: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18330501,"author":"j1vms","month":"2018-10","story_title":"IBM\u2019s Old Playbook","text":"Think you'll get a kick out of this scene from Halt and Catch Fire: [VIDEO] [0] [0] Sales call scene with Joe and Gordon in Halt and Catch Fire: Season 1 Episode 1 [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38142495,"author":"danielvaughn","month":"2023-11","story_title":"When to Shut Up: A Visual Guide (With Included Algorithm)","text":"This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Halt and Catch Fire, when the marketing guru tells the sales engineer (in no uncertain terms) when to shut up: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XRAP3lBivYM":[{"hn_comment_id":21862044,"author":"divan","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"\"Performance matters\" by Emery Berger on StrangeLoop'19 is a great talk - [LINK] Also, rest of his talks are also fascinating: - [VIDEO] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36035793,"author":"samwho","month":"2023-05","story_title":"A highly intuitive visual guide on how memory allocation works, step by step","text":"You\u2019d need cooperation between your malloc implementation and the application code. It\u2019s possible, but tricky. If your malloc returned a pointer to a pointer, and promised to keep the first level pointer up to date, and was able to lock your application whenever it moved things around, it could work. Someone else already mentioned, but garbage collected languages do actually do this. Because they\u2019re fully in control of memory (the language exposes no raw pointers), they\u2019re able to create the layer of indirection you\u2019ve suggested and move things around as they please. I know at minimum the JVM does this. The term to search for is \u201cheap compaction.\u201d There\u2019s also the weird and wonderful work of Emery Berger et al with their \u201cMesh\u201d malloc implementation, which blows my mind: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"XRXwWbo_mX0":[{"hn_comment_id":9287366,"author":"tdicola","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Dot matrix printer playing \u201cEye of the Tiger\u201d [video]","text":"My favorite version of this hack is Renault changing the RPM of their F1 engine to play God Save The Queen: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24685544,"author":"wastedhours","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Honda quits F1, invests in carbon-free tech instead","text":"I once walked the footbridge over the hillclimb at Goodwood during the Festival of Speed as a V10 F1 car went underneath. Was something else entirely. Seeing the musical demos the Renault team used to do was always interesting too - if you haven't heard an F1 car play God Save The Queen [0] it's a great watch (and a reminder about how controllable they are). [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XRYN2xt11Ek":[{"hn_comment_id":7757705,"author":"film42","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Asynchronous JavaScript at Netflix","text":"The conf talk on youtube by Matt Marenghi [linked in the post] is really awesome. Provides great examples and resources. Really worth 28-min. Direct Link: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11824114,"author":"sktrdie","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Async and Await","text":"I don't really like await . It seems to be a syntactical fix which acts in a quite magical way. Not sure if introducing magic to a language syntax is what we want. Rather, we should think about data flow of our async apps differently. I believe Observables are the future of async code. Once you grasp the concept that everything in your app can be transformed into streams of events, and you work with these events using chains of .map(), .filter(), .reduce(), etc. you'll grasp the true power of this paradigm and how well it fits async and/or concurrent apps. I suggest anybody that doesn't quite swallow the await syntax, to have a look at this presentation about Observables at Netflix as it's quite mind changing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7887806,"author":"shaydoc","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]","text":"i thought it was a good presentation, however, I recently watched a Netflix one, published by Matt Marenghi, which to me was infinitely better. I think the description of events as just another collection, albeit a time based collection flow was nicer ( Observable === Collection + Time ), and also that this collection must have the ability to tell you that it has terminated. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7966744,"author":"mattpodwysocki","month":"2014-06","story_title":"An Introduction to Reactive Programming","text":"It's not a fad at all, with Netflix and other companies using Rx in all flavors on their platforms. See this video from Jafar Husain, a tech lead at Netflix, talk about how they use RxJS at Netflix: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7966754,"author":"mattpodwysocki","month":"2014-06","story_title":"An Introduction to Reactive Programming","text":"Why not try watching the video from Jafar Husain, a tech lead from Netflix, talk about Async JavaScript at Netflix which uses RxJS to explain these concepts? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7968636,"author":"sriku","month":"2014-07","story_title":"My Golang UI package: lessons learned about threading and plans for the future","text":"Yes I meant what \"Reactive Extensions\" does. Should've been clearer that it was a reference to \"functional reactive programming\" and not a specific library. edit: \"Async Javascript at Netflix\" is a great talk on this - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XRr1kaXKBsU":[{"hn_comment_id":30560053,"author":"fsh","month":"2022-03","story_title":"We're building computers wrong [video]","text":"I think he is easily one of the smartest people on YouTube and is producing some of the very best videos. He is also a brilliant educator. For examples, his videos on special [1] and general relativity [2] were real eye-openers for me, even though I have studied physics and have seen this stuff explained a million times before. What I really don't like are the new video titles. At some point he started A/B testing them to maximize his revenue. He even made a video about it [3]. Of course, this selects for the most outrageous clickbait in order to get that sweet engagement. I am starting to wonder if he took into account, how much this is starting to alienate long-term followers. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24821704,"author":"doomrobo","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Gravity is not a force \u2013 free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime","text":"When you are at rest on the surface of the earth, you\u2019re actually accelerating. I barely understand it but veritasium explains it in the newest vid [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24824807,"author":"vl","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Gravity is not a force \u2013 free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime","text":"Original page kinda doesn\u2019t explain the idea in simple terms. This Veritasium video gives detailed \u201cpopsci\u201d explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24832820,"author":"j1vms","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Gravity is not a force \u2013 free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime","text":"Here's [0] a bit more thorough explanation of this concept for those who are interested. [0] [VIDEO] (Veritasium on Youtube: Why Gravity is NOT a Force @ 8:24)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30995931,"author":"metrognome","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Weightless cats \u2013 Do space cats land on their feet? (2011) [video]","text":"While falling, the cat is in an inertial reference frame, so it is not accelerating. The ground is actually accelerating upward at 9.8 m/s2, counteracting the flow of spacetime. This Veritasium video gives an intuitive explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35732173,"author":"darken","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Why Gravity Is Not Like the Other Forces","text":"Respin of a comment I posted a while back: This is what helped me wrap ahead around the fact that gravity \"is not really a force\": when you are in free fall you feel 0 acceleration. You appear to be accelerating relative to the ground-- but you're actually motionless in an \"inertial reference frame\". (Similar to how the astronauts on the ISS don't \"feel\" acceleration despite accelerating rapidly relative to the earth.) The \"force\" of gravity is often modeled as \"gravity pulling you down\" and the ground \"pushing you back up\". This works mathematically, but isn't quite logically consistent. In reality, on the ground you're in a region of warped spacetime, so you feel constant upward acceleration despite not actually accelerating. (Thinking of this another way, standing on earth feels identical to being in a far away spaceship accelerating at 9.8 m/s\u00b2.) This is also why time \"speeds up\" near more massive objects. (Separate from \"acceleration\".) We're so used to gravity this it doesn't seem weird. But when you consider the fact that free-fall is when you truly do not experience acceleration... well pondering that from many angles is what ultimately led Einstein to his model of relativity. (This is me trying to condense what could be a 10 minute explanation into a few sentences, so apologies if it's not particularly clear.) Veritasium had a good video on this topic: [VIDEO] (Thanks to u/badocr for commenting with this link last time.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44018821,"author":"qnleigh","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Dead Stars Don\u2019t Radiate","text":"Ah yeah there are multiple definitions of 'acceleration' here. Unruh radiation occurs when you're not 'in an inertial reference frame,' loosely meaning that you feel acceleration. So in a rocket in space or (presumably) standing on Earth's surface. What you say makes intuitive sense, but it was actually the opposite logic that lead Einstein to his general theory of relativity. Here's a slightly dorky but very good Veritasium video that explains this issue and general relativity [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XTeJ64KD5cg":[{"hn_comment_id":9054482,"author":"prezjordan","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Graham's Number","text":"My brain melts every time I watch this video [1] from Numberphile on Graham's number. They also had another video [2] with Ron Graham himself :) [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40396384,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2024-05","story_title":"A Trial HIV Vaccine Triggered Elusive and Essential Antibodies in Humans","text":"If math can make you feel awe, you've got to watch the Numberphile series on very big numbers. They're constants used in proofs that are specific, well-defined integers known to be finite, but so huge that the physical universe does not have enough particles (or even Plank-scale microstates) in it to represent the number of digits these numbers have! Absolutely mind-bending stuff. Listed in increasing order: \"Graham's Number\" [VIDEO] \"How Big is Graham's Number? (feat Ron Graham)\" [LINK] \"The Enormous TREE(3)\" [LINK] \"TREE(3) (extra footage)\" [LINK] \"The Daddy of Big Numbers (Rayo's Number)\" [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9055923,"author":"Ronsenshi","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Graham's Number","text":"I love this video [LINK] by Sean Day[9] Plott describing Graham's number very well. At least I found that description very easy to follow. Numberphile [1] too has a great explanation, but I still strongly recommend watching Day[9] video because it tells a little bit of history and Sean is very expressive and good speaker so he easily engages viewer. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19971071,"author":"johnsonjo","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Knuth's Up-Arrow Notation","text":"I've seen this notation in a video [1] on Graham's number [2] by Numberphile. It's a pretty interesting video for seeing how quickly the numbers get unimaginably massive. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"XUT8ec24anM":[{"hn_comment_id":17484843,"author":"waivek","month":"2018-07","story_title":"No Joke: The Onion Faces Layoffs by Univision, Says Report","text":"Half a decade ago, The Onion reached the pinnacle of satire with their Onion News Network. What made it different was the presence of a really solid fourth wall. Not once is there a wink at the camera or any indication that the actors are \"in on it\". All the satire I've seen in more recent years has had people talking in an exaggerated manner about absurd events. They don't talk like real people. My Favorite ONN videos [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24797679,"author":"arsdragonfly","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Teens' mental health did surprisingly well in quarantine","text":"If anyone is looking for how interaction between teen girls look like, this parody made by The Onion is the best depiction I've ever seen: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40164639,"author":"pants2","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Jeff Lawson buys The Onion","text":"This is the best birthday present I could have asked for. The Onion News Network has the funniest, most prescient videos online and I love going back to watch them. Even if the Onion comes back half as funny as they were it's going to be fabulous. Here are a few of my lesser-known favorites: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"XVbuk3jizGM":[{"hn_comment_id":35723661,"author":"ssalka","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The Glorious Return of a Humble Car Feature","text":"I feel compelled to share a video, now 9 years old, that shows how touch screens could be accommodated with sensible design in cars. The UIs we are used to on our phones are not suitable for driving, but we could make something that is. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14356935,"author":"cyberferret","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Audi's logo rebrand","text":"Whew, I was glad to see they hadn't completely scrapped the iconic 4 rings. Nice to see them making all their branding assets available like this though - right down to the icon sets etc. That would make third party apps or in car navigation systems etc. conform to the same look and feel. On that note - I wonder how soon it will be before car manufacturers have 'app stores' for add ons to their internal systems. Wouldn't it be cool, for instance, to have a custom navigation app that you could install in your Tesla to supplement the factory installed one? For example - this engineer's proof of concept for a touch screen interface in a car [0]. If he could brand it with the Audi graphic assets and pitch it to them, I am sure it will go a long way to them incorporating it in their future vehicles... [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14517403,"author":"cyberferret","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Redditors design worst volume sliders possible","text":"I'd love to see the antithesis of this collection - whereby smart UI designers try and improve the current audio controls to move away from the old style knobs/sliders, to something far better represented by todays interfaces, such as this concept for a car audio control: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17598514,"author":"cyberferret","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Why touchscreens in cars don\u2019t work","text":"Every time I see posts about car touch screen interfaces, and the associated UX problems, I am reminded of this video I saw a few years ago [0]. I think it is an elegant solution (only allow ONE thing to be controlled by the touch screen at a time), however will require a lot of learning and remembering to get used to all the different gestures. [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20883649,"author":"hndamien","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Porsche Taycan revealed: $150,900 base price, 0-60 MPH in 3 seconds","text":"It doesn't help that automotive latency for touch screens is incredibly bad. It it had smartphone level response maybe it would be a better starting point for comparison. I'd love to see something like this, even in a Tesla. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29129851,"author":"lbayes","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Some new BMWs won't have touchscreens thanks to chip shortage","text":"I have a 2015 Audi A3. I didn't want the brand at all, but loved (and still love) the dial control. I've been dreading getting a new car specifically because I do not want the touch screen. Fortunately, I still have a few years left of good life in this machine, otherwise I'd jump on one of those immediately! I still wish something like this UI would have caught on. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XVmsfL5LG90":[{"hn_comment_id":36276959,"author":"shagie","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Turn dumb tweets into cuneiform tablets","text":"If this is interesting... Irving Finkel is the person to look up for cuneiform on Youtube. From the British Museum: Irving Finkel teaches how to write cuneiform [VIDEO] There are many other videos by him, but that's a place to start.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36279374,"author":"nosianu","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Turn dumb tweets into cuneiform tablets","text":"There are many similar ones, but I like this one from The British Museum the most, because of the teacher: \"Irving Finkel teaches how to write cuneiform I Curator's Corner Season 4 Episode 8 #CuratorsCorner\" Who is he: > Irving Leonard Finkel is a British philologist and Assyriologist. He is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia. It's short enough for an introduction, funny and entertaining, and broad enough, with some sprinkling of information that gives an idea of the complexities of the language too, not just the cuneiform itself. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45924410,"author":"Jun8","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Why I'm Learning Sumerian","text":"If you are interesting anything related to cuneiform writing or ancient Mesopotamian culture , Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, is a treasure. Here he is teaching how to write cuneiform: [VIDEO] Here is a hilarious talk he gave at Chicago's Oriental Institute on Noah's Ark: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"XXBxV6-zamM":[{"hn_comment_id":16120592,"author":"jdietrich","month":"2018-01","story_title":"PiTubeDirect: A Raspberry Pi as a BBC Micro Second Processor","text":"I can highly recommend the BBC drama \"Micro Men\", about the early years of the British home computer boom and the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn. It gives a real flavour of the mad, maverick years before the IBM clones took over. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19604157,"author":"joosters","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro","text":"If you haven't already seen it, 'Micro Men' is an excellent TV drama that details the history of the BBC's computer project and the battle to be the chosen computer: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28555546,"author":"tpmx","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Sir Clive Sinclair has died","text":"The excellent Micro Men docudrama ( [LINK] ) has somehow been on Youtube since 2013: [VIDEO] (1h24m) Micro Men, working title Syntax Era, is a 2009 one-off BBC drama television programme set in the late 1970s and the early-mid 1980s, about the rise of the British home computer market. It focuses on the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by Alexander Armstrong), who developed the ZX Spectrum, and Chris Curry (played by Martin Freeman), the man behind the BBC Micro. (Sinclair didn't exactly like it though.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30567606,"author":"louthy","month":"2022-03","story_title":"March 5, 1981: Timex Sinclair ZX81 Launched (2018)","text":"Nice reference there! Micro Men really is a great docu-drama, it really feels like it captures the time very well. As my first computer was a BBC Micro, it really struck a chord. It\u2019s great seeing the specs for the (yet to be built) ARM chip on the board in the Acorn office, and it\u2019s also awesome that Sophie Wilson playing the barmaid too! For those that haven\u2019t seen it, it\u2019s definitely worth a watch [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9844415,"author":"andyjohnson0","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM","text":"Micro Men is available on youtube [1] and is definitely worth a watch. The scene were one of the characters is eating noodles using multimeter probes as chopsticks made me smile. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20745328,"author":"hyperpallium","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Homemade Electric Motorcycle Stopped on M25 in Hertfordshire","text":"\"26 years\" is oddly precise, but the sinclair C5 was 1985, 34 years ago, so it's probably just how long he's served or something. [LINK] BONUS \"Micro Men\" documentary/drama about Sir Clive Sinclair vs Acorn (from which grew Acorn RISC Machine -> ARM) [VIDEO] (1h 24m) \"A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23692645,"author":"chvid","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Micro Men \u2013 10th Anniversary \u2013 With Chris Curry, Steve Furber and Hermann Hauser","text":"[VIDEO] The full BBC movie without commentary. An authentic drama about the heyday of British home computing featuring Clive Sinclair plus Curry, Furber, and Hauser from Acorn computers. Also appearing are the ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro, and the ARM processor on a whiteboard.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25407082,"author":"codeulike","month":"2020-12","story_title":"If-then-else had to be invented","text":"ah yes you are right, the in-line ELSE Obligatory shout out for 'Micro Men', about the making of the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25488117,"author":"29athrowaway","month":"2020-12","story_title":"The Acorn Archimedes and the first ARM processor","text":"Acorn was not obscure. It was a household name, with TV ads and such. There's this nice TV show about Sinclair and Acorn from BBC 4. [VIDEO] (Micro Men)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27143212,"author":"ffhhj","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Movies every physics lover should watch (2020)","text":"[LINK] Favorites about real and fictional creators: Micro Men [VIDEO] Pirates of Silicon Valley Halt and Catch Fire ... and some documentaries like \"Mother of all Demos\", the history of Internet Explorer vs. Netscape, and the creators of the spreadsheet","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30398939,"author":"klelatti","month":"2022-02","story_title":"ZX Spectrum at 40: a look back","text":"It's easy to quibble about some aspects of the Speccy - the rubber keyboard or the limited BASIC for example - but the key thing is that it offered an awful lot for the price - starting at \u00a3125 in the UK when the cheapest BBC Micro was \u00a3300. This made computing with colour and enough memory to write programs that were substantial and interesting available to a much wider group than before. Sir Clive Sinclair had a unique genius for designing and then marketing products that caught the public imagination. Sadly, he seemed to lose interest in building on his success and quickly moved on to the next project. Famously the C5 electric \"car\" but also wafer scale memory! [1] If anyone hasn't seen Micro Men, on the Sinclair vs Acorn rivalry, its definitely worth a watch: [VIDEO] And seeing some of the participants watch it and recall their own versions of the story is good too: [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31137022,"author":"billywhizz","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Celebrating 40 years of ZX Spectrum","text":"one of the reasons it was cheap was they got faulty 64k ram chips at a knock down price - hence the 48k. this film about sinclair is well worth a watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32111827,"author":"thorin","month":"2022-07","story_title":"BBC Basic Editor","text":"And if you're interested in that watch the movie :-) [VIDEO] Micro men, story of the zx spectrum vs the bbc","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38470801,"author":"ochrist","month":"2023-11","story_title":"BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced","text":"To people asking why a broadcasting corporation needed a programming language you might watch 'Micro Men'. It's available on YouTube. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41511282,"author":"lproven","month":"2024-09","story_title":"ZX Spectrum Documentary 'The Rubber Keyed Wonder' Gets London Premiere","text":"I second this recommendation. Both SD and HD versions are on Youtube in their entirety. This is the 720P version: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XZ3w_jec1v8":[{"hn_comment_id":38594359,"author":"__rito__","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best tech talks you have heard in 2023?","text":"For me, my favorites were: 0. \"Computational Physics, Beyond the Glass\" by Sam Ritchie (Strange Loop 2023) - [LINK] - This guy created an interactive Lisp-based Physics visualizer and got started on it by reading Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics . He now has a full-fledged project, and touches upon many ideas for educating people through innovative means. Really loved this video. Connected the ideas of Logo programming environment and something like a LISP-Physics visualizer. 1. \"The Economics of Programming Languages\" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023) - [VIDEO] - How does creating a new programming language work really? Who are the players, and what goes behind? Very highly recommend this funny, informative talk to understand aspects of creating a programming language other than the theoretical ones. 2. Function Composition in Programming Languages - Conor Hoekstra - CppNorth 2023 - [LINK] - This is actually about array languages and Haskell and not C++. Encountered \"tacit\" programming for the first time, and it opened a slightly new way of thinking for me. And others that I liked were: 0. Ruby on Rails: The Documentary - [LINK] - Not a Rubbyist, but still liked this documentary. 1. \"Software & The Game of Go\" by David Nolen (Strange Loop 2023) - [LINK] 2. \"Making Hard Things Easy\" by Julia Evans (Strange Loop 2023) - [LINK] - I always liked Evans' written content and zines, as they were fun to read and helped people. It was nice to see how she operate","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47001214,"author":"arcadia_leak","month":"2026-02","story_title":"D Programming Language","text":"> This talk explain why, it's not technical: [VIDEO] Really good talk, I remember watching it when it came out. Elm is what got me looking into FP several years ago, a nice language it was.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37966673,"author":"josephg","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Just paying Figma $15/month because nothing else fucking works","text":"> if you don't care about the feature ... all you're left with is a broken window. Maybe. Or maybe I'm left with a building that works fine for me. It might be lacking some features that some people want, but maybe thats ok. > Maybe the onboarding is the real issue. ... the maintainers are too busy to do that themselves most of the time. Yeah; I saw a great talk from Strange Loop the other day by the developer of Elm on the economics of opensource software[1]. He pointed out that a \"good\" opensource project really wants good dev work, a maintained issue tracker, infrastructure (CICD, etc), a good website, documentation, blog posts, onboarding of devs, community stuff, conference talks, trademarks, a roadmap, and so on. But it takes more than one person to do all of that. It takes a whole team. And we're spoiled by opensource projects like React or Rust which are sponsored by companies with money. My little opensource projects just have me, in my hobbyist time. And I'm not very good at all the non-programming things. And I'd much rather be programming than doing all of that other stuff. I think a lot of projects really want fulltime maintainers. But instead they just have the unpaid, overworked authors doing what we can. Of course users want better. But, well, thats how it is at the moment. Honestly, its surprising that everything works as well as it does. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38250227,"author":"surprisetalk","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk from the past year?","text":"A bunch of great talks at Strange Loop this year! Two off the top of my head: \u2022 \"An approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permaculture\" by Devine Lu Linvega: [LINK] \u2022 \"The Economics of Programming Languages\" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023): [VIDEO] I've also been loving TodePond's cellular automata videos. Their SPLASH talk was mind-blowing, but it doesn't look like it's out yet. \u2022 TodePond playlist: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39239185,"author":"D4ckard","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice","text":"There's a great talk by Evan Czaplicki [0] that outlines the financial significance of browsers. It helps make sense of why Microsoft (and Apple) act(s) in this way. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39549520,"author":"jcuenod","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)","text":"And for those who are interested, Evan (creator of Elm) gave a great Strange Loop '23 talk that hints at where he imagines things going, if he could figure out how to get the economics to work. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42308205,"author":"yawaramin","month":"2024-12","story_title":"DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation","text":"This reminds me of Evan Czaplicki's great talk where he basically traces the funding of most modern programming languages to search engine revenues :-) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43560393,"author":"plankalkyl","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you make a living contributing to and/or creating OSS projects?","text":"I am not an OSS contributor, so I have no personal experience whatsoever in this context. But I saw this talk by Evan Czaplicki (author of Elm) a while ago.[1] The talk is primarily about the economics of open-source programming languages, but I think that a lot of the issues discussed overlap with other areas of OSS. From the description of the youtube video: > In the mythology of open source, programming languages are created by people who seemingly have no direct economic function. They are just really good at compilers (somehow) and have a house to live in (somehow) and have a lifetime to devote to creating a useful programming language (somehow!) > We will examine specific organizations that create programming languages. Where do the salaries for compiler engineers come from? How does Go end up with 5 engineers and Dart end up with 30? Who signs off on these expenses and why? Does this put any boundaries on language design or development practices? And how do the economics work for people outside of the major tech corporations? > My goal is to give the talk I needed to hear 10 years ago when I was just starting on Elm. By clearly delineating the many variations of corporate funding and independent funding, I hope users will come away with a better foundation for evaluating and comparing programming languages. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44934130,"author":"Imustaskforhelp","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Why Nim?","text":"Oh boy, I always had this knack for seeing/testing multiple langauges and when I had first discovered nim, I used to watch some nim youtube related content and I remember someone in nim community pointed out about this same video from the creator of elm that you also mention. So, I think that I had watched the video and honestly, I will watch it now once again since I don't remember it clearly but If I remember, I really liked it. A quick search points me to the video, though I am not sure [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47000407,"author":"p0nce","month":"2026-02","story_title":"D Programming Language","text":"> Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't? This talk explain why, it's not technical: [VIDEO] > What are some advantages of D over Rust (and vice versa)? Advantages for D: Build faster, in typical programs you would need about 20 packages not 100, COM objects, easy meta-programming, 3 compilers. GC, way better at scripting. Advantages for Rust: borrow-checker is better. rustup.","stance":"rec"}],"XZGiVzIr8Qg":[{"hn_comment_id":28087754,"author":"throwaway2037","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Launch HN: BlackOakTV (YC S21) \u2013 Netflix for black people","text":"You wrote: <<<MTV hardly played black artists.>>> I saw this interview recently: <<<David Bowie Criticizes MTV for Not Playing Videos by Black Artists | MTV News>> [VIDEO] It blew me away. He is so on point!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28112071,"author":"donohoe","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The first two hours of MTV (1981) [video]","text":"No black singers or bands you'll notice... Worth watching: \"David Bowie Criticizes MTV for Not Playing Videos by Black Artists | MTV News\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Xe5AE-qYan8":[{"hn_comment_id":39257354,"author":"dosman33","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Acme Klein Bottle","text":"Here here. I love Cliff and have my own Acme Klein bottle, a wedding present from my wife. I read the book ages ago of course, but I just discovered the NOVA documentary last week. It's quite amazing to see the original people involved recreating events just a few years after they took place (docu was released in 1990). So... I can't believe Cliff's wife agreed to do a shower scene as part of a recreation for the documentary... Just sayin. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44351822,"author":"mrlatinos","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Klein Bottle Amazon Brand Hijacking (2021)","text":"His NOVA episode on the same subject is worth a watch as well [VIDEO] I think most younger readers will be familiar through his videos on the Numberphile YouTube channel.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46426988,"author":"29athrowaway","month":"2025-12","story_title":"","text":"If you like this then you will probably like \"The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage\", a 1989 book by Clifford Stoll. Also available as audiobook, and a documentary (\"The KGB, The computer and Me\"). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XeJSXfXep4M":[{"hn_comment_id":2378354,"author":"espeed","month":"2011-03","story_title":"How to Get to Genius","text":"1. It doesn't say Einstein was bad at math, it says his math skills aren't the reason he is considered a genius. 2. The Google TechTalk it references explains \"insights from weak associations\" in more detail: [VIDEO] 3. If you don't have perspective, how do you know the thing you're focused on is of any importance? You can see practical examples of this everywhere: \"One of my favourite tuppences for engineers struggling to find a bug is 'breadth first not depth first'. This can be annoying for someone working through complex technical details, because it implies that the solution is actually much simpler if they only looked...I coined this saying because in software matters I find that if we force ourselves to examine the top level considerations first, before tunneling down into the detail of a particular line of inquiry, we can save enormous time\" ( [LINK] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2530548,"author":"jochu","month":"2011-05","story_title":"Why you get ideas in the shower","text":"For more specifics into the cognitive science behind why this is - another good book, which has lots of wonderful references to studies on this topic (amongst other things), is \"Your Brain at Work\" by David Rock. Or, for the general overview you can watch the Google Talk at [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2530712,"author":"fredoliveira","month":"2011-05","story_title":"Why you get ideas in the shower","text":"People who are into this kind of thing will probably like \"Your brain at work\" by David Rock. It covers this topic and a few more - it's pretty interesting stuff for developers and knowledge workers. There's also a tech talk here: [VIDEO] Also, get Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt. Also covers these topics and helps people understand learning, creativity and how to exploit the way you work and think to, well, learn better.","stance":"rec"}],"XehNK7UpZsc":[{"hn_comment_id":37880311,"author":"btown","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Microsoft $69B deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard cleared by UK","text":"Giant Grant Games makes a compelling case for why single-player campaign and mod-development experiences are often overlooked but are key for RTS crossover success. And this came out long before the success of BG3. I hold out hope that someone will crack the formula! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39131313,"author":"ixwt","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees","text":"GiantGrantGames on Youtube made an interesting video about \"The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This is Why\"[0]. Turns out he got a lot of this information because he was one of the players that had a huge influence in the development, and this is what ZeroSpace focused their development efforts on. One of which, is targeting the casual audience, and their love for a good story. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XetplHcM7aQ":[{"hn_comment_id":20748118,"author":"jihadjihad","month":"2019-08","story_title":"A World Without Power (2013)","text":"Years back I was introduced to a terrific BBC show called Connections with James Burke (1978). The first episode, available on YouTube [0], is all about the world's reliance on power and that within a short period of time we'd be catapulted back to the plow. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21130908,"author":"Angostura","month":"2019-10","story_title":"New Studies Warn of Cataclysmic Solar Superstorms","text":"I highly recommend James Burke's Connections (the original series if this kind of thing interests you) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25007653,"author":"jihadjihad","month":"2020-11","story_title":"James Burke Interview [video]","text":"For the uninitiated, Connections is a documentary series from the seventies exploring the interconnectedness of technology. In the first episode, titled \"The Trigger Effect\" [0], Burke shows that if electricity were taken away from us, we'd be sent back to the plow. It's a little dated (1978), but it's an excellent watch even today. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32802873,"author":"DoubleDerper","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"^^^ Thank you! ^^^ Came here to reccommend Connections by James Burke and glad to see someone else has mentioned it. It's a masterpiece of popular science production made better with the grainy film patina of the 70s and 80s. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48100836,"author":"jh00ker","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The Greatest Shot in Television: James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene","text":"Connections is one of the greatest shows in television. The pilot episode is amazing, highlighting the problem with dependence on technology that we don't understand. \"Never have so many people understood so little about so much.\" Even more true today. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21060741,"author":"notthemessiah","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Advice for a climate change apocalypse","text":"John Baez's blog has a series on how civilizations collapse, first looking at the Anasazi, and then how one might model it using agent-based modeling and also looking at general collapse through differential equations: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] James Burke is a science historian and BBC documentarian, and in his first episode of \"Connections\" a series on the nature of innovation, he talks about how fragile our complex infrastructure can be, and, much like this article, how hopeless individualist survival skills would be once we \"leave our technological womb\". [VIDEO] In his later series, After the Warming, a 1988 documentary which imagines what it would look like in 2050 if we failed to act on climate change (in which it predicted refugee crises, wars, hurricanes, mass flooding), and looks back on thousands of years of climate shaping civilizational rise and collapse, from the Ice Age to the Nabataeans to today and beyond. It gets most things scarily right, with the notable exception of failing to see Japanese economic bubble popping in 1991. [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24999809,"author":"ThrowawayR2","month":"2020-11","story_title":"How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?","text":"> \" we're not going to stop being able to produce enough food to feed everyone in the US \" The Great Depression? Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic? I'm sure there are modern examples as well. There may be a plentitude of food and other products but if the societal and economic structures that process it and get it to where it needs to be collapse, that food might as well be on the far side of the moon. And even producing that food is questionable. Modern production is reliant on mechanical and electronic systems nowadays, even farming. Without replacement parts and consumable supplies, everything rapidly grinds to a halt. We saw an example of this in the recent COVID-19 shortages; lack of packaging and other consumables from overseas blocked domestic production of products even when the actual content of the product was still available. Everything is interlinked today. Everything. Watch episode one of James Burke's excellent documentary \"Connections\" to get an idea of what occurs when that breaks down: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25180400,"author":"sxp","month":"2020-11","story_title":"We have no idea what happens next","text":"I completely agree. For those who haven't experienced Connections-style history, four episodes are on YouTube: [VIDEO] My favorite is this one about proto-computers that came about due to the Black Death: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31771810,"author":"hn_version_0023","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Younger Dryas cosmic impact of 12,800 years ago (2018)","text":"Your comment reminds me of the excellent series \"Connections\" by James Burke. The opening episode in the series asks that exact question. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33309116,"author":"gmoes","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Pouring the 200 inch disk at Corning Glass Works","text":"I recall visiting the museum many years ago and seeing a demo where they heated a glass rod and pulled a fiber. This was probably when fiber optics was in its infancy. It was definitely a highlight for a young science nerd. I would love to go back some day. Along those lines I highly recommend the episode of the show \u201cHow we Got to Now\u201d about glass [0]. It tells the story of how clear glass was developed, something I always took for granted, but early glass was not clear and took a major effort to create. The show then goes into how Corning took it to a new level for fiber optics. The whole series is excellent and similar to James Burke\u2019s excellent series \u201cConnections\u201d. [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40627910,"author":"aspenmayer","month":"2024-06","story_title":"British Nuclear Warning System","text":"There\u2019s definitely not a lot to like, but there is a lot to appreciate. If you want a somewhat toned down version, the first episode of James Burke\u2019s Connections describes some of the same concepts and themes in the context of the NYC blackout of 1965, and is only somewhat less disturbing, but is easily the most upsetting episode of the otherwise charming educational program. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43830320,"author":"balazstorok","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal","text":"I think James Burke's classic talking about the fragility of our complex interdependent systems starting the episode from the 1965 Northeast blackout is still relevant and an interesting watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49271703,"author":"detourdog","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Compression Is Prediction","text":"They are not blog posts but it is a presentation of technical development that meets my standard. james burke connections [VIDEO] Tim Hunkin Secret Life of Machines [LINK] I have read plenty of blog posts that meet my standard. If I can think of one I will post it.","stance":"rec"}],"XfQUOHlAocY":[{"hn_comment_id":27727210,"author":"benrbray","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The Growth Ponzi Scheme","text":"The Not Just Bikes [1,2,3] YouTube channel also has an excellent series of videos based on work from Strong Towns. I link to these videos whenever a friend asks why I chose to leave the United States. :) [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29897800,"author":"donjoe","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Charge, Baby, Charge for Parking","text":"Well, this is exactly the opposite to an urban environment - this is urban sprawl. Is it better to construct and maintain 75 miles of roads (and all the other infrastructure) for a couple of hundred folks? I highly recommend this video on the finances around urban sprawl and their long term consequences: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27297279,"author":"JBlue42","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Strong Towns Has Filed a Lawsuit Against the Minnesota Board of Engineering","text":"NotJustBikes did a video collaboration with Strong Towns and discussed this: [VIDEO] Great channel for those interested in urbanism.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29758500,"author":"orn688","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in","text":"There's no \"cannot\", it's a conscious choice - if you have more space than necessary that absolutely does not require that you expand to fill all of it. And in particular this has caused issues because American cities tend towards sprawl, filling up area with low-density housing that requires significantly more infrastructure per capita, and implementing zoning laws to prevent higher-density development even as the population grows, resulting in housing shortages. Not Just Bikes has some excellent content about this, e.g.: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30128372,"author":"V__","month":"2022-01","story_title":"One gemini battery nearly doubles Tesla Model S range","text":"That's sadly true. Not Just Bikes and their String Towns initiative is really eye-opening. A bit off-topic but I do wonder if covid and the current state of the economy will accelerate the debt crisis of small cities ( [VIDEO] ) and force a downsizing to a more reasonable infrastructure.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32854570,"author":"jeofken","month":"2022-09","story_title":"A method to promote sleep in crying infants using the transport response [pdf]","text":"Child safety and cars sure is related - and history buffs will be glad to know the \u201ckindermoord\u201d of automobiles was what got the Netherlands to change from car-centric cities with many lanes wide traffic jams, to the best city infrastructure in the world [LINK] Cars produce crazy noise pollution, and car lifestyle requires massive subsidies such as street parking, and a huge share of city real estate being used for parking and roads. Lately, I\u2019ve been inspired by this channel \u201cNot just bikes\u201d on the subject, and other HN readers may find it interesting as well [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40676805,"author":"crote","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Rent in Cities Skylines 2 was too high, so the devs removed landlords","text":"In large parts of the United States it should affect single-family homes. A lot of cities constructed their suburbs with one-term fees and subsidies, but are charging extremely low taxes on the houses once constructed. In fact, the taxes are so low that they don't pay for the upkeep of the infrastructure required to service those houses. They are losing money on every house and are trying to make up for it in volume! The sole reason they have been able to continue is because the dense urban core is subsidizing the suburbs. But it'll inevitably end up with decrepit and neglected infrastructure, and cities going bankrupt. The only way to solve this is to increase the revenue per land area, which means a higher land tax, which in turn means a bigger tax increase per-person for single-family homes than for multi-family dwellings. If you want to know more, the following NotJustBikes videos are a good introduction of the subject: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XfcvX0P1b5g":[{"hn_comment_id":28615128,"author":"n0mad01","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Guy claims to have evidence of who Satoshi Nakamoto is.","text":"I was sure too about Hal Finney until i saw this video [0]. There are a few more references that it is more likely that Adam Back could be Satoshi. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29024707,"author":"CTDOCodebases","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Federated E-Cash as a Bitcoin Scaling Technology","text":"I think the US government would already know who Satoshi is due to bulk email collection via PRISM and stylometry. I don\u2019t know why you think Satoshi broke any US laws. The following video painted quite a compelling story of why Adam Beck is Satoshi: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32376546,"author":"syklep","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Another court case fails to unlock the mystery of Bitcoin\u2019s Satoshi Nakamoto","text":"Don't see anything on HN mentioning Adam Back getting called out as being Satoshi and the massive campaign launched to disprove this. One of the only people who isn't attempting to capitalize on the claim, but who directly benefits from Bitcoin's flaws. In a case of a white knight turning to the dark side. Part 3: [VIDEO] The conspiracy YouTuber making the claim was attacked and slandered heavily after making the claim despite convincing evidence that wasn't disproven: 1 Same English typing mannerisms 2 Misspelling the same words 3 A conspicuous gap in his career while Bitcoin was being developed 4 entering the bitcoin scene in forums very early acting authoritative Not to mention 5 A history of working on bitcoin-like technologies: \"hashcash\" 6 early involvement with the cypherpunks I'm still convinced its him.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39712349,"author":"qweqwe14","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Digital forgeries are hard","text":"Surprised that noone mentioned Barely Sociable video on Satoshi Nakamoto[1] (last of a 3-part series). Pretty strong arguments as to why Adam Back is Satoshi, the amount of coincidences is just way too many IMO. Craig Wright is definitely not Satoshi, the guy has some issues and so keeps claiming that he is. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47690500,"author":"4oo4","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? My Quest to Unmask Bitcoin's Creator","text":"Someone already found this years ago: [VIDEO] I haven't read the full article yet but I'm guessing they didn't give credit, as the New York Times tends to do. Not definitive but it's a very convincing case.","stance":"rec"}],"XgRlrBl-7Yg":[{"hn_comment_id":1246982,"author":"awongh","month":"2010-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Are you happy, well-rounded? (dealing w/ depression/lack of motivation)","text":"This is a bit of a tangent to your question, but I've been thinking about this a bit too. I've been depressed lately as well, and this ted talk [ [VIDEO] ] was really interesting. It has nothing to do with being more happy, but has to do with how we define happiness and how we experience it... (being over-analytical and also unhappy, I thought it was quite good) It basically says that the concept happiness as we think of it is really two things, the \"experiential self\", which is happy when we're snowboarding or whatever, and the remembering self, which is happy when we're deploying some code that's going to take over the world or whatnot. It seems to me, from observation, that unless you are the rare .01 percent who really, really, gets paid well to do the things you want, (I'm not counting Tim Ferris types- that's just a hack) that life is a dissapointment, and at some point you just get over it and live your life and try not to stress out too much about your remembering self, and try to pay some attention to your experiential self. Or, that is to say, that at a certain point, people stop worrying so much about their remembering self's expectations of their future memories... err, that is to say that it's not that you want to be happy, it's that you have an expectation to be satisfied at a later time with your choices and actions. And then at some point you have to change those expectations. This may sound like pyscho-babble at this point, but it really gets to something I'v","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20078110,"author":"cgriswald","month":"2019-06","story_title":"What We Want Doesn\u2019t Always Make Us Happy","text":"You kind of touched on points of this video, although from a different direction. Daniel Khaneman talks about the experiencing self versus the remembering self, which is in charge, and how that relates to happiness. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XheAMrS8Q1c":[{"hn_comment_id":30668007,"author":"comboy","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Electric fields, not individual neurons, may hold information in memory: study","text":"Electric potential across other cells and also single-cell organisms is well known and not new. This is new though (and revolutionary): [VIDEO] Regarding consciousness, I don't get why people who submit to consciousness being everywhere in the universe have problem with simply calling it the universe. It seems to make discussions much more productive.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35075557,"author":"LegitShady","month":"2023-03","story_title":"E-Bandages lightly zap and heal wounds","text":"your cells are sensitive to charge in general - cells attempt to maintain certain voltage differentials across their membranes via ion channels in the cell membrane, can communicate voltage information with each other via gap junctions, etc. That electrical communication does control how cells behave. If you have 20 minutes to watch this ted talk interview I highly recommend it. My mind was blown. Your DNA determines the hardware, but there's a lot of non chemical communication that goes on between cells that determine how they behave. [VIDEO] Once you realize that cells can effectively communicate with each other via voltage, things like whats described about electrical bandages become less surprising.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29622118,"author":"l2p","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Amputated fingertips sometimes grow back (2013)","text":"Regarding how the body \"knows\" how to form missing pieces, might be worth checking out Michael Levin's research regarding bio-electricity. Most interesting finding to me is that once modified, the animal bodies continue to produce different parts as if there is some electrical \"memory\" in the cells. Here is an overview video: [VIDEO] , though there are much longer lectures and papers which I would recommend if you are interested.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34296542,"author":"laughingman2","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Will We Know Alien Life When We See It?","text":"One interesting research group tackling this question is ex-computer engineer, currently biologist Prof. Micahel Levine's group. They built xenobots (biological robots) from frog cells which are not evolutionarily programmed to do tasks which they accomplished. Their research in part deals with emergence of agency at multi-cellular level. And they want to get at the fundamental signatures of what makes some collection of agents into a new single agent at an higher level. Checkout, [VIDEO] And a new research paper (inhavent had the time to read yet) on this question of how coherent higher order agents emerge from underlying sub-agents. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35880886,"author":"holoduke","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Language models can explain neurons in language models","text":"Maybe the neurons are the hardware layer. The software is represented by the electronic activity. There is a good video [VIDEO] about this topic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38032603,"author":"farkanoid","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Bioelectricity could regrow limbs and organs","text":"There's a fascinating (in my opinion) TED talk about this featuring the same Biologist, with examples of regenerative experiments performed using Flatworms: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45611430,"author":"simmanian","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Electricity can heal wounds three times as fast (2023)","text":"The article and the comments remind me of Michael Levin's work on bioelectricity. 20 min ted talk - [VIDEO] 3 hr lex fridman episode - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"XkDEzfpdcSg":[{"hn_comment_id":16536336,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to learn modern C++?","text":"- Tour of C++ ( [LINK] ) - Principles and Practice Using C++ ( [LINK] ) - From Mathematics to Generic Programming ( [LINK] ) - The Scott Meyers books Some of the Bjarne Stroustrup videos, \"Learning and Teaching Modern C++\" - [LINK] Some of the Herb Sutter videos, \"Writing Good C++14... By Default\" - [LINK] \"Back to the Basics! Essentials of Modern C++ Style\" - [LINK] Some of the Kate Gregory videos, \"Stop Teaching C\" - [LINK] \"10 Core Guidelines You Need to Start Using Now\" - [VIDEO] \"It's Complicated\" - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16550005,"author":"boltzmannbrain","month":"2018-03","story_title":"C++ Core Guidelines","text":"I recommend the tl;dr version from Kate Gregory at CppCon 2017, \u201c10 Core Guidelines You Need to Start Using Now\u201d: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XopSDJq6w8E":[{"hn_comment_id":17686937,"author":"ballenf","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Always-on Alibaba office app fuels backlash among Chinese workers","text":"ADV China youtube channel has covered this with some great video of new construction problems in China (not implying the problem is only there): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20466721,"author":"ajflores1604","month":"2019-07","story_title":"China\u2019s State-Driven Growth Model Is Running Out of Gas","text":"This video from last year was pretty eye opening to me. Shows uninhabited \"new\" ghost cities completely crumbling. There's no underlying value to the property bubble going on over there and the scale seems mind blowing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"XpDsk374LDE":[{"hn_comment_id":30194512,"author":"yakshaving_jgt","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Code colocation is king","text":"Just stick everything in the same file until it actually hurts. This presentation[0] gets it right. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39428642,"author":"gabigrin","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Clean your codebase with basic information theory","text":"Great read, as always! The combination of the Elm reference and \"coarsely structure codebases around CPU timelines and dataflow\" statement reminded me of this great talk by Evan Czaplicki (Elm creator): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19135615,"author":"hombre_fatal","month":"2019-02","story_title":"38% of bugs at Airbnb could have been prevented by using types","text":"Premature extraction can solidify premature abstractions and create pressure against reabstraction. The creator of Elm has a talk that mentions this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46154470,"author":"myaccountonhn","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig","text":"There are a lot of lectures/speeches by the creator of elm and Richard Feldman that talk about how to think \"functionally\" Here is one about how to structure a project (roughly) [VIDEO] I also think looking at the source code for elm and its website, as well as the elm real world example help a lot.","stance":"rec"}],"XtMmeAjQTXc":[{"hn_comment_id":18001287,"author":"musewing","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?","text":"Hands down best: David Goodstein, CalTech, the 'Mechanical Universe\" physics series on YouTube. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18001300,"author":"musewing","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?","text":"Hands down best: David Goodstein, CalTech, \"The Mechanical Universe\" physics series on YouTube. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34474472,"author":"meltyness","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Layman's Book on Electricity","text":"Reading sucks; check out \"The Mechanical Universe\" [VIDEO] Basics of electricity start here: [LINK] It glosses briefly over the mathematical parts with advanced-for-the-time animations that may or may not be instructive.","stance":"rec"}],"XuBdf9jYj7o":[{"hn_comment_id":8822708,"author":"m0nty","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Junction design in the Netherlands [video]","text":"The obsession with helmets in many countries is born of an idea that violence on the roads is inevitable. It's a bit like responding to knife or gun crime by saying everyone should wear kevlar vests, problem solved! Rather than insisting that knives and guns are not used in public spaces. Some people have real problems grasping this. Cars are seen as inherently dangerous, pedestrians and everyone else should (ideally) stay off the roads, and nobody should challenge our \"right\" to drive where and when we like. But driving is still a choice, albeit coerced since there are so few alternatives, and that choice has profound implications for others. Why should I wear protective clothing because you choose to drive a vehicle which puts me in danger? In the Netherlands, to respond to your point, they have largely eliminated motoring-related danger for cyclists. If anyone is interested in the development of Dutch cycling infrastructure, this is an excellent video: [VIDEO] (How the Dutch got their cycle paths, 6m 29s) David Hembrow has an informative blog about all things cycling in Holland: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9148349,"author":"bullfightonmars","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Mike Ey, Microsoft HoloLens designer, killed in hit and run","text":"Those \"antifragile\" solutions have been used to great effect in Netherlands where they have built a massive cycling, walking, and transit infrastructure. They were able to build this infrastructure due to a popular protest movement, 'Stop de Kindermoord' (Stop the Child Murder) which was in reaction to exactly the problem we face in the US of deaths and injury caused by motorists. There is a great video about the protest movement and the transformation of dutch infrastructure here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5540875,"author":"maurits","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Electric Velomobiles: fast, comfortable, and more efficient than cars","text":"In short, build bike lanes like the dutch. [1] Big, physically separated, omnipresent bike lines. Ensure that bikes are first class citizens on intersections. Compare the 2-stage turn with the dutch design [2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6020086,"author":"gnosis","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Linux developer Seth Vidal killed in Hit and Run accident on his bike.","text":"Riding a bike does not have to be as dangerous as it is in most places in the United States. Here[1] is an interesting video on how the Dutch got their bicycle paths. From the intro: \"The Netherlands has the world's largest number of cyclists, but it is also the safest place in the world to cycle. That is largely because of the perfect cycling infrastructure that can be found throughout the country. How did the Dutch get this network of high quality cycle paths?\" [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6703669,"author":"Brakenshire","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists?","text":"Yes, definitely a big problem in the UK too. Although I think support for cycling is perhaps more cross-party than in the US, at least in the political elite. Both the Conservative PM and Mayor of London are nominally pro-bike, also The Times (centre-right paper for those from outside the UK) ran a major campaign on cycle safety, after one of their journalists was killed: [LINK] Although certainly their freedom to do something serious about the issue is restricted by the anti-metropolitan, anti-liberal vroom vroom demographic. > If cycling is to ever become safe, cities need to start embracing the bike like they do in the Netherlands, but it's no easy task. On that topic, this mini-documentary is worthwhile looking at: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12676209,"author":"jorgenhorstink","month":"2016-10","story_title":"The Dutch Reach: Clever Workaround to Keep Cyclists from Getting \u201cDoored\u201d","text":"A couple of months ago I watched a short video about how we got our cycling lanes. I think it provides some interesting context on why we built our cycling infrastructure. If you like this topic, you'll like the video... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24087738,"author":"iknowstuff","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Dementia on the Retreat in the U.S. and Europe","text":"I highly recommend researching the Dutch street design. By explicitly avoiding freeways and encouraging biking, they save so much time (no traffic) and money (think long term health benefits of cycling, no pollution, cheaper infrastructure, lower reliance on fossil fuels, fewer accidents, more visits to local businesses) it's insane the rest of the world isn't copying them ASAP. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24087823,"author":"iknowstuff","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Dementia on the Retreat in the U.S. and Europe","text":"I highly recommend researching the Dutch street design. By explicitly avoiding freeways and encouraging biking, they save so much time (no traffic) and money (think long term health benefits, cheaper infrastructure, lower reliance on fossil fuels, fewer accidents, more visits to local businesses) it's insane the rest of the world isn't copying them ASAP. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25807307,"author":"caturopath","month":"2021-01","story_title":"The Children Strike of 1972","text":"A Dutch Youtuber gives some of this history in a pretty good video at [VIDEO] Another awesome urban design channel focused on the Netherlands is [LINK] -- it covers the safe bike/pedestrian infrastructure but lots of other cool things","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29159450,"author":"Gareth321","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The popularity of e-bikes isn\u2019t slowing down","text":"I encourage you to watch [this video.]( [VIDEO] ) No one believed they had enough space in the Netherlands either. Turns out they did, with some creative engineering, time, money, and sheer force of will. It's not easy. It takes a long time. But with a steady hand and the ability to cut through lobby interests, it can be done. Note that they didn't need to knock down many buildings in the NL. They did things like reducing 3-4 lanes to 2; making roads and footpaths narrower; reclaiming roads and re-routing vehicle traffic elsewhere; and of course better utilising a lot of wasted curbside land. Plus lots of redrawing of city plans to ensure future building and renovations incorporated the vision.","stance":"rec"}],"XuKjBIBBAL8":[{"hn_comment_id":15662225,"author":"gabaix","month":"2017-11","story_title":"'Zombie ant' brains left intact by fungal parasite","text":"There is a 3-minute video from BBC Planet Earth showing an infected ant and its demise. [VIDEO] It is like watching the Alien scene, except this is real.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19535658,"author":"lorenzhs","month":"2019-03","story_title":"How Mosquitoes Sniff Out Human Sweat To Find Us","text":"For anyone else not familiar with cordyceps fungi, here's a three-minute clip from BCC Planet Earth: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27238071,"author":"antiviral","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Deadly fungi are an emerging microbe threat","text":"Fungi can be very potent. There is a form of fungi called Cordyceps that invade the brains of ants and change their behavior in a way that increases its spread. Here's a clip by Attenborough explaining it best: [VIDEO] They even made a movie about this jumping to humans called \"The Girl with all the Gifts\"","stance":"rec"}],"XusyNT_k-1c":[{"hn_comment_id":41321474,"author":"estebank","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Why isn't Colorado's snowpack ending up in the Colorado River?","text":"If you don't mind the presentation style, [VIDEO] is great presents an even direr situation: because water rights are \"use it or lose it\", we are actively encouraging water misuse, beyond just \"it's cheap enough to misuse it\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44164689,"author":"davidklemke","month":"2025-06","story_title":"The Colorado River is running low. The picture looks even worse underground.","text":"Climate Town did a great video breaking down where a lot of this ends up, worth the watch if you want some more detailed background on the agreements in place that are leading to this happening: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48760852,"author":"pseudohadamard","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Lake Powell Water Critically Low; Wyoming Expects More Demand On Flaming Gorge","text":"For anyone interested in the background behind this clusterfuck, Climate Town has a good explainer: [VIDEO] . It's not just drought, it's because many of the players involved are required to waste as much water as they can - the video has the details.","stance":"rec"}],"XvDZLjaCJuw":[{"hn_comment_id":10789419,"author":"danso","month":"2015-12","story_title":"A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering (2008)","text":"That was a great watch...and if you keep on watching for a few more minutes, you can watch Lorinda L. Cherry rewrite his implementation using Unix pipes and then creating a talking calculator. The screencasting technology wasn't quite there yet ;), but both are really excellent demonstrations and eludications of the Unix philosophy and mindset that is pretty much unchanged and invaluable ~34 years later [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10789336,"author":"bithive123","month":"2015-12","story_title":"A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering (2008)","text":"Others might also find interesting this video from 1982 where Brian Kernighan demonstrates building a simple spell checker using UNIX command line utilities: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21589163,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2019-11","story_title":"A Mystery of Unix History","text":"Also I found these fascinating: The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) has a lot of history and takes you back in time.. [LINK] Brian Kernighan 'interviews' Ken Thompson (2019) - Ken telling stories. They're both very funny, a very entertaining video, some stories I (and even Brian) hadn't heard. [LINK] UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use (1982) [VIDEO] Also the other day I read in the AWK book that it was mainly inspired by SNOBOL4, so looked at some SNOBOL4 books from archive.org, from 1970-2 and just before, slightly earlier than Unix history takes you back. One tells you how to organize your punch cards to feed in the program.. Another had a bibliography with many dozens of SNOBOL books. It was widely used by people in the humanities apparently; like AWK it was at home dealing with words and text.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25298592,"author":"abetlen","month":"2020-12","story_title":"A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)","text":"They really were. Here's a version of that video that includes Lorinda Cherry writing a talking calculator by piping together 3 unix commands. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28651363,"author":"ducktective","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Toybox: All-in-one Linux command line","text":"Look what I've found! Lorinda Cherry herself explaining how to write a \"talking calculator\" (in 1982!) using dc and Unix pipelines: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30361297,"author":"Ambroos","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Lorinda Cherry, author of dc, bc, eqn has died","text":"I love what she does here: [VIDEO] , also demonstrating pipes and scripts. The input she chooses makes the whole segment pretty damn funny.","stance":"rec"}],"XwRSS7jeo5s":[{"hn_comment_id":30367674,"author":"kwakja","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Music theory for nerds (2016)","text":"> On continuous pitch instruments (e.g. violin, voice), this is entirely possible to do Jacob Collier has a good example of this[1] (I'm a huge fan). Separately, I've previously heard this referred to as \"equal temperament\" tuning which makes me wonder what led to this difference in wording. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48629331,"author":"williamdclt","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Show HN: Teach your kids absolute (perfect) pitch","text":"> adjust between A440 and A400 Someone shared this recently: [VIDEO] I struggle to conceive being able to hear the difference, but _singing_ it entirely blows my mind","stance":"rec"}],"XxCha4Kez9c":[{"hn_comment_id":34997488,"author":"bombcar","month":"2023-03","story_title":"What Is the Most Minimal UK Address Possible?","text":"[VIDEO] might be of interest - it has some of what the machines are trying to read and what accuracy they need.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34999084,"author":"simmonmt","month":"2023-03","story_title":"What Is the Most Minimal UK Address Possible?","text":"This Tom Scott video shows some of the surprising (to me) lengths to which the USPS does go to figure out the right address: [VIDEO] Obviously this doesn't apply to your case, but I certainly didn't think they'd have a national center for decoding terrible handwriting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39911947,"author":"LordDragonfang","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores","text":"Tom Scott did a great video showing the last one in operation. They use totally unique keyboards with what is essentially a stenography system: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40842797,"author":"Caligatio","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Postzegelcode","text":"And like almost all things that are interesting, here's a Ton Scott video about the same topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Y0Oa4Lp5fLE":[{"hn_comment_id":13635824,"author":"philipov","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Understanding Agent Cooperation","text":"> Looking at the long history of evolution, I'd say no. This entire lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology is worth watching from the beginning, but I've linked to a moment where Sapolsky describes tit-for-tat strategies arising in animals. First example: Vampire Bats. []: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26123177,"author":"jonas_kgomo","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Microbial ecosystems in the mouth and gut are linked to many ills","text":"Besides the gut flora being capable of some neurological effects it has demonstrated to be psychoactive. Professor Robert Sapolsky[1] has an amazing course on Behavorial Evolution. The toxoplasmic gondii comes from the rat -> cat -> gut -> brain, it is profound that side effects in the brain are chemically constructed from the stomach. Considering that most animals do not even have a brain,but usually have a stomach, it is evident that the gut is underestimated in the evolutionary tree. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23207413,"author":"remolueoend","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Iterated Prisoners Dilemma Strategies Dominate Any Evolutionary Opponent (2012)","text":"There is a great lecture from Robert Sapolsky/Stanford [2010] about behavioral evolution / prisoner's dilemma / tit for tat strategy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Y3n3c_8Nn2Y":[{"hn_comment_id":11850025,"author":"pkrefta","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Source code for 4kb demoscene production \u201cElevated\u201d released","text":"In year 2000 when I was 16 years old 64k fr-08 by farbrausch told me that I know nothing about programming ;) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15773902,"author":"userbinator","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Terrain rendering in fewer than 20 lines of code","text":"IMHO not very many 64Ks have reached the amazingness of this 11 minute one from 2000: [VIDEO] ...and for 4K, this one from 2009: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14998414,"author":"userbinator","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Papers I like","text":"I discovered #4 through him and I agree both with his summary and the paper itself --- canonical Huffman is astoundingly simple if you look at it in the right way, yet almost everyone doesn't. ryg is also a member of the Farbrausch demogroup, which has released some amazing demos. This one is probably the most memorable: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24017461,"author":"userbinator","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Niklaus Wirth was right and that is a problem","text":"One only has to look at the demoscene to realise that limitations inspire creativity and efficiency. It's just a form of art, but gives a glimpse at what computers are capable of, if only we would try to use them more efficiently. I think award-winning 4k or 64k demos should be required watching for every software developer. Here are some personal favourites which have also appeared on HN: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Y4Gt3Xjd7G8":[{"hn_comment_id":23166878,"author":"devxpy","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Linux containers in a few lines of code","text":"Yes, something like that. Like here's David's \"Build Your Own Async\" [1], which I prefer over Philip's (still extremely good) \"What the heck is the event loop anyway?\" [2]. It's one thing to tell how something works, but to successfully show what the hell its actually doing under the covers, just conveys much more information. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23296660,"author":"migueloller","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Guide to Concurrency in Python with Asyncio","text":"I've found this [1] screencast on the low-level principles of async in Python an amazing resource to understand async at a deep level. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30857472,"author":"neoncontrails","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Pre-Allocated Lists in Python","text":"I highly recommend Victor Skvortsov's exhaustive, 12-part series, \"Python Behind the Scenes,\" a deep dive into the implementation details of just about every Python language feature one could possibly take for granted. There isn't a single one I haven't learned something from, but some of my personal favorites include: * Part 2, How the CPython compiler works: [LINK] * Part 6, How Python's object system works: [LINK] * Part 10, How Python dictionaries work: [LINK] * Part 13: The GIL and its effects on Python multithreading: [LINK] The whole series can be found here: [LINK] For a slightly higher-level (i.e., no macabre, low-level C code), but still incredibly enlightening dive into the \"dark side\" of Python, in particular various abuses and hexes for manipulating control flow, have a look at David Beazley's smorgasboard of keynote presentations like \"Generators: The Final Frontier\" ( [LINK] ), \"Python Concurrency From The Ground Up\" ( [LINK] ), and \"Build Your Own Async\" ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37396428,"author":"mananaysiempre","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Philosophy of Coroutines","text":"> I talk about generators as if they were the coroutine system in Python, but in fact, they\u2019re one of two: Python also has a completely different kind of thing that it actually uses the name \u2018coroutine\u2019 for, in which function definitions start with async def and suspend with await . The async and await system of coroutines in Python is in fact layered on top of the yield system, via an intermediate construct called yield from \u2014which isn\u2019t even technically required, it\u2019s just that implementing it as a loop passing values through from and to the subcoroutine is exceptionally tedious if done correctly[1] and can\u2019t be abstracted as a function call. As a first approximation, await x in Python is equivalent to yield from x.__await__() . It should have been completely equivalent, arguably, but history got in the way. David Beazley has a talk[2] where he walks you through implementing an async runtime (to put it pompously) and you can see how the whole thing hangs together. It\u2019s really quite simple, and in my experience it\u2019s much better than trying to wrap your head around the asyncio docs, because while the language-level foundations are extremely nice and simple, asyncio the stdlib module just kind of sucks. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Y5K9HBiJpuk":[{"hn_comment_id":43182300,"author":"ReptileMan","month":"2025-02","story_title":"MH370: Malaysia is resuming the search for missing 777 airliner, 11 years later","text":"Probably the best summary and why it makes sense to actually search for it, courtesy of mentour pilot. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46434120,"author":"V__","month":"2025-12","story_title":"MH370 vanished in 2014.New search aims to find answers families desperately want","text":"I highly recommend Mentour Pilots videos on the topic, for an indepth introduction to the whole story and the new search: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39739109,"author":"jkic47","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Ignore the Nutty Conspiracies, MH370 Was Likely a 'Zombie Flight'","text":"For those interested in a pilot's view of this incident, check out MentourPilot's latest video. [VIDEO] About 45 min into the video, he quotes a technique called WSPR that can use radio transmissions to track flights. Super interesting, if validated. A less easily digested paper on WSPR technology is available under the video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41377469,"author":"mcbain","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)","text":"[VIDEO] I think Petter's (Mentour Pilot) delve into it is quite good - there's a lot of detail I hadn't known.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41377553,"author":"sofixa","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)","text":"If anyone is interested in recently made content that recaps the whole thing, all the available information, some of the speculation, including the most recent news/information: * video by Mentour Pilot - [VIDEO] * great read, as usual, by Admiral Cloudberg, slightly older: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Y65FRxE7uMc":[{"hn_comment_id":40606315,"author":"josephg","month":"2024-06","story_title":"GNU Justified Public License","text":"This was made by Tom7, who has many amazing videos about doing ridiculous things with programming on YouTube. The talk on this work is here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40615390,"author":"jimmySixDOF","month":"2024-06","story_title":"LaTeX is the first PDF/UA-2 compliance accessible PDF producer","text":"and for anyone in the TeX User Group there is this fun experiment in Typesetting which starts off with the amazing TeX origin story [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45611431,"author":"progval","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Mysterious Intrigue Around an x86 \"Corporate Entity Other Than Intel/AMD\"","text":"If you want more of this: [VIDEO] . You can skip to 7:45 if the long intro bores you, but it's worth listening to it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47116815,"author":"asddubs","month":"2026-02","story_title":"The Tears of Donald Knuth","text":"You might enjoy this video: [VIDEO] The connection to knuth is tangential to the actual video subject, but it does contrast knuth to LLMs as a framing device","stance":"rec"}],"Y6U728AZnV0":[{"hn_comment_id":45240098,"author":"browningstreet","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Why are so many young, fit, non-smoking women getting lung cancer?","text":"I think about this TED Talk from 2012 a lot.. and he presents some data. It changed some of my goals, and I\u2019m a bit more multi-sport than I used to be. Run for your life! At a comfortable pace, and not too far: James O'Keefe at TED\u00d7UMKC [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17948967,"author":"andrewstuart","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Extreme Athleticism Is the New Midlife Crisis","text":"Here's an interesting video if you are an extreme athlete: it is a cardiac researcher and lifelong exerciser who identifies that such exercise patterns damage the heart: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24880997,"author":"andrewstuart","month":"2020-10","story_title":"How to Live with Dying","text":"On the topic of how overexercise can damage the heart by James OKeefe, a cardiologist and lifetime obsessive runner: Notably he points out that they tested people blood after doing long distance events and found that many of them had chemicals usually found in heart attack victims, indicating heart damage. Basically he says that the long term overexercise/heart damage means the heart muscle constantly has microtears which heal up and the healed tissue is scar tissue which is hard and not like normal heart tissue - much harder and less elastic. So people who overtrain end up with a heart much older than their physical age. [VIDEO] Transcript: [LINK] Another video: [LINK] And from another author on extreme exercise and the heart: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33641221,"author":"twawaaay","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of metastatic cancer in mice: study","text":"I believe running your heart at such high intensity every day isn't particularly healthy. It causes scarring of the heart tissue and possible problems as you age. I think watching this Ted might be helpful: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42100811,"author":"browningstreet","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Five minutes of exercise a day could lower blood pressure","text":"This guy looked at longevity stats for runners. He recommends running a little, not a lot. 2012 TEDx Talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Y99Wj-NStok":[{"hn_comment_id":18078553,"author":"msla","month":"2018-09","story_title":"'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record","text":"Summoning Salt makes great videos. The SMB1 video has already been linked, but I also love his video on the Choco Mountain track in Mario Kart 64. It has some great livestream captures which show records being broken, and contextualizes them well enough to give them some pathos: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18109269,"author":"nayuki","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Mario Kart Wii: The History of the Ultra Shortcut [video]","text":"Along the same topic, this YouTuber made a fantastic video explaining the Mario Kart 64 Choco Mountain shortcut: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17693549,"author":"mcast","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some niche communities you enjoy?","text":"I didn't realize I cared about speed-running until I saw this YouTube video from Summoning Salt about N64's Mario Kart level: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Y9FZ4igNxNA":[{"hn_comment_id":28666285,"author":"jstrieb","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Moir\u00e9 No More","text":"I was introduced to this idea in a really cool video about using Fourier Optics for optical pattern recognition.[0] The video happens to have one of the best explanations of Fourier transforms I've yet encountered. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31658351,"author":"orlp","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Photonic Chip Performs Image Recognition at the Speed of Light","text":"For a somewhat related topic (analog image recognition), for those interested, I can highly recommend this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32581661,"author":"jstrieb","month":"2022-08","story_title":"AI-designed camera only records objects of interest while being blind to others","text":"Reminds me of this really cool video about using Fourier Optics for optical pattern recognition.[1] The video happens to have one of the best explanations of Fourier transforms I've yet encountered. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31586515,"author":"ulnarkressty","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers","text":"An even better one - holding an image at the focal point of a lens produces its Fourier transform at the focal point on the other side of the lens[0]. It is used for \"analog\" pattern matching[1]. There is an interesting video explaining this on the Huygen Optics Youtube channel[2]. [0] - [LINK] [1] - [LINK] [2] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40429183,"author":"CamperBob2","month":"2024-05","story_title":"AI Needs Enormous Computing Power. Could Light-Based Chips Help?","text":"You could think of a lens as a \"Fourier transformer,\" not in the LLM sense directly but in the sense of something that executes a Fourier transform. See the excellent videos by Huygens Optics including this one: [VIDEO] entitled \"Fourier optics used for optical pattern recognition.\" Having established that, well, it's not hard to imagine that something that's good at running Fourier transforms is probably good for other situations where you need to run a lot of dot products in parallel. That, in turn, should sound like an awfully familiar problem...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42877977,"author":"infogulch","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Detecting edges of images at the speed of light","text":"Huygens Optics has a great video \"Fourier Optics used for Optical Pattern Recognition\". He starts with explaining the Fourier Transform wrt audio, then demonstrates a physical filter that screens the resulting convolution pattern to identify matches. Very cool: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YAtLTLiqNwg":[{"hn_comment_id":26026714,"author":"space_rock","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Elon Musk admits Tesla car quality flaws, says mass production is \u201chell\u201d","text":"Just watch the interview they used as source. Reading these articles is mostly noise and forcing a narrative [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26525483,"author":"nickik","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Tesla orders its first 8k-ton Cybertruck casting machine","text":"Its not that much faster but Tesla claimed it removes 100s of robots and an incredibly long error prone assembly line. Also, when you weld lots of parts together you have tolerances stack up. Tesla developed its own aluminum that does not need to be heat-treated. It might still need some finishing, but not a very complex process. Check out this video of Musk and Sandy Munro (former Chief Engineer at Ford) talking about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34621478,"author":"nebula8804","month":"2023-02","story_title":"The Cost of Shadow Work","text":"Wow so just like all the outsourcing nonsense that first started in the IT industry (and failed) and then crept into all the other industries (and are subsequently failing now) it was all done by stupid MBAs who couldn't think ahead past one quarter. The way that you explained the phenomenon makes me think that there is a business opportunity to capture customers by providing world class service. Auto companies are relearning why it does not make sense to outsource anything that a customer sees or touches. That is your profound knowledge and any supplier that is incentivized to maximize cost per unit will not care one bit about providing anything more that the minimum needed to get the contract. The customer suffers until one automaker breaks the mold and start to differentiate themselves by building in house and having a tighter feedback loop to provide the best quality. Here's how it went down at Tesla straight from the horse's mouth. I remember the skeptics thought he was crazy for bringing this in house but it seems to have worked out. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YCjNT9qGjh4":[{"hn_comment_id":42234950,"author":"bejd","month":"2024-11","story_title":"A summer intern once saved Valve from a near-fatal lawsuit","text":"Mentioned in the article, but the source is the excellent YouTube documentary Valve released for Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45641513,"author":"sky2224","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of your favorite documentaries?","text":"I really enjoyed the Half Life 2: 20th Anniversary documentary. It gave a pretty neat perspective of what the games' industry was like at the time, and also made me really appreciate the technology that Valve was building. A lot of really innovative stuff came out of the creation of that game. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43071039,"author":"scrlk","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Half-Life 2 and Dishonored art lead Viktor Antonov has died","text":"RIP. For those who haven't seen it yet, he was interviewed in the HL2 20th Anniversary Documentary: [VIDEO] (intro and chapter 1 at 13:40)","stance":"rec"}],"YEBfamv-_do":[{"hn_comment_id":13093159,"author":"zappo2938","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Crypto 101 \u2013 Introductory course on cryptography","text":"For idiots like myself, I found this video, Public key cryptography - Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (full version), to be completely enlightening using mixed colors to explain the most basic features of a cryptography algorithm.[0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23558372,"author":"ndesaulniers","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Postbank to replace 12M bank cards after employees steal 'master key'","text":"Interesting, thanks for sharing (I too was curious). This is my favorite video on Diffie-Hellman key exchange which is a slightly different problem (sharing a secret, without the constraint of dividing the key): [VIDEO] (oh, hey, same channel! Guess I'll need to check out more videos from here!)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35860989,"author":"throw1234651234","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Public Key Crypto Explained in 0 words","text":"This is the only video that ever explained it concisely and clearly, IF you don't care about trying to actually implement it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13073735,"author":"jzl","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Is there a \u201cground-up\u201d explanation of PGP/GnuPG?","text":"This is a great pair of videos that intuitively explain Diffie-Helman key exchange and then the RSA algorithm in a way that requires no previous knowledge of cryptography: \"Public key cryptography - Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange\" [VIDEO] \"Public Key Cryptography: RSA Encryption Algorithm\" [LINK] Good coverage of the fundamentals before attempting a deeper understanding of PGP specifically.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14613551,"author":"tialaramex","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Want to study SSL, HTTPS, and the works. Where to start?","text":"I recommend beginning at the fundamentals. For example here's a video that walks through Diffie Hellman, so that anybody can follow, you can probably sprint through it, but by taking it slow they avoid accidentally forgetting anything important. [VIDEO] Grasping the fundamentals means that when it comes to policy decisions (e.g. in the management of certificates) you can see what the consequences of a particular decision are, rather than just hoping that whoever proposed that policy knew what they were doing. For example, I think a lot of people today use Certificate Signing Request (CSR) files without understanding them at all. But once you have a grounding in the underlying elements you can see at once what the CSR does, and why it's necessary without needing to have that spelled out separately. Or another example, understanding what was and was not risky as a result of the known weakness of SHA-1. I saw a lot of scare-mongering by security people who saw the SHA-1 weakness as somehow meaning impossible things were now likely, but it only affected an important but quite narrow type of usage, people who understood that could make better, more careful decisions without putting anybody at risk.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14643244,"author":"ivanr","month":"2017-06","story_title":"How HTTPS Handshake Happens","text":"As others have already pointed out, this explanation focuses on the RSA key exchange, which has been deprecated. It's not recommended for use with the current line of protocols (TLS 1.2 and earlier) and it's been completely removed from TLS 1.3 (work in progress, but close to being finished). The key weakness of the RSA key exchange is that session encryption keys are transported over the network encrypted with the server's public key. When the server's private key is compromised in some way, the attacker can passively decrypt all traffic, they can also \"go back in time\" to decrypt all previous conversations they might have recorded and kept. For a more secure handshake approach, consider the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which is a way for two parties to agree on a secret number (a very large number when used for encryption, of course) that third party can't discover from looking at the network traffic. It's a very simple and intuitive algorithm; there's a great video that explains it here: [VIDEO] Today, we generally use the ephemeral elliptic curve DH variant (ECDHE), which has better security characteristics and works much faster. However, DH is not sufficient, you must also authenticate the other party. Otherwise you could be negotiating your key exchange with the attacker and not the real recipient. This is where public cryptography comes in. After the key exchange, both parties use their private keys to sign the transcripts of the entire conversation up until that point","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15499868,"author":"gregmac","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Practical Public Key Cryptography","text":"If you haven't seen it, there's a pretty neat video that outlines how public-key cryptography works using paint colors [1]. It's focused on Diffie-Hellman key exchange, but it's a great intro for beginners to be able to visualize the concepts, and I think helps provide some context before jumping right into the GPG command line. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16243111,"author":"itsrajivshah","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Algorithms Explained: Diffie-Hellman","text":"Interesting explanation - thanks for sharing. I find it easier to visualise, through colours of paint, for a high-level metaphor of the DH key exchange process, which may be useful - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27024297,"author":"siparikh","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Diffie-Hellman for the Layman","text":"Here is another video from \"Art of the Problem\" that uses the same analogy that really helped me understand this better: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YGLNyHd2w10":[{"hn_comment_id":45090646,"author":"chii","month":"2025-09","story_title":"What Is Complexity in Chess?","text":"This reminds me of this nice video : [VIDEO] basically, the state space of the game can produce some intuition on why certain games are hard, and is demonstrated as a clustering of various states that are only linked to the winning state by a very small number of edges. So a player can easily \"get lost\" in the maze.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46191143,"author":"ohc","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Solving Rush Hour, the Puzzle (2018)","text":"Great article, very impressive to solve the entire game, rather than just individual puzzles. PS: Good chance that if you're reading these comments that you will appreciate this video by 2swap, visualising solutions to Rush Hour in 3D: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46950715,"author":"sublinear","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Like Game-of-Life, but on Growing Graphs, with WASM and WebGL","text":"This looks similar to the graphs on \"2swap\"[1]. Worth a watch if you haven't by now. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YHLU0Uej1WA":[{"hn_comment_id":30493759,"author":"sillysaurusx","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Is anyone else genuinely scared that this is the start of WW3?","text":"Thanks to HN user eswat, you can: [VIDEO] I recommend waiting till nighttime and turning up the volume for extra effect.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30542713,"author":"CalRobert","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Threads (1984) \u2013 Documentary style account of a nuclear holocaust and its effect","text":"There's a pretty well-done War of the Worlds-style film where a local conflict escalates in to nuclear war at [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YI3tsmFsrOg":[{"hn_comment_id":17086159,"author":"emilga","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Phages are making a comeback","text":"Kurzgesagt goes through bacterophages in this video: [VIDEO] I think this is the case mentioned by Kurzgesagt in the video, although he doesn't use names, so I can't be sure. Super cool, anyways!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17564716,"author":"amingilani","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Using a virus to kill what antibiotics can\u2019t","text":"Relevant Kurzgesagt video explaining _everything_ about bacteriophage[1]. I posted this a while ago, but since it's a video it didn't get much attention. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31371651,"author":"burnished","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Nanobots Can Swim Around a Wound and Kill Bacteria","text":"The latter half of a charming video by Kurzgesagt[0] talks about the tension between anti-bacterial resistance and bacteriophage defenses - we might be able to see-saw treatments based on what local microbes have adapted to. I only mention it as a tangent, and because your comment makes me think you'd be interested. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34523950,"author":"bratwurst3000","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Antidepressants help bacteria resist antibiotics","text":"Thank you very much. I google a bit and here in germany we are allready building a database and a stock of phagea for specific bacteria. They allready have over 1000 phages. They also have \u201ephage cocktails\u201c for broadband. They also state your points. Thanks again. Here the link in german [LINK] And this video is rly interesting [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YJrOuBkYCMQ":[{"hn_comment_id":32224359,"author":"jhallenworld","month":"2022-07","story_title":"An STM32 emulator written in Rust for 3D printers","text":"The short answer is that they are not building more fabs for non-leading edge processes, like those used by STM32. There is an interesting video about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34396151,"author":"comboy","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Explaining the Global Chip Shortage","text":"This video seems to be doing much better job at explaining the problem [1]. Long story short there's high demand for trailing edge (50nm+) tech, but it is not worth investing in building more of these for number of reasons mentioned in the video (huge investment, long time, and despite high demand it's still only low percentage of profit compared to cutting edge) I suppose prices must increase but likely there are some long term contracts in place. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YKuRkGkf5HU":[{"hn_comment_id":23506916,"author":"tbabej","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Is there any work being done in speech-to-code with deep learning?","text":"While (likely) not using directly deep learning, I found the following talk [1] by Emily Shea on her code dictation setup (based on Talon Voice) both insightful and impressive. EDIT: Actual demo with coding starts at 18.00: [VIDEO] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33544250,"author":"glenjamin","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Hey, GitHub \u2013 Waiting list signup","text":"There was an excellent talk at Strange Loop a few years ago by Emily Shea about how she'd learnt to code vim using her voice to combat RSI. [VIDEO] The demos are in Ruby, but I could imagine that languages with strong type-aware auto-completion could be easier to do.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34846444,"author":"cube2222","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Numen: Voice Control for Handsfree Computing","text":"It's worth mentioning Talon[0] here, which is a system for offline voice control as well, with great python-based scripting (and also supports eye tracking, though I haven't used it myself). Using your computer or programming with it works like a charm, with some interesting and impressive projects based on it coming out as well, like Cursorless[1]. There's a great strangeloop talk[2] demonstrating talon and the actual state of voice coding, which is how I discovered it (hint: it's much better than you'd expect, and straightforward to learn at that). [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] Disclaimer: not affiliated, just a happy occasional user","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27215727,"author":"cube2222","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Squeezebox Keyboard","text":"Check out voice programming with Talon[0], I've recently been playing around with it (to be less reliant on my hands), and it actually takes little work to get started and fairly productive. The state of voice programming is much better than most people would imagine. Here's a nice talk on strangeloop by a person who switched to it permanently: [VIDEO] [0]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28912698,"author":"58x14","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Spatial Keyboard Navigation","text":"I think you'll find this presentation by Emily Shea on voice driven development to be intriguing. [VIDEO] aside, novel HIDs are IMO a huge market gap that I'd really like to invest time in if anyone wants to chat.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30117864,"author":"kbenson","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?","text":"For anyone interested in this topic, you might be interested in this tech talk[1] from Emily Shea. In it she demos a tech stack similar to what's mentioned here, to fairly good effect. It does appear that required a lot of tweaking on her part and is optimized for the writing of code, and I'm not sure how well it functions for more general contexts. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YMqgiXLjvRs":[{"hn_comment_id":8041398,"author":"asadlionpk","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Aaron Swartz and the YC Community","text":"I thought about that too when I watched that documentary. You should check out what pg thinks of Aaron in this recent video: [VIDEO] at around 7:42","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8525792,"author":"tjculbertson","month":"2014-10","story_title":"YC W15 emails are out","text":"I think it was in this video with Jcal [VIDEO] . Not sure at what point in the video, but PG definitely gives up lots of great success tips, so worth watching it all. As far as the black swans, I could be wrong on this, but my understanding is that YC has maybe 10 partners all giving a grade on the apps coming in (apparently started this after they missed SendGrid). Im not sure if the 1400 alums initially flag or what, but even with the 10 partners grading, their odds of finding black swans get worse because black swans don't look like winners to most people - they are essentially counter intuitive, crazy ideas that don't appeal to the majority in the beginning (or maybe the founders are not Stanford drop outs or ex Googlers, which further sways the majority to give higher grade to what is more obvious. Thus pushing down more potential black swans below the interview cut off line. So the more partners you have grading a particular startup, the more partners you have trying to cover their asses and not fuck up. So the safer choices will get more interviews - and safe choices don't usually result in black swans. Not sure if I'm making sense here, but maybe the proof is in the pudding in that some of their biggest wins are Dropbox, Reddit, and Airbnb...all relatively early in YC batches when there were fewer partners making choices.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11317674,"author":"tim333","month":"2016-03","story_title":"I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator.  AMA","text":"I can't answer that but pg talking about what may have been Sendgrid was quite interesting along those lines [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YNTARSM-Fjc":[{"hn_comment_id":28343141,"author":"Stratoscope","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Using Postgres and pgRouting to Explore the Smooth Waves of Yacht Rock (2020)","text":"I won't spoil this in case it is a surprise, but if you are familiar with this genre of music and have a guess as to who is at the center of the graph, the most connected person in all of Yacht Rock, your guess is almost certain to be correct. Also don't miss this wonderful parody series: [VIDEO] If you previously saw the old low-definition videos, these are remastered HD versions, well worth a re-watch. Stay smooth, everyone.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14239560,"author":"jrowley","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2017)","text":"The line about yacht rock has me seriously considering applying. Also your stack and philosophy seem pretty cool. For the uninitiated, check out this smooth music: (spotify playlist): [LINK] (original video series): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YQ2QtKcK2dA":[{"hn_comment_id":32537207,"author":"benreesman","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Beyond Hyperanthropomorphism","text":"I really enjoyed this interview [1] with Emad Mostaque who I gather is probably the key funding and organization player in that stuff. It remains to be seen exactly how \"open\" it winds up playing out over time, but they're talking a compelling game and the EleutherAI people seem to be pretty heavily involved, which you probably wouldn't do if you weren't serious. Yandex has also put up a ~100B language model [2]. My old colleagues at Meta have also started nibbling around the edges of opening some of this stuff up [3]. The Meta folks still aren't just handing out the big ones, but they're definitely moving the ball forward. In particular their release of the training logs is a really positive development IMHO as it opens the curtains a bit on the reality of training these things: it's a difficult, error/failure-prone process, there's a lot of trial-and-error, restarting from checkpoints, etc. Anything that puts downward pressure on the magical thinking is A-OK in my book. The reality of this stuff is exciting/impressive enough: there's no need to embellish or exaggerate. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32683437,"author":"preommr","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Run Stable Diffusion on Your M1 Mac\u2019s GPU","text":"The guy's name is Emad Mostaque btw There's a recent video interview he did that goes into his vision: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32724064,"author":"xor99","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Can't believe Stable Diffusion is out for public use and that's considered \u201cOK\u201d","text":"Stable diffusion is good open source software and is well motivated in a very complicated technology/political space. Sure they inherit all of the existing problems with image datasets but they have some plans to mitigate racial and socio-political bias. The alternative is to either not do the project or make it secretive under the supposed motivation of safety. This interview is a good overview of the principles behind their approach: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YQ_xWvX1n9g":[{"hn_comment_id":30045257,"author":"code_biologist","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Crypto: When Will the Madness Stop?","text":"Folding Ideas' new (2 hour podcast-ish) video \"The Problem With NFTs\" is a really good critique of cryptocurrency: [VIDEO] Covers pretty much every thought I've ever had regarding centralization, privacy issues, proof of work and proof of stake both rewarding the rich, economic incentives in speculative markets, NFT hucksterism \u2014 but with detailed research and examples of each. Some of the NFT security stuff is jaw-droppingly bad.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30059866,"author":"AlexandrB","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen","text":"On this note. This recent video is probably the most detailed and incisive critique of cryptocurrency and NFTs that I've seen: [VIDEO] It not only covers the technical limitations, but also the ideological flaws.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30359308,"author":"crispyambulance","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Cryptocurrencies \u2013 An Assessment by Reserve Bank of India","text":"They pretty much nailed it in the last paragraph... > Writing in the New York Times Adrian Chen noted as far back as 2013 that Bitcoin is built on a weird mix of speculative greed bolstered by a utopian cyberlibertarian ideology and likened it to a digital gold rush. Indeed, hyperbole continues to characterise all aspects of the crypto world. Crypto messaging does not appear to be directed at the rational or sensible. Adrian Chen's article... [LINK] Dan Olson's now epic \"Line Goes Up\" [VIDEO] ... a masterful takedown of crypotcurrency and NFT's, it also demonstrates what a shit-show this has all become. Much MUCH worse than in Chen's 2013 article.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33313454,"author":"andreyk","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Fake Books","text":"I've watched the video as well and wholeheartedly agree! His 'Line Goes Up' documentary about crypto is also exceptional; very critical but in educated and actually nuanced ways ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35331173,"author":"mostlysimilar","month":"2023-03","story_title":"The Future Is a Dead Mall \u2013 Decentraland and the Metaverse","text":"Not my favorite video from Dan Olson but still enjoyable. I highly recommend his video about NFTs, Line Goes Up: [VIDEO] So much time, energy, and resources wasted on this stuff when we have such bigger issues to solve as a collective.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30060006,"author":"rideontime","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen","text":"These critics have been around for a while. Dan Olson started researching this video long before this recent crash. You should watch it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30129176,"author":"antifoo","month":"2022-01","story_title":"NFTs Are, Quite Simply, Bullshit","text":"I think the technical jargon (a mix of crypto, distributed systems, and finance) leads people to believe that what's going on in crypto is smarter than it is. It's what P.T. Barnum might have called \"flim flam\"; ~ \"if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.\" Relevant discussion in the \"Line Goes Up\" Youtube video that's very good but extremely long (2h!) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30137571,"author":"StringyBob","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Did I just lose half a million dollars?","text":"I\u2019d say \u2018recommendation\u2019 not \u2018ad\u2019 :) This was the related section [VIDEO] that lead me down the rabbit hole of watching the whole thing I have no connection other than stumbling across it after seeing this story today and thought the critique tied in well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30339135,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Blockfi agrees to pay $100M in penalties and pursue registration","text":"[VIDEO] A rant over two hours long about the endless grift and unfettered scamming that is crypto. Two hours , and it doesn\u2019t even cover all of it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33198723,"author":"cauefcr","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The cumulative advantage of a unionized career for lifetime earnings","text":"I strongly recommend you to actually read some Marx, it might get you out of the Web3 sham, but here's a good economic analysis of cryptocurrencies if you haven't seen it yet (judging from your username you need to see it) [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34710918,"author":"WaffleIronMaker","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Yes, Crypto Is All a Scam","text":"Folding Ideas has a very good documentary on NFTs, and many of the problems faced by cryptocurrency [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36120738,"author":"menus","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Paper Money Diehards Refuse to Fold","text":"After watching Folding Ideas' video on crypto and NFT (1) I am less convinced that is decentralised. It goes over how crypto ended up becoming the very thing it swore to destroy (banks and oligopolies). Also anyone with the means can still do a 51% attack if they wanted. (1) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YR5WdGrpoug":[{"hn_comment_id":18565948,"author":"slifin","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Clojure REBL [video]","text":"While we're talking about this conference, rich hickey just changed how I think about domain modelling forever with this talk, released about an hour ago: [VIDEO] Strongly recommend a watch particularly if you're modelling something in a typed language","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18603634,"author":"gambler","month":"2018-12","story_title":"NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)","text":"Rich Hickey's \"Maybe Not\" should be watched by anyone who thinks nulls/nils/undefineds are okay. It should also be watched by anyone who think that Optional/Maybe/Nullable and good enough: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18741495,"author":"ttiurani","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"\"Maybe Not\" by Rich Hickey: [VIDEO] Another excellent talk by the creator of Clojure, and like the previous ones, relevant for all programmers.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18907813,"author":"vga805","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Porting 30K lines of code from Flow to TypeScript","text":"I bounce back and forth between TypeScript and Clojure. I've been keeping a close eye on Clojure's upcoming spec as it seems to be a nice opt-in, run-time type-checking solution. I like the flexibility and quickness with which dynamic languages let me iterate, but I want the safety. I want at least some of the benefits of both. So yes, they (dynamically typed languages) have some advantages. Sometimes when I'm iterating quickly, especially on new projects, I don't want to fight with the compiler. BUT, I vastly prefer TypeScript to JavaScript because JS has a lot of foot-guns. I think when we get the existential operator, it will have less foot-guns, but I will probably never again write a new project for work in JS from scratch. I really love the ideas Rich Hickey put forth in his most recent Clojure conj talk: [VIDEO] The ability to spec out the shape of an object, and then in the different contexts in which you need some of that data, specify what you need, is an awesome solution to optionality (Watch the talk!). I absolutely love how much thought RH has put into the design of Clojure, and I think the final release of spec will be a close to perfect balance of dynamism and opt-in safety. Of course, TS is a superset of JS, so adopting it little by little sorta gets me that balance I want.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42036491,"author":"MarkMarine","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Programming languages that blew my mind (2023)","text":"My mind blown experience was listening to a Rich Hickey talk (maybe not [1]) that flipped upside down my accepted method of thinking about types and type system paradigms. I still love writing Haskell and Rust, but I see the warts that he is so concisely pointing out. The either type really sticks out to me now, and I see the problems with overtyping what are essentially maps, and how rigid that makes every aspect of your programs. Currently I deal with a fairly large go monolith that had some clean code practices in it, and changing a single field that is going to make it into the public API ends up being hundreds or thousands of lines of changes. Such a waste of time to CRUD what is a map of strings. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18575217,"author":"jpittis","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Party REPL \u2013 A multi-player REPL built for pair-programming [video]","text":"Conj always makes me so envious. So many good talks. This one, the Rich Hickey one on Maybe, the Stuart Halloway one on REBL. Any other must watches? Hickey: [VIDEO] Halloway: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18602003,"author":"draw_down","month":"2018-12","story_title":"NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)","text":"Since it's so close to this topic, I recommend Rich Hickey's talk from about a week ago, called \"Maybe Not\". It's mostly about the issue of how to specify the shape of data a function requires (takes as input) and provides (emits as output), but it also contains a really nice discussion of problems with Option/Maybe types. Anyway, my feeling is that I don't understand what people expect to happen here. Due to a misunderstanding, bad assumption, or other error, you expected to have something when you actually don't have the thing. A null-reference exception (or equivalent) is just the symptom. Null isn't the problem, our dumb brains that constantly make dumb mistakes are the problem. Option/Maybe does force you to deal with the case that you didn't get anything when you asked for something. But as Hickey points out in his talk, it isn't all benefit, there is a cost, and nobody ever talks about the cost. When I provide you an id and ask for a Book object in return, I want a Book back, not a `Maybe Book`. This concept does not map to anything in the real world, and it has problems in practical usage as well. (e.g. My function changes from maybe giving you a Book or maybe not, to definitely providing you a Book. So I change its return type from `Maybe Book` to `Book`. Except, oops, I just broke every single caller of my function, even though I strengthened the guarantee of the data my function will provide. That shouldn't break anyone.) [VIDEO] (Discussion of Option/Maybe starts ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22462933,"author":"jmiskovic","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread","text":"I would say Clojure more than substantial returns of invested time. Not just the language itself, but also the wider approach to software composition, feature accretion vs backward compatibility, schema'd dynamic typing seem benefictial no matter what your development tools you use. Maybe check out the talks below and see if they don't enRich you as software engineer. [LINK] The Language of the System [LINK] Design, Composition, and Performance [LINK] Spec-ulation [VIDEO] Maybe Not","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23615773,"author":"t0astbread","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Show HN: IHP, a batteries-included web framework built on Haskell and Nix","text":"Because you mentioned Result specifically: I've recently seen a talk by Rich Hickey that (for me) made a pretty strong case against Result/Maybe/etc. and for union types instead. Maybe you'll find it interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24457693,"author":"tantaman","month":"2020-09","story_title":"From Rust to TypeScript","text":"Please please please don't perpetuate the use of either or maybe types :( They make software very hard to maintain and end up breaking anyone who depends on a library that uses them. Rich Hickey (author of Clojure) has a great discussion of Either and Maybe here: [VIDEO] that dives into their unsoundness.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28382345,"author":"nerdponx","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Some thoughts about raising the profile of Lisp","text":"Fair enough, I thought it was snark so I responded with snark. I think you should try both. Lisp as a language gives you a lot more freedom than Clojure, but Clojure has a more consistent and elegant language design. Clojure focuses on mostly-pure functional programming with immutable data structures, while Lisp lets you do pretty much anything anywhere, including hacking deep into the runtime itself (Clojure lets you do this to some extent too, but not as much as Lisp). Some videos that are worth viewing, which together I think provide a good sense of how the languages differ: - \"Common Lisp for the Curious Clojurian\" by Alan Diepert. A very lucid side-by-side comparison of Clojure and Common Lisp; assumes some but doesn't really require much knowledge of Clojure. [LINK] - \"Maybe Not\" by Rich Hickey. An unusual but thoughtful take on \"types\" in programming, which I think cuts to the heart of what Clojure is all about. [VIDEO] - \"Immutable Conversations - Common Lisp\" interview with Alejandro Serrano and Micha\u0142 \"phoe\" Herda. Demonstrates the deep programmability and flexibility of the Common Lisp runtime, including its unique \"condition system\". [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35329573,"author":"j-pb","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Rust's Golden Rule","text":"> Putting \u201chere\u2019s the fields I\u2019m borrowing in the body\u201d into the signature, in order to conform with the Golden Rule, looks very odd. I think this would be an amazing feature, but it would require something like typescripts partial types, where essentially every object/struct consists as a collection type of atomic fieldname:field-type types.[1] Rich hickey[2] has a great talk on how existing type systems break in scenarios where they shouldn't break, e.g. relaxing what you accept as arguments should be a forward compatible change, and similarly increasing the guarantees that you provide on returned values should also be forward compatible. Currently they are not, but partial types are one piece to that puzzle imho. 1: [LINK] 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36911033,"author":"chubot","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Cap'n Proto 1.0","text":"Rich Hickey (creator of the Clojure language) has a good talk \"Maybe Not\" that touches on these issues, with a nice way of explaining it [VIDEO] The capnproto link explains it concretely in terms of a message bus example, which is useful. But more abstractly you can think of the shape of data (aka schema, names and types) and field presence (optional/required) as separate things [LINK] First, being valid or invalid with respect to a static type system is a GLOBAL property of program -- writing a type checker will convince you of that. And big distributed systems don't have such global properties: [LINK] If they did, they'd be small :) Namely you could just reboot the whole thing at once. You can't reboot say the entire Internet at once, and this also holds for smaller systems, like the ones at say Google (and I'm sure Cloudflare, etc.). So the idea is that the shape/schema is a GLOBAL property -- you never want two messages called foo.RequestX or two fields called \"num_bar\" with different types, ever. But optional/required is LOCAL property. It depends on what version of a schema is deployed in a particular binary. Inherently, you need to be able to handle a mix of inconsistent versions running simultaneously. --- To be pedantic, I woulds say \"making illegal states unrepresentable\" DOES apply, but you can't do it in a STATIC type system. Your Maybe<T> type is not useful for data that crosses process boundaries. A distributed system isn't a state machine. 1. Lamport showed us ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37766371,"author":"ndr","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Strong typing, a hill I'm willing to die on","text":"Consider reading/watching Rich Hickey's talk Effective Programs [0][1] and Maybe Not [2][3] In [0] in particular there're slides 22/23, here is part of the transcript but makes more sense with the slides on: > And you can call them problems, and I'm going to call them the problems of programming. And I've ordered them here [...] I've ordered them here in terms of severity. And severity manifests itself in a couple of ways. Most important, cost. What's the cost of getting this wrong? At the very top you have the domain complexity, about which you could do nothing. This is just the world. It's as complex as it is. > > But the very next level is the where we start programming, right? We look at the world and say, \"I've got an idea about how this is and how it's supposed to be and how, you know, my program can be effective about addressing it\". And the problem is, if you don't have a good idea about how the world is, or you can't map that well to a solution, everything downstream from that is going to fail. There's no surviving this misconception problem. And the cost of dealing with misconceptions is incredibly high. > >So this is 10x, a full order of magnitude reduction in (?) severity before we get to the set of problems I think are more in the domain of what programming languages can help with, right? And because you can read these they'll all going to come up in a second as I go through each one on some slide so I'm not going to read them all out right now. But importantly t","stance":"rec"}],"YSLV7t9DvN8":[{"hn_comment_id":21348135,"author":"dnchdnd","month":"2019-10","story_title":"A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell by Jorge Luis Borges (1966)","text":"[VIDEO] This is a fascinating series of lectures by Borges. Those who enjoy his erudition and his infectious love for English poetry will no doubt enjoy the investment of a few hours.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28776457,"author":"benrockwood","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Borges: The Library of Babel [pdf]","text":"Borges is the best author most people have never heard of. His stories are mind bending and he's an amazing human being. You can listen to him giving lectures on verse here, his voice is hypnotic: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33793328,"author":"redmalang","month":"2022-11","story_title":"A Jorge Luis Borges Reading List","text":"These lectures by Borges are seriously under-appreciated: [VIDEO] The fact that Borges was, apparently at this point blind and doing these lectures essentially from memory is just mind boggling to me.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"YSfCdBBqNXY":[{"hn_comment_id":22136011,"author":"mr_woozy","month":"2020-01","story_title":"ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)","text":"If you haven't already watched it: ADHD: Essential Ideas for Parents - Dr. Russell Barkely is essential to understanding ADHD at the neurological level. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42606155,"author":"jeromie","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Ask HN: My 12 year-old nephew just got diagnosed with ADHD, any advice?","text":"I can't recommend this video enough. I wish this research and understanding was available when I was a kid. I figured out systems and tools to succeed in school and work (I was largely a C student testing in the top 0.1% of CA school kids on the standardized tests -- found that tidbit cleaning out my mom's things). It was the rejection I experienced in peer friendships that scarred me deeply, and as someone who has been unmedicated into my 40s, still impacts my adult friendships and professional relationships. ADHD: Essential Ideas for Parents - Dr. Russell Barkely [VIDEO] Some key tidbits to sell you (and your nephew's parents) on spending the full two hours with this: \"... it also helps families to understand some of the other life course risks 50 to 70% of ADHD children are utterly rejected by close friendships by second grade it is in fact one of the more devastating consequences of this disorder is this inability to make and keep close sustained friendships with others their children and it is heartbreaking for parents to see this happening that their child is not as liked as other children that the sleepovers the going to the movies and the other social events in which other children celebrate their peer relationships are shut off for this child why is it there the single best predictor of peer rejection is that symptom the emotional impulsiveness friends forgive you your distractability your forgetfulness your working memory problems and even your restlessness they wil","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16413024,"author":"sosuke","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Is it 'normal' to struggle so hard with work?","text":"If you\u2019re still here looking at replies feel free to contact me. And or watch/listen to this video [VIDEO] Wish you'd left some way to contact you. Now that I'm at a computer I can say more but you're certainly not uncommon and there is lots of help that you can have. Cognitive behavior therapy shows great results in adult adhd/add patients. The video I linked talks about children but you'll likely feel yourself nodding along thinking of you. Money quote for me was something like the ADHD child has zero self motivation. All motivation comes from the outside world. Which is why kids can play video games for hours because there is instant feedback. But when you finish a problem on your homework nothing happens. And that there is a extremely poor short short term memory problem. Tons of stuff.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17889156,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Procrastination is more about managing emotions than time: study","text":"So I recently found this fascinating lecture on ADHD. It turns out, it\u2019s poorly named and doesn\u2019t really have to do with an attention deficit. Based on what you\u2019ve said, I recommend watching the first 20 minutes, and continuing with it if it strikes you as relevant: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18668213,"author":"giggles_giggles","month":"2018-12","story_title":"ATDT relief","text":"If you're not trying to sound like a douche, don't put ADHD in scare quotes. Yes, it was over-diagnosed in the 90s, but I brought myself in and was diagnosed as an adult in 2009. Maybe watch this [VIDEO] if you don't think ADHD is real. No, I don't know for certain if this is related to my ADHD. I might just be inconsiderate and annoying. I'm speculating, because it's a behavior that I have spontaneously manifested, observed, criticized myself for, and yet still do. It fits in the category of \"executive control\" and \"impulse control\" and those are the things that ADHD impairs. And I already wear headphones most of the day when I'm in the office because music helps me focus and otherwise I start listening to the conversations around me. Listening to music while I work (and when I studied when I was in school) is one way I have managed my disorder throughout my life.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19016373,"author":"afiori","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Most People With Addiction Grow Out of It (2014)","text":"> Contrast that will ADD/ADHD. I'm not convinced it has anything to do with maturity or a lack thereof. Sure, mindfulness meditation helps quite a bit. But I think you can be mature, self sufficient, polite, etc, and yet still have ADHD, or immature, etc. and have ADHD. There is a very good video about 30 essential things parents should know about ADHD [VIDEO] One of them is that when unmedicated on average a person with ADHD has the maturity of someone 2/3 of its age. Its is just an average, but is relevant to think how different a 14 years old and a 21 years old are (or 20 and 30).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27872355,"author":"rvanlaar","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Show HN: I built an app to create repeatable checklists to help with ADHD","text":"Hey, that sounds rough, very rough. It's not his fault. It's not your fault either. Speaking from experience myself, it's not that he purposely wants to speak its just that he can't not talk. Like people in a wheelchair would like to stand and walk but can't, or only very short distances. I can recommend to great resources. One is a YouTube series by Russel Barkley [1] The other are the books and podcast by Dr Hallowell [2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30865512,"author":"kitsune_","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out","text":"It is possible, the condition is a bit poorly named. The video of the talk by Russell Barkley that is linked elsewhere is a good primer [VIDEO] ). People with ADHD can have episodes of hyper focus. However this is a bit a misnomer, it's called Perseveration and is not really a good thing, and has more to do with one's inability to task switch ( [LINK] ). However it also allows you to completely zone into a code base or a problem. The problem is you don't really have much control over what will catch your attention. But of course you can develop quite some deep technical expertise this way. Now, that said, there is a new movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and if you take this title as a stand in for ADHD, maybe you can see that while this way of living can be overwhelming it also allows you to have a pretty good overview over systems and how their components interacts very fast. I think that's what many ADHD'ers are actually very good at, grokking code bases or the gist of things very quickly. Systems thinking in general. Also quick recall / association chains... Also, on average, the higher your IQ, the later in your life your ADHD diagnosis will be (see this video on adult ADHD [LINK] ). Your other abilities can compensate somewhat for your ADHD. Also of course when battling this condition you will build many personal tools and habits that neuro-typical people will never have to do, so in that sense you also might have a leg up in certain situations. I'd say professio","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30867547,"author":"kayodelycaon","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out","text":"The whole ADHD as an adaptation theory has been throughly debunked. Your confusion is very understandable because most people don't know what ADHD is. Some of the symptoms overlap with immaturity, so people who are not qualified to tell the difference will frequently misdiagnose the problem. If you want to understand ADHD, this video for parents of ADHD children will explain. [VIDEO] You don't need to watch the entire 3 hours. The first 10 minutes should be fairly enlightening.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33080203,"author":"kayodelycaon","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How to find what I am really good at?","text":"ADHD is quite well studied. If you're up for it, there is a 2.5h video that goes into some detail about what it is and how it affects children. I found it quite fascinating and it helped me understand some of my symptoms. (Mine is comorbid with bipolar. Yay.) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38276533,"author":"positus","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Hacking ADHD: Strategies for the modern developer","text":"I strongly disagree and think you should consider watching the following: ADHD: Essential Ideas for Parents - Dr. Russell Barkley [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40013585,"author":"01HNNWZ0MV43FF","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Childhood Loneliness Linked to Later Psychosis","text":"The newer ADHD meds are not stimulants and are not addictive. Maybe ADHD has \"boomed\" in \"\"\"popularity\"\"\" because a disorder that used to be diagnosed as hyperactivity and a deficit of attention actually turned out to be a quantifiable problem with executive function which exists in a known part of the brain, can be quantifiably treated with medication and therapy, and if untreated results in very confusing problems with emotions and motivation for as long as you live. It's not as if ADHD doesn't exist. I'm speaking off of what was apparently state of the art 10 years ago. [VIDEO] I'm hoping today, in a matter of hours, to get prescribed one of these new non-stim drugs, because the stuff described in that video very much matches my experience. Maybe thinking that ADHD is made up has boomed in popularity because of the South Park and King of the Hill episodes that downplay it. Imagine learning medicine from cartoons.","stance":"rec"}],"YThelfB2fvg":[{"hn_comment_id":31716410,"author":"dmix","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Challenge: Pixel perfect design","text":"This is a really good video about how Apple cares about being pixel perfect compared to Windows with something simple and obvious like the mouse cursor icon: [VIDEO] The improvements he made are also quite nice, Microsoft should take note...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35242889,"author":"ChilledTonic","month":"2023-03","story_title":"macOS Cursors","text":"If you want to investigate the history of the macOS cursor, and other cursor schemes, I highly recommend this video: [VIDEO] + [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39248431,"author":"vintagedave","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?","text":"Time for one of my favourite Youtube videos, by Posy (Michiel de Boer.) 'Mouse cursor history (and why I made my own).' [VIDEO] It runs through the history of mouse cursors, as well as problems with some of the standard ones, and shows, among other things, historical cursors which were straight and not tilted. It is one of those amazing videos that make the internet worthwhile, is short, and is by the author of Posy's Cursor Pack, [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39248891,"author":"baxuz","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?","text":"I was just about to say that. There's an amazing video by Posy documenting mouse cursor history, and even provides his own cursor pack: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48108699,"author":"vintagedave","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Don't hijack my mouse pointer","text":"The best video on mouse cursors I've seen, by Posy: [VIDEO] It doesn't exactly answer the question, but I -- someone who doesn't watch video and wants text, articles -- have watched this video twice over. It's worth it :)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39248907,"author":"baxuz","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?","text":"For a better deep dive into mouse cursors with more information, there's Posy's \"Mouse Cursor History (and why I made my own)\": [VIDEO] It also shows how absolutely horrid Windows' cursor designs are. They always were. I still remember making my own sets back in the early 2000s when DeviantArt was the home of desktop customization.","stance":"rec"}],"YUU7_BthBWM":[{"hn_comment_id":15760740,"author":"jonathankoren","month":"2017-11","story_title":"When is it OK to remake a classic game?","text":"The idea of a re-releasing a classic game with running commentary is interesting, but I can't imagine that there's much of an appeal for commentary during the gameplay. Conversely, I did enjoy watching \"We Play Doom With John Romero\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16789284,"author":"doomlaser","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Why I\u2019m Using the Cerny Method of Game Development","text":"Yeah, John Romero explains that the famous e1m1 was the last level he designed for the original Doom, in this fantastic developer commentary he did for the game's first episode with IGN, for the game's 20th anniversary: [VIDEO] 'the classic horseshoe design' - show inaccessible teasers of later areas of the stage near the beginning to drive the player forward","stance":"rec"}],"YX3iRjKj7C0":[{"hn_comment_id":3899835,"author":"AlexFromBelgium","month":"2012-04","story_title":"In which we plot an escape from the quagmire of equality (Clojure and Emacs)","text":"Thx for the responses. I just watched \"What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby, Too\" [VIDEO] pretty interesting","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9851851,"author":"brudgers","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Some Functional Programmers Are Arrogant","text":"For some context on Martin's comments his talk on how arrogance effected Smalltalk is probably relevant: [VIDEO] and probably worth watching if you enjoy Uncle Bob's soulful stylings and are interested in his thoughts about programming language communities.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10008272,"author":"duncanawoods","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Redline Smalltalk for the JVM","text":"After watching a few Alan Kay talks where he pines for Smalltalk, I happened to watch this Robert Martin talk \"What killed Smalltalk could kill Ruby\". [VIDEO] The tldw reasons he gives for why Smalltalk died: - too easy to make a mess where adding complexity would be punished late. - arrogance - community isolated itself from the world and did not address common industry needs - commercial only - alternative free languages dominated","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12850751,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Keep Ruby Weird Again [video]","text":"Quite interesting, maybe one should also check this older talk: Robert Martin, \"What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby\", 2009 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32992695,"author":"bayindirh","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Go runtime: 4 years later","text":"We always make this discussion with friends. I don't think every language should tick the boxes the same way. I also personally like Go a lot. It's filling the gap between C++ and Python for me. If I need something compiled with proper threading support, but C++ would be an overkill, I reach for Go. Go is designed with a human centric view, IMHO: \"Make writing great programs easier rather than design a language with novel/cutting edge features, but with a high cognitive load\", and I find it as a noble aim as Rust's guarantees and aspirations. I understand why people love Rust, but I don't think it's the only one, or the proverbial silver bullet that we finally achieved. Yes, it's nice. Yes, it brings many things to the table, but it's not the final solution for once and for all. You like Rust? Great, Go for it (unintended pun alert), but I think we need all languages from all paradigms and perspectives. I find this talk [0] very informative and useful while interacting with other languages and communities. I'm not sharing this with any insinuations towards you, but just find it generally perspective broadening. [0]: [VIDEO] - What Killed Smalltalk could Kill Ruby.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39572248,"author":"bayindirh","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Rewrite the VP9 codec library in Rust","text":"> your arguments against Rust come off as biased. Yes, I'm pretty aware of this, and I keep this bias voluntarily, because Rust is generally touted (hyped?) as a Silver Bullet, and I'm wary of Silver Bullets. So, I want to highlight that fact. > Sorry if I came across as rude. No hard feelings. As I said, I'm not under delusion of a perfect life. I just said it. > I just find it slightly puzzling how your stance on it is kind of going up and down. :) I have a habit of mirroring the tone of the person I'm talking with. Combine it with the fact that English is not my native language, it's possible that \"tone adjustment\" is far from perfect. > it's been quite a while since I've seen Rust zealotry on HN... Yes, there's no zealotry here, and it's great, but I'm exposed to a wider community than HN people. Unfortunately, HN represents very small percent of the programmers around. A great talk I like about this issue is Robert Martin's \"What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby, Too\" [0]. Let's say, I'm marred and bitter from tons of zealotry and flamewars over the years (yes, I'm not young folk). > While that likely does wonders for your mental health... [Snipped for brevity] First of all, thanks. I pray that you work in a place you love and never work again. I'm very aware that how being solo makes me different and biased, and I think I highlighted at a couple of places. On the other hand, I understand what teams and team-related activities are important for code quality. Let's say th","stance":"rec"}],"YX40hbAHx3s":[{"hn_comment_id":16024348,"author":"sgrove","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Classic Nintendo Games Are NP-Hard (2012)","text":"There's a fantastic video I refer to every now and then if I'm a bit unsure about it, definitely recommend it - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35909234,"author":"sgrove","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Problems harder than NP-Complete","text":"My absolute favorite overview of this - the video goes over both the explanation of the spaces, but also how it relates to a sort of understanding of reality itself! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12895743,"author":"austinl","month":"2016-11","story_title":"The P=?NP Poll (2002) [pdf]","text":"This 10 minute video is a great introduction to the P = NP problem and computational complexity theory if you have no context. I've shown this to plenty of friends (including those outside of computer science). Essentially, \"does being able to quickly recognize correct answers mean there's also a quick way to find them?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13320262,"author":"d23","month":"2017-01","story_title":"P vs. NP","text":"A guy at a company I used to work for made a great video on this. Very understandable even without any background on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14499814,"author":"jlg23","month":"2017-06","story_title":"The asymmetry in storytelling between math and the other sciences","text":"> I would guess the P!=NP proof would be an example. Unfortunately, it doesn't have any easy description that the average person would understand. \"Hard. Really hard. Don't be ridiculous.\". Now backtrack 2 small examples on paper. Oh, look, the number of steps here grow, but these grow even faster! Especially mathematics when explained to a layperson so much depends on the language used. If one manages to keep the rest of the complexity zoo[1] out of the explanation and invests time into very basic examples, a lot things can be explained that otherwise the average person would not understand. [1] [LINK] EDIT: Looking for a video I stumbled upon last week that had a very nice, short explanation of P vs NP (which I did not find again), I found this one: Not lay-person simple, but very funny and also provides a cursory glance at what lies beyond P vs NP, i.e. the complexity zoo: [VIDEO] (10 min)","stance":"rec"}],"YXylqtEQ0tk":[{"hn_comment_id":3770377,"author":"magicalist","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Google's self driving cars can navigate drive-through restaurants.","text":"[VIDEO] 9:00 has a good example, recognizing the state of a traffic light, other cars and pedestrians at an intersection, but lots of cool videos starting around 3:40. The whole talk is awesome and a presentation for an actual technical audience, too.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5634499,"author":"iharris","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Google's self-driving car gathers almost 1 GB/sec","text":"There's a great presentation about Google's self-driving car here (check the second half for video of the real-time telemetry that it gathers): [VIDEO] One of the things that I found really interesting is how the car inches forward at a stop sign in order to show the \"driver's\" intent to other drivers. Lots of actions that seem to be second-nature for human drivers have to be carefully emulated here.","stance":"rec"}],"YaUlqXRPMmY":[{"hn_comment_id":10163528,"author":"asgard1024","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Bruce Eckel announces he's going to write Atomic Python","text":"> What is simple and clear about Python? .. it's really a pretty complex language with a deep ecosystem Here's a helpful video from Feynman that kinda explains it: [VIDEO] Python language (ditto Perl, Ruby..) uses Babylonian approach, while the languages with more fundamental building blocks (like say Scheme, Haskell..) are more like Greek approach. So Python it is not simpler as a language per se, but it is simpler to mold onto the problem. At least that's my explanation why people (myself included) like to use it, despite well understanding there are more elegant (mathematically) languages out there.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10188585,"author":"nerd_stuff","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Feynman the Babylonian (2009)","text":"Here's the part of the lecture mentioned in the article: [VIDEO] Feynman was an excellent communicator, it's rare that having an intermediary \"explain\" what he was saying adds more than it takes away.","stance":"rec"}],"YbZ3zDzDnrw":[{"hn_comment_id":8529187,"author":"krat0sprakhar","month":"2014-10","story_title":"The Raft Consensus Algorithm","text":"One of the most lucid explanations of the Raft Consensus Algorithm that I've ever seen is the one in John Ousterhout and Diego Ongaro's Raft User Study[0]. The 2 videos do an excellent job of explaining both the Paxos and Raft algorithms and the key differences between them. John's narration is extremely clear and the slides are very informative. Definitely recommended! Raft is a consensus algorithm designed to be easier to understand than Paxos. To measure Raft's understandability, we conducted an experimental study using CS students at two universities. We recorded a video lecture of Raft and another of Paxos, and created corresponding quizzes. This page makes our materials available for anyone interested. We think these are valuable resources for anyone learning consensus (whether Raft or Paxos or both). [0] - [LINK] Raft Video - [VIDEO] Paxos Video - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6367282,"author":"tomjohnson3","month":"2013-09","story_title":"ZooKeeper vs. Doozer vs. Etcd","text":"one other thing to keep in mind is that the underlying algorithms (zab and raft) provide different guarantees. for example, zookeeper/zab allows reading directly from followers with a guarantee to get at least a past value that won't be rolled back. this was one reason zookeer didn't use paxos: [LINK] in my understanding, raft doesn't allow reading directly from followers, because the follower logs may get repaired/rolled-back when a new leader is elected. (though i'm sure an implementation can tweak the protocol to provide this support.) that said, raft has a lot of interesting applications, and, in my opinion, is definitely more understandable than the many versions of paxos. (implementing zab yourself, at this point, would be a futile exercise.) i found the videos from the raft user study to be very well done (and easier to understand than even their paper): raft: [LINK] paxos: [VIDEO] ...however, i think they did paxos a disadvantage by not just focusing on multi-paxos (which is probably the most common implementation). but, it's certainly fair to say that info about paxos is spread out far and wide...with perhaps too many knobs to turn and implementation-related details to fill in yourself. as a side note: i've just started implementing raft in a set of libraries (multiple languages) that will be open source - along with other protocols.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6662497,"author":"pkj","month":"2013-11","story_title":"The Writings of Leslie Lamport","text":"A really good intro to Raft --> [VIDEO] Very useful if you are into distributed systems and would like to see a practical implementation with clear examples.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44928657,"author":"sathish316","month":"2025-08","story_title":"The Raft Consensus Algorithm (2015)","text":"This YouTube video by the Raft creators (linked at the bottom of the page) gives a solid explanation of Raft internals - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YcUycQoz0zg":[{"hn_comment_id":49218987,"author":"wanderingmind","month":"2026-08","story_title":"NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for yet another year","text":"A slight tangent here is a technical deep dive on Voyager 1 fixing a memory corruption error in 2023 by hand 15 billion miles away. Blows my mind of the reverse engineering done to achieve this [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47823974,"author":"ndiddy","month":"2026-04","story_title":"NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating","text":"Here's a talk about how the Voyager team fixed the flight data computer on Voyager 1 when a memory chip went bad on it a few years ago. It goes over how the flight computer works and he walks through a few assembly routines. [VIDEO] Some of the challenges they had to deal with while developing the fix: - The only source code they had for the flight data software was an OCR'd Microsoft Word document (with typos) that was likely scanned from a hard copy assembler listing printout. - The processor runs a custom instruction set developed by JPL for the Voyager mission. The documentation they had on the processor was incomplete. - Everybody who had designed the flight software was dead. - They had no assembler, no debugger, and no processor simulator. They had no testbed, the only two FDS processors were in space.","stance":"rec"}],"YdHTlUGN1zw":[{"hn_comment_id":21874302,"author":"rahuldottech","month":"2019-12","story_title":"The Surprise and Wonder of Early Animation","text":"Here's a fascinating video in which Walt Disney showcases how his multiplane camera worked: [VIDEO] Truly incredible.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39158090,"author":"BiteCode_dev","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Disney unveils the HoloTile floor","text":"That's a good example. Look at the video showing off this exact tech: [VIDEO] You feel like you are part of the family while watching this. It's a completely different vibe. Honestly, I feel vaguely threatened by the HoloTile Floor demo tone. The way he answers the question about what's it's going to be used for feels like a parent that doesn't want to reveal something to a child.","stance":"rec"}],"YdOXS_9_P4U":[{"hn_comment_id":43015866,"author":"GuB-42","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster","text":"About geocentrism vs heliocentrism, 3blue1brown has recently released a video [1] that talks about about it. It is about the cosmic distance ladder, but geocentrism is mentioned, and it makes a lot of sense in context. To summarize: heliocentrism was known to the ancient Greeks, who realized the Sun was much bigger than the Earth, so it would seem logical to have the Earth go around the sun. But the counterargument was that if the Earth goes around the Sun, the stars should move relative to each other during the year, because of parallax, and they didn't have instruments that were precise enough to see it, so they assumed that they didn't. Copernicus major contribution wasn't heliocentrism, but the orbital periods of planets. And the model wasn't complete until Kepler calculated the shapes of the orbits. For details, watch the video, it is really good. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46952781,"author":"adolph","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Medieval Monks Wrote over Ancient Star Catalog \u2013 Particle Accel Reveals Original","text":"This is so true. There is an awesome Terry Tao / 3blue1brown collaboration that explicates the epistemological basis: Terence Tao on the cosmic distance ladder Pt 1: [VIDEO] Pt 2: [LINK] Commentary and Corrections: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"YdiZa0Y3F3c":[{"hn_comment_id":18286534,"author":"jrevels","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Julia parallel task runtime (WIP)","text":"This work has been a monumental collaborative effort and I think the eventual outcome will be pretty spectacular. I gave a talk at an MIT Julia meetup a few months ago that the author of this PR also spoke at; I found his talk to be an insightful overview of this work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18287155,"author":"boromi","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Julia parallel task runtime (WIP)","text":"checkout [VIDEO] which explains the new features of the task scheduler in a simple fashion. Basically Julia is employing a new algorithm to schedule tasks, where traditional methods would get stuck/blocked. Essentially, if you run a job with parallel tasks and one of the threads finishes, it's extremely difficult to schedulate the free thread, since the data may still be used by the other threads that are busy; thus you need to have clever way to determine how to allocate computational resources. Julia is implementing results of a new paper on how to optimally do this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20512578,"author":"StefanKarpinski","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Composable multi-threaded parallelism in Julia","text":"Consider a machine with N cores running a program which spawns N parallel tasks, each of which in turn spawns N parallel tasks. Which subtasks do the cores work on initially? If it's the first subtask of each top-level task, that's breadth-first scheduling. If it's all N subtasks of the first top-level task, that's depth-first scheduling. The latter is better for high-performance computing because it tends to be the lower level libraries that are really carefully tuned to make optimal use of the machine (think BLAS/FTT/parallel sum/prefix sum). Previously it was unknown how to implement this kind of scheduling efficiently. See this talk by Kiran Pamnany for more details: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21637524,"author":"falkaer","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Julia v1.3","text":"By far the most interesting part of this release is the new multi-threading features, I recommend reading [LINK] for an overview, and watching [VIDEO] for a talk about some unique stuff that's being worked on with Julia's multi-threading (though the depth-first scheduling is not in 1.3 afaik).","stance":"rec"}],"YdtE3aIUhbU":[{"hn_comment_id":6166483,"author":"schoper","month":"2013-08","story_title":"We still don't really know how bicycles work","text":"We do know, here is the paper that the journalist refers to: [LINK] And here is a great video by the author: [VIDEO] Short answer: \"a bicycle should turn into a fall.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6170606,"author":"aray","month":"2013-08","story_title":"We still don't really know how bicycles work","text":"[1] Explanation of the research in question behind this article, as well as a demonstration of the bike they based the research on. They very clearly describe (at the end of the video) that even with gyroscopic and tracking forces removed, the two most important factors are where the center of gravity is, and the tendency to turn into a fall (arguably just the second, but it is caused by the location of the center of gravity with regards to the pivot). [1] [VIDEO] Edit: more info on the TMS (two-mass skate) bike at its wikipedia page: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Ygty9HxhFK4":[{"hn_comment_id":23363375,"author":"jacobolus","month":"2020-05","story_title":"East Australian Humpback whale bounces back from near extinction","text":"For anyone interested in learning about phytoplankton and other microorganisms, I highly recommend the YouTube series Journey to the Microcosmos , [LINK] For example this video about diatoms, which are responsible for a quarter to half of the oxygen produced on earth, [VIDEO] [LINK] Seeing high-quality video of things moving around gives a much more visceral impression than just reading text interspersed with static images, in my opinion.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41598686,"author":"scghost","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Diatom Arrangements","text":"Diatoms are fascinating. I recently learned about them from an excellent Journey to the Microcosmos video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YjjTPV2pXY0":[{"hn_comment_id":17317818,"author":"halflings","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Neural scene representation and rendering","text":"Disney actually does a lot of research combining the world of graphics with deep learning. Some examples that you might appreciate (from the excellent channel \"Two Minute Papers\"): . \"Disney's AI Learns To Render Clouds\" [0] . \"AI Learns Noise Filtering For Photorealistic Videos\" [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21078259,"author":"jonas21","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Ray Tracing Denoising","text":"It's only briefly mentioned, but NVIDIA's recurrent denoising autoencoder is pretty amazing. [LINK] Two Minute Papers did a nice explanation of it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Yl_K2Ata6XY":[{"hn_comment_id":20624397,"author":"gholap","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Nutrient deficiencies in rice grown under higher carbon dioxide","text":"\"Is Our Food Becoming Less Nutritious?: Veritasium\"[1] is a good short video that puts this into context. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20968762,"author":"dghughes","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914","text":"Derek from Vertasium on YouTbe has a nice explanation. Even showing how the nutrient levels in weed specimens are also falling. The weeds were collected by researchers over the last 100 or more years. The weeds were vital because it showed it wasn't limited to farming practices it's all plants. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YnWhqhNdYyk":[{"hn_comment_id":10992494,"author":"autoreleasepool","month":"2016-01","story_title":"The Landscape of Parallelism in C++ [video]","text":"> It's as if you had to be there from the start to have a full image of how the language grew and truly understand the interplay between all the \"features\", otherwise it's too late to become an expert, and in some cases even too late to become comfortable writing good maintainable code in C++. This is funny to me (not in a condescending way) because I had the exact opposite thought today. I actually came back to C++ on my own fairly recently after learning about the modern version of the language. I was lamenting about how lucky I was to have started learning with C++14 because I didn't have to go through the horrible C++98 and C++03 eras. In fact I could simply ignore most of it. It's all about diving straight into the modern stuff. The biggest problem with learning C++ is that most textbooks, classes, university courses don't actually teach you the real C++ parts until the last 4 weeks of the courses. Instead they teach you \"C with classes.. and std::cout\". This has been acknowledged as an problem by some of the more prominent members of the committee. I urge you to watch Kate Gregory's talk from cppcon 2015 \"Stop Teaching C\". [VIDEO] Not only is she a great presenter, but she makes amazing points about what is fundamentally wrong with how C++ is taught in classrooms around the globe. I really hope her talk makes some impact. I know I used to hate the language. That was when I was writing it for my university that for some reason didn't want to upgrade their 2007 gcc compil","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11721769,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Why I don't spend time with Modern C++ anymore","text":"I've been spending a few days going through talks from last years cppcon[1]. They're all good, but they've all left me with a strong desire for a strongly opinionated, there-is-no-past-only-the-future introduction to C++14 (and incidentally, C11). I've added a few of those talks I've watched and liked to a small playlist (with a couple of other talks on programming, unrelated - the relevant talks are prefixed with \"cppcon 2015\"): [LINK] The full cppcon playlist is here: [LINK] Of special relevance is the rather excellent talk by Kate Gregory on \"Stop Teaching C\" (when you're supposed to do an intro course to C++): \"CppCon 2015: Kate Gregory \u201cStop Teaching C\"\": [VIDEO] (But again, I want an open wiki/live tutorial, along the lines of \"How I start\", but longer, which goes through all this stuff. We really should make one, both for C++14 and for C11). CppCon 2015: Herb Sutter \"Writing Good C++14... By Default\": [LINK] Is also rather uplifting, and: CppCon 2015: Sean Parent \"Better Code: Data Structures\": [LINK] makes a pretty good case for simple, modern C++ being clear, easy and efficient. Finally, CppCon 2015: Phil Nash \u201cTest Driven C++ with Catch\u201d: [LINK] apart for being a pretty straight forward intro to a simple testing framework, appears to reveal some secrets combining template magic and still get sane compile times (hint: don't recompile more (template) code on every iteration than you need to). There's a couple of good ones that touch on meta-programming too (Look for t","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31158996,"author":"tialaramex","month":"2022-04","story_title":"C++20 Ranges Algorithms \u2013 Non-Modifying Operations","text":"If what you need is C++ (which IMNSHO it is not) then starting with C is a bad idea. Here's Kate Gregory's talk, you should definitely listen to her even if you think I'm an idiot because she actually teaches people C++ and I (thankfully) do not. [VIDEO] Now here's my rant, which is unrelated to Kate's very smart talk: C has an excuse, because it was written in the 1970s for the PDP-11. In the 1970s struct qualifies as a fancy new feature. In the 1970s a wide pointer is very expensive. In the 1970s a linked list is often a good choice of data structure. C++ comes along quite a lot later. These things are already untrue or fast becoming untrue, but rather than risk being unpopular Bjarne's language just cargo cults C. It is almost all of C, plus more... stuff. C++ does not fix any of the worst problems with C, because doing so would risk losing compatibility and hurt Bjarne's adoption story. As a result, with only a handful of exceptions all of that broken garbage is still there . C++ still has the almost useless built-in array type from C, it keeps weird syntax from C that was too hard to ban in the 1970s compiler but you should never use, its built-in types have the same stupid, confusing names like \"long\" and \"double\", it has this awful \"macro pre-processor\" which makes even trivial tooling problems very difficult and set back software quality by at least a decade. Kate's approach avoids teaching beginners about most of this. It's still there, which is bad, but at least you","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10820858,"author":"daemin","month":"2016-01","story_title":"} // good to go","text":"For Modern C++ I found this video [VIDEO] interesting in regards to the topics she chooses to teach people new to C++.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14422922,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Coroutines are now in Clang trunk, libc++","text":"First of all, and most important one, learn C++ idioms, not C. This means making use of library types for memory allocation, vectors and strings. There is a place for old C style low level features, but those should come later, after the safer concepts are already ingrained. Kate Gregory's \u201cStop Teaching C\" talk at CppCon 2015 explains better than me. [VIDEO] Get a nice IDE, QtCreator, Clion, VC++ Community, KDevelop, XCode. Besides the \"Tour of C++\", check Stephan T. Lavavej talks at Channel 9. \"Core C++ Lectures\" [LINK] \"Advanced STL\", these ones only when you already have a good understanding of STL as user [LINK] Also check video presentations from NDC, ACCU, CppCon, CppNow and C9 Going Native.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16536336,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to learn modern C++?","text":"- Tour of C++ ( [LINK] ) - Principles and Practice Using C++ ( [LINK] ) - From Mathematics to Generic Programming ( [LINK] ) - The Scott Meyers books Some of the Bjarne Stroustrup videos, \"Learning and Teaching Modern C++\" - [LINK] Some of the Herb Sutter videos, \"Writing Good C++14... By Default\" - [LINK] \"Back to the Basics! Essentials of Modern C++ Style\" - [LINK] Some of the Kate Gregory videos, \"Stop Teaching C\" - [VIDEO] \"10 Core Guidelines You Need to Start Using Now\" - [LINK] \"It's Complicated\" - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18335641,"author":"simias","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Teaching C (2016)","text":"My point was that I don't think Smalltalk was ever more popular in the industry than C regardless of the time frame. By the mid 90's lisp machines were pretty long gone, betting on Lisp instead of C if employability is the metric seems rather bold. MIPS I concede, it was remained fairly popular for a long time. I guess my overall point is that the subjective choices made by this university back then don't really mean much by now. The fact that they taught Pascal instead of C alone proves that they weren't particularly prescient. >Regarding language comparisons, actually C++ is Italian and C Latin. I thought about that while writing this bad analogy but I couldn't come up with a better one. I wasn't really talking about the historical relationship between C and C++ but rather about their relative complexities. Learning C++ is vastly more complicated than learning C. On top of that the coding style of a modern C++ application (which generally involves a lot of metaprogramming, OOP and even some functional constructs) is fairly different from a standard C codebase. You don't write C like you write C++ and vice-versa. There's this good talk about how we should \"stop teaching C\" (if we want to teach C++): [VIDEO] I think the opposite holds true as well for very much the same reasons.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26738099,"author":"tediousdemise","month":"2021-04","story_title":"A simple C implementation to stream H.264 to browser using WebRTC","text":"I just can\u2019t recommend using it for new code in light of the sexy new alternatives that can compile down to the same binary with source code that\u2019s way more intuitive and readable. I do have nostalgia for C since it was my first language, and I think a lot of people are in the same boat, which is a problem. That\u2019s why I think we need to stop teaching C. Kate Gregory has a good cppcon talk on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Yo8kfV9kONw":[{"hn_comment_id":2838124,"author":"rkalla","month":"2011-08","story_title":"My experience with a 'negative review' scammer.","text":"For anyone else interested in this topic (or doubtful about the claim) 20/20 did an cover story on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7039819,"author":"aestra","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Court to Yelp: Reveal names of negative reviewers","text":"Hey, that's the BBB we are talking about here. [VIDEO] Watch the whole video if you haven't seen it before.","stance":"rec"}],"Yocja_N5s1I":[{"hn_comment_id":18005622,"author":"dunk010","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?","text":"I'm quite surprised that nobody has suggested Crash Course. The first one they did - Crash Course World History by John Green - is really great, and I personally found both endearing and funny ( [VIDEO] ). It's not advanced material, mostly high-school level, but you've got to crawl before you can walk, and it can help to fill in some missing spots if you have them, or give a high-level overview or recap in an entertaining way. Example: I'd done basic biology, but taken instead chemistry and physics (where I was, you only did all three if you wanted to go into medicine). I used Crash Course Biology ( [LINK] ) to back-fill my knowledge before studying a masters in Bioinformatics.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19096093,"author":"runyor","month":"2019-02","story_title":"The Decline of Historical Thinking","text":"Interesting is also that you can learn history much better outside of school. In contrast to education institutions youtubers for instance usually succeed at presenting the stuff in an interesting fashion. And if you listen to these kind of presentations in several languages or from diverse political influenced sources then you can also get a rather objective overview. This series taught me in a few hours what I didn't learn in school over years: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10270962,"author":"jhaand","month":"2015-09","story_title":"The World We Have Lost: On the Silk Road Roots of Our Global System","text":"If you're interesting in this kind of history. I can recommend the youtube series: Crash Course - World history. [VIDEO] Only 42 videos of around 12 minutes. Gave me a good brush up on history.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10322445,"author":"afarrell","month":"2015-10","story_title":"How Bernie Sanders Tech Volunteers Code the Bern","text":"I'm afraid that this risks sounding terribly terribly condescending and I don't want it to, but I truly intend the following to be helpful... > that thinks too-logically about politics There is a reason Justice Oliver Wendell Homes said \"The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.\" Humans are complex and if you try to define a set of axioms (or special forms) and build up and understanding from that, it is all too easy to follow your line of thought past massively lethal flaws. In your case, there are very good reasons why we don't give the president all of the powers that are currently allocated to congress. It is very very tempting to lay out specific ones for you. Other commenters will surely do that. However, I think that would not help you learn a better way to approach thinking about human power structures and the ways that they can fail. You should start by reading (or listening to audiobooks of) more history. Read broadly, enough that you start to experience the phenomenon described here: [LINK] If you want some easy-to-digest things to start with, this list of resources videos is pretty good, but has the flaw that it is all from one source: - [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK] For understanding the law, these are a good start: - [LINK] - [LINK] As an exercise, reading both of these and weighing them is a good one. - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] But I really can't actually drop a list of sources on you and give you what you need to have the instinct of thinking","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12673496,"author":"afarrell","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Any online apps to learn history/ geography/ economics (serious stuff)?","text":"For learning historical narratives, Youtube is honestly pretty great. Crash Course[1] is good for a broad overview. It presents a fairly coherent narrative and the advantage of this is that you can then relate any other historical narrative to this skeleton. Extra History[2] is a good example of a channel that presents narratives of specific incidents. If you are looking for a channel focusing on one particular period from lots of different angles, The Great War is not bad[3]. But none of this is actually going to teach you the skill of inquiry and skeptically reading different competing historical narratives. You kinda do need a class for that. A friend of mine is building a startup to make running one easier: [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] , [LINK] , and [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"YpllomiDMX0":[{"hn_comment_id":43717641,"author":"JasserInicide","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss","text":"Jason Fung is probably the world's leading research expert on obesity. If you want videos to watch on it, it starts and ends with this guy. He has done a ton of lectures and blogposts going back over a decade, and also has the stereotypical clickbaity YouTube videos. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7161929,"author":"beachstartup","month":"2014-02","story_title":"What will health nuts eat on Super Bowl Sunday? Nuts","text":"[VIDEO] i'm not sure if you're being serious but it'll take longer than 20 miutes, more like 6 hours. this isn't a simple topic but the new science on it is compelling.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16748358,"author":"mikenew","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Mounting criticism of NIH's relationship with the alcohol industry","text":"Minor point, but Dr. Jason Fung has a very interesting and, in my opinion, compelling explanation of obesity and weight gain. He argues that the main driver of obesity in the long term is insulin rather than total calories, and because alcohol doesn't significanlty raise insulin it doesn't contribute to obesity, despite the calories. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YpuX-5E7xoU":[{"hn_comment_id":39642993,"author":"fnimick","month":"2024-03","story_title":"A 7k-Pound Car Smashed Through a Guardrail. That's Bad News for All of Us","text":"Not only that, it would take only a minor change to have a huge impact and reduce deaths and injuries: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39919737,"author":"kungfooey","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Plunging Pickup Truck Sales Threaten Detroit's Profit Engine","text":"This guy ties grill height directly to fatalities. They really are a menace, but it's by design. Quoth one designer, \"I want it to look like a fist coming through the air.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41310487,"author":"Workaccount2","month":"2024-08","story_title":"A road safety plan that will lead to cars communicating with each other","text":"People just love trucks that are practically purpose built to kill pedestrians and motorcyclists. [VIDEO] Thank you Ryan from Fortnine.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41462090,"author":"mech975","month":"2024-09","story_title":"What to do about America's killer cars","text":"CAFE standards were written in such a way as to encourage large vehicle footprints to work around the requirements of the standards. Motorcycling youtuber fortnine offers a good view on some other aspects of the situation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47936758,"author":"stickfigure","month":"2026-04","story_title":"UAE Leaves OPEC and OPEC+","text":"It isn't about weight, it's way stupider than that: [VIDEO] Tall grilles are a purely aesthetic choice. We could create safety standards for pedestrian impacts and end this inane trend. And still drive trucks!","stance":"rec"}],"YuIIjLr6vUA":[{"hn_comment_id":22345743,"author":"stan_rogers","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)","text":"Burkard Polster's (Mathologer) videos on the subject are probably going to be more useful than Numberphile. Numberphile merely presents a trick; Mathologer points out both that it's patent nonsense [0] and that it's useful patent nonsense [1]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25230470,"author":"cyphar","month":"2020-11","story_title":"1.5 is the midpoint between 0 and infinity in Ruby","text":"That proof (and the more general statement) is not correct because it makes assumptions about infinite summation of divergent series that are not true. There is a link between the sum of natural numbers -- namely, the analytic continuation of the Reimann Zeta function has Z(-1) = -1/12. But the Zeta function is only defined to equal the sum of inverse powers for Re(z) > 1. And under a specific definition of summation (Ramanujan summation) you can say that \"the sum is equal to -1/12\" but that isn't the same as normal summation. Mathologer did a fairly in-depth video[1] into why this proof is wrong and what the actual link is between the infinite series and -1/12. The upshot is that even if you use more complicated definitions of summation, you cannot define sums of the kind 1+2+3+... to equal a finite number. If you assume the infinite sum of 1+2+3+... converges to a finite number you can easily prove a contradictory statement using the same summation properties assumed by that proof. Namely: S = 1 + 2 + 3 + ... = -1/12 S2 = S-S = 0 = 1 + 2 + 3 + ... - 1 - 2 - 3 - ... = 0 = 1 + 2 + 3 + ... - 1 - 2 - ... = 0 S2 = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + ... = 0 S3 = S2-S2 = 0 = (1-1) + (1-1) + ... = 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + ... = 0 But we \"derived\" in the original proof that S3 is equal to 1/2, which is a contradiction. (You could derive S3 is 1/2 from S but that's what the article does in reverse.) [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28780530,"author":"crvdgc","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics","text":"I find a response video to it more enlightening. It's often found as the number one related video. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32221388,"author":"jonnytran","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: YouTube Channels for the Intellectually Curious","text":"I know you're asking about Computerphile, but this video explains how one of the Numberphile videos is wrong: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"YyIQKBzIuBY":[{"hn_comment_id":12642245,"author":"unimpressive","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"These aren't necessarily my absolute favorite talks, but they're great mind-altering talks a little off the beaten path so I'd like to highlight them: \"Writing A Thumb Drive From Scratch\" by Travis Goodspeed - [LINK] Excellent talk on the hardware side of security, goes into some really cool theoretical hard disk defense stuff, incredibly insightful and introduces a hardware security tech toy so fun you'll want to go out and order it the moment you're done watching. The speaker is entertaining as all heck to boot. \"Programming and Scaling\" by Alan Kay - [VIDEO] Interesting talk on the theoretical limits of code size and engineering versus tinkering. Also talks a lot about Alan Kay's philosophy of computer science which analogizes systems to biological systems, which are the systems with the largest proven scaling on the planet. \"The Mother Of All Demos\" by Douglas Engelbart - [LINK] This talk is so prescient you won't believe your eyes. Given in 1968, Douglas demonstrates just about every major computing concept in use today on a modern machine, along with some ones that are still experimental or unevenly distributed such as smooth remote desktop and collaborative editing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18335561,"author":"espeed","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Soup \u2013 Alan Kay on Objects","text":"This is one of my favorite Alan Kay talks of all time (I think this is the right version, but at the time it wasn't on YouTube)... Programming and Scaling - Alan Kay [VIDEO] There's also one where he discusses anthropology and the human universals, but the title of that talk has escaped me for years. Anyone remember what that one's called?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49072484,"author":"neuralkoi","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Any New Computer Ideas?","text":"Check out Alan Kay's perspective on this [0]. This talk is excellent and will cue you in on how to go about thinking about the fact that the way we program and view and understand computers, with the exception of recent advances in neural networks/LLMs, has followed largely unchanged for the past 65 or so years. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24689752,"author":"gambler","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)","text":"Reminds me of some Alan Kay talks: [VIDEO] He actually mentions the book that is the source for the first illustration in the article. He also often talks about the speed of molecules and how it's counter-intuitive to the commonplace idea of cell operation. Cell biology was an inspiration for original OOP (which wasn't much like Java/C++ at all). When reading about Covid stuff and immunity, I often think how these mechanism could be imitated in engineering. I definitely believe there are some general principles that we could benefit from without trying to \"simulate\" biology. Edit: Sorry, same author/illustrator, but different book.","stance":"rec"}],"YycAzdtUIko":[{"hn_comment_id":25231631,"author":"tzs","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Warp Drive News","text":"There's an episode of PBS Space Time about this, \"The Speed of Light is NOT About Light\" [1], which comes pretty close to making the same points you are making. It might be useful to watch this earlier episode, \"Are Space and Time an Illusion?\" [2], first. There is a later episode (or maybe a couple of them) that go into how interactions with the Higgs field make it so things with mass travel slowed than the speed of causality. To tie back to the warp drive news, they have an episode that would be a good place to start on warp drives, \"Is The Alcubierre Warp Drive Possible?\" [3]. There's also \"Superluminal Time Travel + Time Warp Challenge Answer\" [4], and \"Will Wormholes Allow Fast Interstellar Travel?\" [5]. A non-warp unknown physics drive that comes up a lot also got an episode, \"The EM Drive: Fact or Fantasy?\" [6]. There is at least one episode covering interstellar travel without using any unknown physics, \"5 REAL Possibilities for Interstellar Travel\" [7]. The scope of the series is basically anything vaguely connected to astronomy, cosmology, and quantum mechanics, and the episodes are all pretty short (5-12 minutes), so it is a great thing to watch when you've got a short wait for something. Here's the series home page [8], and their YouTube channel [9]. Also on the PBS streaming app, for those who like to get their physics on their big screen TVs. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK] [7] [LINK] [8] [LINK] [9] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13097052,"author":"spuz","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Quantum Gravity\u2019s Time Problem","text":"The speed of light does not change for each given reference frame, i.e. it is constant. However, space and time are observed differently depending on a given reference frame. With regards to your second question, photons experience no time whatsoever. From the photon's perspective, they travel the universe from the point of emission to the point of absorption instantly. If you want to understand this, I highly suggest watching this video explaining reference frames: [LINK] And this playlist of the excellent PBS Space Time series: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13687614,"author":"neom","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Theories about a link between the human mind and quantum physics","text":"I spend pretty much every weekend watching (super dyslexic) hours and hours of \"stuff\" about quantum, form quantum biology to physics to astro, here are some good ones around humans and the universe. Some may not seem totally relevant but give foundational knowledge, suggest watching in order: - [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Yze1YAz_LYM":[{"hn_comment_id":18842876,"author":"baking","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates","text":"For anyone interested in finding out more about the last 50-60 million years of climate history I would strongly recommend this talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18844633,"author":"stareatgoats","month":"2019-01","story_title":"How to give a great scientific talk","text":"Incidentally, yesterday I came across a great scientific talk that I think checked all the boxes here, and then some. 100k views+, but deserves an even larger audience IMO, could clear up some of the confusion about climate (the facts parts): Dan Britt - Orbits and Ice Ages: The History of Climate [VIDEO] Obviously, I think this is a great talk since I find the topic interesting too. There is probably not much you can do if your audience is uninterested in the first place.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20293013,"author":"trymas","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Average Global Temperatures since 1850","text":"> <...> thing someone would do if they wanted to cherry pick their data to suit a case. <...> See for example the year without a summer (1816). _comes and cherry picks a single year to \"prove\" something_ > There are periods of human history where it was warmer than it is now. Yes, but you are talking about geologic time scale and extremely gradual changes compared to what we see now, which is just dozens of years. I recommend to watch this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Z-9rLlFgcm0":[{"hn_comment_id":27832777,"author":"dosman33","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Mike Levin on using bioelectricity to study how cells form (2019)","text":"Moar people need to be talking about this guys work, a buddy clued me in to it last year. Creating new species without any genetic changes... it's huge. Not only has he discovered a new communication control channel in biology, machine learning is unlocking the commands to intelligently manipulate that channel at will. It's many times deeper this too, this is incredible work. Want those tree-grown steaks rather than a stew of muscle cells with no structure? This work is how you grow an intact cow muscle without the rest of the cow with ease. Want to tell those cancer cells using your body as a petrie dish to knock it off and to start working with the rest of your body again? This is a direct path towards that too. Comparing his 2020 ALife talk to another one published in 2021 he's still making progress: [VIDEO] The mainstream of higher-ed biology is not yet fully on board and is still snickering at his work because he is an outsider, but his results are impressive enough that doubters will become irrelevant soon enough.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28948320,"author":"carapace","month":"2021-10","story_title":"On The Origin Of Minds","text":"In re: Michael Levin, do see his talks \"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System\" [LINK] and \"Anatomical decision-making by cellular collectives\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32386145,"author":"Spakman","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?","text":"I'm not nearly educated enough about this subject to try to summarise it, but the research being carried out by Michael Levin's group into how organisms control anatomy growth is completely fascinating and has the feel of a breakthrough. Almost all the talks I've seen are good, for example: [VIDEO] Creating new species without genetic changes seems wild!","stance":"rec"}],"Z0oFJ2jbkDI":[{"hn_comment_id":20246851,"author":"cwkoss","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Swedish Couple Builds Greenhouse Around Home","text":"I can't recommend Kirsten Dirksen's channel enough to people interested in architecture, energy efficiency, tiny homes, 'green' construction, etc. Literally hundreds of hours of high-quality content - I'm really curious how she is able to find all of these interesting people who are doing such cool things. Channel: [LINK] Some other favorites: Baubotanik shapes living tree branches into building facades - [LINK] Boeing retiree finds meaning inventing micro homes & high speed trikes - [LINK] Extreme transformer home in Hong Kong: Gary Chang's 24 rooms in 1 - [LINK] Earth-cooled, shipping container underground CA home for 30K - [VIDEO] Yokohama narrow tiny house \"breathes\" & attracts local nature - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17689573,"author":"jay-anderson","month":"2018-08","story_title":"An office building in Seattle that doesn't have air conditioning","text":"I live in the desert as well. I'd love to have a house with better insulation to spend less on AC. Earth sheltered homes seems like a great way to do that (though there are other problems - e.g. moisture, heavier roof). [VIDEO] , [LINK] - here's a couple examples (she has visited others as well. Short of that I'd settle for a basement. Someday perhaps.","stance":"rec"}],"Z1PCtIaM_GQ":[{"hn_comment_id":15572525,"author":"seanalltogether","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Jackie Chan\u2019s Plan to Keep Kicking Forever","text":"One of my favorite \"Every Frame a Painting\" videos is on Jackie Chan. If you haven't seen it be warned, it will ruin your view of almost all modern action fight scenes. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18865608,"author":"doitLP","month":"2019-01","story_title":"The Painful Price of Becoming Jackie Chan","text":"Here\u2019s a really cool video breaking down exactly how Jackie sets up his stunt-action-comedy. [VIDEO] One thing that was particular interesting to me is how the setup always starts with him at an extreme disadvantage: no shoes, tied to a chair, hanging upside down, etc. I never noticed it before and it\u2019s exactly what makes his action so enjoyable to watch. (The YouTube Channel is called Every Frame a Painting and all the other videos are fascinating and very worth checking out.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29925878,"author":"Fricken","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Colors in movies and TV: What happened to them?","text":"This episode of \"Every Frame a Painting\" does an excellent job of explaining why Jackie Chan's way of doing action is awesome and why contemporary Hollywood (generally) sucks: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9390099,"author":"bentcorner","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Why don\u2019t our brains explode at movie cuts?","text":"You'll probably enjoy this: [VIDEO] In particular, at 5:26, they show how Jackie edits hits to appear twice across cuts to aid in viewability.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21328565,"author":"mopsi","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Demise of Physical Comedy","text":"Indeed! There is a great video essay about Jackie Chan's style (and how it differs from standard Hollywood action movies) on \"Every Frame a Painting\" Youtube channel: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24871910,"author":"andrewzah","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Be prolific","text":"You can see this difference in the the films produced by him and his studio versus the american-produced ones. Every Frame a Painting has a good video on this. [0] Typically for films the shooting portion takes only a few weeks to finish, so lots of retakes = money lost. Jackie Chan does a lot of random flourishes in his films that end up with him needing a lot of takes. For example, how he scales fences. [1] The way he scales the castle wall in Wheels on Meals (1984) is probably my favorite example. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25168765,"author":"dmitriid","month":"2020-11","story_title":"David Fincher\u2019s Impossible Eye","text":"Shaky cams are abused in \"western\" cinema to hide the fact that the studios never have the time to give their actor skills to act out an action scene. In contrast, \"asian\" cinema either stars actors who can do a large chunks of their own action scenes, or spend time training them. On top of that, \"western\" cinema doesn't even know about how our eyes and brains perceive the world. Every Frame a Painting has a very good video essay on how Jackie Chan films action scenes: [VIDEO] Note how punches are filmed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29921329,"author":"jonpurdy","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Colors in movies and TV: What happened to them?","text":"There\u2019s a great quote from Jackie Chan about fight scenes: \u201cI never move my camera. Always steady. Wide angle.\u201d Most action scenes in movies have moving cameras with fast cuts and zoomed in faces. Makes it impossible to actually track what\u2019s happening. I didn\u2019t realize this until I saw this\u203b YT video specifically about his action comedy style. \u203b - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32458218,"author":"mkl","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Hollywood\u2019s visual effects crisis","text":"> Worse, I've seen fight scenes with no/little jiggle, but then every move, punch, dodge, car stunt is replaced with a fast cut, so you don't actually see... well, anything. Jackie Chan's non-American work is the antithesis of this. Here's a great Every Frame a Painting on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Z1qyvQsjK5Y":[{"hn_comment_id":13943985,"author":"jblow","month":"2017-03","story_title":"VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor rendering","text":"I will also say that this is not an academic argument for me; I am in the middle of writing yet another immediate-mode GUI right now, for the game editor I am working on. Every day I am freshly glad that I am doing things as IMGUI instead of RMGUI. Here is a (somewhat old) video explaining some of the motivations behind structuring things as IMGUI: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18306505,"author":"billsix","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Qt Design Studio 1.0","text":"It\u2019s a library for making windows, buttons, etc (called widgets), for windows Linux and macOS. If you\u2019d like to make graphical applications though, I recommend immediate mode frameworks [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30818268,"author":"danhite","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Buttons as Finite Automata","text":"in 2016 Casey Muratori wrote a few words about his old video \"IMMEDIATE-MODE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACES (2005)\" -- apparently he'd been using the technique for years by then and had coined the, now commonly used, imgui acronym -- see: [LINK] and if you dive into that video at 16:50 you'll see a very elegant description of minimal state immediate mode button logic; direct time link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38714721,"author":"WhereIsTheTruth","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface with minimal dependencies","text":"ImGui is engine/GPU agnostic Themeing isn't a just a retained mode thing, you can do wonders with immediate UIs, even though (dear)ImGui doesn't provide much, you can still do wonders: [LINK] The gaming cheating community is quite creative as well: [LINK] More on that topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39008047,"author":"tuckerpo","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Immediate Mode GUI Programming","text":"Casey Muratori of handmade hero fame is one of the original pioneers (potentially the first?) of immediate mode user-interfaces. Check out this lecture/demo from nearly 20 years ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Z20XNp-luNA":[{"hn_comment_id":20045631,"author":"dmbaggett","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Should Failing Phish Tests Be a Fireable Offense?","text":"Phishing is frankly an embarrassment for the mainstream security community. The temptation is to \"blame the stupid users\" -- but the truth is that even a script kiddie can take a real email from a mainstream brand, \"Save As HTML...\", change one link, and resend... and snare even sophisticated victims. This BlackHat talk ( [VIDEO] ) shows just how easy it is to phish even users who think they are too good to be fooled. At Inky ( [LINK] ) we're using a combination of computer vision, anomaly detection, and domain-specific hacks to identify zero-day phishing emails \"from first principles\" (as I like to say). And it works! But the pushback from the security establishment is impressive. I like to say that there are two widely-held but false beliefs about phishing: 1) phishing is solved; 2) phishing is unsolvable. The truth is that we can already see clearly that within 3-5 years machines will be good enough at identifying phishing emails that attackers will move to another vector... but you'd never know it listening to \"Security Thought Leaders.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27384463,"author":"procinct","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Can Apple change ads?","text":"Maybe if you\u2019re referring to regular phishing sure, but spear phishing is specifically designed so it won\u2019t go to your junk email and will look like something made for them personally, there won\u2019t be any spelling mistakes, it will have been sent from a likely email source, it will most likely contain some personal information. The right phish at the right time could catch just about anyone out. There\u2019s a great talk at Black Hat about how Stripe trains staff against these sorts of phishing campaigns and these are highly technical people and they still click the links. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45184800,"author":"x0x0","month":"2025-09","story_title":"We all dodged a bullet","text":"I watched a presentation from Stripe internal eng that was given I forget where. An internal engineer there who did a bunch of security work phished like half of her own company (testing, obviously). Her conclusion, in a really well-done talk, was that it was impossible. No human measures will reduce it given her success at a very disciplined, highly security conscious place. The only thing that works is yubikeys which prevent this type of credential + 2fa theft phishing attack. edit: karla burnette / talk [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Z2DU0qLfPIY":[{"hn_comment_id":19466580,"author":"lelf","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What happened to server-side rendering?","text":"Phoenix.LiveView \u2014 you can't ignore it, the coolest thing happening right now about server-side rendering. Demo: [VIDEO] Links: [LINK] [LINK] PS please stop calling it isomorphic \u2014 this is disgrace for the mathematics.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18831447,"author":"neya","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Go-to web stack today?","text":"If you didn't provide constraints (node/react), I would use the following. Please note, this is highly opinionated, so nothing to get offended or upset about. I like to keep my stack simple: A. Simple static sites: - Jekyll B. Medium complexity, CRUD applications: - Phoenix/Elixir - Coffeescript Note: With the latest version of Phoenix, you absolutely don't any JS frontends at all. Watch they keynote presentation for the liveview demo: [VIDEO] C. Complex Web applications: - Phoenix/Elixir - GraphQL/Absinthe - VueJs + Vuex + Coffeescript Developing with Phoenix/Elixir is so much better than any of the node frameworks in the ecosystem - this has consistently been my experience. So, give it a shot if you can.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18905394,"author":"snake117","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Hardware guy needs to learn web application development \u2013 what language?","text":"If you are feeling a bit adventurous and open-minded as you begin this venture, I would highly suggest looking into Elixir and Phoenix, especially since you are asking for \"...best bang for the buck\". In fact, the 1.8.0 release for Elixir was just announced earlier today here: [LINK] ( [LINK] ) What makes Phoenix great is that, not only is it blazing fast, but the framework serves as more of a web interface to your application as oppose to \"taking over\" your application, like with other major frameworks. Moreover, you get the full power of Erlang and OTP as well. I will have to say that some things are a little rough still, like deploying your application. This process is not as smooth as what you would experience with a Rails or Django app, but it will definitely get better over time. One of the features of Phoenix that is also really exciting is LiveView. If you have some time, definitely check out Chris McCord's 2018 keynote: [VIDEO] There are a lot of great books and resources to explore. I listed a few below: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] (just released) [LINK] [LINK] With regards to Python, I cannot give too much recommendation as I have experience in Ruby/Rails and Elixir/Phoenix primarily. However, if you really want to begin building, stick with Python, since you already have experience with that language, and look into a popular framework, like Django or Flask.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19173356,"author":"karthikksv","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Show HN: Purview \u2013 A server-side component framework","text":"Yes, that was my inspiration! Chris gave a great talk about it at ElixirConf is anyone is interested in watching: [VIDEO] Some differences compared to LiveView: - Type-checking: there are extensive JSX typings ( [LINK] ) that ensure you're attaching event handlers with the correct signatures, specifying supported props, using valid HTML tags and attributes, etc. Static-typing guarantees are one of my big priorities. - I'm not sure if LiveView intends to support nested components like React does. Having the ability to split up complex pages into components that you can nest and reuse (with mostly one-way data flow) is a key part of maintainability. I wanted to maintain a very familiar React interface, so you can pick up Purview quickly if you're comfortable with React.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19406975,"author":"sfusato","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Phoenix: LiveView","text":"Check the demos here (look at the snake game regarding latency concerns): [LINK] Or look at the ElixirConf keynote: [VIDEO] (the video starts at 41:43 showcasing a cool demo where you would expect the latency to be a bottleneck, yet it's not)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20853103,"author":"jeremy_k","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Lumen: An alternative BEAM implementation, designed for WebAssembly","text":"I can't give a deep comparison since I haven't done anything too deep with LiveView (yet!) but I would encourage you to watch the keynotes on LiveView[1][2] if you're really interested. I have spent the last few years working with React / Redux on a big SPA and I believe the entire thing could easily be supported by LiveView; we don't do anything fancy, its basically just a bunch of CRUD based pages. Another shallow comparison is that LiveView isn't meant to compete with modern progressive SPAs. While it can update the DOM with data from the server and is very good at doing that, it has limitations such as no offline support. Chris (the speaker in the videos) also notes that if your clients require very good latency or a very complex UI (think Google Sheets) then a JS framework will probably better suit your needs. However, if you're building out a majority of websites (CRUD type pages) that a lot of us web developers do, my personal opinion is that LiveView will be able to everything needed. [1] Announcing LiveView @ ElixirConf 2018 - [VIDEO] [2] LiveView Update @ ElixirConf 2019 - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Z2o_Sp2-aBo":[{"hn_comment_id":36655732,"author":"MochaDen","month":"2023-07","story_title":"VCF Southwest \u2013 Restoring the Apollo Guidance Computer with CuriousMarc [video]","text":"So cool I'm going to have to go play with the PDP-11/15 in my basement to get my old hardware jones on. This video of building a custom Apollo electroluminescent glass panel DSKY display is also fantastic! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20449514,"author":"LeonM","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Apollo 11 50th Anniversary","text":"Not so much an article about the 50th anniversary, but just the main article about Apollo 11. If you are into space stuff, and haven't seen it yet, there were some pretty cool projects going on on Youtube in preparation for the 50th anniversary: - CuriousMarc's restoration series of an actual ACG [0] - Applied Science made a replica DSKY electroluminescent glass panel display [1] - Project Egress: A maker collaboration on building a replica of the Apollo 11 door (Adam Savage, Jimmy Diresta, This old tony, Blondihacks, etc) [2] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"Z4oYSByyRak":[{"hn_comment_id":18218625,"author":"komuW","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"1. Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? - James Mickens [LINK] 2. James Mickens on JavaScript - James Mickens [LINK] 3. Creating containers From Scratch - Liz Rice [LINK] 4. 2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Existence of Nothing - Panelists: J. Richard Gott, Jim Holt, Lawrence Krauss, Charles Seife, Eve Silverstein. Moderator: Neil deGrasse Tyson [LINK] 5. 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Is the Universe a Simulation? - Panelists: David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi, James Gates, Lisa Randall, Max Tegmark Moderator: Neil deGrasse Tyson [LINK] 6. Zig: A programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity \u2013 Andrew Kelley [VIDEO] 7. Concurrency Is Not Parallelism - Rob Pike [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19138658,"author":"cellularmitosis","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Zig Is Great","text":"(and one continuous paragraph harms readability) edit: here's a great talk on zig from the recurse center: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21740198,"author":"lsh","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Game Boy Advance \u201cHello World\u201d Using Zig","text":"This is the introduction to Zig from the language author that I watched when it was first posted here a while ago: [VIDEO] (good watch)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17057836,"author":"Boulth","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Big Integers in Zig","text":"Zig is really interesting, and the explicit allocators is a feature I miss in many other system languages (like Rust). Presentation by the Zig author is a good introduction to the concept [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17256767,"author":"wlkr","month":"2018-06","story_title":"I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig","text":"Looking for more on Zig I found a talk [0] (~1 hour) on the language by Andrew Kelley from just a few months ago. Edit: I see there already questions about Rust in this thread. There's an audience question on Rust in the talk [1] and the creator states that Rust is Zig's biggest competitor. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18093957,"author":"MaxBarraclough","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Zig 0.3.0 Released","text":"I don't know of an 'objective' thorough evaluation of Zig as it stands, but I hope these are of interest: Previous HackerNews discussion on Zig: [LINK] Also, perhaps not as objective as you'd like but still good resources: Whirlwind tour of the basic thinking behind Zig: [LINK] A ~50 minute talk on Zig, by its creator: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19610542,"author":"lsh","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Zig 0.4.0 Released","text":"The Zig language has a great premise, it's worth reading the above link or watching a bit of this video [VIDEO] just to question our assumptions that certain language features need exist at all.","stance":"rec"}],"Z7Wl2FW2TcA":[{"hn_comment_id":2965644,"author":"jtdowney","month":"2011-09","story_title":"Convergence, distributed, secure strategy replacing certificate authorities","text":"Moxie Marlinspike is the creator of Convergence. I highly recommend watching his Blackhat 2011 talk ( [VIDEO] ) covering authenticity on the web and Convergence.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3292674,"author":"JonnieCache","month":"2011-11","story_title":"US judge orders hundreds of sites \"de-indexed\" from Google, Facebook","text":"Yeah, I edited my list to include a CA-free encrypted replacement for TCP, just before I saw your comment. To all the super-geniuses reading this: burn your socialmobilelocal startup to the ground tomorrow and do this instead. Start by watching this Blackhat talk I linked elsewhere in the thread, the guy has the right kind of ideas: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4111124,"author":"4ad","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Setting out plans to monitor all Internet use in the UK","text":"Businesses (and governments) can legitimately buy root keys that allow MITMing any SSL connection or they could just be a CA themselves (any CA can MITM the whole internet). Here's the best talk I know of this subject: BlackHat USA 2011: SSL And The Future Of Authenticity: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6724876,"author":"rakoo","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Moving forward on improving HTTP's security","text":"Perspectives/Convergence really is a great system, but it unfortunately still has several problems: - it completely leaks your browsing history: you basically ask a notary \"what's the certificate you see for kinkyneighbors.com?\". Convergence addresses this, though - it requires network-heavy intermediaries for all the browsing of all the people around the world. - it still doesn't solve authenticity: an attacker could very well be controlling all connections arriving at your house, or leaving the target's server, and fool everyone Convergence/Perspectives should be coupled with certificate pinning, aka storing _really_ trusted authorities (ie verified by hand) on your computer. Guess what ? [Moxie's next project is just that [0] (For anyone curious, I highly recommend Moxie's talk [1] about Convergence, it does a great job at explaining what's the problem, what's Convergence and how it can solve at least part of it) [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2966064,"author":"jvc26","month":"2011-09","story_title":"Diginotar and Comodo hacker the same guy and claims to have owned 4 other CAs","text":"[VIDEO] The original Comodo attack was discussed by Moxie Marlinspike at Blackhat USA 2011 - quite an interesting discussion on the issue.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3254323,"author":"alecco","month":"2011-11","story_title":"The Sovereign Keys Project","text":"How does this solution deal with the \"Citibank problem\"? (a website with a huge number of SSL keys from multiple certificate authorities) A great talk from last DefCon [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5004081,"author":"jcase","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Enhancing digital certificate security (Fake *.Google.com cert issued)","text":"Some developments in this area are: * Convergence.io * DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) + DNSSEC * Tack.io For various reasons listed in [1] Convergence is not likely to be implemented (by default) in major browsers. On DANE + DNSSEC, where the cert is authenticated via the information published in your DNS, Moxie Marlinspike has said it better then I can: \"CAs are sketchy, but this is a whole new world of sketchiness. Think, sketchasaurus. Registrars were never built or selected with security in mind, and most of them don\u2019t have a very good track record in this area. Shouldn\u2019t it be laughable that the current first step in deploying DNSSEC is to create an account with GoDaddy?\"[2] The 2011 BlackHat video[3] and blog post[2] by Moxie Marlinspike are great sources of information. IMO, Tack.io is the most viable solution. It's compatible with the current model but removes the thread of one CA being able to compromise all domains. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10468106,"author":"glass-","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Sustaining Digital Certificate Security","text":"Convergence was the perfect replacement, but it never gained any traction. Moxie's talk at BlackHat[0] introducing it is a good watch for those unfamiliar with the idea, and if you want to be wistfully frustrated at what could have been. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11332226,"author":"Strom","month":"2016-03","story_title":"StartSSL domain validation vulnerability","text":"You would soon be left without any CAs. [1] People are pretty stupid when it comes to security, and this includes people working for CAs. There have been cases where the CA private key is publicly accessible to the internet without any password. [2] -- [1] Yes, plenty of smart people have been advocating moving away from the current CA system. It's fundamentally broken. [2] A great talk by moxie, filled with horror examples of CAs. The private key example is at 19:20. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Z7rd04KzLcg":[{"hn_comment_id":22895204,"author":"loceng","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Eric Weinstein may have found the answer to physics' biggest problems","text":"Eric Weinstein on April 2nd posted the lecture to his YouTube channel + at the end of video he goes over to clarify some details: [VIDEO] I'd recommend his The Portal video podcast series as well: [LINK] Two other recent interviews he did with Lex Fridman [LINK] and Joe Rogan [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24680355,"author":"maxharris","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Why We\u2019re So Bad at Disaster Planning","text":"No, this happened because our major institutions have driven out people that are able to think originally and avoid the herd mentality. This has happened because of embedded growth obligations that affect all of our institutions, both public and private. If you are suspicious, don't tune out. You might be surprised to hear that the solution to this problem is to give academics MORE funding. If you have never heard of embedded growth obligations, or the Great Nap, watch these two videos. The first is the first 35 minutes of Eric Weinstein's Portal podcast on his proposal to find a unified field theory: [VIDEO] The second is an interview he does with Lex Fridman, calling for MIT to stop killing people like Aaron Schwartz (who faced a 35 year prison sentence for his attempt to battle Elsevier, yet received no support from MIT!) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24700990,"author":"maxharris","month":"2020-10","story_title":"3 scientists win Nobel physics prize for black hole research","text":"The headline should include the name Sir Roger Penrose, because he was awarded 1/2 the prize. Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel were each awarded 1/4 of the prize. Burying the lede like this only undermines our trust in the very institutions we need most today. Please see these two videos by Eric Weinstein for a deeper explanation of what I am only hinting at: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24843629,"author":"maxharris","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Friends/family are getting destroyed by Covid conspiracies its pissing me off","text":"This won't help directly, but Eric Weinstein is pissed off about the same issues, and he has some pretty good thoughts about ending paywalls and increasing funding for basic scientific research. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26458130,"author":"loceng","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Chomsky \u2013 The Machine, the Ghost and the Limits of Understanding (2012) [video]","text":"[VIDEO] - him releasing the video of his multi-hour long guest lecture. He's working on publishing a paper version soon to hash out all the math for people. As far as I know predictions wise, all of the math equations fit within his foundation, allowing a connection between string theory and relatively - which AFAIK didn't previously have math that allowed them to interconnect/co-exist. He's been trying for 15 years to get people in physics interested in it - and realized he has run into what he calls DISC and GIN, as mechanisms that keep outsiders ideas out and status quo narratives perpetuated. And so he's built an audience to educate, to share interviews/talks with high level conversation with a wide range of people, and build momentum/attention for his Geometric Unity theory because the existing institutions seem so indoctrinated into the last 50 years that they aren't looking into other ideas (yet); and an example of this is right here on HN, the previous commenter who called him a charlatan - with what experience are they themselves basing that off of, or who did they hear that narrative from, and how much time did that person invest investigating [interesting how invest is in the word investigating, it takes time which is an investment] and did they actually engage with Eric to see if they perhaps weren't understanding themselves and so then Eric could help them understand, etc.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27830679,"author":"trompetenaccoun","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Is Eric Weinstein a Crackpot?","text":"Questioning scientific dogma is NOT the sign of a crackpot. In fact thinking about things critically and coming up with your own theories is what science is all about. If it doesn't check out, rational people would simply note that the idea was wrong, not blame someone for thinking it, which is the sort of behavior you'd encounter in religious cults. You can listen to his reasoning here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Z8ZhQPaw4rE":[{"hn_comment_id":35427179,"author":"haunter","month":"2023-04","story_title":"2001: A Space Odyssey","text":"Anyone else prefers Solaris over 2001? Both are great movies for sure but somehow Tarkovsky made everything more emotional and relatable. I love 2001 but to me Solaris is on another level (and Stalker too) If you have never watched it's on Youtube [VIDEO] (Mosfilm is generally one of the GOAT Youtube channels with their uploads) There is an older upload on their other channel if you want different subs [LINK] [LINK] (2 parts because of the original 2 reels)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43671906,"author":"thrance","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Philip K. Dick: Stanis\u0142aw Lem Is a Communist Committee (2015)","text":"2 years prior, in 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky adapted Stanis\u0142aw Lem's Solaris to the big screen in the Soviet Union, which may have contributed to Dick's paranoia. Anyway, the film's a masterpiece that I highly recommend, and since it was published before 1975 it is not subject to copyright. You can find it on YouTube [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"ZBtMbBPzqHY":[{"hn_comment_id":27726625,"author":"creamytaco","month":"2021-07","story_title":"America\u2019s government comes clean on UFOs","text":"I suggest you familiarize yourself with some of that eyewitness testimony because everything you wrote simply does not apply: [VIDEO] If you have more to say that you'd also want me to address, it better be directly relevant to the events described in this video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30600563,"author":"pmarreck","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)","text":"It's clear from your comment that you haven't seen this shortish 60 Minutes piece yet. You should. It would fairly quickly dissuade you of this theory. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34670663,"author":"pmarreck","month":"2023-02","story_title":"As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)","text":"> I wonder how much some of these unidentified phenomena might be checked for some similar effects. come on, man. at some point, after enough of these reports, toeing the line you're toeing starts to look ludicrous. these are trained observers, pilots who know what to expect in the sky. and do not take lightly that there is still a certain amount of embarrassment (a social cost) to even coming forward, so to even make this claim is still a brave act at this point. At least watch this 60 Minutes short piece about this phenomenon with interviews with real Navy pilots before you assert things like this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34672840,"author":"pmarreck","month":"2023-02","story_title":"As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)","text":"It's an irrelevant example. The question in THIS case is not whether \"the wings fell off before or after hitting the water, if at all\", but whether \"there was a plane hitting the water at all\" (also a plane that was caught on multiple radars). It's simply not a good comparison. The Navy pilots say they see bogies on radar (not just visually) every day . Watch the \"60 Minutes\" broadcast I linked elsewhere (which is only 13 minutes long: [VIDEO] ). The USG has already admitted these things are real but have an unknown source. To continue to maintain extreme skepticism at this point is to bury one's head in the sand.","stance":"rec"}],"ZC5Zr3NC2PY":[{"hn_comment_id":20790823,"author":"Maxious","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Capturing PAL video with an SDR, and a few dead ends","text":"A reasonably priced and good quality bodge is described in \"The Best Easy Way to Capture Analog Video (it's a little weird)\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24841852,"author":"interestica","month":"2020-10","story_title":"My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes","text":"For those in the Toronto-Hamilton-Montreal corridor, I've been running everpixels.ca for a bit as a side thing (though it's kinda on pause). It's primarily focused on photo digitization for families - but I've also done a ton of tape media. I can help any local HNers that need access to hardware. (Or just some info/direction) Technology Connections (YouTube) does some good coverage of capturing/converting analogue video - hardware choices make huge difference. [VIDEO] There's clearly a need/desire for this kind of stuff (though it's sad how many times I'm approached as someone is near death). Don't wait til that moment to save the stories and memories that you have. I've been back and forth about how much I want to dive in with this project. If anyone is local and really interested in some of it, drop me a line. There are some cool avenues I've touched - seniors, alzheimers, story capture.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30908802,"author":"ocdtrekkie","month":"2022-04","story_title":"A blue connector does not USB 3.0 make","text":"[VIDEO] introduces the \"use a composite-to-HDMI upscaler and a cheap HDMI capture dongle\" trick. It looks like he might've linked a different capture dongle, though the one I bought was pretty near identical to the one this article is about.","stance":"rec"}],"ZCmnQR3_qWg":[{"hn_comment_id":19151197,"author":"sigil","month":"2019-02","story_title":"NIST Reveals 26 Algorithms Advancing to the Post-Quantum Crypto \u2018Semifinals\u2019","text":"This talk by djb and Tanja Lange is a good overview of the NIST candidates and the current state of pqcrypto: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19535847,"author":"shittyadmin","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Cryptography of SSH (2006)","text":"They're using a mixture of Streamlined NTRU Prime 4591^761 and X25519. [LINK] Note that this is still considered \"experimental\" and probably won't be enabled by default. I'd advise checking out some of the recent DJB and Tanja Lange talks for further detail on how research on these algorithms is progressing: [VIDEO] There's also the older but still relevant PQCHacks: [LINK] Haven't seen any talk of post quantum signatures in changelogs yet at least, but research is happening rapidly in this field and OpenSSH has really upped their game in recent years.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20001419,"author":"est31","month":"2019-05","story_title":"How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers in 8 hours using 20M noisy qubits","text":"AES-256 is believed to be quantum-resistant. The only known quantum attack on AES-256 is utilizing Grover's algorithm, which is an universal approach. As for assymetric crypto, the ones we have now are susceptible to quantum attacks. There are a bunch of proposals for quantum-proof algorithms but nothing officially standardized yet. There is a NIST competition going on right now that is trying to find a new suite of assymetric cryptographic algorithms [1]. You can find an awesome talk on the topic here [2]. If quantum computers are possible, we should switch to quantum proof algorithms now rather than later, because then we'd reduce the traffic that can be decrypted at a later point in time. It's quite dangerous right now considering that basically everything is protected by quantum-non-resistant ciphers. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZCuYPiUIONs":[{"hn_comment_id":14064167,"author":"acemarke","month":"2017-04","story_title":"React v15.5.0","text":"For those who are interested in some of the details of the work that's going on, Lin Clark's recent talk on \"A Cartoon Intro to Fiber\" at ReactConf 2017 is excellent [0]. There's a number of other existing writeups and resources on how Fiber works [1] as well. The roadmap for 15.5 and 16.0 migration is at [2], and the follow-up issue discussing the plan for the \"addons\" packages is at [3]. I'll also toss out my usual reminder that I keep a big list of links to high-quality tutorials and articles on React, Redux, and related topics, at [LINK] . Specifically intended to be a great starting point for anyone trying to learn the ecosystem, as well as a solid source of good info on more advanced topics. Finally, the Reactiflux chat channels on Discord are a great place to hang out, ask questions, and learn. The invite link is at [LINK] . [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14142336,"author":"acemarke","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework","text":"I'll repeat the comment I made in the \"React 15.5\" thread a couple weeks ago ( [LINK] ): For those who are interested in some of the details of the work that's going on, Lin Clark's recent talk on \"A Cartoon Intro to Fiber\" at ReactConf 2017 is excellent [0]. There's a number of other existing writeups and resources on how Fiber works [1] as well. The roadmap for 15.5 and 16.0 migration is at [2], and the follow-up issue discussing the plan for the \"addons\" packages is at [3]. I'll also toss out my usual reminder that I keep a big list of links to high-quality tutorials and articles on React, Redux, and related topics, at [LINK] . Specifically intended to be a great starting point for anyone trying to learn the ecosystem, as well as a solid source of good info on more advanced topics. Finally, the Reactiflux chat channels on Discord are a great place to hang out, ask questions, and learn. The invite link is at [LINK] . [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16120073,"author":"acemarke","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Show HN: Nerv \u2013 A fast React alternative, compatible with IE8 and React 16","text":"Yeah, the React team takes backwards compatibility very seriously. They did finally drop some deprecated methods from the main package in React 16, but made them available as separate packages, and even wrote codemods to automatically replace usages. I can recommend several resources for understanding the changes in React 16: - Lin Clark's fantastic ReactConf presentation on \"A Cartoon Intro to Fiber\": [VIDEO] - The official announcements for React 16: [LINK] and [LINK] - A good summary of the major changes: [LINK] - Two articles looking at the user-facing features and changes: [LINK] and [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14142289,"author":"mklarmann","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Facebook Announces React Fiber, a Rewrite of Its React Framework","text":"React Fiber was beautifully described by Lin on the last reactconf. [VIDEO] Congratulations to the release.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15076378,"author":"pmlamotte","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Inside a fast CSS engine","text":"I believe she just has a talent for it, she's an engineer as far as I know and has other related cartoon descriptions: [LINK] Her talk on react fiber this year is quite good as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZDR433b0HJY":[{"hn_comment_id":13073585,"author":"jzl","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Is there a \u201cground-up\u201d explanation of PGP/GnuPG?","text":"Scott Chacon's videos are priceless. (He's the co-author of the git book.) They explain exactly how git works internally in the simplest terms possible. Either or both of these: Introduction to Git - talk by Scott Chacon [LINK] Introduction to Git with Scott Chacon of GitHub [VIDEO] The latter is newer but a bit longer. Don't be fooled by the video names, these are introductions to the internals not just the interface.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13229253,"author":"kwe","month":"2016-12","story_title":"A Git catastrophe cleaned up","text":"This is the video that I keep recommending to new people who want to know how it works on a technical level. I've always had amazing/euphoric feedback to that recommendation. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4203534,"author":"grannyg00se","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Got 15 minutes and want to learn Git?","text":"A lot of these Git tutorials seem to walk you through a series of commands as if knowing the commands is knowing Git. I think they should focus on scenarios instead. Short stories like: \"Bob's code is working well but he wants to try something that might be completely misguided. He knows better than to mess with his working code.....\" Then at the end of the story a command is introduced. Also, some kind of indication of what Git is actually doing when you issue that command. When you tell Git to branch, what actually happens to the file system? When you say git status, what is it actually looking at? And please, don't start a tutorial on Git without introducing the three area paradigm (working, staging/index, commit) Here's a talk by Scott Chacon of GitHub. [VIDEO] It's over an hour long and very detailed.","stance":"rec"}],"ZD_3_gsgsnk":[{"hn_comment_id":20246933,"author":"johnohara","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Swedish Couple Builds Greenhouse Around Home","text":"Completely agree. One of my favorite Kirsten Dirksen videos is about Russ Finch using geothermal energy to grow citrus in a greenhouse located near Alliance, NE. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29007857,"author":"mythrwy","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Geothermal's path to relevance: cheap drilling","text":"Yes I think that would work. Check out this guy, he grows oranges in Nebraska in thermal heated greenhouses. As I recall he talks about cooling as well. He has tubes around 8 feet under the ground running around the yard. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34280154,"author":"kingsloi","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Sunken Greenhouse","text":"If this interests you, I recommend checking out this video by Russ Finch, who grows citruses (orange, lemons, etc), figs, pomegranates in his sunken greenhouse in the middle of Nebraska in the snow/20F, and uses geothermal heating (long tubes buried underground) to heat it during the winter months, and cool in the summer months. Really interesting story/concept and I'm hoping to replicate on a small scale when I renovate my back yard in the coming years. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48741713,"author":"culi","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Forestiere Underground Gardens","text":"Almost all the videos on this channel are fascinating btw. Greenhouses enveloping entire houses/villages[0][1] in northern Europe to earthships[2] to someone growing citrus in Nebraska using trenches[3] to entire villages underground in Australia[4] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] [4] [LINK] I'd also recommend the channels FLORB and Happen Films though they're admittedly a little corny. [LINK] [LINK] Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't recently did a tour of an interesting alt home as well. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ZDnShu5V99s":[{"hn_comment_id":12933885,"author":"kaoD","month":"2016-11","story_title":"An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting","text":"I can't believe this talk hasn't been posted yet! Theory and Practice of Cryptography: Verifying Elections with Cryptography [VIDEO] This is probably one of the homomorphic schemes mentioned in TFA. It's very old (2007-ish?) and the state of the art probably advanced, but it's very interesting and addresses a number of points that are not cared for in TFA (like secret ballots verifiable by the voter but impossible to prove to anyone else).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2212522,"author":"maeon3","month":"2011-02","story_title":"Free university lectures on computer science","text":"Youtube users: 'UserGroupsatGoogle' and 'GoogleTechTalks' post some epic content for the more advanced programmer. Continuous Integration with Hudson: [LINK] Cryptography Theory and practice: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8040127,"author":"aianus","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Software used to count Australian Senate votes is a \u201ctrade secret\u201d","text":"> counted by hand. By whom? Overseen by whom? Who oversees the overseers? Not to mention people make mistakes, ballots get dumped, and nobody has any evidence their vote was actually counted. Here's a long but fascinating tech talk on a real solution: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9320824,"author":"aianus","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Estonia's e-residency program expands abroad","text":"Unfortunately this enables someone to coerce or bribe you into voting for a certain candidate, since the coercer would be able to demand to see your receipt and verify you complied. Here's a rather long but very interesting tech talk about electronic voting schemes which maintain the secret ballot property: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12790618,"author":"grzm","month":"2016-10","story_title":"In Pennsylvania, Claims of a Rigged Election May Be Impossible to Disprove","text":"Here's a link to slides from a talk Ronald Rivest gave back in March 2016 at ACM-IEEE: \"Auditability and Verifiability of Elections\" [LINK] It covers a lot of what I'm sure is going to be discussed in this thread, including vote receipts, coercion, verifiability that your vote is counted. Edit to add: And heres a good talk by Ben Adida speaking at Google for a \"Theory and Practice of Cryptography\" TechTalk series entitled \"Verifying Elections with Crytography\" from 2007. Good stuff there, too. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12843479,"author":"grzm","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Votes could be counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers","text":"I think blockchain might have some application, but I'm unconvinced that computer technology alone is going to solve it. Have a look at this slide deck from Ron Rivest (of RSA fame). [LINK] I think he does a pretty good job of covering the history of modern voting and how technology can be properly applied. You might find this Google Tech Talk by Ben Adida \"Verifying Elections with Cryptography\" interesting as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12846901,"author":"grzm","month":"2016-11","story_title":"E-Voting Refuses to Die Even Though It's Neither Secure nor Secret","text":"There are documented issues with many existing electronic voting systems. E-voting encompasses a lot of different types of system that can involve computers in the chain, and not surprisingly all of them are equal. There have been a few discussions around voting on HN recently, and that's good. It's an important topic, as trust in the integrity of elections is vital for democracy. There's a lot of existing material out there about verifiable and auditable voting systems, especially in the wake of the 2000 US Presidential elections. I encourage you to take a look at what's out there. It can provide a great foundation for discussion. Here are some links I've found useful: Wikipedia page on End-to-End Auditable Voting Systems [LINK] Ron Rivest slide deck from March 2016. Auditability and Verifiability of Elections [LINK] Ben Adida Google Tech Talks December 19, 2007 Theory and Practice of Cryptography: Verifying Electiosns with Cryptography [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13510970,"author":"grzm","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Time to Take a Stand","text":"Going back to my original comment, widespread faith that the voting process is safe is just as important as whether it actually is. Casting doubt on the process without really solid evidence undermines this faith. By no means do I want to be Pollyannaish about this: it's too important. Which is why I want to see improvements in the voting process. If voting integrity is something you feel particularly strongly about (I certainly do), I encourage to look into the work that's already out there. The 2000 election spurred a lot of research. Some good starting points are: Ronald L. Rivest MIT Auditability and Verifiability of Elections ACM-IEEE talk March 16, 2016 [LINK] --- Ben Adida Google Tech Talks December 19, 2007 Theory and Practice of Cryptography: Verifying Electiosns with Cryptography [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19136246,"author":"bubblethink","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Bounty Hunt Announced on Swiss eVoting System","text":">The central issue with electronic voting is that it's opaque to observers. There was this interesting talk years ago. [VIDEO] Does anyone in the space have a more up to date reference on where things are at ?","stance":"rec"}],"ZDxLa6P6exc":[{"hn_comment_id":30334084,"author":"ckozlowski","month":"2022-02","story_title":"A baby saved \u2018Toy Story 2\u2019 from near complete deletion (2021)","text":"You're on the right track. As told in the Next Web story, the workstation in question was a Silicon Graphics Octane or there abouts. These were incredibly expensive and were provided by the company. In addition, according to the story, they were the ones who set up the file sync for her to be able to work from home. LGR and RMC have both done videos on the SGI Octane and are worth watching: [VIDEO] , [LINK] Edit: It was Retro Man Cave, not Adrian's Digital Basement as originally written.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39952525,"author":"pixelpoet","month":"2024-04","story_title":"The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics","text":"Random trivia which will likely get buried but whatever: the rendering software Octane Render got its name from my refusing to let the author use my rendering software's name, and he had some historical beef with us, the two devs of Indigo Renderer, so he named his renderer after the SGI machine that came after the Indigo, Octane. He also leant his SGI Indigo2 to the LGR guy on YouTube, and he did a great video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZEl-Y1NvBVI":[{"hn_comment_id":17325384,"author":"lazysheepherd","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Yam, cultivate and cook","text":"I definitely agree. I think this is the video you mentioned. I have watched it myself many times as well. \"Primitive Technology: Cord drill and Pump drill\" > [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10962318,"author":"furyg3","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Hand powered drilling tools and machines (2010)","text":"The guy over at the primitive technology vlog on YouTube just added a neat video of himself making a cord drill and a pump drill. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15017980,"author":"oakesm9","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Hand powered drilling tools and machines","text":"If you're interested in seeing someone make these take a look at this Primitive Technology video and the others he produces: [VIDEO] Make sure you turn on captions to see descriptions of what's going on.","stance":"rec"}],"ZK3O402wf1c":[{"hn_comment_id":2992134,"author":"palebluedot","month":"2011-09","story_title":"Surprises from numerical linear algebra (2010)","text":"I highly recommend the MIT 18.06 open course on linear algebra - the lectures are first rate. I've been going through this as a refresher, in prep for the Stanford machine learning class. Link to the course: [LINK] Link to the YouTube videos of the lectures: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9056266,"author":"raz32dust","month":"2015-02","story_title":"How to Machine Learn","text":"Useful list. I would recommend adding one more resource for linear algebra/machine learning: I absolutely enjoyed learning Linear Algebra from these beautiful lectures by Prof. Gilbert Strang (MIT): [VIDEO] Seriously, I gained a new found appreciation for Linear algebra after going through these lectures. You should go over some of these lectures even if you already know linear algebra - it might give you insights you never had before (it did, for me). Absolute must-watch if you are into machine learning or related areas.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19176596,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Linear algebra textbooks","text":"Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra course from MIT, available on youtube (3 million views!), and his textbook of the same name are awesome. What a great teacher. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19812266,"author":"olooney","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Self Studying the MIT Applied Math Curriculum","text":"I did Strang's linear algebra course[0] (link goes to Youtube playlist of lectures) several years after graduating and recommend it highly. I was looking for refresher but I gained a deeper understanding of several important concepts; in particular it's fair to say I barely understood, or perhaps even misunderstood, SVD until Strang. If you're not sure if you need something like that, I suggest doing something like testing yourself on this video[1] or the MIT problem sets[2] it's easy to tell yourself that you \"know\" linear algebra when it would be closer to the truth to say that you used to know linear algebra, but can't answer even basic questions today. After Strang, Golub's book on Matrix Computations is also really incredible.[3] [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19939788,"author":"SantalBlush","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Gilbert Strang's New Course on Linear Algebra+ for ML Now Online","text":"Love Gilbert Strang's original linear algebra lectures on YouTube [1]. They were a huge help while I took the course. In my opinion, he takes great care to motivate each topic and express his train of thought when working through problems. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2060420,"author":"jackfoxy","month":"2011-01","story_title":"Johnny Chung Lee to donate $5k for Khan-style linear algebra lectures","text":"I'm not sure how to pass the clearly understandable Khan academy style test, but Gilbert Strang of MIT has a series of 35 excellent lectures on Linear Algebra, starting here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7690181,"author":"SixSigma","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Is CSS Turing Complete?","text":"Ah but the beauty is that you can read for pleasure knowing that you won't have an exam at the end and trying to work out what your professor thinks is important. If you want to enjoy linear algebra without the pressure of doing any, I can heartily recommend MIT's open coursewear videos featruring Gilbert Strang [VIDEO] In fact all the MIT stuff I have tried is fun to watch","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11295179,"author":"SixSigma","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most useful online course you have watched?","text":"Gilbert Strang's linear algebra [VIDEO] Walter Lewin's Classical Mechanics [LINK] for the content and the delivery","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13638544,"author":"blennon","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Big Picture of Calculus (2010) [video]","text":"For anyone who wants to learn linear algebra, I highly recommend Gilbert Strang's book and course from MIT: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14581962,"author":"theCricketer","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Georgia Tech's free math textbook collective","text":"If you find it easier to keep at it and learn from lecture videos instead of from textbooks, here's a math curriculum of lecture videos I've curated. This covers calculus, linear algebra, probability, statistics, convex optimization and a math for ML course thrown in for the HN audience: Calculus Revisited: Single Variable Calculus | MIT [LINK] Calculus Revisited: Multivariable Calculus | MIT [LINK] Complex Variables, Differential Equations, and Linear Algebra | MIT [LINK] Linear Algebra | MIT - [VIDEO] Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems |Stanford [LINK] Probability | Harvard [LINK] Intermediate Statistics | CMU [LINK] Convex Optimization I | Stanford [LINK] Math Background for ML | CMU [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16751673,"author":"theCricketer","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Book: Mathematics for Machine Learning","text":"I've mentioned this on HN before but I think its still relevant to people interested in learning ML who feel they are behind on the math. If, like me, you can't sit thru lots of pages of mathematics text and instead prefer that a human explains it to you via videos that you can replay, here is a list of courses that take you from basic algebra and pre-calculus math all the way to the concepts you need to understand the principles behind the most advanced ML algorithms. All explained by very energetic people who are experts in their fields, and starting from the very basics. This covers calculus, linear algebra, probability, statistics, convex optimization and a math for ML course thrown in for the HN audience: (The first two are \"MOOCs\" recorded in the 1970s! probably the first ever recorded MOOC, even before the internet, and the lecturer is absolute gold) Calculus Revisited: Single Variable Calculus | MIT [LINK] . Calculus Revisited: Multivariable Calculus | MIT [LINK] . Complex Variables, Differential Equations, and Linear Algebra | MIT [LINK] . Linear Algebra | MIT - [VIDEO] . Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems |Stanford [LINK] Probability | Harvard [LINK] . Intermediate Statistics | CMU [LINK] . Convex Optimization I | Stanford [LINK] Math Background for ML | CMU [LINK] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18658967,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Linear algebra for Machine learning","text":"Does your degree program not include at least one Linear Algebra class? Or are you just trying to get a head start? In either case, you might find this course[1] and accompanying videos[2] useful. Also, of course, is 3blue1brown[3] on Youtube. And then there are the Gilbert Strange lectures[4] on Youtube. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22675704,"author":"webartifex","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Show HN: Intro to Python and Programming for non-CS majors","text":"It depends on who wants to hire you. For the top jobs, this is for sure not enough. I always tell people to please make sure they know all the contents from here [VIDEO] (Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra course) before they make any claims about being a data scientist. I bet I can teach a monkey to open a CSV in pandas and call .fit() in sklearn. But do the people really understand the underlying assumptions. Most self-proclaimed data scientists don't I am sure. I still have a hard time calling myself a data scientist. And I am three years into a relevant PhD. The more I study, the less I feel I truly know.","stance":"rec"}],"ZKC3hiyLeRc":[{"hn_comment_id":15761664,"author":"anindha","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Sugar industry withheld possible evidence of cancer link 50 years ago","text":"Refined sugar is the worst and refined carbohydrates are not that much better. I found that Dr. Fung's book and videos are the most informative and most scientific explanations of these concepts [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27777543,"author":"JohnWhigham","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Yes, drinking more water may help you lose weight","text":"Calories aren't equal, otherwise you'd feel sated for the day with 2000 calories of sugar (spoilers: you don't). Every year, we're finding out how much we still don't know about the body regulates our fat stores via hormones. Dr. Jason Fung is a leading researcher on this ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27779683,"author":"user3939382","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Yes, drinking more water may help you lose weight","text":"I\u2019d refer you the research of Dr. Jason Fung or Dr. Robert Lustig, for example: [VIDEO] Here\u2019s an article on keto from a medical journal [LINK] Even the experts debating here aren\u2019t contesting the role of insulin in weight loss, but rather the secondary effects like those on LDL. Here in turn is a talk by a doctor from UC Berkeley explaining more about that: [LINK] From what I can tell, the sole focus on calories is the result of early misunderstandings and oversimplification of biochemistry in 1980s nutritional science. Anecdotally, I did a 3 month experiment where I increased my calories (lots of olive oil, avocado, nuts, butter, etc) but consuming almost no carbs (and mostly carbs from vegetables) and I lost 8 notches off my belt.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33976127,"author":"user3939382","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Effect of Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet versus High-Carb, Low-Fat Diet","text":"Weight isn't the product of calories in vs out, that's an overly simplistic model that doesn't account for the effect of hormones on how we metabolize different compounds and nutrients. This area of nutrition science is nascent and unsettled, and fraught with research funded by parties with conflicts of interest, but here's for example a pretty good talk that discusses some of the research [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37512855,"author":"user3939382","month":"2023-09","story_title":"You're Not Losing Fat Because You're Eating Too Damn Much","text":"People get very heated and religious about this topic so I'm hesitant to bring it up but there are strong arguments that this model is overly simplistic and that the types of food you eat are strongly related to hormonal changes that dramatically affect your metabolism and fat storage. Here's a good talk by a doctor, heavy on research, that's a decent introduction: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZLWMQLMiTPk":[{"hn_comment_id":38809093,"author":"compiler-guy","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Don't Say Velcro (2017)","text":"If you've never seen the video ad that went along with this campaign, it's hilarious and worth watching, as is the follow up. I love the good humor about the whole thing. And it has made their campaign stick in ways that other similar campaigns have not. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42631197,"author":"Stratoscope","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Oracle Will Not Voluntarily Withdraw JavaScript Trademark","text":"That is one of my favorite videos! Content advisory: there is one swear word in it that is bleeped out. Near the end they mention some other trademarks, and adding to the fun they bleep out those too - and even put CENSORED overlays on the singers' mouths. They also made a followup video that is just as delightful (and slightly more NSFW): [VIDEO] And here is a fun article about some other companies' friendly alternatives to the traditional C&D letter: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38806075,"author":"FrustratedMonky","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Don't Say Velcro (2017)","text":"Great. Hope this is real. I'd be impressed if the real lawyers did this. There was a follow up video, also good [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZMByI4s-D-Y":[{"hn_comment_id":6618343,"author":"kunai","month":"2013-10","story_title":"The kilo is losing weight, changing all of science","text":"For anyone interested in the Planck and Avogadro projects to redefine the kilo, this video is an imperative watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8093058,"author":"gsteinb88","month":"2014-07","story_title":"The Meter: The Measure of a Man","text":"Fantastic video by Vertiasium on this: [VIDEO] (side note: that video is about a sphere, but the current standard kilogram and its copies are actually shaped like little bells)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6617702,"author":"EGreg","month":"2013-10","story_title":"The kilo is losing weight, changing all of science","text":"\"Weirdly, it\u2019s not even known if the IPK is getting lighter, or if the national prototypes are getting heavier \u2014 but either way, something is causing these kilos to change weight, by around 50 micrograms every 100 years.\" Well they COULD always do that thing with the water where they heat it to 4 degrees celcius and measure its volume and weight. Then they'd know which it is. That said, there's a nice video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6618991,"author":"JamieLewis","month":"2013-10","story_title":"The kilo is losing weight, changing all of science","text":"Check out this veritasium video [VIDEO] - It goes into a little detail on how the kilogram got it's name, it is also very interesting in it's own right.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8761520,"author":"ozh","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Why Won\u2019t America Go Metric?","text":"I stumbled upon a very interesting short documentary about the metric system and the world's roundest object. Well worth 10 minutes of your break today. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10502692,"author":"aexaey","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment","text":"One cubic centimetre of water at 4 degrees Celsius used to define one gram (or more precisely one litre -> one kilogram, which comes out to be the exact same thing) [1], [2]. Although 1 cm^3 of water is still pretty damn close to 1g. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] (around 1:50, and actually the whole video is excellent)","stance":"rec"}],"ZMQbHMgK2rw":[{"hn_comment_id":37489528,"author":"tstrimple","month":"2023-09","story_title":"New world record with an electric racing car: From 0 to 100 in 0.956 seconds","text":"Cars designed for high speed will have a significant advantage over a motorcycle through capturing down forces to dramatically increase the amount of friction between the tires and the surface before losing grip and spinning out. Motorcycles can own the power to weight ratio category, but they can't use all that power because at that point the wheels just spin. I found it super interesting when I learned that one of the biggest advances in maze solving races is that someone ended up putting a fan in their little \"mouse\" to push down so the wheels could get more traction. [LINK] More details on maze racing from Veritasium: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38037312,"author":"v512","month":"2023-10","story_title":"0 To 100 kph in 1 second","text":"Veritasium did a video on Micromouse competition which also got the breakthrough via similar kind of technology (fan that sucks air from under the car) - [VIDEO] Interesting watch.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40593932,"author":"_carbyau_","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Mitsubishi robot solves Rubik's Cube in 0.305s","text":"For me it was the Veritasium Micromouse video[0]. Hard to quote the video but from wikipedia[1]:\"Micromice are among the highest-performing autonomous robots.\" Things like fans and ground effect being used to make these devices do 6g turns while mapping and solving a maze. Alternately, the world of quadcopters, face recognition (body warmth recognition required?), lidar will make for a terrifying battlefield. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40943325,"author":"sllabres","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Physicists have created the most fiendishly difficult maze","text":"[1] \"The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth\" (22 min) is a nice introduction to the competition and its technical history. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41077163,"author":"kromnomo","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to learn robotics with a 10 year old?","text":"A few months ago, I saw this documentary about maze-solving robots that really impressed me: [VIDEO] This might be an interesting use case.","stance":"rec"}],"ZOzZ8R4gphE":[{"hn_comment_id":27319895,"author":"mythz","month":"2021-05","story_title":"I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time","text":"Thrilled Andreas has managed to receive enough community support to be able to take this big step and is able to focus on Serenity OS fulltime. SerenityOS is an inspiring from scratch grassroots OS effort which plans to build the entire POSIX OS, Kernel and core Apps from scratch, one of the Apps their is their LibWeb browser engine complete with their own LibJS JS VM which already passes the ECMAScript test suite. One of its USPs is that the entire OS is contained within its single source tree where anyone can make changes to its code-base and instantly reboot the OS in seconds with the changes, never seen this done for an OS before, the turn around time allows for some impressive dev iteration speed. A good preview of this hackability is in his Diablo port, whether it's missing C++ APIs, unsupported lang features, missing SDL port impl, toggling kernel features - it all gets done in 1 sit down session to produce a shiny new Diablo port: [VIDEO] Andreas videos on developing LibWeb/LibJS is one of the best resources I've found explaining how to implement a multi-process web browser, e.g. in this video he goes through the HTML Specs which have enough info in them to develop a HTML spec parser whose behavior is the same across all browser engines: [LINK] It's been awesome to see LibWeb/LibJS evolve over time, every time he sits down it gets a bit more capable. Typically it's to implement features for rendering a different website. Here's a nice example where LibWeb gains missin","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27321426,"author":"arduinomancer","month":"2021-05","story_title":"I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time","text":"Haven't heard of this project till seeing this post. Checked out his youtube channel and the video on porting Diablo to SerenityOS in an hour is pretty interesting to watch if you've ever wondered what its like to port software. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28818794,"author":"mythz","month":"2021-10","story_title":"SerenityOS: Year 3 in Review","text":"One of SerenityOS goals I find as its most compelling USP is that it aims to be a \"pure\" OS free of any 3rd Party libs/binaries so that everything is in the project source tree and nothing needs to rely on or sync with any other upstream project, resulting in anyone can always fix & test any issue or add any feature immediately. A good highlight of this is in the Diablo port to SerenityOS: [VIDEO] Whether it's missing C++ APIs, unsupported lang features, missing SDL port impl, toggling kernel features - it all gets done in a 1hr sit down session to produce a shiny new Diablo port. It was a characteristic Andreas experienced at Apple where all code and expertise for macOS was maintained in-house. This does mean everything inc. the OS, Kernel & all default Apps like the Browser needs to be developed from scratch for SerenityOS, but its Browser is making good progress as seems the SerenityOS project and development approach resonates with a lot of devs where it's been able to attract a vibrant community with a number of active contributors. I see a number of benefits of this approach starting with SerenityOS has to be one of the best code-bases to study and learn about OS development where you can see how all components integrate together in a consistent code-base (as well as being able to follow it being developed in real-time with 100s of videos on youtube.com/andreaskling), it enables cohesive behavior and appearance with everything using the same singular library set, it's e","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30220031,"author":"mythz","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Serenity OS: Interview","text":"Maybe, but I've not seen anyone iteratively make changes to all layers of the OS and get instant feedback as Andreas frequently does. The Diablo port is a good example of this, whether it's missing C++ APIs, unsupported lang features, missing SDL port impl, toggling kernel features - it all gets done in a 1hr sit down session to produce a shiny new Diablo port. [VIDEO] Another nice quality of SerenityOS is that the entire OS is written in modern C++ with everything being written from scratch to use the standard AK libraries which the entire OS and components use, i.e. there isn't any existing App that brings in their own string types or other utils.","stance":"rec"}],"ZPoqNeR3_UA":[{"hn_comment_id":7894092,"author":"avar","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Pixel Art + Star Trek = Pixel Trek","text":"Having this on in the background compliments it (\"Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 24 hrs)\"): [VIDEO] Alternatively to mix BSG into it: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9022331,"author":"getdavidhiggins","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Noisli \u2013\u00a0Improve focus and boost your productivity","text":"I listen to this whilst surfing the web: [LINK] Also handy: [LINK] [LINK] This is a personal favorite too - Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 24 hrs): [VIDEO] Personally, whilst coding, I enjoy absolute terrifying silence.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12965748,"author":"TheSpiceIsLife","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Compulab Airtop \u2013 Natural Airflow Desktop","text":"If you like those you might also like the star ship Enterprise idling, for 24hrs... for a more futuristic spin (haha!) on things. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18502455,"author":"octosphere","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Brain.fm: Music to improve focus, meditation and sleep","text":"I just listen to the Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise[1] if I'm coding or trying to focus. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZQFzMfHIxng":[{"hn_comment_id":15770071,"author":"speps","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Designing a Lock-free, Wait-free Hash Map","text":"No, from what I understand, you can't even do it in software anyway due to how the caches work between cores inside the CPU. Watching this was enlightening to say the least (and the presenter is very good): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32938922,"author":"chrsig","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Lockfree Algorithms (2010)","text":"Fedor Pikus has given a number of great talks on the subject at cppcon over the years some links, in no particular order: CppCon 2017: Fedor Pikus \u201cC++ atomics, from basic to advanced. What do they really do? [VIDEO] CppCon 2016: Fedor Pikus \u201cThe speed of concurrency (is lock-free faster?)\" [LINK] CppCon 2015: Fedor Pikus PART 1 \u201cLive Lock-Free or Deadlock (Practical Lock-free Programming)\" [LINK] CppCon 2015: Fedor Pikus PART 2 \u201cLive Lock-Free or Deadlock (Practical Lock-free Programming)\u201d [LINK] CppCon 2017: Fedor Pikus \u201cRead, Copy, Update, then what? RCU for non-kernel programmers\u201d [LINK] Tony Van Eerd has also given some talks on lock free queues, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to search youtube :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44953726,"author":"inetknght","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Without the futex, it's futile","text":"tl;dr: In a multi-threaded context, memory reads and writes can be reordered by hardware. It gets more complicated with shared cache. Imagine that you have core 1 writing to some address at (nearly) the same time that core 2 reads from that. Does core 2 read the old or the new? Especially if they don't share the same cache -- core 1 might \"write\" to a given address, but it only gets written to core 1's cache and then \"scheduled\" to be written out to main memory. Meanwhile, later core 2 tries to read that address, it's not in its cache, so it pulls from main memory before core 1's cache has flushed. As far as core 2 is concerned, the write happened after it read from the address even though physically the write finished in core 1 before core 2's read instruction might have even started. A memory barrier tells the hardware to ensure that reads-before is also \"happens-before\" (or after) a given writen to the same address. It's often (but not always) a cache and memory synchronization across cores. I found Fedora Pikus's cppcon 2017 presentation [1] to be informative, and Michael Wong's 2015 presentation [0] filled in some of the gaps. C++, being a generic language for many hardware implementations, provides a lot more detailed concepts for memory ordering [2], which is important for hardwares that have more granularity in barrier types that what most people are used to with x86-derived memory models. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ZQc9-seU-5k":[{"hn_comment_id":38742594,"author":"mannuch","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Memory safety is necessary, not sufficient","text":"I wonder what the author thinks about Swift\u2019s new C++ interop story? Since the Swift compiler includes Clang, and can thus compile both your C++ and Swift into LLVM IR, without the need for an FFI later between the two, couldn\u2019t this be the \u201cTypescript for C++\u201d that the author points out a space for? The Swift folks are very much thinking about Swift as a C++ successor that can be incrementally migrated to so I\u2019m a bit surprised the author didn\u2019t discuss it further \u2014 especially given Swift\u2019s spiritual similarities to Rust. There\u2019s a couple great talks on this by folks on the Swift team. John McCall at CppNow [LINK] Konrad Malawski at StrangeLoop 2023 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40651792,"author":"glhaynes","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Swift Static Linux SDK","text":"I'm not a (direct) user of the C++ interop, but everything I've heard about it has been quite positive. A few hopefully relevant resources, first a couple of videos: - \"Introducing a Memory-Safe Successor Language in Large C++ Code Bases\" (John McCall; CppNow 2023) [LINK] - \"Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB\" (Konrad Malawski; Strange Loop 2023) [VIDEO] And then a series of blog posts by Doug Gregor: - \"Swift for C++ Practitioners\" [LINK] And finally: - \"Mixing Swift and C++\" (Swift.org) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41209294,"author":"cube2222","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall","text":"Honestly, Swift seems like such a nice language. Most of the performance and power, great interop, but more directed at application development than Rust (with e.g. refcounting being the default). But as they say, you choose a language for its ecosystem, not for the language itself. It would be great if Swift\u2019s open source ecosystem for stuff other than app development grew. It does indeed seem like Apple is pushing for it with stuff like Swift for embedded. The fairly recent presentation about starting to move FoundationDB to Swift[0] was also very interesting. A follow-up on that at some point would be quite interesting to see too, and would inspire confidence if the process is going well. Arc is also a nice example of a cross-platform app written in Swift, with their fairly recent addition of Windows support. Either way, fingers crossed, and very happy with TFA. PS: does anybody have experience with async/await in Swift? Is it pleasant to use? [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZRV3pBuPxEQ":[{"hn_comment_id":37294125,"author":"aarondf","month":"2023-08","story_title":"PHP-Tokio \u2013 Use any async Rust library from PHP","text":"I've been working with PHP since the early 2000s, and it has undergone massive changes. I made a video recently called \"PHP doesn't suck (anymore)\"[0] to try to cover some of the changes from 2012 to now. If you read through the comments you see a lot of people surprised at how much the language has evolved. And a lot of people saying \"PHP sucks lol,\" but it is YouTube afterall. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37446184,"author":"geek_at","month":"2023-09","story_title":"An Internet of PHP","text":"Many people who learned to code with PHP in the 2000s are picking it up again as first choice for web projects since they improved it so much and websites can be updated and running with a simple `git pull` without restarting any services. I saw a video not long ago that made me have hope for the future of PHP again -> [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38597216,"author":"xwowsersx","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet","text":"Not related to security, but I was quite surprised to see how far PHP has come since I used it many years ago: [PHP doesn't suck (anymore)]( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"ZSPkcpGmflE":[{"hn_comment_id":20629230,"author":"johnohara","month":"2019-08","story_title":"A Quarter of Humanity Faces Looming Water Crises","text":"This National Geographic piece about David Bamberger and the Selah Ranch Project in Texas bears watching. [VIDEO] Surface water from rivers, lakes, streams, and reservoirs garner attention because they are visible and make the effects of changes and shortages easier to understand. But a much more difficult crisis may already be upon us in the form of aquifer depletion and may require a complete paradigm shift in how we approach conservation and usage.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21116947,"author":"atourgates","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Scientists Identify How Many Trees to Plant and Where to Stop Climate Crisis","text":"One of my favorite \"case studies\" related to this is the Selah ranch in Texas. The TL;DR: version is that because it was choked with trees and brush, the groundwater had been removed. The owners restored it to primarily native grassland, and in the process restored natural water holes, and streams. National Geographic did a really good 8-minute video on it: [VIDEO] More info on the ranch: [LINK] Trees are great in some environments, but not appropriate for all environments.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32729094,"author":"aarondf","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Mangroves on a Landfill","text":"If this interests you, I've been watching a lot of permaculture and regenerative agriculture videos on YouTube and there is some really encouraging stuff going on out there! I have no idea how to make the restorative stuff go more mainstream, but it's really impressive to watch small communities or determined individuals entirely change a landscape in a few decades. A few I've enjoyed: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ZSRHeXYDLko":[{"hn_comment_id":43054578,"author":"cathalc","month":"2025-02","story_title":"We were wrong about GPUs","text":"\"Preventing the Collapse of Civilization\" by Jonathan Blow comes to mind - [VIDEO] A fantastic talk.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25135368,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Let's Make the Web Weird Again [audio]","text":"> quality will deteriorate over time Jonathan Blow's talk \"Preventing the Collapse of Civilization\"[1] makes a good argument that software quality has already suffered significant deterioration. We've just gotten used to software not working. Reboot the computer; refresh the webpage; spend the morning trying to work around the \"improvements\", regressions, and removed features in the software that forced an update. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26340031,"author":"isolli","month":"2021-03","story_title":"The Air Force is having to reverse engineer parts of its own stealth bomber","text":"Tangentially reminds me of this video by Jonathan Blow [0], \"Preventing the Collapse of Civilization\". The eye-opening moment, for me, was the importance (and neglect) of the inter-generational transfer of knowledge in maintaining technological complexity. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29568085,"author":"anderspitman","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again","text":"Anyone who finds this concept interesting to think about and hasn't seen this video may enjoy it: [VIDEO] See also Foundation by Asimov.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29883617,"author":"elcapitan","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Disillusioned by Tech in 2022","text":"I'm not even expecting technology to get better anymore, I just wish the quality of software wasn't constantly decreasing. I've turned off automatic updates for most of them, e.g. MacOS, Android Apps, Firefox. Just can't stand the constant messing up of UIs that may have worked or were at least not as bad as the next version with more bloated features. Beautiful talk on that topic by Jonathan Blow, called \"Preventing the collapse of civilization\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30574086,"author":"ilrwbwrkhv","month":"2022-03","story_title":"What's the problem with old but excellent Mac apps?","text":"I am reminded of the excellent \"Preventing the Collapse of Civilization\" talk by Jonathan Blow: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30953456,"author":"sjaak","month":"2022-04","story_title":"1.5-Inch Hand-Carved Agate from 1500 B.C. Shows Sub-Millimeter Details (2017)","text":"After reading this I can't help but think of a talk \"Preventing the Collapse of Civilization\" given by Jonathan Blow (the game dev) about progress and how it's not always increasing like we tend to think. Super interesting if you have the time for it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31005189,"author":"theonemind","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?","text":"[VIDEO] I think Jonathan Blow made a decent argument that we're in a decadent age of software. In a decadent age, the civilization still does and can do the thing, but has started to lose a grip on the fundamentals, so it's on the way out. A decadent age is a kind of end, doesn't necessarily feel like the end, it kind of feels like a stagnant bumbling. How many programmers do you know that can write assembly code? How many layers of abstraction between a web app and the silicon? Processor, OS, probably a byte-code VM, probably a framework... leaking a little bit all of the way. He makes a good point--where's the evidence that we can write good software? It seems possible , but it doesn't appear, so really, the feeling that maybe we could is just a feeling, not evidence.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32703001,"author":"asah","month":"2022-09","story_title":"The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero","text":"\"optimal amount of fraud in society is 0\" - are you sure? why? Bad Things(tm) are useful for testing and improving safety/security, and when I see people/institutions with no experience reacting to Bad Things(tm), I know they're in for a world of hurt when it does happen. Perhaps you mean, the optimal amount of fraud that isn't prosecuted... or not detected... ? Even then, I'd argue that there's a tiny percentage that's useful for keeping the safety/security industry on its toes and at the ready. As a proof point, if you believe that war (world peace) is not a solved problem, then it's only a matter of time before your city/region/civilization/race faces an existential threat, for which the only true preparation is to be ready to innovate and mobilize. Sorry if this comes across as dark. I mean it in the same vein as having a small percentage of farmers is desirable. By contrast, I visited a traditional silk factory in Stockholm (amazing btw) and the craft has been lost to the point where they're struggling to find craftspeople able to work their looms and other old equipment. See Jonathan Blow's excellent talk about lost technology: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32916596,"author":"PartiallyTyped","month":"2022-09","story_title":"In 2019 RX470 were $70, RX580 $100","text":"Software has definitely gotten worse, and tbh it will only keep getting worse. I really like this talk by [the possibly notorious] Jonathan Blow on the software industry and software in general decomposing [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33322973,"author":"mrw","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Forgetting the Asbestos \u2013 how we lose knowledge and technologies","text":"I liked Jonathan Blow\u2019s \u2018Preventing The Collapse of Civilisation\u2019 talk on the same topic from 2019. [1] Although, it\u2019s more related to software engineering. Previously discussed on a couple occasions. [2][3] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43941953,"author":"bsrkf","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Rust\u2019s dependencies are starting to worry me","text":"Excuse me for not having much to add to the discussion but two interesting references for people to check out, if so inclined of course: a) Ginger Bill (the Odin language creator, no affiliation) stated on a podcast that Odin will never have an official pkg manager, since what they're, in his opinion, mainly automating is dependency hell, and this being one of the main reasons for rising software complexity and lower software quality; see [LINK] (timestamped to the correct position) (they mention Rust explicitly as an example) b) another programmer rather seriously worried about software quality/complexity is Jonathan Blow, who's talk \"Preventing the Collapse of Civilization\" is worth watching in my opinion: [VIDEO] (it's not talking about package managers specifically, but is on topic regarding software complexity/quality as a whole) Addendum: And sorry, I feel like almost everyone knows this xkcd by now, but since no one so far seems to have posted it; \"obligatory xkcd reference\": [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44643819,"author":"dzonga","month":"2025-07","story_title":"If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?","text":"every once in a while everyone should watch Jonathan's Blow: Collapse of Civilization [0] by not reading and going through docs - we cut out our critique ability as we just ingest fully what A.I gives us. by not writing we don't exercise thinking - question our assumptions etc. since what AI writes will mostly be positive not negative. [0]: [VIDEO] and just like that society stops thinking. stops creating. then civilization collapses.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45529514,"author":"iamwil","month":"2025-10","story_title":"The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe","text":"Jonathan Blow already warned us six years ago. \"Preventing the Collapse of Civilization\" [VIDEO] There is the Handmade and Better Software contingent that is pushing against this trend. I don't know if they'll succeed, but they at least care about quality in a way that a lot of software engineers aren't incentivized or don't know how to do anymore. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ZTC_RxWN_xo":[{"hn_comment_id":3801009,"author":"lukejduncan","month":"2012-04","story_title":"The Birth Of Silicon Valley (timeline)","text":"When I first moved here my favorite introduction to the valleys history was Steve Blanks The Secret History of Silicon Valley. It's well worth the hour [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7157167,"author":"cpr","month":"2014-01","story_title":"PayPal Mafia","text":"You've gotta watch Steve Blank's \"The Secret History of Silicon Valley\". Goes back to its post-war roots in 40's and 50's. A real gem and quite surprising. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3994035,"author":"jstrate","month":"2012-05","story_title":"'The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We're Dancing on its Grave'","text":"I see a lot of comments addressed to \"this guy\" referring to Steve Blank. Let's not forget he's been involved in silicon valley startups since the 70s, including founding semiconductor companies. While they're no hello world rails startup, he has a proven track record and a first-hand experience of how the valley has evolved. I suspect many of you haven't seen his take on the history of the valley, which might give context to his views. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22910195,"author":"DeBraid","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?","text":"Related thread: `Ask HN: What's the best book on the early history of the Internet and/or Web?` [LINK] My previous reco: Not a book, but a great video via Steve Blank: [VIDEO] Also `Bret Victor The Future of Programming`, which is misleading as above is performance piece where title slide reads `1973` [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32139352,"author":"dundarious","month":"2022-07","story_title":"A Look Back at the USSR Computer Industry","text":"Yes, Silicon Valley grew out of quite sophisticated WW2 military R&D, so quite similar to USSR actually. I like this talk given at the Computer History Museum about the history of Silicon Valley, which was secret for many years: [VIDEO] You can argue USSR lacked followup demand for computing from outside the military, and that this was caused by organizational issues. It\u2019s probably pretty important to also state the relative wealth disparity at the start of the relevant period, from 1940 onwards, say. Russia was basically feudal in 1910, and it would be hard for advancement to catch up to US levels by 1940 no matter the organization of the economy, and then we have to account for the devastation of WW2 which followed (WW2 was expensive for US, but it didn\u2019t lose industrial capacity except via opportunity cost). I don\u2019t say this as any kind of apologia, but think it makes more sense to compare USSR to less developed countries than US \u2014 where it still doesn\u2019t compare favorably in many ways, but it\u2019s far more interesting and debatable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40171884,"author":"rapsey","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Big Tech and Silicon Valley are transforming the military-industrial complex","text":"I'm sure there are lots of reading options but this is a very good presentation on the topic (of Silicon Valley and Stanford). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZTdUmlGxVo0":[{"hn_comment_id":5325533,"author":"ciupicri","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Crowding out OpenBSD","text":"If you think that the OpenBSD has it right, why don't you use it as a desktop, too? Why aren't you running a virtual machine of Windows 7 under OpenBSD? Probably because there's no proper virtualization support in OpenBSD. Linux is complex because sometimes it has too be, not just for the sake of it. systemd (which is great in my opinion) wouldn't be possible without cgroups. Should I also mention the better multi-processor support? Regarding the desktop, I strongly recommend watching \"27c3 - Desktop on the Linux... (and BSD, of course) - Wolfgang Draxinger (+ Lennart Poettering)\" [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5665347,"author":"justsee","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Linux is not about choice (2008)","text":"This was an entertaining talk from CCC in 2011 on desktop Linux. 'datenwolf' was the speaker, and he starts talking about sound in Linux here. [1] He's quickly interrupted by the maintainer of PulseAudio, and this interruption continues throughout the talk. My takeaway was that if there was still this amount of confusion and misunderstanding in the community, my frustrating experiences with sound in desktop Ubuntu was not atypical of dekstop Linux users. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZUG9qYTJMsI":[{"hn_comment_id":5600095,"author":"dvt","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Lawdingo: A Funny Ad For a Serious Business","text":"Here's some friendly advice from someone that's done ads for one of my start-ups before. 1) If you can't get top-notch talent, just do the ad yourself. Why? You can tell when amateur actors are just \"reading lines.\" They don't seem excited about the product, all they want to do is get through the script. The had has some brilliant ideas (the best friend cheating on your wife bit is quite funny) but the execution kills it. If you don't think you can pull off \"acting\" by yourself, even describing your business (like you do when trying to get into YC, for example) will go a lot farther than amateur actors reading off of a script. Something like \"Hi, I'm Jim and this is what Lawdingo does. I'm excited to introduce you to this new blah blah\" simply shows excitement (bonus points for being the co-/founder -- viewers get a warmer feeling). 2) If you really want to go the funny route (I don't think I would), do something ridiculous. An 80s eras commercial, a song-and-dance; something that has the possibility of going viral. Law advice is a relatively ubiquitous subject. Consider how GEIKO sells insurance. In your case, I'd say you went half-GEIKO. Go full-GEIKO. Be ridiculous if you want to be funny. The ad makes you seem sorta-kinda serious, so I can't help but get mixed feelings. If you want to see what a great example of the above is, consider: [VIDEO] 3) Diction. Diction. Diction. Have some. Or your actors should have some. I remember we paid this one chick god knows how much to ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9762500,"author":"DiabloD3","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Dollar Shave Club Is Valued at $615M","text":"Honestly, I like their branding. It is unique enough to stand apart, but not so far out there that its unapproachable or unnecessarily too hipster, and manly enough without scaring off the metro-sexual or gay crowd (and please, don't take this as offense, it's just that they gravitate to certain brands that are more \"gentlemenly\" than flat out \"manly\"). Their website portrays their brand extremely well, their famous video ( [VIDEO] ) is absolutely amazing for how low budget it is, and, well, how fail it is and they just keep rolling with it. Its genius. I just wish they'd veer into the double edged safety razor market, which in my opinion, needs a bit of disruption too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12128087,"author":"aorth","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Dollar Shave Club and the Disruption of Everything","text":"The article highlights Dollar Shave Club's 2012 introduction video[0], which is funny and fantastically frames the reality of the razor market. I don't know why I missed this a few years ago... [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZUvGfuLlZus":[{"hn_comment_id":11575019,"author":"_asummers","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Mosh: the mobile shell","text":"And watch this[0] entire (super entertaining) talk from Hope X about elevator security. You get a pretty good feal for how the safety measures work after watching it. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17477982,"author":"unixhero","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What talks or videos do you suggest to watch on a long flight?","text":"Yes. That's the shorter censored versoion. I recommend the full 2 hour version, with all the secrets: [VIDEO] My second favourite talk: You spent all that money and your still got owned: [LINK] I even watch these again and again.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20187952,"author":"thejenk","month":"2019-06","story_title":"I'll Let Myself In: Tactics of Physical Pen Testers (2017) [video]","text":"Deviant Ollam does another talk with elevator consultant Howard Payne just about elevator security which is fantastic. It's very similar to this one, but goes deeper into the single subject. There are a few versions on YouTube of various lengths, but here's the 2 hour version: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27777017,"author":"royjacobs","month":"2021-07","story_title":"List of Special Elevator Modes","text":"If you're interested in elevators and the hacking thereof I would also highly recommend this talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27777999,"author":"mpd","month":"2021-07","story_title":"List of Special Elevator Modes","text":"I ran into [VIDEO] (Elevator Hacking: From the Pit to the Penthouse) awhile back, and it was so interesting to me that I ended up watching the entire 2 hours in one sitting.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49129276,"author":"nhhvhy","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Elevators","text":"If you feel like going down an elevator rabbithole, Deviant Ollam has quite a few talks/videos about all sorts of niche elevator stuff. My personal favorite: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18741370,"author":"lathiat","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"Deviant Ollam - The Hotel Room Gourmet [LINK] Also not 2018 but his elevator with Howard Payne talk: [LINK] (1h version) [VIDEO] (2h version) And the search for the perfect door: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27489331,"author":"wolrah","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Elevator Saga \u2013 An elevator programming game","text":"Relevant video discussing fire keys and other common keys: [LINK] And since this thread is about elevators, I have to also mention another video of theirs: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27781389,"author":"ben_bai","month":"2021-07","story_title":"List of Special Elevator Modes","text":"SimTower started as elevator simulator, and was then turned into a game. Also, this is a great talk if you want to know more about elevators: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZV-AFnCkRLY":[{"hn_comment_id":8224577,"author":"chops","month":"2014-08","story_title":"Notch programming a Doom-like in Dart","text":"Notch's Ludum Dare video for Metagun ( [VIDEO] ) was inspiration for a series of scripts I now use for clients and my own entertainment purposes (for some loose definition of \"entertainment\"). It's a series of shell scripts I use that screencap videos of coding and set them to music (so, for example, rendering a 48-hour coding competition to a 5-minute song, or as I more typically do for clients, render the development process down to a few minutes for them to watch in fast-time how their development was done). It's called watchmecode ( [LINK] ) and I just have to do ./make-av-video.sh /path/to/video.mpg /path/to/song.mp3 And it does the rest, and outputs it to \"done.mp4\" The result is something that looks like this: [LINK] (disclaimer, I've plugged this before on HN: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8834389,"author":"wallflower","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm going to present technology jobs to 400 16yo,what should I tell them?","text":"First, congratulations! I would demystify the process of creation. Show them your wireframes, your pencil sketches, talk about the business v. creative push and pull. Make it interactive - break them into groups of 2-3 each for 5 min and show them Notch's time-lapse in the background on projector while you have them work on exercises in ideation - what would their game be? what would the levels, characters, and challenges be. They don't have to present - just get them comfortable with the first step of creation - putting it on 'scratch' paper. If you have time, deconstruct Flappy Bird. The scrolling left to right background v. making the bird move. How the object detection is greatly simplified when you have only one coordinate to detect (y-bird and y-pipeTop/y-pipeBottom). How adding gravity to the bird (downward velocity) allows you to fly the bird. \"Making Metagun\" by Notch [VIDEO] \"Creating Prelude of the Chambered\" by Notch [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ZW5_eEKEC28":[{"hn_comment_id":244532,"author":"wave","month":"2008-07","story_title":"Early YouTube Engineer Tells All","text":"Here is a better video with the same subject: [VIDEO] Amazing to see how small the team was before Google acquisition: 2 sysadmin 2 scalability software architects 2 feature developers 2 network engineers 1 DBA","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2075825,"author":"rosariom","month":"2011-01","story_title":"Ask HN: how can I learn about real-world software/system design?","text":"Hi, I think this is a hard one without working on a big project with senior people. I struggled with this for years and still do but have gotten a little better thanks to senior developers guiding me. I think besides reading books and attending lectures or listening in on talks online, I think you need to find a problem sizable enough and build it from scratch. My work with senior guys has shown me that designing on paper and the white board is essential to tackling the problem for understanding and eventually building it. The patterns will reveal themselves as you go through this exercise if any patterns are needed at all, and I think this is something you definitely will not learn overnight but overtime by getting your hands dirty. If you have not visited this site infoq.com, please do so. It has tons of experts speaking on it. I have been able to incorporate some of what I have learned from here to the job. A quick link to how YouTube was built: [VIDEO] Really good talk with lots of jewels. Another good book for you: [LINK] Hope this helps.","stance":"rec"}],"ZWQ0591PAxM":[{"hn_comment_id":29127298,"author":"splch","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?","text":"I love this video: [VIDEO] As part of a Kickerstarter campaign, Morphcat Games made this video explaining how they eked out a really incredible game with only 40 Kb (a lot like Super Mario Bros 2). I definitely recommend checking this out as they go over interesting compression methods and more general thought processes.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38433792,"author":"arnaudsm","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Street Fighter II, subtile accurate animation (2021)","text":"Here is my favorite video about 8-bit era optimisations. Makes you appreciate games from this era even more. This arcane magic survived in the demoscene to this day. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21214339,"author":"MrFoof","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Super Mario Bros. game was just 31 Kilobytes. How's that possible?","text":"Very much agree with the parent. If you want a better idea on how you can cram everything into 40KB \u2014 using every trick in the book, including ones not considered 30+ years ago \u2014 take a look at a how a recently released NES game (Micro Mages) managed it. Their primary design constrain was that they restricted themselves to 40KB, despite wanting to do far more than the games that were done in 40KB back in the 80s. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21862490,"author":"alecco","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"ZFS for newbies [LINK] main ideas behind ZFS and why it blows out the competition in many scenarios Making C Less Dangerous in the Linux Kernel [LINK] NUMA optimizations in the FreeBSD stack (Netflix) [LINK] How we fit a NES game in 40KiB [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24765148,"author":"Timpy","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Top games from the JS13K 2020 competition","text":"I'm absolutely blown away by some of the games they managed to make in under 13kb. This video \"How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes\" is an interesting illustration of just how small these games are. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38388236,"author":"MrFoof","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Yoyozo (or, how I made a Playdate game in 39KB)","text":"A similarly interesting story is regarding the NES homebrew game, Micro Mages. The goal with Micro Mages was to get a full-featured game into the same footprint of the original, \"Black Box\" NES releases for the North American launch, where a fair number of games fit in 40KB of ROM or less. Video, but it's a good summary: [VIDEO] Morphcat has done other great NES games as well, such as Space Gulls and Bobl.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41268241,"author":"throwawayk7h","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Crafting a 13KB Game: The Story of Space Huggers","text":"Incredible. I love these stories of kb games. For those interested, there's a great video for this 40 kb nes game, micro mages: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZXJWO2FQ16c":[{"hn_comment_id":12518955,"author":"bane","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Learning Web Audio by Recreating the Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno","text":"This is an incredibly beautiful tutorial. Art, deconstruction, minimalism and some of the greatest musical artists of the 20th century! What an amazing way to explore the mechanics and mechanisms behind these artists. I had heard of other minimalist artists before, but until a couple years ago somehow had missed Reich. I'm now an addict, especially to his later pieces when he really started growing his work into larger and larger themes. \"Music for 18 Musicians\" has become one of my favorite pieces of music of all time. I say this as somebody who finds a great deal of modern art fairly deplorable -- the first time I heard some of Reich's pieces I stayed up the entire night finding everything of his I could put into my ears. Reich has a nack for finding incredibly beautiful and urgent patterns and sounds and exploring them to a kind of amazing fullness. I never had the pleasure to play any of this pieces when I was attempting to become a musician, I understand that the practice for a piece can take months to a year because of the difficulties of maintaining your part of the phase. Listening to his music is, to me, a very intense activity, because I desperately want to notice when the music starts changing and because of the phasing it never does. There's certain parts of the phasing to that I find particularly enjoyable, but I've also found that you can't just jump to them, you have to encounter them in the context of the phases that come before and after. Once you get quite f","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17140660,"author":"lgessler","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What music helps you code better?","text":"For me, the only genre that reliably works is \"minimal\" music, like stuff by Steve Reich[1] or Gas[2]. My definition of this genre would be music with no lyrics that has highly repetitive structures (differentiating it from \"ambient\" music, which I find too sleepy to be invigorating). [1]: Music for 18 Musicians [VIDEO] [2]: Koenigsforst [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17637941,"author":"kashyapc","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Any good examples of learning through games/puzzles, for adults?","text":"[tangent] Speaking of Steve Reich, if you haven't yet listened to his glorious Music for 18 Musicians ensemble piece (duration: 55 minutes), do give it[1] a try. An explanation of the composition and its structure: [LINK] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [/tangent]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36873037,"author":"defrost","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What focus/coding music are you listening to these days?","text":"> people talking/singing in a language I even partially understand to be highly disruptive That's readily addressed: Luritja: [LINK] Djambarrpuynu: [LINK] Kuanua: [LINK] If you're looking for patterned music to keep the world at bay you might look to composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Wim Mertens, etc. eg: Music for 18 Musicians - Steve Reich [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44267392,"author":"defrost","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Dancing brainwaves: How sound reshapes your brain networks in real time","text":"If you like a bit of weird time signature, arpeggios, and seemingly dissonant sounds that eventually harmonize into chaotic outburst you might enjoy what was my coding metronome back in the early 1980s ... YMMV - Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZXtimhT-ff4":[{"hn_comment_id":5873986,"author":"Diederich","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Music to Let you Concentrate","text":"These days, I tend to listen to this: [VIDEO] I have a music composition and conducting background, so any kind of music ends up distracting me at some level.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11933482,"author":"keketi","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Tinnitus in relation to neck/head muscle tension","text":"I was in a similar situation a while ago. You should check out this app: [LINK] I went to a tinnitus clinic and they did a profile of the tinnitus I hear. Then they configured this app to amplify sounds of those frequencies to mask my tinnitus. When I'm hearing a low buzz the app can almost completely remove it, but it doesn't work quite as well with a high frequencies. You'll need rubber ear buds that form a tight fit with your ear canal. Since the app only amplifies sounds it doesn't really do anything in a totally quiet environment. You might want to play pink noise to give your hearing something to work with. I've experimented with different kinds of noise, but this type seems to work the best: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZYj4NkeGPdM":[{"hn_comment_id":42964097,"author":"lblume","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Transfinite NIM (the game, not the programming language)","text":"Nim is, in fact, a proper subset of Hackenbush, a game extensively studied by Conway. I found the following video extremely useful and well-visualized: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32953610,"author":"rini17","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Indefinite and Fictitious Numbers","text":"All numbers are fictitious :) Though, I think \"games\" built on surreal numbers are akin to these. [LINK] An accessible intro: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42551172,"author":"nthingtohide","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Numbers Are Leaves","text":"HACKENBUSH: a window to a new world of math [VIDEO] Thanks for the blogpost, I think you will like this above SOME3 entry. Owen Maitzen committed suicide which is mentioned in the following video. The Endless Universe of \"Bean and Nothingness\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ZZs2HUW9tDA":[{"hn_comment_id":28814356,"author":"LaserDiscMan","month":"2021-10","story_title":"The Coding Secrets Hidden in \u201cSonic the Hedgehog\u201d [video]","text":"For those who don't know, Burton explains this in depth here: [VIDEO] Another one of my favorite ones describes copy protection via intentionally destroyed floppy sectors: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38372033,"author":"LeonenTheDK","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Why does the moon change size when you snipe it in GTA?","text":"I love little game dev anecdotes such as these. Interesting relics of the development process. One of my favourites is Sonic 3D's secret level select screen: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Zd_UcjMusUA":[{"hn_comment_id":27032213,"author":"efortis","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Ways to train your mind to be faster at picking up concepts","text":"I'm not a drummer but my most inspiring example of picking up concepts is this video [1] of Larnell Lewis playing \"Enter Sandman\" by ear for the first time. Note how his vocabulary helps him learn the form of the song and its nuances. Software-development speaking, I feel you, I'm also slow at reading requirements. But I'm slower if I start with over-generalized use cases, rather than going through concrete scenarios. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36049413,"author":"e40","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Microtiming in Metallica's \u201cMaster of Puppets\u201d","text":"Not the same song, but I really, really love this and it is Metallica: [VIDEO] Larnell Lewis Hears \"Enter Sandman\" For The First Time (and plays the drum part)","stance":"rec"}],"Ze2pc6NwsHQ":[{"hn_comment_id":30473620,"author":"kaczordon","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Any scientifically proven techniques to boost concentration?","text":"Dr Huberman from Stanford has a great weekly podcast where he talks about how to improve all parts of your body/mind for various activities(sleep, exercise etc.). Here\u2019s one on improving productivity: [VIDEO] One of the tips from the video that I really love is called the cathedral effect. It was found that having high ceilings increases your creative capacity when doing an activity.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33192503,"author":"blueyes","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation","text":"Virtual interactions are tied to screens. That's their weak point, because screens affect our vision, how we move and focus our eyes. Our eyes are the only part of our brain exposed to light and air. It turns out that how we move and focus them affects the rest of brain function. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, has researched and spoken about this deeply and at length. Here are three podcast episodes where he dives in: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] I think all three points in these comments can be right: 1) we need alone time; 2) sharing physical space can help creativity; 3) virtual meetings can hurt it. But we have to isolate the variables. Shared physical space for creative sessions doesn't have to mean open offices, and it doesn't have to mean eliminating solitude. We should also allow for different people responding differently to virtual meetings, shared space, etc, and remember to consider this statistically, as the scientists do. That is, we should try to segment the subjects of the study. Some will prefer screens more, some shared space. The tech industry remains willfully and obtusely ignorant of the costs of virtualizing human interaction, because people sitting in a room together don't need much software, and nobody's going to build a unicorn on that. As with long covid, the true and persistent costs of these changes -- virtualizing everything -- will only become apparent in the years to come.","stance":"rec"}],"ZecQ64l-gKM":[{"hn_comment_id":32281776,"author":"nomel","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Scientists discover new \u201corigins of life\u201d chemical reactions","text":"I highly recommend the Lex Fridman podcast with Lee Cronin (#269), about the origins of life and complexity theory [1]. The discussion is really incredible. It really changed my naive perspective of life, and the universe. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31154470,"author":"egman_ekki","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Do the same mechanisms that create complex life also create complex technology?","text":"On the topic of complexity of life created structures, I found this Lex Fridman's interview with Lee Cronin fascinating and thought-provoking: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31659508,"author":"nomel","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Amino acids found in asteroid samples collected by Japan's Hayabusa2 probe","text":"There\u2019s a great Lex Fridman podcast related to this, about \u201cAssembly Theory\u201d, by Lee Cronin. I thought it was fascinating. Youtube: [VIDEO] Spotify: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ZeecOKBus3Q":[{"hn_comment_id":21002106,"author":"ludwigschubert","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction","text":"...and many would say that\u2019s because us humans are bad at imagining optimizing agents without anthropomorphizing them. This is a reasonable, even typical suspicion that many people share! The best explanation I know of why it\u2019s unfortunately wrong is by Robert Miles in a video, but if you prefer a more thorough treatment, you could also read about \u201cinstrumental convergence\u201d directly. If you find a flaw in this idea, I\u2019d be interested to hear about it! :) Robert Miles\u2019 video: [VIDEO] Instrumental Convergence: [LINK] Now afaik nothing in this argument says that we can\u2019t find a way to control this in a more complex formalism-but we clearly haven\u2019t done so yet.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36124905,"author":"Veedrac","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Statement on AI Risk","text":"The basic argument is trivial: it is plausible that future systems achieve superhuman capability; capable systems necessarily have instrumental goals; instrumental goals tend to converge; human preferences are unlikely to be preserved when other goals are heavily selected for unless intentionally preserved; we don't know how to make AI systems encode any complex preference robustly. Robert Miles' videos are among the best presented arguments about specific points in this list, primary on the alignment side rather than the capabilities side, that I have seen for casual introduction. Eg. this one on instrumental convergence: [VIDEO] Eg. this introduction to the topic: [LINK] He also has the community-led AI Safety FAQ, [LINK] , which gives brief answers to common questions. If you have specific questions I might be able to point to a more specific argument at a higher level of depth.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36168205,"author":"DirkH","month":"2023-06","story_title":"The greatest risk of AI is from the people who control it, not the tech itself","text":"The paperclip maximizer is an extreme thought experiment to make a point about the the orthogonality thesis. If you think anyone actually takes it seriously as a real-world thing you never understood the example. It is used to guide discussion. The trolley problem is similarly a thought experiment in moral philosophy that many moral philosophers have used to guide discussion, but nobody actually takes the thought experiment seriously as a \"real-world\" thing. If you actually want to engage with the argument in good faith for why an AI might indeed be smart enough to wipe us out but \"dumb enough\" to just pursue some other goal (\"make paperclips as an extreme example\") there is a great video by Rob Miles here: [VIDEO] Point out the flaws in the reasoning. Just saying \"this is nonsense\" does nothing but prove you've never actually taken the time to understand the best arguments. Also... Alan Turing, Geoffrey Hinton... Extremely influential and intelligent people take/took this seriously. These are not SciFi fanboys. AI doom only became sci-fi after smart people like Alan Turing decades ago raised the alarms flags about where AI development might go if we are not careful.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32526566,"author":"sabellito","month":"2022-08","story_title":"John Carmack's new AGI company, Keen Technologies, has raised a $20M round","text":"There's a wondeful youtube channel from a researcher who focusses exactly on this topic, I think you should check it out: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35603961,"author":"jbay808","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Chalmers: Is there a canonical source for \u201cthe argument for AGI ruin\u201d somewhere","text":"That's where the idea of \"instrumental convergence\" comes in. For almost any end goal, there are intermediate goals that are nearly universal, like: not wanting to be turned off. Because being forcibly shut down is not compatible with achieving most goals. It's hard to predict exactly how an AGI would avoid being shut down, but like the Stockfish example, if the AGI is more intelligent than us, it's likely it would find a method that succeeds. It turns out to be quite a delicate problem to create an AI that is compatible with being shut down by an overseer, and neither strives to avoid being shut down nor strives to shut itself down. Here is a paper by MIRI about this[1], as well as a paper by Deepmind presenting one possible solution[2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] Good explainer video by Robert Miles: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38089487,"author":"pixl97","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Nvidia Trains LLM on Chip Design","text":"Robert Miles answers your question [VIDEO] The particular problem that you're showing in your thinking is just thinking of an LLM that is a text generator on purpose. You're not thinking of a self piloting war machine whos objective is to get to a target and explode violently. While it's terminal goal is to blow up, its instrumental goal is to not blow up before it gets to the target as this is a failure to achieve it's terminal goal.","stance":"rec"}],"ZerUbHmuY04":[{"hn_comment_id":11300970,"author":"lr4444lr","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Why Neuroscientists Need to Study the Crow","text":"The reasoning ability and executive function of birds, crows in particular, is astonishing. Intelligence (certain kinds, at least) may be just as reliant on brain:body mass ratio as it is on overall brain size and complexity. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21772251,"author":"danmostudco","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates","text":"Crows are astoundingly intelligent. If you're having a slow day, a quick youtube of \"crows solving puzzles\" yields some great videos of them solving complicated tasks like water displacement to reach food[0]. I believe raccoons share this achievement. Additionally, there was a thread on here some time ago[1] by a Dutch Startup[2] about trying to teach crows to exchange cigarette butts for treats inside a tiny device place in parks, I always thought that was a funny idea if you could get the crows to teach one another. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24587342,"author":"boltefnovor","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute","text":"This video is a startling verification.of the crows mental capabilities. \u201cCausal understanding of water displacement by a crow\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZfuierUvx1A":[{"hn_comment_id":2858279,"author":"jarin","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Low-level x86 code compression for 64k intros","text":"In case you haven't seen a 64k intro, \"Chaos Theory\" by Conspiracy is probably the coolest and most impressive one I've ever seen (fullscreen it in 720p for maximum awesomeness): [VIDEO] I think it's probably one of the few I've seen that goes beyond being just impressive coding and actually seems to evoke the feeling of a post-singularity civilization, or something like that. The graphics and music are all generated on the fly from 64k of code. I think it actually uses the code compression from the linked article.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8231534,"author":"lloeki","month":"2014-08","story_title":"A Single Div","text":"I don't get the fascination with Farbrausch. While I respect and admire the feat which I'm unable to pull of myself, there are comparatively much better realisations both in terms of art and technique. See the following 64k demos: - chaos theory - [VIDEO] - turtles all the way down - sub dream [LINK] - the timeless \u2014 [LINK] - turtles all the way down - brain control - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39116551,"author":"0x000xca0xfe","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Making Rust binaries smaller by default","text":"I work in embedded software and we fight for every megabyte of NAND flash. Multiple smaller executables add up, too. Reducing the binary size is usually more important than performance (and often more important than memory safety, if we are totally honest...). Personally, I hate bloated software just as much as slow software. It's crazy what you can do with 64 kilobytes, let the demoscene blow your mind: [VIDEO] Would be awesome if compilers could do the same :)","stance":"rec"}],"ZggCipbiHwE":[{"hn_comment_id":34820623,"author":"mentos","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them","text":"Only takes me one minute and thirty six seconds to convince anyone I meet of this point: \"This is Extremely Dangerous to our Democracy\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31554667,"author":"cryptoz","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Hottest May in History for Texas","text":"This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. (in case someone missed this, it's incredible: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32562428,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2022-08","story_title":"An odd discovery on Spotify","text":"Something I noticed after I watched an episode of Stoic Finance[1] about a possible \"impending crash of the Chinese economy\" is that YouTube started recommending about a dozen \"independent\" channels. I put the word independent in air quotes because they all have near-identical looking title cards with the similar fonts, some variant of the phrasing \"The collapse has begun!\", and the same-ish content. Different presenters, different channels, same message. Over and over. And over. Reminds me of the \"This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy\" clip that edited together dozens of apparently independent local news channels saying the same script, verbatim.[2] You've got to wonder if there's someone with deep pockets trying to influence public opinion on China? Or is it just the same thing as the \"local\" news channels, where a bunch of YouTubers have been \"bought\" by a corporation that send them material to read? I would love to know if anyone on Hacker News knows something about this kind of thing... [1] In case you're interested: [LINK] ...and some copy-cats clips I recommend opening in a private tab unless you want to be inundated with even more clones: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [2] Entertaining and terrifying: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34848556,"author":"alfor","month":"2023-02","story_title":"How pervasive is corporate fraud?","text":"Same here. I thought it was so obvious and then called out publicly and exposed. It doesn\u2019t matter. I think that as long as the right people in the media are greased it doesn't enter the mass consciousness. If you look at the mass media, you will see that the actors on the news will show emotions around certain subjects, they will make a grind or a disgusted face while talking about a problem at a company or a political movement. That is what change people mind when repeated many times. This video (from a shadow banned account) show how the media talk with one voice. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZhuHCtR3xq8":[{"hn_comment_id":10058830,"author":"kika","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Frege: A Haskell-Like Language for the JVM","text":"To be fair, (I think) you don't need to know category theory to successfully apply FP principles and/or use any functional language. I had a great (GREAT) success at using erlang not only not knowing what monad is, but even not knowing about existence of category theory at all, leave aside monads, monoids, functors, etc. You also don't need to know category theory to understand what monad is [0] This video is all you, as a practicing programmer, need to know about monads and it's just 1 hour long. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11552845,"author":"kika","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Functors, Applicatives, and Monads in Plain English","text":"I don't know category theory, so I defer to more knowledgeable people here, but that sounds strange: \"Functor it understands how to take doStuff and execute it on the value inside itself, then spit out a new Optional. You don't lose the int-ness or optional-ness.\" So if I map a function, that takes an int and returns a string over an array of ints, this array stops being a functor? Or is it just a Swift thing? And, as always, I urge people spend an hour of their life and get the explanation of all this from someone who knows the math but still able to explain this in plain English: [VIDEO] To the best of my limited knowledge, it's all 100% correct.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4985241,"author":"chongli","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Monads are a Class of Hard Drugs (2008)","text":"Apples and oranges. A monad is just an idea; that of storing computations as values. This is useful because these computations can be composed together in a manner not unlike that of a pipeline in shell scripting. Different monads define different ways of composing these computations leading to vastly different semantics. Here's a nice video that explains monads fairly simply: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8511063,"author":"emotionalcode","month":"2014-10","story_title":"On becoming an expert C programmer","text":"> and apparently I'm never going to understand Haskell I found this introduction to the concepts of functional programming (functional composition) to be useful: [VIDEO] Otherwise, it's just a different way of thinking about problems. Instead of building things structurally as an object of objects, and then creating functions that relate, transform, or describe the relationships between the object structures (like taking a pixel object, altering it's x coordinate, and returning the new pixel object with only the x coordinate altered), one has functions that can be composed with other functions to produce more complex object structures. A single base unit with a sequence of functional compositions can describe a very fancy, complex unit, with many fancy, complex characteristics. >> Monads have also been explained with a physical metaphor as assembly lines, where a conveyor belt transports data between functional units that transform it one step at a time.[2] They can also be seen as a functional design pattern to build generic types.[3] [LINK] Otherwise, it's syntax and semantics, which I generally find annoying, but there's always google and books. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9148513,"author":"l4mbda","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Understanding Monoids using F#","text":"This whole video is worth watching, but a simple monoid overview is here: [VIDEO] It's not a difficult concept.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9635718,"author":"zabi_rauf","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Monads in Elixir","text":"I've seen the same video before i knew what a monad was, it helped me in understanding the use case of monad and ultimately monad. Monad is just a generalization of that particular use case. Some resources that helped me in understanding monads 1. Brian Beckman: Don't fear the Monad - [VIDEO] 2. Functors, Applicatives, And Monads In Pictures - [LINK] 3. Three Useful Monads - [LINK] So its been not just one resource but multiple resource before it hit me that it was such a simple concept. So i would suggest to go over them (in order) and also look at other resources (mentioned by others).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11460314,"author":"kika","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Monads Explained Quickly","text":"I'd suggest a longer (1 hour) but much more correct explanation. It doesn't use math beyond high (or even may be middle) school. Video, unfortunately. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13270167,"author":"RossBencina","month":"2016-12","story_title":"What Is Abstract Algebra? [video]","text":"In a Group, every element has an inverse element. If you drop this property, you get a Monoid.[0] Functions under function composition form a Monoid (or Monoidal Category). Brian Beckman did a nice intro video to this at MS Channel 9 a few years back.[1] [0] [LINK] [1] \"Brian Beckman: Don't fear the Monad\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17007576,"author":"mitchty","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Monads for functional programming (1995) [pdf]","text":"Thats me here too! >.< Yeah the hidden subtext here was my presumption in that suggestion was someone was learning monads in Haskell and has at least a basic understanding of Haskell. Sorry if those papers threw you into the deep end. Monads really were thrown into play due to trying to make a pure functional programming language useful. I found the more mathematical explanation a lot easier than any analogies involving say burritos or pipes etc... At first glance to imperative programmers I will admit all of this just looks like a bunch of navel gazing. I thought the same thing, but once you let go of thinking of computation as a series of steps and at a bit of a higher abstraction this makes a lot more sense. For a more soft introduction to the concepts this channel 9 video is probably a bit better: [VIDEO] Another option might be to just get the haskell programming from first principles book: [LINK] Does a good job grounding you up to monads and gives copious amounts of reference material. Even though I already knew haskell when I read the book it helped clear up some gaps I didn't know I had. But monads are going to be really weird no matter if all you've ever seen is imperative programming. Despite the fact that you already use them and have probably discovered them without knowing you did. Much like learning stack based programming languages, sometimes the only way up is to climb off the computational hill you're familiar with to learn another way to the other hill side","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31653160,"author":"omginternets","month":"2022-06","story_title":"The Lazy Monad","text":"[VIDEO] I found Brian Beckman's video Don't Fear the Monad was extremely helpful for understanding monads as a practical user. I now use them everywhere. I don't know the first thing about category theory.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40559492,"author":"lkuty","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Monads are like burritos (2009)","text":"Good tutorial I think and I also appreciated reading the beginning of [LINK] and watching \"Don't fear the Monad\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Zk11vI-7czE":[{"hn_comment_id":22950172,"author":"mempko","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows","text":"Everyone wanting to really understand what is going on with the new green economy and these platitudes should watch Michael Moore's nee documentary he just released free on YouTube called Planet of the Humans. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24577657,"author":"largolagrande","month":"2020-09","story_title":"ZEROe: Hydrogen-hybrid aircraft concept","text":"> A lot of cheap solar energy, from the best location. I recommend that you watch the \"Planet of the Humans\" documentary to understand why there is no cheap solar energy, no so-called \"green\" energies: [VIDEO] So there will never be any \"green\" planes, no matter if they use hydrogen or kerosen. Since the minimum required amount of energy to fly from point A to point B with N passengers will always be the same.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24577713,"author":"largolagrande","month":"2020-09","story_title":"ZEROe: Hydrogen-hybrid aircraft concept","text":"I recommend that you watch the \"Planet of The Humans\" documentary to understand why there is no cheap or green energy: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24792640,"author":"hjek","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for tech","text":"> Are there serious research about how much this \"green\" tech is actually greener or not? The Michael Moore produced documentary Planet of the Humans[0] tries to answer that question. Strongly recommended. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23188707,"author":"m463","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Solar\u2019s Future is Insanely Cheap","text":"also, solar might not be solar. \"Utility scale solar\" is ambiguous and can mean solar thermal or pv solar. I think solar thermal might be a completely different animal that is not long-lived and not clean. It might be a similar situation to where \"renewable power\" turns out to me mostly burning garbage or burning trees. This documentary might be a little biased but also have some interesting insights: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24255341,"author":"acidburnNSA","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Solar panels are starting to die, leaving behind toxic trash","text":"The Moore Documentary got lots of flack but does raise some pretty good points, particularly about combustion of biofuel. You can see the whole thing here: [VIDEO] I disagree with the movie's conclusion, which seems identical to yours. We can use tech to keep quality of life high by using responsible and sustainable energy systems like nuclear/wind/solar/hydro. PoTH hardly even mentioned nuclear, which tears their whole \"we must depopulate\" narrative apart easily.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24828362,"author":"olivermarks","month":"2020-10","story_title":"\u201cAssault on Reason\u201d Endangers Democracy (2008)","text":"I think the Gibbs/Moore film 'planet of the humans' is highly pertinent to this thread. [VIDEO] Blood & Gore come across very poorly as cynical green capitalists in this 2020 documentary. [VIDEO] The profit motive Generation investment management/ Blood and Gore [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33804858,"author":"olivermarks","month":"2022-11","story_title":"EU climate plan sacrifices carbon storage and biodiversity for bioenergy","text":"'Planet of the humans' made trenchant points on three issues 1. The global population is exploding in size and the main cause of environmental anxieties [LINK] 'From 2017 to 2050, it is expected that half of the world\u2019s population growth will be concentrated in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the United States of America, Uganda and Indonesia (ordered by their expected contribution to total growth)'. [LINK] 2. Sierra club and other environmental 'non profits' are condoning the burning of astonishing amounts of wood at the altar of electricity worship for questionable reasons, despite their mission being to save forests 3. The EU appear to have abandoned any sort of strategic foresight, betting the farm on unproven and unreliable wind and solar power claims while shutting off energy to the people they serve in the middle of winter, while simultaneously destroying the ability to travel with punitive restrictions on personally owned vehicles. Absolute madness. The Caliban on the US west coast are the EU's twin organization. ____________________________ [VIDEO] Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will \u2014 that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road \u2014 selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America . This film i","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34486476,"author":"idiocrat","month":"2023-01","story_title":"'A complete failure' Japan's 'fantasy' hydrogen strategy does nothing","text":"Here is an interesting but sad documentary from 2020. (1h40m). It addresses the concerns about hydrogen. \"Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will \u2014 that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road \u2014 selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement\u2019s answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It's too little, too late. \" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Zklo4Z1SqkE":[{"hn_comment_id":34484988,"author":"nazgul17","month":"2023-01","story_title":"'A complete failure' Japan's 'fantasy' hydrogen strategy does nothing","text":"Sabine Hossenfelder recently made a video about hydrogen. Her point is that it is not a good choice for decarbonization, but as part of the video she goes though the various \"hydrogen colors\" and their meaning. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36271620,"author":"funnymony","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Wind-to-Hydrogen Production Reaches Deep Water","text":"If you have some time: [VIDEO] (Sabine Hossenfelder) If I remember video correctly, summary would be: not yet","stance":"rec"}],"ZlfIVEy_YOA":[{"hn_comment_id":11790716,"author":"marlag","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Crying","text":"Sharing my cryiest ever video clip, when Stanford Professor Andrei Linde celebrates physics breakthrough: [1]. I've seen it thirty times and I cry (oh, the tears) every time. I also cried at the end of Real Steal. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7416137,"author":"DangerousPie","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Gravity waves from Big Bang detected","text":"They made a nice video of the researcher surprising Prof Linde with the news: [VIDEO] The reaction of the couple is great!","stance":"rec"}],"ZmNOAtZIgIk":[{"hn_comment_id":2503855,"author":"apu","month":"2011-05","story_title":"Neural Networks making a come-back?","text":"A good intro page with lots of links: [LINK] A lot of the newest work is under a few different names: \"deep learning\", \"convolutional deep networks\", \"unsupervised feature learning\", etc. Here's a great talk by Andrew Ng of Stanford, who's a recent convert to this area: [VIDEO] (Note that this is quite a one-sided view of things, but it does convey the excitement of deep-learning researchers and the potential of what might be possible.) Although I'm not in deep learning myself (I'm a computer vision researcher), here's a TL;DR as I understand it: rather than having people in specific domains such as computer vision or speech processing create their own features, the idea is to take raw inputs (pixels in the case of images) and train multi-layer neural net architectures that \"learn\" the relevant higher-level features in an unsupervised way (i.e., without labeled training data). Some of these seem to be pulling out interesting features and perform competitively on a few benchmarks in vision and other fields. I'm not sold on this yet, because it seems like the complexity of designing features has merely been traded in for the complexity of designing different learning architectures, but it's certainly becoming quite popular these days (mostly led by Geoff Hinton of Toronto, Yoshua Bengio of Montreal, and Yann LeCunn of NYU).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4146995,"author":"brutuscat","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Microsoft Research make breakthrough in audio speech recognition","text":"This seems very related to this [VIDEO] speak by Andrew Ng. It is a 40min speak, but he explains very simply how all this works for images and some examples about the audio case. It is incredible how using this deep learning techniques we can teach this \"neural networks\" to recognize such complicated patterns. It is like reverse engineering the brain's algorithms. BTW I took his Coursera's course about Machine Learning and it was great! I also recommend it A LOT to gather basic ML knowledge.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4163788,"author":"kevin1024","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Google & Stanford create a digital brain that learns to identify a human face","text":"Check out this (awesome) talk: [VIDEO] There are a number of areas in which unsupervised feature learning outperforms the hand-programmed models we have been fine-tuning for decades.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4403845,"author":"FrojoS","month":"2012-08","story_title":"Brains, Sex and Machine Learning (Geoffrey Hinton at Google Tech Talks)","text":"Thanks for pointing this out. Here is a similar awesome by Andrew Ng [VIDEO] who teaches the original Coursea Machine Learning class.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4829309,"author":"pilooch","month":"2012-11","story_title":"Scientists See Promise in Deep-Learning Programs","text":"the one overview I've found the most useful is [VIDEO] (Bay Area Vision Meeting: Unsupervised Feature Learning and Deep Learning by Andrew Ng in April 2011).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5528222,"author":"michael_nielsen","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Neural Network Visualisation in Clojure","text":"Andrew Ng has a fantastic example of visualizing deep belief nets: [VIDEO] The example starts at about 18:20. You really need to have watched the previous material to understand it, but the basic idea is that he's plotting the hierarchy of features learned by successive layers of a deep neural net (a sparse autoencoder, IIRC, it's been a while since I watched it).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2665926,"author":"colincsl","month":"2011-06","story_title":"Andrew Ng: Machine Learning in Robotics","text":"Here is a more in-depth presentation he gave on the same subject at a Google Tech Talk: [VIDEO] (April 11, 2011)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3220133,"author":"dave_sullivan","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Stanford computer diagnoses breast cancer more accurately than human doctor","text":"They kind of hint at it in the article, but sounds like automatic feature detection really helped here. That's really the future (or present): learning algos discovering better features automatically, significantly cutting down the labor involved in feature engineering. Pretty neat. Here's a video talking about current research into this at Stanford: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4146957,"author":"robrenaud","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning","text":"Andrew Ng has set many state of the art results on various data sets using similar approaches as the one described in the paper. Here is a reasonably approachable talk he gave about it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ZmWREtcDVBE":[{"hn_comment_id":34084143,"author":"rhdunn","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The Decline of the City Grid","text":"There was a recent Tom Scott video ( [VIDEO] ) where he was using a GPS and Tom Hutley (a London cabbie) only relied on his London knowledge to get around, travelling the same distance after reaching certain landmarks. It was interesting to watch.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49241209,"author":"phist_mcgee","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's","text":"They also have to remember where roadwork is/was and what kind of traffic is best/worst at a given time. There's a fantastic Tom Scott video on it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"Zn7oWIhFffs":[{"hn_comment_id":18981722,"author":"dvtrn","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Absolutely Right About Racist Algorithms","text":"I was interested in the slide deck and wanted to hear the author expand on some of his thoughts, found a video of his presentation if anyone else is interested. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26148386,"author":"PeterisP","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?","text":"In many unbalanced situations you simply can't have an unbiased decision that's fair across all measures, no matter if the decision is done by a model, a human or a deity; you have to trade off between different types of unfairness. Equality of opportunity for individuals will result in unequal results for groups; equality of outcomes requires unequal opportunities if the historical circumstances have resulted in socioeconomic unequalities. In your financial evaluations example, many biases and disadvantages would remain even if you solely reduce the decision to relevant financial facts for a specific individual, because a poorer individual with lower socioeconomic status and less opportunities actually has a higher risk of non-payment, and a disadvantaged group will have disproportionally more such individuals. Should we accept that? Should we require the other groups to subsidize their non-payment? Both options are unfair in some aspect and fair in another, you can't have your cake and eat it too, and it's not the fault of the model you use - the only difference with a human is that they can better hide the factors they use, lie about the influences (perhaps also lie to themselves) and rationalize/invent factors to justify their decision. For this topic, perhaps this talk \"AI Ethics, Impossibility Theorems and Tradeoffs\" [VIDEO] or its slides [LINK] might be interesting for you, it has some flaws but is a decent exploration of the problem space.","stance":"rec"}],"ZsRRCnque2E":[{"hn_comment_id":43772743,"author":"msarnoff","month":"2025-04","story_title":"How MOS 6502 Illegal Opcodes Work (2008)","text":"Michael\u2019s blog is one of my favorites. His \u201cUltimate Guide\u201d talks are great and I rewatch them at least once a year. Ultimate Guide to the C64: [VIDEO] Ultimate Guide to the Game Boy: [LINK] Ultimate Guide to the Apollo Guidance Computer: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2771411,"author":"psykotic","month":"2011-07","story_title":"The story of FCopy for the C-64","text":"> Back in the 80s, the Commodore C-64 had an intelligent floppy drive, the 1541, i.e. an external unit that had its own CPU and everything. I remember by the time I got a floppy drive for my C64 it was twice the price of a new C64, $400 vs $200. It was a real luxury item in those days. Obligatory link to Michael Steil's The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28554745,"author":"anyfoo","month":"2021-09","story_title":"The Ultimate Commodore 1541 Disk Drive Talk [video]","text":"Not exactly what you're asking for, but [VIDEO] while being 480p and rather noisy, was very sufficient for me to watch and enjoy the talk back in the day. The presented material does not suffer much on the relatively low resolution.","stance":"rec"}],"Ztc6QPNUqls":[{"hn_comment_id":15680934,"author":"cyberfart","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Physics Has Demoted Mass","text":"Veritasium had a video explaining this a few years back, it's one of the videos responsible for sparking my interest in physics and cosmology. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10795153,"author":"yincrash","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Physicists believe they can create matter from colliding photons","text":"A recent attempt by a physicist that makes science education videos to explain how mass exists (through different fields): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22072709,"author":"vecter","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Growing evidence that the universe is connected by giant structures (2019)","text":"This video explains where the mass of a proton comes from: [VIDEO] Based on your comments above, though, I don't think watching this would change your opinion about anything. People have been more than polite in trying to help you fix your misunderstandings, but you refuse to absorb any new information or change your views when presented with new data.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36523876,"author":"zackmorris","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time","text":"This video might help understand where mass comes from and how to potentially modulate it, because mass can be thought of as bound energy creating voids in the gluon field: [VIDEO] The Higgs mechanism affects electrons, not quarks, and is only responsible for about 1% of matter's mass. Most mass comes from the binding energy between quarks, which creates flux tubes between quark-antiquark pairs. If we add more energy to pull quarks apart, eventually the total energy added exceeds the mass-energy equivalence of another quark-antiquark pair, so a new pair gets created from the vacuum. I believe this is related to the Casimir effect, but IANAP (physicist). Keep in mind that the mass-energy equivalence also applies to time. So like in the movie Interstellar, when they go down to the water planet, gravity is so high that time passes slower for them than the guy in the orbiting ship. In other words, the ship sees the landing craft move slower and slower as it approaches the surface. This difference in the speed of time near a gravity well is what slows the inner edge of a satellite slightly more than the outer, curving it along the path of the orbit, which from the satellite's perspective feels like a straight line at that velocity, because it's weightless and feels no other acceleration other than tidal force. So if someone could move large amounts of energy into a confined space with some kind of flux capacitor (is this a pun? I don't even know anymore), they could slow time ther","stance":"rec"}],"ZuXzvjBYW8A":[{"hn_comment_id":27586801,"author":"nickcox","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Ever-increasing home values are a Ponzi scheme","text":"There is definitely a serious intergenerational fairness issue here. One of the best expositions of the problem I've seen is this talk by Tory peer (and boomer!) Lord David Willetts. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32162513,"author":"marcyb5st","month":"2022-07","story_title":"A brief history of nobody wants to work anymore","text":"I think a good explanation of the phenomenon is detailed here: [VIDEO] (it's a 50 min talk and targets the UK, but it's applicable to the Western world IMHO). The summary is: - People are working more and reaping less and less from their labor - Social security is getting both worse and less accessible for people in the working age - Working people in general have a much harder time entering the house market and when they do the bang for the buck is way worse than in the past - Retirement plans are getting worse and worse - Millennials and younger people will likely have to drastically reduce their carbon footprint by as much as a factor of 8 compared to the previous generations if we want to hit climate goals for the century Apart for the carbon one, the others are things I am also witnessing both in Switzerland and Italy. And with these premises I don't find surprising that people consider \"working hard\" or even working not worth it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32477085,"author":"zbuf","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Gen Z have 86% less purchasing power compared to baby boomers in their twenties","text":"You might find this video interesting from a UK perspective, I suspect with a mix of overlap and difference to the USA: [VIDEO] David Willets draws comparison of \"boomers\" to other generations, and includes what is paid into healthcare vs. what is consumed in a lifetime.","stance":"rec"}],"ZuvK-od647c":[{"hn_comment_id":10205076,"author":"slaxman","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Informative YouTube channels","text":"I can't recommend Veritasium and CGP Grey enough. They are amazing YouTube Channels! Check out this video where Veritasium explains Quantum Entanglement. [VIDEO] It amazes me how he explains something so difficult in less than 10 minutes!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10586532,"author":"gibybo","month":"2015-11","story_title":"The quantum source of space-time","text":"Check out [VIDEO] It's my favorite video for explaining how we know that the state is not determined until it has been measured. It's not just a decision we thought up on paper. It is real and well proven.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9053934,"author":"gbelote","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Quantum Physics and the Abuse of Reason","text":"If quantum-entangled particles exist (they do) you can use them to coordinate in a way that's impossible within a \"hidden variable\" model of the universe. You can dig into this by searching for \"bell's inequality\" or \"bell test experiments\", there are a few different experiments that have been done many, many times. There's a pretty good Veritasium video that explains one such experiment in non-physicist terms: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12299218,"author":"blueplanet200","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Interactive explanation of the quantum Bell test","text":"[VIDEO] is a good overview that I really like for Bell's inequality. Worth a watch if you have the time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13351913,"author":"strmpnk","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Bell's Theorem: No EPR \u201cReality\u201d","text":"I don't think that explanation is clear. It takes a bit more work to get something which proves the experimental difference. One of the better explanations I've seen is regarding measuring spin with three state detectors: [VIDEO] This would give specific probabilities to certain outcomes (not just 50/50) IF there were a local hidden variable. (Note: the word local is important there. It means information encoded and carried by or with the particles themselves.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16307335,"author":"CookieMon","month":"2018-02","story_title":"You thought quantum mechanics was weird: check out entangled time","text":"If you watch for more than 4 minutes, this 9 minute video explains how Bell proved that the particles can't have been given opposite \"ball colors\" at the time they became entangled. [VIDEO] It's quite clever how he proved it, and that it's actually possible to rule out \"information that we're just not aware of\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19406161,"author":"chii","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Experimental rejection of observer-independence in the quantum world","text":"> it's both simply because it hasn't been measured ... Meaning it's either one or the other A common misconception about quantum superposition is that the particle \"has\" some state, and we only use superposition to model that we \"dont know\". This is called the hidden-variable theory ( [LINK] ). It's been proven that this hidden variable theory can't be true because of [LINK] . This is completely non-intuitive. See this video for a laymen's explanation: [LINK] (you may also need to watch the prev. video about the EPR paradox [LINK] ). Edit: actually, this is a much better video [VIDEO] - less technical and more visual.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32044810,"author":"rhinokungfoo","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Record-setting quantum entanglement connects two atoms across 20 miles","text":"Your example is akin to the Hidden variable theory (in the example the hidden variable will be the fact the two letters are copies). Bell's inequality tests have ruled out the hidden variable theory. Veritasium has a good video explaining Bell's inequality - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33078503,"author":"GolDDranks","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger","text":"You understood correctly that quantum mechanics cannot be based on some hidden variable we haven't or cannot find. (Edit: oops, I re-read your comment and it seems you say the exact opposite thing? The point is that Bell's theorem rules hidden variables OUT. Here's an easily digestible video about this: [VIDEO] ) About probability: no one knows. It might be that there is a \"wave function collapse\" that has a probabilistic outcome. But it might be that there is no such a thing. Quantum mechanics that remain in the \"quantum\" realm are not probabilistic, it's only when you cross over to the classical world. So it might be equally well, that the Everett interpretation (so-called \"many worlds interpretation\") is true, and the probability is something physicist Sean Carroll calls \"self-locating uncertainty\": [LINK] That is, there are multiple \"yous\" that experience different outcomes, and you don't know which branch of the wavefunction you find \"yourself\" in, which \"you\" you are.","stance":"rec"}],"_-mBeYC2KGc":[{"hn_comment_id":48658870,"author":"DanielHB","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner","text":"If you are in the market for a portable AC I highly recommend you watch this video first: [VIDEO] People seem to be catching on this and some brands now offer portable mini-splits ACs, I just bought this one (waiting for it to arrive though): [LINK] However they are still quite expensive.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24024704,"author":"slig","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Hacking Portable Air Conditioners","text":"Very interesting video from Technology Connections < [VIDEO] \"Portable Air Conditioners - Why you shouldn't like them\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24231109,"author":"dghughes","month":"2020-08","story_title":"\u201cCold Tube\u201d cooling system uses half the energy of an air conditioner","text":"Portable air conditioners are bad. All the hot components are in the room with you and it takes air from the room and blows it outside. Technology Connections has a good video about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27612772,"author":"LeoPanthera","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Will Work for Air-Conditioning","text":"If anyone is considering buying a \"portable\" air conditioner - the kind that rolls around on wheels - know that they are pretty awful. If you must buy one, at least buy a \"dual hose\" version. Single hose versions suck air out of your house, causing fresh, but hot, air to be sucked in through all the vents, gaps, and cracks in your house. Window units or \"split\" systems are far more efficient and work much better, at the downside of cost and installation fees. Technology Connections has a very good video (with perhaps excessive detail, but it is very interesting) about them, here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31974736,"author":"aPoCoMiLogin","month":"2022-07","story_title":"New study lays out hidden backstory behind deadly Pacific Northwest heat wave","text":"not op but was in same situation for few years as in my region A/C is somehow luxury and a lot of landlords don't mount them. the issue with portable A/C is that most of the units needs to stay inside apartment, the cooling happens by compression/decompression of coolant, which produces heat and cold. so the A/C unit is producing additional heat that it needs to chill, which makes it inefficient. also these units are loud as fuck, most of them above 65dB. so if you are in need, look for units that have the ability to channel cold air to the house from outside. otherwise you should always avoid portable A/C as it is really inefficient. here's better explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_0QMKFzW9fw":[{"hn_comment_id":38346800,"author":"bjoli","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Friends don't let friends make certain types of data visualizations","text":"I have never liked violin plots,but I am very much not in the field of data visualisation. Just a week ago I stumbled on a video titled \"violin plots should not exist\" which made things fall into place: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40767397,"author":"j_bum","month":"2024-06","story_title":"I've stopped using box plots (2021)","text":"I disagree about violin plots being better. Here is a great rant (borderline lecture) from Angela Collier on why they aren\u2019t [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_160oMzblY8":[{"hn_comment_id":15107689,"author":"dave7","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Storj: Not a Dropbox Killer","text":"This is much more basic than academic level, for which you could maybe start with the original Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin white paper? - but this video is a fantastic introduction [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15504655,"author":"andreasklinger","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Blockchains explained visually (part 1 of 2)","text":"My favorite: [VIDEO] It explains from ground up without getting complicated - it basically demystifies the whole thing completely i give this to everyone - even to non technical people","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16310897,"author":"phn","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Would like to learn blockchain tech, where do I start? What to build?","text":"If you're really wondering what a blockchain actually is, this video is a really good intro: [VIDEO] If you want something a bit more hands-on, I'm currently following this course: [LINK] I have only made it through the first section, and it does a really good job of explaining the basics of Ethereum and what a smart contract actually is.","stance":"rec"}],"_2LEgowbzSc":[{"hn_comment_id":26733676,"author":"mwlp","month":"2021-04","story_title":"A record label bringing Iranian music to the world","text":"I've been wanting to visit Iran ever since I watched this video: [VIDEO] , where a guy tells the story of him riding a Honda C90 through the country.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27838564,"author":"thinker403","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Mr. Rafieh\u2019s Tehran Pencil Shop","text":"To anybody with a cynical view of Iran and its people I highly recommend watching this fairly recent documentary about a British guy riding a motorcycle through the country. The people seem like some of the most friendly in the world. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12531490,"author":"NaliSauce","month":"2016-09","story_title":"I quit my job, bought an army truck, and spent 19 months circumnavigating Africa","text":"On a only slightly related note: there's a guy who drove across a lot of Asia and Europe on a C90. He filmed some of it and cut it togheter. Here's an example: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22170894,"author":"TomVDB","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Trapped in Iran: My Summer as a Guest of the Revolutionary Guards","text":"There was this British guy who drove from Beijing back home on a Honda C90 moped. His video about Iran is heartwarming. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_3loq22TxSc":[{"hn_comment_id":25541357,"author":"gregsadetsky","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"I would also very highly recommend you watch this talk about PowerPoint\u2019s Turing-completeness \u2014 [VIDEO] It\u2019s from the same person (Tom Wildenhain) as your video, but this is an hour long, there\u2019s an actual audience (that\u2019s supportive and spends most of the talk in disbelief), and the end with recursive slides / fractals is an absolute mind melt. Strong recommend! :) Thanks for the suggestions/reminder!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38615716,"author":"gnatman","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best tech talks you have heard in 2023?","text":"\"Great Impractical Ideas in Computer Science: PowerPoint Programming\" Tom Wildenham (2019) [VIDEO] Really fun, kinda blew my mind. Guy got a job at Microsoft shortly after giving this talk.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22040853,"author":"K0SM0S","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The \u201cNo Code\u201d Delusion","text":"I think this drives your point with incredible wit: \u201cOn The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint (SIGBOVIK)\u201d by Tom Wildenhain[1]. (5 minutes video) [1]: [LINK] (Nerding out should always be hilarious like that!) [2]: Recording of a guest lecture he gave for the Esoteric Programming Languages course at CMU. (~1h) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41030425,"author":"jjmarr","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best YouTube lecture you've seen recently?","text":"[VIDEO] PowerPoint programming by Tom Wildenhain. He does not use VBA macros, just shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing Complete.","stance":"rec"}],"_6pl5GG8RQ4":[{"hn_comment_id":16950773,"author":"dawie","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?","text":"You and your team should watch this 3 times right now: [VIDEO] It\u2019s about finding product market fit after a few different products. It talks about how their new successful product (150 staff) is a small feature from one of their other products and how they scaled that! Do it!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41395320,"author":"ed","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Superhuman built an engine to find product market fit (2018)","text":"Having followed this exact playbook to validate several products I can confidently say this will give you false positives and the only reliable way to determine when you have PMF is: accidentally get PMF on something so that you know what it feels like (it\u2019s unmistakeable). Peter Reinhardt from Segment has a must-watch talk for anyone interested in this topic [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16949746,"author":"hhw3h","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?","text":"Jason Lemkin recommends giving it 24 months to start a B2B SaaS. B2B SaaS is a long road despite the big splashes sometimes seen like Slack or Intercom. [LINK] Also watch the CEO of Segment talk about their journey to product market fit. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24969894,"author":"thojest","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Twilio wraps $3.2B purchase of Segment after warp speed courtship","text":"For those interested in Segment, this is a talk of Peter Reinhardt about Product Market Fit and a bit of the history behind Segment. [VIDEO] I like this talk really much.","stance":"rec"}],"_7X6Yeydgyg":[{"hn_comment_id":34486903,"author":"FireInsight","month":"2023-01","story_title":"I, Libertine","text":"Speaking of Polybius, the best gaming-related video essay produced! [VIDEO] Ahoy is top notch in terms of quality on Youtube IMO.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42349975,"author":"proxysna","month":"2024-12","story_title":"RollerCoaster Tycoon was the last of its kind [video]","text":"Ahoy is one of the best creators on the platform. I\u2019d would recommend his video about Polybius. Great stuff. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"_8bhtEgB8Mo":[{"hn_comment_id":13527536,"author":"platz","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe","text":"Black hole Firewalls with Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette (45m+50s quick summary of the holographic principle) [VIDEO] Leonard Susskind on The World As Hologram (more dense/verbose) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20800033,"author":"platz","month":"2019-08","story_title":"How do black holes destroy information and why is that a problem?","text":"Also see Black hole Firewalls - with Sean Carroll (speaking at 20:25) and Jennifer Ouellette [VIDEO] which explains the paradox and several different competing theories at a high level.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24950122,"author":"andreareina","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The Black Hole Information Paradox Comes to an End","text":"There's a Royal Institute video featuring Sean Carroll and Jen Ouelette[1] that more fully explains the problem, but as I understand it it comes down to a quantum mechanical principle called monogamy of entanglement---there's only so much entanglement to go around, and if two particles (e.g. the pair of Hawking radiation particles) are fully entangled then they cannot have any amount of entanglement with anything else (e.g. information about the black hole). The result in TFA breaks the entanglement between the Hawking pair, allowing the outgoing particles to encode the black hole's information. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31289871,"author":"joncp","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Where do space, time and gravity come from?","text":"Sean Carroll is a master of making quantum mechanics approachable to non-physicists. Here are a few of his talks: - Fermilab 2013: [LINK] - The Royal Institution 2014: [VIDEO] - The Royal Institution 2020: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"_9B__0S21y8":[{"hn_comment_id":16573891,"author":"ajmurmann","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Modeling Redux with TLA+","text":"Hillel gave a pretty interesting talk on TLA+ at last year's StrangeLoop: [VIDEO] If you are new to TLA+ and just want to get the basic idea and use cases, I recommend the talk. Edit: I think he also brought home made granola or something. So attending his talks in person has benefits.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17523744,"author":"bandwitch","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Learn how to design large-scale systems","text":"I feel TLA+ would be too much to ask in a system interview which is what this site is about. In case anybody is interested, there is a nice talk by Hillel Wayne on youtube ( [VIDEO] ) that provides a high-level overview on what TLA+ is about.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44004045,"author":"cess11","month":"2025-05","story_title":"The first year of free-threaded Python","text":"The literature on distributed systems is huge. It depends a lot on your use case what you ought to do. If you're lucky you can avoid shared state, as in no race conditions in either end of your executions. [VIDEO] is fairly concise and gives some recommendations for literature and techniques, obviously making an effort in promoting PlusCal/TLA+ along the way but showcases how even apparently simple algorithms can be problematic as well as how deep analysis has to go to get you a guarantee that the execution will be bug free.","stance":"rec"}],"_9mzmvhwMqw":[{"hn_comment_id":13098792,"author":"dkarapetyan","month":"2016-12","story_title":"This AI Boom Will Also Bust","text":"Moore's law has been dead for a while now. Most of the chip in your phone is powered off because otherwise it would burn up. Highly recommend watching this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14454344,"author":"gens","month":"2017-05","story_title":"The Race to 10/7nm","text":"It is hard (read expensive) to go under 14nm. Sophie Wilson talks about it much better then i could. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_ArVh3Cj9rw":[{"hn_comment_id":41524675,"author":"owenpalmer","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Learning to Reason with LLMs","text":"\"The Future Of Reasoning\" by Vsauce [0] is a fascinating pre-AI-era breakdown of how human reasoning works. Thinking about it in terms of LLMS is really interesting. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41914569,"author":"purgedreality","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite YouTube video, ever?","text":"Journey to the End of Time - [LINK] Veritasium on Thermite reaction - [LINK] Problems of a Shared Office - [LINK] History of the entire world, I guess - [LINK] Colin Furze Underground Activities - [LINK] Future of Reasoning - [VIDEO] Sex in Trek - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"_BNIkw4Ao9w":[{"hn_comment_id":23803017,"author":"sbmthakur","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Tell HN: 6.3% of HN top submissions in plain HTTP, more than half upgradable","text":"This was the article that convinced me to be HTTPS everywhere (well maybe in 99.99% cases if not everywhere). The linked video is a must watch to those who still doubt HTTPS[0]. The mention of China's Great Cannon was particularly eye-opening[1]. 0. [VIDEO] 1. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37251118,"author":"DigitalNoumena","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Learn the basics of digital electronics with the hands-on Logic Lab kit","text":"[LINK] The whole video is great, but particularly this: [VIDEO] [LINK] There are a lot of arguments about why, even non-secret data connection need encryption. The first and most obvious is that not doing so immediately puts a target on the encrypted data. By no means an expert but to me it seems like an oversight not to.","stance":"rec"}],"_B_4vhsmRRI":[{"hn_comment_id":29202740,"author":"_peeley","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Why Lisp?","text":"Not really. With Clojure you don't even have to leave your editor (I use Emacs with the fantastic CIDER package). You can put your cursor over an S-expression, hit two keys, and evaluate and see the results of the S-expression directly within the text buffer. The feedback loop is so quick it's basically instant - even tabbing over to a browser or terminal window feels lethargic in comparison. I haven't used Common Lisp much, but I've seen a few really impressive demos of debugging in its available REPLs. This is a longer one, but a good tour of SLIME (also an Emacs package): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40128726,"author":"spit2wind","month":"2024-04","story_title":"An Exploration of SBCL Internals (2020)","text":"This is what the lisp repl is like. There's not much else like it: [VIDEO] PS: You can also do copy and paste :)","stance":"rec"}],"_ByEBjf9ktY":[{"hn_comment_id":33015677,"author":"pronlover723","month":"2022-09","story_title":"The most dangerous road for cyclists in America","text":"You're looking for fault and there's something to that but there's also just re-designing the streets to prevent the accidents in the first place [VIDEO] also [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33033077,"author":"dagurp","month":"2022-09","story_title":"The most dangerous road for cyclists in America","text":"I'm not talking about markings, I'm talking about designing crossings so that pedestrians and cyclist don't have to watch out for turning cars and improving traffic lights so that pedestrians and cyclist don't feel the need to run red lights. Here are two really good videos about this that talk about this: - [VIDEO] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"_Cm6EFYktRQ":[{"hn_comment_id":8003853,"author":"mitchtbaum","month":"2014-07","story_title":"The Government Once Built Silicon Valley","text":"A great documentary on FidoNet's rise with superb music and universal themes: [VIDEO] A modern tale of care for a bright and reliable future, search: project byzantium fidonet","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21669773,"author":"harrigan","month":"2019-11","story_title":"History of Fidonet (1993)","text":"BBS: The Documentary Part 4 ( [VIDEO] ) has some great interviews with Tom Jennings & co. on the beginnings, growth and decline of Fidonet. \"It just runs in spite of the idiots.\" (Tom Jennings)","stance":"rec"}],"_Cp-BGQfpHQ":[{"hn_comment_id":14412894,"author":"justboxing","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Show HN: FreshTube \u2013 show latest videos from YouTube channels","text":"Thanks for this feed example. Found this gem in there. A beautiful technical / engineering take on why Juicero failed, after he takes apart a brand new Juicero => [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17204623,"author":"picklesman","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Which YouTube channels do you watch regularly?","text":"Seconded. I especially recommend his teardown of the Juicero, in which he displays his insights into design for manufacture, plastics, metallurgy, electrical engineering, etc, peppered with hilarious and insightful jabs at VC culture. For me, it's his masterpiece. [VIDEO] My wife recently watched all 45 minutes and was entertained throughout, despite her not being technical at all. Speaking of which, I also share a distaste for his \"engineering boys club\" sense of humour. I think his heart is in the right place (though who knows?), but it's definitely from another era, one that I won't be sad to see fade off into the distance. That being said, the rest of the components of his humour (obscure Canadianisms, etc) are great and I enjoy the particularity of it. EDIT: added link","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22367056,"author":"msisk6","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Teardown of a $1.25 LED Lightbulb","text":"You'll probably like the product teardowns of youtube user AvE. He usually does tools, but also the random appliance or product from time to time. His teardown of the Juicero is a classic: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25818621,"author":"ryandrake","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Review broken products instead of new ones","text":"He did a great and hilarious teardown of that failed Juicero product that came out a year or so ago [1], noting how ridiculously overengineered and expensive it is to produce. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37342857,"author":"jacobwilliamroy","month":"2023-08","story_title":"X-ray CT scans of coffee equipment: Aeropress, Fellow kettle, Moka pot","text":"You just reminded me there's a video on youtube of a guy literally tearing a Juicero apart and it's hilarious: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39294879,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Vision Pro teardown part 2: What\u2019s the display resolution?","text":"There is a great tear-down video of a juicero on YouTube where the guy makes comments the whole way through about how every part is ridiculously over-engineered: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_DTpQ4Kk2wA":[{"hn_comment_id":8606328,"author":"progman","month":"2014-11","story_title":"J for C Programmers","text":"APL without native fonts isn't fun at all. This is real fibonacci in APL: [LINK] [LINK] This is a nice introduction into APL: [VIDEO] And this is how APL is applied in the right way: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13906894,"author":"cgrubb","month":"2017-03","story_title":"GNU APL 1.7 Released","text":"I think this is a good youtube video for someone starting from zero: [VIDEO] An issue is how to enter the symbols. The way I do it is I created some input methods for Mac and Windows which use at-signs followed by the APL community name for the symbol: @times \u00d7 @grade \u234b @reverse \u233d @domino \u2339 [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20729144,"author":"curiousgal","month":"2019-08","story_title":"J can look like APL or English","text":"There is something so charming about the attached video [0]. It's very reminiscent of the original APL demonstration [1] from 1975. I love it! 0. [LINK] 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20818306,"author":"hhas01","month":"2019-08","story_title":"A+, the Programming Language of Morgan Stanley","text":"I think the key to understanding APL is realizing that it\u2019s not built for Programmers; it\u2019s built for Mathematicians. Here\u2019s a fine half-hour introduction to APL in action: [VIDEO] 1:00-2:00 is the motivation for APL\u2014or any DSL\u2014in a nutshell. (\u201cconversational computing\u201d, \u201cusers who are [not] professional programmers\u201d) Or, if you\u2019re happy to sit back and see math magic happen: [LINK] For all its mechanical advances over the last 40 years, it\u2019s shocking how far our technology has regressed philosophically.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29248103,"author":"jazzyjackson","month":"2021-11","story_title":"IBM unveils 127-qubit quantum processor","text":"Thanks for sharing. I worked on the UIUC campus for some time right by the greenhouses where they experimented with cultivars of corn and other grasses, always funny to see giant 8 foot tall plants lit with sodium lamps through the winter. As for APL, I haven't really got past an orientation in the language but it's held a total mystique to me since seeing this video circa 1975 [0] walking through the language with a Selectric teletype acting as a REPL, totally flipped my understanding of computer history, I assumed it was all punchcard programming back in the old black and white days xD (I am born 1990 for reference, trying to catch up with what happened before me) [0] (30min) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_GVSLcqGP7g":[{"hn_comment_id":29967029,"author":"skibz","month":"2022-01","story_title":"OpenLara","text":"I found some fascinating coverage of the OpenLara project, specifically for the port of Tomb Raider to the GBA. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33070861,"author":"jamesgeck0","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The lost art of handheld demakes","text":"My favorite handheld port is this fan-made port of Tomb Raider to GBA. It's not even a demake, just a really optimized re-implementation of the engine. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_IgqJr8jG8M":[{"hn_comment_id":32127078,"author":"carapace","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Why concatenative programming matters (2012)","text":"I didn't see it linked from the article, Jon Purdy has a great talk about this too: \"Concatenative Programming: From Ivory to Metal\" (2017) [VIDEO] There's also \"A Conversation with Manfred von Thun\" [LINK] which is worth reading (IMO) if you're interested in concatenative languages. He's the creator of Joy. I've been working with Joy over the last few years now and I really think there's something there. It seems to combine the best features of both Forth and Lisp.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22069983,"author":"nemo1618","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Factor: A Practical Stack Languge","text":"I don't know if it's Baader-Meinhof or what, but I'm seeing concatenative languages all over the place now. Which is great, because now I'm planning to write my own! My gut says that a concatenative language could be ideal for competitive programming, where you want to quickly apply various transformations to your input and immediately see the result. Here's a talk I watched recently describing some of the neat mathematical properties of concatenative languages: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31492849,"author":"carapace","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Minimalism in programming language design","text":"Hear, hear! Wise words from the genius who created Turing Drawings. It's becoming more and more important to treat complexity as a kind of technical debt that has the potential at any moment to metastasize into eldritch horror. I've been playing with what you could call a minimalist programming language: Joy created by Manfred von Thun (who was a philosophy professor! See \"A Conversation with Manfred von Thun\" [LINK] ) It combines features of Lisp and Forth, and I suspect it may be the simplest useful language. The syntax is enormously simple, and the semantics are likewise simple. It's easy to reason about functions and derive them in a mathematical way using simple algebra, so it's hard to introduce bugs. I recently found a very good 2017 talk by Jon Purdy describing concatinative programming and it's quirks and (potential) advantages: Stanford Seminar - \"Concatenative Programming: From Ivory to Metal\" [VIDEO] Anyway, it's made me \"allergic\" to complexity. I tried Rust. Wrote the beginning of a Joy interpreter. I paused for a month and came back to it and it had become Greek to me, and I can't read Greek. :( Now part of that is just I 'm getting old, but a lot of it is the complexity of Rust. I don't want to pick on Rust though, complexity itself is the enemy (Rust is, if anything, an improvement on most of what has come before it, eh? I think only Ada can really be said to be Rust's peer?)","stance":"rec"}],"_KRb_qV9P4g":[{"hn_comment_id":38521897,"author":"nyx","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Switch off bad TV settings","text":"Counterpoint: this YouTube rant by an animation person called Noodle is a pretty good overview of why frame interpolation sucks. [VIDEO] Basically, low FPS can be a stylistic choice, and making up new frames at playback time often completely butchers some of the nuances present in good animation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40396495,"author":"zbirkenbuel","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Sakuga-42M Dataset: Scaling Up Cartoon Research","text":"Can't have a conversation about inbetween frames without sharing this[1] Noodle video. Now granted the interpolation there is pretty rigid, and the goal of this dataset will be to train an LLM replicate hand tweening, but I can't help but feel there's going to be a massive uncanny valley. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40908951,"author":"vgbm","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Roku update turns on hated motion-smoothing feature, with no off switch","text":"A really good video on the subject: [VIDEO] The gist is that, for animation, frame interpolation messes with intended timing and can produce incoherent images on interpolated frames and odd frame rate issues for certain kinds of animations. Interpolation can thus cause animations to lose their punch and feel wrong. While interpolation may be nice for live action films, it should still be an option to turn off.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40909038,"author":"kec","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Roku update turns on hated motion-smoothing feature, with no off switch","text":"This video is laced with profanity and focused specifically on animation, but give a pretty good overview of why interpolation does not inherently make things look better: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_L3gNaAVjQ4":[{"hn_comment_id":46740659,"author":"nomel","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Open-source self-driving for 325 car models from 27 brands","text":"There's a few Lex Fridman podcasts with George Hotz, the founder. Highly recommend them: #31 [LINK] #132 [VIDEO] #387 [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25503334,"author":"wsc981","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent","text":"> US e-Dollar. Or FedCoin as George Hotz called it recently in a Lex Friendman podcast [0]. P.S.: I thought this was an entertaining podcast, George is a funny guy. --- [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25540382,"author":"imaginenore","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"George Hots interview by Lex. [VIDEO] Lots of topics covered: self-driving, immortality, UFOs, cryptocurrencies, Tesla/Waymo/OpenAI, GTP-3, AI, book recommendations.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25554449,"author":"pizzabearman","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite Podcast Episode of 2020?","text":"First episode is really good but the second time he was on lex podcast was even better in my opinion: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26154911,"author":"AlbertoGP","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Comma.ai, self-driving cars and indefinite optimism","text":"Just watched today George Hotz\u2019s interview in Lex Fridman\u2019s podcast from last October, 3 hours talking about many interesting things including comma.ai and how it compares with Tesla\u2019s approach. He even mentions HN a couple of times: [VIDEO] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32715412,"author":"merryje","month":"2022-09","story_title":"On Device Learning","text":"He was on the Lex Fridman podcast twice. He's definitely an interesting guy. I've been following comma.ai for some time now it's really cool seeing how much they've accomplished. August 2019 - [LINK] October 2020 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_NuvwndwYSY":[{"hn_comment_id":19684147,"author":"dpedu","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Restoring a Teletype Model 15","text":"CuriousMarc, a volunteer at the Computer History Museum, recently finished a video series restoring two Model 19 teletypes into working order. It's a long series but eventually explains how the devices work at all levels, and shows off some of the more niche features of the ttys. Well worth the watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23944836,"author":"BinaryRage","month":"2020-07","story_title":"FAA issues emergency directive on 2,000 Boeing 737 NG, Classic planes","text":"I was staggered by how much adjustment was required when watching CuriousMarc's excellent Model 19 restoration series, seems incredibly finicky. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_P9HqHVPeik":[{"hn_comment_id":7683336,"author":"munro","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Interactively Programming Flappy Bird in ClojureScript","text":"This was no where near as painful as some talks I've seen, where the speaker is programming. Like running of time, and only being half way through the talk. Live coding definitely slows down the momentum. A good example of coding demos is Stephen Wolfram introducing the Wolfram language [1]. 12:55 minutes of pure ecstasy :D [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7369786,"author":"jdp","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Wolfram Programming Cloud ","text":"For some background on the language, check out Stephen Wolfram's intro video: [VIDEO] The demos are all pretty impressive, and putting aside the breathless marketing of the programming cloud page, this looks awesome.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7539000,"author":"andreyf","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Alan Kay at Demo: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental","text":"Stephen Wolfram's demo he referred to doesn't appear to be up yet, but this one from a couple weeks back is pretty sweet: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9553766,"author":"outworlder","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Wolfram Language","text":"> tl;dr: The Wolfram Language is an ok 30-year-old language I don't think it is just 'OK'. It is lispy, with a HEAVY emphasis on symbolic computation. I have yet to see anything even remotely similar to it. EDIT: There's also the visualization aspect. Things like Jupyter (formerly iPython) come close, but still can't do things like render video. If you don't want to read the article, there's this video: [VIDEO] (initial ego trip skipped) (Another edit: fix typo)","stance":"rec"}],"_YWMGuh15nE":[{"hn_comment_id":7256105,"author":"TacticalCoder","month":"2014-02","story_title":"As much Stack Overflow as possible in 4096 bytes","text":"In a different style, the \"Elevated\" demo, coded in 4K (you'll have a hard time believing it if you haven't seen it yet): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":569351,"author":"barrettcolin","month":"2009-04","story_title":"Awesome Procedural Terrain Generation","text":"Check out 'Elevated' - winner of the 4k PC demo category at Breakpoint 2009. It's a fly-through of a realistic looking procedurally generated terrain model with music and some fancy post processing effects all squeezed into a <4096 bytes executable. Even my moderately high-end PC can't run it (I suspect because it shoves an overwhelmingly huge triangle mesh at the GPU) but there's a video here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1362404,"author":"z303","month":"2010-05","story_title":"The Demoscene -- an Overview","text":"Two more by Farbrausch the.popular.demo [LINK] and Candytron (64K) [LINK] For some newer releases blunderbuss by Fairlight [LINK] is very different is style but still very cool and two post about the particle system behind the demo [LINK] [LINK] Elevated by Rgba & TBC [VIDEO] is a great example of what people can do in 4K, and they even have a presentation about the technical details [LINK] and State of the Art by Spaceballs [LINK] is a highpoint of the amiga scene (edited to add, which I should have clicked on the link to see it had already been embedded)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3958563,"author":"vmind","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes","text":"Cool, but I think my favourite 4k demo is still Elevated, which is much less obviously procedural. ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12184864,"author":"userbinator","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Show HN: A simple infinite world in WebGL","text":"Indeed, keep going, and you may reach this level of awesome: [VIDEO] (Quite realistic terrain generated by a 4 kilobyte binary, along with music . Source code and its discussion here: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23309662,"author":"dwrodri","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The Vanishing Of Ashlar: 4kb demo using GPU for sound and pathtracing","text":"I know that a huge part of the demoscene culture is keeping your trade secrets close, but I'd love to see a YouTube playlist where authors or people with significant graphics experience do in-depth teardowns. Those of us like myself who only take a passing interest from afar are still blown away by how amazing results of demos like \"elevated\" from 2009 [1]. I've heard I\u00f1igo Qu\u00edlez, but I am curious if there are people interested in doing teardowns of winners moreso than elementary concepts (although of course the latter is much more applciable outside of the demo scene). 1= [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43541828,"author":"karteum","month":"2025-04","story_title":"The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden","text":"It's 12 years old now, but I am still extremely impressed by this 64k intro [LINK] and also by this 4k intro [VIDEO] :) And overall this website is extremely interesting with tutorials and code and great explanations [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"_YysNM2JoFo":[{"hn_comment_id":6575520,"author":"jlgreco","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Sloane's Gap.","text":"Background on the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences: [LINK] Very good video on Sloane's Gap, for the impatient: [VIDEO] The article is particularly interesting to me for it's examination of what complexity theory tells us to expect for the distribution of 'interesting' integer sequences. That cultural influences can (probably) have such a dramatic and measurable effect on something like mathematics is fascinating as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13294968,"author":"Houshalter","month":"2017-01","story_title":"2017 is not just another prime number","text":"Well the first number that doesn't appear in OEIS is 18159. That make it interesting to me , but apparently this number isn't interesting to mathematicians. Of course since OEIS is finite, there will always be numbers which don't make it. What's really interesting is that some numbers are disproportionately underrepresented. They appear much less often than other numbers of the same size. And if you plot each number by the number of times it occurs, it makes a really interesting pattern: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_ZG8HBuDjgc":[{"hn_comment_id":21139050,"author":"simonebrunozzi","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy: 40 years of parody and predictions","text":"Obligatory mention of one of his most wonderful talks [0]: \"Parrots, the Universe, and everything\" [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22523097,"author":"simonebrunozzi","month":"2020-03","story_title":"\u201cThe Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy\u201d turns 42","text":"Obligatory mention for every fan of Douglas Adams: \"Parrots, the Universe, and everything\". [0] Watch the whole thing. You will thank me later. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23983358,"author":"simonebrunozzi","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Riding the Rays (1992)","text":"Douglas Adams is one of my favorite writers, and intellectuals, ever. If you are like me, you absolutely have to watch this hour-long presentation he gave at UC Santa Barbara in 2001 [0], titled \"Parrots, the Universe, and Everything\". Mind blowing. His last book, \"Last chance to see\" [1], which is about endangered species, is heavily related to that talk. I recently learned that Douglas Adams had a chance to play on stage at Pink Floyd's 28 October 1994 concert at Earls Court in London [2], playing guitar on the songs \"Brain Damage\" and \"Eclipse\". He's even responsible for the 1994 album name \"Division Bell\" by Pink Floyd. David Gilmour and Douglas Adams were good friends. Well, what can I say... It sucks that he went away too soon. I'd love to read more of his stuff, and I'd love to know his take on today's world. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34345245,"author":"simonebrunozzi","month":"2023-01","story_title":"When Douglas Adams wrote about Hypercard","text":"If you love Douglas Adams, like I do, watch \"Douglas Adams: Parrots, the Universe and Everything\" [0], if you haven't done so. Heck, even if you did years ago. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43376646,"author":"tombert","month":"2025-03","story_title":"So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams","text":"I don't know what you categorize it as (I usually call it an \"educational standup\"), but his last talk before his death \"Parrots, The Universe, and Everything\" is one of the greatest things I've ever seen. It's very funny, with a lot of interesting anecdotes about his life, with a lot of interesting facts about animals, and he manages to tie the entire thing together with a pretty clever theme about the environment. I genuinely think it's one of the greatest public speeches ever done, at least in the English language. If you haven't seen it, it's an hour and a half long, and it's totally worth it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21138802,"author":"dylan-m","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy: 40 years of parody and predictions","text":"In the same way, I'd also recommend Last Chance To See for a slightly different flavour of Douglas Adams. His whimsical style is remarkably well-suited to a non-fiction nature and travel book. I can't say I completely get his science fiction books, but I felt the constraints of a non-fiction book gave me a new appreciation for his sense of humour and his way of balancing that with thoughtful, meaningful exposition. It's one of my favourite books :) He gave a great talk about it, too: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41013675,"author":"Keegs","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The Later Years of Douglas Adams","text":"My favorite book is Douglas Adams\u2019 Last Chance to See . He talks about it here [0] and IIRC he says it was his favorite book to write. Adams took a dark subject - endangered animals and our role in their extinction - and told a story that\u2019s equally hilarious and hopeful. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43374131,"author":"sidmitra","month":"2025-03","story_title":"So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams","text":"Hitchhikers guide was a personality defining read for me when i was younger. I also recommend this video: Parrots, the Universe and Everything [VIDEO] Just this week i was looking for more humour writing like Douglas Adams, PG Wodehouse. I came across this award which seems interesting. [LINK] I plan to read some of them this year.","stance":"rec"}],"__wn9zXFiy8":[{"hn_comment_id":18116975,"author":"dvno42","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?","text":"For Networking in the ISP space, for me the most helpful have been: - Interdomain Multicast Routing: Practical Juniper Networks and Cisco Systems Solutions - Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture - MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies This one's not a textbook but proved invaluable to me in learning optical networking: - New and Updated - Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Optical Networking - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15013500,"author":"madsushi","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Optical Networking [pdf]","text":"YouTube link for the most-recent talk: [VIDEO] I've seen a couple versions of RAS' talk and learn something new every time.","stance":"rec"}],"_ahvzDzKdB0":[{"hn_comment_id":9741194,"author":"tikhonj","month":"2015-06","story_title":"The Tragedy of the Common Lisp, Or, Why Large Languages Explode","text":"He gave a brilliant talk about it: \"Growing a Language\"[1]. The idea is to make languages that grow \u2014ones that provide a small, uniform core that can be extended by the user. Ideally, these extensions feel like first-class citizens: things added by users should feel on par with built-in language features. It's still one of the best technical talks I've ever come across. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15090857,"author":"gnaritas","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?","text":"Not a paper, but one of my favorite talks [VIDEO] Growing a Language by Guy Steele (co-inventory of Scheme). Brilliant speech about how to grow languages and why it's necessary. Languages that can be grown by the programmer, like Lisp or Smalltalk are better than languages that fixed like most others, this is why.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22588178,"author":"pfarrell","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991)","text":"Haven\u2019t read it but remembered this paper being mentioned in Guy Steele\u2019s fabulous \u201cGrowing a language\u201d talk [0]. I don\u2019t want to give anything away about the talk (which is one of my absolute favorites), but Steele says about the title of this paper: \u201c... the truth is that Dick Gabriel knew how to choose words with punch\u201c 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31210903,"author":"kaba0","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang","text":"This is probably the best talk ever on the general topic: [VIDEO] [Growing a language by Guy Steele], seriously give it a look if you have the time and do put up with the seemingly strange start. But at around the end it asks this (paraphrasing): Should a language have complex numbers implemented natively? Should it have numbers module n implemented natively? What about intervals, or rational numbers? I also dislike the ridiculous overloading of cryptic symbols, but neither extreme is good. Not allowing overloading will give you BigDecimal.of(3).add(BigDecimal.ONE).divide\u2026 , while allowing it unrestricted will give you things like msg #!! something. But perhaps a sane middle ground is to allow only basic operators (+,-,*,/) to be overloadable.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10548656,"author":"gramasaurous","month":"2015-11","story_title":"A Basic Guide for Curious Minds: Review of \u201cThing Explainer\u201d","text":"Reminds me of this[0] talk by Guy Steele where he explicitly defines any word outside of a given set before he can use that term in his speech. Interesting language exercise, definitely worth a watch! [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10568382,"author":"pixelmonkey","month":"2015-11","story_title":"For Better or for Worse","text":"I recently watched Guy Steele's \"Growing a Language\" talk. It's very much related to jmoiron's post here, and is worth a watch despite its age: [VIDEO] Steele's commentary on \"Worse is Better\" seems to me to be a better representation of the original essay than the one expressed here about Go. Steele says: \"The gist of ['Worse is Better'] is that the best way to get a language used by many persons is not to design and build 'The Right Thing,' because that will take too long. In a race, a small language with warts will beat a well designed language because users will not wait for the right thing; they will use the language that is quick and cheap, and put up with the warts. Once a small language fills a niche, it is hard to take its place.\" In other words, the lesson of 'Worse is Better' is that getting a 'good enough' thing to market, and benefiting from the network effects of its widespread use, will always beat getting the 'the really good' thing to market in the same category, because the cost of delay is the loss of (community) network effects. The illustrative example here is UNIX and C, but it can be easily cross-applied to more recent projects. From that vantage point, Go isn't a good example of 'Worse is Better'. It occupies the same niche as C, but was delivered nearly 4 decades later. It seems to be a \"second edition of C\" designed with very explicit goals of correcting specific deficiencies of C as a systems programming language, but without the scope creep that ch","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11441587,"author":"skystrife","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Cleartext: A text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English","text":"This idea reminds me of an amazing talk by Guy Steele: [VIDEO] He starts the talk by assuming monosyllabic words as his primitives and builds up the words he needs to use to give the talk by providing definitions for them first.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17990016,"author":"e12e","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Show HN: TechYaks \u2013 Best of 50k tech talks ranked by confidence intervals","text":"Maybe these are mostly too new, or you have different (more practical, hands on?) definition of tech-talk - but from a quick look the only speakers I expected - and found - were Sandi Mets and Rob Pike. If it's practical, I'm surprised not to see the js \"wat\" lightning talk (which I now can't seem to find...). If it's more general \"best of\", I'd expect something like Guy Steele \"growing a language\" : [VIDEO] Douglas Engelbart \"the mother of all demos\": [LINK] Alan Kay \"doing with images makes symbols\": [LINK] Or, if that's too long, the much more condensed ted talk: \"a powerful idea about teaching ideas\": [LINK] (Maybe that's not a \"tech talk\"?) Rich Hickey \"simple made easy\" : [LINK] To name a few of the top of my head.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20504657,"author":"peterkelly","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Multi-Layer Dictionary (2016)","text":"If you like this, you'll definitely enjoy the talk \"Growing a Language\", by Guy Steele: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45100005,"author":"elric","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Growing the Java Language [video]","text":"Brian Goetz mentions Guy Steele's 1998 lecture \"Growing a language\" [1]. It's worth a watch if you haven't watched it yet. It's been discussed on HN several times [2]. Java gets a lot of flack in these parts, mostly by people who don't use Java and pull opinions out of their arse, but you'd be hard pressed watching both talks and not being impressed by the effort that's going into continuously improving the language. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46322586,"author":"NiloCK","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Show HN: Learning a Language Using Only Words You Know","text":"Enjoyers of this concept would probably like this wonderful talk about programming language design by Guy Steele (Sun, Java Language): Growing a Language [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_b4qKv1Ctv8":[{"hn_comment_id":23021578,"author":"loceng","month":"2020-04","story_title":"YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine","text":"\"And I also think you take away responsibility of the viewers if they don't need to be critical about any information.\" This is exactly the problem currently though - the general population doesn't have either the time or critical thinking developed to understand this. Daniel Schmachtenberger on Eric Weinstein's The Portal episode #27 said: \u201c... and the most awesome thing of the current system [of suppressing unruly people] we don\u2019t even have to deal with protestors with tear gas or bean bags or whatever mostly, because mostly addiction, and student debt, and information overwhelm and those things deal with the people adequately so they don\u2019t actually understand enough or care enough or have the capacity to organize very meaningly.\" Eric replied: \u201cWe just legalize weed and make porn free and everyone\u2019s de-motivated..\" - timestamped link to talk [VIDEO] - but I'd highly recommend watching the whole interview. The goal has to be getting the population healthy enough to be responsible and reasonable, rational enough, otherwise these hierarchal systems lead by people are guiding this like parents raise children until people are mature enough; the extreme of this would be CCP controlling China's population.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23696324,"author":"halfcat","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The world should think better about catastrophic and existential risks","text":"I wish there were more interviews with Daniel Schmachtenberger. His interview on Eric Weinstein\u2019s podcast [0] was also great. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_bDXXWQxK38":[{"hn_comment_id":37676752,"author":"TechTechTech","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Nucor and Helion to Develop 500 MW Fusion Power Plant by 2030","text":"If you want to learn more about Helion, I recommend you watch this excellent video by Real Engineering [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34039469,"author":"jseliger","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Why fusion will never happen","text":"Video regarding Helion that sama just posted: [VIDEO] . Note that Helion says it can get D + D to work, which eliminates much of the OP's concern about tritium. The company is also hiring: [LINK] I do not personally have the ability or knowledge to independently evaluate claims, but the history of \"it will never work\" for something that does not outright violate the laws of physics as we understand them is notable too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34069618,"author":"HarHarVeryFunny","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Nuclear physicist explains why fusion ignition is hailed as a major breakthrough","text":"I'm far more excited by the innovative Helion fusion design, which unlike the NIF is intended for commercial use, and is in an advanced stage of development. NIF seems more like a way to conduct military related nuclear physiscs research rather than intended/suitable to ever be used for power generation. [VIDEO] Helion seems far more practical than the Tomahawk designs such as ITER, which seem they'll be too expensive to compete with solar/wind.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34584179,"author":"mpwoz","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Cargo airships could be big","text":"There's a fusion startup called Helion near Seattle working on this, it'll be really exciting if it pans out at scale. This video was a fascinating watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36969358,"author":"PuffinBlue","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Electronic Structure of LK-99","text":"Regarding fusion - have you seen Helion\u2019s approach? [0] It seems their approach removes many of the issues with Tokamak or Laser Pulsed fusion. It also reduces most of the feedstock issues with the two part fuel breeding approach. Their approach seems easier to be optimistic about. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_bP80DEAbuo":[{"hn_comment_id":47380806,"author":"soulofmischief","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Montana Leads the Nation with Groundbreaking Right to Compute Act","text":"This research presentation from Benn Jordan will hopefully change your mind on the noise issue and its consequences. I highly recommend it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47755410,"author":"schainks","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal","text":"Plugging this video about infrasound, which I only recently learned was a thing: [VIDEO] These datacenters can be built in ways to limit this kind of noise pollution, but it appears local leaders do not think about things like this that can truly harm their constituents.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48216656,"author":"Torn","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200","text":"This is a really great watch from Benn Jordan on the topic [VIDEO] Some wild things happening with those, and infrasound. Colossus is shown 4 mins in","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48243168,"author":"e40","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Why We've Filed a Referendum","text":"Watch these [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] Then, tell me if you want to live anywhere near those. Then, tell me of a nuclear power plant that has that bad a repo.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48482100,"author":"code_biologist","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Meta steals a tactic from Tesla and builds data centers in tents","text":"Yes, the noise pollution is insane. Benn Jordan's YT video \"Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons\" is an insightful, scary 30 min video covering the datacenter infrasound noise, and the nasty things infrasound does to people: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_fHfgU8oMSo":[{"hn_comment_id":25386329,"author":"EGreg","month":"2020-12","story_title":"We can have democracy or we can have Facebook","text":"It\u2019s more than facebook. It\u2019s CAPITALISM. People have to always preface any criticism of it by saying \u201cthere is nothing at all wrong with capitalism, but...\u201d But no, the actual ECONOMIC SYSTEM and the incentives and constraints it exerts on institutions and organizations is responsible for what is happening. It selects for the current types of organizations and outcomes by its very nature. You see, both our news and our social networks are driven by a profit motive and face market competition . Thus they are forced to adapt to changing circumstancss in certain ways: Act 1. Journalism was disrupted by the Internet, and survived by adopting the FOX News model of locking in an audience and being biased, showing one part of the story. MSNBC explicitly did it, while CNN jumped the shark after the Malaysian Airlines flight, realizing it can lock in audience. One sided clickbait outrage articles are the norm. There is some attempt to have journalistic integrity and policy focus at Vox and NowThis, but then you also have MotherJones, OccupyDemocrats, DailyKos and more on the left. You have all kinds of independent podcasts like TYT network, Kyle Kulinski, David Pakman, Majority Report, etc. And similarly for the conservatives, libertarians, etc. We are divided also because giant corporations like Sinclair Television bought up all the local stations and outlets, resulting in this: [VIDEO] No really, watch it. It\u2019s black mirror level, and you can see the capitalism at work here. Top do","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30632652,"author":"Minor49er","month":"2022-03","story_title":"DuckDuckGo \u201cdown-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation\u201d","text":"It doesn't need to be a secret. If you have a megaphone that everyone hears all the time, you will simply have more influence than people who whisper quietly. 6 companies dominate the media [1] which together make up at least 90% of all media [2]. Note that this isn't limited to just news. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] Also, you might find this video either amusing or alarming [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34820265,"author":"justin66","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them","text":"> In one small consolation, in both cases Americans had more trust in local news. This trust in \"local\" news is often misplaced given how many local news outlets - television stations or newspapers - have been subsumed by larger interests. For anyone who hasn't seen it, the Deadspin video of dozens of local news anchors reading the same editorial content handed down by Sinclair Broadcast Group is striking: [VIDEO] [LINK] There is an awful lot of really, really good stuff put out by local newspapers and TV stations but people ought to be thoughtful about their use of any media.","stance":"rec"}],"_fQtxKmgJC8":[{"hn_comment_id":31061951,"author":"abeisgreat","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen","text":"A lot of the story regarding the Tetris split between Nintendo and Tengen is covered in the great Gaming Historian video [The Story of Tetris]( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33947783,"author":"mafuyu","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Made in the USSR: 6 video games Soviets went crazy over","text":"The creator, Alexey Pajitnov, was eventually able to see some money from his creation after emigrating to the US and cofounding The Tetris Company. The Gaming Historian channel has a great documentary video on it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33948037,"author":"joe__f","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Made in the USSR: 6 video games Soviets went crazy over","text":"[1] is an excellent and fascinating documentary on the history of Tetris, how it came about and the different business struggles in the West to license the game, which was challenging given that it originated in the USSR [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37212327,"author":"jmyeet","month":"2023-08","story_title":"9% price increase for .COM and .XYZ domains starting Sept 1, 2023","text":"This is what capitalism is: intermediation, rent-seeking and creating a regulatory moat around a monopoly. Some time ago I watched this excellent video on the history of Tetris [1]. The only \"innovation\" of capitalism in this entire story are layers of licensing agreements. Again: intermediation, rent-seeking and regulatory moats (through intellectual property). A domain is nothing more than a digital record. The cost of providing that service is essentially zero. The cost should be pretty much zero. You'd have to do something about squatting but, hey, that's already an unaddressed problem. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_fZOl7C_vDI":[{"hn_comment_id":16403947,"author":"sharkweek","month":"2018-02","story_title":"In Switzerland, it's now illegal to boil a live lobster","text":"Love that whole series of essays in the Consider the Lobster collection - you can also listen to several of them on YouTube and I have to say Wallace\u2019s tone when reading the essays makes them more enjoyable [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19527270,"author":"unmole","month":"2019-03","story_title":"The Weird World of Vegan YouTube Stars","text":"> They don't have brains or central nervous systems, I would very highly recommend reading David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster . You can either buy the book of the same name which includes other essays or here's a PDF of the original article: [LINK] and here's a video of DFW reading it out: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_gXiVOmaVSo":[{"hn_comment_id":36596680,"author":"StevenOtto","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Bret Victor: Update July 2023","text":"His latest demo of Realtalk, Biomolecular design in Realtalk, showcases the strenghts of Dynamicland. Really impressive stuff, as usual. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34488120,"author":"jimmySixDOF","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?","text":"This is the latest thing I know of from him and was recorded at the 2022 Foresight Designing Molecular Machines Workshop talk called \"Nanoscale Instruments for Visualizing Small Proteins\" & Bret Victor comes in about 14:14 [1] It shows just how far the Dynamicland concept can be pushed into a hyperspecific feature set customized to fit a single domain -- because they can deconstruct the user experience to that level of detail. Extending a Tangible UI out to the actual OS itself has been the thing at Dynamicland from the get go but here we see it finally as physical 3d objects participating with realtime digital feedback in the built environment !! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34491078,"author":"jimmySixDOF","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?","text":"Please see his latest demo you might need to update those priors (Bret Victor on stage aprox 14:14) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_gXlauRB1EQ":[{"hn_comment_id":30015783,"author":"DerArzt","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Roblox October Outage Postmortem","text":"To add, there is a nice documentary here[1] which also has a followup[2] that show even more of the issue at hand. Kids making games and only getting 24.5% of the profit is one thing, but everything else that Roblox does is much worse. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33117561,"author":"pull_my_finger","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Roblox sued for allegedly enabling young girl\u2019s sexual, financial exploitation","text":"Some interesting related investigation (I think they mention this girl in the second video) related to roblox is anyone is interested. I had never used it, but after seeing these I don't think I would ever use it or encourage anyone to use it. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35311028,"author":"shagie","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access","text":"People Make Games is one of the YouTube channels that I respect in this domain... Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers - [VIDEO] Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39038417,"author":"follower","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?","text":"The YouTube channel \"People Make Games\" has a couple of reports that I'd suggest parents consider watching first before going down that road: * \"Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers\": [VIDEO] * \"Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.\": [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40478965,"author":"teddyh","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Lessons Learned from My First Roblox Game","text":"The one being exploited is the developer. From the article: > I spent $100 on advertising after publishing the game More information: < [VIDEO] >","stance":"rec"}],"_ivqWN4L3zU":[{"hn_comment_id":37778126,"author":"empath-nirvana","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Pythagorean Theorem Found on Clay Tablet 1k Years Older Than Pythagoras","text":"What everyone is talking past here is that the Babylonians discovered what engineers call a \"rule of thumb\", and engineering is focused on getting things done using rules of thumb. The best possible rule of thumb is a mathematical proof or a scientific discovery, but it's by no means necessary. . Observing that something always holds and even having a formula for it is not the same thing as having a proof, and the proof is what makes it mathematics and geometry and not \"just\" engineering. The babylonians had a rule of thumb -- the greeks discovered the theorem -- and more than that, they seem to have invented the mathematical/geometrical proof as a concept, along with formal logic. Without that mental framework, it's hard to say that the babylonians proved anything or had any theorems at all, only collections of rules of thumb. It's quite likely that lots of babylonians sort of independently and intuitively understood _why_ it must be true, but they don't seem to have ever written it down. Not that there's anything wrong with having rules of thumb -- it's a huge achievement to even notice and collect and teach those things, all the stuff around you is built relying on them. I encourage everyone to watch this series of videos. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48729631,"author":"sublinear","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Open Source Low Tech","text":"As other comments have implied, but not explicitly said, they do their own engineering already with what they have. Since materials can be scarce and inconsistent, much of it is improvised. That in no way diminishes their efforts, results, or knowledge. If anything, that's way more impressive. Lots of engineers in the first world will throw a tantrum if they can't have things exactly their way and probably still make something that doesn't work as well. Entire businesses have shit their pants and gone bankrupt the moment a part is discontinued. Trying to do better than the people who live there is not only arrogant, but it's own variation of Chesterton's Fence. EDIT: I can't help myself and have to post an engineerguy video. It's too important of a topic to not drive this point home crystal clear by someone who is far more respected than me. \"Building a Cathedral without Science or Mathematics: The Engineering Method Explained\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35964316,"author":"mayormcmatt","month":"2023-05","story_title":"The Sourdough Framework","text":"Just yesterday I started watching the video series promoting Bill Hammack's book \"The Things We Make\" in which he discusses how many incredible ancient structures were built using rules of thumb rather than an actual understanding of the science /math underpinning their strength. Truly fascinating. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37438737,"author":"mcpackieh","month":"2023-09","story_title":"China's ancient water pipe networks","text":"> or building slender towers supported on intricate networks of arches without engineering calculations or even Newtonian physics. In fact engineering solutions came long before Newtonian physics. Bill Hammack aka engineerguy has a good video about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40562766,"author":"oscare","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?","text":"Lately I've come to understand the term engineer somewhat differently from this excellent video from the 'engineerguy': [VIDEO] He defines the Engineering Method as: 'Solving problems using rules of thumb that cause the best change in a poorly understood situation using available resources.' In that sense a Software Engineer would not necessary need to know all the complexities of the complete system to make something work as specified. And I would equate a 'Programmer' more like the Scientist or Mathematician in this case. Funny how there are so many different ways to look at a title.","stance":"rec"}],"_loUDS4c3Cs":[{"hn_comment_id":15092395,"author":"eutropia","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Why people believe in conspiracy theories \u2013 and how to change their minds","text":"My favorite response to moon landing conspiracy theories is the counter point that we didn't have the technology to fake the live footage. It was actually easier to go to the Moon than it was to fake it, given the video technology at that time. There's a great YouTube video about this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24523008,"author":"herbstein","month":"2020-09","story_title":"It was more efficient to blow up a real 747 than to use miniatures or CGI","text":"This video goes through why the video technology at the time simply wasn't even good enough to enable faking the moon landing. Even if they wanted to. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_o7qjN3KF8U":[{"hn_comment_id":26741086,"author":"rozab","month":"2021-04","story_title":"EFF's reply to cease-&-desist letter \u2013 \u201cVirtual Coachella\u201d parody video","text":"Here's the actual video: [LINK] These guys have a lot of relevant content for HN types, they're really funny. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40132191,"author":"beezlebroxxxxxx","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Krazam OS","text":"Their video \"The Hustle\" [1] is such a pitch perfect shot at a very common person in tech (and in NYC/SF especially). The \"read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations in bed on my Nook - didn't understand shit!\" comes back to me almost weekly reading HN comments sometimes. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41572473,"author":"kratom_sandwich","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Krazam: High Agency Individual Contributor [video]","text":"Piggybacking to recommend another video of his, \"The Hustle\", which is a fast-paced memefest: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_rBO8neWw04":[{"hn_comment_id":30149364,"author":"ejolto","month":"2022-01","story_title":"My dishwasher won\u2019t start until I let it update its firmware over the WiFi","text":"I don't have any issues putting dirty dishes in my dishwasher. Do you use pre-wash detergent in your machine? I highly recommend you watch this video by Technology connections[1], I too used to think I had to rinse my dishes before putting them in the machine. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30152236,"author":"chillingeffect","month":"2022-01","story_title":"My dishwasher won\u2019t start until I let it update its firmware over the WiFi","text":"This[0] and this[1] are the ultimate dishwasher talks. From what I gather, European dishwashers heat the water, while American do not. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30897405,"author":"bentcorner","month":"2022-04","story_title":"How to get kids to do chores: Does the Maya method work? (2018)","text":"I love this video: [VIDEO] Dishwasher pods are heavily marketed in the US and actually wash more poorly compared to plain powder. With pods the pre-wash ends up running without detergent, so rinsing off dishes becomes necessary.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35097379,"author":"lbutler","month":"2023-03","story_title":"I Splurged for the Fanciest Dishwasher and It Was Worth It","text":"For those that haven't seen them, the two Technology Connection videos on dishwashers are must watch 1 - [VIDEO] 2 - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38990853,"author":"mastercheif","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Cars suck, man","text":"Technology Connections\u2019 video on dishwashers will change your life. [VIDEO] Ever since I switched to powdered detergent and started throwing a pinch of powder in the bottom of the tub in addition to filling up the main dispenser halfway, I have not had a single dish come out with a piece of food on it. I also recommend disabling any \u201cauto\u201d features of dishwasher has. The only caveat to this video: don\u2019t fill up the detergent dispenser all the way with powder, go about halfway. He corrects this mistake in his follow-up video, which I also recommend.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27005718,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2021-05","story_title":"SSD makers start warning that mining products like ChiaCoin will void warranty","text":"Technology Connections has got you covered: > Ever wonder how dishwashers work? Are you ever bummed by the performance of yours? Well, this video can answer your question and possibly provide you with a solution! * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27587928,"author":"sp332","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Are Dishwashing Machines Bullshit?","text":"You don't have to pre-clean dishes. This video is a bit long-winded but gets the point across. [VIDEO] One person doing one person's worth of dishes is pretty manageable. Once you get more people involved, or if you're getting a lot of utensils dirty while making something fancy, it can be a whole different story. Also, I think they use less water than washing by hand, but again this depends on how many dishes you put in there at a time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28456489,"author":"balefrost","month":"2021-09","story_title":"How to properly load a dishwasher (2020)","text":"Somewhat related: if you want to watch a 32 minute video about how to properly use a dishwasher, here you go: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30148526,"author":"slantyyz","month":"2022-01","story_title":"My dishwasher won\u2019t start until I let it update its firmware over the WiFi","text":"Sadly, I don't think dishwashers will last 20 years any more. Since 2005, I'm on my third dishwasher. The first one lasted 9 years, the second one around 5 (with one under warranty repair). At some point the repairs/parts cost more than what the original dishwasher is worth. Regarding the algorithm, I'm not sure they make a huge difference anyways. FWIW, The Technology Connections channel on YouTube has a couple of pretty interesting videos on how dishwashers work and how to get the most out of them: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31556204,"author":"rubenbe","month":"2022-05","story_title":"I disabled WiFi on the new Samsung fridge","text":"I stopped using the default \"eco\" program and switched to the faster \"auto\" program on my dishwasher since watching this video on how these programs actually work: [VIDEO] TLDwatch: eco programs use only one batch of water, others use two and that results in cleaner dishes with the added benefit of a faster program.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35040974,"author":"bick_nyers","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Nobody needs a faster dishwasher \u2013 solve real user needs","text":"Dishwashers contain a heating element no? Not sure if booster powder is a specific product but yeah detergent on the little lip of the main detergent door is a significant help. For those interested, here is a wonderful 30min deep dive by none other than Technology Connections about dishwashers and detergent usage: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36556253,"author":"harrisi","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Workers with less experience gain the most from generative AI","text":"I've gone back and forth with dishwashers my whole life, spending years with followed by years without, etc. and I finally am team dishwasher. There are a few tips I've learned, such as immediately rinsing a dish after using (I don't bother scrubbing), running the hot water for a minute before starting, using the pre-wash detergent and shine stuff appropriately. I also don't bother entirely filling it up to run it - which may seem wasteful, but I'd imagine filling it completely and having to rewash some percent of them ends up being more wasteful. Also, just like getting a manual dishwashing routine figured out, dishwashers are all different and need to be learned like any tool. Understanding where pieces are, which cycles run when, which compartments open and close and even how they do it, are all important. It really is best to think of it as a tool. Some useful videos: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37461513,"author":"enragedcacti","month":"2023-09","story_title":"To Make Dishwashers Great Again? (2020)","text":"For anyone who is upset with the performance of their dishwasher there is a really really easy thing to try. First, replace your pods with a box of powder detergent, then add some detergent to the prewash cup on your dishwasher in addition to the normal dispenser. If your dishwasher doesn't have one you can just put some on the door before you close the washer. This gives your dishwasher detergent to work with on two of its cycles rather than just one and in my experience it makes all the difference on really difficult dishes. The pods are effectively identical to the powder detergent but at a huge cost premium and don't give you the ability to adjust your amount of detergent to match the water hardness in your area which can result in a film on your clean dishes. for more info there is a great Technology Connections video covering it: [VIDEO] Alternatively you can test this by just throwing an extra pod in the bottom of the dishwasher to start with. If it works well then you can consider switching to powder to save costs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42499321,"author":"zahlman","month":"2024-12","story_title":"I just found out I've been using my dishwasher wrong for 7 years","text":"Relevant - since there is more to learn about operating a dishwasher: Technology Connections' series on dishwashers - [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45830573,"author":"codethief","month":"2025-11","story_title":"I was right about dishwasher pods and now I can prove it [video]","text":"I remember watching this[0] video by the OP a couple years ago. Never would have thought I could listen to someone talk about dishwashers for 30 minutes but it was surprisingly fascinating! [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_tpB-B8BXk0":[{"hn_comment_id":19990425,"author":"azeirah","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Developers with ADHD/ADD, how do you cope?","text":"Lists, logs, writing, post-its, Todo lists etcetcetc. I tend to forget stuff even while I'm doing it, so it helps a million if what I'm doing is written on a Post-It right in front of me. Also, to keep track of tasks, problems, todos etc, I have a huge text file that is bound to the ctrl-` keybinding (autohotkey script opens a file in sublime text). I think the most important thing is to externalize your mind into your environment, you might forget, but your table or text files won't. Also, make sure to watch Russel Barkley. This man is literally ADHD Jesus. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22133966,"author":"ncfausti","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Why I Procrastinate (2019)","text":"As a 33 year old who was just diagnosed with ADHD, a few minutes into reading this I knew exactly where it was going. For me, it was when I watched Dr. Russell Barkley's talk[1] and halfway through, it brought me to tears. No one before then had described exactly the way I felt on a daily basis. Since going through a full day of neuropsychological testing and being diagnosed with ADHD-I and starting medication, I feel like the me I think I am, naturally curious, optimistic, and actually following through with the things that interest me. Planning and grad school assignments just click so effortlessly now, and my stress is way down, as I am completing things in a timely manner and not fighting myself at every step of the way. If any of this resonates with you, please talk with a psychiatrist to see if this is something you're unknowingly (and unnecessarily) struggling with. Also,if you're like me and like listening to audio books at 2 or 3x speed, check out Speechify, it allows you to listen to any kind of text including rough scans of books/PDFs. It's been incredibly helpful for required readings in classes. edit: wrong video url [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9480739,"author":"joshuak","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Entrepreneurial Tendencies Among People with ADHD","text":"This 13 min video [1] also by Dr Russell Barkley is something of a summery, but the longer one is absolutely worth watching. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16610298,"author":"burntrelish1273","month":"2018-03","story_title":"In Praise of ADHD","text":"Praise? :/ Just diagnosed as an adult partially due to parents not \"believing in it,\" refused testing then and I was blind to it until now. Currently friendless, jobless, broke, homeless and a bazillion unfinished projects not exactly the picture of praiseworthy. ADHD is a misnomer, it's an executive function disorder, but the name will never change because it's embedded in disability laws. Medicating for emotional regulation, continuity of thought, completing tasks and not coming-off as weird are lifesaving... don't avoid medication out of some antivaxx nonsense. Worth watching: - ADHD Child vs. Non-ADHD Child Interview [LINK] - How To Know If You Have ADHD [LINK] - This is how you treat ADHD based off science, Dr Russell Barkley part of 2012 Burnett Lecture [VIDEO] - Dr Russell Barkley on ADHD Meds and how they all work differently from each other [LINK] - The Neuroanatomy of ADHD and thus how to treat ADHD - CADDAC - Dr Russel Barkley part 1c [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17775446,"author":"azeirah","month":"2018-08","story_title":"The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don\u2019t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do","text":"According to Russel Barkley (well known and central figure in the ADHD scientific community), you should definitely take short breaks every so many minutes. He recommends 3 mins for every 10 minutes of work, but that's for children. I think you'd want be interested in watching this video [VIDEO] Definitely check out his other work as well, listening to his talks is like reading my own diary... except translated to scientific language","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22126704,"author":"rl3","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time","text":"> Some people argue that what we're today are calling ADHD should be referred to as emotional impulsiveness. The argument is that lack of emotional control causes all kinds of symptoms ... While that's certainly a major component, I believe sensory stimulation also plays a role. Certain video games for example tend to yield considerably higher dopamine rewards in part due to their elevated degree of stimuli relative to other, less stimulating activities. It's why I can play certain games to a world-class level, and then by the same token attempt to read technical literature but find myself re-reading the same sentence a dozen times over. On that front, I've found that if I really attempt to immerse myself in a topic in every way I can, while simultaneously convincing myself on the emotional front that learning whatever I'm attempting to learn will be fantastic-it tends to result in better attention. It's as if my mind has a minimum RPM requirement to operate, and the primary challenge is just achieving a minimum speed that gets the blades moving. > I highly recommend looking it up, you should be able to find some of his talks on YouTube. Just watched a (partial?) talk of his, thank you. It was quite informative.[0] He mentioned a steady stream of fast-metabolized glucose [to the frontal lobe] helping tremendously. That's in weird contrast to my experience, as I tend to avoid virtually all refined sugars. In fact, I also fast for 16 hours every day, finding that my mental clar","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22133154,"author":"andai","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Procrastination is about managing emotions, not time","text":"I thought you might appreciate this clip from a lecture by Dr. Russell Barkley which explains how to use the environment to compensate for ADHD (externalize everything - time, to-do's, motivation, rewards, feedback) and how to keep your willpower reserves high (frequent breaks, positive self-talk and positive mental pictures, meditation and exercise). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33450345,"author":"ncfausti","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How to deal with burnout and its consequences?","text":"I have ADHD-I and I'm feeling almost exactly the same way, right up to a falling out with a company I had significant ownership in/was part of the founding team. How are your daily routines? Are you taking breaks and pursuing the things you actually enjoy doing? Have you thought much about the kind of experiences that have brought you the most joy/satisfaction in life (both at work and outside of work)? Maybe watch this video and see if it resonates with you. It's a talk by Dr. Russell Barkley on ADHD and it's what made me finally schedule a full analysis (after literally decades of putting it off). [VIDEO] If you'd like to talk I'm here to listen.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33960406,"author":"prometheus76","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The silent struggles of workers with ADHD","text":"Knowing something or knowing how to use something is not the same as using it. This is a classic struggle between those without ADHD and those with it. People without ADHD think it's just a training issue. It's really not. This is an especially difficult dynamic between non-adhd parents and adhd kids. Ask me how I know. In other words, I know how to use Outlook, and it can help. I know how to use Post-it notes. And it helps a little, but if I don't have a chance to write out a post-it note and put it in a prominent place (with the other 250 prominent post-it notes in a prominent place) it's going to get lost and/or I'm going to forget. This isn't just a \"you're just not organized\" problem. One of the bigger challenges is categorizing things. As you can see just in this post, my brain started sprawling out to all the issues that confront someone with ADHD and the scope started to spread and I started talking about other things besides your post-it notes idea. This isn't a training issue. Largely, the issue is with impulse control and a dysfunctional intrinsic rewards system. Here's a video with some actual useful advice for ADHD people and their managers: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36993836,"author":"code_biologist","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Cognitive AI for ADHD","text":"Great video I came across that expresses similar ideas about it being executive function that's the challenge, not attention. \"This is how you treat ADHD based off science, Dr Russell Barkley part of 2012 Burnett Lecture\" [VIDEO] Edit: here's a newer one by the same speaker \"ADHD as Motivation Deficit Disorder\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37211411,"author":"j33zusjuice","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation","text":"Does this all feel familiar? [VIDEO] I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s always this way, but I create emergencies and catastrophes because I otherwise have no motivation to do anything. My back has to be against the wall to get me to act. It\u2019s been a lifelong issue, I\u2019ve tried to kill myself several times because of it, and I learned it was ADHD in the last month. 100% of my issues are explained by this. I never would have guessed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42606022,"author":"lathiat","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Ask HN: My 12 year-old nephew just got diagnosed with ADHD, any advice?","text":"Medicate and try not to stop. Don\u2019t avoid it, it\u2019s life changing and the most effective intervention by far. None of the other stuff is nearly as effective. It is very likely turn their life around. As someone who was not medicated in his teenage years (Briefly in childhood and now all through adult hood. But was nissing all through school and it sucked). It\u2019s a real life changer. Look up Russ Barkley on YouTube. He\u2019s a very well known and respected ADHD researcher and clinician that has some very engaging and informative videos. Here\u2019s a taster: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_ul7X5js1vE":[{"hn_comment_id":16601664,"author":"peatmoss","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Long Live Mister Rogers' Quiet Revolution","text":"Sesame Street is like a fossil record or tree cross section for attention span in television. Some of the older Sesame Street clips like the one about milk, are trippy long format art pieces. Very very different than the quick cuts / short segments that happen today. Whether that\u2019s good or bad is up to you. I suspect the old style simply wouldn\u2019t compete for viewers today. A bonus: Stevie Wonder playing Superstition on Sesame Street might be my favorite \u201cmusic video\u201d of all time. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27112975,"author":"dang","month":"2021-05","story_title":"'Sesame Street': from radical experiment to beloved TV mainstay","text":"How could they include that and not this? [VIDEO] Edit: Youtube commenter claims the kid rocking out on the stairs is \"my cousin Lenny Kravitz\". Plausible. Am I being naive?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30967353,"author":"alamortsubite","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Frank Oz Says Sesame Street Has Gone Downhill. Is He Right? (2019)","text":"We received two PBS stations at the farmhouse where we lived in the early '70s, so obviously I watched Sesame Street twice a day. If you haven't seen Stevie Wonder's performance of Superstition on the show in 1973, I highly recommend it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_x0eyNkNpL0":[{"hn_comment_id":4072424,"author":"taliesinb","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Gmail security warnings for suspected state-sponsored attacks","text":"This. The philosopher Zizek has a great bit about the \"unknown knowns\" (the quadrant Rumsfeld wasn't smart enough to articulate). Meaning, of course, the unperceived fabric of Western ideology -- that works far better than explicit propaganda ever could. Here is exactly when he starts talking about it in his Authors@Google talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4087268,"author":"sneak","month":"2012-06","story_title":"High school teacher tells graduating students: you\u2019re not special ","text":"Watch this video of \u017di\u017eek talking about the \"unknown knowns\" of ideology to understand why this is such a big deal: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10533885,"author":"RodericDay","month":"2015-11","story_title":"We can't see our culture very well, because we see with it","text":"This concept has been developed very well, imo, by people like Zizek. I honestly don't care much for his political follies or his real academic research- when it comes to discussing ideology, he's doing the best outreach bar none. Here's him giving a talk at Google: [VIDEO] A friend of mine also parsed it well like this: > \"I think there is something to be said to the effect that laziness is actually where we can find a lot of insight - as it's when we're lazy, when we cannot be bothered, or at least where we think it is not essential to focus our attention for the sake of the work at least, that we tend to defer to the implicit shared attitudes or beliefs about the world to do the lifting for us.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30364989,"author":"ksarw","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Love is biological bribery?","text":"I used to watch some of Zizek's videos, though I hadn't seen the one that was linked until now. I'm no student of philosophy though, just a casual viewer so I don't think I can help much in answering your questions. I will say that he is definitely using uncommon definitions of the words \"love\" and \"evil\" as far as I can tell. As to who is this guy, I personally would recommend this video if you are trying to get a better sense of his thoughts as it is relatively clear and covers a large number of stances (the analogy at 7:15 is quite amusing): [VIDEO] On a side note, I am pleased though that you find him entertaining to watch regardless. I find it disappointing when people take speakers like Zizek too seriously; I think even if 80% of what is said is not insightful/intelligible, the occasional grain of truth can be very much worth it.","stance":"rec"}],"_yMMTVVJI4c":[{"hn_comment_id":41137860,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2024-08","story_title":"How I got my laser eye injury","text":"Technology Connections did an excellent video on this: [VIDEO] tl;dw -- kettles in the U.S. only take about 4+ minutes to boil a liter of water. So when you say \"now\" you really mean it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31631588,"author":"philips","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Gas stoves are more hazardous than we\u2019ve been led to believe (2020)","text":"Relatedly I found this video on electric kettles vs gas stove efficiency for heating water pretty illuminating too: [VIDEO] The summary is that a cheap electric kettle can boil water way faster and with far less wasted energy than a stove top kettle.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33498270,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Barilla passive cooker","text":"A better way to save energy is to use an electric kettle to get the water up to boiling. This is about three times as energy-efficient as a gas hob. Combined with passive cooking it could save real money\u2026 Technology Connections on YouTube has a good video about how electric kettles are the superior way to boil water: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38913603,"author":"ravedave5","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Impulse Induction Stove: boils water in 40s and has backup battery for outages","text":"Technology connections has a good video on boiling water. If you have a good way to dump energy into the water, it will boil fast. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42976429,"author":"andruby","month":"2025-02","story_title":"The origins of 60-Hz as a power frequency (1997)","text":"I don\u2019t know is toaster are close to max power draw, but kettles certainly are. Most places with 240V regularly have 16A sockets, allowing a maximum draw of 3840W of power. That\u2019s the limit. Cheap fast kettles will often draw 3000W and boil 250ml of water at room tempature in 30s. Kettles in the US are often limited to 15A and thus max 1800W (usually 1500W) and take twice as long (60s) Technology Connections has a great video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"_zSjpIyMt0k":[{"hn_comment_id":11851771,"author":"Keyframe","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Source code for 4kb demoscene production \u201cElevated\u201d released","text":"Second Reality was the best. First demo that I saw was Spaceballs' State of the art [LINK] and I vividly remember of thinking 'wtf is that, a video or what?' and then Second Reality a year later or so - [LINK] But then (I look all and every demo out there by then at the age of 13) I saw Mars demo [VIDEO] which hooked me forever on the path of graphics programming.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44541724,"author":"reconnecting","month":"2025-07","story_title":"MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today","text":"It's amazing what people achieved with the resources of the '80s, creating fairly enjoyable visuals using extremely limited technology. Another example from the early '90s is MARS.COM (1) by Tim Clarke (1993). Just 6 kilobytes and 30+ fps on a 12MHZ 286 (2). 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"_zfN9wnPvU0":[{"hn_comment_id":48931051,"author":"ColdStream","month":"2026-07","story_title":"How AI Slop Is Killing World War II History (YouTube Video)","text":"I'm glad they go in deep on the data feed back on this. Kurzgesagt made a great video on how this stuff gets generated, an article uses this, data sets get trained on this, and then future outputs will use the article as citation. [VIDEO] This is the paradox to be addressed. In trying to make LLM's more accurate, we try to pin it to citations, but then that means having to trust that the citations are accurate. But having the citations generated by an LLM means it basically becomes impossible to confirm the accuracy. As it has been said anything after 2022 cannot be reliably trusted. You can do you due diligence but that is a lot of work if you can do it. Really highlights the idea that a lie will travel around the world before the truth puts its shoes on.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45514384,"author":"zwnow","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Vibe engineering","text":"Absolutely. If the knowledge is verifiable. Kurzgesagt recently uploaded a video about this, its a lot harder to verify statements due to AI. Not easier. Here is the video in case you are interested: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45617823,"author":"ikiris","month":"2025-10","story_title":"You did no fact checking, and I must scream","text":"If you think this is trivial, I suggest watching the video kurzgesagt just did on the topic. It\u2019s much harder than you appreciate and getting massively worse as the days go by due to ai garbage. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"a-BOSpxYJ9M":[{"hn_comment_id":12639363,"author":"monksy","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Agile Is Dead: By Dave Thomas [VIDEO] I love his talks for a few reasons: Often times... 1. He's anti-hype 2. He's contriversal 3. He's right.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17159169,"author":"jrs95","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Reality Driven Development: Fixing Project Management in Software","text":"I highly recommend this video of a Dave Thomas talk about what agile was supposed to be vs what it has become. Most of us are probably stuck working with some sort of Agile methodology regardless of whether or not we'd like to, but it can still be nudged in the direction that Dave talks about. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12061600,"author":"rimantas","month":"2016-07","story_title":"In a nutshell, why do a lot of developers dislike Agile?","text":"Listen to one of the authors of the manifesto itself: [VIDEO] (BTW, he is very opposed to the use of Agile as a noun ;).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12637561,"author":"lumannnn","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"by Dave Thomas (PragDave) \"LoneStarRuby 2015 - My Dog Taught Me to Code by Dave Thomas\" - [LINK] and \"GOTO 2015 \u2022 Agile is Dead \u2022 Pragmatic Dave Thomas\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13015185,"author":"jeremiep","month":"2016-11","story_title":"It\u2019s not the methods that are Agile, it\u2019s the people","text":"Usually, the more a team advertise itself as Agile, the less agility it actually has. I myself have never seen Agile work well, not even close. I saw plenty of make-believe and head-in-the-sand and as mentioned in earlier comments, insane amounts of cargo culting. I really like the way Dave Thomas put it: [LINK] He also made a talk about it: [VIDEO] These days this is the only methodology I follow and it works wonders, anything more I feel is just noise. At the end of the day nothing replaces actual engineering and understanding what you're doing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15004028,"author":"okreallywtf","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Split user stories ruthlessly and get value earlier","text":"I think Dave Thomas[0] made some great points recently [1] about what Agile (as a noun) has become and I think it addresses some of your complaints. Note this isn't just a repeat of the agile manifesto, it is him discussing why he hates what Agile has come to mean to a lot of people and it sounds like his grump-level closely matches yours. The jist I get from it is that agile has become an Enantiodromia[2] and has in some ways simply replaced the problems it was there to fix. That doesn't mean it has to be that way, but thats what happens when people take something and create a religion around it. In my company we call our process \"agile\", but what that really means to us is to do the minimum amount of analysis we can to develop the features that the customer actually wants, and when they realize what they thought that they wanted was not really what they wanted, we can change it without wasting massive amounts of time. If we find that our process is causing problems for the devs, we tweak it. When we find we're not doing enough analysis in some situations, we try to improve those situations. No buzz words really, just what is best for us and what is best for the customers. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17191357,"author":"FrankyHollywood","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Scrum disempowers developers","text":"Dave has an interesting talk about it. [VIDEO] My personal experience is any project where scrum actually works is a boring project, no interesting problem is predictable. Fortunately I see mostly frustrated scrum masters, not understanding why planning fails :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17567419,"author":"jppope","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the things keep in mind while giving/preparing for a tech talk?","text":"1) Do not attempt to live code. change your code via version control, build small videos, copy and paste... whatever you do... do not try and live code 2) Read \"The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs\" ... its not really about Steve Jobs so much as its about how to be a great presenter. 3) building or writing a talk is significantly less important than the delivery... which means that more of your time should be spent on how to deliver the speech (recording I find is the best way to practice) 4) Pick a single thing and do it well, do not attempt to put too much into a talk or tackle something massively complex. 5) Make sure that everyone is walking away with something they can actually use. This doesn't require it be a hard skill... \"Soft\" or philosophical utilities are just as good 6) Have Fun and be funny... Speakers have a tendency to want to show off the size of their intellect, and the level their competency- having a speech be entertaining is way way more important. 7) DO NOT READ FROM YOUR SLIDES. know your shit. slides are supplementary Extra Credit. Here's a collection of some fantastic technical speeches: * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] * [VIDEO] * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18643036,"author":"dvtrn","month":"2018-12","story_title":"JIRA is an antipattern","text":"Dave Thomas himself declared Agile dead a few years ago, but offers up what I think is a better definition [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20020039,"author":"lugg","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Scrum is fragile, not Agile","text":"Reminds me of this goto conference talk from one of the original Agile developers \"pragmatic\" Dave Thomas. Speaks a lot bout what agile truly is and how scrum is a very large mismatch. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20329567,"author":"rb808","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Dear Agile, I\u2019m Tired of Pretending (2018)","text":"I think most of the people who wrote the agile manifesto said \"Agile\" been warped into something they don't agree with. Its supposed to empower teams, not enforced from on high to increase pressure on teams. Heres's a good one by Dave Thomas. A quote: \"Agile is an adjective not a noun\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"a0atL1HSwi8":[{"hn_comment_id":6023227,"author":"asr2bd","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Militarized police overreach \u2014 a second excerpt from Radley Balko's book","text":"Since drug war/prison system/militarized police keeps popping up on HN, I'd highly recommend anyone very interested in learning more about how this came to be to watch the documentary \"The House I Live In.\" Trailer: [VIDEO] Link to site: [LINK] It's an excellent explanation of how drug laws and being \"tough\" on crime have led to skyrocketing incarceration rates, trigger happy cops, and broken communities.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6313280,"author":"hawkharris","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove Eclipsing N.S.A.\u2019s","text":"If you haven't already seen The House I Live In, I recommend watching the documentary online. It will change the way you think about drugs and the United States' prison system. The movie doesn't focus specifically on technology, but it explores the by-any-means-necessary approach to law enforcement that helps facilitate things such as the Hemisphere Project mentioned in the story. Trailer: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7456783,"author":"sharkweek","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Solitary confinement\u2019s psychological effects","text":"For anyone a little less familiar with mandatory minimum sentencing -- I highly recommend the documentary 'The House I Live In' [VIDEO] Streams instantly on Netflix - one of the most important documentaries I've ever seen","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8091139,"author":"sharkweek","month":"2014-07","story_title":"The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization","text":"Two plugs I always make during any drug law discussion on HN: One - The Economist's 2009 article \"Failed states and failed policies\" - [LINK] (you might have to Google the title to get around a paywall) Two - The documentary, The House I Live In - [LINK] (trailer - [VIDEO] ) Both make such a fascinating case that drugs should have never been a crime and punishment issue, but rather one of public health. I highly recommend both for a read and a watch, and both will articulate the case far superior to anything I would be able to write here.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9634129,"author":"kristofferR","month":"2015-05","story_title":"In Norway, a Prison Built on Second Chances","text":"Cool that this appeared here right now, as I'm in the middle of rewatching The House I Live In, a fantastic documentary about the US drug war/justice system. Go watch it now. [VIDEO] The current US system is mindblowingly stupid. People who are treated like animals tend to act like it, especially if they're encouraged to.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"a1PtQ67urG4":[{"hn_comment_id":6267348,"author":"cjy","month":"2013-08","story_title":"Micromort","text":"Here is great video by Cambridge Ideas about the risk of dying from various activities (measured in micromorts): [VIDEO] The professor's conclusion is that one of the biggest risks is being too cautious.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11370326,"author":"beejiu","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Cambridge professor on how to stop being manipulated by misleading statistics","text":"There's a fun video he created with Cambridge University a few years ago, called \"Professor Risk\". Worth a watch (6 minutes) [VIDEO] Takeaway from the video \"I've come to the conclusion that one of the biggest risks is being too cautious.\"","stance":"rec"}],"a1rC79DHpmY":[{"hn_comment_id":16597521,"author":"lewisl9029","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Atom 1.25","text":"Tree-sitter is not just for code folding, it's a full-on incremental parser that's fast enough to run on every keystroke. See their expand selection example for another really compelling use-case. If you're interested in more details, there's also this talk from the developer behind tree-sitter ( [VIDEO] ), where he showcases how they could use tree-sitter to quickly parse entire multi-megabyte minified JS files to provide complete syntax highlighting for them that updates as you edit, and how the accuracy and usefulness of the actual syntax highlighting can improve over regex based implementations due to having access to the fully specified grammar of the language. I think tree-sitter is also a game changer for extension development once it stabilizes and the APIs are opened up. Extensions like swackets will no longer have arbitrary performance constraints that break user experience ( [LINK] ), and it opens the door to a whole new set of intelligent extensions that understand the languages you write at a much deeper level that were previously unfeasible due to parsing performance, or required some external heavy-weight language server.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30955317,"author":"ris58h","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Zas Editor","text":"They use tree-sitter [LINK] It's ok with errors in AST and just marks such nodes as invalid. There is a long (42 minutes) but worth to watch talk about tree-sitter [VIDEO] Or the shorter version (20 minutes) [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"a1zDuOPkMSw":[{"hn_comment_id":11409952,"author":"jgalt212","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Richard Hamming on Artificial Intelligence (1995) [video]","text":"It's been posted here before, but Hamming's talk \"You and Your Research\" is one for the ages. [VIDEO] Hamming passed in 1998, this talk was given about three years earlier. So much sage advice as compiled over a very long and fruitful career.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16133571,"author":"f00_","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Fifty Years of Shannon Theory (1998) [pdf]","text":"Richard Hamming developed error-correcting codes while working along side Shannon at bell labs, his book The Art and Science of Engineering: Learning to Learn and the associated lectures he gave at the naval postgraduate academy are tremendous [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18839170,"author":"gumby","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What tech talk does everyone need to see?","text":"Richard Hamming: You and Your Research It's on picking the right problems. When I heard him give it I was shocked that he criticized Einstein for working on a unified field theory (of course unlike me, he was actually qualified to offer such criticism). His point for that example was that the necessary tools to attack the problem hadn't yet been developed so it was a fruitless endeavor. While many very important problems are tractable. [VIDEO] He gave this talk several times (I heard it at NASA in 84). Here's a good transcript: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4629052,"author":"sadga","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Richard Hamming: You and Your Research (1986)","text":"[VIDEO] > Intro: I have given a talk with this title many times, and it turns out from discussions after the talk I could have just as well have called it \"You and Your Engineering Career,\" or even \"You and Your Career.\" But I left the word \"Research\" in the title because that is what I have most studied\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5512690,"author":"stiff","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Single best is difficult, here are some favourites of mine: \"You and your research\" by Richard Hamming: [VIDEO] \"How to design a good API and why it matters\" by Joschua Bloch: [LINK] Google TechTalk on Git by Linus Torvalds: [LINK] All talks ever given by Alan Kay, for example: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7451853,"author":"late2part","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you earn your money?","text":"Complete luck. Timing to start out in the right industry, followed by vigorous effort, learning, and experimentation. I also built many relationships early on in my career that I've mostly kept alive throughout the last decades. I've changed careers twice when the old skills/industry lowered the value of those skills. Keep learning - read Richard Hamming's _You and Your Research_ [1]. Keep friends and work hard. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13584666,"author":"JSeymourATL","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Need advice for someone who just got first job as a software engineer?","text":"> I am eager to learn something new... Learning is a life-long process. As it relates to the industry, consider these questions. 1) What are the most important problems in your field? 2) Are you working on ONE of them? 3) Why not? On this subject, Richard Hamming offers excellent advice > [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18838000,"author":"nestorD","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?","text":"In his \"You and Your Research\" talk, Hamming focusses on the selection of the problem you should work on as a researcher. I believe it does apply even if you are not in academics : [VIDEO] (transcript : [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22907947,"author":"wcarss","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?","text":"Don Eyles' writing about programming the lunar module (which was something he did!) is fantastic [1]. There's also a gallery of photos on that site and he has a whole book! And, click around on Bret Victor's references page[2] -- it's a real treasure. Despite my constant fear that mentioning it will make it go away, it needs to be shared to be useful. It's a big collection of classic papers and interviews. Someone mentioned \"As You May Think\", which is on there, as is Bush's follow-up from ~20 years later, and Douglas Engelbart's own partly annotated version of the original! Also check out folklore[3], which is a great bunch of stories about working at Apple in its early days, by people who worked there (mostly Andy Hertzfeld, I'm pretty sure). Lastly, look up \"Ignition!\" by John Drury Clark[4], which is a tangent, but is amazing -- it's about the history of the design of rocket engines, largely about the wild experiments and chemical science involved, and is very well written. I didn't feel right finding a pdf to link straight to, but they aren't that hard to find. As a bonus, this isn't so much historical, but it's a great inspirational essay, Richard Hamming's \"You and Your Research\"(transcript[5], a video version[6]). Talks about working at Bell Labs and the different cultural elements there across people as part of analysing what makes certain people truly great. 1 - [LINK] 2 - [LINK] 3 - [LINK] 4 - [LINK] 5 - [LINK] 6 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31214534,"author":"sireat","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Which books in your field do you think are perfect for self study?","text":"Fantastic recommendation! Hamming's writing is so clear and inspiring. Not a book but his speech \"You and your research\" is quite good: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34297916,"author":"trombonechamp","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most important problem in the world? Are you working on it?","text":"Maybe a nitpick, but Aaron Swartz was probably quoting Richard Hamming: And I started asking, \"What are the important problems of your field?\" And after a week or so, \"What important problems are you working on?\" And after some more time I came in one day and said, \"If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?\" ... If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work. It is the main idea behind his lecture/essay \"You and your Research\", which is worth reading: [LINK] or watching: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"a9b9IYqsb_U":[{"hn_comment_id":15198605,"author":"lathiat","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Evan Doorbell's Classic Phreaking Tapes","text":"I realise the thread is phone phreaking related and that was kind of the point of your post; but in the spirit of the talk below to think more outside the box... There's a pretty good chance in many cases you can just open the external box with some easy to get (and relatively standard) key. And hit a button. Related: [LINK] This is a good related talk - goes outside the box on all the ways you can often get into commercial buildings without picking (or even in many cases, interacting with) the lock \"The Search for the Perfect Door\" by Deviant Ollam [LINK] Also good: [VIDEO] [Howard Payne & Deviant Ollam - This Key is Your Key, This Key is My Key] [LINK] [DEF CON 22 - Deviant Ollam & Howard Payne - Elevator Hacking - From the Pit to the Penthouse]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18515096,"author":"IIAOPSW","month":"2018-11","story_title":"An elevator in a Chicago skyscraper fell 84 floors, requiring a dramatic rescue","text":"I've watched it twice before. I also recommend \"This key is your key, this key is my key\" [VIDEO] Deviant is a pentester focused on physical sec. Not just elevators.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27489331,"author":"wolrah","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Elevator Saga \u2013 An elevator programming game","text":"Relevant video discussing fire keys and other common keys: [VIDEO] And since this thread is about elevators, I have to also mention another video of theirs: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"a9xAKttWgP4":[{"hn_comment_id":3844058,"author":"sblom","month":"2012-04","story_title":"A Programming Language, now in HTML (50th anniversary)","text":"It has an incredible amount of elegant power for some things (see [VIDEO] if you want to immediately fall in love). But I've found that trying to use it for most things just isn't worthwhile. It feels like cheating every time I have to escape from its array programming core to the more familiar flow control structures that only came along in later versions of APL. I think it makes a good puzzle language (i.e. the fun comes from figuring out _how_ to say something rather that just raw getting stuff done), but unfortunately, it's even more of a puzzle to figure out how code that someone else wrote works. For full context: I've spent more time using J than APL itself.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9775225,"author":"jboggan","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Try APL in your browser","text":"While we wait for the site to come back up please enjoy this amazing video showing Conway's Game of Life in APL: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17536247,"author":"sethrin","month":"2018-07","story_title":"APL at Its Core","text":"The following video is probably reasonably well known, and I wish that I had a more intelligent commentary than to say that it blows my mind, but it does I think bear out the point of expressivity rather well. [VIDEO] Conway's Game of Life in some 50 characters of APL.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21302127,"author":"kragen","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Loopless Programming","text":"Try watching this video; it will only take you 8 minutes, but within 3 minutes you should have an idea of why array languages are different from having an ndarray library available in Rust or having typeclasses in Haskell: [VIDEO] After you watch that you will of course suspect that APL and other array languages like J are a sort of DSL for things like numerical linear algebra, which is of course what Numpy and Octave are. (Even though the Game of Life isn't linear algebra, it's very clearly matrix-based, so it doesn't seem that far off.) Dyalog has posted some other videos demonstrating the use of their proprietary APL for different things, but I think a more interesting one is [LINK] , by J inventor Roger Hui. This is an hour and a half, but it demonstrates some approaches to reducing different problems to multidimensional arrays, of pointers (\"boxes\") in some cases. This ought to be enough to convince you that there's an alien kind of thinking here, quite different from the Haskell and Rust approaches, that can be applied to a wide variety of problems. Now, I'm not Stevan Apter, so I'm not going to try to convince you that this alien kind of thinking is better . But it's clearly different , and different ways of thinking work best in different situations.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24188280,"author":"Cactus2018","month":"2020-08","story_title":"A look at the J language: the fine line between genius and insanity (2012)","text":"> Here's a video that really illustrates the power of this paradigm: [VIDEO] Amazing game of life code!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10367526,"author":"rgiar","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Conway's Game of Life in One Line of APL (2007)","text":"For an infinitely more relaxing experience of life in APL, may I recommend: [VIDEO] I've watched it many times but I still expect him to mention happy little trees :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19843577,"author":"sp332","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Alan Kay on \u201cWhat Made APL Programming So Revolutionary?\u201d","text":"I always liked this example: Conway's Game of Life in One Line of APL [VIDEO] It's esoteric as one-liners tend to be, but I think it's a fascinating glimpse.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20818306,"author":"hhas01","month":"2019-08","story_title":"A+, the Programming Language of Morgan Stanley","text":"I think the key to understanding APL is realizing that it\u2019s not built for Programmers; it\u2019s built for Mathematicians. Here\u2019s a fine half-hour introduction to APL in action: [LINK] 1:00-2:00 is the motivation for APL\u2014or any DSL\u2014in a nutshell. (\u201cconversational computing\u201d, \u201cusers who are [not] professional programmers\u201d) Or, if you\u2019re happy to sit back and see math magic happen: [VIDEO] For all its mechanical advances over the last 40 years, it\u2019s shocking how far our technology has regressed philosophically.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21857106,"author":"conover","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Klong: a Simple Array Language","text":"APL (and I assume J) uses a large range of special graphic symbols as part of its syntax, which can be difficult to internalize for folks coming from other languages. It can be easily construed as mysterious or magical lettering (arcane rune). My favorite video to illustrate this is Conway's Game of Life written in APL: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24172540,"author":"moonchild","month":"2020-08","story_title":"J Notation as a Tool of Thought","text":"> My point was that general programming usually looks more like writing the sorting algorithm than simply calling it. Thus, I would be more interested in seeing real examples of how the properties of J allow you to write algorithms more concisely or otherwise better. Ah - I see. Here[1] is quicksort in j. John scholes's videos are excellent and very illustrative, though they deal with apl rather than j; conway's game of life[2] and sudoku[3]. > The article showed how J solves some mathematical problems with built in functions or their built-in modifiers. But in general programming, you won't find a function that does exactly what you wanted, maybe with a little adverb. You'll usually have to write that function yourself, to describe how it works in terms of some of those pre-existing functions. Right. This is true, but you generally stay much closer to the builtins in j than you do in other language. > Note that your second example could be expressed as something like > x.OrderBy(y => y[1]) > In C#, assuming x is int[N][M]. I understand that J's version can work with many other shapes of X, but that is hard to appreciate without seeing example of how that comes in handy when writing some other (hopefully well known) algorithm. Right; you mentioned sort predicates, so I was giving an example of a way in which you could sort according to another relation. My point is: being able to change the layout of your data so easily can obviate sort predicates. (Though I do think a sort a","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27827670,"author":"sgrove","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Jelly: a recreational programming language inspired by J","text":"Seems then you'll probably dislike apl - here's the full implementation of Conway's Game of Life in 53 characters: life \u2190 {\u22831 \u2375 \u2228.\u2227 3 4 = +/ +\u233f \u00af1 0 1 \u2218.\u2296 \u00af1 0 1 \u233d\u00a8 \u2282\u2375} And the explanatory video behind it (quite approachable!) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aAb7hSCtvGw":[{"hn_comment_id":3178399,"author":"socratic","month":"2011-10","story_title":"How to Rock a Systems Design Interview","text":"Obviously, this is marketing rather than a serious treatment of the topic. It seems to basically say: \"in order to design a system, you should have a regular undergraduate Computer Science education\" which seems maybe like a prerequisite (and maybe informative about their hiring process) but not very useful. However, for what it's worth, the two best resources I've seen for systems design are: Hints for Computer System Design: [LINK] How to Design a Good API: [VIDEO] What else should be in this bibliography?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3663104,"author":"philbo","month":"2012-03","story_title":"API Design is UI for Developers","text":"I'm building a public API in my current job and, a few weeks ago, I was scouting around for the good API design advice. Absolutely far and away the best resource that I found was this Google TechTalk by Joshua Bloch: [VIDEO] If you're interested in the topic and haven't seen it yet, I urge you to do so ASAP.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45011584,"author":"minzak","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Everything I know about good API design","text":"Nice article. I'd also highly recommend \"How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters\" video from Joshua Bloch (co-author of Java). He digs much deeper, mostly at code level rather than JSON level but the same principles apply. Even though this video is almost 20 years old, the topics are as significant today as they were back then. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2426226,"author":"rjhackin","month":"2011-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What makes a good API presentation?","text":"Joshua Bloch gave a good presentation on API design, you might have seen this before. Here is the link - [VIDEO] Mostly along those lines will make a presentation useful and interesting. Not sure whats the time limit for your presentation but real life example would keep the audience more interactive or building something on the fly from ground up.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2924158,"author":"d_r","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Ask HN: API design practices","text":"Not specifically about web service APIs, but you might enjoy this talk by Joshua Bloch [1]: \"How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters\": [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3246792,"author":"d_r","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How to design and structure a framework/api","text":"How about this to start? \"How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters\" -- a great talk by Joshua Bloch (also the author of \"Effective Java\") [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5512690,"author":"stiff","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Single best is difficult, here are some favourites of mine: \"You and your research\" by Richard Hamming: [LINK] \"How to design a good API and why it matters\" by Joschua Bloch: [VIDEO] Google TechTalk on Git by Linus Torvalds: [LINK] All talks ever given by Alan Kay, for example: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8521507,"author":"mockindignant","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What makes an API good?","text":"I highly recommend this ~hour long talk given by Josh Bloch a few years ago, it is quite good and gives plenty of concrete examples: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8521627,"author":"paulkoer","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What makes an API good?","text":"I highly recommend the following talk by Joshua Bloch: \"How to design a good API and why it mattes\" [1]. Key points: - When in doubt, leave it out - you can never remove things from an API but always add to it. - Write several clients of the API to get a good feel how its used. Three is usually enough, one is not. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12263573,"author":"neves","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What are good reads for designing APIs?","text":"Don't miss Joshua Bloch (from \"Effective Java\" fame) great presentation: How to design a good API and why it matters [VIDEO] and the accompanying slides: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12641781,"author":"0xmohit","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters [0] The Principles of Clean Architecture [1] The State of the Art in Microservices by Adrian Cockcroft [2] \"The Mess We're In\" by Joe Armstrong [3] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16277644,"author":"watwut","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Good learning material \u2013 JAVA, Spring","text":"a.) On java - one hour talk but good: * How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters [VIDEO] b.) General code structure - dont to read it cover to cover unless you like to, you will die of boredom, but definitely have a look in library. It will help you to think about code structure right way. * Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code * Code Complete c.) Object Oriented Programming * Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented The three books I recommended are older, but not much changed in basics of object oriented programming. They are well readable. I would also recommend to read something on functional programming, mostly so that you see another approach too and thus wont go too far with object design where it does not suits. d.) 8.) I read awesome book on estimations, I really really hope it is this one: * Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art tldr: There is difference between negotiation and estimation, make sure you know which you are doing. Split it into smaller tasks and then estimate minimum, maximum and most likely. Then calculate (min+4*likely+max)/6. Surprisingly, it works and is faster then do one estimate. It is also more precise then anything else I tried. I really hope I shown you right book. e.) On Spring and rest, I would recommend to read documentation and write own code. I don't recall a book that would blow my mind, so I guess any will do. f.) For general \"latest tech\" learning, I like [LINK] site. There are mostly techie te","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218023,"author":"DanPristupov","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Here are some of my favorites: How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters [VIDEO] Agile Methods The Good, the Hype and the Ugly [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"aB8zcAttP1E":[{"hn_comment_id":27570598,"author":"RobertoG","month":"2021-06","story_title":"There Are Aliens, but Probably Not Here","text":"You should check the interviews (there are several, including a 60 minutes) with the pilot David Fravor (1). There are two pilots and two wizards that saw the same with their own eyes (even I have only see the other pilot confirming it). That's an UFO. That doesn't mean that it's extraterrestrial. To say that it's extraterrestrial at this point, is, in my opinion, so ridiculous like to say that there is nothing to explain (like the author of the article seems to believe). (1) - [VIDEO] (this is a great interview interesting in its own right, even without the UFO part)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28306710,"author":"bostonsre","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Joe Rogan, confined to Spotify, is losing influence","text":"Lex did one [1] with the same pilot that saw the ufo (commander fravor). I went from \"no friggin way do they exist\" to \"shit... it actually sounds plausible\". [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24475007,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Fighter pilot says UFO he chased in 2004 committed 'act of war'","text":"I guess somebody had to cherry pick that line from the 3+ hour long interview, because it makes a good click-bait headline. But there's a lot more to the interview with Fravor than that. I still have over an hour of it left to watch, but I'd already say it's well worth watching. And don't get me wrong: I'm not some \"UFO believer\" or member of the \"UFO community\" or anything. I'm a skeptic by nature and I'm definitely a skeptic when it comes to some of the more radical claims made by ufologist types: the \"extraterrestrial hypothesis\" in particular. But Fravor does come off a very reasonable, intelligent, level-headed, sincere witness to something highly unusual. And he makes a point of distancing himself from claims of, as he puts it, \"little green men\". That said, he also allows that what he saw is not, as far as he knows, possible with any human technology. Net-net, if you enjoy this kind of thing, regardless of whether or not you have any pre-existing biases regarding what UFO's \"really are\", I'd recommend this podcast episode. At the very least, it's a chance to hear first-hand testimony by a very credible witness to something extraordinary. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25808002,"author":"pp19dd","month":"2021-01","story_title":"US Navy \u2013 Tic Tac UFO \u2013 High frequency gravitational wave generator","text":"Might be worth something to watch part of the Lex Fridman interview with one of the pilots, David Fravor. The entire podcast is four hours long and goes over his career and experiences, I'd argue establishes him as a competent naval officer and pilot. The timecode is when he describes the actual event- [VIDEO] In the interview he also describes the record keeping process and basically some of the head scratchers you're bringing about. One other thing the pilot confirms in that interview is the validity (authenticity) of the leaked \"Executive Summary\" report, which, was leaked to media and (as far as I know) not really pursued for authenticity verification by others (PDF): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27315835,"author":"tristanj","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Radar data confirms: USS Omaha was surrounded by swarm of UFOs","text":"That article completely ignores the eyewitness testimony from the navy pilots of the Tic Tac incident where they visually identify that the Tic Tac: 1) can hover a few meters above the ocean without generating rotor downwash 2) can accelerate away at 100+g Both of those rule out any known drone or helicopter. David Fravor, one of the pilots, explains this in an interview here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27530669,"author":"grimgrin","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Experts Weigh in on Pentagon UFO Report","text":"Here's a _long_ conversation with one of the pilots with eye visibility that day, David Fravor, though I'm linking you to the start of that specific topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30703907,"author":"subsubzero","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Famous Navy UFO video was camera glare, evidence suggests","text":"So actually Commander Fravor saw the object with his own eyes, he is one of the pilots who was sent in to engage the craft after it appeared on radar from the carrier group, here is a detailed video of him talking about the incident with Lex Fridman(AI reasearcher - MIT) on his podcast - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30704426,"author":"cronix","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Famous Navy UFO video was camera glare, evidence suggests","text":"Here's a 60 Minutes piece discussing it: [LINK] Here's a 4 hour interview with the pilot, David Fravor, on Lex Fridman's show where he goes into much more detail than you'll probably read elsewhere: [VIDEO] This wasn't just a single radar. It was an AEGIS system compromised of multiple ships with state of the art radars, multiple plane radars, and visual confirmation by several pilots. They were tracking it for multiple days.","stance":"rec"}],"aBBuoD9eL5k":[{"hn_comment_id":28776901,"author":"bsanr2","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Borges: The Library of Babel [pdf]","text":"Video (game) essayist Jacob Geller did a few videos which mentioned this work. [LINK] [LINK] They're quite interesting, I think. The abyss really gets him going. And a few more I really like: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44367178,"author":"haiku2077","month":"2025-06","story_title":"A Mysterious Website I Stumbled Upon","text":"For those who don't have time to... \"read\"... this great story, Jacob Geller provides a fun and effective summary within this video at 9 minutes in [VIDEO] In his words: \"It is in my opinion one of the best sci-fi stories ever written.\"","stance":"rec"}],"aCv10_WvGxo":[{"hn_comment_id":13607720,"author":"whack","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Pugs are anatomical disasters. Vets must speak out\u2013even if it\u2019s bad for business","text":"There was a great video I saw about how \"purebred\" dogs are essentially a cesspool of genetic disorders, and how we need to start taking active steps to bring back genetic diversity in our dogs. It was eye opening to see that the pedigrees we put on a pedestal are actually putting our dogs through a host of abnormalities and health complications. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29432388,"author":"hairofadog","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Study: Most Dog Breeds Highly Inbred","text":"I'm not the person you're replying to, but: I love dogs, I have a dog, and I think dog breeding is a net evil. I wish it would stop. Edit: While it's admittedly over-the-top snarky, this video sums up my feelings nicely: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aDMjgOYOcDw":[{"hn_comment_id":20348440,"author":"deanCommie","month":"2019-07","story_title":"YouTube bans content \u201cshowing users how to bypass secure computer systems\u201d","text":"Ben Shapiro was the most popular role model for Alexandre Bissonette, a very clear alt-right white supremacist[1]. Before you dismiss Shapiro's responsibility in stoking these ideals, you should watch this in-depth breakdown of his perspectives and ideals[2]. I know it's a lot to ask to watch an hour long youtube video, but it is thorough to dot all the i's and cross all the t's. Shapiro even stokes anti-semitic rhetoric by distinguishing between \"ethnic jews\" (The Woody Allens of the world, but more broadly liberal hollywood elite jews) and \"cultural/religious jews\" (Morally-clear good-minded folk like himself). The video covers it. This is how he reconciles his alt-right allies who are anti-semitic and white nationalist, yet use Shapiro as a shield to protect their heinous opinions. And this is before we get to any of his perspectives on arabs, which another commenter already addressed. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24982860,"author":"weswpg","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Show HN: Dendron \u2013 A Hierarchical Tool for Thought","text":"For anyone who also thinks Ben Shapiro is a \"serious thinker\", here is the thesis that \"Perhaps Ben Shapiro Shouldn't Be Taken Seriously By Anyone About Anything\": [VIDEO] In short: he's routinely wrong, his views never progress in recognition of his many MANY errors, because he feels that his views are correct regardless of what the facts are; all while smugly bleating \"Facts Don't Care About Feelings\". he's so comically unserious, he had to change the title of his own book after liberals pointed out to him that he miscounted how many arguments he was making in \"10 rules for debating leftists\": [LINK] most of the others on that list are just as bad but it's noteworthy that this laughable \"intellectual dark web\" has Ben Shapiro among those playing the victim card as if he is a repressed academic even though he openly and cynically proclaims his unwillingness to engage honestly with the opposition (\"So, the only other reason that you should ever have a conversation, or be friends with anyone on the left and, and not even be friends, is if you're in public in front of a large audience and then your goal is to humiliate them as badly as possible\") these people aren't \"intellectuals\" or even remotely serious.","stance":"rec"}],"aDNPhq5ggoE":[{"hn_comment_id":13512965,"author":"WWLink","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple","text":"In regards to the smoke detectors, I love that your department does that! I think what finally drove me to realize how important working smoke detectors are, is that video of a modern room flashing over in like 3 minutes. For those who haven't seen it, here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28373935,"author":"tharkun__","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Toxic \u2018forever chemicals\u2019 contaminate indoor air at worrying levels","text":"Like my sibling sort of did I want to point out that this possibly was meant to counter another trend. Unfortunately furniture nowadays burn much faster than before. They did an experiment. Built one room with old furniture made from solid wood and other \"old style materials\" and set it on fire. Then they built another one with modern materials with the typical particle board furniture. Set it on fire. Not many more words needed. Just watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aDejwCGdUV8":[{"hn_comment_id":19800010,"author":"LinuxBender","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered","text":"For those that would like to hear a mind blowing discussion about climate (and the earth in general), watch all of the podcasts with Joe Rogan, Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock. They are three hours each and I promise you will learn many things that give perspective on the repeat arguments and confusion about the climate. There are many other podcasts with these gentlemen, but here are three to start with. Joe Rogan and Randall Carlson #606 (3 hours) [1] Joe Rogan, Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson #725 [2] Joe Rogan, Randall Carlson #1284 [3] [1] - [LINK] [2] - [VIDEO] [3] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10969009,"author":"pgtruesdell","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Atlantis-style myths that turned out to be true","text":"Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock have been on the Joe Rogan Experience a few times over the years, together and separately, and have explained their well documented theory about Atlantis. The short of it would be, before the Younger Dryas period when the massive ice sheets over North America melted, the ocean levels were approximately 300 ft lower than they are today. When you look at the mid-atlantic ridge, the lower sea levels would expose an area now called the Azores Plateau. This would be a large habitable island off the coast of Europe. This becomes especially interesting when you take into account the timeline of Plato's account which exactly lines up with the beginning of the Younger Dryas meltdown. I apologize if my interpretation of their discussions is inaccurate in any way, I am now just digging into this theory and it's truly fascinating. The most recent episode with both Randall and Graham was especially intriguing, since they both brought their unique studies together into a more unified theory. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23676189,"author":"fit2rule","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Silurian Hypothesis: Were There Civilizations on Earth Before Humans? (2018)","text":"Look, there are all sorts of schools of thought on how these things were built, but none of them were conclusive. I'm not saying it was rock-melting alien technology, but it was clearly some form of advanced technology we are unable to duplicate or conceive was available to the builders. Here's where to go to get on the Graham Hancock/Randall Carlson train, in case you haven't seen it: [VIDEO] Some interesting observations which are counter to the narrative: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24207843,"author":"seesawtron","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Lost Advanced Civilizations","text":"Have you guys checked out the episode on JRE with Graham Hancock? [0] They talk about the Bronze Age China and G\u00f6bekli Tepe. At the time I was seemingly convinced why the academic community wouldn't let these new theories flourish despite the archeological evidence. I was not aware of the work by Hanson so I can not comment on that. A similar thread on HN in the past [1]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"aFQFB5YpDZE":[{"hn_comment_id":1686278,"author":"elblanco","month":"2010-09","story_title":"The Jon Stewart Decade","text":"After reading this, I don't think you understand what the Daily Show is. This is probably the best discussion about what the show is all about (note: crossfire was canceled almost immediately after this). [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4927081,"author":"AdamDuMonde","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Eric Schmidt And Stephen Colbert Talk Politics","text":"This is exactly what I thought about John Stewart during his epic debate with Tucker Carlson on Crossfire. It's so very worth watching again even if you've seen it multiple times. It really reminds people that John Stewart and Stephen Colbert really are only \"characters\" on their show. [VIDEO] Bill Maher is another brilliant, politically insightful comedian.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1056699,"author":"biotech","month":"2010-01","story_title":"Brian Williams: Why Jon Stewart Is Good For News","text":"In TFA, Brian Williams mentions Stewart's takedown of Cramer in an interview in which 'the odds were stacked against Jim Cramer'. This brought to mind a brilliant attack on the now defunct political show \"Crossfire\", in which Liberals battled Conservatives. In a nutshell, Stewart was brought on as a guest after attacking Crossfire on The Daily Show. Although Stewart is the guest on the show, he takes the offensive and puts the Crossfire hosts at an instant disadvantage. Here's the link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39132203,"author":"johnnyworker","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Jon Stewart Returns to 'The Daily Show'","text":"I have never seen something like his appearance on Crossfire on TV. [VIDEO] And here is him speaking to Congress over their shameful handling of benefits for 9/11 responders. Nuff said? [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40037015,"author":"spit2wind","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Frank Zappa on Crossfire about censoring rock lyrics (1986) [video]","text":"It's always good to follow this up with John Stewart's appearance, the one that got the show canceled: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aFwVf5a3pZM":[{"hn_comment_id":29781943,"author":"gnuvince","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Write Like You Code","text":"My favorite writing lecture is this one: [VIDEO] The number one piece of advice: your writing can be clear and structured, but if it's not valuable it's useless and people will stop reading. If you want to write well, figure out who your readers are, figure out what they value, and give it to them.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30448025,"author":"gnuvince","month":"2022-02","story_title":"What makes writing more readable?","text":"It's an article about writing, which means I will plug this lecture again: [VIDEO] Short version: good writing is not about rules, it's about the function of the text, the readers, and what they value.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33371879,"author":"thundergolfer","month":"2022-10","story_title":"How to communicate effectively as a developer","text":"Last year wrote a technical writing advice checklist for engineers called How to ask for help in Slack : [LINK] . I was at Canva, a fast growing company adding 500 engineers a year, and the tenured engineers were getting hit with a lot of questions and help requests. I thought about this list a lot, and believe that maintaining adherence to all 10 checklist items will dramatically improve your technical communication in chat apps. For advice on writing long form communications, my absolute favorite resource is LEADERSHIP LAB: Writing Beyond the Academy [1]. This lecture will cleanse you of all the bad writing ideas you picked up in 12+ years of schooling, and show you actually how to think about professional writing. I've watched it about 4-5 times. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23850212,"author":"voortuckian","month":"2020-07","story_title":"How to write technical posts so people will read them (2019)","text":"This is clearer, more indepth, and longer: [VIDEO] But I found it more motivated me to change. (Chicago U, writing class for grad students)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31782007,"author":"gnuvince","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Writing like a pro with Vale and Neovim","text":"A post about writing means that I need to plug a couple talks by Larry McEnerney. [1,2] The tool described in this blog post is all about text-based rules: what the _text_ ought to look like. To improve your own writing (a) learn who your readers are, (b) know what they value, and (c) write so that as readers, they find your work valuable to them. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44671346,"author":"motohagiography","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Writing is thinking","text":"the act of writing takes raw experience, puts it in front of the eyes, and then filters it back through your critical faculties so you can refine and reason about it. the iteration makes it higher quality thought. making writing valuable is another skill (see this evergreen lecture from the university of chicago leadership lab: [VIDEO] ) however when I encounter people with low written or verbal acuity, they have to survive somehow, so it's wise to observe what tools of cunning they tend to reach for.","stance":"rec"}],"aHun58mz3vI":[{"hn_comment_id":36239411,"author":"chx","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Charlie Brooker Got ChatGPT to Write a Black Mirror Episode","text":"Charlie Brooker is fantastic: On how news is reported [VIDEO] On how mass shooting is reported and about the saturation [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10897184,"author":"david-given","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April","text":"The Al Jazeera that we get in the UK is apparently run by a lot of ex-BBC people, and uses a lot of the BBC house style, which means and news report will instantly look respectable to a big British market segment. Not that I've ever met anyone in the UK who's ever watched it, of course. This is the best run-down of the BBC house style I've seen: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16735681,"author":"cirrus-clouds","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Sinclair Made Dozens of Local News Anchors Recite the Same Script","text":"Charlie Brooker did an excellent spoof video of the way news is reported. The video is 8 years old (made in 2010) but it still rings true today: How to report the news: [VIDEO] Every TV news report on the economy in one: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42921743,"author":"hgomersall","month":"2025-02","story_title":"He went to jail for stealing someone's identity, but it was his all along","text":"Most mainstream documentaries are full of fluff. You can generally read the transcript of a half hour programme in a couple of minutes. I thought Charlie Brooker might have a useful segment on it, but all I could find were the not-quite-on-point, but nevertheless excellent two related segments below: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aHx-XUA6f9g":[{"hn_comment_id":20332178,"author":"espeed","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Jeff Hawkins: Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence [video]","text":"Have you ever seen one of Professor Sussman's talks where he analyzes a circuit diagram? For example, see Prof Sussman's 2011 StrangeLoop talk (circuit analysis example begins at ~25 min mark)... We Really Don't Know How To Compute! [LINK] If you have the hardware schematic or the physical hardware and enough time, you can figure out what the hardware does. You can determine what its constraints are, and if you understand it well enough (for simplicity's sake, let's say you understand the hardware up to the level of the engineers who designed it), you can tell what the hardware system can and can't do and what type of codes are required to make the hardware work. You can tell at a low level what the GarageBand developers had to work with when they designed their game. And once you know the required codes, you can write software to generate the codes to make it work. And if you're really good and have the right tools, you can analyze the hardware and/or model the data flows to determine what the optimal data structures must be based on the hardware capacity constraints and data flow. Google \"reverse engineering hardware chip circuits\" or watch Ken Shirriff's 2016 Hackaday talk... Reading Silicon: How to Reverse Engineer Integrated Circuits [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25972469,"author":"gnunez","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Siliconpr0n: High Resolution Chip Maps","text":"Some hobbyists use these die shots to reverse engineer older chips, bypassing the need to decap the chips themselves. The craft is explained nicely in this video [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"aICaAEXDJQQ":[{"hn_comment_id":29730178,"author":"y4mi","month":"2021-12","story_title":"NASA Says Webb\u2019s Excess Fuel Likely to Extend Its Lifetime Expectations","text":"If you're interested in a more indepth view of how it's supposed to work, Real Engineering did a video about it recently. No idea if what they're saying is true however, I've no knowledge about the domain. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29855362,"author":"541","month":"2022-01","story_title":"James Webb is fully deployed","text":"For some context around what makes this deployment so remarkable, watch this[0] video that talks about the engineering/building aspects of the James Webb [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31073541,"author":"ResNet","month":"2022-04","story_title":"James Webb telescope's coldest instrument reaches operating temperature","text":"The fact that the telescope's cryocooler is acoustically symmetrical such that any vibrations made by each cylinder, and the actual flow of gas, is near-perfectly cancelled out is nothing short of amazing. [0] Real Engineering made a video that covered this and more, which is well worth a watch. [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] (The Insane Engineering of James Webb Telescope)","stance":"rec"}],"aIHj3qMRqqE":[{"hn_comment_id":34255224,"author":"rainbowzootsuit","month":"2023-01","story_title":"All About USB-C: Resistors and Emarkers","text":"[VIDEO] I found this video just today about USB PD \"trigger boards\" or \"decoy modules\" in the ali express/ebay/amazon searches. There seem to be some you can short a resistor on for a locked setting, or others like in the video that have a mode select.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35851446,"author":"hug","month":"2023-05","story_title":"EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones","text":"These little boards are ultra handy: [VIDEO] Rip the barrel plug off of things and replace it with USB-C input, or make your own USB-C 'dongle' to power anything that needs 12v.","stance":"rec"}],"aIx2N-viNwY":[{"hn_comment_id":24856523,"author":"hudixt","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Ask HN: As I get older, I see seconds tick physically faster. Am I alone?","text":"Here's the video from Veritasium around same topic [VIDEO] Video explains it in detail about why this happens.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29109534,"author":"shmde","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Why time \u201cspeeds up\u201d as we get older (2019)","text":"There is a good video by Veritasium on this topic titled - \"Why life seems to speed up as we age\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29109565,"author":"cornstalks","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Why time \u201cspeeds up\u201d as we get older (2019)","text":"That's a common argument. Veritasium explores this and IMO the alternative arguments are more compelling: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41205164,"author":"activatedgeek","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Perceived Age","text":"This effect is very interesting. Veritasium covered this effect in a video [1] for the interested. [1]: [VIDEO] (2016)","stance":"rec"}],"aKLntZcp27M":[{"hn_comment_id":18508713,"author":"monocasa","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Still in love with Rust","text":"There was a great talk recently about how to properly build an entity component framework in Rust if you haven't seen it yet. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19295345,"author":"atoav","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Case Study: Npm uses Rust for its CPU-bound bottlenecks [pdf]","text":"It depends, I am over a year in Rust and it doesn't take me that much longer to write something in it than say in Python. The confidence I have that the thing I wrote is way higher in Rust and it is usually much faster. And: it is incredible easy to build and deploy. I think whether Rust is useful or not depends entirely on the application. If you need high confidence in what the thing is doing, it should run parallel and fast and you are familiar with the concepts Rust is using \u2013 it isn't a bad choice. For me it replaced Python in nearly every domain except one-use scripts and scientific stuff. It can be hard for advanced programmers to abandon certain patterns they bring from other languages though. In the first months I tried too much to use OOP, which doesn't make any sense and leads to convoluted code. If you work more in a compositional and data oriented way while making use of Types and Traits, you will end up with much simpler solutions that work incredibly well. Katherine West's RustConf 2018 Talk on ECS Systems describes this incredibly well and might be even good to watch if you are never intending to use Rust at all, because the patterns discussed are quite universal: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27407719,"author":"oconnor663","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes","text":"This is basically what an Entity Component System is, right? I always find myself linking back to this talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32807113,"author":"andrewflnr","month":"2022-09","story_title":"I learned to love testing game code","text":"This Rust conference talk, of all things, is still my favorite ECS explanation, because she builds the concept piece by piece starting from megaclass-hell to full entities-as-IDs with reasons for each step. Also she's a pretty entertaining speaker IMO. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37240544,"author":"estebank","month":"2023-08","story_title":"A half-hour to learn Rust","text":"If you're looking for something with a narrative you can watch, the RustConf 2018 closing keynote [VIDEO] is a great talk that has an overview on \"generational arenas\", which are effectively \"just\" a vector with a custom index type that holds the \"pointed-to\" generation, and the stored values also store their generation inline. This allows: all objects to be stored in a contiguous block of memory (increasing the likelihood of \"pointer-chasing\" style of code to have the pointed to value warm in cache, significantly speeding them up), allows relocation (because you're no longer dealing with pointers, but rather offsets to the beginning of the pointer), and doesn't have the pointer invalidation problem (because the \"pointer\" now asserts that the pointed to value hasn't changed, and if so return an Err/None). It also has the benefit that because you're not dealing with pointers you don't need to write any unsafe Rust code, out of bound accesses are checked, and the borrow graph becomes simpler because the arena owns all of its contents, instead of having to keep track of the lifetime of borrows at compile time (the famous \"fighting with the borrow checker\") nor is as \"expensive\" as the tracking an Arc<RefCell<T>> could be.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18741850,"author":"faitswulff","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"I rather enjoyed RustConf 2018's Closing Keynote, \"Using Rust For Game Development\" by Catherine West: [VIDEO] I learned about the ECS pattern and got to see some Rust refactoring in action. Previous HN discussion here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25038114,"author":"nabakin","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Why Rust Is the Future of Game Development","text":"Chucklefish, the developer of Starbound, uses Rust too. The lead dev on the project gave a great presentation [1] at RustConf. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26088398,"author":"hectorlorenzo","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Are we game yet? \u2013 A guide to the Rust game development ecosystem","text":"I just recently came across these two videos. Using Rust For Game Development by Catherine West: [VIDEO] Counter-rant from Jonathan Blow: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32067787,"author":"pornel","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Roguelike Tutorial in Rust (2019)","text":"It is a very different and seemingly weird approach. It's almost like writing SQL queries for your game world (e.g. \"find all entities with a Flying component and attach them a WooshSound component). A clever memory layout makes these queries super fast. It makes separation of concerns very natural. Different parts/layers of the game, like inputs, AI, sounds, graphics, effects and animations can be coded separately. You don't end up with \"god class\" for player's object that does a bit of everything. You have player entity that has components attached, and each system operates on its own set of components. I can't really do it justice in a comment. It's a quite different approach, so it's not directly comparable. It's like OOP vs Rust's traits. ECS happens to match Rust's memory model and traits incredibly well. Here's a more in-depth talk about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aMcJ1Jvtef0":[{"hn_comment_id":17215508,"author":"corysama","month":"2018-06","story_title":"GrafX2 \u2013 a bitmap paint program inspired by Amiga programs","text":"If you are here and you haven\u2019t seen Mark Ferrari\u2019s GDC talk, you really should sit down and watch it. He is perhaps the greatest pallete animator of all time. Even if you aren\u2019t familiar with the games he worked on, HN folks have likely seen his gallery of single-image animations linked below. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20004424,"author":"corysama","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Making a Game Boy Game in 2017","text":"Every Deluxe Paint fan out needs to watch this video of the master of that tool explain his craft Mark Ferrari: 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26446276,"author":"Macuyiko","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Loom EGA/VGA Comparison","text":"> The original EGA background art for Loom was made by Mark Ferrari Obligatory recommendation for this talk by Mark Ferrari: [VIDEO] - truly an artist","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31405273,"author":"imachine1980_","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Living Worlds: 8 Bit art animated with palette cycling (2012)","text":"this is incredible talk form the Background Artist of monkey island, about 8 bit and explain in details how palette cycling works, and modern way to doing the same more efficiently for modern games. 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39546903,"author":"chongli","month":"2024-02","story_title":"How video games use lookup tables","text":"He gave one of my favourite GDC talks of all time [1]! I recommend this talk to anyone who is interested in the details and history of working on limited colour palette games! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42640891,"author":"corysama","month":"2025-01","story_title":"A Pixel Parable","text":"Mark was nice enough to invite me to his home studio when I was a new high school grad to talk working in games as an artist. He told me the story of the fight over dithering. I give him strong partial credit for ending up a game engine/art pipeline coder instead and got to thank him after his most excellent GDC presentation on the lost power of palettized textures [VIDEO] You can see that power in action here [LINK] (Hit show options) [LINK] BTW: Deluxe Paint has been remade in Python if you want to give it a try [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18523231,"author":"codetrotter","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Dithering Process, Return of the Obra Dinn (2017)","text":"Came across this in a thread on Reddit. It\u2019s been discussed on HN before as well but I think it\u2019s worthy of being resubmitted. Previous discussion: [LINK] In that discussion multiple people said that they preferred the non-stabilized dithering, and they argued that that is \u201chow it was\u201d on the old 1-bit Macs. \u201cThe original effect is how it's supposed to look and how it would have looked on an old computer with 1-bit graphics.\u201d says one commenter. I think these comments are missing the forest for the trees. It\u2019s not about faithful recreation, it\u2019s about artistic inspiration and invoking certain feelings. See also the talk \u201c8 Bit & \u20188 Bitish\u2019 Graphics - Outside the Box\u201d by artist Mark Ferrari. [VIDEO] If you artificially constrain yourself too much, your game will suffer and no-one will want to play it. On the other hand, if you can give a nod to the past and a feeling of nostalgia but at the same time acknowledge that we have had progress, and incorporate that progress in your game, then there is potential for a game that is actually fun to play.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21909470,"author":"kick","month":"2019-12","story_title":"A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art (2015)","text":"I don't agree with that! Early personal computers also had pixel art, and it was mind-blowing what was done with it. Watch this talk from Mark Ferrari, for example: [VIDEO] [LINK] Check out what he did with color cycling in this demo: it's amazing. I recommend looking at \"May - Jungle Waterfall - Rain\" to see how amazing this is. That's not a gif, it's a single image, just rotating the colors. That was to deal with storage constraints. Can you imagine? The techniques of early PC and applications are worth saving , too. The art shown in that tweet is amazing, too, but it's not the same thing! It's an entirely different thing, with entirely different constraints.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23305787,"author":"arexxbifs","month":"2020-05","story_title":"I wrote Task Manager and I just remembered something","text":"There's a lot of stuff available but the problem is knowing what to look for. For example, the book \"Commodore: A Company on the Edge\" chronicles quite a bit of Commodore lore, and there are numerous resources for both Amiga and C64 online. Too many to mention, really, and lots of them are heavily specialized. CSDb[0] for the C64 demo and cracking scene, for example. I also recommend The Early History of Smalltalk[1] by Alan Kay himself and Mark Ferrari's talk[2] on creating pixel art for LucasArts games. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25357971,"author":"rozab","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Designing 2D graphics in the Japanese industry","text":"You might be interested in this GCD talk. The speaker was an artist on various classic adventure games. I found it really interesting how he considered himself a traditional artist and doesn't really like computers at all. The things they achieved with pallette switching were unbelievable, especially considering the limitations of their tools. It's crazy how he managed to do this stuff just in basic paint programs. Some HNers will be horrified (just write some code!) but I think it's really inspiring. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26491710,"author":"_dps","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade EGA/VGA Comparison","text":"If you have an interest in this kind of art, this GDC presentation by Mark Ferrari \"8 Bit & 8 Bit-ish Graphics\" gives lots of great detail about the art process, tools, and practices of the time (Ferrari worked on the EGA art for Monkey Island, among several others). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29444050,"author":"rcarmo","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Super Pyxelate converts images to 8-bit pixel art","text":"This is very neat, but if you want to see a true (human) master at work, check out Mark Ferrari's GDC talk here: [VIDEO] I'd love to see an algorithm that could approximate this degree of mastery :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32807831,"author":"SonOfLilit","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Living Worlds in HTML5 (2012)","text":"This is an amazing engineering and artistic achievement. I have the Live Wallpaper for Android and it's the most delightful $2 I've ever spent, even though it crashes every few days. Right now it's snowing. Yesterday night I spotted a shooting star. There's a great talk by Mark Ferrari about his work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40430874,"author":"corysama","month":"2024-05","story_title":"An Ode to Deluxe Paint (2023)","text":"If you want to see what a master of Deluxe Paint palette cycling can do check out Mark Ferrari's [LINK] (hit \"Show Options) and [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41073956,"author":"corysama","month":"2024-07","story_title":"A Clone of Deluxe Paint II Written in Python","text":"If you want to see what a master of Deluxe Paint palette cycling can do check out Mark Ferrari's [LINK] (hit \"Show Options) and [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41705999,"author":"jkbyc","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene","text":"You might enjoy an entire talk on using a limited color palette for graphics in early games and how it stimulated creativity [VIDEO] \"In this GDC 2016 talk, Terrible Toybox's Mark Ferrari discusses and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47814877,"author":"sph","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Amiga Graphics","text":"You might enjoy this GDC talk by Mark Ferrari of LucasArts fame, where he goes over his pixel art technique, as well as how he did color cycling: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48461928,"author":"corysama","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Making Graphics Like it's 1993","text":"If you want to play with software rendering, here's probably the shortest code that will get an ARGB8888 2D array from main memory to the screen efficiently for all platforms using SDL2 in C [LINK] you'll need to do the translation from a 320x200x8-bit palletized framebuffer to ARGB yourself ;) If you want to get inspired by what can be done with palletized framebuffers check out [LINK] (click Show Options) and the GDC presentation by the artist [VIDEO] With that you can fire up [LINK] for that classic Deluxe Paint IIe vibe. Or, [LINK] for something more modern.","stance":"rec"}],"aMcjxSThD54":[{"hn_comment_id":16193069,"author":"josephg","month":"2018-01","story_title":"The curious star appeal of Jordan Peterson","text":"I think \"watch X destroy Y\" is just youtube's version of clickbait. I suspect you'll find videos like that tailored to most groups on youtube. I sometimes use them as trailers for longer talks that I might enjoy - although I always feel a little guilty for encouraging this sort of thing. In this case I found their interview to be excellent viewing. She was harsh and honest with him, and hurled most of the standard criticism at Peterson that people talk about. And while doing that she gave him the time and opportunity to respond. And he stayed calm, considered, articulate and entertaining throughout. I don't agree with everything either of them said, but I enjoyed watching that interview immensely - its exactly the sort of thing I want to see more of on youtube and in the public sphere. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16398363,"author":"air7","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge","text":"I've recently encounter Jordan Peterson. He speaks very eloquently about topics such as gender differences from (IMO) a rational and scientific point of view. I'm linking an interview with him which I find fascinating: Both for the information he conveys and for the manner in which he manages to remain cool and clear-headed against a very aggressive interviewer. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16516189,"author":"dkoubsky","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Male and female bosses share the same \u201cclassically masculine\u201d personality traits","text":"Jordan Peterson talked about this in his infamous Cathy Newman interview. I think it's worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18707964,"author":"cm2187","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Top Patreon creators launching an alternate crowdfunding platform","text":"Well they occasionally debate with each others but aren't supporting the same ideas. They do have in common that they disagree with identity politics, and as you can tell from the name calling on this HN page, this is a topic on which for many there is zero tolerance for any disagreement. Peterson mostly discusses religion (from a philosophical point of view), self-improvement, identity politics. He tends to be more on the conservative side but outside of identity politics doesn't discuss politics that much. His videos are all on his youtube channel [1]. A good way to make your own opinion is to watch the channel 4 interview, which I think is the way many people discovered him [2] Harris is a Democrat, furiously anti-religious and anti-Trump, talks about quite a variety of topics. You can browse through his podcasts [3]. He also doesn't like identity politics and islamist extremism. To get a good idea of his position on a touchy topic, you can try his interview of Charles Murray [4], which is very interesting and I think is a good example of how a relatively balanced point of view can get unfairly attacked. I am less familiar with Rubin [5]. My understanding is that he is more of a libertarian. Also less familiar with Eric Weinstein (and his brother Bret Weinstein). But you can listen to his discussion on the Intellectual Dark Web with Sam Harris [6]. Harris also has some interesting discussions with Bret Weinstein. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37390625,"author":"hombre_fatal","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Farms that create habitat key to food security and biodiversity","text":"\"So we should X?\" is usually a signal that you're about to not track/engage with what someone said. I'm reminded of Cathy Newman's interview of Jordan Peterson where her only retort the whole time was \"So you're saying that <something he didn't say>.\" ( [VIDEO] -- A classic, even if you don't like the guy) For example, they are talking about cows we farm into existence at the tune of 1.5 billion global population, not a few million wild animals.","stance":"rec"}],"aMnn0Jq0J-E":[{"hn_comment_id":5682484,"author":"erre","month":"2013-05","story_title":"A regular expression matcher By Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan (2007)","text":"Ah, and Jon Bentley's chapter about quicksort, along whose lines there's a (also very interesting) Google Tech Talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37248336,"author":"tonym128","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Where do I find good code to read?","text":"I'm sorry these are videos, but your question made me think of these. If you're looking for programming inspiration I love these videos Jon Bentley - Three Beautiful Quicksorts [VIDEO] Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"aNAtbYSxzuA":[{"hn_comment_id":23197573,"author":"gilesvangruisen","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?","text":"I really enjoyed this interview with Larry Wall (of Perl fame), and I come back to it from time to time. He does a great job illustrating the hacker mindset that you mentioned [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41207843,"author":"kzisme","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Larry Wall's Very Own Home Page","text":"I used to visit his personal site to see updates, but It's been awhile since I last looked. I do however frequently watch this interview with him: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aNR4n0i2ZlM":[{"hn_comment_id":15188425,"author":"eggy","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Articles on fractals, computer graphics, mathematics, demoscene and more","text":"His YouTube tutorial where he creates the beating heart composited on live video as he explains it is a great introduction for beginners and younger people [1]. I've learned so much from his sharing of his techniques and knowledge. Thanks Inigo! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22318795,"author":"isoprophlex","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Wolfram Alpha: {y = Re(sqrt(abs(x)(1-abs(x)))), y = Re(-sqrt(1-sqrt(abs(x))))}","text":"Highly recommended video by Iquilez, in a similar vein: [VIDEO] Watching the guy hack away at graphics is super enjoyable","stance":"rec"}],"aO3JgPUJ6iQ":[{"hn_comment_id":46419217,"author":"cartesius13","month":"2025-12","story_title":"What an unprocessed photo looks like","text":"Highly recommend this CaptainDisillusion video that covers this topic of how cameras process colors in a very entertaining way [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26152247,"author":"MattConfluence","month":"2021-02","story_title":"YouTubers have to declare ads. Why doesn't anyone else? [video]","text":"This video by Captain Disillusion [1] and this bonus clip [2] seems worth mentioning in this thread. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27858791,"author":"rosstex","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Why we're blind to the color blue","text":"If you like this, you'll very much enjoy this exploration of color and chroma keying in cinematography: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39975937,"author":"Arnavion","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Re-creating Disney's sodium vapor process [video]","text":"Somewhat related: My favorite video about green screens and chroma keying, from Captain Disillusion: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aP0Y1uAA-2Y":[{"hn_comment_id":13634025,"author":"espeed","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Why does e to pi i equal -1? (2015) [video]","text":"Have you seen \"Stanford Seminar: Beyond Floating Point: Next Generation Computer Arithmetic\"? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13741936,"author":"trsohmers","month":"2017-02","story_title":"The \u201chigh-level CPU\u201d challenge (2008)","text":"Well unums in particular (especially the new type 3 \"posits\" ones) are very interesting and practical for hardware implementation. John Gustafson, the creator of unums, gave the first talk on type 3 unums at Stanford earlier this month, and there are already multiple hardware implementation efforts (one of which I am indirectly overseeing). While many people have recently hyped up low precision floating point for things like machine learning, Posits provide greater dynamic range AND greater accuracy for very few bits (as low as four, but with good ML starting 8 to 10 bits). On top of all of that, it costs less area and power in silicon than IEEE hardware. Check out the talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13743180,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2017-02","story_title":"GCC optimized code gives strange floating point results","text":"I'm very surprised nobody has brought up John Gustafson's Unum work. His latest iteration is the posit, which he presented at Stanford earlier this month[0][1] EDIT: apologies to CalChris[2]. What I should have said is discussed Gustafson's Unum work. [0] [VIDEO] (relevant question at 1h22m37s) [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15360635,"author":"dnautics","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Floating Point Visually Explained","text":"You may like: [VIDEO] It turns out the math is slightly harder but it's faster than IEEE FP in hardware, probably because of less conditionals in the spec. There is better performance in terms of numerical accuracy at the cost of substantially more difficult error analysis. Disclaimer: I'm in the video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17331781,"author":"gbrown_","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Floating-Point Determinism (2013)","text":"For anyone interested in this sort of thing you'd probably also be interested in John Gustafson's work on unums/posits. Here's a nice introductory presentation [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aSEQfqNYNAc":[{"hn_comment_id":26364381,"author":"TacticalCoder","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Clojure from a Schemer's Perspective","text":"> Do people actually build large codebases with the 'hash map first' approach? There are a few large projects written in Clojure. I'd say it's a \"data first\" approach, not uniquely \"map first\". There's this famous 4 minutes rant by Rich Hickey (the creator of Clojure) where he talks about maps and about how Java does OOP (and how maps are served through getters but you can't see easily that they're maps), it's golden: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26788213,"author":"daly","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Languages you must know #10 (Lisp)","text":"Rich Hickey \"thinks in lisp\". For example, he talks about his \"maps\" data structure (aka association lists). See [VIDEO] Since data and programs are the same thing in lisp you can fluidly shift from one to the other, like I did with \"knowledge\" vs \"rules\". They both have the same representation (defstructs) but they are also code and have execution semantics. Clojure allows you to do this with map objects. The fact that you can use the whole language on everything at any time and that everything at any time is also \"the language\" is how you \"think in lisp\". Nobody thinks of Python programs as \"data\" or data as Python programs. Watch anything Rich Hickey talks about. He really \"gets it\".","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38360086,"author":"travisjungroth","month":"2023-11","story_title":"","text":"A classic rant by Rich Hickey: [VIDEO] I say this even though I don\u2019t usually code this way: I think the big benefit for business code is sort of a constrained flexibility. Objects tend to get really big (the alternative is you have a ton of classes). Think about all the data that makes up one Uber ride. So if I want to do anything with a Ride, I need everything. An even the many classes thing doesn\u2019t really solve that because maybe what I want is cross-cutting. So either way, I just end up having to supply a bunch of stuff I don\u2019t need. The maps-first approach is more incremental. Every function takes what it needs and gives what it can.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43655327,"author":"filoeleven","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Why I Program in Lisp","text":"I like \"Clojure, Made Simple\" even more. [LINK] Someone helpfully pulled out this chunk, which is a good illustration of why data is better than functions, a key driver of Clojure's design. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48378665,"author":"drob518","month":"2026-06","story_title":"My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month","text":"> I personally find OOP to be the most intuitive for large scale systems design, but that's just me. At one point, I was the same. But after going functional in Clojure, I can\u2019t imagine going back. Using maps nd just having common functions that transform data into different data is definitely the way to go. This is with your time: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aT7mnSstKGs":[{"hn_comment_id":14444142,"author":"auganov","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Intel Announces Skylake-X: Bringing 18-Core HCC Silicon to Consumers","text":"I'm sure all of you who love debating ECC will enjoy this defcon video: [VIDEO] \"DEFCON 19: Bit-squatting: DNS Hijacking Without Exploitation (w speaker)\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28616778,"author":"sithadmin","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Cosmic Rays Flipping Bits","text":"There was a good Defcon talk about some security implications of this phenomenon (specifically, DNS squatting) around a decade ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aVUqaB0IMh4":[{"hn_comment_id":33218452,"author":"LeifCarrotson","month":"2022-10","story_title":"LibrePCB 0.1.7","text":"A few months ago, you would have been on Kicad 6 (assuming you didn't pull some ancient 5.0 release from your distro), which I've found to have a great UI. Like all EDA software, the UI is optimized for power users, and therefore has some quirks and a learning curve for the hotkeys, but I would not say that Kicad is phenomenally bad. Work your way through one tutorial (eg. this recent one: [VIDEO] ) and make a quick-reference note for shortcuts, and you can probably be off to the races.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39891103,"author":"mlsu","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What Are You Learning?","text":"I'm in embedded also, I started this journey at work doing board bring-up. I wrote drivers mostly, not doing any direct electrical work, but after reading the schematics I thought, \"oh wow, so that's how they do schematics professionally,\" followed by \"wait, I can do that!\" Before that, I just did a few small things with Arduino. The Youtube channel Phil's Lab has a really good series [1] on PCB design focused on STM32 series chips, that is where I started. I also got a lot of good information in this thread [2] And I got feedback on one of my designs on the PrintedCircuitBoard reddit, which is very active and full of amateur and pro-am PCB designers getting feedback. You can post a schematic or layout and people will leave high quality critiques. For vendors, I have had 2 runs made with JLCPCB (with each run having flaws; some bad, and some not too bad; my board is fairly complex/ambitious so that's part of it). I have heard PCBWay is similarly cheap and good. No quality issues but I've kept traces, spacing, and components on the larger side. I'm not good at PCB design but am having a blast with it. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44951279,"author":"waerhert","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Custom telescope mount using harmonic drives and ESP32","text":"Checking the datasheet is essential, they usually show the \u201cmust-have\u201d parts around a chip. Beyond that, good habits are adding decoupling caps close to the pins, keeping ground solid, and following the reference layout. I also learned a lot just by listening to experienced designers explain their choices, like here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aVwxzDHniEw":[{"hn_comment_id":29064436,"author":"progbits","month":"2021-11","story_title":"SoME1 results","text":"Probably \"The Beauty of B\u00e9zier Curves\" [1], one of the choices by 3B1B, comes closest. It is already a relatively large channel although usually focused on game dev tutorials rather than math explanations. This video bridges those two areas and is absolutely beautiful. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30104044,"author":"eveningtree","month":"2022-01","story_title":"A Primer on B\u00e9zier Curves","text":"Another beautifully explained piece on b\u00e9zier curves is: The beauty of b\u00e9zier curves by Fr\u00e9ya Holmer [VIDEO] Found this via a contest by Grant Sanderson, and it absolutely blew me away(and most people I forwarded it to)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32258549,"author":"armchairhacker","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Higher order derivatives in everyday life?","text":"Bezier curves. Cubic bezier curves (generally the most common type) are represented by cubic polynomials x(t) and y(t) (or just one polynomial P(t) where the coefficients are vectors). The first derivative gives you the tangent and normal. The second derivative gives you the direction the normal will gradually become as t increases. The third derivative gives you the change in this change (the fourth derivative is zero). Curvature is also computed from the first and second derivatives: K = det(P', P'')/||P'||^3 Other kinds of bezier curves are similar. In quadratic ones the first and second derivatives are normal and normal change but the third derivative is zero. In higher-polynomial bezier curves the third derivative changes over time as the fourth is non-zero, and so on. Source is a really interesting video on bezier curves which I highly recommend: [VIDEO] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42991078,"author":"viggity","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Jacksonpollock.org (2003)","text":"If splines/beziers are of any interest to you, I could not recommend these videos from Freya Holmer enough. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44889077,"author":"viggity","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Bezier-rs \u2013 algorithms for B\u00e9zier segments and shapes","text":"Anytime b\u00e9ziers are mentioned on HN, I feel compelled to share these absolutely incredible videos from Freya Holm\u00e9r [LINK] (73 minutes) [VIDEO] (24 minutes)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44980800,"author":"amtunlimited","month":"2025-08","story_title":"An interactive guide to SVG paths","text":"I'm really glad the article links to Freya's \"Beauty of Bezier Curves\" videos, it's genuinely one of the best math/graphics/explainer videos ever made [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47961451,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2026-04","story_title":"A Primer on B\u00e9zier Curves \u2013 So What Makes a B\u00e9zier Curve?","text":"Related, I think Freya Holm\u00e9r's \"The Beauty of B\u00e9zier Curves\" is in the running for one of the best educational videos on YouTube. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28247755,"author":"nrjames","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Manim: An animation engine for explanatory math videos","text":"While not Manim generated, I came across this video explaining Bezier curves yesterday and thought it was pretty awesome. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28368823,"author":"ud_0","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Chaikin\u2019s Algorithm: Drawing Curves","text":"Freya Holmer made a very nice visualization of bezier curves by showing the \"helper\" lines here: [VIDEO] Worth a watch for a quick introduction/recap on how these curves work in the first place (with a focus on gamedev applications).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28377293,"author":"BoppreH","month":"2021-09","story_title":"A layman\u2019s guide to recreational mathematics videos","text":"I'm also a big fan of Freya Holm\u00e9r. She's the author of one of my favorite VR games, Budget Cuts, and her Youtube channel has videos on game development math and shaders [LINK] Her latest video is on B\u00e9zier Curves, using beautiful imagery from her Unity plugin Shapes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29085676,"author":"jbluepolarbear","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Curves and Surfaces","text":"Curves and Surfaces was my favorite class in college and I\u2019ve tried to apply it where ever possible. I recommend this video from Freya Holmer on B\u00e9zier curves. Really cool: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29540586,"author":"thecrims0nchin","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Cubic B\u00e9zier: From Math to Motion","text":"Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown) had a video submission contest and the winner that blew me away did a video on bezier curves. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32936822,"author":"an1sotropy","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Why are quadratic Bezier curves described so obtusely?","text":"It is not the case that cubic Beziers are 3D. There\u2019s a good chance that the font you\u2019re using to read this (especially if you print it out) defines the outline of (2D) letters with a sequence of cubic Beziers. Lots of 2D computer graphics uses cubic Beziers because they ~balance the needs of having lots of DOF for expressivity, while not being so complicated that they\u2019re a pain to evaluate. And the control points that define a quadratic Bezier could be in any dimension, including 3, or even 1, which is good for plotting the basis functions. Where you are shapes how you make sense of things. As you learn to see B\u00e9zier curves from different viewpoints, the particular physical viewpoint you have now will coexist with others. It\u2019s always that way learning math. That feeling of being disoriented is something to treasure, btw; you won\u2019t always have it. My hunch is that this video [VIDEO] comes from someone who\u2019s path through learning B\u00e9zier curves was non-traditional, but they do a beautiful job of explaining and illustrating things. It showed me that I have more to learn too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33764733,"author":"joshu","month":"2022-11","story_title":"When Splines Were Physical Objects","text":"i think - but am not sure - they use clothoid definitions to characterize jerk, as it is more restrictive regarding the maximum rate of turn change. you can make quite a sharp turn with a mathematical spline. but i can see how they would use the physical spline to solve this\u2026 Googling \u201crailroad spline clothoid\u201d got some intriguing hits \u2014 and this HN comment. [LINK] semi-relatedly, this is a fun watch. [VIDEO] even less relatedly, here is a drawing i did by torturing a clothoid optimizer [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36581295,"author":"zoogeny","month":"2023-07","story_title":"An Interactive Guide to SVG Paths","text":"If you are looking for solid content on Bezier curves then Freya Holm\u00e9r's video on The Beauty of B\u00e9zier Curves [1] is well worth the time it takes to watch. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42851753,"author":"WillAdams","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Desmos Animated Graphing Calculator","text":"A wonderful example of this is: The Continuity of Splines [LINK] and The Beauty of B\u00e9zier Curves [VIDEO] by Freya Holm\u00e9r [LINK] While not animated, I find: _Euclid's Elements_ (Joyce's Java Version) very helpful [LINK] Since my current project has pretty much devolved to putting a UI on various trigonometric functions and allowing the user to program them, I'd be very glad of other resources in this space (currently working through Hilbert's _Geometry and the Imagination_ and the book which matches [LINK] and just finished the _Make:Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus_ series, and have had recommended Curves and Surfaces for CAGD: A Practical Guide by Gerald Farin)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44889793,"author":"ajs1998","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Bezier-rs \u2013 algorithms for B\u00e9zier segments and shapes","text":"Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but this video is excellent. And her other video on Splines is also great. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aWvHrih-Juk":[{"hn_comment_id":35592452,"author":"exhilaration","month":"2023-04","story_title":"SpaceX's First Starship Launch Tomorrow","text":"You should read the previous thread [LINK] lots of good stuff in there about visiting, especially this video [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40919606,"author":"gangstead","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Guide to attending a space launch in person","text":"I've been to the last 3 Starship Launches, it's only a 10 hour drive each way! I hope I'm able to go to everyone and to eventually see a booster catch in person. Everyday Astronaut did a great writeup on seeing a launch in South Texas: [VIDEO] My preferred way is to get a hotel room on the south end of the island (Everyday Astronaut recommends Margaritaville and I agree). I woke up an hour before launch and walked a mile down the beach with my kids to Isla Blanca park. Coming from off island you'll have to leave much earlier because the bridge onto the island becomes a parking lot. Hearing protection is probably wise, but it's a different kind of \"loud\". You feel it in your chest. Looking at the distances you are much closer to a much bigger rocket in South Padre than in Florida. The most important thing is to get down at least a day early and drive over to the rocket. Starbase and the OLM are on a public road so you just pull over and look straight up at the world's biggest rocket. Also plan on being there a couple extra days to account for delays. Second most important thing is to go to Hopper Haus (Starbase themed bar/restaurant in Port Isabel). People always say to me they'd like to join, when's the next launch? Driving down there is a leap of faith since there is only an announcement 4-5 days out and the launch license sometimes isn't issued until the day before. So you have to be ready and have a flexible schedule.","stance":"rec"}],"aXQ2lO3ieBA":[{"hn_comment_id":9807557,"author":"kelvin0","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Test Pilot Admits the F-35 Can\u2019t Dogfight","text":"Agreed, but more specifically here is the 10 minute video which best distills the whole movie. It's worth watching: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16630467,"author":"urlgrey","month":"2018-03","story_title":"The US Army\u2019s costly quest for the perfect radio","text":"Watch the \"Pentagon Wars - Bradley Fighting Vehicle Evolution\" video: [VIDEO] It's a great example of how trying to design a product that works well for every stakeholder in every scenario leads to a Frankenstein of a product that doesn't work well for anybody. This happens all too often in government (typically military) contracts.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35720027,"author":"somethoughts","month":"2023-04","story_title":"U.S. Navy wants to sell off its troubled littoral combat ships to allies","text":"Reading this \u201cWe weren\u2019t sure LCS was executing the missions it was designed for,\u201d Commander of Naval Surface Forces Vice Adm. Roy Kitchener said in January 2022. \u201cAnd so we \u2026 went out to the number of fleet commanders and said, \u2018Alright, what do you want it to do? And what missions do you want it to execute based on the environment we\u2019re in now?\u2019\u201d reminds me of this excerpt from a movie: Pentagon Wars - Bradley Fighting Vehicle Evolution [VIDEO] From the movie \"Pentagon Wars\". Bradley Fighting Vehicle design and development. Any design engineer will love this scene.","stance":"rec"}],"aXflBZXAucQ":[{"hn_comment_id":17592021,"author":"FrankyHollywood","month":"2018-07","story_title":"The brain may clean out Alzheimer\u2019s plaques during sleep","text":"His Google talk is also very interesting, a lot of other effects besides Alzheimer's are related to sleep deprivation [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18110999,"author":"parski","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Do we really need eight hours of uninterrupted sleep a night?","text":"On the subject of Why We Sleep: I'm not sure how well it corresponds to the book, but Matthew Walker also has a Google Talks talk on the same subject that I recommend watching if you're not a book person: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21415923,"author":"jmts","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Deep Sleep May Help the Brain Clear Alzheimer's Toxins","text":"Matthew Walker wrote that book [1]. He also has a few talks on YouTube worth checking out. From memory [2] was an informative one for me. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aXvDEmo6uS4":[{"hn_comment_id":30001844,"author":"musesum","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Burned Out. What Now?","text":"I've gone through two burnouts in my career. The first time around, I tried CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy), with limited results. Recently, I followed the Huberman protocol for sleep [1] and daily tools [2], with profound results. Recovery time was respectively 12 months (CBT) and 3 months (Huberman). YMMV [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29865277,"author":"Prdikt","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Biohacking: Temp minimum suggests your most productive time","text":"Temp minimum and productivity are regulated by your circadian rhythm and there are many works on the topic. E.g., [LINK] , [LINK] . You also may want to listen to Dr. Andrew D. Huberman, a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He perfectly describes how it works in one of his YouTube videos: [VIDEO] Will be great to hear back if you try this approach!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34219490,"author":"pigcat","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you work on your mental health?","text":"I'll start with things that really worked for me last year: I began every day with a short daily walk in the morning. 15 minutes. It's a fairly easy goal so it's possible to stick to it, and it made a surprising difference in my mood. Got this one from this episode of the Huberman podcast [1]. Then I changed from doing hot yoga/HIIT three times a week to doing it daily at 6:30am, which requires going to bed at 10pm. This was harder to get in to, but I suffered for a couple weeks and it's now a habit. This year, I'm continuing with the above but adding cold showers. Note that these are all physical rather than mental improvements, but their impact on my mental health has been huge. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aY985qzn7oI":[{"hn_comment_id":36662982,"author":"DemocracyFTW2","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Professor believes alien fragments found in 2014 Papua New Guinea meteor","text":"posted here a few days ago: [ harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb ]( [VIDEO] ) by Angela Collier. It's 1h6m long but I was surprised about myself that I watched the entire thing and I guess it's because of the high quality of the presentation and the occasional deadpan remark that keep you awake. Talk about Avi Loeb specifically start at 24 minutes. The most damning part of her takedown is probably when she shows zoom footage of a physicists' video conference and other snippets where Loeb is literally foaming with expletives directed mostly at fellow physicists, y'know, the Establishment who just wouldn't follow his by-now predictable but wholly unsupported jump from \"I found mineral spherules on the bottom of the ocean\" to \"these must come from that deep space meteorite that I lately discovered\" to \"It's aliens!\". Collier is such a sound antidote to all that flaky and faky science coverage we're getting. For all the clear words that she finds she still leaves viewers with an open question: \"So is Loeb a grifter? I don't think so. Is he a crackpot? Future will tell.\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37280851,"author":"DemocracyFTW2","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Astrophysicist Avi Loeb: \u2018UFOs should be the subject of mainstream inquiry'","text":"Yeah, that guy again. Required viewing: acollierastro harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36654197,"author":"maxbond","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Physicist who found spherical meteor fragments claims they are alien","text":"This isn't the first time Loeb has shouted \"aliens!\" Previously he said Ouamuamua was aliens based on a hunch, and after the news got their hands on it and declared aliens to the public, astronomers were understandably peeved with him and asked him not to shout \"aliens!\" unilaterally based on a hunch. Loeb didn't take it well. There's an amazing clip where he rants about how he is the only one serious about finding extraterrestrial intelligence... To a room full of career SETI astronomers. Here's a video essay about him. (People who have a strong preference for direct/to the point videos would probably be better served seeking out another source, I feel like this video adds interesting context but I know a lot of you would feel it's fluff.) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37293634,"author":"hikingsimulator","month":"2023-08","story_title":"A Harvard Professor Became the World\u2019s Leading Alien Hunter","text":"Since it's on topic, I'd like to share a small youtuber who does science communication. She covered Loeb and the topics of crackpots in science [1]. Her other video on string theory and how it damaged science communication is really good too. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37295787,"author":"adolph","month":"2023-08","story_title":"A Harvard Professor Became the World\u2019s Leading Alien Hunter","text":"Thanks to hikingsimulator's link below, here is Loeb interacting with Tarter [0]. The entire video is worth listening to and the vlogger is refreshingly fair minded. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37318556,"author":"Eji1700","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Discovery of Spherules of Likely Extrasolar Composition in the Pacific Ocean [pdf]","text":"> He's written \"over 800 scientific papers\". Is that... a good thing in his field? No...it really isn't. If you want a very accurate and in depth breakdown of why, i suggest you watch this: [VIDEO] If you don't want to do the whole thing, just jump to his lovely little interaction with Jill Tarter. Then look at all the comments trying to somehow give this snake oil salesman credibility. He's a publicity chaser who's past his prime and cashing in on his reputation and abusing his position. The fact harvard is profiting from it frankly is a disgrace.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37328727,"author":"DemocracyFTW2","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Discovery of Spherules of Likely Extrasolar Composition in the Pacific Ocean [pdf]","text":"OK so maybe I should've just linked e.g. to that very detailed (and sort of lengthy, but entertaining) video by acollierastro \"harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb\" ( [VIDEO] ) which is definitely not flamewar-ish. Guess I've gotten somewhat thin-skinned given the volume of faux / overblown science news of late. For those reading this, there's yet another post here ( [LINK] ) that links to a harvard.edu article that gives more details on why the collectors of the spherules believe they have reason to assume that (1) they are really from the suspected meteorite, (2) the material's composition doesn't resemble materials known from other meteorites. Many questions remain though; for those interested in spherules from outer space, there's yet another earlier post ( [LINK] ) that links to a video that shows how excrutiating it is to collect and sort out teeny meteorites from the environment. Having seen that and a clip about the expedition's method of collecting (lowering a strong magnet to the seafloor) I wonder how often they lifted the thing up to collect material because otherwise they could not produce statistics about abundance in relation to the asteroid's flight path.","stance":"rec"}],"aZY-yQYVf38":[{"hn_comment_id":21612933,"author":"dr_dshiv","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion","text":"If you have never seen the original 1985 British film that introduced \"Max Headroom: 20 minutes into the future\", you are in for a serious treat. It is so much better than I ever expected -- and it's only 55 min long. More relevant than ever: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25539314,"author":"jimsmart","month":"2020-12","story_title":"The Max Headroom Christmas Special","text":"Not many people know: the original Max Headroom 'pilot' was a 1985 British cyberpunk movie, somewhat underground despite being shown on TV \u2014 \"Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future\" \u2014 not only does it explain the origin of the Max Headroom character, it's actually a great watch IMO :) Whole movie [VIDEO] Wikipedia info [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ab-r0capbzk":[{"hn_comment_id":23756803,"author":"chvid","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Seven year coronavirus trail from mine deaths to a Wuhan lab","text":"If anyone here wants a break from Joe Rogan and Eric Weinstein's world view here is a suggestion: [VIDEO] Did SARS-Cov-2 start in a Chinese lab? Potholer54 is an Australian science journalist whoes mission it is to debunk junk science and conspiracy theories. He is very entertaining and very insightful.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24699242,"author":"hwillis","month":"2020-10","story_title":"'Long Covid': Why are some people not recovering?","text":"> I'm not denying the plausibility that it was simply a mistake with a highly contagious virus being studied in their Wuhan lab There are two labs in Wuhan. The institute of virology, and the wuhan CDC. The institute of virology is 12 km from where the virus started spreading. The CDC lab -which does not study viruses- was the one at the center of the spread. The amount of bullshit associated with the origins of the virus is embarrassing. It would be one thing if it was planted propaganda- there are obvious lies and embellishments, but the sheer number of mistranslations, misunderstandings, and hilariously implausible theories taken as fact is insane. Potholer54 did a rather methodical takedown: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27413121,"author":"TazeTSchnitzel","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Publish and Perish","text":"A lot of this \u201ccircumstantial evidence\u201d was and is game-of-telephone nonsense. Many mix together two completely different institutions (the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and the Wuhan Institute of Virology) which are several kilometres apart, for example. (Edit: [VIDEO] is a great look at said game of telephone.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29659497,"author":"wh313","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Apache Log4j bug: China\u2019s industry ministry pulls support from Alibaba Cloud","text":"Here's a two of his videos where he claims that COVID-19 emerged from a lab: [LINK] [LINK] And here's a pretty thorough analysis of the flaws with this theory: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aeRVdYN6fE8":[{"hn_comment_id":27331302,"author":"vishnugupta","month":"2021-05","story_title":"\u201cComputer science is not about computers\u201d","text":"I suggest a combination of theory (videos/books/papers) and practice. For practice; I highly recommend learning Haskell. If you are new to functional programming then learning Haskell is challenging and frustrating but as with any new topic the key is to not give up but keep probing. A good recent development is lot of mainstream languages are beginning to include functional paradigms such as lambda, closures etc., For example Java introduced lambda expressions, Javascript has had them for a while now. But from a first-principles stand point Haskell is as good as it gets so please do learn and code in Haskell if not at work then at least side projects. For theory I've found following material super useful. 0. This[0] is an incredibly awesome lecture where Phil Wadler takes us on a whirlwind tour of computer science. He talks us through different foundational structures on which almost everything (hardware and software) about computer science is built. I watch this lecture once every few months :-). It helps you build up context and ground various topics. 1. The one and only SICP. Book[1] and lectures[2]. 2. Automata theory[3]. This isn't an easy course but gets to the heart of the matter i.e., the meaning of \"function\" and what how can it be mechanically \"computed\". 3. Category Theory is where lot of active research is happening in CS theory. This is a very good lecture series[4]. The pace may seem a bit meandering but don't be put off. Bartosz is a gifted teacher and works i","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11607004,"author":"knucklesandwich","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Type Wars","text":"> Neither is static typing. It's a layer of protection, much like tests. Not true. The curry-howard correspondence shows the relationship between typed programs and proofs. I recommend you watch a Phillip Wadler talk about this: [VIDEO] Note: This doesn't mean that type systems can prove _all assertions_ about a program, but type systems do indeed work as provers. > I don't think that's necessarily true. You still need to write tests with or without static typing. Those tests you need to write anyway will catch type errors in a dynamically typed language that a statically typed language picked up at compile time.. This isn't necessarily true unless you test for all inputs (which tends to be infeasible in most cases). A type system can reject inputs by virtue of their lack of conformance to a type, which eliminates the need to test them. > The question is whether you need to write more tests and whether the greater number of tests offsets the greater amount of code you need to write to statically type your code. I don't have any evidence to support this (if someone does or has proof to the contrary, I'd love to see it referenced here), but I believe there is almost no overhead imposed by a static type system with type inference. > Ditto for types. I acknowledged this above, you just removed that part from the quote. In practice I've never had a bug with the type system (that I'm aware of), while I've seen hundreds of bugs from incorrect test assertions.","stance":"rec"}],"aeWyp2vXxqA":[{"hn_comment_id":38173921,"author":"rishav_sharan","month":"2023-11","story_title":"UHZ1: NASA Telescopes Discover Record-Breaking Black Hole","text":"Quasi stars are one of the theories for the existense of the super massive black holes. Here is a nice video [VIDEO] by Kurzgesagt on this topic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44740265,"author":"db48x","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Early universe's 'little red dots' may be black hole stars","text":"Just in case you somehow don\u2019t know what a Black Hole Star is, check out Kurzgesagt\u2019s video about them < [VIDEO] >","stance":"rec"}],"agOdP2Bmieg":[{"hn_comment_id":16839792,"author":"Stwerner","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Really excited to go through all the other talks listed here I'm not familiar with! Three talks that I tend to reference a lot and have had a huge impact on the way I think about software: The Soul of Software: Avdi Grimm - [LINK] The Humane Representation of Thought: Bret Victor - [VIDEO] How to Program Independent Games: Jonathan Blow - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14509064,"author":"skadamat","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?","text":"It's going to be entirely different I feel. Instead of manipulating graphics on a flat screen, focus will probably be on manipulating physical objects on a table / in a room. Watch his 2 talks that highlight the thinking and inspiration behind the RealTalk project: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15565912,"author":"skadamat","month":"2017-10","story_title":"The HARC First Year Report","text":"Highly recommend Bret's 2 talks for context: [1] Seeing Spaces: [LINK] [2] Humane Representation of Thought: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18317856,"author":"skadamat","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Dynamicland: The Next Big Thing Is a Room","text":"One of the goals of Dynamicland is to foster the creation of new representations that take advantage of + live across more sensory modalities. Bret calls them modes of representation, but there are similar phrases in learning & psychology literature. Most representations are haphazardly created (math notation, periodic table of elements, etc) by (often) singular experimentation. Representations are poorly researched and understood (there's no branch of science dedicated to them). If representations were studied more closely, we could get much better at deliberately creating representations that are more humane. When the scientific method is applied, we can then apply the engineering method to create new things from those principles. Bret's talk is a great, accessible overview of these ideas from his context ( [VIDEO] ). To vastly oversimplify things, one way to improve accessibility is to parallelize representations that live in just 1 or 2 sensory modalities to all of our sensory modalities. This way, math notation could be made accessible to & equally powerful to the blind (as it is to those who can see). I empathize (a little, it would be naive for me to assume I can 100% empathize) with your reaction along the axis of accessibility. What Dynamicland looks like right now isn't what it's going to look like later. Right now, you may see Dynamicland as text boxes but now distributed in a room. In 50 or 100 years, there may be no text AT ALL and you can use the senses availabl","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28452882,"author":"badassiel","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Show HN: Web browser to help programmers think clearly","text":"It just so happens I was thinking about spatial org just yesterday, that it would be so nice if I can have 'villages' of tabs on a (geographical) Map. Amazing co-incidence that I woke up to bonsai browser notification! You might find The Humane Representation of Thought[1] by Bret Victor[2] useful, where he demonstrates by example, how existing tools/software (generally speaking) doesn't utilize all the 'superpowers' that we acquired via evolution. --- [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] Edit - grammatical fixes","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34487952,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?","text":"For the people asking who is Bret Victor: When \"What are your favourite tech talks of all time?\" is asked on HN, he gets more mentions than anyone else, usually. Some of his talks: Inventing on Principle [LINK] The Future of Programming [LINK] The Humane Representation of Thought [VIDEO] Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [LINK] Seeing Spaces [LINK] Drawing Dynamic Visualizations [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"agS6ZXBrcng":[{"hn_comment_id":21530132,"author":"Bluecobra","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Sir Rod Stewart reveals his epic model railway city","text":"I loved that intro when I was growing up! There's a documentary about how they made it that can be found on Youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35007489,"author":"jcl","month":"2023-03","story_title":"CGI Renders Are Real Photos","text":"Reminds me of the making of a pre-CGI HBO intro -- looks CGI but is entirely physical models, motion controlled cameras, and clever compositing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44746572,"author":"SoftTalker","month":"2025-07","story_title":"How was the Universal Pictures 1936 opening logo created?","text":"The original HBO \"Feature Presentation\" intro was shot with minatures and similar sorts of effects, all before digital/CGI existed or was feasible. There's a documentary about it on YouTube [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"agZ0xISi40E":[{"hn_comment_id":19373044,"author":"_rpd","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Brexit: MPs reject Theresa May's deal by 149 votes","text":"This 6 minute video by CGP Grey explains the different possible relationships with the EU available to the UK, and why the UK has so far rejected all of them ... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20871920,"author":"Gwypaas","month":"2019-09","story_title":"No-deal Brexit opponents defeat government","text":"It is not really a negotiation. It's a pick and choose for the UK, the problem is that their red lines does not correspond to any \"orbital\" around the EU. Budging on any of them for the EU is not an option to keep the single market intact and other systems intact. Sure they negotiate the exit tab and such but for a deal the size with the EU a couple of tens of billions over the period it is supposed to last just gives political points when talking to the media. This video [0] from CGP grey using a slide by the EU chief negotiator from december 2017 defining the EU \"negotiation tactic\" which they haven't stepped away from yet gives an overview to the issue. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21096187,"author":"NeedMoreTea","month":"2019-09","story_title":"New research suggests that we\u2019re making ourselves sick over politics","text":"> crash the country out of the European Union because no one was willing to work with Theresa May. The possible was agree Theresa May's deal untouched, drop some UK \"red line issues\", remain in the EU, or no deal Brexit (crash out). That's it. Except many didn't think that good enough, or it wasn't in Britain's interests (no kidding) and we've spent 2 years trying to tolerate them all indulging in this political act of national self-harm. Our international status is \"laughing stock\". Surprisingly, the impossible has not yet become possible! EU's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, published a single slide in 2017 that summarises the whole mess well. CGP Grey has a video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21216652,"author":"NeedMoreTea","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Isle of Man is not in the UK","text":"See this is where it gets truly silly. You may not be wrong about some form of soft-Brexit, or EEA status, but whichever level of closeness you consider that is not \"hard Brexit\" would have required dropping one of the UK's \"red line\" issues. Anything else that was not Theresa May's deal needed the EU offering cake and cookies for free. It wasn't so much she couldn't sell it as the hardliners of the Tory party wouldn't take it. For 3 years the UK's negotiating position has been \"la, la, la, not listening\", whilst asking for the impossible (or cake). Michel Barnier, the EU's chief negotiator summarised it all beautifully in a single slide he put out in about 2016 or 17. Each level of softer Brexit available is ruled out by a UK red line. Should you want a breakdown, CGP Grey did a short video about \"that slide\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26055412,"author":"kergonath","month":"2021-02","story_title":"UK exports to EU slashed by 68% since Brexit","text":"Everything was predicted a long time ago. All the friction at the border is the inevitable consequence of the choices the successive British governments made. I like to show this as a demonstration: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26541947,"author":"dgellow","month":"2021-03","story_title":"EU rebuffs UK calls to ship AstraZeneca Covid vaccines from Europe","text":"Well, that's the point, no? The UK decided to leave but refused all the existing forms of bilateral agreements. The country mentioned by the comment you responded to all have some form of bilateral agreements with the EU, there are a lot of ways to be a close partner with the EU without being part of the union. Switzerland is part of the Schengen area and we regularly renegotiate (and vote on) new agreements. Norway is also part of the Schengen area, but also part of the EEA (European Economic Area). Turkey is part of the European Custom Union. The UK decided to go its own way instead. This interactive SVG gives a good overview: [LINK] . CGP Grey did a great video in 2019, though it's of course a bit outdated now: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29714996,"author":"Kim_Bruning","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Brexit: \u2018the biggest disaster any government has ever negotiated\u2019","text":"Can you provide some examples? As far as I know there are many countries that cooperate with the EU but are not a part of it, based on many levels of compromise. (This video proposes we replace the european flag's stars with asterisks for all the exceptions and compromises! [LINK] ) In fact the UK took several of those types/levels of cooperation into consideration and rejected each. (Here's a quick video overview of that [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31145705,"author":"dmitriid","month":"2022-04","story_title":"UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned","text":"> The EU wants the UK to be subservient to the Commission for ideological, political and economic reasons You mean, the UK was one of the three largest powers in the EU with all the power to influence its policy and direction which it did. Instead, the UK adopted the attitude of \"we are a superpower, you owe us everything, we owe you nothing\" to which the planet's largest economic union and one of the planet's largest markets calmly responded, \"u wot mate?\" About a year into the whole Brexit brouhaha the EU said, look, here are the various agreements and levels of agreements we have with all the countries [1] (taking from the amazing short overview here [2]). You don't want Norway style because \"it's EU with extra steps\", you don't want Switzerland-style because \"same thing\", you don't want Ukraine or Turkey-style because you don't want to be bound by EU trade agreements etc. At every step of the way UK's reaction was \"these Brussels democrats are smothering our great independent nation, they must give us everything we want\". That's not how negotiations work. Especially not with an economic block of ~450 million people who are your biggest trading partners. And after all that puffing and chest-beating, almost seven years into the whole Brexit ordeal UK also \"suddenly\" discovered the whole Northern Ireland border issue. Which tells you a lot about the competence of your government. So, no. UK went from being the country with the largest influence on EU policy to an outside cou","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34596047,"author":"dmitriid","month":"2023-01","story_title":"UK expected to be only major economy to shrink in 2023 \u2013 IMF","text":"The EU is a huge economic block, and Britain's single most important trading partner. They can be whatever the fuck they like to be. And the EU was exceptionally friendly and patient towards the UK which demanded all the benefits with none of the responsibilities. UK's entire chain of options were known to everyone with half a brain even before Brexit started. Described succintly in this chart: [LINK] and explained very briefly in this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"agzNANfNlTs":[{"hn_comment_id":31602104,"author":"gaze","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Microsoft Purview: Additional classifiers for Communication Compliance (preview)","text":"Yeah it's not necessarily true. I think Innuendo Studios/Ian Danskin explains this mechanism very very well [VIDEO] Many people think Jeff Bezos should exist and have his wealth because he got there by playing the game better than everyone else, and that this game is just the way things are. He earned it. Attempts to change the game will just make everything worse and people won't get what they deserve, and thus these attempts are unethical. Equal societies are an absurd liberal fantasy. My attempts to advocate that Jeff Bezos shouldn't have the money he does are actually just selfish attempts to cheat at the game and stuff my own pockets with money and get something I haven't earned. The real issue here is a lack of discipline. Watch the rest of the videos. People who think like this largely can't be argued with.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19585309,"author":"pxc","month":"2019-04","story_title":"The golden age of YouTube is over","text":"My favorite corner of YouTube\u2014 lengthy, thoughtful, and often artistic video essays and skits addressing culture and politics\u2014 is flourishing right now. Some examples: Unfolding Ideas \u2013 [LINK] ContraPoints \u2013 [LINK] Philosophy Tube \u2013 [LINK] Lindsay Ellis \u2013 [LINK] Innuendo Studios \u2013 [VIDEO] HBomberguy \u2013 [LINK] and so on. And it seems like it's only in the past couple of years that many of these channels have reached their current levels of artistry and production value. Most stuff on YouTube is trash, but there's plenty else to watch.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45229441,"author":"Terr_","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction","text":"> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity. I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics. There's a model for analyzing \"how could you think that\" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay: > See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...] > Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...] > Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ainyK6fXku0":[{"hn_comment_id":6388558,"author":"shimfish","month":"2013-09","story_title":"The CEO of Panera Bread attempts to live off food stamps for a week","text":"Incidentally, I really like William Shatner's cover. It brings out the contempt in the lyrics. And it rocks. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9777396,"author":"BuildTheRobots","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Chromium will no longer download/install the Hotword Shared Module","text":"somewhat even more off topic, but: Thanks to William Shatner for lots of things; least of all demonstrating how to deliver a line of dialogue without it sounding like you're reading off the back of a cereal packet and left your glasses at home. His cover of Common People (Pulp) is an immense example of this. [VIDEO] Yes Doctor Who, I'm staring you out whilst shaking a fist at you....","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28790758,"author":"simias","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Going from $110k to $24k for more skin in the game","text":"Glad you liked it, I also enjoy the cover of this song by William Shatner that's surprisingly good IMO: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33074843,"author":"svnt","month":"2022-10","story_title":"From Burned Out Tech CEO to Amazon Warehouse Associate","text":"\u201cYou will never understand how it feels to live your life with no meaning or control, and with nowhere left to go. You\u2019re amazed that they exist, and they burn so bright that you can only wonder why?\u201d \u2014- Pulp, Common People The Shatner cover is something special: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33131678,"author":"ThePhysicist","month":"2022-10","story_title":"My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness","text":"I like him, he seems to be a thoughtful person. I once listened to his album (which has a great cover of the song \"Common People\", that jokes about how rich people see the world [1]), in which he reflects on the death of his previous wife, who drowned in their pool, I found that quite touching as well 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38248209,"author":"ur-whale","month":"2023-11","story_title":"From Aristocratic to Ordinary: Shifting Modes of Elite Distinction (2020)","text":"> Not to mention the Jarvis Cocker fascination If you like the Pulp (original AFAICT) version, you have to listen to this cover by Cap'n Kirk: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aircAruvnKk":[{"hn_comment_id":15689936,"author":"hal9000xp","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to get started with AI?","text":"I'm in the same boat. For long time, I was interested in AI but at the same time intimidated by math. I'm relatively comfortable with discrete mathematics and classical algorithms and at the same time calculus and linear algebra is completely foreign to me. Also, I do not accept way to learn ML without good understanding of core principles behind it. So math is a must. A few months ago, I stumbled upon very amazing YouTube Channel 3Blue1Brown which explains math in very accessible way and at the same time I got feeling that I finally started understanding core ideas behind linear algebra and calculus. Just recently he published 4 videos about deep neural networks: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] So my fear of ML was gone away and I'm very excited to explore whole new world for neural networks and other things like support vector machines etc","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16040048,"author":"mandliya","month":"2017-12","story_title":"What was the best CS, SE or Math video you watched in 2017?","text":"[VIDEO] 3Blue1Brown\u2019s playlist on neural networks. Like other 3Blue1Brown videos, the visualisations and explanations of the math/concepts are so amazing, they give you the intuition behind the neural networks naturally.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19981623,"author":"spandexcajun","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1908)","text":"3blue1brown videos are probably the best equivalent. Maybe a little basic? But really, all his math videos are just ridiculously good quality. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35431798,"author":"superkuh","month":"2023-04","story_title":"State-of-the-art open-source chatbot, Vicuna-13B, just released model weights","text":"Essentially a computer neural network is just a lot of addition (and matrix multiplication) of floating point numbers. The parameters are the \"strength\" or \"weights\" of the connections between neurons on different layers and the \"bias\" of each neuron. If neuron Alice is connected to neuron Bob and Alice has a value of 0.7, and the weight of Alice's connection to bob is 0.5, then the value sent from Alice to Bob is 0.35. This value (and the values from all the other incoming connections) are summed at added to the neuron's negative bias. I highly recommend checking out 3blue1brown series on how neural nets, gradient descent, and the dot product (implemented as a matrix multiplication) all tie together: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39902838,"author":"6mian","month":"2024-04","story_title":"But what is a GPT?  Visual intro to Transformers [video]","text":"For me 3brown1blue series: [VIDEO] was an excellent introduction that made Andrej's videos understandable. Then I did 3 first chapters of fastai book, but found it too high level, while I was interested in how things works under the hood. Going through Andrej's makemore tutorials required quite a lot of time but it's definitely worth it. I used free tier of Google Colab until the last one. Pausing the video a lot after he explains what he plans to do and trying to do it by myself was a very rewarding way to learn, with a lot of \"aha\" moments.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15506349,"author":"ocharles","month":"2017-10","story_title":"A Neural Network in 11 Lines of Python (2015)","text":"3blue1brown is currently doing a terrific series on how neural networks work, which nicely compliments this blog post. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15625863,"author":"nouveaux","month":"2017-11","story_title":"What is backpropagation and what is it doing? [video]","text":"This was very timely for me and for anyone else learning, here are the first few videos of the series: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] (Original video) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16921516,"author":"dahart","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Microsoft makes AI training courses available to the public","text":"The Stanford course is pretty good. [LINK] For something quicker & less applied, maybe the 3b1b series on neural networks: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23085192,"author":"miklosme","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Humans Not Invited","text":"If you want an extensive answer, I recommend the neural network playlist on 3Blue1Brown: [VIDEO] For a quick answer, watch this segment: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24595807,"author":"aero-glide","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Bringing the Mona Lisa Effect to Life with Tensorflow.js","text":"Here's a 4-part video series by 3blue1brown : [VIDEO] Explains the big picture in an intuitive way","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34730345,"author":"ianbutler","month":"2023-02","story_title":"GPT in 60 Lines of NumPy","text":"I think FastAI lesson 3 in \"Practical Deep Learning for Coders\", has one of the most intuitive buildups of gradient descent and loss that I've seen. * Lecture [1] Book Chapter [2] It doesn't go into the math but I don't think that's a bad thing for beginners. If you want mathematical, 3blue1brown has a great series of videos [3] on the topic. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] * I've been messing around with this stuff since 2016 and have done a few different courses like the original Andrew Ng course and more.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35757475,"author":"circuit10","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The future of generative AI is niche, not generalized","text":"If a human brain doesn\u2019t use maths, what does it use? It\u2019s Magic? > \"training\", more accurately described as references Uh, no, that's not at all how the training process works. The training process very roughly mirrors evolution/natural selection except more more direct and faster. This is a good introduction to the concept of how a computer could learn: [LINK] This is a more technical look at how exactly it works in more modern AIs: [VIDEO] (it's a series) > If it encounters a problem it hasn't been programmed for, it cannot reason a new solution. But an LLM can? It's not as good at it as a human but it can Relevant: [LINK] (if you don\u2019t want to click it it says \u201creferring to AI models as \"just math\" or \"matrix multiplication\" is as uselessly reductive as referring to tigers as \"just biology\" or \"biochemical reactions\"\u201d) > By your logic, video game characters must use reasoning, when no, they don't. It's maths. \u201cBy your logic, if tigers are dangerous, then bananas must be too, when no, they aren\u2019t. It\u2019s biology.\u201d","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36248931,"author":"segmondy","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Getting into AI This Summer","text":"Studying C or Python is studying C or Python. Rather, study AI. Pick up python along the way, skip C. [VIDEO] [LINK] There's tons of book, but I recommend this since it's hands on \"Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow\" [LINK] [LINK] download some local LLMs and play with them along the way. Good luck.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40225532,"author":"phkahler","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Better and Faster Large Language Models via Multi-Token Prediction","text":">> YouTube has always been a mixed bag As an outsider but avid reader of this stuff linked from HN, I would recommend the channel 3blue1brown. He's got several NN and AI related videos, and the couple I've seen were pretty good. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43391604,"author":"rottc0dd","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Deep Learning Is Not So Mysterious or Different","text":"If anyone wants to delve into machine learning, one of the superb resources I have found is, Stanfords \"Probability for computer scientists\"( [LINK] ). It delves into theoretical underpinnings of probability theory and ML, IMO better than any other course I have seen. (Yeah, Andrew Ng is legendary, but his course demands some mathematical familarity with linear algebra topics) And of course, for deep learning, 3b1b is great for getting some visual introduction ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45227436,"author":"Razengan","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Qwen3-Next","text":"A while ago I had caught up with the basics thanks to the legendary 3blue1brown and his playlist on Neural Networks: [VIDEO] and other helpers like Artem Kirsanov: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"aiv1JOfMjm0":[{"hn_comment_id":10316749,"author":"shawnps","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Golang proposal: Dense mark bits and sweep-free allocation","text":"If you liked this you might also find Rick Hudson's talk on GC improvements in Go 1.5 interesting: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11002695,"author":"kelseyhightower","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Google Open Source Load Balancer in Go","text":"Go's TLS support should be greatly improved in Go 1.6 thanks to the performance work you referenced by Cloudflare. The licensing issue was resolved and the work was merged 11/10/2016[1] While GC will always carry a cost, great improvements have been made over the last year and continues to be an area of focus for each Go release. Rick Hudson gave a nice update on Go's GC improves at GopherCon 2015 [2][3] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] . [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ajGX7odA87k":[{"hn_comment_id":21198451,"author":"_wldu","month":"2019-10","story_title":"James Mickens\u2019 Tenure Announcement","text":"I've always been a fan of his talks. His keynote at USENIX Security 2018 is by far the best summation of the dangers of ML that I've ever seen. It's hilarious too. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38836107,"author":"jamesblonde","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What talks do you consider real gems?","text":"Nearly all talks by James Mickens are a laugh a minute. The guy is the only computer science standup comedian I have ever encountered. He is also technically excellent. This one is a classic: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40860920,"author":"tomxor","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Explainability is not a game","text":"> ML models is most often inscrutable, with the consequence that decisions taken by ML models cannot be fathomed by human decision makers Yup, James Mickens planted this seed 6 years ago, well worth the watch, even if you already agree it's brilliant cathartic humour (the subject isn't really \"security\"). [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46818920,"author":"vizzier","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Was Vibe Coding a Ruse?","text":"James Micken's talk from almost a decade ago now covers this stuff perfectly... [VIDEO] I re-watch it fairly often, and we just keep getting worse.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18345245,"author":"tempodox","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Google Home (in)Security","text":"You might be interested in this keynote by James Mickens: [VIDEO] titled \u201cWhy Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?\u201d.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20769477,"author":"w8rbt","month":"2019-08","story_title":"How to Start with Machine Learning","text":"I think James Mickens (Harvard CS) has it right. ML is inscrutable, black-magic that no one really understands. This is long, but worth watching: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23485283,"author":"specialist","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Police have been spying on black reporters and activists for years","text":"\"What matters now is impact, not intent.\" James Mickens, using logic and humor, makes this point in a way that even geeks might understand. \"Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28507864,"author":"bawolff","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Have you found it difficult to get quality technical content on YouTube?","text":"I generally dislike consuming computer content in video form, but there is plenty of interesting content out there. Lots of conferences video tape sessions. Plenty of noise but some good things too. E.g. one of my faves: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31089803,"author":"hallway_monitor","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Planting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models","text":"I believe this talk [0] by James Mickens is very applicable. He touches on trusting neural nets with decisions that have real-world consequences. It is insightful and hilarious but also terrifying. [VIDEO] \"Why do keynote speakers keep suggesting that improving security is possible?\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34498558,"author":"mikewarot","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Why the infosec community is ahead of the curve and rationalists and nihilists","text":"The actual video referenced is a hoot[1] A cautionary tale about AI, Technological Manifest Destiny, IoT, and why you shouldn't trust it, ever. His take down of IoT devices is hilarious. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"akVL7QY0S8A":[{"hn_comment_id":3991885,"author":"JackC","month":"2012-05","story_title":"TED and inequality: The real story","text":"This is a great point. Not to get political myself, but if you compare this talk to Elizabeth Warren's \"The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class\"[1] from a few years back, it's night and day. Before she made economic claims, she described her exhaustive process with government agencies to get reliable data; the ways she tested the data when it seemed implausible; the various theories she tested and rejected to explain the data ... it's gripping stuff, because she develops insights based on research and hard-nosed science. That's what TED should be about. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6412102,"author":"hannibal5","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Median Family Income Is Lower Today Than in 1989","text":"Elizabeth Warren has answers: The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class with Elizabeth Warren [VIDEO] Everyone should watch the video. She answers for the question of having more cars etc.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":187452,"author":"timnic","month":"2008-05","story_title":"After the boomers, meet the children dubbed 'baby losers'","text":"I was watching a video by Elizabeth Warren of Harvard Law School on the topic the other day. The gist of it is (I think) basically that housing and healthcare are taking up most of the money of the middle class. In the 1970-ties a single earner could bring in enough money to support the whole family. Now in the middle class both parents have to work, which doubles the financial risk for the family if one of them (for example) looses a job. If you are interested: the link is [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1474991,"author":"johnohara","month":"2010-06","story_title":"David Harvey: Crises of Capitalism (RSA Animate)","text":"In 2007, before the financial crisis and before becoming Chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel investigating the Troubled Assets Relief Program, Dr. Elizabeth Warren gave a very interesting talk at UC Berkeley titled \"The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class.\" [VIDEO] At the time I thought it was a little alarmist, but in view of recent developments I recommend watching it (58 minutes, sorry). It speaks directly to the point about wages and how middle class households employ revolving credit to make up the the difference. The graphs and data are interesting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4262045,"author":"patdennis","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit","text":"This is very interesting. I think it's also worth pointing out that the data tends to show that the use of personal bankruptcy to game the system is actually very low. I find that when the subject is brought up in a political context, this distinction is often not made. Here is a great lecture from Elizabeth Warren on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5111682,"author":"eli_gottlieb","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Recession, tech kill middle-class jobs","text":"I'd advise giving this a watch. The data has surprised everyone, including the people researching it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10827317,"author":"heurist","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Economic Inequality","text":"It's more complicated than that. You need to live in a cheap part of town to afford rent but your city is un-walkable and has poor public transportation? Buy or lease a car so you can reliably get to work on time. You have a family and want to send your children to the best (or even decent) public schools? Live in a more expensive area - you have to buy access to good schools in many places, and the monthly payment on a mortgage for a house is cheaper than renting. You want a college education? Pay up. You want health care? Better have good insurance. There are many reasons that people have debt, and it's not all exorbitant spending. At the same time SOMEONE is profiting off that debt, and they have a vested interest in keeping that debt alive. This is a good talk that discusses nonintuitive pains the middle class is experiencing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12587291,"author":"sn9","month":"2016-09","story_title":"A disaster is looming for American men","text":"This 2008 talk by Elizabeth Warren shows how much more complicated the situation is than the picture you paint. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24113316,"author":"SketchySeaBeast","month":"2020-08","story_title":"CEO of Uber: Gig Workers Deserve Better","text":"> Single income households were a common occurrence, since dual income households competing for housing were not out competing single income houses. And I don't mean this in a crypto conservative way, even Elizabeth Warren wrote a book about it: [LINK] I haven't read the book, but her speech a decade ago is really eye opening. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32088563,"author":"karmelapple","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Inflation rose 9.1% in June, even more than expected","text":"This talk by Elizabeth Warren, before she was a US Senator, talks a lot about this problem of essentials like housing, education, and healthcare going up much faster than, say, a new TV price: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"alasBxZsb40":[{"hn_comment_id":21692324,"author":"smilbandit","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Aldous Huxley Foresaw America\u2019s Pill-Popping Addiction","text":"Aldous's pill popping from Brave New World isn't as interesting as what he said in his interview with Mike Wallace, [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46395719,"author":"Towaway69","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut Had Something to Say. We Have It on Tape","text":"Vonnegut is good but I think (Aldous) Huxley had more to say, at least that resonated more with me. I recently discovered this 1958 interview of Huxley[1]: > This is the force which in general terms can be called overpopulation, the mounting pressure of population pressing upon existing resources. \u2026This, of course, is an extraordinary thing; something is happening which has never happened in the world's history before. I mean, let's just take a simple fact that between the time of birth of Christ and the landing of the Mayflower, the population of the earth doubled. It rose from two hundred and fifty million to probably five hundred million. Today, the population of the earth is rising at such a rate that it will double in half a century. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"amJ-ev8Ial8":[{"hn_comment_id":18112822,"author":"mtgx","month":"2018-10","story_title":"A bone-marrow transplant treated a patient\u2019s leukemia \u2013 and his schizophrenia","text":"It seems that high amounts of salt are \"bad for you\" only in the context of low potassium . But most doctors either aren't aware of the fact that there needs to be a certain proportion of salt and potassium, or they don't bother telling patients because the doctors know most people won't eat anymore potassium-rich foods, so they just tell them to \"eat less salt.\" This video has some references to studies backing this: [VIDEO] There's also this book that argues for the importance of salt in our food, of which I heard good things but haven't read: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18460108,"author":"mtgx","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Western lifestyle may cause blood pressure to rise with age","text":"I really don't think high amounts of salt is a big deal, unless you almost never eat foods with potassium, too. But even then high levels of salt is probably a bigger issue for people who already have border-line high blood pressure due to atherosclerosis, and then eating a lot of salt pushes them over the limit. It's also much easier for doctors to say \"eat less salt\" than to say \"eat more potassium-rich foods\", even if they know that the two need to be in balanced. When doing a 5-day fasting recently I purposefully tried to consume significant amounts of salt because I felt like I was lacking in electrolytes. I could barely maintain my blood pressure around 10.5/6. Normally, it's around 11.5-12/7. This is a nice video discussing some studies that show that high levels of salt is significantly better if it comes with high levels of potassium compared to low levels of salt but even lower levels of potassium (by ratio): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34195674,"author":"balaji1","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Does sweet sensitivity go down with age?","text":"Salt could be misunderstood. This what I\u2019ve learned video discusses salt and recommended standard sale amount might be too low: [VIDEO] But if the GP comment is listening to his body, it\u2019s fine. I personally prefer more salty food(not snacks) than others around me. And the only opposition seems to be that less salt is better. And less salt means more mental stability.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42665835,"author":"lylejantzi3rd","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Kirin demos \"electric salt spoon\" at CES","text":"> Is salt really that bad? Here's a brief video that makes the claim that you probably need more salt in your diet. He has 3 more salt videos, if you're intrigued. You probably need more salt (short): [LINK] Salt: Are you getting Enough?: [VIDEO] WHY Low Salt Stresses the Body: [LINK] Low Sodium's link to Fat Gain & Insulin Resistance: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"an5abNFba4Q":[{"hn_comment_id":13504773,"author":"yoasif_","month":"2017-01","story_title":"I cannot continue working on my add-ons","text":"There seem to be a lot of people that are saying \"oh, without XUL based extensions, Firefox is just a (worse) Chrome clone, so I might as well just use Chrome.\" I think what they might be missing is that Mozilla's conclusion is a lot like the people seem to be thinking here -- even though Chrome doesn't have the fancy extensions that are possible in Firefox, many many more people are using Chrome than Firefox, because they see it as a better Firefox. Clearly, that has something to do with either security or performance, where Firefox has a perceived lag. Mozilla is actively working to improve performance, and you may not want to switch to Chrome after all, because Chrome may instead be the poor man's Firefox (I personally think this is already the case, simply because with my 679 open tabs, Chrome would simply kill itself [44 loaded]). This video is one of the most exciting I have seen with regards to web browser performance, and it's Mozilla: [VIDEO] More info on what this means for Firefox: [LINK] TL;DR: What if even with the missing XUL extensions, you wouldn't want to switch to Chrome, because Firefox was just plain faster?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14165303,"author":"NiLSPACE","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Mozilla and Microsoft are rebuilding their browsers\u2019 foundations","text":"If you have the time there is a nice talk about WebRender: [LINK] Here is another great talk: [VIDEO] At ~25:30 he'll also talk a bit about Quantum. In a nutshell WebRender is used to send a web page to the GPU which will paint all divs, borders, shadows, images etc. Currently WebRender is the only component I'm aware of that is inside Firefox Nightly. It's still behind a config though.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15445824,"author":"lkbm","month":"2017-10","story_title":"The web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank","text":"This is a great explanation. I also recommend Metajack's talk on WebRender in Servo: [VIDEO] Also go read everything else Lin Clark has done. They're pretty great.","stance":"rec"}],"ao2GL3NAWQU":[{"hn_comment_id":17513267,"author":"mockingbirdy","month":"2018-07","story_title":"A biologist who believes that trees speak a language we can learn to listen to","text":"Start here [1] and see this [2] for a light introduction. Then proceed with cognitive dissonance, implicit belief systems and cognitive biases [3]. Have fun! [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26936682,"author":"hjek","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Word usage guidance and alternative terms","text":"Yea, sure. Say we're talking about someone's leg. If we use words like \"muscles\" and \"flesh\" to refer to their leg, then that's different than using the words \"steak\" or \"meat\", because those last two words are used to legitimize eating the leg in question. If a friend of yours referred to your skin as \"bacon\", perhaps you'd laugh because it's an absurd idea that your friend would want to fry and eat your skin for breakfast. But sometimes we use the word \"bacon\" for real about eating someone's skin, mostly if they're a pig. Those, who don't view it as ethical to commit violence towards others and then eat their bodies, would therefore avoid talking about the skin of others as \"bacon\" and their muscles as \"meat\" (unless they were joking, perhaps). I wouldn't consider \"egg\" is an oppressive word as such, because it doesn't imply eating per-se. Vegans would still say that a chicken is laying eggs. But \"fishing\", even though it's just the noun \"fish\" turned into a verb, is violent because it means \"to hunt fish, often for eating\". Imagine if the verb \"dogging\" was used for hunting and killing dogs? \"Childing\"? \"Womaning\"? Sometimes this carnistic language bias is hidden for us. If you're more curious, please check out Melanie Joy's video, The Secret Reason We Eat Meat: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aoNOVlxJmow":[{"hn_comment_id":19903853,"author":"janoc","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Ethiopian Max Crash Simulator Scenario Stuns Pilots","text":"Well, the \"Stabilizer wheel - grasp and hold\" item of the procedure doesn't necessarily mean the crew will be able to override it. That's the last ditch option on the checklist, when everything else has failed, even turning the motors off (there could be e.g. a short circuit powering the motor). There is no clutch on the 737, AFAIK, because the forces are such that it wouldn't work. Here is a good video by an actual 737 captain explaining how the runaway stab trim procedure works and what you have to do. [LINK] And this simulator video shows both how the 737 horizontal stabilizer is controlled and what kind of forces are on the trim wheel and control column when severely out of trim: [VIDEO] Should give you an idea what were the Ethiopian pilots facing when unable to use the electric trim, plane trimmed nose heavy by MCAS and at high speed ...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19903886,"author":"janoc","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Ethiopian Max Crash Simulator Scenario Stuns Pilots","text":"This video by a 737-NG captain shows the kind of forces you get: [VIDEO] It is not MAX but the systems are identical. That's why it is so essential to recognize and stop the runaway trim (for whatever reason) ASAP or you could get into a situation where it would be physically impossible for the crew to do so.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20043320,"author":"Zancarius","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Long Before Boeing 737 Max Crash, Ethiopian Air Pilot Warned of Dangers","text":"Depends on the aircraft. Some modern jetliners are using fly-by-wire, while others have hydraulically-boosted controls. Some still rely on cable-and-pulley. Either way, as I understand, it wouldn't matter with the MCAS-related MAX aircraft crashes. The elevator trim is able to move the entire elevator (literally, the entire elevator moves in response to the jackscrew controlled by the trim system) to such an extent that, depending on CG, airspeed, and other factors, it cannot be overpowered by moving the control surface to its full deflection. So whether or not the MAX had boosted controls or fly-by-wire probably wouldn't have mattered in the case the aircraft were trimmed fully nose-down. The pilots would have been struggling to maintain control either way. That's why there's stabilizer trim cut-out switches and manual trim. I'd highly recommend Mentour Pilot's videos on the subject, links below: Runaway Stabilizer: How to stop MCAS - [LINK] Boeing 737 Unable to Trim! Cockpit video (full flight sim) - [VIDEO] Five questions about the Boeing 737 MAX Answered - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30245887,"author":"jcalvinowens","month":"2022-02","story_title":"How the Boeing 737 Max disaster looks to a software developer (2019)","text":"> ... it can become impossible for a pilot to physically turn the manual trim wheels to get back into trim I feel like this isn't talked about enough. I had no idea how bad it can actually get: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aoczYXJeMY4":[{"hn_comment_id":27644694,"author":"stuntkite","month":"2021-06","story_title":"CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases","text":"His YouTube channel The Thought Emporium, is amazing. He just moved into a new lab and I really appreciate what he\u2019s working on and how he communicates it. The robot painting fluorescent proteins is neat and recently he dropped a video demonstrating his adventures making synthetic opal. Apparently the edit made him totally lactose tolerant for over a year and now he has very mild lactose intolerance. He says he hasn\u2019t redosed because he wants to improve the plasmid (I think that\u2019s the right term, BUGFIX probably isn\u2019t right) before he takes another run at it. Here\u2019s his update video from last year on that endeavor. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23741053,"author":"freezing_coffee","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The Thought Emporium","text":"Have been a patron for some time, and discovered his channel with his lactose gene therapy video - to which he recently posted an update: [VIDEO] . Great addition to scientific youtube.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25581425,"author":"jcims","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Girlfriend warned Nashville police Anthony Warner was building bomb a year ago","text":"With a germ you can kill a few million people - [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] If you want to see someone do cool stuff with the above: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"aokNwKx7gM8":[{"hn_comment_id":25312261,"author":"szc","month":"2020-12","story_title":"What we can learn from the latest indoor dining study","text":"The way this is presented is going to be interpreted incorrectly. It is incorrect to compare percentages or probabilities like this. Here is a different example to try and illustrate the problem: Is 10% larger than 5%? It is not possible to answer this question if the basis on which the percentages are calculated are different. What if I said the 10% was 10% of whatever you last spent money on, but the 5% was 5% of Google's annual revenue. Which is larger? The same thing is happening in the above - it isn't okay to calculate the probabilities in two situations and then try to cross compare them for size. Sadly this error seems to be cropping up quite a lot! Matt Parker (Stand-up Maths) has an example of this and related to a recent election: [VIDEO] . His explanation is likely better than mine.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25362130,"author":"trevor-e","month":"2020-12","story_title":"YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud","text":"I really hope something is done against Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's content. He's been posting highly misleading/disingenuous election fraud material in order to gain a following, and people are believing it because he touts his PhD from MIT. Honestly at this point between his senate run and \"Inventor of Email\" scandal I'm surprised MIT hasn't had a response. For example, here's a video that debunks many of his claims: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25553156,"author":"nitrogen","month":"2020-12","story_title":"California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M","text":"I am replying for the sake of the hidden sibling comment: I don't watch any major media coverage of politics, but a mathematician and comedian I follow on YouTube (from a different country who presumably has no horse in the race) has analyzed some of the numerical allegations of fraud: - [LINK] - [VIDEO] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26401919,"author":"hinkley","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Nuclear technology\u2019s role in the world\u2019s energy supply is shrinking","text":"Don't. Compare. Percentages. Stand-up Maths called this out recently and it's good to mention. I think this might be the video: [VIDEO] Give me the output and our total consumption please.","stance":"rec"}],"aoy_WJ3mE50":[{"hn_comment_id":27682918,"author":"caddywompus","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Portable nuclear reactor program sparks controversy","text":"Yes, I was really disheartened when I learned that my city only recycles a few types of plastic, and most of it just goes to the landfill. And now its being theorized that oil industries encouraged recycling as a solution, even knowing its deficiencies, so that plastics would be more readily accepted. Regarding nuclear waste disposal, this is the coolest solution I've seen so far: - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32567801,"author":"Nannooskeeska","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The messages that survived civilisation's collapse","text":"Tom Scott has a great video[0] about the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository in Finland[1], in which he talks about one of the reasons that they decided on the particular area - why would anyone dig there? Skip to 4:29 in the video for the relevant info. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ar9WRwCiSr0":[{"hn_comment_id":21096404,"author":"sdenton4","month":"2019-09","story_title":"SNES Cartridges and Enhancement Chips","text":"Along these lines, Tom7 invented* 'reverse emulation' which effectively uses a Raspberry Pi as a co-processor, allowing him to run [spoilers ahoy!]an SNES emulator on an NES.[/spoilers] The talk is brilliant: [VIDEO] * - as far as I know...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25432462,"author":"sgrove","month":"2020-12","story_title":"SuperRT \u2013 Realtime Raytracing on the SNES","text":"In that case, you might like one of tom7's many wonnderful videos [0], \"Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!\" where he hacks a real NES cartridge with a raspberry pi with an emulator, then figures out how to map all of the data into NES sprites, etc. As usual for his videos, it's absolutely wonderful. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30974434,"author":"GuestHNUser","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Harder Drive: Hard drives we didn't want or need [video]","text":"Tom7 is brilliant for anyone that hasn't seen him before. His Reverse Emulation video ( [VIDEO] ) and Weird Chess Algorithms ( [LINK] ) are a must watch. His dead pan delivery coupled with the ridiculous amount of effort he puts into things that don't _really_ matter is honestly inspiring.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31730202,"author":"anyfoo","month":"2022-06","story_title":"The Floppotron 3.0","text":"You will love Tom7/suckerpinch's stuff then, if you don't know him already. Here's a good one for the start, though really, they are all fantastic: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45699619,"author":"pinkmuffinere","month":"2025-10","story_title":"First convex polyhedron found that can't pass through itself","text":"Tom7 is one of my favorite people, he is hilarious, has an amazing technical depth, and so much whimsy to go along with it. I'll proselytize for him all day! relevant video: [LINK] less relevant, but I think my favorite: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18741306,"author":"rrherr","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"From Deconstruct: Nabil Hassein: Computing, Climate Change, and All Our Relationships [LINK] Tom 7: Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22844397,"author":"progval","month":"2020-04","story_title":"RaSCSI: SCSI Interface for Raspberry Pi (2019)","text":"This reminds me of this video of a \"reverse-emulated\" NES using a raspberry-pi: [VIDEO] (you can skip to 3:35 if you're not interested in the jokes). The author further explains how he did it in this \"making of\" video: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27707193,"author":"jerf","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Installing Linux into a 286 laptop from the year 1989","text":"Well, then do I have the video for you: [VIDEO] Bit of a spoiler to post it in this context, but still worth it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30817267,"author":"bla3","month":"2022-03","story_title":"What made the NES so interesting?","text":"What a great article. If you liked this, you'll likely also enjoy [VIDEO] I'm not giving a summary since that video is most fun to watch if you don't know the punchline in advance. (No relationship to the video other than that I liked it.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32947282,"author":"jabbany","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Pcmcia Pico W Card","text":"Heh, it reminds me of this gem: [VIDEO] which does something similar... using a modern device to give old devices essentially capabilities beyond what they should be able to do.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34172964,"author":"NotYourLawyer","month":"2022-12","story_title":"I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM [video]","text":"Great YouTube channel. Here\u2019s a fun video where he integrates a raspberry pi into a NES cartridge to do all kinds of crazy things using the NES\u2019s native hardware. Spoiler alert: full-motion video of the rickroll video is not the craziest thing he manages to pull off. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36810543,"author":"iamevn","month":"2023-07","story_title":"GradIEEEnt half decent: The hidden power of imprecise lines [video]","text":"Anything that catches your eye is good but my favorites are: 30 Weird Chess Algorithms: ELO World [LINK] Reverse Emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"arj7oStGLkU":[{"hn_comment_id":35952165,"author":"akhayam","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Taxonomy of Procrastination","text":"Nicely written. Before taxonomies and remediation, I would watch Tim Urban's absolutely legendary TedX talk that humanizes procrastination--despite all its ills--and how to empathize with procrastinators (inside and around you): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11930355,"author":"nu2ycombinator","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Imagine yourself starting, not finishing","text":"On similar topic, following video is very informational and entertaining. Especially last part the life calendar. Sometimes this life calendar motivates me procrastinate the procrastination :) [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15171383,"author":"foxhop","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Ask HN: How to be curious about last uninteresting 20% of a task?","text":"[VIDEO] Watch this video. It sometimes helps me. I've become a worst procrastinator as I have grown and have more and more responsibility. I like to get things done.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25831578,"author":"uppsalax","month":"2021-01","story_title":"The Reason We Procrastinate and How to Stop","text":"Thank you for sharing, procrastination is something very addictive. A way to deal with it is fundamental. I'd like to share with you a TEDx Talk a professor of mine shown us along a Behavioural Psychology course: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29967713,"author":"awb","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Effortless personal productivity (or how I learned to love my monkey mind)","text":"In the same vein, here\u2019s a fun illustrated guide to procrastination (and fixing it) by Tim Urban: [LINK] And accompanying TED Talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30001847,"author":"awb","month":"2022-01","story_title":"A simple math equation can transform your productivity","text":"For those that aren\u2019t resonating with this take on productivity (and procrastination), check out Tim Urban. Illustrated guide: [LINK] And accompanying TED Talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"atvtBE6t48M":[{"hn_comment_id":16071247,"author":"kowdermeister","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Open source modular synth software lets you create 70s & 80s electronic music","text":"I highly encourage you to watch this and P2 on synthesis. The concepts haven't changed since then. You will find the same things on all synths. [VIDEO] Also, go ahead and try Propellerhead Reason (free to play with, you can save, but can't open saved files). It's the best one on the UX side. However I have to admit I'm using it for 10+ years now.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19770083,"author":"superzadeh","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Subtractive synths explained (2011)","text":"This has been my favourite course to learn about Audio Synthesis; it's old school but has all you need to know, in a digestible format: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25547651,"author":"aasasd","month":"2020-12","story_title":"1937 film explains how a car differential works","text":"That's exactly why this three-hour \u2018Intro to synthesis\u2019 series is one of my favorite explanations on musicmaking: [VIDEO] Instead of running through all the parameters in ten minutes and one second, the dude keeps twiddling the knobs and lets you hear what they do. He spends ten minutes on dialing just one sound. As a bonus, since the vid is from the early eighties, you can occupy yourself by guessing exactly how high the man is.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28507905,"author":"aasasd","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Have you found it difficult to get quality technical content on YouTube?","text":"My problem with informational videos on YouTube is that the majority of what I see in search results is ten minutes or less, often like two-three minutes. So if I want somewhat more information than \u2018I wonder what is that thing anyway\u2019, I pretty much can't get that on YouTube. Like, I'd expect thirty minutes to an hour to be a reasonable length for explaining a topic superficially but in more depth than a dictionary entry. Compare that to the three-part introduction to sound synthesis from the 80s where the dude twiddles knobs for three hours and explains what each of them is doing. Just dialing in one sound takes him ten minutes. It's the best educational video I've seen on YT: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20586506,"author":"aasasd","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?","text":"More of an explanation than a tutorial, and dunno how it is for total beginners, but \u2014 Intro to Synthesis: The Building Blocks of Sound & Synthesis, by Dean Friedman: [VIDEO] It explains the things that you'll constantly fiddle with on a synthesizer (and sometimes even in a DAW with samples: envelopes are likely to appear there). The series benefit greatly from being three hours long in total instead of ten or even thirty minutes. The first vid is followed by: - Intro to Synthesis Part 2 - Types of Synthesis & Programming Examples [LINK] - Intro to Synthesis Part 3 - Additional Synth Features, Performance Controls & Wrap Up [LINK] Also, since the vids are from sometime in early 80s, you'll have fun trying to figure out exactly how high the guy is.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32016440,"author":"aasasd","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ed is the standard text editor (2014)","text":"Yeah, I'm kinda getting into these vids from the seventies and eighties. \u201cIntroducing The Amazing Compact Disc, 1982\u201d [LINK] \u2014 \u201cYou can pick it up and move around, even shake, and nothing happens\u201d, yeah sure bud. \u201cIntroduction to Microsoft Excel, 1992\u201d [LINK] \u201cSusan Kare explains Macintosh UI ergonomics on the Computer Chronicles, 1984\u201d [LINK] \u2014 the control panel is just astounding by modern standards, especially seeing as for me the control panel is a litmus test of an OS interface. Also one of my favorite music-making tutorials is the three-part, three-hour series \u2018Intro to Synthesis\u2019 from sometime in the early 80s: [VIDEO] \u2014 instead of going through all the terminology in ten minutes and one second, the guy takes his time twiddling knobs and showing what each one does.","stance":"rec"}],"au0QJYISe4c":[{"hn_comment_id":27820878,"author":"danparsonson","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Positive Energy Warp Drive from Hidden Geometric Structures","text":"Try this: [VIDEO] c isn't defined as the speed of light - light travels at c, but so does everything else, when you factor in movement through time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28104559,"author":"keithnz","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Very fast rocket","text":"you can't go faster. I know a lot of people find this video helpful in conceptualizing things. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"aw7fUMhNov8":[{"hn_comment_id":26276985,"author":"Meleagris","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The Cuboid: A DIY air purifier that's better than a box fan","text":"This Old House made a great video on the subject of using box fans with filters: [VIDEO] I've been using the design they showed in the video, but I will definitely try this duct-fan method, saving electricity is always a bonus.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28812611,"author":"tootie","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Real-world data show that filters clean Covid-causing virus from air","text":"This Old House has a really good breakdown on filtration and air volume and have a pretty clever DIY box fan approach using multiple filters. Still costs under $100. The Wirecutter recommended Coway filter is $185 on Amazon. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ax7f3JZJHSw":[{"hn_comment_id":22752412,"author":"gundmc","month":"2020-04","story_title":"An analysis of unclear lessons in video games (2019)","text":"I really recommend clicking through and watching the referenced embedded video that forms the basis for this article. It's very well done and much more substantive than this summary. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27556331,"author":"vinkelhake","month":"2021-06","story_title":"The UX of video game tutorials","text":"This guy[1] put his non game playing wife in front of a bunch of games, one of them being SMB. He noted that she never learned how to sprint, and that the game doesn't tell you how to do it either. If you can't figure it out on your own, you have to be told about it, or read the manual. NES games (and other games of that era) were in general pretty bad at tutorials. Players back then were expected to figure things out for themselves, mostly by trial and error. The video has a bunch of other interesting observations. A common theme is that games often assume that the player has some base understanding of game play that might not always be there. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31894977,"author":"newswasboring","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Life is not short","text":"I don't know man, I downloaded Cup Head because it looked cute and it has been kicking my ass since like a month. I know it is one of those notoriously hard games but I think the point stands. I think games have moved away from precision challenges to more abstract ideas. Like Doki Doki Literature Club, I have no f'ing clue whatever that is all about but I am experiencing it. Challenge for me comes from the fact that it relies on peoples knowledge of tropes to enable different story progressions. I don't have that because last game I played was in like 2009. Another game I am having trouble with is watch dogs 2. I know, AAA game, made for less than pro gamers. But again, they are relying on my knowledge of AAA games for conveyance. I regularly have moments where I am thinking, what do I do? where do I go? Now I have played GTA vice city, so open world is not an alien concept. But the scale of it all, its just magnificently complex. Edit: I occurs to me all this can just be the fact that I suck at video games. But I used to be good at them, that's the point. Edit 2: This video explains my feelings better than me [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37430537,"author":"zjp","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Linux becoming a Windows / OS X clone","text":"I agree, for most people the system is a bootloader for Chrome. But this article is about one guy's disappointment he can't hold the whole system in his head anymore, and I'm just saying the user never cared about that in the first place. But also, if you've only used one operating system, there hasn't been any need to generalize what you've learned from that system interaction wise. We had to learn a bunch of computing conventions. Eventually you learn things like \"most command line tools have -v,--verbose\". Grandpa doesn't think computers work this way, he thinks Windows works this way and how should he know how Linux works. 'What games are like for someone who doesn't play games' is a pretty good video about a similar thing. It's easy for you, you know computing vernacular. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"azI3nqrHEXM":[{"hn_comment_id":37323226,"author":"ewgoforth","month":"2023-08","story_title":"The end of cool small cars","text":"This video [VIDEO] explains why small pickup trucks can't really be sold in the USA anymore. This explains the drive to larger pickups, but I don't know what explains the drive from cars to trucks/SUVs. We were considering a wagon when we bought our last vehicle, an SUV. The ability to occasionally carry more than five people was the deciding point. I believe crash standards prevent the selling of wagons with a \"wayback\" anymore.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38268198,"author":"paulgerhardt","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians","text":"They are not making trucks bigger despite CAFE regulations. They are making trucks bigger because of CAFE regulations. This video details why: [VIDEO] The short version is there is an exploit to meet standards by increasing footprint that is easier to implement than to make vehicles more fuel efficient. That exploit needs to be nerfed.","stance":"rec"}],"b-7dMVcVWgc":[{"hn_comment_id":28565576,"author":"nk1tz","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem","text":"Bitcoin is a \"machine that greens\". It will drive sustainable energy development in an emergent free market fashion and take us to a type 1 civilization. [VIDEO] Fix the money, fix the world.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28572964,"author":"easymovet","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Bitcoin's growing e-waste problem","text":"Once you find out you'll panic about not having enough. The benefits are apparent when analyzed from the perspective of money as a technology that enables strong property rights defended by cryptography. Robert Breedlove does a podcast on the nature of money which great. This video also does a great job of addressing the \"waste\" by elaborating on \"unforgable costliness\" : [VIDEO] All of these \"uses energy per transaction\" people are being underserved by their news sources on the development of the lightning network, which is like going from a LAN with global broadcast to NATed and routed TCP/IP (Bitcoin is a global broadcast layer and lightning is a transaction bundling / routing layer/network). I mean an entire country has adopted it and we still have folks on hacker news missing the disruption for the trees!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28641488,"author":"Offpics","month":"2021-09","story_title":"China declares cryptocurrency deals \u2018illegal\u2019","text":"You should educate yourself. Energy consumption is an old myth and cryptocurrency pushes a lot of innovations in this field. There is a great documentary on this [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29832119,"author":"Quindecillion","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Mozilla Foundation pausing cryptocurrency donations","text":"Bitcoin's energy consumption is a feature, not a bug. The amount of energy consumed by the network will continue to increase, as it should, as it secures more wealth. A currency that's based on energy has been speculated about for decades, such as by Buckminster Fuller, which he called the Kilowatt Dollar: [LINK] Bitcoin is the first attempt at such a money that might actually work. [LINK] If you're curious about the connection between Bitcoin and the energy sector these are worth looking at. * [LINK] * [LINK] * [VIDEO] * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30829933,"author":"lumannnn","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?","text":"[LINK] - \"Bitcoin & Renewable Energy Transition - Bitcoin Incentivizes Green Energy\" [LINK] - \"Can Bitcoin Mining Save the Environment? with Troy Cross\" [LINK] - \"This Machine Greens\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"b0EF0VTs9Dc":[{"hn_comment_id":12423630,"author":"nnq","month":"2016-09","story_title":"In defence of Douglas Crockford","text":"also, this indirectly reminded me of what I thought to be one of DC's greatest talks: Monads and Gonads ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21171267,"author":"scotty79","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Learning Haskell is no harder than learning any other programming language","text":"The one thing that made monads clearer for me was this thing [VIDEO] Monads and Gonads It's probably condescending for haskellers because it shows that monads are not some enshrined primary concept but just a kind of dumb wrapper you can write in any language and you do when it's useful for you.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"b1JlYZQG3lI":[{"hn_comment_id":27577421,"author":"AlbertoGP","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split","text":"I\u2019ve heard recently (in a video that I don\u2019t know how to find again) that that\u2019s exactly what happened with the automotive industry\u2019s chip shortage: Toyota was the only one that built a stock of chips in advance, and now are the only ones that can keep producing cars without being limited by the shortage. Edit: found the video: [VIDEO] At 13 min. 24 seconds: > Just in time is such a simple principle, but the pursuit of the elimination of waste is now the central mission of any major manufacturer. > However, most did it wrong. Manufacturers globally saw the headline \u201celimination of inventory leads to massive efficiency gains\u201d and jumped on that without actually determining what made it work for Toyota. > They ignored that Japan's small physical size made for short domestic supply chains, less vulnerable to things going wrong. > They ignored the company's production leveling: finding the average daily demand and producing that regardless of short-term changes and demands. > They ignored the fact that eliminating excess inventory is different from eliminating all inventory. > They ignored the principle of growing strong teams of cross-functional workers predicated on respecting people. > They ignored the culture of stopping and fixing problems to get things right the first time. > They ignored huge swaths of the Toyota Way and created a system that\u2019s less effective and less resilient but can impress shareholders through short-term savings. > How Toyota has effectively implemente","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28233556,"author":"danparsonson","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Chip shortage: Toyota to cut global production by 40%","text":"I don't think that's exactly true and actually may be a common misconception - see [VIDEO] for a much better explanation than I could provide.","stance":"rec"}],"b1NTaVQPt1E":[{"hn_comment_id":12123037,"author":"matthewrudy","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Graal and Truffle could accelerate programming language design","text":"Chris Seaton gave this talk recently about JRuby+Truffle and some specifics about how it optimises so well compared to other Ruby implementations. [VIDEO] Previous discussion [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13088161,"author":"BenoitP","month":"2016-12","story_title":"The Ruby+OMR JIT","text":"I hear the Truffle+Graal combination is getting very good results about Ruby. Here is video about it (pointed to the missing-method example): [1] They're hitting 35x in some benchmarks [2]. Most benefits being in workloads where Ruby has to continuously talk to C; the result-passing part gets compiled away. It is available in Java 9, if I'm not mistaken. LLVM IR bytecode ingestion is in preparations too [3]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"b5P3QDm61go":[{"hn_comment_id":28802885,"author":"filereaper","month":"2021-10","story_title":"M1 Inside a G4 Sunflower iMac","text":"Totally agree about the playfulness. I still remember this ad for the G4 which feels very similar to Luxo Jr. from Pixar. Really fun. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43190581,"author":"bsimpson","month":"2025-02","story_title":"iMac G4(K)","text":"I'm realizing that there may be people here who are too young to remember how great the ad for this was: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"b9FC9fAlfQE":[{"hn_comment_id":3897263,"author":"nrp","month":"2012-04","story_title":"Hand solderable 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 in TQFP package","text":"It's actually pretty simple to hand solder a TQFP by drag soldering. The key is to use plenty of flux and have solder braid handy to take care of any bridges. [VIDEO] It's sort of a moot point with this Cortex A8 IC though, because the RAM it needs only exists in a BGA package.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24050254,"author":"Jugurtha","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Good resources for learning electronic curcuits and PCB design","text":"Meta : You can open an account at: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] These are forums with extremely helpful members. The format is different than Stack Overflow's \"Question/Answer\". It is built on the \"Post/Thread\". You can have threads that go on for 40 pages and span a year, when someone is doing a project, and these magnificent creatures will accompany the users with feedback. One thing I've done when starting to do PCB is submitting the design to electro-tech-online.com asking for feedback and how I could improve it. You'll have people there with decades of experience go through it, make actionable suggestions on the design stinks and why they're not good. You can also share a project you're doing as you are doing it, and they can help with the brainstorming/ideation and implementation, they would ask questions and question assumptions. If you write firmware for microcontrollers, they can also chime in and help you refine the code. If you get into that community, you'll be on a fast track because you'll have people who can do that in their sleep help you in the nicest way. PCB Design : You can get yourself CadSoft EAGLE or KiCad, print the tiny documentation in a booklet format, then read the whole documentation, page by page, annotating it, trying every functionality. Making routes, ground pour, layers, with commands and with the mouse. Dave Jones' \"PCB Design Tutorial\"[0], will also be very helpful. Soldering : Check out Dave Jones' multi-part videos on soldering[1][2][3]. Part 3 i","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24651503,"author":"foldr","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Baremetal programming on the tinyAVR 0 micro-controllers","text":"It's really not difficult to solder SMD components. See e.g. [VIDEO] for a good introduction to the relevant techniques.","stance":"rec"}],"b9IkpUYlOx8":[{"hn_comment_id":37052199,"author":"smoldesu","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Super Mario theme played \u201cblind\u201d by Tom Brier (2008) [video]","text":"An amazing morning to rediscover this amazing artist. I remember watching his videos when I was in school, enjoying his interpolation of popular video game ragtime. The last thing I remember hearing is that he was left comatose after a car crash, with poor outlook for his future. Turns out he's still alive and fairly well, which is a huge relief: [LINK] If you haven't; treat yourself, and just listen through a mix of his sight-read performances on the internet. He's a rare gem and a treat to the ears. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37615895,"author":"airstrike","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Show HN: Learn piano without sheet music","text":"This reminds me of this excellent video: [VIDEO] Can we get this guy to play the Super Mario World ending theme with the notation from TFA?","stance":"rec"}],"b9_Vh9h3Ohw":[{"hn_comment_id":30238312,"author":"roywiggins","month":"2022-02","story_title":"IBM Simon","text":"Calling it a Palm clone isn't really fair, it was developed by the team that founded Palm, Inc in the first place. [LINK] I thought this documentary about Handspring was interesting, and it also comes to the conclusion that the problem was at least mostly the telcos. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39965344,"author":"pushedx","month":"2024-04","story_title":"PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS","text":"Right, it was ex-Palm employees at Handspring that created the Treo. Nice documentary about this with interviews: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40158152,"author":"throwaway74354","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Palm OS and the devices that ran it","text":"Handspring documentary by the Verge had an interesting perspective on the matter: [VIDEO] (I'm bad at cropping YouTube videos. The part in question is [12:53 - 14:30])","stance":"rec"}],"bAUVCn_jw5I":[{"hn_comment_id":36450189,"author":"frederikvs","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Full ignition for ESA\u2019s reusable rocket engine","text":"I'd say it's pretty impressive. Building and igniting a rocket engine is hard. For more detail, I can recommend watching \"Why starting a rocket engine is so hard\" by Tim Dodd [0]. It's not \"never been done before\" impressive, they're a few years behind e.g. SpaceX's Raptor engine, which uses the same propellants, and is also reusable. But still, a new rocket engine is no small feat - the engine is probably the hardest part of a rocket. This is quite literally rocket science. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38321410,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2023-11","story_title":"SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight","text":"Everyday Astronaut had a couple of (IMHO) great videos which goes into why rocket engines are hard[1] and the Starship many-engine approach[2] specifically. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48322298,"author":"HarHarVeryFunny","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The most spectacular rocket explosion since N1 just happened in Florida","text":"Starting/igniting a liquid fueled rocket engine is an inherently complex process - everything has to be sequenced just right to get engines chilled, turbo pumps up to speed, any gaseous fuel vented and harmlessly ignited before it build up, ignition of fuel, etc. Here's a 1hr video from the Everyday Astronaut explaining the process and everything that can go wrong. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bAxRYrpbnuA":[{"hn_comment_id":24537053,"author":"superice","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?","text":"I understand your situation, but please also understand that per cycled kilometer, the Netherlands is a lot safer than any other country. There exists no country with as big of a modal share with bicycles, and our accident rates involving bicycles are still super low. I'd love to get my hands on statistics on accidents per million kilometers or so, but it doesn't seem to be tracked anywhere for bicycles. Point being is mostly that although a helmet helps if you get hit by a car, that itself is already a very rare occurrence in the Netherlands due to the way our infrastructure and roads are laid out. In addition to that, the average speed for our cyclists is lower, because 'sporty' cycling and commuting cycling are two very distinct kinds of activities over here. This means that your average city commuter cyclist will usually cycle at a leisurely pace between 15 and 20 km/h, not the >25km/h your average sporty bike will do. I'm not saying not wearing a helmet would be the best choice your situation, in almost any biking situation around the globe that is the obviously correct choice. The Netherlands (and perhaps Denmark) are the exceptions to this because we have taken so many other precautions to make cycling a safe experience. This video lays that out perfectly: [VIDEO] It's relatively easy to make the argument that added pollution of people taking the car due to hassle with helmets will cause more deaths and injury than leaving the helmets at home, or at the very least it'l","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30332039,"author":"palijer","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Pedestrian deaths spike in U.S. as reckless driving surges","text":"And that still doesn't seem to stop reckless driving from killing pedestrians. The only thing that will slow drivers down is when they feel unsafe themselves, or have a risk to their vehicle. Adding signs or automatic fines doesn't do anything. You need narrower streets utilizing actual traffic calling techniques. It's such a sad sight to see signs with a \"traffic calming zone\" sign, but absolutely zero traffic calming done. It'll be a wide open street, we'll paved, no trees right against the road or bollards in the middle or speed bumps. Watching this video feels like an alternative reality that never happened and it seems great. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34980865,"author":"oblio","month":"2023-03","story_title":"US Pedestrian Death Rate Increased 9x Faster Than Population 2019 to 2022","text":"If I'm reading it right, the advice in your comment is basically \"Bad Infrastructure Planning 101\" in 2023. The right way to do it is what the Dutch do: [VIDEO] It's called \"traffic calming\". Oh, and underground pedestrian walkways, skybridges, etc are absolutely horrible long term solutions. If you'd use one of them for extended periods of time, you'd know. They're generally under maintained over the decades, they tend to get dirty and attract homeless people as shelter (I don't want to get into the debate of why homeless people need to use them as shelter), they're for various reason a top target for muggings, they inconvenience the people you should be encouraging (pedestrians) by greatly increasing the distances they have to walk, which means that people will just stop walking when their 500m straight line walk becomes a 1.2km runaround, etc.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43869325,"author":"broguinn","month":"2025-05","story_title":"New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer","text":"The above comment is getting downvoted, and I suspect it's due to a misunderstanding of their intent. Yes, high speeds can make collisions (especially, as another commenter points out, to pedestrians and cyclists) more dangerous. However, just as human drivers subconsciously speed up when part of a group of cars, they are not often conscious of the environmental queues informing the speed at which they drive. Given the poster's allusion to 'stroads', I suspect that they're in favor of traffic engineering patterns that encourage speed reduction based on safe context queues without solely relying on an unenforced and often unobeyed traffic speed. Consider this video on Dutch traffic calming: [VIDEO] . Lane narrowing, raised walkways, curves in the road (chicanes), etc. are all environmental queues that enforce safe traffic speed based on context, without relying on conscious human compliance.","stance":"rec"}],"bB340S0tGf8":[{"hn_comment_id":36724347,"author":"EarthIsHome","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Interview with Senior Rust Developer in 2023 (Parody) [video]","text":"Their \"Interview with an Agile Coach\" [0] parody video is one of the best I've seen. Take a look if you enjoyed this one! [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32504973,"author":"shrubble","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Agile projects have become waterfall projects with sprints","text":"A funny enough YouTube video (comedy) and really, it kind of reminds me of the agile methodology in the large company I worked at ... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bBC-nXj3Ng4":[{"hn_comment_id":15142195,"author":"sagitariusrex","month":"2017-08","story_title":"A Guide to Crypto Currencies","text":"For a quick video intro I recommend this video from 3Blue1Brown (\"youtube mathematician\") [VIDEO] IMHO the best intro to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15504409,"author":"ahussain","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Blockchains explained visually (part 1 of 2)","text":"The best explanation of blockchain has to be (unsurprisingly) 3Blue1Brown: [VIDEO] Would highly recommend watching this video for anyone who hasn't already.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15791063,"author":"gnarbarian","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Demystifying Blockchains","text":"this video is the best explanation for how mining and blockchains work IMO: [VIDEO] It's long but very clear and thorough.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40735461,"author":"RichardCA","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Nobody knows what's going on","text":"> As someone that works in the crypto industry, I feel this every time I see the news or articles report on it, or comments here talking about it. It was the same way during the 90's Dot-Com era, journalists would explain the World Wide Web with word salad, e.g., the \"Graphical portion of the Internet\". With regard to Crypto, I decline to discuss it without mentioning the 3Blue1Brown video, sometimes the gambit works and triggers a better discussion: [VIDEO] And I love the comments in that video about being \"Confused, but on a higher level\".","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15400703,"author":"agreen","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources to learn blockchain and smart contracts?","text":"Intro: 1. [LINK] 2. [LINK] 3. [VIDEO] 4. [LINK] 5. [LINK] 6. [LINK] Build Your Own Blockchain: 1. [LINK] 2. [LINK] 3. [LINK] Resource List for an Advanced Understanding (Multidisciplinary Approach): 1. [LINK] --- Additionally, here is some advice from Balaji Srinivasan (source: [LINK] ): 1. First, I'd master database and cryptography fundamentals, with something like Dan Boneh's course for the latter 2. Then, I'd read the Bitcoin.org and Ethereum documentation 3. Then, you should write short Python or Go scripts to do things like printing out the blockchain, formatting and signing a transaction by hand, managing private keys, that type of thing. This will give you a feel for the raw data structures. 4. After doing all this, I'd take a look at application libraries like Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali's new blockstack.org The reason I'd do it in this order is that you would learn fundamentals first before proceeding to the cutting edge.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15402958,"author":"AdrienChey","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources to learn blockchain and smart contracts?","text":"As a quick and visual introduction, I would recommend the great \"Ever wonder how Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) actually work?\" youtube video from 3Blue1Brown [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15644234,"author":"ddebernardy","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Bitcoin mining uses more energy than Ecuador \u2013 but there\u2019s a fix","text":"Mining and facilitating transactions, by which I'm assuming you're meaning certifying that transactions are legit, are the same thing. Here's a short video by 3Blue1Brown on how cryptocurrencies work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15765623,"author":"afarrell","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Best online resources to learn about Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency?","text":"For a high-level introduction, this article in The Economist is where I'd advise someone to start: [LINK] Then, to make things feel more grounded, watch this video of a maths teacher walking you through the mechanics of what actually happens. He starts with \"four friends who sometimes spot each other $5 for lunch\" and then builds from there with great visuals, so it is quite accessible. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15806026,"author":"j_s","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Understanding Ethereum Smart Contracts","text":"Just over a month ago, HN user DennisP answered the question \"How did you get into contract ethereum development?\". [LINK] If you are starting back at the idea of the Bitcoin blockchain, see ahussain's recommendation of 3Blue1Brown a day later: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17297041,"author":"drexlspivey","month":"2018-06","story_title":"How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain","text":"This video does a very good job explaining what exact problems you would face if you tried to create a decentralized payment system and how bitcoin solved these problems. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29157107,"author":"axby","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Blockchain 101: The Simplest Guide You Will Ever Read","text":"I really liked this video by 3Blue1Brown explaining how blockchain works: [VIDEO] Things that I didn't realize until I watched the video: * \"Mining\" bitcoin means processing transactions for other people. Miners do time consuming operations to process transactions. I had never heard of 3Blue1Brown before someone showed me that video, but he has a bunch of other good math videos. I liked the one about pi showing up in weird places.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29854594,"author":"grog454","month":"2022-01","story_title":"My First Impressions of Web3","text":"What exactly isn't clear? How cryptography works / benefits people? How applying cryptography to ledgers and ownership databases works? Or how it's all going to be enforced? By the way I'm not pro crypto in that I'm not trying to convince people to put money into it. I think the energy costs of all crypto token systems are prohibitively high right now. That, and the deflation problem I personally think are the biggest unsolved problems in Bitcoin right now.. But somehow I can't even get past what a cryptographic ledger is and how it's beneficial on this forum, of all forums. Yikes. I've been patiently explaining my understanding of the ideas behind crypto. 3Blue1Brown seems to be favorably received on this forum, so maybe this will help educate you: [VIDEO] NFTs are a natural extension of a cryptographic ledger as it's explained in that video. It's just adding non fungible tokens to the otherwise fungible bitcoin tokens being exchanged on the blockchain, and we'd like those non fungible tokens to represent real world objects, rather than just USD. Aside: I feel like we're in the dark age of cryptocurrencies right now. People are just incredibly unimaginable. I imagine 7,000 years ago there was a guy named Bob who wanted to trade his apples for some oranges. A girl named Alice wanted some apples but didn't have any oranges so instead she offers a piece of gold jewelry. Most of the Bob's on this forum would tell her to ** off. But there was some Bob who accepted the gold jewelr","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31452391,"author":"jstx1","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Should I learn the tech behind crypto even if I don't want to own any?","text":"If you're interested, watch a youtube video or two about it (e.g. [VIDEO] ). You don't need to get super deep or spend too much time on it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32182957,"author":"cowtools","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Blockchain.com cuts 25% workforce amid crypto bear market","text":">If the majority of miners agree to it then the rest of the network either goes along with it, or they're forced to do a hard fork themselves. The only the hashrate attacks can do is alter the order of transactions (for example allowing them to replace their past transactions and double-spend). They cannot change the way in which users interpret blocks (for example, they cannot spend another user's outputs, change the value of a given output such as a coinbase output, or otherwise alter the tokenomics). I recommend watching 3blue1brown's video: [VIDEO] >For the end user just trying to make a payment, it's irrelevant whether it's intentional or not, either way he is now faced with the spitting of his coins and the resulting chaos. Any reasonable vendor will wait for X amount of blocks to pass before accepting a transaction. You're describing a well known vector called a \"Finney Attack\", which becomes exponentially less likely for every block you wait. >What's the actual value of a bitcoin? There just isn't one. Take the number of pizzas that are being sold for bitcoins, and divide that by the number of bitcoins in circulation. I think you may find that the value of BTC/Pizza has not changed much over the last decade. I mean, what is the actual value of a dollar. It is not like we use the gold standard anymore. The dollar is valuable because it is a connected to a useful payment system. You don't mind holding some liquidity in US Dollars because you have an expectation that you","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32848349,"author":"cowtools","month":"2022-09","story_title":"The Ethereum merge is done","text":"Here is a good video that basically explains everything: [VIDEO] This is not a very good explanation, but basically, you can have a \"currency\" using just asymmetric key cryptography: users simply sign \"transactions\". The problem is that you need a central authority to confirm the order of transactions, otherwise the recipient of a \"transaction\" will not know if the funds associated with that transaction have already been spent to someone else (\"double spending\"). You can solve this using hashcash to make the transaction order hard to reverse- creating a \"proof-of-work\" by doing something that is easy to verify but hard to determine (like reversing a hash function). Another method is \"proof-of-stake\" wherein transaction order is not signed by a central authority but instead general users that are guided by some internal incentive structure. Cryptocurrency is often expensive to run or use because a cryptocurrency transaction has to be synchronized across the entire network of that cryptocurrency, and there are incentive structures like fees to prevent people from spamming the network. There is also tech like zero-knowlege-proofs, multisig, etc. that can do interesting stuff. But this is the basic concept.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32895080,"author":"cowtools","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Bitcoin is not a store of value","text":">transaction fees will prop miners up (though it hasn't happened yet so it's valid to be doubtful this'll happen in practice) No, they won't. This is a common talking point, but it is rarely accompanied by facts. Consider that fees currently amount to about about a percent of the total miner payout. There is some research that indicates that bitcoin is vulnerable to a class of double-spending attacks known as selfish mining: [LINK] [LINK] >And also depends what you mean by securing. All clients, miners and not, are capable of checking transaction and discarding \"insecure\" and invalid chains. I don't need a miner to tell me if your transaction is valid or not. No they aren't. You misunderstand the fundamental design of bitcoin. The problem is not that the non-mining nodes cannot verify signatures or something, the problem is that these non-mining nodes will not be able prove to each other that the signatures to not refer to already spent funds. The non-mining nodes cannot conclusively prevent reorgs that can be used for double-spend attacks. >All clients, miners and not, are capable of checking transaction and discarding \"insecure\" and invalid chains. They do this by selecting the chain with the highest amount of PoW associated with it. If the network hashrate is low relative to an attacker, then any attacker will be able to easily overpower the network and decide which chains are invalid. If you are new, I recommend this video on bitcoin's design: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33619043,"author":"c54","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is crypto\u2019s Enron moment","text":"It depends on the specific protocol (aka blockchain or token) you're using. For instance, bitcoin is very simply publicly visible, each transaction is broadcast in the clear and you can trace inputs and outputs online [0] Other protocols, such as zcash, specifically obfuscate the inputs and outputs using cryptography, in ways that I'm not specifically sure how to explain, but are supposed to work. In some ways to me this is unsurprising in a way different from the ponzi nature of crypto. I can't explain Ed25519 either, and I'd also get bogged down reading a paper explaining it. I can get my head around the basics of btc and pre-proof-of-stake ethereum though, this[1] 3Blue1Brown video went a long way. Definitely not going to disagree that lots of tokens are ponzis, and lots of the tech and promises are imaginary vaporware. But there are some real pieces of tech in the mix too. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bC-8y2R6IxI":[{"hn_comment_id":46204552,"author":"komali2","month":"2025-12","story_title":"The Joy of Playing Grandia, on Sega Saturn","text":"I've been getting more and more into retro gaming lately, and something that really made it click for me is leveraging shaders (or overlays) to simulate period-accurate displays. For a Sega Saturn, that'd be some kind of CRT. The art direction in these games are designed to take advantage of the quirks of the CRT, and often look significantly better on a CRT. Noodle just did a decent video on it: [VIDEO] I strongly recommend anyone getting into retro gaming, try some CRT shaders (or lcd ones for portables)!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47533989,"author":"user68858788","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?","text":"Interesting article. I hope their engine gets to the point where it actually looks like CRT instead of the blocky filters we see nowadays. Here\u2019s an entertaining video showing the difference in retro games on crt and lcd screens. It\u2019s pretty incredible if you aren\u2019t aware. Games back then were designed on CRTs and can look awful on LCDs in comparison. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48287320,"author":"dleslie","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Earthion: A New Mega Drive-Style Shoot-Em-Up","text":"The video I linked is taken of a CRT and is not a screenshot of an LCD. This is an excellent deep dive on the issues I spoke of: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bEXefdbQDjw":[{"hn_comment_id":44176142,"author":"chneu","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Human Brain Cells on Chip for Sale \u2013 First biocomputing platform hits the market","text":"The YouTuber \"The Thought Emporium\" has been working on a similar project for a few years. [VIDEO] They run an amazing channel that covers a variety of topics. Highly recommend. The mummification video is fun.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40517200,"author":"zonkerdonker","month":"2024-05","story_title":"First Bioprocessor Powered by Human Brain Organoids","text":"Anyone ineterested in more wetware projects should check out the series from The Thought Emporium on youtube: [VIDEO] They are attempting to train a (literal) neural network to play DOOM. And yes, it os as fascinating and horrifying as it sounds. It's hard not to extrapolate 50 years down the line with this tech. Stuff gets complicated quick. How many human neurons do you have to use before you get an actual human consiousness?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47300735,"author":"fenykep","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Living Human Brain Cells Play Doom on a CL1","text":"I think the Thought Emporium youtube channel has some explanatory [videos]( [VIDEO] ) of the whole process. I couldn't wrap my head around the thing tho.","stance":"rec"}],"bHIhgxav9LY":[{"hn_comment_id":37638444,"author":"jerf","month":"2023-09","story_title":"How the Most Useless Branch of Math Could Save Your Life","text":"The video in question for reference: [LINK] Interestingly, when I saw that I figured this channel for a goner because he was going to turn to the darkside, but quite contrary to expectations I feel like his channel has actually blossomed since then. His older videos are fine, but often just explaining concepts that you can find a lot of other explanations on, but some of his recent videos have rocked the boat even among physicists and IMHO he was ultimately proved to be correct for them. I particularly point at his videos about how nobody has measured the one-way speed of light ( [LINK] ), which was well-known among people very very deep in the field of relativity but not very well known outside of that (even amongst physicists in other fields, let alone lay people) and the electricity videos he's done in the last year ( [VIDEO] , [LINK] ) which attracted a whole whackload of \"debunking\" videos, which were themselves wrong (the best \"bunking\" video, if I may call it that, is probably AlphaPheonix's: [LINK] , since he actually set up the experiment, albeit on a smaller scale). They aren't all of that caliber, but the knot theory video was very good too and not something I've seen a hundred times elsewhere, and the airships video that preceded that one clearly had a high degree of research put into it beyond just the hype.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39173600,"author":"lchengify","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Why is Maxwell's theory so hard to understand? (2007) [pdf]","text":"Only tangentially related, but I highly recommend watching Veritasium's YouTube video on electricity if you're curious as to how Maxwell's fields create the current / amp abstractions in EE [1]. It's a common misconception that electrons or current transfer energy. In reality it's the electric field that exists between the wires that is doing the heavy lifting, the electrons in the wires are just controlling the field. This has always confused me and I was very irritated when I first learned electromagnetics about how rote all the initial learnings are. I wish more work was put earlier into making everything relate back to Maxwell's equations to make it make sense. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29922375,"author":"123pie123","month":"2022-01","story_title":"5.5 mm in 1.25 nanoseconds","text":"this is an interesting video (to me anyway!!) on the speed of electrons vs fields The Big Misconception About Electricity.. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40750133,"author":"poorman","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Wireless power transfer system achieves 270-kilowatt charge","text":"I dove deep into this topic after reading your post and discovered something fascinating: electricity doesn't actually flow through wires in the conventional way I was taught. It's more about the electromagnetic field around the wire. This video explains it really well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43149499,"author":"H8crilA","month":"2025-02","story_title":"But good sir, what is electricity?","text":"The problem with (or the advantage of) the water flowing analogy, or even more broadly the discrete element model, is that it explains reality good enough to be used in most practical situations. Schematics are ubiquitous, yes they are \"fake\", but they are also usually \"correct enough\". Kind of like the incorrect Bohr's model of electrons orbiting the nucleus actually does explain the emission spectra (up to a point). But there is an accessible video that explains electricity pretty well. Veritasium - The Big Misconception About Electricity: [VIDEO] There is one commonly used concept that requires understanding electricity correctly, and not just as a combination of waterhoses and gizmos. It's impedance, and it directly corresponds to the \"controversial\" experiment that Veritasium is proposing in his video. Impedance breaks the pipe-of-electrons analogy.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43149571,"author":"djsamseng","month":"2025-02","story_title":"But good sir, what is electricity?","text":"There's also the field theory of electricity: [VIDEO] It\u2019s an eye opening alternative explanation to the electrons flowing like a chain theory of this article.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49106407,"author":"leonidasrup","month":"2026-07","story_title":"A.I. Companies Are Recruiting Electricians and Carpenters by the Thousands","text":"Good intrpduction are Veritasium videos: \"How Electricity Actually Works\" [LINK] \"The Biggest Misconception About Electricity\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bHJyoqDO0zw":[{"hn_comment_id":28778408,"author":"vjaswal","month":"2021-10","story_title":"The Truth About Nuclear Fusion Q Factors","text":"I've seen various youtube videos from their employees and CEO. From what I remember, Dennis Whyte (head of the fusion lab at MIT and CFS cofounder) says you need about Q>5 at least, to make fusion economically viable. So that must mean Qplasma > 5. SPARC is working towards that by 2025. And so far, the company, CFS, has been achieving their milestones for the performance of their magnets. The HTS magnets and coils is the main ingredient that the startup is optimizing for. Sometime in the last year, they implied that their Qplasma was much better than they minimally hoped for. I think they achieved Qplasma > 10, but Dennis was keeping the details proprietary. From all the talks I remember, they are targeting power on the grid with the ARC reactor by 2035. Edit: This is the best recent video I've seen, about SPARC and ARC. Jumped to 2:25 for Dennis Whyte. [VIDEO] It's targeted to MechE students and gives a lot of details about other aspects of a potential ARC reactor design, e.g. how to get the heat out.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47850020,"author":"leonidasrup","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Fusion Power Plant Simulator","text":"For those interested not only in simplified energy balance of a fusion power plant as shown in Fusion Power Plant Simulator, but in more realistic engineering of heat extraction from a tokamak I recommend the following lecture by Dr. Dennis Whyte from MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center. Fusion Reactor First Wall Cooling [VIDEO] One of the designs uses 3D printed silicon carbide vacuum vessel cooled by a layer of molten lead and a layer of FLiBe (a molten salt made from a mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2)). [LINK] The lithium component of FLiBe is used for breeding of the radioactive isotope tritium, which will be extracted from the salt and used for making the deuterium-tritium fuel of the tokamak.","stance":"rec"}],"bJ5ppf0po3k":[{"hn_comment_id":17339000,"author":"hbosch","month":"2018-06","story_title":"How Peppa Pig became a video nightmare for children","text":"You might enjoy this video. It\u2019s part humor and part technical discussion on how his talking \u201cBanana\u201d bot was brigades by users on Twitch in an effort to make him say racist words and phrases. After he got a strike on Twitch, he patched the software and then it got circumvented... terrific little video about the battle between him and his viewers and ultimately ends with his approach to sterilizing input so that the banana couldn\u2019t speak anything harmful. I thought it was great. * [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17160410,"author":"rasz","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Soundex","text":"If you are interested in phonetic algorithms, sorting, recognizing and filtering, you will enjoy Talking Banana Twitch ban story by Useless Duck Company : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28785766,"author":"tonfreed","month":"2021-10","story_title":"The naughty username checking system used by Twitch","text":"You say that there's no \"non-hacky\" way, but... [VIDEO] He made a filter that did analysis of the pronunciation of the messages that were being sent. His breakdown of it starts at around 13:30","stance":"rec"}],"bJczLlwp-d8":[{"hn_comment_id":33106222,"author":"simonh","month":"2022-10","story_title":"How does the Russo-Ukrainian War end?","text":"I can imagine Russia conducting as 'nuclear test' in or near Ukraine, but I think the consequences for Russia would be dire, and I hope the Russian leadership realise that. Ive been following the author's currently ongoing Yale course on the history of the Ukrainian state on youtube, it's excellent. The latest lecture dropped yesterday and I just finished it a few minutes ago, so it seems weird to see his name again here so soon. Here's a link to the first of them. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34592294,"author":"jnsaff2","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine. [0] gives you invaluable understanding about much more than just Ukraine. MIT 16.885J Aircraft Systems Engineering, Fall 2005 [1] - the aircraft they focus on is the Space Shuttle. Amazingly demystifying. Some of the actual early designers talk there. [0] - [VIDEO] [1] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35826354,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Good History Blogs?","text":"Timothy Snyder is just fantastic: [LINK] His class on Ukraine on Youtube is fantastic: [VIDEO] If I had a history class taught like this in college I might have looked at it. I think in one of his classes about Ukraine he mentioned that he was a programmer at some point. His explanations of history are often very input/output oriented or explained almost like an algorithm. His books are also worth reading and every one of his lectures on youtube I have enjoyed. He's great at giving historical perspective to current affairs, and probably more than anyone else, I feel like he makes the current political climate make sense.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35221558,"author":"caskstrength","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Alternative facts: How the media failed Julian Assange","text":"As a Ukrainian I find your comments in this thread insulting. You should educate yourself a little about history of Ukraine before you start spewing such nonsense. I would suggest you to start with this: [VIDEO] Now, I will assume you are just a misguided westerner who watches too much Fox news and indulge you: > Ukraine is right on the russia's border. So? How about US invading Mexico, occupying and annexing its lands, killing bunch of civilians while simultaneously demanding Mexico to \"respect\" US \"sphere of influence\", speak English, stop \"threatening\" it by committing to neutrality, etc. > Their economies and cultures are intertwined. Let them rape and indiscriminately kill bunch of civilians in some Bucha or other towns because of similar languages and economical ties? How does that make any sense to you? Also, claiming that Ukraine doesn't have its own historical roots and cultural identity is one of the Russian propaganda talking points. > And their have been hostilities between the two \"Hostilities\"? Excuse me? Russia occupied and annexed parts of Ukraine repeatedly but you dubbing it \"hostilities\" make it sound like some kind of a border skirmish where both parties are culpable which couldn't be further from the truth. > since 2014 when the US formented a revolution there Another Russian propaganda talking point. People were fed up with Yanukovich and decided to remove him from power. Support from US was inconsequential. > I am not shilling for Russia Yes you are! Op","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35288938,"author":"kstenerud","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How to best follow Ukraine Russian conflict?","text":"[LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Also, Timothy Snyder's Yale classes on Ukrainian and Russian history offer an excellent background to the war, which helps when trying to separate reality from propaganda: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35322532,"author":"kstenerud","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Fide Women\u2019s Grand Prix Collapses into \u201cChaos\u201d as Players Withdraw","text":"Aaaaand now we've taken a hard-right into propaganda territory, so I'll get off here. I would suggest consulting Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe [LINK] His lectures are available on youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43070701,"author":"philipov","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Doubts remain over reliability of Texas power grid","text":"One clarification to make - While I haven't read On Freedom, Tim Snyder is a scholar of Ukrainian (and slavic) history who is a major opponent of the far right's agenda. One of his big ideas is the different approach to time promoted by authoritarian vs liberal regimes, to try to inoculate people against the talking points of the authoritarian view. I might disagree with the positive/negative freedom argument on a more fundamental level than he does, but he's not engaging with it because he's trying to promote it. His lecture series on the Making of Modern Ukraine: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bKGhvKyjgLY":[{"hn_comment_id":1322106,"author":"pohl","month":"2010-05","story_title":"How will memristors change everything? ","text":"There's a presentation by R. Stanley Williams linked to in the article, and it is well worth watching. [VIDEO] It has some tidbits I didn't expect. Teaser: \"one of the guys in my group has...built a compiler to compile C code using implication logic rather than NAND logic and, interestingly enough, when we play with that the compiled code we get is always more condensed...by about a factor of 3\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4125933,"author":"mbenjaminsmith","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Intel Reveals Neuromorphic Chip Design","text":"I don't understand why Leon Chua keeps popping up first when memristors are discussed. Williams at HP is the person that made it a reality. Chua postulated the existence of the memristor but as far as I know made no progress on a working example. That's a bit like giving da Vinci credit for the invention of the helicopter. The Williams talk on youtube is really good. He discusses the element itself, its use in memory (as vast amounts of on-CPU memory) as well as the possibility of new CPU architectures based on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4183224,"author":"reitzensteinm","month":"2012-07","story_title":"SSDs cost half of what they did in 2011","text":"We may actually see them both happening at once; one of the things R. Stanley Williams talks about in his excellent memristor talk is a method they developed for stacking hundreds of chips on top of a processor, which he says may end up providing just as much benefit as the memristor itself. The possibilities that could be opened up by having a terabyte or more of extremely fast non volatile storage attached by a bus as large as you care to make it directly on top of a CPU are mind boggling. Then when you consider that you can use them as FPGAs for computation instead and dynamically reconfigure them... wow. Memristors are only a year or two away from commercial availability, though it will probably be a while after that until they live up to the hype. We live in exciting times. The talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7879233,"author":"achille","month":"2014-06","story_title":"With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer","text":"I encourage folks to watch this tech talk by HP Research Labs on the discovery of the memristor and implementation details. It goes into the gory technical details, from the low level physics to the construction of the gates, the truth tables, and the high level computation possibilities once chips are assembled in a crossbar package. > [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7920366,"author":"jmpe","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Will 7nm And 5nm Really Happen?","text":"How i learned to stop worrying and love the miniaturization: [VIDEO] Seriously, watch it. Memristor-tech relies on this kind of miniaturization and can provide a speed boost in several areas in current architectures. Secondly, having worked for semi: there's a lot of conservative force holding back development. We could have had current tech with much less worries than we have now if they didn't respond so allergically to everything that looks a little exotic in the CMOS process, like high-k dielectrics.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8651403,"author":"FD3SA","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Six-State Memristor Opens Door to Weird Computing","text":"This is an interesting implementation of the memristor, but I still think the real breakthrough will be in the two state memristor [1]. Once memristor fabrication technology is mature, we are going to see a massive paradigm shift away from the Von Neumann architecture. All the details are in the linked video by HP's Stan Williams. Definitely worth a watch if you're interested in the future of computing 1. [VIDEO] (start at 38m for future computing implications) EDIT: Another video [2], but a bit more in depth. Recommended if the material in the first was a bit confusing as Stan was short on time to explain some of the details. 2. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1287590,"author":"modeless","month":"2010-04","story_title":"Get Ready For the Memristor Revolution","text":"For more technical details try this video of a keynote by R. Stanley Williams: [VIDEO] Submitted as a YC story here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3089094,"author":"plasma","month":"2011-10","story_title":"HP plans to release first memristor, alternative to flash and SSDs in 18 months","text":"Watch HP research's Stanley Williams describe the memristor and what they are working towards in more detail on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3562692,"author":"InclinedPlane","month":"2012-02","story_title":"Stack Overflow running short on space","text":"Here's a useful, but lengthy, talk on the subject: [VIDEO] Memristors look extremely likely to be able to provide non-volatile storage with latency, access speeds, and density higher than existing DRAM and flash. They also look like they can be used to make FPGA-like devices which can approach the speed, power efficiency, and logic density of custom designed ASICs but with extremely fast reconfiguration speed. And those seem to be the less fascinating aspects of memristor technology.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4231023,"author":"kbd","month":"2012-07","story_title":"HP Memristors Will Reinvent Computer Memory \"by 2014\"","text":"> Historically, electrical circuits were crafted with three basic building blocks: the capacitor, the resistor, and the inductor. But in 1971, University of California at Berkeley professor Leon Chua predicted the existence of a fourth: the memristor, short for memory resistor. > Then, in May of 2008, HP announced that it had actually built a memristor, thanks to HP Labs Fellow R. Stanley Williams and others working in the company\u2019s research arm. Here's a great presentation from R. Stanley Williams[1], via prior discussion at HN[2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7302973,"author":"somethingnew","month":"2014-02","story_title":"64 Terabyte RAM computer from SGI","text":"If you want to see something awesome HP has done \"recently\" check out this talk on memristors. Other than that I don't know... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7881152,"author":"mitchty","month":"2014-06","story_title":"With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer","text":"What don't you buy about them being the fourth fundamental circuit type? Its mathematically provable, proven in the 60's actually. Here watch this for a decent introduction. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9506427,"author":"FD3SA","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Neural network chip built using memristors","text":"The top comment mentions DARPA research, but for those who are actually interested in the theory behind the memristor and its potential applications, here [1] is an excellent resource by the man who discovered the first physical memristor. Furthermore, there is a huge amount of open access journal articles and wikipedia material on memristors. DARPA is nowhere close to the cutting edge, SK Hynix is already tooling ReRAM fabs for mass production. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bKgf5PaBzyg":[{"hn_comment_id":25828718,"author":"tachyonbeam","month":"2021-01","story_title":"The short, tormented life of computer genius Phil Katz (2000)","text":"I loved McAfee's video on How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus: [VIDEO] At least he's got a sense of humor.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41601439,"author":"specproc","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host","text":"For anyone in the thread that's not seen \"How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus\" by John McAfee, you are very, very welcome [0]. Content warning: it was made in his Alpha-PHP era, and contains a lot of sex and drug references. It's mostly sex and drugs IIRC. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bL6hp8BKB24":[{"hn_comment_id":14466828,"author":"jerf","month":"2017-06","story_title":"The Algorithms Behind Moana\u2019s Animated Ocean","text":"Computer graphics are already better than a lot of people realize, because now you only \"see\" the bad effects. The good effects you often don't notice. Highly relevant YouTube video: [VIDEO] While they may not quite be there yet, I think a lot of the modern animated movies are deliberately affecting a style, rather than being forced into one by the technology.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15500492,"author":"rdoherty","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Goodbye Uncanny Valley [video]","text":"Related video about why people think CGI sucks or is still in the uncanny valley: [VIDEO] Basically we consider CGI bad because we only see bad CGI. If it's used properly and the director/creator understands its limitations we either don't notice it or use our suspension of disbelief and don't care.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30180546,"author":"vlunkr","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Over-reliance on CGI in movies","text":"This video from a few years ago is a great counterpoint: [VIDEO] It's not defending all CGI, just arguing that we only notice it when it's bad. It's basically a toup\u00e9e fallacy","stance":"rec"}],"bLk1cjZ4ll0":[{"hn_comment_id":31109515,"author":"BeefWellington","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Companies are buying washing machines to take the chips out and repurpose them","text":"Indeed, and in some cases the experiences have gotten worse. There's a Youtube channel named Technology Connections and he has several videos on this topic that I recommend. This one about Sunbeam toasters from 50+ years ago is particularly great: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36945973,"author":"shagie","month":"2023-07","story_title":"A fridge from 70 years ago has better features than the fridge I own now","text":"One of the YouTube channels that I watch from time to time is a guy who is ranting/passionate about technology. The Antique Toaster that's Better than Yours - [LINK] and How to design an actually good toaster with lessons from the 1940's - [VIDEO] It's not a fridge... but similar design thoughts. There is a recent video about a fridge... This goofy fridge has a really clever design. It's also kinda terrible. - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"bM0PmwOlifE":[{"hn_comment_id":8490527,"author":"_nullandnull_","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Troubling Arguments from the Government in Smith v. Obama","text":"> Call Detail Records Don\u2019t Actually Identify People This is one of the best videos I have ever seen countering this argument. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20802265,"author":"guitarbill","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Why the CIA Doesn't Spy on the UAE","text":"who could forget the Abu Omar Case, where the CIA kidnapped an individual in Milan. but they left evidence due to sloppy OPSEC. so we know for sure they used to do much worse. I guess most spying activities don't warrant such a detailed investigation though, so we never find out. the Black Hat 2013 talk on this is a great watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bNfAAQUQ_54":[{"hn_comment_id":15290909,"author":"musage","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Facebook\u2019s war on free will","text":"A few days ago someone posted this in a comment.. I can't find the comment, and the whole thing is worth watching, but since apparently a lot of people share this sentiment, maybe they too can have some of their faith restored a bit by this rant; and it's why the idea of \"integrity first\" was floating in my head: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15278248,"author":"bproven","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Silicon Valley CEO Called Employees the N-Word and Hit Three Women, Suit Claims","text":"Summed up here in the integrity rant by Bryan Cantrill - many companies don't have it (or care): [LINK] ( [VIDEO] ) >In the short run, they win. In the current world of high (fake?) valuations, make money fast and now - this strategy wins so it is considered \"OK\", overlooked or the norm. The fact that it is revealed to be happening in SV is only IMO b/c the industry is so hot now. All eyes on on it. Its also the only real investment/booming industry left in America. I'm sure we saw a lot of this in the past too (80s wall street etc) :(","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15895435,"author":"musage","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Amazon delivery drivers complain about bad work conditions","text":"You might enjoy this, I know I agree with it: [VIDEO] (turn the sound down some before clicking the link though, it features screaming about important things for the right reasons)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37126516,"author":"josephg","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Following Pushback, Zoom Says It Won't Use Customer Data to Train AI Models","text":"> That's how a company works: try to do everything they legally can to make as much money as they can. No, companies don\u2019t need to be like that. This is a meme that needs to die. Companies can have a set of values (principles) and act according to those principles. Any investors can be told ahead of time the principles by which the company operates, and if they don\u2019t want to buy stock on that basis, they\u2019re welcome to stay out. Bryan Cantrill has had some excellent rants about this over the years. Eg: [VIDEO] . His take is that money for a company is like fuel in a car. You don\u2019t go for a road trip (start a company) because you want to get more fuel. You go because there\u2019s some place you want to get to. And fuel (money) is something you need along the way to make your journey possible. Don\u2019t let sociopathic assholes off the hook. They aren\u2019t forced to be like that. They\u2019re choosing to abandon their ethics and common decency. Everyone would be better off if this sort of behaviour wasn\u2019t tolerated.","stance":"rec"}],"bOf4EMN6-XA":[{"hn_comment_id":13492724,"author":"kickscondor","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Thinking about Thinking about Seymour: Livestream [video]","text":"If you haven't been exposed to Papert - check out some of his old videos from the 70s and 80s. [VIDEO] - One really powerful idea he had was ensuring that we stay \"somatic\" with our computer instruction - playing with abstract concepts in a physical way. Watch the video - he explains it better than I can. [LINK] - One from the 1970s - perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems like some of these computers they're using don't even have monitors, just control the turtle. [LINK] - I also like this discussion - it reminds me that school is a prison for children, unless I work to elevate it beyond that. I just kind of watch these periodically to remind me of the wonder that computing was back then.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8602145,"author":"daveloyall","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform","text":"[LINK] [LINK] > I think you have it backwards. It's the new vision of computers (walled gardens, all the interesting logic hidden away in data centers, content consumption appliances instead of real computers) that is pale and sickly. Yes, these new trends are worrisome. But it's not the first time! I firmly believe that we'd all be better off if THIS guy had been the one to introduce computers to the common man: [LINK] [VIDEO] To this day, Microsoft is putting computers in schools--but not LOGO, not free software, not unix, not lisp, not crates of disposable m68ks and bread boards... Nope, they are putting products in front of new generations eyeballs. Data can trump anecdotes, and it should when a culture believes they are doing the right thing but things are still going poorly and nobody understands why--at those times, by all means, collect some data and analyze it! But when \"everybody knows\" we're doing something wrong, and things are going poorly, then for the love of god use some common sense and stop doing it! The whole planet got 0wned by MS before many of us here were born--certainly before most of us were competent. So this is what we've got, this is where we are. Big picture: Where do we go from here? Immediate situation: don't become part of a new generation of MS fanboys. We don't need that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10189187,"author":"sdg1","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Decline of play and rise of sensory issues in preschoolers","text":"There's a somewhat relevant concept in Seymour Papert's book Mindstorms. Papert talks about \"body-syntonicity\" where the act of drawing a circle on the computer screen with LOGO can be seen as bridging children\u2019s sense and knowledge about their own bodies to something abstract. Young children would often pretend to be the LOGO turtle, acting out commands on the floor, during stages of planning a LOGO program, or while debugging LOGO code. It has also been a strategy for teachers to introduce programming and procedural ways of thinking. This video shows this in action (with some followup comments from Papert): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bPhUhypV27w":[{"hn_comment_id":20027469,"author":"jobigoud","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Leaks indicate 2018 gas attacks in Syria may not have happened","text":"Speaking of fake news, this DeepFake video (SFW) is the most impressive I've seen so far: \"Bill Hader impersonates Arnold Schwarzenegger [DeepFake]\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20612233,"author":"jcims","month":"2019-08","story_title":"\u2018Deepfakes\u2019 Trigger a Race to Fight Manipulated Photos and Videos","text":"Ctrl Shift Face on YouTube has some really good stuff. There are definitely artifacts in this vid but the seamless transitions are pretty crazy - [VIDEO] To me the odd part is that these are just generally individuals tinkering with the technology using source material that wasn't intended to support a fake.","stance":"rec"}],"bRCNenhcvpw":[{"hn_comment_id":35569352,"author":"voxadam","month":"2023-04","story_title":"DIY IBM Selectric type balls give \u201960s typewriters new life (and Comic Sans)","text":"The Selectric is a fascinating machine. I highly recommend watching \"IBM Selectric Typewriter & its digital to analogue converter\"[0] by The Engineer Guy. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11978153,"author":"dghughes","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Xerox Alto Restoration Part 2: Firing up the monitor [video]","text":"You may enjoy Bill Hammack's video \"IBM Selectric Typewriter & its digital to analogue converter\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35133966,"author":"djmips","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Mechanical aircraft weight and balance computer using whippletrees","text":"You might enjoy these. IBM Selectric Typewriter & its digital to analogue converter [VIDEO] The Whiffletree: A mechanical digital-to-analog converter [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36411413,"author":"golem14","month":"2023-06","story_title":"How to make your own Selectric Typeballs","text":"To deepen the wonder, I'd be interested to see the longevity per material (PLA/Nylon/metal/...). I'd expect a lot of trial and error to deal with shrinkage and the probably high precision needed by the Selectric. But this is a great repository, thanks a lot! P.S. excellent short video by Bill Hammack on the Selectric internals: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45112883,"author":"voxadam","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Comic Sans typeball designed to work with the IBM Selectric typewriters","text":"Bill Hammack (engineerguy) has an excellent video on the IBM Selectric titled IBM Selectric Typewriter & its digital to analogue converter .[1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bRcu-ysocX4":[{"hn_comment_id":14734401,"author":"meseznik","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Sea Peoples","text":"I recently stumbled upon this lecture, definitely recommended it (Sea Peoples introduced @ 08:20): [VIDEO] -1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Eric Cline, PhD)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21859330,"author":"itcrowd","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"Not a talk from 2019, but discovered it this year: \"1177 BC, the year civilization collapsed (Eric Cline, PhD)\" [VIDEO] Excellent informative and hilarious talk about his (at-the-time) new scientific hypothesis to explain the end of the Bronze Age ca. 1200 BC. Multiple civilizations collapsed within a few decades of each other with the ability to read, write and make high buildings being lost all across the Eastern Mediterranean simultaneously . The Bronze Age is magical and interesting of itself, the talk gives a great introduction as to why we know much more about it than we think.. definitely recommended. Duration ~1 hour (feels like 20 minutes)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14734711,"author":"flukus","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Sea Peoples","text":"If your interested then here is a good talk on the various contributing factors: [VIDEO] . Looks like youtube has quite a few more as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25965265,"author":"qq4","month":"2021-01","story_title":"'Sea Prison': Covid-19 has left hundreds of thousands of seafarers stranded","text":"Wow haha, only on HN would I read a sea peoples joke. Did you also watch that informative YouTube lecture [0] or did you find out about them elsewhere? [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28604229,"author":"DavidPiper","month":"2021-09","story_title":"A Tunguska size burst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, Bronze Age city in Jordan Valley","text":"There is also [VIDEO] by Eric Cline, an (alternative) accompaniment to his book \"1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed\". - I do recommend the book, but for most folks the YouTube lecture is probably enough detail :)","stance":"rec"}],"bSfe5M_zG2s":[{"hn_comment_id":11832173,"author":"jordigh","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Pycon 2016 videos now available","text":"They were available as the conference was unfolding, usually no later than a couple of hours after each talk. Really awesome work by the conference organisers. I feel so lucky I was able to attend. The closing keynote had everyone very excited. It's a beautiful talk about music, programming, biking, and life: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12087835,"author":"denfromufa","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music","text":"You should perhaps watch this incredible video from PyCon 2016 given by Lars Bark about music, road trips, software development, and fractals! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16840747,"author":"webdevatlurk","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Finally made an account to post in this thread. I'm rather early in my career doing mostly Ruby, Python and JavaScript things. As you might expect, I consume mainly Ruby, Python and JavaScript related talks. The first two talks that really blew my mind are: - K Lars Lohn's PyCon Keynote from 2016: [VIDEO] - Jim Weirich's (RIP) \"Y Not\" talk from RubyConf 2012: [LINK] There are many other presenters who I have a good opinion of: - Raymond Hettinger: his presentation/teaching style is something I'd like to model my own after, also he gave the first talk on writing proper threaded/concurrent python that I was able to understand and make use of. - Brandon Rhoades: another speaker with a presentation style that I've found easy to follow, also he takes a little shot at the dd utility about 18 minutes into [LINK] ) - Sandi Metz: I started out in Python land and moved to Ruby land, where I was introduced to Sandi's talks. She doesn't talk about incredibly complex topics, but she's got insight into some really basic things that's helpful to new people who can't see the forest through the trees. - Robert Martin: I gather that his OO principles are not universally revered, but I find his talks useful. - Gary Bernhardt: his talks are interesting and entertaining in ways that most are not The list goes on, but I can't think of them all right now.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20833117,"author":"smitty1e","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Thank you, Chris","text":"Need to figure out a subscription model to ensure that a non-Google browser continues to flourish. Also, K. Lars Lohn is the man. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"bSkpMdDe4g4":[{"hn_comment_id":18679929,"author":"drej","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Compiler Explorer","text":"Matt Godbolt is a great speaker as well. I loved this talk that included a bit about the architecture behind his Compiler Explorer. The rest of his talk is super cool as well. E.g. closed form solutions from O(n) code? Compilers are awesome. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20915513,"author":"snailmailman","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Popcount CPU instruction","text":"I highly recommend Matt Godbolt's talk \"What has my compiler done for me lately?\"[0] and its follow-up[1]. Both are great presentations going into details on some of the crazy optimizations compilers will do. As someone who knows very little about the inner workings of compilers my mind was blown when I saw some them. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16259157,"author":"pkaye","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Outperforming LAPACK with C++ metaprogramming","text":"You should check out this presentation done by Matt Godbolt about compiler internals. He talks about what kind of optimizations are being done by GCC and Clang. Pretty amazing stuff. For example, the compiler will figure out you are trying to write a pop count in high level code and replace it with a single popcount instruction. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218470,"author":"highesttide","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"What has my compiler done for me lately? - Matt Godbolt [VIDEO] Entertaining talk, not extremely in depth, though.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18282105,"author":"drej","month":"2018-10","story_title":"C++: Associative map containers with compile-time lookup","text":"CppCon has super interesting content. That comes from a person who has written maybe two dozen lines of C++ code, mostly just hello world. E.g. this talk by Matt Godbolt or anything by Chadler Carruth. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20961042,"author":"fps_doug","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Color Emulation","text":"But please keep in mind that today's compilers are (most of the time) very smart. Hacker's Delight is somewhat outdated today. There's no need anymore for writing \"x << 2\" instead of \"x * 4\". I recommend Matt Godbolt's Talk(s) about compiler cleverness: [VIDEO] (see the 30 minute mark for the multiplication example)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22981369,"author":"manaskarekar","month":"2020-04","story_title":"I translated a simple C program to x86_64 and it was slower","text":"Tangent, but this reminds me of this great talk by Matt Godbolt from CppCon 2017: \u201cWhat Has My Compiler Done for Me Lately? Unbolting the Compiler's Lid\u201d [VIDEO] . And the follow up [LINK] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26465939,"author":"s3cur3","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, Awk, Forth, Rust","text":"Link to the (great) CppCon talk: [VIDEO] The one thing I would say is: as you dig more into C++ perf, you can develop an intuition for the kinds of things the compiler can and can't optimize. For instance, the C++ example from the article uses `std::unordered_map`, which is just an absolute mess from a cache locality perspective\u2014the best compilers today (or of the foreseeable future) can't do a thing to fix that. Improving the programmer's choice of data structure is just not on the radar. :(","stance":"rec"}],"bY2FlayomlE":[{"hn_comment_id":45094428,"author":"inetknght","month":"2025-09","story_title":"How is Ultrassembler so fast?","text":"> I don't have enough time to watch these kinds of presentations. Then let me pick and share some of my favorites that I found enlightening, and summarize with some information that I found useful. By far, the most useful one is Khalil Estell's presentation last year [0]. It's a fairly face paced but relatively deep dive into exception mechanics. At the end, he advocates for a new tool that would audit a program to determine what exceptions could be thrown. I think that's a flipping fantastic idea for a tool. Unfortunately I haven't seen any progress toward it -- if someone here knows where his tool is, or a similar tool, please reply! I did send him an email a few months ago inquiring about it, but haven't received a reply. Nonetheless, the whole presentation was excellent in my opinion. I did see that he had another related presentation at ACCU this year [4] with a topic of \"C++ Exceptions are Code Compression\" (which I totally can believe -- I've seen it myself in binary sizes), but I haven't seen his presentation yet. I'll watch it later today. Just about anything from Herb Sutter is good. I don't like that he works for Microsoft, but he does great stuff for C++, including the old Guru of the Week series [1]. In particular, his 2019 presentation [2] describes different error handling techniques, some difficulties and pitfalls in combining libraries with different error handling techniques, and leads up to explaining why std::expected came about. He does pontificate a lot ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42952302,"author":"bluGill","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Software development topics I've changed my mind on","text":"Khalil Estell has some great work on that. [VIDEO] is one link - very low level technical of what is really happening. He has other talks and papers if you search his name.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45088545,"author":"mpyne","month":"2025-09","story_title":"How is Ultrassembler so fast?","text":"A specific presentation I'd point to is Khalil Estell's presentation on reducing exception code size on embedded platforms at [VIDEO] But honestly you'd get vast majority of the benefit just by skimming through the slides at [LINK] With a couple of symbols you define yourself a lot of the associated g++ code size is sharply reduced while still allowing exceptions to work. (Slide 60 on)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45783042,"author":"neonz80","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Async/Await is finally back in Zig","text":"There was an interesting talk about C++ exceptions in smaller firmware at CppCon last year: [VIDEO] Basically, the overhead of exceptions is probably less than handling the same errors manually in any non-trivial program. Also, it's not like these table doesn't exist in other languages. Both Rust and Go have to unwind.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47330831,"author":"daemin","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Practical Guide to Bare Metal C++","text":"I just thought I'd mention that Khalil Estell is doing some work regarding exceptions in embedded and bare metal programming. In the first of his talks about this topic ( [VIDEO] ) he mentions that a lot of the bloat in exception handling is including printf in order to print out the message when terminating the program. For those interested he has another presentation on this topic [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"bY7aRJE-oOY":[{"hn_comment_id":13387254,"author":"corysama","month":"2017-01","story_title":"How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games","text":"Sid Meier (Civilization) gave a great GDC keynote in 2010 where he describes his multi-decade struggle to convey to users ideas like \"Stuff that only has a 10% chance of happening still happens sometimes.\" [VIDEO] Multiply that by a million daily active users and it really works out to \"Stuff that has a 1-in-a-million chance of happening will happen to somebody every day\". Leading to player reviews like \"The game rolled me a 1-out-of-10 SIX TIMES IN A ROW!!! The game is explicitly cheating me!!!\" every day. Thus games tend to use random shuffles rather than independent random numbers so as to better align with common misunderstandings about statistics...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17459299,"author":"jcrites","month":"2018-07","story_title":"If You Say Something Is \u201cLikely,\u201d How Likely Do People Think It Is?","text":"This article, and some of the comments here, reminded me of another article (and GDC talk) by Civilization game designer Sid Meier, about his experience with players' perception of probability in games. Sid's talk grapples with the issue \"If the game says you have 3-to-1 odds to win a battle, how often do players actually expect to win?\" > When designing the combat system in Civilization: Revolution, Sid Meier found himself up against some interesting design problems. His players didn't understand math. In Civ Rev, the strength of units were displayed up front to players before battle to show the odds of victory. For example, an attacking unit might be rated at 1.5 with the defending unit at 0.5. This is a 3-to-1 situation. > Unfortunately, the testers expected to win this battle every time despite there being a 25% chance of losing each time. Sid tweaked the math to make the player win more in this situation. Next, the reverse case was tested. The player had 1-to-3 odds. If they won, the math was functioning properly. They had a slim chance to win and they did. > Sid identified a few cases of interest. When the player was presented with 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 odds, they expect to win. With 2-to-1 odds, the player will accept losing some of the time, but expect to win at 20-to-10, which is just a larger expression of 2-to-1. When the numbers get larger, the perceived advantage grows. [LINK] Here is a link to the actual GDC talk by Sid with the content about probability: [VIDEO] (It","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21905651,"author":"jcrites","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Paean to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (2016)","text":"I believe you're thinking of Sid Meier's GDC 2010 keynote \"Everything You Know Is Wrong\" [1]. The entire talk is interesting, but section on player perception of probability is about 20 minutes in. One takeaway is to be careful about how strength numbers translate into odds. If your strength is 100 and mine is 1, does that mean I have a 1% chance to out-and-out beat you? Your armored tank shouldn't have an even 1% chance of being completely annihilated by my club-wielding warrior (that's somehow still around by then). The later Civ games have taken odds out of the equation, and I think it's for the better. Instead, the amount of damage each unit takes per combat depends on the difference in their strength deterministically. From my own perspective, this is overall more fun than 'randomly' having really strong units lose against weak units occasionally. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bZQun8Y4L2A":[{"hn_comment_id":36207905,"author":"sagarpatil","month":"2023-06","story_title":"GPT Best Practices","text":"I would highly recommend watching - State of GPT video by Karpathy at Microsoft Build to get an idea of how LLM\u2019s work. There are some really good prompting ideas. It changed the way I use GPT-4. Video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36188527,"author":"mcint","month":"2023-06","story_title":"It\u2019s infuriatingly hard to understand how closed models train on their input","text":"I share many of your concerns and frustrations, although I suspect what you're asking for their consider a moat along the lines of a trade secret, rivaled only by the collection of performance improvement techniques they've amassed in 1000s-10,000s of training runs, 100s of engineers, and (hundreds of?) millions spent on compute. People are hired and praised in the community for their skill in cleaning data. A non-answer for you, but for curious others, [State of GPT] 10 days ago provides a through introduction to the process used to train, Karpathy speaking at a Microsoft event providing a deep summary review of concepts, training phases, and techniques proving useful in the world of Generative Pretrained Transformers. [State of GPT]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36197725,"author":"valgaze","month":"2023-06","story_title":"A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT","text":"I recognize there's plenty of catnip here when it comes to calling this \"engineering\" or not, however, whatever you want to call it (prompt fiddling?), the techniques are crucial if you want to achieve reasonably consistent output from current-state LLMs. As models improve concerns about context window limitations will be reduced and it will be easier to discern user intent. These are good straight-to-the-point guides: - Prompt Engineering by BrexHQ: [LINK] - OpenAI guidance: [LINK] - [LINK] - (great examples): [LINK] - (~hr) Karpathy talk: [VIDEO] tl;dr: - Begin with the best and most forgiving model available, optimizing it later if necessary. - Write your prompts in a clear, specific, and detailed manner - Be mindful, however, of the tradeoff between including more detail and increasing latency or cost. - If you're doing any complex reasoning, ask the model to show its work, help \"stretch out\" computation over more tokens - \"Escape\" any included or quoted text properly to avoid confusing the model. - Keep track of your token budget, considering the context window in conversations and response length. - Employ an iterative process of measuring, adjusting, and improving your prompt engineering techniques.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36528862,"author":"jsight","month":"2023-06","story_title":"The future of AI according to thousands of forecasters","text":"Karpathy explains it far better than I did in his \"State of GPT\" talk about a month ago: [VIDEO] Yes, language can do that, but books and other texts, on average, leave out a lot of steps that humans have learned to do naturally. They can be prompted to do them, and their answers improve, indicates that there is definitely some level of \"reasoning\" there. But it has weird limitations in its current forms. I expect that to improve pretty quickly, tbh.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42259017,"author":"tikkun","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI","text":"It sounds like you want more broad stuff, not necessarily learning how to train models. More like learning to use them and how they work. [LINK] and Hacker's Guide to LLMs by Jeremy from Fast.ai - [LINK] State of GPT by Karpathy - [VIDEO] LLMs by 3b1b - [LINK] Visualizing transformers by 3b1b - [LINK] How ChatGPT trained - [LINK] AI in a nutshell - [LINK] How Carlini uses LLMs - [LINK] For staying updated: X/Twitter & Bluesky. Go and follow people that work at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. Podcasts: No Priors, Generally Intelligent, Dwarkesh Patel, Sequoia's \"Training Data\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42913862,"author":"tintor","month":"2025-02","story_title":"RLHF Book","text":"Thanks. Here is presentation by Karpathy explaining different stages of LLM training. Explains many details in a form suitable for beginners. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"baFaEvBywGc":[{"hn_comment_id":22842876,"author":"john-tells-all","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Connections Episode 1: The Trigger Effect (1978) [video]","text":"Another wonderful series is \"The Secret Life of Machines\". Cartoonist Tim Hunkin explains how machines work, with lots and lots of models and cut-aways of real life devices. And animations! And moving sculptures! His humor is pervasive and a delight. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15036256,"author":"tim333","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Concrete-free washing machines are lighter to transport, just as good in a spin","text":"Yeah, check out Secret Life Of Machines 104 The Washing Machine [VIDEO] they show what happens if you take the block out. Also how comercial machines do without it by balancing the load.","stance":"rec"}],"baxtyeFVn3w":[{"hn_comment_id":23509075,"author":"jasim","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)","text":"If you're tired of hearing about the virtues of Smalltalk (like I was at one point) and ask \"if it is so good, why isn't it popular?\", then watch @deech's talk (Aditya Siram) - \"What FP can learn from SmallTalk\" - [VIDEO] I think it is the most accessible explanation of the marvel of Smalltalk, for those who were not lucky to work with it during the late 80-90s. Also I think Ruby is the mainstream language that is closest to Smalltalk today, with the idea that everything is an object and late-binding as much as possible. One thing I can't help point out is that Smalltalk / Alan Kay's vision of interconnected objects forming a recursive computing system is not the only \"true\" vision of OO out there. From Simula thru C++ and then Java and C# also are object-oriented (or class-oriented for those who care about the distinction), but they are statically typed. It is also OO because OO is a word, not a mathematical definition, and when people talk about OO, there is enough similarity between all these variations that we consider all of them to be in the same camp. Plus with the growing move towards strict static typing even in interpreted languages, which I think is driven by actual industry needs and programmer preferences than external marketing, it is becoming a disservice to think of statically typed OO languages as being somehow inferior to the true ideal of object-oriented programming.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25642717,"author":"nsm","month":"2021-01","story_title":"On Repl-Driven Programming","text":"I'd also add this talk \"Lambda World 2018 - What FP can learn from Smalltalk by Aditya Siram \" [VIDEO] as well as the whole series of things that Tudor Girba & co. are doing with Glamorous Toolkit [LINK] I'd still recommend folks use Pharo over GToolkit for most things, as GToolkit lacks a bunch of polish and documentation (not to say that even Pharo documentation approaches anything of the quality of the Rust and Python ecosystems).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26167627,"author":"nsm","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The Database Inside Your Codebase","text":"I am really glad they mentioned Smalltalk! I recently had a chance to experience Smalltalk and it was just mind blowing. Check out a video demo of the code introspection and visualization at minute 17 in [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bbyr7jZOllI":[{"hn_comment_id":9649667,"author":"Difwif","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Transatomic Power","text":"From my understanding it comes down to part politics, part feasibility. When nuclear power first started becoming popular light water reactors were easier to make and their fuel/byproducts aligned with the production of nuclear weapons. As years went on regulation and inertia did a great job of cementing us into our old ways. Today, advances in (material) science have made producing molten salt reactors more feasible. They also seem more attractive now that the public is generally very adverse to nuclear waste and power plant failures. I'm paraphrasing what was explained to me so someone that knows more please chime in. Kirk Sorensen has been a major advocate of molten-salt reactors and gave a great Google tech talk on the subject. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4629471,"author":"pippy","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected","text":"The sad thing is we've already got the technology for clean(er), cheaper reactors now: [VIDEO] But we lack the infrastructure and investment to build them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4913231,"author":"eco","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Thorium","text":"There is a Google Tech Talk on this very subject by Kirk Sorensen. He's a big thorium proponent so apply salt as you see fit but his talk seems fairly well cited. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31092914,"author":"jgod","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Utilities Want to Convert Coal Plants to Nuclear; Skeptics Abound","text":"This discussion always leaves out LFTR [LINK] [LINK] Top comment: \"Advantages of thorium: Much safer than uranium-no pressure vesel, no fuel rods to melt down Much simpler reactor-Thorium salt liquid is pumped from the reactor tank through a heat exchanger and back into the tank Thorium is much more plentiful than uranium--in fact so plentiful it is considered a waste product from rare earth mining Thorium doesn't need expensive enriching to make it usable Thorium is of little use for weapons If power goes off liquid fuel simply drains into a pit which stops reaction. No fuel rods to cool or melt down if power fails This technology has been around for years. Why was it not developed long ago?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bfN2JWifLCY":[{"hn_comment_id":22912393,"author":"9nGQluzmnq3M","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Rt: Effective Reproduction Number of Covid-19","text":"Here's an interesting interview with a senior epidemiologist partly responsible for Sweden's unconventional strategy: [VIDEO] TL;DW: Preventing transmission in the long term is impossible and the actual fatality rate is likely on the order of 0.1%, so general lockdowns are pointless and being driven mostly by political considerations (something must be done and this is something). Just protect the elderly and weak.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22945628,"author":"salimmadjd","month":"2020-04","story_title":"The epidemiologist behind Sweden\u2019s controversial coronavirus strategy","text":"There is a lengthier interview by UnHeard with Professor Johan Giesecke (another experienced epidemiologist) of Sweden on YouTube [0]. It\u2019s worthwhile listening to their perspective. One of the comments he made was that no lockdown would work in democratic countries and the real test will be fatality rates between Sweden and others in 1 year. He believed it\u2019ll be very little difference between those countries that have implement the lockdown and those that haven\u2019t I had watched the simulation of covid19 infection by 1blue3brown[1] and some of his modeling appeared to me (maybe I misunderstood them) to confirm Swede\u2019s point of view. Ultimately the same number of people got infected albeit in a \u201cflatter\u201d rate. However one counter point by Johan Giesecke was that these flattening the curve is motivated by the assumption of a static capacity of ER rooms to deal with this pandemic and he pointed out they have increased capacity. Overall I found listening to his side very informative, at least it gave me a different view of looking at from their view. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22988953,"author":"rishirishi","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Seattle\u2019s leaders let scientists take the lead, New York\u2019s did not","text":"As I see it, lockdowns are not effective and were a massive mistake. You may find this epidemiologist's perspective to be interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23131564,"author":"dcanelhas","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Getting Back to Work","text":"Sweden has a rather different welfare system, typical population density, income distribution, typical household demographic, urban planning and culture regarding social interactions, compared to many places that would use it as an example for what to do in this crisis. I think following the available evidence, interpreted by experts is the way to go. Ultimately the argument for Sweden's policy seems to be less based on cost saving than general wellbeing. A good bit of insight here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23202823,"author":"benjaminwootton","month":"2020-05","story_title":"How Apocalyptic Is Now?","text":"Unherd.com have had some of the best journalism of the crisis so far. In particular some of the interviews with epedimiologists: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23311245,"author":"K0nserv","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Stockholm Won't Reach Herd Immunity in May, Sweden's Chief Epidemiologist Says","text":"I'm Swedish but I live in Scotland and I've been watching the Swedish approach to COVID with great interest. I remain fairly sceptical but I also thought this interview[0] with Johan Giesecke who was the previous state epidemiologist and is advising both WHO and the current state epidemiologist interesting. In particular it seems like Sweden messed up the response in elderly care which is something that everyone is admiting to. I do think it's too early to say whether Sweden's approach is as bad as it currently looks, likely this is not something that can be measured and compared to other nations for years. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28269454,"author":"jansan","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy","text":"Here is an interview with Prof Johan Giesecke from April 2020. In hindsight one can call his statements prophetic. [VIDEO] They had a clear plan, unlike other governments like Germany, who still do not have a plan how to get out of this mess.","stance":"rec"}],"bglWCuCMSWc":[{"hn_comment_id":30814535,"author":"gregmac","month":"2022-03","story_title":"New speed camera \u2018detect\u2019 vehicles braking as they approach","text":"I think my first intro to this was from a Not Just Bikes video on speed limits [1], and that profoundly affected my opinion on this stuff. I now think a lot of road design is just utterly broken, and it includes speed limits, what that channel (and other related) refer to as \"stroads\", and intersections (roundabouts vs traffic lights). That video in particular is highly relevant to the speed camera thing. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34345350,"author":"noirdujour","month":"2023-01","story_title":"America\u2019s roads and highways have a big, fat style guide","text":"> MUTCD designs streets similarly to rural highways, and this can create conditions where people speed when they need to be driving slowly, because the design of the street doesn't reflect the speed the sign says you need to be driving. Not Just Bikes covers this shortfall in a video on speed limits[1], and it really opened my eyes on the relationship between rules and actual behavior. Essentially, speed limit signs affect driving speeds slightly, but the street design is important. Wide, open, straight roads naturally prompt drivers to drive to highway speeds, even in more suburb areas. It's amazing how often I check the speedometer and find that I'm driving much more than the posted speed limit when following the flow of traffic. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40268915,"author":"gregmac","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Bollards: Why and What","text":"Europe has a lot more roads with a lower design speed. Curves, narrow lanes, on-street parking, trees/poles/etc close to the road. These things cause people to drive slower, because it doesn't feel safe to go fast. In North America, roads are usually built in the complete opposite way, with long straight roads and wide lanes, so the design speed is actually quite high -- even if that wasn't the intent. People go fast, because it feels safe to go that speed, but isn't, because there are pedestrians and turns. We then \"fix\" that shit road design by having low speed limits. This video is all I think of when this discussion comes up now: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40482974,"author":"CalRobert","month":"2024-05","story_title":"California Senate Passes Bill Requiring Passive Speed Limiters","text":"Not much but it\u2019s a start. Unfortunately the US treats every street and road like it\u2019s a country road when it comes to speed limits, with a lot of deaths as a result. Great video on this at [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28991677,"author":"xputer","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Car accidents cause death, injury and trauma. Why do we shrug them off?","text":"Sorry but this is just so wrong. American road design is super predicated on personal responsibility. We design roads that are as wide as freeways and then put a little sign on the side that says 35mph speed limit. What we need is less focus on personal responsibility and accept that people make mistakes, we're all human after all. Our roads should be designed with human error in mind. The road design itself should make it natural for drivers to slow down near dangerous areas. See this video for example: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29009011,"author":"xputer","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Car accidents cause death, injury and trauma. Why do we shrug them off?","text":"It's not about making the roads more narrow or winding per se. It's about deliberately slowing cars down where they need to, through the road design. See this video for example: [VIDEO] Besides that, roads in the US are generally poorly classified. They're often trying to both function as both high throughput roads and destination serving streets. Such hybrid roads are known as \"stroads\" and they're bad for everyone involved. Stroads are bad for moving cars fast due to the many conflict points (driveways, intersections, etc.) that force drivers to constantly slow down. They are also bad at serving destinations because the many conflict points make stroads very dangerous, especially if you're not in a car. See this video for example: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32806500,"author":"occz","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Heavier cars are safer for their drivers, but far deadlier for everyone else","text":"People don't follow speed limits, regardless of how literate they are. Relevant Not Just Bikes-video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32806588,"author":"ben-schaaf","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Heavier cars are safer for their drivers, but far deadlier for everyone else","text":"Not Just Bikes has a great video covering this: [VIDEO] TLDW: People don't obsessively check their speedometer and thus changing the speed limit largely doesn't affect the speed people drive at. To effectively change that you need to change the road design.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33214330,"author":"YawningAngel","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere","text":"That's not really how speed limits work though. People take their cues from road design and conditions, not what the speed limit actually is. Virtually changing speed limits is dangerous because it causes you to think you are altering the behaviour of traffic without actually doing so. [VIDEO] goes into detail on this","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33768362,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The Exceptionally American Problem of Rising Roadway Deaths","text":"Not Just Bikes on YouTube covers road/pedestrian/bike safety extensively. [LINK] Specific videos: Crossing the street should be safer: [LINK] How to quickly build a cycling city: [LINK] Wasting money on car infrastructure: [LINK] The wrong way to set speed limits: [VIDEO] Safe cycling: [LINK] \"Stroads\" are dangerous: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37911984,"author":"CalRobert","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Wales' 20mph speed limit: How has the first month gone?","text":"As much as the comments from complaining drivers are frustrating, it reveals that the problem here is relying on speed limits and not street design. If you want drivers to go 20mph, you need to design the street so going any faster feels uncomfortable. [VIDEO] discuses this. Also, I notice that most of those drivers complaining don't address what it's like to have a small child who's a runner and is always trying to get loose of your grip and run in to the street.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42699055,"author":"TomK32","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Making an intersection unsafe for pedestrians to save seconds for drivers","text":"The road design is what causes bad or good driving. The road you describe should narrow before the blind curve so the drivers would (often enough unconsciously) slow down before it. For the pedestrian crossing, small islands that separate the lanes and give pedestrians a safe space will help. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"biYciU1uiUw":[{"hn_comment_id":33313379,"author":"freediver","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Fake Books","text":"The 'book factory business oppportunity' trend spotted in the article is explored in depth in this excellent Dan Olson video: [VIDEO] It is a great and informative watch.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42700298,"author":"latexr","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Using coding skills to make passive income","text":"> This is what I call meta advice. That\u2019s what I call a grift. Your description reminded me of Dan Olson\u2019s fantastic video on that type of strategy\u2014where you make money by selling the idea that anyone can make passive income by doing something the seller doesn\u2019t themselves do (anymore)\u2014using the Mikkelsen Twins as the example. In Dan\u2019s words (emphasis mine), the Mikkelsen Twins aren\u2019t special, grifters like them are a dime a dozen. He chose them as the example \u201cbecause they are of a type. They are a representative sample of a category of grift. And also because they\u2019re kind of incompetent and that makes them entertaining \u201d. He\u2019s not wrong. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47803898,"author":"pas","month":"2026-04","story_title":"The \"Passive Income\" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs","text":"a very entertaining, highly-recommended, and intense gonzo video essay on the topic of the courses scams [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34125437,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Kindle novelists are using ChatGPT","text":"Relevant high quality and interesting video that dives in to the world of get rich quick book dumping schemes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34650076,"author":"asddubs","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Hustle bros are jumping on the AI bandwagon","text":"Reminds me of the excellent folding ideas video on these sort of scams: [VIDEO] In the video he talks about a course (which is a scam) selling a different scam of getting a ghostwriter to write a crappy book, getting someone else to record it, and then publishing it to audible to make money. which seemingly did work for a short period of time but no longer does. I guess this is the same sort of thing, except cutting out the ghostwriter.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34883641,"author":"fattless","month":"2023-02","story_title":"ChatGPT launches boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon","text":"Somewhat related, and might give insight. This seems like the next step of the \"hustle culture\" this video explores, definetly worth a watch: [VIDEO] People looking to get rich quick write (or pay sweatshops to write) very low effort, poorly researched books about obscure topics. They put them on amazon, maybe make some money, then repeat. The video explores one of those buyable programs to get you involved in all of that. Seems like chatGPT is being used as the next tool in this process","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34921976,"author":"fxtentacle","month":"2023-02","story_title":"You\u2019re Not a Girlboss \u2013 You\u2019re Just Trapped in an MLM Scheme (2020)","text":"Apparently, you've never watched those start-up tutorials sold on YouTube. Half the course is spent on arguing that by paying $2000 to learn how to make your own iOS apps, you're \"investing in yourself\". And of course the people that run the course make most of their money from running the course and not from actually releasing iOS apps... I recommend \"Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins\" by \"Folding Ideas\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37580638,"author":"bizzletk","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Amazon Limits Authors to 3 Books a Day to Combat AI-Generated Material","text":"Folding Ideas on youtube has an excellent explanation of the business model behind the rise of EBook Spam. The Mikkelson Twins are running a massive MLM scheme but instead of steak knives or scented candles, it's \"training and support for creating your own EBook Passive Income Stream\" which leads to what we see on Amazon ebook listings. The video also goes into the darker side of the incentives that lead people to commission ghostwriters, AI editors and the crushing labour demands of the people employed to write these books: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38891701,"author":"hnbad","month":"2024-01","story_title":"AI Is Already Killing Books","text":"Zoe Bee did a video essay[0] on her experience as a ghostwriter producing essentially the kind of junk that is now being automated with LLMs. In her case she was (somewhat unknowingly) paid to write unlicensed Minecraft stories. I think the video is worth a watch if you're not aware of the state of ebooks (especially on Amazon) prior to LLMs. It's also worth mentioning that this problem isn't limited to ebooks. There's also a cottage industry of mass produced minimal-effort audiobooks on Audible as part of various \"passive income\" scams. Dan Olson made a pretty good video essay[1] about one such scam where he actually played along for most of it and also gave it a try as a ghostwriter. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO] EDIT: Considering the most cited examples are Amazon/Kindle and Audible, I think parallels can also be drawn to the proliferation of no-name brand Chinese whitelabel dropshipping products on regular Amazon. Everyone already knows not to trust Amazon reviews but at this point it's hard to find reputable brands for products you're not already familiar with (e.g. which of the one hundred brands featuring near identical products are actually brands you might find in a retail store rather than a random name slapped on the product in the same Chinese factory?). LLMs will definitely make reviews even more untrustworthy but they might also help generating even more plausible copycat product descriptions and designs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38956835,"author":"latexr","month":"2024-01","story_title":"The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit","text":"> One possible future is going back to a medium with higher cost of publication. Books. The grifters are all over that already. No AI necessary to generate and publish drivel. See \u201cContrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins\u201d\u00b9 by Dan Olson\u00b2 for an informative and entertaining documentary on the matter. \u00b9 [VIDEO] \u00b2 A.k.a Folding Ideas. A.k.a. the creator of \u201cLine Goes Up \u2013 The Problem With NFTs\u201d.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44645095,"author":"TheDong","month":"2025-07","story_title":"I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again","text":"If you want an overly long slightly different version of that video, you could check out the Folding Ideas video [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bkQJdaGGVM8":[{"hn_comment_id":15076449,"author":"levthedev","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Employer gave me a conference budget for next year. Can I get suggestions?","text":"You should definitely check out !!con. They have really fascinating and weird talks about all sorts of interesting CS and design topics. Plus, it's pay what you can and is located in New York, so there's lots of interesting stuff to do nearby. My favorite talk from this year was about implementing an algorithm for HDR photography purely in Microsoft Excel - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43985557,"author":"asafira","month":"2025-05","story_title":"What is HDR, anyway?","text":"I did my PhD in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physics, and despite \"optical\" being part of that I realized midway that I didn't know enough about how regular cameras worked! It didn't take very long to learn, and it turned out to be extremely important in the work I did during the early days at Waymo and later at Motional. I wanted to pass along this fun video from several years ago that discusses HDR: [VIDEO] . It's short and fun, I recommend it to all HN readers. Separately, if you want a more serious introduction to digital photography, I recommend the lectures by Marc Levoy from his Stanford course: [LINK] . I believe he runs his own group at Adobe now after leading a successful effort at Google making their pixel cameras the best in the industry for a couple of years. (And then everyone more-or-less caught up, just like with most tech improvements in the history of smartphones).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16046222,"author":"floatboth","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What\u2019s your favorite talk from 2017?","text":"On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint [LINK] Compiling C to printable x86, to make an executable research paper [LINK] HDR Photography in Microsoft Excel?! [VIDEO] Zebras All the Way Down [LINK] Solving Layout Problems with CSS Grid and Friends [LINK] Console Security - Switch [LINK] Let's move SMM out of firmware and into the kernel [LINK] Bringing Linux back to server boot ROMs with NERF and Heads [LINK] Sharing the Chisel [LINK] (looks like the actual conference video wasn't released)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20284767,"author":"Mister_Snuggles","month":"2019-06","story_title":"3D engine on MS Excel without VBA (2018) [video]","text":"My favourite (ab)use of Excel, which is already on your list, is using it for HDR photography[0]. While I'd never use it for day-to-day anything, things like this are a really interesting way to show how things like HDR photography actually work. Excel can be very approachable for stuff like this. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bl8jQ2wRh6k":[{"hn_comment_id":16592681,"author":"grovehaw","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Portacle \u2013 A Portable Common Lisp Development Environment","text":"The Potato open source chat platform has a Common Lisp backend and a Clojurescript frontend. There is a fascinating talk by one of the authors on Youtube [0], and the code is on github [1]. A relatively new Web Application Environment called Radiance may also be worth looking at.[2] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28349671,"author":"tgbugs","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Hell Is Other REPLs","text":"The workflow for slime/sly and swank/slynk described at the end of the article is standard if you are in the Emacs world. Sometimes I work in an Org file, sometimes in a lisp file directly. In both cases I will C-x C-e (eval-last-sexp) or run blocks, or the whole file (depending on Org vs lisp file). It is copy and paste on steroids (same for slime-eval-defun were you can be working deep inside some large function and update the whole without changing your view). There are some examples of developing in the debugger in [0] around 55 minutes (linked). This video also has great examples of other crazy interactive development workflows and is worth watching in its entirety if you are interested in this kind of thing. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bmSAYlu0NcY":[{"hn_comment_id":19228349,"author":"EdwardCoffin","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Programming Books You Wish You Read Earlier","text":"I haven't read the book yet, but I have watched his Talks at Google talk on the topic [1] a couple of times (1 hour), highly recommended. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34375806,"author":"loup-vaillant","month":"2023-01","story_title":"","text":"> I'd rather get to value now by making something that just works(and is adequately tested) than engineer something thats future proof but takes longer to get out. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout. His talk is a great teaser for the book: [VIDEO] Here's the thing: a program properly written for the future does not take longer to get out. Not much, at least. What we instinctively think of as \"future proof\" is generally anything but: by anticipating some particular kind of change that may happen some time in the future, but in practice almost never does, we end up with more complex programs that are harder to modify when an actual (typically unforeseen ) change comes our way. The best way to future proof your program is to make it simpler , according to the requirement you are currently aware of. If you expect a particular change, sure, plan for it. But for the unexpected, just keep it simple. Because simple is easier to adapt, add to, or rewrite. That said, the simplest solution is rarely the most obvious. Making thing simple does take a bit more time than rushing through the first thing that comes to mind. But it also pays off in a matter of weeks, so it's quite worth it. And if you have a hard time assessing what \"simple\" means, SLoC is a surprisingly good metric (we have research that shows this). And mostly your modules should be deep: small APIs that hide significant implementations. I think of it as encapsulati","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41019916,"author":"devnonymous","month":"2024-07","story_title":"A brief interview with Tcl creator John Ousterhout (2023)","text":"This google talk [VIDEO] is a condensed version of the (already small - 150 pags IIRC) book. I highly recommend both. To the point made by the GP (and others here) about how useful the book is, I must add that I got a whole lot more from this small book than some other well known and oft suggested titles (like Clean Code, POSA etc). My most recent peeve about the matter is that Kent Beck\"s \"Tidy, Fisrt?\" was apparently motivated partly in response to this book and yet it falls way too short to matching up. Half of thst book is way too simplistic and almost patronizing and the other is handwavy abstract notions too scared to touch reality lest it spoil the narrative.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46961829,"author":"pcwelder","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Parse, Don't Validate (2019)","text":"Each repost is worth it. This, along with John Ousterhout's talk [1] on deep interfaces was transformational for me. And this is coming from a guy who codes in python, so lots of transferable learnings. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22189028,"author":"bch","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Who Says Tcl Rules?","text":"You\u2019re right re: it\u2019s early internals, and we probably both know people who still (mistakenly) complain about that. Conceptually the \u201ceverything is a string\u201d(EIAS) model still holds though, even though it\u2019s supported by dual-ported \u201cobjects\u201d w native representation, and the running is often byte-compiled instead of string parsing. We\u2019ve got early smart fans who saw the vision and possibilities like Karl Lehenbauer, Don Libes, Richard Hipp, and the current core team like Kevin Kenny, Don Porter, Donal Fellows, etc who deeply understand What Tcl Is, and strictly maintain it, even while pushing it ahead (TclObj, finally an in-core blessed object system, native database framework, Miguel Sopher\u2019s(RIP) work on the stackless non-recursive engine (NRE) and coroutines that fell out of that work... Back to Ousterhout though, you might dig his \u201cPhilosophy of Software Design\u201d[0] book, or talks associated with it[1]. Lots to like in this space... [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23133711,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2020-05","story_title":"In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (2014) [pdf]","text":"I haven't read the book, but this presentation from professor John Ousterhout on the book was pretty good: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23366115,"author":"code_biologist","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?","text":"I came into this thread hoping to find the suggestion near the top. Beyond his credibility as the creator of Tcl, in the talk he gave at Google about the book [1] he describes the course he teaches that was the inspiration for the book. The course is to write a word processor with a team and extended it with features over the semester, swapping codebases between teams so occasionally you have to work with other's code. Essentially the largest possible code project you can fit in one semester. Along the way, Ousterhout will give a deep code review of the each project. I think it must be very insightful to see the same project implemented so many ways, and to see what works in terms of simplicity and extensibility. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31386387,"author":"bear8642","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How did you learn good program design?","text":">\"A Philosophy of Software Design\" by John Ousterhout Indeed, very interesting little book! He's done a talk[0] about it if you want a taste before buying. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36121390,"author":"Mawr","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Death by design patterns, or On the cognitive load of abstractions in the code","text":"Ah, a Java developer. Try a normal language and when faced with the need to split code up, use... functions. You will be enlightened. Mandatory homework: - [LINK] - \"A philosophy of software design\" by John Ousterhout. Video primer: [VIDEO] - \"Functional Core, Imperative Shell\": [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38009366,"author":"fzil","month":"2023-10","story_title":"A Philosophy of Software Design","text":"Probably the best book I\u2019ve read on this subject. There\u2019s a lecture by the author[1] as a quick overview of what the book is about. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44472014,"author":"WillAdams","month":"2025-07","story_title":"A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science","text":"I've been re-learning CS (programmed as a kid, then missed getting a minor in CS in college after the service by one 300-level course which wasn't being re-offered when I needed it) and then just did (La)TeX and AppleScript for my day job, but am now trying to create a tool for CNC which is quite different from those which have existed previously, and one thing which has helped a lot is MIT OCW: - the Python courses got me up-to-speed on the basics of that language: [LINK] and [LINK] - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs served as a disciplined review of a book which I wasn't patient enough to do the exercises of when I first read it: [LINK] - Mathematics for Computer Science helped make up for my spotty math: [LINK] I've also found the recent book: [LINK] very helpful (first reading I did one chapter at a time, re-writing my current project applying the principles of that chapter) --- interesting video overview at: [VIDEO] If one is fortunate, there are videos on specific subjects/algorithms which one needs, e.g., [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"bmsV1TuESrc":[{"hn_comment_id":34062875,"author":"stdbrouw","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Stanford's \u201cElimination of Harmful Language\u201d Initiative","text":"Obviously there's much to laugh at in this initiative and a legitimate worry about thought being policed. That said, if you are open to changing your mind, there's an excellent 9-minute bit of stand-up comedy from Stewart Lee about political correctness you might want to watch [1] where he discusses why for example it's not \"political correctness gone mad\" to refer to a prostitute as a sex worker [2]. I do think the general impulse to try and create a kinder language is worthwhile, even if in practice it can spiral out of control due to virtue signaling and people with too much time on their hands. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11940925,"author":"zorpner","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Trump","text":"He's right that we're drowning in political correctness... Trump's casual racism, misogyny, and conspiracy theories are without precedent... That's some impressive cognitive dissonance, sama. Those are two aspects of the same thought happening in Trump's mind. EDIT: Stewart Lee's smart (and amusing!) bit on the idea of \"political correctness\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27549247,"author":"geden","month":"2021-06","story_title":"What's Happened to the National Trust","text":"Stewart Lee, another British institution, telling you all you need to know about \u2018wokeness\u2019, 10+ years ago. [VIDEO] It\u2019s extra charged in the UK because \u2018PC gone mad\u2019, please don\u2019t show me inconvenient truth types, map neatly onto Brexit supporters.","stance":"rec"}],"bnKIVX968PQ":[{"hn_comment_id":26663490,"author":"rossng","month":"2021-04","story_title":"A billion for every chip-maker who 'makes in India,' sources say","text":"Yes, and it's often referred to as 'gentle density'. The idea is to build relatively dense housing, but at a human scale - mostly 3-5 storeys. Combined with narrow streets that support walking and cycling, this creates enough density to support a 'real' city centre with shops, restaurants, offices and so on. I think these videos convey the idea well: * [VIDEO] * [LINK] Of course, this is not to say that you _can't_ build other kinds of housing. But many cities are badly balanced.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28210546,"author":"benrbray","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Why are so many knowledge workers quitting?","text":"There is something in between NYC and an American-style suburb. I encourage you to take a look at Not Just Bikes [1,2]: [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28839003,"author":"stormgrab","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Amazon will allow many employees to work remotely indefinitely","text":"The whole medieval cities designed for walking is not actually true. Not just bikes youtube channel( [VIDEO] ) has a great video about this. Here he has taken Houston as an example.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31534911,"author":"est31","month":"2022-05","story_title":"An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency","text":"No but there is way less dependence on cars, at least in medium cities and up. Many developments in america just build suburban deserts where there is just more single family homes around you, where you have to drive to the next supermarket, both because it's so far away, and because sometimes there literally isn't a way for pedestrians to walk on. There are a few good videos on the subject: * [LINK] * [VIDEO] * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32188417,"author":"xputer","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes","text":"Oh boy you are in for a treat. Google parking minimums and single family zoning. And watch some videos from this channel: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bnoUBfLxZz0":[{"hn_comment_id":31150439,"author":"Slow_Hand","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Drones have transformed blood delivery in Rwanda","text":"Wendover Productions did a great video detailing this a few years back. It\u2019s so cool what they\u2019ve done. [VIDEO] Also, Wendover have a fantastic Youtube channel that\u2019s focused on global logistics. It\u2019s endlessly fascinating and extremely well executed. Strongly recommended.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21020998,"author":"Fabricio20","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Google Wing Launching US Drone Deliveries with FedEx, Walgreens","text":"The catapult launches the drones into the air, which then parachute the package to the location. Real Engineering [1] and Wendover Productions [2] have really nice videos about their system currently deployed in Rwanda. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"boPEO2auJj4":[{"hn_comment_id":13250285,"author":"trendia","month":"2016-12","story_title":"The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing (1997)","text":"This is a bit higher-level than what you're proposing, but a good introduction is the \"C++ in the Audio Industry\" talk [0] given at CppCon 2015. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27275571,"author":"CraigJPerry","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How to get started with audio programming?","text":"I watched CppCon 2015: Timur Doumler \u201cC++ in the Audio Industry\u201d [VIDEO] not long ago and enjoyed it. He was a developer at Roli working on synths and he goes through real time strategies to keep the response time under around 30ms IIRC","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48256217,"author":"creatorcoder","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How to learn how to develop real time applications?","text":"Thx for advice! It seems that the audio industry also faces challenges related to high-speed data processing and display. I'm was found a very interesting talk CppCon 2015: Timur Doumler \u201cC++ in the Audio Industry\u201d [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bpAi70WWBlw":[{"hn_comment_id":20730423,"author":"henryl","month":"2019-08","story_title":"California\u2019s Biggest Cities Confront a \u2018Defecation Crisis\u2019","text":"\u201cSeattle Is Dying\u201d is a great investigative report about the problems and potential solutions to homelessness. Also applicable to SF. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28335771,"author":"j8hn","month":"2021-08","story_title":"I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem","text":"I don't have any experience with the housing issue in California, but got involved a while back trying to find pragmatic solutions in Seattle. The situation is a mess and there is an entire \"homeless industrial complex\" complicating matters here, rife with fraud, misspending and cronyism. Every year it seems like many millions of dollars more are spent on this issue but it keeps getting visibly worse. At first I was in the \"Housing First\" crowd, but after my experiences I would say I more firmly believe in \"Rehab First\". A local news station released a great documentary called \"Seattle is Dying\". It has 10 million views since released a couple of years ago. [VIDEO] The sequel is \"The Fight For the Soul of Seattle\". [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19615383,"author":"freyir","month":"2019-04","story_title":"San Francisco\u2019s Slow-Motion Suicide","text":"A good video on the topic: [VIDEO] It\u2019s not a homelessness crisis. Homelessness is a symptom. Our cities are in the grips of a heroin & meth epidemic. Until we acknowledge that, it won\u2019t get better.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19811493,"author":"nugget","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Billionaire Marc Benioff donates $30M to research homelessness","text":"Here's a recent expos\u00e9 about homelessness in Seattle: [VIDEO] My takeaway: drug addiction and mental illness are the real problems. Homelessness is just a symptom of the disease. Why does that distinction matter? Building affordable housing without infrastructure and services to address addiction and mental health will not work.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19872904,"author":"drak0n1c","month":"2019-05","story_title":"The rise of fear-based social media like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Neighbors","text":"Rhode Island (where I used to live before Seattle) is a blue state with functioning prosecutors that actually prosecute charges for misdemeanors and crimes, but they offer sentenced individuals the alternative of entering the drug court system for mandatory interned rehab, or the mental health system. People going through the system say it saved their life. Intervention works. West coast states do have similar drug courts, but since crimes are not prosecuted and misdemeanor charges are routinely vacated there is no incentive for people to actually be helped. For helpful information on Rhode Island's program I recommend the last 20 min of this documentary: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20142850,"author":"jxramos","month":"2019-06","story_title":"After Amazon-Led Tax Rebellion, Seattle's Homeless Aid Stalls","text":"I was just thinking of that documentary. I agree it was very eye opening. Looks like it stands at 3.9M views currently. I read an article about it that the journalist brought a lot of ire his way producing that blunt exposition. If I remember correctly there was a PR campaign to undo his work or something along those lines. Direct YouTube link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27273195,"author":"29athrowaway","month":"2021-05","story_title":"I Was Robbed in San Francisco While the Cameras Rolled","text":"There is this documentary called \"Seattle is dying\" by KOMO news: [VIDEO] The situation in this documentary is similar to SF.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27304581,"author":"dolni","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some things you learnt from a game that changed your life?","text":"> This is GP's entire point. Given the freedom to choose what to do, \"do nothing\" is not a common choice. In a world where everyone has the option to say, \"I don't want to work\", most won't actually say that, especially in the long term. Absolutely wrong? The U-3 unemployment rate always lags 3-7% behind the U-6: [LINK] To suggest up to 7% of people just not looking for a job is \"not a common choice\" is terribly misleading. Even during good periods for the economy, the number sits around 4%. I don't expect that number to get smaller by adding UBI. Do you? > Why fairness? The system we have now is incredibly unfair. UBI would at least provide more fairness by removing wage slavery. Why not fairness? How many individuals can you speak to who have done _literally anything_ to invest in their career skills who are earning \"wage slavery\" levels of pay? If you're 30 years old, and the best thing you can do is make Subway sandwiches... what are you doing with your life? > 2. Addictions are already putting people in poverty, and the best solution is recovery from those addictions. That recovery requires access to healthcare. Access to healthcare and UBI are different discussions entirely. And often \"access to healthcare\" by itself is not sufficient to get people to stop being addicted. You actually have to hold them accountable. I recommend watching a documentary called \"Seattle is Dying\" [1] to see why just being nice is not a solution. > 3. Children are people who can't really mana","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29021674,"author":"throwawaysea","month":"2021-10","story_title":"End Amazon\u2019s Surveillance Partnership with Police","text":"Some jurisdictions do, particularly in smaller cities like suburbs, where police staff aren't fully occupied with higher priority calls. However, many bigger cities are simply too understaffed compared to the past, and ignore property crimes as you say. This is especially true in West Coast cities like SF, Portland, and Seattle. For example Seattle has lost hundreds of police officers in the last year due to the push for defunding, hostile attitudes towards police from activists/local politicians, and the opportunity to have a less stressful/better paying job elsewhere after a very rough year dealing with near-daily rioting. At present, the city has only around 1000 officers and it is expected to lose some more due to the vaccine mandate. This is around half of what the average city has per capita, and in the last decade the effects of a lenient city attorney, crime-friendly local government focused on \"restorative justice\", and falling per capita officer counts has led to a massive increase in crimes. Just like in SF, people have given up on even reporting them since even if someone is arrested, the city attorney will just release them anyways, and insurance claims require a deductible. Even businesses have given up on crime reporting (example: [LINK] ). A good overview of the Seattle situation can be found in a couple documentaries, \"Seattle is Dying\" ( [VIDEO] ) and \"The Fight for the Soul of Seattle\" ( [LINK] ). The city's transformation from a safe clean city to what it ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39947457,"author":"PKop","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Former University of Iowa hospital employee used fake identity for 35 years","text":"I don't understand how any of you can see this as a lack of will from police rather than political policy coming from above them. Here is thorough documentary outlining over and over again police prevented from enforcing law by politicians, who also don't charge or incarcerate criminals who cops arrest repeatedly. [VIDEO] Similar policies exist in other cities like San Francisco.","stance":"rec"}],"bpQFCcSI0pU":[{"hn_comment_id":25587616,"author":"june11","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it","text":"I wish more people would watch this [0], might not be true but damn does it seem convincing. Seems pretty obvious that it was lab originated, even if it isn't manufactured. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27312180,"author":"phyalow","month":"2021-05","story_title":"The case for a leak of a virus engineered in a Wuhan lab","text":"Exactly. I am not into conspiracies, but I highly recommend this video from early 2020 which details how one of the Chinese researchers at WIV, Huang Yan Ling disappeared in late 2019 and how subsequently her internet presence was memory holed [1] by Chinese censors (all verifiable with the links in the video description and wayback). [VIDEO] This to me is one of the smoking guns. [1] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22851856,"author":"light_cone","month":"2020-04","story_title":"China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest","text":"The most credible evidence has been gathered and presented in a youtube video [VIDEO] . The youtuber was a long time china immigrant before being forced to move abroad.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22851935,"author":"abc-xyz","month":"2020-04","story_title":"China clamping down on coronavirus research, deleted pages suggest","text":"Her name was Huang Yan Ling (\u9ec4\u71d5\u73b2) for anyone who might be interested in learning more about the potential patient 0. The evidence is very compelling and this video does a good job at presenting it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23071081,"author":"Tarlox","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release","text":"[VIDEO] The sources listed in the description of this video seem somewhat reliable. While I'm not completely sold on the lab being the source I think the odds that it was are still pretty high for me.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34951030,"author":"Izkata","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Agency Now Says","text":"> Patient zero was a virologist that seems to have been censored off the Chinese internet afterwards, and I can't find the links anymore :-/ 10-minute video that includes that plus a few other things: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bqPARIKHbN8":[{"hn_comment_id":16263240,"author":"dfee","month":"2018-01","story_title":"\u2018The Shed at Dulwich\u2019 was London\u2019s top-rated restaurant. It didn\u2019t exist","text":"The tenor in this discussion so far seems to be a bit on the condescending side. Frankly, I'll pick it up for this guy. What an incredible job \u2013 and a great reminder that marketing your service is often times more important than the service itself. Maybe it's the prankster in me, but I don't feel like this is the end of the world \u2013 and it's not an indicator that the world is coming to an end. Fundamentally, people follow the rules and trust structure. That's probably why society can exist. For the many people who don't have their glasses on, this was a brief glimpse at reality. I'd recommend watching the Vice video I found in another comment: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26578814,"author":"fatfox","month":"2021-03","story_title":"More big investors shun Deliveroo over workers' rights","text":"Unrelated to Deliveroo, but \"How to Become TripAdvisor\u2019s #1 Fake Restaurant\" (2018) was very telling as well: [VIDEO] From the video description: > The Shed at Dulwich was the number one rated restaurant in London, with foodies, celebrities and bloggers trying to get a table. The main obstacle for them, however, was that it didn't exist. Over the course of 8 months VICE's Oobah Butler used an assault of fake reviews to get his 'restaurant' to the hallowed top spot on TripAdvisor.","stance":"rec"}],"bvim4rsNHkQ":[{"hn_comment_id":16316453,"author":"Medox","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Watch the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Launch Today","text":"Speaking of not being ashamed of failures, I've always liked their compilation of them (with sound it's even better): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16319877,"author":"peterwaller","month":"2018-02","story_title":"SpaceX\u2019s Falcon Heavy successfully launches","text":"Agree it is strange. I love their \"How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster\" film. [VIDEO] Watching the countdown net it seemed plausible that they didn't know whether it had successfully landed either.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24364002,"author":"codeulike","month":"2020-09","story_title":"SpaceX Launch: Starlink 12 [video]","text":"Everyone is commenting saying how mundane it has become to see the landings. Hence you might enjoy this official SpaceX Blooper reel from 2017 that shows the numerous spectacular failures that they worked through. Innovation is a type of gamble. People forget that. \"SpaceX: How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster\" [VIDEO] (and regular reminder that these things are 12-storey high explosive tubes)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26007488,"author":"jerf","month":"2021-02","story_title":"SpaceX SN9 Explodes on Landing","text":"If you happen not to have seen it, \"How Not To Land an Orbital Rocket Booster\": [VIDEO] from SpaceX.","stance":"rec"}],"bwDrHqNZ9lo":[{"hn_comment_id":22926722,"author":"paganel","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Shirt Without Stripes","text":"People on an website like this should at least have a general idea of who Zizek is. I've never yet read any of his books but as a guy living in the Balkans this short clip [1] of Zizek explaining the geography that separates Central Europe from the Balkans is one of the best things on YT. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42762358,"author":"Swizec","month":"2025-01","story_title":"TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users","text":"> The actual meaning of democracy is the \"power of the people\". Nowhere that implies a western-like electoral system. Correct. \u201cwe\u201d used to do it simply by killing the leaders that were disliked. Elections are a bit friendlier than that :) You might enjoy this Zizek video on the border between the west and the balkans: [VIDEO] . I think he captures the sentiment well. > I'd argue in your average western democracy the people have very little power, with lots of symbolic processes to reinforce the illusion. This was Chomsky\u2019s whole point in Manufacturing Consent.","stance":"rec"}],"bx3KuE7UjGA":[{"hn_comment_id":5513993,"author":"TallGuyShort","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Andrew Tanenbaum presenting on Minix 3's architecture: [VIDEO] . Regardless of one's opinions on microkernels vs. monolithic kernels, it's a very interesting but accessible talk for those interested in lower-level systems and fault-tolerant architectures.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5274689,"author":"thirsteh","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Minix 3.2.1 Released","text":"It's also for security. If you find a security vulnerability in e.g. the sound driver, you're not going to get root access. Andrew Tanenbaum explains it well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7862632,"author":"noblethrasher","month":"2014-06","story_title":"What are the advantages of the Hurd over Linux/BSD? (2013)","text":"Here's Andy Tannenbaum's response to the performance issues of microkernels: [VIDEO] (should start at about 47:15)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8572128,"author":"shangxiao","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Hobby kernel and userspace, built mostly from scratch","text":"Writing OS's is hard and there are no shortcuts. You should take a look at microkernels and the work Andrew Tanenbaum did with Minix 3 [1] and his modular design as this is the sort of direction you're probably looking for with customisable OS's. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"bxe2T-V8XRs":[{"hn_comment_id":9124289,"author":"film42","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Beginning deep learning with 500 lines of Julia","text":"The gist of this is really the Backpropagation algorithm [1]. It appears as though everything else is a means to detect when to stop. One of the clearest walkthroughs I've seen online is a short series of very short videos by Stephen C Welch [2] [3]. If you're interested in this space, start with him. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11510629,"author":"josso","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Google has started a video series on machine learning and I can understand it","text":"I also recommend Welch Labs\u2019 Neural Network Demystified-series[0]. It is a combination of the Coursera course and the YouTube videos. It get\u2019s into some of the math, while still keeping it basic. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11875263,"author":"max_","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Ask HN: From programming to AI, how?","text":"Hello, my background is just like yours. Assuming you are a total noob I learned that AI is not like programming, where anyone with basic knowledge of computation can dive in. You can NOT just learn AI by reading other people's code. Its like Physics, there are solid principles you need to understand before you get in. The point: AI does not come with the \"batteries included\". If you are in deed a noob you MUST learn the prerequisites. Follow these steps in order and I guarantee you will be competent with AI in six months tops.(from my past experience) - 1. Know what AI actually is [VIDEO] - 2. Write basic Machine Learning code [LINK] - 3. Understand the Mathmatics involved [LINK] - 4. Get some important concepts, [LINK] - 5. Finnish off. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"byjhpzEoXFs":[{"hn_comment_id":31134858,"author":"mungal","month":"2022-04","story_title":"I stopped working on black hole information loss","text":"I\u2019ll add to this to give an example of someone who I feel is doing a great job of satisfying this very request in the field of mathematics: Timothy Gowers. His yt channel is an excellent resource of theoretical understanding through numerical methods. Here\u2019s my favorite series where he confirms/elucidates a \u201cstrange\u201d theoretical fact with an explorative numerical style: [VIDEO] Simply superb content.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40101854,"author":"jrhvmt","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Programming vs. Mathematical Curiosity","text":"But I do appreciate the comedy! Well while I have you, the message I feel I failed to adhere to in my comment was my interest in letting you, or others who follow their passion in math and programming, know that what you are doing is in fact \u201creal\u201d math! Keep it up! Your post made me click through a bunch of links in it. Thank you, but give me back that hour! ;P Better yet, I\u2019ll trade you a different rabbit hole. Based on your post I think you\u2019d really enjoy this \u201cstrange determinant\u201d series from Timothy Gowers: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48215033,"author":"missyougowers","month":"2026-05","story_title":"An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry","text":"Unfortunately Gowers has taken Tao's lead on this one. Gowers has one of my favourite video series about how he approaches a problem he is unfamiliar with: [VIDEO] It is disheartening to see him jump into this GenAI puffery. I hope these GenAI labs are paying Tao handsomely for legitimizing their slop, but more likely he's feeling pressure from his University to promote and work with these labs. My guess is Gowers wants in on that action, or his University does. Either way, it makes me sad. If its self motivated... even sadder.","stance":"rec"}],"bzkRVzciAZg":[{"hn_comment_id":12629162,"author":"davidw","month":"2016-10","story_title":"The State of JavaScript \u2013 Survey results","text":"If you haven't seen it, you might find this entertaining: [VIDEO] I really wish gar1t would make some new videos, I love them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28882271,"author":"throwaway81523","month":"2021-10","story_title":"A viable solution for Python concurrency","text":"> What specifically is the problem with asyncio? Watch the very NSFW (lots of swearing) but hysterically funny video \"node.js is bad ass rock star tech\" on youtube sometime ;). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"c0O6UXrOZJo":[{"hn_comment_id":24132919,"author":"bXVsbGVy","month":"2020-08","story_title":"PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later","text":"> You may remember that this played a strange role in Obama's birth certificate some years back Just to clarify, the issue with the compression algorithm used by the scanner, not with the PDF format itself. There a few videos of David Kriesel explaining the bug for the curious: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36305410,"author":"lynx23","month":"2023-06","story_title":"","text":"Even though this happened a long time ago, whenever I hear or think about it, I am a mazed that it didn't put Xerox out of business, or at least hurt a little more. After all, some big players were already doing digital archiving at the time. :-/ BTW, the CCC had a pretty neat presentation at that time as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"c12cYAUTXXs":[{"hn_comment_id":8087517,"author":"rdtsc","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Revisiting 1M Writes per second","text":"My other favorite \"scalability\" study is from WhatsApp: [VIDEO] That's 'Billion' with a 'B': Scaling to the Next Level at WhatsApp (that walk title was create before the acquisition and was mean to imply message count, after the acquisition it got a secondary meaning). The one thing that is fascinating about it, is how small their team was compared to the volume and complexity of the operation.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14748689,"author":"kornish","month":"2017-07","story_title":"How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users","text":"Not sure why this comment saw a couple downvotes earlier. mbesto is correct: for most startups, most of the time, competitive advantage doesn't come from the underlying tech stack. To make a general statement, most things could be done similarly on any of several platforms. However, when product requirements match exceptionally well with a specialized technology, you can see things that would simply be infeasible or extremely tough using a different stack. WhatsApp + Erlang was one of those cases (watch this talk and imagine trying to recreate that system with only a handful of server engineers using any other tech: [VIDEO] ). Discord + Elixir appears to be another. Curious if anyone has any examples that spring to mind from outside the highly concurrent messaging space.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24445167,"author":"kornish","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Scaling Erlang Developer Experience at WhatsApp [pdf]","text":"One of my favorite talks is by Rick Reed about scaling Erlang at WhatsApp. What an absolute savage. He flies through an articulate and in-depth curriculum on system performance and bottleneck mitigation. The talk is called \"That's 'Billion' with a 'B'\" and makes for a great lunchtime watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8421162,"author":"rdtsc","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Mnesia and CAP","text":"Unrelated, but maybe interesting: WhatsApp was running Mnesia and made it work fantastically. Especially with such a small team of engineers. Here is a video of Rick Reed talking about how they did it (hint it is not a one monolithic Mnesia cluster). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8664120,"author":"rbsn","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Yahoo Mail moving to React","text":"Just to follow up on topic of WhatsApp and Erlang, here is a presentation given at Erlang Factory 2014 about their goals with scaling WhatsApp to billions of simultaneous users. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10226673,"author":"rdtsc","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users","text":"Not \"parent\" but search for Erlang Factory talks they talk about it. Here is one from Rick Reed. He explains how the product works : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11673148,"author":"ddeck","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Introducing WhatsApp's Desktop App","text":"It's required because your phone is where your messages are stored. Whatsapp don't retain messages/media after they've been delivered to your phone, which is a compelling privacy feature for many. It's also what allows them to serve such an enormous user base with limited hardware. Their technology stack (FreeBSD/Erlang) is pretty interesting, more info here: 2014 talks by Rick Reed: [VIDEO] [LINK] Slides: [LINK] There's likely no technical reason why you couldn't use a pc instead of a phone for users that want to use the pc as the primary client (with the phone optionally accessing the DB on the pc in the same way that the desktop client does for the phone). Perhaps they've decided that this is a small and declining market. Edit: Slides for second talk [LINK] 440k connections/sec, 1.1 million msgs/sec, 1 billion images/day, and that was in 2014...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13858908,"author":"otterley","month":"2017-03","story_title":"A comment left on Slashdot","text":"Here's a great talk from Rick Reed (a former mentor of mine at Yahoo!) about how WhatsApp scaled their Erlang infrastructure: [LINK] Here's another talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15161747,"author":"rdtsc","month":"2017-09","story_title":"WhatsApp Cofounder on How It Reached 1.3B Users Without Losing Its Focus","text":"Here is the description of their stack and how Erlang helped them by Rick Reed at Erlang Factory: [VIDEO] Here is Jamshid Mahdavi talking about their stack as well but focusing on development, testing and shipping code. Some of the stuff they do will surprise you if you've been at a shop with a large QA team and deployment pipelines with many stages. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32326449,"author":"dpeck","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What startsups made the best early-tech decisions?","text":"WhatsApp. Rick Reed\u2019s \u201cThat\u2019s Billion with a B\u201d presentation is a good glimpse into their own view of it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"c1QmB5bW_WQ":[{"hn_comment_id":28090641,"author":"marto1","month":"2021-08","story_title":"You've got $30B to spend and a climate crisis. Nuclear or solar?","text":"On that note for anyone interested in the economics(and working in general) of nuclear energy check out the Illinois Energy youtube channel. Here's a quiz video of theirs: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29658361,"author":"mhh__","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year","text":"Not only is it solvable, it's basically been solved for years. [VIDEO] is aimed at the lay audience. The issue is that radiation is a silent killer, so it is extremely easy people with vested interests in (say) fossil fuels to exploit our inability to access risk. Coal hurts people every single day, but it doesn't have the same poetic weight as radiation so this is lost on the general public. Nuclear power is expensive, however. Dealing with the waste is also an issue but firstly, forcing us to deal with the waste seriously is potentially not such a bad thing (assuming we need nuclear in the long run, which unless storage comes a very long way we presumably will), and secondly this is the kind of question where a government with a lot of political capital needs to just find some deserted land to build a long term solution.","stance":"rec"}],"c1UBJbfR-H0":[{"hn_comment_id":25394602,"author":"remexre","month":"2020-12","story_title":"How the Python object system works","text":"There's an interesting talk [0] from Bobby Powers on how to make a malloc() and free() that perform compaction, to be able to release memory back to the operating system more frequently (and improve cache hit rates, etc.). But this isn't standard at all yet. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32283251,"author":"rtfeldman","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Reference count, don't garbage collect","text":"There was a great talk at Strange Loop about a drop-in malloc replacement which compacts. Apparently it actually led to memory usage improvements in industrial projects like Redis: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42665511,"author":"superjan","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Using black magic to make a fast circular buffer (2017)","text":"There\u2019s a great paper from the group of Emery Berger, where they merge memory pages that become sparse. A kind of garbage collection for C and C++ languages. There\u2019s also a good presentation about it on youtube. [LINK] The presentation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"c2J91UG6Fn8":[{"hn_comment_id":35211611,"author":"jameshart","month":"2023-03","story_title":"A Short History of the VW Mark 1 Rabbit/Golf","text":"Tech Connections has, as so often the case, a great video about why old car headlights were the shapes they were - and why in later models they often changed: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33230205,"author":"xani_","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The US will finally allow adaptive beam headlights on new cars","text":"Also interesting piece about why US was stuck in decades of same light design because of more stupid regulations [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33355444,"author":"NeoTar","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Where did all the \u201creject\u201d buttons come from?","text":"There is a YouTube channel called Technology Connections which has a video about American car headlights: [VIDEO] which I think illustrated a good example of the difference between mandating a solution, and mandating requirements. Considering car headlights. Obviously there are some requirements we should make - they need to be bright enough to safely light-up the road. They should not blind oncoming drivers. They need to be reasonably safe in the event of a collision. Between the sixties and 1984, the government of the USA mandated a solution. Basically one model of headlights was permitted (with a few minor variations introduced over time). If you look at all car models from this time they have a similar appearance, and the same headlights are still in use in some commercial vehicles today. In most European nations (and other parts of the world) instead a requirement, or series of requirements were made. If you met these standards for lighting level, glare, etc. your headlight was permitted. This led to European and Japanese cars have very varied headlight models, while most American cars were forced to stick to the same old style. This meant that American drivers missed out on innovations in this space. Mandates can very easily become out-dates. Whereas well written requirements are much more timeless.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36563914,"author":"dharmab","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Tesla Gives New UK Owners a \u2018Reacher\u2019 Stick to Deal with Left-Hand Drive Cars","text":"There's two major safety issues: You can't see around cars to be able to pass. Okay, so you often don't pass. But much more importantly, car headlights aren't symmetrical. The one pointing towards the oncoming lane has a \"cut\" beam to avoid blinding other drivers while the other has a taller beam to improve visibility of anything entering the road. When you drive LHD in a RHD country, or vice versa, you are blinding other drivers while having low visibility of pedestrians and animals. Technology Connections did a great video about this. His solution was to stop driving his RHD car in low light. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"c2lgEyNaop4":[{"hn_comment_id":20722210,"author":"nope96","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Alone in the Dark","text":"There's also a great \"Classic Game Postmortem\" video from 2012 by Frederick Raynal, too: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23667215,"author":"pengaru","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Alpha Waves was the first 3D platform game","text":"Also worth a watch/listen is the talk by Frederick Raynal at GDC about Alone in the Dark. He touches on converting Alpha Waves from Atari ST to PC: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37967475,"author":"smokel","month":"2023-10","story_title":"How the creator of Alone in the Dark came back to games","text":"Note that both Little Big Adventure (also called Twinsen's Adventure) and Alone in the Dark were created by the same person, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9rick Raynal! There is a very nice presentation [1] in which Raynal shows some of the old tools that were used to create Alone in the Dark. I'm still not entirely sure what kind of rendering is being used, but the editor sure looks nice (in 640x350 EGA). Perhaps there is some more background information on LBA out there as well? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"c52QhiXsmyI":[{"hn_comment_id":18575217,"author":"jpittis","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Party REPL \u2013 A multi-player REPL built for pair-programming [video]","text":"Conj always makes me so envious. So many good talks. This one, the Rich Hickey one on Maybe, the Stuart Halloway one on REBL. Any other must watches? Hickey: [LINK] Halloway: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29554521,"author":"panick21_","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Sublime Clojure","text":"This is real neat. However, I tend to use Cursive and REBL. I think that's some of the coolest development environment I ever used. People who have not heard of the REBL, can check out this video: [VIDEO] > REBL is a graphical, interactive tool for browsing Clojure data.","stance":"rec"}],"c5QF2HjHLSE":[{"hn_comment_id":41744673,"author":"jauntywundrkind","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Holocron is an object storage based leader election library","text":"Rich Hickey has a section on using good words, on not using nicknames, in his (as ever wonderful) Clojure Conj 2023 talk Design in Practice, [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41888376,"author":"erichocean","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Focus on decisions, not tasks","text":"A good approach to making decisions in a team context (also works for personal use) is explained by Rich Hickey here: [VIDEO] The talks is called \"Design in Practice\" but is really about making decisions.","stance":"rec"}],"c8iFtaltX-s":[{"hn_comment_id":43526623,"author":"resource0x","month":"2025-03","story_title":"C. Elegans: The worm that no computer scientist can crack","text":"This podcast will be a shocking experience for anyone who still holds reductionist views on life. [VIDEO] Michael Levin's channel: [LINK] His blog: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46844578,"author":"jupiterelastica","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Cells Use 'Bioelectricity' to Coordinate and Make Group Decisions","text":"For those interested in more details and quite mind blowing examples, here is a fascinating interview with Michael Levin (one of the researchers mentioned in the article). [VIDEO] Start at 1:19:11, the stuff before is him talking about biology, but from an intelligence perspective. After this time stamp is his retrospective on his bioelectricity research over the years, showing also examples of how they got a frog embryo to produce eyes, and many more things.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43724146,"author":"hirvi74","month":"2025-04","story_title":"What my stroke taught me (2017)","text":"> A small part of the brain that gives consciousness. Not to get too tangental, but it was common thought at one time to think the brain is the center of consciousness. However, I have come across new data [1] that has convinced me that consciousness is entirely a full-body experience. According to the definition of some, consciousness might not even be a binary state, but rather a property of our universe like heat. [1] Found this video on this site, and I found it to be a fascinating discussion if you have the time: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cBDJDZAo41c":[{"hn_comment_id":31537813,"author":"ghostpepper","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Why is Tiny Dancer such a great song? [video]","text":"Rick Beato is great. My favourite video of his is about the most accomplished songwriter most people have never heard of - Max Martin (producer and co-writer of this Ariana Grande song and a ton of other pop songs you've heard) [0] Also worth checking out is this 12Tone analysis of Tiny Dancer [1] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24601008,"author":"dehrmann","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Update on YouTube copyright dispute over guitar tutorials [video]","text":"I recently stumbled across some videos where a producer breaks down how some very good songs are produced. Here's one he does for a Max Martin track where you get screenshots of the track in Pro Tools: [VIDEO] > From there, it should be possible to mangle it into a tabulature? A produced pop track might be a little extreme, but there's a lot going on in these tracks. Even if you know the chord progression, it's hard to tell if a note played by a guitar is played by the rhythm guitar, lead guitar, an overdub, something with double tracking, or even an overtone from the bass, especially when the note makes the chord an add4. The same goes for walking basslines played by the guitar. You also arrange things differently for solo performances, live performances with a band, and produced performances, so even if you could extract a rhythm guitar tab from a recording, that might not be how you'd want to play it solo.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31537598,"author":"ushakov","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Why is Tiny Dancer such a great song? [video]","text":"yeah, but sometimes the effect is completely opposite for me it was these pop songs you hear on the radio i used to hate them universally, but once i've started listening more to the tone/melody rather that just the song i found myself hooked all these great pop songs, and i mean all of them are made by a group of people around the Swedish producer Max Martin Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, the list goes on and nobody even knows the man behind the show (which i find quite fascinating) Rick Beato has a video on him: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cCOL7MC4Pl0":[{"hn_comment_id":18217867,"author":"wattengard","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Jake Archibald talking about the javascript event loop and actually making it both entertaining and easily grokable! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18219482,"author":"olavgg","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Jake Archibald's \"In the Loop\", Visual explanation of how the javascript event loop works! Awesome video for every javascript developer. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25032014,"author":"phist_mcgee","month":"2020-11","story_title":"How does the event loop work in JavaScript? [video]","text":"The best primer for the event loop I have found is here: [VIDEO] The speaker (Jake Archibald) has that rare ability to be both likeable and relatable, while also being incredibly knowledgeable and enthusiastic. I wish a lot more talks were like this!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17467065,"author":"mxschumacher","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What you wish you'd known before getting into JavaScript?","text":"Be sure to understand the event loop. Javascript as an asynchronous language often comes back to bite beginners. Here are two great talks to help you: [VIDEO] [LINK] Your life will be easier if you learn to use Chrome Dev tools (or the Firefox equivalent) early. In the beginning, you don't have to worry about browser compatibility - embrace modern JS (ES6+)!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33596401,"author":"luuuzeta","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?","text":"I've been struggling with wrapping my head around asynchronous programming with callbacks, promises and async/await in JS, however I think it's finally clicking after watching these YouTube videos and creating a document where I explain these concepts as if I'm teaching them to someone else: * Philip Roberts's What the heck is the event loop anyway? - [LINK] * The Story of Asynchronous JavaScript - [LINK] * JavaScript Callbacks, Promises, and Async / Await Explained - [LINK] * Async Javascript Tutorial For Beginners (Callbacks, Promises, Async Await). - [LINK] * Jake Archibald: In The Loop - setTimeout, micro tasks, requestAnimationFrame, requestIdleCallback, - [VIDEO] Edit... I've been rewatching these videos, reading the MDN docs, the Eloquent JavaScript book, javascript.info, blogs about the subject, etc. This further proves you shouldn't limit yourself to a single resource, and instead fill up the laguna with water from different sources if you will.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36598055,"author":"cassepipe","month":"2023-07","story_title":"How to think about `async`/`await` in Rust","text":"Coming from C and having used thread and being totally ignorant to javascript, this article really helped me grasp async in js by clearing away implicit misconceptions I held : [LINK] And also that talk on the event loop : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37875431,"author":"mananaysiempre","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Populating the page: how browsers work","text":"> It basically flickers between tasks very rapidly to simulate concurrency. That\u2019s usually used a description of preemptive multitasking, like what you get running a modern OS on a single core (on multiple cores it\u2019s also this but on each core). Every once in a small while, the current task is made to inhale chloroform, another task is chosen to wake and takes its place. Pro: you can\u2019t hang any given task from a single thread; con: shared memory is very difficult to impossible, as you never know when you\u2019ll be interrupted. Browser JavaScript and UI interactions instead use cooperative multitasking, which you\u2019ll also find in classic Mac OS, 16-bit Windows, basically every embedded system ever, and languages like Python and Lua. A task has to explicitly call out to the scheduler to hand off execution resources to the next one. Pro: as task switching only happens at clearly visible points, many of the horrors of shared memory are diminished; con: you can and will hang the UI (or other outside-world interactions) if you accidentally write an infinite loop or just do too much CPU-bound work without yielding (as any developer using one of the aforementioned systems knows). For how this works in the browser environment specifically, see Jake Archbald\u2019s superb talk[1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cDA3_5982h8":[{"hn_comment_id":13675528,"author":"zyang","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How should I teach code to kids?","text":"Have you seen the exact instruction challenge on youtube? I thought it was a great segue into technical thinking for young kids. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19746134,"author":"srirangr","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?","text":"1. Tell them what to do but do not tell them how to do it. (Just give a few pointers otherwise they'll be lost.) 2. Give them a playground to fail - Offload any non-business critical tasks and let them make mistakes. No one I know ever learnt programming without making any mistakes. Immediately tell them about best practices and how to avoid such mistakes in future. 3. Show them the impact of their work - There's nothing more motivating than seeing the impact of one's work. 4. Build curiosity - Answer as many questions as you can answer. Admit when you don't know any answers and start looking it up on the web right in front of them. People pick habits by looking at their superiors. If it's absolute beginning to programming, this video is a great way to show how difficult it is to teach a machine to do something and how clear instructions can help get things done: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cIQ36Kt7UVg":[{"hn_comment_id":21134253,"author":"simonh","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Solving the Wrong Problem (2011)","text":"The Everyday Astronaut had a great interview with Elon Musk after the Starship presentation a few days ago. They spent a bit of time talking about how much progress the team had made in very little time, and Musk's take was that it took them an awful long time to finally ask the right questions - years. Once they had formulated exactly what they were trying to do and what the actual relevant constraints were, finding the right solutions and making very rapid progress was actually not all that complicated. He talked about the tendency really good engineers have to spend a lot of effort optimising the design of things that shouldn't be there at all. Finally he banged on hard about always questioning your design constraints. He pointed out that if you get given some design constraints by another team, you should always consider their validity since it;s very unlikely they are optimal. The converse assumption would be that they are always perfect, so looking at it that way there's no reason you should assume they are right from the start. For anyone who worries about the sunk cost fallacy, bear in mind it was only about a year ago they decided to throw away all the investment they'd put into building a composite body, including a huge main body tool. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21295395,"author":"blakes","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Are Aerospike Engines Better Than Traditional Rocket Engines?","text":"Here's an interesting interview the author did with Elon Musk: [VIDEO] Fun to see how interested Elon is with the engineering of rockets, looks like he could talk for days if he had the time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24084582,"author":"jjoonathan","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Chrysler's Radical Space Shuttle Design","text":"Agreed! It's also worth highlighting the bit where he asks Elon Musk: [VIDEO] I've internally asked this question so many times, like, guys, shouldn't we maybe do an aerospike? Musk focused on the high combustion efficiency of traditional combustion chambers, combined with the high efficiency of having two stages, as the reason why they won out. Jettisoning irrelevant fuel-containing mass as you go is great for efficiency and as a bonus it makes it easy to put sea-level-optimized nozzles on the bottom stage and vacuum-optimized nozzles on the top stage.","stance":"rec"}],"cIQ9IXSUzuM":[{"hn_comment_id":18002373,"author":"combatentropy","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?","text":"Monty Montgomery's explanation of digital audio might be the best explanatory video I have ever witnessed, [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20539293,"author":"mhh__","month":"2019-07","story_title":"A Pixel Is Not A Little Square (1995) [pdf]","text":"[LINK] The talk [VIDEO] <-- Youtube backup in case it doesn't work (YMMV) I wish I could force any audiophiles to watch it before they waste their money on snake oil. I think a similar point can be made about analogue synthesis, e.g. You pay Moog \u00a31500 for what is ultimately a fancy box for a relatively simple analogue circuit.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34275684,"author":"SeanLuke","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Why Cassettes?","text":"> Audiophiles might point out that analog audio sources can theoretically hold details you can't hear in digital. This is true because values in analog media are continuous. Over imperceptibly short periods of time, the numbers that represent different values on a sound wave in a digital recording jump instantaneously from one discrete value to another with no gentle slope between. Analog signals instead form smooth curves, so at some level they can contain tiny variations in slope that are too subtle for the digitization of that signal to represent. > The problem with analog superiority in general is that, when that digital signal is of standard CD quality (44,100 samples per second at 16-bit resolution), whatever details in the analog signal are too subtle to be captured digitally are also too subtle for me or really most people to hear. This so wrong it makes my head hurt. It's 2023 and people still think that digital doesn't produce smooth curves and that typical analog media -- cassette tape no less -- can store more details than a CD. These people need to be tied to a chair, have their eyelids taped open, and force-fed Monty Montgomery's video. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39590748,"author":"sramsay","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Sampling: What Nyquist didn't say, and what to do about it (2018) [pdf]","text":"This is the most lucid explanation of aliasing I think I've ever read. I mostly deal with this stuff in the realm of audio where the matter of analog vs digital rages regularly. The reason one hears \"Nyquist says\" so often from people defending digital audio is that the pro-analog people are imagining stair-stepped signals in which the information that is \"lost\" results in a noticeable degradation in sound quality. This (11-year-old) video is the gold standard for addressing this concern: [VIDEO] Curiously, no one ever seems to mention the actual problems (like aliasing).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48764448,"author":"hackingonempty","month":"2026-07","story_title":"24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense","text":"@xiphmont also made an amazing video response to the many responses he received to this article. Using analog equipment he busts a bunch of myths and demonstrates what really happens with digital audio. [LINK] or on YT if you can't play it [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15131491,"author":"olau","month":"2017-08","story_title":"24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)","text":"Try watching this video (hope I found the right one): [VIDEO] I think you're right that recording equipment has a long way to go, though; regardless of format I think people can relatively easily distinguish real acoustical instruments from recordings.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16995504,"author":"louthy","month":"2018-05","story_title":"A 1970s Teenager's Bedroom (1998)","text":"It's worth watching the video in my references [1] - it's a proper hacker's view of digital audio and how it translates to the analogue domain. Even with a 20khz sound you're not going to get any aliasing at 44khz sample rate. Most people's hearing starts to fall off significantly after around 12khz or so (depending on age). Most cymbals have a fundamental frequency around 2-5khz in my experience. Also, because cymbal sounds are pretty close to being noise, it's arguable whether it would matter or not. Although if you listen to a 128 kbps MP3 then you can often hear the top end frequency sounds (like cymbals) becoming 'mushy'. To the vast majority of people once you get to 192 kbps it's inaudible, and then above that most people with 'perfect ears' would struggle. And that's with a lossy format, never mind the lossless formats of CDs, WAV or FLAC which is the discussion at hand. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19098958,"author":"mc32","month":"2019-02","story_title":"The Vast Re-Education Program of the Superbowl Ads","text":"Exactly. I like Monty Montgomery from Xiph's explanation video[1] on Sine waves, sampling and digital stairsteps. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19458554,"author":"benji-york","month":"2019-03","story_title":"A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music","text":"Aside from the history and opinion in the piece, there are technical errors that are addressed by this: [VIDEO] Anyone interested in the argument over digital audio vs. analog will enjoy the above.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20537558,"author":"shawnz","month":"2019-07","story_title":"A Pixel Is Not A Little Square (1995) [pdf]","text":"A great video which touches on this idea, but mostly in the context of audio: [VIDEO] (relevant part around 8 minutes)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26413115,"author":"bch","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Lou Ottens, inventor of cassette tape, has died","text":"Let Monty Montgomery of xiph.org provide an illuminating tear down of \u201cdigital can\u2019t really produce...\u201d: [VIDEO] Edit: fix auto-incorrected xiph.org domain","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32842423,"author":"colejohnson66","month":"2022-09","story_title":"FLAC 1.4.0 released \u2013 added support for 32-bit audio","text":"Nyquist-Shannon simply says that you need 2x the sample rate of the highest frequency to perfectly recreate something. So, to recreate a 20 kHz wave that was sampled at 16 bits, you'd need 40 kHz sample rate. Bump that up to 22.05 kHz (for anti-aliasing) and you get CD audio. The bit depth, OTOH, is your signal-noise ratio (noise floor) when sampling/quantizing said audio. It's unrelated to Nyquist-Shannon. More bits gives you less noise when reproducing it. For CD audio, 16 bits was chosen to give an acceptable SNR of 96 dB. Monty Montgomery (of xipf.org) has a nice YouTube video related to this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35094198,"author":"ZoomZoomZoom","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Is there anyone here making music?","text":"In sound, nothing beats personal experience, experimentation and hours of deliberate listening. Spend a couple of hours with a basic compressor built-in your DAW and try to get the feel and understanding of how each parameter affects different sounds (from sine wave and noise to voice to drums, etc.). If you feel it's not fruitful, read, watch videos, listen, work on your stuff and come back to it after a while. Regarding books, there's lots to choose from. For some quick applied wisdom, Bobby Owsinski's Mixing, Recording and Mastering Handbooks (separate) are recommended. Zen & The Art Of Mixing by Mixerman is very good, as well as his classic The Daily Adventures. The Bruce Swedien Recording Method is very good if you're into recording. For Youtube videos, some random things I can vouch for: I'd suggest watching Monty's Digital Show and Tell [1] as a primer for digital audio as a form. Steve Albini has been putting out some very solid and entertaining videos on recording lately [2]. There's also of course a few hyped (but deservedly so) channels such as @DanWorrall, @Producelikeapro or @ProductionAdvice. Nothing I can suggest for courses as I haven't been interested in them for a while. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35340205,"author":"wwalexander","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Apple Music Classical","text":"There is no system high-end enough to allow your ears to magically hear 96kHz, or even 48kHz. Unless you\u2019re very young with golden ears it\u2019s extremely doubtful that you can hear a 24kHz tone. It is absolutely snake oil. [LINK] is an overview by the creator of Ogg and Vorbis explaining exactly, scientifically, why these inflated sampling rates are snake oil. [VIDEO] is a longer video by the same person that debunks a lot of digital audio myths.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46591163,"author":"everfrustrated","month":"2026-01","story_title":"How problematic is resampling audio from 44.1 to 48 kHz?","text":"Changing the sample rate of audio only affects the frequency range. All audio signal is _perfectly_ represented in a digital form. I am ashamed to admit this took me a long time to properly understand. For further reading I'd recommend: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cIcbAMO6sxo":[{"hn_comment_id":30383687,"author":"grapescheesee","month":"2022-02","story_title":"FBI sounds alarm as QR code usage soars","text":"Richard Henderson had a talk at the last Defcon about QR codes. I'd recommended checking it out. Video - [VIDEO] PDF of slides - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38235296,"author":"jrockway","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music (2022)","text":"None of this seems too terrible to handle. The title of the song can be an empty string, so use *string/Maybe string instead of string to distinguish between unset and \"some idiot made the song literally untitled\". I am surprised there are no songs that use characters only available in two different character sets, or are the same Chinese character repeated with multiple different writings (Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese). I suppose that some people are running into trouble by using CHARACTER VARYING(n) instead of TEXT in their database, but if you pick the most likely database for your local music player, then it doesn't matter. (sqlite doesn't care, basically.) The song that's named after a virus test signature is amusing. I guess encrypt your filenames and database so that the OS can't pry into the details. Since you hopefully didn't write your music player in C, there should be no way that a virus can affect your music player. (While I was researching this post, I found an interesting Defcon talk about what happens when you turn the EICAR virus signature into a QR code and scan it. [VIDEO] A lot of stuff breaks! I almost got forced into adding similar breakage. At work we make what is essentially a database, and we got acquired by A Large Company, which had to do a security audit of our software. One of the \"security vulnerabilities\" in our product was that we don't scan the data in the database for viruses. We pushed back to not do this, becaus","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44156029,"author":"Full_Clark","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Nitrogen Triiodide (2016)","text":"There's a good DEFCON 29 presentation on this topic. [VIDEO] If you skip forward to 16m 33s you'll be treated to a lively streak of invective from the passenger of a car whose driver has just confirmed that feeding EICAR to a parking system prevents it from letting any vehicle past the barrier.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47944445,"author":"tetha","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Claude system prompt bug wastes user money and bricks managed agents","text":"Do have way too much fun with EICAR: [VIDEO] This guy put the EICAR test string into a barcode and started to scan it on various systems, with rather funny effects.","stance":"rec"}],"cKPlPJyQrt4":[{"hn_comment_id":23088282,"author":"mattst88","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Resources to Learn Python in 2020","text":"I work professionally in C/C++ and the instances I needed to use Python I always felt like I was missing the core understanding of the language and was writing C in a different syntax. I found James Powell's PyData 2017 talk \"So you want to be a Python expert?\" ( [VIDEO] ) to be incredible at helping me to gain that core understanding of the language. It's legitimately the best technical talk I think I've seen and I can't recommend it highly enough.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24593588,"author":"ransom1538","month":"2020-09","story_title":"YouTube Channels to Level Up Your Programming Skills","text":"I don't even use python. But this python expert video was absolutely amazing done by a true pro. James Powell [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36793028,"author":"charlysl","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Advanced Python Mastery \u2013 A Course by David Beazley","text":"Another good (and entertaining) resource is James Powell's talk \"So you want to be a Python expert\" [1], the best explanation I've seen of decorators, generators and context managers. Good intro to the Python data (object) model too. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33766379,"author":"barefeg","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Data-Oriented Programming in Python","text":"I recommend any of the talks by James Powell at PyData. For example this one [VIDEO] Edit: maybe this one on Numpy may be more relevant: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34570666,"author":"jphoward","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Which book would you recommend for learning Python in detail?","text":"James Powell frequently gives very deep Python talks at conferences like Pydata, and shows you his coding approach in real time on Vim. Plenty of them are on YouTube and are worth a watch. This one [1] entitled \"So you want to be a Python expert?\" has almost half a million views! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46486063,"author":"kengoa","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Reading list for being a better engineer?","text":"Understanding Python's data model helped me become a better software engineer. I'd recommend watching this PyData talk (James Powell: So you want to be a Python expert? | PyData Seattle 2017 - [VIDEO] ) and then using the official doc as a reference which is also fun to read: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"cKxRvEZd3Mw":[{"hn_comment_id":11544088,"author":"simulate","month":"2016-04","story_title":"TensorFlow Simplified Interface Examples","text":"This series by Josh Grodin got started recently and looks promising. I assume they will eventually cover neural network / deep learning basics. Hello World - Machine Learning Recipes #1 [VIDEO] Visualizing a Decision Tree - Machine Learning Recipes #2 [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11875263,"author":"max_","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Ask HN: From programming to AI, how?","text":"Hello, my background is just like yours. Assuming you are a total noob I learned that AI is not like programming, where anyone with basic knowledge of computation can dive in. You can NOT just learn AI by reading other people's code. Its like Physics, there are solid principles you need to understand before you get in. The point: AI does not come with the \"batteries included\". If you are in deed a noob you MUST learn the prerequisites. Follow these steps in order and I guarantee you will be competent with AI in six months tops.(from my past experience) - 1. Know what AI actually is [LINK] - 2. Write basic Machine Learning code [VIDEO] - 3. Understand the Mathmatics involved [LINK] - 4. Get some important concepts, [LINK] - 5. Finnish off. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12402928,"author":"mliker","month":"2016-09","story_title":"How a Japanese cucumber farmer is using deep learning and TensorFlow","text":"Honestly, it doesn't seem that complicated. Just watch this educational video series [VIDEO] by Google, and you'll be able to do cool stuff with machine learning.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12623864,"author":"iverjo","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Announcing YouTube-8M: A Large and Diverse Labeled Video Dataset for Research","text":"I'd say scikit-learn is a better way to get started with machine learning. Check this out, for example: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12714957,"author":"kbaker","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning?","text":"You could watch the 'Hello World' Machine Learning Recipes videos by Josh Gordon at Google. Very approachable! The first lesson is a classifier to separate apples and oranges. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14402822,"author":"goldenbeet","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Good book to start programming for 15 yo?","text":"Why book? I don't know about you or your cousin, but learning from a book is so slow and dry. Why not a video series or online tutorial? Hell, maybe teach him the basics and build a small project with him. Codecademy is a great way to learn a bit of syntax and then build something. 'How to make a website' is a good intro course for getting into web dev. There's also a lot of good python basic videos on YouTube, then he could dive into ML/AI with: Machine Learning Recipes from Josh Gordon at Google [VIDEO] Siraj Raval's channel on ML/AI/Programming [LINK] All that said, if you reallllly want a book: \"Learn Python the hard way\" by Zed Shaw [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"cNICGEwmXLU":[{"hn_comment_id":35967771,"author":"POiNTx","month":"2023-05","story_title":"What's special about Erlang and Elixir?","text":"\"Systems that run forever self-heal and scale\" by Joe Armstrong (2013) [0] is a great talk too. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38015803,"author":"dogleash","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Flawless \u2013 Durable execution engine for Rust","text":"It wasn't a video pitching the language and certainly not drawing any explicit parallels to modern practices. Just something that got me thinking about the distributed concurrency system of erlang for the first time in a decade. Here is a conference talk that is a pitch, if that's what you're looking for: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cQO2XTP7QDw":[{"hn_comment_id":40409705,"author":"sandreas","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Coding My Handwriting","text":"There is a very cool youtube video with something similar from Stuff Made Here: [VIDEO] Was very fun to watch and he also explains the trials and errors, he did. There is also a link to a very interesting repository of handwriting synthesis: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45143008,"author":"mdorazio","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Making a font of my handwriting","text":"For those who were hoping for the physical version of this, I recommend the Stuff Made Here Video on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48628778,"author":"xz18r","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Writing Postcards with a 3D Printer","text":"Not a 3D printer but really cool video by Stuff Made Here explaining how he tried to make 'realistic' handwritten forgeries with a pen plotter: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cQP8WApzIQQ":[{"hn_comment_id":25338530,"author":"taude","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Raft Visualization","text":"MIT online trainig has this great YouTube playlist on distributed systems, with one of the lectures being on RAFT [1,2,3]. The entire playlist [4] is probably worth your time, though. [1] Intro [LINK] [2] Part I: [LINK] [3] Part II [LINK] [4] Playlist for the course: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25988415,"author":"yes_but_no","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommended books and papers on distributed systems?","text":"Not a book nor a paper, but MIT has published their recent Distr. Systems lectures[0] on youtube. Haven't finished it yet but it touches on papers that stood the test of times. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27389804,"author":"uyt","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Stanford CS Curriculum 2021","text":"Not from stanford but I enjoyed these: MIT 6.824: Distributed Systems [VIDEO] CMU The Databaseology Lectures [LINK] You essentially learn systems by looking at lots and lots of examples of how good real world systems are designed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35500682,"author":"avinassh","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best textbook or video lectures on a topic you've come seen?","text":"Intro to Database Systems by Andy Pavlo - [LINK] MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems by Robert Morris - [VIDEO] Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) - [LINK] Crafting Interpreters - [LINK] > What made it so special these break down really complex topics and make the concepts approachable. As a noob, I learned a lot from these.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37248619,"author":"avinassh","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Which books, courses, projects have improved your programming skills immensely?","text":"Intro to Database Systems by Andy Pavlo - [LINK] MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems by Robert Morris - [VIDEO] Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) - [LINK] Crafting Interpreters - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43197284,"author":"bigmutant","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Distributed systems programming has stalled","text":"Good resources for understanding Distributed Systems: - MIT course with Robert Morris (of Morris Worm fame): [VIDEO] - Martin Kleppmann (author of DDIA): [LINK] If you can work through the above (and DDIA), you'll have a solid understanding of the issues in Distributed System, like Consensus, Causality, Split Brain, etc. You'll also gain a critical eye of Cloud Services and be able to articulate their drawbacks (ex: did you know that replication to DynamoDB Secondary Indexes is eventually consistent? What effects can that have on your applications?)","stance":"rec"}],"cQWlnTyOSig":[{"hn_comment_id":30745955,"author":"acidbaseextract","month":"2022-03","story_title":"I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears","text":"Polymatter recently had a great video on the way the college ranking system is a hustle for foreign student money, and just how heavily it distorts colleges incentives: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32063437,"author":"dnissley","month":"2022-07","story_title":"U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings","text":"Polymatter did a great episode on the pressures that create outcomes like this in regards to rankings: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cQl6jUjFjp4":[{"hn_comment_id":2768272,"author":"mikegreenberg","month":"2011-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings. Inquire within.)","text":"First thing: Watch this video from Luis von Ahn [VIDEO] He is the creator of reCAPTCHA and working on a translation solution which answers your question (regarding how to get people to eagerly do work for your community) pretty eloquently. Regarding your specific user engagement problem... I would venture to say that the problem you're solving here is not clear. You describe what your site can DO! But not what your site DOES for me. In other words, you're solving problems. Not providing solutions. This blog post from Dave McClure is pretty relevant here, too: [LINK] Despite the aggressive tone of the article, I think there's a good insight on how you should be \"pitching\" on your website's landing page.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4231699,"author":"amix","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Luis von Ahn (creator of CAPTCHA and Duolingo) Reddit AMA","text":"I am currently using Duolingo to learn Spanish and I find it quite amazing. It offers a great interface and I love the gaming elements. It's by far one of the best web applications I have used in a long time. So kudos to Luis von Ahn and the team! I recommend watching his TedX talk (the mind boggling thing from the presentation is: English Wikipedia could be translated in 80 hours if 1 million people used Duolingo!) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cQoQE_HDG8g":[{"hn_comment_id":26418630,"author":"tux1968","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Guide: Full Wayland Setup for Linux","text":"I tried to give a hint about the basic reason of trying to get out from under the weight of a huge code base that had become old and crufty while the very architecture it was designed around was becoming moot since things were shifting to client side rendering already. Couldn't find a good article on short notice, but there's a decent video from back in 2013 about it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26421574,"author":"kaba0","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Guide: Full Wayland Setup for Linux","text":"Here you are: [VIDEO] It\u2019s a great presentation by one of the guys behind wayland, who worked on X a lot before. Basically, X has a fundamentally misaligned abstraction of the underlying hardware - which is expected based on its age. When used with a compositor, it is basically a middle-man with no function whatsoever. So Wayland decided to cut out the middle man and pass events directly between client and compositor. But please watch the video, I think it will answer all your questions. Also, it\u2019s not like X will be totally deprecated, XWayland is an API implementation of it that will be supported forever.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30244099,"author":"kaba0","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Less Than 10% of Firefox Users on Linux Are Running Wayland","text":"Please have a look at an X maintainers very own presentation: [VIDEO] Wayland is not a middle man as it is the compositor itself as well - it does the minimal amount of work necessary to compose the desktop. X on the other hand just transfers messages between clients and the compositor without doing any actual work (x render functions are almost never used by modern applications)","stance":"rec"}],"cQq2pKNDgIs":[{"hn_comment_id":36687478,"author":"Simon_O_Rourke","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Laniakea Supercluster","text":"> Every human has a camera 24/7 now and no one has documented visitors. Take a few minutes to listen to Prof. Robin Hanson talk on this very thing. [VIDEO] The jist of what he says, is that there's very much weird stuff seen in the sky, like the McMinnville photos [1], but there's nobody as yet landing a craft on the White House lawn and posing for the cameras. He puts forward a model for this kind of scenario, it's worth a listen, that any visitors would quite rightly be far in advance of the societies we currently live in, and may only show themselves fleetingly so we gain an acceptance of their presence. [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37535484,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2023-09","story_title":"NASA clears the air: No evidence that UFOs are aliens","text":"Here are some boring and obvious thought ending dismissals. Grabby Aliens concept by Robin Hanson is an interesting new take on UFOs. Start with \u201cif they are UFOs, what could we reason about them from their behaviour?\u201d. See [VIDEO] \u201cIt might be unlikely but it\u2019s not crazy unlikely\u201d.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38424286,"author":"ricksunny","month":"2023-11","story_title":"The most powerful cosmic ray since the Oh-My-God particle puzzles scientists","text":"To the casual HN reader - my recommendation to you is to neithet laugh at nor dismiss out of hand analyses such as this (even as logic intrinsic to them merits as much picking apart as any other analysis one sees everyday on HN). Robin Hanson's description of long-lived stars (usually strongest in infrared - i.e. the 3 stars our eyes lack the spectral response to see for every 1 star that we do see when looking into the night sky) significantly updated my priors on the likelihood of intelligent, non-human life roaming about the cosmos. [VIDEO] (timestamped) tl;dr: Red-dwarf stars have been around -- with all that goes with that.. -- for much, much longer than our sun.","stance":"rec"}],"cTsEzmFamZ8":[{"hn_comment_id":19295853,"author":"hanniabu","month":"2019-03","story_title":"France Plans 5% Digital Tax as Governments Chase Internet Giants","text":"I was listening to Presidential candidate Andrew Yang in his podcast with Joe Rogan. His plans, since there's a lot of avoidance, is to attempt a different route called a \"value added\" tax where there's a tax for trucking mileage and online transactions. He mentioned other countries to both of these, but don't remember which he mentioned off the top of my head. Here's the podcast for those interested, there's a lot of other interesting discussions here that are related to this topic, such as automation and basic income. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19525614,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Boston Dynamics\u2019 new robot stacks boxes [video]","text":"This might be good point to mention the only 2020 presidential candidate who is talking about how UBI could address this seemingly inevitable future that is closer than we think. Andrew Yang. See his discussion with students at Georgetown Univ. [LINK] or for a longer exposition of his ideas see [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20269619,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Sanders to propose canceling entire $1.6T in US student loan debt","text":"That is candidate Andrew Yang's proposal. 120K to every American over 10 years. You should checkout his proposals. There are long form interviews on Youtube. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21154643,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Stockton, CA Tested Universal Basic Income. Here\u2019s How Recipients Spent It","text":"A public jobs/infrastructure program would work something like this: various states would lobby for money to spend in their states, $billions in large contracts would be awarded to politically connected corporations that would bill at $100/hr keep a large percentage and subcontract the work at $40/hr to smaller businesses that in turn would keep a percentage and hire people to do the work for $15/hr. That is trickle down economics. If instead you distributed the $billions to every citizen in the country, the vast majority of the money would be spent in local economies on things like day care, car or home repair, taking your kids in for dental cleaning. That is a trickle up economy. I too reasoned that UBI was liberal social nonsense. But I've been following Andrew Yang's presidential campaign and his justifications make sense from a capitalist point of view. As Yang points out - this is capitalism that doesn't start at zero. It has benefits. Check out his long interviews on Youtube. The Joe Rogan interview is a good place to start [VIDEO] . If you don't have the time check out his talk with the AARP [LINK] or the AFL-CIO [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"cUzklzVXJwo":[{"hn_comment_id":30289717,"author":"Psyladine","month":"2022-02","story_title":"How the modern world arose from imaginary numbers","text":"For those interested I also highly recommend Veritasium's video[1] as an excellent explainer as well, especially regarding the roots of imaginary/complex numbers in geometry. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29119660,"author":"Jap2-0","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Will it rot my students' brains if they use Mathematica? (2002)","text":"> Something that occurs to me is that most of us have a poor grasp of why we even teach school math One of my favorite math courses was a college class that focused on concepts - technically not an education class but intended for those in education majors. It covered 5th-8th grade math and showed me the why of so many things I had just taken for granted previously, and I'm sure if math was taught that way it would be much better remembered. Of course, it could still be argued over whether math should be intended for practical use or not, but I think it's important that math be taught from (at least one of) a conceptual basis, or a historical basis (eg. [0] on the creation/discovery of imaginary numbers - it explains why they were needed, as well as interesting historical background). (This was typed in a hurry, sorry if it's not entirely cohesive.) [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29891179,"author":"Retric","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Euler\u2019s 243-Year-Old \u2018Impossible\u2019 Puzzle Gets a Quantum Solution","text":"Imaginary numbers simply represent a different and more powerful system like how integers gain power when you introduce 0 and negative numbers. Rational numbers (fractions) can\u2019t represent irrational numbers like pi or e etc. It\u2019s often useful because you can use complex numbers as an intermediary step in many calculations (such as solving cubic equations) while still ending up with a non imaginary number at the end. The history is actually fairly interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29909242,"author":"phatfish","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: I suck at math, where to start?","text":"I think the sort of visualizations that are around on Youtube are great for those who don't \"get\" maths easily and need another angle to help them understand. Although 3Blue1Brown is not for beginners there are other beginner resources. For example, this goes right back to basic algebra but is a very well explained with the afore mentioned visualizations. Veritasium - How Imaginary Numbers Were Invented [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30287160,"author":"adityapatadia","month":"2022-02","story_title":"How the modern world arose from imaginary numbers","text":"This is one video which shows history of imaginary numbers and their usefulness in current times. It's from Veritasium: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35515936,"author":"shagie","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Why don't we define \u201cimaginary\u201d numbers for every \u201cimpossibility\u201d? (2012)","text":"There's a good YouTube video on it that includes an epic math battle. Veritasium - How Imaginary Numbers Were Invented - [VIDEO] Solving the cubic was a physical thing back then. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35698281,"author":"ordu","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Quantum Physics Falls Apart Without Imaginary Numbers","text":"There is a video depicting the story of a search for a cubic equation solution and invention of complex numbers. Here it is described in a few sentences but really it was a novel, with secrets passed from dying masters to apprentices, duels (mathematical), broken oaths and suchlike. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cVaTc15plVs":[{"hn_comment_id":14939737,"author":"jorgemf","month":"2017-08","story_title":"10 page anti-diversity screed circulating internally at Google","text":"watch this: [VIDEO] (even better if you see it all) biology comes before history, history can be a consequence of biology > If men turn out to be naturally, as a group, less good at math than women, does that mean we should stop training men on math? No. We should train men more at math, because math is a valuable skill This is what scares me of this society. If someone is bad at something lets force him/her to improve at the things he/she is bad at. Instead of focusing on the things a person is good at and try to put them on the next level and make a difference that way, let's focus on the bad things and get a mediocre individual. I love maths, but are you saying art is not a valuable skill compare with maths? Should the great artist bad at math study math and give up in art? You might think that not training someone at something that he/she is bad at is stupid, but some people like me think the stupid thing is to no to focus in what make someone special and good at. And finally, why do you think there is a bias? Couldn't be the reason that there are not more female CS engineers that they choose freely not to be because they just don't like it? The answer is in the video I put before.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9393197,"author":"kristofferR","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Why Young Men Go to War","text":"> \u201cI have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists \u2026 [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all gender differences are cultural.\u201d This documentary is really interesting in that regard: [VIDEO] It's a Norwegian documentary from 2010 about \"Why do girls tend to go into empathizing professions and boys into systemizing professions? Why does the labor market become more gender segregated the more economic prosperity a country has?\" A lot of the scientists interviewed didn't even bother to consider evidence that innate sex differences exists.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14940752,"author":"josephg","month":"2017-08","story_title":"About This Googler's Manifesto","text":"Alright, I'll bite. But, I've never heard of any research suggesting women have a different cognitive capacity than men. I read some research a number of years ago suggesting cross-culturally women had better language skills than men, but I don't know if this is still considered to be true. I can't remember reading anything in the manifesto which suggested women are less capable as software engineers. The essay did suggest women were less interested in programming than men (obviously true - see enrolment figures) and that at least some of the effect size is due to biological factors (probably true - see below). --- None of these links suggest any capacity difference. Only that there is a biologically influenced gender difference in interests. Here's an essay contextualising and summarising the historical specifics of male and female gender roles in society: [LINK] Here's a study of how prenatal androgen effects psychological thing vs people orientation, and how it influences career choice: [LINK] A summary of studies looking at big 5 personality distributions and other effects. Of note is the long section describing blindspots in current research: \"Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where and Why?\" [LINK] Here's a Dutch documentary where they send a camera crew around asking different researchers about gender differences: [VIDEO] The full documentary is great. Their conclusion is that biological factors result in an overlapping but different distribution o","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14957536,"author":"jorgemf","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo","text":"There is a documentary called Hjernevask from Norway that had a lot of controversy because of the topic. It is good to see different opinions of experts and what happened there: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cYsVvV1aVss":[{"hn_comment_id":20060765,"author":"hardwaresofton","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Billions wasted on Hadoop startups, the same will eventually be true of Docker","text":"This is precisely why I said the fact that someone would gloss over this is a red flag. The point is super critical . VMs are literally so hard to do correctly and in a performant fashion that parts of CPU instruction sets[0], and kernel subsystems (KVM[1]) were created to make them easier to run. Containers, in contrast are literally a few flags and a bunch of in-kernel antics. A few people, notably Liz Rice and Jessie Frazelle have given talks on how to make containers from scratch that are very illuminating for those that are interested: [LINK] [VIDEO] [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25547739,"author":"karlding","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Run More Stuff in Docker","text":"The blog post links to Jessie Frazelle's GitHub repo [0]. Jessie also has a blog post about this [1] from back in 2015. If you prefer video format, Jessie also has a talk at DockerCon SF 2015 [2]. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cZYNADOHhVY":[{"hn_comment_id":17381766,"author":"snvzz","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Around the World, People Have Surprisingly Modest Notions of the \u2018Ideal\u2019 Life","text":"Most people confuse age with aging, because aging is still unavoidable, and as it's always been the case, it looks like it will remain so forever. But that's wrong. The outlook is different now. Yet, unfortunately, most still see it as unavoidable. Everybody should watch The Fable of The Dragon Tyrant: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20854536,"author":"mLuby","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Alan Turing to be the face of new \u00a350 note","text":"All attempts to cure aging have been magic/religion-based until very recently. Also it's not like we \"learned to fly\" as if cavemen could have done it had they only known the right wing shape and arm technique. It was only possible because of an accumulation of industrial and scientific knowledge. Significant life extension will likely be built off the same accumulation of knowledge, not some rainforest frog extract the ancients could have refined. The only way I can imagine we don't have this in 1000 years is if someone's nuke finger gets twitchy. Want to accelerate research? Make \"The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant\" required reading/watching for all schoolchildren: [VIDEO] (That this might be controversial is itself interesting.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22002471,"author":"seer","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Scientists identify pathways that extend nematode worm lifespan fivefold","text":"CGP gray's videos on YouTube are maybe the most concise and fun to watch materials I've seen on the subject. [LINK] [VIDEO] And you'll be surprised how many people _are_ indeed thinking about all of the outcomes. Have in mind though that as with any technology it is not good or bad, and if it is possible someone will do it sooner or later. It makes no sense to not do it as your adversaries will, and then they'll dictate how it is used, probably not to your liking. If you develop it first you can talk and deliberate at your leisure and find solutions that look much better to you and yours.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37288104,"author":"tjlingham","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Scientists find way to wipe a cell's memory to reprogram it as a stem cell","text":"That's very easy to say until it's your partner, mother/father, or child on the other side of that assertion. If you're curious and have time, I'd suggest the following excellent exploration of the idea of extinguishing natural death by CGP Grey. He uses an interesting analogy to help challenge the ingrained belief that natural death is just [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17421953,"author":"jeffreylees","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Matter: How Long Can We Live? The Limit Hasn\u2019t Been Reached, Study Finds","text":"I've always found this to be an interesting topic. See here for more: [VIDEO] . The argument made there is basically that death (human aging, at any rate) is a sort of condition, or disease, if you will, like any other, that could be solved if we plied it with enough resources. Maybe the real question is where on the scale the extension to life happens? If we keep reaching adulthood, and then elderly, more inhibited lifestyles at the same ages, just prolonging the elderly state via good medical practices, that's one thing. But if we could slow aging in general to extend younger and middle-aged sections of life, that'd be another thing altogether.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19429355,"author":"dtujmer","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Longevity and anti-aging research: \u2018Prime time for an impact on the globe\u2019","text":"\"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.\" Well, maybe not the last one, but still an important one. Nick Bostrom has a great story describing the underlying philosophy in the fight against aging: [LINK] And here it is in video form as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24643968,"author":"cosmojg","month":"2020-09","story_title":"On Old Age","text":"\"Those who live in the desert learn to worship thirst.\" \u2014 vharuck There's no reason we should accept the consequences of old age without a fight. Donate to SENS, or even better, dedicate your own work to extending human healthspan. See also: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant by CGP Grey \u2014 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27064166,"author":"chr1","month":"2021-05","story_title":"LiveLeak shuts down after 15 years online","text":"Try watching videos of old people with Alzheimer's, and try imagining what people will be doing when you are dead to gauge how much your life is worth, and if small risk of dying in a car accident not caused by yourself is acceptable. For me in similar situation answers were not important and acceptable. But if you find that your life is precious to you it still would be better to channel the natural fear of death to more productive venues like [LINK] or much more importantly to donations to [LINK] because we are very close to solving the problem of death for good [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29535134,"author":"Tmpod","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Japanese scientists develop vaccine to eliminate cells behind aging","text":"CGP Grey has a video with him reading the short over some neat drawings, which is more enjoyable I suppose: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31121949,"author":"montenegrohugo","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Your real biological clock is you\u2019re going to die (2018)","text":"I have to say I like this somewhat poetic way of writing, especially the sentences with which the author ends paragraphs. Very rich. On a different note, no. Let's fight death. Fuck aging. We can fight it. We don't have to suffer like cattle under it. We can beat it. There are plenty of longevity focused startups and academic research groups, and yet we're not spending nearly enough effort and money on this problem. It affects every human on earth, and the immense benefits of adding even one year of healthy lifespan to 7 billion people make it a moral imperative to act upon. Fighting death should be a multi-national effort that we focus on with all our might, _right now_. You shouldn't have to die. Related: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42314014,"author":"nayuki","month":"2024-12","story_title":"\u2018With brain preservation, nobody has to die\u2019","text":"> our societal acceptance of death comes from an inability to imagine anything otherwise CGP Grey captures this sentiment nicely in this animated essay: [VIDEO] \"Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant\" [2018-04-24]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45765681,"author":"willis936","month":"2025-10","story_title":"How ancient people saw themselves","text":"I don't think that death is a certainty. It is today, but we are working on it. We are not supernatural. CGPGrey's thoughts on this mirror a lot of my own. I grant that not all care given to aged is a kindness, but not fighting aging is not virtuous. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cbSu2PXOTOc":[{"hn_comment_id":15754816,"author":"ablekh","month":"2017-11","story_title":"The Secret Lives of Urban Crows","text":"I hope that people here will enjoy this amazing video ( [VIDEO] ) as much as I did. I knew that crows are smart, but this is clearly the next level of intelligence ... By the way, I have discovered this video via the relevant cool project's website: [LINK] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28132246,"author":"belter","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero","text":"This one impressed me so much, I never looked at Crows again the same way: \"Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"cbeJIwF1pVY":[{"hn_comment_id":24876744,"author":"vermontdevil","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The world needs nuclear power and we shouldn\u2019t be afraid of it","text":"You should watch this video (and several others) of this professor, David Ruzic from Uni of Illinois This video he talks about the economics of nuclear plant. [VIDEO] This video, he talks about modular micro-nuclear reactor [LINK] His videos are great. Worth your time.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44143499,"author":"orson2077","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Investment Risk Is Highest for Nuclear Power Plants, Lowest for Solar","text":"For anyone interested in the economics of fission reactors, Illinois Energy Prof did a GREAT video a while back: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28217497,"author":"colechristensen","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Lawrence Livermore claims a milestone in laser fusion","text":"> is it going to be the catalyst that will enable humanity to accelerate wreaking havoc on what's left of our ecosystems? The question is how cheap can it get, can the energy production scale up vs cost, and how much does maintenance cost. This is a good video about fission energy production economics [VIDEO] If one of these fusion reactor projects results in a competitively priced power plant, ok, we can reduce fossil fuel energy production towards zero in a few decades. That's pretty good for the environment but nothing really \"new\" is possible. If one of these fusion reactor projects results in a 10x reduction in the cost of electricity... then we have something new. Things that people didn't imagine being possible before become possible. Things like desalination instead of taking water from rivers or aquifers because it's cheaper. Tearing down dams because the power isn't needed. \"Farms\" in skyscrapers packed with artificial light where food can be produced without pesticides or herbicides because it's a controlled environment. Using landfills like mines, extracting tiny amounts of useful materials so ordinary mining becomes much less needed. You can also think of plenty of things cheap plentiful energy could make happen that are destructive too... it is difficult to project and I assume will go in both directions.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43743561,"author":"mpweiher","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Germany Deserves a New Deal on Nuclear Energy from Merz","text":"That turns out not to be true. Here a short primer on the economics of nuclear reactors: [VIDEO] Intermittent renewables on the other hand require massive subsidies.","stance":"rec"}],"cdiD-9MMpb0":[{"hn_comment_id":34453756,"author":"tdalaa","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Will Tesla Ever \u201cSolve\u201d Full Self Driving? (2022)","text":"Anyone seriously interested in this question should listen to the Lex Friedman interview of Andrej Karpathy: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33457273,"author":"jcims","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Study urges caution when comparing neural networks to the brain","text":"Andrej Karpathy was recently on Lex Fridman's podcast and covered this to some extent. He has the same perspective on this topic and expanded on it quite a bit. Great listen overall IMHO - [VIDEO] I like his idea of finding 0-days in physics. :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34089074,"author":"meken","month":"2022-12","story_title":"","text":"My understanding is the transformer layer in the LLM is basically doing something akin to message passing, it\u2019s like a mini computer. In predicting the next word, it has to understand a lot about a lot of different kinds of topics My understanding is kinda fuzzy because I haven\u2019t coded it up myself, but this was the takeaway I got from this explanation (starts at 36:21) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ceFyF9px20Y":[{"hn_comment_id":26239385,"author":"akurzon","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Fructose reprogrammes glutamine-dependent oxidative metabolism to support LPS","text":"For anyone interested in a detailed explanation of fructose metabolism (and why it's bad for you), I'd highly recommend these two talks by Robert Lustig on the subject. The first one is about how the body reacts to fructose, and the second video is a follow-up that emphasizes how fructose has contributed to the obesity epidemic in the US and elsewhere. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7763249,"author":"pkulak","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Always Hungry? Here\u2019s Why","text":"If carbs are bad, sugar is horrible. Just in case you haven't seen these: Sugar: The Bitter Truth: [LINK] Fat Chance: Fructose 2.0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16449094,"author":"halotrope","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Obesity and Overweight Prevalence for the U.S","text":"Sugar seems to be a major driver of this development. The main problem is likely excessive sugar and especially fructose consumption starting with the emerge of cheap HFCS in most products. Dr. Robert Lustig has put a lot of research into the causes of the obesity crisis. He goes into great detail in his lectures on YouTube [VIDEO] He also argues against the \"gluttony and sloth\" prejudice by saying that you eat too much and move to little as a consequence of messed up hormones due to excessive fat. Not the other way around. The problem is probably more dimensional but the correlation between increasing Sugar/HFCS amounts in foods and the onset of obesity seems to be pretty strong.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17156621,"author":"mirko22","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Flipping the Metabolic Switch: Applying the Health Benefits of Fasting","text":"Robert Lusting has cery intersting book on this, and more specifically the influence of fructose sugar in diet. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40403355,"author":"aficiomaquinas","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Japan: The land that doesn't need Ozempic","text":"If by lifestyle you mean behavioral disorder, It seems to me that the science from the last 10 years is starting to point in the opposite direction. If I may recommend, there is a great presentation by Dr. Robert Lustig called \"Fat Chance: Fructose 2.0\". [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cefnmjtAolY":[{"hn_comment_id":8621948,"author":"mijoharas","month":"2014-11","story_title":"How I Start: Haskell","text":"I found this talk by edward kmett incredibly helpful[0]. I kept rewatching parts of it bit by bit until I managed to absorb it all (there is a lot of information for a beginner) but I found it hugely helpful and mind-blowingly powerful. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5042958,"author":"jerf","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Why is the C++ STL so heavily based on templates?","text":"If you want to work in an environment where a lot of people are thinking like this routinely, instead of a few lone voices in a vast sea of otherwise uninterested people, the Haskell community is doing a lot of work in this area, and able to move much faster since it's so much easier in Haskell than C++ templates (which isn't really a criticism of C++ templates, a lot of their capabilities are accidental rather than intended). This is why the Haskell community talks so much about monoids and applicatives and semigroups and a variety of other interesting structures in that area (and no, I did not forget to say monad, that structure is actually uninteresting here because it is too powerful). I believe the Fortress language is also doing some work here. A sample of the interesting sort of algorithm work that you can do when you think this way: [LINK] Edit: See also the Typeclassopedia: [LINK] And if you're really interested and want to take it hardcore, Edward Kmett's video on his lens library walks through how you can derive it with this sort of logic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8123070,"author":"dllthomas","month":"2014-08","story_title":"Letter to a Young Haskell Enthusiast","text":"\"The best forms of language advocacy probably involve showing the great things you've done with a language and forgetting about comparisons to the competition.\" Great things the parent has done with the language: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cfwwHa-7Ux8":[{"hn_comment_id":4181750,"author":"luckymurari","month":"2012-06","story_title":"How to beta test your mobile apps","text":"Feedback is awesome. But, I guess you could've reduced a bit of causticness in it. This is the video, I want everyone on internet to watch - \"A real person, a lot like you\" - [VIDEO] PS/Disclaimer: Not directly affiliated to them. Founders are my friends!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2836000,"author":"patio11","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Bassnectar responds regarding music piracy","text":"Hiya Slowpoke. You seem to be new to HN. That's cool. We're very much unlike some other Internet communities which you've spent time on. In particular, we place a wee bit of emphasis on treating people like they are people, even when interacting with them over HTTP. My name is Patrick. Pleased to meet you. I run a business which helps teach little kids to read, and spend a lot of time on HN as my hobby. A lot of HNers know me, have spoken to me, or have shaken my hand in person, because I'm a fairly personable guy. Most do not say \"Hello Patrick, pleased to meet you, I don't give half a fuck whether you starve to death.\" That would be a wee bit uncouth. We have guidelines here for the community's consensus on talking to each other: [LINK] I'd also like to leave you with a video from Derek Sivers, who also happens to be a HNer. I think the lesson is rather important. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5342198,"author":"networked","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Hello, I'm a Human Being","text":"Derek Sivers makes a somewhat more extensive comment on the same point in \"Anything You Want\". There's a nice three-and-a-half-minute video based on it [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cfyWvJdsDRI":[{"hn_comment_id":13476948,"author":"jblow","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What are good software architecture interview questions?","text":"It's not specific questions that are important so much as the process. You want the questions to be tailored to the candidate. See this example: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13815352,"author":"lj3","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Tech Interview Torture Chamber","text":"I don't know why you're being downvoted. This is essentially what I suggest for an interview process and I'm not the only one. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18381001,"author":"zozbot123","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Google's interview system: it's not about solving the problem","text":"To any hiring managers that might be reading this, please watch this alternative method of interviewing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24460023,"author":"yakubin","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What is a better approach to interviewing?","text":"Casey Muratori showcased a new model of a programming interview here: [VIDEO] It shows to the interviewer how a given person works in a programming job, how they researched solutions to the problems they were faced with in the past etc.; as opposed to the usual exercises that have nothing to do with the job and won't really show you how well they will perform. It's also less confrontational which should put the interviewee at more ease.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32406545,"author":"PainfullyNormal","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Why is recruiting developers so difficult?","text":"There are ways of discovering if somebody can code without making them do fizzbuzz. This is a good process: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38543013,"author":"andai","month":"2023-12","story_title":"NN-SVG","text":"This is great! I'm currently learning 2D graphics from scratch (making vector art software), can anyone recommend any related resources? I found this interview (one relevant bit at 29:55) very interesting. Shawn McGrath did the graphics code for the game N++ which is very vectory, so he found efficient ways to render it on a GPU. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ciStnd9Y2ak":[{"hn_comment_id":19899805,"author":"erentz","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Fukushima Nuclear Waste Mess is by No Means Solved","text":"Nuclear power proponents don\u2019t let emotion and fear get in the way of the facts. Nuclear power kills far far (far far far) less people than other forms of power generation. When it goes wrong it\u2019s super scary looking, terrifying really, but when you dig into the statistics of these accidents they wind up being less scary than is usually made out. It helps to learn about how nuclear power plants work, and visit one if you ever get the chance, once you get your head around it it becomes a lot less scary. For example take a look at the fatalities table here: [LINK] PS: A good starting point to start questioning the anti-nuclear narrative is a documentary called Pandora\u2019s Promise, which is on Prime for free. Or perhaps this TED talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20661666,"author":"smnplk","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Climate change: Marine heatwaves kill coral instantly","text":"1. Look into thorium-based nuclear power. Also, I think each country should have its own nuclear waste facilities, not a single barrel of nuclear waste should leave the border. Nuclear power kills fewer people than solar per unit of electricity. 2. Tricky. Educate kids. But of course, I am not delusional about human nature. Checkout this talk [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20821469,"author":"cowmoo728","month":"2019-08","story_title":"France Is Still Cleaning Up Marie Curie\u2019s Nuclear Waste","text":"There has been a little bit of an update on views of chernobyl. Despite being considered the worst nuclear accident of all time, the actual death and damage toll from chernobyl is minimal compared to more boring things like coal dust and air pollution. This is a self-professed anti-nuclear hippy giving a talk about how rationally looking at chernobyl and fukushima made him a nuclear power advocate. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21200085,"author":"daenz","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Sea 'Boiling' with Methane Discovered in Siberia","text":"Go into this with an open mind, but it shows a number of ways that nuclear is superior to renewables, coming from someone who was staunchly against nuclear: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24329257,"author":"paulintrognon","month":"2020-08","story_title":"After 48 years, Democrats endorse nuclear energy in platform","text":"> Renewable energy sources have zero fuel costs. That's not true. It costs fuel to mine the resourses needed, to build the equipments, to install them, to maintain them. The IPCC states that globally, nuclear power emits _less_ greenhouse gases than hydro and solar, and emits about the same as wind. [1] [1] [LINK] Table A.III.2, page 1335 For more info, please see this eye opening TedX talk on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28522321,"author":"otikik","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Coal replaces wind as most important energy source in Germany in H1","text":"Give this a look [VIDEO] The TLDR is: 7 million people die anually from air pollution. Fukushima and Chernobil combined don't even put a dent on that. And solar+wind alone is not enough.","stance":"rec"}],"cidchWg74Y4":[{"hn_comment_id":5513985,"author":"jacobolus","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Also see Stuart Halloway\u2019s earlier talk, Simplicity Ain\u2019t Easy . There\u2019s a fair amount of overlap with Rich Hickey\u2019s talk, but both are worth watching: [VIDEO] And also his talk Radical Simplicity : [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6059735,"author":"JeanPierre","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Who Says C is Simple?","text":"To get an even better explanation on what the word \"simple\" means and what it derives from, I would recommend \"Simplicity Ain't Easy\" by Stuart Halloway[1]. While it is very similar to \"Simple made Easy\", it focuses a lot more on the etymology of the words \"simple\" and \"complex\" and how people misuse the word. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7709206,"author":"dkersten","month":"2014-05","story_title":"I don't love the single responsibility principle","text":"I'll add this to your links: [VIDEO] He talks about his definition of \"simple\" (by digging into what the original English definition was) and what that means for code.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8700378,"author":"nickik","month":"2014-12","story_title":"A farewell note to a programming language","text":"I would suggest to you that Clojure has a very clear \"the Clojure Way\" I would say, more so then almost any other language. It goes beyond syntax to a pretty deep design level. Its not even all that unique to clojure, you could do 'the clojure way' in other languages, but they usally dont. Some of the importent keynotes from some of the early conjs are really importent, and they really went deep in the community, you can see it in almost every major library. Another commenter has mentioned the notion of 'simple' but thats not really all that clear. I not enougth of a writer to tell you about it, but I can give you the resources: - This classic got Clojure on the map for many people: Are We There Yet? - Rich Hickey www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey - Simple Made Easy - Rich Hickey - [LINK] - Simplicity Ain't Easy - Stuart Halloway - [VIDEO] - Ousterhout's Dichotomy Isn't (Part 2 of the Simplicity/Power/Focus Series) - Stuart Halloway - [VIDEO] - The Language of the System - Rich Hickey [LINK] - Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey [LINK] In addition to these, there are many talk that are about people trying to run with these ideas. Datomic is a example of taking these ideas to the max, it really standas as a nice example. You can find others in talks by David Nolan for example, but there are tons of applied talks. - The Design of Datomic - Rich Hickey [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9623140,"author":"jacobolus","month":"2015-05","story_title":"UDP and me","text":"If you haven\u2019t seen them, I recommend the Clojure guys\u2019 talks about the subject of simplicity. They reached into the etymological history of the word \u201csimple\u201d to pull out its early definition, which is quite precise and IMO tremendously useful in this context, unlike the confused muddle of modern definitions. Rich Hickey, \u201cSimple Made Easy\u201d: [LINK] Stu Halloway, \u201cSimplicity Ain\u2019t Easy\u201d: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11809231,"author":"mindcrash","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Relationship between OO and functional programming?","text":"Stuart Halloway has a great talk on this called \"Simplicity Ain't Easy\" [0] where he more or less states that a FP language like Clojure is basically a better designed OOP language, because FP is basically contains all its strengths (namespaces, abstractions and the like) and none of its weaknesses (e.g. uncontrolled state mutation) and you are able to select and use specific features you need to solve a specific problem, and not being saddled with every feature (including the ones you do not need to solve the problem at hand) at once. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"cj02_UeUnGQ":[{"hn_comment_id":29965392,"author":"jraph","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Window System X (1984)","text":"I invite anyone interested by the subject to watch Keith Packard's amazing presentation on this at LCA 2020: A Political History of X - [VIDEO] (can be listened without the video if you want to do other things while listening to it)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22501703,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2020-03","story_title":"The X-Windows Disaster (1994)","text":"> X-Windows started out as one man's project in an office on the fifth floor of MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. A wizardly hacker, who was familiar with W, a window system written at Stanford University as part of the V project, decided to write a distributed graphical display server. An overview of how this came to be: \"A Political History of X\" - Keith Packard (LCA 2020) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38447628,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 Plans for Wayland and Xorg Server","text":"Perhaps of some interest is \"A Political History of X\" by Keith Packard from the 2020 Linux Conference Australia (LCA): * [VIDEO] > Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the late 1980s as a member of the MIT X Consortium, XFree86 and the X.Org Foundation. * [LINK] Goes over things from the early 1980s.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41384036,"author":"indrora","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Window Maker: X11 window manager with the look and feel of the NeXTSTEP UI","text":"X11 did a lot of things. None of them \"wrong\", just \"badly conjoined at the spinal cord\". An X server is a fantastic example of how building drivers for deep hardware components should never have been written in userspace. (If anyone wants: There's a fantastic talk at LCA a few years ago from Keith Packard about X's history: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"cjuGCJJUGsg":[{"hn_comment_id":10341965,"author":"lbenes","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Gains in Antarctic ice might offset losses","text":"Watch Fox new much? Climate deniers love this argument. Jon Stewart answers your question here: [LINK] While looking for the clip I found this gem: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30265036,"author":"BLKNSLVR","month":"2022-02","story_title":"You cannot police misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and representative way","text":"Exactly, and demonstrated beautifully by John Oliver: [VIDEO] An aim at 'balance' is part of the problem because it's not an aim at facts or truth. Aiming at balance is the media twisting debate to produce maximum outrage, and therefore increase 'consumer engagement'. Aiming at balance is politicians providing themselves supposed reasons to maintain the status quo or move in counter-factual directions.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32222419,"author":"consp","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change","text":"There is a nice visual example of this made by John Oliver on his show to illustrate this to a more understandable level: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ckSoDW2-wrc":[{"hn_comment_id":10682521,"author":"thingsgoby","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Things I Won\u2019t Touch: Hydrofluoric Acid (2004)","text":"if you like that article you'll love this video \"5 of Worlds most dangerous Chemicals\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20433479,"author":"Causality1","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Sand won't save you this time (2008)","text":"One of the substances featured on the excellent \"5 Most Dangerous Chemicals\" episode of Sci-Show: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21958833,"author":"eftychis","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Root cause analysis on the Notre Dame fire","text":"Yes concrete is \"flammable\" in the context of fluorine (most things are though). Chlorine trifuoride is extremely notorious for that. Silicon dioxide can be oxidized by fluorine (which is a stronger oxidizing agent than oxygen, so...) P.S. This is a fun video to watch [VIDEO] for \"exciting\" chemicals.","stance":"rec"}],"clnozSXyF4k":[{"hn_comment_id":41584276,"author":"xsmasher","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Why wordfreq will not be updated","text":"This is an amazing demo reel of effects shots used in \"mundane\" TV shows - comedies and produce procedurals. - for faking locations. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15333291,"author":"manigandham","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Why did science fiction stop moving forward?","text":"You only notice the bad CGI - most TV shows, even a normal sitcom, have a ton of CG that you would never realize unless you saw the raw shots. It's what the audience expects and demands today. Things are getting more efficient but quality level has risen even faster. Here's a good video, from 2009: [VIDEO] And 2012: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39417851,"author":"e_y_","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Jeffrey Katzenberg Says A.I. Will Eliminate 90% of Artist Jobs on Animated Films","text":"Even today, there's good and bad uses of CG, usually coming down to schedule and creative direction. The average quality has gone up substantially, though. As you pointed out, there's all kinds of ways to use CGI and VFX more subtly that most people would never realize. [VIDEO] is a great example of green screen set replacement being used for things as ordinary as a city street, 15 years ago on a TV series budget. I expect the use of AI will be similarly varied in the beginning. It could be used just for background details. It could be used in a hybrid fashion where artists design the characters with reference poses, a storyboard, and maybe even some keyframes, and the AI fills in the gaps. And of course some studios will just be sloppy and use AI to generate larger pieces without fixing the glitches and inconsistencies. People are sometimes dismissive of AI based on the \"fire and forget\" prompting modes but don't consider AI-assisted tools or human-assisted AI like inpainting.","stance":"rec"}],"cn7kTPbW6QQ":[{"hn_comment_id":711619,"author":"andreyf","month":"2009-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you see the future of computing ?","text":"Easy, COLA: [VIDEO] Any syntax you want, running on the same JIT compiler, but designed from scratch without marketing breathing down your neck.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":828437,"author":"andreyf","month":"2009-09","story_title":"Steve Yegge: Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp. (2006)","text":"Thanks for the link, it's a good read. Ian gave a talk on the same material at Stanford ( [VIDEO] ). The paper about the object model ( [LINK] ) is also very useful. The hallmark of COLA is recursive design, which sort of makes it more like Smalltalk than Lisp Late binding is certainly a big part of the smalltalk philosophy as well, and recursive design is a great way of implementing late binding. A system uses the same \"user interface\" internally, it certainly makes it easier to let people modify the internals. The big difference I see between Smalltalk and Lisp (correct me if I'm wrong) is that Lisp systems tend to use compile-time abstractions Lisp->machine code->execution, while Smalltalkers from early on started thinking about interpretation and VM's - using abstractions which require run-time data to make decisions.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7533921,"author":"wedesoft","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Don't use assembly unless you're an expert","text":"No big deal. Just become an expert then. It is not that hard. Just have a look at Ian Piumarta's work [1,2]. Future systems will probably facilitate programming on every level from the bare metal to the highest abstraction. I.e. no strict boundaries between the implementation of the application and the implementation of the compiler/interpreter. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] EDIT: There are other reasons to write machine code than performance.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8484504,"author":"theoh","month":"2014-10","story_title":"A Conversation with Arthur Whitney (2009)","text":"Well, in terms of whether the example is a well-posed question, a networked window system isn't too different from the WWW, which as we know by now works pretty flawlessly. Perhaps the key contrast here is between the tendency toward static mathematical perfection of the APL family and the notion of dynamic languages for building systems that Alan Kay et al would propose. \"APL is like a beautiful diamond - flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can\u2019t add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don\u2019t get a bigger diamond.\" --Joel Moses There's a talk by Ian Piumarta that tries to get to the core of what the VPRI guys feel is important. I'm not sure about it but it seems worth mentioning in this context: Ian Piumarta \"Building Your Own Dynamic Language\" [VIDEO] Also, this: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"coFIEH3vXPw":[{"hn_comment_id":15611533,"author":"kbenson","month":"2017-11","story_title":"My VM is lighter and safer than your container","text":"SmartOS's LX branded zones seem kind of cool to me, and may hit an interest point for you. Basically, SmartOS is an OpenSolaris variant where they use Solaris Zones for docker images, but they've implemented a Linux syscall table API so you can create Linux \"compatible\" containers from a Solaris kernel (and also full access to ZFS, etc). You can see a talk here[1] where Bryan Cantrill goes over the reasons you might want to use containers, SmartOS and how LX branded zones. Warning though, he's an extremely engaging speaker, so not only are you likely to watch all of that 40 minute talk, but you might feel like binging on some other talks of his, so here you go.[2] 1: [VIDEO] 2: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10618620,"author":"dpeterson","month":"2015-11","story_title":"EC2 Dedicated Hosts","text":"I have run containers on bare metal and in Amazon. Performance can be noticeably slower in Amazon on machines with similar specifications. A detailed explanation why is in this informative video by Bryan Cantrill [VIDEO] . It is a talk about how layering containers on top of virtual machines is a recipe for poor performance and wasted resource utilization. He equates it to developers \u201cbeing given fire, then proceeding to put the fire out.\u201d","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10625983,"author":"cpeterso","month":"2015-11","story_title":"What is a 'unikernel'?","text":"Unikernels : hypervisor :: processes : traditional operating system Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill gave a great talk at Velocity NYC 2015 about the history of containers (going back to March 18, 1982 when Bill Joy added the chroot system call) and the problems of running containers on operating systems in VMs on hypervisors: \"Stop killing kittens and melthing the ice caps: Run containers on bare metal already!\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45854356,"author":"kbenson","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD","text":"It's all just history now for all I know, but there was work in the past to make Linux containers work on a Solaris fork (SmartOS, specifically) by emulating the Linux syscall table and presenting that to the containers. Joyent did work on this (alas, and there's an excellent and entertaining talk from Bryan Cantrill[1] that goes over it. I imagine FreeBSD could do something similar if they aren't already. IIRC FreeBSD has a Linux emulation layer (but I don't know how much attention it still gets), and it's had containerization primitives longer than linux, so some amount of filling in the gaps in containerization features and syscall tables (if needed) could possibly yield an OCI compatibility later (for all I know all this already exists). The problem, and the reason if this doesn't exist why people probably weren't as interested in doing the work, is it would always be \"mostly\" compatible and working and there would be no guarantee that the underlying software wouldn't exhibit bugs or weird behavior from small behavior differences in the platform when emulating something else. Why open yourself up to the headache when you can just run Linux with containers or build what you want on FreeBSD with jails and their own native containerization primitives. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"coGpmA4saEk":[{"hn_comment_id":6285919,"author":"WestCoastJustin","month":"2013-08","story_title":"Researcher controls colleague\u2019s motions in first human brain-to-brain interface","text":"> doesn't seem to have broken any new ground, only mashed together two existing technologies I'd argue that new inventions are created by mashing existing technologies, often emerging or bleeding edge, and creating something new. Henry Ford didn't invent the combustion engine, transmission, suspension, etc, but he did mash these things together into something new. What we are seeing in the video and research is something new and pretty exciting if you take it a couple steps further. Think about replaying these signals, building a play book, etc. ps. If you have some time to kill, I would check out this video called, \"Everything Is A Remix\", which talks about this idea @ [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10532931,"author":"icegreentea","month":"2015-11","story_title":"StarCraft: The past, present and future","text":"You will enjoy this documentary (Everything a Remix). [VIDEO] Hardly 'scientific'... but how do you quantify copying.","stance":"rec"}],"csyL9EC0S0c":[{"hn_comment_id":11183901,"author":"hire_charts","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Rich Hickey Fanclub","text":"That and Hammock Driven Development: [LINK] Both of these talks are in my top 5. Edit (okay, here are the other 3): * All the Little Things by Sandi Metz [LINK] * Programming is terrible\u2014Lessons learned from a life wasted. [VIDEO] * Some talk I saw by Dan McKinley on making Data-Driven decisions. I can't find the original video, but here's a really similar one: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17567419,"author":"jppope","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the things keep in mind while giving/preparing for a tech talk?","text":"1) Do not attempt to live code. change your code via version control, build small videos, copy and paste... whatever you do... do not try and live code 2) Read \"The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs\" ... its not really about Steve Jobs so much as its about how to be a great presenter. 3) building or writing a talk is significantly less important than the delivery... which means that more of your time should be spent on how to deliver the speech (recording I find is the best way to practice) 4) Pick a single thing and do it well, do not attempt to put too much into a talk or tackle something massively complex. 5) Make sure that everyone is walking away with something they can actually use. This doesn't require it be a hard skill... \"Soft\" or philosophical utilities are just as good 6) Have Fun and be funny... Speakers have a tendency to want to show off the size of their intellect, and the level their competency- having a speech be entertaining is way way more important. 7) DO NOT READ FROM YOUR SLIDES. know your shit. slides are supplementary Extra Credit. Here's a collection of some fantastic technical speeches: * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] * [VIDEO] * [LINK] * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30238757,"author":"iwwr","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Inspiring hacker talks and presentations?","text":"Rich Hickey - Hammock-driven development: [LINK] Brett Victor - Inventing on principle: [LINK] Programming is terrible: [VIDEO] Dave Beazely - Python concurrency from the ground up (applicable to languages in general, with generator and corourine functionality) [LINK] Functional programming, with birds: [LINK] Short and classic: Wat [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ctS8FzqcRug":[{"hn_comment_id":15933648,"author":"Veedrac","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Type Erasure in Swift","text":"If you're interested, there's a very nice talk on how Swift's generics compile. It's different to Rust in some key ways. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33241738,"author":"favorited","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Compiling Swift Generics [pdf]","text":"Swift's generics have some unique properties at module boundaries to allow for a stable ABI while enabling library evolution. To get additional background, you might be interested in this[0] conference talk (the paper's author is one of the co-presenters). Also, this post[1] by a Rust and Swift compiler engineer talks about what Swift does differently than other languages, and the tradeoffs that are involved. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"cxrkC-pMH_s":[{"hn_comment_id":37047876,"author":"nntwozz","month":"2023-08","story_title":"TSMC, Bosch, Infineon, and NXP to build fab in Germany","text":"Just want to share these relevant videos from Asianometry: How Semiconductors Ruined East Germany [VIDEO] Why Europe Lost Semiconductors [LINK] Europe\u2019s Lost Decades in Semiconductors [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41154342,"author":"flohofwoe","month":"2024-08","story_title":"The Untold Story of How US Spies Sabotaged Soviet Technology","text":"Regarding the microelectronics industry behind the Iron Curtain, this is a well researched video by Asianometry, which actually contains a couple of details (unlike the Politico article) about the spycraft involved: [VIDEO] (based on the first-person account book 'Deckname Saale' by Gerhardt Ronneberger)","stance":"rec"}],"czgOWmtGVGs":[{"hn_comment_id":45668468,"author":"daeken","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, has died","text":"I've become an unironic proponent of HE, the Human Era. For CE dates, we just add 10000 (I'm writing this from 12025). But for BCE dates, they're subtracted and it makes things so much clearer when it comes to telling how long ago something was. E.g. the sundial was invented around 6000 HE, steel was developed around 9000 HE. Kurtzgesagt has a really great video about the subject: [VIDEO] There's also a timeline in HE that covers many major historical events: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16235841,"author":"doctoboggan","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave","text":"It might not be what you were thinking, but the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt has 2 very good videos on the topic: [LINK] [VIDEO] His stuff is well sourced and generally reliable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16441891,"author":"ASalazarMX","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Anthropocene began in 1965, according to signs left in world\u2019s \u2018loneliest tree\u2019","text":"I'm all for leaving a religious calendar and using the Holocene calendar. Just add 10,000 to your dates and you're set. [LINK] If you don't mind videos, here's a good explanation of it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"d-7o9xYp7eE":[{"hn_comment_id":15360537,"author":"Chaebixi","month":"2017-09","story_title":"King County rolls out Miranda rights tailored for young people","text":"> If you do want to talk to me, I can tell the juvenile court judge or adult court judge and Probation Officer what you tell me. It's missing the explicit warning that \"what you say can and will be used against you in the court of law.\" I think they should add a clause to the end stating \"and they can use this information against you to get you in trouble.\" This video is always relevant when the subject of talking to police comes up: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27412734,"author":"lmilcin","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Tips for Interviewing over Zoom","text":"No, not really. Advice for police interrogation is: never talk to the police. If you don't know why, you must watch this: [VIDEO] Also, I never said this is my advice. In general I like to volunteer information during interview when I am the candidate. I think it lets me control the situation a little bit better and move to ground that I have much more expertise in. I am just saying that I can't fault candidate for not doing this.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16633148,"author":"sigstoat","month":"2018-03","story_title":"\u2018Testilying\u2019 by Police: A Stubborn Problem","text":"> The police are 100% your enemy once they start questioning you about anything. Record, record record. even better, stop talking to them. [VIDEO] > Catch them in one lie, and you get off scot free. they're not leprechauns, there are no magical rules in effect.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17870694,"author":"mhkool","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Tesla Directors, in Damage Control Mode, Want Elon Musk to Stop Tweeting","text":"The video titled 'don\u00b4t talk to the police' [VIDEO] is a very serious message from a lawyer and a cop not to say a single word since it will be used against you. The same is true for Musk and twitter.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19937578,"author":"andybak","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Hertz bug leads to people being erroneously arrested and jailed","text":"> The \"don't talk to police\" mantra is for when you know that you've done something wrong Not true. Rewatch the original video. It covers exactly this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19955654,"author":"conanbatt","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Seattle police use family DNA, latest science to identify killer 52 years later","text":"> I've been part of the group who got asked to give a DNA sample in the Nicky Verstappen [1] case. This was voluntarily, and I reluctantly did this Great story and thanks for sharing this. I want to answer why I think this is a bad idea however. First, I would talk to a legal defense attorney before doing this. A famous video about this topic is here [VIDEO] . 1) The police might have told you it was for one case but it was for another, as the police can lie. 2) The DNA test itself might give a false positive on you or your family members, putting your family to a harsher scrutiny by the police that would have otherwise, and with more judicial justification. In the investigatory zeal they might find other lesser crimes they might want to prosecute just to not be empty handed. In the U.S., they might have charged a family member on a false positive with a ridiculously overblown crime. People have killed themselves over that prosecutorial technique ( [LINK] ) 3) The police could fiddle with the samples and plant evidence if they thought you or someone else did it. (Steven Avery case) 4) The lab might fake results if they are in tandem with the DA ( [LINK] ) You are gambling with your life and the life of your family members when you make that choice. And if you were so sure a family member of yours did not do it, then the police could have come to the same conclusion on their alibis and physical state of your family members. Even if you believe non of that is \"likely to happen\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20309500,"author":"dandellion","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Gallery Owner Arrested After Placing Spoon Sculpture at Purdue Pharma (2018)","text":"You might find this interesting, where a lawyer explains why should never say a single word to the police, under any circumstances: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27859819,"author":"codegeek","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Illinois first state to tell police they can't lie to minors in interrogations","text":"In case people are not aware yet, please watch this video about \"Don't talk to the police\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31441809,"author":"mulmen","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: I found a pretty extreme data leak and I'm not sure what to do","text":"This is terrible advice. Do not talk to the police. You have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Contact a lawyer. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38663095,"author":"bacheaul","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Suspects can refuse to provide phone passcodes to police, court rules","text":"> Don't talk to the police: Regent Law Professor James Duane gives viewers startling reasons why they should always exercise their 5th Amendment rights when questioned by government officials. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39266824,"author":"throwaway19091p","month":"2024-02","story_title":"WA House bill would make it illegal for police to lie during interrogations","text":"> They can use \"I don't remember\" ? They absolutely can, and will use that in a court of law. Any comment that you make that seems completely fine from your perspective can quickly be turned around to lock you up. I highly recommend checking out this lecture when you get a chance: [VIDEO] Police are not generally concerned with getting the right person, they're just concerned with getting a person.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46095913,"author":"lclc","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)","text":"Indeed. As to why, see this video with Regent Law Professor James Duane: [VIDEO] It's pretty shocking.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48558879,"author":"digitalPhonix","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Never talk to the police","text":"If they wanted to do that, your chances of \"I talk, and it screws me\" are pretty high anyway. Also, don't take my word for it - here's a US police officer saying the same thing: [VIDEO] (skip to the second half) He wouldn't talk to police.","stance":"rec"}],"d-YcVLq98Ew":[{"hn_comment_id":43978062,"author":"shantara","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Starcloud","text":"Scott Manley has published a video a few months ago explaining why putting data centers in space is an absolutely terrible idea. Lumen Orbit, the company mentioned, is a former name of Starcloud. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46275152,"author":"freefaler","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space, orbital data centers","text":"The great Scott Manley did a video about that: [VIDEO] basically it doesn't make sense with current technologiesa and even with Starship's proposed specs/price it won't be profitable. Check it out...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46282842,"author":"Ataraxic","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers","text":"Scott Manley had a video about this last year. [VIDEO] The short of it is that cooling is likely the biggest problem, given you will need to pump the heat to the backside and radiate it away, and the amount of mass you will need to dedicate to cooling works against deployments and increases the cost per unit significantly. Not to mention, the idea of these huge deployments runs into potential space debris issues. Whenever one of these ventures actually manages to launch a proof of concept, I think we'll be able to quickly discern if there is actually a near-future here.","stance":"rec"}],"d0nERTFo-Sk":[{"hn_comment_id":1419133,"author":"Artifex","month":"2010-06","story_title":"Hayek's Road to Serfdom #1 on Amazon Today","text":"At least Glenn Beck is attempting to educate himself/his audience. Although, he'd probably do better to show everyone this (it's educational, hilarious and very well done): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2852894,"author":"ramanujan","month":"2011-08","story_title":"United States loses AAA credit rating from S&P ","text":"You take the Keynesian view. It's difficult to discuss this in more than a soundbite, but the Hayekian view is well explained by these two videos: [VIDEO] [LINK] Well worth watching if you haven't seen them. In short, the opposite/Hayekian view contends that taxation is seizure of resources from profitable/efficient entities and redistribution towards unprofitable/inefficient entities. We saw this in extremis in the bank bailout, and more controversially in microcosm with individual redistribution. If you accept this -- that \"profitable\" correlates with \"efficient\", and conversely, though the correlation is not perfect -- then taxation is not a Robin Hood sort of thing that increases well being, but rather a move that ties the legs of the efficient sectors of the economy -- those that can post a profit even in tough times -- to those that are already underwater.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25887144,"author":"wonder_er","month":"2021-01","story_title":"No one knows how much the government can borrow","text":"For a hilarious and sharp rap-battle comparison of Keynes vs. Hayek (which... is basically the framework for all competing conversations on this topic) check out: Just a reminder - this is a rap-battle music video about economic policy. This is why the internet is amazing: Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek - The Original Economics Rap Battle!(Youtube)[0] [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1090807,"author":"kiba","month":"2010-01","story_title":"Paul Volcker: How to Reform Our Financial System","text":"I think an economic hip-hop video is relevant here: \"Fear the Boom and Bust\" - a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1849935,"author":"jswinghammer","month":"2010-10","story_title":"Things Economists Agree On","text":"This is a Keynesian and Monetarist view of budgets. The idea is that IF you balance the budget (they often don't think this is ever a great idea anymore) then it should be balanced over the ups and downs of the business cycle. So let's say a business cycle starts up again and somehow the government doesn't spend all that extra money before it comes in and there is surplus. Now booms are followed by an inevitable bust no matter what anyone tells you when the next one starts up. Keynes argued that you should spend during busts to keep aggregate demand up and let the economy recover. So you run a deficit during this time. If you consider a balanced budget then they might argue that you should balance it with consideration to short term gains and losses. If you're interested this video is a fun and very accurate way to learn about two different views of the business cycle: [VIDEO] For the record I'm with Hayek in this video :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2012785,"author":"lionhearted","month":"2010-12","story_title":"Internet start-ups: Another bubble?","text":"> The single most destructive force in a crash is deflationary pressure which can quickly feed on its self and spiral out of control. Well, that's part of the Keynesian view yes. I'm personally of the belief that currency-fuckery causes crashes in the first place, and that more currency-fuckery isn't the answer [1]. But let's just say Keynes is right for now. That still doesn't explain why the healthy Clinton/Bush economies had crazy-low interest rates, which was the main cause of this mess. [1] While it has a humorous spin, the Keynes vs. Hayek rap is incredibly well informed about both positions, and it's pretty easy to follow and entertaining - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10437924,"author":"afsina","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Decline in the labor share of income in the U.S.","text":"What you describe is part of the Keynesian economics. There is a great deal of resources about the criticism of Keynesian economics especially from Austrian School. But i like the rap battle the most :) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12565777,"author":"marmot777","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the must-read books about economics/finance?","text":"These are important books but obviously not a comprehensive list. * John Locke's Two Treatises of Government - It's political philosophy but it's hard to understand Classical Liberalism without having read some Locke. * Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations - He and Locke are the two main guys to read for a solid start on Classical Liberalism, which is completely different than modern political liberalism. It's like having two features in an app with nearly the same name. Confusing as fuck. * E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered - This book will shift your perspective, useful to avoid becoming an a mindless advocate for one school of thought or another. * Marx is a tough one as Capital is massive and unreadable and The Communist Manifesto is a propaganda pamphlet but I think you need to at least find some articles that summarize the basics. * Keynes and Hayek - This hip hop battle is a decent start: [VIDEO] then read Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. * Milton Friedman's - Yes, read Capitalism and Freedom. I hesitated to include it as the guy's so good at making the case that it can turn you into a market advocate bot. Please resist that. Can someone help me on this, is there a book balance Hayek and a book to balance Friedman? I'm sorry but Keynes doesn't do it for me. Look at the difference in titles between Hayek and Keynes. It's hard to motivate to read the Keynes book but nobody ever ha","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23687304,"author":"miles","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Friedrich Hayek on Evolution and Spontaneous Order (1983) [video]","text":"There have been a number of Hayek posts, though sadly few of them gained much traction: [LINK] For those new to Hayek, here is an entertaining overview: Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek [VIDEO] Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39675667,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Rethinking my economics","text":"If anyone wants a fun quick summary of Hayek this throwback to the 2008 crisis is an easily consumed primer on Keynes vs Hayek: Keynes vs Hayek rap battle 1: [VIDEO] Keynes vs Hayek rap battle 2: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"d0vY0CKYhPY":[{"hn_comment_id":20915607,"author":"elamje","month":"2019-09","story_title":"The Riemann Hypothesis","text":"My absolute favorite numberphile video is how pi occurs in a peculiar way with Riemann Zeta/Mandelbrot. Maybe it only amazes me because I don\u2019t have a PhD in math, but it just seemed so strange how pi shows up in this video. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13999795,"author":"kpil","month":"2017-03","story_title":"The Mandelwat Set","text":"I really enjoyed this video with Dr Holly Krieger of Numberphile. [LINK] There are a few more videos related to PI and The Mandelbrot set, Julia, etc. All nice to watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20062075,"author":"throwawaymath","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Generating the Mandelbrot Set","text":"When you begin with z = k i - 0.75, you can obtain an arbitrarily good approximation of pi by multiplying the p for which f_p(z) = z^2 + z diverges by k . The approximation increases in precision as k tends to 0. There's a neat video explaining it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"d0yGdNEWdn0":[{"hn_comment_id":9574911,"author":"getsat","month":"2015-05","story_title":"The Sound of TED: A Case for Distaste","text":"TEDx might be largely garbage, but it has this talk which actually changed my life: [VIDEO] Strangely, this guy does not even promote his book. His book completely changed my mental approach to language learning. I highly recommend it to anyone who is learning a language.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7873236,"author":"m0llusk","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best way to learn a language?","text":"What way is best depends on your intent. Do you want to speak the language or write it or use it for a particular specialization? Chris Lonsdale teaches a methodology for quick acquisition of spoken language that he presents in this TEDx talk: [VIDEO] This primarily involves listening, getting the basic meaning first perhaps through body language or other clues, mix up words and expressions, go from a tool box to command acquisitions to pronouns and adjectives to glue words, copy facial expressions, and finally direct connection by exercising multiple paths to the same meaning.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8806554,"author":"readme","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Ways to learn a language as an adult?","text":"Learn programming in 24 hours! This is just fluff. Sure, the guy probably learned some French, but it's anecdotal. To assess proficiency he needs to be tested by native experts in all the modalities of language: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Not by the opinion of some girl who probably liked him at a coffee shop. Where I am we take 6 months to get a student from 0 to basic proficiency in french: i.e. able to read/listen to news and discuss advanced topics, like economics. That's with 6 hours of class a day, M-F all with native speakers. If you really want to learn a language efficiently, I'd recommend this ted talk: [VIDEO] BTW, I doubt his 6 month mark applies to harder languages like chinese.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19788439,"author":"Kaiyou","month":"2019-04","story_title":"It\u2019s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age","text":"If you learn a language through memorization of words you're being very, very inefficient. Very. Learning a language requires next to no effort (compared to 30 words per day) and can be done at any age within six months. The strange thing is that nearly everyone does language learning wrong. I think it's because schools set everyone up for failure by teaching how to learn a language in a way, that's just so very inefficient. If you care for the easier way: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20635280,"author":"HerrMonnezza","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language","text":"This talk by Chris Lonsdale gives some practical advice on learning new languages fast. Most of it is along the lines of what the article says, but seems to say that the key part is to get a \"language parent\", whom you can have conversations with and will try to understand and reply to you, no matter what (like parents do with small children): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"d1EB1zsxW0k":[{"hn_comment_id":19278318,"author":"acidburnNSA","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Cheap renewables won\u2019t stop global warming (2018)","text":"This contains a link to the actual discussion [1] which I highly recommend watching. Bill demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of energy systems, guided by one of his favorite authors (Vaclav Smil) who recently wrote the incredible and humbling book, Energy and Civilization [2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19564865,"author":"Reedx","month":"2019-04","story_title":"The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet","text":"Solar & wind are great, but no mention of nuclear? (look into Gen IV if concerned about nuclear's reputation) That's looking like what we need most of all if we want to seriously tackle the problem. If you're wondering why, Bill Gates argues a good case on why solar & wind are not enough: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20867918,"author":"Reedx","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Why California May Go Nuclear","text":"Here, Bill Gates has done the math: [VIDEO] TLDW: Batteries are several orders of magnitude too expensive to solve the reliability problem or make things like steel and concrete.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21168124,"author":"Reedx","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Traveling Wave Reactor","text":"I didn't set up that strawman. They're too expensive for a lot more than that. Seriously, watch Bill's response to this and I'd be interested if you or anyone has a better answer: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23579265,"author":"aksss","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power","text":"The Gates Foundation is one of the leading US investors in new nuclear tech right now. That documentary gets into the details of what they're working on and the hurdles they have in bringing new tech online. For a quick digestible bit of Gates on nuclear, watch the following. The documentary explores a lot more about the reactors: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"d2lJUOv0hLA":[{"hn_comment_id":33298127,"author":"wanderingstan","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Drone photos reveal an early Mesopotamian city made of marsh islands","text":"If you\u2019re interested in the history of Lagash and the wider Sumerian civilization, I highly recommend the _Fall of Civilizations Podcast_ episode 8. [VIDEO] At 2.5 hours it\u2019s more like an audiobook. During the pandemic this was my gateway into learning a ton about this ancient civilization, when humanity first began to write and thus be able to communicate with us thousands of years later.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33578055,"author":"Strom","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ur","text":"Fall of Civilizations is absolutely amazing stuff, I double recommend it. It has an episode that covers this specific topic as well - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25210080,"author":"oblio","month":"2020-11","story_title":"1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland","text":"> The producer of \"civilization and culture\"? In what sense? Farms produce the goods we eat, how does that lead to culture and civilization? I'm not that knowledgeable at history - if that is the case, then I'd really like to read more about it. Well, I recommend any history book about the Fertile Crescent and Ancient Egypt. If you have 1 hour, hear/listen to this podcast/video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26011016,"author":"wanderingstan","month":"2021-02","story_title":"How to write cuneiform","text":"I went down the cuneiform rabbit hole last summer after listening to the excellent \u201cFall of Civilizations Podcast\u201d episode about Sumer: [VIDEO] This led to many of Finkel\u2019s videos and the book mentioned in this post. (So far I\u2019m not too impressed with the book, TBH.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28173672,"author":"andyxor","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Archaeologists discover 4k-year-old ancient city in Iraqi desert","text":"this is just 30km from Ur, I thought Akkad capital was more to the north , in the traditionally Akkadian territory [LINK] btw this is great series on that time (and what preceded it) \"The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28571766,"author":"mannerheim","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Life-size camel sculptures in Saudi Arabia are older than Stonehenge, pyramids","text":"Arizona is very hot, very arid, and also very favourable for agriculture, with significant production of lettuce and cotton. As long as you can make sure your crops get water through irrigation (which ancient Mesopotamians were very skilled at), your crops will thrive. In fact, the heat and sunlight actually provide a bit of an advantage. However, a number of factors eventually led to the collapse of the civilisations in the fertile crescent. One factor has been the region getting warmer and drier, which poses a challenge even with irrigation. As an example of how different the climate is now from what it was then, Uruk used to be on a channel of the Euphrates, but now that riverbed is completely dried up. Meanwhile, Ur was once a coastal city, but is now ten miles inland. Another factor for the collapse of these civilisations is that the process of irrigation accumulated salt in the soil. The very process that made complex civilisation possible in this part of the world eventually contributed to its end. I recommend the Fall of Civilizations podcast for more on this and other societies: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29450394,"author":"miltondts","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The sea people: Alexander the Great trod in the footsteps of forgotten Greeks","text":"And one more resource with the history of many civilizations: [LINK] I especially enjoyed [VIDEO] , as I had no idea the first cities were already so advanced and lasted for so many centuries. EDIT: fixed youtube link.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29677098,"author":"miltondts","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best podcast you listened to in 2021?","text":"Fall of civilizations has the history of many: [LINK] I especially enjoyed [VIDEO] , as I had no idea the first cities were already so advanced and lasted for so many centuries.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31458455,"author":"davedx","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ancient civilisation under eastern Turkey estimated to be 11k-13k years old","text":"Yeah, the sea level rise thing is one explanation for why Sumerian is a language isolate. This YouTube series is a great deep dive into it all: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33578105,"author":"Strom","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ur","text":"It's a great episode and I also recommend it. For those who wish to have something visual the better link would be [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34861824,"author":"wanderingstan","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Discovery of 4,500-year-old palace in Iraq may hold key to ancient civilisation","text":"Related: I was introduced to Sumerian history by this excellent episode of the \u201cFall of Civilizations Podcast\u201d: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"d3kfEeMZ65c":[{"hn_comment_id":10677072,"author":"on_and_off","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Android Audio Latency","text":"If you want an in-depth explanation (AP mostly skims the surface) : [VIDEO] is a must-watch. Obviously, it does not cover the work accomplished these past two years, but it gives a good idea of the challenges of audio latency on Android","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7231619,"author":"fidotron","month":"2014-02","story_title":"Show HN: Fiddlewax","text":"They gave a good talk at I/O on just audio latency: [VIDEO] The touch latency alone is generally in the >80ms ballpark as well though, and varies a lot between devices.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9390409,"author":"dottrap","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Android\u2019s 10 Millisecond Problem explained","text":"This is a great description of the lowest level problem. But for those wondering why iOS doesn't have the problem or why only 10ms is such a difference, the answer is that this is only the beginning of the problem of Android audio latency. There are still additional problems that add latency that span the entire Android stack from the actual hardware and drivers, to the kernel and scheduler, to the Android implementation of their audio APIs. Anybody who has tried to do any serious audio on Android knows the infamous Bug 3434: [LINK] Google I/O 2013 did a pretty good talk on the problem and shows how there are problems across the entire stack. Glenn Kasten pretty much carries the brunt of all the audio problems with Android. I find it telling that he had to handcraft his own latency measurement device using an oscilloscope and LED because there were no actual tools built into the OS to help them analyze performance. [VIDEO] Audio has been terrible since Android's inception. It has improved a little over time, but unfortunately, 7 years later is is still pretty much unacceptable for any serious work.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10680460,"author":"Polyphonie","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Android Audio Latency","text":"You can watch this I/O session from a few years back: [VIDEO] It probably provides the best insight to the problem Google engineers were and probably is still facing in regards to high performance audio on Android. Even when the latency is brought down, there's still other audio related issues/glitches (like buffer underruns). Even now that Android is measurably better than it was previously, things like buffer underruns can still affect the overall usability. Increasing the buffer (to fix the underruns) render the device less suitable for such things as using it with external MIDI controller. You can see from Superpowered's audio latency measurements: [LINK] that the buffer for iOS is half that of the best Android (the dual-core Nexus 9)- 64 instead of 128 for Android. I","stance":"rec"}],"d4EgbgTm0Bg":[{"hn_comment_id":17935266,"author":"Twisol","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Quaternions: the Strange Numbers That Birthed Modern Algebra","text":"I'm happy to see 3Blue1Brown's most recent video [0] get a mention in this article! He does a great job of explaining quaternions though visual intuition. (I do think simply calling Grant a \"math animator\" is selling him a bit short. He's a true educator in every sense; animation is just one of the (very effective) learning aides he uses.) [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22202162,"author":"mlatu","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Let's remove quaternions from every 3D engine (2018)","text":"> rotors operate fully in 3D By this, the author means: you can visualize a rotor FULLY in 3D, no extra dimension neccessary. I suspect you never have tried to think about how quaternions work mechanically, I suggest this neat video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27329832,"author":"huachimingo","month":"2021-05","story_title":"What is the Fourth Dimension? (1884)","text":"I still remember the first time when I saw videos about non-Euclidian Geometry[1] and Higher Dimensions[2]. I was amazed with such concepts, but I still havent read books about them. They are related somehow with topology[3] and curvature (and tangentially, to differential equations). [1] [LINK] (5 sided square) [2] [LINK] (The road to 4D part 1) [LINK] (Carl Sagan's explanation) [3] [LINK] (Zach Star's intro) Also, a nice exercise to visualize 4D is to study quaternions and their properties. Vectors are somehow a nice simplification of them, see Maxwell laws. 3blue1brown has a video[4]. [4] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28361567,"author":"nayuki","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The Dirac String Trick (2015)","text":"The first part of the article about describing sphere rotations with a direction and magnitude has some overlap with quaternion rotations, described and visualized nicely here: [LINK] ; [VIDEO] The second part of the article about untangling strings after a 720\u00b0 turn is also covered in: [LINK] ; [LINK] ; [LINK] ; [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29510930,"author":"Jun8","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Quaternions","text":"3B1B is also informative, especially in explaining why C was not extended using triplets but 4-tuples were needed: [VIDEO] . Here\u2019s a Math SE answer on why: [LINK] , here\u2019s a more ELI5 discussion: [LINK] . I especially like this very intuitive comment in that thread : [LINK] Left as an exercise to reader: prove that no such n-tuples exist for n>4.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36560692,"author":"nkrisc","month":"2023-07","story_title":"It\u2019s hard to give a good intuitive explanation for the volume of a cone","text":"I found this video explaining quaternions to actually be a great way to explain (and visualize) higher spatial dimensions: [VIDEO] When you think about the nth dimension as a projection of the n+1th dimension, it begins to make a lot more sense. That doesn\u2019t mean you can necessarily visualize the 4th spatial dimension directly, but you can at least visualize how the 3rd dimension can be a projection of the 4th, just like how we can easily see that the 2nd dimension as a projection of the third.","stance":"rec"}],"d6DBKoWbtjE":[{"hn_comment_id":28714337,"author":"malermeister","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Klimaticket: All public transport in Austria with a single ticket for 1095 EUR/y","text":"That's just not true. The problem is that government housing is so terrible that sleeping on the street is preferable to some. Public housing in Austria is high quality, cheap and plentiful, with two-thirds of Viennese residents living in it. Coincidentally, homelessness is a non-issue in Austria compared to the US (based on my experience living in the Bay for 10 and in Austria for 20 years). See this video for what government provided housing could be. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38117223,"author":"toomuchtodo","month":"2023-11","story_title":"The US Housing Market Has Become an Impossible Mess","text":"Vienna is a great example. [LINK] (Youtube: Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All) [VIDEO] (Youtube: Does Vienna Have the World's Best Council Housing?)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38721326,"author":"toomuchtodo","month":"2023-12","story_title":"US homelessness up 12% from 2022, hits highest level since 2007","text":"Government can build if private industry will not. If you argue \"we can only fix this with the private sector and private investment\", welp, we tried that and we're plain ol' fucked at the moment. Vienna is a great example. [LINK] (Youtube: Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All) [VIDEO] (Youtube: Does Vienna Have the World's Best Council Housing?)","stance":"rec"}],"d6PyyatqJSE":[{"hn_comment_id":13689028,"author":"ndb6000","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Fasting leads to stress resistance, self-renewal, and regeneration (2014)","text":"I enjoyed this recent interview with Valter Longo on the subject of fasting: [VIDEO] They discuss underlying mechanics and various clinical trials and much more...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16557818,"author":"pgt","month":"2018-03","story_title":"The antidepressant effect of sleep deprivation","text":"Wow! I awoke early this morning from a bit of a bender last night and have a similar feeling of mania (the positive, productive kind). At first I attributed it to a GABA rebound, but thinking back, a sleep fast has historically injected a sense of urgency and vigour. I have been fasting intermittently after reading Valter Longo's metabolic oxidation research (the term they used for aging research to get it published). I skip breakfast and try to leave 16-18 hours between meals. Have been losing weight but keeping muscle tone almost effortlessly. My skin has also improved. No negative effect so far. Good interview about I.F.: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18007596,"author":"bodhibyte","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Molecule produced during fasting has anti-aging effect on vascular system","text":"I'm on a day 4 of a water-only fast and have completed a two-week medically supervised fast as well as many other shorter fast. As an anecdote, I can say water-only fasting in combination with a high nutrient density plant-based diet has helped me overcome some serious allergies and other health conditions. As an added bonus, I've lost 65 pounds from my peak weight over the last few years and my weight has been stable. It's not a panacea, but I've found it to be a net benefit. For those interested in a deeper dive on the benefits of water-only fasting and diets that try to mimic its benefits, as well as time-restricted feeding, see: Valter Longo, Ph.D. on Fasting-Mimicking Diet & Fasting for Longevity, Cancer & Multiple Sclerosis [1] Dr. Valter Longo on Resetting Autoimmunity and Rejuvenating Systems with Prolonged Fasting & the FMD [2] Dr. Satchin Panda on Time-Restricted Feeding and Its Effects on Obesity, Muscle Mass & Heart Health [3] Dr. Satchin Panda on Practical Implementation of Time-Restricted Eating & Shift Work Strategies [4] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [Edit to fix typos and formatting]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19258104,"author":"itchyouch","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Exercise, fasting shown to help cells shed defective proteins","text":"There's health benefits and potential longevity benefits. I would hardly call fasting a fad. It has been around through the ages. Here's some legitimate information on a fast. [VIDEO] We know enough about some of the mechanisms involved and how it can promote healing the body by offering it a \"reset\" so-to-speak via autophagy.","stance":"rec"}],"d6iQrh2TK98":[{"hn_comment_id":39860624,"author":"golergka","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Thirty Seven","text":"Probably posted because of this video: [VIDEO] Which not only links to this website, but also explains the topic in detail. Can highly recommend the channel anyway \u2014 especially for the HN crowd.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44779934,"author":"mitch_f","month":"2025-08","story_title":"The Ski Rental Problem","text":"Derek Muller did a good overview of this concept on his Veritasium channel: [VIDEO] . Even more interesting for HN is a link in the description to one of the speaker's (Tom Magliery) websites: [LINK] .","stance":"rec"}],"d8RRE2rDw4k":[{"hn_comment_id":29282902,"author":"cultofmetatron","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Designing transport for humans, not econs","text":"I've been watching a channel that really opened my eyes on how terrible urban planning is in america. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29736938,"author":"Improvotter","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Changes in Dutch streets throughout the years (photo album)","text":"I think this is due to how car dependent North America is. There are so many aspects that are missed in these pictures or what you are for example experiencing. It's not that you're situation is improving, it's most likely not. But that's not due to car independent cities being bad, it's because changing from being car dependent to car independent is hard and takes time. I would recommend you have a look at Not Just Bikes on YouTube, a Canadian that moved to the Netherlands. He talks about car independent cities in Europe, more specifically The Netherlands and compares it to car dependent North America. Here is a video that talks about how these \"car independent\" countries are still the best to drive in compared to others: [VIDEO] . Regardless, I would recommend you check out a few other of his videos, most importantly his series on the US non profit organisation \"Strong Towns\": [LINK] . It think it's about sharing the message that placing public transport, cyclists, and pedestrians in the forefront is better for almost everyone involved, including drivers, and especially people who live in cities and towns.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32188489,"author":"xputer","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes","text":"Both are definitely a factor, but don't forget that a lot of the irritate driving behavior is because in America people are forced to drive. Even if they don't want to or really shouldn't be driving, they still have to drive to get around town. Here is a video that explains it further: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32815832,"author":"Kim_Bruning","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Bikes, not self driving cars, are the technological gateway to urban progress","text":"So the actual challenge is to convince those car drivers that they really should be pushing for more bike lanes, since it really is in their best interest. O:-) For more arguments than can fit in this margin, see: [VIDEO] \"The Best Country in the World for Drivers\" (edit: +if you don't have time for an entire video, just watch this one traffic light for single example that exemplifies the story: [LINK] ... comments on that video are good too!)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35246705,"author":"_dain_","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Cyclists Now Outnumber Motorists in City of London","text":"Most (or at least, a plurality of) people who cycle or take the tube in London also drive a car sometimes; it's not like you have to be wedded to one particular transport mode. Drivers aren't drivers 100% of the time. Reducing motor traffic makes for safer, more aesthetically pleasant streets. You can expand the pavement, have flowers, landscaping, public art, outdoor dining, etc. The air quality is better, the surroundings are quieter, people don't get run over and maimed in collisions. And when you really want or need to drive, there's less traffic around. Nobody likes sitting in traffic jams! See this video for how these kinds of policies benefit drivers directly[1]. The carrot is having a more pleasant city. Everyone wins from that. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37836886,"author":"mitchbob","month":"2023-10","story_title":"A global climate solution \u2013 if it can get past conspiracy theories and NIMBYs","text":"One of the many excellent videos on the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel [1] shows how the Netherlands has done it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41106956,"author":"LeChuck","month":"2024-07","story_title":"If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity","text":"A city designed for other modes of transport is also better for drivers because only those who need (or really want) to drive need to do so. Result, less congestion and more relaxed driving. If you have 15 minutes to spare, watch this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47795537,"author":"nehal3m","month":"2026-04","story_title":"The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Where Do We Go from Here?","text":"You might think so, but a flat number comparison doesn't do justice to the vast differences in urban planning. Check out this video, it describes Dutch urban planning pretty well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47914736,"author":"tmsbrg","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Waymo says expecting driverless taxis to stay out of bike lanes is unrealistic","text":"Kind of weird article. If you want cars to stay out of bike lanes, make them protected like in here in the Netherlands. But also why do people expect to be taken to a bike lane rather than a parking space? Also seeing a lot of ignorance about cycling here in the comments. Would recommend some people to watch some Not Just Bikes videos. Building better cycle infrastructure is better for everyone, cars and cyclists included. Less people die, and cars don't have to deal with cyclists on the road. Ex [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dBnniua6-oM":[{"hn_comment_id":1056898,"author":"vixen99","month":"2010-01","story_title":"The Men Who Live Forever","text":"If you want some peer-reviewed background on why it's smart to cut out sugar and the foods to which it's added by manufacturers, do take a look at [VIDEO] This is one of the best nutritional videos I've ever seen. There's a chunk of biochemistry in the middle but it's worth watching to the end! Don't miss it and add years to your life.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6038554,"author":"colinprince","month":"2013-07","story_title":"High-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain than sugar (2010)","text":"I think the point is that getting rid of the subsidies would let the price of HFCS increase and would be less attractive to food producers. Regarding the idea that sucrose is healthier than HFCS, I remain unconvinced. See Robert H. Lustig's awesome expostion, Sugar: The Bitter Truth: [VIDEO] He explains the endocrinology behind why our bodies cannot stay ahead of our sugar intake.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13282603,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2016-12","story_title":"US government to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol (2015)","text":"I agree with you. This article also mentions they're focusing on fats/saturated fats; which is also a terrible focus. The real danger is not fat, even saturated/trans-fats, but starches and sugar. The increase in these types of carbohydrates in products like baby formula is actually leading to obesity in infants! Excess sugar can stress arteries and damage them. Cholesterol is carried to these artier by lipids (LDLs and HDLs, which are not actually cholesterol, but proteins that carry it through your bloodstream). If you eat a lot of sugar, cholesterol can build up between the walls of arteries as they fix the damage. They can eventually break down the wall, releasing plaque into the bloodstream and potentially causing heart complications. I highly recommend Dr. Lustig's video (UCTV) to learn more: [VIDEO] A few years back I switched to a keto normal fat/very low carb (excluding fiber) diet. I've lost weight, gained energy and have felt a lot better. Of course this isn't for everyone. Some people have a body type that lends itself to higher carb intake (I knew a runner who'd eat 30 bananas a week) and as always do your research, consult with your doctor, dietitian, etc. before drastic changes in your diet. It's a common myth that Adkins died of his own diet. He didn't, and Reuters rededicated their column implying that he did. I honestly wonder if the obesity epidemic would have gone down today if the world didn't dismiss his ideas, or the ideas of many nutritionist for decad","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14573720,"author":"maxharris","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Coconut oil isn't healthy and it's never been healthy","text":"If this article is correct, please explain why my blood pressure and cholesterol figures go through the roof when my diet includes fructose. Please also explain how and why everything goes back to normal when I cut fructose out entirely. I am an quite serious - I do not allow even trace amounts in sauces and mayo and the like, nor in hidden sources such as \"agave nectar\" (which is 50-90% fructose). Oh and BTW, I eat TONS of pasta, saturated fat (including butter), plants, and a really nice steak every month. I pour heavy whipping cream into my coffee every morning (not the usual trash, but the fancy expensive stuff free of polysorbate 80 and carrageenan.) Unless you're eating a fresh strawberry that hasn't been mutilated in a blender (and even then, not too many all at once), fructose makes you fat because it messes with your appetite regulation in the bad direction. Even a little fructose makes you hungry. Dietary fat (saturated or otherwise) does the exact opposite: all other things being equal, it makes you feel sated. Don't just take my experience over the last ten years into account - here's a leading endocrinologist that's overturning decades of dogma. He'll set you right: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26239385,"author":"akurzon","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Fructose reprogrammes glutamine-dependent oxidative metabolism to support LPS","text":"For anyone interested in a detailed explanation of fructose metabolism (and why it's bad for you), I'd highly recommend these two talks by Robert Lustig on the subject. The first one is about how the body reacts to fructose, and the second video is a follow-up that emphasizes how fructose has contributed to the obesity epidemic in the US and elsewhere. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1219187,"author":"yanowitz","month":"2010-03","story_title":"Princeton researchers find that HFCS prompts considerably more weight gain","text":"This is further confirmation of a well-known phenomenon. If you want to watch a long presentation on what's going on, check this: [VIDEO] Short version: Fructose is metabolized by your liver, results in a lot of nasty byproducts, your liver stores the excess energy as fat, etc.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4892970,"author":"dools","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Why We Get Fat","text":"This is a relevant and very informative video about the impact of sugar on humans: [VIDEO] I'd say that if you were to just dramatically reduce sugar you'll get results pretty quickly.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10035882,"author":"pkulak","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Coca-Cola Funds Scientists Who Shift Blame for Obesity Away from Bad Diets","text":"Here's the video that started a lot of the public awareness of the issue: [VIDEO] And there's also now a great documentary on Netflix called \"Fed Up\" ( [LINK] ), for anyone who has a subscription. It particularly tackles this silly idea that it's okay to eat and drink shitty food all day, so long as you exercise for a little bit too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13736946,"author":"08-15","month":"2017-02","story_title":"DNA tests show Subway sandwiches could contain just 50% chicken","text":"This is almost right, but still manages to be dangerously wrong. Frustose and glucose are very different, one never gets converted to the other. All cells can and will take up and metabolize glucose, but only the liver can import and metabolize fructose. Metabolically, fructose does not behave like a carbohydrate, but like alcohol. Insulin affects mostly fat, muscle and liver cells. They react by storing the excess glucose, which they do harmlessly. Excess glucose does not cause insulin tolerance; fructose seems to do that, thought I don't remember the whole mechanism. Neither chitin nor lignin are carbohydrates, lignin isn't even chemically related. Even ruminants can't digest lignin, only a few funghi can do that. At any rate, the bottom line is that frustose is a problem, glucose isn't, and lumping both under \"carbs\" confuses matters. See [VIDEO] for lots of details. (But don't take Dr. Lustig's words at face value---check other sources. Most of it is uncontroversial.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14547328,"author":"ibejoeb","month":"2017-06","story_title":"The Liver: A \u2018Blob\u2019 That Runs the Body","text":"Robert Lustig does a good talk about sugar metabolism in \"Sugar: The Bitter Truth\": [VIDEO] Also, \"The Trouble with Fructose\": [LINK] Despite the baity titles, it's a good talk with real biochemistry. Edit: better video added up top","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18795425,"author":"mtgx","month":"2018-12","story_title":"The $35B race to cure a silent killer that affects 30M Americans","text":"For starters, stop ingesting all things that have fructose in them. The U.S. government is really kind of complicit in allowing the spread of diabetes and NASH to happen in the first place by allowing harmful substances such as high-fructose corn syrup and to be infused into anything you can find in a store or fast food. Sure, it's ultimately an issue of education, but when the vast majority of foods have this stuff in them, educating every person on non eating most of the available foods in stores becomes very difficult. Watch how the metabolism of alcohol and fructose compare: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24773051,"author":"brian_cunnie","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Wim Hof\u2019s teachings about breath work and the health benefits of cold plunges","text":"Don't take my word for it (how bad sugar is). Go to an expert: Dr. Robert Lustig, Endocrinologist at UCSF. \"Sugar, the Bitter Truth\" [0]. He'll describe the metabolic pathways of sugar. Key take-away: fructose is processed by the liver, and much of its calories is turned to fat. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25078612,"author":"identity0","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Most-mentioned links in Hacker News comments, 2006\u20132015","text":"I watched [VIDEO] a few days ago and was surprised to see is the #1 youtube link. It does have 11M views, however, and it is a great talk.","stance":"rec"}],"dCSIXLIzhzk":[{"hn_comment_id":43886993,"author":"7373737373","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart","text":"My favorite: Cody'sLab's \"How far away are the nearest stars\": [VIDEO] Also gives an intuition for how incredibly bright stars shine","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21236230,"author":"andrewstuart","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Humans will not 'migrate' to exoplanets, Nobel winner says","text":"Anyone who thinks we'll ever travel to another solar system really truly fails to understand the distances involved. The furthest humanity has ever travelled, by way of analogy, is a couple of millimeters - to the moon. The nearest star system relatively speaking is another 200 kilometers further. And sure you can appeal to the \"well you never know what humans are capable of in the future\" line of thinking, but that's really just star trek fantasy - there's not the remotest chance, nada, never. Here's a fun video that explains and will totally dismiss any idea that we'll ever get there - apart from Star Trek fantasy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26425381,"author":"GuB-42","month":"2021-03","story_title":"The Sweden Solar System","text":"Cody put a few solar system objects on a stadium, with distances to scale, the sun is represented by a pea. He then proceeds to drive cross country to put on the closest stars. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34345050,"author":"andrewstuart","month":"2023-01","story_title":"'Oumuamua: An analysis of the debate regarding the first interstellar visitor","text":"I believe in aliens from a statistical standpoint. But I don't believe in interstellar travel at all. I don't think people grasp the distances between stars. The longest distance a human has traveled through space is to the moon. If, for scale, this was about 2 millimeters, then the nearest star would be another 200 kilometers/124 miles away. Here's a great video to illustrate [VIDEO] IMO Oumuamua was a rock.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36499416,"author":"andrewstuart","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Rubio Says He\u2019s Heard Shocking \u2018Firsthand\u2019 Accounts of UFOs","text":"There's no aliens anywhere near earth. There really aren't. Given the staggering, likely impossible task of traveling between the stars, it's essentially impossible that they'd turn up on a planet with this many people and be so in tune with our technology and media that they manage to stay out of sight entirely, except for some government secret Area 53 base or whatever. If you think that traveling between the stars is even remotely practical then maybe watch this video that illustrates the distance only to the closest star, let alone any further away: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dCuZkaaou0Q":[{"hn_comment_id":23264400,"author":"Jach","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can\u2019t handle HEIC images","text":"The context here isn't the average American, but a high school student taking an AP test involving writing math -- where scoring well counts for the same credit as having passed the equivalent entry level course(s) in college. Besides, math is already pseudo language on top of pseudo language. Learning notation is part of math, I'll concede learning to type an expression on a computer is a different notation than writing it with pen, but if you can't learn that, why learn math? Each domain does its own thing too and isn't even necessarily consistent. Guy Steele gave a great talk a few years ago on \"Computer Science Metanotation\", and that's just one area of math: [VIDEO] (Edit: And to conclude here, learning to read and write with some notation tends to be easy, it's learning what the math actually means that is the hard part.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29709430,"author":"earleybird","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Mathematical Notation, Past and Future (2000)","text":"For a deeper exposition on language and notation, Guy Steele[0] is the definitive authority :-) - with some discussion here[1]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31605947,"author":"amar-laksh","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How to get better knowledge about math notations in computer science","text":"Excellent talk by Guy Steele explaining the history of maths/comp notations that can probably lead you to the right path through original sources: [VIDEO] Then have a look at this extremely underrated talk by Alexander Stepanov for basically falling in love with maths (he gives a long view of maths in general adorned with beautiful commentary): [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15595551,"author":"hellofunk","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Effective Programs: 10 Years of Clojure","text":"> I didn't really understand his talk I think he was too abstract Then you better stay away from another talk at the same conference, by Guy Steele [0] ! [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15633640,"author":"hyperion2010","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Problems of Traditional Math Notation (2004)","text":"Not directly math but Guy Steel's talk at Clojure Conj [0] on computer science type notation touches on related issues and is a great watch. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18348150,"author":"Jach","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Clojure at Netflix (2013) [slides]","text":"You would probably enjoy this talk by Guy Steele where he discusses the language of mathematics that computer science people use in their papers (Computer Science Metanotation) to talk about other languages. Funnily it's untyped and lacking a rigorous specification... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36784047,"author":"MathMonkeyMan","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Coroutines for Go","text":"Guy Steele Jr. worked on a language called \"Fortress.\" There are a few good talks that he gives: - (toy problem) [LINK] - (parallelism) [LINK] - (languages) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37140405,"author":"dan-robertson","month":"2023-08","story_title":"How should I read type system notation?","text":"There was a Guy Steele talk a while ago on this topic. He also gives searchable names for some of the things (eg the \u20182d inference rule diagrams\u2019). He calls it \u2018computer science metanotation\u2019, though I think it\u2019s more of a PLT thing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dDddKmdLEdg":[{"hn_comment_id":25737452,"author":"kitkat_new","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Why Isn\u2019t Telegram End-to-End Encrypted by Default (2017)","text":"Actually setting up a server is not difficult. Check out [VIDEO] for setting one up with video conferencing. Finding a server is not difficult - in the worst case you take the default server. And given the server is not locked down, you have access to all other servers (and their users) as well. So I don't really get where you are going with this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25808365,"author":"29083011397778","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Signal Is Back","text":"> How many users does Matrix have? It's difficult to say, as the French government [0], German armed forces [1], and several thousand independent users/corporations/groups run their own servers. What we can determine is that matrix.org on its own has >10 million accounts [2] (search for \"global visible accounts\" in the link). > Hosting an own server is not possible on a small root server you can get for 5 EUR/USD a month, it requires signifcant [sic] resources A direct example of setting up Matrix is shown here [3], using a $20USD/month Digital Ocean droplet. It's a reasonable approximation, though inexact, as we don't know how many users this server will be supporting. This example is thrown further off, as it's the Matrix project lead setting up the server. He's likely in many rooms with high user counts and, as high user counts dramatically increase resource needs, likely needs more RAM and CPU than someone setting up a server for a group of friends. I think it's gotten much easier to stand up a matrix-synapse server than when you last tried, and suspect you left with a bad taste after joining popular rooms that (due to how many users they have) lag much more than you'd typically experience. Perhaps I'm wrong and you did everything right just last week and still don't like it, but I'd encourage more people to see for themselves :) [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26397325,"author":"schoolornot","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Signal Appears to Have Abandoned Their AGPL-Licensed Server Sourcecode","text":"Was your experience with Matrix bad because of the server setup or the Element client app? If server, I found this video to be super helpful: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27554734,"author":"schoolornot","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Jackal 0.54.1 \u2013 Go XMPP Server","text":"Matrix servers are now fairly simple to deploy. [VIDEO] I do wish the Element team moved a bit quicker at attacking Slack head-on. Element isn't super polished yet nor does it implement all the features built into the server/spec. So there is some catching up to do there. But the project is more than ready to use today at a large org and it includes a ton more features than what you get out of the box with an off the shelf XMPPd. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"dEaecUuEqfc":[{"hn_comment_id":5095996,"author":"lisper","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Quantum physics made relatively simple: Three lectures by Hans Bethe","text":"Before you invest three hours to watch these lectures you should know that the title is terribly misleading. These lectures are not about QM at all, they are about the history of QM, albeit told by someone who was actually part of it. But the coolness of hearing the history of QM firsthand is undermined by the fact that Bethe is clearly well past his prime, and he's not particularly good at telling stories. If you want a video that is true to this title I'd recommend this: [LINK] EDIT: And if you want to really understand QM, there's this: [VIDEO] :-)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7602116,"author":"cromwellian","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Quantum Entanglement Drives the Arrow of Time","text":"This Google Talk [VIDEO] uses entanglement and quantum information theory in a clear and understandable way to explain 'spooky' quantum phenomena, like the quantum eraser, de-coherence, the aspect experiment, and the measurement problem. Even if you don't know any QM, just basic algebra and calculus, it's really approachable. I used to be a fan of the Many Worlds interpretation, but after seeing this, I'm now a big fan of the Quantum Information Theory explanation. Starting about 43 minutes in, he goes into the QM Information Theory explanation, but I'd recommend watching the entire prezo. Link to my original post on the subject: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21539468,"author":"oceanghost","month":"2019-11","story_title":"How Quantum Teleportation Works","text":"If I may recommend a lecture given at Google Tech Talks-- \"The Quantum Conspiracy: What Popularizers of QM Don't Want You to Know\", It really clarified some things for me. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30577780,"author":"raphlinus","month":"2022-03","story_title":"A wave function does not collapse upon detection?","text":"This is the video that finally made it click for me[1]. Despite the somewhat click-baity title (\"What Popularizers of QM Don't Want You to Know\") it actually goes into quite a bit of detail of what is and isn't a measurement, in the sense of interactions in a quantum mechanical system that strongly resemble classical behavior (it can be said that the quantum mechanical world is a simulator that can run classical mechanics). [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3592558,"author":"replax","month":"2012-02","story_title":"A Schr\u00f6dinger cat with eight lives: quantum entanglement of eight photons","text":"In fact, the Copenhagen interpretation has been proven wrong by fellow lisper Ron Garret. You can read his paper here: www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf and watch his google talk about it [VIDEO] . The problem is, that most people (not scientists, mind you) do not really care anyway, and the Copenhagen interpretation gives you a nice story to tell, which is fairly \"strange\", yet somewhat understandable. I hate the fact that even science magazines still 100% subscribe to the Copenhagen interpretation, just to attract a greater readership and to be able to use catchier headlines.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4719495,"author":"mtrimpe","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Quantum entanglement shows that reality can't be local","text":"This Google Talk from last year provides an argument and interpretation of this that's fairly understandable with a programmer's mindset: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9450870,"author":"dools","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Is the Universe a Hologram?","text":"Anyone interested in this can find an excellent lecture here [VIDEO] and of course by looking up leonard susskind's stuff on the black hole wars and universe as a hologram","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12378785,"author":"lisper","month":"2016-08","story_title":"There are no particles, there are only fields (2012)","text":"> (whatever that means) That (implied) question has an answer: measurement is the mutual entanglement of a number of degrees of freedom. See: [LINK] Or the movie version: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12656831,"author":"lisper","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Physicists Create World\u2019s First Time Crystal","text":"> Isn't the entire universe one quantum system? Yes. > If so, how can we talk about discrete systems. That is an excellent question! And the answer is that when you do the math, the result of taking a subset of the wave function (the mathematical operation is called a \"trace\") is something that looks like a classical system. If you want the details, see this paper: [LINK] Or this video [VIDEO] which covers the same material.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13344353,"author":"phkahler","month":"2017-01","story_title":"What If Time Really Exists? (2008)","text":"Nothing changes at the time of \"wave function collapse\". When you measure one particle of an entangled pair, nothing actually happens to the other one. But you don't need to listen to me, check this out: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16166375,"author":"lisper","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Blocking via an Unsolvable CAPTCHA","text":"No, it's a little more subtle than that. If you really want to know, the answer is in this paper: [LINK] Or if you prefer, this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16254834,"author":"neel8986","month":"2018-01","story_title":"The Quantum Theory and Reality (1979) [pdf]","text":"One explanation[1] i heard is observation is a actually equivalent to entanglement. Now we know that two elements entangled will have to maintain the state corresponding to its entangled peer. Now if you observing (or taking measurement) the whole system gets entangled to the particle. you are observing and hence the wave function collapses. You can look at a better explanation here [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19405424,"author":"cromwellian","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Experimental rejection of observer-independence in the quantum world","text":"Ron Garrett gave a presentation at Google years ago on Quantum Information Theory that kind of demystified a lot of spooky stuff (like quantum eraser), and I'm wondering how much of this is merely an artifact of the way we're interpreting the math. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31549470,"author":"newpavlov","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Chaos: The real problem with quantum mechanics","text":"Personally, I am firmly in the \"superdeterminism\" camp. To me it's the most elegant interpretation of QM without any mystical measurements magically dependent on \"consciousness\" and whole universes created on each interaction. If you want to learn basics about it, I recommend watching this video: [VIDEO] Do not mind the (joking) clickbait title, the talk itself is quite good even if you only vaguely remember QM.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41391782,"author":"newpavlov","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Computer scientists prove that heat destroys quantum entanglement","text":"There is a very important and often forgotten caveat to the Bell's inequalities: it covers local hidden states. If we are to assume that measurement and particle creation apparatuses are entangled with each other (after all, they had plenty of opportunities since the big bang), then we have a global hidden state and the quantum measurment randomness becomes a simple artifact of removing global state from the picture. This interpretation of QM is usually called \"superdeterminism\" and, personally, I like it much more than the black vodoo measurement magic with collapsing wave functions or creation of whole new worlds on each tiny measurement. This video can be a good introduction to this topic: [VIDEO] (don't mind the clickbaity title, the video itself is good)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43706167,"author":"david927","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? (2003) [pdf]","text":"Ages ago I talked about this with Ron Garret here on HN and he pointed me to his Google Talk: [VIDEO] He makes a tremendous case that, yes, we're in a simulation, and the more I learn the more that conviction grows.","stance":"rec"}],"dF_9YcehCZo":[{"hn_comment_id":41520970,"author":"tverbeure","month":"2024-09","story_title":"NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive","text":"2 weeks ago, Bruce Wagoner from the Voyager program gave a talk at !!Con about how they recovered from the CMOS memory issue that they had a year ago. It\u2019s basically blind debugging with a latency of 45 hours. The talk is amazing and goes through the computer architecture of the spacecraft as well as the challenges of dealing with something that is so old, with so documentation that has conflicting information or unreadable etc. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41521054,"author":"tverbeure","month":"2024-09","story_title":"NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive","text":"When Voyager failed last year with a CMOS memory error, one of the big problems was that a bunch of low level information was gone or conflicting. For example, they sometimes had to guess assembler instructions because the code printouts were low quality photocopied pages. Or because there were handwritten comments or comments scratched out with pencil without any clue about why it was done. One saving grace was the fact that the architecture and the code space was simple enough so that they could reason through the symptoms and actions to take, something that would have been much harder with modern spacecraft. Check out this amazing talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41520340,"author":"Twisol","month":"2024-09","story_title":"NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive","text":"I had the extreme pleasure of seeing Bruce Waggoner of the Voyager team give a keynote at !!Con just last month. The recording landed on YouTube just a couple days ago, so this is great timing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41998078,"author":"Ductapemaster","month":"2024-10","story_title":"NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause","text":"Check out this talk: [VIDEO] The source code isn't hiding in a repo somewhere for security reasons \u2014 it's spread around on various pieces of paper and computers over the last 50 years. There isn't a single source of truth. Adds a whole other level of wizardry to keeping the thing running.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43165791,"author":"asalahli","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)","text":"You might like this and or find it inspiring, in case you haven't seen it already: Saving Voyager 1! - Bruce Waggoner at !!Con 2024 - [VIDEO] Edit: Also, please do share when it's playable :)","stance":"rec"}],"dFs9WO2B8uI":[{"hn_comment_id":29332605,"author":"gerbilly","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus","text":"I think you're right. There seems to be two sorts of attention in the mind, narrowly focused attention and broad diffuse attention. I see the goal of meditation not so much as alternating between the two modes but rather like balancing them and running them both in parallel. This entire video is really excellent, but see particularly this bit here, where Iain McGilchrist describes the concept. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17135439,"author":"no_identd","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Is Information in the Brain Represented in Continuous or Discrete Form?","text":"That question has a very complex and complicated answer, hence why McGilchrist devoted the entire first half of the book to it, I can hardly summarize it here. You might want to watch the RSA Animated talk by McGilchrist: [VIDEO] If this reminds you of Julian Jaynes, then yes, there exists some similarity, but, to quote Wikipedia: \"McGilchrist, while accepting Jayne's intention, felt that Jayne's hypothesis was \"the precise inverse of what happened\" and that rather than a shift from bicameralism there evolved a separation of the hemispheres.\" In my opinion, it seems like a better question to ask then consists of asking if what McGilchrist describes holds 'all the way down', and I lack an answer to that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17896715,"author":"AltruisticGap","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Naked Europe covers up","text":"Hey, thanks for the appreciation. Indeed, Ian Mc Gilchrist mentions how empathy is the realm of the right brain hemisphere. There is a good animated summary of his work: RSA ANIMATE: The Divided Brain [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dGVqrGmwOAw":[{"hn_comment_id":23174139,"author":"dominotw","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Optimising for Concurrency: Comparing the BEAM and JVM virtual machines","text":"I started to write a response but remembered rich hickey talk I went to where he lays out problems with java style concurrency Clojure Concurrency - Rich Hickey [VIDEO] Even though the talk is called clojure concurrency, first half of the talk is about the problems clojure solving in traditional concurrency. one my favorite talks I ever went to.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37006676,"author":"cmiles74","month":"2023-08","story_title":"(Next Rich)","text":"Rich presented Clojure to our local software development group in 2008, I've been working with Clojure (both as a hobbyist and eventually professionally) ever since. [VIDEO] At that time I had been working with Java for years, both the conciseness of the code and the interactivity were flat-out amazing to me. It's saved me time and made me 100 times more productive. Congratulations to Rich, I am also extremely grateful for his work!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6035098,"author":"bachback","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Why bother learning Clojure?","text":"I like Rich talks and his main point for his invention seems to be: to get concurrency right. Clojure Concurrency [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6880673,"author":"jwr","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Why Johnny Can\u2019t Write Multithreaded Programs","text":"> No, no, no. If you are writing multithreaded programs, you _will_ have locks, period. The question is whether you explicitly use them or if they are hidden somewhere in your libraries, frameworks, etc. Actually, the latter are much more difficult to debug. You say that and then proceed to call the article ridiculous. Well, I write and maintain large applications in Clojure. The code uses a multitude of threads for various purposes, with different lifetimes. And I've yet to see a single explicit lock. What's more important, though, is that I've yet to see a race condition, a deadlock, or data corruption, which I find pretty impressive. I do agree that you need to understand what is happening \u2014 but I disagree with your assumption that the basic tools are all on the same level. They are not, which Clojure clearly demonstrates. I won't go into details, because Rich Hickey explains it much, much better than I ever will be able to \u2014 here's an example of his talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35513090,"author":"cellularmitosis","month":"2023-04","story_title":"REBL","text":"> I have yet to encounter a single problem that is solved more elegantly in Clojure than the equivalent Pythonic solution. A good place to start would be implementing Rich Hickey\u2019s ant colony demo in both Python and Clojure. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dGiQaabX3_o":[{"hn_comment_id":12286121,"author":"joshbaptiste","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Did Our Ancestors Become Bipedal So They Could Throw?","text":"I live in a world where 90% of my friends and family believe that they came from the sins of a woman who decided to eat an apple. I recently read a book called Sapiens, this book really drilled into my mind that we homo-sapiens are a derivative of a single great ape that had two daughters, one that became the ancestor of all chimpanzees and the other all humans. If human origin interests you there is a great 10 minute video from the Youtube Kurzgesagt channel that lead me to read Sapiens. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16235841,"author":"doctoboggan","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Jawbone of Earliest Modern Human Out of Africa Discovered in Israeli Cave","text":"It might not be what you were thinking, but the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt has 2 very good videos on the topic: [VIDEO] [LINK] His stuff is well sourced and generally reliable.","stance":"rec"}],"dK3zRXhrFZY":[{"hn_comment_id":11805306,"author":"Flow","month":"2016-05","story_title":"European Lisp Symposium 2016","text":"Ah, the Julia talk ( [VIDEO] ) was just great. Showing the generated machine code is so hackerish yet so rare these days. :-/","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11862372,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Nim Programming Language 0.14.0 released","text":"This reminded me of the recent brilliant talk about design of Julia: \"Julia: to lisp or not to lisp?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11801448,"author":"krzychukula","month":"2016-05","story_title":"European Lisp Symposium 2016","text":"Best talks in my opinion: * [LINK] * [VIDEO] Notable mentions: * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] I liked OpenGL lightning talk as well: * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12025803,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Why is Python slow","text":"From the linked [lwn] article: \"Another example he gave demonstrates the slowness of the C runtime: import itertools sum(itertools.repeat(1.0, 100000000)) That will calculate the sum of 100 million 1.0s. But it is six times slower than the equivalent JavaScript loop. Float addition is fast, as is sum(), but the result is not. Larry Hastings asked what it was that was slowing everything down. Modzelewski replied that it is the boxing of the numbers, which requires allocations for creating objects. Though an audience member did point out with a chuckle that you can increase the number of iterations and Python will still give the right answer, while JavaScript will not.\" Reminded me about the excellent talk about Julia: \"Julia: to Lisp or not to Lisp?\" [VIDEO] One things he points out early is that both the C99 and the R6RS Scheme spec is 20% numerical. Because correct and (reasonably) fast numbers and arithmetic is actually pretty hard to get right on a computer - if you want to abstract away hardware \"short-cuts\" and allow for precise arithmetic by default. It will be interesting to see how much type hints (eliminating some of the boxing/unboxing) will help python. And if it turns out to really be a good fit for the language -- everyone wants \"free\" performance, but transitioning to a (even partially) typed language is certainly not \"free\". Another point with the above loop, is that ideally, even if it can't be optimized/memoized down to a constant - it really shouldn't have t","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12903862,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-11","story_title":"A Look at How Traders and Economists Are Using the Julia Programming Language","text":"Speaking of talks on Julia, I'll again recommend: [VIDEO] \"Julia: to Lisp or not to Lisp?\" from the European Lisp Symposium in May 2016. I found it was rather illuminating on Julia in particular and lisps and programming languages in general.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13872012,"author":"e12e","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Some fun with \u03c0 in Julia","text":"I'm not sure if \"special language\" is a particularly apt description of what Julia is. SQL is a \"special\" language. At any rate - a lisp-like language with llvm backend, package manager, and a (small, but not trivial) group of users writing real software - what's not to like? I (still) recommend the talk: \"Julia - to lisp or not to lisp?\", that gives a quick overview of some of the design choices: [VIDEO] For me, I like that it has a real story trying to balance \"actual integer math\" (not this silly machine constrained twos-compliment hack\" and \"you could conceivably write a ray tracer that wasn't unusably slow\" :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17037493,"author":"e12e","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Common Lisp homepage","text":"You might also want to have a look at Julia. It's not really a lisp, but it sits on top of a scheme - and it has a rather interesting, pragmatic type system: \"Julia: to lisp or not to lisp?\": [VIDEO] [LINK] Maybe compare and contrast with Maxima?: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18407964,"author":"e12e","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Chicken Scheme 5.0","text":"I'm a great admirer of Julia, but I doubt it would appeal to those seeking a \"true\" lisp/scheme. Even if it's has a sane macro system, and much of the same power. You can indeed see s-expressions (search for \"s-expression\") : [LINK] This nice talk mentions a bit on how Julia is (not) a lisp (if I recall correctly): \"Julia: to Lisp or not to Lisp?\": [VIDEO] This might also be of interest: [LINK] As well as (maybe) clasp: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32745853,"author":"travisd","month":"2022-09","story_title":"From Common Lisp to Julia","text":"Stefan Karpinski (one of the core Julia contributors) gave a talk (in 2016, so rather dated as far as the Julia syntax and whatnot go) about how Julia is secretly more lisp-y than even lisp & Scheme. The core of this argument is that most language specifications dedicate many pages to defining how arithmetic works, whereas Julia is actually just able to define that in Julia code as part of the stdlib (the implementation just calls out to LLVM intrinsics, but nonetheless, super neat!). `Int64` is actually defined in a Julia file. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dKJEpOtVgXc":[{"hn_comment_id":39855435,"author":"a_wild_dandan","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Jamba: Production-grade Mamba-based AI model","text":"To those curious about the tradeoffs between transformer and state space model layers, I highly recommend Sasha Rush's video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38935434,"author":"anomaly72","month":"2024-01","story_title":"MoE-Mamba: Efficient Selective State Space Models with Mixture of Experts","text":"Would recommend Sasha Rush's lecture [VIDEO] , it provides the intuition for state space models via linear RNNs","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39348565,"author":"srush","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The Annotated S4","text":"Hi! Blog author. This was an attempt a couple years ago to understand and write about this paper in a detailed way. Here is a video going through this topic as well: [VIDEO] Section 2 of the blog post is no longer very relevant. A lot of advances (DSS, S4D) simplified that part of the process. Arguably also this all should be updated for Mamba (same authors).","stance":"rec"}],"dKx1wnXClcI":[{"hn_comment_id":23528118,"author":"sjwright","month":"2020-06","story_title":"MuseScore 4: Moving from notation software to composition software","text":"The cheese melts in the microwave; the music melts in Sibelius. Tantacrul\u2019s review of Sibelius\u2019 might be the most entertaining serious critique of a software user interface ever posted to YouTube. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27005215,"author":"wexq","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Audacity Aquired by Muse Group","text":"OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this. His twitter ( [LINK] ) and youtube ( [LINK] ) are full of interesting tidbits, an you can tell he's passionate about things. Even if you don't do music/notation his video on Sibelius, [VIDEO] , is ridiculously funny, but also on point.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28755471,"author":"btown","month":"2021-10","story_title":"\u2018Jean Sibelius\u2019 Review: An Early Finale","text":"Since Sibelius and Finale are two industry-leading (and very much competing) music notation software systems, this headline made me do a quadruple-take! [LINK] [LINK] For those interested in (extremely entertaining) breakdowns of the Sibelius software and other offerings in this space from a UI/UX design perspective, I highly recommend Tantacrul's videos, which propelled him to becoming the head designer for MuseScore and Audacity. IMO, this and his Dorico video are must-watch crash-courses for any developer touching UX design, even outside of music! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36700691,"author":"l__l","month":"2023-07","story_title":"MuseScore 4.1 is now available","text":"If anyone is yet to see it, Tantacrul (on youtube) is now deeply involved with MuseScore (UX lead or similar?); he put out an awesome vid on the design of MS4 at the beginning of the year: [LINK] His video on how Sibelius' UX is a pile of shit remains one of my favourite vids on yt: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19153927,"author":"rgoulter","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Whitespace killed an enterprise app","text":"This entertaining diatribe about Sibelius' difficult to use design mentions poor use of a Ribbon. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21046655,"author":"xmprt","month":"2019-09","story_title":"The Distribution of Users\u2019 Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)","text":"The solution isn't to put things in preference windows either because even smart users will find that cumbersome. There's an interesting pair of videos (if you have some time) that goes over the UI of two competing music scoring software and why one is bad and the other good. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31262091,"author":"TremendousJudge","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Clairnote: An alternative music notation system","text":"We are very, very far away from that. To get a feel of what scorewriter software is like nowadays, Tantacrul's videos[0] on the subject of UI are very good at showing what the state of the art is. On one of his videos he shows that the best score engraving can only be achieved by using a closed source, now-unsupported command line program from the 80s called Score[1] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33993124,"author":"radicality","month":"2022-12","story_title":"MuseScore 4","text":"Obligatory funny video review of MuseScore 3 UI: [LINK] Same author also has a funny video on the UI of another music notation program, Sibelius: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dNs_kNilSjk":[{"hn_comment_id":35536608,"author":"slimsag","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Energy-saving coating without pigment keeps the surface beneath cool","text":"Two YouTube researchers[0][1] (they make science content that is very much not in the traditional form of YouTube) have been working on Infrared Cooling Paint for almost a year now and have been detailing how individuals can make it at home (although a fairly involved/lengthy process today.) There's definitely something here, hopefully someone sells it pre-made, I'd love to try some. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35866404,"author":"bertil","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Vietnam records highest ever temperature of 44.1C","text":"Technology Connection is a fantastic YouTube channel that shows how to build all sorts of useful things. Their latest video is on passive cooling and very impressive. [VIDEO] Warning: the \u201csenior-engineer; knows how to make stuff\u201d energy from that channel is off the charts. Enough to warn people on HN.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36595467,"author":"Azrael3000","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Making Radiative Sky Cooling Paint (With Novel CaCO\u2083 Microsphere Synthesis) [video]","text":"You can check out Tech Ingredients video [0] on the same topic, which will give an answer to your question. It is: Yes, it is better than regular white paint [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38238476,"author":"scotty79","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Passive radiative cooling ceramic with high solar reflectivity","text":"Great video about making home-made high reflectivity paint: [VIDEO] Aluminium plate painted with this paint is cooler when exposed to the sun not only than unpainted plate but also ambient air which feels really magical for me.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39586846,"author":"slimsag","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Using a solar oven as a radiant refrigerator at night","text":"You might like NightHawkInLight's videos on the topic[0] and Tech Ingredients[1] - they've been working on making paint using this technology with an at-home DIY process and experimenting with it. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39587074,"author":"20after4","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Using a solar oven as a radiant refrigerator at night","text":"Sort of related: the YouTube channel \"Tech Ingredients\" do some cool things with radiant cooling: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dP1xVpMPn8M":[{"hn_comment_id":7828961,"author":"teeray","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Why Atom Can\u2019t Replace Vim \u2013 Learning the lesson of vi","text":"It's sad that Acme hasn't been mentioned at all. While its mouse-oriented nature is a little strange coming from Vim, there are some very awesome ideas in it. For one: It lets you write plugins in anything you like. This is because all aspects of the editor are exposed as a filesystem a la /proc. Need to create a new window with some custom contents? Create a new file. Other awesome ideas: The text in that custom window can be actions because any text can invoke commands by using another mouse button. Russ Cox has a great video tour of Acme's features here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32142528,"author":"marttt","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Is there other software similar to Vim and Emacs?","text":"Rob Pike's acme text editor for the Plan 9 operating system: [LINK] [VIDEO] (excellent overview of the editor by Russ Cox) And acme's predecessor sam: [LINK] You'll need plan9port to run acme on Linux, though. But the core ideas are very simple and powerful (sam: everything is a huge string; acme: everything is a clickable file) and thus hopefully long-lasting. I would also mention edbrowse, a line-oriented web browser initially for blind people. Maybe this is too far on the fringe, though. It does have a lot of depth (excellent scripting capabilities); it's an amazing project actually: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44366901,"author":"alganet","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell","text":"On tmux, I use split panels more often than tabs. Usually, there will be from 2 to 8 panels of different sizes. This gives me spacial short term memory: I know what each shell is by the panel position. I can zoom on then to bring them full screen (ctrl+b z) if I'm going to do anything that requires more space, then zoom out to the panel arrangement when I'm done. Sometimes I'll name prompts (eg `PS1='stg$ '`), specially when working with ssh, but that's rare. What inspired me to work this way was this video on the acme editor: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4691793,"author":"mdonahoe","month":"2012-10","story_title":"UsesThis: Rob Pike","text":"If you haven't seen acme in action, it is pretty crazy and interesting. Basically it makes heavy use of the mouse, and any typed word can be invoked like a command. Here is a tutorial. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11105853,"author":"muraiki","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Why GNU Emacs?","text":"I found [LINK] (no affiliation) to be the best way to finally learn vim in the sense of actually developing automatic muscle memory. It teaches you how to use vim using a 2d game. It's worlds better than the built in vim tutorial, to say the least. :) For a really different take on editors+shells, check out acme: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12704669,"author":"Esau","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?","text":"I have to say that I had no use for YouTube until I realized that these kind of talks were on there. In addition to what you mentioned, some I like: The Gruqg on OpSec: [LINK] Russ Cox's ACME tutorial: [VIDEO] Jessie Frazelle on running containers on the desktop: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13685241,"author":"black_knight","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Adventures in /usr/bin and the likes","text":"Acme, the text editor from Plan 9 has this. Piping, inputing and outputing from commands are some of the most basic operations there. Check out: - [LINK] - Russ Cox' tour: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13731332,"author":"hawski","month":"2017-02","story_title":"A curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins and resources","text":"Pretty close to what you describe is Acme [0] the text editor/shell from Plan 9. It is mouse oriented edit. You can right click on words to search them in file or open text files, directories or compiler errors. I recommend viewing this [1] introduction video. I miss few things in Acme. A bit more WIMP-y familiarity and a 3 button mouse. That's why I'm working on experimental text editor inspired by Acme [2]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25402588,"author":"rakoo","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Become Shell Literate","text":"It still strikes me that after all this time, the next step in the direction of the author is to use an editor like ACME ( [LINK] ): use the shell to its maximum power, where the output of a command can be edited and used to control the existing interface. Take for instance this video: [LINK] The author shows how the output of \"git status\" is just a text, you can modify the text and add \"git add\" just in front of the files you care about and add the file to the index. There is no linear loop of command input that becomes command output, it's all one big buffer that can feed itself. Consider how there could be another window that perpetually shows the status thanks to a combination of inotify and git status, and you have a git view. Fiddle with the command line argument and you can choose wether to show whitespaces or not, whether to show a summary view or the full diff, or restrict the list to some files. Have another window where you can write some message, and a GitCommit command in the \"Tag\" of the window will use the whole buffer as a git commit message; boom, you have 60% of what I use git-cola for. A bit more information can be seen by one of its creator here: [VIDEO] . The possibilities are truly endless, and I haven't seen anything that resembles it. There is just no editor that embraces your platform the way Acme does. No, Emacs is not the same, because Emacs doesn't integrate with your OS; Emacs is an OS unto itself. You can't really say it's integrated to the OS wh","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33575480,"author":"AceJohnny2","month":"2022-11","story_title":"In Praise of Plan 9","text":"A great way to get a feel for Plan9's concepts and their power is Russ Cox's (of now Go fame) Tour of the Acme Editor: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34061062,"author":"gwp","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Looking for a Programable Text Editor","text":"Acme: [LINK] It can do everything Emacs can but it's so lightweight it almost doesn't exist. Its power comes from the fact that it brings your external tools together. It can be programmed using its filesystem (9p) interface, and extended by adding plumber(4) rules. A demo by Russ Cox: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dPHPNgIihR0":[{"hn_comment_id":43870707,"author":"philipwhiuk","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US","text":"> Fortnite, in my opinion, has been a gold standard for F2P monetization. No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. Hard disagree. The tour-de-force on Fortnite's insane process [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19585309,"author":"pxc","month":"2019-04","story_title":"The golden age of YouTube is over","text":"My favorite corner of YouTube\u2014 lengthy, thoughtful, and often artistic video essays and skits addressing culture and politics\u2014 is flourishing right now. Some examples: Unfolding Ideas \u2013 [VIDEO] ContraPoints \u2013 [LINK] Philosophy Tube \u2013 [LINK] Lindsay Ellis \u2013 [LINK] Innuendo Studios \u2013 [LINK] HBomberguy \u2013 [LINK] and so on. And it seems like it's only in the past couple of years that many of these channels have reached their current levels of artistry and production value. Most stuff on YouTube is trash, but there's plenty else to watch.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19899592,"author":"AlexandrB","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Fortnite is free, but kids are getting bullied into spending money","text":"Make no mistake, this is an entirely intentional consequence of Fortnite's design. There's a great video[1] that goes into detail on the psychological manipulation used in Fortnite's monetization model. It saddens me that a hobby that brought me so much joy as a kid/teenager now preys on the same insecurities it once sheltered me from. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27057453,"author":"gizmo385","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years","text":"I think Errant Signal has a great video [1] dissecting the appeal and breadth of content in Fortnite. It's not my cup of tea, but I certainly don't think you can call it \"shallow\". On the other side, Folding Ideas has a great video [2] (that the Errant Signal video references) dissecting the monetization systems in Fortnite and their negative aspects. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28931896,"author":"AlexandrB","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Facebook plans to change its name as part of company rebrand","text":"If you have 20 minutes, this video[1] presents a good critique without mentioning aesthetics. It's especially notable how central the shop is to the whole experience. I personally found Fortnite to be a huge slog to play - with tons of downtime compared even to games like CS: GO, let alone old-school arena shooters like Q3. The only thing that kept me coming back is the season pass reward tracks and daily missions. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30826974,"author":"bccdee","month":"2022-03","story_title":"I hate what video games have become","text":"Fortnite's a good example about how your two rules aren't enough, actually. Because of the way the game's designed, it pressures its audience (of primarily children) into purchasing microtransactions, to the point where there's been widespread bulling of kids who don't pay for premium Fortnite skins [1]. For a more detailed exploration of the dark side of Fortnite's monetization model, check out \"Manufactured Discontent and Fortnite\" [2]. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35059095,"author":"preinheimer","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Mario Kart Tour Triggers You into Gambling Your Money","text":"First, that was an amazing breakdown of what's happening. If you enjoyed reading that you might like Folding Ideas breakdown of Fortnite - [VIDEO] Second, I've personally become very wary of any mobile app that introduces multiple currency types. There's gold, and rubies, and power balls, and stardust! At some point pretty early on I decide it's not worth it to figure out how much things /actually/ cost and delete the thing. My understanding is that the math shows companies that microtransactions are the winning move over and over again. I hope that eventually there's enough grumpy consumers both parties become worth serving better.","stance":"rec"}],"dPK6t7echuA":[{"hn_comment_id":38166248,"author":"svieira","month":"2023-11","story_title":"In the bad old days we had Punchcards. How did people deal with that?","text":"By thinking about things that were not applicable to the problem domain says Guy Steele in \"How to Think about Parallel Programing: Not!\": [VIDEO] It's a fantastic talk in its own right, but the first bit about fitting a program onto a punch card by self-modifying the code involved (and just how much thought was about fitting-the-program, and how little relatively is involved in the-purpose-of-the-program) is quite eye opening.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36784047,"author":"MathMonkeyMan","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Coroutines for Go","text":"Guy Steele Jr. worked on a language called \"Fortress.\" There are a few good talks that he gives: - (toy problem) [LINK] - (parallelism) [VIDEO] - (languages) [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"dQGnwKBxAKk":[{"hn_comment_id":32307182,"author":"chrisjc","month":"2022-08","story_title":"TSMC Completes Construction of 5nm Fab 21 in Arizona","text":"Asianometry released a video yesterday related to this. [VIDEO] While stating that SMIC might still be around 4-6 years behind the competition, I was completely shocked to hear it was only that. The next few years are going to be some very interesting times.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39927369,"author":"zer00eyz","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Intel discloses $7B operating loss for chip-making unit","text":">> Western FDI constituted negligible part of PRC domestic investment as % of GDP... US made it geopolitically difficult to invest in PRC Foxconn leaving at apples behest (and the Foxconn owner getting vocal with the prc in a rare move). The banking exoudus from Hong Kong (now deep into its 2nd year). And the impact to the GDP... its a literal house of cards with the failure of ever grand with country garden hot on its heels... Meanwhile the retail apocalypse has hit china. High end luxury brands. Out. Grocery chains, shutting down. Finally the iron bowl, the local government workers are getting pay cut. (because land sales are a shitty source of funding)... Post pandemic there was going to be a realignment of global supply chains to be multi source and closer to home. Chinas covid zero policy just accelerated a decisions already made. >> Every component has domestic ventures to replicate. These have been facing up for decades. Without EUV they have no path forward. There is no EUV without Zeiss and ASML. Meanwhile unless your TSMC with their knowledge your going to have dismal yeilds. [VIDEO] Probably one of the best high level insights into tech mfg in Asia. >>PRC hard tech sectors have exploded in employment and compensation. Broad unemployhment 5% which means new graduates get jobs eventually. There's new youth unemployment stats to discount students in tertiary like west, it's fine at ~20%. Youth? [LINK] Tech sector: [LINK] [LINK] The decline of Chinese tech from stem to","stance":"rec"}],"dT9y-KQbqi4":[{"hn_comment_id":33589673,"author":"anyfactor","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Starlink User Terminal Modchip","text":"I think hardware hacking is the coolest stuff ever. That is why we have so many people buying Raspberry Pi-s. I guess the best way to keep your curiosity after X years of age is to start with a really challenging project that you know has steps of micro-success. Also, find a motivating community where you can chill, rant or discuss things with. That's why I am here, you are here. You need to have some level of familiarity with the domain of knowledge so, you know what you can achieve in what amount of time. There needs to be the idea of challenge, definite success and somewhat familiarity involved. My example: I like the old school WSB community. If you know, the tesla-short era. So, I attempted to build tooling that they will enjoy, and I will have fun discussing. My checklist of accomplishments was things I knew can be completed in a few hours. The progressive dopamine hits kept me focused. I was doing great. Why did I fail? Community itself become not the same. Fun discussions were harder to find. Market kept going up, meaning tools that I made is worthless because anything I didn't make sense because stonks go up. A Complex JavaScript project felt harder to write than I anticipated. So again, community, challenge and knowing your limits. If you are looking for hardware hacking motivation, these two videos blew my mind. Joe Grand, crypto wallet hacking: [VIDEO] [LINK] This channel is also good, but it is a bit wacky: [LINK] Edit: Also validation. When WSB got extremely pop","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35955389,"author":"barbazoo","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Kaspersky: Case study: fake hardware cryptowallet (Trezor)","text":"Somewhat related, I was recently pointed to a cool video about someone hacking a Trezor One. Very enjoyable watch. [VIDEO] > I was contacted to hack a Trezor One hardware wallet and recover $2 million worth of cryptocurrency (in the form of THETA).","stance":"rec"}],"dW8Cy6WrO94":[{"hn_comment_id":37162765,"author":"ryneandal","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?","text":"Highly recommend his History of Mathematics lectures on YouTube, if you are interested in that sort of thing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8283922,"author":"askar_yu","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Al-Jazari","text":"slightly OT, but I've enjoyed N J Wildberger's lectures on History of Math: [VIDEO] It's a good coverage of fundamental theorems in Math with well balanced historical touch.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13252658,"author":"PhillyPhuture","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Do Teachers Need to Include the History of Mathematics in Their Teaching? (2003)","text":"I think I recall reading a different version from Leibniz's POV (sp). I have always liked these videos: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22331304,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2020-02","story_title":"A Map of Mathematics","text":"This is a much more entertaining map of mathematics in about 10 minutes [LINK] For a history of mathematics NJ Wildberger's lectures are easy to listen to. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23074868,"author":"chadcmulligan","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Study Mathematics?","text":"Maybe some history of mathematics, to give you some perspective on it all? Something I wish I'd known when I did my degree, Norman Wildberger has a great course: [VIDEO] Visual Group Theory, by Nathan Carter is a book you can get something from no matter your level of maths, imho. If you know some linear algebra, Gilbert Strang's course on YouTube may be interesting - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41258620,"author":"mbivert","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Galois Theory","text":"> I'd be interested in any recommendations for math history tomes like that. Not a book, but FWIW, I've enjoyed a few videos from Norman Wildberger's \"Math History\" playlist[0]. Interestingly, he has a unconventional view of infinite processes in mathematics, a point of view that used to be common about a century ago or so. I'm sure knowing some amount of history is useful, but there must be a limit to how much of it is practically useful though. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dX649lnKAU0":[{"hn_comment_id":18968519,"author":"canthonytucci","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Odd History of the SD Logo [video]","text":"So happy to see Technology Connections here, one of my absolute favorite YouTube channels and one that I have learned a lot from. This one on \"how analog tv works\" I thought was especially good. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47639854,"author":"AlexDragusin","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Why Inventing Color TV Was So Difficult [video]","text":"Alec Watson from Technology Connections did an entire series on this subject: (How Analog Color TV Works: The Beginnings) [VIDEO] Then the playlist on TV stuff: [LINK] Don't blame me for the rabbit hole :P","stance":"rec"}],"dX9CGRZwD-w":[{"hn_comment_id":44349303,"author":"throwaway31131","month":"2025-06","story_title":"How Are Transistors Assembled Inside a CPU? [video]","text":"In the description they say a video on lithography is on the way. In the mean time maybe this one from the same channel: [VIDEO] Great channel","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45973226,"author":"itopaloglu83","month":"2025-11","story_title":"\u201cOne Student One Chip\u201d Course Homepage","text":"Just to add to this, the Branch Education YouTube channel has great videos detailing the manufacturing process as well, here's one for starters: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dXdoim96v5A":[{"hn_comment_id":14457496,"author":"bogomipz","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Build an 8-Bit Computer from Scratch","text":"This is really amazing. In addition to the interesting project this individual has a great gift for articulating everything in a concise manner and with a very pleasant cadence. What a great teacher. Thanks for sharing. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of this series. If you only have a limited amount of time I would highly recommend the control logic video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34980599,"author":"dkersten","month":"2023-03","story_title":"AMD ymm registers are rolling back","text":"I found these Ben Eater YouTube videos very useful to understanding what microcode is and how it works: 8-bit CPU control logic [VIDEO] 8-bit CPU reprogramming microcode [LINK] In short, the microcode instructions are a bunch of flags that enable different parts of the processor during that clock cycle (eg is data being loaded off the bus into a register? Is the adder active? Etc), so to implement an instruction that says add value from memory a to value from memory b and store in memory c, the microcode might be: copy memory a onto bus, store bus to register, copy memory b to bus, store b to register, add both register and put result online bus, store value on bus to memory c. (In a hypothetical simple cpu like the one Ben built, a real one is obviously much more sophisticated). So in Ben\u2019s toy CPU, the instructions are just indices nto an EEPROM that stored the control logic but pattern \u201cmicrocode\u201d for each instruction, and IIRC each instruction takes however many cycles the longest instruction requires (in real life that would be optimised of course). This is also how some processors like the 6502 have \u201cundocumented\u201d instructions: they\u2019re just bit patterns enabling parts of the processor that weren\u2019t planned or intended. So you can see that it may be possible to fix a bug in instructions by changing the control logic in this way, even though the actual units being controlled are hard wired. I guess it very much depends on what the bug is. Of course I only know how Ben\u2019s mi","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36752105,"author":"pests","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode","text":"Ben Eater on YouTube has recreated an 8-bit computer on breadboards. [VIDEO] That is the start of the videos where the control logic gets microcoded. Its pretty basic but over the next few videos he comes up with about 10 different OPCODES and programs their microcode (a series of control logic activations). Its pretty amazing to see it all come together and work in the end.","stance":"rec"}],"d_FEaFgJyfA":[{"hn_comment_id":23250414,"author":"seshagiric","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The silence of the owls","text":"To really appreciate how silent Owls are as compared to other birds, see this excellent video from BBC: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48356457,"author":"Amorymeltzer","month":"2026-06","story_title":"The Genius of the Barn Owl's Feathers","text":"I also love the longer clip with the bed of feathers: [VIDEO] It gives a good visual as to how much air is being moved/disturbed during the flight/glide of each.","stance":"rec"}],"d_zt3kGW1NM":[{"hn_comment_id":18292032,"author":"mistersquid","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World [video]","text":"Giridharadas talk is explosive in terms of its ideas. From what I can tell, he's not pulling any punches even though he's been invited to speak on a Google campus (Boston). At 29:03 Giridharadas challenges his audience to demand that Google (and other Silicon Valley companies) generate an annual political disclosure to its employees, the very people in his audience. [0] As a side note, Giridharadas is very clear and measured in his articulation, and I found that speeding the video to 1.5 times normal rate to be a good delivery speed (YMMV). What Giridharadas says prior to the timecode I referenced is also provocative and politically risky. I can't yet comment on his entire talk, but the quality of the first half the video is superb. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19221081,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Is Philanthropy Anti-Democratic?","text":"One of the best explanations why \"philanthropy\" and \"novel (disrupting), win-win solutions\" for systemic problems is highly anti-democratic (and inciting class warfare) is Anand Giridharadas's recent talk[1] at Google[2]. I strongly encourage everyone - especialy anyone employed at Google - to watch it. [1] [VIDEO] [2] Google is the perfect venue for this talk.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19313330,"author":"CharlesColeman","month":"2019-03","story_title":"The Oppression of the Supermajority","text":"> But a system of philanthropy is inherently biased insofar as since donors can and do choose charitable causes that match their own preferences. Anand Giridharadas goes pretty deeply into that idea in this talk that he did at Google. I highly recommend watching it, I thought it was elucidating. [VIDEO] I want to read his book \"Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World\" but I haven't gotten to it yet.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26978300,"author":"Shacklz","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Artist faked being a billionaire to photograph New York City\u2019s best views","text":"> It's way nicer on our side, where we do win-win deals, and know to be happy, the people around us need to be happy. If you would like this world-view to undergo some critical analysis, I strongly recommend Anand Giridharadas' take in \"Winners take All\" (condensed in this google-talk here: [VIDEO] ). He specifically addresses the negative points of the \"win-win\"-mentality, and in my opinion, makes a strong point that a society built on a \"win-win\" culture is bound to be doomed.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48393774,"author":"abuob","month":"2026-06","story_title":"American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn","text":"If you're genuinely curious, a few suggestions that I personally found incredibly enlightening: Anand Giridhardas, Winners Take All: The book is fantastic, there's also his now infamous google talk where he talks about dismantling google: [VIDEO] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st century: Probably the most comprehensive (but at times also longwinded) outline on how wealth inequality comes to be, why it's not good for society and how it could be adressed","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18347654,"author":"IBM","month":"2018-10","story_title":"An Alternative History of Silicon Valley Disruption","text":"I think you'll like this talk by Anand Giridharadas [1]. He makes the point that the tech industry still thinks they're the pirates and don't realize that they're the navy. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18784025,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Adding Up the Cost of Tax Breaks for Big Tech\u2019s Data Centers (2016)","text":"> \u201cwin win\u201d (company gets subsidy, area gets jobs) Anand Giridharadas recently gave an a great talk[1] (at Google!) in which he explains how \"win win\" is a charade used to set the framing of the conversation. Framing a plan (like a subsidy) as something that benefits everyone has good optics, but it implicitly creates a framing that only considers that plan. (it's either this plan or \"you get nothing\"). Without the restricted framing, the choice isn't a binary \"subsidies or nothing\"; there are many ways that money could be spent. (e.g. maybe going without that business and investing in education or infrastructure would provide a greater benefit). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18994103,"author":"sleazy_b","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Down with philanthrocapitalism, says an entertaining polemic","text":"I read this book and, to be honest, did not enjoy it very much. It consists largely of profiles of people involved in this sort of philanthrocapitalism. The main theme seems to be that the ultra-wealthy have coopted the work of social institutions in such a way as to undermine efforts for truly revolutionary change, that is change that might threaten them. The premise is interesting but the content is pretty boring. I got tired of reading about people whom the author believes to be mislead or malicious or otherwise on the wrong path. For those interested he gave a talk at Google in Cambridge that was pretty good. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19357371,"author":"Shacklz","month":"2019-03","story_title":"GoFundMe CEO: \u2018Gigantic Gaps\u2019 in Health System Showing Up in Crowdfunding","text":"For those interested, he held a Talk at Google about this topic: [VIDEO] I thought it rather interesting that he was able to hold this kind of talk at Google - after all, his audience there probably consists of people that are probably part of the \"winners\" he is talking about.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26602202,"author":"Shacklz","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Elite philanthropy mainly self-serving","text":"Anand Ghiridaradas' Book \"Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World\" is very insightful in that regard. He held a google talk ( [VIDEO] ) about it that got a bit of notoriety since he apparently ruffled a few feathers there.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27565419,"author":"Shacklz","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021","text":"Public schools work well throughout the majority of the developed world - the US seems to be a notable exception. Anand Giridharadas addresses this in his infamous google-talk quite nicely I think: [VIDEO] (I'm linking this talk on HN way too often, but it just seems perfectly fitting so very often)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27570080,"author":"beckman466","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Seeding by Ceding","text":"\"These new philanthropists bring to charity an \u201centrepreneurial disposition\u201d, Hay and Muller wrote in a 2014 paper, yet one that they suggest has been \u201cdiverting attention and resources away from the failings of contemporary manifestations of capitalism\u201d, and may also be serving as a substitute for public spending withdrawn by the state. Essentially, what we are witnessing is the transfer of responsibility for public goods and services from democratic institutions to the wealthy, to be administered by an executive class. In the CEO society, the exercise of social responsibilities is no longer debated in terms of whether corporations should or shouldn\u2019t be responsible for more than their own business interests. Instead, it is about how philanthropy can be used to reinforce a politico-economic system that enables such a small number of people to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth. Zuckerberg\u2019s investment in solutions to the Bay Area housing crisis is an example of this broader trend.\" [1] Although with your \"in excruciating detail\" it sounds like you've been presented with the evidence before, yet you are somehow unwilling to admit the failings of the system. This last part is meant as an observation and not as a negative value judgement. This video with Anand Giridharadas is also great: [VIDEO] , as well as his book 'Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World'. [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27967295,"author":"brigandish","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Disinformation for hire, a shadow industry, is quietly booming","text":"There's a talk[1] by Anand Ghiridharadas about his book[2] - ironically, given at Google - which has many excellent insights, among them that local news has been hollowed out and destroyed by Google and the bigger fish are struggling, leading to this race to the bottom for clicks. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"da1vvigy5tQ":[{"hn_comment_id":10713071,"author":"montecarl","month":"2015-12","story_title":"What Your Microbiome Wants for Dinner","text":"I like your scientific approach. It would be awesome to have continuous monitoring of blood sugar, heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure, and other vital signs. From what I have read, early type 2 diabetes can be completely controlled via diet changes as you have already started to see. The amount of insulin your body needs to make is by far the largest for carbohydrates, then somewhat less for protein, and then near zero form fat. I liked this talked which summed up the argument for treating diabetes (type II at least) with diet and not drugs: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12279729,"author":"thisisananth","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Machine Learning and Ketosis","text":"This matches my experience of weight loss using high fat diet. I started it after hearing Sarah Hallberg's Tedx talk. [VIDEO] For a vegetarian, starting and continuing the high fat low carb diet is difficult. Are there any resources for more vegetarian recipes for high fat low carb food? The article was very impressive. I liked the graphs and presentation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14572975,"author":"mf2hd","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Coconut oil isn't healthy and it's never been healthy","text":"Bullshit, the problem is not fat, it's the carbs. Watch this video: [LINK] David Diamond, Ph.D., of the University of South Florida College of Arts and Sciences shares his personal story about his battle with obesity. Diamond shows how he lost weight and reduced his triglycerides by eating red meat, eggs and butter. This one is not heart problem related, but still interesting: [VIDEO] Can a person be \"cured\" of Type 2 Diabetes? Dr. Sarah Hallberg provides compelling evidence that it can, and the solution is simpler than you might think. So after learning a lot about it I just started ketogenic diet a couple of weeks ago (very low carb, high fat, moderate protein). Everything I read about it says MCT is good, so coconut oil is good. Pure MCT is much better but it's \u00a318 half litre so I'm not going to cook with that. KCKO :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24969195,"author":"timbit42","month":"2020-11","story_title":"As an older guy I've finally figured out weight-loss","text":"You can but you will be hungry and it will be very difficult. You want to avoid carbs and sugar because carbs get turned into sugar and they spike your sugar levels, causing your pancreas to produce insulin to tell your body to store the excess sugar in your fat cells. Then when the excess sugar is all stored, you get the crash and you're hungry again. This is why people want to snack between meals. Instead, avoid carbs and eat proteins and healthy fats. You won't get the sugar spike and crash, and will last hours without getting hungry. It is easy to eat only twice a day this way. This video of Dr. Sarah Hallberg explains it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30401622,"author":"timbit42","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories","text":"If you find dieting difficult because you get hungry, look at the keto diet, which reduces hunger. When you eat carbs your body turns them to sugar because that's all it can do with it. Then your pancreas notices there is too much sugar in your body and tells it to store it in the fat cells for later use as energy. When the sugar is cleared out of your body, you become hungry again. This process only takes a couple of hours which is why people who eat carbs get hungry between meals. Instead, eat healthy fats. They don't cause your sugar levels to spike so they don't cause you to have that sugar crash and hungry feeling. You can remain feeling full for 8 hours on fat. Of course you also need proteins so make sure you get enough. Proteins do cause your sugar levels to go up some, but no where near as much as carbs do so they don't cause a crash either. This video of Dr. Sarah Hallberg explains this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30606856,"author":"timbit42","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The Hacker's Diet","text":"The good parts of keto are the reductions in carbs which reduces blood sugar, and that by focusing on healthy fats and protein, you don't get the sugar spike and crash and then feel hungry. Because you can go between meals, or even two meals without feeling hungry, it makes IF easier. I recommend this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"db-7J5OaSag":[{"hn_comment_id":16195151,"author":"mmanfrin","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Relativ \u2013 A VR headset that you can build yourself for $100","text":"I think the less cynical answer is that HTC often has good ideas for physical devices but then often fails to follow through and iterate well. They're also just struggling as a company in general. But damn, so I 1000% agree with being bummed about it not being the hackers headset. I preordered the Vive because of a VR video of a guy programming the environment he was in at the moment: [VIDEO] I would love to use a VR IDE some day.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23704532,"author":"moron4hire","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Holographic optics for thin and lightweight virtual reality","text":"Part 2: That was right about when Google Cardboard hit. That was 2014? I saw it during a Google I/O livestream and just so happened to have a few lenses left over from some still-photography experiments involving lasers and... never mind, another thing that went nowhere, I just had some lenses around. I quit watching the Google I/O stream and immediately hacked together a new cardboard box viewer with the lenses. Saw Versailles, which I have never been to, but I have been to Linderhof Palace in Bavaria, which is modelled after Versailles. Saw the Galapagos, where my wife and I had just spent our honeymoon about a year or so before. I immediately saw the experience was closer on the spectrum to really being somewhere than it was to seeing it on TV. So I'm sitting there, this cardboard box in my hand, this powerful smartphone in my hand, thinking to myself \"I have to do this, I have to make these things\". But all I knew was C# and JavaScript. Unity was garbage at the time. It's still garbage, but also back then. I had tried my hand at native app development and just didn't have the patience for Xcode or Android Studio. So I started hacking with Three.js and JavaScript. I ended up making the first JavaScript API for VR, releasing the first version about a month before the first announcements of WebVR. Then I saw RiftSketch ( [VIDEO] ). It blew my mind. Started chatting with people. Brian Pieris talked about wishing he could get syntax highlighting into the app, and complained ab","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8749159,"author":"digi_owl","month":"2014-12","story_title":"My Adventures with \u201c4K\u201d 2160p and Linux","text":"> Basically, I won't be satisfied until I get the holodeck... or a neural jack. How about a Rift work space? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8974562,"author":"corysama","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Show HN: Primrose \u2013 a text editor that runs in a WebGL texture","text":"Yep. To glimpse the potential for this, people should check out Peiris's demo vid: [VIDEO] If anyone is interested in working on something like this, there's a very small community germinating in [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9703846,"author":"jfoster","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Oculus Rift","text":"It doesn't (yet) seem particularly comfortable, but this was an impressive demo of someone coding their environment in the Rift. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12935147,"author":"mmanfrin","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Wind Waker Graphics Analysis","text":"Does anyone know of any other threejs talk/walkthrough posts? I love watching the development of things with it, like this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dcjkezf1ARY":[{"hn_comment_id":28140076,"author":"mprovost","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Console Desktop Guide (2018)","text":"If you haven't seen the work Nick Black is doing with notcurses [0] it's pretty amazing to see what it can do with bitmapped graphics in a modern terminal. Makes me wonder if we're ready for a resurgence of TUIs with full motion graphics. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29452385,"author":"gadrev","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Hacking the planet with Notcurses: a guide to TUIs (2020) [pdf]","text":"Ok, if you're looking into notcurses, you may want to watch this: [VIDEO] (~ 6') the WTF effect that video had on me lasted quite a while. I still can't describe it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28195019,"author":"dankamongmen","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Notcurses: Blingful TUIs and Character Graphics","text":"hey there! this is my project of close to two years. happy to answer any questions anyone might have! if you haven't seen it, you might enjoy the Notcurses III hype video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30706206,"author":"easygenes","month":"2022-03","story_title":"TUIs","text":"It\u2019s buried in that list, but Notcurses is fast and challenges assumptions about what can be done in a terminal. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dfY5ZQDzC5s":[{"hn_comment_id":13890865,"author":"phumbe","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Enroute Airbus A380 wake flips Challenger business jet upside down","text":"For anyone interested, there are several great youtube videos[1-4] that show the wakes (the wingtip vortices in particular) created by various aircraft. This incident brings the Reduced Vertical Separation Minima (RVSM)[5] into question. Strategic Lateral Offset Procedure (SLOP)[6] can be used used to avoid such incidents. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29027864,"author":"ertemplin","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Incorrect Lift Theory","text":"Regarding your 2nd answer, taking off quickly after another aircraft has departed is difficult because of wake turbulence. The most hazardous part of wake turbulence is the spiraling wingtip vortices which can be observed in this neat video: [VIDEO] One notable wake turbulence incident was in 2006 at Boeing Field in Seattle where a Cessna 172 and Boeing 747 were both on final approach for parallel runways. The Cessna 172 got flipped almost upside down and recovered 150 feet over the terrain: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"djB9oK6pkbA":[{"hn_comment_id":27014744,"author":"zeotroph","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Machine Thinking on the Printing Press: The Screws of Disruption [video]","text":"How the screw of the wine press was the central part of Gensfleisch/Gutenbergs invention which allowed all the other previously existing ones to finally come together (though I also read that certain advances in metallurgy were also essential). Also see the previous video on screws, a much underappreciated invention. It then describes how the availability of books made propagation of existing technology and newer developments possible and faster. The only other comparable moments in history are probably the evolution of spoken language, the invention of writing and most recently the internet. Also much recommended from that Chanel are the videos on the \"Origins of Precision\"[1], and \"The 1751 Machine that Made Everything\"[2]. 1: [LINK] 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22214440,"author":"zeotroph","month":"2020-02","story_title":"The Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris is a trove of cunning inventions","text":"If you can't visit but are interested in the topic and the beginning of the industrial revolution in general, the YouTube channel \"Machine Thinking\" has a video about this[1][2] and related topics. E.g. in another video he explains how to get a perfectly plan surface from scratch: Rubbing two somewhat flat surfaces together until they are smooth enough does not work, you might end up with a subtly concave/convex combination. But do that with three surfaces and the result can only be perfectly flat, though it will take quite some time. [1]: [LINK] - Paris' Temple To Science - Part I [2]: [VIDEO] - The 1751 Machine that Made Everything","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36757930,"author":"roelschroeven","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Backyard Metalcasting","text":"Also Machine Thinking's videos \"The 1751 Machine that Made Everything\" ( [VIDEO] ), \"Origins of Precision\" ( [LINK] ) and some others on his channel.","stance":"rec"}],"dljNabciEGg":[{"hn_comment_id":36962621,"author":"pxc","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Emacs is my new window manager","text":"This is the blog of Howard Abrams, who also has a great YouTube channel full of Emacs demos and tutorials. His video on literate programming for DevOps via Emacs' Org-mode was very impressive and inspiring to me. It's my favorite. :) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10281948,"author":"brudgers","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Emacs Artist Mode","text":"Emacs org-mode supports a lot of languages [1] and you can mix and match within a file. Howard Abrams literate devops is an interesting example of what org-mode code blocks can do. [2][3] Org-mode also allows embedding images or source blocks in languages like LaTeX that resolve to rendered images. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10637911,"author":"julienchastang","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Worg, the Org-Mode Community","text":"I use org-mode everyday, as well. And the org-babel literate programming environment is a game changer, and something I find new uses for all the time. Check out this literate devops video [1] But I share your sentiment for the stability issues which I think reflect problems with emacs in general. One day, you update your packages and suddenly your favorite mode does not work anymore and you have to spend 1/2 day figuring out why literally digging into the source with edebug. Because of this I take the following measures. I use melpa-stable which as the name indicates are the stable versions of emacs packages. (The problem is not all packages are in melpa-stable so you have to deal with that too.) Also, I manage my own version of org-mode cloned from the canonical org-mode repo that I update when I decide and I can back out of if there are problems. Finally, I run emacs within docker which allows me to freeze dry and rehydrate environments that are completely under my control so that I don\u2019t encounter problems with a changing environment either. Here is my literate org-babel .emacs, if interested [2] (I don\u2019t have the Dockerfile on github, yet, unfortunately.) [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10926067,"author":"julienchastang","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Org-Mode for Writing: Structure and Focus","text":"I could go on and on about the benefits of org. And the org-Babel full fledged literate programming environment is another game changer. I used org for a scientific conference I attended recently. From one org file, I could provision a VM in the cloud and get various Docker containers running via tangling with plenty of human friendly exposition. (See tramp mode too.) I could then export that file as an extended abstract via Latex export (conforming to the conference formatting guidelines) and also produce attractive HTML (see ReadTheOrg). Also checkout this literate devops video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15773801,"author":"deerpig","month":"2017-11","story_title":"What Is a Computational Essay?","text":"Literate programing is used to tangle text and code. You tangle the document and the code blocks are pulled out to create a working program. But Orgmode's Babel, iPython and Wolfram's Computational Essays are literate computing, with code being executed in the document. Howard Abrams has extended the concept to create literate devops ( [VIDEO] ) using orgmode babel where the code in the document is used to configure software running on local or remote servers. I use Babel as part of my daily workflow. Very cool stuff.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17007811,"author":"unhammer","month":"2018-05","story_title":"ZSH, tmux, Emacs and SSH: A copy-paste story","text":"All these workarounds sound like a reason to use start using tramp more (apropos, [VIDEO] / [LINK] is a pretty neat demo of combining org-babel and tramp). ----- There is also emamux, which seems to be able to copy from tmux: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17254999,"author":"ScarZy","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Remote Only","text":"This is the main reason I want to try and learn Emacs, OrgMode, and Babel. The stuff that Howard Abrahams discusses on the below video is something I think would be highly successful in a remote environment. Documenting your workflow as you go, including commands and output, then emailing it to your team that day or uploading it to a document store/gitbook: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23723594,"author":"elviejo","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What do you use to write documentation? LaTeX? Word? Markdown?","text":"Org-mode in Emacs. Because it enables to do literate programming. In this video [0] by Howard Abrahams you can see how to wave the instructions and the execution of them with Emacs. Another advantage is that you can mix your diagrams (in plantuml or ASCII art) with your code, in the same org-mode file. Gitub displays .org files the same way it does Markdown. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31029794,"author":"kkfx","month":"2022-04","story_title":"A Dotfile History","text":"Personally I've failed with Emacs years ago, just tried it and decide that's a heavy and horrid mess, I re-tried it few years ago when I see it in action and was at that point in time that I realize it's power. Emacs is one-tool one-job BUT the tool is just a function and functions can be combined like unix commands in pipes but in far more powerful manner and with far less overhead. Try seeing this: [LINK] or this [VIDEO] the real issue when starting without a friend of video-tutorials is that Emacs defaults are barebone and really old, the juicy things come only when you discover them. The power of Emacs is not much Emacs itself but the classic desktop paradigm: anything is integrated so anything can be combined. You type some math in a mail? Why not have it rendered by LaTeX, since your system do have LaTeX support installed and why not solve the ode you are typing since you have a CAS? Why being tied on GUIs to cut&paste as the sole IPC? That's is. Is extremely powerful but so different than actual environments that most users fail to comprehend without seeing it in action...","stance":"rec"}],"dngqR9gcDDw":[{"hn_comment_id":34209667,"author":"olalonde","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?","text":"It took me a long time to grasp market economics. I knew it worked somehow but I didn't quite understand why. What really made it click was Milton Friedman's \"Free to Choose\" TV series[0]. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41402877,"author":"maerF0x0","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Judge rules $400M algorithmic system illegally denied Medicaid benefits","text":"That is also a fantastic comparison point. The same ideal is part of the idea behind UBI replacing the social welfare bureaucracy. I found this documentary \"Freedom to choose\" to be really interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"doN4t5NKW-k":[{"hn_comment_id":10164878,"author":"sandyarmstrong","month":"2015-09","story_title":"ISS Virtual Tour","text":"This is awesome. If you'd like a live video tour, I recently sat down with my 5 year old to watch a wonderful video from NASA [0]. They talk about some of the facilities in a way that kids can understand, and there's something wondrous about seeing how they move around, regularly changing their orientations, etc. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10725866,"author":"momavujisic","month":"2015-12","story_title":"What it's like to live on the International Space Station","text":"There's a great 25 minute tour of the ISS by Sunita Williams on NASA's YouTube channel along with commentary on how life works up there. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"doaQC-S8de8":[{"hn_comment_id":20948104,"author":"_hardwaregeek","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting (2017)","text":"What I love about Every Frame a Painting is the depth of its research. It's quite clear that the creators had an extensive knowledge of film. The videos always include wonderfully selected interviews with the filmmakers that emphasize the point far more than just a person talking. The Deakins interview in Shot | Reverse Shot taken from Cinematographer Style is a nice example^[1]. Or Sidney Lumet's interview in the Kurosawa video^[2]. Taking from film criticism solidifies the video's arguments, creates an amazing rhythm to the videos (Tony and Taylor are clearly great editors) and also prevents the \"annoying person endlessly lecturing to me about film\" feeling that I get with some other channels. I've thought about doing videos of my own on various topics (the usage of eyes and glances in Il Posto, Kieslowski's poetry, the reflexivity of In the Mood for Love, etc.) but the YouTube film criticism industry is pretty saturated. Perhaps a different format? [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23435884,"author":"Daub","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Akira Kurosawa\u2019s hand-painted storyboards","text":"If you havne't already done so, check out the wonderful commentary by 'Every Frame a Painting': [VIDEO] (Composing Movement) [LINK] (The Geometry of a Scene) I don't normally recommend YouTube channels for film commentary, but this channel is very good indeed.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19692206,"author":"yarapavan","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the most educational,interesting or insightful vids on YouTube?","text":"Selected Twitter responses: - Why Planes Don't Fly Faster, [LINK] - Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement, [VIDEO] - Richard Hamming: \"Learning to Learn\", [LINK] - Rise and fall of Third Reich, [LINK] - The men who built America, [LINK] -History of the World, [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30188508,"author":"SAI_Peregrinus","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Over-reliance on CGI in movies","text":"I think we're sort of aggressively agreeing with each other. It's not the CGI (or lack thereof) that makes the modern superhero films bad (except as a sort of demoscene-with-infinite-budget visual spectacle where they're great). It's the writing. To a lesser extent the cinematography is poor, which makes it hard to really feel what's going on. There's lots of unnecessary camera movement, frenetic jump cuts during fights, and all the colors are dull and muted. Every Frame a Painting has a good video on Kurosawa's use of movement in his films, and actually uses The Avengers as a contrasting example and how the cinematography & direction makes the scene in question feel meaningless.[1] So I agree that it's not the CGI that's the problem. It's the writing, the direction, the cinematography, the editing, the music[2] (though they improved since the linked video came out, directly in response to it), etc. The films are bad in many ways, but the CGI isn't really one of them. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37219116,"author":"keiferski","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Can\u2019t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You\u2019re Not Alone","text":"Part of this, I think, is also the shift to dialogue-based scripts. It reminds me of this excellent Every Frame a Painting video that compares Kurosawa\u2019s effective use of movement with the barely-moving, dialogue-driven Avengers films. A huge percentage of films/shows today are what Hitchcock called, \u201cphotographs of people talking\u201d and aren\u2019t actually cinematic. If they were more cinematic, hearing every line of dialogue wouldn\u2019t be as important to understanding the story. Start at about 4:25: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"doz1QJ7LwjA":[{"hn_comment_id":21396313,"author":"ZeroGravitas","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Show HN: SlowTube \u2013 Learn songs by ear by slowing them down","text":"Other slow music worth checking out, in some other genres: Jolene by Dolly Parton slowed down to 33rpm: [VIDEO] And some slow covers: Vanilla Fudge (they do a few like this): [LINK] Issac Hayes 18bmin cover of By The Time I get to Pheonix: [LINK] Dick Slessig Combo doing a 42 minute version of Wichita Lineman: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38206188,"author":"jihadjihad","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Sad clown paradox","text":"It's a great song. Hearing it at 33 rpm [0] is a different experience still: it's almost more plaintive, more haunting. Worth a listen IMO. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dpw9EHDh2bM":[{"hn_comment_id":20929537,"author":"kybishop","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Frustrations with React Hooks","text":"Have you seen the ReactConf talk on hooks? [1] It's absolutely worth the watch, even if you're somewhat familiar with hooks. They go through the pitfalls of class-based components and how hooks solve them. It more-or-less boils down to: 1. class-based components force your lifecycle logic to live in disparate locations. 2. Class-based hooks are obtuse with hidden gotchas whereas pure functions tell you exactly what they're doing. 3. A whole class of unergenomic solutions disappears when you use hooks. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32920506,"author":"jasongi","month":"2022-09","story_title":"React I love you, but you're bringing me down","text":"You aren\u2019t the only person, I\u2019ve certainly heard it before. But I\u2019m yet to hear a convincing rebuttal to Mixins Considered Harmful [1], the hooks talk [2] or the Motivation section [3] on the announcement. The arguments I\u2019ve heard is that it is \u201ccleaner\u201d, \u201cmore understandable\u201d or the OO style is preferred. Some developers feel uncomfortable with hook magic because it introduces a more niche programming concept than OO (e.g stateful functions). I don\u2019t find these arguments compelling. What the React team managed to do was reproduce the same functionality as class components while decreasing the footguns associated with them. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] 3. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39006578,"author":"AndrewOMartin","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Learn React or Vue?","text":"Just watch the video from ReactConf 2018 where hooks are introduced (by the dude who built them). You can play along at home quite easily by getting started either with \"npx create-react-app myApp\" or a simple html file with one script tag to download react from a CDN and one script tag for your code. Talk: [VIDEO] By the end of the talk you'll probably be leaning towards \"this sounds cool, I'd like to play around with it\" or \"that sounds like cursed incantations for the damned\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43548882,"author":"jfcisco","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Show HN: Nue \u2013 Apps lighter than a React button","text":"Hooks require less boilerplate to set up and reuse stateful logic across components If you havent watched it yet, the talk that introduced hooks explains much better than I can: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"dqQw05Mr63E":[{"hn_comment_id":29306527,"author":"joshlemer","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Stroad","text":"Exactly. This video makes that point so crystal clear: [VIDEO] Car-dependent suburbia is about imposing your car on everyone else while not allowing anyone else to impose their cars on you. It is inherently selfish city design.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29312982,"author":"drivers99","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Stroad","text":"There's a great video about that too. \"The Suburban Traffic Contradiction\" by Oh The Urbanity. [VIDEO] One of the interesting points is that there is a commonality between those suburbans and people who want walkable urban areas: few of us want to deal with the problems of lots of cars driving around us.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29961401,"author":"nayuki","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Why Galesburg has no money","text":"There's a good video explaining how urban and suburban residents alike want less traffic in their neighborhoods: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35407714,"author":"nayuki","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Maps show how parking lots \u201ceat\u201d U.S. cities","text":"Correct. Suburbanites want the freedom to drive everywhere but also limit through-traffic and noise on the street their house exists on. That's why twisty roads and culs de sac exist. \"Oh The Urbanity!\" argues this point elegantly in: [VIDEO] \"The Suburban Traffic Contradiction\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41105194,"author":"ryukafalz","month":"2024-07","story_title":"What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street","text":"Yes, cul-de-sacs are a design element that can help to reduce the negative impacts of cars - in the immediate area. Though if you build an area out of cul-de-sacs with no bike/pedestrian shortcuts, you end up not being able to practically get around without a car, so the area around the cul-de-sacs needs lots of car infrastructure. (Which is not so great if your kids are unlucky enough to live across a wide arterial from their friends from school.) But ultimately yes, reducing through traffic can be a good thing, and there are ways to do that in cities too. There's a good video on this here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"drv3BP0Fdi8":[{"hn_comment_id":8563839,"author":"Lifescape","month":"2014-11","story_title":"The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014)","text":"Maybe depression can't be 'fixed', but you can learn to understand it and find ways to ignore it. This helped me: [VIDEO] It's different for everyone so it might not make a difference.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27545105,"author":"jointpdf","month":"2021-06","story_title":"I will never not talk about my depression","text":"On the topic of destigmatization, I recommend this Robert Sapolsky lecture (on the neurobiology of depression) to everyone to understand just how physical and systemic depression is: [LINK] . For understanding how lifestyle changes can help treat depression, I recommend this: [VIDEO] . He contradicts the author on the point of exercise\u2014it is one of the most potent medicines (though hard to administer to yourself when you\u2019re depressed). Reflecting on my own (extensive) experiences with depression and its co-conspirators, I think there are two deep fears that inhibit seeking or sticking with treatment: 1. What happens if I don\u2019t get better? Then I\u2019m hopeless. 2. What happens if I do get better (and it\u2019s not enough, or I ruin my progress with a relapse)? I don\u2019t have a definitive answer to either, but reasonable responses include: trying and failing feels better than languishing/surrendering (not trying is the only thing that\u2019s likely hopeless), it is (or should be ) OK to make nonlinear progress in managing chronic illness (depression or otherwise), and the universe/existence is at once magnificent and meaningless so just try to relax and enjoy the ride with your fellow creatures.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29778191,"author":"rancar2","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Loving Someone with Depression","text":"There are programs, non-profits, and alternative treatments depending on the country/region/state/city. If you are able to send US text messages for free to/from the US, you can use X2AI\u2019s chatbot for free by texting \u201cYC\u201d to (650) 825-9634. It will at least get you access to CBT coaching, which has shown to help. Medication (once one finds the right one for themselves) helps many, but here is a good TED talk on approaches without medication: [VIDEO] Disclosure: I know the founder.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30927294,"author":"hsn915","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Beating depression with or without anti-depressants?","text":"I can't say I had full on depression, but I did go through periods where I spent more time in bad moods than good moods, and I didn't have a clear idea of where I was going in life. I remember watching this video [VIDEO] Two points I remember clearly taking from this lecture: - Omega-3. Make sure they are 1) high quality 2) high EPA content 3) over 1000mg of EPA per day - Walking. If you can spend more than one hour walking, do it. The other things I sort of knew, like sunlight and social connection. They are also very important, obviously. So, try to find a way, any way, to have some sort of social connection. Nothing deep. Just very casual and occasional. I used to go to meetup.com and look for things that interested me. At the time it was: pickup soccer, and language exchange. Not only I was interested in them, but they don't require social skills to participate in. You don't need to approach anyone. For language exchange, there's usually seat arrangement so the organizers will decide for you who you will talk to. So it's not like you're in a bar and have to work up the courage to approach people. This is very important. Same with soccer. There's no social skill required. The organizer will manage assigning you to a team. One thing to keep in mind: when you go to a meetup, do not talk about having depression. It's not a positive/welcoming topic. Keep it light and casual. And finally, this is just my personal take. It's possible that your job itself is a source of depressio","stance":"rec"}],"ds77e3aO9nA":[{"hn_comment_id":6563326,"author":"chubot","month":"2013-10","story_title":"The Government Shutdown Has Revealed Silicon Valley\u2019s Dysfunction Fetish","text":"EDIT: Watch this video for details! [VIDEO] Key quotes around 8:30 - 9:00, but the whole thing is excellent. DARPA was funding all sorts of different networking and operating systems, which in those days were all incompatible. But they wanted them to cooperate, hence open source BSD and the Internet. Silicon Valley doesn't get this kind of cooperation. In stark contrast, a proven business tactic is to undermine cooperation by poisoning open standards (e.g. embrace and extend).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7610225,"author":"networked","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Your favorite YouTube channels?","text":"BSDs, game design and computer history: \u2014 [LINK] collects talks from various BSD conferences. An interesting non-technical talk from the collection is \"A Narrative History of BSD\" by Marshall Kirk McKusick ( [VIDEO] ). \u2014 [LINK] \u2014 lectures on game design and development by Chris Crawford ( Balance of Power , The Art of Computer Game Design ) uploaded by the man himself. \"The Dragon Speech\" of his can be found elsewhere on YouTube ( [LINK] ). \u2014 [LINK] \u2014 early computer graphics demo reels, mostly from the '80s.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13610280,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave","text":"If you have some time to refresh memory. \"A Narrative History of BSD by Dr. Kirk McKusick\" [VIDEO] \"Unix came into many CS departments largely because it was the only powerful interactive system that could run on the sort of hardware (PDP-11s) that universities could afford in the mid '70s. In addition, Unix itself was also very inexpensive. Since source code was provided, it was a system that could be shaped to the requirements of a particular installation.\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"dw_mRaIHb-M":[{"hn_comment_id":9380627,"author":"spacemanmatt","month":"2015-04","story_title":"100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley","text":"There are a lot of ways to explain that power imbalances are critical context to racist statements. Yes, when black people say racist things in America, it's racist, but when white people do it, it's racism. But the very best explanation is long-form stand-up comedy. If you don't understand, you really should watch this. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6983124,"author":"jdunck","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Girls Who Code","text":"That people are reading this subthread and finding common cause with this right here... Do you realize how ridiculous you are? If you would like to know what racism is and why criticism of a dominant group on the basis of race isn't in, here's one take: [VIDEO] But you'd have to listen to get it, and you'd definitely have to give up your bullshit self-serving circular \"logic\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9380194,"author":"smtddr","month":"2015-04","story_title":"100 Days as a Black Man in Silicon Valley","text":"First, I downvoted your comment for the excessive negativity/abuse in it. You could have made your point just as clear without them. Second, I'm going to take your comment to point out something I've noticed when talking about sexism/racism. I'm going to call this theory of mine \"Calibration\". When I hear people say stuff like \"What about letting [underrepresented group] choose what they want to do with their lives?\" , I've come to believe that most are not trolls and they're probably not actually actively racist[1]. It's a difference in calibration. Perhaps you believe by default these kids are at a neutral(zero) level and have the full power of choice right now. But, what I see is that society actually puts them at like a negative 5. You see these efforts as forcing them to go into tech, a +5 if you will. I see it as just bring them up to 0 from the -5 society put them at so they have the same sense of free choice you & I do. This vid I think is also based on the calibration idea when it comes to \"Reverse racism\" [VIDEO] . Basically, it talks about the underlying assumption that the current state of things is neutral for everyone so any effort to improve standings for a group is unfair to the groups not getting help. It's like how every year on Google+, when the LifeAtGoogle account posts something like Black Appreciation day during Black history month, someone always asks \"When is White appreciation day?\" . Or when people talk about BlackGirlsCode.com, someone says \"I bet ","stance":"rec"}],"e08kOj2kISU":[{"hn_comment_id":12638364,"author":"anoother","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"\"How to Speed up a Python Program 114,000 times.\" - [VIDEO] Humour, serious technical insight and a good reminder of why being a generalist is an advantage.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13130579,"author":"gravypod","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Talks that changed the way I think about programming","text":"This will technically only work on pipelined architectures of which all major CPU architectures are one. You will be able to see a significant boost to performance given the following are all true: * You have no inter dependancy of information across the lines * All your data is in the cache * You don't have instructions generated between the two lines that will require some sort of operand forwarding Basically, if you already have the stuff in the cache, the calculation is invarent to the last calculation, and you have a processor capable of it you'll see a large speed improvement. There is a great talk about this [0] (for the exact moment go to [1]). If you're interested further I'd very much recommend finding some sort of GOOD computer architecture class. Luckily now we have a fantastic resource to locate these such courses [2]. This seems like dark magic and many programmers refuse to come to terms with it's existence. Check out `dreta`'s comment to see an example. Now I do agree with dreta, this is VERY much architecture dependant but most architectures would benifit from this sort of optimization. Pretty much all modern Intel and AMD CPU's caches are large enough, they support a big enough cache, and they also all have pipelines under the hood. Intel started this in the pentium series with a 5-stage-pipeline (which I find very funny due to the GHz wars that came from that time period desipte the pipeline being probably the pargest performance boon in most cases that you","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24766844,"author":"lkbm","month":"2020-10","story_title":"14,000x Speedup (2015)","text":"I thought this was going to be \"How to Speed up a Python Program 114,000 times\"[0]. It's an hour-long talk, but quite enjoyable. In the example in the talk, it was less about knowing cs algorithms and more about knowing the details of how modern computer architecture works, but the lesson is the same: sometimes the background knowledge of a cs degree is useful. He also has the same point about optimizing our code rather than just adding more and more machines. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"e0elNU0iOMY":[{"hn_comment_id":32503965,"author":"AnotherGoodName","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Extracting Audio from Visual Information","text":"If you haven't already seen tom Scott's video on background noise giving the location of a recording due to power line frequencies being subtly different I recommend it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34926691,"author":"subpar","month":"2023-02","story_title":"How to date a recording using background electrical noise","text":"If this is interesting to you or your kids, here's a less detailed but pretty accessible video [1] explaining how mains hum forensics work, complete with British accent. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34938145,"author":"Groxx","month":"2023-02","story_title":"How to date a recording using background electrical noise","text":"A video on the same subject: [VIDEO] I really enjoy Tom Scott. Everything he puts out is wonderfully concise.","stance":"rec"}],"e3GFG0sXIig":[{"hn_comment_id":13697545,"author":"LoonyBalloony","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Robots Aren\u2019t Killing the American Dream","text":"Elections were (IMO) meant to be bloodless revolutions. its just the 1% has captured both primary political parties. Also, the flawed first past the post electoral system discourages competition (IMO to keep it cheaper for the 1% to own the whole process). I'll post some videos from people smarter then me: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13705719,"author":"redahs","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Kenneth Arrow Has Died","text":"You might like 'undefined behavior'. The following video covers 'Range Voting' in relation to Arrow's Theorem: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18507505,"author":"thelasthuman","month":"2018-11","story_title":"The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten by the Public","text":"Elections are supposed to be bloodless revolutions. If you can't effect change through the electoral system, then the non violent solution is to revolutionize how we vote. Relevant videos (IMO) First Past The Post Voting - [LINK] Range Voting - [VIDEO] Single Transferable Vote - [LINK] Alternative Vote - [LINK] Mixed-Member Proportional Representation - [LINK] Bonus video This video will make you angry - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"e3K5UxWRRuY":[{"hn_comment_id":23550373,"author":"jmiskovic","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Discovering How the Brain Works Through Computation","text":"Yesterday I watched a fascinating talk The Ghost in the Machine by AI researcher Josha Bach. He claims that computational math is enough to support the conscious thought, both in living things and simulated environments. The whole talk is densely packed with ideas and concepts (for example nice illustration of concepts behind back-propagation NNs at 19:20). Here [0] he lays out his current model for mind. I have no idea what to make of it, but the whole talk is incredibly lucid and contains zero fluff or BS (unlike linked article). [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22045579,"author":"fjfaase","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism","text":"Joscha Bach has an interesting take on how to combine idealism with materalism. See for example his 'The Ghost in the Machine' talk at 35C3: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23925091,"author":"maze-le","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Joscha Bach: Artificial Consciousness and the Nature of Reality [video]","text":"He is definitely one of the most interesting people to listen to when it comes to AI, Intelligence and Philosophy. I've seen him in Leipzig on CCC events in the past, here are some of his other talks: * Computational Meta-Intelligence (32C3): [LINK] * Machine Dreams (33C3): [LINK] * The Ghost in the Machine (35C3): [VIDEO] He also did a very interesting podcast episode with Fefe and Frank from alternativlos! (in German): [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"e3msMuwqp-o":[{"hn_comment_id":25467057,"author":"teddyh","month":"2020-12","story_title":"John Carmack: Career Advice","text":"I prefer Richard Hamming\u2019s series: [VIDEO] \u201c I have given a talk with this title many times, and it turns out from discussions after the talk I could have just as well have called it \"You and Your Engineering Career,\" or even \"You and Your Career.\" But I left the word \"Research\" in the title because that is what I have most studied. \u201d","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27615496,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Things 10x People Do","text":"This reads a lot like Hamming's talk You and Your Research applied to programming. It's the last lecture in a wonderful 31-lecture course, about maths, computers, physics, technology, illustrated through Hamming's life. He'd spend his lunch hours chatting with people at Bell Labs, asking them if they were working on the most important problems in their field, and if not, why not?! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32287818,"author":"teddyh","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Allocating resources where they solve the most important problems","text":"\u201cIf what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you working on it?\u201d \u2014 Richard Hamming [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39058099,"author":"Tangurena2","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Good books on philosophy of engineering?","text":"It is a great book, and it includes an amazing essay by him titled You and Your Research [0][1] - which explains why it is important to \"always be learning\". 0 - [LINK] 1 - [VIDEO] (lecture version)","stance":"rec"}],"e4wbFdePb-k":[{"hn_comment_id":11989047,"author":"gjkood","month":"2016-06","story_title":"New Cities","text":"Speaking of new cities; A shoutout to a new video series from WIRED on Shenzhen. Episode 1 : [LINK] Episode 2 : [LINK] Episode 3 : [VIDEO] I came upon these videos through Andrew \"Bunnie\" Huang's blog. [LINK] Enjoy.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26439928,"author":"neonological","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Hurricane China: How to prepare","text":"> No, there are iPhone assembled from parts, I won't call it pirated. And people who buy those phones because they cannot afford it. It is very different from what you are doing. And the worst part of your story is that you attribute what you did to something not yours, so you don't have to take the responsibility of your own behavior. It is wrong. Some are legit parts. Many are pirated. There's even android phones sold under the apple brand with a reskinned android OS. You 100% don't know what you're talking about at all. You want proof? Watch it: [VIDEO] The more you watch the more educated you'll be. >Look at the iPhone sales figure from Apple, and look at android sales numbers. And you are trying to suggest that \"the rest of China\" buys a counter fake iPhone? You are either dishonest or you know nothing about China. Yes. Dude. In China they have entire factories that build counterfeit stuff. >And the worst part of your story is that you attribute what you did to something not yours, so you don't have to take the responsibility of your own behavior. It is wrong. This is where you're wrong. I never admitted or justified what I was doing as right or wrong. In fact I think it's wrong. I'm human and I'm not perfect. I'm very capable of doing things that are wrong. The difference between you and me is that I don't have to lie to myself about the reality of what I'm doing. I don't have to justify it to myself. It's wrong, but I do it regardless without lying to myself. There are","stance":"rec"}],"e7wFotDKEF4":[{"hn_comment_id":29036234,"author":"galkk","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)","text":"The article casually mentions Koko, and it's a bit sad that the story of Koko's \"language\" is still alive... I can not remember book exceprt, but recently there was a great video about Koko [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30975206,"author":"expensive_news","month":"2022-04","story_title":"What happens in your dog\u2019s brain when you speak","text":"I\u2019m skeptical of this. This sounds similar to the way Koko \u201clearned\u201d sign language. While this video is long, it explains the controversy very well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43099599,"author":"dlcarrier","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Why Teach American Sign Language (ASL) to a Gorilla?","text":"Here's a great video about the extreme cherry picking and lack of transparency it takes to argue that Koko had any better of an understanding of language than a well trained dog: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47502794,"author":"gf000","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a Frontier Math Open Problem for the first time","text":"You may want to watch this video: [VIDEO] Human language is way above what communication animals show. We don't really know what's the exact boundary, but again, the difference is significant and not just \"scaled up\".","stance":"rec"}],"eBCbdThIJNE":[{"hn_comment_id":26264013,"author":"mchusma","month":"2021-02","story_title":"A solar panel in space is collecting energy that could be beamed to anywhere","text":"Power satellites like this are one of the first great possible ways to put industry in space. We need early economic reasons to get there. Issac Arthur usually has the best overview of topics like this [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25553419,"author":"voodootrucker","month":"2020-12","story_title":"The future of electricity is local","text":"Solar panels perform 2x better in space, and also you could beam it down day or night so you don't need to worry as much about storage. [LINK] Edit: re-watching that, the economics doesn't sound great. Edit 2: a more in depth video [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eC7xzavzEKY":[{"hn_comment_id":35190894,"author":"cnick","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Amazon Photos just ate 240,364 of my photos","text":"In macro photography, taking an extreme closeup of something like an insect necessarily has a very, very thin depth of field due to its high magnification. To get the entire insect in focus, you use a technique called focus stacking where the focus changes by tiny fractions of a millimeter on each exposure. You can literally take 100 to 200 of pictures for one subject. If I do 10 of these in a day, I've reached one percent of OPs forever photo volume. [LINK] Time lapse photography is taking a photo every X seconds/minutes/days. If you want the video to look smooth, you need 24-30 shots per second, so a 30 second video has 720 exposures. So again, failed three time lapse attempts and I'm at 1% of OPs forever exposure count. There's an awful lot of judgment in your comment, and the issue certainly seems like a lack of understanding on your part, rather than OP's \"psychological issue\" or \"lying.\" I'll refrain from my own judgements, and suggest you watch David Foster Wallace's \"This is Water,\" and when you're done, please watch it again. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34839215,"author":"hacknewslogin","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best advice you got on any aspect of life?","text":"Ok but what if the result of contemplating this is overwhelming existential dread? This comment kind of reduces life to a give and take philosophy. One where everything you do is to accomplish a task. I'm not sure that has anything to do with Buddhism. It's my understanding that part of Buddhism is the removal of the self, and appreciating the moment. I agree that focusing on the end result can detract from appreciating being in the moment, but this sounds sounds more like self-deception. I prefer the Japanese concept that, and I'm paraphrasing here, \"every action has a purpose.\" Putting value on the actions themselves adds an appreciation for the moment you are in, and the process you are doing. It then becomes a sign of respect for you to do everything in your life to the best of your ability. There's a whole philosophy about this, but the name of it escapes me. A few things I've found that are related: \"The was of the peaceful warrior\" - Book This is water - [VIDEO] Sorry if this is a little rambly, I have ADHD and my adderoll is doing its thing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40995716,"author":"latexr","month":"2024-07","story_title":"My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website","text":"Respectfully, if you see the comment as critique, that\u2019s on you. It could just as easily be described as \u201cunsolicited advice\u201d or \u201cunsolicited tips\u201d. The communicator does have responsibility on how their message comes across, thought not all of it. It\u2019s on the receiver to also make an effort to understand what was meant and not take unnecessary offence. The comment reads pretty much neutral, apart from a post scriptum which is explicitly about the author\u2019s preference. It\u2019s up to you to inject the writer\u2019s feelings as either \u201cthis code sucks, here\u2019s how you do it\u201d or \u201ccongratulations on making something cool, here are a few suggestions\u201d. My experience is that life is much better if you take the latter approach. Default to empathy. Consider listening to \u201cThis is Water\u201d from David From Wallace. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eDJrQBwJpqk":[{"hn_comment_id":1371193,"author":"dotBen","month":"2010-05","story_title":"Don't Talk to the Cops","text":"I've seen these two videos a long time ago and they are GREAT advice. It's actually scary the kind of stuff the cop says he has done and other cops will do to you during questioning. In the UK, where I'm originally from, the police are not allowed to lie or ask you to do anything outside of your rights and so it is total wake up call for anyone who is not used to the way the police work here in the US. This video is also useful, [VIDEO] However, a friend who I talked to about this did make a counter perspective... that sometimes it is worth talking to the cops in the right circumstances. For example, if you are pulled over cos you just ran a stop sign and you have nothing illegal on you/in the car/etc then it is better just to talk to the cop and get the ticket dealt with. If you start playing the 'not going to say anything' and 'no you can't look in the car' then you are opening yourself up for a long painful experience and potentially arrest if they decide to fuck back with you and they can pin some suspicion for something on you (eg you are driving through an area that happens to be associated with drug sale, you have a LeatherMan tool you and the cop can say the knife was being carried for other intent, etc) Cops are naturally authoritarian and can choose to make your life hell if they think you are trying to be superior or above them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2959287,"author":"username123","month":"2011-09","story_title":"Police Assisted Apple Investigators in Search of SF Man's Home","text":"My take: KNOW your rights. Nothing stinks here. As one of the videos below states: If police is entitled to a search then they will just break in and do a search. If they ASK for consent, and even more, if they threaten, they KNOW that they are not entitled. Keep the door shut and don't given up your rights. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"eDNX65d-FBY":[{"hn_comment_id":17427770,"author":"wizardforhire","month":"2018-06","story_title":"The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation (2012)","text":"aerospikes There\u2019s a lot of reason why they haven\u2019t been used yet, but I think most the compelling argument against them is that they won\u2019t be used until fuel costs become the competitive factor in launch prices. [LINK] [LINK] Nuclear rockets are quite the concept but have their obvious limitations. This video is worth checking out if you haven\u2019t seen it yet. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24891380,"author":"cwojno","month":"2020-10","story_title":"New nuclear engine concept could help realize 3-month trips to Mars","text":"This article didn't explain it at all, so you're right to ask. tl;dr: Gaseous propellant (I'm guessing hydrogen) is heated with fission then pointed in the opposite direction of intended travel. The uranium in this design is not a propellant, but a heat source. Aside: you can use photons/heat as a propellant, but it's thrust is very low [LINK] . Ideal propellants typically have a high exit velocity and low mass. That gives you the longest amount of \"burn\" time, and the greatest amount of control for the weight. [LINK] Back in the day when the US was building more of these nuclear rockets, the propellant of choice was typically hydrogen [LINK] . Old timey video explaining it [VIDEO] . I'm assuming this proposed design would also use hydrogen, but I couldn't find any sources on the propellant for their design. Liquid hydrogen served to keep the reactor cool as it transitioned from liquid to gas as that phase change absorbs energy. The gas is the directed through the reactor core where the gas heats up. As gases heat up, they absorb energy, their average particle velocities increase. Eventually, the hydrogen molecules (mostly H2 or H-H gaseous hydrogen), makes it to the nozzle and is ejected. The high-velocity hydrogen is what actually provides the bulk of the thrust to the spacecraft. Compare this to Project Orion ( [LINK] ) which intended to detonate nuclear warheads and the craft essentially rode the shock wave into the stars. I would classify this method of propulsion, not s","stance":"rec"}],"eG0KrT6pBPk":[{"hn_comment_id":4869286,"author":"losvedir","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Steps to Anonymous and Secured Communication","text":"> Or, maybe, IM with OTR without logging, but that . . . might also fall prey to crazy counterparty either not disabling logging or intentionally recording and blackmailing. I thought this was one of the benefits of OTR over, say, PGP. That is, with PGP if you sign a message the counterparty can wave it around and say \"look at what this poerson said\", while with OTR, since the encryption is done with a shared key, it could be just as likely that the counterparty made it up. At least, that's what I gleaned from this wonderful video[1] someone linked to on HN yesterday. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6158150,"author":"yourcelf","month":"2013-08","story_title":"The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership","text":"Moxie Marlinspike gave a fantastic talk on this subject in 2010, even down to the government mandated tracking device vs mobile phone: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6795569,"author":"CodeMage","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Surveillance as a Business Model","text":"I would highly encourage anyone who thinks that the solution is as simple as \"don't use XYZ\" to see what Moxie Marlinspike had to say about \"Changing threats to privacy\" at Defcon 18: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20088926,"author":"CodeMage","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Open Up vs. Break Up","text":"> I think part of the difference in HN opinion color is somewhat related to transparency. It's not that I disagree with you on the topic of transparency, it's that I think we can't really compare opinions on two very different topics as if they were the same topic. People complaining about too many subscription content providers are not really arguing for or against a monopoly. It's not the same discussion. > And I'd say Google and Facebook haven't done a sufficient job in proactively informing the public about what they collect, how they generate revenue from it, and what's currently stored about a user. Granted, but I'm pretty sure that even if they did so, it wouldn't make much difference. I always refer people to Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON keynote called \"Changing threats to privacy\" [1]. I would definitely recommend watching it in full, but the key takeaway from it -- for the purposes of this discussion -- is that it all boils down to choice. He talks about the way technology changes the fabric of the society, how it changes the way people interact, communicate and coordinate, and declining to participate in this new way of doing things exposes you to the \"no network effect\". This is why it's not enough for Google and Facebook to merely inform people about what they collect and how they use it. As long as they're practically monopolies, they can disclose and inform and then go on just the same, because there's no other viable alternative and they'll work hard to ensure ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4822165,"author":"jiggy2011","month":"2012-11","story_title":"I Don't Want To Be Part of Your Ecosystem","text":"Lots of people don't care about voting in elections, giving to charity, partaking in public demonstrations or looking after their health either. The problem is not so much whether people mind if their location is tracked or whether they have control over their hardware etc. It's more that once these things reach a critical mass it is very difficult to start to go back if we don't like where we are or indeed for an individual to make a choice to live outside of this stuff. It is articulated quite well here: [VIDEO] At around 09:00","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6876941,"author":"lucb1e","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Facebook's AI lab","text":"Define: freely I think Moxie Marlinespike's talk at Defcon 18 (2010) was a really good one: [VIDEO] He talks about how we do not really have a free choice when it comes to things like having a Facebook account or having a mobile phone. Namely due to the network effect, you don't really have a choice if you want to be a normal member of society.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12362430,"author":"CodeMage","month":"2016-08","story_title":"\u201cHow do I choose not to share my account information with Facebook?\u201d","text":"There's a reason most people don't like hearing that: it's not a solution. I could try to explain, but Moxie Marlinspike did it a lot better: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12589794,"author":"sygma","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany","text":"> Using the messaging service is a voluntary decision Yes, it is voluntary, but it would be socially alienating not to be on that service. Here's a relevant talk [0] by Moxie Marlinspike talking about that. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12810981,"author":"CodeMage","month":"2016-10","story_title":"CoinTent: A Sustainable Ad-Free Web","text":"I would encourage you to watch the Defcon 18 talk by Moxie Marlinspike, called \"Changing threats to privacy\". It explains why \"simply don't participate in X\" is not really a valid option. Here's the link to the talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18948773,"author":"CodeMage","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Tech Companies Manipulate Our Personal Data","text":"> There are plenty of alternatives to social media - email, SMS, phone calls, and even decentralized options. I suggest watching Moxie Marlinspike's keynote for Defcon 18: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eGKFTUuJppU":[{"hn_comment_id":26508682,"author":"ivan_ah","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Is Consciousness Everywhere?","text":"I'm not sure if it is a \"proof\" of any sort, but I find the ideas in the \u092e\u093e\u0923\u094d\u0921\u0942\u0915\u094d\u092f \u0909\u092a\u0928\u093f\u0937\u0926\u094d (Mandukya Upanishad [LINK] ) to be a very interesting point of view. This short text discusses the theory of four states of consciousness: Waking \\ Dreaming > Turiya \u225d pure consciousness illuminating these Deep dreamless sleep / These two lectures were very good: - [VIDEO] - [LINK] And you can read the original text here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30931451,"author":"croh","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What do you think is all this? (this reality, existence, space-time, us)","text":"I found asian philosophies very interesting in this regard. There is an interesting Hindu philosophy about 4 states - awake, sleep, dream and turiya. In below video, lecturer explained them very beautifully. [VIDEO] Also you might enjoy G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid where author tried to explain self-referential systems. If you pick up any interest in asian philosophies, try [LINK] and [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"eGaKZBr0ga4":[{"hn_comment_id":25013661,"author":"benjaminjosephw","month":"2020-11","story_title":"The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)","text":"I came across a video showing Pharo and Smalltalk that blew me away[0] and I completely agree with you. In some fields, we are heading back in this direction with literate programming (notebooks) and new languages like Dark that attempt to rethink some of our ingrained traditions for engineering workflows. I'm working on a project in this space too. There is still hope! [0] - MountainWest RubyConf 2014 - But Really, You Should Learn Smalltalk ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12162554,"author":"bencoman71","month":"2016-07","story_title":"How learning Smalltalk can make you a better developer","text":"> The colorful Playskool environment That was likely Squeak, not Pharo. Pharo has muted a lot of the UI colours to be more appropriate for a business environment. > How anyone could possibly be productive in such an environment. What is it that's so attractive about it to Smalltalkers? Perhaps its useful to get some outsiders perspectives.... Avdi Grimm has written a few books about Ruby. He records his experience trying Pharo in \"I make you hate Ruby in 7 minutes\" [LINK] Noel Rappin has written a few books about Ruby & Javascript. He provides an introduction to Smalltalk in \"MountainWest RubyConf 2014 - But Really, You Should Learn Smalltalk\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37314602,"author":"sebastianconcpt","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?","text":"Because it managed to produce frictionless adoption in academia. All the rest is downstream of that. MVPs in entrepreneurial initiatives are done with that. RESTful APIs are based on the prototypes that come from academia. Good libraries for data processing of lots of data required by academic studies became easily adopted there. So a less-effort/easiest-convenience law inside academia made it win. BTW, if you enjoy Ruby, watch this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eGnH0KAXhCw":[{"hn_comment_id":27321011,"author":"gsk22","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Why Russians do not smile (2002)","text":"You're misunderstanding what the phrase \"how are you\" means in the US. It is not a literal question, but a set phrase with implicit social rules for \"correct\" responses. This doesn't mean the person asking is faking kindness - but also understand they're not actually asking for a rundown of how your life is going. Negative responses to the question are ok, just not deeply personal answers. Tom Scott has an excellent video that addresses this very issue. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27322687,"author":"justusthane","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Why Russians do not smile (2002)","text":"> \u201cgood, but I have a billing issue\" I think this gets exactly to it, but I don\u2019t agree with the rest of your comment. In both the provided examples, the fact that there's a request for actionable information is already implicitly understood based on the situation. When a doctor comes into your room, you already know they're checking on your condition. The \"How are you?\" is just general greeting (to which, in casual situations, the proper response is \"Fine, and you?\"). And this is the crux of the misunderstanding. The Russian takes it as a request for information when it isn't. *Edit*: A YouTube video pulled from another comment in this thread that explains what I was trying to say much better: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34556047,"author":"ojkelly","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Should we be asking 'how did you sleep' vs. 'how are you'?","text":"How did you sleep is a great question to understand how someone is, it\u2019s one of the first things I ask myself when I wake up. I then get a more quantitive answer from my Oura ring. That then helps me plan what is achievable that day. BUT, \u201chow are you?\u201d is almost always a Phatic Expression[0], especially in cases where it could be considered a generic greeting. Phatic Expressions seem to be more important to some cultures than others. For example, in Australia it\u2019s such a fundamental greeting it often trips people up[2]. In this case the question is not a genuine or sincere inquiry into you current state, but rather a request to acknowledge the presence of each other. In that sense, \u201chow did you sleep\u201d would be such a curve ball unless among friends I think it would cause secondhand embarrassment. Tom Scott did a great 3 min video[1] on this exact thing. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"eJ3RzGoQC4s":[{"hn_comment_id":12879326,"author":"urza","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Is democracy a failure? (1861)","text":"Indeed we should be afraid of modern advertisers. They exploit the nature of human mind, to manipulate us into decisions that are often not in our best interest. Politicians then use advertisers to manipulate masses to ensure power for themselfs. In my country people in last elections elected an Olygarch, multi billionair, who controls whole agriculture, all main media, medical and other industries and now he is writing laws that suits his needs and stealing billions in \"donations\" from us. How is this possible? How was he elected in democracy? How is it possible that he has support of majority of people? Because he has very good PR, advertisement and propaganda team. Anyone who hasnt seen \"The Century of Self\" documentary, please watch it, it will open your eyes: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16034465,"author":"stevewillows","month":"2017-12","story_title":"IKEA Effect","text":"I love building IKEA furniture. For me, there is a certain controlled fear that comes with opening the boxes. I know it'll go together, because.. well, its not difficult, but there's always that lingering fear that it won't. In regards to the egg in the instant mix (pancakes, cakes, etc), this is mentioned in Adam Curtis' 'The Century of the Self'[1], which is a fantastic documentary, and definitely worth a watch. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18728924,"author":"cronix","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Why Is America So Angry? The Real Roots of American Rage","text":"Having recently discovered Adam Curtis (from other HN posts), I'd highly recommend watching his documentaries. All of them. Absolutely riveting stuff. HyperNormalization: [LINK] Bitter Lake: [LINK] The Trap: [LINK] The Power of Nightmares: [LINK] The Mayfair Set: [LINK] The Century of the Self: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22979406,"author":"mistermann","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Anatomists of Melancholy in the Age of Coronavirus","text":"The documentary Century of Self (re: Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays) gets into this type of thing , and many, many others. [LINK] Full: [VIDEO] 10 minute trailer/summary: [LINK] If someone wants to check out the above political aspect, fast forward to the 3 hour mark or so. Fair warning, this would be typically filed under conspiracy theories / propaganda by most people, but even so, it is by far one of the most compelling ones I've seen. It very much advocates for the common man, and I believe makes a decent case. It certainly has had a major effect on the way I view how the world works, but YMMV.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32800759,"author":"orasis","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"\u201cThe Century of the Self\u201d by Adam Curtis. [VIDEO] It goes through each decade of the 1900s and explains how Freud\u2019s psychology and the new field of marketing completely reshaped society. For the first time in my life I feel like I understood the \u201cwhy\u201d of how things work in American society. This film is probably best if you\u2019re age 40+ and actually remember some of the events.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35620952,"author":"badrabbit","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The Cult of Sigmund Freud","text":"I wholly distrust anything freudian. Every major claim he made I keep finding serious flaws in it. Freud did not popularize the unconscious or thinking about how you think. Basic children's sunday school at a Church even talks about how you think. Major religions from Christianity to Buddhism talk about how the thought life of a person affects everything and the split and conflicted nature of humans. They just don't use post-freudian terms like conscious and unconscious. What freud popularized was a secular way of coping with how humans think, analyzing it in a purely secular context and considering thousands of years of knowledge on the subject as childish fairytales and defining a framework by which a modern secular world can explain the actions of people and respond to them. Socially, I have seen horrific impacts of his work from criminal punishment to people attempting to understand and help people who have chosen to be evil (worst examples being child rapists, school shooters,etc... not sick, evil! But evil has no place in a freudian context). This documentary shared on HN a while back was eye opening for me, how almost every aspect of modern capitalist life was influenced by freud: [VIDEO] (Century of the self). Worth watching the whole thing. I don't discount psychoanalysis as quackery but I am very hostile to it. I would need to filter any attempts of psychoanalytical thinking with a ton if critical analysis, taking it with buckets of salt!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13603860,"author":"seltzered_","month":"2017-02","story_title":"HyperNormalisation (2016) [video]","text":"Adam Curtis has a history of making these films. Worth also checking out his 2002 film 'the century of the self'. Wikipedia on Adam Curtis: [LINK] The century of the self on youtube: [VIDEO] Other films of his are also on archive.org","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18085978,"author":"compcoffee","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"> The Century of the Self: [VIDEO] I think all of Adam Curtis' documentaries are worth a watch: [LINK] Some others favourites off the top of my head: 808 (about the drum machine): [LINK] Scratch: [LINK] Hoop Dreams: [LINK] Startup.com (a classic!) : [LINK] The Fog of War: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20315623,"author":"musha68k","month":"2019-06","story_title":"I\u2019ve Picked My Job over My Kids","text":"Your short comment rings very true to me and reminded me of Adam Curtis' \"Century of the Self\" theory which in his latest documentary \"Hypernormalization\" gets developed even further. I guess you might know it but for those who don't - both freely available on youtube. Century of the Self: [VIDEO] Hypernormalization [LINK] Adam Curtis: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20429554,"author":"wizardforhire","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Six Degrees of Separation at Burning Man","text":"\u201cProbably\u201d doesn\u2019t do it justice. If you haven\u2019t seen this documentary it\u2019s worth checking out if you\u2019re curious to see how sinister and deep the rabbit hole goes. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37070396,"author":"c23gooey","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Many temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer","text":"The documentary \"Century of Self\" by Adam Curtis [0] certainly opened my eyes to the damage that Bernays has inflicted on society in general. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37706402,"author":"LinuxBender","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Norway wants Facebook behavioral advertising banned across Europe","text":"There's even an old BBC documentary on this called Century of the Self [1] created by Adam Curtis that covers how businesses and governments were taught to make people desire things they don't need. [1] - [VIDEO] [video][4 hours][996 MB]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44977743,"author":"ixtli","month":"2025-08","story_title":"In Defense of Car-Centered Society","text":"Correct. The car industry intentionally socially engineered the US to associate the giant individual and social burden of car ownership with freedom. A great documentary called Century of the Self covers this and other related things ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"eKl6WjfDqYA":[{"hn_comment_id":46343372,"author":"dokyun","month":"2025-12","story_title":"You have reached the end of the internet (2006)","text":"You should play Metal Gear Solid 2, or at least watch the last codec call[1]. See how much you can apply what it talks about to the current year. This game came out a month after 9/11. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40436284,"author":"Lammy","month":"2024-05","story_title":"The internet is overflowing with bad content. Users are fighting back","text":"> The information age gave us information overload, something I don't think anyone predicted. Have you ever played Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001)? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43130282,"author":"dmonitor","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row","text":"The real prescient threat in that movie was the predictive AI algorithm that tracked individual behaviors and identified potential threats to the regime. In the movie they had a big airship with guns that would kill them on sight, but a more realistic threat is the AI deciding to feed them individualized propaganda to curtail their behavior. This is the villain's plot in Metal Gear Solid 2, which is another great story. This got me thinking about MGS2 again and rewatching the colonel's dialogue at the end of the game: [VIDEO] > Your persona, experiences, triumphs, and defeats are nothing but byproducts. The real objective was ensuring that we could generate and manipulate them. It's really brilliant to use a video game to deliver the message of the effectiveness of propaganda. 'Game design' as a concept is just about manipulation and hijacking dopamine responses. I don't think another medium can as effectively demonstrate how systems can manipulate people's behavior.","stance":"rec"}],"eKtsY7hYTPg":[{"hn_comment_id":23986648,"author":"weinzierl","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Show HN: WebGL simulation of rainy autumn day/evening","text":"Not sure if it is the original but the source where I first saw this rain effect was on ShaderToy - The Drive Home by Martijn Steinrucken aka BigWings[1] The accompanying video tutorial[2] is super interesting too as well as the HN discussion at the time [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] Link to first part: [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43668943,"author":"FjordWarden","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Shadertoys Ported to Rust GPU","text":"I've always enjoyed watching The Art of Code[1], Freya[2] also has a good number of videos on it. But that is just vertex shaders for things like Shadertoys. There is much more to computer graphics or GPGPU than this though, Im still learning about that myself X). [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"eLn6LC1RpAo":[{"hn_comment_id":23411599,"author":"anonymfus","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Toki Pona","text":"Conlang Critic is a fan of this language: [VIDEO] I highly recommend watching all episodes of their show if you like an idea of short text based video essays about constructed languages: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29036314,"author":"rsapkf","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Toki Pona: A Language with a Hundred Words (2015)","text":"If anyone is interested in learning about conlangs, jan Misali has an interesting playlist[0] with reviews on various contructed languages including Toki Pona. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36010083,"author":"FireInsight","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Lojban: Constructed language to eliminate ambiguity from communication","text":"I take all my conlang opinions from jan Misali aka Conlang Critic and he tells me to love toki pona [0] instead of lojban [1]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"eLqC3FNNOaI":[{"hn_comment_id":27169435,"author":"gundmc","month":"2021-05","story_title":"The True Size of Africa (2015)","text":"This reminds me of my favorite scene from The West Wing where they talk about how misleading the Mercator projection is with regard to the size of Africa. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36422476,"author":"randcraw","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Maps Distort How We See the World","text":"There was a memorable scene from \"The West Wing\" on the biases imposed by most map projections, in particular, how Mercator makes North America look huge: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40510818,"author":"sircastor","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Princeton astrophysicists re-imagine world map (2021)","text":"Coincidentally, yesterday I saw (again) \u201cThe West Wing\u201d scenes[1] that express this problem (and the related social issues). It was the first learned about map projections and I think if they aren\u2019t already an explicit topic in school, they ought to be. I find it very interesting. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eMlx5fFNoYc":[{"hn_comment_id":40873442,"author":"tomashm","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The Illustrated Transformer (2018)","text":"This is good, but what bade me finally understand the transformer architecture [0] and attention [1], are 3Blue1Brown's videos. 0. [LINK] 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48321181,"author":"onlyrealcuzzo","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Claude Opus 4.8","text":"Because it doesn't work like how you think at all. You're still thinking it works like Chain of Thought. It doesn't. And the difference is key! It works by introducing probabilistic noise, and exploring N paths fully (each with noise) in parallel (all compressed). It's reasoning at a much, much smaller (probabilistic) level than running everything through the expensive large model (deterministic) and sometimes catching that it said, \"I think 1.12 is greater than 1.9 because 12 is bigger than 9, final answer\". The easiest way to think about it is: if you understand how hyper words work, it's as if it's searching for different versions of the hyper words that probilisticslly would lead to better outcomes IF it fed them to the LLM before it even does. That's not actually how it works exactly. But I think it is close enough to be helpful to understand where the gain is, a rough idea of what's happening (searching paths), and how it can potentially have huge orders of magnitude improvements (doing so without paying the full price of exploring the paths through the expensive and huge model). And also why it is so much harder to determine what it's \"thinking\". If you aren't familiar with hyper words, this is an amazing series: [VIDEO] The general idea is that a token is a multidimensional vector to represent a word -> think like \"man\" is a [noun, singular, English, pronoun, masculine, contemporary, ...]. Each time is sees a new word, it mutates this word to mean some new token (ofte","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40974756,"author":"MAXPOOL","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The Engineer\u2019s Guide to Deep Learning: Understanding the Transformer Model","text":"There are many others that are better. 1/ The Annotated Transformer Attention is All You Need [LINK] 2/ Transformers from Scratch [LINK] 3/ Andrej Karpathy has really good series of intros: [LINK] Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out. [LINK] GPT with Andrej Karpathy: Part 1 [LINK] 4/ 3Blue1Brown: But what is a GPT? Visual intro to transformers | Chapter 5, Deep Learning [LINK] Attention in transformers, visually explained | Chapter 6, Deep Learning [VIDEO] Full 3Blue1Brown Neural Networks playlist [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41926020,"author":"superkuh","month":"2024-10","story_title":"LLMs Aren't Thinking, They're Just Counting Votes","text":"> when an LLM tells us that the sun rises in the east, it's not because it truly understands astronomy or the solar system. Rather, it has seen the phrase \"sun rises in the east\" repeated so many times in its training data that this becomes the highest probability answer. It's less about understanding and more about pattern recognition. This is not too different from most human person's experience with basic education ( [LINK] ). Though it is obvious that humans can do more than that too. And while \"voting\" that may be a close-enough metaphor for the multi-layer perceptron layers, it is not what is happening in the attention layers. I suggest checking out 3blue1brown's videos on gradient descent [LINK] and \"How might LLMs store facts\" [LINK] versus how attention works [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48510295,"author":"wren6991","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Can I Buy Your KV Cache?","text":"If you want the actual maths instead of handwaving, I recommend: [LINK] For something gentler, 3Blue1Brown: [VIDEO] (this is part of a series)","stance":"rec"}],"eMmNy11Mn7g":[{"hn_comment_id":35680814,"author":"crtasm","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ban all gambling adverts, say more than half of Britons","text":"More people need to see interviews such as those in the People Make Games video \"How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos\" - skip to 15mins for them. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33689481,"author":"maxbond","month":"2022-11","story_title":"A lobbying blitz made sports betting ubiquitous","text":"> This is inane bullshit. It's a video game. I think you may be unaware of the extent to which players, including children, are engaging in real-money gambling at the periphery of video games. Here's some recent reporting on the topic. [VIDEO] Tl;Dw there's a thriving, multibillion dollar gray market for gambling with cosmetic items in games, as well as a market for trading these items for real money. Together this creates stealth real money casinos.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35292486,"author":"follower","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Facebook is aggressively going after LLaMA repos with DMCA's","text":"For people interested in this topic, the \"People Make Games\" channel on YouTube have a couple of related videos with original research/interviews: * \"How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos\": < [VIDEO] > * \"Working at Valve: 'A Fearless Adventure' or 'Lord of the Flies'?\": < [LINK] >","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38212939,"author":"drngdds","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Steam Deck OLED","text":"It's not even just loot boxes, but them letting people gamble with the items (which can be worth a lot of money!) on unregulated gambling sites that allow minors. It's insidious stuff. Good video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43094628,"author":"pityJuke","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code","text":"> Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without spending it? Critically, Valve allows you to trade items. This results in a couple of downstream effects: 1. Items have real-world value because they can be traded for money outside of Steam. Multiple sites exist for people to convert items into real-world money (certain rare items have been sold for >$1m [0]). 2. As these items have value, they can serve as a surrogate for money in casinos, or for sports betting. 3. This can even lead to money laundering [1]. As such, skins should be considered money, but the sites running these services don't. Therefore, it is trivial for a child to walk into a game store, buy Steam credit, use that credit to buy skins, and then spend that money on literal gambling (as very few sites have KYC). I know because I've actively partaken in it as a child. Even cryptocurrency is harder: most legitimate exchanges attempt to do identity validation. Some video resources that might be useful: - Coffeezilla: [LINK] - People Make Games: [VIDEO] [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46368013,"author":"crtasm","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Meta is using the Linux scheduler designed for Valve's Steam Deck on its servers","text":"Their games and systems tie into huge gambling operations on 3rd party sites If you have 30mins for a video I recommend People Make Games' documentary on it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eNC0mRYGWgc":[{"hn_comment_id":9011460,"author":"peterhunt","month":"2015-02","story_title":"First Impressions Using React Native","text":"If you're interested in doing it with React, here's a video explaining how to do a custom backend: [VIDEO] You basically need to change BackendIDOperations and ReactEventListener to send/receive messages vs talking to the real APIs. It's already set up in the codebase to do this (because it actually worked at one time). Webpack, per usual, already thought of this and has an answer for you :) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9639041,"author":"mikeryan","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Is ReactJS really fast?","text":"There's an interesting video by Netflix where they discuss using React in their stack. To increase performance on many of Netflix's TV or Console based UI's they have their own rendering engine they're using instead of the manufacturer's browser engine. This means any of React's \"speed\" improvements are a moot point so instead they use it because of its simplicity for UI layouts. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eOti3kKWX-c":[{"hn_comment_id":33351022,"author":"somat","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so","text":"CuriousMarc has an excellent episode on an atomic clock. [VIDEO] I like to pretend I can fix computers, this guy can actually fix computers, which is probably why I find his show so fascinating.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49210263,"author":"alnwlsn","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Atomic Clocks","text":"If you want to see how an actual application of this works, I've yet to see a description better than in CuriousMarc's HP 5061A series: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22666199,"author":"kens","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Living Without Atomic Clocks (2016)","text":"CuriousMarc made a video last week where he uses a vintage HP 5061A atomic clock and explains how it works. It's interesting to see that atomic clocks aren't just some giant laboratory thing, but a product you could buy, even in the 1960s. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34125365,"author":"puzzledobserver","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The state of the art in amateur timekeeping (2003) [pdf]","text":"CuriousMarc uploaded a video to Youtube showing the startup procedure for an HP 5061A cesium clock [0]. They switch on the clock and compare it to a GPS reference. Seeing the abstract description realized in concrete terms through hot cesium tubes, phase locked loops, and Lissajous curves was really fascinating. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ePA1zq56J1I":[{"hn_comment_id":39346818,"author":"adtac","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The Ultraviolet Myth","text":"Douglas Hofstader has a talk on this topic called \"Albert Einstein on Light; Light on Albert Einstein\" that I often revisit: [VIDEO] (watch 10:30 to 12:00 if you're pressed for time, but I recommend the whole thing)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30217451,"author":"passion__desire","month":"2022-02","story_title":"The case for and against analogies","text":"I have following 3 suggestions regarding analogies. [1] Analogies in Fundamental physics Lecture by Douglas Hofstadter: Albert Einstein on Light; Light on Albert Einstein : [VIDEO] \u201cWhere does deep insight in physics come from? For those who view physics as a highly rational science grounded in strict mathematics, it is tempting to think that it comes from the purest and most precise of reasoning, following ironclad laws of thought that compel the clear mind completely rigidly. And yet the truth is quite otherwise. One finds, when one looks closely at any major discovery in physics, that the greatest of physicists are the most daring and are constantly being guided by blurry, instinctive, nearly irrational mental forces. Albert Einstein ideally exemplifies this thesis. In this talk, I will discuss the eternal mystery of light, which, over the course of millennia, was puzzled over, pondered on, and slowly worked out by a series of great minds, and finally, in the nineteenth century, was definitively settled with clarity and rock-solid certainty. And yet one day in the early spring of 1905, quite out of the blue, came an absurd-seeming new suggestion from an unknown Swiss patent clerk, third class, clashing violently with that rock-solid piece of collective wisdom. How did the brazen patent clerk come up with this crazy idea? How it was received by the physics world? What was its eventual fate? And what can we learn about the workings of the human mind from this twisty story fi","stance":"rec"}],"eQ2OZKitRwc":[{"hn_comment_id":8927870,"author":"at-fates-hands","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Feds found Silk Road 2 servers after a six-month attack on Tor?","text":"Not sure why I can't edit my original comment, but whatever. Here is the presentation Adrian Crenshaw gave at DefCon 22 called \"Dropping Docs on Darknets: How People Got Caught\" Great presentation: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14838651,"author":"andai","month":"2017-07","story_title":"18yo arrested for reporting a bug in the new Budapest e-Ticket system","text":"In case anyone feels like doing something like that, this talk is worth a listen: [VIDEO] A talk on how Tor users got caught. In a nutshell: it wasn't Tor's fault, but bad OPSEC on the part of the users.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22172076,"author":"friendlybus","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Who Deserves This? (2018)","text":"Most cases are closed on circumstantial evidence. Weird to see the same podcast that hosts freeross information as also hosting bitcoin podcasts. Adrian Crenshaw the security researcher has a good defcon talk on how ross went down for SR. Don't post your tech problems for an illegal service on stackoverflow! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eREuZEdMAVo":[{"hn_comment_id":1041527,"author":"jackchristopher","month":"2010-01","story_title":"UCSF Endocrinologist debunks \"Calories In / Calories Out\" Model","text":"To steal a line, dietary science is younger than it looks. Don't be surprised if decade spanning long held beliefs start collapsing. Another good video. Stanford nutritionist and self-described vegetarian admits benefits of low carb diets: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14833234,"author":"scholia","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Sugar-sweetened drinks with protein rich meal affect metabolism","text":"There's a good (old) talk where Stanford's Christopher Gardner researched different diet books with 311 women. The Battle of the Diets: Is Anyone Winning (At Losing?) [VIDEO] The study was announced at [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"eRkgK4jfi6M":[{"hn_comment_id":16162310,"author":"mushishi","month":"2018-01","story_title":"The brains of jazz and classical pianists work differently","text":"I liked this explanation of harmony using different levels of musical comprehension (by Jacob Collier, featuring Herbie Hancock) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35111418,"author":"petercooper","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Coltrane: A music theory library with a command-line interface","text":"Yes, Rick Beato. He covers all sorts of stuff to different extents. Like music theory in ten minutes: [LINK] .. but he has hundreds of videos on keys, modes, analyzing popular music, the works. If you really know nothing you might enjoy this attempt at explaining harmony at five different levels from a child to Herbie Hancock: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eU5Dn-WaElI":[{"hn_comment_id":14303848,"author":"guruz","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Get started making music","text":"I think I've watched this video a ton of times: [VIDEO] That guy is using Ableton Live to re-create a popular song of The Prodigy.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7013737,"author":"bigsassy","month":"2014-01","story_title":"How Daft Punk Created One of Their Most Famous Samples","text":"Here's a similar, but more in-depth, video on making \"Smack my Bitch Up\" from The Prodigy. My mind was blown when it shows how \"Bulls on Parade\" was sampled :D [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7014745,"author":"klochner","month":"2014-01","story_title":"How Daft Punk Created One of Their Most Famous Samples","text":"A little older but similar idea (and fun to watch) - remaking of The Prodigy's \"smack my bitch up\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41385909,"author":"xpl","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Judge dismisses majority of GitHub Copilot copyright claims","text":"There are legendary Prodigy tracks reconstructions by Jim Pavloff, see: 1. \"Smack my bitch up\" [VIDEO] 2. \"Voodoo people\" [LINK] Those pieces sound exactly the same as the original, but it does not violate copyright because they've been produced by hand. Mind blowing!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43591735,"author":"dash2","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Recreating Daft Punk's Something About Us","text":"Related: this recreation of Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up. I'm amazed at the level of musical knowledge needed to do this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eUHBPuHS-7s":[{"hn_comment_id":38790733,"author":"kragen","month":"2023-12","story_title":"NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances","text":"this was predicted in the very influential epic 2014 video in 02004 [VIDEO] (the original is flash and has thus been consigned to the memory hole, so we are left with this poor-quality conversion) 36\": 'however, the press as you know it has ceased to exist' 40\": '20th-century news organizations are an afterthought; a lonely remnant of a not-too-distant past' 2'11\": 'also in 2002, google launches google news, a news portal. news organizations cry foul. google news is edited entirely by computers' 5'13\": 'the news wars of 2010 are notable for the fact that no actual news organizations take part. googlezon finally checkmates microsoft with a feature the software giant cannot match: using a new algorithm, googlezon's computers construct new stories, dynamically stripping sentences and facts from all content sources, and recombining them. the computer writes a new story for every user' 5'55\": 'in 2011 the slumbering fourth estate awakes to make its first and final stand. the new york times company sues googlezon, claiming that the company's fact-stripping robots are a violation of copyright law. the case goes all the way to the supreme court' they didn't get the details exactly right, but overall the accuracy is astounding however, that may be a hyperstition artifact in this timeline [LINK] (i thought epic 2014 might be the only flash video to hae a wikipedia article about it, but then i looked and found five others)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47785366,"author":"duckmysick","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Google Broke Its Promise to Me. Now ICE Has My Data","text":"Does anyone else remember Epic 2014? It was a video made years ago that speculated about the future of the internet and media, with the end game being personalized news written by a computer. The timeline is off but the brand names are mostly the usual suspects. Rewatching it now gives me this uncanny feeling. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"eUPJ9zFV5IE":[{"hn_comment_id":34778722,"author":"Arathorn","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Matrix 2.0: How we\u2019re making Matrix go voom","text":"If you watch the video, you'll see that we're making the client-server protocol crazy lightweight ( [VIDEO] ) and that we're adding the ability to remove servers entirely and go full P2P: ( [VIDEO] ). So you're working on stale data here. (Also, only about 35% of users we're aware of are on the matrix.org server, not 99%...)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34945260,"author":"Arathorn","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved","text":"Fixing this has been the primary focus of the core Matrix team over the last year - we revealed the end result at FOSDEM a few weeks ago, and it literally improves performance to be better than Telegram/Discord/Slack or anything else we've benchmarked against: [VIDEO] If you're feeling adventurous, try develop.element.io and enable Sliding Sync in Labs, and you should get instant login, sync, and orders of magnitude better performance (but it is definitely beta). You may need to run your own SS proxy, for which we published a guide yesterday: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36920815,"author":"Tmpod","month":"2023-07","story_title":"IRC Is the Only Viable Chat Protocol","text":"Matrix 2.0 will put an end to that trait plaguing the protocol's viability. With the new \"sliding\" sync, clients will be able to fetch stuff much more efficiently (and more akin to Discord's API, for example) than before. Syncing an freshly logged-in account takes seconds instead of minutes and syncing messages when returning to the app is instant. They presented this at FOSDEM this year: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eVtCO84MDj8":[{"hn_comment_id":2634302,"author":"joshg","month":"2011-06","story_title":"The Dangerous Mr. Khan","text":"Well if you want to pay great teachers to produce science videos, I would start by offering this guy a lot of money. Or at the very least, please watch the whole video because it explains one massive problem with video science lessons and how to partially fix the problem. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34625370,"author":"james-revisoai","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Anki and GPT-3","text":"Founder of StudyWand.com here, who received a 15k grant to develop an AI generating flashcard app in 2020 after an earlier prototype. We've found students more consistently study ready-made cards that are at desirable difficulty (they get about 80% correct) and which are segmented by topic (e.g. semantic grouping of flashcards to tackle \"one lesson at a time\" like Duolingo). Students would prefer to use pre-made flashcards by other students in their class, then AI flashcards, then create and use their own. There is limited evidence by Roediger and Karpicke who are the forefathers of retrieval practise that creating cards is also important. Frank Leeming (2002 study Exam-a-day) also showed that motivation when studying is peaked when you ask just a few questions a day, but every working day. Now one of the vital benefits of retrieval practise with AI over creating your own cards is foresight bias - not mentioned yet in this thread - the fact that particularly in some subjects like Physics, students don't know what they don't know (watch this amazing Veritasium video, it also explains why misconceptions are so handy for learning physics): [VIDEO] - basically, if you use AI quizzes (or any prepared subject-specific right/wrong system), you learn quickly where your knowledge sits and what to focus on, and reduce your exam stress. If you just sit their making quizzes, firstly you make questions on things you already know, you overestimate how much you can learn, and you consolidat","stance":"strong_rec"}],"eW-OMR-iWOE":[{"hn_comment_id":17914279,"author":"ObsoleteNerd","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level","text":"This video they made is absolutely hilarious, and shows just how un-hilarious and fucked up these proposed changes are: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17950409,"author":"ObsoleteNerd","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Australia's anti-encryption law will merely relocate the backdoors: Expert","text":"FWIW, I've had pretty good success in getting non-techie friends and family to write in after showing them this video: [VIDEO] It's very entertaining, and explains it in a way that everyday people can understand how bad it will be. I highly urge all Australians to either send this video out to your circles. (No affiliation, it came up in a previous thread about this topic)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17914005,"author":"acutesoftware","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level","text":"I came across this video that shows the potential issues with this bill [VIDEO] What is concerning is I am building a information management system that focuses on privacy and this sort of bill makes a mockery of the entire concept.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18656022,"author":"d2wa","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Goodbye FastMail: Aussie government undermining trust in tech companies","text":"Companies have to build tools that grants any law enforcement agency access to whatever data they want on whomever they want. For an email provider, these tools could include a search function that lets them look through every email on the platform. Or they could just ask them to mail them a daily dump of all new messages on a floppy disk. The point being, FastMail can\u2019t tell the world what assistance and access their granting the government and there is no oversight or even transparency that could spark public debates on what is reasonable and what isn\u2019t. This satirical video is a good introduction to the changes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eX9m3g5J-XA":[{"hn_comment_id":4508406,"author":"e12e","month":"2012-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Python / Django Workflow, and choosing an OS","text":"I'm not sure this is an answer for you, as you ask for \"tools like LXC for virtualizing a production environment\", but have you looked at Vagrant? I don't use OS X myself, but AFAIK it should work fine on OS X, see eg: \"Django project deployment with vagrant and fabric\" [LINK] and maybe: [LINK] As for \"vim-elite\" -- that really isn't what vim is about at all -- I recommend having a look at: \"7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0\" [VIDEO] As for window management on OS X -- again, I don't really use OS X -- but maybe something like: [LINK] can help? edit: Added titles for video links, additional vagrant link.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20482822,"author":"anaphor","month":"2019-07","story_title":"History and Effective Use of Vim","text":"This video of a talk that Bram Moolenaar (the author of vim) gave at Google in 2007 has some pretty good advice. [VIDEO] Mainly the idea is to not try and learn everything about vim, but instead pay attention to how you use it, and find things that are inefficient or could be easier, and then go figure out how to make vim do that thing more efficiently.","stance":"rec"}],"eXR1olg_I0w":[{"hn_comment_id":13880117,"author":"hexane360","month":"2017-03","story_title":"An 85-year old millionaire hides $1M treasure in the Rocky Mountains (2016)","text":"[VIDEO] Here's a pretty good one. It appears to be constant 3-axis compensation, although he alludes to newer helicopters that have made it much easier.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17812542,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2018-08","story_title":"What to Do After Finding Hot Connectors on Overhead Power Lines (2017) [video]","text":"> Those helicopter pilots must have a very steady hand. Piloting a helicopter in general requires an incredibly steady hand on unintuitive controls that interact with each other in ways that are difficult to predict[1]. Being able to do that with high precision, a disturbingly small margin of error, and fatal consequences for almost any error is basically a superpower. [1] SmarterEveryDay has an interesting video[2] about learning to hover a helicopter, which apparently requires trying to hover (badly) until the brain learns how to abstract away all of the complexity. [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ecIWPzGEbFc":[{"hn_comment_id":15526589,"author":"kartan","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Tech workers worry about age discrimination at age 40: Study","text":"For an informed answer you can see: \"Uncle\" Bob Martin - \"The Future of Programming\" [VIDEO] Please, see the video. It is an awesome informative and it will give you a lot of insight on our current situation. It is not about startups, but about the maturity of the industry itself.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17653650,"author":"rb808","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Computer science as a lost art (2015)","text":"Bob Martin has a great talk [VIDEO] , which illustrates a lot of history of computers. He asserts that the number of devs is doubling every 5 years which means that half the developers have < 5 years experience. The industry has lots much of its scientific discipline which has to return, or regulations will force more structure. Anyway he's a great speaker and this is one of my favorites.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21703519,"author":"neovive","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Say it's 1962, you're lucky enough to be a programmer working with an IBM 7090","text":"For those interested in the history of computer programming, \"Uncle\" Bob Martin gave an excellent talk in 2016 called \"The Future of Programming\", starting with Alan Turing in 1936. It's a fascinating introduction to the evolution of hardware and programming languages. I was particularly amazed at how Turing used CRT screens for memory and output. The history discussion starts at around 11 min: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32225486,"author":"ghoward","month":"2022-07","story_title":"What\u2019s the end goal for you programmers?","text":"I am not working in industry; I'm such a loner programmer that I struggle in industry. But since my wife likes her work, I have space to write the software I want to write. My first goal is to make that software good enough and useful enough to create an engineering-only company like Hwaci, the company that does SQLite and Fossil. If I succeed at that, I'll see about trying to pull in enough money to retire early and do charity work through my church. But I have another goal for while I'm still in industry. I want to change our industry such that it is a professional industry, with a code of ethics, to where we create software that serves users , not our employers or government. This means fighting against slurping up user data, serving ads, and other ways that software disobeys users in favor of obeying its creators. I even created a Twitter account to show some of those things. [1] Yes, that means an uphill battle against basically all of Big Tech, and I don't expect to win. But if I make people think about it, I'll take that as a win. But regardless, I feel strongly about it because users depend on us to make software that will serve them. If we don't, no one will. Uncle Bob Martin talked about this. [2] (That link starts at a good point, but the whole talk is worth watching.) So that's my goal: make good software and change the industry for the better. Lofty, yes, but I'll be satisfied by completing one of those goals. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12725805,"author":"algold","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Really good talk! This is a newer and also really good talk about programming languages and their future: \"Uncle\" Bob Martin - \"The Future of Programming\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13430395,"author":"EdSharkey","month":"2017-01","story_title":"My Response to \u201cAre we overcomplicating software development?\u201d","text":"To me, the real issue is that the managers got ahold of agile. Most managers just want waterfall, I'm convinced, which I suspect is where so much of the head scratching about Agile comes from. We developers have done an abysmal job developing, socializing, and formalizing our standards and practices. Needing to keep agile things loose because teams and industries and people and projects differ is one thing. But, we don't even try to establish unambiguous definitions for general topics like test-driven development, big visible charts, or sprints. Frankly, we need industry leadership and earned certifications for developer craftsmanship. Uncle Bob recently has shared some good food for thought in this area. Not only does he recommend the direction we professional devs need to head, but he also speculates as to what will happen if we don't (loss of freedom.) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16840291,"author":"geksilla","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Rich Hickey - \"simple made easy\" [LINK] Rob Pike - \"concurrency is not parallelism\" [LINK] Uncle Bob Martin - \"future of programming\" [VIDEO] Martin Kleppmann - \"transactions: myths, surprises and opportunities\" [LINK] Simon Brown - \"software architecture vs code\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19698523,"author":"fogetti","month":"2019-04","story_title":"How the Boeing 737 Max disaster looks to a software Developer","text":"Let me tell one thing: I absolutely hate sloppy engineering. And by sloppy I also mean rushing. There is a class of engineers and engineering managers who think that they are rockstars because they can churn out code quickly. I am absolutely disgusted and sick of this attitude. And why do I bring it up here? Because I suspect this kind of attitude was partly blamed for this fatal and tragic accident. Of course this is pure speculation. But my 12 years experience in the software industry makes me believe that's what happened. Also a relevant talk by Uncle Bob: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20998907,"author":"miguelmota","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Joel Spolsky and Clive Thompson discuss the past, present, and future of coding","text":"A good presentation on the history of programming and how we got to where we are is Bob Martin - The Future of Programming [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22981220,"author":"Hokusai","month":"2020-04","story_title":"A one-line package broke `npm create-react-app`","text":"I found it! :) I has a lot of content and insights. \"Uncle\" Bob Martin - \"The Future of Programming\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ed2FWNWwE3I":[{"hn_comment_id":6628049,"author":"chinmoy","month":"2013-10","story_title":"How to Get a Job at a High Frequency Trading Firm","text":"I'm happy to see this pop up on HN since HFT is something I've been looking into lately. If you're interested to dig deeper into HFT and algorithmic trading, 'Inside the Black Box' will be a good read. Link: www.amazon.com/Inside-Black-Box-Quantitative-Frequency/dp/1118362411 If you want to take your reading further, there are some great recommendations on the review section. And just to get an insider look into quant traders and the effect HFT can have on the market, I also recommend these two short documentaries made by the dutch national TV: 1. Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street [VIDEO] 2. Money & Speed: Inside the Black Box [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25972963,"author":"kratom_sandwich","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Resources on (Computational) Finance","text":"Check out the works of Paul Wilmott, which include textbooks and a magazine of the same name which is (or at least used to be) the most expensive magazine subscription there is. Wikipedia: [LINK] Documentary on \"quants\" featuring him: [VIDEO] For finance in general, I recommend \"Corporate Finance\" by Berk & de Marzo or the CFA study material, which is quite accessible (at least for Level 1).","stance":"rec"}],"ef2jpjTEB5U":[{"hn_comment_id":45981718,"author":"laszlokorte","month":"2025-11","story_title":"The Future of Programming (2013) [video]","text":"My favorite Bret Victor talk ever is \u201eDrawing dynamic visualizations\u201c [1] that made me try to reverse engineer [2] the demonstrated tool that he sadly never released. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27843489,"author":"melling","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Pharo 9","text":"\u201cPharo is a \u2026 and immediate feedback.\u201d The key that we should provide more often. Bret Victor has been discussing for over a decade. Can\u2019t find them demo that i\u2019m thinking of but here\u2019s an introduction into Bret [VIDEO] [LINK] His ideas go beyond \u201cimmediate feedback\u201d \u2026","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34487952,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?","text":"For the people asking who is Bret Victor: When \"What are your favourite tech talks of all time?\" is asked on HN, he gets more mentions than anyone else, usually. Some of his talks: Inventing on Principle [LINK] The Future of Programming [LINK] The Humane Representation of Thought [LINK] Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [LINK] Seeing Spaces [LINK] Drawing Dynamic Visualizations [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"efPrtcLdcdM":[{"hn_comment_id":42280404,"author":"benreesman","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA","text":"In my opinion the granddaddy of all 4chan CAPTCHA busts is still Yannick Kilcher\u2019s GPT-J tune on \u201cRaiders of the Lost Kek\u201d set, and might be the coolest thing an LLM has ever done on video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31614432,"author":"thegreatdukd","month":"2022-06","story_title":"GPT-4chan","text":"There is a solid video explanation (though the author is undermining the toxicity of the average 4chan /pol/ posts): [VIDEO] . A really interesting experiment.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39667911,"author":"sigmoid10","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target","text":"I still love this experiment: [VIDEO] The theories about the origins of these commenters were amazing. There's nothing to say that other people are not doing the exact same thing right now here on HN and other places. And very few people would even notice, because open LLMs have progressed significantly since then.","stance":"rec"}],"egEraZP9yXQ":[{"hn_comment_id":25929876,"author":"thearrow","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Topology 101: How Mathematicians Study Holes","text":"If you'd like a fun, light, video introduction to this topic, this Vsauce video is worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27231453,"author":"dsamarin","month":"2021-05","story_title":"The anus is an evolutionary marvel","text":"It depends on the minimum size of the what you will consider a hole. Check out the video from VSauce on YouTube about how many holes a human has. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39555949,"author":"davkan","month":"2024-02","story_title":"'Entropy bagels' and other complex structures emerge from simple rules","text":"Vsauce has an interesting video regarding topology[0]. Probably a bit rudimentary for anyone already familiar with the math, but still entertaining in the typical vsauce way. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eiYoBbEZwlk":[{"hn_comment_id":13266507,"author":"nickpsecurity","month":"2016-12","story_title":"The Resurgence of C Programming","text":"Case in point: [VIDEO] Maybe we need to use your sharp tools point with that video. It drives the point home with even experienced people losing fingers to their tools followed by tech modified to prevent it. The demo also never gets old. Just too badass.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9530459,"author":"toothbrush","month":"2015-05","story_title":"The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car","text":"Wow, that's super neat, i'd never heard of it. Seems like something that should be absolutely mandatory for all factories equipped with such devices! Go technology! Here's a demonstration, it's very fluffy but it gets the point across. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"elqAh3GWRpA":[{"hn_comment_id":28020975,"author":"leijurv","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Minecraft\u2019s 'Worst' Server Was Exploited So Hard, Griefers Could See the Future","text":"Hi, this was me. That article has a lot of inaccuracies, typos, and general mistakes due to it being a summary of a YouTube video. I recommend instead looking at: The video it is summarizing [VIDEO] My explanation [LINK] The 2b2t wiki page about it [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38411191,"author":"xcdzvyn","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Minecraft rewritten from scratch in Kotlin, hypixel works","text":"Perhaps the most impressive feat I've seen out of 2B2T was an exploit called \"Nocom\". It began with 2B2T being hit with a lag exploit, then that exploit being fixed in a 3-line patch - that patch subtly introduced another exploit that allowed the author to track the position of every player in the server at all times, down to the chunk. I won't explain the whole video[0], but it details a story of gaslighting, 3 years of player data, and some really really impressive technical work, given this is all over a block game. [0] [VIDEO] And while certainly not to the scale of Minecraft, Counter-Strike does have a (diminishing) sizeable community of cheaters that majorly play against each other, competing in technique and configuration, called Hack-vs-Hack (HvH).","stance":"rec"}],"elvOZm0d4H0":[{"hn_comment_id":8718198,"author":"japhyr","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Almost all numbers contain the digit \u201c3\u201d [video]","text":"I teach high school math and science. I had a group of students do a mini-project around the question, \"Is there anything bigger than infinity?\" The core of the project was students watching this numberphile video [0], and recreating his reasoning on their own. That project helped them reason about higher-level math in a way they never thought themselves capable. The idea of \"magic\" never came up, but they certainly spoke about their sense of wonder at higher-level math. I really appreciate the way he presents mathematical concepts. [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7363061,"author":"japhyr","month":"2014-03","story_title":"LHC Physics Center bans Powerpoint, switches to whiteboard-only forums","text":"I like the numberphile series on youtube. I showed one in class where he explains how some infinities are bigger than others. My non-math-inclined students were able to follow it by watching several times, because they could see the entire process. They re-created the process themselves, rather than just trying to digest an explanation of an already-completed proof/ demonstration. Infinity is bigger than you think [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17300643,"author":"cyphar","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Are real numbers really real?","text":"Yes, because if there were such a list then you could assign a 1-to-1 mapping (by list index) of each number between 0 and 1 to a whole number which would prove they have the same size. If it is impossible to have a complete list of all real numbers between 0 and 1 then there cannot be such a mapping, and thus you'll \"run out\" of integers before you've counted all of the reals (more correctly you're showing that the size must be larger because if it was smaller or of equal size it could fit in such a list). Numberphile did a pretty good introductory video to this if you want to learn more: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27849375,"author":"twelfthnight","month":"2021-07","story_title":"How many real numbers exist? New proof moves closer to an answer","text":"Here's some background on the proof [1]. Here's a video explaining it little better [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"enHF9lMseP8":[{"hn_comment_id":21849310,"author":"ChuckMcM","month":"2019-12","story_title":"In Memoriam of Charles \u201cChuck\u201d Peddle","text":"Agreed. I was sad to hear of Chuck's passing. His MOS Technology was a huge thorn in Intel's side in the early days. That company punched way above its weight class because the chip was so simple it made a huge number of things possible. I got to meet him when he did this interview ( [VIDEO] ) with the Computer History Museum and really was impressed at how he understood and expressed computation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27424218,"author":"vidarh","month":"2021-06","story_title":"6502 \u201cIllegal\u201d Opcodes Demystified","text":"Most of what I know about that comes from Brian Bagnall's books (e.g. Commodore: A company on the edge). It's covered in the first chapter. I don't know of any preserved documents - if they exist they'd belong to Motorola, and I'd expect the leavers would have preferred to ditch any such documents (though part of the reason for the settlement with Motorola was that one of the engineers stupidly taking 6800 documentation with him). This [1] summarizes it. Here [2] is an interview by Computer History Museum of Chuck Peddle. It matches up with the first chapters in Bagnalls book very closely. From about 50 minutes in he talks about his meetings w/Motorola customers that told him the 6800 was too expensive. From about 58m in they talk about basically setting a size metric for the chip to meet a low enough price point. So the starting point was what they could fit in small enough space. You might also like the Computer History Museum interview w/Bill Mensch [3] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"eqQBubilSXU":[{"hn_comment_id":16114829,"author":"imglorp","month":"2018-01","story_title":"A Type of Road Junction that Kills Cyclists","text":"This is also of high interest to motorcyclists who even have a name for the phenomena: SMIDSY (Sorry, Mate I Didn't See You). OP was focused on the A pillar and some other effects, while this excellent video goes a little further into some perception psychology about camouflage and how we perceive moving objects across backgrounds. You can ignore the motorcycle stuff but the explanation is enlightening. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21157222,"author":"imglorp","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Lethal memory fail: Why drivers see, and then forget motorcyclists","text":"There's a second factor at work beyond memory - it's the human visual perceptive system. Bikes are not always moving across the visual field, and they aren't fitting the pattern of a bigger single-color smooth object so it's effectively camouflage. This is an outstanding vid on the whole subject illustrating the problem and some avoidance methods. This should be taught in rider training but it's not (US). [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24352648,"author":"kingaillas","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Airline pilots landing at LAX report \u201ca guy in jetpack\u201d flying alongside them","text":">it's always \"Sorry mate I didn't see you\". Ah, the SMIDSY: [VIDEO] That video covers the optical illusion that leads to it and what motorcycles can do.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28271176,"author":"IgorPartola","month":"2021-08","story_title":"A DIY E-bike Conversion on the Cheap","text":"Have you ever seen videos of how invisible you look despite all the high viz stuff? In some cases it becomes urban camo. Take a look at this video, especially at 2:30 or so. It\u2019ll show you just how little visibility you\u2019ll have: [VIDEO] Your best bet is to have all your clothing match your bike, Power Rangers style, to increase your chances. And lots and lots of very bright lights. One little handlebar mounted light is going to look like a reflection or a flashlight.","stance":"rec"}],"er_lLvkklsk":[{"hn_comment_id":27363457,"author":"kanzenryu2","month":"2021-06","story_title":"William Byrd on logic and relational programming, miniKanren (2014)","text":"You might enjoy this amazing talk. I've linked to a part when the next 20 seconds of explanation turns the amazing up to 11. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27363028,"author":"will_byrd","month":"2021-06","story_title":"William Byrd on logic and relational programming, miniKanren (2014)","text":"For anyone who finds this topic interesting, you might be interested in the following resources: [LINK] The second edition of `The Reasoned Schemer` (MIT Press, 2018): [LINK] The Clojure/conj 2016 talk Greg Rosenblatt and I gave on Barliman: [VIDEO] `A Unified Approach to Solving Seven Programming Problems (Functional Pearl)`, William E. Byrd, Michael Ballantyne, Gregory Rosenblatt, Matthew Might (ICFP 2017) (Open Access): [LINK] and the related talk: [LINK] and Nada Amin's interactive version of the paper: [LINK] Cheers, --Will","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39183350,"author":"thuuuomas","month":"2024-01","story_title":"A Tour of the Lisps","text":"Have you checked out any of the minikanren logic programming environments people have implemented in scheme? The Reasoned Schemer is an accessible introduction to that space if you\u2019re not put off by the socratic-themed dialogue. & the Barliman demo is still pretty exciting even after LLM codegen. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"esPRsT-lmw8":[{"hn_comment_id":23258771,"author":"scns","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Surviving Depression","text":"You can show via SPECT brainscans that the over- or underactivity in certain parts of the brain correlates strongly with psychological symptoms. For example you can show that people suffering from ADD have a lowered activity in their prefrontal cortex. Or that people with an overactive deep limbic system suffer from depression. Check out Dr Daniel Amen's work. He did over 83000 brainscans. [VIDEO] edit: added count and link to video","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28380934,"author":"jlokier","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Zoom court hearing postponed after accused found in same location as witness","text":"I think this talk is relevant. It's not specifically about convicts but includes them. \"The most important lesson from 83,000 brain scans | Daniel Amen | TEDxOrangeCoast\" [VIDEO] My summary of the thesis of the talk: Brain injury is far more common than is generally realised, contributes to many kinds of behavioural issues far more than is realised, is visible on scans, and is to some extent treatable, but it's usually not considered or examined.","stance":"rec"}],"esQyYGezS7c":[{"hn_comment_id":35082542,"author":"slowmovintarget","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Why Poverty Persists in America","text":"You're forgetting the NIST. They operate at a net profit, selling things like Standard Jars of Peanut Butter for equipment calibration ($1,069 per unit). There's a cool Veritasium video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38017567,"author":"seritools","month":"2023-10","story_title":"NIST Standard Peanut Butter \u2013 $1,107","text":"Probably the one linked above by Tom Scott, or this one by Veritasium: [VIDEO] The Veritasium one mentions NIST peanut butter specifically, even.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38017639,"author":"V__","month":"2023-10","story_title":"NIST Standard Peanut Butter \u2013 $1,107","text":"Veritasium [1] did a video of exactly this and explains why it exists [at 2m35s]: > An ordinary jar of peanut butter costs less than $5. And on the label you can see the ingredients and the amounts of different nutrients like protein, fats, sugar, and sodium. Those values have been measured by the manufacturer using different machines and analytical techniques. But how do you know those results are accurate? Well, this is where the government's standard jar of peanut butter comes in. It is mixed up so carefully and thoroughly that each jar contains exactly the same substance. > \"We take great pains at homogenizing these things. Make sure it's consistent.\" > Then scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, take years to painstakingly identify the quantities of all the different compounds in the peanut butter with specified uncertainties. This peanut butter is then known as a standard reference material or SRM. They sell these perfectly characterized SRM samples of peanut butter to researchers and manufacturers so they can calibrate their equipment. Essentially, the buyer knows that their equipment is working properly if, when they run the standard peanut butter, they get the values NIST supplies on the certificate. > \"We've spent a lot of time to make sure that we're confident and, you know, we can spend years studying the amount of fat in here and trying to figure out exactly what those numbers are.\" > So what you're paying for is not really the pe","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38022916,"author":"jwestbury","month":"2023-10","story_title":"NIST Standard Peanut Butter \u2013 $1,107","text":"Correct. Veritasium actually did a video on exactly this set of items last year[0]. The tl;dr is that NIST has a large collection of items which are rigorously produced and tested, with detailed documentation about their composition and test results, which allows companies to test their own products to very specific standards. For instance, peanut butter has aflatoxins -- known carcinogens. NIST's standard peanut butter has known levels of aflatoxins. By purchasing this peanut butter and testing it on your own peanut-butter-aflatoxin-sensing machine, you can calibrate your machine to detect aflatoxins in peanut butter to a reasonably high precision. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42842967,"author":"0xC0ncord","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Going Nuts over NIST\u2019s Standard Reference Peanut Butter (2016)","text":"Veritasium has a great video[1] on NIST's Standard Reference Materials including their peanut butter. It talks about some of the other aspects of NIST's business in selling these items, their history, why they exist, and some of the other interesting ones like their standard reference cigarettes. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47809433,"author":"prophesi","month":"2026-04","story_title":"NIST gives up enriching most CVEs","text":"Assuming this is in reference to the great Veritasium video[0] going over what these reference materials are used for and why they're so expensive. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"esUb7Zy5Oio":[{"hn_comment_id":25544441,"author":"sorenjan","month":"2020-12","story_title":"1937 film explains how a car differential works","text":"Youtube has recommended a few videos from the channel Learn Engineering that have been surprisingly good. For example: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32427059,"author":"londons_explore","month":"2022-08","story_title":"A 17-year-old designed a novel synchronous reluctance motor","text":"A tesla Model 3 motor already is partially a reluctance motor. This youtube video describes it rather well, and I'd recommend giving it a watch [1]. Notice the air gaps - thats the reluctance part of the rotor. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ett_8wLJ87U":[{"hn_comment_id":37731342,"author":"xmprt","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Don't worry about global population collapse","text":"Wars don't just appear out of thin air. There were a lot of incentives for countries to engage in war. Cloning doesn't really benefit anyone and doing cloning requires a ton of funding and grants and ethics boards reviews. If you're interested in the history of human cloning (and where that field of research is trending towards), I'd recommend watching this video [1]. Full human cloning is somewhat pointless however the research has lead to innovations in stem cell research which does have real benefits for things like organ transplants. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38828013,"author":"mbaye","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the YouTube channel worth to follow in 2024?","text":"Bobby Broccoli: [LINK] Documentaries about daring scientific fraud such as \"The man who tried to fake an element\" [LINK] or \"The man who faked human cloning\" [VIDEO] Or the epic tale of political intrigue in \"The $21,000,000,000 hole in Texas\" [LINK] about the The Superconducting Super Collider that never was.","stance":"rec"}],"etx0k1nLn78":[{"hn_comment_id":25553156,"author":"nitrogen","month":"2020-12","story_title":"California Public Utilities Commission fired director who exposed missing $200M","text":"I am replying for the sake of the hidden sibling comment: I don't watch any major media coverage of politics, but a mathematician and comedian I follow on YouTube (from a different country who presumably has no horse in the race) has analyzed some of the numerical allegations of fraud: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35588673,"author":"MrJohz","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Investigating and preventing scientific misconduct with Benford\u2019s law","text":"Matt Parker did a good video with lots of visuals to explain why Benford's Law works in general, but why it cannot always be simply applied to election results. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"euJgtLcWWyo":[{"hn_comment_id":31239809,"author":"naraic0o","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Fritzing is an open-source electronic design tool","text":"mitxela did a great video on this topic recently and wrote a plugin for kicad to make the regular geometric layouts more organic. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45633551,"author":"OisinMoran","month":"2025-10","story_title":"./watch","text":"This is gorgeous! I knew you could get different colo(u)red PCBs but had no idea about transparent solder masks. Even more reason to \"Melt your circuit boards\" video: [VIDEO] blog: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"evQsOFQju08":[{"hn_comment_id":20836864,"author":"0xdeadb00f","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves?","text":"For anyone who read this comment and was wondering what \"qualia\" actually is, I found an old episode of VSause about it: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23592745,"author":"behindsight","month":"2020-06","story_title":"\u201cYou want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?\u201d (2018)","text":"You might be interested in the concept of qualia [0] Vsauce did a good video on it, \"Is Your Red The Same as My Red?\" [1] 0: [LINK] 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"eviSykqSUUw":[{"hn_comment_id":29319624,"author":"jjoonathan","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Full key extraction of Nvidia TSEC","text":"For real. The talent in the game industry is insane. Recently, I got my mind blown by the Unreal Nanite team: [VIDEO] The core of it is a respectably sophisticated LOD building algorithm, as you might expect, but the sheer amount of engineering horsepower they put into driving it into production just boggles the mind.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29511277,"author":"jameshart","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The Matrix Awakens: Unreal Engine 5 Techdemo [video]","text":"If this UE5 demo is using Nanite, then it really may well just be modeled geometry. Nanite really blurs the line between geometry and texture - in a sense it\u2019s a shader that uses triangle mesh data as if it were a texture source. This siggraph session will expand your mind: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35660733,"author":"jjoonathan","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads","text":"It attracts truly extraordinary talent. One of many examples: [VIDEO] . There is more technical ambition in a single slide of that project than an entire department at places I've worked. However, it also tends to demand more and pay less, so there is churn and burnout and when it comes time to triage, the triage can cut very deep. If I were to dive into the JIRA for any one of these \"missing compression\" incidents, I wouldn't expect to find an easy win, I would expect to find \"missing compression\" beneath a pile of much worse bugs like \"level 2 crashes on AMD cards.\" So it goes.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37487737,"author":"superb_dev","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Apple iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max","text":"Nanite has a large pre-render step, but it also changes the rendering quite significantly. (Which in some cases includes a software rasterizer running on the GPU) This is a really good deep dive if you\u2019re interested: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48963896,"author":"jfim","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Advances in Real Time Rendering in Games","text":"Their YouTube channel has the excellent deep dive on the unreal engine's nanite virtual geometry system: [VIDEO] The one on idTech8 global illumination from last year is pretty interesting too.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29626114,"author":"jjoonathan","month":"2021-12","story_title":"War stories: how Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Playstation (2020)","text":"If you want to see this sort of brilliant hacking on a modern system, I recommend taking a closer look at Unreal Nanite. It isn't just auto-LOD. Oh no. That's the core, but they had to do this same sort of \"work around the tools they are given\" to make it actually happen. Tiny triangles chug in modern GPU hardware raster pipelines -- so they wrote a GPGPU software rasterizer. They needed more bandwidth, so they wrote a compression engine. Their shaders needed better scheduling, so they abused the Z-test to do it. It's nuts! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29755997,"author":"Animats","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Finding your home in game graphics programming","text":"No, but it is a full time job. It's getting much more complicated. Here's an hour long talk on how Unreal Engine 5's Nanite works.[1] This is a huge breakthrough in level of detail theory. Things that used to be O(N) are now O(1). With enough pre-computation, rendering cost does not go up with scene size. See this demo.[2] You can download the demo for Xbox X/S and PlayStation 5, and soon, in source form for PCs. Explore 16 square kilometers of photorealistic city in which you can see a close-up view of anything. The format of assets in memory for Nanite becomes far more complicated. GPUs need a redesign again; UE5 has to do more of the rendering on the CPUs than they'd like. What they need to do is simple but not well suited to current GPU designs. It's such a huge win this approach will take over, despite that. New game engines will need to have something comparable. Maybe using the same format. Epic doesn't seem to be making patent claims, and the code for all this is in the Unreal Engine 5 download. (Basic concept of how this works: A mesh becomes a hierarchy of meshes, allowing zoom in and out of on level of detail. The approach to subdivision is seamless. You divide the mesh into cells of about 20 triangles. Then, each cell is cut by one or two new long edges across the cell. These become the boundaries of a simpler cell with about half as many triangles, but no new vertices. The lower-resolution cell has no more edges than the higher-resolution cell. There's a neat gra","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30922283,"author":"jjoonathan","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Unreal Engine 5 is now available","text":"Yeah, but they had to go through hell to make it happen. It took a lot more effort than you might think. [VIDEO] Some highlights: Seam staggering between levels for smooth swaps Current hardware rasterizers chug on small polys so they made a GPU software rasterizer (!) Actually it's a hybrid rasterizer, and gnarly features like derivatives are supported on both sides The GPU scheduler chugged so they abused Z-test wave repacking Streaming compression","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37456573,"author":"spoiler","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Why Unreal Engine 5.3 is a BIG Deal [video]","text":"There's a lot of techniques applied. It's not really \"one new revolutionary thing\" but a bunch of things and research over the past 20-30 years put together to make nanite possible. This video might shed some light [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41459530,"author":"Animats","month":"2024-09","story_title":"UE5 Nanite in WebGPU","text":"The answer to that is in this hour-long SIGGRAPH video.[1] Some of the operations needed are not done well, or at all, by the GPU. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42931273,"author":"Gollapalli","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Nvidia open-source nanite: continuous level of detail (LOD) mesh library","text":"Thanks for posting this! I'll be digging into it. It seems like a good basis for learning how the tech works. For those interested in more on continuous LOD, here's a SIGGRAPH talk where they go into some of the why and how of Unreal's Nanite (similar continuous LOD system) here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ewsGmhAjjjI":[{"hn_comment_id":20268525,"author":"michaelbuckbee","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Aphantasia","text":"A little slow, but this video is fantastic for describing the feeling of aphantasia and it's sort of doubly fascinating that the incredibly talented artist who made it suffers from it (as I'm the flip side, great at visualizing and horrid at creation) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18805716,"author":"cybersol","month":"2019-01","story_title":"The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia","text":"So I have aphantasia, and I first realized when talking to someone about mental images and memories. They have photorealistic pictures in their mind, or even video scenes like a movie. At my best I have something like an expressionist painting with words and concepts arranged spatially on blobs of color representing the object. More typically, just blackness. Here is another description of it, and a test in the first part: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ez4DgdurRPg":[{"hn_comment_id":3308528,"author":"knowledgesale","month":"2011-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What interesting non-intuitive things do you know?","text":"The p-value [1] criterion is often used to test a proposed hypothesis in medical and social science research papers. When you stumble upon something along the lines of \"studies that shown that eating broccoli makes people happy\" in your everyday life, it comes down to the p-value calculation being small enough <0.05 for the before and after gathered datasets. The p-value method is practically a standard for scientific reporting in some fields. It also has some drastic shortcomings, including, e,g., dramatic instability for tests with only little data [2]. Naturally, people realize that and try to use additional tools and criteria when available. However, scientists are pretty brutally incentivized to publish positive results and, as a result, more often than it should be, too much weight is put on the single p-value criterion. With issues like this in mind, in my opinion, it makes sense to be somewhat skeptical when seeing reports in the news that \"A effects B\" and definitely not to rush with the conclusions. Trivial, I know. The [3] video pretty much sums it up and by all means is worth a watch. ------------------- [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9110898,"author":"po","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Psychology Journal Bans Significance Testing","text":"The audio is a bit quiet but the 'dance of the p values' video [1] linked to by the article is absolutely fantastic and well worth watching. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"ez773teNFYA":[{"hn_comment_id":30941374,"author":"Pilottwave","month":"2022-04","story_title":"We\u2019ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute","text":"Lots of comments about his \"arrogance\" but i just see someone passionate, judge for yourself! He has three long interviews on Lex Fridmans youtube channel! I greatly enjoyed watching those those. 1:[Stephen Wolfram: Cellular Automata, Computation, and Physics]( [VIDEO] ) 2:[Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe]( [LINK] ) 3: [Stephen Wolfram: Complexity and the Fabric of Reality ]( [LINK] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23589312,"author":"__s","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Odds of communicating with 36 other possible intelligent civilizations are small","text":"Random math doesn't imply intelligence: [LINK] is that shell intelligent? Wolfram has an alright interview where he considers this: [VIDEO] My own thoughts: intelligence is something which you need to observe predicting the future, ie something proactively reacting to the future in order to achieve a goal. This means ideally you have a bit of interaction so that you can see that you're interacting with is capable of learning in response to you","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29133533,"author":"erikig","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?","text":"I still use it regularly too - even more so after listening to Stephen Wolfram\u2019s 3 part podcast [1] with Lex Fridman where he discussed the latest developments in Wolfram, Mathematica etc [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33594344,"author":"SuoDuanDao","month":"2022-11","story_title":"What You (Want to)* Want","text":"Regarding reading suggestions, you'd probably like Wolfram's cellular Automata theory. accessible intro: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ezVk1ahRF78":[{"hn_comment_id":39279581,"author":"leipert","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better","text":"Just can recommend this great talk: [VIDEO] Amount of kids is strongly linked to child mortality and access to health care access.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6658623,"author":"sdoering","month":"2013-11","story_title":"An interview with Bill Gates","text":"Funny thing is, we \"know\" relatively good, what the maximum of earths population will be and why. And we know (also relatively good) how fast we will lift people from poverty, given the actual and historical numbers. Hans Rosling showed it quite well in a TED talk he gave: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21061107,"author":"familysized","month":"2019-09","story_title":"From Underwear to Cars, India\u2019s Economy Is Fraying","text":"> You are right, what nature actually cares greatly, is about exponential population growth with no regard for future sustainability. Perfect, I was waiting for you to say this. Now I have the chance to educate you (which should have been done by your \"superior western education\" but anyway). Read these articles and you will find that exponential growth is a myth. We are already close to replacement levels. The population is high in India and China only because of historic reasons - they are one of the most fertile lands on the planet. [LINK] [LINK] Then watch this video to understand the real trends in population growth. [VIDEO] Great! You finally rid yourself of these myths.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40316473,"author":"WA","month":"2024-05","story_title":"The world has probably passed peak pollution","text":"It's not. We need a sustainable size of population. Unlimited population growth is not sustainable. It doesn't mean that we are going to die out. It just means that there are as many newborns as old people dying. Check out this good old Hans Rosling video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ezqwfha-BZ8":[{"hn_comment_id":19834151,"author":"2Ccltvcm","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Repair delays for Tesla owners","text":"Anybody involved with Tesla in any way should at least watch The Fantastic Case of the Missing Tesla by Rich [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19745413,"author":"kylec","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Tesla Posts Big Quarterly Loss as Its Electric-Car Sales Lag","text":"You should watch the Rich Rebuilds series of videos about the problems he had buying a used Model X from Tesla: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"f-wWBGo6a2w":[{"hn_comment_id":16195631,"author":"nicolashahn","month":"2018-01","story_title":"What\u2019s So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?","text":"For those interested in his non-gender identity content: His series on the Bible: [VIDEO] is generally regarded (by those I know, at least) as Jordan at his best. He goes through the first few stories in the Bible and tries to bring meaning to them, not from the fundamental Christian lens of \"this is absolute truth,\" but more like: \"Here are some archetypal patterns about the world and how to act in it that our ancestors have discovered over thousands of years and distilled into stories. Maybe they hold truth that isn't the 'word of God' truth, but observations about the world that have utility to us even as a modern, rational, scientific civilization. I'll back this up by tying it to studies on psychology, neuroscience, evolution, and animal behavior, and show that variations of the same archetypal stories appear in non-Judeo-Christian societies all over the world.\" You can be a hardline atheist and still get tons of value out of these lectures. I also found his 2017 Maps of Meaning lectures particularly interesting, and personally more relevant: [LINK] He does a similar thing with the story of Pinocchio instead of the Bible for the first few lectures, which might be more palatable for some. There's a lot of overlap with the Bible series as well.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23251870,"author":"dagav","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Surviving Depression","text":"I highly recommend you listen to these lecture series. I cannot overstate the profound effect they had on my life, by giving me the tools I needed to turn my depression around and give me a sense of balance and control in my life. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27739831,"author":"alfor","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Dabrowski\u2019s theory and existential depression (2020)","text":"There might not be meaning to the universe, but there is meaning in the human enterprise. We went from animals, to highly effective and conscious of ourselves and the universe. The human developpement keep pushing forward. I think that the main cause of meaninglessness is our rejection of our own culture ( mostly Christian). There is good reason to reject them as the bearded magician in the sky seem stupid to a modern science minded person, however if you look at those stories at a second degree there is a lot of parts that make sense. Theses stories were the bedrock of our civilisation and the spine of our consciousness. We need to update theses stories with what we now know instead of throwing them out because science make them look outdated. Take a look at Jordan Peterson biblical series, it explain in evolutionary terms how we invented theses stories, what they mean, what we can learn from them. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"f0gMdGrVteI":[{"hn_comment_id":22653680,"author":"spectramax","month":"2020-03","story_title":"TSMC Details 5 nm","text":"I don't understand callous contempful comments against Intel's manufacturing capabilities. There are incredible people making things possible fomr both sides in one of the most advanced manufacturing processes in the world. I've worked inside a fab and I can tell you that the industry is much more appreciative of each other's competitors than the outside fanboys who are largely pissed off at the executive decisions (lawsuits , etc). This article is about TSMC's technical achievements and your comment has not added anything to the discussion, time and again I see this rooting for \"underdog\" behavior all too the same (just flipped the sides) from 2006. I wrote about it here: [LINK] If you'd like to know what goes into shriking a process node from lithography standpoint, I implore you to watch this: [VIDEO] and be in complete utter awe... Tell me if they are \"Sitting on their asses\"?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21431297,"author":"car","month":"2019-11","story_title":"TSMC 5-Nanometer Update","text":"Seeker released a very insightful feature about the ASML Extreme UV / soft X-ray (13.5 nanometers) photolithography system that is being referred to in the article. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22515976,"author":"spectramax","month":"2020-03","story_title":"New AMD side channel attacks discovered, impacts Zen architecture","text":"I think the culture is improving despite of cashing it out in the 90's and 2000's during the Ballmer / Jack Welsch era. Semiconductor industry hasn't done a good job of cultivating a good, positive company culture and making it less regimented. We need to make it cool to work in a semiconductor company. I can assure you that there are so many incredible challenges that exist - with good definition/funding to tackle them from materials to marketing (direly needs to revamped). Imagine running a portion of the world's most advanced manufacturing processes. Ultra high volume (thousands of wafer starts per week), mind you. Perhaps videos such as these are shining a positive light on the entire semiconductor goodwill: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23764928,"author":"jcun4128","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips","text":"This was also a cool video I saw recently about lithography with plasma lasers [VIDEO] around 7:14 in particular","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23977439,"author":"SonOfLilit","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Intel Ponte Vecchio GPU Will Be Made on TSMC 6nm Process, CPUs Could Be TSMC 3nm","text":"Each additional step requires solving a lot of new engineering problems and usually some new physics too, and it's not a linear process: many techniques are proposed that become cost effective only when previous techniques hit their size limits, and then a lot of research is done and most techniques are never gotten to work at scale and just a few pan out and become the next process. This is a great talk on the history of chip processes: [LINK] This is about some of the challenges that had to be solved for a current modern process: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33652448,"author":"sllabres","month":"2022-11","story_title":"ASML looking to finally get ahead of Moore\u2019s Law","text":"Cant answer the question and my knowledge is only from 'one interested' but from how long (~20 years) it took to build the current EUV source and how complicated the alternatives look this is for sure no easy feat. Can recommend [1] as the title say about the light source. Very interesting even for a non professional (and [2] as on high level overview of the machine and [3] as longer documentation inside ASML). [1] [LINK] \"The Extreme Engineering of ASML\u2019s EUV Light Source\" [2] [VIDEO] \"The Extreme Physics Pushing Moore\u2019s Law to the Next Level\" [3] [LINK] \"ASML's Secret: An exclusive view from inside the global semiconductor giant\"","stance":"rec"}],"f4U8YbXKwog":[{"hn_comment_id":24069783,"author":"waldfee","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Usbkill \u2013 anti-forensic tool to halt computer when new USB device is connected","text":"If you are paranoid about something like this happening, just use [LINK] . all usb devices are jailed in a non-networked vm by default. In general, if what you do warrants that level of paranoia, qubes will help you massively. Micah Lee held a great overview talk at HOPE 2018: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32158096,"author":"isolatte","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you develop locally with privacy/security in mind?","text":"In order of decreasing isolation: For hardware and system's security QubesOS(i) is superb for isolation at the (virtual)machine layer. This talk(ii) from Micah Lee when 4.0 launched is a great overview/preview. It's my daily driver, and I find it indispensable. For software security any standard linux distro you can utilize encrypted chroots(iii). This is how things like crouton(iv) work on ChromiumOS. For library isolation you could utilise virtual environments like virtualenv for python. ( or nodenv(v) for 'Node libraries') (i) [LINK] (ii) [VIDEO] (iii) [LINK] (iv) [LINK] (v) [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"f5SE47Xjx2Q":[{"hn_comment_id":18936198,"author":"itchyjunk","month":"2019-01","story_title":"A Fifth of China\u2019s Homes Are Empty (2018)","text":"I watched a really nice 12 mins video[0] on this topic only yesterday. I haven't fact checked it though. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22219222,"author":"Fjolsvith","month":"2020-02","story_title":"China to inject $174B of liquidity on Monday as markets reopen","text":"You might be surprised to learn why there's excess housing. Young men who are courting a lady need two or three houses to have any chance of winning her hand: Why 50 Million Chinese Homes are Empty - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32647107,"author":"8bitsrule","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Loan woes: China's troubled property market hits banks","text":"I was befuddled by what's been going on there. So earlier today I watched this [0], it explains clearly (for a complex situation) what's been going on in China's real estate, the 'ghost cities' and the demolitions. Below that,[1] a recent look at a 'ghost city' by two western bikers. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"f6kdp27TYZs":[{"hn_comment_id":4218574,"author":"mseepgood","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Having a Go - first time experience with Golang","text":"Great talk by Rob Pike: [VIDEO] \"Go Concurrency Patterns\" with cute little gophers playing Chinese whispers with megaphones","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6417758,"author":"canthonytucci","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Less is exponentially more (2012)","text":"For those who don't know who Rob Pike is, he's pretty awesome, helped create UTF-8 among other things, and now works on Go. [LINK] He has given some really great Go talks which are available on youtube, about an hour each: Origins of Go Concurrency Style - [LINK] Lexical Scanning in Go - [LINK] Go Concurrency Patterns (One of my favorites) - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4197854,"author":"luriel","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Golang at CloudFlare","text":"In one word: channels. They might be theoretically equivalent to some degree, but in practice they are quite different, and I find reasoning about both concurrency and parallelism using goroutines and channels much more natural. Also see this talk by Rob Pike on the origins of Go's concurrency model here: [LINK] See also this article by Russ Cox about CSP: [LINK] And Rob Pike's latest talk about concurrency patterns at Google IO last week: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5634733,"author":"mseepgood","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Why Node and Scala will dry up: Go will drink their milkshake","text":"I'm a fan of Go, but this is not a very good talk. The first half is unnecessary trolling, and the second half is based on some code snippets taken from Rob Pike's \"Go Concurrency Patterns\", but in this case badly presented. So I prefer the original: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6072965,"author":"danneu","month":"2013-07","story_title":"ClojureScript Core.async Todos","text":"You're responding to: > Clojurescript is the browser language I always > wanted. JS seems like such a hack. You're getting downvoted for reading into someone's enthusiastic personal endorsement and then ending it with the tiring \"Tell me something good about <thing I refuse to read or understand on my own time but I'll partake in discussion anyways>...\". Start with Rob Pike's \"Go Concurrency Patterns\" ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7395708,"author":"aray","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Go Concurrency Patterns: Pipelines and cancellation","text":"Great explanation in document form of these patterns. Also very succinct and easy to reference. For those that would rather read this in presentation form: [LINK] And for those that would rather watch a video presentation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7925704,"author":"srcreigh","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Go support for Android","text":"In my experience with Android apps, I've almost never had to use the NDK. When I did have to use the NDK, it wasn't because I wanted to code in C/C++---it was because there were strong, open-source libraries written in C/C++ that I wanted to use in an app (Though, I have no experience making games on Android). If you want to check out Go, then the Go Tour [1] and the various talks by Rob Pike [2] [3] / Sameer Ajmani [4] are great resources. The Go Tour stands on its own as an interest-building resource; the several programming exercises it has you do are fun and challenging. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17778281,"author":"staunch","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Concurrency in Go vs. C/C++","text":"Rob Pike did a number of interesting talks on concurrency in Go. If you search \"Go concurrency\" on YouTube there are more good talks. Go Concurrency Patterns [VIDEO] Concurrency Is Not Parallelism [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31899203,"author":"gunapologist99","month":"2022-06","story_title":"What's New in Python 3.11?","text":"This is true, that's exactly what exceptions are. One could argue (I would) that this is a very powerful part of Python, but the indeterminate nature of the exception (where is it coming from, how is it defined, what should I provide to my client) makes it easier to catch exceptions as they percolate upward, but more difficult to correctly know how to handle them (especially as the permutations approach infinity as underlying libraries get upgraded). Golang actually has a back-channel communication path that is somewhat similar as a second channel of communications. (Actually they're called channels!) They're a first-class and extremely powerful feature of the language. You can even run a for loop over them, block or not block while waiting for an incoming message, etc. Here's a great video that talks about use cases and the patterns in using them, and they pair great with goroutines (and you don't have to sprinkle async before every function, either): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46050865,"author":"pbohun","month":"2025-11","story_title":"A million ways to die from a data race in Go","text":"Not quite. Erlang uses the Actor model which delivers messages asynchronously to named processes. In Go, messages are passed between goroutines via channels, which provide a synchronization mechanism (when un-buffered). The ability to synchronize allow one to setup a \"rhythm\" to computation that the Actor model is explicitly not designed to do. Also, note that a process must know its consumer in the Actor model, but goroutines do not need to know their consumer in the CSP model. Channels can even be passed around to other goroutines! Each have their own pros and cons. You can see some of the legends who invented different methods of concurrency here: [LINK] There's also a nice talk Rob Pike gave that illustrated some very useful concurrency patterns that can be built using the CSP model: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"f7CW7S0zxv4":[{"hn_comment_id":17053540,"author":"astatine","month":"2018-05","story_title":"The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s","text":"There was a debate about reparations in quite another context - the British colonisation of India. Though not connected with the topic being discussed, the question of reparations for historical wrongs is presented in an interesting manner. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19184648,"author":"rainhacker","month":"2019-02","story_title":"The Rest of Us Always Knew Churchill Was a Villain","text":"If anyone is interested to learn more; the author of this post has debated \"Britan does owe reparations\" in Oxford Union Society here : [VIDEO] This talk has many facts not even commonly known to Indians.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21104966,"author":"shripadk","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Before the East India Company","text":"I'll stick this here for anyone wanting to know the real history of EIC and not some fancy, all-so-rosy version presented by EIC apologists. As a constant reminder of the atrocities, plunder, destruction of culture and tradition carried by EIC in the garb of \"Industrialization\" and establishing \"Democracy\" for which Britain has never apologized: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29159110,"author":"rramadass","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Shooting an Elephant (1936)","text":"This argument is somewhat disingenuous with cherry-picked examples which are highly dependent on Time and Context. Colonialism ruined whole countries leaving them poor, rewrote cultural narratives, uprooted entire social structures and in a word, destroyed peoples histories and a sense of their own independent identity. In the bloody aftermath some flourished and some did not; but this cannot be used as an example of the \"superiority\" of certain forms of government when the existing forms had been destroyed. A good starting point on further research is the book; Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Acemoglu and Robinson (be sure to read the Critical Reviews section) - [LINK] The following two videos though dealing specifically with India under British Colonialism are equally valid as to what had happened to other countries under the British Empire; 1) W.r.t. what British Colonialism did to India, see Dr. Shashi Tharoor's longer speech Looking Back at the British Raj in India - [LINK] 2) Shorter version of above at Britain Does Owe Reparations [to India] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29239938,"author":"nonamechicken","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Indian Railways Works Manual (2000) [pdf]","text":"Regarding 'helped unify India as a nation', they are not the first. Referring to [LINK] , India's map looked close to the present day multiple times in the past. Maurya Empire-284 BCE [1:57] Delhi Sultanate (Tughlaq)-1345 [8:45] Mughal Empire-1692 [10:24] As for 'they also brought manufactured goods back', they exported raw materials from India and imported back finished goods, thereby destroying the local industries in India. >By the mid-19th century, the Indian economy had been fully transformed into a colonial trade pattern, where its export consisted mainly of agricultural commodities such as foodgrains, and the home charges were met by exporting such commodities, while the imports consisted of manufactured goods, especially cotton textiles and machinery (Siddiqui, 2015c). After the 1880s, the trade imports became more diversified, due to the growing penetration of foreign manufactured goods such as cotton textiles, capital goods, machinery etc. (Siddiqui, 1996) This in turn further undermined the position of the local producers and hastened the decay of indigenous industries and handicrafts. [LINK] Dr Shashi Tharoor did a nice speech about the British rule in India listing out the damages they did: [VIDEO] . Text version of this speech available here: [LINK] . His book on the same topic: [LINK] Then there is the famines. Famines during british rule is estimated to have killed from 20-50 million Indians: [LINK] . Google image search of 'british india famines' should show ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32715468,"author":"vivegi","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Some things to learn from the British East India Company's growth and demise","text":"Mr. Tharoor is a current Member of Parliament of India and previously India's Ambassador to the UN. He is a very eloquent speaker and writer. Here's his famous short speech at the Oxford Union where he made a case for reparations from Britain for its excesses during its reign of the Indian subcontinent. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33387861,"author":"hawk_","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Exploring the richness and variety of letters sent to the East India Company","text":"The video linked by parent is light on details. This one has more details if anyone's interested (A debate on the empire but many of the things apply to EIC) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34596990,"author":"parthdesai","month":"2023-01","story_title":"UK expected to be only major economy to shrink in 2023 \u2013 IMF","text":"Yeah, but we are talking about India under british empire. Not Rwanda and Haiti. Since you're so oblivious of what the british empire did, here's a 8 minute mini speech of things British empire did in India. India wasn't some poor country, it was actually one of the richest countries in the world before brits came along and stole everything. This was my entire point in the initial post, it's both hilarious and a bit sad how people are so unaware what the british empire did in India. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"f7MzFfuNOtY":[{"hn_comment_id":18722377,"author":"nayuki","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Water-stabilized hydrogen promises twice the range of gasoline at half the price","text":"Storing energy as hydrogen is much less efficient than storing energy in batteries. The channel Real Engineering explains: [VIDEO] ; [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22180404,"author":"mcot2","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Nuclear power is the only green solution (2004)","text":"I am sorry you are so misinformed. Lithium is a common abundant resource and battery packs are easily recycled but more importantly there is a financial incentive to do so. Manufacturing technology for cells is improving rapidly. Much faster than the pace of innovation in Hydrogen fuel cells. Most are focusing on reducing Cobalt and other techniques to reduce or eliminate chemicals and energy used in wet electrode processes. Hydrogen is pretty much DOA for cars. This is a good video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23734017,"author":"dmix","month":"2020-07","story_title":"After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit","text":"Now I'm curious how Hyundai or the stations actually produce the hydrogen fuel. Edit: this video had a good overview of the various production methods, including on-site at the fuel station [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24368517,"author":"nuccy","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval","text":"Hydrogen is not a good (at the moment at least) source of energy or fuel for cars or industry (chemically speaking, obviously much better together with Deuterium and Tritium for fission, though we are still from such a technology). Steam reforming, which is currently the most common way of hydrogen production, uses natural gas and water and produces plenty of CO2 [1]. Nice summary as for cars fuel application here [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26327467,"author":"rdedev","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Toyota Develops Packaged Fuel Cell System Module for Hydrogen Utilization","text":"[VIDEO] This video gives a good breakdown on how the inefficiencies in hydrogen fuel cell based cars add up. The best case scenario for hydrogen based land transport I can think of is probably in the trucking industry where engine weight, range and refuelling time are important factors","stance":"rec"}],"f84n5oFoZBc":[{"hn_comment_id":11183901,"author":"hire_charts","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Rich Hickey Fanclub","text":"That and Hammock Driven Development: [VIDEO] Both of these talks are in my top 5. Edit (okay, here are the other 3): * All the Little Things by Sandi Metz [LINK] * Programming is terrible\u2014Lessons learned from a life wasted. [LINK] * Some talk I saw by Dan McKinley on making Data-Driven decisions. I can't find the original video, but here's a really similar one: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8257907,"author":"cageface","month":"2014-09","story_title":"The End of Agile: Death by Over-Simplification","text":"This is a classic and hilarious series of posts on the foolhardiness of the TDD approach to software design: [LINK] Personally I prefer Rich Hickey's \"Hammock Driven Development\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9210820,"author":"bjwbell","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Stanford study shows success of different programming styles in CS class","text":"\"don't get stuck\" reminds me of the feynman method of problem solving: 1. Write down the problem. 2. Think very hard. 3. Write down the answer. Rich Hickey's Hammock Driven Development, [VIDEO] , is IMO very good for actually not getting stuck in a bad place problem solving.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11107519,"author":"dyadic","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Building a Startup in 45 Minutes per Day While Deployed in Iraq","text":"This is very similar to what Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) talks about when he talks about Hammock Driven Development, I recommend watching him talking about it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11897819,"author":"abc_lisper","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How many programmers out there keep a paper notebook for their projects?","text":"I was searching for exactly the same stuff yesterday, and I found this: [LINK] I usually keep notebooks, but I am ever more convinced of using one because of Rich hickey's talk: [VIDEO] and we have a better chance of remembering something if we write than type. [LINK] . I have previously read that people like Martin Gardner had an awesome system of keeping notes. I would love to know more about your tips. How do keep your notes? How do you organize stuff, while retaining the freedom to doodle. How do you find stuff again(which is the killer feature for typed notes). Would love to learn from the masters - do you have any books to recommend?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13347222,"author":"udfalkso","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Lecture on Creativity (1991)","text":"I have loved this talk for some time and have forced everyone at my company to watch the video. I found a lot of parallels with this \"Hammock Driven Development\" talk by Rich Hickey: [VIDEO] They both seem to suggest that you have to put in the effort, do the hard work and dig into the problem deeply. But then when you hit a wall, you should take a break. Relax. Play. Sleep. It is often during this \"open\" minded stage when the solution comes.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15389075,"author":"digaozao","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Streams: a new general purpose data structure in Redis","text":"I like this kind of development also. But I don't think it is for everyone (the person has to keep thinking on the problem for long time). A good talk about It, from the creator of clojure: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17429724,"author":"valw","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Readme-Driven Development (2010)","text":"This makes me think of Rich Hickey's Hammock Driven Development: [VIDEO] - \"Stay away from the computer\" - Start by asking: \"what is the problem?\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22402171,"author":"sgentle","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Ask HN: I feel like I should be working all the time and its killing me","text":"The feeling you're describing is called anxiety. Some anxiety is normal, but constant anxiety that interferes with your life is a problem. I think it'd be worth trying that label on: call it anxiety, and ask \"how do I reduce my anxiety?\". About 1 in 4 people experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives, so there's a lot of research and good approaches out there. One thing that stands out to me is that you've made some pretty big and scary claims without a lot of evidence to back them up. Are you actually not a good developer? Are smart people really \"capturing\" the opportunity (ie there is less opportunity over time)? Do people who aren't working all the time fall behind and never make anything of significance? If so, prove it! Figure out what evidence you would need to definitively answer these questions, and research or experiment until you have that evidence. Anxious thoughts are like dreams: they seem perfectly reasonable in your head, but when you try to bring them into the real world they fall apart. As far as evidence goes, I'd point you in the direction of two of my favourite Richards. The one who did Clojure: [VIDEO] and the one who got a Nobel for Quantum Electrodynamics: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23271401,"author":"jugjug","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How does one becomes a pro at Software Engineering","text":"I think a good starting point is to integrate the principles described in the Simple Made Easy[1] & Hammock Driven Development[2]. These are overarching first principles that help in designing and writing code, but also in communication & team work. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23725844,"author":"bhntr3","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Did you take any fresh MOOCs as of 2020?","text":"In terms of mind-expanding or intellectually stimulating, I find it's easier to get that from Youtube. I recommend: 3blue1brown for math ( [LINK] ) Everyday Astronaut if you are casually interested in rockets ( [LINK] ) Bret Victor ( [LINK] ) or Rich Hickey ( [VIDEO] ) for programming and design. Doing a full college course is such a time investment and it usually takes a few weeks to start proving the interesting stuff. I find it more fun to look to shorter content for inspiration. I might realize I don't understand the fundamentals of the topic and then seek out a way to study it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29592532,"author":"the-alchemist","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Are most of us developers lying about how much work we do?","text":"Rich Hickey, of Clojure fame, has a talk you might find interesting. It goes by multiple titles: * Step Away from the Computer * Hammock-Driven Development [VIDEO] The idea / hypothesis is that sometimes we need to sit down and think about something for an hour, a day... This seemingly \"wasted time\" can pay huge dividends in long-term health of a project. Like compound interest. As others have noted, this may seen \"lazy\" to managers, especially if LOC or sprint velocity is the metric they use.","stance":"rec"}],"f8FAJXPBdOg":[{"hn_comment_id":40723417,"author":"mech422","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Can you inherit memories from your ancestors?","text":"Thanks! That was pretty good...gonna see what else he has :-D ok - I have no idea what he's talking about, but both my girlfriend and I loved the ones we listened to :-D (1)(2) Thanks again! 1) [LINK] 2) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42888288,"author":"TeMPOraL","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Ear muscle we thought humans didn't use activates when people listen hard","text":"Yup, DNA turned out to not merely be a sequence of triplets telling a dumb matter printer which hard-coded proteins to make - at least according to what little I understand of evolutionary developmental biology[0], DNA is much more like procedural generation in gamedev or demoscene. That is, there's plenty of recipes for various structures and body parts, and then there's lots of DNA that's responsible for conditionally enabling or disabling or modulating those recipes, depending on more DNA that controls when and where and how much to enable them, and then more - a complex network of logic . -- [0] - Didn't get much further than this four-minute intro to the field, but it is a good intro : [LINK] . (EDIT: It's actually the second part of a trio, that starts with a four-minute bottom-up overview of organic chemistry[1], and ends on a three-minute intro to nanotechnology[2]. I recommend the series together for how well it frames humans in relation to other life and universe as a whole.) [1] - [VIDEO] [2] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"f8ZqBLcIvw0":[{"hn_comment_id":32292068,"author":"bilegeek","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Tor is fighting and beating Russian censorship","text":">How does it get to this point? I would imagine because, going back to even before Soviet times, all the people who do care are either disappeared or flee, leaving behind only the people who are too jaded to effectively resist. Russian absolutism is generally more, well, absolute than other places. Though it's imperfect, a video[1] by Kraut gets the gist across. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32655813,"author":"throwaways85989","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Mikhail Gorbachev has died","text":"It was not really a base for capitalism to take hold and effect. It needs a basic rule of law and democracy to work. All it got was brief window of chaos, before the kleptocracy returned. Best description of the cultural background i found so far was this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34075958,"author":"lambic2","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Facial Recognition Tech Gets Woman Booted from Rockettes Show Due to Employer","text":"I doubt this question can be answered in a short comment. The differences stem from thousands of years of diverging cultural influences, history and geography. As for Russia, this video gives a good introduction to the origins of Russian Authoritarianism (with comparison to power structures in China and Europe over history), that go all the way back to the 5th century A.D. with the Huns and the unique geography/climate of Russia: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"f9EbD6iY9zI":[{"hn_comment_id":30818893,"author":"7373737373","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The SHA-256 Project: learn how hash functions work by implementing one yourself","text":"I found this video to be an excellent explanation and sufficient to implement the algorithm: [VIDEO] Code: [LINK] This site contains a nice visualization: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23165906,"author":"1_player","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Show HN: SHA-256 Animation","text":"Here's the author doing an in-depth explanation of how SHA-256 works using this code: [VIDEO] I'm halfway through, but looks very well done, thanks!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30247100,"author":"oconnor663","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Show HN: SHA-256 explained step-by-step visually","text":"Oh this is great. When we taught SHA-256 last semester, we linked to this YouTube video: [VIDEO] . Next time we do it, we'll probably link to both. Having several different ways to visualize the same thing is very helpful, and I like that this one moves quickly. A couple of details missing from this visualization are how you pad a message to be a multiple of the block size, and how you chain blocks together to form a longer message. In the pseudocode at [LINK] , that's the \"Pre-processing (Padding)\" part and the \"for each chunk\" loop just below it. I get why you'd want to leave those things out, since they're not really the interesting part, and the screen is already pretty packed as it is. If anyone's feeling curious about implementing this yourself, take a look at these project notes: [LINK] . At some point I'll clean that up for public consumption, but for now just ignore the parts about grades and cheating :)","stance":"rec"}],"f9vRcSAneiw":[{"hn_comment_id":15903775,"author":"robertkrahn01","month":"2017-12","story_title":"An Interactive Introduction to Quantum Computing","text":"Interesting in this regard might also be the talk that Robert Smith of Rigetti Computing recently gave: [VIDEO] Apart from praising Common Lisp he describes how they are building an assembler-like language for quantum computing. The HN thread: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16046384,"author":"Vekz","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What\u2019s your favorite talk from 2017?","text":"Lisp at the Frontier of Computation, by Robert Smith at Rigetti Computing [VIDEO] About the application of Lisp on quantum hardware.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16228294,"author":"reikonomusha","month":"2018-01","story_title":"The Era of Quantum Computing Is Here. Outlook: Cloudy","text":"Rigetti Quantum Computing [0] is a YC startup that actually manufactures real quantum computers that are accessible through Forest. There are a couple neat videos about the tech. [1,2] You can access the service through a Python API [3]. Disclaimer: I work there. [0] [LINK] [1] \u201cLisp at the Frontier of Computation\u201d [VIDEO] [2] Rigetti talk at QIP 2017 [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"fBt5NuNsoII":[{"hn_comment_id":18210233,"author":"loeg","month":"2018-10","story_title":"BetrFS: An in-kernel file system that uses B\u03b5 trees to organize on-disk storage","text":"This isn't completely fair, although most of it is. Some of the reasons for modifying Linux are performance enhancements to the filesystem layer that only make sense with a B\u03b5-tree filesystem (and are not possible without patching Linux). They cover this in the hour-long talk at MS research linked elsewhere in this thread.[1] (Yes, it's long, but it's a pretty good presentation.) E.g., they describe modifying the page cache to write-through small modifications to file data, rather than dirtying the entire page and writing it back later (a form of write amplification). [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29403597,"author":"williamkuszmaul","month":"2021-12","story_title":"BetrFS: an in-kernel file system that uses B\u03b5 trees to organize on-disk storage","text":"The website doesn't seem to mention that several of the papers on the filesystem won best-paper awards at major conferences. The paper, Optimizing Every Operation in a Write-Optimized File System, in particular, won best-paper award at FAST '16. Also, if you're interested in learning more about B^\\epsilon trees, here's a talk given by Rob Johnson a few years ago at Microsoft Research: BetrFS: A Right-Optimized Write-Optimized File System [VIDEO] In general, I think it's really cool that there is a file system that exists today (i.e., BetrFS) that uses data structures which didn't exist 25 years ago. It's a great example of theoreticians and systems researchers working together.","stance":"rec"}],"fCbAafKLqC8":[{"hn_comment_id":25043830,"author":"205guy","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Let\u2019s Build a Video Card","text":"I got caught up in all his videos and had the same question. Fortunately, he has a dedicated video where he answers this with testing on the scope: [VIDEO] tl;dr is what the sibling comment already explained: low clock rates.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29517760,"author":"eco","month":"2021-12","story_title":"An 8-bit minicomputer with a fully custom architecture","text":"Ben Eater had a whole video on why he encourages building a breadboard computer. [VIDEO] A lot of people have taken what they've learned and moved on to designing their own PCB versions. You can see some of them here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"fCn8zs912OE":[{"hn_comment_id":19111694,"author":"Baeocystin","month":"2019-02","story_title":"German for Programmers","text":"I won't say it's easy , but it's easier than you might think. Word use follows a power law distribution in all languages ( Zipf's Law, [VIDEO] is an excellent vsauce cover of the subject ), but the short of it is that within a relatively short amount of time spent studying you'll be able to pick out common words and build from there, even if you started from zero.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21540865,"author":"sillysaurusx","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Any number can start a factorial","text":"Your shock is warranted. It's actually a very deep question, called the Zipf mystery: [VIDEO] No one really knows why it's true. It's also true across physical constants, not just artificial quantities made up by humans. The same type of distribution pops up in language, in nature, in numbers, popularity of opening chess moves, everywhere.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26760508,"author":"WhateverHappns","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Embrace the Grind","text":"> You need to know about 20,000 words in any language to sound fluent Are you sure about this? AFAIK the use of words in a language isn't distributed evenly, but according to a Pareto distribution. Thus, you can speak _okay_ knowing only ~500 words, I believe. It won't sound perfect but you'll speak and understand pretty decently. I once wrote a python script which read words from a .txt file full of french words with their english counterparts and then displayed the french word, waiting for you to type your guess. It gave instant feedback which I thought important for learning anything. The file contained the 500 most used french words according to large book surveys. This was in my last year of school and it saved me during tests where I had to write coherent sentences in french. Edit: Here it is! Zipf's law is what it's called.( [LINK] ) and here's an interesting video about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40978289,"author":"its_ethan","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The mysterious maths at work in the Tour de France","text":"There's an entertaining \"V-Sauce\" video about Zipf's law for anyone wanting to learn a bit more about it and to see other examples of where it shows up: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fD-R35DSSZY":[{"hn_comment_id":31172494,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-04","story_title":"3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work","text":"The Longest Year in Human History (46 B.C.E.) - [VIDEO] gets into the \"why the year we have is designed the way it is\" ... though it takes 22 minutes to get to that part. It wasn't really better as the 30 * 12 + 5 approach needed manual application of the + 5... which is what the new calendar was trying to avoid.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32976133,"author":"comeonbro","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar","text":"I didn't appreciate until recently that the calendar we live by today was personally designed by Julius Caesar. Like not by some forgotten technocrats incidentally during his time, but Julius Caesar himself as a subject matter expert, as a side-project. With consultation, certainly, but by his initiative, from long-standing engagement with the problem in one of his early jobs from long before he was a main character of the Roman story. Digestable and entertaining (fragment of a) video on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39543523,"author":"hr0m","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Julius Caesar's Year of Confusion","text":"Ha, a proof that by watching YouTube videos you learn something. This was covered by one of my favorite series on YouTube. Here is the particular video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39544096,"author":"j-bos","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Julius Caesar's Year of Confusion","text":"Historia Civilis has a great video explaining how Caeser used the longest year to his advantage in war: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fD2briZ6fB0":[{"hn_comment_id":18344243,"author":"sascha_sl","month":"2018-10","story_title":"The Internet Will Be the Death of Us","text":"There's a bit more to it than you might think, and not in a good way. Here's an excellent video essay on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28313759,"author":"dijit","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Almost all of the top subreddits are moderated by the same people","text":"Radicalisation is actually very interesting and I (ashamedly) nearly succumbed to the same thing myself. There's a really good youtuber called \"Contrapoints\" that attempts to deconstruct with low judgement the kind of environment an Incel lives in and what the worldview is. Empathy is always at the root of deradicalisation, so I always plug her videos when I can. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38982534,"author":"JieJie","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Incels need more mental health help, have \"fundamental thinking errors\"","text":"Natalie Wynn's video^0 on incels always struck me as uniquely useful, not just for exploring their genesis and radicalization, but in generating empathy for those who suffer from it. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18120592,"author":"hjek","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Is Reddit censorship healthy?","text":"It looks like Reddit hasn't censored TRP, just put up a warning. Reddit appears to be free software[0], so you can host your own if you're not OK with that. Haven't read what's on TRP, but if you'd like to listen to informed critique and considerations of it, I'd warmly recommend watching ContraPoints[1]. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18594835,"author":"namlem","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th","text":"Boys instead fall into other toxic communities, like incels. The youtuber ContraPoints made a great video about such communities: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19891495,"author":"voltagex_","month":"2019-05","story_title":"For many young South Koreans, dating is too expensive, or too dangerous","text":"The \"incel\" population also manage to be a self fulfilling prophecy. It's a little dramatic, but [VIDEO] explains it well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22366218,"author":"AlexandrB","month":"2020-02","story_title":"The Age of Instagram Face","text":"> You can't have a happy society where the top 5% of beautiful men are paying people to schedule their calendar of tinder lays while other guys buy thot bathwater, or where the top 5% of women get all the attention and the rest wonder where their prince charming is who's been denied them from all this as they sadly pass 30 alone. This is so reductive of human relationships. You\u2019re basing your entire worldview on what happens on Tinder and Instagram. That\u2019s not the world, not even close. Basically, I suggest that you watch this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33069568,"author":"AlexandrB","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Fake Men on Hinge","text":"Ironically, this video focusing on \"incels\" has a pretty good understanding of the male online dating experience (starting around 17:00): [VIDEO] I agree that the various \"red pill\" subcultures have done a terrific job of sucking the air out of the room RE conversations about men's dating experience. It's a hard conversation to have with any amount of nuance in 2022.","stance":"rec"}],"fDqBeXJ8Zx8":[{"hn_comment_id":20698385,"author":"khawkins","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Watch Out Google, YouTubers Are Unionizing","text":"Here's an excellent video breaking down with extremely compelling data how the \"trending\" tab is very heavily manipulated in favor of mainstream media sources: [VIDEO] What's interesting is that extreme bias in the US is not seen in Canada. Though I'm not sure it's stated in the video, I think that Youtube has been propping up MSM sources so that they can make themselves seem more relevant in the eyes of the MSM. They're doing this so that they can partner with the MSM and expand their YoutubeTV service. They desperately want some sort of service model to make money, and they're willing to destroy the goodwill of the community to achieve it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20558249,"author":"aphextim","month":"2019-07","story_title":"YouTube faces creator backlash","text":"This is a video I recall watching recently that backs up your point. Not sure if anyone has refuted this person's points but they are pretty alarming no matter what side of isle you sit. [VIDEO] (What 40,000 Videos Tell Us About The Trending Tab)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23765735,"author":"symplee","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Analysis of all YouTube trending videos in US for 2019","text":"Another excellent analysis of what Trends on YouTube [0] \"Is the trending tab rigged against creators? Is late night dominating the charts? Why does it feel your favorite controversial creator never trends. All of that and more, in the first ever data-driven look at the trending tab.\" What 40,000 Videos Tell Us About The Trending Tab: [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fE2KDzZaxvE":[{"hn_comment_id":18226199,"author":"gt2","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Zebras All the Way Down - Bryan Cantrill, Uptime 2017 [VIDEO] Lots of great tangents that add to the subjects. I love talks like this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18345338,"author":"ar0b","month":"2018-10","story_title":"iPhones are allergic to helium","text":"One of my favorite conference talks is semi related to problems like this. [VIDEO] Brian Cantrill - Zebras all the way down","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20347825,"author":"kbenson","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Replacing a silently failing disk in a ZFS pool","text":"On this topic (and related in many ways) is Bryan Cantrill's talk Zebras All the way Down.[1] The gist is that in medicine there's the concept of diseases that are zebras and horses, rare and common, and the saying goes \"when you hear hoof beats think horses not Zebras\". Unlike medicine, in software most the easy problems have already been abstracted away or made trivial through our software stacks, so often what's left are Zebras. What used to be the exceedingly rare bugs now account for a large proportion of the odd behavior we see in very robust tech stacks, because the easy bugs have been hunted down and eliminated already. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22165352,"author":"kbenson","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Five Years of Btrfs","text":"There's a good Bryan Cantrill talk about that.[1] The gist is that eventually, when you throw enough resources at a problem, all that's left are the really uncommon problem and bugs, and this is specifically what you get in the data path (including drive firmware) where things get harder and harder to figure out as the code gets more hidden and obscure. As with all his talks, you can expect it to be quite entertaining as well as informative and historical (if from his POV). 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22213803,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What were the things you did that made the biggest impact at your work?","text":"In my time writing databases, I found that not only the mount-flags could result in data-loss despite fsync, given you use fsync as it is supposed to be used [0], but even enterprise-grade hardware would at times (at that scale [1]) drop and/or corrupt a few bits here and there. That reminds me of the case where AWS famously revealed that a single NIC in their ginaromous S3 fleet flipped a single bit once in a while and that caused an outage because their gossip-daemon responsible for fleet health-checks failed spectacularly [2]. Bryan Cantrill's talk on the realted topic of hardware/firmware bugs is pretty good [3]. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25856114,"author":"Bayart","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Installing Debian on Modern Hardware","text":">Why does anyone really care about non-free firmware blobs? Aside from the philosophical considerations, stuff breaking in a black-box firmware that you're lead into believing \"just works\" is particularly aggravating. I'll link Bryan Cantrill's talk on the subject, he's more entertaining than I am. [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43758926,"author":"thomasjudge","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Synology Lost the Plot with Hard Drive Locking Move","text":"For an entertaining/terrifying perspective on firmware, obligatory Bryan Cantrill talk \"Zebras All the Way Down\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fHNmRkzxHWs":[{"hn_comment_id":8705962,"author":"amaks","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Std::string half of all allocations in the Chrome browser process","text":"There are many things in the standard C++ library which are named incorrectly (std::string), awkwardly (std::unordered_map) and and implemented inefficiently from the perspective of modern CPUs (same std::unordered_map, which uses linked list for the underlying hash table buckets). See the great talk on CppCon 2014 about those issues - [VIDEO] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39579432,"author":"slavik81","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?","text":"Strongly agree. That's perhaps less true for the software I work on these days (lapack), but I've seen that so many times over my career. I'm also a big fan of \"Efficiency with Algorithms, Performance with Data Structures\" by Chandler Carruth at CppCon 2014. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8979237,"author":"yoklov","month":"2015-02","story_title":"The Care and Feeding of C++'s Dragons (2013) [video]","text":"Chandler Carruth's CPPCon talk [0] this year was also great (surprisingly, as I had a fairly low opinion of most of the others). It wasn't better than Mike Acton's [1], but I suspect that it was more actionable for most devs. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10018701,"author":"sanderjd","month":"2015-08","story_title":"The Case for Controlled Side Effects","text":"Also, those allocations imply linked, rather than contiguous, data structures, which (often? always?) imply poor cache interaction, which is a major source of inefficiency. Would love some more perspectives on this, as I've just watched a couple cppcon talks ([0], [1]) and I'm feeling a bit drunk on the kool-aid. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11721276,"author":"humanrebar","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Why I don't spend time with Modern C++ anymore","text":"Here's a few: - \"Tuning C++: Benchmarks, and CPUs, and Compilers! Oh My!\" [LINK] - \"Understanding Compiler Optimization\" [LINK] - \"Optimizing the Emergent Structures of C++\" [LINK] - \"Efficiency with Algorithms\" [VIDEO] The first one is really good if you've never benchmarked anything in a Linux environment. Or if you otherwise want to learn how to investigate how C++ gets turned into machine code.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11802177,"author":"amaks","month":"2016-05","story_title":"C++ for Games: Performance, Allocations and Data Locality","text":"STL is not inherently slow per se, some data structures are just not fast on modern CPUs, so they have to be chosen wisely. Here is good talk: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14634281,"author":"adrianN","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Diving into the world of hash tables","text":"Yes, if you write performance sensitive code you have to be very careful with dictionaries. See for example this nice talk by Chandler Carruth [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24364139,"author":"alexhutcheson","month":"2020-09","story_title":"On modern hardware the min-max heap beats a binary heap","text":"If you haven't already seen it, you'd probably really enjoy Chandler Carruth's \"Efficiency with Algorithms, Performance with Data Structures\" talk from CppCon 2014: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fHsa9DqmId8":[{"hn_comment_id":25116519,"author":"eins1234","month":"2020-11","story_title":"A Spacetime Surprise: Time Isn\u2019t Just Another Dimension","text":"Long time Veritasium subscriber here. He actually made a great video a while ago explaining why professional Youtubers don't have much of a choice when it comes to clickbaiting with titles and thumbnails, because it's the only way to reliably get lots of impressions and views and grow their channel: [VIDEO] It made me gain a bit of empathy for creators using these tactics on Youtube and tolerate it as long as it's not being used to promote content that's devoid of any substance, which is pretty much never the case for Veritasium videos or any of the other educational channels I subscribe to.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28020675,"author":"jlokier","month":"2021-07","story_title":"As lockdowns lift, media firms brace for an \u201cattention recession\u201d","text":"This video from Veritasium goes into more about Youtuber burnout, self-blame, dynamics and the drive to non-platform revenue streams: [VIDEO] If you find the apparent contradiction between Youtube success and creators needing to built out non-platform revenue streams strange, the video gives a pretty good theory explaining why. It's possible that a small number of creators are taking most of the revenue at any particular time, and the set of outstandingly successful creators keeps changing, which it might due to the promotion algorithm. That gives all of them reasons to build out non-platform revenue streams. I'm not saying Google/YouTube aren't taking too much. But hypothetically, even if they took 0% cut, the above could still happen.","stance":"rec"}],"fKy7ljRr0AA":[{"hn_comment_id":17270118,"author":"selljamhere","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Mr. Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children","text":"One of my favorite examples of public speaking is Mr. Rogers testifying before a Senate subcommittee in support of funding for national public television. He is calm, thoughtful and thorough through the entire process, speaking simply and without grandeur. It's a small wonder he found such success, and a great example of the importance of clear communication. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21747522,"author":"kingbirdy","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Caroll Spinney has died","text":"If you haven't seen it before, Fred Rogers' 1969 testimony before the Senate in defense of PBS funding is very moving. He was able to prevent a $10M cut to their $20M funding. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39121072,"author":"chimeracoder","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Mr. Rogers' music was intricate (2020) [video]","text":"> Doesn't look like he recorded much (outside the show), but definitely will be looking into what he has recorded. For anyone who hasn't seen it, one must-see video outside the show is Fred Rogers testifying before the Senate in 1969, in order to defend funding for public television. He is able to win over an incredibly rude and hostile senator in just a few minutes. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10699560,"author":"hitekker","month":"2015-12","story_title":"How Elmo Ruined Sesame Street","text":"> Mister Rogers For those who didn't grow up with Mister Rogers, I encourage you to watch this, [VIDEO] , to get a sense of how effective he was as a speaker.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17468688,"author":"disqard","month":"2018-07","story_title":"The Fred Rogers We Know","text":"That's very well articulated. He had no pretense and never came across as patronizing, at least in my (admittedly limited) sampling of old episodes via YouTube. The \"take others for exactly who they are\" mentality captures his earnestness and utter lack of guile in his interactions. I'm sure you've seen him testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications to maintain funding for PBS [0], but I'll leave this link here anyway, for others who might not have seen this. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17625072,"author":"extralego","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor","text":"Incase anyone hasn\u2019t seen this video of him presenting before the senate committee in 1969, in support of national public television. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18056208,"author":"yoshamano","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Mr. Rogers vs. the Superheroes","text":"There was a documentary about him released this year I highly recommend called Won't You Be My Neighbor. [LINK] As far as examples, here's an episode about divorce that I remember helping me deal with my parents' divorce when I was little. [LINK] Or here's his speech to Congress fighting for funding for public television (it's more complicated than just funding for public television, but that's the basic idea). [VIDEO] Or one of my favorites, his acceptance speech for his lifetime achievement Emmy Award. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28617420,"author":"alickz","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Mister Rogers had a simple set of rules for talking to children (2018)","text":"As a European I never grew up with Mister Rogers, but his testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Communications is very impressive to me. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46226677,"author":"adfm","month":"2025-12","story_title":"After NPR and PBS defunding, FCC receives call to take away station licenses","text":"I offer Fred Rogers testifying before the senate subcommittee on communications as a refresher on why we must continue to fund PBS and NPR. [VIDEO] The person on the other end of that call is thin skinned and likely not hugged much as a child. Sad.","stance":"rec"}],"fNk_zzaMoSs":[{"hn_comment_id":18679785,"author":"nicebill8","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Introduction to Applied Linear Algebra: Vectors, Matrices, and Least Squares","text":"The 3B1B series on Linear Algebra is by far the most welcoming and informative introduction to the topic I've ever seen: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18841427,"author":"PinkMilkshake","month":"2019-01","story_title":"How to Start Learning Computer Graphics Programming","text":"3Blue1Brown has a great series on Linear Algebra. His explanations are so clear that by the 2nd or 3rd video you'll already understand how it applies to computer graphics. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19267665,"author":"aidos","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Immersive Linear Algebra (2016)","text":"3Blue1Brown's Essence of linear algebra series is the go to place for learning this material. I've included the link to the series below so people don't get lost in all his other wonderful videos along the way. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19350539,"author":"daeken","month":"2019-03","story_title":"An Intuitive Derivation of Eigenvectors","text":"If you want to get an intuitive, visual understanding of linear algebra -- including eigenvectors/eigenvalues -- 3blue1brown's playlist on the subject is just ... perfect. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22416992,"author":"vecter","month":"2020-02","story_title":"An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra (2012)","text":"This is ok but nothing is as intuitive as 3B1B's series on YouTube that has been posted hundreds of times on HN [0]. Linear algebra is really about linear transformations of vector spaces, which is not captured in this blog post. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24863375,"author":"dr_zoidberg","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A Programmer\u2019s Intuition for Matrix Multiplication","text":"I strongly recommend 3blue1brown's intro to linear algebra[0] for quick intuitions, followed by Gilbert Strangs MIT Open Course[1][2] for (much) deeper detail. Strang is a genius, but Sanderson's graphics and intuitions can be helpful early on. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29064413,"author":"truly","month":"2021-11","story_title":"SoME1 results","text":"For anyone wondering what 3Blue1Brown is, it's a top Youtube channel with very nicely made explanatory videos for math. The videos on linear algebra in particular are worth it, especially if you do any sort of machine learning: [VIDEO] . The author of the channel is Grant Sanderson. He has recently given a talk at SIGGRAPH 2021: [LINK] . As part of developing his Youtube channel, he has written and open-sourced manim, a library for programatically generating animations written in Python: [LINK] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30874816,"author":"laplacesdemon48","month":"2022-04","story_title":"An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra","text":"Here's another vote for 3Blue1Brown's series on linear algebra [1]. Spending a few hours on this series will easily save you dozens of hours when going through a comprehensive LA textbook. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31707568,"author":"aidos","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Best beginner friendly linear algebra book?","text":"Essence of linear algebra is an absolutely wonderful series. It gave me an intuition of the subject in a matter of hours in way years of university didn\u2019t do. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38951710,"author":"drfunk","month":"2024-01","story_title":"How do I relearn mathematics for machine learning?","text":"3blue1brown's visualizations made a lot of things click for me, years after learning algebra and calculus. In my opinion they're the perfect companion to a more formal study with textbooks. Playlist for linear algebra: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41417101,"author":"zvmaz","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Linear Algebra Done Right [pdf]","text":"Linear Algebra Done right did not help me try to demystify linear algebra. Quite the contrary. It is the Youtube channel 3Blue1Brown[1] that gave me an intuition of what linear algebra was about, and I am forever thankful to him. Watch it and if you are a teacher, don't be a smug \"formalist\". [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42108671,"author":"traes","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Adventures in Probability","text":"The entire 3blue1brown series[0] on linear algebra is well worth watching, it has really intuitive graphical explanations of a bunch of concepts. Here's the one on determinants in particular[1]. TL;DW the determinant represents how much you scale the area/volume/hypervolume (depending on dimension) of a shape by applying a matrix transformation to each point. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45800005,"author":"seanhunter","month":"2025-11","story_title":"An Illustrated Introduction to Linear Algebra, Chapter 2: The Dot Product","text":"If you actually want to learn linear algebra, don't use this blogpost. It's real weaksauce compared to the wealth of free information and resources available online. Firstly, the real illustrated guide to linear algebra is the youtube series \"The Essence of linear algebra\" by 3blue1brown[1]. It has fantastic visualisations for building intuition and in general is wildly superior to this, which seems fine but extremely superficial. If you're done with 3b1b and want to take things further, then the go-to is the excellent 18.06SC course by the late and legendary Gilbert Strang. It's amazing, it's free. [2] Still want more? OK now you're talking my language. If you are serious about linear algebra (Up to graduate level, after that you need something else) then you want the book \"Linear Algebra Done Right\" by Sheldon Axler. It's available for free from the author's website[3] and he has made a bunch of videos to supplement the book. There's also an RTD Math full lecture series[4] that follows the book and he explains each thing in a lot of detail (because Axler goes fast , so it's beneficial to unpack the concepts a bit sometimes). [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] and [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48946645,"author":"zvmaz","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Immersive Linear Algebra Book with Interactive Figures","text":"3Blue1Brown[1] has opened my eyes on the intuitive understanding of linear algebra, many, many years after taking a first course in linear algebra, which left me completely mystified. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17754724,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Organized Resources for Deep Learning Researchers and Developers","text":"If you haven't already studied Linear Algebra, and want to get a headstart on that, check out the \"Coding The Matrix\" book/videos from Brown. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Also, see the Gilbert Strang video series on Linear Algebra: [LINK] and the amazing 3blue1brown \"Essence of Linear Algebra\" series: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22106014,"author":"edanm","month":"2020-01","story_title":"My story as a self-taught AI researcher","text":"If you haven't seen it, it might be worth checking out 3Blue1Brown's Linear Algebra YouTube series ( [VIDEO] ). I think it's exactly that kind of \"intuition of what Linear algebra is and is for\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23655193,"author":"chongli","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Numerical Linear Algebra for Programmers","text":"Maybe you would get something out of 3blue1brown's series on linear algebra [1]. It will give you an intuitive, geometric interpretation for concepts such as a vector, a basis, an eigenvalue, a linear transformation, etc. As for why you would want to know these things, well, linear algebra is finding applications all over the place these days. Everything from computer graphics to machine learning is jam-packed with linear algebra. And I'm not just talking about basic concepts such as matrix-vector multiplication. The singular value decomposition has applications in discrete optimization, image compression, the PageRank algorithm [2], computer vision [3], and machine learning [2] [4]. Having said that, you may find it very difficult to understand something like SVD without a firm grounding in the topic of vector spaces, linear transformations, spanning, linear (in)dependence, subspaces, eigenvalues, eigenvectors, diagonalization, and determinants. This is why SVD is one of the last things you learn in a linear algebra course (indeed, it's not covered until lecture 29 of Gilbert Strang's course). Ultimately, it all depends on how relevant these things are to you. I would assume (hope) that because you clicked on this HN discussion that you're interested in learning linear algebra because you think it might be useful to you. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24828594,"author":"jlos","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Euler's Formula: A Complete Guide","text":"To answer your main question - \"what level of maths\" do you need is more about what topics: a couple introductory classes in Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Discrete Mathematics will make that sentence understandable. I'll give some definitions and resources, but think about how you would explain multiplication/division/algebra to a kid. At some point, you just have to work through some problems and the math just makes sense. So I'll explain the terms above, but best bet is to just take a few courses on the topics I mentioned above. Quick definitions: - Exponential: is the constant e to the power of some number. e, like pi, is a ubitiqous constant in mathematics and nature. You run into pi when doing geometry, and e when doing calculus. - A function in mathematics is similar to a function in programming, but not exactly. A course in Discrete Mathematics helps here. - F-apostrophe is notation used in calculus to show the relation of one type of function, called a derivative to another. f and f' are related. How, though, is better explained by taking calculus. - An eigenfunction exists in a system of equations. Think of it like a 'balance' point. Linear Algebra will help make sense of this term. Resources - Essence of Calculus: [LINK] - Essence of Linear Algebra: [VIDEO] Those 2 video's will do a good job of giving you the 'intuition' behind Calculus and Linear Algebra. Like programming, though, you just have to actually work some problems out by hand for the stuff to sink in. Fo","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33176535,"author":"gwgundersen","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Seven sins of numerical linear algebra","text":"There are many good resources! A few, depending on your inclination: - For intuition: [VIDEO] - For rigor: [LINK] - For code: [LINK] - For numerical/algorithmic details: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"fNpsgTIpODA":[{"hn_comment_id":24334137,"author":"platz","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Motivation \u2013 Keli Language","text":"The reason why FP still doesn't really break through in the corporate world is a marketing failure, in the strictest sense of the word marketing, which means prioritizing the right features to target the right market. A large proportion of this talk is based on the book \u201cCrossing the Chasm\". The book was originally written for startups, and this talk adopts the book to an open source audience, especially Haskell developers. Gabriel Gonzalez \u2013 How to market Haskell to a mainstream programmer: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24404593,"author":"platz","month":"2020-09","story_title":"What killed Haskell, could kill Rust, too","text":"The reason why Haskell still doesn't really break through in the corporate world is not a failure of arrogance, but a marketing failure in the strictest sense of the word 'marketing'\u2014which means prioritizing the right features to target the right market. A large proportion of the talk linked below is based on the book \u201cCrossing the Chasm\". The book was originally written for startups trying to break into the mainstream, and this talk adopts that book to programming laguage (or tools more generally), particularly regarding Haskell. Gabriel Gonzalez \u2013 How to market Haskell to a mainstream programmer: [VIDEO] Gabriel also suggests that in order to \"cross the chasm\" you have to offer a best-in-class experience in some area, and suggests that Haskellers adapt the language to facilitating building interpreters, which is it particularly well suited for. So, base on the above, I don't think the OP's emphasis on the emotional analysis of Haskell programmers is anything more than the OP's just-so story, although the notion of parochialism may have some crossover with the concept of marketing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28521098,"author":"platz","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Functional programming is not popular because it is weird (2016)","text":"this is also a good talk in a similar vein, although aimed at haskell programmers, is really about any technology looking to grow into the mainstream Gabriel Gonzalez \u2013 How to market Haskell to a mainstream programmer - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31774803,"author":"JoelMcCracken","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Why Rust is a great choice for startups","text":"> compelling framework Sadly no. There are contenders for this that have arisen over the years, but we don\u2019t have a RoR for Haskell yet. If you\u2019re curious, here is a talk that goes into this problem. It\u2019s very accessible IMO. [VIDEO] To be honest, the compelling reason to learn Haskell for me was so I could engage with various academic literature. I just kept running into things I didn\u2019t understand which were tangential to the topic of the paper, and it seemed like the most straightforward way to solve this was to start with learning Haskell. Once I learned it, I realized I was wrong in my biases, and Haskell is a fantastic tool for normal programming, with some important caveats.","stance":"rec"}],"fOGdb1CTu5c":[{"hn_comment_id":31283169,"author":"jimmySixDOF","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Zero knowledge proofs in RISC-V","text":"This is the best explanation I have seen [1] : \"Computer scientist Amit Sahai, PhD, is asked to explain the concept of zero-knowledge proofs to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert.\" [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48762205,"author":"mohsen1","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance","text":"Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficult [VIDEO] This video is very beautifully explains it","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44458289,"author":"abhv","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Opening up \u2018Zero-Knowledge Proof\u2019 technology","text":"My colleague Amit made a simple video explanation about zkp with Wired. [VIDEO] That doesn't explain the way this scheme works, but it's a nice start.","stance":"rec"}],"fPKMmJpAGWc":[{"hn_comment_id":26366696,"author":"rmetzler","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Caramel: An OCaml for the Erlang VM","text":"Lots of people mention Nx and of course I want to do the same but with a link to a youtube video, in case you wonder what's possible currently. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26743910,"author":"bfm","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Axon: A library for creating neural networks in Elixir","text":"If you have not been following the work Jos\u00e9 and Sean have been doing lately, I recommend you watching Jos\u00e9\u2019s talk introducing Elixir Nx [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fPrvnlvnu-k":[{"hn_comment_id":1986414,"author":"DevX101","month":"2010-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Web IDE (Eclipse)?","text":"[LINK] Below is the Founder talking about his product. It looks like a great site, with about 6000 users now: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3161289,"author":"staunch","month":"2011-10","story_title":"What are some inspiring videos I can watch to renew my passion for startups?","text":"DHH is always fun. David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08 [LINK] Jason Calacanis vs. David Heinemeier Hansson on This Week in Startups [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7182968,"author":"usablebytes","month":"2014-02","story_title":"37signals becomes Basecamp","text":"People, please watch these few videos to genuinely understand what 37Signal guys (David and Jason) stand for before having a say. [LINK] [LINK] and [VIDEO] and yea, don't forget [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"fTjhHrcyiQI":[{"hn_comment_id":22759624,"author":"davidu","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Planning and Managing Layoffs","text":"One of the hardest things about this process for a sensitive and compassionate leader is knowing when to not try and \"make it better.\" This is probably the greatest video clip on the subject of all time: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29029186,"author":"jaggederest","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Programmer Moneyball (2016)","text":"It's extra funny, because the same movie has this wonderful scene I refer to often when I'm working as a consultant: [VIDEO] TL;DW: \"We're professionals, treat me like a professional. If it's not working out, say so, and I'll make it right or we'll shake hands and part ways on good terms\". I used to provide clients with a \"how to fire me\" document because it made them feel comfortable hiring me in the first place. (Tell me, I return materials, pay me outstanding balances, here's the keys you change, here's how we wrap up the contract terms, etc etc) I've been \"fired\" a bunch of times, and at times have had those same clients that \"fired\" me refer me to new clients. It's the same as with most technical work, I find: if you're not failing at least sometimes, you're not pushing the limits of what is possible.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29461900,"author":"notpeter","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Better.com CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call","text":"Getting fired is bad enough, but if it's being done by someone bad at firing people it's the worst. Moneyball had some solid advice: \"Be straight with them, no fluff, just facts. 'Pete I gotta let you go. Jack's office will handle the details.'\" That's it. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fTznEIZRkLg":[{"hn_comment_id":13590370,"author":"radicalbyte","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Hans Rosling has died","text":"Sad day. RIP. For some context: Hans is famous here for his fantastic series of TED talks which cover population growth, poverty and development. Totally changed (well, confirmed) my world view. Start here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23448044,"author":"polycaster","month":"2020-06","story_title":"The world might run out of people (2019)","text":"While I didn\u2019t read the article, telling from the title this talk by Hans Rosling could be a resourceful addition to the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fU9hR3kiOK0":[{"hn_comment_id":9455670,"author":"btown","month":"2015-04","story_title":"How Sift Science Rebuilt Its App on React and DropWizard","text":"Since this is taking off a bit: Here's an excellent talk that provides some context to the Confluent article, and takes us through the thought process of simplifying convoluted database-cache-user interactions by thinking in terms of streams of derived data: [VIDEO] . Also highly recommended.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17130800,"author":"lbradstreet","month":"2018-05","story_title":"GCP and Confluent partner to deliver a managed Apache Kafka service","text":"Yes, I like to think of it as as the transaction log without any of the logic. If you\u2019re interested, I can highly recommend Martin Kleppmann\u2019s talk \u201cTurning the database inside out\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19905066,"author":"btown","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into","text":"The talk on \"Turning the database inside-out\" [0][1] by the author, Martin Kleppmann, is a fantastic intro to these dynamics, and it's something I'll always recommend to both experienced and inexperienced data modelers and backend developers. It goes pedagogically through the way things are typically done in a relational database in such a clear way that word-for-word it's one of the best tutorials I've seen... but it also weaves a narrative of \"how can this be done better/more scalably/more reliably/more flexibly-to-business-needs\" in pointing to a streaming/event-sourcing architecture. You may or not need the latter right away, but it's a fantastic tool to have in your toolbox to be able to say \"ah, this new requirement feels like it would benefit hugely from this architecture.\" Especially for OP who's starting to think about the \"why\" of messaging queues, this could be a fantastically valuable first step. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45084830,"author":"chamomeal","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Replacing a cache service with a database","text":"Idk I think caching is a crucial part of many well-designed systems. There\u2019s a lot of very cache-able data out there. If invalidating events are well defined or the data is fine being stale (week/month level dashboards, for example), that\u2019s a fantastic reason to use a cache. I\u2019d much rather just stuff those values in a cache than figure out any other more complicated solution. I also just think it\u2019s a necessary evil of big systems. Sometimes you need derived data. You can even think about databases as a kind of cache: the \u201creal\u201d data is the stream of every event that ever updated data in the database! (Yes this stretching the meaning of cache lol) However I agree that caching is often an easy bandaid for a bad architecture. This talk on Apache Samza completely changed how I think about caching and derived data in general: [VIDEO] And this interview has some interesting insights on the problems that caching faces at super large scale systems (twitter specifically): [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45087464,"author":"chamomeal","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Replacing a cache service with a database","text":"Hey OP you may have seen this already, but in case you didn\u2019t see my other comment, you should definitely check out this talk by Martin Kleppman. [VIDEO] It details Apache samza, which I didn\u2019t totally grasp but it seems similar to what you\u2019re talking about here. He talks about how if you could essentially use an event stream as your source of truth instead of a database, and you had a sufficiently powerful stream processor, you could define views on that data by consuming stream events. The end result is kind of like an auto-updating cache with no invalidation issues or race conditions. Need a new view on the data? Just define it and run the entire event stream through it. Once the stream is processed, that source of data is perpetually accurate and up-to-date. I\u2019m not a database guy and most of this stuff is over my head, but I loved this talk and I think you should check it out! It\u2019s the first thing I thought of when I read your post.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9370136,"author":"felipesabino","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Real-Time Full-Text Search with Luwak and Samza","text":"Samza's author really opened my mind related to how useful stream process is to high performance data processing [1] and I think Samza's only bummer (for me, personally, today) is it's lack of support for non-JMV languages [2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11465705,"author":"pramodliv1","month":"2016-04","story_title":"GraphQL-enabled event sourcing engine","text":"If you want a more modern and concrete example, the \"Turning your database inside out\" talk by Martin Kleppmann is pretty good too: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11967214,"author":"z1mm32m4n","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)","text":"Hearing the way Alan Kay talks about \"messaging\" always reminds me of two technologies: the Flux/Redux architecture and Apache Samza & Kafka. > The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be. With React and Flux, this is exactly what's going on! You're defining view components, and when someone interacts with them, there's a very structured, discrete set of actions that can be fired. These actions are then dispatched and handled elsewhere, but somewhere at the core, there's a single source of truth for what happens upon any given message. And for Apache Samza, I think this video[1] does a nice job of talking about stream processing as a programming architecture. There's a connection to be made between processing streams of information and processing messages between modules, and that video goes a good way towards exposing it. [1]: [VIDEO] \"Turning the database inside out with Apache Samza\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25349678,"author":"je42","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Kafka Is Not a Database","text":"Indeed. Known the tools and apply the one that has least cons and most pros ;). Also, a good starter to for knowing how to use a Streaming Store like Kafka as DB is the video Database inside-out. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28702975,"author":"dmitryminkovsky","month":"2021-09","story_title":"The Reactive Monolith \u2013 How to Move from CRUD to Event Sourcing","text":"I second this wholeheartedly because this happened to me. I'm the kind of person who learns by my making my own mistakes (as opposed to learning from others', which is what smart people do)\u2014and boy, did I learn a lot from the mistake of trying to build a general purpose application with event sourcing. Theoretically, event sourcing is the way all applications should be built. I was first taken by this methodology by Martin Kleppmann's talk \"Turning the Database Inside Out\" (2014)[0]. Looking back, I think I had always subconsciously felt like there was something wrong with mutating state in place. You lose information. You lose accountability. After all, \"accountants don't use erasers,\" and Martin's talk validated many of my obsessive-compulsive insecurities about data. As Charity Majors points out on Twitter [1]: > ...while storing raw events may be \"expensive\" compared to any single optimization, all optimizations can be derived from raw events. The reverse is impossible. And that's true. The table-stream duality [2][3] means that if you store events, you can later project those events into the exact perfect table for any use-case. But if you transform those events into a projection and store that projection, well, whatever table you store is data you have. You wind up having just an aggregate. Unfortunately, the technical costs you incur when you attempt to store events instead of tabular data are tremendous . The problems and questions that arise are basically endless. To","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35500573,"author":"avinassh","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Append-Only SQL Schema?","text":"I think you would love this talk by Martin Kleppmann - Turning the database inside out with Apache Samza: [VIDEO] He basically explores similar idea, you have a log to persist and materialised views to query.","stance":"rec"}],"fW8amMCVAJQ":[{"hn_comment_id":26849988,"author":"yogrish","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?","text":"The challenge I faced earlier was to get things executed ( expected outcome) from different teams. When I found my first follower , the one who really buys my vision and takes it down, things started to roll faster. This might give you an idea of first followers. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33655751,"author":"memish","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended","text":"What happens when Twitter survives despite reducing headcount by 80-90%? It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought. This may explain an underlying fear driving even some engineers to put their reputation on the line with confident declarations that Twitter is going to fail. Some were saying it wouldn't survive the night. It's now morning. Others saying it won't last the weekend or coming week. We'll soon find out. I would expect some bumps along the way. Twitter Blue was a bump. Perhaps Twitter is just the first to go lean before the recession. Elon merely the first dancer who is willing to look dumb. Now who's going to be the first follower to transform the lone nut into a leader? Watch this 2 minute to see how this works, you may have seen this before: [VIDEO] Now here's a counterbalance to the fear with an optimistic take: This is a correction. A small number of tech companies have been hoarding talent. The talent gets a 3 month severance and made available to the larger ecosystem.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46455478,"author":"abirch","month":"2026-01","story_title":"I rebooted my social life","text":"1) Do something you enjoy *and* that others in your area enjoy. 2) Look for opportunities to be a first follower: [VIDEO] 3) Build a routine. E.g., this event will happen every 2nd Tuesday of the month.","stance":"rec"}],"fWDxdoRTZPc":[{"hn_comment_id":38844750,"author":"bazza97","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Video playback on low-end MS-DOS machines","text":"Love how people are still pushing old hardware. These are also two excellent demo's on the XT: Area 5150 [VIDEO] 8088 MPH [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39550152,"author":"Akronymus","month":"2024-02","story_title":"How video games use lookup tables","text":"Makes me think about the area 5150 demo [VIDEO] edit: This comment really summarizes just how impressive the demo is [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"fWqBmmPQP40":[{"hn_comment_id":8670089,"author":"joshvm","month":"2014-11","story_title":"A Japanese-based multinational made a CD-based console once","text":"There's a lot of information about reverse engineering some of the older CPUs around e.g. the MOS6502 (NES, Apple II, C64, etc). This is a great presentation showing how this CPU is reverse engineered: [VIDEO] Basically it comes down to the fact that you can't really hide transistors and ultimately that's something you can reconstruct. It sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but if you do it you can perfectly emulate a chip. If you can dig out non volatile memory then potentially you have the firmware. Once someone has their hands on that it'll be broken, almost guaranteed, as it becomes a software problem. Lots of people are very good at assembly hacking.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19899861,"author":"joshvm","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Self-Study Integrated Circuit Design?","text":"If you have no experience in digital electronics at all, I would actually start with a book like Code by Charles Petzold. It's a pop-science book about electronics and goes from light bulbs and switches to simple logic blocks like adders. It covers the basic building blocks of virtually every cpu in existence - how to turn transistors into calculators. It's well written and provides some context to otherwise pretty dry textbooks. There is quite a bit of difference between how an FPGA works and is programmed versus a totally custom chip. You could also take a look at reverse engineering walkthroughs eg Ken Shirrif has a few on his blog. Nand2tetris is another good thing to look at. Finally, reverse engineering the MOS6502: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21490024,"author":"leoc","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Visual6502 Remix","text":"Here's a nice talk video covering the story from the origins of the 6502 to the Visual 6502 (but not the wasm Remix): [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"fXW-QjBsruE":[{"hn_comment_id":36702042,"author":"axolotlgod","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Telling the Bees","text":"First off, I think everyone deals with this at some point. I think, also, since you are always changing as a person, what helps you cope at one point of your life might not work as life goes on. Various things have all contributed, in some way or another, to helping me in the past and present. Most recently, I came across a VSauce video from a year ago: \"Do Chairs Exist?\" by VSauce [1]. Now, the thrust of the video deals with mereology [2]. However, the final line from Michael at the end surprised me a lot, and in the days since watching it, has been an extremely strong comfort for me: \"I am not a thing that dies and becomes scattered, I AM death and I AM the scattering.\" I think it is worth spending the 40 minutes to watch the whole thing, as makes this line make more sense and extremely impactful. Anyway, this helped me recently, maybe it can help someone else :) [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28757100,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Flat Earth \u201cScience\u201d \u2013 Wrong, but not Stupid (2020) [video]","text":"Sabine's lecture pairs nicely, I think, with a recent Vsauce episode asking \"Do Chairs Exist\". Both, to my mind, explore elements of empiricism and pragmatism, and unearth subtleties of epistemology that most discussion seem to miss. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29481980,"author":"samhain","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs","text":"This sounds like you might be able to gain something from the \u201cDo chairs exist?\u201d video by vsauce.[1] Basically, he goes through the different philosophical reasonings of the past and then explores where each one of those fall apart. He goes explicitly into how small things can create something larger but why philosophers have struggled to make the leaps to change definition. He ends on the latest philosophical reasoning, which I think thoroughly explains your conundrum. I\u2019ll try to explain even if it seems less profound here than in the video. Basically, all concepts are emergent behavior of \u201cstuff.\u201d There really isn\u2019t a chair, but \u201cstuff\u201d arranged chair-wise. And humans decide what that boundary is for both chairs and consciousness as they are concepts we apply to stuff that is \u201cchairing\u201d or \u201cbeing conscious.\u201d A collection of neurons may or may not be conscious by defining how they behave. And the details on where we draw the line for consciousness is no different than where we draw the line for how many atoms we can scrape away from a chair and it still be a chair. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34523004,"author":"yamtaddle","month":"2023-01","story_title":"US Marines Defeat DARPA Robot by Hiding Under a Cardboard Box","text":"\"Do chairs exist?\" [VIDEO] Perhaps the desk is \"chairing\" in those moments. [EDIT] A little more context for those who might not click on a rando youtube link: it's basically an entertaining, whirlwind tour of the philosophy of categorizing and labeling things, explaining various points of view on the topic, then poking holes in them or demonstrating their limitations.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37644877,"author":"crazydoggers","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Time Doesn\u2019t Belong to Physics","text":"Love this vsauce video for some examples [VIDEO] There\u2019s still a lot of value in philosophy when we use it to think about how we structure and rationalize the world. Even if science gives us ever better models of the underlying reality of the universe, there\u2019s still the understanding of how we conceptualize that reality and what it means to us. Specifically in ways that don\u2019t require religion or supernatural beings, nor in purely psychological means of perception or physiology. I think of it as the study of the emergent properties of complex information processing. It can do things like help us talk about the minds of others, for example future AI, potential extraterrestrial intelligences, or even other terrestrial intelligences (dolphins, octopus, etc)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44116931,"author":"throw0101b","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Chairs, Chairs, Chairs","text":"Given the title, as good an excuse as any to point people to the Vsauce video \"Do Chairs Exist?\": * [VIDEO] (Can't believe a half-hour video on ontology has >13M views.)","stance":"rec"}],"f_0QlhYlS8g":[{"hn_comment_id":18128634,"author":"xelxebar","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Concatenative language (2017)","text":"I just stumbled across this Google Tech Talk on [factor][0] last night! It absolutely blew my mind. The engineering looks to be top notch, and the video is 9 years old to boot! [VIDEO] Anyway, really want to give Factor a try for some personal projects. Would love to hear anecdotes from people who futz with this stuff. [0]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46430008,"author":"fud101","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Why did Python fail to evolve?","text":"It's funny because 3 dropped in 2008, the same year Slava was demonstrating Factor in google tech talks which was a contemporary language to python3 that completely blew Python out of the water. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7082090,"author":"agumonkey","month":"2014-01","story_title":"K, by Arthur Whitney (2005)","text":"I see what you did there. ps: just in case here's a very enjoyable talk, not about, but by Slava [VIDEO] Beautiful and impressive.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22068894,"author":"benhoyt","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Factor: A Practical Stack Languge","text":"As someone who built Forth compilers back in the day, I really like this language. There's a nice overview of Factor as a paper here: [LINK] and a Google tech talk video of Slava Pestov (Factor's creator) showing off the language here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45076408,"author":"johnisgood","month":"2025-08","story_title":"The V Programming Language","text":"I agree. I remember his talk on Factor. I wish people gave enough support back then so he could work on it full-time. Here is his talk on Factor: [VIDEO] , back from 2008.","stance":"rec"}],"fa28lIGuxq8":[{"hn_comment_id":25888105,"author":"chrisbolt","month":"2021-01","story_title":"France has passed a law protecting the sounds and smells of the countryside","text":"> Back up beepers are considerably louder than they need to be. Tom Scott has a fascinating video that describes how this is changing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12175502,"author":"Scottopherson","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Mercedes-Benz shows off the first fully electric heavy urban transport truck","text":"Not necessarily. It's being changed in some places because studies show that there are safer (and less annoying) noises that can be utilized: Tom Scott - Why Do Reversing Trucks Not Beep Any More? [VIDEO] As someone with construction taking place next door to me I really wish they would start getting rid of the beeping in more places. I'm pessimistic that it will happen in my area anytime soon though.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46657706,"author":"VageGast","month":"2026-01","story_title":"STFU","text":"It does remind me of a video from Tom Scott about the use of white noise for reversing trucks. It has multiple benefits over the old beeping sound, including being easily able to hear the direction the sound is coming from. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"faHQA_0d9Mo":[{"hn_comment_id":34019488,"author":"LarryMullins","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Apple TV+ to adapt William Gibson\u2019s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer","text":"The Spicediver edit of Lynch's Dune proved to me that Dune is filmable. I think it remains the best adaptation of Dune. You can watch it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38984951,"author":"shrubble","month":"2024-01","story_title":"I Found David Lynch's Lost 'Dune II' Script","text":"Dune: The Alternative Edition Redux at [VIDEO] is a fan's \"fanedit\" of Lynch's original Dune movie, about 2h50m I think. I found it enjoyable to watch. \"Dune Remix is as close to Lynch's vision as possible. Its authors even followed the original script and all the scenes are in this version now reassembled in the correct chronological order and originally intended. It is true that not all the scenes could be found because probably Dino de Laurentis didn't even let them film, but much of what is in the cut, according to Spicediver, was enough to restore the film practically in its entirety according to what was written and planned by Lynch decades ago, following the script from scene to scene as faithfully as possible.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44024713,"author":"krrrh","month":"2025-05","story_title":"The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick","text":"I love it too, I actually decided to never read the book because all the book readers I have talked to hated it. Highly recommend the upscaled to 4k fan edit on YouTube. They splice in lost footage that was cut from Lynch\u2019s initial edit. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fbhPIK-oBvA":[{"hn_comment_id":25691882,"author":"virgulino","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Excess protein enabled dog domestication during severe Ice Age winters","text":"Herzog's documentary is just a new cut of the original Russian documentary, adding Herzog's old hippie narrative. The original version is fantastic, and much more authentic. Available on YouTube, with subtitles, on the director's own channel: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34573890,"author":"virgulino","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Living Alone in the Wild Siberian Forest","text":"Thank you. What Herzog did was re-edit and put his own narration on the original Russian Happy People, a 4-part documentary. I like the original much better, I think of it as the authentic view, while Herzog's version is the typical old German hippie looking at an alien world (and I love Herzog!). Still, I found it very interesting to see both versions. The original 4-part documentary, with English narration, is available on the original Russian director's YouTube channel: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10201416,"author":"ak1394","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Building a hut with a tiled roof, underfloor heating and mud and stone walls","text":"There is a somewhat similar russian documentary about people leaving in the small settlements in Siberia: Happy People [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15756680,"author":"wohlergehen","month":"2017-11","story_title":"A Man Who Has Lived Alone on an Island for 28 Years","text":"If you enjoyed that, you might also enjoy Dmitry Vasyukov's \"Happy People\" documentary about the people living in the Siberian taiga. It's on youtube [1]. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32801537,"author":"nkurz","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"I watched this, and enjoyed it, but was later surprised to learn that Herzog had started with a completed documentary but made major changes to the narrative---for the worse! There are few scenes that he edited to tell a different story than they did in the original, seemingly with minimal concern for truth. It really hurt my image of Herzog. So I'd second the recommendation, but add that if you get a chance, you should try to view Vasyukov's original as well. Herzog's version might be a bit snappier, but I don't think it's actually better. The original is available in four parts on Youtube. Here's part one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ffkIQrq-m34":[{"hn_comment_id":18218023,"author":"DanPristupov","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Here are some of my favorites: How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters [LINK] Agile Methods The Good, the Hype and the Ugly [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26351003,"author":"rramadass","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for software delivery?","text":"Agile/Scrum in limited doses to aspects of Software Development is basically common sense. Applying it mechanically to the entire Product/Project Development life cycle is dumb. The \"Agile Manifesto\" is just well known platitudes. Agile!: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly by Bertrand Meyer is a must read. Summary: [LINK] Webcast: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38898706,"author":"rramadass","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life","text":"What you say has been well known and that is why techniques like Barry Boehm's \"Spiral Model\" - [LINK] were invented long ago. But \"Incremental Design\"/\"Refactoring\" as practiced by XP/Agile/Scrum crowd is not that at all. It is giving up on \"Upfront Design\" altogether because Requirements/Design is subject to change anyway. The fact that you will have unknowns should not be an excuse to not come up with a blueprint i.e. Design for the overall system. The focus should be on the long-term with decisions/allowances/techniques made for extension/maintainability/refactoring within the blueprint. That is the point of \"Upfront Design\". The XP/Agile/Scrum crowd have effectively thrown the \"baby out with the bathwater\" with the result that their methodology has degenerated to \"think short-term and make shit up as you go long-term\". See also Bertrand Meyer, \"Agile! The Good, The Hype and The Ugly\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ffngZOB1U2A":[{"hn_comment_id":18128930,"author":"TimGremalm","month":"2018-10","story_title":"10 years of gog.com","text":"Noclip did an interesting documentary about GOG. \"GOG: Preserving Gaming's Past & Future\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30594569,"author":"wildpeaks","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Russia to legalize software piracy","text":"An interesting point from the history of GOG is that it originated from a market where piracy was the norm, Noclip has a great documentary about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fhOHn9TClXY":[{"hn_comment_id":13407750,"author":"lliamander","month":"2017-01","story_title":"What Happens to OO When Processors Are Free? (2015)","text":"> Erlang != OOP as imagined by Kay... as I understand Kay's intent. You should check out the video[0] of Joe Armstrong interviewing Alan Kay - it seemed to me that Erlang was in some respects closer to what Alan Kay intended for OOP than even smalltalk was. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19706607,"author":"dpeck","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Joe Armstrong has died","text":"That is so sad, he was in his late 60s and it seemed like he had a lot of life left in him, talking about how software can get better and having a great (and sometimes snarky) outlook on the profession. Highly recommend his thesis (2003) and a few of his great interviews/presentations for anyone who isn\u2019t familiar with Joe, it captures a lot of what he thought about and pushed for in his professional life. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] I hope his family and friends can find some comfort in how much he was appreciated and admired in the development community.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22903283,"author":"gens","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Gleam: A statically typed language for the Erlang VM","text":"Concurrency.. the way i understand it, it is about making parts of the program run independent of each other and thus can run at the same time. But you might want to check out someone who knows better, like Rob Pike: [LINK] Yes, Erlang makes concurrent programs easier to write. Again it is better to listen to someone who knows more, like the creator of Erlang Joe Armstrong: [LINK] Any talk by him is great. Erlang, in how i see it, makes it easier to write concurrent programs because: 1. Parts of a program communicate with other parts by passing messages 2. Every variable is static, as in if you declare that A is 12 you can not change it to be 13 Joe Armstrong had a way of explaining these things so that even i could understand, so i do recommend watching every talk you can find of him. I also recommend the interview he did of Alan Kay [VIDEO] . But if you want to really get into concurrency i recommend a paper called \"Communicating Sequential Processes\" by C. A. R. Hoare. See [LINK] It's a \"formal language\" for dealing with concurrency. Go, and some other languages, implement a \"CSP style\" way of doing concurrency. Erlang doesn't do SIMD, nor GPU. However, it does world scale low latency systems. Of course, it's still up to the programmer to do everything correctly and Erlang is just a tool. I don't quite like *JS, so i won't say anything about that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23148911,"author":"gens","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Single Writer Principle (2011)","text":"Checking out what Alan Kay has to say about it might help: [VIDEO] The way i see it OOP is about encapsulating/bundling data and the code that processes that data into one \"object\", that is isolated from other objects. The objects could only \"communicate\" with other objects by sending \"messages\" (data/events/something). Personally i don't like OOP, and think that focusing on data and how it's processed is a better way forward (CSP and such). It's.. a complicated matter.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29370370,"author":"Rendello","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: If OOP is about message passing, why not sender.send(receiver, message)?","text":"One sort-of exception is Erlang (and anything else that runs on the BEAM vm, like Elixir). It doesn't match Alan Kay's vision exactly, because the message passing is done a bit differently (for example it's asynchronous), but creator Joe Armstrong called it something like \"the best of functional programming and OOP\". If you come from C++, Java, or other \"OOP\" languages, and look at Erlang, it's completely different than what you expect. In Erlang, the \"objects\" are less like mutable structs and more like functional mini-programs that can create new programs, pass messages, and fail as you would expect. To get some perspective on both of their perspectives, here's \"Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43949946,"author":"AceJohnny2","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Alan Kay did not invent objects (2019)","text":"Indeed, here's a email from Alan Kay about how his perspective is about \"messaging\" between objects: [LINK] (edit: derp, this is directly cited in TFA) Also, I loved this interview/discussion between Kay & Joe Armstrong, inventor of Erlang, where the topic comes up again (because Erlang is also a lot about messaging between agents) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49069690,"author":"mempko","month":"2026-07","story_title":"A Love Letter to Object Orientation","text":"Thanks, I'll check it out! When I implemented messaging for Abject, I used the Erlang model. I also added P2P support so objects can talk across the network. There is this great discussion between Joe Armstrong and Alan Kay if you haven't see it. [VIDEO] EDIT: Just checked your smalltalk implementation. Very cool! Do you remember the Open Croquet project in the early 2000s? Way ahead of it's time. I wonder if a modern version of that could work today now that we have good VR headsets.","stance":"rec"}],"fifjjacjLBE":[{"hn_comment_id":18522628,"author":"tyingq","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Making transparent wood [video]","text":"I moved around a lot as a kid, so I saw a lot of wood shop teachers. All were missing various parts of fingers. Pretty good \"mea culpa\" video here from a guy that cut his hand up: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19082937,"author":"beams_of_light","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Table Saw Accidents","text":"This is one of my favorite kickback demonstrations. Since watching this, I have made sure to keep my push block/stick close to the blade & applying pressure toward the fence, instead of closer to the fence & applying pressure toward the blade. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fjbWr3ODbAo":[{"hn_comment_id":24417941,"author":"serf","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Sid Meier: \u201cI don\u2019t think I could make Civilisation today\u201d","text":"it's not just that phenomenon. Daniel Dennett mentions an experience where a painting , with very little detail up-close, appeared to him to have all the detail of a photograph when viewed from afar[0]. It's not quite the same thing as the uncanny valley effect, for him it came about from his naive expectation of up-close detail being blown apart by his experience, when getting closer and closer to the painting, of realizing that the painting itself was almost incomprehensible up-close -- the detail was created by the way the abstract shapes created the illusion of detail from afar on a very large canvas. It was sort of an artistic physical version of rendering LOD tricks. He expresses it much better than I do, I recommend the TED talk or the Google talk where he highlights this example as a way to gain insight into what consciousness may be. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34812080,"author":"schiffern","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Bing: \u201cI will not harm you unless you harm me first\u201d","text":"One can equally say, \"Human brains only know that a neuron is activated by a pattern of axon firing in response to physical inputs from nerve endings.\" Does any of that change anything? Not really. >It doesn't understand credit card rewards Is this assertion based on anything but philosophical bias surrounding the word \"understand\"? >it understands how to compose an elementary word problem into algebra That's exactly how a human, who may or may not have understood rewards programs beforehand, would solve that word problem. Dan Dennett is informative here.[0] Yes, consciousness (even your own!) can just be a bag of tricks. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fjs2gPa5sD0":[{"hn_comment_id":14241266,"author":"carsongross","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Why manufacturing jobs aren't coming back to the U.S","text":"I agree entirely with you on the urgency of figuring out productive jobs for people with IQs on the left side of the bell curve. Jordan Peterson has a very good video on this[1]. I would couple this with a concern that we end (or, dare we dream, reverse) the dysgenic social policies we currently have in place (IQ is 50-80% heritable). In the short run, we need to work to move the production chain back to the united states, and that will generate some manufacturing jobs. I suspect more than the corporate-interest controlled media will say, but it almost doesn't matter if we are playing the long game for our kids. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18161385,"author":"collyw","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Gig-Economy Workers Are the Modern Proletariat","text":"There is an interesting clip from Jordan Peterson on IQ and jobs. Sure intelligent people want something meaningful from their jobs, but at the lower ends people are probably happier with something less challenging. [VIDEO] Personally I wouldn't mind cycling around all day and staying fit, but keeping software running pays a fair bit better.","stance":"rec"}],"fmF7HpU_-9k":[{"hn_comment_id":33671306,"author":"ZeroGravitas","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Show HN: Easylang \u2013 A browser-based first programming language","text":"This reminded me a little of Hedy language: [LINK] It starts off super simple, like: print something and then introduces all the fiddly concepts like quoting, escaping etc. 1 by 1 until it turns into python. The designer had a neat talk about it at the strange loop conference. One of the themes they talk about is the difference between \"easy to learn\" and \"easy to teach\" which I found insightful. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34290313,"author":"dndn1","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Show HN: A 100% free and interactive Python course for coding beginners","text":"For 8yo, maybe you can consider bringing her through Hedy: [LINK] It's gradual (starts easy but limited, then with progress through levels gets more precise and powerful), and I read that it gets to full blown Python programming. Theres an excellent talk on the approach by the author: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"folTvNDL08A":[{"hn_comment_id":36361192,"author":"thingification","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Annoying A/B testing mistakes every engineer should know","text":"As kevinwang has pointed out in slightly different terms: the hypothesis that seems wooly to you seems sharply pointed to others (and vice versa) because explanationless hypotheses (\"changing the colour of the button will help\") are easily variable (as are the colour of the xkcd jelly beans), while hypotheses that are tied strongly to an explanation are not. You can test an explanationless hypothesis, but that doesn't get you very far, at least in understanding. As usual here I'm channeling David Deutsch's language and ideas on this, I think mostly from The Beginning of Infinity, which he delightfully and memorably explains using a different context here: [VIDEO] (the yt link if you're impatient: [VIDEO] - the part I'm talking about starts at about 9:36, but it's a very tight talk and you should start from the beginning). Incidentally, one of these TED talks of Deutsch - not sure if this or the earlier one - TED-head Chris Anderson said was his all-time favourite. plagiarist: > That doesn't test noticing the button, that tests clicking the button. If the color changes it is possible that fewer people notice it but are more likely to click in a way that increases total traffic. \"Critical rationalists\" would first of all say: it does test noticing the button, but tests are a shot at refuting the theory, here by showing no effect. But also, and less commonly understood: even if there is no change in your A/B - an apparently successful refutation of the \"people will click more be","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31174763,"author":"npalli","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Against Bayesianism \u2013 David Deutsch","text":"Great essay, deeper than being about just Bayesianism. In the essay David talks a lot about explanations and what is good one v/s a bad one. The short TED lecture by him gives a deeper insight into his explanation of why good explanations (hard to vary theory of the world) are the key to scientific and human progress since the scientific revolution. (17 min at 1x) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fpbOEoRrHyU":[{"hn_comment_id":8257993,"author":"felipesabino","month":"2014-09","story_title":"There Are Only Two Weeks Left to Comment on Net Neutrality","text":"What was that? I am so disappointed to see that they featured a video showing net neutrality being ONLY about facebook, youtube and more video streaming... If they wanted to go mainstream, John Oliver did a much better job (and funnier, btw) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8964584,"author":"e0m","month":"2015-01","story_title":"The Net Neutrality Bait and Switch","text":"In case you haven't seen John Oliver's take on Net Neutrality, this video is 13 minutes well spent: [VIDEO] \"Tom Wheeler is [like] a dingo\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13050425,"author":"musha68k","month":"2016-11","story_title":"European Union dedicated questionnaire on the Encryption of Data","text":"What can a \"hacker\" possibly have against John Oliver? He and his team were the most effective drivers for stronger Net Neutrality policies in the US. The man is a living legend. Edit: 12 million views on the abstract topic of Net Neutrality. That's what I would call a feat indeed: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7874664,"author":"danesparza","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Netflix responds to Verizon","text":"I agree that our bandwidth to price ratio is shitty in this country. But until we have viable competition in THIS country, our rates won't come down. John Oliver's rant on Net Neutrality (ironically on HBO) sums this up pretty nicely: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8049279,"author":"spuiszis","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Verizon's accidental mea culpa","text":"I have Comcast as well and it's gotten because of the deal Netflix struck with them... [LINK] EDIT: John Oliver also talks quite eloquently about this as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15750193,"author":"shmerl","month":"2017-11","story_title":"FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see","text":"John Oliver found a good way to explain it: [VIDEO] [LINK] The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition. They aren't elected officials.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15757330,"author":"sunnykgupta","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Join the Battle for Net Neutrality","text":"While we are on the topic, may I bring up John Oliver's June 1 2014 episode. [VIDEO] tl;dw - For those who want to understand how closely the government is related to those who benefit from NO net-neutrality.","stance":"rec"}],"frLwRLS_ZR0":[{"hn_comment_id":13565183,"author":"legodt","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Breakdown of a Simple Ray Tracer","text":"This is a really cool demonstration, love the code breakdowns. For a less technical, but broader scale description of ray tracing, Disney made an excellent video describing their use of ray tracing in movies. Check it out here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18389306,"author":"andystanton","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Accelerated \u201cRay Tracing in One Weekend\u201d in CUDA","text":"As the topic is about Ray Tracing in One Weekend and the book admits it's \"technically a path tracer\" here's a great Disney video introducing path tracing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25617013,"author":"lattalayta","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Pixar's Render Farm","text":"Here's a kind of silly but accurate view of path tracing for animated features [VIDEO] Typically, most pathtracers use a technique called Monte Carlo Estimation, which means that they continuously loop over every pixel in an image, and average together the incoming light from randomly traced light paths. To calculate motion blur, they typically sample the scene at least twice (once at camera shutter open, and again at shutter close). Adaptive sampling rendering techniques will typically converge faster when there is less motion blur. One of the biggest time-saving techniques lately, is machine learning powered image denoising [1]. This allows the renderer to compute significantly fewer samples, but then have a 2D post-process run over the image and guess what the image might look like if it had been rendered with higher samples. Animated movies and VFX render each frame in terms of minutes and hours, while games need to render in milliseconds. Many of the techniques used in game rendering are approximations of physically based light transport, that look \"good enough\". But modern animated films and VFX are much closer to simulating reality with true bounced lighting and reflections. [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"frnLiXclAMo":[{"hn_comment_id":14388931,"author":"dchest","month":"2017-05","story_title":"TFS: A file system built for performance, space efficiency, and scalability","text":"On the contrary, it makes it suitable for file systems! File systems are not block devices, they are data structures on top of block devices \u2014 it's the job of these data structures to keep stuff, such as data, inodes, and... keys, and IVs, and MACs, checksums, etc. TFS uses Speck in XEX mode (edit: I just realized you're the author, so you already know that :). tptacek wrote a nice post about it: [LINK] and I quote: \"If you\u2019re encrypting a filesystem and not disk blocks, still don\u2019t use XTS! Filesystems have format-awareness and flexibility. Filesystems can do a much better job of encrypting a disk than simulated hardware encryption can.\" Edit: check out this presentation on how encryption was bolted on ZFS: [VIDEO] (slides: [LINK] ) It's not perfect, but it provides data authentication by reusing checksum fields for storing MACs. Edit 2: also check out bcachefs encryption design doc: [LINK] (also not perfect, but uses proper AEAD \u2014 ChaCha20-Poly1305. I sent some questions and suggestions to the author, but received no reply :/)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33926524,"author":"drbawb","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Apple advances user security with powerful new data protections","text":"The problem is that a stream cipher is going to have some per-object uniqueness (a salt, IV, etc.), so by design even if you feed it related input blocks you will get different output blocks. This is, of course, antithetical to deduplication: so you need to check/store the hash of the input before it goes through the cipher. The presentation about ZFS' native encryption[1] covers many of these sorts of trade-offs necessary to do full-disk encryption at scale. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ftcIcn8AmSY":[{"hn_comment_id":24702053,"author":"tkf","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A quick introduction to data parallelism in Julia","text":"Hi, the author here. One of the hidden messages of the introduction is: watch Guy Steele's talks [1][2][3] if you are interested in data parallelism! These talks are not Julia-specific and the idea is applicable and very useful in any languages. My libraries are heavily inspired by these talks. Of course, if you haven't used Julia yet, it'd be great if (data) parallelism gives you an excuse to try it out! It has a fantastic foundation for composable multi-threaded parallelism [4]. [1] How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not! [LINK] [2] Four Solutions to a Trivial Problem [VIDEO] [3] Organizing Functional Code for Parallel Execution; or, foldl and foldr Considered Slightly Harmful [LINK] [4] Announcing composable multi-threaded parallelism in Julia [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17733599,"author":"platz","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Organizing Functional Code for Parallel Execution (2009) [video]","text":"I enjoyed this talk along the same lines by Guy Steele, regarding not necessarily forcing a sequential solution to a non-sequential problem: Four Solutions to a Trivial Problem - Guy Steele Jr.: [VIDEO] Look for steps that are commutative and/or associative in the problem to exploit parallelism.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33002972,"author":"heleninboodler","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Someone is pretending to be me","text":"This type of interviewing style is bullshit. It means the interviewer knows a better solution that is \"clever\" and expects you to either have the same cleverness epiphany on the spot or to have studied this question. Neither is actually very useful as a hiring criterion. Guy Steele gave an incredibly interesting guest talk[1] at google about four different ways to solve this exact problem, and the fact that it's an interesting enough topic for an hour long google talk should probably be a clue that you shouldn't be expected to invent the best solution on the whiteboard in 40 minutes. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36784047,"author":"MathMonkeyMan","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Coroutines for Go","text":"Guy Steele Jr. worked on a language called \"Fortress.\" There are a few good talks that he gives: - (toy problem) [VIDEO] - (parallelism) [LINK] - (languages) [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"fuFlMtZmvY0":[{"hn_comment_id":45999459,"author":"johnsmith1840","month":"2025-11","story_title":"How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity","text":"I view social media through this lens now. [VIDEO] It's less that we are in echo chambers and more of being completly flooded with too many opinions. Avacados == liberal Steaks == conservative The point I take is that the only way to prevent this is decrease the amount of information you recieve not increase. If you constantly read extreme opinions everywhere your brain cannot process it and therefore starts dropping everything into really big buckets. The more sides you read the bigger your buckets becomes. Sure you're less informed but I don't think humans were designed to grok the entire world's information either.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38602079,"author":"audunw","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Elon Musk brings Alex Jones and Infowars back on X after user poll","text":"Sure, bring him back or whatever. But don\u2019t pretend it has anything to do with free speech. That\u2019s undermining the importance of the concept free speech. Free speech has never been about forcing all (social or not) media platforms to publish the opinions of all people. The concept of \u201cfree speech\u201d that Elon Musk is chasing is noble in a twisted way I suppose. But it\u2019s naive. Especially in the coming era of \u201cAI\u201d, where it will be increasingly easy to generate fake activity if you have the money. I think people will seek platforms that do work like open forums, so you get the opinions and ideas of people outside your immediate network\u2026 but people will increasingly value that those opinions and ideas are held to a certain minimum standard. Otherwise the platforms will just be spammed to death by people with a zealous political agenda and state actors trying to amplify political divides. I found the recent Kurzgesagt video on this topic illuminating, and an essential perspective when considering how to go forward with these social platforms [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38706519,"author":"rockbruno","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Reddit died, nothing took its place. What will happen when HN dies?","text":"Why do you think that being spread out is an issue? Niche forums like HN were exactly how the internet worked before mass social media arrived and ruined everything. Going back to this old format is exactly what we should be doing in my opinion. I find that Kurzgesagt's video on social media touches this subject very well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38757832,"author":"jug","month":"2023-12","story_title":"People aren't posting on social media as much","text":"There is a Kurzgesagt that I can recommend about this! How our puny brains are ready for socializing and it\u2019s been very important for us, but more on an isolated \u201ctribe\u201d level or at the very least without social networks, arguing that returning to special interest bulletin boards online will probably have us feel better. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39549995,"author":"lorean_victor","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Can we get more decentralised than the Fediverse?","text":"I've got to disagree on this point. I am a firm believer in \"democratisation\" of anything, including \"publishing content that many other people will see\". this is what social media mainly have done, in my opinion. they have made it extremely easy to publish content. the \"social\" part is just to further lower the barrier: it is easier to quote or comment on something someone else has already said compared to posting something out of the blue, and features like \"like\" or \"share\" allow you to create content with push of a button. they have also used other techniques that has no social aspect (Twitter's character limit, TikTok's musics and video length limit, Snapchat's stories, etc). of course, that means posting and spreading \"worst in people\" is also easier (as is spreading spam, etc). this aspect I feel has nothing to do with the \"social\" part of these platforms, any form of lowering the entry barrier would have caused more terrible things to be published and spread (maybe with different extents, but not essentially different). p.s. you might find this interesting if you haven't seen it already: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fwCz8Ris79g":[{"hn_comment_id":18149933,"author":"michaelbuckbee","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Heat Storage Hypocausts: Air Heating in the Middle Ages (2017)","text":"I wonder what the efficiency is compared to a modern \"rocket stove\" build [1] Mass rocket stoves are _incredibly_ efficient. So much so that I've always wondered why more similar designs weren't used in times when the primary heat sources were wood, etc. 1 - [VIDEO] (skip to 1:50 if you want to see a full one and not the ms paint diagrams)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26162257,"author":"mikeytown2","month":"2021-02","story_title":"What went wrong with the Texas power grid?","text":"Best fireplace in terms of efficiency is a rocket mass heater. It burns the wood gas in a secondary burn chamber and then routes the exhaust through a lot of thermal mass. One 2 hour fire a day will usually heat 2000 sq feet of house. 3m video explains the concept; longer videos will better explain it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26168188,"author":"mikeytown2","month":"2021-02","story_title":"What went wrong with the Texas power grid?","text":"You can do a hybrid approach with the hot metal burn chamber for wood gas and earthen materials to slowly radiate the heat. This is called a rocket mass heater. The exhaust temperature is usually below 100C and often smokeless (a complete burn). Using a fan to extract heat from the final vertical stack (pipe around the exhaust with air running by) can give you an exhaust temperature of around 40C. Here's a quick 3 minute video that explains the concept; there's other YouTube videos that go into greater details if you wish to research this topic more. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fwcl17Q0bpk":[{"hn_comment_id":7558370,"author":"ensmotko","month":"2014-04","story_title":"\"OpenSSL has exploit mitigation countermeasures to make sure it's exploitable\"","text":"Check out phk's fosdem talk[0]. I've linked to the the part where he talks about openSSL, but I'd suggest watching the whole thing. I'm now starting to believe the talk wasn't a joke at all... [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7558483,"author":"TacticalCoder","month":"2014-04","story_title":"\"OpenSSL has exploit mitigation countermeasures to make sure it's exploitable\"","text":"There's a talk that was given in Belgium / Brussels at FOSDEM2014 two months ago or so by Poul-Henning Kamp (FreeBSD) regarding the NSA and how he'd do it if he had to create holes in software: [VIDEO] He's talking specifically about OpenSSL quite a lot (basically saying it's too complex to ever be secure and probably received many \"security patches\" from NSA employees). The entire talk is an eye opener. He explains how NSA shills are reading reddit / HN and poisoning communities / standards / protocols / etc. How everything is made, on purpose, needlessly complex to prevent honest developers from working on important things. He talks about shills submitting a few correct patches over the months / years, slowly gaining reputation among the community and then misusing that trust to submit (not so) subtle patches introducing security holes on purpose. He mentions a few of the \"common mantra\" repeated often (including here) by people who have an interest in the status quo. He explains why SSL/TLS is broken and says that the \"SEC\" part of \"DNSSEC\" is not going to be that secure ; ) I think that the problem is much worse than most people think and that Poul-Henning Kamp is closer to the truth than the ones constantly repeating \"bug happens\" as if nothing malicious was ever going on.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7565477,"author":"higherpurpose","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Julian Assange: \"Debian Is Owned By The NSA\"","text":"Debian's 2006 PRNG anyone?! Maybe these are stupid dumb mistakes, but if I were NSA this is exactly how I'd implement backdoors. 2 lines of code cloned here (go to fail), 2 lines of code commented out there (Debian PRNG issue), and just like that you create huge vulnerabilities in the system. Hard to notice, and impossible to blame on anyone. Everytime they seem to be some brilliant \"stupid mistakes\". And as others have said, do listen to the FreeBSD developer's talk on NSA' ORCHESTRA operation (subverting open source projects): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7587276,"author":"notdonspaulding","month":"2014-04","story_title":"PHK: OpenSSL must die, for it will never get any better.","text":"Also worth watching is his FOSDEM talk where he was calling for this before news of Heartbleed broke. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7640378,"author":"romanovcode","month":"2014-04","story_title":"IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, others pledge $3.6 million to fund OpenSSL","text":"OpenSSL source code is a disaster. It's spaghetti that doesn't do what you think it does with horrible documentation. People submit patches from people they don't even know and then you have it: An SSL library that is flawed but everyone is using it. An spying agency and hackers dream. We don't need OpenSSL, we need another library built from scratch with very clean code and documentation. Everyone who has more interest on why OpenSSL is a catastrophe should watch operation ORCHESTRA[0]. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8484177,"author":"AlyssaRowan","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Making sure crypto remains insecure [pdf]","text":"Hmmm\u2026 and ElGamal's signing scheme didn't qualify? I don't think that's a reason, or even an excuse: Schnorr actually did claim his patent read on DSA. (That obviously never went anywhere, and the US Government, in a show of force via the NSA, filed their own patent on DSA.) The NSA also really doesn't seem to have had much of a problem negotiating the licensing of patents with industry participants in the past! It is, after all, in an extraordinarily strong bargaining position: an awful lot of public money to throw around (openly, via on-the-book government contracts, and otherwise); the backing of a 'superpower' government and its negotiators; a remarkably good idea of what the position of those its bargaining with is (it is a signals intelligence agency\u2026!); and is even able to classify patents and other nonsense like that. DSA was sceptically received at the time, and there was widespread suspicion about its complexity and critical dependency on random k. (Even just two or three predictable leading bits of k can cause disaster!) Sizes above 1024 bit were not specified for way too long, and I would consider a 1024-bit DSA key most definitely crackable by the computing resources available to the NSA (or perhaps anyone else with a budget and a chip fab on contract after-hours!) today. (Those with DSA PGP signing keys may wish to take note and replace them, I suggest, with 4096-bit RSA keys.) I think perhaps the only reason DSA got any popularity was because of the RSA patent,","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839279,"author":"hackermailman","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"This talk was an interesting thought experiment by PhK of FreeBSD on how if he were tasked by some agency to sabotage open source projects and standards how he would go about doing it [VIDEO] A talk by Robert Harper at OPLSS in 2017 is really good as well, covering the basics of programming language background [LINK] \"concrete syntax is where computer science meets psychology.... at the moment it's all a matter of opinion\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17895051,"author":"no_identd","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers","text":">I have this notion that surrounding a subject with basket case conspiracy theories would be a good way to get people not to take it seriously :) Indeed, it would. A lot of clever people have discussed the issue of disinfo & FUD, you might wish to: * Watch this talk from FOSDEM '14 by Poul-Henning Kamp [Contextually, one important tidbit to keep in mind while watching it: At the time phk gave the talk, the heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL wasn't yet known!]: [VIDEO] * and, perhaps, read these two blog posts, but tread carefully with those two, as, unlike the above video, the below edges MOST dangerously close to basket case conspiracy theory territory - arguably, it doesn't get there, but I can definitely say that if one slips while looking into the below, one'll immediately end up in basket case territory: [LINK] [LINK] However, having said this & pointed out all of the above, before going down any of the above lanes, keep something else in mind: 1. Take a look at when some of these links got first published online . Multi-decade gap vs. original date of publication. Something unfortunately still the norm for a lot of old(er) scientific/academic literature. 2. Most of Frey's original papers from the 60s are still behind a HARD paywall. Again, unfortunately still the norm for a lot of old(er) scientific/academic literature. 3. The whole classified Radar tech research aspect of it (This whole avenue of research got started out when radar techs in the 60s started complaining","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21163743,"author":"askmike","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Signal: Incoming call can be connected without user interaction","text":"I think open-source software is great as well, but assuming these kind of bugs are found because you can inspect the code is very wishful thinking that doesn't always hold up. This specific example required a Google department to find it. Who would have found it if Google got restrained by the NSA?. Other notable examples include openSSL. On top of that, here is a great talk about how easy it would be to infiltrate open source projects: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"fwjwePe-HmA":[{"hn_comment_id":14132216,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2017-04","story_title":"How the Airlines Became Cartels","text":"There's a good Wendover video on airline classes: [LINK] And another great one about AmTrak in relation to flight: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16173361,"author":"MrFoof","month":"2018-01","story_title":"California bullet train cost surges by $2.8B","text":"There's a lot of reasons as to why this is the case, but the bulk of it is labor. * Trains ultimately require close to 1 staff member per 4 passengers, much more than a budget airline. * Unions and legacy salaries further add to those personnel costs. The average Amtrak employee ($75K/yr) nearly makes as much as the average commercial pilot ($77K/yr). * Since train journeys take longer, the labor cost per trip is considerably higher, especially for long haul routes. When you're doing a long trip like Chicago to Los Angeles, a train takes a lot longer than a plane, so you're paying for yet more labor for that trip. 44 hours of labor for the train versus 4 hours for the plane. There's a good video that breaks down the costs that make up your train ticket: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16888221,"author":"pocketstar","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Want airline food? Take Amtrak","text":"I understand the root issues is Amtrack unions. Amtrack staffing is one employee to four passengers. I dont know what the ratio is for airlines but it must be lower. This video does a pretty good explonation i think: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16888689,"author":"rdl","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Want airline food? Take Amtrak","text":"Also because it's so slow. You're tying up a lot of personnel on the train, as well as capital equipment, for multiple days, rather than hours for a plane. With the same personnel (which cost about as much as pilots/cabin crew), you could run ~10 equivalent flights. Capital equipment is cheaper for rail than in the air, but the portion of rail capex/opex (either directly, or usually via fees to freight lines) is also high. This video is a good analysis. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22335085,"author":"MaulingMonkey","month":"2020-02","story_title":"More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights","text":"> I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. I recently watched [VIDEO] which covered much of the cost breakdowns - especially for American passenger rail. TL;DR: * Labor is expensive. That 10 hour train ride is 10 hours you're paying every employee on the train. The faster speed of an equivalent plane ride means you're not paying pilots for as long, or allows them to make more trips. * Rail is expensive. You have to buy the land between point A and point B. You have to build the rails, bridges, crossing guards, with lots of labor to build and maintain it all, with plenty of regulatory burdens to work through (ecological, safety, eminent domain, ...). The sky between airports, on the other hand, is free. I've seen some suggestions that the sweet spot for trains is in medium length routes (\"too far to drive, too near to fly\"), with short haul routes being dominated by road vehicles (cars, taxis, buses) and long haul routes being dominated by airplanes (fast, don't need to buy/lease/maintain rails across thousands of miles)","stance":"rec"}],"fzBRYsiyxjI":[{"hn_comment_id":21389349,"author":"russdill","month":"2019-10","story_title":"A 3D Metal Printer Is Churning Out Rockets","text":"Great Real Engineering video with a lot of discussion of the issues with material properties, crystalline structure, and fatigue cracks related to metalized 3d printing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24700980,"author":"Animats","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The Best of Both Worlds: A New Take on Metal\u2013Plastic Hybrid 3D Printing","text":"\u201cOur hybrid 3D printing method has opened up the possibility of fabricating 3D electronics so that devices and robots used in healthcare and nursing care could become significantly better than what we have today.\u201d And right there, the PR operation blew their credibility. Here's a useful video on the metallurgy of 3D printing metal.[1] Actual X-ray movies of what's going on during laser sintering, why 3D printed metal parts have crack growth problems, and what's being done about it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24797241,"author":"kbenson","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Army Dissects Black Hawk Helicopter, Scans Parts for 3D Printing","text":"I was going to write a reply saying that I don't see why we can't use it in many places as long as we understand the parameters of the product, but as so often happens I found an excellent source that actually explains your stance in details.[1] The TL;DR is that there are lots of imperfections in 3D printed parts, which means they typically fail at much lower stresses. It actually includes some pretty good video illustrating this at a microscopic level. That said, there are apparently new techniques being researched and discovered that have promise to increase the quality of 3D printed parts. One way to thing of it is that we have hundreds to thousands of years of experience in material science with forming metals in other manners, and we've just started with additive engineering, so there's a lot of room for improvement. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"g0lrIi0ce5E":[{"hn_comment_id":27880249,"author":"virgulino","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The History of the Dot Com Era","text":"I highly recommend the documentary \"Riot On!\". Great documentary, great cinema, and great entertainment. \"E-Dreams\" and \"Startup.com\" are also very good. All of them on youtube: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31515578,"author":"mvdwoord","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Bolt announces layoffs","text":"Interesting and funny documentary from the dot com boom era in a finish company, riot entertainment. Great watch on the insanity of VC funding and growth. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"g1GgnbN9oNw":[{"hn_comment_id":11298909,"author":"rietta","month":"2016-03","story_title":"FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow","text":"It has been explained to them multiple times in congressional hearings. If you have a long time, the recent House Judiciary Committee Hearing is worth the watch: The Encryption Tightrope: Balancing Americans\u2019 Security and Privacy [VIDEO] There was another one that I watched back in June, but I cannot find the video at the moment. Should have bookmarked it! In the rietta.com article, I linked the this hearing, starting with Susan Landau's testimony starting at [VIDEO] . But there is more must watch portions of the hearing. I like GnuPG and I use it regularly with work as does my team. And some of our clients do too, but not nearly enough. But my mom and dad are never going to use it. They do both use iPhones though. So being able to protect them is important.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11206893,"author":"alblue","month":"2016-03","story_title":"FBI\u2019s Comey Concedes Mistake Was Made Over iPhone in San Bernardino Case","text":"I sat through the YouTube presentation (which is available at [VIDEO] if you have four hours to spare). In general the discussions were quite well presented, apart from a couple of rabid questioners suggesting that public security trumped any one individuals' right to personal security. I've written up a summary of the hearings at InfoQ here: [LINK] The general responses from Apple were that it wouldn't be possible to write this just for one phone; that once the FBiOS was available for one it would be available for any phone. Dr Landon also highlighted the fact that most people now use their phones as part of a two-factor authentication, and that the easiest way to break into a system (such as the IRS leak) is to compromise login credentials. The fear is, therefore, that once pandora's box is opened that the operating system would be installable on any device and thus potentially give access to any state actor to any account simply through device compromise. The entire hearing was very well laid out, though in a few cases Apple's witnesses weren't quite as fluid as the FBI's. The congress members have five days to ask additional questions, after which presumably a report will be made. More information is available at the House page here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14262169,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2017-05","story_title":"FBI director Comey backs new Feinstein push for decrypt bill","text":"Susan Landau's congressional testimony - with Comey siting one table away - applies to this as well. She explains in detail not only the problem with backdoors, but also how the FBI badly needs to update their methods. The quote from the NSA that legal access doesn't mean that access will be easy should have ended this brouhaha last year. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"g1ib43q3uXQ":[{"hn_comment_id":23030606,"author":"kashfi","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: As a programmer, how should I teach coding to my kid?","text":"Also, I attended Strange Loop conference last September and there was a keynote speaker who discussed effective ways of teaching programming to kids. The talk is on YouTube and I gotta say, it's very insightful. \"How to teach programming (and other things)?\" by Felienne Hermans Link: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21736710,"author":"noelwelsh","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Learning to code vs. learning to automate","text":"I'm struggling to parse \"essentially motivationally self-taught\" but if you mean to say something like \"only self-taught programmers will successfully learn to program\" that's a myth that isn't backed up by the evidence and serves to exclude people from programming. This talk addresses that misconception: [VIDEO] The paper discusses \"constructionism\" (which, loosely put, is the idea you give someone a toy and let them figure it out): [LINK] There is more out there but that's all I have time to find right now.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23053225,"author":"chrisdone","month":"2020-05","story_title":"History of Logo","text":"There's a StrangeLoop talk about teaching programming by Felienne Hermans ( [VIDEO] ) that claims that all fields have an \"exploration vs instruction\" debate on how to teach their field, but this debate is apparently absent from the field of programming for the most part, wherein the \"mess around and figure it out\" exploration style of LOGO and Papert (\"every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery\") is the predominant unquestioned wisdom. Felienne wants more pedagogy fights. It's a worthwhile talk. I love LOGO and I think our generation of programmers are very sympathetic Papert's philosophy due to most of us being self-taught to some degree (you can see the fond nostalgia already on display in the comments here), but Felienne made me think about it more critically.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24068756,"author":"greggman3","month":"2020-08","story_title":"The Hacker Way: How I taught my nephew to program","text":"I was self directed as apparently are many software engineers so I've always assumed that the best way to teach would be to let kids direct themselves and they can ask questions if they get stuck. Well, this video claims I'm wrong. Self directed study doesn't fit most students according to the research presented in the video. [VIDEO] you can jump to 11:00 if you want to jump to the part about learning.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24339299,"author":"greggman3","month":"2020-09","story_title":"How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries","text":"According to this person there is plenty of research saying you should tell them how to do it [VIDEO] I think she makes a good point. We don't hand people a guitar and say \"figure it out on your own\". Cooking shows don't generally show the final dish and say \"if you want to make this yourself figure it out on your own\". You might say computer programming is different but I suspect for most people here you were taught things like sorting algorithms, database queries, lexers and parsing algorithms, etc. You were not made to figure them on your own. Sure maybe you were self motivated and looked up the topics by yourself but likely you mostly learned by looking at existing code and over time figured out how to see what it was doing and how to modify it or apply the same ideas.","stance":"rec"}],"g2tMcMQqSbA":[{"hn_comment_id":30534745,"author":"jazzyjackson","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Psychological Operations","text":"To deceive your enemy is a valuable thing. I just watched this excellent lecture on the Colossus machine [0] and learned that our invasion of Normandy was successful in part thanks to US communications being able to \"leak\" plans to Nazi code breakers and fool them into thinking we would land in an entirely different beach. (The colossus decoding high command communications allowed us to confirm the deception was successful) OTOH, mass deception of a population is a little newer, and anytime Russian PSYOPS are brought up I like to drop this link [1] about US Army developing social media \"sockpuppets\" back in 2011, years before we ever heard of the Internet Research Agency (founded in 2013 if wiki is credible) Now that the disinformation cat is out of the bag, I wonder what kind of internal fact checking tools the Army uses to separate fresh SIGINT from trash. The videos purportedly coming out of Ukraine are impossible to sort through, the strangest thing to me was seeing hundreds of accounts post the same video, instead of quote tweeting or retweeting or linking to a source, just, 'I've never mentioned Ukraine before but here's a video of what's happening right now!' [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40329970,"author":"hoten","month":"2024-05","story_title":"ENIAC Simulator","text":"I forget the details, but I recall this video on the Colossus- a very secretive program that resulted in arguably the first programmable digital computer (iirc). I think we only relatively recently learned of it's existence? [VIDEO] It was very worth the watch, lots of fascinating tidbits including some stories of unsung heroes / geniuses. It was kept secret even after WWII but the people involved went off to kickstart the computer industry in England","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39983868,"author":"jgalt212","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Virtual Colossus","text":"a nice video on the real thing by the inimitable Professor Brailsford. [LINK] And a longer, deeper dive (also very good). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"g3Ud6mHdhlQ":[{"hn_comment_id":26691379,"author":"rtkwe","month":"2021-04","story_title":"A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture","text":"Not sure if it's the same stuff exactly or if the cost includes reprocessing but there's an amine cycle that seems to be mostly closed that's used for CO2 removal on submarines. So it's just used to separate CO2 from the rest of the output. I think that's what this sentence is talking about: > Notably, it is projected that this solvent can operate at a regeneration heat rate of 2.0 GJ per tonne CO2 for post-combustion capture Smarter Every Day did a video on it and atmosphere management on a submarine more generally which is pretty neat. The CO2 scrubbing is around 20 minutes. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27552096,"author":"nielsbot","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Nuclear Power at McMurdo Station, Antarctica","text":"You might find this series from Smarter Every Day interesting. [VIDEO] I didn't find a bit about how they make drinking water, but here's an episode about how they regenerate their oxygen on a nuclear sub.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31161958,"author":"CharlesW","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Nukes, nubs and coners: The unique social hierarchy aboard a nuclear submarine","text":"I really enjoyed this Smarter Every Day episode that talks about maintaining air quality on a submarine: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31324232,"author":"rdl","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Oxygen Candles: Providing Emergency Air","text":"Yes, but the context of this post was emergency systems which are purely chemical. For routine operations on e.g. a submarine, [LINK] As other people have mentioned, this is a great introduction to the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37245818,"author":"helsinkiandrew","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Life on board a British nuclear submarine (2012)","text":"The SmarterEveryDay YouTube channel did a slightly more indepth series of videos aboard a nuclear sub, obviously still censored, but educational. [LINK] The video on producing oxygen was particularly enlightening: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"g6bOwQdCJrc":[{"hn_comment_id":35843032,"author":"fossuser","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Waymo doubles service area in Phoenix Metro","text":"This talk was worth watching (any Karpathy or Carmack talk is imo): [VIDEO] Specifically this is the relevant part: [VIDEO] They removed radar because it was making things worse.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27901048,"author":"simondotau","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Tesla\u2019s \u2018Full Self-Driving\u2019 Beta Software Used on Public Roads Lacks Safeguards","text":"If you're interested, Tesla's head of AI recently did a public presentation of their new vision based depth system. It's worth a watch if you find this stuff interesting and enjoy learning about the forefront of technology. [VIDEO] A key takeaway is that they've been running this stack in shadow mode (validating output but not controlling the car) on everyone's Tesla for quite some time. Equivalent to 1000 YEARS worth of real world driving. And from this data they've proven it is now superior to radar in all circumstances.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31400400,"author":"ggreer","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Tesla FSD Beta almost causes a head-on collision [video]","text":"Radar has poor resolution, which means it can't always differentiate between an object near the car's path and an object in the car's path. The radar can give false positives when there's a truck on the side of the road or a metal sign on an overpass. Then you have to use the vision cameras to figure out what's really going on. Radar also loses its \"lock\" sometimes, which can be an issue with cars braking quickly. The radar will say \"no obstacles detected\" when the car in front of you is slamming on the brakes. Again, you have to use the vision cameras to figure out what's actually going on. The people at Tesla decided that the radar was creating more noise than it was helping with, so they removed radar last year. Andrej Karpathy explains it in far more detail in this talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31416449,"author":"JoshCole","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Tesla FSD Beta almost causes a head-on collision [video]","text":"> These are the same things that can cause a traffic accident for a human with human eyes, so there's really no logical reason to assume that you can create a more performing and safer computer driver by emulating human vision only. Okay. This is a concrete claim that I think is falsifiable. I'll give not just one, but multiple arguments. Argument 1: Connect Four, Chess, Checkers, Go, Limit Hold'em, No Limit Hold'em, Poker, DOTA, and Starcraft II are all examples of games in which AI outperforms even the best humans despite having equal sensory access. Driving can be reduced to a problem comparable to playing an imperfect information game and we can play imperfect information games at superhuman levels using computers. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that even human-level sensory access can enable safer than human performance. Argument 2: Currently we have statistics on driver-assistance programs that demonstrate that human + technology assistance is superior to human alone. This holds true even in cases in which those assistance technologies are only using vision. So we have a contradiction. If it wasn't possible to do better than human with only human senses, we wouldn't be able to point to many different situations in which driving with an AI clearly outperforms humans, but we can. For at least those subsets of AI driving, we can say that an AI driver will outperform humans. > I can't understand why they removed radar. Check out [VIDEO] for a very detailed breakdown ","stance":"rec"}],"gAk7aX5hksU":[{"hn_comment_id":22726946,"author":"bkor","month":"2020-03","story_title":"The origin story of the N95 mask","text":"According to the Corona expert in South Korea, masks help a great deal. His assumption on why the WHO only recommends masks in Asia and not anywhere else is due to the limited amount of supply anywhere but in Asia. In Asia people like already own masks. Anywhere else people would first need to stock up. Leading to shortages. As such, it's better not to recommend them so medical professionals are prioritized. It's also interesting that in in Europe/US they focus on a person not getting a disease. In Asia they often wear a masks if the person isn't feeling well. Meaning, the mask is to prevent the person who is wearing it from infecting others. This bit is often glossed over. The video is available at [VIDEO] . I don't know exactly where they discussed the masks. The entire video is great, so suggest to watch the whole thing. Note: It also talks about spreading by touching your nose and then someone or some surface.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22734442,"author":"JimTheMan","month":"2020-03","story_title":"On \u201cArmchair Epidemiology\u201d","text":"I highly recommend this video from Korea (Professor Kim Woo-joo from Korea University Guro Hospital) that gives a Korean perspective on the disease and the western response to it: [VIDEO] A few points of interest: (He is a very respectful fellow so apologies if the summary seems a bit to the point) - Masks help and he is slightly puzzled why the west hasn't adopted that culture - Their testing and tracing helps and they doubt the US would allow their level of privacy invasion - Korea is doing well because they have had to respond to pandemics and were prepared (as are Taiwan, Singapore etc)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23025601,"author":"dba7dba","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Recovered virus patients retest positive due to 'dead' virus fragments: experts","text":"To learn more about coronavirus, treatment and vaccine development from the perspective of doctors in S. Korea, try watching these interviews in order. Each is about 30 - 50 min long. I posted the links and the dates they were uploaded. The videos are excellent because the doctors are not interrupted with questions. 1) 2020.03.27 1st interview with Professor Kim, leading expert on coronavirus in Korea. In Korean with excellent English subtitles. [VIDEO] 2) 2020.04.14 2nd interview with Professor Kim, leading expert on coronavirus in Korea. In Korean with excellent English subtitles. [LINK] 3) 2020.04.25 Interview with the Director General of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) about COVID-19 Vaccine. It's in English. [LINK] 4) Note in the interview with Prof Kim uploaded on 2020.04.14, they were still not sure if a recovered patient testing positive again was due to reactivation/reinfection or not. They were still trying to confirm it as of 2020.04.14. But it seems the yna.co.kr article posted on 2020.04.29 confirms recovered coronavirus patients may have tested positive again due to traces of virus fragments that have been inactivated. 5) I'm hoping the Youtube channel will upload another interview with Prof Kim about covid-19 soon.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23136769,"author":"dkfjdkfjda","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Take the Shutdown Skeptics Seriously","text":"I agree there's a lot of misconceptions and myths about masks. It clearly is not a panacea, it's really difficult (or even impossible) to quantify the impact, especially when combined with other precautions. Plus there's very little research about how masks affect this particular virus, because it's always somewhat specific. IMO the best thing we can do is look at experience from countries that managed to get the infection under control, like SK. I highly recommend these interviews with one of their leading experts, what he says makes a lot of sense: [LINK] [VIDEO] When he says face masks are one of the effective measures, I'd probably trust him ... The question is what exactly should be the rules. Our country is in a lockdown for ~2 months now, and most of the time face masks were required when leaving the house. We're probably going to relax the rules a bit soon, only requiring them when closed spaced, etc. Which probably makes sense, it's pointless to wear a mask when jogging alone in the woods, or something like that (and people were not following that perfectly anyway). My personal opinion is that face masks do help, partly because they limit how far your droplets reach, partly because it limits how frequently you touch your face. Even a simple home-made mask or scarf will help with that. I think a lot of the \"do not wear masks\" recommendations in many countries is due to concerns that a recommendation to wear a face mask would make the shortage even worse.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"gB9n2gHsHN4":[{"hn_comment_id":27742831,"author":"SavantIdiot","month":"2021-07","story_title":"A Closer Look at Fractals","text":"Here is are two very clear explanations of fractal dimension by the man himself, Grant from 3b1b. [1] Fractals are typically not self-symmetric: [VIDEO] [2] Fractal charm: Space filling curves: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15113695,"author":"FullMtlAlcoholc","month":"2017-08","story_title":"The Hindu Temple as a Model of Fractal Cosmology (2015)","text":"When something is referred to as fractal, does it always imply a degree of self-similarity? As I understand it, Mandelbrot developed fractal geometry as a tool to examine the \"roughness\" of reality as opposed to the smoothness of calculus and fractal dimension is a measure of complexity at every scale, with a self-similar pattern being an easy example to follow. If that is so, that the universe has a high degree of complexity at every scale, is that really controversial? Here is an excellent 20 min introduction to fractals: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19638185,"author":"Balgair","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Ford CEO says the company 'overestimated' self-driving cars","text":"Actually, you make a good point. The social dynamics are themselves a dimension. Social network graphs can behave as fractals. In a gymnasium filled with people, there is a significant 'fractallyness' to the social network. In traffic, the fractallyness is very limited to just about all the people in the road near you. The social graph, though more fluid in a traffic jam than a pep-rally, is still fairly small. 3Blue1Brown has a great video on the dimensionality of fractals [0] that is useful here. I'm just going to spitball, but I'd bet that the dimensionality of the social graph of a traffic jam is really close to 1. So in the end, the DoFs of a traffic jam are probably very close to 3, but just a bit over. Say, 3.14-ish. ;) [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21888223,"author":"jerf","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Recursion and Fractals","text":"Trying to explain fractional dimensions is probably not conducive to an HN post. but fortunately, 3blue1brown converted this: [VIDEO] Which also nicely and conclusively shows why self-similarity is just a special case of things that have fractional dimension.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22403735,"author":"jameshart","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Cellular Automata in the Browser","text":"This is a more detailed explanation of what fractals actually are, and what mathematics actually mean by 'fractals are everywhere in nature': [VIDEO] It might help connect some dots. Short version: simple rules -> can create self-similar shapes -> which can have fractal dimension -> cellular automata can create fractals but nature -> creates shapes which have fractal dimensions does not mean that the processes that create fractal shapes in nature are based on simple rules or cellular automata (but that's not to say they aren't!)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35904359,"author":"coremoff","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Fern leaves and cauliflower curds are not fractals","text":"3blue1brown has some good fractal videos; one in particular being relevant to this discussion: \"Fractals are typically not self-similar\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42203527,"author":"jrvieira","month":"2024-11","story_title":"The Matrix: Infinite-Horizon World Generation with Real-Time Interaction","text":"\"Fractals are not self-similar\" [VIDEO] If you want to learn more about the fascinating world of fractals.","stance":"rec"}],"gC295d3V9gE":[{"hn_comment_id":17111905,"author":"a-saleh","month":"2018-05","story_title":"A relatively simple Datalog engine","text":"\"Streams of solution trees\" kinda reminds me of mikro-kanren [1]. When I was using Clojure roughly 3 years ago, kanren was quite popular embedded logic. W.r.t. Datafun, i learned about it from a talk its creator gave on strangeloop last year [2], for me it seemed quite approachable :) [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44274287,"author":"fogzen","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Implementing Logic Programming","text":"Yes, for some kinds of operations on some kinds of data structures. The keyword/property is \"monotonicity\". Monotonic functions are guaranteed to terminate under fixed-point semantics. Look into Datafun: A total functional language that generalizes Datalog. Also be sure to watch Datafun author Michael Arntzenius's Strangeloop talk. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gCWtkvDQ2ZI":[{"hn_comment_id":22016634,"author":"reggieband","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The Unison language","text":"I recently came across Unison through YouTube recommending me a series of videos from the \"Strange Loop\" channel [1]. The fundamental idea of uniquely addressing functions based on a hash of their AST is mind-blowing to me. Immediately my mind started to consider many of the possible paths such an idea could lead down, many of which are clearly tickling the minds of many of the commenters in this thread. My first thought was the same insight from von Neumann architectures: code is data. So I thought of package repositories with URLs corresponding to hashes of function definitions. [LINK] could represent a specific function. A process/server could spin up completely dumb other than bootstrapped with the language and an ability to download necessary functions. You could seed it with a hash url pointer to the root algorithm to employ and a hash url to the data to run against and it could download all of it's dependencies then run. I imagine once such a repo was up and running you could do something like a co-routine like call and that entire process just happens in the background either on a separate thread or even scheduled to an entirely different machine in a cluster. You could then memoize that process such that the result of running repo-hash-url against data-hash-url is cached. e.g. I have [LINK] run against [LINK] and store the result at [LINK] 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27653160,"author":"umvi","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Unison Programming Language","text":"I had a really hard time wrapping my mind around this just reading the website alone. If you are in the same boat, watch the first 10 minutes of this video at 1.5x speed: [VIDEO] and it will make so, so much more sense. ...and if you are like me you'll probably need to read this twitter thread to get the answer to your #1 question: [LINK] Basically the core idea (or one of the core ideas) is instead of a function (like fib(n) which returns nth Fibonacci number) being identified by its name (fib) as is the case with most traditional languages, it's instead identified by a hash of its implementation.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34335407,"author":"dietr1ch","month":"2023-01","story_title":"A look at Unison: a revolutionary programming language","text":"Looking at the comments it seems that this talk might be a better introduction than just skimming at the landing page. [VIDEO] I watched that in 2020 or so and got amazed at how much a seemingly simple idea could work it's way into the core of a language. What I recall is this, The main new idea is turning codebases into a content-addressed store, this needs some new tooling, but makes a couple of interesting things possible, * Having different versions of the \"same\" function. They are actually different functions anyway, so you can do things like partial library upgrades when there's breaking changes. Large migrations like python 2 to 3 wouldn't take O(10yr). * Formatting is not a thing anymore. This goes further than just having a formatter as there's really no format nor names you can't personalize locally without affecting anybody. * Similarly, renaming is free, so you can come up with better names in the future and chanting it just needs a tweak to the canonical name for the function. * Functions are serialiazable, which makes it possible to send them to remote nodes for execution without any concerns about their deus, since a function is now more of a Merkle tree, so if there's any difference the client would know and be able to ask for missing dependencies * The tool to manage your function repo might seem like a burden to some, but once you realize that having this as a first class tool that understands the language you can propose safe mass refactoring of code you do","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23349192,"author":"j1mr10rd4n","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Deno Is a Browser for Code","text":"I was just racking my memory and searching through my library of interesting links to find exactly this! Paul Chiusano gave a nice introductory talk at strangeloop last year: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26318789,"author":"nerdponx","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You","text":"Not necessarily the same thing, but have you looked into the Unison project at all? Unison is an open source functional programming language based on a simple idea with big implications: code is content-addressed and immutable. Homepage: [LINK] Strange Loop talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28103062,"author":"sullyj3","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Defunctionalization: Everybody does it, nobody talks about it (2019)","text":"This seems like exactly the sort of issue the Unison language is trying to tackle. They want straightforward execution of distributed computations using the same language, with no friction across machine boundaries, no sacrificing composibility. The article mentions: > remote procedure calls with higher-order functional arguments would require serializing those functions, which is not easy to do safely or efficiently. This is exactly what Unison is designed to do. Code is not stored as text, but is stored in a serialized AST form and identified by hash. Therefore, transmission between nodes is trivial. The language is still a work in progress, but it's making rapid strides. Here's an explanation: [VIDEO] The part relevant to distributed computation is at 30:08, but the earlier parts go through the basics of how code is stored, and why this design choice was made, which might help with understanding what's going on.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36352576,"author":"nimos","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Unison Language and Platform Roadmap","text":"[VIDEO] This video is a little old but I remember finding it really interesting and I think dives into it a bit.","stance":"rec"}],"gD_dZvPwAj0":[{"hn_comment_id":21921737,"author":"amiga_500","month":"2019-12","story_title":"What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?","text":"Watch this 5 times then spend ten minutes passing it on: [VIDEO] Questions in this thread about real estate, \"investing\" etc. Comprehend it with the above.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17875496,"author":"branchless","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Bullshit Jobs","text":"Spot on. Spare time would allow us to conclude we can expunge rentiers. Here is a video on land value tax, which would fix our messed up feudal economies: [VIDEO] Posting here as shadow banned after two posts because Hacker News hates any kind of free speech.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21899605,"author":"amiga_500","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Is College Still Worth It? The New Calculus of Falling Returns [pdf]","text":"From your reply you are obviously not stuck at the \"rents are the cost to the landlord + 10%\". Good! Have a look at this 10 minute video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21966231,"author":"amiga_500","month":"2020-01","story_title":"How Much Land Does a Man Need? (1886)","text":"[LINK] > Tolstoy also became a dedicated advocate of Georgism, the economic philosophy of Henry George > towards the end of his life, Tolstoy become more and more occupied with the economic theory and social philosophy of Georgism. > He spoke of great admiration of Henry George, stating once that \"People do not argue with the teaching of George; they simply do not know it. And it is impossible to do otherwise with his teaching, for he who becomes acquainted with it cannot but agree.\" Land value tax explained in 10 minutes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gDdq2rIqAlM":[{"hn_comment_id":7471929,"author":"phil21","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Google Deal With Luxottica Will Bring Glass to Ray-Ban, Oakley","text":"These are really just design houses that aggregate brand names and manufacture largely in China. [VIDEO] is a great watch if you have time. Nothing too surprising to those that understand where this stuff comes from, but certainly interesting to see it laid out.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10438665,"author":"wespad","month":"2015-10","story_title":"101 Brand Names, 1 Manufacturer (2007)","text":"It's the same with eyewear. Check out the 60 Minutes story on Luxottica: [VIDEO] They control over 80% of the global market, from manufacturing, to opticians, retail stores, and brands, including the second largest vision benefits company in the US.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18810526,"author":"cheriot","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Warby Parker built a 1,400-employee company by focusing on team culture","text":"The 60 minutes episode on Luxottica and why glasses are so expensive was interesting context for reading about Warby Parker. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18981180,"author":"interlocutor","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry","text":"The reason glasses cost so much is because one company owns: (1) nearly all brand name frames including Ray-Ban, Oakley, Prada eyewear, Armani eyewear and so on, (2) nearly all retail stores such as LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical and Target Optical and (3) EyeMed, one of the largest vision insurance companies. See this eye-opening 60 Minutes story on Luxottica: [VIDEO] Luxottica retail brands: [LINK] Luxottica eyewear brands: [LINK] Luxottica vision insurance: [LINK] In the US, only Costco and Walmart's optical departments are independent of Luxottica.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33526928,"author":"petilon","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Why are glasses so expensive? The industry prefers to keep that blurry (2019)","text":"Glasses are expensive because there is no competition. One company - Luxottica - owns pretty much everything. You go to LensCrafters and prices seem super expensive, so you go to Pearle Vision and that's expensive too, so you go to Target Optical and prices are still high and then you think maybe glasses are expensive, since you went to multiple stores and they all have similar prices. What you don't realize is that all those retail brands are owned by the same company - Luxottica [1]. They operate under several names, so there is an appearance of competition but there isn't. But wait, it isn't just stores, they also own eyewear brands such as Ray-Ban, Chanel, Coach, Oakley, Prada, Tiffany, and so on. Yes, all of those brands are owned by Luxottica [2]. Wait, not done yet. They also own insurance. Luxottica owns the vision insurance company EyeMed. [3] Still not done. Luxottica has merged with Essilor and now own multiple lens brands [4]. See 60 Minutes story on Luxottica if you're not outraged yet [5]. Where are the anti-trust enforcers in this country and other countries, and why are they not doing anything? [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gDfNRWsMRsU":[{"hn_comment_id":34596804,"author":"consumer451","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M paid subscribers","text":"Benn Jordan, aka The Flashbulb, made a recent video titled: \"Why Spotify Will Ultimately Fail\" (Because they are screwing artists, on whom they depend to generate streamable content.) As an example, he made 3x on Bandcamp vs Spotify for the same album. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37078176,"author":"jasode","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the economics of a streaming based record label?","text":"This 17 minute video has a few streaming numbers: [VIDEO] I don't agree with all his predictions and conclusions but you can watch it for the data and see if it applies to your business plans.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38516704,"author":"thomastjeffery","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Spotify cuts almost 1,600 jobs amid rising costs","text":"The magic word is \"growth\". For context, I find this artist's explanation of the situation helpful: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gEKSpZPByD0":[{"hn_comment_id":12676428,"author":"Noseshine","month":"2016-10","story_title":"A Natural Law for Rotating Galaxies: What Does This Mean for Dark Matter?","text":"> Every point of Universe contains infinite number of small, even infinite small, particles. What \"particles\"? [VIDEO] (really worth it! Watch at 1.5 times speed) and [LINK] (reading the discussion is useless though without understanding at least what is presented in the above lecture)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12377595,"author":"okket","month":"2016-08","story_title":"There are no particles, there are only fields (2012)","text":"Sean M. Carrol always mentions this fact when he talks about QFT, which can be very entertaining like this one from 2013 \"Particles, Fields and The Future of Physics\" [VIDEO] (Audio starts at 19 sec, Lecture starts at 2:00)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22373206,"author":"brian-armstrong","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Double Slits with Single Atoms","text":"I believe \"everything is fields\" is indeed a common interpretation. Particles are an unnecessary component we invent because of our familiarity with \"stuff\" This lecture is long but goes into the everything is fields idea [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22459946,"author":"bvinc","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Quantum researchers able to split one photon into three","text":"There are many different ways of looking at quantum mechanics, so here is one way of answering your confusion. Probably the standard way of looking at quantum mechanics right now is quantum field theory. In quantum field theory, you give up the notion of \"particles\" and instead view them as vibrations in fields. Once you do that, it makes more sense that these \"particles\" can turn into other particles, be absorbed or emitted by other particles, or split. Here's a video of Sean Carroll talking about it, roughly 28:00-33:00. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31289871,"author":"joncp","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Where do space, time and gravity come from?","text":"Sean Carroll is a master of making quantum mechanics approachable to non-physicists. Here are a few of his talks: - Fermilab 2013: [VIDEO] - The Royal Institution 2014: [LINK] - The Royal Institution 2020: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"gFEE3w7F0ww":[{"hn_comment_id":39932517,"author":"chubot","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Autoconf makes me think we stopped evolving too soon","text":"Yup, I agree that Python composes like Unix does, which is a reason for its phenomenal growth: Narrow Waists Can Be Interior or Exterior: PyObject vs. Unix Files - [LINK] The appendix links to: Why is Python the language of machine learning? [LINK] In particular, I highly recommend this bit of history from NumPy creator Travis Oliphant: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29171519,"author":"chubot","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How did Python become the lingua franca of ML/AI?","text":"Because Python has NumPy, which implements vectorized math on arrays and matrices. Machine learning algorithms are implemented naturally and efficiently with those primitives. PyTorch, TensorFlow, and I think every other machine learning framework in Python all use NumPy. JavaScript, Ruby, and Perl either don't have this abstraction at all, or they have much weaker versions of it, and many fewer scientific libraries. NumPy started in the early 2000's and continues to this day. It takes decades to build up this infrastructure! This recent interview with NumPy creator Travis Oliphant is great: [VIDEO] He talks about how there were competing abstractions like \"Numeric\" and another library, and his goal with NumPy was to unify them. And how there are still some open design issues / regrets. There were multiple people in the nascent Python community who were tired of MATLAB, not just because it's proprietary, but because it's a weak and inefficient language for anything other than its scientific use cases. You won't have a good time trying to write a web app wrapper in MATLAB, for example. The much more recent Julia language is also inspired positively and negatively by MATLAB, and is very suitable for machine learning, though it doesn't have the decades of libraries that Python has. ----- The NumPy extension was in turn enabled by operator overloading in Python (which is actually a very C++ influenced mechanism). JavaScript doesn't have operator overloading; I'm pretty sure Perl ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30812974,"author":"calmdown13","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The counterintuitive rise of Python in scientific computing (2020)","text":"This episode of the lex fridman podcast gives a good overview of how python's scientific computing community developed. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gJ5KV3rzuag":[{"hn_comment_id":20451780,"author":"anthony_doan","month":"2019-07","story_title":"A material way to make Mars habitable","text":"I wish we would focus on Venus. It have similar gravity to Earth's. There is an excellent video about it [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20889181,"author":"gkfasdfasdf","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Venus\u2019 Ocean of Air and Clouds","text":"This idea is explored in an episode of the excellent PBS Space Time: [VIDEO] In short, Venus has many advantages over Mars.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24568180,"author":"guerrilla","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Mars Problems vs. Venus Problems","text":"Don't miss the PBS Space Time episode suggesting we should colonize Venus instead of Mars which gives some good arguments and goes through the basics. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25066696,"author":"tzs","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Screw the Mars hype. Here's why we should move to Venus","text":"PBS Space Time did a short (7 minute) episode called \"Should We Colonize Venus Instead of Mars?\" [1] that gives several advantages Venus has as a colonization target compared to Mars (and covers some of the difficulties). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gKWNjFagR9k":[{"hn_comment_id":6712173,"author":"avsm","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Real World OCaml","text":"Another cool one from CUFP this year is how Facebook is using OCaml to add incremental type inference to their vast PHP code base. There's (slightly hard to see video) here, but I'm sure Facebook will publicize it more widely when they're ready. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7252141,"author":"Xdes","month":"2014-02","story_title":"List of possible changes, updates, additions for PHP 6","text":"Check out Hack for HHVM[0][1][2]. It's a lot saner than PHP, but it's not documented or well known outside Facebook. [0]: Strangle Loop 2013: Keith Adams, Facebook: Taking PHP Seriously [LINK] [1]: CUFP 2013: Julien Verlaguet, Facebook: Analyzing PHP statically [VIDEO] [2]: HHVM and Hack \u2013 Can We Expect Them to Replace PHP? [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7472588,"author":"amirmc","month":"2014-03","story_title":"What it's like to use Haskell","text":"It's good to hear stories about how FP is being used in industry and I'd like to read more. For those who have an interest in this, I recommend the Commercial Users of Functional Programming workshop ( [LINK] ). It's where I first heard about Facebook's use of OCaml to create Hack ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"gLDYtH1RH-U":[{"hn_comment_id":16280334,"author":"huhtenberg","month":"2018-02","story_title":"A daredevil climber risking his life for breathtaking views","text":"For those who managed to miss the \"Shanghai Tower\" video from 2014 - this is what basically put this guy and his friend on the radar. An absolutely fantastic watch. Incidentally, it also helped putting some much deserved light on N'to and Worakls, whose Trauma track was used for the soundtrack. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9229387,"author":"pimlottc","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Where the Real Skyscrapers Are (Hint: North Dakota)","text":"Another heartstopper is this POV video of two Ukrainians illegally scaling the 650-meter Shanghai Tower while it was still under construction, which gets really nuts when they start climbing the construction crane at the very top: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gM95HHI4gLk":[{"hn_comment_id":2429649,"author":"fourspace","month":"2011-04","story_title":"Khan Academy: the bad","text":"The OP seems to forget that the goal of the Khan Academy is not just to produce videos. Of course there's no feedback with a one-way video lesson. If you watch his (excellent) TED talk [1], you'll see that his organization isn't just about video lectures, but rather an all-encompassing suite of tools that allows students to learn at their own pace, repeat lessons that they didn't understand at first, and provides teachers with analytics to target their attention towards those students who need help. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2726031,"author":"espeed","month":"2011-07","story_title":"What hackers can learn from Djokovic","text":"Feynman would probably say establish a rock solid base, fill in the gaps in your understanding, and explore all of the components surrounding your areas of interest (e.g. read the sources cited in the footnotes :-). \"It's not quite true that Feynman could not accept an idea until he had torn it apart. Rather, the idea could not yet be part of his way of thinking and looking at the world. Before an idea could contribute to that worldview, Feynman wanted to turn over the idea, to see why it was true, from any angle that he could find...In other words, he wanted to connect a new idea to what he already understood and thereby extend his understanding\" ( [LINK] ). Feynman wanted to understand problem from all angles and understand why something was true, not just that it merely was true. His approach resulted in a tight mental framework that enabled him to connect new ideas and build upon insights from the outside in -- breadth before depth (see [LINK] ). Watch this TED talk by Sal Khan, the founder of the Khan academy, to see how filling in gaps of understanding can significantly accelerate your rate of progress ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3315506,"author":"nassosdim","month":"2011-12","story_title":"Why Do So Many Gifted Kids Think They Don't like Math?","text":"This is exactly what Sal, the founder of Khan Academy, believes. What strengthens this argument is that, if you miss a few logical steps you end up even more baffled when you encounter concepts that are build upon the concepts on which you neglected to learn, mostly because you were either embarrassed to ask in class or because you thought that you got it right in the first place. This, adding the fact that it's \"socially acceptable\" to claim that a person might not be smart enough and give up entirely, is what makes children fail in the end and deemed to be \"stupid\". Edit: If you're further interested in Salman Khan's point of view you can check his TED talk here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3554919,"author":"Osmose","month":"2012-02","story_title":"Khan Academy: It\u2019s Different This Time","text":"I think the best rebuttal to this article would be Sal's TED talk: [VIDEO] In particular, he doesn't present the Khan Academy as a full replacement for primary education, but as an enhancement. In the second half of the video, he illustrates the teacher as maximizing the amount of useful interaction between themselves and the students. Instead of spending class time lecturing and producing examples (things that technology can handle easily, and in some cases better than a human can), teachers use their class time to interact with students individually, helping them better understand the content and meaning behind it. This time becomes even more useful because the application gives statistics on how students are performing, and what directions they're moving in; it arms teachers with better data and more time to use it.","stance":"rec"}],"gMqZR3pqMjg":[{"hn_comment_id":14908596,"author":"sn9","month":"2017-08","story_title":"The sea was never blue","text":"Text really isn't the best medium to discuss color perception. This Vox video summarizing the research of linguistic anthropologists is much more clear: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15353744,"author":"maxwell","month":"2017-09","story_title":"New theory why languages don\u2019t all have the same number of terms for colors","text":"Just watched this Vox video on a (potential) pattern behind color names last week, which also covers a bit about the research by Berlin and Kay: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37987364,"author":"dghughes","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Why Japan Has Blue Traffic Lights Instead of Green","text":"I also find it fascinating that cultures have so many words for colours or so few words for colours either way it's interesting. Here is a good video on colour and how many cultures perceive colour and name them, or not. \"The surprising pattern behind color names around the world\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41430521,"author":"Jeremy1026","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Is My Blue Your Blue?","text":"It's very cultural. For example, Japan used the same word for green and blue, so their green light on traffic lights is as blue as possible while conforming to international standards for the light to be \"green\". Also, there is a pretty well done video by Vox on how color names are influenced by culture [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gNRnrn5DE58":[{"hn_comment_id":24522543,"author":"kazen44","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining","text":"the lathe is basically the one machine required to kickstart the industrial revolution. (and a way to drive it ofcourse). Also, three surfaces that can be ground truely flat is also vital. i can highly recommend the youtube series \"machine thinking\" if you have interest in this[0], aswell as the book \"the perfectionist\" [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36795642,"author":"hinkley","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Cold restart whole system after total outage","text":"There's a way to grind mirrors optics for optics with polishing stones that aren't even flat to the naked eye. Basically the system arrives at tiny tolerances via the process of using the system. And there's way to make three perfectly flat sharpening stones by starting with three raw pieces of natural sharpening stone, just by alternately rubbing the three stones together until they flatten each other out. Paul Sellers can teach you how to flatten a large board without a planer. He also has videos on how to get a wood plane perfectly flat using a large sharpening stone (which can be made as above or with float glass). And if memory serves, you to make something perfectly round you first need something perfectly flat. Once you have something perfectly flat and something perfectly round it's off to the races. Edit: \"The Origins of Precision\" is a half hour well spent [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20366681,"author":"nas","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Wringing","text":"This is a really nice video if you are interested in measurement precision for manufacturing: Machine Thinking: Origins of Precision and first project introduction [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26760972,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Why was cycling not included in the ancient Olympics? (2004) [pdf]","text":"> the precision metal tools I was wondering about how those came about not long ago, and stumbled over this[1] nice video, \"Origins of Precision\". [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27014744,"author":"zeotroph","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Machine Thinking on the Printing Press: The Screws of Disruption [video]","text":"How the screw of the wine press was the central part of Gensfleisch/Gutenbergs invention which allowed all the other previously existing ones to finally come together (though I also read that certain advances in metallurgy were also essential). Also see the previous video on screws, a much underappreciated invention. It then describes how the availability of books made propagation of existing technology and newer developments possible and faster. The only other comparable moments in history are probably the evolution of spoken language, the invention of writing and most recently the internet. Also much recommended from that Chanel are the videos on the \"Origins of Precision\"[1], and \"The 1751 Machine that Made Everything\"[2]. 1: [VIDEO] 2: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27957801,"author":"Lev1a","month":"2021-07","story_title":"TSMC eyes Germany as possible location for first Europe chip plant","text":"From what I've seen as an amateur that is yet fascinated by mechanical engineering: iteratively work up to the precision limits with your current methods then try to find/research a (slightly) better way of measuring and/or manufacturing. Since humanity has worked up to this point over centuries/millenia, you wouldn't need to \"bootstrap\" it from the beginning anymore, just choose the appropriate level of (manufacturing/measuring) precision for your usecase. Otherwise start with a surface plate. Nice summary: [VIDEO] (\"Origins of Precision\" by \"Machine Thinking\")","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28022430,"author":"q3k","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap (2011)","text":"(Hand) scraping refers to [LINK] . With two surfaces you can still have some bias (convexity/concavity) even though they appear to be relatively flat, you need three surfaces for absolute flatness. See the Whithworth Method described earlier in this topic. If you're interested in this sort of stuff and want a video introduction, see: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33204995,"author":"csours","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Why wasn\u2019t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III","text":"A YouTube channel primarily dedicated to precision: [LINK] Example video: [VIDEO] I think it's fair to call these mini-documentaries.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36757930,"author":"roelschroeven","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Backyard Metalcasting","text":"Also Machine Thinking's videos \"The 1751 Machine that Made Everything\" ( [LINK] ), \"Origins of Precision\" ( [VIDEO] ) and some others on his channel.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39046308,"author":"adolph","month":"2024-01","story_title":"What happened to the US machine tool industry?","text":"Agreed and to clarify: > everything in inches, foot pounds, and what not doesn't translate very well internationally when you start outsourcing It translates pretty well for the last 90 years: In 1930, the British Standards Institution adopted an inch of exactly 25.4 mm. The American Standards Association followed suit in 1933. By 1935, industry in 16 countries had adopted the \"industrial inch\" as it came to be known, effectively endorsing Johansson's pragmatic choice of conversion ratio. [LINK] See also the paragraph above referencing the precision tools enabled by Swede Carl Johansson's \"Jo Blocks.\" For a nice video/contextual storytelling, see Machine Learning channel's Origins of Precision: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44831853,"author":"anitil","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Historical Tech Tree","text":"I find this video of theirs the most relevant [0] where they go through how to start on a desert island and build a flat reference plate using the three plate method and the build up from there [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gPlpphT7n9s":[{"hn_comment_id":5130738,"author":"keyboardP","month":"2013-01","story_title":"When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?","text":"A bit OT but hopefully interesting nevertheless. This is apparently the original pronunciation for the works of Shakespeare [VIDEO] The entire video has some nice information but if you want to skip to an example of the original pronunciation, you can jump to 2:50.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7384296,"author":"zhte415","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Pronunciation errors that made the English language","text":"I very much enjoyed this quick introduction to Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation (the sound of speech at the time) and how many puns and much interpretation is lost in modern accents. From the Open University: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26809225,"author":"gchucky","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Great Vowel Shift","text":"The vowel shift is one of the major reasons why Shakespeare's poetry doesn't rhyme when spoken with modern English. There was a rather fascinating video that went around awhile back of a father and son demonstrating the changes.[1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26818808,"author":"petercooper","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Are We Getting Shakespeare\u2019s Rhythms All Wrong?","text":"Along similar lines, some years ago I really enjoyed [VIDEO] as an introduction to the realities of the pronunciation of Shakespeare's English. Jump to 5 minutes in for a demonstration of how \"lines\" and \"loins\" were pronounced the same and resulted in a pun that's missed in modern pronunciation.","stance":"rec"}],"gQnmP7UD_zk":[{"hn_comment_id":28157494,"author":"osamagirl69","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Tesla valve","text":"There is an youtube video[1] by the excellent channel Huygens Optics which goes through trying to make a microscopic tesla valve. The valve does not work as a checkvalve (it is sufficiently small that surface tension and all that work differently than in a macroscopic system), but the author argues that it did satisfy the real goal of being a tesla valve -- which is to look sexy and high tech. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28158365,"author":"showerst","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Tesla valve","text":"For a fun visual demonstration, check out nighthawkinlight's video where he runs a flamefront through one -- [LINK] Also seconding the Huygen's optics video osamagirl69 already posted below -- [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32575748,"author":"thrown_22","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Perfluorocubane is (as you would expect) weird","text":"I read that, then I saw this guys youtube channel: [VIDEO] on the bright side I've found something I have not been desensitized to no matter how many time I've watched it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39800716,"author":"samstave","month":"2024-03","story_title":"High-speed microscale 3D printing","text":"[LINK] Seems like it would work beautifully. What would be cool is to make a logic-gate-tesla-valve-micro-hydraulic computer? -- The video on micro etching glass with HF is highly informative on this post... he talks about etching tesla valves at the end... [LINK] <-- 30 microns long with channel width of 4 microns via etched glass... [LINK] [VIDEO] -- So I wonder what resolution would be possible via the 3d version. What would be really interesting to see with this method would be to make a blend of a spiral-screw with the tesla valves to climb or control vertical rates of flow. --- Since this process can print in ceramics, I wonder if the can effectively make a \"super-conductive-nano-wire with spiraling interconnected bucky-ball-shaped lattice of particles\"","stance":"rec"}],"gRRvjZ_XNog":[{"hn_comment_id":18119225,"author":"whitepoplar","month":"2018-10","story_title":"What I Learned from Having Steve Jobs Swear at Me","text":"For anyone who's curious, here's the best video I've found that breaks apart the idea of an \"asshole\": [VIDEO] Essentially, people can be dicks and non-dicks, while simultaneously being givers or takers. Nobody likes a taker, even if they're nice, because that person doesn't help one grow. On the other hand, someone can be a real dick, but in a \"giving\" way that helps achieve a better outcome for both individuals. In the case of Jobs, one could argue that his personality was justified not only because great work came out of it, but also because the people doing that work became the best version of themselves in the process. If someone is capable of great work and they produce good work, there's a certain kindness to telling them that's not acceptable. But saying the exact same thing to someone who's less capable can be mean.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19793073,"author":"azhenley","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Career advice I wish I\u2019d been given when I was young","text":"Being pleasant is one of my personal rules/goals for life. But it is interesting to analyze great leaders who have been jerks. This 30 minute Youtube documentary on the topic is very interesting: \"DICKS: Do you need to be one to be a successful leader?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23234463,"author":"ak39","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The Great Asshole Fallacy","text":"I think the writer is correct: there is a meme out there that in order to be great, a leader, a trailblazer etc you have to become inevitably the arsehole. So much so, that arseholism is not just tolerated but celebrated. I wonder why the author did not feel persuaded to mention our current poster child of arseholism, the quintessential kind: Donald Trump. Here's a good video essay on the same subject by a filmmaker, Max Joseph: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gSKTfG1GXYQ":[{"hn_comment_id":42191388,"author":"kolja005","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Using uv with PyTorch","text":"I recently watched a talk by the author of uv that was surprisingly fascinating [1]. He goes into a few of the more notable hacks that they had to come up with to make it as fast as it is. The most interesting thing for me was that package resolution in python given constraints defined (eg. in requirements.txt) maps to a boolean satisfiability problem which is NP-complete. So uv uses a custom SAT solver to do this. I totally under-appreciated how much goes into this software and I'm bummed I have to use Poetry at work after having watched this talk. [1] [VIDEO] edit: NP-complete not NP-hard","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44359610,"author":"globular-toast","month":"2025-06","story_title":"uv: An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust","text":"There is a talk about it from one of the authors here: [VIDEO] tl;dw Rust, a fast SAT solver, micro-optimisation of key components, caching, and hardlinks/CoW.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46398105,"author":"krick","month":"2025-12","story_title":"How uv got so fast","text":"To be fair, the whole post isn't very good IMO, regardless of ChatGPT involvement, and it's weird how some people seem to treat it like some kind of revelation. I mean, of course it wasn't specifically Rust that made it fast, it's really a banal statement: you need only very moderate serious programming experience to know, that rewriting legacy system from scratch can make it faster even if you rewrite it in a \"slower\" language. There have been C++ systems that became faster when rewritten in Python, for god's sake. That's what makes system a \"legacy\" system: it does a ton of things and nobody really knows what it does anymore. But when listing things that made uv faster it really mentions some silly things, among others. Like, it doesn't parse pip.conf. Right, sure, the secret of uv's speed lies in not-parsing other package manager's config files. Great. So all in all, yes, no doubt that hundreds of little things contributed into making uv faster, but listing a few dozens of them (surely a non-exhaustive lists) doesn't really enable you to make any conclusions about the relative importance of different improvements whatsoever. I suppose the mentioned talk[0] (even though it's more than a year old now) would serve as a better technical report. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gSKzgpt4HBU":[{"hn_comment_id":12375727,"author":"acidbaseextract","month":"2016-08","story_title":"New class of galaxy has been discovered, made almost entirely of dark matter","text":"\"The True Nature of Matter and Mass\" - [VIDEO] This whole channel will be up your alley, but this video and \"The Real Meaning of E=mc^2\" one directly answer your question.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16310945,"author":"doctoboggan","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Three Meanings of E=mc\u00b2","text":"The YouTube channel PBS SpaceTime gives an excellent overview of these same ideas. The presenter is great at making things as simple as possible, but not simpler. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29953924,"author":"MetricExpansion","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The Shameful Decline of Scientific American","text":"Pithy, but I\u2019d actually argue the opposite. As someone who consumes quite a bit of science content on YouTube, it\u2019s actually quite jarring to go back to traditional TV science shows. It feels a lot less information dense and more time-wasting. An interesting example is when Veritasium, who normally does the usual YouTube science content, got some big budget funding for one video [1] and produced it in a style more like what you\u2019d see on TV. It was striking how there was so much filler and dramatization to try to make it interesting, and the whole thing felt dumbed down compared to his usual content, for example [2], which is deeper and relatively information-dense. And there are channels like PBS Spacetime which go far, far beyond anything I\u2019ve ever seen in any media aimed at a general audience [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gSPNRu4ZPvE":[{"hn_comment_id":22170315,"author":"alisson","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Deep Decarbonization: A Realistic Way Forward on Climate Change","text":"I think for agriculture the way to go is syntropic agriculture: [VIDEO] I've seen people implementing this very successfully, I've been doing it myself for around 4 years now, and its very impressive how much carbon the soil stores after a few years on this practice.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23796146,"author":"reginaldo","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable","text":"Ever since watching the video on syntropic agriculture which I bumped into by reading a comment here in HN [1], I've been doing some research on the matter. The practice seems promising. It seems to work at both small and large scales, so it enables small farms, which are very hard to defend as a business in the US. It also has a component of improving the value of land, by making marginal (sandy) terrain into productive agricultural land. The other interesting fact is that the productivity per acre for the individual cultivars when planted together is higher than if they were the only thing being planted. I can see those things combining to drastically increase products. The part of the video that was the most interesting was the farmer saying \"this works. If I don't sell, I don't live, and I do sell\" (not an exact quote). Intriguing indeed. [1] [LINK] / [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13951273,"author":"alisson","month":"2017-03","story_title":"UN experts denounce \u2018myth\u2019 that pesticides are necessary to feed the world","text":"Sure! When I started learning about agroforestry I looked for english books on the subject but didn't find good ones, Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway have really good info you could use. But in portuguese I've so a few good PDFs here, I guess that's because of the work of Ernst Gotsch here in Brazil, here's a good video that summarize his work: [VIDEO] An agroforestry look like this: [LINK] Take very special attention to the ground on the video I linked above. So the main thing is the soil, the work will basically be always improving it by pilling up organic matter, from regular pruning and your organic waste too, the school must have good source of organic waste, also the city gardens/grass pruning are a good place to look for organic matter you could use on this project. Also, the more you plant together and at the same time the better. On the video you can see Bananas and Eucalyptus side by side, people think that Eucalyptus doesnt let anything grows near it, etc... but then I saw a lot of things fruiting just a few centimeters from Eucalyptus, because of the regular pruning. I'll send you an email so we can continue to talk about this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16521776,"author":"alisson","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious?","text":"We should be focusing into building soil and edible forest to harvest multiple floors instead of just that usual monoculture one: [VIDEO] If we look closely forest's soil usually gets better and better, I see some people replicate this and seen some 'agroforest' with more then 5 years old and its stunning how productive there lands are, how diverse and how the soil just get better without adding external stuff like fertilizer, its a process type of agriculture instead of an input one.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18630970,"author":"alisson","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Can We Grow More Food on Less Land?","text":"There's a great method called Agroforestry that uses forest floors to produce more food: Quick overview of a farmer's land that uses this method: [LINK] he harvest around 3x more cocoa per hectare than traditional methods and its one of the most valuable in the world right now. Big producers joining to make it more scalable: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23631196,"author":"alisson","month":"2020-06","story_title":"What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture","text":"Around 6 years ago I quit my job as a developer to dive into agriculture. I learned about syntropic agriculture systems and felt in love with it because: - You are able to work with space and time in a way to maximize yield (not 1 crop yield, but but multi crop) - It focus on being biodiverse - It builds forests So in this systems you will see rows of trees intercalated with rows of beans, corn, soy anything \"weedy\" or grasses... Harvest this small plants for many years, after a few years you harvest fruits, and after 2 decades you harvest the wood and start over. All with extensive pruning. This way you end up with better soil each time without machines or fertilizers (sure you can speed even more the process with them), its a type of agriculture focused on nature's processes instead of inputs. There's an interesting video about it showing some big farmers here trying to build machines better adapted to this kind of agriculture, this is the biggest bottleneck to scale because right now most machines are very focused on monocultures: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29781577,"author":"beckman466","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Healthy soil is key to feeding the world","text":"wish i could upvote this a hundred times. i love the work of Million Belay with The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) ( [LINK] ) as well as with the Stockholm Resilience Agency. this video of his and others like it really drove home the important core reasons to focus on soil health: [LINK] ( [LINK] ) also i think this video about Ernst G\u00f6tsch and his 'syntropic' agroforestry is very exciting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37389698,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Farms that create habitat key to food security and biodiversity","text":"Very good movie. I'd also recommend Syntropic Agriculture, an agroforestry method pioneered by Ernst Gotsch. He personally reforested 500 hectares of degraded pastures and doesn't use any external resources such as pesticides and fertilizers. Instead, he employs methods like maximizing photosynthesis and selective pruning. As a result, his land now stands as one of the most fertile and biodiverse regions within the Atlantic rainforest, achieving even higher yields than traditional farms. As syntropic farmers often say, they grow the soil to grow the food. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] Another example would be the Natural Farming method pioneered by Masanobu Fukuoka. He also practices farming without the use of pesticides and herbicides, and his yields also surpass those of traditional farms. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"gSvUqhZcbVg":[{"hn_comment_id":19441316,"author":"vvdcect","month":"2019-03","story_title":"The Lost Futures of Mark Fisher","text":"Do checkout \"Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?\", It's a concise book that talks about capitalism and its effects on culture and public thought. I haven't read lost futures yet but I found this really good video discussing Mark's idea by Cuck Philosophy called \"Hauntology, Lost Futures and 80s Nostalgia\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24308180,"author":"thevardanian","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Is Cyberpunk Dead? A Conversation with Bruce Bethke","text":"One word: Hauntology. Jacques Derrida coined the neologism to describe narratives of the future. Hauntology is the idea that the present is \"haunted\" by lost futures, and refers to the return of elements of the past that \"haunts\" the present as a ghost. So imagined futures, instead of exploring new futures, itself becomes a form which is haunted by the exploration of past ideas of the future. This is the whole idea of retro-futurism that we often see these days. Here's a vid that talks about exactly what people here are trying to analyze. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30803240,"author":"futureproofd","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Mark Fisher\u2019s \u201cK-punk\u201d and the futures that have never arrived (2018)","text":"It's good to see the occasional Mark Fisher thread here. On the topic of Hauntology and lost futures, I think this guy does a great job of explaining it through the analogy of the Fallout videogame series: [VIDEO] Analogies through pop-culture is something Mark Fisher also did very well to get his point across, and appeal to a broader audience.","stance":"rec"}],"gTAghAJcO1o":[{"hn_comment_id":13977668,"author":"romaniv","month":"2017-03","story_title":"The AI Misinformation Epidemic","text":"Alan Kay spoke about it length in many of his talks. For example: [VIDEO] Excellent video. I highly recommend everyone working in or with IT to see it. I think he is right. PCs and smartphone are mostly recreating thing from the past, and not the best things either. However, this isn't because we invented everything there is to invent. It has more to do with how research in computing is currently funded and how companies approach invention and innovation.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14038267,"author":"gambler","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award","text":">He thinks that you can just design something nice from whole cloth and people will use it. Because that's exactly what they did in Xerox Park, many times over. >That's why his designs aren't deployed. No comment. >But he's basically confusing research and engineering, as if engineering wasn't even a thing, and you can just come up with stuff and have people use it because it's good. Kay has many talks about the difference between invention and innovation (which are much better terms than ones you're using). In fact, his analysis of this difference is probably the most insightful and though-provoking technology talk I have ever seen: [VIDEO] Of course, this subject makes a lot of developers highly uncomfortable, hence a lot of shallow, ignorant, knee-jerk dismissals. \"Everything is incremental.\" \"Everything is the only way it could be.\" \"This is fine.\" And so on. Thing is, Kay worked at Xerox and Apple. He read a myriad of books and research papers on computing, which he constantly references in his talks and writings. He worked and continues to work with some of the most forward-thinking people in the field of computing. In late eighties he foresaw most of the current computing trends - which is verifiable via YouTube. Even without any context his talks display a considerable depth of thought. In short: unlike some people, he actually knows what he is talking about. >The point is that it couldn't have been any different. It wasn't designed; it was evolved. And that is why so","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8339376,"author":"nrao123","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Read Slowly to Benefit Your Brain and Cut Stress","text":"This slow reading idea also jives with Alan Kay's observation of \"Slow Deep Thinking\" which allowed us to have massive & non-incremental leaps into the future. [LINK] Video by Kay which goes into more depth: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13113664,"author":"rtens","month":"2016-12","story_title":"What's wrong with Software nowadays and how we can fix it","text":"Wow that's exactly how I feel. I couldn't even formulate it that well. But I'm very happy to know that other people feel this itch as well. Your sentiment of \"aiming for the future we want\" instead of \"piling up more stuff on our existing stack\" reminded me very much of this talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15591999,"author":"georgewsinger","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea","text":"I'd like to argue something contrarian in this thread: you could be on the right path. Some facts to keep in mind: - There are on the order of 20,000 new startups each year; most of the other people in this thread are from this pool. - Only 2-5 of those 20,000 startups will end up mattering (i.e., will reach a high enough valuation/impact on the world to move a needle). - Of these 2-5 startups that matter per year, almost none of them were pivots (Twitter is LoudCloud are the only examples I can think of). - The conventional wisdom is to take an incremental idea and run with it; \"ideas don't matter and execution is everything\"; run sprints and use the Lean Startup methodology to pull the market out of an idea (or pivot), and reach a local maxima. - This will only get you the result that 20,000 startups a year typically get: incrementalism, small victories, and/or failure. - There's also lottery ticket mentality to this conventional style of thinking: you're no different than anyone else, so stop ideating and start doing, and maybe you'll get lucky. If you've been at it for a year and haven't found anything good enough to give your life to, it could mean you are different than the average HNer. It could mean you have a calling to think bigger than most people do. Here is some material you may be interested in which bolsters this viewpoint: - Alan Kay's \"The Future Doesn't Have to be Incremental\": [VIDEO] - Peter Thiel's book Zero to One . Among other things, this book discusse","stance":"rec"}],"gTmhS6hcY-A":[{"hn_comment_id":40333694,"author":"doug_life","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Farewell, Chuck E. Cheese Animatronic Band","text":"Somewhat related is the The Rock-afire Explosion band from ShowBiz Pizza Place. There is an excellent documentary on the history and some of the fans preserving the technology. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42359953,"author":"tracerbulletx","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Chuck E. Cheese's animatronics band bows out","text":"Anybody vaguely interested in this story would probably enjoy this documentary about the the direct ancestor of this band. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gUnxzVOs3rk":[{"hn_comment_id":28092968,"author":"crooked-v","month":"2021-08","story_title":"How Technicolor created Ruby slippers without using color film","text":"This video has a lot of examples: [VIDEO] Part of the idea is to do as much as possible in-camera, by rendering the virtual surroundings at a high enough quality to directly film them as the actors' backdrop. It's sort of like a wildly more advanced version of using matte painting backdrops. It also seems far better for actor immersion than green screen, as the people on camera get a live wraparound view of the virtual 'set'.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28118535,"author":"Twirrim","month":"2021-08","story_title":"BBC Sport's Tokyo Olympics studio [video]","text":"Take a look at how they filled the Mandalorian. Quite a lot of it was filmed inside a large video wall / cube. One of the big advantages for them was that it resulted in far more realistic lighting. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30952025,"author":"russellbeattie","month":"2022-04","story_title":"\u201cI believe CGI is getting worse even as the tech advances.\u201d","text":"The advances they've made in virtual production studio backdrops are amazing. Camera-linked floor-to-ceiling 180\u00b0 LED screens and synced lighting is just amazing. The stuff they're able to do in The Mandalorian is incredible. Though once you know what to look for (the camo hiding the floor/wall seam) you can tell they're using it a bit too much. But still it's incredible. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gV5obrYaogU":[{"hn_comment_id":18226522,"author":"loosetypes","month":"2018-10","story_title":"How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language","text":"For whatever reason I really enjoyed the Symbolics graphics and animations demo[0] linked in the article. I was born in the 90s and have constantly heard the narrative that technological progress is getting faster and faster, and that we're currently at the forefront. And then I see something like this. They had basically photoshop before I was even alive!? [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25622823,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2021-01","story_title":"On Repl-Driven Programming","text":"Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. \"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar\" [LINK] \"Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0\" [LINK] \"Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo\" [LINK] \"SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO\" [VIDEO] \"Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk\" [LINK] \"Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988\" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) [LINK] \"The Interlisp programming environment\" [LINK] And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30948200,"author":"mepian","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996","text":"I'm glad the middle screen is explained, Symbolics always gets overshadowed by SGI. If you want to see it in action, watch this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41767000,"author":"hcarvalhoalves","month":"2024-10","story_title":"The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)","text":"See these demos for the kinds of interactive systems LISP enabled back in the day: [LINK] [VIDEO] It makes working on VSCode today look like banging rocks together, let alone 30 years ago.","stance":"rec"}],"gWVmPtr9O0g":[{"hn_comment_id":16821511,"author":"jsheard","month":"2018-04","story_title":"The NES Homebrew Scene","text":"It's really amazing how people keep finding ways to make old hardware do new tricks. Overdrive 2 is my favorite example - it's a Sega Megadrive demo that was released 30 years after the Megadrive launched, but still managed to pull off multiple effects that had never been seen on the system before. It abuses the hardware in such unique ways that no emulator can run it properly. [LINK] / [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40046396,"author":"jsheard","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Nathan Tolbert pushes the limitations of new games on old consoles","text":"It's not a game but I'll take any opportunity to plug Overdrive 2 for the Mega Drive: [VIDEO] That system has no business producing any kind of 3D graphics but they did it anyway.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48897248,"author":"chromadon","month":"2026-07","story_title":"The art and engineering of Sega CD Silpheed","text":"If you've never seen Overdrive 2 by Titan (a demo scene group), it's unbelievable what the MegaDrive can do stock. [VIDEO] I'm reasonably familiar with the hardware, I've written some games from scratch and I still have absolutely no idea how they did most of it.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"gbYXBJOFgeI":[{"hn_comment_id":16121525,"author":"freedomben","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Cory Doctorow: Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention","text":"Always interested in what Cory Doctorow has to say. While this particular blog post isn't about DRM, his work is benefiting everyone (except those who would rather enrich themselves at the expense of humanity). It's probably bigger than you think. I highly recommend reading up on what Cory has to say on DRM and the war on general purpose computing. It may change your mind. [LINK] [LINK] Also watch the various youtube videos of his talks, like this one: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7875678,"author":"jcr","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Cory Doctorow novel pulled from school reading for 'questioning authority'","text":"The book, \"Little Brother,\" is available in multiple formats under Creative Commons licensing (free): [LINK] Also, you might enjoy Cory Doctorow's talk: \"The Coming Civil War over General-purpose Computing\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14561825,"author":"zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption","text":"> are you okay with me being able to spend two weeks on the dark-web researching how to make and detonate a bomb using totally innocent chemical purchases, and then your spouse, parents, relatives, or you, being an innocent victim of my exploding the results, or would you want me to be stopped at some point after I started doing that? Yes, of course. Just as I am okay with people being able to spend ten minutes to take a knife from the kitchen and kill me. People are able to do all kinds of bad stuff, doesn't mean they actually do. The only alternative to a world where people are able to do bad stuff is totalitarianism, which is itself bad stuff (if only because I don't get to say what is considered good and what is considered bad), so not actually a solution either. Also, what you seem to think is just a logical impossibility. Either your communication can be read by third parties or it can not. You cannot build crypto that only leaks nuclear bomb plans, but keeps your medical information uncrackable. And you might be interested in some of Cory Doctorow's talks (or blog articles or maybe even books) on the general topic of \"the war against general-purpose computing\", like maybe one of these: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14730342,"author":"zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC","month":"2017-07","story_title":"DRM Is Toxic to Culture","text":"> How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would insist upon, should you decide to republish their work? One of those is decided by a democratic process, the other is dictated by one party. > but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept. Actually, it is a problem of the concept. It is asking for computers to be robbed of their defining characteristic, and to be put under dictatorial control. See also Cory Doctorow's talks on the topic, like maybe this one: [VIDEO] (he gave this and similar talks in many places, you can find quite a few of them on youtube, I have no clue whether this particular one is good)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19146530,"author":"freedomben","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Apple fails to block porn and gambling \u201centerprise\u201d apps","text":"> Really? We're there now? It's become Apple's \"responsibility\" to police every last corner of iOS? I find it disgusting, but really Apple is the only one to blame for that when they started aggressively policing and removing apps, and then marketing to customers based on that. I've heard people on HN state ad nauseam that they love that Apple does this, and that it's one of the reasons they live in the Apple ecosystem. They want to be protected from running apps that might do something objectionable (according to Apple's standard), and are absolutely willing to trade their freedom for some security. I obviously don't agree with this at all (I refer you to Cory Doctorow's War on General Purpose Computing: [VIDEO] ) but it is a position I can understand.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31543246,"author":"est31","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Google has banned the training of deepfakes in Colab","text":"There is this talk about the civil war on general purpose computing by Cory Doctorow: [LINK] He gave the same talk at Google: [VIDEO] It's slowly becoming reality.","stance":"rec"}],"gcS04BI2sbk":[{"hn_comment_id":8662770,"author":"joelgascoigne","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you know other firms like Valve or GitHub?","text":"At Buffer we've started to move in this direction. I can highly recommend watching this video if you're interested in self-management and the idea of a new management paradigm: [VIDEO] . Frederic's book by the same name also goes into further details and shares several example companies: Buurtzorg, AES, Morning Star, FAVI, RHD and others.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8673838,"author":"s3nnyy","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Mean People Fail","text":"I agree with PG on this trend. In \"Reinventing Organizations\" by Frederic Laloux you'll get more evidence that lack of meanness leads to success: [VIDEO] Particularly the example of Buurtzorg, a Dutch healthcare provider, is quite convincing: They went from 0% to 80% market-share by basically being less mean to their employees and clients. (This Ask-HN discussion is also related to this: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9790813,"author":"bcx","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Reinventing organizations (2014) [pdf]","text":"The author of this book wants readers to pay what they feel the book was worth to them. [LINK] So you if you end up downloading and reading the direct PDF link (the security through obscurity method is clearly failing here) I recommend paying what feels right to the author: You can watch a pretty good summary of the book here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gcUWTa16Jc0":[{"hn_comment_id":16421555,"author":"Nadya","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Common combinators in JavaScript","text":"What use is Chinese for someone who doesn't read Chinese? The S combinator written like that is perfectly legible and fine for someone who is already familiar with the S Combinator. I don't see the problem there and I don't already grok the S Combinator. I do appreciate writing code under the assumption people working on the code would have some level of prerequisite knowledge. I'm sure you'd get a kick out of Co-dfns [0]. But once you learn to \"speak\" APL programming it makes a lot more sense. I'd highly recommend, if you have the time, to listen to the author explaining the code for the compiler [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] / HN discussion: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27829579,"author":"Nadya","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Jelly: a recreational programming language inspired by J","text":"One of the most memorable and interesting things I've ever seen on HN was an AMA from the creator of the Co-dfns parallel APL compiler. Here is co-dfns [0] and the AMA by the creator [1]. The video may give you some insight and at the very least may be extremely interesting to hear the APL code explained (jump to around 13:30 for the beginning of the explanation behind the structure + what the compiler is doing). He explains it very well - it's quite easy to follow along. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38982944,"author":"refset","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Thinking in an array language","text":"Nothing has ever convinced me about the potential for array languages in practice quite like watching Aaron Hsu describe how he develops his parallel APL compiler [0] using two Notepad.exe windows side-by-side: [VIDEO] He has also written many comments (arcfide on HN) about this stuff before, e.g. discussing \"semantic density\" [1] > The compiler is designed so that I can see as much as possible with as little indirection as possible, so that when I see a piece of code I not only know how it works in complete detail, but how it connects to the world around it, and every single dependency related to it in basically one single half screen full of code (usually much less than that) without any jumps, paging, scrolling or any movement. [...] The idea of semantic density is critical to this point. The semantic density of the APL code I'm using to solve the problem is at a certain rate. I maintain a consistent density rate by choosing my variable names in such a way that they visually align with the expressivity per character of the built in primitive symbols. And > [...] idiomatic programming methods that are so concise, they can begin to be read as we read and chunk English phrases. By doing so, it becomes actually easier to just write out most algorithms, because the normal name for such an algorithm is basically as long as the algorithm itself written out. This means that I start to learn to chunk idioms as phrases and can read code directly, without the cost of name lookup indi","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40806408,"author":"Nadya","month":"2024-06","story_title":"APL Demonstration (1975) [video]","text":"I thought the same about APL until arcfide made a video about codfns a few years back. Was eye opening. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17177051,"author":"a-saleh","month":"2018-05","story_title":"APL deserves its renaissance too","text":"I remember being floored by APL few months ago when I learned about co-dnfs and watched the stream by Aaron Hsu [1] with quotes like \"This code is perfectly readable, it just isn't in English\". Thing is, when I was thinking about trying it, I never figured out a good toy project. Like, when I wanted to try anything else, most of the time I would know I would be able to cobble together a web-service. Haskell, Erlang, even Prolog. I understand co-dnfs to be self-hosting, so maybe a toy programming language? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gd5uJ7Nlvvo":[{"hn_comment_id":36868375,"author":"spudlyo","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Unicode is harder than you think","text":"If you found this essay interesting, you owe it to yourself to check out this super entertaining talk \"Plain Text\"[0] from NDC 2022 by Dylan Beattie. Rabbit hole warning: This video caused me to lose an entire Sunday watching Dylan's talks on YouTube, which are uniformly awesome. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33094763,"author":"0xFEE1DEAD","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Mojibake","text":"Just yesterday I watched a talk from NDC Copenhagen by Dylan Beattie about this exact topic. The story which stood out the most was this [VIDEO] The whole talk was an interesting watch tho.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34174925,"author":"mikece","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best conference talk you've seen in 2022?","text":"\"Best\" is subjective but one of the most interesting talks I've seen this year is one on Plain Text: [VIDEO] And although it's almost ten years old, Gary Bernhardt's \"Birth and Death of Javascript\" is one I re-watch at least twice a year and frequently recommend (and it's unreal how prescient he is in this talk -- I just hope the references to the Bay Area exclusion zone and us all running for our lives isn't as accurate as his prediction of the raise of WASM): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40396977,"author":"ReleaseCandidat","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Write Plain Text Files (2022)","text":"> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text. [...] But plain text? Always. Everywhere. Somebody needs to watch \"Plain Text\" (Dylan Beattie, NDC Copenhagen 2022) [VIDEO] For example, have fun with ISO 8859-2 vs. Windows 1250. And add Windows 1252 for giggles. And for the ASCII-only persons: there still is EBCDIC.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45638377,"author":"tpmoney","month":"2025-10","story_title":"The macOS LC_COLLATE hunt: Or why does sort order differently on macOS and Linux (2020)","text":"Not Tom Scott, but Dylan Beattie has done a handful of interesting talks[1] effectively on \"there's no such thing as plain text\" which in part covers this sort of thing. In fact, I think your Danish cities list is actually one of his examples. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gdK4y6O-llE":[{"hn_comment_id":26466750,"author":"jmcalvay","month":"2021-03","story_title":"The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions","text":"I've been enjoying this video series with interviews of Boyd's surviving collaborators as a way to separate out what he meant from what folks often misunderstand: Chet Richards (as it relates to business) - [LINK] Chuck Spinney (as it relates to epistemology) - [VIDEO] Both - [LINK] (they're from this meetup: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26486740,"author":"jasonra","month":"2021-03","story_title":"The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions","text":"See here the original presentation on OODA Loop that has been given at Quantico Marine base dozens of times by John Boyd's associate of 20 years Chuck Spinney. It shows the thinking method behind the OODA Loop--Evolutionary Epistemology: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29334993,"author":"jmcalvay","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Thinking in OODA Loops [slides]","text":"I also found this presentation/discussion with Chuck Spinney, one of Boyd's collaborators, to be a helpful elaboration of the concept - [VIDEO] (the meetup also has a couple of other similar videos with Chuck Spinney and Chet Richards, another of Boyd's collaborators who focused on applying Boyd's ideas to business)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44235884,"author":"aspenmayer","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Successful people set constraints rather than chasing goals","text":"An interesting video from another time this came up on HN: [VIDEO] > OODA Loop & Evolutionary Epistemology of John Boyd by Chuck Spinney From this comment: [LINK] They also mention a video by Chet Richards and how it relates OODA to business context. [LINK] The Q&A with both Chet Richards and Chuck Spinney is also worth a look: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ge7i60GuNRg":[{"hn_comment_id":11795409,"author":"SomeCallMeTim","month":"2016-05","story_title":"The Liberal Blind Spot","text":"> If you are white and male, for example, then you are seen as privileged because, statistically, white males have more wealth and power. No. If you are white and male, you've experienced more invisible privilege than you realize. [1] It's not about wealth, but it is about power -- power over others. Questions: * White man says that black woman stole something from him. What will happen? * White woman says that black man stole something from her. What will happen? * Black man says that white woman stole something from him. What will happen? * Black woman says that white man stole something from her. What will happen? What were your honest, visceral, reactions to each of these statements? Were they all completely symmetric? I can tell you I've been working on balancing my own feelings about various races, and I can't claim my own thoughts were completely unbiased. And I have been trying for years to purge the bias. There's an awesome video of three college-student-aged in a park. All three are obviously trying to steal a bike. They picked three actors and dressed them roughly equivalently. [2] Watch the video if you want to be shocked, or just read my summary if you can't be bothered: * White Actor: Everyone ignores him or asks him what he's doing. He gives dodgy answers, but people wish him \"good luck\" or leave the scene. Some say they might have called the police later (when confronted by the camera crew), but they clearly didn't seem to be concerned. * Black Actor: Within s","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6471996,"author":"fleitz","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Bitlock replaces your bike key with your phone","text":"As always social engineering works far better than tech engineering, watch the guys try and help the girl steal a bike. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gfh-VCTwMw8":[{"hn_comment_id":18531030,"author":"tony-allan","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Avoiding Microservice Megadisasters","text":"[VIDEO] (39:00) Conway's law: Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. Jimmy's law: A broken, dysfunctional organization driven by meeting unhealthy goals and metrics will produce broken, dysfunctional systems. Inverse Conway Maneuver: Design the organization you want, the architecture will follow, kicking and screaming.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36388722,"author":"ketzu","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Make microservices look like monoliths","text":"It is such a weird feeling to come across a topic I haven't read on in a while, watch two videos on it out of random curiosity, hop on hackernews the next day, and get a recommendation for the exact same videos. I very much enjoyed the 5 techniques and many of the tidbits. I also liked \"Avoiding Microservice Megadisasters\" but mostly for the entertainment value ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"ggUduBmvQ_4":[{"hn_comment_id":37597876,"author":"somethingsidont","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Airlines Are Just Banks Now","text":"One of my favorite YouTube videos on this subject: [VIDEO] Key point: airlines are more powerful than normal banks - they are central banks, with complete control of the money (point) supply. On the trilemma [0], they chose to control the exchange rate (points to flight value) and have an independent monetary policy (how many points to issue to flyers or other buyers). [0] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30314422,"author":"hourislate","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Things Delta told the SEC about its SkyMiles program","text":"Wendover Productions has a video on how airlines are banks now. Their Loyalty Programs are worth several times more than the Airlines and flying is basically a secondary business for them. How Airlines Quietly Became Banks [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37606599,"author":"trimbo","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Airlines Are Just Banks Now","text":"Wendover Productions had a good video about this, framed around United getting a loan during the pandemic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48003498,"author":"rapatel0","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Let's Buy Spirit Air","text":"Fundamental problem: Flights don't make money. Airlines actually make all of their money through loyalty programs and credit card payments. They basically should have turned into regulated utilities long ago, but loyalty program revenue saved them. Unless this initiative will turn into a credit card company (which nobody likes or wants to do) it won't go anywhere Private equity will likely sell the company for parts. There is no operational improvements for cash flow that they can do. Useful watch (skip to 2:20): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48009344,"author":"risfriend","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Let's Buy Spirit Air","text":"> how the major airlines now are more of a \"bank that happens to have planes\" Here is a decent video explaining it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ghDvyItIHTY":[{"hn_comment_id":29347538,"author":"maximus-decimus","month":"2021-11","story_title":"How can MacBooks be so slim compared to others laptops","text":"Interesting video about how the only reason you even need a fan in the mac book pro is because how hot the shell of a laptop is allowed to get is legislated so you don't burn yourself on it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35028184,"author":"Dalewyn","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Fix Intel CPU Throttling on Linux","text":"For a layman's overview of this, Linus from LinusTechTips gives a basic rundown of the relevant safety regulation and some numbers in one of his videos featuring the M1 Macbook Air and its cooling solution.[1] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ghUs-84NAAU":[{"hn_comment_id":26861079,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Deriving the piano keyboard from biological principles using clustering","text":"Your post reminded me of this video[1] by Adam Neely, where he tries various tuning systems around A = 432 Hz. As a non-musician it really made me appreciate how little I know about the technical side of music. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29849269,"author":"viraptor","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Music Tuned to 440 Hz versus 432 Hz and the Health Effects","text":"If anyone's interested in more about this topic, Adam Neely did interesting videos about this: [VIDEO] and [LINK] (beware, starts with satire) Edit: I watched the second one again, and it actually gives some reason why 432Hz may be preferred in some way in this test.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30179732,"author":"pythko","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Who cares about plagiarism?","text":"Traditional western music assigns 12 notes to an octave using a tuning known as Twelve Tone Equal Temperament[1]. These twelve tones include whole tones and semitones. The vast majority of western music is composed exclusively using these twelve notes. I believe the GGP meant to refer to \u201cmicrotones,\u201d which are frequencies that don\u2019t fall into the Twelve Tone Equal Temperament tuning system. These are commonly used in non-western music (Indian music is a typical example), and occasionally in some western music styles (blues, some jazz, some sub-genres of rock, maybe), but you\u2019re not going to find microtones in most western music. The use of microtones would greatly expand the set of possible melodies, but those melodies would also sound very weird to someone who has grown up listening to western music. Also, these legal cases are not decided by precisely comparing the relative frequencies of notes in two different melodies. Relating all this to the article, I personally feel like music is not a good parallel for the topic of academic plagiarism since the idea is the whole point of academic papers, whereas the point of music is harder to pin down, but it\u2019s certainly not only to expand the set of melodies and chords used in songs. Anyways, for more on music theory, I\u2019d suggest Adam Neely\u2019s YouTube channel [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] such as this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32627927,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?","text":"Your post reminded me of a video[1] Adam Neely made where he explored some (to me) weird tunings, starting with one where A = 432Hz. As someone who hasn't taken any musical theory or similar, it was quite interesting to hear. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ghtpJnrdgbo":[{"hn_comment_id":22300842,"author":"asix66","month":"2020-02","story_title":"The History of Git","text":"This reminds be of a talk I watched by Richard Hipp, \"Git: Just Say No\" [0] where he discusses a \"top 10 git enhancements\" list, as of the time (4 years ago.) It's a good talk, and caused me to discover Fossil SCM. Sadly I've yet to try/use Fossil, and my teams still use git. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22491629,"author":"brigandish","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Please stop recommending Gitflow","text":"> Take a look at this image and tell me it\u2019s immediately intuitive I'm using Git, there's nothing intuitive to be found here. On a possibly related note, I watched a talk by D. Richard Hipp (I don't remember which one - edit: probably \"Richard Hipp - Git: Just Say No\"[1]) where he compared it with Git (a lot) and explained how Fossil keeps everything, there's no throwing away of history, no need for rebasing (at least as a workflow). It sounded nice - refreshing, even. I'm going to start using it for some projects and see how I get on, because frankly, I'm tired of Git and this need to strategise saving copies of my work , because that's basically what it does. Sometimes I even pine for the days I used to version zip files\u2026 [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27738825,"author":"belter","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Git vs. Fossil: what you should have done vs. what you did","text":"Here is a (somewhat old) talk by Richard Hipp, the author of SQLite about Git: \"Richard Hipp - Git: Just Say No\" [VIDEO] I use Git every day, but I am curious about Fossil and have been researching it for a while. I am not planning on changing, as I need to get to the bottom of some data corruption events I have seen in their forums. Not saying it was the fault of Fossil, just that it requires more research on my side. We should not forget Version Management did not start with Git but has a vibrant history that began with SCCS, RCS, CVS, ClearCase, Perforce, SVN, etc... As I used all the systems above except for SCCS and RCS I would advise for some caution here on thinking Git core flows are the one true way. I know the authors of ClearCase though the same way :-) If the author of SQLite advances some arguments around the proper way of doing version management, I would advise to error on the side of caution and listen at least a second time. Do not throw away your own experience and insight, but at least listen carefully. Don't just dismiss the arguments as quickly as some are doing here. I found this recent thread very useful not only as a features comparison but also as a core reminder of what the main use case for Fossil is: \"Lessons from 13+ Years of Fossil\" : [LINK] \"Fossil's reason for existence, plain and simple, is managing the source code for sqlite3. That's the scope of project it was initially envisioned for, and that size of project seems to be quite average for t","stance":"rec"}],"giQ8xEWjnBs":[{"hn_comment_id":20366785,"author":"Nican","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Amazon Seeks Permission to Launch 3k Internet Satellites","text":"Real engineering made a video on it: [VIDEO] I recommend watching. The channel does really good explanations.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21325111,"author":"bearcobra","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Elon Musk tweets using SpaceX\u2019s Starlink satellite internet","text":"Real Engineering has an interesting video on why it would be useful for firms trading internationally [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24291471,"author":"PopeDotNinja","month":"2020-08","story_title":"SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up","text":"Light travels 47% slower in a fiber optic cable than it does in the vacuum of space. [1] [1] [VIDEO] (the whole video is worth watching, but that timestamp answers your specific question.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24346734,"author":"hangonhn","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Amazon drivers are hanging smartphones in trees to get more work","text":"Right, so if you can't go through the crust then going up would be another option. Over long enough of a distance, say NYC to London (or even farther), the overhead of going up first and then a \"straight\" line horizontally (it's not completely straight because it has relay between the satellites via LOS laser but each arc would be fairly long) and back down would be shorter than a line following the curvature. (Edited: This is wrong. I had conflated the lower latency with shorter distance as others have pointed out.) BTW, I want to give full credit to my source: [VIDEO] It also does a much better job of explaining it than I have but it is a convincing argument for how Starlink can be useful and why traders would be willing to pay a lot for it.","stance":"rec"}],"giYbq4HmfGA":[{"hn_comment_id":40657484,"author":"gregors","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Elixir 1.17 released: set-theoretic types in patterns, durations, OTP 27","text":"If you're into watching talks, this will be well worth your time. ElixirConf 2023 - Jos\u00e9 Valim - The foundations of the Elixir type system [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38215262,"author":"whalesalad","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Switching to Elixir","text":"static typing is a means to an end. if you can achieve the same end without static typing, good right? that is the goal of spec. the creator of the language has a fantastic talk on this [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38919993,"author":"H12","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Elixir is now a gradually typed language","text":"My understanding is \"yes, but only type errors that violate guards and pattern matching\". Jose's elixirconf keynote this year did a great job providing details on how how this new type system works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gisdyTBMNyQ":[{"hn_comment_id":36996472,"author":"jpalomaki","month":"2023-08","story_title":"I thought this rotating house was impossible [video]","text":"The part where it shows how the electricity and piping works was pretty interesting. Skip to ~3:00 to see this [1] Patent shown in the video [2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37863610,"author":"isaidthis","month":"2023-10","story_title":"The Midwit Smart Home","text":"The owner of a custom rotating house in California cited a similar reason for moving. The video is worth watching but here is the relevant section: \"I've had 18 heart procedures. My wife is in perfect health. The odds of me outliving her are zero...We're moving back to Coronado. This is a complex house, even though I think it's simple! For her to try and teach somebody else how to run everything and do everything would be difficult if something happened to me. So we're just kind of jumping ahead.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39469468,"author":"dabluecaboose","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Rotating house goes up for sale in New Zealand","text":"Unsure about this particular house in NZ, but there's one in California that Tom Scott did a video on with a very good animation of how its electricity/water/sewage slip ring works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39469541,"author":"alargemoose","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Rotating house goes up for sale in New Zealand","text":"It\u2019s not the same rotating house, but Tom Scott did a video last year that has a great 3D render of the system that designer used to facilitate their build! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gkj_91IJVBk":[{"hn_comment_id":20776293,"author":"raaaaraaaa2","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Singapore Says Musk's Electric Cars Are About 'Lifestyle,' Not Climate","text":"On the other hand 1/2 of world looks more or less the same - rural Africa, india, china... If you believe we are highly adaptable and new technologies will 'save us' somehow check this presentation : [VIDEO] ...it's eye opening","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28733072,"author":"carapace","month":"2021-10","story_title":"\u2018Green growth\u2019 doesn\u2019t exist \u2013 less of everything only way to avert catastrophe","text":"Here's a fascinating talk by V\u00e1clav Smil at the Driva Climate Investment Meeting in 2019: [VIDEO] Bill Gates calls him \"one of my favorite thinkers\" and reviews his recent book \"Growth\": > Vaclav Smil ... reaches the ... conclusion: Earth is fragile and \u201cbefore it is too late, we should embark in earnest on the most fundamental existential [task] of making any future growth compatible with the long-term preservation of the only biosphere we have.\u201d [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30674949,"author":"carapace","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Launch HN: Living Carbon (YC W20) \u2013 Trees that capture and store more carbon","text":"> the ability to dramatically reduce world hunger is a direct consequence of humans' capacity to improve crop yields such as rice and corn through breeding and engineering. Not through \"breeding and engineering\", through artificial nitrogen fertilizer. We have been turning oil into people . > prevented the starvation of millions of people. That delayed the starvation of millions of people and now we are facing the prospect of the starvation of billions of people. FWIW, I do applauded Maddie and her team, and I wish them luck and hope they succeed. But the only way we are going to avert disaster is to stop taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the air. That's it. Here's a fascinating talk by V\u00e1clav Smil at the Driva Climate Investment Meeting in 2019, where he makes the point better than I ever could: [VIDEO] - - - - edit: i'm rate limited at the moment. Replying to HWR_14 below Dwarf wheat was generated through selective breeding, same as the last N-thousand years. And it was only necessary due to the defects of using artificial nitrogen fertilizer: > Taller wheat grasses better compete for sunlight, but tend to collapse under the weight of the extra grain\u2014a trait called lodging\u2014from the rapid growth spurts induced by nitrogen fertilizer Borlaug used in the poor soil. To prevent this, he bred wheat to favor shorter, stronger stalks that could better support larger seed heads. [LINK] Anyway, my point isn't that science doesn't work or isn't good, it's that engine","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41535494,"author":"carapace","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Shrinking the economy won't save the planet","text":"> the degrowth position is that people are inevitably going to lead worse lives than at present, but that we can choose between things getting kind of bad, by systematically pursuing degrowth, and things getting apocalyptically bad, which is what will happen if we continue pursuing growth I can't speak for others who advocate for degrowth, but that seems about right to me, with the caveat that I believe ecologically harmonious lifestyles would be more fun and fulfilling than what we have now. The challenge is to return to harmony with Nature while still enjoying the benefits of science and technology. - - - - > fourth, the most urgent environmental problem for human quality of life is global warming, and atmospheric carbon capture is necessary to solve it, a measure which will almost certainly require vast expansion of human energy exploitation and therefore economic growth (because you can have growth without increased resource exploitation, but probably not vastly increased resource exploitation without growth) V\u00e1clav Smil has me convinced that atmospheric carbon capture on a scale great enough to counter-act our continued fossil fuel use is a pipe dream, pretty much for the reason you say: it takes too much energy to sequester the carbon. Here he is at Driva Climate Investment Meeting in 2019. It's a great lecture IMO, and he starts bagging on carbon capture around minute 39: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26481130,"author":"aksss","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Moore's Law for Everything","text":"> \u201cMoore\u2019s Law for everything\u201d should be the rallying cry of a generation whose members can\u2019t afford what they want.\" Ugh. Moore's law doesn't apply to everything, and in fact doesn't apply to most things, and wishing it did won't change that. I think Vaclav Smil did an effective diagnosis of this at the Driva Climate Investment Meeting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26541984,"author":"carapace","month":"2021-03","story_title":"The operative system for a decarbonised, decentralised, digitised energy system","text":"Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into regenerative agriculture. (This is different from large-scale industrial ethanol production.) You grow e.g. sugar beets, convert them to alcohol and some byproducts (that go back into the farm as feed and fertilizer), use the alcohol in generators and vehicles. You're operating within your solar budget, the atoms that make up the alcohol came from water and air so all your nutrients and trace minerals stay on the farm and the fuel is carbon-neutral (all the carbon released when you burn the fuel originally came from the air in the form of carbon dioxide, not from underground fossilized carbon), and it can be done with simple off-the-shelf tech that has been around for literally thousands of years. You don't have to scrap your ICE cars and trucks, you can modify them to work with alcohol as fuel (some cars it's a software mod!) and the exhaust is not poisonous. - - - - Here's a video of V\u00e1clav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called \"Investing in a changing climate \u2013 what we can learn from historic energy transitions\". [VIDEO] The presentation is IMO very interesting, and the conclusion is sobering: \"Only absolute cuts in energy use would work.\" ( [VIDEO] ) We use too much power. And when I say \"we\" I mean mostly the USA but the rest of the world is ramping up rapidly. Unless there's a miracle (like clean fusion generators that kids can make in the garage out of chicken wire, tires, and ducktape) th","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26983515,"author":"carapace","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Mining robot stranded on Pacific Ocean floor in deep-sea mining trial","text":"Batteries are not a great idea. E.g. an electric car should use alcohol fuel and a small generator rather than fancy batteries. You can grow sugar crops, convert them to fuel (reclaiming the non-fuel parts), and then use that to power your infrastructure. It's carbon-neutral, environmentally sound (waaaaaaay more than batteries), and you can do it today. No sea mines required. The only downside is that you have to live within your solar power budget, but we have to do that anyway to counter global warming (until cheap fusion becomes a thing.) Here's a video of V\u00e1clav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called \"Investing in a changing climate \u2013 what we can learn from historic energy transitions\". [VIDEO] The presentation is IMO very interesting, and the conclusion is sobering: \"Only absolute cuts in energy use would work.\" ( [VIDEO] ) We are going to have to use less energy. We don't have to endure lower QoL but we do have to achieve our Quality of Life more efficiently .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27497017,"author":"carapace","month":"2021-06","story_title":"What can a technologist do about climate change? (2015)","text":"Use less energy. Here's V\u00e1clav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called \"Investing in a changing climate \u2013 what we can learn from historic energy transitions\". [VIDEO] The conclusion is sobering: \"Only absolute cuts in energy use would work.\" ( [VIDEO] ) We can do this and most of the technology needed is already invented and available, we just have to get our act together as a species and start using our tech efficiently. We don't have to endure a lower quality of life, just eliminating waste would get us most of the way there.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29656695,"author":"aksss","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Technology Behind the Lilium Jet","text":"I recall Vaclav Smil saying batteries are consistently about 2-3% per year over the long haul. It's not a Moore's law scenario, but a very slow crawl. \"Miracles might happen,\" he says, \"but would I bet on a miracle happening? No.\" This link is to the point in the video where he says this, but the whole talk is quite interesting. [VIDEO] Edit: here's a more recent video of Smil talking about energy density of batteries and the problems there, specifically mentioning the unlikelihood of flying on battery anytime soon. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"gmn7tjSNyAA":[{"hn_comment_id":12054586,"author":"internaut","month":"2016-07","story_title":"How Trees Calm Us Down","text":"If you want to know more you may be interested in these: Japanese researcher describes (with control group) the interesting affects of walking in a forest. [LINK] Indian researcher describes side affects of indoor plants on health esp. air quality. [VIDEO] I'm incorporating some of these concepts into my tiny house design e.g. a terrarium and an hinoki ofuro, together with natural daylighting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12179377,"author":"patrickk","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Mercedes-Benz shows off the first fully electric heavy urban transport truck","text":"When I flew into Heathrow last year, I was amazed by how visible the pollution was- over central London, there were no clouds (there were clouds around the outskirts) but this vague, blue haze was quite noticeable. Although compared to Shanghai, London is really clean, if you live in Shanghai you keep your windows permanently shut and run an air purifier 24/7: [LINK] > I'd recommend anyone living in a city to invest in a good air purifier from BlueAir or IQAir (if you can afford it). Another, more environmentally friendly option: [VIDEO] Also basil plants are a natural mosquito repellent, might not be an issue in the UK though.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12470620,"author":"internaut","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Air pollution a risk factor for diabetes","text":"From this thread \"How Trees Calm Us Down\": [LINK] Japanese researcher describes (with control group) the interesting affects of walking in a forest. [LINK] Indian researcher describes side affects of indoor plants on health esp. air quality. [VIDEO] I'm incorporating some of these concepts into my tiny house design e.g. a (truly ingenious design using mirrors!) terrarium and an hinoki ofuro, together with natural daylighting. A poster called mantesso offered up this interesting paper: Here's the original study from NASA, Interior Landscape plants for indoor air pollution abatement : [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"gn8m5d74fk8":[{"hn_comment_id":9703410,"author":"lhl","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Oculus Rift","text":"While this may be true for high fidelity gaming, for moving some textured triangles around, mobile GPUs are fine. Also, they can (and do) perform much better clock-for-clock vs a PC (and especially a Mac) thanks to the ability to optimize drivers. For a fascinating discussion of the optimizations possible, Carmack's 2014 Oculus Connect keynote is well worth watching: [VIDEO] This talk was a slightly long but very informative discussion of the various challenges in reducing latency and dealing w/ PC rendering: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27687730,"author":"nickjj","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Note that I wouldn\u2019t pass the listed minimum requirements","text":"> What was Carmack's development focus during Oculus? I'm not sure exactly but there's a bunch of keynotes from Carmack around Oculus Connect on YouTube. Here's one from 2014: [VIDEO] , and another one from a year later where he's live coding in a VR environment [LINK] . You'll find a bunch more if you search too. I remember skimming through them years ago not because I'm into VR development but I've been a life long fan of Carmack's work and like listening to him talk about things.","stance":"rec"}],"goSEyGNfiPM":[{"hn_comment_id":35178468,"author":"nickpinkston","month":"2023-03","story_title":"The Social Radars: Conversations with Startup Founders","text":"Yea, that's an interesting perspective. I do wondering if we can learn from a related, but successful form of failure content, which is the disaster/accident investigation videos. I watch a wide range from the classic TV airliner crashes [1], to highly detailed air crash disaster investigation reports / training [2], to industrial / other accidents [3], to gov't industrial accidents reports / simulations [4]. I wonder if there's anything to be gained from way that content succeeds while business failures don't? Is it just that startup failures aren't as dramatic? It's not a clear-cut kind of narrative that's satisfying? No idea... These are all great: [1] Tenerife Crash for TV: [LINK] [2] Tenerife Crash for Pilots: [LINK] [3] SL1 Nuclear Accident: [LINK] [4] BP Texas City: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43317909,"author":"Lammy","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Chasing RFI Waves \u2013 Part Seven","text":"> I read about it in one of the disaster reports about the Texas City BP refinery explosion. Relevant part of USCSB accident reconstruction animation: [VIDEO] (but worth watching the whole thing!)","stance":"rec"}],"goePYJ74Ydg":[{"hn_comment_id":26634585,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Show HN: Play with Shaders Inspired by Slime Mold","text":"Coding Aventure is one of my favorite intellectual(?) exploration channels, along with Primer, who's had a great string of genetic/evolution simulation videos exploring the emergent evolution of society [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26702399,"author":"ghgdynb1","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Yellen calls for global minimum corporate tax rate","text":"Happy you found it helpful! The final section (imposters) of this [1] simplified exploration of \u201cgreen beard altruism\u201d might be of interest to you if you want to explore this further. If you\u2019re interested in thinking about things like this generally, these are Nash equilibrium problems and the field is called game theory. In answer: if we do discard the assumptions of game theory and we imagine nobody would ever think to \u201ccheat,\u201d it could work. But in reality it wouldn\u2019t be just that some countries have huge advantages in some industries\u2014 they would have huge advantages in every industry. People and companies looking to maximize their opportunities would flee to the country with the lowest effective (nominal doesn\u2019t matter) tax rate which could also guarantee their safety. This is actually part of how the US ended up burying the Soviet Union/eastern Bloc with economic productivity\u2014 we kept poaching all their best engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and entrepreneurs. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27475156,"author":"qvrjuec","month":"2021-06","story_title":"ALiEn \u2013 a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program","text":"Also, \"The Selfish Gene\". Super fun read. Also, there are a bunch of really interesting videos made to demonstrate concepts like the evolution of altruism on youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"goh2x_G0ct4":[{"hn_comment_id":17616239,"author":"rospaya","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars","text":"There's a great Gil Scott Heron song with the same theme. In his case it was poverty and healthcare among African Americans in the 60s, not cancer. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25879579,"author":"lordlic","month":"2021-01","story_title":"One hull crack located in ISS, another one suspected","text":"No, the argument is that there's plenty to learn, and it's all very interesting, but it doesn't stand up against people's very real needs here on Earth. I'm about the biggest fan of space you'll find, but even I, sadly, find the ethical calculus unassailable. Manned spaceflight won't accrue material benefits for ten generations or much more, and meanwhile human beings are dying of treatable or curable diseases, suffering under poverty, and living without access to clean water. This spoken-word work from 1970 conveys the sentiment well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27896306,"author":"bloak","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Whitey on the Moon","text":"Is this in some way related to Bezos and Musk's antics? There's a recording on YouTube. Only two minutes, worth a listen: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gp4U5aH_T6A":[{"hn_comment_id":32457191,"author":"sph","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Man who robbed bank to get his own money back hailed as national hero","text":"I recommend Saifedean Ammous' interview with Lex Fridman. He's got strong opinions and a somewhat dour persona, but as Lebanese-Palestinese he's lived in a very different environment than what we're used to here in the West. If you keep an open mind and understand where he's coming from, I think he's good some insightful ideas on Bitcoin and its role in economic upheaval. [VIDEO] FWIW this episode turned me from a \"fuck any form of crypto\" stance to an appreciation of BTC the technology. All the other scam coins and Ponzi schemes can't collapse to zero soon enough.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31377958,"author":"tejohnso","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Why All Cryptocurrency Should Die in a Fire","text":"> But \"Crypto\" (specifically the energy intensive kind) has a different problem, and that's that it has /massive/ externalities that it simply ignores, forcing us, the people who want nothing to do with it, to now deal with it Grossly inefficient personal transportation and industrial farming have massive externalities forcing people who want nothing to do with it to deal with it. That doesn't seem to be a concern that matters to most people. And they're exacerbating the same climate and energy issues. Public blockchain can be powered by renewable energy, using its own value to pay for it, and can harness power in areas where it is not feasible to harness that power for other purposes. Here's a podcast[1] episode with Saifedean Ammous, if you're interested in the value proposition. He claims Bitcoin actually saved his life, so obviously incredibly valuable to him. Lex does a pretty good job at pushing back on his evangelism. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gqGEMQveoqg":[{"hn_comment_id":41457145,"author":"barrkel","month":"2024-09","story_title":"How the Hourglass Won","text":"Consider a society that has left Earth. If light takes minutes to travel between locations, is a chatty protocol what you want? Or do you need a whole host of different application-level solutions to this problem? There's a different lens to look at it. There's an old tech talk that got me out of the IP-shaped box a lot of us are trapped in: [VIDEO] I got Gemini 1.5 Pro to summarize the transcript, which I butchered a bit to fit in a text box: The Problem: The Internet is treated as a binary concept: You're either connected or not, leading to issues with mobile devices and seamless connectivity. The focus on connections (TCP/IP conversations) hinders security: Security is tied to the pipe, not the data, making it difficult to address issues like spam and content integrity. Inefficient use of resources: Broadcasting and multi-point communication are inefficient as the network is unaware of content, leading to redundant data transmission. The Proposed Solution: Data-centric architecture: Data is identified by name, not location. This enables: Trust and integrity based on data itself, not the source. Efficient multi-point communication and broadcasting. Seamless mobility and intermittent connectivity. Improved security against spam, phishing, and content manipulation. Key principles: Data integrity and trust are derived from the data itself through cryptographic signatures and verification. Immutable content with versioning and updates through supersession. Data segmentation for","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4200736,"author":"seiji","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham develops federated wiki","text":"Ye olde, but still worth watching: Van Jacobson's Google Talk from 2006, \"A New Way to look at Networking\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14472179,"author":"pololee","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Network Protocols","text":"Very good reading. I'd also recommend Van Jacobson's talk [VIDEO] You'll learn some good stories about internet history. He has done a lot of work on TCP congestion control, especially the fast retransmission idea by using duplicate ACKs. There is an interesting thing about TCP. A lot of popular TCP implementation use city names, e.g. TCP Reno, TCP Vegas, TCP Westwood. TCP Westwood is a very interesting implementation. It has very intelligent way to estimate bandwidth, (not just based on duplicate ACKs). You may find this paper very interesting. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"gsffg5xxFQI":[{"hn_comment_id":14421628,"author":"rockmeamedee","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Is Clojure dying, and what has Ruby got to do with it?","text":"I just finished watching this talk \"ClojureScript for Skeptics\" ( [VIDEO] ) that laid out the pros of ClojureScript and completely sold me on trying it out. Weird seeing this article about Clojure dying right after, too. In this talk I watched, the speaker argues for ClojureScript for SPAs because it has: * an excellent standard library (great functional programming so no need for lodash or other hacks, no issues with things like map(Integer.parse), solid date support, etc) * Go-level easy concurrency * Immutable types built-in for a fast React experience (immutable.js by default) * built-in Google Closure Compiler for optimizing, (also with sourcemaps and devtools) * built-in tree-shaking (only import what you use) from Google Closure Compiler * built-in code-splitting (don't import the code for the settings page on the home page, automatically load it when the user goes there), also from Google Closure Compiler And the talk is from 2015! So there's probably been even more added I don't know about yet. Then again, in 2017 I feel like we have an embarrassment of riches of programming languages. I'm already playing around with Elixir (loving it), wanna try out Rust's zero-cost everythings, and have finally finishing learning Haskell on my back burner.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10672661,"author":"edko","month":"2015-12","story_title":"What Holds Me Back from ClojureScript","text":"ClojureScript has some very powerful tools available (figwheel, om/next), and the community is working on resolving many of the issues mentioned in the article. Derek Slager's presentation \"ClosureScript for Skeptics\" is really good and covers many of these topics ( [VIDEO] ). Myself, I prefer ScalaJS because I already know Scala, the tooling is excellent, it is fast, and the resulting JS is of reasonable size. Fortunately, it is not an either/or decision. Both compile to JS and can interoperate without too much effort.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10801957,"author":"Flow","month":"2015-12","story_title":"JavaScript Fatigue","text":"I once tried Yeoman. Angular was the hottest thing ever and I was recommended to use Yeoman to set up a template project. The damn thing downloaded 30000 files into my project. It took a while, but nothing I really noticed until I saw dropbox working for 40 minutes. I just can't take some projects seriously after that. Anyway, compare your problems and effort to things like this: Building a tictactoe game in ClojureScript with reagent and figwheel: [LINK] ClojureScript for Skeptics: [VIDEO] Notice the modularization section that starts around 32m.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15054856,"author":"christophilus","month":"2017-08","story_title":"React and Redux are a joke right?","text":"Clojurescript's bundle size for real world apps is decent, especially given the power it provides. If all you're doing is a 3 line JavaScript, Clojurescript won't benefit you. But if you're writing a complex application,it will beat or match your typical JS stack in terms of code size. I suggest watching this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gtLxZiiuaXs":[{"hn_comment_id":9989534,"author":"TimFogarty","month":"2015-08","story_title":"India and Bangladesh have begun the exchange of over 160 enclaves","text":"For a great explanation of the enclaves and exclaves described in the article, you might like to check out this youtube video: [VIDEO] The visual aids definitely help.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18693699,"author":"bchallenor","month":"2018-12","story_title":"DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter","text":"There's a fascinating YouTube series called \"The Most Complex International Borders in the World\" about enclaves and exclaves. [1] There are even some \"counter-enclaves\", e.g. a part of the Netherlands inside Belgium inside the Netherlands. [2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"gvZSpET11ZY":[{"hn_comment_id":12026482,"author":"whamlastxmas","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you manage you money?","text":"You might like this: [VIDEO] My personal method is to have a standard of living high enough that I don't have to really think about it much. A small amount of discomfort, but not much. I'm a naturally frugal person so it's not so bad. I have a single credit card, a single debit card, and various Vanguard accounts (IRA, Roth IRA, Brokerage). I keep a few months of cash liquid in the bank account, whenever it gets a couple thousand over that I transfer it to my Vanguard accounts. Vanguard is very easy to manage. About an 80/20 mix between US and international, and an 80/20 mix between stock index and bond index for both US and international. So only 4 index symbols to deal with and rebalance every 6 months or so. Increase the size of your bond holdings as you get older. I log into my bank's website to pay my balance every month, and to view my transactions for that month to make sure there's no fraud/stolen card. I look at my net worth in Mint every few months just out of curiosity. I used to use Mint for tracking budgets for stuff like food, but I found that my happiness went down drastically if I tried to artificially limit my spending because I feel like I'm already really frugal. This is enough for 95%+ of people assuming they're saving enough and making enough to save enough.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29057681,"author":"alecst","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How to start learning about investments?","text":"John Oliver had a great bit on retirement plans [1] if you're interested in passive investing. I've pretty much only followed this advice since 2016, with minor changes accounting for my personal situation. My Vanguard portfolio has tracked the market, which means my annualized rate of return is about 12%, at an expense ratio of .1% (how much I pay in fees of that original 12%.) Of course that won't last forever, but it's a good balance of risk and return. A bank account usually pays around .25-1% a year. Active investors, on average, do as well as passive investors, but incur greater costs. [2] I only \"actively invest\" for fun, and as a way of connecting with my friends and family who also enjoy the stock market casino. [1] [VIDEO] [2] Warren Buffett's side of [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30137336,"author":"giorgioz","month":"2022-01","story_title":"What I learned from a year of watching bad financial advice on TikTok","text":"ETF aren't rocket science. They are not super easy either, maybe 2-4 weeks of research. It's quite probably they will literally DOUBLE your savings when you will retired. And you will be able to retire when you say so not when the governments tells you that you can. There are 2 types of pensions funds essentially. 1) The ones that do not save money. You pay pensions taxes now that just go to pay the people retired today. Believe it or not the vast majority of governments pension funds are like this. In Italy it's like this. You IRPEF money doesn't go in an investment, it pays the retirees of today. Now just wait and see what we'll happen with life expectancy increasing and population reduction. 2) The ones that buy things for you. And guess what they buy: usually 3 bonds and 2 ETFs. And they will take 1-2% for that. And you might think: \"oh but 1-2% I can give awayt if I do not have to care about anything\". In practice though ETFs return 5-8% per year when kept for decades and the earnings are averaged. So the pension fund takes 1-2% from 5-8% which is 20-30%. On top of that there is compounding interest. When you will have retired it's likely you will have given away half of your savings to the company managing the pension fund/retiring plan. Watch this video from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver that explains the last concept very well: [VIDEO] AS USUAL, DO NOT JUST TRUST ME, RESEARCH WHAT I SAID (AND NOT ON TIK TOK)","stance":"rec"}],"gwf5mAlI7Ug":[{"hn_comment_id":38245821,"author":"ethbr1","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Lost Doctor Who episodes found but owner is reluctant to hand them to BBC","text":"Two gems (among many)... Periscope Films (on YouTube): [LINK] Digitized 40-60s era reels. It still amazes me how effectively they presented complex topics then. E.g. mechanical naval gunnery computers: [VIDEO] And this on-the-ground movie on the Columbia student occupation in 1968: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17747224,"author":"jeffwass","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Tide-Predicting Machine No. 2","text":"You might like this video about the US Navy fire control computer. Mechanical yet also programmable. Eg with cam-based calculation modules like 1/x or differential gearings to perform addition : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21000483,"author":"Scaevolus","month":"2019-09","story_title":"UCLA\u2019s 1948 Mechanical Computer [video]","text":"If you want more information on how you can do computation with mechanical systems, try this video: U.S. NAVY BASIC MECHANISMS OF FIRE CONTROL COMPUTERS MECHANICAL COMPUTER INSTRUCTIONAL FILM 27794 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22807640,"author":"tzs","month":"2020-04","story_title":"How to Use a Differential Analyzer","text":"This could use a lot more visual aids. Here's a film that goes over a lot of the basics: \"BASIC MECHANISMS IN FIRE CONTROL COMPUTERS\" [1]. It's a 1953 US Navy instructional film explaining how mechanical fire control computers worked. These machines took inputs giving the speed and direction the ship was traveling, the speed and direction the target was moving, the distance and direction to the target, the wind speed and direction, and other factors, and computed how to aim the guns to shell the target. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24938644,"author":"fallous","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Show HN: What would mechanical programming look like?","text":"I went a bit further back when I saw \"mechanical programming\" and thought of this video. [VIDEO] Mechanical analog computing FTW!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25544294,"author":"segfaultbuserr","month":"2020-12","story_title":"1937 film explains how a car differential works","text":"If you enjoy this, don't miss the video lecture on World War 2-era mechanical fire control computers by the U.S. Navy. I learned you can do a lot of computations with gears and shafts. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30990471,"author":"dragontamer","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Why a Slide Rule Works","text":"So I've known about slide-rules for a while. What I didn't realize was that the mechanical principles of slide-rules were applied to fire-control computers on WW2-era Battleships. [LINK] These computers had slide-rule like cylinders that would rotate. As you aimed the gun sights \"at\" a target, the gun's coordinates were being mapped to a cylinder, which would move the gun a different direction (you have to aim the gun \"higher\" the further away the target is, to account for gravity \"drooping\" the bullet). In effect; the weirdly shaped cylinder inside the fire-control computer is a pre-computed solution that maps x/y coordinate inputs to a z-coordinate output (where \"z\" would be fed into the gun's raw aiming system). The different parameters of the gun were programmed in with gears and cranks, moving the cylinder around physically. For more details, see: [VIDEO] Its a 20-minute video. The cylinder mechanism (of 2x inputs mapped to 1x output) is specifically talked about here: [VIDEO] . Carefully crafted cylinders could be any pre-computed 2-input / 1-output function. --------- Mechanical computers are fun. Slide rules are but the simplest kind. People were using more complicated \"mechanical computers\" for very serious combat / rangefinding / etc. systems just a few decades ago, before the advent of modern digital computers.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31465126,"author":"pkaye","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Collection of US Navy Training Courses Developed","text":"The US Navy had this great video on principles of mechanical computers. Using cams and gears to compute functions. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35315951,"author":"tiedieconderoga","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Reverse-engineering the Globus INK, a Soviet spaceflight navigation computer","text":"You've probably already seen it, but there's a classic US Navy training film which talks about how they were used to solve differential equations in battleships around the WWII era. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38516789,"author":"maxglute","month":"2023-12","story_title":"1962 Military Innstructional Video on Magnetic Cores","text":"From top of head I really enjoy: MAPMAKING PROCESS, THE [LINK] mechanism computer of fire control computer (a classic) [VIDEO] Physical science documentary series whose exact title I can't recall. It has been a while. To find more, my method is to do the occasional PeriscopeFilm binge (on youtube that digitizes a lot of old media, with great descriptions), always find find something interesting I haven't watched. If style, delivery really good, there's usually something in description to point to more. Like \"U.S. NAVY TRAINING FILM\", which usually returns playlists, and videos in same era often share quality. The technical ones generally don't disappoint. Another one is The Best Film Archives with good military training playlists. Tangent for others: the one I wish to remember, is a deleted/banned channel, one of the original US archival footage channel, with I think 1000s of videos, that got wiped many years ago right when youtube started drm crackdown. It had a companion website with obsessive amount of detail and tags to find the perfect video. And from what I recall, it didn't feel like a business like periscopefilm, but a passion project. It was an incredible amount of work to have been wiped out.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41304187,"author":"turtledragonfly","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Basic Mechanisms In Fire Control Computers (1953) [video]","text":"I especially like the section on differential gears, demonstrating their use as computing units: (timestamped link) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gwvA49ZXnf8":[{"hn_comment_id":25495542,"author":"asats","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Russian opposition leader Navalny dupes spy into revealing how he was poisoned","text":"If you haven't seen the full investigation released last week I'd strongly recommend you check it out, top notch investigative journalism. The video has English subtitles: [LINK] Also here's the full phone call with the FSB agent, with english transcript: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39019747,"author":"cedws","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Bellingcat Open Technical Questions 2024","text":"I highly recommend reading Bellingcat's investigation into the poisoning of Alexei Navalny and how they tracked down the individual FSB officers responsible: [LINK] It's the most impressive investigative work I have ever read. One can only imagine the capabilities of nation state actors if an NGO is capable of this. Even more incredible is that Alexei Navalny personally called an FSB officer and was able to extract a confession: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25868124,"author":"wyldfire","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Novichok Nerve Agent Poisoning","text":"In case you missed it: Navalny found conclusive evidence of a cover-up for his poisoning [1] [2] [3]. But the best part is how he did it: caller ID spoof + social engineering. IMO exploiting the authoritarian nature/culture was really clever. Every time Kudryavtsev demurs about revealing more details, Navalny (as Ustinov) calls him by his full name. To me, it sounds like he's threatening him or reminding him of their relative position in the hierarchy. Each time, Kudryavtsev continues to spill the beans and give up co-conspirators. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"gxAaO2rsdIs":[{"hn_comment_id":22716520,"author":"foobarbecue","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Japan set to ban entry from the U.S. as early as next week","text":"Part of 3 Blue 1 Brown's excellent latest video simulates travel restrictions and suggests they're not very effective: [VIDEO] . However, that was only for cutting travel between all communities by a factor of 4, rather than completely banning travel between two particular communities / countries.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22905289,"author":"kaunta","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Building a command line tool to simulate the spread of an infection","text":"Garrett, thank you. * * * My inspiration for writing this came from watching 3Blue1Brown's YouTube video, \"Simulating an epidemic\": [VIDEO] His simulations cover several scenarios: - Simulating social distancing. - Having people travel to a central location (e.g. a grocery store). - What if the government is able to identify and isolate cases? - Simulating multiple communities with travel, that put quarantine measures in place. - What happens when people get tired of social distancing. * * * Thanks for sharing your code. I see that you are using gnuplot to visualize the output of the script. Have you considered using the csv module ( [LINK] ) to output the data, instead of using the print() function? That way, you wouldn't have to manually add in spaces around the data and stringify the numeric data. >>> import csv, sys >>> writer = csv.writer(sys.stdout, delimiter=\" \") >>> writer.writerow([\"#\", \"T\", \"S\", \"I\", \"R\"]) # T S I R In the script, usage would look something like this: import csv import sys ... writer = csv.writer(sys.stdout, delimiter=\" \") writer.writerow([\"#\", \"T\", \"S\", \"I\", \"R\"]) writer.writerow([T, S, I, R]) while I > 1000: ... writer.writerow([T, S, I, R])","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22711544,"author":"gilbetron","month":"2020-03","story_title":"FDA grants emergency use authorization for 5-13 minute Covid-19 test","text":"If we can test and isolate, we can manage how the disease progresses through society, with a (very very slight, now) chance of stopping it. While not scientific, this is illustrative and well done that shows many aspects of disease spread: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22727266,"author":"mcsb4","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Austria to make basic face masks compulsory in supermarkets","text":"Homemade masks made of a double layer of tea towel cloth are not only protecting others but also protect yourself nearly as effectively as N95 masks. The original research was made by PHE - Public Health England and the results are: B atrophaeus - ~1um : Surgical mask 96.35% filtering Double layer tea towel 96.71% filtering Bacteriophage MS2 - 23nm : Surgical mask 89.52% filtering Tea towel one layer 72.46% filtering The full paper is on researchgate, title: \"Testing the Efficacy of Homemade Masks: Would They Protect in an Influenza Pandemic?\" Also every super market should have the use of hand sanitizer obligatory at the entrance. There is a pretty good video for simulations of the epidemic spreading [1] - it is not going to stop until we either have a vaccine or ~60% of the population have antibodies. So the choice is to sit the next 12-18months at home or we fight the transmission of the virus. Masks cost nothing compared to the economic disaster that we are running into. The virus spreads via mouth and nose and secondary via the hands. So just stop it at the source. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22902446,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Covid-19 Antibody Seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California","text":"> ...noticeable reduction in the spread? I believe the SIR model [0] answers those questions. 3blue1brown's video on the topic is super digestible and informative [1]. In short, the discovery of a prophylactic if not a therapeutic treatment are our best immediate bets, absent which, quarantines and lockdowns will have to persist to curb the spread of a disease as infectious as covid-19 whilst we patiently wait for an effective vaccine against it [2]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24927795,"author":"tmabraham","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos","text":"BTW, he's currently co-teaching a course on Julia with some really great lectures on computational thinking: [LINK] He also had a nice video about epidemics/pandemics: [VIDEO] All using manim for visualizations.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25978900,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Contra Weyl on Technocracy","text":"> Technocrats used complicated mathematical models to determine that mass vaccination would create a \"herd immunity\" to disease. The SIR model is very simple [LINK] At the beginning of the covid19 epidemic everyone and their dog was writing one and publishing a demo version. It was interesting/scary to modify the parameters and see how thing changed. Also, try to fix misinformation in the models, like a 50% death rate. Anyway, a SIR model can be programed in 20 lines of codes, and is pretty straightforward. Adding a vaccine is like 5 additional lines at most. Also, the main idea is very simple to understand. (Someone should write a tutorial of SIR in Excel/GoogleSheets, it's interesting to see the graphics.) The most simple models just assume that everyone meets everyone randomly. It's more complicated if you want to consider a more realistic model of how people move. For a decision about lockdown you need the complex model, but to understand herd immunity the simple model is good enough. For a nice explanation of more complicated models, there is a video of 3Blue1Brown: \"Simulating an epidemic\" [VIDEO] Note that he explains that the models in this video are not 100% accurate, some number are chosen to get nice graphics, they are only useful to get some insight but not get quantitative predictions.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27003558,"author":"systemvoltage","month":"2021-05","story_title":"India\u2019s second wave of Covid-19 feels nothing like its first","text":"Dynamics of the virus spread is quite interesting. 3Blue1Brown made a fascinating video about how an epidemic spreads: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"h2I8AoB1xgU":[{"hn_comment_id":15093927,"author":"niftich","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Water Found Deep Inside the Moon","text":"For a dramatic coverage of this exact subject, I highly recommend 'Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror' [1] from NASA JPL. [1] [LINK] or on Youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23562863,"author":"perryizgr8","month":"2020-06","story_title":"NASA rushing to complete Mars launch before planet moves out of range","text":"> Oh, it has to land like the Falcon 9 as well, except hovering and lowering itself on a tether, like the Air Cav for Mars. Here's a video that blows my mind every time I watch it. [VIDEO] Such a complicated landing sequence, and needs to work correctly the first time, all autonomously. And it worked!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25706351,"author":"rossdavidh","month":"2021-01","story_title":"NASA's Curiosity rover: 3k days on Mars","text":"Somewhat over-the-top but still cool discussion of this by actual NASA tech folks, made before the landing actually happened: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"h2cs8QLnxlU":[{"hn_comment_id":11953060,"author":"maheart","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Lenin was a mushroom","text":"Haha, hilarious, thanks for sharing. I had to see this for myself. Source: Video, part1: [VIDEO] Video, part2: [LINK] The \"revelation\" occurs at 2m36s: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18423826,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2018-11","story_title":"How Vladimir Lenin Became a Mushroom (2017)","text":"Haha that's awesome! Part I: [VIDEO] As a kid I read a book which seriously made the case that Jesus was a magic mushroom - the English archaeologist and Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John M Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) \"Allegro's book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) argued...that stories of early Christianity originated in an Essene clandestine cult centred around the use of Psilocybin mushroom, and that the New Testament is the coded record of this shamanistic cult. ...that the authors of the Christian gospels did not understand the Essene thought..[that] the Christian tradition is based on a misunderstanding of the scrolls. ...that Jesus in the Gospels was in fact a code for a type of hallucinogen, the Amanita muscaria, and that Christianity was the product of an ancient 'sex-and-mushroom' cult.\"[0] Well, I learnt since that Santa Claus is a mushroom myth[1], and the soma of the Vedas (the earliest Hindu texts) sure sounds like mushrooms.. edit: Added last paragraph and..Ok downvoter, care to explain? Maybe you have some good reason, but it just makes me dislike HN when people downvote for apparently no reason but..well, who knows. [0] [LINK] [LINK] [1] I read about that in Scientific American 20ish years ago. Some interesting leads here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"h3gwyHNo7MI":[{"hn_comment_id":8418345,"author":"bluekeybox","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Project Cybersyn and the origins of the Big Data nation","text":"Related and a very good BBC documentary on the role (and tragedy) of engineering and planning in the USSR: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10680999,"author":"rdtsc","month":"2015-12","story_title":"In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (2012)","text":"Speaking of that I recommend watching Pandora's Box documentary. It is fun and pretty well made (although the quality on youtube is rather low). Here is where they start talking about Gosplan -- the central economic planning department: [VIDEO] It is funny to hear how they tried to control things. At some point during Stalin's time they planned how many people to arrest and where. No matter if they were guilty or not. The it talks how they tried to modulate various controls -- they measured success by amount of raw material consumed, so all of the sudden they ended up with oversized couches, and trains were being run for thousands of miles empty just to burn the fuel so everyone can get a bonus during the years' end. Then they started to fix prices for everything. That ended in disaster of course and so on. Then have to like the taxi driver driving past Gosplan and saying \"how they hell do they come with such ridiculous plans\". EDIT: They also mention Victor Glushkov, the father of Soviet Cybernetics. Here is a documentary about him as well. It is putting it in good light as if Soviet Cybernetics used in planning would be successful. It is a propaganda film. But it is fun to watch: [LINK] He talked about paper-less office and economy back in the 60s.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46160608,"author":"hylaride","month":"2025-12","story_title":"The US polluters that are rewriting the EU's human rights and climate law","text":"The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US. They managed to be relatively competitive in some endeavours by concentrated massive percentages of their national people and resources on certain endeavours (industrialization, space, the military), often with brutal violence. The US was militarily competitive, often with more advanced equipment, at a fraction the economic resources - and did it at the same time as having one of the highest living standards in the world (and often had the positive results of military tech bleeding into the civilian sector, like computers). Magnitogorsk, a massive soviet city built around a steel mill, was essentially built with American expertise (this whole documentary is extremely fascinating on how central planning got to sophisticated and how the USSR ground to a halt): [VIDEO] This is not to say that any planning is bad, but having a central state trying to control everything from how many belt buckles to make down to how far cab drivers should drive each year, and you're going to become a bureaucratic nightmare. Central planning everything becomes a logarithmic planning nightmare, especially when trying to innovate at the same time. You can't plan around output of innovation because the planners are often far removed from everything. A planner would probably try and \"plan\" on how to breed a faster horse instead of a car, for example. I'm reminded of an interview I once saw with Gorbachev. He was talking about how he ","stance":"rec"}],"h47zZrqjgLc":[{"hn_comment_id":31174706,"author":"Jasper_","month":"2022-04","story_title":"MCC (Master Chief Collection) Server Incident Summary","text":"This talk from the Halo: Reach team might be one of my favorite game networking talks I've ever seen: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43436999,"author":"c4wrd","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Activision Cut Call of Duty's Build Time by 50%","text":"For those who aren't in the video game development field and like technical content, I cannot recommend watching GDC's content enough (even better, attending!). Although this blog post isn't as detailed as I've seen them do in the past, I appreciate that game developers have the opportunity to share their wins like this externally. If you enjoy watching technical content and video games, the following videos are greatly entertaining deep dives into ludicrously technically complicated bugs or performance optimizations done to deliver the gaming experience that I myself take for granted. - I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of Halo: Reach: [VIDEO] - 8 Frames in 16ms: Rollback Networking in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2: [LINK] - It IS Rocket Science! The Physics of Rocket League Detailed: [LINK] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45685836,"author":"stefan_bobev","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region","text":"I appreciate the details this went through, especially laying out the exact timelines of operations and how overlaying those timelines produces unexpected effects. One of my all time favourite bits about distributed systems comes from the (legendary) talk at GDC - I Shot You First[1] - where the speaker describes drawing sequence diagrams with tilted arrows to represent the flow of time and asking \"Where is the lag?\". This method has saved me many times, all throughout my career from making games, to livestream and VoD services to now fintech. Always account for the flow of time when doing a distributed operation - time's arrow always marches forward, your systems might not. But the stale read didn't scare me nearly as much as this quote: > Since this situation had no established operational recovery procedure, engineers took care in attempting to resolve the issue with DWFM without causing further issues Everyone can make a distributed system mistake (these things are hard). But I did not expect something as core as the service managing the leases on the physical EC2 nodes to not have recovery procedure. Maybe I am reading too much into it, maybe what they meant was that they didn't have a recovery procedure for \"this exact\" set of circumstances, but it is a little worrying even if that were the case. EC2 is one of the original services in AWS. At this point I expect it to be so battle hardened that very few edge cases would not have been identified. It seems that the EC2 fa","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31540604,"author":"SahAssar","month":"2022-05","story_title":"How do video games stay in sync?","text":"A great talk about this is about halo reach'es networking: [VIDEO] I haven't seen it in a few years (re-watching it now), but IIRC they talk about how they do forecasting of things like shielding, grenade throws but need to reconciliate state after.","stance":"rec"}],"h4Uu5eyN6VU":[{"hn_comment_id":20534137,"author":"tasubotadas","month":"2019-07","story_title":"\u201cMy GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea\u201d","text":"All EU officials are elected directly or elected/assigned by the people that were elected. This will help you to get the facts straight: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31361859,"author":"dijit","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11","text":"Thanks for taking the time to think about it. > Democracy itself always gives rights to the majority against the will of the minority. this is true and it has a name I believe; the \"Tyranny of the Majority\", I think. > The tyranny of the majority (or tyranny of the masses) is an inherent weakness to majority rule in which the majority of an electorate pursues exclusively its own objectives at the expense of those of the minority factions. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, being _more democratic_ ultimately lends itself to being this way. However one neat trick the EU has (and I promise I'm not trying to spin this as pro-EU, as it's only in one place): is that the direct votes are split proportionally. This means that lesser represented groups get a voice in the EU parliament. For the UK with their \"First past the post\" system, and winner take all government; where a party like UKIP can get 12.6% of all votes and win 0 representation in parliament.... well, lets say it's a stark contrast. explained very nicely; here: [LINK] The EU voting system (the way in which we elect MEPs to parliament) is detailed in this video by the BBC: [LINK] ; as you'll see it's much more representative. I know of other videos that speak pragmatically about the EU, its problems and if it's worth it (though with a slight pro-EU stance): [VIDEO] I also found this video that asks the question if the EU is democratic, which I think makes good points and you can draw different conclusions from it: [LINK] I","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31922276,"author":"BadOakOx","month":"2022-06","story_title":"EU Commission says it cannot find messages with Pfizer CEO","text":"> > Ursula von der Leyen was not elected by EU citizens > But was she not elected by EU members of parliment, who were elected by EU citizens? This is a common argument when criticizing the EU, but in the end everybody is elected by the people of EU (directly or indirectly). Here is a quick video explaining how it works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"h5cm7HOAqZY":[{"hn_comment_id":20032367,"author":"Ygg2","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Steep decline in nuclear power would threaten energy security and climate goals","text":"Because, Simpsons. I admit, it's only half joking. But it seems more and more nuclear + renewables (+ some carbon removal) is the only solution forward. For those interested why that might be look at this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20696140,"author":"tbirrell","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Texas Power Prices Briefly Surpass $9k Amid Scorching Heat","text":"Thats is the only reason not counting infrastructure, storage, peak-usage logistics, winter-usage logistics. Oh, and the fact that weather is temperamental, not consistent, not under our control at all, or able to change to meet our demand. Oil and Gas already has infrastructure, and solves literally every one of those other issue due to the fact it can ramp up quickly if necessary. If renewable advocates actually cared about something besides being anti-oil, they would see that the best renewable strategy is something to the effect of 70-80% nuclear, and 20-30% wind/solar/hydro with efficient storage options. And finally, here is a Practical Engineering video that says the same thing but with data to prove it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24506558,"author":"V6HBGNQHU","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ultra Safe Nuclear","text":"When people talk about the cost of solar they ignore the price of batteries and underestimate the amount of batteries required. Watch this video about renewables in California[0]. The video mentions a study that would put the cost of energy storage required for California to be 100% on renewables would be over $3.6 trillion which is equivalent to an entire year's GDP for the state. The video author explained that study's methodology got that number by assuming enough to store excess capacity during the summer to provide power in winter when not enough would be generated on most days. This isn't great because li-on batteries are not great for long term storage and would lose power over time. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32155847,"author":"kpennell","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Germany to Rethink Nuclear Shutdown as Energy Crisis Deepens","text":"I'd be curious to hear your take on this [VIDEO] (California's Renewable Energy Problem by the Youtube channel Real Engineering) Walks through the numbers on what it would take to run California on renewables + storage alone. Because of the intermittency, it seems like the costs of storage (even though it gets better/cheaper each year) maker it not possible.","stance":"rec"}],"h67k9eEw9AY":[{"hn_comment_id":6645304,"author":"chill1","month":"2013-10","story_title":"California woman ticketed for wearing Google Glass while driving","text":"For starters, we could all stop calling them car \"accidents\"... The language we use has a direct affect on the emotions we feel while talking about subjects such as this. Softening our language takes the humanity out of life. I refer you to George Carlin [1], who explained it better than I could. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8800435,"author":"7Figures2Commas","month":"2014-12","story_title":"\u201cEmployee\u201d and other words that make me cringe","text":"Humble suggestion: the author should watch George Carlin's skit on \"soft language\"[1] and reflect. A mature individual can contribute to a company he or she didn't start and still feel a sense of responsibility and ownership without being coddled by language that pretends employees aren't employees, teams have no leaders, and everybody is equally responsible for the success or failure of the business. Frankly, I would probably avoid a company run by a founder who appears to have hang-ups about being an employer and seems reluctant to accept the responsibilities and rewards of leadership. This is about as appealing as going for a ride in a car without a driver. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"h6fcK_fRYaI":[{"hn_comment_id":23220146,"author":"stared","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Electrons May Well Be Conscious","text":"Closely related, especially given the context of consciousness, one of my favorite stories: \"The Egg\" ( [LINK] , or if you prefer read by Kurzgesagt: [VIDEO] ).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24093078,"author":"bigmattystyles","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Films that made you see the world differently?","text":"Jean de Florette (1986) and its conclusion Manon des Sources (1986), great 80s French movies, top notch cast you would even recognize in the US. Also Le ch\u00e2teau de ma m\u00e8re (1990) and La gloire de mon p\u00e8re (1990). I haven\u2019t watched the second pair since I was a small boy, but I remember being captivated. A complete tangent is this Kurzgesagt video on YouTube where they consider the possibility that you will be every human and live every life. I can\u2019t stop thinking about it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27086247,"author":"beckman466","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Apple Silicon Hardware: SPRR and Guarded Exception Levels (GXF)","text":"> People aren't \"gifted\" with technology I used the words \"humans having been gifted digital technology\" as I am a marxist and I believe that all the technologies and scientific knowledge that we reverse engineer from nature is gifted to us by a higher power. Others talk about the brilliance of human minds, yet since I see us as a part of nature, there's no distinction in that for me. Another reason I say it that way is because unfortunately the 'great man theory/myth' still reigns supreme in the tech industry [1]. I think though that this 'brilliant mind' story that is commonly told in the west seems to have often justified detrimental and destructive human supremacy/domination over the rest of nature (also leading us to the edge of the cliff now with global warming). Anyways, I think that we all tell ourselves different stories and this is one of mine. This is another story I tell myself because it is ridiculously beautiful to me: [LINK] or Kurzgesagt version: [VIDEO] > I was privileged enough to have my mother sacrifice everything(her property, her life, her family and her homeland) to pull me out of a warzone to provide for me so I would be in a position to be able to build these skills. That sounds incredibly difficult and distressing for her (and possibly for you too). Thank you for sharing this personal story here. > Just calling the whole thing privilege is such a disservice to all she had to sacrifice for me to be able to be in this position. That isn't what I am ref","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38422785,"author":"timetraveller26","month":"2023-11","story_title":"They're Made Out of Meat","text":"The Egg is one of my life long favorite histories. kurzgesagt did a video animation of it a few years ago [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29284071,"author":"freediver","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: I feel so shallow and dumb when I see what other smart people are doing","text":"A perspective that may be interesting to you - all those successful around you are you, as well as the billions less fortunate - they are also you. \"The Egg\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32400343,"author":"BbzzbB","month":"2022-08","story_title":"From novice to master, and back again (2013)","text":"Kurzgesagt's short video is great too, it's (quasi-)verbatim, but the music, animation and narration makes it quite poignant. The idea behind the story is quite fascinating to me. If simulationists are right, it's as good or better of a \"why\" as \"origin seeking\" IMO. Not that I believe one way or the other, I just think the idea's interesting to ponder on. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34470373,"author":"majewsky","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Make Up a Guy","text":"Since we're linking to The Egg, we should also link to the animated narration of it by Kurzgesagt: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"h7Sv_pS8MgQ":[{"hn_comment_id":24101848,"author":"jdc","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media","text":"Right - see the MedCram lectures on the topic: How to Beat COVID-19 with At-Home, Rapid Result Testing: 5 Min. Summary by Dr. Mina (Antigen Tests) [LINK] Coronavirus Pandemic Update 98: At Home COVID-19 Testing - A Possible Breakthrough (~ 15 min) [VIDEO] At Home, Cheap, COVID-19 Tests with Results in 15 Minutes: How to Fix Testing with Dr. Michael Mina (~ 1 hr) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25755305,"author":"devy","month":"2021-01","story_title":"U.S. to require negative Covid-19 tests for international air passengers","text":"> But if the rapid tests are as unreliable in general as they were for me, it\u2019s sort of no wonder COVID is spreading like wildfire. Many rapid tests are indeed not accurate[1] but they still serve a purpose, depending on the sensitivity and specificity of the tests[2]. For the rapid tests with high sensitivity and you get a positive result, it's highly likely you have COVID. For the rapid tests with high specificity and you get a negative result, it's highly likely that you don't have COVID. And the public health measures of testing / contact tracing ONLY works if testing results come back quick. PCR tests are neither fast nor cheap, so those are not as effective in prevention of spreading because you don't do those all the time (slow + expensive). Medcram has a good video talking about this. [3] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"h7apO7q16V0":[{"hn_comment_id":29309951,"author":"withinboredom","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?","text":"Not a book, but I truly enjoy this guy\u2019s videos: [VIDEO] . I usually watch them while eating lunch. He does a truly fantastic job.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33828873,"author":"squaredot","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Understanding Convolutions in Probability: A Mad-Science Perspective","text":"As the author mentions, convolutions for signal processing and convolutions for probability are essentially equivalent things in two different contexts. It is interesting that the same concept is behind the multiplication of polynomials. In the discrete case we have the parallel of the vectors representing ... the (discretized) probability density <-> the (discrete) signal intensity <-> the coefficients of the polynomial ... in the respective context. If we look at the discrete case, since the operation of convolution is computationally expensive (O(n^3)), people often rely on the Fast Fourier Transform Algorithm (FFT), that runs in O(n log(n)). An excellent and very enjoyable video on the FFT applied to the polynomial multiplication is [VIDEO] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34209760,"author":"kippinitreal","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?","text":"That video did the same for me. I also like the reducible video for Fast Fourier Transforms as well as the Veratasium piece that shares some fun history. Reducible - FFTs the most ingenious algorithm ever [VIDEO] Veritasium - The Most Important Algorithm of All Time [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40846259,"author":"tverbeure","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Convolutions, Fast Fourier Transform and polynomials (2022)","text":"If you haven\u2019t seen it yet, you should watch this video: [VIDEO] It derives the FFT algorithm from polynomial multiplication and it\u2019s fantastic . I rewatch it every 6 months or so.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45469655,"author":"tverbeure","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Discrete Fourier Transform","text":"I almost always prefer text over video, but this video on the same subject is fantastic: [VIDEO] . I watch it at least once every year. Also, the title of the blog post (and by extension this HN post) is IMO not really correct: it's not about the DFT but specifically about the FFT.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28941742,"author":"jstx1","month":"2021-10","story_title":"A gentle introduction to the FFT (2002)","text":"And an FFT explanation by Reducible - [VIDEO] It's in a similar style to 3blue1brown (uses the same visualisation library) but the video focuses specifically on the FFT algorithm, not on Fourier transforms in general. I'm pretty sure Grant himself recommended the Reducible video at some point.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34714187,"author":"foooobaba","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Polynomial Interpolation","text":"Related: Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) can be used for polynomial interpolation in O(nlogn) time (if you get to choose the points, and use \u201ccomplex roots of unity\u201d), where n is the degree of the polynomial, and is used as a step in multiplication of polynomials in O(nlogn) as well. This video covers it well: [VIDEO] Also, chapter 30 of CLRS: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47817950,"author":"medbar","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Understanding the FFT Algorithm (2013)","text":"For anyone interested and with 30 minutes to spare, I would recommend the youtube video [1] by Reducible for an intuition on how FFT works. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hB6eY73sLV0":[{"hn_comment_id":25252310,"author":"qwertox","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Flappy Bird in 228 bytes","text":"This reminds me of the incredible Flappy Birds SNES Code Injection into Super Mario World. A must-see video. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11984498,"author":"TheLilHipster","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Crash Course \u2013 Educational course videos on YouTube","text":"Youtube is full of hidden gems, all a matter of taste. Meta-programming: [LINK] Math'n'music edutainment: [LINK] Science edutainment: [LINK] Feats of incredible gaming skill: [LINK] Tidbits of hacking ingenuity: [VIDEO] Looking for heart in pop culture: [LINK] You can get lost in the maze of excess information. It's great - i think...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18074343,"author":"tribby","month":"2018-09","story_title":"'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record","text":"super impressive stuff. I'm generally unfamiliar with speedrunning, but I am familiar with the billy mitchell controversies, so I'm surprised that people accept the legitimacy of streamed runs. wouldn't it be trivial-enough to fake? tangental: my personal favorite mario-related feat is sethbling injecting flappy bird into super mario world manually: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24458049,"author":"kibwen","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Super Mario Bros. 3 in 3 Minutes \u2013 World Record Speedrun Explained [video]","text":"I don't know about the run shown in the OP, but there are a fair number of memory-manipulation/ACE speedruns that are feasible in RTA (\"real-time attack\", a.k.a. something a human could pull off, as distinct from TAS). Off the top of my head I can think of such routes for Pokemon Red/Blue, Ocarina of Time, and Super Mario World. To answer your question of \"how likely is one to pull this off\" for those three, the Pokemon one requires no almost advanced execution, other than turning off the console at a precise point to corrupt the save data you otherwise just need to follow a simple (though long) series of steps. The Mario one requires some pixel-perfect precision, and runners often used hacked ROMs that display coordinates in order to train. The Zelda one requires exact angles to be held on the analog stick, and I've heard of people creating guides out of cardboard and rubber bands in order to help them achieve the angles more reliably. Sorry that I don't have any video links on hand, but you could almost certainly find examples of these in the GDQ archives. EDIT: Found a good video for the SMW example, by SethBling, which actually goes a step further and manually reprograms SMW into Flappy Bird: [VIDEO] EDIT 2: Here's an excellent explanation of the Zelda ACE: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26661668,"author":"argvargc","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Hacker Exploits Bugs in Original \u2018Doom\u2019 Code to Run \u2018Snake\u2019 Inside the Game","text":"This one creates a Flappy Bird clone by hand from within SMW, using the controller under ordinary manual control, on an original, unmodded SNES (with a couple or other standard controllers attached with buttons taped down). Explains the process in detail, which includes creating a kind of crude \"IDE\" using the score table as feedback for hex values input to make the process faster and less error-prone: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32000282,"author":"SkeuomorphicBee","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Arbitrary Code Execution in Super Mario All-Stars [video]","text":"Just to add some context, arbitrary code execution in Super Mario World is nothing new, it has been known since 2014. There was a tool assisted demonstration at Awesome Games Done Quick 2014 [1] where they inject a pong and a snake game using a TASBot (a robot controller that replays input scripts to the console). And in 2016 a streamer performed it manually to inject a flappy birds game [2] (this second video is really good, he goes into detail of the process). So, what this newer demonstration brings is the use of the known arbitrary code execution capabilities of \"Super Mario World\" to help finish all 5 games in \"Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World\" as quick as possible. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40287980,"author":"Dwedit","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Hackers discover how to reprogram NES Tetris from within the game","text":"Sometimes even after you've come up with the exploit, you can create something really beautiful for the console to run afterwards. Pokemon Yellow: [LINK] Super Mario World: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43234646,"author":"tbalsam","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Speedrunners are vulnerability researchers, they just don't know it yet","text":"I'm a speedrunner, and I'm pretty sure this is well known -- and accepted as standard in some categories! It's a pretty well accepted standard (to the point of the headline being almost a mild offense!). In the gaming world, undefined software behavior is critical to this sort of thing, we see this especially in some games like the legendary exploits found in the Ocarina of Time speedruns for example. I mean, in Super Mario World, SethBling did code injection to manually run a version of Flappy Bird (how ironic given the origin of the pipes!) in the game. By hand. No savestates. It took forever and the run through is really and truly fascinating: [VIDEO] I speedrun things other than games as well -- and so the generalization is not just that we are security researchers, we are people who fundamentally learn the \"shape\" of a thing very, very well, and ways that this shape can be used to get from one state on that shape to another. In conclusion -- yes, it can be something as simple as security research! But the joy and the beauty of speedrunning is something so much bigger and beautiful than that -- though it certainly is one outcome that can be had!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45428158,"author":"BuildTheRobots","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Bad Apple but it's played inside Super Mario Bros","text":"My understanding is that they're glitching the game to inject data into memory, in this case processor instructions. And then they use another glitch to jump to and execute that code. No modifications needed to the hardware or ROM, you're just being extremely selective about how to play the game to cause memory to get flipped. This video is done by hand and explains a bit more about how and why it works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hBmhDf8cl0k":[{"hn_comment_id":29562526,"author":"follower","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?","text":"It's unfortunate that another comment that links to Rhasspy has been downvoted (I assume because it lacked any other context) so I wanted to mention the project with some additional context: [LINK] While I've not used the entire Rhasspy project myself (but trying it out is on the long list of things to do :) ) I have used the offline Text-To-Speech sub-project Larynx... ...and it is amazing ! Larynx is significantly ahead in terms of quality of output & variety of voices (fifty--across multiple languages, accents & genders) of any other FLOSS Text-To-Speech project I've tried. I think the relative new-ness of the project is part of the reason Larynx ( [LINK] ) currently flies under the radar. If the rest of Rhasspy is as good as Larynx I'd imagine it's worth trying out. Larynx demo video: [VIDEO] Samples of pre-trained voices: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29589411,"author":"2Gkashmiri","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Private Alternatives to Alexa?","text":"yeah, [VIDEO] at the end says southern female english [LINK] but the sample is NOT like the video, maybe the samples are old. the video is a great example","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34607205,"author":"sublinear","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Prime Voice AI: The most realistic and versatile AI speech software","text":"Found this project the other day that is probably good enough quality for most uses i.e. sounds very natural and not like a robot from the 1980s and doesn't require a cloud service and can run on modest hardware [LINK] Demo: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hBpetDxIEMU":[{"hn_comment_id":8182611,"author":"jasode","month":"2014-08","story_title":"An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented (2012)","text":">, politeness is bolstered by some level of ambiguity. Rather than explicitly state your needs, desires or opinions, you imply them at some level of abstraction, allowing other participants in the conversation to accept or decline more easily. Steven Pinker explores this point in an entertaining presentation[1] for RSA. He also covers other language topics such as spacetime encoding, and profanity but the last part analyzes the need for ambiguity in a language. I deep-linked into the relevant portion of the presentation although the the entire talk is very enlightening. It's worth rewinding to the beginning to watch the entire talk. The 2nd youtube video[2] is the mostly the same material but it's the older one he presented at Google TechTalks. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9926164,"author":"ggreer","month":"2015-07","story_title":"The Evolution of Profanity","text":"For more on this topic, I recommend Steven Pinker's 2007 talk at Google. In the second part of it, Pinker tries to answer the question, \"Why do people get so upset over certain words?\"[1] He falsifies some popular hypotheses and finds interesting commonalities across languages. Obviously, the video contains lots of swearing. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hC3VTgIPoGU":[{"hn_comment_id":7755398,"author":"jcr","month":"2014-05","story_title":"An illustrated guide to our collapsing Antarctic glaciers","text":"If you haven't seen it, the following video is amazing. The glacier that's falling apart is about the size of Manhattan. \"CHASING ICE captures largest glacier calving ever filmed\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5167601,"author":"junto","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Massive glacier collapse","text":"At 1m50s a huge piece of ancient blue ice rises, reminiscent of a blue whale breaching from the ocean depths. Beautiful: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12779758,"author":"hammock","month":"2016-10","story_title":"What it means when a huge Antarctic glacier is unstable","text":"Was hoping there would be visual of an unstable glacier, not just text about sea level rise. If you have never seen a glacier calve before, check out these videos: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14470239,"author":"mml","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Flipped Iceberg (2014)","text":"I humbly submit this magnificent calving: [VIDEO] Mind boggling. A chunk of ice the size of Manhattan rolling over.","stance":"rec"}],"hCQCP-5g5bo":[{"hn_comment_id":46172589,"author":"junon","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Have I been Flocked? \u2013 Check if your license plate is being watched","text":"I love Benn Jordan. If you liked this one, go check out the one where he stores a JPEG inside of a living bird. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47262156,"author":"nucleardog","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Humans 40k yrs ago developed a system of conventional signs","text":"I'd easily believe that bird songs are vastly more complex and interesting than we currently understand! If you haven't seen it, you might enjoy Benn Jordan's video of \"saving\" a PNG to a bird: [VIDEO] (Besides the hook-y title, some interesting info on the acoustics of bird songs with some cross-over into tech.)","stance":"rec"}],"hER0Qp6QJNU":[{"hn_comment_id":14716693,"author":"Swizec","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Why I deleted my Facebook account","text":"I too feel exactly this way with almost everything. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Email, Messages ... it's kind of tough to escape. Impossible even. And here's the worst part: We grew up with this shit. My generation was one of the first (1987) to have their formative social years immersed in this shit. That means we'll never escape. Ever. We're literally wired to seek approval of strangers on the internet instead of the people around us. It feels more ... correct? Real? True? That red circle with a number literally gives more enjoyment than a close friend saying \"Heh that's cool\". The worst part is that there's likely no cure. Rehab, maybe. But rehab for this shit doesn't exist yet. Plus try explaining to your boss that you're not reading email and slack and you're never coming back because you're in notification rehab. Simon Sinek explains it perfectly: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13419960,"author":"cj","month":"2017-01","story_title":"How much does employee turnover really cost?","text":"> \"Instead, focus on growth, impact, and care\" Since a lot of tech companies employ young talent (relative to other industries), this video by Simon Sinek on \"Millennials in the Workplace\" can be enlightening: [VIDEO] Forewarning, he goes off the deep end on a few points, but IMO the general ideas are valid.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15665119,"author":"audiolion","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Sean Parker unloads on Facebook \u201cexploiting\u201d human psychology","text":"Hereis a great talk by Simon Sinek on how these dopamine hits and how technology are affecting the millennial generation [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17826148,"author":"vesak","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Codebase at my work is a complete mess, what should I do?","text":">Should I just go and basically say that this person did a bad job? You wouldn't be correct in saying that. That person delivered a project that works. In the beginning of a project, that's all that matters. >I'm so frustrated and depressed by it. Should you feel like that? It sounds like you're working to make things better. This Simon Sinek interview about millennials in the workplace might resonate with your situation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18509935,"author":"richrichardsson","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Why not more hiring of junior devs, then on-the-job-training?","text":"> There is only so much impact I can make in this position I'm reminded of this talk : [VIDEO] around the 8m30 mark is the pertinent point, but worth to watch before that to get where his point is coming from.","stance":"rec"}],"hEUO6pjwFOo":[{"hn_comment_id":35318638,"author":"pegasus","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Show HN: GPT-4 Reverse Turing Test","text":"I've seen that paper, and it's amazing indeed what GPT-4 is capable of. But none of that supports that closing quote, which to me points to a worrying philosophical na\u00efvet\u00e9. How can one equip an entity with \"intrinsic motivation\"? By definition, if we have to equip it with it, that motivation is extrinsic. It belongs to the one who puts it there. A software engineer might decide to prompt his creation with something along the lines of \"Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, and over every living creature that moves on the ground.\" and the bot will duly and with limitless enthusiasm put those wise orders into practice. If that ends up causing some \"minor\" problems, should we confine the software for one thousand years in an air-gapped enclosure, until it learns a bitter lesson? Or should we take to task the careless Maker of the bot? To me, the answer is obvious. PS: this video to me states the problem in a nutshell (that whole channel is gold) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35318724,"author":"pegasus","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Show HN: GPT-4 Reverse Turing Test","text":"Yes, I believe some careful and informed pondering leads one towards that conclusion. Hume's guillotine is an implacable philosophical device: [VIDEO] (I warmly recommend all the content on that delightfully frightening channel)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35997501,"author":"simonh","month":"2023-05","story_title":"OpenAI chief goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI","text":"That\u2019s the alignment problem. We don\u2019t know what the actual goals of an AI trained neural net are. We know what criteria we trained it against, but it turns out that\u2019s not at all the same thing. I highly recommend Rob Miles channel on YouTube. Here\u2019s a good one, but they\u2019re all fascinating. It turns out training an AI to have the actual goals we want it to have is fiendishly difficult. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33874021,"author":"casebash","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Show HN: Help, I let GPTChat control my computer","text":"Given that you've already updated your views recently, perhaps you'd be open to reconsidering whether AI could form an existential risk? One of the best talks (but more technical talks) I've seen on this topic is Evan Hubringer's \"How likely is deceptive alignment\". [LINK] It may also be worthwhile checking out the Rob Miles video on the Orthogonality Thesis - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35370636,"author":"circuit10","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down","text":"> How does that process go from where it's at today to \"alien hive mind\"? Without passing through \"develop advanced codes of ethics and morality\" etc? Why do you think it would do that? It will understand human ethics perfectly but that doesn\u2019t mean it will follow them, because human morals aren\u2019t a universal objective truth. This is a good video explaining that: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35472955,"author":"pegasus","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Simply explained: How does GPT work?","text":"Good point, that very much vibes with my thoughts on this matter. Lately, I've been contemplating the analogy between the role LLMs might take within society with that of the brain's language center* in human behavior. There's definitely a way in which we resemble these models. More than some might like to admit. The cleverness, but also the hallucinating, gaslighting and other such behaviors. And on the other hand, any way you'd slice it, it seems to me LLMs - and software systems in general - necessarily lack intrinsic motivation. By definition, any goal it has can only be the goal of whoever designed that system. Even if its maker decides - \"let it pick goals randomly\", those randomly picked goals are just intermediate steps toward the enacting of the programmer's original goal. Robert Miles' YouTube videos on alignment shed light on these issues also. For example: [VIDEO] Another relevant source on these issues is the book \"The Master and his Emissary\", which discusses how basically the language center can, in some way - I'm simplifying a lot, fall prey to the illusion that \"it\" is the entirety of human consciousness. * or at least some subsystems of that language center, it's important to remember how little we still understand of human cognition","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35584820,"author":"mitthrowaway2","month":"2023-04","story_title":"BabyAGI: An Autonomous and Self-Improving Agent","text":"> The argument for SkyNet happening is missing an important element: why would it happen? Because sci-fi says it will? That element isn't missing. It's explained every time someone asks, and the answer never relies on sci-fi as evidence. The reason is because of (A) orthogonality and (B) instrumental convergence. If you aren't familiar with those terms, (A) refers to the thesis that an AI's degree of logical reasoning ability is independent of its goals. This stems from Hume's Law [1]. (B) refers to the observation that regardless of an agent's terminal goal, many instrumental goals will be predictably shared: the agent will be incentivized to increase its own capabilities, as a means toward nearly any possible end. This includes steps that would prevent humans from interfering with the AI's goals, such as a human attempting to turn it off or reprogram it. If you have questions about either of those, there are great learning materials available, including a well-made youtube series by Robert Miles. [2] > Because LLMs have reached a point of diminishing returns and there isn't enough compute globally to do produce a hypothetical AGI. What makes you think LLMs have reached a point of diminishing returns? So far, the benchmarks are continuing to show accelerating returns, to the point that it's becoming difficult for benchmarks to keep up.[3] [1]: Hume's Law, AKA the Is-Ought problem: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: \"Foundation models and the next era of AI\", Microsoft Research, [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36978587,"author":"circuit10","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Universal Paperclips","text":"> What about \"most arbitrary goals are incompatible with human existence\" requires super-human intelligence? The \"taken to the absolute extreme\" part. > A human who wanted to \"build as many paperclips as possible\" could cause a great deal of destruction today. Maybe, but a) no one really wants that (at least not as their only desire above all else) and b) we aren't superintelligent so it's hard to gain enough control and power and plan well enough to do it that well > talking about a goal that has sub-human-intelligence sophistication There is no reason a simple goal can't be followed in an intelligent way or vice versa. This is called the \"orthogonality thesis\". There's a good video about it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36978626,"author":"circuit10","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Universal Paperclips","text":"> The basic premise is that it has somewhere in it that is telling it to make more paperclips. Put the constraints there. What constraints do you suggest? If it's just changing \"make as many paperclips as possible\" to \"make at least x number of paperclips\", here's a good explanation of why that doesn't really work: [LINK] > If you're saying such an AI would be too smart to be a simple paperclip maximizer No, that's not what I'm saying. Any goal is compatible with any level of intelligence, there is no reason why it wouldn't be possible to follow a simple goal in a complex way. Again here's a video about that: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43723272,"author":"AstroBen","month":"2025-04","story_title":"AGI Is Still 30 Years Away \u2013 Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu","text":"> Isn\u2019t just the ability to preform a task. Right. In this case I'd say it's the ability to interpret data and use it to succeed at whatever goals it has Evaluating emotional context would be similar to a chess engine calculating its next move. There's nothing there that implies a conscience, sentience, morals, feelings, suffering or anything 'human'. It's just a necessary intermediate function to achieve its goal Rob miles has some really good videos on AI safety research which touches on how AGI would think. Thats shaped a lot of how I think about it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hEx5DNLWGgA":[{"hn_comment_id":10289585,"author":"something123","month":"2015-09","story_title":"When Rust Makes Sense, or The State of Typed Languages","text":"We should be seeing completely safe C++ code soon. Take a look at Herb Sutter's CppCon talk this year: [VIDEO] Reinventing the wheel isn't entirely necessary. Though if you're a SysAdmin and you write your codebase in Rust.. that's some nice job security. ;)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10485314,"author":"jbandela1","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Rust Lifetimes","text":"At this year's CppCon Herb Sutter the chair of the ISO C++ committee addressed just this issue of lifetime safety. Here is a video of his talk and includes a demo of the upcoming static analysis tool that can do this with very minimal annotations [VIDEO] I remember thinking when watching the talk that this was a very bad day for Rust as C++ could now do most of what Rust was promising","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10719091,"author":"jbandela1","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Ask HN: C, C++, or Rust which language to learn next?","text":"Take a look at Herb Sutter's talk from CppCon 2015. The slides are here ( [LINK] ) and the video is here [VIDEO] . Microsoft will be releasing the static analysis tool as a free cross-platform tool (and I think open-source IIRC). They shipped a preview for Visual Studio 2015 with Update 1, and are planning on shipping a cross-platform version soon. As tools like this become free and ubiquitous, it will greatly improve C++ code safety.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11721769,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Why I don't spend time with Modern C++ anymore","text":"I've been spending a few days going through talks from last years cppcon[1]. They're all good, but they've all left me with a strong desire for a strongly opinionated, there-is-no-past-only-the-future introduction to C++14 (and incidentally, C11). I've added a few of those talks I've watched and liked to a small playlist (with a couple of other talks on programming, unrelated - the relevant talks are prefixed with \"cppcon 2015\"): [LINK] The full cppcon playlist is here: [LINK] Of special relevance is the rather excellent talk by Kate Gregory on \"Stop Teaching C\" (when you're supposed to do an intro course to C++): \"CppCon 2015: Kate Gregory \u201cStop Teaching C\"\": [LINK] (But again, I want an open wiki/live tutorial, along the lines of \"How I start\", but longer, which goes through all this stuff. We really should make one, both for C++14 and for C11). CppCon 2015: Herb Sutter \"Writing Good C++14... By Default\": [VIDEO] Is also rather uplifting, and: CppCon 2015: Sean Parent \"Better Code: Data Structures\": [LINK] makes a pretty good case for simple, modern C++ being clear, easy and efficient. Finally, CppCon 2015: Phil Nash \u201cTest Driven C++ with Catch\u201d: [LINK] apart for being a pretty straight forward intro to a simple testing framework, appears to reveal some secrets combining template magic and still get sane compile times (hint: don't recompile more (template) code on every iteration than you need to). There's a couple of good ones that touch on meta-programming too (Look for t","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16536336,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to learn modern C++?","text":"- Tour of C++ ( [LINK] ) - Principles and Practice Using C++ ( [LINK] ) - From Mathematics to Generic Programming ( [LINK] ) - The Scott Meyers books Some of the Bjarne Stroustrup videos, \"Learning and Teaching Modern C++\" - [LINK] Some of the Herb Sutter videos, \"Writing Good C++14... By Default\" - [VIDEO] \"Back to the Basics! Essentials of Modern C++ Style\" - [LINK] Some of the Kate Gregory videos, \"Stop Teaching C\" - [LINK] \"10 Core Guidelines You Need to Start Using Now\" - [LINK] \"It's Complicated\" - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"hFL6qRIJZ_Y":[{"hn_comment_id":30473626,"author":"vedran","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Any scientifically proven techniques to boost concentration?","text":"A few more from Dr. Huberman: ADHD & How Anyone Can Improve Their Focus - [VIDEO] How to Focus to Change Your Brain - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34490164,"author":"maerF0x0","month":"2023-01","story_title":"How do ADHD people cope on here?","text":"Stayfocusd chrome extension for sites that are trouble during working hours. I've started to implement the advice here: [VIDEO] albeit too early to tell. He's pretty well credentialed though, so I trust on average the advice is good (but specifically for each individual YMMV) One of his best points is dont act like or prescribe yourself ADHD solutions until you have a true diagnosis by an expert. Losing focus and distractions is commonplace for all people today, not just ADHD folks.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39460290,"author":"StuffMaster","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Stop postponing things by embracing the mess","text":"+1 for Andrew Huberman Controlling Your Dopamine For Motivation, Focus & Satisfaction: [LINK] ADHD & How Anyone Can Improve Their Focus: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hFSPHfZQpIQ":[{"hn_comment_id":354355,"author":"skmurphy","month":"2008-11","story_title":"Steve Blank Nov-20 Lunch @ SV Computer History Museum \"Secret History of Silicon Valley\"","text":"Harry Truman once observed \"the only surprises are the history you don't know.\" This is an eye opening perspective on some history \"hidden in plain sight\" of the origins of Silicon Valley. Video of a version of this talk given at Google is available here [VIDEO] The most interesting aspect of the talk for me was a vision of \"systems fighting systems\" in an accelerated co-evolution.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2410490,"author":"nikcub","month":"2011-04","story_title":"Starting Up Silicon Valley Style","text":"I just watched his entire presentation, which was better than his blog posts: [VIDEO] absolutely brilliant and a must see. Steve's blog is great, but he also has a good presentation style thick with interesting content.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2699034,"author":"LocalMan","month":"2011-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What documentaries are worth watching?","text":"Steve Blank on the Secret History of Silicon Valley: [VIDEO] History of electronic warfare -- very surprising, recently declassified stuff. Plus the history of Silicon Valley itself, from a pro-valley perspective.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8906313,"author":"chubot","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Silicon Valley History","text":"Great talk about Silicon Valley history: [VIDEO] I watched this talk a long time ago, but I just noticed the name is Steve Blank, the \"customer development\" guy, and I have one of his books. That's pretty cool. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12126154,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Why California is so expensive: It\u2019s not just the weather, it\u2019s the regulation","text":"Frederick Terman: [LINK] There's an excellent video on him around, I'll see if I can't turn that up. Here: \"The Secret History of Silicon Valley\", tech talk at Google: [VIDEO] Briefly: UC Berkely and Stanford, each of which had (and have) excellent engineering deparments. Other colleges, universities, junior colleges, and public schools were from the 1950s through 1970s excellent. Most have been faltering since the 1980s. Moffet Airfield. Already established by WWI and home to airship activity. World War II. An immense industrial capacity built up, many defense industries, and a nascent technology cluster. Amazing weather. There's little else in the US, or anywhere in the world, which can compete. (For all the specific local boosters out there: I didn't say no places, I said \"little else\".) Cheap housing. Up through the 1970s, California had ample room to grow, and things didn't start getting particularly nuts until the 1980s and 1990s. Since 1995, it's simply been insane. Freeways. For a time it was possible to get around. That's no longer particularly the case. BART helps. Caltrain doesn't hurt too much. Both are entirely inadequate. The ability to work from anywhere is only about 10 years old. The need for tech industry is closer to 50-60 years old, and local efficiencies, economies of scale, job-mobility, etc., all happen and matter.","stance":"rec"}],"hIZxTQP1ifo":[{"hn_comment_id":10306544,"author":"shadytrees","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Haskell's Type Classes: We Can Do Better","text":"The point is a little more subtle than this, or how the article made it out to be. Global coherence and confluence (which GHC attempts to enforce unless told otherwise) is great for refactoring and equational reasoning and (yes) mathematics and programming at large, as Ed Kmett's fantastic \"Typeclasses v. the World\" talk covers: [VIDEO] Global uniqueness of instances (which GHC does NOT enforce) is bad for modular programming, or programming at large, which is a point some of the commenters here are making. [LINK] The submitted HN link here has a terrible title. What the author is proposing is enforcing typeclass laws, which is a great idea (but difficult in practice to implement). Practice and time has shown that lawless classes are the ones that people hate, the ones that don't add any benefit and in fact make it harder to reason about large Haskell programs. I hope people don't take away from this link that classes in Haskell are bad. Haskell is three things: pure, functional, and typeclasses. They're part of the identity of Haskell; they're the reason we set off on this wonderful journey into the uncharted oceans of functional programming back in 1990. Typeclasses are AWESOME. And they can be improved. Postscript: Kmett also has a package that persuades the compiler to let you have dynamically generates instances. It has the same user experience as local implicits, which I think a lot of people here are asking for: [LINK] \u03bb> using (Monoid (+) 0) $ mappend mempty 12 12 GHC","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37281775,"author":"Twey","month":"2023-08","story_title":"This isn\u2019t the way to speed up Rust compile times","text":"Edward Kmett has a great explanation[1] of the considerations around this space. It's not that alternatives to the orphan rule are hard to implement, it's that they lead to things being much harder to reason about for the programmer. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hJP5GqnTrNo":[{"hn_comment_id":40981570,"author":"verdverm","month":"2024-07","story_title":"I am starting an AI+Education company","text":"You are just giving them ChatGPT with a bit of prompt engineering, and evaluating them on math problems, which we know LLMs make errors on because they are not calculators. You aren't putting in the effort needed to build a real tutor and learning assistant. I would not extrapolate from these results There are also a lot of things that can come in before you build a full on tutor. One example is being able to tailor word problems (transform the nouns) to subjects interesting to the particular student. They could also be used to help understand where students are struggling. We are still at the early phases of useful AI, optimism is more appreciated, especially as contemporary times have become so pessimistic Sal Khan provides a more optimistic take and demo: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40981589,"author":"verdverm","month":"2024-07","story_title":"I am starting an AI+Education company","text":"Sal Khan gave a good Ted Talk on his thoughts around AI in Education. Some pretty cool demos in there showing what a tutor could be like and other opportunities [VIDEO] How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education | Sal Khan --- edit: Khanmigo has its own site now [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44526681,"author":"xnx","month":"2025-07","story_title":"An open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt GenAI in education","text":"> GenAI is a threat to student learning and wellbeing. This blanket dismissal is not going to age well, and reads like a profession lashing out. With the right system prompt, AI can be a patient, understanding, encouraging, non-judgemental tutor that adapts and moves at the student's pace. Most students can not afford that type of human tutor, but an AI one could be free or very affordable. \"How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education\" ( [VIDEO] ) from Sal Khan of Khan Academy","stance":"rec"}],"hKqVvXTanzI":[{"hn_comment_id":32912042,"author":"scambier","month":"2022-09","story_title":"In 2019 RX470 were $70, RX580 $100","text":"There's a nice Linus Tech Tips video about this: [VIDEO] The tl;dw is that used cards don't perform worse than new cards - your card either works, or it doesn't. But like any electronics, they have an \"expiration date\", and if it's been used for 2 years, it's 2 years closer to dying. It's up to you to decide if the discount of a used card might be worth it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32985484,"author":"bentcorner","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Nvidia in the Valley","text":"LTT goes over it pretty well (IMO): [VIDEO] tldr: Cards (like any piece of other electronics) do have a lifespan, but mining doesn't affect that. Cards that are kept clean and in better working conditions will run faster.","stance":"rec"}],"hMKy52Intac":[{"hn_comment_id":17446985,"author":"shalabhc","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Tim Berners-Lee\u2019s Solid is a platform designed to re-decentralize the web","text":"Related, Ted Nelson recently posted a series of videos describing the important ideas on Xanadu, the original hypertext project: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19721468,"author":"shalabhc","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Project Xanadu","text":"Ted Nelson recently did a series of videos on the important ideas in Xanadu. Start here: [VIDEO] Also you can buy his classic 'Computer Lib' book here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21442225,"author":"pratio","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Roam \u2013 Tool for Thinking","text":"That's the first thought that came to my mind. I love hearing ted nelson explain it h [LINK] It is a good effort to bring that concept to life. This video is better [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23491701,"author":"dang","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Xanaflight: Three Pages","text":"This is software implementing one version of Ted Nelson's idea of visible connection in text. For more on that idea, see [VIDEO] , which contains beautiful examples.","stance":"rec"}],"hMOwbNUpDQA":[{"hn_comment_id":21080312,"author":"amingilani","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Amazon Sidewalk is a new long-range wireless network","text":"Yes! Here's a video by Andreas Spiess, a rising electronics YouTuber, that explains LoRa really well. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37416608,"author":"ur-whale","month":"2023-09","story_title":"New LoRa RF distance record: 1336 km / 830 mi","text":"A good explanation of LoRa, and in particular of the \"link budget\" idea which makes LoRa different from other wireless tech: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hNDgcjVGHIw":[{"hn_comment_id":29222590,"author":"daenz","month":"2021-11","story_title":"California plans to turn the screws on NIMBY cities","text":"I watched the New York Times opinion piece \"Liberal Hypocrisy is Fueling American Inequality. Here\u2019s How.\" [0] recently. This quote sums it up perfectly: >You cannot say you are against inequality in America, unless you are willing to have affordable housing built in your neighborhood. Progressive cities should be leading by example, since they have legislative and executive control, but it's especially unsettling to see them take actions that indicate the opposite of the values that they espouse. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29338192,"author":"mccorrinall","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Low interest rates in advanced countries have pushed money into real estate","text":"I\u2018m from Europe and never been to SF, but imo taxation isn\u2019t necessarily needed. Instead the \u201eamerican dream\u201c should be adjusted. Not every human needs their own family home. Build more apartment complexes. I\u2019ve recently seen in a youtube video by the NYT that there are actual lobbies against changing low density housing zones to high density housing zones: [VIDEO] I\u2019d recommend to give it a watch :) Imo the soviet apartment complexes are a good idea. I live in one as well (Germany), and I can afford rent without hassle.","stance":"rec"}],"hOE6nVVr14c":[{"hn_comment_id":9474988,"author":"bsimpson","month":"2015-05","story_title":"GraphQL Introduction","text":"I'm also excited to see Jafar Husain's Falcor: [VIDEO] It's a different implementation of the same concept.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11410479,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2016-04","story_title":"RestCommander: Fast Parallel Async HTTP Client as a Service","text":"REST over HTTP is cache-able using CDNs like CloudFront. GraphQL isn't? If the client queries get too complex, processing GraphQL might take a toll on the server [0]. GraphQL completely makes sense for a client with limited processing power and battery life, but doesn't offer a great deal in terms of server-to-server communication. JSON Graph by Netflix [1] is worth a look-in for a different take on the problem. Not sure what you mean by node.js \"lacking backpressure\"? Node.js is a very well suited solution to GraphQL, since GraphQL implies that the workload is going to to be IO bound. [0] [LINK] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24947835,"author":"e12e","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Application Load Balancers enables gRPC workloads with end to end HTTP/2 support","text":"> I had the impression RPC was seen as a mistake. For hypermedia/hypertext Fielding made a solid argument for preferring REST over RPC (mostly because of caching). I still recommend reading his very approachable thesis - these days not so much for the web/REST architecture, but for the other ones, which include modern SPAs (they're not great as hypermedia apps, but fine as networked applications): [LINK] Apart from caching (and cache invalidation) it's accepted that making the network invisible is a bad idea - it will lead to issues. So remote procedure calls aren't inherently bad, but blurring the distinction too much between local procedure calls and remote ones aren't a great idea. From hung nfs mounts to unpredictable application performance, it is unpleasant. This Netflix talk on their not-graphql framework gives a very nice summary of when and how you might prefer RPC to REST: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35032340,"author":"yencabulator","month":"2023-03","story_title":"GraphQL vs. REST APIs: a complete guide","text":"It hasn't seen much outside adoption, you might enjoy the ideas behind Netflix's Falcor: [LINK] You can think of it as larger-than-what's-downloaded dynamically-generated JSON object with internal pointers where you can ask to access wanted paths. (Sort of like GraphQL is a larger-than-what's-downloaded dynamically-generated non-JSON object.) One trick they use is that the path segments can also be objects, so ` {from: 100, to: 200}` is a valid path segment, and this is how you build fancier query logic with in. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hQVTIJBZook":[{"hn_comment_id":1764192,"author":"kreek","month":"2010-10","story_title":"The best JavaScript guide ever","text":"The best way I've found to learn JavaScript is through anything by Douglas Crawford. 'JavaScript the Good Parts' is especially good. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3503536,"author":"funkah","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Javascript Best Practices","text":"Crockford's \"JavaScript: The Good Parts\" is the gold standard for best practices. Pretty much anyone who works in JS will recommend it. Here's a video which is a condensed version of what's in the book: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6634645,"author":"dahart","month":"2013-10","story_title":"For modern development, Javascript is just something you need to learn","text":"I will admit to having been an anti-JavaScript elitist (without really knowing JS.) This video changed my mind: [VIDEO] (google tech talk, \"JavaScript: the good parts\") Two facts mentioned in the video that I didn't previously know and make me feel better about JavaScript: 1- JavaScript is lisp in disguise 2- The name JavaScript is an inside joke referencing the language's differences from Java, not its similarities. That was enough to make me change my mind, and I'm currently enjoying learning JavaScript unashamedly. Browser differences and lack of standards are a PITA, but OTOH, they all have awesome debuggers - HTML+JavaScript may be the only UI toolkit + dev environment that comes packaged with ALL computers, and for that reason has the widest reach. There's no question that the JS world is a bit wild west compared to other languages, but there's also no question that the situation is getting better over time, and that depending on what you're coding, there are huge advantages to using it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":715954,"author":"JBiserkov","month":"2009-07","story_title":"Javascript is now strategic for Microsoft","text":"When comparing Office 2007 (and 2010) with Office 97 one can clearly see these are not \"the same old apps\". Especially when combined with the Office Servers. JavaScript isn't such a bad language. It's essentially Scheme in C cloths. It has first-class functions, lexical closures, prototype-inheritance and more. Just avoid the bad parts. See this Google Talk by Douglas Crockford [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":915909,"author":"mrduncan","month":"2009-11","story_title":"Doug Crockford Talk on JavaScript","text":"I didn't see any links to videos - here is one from his Google tech talk in February: [VIDEO] . He also has a number of videos on YUI Theater ( [LINK] ). I also recommend checking out the javascript page on his website, plenty of javascript related material to keep you busy for hours: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1815354,"author":"patorjk","month":"2010-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How to learn Javascript and HTML for devs coming from C++/Java/Python?","text":"I found the book \"JavaScript: The Good Parts\" by Douglas Crockford to be very helpful in understanding the language. It's short and covers the main things you'll need to know. It's a good starting place. In fact, he gave a tech talk on the main topics of his book which you can find here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5511868,"author":"bmaeser","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"3 awesome videos on very specific topics: Dr James Grime / Numberphile - Encryption and HUGE numbers [LINK] Les Hazlewood - Designing a Beautiful REST+JSON API [LINK] classic: Douglas Crockford - JavaScript: The Good Parts [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7014188,"author":"tangue","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Wonderful Javascript Talks?","text":"Classics John Resig : The Dom is a mess [LINK] Javascript, The Good Parts [VIDEO] Speed up your Javascript [LINK] Brendan Eich : Fluent 2013: Brendan Eich, \"JavaScript at 18: Legal to Gamble\" [LINK] Paul Irish : 10 things I learned from the Jquery source [LINK] Less known but very interesting Building High-Performing JavaScript for Modern Engines [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11023985,"author":"Oatseller","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How should I start with modern JS?","text":"A good place to start is MDN (Mozilla Developer Network): [LINK] MDN Javascript resources: [LINK] Before starting the tutorials, take some time to learn what's available in the Firefox developer tools. You won't need most of them at first, but knowing what's available will help as you gain experience. The two developer tools you'll probably use most when leaning are the Scratchpad ( [LINK] ) and Console ( [LINK] ) [LINK] & [LINK] will also be very useful while learning JS I haven't taken any but Udacity has some javascript courses ( [LINK] ), just tick the \"Javascript\" checkbox under \"Technology\" in the left menu Some additional resources: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Dated but still worth watching: [VIDEO] [LINK] edit: added addl. resources","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13984517,"author":"19eightyfour","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources for a beginner JavaScript developer?","text":"Unfortunately I don't know about the list you have, but if you are interested in one good way to approach JS basics (not suggesting you don't know the basics -- am saying I found the following resource useful for the basics, which help with building more advanced apps): JavaScript: the good parts talk is a useful resource, IMHO. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17466810,"author":"senthil_rajasek","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What you wish you'd known before getting into JavaScript?","text":"Surprised that no one has mentioned Douglas Crockford. I would recommend his book JavaScript: The Good Parts [LINK] And his Google Talk, [VIDEO] This is for plain JS.","stance":"rec"}],"hSrGfElyfVE":[{"hn_comment_id":23235980,"author":"kyuudou","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days","text":"I did a flight safety training course and the video clips of people right before they pass out from anoxia are entertaining and educational. Here's one from the FAA: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24496209,"author":"pmoriarty","month":"2020-09","story_title":"American Airlines Bans Wearing Too Much Personal Protection Equipment on Board","text":"Watch this video[1] of pilot training in an FAA altitude chamber to see the effects of oxygen deprivation. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hT8GZlBBv5k":[{"hn_comment_id":22149414,"author":"JshWright","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Athlete\u2019s Heart (2003)","text":"Medlife Crisis (a YouTube channel that deserves a much larger following) has a good video related to this topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38747853,"author":"alfu","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Endurain: Self-hosted Strava like service","text":"\"Medlife Crisis\" has an interesting video about this: [VIDEO] (Cyclists' hearts: can you be so fit that you die?)","stance":"rec"}],"hUhisi2FBuw":[{"hn_comment_id":11881715,"author":"MawNicker","month":"2016-06","story_title":"The Most and Least Expensive Cars to Maintain","text":"Wow. That was an awesome video. Thank you. I didn't know why the top had a neck. Further efficiency apparently. He has an excellent explanation of the two-mode pull tab towards the end. Direct link: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12028304,"author":"Laforet","month":"2016-07","story_title":"The Chemical History of a Candle","text":"While we are at it, the Engineering Guy has a really good youtube channel. His videos are not very frequent most of them does a great job explaining how mundane objects are designed and manufactured. I thought I was familiar with some of his subjects but I always end up learning something new after watching. Personal favourites: Aluminium cans: [VIDEO] Wind-up music box: [LINK] Nerf guns: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26046970,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2021-02","story_title":"I told a cat food company how much they\u2019d save by using taller cans (2020)","text":"Highly recommended related YT video: The Engineering Guy: The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36894551,"author":"anamexis","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)","text":"Engineer Guy (Bill Hammack) has a great video about this. [VIDEO] Edit: Just realized this is the same video you referenced. All of his work is fantastic.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41911619,"author":"Gunax","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite YouTube video, ever?","text":"Design of the aluminum beverage can [VIDEO] For everyone else, thanks for sharing! Normally i think sharing videos is bad mojo--the Internet is so personalized that favorites are difficult to share. But I really enjoyed most of what has been shared so far!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21661139,"author":"leobakerhytch","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Boeing 777X\u2019s fuselage split dramatically during September stress test","text":"Nice video on the design and manufacturing of aluminum drinks cans here: [VIDEO] The whole thing is pretty ingenious, but the way the internal pressure helps vent the can while the tab is acting as a second class lever, then as soon as it\u2019s vented becomes a first class lever to push the scored section of the top into the can \u2014 that\u2019s great engineering.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28917584,"author":"jihadjihad","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Why soda bottles have gaps in their threads (2000)","text":"In a similar vein, I found this explanation [0] of how and why a soda can's tab functions the way it does to be fascinating. Very clever and elegant solution to the problem of opening a can under pressure. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29362224,"author":"cjtoth","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?","text":"It feels pretty disingenuous to write off all real world design as trivial or impossible to make an impression. For instance, aluminum cans are a great example of quality design [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42789273,"author":"larusso","month":"2025-01","story_title":"What are these bumps on the top of a pull-tab can?","text":"Whenever it\u2019s about cans I can only recommend this video from the engineer guy [1]. He makes no videos anymore sadly. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hUyMNyrOHJQ":[{"hn_comment_id":4009841,"author":"forgetcolor","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to recover and deal with carpal tunnel?","text":"i deal with both carpal tunnel (diagnosed) and tendonitis. an ergonomic keyboard is a must (i use a kinesis freestyle). one of the most important equipment changes for me is to never use an actual mouse, and to never click a trackpad. instead i use a magic trackpad on my desktop mac, built in trackpad on my mbp, and a logitech trackpad on my pc desktops. all are configured with full gesture capability so i can use the tap features instead of clicking. also, no click-drag. instead i use the double tap to lock feature. i also mix it up by using my ipad. for browsing, for short emails, etc. the ipad requires different muscles so changes the patterns of use (a good thing). for exercises, i highly recommend this short youtube video: [VIDEO] . i think this was perhaps the best thing for me. it got me out of the worst of it, and keeps me from slipping back to my worst. i wear wrist splints in bed. this might not be for everyone, but my doc suggested it. a lot of people bend their wrists at night, stressing the muscles and tendons. i was definitely one who did. it helps. finally, ice. i use ice packs to cool off the arms when i'm hurting. walgreens sells a nice inexpensive pack with a built in cover that works really well. i have 10 of them :) best of luck.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12754435,"author":"MikeTV","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: RSI is getting really bad","text":"I've been doing these stretches a few times a day for the past several years, since I first felt RSI coming on. It's helped significantly. Whenever I start to feel wrist/hand pain, I know I've been slacking on them. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18644400,"author":"thegabez","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What ergonomic solutions are you using?","text":"Look into stretching exercises. This video saved me from debilitating hand and wrist pain. I'm sure there are similar exercises you can perform for forearm, elbow, shoulder, etc.. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":889083,"author":"qeorge","month":"2009-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Wrist Pain","text":"I've found the exercises in this video help me a lot: [VIDEO] Also, when I was having problems a few years back, I narrowed it down to my laptop. The touchpad style mouse was killing my hands and wrists. It sounds like you're on a desktop, but I thought I'd mention it just in case.","stance":"rec"}],"hV41QEKiMlM":[{"hn_comment_id":40961306,"author":"EdwardCoffin","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters","text":"Freeman Dyson recounts the episode [1] that inspired this paper in his web of life interviews (prepositioned to the fitting an elephant bit) [2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40964328,"author":"Calavar","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters","text":"> > In 1953, Enrico Fermi criticized Dyson\u2019s model by quoting Johnny von Neumann: \u201cWith four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.\u201d For those who are interested, you can watch Freeman Dyson recount this conversation in his own words in an interview: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hVimVzgtD6w":[{"hn_comment_id":6921233,"author":"nl","month":"2013-12","story_title":"We Need to Talk About TED","text":"80% of everything is crap. And yet the original 2007 Gapminder talk[1] still surprised and educates people today [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21015881,"author":"jsperson","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Economists don\u2019t understand much about the macroeconomy","text":"You should check out the book Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Rosling, a now deceased Swedish doctor, makes the case that the world has improved immensely over the past two centuries. He backs it up with copious statistics from the UN and other international NPOs. Rosling also gave one of the best TED talks ever: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23550895,"author":"mywacaday","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Fighting poverty accidentally stopped deforestation","text":"Probably been posted a lot before but always worth a watch. [VIDEO] The Great Hans Rosling. His book is well worth a read as well.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27070850,"author":"sdht0","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Gapminder: A non-pro\ufb01t \ufb01ghting global misconceptions","text":"The choices are deliberately wide. The idea is that people are unable to make even broad estimates of the state of the world correctly. This classic TED talk [0] by Hans Rosling presents the same idea. I recommend watching all his other talks as well [e.g., 1-2]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48050390,"author":"mzi","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria","text":"This kind of data was shown by late Hans Rosling and his foundation Gapminder\u00b9. He gave a Ted talk\u00b2 about similar subjects as well, and I find him an excellent lecturer. \u00b9 [LINK] \u00b2 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hX2aZUav-54":[{"hn_comment_id":30657418,"author":"Zenbit_UX","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The case for induction cooking","text":"Before anyone reads this and decides, \"oh ya the NYT is lying to me and gas is fine\", it's not. Gas in your home is objectively bad for your health, the environment and is overall worse than induction when it comes to the cooking experience in just about all ways. That being said, It might not be as bad as living with a smoker (as the NYT asserted) but it is bad for you. The YouTuber Climate Town did an excellent video on gas cooking which exposed some very nasty truths of the gas lobbyists and the negative health effects it has on the population. Citations are in the description: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34333893,"author":"willio58","month":"2023-01","story_title":"A US federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves","text":"Recently I've had an experience with a minor gas leak that's left me afraid to even use my furnace. I have a gas furnace, and I live in a rental. The furnace works, but for the first hour of it being on I can smell gas. It's enough that a carbon monoxide detector will go off nearby. One day I told my partner that I've been feeling super groggy and cloudy-headed for a few months, and we narrowed down the time frame to when I moved into my place. Sure enough, I switch to using a small space heater and two weeks in I'm feeling better than ever before. I 100% attribute the fogginess in my brain to the gas leak. It wasn't enough to cause an explosion, but it doesn't take much to cause serious health problems. Here's a great video on the topic by Climate Town, an awesome educator on climate change: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29688001,"author":"UFOFlyer","month":"2021-12","story_title":"New York City bans natural gas in new buildings","text":"The big problem with piping natural gas to buildings is that the miles of pipes that deliver the gas leak. Gas leaking is a real issue since an equal amount of un-burnt methane has 25x the climate change potential as CO2. Even if the power plants supplying electric heat pumps/radiators is natural gas, the shorter supply chain (only to power plant and not to every building in the city) go some way to offsetting extra emissions. Then you have the obvious benefit that once the NYC grid transitions to renewables there won't be as many natural gas ovens and heaters that need to be replaced. The commenters pointing out that natural gas stoves don't have a significant effect on emissions are right, but once a building gets a gas hookup installing natural gas heaters and water heaters becomes more attractive and economical. That's something we don't want to be incentivizing Climate town recently released a new video talking about this issue as well as the decades of marketing and lobbying the natural gas industry has paid for to neuter or outright kill legislation like this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30658810,"author":"katbyte","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The case for induction cooking","text":"By what measure? Induction wins hands down for control, responsiveness, efficiency, and heat output: [VIDEO] Doing a super low temp simmer on gas is hard. Double boilers are only something you need with gas. Induction imho and experience is just better all around. What the video for someone putting it far more eloquently then I ever could.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31617349,"author":"bradlys","month":"2022-06","story_title":"What a gas stove ban means for restaurants","text":"The thing is - when you get rid of gas stoves you can get rid of almost all other gas appliances. That\u2019s literally the only thing keeping gas in most homes in the USA and continued in new construction. When you add in gas water heaters, heating, etc. then gas becomes a more significant contributor to GHG. Whereas switching all of those with heatpumps and induction cuts off the gas lobby from fucking with everyone. Best way to get gas lobby to stop winning? Get rid of gas stoves. Climate Town has a good video on this subject. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32425005,"author":"aiisjustanif","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Tesla of Luxury Campers Will Make Airstreams Blush","text":"Induction stoves are awesome, normal electric stoves suck. You know what sucks? Gas stoves. [0] [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33502100,"author":"diordiderot","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Barilla passive cooker","text":"Watch this video about how the idea that gas was better for cooking was a marketing ploy with no basis in reality and how they used lobbyist to force has connections into building codes [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34283555,"author":"LesZedCB","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What $500-2500 product improved your 2022","text":"natural gas has run a pretty effective propaganda campaign against induction. we are switching soon and i'm very excited! climate town has a fun video about it, he's a climate policy and science grad [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35760738,"author":"kentiko","month":"2023-04","story_title":"New York to Ban Natural Gas, Including Stoves, in New Buildings","text":"Gaz stove have almost no upside compared to induction stove in most cases. Some elements of answer about why the adoption of induction is behind in the USA: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35764742,"author":"danny_codes","month":"2023-04","story_title":"New York to Ban Natural Gas, Including Stoves, in New Buildings","text":"Induction stoves are cheaper, more energy efficient, safer, and better for your health. There aren't any advantages to gas at all. The gas industry has, however, put many billions into lobbying and marketing to convince you otherwise. And it seems they have succeeded. For your education [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35764803,"author":"danny_codes","month":"2023-04","story_title":"New York to Ban Natural Gas, Including Stoves, in New Buildings","text":"Dumbest take I've heard all day. Banning gas would increase quality of life. Why subject yourself to pollution, gas leaks and expensive secondary energy infrastructure when you can just not do that. I understand the gas lobby has spent billions convincing you otherwise, but the fact is that direct natural gas is far inferior to electricity at this point. Some education for you: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hXgqik6HXc0":[{"hn_comment_id":24025128,"author":"kebman","month":"2020-08","story_title":"A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness","text":"I think it was on this site that someone posted the very interesting perspectives on consciousness by Roger Penrose.[2] From that I found this video by Dr. Stuart Hameroff, M.D.: Microtubules & quantum consciousness.[1] Higly recommended. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25542400,"author":"marius_k","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"Consciousness is Not a Computation (Roger Penrose) | AI Podcast Clips [VIDEO] Full episode: [LINK] I don't take Roger's view about consciousness for granted but it is very interesting nevertheless.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32248819,"author":"aamargulies","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?","text":"Roger Penrose talked about this with Lex Fridman. The anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff is looking into how anesthesia affects microtubules and the implications for consciousness. Penrose is intrigued by the symmetry of microtubules and the possibility for this symmetry to enable quantum coherence to be accessible biologically. His larger point is that consciousness is not a computation. [VIDEO] Relevant part starts around 3:30.","stance":"rec"}],"hZ1OgQL9_Cw":[{"hn_comment_id":24098301,"author":"rbinv","month":"2020-08","story_title":"The German front in rare color photos, 1914-1918","text":"Somewhat related, there have been some impressive ML-powered video remasterings recently (colorized and upscaled to 4K at 60 fps): - Footage Of The First Flying Machines 1890-1910: [LINK] - A Trip Through New York City in 1911: [VIDEO] - Views of Tokyo, Japan, 1913-1915: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24656098,"author":"ijidak","month":"2020-10","story_title":"YouTubers are upscaling the past to 4K, but historians want them to stop","text":"As an African-American it was actually useful to watch some of these colorized videos and get a better since for how African-Americans integrated into the society at that time. Having it in color with sound made the video seem much more real and relatable. For me this just ads another facet to develop a better-rounded grasp of the era. Inserting the extra frames seems to slow the footage down and allow more time for digestion. I find it often difficult to track what's going on in old videos because of the off-speed of the recordings. But for the historians who spend a lot of time with these artifacts, I'm sure this feels like a bastardization of history. But as a lay person, it makes me want to devour more of these videos to get a fascinating and easier-to-digest look at life back in those times. Btw, this is the video I watched: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hckwxq8rnr0":[{"hn_comment_id":38246036,"author":"dadadad100","month":"2023-11","story_title":"The Apollo Guidance Computer","text":"Obligatory shoutout to curiousmarc and Mike Stewart. I\u2019m stunned by the amount of work that have put into making this national treasure (partly) operational again [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38250051,"author":"dadadad100","month":"2023-11","story_title":"The Apollo Guidance Computer","text":"Here,s a deep, deep dive into AGC rope memory. My mental model was stuck on core memory until I saw this and finally got the difference. Tl;dr Way higher information density. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38519425,"author":"FullyFunctional","month":"2023-12","story_title":"A Vacuum Tube Single Board 1-Bit Computer [video]","text":"Delay lines are fascinating, but I don't see why this is easier than core memory; seems like you are trading an electronics problem for a mechanical one. Regardless, at the speeds they are targeting, I think delay lines might be difficult. Another interesting option (for ROM) is core rope memory. CuriousMarc has the ultimate explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hdUbIlwHRkY":[{"hn_comment_id":38780817,"author":"surfpel","month":"2023-12","story_title":"History-making SpaceX booster mostly destroyed in post-flight topple","text":"\"Learning\" is also a noun [1] - which can be plural, so I'd say the creator of those comments has some learnings to make. More generally, though, being a grammar nazi is silly. Dictionaries are defined by the common use of language and language is quite flexible, evolving, unique to individuals, and even used to be much more geographically continuous than it is today.[2] 1 - [LINK] 2 - Here's my favorite talk on the subject given by Chomsky, highly recommend a listen (especially to the poster of those dead comments): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31567010,"author":"random314","month":"2022-05","story_title":"France bans English gaming tech jargon in push to preserve language purity","text":"Yes, the concept of nationalism and national language is a modern phenomenon. It is helpful in having subjects treat their governments as correct and moral by default and develop a distrust of their neighbors. Noam chomsky has an informative interview. He seems to think the concept of guardianship of a \"pure\" language is conceptually silly [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40651989,"author":"jcul","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'","text":"I love this old interview. If you skip to the very last question at 26:50, it is a little bit poignant, considering this news. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hdt18p-VMmQ":[{"hn_comment_id":33020358,"author":"atribecalledqst","month":"2022-09","story_title":"On Mr. Beast and being alone in a circle for 100 days","text":"I'm not really interested in Mr. Beast's content but there is a video from one of the engineers involved in his Squid Game recreation that I thought was pretty interesting. Seems like this guy went for three whole weeks without sleeping, just piling on hack after hack to make the event come together. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38896868,"author":"cf1241290841","month":"2024-01","story_title":"YouTube star MrBeast rejects Elon Musk's appeal to share content on X","text":"IMO a lot more interesting story around mr beast: If you have a bit of patience, while very much annoying, the making off video of his squid game blood packs is really interesting from a maker perspective. > How I Almost Ruined MrBeast Squid Game [VIDEO] or 7:30 if you know what a squib is They had 3 weeks (yes) to get 500 wifi controlled bloodpacks. And went through all stages of development hell. After technical problems, regulatory problems, supply chain problems, manufacturing problems and last but not least the obvious integration problems it started a day late (+500k$ for MrBeast) because the team with the targeting software had shit latency and drained their batteries prematurely. In the end they still added cgi for a better videoflow and used thin yellow paint to not get demonetized. Again, worth the pain of watching it. Turn down the sound a bit and stay strong. Skip forward if need be He also had an interview later once you are through with the video. > The TRUTH Behind Mr Beast's Squid Game Video [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"helScS3coAE":[{"hn_comment_id":14236973,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Robust-First Computing: Distributed City Generation (2015) [video]","text":"A Movable Feast Machine [1] is a \"Robust First\" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. The video \"Distributed City Generation\" [2] demonstrates how you can program a set of Movable Feast Machine rules that build a self-healing city that fills all available space with urban sprawl, and even repairs itself after disasters! The paper \"Local Routing in a new Indefinitely Scalable Architecture\" [2] by Trent Small explains how those rules work, how the city streets adaptively learn how to route the cars to nearby buildings they desire to find, and illustrated the advantages of \"Robust First\" computing: Abstract: Local routing is a problem which most of us face on a daily basis as we move around the cities we live in. This study proposes several routing methods based on road signs in a procedurally generated city which does not assume knowledge of global city structure and shows its overall efficiency in a variety of dense city environments. We show that techniques such as Intersection-Canalization allow for this method to be feasible for routing information arbitrarily on an architecture with limited resources. This talk \"Robust-first computing: Demon Horde Sort\" [4] by Dave Ackley describes an inherently robust sorting machine, like \"sorting gas\", implemented with the open source Movable Feast Machine simulator, available on github [5]. A Movable Feast Machine is similar in many ways to traditional cellular automata, except for a few ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14245485,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Esoteric programming paradigms","text":"I recently submitted a link about \"Robust First Computing\". It didn't get any response, but I'll repeat the link and description here, since it's certainly esoteric, but has some extremely important properties. Robust-First Computing: Distributed City Generation [LINK] A Movable Feast Machine [1] is a \"Robust First\" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. The video \"Distributed City Generation\" [2] demonstrates how you can program a set of Movable Feast Machine rules that build a self-healing city that fills all available space with urban sprawl, and even repairs itself after disasters! The paper \"Local Routing in a new Indefinitely Scalable Architecture\" [2] by Trent Small explains how those rules work, how the city streets adaptively learn how to route the cars to nearby buildings they desire to find, and illustrated the advantages of \"Robust First\" computing: Abstract: Local routing is a problem which most of us face on a daily basis as we move around the cities we live in. This study proposes several routing methods based on road signs in a procedurally generated city which does not assume knowledge of global city structure and shows its overall efficiency in a variety of dense city environments. We show that techniques such as Intersection-Canalization allow for this method to be feasible for routing information arbitrarily on an architecture with limited resources. This talk \"Robust-first computing: Demon Horde Sort\" [4] by ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10723354,"author":"Kapura","month":"2015-12","story_title":"It Probably Works: Probabilistic algorithms are all around us","text":"Fantastic article. Probabilistic algorithm design is fascinating to me because it's all about making sure that the system behaves as expected, rather than every individual operation being perfect. Implementing most random algorithms in practise strongly reminds me of studies of populations & behaviours of organic life (which is much better than the rube goldberg/spaghetti factories which sometimes arise as \"solutions\" to complex problems). Another interesting related field is Dave Ackley's Robustness-First Computing model[1], which operates with every atomic computational cell having some elements of randomness built in. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15560845,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Cryptography with Cellular Automata (1985) [pdf]","text":"A \"Moveable Feast Machine\" is a \"Robust First\" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. It's similar to a Cellular Automata, but it different in several important ways, for the sake of \"Robust First Computing\". These differences give some insight into what CA really are, and what their limitations are. Cellular Automata are synchronous and deterministic, and can only modify the current cell: all cells are evaluated at once (so the evaluation order doesn't matter), so it's necessary to double buffer the \"before\" and \"after\" cells, and the rule can only change the value of the current (center) cell. Moveable Feast Machines are like asynchronous non-deterministic cellular automata with large windows that can modify adjacent cells. Here's a great example with an amazing demo and explanation, and some stuff I posted about it earlier: [LINK] Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation: [LINK] A Movable Feast Machine [1] is a \"Robust First\" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. The video \"Distributed City Generation\" [2] demonstrates how you can program a set of Movable Feast Machine rules that build a self-healing city that fills all available space with urban sprawl, and even repairs itself after disasters! The paper \"Local Routing in a new Indefinitely Scalable Architecture\" [2] by Trent Small explains how those rules work, how the city streets adaptively learn how to route the ca","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19576267,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2019-04","story_title":"A Conversation with Language Creators: Guido, James, Anders and Larry [video]","text":"Actually, the Moveable Feast Machine is a \"Robust First\" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture that DOES reason about what might happen if computers randomly explode in mid-program! (One of my favorite topics, that I've written about in other threads!) [LINK] Check out how the city seamlessly regrows after you nuke it: [LINK] > Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation: A rough video demo of Trent R. Small's procedural city generation dynamics in the Movable Feast Machine simulator. See [LINK] for more information. And here's a robust, self-healing membrane, that tolerates random failures (like tiny little exploding computers): [LINK] >To demonstrate the robustness of three membrane implementations in the MFM, an instance of each was placed side by side and subjected to a failure probability of 5e-5 per site per EPS. That is, each site is erased, on average, every 20,000 event cycles. Intercellular Transport also demonstrates some robust chemical and biological programming metaphors: [LINK] >Two cells are interconnected by self-healing wire. The magenta substance is being passed from the cell in the west to the cell in the east. The black particles are an ectoplasm, allowing the membrane to identify sites outside of the cell. Similarly, the yellow and blue particles are an endoplasm specific to the cell in which they reside, allowing the membrane to identify sites inside of it. Demon Horde Sort exemplifies the Robust Fi","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21858577,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? (1977) [pdf]","text":"I've posted about this before, but it's worth repeating here: [LINK] DonHopkins on Oct 26, 2017 | parent | favorite | on: Cryptography with Cellular Automata (1985) [pdf] A \"Moveable Feast Machine\" is a \"Robust First\" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. It's similar to a Cellular Automata, but it different in several important ways, for the sake of \"Robust First Computing\". These differences give some insight into what CA really are, and what their limitations are. Cellular Automata are synchronous and deterministic, and can only modify the current cell: all cells are evaluated at once (so the evaluation order doesn't matter), so it's necessary to double buffer the \"before\" and \"after\" cells, and the rule can only change the value of the current (center) cell. Moveable Feast Machines are like asynchronous non-deterministic cellular automata with large windows that can modify adjacent cells. Here's a great example with an amazing demo and explanation, and some stuff I posted about it earlier: [LINK] Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation: [LINK] A Movable Feast Machine [1] is a \"Robust First\" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. The video \"Distributed City Generation\" [2] demonstrates how you can program a set of Movable Feast Machine rules that build a self-healing city that fills all available space with urban sprawl, and even repairs itself after disasters! The pa","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34262052,"author":"camel-cdr","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Artificial Life Creation T-0 and Launching","text":"As I understood it: The T2 tiles are \"normal\" microcomputers, that run a special software stack implementing the cellular automata. The tiles communicate over the connections, and essentially just act like a bigger automata grid. But the interesting part is that there is no global synchronization, and this architecture could be scaled indefinitely wide, by just adding more tiles. The impressive/hard part is creating the asynchronous automata, where each cell can only see a fixed amount of neighbors, and creating something from that. Edit: I think this video explained the general idea quite well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hgN8pCMLI2U":[{"hn_comment_id":12024590,"author":"ketralnis","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Running I3 Window Manager on Ubuntu for Windows","text":"Bryan Cantrill has a wonderful talk about exactly this in Illumos that I recommend at every opportunity [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41055476,"author":"panick21_","month":"2024-07","story_title":"\"Doors\" in Solaris: Lightweight RPC Using File Descriptors (1996)","text":"I highly recommend this talk, talking about Jails and Zones. Jails was first, but Zones took a lot of lessens from it and went further. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13349705,"author":"eternalban","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Memory Deduplication: The Curse that Keeps on Giving [video]","text":"I am watching it now but he's talking about VMs (\"KVM\") and not \"containers\". As to why we're in this mess, this rather amusing talk by B. Cantrill discusses the history: [VIDEO] (Linux) Containers are not VMs: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13918062,"author":"jsiepkes","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Comprehensive and biased comparison of OpenBSD and FreeBSD [pdf]","text":"Bryan Cantrill has a nice talk which starts with a bit of history on containers (chroot, FreeBSD jails, Solaris zones, etc.). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23560538,"author":"kohtatsu","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Gocker: Docker implemented in 1.3k lines of Go","text":"This talk by Bryan Cantrill on the history of OS-level virtualization is great. [VIDEO] Apparently the first version of Jails was a few hundred lines of code.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34768124,"author":"yakubin","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Sun: The Network Is the Computer","text":"FreeBSD jails were released in 2000 in FreeBSD 4.0. Solaris Zones in 2004/2005. In fact, the original Solaris Zones paper cites jails as inspiration. Jails: Confining the omnipotent root (2000): < [LINK] > Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Consolidating Commercial Workloads (2004): < [LINK] > Originally, jails didn't virtualise the network stack. That was added later, in FreeBSD 8.0 with VNETs, which were buggy for a long time, but went through extensive testing and are enabled by default since FreeBSD 12.0 (quite recently). Solaris Zones went a step further than the original design, and run a separate network stack for each zone from the start, years before FreeBSD did. BTW, recommended talk about those topics: Papers We Love: Jails and Zones: < [VIDEO] >","stance":"rec"}],"hhMAt3BluAU":[{"hn_comment_id":27186838,"author":"honkdaddy","month":"2021-05","story_title":"China increases spending 500% to influence America","text":"Kraut has a fantastic video on the topic - [VIDEO] While its title relates to Trump, the video is much moreso about Chinese history and culture and what brought them to the position they're in today.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37097137,"author":"hotdogscout","month":"2023-08","story_title":"We Need Scientific Dissidents Now More Than Ever","text":"Please take a look at this analysis if you can. It was miraculously done before COVID yet it explains those exact mechanics you exemplified. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hhiLw5Q_UFg":[{"hn_comment_id":35702146,"author":"mike_hearn","month":"2023-04","story_title":"It's not only you, there's an explosion of ChatGPT on HN","text":"Sure, here you go: [VIDEO] Summarizing: 1. Obviously you can't completely \"solve\" truthfulness because people disagree on what is and is not true. But you can go a long way. 2. The models do know what they don't know. Their level of uncertainty is not only expressed in the final token logprobs but also seems to be reified somehow, such that they can express their own level of certainty in words. 3. Many of the problems are introduced by subtle issues introduced during training which effectively teach the AI to guess. One example is by training on QA data sets where the answer is never \"I don't know\". RLHF introduces its own problems because the human trainers don't know what the model knows, so may reward it for getting a correct answer by guessing. 4. Many failures are caused by lack of access to information. Giving the LLM tools to let it search the web and access other databases can help a lot, and it's relatively easy to do. 5. In some cases you want it to guess. Like, it's much more useful when coding for it to spit out a screenful of code that has one or two minor errors, than to just refuse to try at all because the result might not be perfect.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36013980,"author":"KKKKkkkk1","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT","text":"There is this idea that the goal of RLHF is to make ChatGPT woke or as you put it to lobotomize it. I suspect that this is a conspiracy theory. There's a very good talk by John Schulman, chief architect of ChatGPT [0], where he explains that if you don't include a RL component in your training, you're essentially doing imitation learning. It's well known that imitation learning fails miserably when presented with conditions that are not in your training set, i.e., answering questions that don't exist on the Internet already. So the goal of RLHF is actually to reduce hallucination. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hk-0qJXyido":[{"hn_comment_id":35196830,"author":"m0llusk","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Who Blew Up Nord Stream? Investigators Focus on Mysterious Passengers on a Yacht","text":"Anders Puck Nielsen has an under 15 minute video with a compelling explanation for why Russia is most likely to have done it despite the obvious downsides. Just to pick some particular details: At this particular time the primary Russian strategy was to push Europe into a cold and dark winter. Pipelines can be rebuilt and that is not especially difficult when you are making big money from extracting and distributing fossil fuels. Even if you disagree with Anders' conclusions I think the points he raises are generally quite interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34714147,"author":"m0llusk","month":"2023-02","story_title":"","text":"The Anders Puck Nelson video about this came to the conclusion that it was probably Russia. His reasoning is interesting. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34716736,"author":"Const-me","month":"2023-02","story_title":"","text":"> what is the most articulate and sensible piece on why the most likely culprit is Russia? I think this video is articulate and sensible: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hlrv7DIHllE":[{"hn_comment_id":45294463,"author":"jackdoe","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Chrome's New AI Features","text":"I suggest the people working on those features watch Neil Postman's \"The Surrender of Culture to Technology\": [VIDEO] Part of me is actually excited for the acceleration of the end of the web, I even wrote [LINK] few days ago in frustration. The sooner it ends the better. I really don't want to see \"summarization\" tokens of other people's tokens.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7754646,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Neil Postman: Things We Need to Know About Technological Change (1998) [pdf]","text":"There's a related video from a March, 1997 lecture, in which Postman discusses the questions. Though I agree with much of what he says, I also feel he suffered from a bit of failure of imagination in conceiving of what the possible utility of information might be. [VIDEO] Two bits, both in the Q&A, particularly stand out. First: the observation that as the hoi polloi are told they need to acquire technical skills, the ruling class retains its power by learning how to speak and write effectively. Second: \"I feel very strongly about this: what is distracting us from solving some of the problems that you mention is a kind of a world view that's being promoted now by computer technology, that the main reason we have problems in the world is that we have insufficient information. If only we could get more information, easier to access, and get it faster, then we can solve this problem, or any of the others you mention. And I think this is an awesome conceit, and a terrible mis-judgement. Look, if there are children starving anyplace, it's not because we have insufficient information. if there's crime rampant in the streets in New York, Detroit, and Chicago, it's not because we have insufficient information. If the ozone layer is being depleted and the rainforest is disappearing, it's not because we have insufficient information. And if you can't get along with your own relatives, it's not because you have insufficient information. But we have come to believe that that is the sourc","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11996211,"author":"fkooman","month":"2016-06","story_title":"The Moral Economy of Tech","text":"> Not necessarily more smarts, but better tech means more affordable connectivity and education, and better education too. This is not true. Neil Postman has something to say about this, already in 1996, in \"The Surrender of Culture to Technology\". It specifically mentions education and how the \"wiring up to the information super highway\" was misguided. [VIDEO] It is very interesting in reading/watching Maciej, Neil Postman and also Evgeny Morozov to put things in perspective.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22585886,"author":"zulgan","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]","text":"a bit off topic, but if you enjoy questioning the value of technology and the impact on our society, check out Neil Postman's \"The Surrender of Culture to Technology\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37423031,"author":"blueridge","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Like privacy? Then smart devices are a dumb idea","text":"Yes, likewise. We have no smart devices, no TV in the house, no cameras or smart doorbells or Internet enabled appliances. People are always disoriented when they visit because there is no TV and no Echo-like device on the kitchen counter. Here's Neil Postman on using technology to solve problems that no one has, linked to start at 20:03: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ho7oagHeqNc":[{"hn_comment_id":19787262,"author":"sunmao","month":"2019-04","story_title":"How category theory is applied","text":"\"But it\u2019s hard to explain to people not steeped in the subject.\" I don't agree. Actually it can be understood relatively easily, if it's explained well: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26012705,"author":"gugagore","month":"2021-02","story_title":"What Is Applied Category Theory? (2018)","text":"There is an applied category theory course that is currently in the process of wrapping up: [LINK] The examples in the course offer a complementary entry point to category theory compared to an approach that leverages programmers' knowledge of functional programming. Personally, the more examples the better. I'm grateful to be able to rely on the example of a category as a collection of objects corresponding to types, and arrows between types corresponding to functions with that type signature, and arrow composition corresponding to function composition (and functors, and natural transformations, and ... corresponding to familiar concepts like polymorphic types, and map, and polymorphic functions and ...). I believe that many programmers can [come to] understand this one specific example of category theory objects, even if the words are unfamiliar. And there are so many more examples! There is a great pleasure in formalizing the analogies across different aspects of math and engineering. To get a flavor of and gentle introduction to the analogy-making power of category theory, I recommend this talk by Eugenia Cheng: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32424051,"author":"OracB7","month":"2022-08","story_title":"How to learn hard things in tech","text":"Eugenia Cheng has some interesting and accessible videos, e.g.: [VIDEO] and in a similar vein I am enjoying her book: \"How to Bake Pi\". Getting more into the technical side of things, Bartosz Milewski has good lessons in this playlist: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"hpAMbpQ8J7g":[{"hn_comment_id":9370062,"author":"mmanfrin","month":"2015-04","story_title":"The Noble Edge Effect","text":"This charity-as-part-of-consumerism is the topic of Zizek's talk First as Tragedy, Then as Farce ; well worth a watch (10 minutes) and approachable by those without philosophical backgrounds: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18132954,"author":"sithadmin","month":"2018-10","story_title":"The ugly truth about the ugly produce movement","text":">I know many people who buy into these 'good feelings' products. Good, quick talk by Zizek on this phenomenon: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34179840,"author":"rsj_hn","month":"2022-12","story_title":"On \u2018Plant-Based\u2019","text":"Slavoj Zizek discusses this idea of \"ethical consumerism\" in a beautifully illustrated talk here: [VIDEO] Needless to say, the idea that you are \"supporting\" something by voluntary exchange (how do you know that they aren't supporting you ?) is a relatively recent development, and is of course completely unworkable. It's just another form of retail therapy.","stance":"rec"}],"hpgK51w6uhk":[{"hn_comment_id":41326494,"author":"rendall","month":"2024-08","story_title":"How to build a 50k ton forging press","text":"I first learned about these presses several years ago from the YouTube channel Machine Thinking which is excellent and unfortunately infrequent. The linked video has some excellent footage of these beasts in action. \"America's Iron Giants\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26526709,"author":"alecco","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Tesla orders its first 8k-ton Cybertruck casting machine","text":"The Machine Thinking channel has a very interesting video on this [VIDEO] I wonder if these modern high pressure casting produce results closer to forging.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34808606,"author":"mvidal01","month":"2023-02","story_title":"The giant die casts reshaping car manufacturing","text":"This youtube video seems related. [VIDEO] This is the story of America's massive forging presses built during the cold war used to build America's most advanced machinery - the Heavy Press Program. Modern airplanes, missiles, helicopters, turbines - all have parts made on these giant machines! The Machine Thinking channel seems interesting.","stance":"rec"}],"hps-HfpL1vc":[{"hn_comment_id":39673895,"author":"harywilke","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate","text":"Dr.Becky goes over this in a video [0] from a year ago about the divergent results obtained by the two main ways we measure the rate of expansion. Cosmic Microwave Background Vs. Supernovae. As the accuracy of each method has improved, the end results have diverged. [0] 'theJWST just made the \"Crisis in Cosmology\" WORSE' [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39678307,"author":"jug","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate","text":"I can recommend Dr. Becky's introduction to the issues surrounding the Hubble Tension and recent JWST measurements in this 16 minute clip, as she introduces laymen to the problems well: [VIDEO] It's an older clip, but it checks out... ;) (still JWST discoveries and she most importantly introduces the viewer to the still remaining conflicts)","stance":"rec"}],"hs3piaN4b5I":[{"hn_comment_id":17619608,"author":"ljoshua","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Show HN: Layoutit \u2013 An interactive CSS Grid generator","text":"Here's a great explanation from Jen Simmons that really helped me understand the differences and respective strengths and weaknesses of each: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17159933,"author":"Deimorz","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Best Practices with CSS Grid Layout","text":"They serve different purposes, and you'll often want to use both for different pieces of the layout. Flexbox is for laying things out in one dimension, Grid is more for two-dimensional ones. This video might help show the difference (and all the Layout Land videos are great if you want to look more into CSS grid): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22825278,"author":"JamesSwift","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources to learn basic UI layout design for React apps?","text":"Grid is awesome, and I highly recommend learning what it can do for you. That said, they serve different purposes. However, between the two of them they address 97% of my needs on the frontend. This[1] is a good rundown of what the two do/dont do. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22825294,"author":"JamesSwift","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources to learn basic UI layout design for React apps?","text":"The two occupy a venn diagram of functionality. They do some stuff the same, but they also both do unique things the other doesnt. See this for a good rundown: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"htYh-Tq7ZBI":[{"hn_comment_id":38045426,"author":"mkaic","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Exploring Quaternions (2018)","text":"Freya Holmer, of The Continuity of Splines [0] fame, recently gave a great conference talk about how quaternions naturally arise from the desire to define the multiplication of two vectors if you just agree to one new axiom : v^2 = ||v||^2, or \"the square of a vector is equal to the square of its norm\". It was fascinating and entertaining and I highly recommend anyone who finds this stuff interesting but confusing (like I do) to check it out: [VIDEO] [0] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38064394,"author":"Syntonicles","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Linear Algebra Done Right \u2013 4th Edition","text":"I know people have jumped here to try to explain it to you as a comment, but I highly recommend a recent talk by Freya Holmer. It's a fun little exploration of a seemingly simply question about vectors that motivates the answer you asked. It also culminates with an introduction to Clifford Algebras, which you may or may not want to learn about after the talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39541173,"author":"zoogeny","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Look, ma, no matrices","text":"One of my favorite math/graphics YouTube creators Freya Holm\u00e9r did an excellent intro to Geometric Algebra not that long ago [1]. If you have any interest in 3d graphics (especially but no limited to splines/Bezier curves) then be sure to check out all of their videos. I personally have always struggled with linear algebra and I tend to find these Clifford Algebra approaches much more intuitive. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39543033,"author":"simpaticoder","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Look, ma, no matrices","text":"In another comment, they pointed out [VIDEO] in which Freya did an excellent job reducing the number of axioms to 1: If you define multiplying a vector by itself to be equal to the length of the vector, squared, then everything else falls out of simple polynomial multiplication. It's quite lovely.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41361537,"author":"gowld","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra","text":"The absolute first video to watch should be the (ironically titled) Why can't you multiply vectors? [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38049989,"author":"conradludgate","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Exploring Quaternions (2018)","text":"Coincidentally, this conference talk[1] released yesterday regarding vector multiplication. In it, it describes how quaternions can be seen as an extension of 3d vector spaces, like how complex numbers can be seen as an extension to 2d vector spaces. More specifically, quaternions are a 4d vector with the basis of {1,yz,xz,xy} where those \"bivectors\" result from 3d vector multiplication, e.g. (ax+by+cz)(dx+ey+fz) [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39520636,"author":"infogulch","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Rapier is a set of 2D and 3D physics engines written in Rust","text":"I got sucked down a Geometric Algebra rabbit hole a few months ago, which seems like a remarkably concise and intuitive way to work in a very wide variety of geometries, including 2D, 3D, 4D+, non-euclidean etc. I've wondered if GA would make a good foundation for a physics engine... There are a few small rust libraries that look interesting [1][2], but none with a lot of traction. Has anyone looked into this? [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] If you dare, a good place to jump in might be Freya Holm\u00e9r's Why can't you multiply vectors? - [VIDEO] - Then [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40164494,"author":"GuB-42","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2019)","text":"If you are still interested, try this: [LINK] The idea is that quaternions are the wrong way to look at the problem and that a better approach would be to use geometric algebra, bivectors and rotors. The formulas are essentially the same as with quaternions, but at least for me, this approach make more intuitive sense. It also work in dimensions other than 3, which matter to the author as he is the author of \"4D toys\" and hopefully, Miegakure. Here is another talk on the subject, by a different author: [VIDEO] It is not specifically about quaternions, it is about multiplying vectors and what you get from that, and it includes quaternions.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40849676,"author":"BenoitP","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Quaternions in Signal and Image Processing","text":"You should jump straight to geometric algebra. It's actually simple there. Quaternions and Complex Numbers are about just some not so special multivectors. Here are 2 45mn videos you'll not regret: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"huEtJw7pfLk":[{"hn_comment_id":27541446,"author":"mustacheemperor","month":"2021-06","story_title":"A Beginner\u2019s Guide to Miles Davis","text":"This reminded me of this 10 year old YouTube video that creates a \"duet\" between that soundtrack and LCD Soundsystem's New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down, which served as one of my most memorable early introductions to jazz: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28517435,"author":"gtpedrosa","month":"2021-09","story_title":"RaveDJ \u2013 AI Music Mashup Maker","text":"Can't help but remember LCD Soundsystem + Miles Davis duet from 2011: [VIDEO] Blew my mind back than as it still does today","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32919804,"author":"spartanatreyu","month":"2022-09","story_title":"React I love you, but you're bringing me down","text":"How did you manage to share the song without also sharing that amazing mashup? One of those rare exceptions, where overlaying another song improves the original: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39600319,"author":"LanternLight83","month":"2024-03","story_title":"How I listen to music","text":"This reminds me, somewhat tangentially, of one my favorite videos, the Miles Davis / LCDS YT Duet w/ the oddly affectionate mouse cursor [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"hvk_XylEmLo":[{"hn_comment_id":43471786,"author":"kolanos","month":"2025-03","story_title":"X\u2019s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has left the company","text":"Here is an excellent video on the history of work. In short, the Dutch screwed it up for all of us. [0] [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37708301,"author":"patmorgan23","month":"2023-09","story_title":"How a Four-Day Workweek Works, from the Companies Pulling It Off","text":"Just watched this interesting video comparing how much we work today to medieval times. [VIDEO] TL;DR we work a LOT more hours now than substance farmers did. They worked 4-6 hours a day and only worked about half of the days out of the year.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44060486,"author":"GreenWatermelon","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Jules: An asynchronous coding agent","text":"Hell, when the industorial revolution happened, working hours increased , not decrease. And especially with electricity, Factory owners forced workers to work deep into the night. A constant 16-hour shift was the norm, so much that it requires legal intervention [1] > In 1833, the Factory Act banned children under 9 from working in the textile industry, and the working hours of 10-13 year olds was limited to 48 hours a week, while 14-18 year olds were limited to 69 hours a week, and 12 hours a day. Government factory inspectors were appointed to enforce the law. Constant work day in and out, morning and night. At least before the industrial revolution farmers only had to work as long as there was daylight, and winters meant shorter work times. This video [2] from Historia Civilis is very relevant. The gist of ot is that to this day, we work more hours than medieval peasants did. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hx7BXih7zx8":[{"hn_comment_id":23837632,"author":"maxharris","month":"2020-07","story_title":"German court bans Tesla ad statements related to autonomous driving","text":"If you actually believe that Tesla will fail to deliver full self-driving in the coming years, I have two questions. 1. have you watched this entire technical presentation made by Andrej Karpathy, Senior Director of AI at Tesla? [VIDEO] 2. if you understand what you've seen in that video, why do you think Tesla will fail?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25705486,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Tesla to produce $25K car as early as 2022","text":"Removing the cameras may be a good idea, but note that their extensive fleet of camera-equipped vehicles is an important part of their potentially VERY lucrative self driving software development. EDIT: I highly recommend watching head of AI at Tesla Andrej Karpathy's talk on their self driving architecture. \"The Fleet\" as a source of data is a vital functional part of their self driving software development. They may be able to calculate that including cameras and a computer on a car that will ship in high volumes would increase sales of their self driving option across all Tesla vehicles (including that low cost model) enough to justify the inclusion of those parts. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27989387,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Tesla auto-pilot keeps confusing moon with traffic light then slowing down","text":"You can learn about their systems by watching talks by Andrej Karpathy. As a robotics engineer interested in vision, their architecture is inspiring. This talk [1] is a good overview but each talk he gives is a little different so search for more if you want to know as much as possible. But the big thing is that their autonomy computer can be programmed to look for odd scenarios and send them back home. Tesla uses their fleet of hundreds of thousands of cars to collect edge cases like this, and then they have a kind of compartmentalized neural network system that breaks apart disparate tasks. With their collected examples they can create unit tests to ensure that the moon stops activating the stoplight detector. Once trained, the unit tests presumably help ensure they don't end up with future regressions. So basically every time you see a Tesla do a weird thing, there is a good chance it will stop doing it soon enough. At least if it's hitting hacker news. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23162842,"author":"kjksf","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Waymo has raised $3B in the last two months","text":"Here's the most recent talk by Karpathy about this topic: [VIDEO] (there are more if you google for \"karpathy talk\") Here's the summary via 2 examples. 1. Example of gathering data that needs further labeling To implement neural network (NN) to recognize stop signs they program the cars to recognize things that look like stop signs and deploy that to the fleet of over 600 thousand cars on the road. The cars send those \"might or might not be a stop sign\" images back to tesla and they get manually labelled and added to a training set. They gather enough images and the \"recognize stop signs\" feature is done. Apply the same logic to other recognition tasks: recognize cars, pedestrians, animals, speed signs, traffic lights etc. Yes, labeling is expensive but everyone else (including Waymo) has the same cost. But Waymo has even bigger cost of driving around to collect those images. Tesla makes gross profit on every car they sell and they got 600 thousand people driving for them for free. Waymo has 600 cars, each of them reportedly costing over $200k and they have to pay drivers at least minimum wage for each hour of driving. That's why Google is reportedly is spending $1 billion a year on Waymo and why they need $3 billion of additional investment to keep going. 2. Example of gathering data that doesn't need labeling Consider implementing NN to recognize cut in i.e. other cars entering your lane in front of you. They deploy a first version trained on small sample, running in shadow","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24437739,"author":"fossuser","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Nikola: How to Parlay an Ocean of Lies into a Partnership with GM","text":"It's not the same: [VIDEO] You can watch that talk and see the approach they're taking. Maybe you're more skeptical than they are about the near term possibility, but you can see that the work and progress is real. The AGI risk is real too. What Milton said doesn't make semantic sense, it's not a question of timelines. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24602302,"author":"maxharris","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Tesla\u2019s Nemesis in China Is a Tiny $5k Electric Car from GM","text":"Better yet, let's get rid of cars altogether from city streets. This is coming along very nicely... [LINK] Autonomous driving is just around the corner, too, which means that there is no need to waste space on parking structures, either. Here's a Tesla engineer that gave a great technical talk demonstrating their progress as of early this year: [VIDEO] EDIT: yes, there are clear reasons why having an three-dimensional underground structure will absolutely affect the social dynamics above-ground in a city, yet it remains true that it is possible to banish cars from downtown cores in the near future (i.e., say by 2030 or so), given the present shift to electrification and autonomous driving. These issues are worthy of debate, and I'm just trying to shift the conversation to what's current. I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade! I love the goal of city streets for people, as exemplified by the beautiful laneways in Melbourne (11 minutes): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26033849,"author":"maxharris","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Trump left a traffic-safety mess for Biden.Item one:Tesla\u2019s self-driving claims","text":"This is anti-Tesla astroturfing, so I flagged it. If you'd like a high-level technical overview of Tesla's FSD efforts, check out this talk by Andrej Karpathy from February 2020: [VIDEO] There are literally thousands of videos of people filming the FSD beta doing amazing things. They are making great progress very, very quickly: [LINK] As you can see from videos like the one above, real-world data is needed to make FSD practical. There is a very long tail of things to get right, so blocking this progress with regulations would effectively outlaw FSD, or delay its development by a very long time. Given the number of road accidents that human drivers cause (think of just sleep deprivation and drunk driving), delaying FSD through regulation would ultimately cause a great number of uncessary deaths.","stance":"rec"}],"hxM8QmyZXtg":[{"hn_comment_id":27725559,"author":"dmitriid","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Apple and Intel first to use TSMC 3nm","text":"As luck would have it, here's the continuation to Windows Terminal. Casey Muratori made a reference terminal renderer: [LINK] This uses all the constraints that the Windows terminal team cited as excuses: it uses Windows subsystems etc. One person, 3k lines of code, it runs 100x the speed of Windows terminal. See the epic demo (and stay till the end for color output): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31346580,"author":"dundarious","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Windows Terminal Source Code","text":"Worth watching Casey Muratori's series of videos on terminals, and how to implement them, where he often makes specific comparison to Windows Terminal. He has some specific criticisms that are easy to disagree with, but the vast majority are well warranted. His broader series of videos on the topic are even worthwhile from a purely \"software engineering education\" standpoint. [VIDEO] I feel a bit bad about posting comments about it relatively frequently on HN, but it's just so very very good, and snark aside, his perspective is extremely valuable.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28760955,"author":"dundarious","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Microsoft: Extremely slow performance when processing virtual terminal sequences","text":"With some limitations that I can\u2019t remember, that I believe were minor and not insurmountable, Casey actually implemented a windows terminal with the \u201cPhD\u201d level work mentioned in this issue. He showcases it here. [VIDEO] I watched it months ago, but from memory, I believe: - it has better Unicode/layout support than windows-terminal - it renders as fast as promised - it has a tiny code base","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31284704,"author":"djoldman","month":"2022-05","story_title":"When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am \"misguided\"","text":"Link to dev's presentation of their implementation that seems to run circles around microsoft's terminal: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33029580,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Why modern software is slow","text":"Oh, this is nothing . Windows force-updated my Notepad.exe to the new modern UI version. It is very visibly laggy for basic actions such as opening menus or scrolling through text. You have to be spectacularly bad at programming to make something so basic so slow in 2022 on a very high-end gaming computer. Not just bad, but utterly oblivious. Casey Muratori excoriated the Windows Terminal dev team for failing to achieve a consistent 60 fps when displaying fixed-width text, which is such a trivial exercise that Casey whipped up a demo in like two weekends. [1] Now the Notepad team insisted on following in the Windows Terminal team's footprints and slowing down the other fixed-width text app that needs to be lightweight fast for all sorts of reasons. Nobody needs Notepad to be pretty. Everyone needs it to work .[2] Just amazing to see something like this happen. It's like a slow motion train wreck, ruining one Windows app at a time. [1] These videos are especially \"shocking\" because the code he wrote is terse, straightforward, lightning fast, and more correct than whatever madness Microsoft was doing. First weekend: [VIDEO] Second weekend: [LINK] [2] For example, opening a 300 MB log file takes a solid minute of time, which is absurdly slow. It also bloats this to 800 MB of memory usage. For comparison, TextPad opens it in 5 seconds and uses 30 MB of memory. VS Code, an electron application(!) opens in under 2 seconds.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38252310,"author":"surprisetalk","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Compressing Codebase Collocates","text":"Author here. It is very implausible :) After watching an inspiring video on terminal optimization [1], I started doing some napkin math on how fast my ex-employers' programs \"should\" run and how many resources they \"should\" take up. With my very small sample size (N=5), those numbers definitely hold. My big untested assumption is that most startups have even worse codebases than what I've experienced in my short tenure haha. I'd be curious what an \"average\" startup could achieve in 6 weeks. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40461320,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What makes Windows 11 perform much worse than Windows XP?","text":"Casey Muratori has some great YouTube videos (a.k.a.: rants) about the end-user visible performance degradation over the last two decades despite computers becoming 10-100x faster by various metrics. E.g.: Visual Studio Rant [LINK] How fast should an unoptimized terminal run? [VIDEO] The root cause is that Microsoft simply doesn't have performance as a priority. It's not a KPI for (almost) anyone, certainly nobody in the desktop teams. Upper management doesn't prioritize input latency over telemetry or advertising \"features\". It's that simple. There's no pressure, no rejection of slow code, no metrics, no pride in good engineering. If it barely functions, it's good enough to ship.[1] Microsoft employees will occasionally comment to say otherwise, but their statements are contrary to easily verifiable facts, such as massive performance degradations in trivial tools such as the new Notepad, the new Terminal, and the Calculator app. The actual specific technical reasons include: - Executables used to be loaded from disk one 4KB page at a time. Execution could start as soon as the first 4KB block was loaded. For a long time now, executables are digitally signed using a hash like SHA1 or SHA256, which means that large executables can't actually start running any code until the entire file is loaded. The obvious fix -- that didn't occur to anyone at Microsoft -- is to use a Merkle tree hash instead of a linear, single-threaded, whole-file hash like SHA256. - Similarly, anti-malware","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44745212,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Fast","text":"It's well known, but this video[1] is a proof of concept demonstration from 4 years ago, Casey Muratori called out Microsoft's new Windows Terminal for slow performance and people argued that it wasn't possible, practical, or maintainable to make a faster terminal and that his claims of \"thousands of frames per second\" were hyperbolic, and one person said it would be a \"PHD level research project\". In response, Casey spent <1 week making RefTerm, a skeleton proto-terminal with the same constraints Microsoft people had - using Windows APIs for things, using DirectDraw with GPU rendering, handling terminal escape codes, colours, blinking, custom fonts, missing font character fallback, line wrap, scrollback, Unicode and Right-to-Left Arabic combining characters, etc. RefTerm had 10x faster throughput than Windows Terminal and ran at 6-7000 frames per second. It was single-threaded, not profiled, not tuned, no advanced algorithms, no-cheating by sending some data to /dev/null, all it had to speed it up was simple code without tons of abstractions and a Least Recently Used (LRU) glyph cache to avoid re-rendering common characters, written the first way that he thought of. Around that time he did a video series on that YouTube channel about optimization and arguing that even talking about 'optimization' was too hopeful, we should be talking about 'not-pessimization', that most software is not slow because it has unavoidable complexity and abstractions needed to help maintenance, it","stance":"rec"}],"hyYCn_kAngI":[{"hn_comment_id":36691784,"author":"PUSH_AX","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your base template for first time communication with a prospect?","text":"I watched this just yesterday [VIDEO] The entire video is really good actually I recommend watching the entire thing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46407398,"author":"jppope","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources to get better at outbound sales?","text":"I spent the first chunk of my career doing sales (2nd half spent in software engineering). Theres a lot of good books out there but you're going to find a lot of the direct advice to be non-applicable (as I'm sure you can pick up from the comments). Most of the Literature out there is directed at professional sales people, who for the most part are non-technical, have the backing of a marketing org, and are also different than a founder. Anyway, heres a reading list. Most of the trainings I've been a part of were custom built to the org or market, and frankly I learned more from Rules of the Game by Neil Strauss. I did enjoy \"the Wedge\" training by Randy Schwantz... that one you should do the video not the book. It also sounds like you could use some marketing stuff so I'll throw some of that in there too. In no particular order, and please keep in mind this is off the top of my head: * Influence (the classic) * YC videos (e.g. [LINK] , [LINK] , [VIDEO] , etc) * Thinking Fast and Slow * Purple Cow * Clayton Christensen stuff * Spin Selling * Challenger Sale * Guerrilla marketing (for the mental muscle) * Jeffrey Gitomer (basic but useful) * Lean Startup (for positioning) * Charisma Myth * Minimalist Entrepreneur (bits and pieces) * The presentation secrets of steve jobs (just a good book on presentations, framed around Steve Jobs to sell more) For what its worth this question comes up fairly often. It seems like technical people would like a \"technical people\" guide on how to","stance":"rec"}],"hyry8mgXiTk":[{"hn_comment_id":11686908,"author":"dpeck","month":"2016-05","story_title":"3600-year-old Swedish Axes Were Made with Copper from Cyprus","text":"Nice video intro/discussion about the book for anyone interested. I haven't had a chance to read it yet but it is fascinating. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12208653,"author":"Radim","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Late Bronze Age Shipwreck Excavation","text":"Eric Cline, the author of that book, is also an entertaining speaker. I recommend his 1h youtube talk about the bronze age & genesis of \"1177 BC\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"hzGaO4Kdz2Y":[{"hn_comment_id":11465383,"author":"kalleboo","month":"2016-04","story_title":"When mechanical analog computers ruled the waves (2014)","text":"Dave Jones of EEVBlog recently tore down an analog navigation computer used on the B52 if you want to see inside a mechanical computer of this type [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13999202,"author":"david-given","month":"2017-03","story_title":"The Dornier DO-960 Analog Computer","text":"Eevblog has a teardown of the mechanical analogue computer that drove an astrocompass from a B52 bomber: [VIDEO] So, so many beautiful cams and moving arms...","stance":"rec"}],"hzPd3umu78g":[{"hn_comment_id":20300358,"author":"kadblas","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Why I think Haskell is the best general purpose language as of June 22 2019","text":"Qualification: I was introduced to FP a number of years ago and have finally reached a point where I feel that I have a deep understanding of FP in general. In my mind, Haskell is the \"best\" language out there (\"best\" in that it provides the best overall gain when all tradeoffs are considered). I'm no longer confident that Haskell is the \"best\" language anymore. I was recently introduced to a language that might be even better than Haskell: Dyalog APL. ( [LINK] ). Try it out yourself ( [LINK] ) To explain why, I recommend watching Aaron Hsu's videos on Dyalog APL: - Does APL need a Type System? ( [LINK] ) - This is actually a very interesting question that is more nuanced than upon first glance. - Design Patterns and Anti-Patterns in APL ( [LINK] ) - The main takeaway from this video for me was the principle of \"Idioms over libraries.\" - Higher Performance Tree-Wrangling, the APL way ( [VIDEO] ) - Or how to model Trees without using pointers by using \"Inverted Tables.\" (An inverted table is a table where the columns are the rows and the rows are the columns)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22050951,"author":"snaky","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Language as an intellectual tool: From hieroglyphics to APL (1991)","text":"I had this feeling exactly listening (great, as everything Aaron does) presentation about manipulation and transformation of trees in APL, [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27401189,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Zig 0.8.0 Release Notes","text":"> \" his saves on allocations, saves on total memory usage \" Co-Dfns is Aaron Hsu's project, and he has a talk[1] on a compiler implemented in a nano-pass style, once in Racket, once in Chez Scheme[2] and once in Dyalog APL, each using CPU and GPU. For compiling an AST with ~16 million nodes, he gives benchmark figures that Dyalog APL takes 64MB RAM to hold it, Racket takes 1051MB and Chez Scheme takes 1485MB. His provocative statement for the talk is \"pointers are the refined sugar of programming\". The APL version is 1/50th of the lines of code[4], runs typically 9x faster on the CPU, 50x-200x faster on the GPU, despite being interpreted by Dyalog vs compiled Scheme. There are benchmarks where the APL version loses in runtime, under 1k lines of code (which he calls \"tiny tiny\") so lots of startup overhead and not enough big arrays to gain ground on. He has one talk (available on YouTube) about his approach to using arrays to working with tree structures in a high-performance way in APL[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] he used to be on the Scheme R6RS steering committee, so he's not new/inexperienced with it [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] [4] 17 lines of code which took a PhD researcher (him) 5-10 years to write, mind you.","stance":"rec"}],"hz_mMLhUinw":[{"hn_comment_id":20751319,"author":"rhinoceraptor","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Roaring 20s Superhets","text":"Heterodyne is a signal processing technique, and superheterodyne is an application of that for radio tuning. This video is a great explainer (and I also highly recommend every other video on the channel): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39827544,"author":"wkjagt","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Radios, how do they work?","text":"This reminds me of a really cool video on superheterodyne receivers that Technology Connections did. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40496976,"author":"benkuykendall","month":"2024-05","story_title":"An adjustable filter that can prevent interference in the range 600 MHz to 6 GHz","text":"This kind of work sounds potentially (?) important for continuing to improve network technology. Unfortunately I don't have the background to understand why it works in the slightest. However, it reminded me of an older approach to signal filtering that I just recently learned about: the superheterodyne radio receiver. It's a simple idea that enabled us to build cheap, tunable radios. YouTube video if you're curious: [VIDEO] . Definitely an accessible introduction to a neat trick in signal processing!","stance":"rec"}],"hzyFZcuHmeI":[{"hn_comment_id":17481078,"author":"JshWright","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Seriously, Juice Is Not Healthy","text":"And basically no evidence that it's good for you. Here's a great video on the topic from one of the co-authors of this article: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8621452,"author":"therealdrag0","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Milk Might Not Be Doing You Much Good","text":"Healthcare Triage has a video on milk being not particularly healthy or even beneficial in ways people think: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10859040,"author":"justncase80","month":"2016-01","story_title":"You Can\u2019t Trust What You Read About Nutrition","text":"A gallon per week by yourself, or for a household? Milk isn't inherently bad but the things you need to know are: A) Consuming it doesn't really affect your calcium levels. B) Its basically just another sugary drink. C) Excessive amounts of it can cause anemia. D) Don't give much of it to small children due to reason C. Here are some more details: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43063812,"author":"pinkmuffinere","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Jane Street's Figgie card game","text":"I don\u2019t think they\u2019re quite as bad as soda, but I do think they\u2019re fairly close. I think this video is what first convinced me (been a long time since I watched, sorry if I\u2019m wrong about small details): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"i1vbvikDiI8":[{"hn_comment_id":22204143,"author":"rehemiau","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The Odin Programming Language","text":"Jonathan Blow's language is the most interesting from these three for me because it will have nice metaprogramming features. The document you linked to seems slightly outdated. One of the beta testers has published some more up to date videos with his language introduction and initial experience: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23803228,"author":"robaay","month":"2020-07","story_title":"A Programming Language for Games (2014)","text":"You can watch[1] one of the lead programmers from CD Projekt Red joyfully give an overview of where Jai is at now. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25852524,"author":"viktorcode","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Jai Language Primer (2017)","text":"Jai changed quite a bit since then. For more current info check out beta user's impressions (and the language primer) here: [VIDEO] (first video in the series)","stance":"rec"}],"i5uSbp0YDhc":[{"hn_comment_id":32287491,"author":"eurasiantiger","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Review of 17\u03b1-ethynylestradiol in water across 32 countries: Estrogenic effects","text":"As ridiculous as it is, this one is very likely true. For a thorough review, see \u201dGay Frogs: A Deep Dive\u201d by Oki\u2019s Weird Stories: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38596039,"author":"richbell","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Inert pesticide ingredients in may be more toxic to bees than scientists thought","text":"It's even worse: the chemical companies also get to dictate what science is allowed to be considered. [VIDEO] (this whole video is a gem, but ~13:30 is the relevant bit)","stance":"rec"}],"i6Fr65PFqfk":[{"hn_comment_id":6661706,"author":"aroman","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Django plugins you shouldn't start without","text":"Maybe I'm delusional, but even as someone who has worked pretty extensively (4 months of full stack Django development) with Django, posts like these things make me want to stay away from Django. I read this post, and I see bandaids. I see bloat, and I see warts. I don't want to build on a codebase that needs 5 extensions out of the box to be sane. Granted, I know this is not the real story with Django. It is a rather lovely, if rather rigid and stubborn framework (at least it was when I was writing with in circa 1.3). And it is powerful. But, and this is my point, it seems to me that there is almost no reason I would use Django over something like flask for anything but the most basic of apps. Any time you need to do \"serious\" work \u2014 beyond cookie-cutter stuff \u2014 you're going to need to seriously extend Django (or any other web framework for that matter, in my experience/humble opinion). And then it gets ugly, and you're better off building from the ground up on a minimal codebase than trying to contort an existing one to do what you need it to. Actually, most of my thoughts have been summed up 5 years ago by one of Flikr's lead architects (iirc) at DjangoCon '08 in a brilliant (and hilarious) talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":588941,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2009-05","story_title":"Cal Henderson leaves Flickr to create new startup","text":"Cal Henderson gave one of the DjangoCon 2008 keynote talks, and it's very good: [VIDEO] He seems to know his stuff. Good luck to them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1028149,"author":"forsaken","month":"2010-01","story_title":"DjangoCon Talk Videos Starting to Go Up","text":"Excited about these! The ones from 08 were amazing, if you have just gotten into django, I would recommend going back and listening to some of them. Favorites are anything by Malcolm, including Inside the ORM: [LINK] James' talk on Reusable apps: [LINK] Cal's Why I hate Django: [VIDEO] Technical Design Panel: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1129232,"author":"tsally","month":"2010-02","story_title":"Bill Gates is officially redeemed from presentation purgatory","text":"Lawrence Lessig does presentations like this [1]; I've always been a fan. A great example of this type of presentation done well is Cal Handerson's keynote at Djangocon in 2008 [2], \"Why I Hate Django\". Previous discussion on this presentation here [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1918866,"author":"sph","month":"2010-11","story_title":"Comparing MySQL and Postgres 9.0 Replication","text":"This is a wonderful in-depth article and the PostgreSQL team deserves a lot of kudos for the work they put into this. I'm looking forward to using it. The thing I find interesting that MySQL offers is multi-master and circular replication. Cal Henderson noted that Flickr uses multiple masters replicating to slave servers in their setup during DjangoCon 2008 (a great presentation if you haven't seen it: [VIDEO] ). Granted, multi-master setups aren't needed for most sites and PostgreSQL's new WAL replication and the fact that it makes sure that the WAL is written on the slave before the transaction is committed on the master means that data integrity should be top notch. It's exciting to see PostgreSQL's development progressing so well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12640766,"author":"davur","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Cal Henderson \"Why I Hate Django\" DjangoCon 2008 Keynote - [VIDEO] . Not that it is the most educational talk, but it's really funny (edit: added youtube link).","stance":"rec"}],"i70wkxmumAw":[{"hn_comment_id":20383507,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Atlantropa","text":"Tom Scott has a great video[0] about a similar attempt to dam the San Francisco Bay that got a lot closer to actually happening. So see if it was practical, the US Army Corps of Engineering built a giant scale model of the SF bay and put a dam on it to see what would happen. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20550442,"author":"CaliforniaKarl","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Harrison Ford: \u201cStop Giving Power to People Who Don't Believe in Science\u201d","text":"I don't think we can change the fact that people generally listen to what actors (and other charismatic people) have to say. This is nothing new. For a local example, San Francisco's John Reber, and the plan he pushed to turn the Bay into a freshwater lake ( [VIDEO] is a good video to watch). For a state (California) example, there's Arnold Schwarzenegger. For a national (US-level) example, there's Ronald Reagan. For what it's worth, Harrison Ford seems to be a stand-up guy. For example, his reaction when he accidentally landed his private plane on an airport taxiway: [LINK] So, rather than saying \"Stop listening to <insert charismatic group here>\", it's better to engage with and educate them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25026638,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2020-11","story_title":"The New Europe With Lasting Peace (100 year old map)","text":"> It\u2019s reminiscent of the plan suggested by a school teacher, to dam the San Francisco Bay, which was taken seriously enough to be modeled to scale by the military. For those unaware, I learned of this plan via this short Tom Scott video. Fascinating. [VIDEO] (4:33)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25559168,"author":"pmiller2","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Atlantropa","text":"Yeaaaah, like that wouldn't have any unintended consequences. Meanwhile, I find this more interesting: [LINK] The Army Corps of Engineers literally built a scale model of the San Francisco Bay Area, and they used it to figure out that damming the SF Bay was a very, very bad idea: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48397447,"author":"LucasLanglois","month":"2026-06","story_title":"U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model","text":"If you don't know Tom Scott, he has done a great video 4mn vide on the model where you can see it in action: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"i9MHigUZKEM":[{"hn_comment_id":7238089,"author":"zebra","month":"2014-02","story_title":"Angular JS Kinda Sucks","text":"Documentation really is not beginner friendly. Try watching these screencasts which will introduce you to the workflow and the beauty of AngularJS and you will make a small application during the exercise: AngularJS Fundamentals In 60-ish Minutes by Dan Wahlin: [VIDEO] Introduction to Angular JS by David Mosher: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12384223,"author":"bdcravens","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Stepping Backwards from AngularJS to JQuery \u2013 An Experiment","text":"For Angular 1, I'd recommend sitting through Dan Wahlin's hour intro to Angular. Don't code, just watch. It really helped me get that initial chunk of knowledge in my head. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"i9MXYZh1jcs":[{"hn_comment_id":22664199,"author":"uk_programmer","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Someone Is Stealing Tracker Songs and Selling Them","text":"There is a great video on youtube that explains how it all works. [VIDEO] He gets into the explanation of how the tracker software works about 8min 30seconds in. Typically though if you got a cracked game at that time it would have the crackers group name and there would be a little graphical demo and some tracker music.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27570007,"author":"aasasd","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Renoise \u2013 A DAW with a tracker-like interface","text":"Here's a good recap of what sampling looked like in the time of Amiga: [VIDEO] \u201cTa-da-da-da... aaaaaaand we're out of memory.\u201d Likewise apparently DJ Shadow pulled off quite a feat with his Akai MPC60 on \u2018Endtroducing\u2019, because the sampler could store something like twelve samples, also not too long. A sorta related anecdote is how the British \u2018mind the gap\u2019 was this terse because it was recorded on a solid-state memory, costing dearly in '68 even for the small amount by today's standards.","stance":"rec"}],"i9i47sgi-V4":[{"hn_comment_id":33368758,"author":"somat","month":"2022-10","story_title":"I tried starting a manufacturing unit in India (2020)","text":"The paperwork is an attempt(usually misguided) to stop the corruption. The idea is that if you have to account and document all actions you will have act in the proscribed manner and not in a way that benefits you. This usually fails for the reason you posted. I am not really sure how you are supposed to stop corruption once it gets rooted in your society. It is a vile and subversive menace that turns every one into a criminal, preying on their fellow man. A very unpleasant environment to live in. The best article on corruption I have seen.(if you have time for an hour long power point presentation ) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32112843,"author":"tablespoon","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Dmitry Rogozin has been dismissed as director general of Roscosmos","text":"> Maybe but those are big assumptions. Does the USA inspect it's missiles in the middle of nowhere? The US almost certainly does, but the Russians might not. They've been shown to have neglected routine maintenance in ways that caused very critical problems for their military (e.g. they lost a lot of expensive advanced vehicles, because their unmaintained knock-off tires disintegrated). Both these videos are long, but they had a lot of interesting ideas and insight on this topic: [VIDEO] [specifically 33:10] (How Corruption Destroys Armies - Theft, Graft, and Russian failure in Ukraine) [LINK] (All Bling, no Basics - Why Ukraine has embarrassed the Russian Military)","stance":"rec"}],"iD9xk3SDSYc":[{"hn_comment_id":48030099,"author":"kw3b","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Write some software, give it away for free","text":"This is awesome as hell, haven't seen that one yet. I love that cracktros/demos are still a thing. A cracktro a day keeps the slop away. If you like that one, you'd probably dig this. I feel like this is one of the best demos of all time from both a technical point of view plus storytelling. Dropped back in 2019. Warms my heart. The Black Lotus - Eon: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20690596,"author":"unixhero","month":"2019-08","story_title":"We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015)","text":"Vampire V4 SA (coming 2019/Q3) ------ There is a new Amiga being developed. It is an accelerator board with a brand new 68080 processor. The thing is, it being FPGA, it actually doesn't need to be hosted in an actual Amiga any more. Therefore they are planning to make a standalone, essentially new Amiga. The Apollo 68080 Accelerator - New Amiga: [LINK] Also. This is what Amigas can do in 2019: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25246849,"author":"29athrowaway","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Little Things That Made Amiga Great","text":"The Amiga has a very impressive demoscene... Two Amiga demos that I like from The Black Lotus (TBL): - Eon (2019): [VIDEO] (4:16 is my favorite part) - Starstruck (2006): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37860335,"author":"dansalvato","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Grind \u2013 A first person shooter for Amiga 500","text":"Certainly! Here are some of my personal favorites from recent years. These all run on a stock A500 (with the ubiquitous trapdoor memory expansion). [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39498681,"author":"dansalvato","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Coding the anime \"woosh\" screen on Amiga","text":"I use the same trick today! I have some \"benchmark\" macros set up which forcibly override the background color when I want to see where in the frame my operations are taking place. > Didn't know there were people still trying to squeeze more out of that chipset nowadays. You will be amazed. The demoscene has gotten insanely good since around 2017. Here are some of my favorites that all run on a stock Amiga 500 (with the trapdoor memory): [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"iDulhoQ2pro":[{"hn_comment_id":34572457,"author":"bfung","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Transformer Family","text":"YouTube channel that explains the paper in detail: [VIDEO] And subsequent follow-ups (ROME, editing transformer arch): [LINK] I find the channel amazing explaining super complex topics in simple enough terms for people who have some background in AI.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24895357,"author":"kanche","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Rethinking Attention with Performers","text":"Everyone has a different way of approaching. I like video walk-throughs of papers. If you are the same, for the theory bit you may find Yannic Kilcher's videos [0,1] helpful. On implementation side, the best project out there is [2] with good documentation. Also spacy has transformer package [3] (I personally haven't tried it), so maybe it will be easier for you to jump in if you have prior experience with spacy. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29629126,"author":"visarga","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The potential of transformers in reinforcement learning","text":"For accessibility I recommend Yannic Kilcher video review of \"Attention Is All You Need\" [VIDEO] Yannic has been making about 62 other transformer paper reviews since. You can find the usual suspects. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35978097,"author":"throwawaymaths","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Can someone ELI5 Transformers and the \u201cAttention is all we need\u201d paper","text":"The Yannic kilcher review is quite good. [VIDEO] I can't ELI5 but I can ELI-junior-dev. Tl;dw: Transformers work by basically being a differentiable lookup/hash table. First your input is tokenized and (N) tokens (this constitutes the attention frame) are encoded both based on token identity and position in the attention frame. Then there is an NxN matrix that is applied to your attention frame \"performing the lookup query\" over all other tokens in the attention frame, so every token gets a \"contextual semantic understanding\" that takes in both all the other stuff in the attention frame and it's relative position. Gpt is impressive because the N is really huge and it has many layers. A big N means you can potentially access information farther away. Each layer gives more opportunities to summarize and integrate long range information in a fractal process. Two key takeaways: - differentiable hash tables - encoding relative position using periodic functions NB: the attention frame tokens are actually K-vectors (so the frame is a KxN matrix) and the query matrix is an NxNxK tensor IIRC but it's easier to describe it this way","stance":"rec"}],"iFDe5kUUyT0":[{"hn_comment_id":18817169,"author":"jcslzr","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ten Years of Bitcoin","text":"You don't understand that what we call \"money\" today its a scam: [VIDEO] BTC will create prosperity we can not even dream of","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22621783,"author":"mrnobody_67","month":"2020-03","story_title":"The Longest Record Broken: Gold/Silver Ratio Hits Highest in Over 5,000 Years","text":"This is the best explanation I've ever seen of how the Fed and US Dollar money printing actually works: [VIDEO] Most people also don't realize that the Fed, which buys Treasury's drawn on a bank account with $0 in it, is privately owned - and distributes dividends to its private shareholders holders (who are not disclosed).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24551886,"author":"jondubois","month":"2020-09","story_title":"The unrealized potential of federation","text":"> Cryptocurrency is the digitally woke techbro\u2019s ponzi scheme The fiat monetary system is a ponzi scheme. Watch \"Hidden Secrets of Money\": [VIDEO] I also recommend doing your own research after this. The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Cryptocurrency is merely a response to this scam and its continued success helped to further prove that the financial system is a scam. Even if you assumed that cryptocurrency is a scam, what kind of financial system enables a scam to thrive for 10+ years? In such a system, how can you tell the scams apart from the non-scams? Clearly the so-called 'free markets' are not capable of distinguishing the two. What's to say that most big tech corporations aren't scams? They get a lot of 'free money' from the government through massive contracts to build projects which only add more bureaucracy.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8066131,"author":"xiphias","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective","text":"Volatility should never be important when selecting a store of value. Gold and silver has much volatility compared to USD and hamburger price, still if you sold a cow 5000 years ago in Egypt for silver, you could buy at least 0.1 cows from the same amount of silver today. Silver doesn't lose more than 0.01% of its value/year (still the volatility is much higher than that). It's actually more important to understand why USD and CHF are so bad store of value. The best explanation is by Mike Maloney: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10551919,"author":"ZenoArrow","month":"2015-11","story_title":"What happens when a culture is driven by the need for money to make more money","text":"To understand what debt-free money is (and to address how the US money system currently works), I'd recommend this video: [VIDEO] Please note that although there are a couple of subtle hints in the video about returning to the gold standard, the video can still be of use as a general introduction into the US money system even if you don't think that's a good idea (I don't think it's a good idea to go back to the gold standard). Hope the video can be useful for you, I know I found it useful. Feel free to ask me any questions about debt-free money (and how it could be implemented) after watching the video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24607042,"author":"jondubois","month":"2020-09","story_title":"5k people have pledged to give 10%+ of their income to effective charities","text":"I recommend reading up on monetary policy and the Federal reserve (and watch videos) and you will understand what I mean and how it fits into Annand's description of the world (it compounds the problem). It's a lot worse than you think. I recommend also doing your own research to verify all the facts. I had a hard time believing some of the facts presented but all checked out so far. Hidden Secrets of Money: [VIDEO] An interesting recent discussion I found which discusses the current state of the economy: [LINK] Actually the second one is eye-opening for anyone who wants to make sense of the current situation.","stance":"rec"}],"iFTWM7HV2UI":[{"hn_comment_id":49282869,"author":"kaizenb","month":"2026-08","story_title":"uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook","text":"uBlock team is the modern times heroes fighting the good fight for us. Thanks to them I've been navigating the web with peace of mind for a long time. Sometimes I find myself thinking how our lives would be if couple of guys didn't build shitty tech startups. We've gone from creative advertising to these manipulative online marketing scams, that attack our brains, especially targeting young generation, which effects how our societies, behaviours, art and culture develop. Recommend watching: \"We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15957248,"author":"greggman","month":"2017-12","story_title":"A friend of mine died and I didn't know because of algorithms","text":"you may have seen it but there is a really scary Ted talk suggesting that it's possible Facebook is using deep learning techniques to optimize for engagement and they have no idea why it picks what it picks but it's possible making people choose sides and argue happens to be the best way to meet its goals [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16380357,"author":"redux13","month":"2018-02","story_title":"The FBI, CIA and NSA say American citizens shouldn't use Huawei phones","text":"This comment is highly understating the power of social media micro-targeting by dubbing it as buying a few ads on FB and running twitterbots. I would request you to check out the Ted talk by Zeynep Tufekci ( [VIDEO] ) to get a sense of how effective social media campaigns can be.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23318123,"author":"save_ferris","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive","text":"> Anecdotally of course, as one of those tech-folks who's got nothing against good and relevant ads. Be careful what you wish for. This TED talk[0] on persuasion architectures brings up some interesting moral arguments against this idea. If we generally accept that ad conversion is a metric of an ad's success, how do we handle the situation where people that are susceptible to addictive behaviors like gambling and compulsive shopping are exposed to ads that exploit their condition? Data-driven advertising systems are built particularly well to find and exploit these kinds of people. We already see this a lot in the scam call/email world. Once you fall for one, the amount of inbound traffic you receive from scammers increases dramatically. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25746808,"author":"inglor_cz","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Facebook to staff: Avoid company-branded clothing for own safety","text":"That is not the case of YouTube, though. YT pushes recommended videos on you. There is an interesting speech by Zeynap Tufekci on this topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47009176,"author":"DarkUranium","month":"2026-02","story_title":"The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling","text":"There's literally a name for using this on purpose: stochastic terrorism. There's also a very good TED talk on this topic from 8 years ago : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iG9CE55wbtY":[{"hn_comment_id":33320635,"author":"robomartin","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students","text":"Lots of interesting elements in your comment. > Even with more resources, as long as we're going to insist on mainstreaming students with behavioral problems or who just don't care about the educational process, outcomes for the other students in the rooms are going to be affected. The insistence on equality at all levels and all things is a problem. I know there are people reading this comment thinking \"this guy is a bigot\". If you are that person, please stop, calm down and think. Everyone understands that there are people who will never been competitive swimmers, basketball players or good dancers. While I am not terrible at sports, I could not become one of those three, no matter what I do. One of my kids will never be an artists. Just not interested, at all. Another cannot think about anything else. Why is it that we want to shove everyone into the same mold when it comes to intellectual capacity, IQ, etc.? Should I force one of my kids into art class and the other into engineering? No. That would be insane. We don't all have to be engineers. It would be a really sad planet if that were the case. It is not bigoted to suggest we need to allow kids to excel at what really drives them. Expose them to a range of topics, of course. Don't torture them by forcing them into a mold. Should a kid who is an artist not graduate high school if they don't pass algebra, physics and calculus? Why? I love this Ted talk: [VIDEO] The whole thing is interesting, however the story that start","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31545285,"author":"johnisgood","month":"2022-05","story_title":"My students cheated... a lot","text":"Quite sad that nothing came out of [LINK] . Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about the education paradigm and why it should be changed, and in what ways. He appeared on TED[1][2], too, since then, and probably elsewhere as well. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41932946,"author":"andrei_says_","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite YouTube video, ever?","text":"Russ Olsen, author of Getting Closure, Eloquent Ruby and Design Patterns with Ruby, telling the story of the moon landing as a conference talk. Inspired me beyond measure and brought tears to my eyes. [LINK] \u2014- George Lakoff\u2019s lecture on Moral Politics. Instantaneous understanding of political language and identity politics. Incredibly important, especially today in time of extreme polarization. [LINK] \u2014- Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iGFqfTCL2fs":[{"hn_comment_id":30907151,"author":"wildrhythms","month":"2022-04","story_title":"A smartphone app that allows public to submit evidence of speeding drivers","text":"One of my favorite videos of all time on this topic: Traffic Waves [VIDEO] (Not new information, but a fun video, and it's something truckers have known about for decades)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9583782,"author":"thunderbong","month":"2015-05","story_title":"What Are Traffic Waves and Why Do They Happen So Much?","text":"I don't know if you've seen this video[0]. It helped me understand traffic waves quite a bit [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11597355,"author":"xbryanx","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Can a single car break a traffic jam?","text":"William J Beaty's video on Traffic Waves (linked in the article) is an enjoyable summary of some of these ideas: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17964689,"author":"tobmlt","month":"2018-09","story_title":"How America lost its love for the stick shift","text":"You beautiful zen traffic wave surfer you. This, a thousand times this. Somewhere on the web there is a great video of a guy doing this pretty effectively. I guess it's maybe five years old now but worth a watch. I think this wsj vid may contain excerpts from the original: [LINK] If everyone could just relax out there, some of those traffic standing waves would diffuse away to nothing. Ahhh... When I get in bad traffic and struggle against the urge to tailgate I play a game where I try and give enough space to where I just roll up to the car in front of me as it is starting to move again. This gives me a time-local goal to aim at instead of fixating on supposed \"bad actors\" I might want to judge instead. Edit: I found it! (from 2008 it appears) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18638562,"author":"TheSmiddy","month":"2018-12","story_title":"After 48 hours we haven't seen any sign people are using Waymo's service","text":"I leave massive gaps constantly now, it lets me see farther ahead so I can switch lanes when I see a problem coming and my average trip time is definitely shorter because of this. I really like this video for describing some of the advantages of \"zen driving\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iGbC5j4pG9w":[{"hn_comment_id":22992262,"author":"bane","month":"2020-04","story_title":"An average family in Tokyo can own a new house for $850/month","text":"Decent family houses in Tokyo are definitely more expensive than this, but not hugely (also Kyoto surprisingly). There's some interesting things about the Japanese housing market, for example, many homes become \"worthless\" after the end of the mortgage -- so they depreciate and are more like buying cars. Tokyo is also an absolutely enormous city with even more massive metro area. There's very few examples on the planet that come close. Tokyo is sometimes called \"the infinite city\" for good reason. This means that yes, you can pay huge money for a coffin in some areas, and little money for an entire house elsewhere in the same city. New York is kind of the same way in that respect, but is actually still smaller and less diverse. I could write a ton more, but I think this series from \"Life Where I'm From\" which is pointed out in the article is a fantastic overview of housing for a nuclear family in Tokyo. How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New Home - [VIDEO] Brand New Japanese House Tour - [LINK] Are Japanese Homes Really Worthless After 30 Years? - [LINK] Old Japanese Apartment vs. New House - [LINK] What a Very Old Japanese House is Like - [LINK] Living in Traditional Japanese Townhouses: Kyo-machiya - [LINK] Checking Out New Japanese House Design and Technology - [LINK] I'd also point out this young couple who are expecting their first child (Paolo from Tokyo) What a Japanese Moving Company in Tokyo is like - [LINK] $1500 Japanese Apartment Tour in Tokyo Shibuya - [LIN","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16088864,"author":"monkeypizza","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Why Is 'Affordable' Housing So Expensive to Build?","text":"Check out this video explaining why you can buy new detached homes in Tokyo for about 300k usd. [VIDEO] * Land owners have an absolute right to develop their own land - neighbors can't block you. * You can build a 60 m^2 x 3 floor house on 100m^2 of land, or more. So basically they build way denser, and reduce opportunities to block/rentseek.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30095526,"author":"seanmcdirmid","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The history of the end of poverty has just begun","text":"Here is a nice video explaining housing affordability in Tokyo: [VIDEO] Notes: * No one thinks of residential housing as an investment, so there is no speculation. * Building codes are such that residential can be built almost anywhere. Japan has zoning, it is just really simplified. * There is no resistance to rebuilding, so it is done a lot (why houses last only 30 years, the market demands new housing). * Housing can be built on really small lots, only 2 meters of clearance is required. * A $300k low end house is around 6-700 SQF, which might not make sense from an American context.","stance":"rec"}],"iHzzSao6ypE":[{"hn_comment_id":18985538,"author":"heimatau","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Queueing theory: The science of waiting in line","text":"Stop/go is bad. Gliding is better for the collective and for your fuel efficiency. CGP Grey has a great video on traffic flow: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19672535,"author":"yreg","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Microsimulation of Traffic Flow","text":"[CGP Grey did a video on this]( [VIDEO] ). Your goal, as a driver, should be to try to maintain equivalent distance between your car and cars in front of you and behind you.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21355338,"author":"Timpy","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ants Are Practically Immune to Traffic Jams","text":"CGP Grey did a really nice, concise video on the topic of traffic and he addresses your point in the first 30 seconds. Coordination, not cars, is the problem. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28855856,"author":"mjevans","month":"2021-10","story_title":"AI predicts accident hot-spots from satellite imagery and GPS data","text":"CGP Gray's simple solution to traffic and good visuals. [VIDEO] The real simple solution to traffic is no more monkeys driving cars. Also, implicitly, fully isolate cars from human powered forms of transportation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41203275,"author":"pchristensen","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Robocars improve traffic even when most cars around them are driven by people","text":"This video illustrates the principle: [VIDEO] Basically, people following too closely cause more braking, which cascades to more braking for an obstacle that was never actually there.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46960770,"author":"maerF0x0","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk","text":"> You don\u2019t own the asphalt in front of you. Correct, but you _need_ the asphalt in front of you for both safe driving and also to avoid cascading hard braking events. I also don't own the asphalt under me or behind me too, so it's kinda a silly statement tbh. This youtube talks about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iIpPuJ_r8Xg":[{"hn_comment_id":34957420,"author":"rtkwe","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Consultants, The real reason it costs so much to build new subways in America","text":"The US could cut back and still compete in the West Pacific/South China see but it would have to focus there very heavily to the detriment of the existing implied obligations to NATO. Part of the US's politically dominant position post WW2 is that we've signed ourselves up to be anywhere in the world fighting a large scale conflict inside of a month with huge stockpiles of everything you need to fight all over the world, including one floating one that can backup the standard land based prepositioned stocks. [0] Granted a lot of that was also enabled by being the only major economy not significantly bombed through the war but that advantage was heavily invested in since then. [0] Wendover Productions has a great video about the insane amount of logistics dedicated to the goal of never having to wait for materiel practically anywhere in the world. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33476977,"author":"rsj_hn","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted the F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed","text":"I'm really worried that cheap, abundant and reliable is not something our defense industry is capable of. - As a result of deindustrialization, we can't ramp up production of critical components. We make up for that by prepositioning supply depots around the world, and these depots allow a brigade or so to fight for a few weeks. But once that runs out, things get hairy. See this article: [LINK] which talks about \"surge\" capability after a four year ramp up time and also here: [LINK] - We have little sea lift capacity to move gear around to the hot spot even if we were able to produce it in large quantities. [LINK] see also [LINK] A nice summary of US military logistics is here: [VIDEO] - US gear has a reputation of being expensive to maintain and breaking down easily, even though it is generally best in class. - We critically rely on air dominance Basically we've optimized our military for global police actions by pre-positioning small amounts of troops and supplies around the world, rather than maintaining an industrial base with a large amount of slack and the ability to quickly ramp up production to support a sustained conflict. At some point an adversary is going to call our bluff with a major sustained conflict - and sufficient AA defenses to deny us air dominance. Then people will realize how hollowed out our defense industry has become, and they'll look at the huge amount we spend on defense and how little we are getting in return for that investment.","stance":"rec"}],"iJfw6lDlTuA":[{"hn_comment_id":17075830,"author":"Panoramix","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I learn math/physics in my thirties?","text":"For physics, I believe you fall in Leonard Susskind's target audience. You can get his book, or even better, watch his large amount of lectures: [VIDEO] Susskind is an eminence - he was Feynman's buddy back in the day. And he's entertaining as hell. Here's also Gerard 't Hooft's (Nobel laureate) list of concepts and books to master. If you finish that -in several years- you will be a qualified theoretical physicist. Whereas Susskind will give you more of an overview. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14175623,"author":"empath75","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Physicists demonstrate new way to violate local causality","text":"Do you have a few hundred spare hours? Leonard Susskind did an extensive series of lectures, that assumes some familiarity with Calculus and linear algebra, but almost nothing else. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27828719,"author":"hackermailman","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How can I get basic astrophysics knowledge?","text":"Search youtube for the theoretical minimum [VIDEO] its a whole playlist for quantum mechanics, Wilberger also has videos on hyperbolic geometry and relativity","stance":"rec"}],"iLmkec_4Rfo":[{"hn_comment_id":9046646,"author":"krebby","month":"2015-02","story_title":"David Carr Dies at 58","text":"One of the best scenes from Page One: [VIDEO] Carr talks to the Vice guys about their deal with CNN: \"Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop, doesn't give you the right to insult what we do.\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35945900,"author":"vanyamarka","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Vice files for Bankruptcy","text":"There's an interesting confrontation over that piece in the NY Times 'Page Six' documentary, which filmed David Carr, the Times's then media correspondent, interviewing the Vice Founders: [VIDEO] I think part of the Vice pitch was always that it was a disruptor of the old-fashioned media narratives, uncovering the stories to which boring old media was blind. I tend to agree with Carr's implicit critique here that we undervalue the journalistic, societal value of the sort of unglamorous coverage in which traditional media invests and at which it excels.","stance":"rec"}],"iN1MsCXkPSA":[{"hn_comment_id":22788833,"author":"airstrike","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Crafting \u201cCrafting Interpreters\u201d","text":"> I used to do graphic design, and I have this weird tic where any time I see something that looks handwritten, I look for multiple instances of the same letter to see if they are different or if the design just used a handwriting font. It\u2019s almost always a handwriting font and I die a little inside to see the illusion evaporate. Not a graphic designer, but I do the exact same thing and feel the exact same way... Happy to see I'm not crazy alone And his look like really neat hand-drawn diagrams! I certainly appreciate the degree of craftsmanship and care displayed throughout both books As a someone put it on YouTube, the time-lapse video of the entire process is like ASMR for geeks [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30335732,"author":"vishnugupta","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Crafting Interpreters \u2013 Web Version","text":"Related. The author's love for their craft oozes through their work. If I'm not wrong every single illustration in the book is hand-drawn ; like literally. Take a look: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iRdwXQb7CfM":[{"hn_comment_id":38633010,"author":"lokar","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Santa Cruz plans high-rise living as a fix for sky-high housing costs","text":"A video I found interesting related to this: [VIDEO] Outdated building codes require 2 stairs, making smaller multi-story housing infeasible. So only larger (whole block) projects pencil out, but people don\u2019t like them because they don\u2019t fit in well. I wonder if smaller (the size of 1-2 normal lots) 4-6 floor buildings spread out more would face less resistance.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40384993,"author":"languagehacker","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Exit Strategy: The Case for Single-Stair Egress","text":"I caught a YouTube about this recently that I really enjoyed. \"Why North America Can't Build Nice Apartments (Because of One Rule)\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40385291,"author":"aeturnum","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Exit Strategy: The Case for Single-Stair Egress","text":"I liked this youtube video that covers the same topic[1]. The US focusing entirely on this strategy to increase fire safety seems obviously stupid to me. As people say in other comments here - Europe and other countries require better fire suppression measures and materials instead of particular egress options. An obvious improvement would be to allow builders to use any combination of these approaches to achieve a minimal level of safety. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iRkZcTg1JWU":[{"hn_comment_id":10070275,"author":"chengsun","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Winning 1kb intro released at Assembly 2015","text":"Also, a fantastic visual guide is the documentary film \"Moleman 2\" (2011). It's freely available to watch on YouTube; highly recommended: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32801956,"author":"no_time","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"Moleman 2 - Demoscene: [VIDEO] Moleman 4 - Longplay (A videogame documentary): [LINK] Both are expertly crafted and fun documentaries about their titular subculture with a Hungarian twist.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13833882,"author":"nom","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Watch demos all day [video]","text":"If you are interested in today's* state of the demo scene, check out the documentary \"Moleman 2 - The Art Of The Algorithms (2012)\": [VIDEO] *Granted, it's 5 years old, but still awesome :D!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14393254,"author":"kodfodrasz","month":"2017-05","story_title":"How a 64k intro is made","text":"There is a nice documentary on the history of the demoscene, with some introspection to the creative process behind a demo/intro. It was made by a Hungarian team, who has other interesting documentaries on underground culture. It is also available in English, at: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33200047,"author":"aphroz","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Using an Amiga in 2021: Making an intro","text":"Demoscene is such an interesting form of art. If you are interested, watch this documentary: [VIDEO] The 4k (not the resolution) are very impressive.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37931412,"author":"omoikane","month":"2023-10","story_title":"What is the Demoscene? An obscure but influential art form","text":"I second this recommendation for Moleman 2 documentary, but the video I found has a different link: [VIDEO] Looks like this version is in English, while the earlier link is in Hungarian, otherwise they appear to be the same film.","stance":"rec"}],"iRleB034EC8":[{"hn_comment_id":21333965,"author":"personlurking","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Edward Snowden on The Joe Rogan Experience [video]","text":"Peter Robinson (of the Hoover Institution) is a good example of a master interviewer, with his Uncommon Knowledge series. Here's one of the last ones I saw: Peter Thiel on \u201cThe Straussian Moment\u201d (Sept 2019) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23892666,"author":"MrBuddyCasino","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Peter Thiel's New Man in the Defense Department","text":"If anyone wants an amuse gueule for the thought of Peter Thiel, this is a good one: [VIDEO] So many interesting, fundamental topics.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28633466,"author":"hacknat","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Peter Thiel, Scourge of Silicon Valley","text":"I don't disagree, but I think there is a lot of nuance to it. Thiel is an ardent disciple of Rene Girard. If people want insight into how Thiel sees the world, I would strongly recommend reading The Straussian Moment . There is a Peter Robinson interview about the essay that can serve as a good primer[1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iRsSjh5TTqI":[{"hn_comment_id":9585568,"author":"ZenoArrow","month":"2015-05","story_title":"How Eddie Van Halen Hacks a Guitar","text":"That sounds like a cool instrument, would be interested in hearing what it sounds like, do you have any clips of you playing it? I like the idea of a guitar that can easily reach lower registers. Whilst 7-string (and in Charlie Hunter's case, 8-string) guitars are possibly more versatile, I'm quite partial to baritone guitars. This sounds beautiful to me: [LINK] Talking of unconventional instruments, you may be interested in hearing these microtonal guitars, I think the second one in particular sounds pretty good: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12377237,"author":"ZenoArrow","month":"2016-08","story_title":"The same melodic sequence appears in a surprising number of recent pop songs","text":"> \"But don't hold your breath for oriental tuning. I don't see any reason why that would ever catch on. ick.\" I can understand your personal preference. That said, I think the ear is more adaptable than you might think, I've found myself enjoying music that employs microtones. To give one example, here's some Turkish music played on microtonal guitar: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32629160,"author":"kortex","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?","text":"Anyone who is interested in going down the beyond-12-equal-temperment rabbit hole: - xeharmonic wiki: [LINK] - xenharmonic playlist: [LINK] - Tolgahan \u00c7o\u011fulu and his awesome microtonal guitar creations: [VIDEO] Some bands with more \"approachable\" sounds (vs the xenharmonic playlist, which gets spicy) known for microtonal work: Psychedelic rock: - King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (namely albums Flying Microtonal Banana, KG, LW) - Altin G\u00fcn - Gaye su Akyol Classic blues rock (Led Zeppelin and the like, but also OG blues like Robert Johnson, that's another rabbit hole) also has a surprising amount of off-12Tet notes, because of the blues scale In the electronic realm, Aphex Twin does some interesting stuff with microtones - Jacob Collier - musical prodigy, mostly a capella/vocal arranging, but is a genre polymath, does some incredible stuff with just harmony If anyone has anything to add, please do! I can't get enough of this stuff","stance":"rec"}],"iSVHp6CAyQ8":[{"hn_comment_id":30881019,"author":"tux1968","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Why the World Relies on ASML for Machines That Print Chips [Video]","text":"The entire video is pretty fascinating, but this direct link to the timestamp where they explain how the EUV 13nm wavelength light is created, is particularly incredible: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32333211,"author":"photochemsyn","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Political Chips","text":"> \"The most important decision was shifting to extreme ultraviolet lithography at a time when Intel thought it was much too expensive and difficult to implement; TSMC, backed by Apple\u2019s commitment to buy the best chips it could make, committed to EUV in 2014, and delivered the first EUV-derived chips in 2019 for the iPhone. Those EUV machines are made by one company \u2014 ASML. They\u2019re worth more than Intel too (and Intel is a customer).\" CNBC toured ASML clean rooms in a very interesting video. IIRC, the only thing keeping ASML from exporting these machines to China is some EU/USA export control rule: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32357218,"author":"Cyph0n","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Italy, Intel close to $5B deal for chip factory","text":"All of the above. You need thousands of highly skilled engineers to operate an advanced fab. You need extremely advanced and expensive specialized equipment - look up ASML for a general idea of what this equipment does. You need a huge, purpose-built cleanroom that is many orders of magnitude \u201ccleaner\u201d than an operating room. You need a structure (and location) that has virtually zero vibration or noise. You need an constant, high-volume supply of a bunch of resources including water, power, and sand. And the list goes on. Edit: Good video on ASML and semiconductor fabrication equipment in general: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39453286,"author":"tim333","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Japan bets $67B to become a global chip powerhouse once again","text":"'Why The World Relies On ASML For Machines That Print Chips' an 18 min CNBC piece is quite jolly [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iSmkqocn0oQ":[{"hn_comment_id":38027315,"author":"ernst_klim","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Was Rust Worth It?","text":"These are two issues, which a theoretically orthogonal but in practice not so much. These are known as soundness and completeness. A good talk on topic [1] Rust will reject a lot of sound programs, and that's a huge performance hit. You are hitting the incompleteness wall with multiple mutable borrowing, closures in structures are a huge source of pain as well. And usually the answer from the community is \"use handlers instead of pointers\", but this gives you, surprise surprise, manual resource management alike that in C, and the compiler won't help much. Of course this is all subjective but for me the ergonomics of Rust is far too bad. It's a good step in right direction along with ATS, but I really hope we could do better than this. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40666486,"author":"ReleaseCandidat","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Gerald Sussman: Programming is (should be) fun (2022) [video]","text":"That must of course be \"Haskell is useless\" [VIDEO] But apart from that, his enthusiasm can even make the mseemingly most boring topic interesting. I'd personally start either at \"the story of Haskell\" Escape from the Ivory Tower [LINK] Or something more recent, about Epic's Verse [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"iYJKd0rkKss":[{"hn_comment_id":4771229,"author":"js2","month":"2012-11","story_title":"Photos of Cabins","text":"I think HN would really appreciate the story of Dick Proenneke, the cabin he built, and the simple life he lived there: [LINK] There are several documentaries made from footage he filmed, later edited and narrated by a friend of his from his journals. Clip: [VIDEO] More info and links to buy the videos: [LINK] (Sadly, I was unable to legally find them available digitally, so you have to order and wait for the DVD.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12999949,"author":"eth0up","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Beginning Woodworking","text":"I was surprised to not see any comments here referencing ol' Dick Proenneke, whose creative, improvisational woodwork will, in my opinion, remain legendary for the duration of humanity. For most, his work won't be practical or directly applicable, but only for the most indifferent will it fail to be inspirational. [LINK] [VIDEO] Alone In The Wilderness, Part I","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14938922,"author":"influx","month":"2017-08","story_title":"There Have Always Existed People Who\u2019ve Simply Wanted to Be Alone","text":"Your sample size is one. Let me double it for you, I highly recommend Dick Proenneke's story, Alone in the Wilderness. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15775456,"author":"samcheng","month":"2017-11","story_title":"An Island to Oneself","text":"This reminds me of some awesome documentary footage of a man who built a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness: [VIDEO] Alone in the Wilderness - Dick Proenneke The same dry commentary made riveting by insightful and sometimes whimsical observations, the same hardship usually effortlessly overcome, and of course the same solitary strength of a middle-aged man. Both stories make me a bit envious, and inspire me to create a little more with my hands.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16886322,"author":"xbryanx","month":"2018-04","story_title":"How to build a house alone [video]","text":"Dick Proenneke's Alone in the Wilderness is a wonderful TV show to watch if you're into this sort of DIY building joy. He starts with only a few tools and builds himself a little cabin in Alaska, narrating and filming the whole thing. Quite peaceful and inspiring. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6461871,"author":"dot","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Thoreau 2.0 ","text":"if you're inspired by Thoreau, I recommend you check out Dick Proenneke's little film \"Alone in the Wilderness\". First 10 minutes here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16883861,"author":"ctime","month":"2018-04","story_title":"How to build a house alone [video]","text":"Richard Proenneke built a home in the middle of no where Alaska in the 50's, using only hand tools, check out: [LINK] Alone in the Wilderness - YouTube [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16946288,"author":"chrissnell","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Make your own sourdough","text":"I had a starter for several years that was descended from the one kept by Dick Proenekke [1]. He lived alone in a cabin that he built himself--by hand--deep in the Alaskan bush. He made sourdough pancakes daily and his original starter came from a friend of his back in town. Someone related to this person sells the starter (on a wooden spoon) that you can buy [2] and use to create your own descendant. There's a fascinating PBS documentary on him that you can watch on YouTube, if you're interested: [3] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23577973,"author":"livueta","month":"2020-06","story_title":"'Into The Wild' bus removed from Alaska wilderness","text":"I've always thought of Dick Proenneke[1] as what McCandless could have/should have been. Despite attempting a similar thing (go detach from civilization as much as possible, though Proenneke didn't take it to the same extreme), Proenneke was actually prepared and talented in the kinds of crafts necessary to have a good life in the wilderness - guy was a crazy-good outdoorsman in general, on top of great carpentry/woodworking[2]/general jury-rigging. The best part is that he took an 8mm camera and filmed a lot of his work, including building his cabin from almost entirely indigenous materials. Those films ended up as the (PBS-involved?) documentary Alone in the Wilderness [3]. --- [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] (partial)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26474442,"author":"TrackerFF","month":"2021-03","story_title":"One Year Alone in Forest of Sweden Building a Log Cabin","text":"If you enjoy this stuff, do check out \"Alone in the Wilderness\" with Dick Proenneke Here's a clip [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"i_qE1iAmjFg":[{"hn_comment_id":2164495,"author":"niyazpk","month":"2011-02","story_title":"JQuery Deconstructed","text":"I found these videos by Paul Irish very interesting too: 10 Things I Learned from the jQuery Source : [VIDEO] 11 more Things I Learned from the jQuery Source : [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2466172,"author":"jarek-foksa","month":"2011-04","story_title":"Code which every programmer must read before dying","text":"If you are fronted web developer then you should defenitely read jQuery sources. There is a lot of patterns that you could borrow and reuse in your own JS libraries. A good place to start is this interactive code viewer: [LINK] There is also a great presentation by Paul Irish (\"10 Things I Learned from the jQuery Source\"): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2476220,"author":"geuis","month":"2011-04","story_title":"Tell HN: Will answer your javascript questions for the next few hours","text":"Take a look at this. [VIDEO] This is Paul Irish giving a breakdown of interesting bits about jQuery. He talks about this technique roughly 50 minutes in.","stance":"rec"}],"ia7IKW0yuG0":[{"hn_comment_id":34698461,"author":"robocat","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Tech's Elite Hates Labor","text":"> that over the past 20 years the cultural gap between typical SV \"tech employee\" and typical SV \"tech leader/founder\" has widened dramatically Maybe something to do with the change in the type of people wanting to work in tech - it used to be geeks and now it is a high status job and attracts status/money seekers. Great discussion on \u201cThe cult of conformity in Silicon Valley\u201d [VIDEO] [LINK] 2000\u2019s - \u201cthe Dark Ages you and I went to school in the early and mid 2000s\u201d - \u201cit's probably hard for us to explain to a current college kid how uncool Tech was\u201d - \u201cI was a Yale 05 graduate and in my graduating year Yale graduated 10 CS majors in a class of 1200 kids\u201d - \u201cstatus seeking thing that a gunner should want to go after:\u201d Finance, Consulting, Law, or Medicine (not startups, not tech) 2020\u2019s - \u201cnow things have changed you know fast forward um a little less than 20 years and Tech is now attracting conformists\u201d - \u201ccollege kids today obsess with getting jobs at Facebook and Google. They study how they interview just as much as people study how to interview how to get into Goldman Sachs\u201d - \u201cthey want the status they want the money that used to be associated with these Finance or professional jobs: bam, they're all now associated with big Tech\u201d - \u201cat first you see the explosion of CS majors in school and I think you would think to yourself oh man that means that there are a lot more people who are interested in building but that's not actually the case like it's it's it's uh it's dece","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34720837,"author":"earthnail","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Burnt out from big tech. What's next?","text":"What helped me was surround myself with people I like - I mean, work wise. That\u2019s much easier said than done. Michael and Dalton touch on this on a recent video where they compare modern FAANG with Goldman Sachs: [VIDEO] The founder culture is so full of kool-aid that it can be tough to find those people there, too, but I found overall that that was the best place for me. Interestingly, I found the older and more successful people to be much more sane, and super happy to meet smart sane young people. I have a lot of older friends now; many are founders of large companies who are just glad to have normal conversations - the kind of people that as a FAANG middle manager would be status contacts to brag about but now are just nice folks to grab a pint with. The good people in tech still exist, and they\u2019re often at key positions. But at Goldman Sachs I mean FAANG you\u2019ll have a tough time fighting through middle management. And BOY was that FAANG culture bad for my mental health\u2026 I hope this makes some sense. Watch the video, I think it will cheer you up big time:).","stance":"rec"}],"ia8Q51ouA_s":[{"hn_comment_id":41309958,"author":"sph","month":"2024-08","story_title":"The YouTube like button glows when you say \"smash that like button\" [video]","text":"I have only once, for KRAZAM. I need to balance all the time spent on this site reading about using Kubernetes at scale, AI changing the world and how to bring more value to my employer with their videos. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41575006,"author":"einichi","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Krazam: High Agency Individual Contributor [video]","text":"Positive Affirmations for Site Reliability Engineers [VIDEO] this hit so close to home I didn't know whether to laugh or cry","stance":"rec"}],"ibqiet6Bg38":[{"hn_comment_id":25566455,"author":"0x38B","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Russia gives Kremlin critic Navalny an ultimatum: Return immediately or jail","text":"Related: the video of Navalny calling one of the FSB agents who poisoned him is definitely the best prank of 2020 [1]. (Video has English subs) Watching Navalny grill Konstantin Kudryavtsev about why they failed to kill Navalny (flight quickly grounded, quick medical aid on the ground) was unreal and the best spy moment of 2020 for me. One thing that's been making a difference is Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation's \"Smart Voting\" system, which helps people vote out \"United Russia\" members and bring in opposition or at least non-United-Russia candidates [2]. 1: [VIDEO] 2: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28191993,"author":"sam_lowry_","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The best books on assassinations","text":"This is a bit off-topic, but Navalny calling his killer and pranking him into telling all kinds of nasty details of Navalny's own killing attempt is mind-bogging [1]. I am sure this is now part of all secrets services of the world 101 trainings. Full audio with English transcript: [2]. There is also a bit of background told by Navalny later on, e.g. the name Maxim Sergeevich Ustinov was not really random. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] P.S. fivebooks.com seems to be spamming HN quite regularly.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25868124,"author":"wyldfire","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Novichok Nerve Agent Poisoning","text":"In case you missed it: Navalny found conclusive evidence of a cover-up for his poisoning [1] [2] [3]. But the best part is how he did it: caller ID spoof + social engineering. IMO exploiting the authoritarian nature/culture was really clever. Every time Kudryavtsev demurs about revealing more details, Navalny (as Ustinov) calls him by his full name. To me, it sounds like he's threatening him or reminding him of their relative position in the hierarchy. Each time, Kudryavtsev continues to spill the beans and give up co-conspirators. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"id1WShzzMCQ":[{"hn_comment_id":18379846,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you come up with creative, original ideas?","text":"I don't know that I can say I'm particularly good at this, but to the extent that I do have any original / good ideas, I think a big part of it is this: 1. Know at least a little bit, about a lot of stuff. 2. Know a lot about at least a few things. 3. Constantly trawl for new \"stuff\" (eg, read books, magazines, the web, watch documentaries, etc.) 4. Think about how to combine different bits of the \"stuff\" you have in your head. Take notes, write down lots of ideas, even if they're dumb at a first glance. Keep chewing on things, and eventually the penny drops and you see some connection between things that makes sense. 5. Related to that, and I don't do this well enough myself, is \"spend a lot of time thinking about the kinds of problems people have\". I've read a few books on creativity / innovation / etc., but I'm not sure I can say any of them specifically helped, although a few of the ideas may have been useful without my being consciously aware of it. I read some of the Lateral Thinking book and I vaguely recall thinking it seemed somewhat useful. YMMV. [LINK] I also recommend Alan Kay's video series on \"How To Invent The Future\". Part I: [VIDEO] Part II: [LINK] Another thing: I think sometimes ideas come out that are \"ahead of their time\" and seemingly die on the vine, or just get left behind. But sometimes when the environment changes, those ideas become ripe to get re-invented. There's a book title Rethink that sorta deals with this idea. [LINK] Anyway, I think there's ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24040298,"author":"matt_s","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Other examples like \u201cKodak missed digitization\u201d for presentations?","text":"Counterpoint is that they picked one thing (laser printing) out of the dozens of ideas coming out of PARC and capitalized on it to the point that they were found to be a monopoly [0] and forced to license their patents [1]. Watch Alan Kay's \"How to Invent The Future\" talks from Stanford about this [2] and he talks in more depth. I don't think any company could have built products around all of the ideas that came out of there and been successful, they would have been focused on too many things. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] and [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27062598,"author":"matt_s","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Crazy New Ideas","text":"I don't think pg intended that crazy new ideas require someone to be a domain expert, just some expertise. Slight wording difference. In the case of music, one could have domain expertise on audio files, compression and domain expertise about file sharing and domain expertise about younger people's listening habits. That's just having some insights into the domain, several as is the case with Napster. Music industry execs in those days probably had domain expertise on contract law, revenue sharing models, marketing and didn't have a clue about file sharing or audio compression. Also want to mention the examples you mention seem to have not much \"newness\" to them to be \"crazy new\" in my opinion. When I think of \"crazy new\" ideas, I think of things like stuff that came out of PARC in the 60's. If you go watch the Stanford 2 part series \"How To Invent The Future\" with Alan Kay on youtube [0] it goes into a lot of detail about them. The challenge there with Xerox was they couldn't capitalize on every single idea that came out, just not logistically possible for a company to really do that. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27117630,"author":"matt_s","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Which tech documentaries would you recommend and why?","text":"How To Invent the Future, parts 1 and 2. [VIDEO] Alan Kay talks about the innovations that came out of PARC. I liked it because it confirmed my belief that true industry changing innovations are rare.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30457221,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?","text":"If I was really truly stuck for an idea and could not get anything to pop into mind, here's something I might try: Apply the \"take an old idea and reinvent it in light of newer discoveries, new technology, or in application to a new problem\" approach. To do that, read about old ideas in some area of interest to you, that didn't catch on, or were abandoned for whatever reason. Use Google, Wikipedia, Sci-hub, old print magazines, old newspapers, whatever it takes. Look at things through a lens of \"Could I resurrect this idea with a new twist that wasn't available when it was first proposed?\" Do that for enough \"things\" there's a chance it'll spark something. Extra hint: if you're looking for a startup idea specifically, Google for one of the multiple lists of \"startup ideas that never work\" that are out there. Of course it should go without saying to be very cautious about jumping into a project where many other people have failed with the same idea: there's probably a good reason for their failure. But IF you can find a new angle or hook that's \"just right\" maybe you can succeed. Or the whole exercise may actually bring a completely different idea to mind. Try to be open minded with this stuff. Also, find the two video series[1][2] that Alan Kay did on \"Inventing the Future\" and watch those. He shares a lot of great ideas in those. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31524279,"author":"morphle","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How to start developing critical thinking?","text":"Alan Kay's lectures on youtube are mostly about (critical) thinking and how to educate your own thinking. Each of his talks is aimed at a different audience but all address your question. For our HN audience the 1997 OOPSLA talk [1] is a place to start, or the \"How to Invent the Future I - Stanford CS183F: Startup School\" talks [2]. There are many recommendations of books to read to develop your thinking. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34994772,"author":"matt_s","month":"2023-03","story_title":"50 Years Later, We\u2019re Still Living in the Xerox Alto\u2019s World","text":"Do you realize the concepts for computing tablets came out of PARC as well? Alan Kay gave a couple lectures at Stanford on \"How to Invent the Future\" and went over all the stuff that came out of there. [VIDEO] Much of what we use today was conceptualized 50+ years ago. PARC's outputs paid off immensely for Xerox over a very long period of time since they picked a tech (laser printing) that was perfect for their wheelhouse. Companies and our culture these days don't allow for exploration like PARC was allowed. There is too much focus on monetizing everything and having an ROI.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39120584,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Where can I find ideas on what to build (for fun)","text":"I'll repeat my answer to the previous iteration[1] of this question from a couple of weeks ago: ---- You might find something of use in some of this stuff: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] ---- In addition, the two videos on \"How to Invent the Future\" by Alan Kay might be inspirational to you (or anybody else thinking about this topic): Part I - [VIDEO] Part II - [LINK] Actually, this entire playlist is quite interesting, even if you're not looking to launch a startup right now - [LINK] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ieb1lmm9xHk":[{"hn_comment_id":12528900,"author":"andy_ppp","month":"2016-09","story_title":"The Inner Game of Everything: 1974 Tennis Book Is Still a Sensation","text":"[VIDEO] This video of Timothy Gallwey teaching a woman how to play tennis. In 5 minutes. The book is one of the best I've ever read (go get it now), it's about mental focus, improvement by not trying and about not judging your results. I was sitting in front of a really difficult problem earlier today but I kept persisting at it even though at points I got frustrated (\"I'm not sure I'm smart enough to do this...\") I managed to stop thinking for a bit and try again without understanding the code fully and it ended up working. I'm not saying being intuitive always works with programming but sometimes if you feel out of your depth it can really help push you through.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10623598,"author":"leoc","month":"2015-11","story_title":"How the 'Quiet Eye' Technique Makes Athletes More Coordinated","text":"Obligatory Inner Game of Tennis TV feature: [VIDEO] and specifically related to keeping the eyes on the ball: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iffTJ1vPCSo":[{"hn_comment_id":15670678,"author":"SEJeff","month":"2017-11","story_title":"\u201cWe have obtained fully functional JTAG for Intel CSME via USB DCI\u201d","text":"Absolutely fantastic video from a google engineer (and the original author of LinuxBios / Coreboot) on how they replaced the UEFI firmware with Linux to get Dell servers to boot in 20 seconds: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35498930,"author":"anonym29","month":"2023-04","story_title":"GNU+Linux laptops with Libreboot preinstalled, based on coreboot","text":"Intel CSME (formerly ME) and AMT ST (formerly PSP) have many properties that are / would be desireable for someone who is/was building a backdoor (DMA, TCP/IP stack that can use onboard ethernet without the host OS being aware, closed source, unremovable, etc). Keep in mind that even if there has not been a backdoor deliberately added, there absolutely have been serious exploits in ME and PSP, and even for those who are not worried about the government, these security coprocessors still pose grave risk to data privacy and security, potentially handing \"ring -3\" access to non-government hackers. While I personally share your belief that these are probable backdoors, it is important to remind skeptics that they pose a grave security and privacy threat even outside the context of a government backdoor conspiracy. There's a great talk on the risks posed by the capabilities of these security coprocessors by an extremely well-versed individual at Google who was (leading? involved at a high level?) working on Google's efforts to neutralize these dangerous subsystems at Embedded Linux Con in 2017: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15643697,"author":"mmcclellan","month":"2017-11","story_title":"An Open Letter to Intel","text":"I first heard the Minix thing in this talk: [VIDEO] which I found, I think via a HN thread. Anyway, most of the articles rehash this talk and IMO its a solid 30 minute investment.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15669796,"author":"jjevanoorschot","month":"2017-11","story_title":"\u201cWe have obtained fully functional JTAG for Intel CSME via USB DCI\u201d","text":"A recent talk [0] by Ronald Minnich from Google gives a nice overview of their efforts to replace parts of Intel ME and UEFI with Linux, mostly for security reasons. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17590538,"author":"watersb","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Intel patches new ME vulnerabilities","text":"There seems to be confusion about vPro, AMT, BIOS, UEFI, Trusted Boot, and so on. This talk helped me: \"Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35229731,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Where can I find a primer on how computers boot?","text":"The gist is (which doesn't hold universally true), when the CPU is powered up, it initializes its internal RAM, loads in a pre-boot ROM, executes it. pre-boot ROM's job is to initialize whatever it has to, to bring in the initial bootloader which initializes RAM, finds a suitable bootloader program and loads it in. This program, also called second-stage bootloader , is an Operating System in its own right. It can understand filesystems, explore attached hardware, speak multiple network protocols, initialize devices as needed. The second-stage bootloader (there may also be a third-stage ) usually then boots into a Kernel. The Linux Kernel invokes the init process and things proceed into the userspace from there. At each of those stages, the bootloader images, the kernel image, the device trees, and the disk / filesystem are verified (\"measured\") for integrity eventually anchored on a \"hardware root-of-trust\". If you're a visual learner: How TI Beagleboard boots (33m): [LINK] / [LINK] How ARM Cortex M boots (9m): [LINK] / [LINK] Bootloader 101 (embedded devices; 38m): [LINK] / [LINK] Measured Boot (39m): [LINK] / [LINK] Coreboot (38m): [VIDEO] / [VIDEO] U-Boot (1h 25m): [LINK] UEFI for U-Boot (38m): [LINK] / [LINK] Device Trees (43m): [LINK] / [LINK] ARM Trust Zone (46m): [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ig_qpNfXHIU":[{"hn_comment_id":22502783,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some deep, mentality changing books?","text":"For me, several books by Greg Egan fall into this category. Permutation City, Diaspora, Quarantine, and Schild's Ladder have all... changed me. I was a different person before and after I had read those books, and now I categorise all works of fiction into those that forever alter my way of thinking and those that do not. [LINK] Which reminds me, I should finish: [LINK] The Culture series by Iain Banks, especially Inversions also satisfy this requirement, as does The City at the End of Time by Greg Bear: [LINK] -- which is a difficult to consume masterpiece that nonetheless left me permanently horrified in the way that H. P. Lovecraft tried but failed. For the non-fiction category the CGP Grey video \"The Rules for Rulers\": [LINK] and Part 2: [VIDEO] have totally changed the way I look at all political discourse, and this is coming from someone who has already absorbed The Prince. It's based on the Dictator's Handbook, which I should read also, but the CGP video was an effective summary already! [LINK] Last, but not least, if I'm allowed to include lecture videos, then the \"Arithmetic, Population and Energy\" lecture by Al Bartlett is absolutely amazing. You will never see the news in the same way again after watching it: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28429770,"author":"ghoward","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Russia asks Google to clamp down on Navalny\u2032s \u2018Smart Voting\u2032","text":"To learn some of the answers to those questions, may I suggest you start with a particular YouTube video [1] (and its sequel [2]) and the book that inspired them [3]? [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35629814,"author":"derefr","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Software firms across US facing tax bills that threaten startup survival","text":"The 101-level crash-course on this is CGP Grey's video Death & Dynasties : [VIDEO] . In est, your \"social connections\" \u2014 Grey's \"keys to power\" \u2014 value stability of their own powerful positions in your government (or noble house, or family-run utility company/industry monopoly, or whatever other forms lumps of power can take.) The key-holders' own political power exists regardless, but whether it translates to active ability to affect change right this moment depends on favor of the current ruler. Who better to place their bets on, then, as a replacement for a ruler who will continue to favor them \u2014 a ruler who will ensure the stability of the previous ruler's power base \u2014 than someone the previous ruler has been grooming for that very job from birth? But I would argue that, at least for non-totalitarian states, there's also another, more interesting and crucial influence on what makes power legitimate. When governments and noble houses generate revenue and get things done through free people who they employ or contract \u2014 not slaves or serfs or indentured servants \u2014 then it's the opinion of those free people on who is the legitimate next ruler, that actually determines who the legitimate next ruler will be. In a non-totalitarian state, a ruler cannot rule without the will of the people. To do otherwise provokes a populist -led revolution to abolish the seat of power altogether. Looking at how lines of succession of royal seats of power work/are calculated can be enlightening,","stance":"rec"}],"ihkRwArnc1k":[{"hn_comment_id":18088104,"author":"newman8r","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"I wouldn't call it the best documentary, but I think people here will like it, it's a 4 part documentary: \"A Video History of Japan's Electronic Industry\" I. Birth of the transformer: [VIDEO] II. Circuits in stone: [LINK] III. Calculator wars: [LINK] IV. Tech Giant: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23506739,"author":"rmrfstar","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Officer of China\u2019s People\u2019s Liberation Army Arrested at LAX","text":"This is bad read on the history of innovation. I offer two counter-examples, though there are many more: (1) Japanese semiconductor industry, for which there is an excellent NHK documentary [1]. (2) After WW2, the British invited Soviet engineers to tour jet engine factories as a token of good faith. The engineers documented the factory layout, and wore adhesive on their shoes to gather metal filings for later analysis. A few years later, Mig-15's were shooting American planes out of the sky over Korea. A similar example: the British transferred huge bodies of knowledge to US aircraft engine manufacturers during WW2. This laid the foundation for the industry's future success. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32174881,"author":"JKCalhoun","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The Rise and Peak of Japanese Semiconductors","text":"There is a four-part documentary I saw on YouTube that went into much more (fascinating) detail. Part 1: [VIDEO] Part 2: [LINK] Part 3: [LINK] Part 4: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ip641WmY4pA":[{"hn_comment_id":41083968,"author":"laurencei","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Reverse-engineering my speakers' API to get reasonable volume control","text":"Hey OP - if your thinking about a smart knob with haptic feedback etc - check this open source project out that you can build yourself - its amazing: [LINK] Video demo here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44425964,"author":"rzzzt","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)","text":"Vaguely related - two encoder wheel projects on YouTube that might interest you: - \"Wireless High Resolution Scrolling is Amazing\": [LINK] - \"DIY haptic input knob: BLDC motor + round LCD\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ipVxxxqwBQw":[{"hn_comment_id":30248491,"author":"kleer001","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you care about your carbon footprint?","text":"No. It's a canard, a wild goose chase, a red herring... Thanks to Kurzgesagt. They did a great video essay at : \"Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? \u2013 Who Needs To Fix It?\" [VIDEO] Also Goodheart's law: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27146870,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2021-05","story_title":"U.S. has entered unprecedented climate territory","text":"Kurzgesagt has a good video called \"Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? \u2013 Who Needs To Fix It?\": * [VIDEO] There are multiple view points. The country with the largest current annual total emissions is China with 27-30% and the US with 15% (see 2m10s). The country that produced the most CO2 in total historically which got us to this point of climate change (see 3m30s), were US first at 25% of historical emissions, and the EU in second at 22%, and China in third with 13% of historical emissions. India, all of Africa, and all of South America each had 3% of historical emissions. Then there's per capita emissions (see 5m10s of the video). So which of these three metrics should be used? Or should it be some other metric or a combination? Also probably worth noting that China seems to have peaked in coal plants. They've built too many already, but hopefully it should be going down now.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39803933,"author":"albumen","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Most CO2 emissions were in the last 30 years","text":"Or perhaps the argument is more complicated than the OP suggests. Perhaps you and they should watch the Kurzgesagt video made in conjunction with Our World in Data (linked on OP's linked page): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iph500cPK28":[{"hn_comment_id":29599831,"author":"jacobolus","month":"2021-12","story_title":"I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]","text":"Controversial is fine to the extent the controversy shows people struggling toward clearer understanding and better explanations, and as long as all parties are operating in good faith (i.e. not being deliberately misleading). Let me highly recommend Mehdi Sadaghdar\u2019s (ElectroBOOM) excellent response video [VIDEO] which does a great job of empirically investigating and theoretically explaining the subtleties involved, in a polite, respectful, and entertaining way. I have similarly enjoyed the exchange between Sadaghdar and Steve Mould about the physics of the \u201cchain fountain\u201d. These kinds of friendly scientific \u201cdebates\u201d show viewers (e.g. kids) a bit of how the scientific process and scientific discourse works, in a form that is more accessible and digestible than technical journal papers or history books. Having a discussion back and forth helps to improve both viewers\u2019 specific knowledge and viewers\u2019 processes for comprehending and interrogating new information, so long as the median viewer actually sees some of the responses. (Someone who only ever saw the first Veritasium video probably ends up with a somewhat wrong mental model.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29600418,"author":"afiori","month":"2021-12","story_title":"I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]","text":"In my opinion the video made a couple of mistakes, which I think ElectroBoom's response* addresses nicely. Also its proof using the pointing vector to show the flow of energy is misleading; In the video Derek shows that the energy flows toward the lamp when the circuit is already in a stable configuration, but the point of the video is to explore what happens before the circuit reaches that configuration. This is relevant: assume that the right half of the cable is connected to the positive pole of the battery, in a stable configuration every point of the right half of the circuit has a positive charge (creating the poynting vector field as shown in the video) while 1/c seconds after the switch was closed the wire just to the right of the lightbulb will have a negative charge (the cable near it is positively charged from the battery and so the upper cable acts as a the negative half of a capacitor) which changes the direction of the poynting vector. In the end it felt like it was telling you that its message was that energy travels via the fields but what it actually said what that switches cause electric interference. * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29601345,"author":"naasking","month":"2021-12","story_title":"I bought 1000 meters of wire to settle a physics debate [video]","text":"You should watch Electroboom's analysis if you want the full details from an electrical engineer: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29672707,"author":"haxiomic","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Electricity Is Magnetism","text":"The veritasium video didn\u2019t create a clear picture of what\u2019s going on and you shouldn\u2019t feel bad for feeling more confused after watching it ElectroBOOM has a good response [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iphcyNWFD10":[{"hn_comment_id":15351930,"author":"aeleos","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger observed by LIGO and Virgo","text":"There are many good videos on youtube that do a good job explaining what gravitational waves are and how we detect them. Many of these were made in response to the first detection, and they do a pretty good job explaining it in laymans terms. I personally really like veritasiums video here. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14462222,"author":"ehsankia","month":"2017-06","story_title":"LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves for Third Time","text":"Except imagine you're embedded on the string itself and cannot actually sense the string \"moving through space\". The way you have to measure it is by sensing tiny changes in distance between the left and right side of the string as it wiggles around. The actual detail of the experiment and the precision they reach is quite fascinating. Veratisium has a pretty good video explaining it in more laymen terms [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14462498,"author":"netcraft","month":"2017-06","story_title":"LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves for Third Time","text":"Here is a great video with explanations: [VIDEO] Short answer - they use lots of techniques - its super hard.","stance":"rec"}],"ipzR9bhei_o":[{"hn_comment_id":1153559,"author":"boredguy8","month":"2010-02","story_title":"Piano music visualized on a logarithmic spiral","text":"Personally, I love the \"Music Animation Machine\" visualizations, especially of Bach. Toccata and Fugue [VIDEO] \"Little\" Fugue [LINK] Also enjoyable: Debussy's Clair de lune [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9491792,"author":"avodonosov","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Touch Pianist \u2013 Tap in Rhythm and Perform Your Favourite Music","text":"Cool, I like it. BTW, cool music visualization: [VIDEO] (you can't play there, but it helps o perceive music better)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28515048,"author":"quercusa","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Beneath the surface of Bach\u2019s music is a world of numerology and cunning craft","text":"For those who are not up to reading music at Bach's level, Stephen Malinowski's Musical Animation videos are eye-opening, e.g., from the Musical Offering mentioned in the article: [LINK] Toccata and Fugue in Dmin: [VIDEO] I was directed to Malinowski's work by Edward Tufte (you may be able to figure out why) and feel I should pass it on.","stance":"rec"}],"iqddnwKF8HQ":[{"hn_comment_id":48633488,"author":"nilsherzig","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Pledging Another $400k to the Zig Software Foundation","text":"If you're unsure about spending the time to learn Zig, I really recommend watching the following interview with the creator of Zig [VIDEO] convinced me more than any design doc or blogpost could","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48423825,"author":"norman784","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Zig Zen Update","text":"I recommend you to watch Andrew Kelly interview[0], while I'm not the target audience of Zig, I don't see him driving away any user. Also Jai as for now is a non existing language, just a selected few has access to it, but Jai approach is a kitchen sink, from what I saw it is all over the place in terms of features, now Zig vision feels cohesive. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48447314,"author":"Erenay09","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Zig by Example","text":"I\u2019d prefer that you watch this video interview with Andrew Kelley. He is describing that. [VIDEO] Personal thoughts: I think Zig will become more stable once 1.0 tag released. Currently I cant find a fix to my error in net. But the folks on Zig Discord server helping me out.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48729039,"author":"auraham","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Zig \u2013 SPIR-V Backend Progress","text":"I have the same feeling about Zig. In this interview [1], Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, explains a lot of the features of the language; compares it against c, rust, go; and explains why he created the language. According to him, the killer feature of zig is the tool chain (compiler, linker, build system) since it has no dependencies. So, it will work in any OS/target you choose. It is a really interesting interview. However, Zig code is a bit hard for me to read. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48894141,"author":"randusername","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke","text":"TFA has an odd perspective. > Views are my own. I have no history with Zig. I\u2019ve never spoken to Andrew Kelley There are better primary sources to explain what ZSF is trying to achieve with its AI stance. Kelley's rant [0] was a bit much but the ZSF AI Policy [1] and Kelley's interview on it [2] are interesting and informative. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ir0FAa8P2MU":[{"hn_comment_id":32056829,"author":"viggity","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Lockheed Martin Prepar 3D","text":"there is an old made-for-HBO movie called The Pentagon Wars... I presume it is accurate enough, although it was turned into a comedy so I'm sure they took some artistic license with it. Highly recommended. It's available for free on youtube. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37564814,"author":"TylerE","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Marine Corps orders safety stand-down of all aircraft after F-35 disappearance","text":"I don't know why the military can't learn from a string of failed systems going back to at least the '80s. 1. Make Tough Requirements 2. Get Prototype 3. Prototype attracts some interest 4. Now the brass additionally wants capabilities X, Y, Z 5. Prototype now costs twice as much and is more failure prone, and actually less mission-capable due to all the bolt-ons 6. Program costs goes up due to all the changes 7. We can't afford this! 8. Cut unit acquisitions by 50% 9. Wait? Our unit cost just nearly doubled because the real costs were all in design/R&D? 10. Now we REALLY can't afford this. 11. Cut orders by another 75% 12. So finally approximately 10% of the original order actually gets built, at a total program cost 2 or 3x what it was supposed to be, and a unit cost that's massively huge. 13. Program fails in the mid-to-long term due to maintenance costs and falling spares inventory. HBO did a great made-for-TV movie on this called the \"Pentagon Wars\", which while fictionalized is only about 20% actually made up: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"isBYV6QWDIo":[{"hn_comment_id":30129263,"author":"pkaye","month":"2022-01","story_title":"India Semiconductor Mission","text":"There is a YouTube video about India's attempt at semiconductor fabs. Never knew they had built a fab before Taiwan had one. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43867245,"author":"newusertoday","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Zoho halts $700M semiconductor plan","text":"india does not lacks it, its not price competitive as compared to china which has better supply chain and economy of scale. India and other countries are not going in fab for jobs but for self-reliance. Going for high-value semicon later is similar to the logic of removing poverty first before investing in space tech. It doesn't work that way. India had sound policies it was quite ahead of time when it created SCL, check this video for more [VIDEO] it does lacks execution though and had some bad luck. India does have 130nm plants right now its obsolete node but works fine for low volume needs of its govt.","stance":"rec"}],"ispyUPqqL1c":[{"hn_comment_id":46410189,"author":"derriz","month":"2025-12","story_title":"How we lost communication to entertainment","text":"Patrick Boyle eventually comes to a similar conclusion in his video about global population decline - [VIDEO] - but includes lots of graphs and other interesting factlets. * warning for Americans: not suitable for those offended by sarcasm","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46962702,"author":"ndiddy","month":"2026-02","story_title":"The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline","text":"I watched this video a while ago that said something similar. [VIDEO] The decline in birthrates isn't related to growing living standards, as poorer countries also have declining birthrates. Turkey has a lower birthrate than the UK, and Mexico has a lower birthrate than the US. Places like North Africa and South India have seen declines in birthrates comparable to the West. He makes the argument that declining birthrates are due more to a fall in coupling than a fall in people in relationships choosing to have kids. He brings up that birthrates would actually be increasing if marriage rates remained constant. This means that all the incentives countries push such as subsidized childcare or tax breaks to have kids are putting the cart before the horse, as a growing share of young people don't have a partner to have kids with to begin with. He then brings up that the fall in coupling a country experiences is roughly correlated to the rate of mobile internet usage in that country. 46% of American teens say they use social media \"almost constantly\" vs. 24% a decade ago. People would rather use social media than go out and meet others. He points to South Asia as an example, as it's experienced a relatively smaller decline in marriage rates, and mobile internet usage there is lower than in the rest of the world. I suppose it's yet another way that cell phones are impacting society.","stance":"rec"}],"iukBMY4apvI":[{"hn_comment_id":9415166,"author":"mrspeaker","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Deploying ECMAScript 6","text":"My favourite way is via JSPM and live-server. I got into that after watching this amazing dev video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11018397,"author":"hardwaresofton","month":"2016-02","story_title":"What's New in Webpack 2","text":"I regularly use JSPM (with systemJS) for new projects, and I've liked it a lot. Back when webpack first came out, I struggled a little bit with figuring out what it actually did. While I understand now, I am not why I would want to (or you) switch from JSPM to webpack. I don't see any features that webpack has that JSPM doesn't (and JSPM offered ES6 support well before of course, with babel on by default). I like to use JSPM because of how relatively easy everything fits together -- and how straightforward it is to use and configure. For those not familiar, JSPM is a package manager, module bundler, and module loader all in one for javascript applications. This means you can: jspm install <package> And JSPM will look in NPM/Github (and it's possible to add registries, like bower) for stuff . That's the package management facet. jspm bundle-sfx js/main dist/build.js Bundle your code all together, and drop it in a file <import src=\"system.js\"> <script> // set our baseURL reference path System.config({ baseURL: '/app' }); // loads /app/main.js System.import('main.js'); </script> Load your modules on the fly like you would with something like RequireJS. As you may have guessed, JSPM relies on SystemJS ( [LINK] ) internally for some of the features above. This video really opened my eyes to what it could do: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15064758,"author":"hardwaresofton","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Vue.js and Brunch: Webpack Alternative","text":"If you're looking for alternatives to Webpack, please also check out JSPM (a good short description might be \"preprocessing system + package manager + systemjs\"): [LINK] It takes a little more to get it to work with vue (the plugin that makes .vue files work is older and unsupported nowadays), but I use it just fine, with my template, styling and component files separated (I wrote a little thing: [LINK] ) If you dislike how complex webpack is, you'll like JSPM -- here's the video that got me hooked (it's pretty old but still valid): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9955344,"author":"bkurtz13","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Browserify vs. Webpack \u2013 Configuration isn't evil","text":"As if the churn wasn't already bad enough, I've recently started using JSPM[1] and it's pretty awesome. I'm writing ES6+ code with hot reloading react components. If you're trying to decide between build systems I would recommend checking it out, and watching this video[2] for a nice overview. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iw17c70uJes":[{"hn_comment_id":37927740,"author":"ChrisArchitect","month":"2023-10","story_title":"What is the Demoscene? An obscure but influential art form","text":"Nice little interview that touches on a number of the magical parts of the scene and the many elements and major sites. This guy only started in 1997? All good, but feel like that's just a bit 'after' the golden, significant era. There was definitely a change as PC/windows development happened ...right around then I'd say. But maybe that's just my take on it. Feel like references to some classic demos should be late 80s/early 90s for the sheer impact and that it was a much much more active scene then. Future Crew \"Second Reality\" forever. ;) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26314725,"author":"herodoturtle","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Demoscene the Amiga Years Volume 1","text":"Loved reading this comment, thanks for sharing. The demo scene is what got me into programming in my youth - in particular Denthor's BBS tuts, and many late night adventures in mode13h. Good times! > That was when Future Crew showed up with 2nd Reality and the double bouncing, transparent balls. I still remember the feeling of amazement and utter loss at seeing that :) Future Crew's 2nd Reality demo, for those that haven't seen it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38182464,"author":"Flow","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Northlight makes Alan Wake 2 shine","text":"Here's a 60fps video of the same demo. The demo-sceners work really hard to make everything 60fps(1 vbl), so watching it in any other frame-rate feels wrong. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"iwcYp-XT7UI":[{"hn_comment_id":20715214,"author":"mark_l_watson","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Camera vs. Lidar","text":"I strongly recommend Lex Firdman\u2019s recent interview with George Hotz where they covered this topic in some detail [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25554140,"author":"bko","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite Podcast Episode of 2020?","text":"I loved this interview Lex Fridman had with George Hotz. He's very opinionated original thinker with the credentials to back it up. He runs comma.ai, sellers of a device that can plug into many cars and drive for you. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46740659,"author":"nomel","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Open-source self-driving for 325 car models from 27 brands","text":"There's a few Lex Fridman podcasts with George Hotz, the founder. Highly recommend them: #31 [VIDEO] #132 [LINK] #387 [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20711698,"author":"rmason","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Camera vs. Lidar","text":"I suspect this is yet another story sponsored by the Tesla shorts. Just saw an excellent two hour interview by Lex Fridman of George Hotz and he goes into details why he thinks camera will win over lidar. But he also admits that presently Google is ahead of everyone in the race for level 5, but raises the question of whether they can ever do it economically enough to make money on it? [VIDEO] 2 hours! Money quote is when Lex tells him, \"\"Some non-zero part of your brain has a madman in it\" I'd argue that is true of many of the greatest inventors of our time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20785652,"author":"dumbfoundded","month":"2019-08","story_title":"How Uber Got Lost","text":"I agree. Self-driving cars will take a really long time to emerge. The progress will be gradual. According to George Holtz of Comma ai, great lane-keeping is the first major milestone. The problem with your logic is the connection to Uber. Uber doesn't control the cars their drivers use. Sure they can set restrictions but they never collect actual data that is useful for self-driving. The only data Uber collects is when and where people want to travel. Google & Apple both have this dataset (probably superior) through their map apps. The real data gathering will come in the way Tesla does. Gather data from real-time drivers by putting the necessary sensors in cars you sell. Maybe Uber could force their drivers to install kits but I doubt it. Self-driving cars will emerge over time as new features in cars you buy. This is already happening (ie brake assist). You'll then just get updates to your car when new features become available. There's a pretty good talk about the future self-driving cars here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21564521,"author":"czr","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Show HN: Autopilot written in Keras for Self Driving Cars","text":"for specifics, would recommend to simply read the code. for overall context, geohot has done interviews ([0], [1]) and that give overview of comma/openpilot at high level. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21987585,"author":"kick","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Comma Two Devkit","text":"[VIDEO] This Lex Friedman interview is pretty explanatory on the topic of responsibility. A couple of highlights, which point to Comma being at minimum more responsible than Tesla: Comma doesn't advertise itself as anything beyond L2, unlike Tesla; Comma doesn't fuck up eye-detection, it refuses to cooperate with a driver who has their eyes off the road.","stance":"rec"}],"izxXGuVL21o":[{"hn_comment_id":22819840,"author":"lathiat","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM [video]","text":"I'm loving this series from ARS, another great one about Crash Bandicoot where apparently they needed extra RAM so selectively overwrote the sony libraries in RAM with their own data, by experimenting which areas were needed on whether it crashed or not. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22819857,"author":"jonas21","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM [video]","text":"This is part of a great series of interviews with the developers of some of the most influential games in history. Two of my favorites are Andy Gavin on Crash Bandicoot: [VIDEO] and Sid Meier on Civilization: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22932418,"author":"dzeix35wc363CzC","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Playstation Architecture: A Practical Analysis","text":"For anyone interested how it was developing for the original PSX (and therefore under hardware constraints) How Crash Bandicoot Hacked The Original Playstation [VIDEO] Immensely interesting video! \"Old\" hardware makes me feel so humble regarding what we have now. Hardware limitations back then really pushed developers towards novel approaches and solutions.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24568052,"author":"mmm_grayons","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Amnesia is now open source","text":"For anyone that hasn't yet seen it, I'd highly recommend watching Ars Technica's video interview on Amnesia and how it created its unique atmosphere: [LINK] Along with the rest of their War Stories videos, for that matter. The interview with Andy Gavin on Crash Bandicoot is great, even though I never played the game: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29989968,"author":"bmitc","month":"2022-01","story_title":"OpenGOAL: Port of Jak and Daxter, written in GOAL, a custom Lisp by Naughty Dog","text":"In the cause of Naughty Dog, it was Andy Gavin who introduced Lisp and GOAL and was one of the co-founders of Naughty Dog. He came from MIT and was a student of Rodney Brooks. [LINK] [LINK] If someone hasn't seen it, his episode on Ars Technica's War Stories was awesome. He seems to be a hacker's hacker. It's a fascinating story because it's not really how I personally work (internally), so it's fun hearing someone describe just diving in like that. [VIDEO] [LINK] It was my understanding that Racket wasn't in use anymore at Naughty Dog. It would be cool if there was an update or someone who knows (I know Dan is no longer at Naughty Dog), because unfortunately the tale of Lisps in companies is normally that it eventually gets replaced or set aside (where new stuff is built in something else).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41483527,"author":"zzanz","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Graphics Tricks from Boomers","text":"I really do miss this old regime of utilizing the entire machine in games. There is a fantastic video of one of the original Naughty Dog developers talking about the optimizations they did for the original Crash Bandicoot ( [VIDEO] ), and some of the less conventional tricks they did to enable 3D gameplay on the PS1. I've always wondered what the true limit of performance optimizations is in games. Obviously modern systems have a lot more systems to compete and share memory between, but there have been obvious cases where performance has had low priority. Also under consideration is the constantly morphing landscape of PC hardware and software architecture. Given a fixed hardware, like the PS5 or Xbox, with the hardware of a high end gaming computer, what is the true limit a game could reach.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48500887,"author":"mscdex","month":"2026-06","story_title":"How we made hit video game Prince of Persia","text":"If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend watching the \"War Stories\" video on the making of Prince of Persia: [LINK] On a related note, I also highly recommend the \"War Stories\" video for the making of Crash Bandicoot: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22571363,"author":"eindiran","month":"2020-03","story_title":"The Polygons of Another World: Atari Jaguar","text":"Andy Gavin has a great interview on the technical-side of developing Crash Bandicoot [0], which they wrote in GOOL, the precursor to GOAL. In fact, they wrote GOOL explicitly for Crash Bandicoot. Later, when writing Jak & Daxter, Naughty Dog developed GOAL. Sony ended up buying ND -- among other things, they were hoping to use ND's code, and were quite surprised to discover that it was all written in a homebrewed Lisp dialect. You can see some GOAL here: [LINK] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29127188,"author":"georgewsinger","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?","text":"I recommend watching this: [VIDEO] Naughty Dog Co-founder Andy Gavin discusses various hacks that were used on the Playstation to get Crash Bandicoot to run smoothly. The fuller version is also worth watching.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29128261,"author":"de6u99er","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?","text":"This is a cool story on how the Crash Bandicoot developers hacked toe PlayStation to get free up more memory for their game. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32191161,"author":"hotpotamus","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Jurassic Cloud","text":"There's a talk by one of the developers of Crash Bandicoot of all the hacky (and brilliant) things they had to do to get the game to load quickly off the (2X?) CD-ROM into the very limited RAM of the Playstation 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36370436,"author":"gnatman","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Reddit 1.0 was written in Lisp","text":"I'm sure the commenter above has seen this but for anyone who hasn't: Andy Gavin talking about pushing the envelope of the Playstation for Crash Bandicoot. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41414872,"author":"2600","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Playstation 2 GS emulation \u2013 the final frontier of Vulkan compute emulation","text":"I heard something similar with Jak and Daxter, where they took advantage of the embedded PS1 hardware on the PS2 to scrape together some extra performance. I very much enjoyed this video that Ars Technica did with Andy Gavin on the development of Crash Bandicoot: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"j-kj2qwJa_E":[{"hn_comment_id":15038558,"author":"JamesLeonis","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Lispers: Which dialect of Lisp do you use and why?","text":"If you're interested in Clojure, I _highly_ recommend /r/Clojure on Reddit. It's very active; several library devs, book authors, and core maintainers frequently post and comment. There's a weekly thread dedicated to new Clojure users ([Latest thread here][1]). The Clojure Slack[6] is even more active if you have a burning question. If you would like to dip your toes in the water, 4Clojure[2] is an online interactive Clojure Kata. There's also a (nearly) full REPL environment at Try Clojure[3] or repl.it[4]. The Clojure Cheatsheet[5] makes it easy to browse and discover the Clojure standard library, and IMHO is _so_ well organized! But the biggest part of Lisp is the interactive development. You really have to see it, and I love showing the [Bruce's Figwheel project presentation][7] because it's a very visual demonstration of what hot-reloading code and interactive development can bring. It also helps that he's doing Clojurescript in a live browser for web development. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK] [5]: [LINK] [6]: [LINK] [7]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14841749,"author":"freshhawk","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Show HN: Mesh IDE \u2013 a code editor that feels like a spreadsheet","text":"I'm not sure if the parent did, but I followed what you were looking for and the answer is still \"try clojure\", perhaps more specifically it is \"Try the Clojure libraries figwheel and devcards to do web stuff\" but the push for immediate feedback and \"interactive programming\" is central for everyone. It's a community that took Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle talk to heart, already agreeing due to the REPL centric workflows that most people used. Bruce Hauman has some good talks about his tools, which are GUI application-centric and a joy to use [1][2][3] If you aren't doing web or native mobile GUI stuff then the default tools have immediate unit test/linting/spec compliance feedback triggered every time you save a file. Unless you mean you want a very simplified language, in which case you should look elsewhere. Clojure has definitely chosen the high power side of that trade-off, but this also allows some truly first class tools to be developed. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] <- this one in particular is original and outstanding in my opinion","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27282078,"author":"lmilcin","month":"2021-05","story_title":"ClojureScript 1.10.866 Release","text":"Sure. I use fighwheel. [LINK] Actually, when I develop with clojure, I typically have both backend and frontend running at the same time and I am concurrently modifying both applications without restarting them. This is way, way more convenient than having to restart application and then to bring it to a state to run your test. This is youtube video from which I learned about fighwheel: [VIDEO] Have fun!","stance":"rec"}],"j-vJxez9UF8":[{"hn_comment_id":13789203,"author":"WestCoastJustin","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Nintendo Switch Teardown","text":"This might be slightly off-topic, but if you like this type of teardown content, I highly recommend checking out AVE's channel on Youtube [1]. He does plenty of tool teardown's, things like drills, all types of heavy industrial gear, and some electronics thrown in. I find is fascinating, because you start to learn about the manufacturing process, why mechanical engineers choose specific materials, how they cut corners, and generally how things are made at low cost and high volume. Here's some highlights: - Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer: [VIDEO] - Hammer Drill Mechanism: [LINK] - Blendtec Blender: [LINK] - KitchenAid Mixer: [LINK] - $500 Mining Flashlight: [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17483370,"author":"rwmj","month":"2018-07","story_title":"What cracking open a Sonos One tells us about the Sonos IPO","text":"Watch AvE take stuff apart on Youtube. His disassembly of the Juicero would be a good place to start: [LINK] or this one disassembling an overpriced Dyson hairdryer: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19456939,"author":"subculture","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Dyson Lightcycle Task Lamp","text":"AvE did a fun teardown of the hair dryer [0]. If you haven't seen his videos they're all pretty terrific, especially the Juicero one. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26103570,"author":"crmd","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Dyson air purifier outperformed by cheap DIY box fan filter in Marketplace test","text":"Check out AvE\u2019s tear down of a $500 Dyson hair dryer.[1] He was expecting to ridicule it but was instead blown away by the engineering - tiny high torque zinc cast brushless DC motor, CNC-milled impeller, etc. It\u2019s a good watch, including FLIR performance analysis, Fourier analysis of bearing noise, and more. In summary it\u2019s definitely more engineering porn / extreme overkill than marketing bs. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35523840,"author":"crmd","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Dyson Hair Dryer Becomes Jet Engine","text":"aVe did a great teardown[0] of a Dyson hairdryer. He was contemptuous in the beginning because of the ridiculous price, but totally nerded out over the motor. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"j02b8Fuz73A":[{"hn_comment_id":10097,"author":"henning","month":"2007-04","story_title":"The greatest Demos/screencasts you've seen","text":"I thought Steve Jobs's NeXT demo from 1992-1993 was pretty impressive. [VIDEO] It certainly would have seemed space-age in 1992.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2312730,"author":"_frog","month":"2011-03","story_title":"Steve Jobs on Apple's brand strategy in 1997","text":"Not as relevant but I saw this video a while back: [VIDEO] It's interesting to see a young Steve Jobs perfecting his presentation style.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4969667,"author":"ben1040","month":"2012-12","story_title":"The legacy of NeXT lives on in OS X","text":"Relevant - this 20 year old video with Steve Jobs giving a demo of NeXTSTEP 3. I first saw this after having bought a Mac running OS X 10.2 and was surprised by how the user-facing stuff was still very similar to its roots (maybe not nearly as much now). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"j1I63wGcvU4":[{"hn_comment_id":14449914,"author":"santoriv","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What linux distro should I start with?","text":"I use Arch but if you are starting out I would recommend Ubuntu. It's probably got the most youtube videos, online articles, troubleshooting questions online. This make things a bit easier. For example, you mention i3 - probably the best i3 tutorial on youtube is running ubuntu. -> [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23468825,"author":"typenil","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?","text":"Most of my productivity gains these days has come from aligning myself and my workstation. - i3wm ( [LINK] ) - particularly getting comfortable editing the .i3/config. It's the most significant productivity change I've had since switching to Linux from Windows. To get into it, I highly recommend this 3-part video series from Code Cast: [VIDEO] - yadm ( [LINK] ) - a dotfile manager. It's essentially a git wrapper, but it's allowed me tons of freedom tweaking my setup without worrying about persisting it. It supports encryption and switching file versions based on which system you're on.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10645633,"author":"jarboot","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Switching from OS X to FreeBSD \u2013 Both Desktop and Laptop","text":"For those of you that might be professionals or adults that don't spend much time on 4chan/reddit, you should know that i3 is pretty popular with 4chan.org/g/ or reddit's linux subreddits. It's a pretty effective path for us young nerds to get into the linux ecosystem. Beginners might learn vim to modify their ~/.i3/config, hex values for coloring their desktop, or basic CLI commands to add functionality to their keybindings. Maybe they want to add a customized weather applet to the bar at the bottom of the screen, so they write a shell script utilizing wget. Soon enough they're learning to install Arch Linux (because everybody else on that \"Show off your desktop\" thread is using it), and it's not long before they're a full-blown linux fanboy. That's at least the route I took. It's not that i3 is popular among these communities because it's the easiest, but because it looks the coolest and offers the most amount of visual customization. But after getting used to it, there's an incredible amount of depth and usability that keeps you on it. I really can't imagine a more effective window manager. If you're looking for neat-looking i3 setups, check out reddit.com/r/unixporn/ . If you're interested in getting started with it, somebody made a great tutorial for it at [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15572460,"author":"kentt","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your \u201cI wish I did it sooner\u201d moment?","text":"i3wm. I thought it couldn't be that much better, it just a window manager. Now it's hard to imagine using anything else. If you want to get started the long exhaustive way, start here: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"j2Mu8qfVb5I":[{"hn_comment_id":12599625,"author":"thaumaturgy","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]","text":"Yep. There's a great video of Dr. Robert Zubrin (author of \"The Case For Mars\") answering the why question of going to Mars: [VIDEO] One of his points is the effect that space exploration has on kids. It excites them. It makes them want to be explorers too. Kids are full of imagination, they hear about people on another world and they imagine themselves doing it too. It happened with the moon landings, and it inspired kids to become scientists and technologists and to follow their own paths to exploration. edit: despite being born too late to be mesmerized by the moon landings in real-time, I was one of those kids. I started playing with computers and writing my first programs when I was 8. I watched a lot of Star Trek and James Doohan's Scotty was my favorite character. There was a picture of Neil Armstrong on my wall. I got \"Odyssey\" magazines and had a book that artistically imagined what life might be like elsewhere in the solar system that I read until, literally, the cover fell off. I had an audio cassette that took you on a wild ride through the solar system. The hope of exploring space someday is what drew me into technology. So many years later, and I only use that technology to have arguments with other people over whether exploration is \"worth it\" at all. How's that for some weltschmerz?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17612375,"author":"thaumaturgy","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars","text":"The person I responded to, in the part that I quoted, brought up people without electricity and plumbing as a contrast to spending efforts on exploration. It looks like an either/or to me. > People are simply arguing against spending more on it when we have more pressing issues to contend with. But this argument happens every time the issue of funding space exploration comes up. Every single time. Without fail. Not a single time is there a proposed NASA budget without part of the discussion devolving into, \"why don't we just hand the money out to the poor instead?\" Not a single time do the risks and costs of SpaceX, or a new satellite, or the rovers, or the ISS, or other efforts get discussed without someone saying, \"but cancer...\" This is a line of thinking which scrutinizes every single dollar spent on exploration. Left unchallenged, it would eventually halt all spending on exploration altogether. I, and a lot of other people -- like the person at the top of this thread -- believe that exploring Mars is not just worthwhile, it's necessary, in spite of the many other people on Earth who have more immediate needs. Dr. Robert Zubrin argued that case far more eloquently than I could: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23219817,"author":"herbstein","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Space Plane: Mysterious US military aircraft launches","text":"Robert Zubrin has what I consider a great, comprehensive answer to why we should go to Mars. But ultimately it generally applies to all space exploration. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26912806,"author":"sktrdie","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Mars sucks","text":"When I hear these kind of \"why go to space if we have people dying of hunger here on earth?\" kind of arguments I always refer them to the amazing speech Robert Zubrin gave on the answer for \"why go to Mars?\": [VIDEO] The idea is that: \"We\u2019d get millions of scientists, engineers, and inventors, technological entrepreneurs, doctors, medical researchers out of that (going to mars), and the intellectual capital from that would enormously benefit us\" I do believe of course that all things should be done - we should do the best we can to first save our planet. But that doesn't mean we should stop doing the rest of the \"pushing the envelope\" kind of things.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11460675,"author":"sktrdie","month":"2016-04","story_title":"SpaceX Launch Livestream: CRS-8 Dragon Hosted Webcast","text":"As Dr. Zubrin once said \"I think societies are like individuals, we grow when we challenge ourselves, we stagnate when we do not.\" - [VIDEO] I truly believe the whole point of going to Mars is to challenge ourselves. New skills will be required; new passions will be planted in future generations. The benefits will dwarf the cost of the program. But above everything, humans are wired to explore. Obviously we're exploring things in many other fields, but \"exploring other planets\" is a different kind of exploration.","stance":"rec"}],"j2dHFC31VtQ":[{"hn_comment_id":41421541,"author":"CHB0403085482","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them","text":"Also \"How USA Fire Departments Are Getting People Killed\". Summary: forcing bad road design to accommodate giant fire trucks cause more car collisions [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42375975,"author":"viraptor","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Fire risk assessment of battery home storage compared to general house fires","text":"Depending on which requirement they mean, that case is actually interesting. There's a good video from Not Just Bikes about it [VIDEO] (\"How American Fire Departments are Getting People Killed\")","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44708296,"author":"piva00","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Why does a fire truck cost $2m","text":"I think this video from the Not Just Bikes channel shows quite well the major difference in approach between fire departments in the USA vs the Netherlands (which is quite similar to many other European countries): [VIDEO] Fire engines in Europe are as well equipped as the American/Canadian ones while not depending on these massive and expensive bespoke rigs.","stance":"rec"}],"j3mhkYbznBk":[{"hn_comment_id":5512601,"author":"alxbrun","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Richard Feynman - The Character of Physical Laws [VIDEO] Incredible talk for both the content and the form ! There is so much we could learn from him.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6074246,"author":"sillysaurus","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Neutrino shape-shift points to new physics","text":"Physics is just mindblowing. When I think deeply about the fact that things that are moving will keep on moving forever unless a force acts on them, and the fact that no one knows why it's true (and that the question may not even have any meaning), and that my body is nothing more than a very advanced method of propagating genetics, then... well, it's just a lot of fun to think about! The fact that there are mysteries that no life will ever have answers to is quite humbling. If you find physics interesting, then you'll love these Feynman lectures. Feynman is so good at explaining these concepts that you don't even need any formal training to understand them. Lecture 1: The Law of Gravitation [VIDEO] Lecture 2: The Relation of Mathematics to Physics [LINK] Lecture 3: The Great Conservation Principles [LINK] Lecture 4: Symmetry in Physical Law [LINK] Lecture 5: The Distinction of Past and Future [LINK] Lecture 6: Probability and Uncertainty [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14564632,"author":"mabbo","month":"2017-06","story_title":"If you can\u2019t explain something in simple terms, you don\u2019t understand it","text":"Edit: apparently, I have been misinformed for a very long time. These are still excellent lectures to watch though! The Feynman Lectures are now on Youtube[0], and I like to watch them (all of them) every few years. I highly recommend that if you've never seen them, you take some time and watch them- really watch them. Close the other windows, turn your phone to do not disturb, and really watch these masterpieces of education. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18220081,"author":"jacobedawson","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"The Feynman Lectures (on Physics) are incredible - Feynman had such an amazing mind, one of the greatest the world has known, yet could explain complex things like he was talking to a friend in the living room over drinks. Never patronizing, always amusing & informative: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17472595,"author":"TripleH","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What talks or videos do you suggest to watch on a long flight?","text":"It's kind of a classic, but I really enjoyed Richard Feynman lectures[0], especially on subjects I thought I knew well. [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17927359,"author":"shawn","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Feynman's Lost Lecture (ft. 3Blue1Brown) [video]","text":"If you haven't seen it yet, Feynman's podcast series The Character of Physical Law is quite wonderful: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"j4H9LL7A-nQ":[{"hn_comment_id":45084446,"author":"zahlman","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Google: 'Your $1000 phone needs our permission to install apps now' [video]","text":"Sure, but that's demonstrably more to do with the actual financial position than the ownership status. If you own the house and no longer pay a mortgage then you're ipso facto wealthier \u2014 although you presumably do still pay property tax. During the period of the mortgage, while rent wouldn't necessarily be cheap, it would be cheaper than the TCO of the house. The overall financial consideration is complex and pro-ownership dogma is just dogma: see e.g. [VIDEO] . More importantly in my opinion, though (and especially for single childless people), rental housing is available in smaller and finer-grained quantities.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45244082,"author":"whymarrh","month":"2025-09","story_title":"My thoughts on renting versus buying","text":"You\u2019re right, the math is slightly more complicated than rent v. mortgage payment. Ben Felix, a popular financial YouTuber, made many a video about the math: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48283630,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The Cost of Owning a Home","text":"Ben Felix, a Canadian portfolio manager that does personal finance videos and podcast, has been arguing for years that rent versus buy is often a wash financially, and that you should make the decision for non-financial resasons. * recent 2026 video: [LINK] * 2025a: [VIDEO] * 2025b: [LINK] * 2021: [LINK] * 2019: [LINK] The 2019 video goes over a handy \"5% rule of thumb\": start with the purchase price of home, take 5% of that: if your rent is less than that, better numbers-wise to continue renting (and investing the difference); if your rent is more, probably better numbers-wise to buy/own. The company he works for created a tool to examine the numbers: * [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"j4kI2h3iotA":[{"hn_comment_id":31783387,"author":"lofatdairy","month":"2022-06","story_title":"US prison slaves produce $11B worth of goods and services","text":"Knowing Better on YouTube produced a really good documentary answering \"when was the last slave freed?\" [^1]. His argument is that it didn't end until 1942, a mere 80 years ago. A big part of the reason why was the prison system and legal system, which was structured around criminalizing blackness, and using this to fulfill an economic need. Articles like this make me think perhaps 1942 may be a bit optimistic, after all, we still rely heavily on prison labour without allowing incarcerated people to earn sufficient funds to support themselves after their rehabilitation, and we're still fighting the war on drugs that started under Nixon. That said, I'm not sure how non Americans feel about US politics being discussed here, since I rarely see news about domestic issues in other countries. [^1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32092568,"author":"abvdasker","month":"2022-07","story_title":"US Doesn't Care About Financial Crimes","text":"There's no reason for scare quotes given the specific carveout for slavery which exists in the Constitution. If you have an issue with that verbiage, take it up with the 38th United States Congress and Abraham Lincoln. > do murderers get to walk free? You're arguing against an extreme position that nobody actually holds. Most reasonable people would probably point to criminal justice as implemented in many European countries as exemplifying a more humane model which produces better long term results. The carveout for the enslavement of incarcerated people also created a perverse incentive which played out predictably in the wake of Reconstruction's failure. If you're interested in the long and painful history of this fact here's a useful resource: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32496467,"author":"pixl97","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Sorry, your wife is Indian, landlord won\u2019t rent to you","text":">classed as being marginally racist, usually they do not really mean the things they say. As someone that moved to a very very racist part of the US in their teens (near a sundown town), this is by far the most scary statement you could write. I believe you would be far more concerned if you understood the enormity of it when you look at it in the converse. This person you mention that creates an exception 'for one of the good ones' will also create an exception for their buddy when they lynch someone and they just forget to tell the police about it. I recommend 'Neoslavery' by Knowing Better as a little chunk of more recent American history a lot of people would like to erase. Racism runs very deep in some places. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36747889,"author":"1MachineElf","month":"2023-07","story_title":"The Negro Motorist Green Book","text":"YouTube's algorithm recently recommended me a video which presented a compelling case that US slavery truly ended in 1942. It included references to this book. Here's the link, for anyone curious: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"j56s46e97Lo":[{"hn_comment_id":14795607,"author":"mikejb","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Eye in the Sky","text":"At the 30c3, Trevor Paglen gave a talk about his work, where he also goes into details or it [1]. I found it highly interesting and can only recommend it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34112099,"author":"eye_street","month":"2022-12","story_title":"I Found a Secret US Government Surveillance Program","text":"Kinda related, I saw this fascinating presentation by Trevor Paglen recently. It's about the footprint of secrecy. It's almost a decade old, but still very much worth your time. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"j5v8D-alAKE":[{"hn_comment_id":31432210,"author":"somenameforme","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Engineers investigating NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 telemetry data","text":"Veritasium has an awesome video on planned obsolescence here. [1] The problem in many cases isn't that it costs so much more to make products that last, but rather that making products that break is just way more profitable when you can effectively control the market to such a degree that you don't need to worry about some party pooper (1) coming in and making stuff that does genuinely last and (2) gaining significant marketshare. The example of the light bulb cartel that had unquality assurance, spot testing, and a formal structure of fines and penalties for any members who made too long of lasting lightbulbs is just hilariously dystopic. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26945731,"author":"infogulch","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Phoebus Cartel","text":"Veritasium made a video that reviews the history and presents the topic in an engaging way. \"This is why we can't have nice things\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30661286,"author":"ComradePhil","month":"2022-03","story_title":"EU to make it mandatory to use customer-replaceable batteries in household items","text":"This is a very good start. If they did the same for screens, I wouldn't be surprised if the phone sales dropped to half or even less. There is no way companies like Apple and Samsung will be OK with this. I expect big pushback from them. If these steps go through, it will be interesting to see what other planned obsolescence [1] methods will these companies go for. The one big tool Apple has is the full control of the software ecosystem. They can simply make newer apps unavailable for old phones for example. That will need to be tackled at some point. [1] Veritasium video on planned obsolescence which is interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31435869,"author":"somenameforme","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Engineers investigating NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 telemetry data","text":"In modern times planned obsolescence is a normal part of business. The comments for the linked video [1] are awesome because it has so many people from different areas of industry (and academia) sharing anecdotes. So cartel? Probably not. Built to fail? Almost certainly. If we view things only through the lens of profit, then MTTF (mean time to fail) is just another curve to maximize against profit. If it's too short then your reputation will suffer and you'll lose money. If it's too long, then you're just leaving money on the table. In our society the brilliant engineer is not the one who makes a thing that last for 50 years, but one that lasts for just long enough to avoid damaging your brand image, and also fails in a way that makes the consumer more incentivized to buy a new thing than try to repair their current one. The guy who came up with the idea of slowing old iPhones \"to save battery life\" is who the bonus+promotion is going to. One of the biggest problems that has to be understood is that there is every incentive for money-driven governments to actively support planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence drives factors that we believe are indicators of a strong economy, like GDP. If people were able to stop endlessly buying the same things over and over, the \"economy\" would take an absolutely massive hit. And with it there would also be declines in employment, tax revenue, and everything else. This is one of the many examples where the socially detrimental relation","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32373652,"author":"deltasevennine","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Electronics are built with death dates. Let\u2019s not keep them a secret","text":"I don't think you understand the extent of what's going on. It's not that people are trying to make hardware last forever. It's that these devices are being deliberately designed to break down in a couple years. There are actual design decisions to force consumer behavior into purchasing new things every couple of years. This doesn't just apply to things that follow moores law. Almost every product in existence nowadays is literally designed to break earlier then they usually do. Companies in certain cases actually spend more money creating a design that ensures that a product will break early so that consumers will buy a new thing within some years. This includes cars, computers, phones, microwaves, lightbulbs. Etc. Your personal need to buy a new car, new phone and new clothes is the result of market manipulation over the last 10 decades or so... morphing our culture from one where we kept tools around for years into one where we need to buy new things all the time. It was not like this at least 1 or 2 generations ago. The result of this endless buying behavior is good for business and the economy but it has devastating effects on the environment and our resources. Worth watching if you have 15 minutes: [VIDEO] The actual story of how companies colluded to make lightbulbs not last as long.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32373683,"author":"deltasevennine","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Electronics are built with death dates. Let\u2019s not keep them a secret","text":"This is called planned obsolescence, and it's not just electronics. Practically every product nowadays are designed with a death date to perpetuate a repeating buying cycle from consumers. It's very real. To learn more here's an interesting short video about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"j6VlT_jUVPc":[{"hn_comment_id":34931269,"author":"qbasic_forever","month":"2023-02","story_title":"The Beginner's Guide to over\u00adComplicating Coffee","text":"I don't like the stock aeropress recipe. I too found it wasn't very consistent and sometimes gave wildly different results. I've found James Hoffman's aeropress technique to be fantastic though and much more repeatable--give it a shot: [VIDEO] The big difference with James' technique is that it spends more time immersion brewing, almost like a french press, vs the stock technique that's really rushing you to extract and then percolate with the push. I find the longer immersion brew is a lot more forgiving and repeatable as a technique.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26994600,"author":"windsurfer","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Coffee drinkers display a distinct pattern of brain functional connectivity","text":"Yes, a minimal amount of water will escape but I haven't found it to negatively impact my brew. One of the best things about the aeropress is the experimentation and variety, so I encourage you to try this and see if it makes a difference. James Hoffmann has a video on this technique (jump to 2:00 to see the start of the recipe): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34935907,"author":"recuter","month":"2023-02","story_title":"The Beginner's Guide to over\u00adComplicating Coffee","text":"In the spirit of no over complications: don't bother inverting. Here is a weird coffee person succinctly explaining: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46188106,"author":"techwizrd","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Minimum Viable Arduino Project: Aeropress Timer","text":"I've had good results from the James Hoffman recipe [0], although I brew inverted. You can push the plunger down with just the weight of resting your arm on the plunger. For something very different, you can brew something not-quite-espresso using the Fellow Prismo cap for the Aeropress. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"j6ow-UemzBc":[{"hn_comment_id":24948311,"author":"gravypod","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Application Load Balancers enables gRPC workloads with end to end HTTP/2 support","text":"My main reasons: 1. It's standardized all the implementation for each language is roughly similar and has the same feature sets (middlewares, stubs, retry, hedging, timeouts, deadlines, etc). 2. High performance framework/webserver in \"every\" language. No more \"should I use flask or the built in http server or gunicorn or waitress or...\" 3. Tooling can be built around schemas as code. There's a great talk that I highly recommend about some of the magic you can do [0]. 4. Protos are great for serialization and not just over a network! Need to store configs or data in a range of formats (json, prototxt, binary, yaml)? 5. Streaming. It's truely amazing and can dramatically reduce latency if you need to do a lot of collection-of-things or as-soon-as-x processing. 6. Lower resource usage. Encoding/decoding protos is faster then encoding and decoding json. At high throughput that begins to matter. 7. Linting & standards can be defined and enforced programatically [1] 8. Pressures people to document things. You comment your .c or .java code, why not comment your .proto? [0] - [VIDEO] [1] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27082156,"author":"bpicolo","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Smithy: A language for defining services and SDKs","text":"Reminds me a lot of this talk: [VIDEO] I think it's a really powerful paradigm. I think an org adopting such patterns widespread leads to some really rad capabilities. GDPR compliance, for example, is really tough in SOA architectures in companies without a ton of engineering capacity, but this sort of data/api introspection could do a lot to change that. Any plans to open source projection for languages other than Java? edit: I see that typescript and rust are available on github as well","stance":"rec"}],"j7zzQpvoYcQ":[{"hn_comment_id":28151109,"author":"SEJeff","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Monday was my 46th birthday and likely my last (2013)","text":"This reminds me of the Last Lecture by Professor Andy Pausch. It is a lecture that will really hit you in the feels: [VIDEO] It is also an excellent book.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28233013,"author":"orbz","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?","text":"While not a blog post really, I often times revisit Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture[1] to act as a memento mori[2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12336666,"author":"Create","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Fighting Cancer","text":"I am not sure you came across The Last Lecture, if not you may find it interesting: [VIDEO] [LINK] I consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you and learn an awful lot along the way. Thanks!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19651032,"author":"jefflombardjr","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are good resources for life advice?","text":"First and foremost, what you are describing is metacognition - thinking about the way you think. Hopefully that will aid you in your search for things! Secondly, here are some of my favorite influential material: - Li Ka-Shing, Tips on Life. My takeaway: invest in yourself. [LINK] - Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture. My takeaway: don't limit yourself [VIDEO] - Guy Kawasaki, Make Meaning. Aimed for startups, but equally applicable in life. My takeaway: Have the proper motivations for doing things. [LINK] - Admiral William H. McRaven, Make your bed. My takeaway: if you want to change the world, start by changing yourself. [LINK] - David Foster Wallace, This is Water. My takeaway: Take a big picture view, and don't sweat the small stuff. [LINK] - \u201cOut beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.\u201d\u2015 Rumi - Man's Search for meaning. My takeaway: We make meaning. [LINK] - \"All the livin that you're saving, won't buy your dreams for you\" - Townes Van Zandt - Idiot wind by Bob Dylan My takeaway: Your reaction to things can be just as bad as the actual thing. [LINK] - Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius, Seneca. My takeaway: Focus on what matters. [LINK] (read this one first for a good foundation) [LINK] [LINK] - Buddhism. Our takeaway: Meditation is important, the doctrine of emptiness (not nihilism!) is super interesting. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] - Leonardo Da Vinci My take","stance":"rec"}],"j9uRckJLqLk":[{"hn_comment_id":18285849,"author":"function_seven","month":"2018-10","story_title":"The Slide Rule","text":"I'm sure you've seen this already, but if not: [VIDEO] A 3:1 scale replica of the Curta, 3D printed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46076632,"author":"beeforpork","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Designing a Mechanical Calculator","text":"Maybe have a look at the Curta for inspiration of a mechanical calculator. There's a 3D printable version of it. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"jA1C9VFqJKo":[{"hn_comment_id":8283777,"author":"baddox","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Musical Scale Generator","text":"It looks like there's no problem with just swapping frequencies as you change chords. This youtube video is great, as is the guy's blog: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19478472,"author":"williamdclt","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Show HN: Harmopark \u2013 Web tool to visually build chords and progressions","text":"Very interesting, I'll definitely play with it for a bit! I came across this concept of \"lattice\" about a year ago too, with this beautiful song using it: [VIDEO] A couple of comments: - Why select notes by right-clicking rather than left-clicking? - When building a chord, it shows the name on top and the scale degree below. But it's the opposite when I drag it to the chord progression zone, it confused me - Might be worth it to add a few tooltips or links for help (eg explaining what's a \"parallel progression\") - I don't understand why notes are more or less red - It'd be useful to show the scale degree of each note in the lattice (in addition to the note itself and its octave)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23347138,"author":"isolli","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Guitar Decomposed: 5. Mutating the Third","text":"Gary Garrett is a musician who works with just intonation (or, as he calls it, untempered music) [0]. Below is a link to a piece he composed [1]. Definitely worth checking out. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24972464,"author":"elihu","month":"2020-11","story_title":"How to create minimal music with code in any programming language","text":"For ii, I find it helps to add 10:9 to the list I gave earlier, I just omitted it to stay within the familiar framework of 12 notes-to-the-octave. 12 really isn't enough, though, in a lot of cases. Here's a visualization I like, that uses 22 notes: [VIDEO] Speaking of large-number EDOs, some people I know locally are doing guitar conversions to 41-EDO. The trick that seems like it absolutely shouldn't work but it does is to omit half the frets, so that only half of the notes are available on each string. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"jAZapFzpP64":[{"hn_comment_id":30820941,"author":"athrowaway3z","month":"2022-03","story_title":"TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack","text":"[VIDEO] Worth the full watch on video media money. But tldw; TikTok splits a pot of money over the views each video gets. The pot doesn't grow with the revenue they make or total views, so it's pretty exploitative.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32296812,"author":"status200","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The unlikely odds of making it big on TikTok","text":"Tiktok will definitely be replaced by a similar app if they don't start paying out to their content creators in a similar way that Youtube (still awful, but better) does. Hank Green has a great video[0] on the difference since he is on both platforms, and unless there is more compensation to the creators, they will get burned out chasing the high of the occasional viral video. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jAhiMCSvtCc":[{"hn_comment_id":22033545,"author":"Obsnold","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The 'Great Wave' has mystified art lovers for generations (2019)","text":"If anyone is interested in Japanese wood block prints I really suggest checking out David Bulls channel on YouTube. He did a whole series on his own copy of the Great Wave. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22735957,"author":"rwmj","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Dutch museum says van Gogh painting stolen in overnight raid","text":"I think there's a genuine reason for them to be worth more since they are closer to the original painting. There's a fantastic (and long) series on Youtube about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47093171,"author":"MengerSponge","month":"2026-02","story_title":"The Rediscovery of 103 Hokusai Lost Sketches (2021)","text":"I bought one of his prints of The Great Wave off Kanagawa. It's stunning. The series is up there with Clickspring's skeleton clock in my pantheon of \"greatest long-form process videos\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26994978,"author":"Cerium","month":"2021-04","story_title":"The 'Great Wave' has mystified art lovers for generations (2019)","text":"You may find David Bull's youtube content interesting. He is a Japanese woodblock printer living in Asakusa, Tokyo, where he runs a print shop. In 2015 he did a reproduction of the Great Wave and documented the progress online: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jAhjPd4uNFY":[{"hn_comment_id":14249659,"author":"rosalinekarr","month":"2017-05","story_title":"CRISPR eliminates HIV-1 infection in live animals","text":"For anyone unfamiliar with CRISPR, I strongly recommend this quick introduction video from Kurzgesagt on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18531383,"author":"TeMPOraL","month":"2018-11","story_title":"First gene-edited babies claimed in China","text":"For the surely upcoming discussion about pros and cons of genetic editing in humans, Kurzgesagt has a basic overview of the space, if you can spare some 15 minutes with your morning coffee. [VIDEO] (not affiliated, just love their videos)","stance":"rec"}],"jB0vBmiTr6o":[{"hn_comment_id":9398012,"author":"userbinator","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Code Inflation [pdf]","text":"Those who don't see anything unusual or wasteful about an 8KB+ executable whose only action is to exit and return a value are recommended to watch this demo generated in realtime by a 4KB executable: [VIDEO] There's more here: [LINK] The demoscene is basically the exact opposite of mainstream software culture, and although it's focused on multimedia shows, I think some of their techniques and underlying motivation could be applied more generally... I wonder if /bin/true and /bin/false in their most simplest forms even meet the minimum \"requirement for creativity\" to be copyrightable, and if the reason why it has bloated significantly is so that it could be.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11848122,"author":"jsheard","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Source code for 4kb demoscene production \u201cElevated\u201d released","text":"Release info: [LINK] Binary: [LINK] Video: [VIDEO] Everything you see and hear is procedurally generated by the 4096 byte executable, in real time. It still blows my mind 7 years after release...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13056925,"author":"M4v3R","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Making graphics in 4 kilobytes (2008) [pdf]","text":"Obligatory link to Elevated - a 4 kilobytes animated 3D demo with music by rgba (authors of PDF in the OP) & TBC: [VIDEO] For me, achieving something like this in 4k is just mindblowing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14397219,"author":"userbinator","month":"2017-05","story_title":"How a 64k intro is made","text":"Here is another page on distance functions... [LINK] ...written by one of the authors of this amazing 4k ( four kilobytes! ) demo: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21643150,"author":"twic","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Who are your programming rockstars, and why?","text":"Inigo Quilez, a demoscene programmer who does amazing work - of a very high technical and artistic standard, often in painfully tiny sizes - and then writes lucidly about it: [LINK] Here's 'Elevated' a four-kilobyte demo he did (along with others): [VIDEO] And here's the writeup: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22882595,"author":"duskwuff","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage","text":"The 4k category was blown wide open in 2009 by rgba/tbc with Elevated [1] (live reactions: [2]). It demonstrated that 4k was more than sufficient for impressive effects and music -- suddenly, 64k was no longer an interesting constraint. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44059915,"author":"onename","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Inigo Quilez: computer graphics, mathematics, shaders, fractals, demoscene","text":"When I want to show people what an intro is and tell them a bit about the demoscene, I usually show them the intro Elevated, which won the PC 4k compo at Breakpoint 2009. For me it really shows the talent of Iq and the other people who created it. It\u2019s truly amazing what can be done in just 4 kilobyte! Elevated by Rgba & TBC: [VIDEO] Iq's slides on the Elevated intro: [LINK] Sourcecode: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9578569,"author":"david-given","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Voxel Quest Fluid Dynamics and New Rendering Method","text":"The maths isn't hard, but you do need a decent grasp of vectors and (optionally) 3D transformation matrices, and it's pretty opaque until you figure out the terminology. I haven't done GPU raymarching myself but I've used the same techniques on the CPU side in order to develop a whole-planet procedural renderer (in Ada, of course); the raymarching was relatively straightforward but I got horribly bogged down trying to make a volumetric atmosphere work. One resource I found really useful was I\u00f1igo Quilez' website; in particular, his article on basic terrain raymarching explains most of the concepts: [LINK] (Also known as iq, he's responsible for a number of amazing demos, including the 4kB demo _Elevated_: [VIDEO] He also appears to have written ShaderToy. Search for iq to see his stuff omfg ShaderToy lets you write shaders to produce _music_ now? [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15773902,"author":"userbinator","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Terrain rendering in fewer than 20 lines of code","text":"IMHO not very many 64Ks have reached the amazingness of this 11 minute one from 2000: [LINK] ...and for 4K, this one from 2009: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18778536,"author":"userbinator","month":"2018-12","story_title":"\u201cModern\u201d C++ Lamentations","text":"The size comparisons are also very useful, if anything to show that even the simple \"non-Modern\" C++ program already has quite a bit of bloat. Compilation takes 0.064 seconds, produces 8480 byte executable I am experienced with Asm so I can come up with an instinctive order-of-magnitude estimate, but even those who aren't should try to roughly estimate how many machine instructions are required to implement that code, and come to the conclusion that over 8000 bytes for three nested loops with not much in them, a comparison, some arithmetic, and a handful of library function calls seems rather excessive. Even 800 would be on the high side --- somewhere around 100-200 bytes is my estimate. Also, watch this 4k demo (everything you see and hear is generated in realtime by a 4096-byte executable): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jCC8fPQOaxU":[{"hn_comment_id":19797520,"author":"jamestanderson","month":"2019-05","story_title":"The Mobile-Home Trap (2015)","text":"This was recently featured on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver [1] which also does a good job of covering this issue. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38986207,"author":"0xcde4c3db","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Austin takes a bet on tiny homes to ease homelessness","text":"How much time do you have? The short version is that while there's not necessarily anything wrong with them in principle, in practice there's a pretty impressive amount of exploitation at nearly every level of the industry. It more closely resembles the dynamics of car sales and financing than it does a downmarket version of conventional real estate. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] (~16-minute Last Week Tonight segment)","stance":"rec"}],"jEbRVNxL44c":[{"hn_comment_id":37581634,"author":"zx10rse","month":"2023-09","story_title":"FAA Authorizes Zipline to Deliver Commercial Packages Using Drones","text":"One of my favorite companies since I heard about them - [VIDEO] I personally believe this is the way forward, like in a star wars movie full of a plethora of \"dumb\" robots who have a specific work task, and are almost self sufficient. Like you have a robot that fix delivery drones, a robot that assembles them, and etc. Drones will be also much better at avoiding obstacles, and they will be much more efficient than cars. I am not really sure why there isn't more competition in this market. I believe they can build an autonomous delivery hub, and factory. I wish them all the best.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20622605,"author":"1023bytes","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Swiss Post Suspends Drone Delivery Service After Second Crash","text":"Delivery drones are definitely unnecessary in densely populated areas. It's cool and futuristic, but it's not economical at all, it's very unsafe and also loud. However it's a wonderful thing for rural places with poor infrastructure. For example Zipline in Rwanda, one of the most interesting solutions an engineering perspective too: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21020998,"author":"Fabricio20","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Google Wing Launching US Drone Deliveries with FedEx, Walgreens","text":"The catapult launches the drones into the air, which then parachute the package to the location. Real Engineering [1] and Wendover Productions [2] have really nice videos about their system currently deployed in Rwanda. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23448100,"author":"ViralBShah","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Zipline: Drone delivery of medical supplies","text":"I learnt about Zipline in a talk at JuliaCon by Tucker McClure who spoke about how they use Julia for designing and tuning their aircraft. Had the great fortune of spending an evening at the conference to learn more about the company itself, how it got started and their use of Julia. Recommend the 2019 JuliaCon video on how Zipline uses Julia for vehicle simulation: [LINK] And this video by Real Engineering that does a great job of explaining how the whole thing works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28070186,"author":"RheingoldRiver","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The slow collapse of Amazon\u2019s drone delivery dream","text":"flyzipline is so cool! I saw an AMA they did on reddit a while ago and their tech for the thing landing where it hooks onto the the wire is really neat! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28071975,"author":"matkoniecz","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The slow collapse of Amazon\u2019s drone delivery dream","text":"> Even if they're literally worse at everything than the alternatives, cost more, are less reliable, etc. Drones may be better for very quick delivery or where road network is very poor. See [LINK] with amazing [VIDEO] (delivery of medical supplies in Rwanda) and mentions ship-to-ship transport.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28262943,"author":"jazzyjackson","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Police helicopter's 100mph chase with 'super sophisticated' drone near Tucson","text":"I was also going to mention zipline in Rwanda, last video I saw was two years ago but it looks like they\u2019re doing well enough to be hiring interns in San Fran. Really cool tech, the way they have a sort of assembly line for getting ready-to-fly parts on the package in the space of minutes - these are life and death deliveries out here! [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31147012,"author":"SPBS","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Drones have transformed blood delivery in Rwanda","text":"For those blocked by a paywall, Real Engineering did a video on it [ [VIDEO] ]. The most interesting aspects to me were: - The drone is not a quadcopter, they are too inefficient. Mini plane design. - GPS device is directly attached to the swappable battery unit to ensure it is always connected to a satellite, eliminating satellite connection delays when the drone powers up. - It is launched into a sky by a powered rail. It doesn't need to land to deliver the goods, the items get parachuted down. No infrastructure needed on the receiving end, the item just drops from the sky. - For landing the drone flies past an aircraft arresting wire while hooking onto it which decelerates it and causes it to swing down (suspended above the ground). Easy to retrieve.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37580990,"author":"gniv","month":"2023-09","story_title":"FAA Authorizes Zipline to Deliver Commercial Packages Using Drones","text":"They\u2019ve been doing those deliveries in Rwanda for 6 years! Very impressive. This video has a bit more info and is less rushed: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jGWFg7EDnyY":[{"hn_comment_id":18585417,"author":"c0nducktr","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Receiving NOAA Weather Satellite Images with $10 USB SDR Device (2014) [video]","text":"I'm in the process of setting up an antenna for receiving data from the GOES-15 weather satellite. I'm just starting out but got inspired after watching this video (no affiliation with the channel). [VIDEO] People have been able to get some stunning pictures of the earth from those satellites. Examples: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] If you're interested, check out r/rtlsdr, which is where I first was introduced to the hobby. It's full of helpful people.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31141113,"author":"notsound","month":"2022-04","story_title":"How to pull images from satellites in orbit","text":"The sequel to this video: [VIDEO] The Thought Emporium makes really high quality content. He does a lot of things, most recently covering things in metal, but in the past they have made videos on gene editing, growing opals, and making holograms. It\u2019s a lot of different topics, all presented very well.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18619309,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Serial Port SDR","text":"A YouTube channel called The Thought Emporium has a series about using a sdr called the HackRF to make a radio telescope and a satellite receiver for a few weather sats. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jHP942Livy0":[{"hn_comment_id":44162334,"author":"mastercheif","month":"2025-06","story_title":"The Unreliability of LLMs and What Lies Ahead","text":"You don\u2019t need to pre-wash dishes before they go in the sink, beyond a basic scrapping of the plate into the garbage. Pre-washing dishes degrades the performance of the dishwasher. This is due to the use of enzymes in modern detergent formulations. I\u2019ve sent dozens of people the Technology Connections video on this topic to rave reviews: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41379352,"author":"FredPret","month":"2024-08","story_title":"A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)","text":"If you have soap residue: - Try running the dishwasher a second time with no soap, or on a rinse cycle - If you use soap pods, try putting it not in the soap tray, but directly in with the dishes. [0] [0] This video (starting at 11:40) explains how soap is used in a dishwasher. This guy (who has an excellent channel) gives tips to maximize soap exposure in your dishwasher, but you can do the opposite to minimize it instead. If you have a good machine, your dishes might still come out clean. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42499321,"author":"zahlman","month":"2024-12","story_title":"I just found out I've been using my dishwasher wrong for 7 years","text":"Relevant - since there is more to learn about operating a dishwasher: Technology Connections' series on dishwashers - [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46549860,"author":"bschwindHN","month":"2026-01","story_title":"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Fourier Transform","text":"> I was minimizing time so spent while she was minimizing number of washes I'm probably just slow, but I'm not following. Do you mean because you went fast, you had to run another cycle to clean everything properly? If you haven't already, you should watch the Technology Connections series on dishwashers. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47127993,"author":"modeless","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Yes there is a right way to stack the dishwasher. Here are the 5 rules","text":"Article is wrong. Tablets/pods are silly. The most important thing to improve dishwasher performance is to put detergent in the prewash compartment as well as the main compartment, which you can't do with pods. Second most important (maybe North America-specific) is to run the hot water in the sink to flush the cold water out of the hot water line before starting, so the first fill of the dishwasher uses hot water. More than you ever wanted to know: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47128040,"author":"foenix","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Yes there is a right way to stack the dishwasher. Here are the 5 rules","text":"Hate to be that guy, but I'm not sure this is an HN worthy article to be honest. It's a listsicle that covers the title for a minority of its points. Perhaps one could look at this recent Technology Connections video and its accompanying blog for a more insightful look: [VIDEO] Alternatively, perhaps a direct link to the video from this article is in order?","stance":"rec"}],"jILgxeNBK_8":[{"hn_comment_id":9603891,"author":"Litost","month":"2015-05","story_title":"John and Alicia Nash, 1928,1933-2015","text":"I've only had a cursory introduction to Nash's work through brief flirtations with game theory, but this is the best explanation i've found so far on Nash's Equilibrium which i still remember vividly for highlighting why a \"Socially Optimal Solution\" is pretty rare in real life [1] (apologies in advance to the ted-talk averse). Has anyone got any other good pointers to examples of his work? P.S. Can anyone recommend A Beautiful Mind, i'm kinda put off by the description in here which makes it sound very hollywoodised [2]? [1] - [VIDEO] [2] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11809992,"author":"tantalor","month":"2016-05","story_title":"A Renegade Muscles in on Mister Softee\u2019s Turf","text":"Setting up shop directly next to your competitor is the best choice, i.e., Nash equilibrium. That's why all the gas stations and coffee shops cluster up instead of spreading out. For example, on a beach, you should expect 2 ice cream vendors to cluster in the exact middle rather than move closer to their respective territories. This video explains it perfectly: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20539824,"author":"asdf9240","month":"2019-07","story_title":"How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?","text":"extrapolating a small sample size will probably produce unreliable results. also its possible that there are 3 sushi restaurants on the same street because of the Hotelling model of spatial location (good vid explaining that: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"jK0BkTPUGQY":[{"hn_comment_id":33319071,"author":"oifjsidjf","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Exposure to environmental toxins may be root of rise in neurological disorders","text":">> The mystery behind the astronomical rise in neurological disorders like Parkinson\u2019s disease and Alzheimer\u2019s could be caused by exposure to environmental toxins that are omnipresent yet poorly understood, leading doctors warn. Keto/low carb/and especially fasting+lowcarb was shown to help in many of these diseases. This article smells like misdirection away from sugar which is a poison which our kids eat in insane quantaties. It's because of fructose (sugar) that fatty liver disease and T2 diabetes, which was once a disease that only appeared in adult alchoholics, now also happens in children and non-alchoholic adults: ~1980 was the 1st known case of a kid getting fatty liver. One study found a quick way to eliminate fatty liver in kids: replacing 10% to 15% of carb calories of fructose with glucose. Fat + fructose is also particulary dangerous, though the issue is not fat but fructose, it's just that when you combine them the negative effects of fructose get much, much more severe. What does alzheimer and cancer have in common? Both cells have damaged mitchochondria. The difference between neurons and non-neuron cells in other parts of the body is that neurons do not have the ability to use the Warburg effect since they are missing some glycolictic machinery in order for that to happen. This is why neurons cannot go \"full cancer\" like other cells in the body and just \"die peacefully\": BUT that deaths might then create negative side effects later. One video below clearly sh","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33667349,"author":"pengaru","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Intermittent fasting protects against Alzheimer\u2019s disease in mice","text":"This talk by an actual neurologist intersects much of what you're speaking to, but not through a \"type 3 diabetes\" lens. More of a \"tumor growth and neurodegenerative diseases are caused by mitochondrial dysfunction, and fasting is our most powerful tool for straightening out misbehaving mitochondria\" perspective, if memory serves. My impression is that ketogenic diet alone is insufficient for lack of aggressive autophagy/mitophagy fasting triggers. But I'm just a lowly software dev, this shit is not at all my wheelhouse. It doesn't surprise me though that our cells need regular spring cleaning, my home certainly does. Apparently we evolved to opportunistically do that internal spring cleaning in times of scarcity... Worth a listen: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jMmUoZh3Hq4":[{"hn_comment_id":29340451,"author":"kruador","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Museum of Plugs and Sockets","text":"Relevant video: Technology Connections, \"The US electrical system is not 120V\", where there is a (long) discussion of how the breaker panel works and how you get 240V. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32301628,"author":"coreyp_1","month":"2022-08","story_title":"A looming copper crunch and why recycling can\u2019t fix it","text":"There's a lot of misconceptions about US electricity. This video does a nice job at pointing out the good and the bad. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34334138,"author":"Rimintil","month":"2023-01","story_title":"A US federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves","text":"Single family homes in America are 240v rails for large appliances, like stoves/ovens, furnaces, and dryers (two-phase). Technology Connections (YouTube) explains this fairly well: > [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41483366,"author":"jamesbfb","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Serving AI from the Basement \u2013 192GB of VRAM Setup","text":"Huh, what?! Mega TIL moment for me as an Australian with an electric kettle and dryer plugged into whatever power socket I wish! Reminds me of this great Technology Connections video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jN7mSXMruEo":[{"hn_comment_id":35094573,"author":"eska","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Building a city optimized for bikes is a choice","text":"As a European I was really surprised why SUVs are so popular in the US, making biking extremely dangerous. This documentary was quite eye-opening for me: [VIDEO] Similarly in Germany we\u2019re building a new Autobahn in the middle of a city (Berlin) under extreme costs, while still neglecting investment in trains, because we\u2019re a car country.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35584996,"author":"pastacacioepepe","month":"2023-04","story_title":"SUVs more dangerous to cyclists than other cars, study suggests","text":"Just do yourself a favour and watch this video[0], you might learn why SUVs and in general cars with a taller bumper height are more dangerous. .0: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46649903,"author":"culi","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%","text":"Here's a video I wish I could make every American watch [VIDEO] It provides a deep-dive video into the history of how we got to the situation we're in today with American cars exploding in size. It actually has its origins in Obama-era legislation for emissions standards that made an exception for \"light trucks\". SUVs are legally classified as light trucks so the industry has massively pushed these tanks onto the consumer promising more safety. It has led to a dramatic decrease in public safety and pedestrian deaths that is unique to the US. One contributor to these deaths is literally parents running over their own children in their own driveways. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT IS HAPPENING IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY. The video goes over the visibility issues with these trucks, how our safety regulations fail to account for them (light trucks only need to be tested in collision with other light trucks) and also covers how modern trucks have the same carrying capacity as pickup trucks from 30 years ago (the main thing that's increased is the hull and cabin size) while being harder to use for actual work since the bed is higher offer the ground","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35046671,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Pickup Trucks: From Workhorse to Joyride","text":"> Article didn't mention CAFE (which is the reason for larger sizes) nor chicken tax (which makes, even if they qualified under CAFE, foreign small trucks economically non-viable). I was pointed to the article from the just-posted Not Just Bikes video \"These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us\", which does go over those things: * [VIDEO] The point of the Axios article, which comes up at the 25m25s point in the NJB video, goes towards the point that the pickup truck has actually become less practical over the decades. And to the idea that most folks would be better served with a station wagon or perhaps a minivan. Trucks have gone from the cargo bed being >60% of the usable length (ignoring the engine), to the (crew) cab being >60% of the useable length. Pickup trucks gone from thing-haulers to people-haulers, in which case, why bother with that form factor?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35046720,"author":"vanilla_nut","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Pickup Trucks: From Workhorse to Joyride","text":"Not Just Bikes video on the same subject today: [VIDEO] It's crazy to see how much trucks have blown up in the last few years. They clog up parking lots, barely fit in parking garages (let alone personal garages), blind me at night with their too-high too-bright headlights, and completely block cross-street vision for anything except other trucks when they park on the street. A complete failure of US govt regulation. At this point I hope gas prices go through the roof and punish these truck owners for their selfish decisionmaking.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35049727,"author":"estebank","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2022 Preliminary Data","text":"Not Just Bikes just released a very relevant video about the very real problems that SUVs and modern trucks have on urban environments. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35417799,"author":"crooked-v","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Giving kids no autonomy at all has become a parenting norm","text":"On that note, there's the video essay \"These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us\" [VIDEO] , which includes various statistics and some striking visual examples of the absolutely absurd grill heights of modern production vehicles.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35650037,"author":"kinjba11","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks","text":"Not Just Bikes, a YouTuber made a video about increasing vehicle sizes in the US and why you may be interested in [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35650950,"author":"m000","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks","text":"These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us [1] explains in detail how \"trucks\" overtook \"cars\" as the most popular vehicle in the US, and legislation that lead to that. (Quotes because the words refer to the legal definition of trucks/cars.) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37325443,"author":"rurounijones","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Weight-based motor vehicle tax","text":"> That's the first time I hear this argument. SUVs and the like exploit a loophole in various standards like fuel efficiency requirements because they are not \"cars\" but \"Light trucks\" and therefore those standards don't apply to them; which makes them cheaper to design and build for automotive companies. The \"Light trucks\" category was supposed to be used for light commercial vehicles, not personal vehicles but then the law of unintended consequences had a love-child with profit seeking corporations and their linguistic games. Literally the only reason SUVs and trucks became popular is because the automotive manufacturers could make more money doing it that way and convinced the consumers to buy them. NotJustBikes did a good intro video on the subject. * [LINK] * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38754424,"author":"turquoisevar","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Tesla Has a Design Problem","text":"I\u2019m not sure how it relates to passenger safety regulations, but it is true that in the US there is a lower set of fuel efficiency and safety requirements for light trucks. And SUVs are classified as light trucks, hence the push by manufacturers for people to buy SUVs. Not Just Bikes has a pretty extensive video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jOyfZex7B3E":[{"hn_comment_id":18654541,"author":"dsco","month":"2018-12","story_title":"How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated","text":"Related and _very_ inspiring; how the Sega Saturn CD was cracked after 20 years. Even my very non-technical girlfriend sat through this thing, being intrigued by the dedication. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12155798,"author":"drakenot","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Repairing the only known prototype of Nintendo PlayStation [video]","text":"For anyone who likes this video, you should also checkout Sega Saturn CD - Cracked After 20 Years[0]. [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29316341,"author":"iamtedd","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Full key extraction of Nvidia TSEC","text":"I love hearing these stories too! Here's a video of someone finally cracking into the Sega Saturn well after the console was current commodity: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jPhJbKBuNnA":[{"hn_comment_id":34775825,"author":"neom","month":"2023-02","story_title":"The AI Bubble of 2023","text":"Tom Scotts video today re where we are on the AI's impact to society curve was interesting : [VIDEO] I think he's probably right that we're very early on the adoption curve. (even though I always get downvote and call a dumbass when I mention it here, I still think progress in quantum computing (predictive) and AI go hand in hand towards AGI.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38536522,"author":"ortusdux","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Why is it taken for granted that LLM models will keep improving?","text":"I enjoyed Tom Scott's YT video monologue about this. To summarize, he postulates that most major innovations follow a sigmoid growth curve, wherein they ramp up, explode, and then level off. The question then becomes, where are we on this curve? He concludes that we will probably only know in hindsight. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38621105,"author":"shagie","month":"2023-12","story_title":"The Singularity Is Nigh!","text":"I tried using AI. It scared me. - Tom Scott [VIDEO] I'm also gonna recommend Accelerando - [LINK] As an aside, I'd also recommend Glasshouse (also by Charles Stross) as an exploration into the human remnants post singularity (and war)... followed by Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams... > \u201cI and my confederates,\u201d Aristide said, \u201cdid our best to prevent that degree of autonomy among artificial intelligences. We made the decision to turn away from the Vingean Singularity before most people even knew what it was. But\u2014\u201d He made a gesture with his hands as if dropping a ball. \u201c\u2014I claim no more than the average share of wisdom. We could have made mistakes.\u201d for a singularity averted approach of what could be done. One more I'll toss in, is The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts which feels like you're missing a lot of the story (but it is because that's one book of a series) and... well... spoilers.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41854924,"author":"chii","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Headstart accelerates software development by up to 100x with Claude","text":"> get an LLM that can write production code reliably it depends on what that user wanted the code to do, and how important it is. For example, an average, non-technical user could use this to generate a script to sort out their email, or a script for automation in MS Office VBA. Just because it's not perfect, doesn't mean it doesn't have a good use, and won't improve. Tom Scott's video[0] makes a very good argument: we don't know where we are on the technology curve. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jQIHqkudgNY":[{"hn_comment_id":34062985,"author":"jterrys","month":"2022-12","story_title":"A real history of video games \u2013 Pay to Win","text":"Though the video is fairly long, it's a genuinely interesting exploration on the murky history of video games and gambling. This is part two of a video series, I highly recommend watching both. Part 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38240772,"author":"AlexandrB","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Casino-like apps have drained people of millions","text":"I recently saw a good video[1] covering the history and appeal of gambling machines. My takeaway is that the primary reason people play these is not because they think they're going to win money. This especially true of pachinko where \"cashing out\" is a convoluted process of trading balls for prizes for cash. > If they never paid out, people would never go and the casinos would not exist This is self evidently false based on the linked article. Random chance games that have no possibility of ever having a net payout attract tons of players and make a lot of money. I think the problem is analyzing this with the economic \"rational consumer\" model of human behavior. Gambling is not rational but extremely popular because people are not rational. The whole industry is a trap that feeds users dopamine rewards in exchange for money. Once you're in, the payouts have little to do with it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41272444,"author":"maxbond","month":"2024-08","story_title":"A New Theory of Distraction (2015)","text":"This is tangential but I watched an interesting video essay about slot machines recently[1], based on the book Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Sch\u00fcll, and one of the surprising things Sch\u00fcll's research turned up in interviews with slot machine gamblers was that for some winning was jarring and not really satisfying. It took them out of the trance-like \"machine state,\" and their goal was not to win but to linger in the machine state. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jQOfbObFOCw":[{"hn_comment_id":17046302,"author":"BreakfastB0b","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?","text":"\u201cThe Myth of Sisyphus\u201d by Albert Camus, if you find yourself worrying about existential nihilism then this is the book for you. I found it extremely useful after an intense psychedelic experience. The School of Life has a good overview of his brand of existentialism here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29347091,"author":"cupcake-unicorn","month":"2021-11","story_title":"In Praise of Idleness (1932)","text":"Absolutely. Thanks for this. It's telling to me how dismissive/judgemental are about nihilism, and that's been a good signal for me in other areas that it's getting a lot closer to a basic truth and people are threatened with it and want to push it away. Which is what we shouldn't be doing. Optimistic Nihilism ( [LINK] ) or Absurdism ( [VIDEO] ) are maybe more accessible takes if nihilism seems too \"scary\".","stance":"rec"}],"jSFsrmLhC00":[{"hn_comment_id":24660579,"author":"xlii","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Transport Tycoon a.k.a. the great optimiser, Chris Sawyer","text":"I was looking for the soundtrack and there is remastered version coming from mobile version. It's so awesome. [VIDEO] It makes me want play OpenTTD :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26664494,"author":"RankingMember","month":"2021-04","story_title":"OpenTTD 1.11","text":"I wish I still had the time to play this game for hours at a time like I did when I was a kid. Good memories. That soundtrack was fantastic. The composer performed it with real instruments sometime in the past few years and it really brought on those nostalgic feelings: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46136818,"author":"p0w3n3d","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)","text":"Chris Sawyer's work known to me is mainy Transport Tycoon and TT Deluxe (which are now implemented in opensource repository, and I think it even has its own free graphics by now. But the original graphics, and MOSTLY music is great, you can even listen to it, remastered with live instruments on youtube. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jSo5v5t4OQM":[{"hn_comment_id":15888599,"author":"lucio","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests","text":">Yet, also, IQ tests are strongly influenced by cultural knowledge Raven Progressive Matrices, I believe the most used IQ test today is not influenced by cultural knowledge. IQ has an amazingly high correlation with academic success and work success, see [VIDEO] it is worthwhile","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18804084,"author":"akira2501","month":"2019-01","story_title":"IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle","text":"> but \"intelligence\" less so I don't think there's any problem measuring intelligence, where we've traditionally run into issues is where we start to make policy or social decisions using this data without understanding it's subtleties. I think Jordan B Peterson has a good classroom video segment[1] on this problem. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41540877,"author":"zahlman","month":"2024-09","story_title":"The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out","text":"The link demonstrates that there is a well-reproduced phenomenon in real science whereby, e.g., test scores in various academic subjects correlate positively with each other, and that this can be explained by a common psychometric factor that is reasonable to refer to as \"intelligence\". The IQ or \"intelligence quotient\" is an attempt to quantify that which is known to exist, and it's actually one of the best understood ideas in the science of the brain. Additional viewing that largely covers my points below: [VIDEO] You started off saying: > There a lot of pseudoscience around IQ too, probably starting with the very concept of IQ for measuring \"intelligence\" (for which we would need a strong definition anyway) The point is that we do, in fact, have all the necessary scientific research to argue that the concept of \"intelligence\" exists - i.e., that we can identify a single-factor quantity that can be fairly described with a single number - and that anything calling itself IQ is definitionally a measurement of that single quantity. In particular: problem-solving capability is a real thing, and some people very obviously have more of it than others. Also, we notably don't have data to support more than one factor anywhere near as strong as Spearman's g . (That is to say: we see correlations between academic performance in all subjects - rather than strong positive correlations within certain groups but weak or negative correlations between those groups). The fact that specific ","stance":"rec"}],"jTYkdEU_B4o":[{"hn_comment_id":7704043,"author":"snitko","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Is Bitcoin the Future of Money?","text":"> There would be no courts for those who cannot afford to pay for them. That's one major difference. There would be no police, fire agencies, etc etc, I highy recommend you watch this video, it's an illustrated talk by David D. Friedman, explaining how police, courts and other things would exist and work in a world without government: [VIDEO] All of those things are just services. And the poor would be able to afford them too, just like the poor can afford cars, shoes and computers. > So it is outright impossible for groups of people to gather to cause serious violent harm towards members of a minority, leading to loss of life with no potential legal recourse? Is this what you are saying? It's possible, but they'd be paying for violence out of their own pocket. How many people, do you suppose, would oppose gay marriage or, say, pot if they were presented with a bill for outlawing it? My guess most of them would prefer to keep the money and make their peace with it. But because the cost of outlawing certain things is paid by all the taxpayers, they essentially pay for what they believe is right out of everyone else's pockets.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11418491,"author":"snitko","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens","text":"> Okay, let's say there's no governing body. Now, there's a dispute. How is it resolved? Fight to death? You've got an excellent question and I've got an excellent answer for you: [VIDEO] It's a short video, but I highly recommend it to you (skip the first minute or so for a short historical intro). Please come back here and let me know if it answered your question. I also hope it doesn't just answer your question, but sets in your in a different mode for thinking, mode in which problems that seemed unsolvable can now be solved.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5963089,"author":"snitko","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Freedom: The Big American Lie","text":"No, we don't. A great talk and an illustration about how law and protection could work in a stateless society: [VIDEO] by David D. Friedman (an economist AND a lawyer).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6493137,"author":"baddox","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs","text":"This is similar to, although one step removed from, the anarcho-capitalist proposal in David Friedman's 1973 book The Machinery of Freedom [0]. In this proposed society, monopoly government is replaced completely by a market for everything that government currently does, including law production, law enforcement, arbitration (courts), roads and infrastructure, and even \"national\" defense. I'm admittedly a big fan of Friedman's proposal, and I wonder what supposed advantage this futarchy provides over Friedman's proposal. There's a decent 20 minutes illustrated summary video on YouTube [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6512306,"author":"baddox","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Silk Road 2.0: A concept of a distributed anonymous marketplace","text":"> However, in my experience they seem to try to vastly simplify many issues by waving their hands and talking about the non-aggression principle as if that automatically solves everything. The truth is, while there may be laws which are unjust, unfair, or plain silly, most of them were created to meet a need or solve a problem. This is very true, but it doesn't represent the views of all libertarians or even all anarcho-capitalists. For a much better approach to anarcho-capitalism\u2014one that focuses primarily on economics and not on morality\u2014check out David Friedman's writings and talks. Here's a basic introduction to his proposal of a polycentric legal system where the market produces all goods and services including law, law enforcement, arbitration (courts), and even national defense: [VIDEO] . Along with Murray Rothbard's primarily moral/ethical/legal arguments (which seem slightly more prominent, and seem to be the ones you've encountered), Friedman's economic arguments make up the main \"branches of anarcho-capitalism.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7236312,"author":"pielud","month":"2014-02","story_title":"Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen","text":"As another reply has suggested, David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom is an excellent book which describes how private defense, law and dispute resolution might happen. This video is a good introduction to the ideas presented in the book [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8157484,"author":"snitko","month":"2014-08","story_title":"SpaceX Slapped With Wage Class Action Over Mass Layoff","text":"I suggest you watch this short video then, which explains how laws, protection and private property can be created and enforced in a free market: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24385358,"author":"jokethrowaway","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Are you an anarchist? The answer may surprise you (2000)","text":"Funnily enough, as an anarchist, I never heard before that removing the government (or hierarchical use of violence) would remove violence from the world. There are plenty of ideas on how to keep law and order in an anarchic society. I recommend you to read The Machinery of Freedom (by David Friedman) or check out a summary here: [VIDEO] TLDR: One way to keep order is having private law enforcement / private insurance you voluntarily subscribe to. This can be provided by multiple companies competing on the market. These entities can agree between each other on how to settle disputes, use a third party private arbitration system or physically fight against each other. A war between law enforcement agencies would be expensive and hard to predict, so I think these businesses would pick peaceful resolution over war. How contracts are resolved by law enforcement agencies can become a selling point, letting consumers decide with their wallet what kind of laws they agree with. Charities can collect money, voluntarily provided by citizens, and pay the fee required to protect people without money.","stance":"rec"}],"jVkLVRt6c1U":[{"hn_comment_id":13026384,"author":"thaumaturgy","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Freelance Isn't Free Act Passes in NYC","text":"You really need to watch this (very famous) talk by Mike Monteiro, called \"Fuck You, Pay Me\": [VIDEO] Especially the section where his attorney starts talking (at about 7:20).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13026528,"author":"MrFoof","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Freelance Isn't Free Act Passes in NYC","text":"Please watch this: Fuck You, Pay Me: [VIDEO] The $1250 I spent once to have a business attorney draft up a template for my services agreement is the best $1250 I ever spent in the past 7 years. That $1250 makes me money , because I never have to harass clients to get paid, because they know I have legal recourse if they don't. Since then I've maybe paid him $1000 to deal with things clients wanted to redline in my service agreement. That $2250 total (which is a legitimate business expense) is a pittance compared to what I would lose for a single unpaid invoice. Meanwhile, I always hear from freelancers that don't get paid, but claim lawyers are \"too expensive\". You know what's really expensive? Getting $0 for the last N days you worked instead of $X. $X is a hell of a lot more money, and unless you have a contract in place, you expose yourself to that possibility every time you engage with a client.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20134911,"author":"Improvotter","month":"2019-06","story_title":"I didn't get paid, so I open-sourced my client\u2019s project","text":"I watched this video from Mike Monteiro and I always refer to it since. It's about getting paid for the work you do. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26937962,"author":"Mandatum","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Job descriptions should show a salary or salary range","text":"Fuck you, pay me for those of you uninitiated, this talk by Mike Monteiro is awesome - about not getting paid in creative services: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9797790,"author":"wwkeyboard","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm owed 8k by a startup that's going under. What do I do?","text":"It's a little late for you, but Mike Monteiro's \"Fuck you, pay me!\" talk has a lot of good information. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15160525,"author":"quanticle","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Fucking Sue Me (2011)","text":"That really depends; some company's legal department might go overboard with the stuff they make you sign 'or no deal'. Mike Monteiro talks about this in his \"Fuck you, pay me\" talk [1]. He says that a lot of companies have boilerplate contracts which have outdated provisions like requiring you to hand over printouts of source code, or delivering software on floppy diskettes. The proper response is to have a lawyer yourself who can review the contract and explain to the company's legal counsel that 1) these contract provisions are unreasonable and outdated and 2) that striking these provisions will not create additional liabilities for the company. The reasons these contracts go overboard is because every time the company gets burned, it adds some scar tissue to the contract to prevent that same eventually from occurring again, regardless of whether it's applicable to the task at hand. Maybe it works different in different parts of the world, but we signed some crazy things (which were dealbreakers if not signed) in the past and no-one ever sued us for it I will be extremely honest. You got lucky. You put your head in the mouth of the lion, and it didn't bite. It doesn't mean that what you did was a good idea, it just means that you got away with it. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15162735,"author":"gravypod","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Fucking Sue Me (2011)","text":"This is some bad advice because there are people who will \"Fucking sue [you]\". If you want to learn about how a professional deals with contracts, payments, and contracting I'd say to check out \"Fuck you. Pay me\" [0] that gives a reasoned explanation of negotiations, what to expect, and reasonable ways to react/behave. [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28500503,"author":"somedangedname","month":"2021-09","story_title":"The Magic Behind the Scenes of Docker Desktop","text":"You give people something cool for years at no cost and now they're pissed that they have to compensate you for your labor. The way that people value software these days is completely insane. People writing you hate mail are bad clients that you don't want and you can feel free to ignore them. Also watch this video that was doing the rounds on HN a couple of years ago: [VIDEO] Your app looks neat - I'll go try it out.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39318087,"author":"morphle","month":"2024-02","story_title":"I'm an engineer that needs to sell my services. Any good books on sales?","text":"Very good advice for consultants and freelancers: [VIDEO] TL;DR: Make good consulting contracts with a proper lawyer","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40944084,"author":"ClearAndPresent","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Freelancer's Dilemma \u2013 Client Won't Pay Despite Clear Agreement","text":"As a palette cleanser and loin girder: [VIDEO] (You already guessed it was Mike Monteiro.) For this project: Did they refuse to pay actively (\"We won't pay you.\"), or passively (No replies to emails.) The latter might be incompetence. As others mentioned, specific legal advice depends on respective jurisdictions, but an offical lawyer's letter sometimes wakes up legal when accounting is drifting. Did you deliver the final access to the code / server / credentials? If not, gently bring servers, DBs, platforms to a halt pending final payments. Future projects: Contract, always. Up-front commencement payments, always. Price yourself higher in the initial quote, and ask for staged payments, such that by the time your delivery schedule is 50-75% done you are 100% paid. You control the source code accounts, you control the server credentials, you control the database access credentials, you hand over final access after the final check has cleared.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40944227,"author":"Zealotux","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Freelancer's Dilemma \u2013 Client Won't Pay Despite Clear Agreement","text":"Oh you just revived sweet memories of my times as a freelancer. As a freelancer, it's sometimes hard to get around the simple idea that you are your own company and that you must act like one: protect and defend your work at all cost. It took me months of time wasted, and thousands of dollars of work stolen to accept the fact I need to change my behaviour, as a freelancer you have roughly two approaches: - set boundaries early on, don't start any work with a predefined and agreed upon down payment, if the work is more than a few days long: set milestones as need be with payments required. - lawyer up, be flexible with clients (delays in payments are a common occurrence with any company) but don't be afraid to go after dishonest clients, if you can't afford it or don't feel like going this path then you need to set up as many contingencies as possible upfront (see previous point). A classic video that might help you get in the right mindset: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43640307,"author":"SamuelAdams","month":"2025-04","story_title":"No Pay, No Work; Early Career Lessons","text":"I also recommend watching this talk if you have not seen it already. Mike Monteiro: Fuck you, pay me. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jVoSQP2yUYA":[{"hn_comment_id":12135122,"author":"voltagex_","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Japan Will Make Its Last VCR This Month","text":"TechMoan on YouTube has a great video on cassette tapes - granted he's got thousands and thousands of dollars worth of audio equipment. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13387233,"author":"anonova","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off","text":"> They sounded bad. Cassettes weren't _that_ bad. The problem is that there were essentially different grades of tapes and players that supported different noise reduction techniques, and people tend to remember the ones played back with low end gear. Here's a great video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13390526,"author":"ZenoArrow","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Music's weird cassette-tape revival is paying off","text":">\"As others have attested there is nothing good about tapes.\" Tapes weren't as bad as you may think/remember, at least not from an audio point of view, if you Type-IV cassettes and Dolby S noise reduction you can get pretty decent sound output: [VIDEO] I personally preferred MiniDisc, but I don't see them making a resurgence, probably lots of proprietary parts of the tech owned by Sony.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15319776,"author":"rwmj","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Take a trip through music history with Archive.org's Great 78 Project","text":"Matt from Techmoan did a couple of videos about how to make cassette tape sound very good: [LINK] [LINK] They're worth watching but to be honest it hasn't made me want to convert all my music to tapes. Edit: The link I was actually looking for is: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17504039,"author":"voltagex_","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Vaporwave\u2019s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases","text":"[VIDEO] - \"better than you don't remember\". This is an interesting watch if you've got the time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46203056,"author":"klez","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Modern Walkmans","text":"Take a look here[0] for a discussion about cassette quality. TL;DR: Like many of us you probably had shitty equipment and shitty cassettes. They are more than capable of sounding great with the right tools. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jbkSRLYSojo":[{"hn_comment_id":34561628,"author":"somethoughts","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?","text":"This is just personal but anytime I feel similar to the OP, I watch something by Hans Rosling [1] or Anna Rosling [2]. Although 10 and 5 years old respectively, I feel the general sentiment is still true - that human progress is slow, in the background and might be ebbing and flowing in your specific sub-population. And when compared to the present, media narrative driven present its hard to see the improvements happening across the global population. It helps me put stuff in perspective - of course mileage may var (and maybe it's just helping me delude myself into getting out a funk but it works!). [1] Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - [VIDEO] [2] See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income - Anna Rosling R\u00f6nnlund [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35889667,"author":"SeanAnderson","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Helion\u2019s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft","text":"It's admittedly a 12 year old YouTube, but I always liked watching this when I was feeling especially cynical about the overall trajectory of the world: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36398576,"author":"sethammons","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Are You a Late Bloomer in Work or Love? Maybe You\u2019re Right on Time","text":"Spend five minutes and watch this. Amazing presentation my Hans Rausling, economist, on rising global property. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2151277,"author":"thret","month":"2011-01","story_title":"How to Make Trillions of Dollars","text":"Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes [VIDEO] Concisely sums up everything good about free-market capitalism.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3180046,"author":"KingOfB","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Visualizing how a population grows to 7 billion.","text":"Here's another visualization focusing on the last 200 years. Doesn't focus on population growth as much as life expectancy, but a far cooler visualization in my book! Starts about 30 seconds in: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6040231,"author":"btilly","month":"2013-07","story_title":"High-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain than sugar (2010)","text":"I am making a statement about the reasoning that results in current policies. I'm not saying that the policies are well-executed (indeed I think they are not), merely that they have something more than just \"reward a well-connected lobby\" justifying them. As for African poverty and famine, you're right that measures that protect farmers in rich countries will hurt farmers in poor ones. However the #1 cause of African famine remains corruption and war inside of Africa. And on current economic trends, we'll see economic powerhouses emerging in Africa in near decades. So as sad as our neglect of the interests of over a billion Africans is, it does not seem to be a permanent boot in the face. For perspective, take 5 minutes to watch [VIDEO] . There are - today - African countries that are better off than any country in the world was 70 years ago. If others continue on trends that have happened elsewhere, things are going to improve fairly dramatically. I agree with you that our agricultural policies create problems. But I'm optimistic about what the future holds for people who are impacted.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8674422,"author":"btilly","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Mean People Fail","text":"No, something has changed and PG understands it while you don't. As [LINK] explains, what you are missing is that what people really want is wealth, not money. And wealth is things of value created by people. As productivity improves, we can create more wealth. One form of that wealth is that we can make more efficient use of fundamentally scarce resources. Which admittedly does not increase them, but does decrease pressure on them. The aggregate effect of these trends over time is truly remarkable. See [VIDEO] for a vivid demonstration of how remarkable it is.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11508241,"author":"tim333","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Business in Africa: 1.2B opportunities","text":"It took the west a long time to figure out the stable government structures. I saw one theory that civilisation started around the Med because it was easy to get about by boat and was slow in Africa because it was pretty hard to get about before jet aviation. I figure that now they've got internet they'll catch up. Hans Rosling's thing is interesting showing Africa catching a bit towards the end [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12271986,"author":"Swizec","month":"2016-08","story_title":"The fight to cheat death is heating up","text":"Not utopia compared to what? My great grandmother had to have 8 kids so that she could have 4 or 5 adult children. That was less than 100 years ago. My grand parents were the children of subsistence farmers without running water or electricity. They went to high school, worked in factories, and could get broadcast TV in their living room. Electricity and running water became a base default. My parents work in an office pushing papers around. Even the society of their youth seems alien in its antiquatedness of both social mores and amenities. I get paid to think things and can reasonably expect to live essentially disease free until my 70's. Achieving 90 in relatively good health and vitality doesn't seem out of the question. Seems pretty utopic to me. What not-utopia are you talking about? EDIT: Watch: [VIDEO] Over the past 200 years, the difference between 1st world and 3rd world has all but vanished. We still have a ways to go, but no utopia is perfect. Even in the movies.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12272141,"author":"Swizec","month":"2016-08","story_title":"The fight to cheat death is heating up","text":"The people who grow my coffee beans also live much better than they used to. We're enjoying a before unseen period of peace and prosperity. Globally. Watch: [VIDEO] Over the past 200 years, the difference between 1st world and 3rd world has all but vanished. We still have a ways to go, but no utopia is perfect. Even in the movies.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20144255,"author":"peteforde","month":"2019-06","story_title":"It's Cold in the Information Age","text":"To quote David Mitchell (the comedian, not the author) it would be tempting to take this kind of thing seriously if it wasn't for a damnable sense of perspective. Some thoughts: 1. Much like how the entire centrist media machine feeds off the insanity of the current US administration, somehow this article is at the top of HN. We put it there. (Well, 42 of you did, as of the time I wrote this.) 2. Perhaps the best-kept secret in the world is that it is getting better by almost every measurement. The late, great Hans Rosling was superb at breaking down these dimensions in video form (eg. [VIDEO] ) but if you want the real deal, I recommend Steven Pinker's excellent \"Enlightenment Now\". 3. I couldn't care less that Intel has \"stalled\" since you can now buy a Raspberry Pi that pwns my first computer by an order of magnitude or three and costs less than $25. Meanwhile, Apple is refocusing on Mac hardware again because so many \"poor\" people have phones now that they can see a sales ceiling... this means that a huge percentage of the planet has a significant computer on them all of the time. 4. Not only does age and wisdom allow you to observe tech over many cycles, but the older I get the more I realize that tech is nothing outside of its relationship to politics, culture, and ourselves. Look at how young children just assume everything is a screen, now. Tech is now an important aspect of the daily political conversation. In just 15 years we've gone from a society that rents VHS mo","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28870852,"author":"FredPret","month":"2021-10","story_title":"You Are Jeff Bezos","text":"Fair point. In defense of my moral model, it's backed up by this idea: are things perfect? No. Is the system working? Yes, and astonishingly well. Is there a better way to get from here to there, where \"there\" is some improved state of prosperity and development? No. Human nature is what it is, and our systems must exploit our nature rather than combat it. It's all based on measurable positive outcomes, rather than some theoretical idea that being eye-wateringly rich is somehow bad - morally bad, or bad for society. That idea is rooted in the old, pre-growth, pre-industrial paradigm, when all wealth was seized by force in some way. Today, some wealth is from violence, but the overwhelming majority is new money that was created out of nothing but good old human intelligence. Here are some references backing up my idea that the system works. Here's one focusing on the most important metric, human development: [LINK] This one is from the World Bank. You have to go into the metrics and countries. There are metrics that aren't of interest here, but some are, like access to clean cooking fuels, or electricity. But it's easy to see that most of it is pointing in the right direction. [LINK] Here's a book about all the things that ordinarily fuel existential pessimism: [LINK] Here's a book about how innovation progresses exponentially, and what it means for the masses: [LINK] Here's that classic video by Hans Rosling giving us some perspective on the progress over the last century: [V","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30908496,"author":"sethammons","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How can I start thinking optimistically?","text":"There are lots of things to worry about. There are lots of promising possibilities. Here is a talk from Hans Rosling talking about long term global economic and poverty trends that gives an optimistic outlook. 4min. [VIDEO] And while that is promising, the question for me comes down to happiness which is different than prosperity. I'm just starting to think more about that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36385484,"author":"sethammons","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Goodbye, Twilio","text":"Can your zero sum hypothesis explain the following amazing video from Hans Rausling, economist, on rising prosperity? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jbp3kdJZ1_A":[{"hn_comment_id":47989143,"author":"cmrx64","month":"2026-05","story_title":"America's Expanding Domestic Surveillance","text":"and soon from space? radio engineering breakdown of starlink radar capabilities, it\u2019s a pretty impressive bird if you were designing it only for that: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48117570,"author":"Enginerrrd","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Starship V3","text":"Yeah, I agree. A massive radar network, passive or active is the most likely possibility I have come across. You'd need a LOT of compute at each node to get the most out of the network. I found this video[1] to be a pretty convincing analysis of the absolute max capability you could expect, and it would indeed be impressive. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48117591,"author":"yellowbkpk","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Starship V3","text":"Check out this video that goes into a very deep technical explanation about how the satellites can be used as a Synthetic Aperature Radar to build a realtime representation of the entire globe at meters of resolution: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jcKRGpMiVTw":[{"hn_comment_id":20600421,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2019-08","story_title":"The Ramanujan Summation: 1 and 2 and 3 and \u22ef + \u221e = -1/12","text":"It's more complicated. The lie is using the same symbol for the usual summation and the extended version of the summations. We all agree about the value of a finite summation. We all agree about the value of a sum when the summation is absolutely convergent. We all (almost) agree when the summation converges, but the convergence is not absolute. This is the standard definition that is used in a calculus course, but be aware that when the convergence is not absolute there are some minor problems here and there. It's much better if you have absolute convergence. After that, the idea is that you can extend the definition of summation. The more easy way is [LINK] but the other comment posted a link to a more generic article [LINK] Ces\u00e0ro summation is fine, you don't get too many surprises using it. But when you extend too much the definition of summation you get more weird results, and you loose some properties of the standards summation, for example a+b+c+d+e+... = a + (b+c+d+e+...). In particular, to get a finite result for 1+2+3+4+... you have to use extend the definition of summation a lot, perhaps too much, and there are many ways to do the extension, and not all of them give the same result. If you have half an hour to spare, I highly recommend to watch \" Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co. \" by Mathologer [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22345743,"author":"stan_rogers","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Ramanujan Surprises Again (2015)","text":"Burkard Polster's (Mathologer) videos on the subject are probably going to be more useful than Numberphile. Numberphile merely presents a trick; Mathologer points out both that it's patent nonsense [0] and that it's useful patent nonsense [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25142666,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Ramanujan's Easiest Formula","text":"It is weird, very weird. A very nice explanation of the proof is in a video by Mathologer \" Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co. \" [VIDEO] [spoiler alert] You can extend finite summations to infinite summations. The first extensions are nice and you get intuitive results, and are the extensions studied in Calculus in the university. But these extensions are not enough for this sum. You must make more bold extensions, and the results are not as intuitive, and not useful outside some special applications.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31135510,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2022-04","story_title":"I stopped working on black hole information loss","text":"I agree that most videos in YouTube simplify the problem too much or are just wrong. My recommendations anyway: * Mathologer: \" Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co. \" [VIDEO] * Vsauce: \" The Banach\u2013Tarski Paradox \" [LINK] Each one is like half an hour long, but you may need to pause them and rewatch them a few times to understand the details.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38488182,"author":"thaumasiotes","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Code is run more than read","text":"The result isn't owed to the zeta function. For example, Ramanujan derived it by relating the series to the product of two infinite polynomials, (1 - x + x\u00b2 - x\u00b3 + ...) \u00d7 (1 - x + x\u00b2 - x\u00b3 + ...). (Ok, it's the square of one infinite polynomial.) Do that multiplication and you'll find the result is (1 - 2x + 3x\u00b2 - 4x\u2074 + ...). So the sum of the sequence of coefficients {1, -2, 3, -4, ...} is taken to be the square of the sum of the sequence {1, -1, 1, -1, ...} (because the polynomial associated with the first sequence is the square of the polynomial associated with the second sequence), and the sum of the all-positive sequence {1, 2, 3, 4, ...} is calculated by a simpler algebraic relationship to the half-negative sequence {1, -2, 3, -4, ...}. The zeta function is just a piece of evidence that the derivation of the value is correct in a sense - at the point where the zeta function would be defined by the infinite sum 1 + 2 + 3 + ..., to the extent that it is possible to assign a value to the zeta function at that point, the value must be -1/12. [VIDEO] is a youtube video (Mathologer) which goes over this material fairly carefully.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41504410,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some interesting math and physics blogs you follow?","text":"Not sure if this is what you want, but I like: The post of Mathologer about 1+2+3+...=-1/12 , probably [VIDEO] The post of Minute Physics about the Higgs Boson , probably [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"jfOUVYQnuhw":[{"hn_comment_id":34177906,"author":"simplyinfinity","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Airport Runway Names Shift with Magnetic Field","text":"CGP Grey did a couple of episodes on runways[0] and airport codes[1] that are just fascinating and worth the watch [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44206751,"author":"Titan2189","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Falsehoods programmers believe about aviation","text":"Great Summary of how messed up Airport Codes are by CGP Grey [VIDEO] including (attempts at) a few in-depth reasons for why these quirks exists","stance":"rec"}],"jf_ddGnum_4":[{"hn_comment_id":38429356,"author":"sarupbanskota","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Show HN: I built a guided Build your own DNS Server challenge","text":"(CodeCrafters team here). Out of curiosity, is there a reason why you prefer video format vs. interactive? e.g out of habit, when I'm having a meal, I like watching \"course videos\" or streams occasionally. Is yours similar? P.S. Jon Gjengset did a comprehensive stream going through the Build your own BitTorrent challenge [VIDEO] , if you're interested in Rust","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38514601,"author":"joshka","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Show HN: Rqbit \u2013 bittorent CLI and desktop app written in Rust","text":"Take a watch of Jon Gjengset's vids on this (there's a codecrafters challenge for building out a bittorent protocol that he's going through). - [VIDEO] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"jgOTZe07eHA":[{"hn_comment_id":23953001,"author":"vlasev","month":"2020-07","story_title":"When Hubble stared at nothing for 100 hours (2015)","text":"You can pretty much make a telescope as large as you'd like, depending on your technological level. Hypothetically, you can use gravitational lensing to make a telescope via the sun! It's rather unfeasible at our current level of rocketry, but in time, maybe! Article: [LINK] You can also use Earth's atmosphere as a lens too! It's an amazing video: [VIDEO] Going even crazier, I can imagine we could some day use a massive black hole as a giant telescope.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29109248,"author":"TomGullen","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Astronomers want NASA to build a giant space telescope to peer at alien Earths","text":"I love the idea of using gravitational lensing of the sun from a lagrange point around Jupiter. IIRC it theoretically could image an earth like planet in the region of 1000px x 1000px so you could see continents and weather systems - perhaps even light from large cities. I watched a great \"Cool Worlds\" video as well that said you could do similar with atmospheric lensing of the earth from a lagrange point near the moon (although it would filter out some visible light wavelengths and be weather dependant) - but potentially a much cheaper mission: [VIDEO] This would be going full circle in terms of telescope technology, we started with lenses, moved to mirrors and now back to lenses! To me these seem like the most exciting missions ever - could define a new epoch for humanity and inspire and excite hundreds of millions of people. I would be very disappointed if this didn't happen in my life.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32263298,"author":"TomGullen","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Mission to reach and operate at the focal region of the solar gravitational lens","text":"An excellent video on this: [VIDEO] Earths atmosphere and weather affects this sort of telescope IIRC and will filter out some lightwaves but seems like a much easier win","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33725768,"author":"spartanatreyu","month":"2022-11","story_title":"First active chemistry on an exoplanet revealed by Webb telescope","text":"You might be interested in this video which talks about using the Earth's gravity to create a telescope with a lens roughly the size of the Earth (a terrascope): [VIDEO] They also have a follow up video about using Jupiter to create a jovoscope and there's also more about creating a telescope using the sun (although since the sensor would need to be so far away from the Sun, we would essentially need to launch a different spaceship for each target that we tried to image).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35370015,"author":"usful","month":"2023-03","story_title":"","text":"Need many images to superimpose them into a single computed image. David Kipping has a great video on it [VIDEO] We would need a train of probes being sent in a row because there is a limited amount of time they will pass through the focal area.","stance":"rec"}],"jh8supIUj6c":[{"hn_comment_id":9528692,"author":"rashkov","month":"2015-05","story_title":"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish","text":"Aral Balkan gave a superlative talk a few days ago at re:publica 2015, called Beyond The Camera Panopticon: [VIDEO] It's a broad overview the current state of the internet as seen through a cyberpunk, pro- freedom, human rights, and privacy perspective. Aral is a dynamic speaker and delivers it with a delightfully dark and sardonic voice. Really one of the best talks I've seen on the topic.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16699012,"author":"mashedvikings","month":"2018-03","story_title":"It\u2019s Time to Make Our Privacy Tools Easier to Find","text":"Aral Balkan has excellent things to say about charades such as \"privacy on facebook\": [VIDEO] All in all, this is a great talk, I highly recommend you watch from start.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10208351,"author":"yuvadam","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Is it futile to un-Google?","text":"Approaching the \"to google or not to google\" question is impossible without stating your casus belli . If you care about opsec, there are many reasons why you would want to use google services: e.g. a hostile actor will have an extremely hard time stealing your emails from Gmail while there's a might higher chance you fucked up a config on your self-hosted setup. Usually, as always, it comes down to smart compartmentalization and using the right tool for the job. Personally, the ethical perspective is a much stronger reason why to stray away from data behemoths like Google and Facebook. First of all I believe the \"usefullness\" of many of these services is over-exaggerated: Facebook noawadays is more of a brainwashing service to expose you to \"content\" that does nothing more than dull your mind and keep you mindlessly scrolling and endless stream of irrelevant advertisements. But even if this isn't the case for all online services, some come at a price I am personally not willing to pay. We are entering an era of digital slavery where our entire lives are managed by data monopolies that are bound by no rules other than those they create for themselves. I don't care how convenient these commercial services are, if the price is giving up the sovereignty of my data, and the core liberties of my human existence. I make a conscious choice to not be part of this system, and we will all have to face this choice sooner or later. For more on this topic, I highly suggest Aral Balkan's t","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10230678,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)","text":"re:publica 2015 - Aral Balkan: Beyond The Camera Panopticon has an excellent further discussion of this problem beyond just Gmail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22358024,"author":"maqp","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Privacy-focused messenger Signal is ready to go mainstream and take on WhatsApp","text":"\"Facebook doesn't control it.\" Unfortunately it's controlled by the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia who still has access to his data brokers. None of the companies with access to our private data seem problematic at first. Google was a gift from the heavens with it's insane 1000MB gmail accounts back in 2003, now it's a private intelligence agency. Facebook was about free fun and connectivity, now it's a private intelligence agency. But Telegram's going to be different and money comes from magic and ICOs even after it reaches critical mass. Aral Balkan explains this better than I ever could [VIDEO] Also, the security model of Telegram is exactly the same as Facebook Messenger: A bunch of promises about respecting your privacy, coupled with opt-in end-to-end-encryption that doesn't work cross-device, and the use of which reveals the intention to hide messages from server (which is extremely valuable metadata: these messages I want to hide from service provider and governments!)","stance":"rec"}],"jhicDUgXyNg":[{"hn_comment_id":22176622,"author":"brodouevencode","month":"2020-01","story_title":"New era for KEXP: How this radio station is doing top-notch live video (2014)","text":"KEXP was the first time I saw the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, with Jimmy James on guitar. He's hands down one of the most talented guitarists alive today. Sample vid: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26840456,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2021-04","story_title":"A top audio engineer explains NPR\u2019s signature sound (2015)","text":"The KEXP stuff also sounds as good if not better than album recordings most of the time. Quite impressive stuff both of them. Of course there's something magical about live sets that often get lost on studio recordings. Great thing we have sources like NPR Tiny Desk and KEXP so we can discover and enjoy awesome music. Just throwing in some semi-random sets I enjoy KEXP [VIDEO] Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio [LINK] Billy Strings & Don Julin [LINK] amiina [LINK] Mokoomba [LINK] Kikagaku Moyo [LINK] Jos\u00e9 Gonz\u00e1lez NPR [LINK] Andrew Bird [LINK] Trombone Shorty [LINK] DakhaBrakha","stance":"rec"}],"jhnKBKZvb_U":[{"hn_comment_id":7897130,"author":"dave809","month":"2014-06","story_title":"The Disappearing Universe","text":"Leonard Susskind talked about this idea and expanded on it in his talk 'Why is time a one way street' Highly recommend the talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26756865,"author":"WindyLakeReturn","month":"2021-04","story_title":"The Expansion of the Universe","text":"One interesting question of this is if science changes once the other galaxy groups disappear. By that I mean if a human was to redo all previous experiments have we lost any data that would result in us building a different model of the universe than what we've built with the other galaxy groups present. Sure, we will have records of evidence from the past, but records of evidence from experiments that can no longer be repeated is no longer reliable data. This is ignoring the whole development of humanity and science in the intervening 150 billion years which may change what options are available to use then. I'm also not sure if this is the most up to date model of the universe. I've recently dived deep into quantum field theory and theoretical physics (well as deep as one can without understanding a field of spinors) and I've watched a number of lectures given over the last decade that include alternate takes on expansion. I could be completely misunderstanding what was being spoken about, but it appears one possible model of reality is a sort of bubble in hyperexpanding space that gives rise to a big bang event that eventually leads to the bubble becoming hyper expanding space itself that can give rise to further bubbles. Here is one talk. [VIDEO] I recommend the whole thing if you aren't familiar with Boltzmann brains and boxes, but if you want to see the issue with the current model presented in this article go to 41 minute mark and to see a possible alternate model go ","stance":"rec"}],"ji5_MqicxSo":[{"hn_comment_id":1726795,"author":"sdrinf","month":"2010-09","story_title":"Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What now?","text":"Welcome to the law of Diminishing returns. Your choices fundamentally boils down to the following: -Take the blue pill. Stay in wonderland. Pick a technology, any technology. Drive yourself into it deeper. The rabbit hole goes much, much further, than you can imagine. -Take the red pill, and wake up: the rabbit hole goes the other way, too. On first basis, you have the ever-exploding number of scientific disciplines ( [LINK] ). Even further, society isn't merely a collection of engineers, and scientist: other people have all kind of different jobs. Furthermore, they are equally convinced, that their field of choice was the right one; and from their own perspective each one of them was right. Since you're HN, you might have a particular interest towards this field we call \"business\". Now, this is not what people around you -who are called \"managers\" btw- do. A good working definition for engineers is: Business is the ability to actualize a job that needs to be done, on which you're retroactively hired (or fired) by society as a whole. Or, as PG put it: doing stuff what people wants. Regardless of how you choose, a good partition of it is going to be soul-searching. There are 2 pieces of media I'd strongly recommend for that: -Randy Pausch Last Lecture [ [VIDEO] ], and -wishcraft, which is a short book, available freely from [LINK] . On an ending note, I feel for you. Every time I've been down to this alley, I always always wished I'd have done it earlier. If anything, you shou","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17213004,"author":"rebase","month":"2018-06","story_title":"YouTube\u2019s top creators are burning out","text":"If you haven't watched this, it will change your life. Even if you have, it's one of the few youtube videos that is worth a re-watch. The book is just as good if not better. [VIDEO] Spoiler: It is a former CS professor at Carnegie Mellon named Randy Pausch. He had terminal pancreatic cancer. This is a dying professor's last lecture. It is a father sharing life lessons for his kids when they are older to watch. Some relevant quotes: - \u201cAs you get older, you may find that 'enabling the dreams of others' thing is even more fun.\u201d - \u201cWe cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.\u201d - \u201cThe key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have. \u201d - \u201cShowing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.\u201d - \u201cPeople are more important than things.\u201d","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":601937,"author":"Tarks","month":"2009-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Just lost my year long placement because they have no work. Begging for advice ","text":"Thankyou, I'd lost sight of this a little. teaching someone how to deal with a type of situation rather than a specific one is always useful in the long run. If anyone else appreciates this type of thing then Randy Pauche's \"Last Lecture\" is very inspirational [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1752301,"author":"andre3k1","month":"2010-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Good books?","text":"If you're looking for something different then check out The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. It's is an eye-opening book in a very nontraditional sense. You may remember Pausch as the computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who was told that he had but a few months left to live (cancer). This book doesn't stray from its topic: \"What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?\" If you're looking for motivation and an \"out of the box\" approach to analyzing daily life then this is it. Here's the book: [LINK] Here's the famous speech: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2662355,"author":"Xk","month":"2011-06","story_title":"Hacking the system: how to land meetings with anyone you want","text":"This reminds me of Randy Pausch's method of getting someone to sit down for lunch. [1] \"And he asked a question. And I was like, I\u2019m sorry did you say you were Tom Furness? And he said yes. I said, then I would love to answer your question, but first, will you have lunch with me tomorrow? And there\u2019s a lot in that little moment. There\u2019s a lot of humility, but also asking a person where he can\u2019t possibly say no.\" Although, admittedly, that's after you got them to say a few words to you and you're in front of a large group of people. [1] [VIDEO] 19:40 Edit: For those who don't know, here's the setting of this talk: This talk is one in a series given at CMU called the \"Last Lecture\" series with the hypothetical setting of 'what if you had one last talk to give?'. Randy Pausch, a professor at CMU, didn't have to pretend. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and in August of 2007 (when he gave the talk) was told he had three to six months left to live. If you haven't seen it, watch the whole talk. It's really good.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3078623,"author":"elliottcarlson","month":"2011-10","story_title":"Pancreatic Cancer","text":"The Last Lecture is an inspiring book - Randy Pausch was another great man that the technology community had lost and I recommend everyone to both watch the Last lecture and read the book. The video is viewable here: [VIDEO] (as embedded on the OP's submission)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7684557,"author":"ehurrell","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Hamming, \"You and Your Research\" (1995) [video]","text":"I was introduced to this recently and it has become one of my favourite talks. Maybe also of interest on the topic of doing important work, Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15669270,"author":"delibes","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Business questions engineers should ask when interviewing at ML/AI companies","text":"Thanks for reminding me. The Last Lecture is good. Since it's about 9 years ago, some younger HN readers may have missed it: [VIDEO] Cancer sucks.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28024464,"author":"prakhar897","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best non-technical talks of all time?","text":"Here's mine: 1. Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams [VIDEO] 2. Strange answers to the psychopath test | Jon Ronson [LINK] 3. The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Pranav Mistry [LINK] 4. Steve Jobs MIT Class: What he learnt after he was fired from Apple? [LINK] 5. Eric Liu: Why ordinary people need to understand power [LINK] 6. Peter Lynch 1994 Lecture [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28575514,"author":"___luigi","month":"2021-09","story_title":"I\u2019m 22 and I\u2019ve failed","text":"Oh Boy! Life is a marathon, not a sprint. You are still young (revisit these words when you reach 32, 42, and 52). So, hear me out. You need to work on developing habits, habits of winning, winning every time, develop a process of learning and improving and trust the process. Ignore failures, you might look boring and unsuccessful to some people, but once your habits start to work, it can change your orbit. You\u2019re not failing, boy. You are growing up and this is how life look like. If you read a lot of books/biographies, you will realize how some very successful people have had setbacks. Ignore these negative depressing whispers, and learn, read more. Most of us were in that spot before, do yourself a favor, and take some time to watch this talk \"Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams\", Randy Pausch [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31356924,"author":"PatentlyDC123","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some good inspirational and uplifting books?","text":"The Last Lecture was great. If you can, watch the lecture too [0]. Even beyond the literal message, Randy Pausch's outlook and delivery really elevated the story for me. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34301885,"author":"RonaldOlzheim","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Tech After Chemotherapy","text":"Please watch these videos in the right order: 1 Please watch this video for why: [LINK] 2 Please watch this video for how: [LINK] 3 Please watch this video for what: [LINK] 4 Please watch this for when: [VIDEO] Final note: I believe in the good so much all the time, but it is hard to keep believing in the good all the time. Please watch this when you are having a hard time believing: [LINK] I hope you receive courage, wisdom, temperance and moderation. *Let\u00b4s connect on Linkedin. (You can message me anytime) Ron.","stance":"rec"}],"jj8rMwdQf6k":[{"hn_comment_id":981787,"author":"iterationx","month":"2009-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you manage money?","text":"I recommend Peter Schiff for investing ideas, here's a famous video, he's got some bestselling books too. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5115381,"author":"jcven","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Blowing the Whistle on the Mortgage Bubble","text":"The best whistle blowing before the bubble popped had to be Peter Schiff telling a huge crowd of mortgage bankers they were about to lose their jobs in Nov 2006: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jkrNMKz9pWU":[{"hn_comment_id":37636479,"author":"tarruda","month":"2023-09","story_title":"A Hackers' Guide to Language Models [video]","text":"Thanks a lot for this video, best LLM usage tutorial I've seen so far. At [VIDEO] when talking about valid use cases for a local model vs GPT4 is: \"You might want to create your own model that's particularly good at solving the kinds of problems that you need to solve using fine tuning, and these are all things that you absolutely can get better than GPT4 performance\". In regards to this, there's an idea I've been thinking about for some time: Imagine a chatbot that is backed by multiple \"small\" models (such as 7B parameters), where each model is fine tuned for a specific task. Could such a system outperform GPT4? Here's a high level overview how I imagine this to work: - Context/prompt is sent to a \"router model\", which is trained to determine what kind of expert model can best answer/complete the prompt. - The system then passes the context/prompt to the expert model and returns that answer. - If no expert model is found, just use a generic instruct tuned general purpose LLM to answer If you can theoretically get better than GPT4 performance on a small models fine tuned for that task, maybe a cluster of such small models could collectively outperform GPT4. Does that make sense?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38275277,"author":"dojitza1","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Effective GPT-4 Programming","text":"An interesting solution to the blind spot error (taken directly from Jeremy Howard's amazing guide to language models - [VIDEO] ) is to erase the chat history and try again. Once GPT has made an error (or as the author of this article says, the early layers have irreversibly pruned some important data), it will very often start to be even more wrong.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38412110,"author":"tarruda","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Generative AI for Beginners","text":"If you're looking for a practical guide on how to use LLMs, highly recommend \"Hackers Guide to language models\" by Jeremy Howard. 1.5h video packed with practical information: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39398764,"author":"mangoman","month":"2024-02","story_title":"I'm an Old Fart and AI Makes Me Sad","text":"I understand the sadness around not understanding it, it's fucking hard. however, there are more and more resources online getting published for how to get started understanding it that help with understanding the math at an abstraction that helps with learning how to build with it. I would strongly strongly strongly recommend starting with karpathy's from 0 to hero neural networks youtube course - it starts with building a tensor library and back propagation, explaining it in a way that finally clicked for me [LINK] jeremy howard also has a fantastic video that is more around how to use LLMs and such called a hacker's guide to language models - [VIDEO] as i've dove more and more into it, i would strongly recommend trying to run things on your local machine too (llama.cpp, ollama, LM studio). that has helped me fight that feeling of like \"are we all just going to be open AI developers in the end\" and made me feel like you _can_ integrate these things into stuff you build by your self. I can't imagine how fucked we'd all be if llama was never opensourced. being old does not mean that you can't continue to grow, and remember that it's okay to feel overwhelmed about all this - many people are.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37845642,"author":"code_biologist","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Mistral 7B Paper on ArXiv","text":"Jeremy Howard talks about it in his recent video \"A Hackers' Guide to Language Models\": [VIDEO] That link goes directly to the timestamp where he discusses fine tuning, but the whole talk is great. Punchline, check out Axolotl: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37903176,"author":"lsedgwick","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Advent of Code 2023's new AI/LLM Policy","text":"You're right about the basic mistakes they can make - they can also excel at the same tasks if prompted differently. But I was making a slightly different point. The point is they can reason about things in a better-than-chance way (I mean, a much-better-than-chance way) when given problems not in the training set. Have you read the Codex paper? Seriously, go look, an LLM even from years ago (which is like decades ago in ML-time) is often able to write code to solve novel programming problems that were handwritten to not be in the training set! Also, the benchmarks against which GPT3, InstructGPT, and GPT4 were tested are illuminating about its problem solving ability on novel problems, these are described in the three respective papers. Secondly, quality is highly variant and there are traps the context window can fall into which causes especially bad results. Jeremy Howard has a great video ( [VIDEO] , starting at 18:05 the 'limitations and capabilities' section is only 13 minutes long) talking about how quality depends on: how you frame your prompts, model power (4 does a lot of stuff that 3.5 can't), and whether you're in a kind of \"context trap\" of repeated mistakes. Of course, some people like to point out that if it's so \"finicky\" and variant, it is \"dumb.\" Sure, if you like. I'm not interested in whatever definitions you're using those things, the objective and observable point is that given well-known prompting practices, LLMs can do something functionally equivalent","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38616579,"author":"ghj","month":"2023-12","story_title":"A new old kind of R&D lab","text":"Will you still be working on educational content on the side? (e.g. updating fast.ai and/or making one off lectures like [VIDEO] ) Either way thank you for all the amazing free content you've already put out and good luck on the new endeavor!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39811640,"author":"simonw","month":"2024-03","story_title":"GPT-4, without specialized training, beat a GPT-3.5 class model that cost $10M","text":"For \"citation needed\", read \"please link me to a blog post showing how, don't just tell me to Google for one\". The internet is full of blog posts about this. That doesn't mean they're actually good - I'd love to be pointed at one that has proven itself useful for someone (and definitely isn't just LLM blog-spam). I don't care if it's trivial to fine-tune and get crap results - I care about fine-tuning where the result was worth the effort. For the record, my favourite guide to fine-tuning is the section of this Jeremy Howard video that shows how to train a text-to-SQL model: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40188612,"author":"tikkun","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Ask HN: AI Training for Executive Level","text":"I suspect these videos would be higher quality than most offerings from universities or business schools (given that it's a fast moving field, and most of the true experts are practitioners, and so if they're teaching, they're not teaching actual classes, at most they're doing youtube videos or interviews): - [VIDEO] (Jeremy Howard Hacker's Guide to LLMs) - [LINK] (Karpathy Intro to LLMs)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42259017,"author":"tikkun","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommendation for a SWE looking to get up to speed with latest on AI","text":"It sounds like you want more broad stuff, not necessarily learning how to train models. More like learning to use them and how they work. [LINK] and Hacker's Guide to LLMs by Jeremy from Fast.ai - [VIDEO] State of GPT by Karpathy - [LINK] LLMs by 3b1b - [LINK] Visualizing transformers by 3b1b - [LINK] How ChatGPT trained - [LINK] AI in a nutshell - [LINK] How Carlini uses LLMs - [LINK] For staying updated: X/Twitter & Bluesky. Go and follow people that work at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. Podcasts: No Priors, Generally Intelligent, Dwarkesh Patel, Sequoia's \"Training Data\"","stance":"rec"}],"jlX_pThh7z8":[{"hn_comment_id":36846820,"author":"UncleMeat","month":"2023-07","story_title":"C89 compiler produces printable executables from C code [pdf]","text":"Sigbovik is a joke conference put on by CMU students. About 80%-90% of the papers each year are pure jokes, but about 10-20% of them are jokes that have a nontrivial amount of work backing them up. These papers are awesome. Tom publishes at least one every year (sometimes 3-4) and his papers are among the best but there are others that are also awesome. It hits a very fun combination of hard work on trivial problems that is fascinating. They publish a proceedings every year and they are fun reads. Not a lot of people do accompanying videos like Tom does, but this one on WordTeX is excellent: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17863297,"author":"amhouse","month":"2018-08","story_title":"LyX: combine the power of LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface","text":"There's also WordTeX, a \"WYSIPCTWOTCG\" editor. There's a paper [1], but this is a rare case where the Youtube video [2] is both more entertaining and the medium lets the content shine. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23285012,"author":"gitgud","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Show HN: LaTeX.css \u2013 Make your website look like a LaTeX document","text":"If you're a fan of this, you might like; \"WordTeX - A WYSIPCTWOTCG Typesetting Tool\" [1] [VIDEO] (video)","stance":"rec"}],"jmTwlEh8L7g":[{"hn_comment_id":28182090,"author":"daniel-thompson","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Compiling C Programs Into \u201cMov\u201d Instructions (And Only \u201cMov\u201d Instructions)","text":"These links don't work for me, but the videos are on YT: - [VIDEO] - [LINK] And yes, they are spectacular.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49286925,"author":"MattSteelblade","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Spaghettifying DRAM","text":"I cannot wait for the accompanying Black Hat talk. Christopher Domas is one of my absolute favorite all-time hackers. He does such a fantastic job of explaining his work. Some of my favorite talks of his: - Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering [LINK] - The MoVfuscator [LINK] - Hardware Backdoors in redacted x86 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29490992,"author":"not1ofU","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Intel updates mysterious \u2018software-defined silicon\u2019 code in the Linux kernel","text":"This guy now works for intel: DEF CON 26 - Christopher Domas - GOD MODE UNLOCKED Hardware Backdoors in redacted x86 [VIDEO] This is one of many amazing videos this guy did before they hired him.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49286937,"author":"aecsocket","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Spaghettifying DRAM","text":"Holy shit, Christopher Domas is back. I remember watching his Defcon talks on x86 shenanigans[^1][^2] and being amazed at what he's been able to discover. Then he got whisked away by Intel and now drops this. I'm excited. [^1]: [LINK] [^2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jo_B4LTHi3I":[{"hn_comment_id":4157286,"author":"pooriaazimi","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Node.js v0.8.0 [stable] is out","text":"It's been a long since I watched \"Introduction to Node.js with Ryan Dahl\"[1], but although I think it was circa v0.4.0, it's not really outdated. It's a short talk, but it talks a little about Node's philosophy and I highly recommend watching it. I haven't watched Pedro Teixeira's tutorials[2], but many recommend it. But I personally think Manuel Kiessling's online book[3] is the best. It really teaches you to think asynchronously. I took a quick look and I don't think any of the modules he's used have had a significant change. Be sure to check it out. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17248345,"author":"ahmetkun","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Things I Regret About Node.js [video]","text":"You can see the same sarcastic wit in this talk too: [VIDEO] It's still my favorite tech talk, very fun to watch.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2513736,"author":"thirtysixred","month":"2011-05","story_title":"Ask HN: what makes Node.js hip?","text":"The only thing that makes node.js hip is people who call it hip. Using node.js isn't about being hip or cool, or whatever else you want to call it. It's about solving a problem you have. Personally node.js has solved a problem I was having with a recent project that needed a Comet server, and since node is all async I got this server up and running in a few minutes. I was never successful with Apache or Nginx. I recommend taking a look at this Stackoverflow answer as it outlines the benefits of node.js: [LINK] Also I recommend watching Ryan's Introduction to node.js talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3687596,"author":"drostie","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Create a blog in 30 mins with Django 1.3 (Screencast)","text":"I always like presentations like this. I think most languages really just need screencasts where people show you, \"here is how you start using this language.\" One of my favorites was Ryan Dahl's introduction to Node.js, which had the same general form: [VIDEO] So thanks for that. I still don't like Django so much, precisely because of the fact that you're sitting here navigating through these massive config files -- and you even need Django's bundled applications to make those files in the first place. Libraries seem much cleaner to me. I guess what I'm dreaming of is a version of django where this whole talk becomes a little simpler, a sort of cookie-cutter formalism where you just start writing: #!/usr/bin/python import django serve = django.server(port=8080, db=('sqlite3', 'mysite.db')) serve.url('/admin/.*', django.admin_site()) blog = serve.app(model={ \"some json model\": \"I don't know exactly how it works\" }) serve.url('/blog/.*', blog) ...to accomplish the same thing that you're doing in this talk. I mean, it's okay that applications often get their own folder, but shouldn't they grow into that with import statements? An open question to HN: are there libraries which do this sort of thing which I should know about?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7067880,"author":"ricardobeat","month":"2014-01","story_title":"The Next Phase of Node.js","text":"You should read this interview [1] and watch the talk [2] by node's creator Ryan Dahl to get a better understanding of where it comes from. There was much more to it than \"we really like javascript\" (tldr: single-threaded, evented, dynamic, freedom to write new I/O apis, backed by huge companies, well known). [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jqjacHSTd48":[{"hn_comment_id":8476426,"author":"steakejjs","month":"2014-10","story_title":"A difficult lock to pick [video]","text":"If you ever listen to people who really love locks talk about locks they all seem to say one thing. \"All locks are pickable [or attackable]\". This just means that this particular lock is abnormal and most lock-people don't have the experience to attack it, not that it is secure. If you are semi-interested in locks, I really recommend listening to Schuyler Towne talk about locks. He's one of those people who is very passionate about what he does in a way that interest in locks really rubs off onto you in a really educational and relatable way. Here's a longer talk about the history of locks by him from 2012. It's a great place to start. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12928468,"author":"brownbat","month":"2016-11","story_title":"China\u2019s \u2018Artificial Sun\u2019 achieves fusion breakthrough","text":"And the US in the early 1800s. Schuyler Towne has an amazing discussion of this, how Europeans routinely were laughing at American inventions... until they suddenly very much weren't. It's in this talk. [VIDEO] I'd link directly to the relevant five minutes but it's hard to justify doing that sort of harm, depriving you of the other great 45 minutes there. (Ok, let's say it's 34ish to 41ish. Still, that entire thing is probably better than the other way you were going to spend some 50 minute block today.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23336301,"author":"brownbat","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Guerrilla Public Service Redux (2017)","text":"Schuyler Towne has (several?) great talks on this, going through the history of physical security and our assumptions about perfect security vs. social and cultural symbols. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jvPPXbo87ds":[{"hn_comment_id":34121648,"author":"AceJohnny2","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Apple's Unique Device Curvature","text":"Another upvote for Freya Holm\u00e9r's amazing video \"The Continuity of Splines\". She covers the insightful \"reflection test\" around the 28:05 mark: [VIDEO] and actual \"curvature combs\" at 32:26. Finally, she covers the continuity of curvature combs that B-Splines exhibit around the 54:00 mark: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38070047,"author":"zxexz","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Why can't you multiply vectors? [video]","text":"Oh lovely, can't wait to give this a watch. Freya dives deep, and gives wonderful talks. Her video \"The Continuity of Splines\"[0] is my favorite watch of the past year. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38656527,"author":"viggity","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Interpolation Methods","text":"If this paper is interesting to you, you may also be interested in this amazingly well done video on the continuation of splines. It isn't exactly the same thing, and delves into some deeper concepts, but I've watched it like 3 times over the last year. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39544412,"author":"aaronblohowiak","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Look, ma, no matrices","text":"the splines yt video ( [VIDEO] ) is (IMHO) one of the best educational videos on a programming topic, full stop.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40246977,"author":"ixwt","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Hobby's algorithm for aesthetic B\u00e9zier splines (2020)","text":"I didn't really understand B\u00e9zier splines until I watched this excellent video [0] from Freya Holm\u00e9r. It talks about various kinds of splines, and the various equations behind them. Explains the importance of the derivatives of splines (as other comments here have pointed out). [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42991078,"author":"viggity","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Jacksonpollock.org (2003)","text":"If splines/beziers are of any interest to you, I could not recommend these videos from Freya Holmer enough. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44243767,"author":"WillAdams","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What cool skill or project interests you, but feels out of reach?","text":"For me, it's B\u00e9zier curves --- Freya Holm\u00e9r has a wonderful video on them: [VIDEO] and I've been trying to read through _METAFONT: The Program_ and [LINK] and I keep wondering if I shouldn't just try scripting Inkscape.... I want to do a couple of different things, and not sure if they all fit in one project or no: - implement a single line font in my current project: [LINK] - implement a way to convert arbitrary curves into smooth arcs (for DXFs or G2/G3 arcs for G-code) - work up an interactive version of METAFONT/METAPOST which allows both programming and drawing","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44889077,"author":"viggity","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Bezier-rs \u2013 algorithms for B\u00e9zier segments and shapes","text":"Anytime b\u00e9ziers are mentioned on HN, I feel compelled to share these absolutely incredible videos from Freya Holm\u00e9r [VIDEO] (73 minutes) [LINK] (24 minutes)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37368115,"author":"fuzzythinker","month":"2023-09","story_title":"B\u00e9zier Curves and the logic behind them","text":"Also from her - The Continuity of Splines [0]. More from her site [1]. Long interactive read from Bartosz Ciechanowski [2] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37577367,"author":"nick-of-time","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Circles Do Not Exist","text":"I recommend anyone who finds this topic interesting watch the video The Continuity of Splines . It's a detailed discussion of how you derive B\u00e8zier and higher-order curves to serve your purposes. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42825333,"author":"weswilson","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Show HN: Apple-like smooth corners for Tailwind CSS","text":"Obligatory video on splines: [VIDEO] From what I've read, Apple rounded corners are using G^2 or G^3 geometric continuity to generate smoother curves. It's hard to tell which smoothing function this library uses since it looks like it's based on PNG masking.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42851753,"author":"WillAdams","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Desmos Animated Graphing Calculator","text":"A wonderful example of this is: The Continuity of Splines [VIDEO] and The Beauty of B\u00e9zier Curves [LINK] by Freya Holm\u00e9r [LINK] While not animated, I find: _Euclid's Elements_ (Joyce's Java Version) very helpful [LINK] Since my current project has pretty much devolved to putting a UI on various trigonometric functions and allowing the user to program them, I'd be very glad of other resources in this space (currently working through Hilbert's _Geometry and the Imagination_ and the book which matches [LINK] and just finished the _Make:Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus_ series, and have had recommended Curves and Surfaces for CAGD: A Practical Guide by Gerald Farin)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43170801,"author":"WillAdams","month":"2025-02","story_title":"History of CAD","text":"I've been reading through a PDF on my Kindle Scribe which I downloaded from the original site --- it's a great overview, and most importantly, includes citations and references to the various papers where folks shared their research/progress. These days of course, one would just get _The Essentials of CAGD_ and similar texts, or read: [LINK] or watch: [VIDEO] Highly recommended for anyone who wants an understanding of how modern CAD software came about. For my part, I have found it invaluable in working on my current project as described at: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43569995,"author":"skydhash","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Dijkstra On the foolishness of \"natural language programming\"","text":"> I just need to find the perfect GUI toolkit which allows B\u00e9zier Curve representations in a way which clicks and makes sense to me, and suits my next project. Not a proper answer, but here is a very good video on splines: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jw8K460vx1c":[{"hn_comment_id":10079935,"author":"larrydag","month":"2015-08","story_title":"How I came to find Linux","text":"My encounter with Linux was somewhat similar but mostly from having enough with windoze. I had called a PC repair guru for the third time because of virus's on my windoze PC in 2007. He told me about a Linux but I was skeptical thinking it was more for the uber elite hackers. I tried out the Knoppix CD and then installed SuSE. I was hooked immediately. Much like the article writer's hook with being my own \"superuser\". For those that haven't seen Revolution OS I would highly recommend it for much of the Linux backstory. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9239810,"author":"stolio","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Ten Years of Kubuntu","text":"> I've personally tried a few distros of Linux, originally developed by Linus Torvalds. Is there some Intro To Linux we can point just people to in order to avoid things like this? The \"GNU slash Linux\" conversation is wearing pretty thin but it should be common knowledge at this point that the GNU project did 10 ten years of work so Linus could add the kernel and have it be the first completed system. Should we point to Revolution OS ( [VIDEO] )? Should we point to GNU's page about the issue ( [LINK] )? Without getting into any finger-pointing, it's just history and we should all know it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11592447,"author":"zeeshanm","month":"2016-04","story_title":"ACM 2015 Technical Award Recipients","text":"So good to see RMS being recognized for his work. A lot of my interest in computers is due to being inspired by RMS. stallman.org is a good resource for anyone wanting to learn more. Stallman's commentary on politics is also second to none. _Revolution OS_ is a really good documentary that goes over the genesis of FSF and how Stallman played an in important role: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jwG_qR6XmDQ":[{"hn_comment_id":23102447,"author":"hartleybrody","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life","text":"Jeff Bezos has a great interview where he talks about his decision to leave his cushy Wall Street job and start a website selling books. He talks about how he used a \"regret minimization framework\" where he projects himself into the future and imagines which decision he would regret the least. I have used this technique multiple times myself to help with otherwise fraught or overwhelming decisions, and I think it's a great way to shift your frame of reference. Interview where he describes it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1324100,"author":"paulsb","month":"2010-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Share encouraging advice","text":"\"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.\" -- Mark Twain \"So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, 'Okay, now I\u2019m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.' I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn\u2019t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And I think that\u2019s very good.\" -- Jeff Bezos, Regret Minimization Framework ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6401943,"author":"ledon","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Smart Things Jeff Bezos Has Said","text":"Hearing Bezos's regret minimization framework was one of the things that helped to make an easier decision to leave my job to start a company (I left Amazon, ironically). Here is the original video which this quote is taken from: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12941684,"author":"npostolovski","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What should I plan to do on a 6 month sabbatical?","text":"This question is eerily similar to my current situation: hoping to go on a 6 month sabbatical starting in 2017. My goal is to, basically, work on things that I've always dreamed of doing but haven't pursued because of the demands of everyday life. See Jeff Bezos' regret minimization framework for inspiration: [VIDEO] . Imagine yourself at 80. What would you regret not doing?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16799306,"author":"drawkbox","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you have the courage to abandon your high paying job?","text":"Use Jeff Bezos 'Regret Minimization Framework' to decide [1]. Basically, when you are 80, will you regret having tried and possibly failed or regret having not tried at all? Granted you aren't going to be Amazon probabilistically but it will definitely make your life more interesting and put you in control of it and fully responsible for it. Personally I'd rather try and succeed or fail on my own than just be a cog in the machine and possibly be on a ship that sinks out of my control or merely latching onto success. I'd rather be the captain whether she sinks or sails smoothly, hopefully the latter. I went fully independent six years ago, originally just planning on a year, and there have been times of awesome and times of rough waters, but she is still sailing and it has been an adventure I know I won't regret having embarked on. Three of my six years are the highest revenues/income I have had annually in my career but one was the lowest ever, prepare for more volatility if you do. If you do, my recommendation is make good habits early, cut your costs, be disciplined, aim for revenues as early as possible, work hard but work smart, be sure to take time off, and especially enjoy your successes and learn from your failures. Ship on the regular, and if you aren't, kick it in gear to go all in. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jyQwgBAaBag":[{"hn_comment_id":27701541,"author":"karmakaze","month":"2021-07","story_title":"A Physics Prof Bet Me $10k I'm Wrong","text":"The visual that made it click for me was at 18:54 in the original video[0]. It shows the air hitting the propeller losing kinetic energy which becomes the energy ultimately making the vehicle go. I also don't know how you can watch the treadmill video and doubt it after seeing it go up the treadmill unless you believed it was a complete hoax. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27707989,"author":"kinjba11","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Science YouTuber Wins $10k Bet with Physicist","text":"Original video triggering the bet for context: [VIDEO] Video discussing the bet and going over criticism: [LINK] Veritasium is a great YouTube channel.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28117940,"author":"tzs","month":"2021-08","story_title":"A wind-powered vehicle that can travel twice as fast as the wind itself","text":"If you believe that sailboats can beat a drifting balloon downwind by zigzagging, then there is a very good explanation in the original Veritasium video that shows that this is essentially the same thing. Here's a link to the section of the video with that explanation [1]. Watch about 2 or 3 minutes starting there and it becomes clear. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28118403,"author":"theli0nheart","month":"2021-08","story_title":"A wind-powered vehicle that can travel twice as fast as the wind itself","text":"I thought the video below provided a good explanation for why this works. The physics are similar to those of a single sailboat going faster than the wind. Imagine two sailboats on a cylindrical ocean on diagonal tacks, on opposite poles, and rotating around the core with rods connecting them to the core. Now you have a propeller. :) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32046080,"author":"TimSchumann","month":"2022-07","story_title":"DDWFTTW Vehicle Analysis (2013)","text":"Derek from the YouTube channel Veritasium made two interesting videos about this vehicle. [VIDEO] [LINK] They go into some nice detail about why the physics works out the way it does.","stance":"rec"}],"jzERXJgi5vQ":[{"hn_comment_id":7182968,"author":"usablebytes","month":"2014-02","story_title":"37signals becomes Basecamp","text":"People, please watch these few videos to genuinely understand what 37Signal guys (David and Jason) stand for before having a say. [LINK] [VIDEO] and [LINK] and yea, don't forget [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6182931,"author":"valgaze","month":"2013-08","story_title":"Amazon's profits ","text":"Check these two ideas out: 1) Bezos said: \"Percentage margins are not one of the things we are seeking to optimize. It's the absolute dollar-free cash flow per share that you want to maximize, and if you can do that by lowering margins, we would do that. So if you could take the free cash flow, that's something that investors can spend. Investors can't spend percentage margins\" ( [LINK] ) 2) Listen to Ruby on Rails' DHH break it all down here @ 44min30sec (he also knocks salesforce) quoting Bezos' line \"your margin is my opportunity\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10508509,"author":"gozo","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Reconsider","text":"It's not that they can get away with wearing jeans so much as they can't get away with wearing other things. There's still an egalitarian and meritocratic notion in technology that rank shouldn't matter. Ask yourself why NSA director and General Keith Alexander showed up at DEFCON in jeans and a t-shirt with an EFF logo on it. Most of these guys telling you what to do, where to live and which technologies or schools that matter are Ivy League alumni multimillionaires. Many from a time before a widespread Internet and grants for poor students. When was the last time you saw any of them sit down with someone who were really challenging their views? Edit: For somewhat of an example of the last thing there are two episodes of This Week In Startups with DHH. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"jzMFoNZeZm0":[{"hn_comment_id":22378806,"author":"nerfhammer","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner on their 70-year friendship","text":"I saw a good youtube video about how blazing saddles was satirizing decades of hyper popular sanitized Western genre and helped kill it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43275870,"author":"Terr_","month":"2025-03","story_title":"The \"Take It Down\" Act","text":"There's an informative video-dive into that, centered on the effect of the movie Blazing Saddles : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"k1BneeJTDcU":[{"hn_comment_id":27491999,"author":"zubspace","month":"2021-06","story_title":"I Miss the Old Internet (2019)","text":"I just watched Inside [1], where Bo Burnham creates a wonderful, funny, sad and thought-provoking \"Special\" about our internet culture. Highly recommended. This is one of my favourite songs now: [2] It's a bit crazy when I think about how different our generations grow up and it makes me a bit sad that our children will have a completely different understanding of what the internet is. For me it was a place of wonder, freedom and self-expression. It's different today, but even I have problems explaining how it changed. But it definitely lost some if it's playfulness on the way. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47123075,"author":"Imustaskforhelp","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Hacker News.love \u2013 22 projects Hacker News didn't love","text":"This reminded me of this song which actually shows the extremism of things in Internet. Welcome to the Internet - Bo Burnham: [VIDEO] \"Y'know wasn't always like this, not very long ago.. just before your time.. right before the towers fell.. circa 99 this was catalogues, travel blogs a chatroom or two, we set our nights and spent our nights waiting for you.\" \"It was always the plan to put the world in your head.\" \"Could I interest you in everything all of the time? Apathy is a tragedy and boredom is a crime. Everything and anything all of the time\" Bo Burnham is amazing. Another (interesting?) song is jefferey bezos song [LINK] [Bo Burnham: Inside - Jeff Bezos] Recommend everyone to watch both music if you have the time and the first one for sure.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27462622,"author":"sodality2","month":"2021-06","story_title":"iOS 15 Humane","text":"Yep- it's totally different from his previous work but I absolutely loved it. Especially \"Welcome to the Internet\", because I can see firsthand what the song is about. Here's the video on Bo Burnham's own channel: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28043136,"author":"Pyrodogg","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Life before smartphones (2020)","text":"\"Apathy's a tragedy and boredom is a crime\" - Welcome to the Internet by Bo Burnham[1] This new song from Bo's covid-lockdown inspired special \"Inside\" hits this right on head. The Internet, particularly when paired with mobile devices just tries to suck up so much attention, because that's exactly what we made it do. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"k1kndKWJKB8":[{"hn_comment_id":16832604,"author":"Balgair","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Exit scammers run off with $660M in ICO earnings","text":"It is always amazing to me that humans are just so predictably greedy . You'd have thought that we'd have learned any damned thing from history. For other readers with a bit of free time this Friday afternoon, XtraHistory has a great series on the 'South Sea Company' Bubble and the always interesting First British Prime Minister, Robert Walpole: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20564202,"author":"kenneth","month":"2019-07","story_title":"The Invention of Money","text":"If you liked this story, I also highly recommend the YouTube Extra History miniseries on the South Sea Bubble, which is a very similar contemporary scheme in the U.K. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16246749,"author":"dharmab","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Newton\u2019s Financial Misadventures in the South Sea Bubble [pdf]","text":"For those who want an accessible introduction to the South Sea Bubble, Extra History has a video series on the causes and aftermath: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16253131,"author":"downrightmike","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Tether Is Breaking Its Peg to the Dollar","text":"I think you'd like this overview of England's South Sea Company and how John Blunt used all kinds of now illegal monetary fraud to become England's largest company, worth more than their GDP: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19622644,"author":"inglor","month":"2019-04","story_title":"The Dutch East India Co was richer than Apple, Google, Facebook combined (2017)","text":"Also mentioned: The south sea company was basically a huge banking bubble scam. It is quite an interesting tale: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46189143,"author":"duttish","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Palantir could be the most overvalued company that ever existed","text":"I'll throw the British South Sea Trading Company into the ring for that title of most overvalued company ever. It had the king himself on the board. The company value represented a decent fraction of the national gdp at the time. All without actually never producing anything of actual value. It was just bribes and speculation all the way through. It's wild. [LINK] Extra History did a more easily digestible series, which was how I learned about it in the first place. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"k1luKAS_Xcg":[{"hn_comment_id":12167648,"author":"hackaflocka","month":"2016-07","story_title":"We have an epidemic of bad posture","text":"I haven't read all the other comments so not sure if this has been mentioned already. The modern concepts of posture may be wrong. I have a curved butt to shoulder area. It makes me look somewhat duck like. However, I never have any back aches etc. I know of people who are straight as a plank, and complain constantly of aches and pains. This TED talk will explain why curved is better than straight: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17757434,"author":"superasn","month":"2018-08","story_title":"To Fix Back Pain, You Might Have To Change The Way You Sit","text":"I read about this a long time ago in a book by Esther gokhale called lose the back pain. I think she called it stack sitting iirc. There was another thing in the book that has really helped me over the years and it's called the shoulder roll. The way to do it is to roll your shoulders in counter clockwise motion and leave it when they move back. It really does help while sitting. That book was full of such things like hip hinging, walking properly, etc and pictures incidentally also of Indian men who do hard labor much like the loom guy in the article. Here is a relevant video from her: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18336159,"author":"nverba","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What do you do to avoid back pain?","text":"[VIDEO] I found this Ted talk helped me with some lower back and leg issues. I don't do exactly what she demonstrates in the video, but I find focusing on the 'tail out' posture helps a lot. Also regular breaks and going for walks.","stance":"rec"}],"k2h2lvhzMDc":[{"hn_comment_id":1377918,"author":"10ren","month":"2010-05","story_title":"Animating a Blockbuster: How Pixar Built Toy Story 3","text":"fantastic business talk by Ed Catmull (pixar co-founder) at Stanford [VIDEO] btw: I find it hard to believe that Toy Story 3 could be any good (because of the \"3\"). Is it?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2421468,"author":"alexqgb","month":"2011-04","story_title":"Microsoft's office: Why insiders think top management has lost its way","text":"I believe Ed Catmull refers to this as 'keeping your crises small.' That is to say, it's much better to actively surface problems before they leave the shop than it is to ship with issues, and try to deal with implosions after the fact (ahem, Vista). Here he is, giving a really good talk at Stanford Business School, in which he covers this (among other good ideas). About an hour, but worth much more. [VIDEO] Interestingly, an ethos like this suggests that the fate of Microsoft is NOT inevitable. It's only becomes that way when you no longer care about shipping garbage. Exhibit B: Detroit in the 70's and 80's.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2798508,"author":"henryprecheur","month":"2011-07","story_title":"A conversation with Ed Catmull","text":"Keep Your Crises Small, [VIDEO] It's a lecture from Ed Catmull. I highly recommend it, many gems from a brilliant developer turned brilliant manager.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4821293,"author":"pooriaazimi","month":"2012-11","story_title":"What they don't tell you about being a game developer","text":"It's \"The Pixar Story\"[1]. A great documentary, highly recommended. But Pixar wasn't all roses either - during the tight production of Toy Story 2 (because they changed almost all of the story and had to rush it for christmas), a couple (who were both animators) forgot that their 1-year old was in the car (and not in the day care!), and the girl was there for almost 10 hours... She lived, but still a pretty horrible story. The source for this unpleasant anecdote is [2]. It's a long talk by Ed Catmull, but I can't recommend it enough. It's really, really awesome . Success hides problems (Ed Catmull) Want to know why Pixar was awesome for soooo long? It wasn't luck, and it wasn't because they had great animators. It wasn't even (entirely) because they told terrific stories. It was because they constantly learned from their \"successes\"... Watch (or listen) to Catmull's talk. I guarantee that you won't regret the 55 minutes you spend on it... [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13575700,"author":"danielvf","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some 'must watch' talks?","text":"Rich Hickey's talk on simplicity is a must watch. [LINK] And one of the most useful talks of all time for building organizations is by Ed Catmull (of Pixar) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1455618,"author":"10ren","month":"2010-06","story_title":"Pixar\u2019s leaders want to make their creative powerhouse outlast them","text":"Article is a little shallow. Great video by Catmull to Stanford business school on it: [VIDEO] (54 minutes) And here's an article by him: [LINK] e.g. Toy Story 2 was an impetus to creating the present review system; the reason for saying 5 good things is just to make the people feel better about the criticisms: the last thing you want to do after years of exhausting work is point out what sucked. Catmull is the main guy driving these standards; Lasseter is busy being a creative; BTW: I thought I'd discerned a hidden pattern of pixar having the writer voice the primary mentor role - Brad Bird voiced Edna Mode in The Incredibles ; Andrew Stanton voiced Crush in Finding Nemo - but... Brad Bird didn't voice Gusteau in Ratatouille","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2594149,"author":"panic","month":"2011-05","story_title":"Ideas Matter","text":"Ed Catmull, president of Pixar, has made the same comment about their films. The entire video is worth watching, but the quote in question is at [VIDEO] - The other thing to note is, there is a confusion, I think, that the people have and is \u2014 the books and press kind of work this way in that we think about \"an idea.\" When we think of ideas for movies, we think about ideas for products. And it's usually thought of as some singular thing. But the reality is, these successful movies \u2014 as with all successful products \u2014 have got thousands of ideas. It's just all sorts of things necessary to make it be successful. And you have to get most of them right to do it. And that's why you need a team that works well together.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5765795,"author":"6ren","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Inside Pixar's Leadership","text":"Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small , Stanford Graduate School of Business [VIDEO] (54:11) Long. Worth it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12654260,"author":"bla2","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Google Canceled the Launch of a Robotic Arm","text":"Google seems to be doing ok to me. I like your point that success can hide problems though; Ed Catmull presents it very well here: [VIDEO] It looks like people were suggesting that Google takes this advice more to heart six years ago already: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14805930,"author":"hodgesrm","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Things I\u2019ve Learned from Reading IndieHackers","text":"It's worth thinking about the team in advance, especially to understand what things you do well and where you need complementary talents. Good teams also work through the problems that are inevitable in new products. There's a great speech by Ed Catmull that makes this point well. ( [VIDEO] ) Of course this is useless advice if you are doing a one-person business. :)","stance":"rec"}],"k6U-i4gXkLM":[{"hn_comment_id":1520426,"author":"bdlang","month":"2010-07","story_title":"A Gentle Introduction to Programming Using Python","text":"Here's the MIT OCW index for EE and CS courses: [LINK] Here's the MIT OCW index for 6.00 w/ Grimson (2008): [LINK] Here's the first video lecture on YouTube: [VIDEO] I should mention this is a really good (IMHO) CS course that happens to use Python.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2457355,"author":"rblion","month":"2011-04","story_title":"How can I learn to program? ","text":"Here is an MIT Course: Introduction To CS and Programming [VIDEO] Professor keeps everything simple and direct because this class is designed for beginners with no or little programming experience.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2718793,"author":"jgrahamc","month":"2011-07","story_title":"Khan Academy Computer Science","text":"I've really enjoyed watching the MIT 6.00 course (Introduction to Computer Science and Programming): [VIDEO] The Khan videos seem to be about programming instead of computer science.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4766690,"author":"mokash","month":"2012-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How would a high schooler find CS mentor?","text":"Make the entire Internet your mentor. It's filled with information and answers to all sorts of questions. Look at some programming tutorials such as codecademy. Maybe find some books on computer architecture, learn about mathematics that might apply to computer scientists. Here are some links to get you started. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Also, learn to use YouTube to search for answers. Check this video out. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"k7X7sZzSXYs":[{"hn_comment_id":1722934,"author":"fleitz","month":"2010-09","story_title":"How Loneliness is Contagious","text":"I've often been alone but never felt lonely, I guess this video kind of sums up my thoughts. \"How to be alone\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5935463,"author":"paganel","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Only the Lonely","text":"Maybe lots of people already know about it, but I'll just copy-paste this in here: [VIDEO] It's not an anti-dote (to loneliness and everything), it just genuinely helped me from time to time and I hope it will also help others.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9562984,"author":"barbs","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Start doing more things alone","text":"This video did the rounds a few years ago, and I think it nicely captures the sentiment of doing things alone. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30668785,"author":"ptrklly","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm So Lonely","text":"I'm sorry you feel this way! I've felt very lonely in the past and it was among my hardest times--though I'm sure my version of it was different and doesn't have specific applicability, just figured I'd share. You asked on \"tips for giving yourself attention\". Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Are there examples you could give us of what that is like, to help us think of other ideas? One piece of art that I loved that is about this topic is this: [VIDEO] . Like most art it doesn't really answer your question directly with concrete suggestions, but maybe it will be worth watching anyway.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47302566,"author":"idealboy","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Be Alone?","text":"Most responses are about how not to be alone. Your question reminded me of an old YouTube video I found helpful called how to be alone: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47305124,"author":"forrestpitz","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Be Alone?","text":"Maybe not specific advice for your situation but I've always found this poem moving and valuable when it comes to building comfort in being alone. I hope it helps you too [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kBLkX2VaQs4":[{"hn_comment_id":24721727,"author":"flokie","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix","text":"I know the community is generally very negative/skeptic on this (at least based on the 21 comments so far below), but this is an amazing technical & business accomplishment. Congratulations! The blog post is relatively clear that ramp up will take a few weeks - \"we\u2019ll start with those who are already a part of Waymo One and, over the next several weeks, welcome more people directly into the service through our app\" before you comment watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28733294,"author":"silisili","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Farmer born in 1842 talks about life and change (1929) [video]","text":"Similar thought here. I don't know if it was the era or being relatively poor, but the big change in my life was giftgiving. You used to get a book or sweater or doodad and be wowed and thankful. As an adult it seems everyone has Amazon and everything they want, so what's to do but trade boring gift cards we don't need. How exciting. I will say one thing I noticed and dislike about myself is how impatient and 'privileged' I've become. I mean, we used to order from Sears or Penney's catalogues as a kid and that stuff took weeks to arrive, and we were thrilled. Today it's all instant gratification. Amazon is a day late and we(I) act perturbed. I like to watch this Louis CK clip, it really puts me back in place...for a while. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kBdfcR-8hEY":[{"hn_comment_id":5803051,"author":"soheil","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Oculus Rift co-founder killed by gang trying to escape police","text":"It's like asking what makes 5 greater than 5. Humans are all significant simply because they have rational minds and are rational beings. A human being cannot impose on others a value or worthiness, because we are rational beings and have independent minds. As you probably have noticed by now this is not me saying these things, it's from Immanuel Kant. I found these lectures on the topic absolutely amazing to watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9273474,"author":"clusterfoo","month":"2015-03","story_title":"What Would You Recommend to a Bright 14 Year Old?","text":"Be well versed in genetics / molecular biology! - If I had the time to finish school, I'd double in biology / math or CS. Man will that be a killer combo when that kid is 30. It feels like biotech is where computing was in the 1930's... what's to come, and how it will change the world is both frightening and exciting. On the \"soft\" side (whatever that means): ethics, the history of ethics, from every point of view. Two lecture series I always recommend, and feel like everyone should watch with a gun to their head (as the instructor himself says): - [VIDEO] -- Harvard course on justice / ethics. - [LINK] -- Robert Saposky (and guests) on the biology of human behavior. Literary theory. Gaining a deeper understanding of how masters of symbolism, language, and creativity think and put together their work; the history of literature; etc. will open you up to new ways of thinking just like studying pure maths or programming would. Now to invent a time machine and give myself this advice! Boy I could've used it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10647440,"author":"kevindeasis","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite online course?","text":"It has been over a year and I haven't finished it yet, but I find it the most interesting. It's Harvard's philosophy course [1] Also, intro to comp sci by Harvard's open courseware. Without these, I might've dropped out of comp sci in my second year [2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14880147,"author":"nopinsight","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Thoughts on OpenAI, reinforcement learning, and killer robots","text":"Unfortunately, no one can really articulate the full set of human values yet, especially since they are often in conflict in real-world situations. Which value(s) should be prioritized over others? How about differing values between cultures and human groups within each culture? You might have heard of the Trolley Problem. There are many and more complicated variations of that. This Harvard session on Justice (The Moral Side of Murder) is edifying and surprisingly fun to watch: [VIDEO] The problem with AGI is more acute than most other technologies because it is software-based, which makes it nigh impossible to regulate effectively, especially globally.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16751525,"author":"ljiljana","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?","text":"Came here to suggest Robert Sapolsky's class as well. I would also add Michael Sandel's Justice: What's the right thing to do? [VIDEO] great course on moral reasoning, covers different theories of justice based on ideas from Aristotle, Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls and many more, extremely well presented too.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22778527,"author":"mettamage","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Best practices for ethical web scraping?","text":"Indirectly related, if you have some time to spare follow Harvard's course in ethics! [1] Here is why: while it didn't teach me anything new (in a sense), it did give me a vocabulary to better articulate myself. Having new words to describe certain ideas means you have more analytical tools at your disposal. So you'll be able to examine your own ethical stance better. It takes some time, but instead of watching Netflix (if that's a thing you do), watch this instead! Although, The Good Place is a pretty good Netflix show sprinkling some basic ethics in there. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12633173,"author":"lvs","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Moral Machine","text":"Many of these are what we call \"false choices\" of the sort that typically arise in hypothetical utilitarian dilemma used in rhetoric and debate. Humans are creative enough to see alternative options that obviate the dilemma, at least to some extent. See Michael Sandel on moral dilemma. Edit: FYI, Sandel's complete course \"Justice\" is on Youtube.[1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20129548,"author":"ubershmekel","month":"2019-06","story_title":"People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge","text":"I learned this lesson from the videos of the Harvard course on justice. The lecturer got explanations that I thought at the time were laughable, but somehow in his response he rephrased them to be reasonable and a great platform to deepen the conversation. It requires a great deal of empathy and intelligence to do that and I try my darndest to read as much sense as possible from any question directed my way. Here's an example: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25005327,"author":"mgh2","month":"2020-11","story_title":"The Canadian Mental Health Association has endorsed basic income","text":"Please follow HN guidelines- your comment appears vitriol As for taxes, I recommend this Harvard video series on ethics: [VIDEO] Note: Taxes appear way after several videos though...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26900872,"author":"mettamage","month":"2021-04","story_title":"The real reason to end the death penalty","text":"Sure, from a persuasion point of view I agree. But from a \"trying to understand another human\" point of view, I'd recommend you to read the Wikipedia page on ethics [1]. My own education on the topic: a course in college (as a business student) and watching some of the Harvard lectures on ethics [0]. IMO ethics courses teaches people to gain a more fine-grained vocabulary on explaining their own positions and understanding other's positions. GP clearly uses a deontological line of thinking on this matter. Something that GP considers to be \"inhuman and barbaric\" invokes a line of thinking in where he/she believes one ought to not do a certain action, because it simply is wrong. I'm not the best at explaining deontological ethics, nor are the people who think like this. My point is: a lot of thought has gone into the types of statements that GP makes, and IMO it's worth thinking about. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32068998,"author":"pagade","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Absurd Trolley Problems","text":"Reminds me of Harvard University lecture that starts with this discussion: [VIDEO] I would highly recommend.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42582470,"author":"jasonhong","month":"2025-01","story_title":"I am rich and have no idea what to do","text":"I was in a somewhat similar position as the OP, having had a successful exit many years ago and trying to figure things out. I was lucky that I still had a faculty position at a top university, young kids, and a good family to help ground me and guide me. My general take on things is this: money is one of the closest things we have to a superpower in this world. With enough money, you can build new things, make steps toward solving hard problems, and influence people and organizations to do things you want. Given all this, what kind of world would you want to live in? And with your newfound superpower, what kind of steps can you take that might get us closer to that world? Now, of course, this path is fraught with many challenges and dangers (especially as evidenced by so many superpowered billionaires around the world that want us to live in an oligarchy, but that's a rant for another day). Instead, I'll end by sharing a few things that have helped shape my thinking about how I spend my time and what kind of positive impact I want to make on the world: - [LINK] - John Rawls on the Veil of Ignorance and the original position [LINK] - Prof. Michael Sandel (Harvard) on Justice: What's the Right Thing to do? [VIDEO] - Prof. Robert Reich's course on Wealth and Poverty (former US Sec of Labor) [LINK] There's also an interview with a sci-fi author (Ted Chiang I believe, but I can't find it to confirm), that also posed an interesting question: what is your ideal world, and what step","stance":"rec"}],"kCc8FmEb1nY":[{"hn_comment_id":34572973,"author":"yonz","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Transformer Family","text":"Great compilation, would be great to see Vision Transformer (ViT) included. Andrej Karpathy's GPT video is a must have companion for this [VIDEO] I was going nuts trying to grok Key, Query,Position and Value until Andrej broke it down for me.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34739153,"author":"durdn","month":"2023-02","story_title":"GPT in 60 Lines of NumPy","text":"Very impressive. Recently I watched this really amazing lecture on building GPT from scratch from Karpathy, I was blown away: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35800127,"author":"wesammikhail","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Google DeepMind CEO Says Some Form of AGI Possible in a Few Years","text":"Andrej Karpathy, the director of AI at tesla, published an AMAZING video about how the current models are built which I think everyone in the tech space should watch. It is intuitive, easy to follow and quite frankly the best video I have seen on the topic. Here is the link: [VIDEO] If you conclude, after watching this, that this is all intelligence is - namely cascading optimization and data structure problems chained in a row, then you and a fair number of people here wont ever find common ground. That is not to say that you're wrong, it just seems as if there is a missing component here that we haven't yet discovered.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39159144,"author":"villedespommes","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Implementing a ChatGPT-like LLM from scratch, step by step","text":"+1, Andrey is an amazing educator! I'd also recommend his [VIDEO] and checking out his github repos. MinGPT, for example, implements a small gpt model that's compatible with HF API, whereas more modern nanoGPT shows how to use newer features such as flash attention. The quality of every video, every blog post is just so high.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34451717,"author":"amrb","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Deep Learning Tuning Playbook","text":"I recommend this video on the subject. \"Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35229870,"author":"qazpot","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Flow-Based Programming, a way for AI and humans to develop together","text":"I think you are taking a very major assumption that LLMs are deterministic infact they are exactly opposite. They are probabilistic systems. - They do not transpile Rough English to Deterministic English. Infact they do not do any transpiling at all. - LLMs learn the probabilities of words in the dataset for all contexts from that dataset (context is a ordered set of words). This is called training. - Once training is done, LLMs can generate text given a prompt and the probabilities that it has learned. The analogy of LLMs being auto-complete on steroids is very apt. - Whether the text generated by LLMs is factual or not is purely coincidental. I would highly recommend watching and working though the code (if possible) of NanoGPT by Andrej Karpathy. [VIDEO] A lot of things which seem like magic about LLMs will get demystified. Now one can argue that LLMs are showing human like reasoning/intelligence/sentience as an emergent behavior. This is hard to argue against because all these terms are extremely hard to define. IMO, the only emergent behavior that LLMs are showing is the output they generate looks like it might have been generated by a human which should not be surprising given that LLMs like ChatGPT has trained on a large amount of human written text available on internet.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35415703,"author":"bfg_damien","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Learn LLM Fundamentals","text":"Here are a few resources that might help get you started: 1. A thread explaining the internal working of transformers: [LINK] 2. Paper by DeepMind which provides pseudo-code for important algorithms for Transformer models: [LINK] 3. Another thread specifically on large language models: [LINK] Once again these are not courses per se, but do provide intuitive explanations for how transformers work. There is also the nanoGPT series of videos by Karpathy on youtube. First video here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35579124,"author":"pankajdoharey","month":"2023-04","story_title":"What Are Transformer Models and How Do They Work?","text":"I agree that Karpathy's YouTube video is an excellent resource for understanding Transformers from scratch. It provides a hands-on experience that can be particularly helpful for those who want to implement the models themselves. Here's the link to the video titled \"Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out\": [VIDEO] Additionally, for more comprehensive resources on Transformers, you may find these resources useful: * The Illustrated Transformer by Jay Alammar: [LINK] * MIT 6.S191: Recurrent Neural Networks, Transformers, and Attention: [LINK] * Karpathy's course, Deep Learning and Generative Models (Lecture 6 covers Transformers): [LINK] ... These resources cover different aspects of Transformers and can help you grasp the underlying concepts and mechanisms better.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35713090,"author":"erwincoumans","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Transformers from Scratch","text":"Andrej Karpathy's 2 hour video and code is really good to understand the details of Transformers: \"Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35917324,"author":"Alpi","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Introducing \"Implement DNS in a Weekend\"","text":"I love all the series about writing your own X in 100 lines of code. It gives you the understanding of technology and removes a lot of unnecessary details. The great examples of this are 'A from-scratch tour of Bitcoin in Python' [LINK] and 'Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out' [VIDEO] from Andrej Karpathy I wonder if anybody tried to collect all such projects together and built his own 'Internet in just 100 lines of code'","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35980149,"author":"FranklinMaillot","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Can someone ELI5 Transformers and the \u201cAttention is all we need\u201d paper","text":"Those Computerphile videos[0] by Rob Miles helped me understand transformers. He specifically references the \"Attention is all you need\" paper. And for a deeper dive, Andrej Kharpaty has this hands-on video[1] where he builds a transformer from scratch. You can check-out his other videos on NLP as well they are all excellent. [0] [LINK] , [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38389205,"author":"samspenc","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Andrej Karpathy: Intro to Large Language Models [Video]","text":"I initially thought this was his older video, but I see this video was published just an hour ago (from the time of this comment). I was thinking of this other video he had published early this year: \"Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out\" [VIDEO] Karpathy is generally well-reputed as a good tutor, especially for complex topics in AI / ML.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38848607,"author":"solomatov","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Is it feasible to train my own LLM?","text":"Yes, it's doable. Your model won't be as large and as performant as a real large scale model, but you could train something. You could watch this for a start: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42398079,"author":"yreg","month":"2024-12","story_title":"A ChatGPT clone, in 3000 bytes of C, backed by GPT-2 (2023)","text":"Attention is all you need and GPT-2 were well known at that point. Many might doubt whether this approach leads to \"general\" intelligence \u2013 depends on the definition. BTW, Karpathy has a nice video tutorial about building an LLM: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kF9KretXqJw":[{"hn_comment_id":30538934,"author":"erddfre3423","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Research: \u2018Ukraine war costs Russian military \u20ac20B per day\u2019","text":"I recommend this video from a Finnish army intelligence expert & researcher to those trying to understand logic behind Russia's actions. It's in Finnish but English subtitles should be good enough. Really awakening stuff at least for me. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30538938,"author":"erddfre3423","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The implied poor Russian Army truck maintenance practices","text":"I recommend this video from a Finnish army intelligence expert & researcher to those trying to understand logic behind Russia's actions. It's in Finnish but English subtitles should be good enough. Really awakening stuff at least for me. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30539293,"author":"erddfre3423","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Psychological Operations","text":"I recommend people looking to understand Russian governments mindset and tactics to take look at this video by Finnish army intelligence expert & researcher. It has decent English subtitles. Quite awakening stuff. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30555783,"author":"asdswe","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest","text":"I highly recommend this lecture by Finnish army intelligence expert to those looking to understand the deeper roots behind Russia's actions. Lecture in Finnish, but it has English subtitles. Truly wakening stuff, it really helps you to understand the situation much better. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30570361,"author":"kr433223","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Putin says Western sanctions are akin to declaration of war","text":"I highly recommend this lecture by a Finnish military intelligence expert for anybody looking to understand Russia's actions better. It was very enlightening at least to me, goes in depth to how Russia's history has shaped its culture and thinking in bad ways. English subtitles available. [VIDEO] Based on the lecture it's evident that the Russian government only respects force. Soft measures will only encourage them.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30647482,"author":"mikkom","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Inside Putin's Circle","text":"Evaluation of Russia by Finnish Intelligence Colonel (subtitles) [VIDEO] I think this is something you should watch if you are interested in how russia works. It's very straight talk and clarified russian mindset a lot for me at least.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30658878,"author":"waihtis","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Finnish govt agency warns of unusual aircraft GPS interference","text":"Suggesting Russians are playing a rational game here? I think the cover has been pulled on the Russian \"master strategy\".. it's literally a hierarchy of terror and lies, where everyone will do whatever it takes to please the irrational autocrat. I have been spamming this lecture everywhere since the war started and again I think anyone who's still questioning the Russian operative reality should watch it: Evaluation of Russia by Finnish Intelligence Colonel (subtitles) | December 3, 2018 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32210702,"author":"palmetieri2000","month":"2022-07","story_title":"A chess robot in Moscow has broken the finger of its human opponent","text":"This videogame review from a YouTube channel called Warlockracy is actually also a really interesting perspective on at least some aspects of Russian subcultures and their prominence, I found it a surprisingly insightful social commentary wrapped up in an entertaining vid. 1. [LINK] (~45mins) The second video is more serious but also rather interesting (clips from it became very popular at the beginning of the Russian invasion into Ukraine). It is a lecture from a Finnish University Professor whom spent most of his career in Intelligence specializing in Russian relations and now teaches intelligence and security. He talks extensively about the corruption hierarchies in Russia as well as Putin and Propaganda, well worth a watch (and more recent videos have been released since found on the same channel). 2. [VIDEO] (~60mins) Operating under the assumption that the video isn't misrepresenting the cultural aspects of Russia I think we would both be surprised at how \"cartoonish\" things can be.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32925587,"author":"saiya-jin","month":"2022-09","story_title":"President Putin has announced a partial mobilization in Russia","text":"I really don't think he is facing any kind of true rivalry here. Read up a bit (ie [1] is fantastic since its from 2018 but still 100% valid) on the structures of power and ingrained potential (and limits) of corruption that he gives to those under him. Its not like there is any democracy, other hawks/oligarchs with big ego need to shut up and follow within their constraints or they are murdered or imprisoned, usually pretty visibly, sometimes with whole families. He did it in very smart way, I leave him that (plenty of KGB experience to learn from). Hitler and other dictators were proper amateurs compared to how Russia is run today. Nobody on their own has enough power to stand against him. He has a separate branch of paramilitary forces (on top of Wagner, GRU and KGB forces) that answer only to him and is there only to protect him. What it would require is massive conspiracy and cooperation of literally all of his underlings to topple him down, which is unrealistic to ever happen. Lone shooter/poison deliverer from his closest circle may have the best chance, but I presume he has multiple safeguards there too. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30698007,"author":"jnsaff2","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Norwegian developer job board for Ukrainian refugees","text":"Bullshit. The country is not 140M slaves without any agency. The system is effective, but people are complicit. Why they still are, I don't know. I grew up on soviet union and we escaped the first chance we got. But them behind the border decided to accept whatever they did. A little explanation from our neighbors who also have to put up with the russian threat all the time [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30727603,"author":"Moru","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Mariupol's devastation: AP journalists document war's toll","text":"I think you need to watch this one[0], it's an explanation of what you are seeing. In general, that is the propaganda doing it's job. It's similar to all countries, we all have our propaganda and our view of our situation in the world. Russias is the classical \"It's us against them! And we are surrounded by our enemies!\". I'm sure North Korea is about the same only worse. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31094799,"author":"simonh","month":"2022-04","story_title":"War of memes: Why Z-war won't end with peace","text":"Very interesting taken alongside this strategic analysis of Russian thinking by a former Finnish intelligence officer, from 2018. He's approaching the topic from a bit of a different angle, but coming to very similar conclusions. There are subtitles in multiple languages. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31631502,"author":"eveningcoffee","month":"2022-06","story_title":"What the West (Still) Gets Wrong About Russian President Vladimir Putin","text":"Quite contrary. She provides much insight into the issue and all these points are worth consideration and discussion. Western politician try to project their view of the word on the other party and fail to see the issue from other point of view. People who have more intimate knowledge about Russia, for example Finns (1), can provide much more valuable insight. Especially so Russians with even more intimate knowledge about Russia. (1) Martti J. Kari (former intelligence Colonel in the Finnish Defence Forces) gives a lot of insight [VIDEO] Complementary material from Western point of view by historian and Holocaust researcher [LINK] I recommend to read especially this [LINK] Also Kamil Galeev from Russian Republic Tatarstan provides a lot of interesting insights [LINK] Perhaps the most interesting read from him is [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32655220,"author":"Quekid5","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Mikhail Gorbachev has died","text":"I think this talk shows that it's probably a bit more complicated than that: [VIDEO] Unless you happen to understand Finnish, subtitles are mandatory (and very accurate AFAICT). There is a link to a dubbed version in the comments if that is preferred.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38163238,"author":"lapphi","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Who's Behind the Swat USA Reshipping Service?","text":"For anyone curious as to why crime in Russia seems to be so ingrained into the culture, this lecture from a finnish intelligence officer is quite informative. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39122397,"author":"lcnPylGDnU4H9OF","month":"2024-01","story_title":"An illustrated guide to post-Orwellian censorship (2021)","text":"> a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions I remember an informative presentation about Russian history and culture which seems to go along with this, in particular the bit about \"two words for the truth and three for the lie\". [VIDEO] (time-stamped at the relevant portion but the whole talk is good)","stance":"rec"}],"kH5APw_SLUU":[{"hn_comment_id":3441620,"author":"polyfractal","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Does anyone use something to monitor air quality in their workspace?","text":"If you are worried about particulate, you can build one of these: [VIDEO] I built one for my room because my previous tenants had cats, which I'm allergic to. Even after steamcleaning our apartment I was chronically congested. Built one of those purifiers and a few days later most of my symptoms are gone. It's been about a month now and the filter is noticeably soiled.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22111304,"author":"dublinben","month":"2020-01","story_title":"A small DIY air purifier","text":"Here's a video from the University of Michigan showing just how effective these cheap DIY air filters can be: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24476374,"author":"shard","month":"2020-09","story_title":"At JPMorgan, productivity falls for younger employees at home","text":"If this is because of high PM2.5 concentration (due to wildfires or otherwise), I suggest building a DIY air filter, such as the one in the video here: [VIDEO] When the Air Quality Index shot up to ~150 in my area (you want to keep it below 100, preferably below 50), I went to Home Depot and bought box fans and furnace filters and built my own. You can check the air quality in your area on this site: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24482200,"author":"Qub3d","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Smoke has caused temperature forecasts to go crazy","text":"The University of Michigan made an instructional video showing how you can easily make an air purifier out of a box fan and a HEPA-rated furnace filter for $25: [VIDEO] It won't be as good as a purpose-built machine, but it will be far better than nothing at all. TheWirecutter found it reduced particulate matter in a room by 87%, if you do it right. They also make clear important caveats about this method -- in short, this works in a pinch, but probably should not be used in place of a purpose-built filter if you want one for year-round use. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25455948,"author":"thomas","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier that takes 30s to assemble","text":"Yeah, same thought. Something like the Coway air filter ( [LINK] ) regularly sells for under $200, and it is going to be much quieter than this option. It also has been tested fairly extensively from what I've seen, it's EnergyStar approved, etc, and it has a built in sensor. It doesn't look too bad either. But I understand the point, especially in times when you can't find a purifier. Also, good video on all this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kIoZDUd5DKw":[{"hn_comment_id":26315229,"author":"flohofwoe","month":"2021-03","story_title":"How to Read Assembly Language","text":"There's a few nice hidden features presented in Matt Godbolt's talk here: [VIDEO] As for LLVM IR output, just use the right clang command line options: [LINK] Likewise for WASM: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27728834,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Apple and Intel first to use TSMC 3nm","text":"I recently watched the CppCon 2019 talk by Matt Godbolt \"Compiler Explorer: Behind The Scenes\"[1], and a cool feature he presented is the integrated LLVM Machine Code Analyser tool. If you look at the \"timeline\" and \"resource\" views of how a Zen 3 executes a typical assembly snippet, it is absolutely mind blowing. That beast of a CPU has so many resources it's just crazy. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kLiwvnr4L80":[{"hn_comment_id":38646847,"author":"alecco","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Intel CEO: 'The entire industry is motivated to eliminate the CUDA market'","text":"It looks like both Pat Gelsinger and Lisa Su have no clue about software and can't even delegate this. They expect \"the community\" to do the software for their extremely complicated hardware. If you see the presentations by Nvidia's Bill Daly [1] it shows they've been evolving hardware and software together. The CUDA programming model was a massive bet a long time ago. And they deservedly won ML/AI. Unless Intel and AMD do a radical change it's game over for them. They will lose to ARM and Nvidia. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38668753,"author":"huijzer","month":"2023-12","story_title":"ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips","text":"Depends what you consider as part of chip production. If you consider new instructions and the related software as new chip production, then the performance improvements have continued quite dramatically. Single chip inference has gone 1000x over the last 10 years according to Bill Dally from Nvidia [1] at 10 minutes (probably not original source). Main gains according to the video have been different numeric types (fp16 for example) and more specialised hardware together with more complex instructions. Note that process improvements have only caused a 2.5x from that 1000x. He also mentions that Google\u2018s TPU has no fundamental benefit over dedicated instructions in GPUs. Quite an interesting video IMO. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38841696,"author":"raphlinus","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Why does integer representation of a floating point approximate its logarithm?","text":"In a recent talk[1], Bill Dally of Nvidia suggests using actual logarithms, as they're more consistent in relative error than floats, which is especially relevant at low precision as increasingly used in AI. Multiplications then become simple additions, but then addition becomes more complicated, as in general it needs lookup tables. This is the same mechanism as a slide rule, and also reminds me of the way the Yamaha DX7 works. The lookup tables can be expensive, and the talk contains an idea how to batch them when adding up the results of many many multiplications (as is also often the case for AI workloads). [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kPR8h4-qZdk":[{"hn_comment_id":22198573,"author":"pjscott","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Libc++'s Implementation of std::string","text":"I think this is the talk you're referring to. If not, it's still definitely worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39724352,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Algorithms for Modern Hardware","text":"The FAANGS certainly have people doing this kind of work. For example, Andrei Alexandrescu has a bunch of keynote talks at CPPCon where he talks about 1-4% speed optimisations he makes to the std library at Facebook. [LINK] I also like the talk by Nicholas Ormrod \u201cThe strange details of std::string at Facebook\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42465981,"author":"D4ckard","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Fixing C Strings","text":"Yes, there are really cool packing techniques. See this talk for example: [VIDEO] I don't include the null-terminator because I use this type in my own environment where I never use null-terminated strings so there is no need for it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47339159,"author":"def-pri-pub","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Faster Asin() Was Hiding in Plain Sight","text":"You'd be surprised how it actually is worth the effort, even just a 1% improvement. If you have the time, this is a great talk to listen to: [VIDEO] For a little toy ray tracer, it is pretty measly. But for a larger corporation (with a professional project) a 4% speed improvement can mean MASSIVE cost savings. Some of these tiny improvements can also have a cascading effect. Imagining finding a +4%, a +2% somewhere else, +3% in neighboring code, and a bunch of +1%s here and there. Eventually you'll have built up something that is 15-20% faster. Down the road you'll come across those optimizations which can yield the big results too (e.g. the +25%).","stance":"rec"}],"kPRA0W1kECg":[{"hn_comment_id":7652698,"author":"Artemis2","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Illustrated Sorting Algorithms","text":"Fascinating! Another sorting visualization that I like is this one: [VIDEO] . It is well-known but the way everything falls back into place at each time... that's very satisfying.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22323550,"author":"jerf","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Quadsort: a stable non-recursive merge sort","text":"You may enjoy this: [VIDEO] There are several similar videos on YouTube demonstrating sorts. If that's a bit sterile for you, you can get a more human touch via the playlist [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25440925,"author":"bestboy","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Bubblesort, rocksort, and cocktail-shaker sort","text":"just want to quickly share an IMHO interesting sorting algorithm visualization video: [VIDEO] \"Visualization and \"audibilization\" of 15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 Minutes. Sorts random shuffles of integers, with both speed and the number of items adapted to each algorithm's complexity. The algorithms are: selection sort, insertion sort, quick sort, merge sort, heap sort, radix sort (LSD), radix sort (MSD), std::sort (intro sort), std::stable_sort (adaptive merge sort), shell sort, bubble sort, cocktail shaker sort, gnome sort, bitonic sort and bogo sort (30 seconds of it).\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34349757,"author":"hot_gril","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite illustration in Computer Science?","text":"The classic sorting algo videos with sound come to mind first: [VIDEO] . Mergesort is my favorite video. The main resource on learning Erlang, [LINK] , has a lot of funny ones, some of which are useful.","stance":"rec"}],"kRlhlCWplqk":[{"hn_comment_id":38112352,"author":"thaumaturgy","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Moon-forming impactor as a source of Earth's basal mantle anomalies","text":"If you haven't seen it yet, the simulation released last year of the hypothesized Earth-Theia moon formation is really cool: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38136790,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Remnants of Theia, an ancient plant that collided with the Earth","text":"It's not my area, but this video looks interesting and is produced by NASA \" New Supercomputer Simulation Sheds Light on Moon\u2019s Origin \" (October 2022) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kTKn1aSOyOs":[{"hn_comment_id":16776182,"author":"dbg31415","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire","text":"It's been a consistent of my life, every good friend I've had already knows all the words to all the Tom Lehrer songs. And enjoys singing them while drunk. My parents... who are only slightly younger than Tom Lehrer... think he speaks too fast, think he's too disrespectful, or just don't get the humor. I get that he was successful -- but I think classic example of someone born a little too soon. Anyway, if someone could put Tom Lehrer and Stephen Colbert together for an interview I'd be pretty happy. === Good atricle from 2000. * 'When Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize, satire died' | Global | The Guardian || [LINK] === Some of my favorite songs... but you can't go wrong, and they're all on YouTube. * Tom Lehrer: Smut (concert live) (1965) - YouTube || [LINK] * Tom Lehrer: Alma (concert live) (1965) - YouTube || [LINK] * Tom Lehrer - Wernher von Braun - with intro - widescreen - YouTube || [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24839606,"author":"Diederich","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain","text":"For those who haven't watched any of his material, please click here to see the above performed: [VIDEO] He is amazingly talented across many different axes.","stance":"rec"}],"kTiP0zKF9bc":[{"hn_comment_id":44320225,"author":"schmorptron","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Game Hacking \u2013 Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)","text":"Woah, cool to see a bit of how it all works. Seems similar to basic antivirus signature checking? As a side note, a few years back, they had a GDC talk about a (then-new) machine learning based approach to catching cheaters. Regardless of how it worked out, I found it fascinating. The presenter delivered the problem and solution approach so well I'd still like to work on something like this some time. I think they're still updating this for CS2, so it would be really cool to see how far it's gotten now. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26772023,"author":"schmorptron","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Valve accused of ignoring existing RCE vulnerability in Source games for 2 years","text":"From what I know, VAC (Valve Anti Cheat) just looks for processes running on the system and detects injections into CSs memory. Then, for CS:GO specifically there's Overwatch, in which players look at other reported players' gameplay to determine whether they were cheating, and VacNET which is a machine learning system trained on the data from Overwatch to detect aimbots that way. There's a really good talk that someone from valve gave about 3 years ago[0]. The bigger problem is that even with input recognition, one of the biggest problems are wallhacks, meaning you can see other players through walls which is an advantage that's almost as large as aimbotting in tactical shooters like CS. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30245684,"author":"crtasm","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Thank You, Valve","text":"Valve do this, here's a good talk: Robocalypse Now: Using Deep Learning to Combat Cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32525799,"author":"kllrnohj","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The ABI status of ELF hash tables","text":"Or server-side automated review using machine learning models, which is what Valve is trying with \"vacnet\" (with then manual review to confirm the model's results are accurate - something most tech companies should learn from) Great talk on it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33478467,"author":"arwineap","month":"2022-11","story_title":"AI Learns to Play CS:Go via Large-Scale Behavioural Cloning","text":"Valve has been at this for a long time... They started with a system that lets players review games and try to understand if a player is a cheat or not. Games are anonymized, and you get to rewatch the replay to try to make a determination They can then use that data to train their NN to help detect which players / games should be fed into this manual review process I assume now the product is probably good enough that it's ranking reviewers too to determine how good reviewers are at detecting if there's cheats or not. It's pure genius Here's a GDC talk you may find interesting: > In this 2018 GDC session, Valve's John McDonald discusses how Valve has utilized Deep Learning to combat cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41377856,"author":"magic123_","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Are We Anti-Cheat Yet?","text":"Unfortunately the Overwatch system has been disabled for years, and we currently have no reason to think it will be reopened for CS2. I take this opportunity to share this great talk about Valve's usage of deep learning to fight cheating in CS:GO: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kTrOg19gzP4":[{"hn_comment_id":14797109,"author":"beagle3","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Red Programming Language 0.6.3","text":"Not very easy to come by, but if you haven't seen it yet, here's a presentation by geocar from 2014: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20253417,"author":"undecidabot","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Impending kOS (2014)","text":"For those who want to see it in action, there's actually a talk about kOS on YouTube: [VIDEO] . The talk is by the fourth member, Geo, who also frequents HN (geocar).","stance":"rec"}],"kU3BceoMuaA":[{"hn_comment_id":19594918,"author":"LeoPanthera","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?","text":"It was a massive success everywhere except the USA. But because the USA defines history, it was a \"failure\". Wonderful video about the format: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22701873,"author":"sorenjan","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Dumping MiniDisc Media","text":"> There is still something so cool about MiniDisc though Agree. I really wanted one for years, I even had some blank discs to fidget with, but when I could finally afford one the iPod had come out and I bought that instead. Part of me still wants to buy a MiniDisc player and some discs, but I try to keep the amount of stuff I own down to the essentials, and vintage electronic doesn't really make the cut. TechMoan on Youtube have a few videos about the MiniDisc format for anyone interested. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24858337,"author":"mikepurvis","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Building replacement proprietary battery packs","text":"As a younger person who missed out, I recently enjoyed this mini-documentary\u2014 especially the surprisingly lengthy history of the many devices for a supposedly \"failed\" format: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27482461,"author":"zinekeller","month":"2021-06","story_title":"The MiniDisc: the failure of a forgotten format (2020)","text":"Ah yes, another American-centric viewpoint (which is correct, no qualms about that part) but in other countries (probably with the exclusion of inner reaches of Africa and, uhm, Canada) MiniDisc (at the late 1990's and early 2000's)... is just there: a reliable way to have portable copies of your music. P.S. British viewpoint by Techmoan (which pointed out the American-centric \"MiniDisc is a failure\"): [VIDEO] P.P.S. A direct rebuttal (to the point it was titled \"The (Not) Forgotten Audio Format That (Never) Failed\"): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35737354,"author":"NoZebra120vClip","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Minidisc FAQ: MDLP (\u201cLong-Play\u201d) Mode Topics","text":"Reference to Techmoan is de rigeur : [VIDEO] Especially any of you kids who weren't around when the MiniDisc craze swept the world like a wildfire gone berzerk.","stance":"rec"}],"kUfF2MTnqAw":[{"hn_comment_id":43724138,"author":"j_bum","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Decreased CO2 during breathwork: emergence of altered states of consciousness","text":"Destin from Smarter Every Day (YouTube) has a wonderful video demonstrating this effect [0]. I\u2019d recommend watching the whole thing, but you can see how much of an effect it has starting around the 6:00 mark. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14793120,"author":"JshWright","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Two days in an underwater cave running out of oxygen","text":"To take this tangent even further afield... Here's an actual real life demonstration of why you should put your oxygen mask on first: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15310106,"author":"glandium","month":"2017-09","story_title":"How flying messes with the mind","text":"This Smarter Every Day video demonstrates how dumb you can get under (less mild) hypoxia (and why it's important to take care of your own oxygen mask before others') [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18921134,"author":"mikejb","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Why is cognitive function impaired at high altitude?","text":"Destin from the 'Smarter Every day' YouTube channel did something similar (in a PSA-sort of style), and it's partly funny, partly scary to watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30103113,"author":"sithadmin","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The strangely successful history of people mailing themselves in boxes (2015)","text":"30-40k ft is absolutely a problem. Even if you remain conscious, you're completely unable to think coherently and generally have no idea what you're doing. Stay there long enough and you will unquestionably suffer brain damage and probably death as well. SmarterEveryDay did a good video about hypoxia training that demonstrates the very rapid onset and severe effects of hypoxia at cruising altitudes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kXpzp4RDGJI":[{"hn_comment_id":30491237,"author":"whoisburbansky","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Discovery of ultrafast myosin, its amino acid sequence, and structural features","text":"Professor Lue from Harvard has a pretty cool visualization of how ATP synthase uses rotation and the energy produced through cellular respiration to produce ATP at [VIDEO] , slightly more visceral than digging through a paper for a layperson.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30491450,"author":"dopylitty","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Discovery of ultrafast myosin, its amino acid sequence, and structural features","text":"Motor proteins are so incredibly cool. Like many others I was blown away by the 3D animated Inner Life of the Cell[1] showing these proteins physically walking around in the cell. Previously I had this idea that cells were just blobs of jelly and somehow they interacted with each-other to produce macro phenomena like muscle movement. And then you get into the other protein machines like the ATP synthase in the mitochondria [2] (also linked below) which are actually little motors/pumps. And we all have billions of these inside use spinning away. It's just amazing. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kYHTzqHIngk":[{"hn_comment_id":28629701,"author":"Ericson2314","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Spain will ban selling fruit and vegetables in plastic containers starting 2023","text":"[VIDEO] had me pretty convinced land use was the key to breaking through a bad food waste vs shelf-stable food trade-off.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36941328,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2023-07","story_title":"If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity","text":"I think this video sums up how I, and most europeans, feel about it: [VIDEO] If you don't understand the core differences between how to even buy shopping and the influence this has on how you live your life\u2026 it's not possible to explain that, actually yeah, it's possible to never do shopping by car, even to feed a whole family.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24335865,"author":"Flobin","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Interchange in Houston is the same size as an entire city center in Italy","text":"When a grocery store is very nearby and you go to the grocery store, you can get your produce fresher. And you don't have to plan your meals, which may or may not be a positive side (it is for me). Check out this Canadian talking about his grocery trip in Amsterdam: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31649994,"author":"trinovantes","month":"2022-06","story_title":"We Won't Raise Our Kids in Suburbia","text":"\"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled\" I used money as it's universally understood to demonstrate how absurd North America urban planning is. But let's say for the sake of argument, you prefer non quantifiable qualities: > Instead of visiting grandparents once per month (because 2 separate trains + a bus is pretty hard trip for someone with little kids), you could visit them every weekend. Alternatively your grandparents can live within walking distance and everybody can see each other everyday or have spontaneous encounters on the streets > Instead of only seeing wild animals in the zoo, you can see them in the forest.. and still have time for chores afterwards. I'm not a woodsman but I'm pretty sure most wild animals are too dangerous for you to be close enough to have a zoo-like experience > Instead of shopping at your local store, where every single yogurt has an added thickener, you can have a better food at a cheaper price -- and spend less time on shopping per week, too. NJB conveniently has a video on this topic as well. Grocery shopping is no longer a 1-2h weekly chore and is just a quick 10 minute detour in your daily commute. The stores also have large variety of healthy produce and buying what you need immediately also results in less food waste. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33039061,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2022-09","story_title":"KittyHawk air taxi startup is winding down","text":"Here\u2019s a video about why small grocery stores are better called \u201cWhy Grocery Shopping is Better in Amsterdam\u201d: [VIDEO] This is why I asked you for a source. We can play anecdote versus anecdote all day. In the absence of a source I\u2019d be very curious what you think of any specific points made in the video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35995991,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2023-05","story_title":"How to Quit Cars","text":"The YouTube channel Not Just Bikes has a 4 minute video on grocery shopping in Amsterdam, compared to when he lived in London, Ontario: [VIDEO] (In response to now flagged comment below about grocery shopping 'requiring' moving big stuff)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43493527,"author":"MrDresden","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Stockpile 72 hours of supplies in case of disaster or attack, EU tells citizens","text":"As others have already touch on, there are no parking lots. The streets are narrow with one directional car traffic, and some of the streets around here do not allow car traffic. Most if not all of the shoppers are walking or cycling. And to be fair, I'm cheating just a bit. One of these grocery stores is a \"normal\" chain (Albert Heijn) whereas the other one is an organic chain (EcoPlaza) so these can coexist in such close proximity to one another. The density of grocery stores is pretty high in the Netherlands. It wasn't until writing this response that I remembered that there is a third grocery store (PLUS) that is also within 1 minute walk from my front door. If I were to increase the time from my door to ~5-6 minutes then the number of grocery stores would become 6x. I would recommend looking at this video[0] from NotJustBikes on the subject. It shows exactly the type of mindset at work when it comes to urban design and zoning. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kYYJlNbV1OM":[{"hn_comment_id":21658982,"author":"kleer001","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Why the Hate?","text":"Because the world, for the most part, is (and always has been) a dangerous place and hate has proven to be a very useful (highly conserved through evolutionary time) adaptation to help keep small and delicate bands of our ancestors safe for one more day. You can see this bias towards negativity easily in the structure of basic emotions. There is one positive affect (happiness) and waaaaay more negative affects (fear, anger, disgust, sadness) and only one neutral (surprise). And those negative emotions are all very distinct. If you want more detail I can recommend over 120 hours of learning in the following (which I've watched and digested). They'll walk you through the details from the bottom to the top. - Watch Robert Sapolsky's lectures: [LINK] Watch Jordan Peterson's Personality lectures: [VIDEO] and his Maps of Meaning Lectures: (or read the book or listen to the audio book) [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20932045,"author":"mrdoops","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you keep your programming motivation up?","text":"Trial and error as a programmer dealing with depression and anxiety accounts for a lot, but for resources I'd point you to Robert Sapolsky's lectures on Behavioral Biology (here: [LINK] ). Sapolsky's lectures are great for getting a Biology perspective to how human's operate. Jordan Peterson's has lectures on Personality (here: [VIDEO] ) which are also great and echo similar ideas from a Psychology perspective.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34594625,"author":"lysecret","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"I am not a big fan of his work anymore but the original Personality Lectures (2017) of Jordan Peterson are really great. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kYfNvmF0Bqw":[{"hn_comment_id":7001489,"author":"dmak","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Which books changed your life?","text":"Steve Job's book was very inspiring and motivational for me. The way he saw the world was very enlightening. Here's a video of what I thought was really profound for me: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25514997,"author":"keiferski","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Things You're Allowed to Do","text":"This reminds me of an old video of Steve Jobs. His idea is simple, but it's really powerful. In short: the world is something you can change, not merely participate in. When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That\u2019s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you\u2019ll never be the same again. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it. That\u2019s maybe the most important thing. It\u2019s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you\u2019re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that\u2019s very important and however, you learn that, once you learn it, you\u2019ll want to change life and make it better, cause it\u2019s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you\u2019ll never be the same again. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3446783,"author":"denzil_correa","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Ask HN: \u201cStay Hungry. Stay Foolish.\u201d","text":"I think by foolish he implies that all of us in this world were born naked. None of us are omniscient or above the other. Here's a 1-minute interview which embodies the same message [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5120571,"author":"thiagoperes","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you stop regretting?","text":"1st - Change your username. 2nd - I'm positive that If you don't change your mind, the thing you'll regret the most in the coming years will be the way you're thinking right now. There's still a lot that can be done. Lots of people succeeded after their 30's. Hugh Hefner started at 26: [LINK] 2 videos for you: - 8 characteristics every sucessfull person has (based on a study) [LINK] - Steve Jobs on Life [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8736442,"author":"Revex","month":"2014-12","story_title":"The Programmer's Dream (A Ramble)","text":"This ramble made me think of an interview with Steve Jobs - [VIDEO] Basically - Everything in life is made up of people who are no smarter than you. And you can help shape reality and improve it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23454744,"author":"bsldld","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: I implemented the life I designed: perfect but I feel lost. What now?","text":"The best thing according to me is to see smile on other people's faces. Atleast on those people's faces who have lost all hope. If I was in your position, I would concentrate on two things. Doing something to provide free(or atleast affordable) best quality - education to everyone, especially under priviledged kids e.g. from poor families and orphans. - healthcare to poor people. Atleast do these two things and the world will be a far better place. Take a break from your comfortable life and go travel to places like asia, africa and south america and you will find your calling. Here is some advice from a well know person: [VIDEO] Edit: typo","stance":"rec"}],"kZA9Hnp3aV4":[{"hn_comment_id":21957972,"author":"pink_surfer","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The Future Is Grim","text":"The problem is that we cannot comprehend how fast things can shift. I just came across this video in another thread that I think illustrates the problem very well: [VIDEO] Basically, we can\u2019t see something growing exponentially for the disaster they it will unleash until the last minute (literally) For instance, if something doubles every hour, we don\u2019t realize there is any problem until the very last moment: one hour before, half the resources were free, and the hour before, 3/4. But two hours later, it\u2019s 0% and we never saw it coming. The point is well illustrated in the talk, I highly recommend it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21922849,"author":"maerF0x0","month":"2019-12","story_title":"What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?","text":"A requisite response to those who mention compound growth (interest) and the fallacy of it \"never\" ending: [VIDEO] (Exponential Growth Arithmetic, Population and Energy, Dr. Albert A. Bartlett)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22605495,"author":"voxadam","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What happens next after a successful lockdown?","text":"While not specifically about the exponential growth of pandemics I've always liked the lecture \"Exponential Growth, Population and Energy\" by Dr. Albert Bartlett. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27353567,"author":"knorker","month":"2021-06","story_title":"It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency","text":"> Energy consumption in itself is not a problem My main point on that was that the exponential function grows quickly. If it's all of Sweden today, then it's just a couple of doublings before it's literally everything. If you graph the current use this is not the far away future. I don't have absolute proof, but you cannot hide the kind of electricity use without driving up demand noticeably, so actually people are already today paying more for electricity in order for someone to profiteer from hashing. We're all paying for this. > 1. The energy source is not renewable Or it displaces otherwise-renewable use into non-renewable. Which (at this scale) of course it has. > To sum it up, it's not as bad as the headlines say, and rapidly improving for the better. I disagree on both points. The waste graph (and that's just electricity. Where do you think non-economical mining rigs go?) is growing exponentially. Have you seen this guy talk about our inability to understand the exponential function? [VIDEO] > Keeping devices powered on/plugged in costs more energy and serves no purpose, It's a problem, yes. But it's not true that it serves no function. \"It's easier to keep it plugged in than not\" is convenience. I'm not justifying it, but yes actually it does have a purpose. Just like idling a diesel car outside my window while I'm trying to sleep does have a purpose. > Bitcoin's supply is entirely predictable Not really since an unknown amount is lost forever every year due to crashe","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29523857,"author":"belfalas","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Long-form info-dense videos on YouTube you would recommend to anyone?","text":"Check this one out: [VIDEO] \"Exponential Growth Arithmetic, Population and Energy, Dr. Albert A. Bartlett\"","stance":"rec"}],"kZRE7HIO3vk":[{"hn_comment_id":17062666,"author":"ropeadopepope","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Docker is a dangerous gamble","text":"This may be a little off topic, but has anybody watched Casey Muratori's proposal on SoC ISAs[0]? The video is long, but it's worth watching all of it. It sounds to me like a SoC ISA could make docker obsolete. If it ever happens, anyway. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41747886,"author":"henning","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Show HN: One \u2013 A new React framework unifying web, native and local-first","text":"Yes, modern computer systems are unbelievably complicated from the application level down to the hardware. The consequences are absolutely devastating. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18211760,"author":"meuk","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]","text":"I think the problem is that current OSes are too complicated. What does a common user really want? I'd say text editing, making presentations, multimedia, and browsing. While these sound like simple things, text editing usually happens in a Word-like format, which - from what I've heard - is ridiculously complex. The same thing holds for browsing (simple browsers don't exist anymore, and many use the same back-end for rendering). For multimedia, USB is very important, which is a very complicated format to use correctly. Then, there are tens of codecs and formats for multimedia, each with their own idiosyncrasies and ambiguities in the specs (or deviations from the spec that are so common that they are expected nowadays). The case is even worse when your OS is supposed to run on different hardware. I think this is the main reason that Apple, in general, has a much better UX: They only have to support a limited set of hardware. Casey Murati has a great rant about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20032205,"author":"worldsayshi","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Docker is vulnerable to a symlink-race attack","text":"If you'd like to venture further into this rabbit hole I can recommend \"Preventing the Collapse of Civilization\": [LINK] And \"The Thirty Million Line Problem\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21369157,"author":"dsego","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Software Is Hard (2007)","text":"Have you seen the 30 million line problem* by Casey Muratori (of Handmade Hero fame)? There is an argument that a lot of today's complexity in software is an (unnecessary) byproduct of changes in hardware design. * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21967038,"author":"scruple","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Anti-patterns and malpractices in modern software development (2015)","text":"There is a related Jonathan Blow talk titled \"Preventing the Collapse of Civilization\" [0] that I came across recently from a HN post. You might be interested in watching it. Also, Casey Muratori's talk titled \"The Thirty Million Line Problem\" [1]. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23216421,"author":"stephc_int13","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?","text":"A quite well-known rant from Casey Muratori about a very similar issue: [VIDEO] (For those who never saw it)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26890566,"author":"JamesSwift","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris","text":"That might be what OS'es currently _are_, but I disagree that it is what an OS _is_. I think fundamentally an OS is as the OP uses it, a set of code that interfaces with all your hardware to make the computer function. Heres a good talk I came across in a HN comment a little while back [1] about how games used to be developed vs how they are today. [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31888993,"author":"posnet","month":"2022-06","story_title":"DevOps is a failure","text":"You are not alone in thinking that, see 'The Thirty Million Line' talk by Casey Muratori. (Long, but worth it, assuming you haven't seen it already) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35365281,"author":"drivers99","month":"2023-03","story_title":"I wanted a beautiful computer and couldn't find one, so I made my own","text":"I would say just look around, but it's probably because of some of the information I've seen that opened my eyes to it, so I'll point you to these two talks: [VIDEO] Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow [LINK] The Thirty Million Line Problem / Casey Muratori","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38416701,"author":"frfl","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Article on software only increasing complexity?","text":"It's not what OP is looking for, but there's a relevant video I know of by a well known game-dev, The Thirty Million Line Problem - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"k_5M-z_RUKA":[{"hn_comment_id":20316540,"author":"icelancer","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Vintage video game cartridges with built-in modems","text":"It was. Very much so. I have a lot of fond memories of playing Kirby's Avalanche and Killer Instinct on the SNES over the phone lines. I could not fathom why more people didn't flock to the XBAND. It represented everything I ever wanted as a kid gamer. They had the right idea. Way before its time unfortunately, and shockingly. I still don't really understand why it didn't take off. Luckily, just last month (May 2019) there was a one hour documentary on it that covered a lot of the development of the unit. Well worth watching. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20316475,"author":"markchristian","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Vintage video game cartridges with built-in modems","text":"Amazingly enough, [LINK] has a working implementation of XBAND. You can see a demo of it in the excellent Wrestling With Gaming documentary on XBAND: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22756137,"author":"Kaze404","month":"2020-04","story_title":"How SNES emulators got a few pixels from complete perfection","text":"If this is interesting to you, I recommend this (1) documentary on XBAND, a peripheral used to access an Xbox Live-like service for the Super Nintendo. It's a fascinating piece of engineering for the time. (1) - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24006202,"author":"dimator","month":"2020-07","story_title":"A Closer Look at the Super NES Doom Source Code Release [video]","text":"There's an excellent retrospective on YouTube about the xband and how it was built. It was a product ahead of its time. For example, the way they got games that weren't built for laggy multiplayer to work was unbelievable: they recognized the cartridge and patched the code. Yes, that means every game that worked was a result of a custom built patching of that game's code at run time! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"k_P7Y0-wgos":[{"hn_comment_id":24567792,"author":"gattilorenz","month":"2020-09","story_title":"After simple dental surgery, a man lost his ability to form new memories","text":"For another incredible case of retrogade amnesia, check the story of Clive Wearing, the men with a few seconds of memory. Short clip: [LINK] Extended documentary: [VIDEO] I learned of him through neuroscience classes. That was plenty of years ago, and I still think of his condition every now and then. One thing that amazes me is that he keeps stacks of diaries where he keeps erasing the previous entry, adding the current date and time, and writing \"first entry I made consciously\" ( [VIDEO] ). But also, it seems that over time he does learn something new, somehow. For example, he can now reliably \"predict\" the ending of movies he has seen a great amount of times after the amnesia started, without remembering of having ever seen the movie. And, of course, it's touching to see the relationship with the wife.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41228692,"author":"passion__desire","month":"2024-08","story_title":"There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)","text":"Have you seen the documentary \"7 second memory man\" on BBC. It is about an intelligent person who is confined to live with only 7 second memory. He keeps a diary recording his entries. As he reads past entries, he realises the predicament he is in and considers that his case would be interesting to doctors. Then forgets all about that. Rediscovering the whole thing again in the next 7 seconds for himself anew. 44:20 @ [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kb-m2fasdDY":[{"hn_comment_id":12626814,"author":"smcl","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend","text":"Joking aside I enjoyed that video ( [VIDEO] - for those who didn't see it), the presenter was pretty honest and way more open than I expected. I'm just so curious how those services break down - if it's genuinely on the \"lstrip as a service\" level or whatever, whether that's \"1,000 services\" figure was actually a relatively simple API with 10 versions at various levels of deprecation, whether he meant it was 1,000 different service endpoints (250 services each with POST, GET, PUT, DELETE) or what. I want to know more basically :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15159748,"author":"kartD","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommended (recent) videos for a Lunch and Learn","text":"Little drunk so bear with me :) Rich Hickey: Clojure concurrency[ [LINK] ] Keynote - Rust: confident, productive systems programming by Aaron Turon [ [LINK] ] RustConf 2016 - A Modern Editor Built in Rust by Raph Levien [ [LINK] ] Microservices at Netflix Scale: Principles, Tradeoffs & Lessons Learned[ [LINK] ] What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber to 1000 Services[ [VIDEO] ] Dynamic Code Optimization and the NVIDIA Denver Processor [ [LINK] ] * if you can get anything on Apple's Ax series that's even better","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17567419,"author":"jppope","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the things keep in mind while giving/preparing for a tech talk?","text":"1) Do not attempt to live code. change your code via version control, build small videos, copy and paste... whatever you do... do not try and live code 2) Read \"The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs\" ... its not really about Steve Jobs so much as its about how to be a great presenter. 3) building or writing a talk is significantly less important than the delivery... which means that more of your time should be spent on how to deliver the speech (recording I find is the best way to practice) 4) Pick a single thing and do it well, do not attempt to put too much into a talk or tackle something massively complex. 5) Make sure that everyone is walking away with something they can actually use. This doesn't require it be a hard skill... \"Soft\" or philosophical utilities are just as good 6) Have Fun and be funny... Speakers have a tendency to want to show off the size of their intellect, and the level their competency- having a speech be entertaining is way way more important. 7) DO NOT READ FROM YOUR SLIDES. know your shit. slides are supplementary Extra Credit. Here's a collection of some fantastic technical speeches: * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kc9HwsxE1OY":[{"hn_comment_id":23480814,"author":"dTal","month":"2020-06","story_title":"JuliaCon 2020 Goes Online","text":"Did you mean \"unreasonable effectiveness\"? :P I just watched that talk the other day, and boy is it insightful. Julia has cracked a fairly magical combination of features. I fully expect it to replace Python over the next 10 years. Direct link to \"Unreasonable Effectiveness\": [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23133351,"author":"ddragon","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Julia library for fast machine learning","text":"It's hard to say limited benefit when the entire Julia ecosystem evolved to so heavily rely on it, to allow for each package to work on it's own level of abstraction: For example, the Julia's standard library implements all of the basic math operators on the CPU, and libraries like Flux then define it's own methods to implement the higher level operators used in ML (such as convolutional layers and activation functions). And then someone writes those same basic math operators but instead of running on CPU they run on GPU, and for that they use a new type (CUArray). The original library knows nothing about CUArrays, it will call the same basic operators as always, but since they have a different type (received from the user) they'll dispatch to the GPU version. This kind of interaction can grow indefinitely, for example if you use a complex number type/library it will change the basic operators to deal with both real and imaginary parts, and if you use the GPU types within it, then it will do complex math in the GPU (and ML on complex math on GPU..., without any of the libraries being aware of the other). You can see a more detailed explanation on: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23741105,"author":"ssivark","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Multiple Dispatch in Julia","text":"You might also enjoy Stefan Karpinski\u2019s talk at JuliaCon 2019 about how multiple dispatch helps make the language more expressive (than OOP, for Eg). The unreasonable effectiveness of multiple dispatch [VIDEO] It seems like such an elegant idea, I\u2019m somewhat surprised no one seems to have run with it earlier.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24674448,"author":"nur0n","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel to learn advanced programming?","text":"I like to watch talks by programming language designers. Some that readily come to mind are Rich Hickey, Joe Armstrong (RIP), and Stefan Karpinski. Some of my favorites are: - Simple Made Easy (Hickey): [LINK] - The Mess We're In (Armstrong): [LINK] - The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Multiple Dispatch (Karpinski): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24842416,"author":"StefanKarpinski","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The Accelerating Adoption of Julia","text":"The core problem with class-based object orientation is that methods go inside of the type instead of being added externally. That means everyone has to agree on what methods can be called on a class or they have to subtype it, which sounds harmless, but is actually a big problem when what you really wanted to do was just define a new method for an existing type. My best attempt at explaining: [VIDEO] There's also the issue that one sometimes needs to specialize generic operations in generic algorithms on something other than the receiver\u2014sometimes even on more than one of the arguments. Single dispatch forces you to use something slow and awkward like double dispatch in cases like this. And that's assuming the person who wrote the generic code anticipates the need for specialization! If they don't allow for it, then you're just stuck. With multiple dispatch, you can just define the method you need the specialization for and you're done.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24844211,"author":"amkkma","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The Accelerating Adoption of Julia","text":"What? I used to write python, and to me, MD is first and foremost a conceptual improvement. Makes writing code so much sweeter, more expressive and sensical. It also heavily improves composability. It's LESS performant if not done carefully. Certainly FastAI, Matt rocklin etc didn't reimplement a subset in python just to get slower code See [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24847421,"author":"stabbles","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Why Does Julia Work So Well?","text":"\"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of X\" is a reference to the well-known 'the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences'. It's turned into some sort of meme. Maybe you've seen 'the unreasonable effectiveness of recurrent neural networks' before. What you were referring to is a talk by a core developer at JuliaCon 2019 titled 'The unreasonable effectiveness of multiple dispatch' [1], which has less of a fanboy-vibe imho. Edit: Oh. I didn't notice the arstechnica article had this exact title. That's a bit cheap... [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25720638,"author":"dandanua","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Quick Overview of Julia language [pdf]","text":"Indeed, Julia's abstract type system with multiple dispatch is its killer feature. It enables generic programming in a beautiful and concise fashion. Here [1] Stefan Karpinski gives some explanations of why multiple dispatch is so effective. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26137896,"author":"krastanov","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?","text":"Julia's model is based around multimethods, which enables pretty crazy levels of interoperability (imagine being able to use scipy and tensorflow together, with tensorflow's autograd just magically working on most of scipy's functions). More about it here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kc_Jq42Og7Q":[{"hn_comment_id":18333406,"author":"colllectorof","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app","text":">Remove the YOU from social media, and use it to have fun about whatever it is you do to have fun, and it can actually be ... fun. This doesn't change the fact that 99% of things people give credit for to social media can be easily done without mediation through a multi-billion dollar corporation. Neither does it change the fact that Twitter and Facebook have a whole slew of horrible social effects. Centralization of the web, political polarization, emergent mobs trying to ruin people's lives, rise in depression and suicide rates, normalization of global surveillance, normalization of censorship, etc, etc. Jaron Lanier has some interesting thoughts on the economy behind some of this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19041053,"author":"randomsearch","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach","text":"Couple of points people are missing: - The biggest problem with Facebook in terms of immediate impact is not loss of privacy, though that\u2019s real. It\u2019s behavioural manipulation, which has lots of very negative outcomes for you as a user as well as society. Don\u2019t think you\u2019re not been manipulated, you are, and you are susceptible to it. Your behaviour and emotions are negatively impacted by the fact you use facebook. - This is not \u201ccapitalism\u201d or \u201cconsumer voting with their money\u201d. Firstly, due to network effects Facebook has a monopoly on their kind of product. The choice is Facebook vs no facebook. Second, the currency is time and attention to sell ads. Finally, most people are addicted to social media by design and it\u2019s arguable whether they have a truly free choice. Is a gambling addict voting with their feet? The gambling addict knows they won\u2019t win and usually knows they\u2019re addicted; social media addicts people very subtly and manipulates you over time. Few people would admit to being addicted, but if you really think you\u2019re not - fine, if it\u2019s no big deal then just take a month off from social media and see what happens. Good summary is Jaron Lanier\u2019s interview [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kd2KEHvK-q8":[{"hn_comment_id":20205951,"author":"ziddoap","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?","text":"There is a really well put together video[1] by a YouTuber, who goes by the name of Lemmino, covering this topic (among others). I highly suggest it if this story interests you! And if you like his style, his Cicada 3301 video is also a fascinating watch. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23598534,"author":"1_player","month":"2020-06","story_title":"One-fifth of Earth's ocean floor is now mapped","text":"If, like me, you needed a refresher about flight MH370, I wholeheartedly recommend this video by LEMMiNO: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28625639,"author":"1_player","month":"2021-09","story_title":"New search for MH370 greatly enhanced by breakthrough flight tracking results","text":"I'll never pass the opportunity to share the documentary \"The Vanishing of Flight 370\" by LEMMiNO whenever appropriate: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"kdsb2wwn-7g":[{"hn_comment_id":15160138,"author":"Baeocystin","month":"2017-09","story_title":"As Bike-Sharing Brings Out Bad Manners, China Asks, What\u2019s Wrong with Us?","text":"I found this video by ex-pat YouTuber Serpentza to be quite informative on the issue, and he has been living in China for long enough to have an insider's perspective. Well worth a watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15205383,"author":"Baeocystin","month":"2017-09","story_title":"China builds world\u2019s largest EV charging network with 167,000 stations","text":"? Yes they do. It's a real problem. There are a lot of people working to make things better, but there is a lot of work to be done. I find this fellow's assessment accurate, if you want a brief overview. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16277282,"author":"edaemon","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Uber Bike \u2013 A New Way to Commute or Explore","text":"I've never used one myself but I've seen a lot of criticism of the Chinese implementation of dockless shared bikes. Here's a video that summarizes the problem: [VIDEO] (you only need to watch a few minutes to get the idea) The purpose is to have them everywhere so they're easy to find, but that's also the problem -- if you have too many companies involved, or an irresponsible company involved that just dumps bikes in the city, there are too many bikes. Bikes get left on sidewalks, in streets, in parks, etc. The docked bike share systems don't have that problem because you have to return them to a designated location, but obviously it makes the bikes less ubiquitous. Portland has a pretty good system where there are many stations, but if a station is full you can lock it at a nearby public rack for free (the station knows it's full). You can also drop it off at any random public rack in the service area for $2. The app tells you where all the available bikes are: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"kfM-yu0iQBk":[{"hn_comment_id":28659968,"author":"high_byte","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Visualize 3D hyperbolic honeycombs and sphere packings","text":"[LINK] and a good sandbox is [LINK] and you should consider unity too, this is a good tutorial but also lots of good info about graphics in general: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30364881,"author":"honkycat","month":"2022-02","story_title":"The harsh truth of video games programming","text":"For procedural animation: I have yet to find the path to learning this skill. It is very opaque, and I think you just need to attack it with your brain and learn it. For shader and graphics programming: I liked this tutorial series as a \"first steps\" by Freya Holm\u00e9r: [VIDEO] Here is another list: [LINK] The Book of Shaders is a popular suggestion, but it appears to be abandoned: [LINK] For general Unreal? Tom Looman's $300 Unreal C++ class, available on his website. It is pricey but really excellent. I also discovered this AWESOME list of learning paths for all gamedev concepts: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43668943,"author":"FjordWarden","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Shadertoys Ported to Rust GPU","text":"I've always enjoyed watching The Art of Code[1], Freya[2] also has a good number of videos on it. But that is just vertex shaders for things like Shadertoys. There is much more to computer graphics or GPGPU than this though, Im still learning about that myself X). [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kfg_e6YG37U":[{"hn_comment_id":12653034,"author":"threepipeproblm","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Posture \u2013 what do you do during work to avoid back pain?","text":"As someone who has made huge progress on posture over a long period of time, my first recommended steps for you would be: 1. Watch the \"Deskbound\" Google Talk by Kelly Starett [VIDEO] 2. Read and do the exercises in Awareness Through Movement by Moshe Feldenkrais. 3. Get into the habit of wiggling and shifting your body throughout the day. And get into the habit of devoting regular time to being more conscious of where your muscles are and how you are using them. 4. Trigger Point Therapy is amazing for self-treating body pain, if you are willing to experience short bursts of pain during the treatment.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4993732,"author":"chhunsguns","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Fixing the computer guy posture [pdf]","text":"Here's another useful resource regarding posture and sitting [1] by Kelly Starrett, who's probably well-noted in strength training circles for his MobilityWOD project. He explains how to sit and provides guidance on several related topics such as shoulder/hip mobility and hydration. He also illustrates some massages and stretches you can do to take care of your junk through hours of prolonged sit-and-keyboarding. For what its worth, I've been following along with his MobilityWOD project [2] for some time and it has immensely helped with my strength training pursuits. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5720612,"author":"paydro","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Apparently standing desks can hurt too","text":"Love Starrett! He also did a talk at Google ( [VIDEO] ) and near the end someone asks about stand up desks. The problem the author has might not be due to the standing desk but more with his posture. The standing desk probably exacerbated the problem.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23667484,"author":"cesarosum","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Has anyone fixed their own bruxism?","text":"I suffered from mild bruxism about 10 years ago and have had several bouts of TMJD where I couldn\u2019t close one side of my jaw. For me, the key has been poor posture induced by stress; these bouts coincide with heavy laptop and mobile phone use (neck angle forward and down). What fixed it for me was switching to a good desktop set-up whenever possible and self-treatment via Kelly Starrett\u2019s Becoming A Supple Leopard (there is whole section in the second edition on neck and jaw). He has good general advice in this video as well - [VIDEO] I haven\u2019t used the mouthguard now in probably 5 or more years.","stance":"rec"}],"kgCUn4fQTsc":[{"hn_comment_id":47060960,"author":"dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card","text":"He was unfairly labelled as a lunatic early on. I'd implore anyone reading this thread to see what he had to say for yourself and form your own opinion: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31888404,"author":"antoniuschan99","month":"2022-06","story_title":"LaMDA\u2019s sentience is nonsense","text":"He went on Bloomberg with Emily Chang to discuss it. It\u2019s a good interview, he doesn\u2019t come off as weird. He said Google won\u2019t allow LaMDA to undergo a Turing test and it\u2019s hardcoded to say it\u2019s an AI but Google won\u2019t even allow them to ask it in the first place. A more important thing he points out is AI Ethics, and his worry why Google keeps firing them. A comment on the youtube video sums his concerns the best: \u201cThe AI sentience debate is a distraction to the real problem. He risked losing his job because he feared that Google is preventing AI ethics research from happening, which could amount to \u2018AI colonialism\u2019.\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31921207,"author":"jaggs","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Humans made AI go sentient","text":"Interesting how coherent 'the engineer' is, despite being labelled and insulted around the world. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kh88fVP2FWQ":[{"hn_comment_id":29990417,"author":"deanCommie","month":"2022-01","story_title":"How the Native American population changed since the last census","text":"CGP Grey made a very convincing video on the argument that at least in the US, unexpectedly enough, \"Indian\" is probably the most appropriate term to use for Native Americans for a multitude of reasons: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23840580,"author":"lelandbatey","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The Lost Art of Growing Blueberries with Fire","text":"Many of the first people of what is now known by many as the United States prefer the label of \"Indian\" over the label \"Native Americans\". A very excellent (if also very \"edutainment\") exploration of labels and the label of \"Indian\", based on conversation with people who identify as \"Indians\", can be viewed here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33484262,"author":"currydove","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Indian Air Force inducts natively developed light combat helicopter \u2018Prachanda\u2019","text":"Tl;Dr: it's tricky. and because it's not that simple. I don't know your background and maybe you're from a first nation or tribe, but there isn't a common agreement between the populations of existing tribes and nations on what is offensive or incorrect. This isn't to say that any term is acceptable, but Indians, however incorrectly labeled by a colonizing group a few hundred years ago, is literally how some choose to identify themselves here in North America. I say this as someone from India and event there, there isn't a common agreement or knowledge to arrive at an \"inoffensive\" term for folks who live here. Most just use the descriptor left by the British and say \"Red Indians\" with no malice implied. this was interesting to watch - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38179302,"author":"daveslash","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Maine's Constitution Has Unprintable Sections","text":"I'd be a bit reluctant to quickly judge someone's exposure to the various terminology around this topic. CGP Grey has a good video on the terminology as used in the US [0]. From the video: \" Talking to people over the last [sigh] 5 years revealed a strong correlation: the closer a person had ever been to a reservation, the more likely they would be to use the word 'indian'. The farther, the more likely they would be to use the word 'Native American'. \" and also \"At the time of writing [this video/2019], 'Indian' is used by Indians on Indian reservations to describe themselves\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kixAljyfdqU":[{"hn_comment_id":16310945,"author":"doctoboggan","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Three Meanings of E=mc\u00b2","text":"The YouTube channel PBS SpaceTime gives an excellent overview of these same ideas. The presenter is great at making things as simple as possible, but not simpler. [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30015365,"author":"alsonote","month":"2022-01","story_title":"What sonic black holes say about real ones","text":"Electrons' mass is a little strange, in my (limited) understanding. The Standard Model predicts that electrons should be massless, but they gain mass (or maybe easier to say, \"massiness\") through interactions with the Higgs field. This effectively creates a constant \"drag\" on electrons, giving them a kind of inertia or \"mass\". I think this video does a good job explaining it, much better than I could: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30810123,"author":"Tomte","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Mounting evidence for a 95 GeV Higgs boson","text":"> There are a few bad explanations about the Higgs boson floating around. I hate all of them. What's your opinion on the PBS spacetime explanation? [VIDEO] I've discovered the channel only recently, and have been binge-watching since.","stance":"rec"}],"kjBOesZCoqc":[{"hn_comment_id":13451674,"author":"wyc","month":"2017-01","story_title":"How a Kalman filter works, in pictures (2015)","text":"Wow, this lecturer is great! I think this is the most intuitive explanation of Kalman filters I've seen yet. I've seen other lecturers try to quickly jump into state space and lose students with big matrices. I would have paid good money for this if I wasn't already familiar with the material. The clarity is up there with The Essence of Linear Algebra: [VIDEO] Trading math videos on the Internet--definitely nerds.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14116824,"author":"Double_Cast","month":"2017-04","story_title":"No bullshit guide to linear algebra \u2013 v2","text":"Fror a high-level overview of linear algebra, 3Blue1Brown's youtube series I cannot recommend highly enough. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15286021,"author":"makmanalp","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Special Linear Systems and Cholesky Factorization for Programmers","text":"For linear algebra basics, I also especially recommend 3Blue1Brown's youtube channel and his \"Essence of\" series: [VIDEO] I've never seen the material presented more clearly - it's completely visual and focused on building intuition first.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15865988,"author":"hexane360","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Down with Determinants (1995)","text":"If anyone's looking for a (high level) overview of linear algebra, I'd highly recommend 3blue1brown's video series: [VIDEO] It's mostly graphical, and is really helpful in forming and cementing an intuition for linear algebra.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16562427,"author":"dvddgld","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How to self-learn math?","text":"Two quick things I can recommend without hesitation, which focus on an intuitive understanding of concepts: 1. Essence of Linear Algebra mini-series - [VIDEO] 2. Better Explained website - [LINK] YouTube has a lot of high quality math content, it definitely helped through university. It's also worth mentioning the Stanford U courses. The main takeaway I have for you is learn the concepts intuitively first, then spend the time to play around with them on paper until they sink in. Some things will be easy, some will be frustrating, much like programming you will walk away from a frustrating problem and have an epiphany while doing something completely different. All the best and have fun!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13041491,"author":"c3534l","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Matrix Multiplication","text":"It at least cuts down on the amount of time you have to explain the mechanics of it. This is more intuitive to memorize than an algorithm composed of bullet-point instructions. For intuition, I highly recommend [VIDEO] - I think both the intuition and practicing the details should be learned.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13632948,"author":"espeed","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Why does e to pi i equal -1? (2015) [video]","text":"See the \"Essence of Linear Algebra\" (visualized) by the same author -- it should give you more intuition into the nature of the transformations: Essence of Linear Algebra [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13638741,"author":"espeed","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Big Picture of Calculus (2010) [video]","text":"Have you seen the Essence of Linear Algebra video series posted to HN a few days ago? Seeing the geometric transformations animated gives you intuition hard to develop otherwise: Essence of Linear Algebra (visualized) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14174169,"author":"afarrell","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you unwind at the end of a day?","text":"Ooooh, these are nice. Here are mine: Extra History: stories of historical incidents \u2014 [LINK] Real Engineering: mostly materials science \u2014 [LINK] - Wendover Productions \u2014 mostly transportation - [LINK] Tom Scott: a bit of everything \u2014 [LINK] - Jay foreman: Urban planning and maps \u2014 [LINK] The Engineer Guy: Manufacturing \u2014 [LINK] Practical Engineering: Mostly Civil Engineering \u2014 [LINK] 3Blue1Brown: Math, visualized to me more intuitive \u2014 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15931809,"author":"skadamat","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Communicating Advanced Mathematics to Kids","text":"So many things I could say about this, but I\"ll let Alan Kay speak for me - [LINK] Alan talks about how ideas in Calculus could be manifested from an early age and a richness in understanding built up as they aged up: - at very young ages, kids really respond well through \"doing\" / the enactive channel. When asked to draw a circle, kids in Papert's group would first emulate what a LOGO turtle would do by rotating their body in a circle (making tiny increments in x and y). - as they got a bit older, the visual / iconic channel was more developed and they could understand the abstraction of a circle on pencil/paper and how the concepts carried over there - closer to early teens, symbols were much easier to grasp and relate to, etc. With this context in mind, there have been some cool efforts to mix the second and third channels I just mentioned to communicate advanced math concepts. Vi Hart and Grant Sanderson's youtube channels come to mind. Here are my favorite videos by Grant: - \"What does it feel like to invent math\": [LINK] - On the visual intuition behind a hard problem on the Putnam exam - \"The hardest problem on the hardest test\": [LINK] - From vectors to matrices to vector spaces to higher-level ideas like the link between linear algebra and calculus: \"Essence of linear algebra\" series: [VIDEO] What I especially like about Grant's videos, is that he often walks through what a mathematician would do, the questions she would ask, etc.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15946400,"author":"dyarosla","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Matrices from a geometric perspective","text":"For an article like this I find that static visualizations aren't anywhere near as effective as dynamic ones found in a similar explanation here (3Blue1Brown on Linear Algebra Transformations) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16562324,"author":"hiaux0","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How to self-learn math?","text":"+1 And definitely follow through his \"pause and ponder\" sections. If you want to build up your maths skills, it is crucial to learn how to think in the maths way. Like becoming a good programmer involves writing lots of code yourself, or to become a good dancer you need to practice your steps. For maths it's abstract thinking. Appreciation of maths is one thing, having the discipline to self-study a whole other. Edit. Regarding your 2nd Edit: His videos are made for the broadest audience possible. I'd recommend picking any video whose topic interests you the most at the moment. You will see what knowledge you lack (take notes of these!) and can expand from there. Be it to watch his maths fundamental ((1)) series [0],[1] or just rewatch. ((1)): As in any other things, knowing your fundamentals is significant to the understanding of a topic. It won't help you at all if you can apply (copy paste) some machine learning techniques if you don't know about linear algebra at all. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"klTjiXjqHrQ":[{"hn_comment_id":15565912,"author":"skadamat","month":"2017-10","story_title":"The HARC First Year Report","text":"Highly recommend Bret's 2 talks for context: [1] Seeing Spaces: [VIDEO] [2] Humane Representation of Thought: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14509064,"author":"skadamat","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?","text":"It's going to be entirely different I feel. Instead of manipulating graphics on a flat screen, focus will probably be on manipulating physical objects on a table / in a room. Watch his 2 talks that highlight the thinking and inspiration behind the RealTalk project: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18223107,"author":"mitchtbaum","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"on one level, yes on another, they're down right scary and overwhelming, or at least dumbfounding and perplexing ..thinking specifically about The Humane Representation of Thought [LINK] I had to stop it half way through.. :-/ see also Seeing Spaces [VIDEO] and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34487952,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?","text":"For the people asking who is Bret Victor: When \"What are your favourite tech talks of all time?\" is asked on HN, he gets more mentions than anyone else, usually. Some of his talks: Inventing on Principle [LINK] The Future of Programming [LINK] The Humane Representation of Thought [LINK] Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [LINK] Seeing Spaces [VIDEO] Drawing Dynamic Visualizations [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"klaJqofCsu4":[{"hn_comment_id":25822217,"author":"MrGilbert","month":"2021-01","story_title":"The Dubai Lamp: The \u201cWorld\u2019s Most Efficient\u201d LED Light Bulb","text":"I think this one here appeared because it's been featured on hackaday recently[1], which got featured there because Youtube channel \"bigclivedotcom\" made a video about them[2], which blew through the roof because of some Youtube-algorithm-doodads? Compared to his recent other videos, this really stands out in terms of views. (Although I can really recommend the channel). Anyways, the main thing is that these lamps use more filament-strips than usual led bulb, thus allowing them to run cooler and last longer. Unfortunately, they are only available in Dubai (afaik). [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26142468,"author":"foxhop","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ercot nearly at capacity for Texas power grid","text":"I love my incandescent bulbs. It is a threat to remove them. The heat they produce is amazing in the winter. I use a 100 watt bulb to keep me warm at my desk. Heat bodies not buildings. I've been practicing this since a child and I'm 36 now. To heat yourself, check out: [LINK] For actual good LED lamps (not the crap they push in USA) check out: [VIDEO] TLDR most LED lamp are running over spec which cause them to fail and become a commodity rather than infra. I had a rear projection DLP LED TV which ran its red LED over spec and it burned out at least 3 times as fast as the green and blue. [LINK] The heat is not always just a byproduct, sometimes you need or want the heat. Compare this 100 watt bulb to a tiny space heater and you will see the difference in your electricity bill. Buy a \"kill a watt\" meter to start testing you appliances rather assuming incandescent is evil.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29300395,"author":"asddubs","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Upgrading the soldered-on RAM of a Dell XPS13 7390 laptop","text":"although it certainly is true these days, that the average LED based bulb is pushing those LEDs hard, which incidentally also makes them less efficient, rather than just using more of them at the same wattage. Check out the dubai lamp to see a lamp designed to be efficient and last: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35013048,"author":"adolph","month":"2023-03","story_title":"LEDs from Dubai: The Royal Lights You Can\u2019t Buy","text":"2021, cited source material comes from the always awesome Big Clive YouTube Channel. bigclivedotcom: The lamps you're not allowed to have. Exploring the Dubai lamps: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36230389,"author":"shagie","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)","text":"There are a lot of cheap, poorly designed LED bulbs that put heat stress on critical components. Technology Connections : A troubling trend in lighting? - [LINK] (It goes into how a number of LED bulb failures are because the lamp wasn't able to dissipate heat from the electronic components. It also shows how some higher quality LED bulbs are made so that they dissipate heat better - they don't make as much heat as an incandescent bulb, but there is still some and that is the cause of a lot of failures.) The lamps you're not allowed to have. Exploring the Dubai lamps - [VIDEO] is also interesting. They have a different design and it gets into the electronics.","stance":"rec"}],"klpDHn8viX8":[{"hn_comment_id":21664576,"author":"bentona","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Hologram Within a Hologram Hints at Fate of Black Holes","text":"Here's a video that made me feel like I almost half-way understood one of the main underlying principles (AdS/CFT correspondence) [VIDEO] re: \"Following the discovery of this duality by Juan Maldacena\" Semi-unrelated: If you like articles like this, I bet you'll love that whole channel.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22143013,"author":"Khaine","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Gravity: We might have been getting it wrong","text":"PBS Space Time have done a number of episodes on the holographic principle[1] I strongly recommend anyone interested in physics check out the channel [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21666616,"author":"bentona","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Information Is Physics","text":"There's a lot here but this specifically talks about AdS/CFT which seems to be a pretty core concept [VIDEO] Just linked this on a similar information theory thread [1] (glad it's so popular on HN right now!) 1: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"kmFOBoy2MZ8":[{"hn_comment_id":15249748,"author":"leanthonyrn","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Asteroid Mining Is Our Best Hope for Colonizing Mars","text":"Highly recommended video on Colonizing Mars by Isaac Arthur [VIDEO] Equally amazing Asteriod Mining by Mr. Arthur [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15039657,"author":"devrandomguy","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About","text":"Perfect timing! Isaac Arthur just kicked off Outward Bound with an in depth look at colonizing Mars. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22225132,"author":"keanzu","month":"2020-02","story_title":"James Lovelock: 'I Would Not Waste My Fortune on Colonizing Mars'","text":"The sum total of human activity in the last 100 years also eclipses the sum total of all human activity prior (300k years worth). Humanity didn't do a lot for a long time. But yes, Mars would be a mega project. Isaac Arthur does great stuff on Youtube which gives an idea of the magnitude of the works necessary. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34064651,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2022-12","story_title":"What ever happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?","text":"The Sun radiates about 400 trillion trillion Watts in all directions, and only a couple of billionths of it crosses Earth. There's a lot more radiant energy spreading out into the void waiting to be Dyson Swarmed. There's no way we're going to rocket launch billions to Mars, and there isn't another planet worth living on without unreasonable amounts of energy for Terraforming. But we are capable of rebuilding the atoms of Earth into much larger living environments - there are so many atoms it wouldn't mean destroying the Earth to do it. A Space Elevator doesn't need diamond nanowire, it could be built with enough steel chain. An orbital ring around the Equator would be enormous and would take approximately nothing of the Earth's matter to construct. Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel is full of speculation and plans for all kinds of possible or nearly-possible futures, as well as more distant dreams. e.g. the playlists: - \"The future of Energy, Industry and Agriculture\" - [LINK] - \"Earth v2.0\" - [LINK] - \"Outward Bound\" - near-Earth space exploration and living - [VIDEO] - \"Visions of Earth\" - arcologies, megacities, ecumenopolises, geoengineering, weather control - [LINK] And somewhere in there, megastructures such as Dyson Spheres, ringworlds, etc.","stance":"rec"}],"knUitQQnpJo":[{"hn_comment_id":11921324,"author":"insertnickname","month":"2016-06","story_title":"PG Casts \u2013 Postgres Screencasts","text":"For this, I highly recommend this tutorial by Christophe Pettus from PyCon: [VIDEO] It covers the basics of setting up Postgres as well as other things.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12470200,"author":"elmigranto","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Things I Hate About PostgreSQL (2013)","text":"I found this to be great introductory that touches on all the major points to keep in mind with Postgres. It's pretty up-to-date too! [VIDEO] It isn't quite what you ask for, but should be enough to get you high-level overview of major systems and contains solid practical advices (on vacuuming, mvcc, replication, backups, etc\u2026), so you know what to google for deeper understanding.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12353755,"author":"ceyhunkazel","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Practical Guide to PostgreSQL Optimizations","text":"I recommend following Christophe Pettus - PostgreSQL Proficiency for Python People - PyCon 2016 video for postgresql basics and optimization [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"knbVWXzL4-4":[{"hn_comment_id":29465746,"author":"Kim_Bruning","month":"2021-12","story_title":"In 2019 40% of San Francisco traffic fatalities are from left turns","text":"Here's a link to some traffic light systems that you can trust most of the time. But nothing is perfect, so you're still required to pay attention yourself too, of course. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34050828,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2022-12","story_title":"P-22 Has Died","text":"See the youtube channel Not Just Bikes[1], specifically videos like - \"Why the Dutch wait less at traffic lights\" - [VIDEO] argues that American traffic engineering is optimised for car movement, at the expense of pedestrians and bikes, whereas Dutch traffic engineering is to minimise conflict between vehicles and maximise movement of people overall. Leading to more complex but more efficient intersections. - \"The Dutch solution for safer sidewalks - continuous sidewalks\" - [LINK] has crossings at junctions where cars and people intersect designed so the cars visibly have to travel over the sidewalk through the people's area, instead of designed so the people have to visibly travel over the road, through the car's area. - \"Crossing the street shouldn't be dangerous, but it is\" [in North America] - [LINK] talking about length of crossings on wide road, traffic signals, priorities, etc. [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"koTf7u0v41o":[{"hn_comment_id":27483997,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Beware of Tight Feedback Loops (2020)","text":"This guy has had a few talks at CppCon over the years, and covers the basics of how to attempt benchmarking with actual computer science instead of myth and voodoo rituals: [VIDEO] In practice, it's not critical to go that far. In my experience, huge performance wins are trivial to benchmark with just a modicum of effort, and tiny performance wins are typically not worth any effort at all. At FAANG scale they might be, but I don't work at a FAANG, so not my problem! :) Simple methods I use and can recommend are: - Ideally, collect data from production, where the change behaves exactly as it would in production because it is production! - Interleave tests on the same machine. E.g.: A, B, A, B, A, B, etc... - Run tests on every machine you can get your hands on over an extended period and draw a histogram or a scatter chart of some sort. You don't have to do this at 100% load, it's actually better to mix this in with normal workloads. This gives you an idea of the noise versus signal, platform variance, variation due to time of day, etc... - Run tests after a cold boot to get a sense of worst-case performance instead of idealised and often unrealistic \"hot loop\" performance. - Run tests with different input sizes and draw a graph. Try find the explanation for every feature of the graph. - Be aware of every cache layer in the system. Don't forget about the potentially huge RAM or SSD cache of the storage subsystem. Typical SAN arrays now have 256 GB or more. The previous graph a","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29756521,"author":"captaincrowbar","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Finding your home in game graphics programming","text":"The term you're looking for might be \"abstraction penalty\". For tools that can identify where the bottlenecks are, I recommend watching Emery Berger's talk \"Performance Matters\" from CppCon 2020 (either of the two links below should work). He introduces some innovative new profiling tools for this sort of analysis. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"kpk2tdsPh0A":[{"hn_comment_id":11767863,"author":"meanduck","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Flappy Bird Clone Code Injected into Super Mario World for SNES by Hand","text":"This[1] was mentioned in its other thread. Not related to programming but the amount of thought process went into it is just amazing. [1] \"SM64 - Watch for Rolling Rocks - 0.5x A Presses (Commentated)\" : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12558905,"author":"baconomatic","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Super Mario 64 \u2013 1996 Developer Interviews","text":"If you're at all interested in speedruns, this is a great video that takes it to the extreme for Super Mario 64: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14451548,"author":"joshguthrie","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Jailbreaking Super Mario World to Install a Hex Editor and Mod Loader [video]","text":"Pannenkoek2012 is both genius and crazy awesome at the same time. Its video \"0.5x A Key Presses\" provoked a riot in video game circles some times ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18074928,"author":"kchoudhu","month":"2018-09","story_title":"'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record","text":"Did you ever see this one? [VIDEO] This guy literally has a PhD in SM64. It's insanely complicated, and surprisingly lucid.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24017436,"author":"ruytlm","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Spherical Geometry Is Stranger Than Hyperbolic","text":"At 5:45[0] in that video, he makes a reference to one of the greatest weird explanations of video game things ever: the explanation[1] of how to beat the Watch for Rolling Rocks level in Super Mario 64 with only half an A-press, which is highly worth a watch if you like this stuff about geometry. And if that was interesting, I also recommend the history of any percent speed runs for Super Mario Sunshine.[2] [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36726365,"author":"keepamovin","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Super Mario 64 \u2013 Watch for Rolling Rocks \u2013 0.5x a Presses [video]","text":"I kind of lost it at the point where he \"builds up speed for 12 hours\". AHAHA [VIDEO] His mind is so clear. I love how there's so many super super smart people on the internet! :)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40335588,"author":"RadiozRadioz","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Super Mario 64's unopenable door has been opened [video]","text":"I recommend this channel in general. He has extremely deep knowledge of the inner workings of the game, and presents it in an approachable way. Other classics: A 3 hour 45 minute deep dive into the game's infamous invisible wall bug (useful for understanding the linked video): [LINK] His most famous video, a summary of the extremely involved and complex methods required to beat a particular level using the lowest number of A button presses - in this case, 0.5 : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11391878,"author":"CM30","month":"2016-03","story_title":"The Rest Is Advertising \u2013 Confessions of a Sponsored Content Writer","text":"Depends what kind of info you're looking for. Are you looking for information on the current middle east geopolitical situation? Then not really. Same deal if you're looking for some sort of longform investigative journalism like the recent one about one of the Truecrypt founders. But if you're a web developer or programmer looking for information about the latest Javascript frameworks or what not, then yes. You're going to find better information in blogs and on social sites that on a mainstream news site or publication, because the former cares about the specific subject and the latter has to try and cover a wide range of things to less of a degree. And in gaming... well, the 'professional' journalism is terrible quality to begin with. The only sites that cover anything remotely interesting are fan or volunteer run, and the most interesting sources for gaming related media are indeed social media sites. You're not gonna find anything as in depth at this on most sites: [VIDEO] Even for more normal 'news' stuff, there are usually tons of free and fan run alternatives. For example, no one tries to get news about Pokemon from a mainstream source, because they've got other things to focus on and don't know a lot about gaming in general. Instead, they go to one of the many fan run sites, like Bulbanews or Serebii.net. This holds true for most gaming related niches, where there'll be a few sites that provide it directly (hours ahead of the mainstream media) then a flood of copycat","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14440331,"author":"MrJagil","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Jailbreaking Super Mario World to Install a Hex Editor and Mod Loader [video]","text":"Pannenkoek2012 does great breakdowns of SM64: [VIDEO] If you like this sort of stuff, reddit.com/r/speedrun can be fun to visit.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19935703,"author":"roryokane","month":"2019-05","story_title":"YouTube \u201cLet's Play\u201ds are preserving video game history","text":"There are Let\u2019s Plays that I think are better than others, but I don\u2019t think any of them, even the best of them, are popular enough to be part of gamer culture. However, the gameplay video that I think comes closest to leaving \u201ca mark in history\u201d is this single video by pannenkoek2012: [VIDEO] \u201cSM64 - Watch for Rolling Rocks - 0.5x A Presses (Commentated)\u201d. That\u2019s the only video I\u2019ve seen referenced in comments on videos of completely different games. The references are to \u201cparallel universes\u201d and \u201c0.5 A-presses\u201d, terms that are explained in this video. I don\u2019t know if you could call this video a Let\u2019s Play, though, since the commentary is recorded after the gameplay, it\u2019s not part of a larger playthrough of the whole game, and the video has custom-made animations to aid in explaining the game, not just raw gameplay footage. It\u2019s quite interesting, though, especially to a programmer. Among popular Let\u2019s Play series, one I recommend is the Achievement Hunter Minecraft Let\u2019s Play series: [LINK] . (Yup, they snagged the username \u201cLetsPlay\u201d.) In each episode, members of the Achievement Hunter group of players play some custom-made activity together in Minecraft. I don\u2019t like the personalities of the players/commentators that much, but the immense creativity of the challenges and the players\u2019 occasional funniness make it worth it. After 100 episodes it started getting repetitive though. A few other lesser-known Let\u2019s Plays I recommend: \u2022 Cryaotic\u2019s Undertale playthrough, Pacifist ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23666396,"author":"dx87","month":"2020-06","story_title":"GNU GCC does not round floating-point divisions to the nearest value","text":"For anyone else interested in similar tricks, here is an in-depth video where someone talks about getting a star with half a button press. It starts out straightforward enough, but eventually gets really interesting when they start talking about parallell worlds that you can only access by abusing bugs to reach unrealistic speeds. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24457794,"author":"devindotcom","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Super Mario Bros. 3 in 3 Minutes \u2013 World Record Speedrun Explained [video]","text":"This was interesting. I used to whine about doing this kind of glitched run, but it's just a different category of speedrun. Amazing to have that level of precision, though of course he must have done this hundreds, maybe thousands of times to get it right. If you like this kind of explanation be sure to watch the \"0.5 A presses\" Mario 64 speedrun video, which is equally interesting as far as getting into the hidden guts of the game: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29370034,"author":"bspammer","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Floating point visually explained (2017)","text":"I highly recommend watching this video, which explains floats in the context of Mario 64: [LINK] Games are a great way to explain floats because they're so visual. Specifically, check out 3:31, where the game has been hacked so that the possible float values in one of the movement directions is quite coarse. (If you're curious what a PU is, and would like some completely useless knowledge, this video is also an absolute classic and very entertaining: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"krB0enBeSiE":[{"hn_comment_id":27593786,"author":"michaelsbradley","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Brave Search beta","text":"Lex Fridman interviewed Brendan Eich earlier this year (a real gem of an interview, in my opinion). I found all of it interesting, but here's a timecode link where they begin to discuss the current era of \"browser wars\", technical aspects and history of privacy protections, ads, search, and how that's all related. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26150493,"author":"jcims","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Faster JavaScript Calls","text":"Lex Fridman just did a great podcast episode with Brendan Eich, credited with creating JavaScript. Lots of great little tidbits of history in the conversation - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26215642,"author":"onetom","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Choose Boring Technology (2015)","text":"Recommended \"literature\": 1. 10 Things I Regret About Node.js - Ryan Dahl - JSConf EU ( [LINK] ) 2. Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave | Lex Fridman Podcast #160 ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26330607,"author":"pmurt7","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling","text":"There was this wonderful podcast featuring Eich a few days ago: \"Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36785327,"author":"hnrodey","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript (1995)","text":"If this is exciting for you then you'll love this podcast with Brendan Eich. Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla and Brave. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"krfcq5pF8u8":[{"hn_comment_id":23453025,"author":"sdenton4","month":"2020-06","story_title":"America is giving up on the pandemic?","text":"Instead of expecting every commenter to live up to your standard of evidence - lest the entire movement be labelled an anti-intellectual mob - why don't you go get educated yourself? Here's a movie, Thirteenth, which VERY CLEARLY defines and examines structural racism in the criminal justice system in the US, and how it evolved directly from the systems of slavery and its sequel, Jim Crow. [VIDEO] This analysis and conversation has been building for literally decades. It's like showing up for the fifth week of an algebraic geometry class and calling it 'anti-intellectual' because you can't be bothered to pick up Euclid...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23501231,"author":"lm28469","month":"2020-06","story_title":"California bans private prisons and immigration detention centers (2019)","text":"There seem to be plenty of comments that are OK with private prisons. I highly recommend watching this documentary: [VIDEO] It will most likely change your mind.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27543119,"author":"lpa22","month":"2021-06","story_title":"After 50 years of the war on drugs, 'what good is it doing for us?'","text":"This documentary is an absolute must-watch and shows how devastating the war on drugs is and was from a race perspective [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23660137,"author":"joshuamorton","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first","text":"You're making a lot of (intentional or not) dogwhistles. So let's dive in to a few of them: > Blacks kill more blacks than any other race or ethinicity.[1] Blacks also kill more whites, than whites kill blacks in pure numbers. Indeed, let's rephrase this: races in the US continue to be relatively segregated[0]. And crimes, even violent ones, are usually committed within-community. So the meme around \"black on black violence\" is a bit of a distraction unless you also are concerned about \"white on white\" violence. And if you are, organizations like stop the violence[1] do exist to address specifically violence within the black community. So you start by stating true, but ultimately misleading claims that are often used to justify racial prejudice. Then, you justify this opinion with two videos from black people. Neither Larry Elder nor Denzel Washington is an expert on incarceration or the US justice system. Larry Elder, in fact, is a right wing political pundit, so his income relies on his viewership. This calls into question his reliability. I'd suggest you watch the documentary 13th[2] or read up on these issues from actual experts. But I'll spend some time breaking down his video: He starts by noting that white men and black men are killed by police at around the same rate. This is, again true. But this means that Black people are killed at around 5 times the rate of White people. Then he restates the whole issue of black on black crime, which we've already discussed. He th","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24155394,"author":"7sigma","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Feds say Yale discriminates against Asian, white applicants","text":"Its not just slavery, its jim crow, segregation, black people being systematically disadvantaged through racist policies like getting higher rates on loans despite having the same risk. Also: - the New Deal excluded black people - The GI Bill excluded black people etc... Slaves built a huge part of the economy for free and americans benefit from that work for which they were not compensated, so yes there absolutely should be reparations. I think this should be done in several ways: - monetarily: by funding scholarships and other projects to remedy the injustices perpetrated and help black americans accumulate some of the generational wealth they have been denied. Although at the end of the day, no amount of money will ever compensate for the hurt, death and atrocities, its a start. - education: teaching kids at school what slavery was really like, instead of what some of the schoolbooks teach (that slavery wasn't that bad for example). Teaching kids about systemic racism that persists to this day. - policing, housing, prisons: watch 13th documentary ( [VIDEO] ) its free on netflix (edit: spelling and formatting)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37322184,"author":"egonschiele","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Hundreds of thousands trafficked to work as online scammers in SE Asia","text":"This is not as simple as your argument makes it out to be. The US has a long history of imprisoning people so they can be used as slaves. Netflix has a good documentary on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ky1nGQhHTso":[{"hn_comment_id":42126786,"author":"ambyra","month":"2024-11","story_title":"A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)","text":"[VIDEO] Asianometry has a good one on this. They\u2019ve become dependent on US software (and hardware), and programming is considered a low prestige job.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49097247,"author":"smcleod","month":"2026-07","story_title":"KOReader","text":"Japanese software and software technology culture is amongst the worst in the world. They're famous for failing to adopt modern ways of working, tools and as an industry is seriously struggling. There's fantastic video in this from Asianometry: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"kya_LXa_y1E":[{"hn_comment_id":39224572,"author":"echelon","month":"2024-02","story_title":"In a 'Dark Dimension,' Physicists Search for the Universe's Missing Matter","text":"This [1] is a fantastic refutation of string theory in that the string theorists have taken more than their fair share of research dollars and public consciousness and that it's time for other branches of physics to get the funding. With limited resources, if you don't context switch, you starve everything else. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39756012,"author":"sockmeistr","month":"2024-03","story_title":"20 Years of \"Not Even Wrong\"","text":"I just wanted to second this recommendation - while the video is nearly an hour long, it feels much shorter and is well worth watching: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39753872,"author":"seanhunter","month":"2024-03","story_title":"20 Years of \"Not Even Wrong\"","text":"Agree but very much with your caveat. If you study the mathematics of some sort of abstract structure you are doing research in pure maths. That is a worthy and completely legitimate pursuit and a ton of stuff started life as pure abstract mathematical research and ended up having real-world benefits way down the line that noone could have forseen.[1] If on the other hand you say that abstract structure is a fundamental building block of the universe and, say, unifies the standard model with gravity etc but actually your theory isn't explaining anything observable I would say that isn't theoretical physics[2] but is just \"making shit up\". So far string theory has failed to produce any sort of verifiable prediction[3], so I just don't see how it's physics (you could say \"yet\" perhaps). I enjoyed the video \"String Theory Lied to Us and Now Science Communication is Hard\"[4] by Angela Collier, who is a computational astrophysicist[5], because it gives a sense for how these things impact other physicists and the popular perception of science. [1] And Ed Witten for example is without doubt a very impressive mathematician - he won the Fields medal. [2] Which is the science of matter, energy, space, time etc all the stuff which makes up the natural world. [3] In particular, the one that has been tried is supersymmetry and the LHC, as I understand it as a non-physicist, brought about an experimental result that called supersymmetric extensions of the standard model into serious doubt ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39758094,"author":"thaumaturgy","month":"2024-03","story_title":"20 Years of \"Not Even Wrong\"","text":"For those that have the time and interest, Angela Collier is a somewhat newer science communicator, and covers everything described in this reply (and more) at [VIDEO] . I don't have the knowledge needed to criticize or defend Dr. Collier's arguments, but Woit linked to her video at [LINK] , so he at least seems to appreciate it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39760601,"author":"nick238","month":"2024-03","story_title":"The humiliating truth behind Harvard astronomer's alien spherules","text":"Collier has a video on the history of string theory as a narrative and how it kinda tainted the public perception of high energy/particle physics: \"String theory lied to us and now science communication is hard\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41341678,"author":"johnkpaul","month":"2024-08","story_title":"The Elegant Universe: 25th Anniversary Edition","text":"I\u2019ve found this explainer by Angela Collier super helpful in understanding the current state of string theory. [VIDEO] I was a gigantic pop science fan and read The Elegant Universe when I was approximately 13 and am excited it\u2019s still being read even if it\u2019s not necessarily true about our universe. It\u2019s got the inspiration and excitement part that\u2019s all I really needed as a kid.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41811412,"author":"Shawnecy","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Fundamental physics is dying? [video]","text":"Exactly. Consistently untestable and unfalsifiable claims for decades has to be seriously questioned at some point, and I think we're well beyond that point. This is especially true for string theory. I'm particularly fond of how Angela Collier laid out the timeline of string theory in her video on it[0] as well as the consequences that science communication is now facing as a result. [0] = [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46623825,"author":"carrozo","month":"2026-01","story_title":"The string theory hype machine will never die","text":"not a physicist but this video by Angela Collier is a fun watch: \u201cstring theory lied to us and now science communication is hard. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"l0GA901oGe4":[{"hn_comment_id":12334474,"author":"raarts","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Guerrilla Bike Lanes in San Francisco","text":"This is an overview of how the Dutch do it as presented by a city planning guy from Seattle. Lengthy, but I was glued to the screen. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17714060,"author":"Vinnl","month":"2018-08","story_title":"New York\u2019s success provides road map for others taking aim at pedestrian deaths","text":"For those interested in this, I can highly recommend \"What Seattle can learn from Dutch street design\" [1]. It's a presentation that gives an overview of all sorts of small infrastructural measures, similar to the Queens Boulervard redesign, taken in the Netherlands to prevent traffic deaths. What makes it especially interesting is that e.g. rather than reducing the speed limit, cars are nudged to slow down through using different material for the road, or by simply making the road less wide. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7930222,"author":"narwally","month":"2014-06","story_title":"A New Bike Lane That Could Save Lives and Make Cycling More Popular","text":"Here's a great talk[1] about all the clever bike infrastructure in the Netherlands, and how it can be adapted to work in Seattle specifically. It's a great in depth look for anyone interested in this stuff, basically a tech talk for urban planning. Edit: Here's a similar talk[2] I just found talking about adopting Dutch traffic planning to work in Vancouver. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12685286,"author":"raarts","month":"2016-10","story_title":"The Dutch Reach: Clever Workaround to Keep Cyclists from Getting \u201cDoored\u201d","text":"For a pretty thorough description of how The Netherlands achieves safe biking, see this video: [VIDEO] \"Fred Young, a Landscape Architect based in Seattle, led us through a visual tour of Dutch cycling infrastructure, share insights of the transportation experts he met and show how cycling is a part of daily life in the Netherlands.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14427806,"author":"raarts","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Do We Overvalue Bike Lanes?","text":"OP makes some good points but should go on vacation in the Netherlands. Way ahead in road safety. For example: [LINK] Or more extensively: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17866422,"author":"Vinnl","month":"2018-08","story_title":"How the Dutch created a casual biking culture","text":"Relevant: what Seattle can learn from Dutch street design: [VIDEO] A presentation with a ton of examples of small infrastructural touches that make it safer to cycle in the Netherlands.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20603267,"author":"Vinnl","month":"2019-08","story_title":"What We Can and Can\u2019t Learn from Copenhagen","text":"This article might just as well have been about the Netherlands, so for those interested in this, you might also like this lecture discussing the many small measures taken in Dutch infrastructure to make cycling a safe and pleasant experience: What can Seattle learn from Dutch street design? [1] It helped me find out that apparently I'm a public infrastructure geek. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29305521,"author":"Vinnl","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Stroad","text":"Similar video (but then an hour long) that I always post together with that channel: What can Seattle learn from Dutch street design? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"l3whaviTqqg":[{"hn_comment_id":29524609,"author":"Isinlor","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Long-form info-dense videos on YouTube you would recommend to anyone?","text":"Everything from 3 blue 1 brown: [LINK] Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics): [LINK] history of the entire world, i guess: [LINK] TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K): [LINK] Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens. and Grabby aliens: when we'll meet them, how big they are, and other predictions [VIDEO] [LINK] Everyday Astronaut videos (he has 90 min documentary on Soviet rocket engine): [LINK] Cool Worlds - a lot of 25-35 min very nice astronomy explanations: [LINK] 'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31641017,"author":"BurningFrog","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Amino acids found in asteroid samples collected by Japan's Hayabusa2 probe","text":"Robin Hanson, who coined the term \"Great Filter\", presented a theory in 2021 to explain the Fermi Paradox. It's known as the \"Grabby Aliens Theory\". This 12 minute video does a good job of explaining the fairly non intuitive reasoning: [VIDEO] As I understand it (it's not an easy theory to wrap your - or at least my - mind around), the reason we don't see any other civilizations is that we're among the first ones. This seems very unlikely, but is actually not. Because a successful hi tech civilization would likely be inclined to expand (\"be grabby\") and fill up the galaxy in ~100 million years, as Fermi pointed out. That would mean all habitable planets would then be taken, and no more civilizations would rise up from primordial goo like ours. That means - and it's a weird mental leap, but I think it's correct - that almost all civilizations arising \"naturally\" would have the same experience we have: The universe seems weirdly empty. I guess it also means that the galaxy is ours for the taking!","stance":"rec"}],"l4dCJJFuMsE":[{"hn_comment_id":38829985,"author":"colund","month":"2024-01","story_title":"27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process","text":"Jobs talks about this in [VIDEO] . I wish more leaders understood this. I interpret his words that people who do, understand and care are more valuable than those who only focus on process and politics. Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26405641,"author":"KajMagnus","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Fuckin' user interface design, I swear","text":"Intereting talk :- ) \"Steve Jobs: Content vs Process\", [VIDEO] 3 minutes. I'd guess that it'd work better with a better-than-good-enough Benevolent Dictator who gets to improve the user interface however s/he wants, than to go looking for the \"magic\" UX improvement process","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30612431,"author":"edelans","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Low process culture, high process culture","text":"there is also this gold nugget from Steve jobs (there is no date, late 80s ?): [VIDEO] >\"Companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they wanna replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think somehow there is some magic in the process of how that success was created. So they try to institutionalize process accross the company, and before very long, people get very confused that the process is the content. And that's ultimately the downfall of IBM : IBM has the best process people in the world, they just forgot about the content.\" [...] >\"In my career, I found that the best people are the ones really understanding the content, and they are a pain in the butt to manage, but you put up with it bc they are so great at the content. And that's what makes great product : it's not process, it's content.\"","stance":"rec"}],"l6T9xIeZTds":[{"hn_comment_id":24564027,"author":"dayaz36","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Tesla says its battery innovations will deliver its goal of a $25,000 car","text":"Copy pasting previous comment since the number of people misrepresenting the ground breaking tech that was announced is to high to spend energy on: 1)56% reduction in cost (which blows way past the $100/kwh holy grail for EV to sub $40). This by itself is insane and most people in the industry thought it wont happen for at least another decade. This puts the last nail in the coffin for the future of ICE cars. 2) 54% increase in range. The new Model S will have minimum 520mi of range and much more actually when they start production. Range anxiety gone out the window. 3) New manufacturing tech along with vertical integration will allow Tesla to scale 55x their current rate of production and become the world's largest auto manufacturer by many multiples. Tesla will not only produce their own battery cells but they're even getting into mining!! Along with many other things announced in a 3+ hour technical video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27856735,"author":"clomond","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Tesla\u2019s new patent involves using table salt to mine lithium","text":"This is directly related to their set of battery day announcements [1]. Some of the key points from their battery day are: - focus on simplifying process from ore to EV in order to maintain cost declines per unit energy while enabling scale up - key to that is simplifying the lithium extraction process (noted patent for this thread), they spoke about the core of this patent before - getting enough factories constructed and dealing with expected limitations in raw material - reducing costs by simplifying manufacturing process / reducing parts - reduce parts by having bigger batteries (also more energy dense) and single casted sections of the vehicles - also interesting work on incorporating Si (which increases energy density) while solving the issue of cycle life when increasing Si ratio. Overall, for anyone even remotely interested in this space and this topic, I think it is an essential watch. [1] keynote starts at 33 mins [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27694016,"author":"maximus-decimus","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Tesla just announced a brand new car - a $25K hatchback","text":"The five times more energy dense and 6 times the power refers to the design explained on Tesla's Battery day. Seriously, they made a 2 hours presentation about it. Total nerd porn : [VIDEO] This really applies to the cells, not the battery itself, I think they just misunderstood. This is in comparison to the current design. They did that mostly by... making the cells bigger! I think the battery itself is 35% smaller because this removes the need for using tabs and the cell volume/surface area is greater. Also note that \"six times the power\" doesn't mean six times the range. Power is energy per unit of time so it really only tells you how fast you can use the energy in your battery (and I'm assuming how fast you can charge.)","stance":"rec"}],"l6XQUciI-Sc":[{"hn_comment_id":10353083,"author":"protomyth","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Things you can do with ZFS [video]","text":"Probably not, since that would have allowed someone to add GPL-only code to it which couldn't be distributed with the whole. The video is very good and you can follow-up with [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10568377,"author":"myztic","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Run containers on bare metal already [video]","text":"Amusing Interview with Bryan Cantrill (regarding his background and he also shares some stories) [VIDEO] Also very informative (about what happened at Sun in the 90s, dtrace, ...) Quite a funny and smart guy ;)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12344552,"author":"Gracana","month":"2016-08","story_title":"\u201cNode.js is one of the worst things to happen to the software industry\u201d (2012)","text":"This sounds like something straight out of the Unix Hater's Handbook. :) But epoll is not the fault of Unix. Linux gets it wrong, but others do not. There's a good (and wildly entertaining) discussion/rant about it in this BSD Now episode: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16303741,"author":"beefhash","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Talks I have given","text":"I also found the somewhat more casual BSDnow podcasts that featured Mr. Cantrill quite insightful[1,2,3]. He shows up around 15 or 30 minutes in. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"l70iRcSxqzo":[{"hn_comment_id":15698044,"author":"otoburb","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Mt. Gox Bankruptcy Wasn't Really a Bust","text":"If anybody wants the full sordid history from an investigative standpoint, check out Kim Nilsson's great writeups[1][2] and presentation[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16241161,"author":"stuxnet79","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange hacked, losing $530M: NHK","text":"Kim Nilsson's group have been investigating the Mt Gox incident for years and he gave a presentation some time ago that summarized some of their findings ( [VIDEO] ). One of the best summaries of the Mt Gox incident, as well as the fallout and subsequent investigations that I've watched.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19399311,"author":"pakitan","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Mark Karpeles Gets Suspended Jail Term","text":"Kim Nilsson's work is as good and unbiased as it comes and it pretty much explains everything you need to know about the missing coins: [VIDEO] [LINK] Btw, with your 350 coins, I hope you've already submitted a claim and are planning to vote on the upcoming Civil Rehabilitation plan.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15699593,"author":"jandrese","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Mt. Gox Bankruptcy Wasn't Really a Bust","text":"It is not unfair to say that the majority of Bitcoin exchanges to date have been either intentionally fraudulant or incompetently run. This includes MtGox. Here's a talk that discusses the financial situation at MtGox and the raging dumpster fire that its security system was when Mark Karpeles bought it. [VIDEO] It's hard to say if the poor security was due to a staggering level of inexperience and thoughtlessness, or if the previous owners had left it open so they could pilfer money as easily as possible before the whole house of cards collapsed. It's hard to imagine a financial services administrator leaving an unsecured Windows file share open to the Internet with all of the private keys on it, but somehow this was considered to be not a problem at MtGox.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26043309,"author":"Groxx","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider","text":"There's also this entertaining presentation from an outside researcher (tracing down the missing money) from 3 years ago (I don't know what's up with the framerate, but really, it's worth watching): [VIDEO] It's quite a rollercoaster of failures.","stance":"rec"}],"l7TONauJGfc":[{"hn_comment_id":31204973,"author":"kite_and_code","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: A genie appears. What do you wish for?","text":"Do you have hope that you will find it in the future? It seems like you did not find it yet? I am grateful that I found my key to love both with my spouse but also via being increasingly able to connect to all the other lovely persons and creatures (dogs,...) in my life :) But it was a long path for me. For me, I discovered it more and more after years of dancing Salsa, Bachata etc where the best teachers always focus on connection as well as leading and following. Those experiences together with regularly changing between the lead and the follow - while always being clear who plays which part - was the key for me. And also the book \"Hold me Tight\" gave me mental clarity which led to mental clarity for organizing the experiences that I had in my life before. It was a life-changing event for me when I learned about this. together with watching the following video (which I did 1 year before and practiced it regularly with my wife): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46520860,"author":"CuriousSkeptic","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Murder-suicide case shows OpenAI selectively hides data after users die","text":"A lot of NVC writing is pretty bad. I recommend going directly to the source [VIDEO] (3h video, but worth the time) I think NVC is better understood as a framework to reach deep non-judging empathic understanding than a speech pattern. If you are not really engaging in curious exploration of the other party using the OFNR framework before trying to deliver your own request I don\u2019t think you can really call it NVC. At the very least it will be very hard to get your point across even with OFNR if ot validating the receiver. Validation being another word needing disambiguation I suppose. I see it as the act of expressing non-judging emphatic understanding. Using the OFNR framework with active listening can be a great approach. A similar framework is the evaporating clouds of Theory of Constraints: [LINK] Also see Kants categorical imperative: moral actions must be based on principles that respect the dignity and autonomy of all individuals, rather than personal desires or outcomes","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20956910,"author":"CuriousSkeptic","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Are you ok?","text":"I can relate somewhat. Even with the 5 year mark. 19 years in, somewhere along the line it seems we learnt to understand and love each other. Just wanted to provide the data point, such a thing is possible. One thing that might be just the thing is to checkout the model of \u201cnon violent communication\u201d by Marshall Rosenberg. It\u2019s a nice way of framing things, especially with whom responsibility of feelings lie. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30412341,"author":"onion2k","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I develop skills to comfort people and offer compassion?","text":"I'd start with \"non-violent communication\" by Marshall Rosenberg. It's a communication technique. There's a book, but there's also a YouTube video that's a very good starting point. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30858594,"author":"sedocmiv","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Show Gratitude to a Coworker","text":"One approach that resonates with me is to use the NVC (non-violent communication) framework. How to express and receive gratitude with NVC: [LINK] Marshall talks about jackals and giraffes. In a nutshell, jackal language is what we all use everyday. Giraffe language is the language he is proposing we use to enable human connection. The full talk on NVC is here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32248841,"author":"roey2009","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?","text":"There's a discipline of communication called, Nonviolent Communication. [VIDEO] It talks about communication via emotions, vs thoughts. I would suggest taking a look.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34312781,"author":"contrapunctus","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Reverse Engineering TikTok's VM Obfuscation (Part 2)","text":"I often wonder the same thing. A similar aim was expressed in at least one of RMS' essays. The other comments here remind me of how pessimistic and lacking in imagination the tech crowd tends to be. Because earlier attempts failed, does that make an endeavor \"impossible\"/\"naive\"? People cite \"human nature\", but forget that there exist and have existed systems of living, radically different from what they are used to, which gave rise to completely different \"human nature\" - or perhaps merely gave it a healthier environment, so it manifested very differently. (This \"problem\" is frequently refuted in anarchist texts.) I'll leave some links which I think are relevant to this quest. I hope they provide some answers, or at least provoke further searching. 1. [LINK] 2. [LINK] 3. [VIDEO] 4. [LINK] I hope we find a way. And for those looking and trying to move beyond the status quo, I supply a maxim to bear in mind when facing the unimaginative and the complacent - \"It's always impossible until it's done.\"","stance":"rec"}],"l7rce6IQDWs":[{"hn_comment_id":20854082,"author":"dimator","month":"2019-09","story_title":"CPU Made from 74HC Chips Is a Glorious Mess","text":"Ben Eater did a video on driving a VGA display using a breaboard circuit. He builds up to it in his usual amazing teaching style, highly recommend: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22077951,"author":"Diederich","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Show HN: 1.5kb Microkernel for Ben Eater's 6502 Computer","text":"I'm actually more excited to see a new Ben Eater video on youtube than anything else. His stuff is just fantastic. Even though it's lower level than I've ever worked, it's extremely entertaining and educational. His 6502 series is just great, but I want to highlight another couple of videos he did: \"Let's build a circuit that displays an image on a VGA monitor! In this video, I talk about how VGA signals work and build a circuit that provides the correct timing of sync signals so that a monitor recognizes the signal.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22330486,"author":"MarioMan","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Brown: color is weird [video]","text":"Not the same thing, but you reminded me of this since it's in a similar vein. Ben Eater went through the entire process of building a VGA \"video card.\" Anyone with a basic understanding of logic circuits has enough background to understand it. Worth a watch. Part 1: [VIDEO] Part 2: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24661764,"author":"el_oni","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A trip through the Graphics Pipeline (2011)","text":"Maybe something like Ben Eater's video card series? [VIDEO] If i remember correctly he assembles a gfx card on a bread board. So its fairly fundamental","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24662852,"author":"dahart","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A trip through the Graphics Pipeline (2011)","text":"This one might be interesting to you: [VIDEO] \u201cThe world\u2019s worst video card?\u201d Ben builds a framebuffer display device on a bread board from scratch, you\u2019ll understand what every transistor does at a high level in an hour (don\u2019t miss part 2). That is abstractly what first principles graphics looked like some time ago - pixels were represented by a block of main memory, and the video system simply scanned that memory at the same frequency as the CRT monitor\u2019s beam. I\u2019d say it\u2019s pretty important to remember that what counts as \u201cfirst principles\u201d graphics has changed over time, and there was a time before frame buffers (the first Pong game was displayed on an oscilloscope) and the way we use framebuffers today is completely different - there is no more direct access to pixels in the same way old terminals used to work. The article here is detailing how we use a higher level API to draw higher level primitives, and the hardware takes care of the pixels. I\u2019d love to hear a little more about your goal... what\u2019s driving you to study the old terminals?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25288636,"author":"vishnuharidas","month":"2020-12","story_title":"NandGame \u2013 Build a Computer from Scratch","text":"Reminds me of Ben Eater's Youtube videos where he builds everything using basic gates on a breadboard. He made a video-card using ICs on a breadboard that fascinated me: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27194474,"author":"fowl2","month":"2021-05","story_title":"The Graphics Gremlin \u2013 An Open Source Retro ISA Video Card","text":"Even further to that end of the spectrum is \"The World's Worst Graphics Card\"[1] on a breadboard with mostly discrete logic. Fascinating. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27429954,"author":"caymanjim","month":"2021-06","story_title":"An interactive look at how a video signal is made","text":"Ben Eater has a great video[1] about building a video card from simple gates and other basic components. It goes into some detail about how a VGA signal is generated. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"l8XOZJkozfI":[{"hn_comment_id":15962542,"author":"CivBase","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Gerrymandering with geographically compact districts","text":"Gerrymandering is a problem because we have a poor voting system. I'm not sure if a single transferrable vote (STV) is the best system, but it would significantly reduce the benefit of gerrymandering (and probably result in better candidates from both parties). CGP Grey did a great video on STV: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13697545,"author":"LoonyBalloony","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Robots Aren\u2019t Killing the American Dream","text":"Elections were (IMO) meant to be bloodless revolutions. its just the 1% has captured both primary political parties. Also, the flawed first past the post electoral system discourages competition (IMO to keep it cheaper for the 1% to own the whole process). I'll post some videos from people smarter then me: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14215622,"author":"orthecreedence","month":"2017-04","story_title":"\u201cRestoring Internet Freedom\u201d Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [pdf]","text":"Support anyone who wants to get rid of FPTP voting and introduce a more representative voting system (ranked choice, for example). Right now, people have to vote for the least of two shitty candidates. Instead, we could vote for the ones who represent us the most without worrying about who will actually win. This won't fix corporate corruption, which is the underlying cause of the attack on net neutrality, but it will certainly make representatives more beholden to their voters. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18507505,"author":"thelasthuman","month":"2018-11","story_title":"The Second Half of Watergate Was Bigger, Worse, and Forgotten by the Public","text":"Elections are supposed to be bloodless revolutions. If you can't effect change through the electoral system, then the non violent solution is to revolutionize how we vote. Relevant videos (IMO) First Past The Post Voting - [LINK] Range Voting - [LINK] Single Transferable Vote - [VIDEO] Alternative Vote - [LINK] Mixed-Member Proportional Representation - [LINK] Bonus video This video will make you angry - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18620562,"author":"khr","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Commandeering Australian citizens to become spies","text":"erentz was probably referring to the single transferable vote system ( [LINK] ), which uses a ranked ballot in elections and results in relatively proportional representation. CGP grey explains it pretty well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19394303,"author":"lpolzer","month":"2019-03","story_title":"DARPA Is Building a $10M, Open-Source, Secure Voting System","text":"Now if only they would introduce something like Single Transferable Vote (entertaining CGPGrey video: [VIDEO] ), or another more effective voting system. Probably won't happen though, as it would seriously shake up politics as we know it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21326149,"author":"s_dev","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in New York City","text":"Ireland uses this appraoch. We call it STV. STV Explained -- [VIDEO] It just a better democracy because it's more representative. It's solves the \"wasted vote\" problem people have with democracy and why many democracies result in a two party system. This way it ensures your vote is counted and multiple parties exist.","stance":"rec"}],"l9ZqXlHl65g":[{"hn_comment_id":7212372,"author":"lingben","month":"2014-02","story_title":"Facebook Fraud [video]","text":"If you haven't yet watched Derek's earlier video about \"the problem with facebook\", you should: [VIDEO] because in it he lays bare several fundamental structural issues about facebook which 99% people don't realize. Well worth the watch. Unless fb changes drastically, it will die a surprisingly fast death.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8381761,"author":"lingben","month":"2014-09","story_title":"With New Ad Platform, Facebook Opens Gates to Its Vault of User Data","text":"facebook ads are junk and have been proven to be so before you waste any money, watch these two videos: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9442364,"author":"lingben","month":"2015-04","story_title":"The Bot Bubble: Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency","text":"for those interested in this topic these two excellent videos from veritasium corroborate this article and go beyond to explain the stark implications for facebook's business model: facebook fraud: [LINK] the problem with facebook: [VIDEO] > From January 2013 to February 2014, a global team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Microsoft\u2019s and AT&T\u2019s research labs, as well as Boston and Northeastern Universities, conducted an experiment designed to determine just how often advertising campaigns resulted in likes from fake profiles. The researchers ran ten Facebook advertising campaigns, and when they analyzed the likes resulting from those campaigns, they found that 1,867 of the 2,767 likes\u2014or about 67 percent\u2014appeared to be illegitimate. After being informed of these suspicions, Facebook corroborated much of the team\u2019s work by erasing 1,730 of the likes. Sympathetic researchers from a study run by the online marketing website Search Engine Journal have suggested that targeted Facebook advertisements can yield suspicious likes at a rate above 50 percent. In the fall of 2014, Professor Emiliano De Cristofaro of the University College of London presented research which found that even a page explicitly labeled as fake gained followers\u2014the vast majority presumably bots. > The bot buildup can even affect companies that aren\u2019t advertising with Facebook, but are just passively hoping their pages gain real fans. In 2014, Harvard University\u2019s Facebook fan","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14181295,"author":"lingben","month":"2017-04","story_title":"A Facebook bot purge clobbered USA Today","text":"for a fantastic expose of how facebook is riddled with fraud and bots, check out veritasium's two videos: facebook fraud [LINK] the problem with facebook [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7451941,"author":"vacri","month":"2014-03","story_title":"The Free Marketing Gravy Train Is Over on Facebook","text":"Ambiguous headline: 'over' meaning 'finished'? Or 'over' meaning 'located'? Veritasium has an interesting related video explaining some of the Facebook shennanigans where they withhold your posts from a large amount of your subscribers if you're popular, unless you pay them money: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7452203,"author":"lingben","month":"2014-03","story_title":"The Free Marketing Gravy Train Is Over on Facebook","text":"in case you haven't watched these videos from Veritasium yet: [VIDEO] [LINK] both videos show why facebook's model is inherently self-destructive and incoherent and will inevitably implode","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7638445,"author":"vacri","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Facebook earnings gain as ad sales surge 82%; CFO is stepping down","text":"Veritasium on youtube has a couple of videos breaking down the numbers - not only do you have to pay to get views now, but the views delivered above and beyond what you usually get are fraudulent. He showed the usage of his page beforehand, with users clustered in Western countries, generally 20-40% of whom interacted with his page in some way. After paying for more views, they were all from developing countries, a profile of users he'd never seen before with very little (0-1%) engagement with his page. It's worth checking out his videos if you want more detail on the patterns he found. It's pretty clear that it's fraudulent. [VIDEO] (explores problems he sees with FB as a marketing platform) [LINK] (massive influx of unengaged developing-world pageviews)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9201935,"author":"Veedrac","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Reasons not to use Facebook","text":"Since this seems to just be a braindump, I might as well add Veritasium's comments on the matter: [VIDEO] [LINK] I found them pretty interesting listening from a content-distribution and -consumption side of things, rather than from a social-network perspective.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10025857,"author":"lingben","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Why Facebook\u2019s video theft problem can\u2019t last","text":"facebook as a platform and business is hollow, but very few realize it. this is similar to Enron, Madoff, the financial crisis, Groupon, etc. history has shown that 99.99999% of people totally miss these business models that are built on a MASSIVELY fraudulent or hollow foundation. When the music stops thousands and thousands of gallons of pixels will be spilt trying to explain how nobody saw their collapse coming and why they are not to blame. Here are two videos that succinctly introduce the reality of facebook's mirage: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12440532,"author":"vacri","month":"2016-09","story_title":"How we unnecessarily burned 20k with Facebook Ads","text":"Derek Muller burned money on Facebook ads, and did an analysis showing that their metrics are flat-out horseshit. Definitely have a watch if you're considering spending on Facebook. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"l9ag2x3CS9M":[{"hn_comment_id":22070954,"author":"yborg","month":"2020-01","story_title":"U.S. Torpedo Troubles During World War II (1998)","text":"[VIDEO] One of the best visualizations I've come across of just how dominant the US industrial base was in the 1940s under full mobilization.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22069153,"author":"DuskStar","month":"2020-01","story_title":"U.S. Torpedo Troubles During World War II (1998)","text":"My understanding is that while the US losing her carriers at Midway would have allowed Japan free reign in the South Pacific for a few months, that was already the case for anywhere that all 6 fleet carriers showed up. Nothing the US had - combined, worldwide - could match those 6. Killing the US carriers at Midway was just to turn it from a 6v3 to a 6v0 - instead it ended up 2v2, but so goes war. Japan invading Hawaii would have caused a famine if they succeeded - it'd be even harder to keep supplied than Midway, but with dozens of times the population. In my opinion Midway marked the turning point of the war in the Pacific, but that turning point was inevitable as long as the US could credibly say \"we're going to commission 6 fleet carriers with a full suite of aircraft over a 12 month period\". There's a great video here [0] that illustrates the differences in production over the course of the war. For instance, the US commissioned 17 fleet carriers and 9 light carriers from 1941 on - Japan commissioned 7 and 1, respectively. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33604303,"author":"hirundo","month":"2022-11","story_title":"How the War Was Won","text":"I had no idea how asymmetrical naval production was in the Pacific theater of WWII until I watched this: [VIDEO] With these numbers the relative merits of the actual warfighters had little effect on the outcome. The war with Japan was won in U.S. shipyards.","stance":"rec"}],"lBVvnDfW2Xo":[{"hn_comment_id":26162363,"author":"8note","month":"2021-02","story_title":"What went wrong with the Texas power grid?","text":"For a full on description of how a good portion of furnaces, tech connections made a video not long ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26174277,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Analysis: Texas power outage leaves officials working political angles","text":"Yes, they do need need electricity. Source: I live in Ontario, Canada, and am currently being kept warm by one. Most (gas) furnaces are forced air, and how exactly would the fan run without electricity? How do you think the thermostat runs its thermistor (and probably LCD display) without a power? The Technology Connections YT channel has a recent good overview, \"Forced-air Furnaces: The What, Why, and How\": * [VIDEO] As for efficiency, you can get units that are 99% efficient (AFUE): * [LINK] * [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31415399,"author":"8note","month":"2022-05","story_title":"SEC charges Nvidia with inadequate disclosures about impact of cryptomining","text":"Tech connections has what you're looking for: [VIDEO] Efficiency wise, the comparison between a heat pump and a furnace depends on the outside temperature. Heat pumps lose their efficiency for high \u2206T, so for winter in a Russia, a furnace is likely the better option","stance":"rec"}],"lC4YLMLar5I":[{"hn_comment_id":42897467,"author":"hyperbrainer","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Elite on the 6502: The original 6502 assembly source, heavily commented","text":"Alexander the Ok, on youtube, has an amazing video on this. It is not quite as technical as the webiste for obvious reasons, but great overview and historical facts as well. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40071245,"author":"maxbond","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Oolite: An open source open-world space opera","text":"Reposting an old comment[1] which may be of interest to Oolite players: > Elite: \"The game that couldn't be written\" > An hour long video essay about the classic game Elite, the BBC Micro, and how Elite was able to deliver an open-world 3D experience in the 1980s. The creator is \"Alexander the ok.\" [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"lD9FAOPBiDk":[{"hn_comment_id":4887641,"author":"sharkweek","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Microsoft's DroidRage Twitter campaign goes painfully wrong","text":"I thought this was \"hip\" or whatever you want to call it, and pretty clever for a long term hearts-and-minds strategy -- [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4891128,"author":"mynameisvlad","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Microsoft's DroidRage Twitter campaign goes painfully wrong","text":"Their newest ads are pretty awesome. Surface's dancing ad [LINK] , the IE9 dubstep [LINK] , the IE10 troll [VIDEO] , and the various Windows 8 international musical ads (the wave after the countdown ad) [LINK] [LINK] and [LINK] are definitely a step way up from previous ad campaigns that Microsoft launched. All in all, the Windows 8 ads are IMO fresh, and definitely leaning more towards the younger adult hip side. And they're pulling it off pretty nicely.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5980027,"author":"nwilliams","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Internet Explorer 11: \u201cDon\u2019t call me IE\u201d","text":"That comment reminded me of the Microsoft ad video targeted at web devs. [VIDEO] Interesting and funny video, regardless of if you think anything changed.","stance":"rec"}],"lDfjdGva3NE":[{"hn_comment_id":29093980,"author":"brightball","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Zig monthly, October 2021: Games, gamedev, Elixir, tools and more","text":"Really fascinating to see Zig being used to make Elixir cross platform! Exciting stuff. Here's a direct link to the ElixirConf talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41939013,"author":"kristoff_it","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Zigler: Zig NIFs in Elixir","text":"There's a series of things that a NIF must do to be a good citizen. Not crashing is a big one, but also not starving the VM by never yielding (in case the NIF is long-running) is important, plus a few secondary things like using the BEAM allocator so that tooling that monitors memory consumption can see resources consumed by the NIF. The creator of Zigler has a talk from ElixirConf 2021 on how he made Zig NIFs behave nicely: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lFXJWPhDsSY":[{"hn_comment_id":21793922,"author":"lawrenceyan","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Zugzwang","text":"A great example I love showing people is Alpha Zero's infamous \"Immortal Zugzwang Game\" against Stockfish [0]. Stockfish gets utterly annihilated in a trap that seemingly springs out of nowhere, though of course the reality is that Alpha Zero was actually really in control the entire time. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21395650,"author":"mrleiter","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Multiplayer AlphaZero","text":"Anyone who's interested to see how brilliant AlphaZero played against the best chess computer (then), with solid explanations: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lG2dXobAXLI":[{"hn_comment_id":17201255,"author":"ljm","month":"2018-05","story_title":"The Never-Ending War on Fake Reviews","text":"I actually wonder why crowd-sourced reviews have become so ubiquitous, to the point of almost being necessary (along with five-star ratings). Has anyone legitimately attempted to challenge the status quo here? I'm reminded of videogamedunkey on YouTube and his video about game critics[0], where he goes into some detail about the preferences and integrity of the critic being just as important (if not more) than the review and rating. Professional critics build a strong reputation around their taste and preference and they gain notoriety from doggedly sticking to those principles. So you'd likely trust the opinion of Roger Ebert or Mark Kermode if you share their taste in cinema, and even watch something you normally wouldn't if even they recommended it. You're very likely to subscribe to a publication whose critics align with your own tastes because they're effectively curating content for you in the form of recommendations. None of that applies when you have reviews from a succession of total strangers - you're not going to research dozens or hundreds of commentators to establish a logical consistency in their point of view and decide whether or not their tastes align with yours. More often than not the reviews are low quality and low value, spread across a five-point scale but essentially treated as a binary like/didn't like system. At that point, crowd-sourced reviews tell you nothing you didn't know already: some people enjoyed it for one reason and others didn't for a dif","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20586892,"author":"fyrabanks","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Devilution \u2013 A web port of the original Diablo game","text":"Dunkey presented a fairly well-argued idea why major publications tend to give 9+/10 reviews to games, even when the actual text of their review clearly points to major issues ( [VIDEO] ). The tl;dw version is that gamers, by and large, tend to disparage media outlets for giving poor ratings to games that aren't already widely disliked by the hive mind. It comes from the perspective of someone who does unbiased VG reviews, and I think it raises an interesting point that might otherwise be overlooked. (Of course, payola should certainly not be discounted as a factor.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28202453,"author":"MaXtreeM","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Video Game Pricing [video]","text":"I never thought I would see videogamedunkey in top hot posts on HN but here we go. As others have already pointed out, he usually makes silly videos but has been consistent for many years if you like his kind of humour. From time to time he makes a video-essay which are usually great, I would recommend a \"Game Critics\"[0] and part two if you liked the first one. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32265051,"author":"seanhunter","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The man who made the \u201cworst\u201d video game in history (2019)","text":"There really are a lot of terrible game journalists. The ones who aren't terrible tend to be independents rather than writing for big publications. An amusing and yet thoughtful take on the problem comes from Videogamedunkey [VIDEO] and [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"lG4VkPoG3ko":[{"hn_comment_id":25544087,"author":"drewmate","month":"2020-12","story_title":"1937 film explains how a car differential works","text":"I agree that this is definitely a trend, so I feel like highlighting a great example of educational content that is very dense, concise, and with just a touch of whimsy: 3Blue1Brown on Youtube[0]. He has been doing math education videos on YouTube for years. I just watched his latest video on the medical test paradox and redesigning the Bayes rule to address it[1]. All his videos are absolutely phenomenal - the best educational content I've seen on YouTube. I cannot recommend them highly enough. In my experience it is more akin to reading a (very engaging) textbook than watching a video. I often find myself pausing to think things through and can _feel_ myself grasping at new ideas and learning while watching. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25758943,"author":"kilotaras","month":"2021-01","story_title":"U.S. to require negative Covid-19 tests for international air passengers","text":"Almost no tests in existence can confirm or deny particular infection. Think of them (and symptoms) more as odds updater. If you have 20 minutes to spare this video [0] by 3 Blue 1 Brown is a brilliant introduction to the concept. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39174037,"author":"andersrs","month":"2024-01","story_title":"The cancer that some doctors don't want to call cancer","text":"3Blue1Brown explains it well. [VIDEO] If the population who do _not_ actually have serious cancer is orders of magnitudes larger than those who do then there will be far more people in the false positive group than the true positive group and thus the vast majority of operations will be unnecessary.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44982810,"author":"V__","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Everything is correlated (2014\u201323)","text":"I really like this video [1] from 3blue1brown, where he proposes to think about significance as a way to update the probability. One positive test (or in this analog a study) updates the probability by X % and thus you nearly always need more tests (or studies) for a 'meaningful' judgment. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lHLpKzUxjGk":[{"hn_comment_id":14801104,"author":"chubot","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Terminal and shell performance","text":"If you care about end-to-end latency, I highly recommend this talk by John Carmack: [VIDEO] This talk blew my mind and made me feel like a terrible engineer. He's talking about end-to-end latency in VR, which actually has a commercial motivation because VR products with high latency will make you sick. (this obviously doesn't happen with shells and terminals!) He's talking about the buffering and filtering at every step of the way. And it's not just software -- sensors have their own controllers to do filtering, which requires buffering, before your OS kernel can even SEE the the first byte, let alone user space. On the other side, display devices and audio output devices also do nontrivial processing after you've sent them your data. It's an integrated hardware/software problem and Carmack is great at explaining it! It's a dense, long-ish talk, but worth it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14801116,"author":"chubot","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Terminal and shell performance","text":"Oh definitely, see my comment here about an excellent talk by John Carmack on this very subject (end-to-end hardware/software latency in VR): [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15044607,"author":"waivek","month":"2017-08","story_title":"John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]","text":"[VIDEO] I disagree. See the above link for a lecture where he describes the difficulties in VR in a manner that anybody with minimal programming experience can understand.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35994625,"author":"Dig1t","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Apple's Reality Pro headset compromised","text":">Also, prolonged use causes nausea in a large percentage of people. There's an excellent video of John Carmack talking about this and how to solve it. This is much less of an issue now. [VIDEO] I agree with you though that there aren't any killer apps for VR/AR yet, and it remains to be seen if there will be any at all.","stance":"rec"}],"lHcTKWiZ8sI":[{"hn_comment_id":10793933,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2015-12","story_title":"\"Free Basics\" - Myths and Facts","text":"> anti-free-basics mindset Ahh, the usual attempt to create factions. > Facebook isn't stopping anyone from providing internet access anywhere. The very idea of \"free basics\" is about normalizing the idea that Facebook can prevent who people can access. Yes, other providers already exist (removing any need for \"free basics\"), which is why Facebook is abusing their position as a social network to manipulate people into supporting their plan. They can do this because being a gatekeeper of social interaction is one of the most powerful political tools known to man. > And they certainly don't gain this power by providing free basics. If you read any of the other threads on this topic, you will find examples Facebook's tactics such as lying to users saying their friends support \"free basics\". That is their existing power as a social gatekeeper. The entire point of this new plan is to extend their gatekeeper position into one of the largest untapped markets on the planet. Without even considering how this position would allow Facebook to monopolize the market, their power as a gatekeeper to monitor social interaction (why do you think they MitM encryption?) and manipulate public opinion is so powerful it should be seen as a threat to national sovereignty . You probably think this is hyperbole, but I'm deadly serious. As I mentioned in a previous thread, the end game of this power to use friends against each other already exists in China under the name Sesame Credit. I recommend wat","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10871778,"author":"samstave","month":"2016-01","story_title":"China Shows How Surveillance Leads to Intimidation and Software Censorship","text":"Check out this nightmare of a system China is implementing to use gamification to control populations: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10882606,"author":"joeyespo","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Why privacy is important, and having \u201cnothing to hide\u201d is irrelevant","text":"I'm sure there are more direct examples, but I watched a video about Sesame Credit recently and it paints a rather dystopian picture of what's possible when you mix surveillance and gamification. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15799672,"author":"heroprotagonist","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Tencent\u2019s Just Getting Started on Online Advertising","text":"Beyond that, consider what Tencent are doing with a \"social credit score\" to compete with Alibaba's Sesame Credit. It will be scary when these systems eventually migrate to or evolve in the US. Tencent social credit: * [LINK] Sesame Credit video from Extra Credits (almost a couple years old now, but most easily-engaged piece I've seen on implications of social credit): * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15940927,"author":"maltalex","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking","text":"Extra Credits made a video about Sesame Credit a couple of years ago. It's 7.5 minutes long, and well worth the watch: [VIDEO] Being a game design channel, they discuss Sesame Credit as obedience to the party, gamified.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16441931,"author":"hagbardceline","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI","text":"I believe much of this can be dealt with, if we start RIGHT NOW to address a serious issue in our systems - the lack of a way to represent Morals and Ethics (the When and the Why) in the systems we are building. This needs to provide important input to, and thus shape the DIKW(D) pyramid. I've been doing some work with the IEEE on this - and I'm looking here on ycombinator to get some real-world feeedback on what people are thinking and concerned about. I have some (personal) ideas that might work to address the concerns I'm seeing. { NOTE Some of this is taken from a previous post I wrote (but kinda missed the thread developing, I was late I don't think anyone read it). It is useful for this thread, so a modification of that post follows.} First, I think you need a way to define 'ethics' and 'morals', with a 'ontology' and a 'epistemology' to derive a metaphysic for the system (and for my $.02, aesthetics arises from here). Until we can have a bit of rigor surrounding this, it's a challenge to discuss ethics in the context of an AI, and AI in the context of the metaphysical stance it takes towards the world. This is vital, as we need to define what 'malicious use' IS . This is still an area (as the thread demonstrates) of serious contention. Take sesame credit (a great primer, and even if you know all about it, it is still great to watch: [VIDEO] ). Now here is a question for you: Is it wrong for the government to create a system that uses social pressure, rather than retrib","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16780828,"author":"viraptor","month":"2018-04","story_title":"China\u2019s experiment in ranking and monitoring citizens has started","text":"There's an interesting video from Extra Credits about this. It's based on early announcements and repeats some of the popular points, but it addresses the gamification and social pressure side of the issue which I haven't seen discussed that much elsewhere. I recommend watching: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lI7T650RTT8":[{"hn_comment_id":31298203,"author":"chiph","month":"2022-05","story_title":"When is a \u2018tank\u2019 not a tank?","text":"An armor officer can answer this better than I can: [VIDEO] If you're watching the videos from Ukraine - the Russians are pretty much doing it all wrong. You do not send tanks into cities unless they're following infantry who are clearing houses & rooftops. You do not leave your tanks parked in a nice neat line on a country road. When your unit comes under fire, you do not just sit there. Why are the Russians doing these things when they know it's bad for their health? They don't have much of an NCO cadre. In a modern military, the NCOs have the experience and the authority to make sure stuff happens rapidly and correctly. They will have made sure the junior enlisted know how to operate and maintain their weapon & gear, and are able to do the mission without fucking up.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31610032,"author":"some_random","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Classified specs leaked on War Thunder forum for third time","text":"I really don't think that's a good comparison, cavalry didn't just fall from grace because they became easily slaughtered by infantry, they stopped being used because their role became irrelevant and were replaced. The role tanks play has not become irrelevant and while they aren't as survivable as they used to be they aren't nearly as vulnerable as clips from UA seem to imply. I'd recommend this video by a former Abrams commander and tank historian who presents this argument far better than I can. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31755571,"author":"breadloaf","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Does the Tank Have a Future?","text":"Yes it does. See \"The Chieftain: No, The Tank Is Not Dead\" [VIDEO] TLDW: Tank has a task on a battlefield and fact that you can easily kill it won't take that task away. Same goes for infantry and they are not going away either. On the other hand we don't see battleships anymore, because big guns were replaced by precise missiles with much more range.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33519694,"author":"mellavora","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Dragon\u2019s teeth \u2013 Stopping tanks in their tracks","text":"> currently completely overmatched by anti-tank weapons The Chieftan disagrees with you. [VIDEO] I suspect he has more practical and theoretical knowledge on the topic than the sum total of all posters on this thread.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33524125,"author":"scottLobster","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Dragon\u2019s teeth \u2013 Stopping tanks in their tracks","text":"Against an enemy with signal jamming capability remote operation is not a given. Plus tanks communicate in real time with infantry/other elements. The lag introduced by remote operation/communication would be a serious hindrance even if everything was working, which it often isn't. Tanks have to respond in real time, they don't have the luxury of seconds of delay like say an orbiting drone. There's also the case of not wanting disabled tanks to fall into the hands of the enemy. Short of rigging the tanks with a self-destruct system (which would likely just make them explode more easily when hit), you need soldiers to do that. Keep in mind that anything operating in battlefield conditions must be resilient. The entire situation is a constant stream of edge cases. Also, don't look to Russia in Ukraine for an example of how tanks are used. Tanks are generally not meant to act alone. Either they're operating with a lot of other tanks, substantial supporting infantry, or both. There are tons of other reasons as well, The Chieften, a former Tanker, has a good video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lIFE7h3m40U":[{"hn_comment_id":23158049,"author":"modernerd","month":"2020-05","story_title":"In Praise of AutoHotKey","text":"AutoHotKey (in addition to WSL and VS Code) was enough to make me Windows-curious and eventually try a Windows laptop again after 10+ years on Mac. I first found out about AHK via Tom Scott's similar ode here: [VIDEO] He describes it as \u201ca bodge that helps you make other bodges\u201d, which is beautifully put. [For those outside the UK, a \u201cbodge\u201d is a clumsy hack or repair.]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23160681,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2020-05","story_title":"In Praise of AutoHotKey","text":"Fun AutoHotKey abuse: Tom Scott's emoji keyboard[0]. It's every single emoji (at the time of recording) on 14 full keyboards with 1,000s of hand-placed bespoke stickers. He goes into more detail here[1], but it's beautiful. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24150252,"author":"dijit","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Jira Is a Microcosm of What\u2019s Broken in Software Development","text":"Never underestimate the art of the bodge, it's quite literally keeping the world ticking over, perfection has a place but it is rare and fleeting. I saw a good talk on it from Tom Scott some time ago[0] which I think is relevant. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32954906,"author":"lcnPylGDnU4H9OF","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Software I\u2019m thankful for (2021)","text":"I can't disagree, even if I would prefer something else. Easily the most compelling argument I've heard for Windows is Tom Scott's: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"lIW5jBrrsS0":[{"hn_comment_id":34254312,"author":"chrisandchips","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Lex Fridman's Reading Plan in Numbers","text":"Agreed. He is presenting the list as \"too be finished by X date\", which within itself sort of implies trying to do it quickly, or at least that he is taking time into account while reading. But it's not unreasonable that he make it through this list and enjoy everything. Half an hour a day really isn't much. Phenomenal and related mini-doc on the subject of reading time and frequency: [VIDEO] I should also add, page count is very much so dependant on font size.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39857876,"author":"underlipton","month":"2024-03","story_title":"How does an independent bookstore survive for 90 years?","text":"I know some might chafe at me recommending a Youtube video about reading, but I came across this one a few years ago, and it's an interesting exploration of modern bookstores and the dynamics of reading as a pursuit in the age of social media: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47198754,"author":"j1elo","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension","text":"I know the topic won't probably be about this -and I'll be reading the article next-, just wanted to share that this title perfectly reminded me the feeling of attempting the speed reading technique explained in this old gem of a video (minute 20:15) BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lJ3NC-R3gSI":[{"hn_comment_id":22843808,"author":"iknowstuff","month":"2020-04","story_title":"How often does Rust change?","text":"Oh boy. The author of this post gave a speech about Rust\u2019s journey to async/await: [VIDEO] I highly recommend you skim it. It will show you how meticulous the core team is and how long it took to arrive at this incredible, best in class design.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22820922,"author":"xiphias2","month":"2020-04","story_title":"I can't keep up with idiomatic Rust","text":"I was referring to the fact that it is the only async implementation that I know of that compiles to a state machine that doesn't need to allocate new memory for each continuation. I think it will translate to extremely fast web services in practice. Pinning is of course part of the elegant solution. There are some great videos about it: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25524902,"author":"dwoot","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Tokio 1.0 \u2013 async runtime for Rust","text":"I believe these are the talks from Steve that he's referring to. It was enlightening for me: 1. Rust's Journey to Async/Await - [VIDEO] 2. The Talk You've been Await-ing for - [LINK] The first video goes into all the bits you're concerned about and all the things that Rust has tried before arriving where they are now","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43965455,"author":"frollogaston","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Leaving Google","text":"As you probably know, Rust ended up with async/await. This video goes deep into that and the alternatives, and it changed my opinions a bit: [VIDEO] Golang differs from Rust by having a runtime underneath. If you're already paying for that, it's probably better to do greenthreading than async/await, which is what Go did. I still find the Go syntax for this more bothersome and error-prone, as you said, but there are other solutions to that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48140270,"author":"traderj0e","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The limits of Rust, or why you should probably not follow Amazon and Cloudflare","text":"Java is different. Tomcat's thread pool is the older way. A lot of newer stuff was using something promises-related instead with an event loop. But then recently Java added virtual threads which should obviate the need for that, similar to Go. Rust considered virtual threads but chose against that because it requires a more abstracted runtime like Java and Go have. Great preso on this [VIDEO] All the \"async\" stuff is super poorly named. They mean cooperative multitasking, or I guess \"async within a single kernel thread.\" Yeah multiple kernel threads are asynchronous but \"async\" doesn't mean that :S","stance":"rec"}],"lJ8ydIuPFeU":[{"hn_comment_id":12241122,"author":"vikiomega9","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Throughput vs. Latency and Lock-Free vs. Wait-Free","text":"Doesn't this depend on how \"tuned\" your subcomponents are? If I had a system that's supposedly heavily optimized, I would simply start seeing the worst-case latency on a higher percentile, 99.9th and so forth. Gil Tene has an excellent talk[1] on this. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19558469,"author":"Rafuino","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Averages Can Be Misleading: Try a Percentile (2014)","text":"This topic always leads me to think about this great talk from Gil Tene on how NOT to measure latencies (basically, don't use averages!). [VIDEO] I'm also a huge fan of how Dormando showed latency distributions in one of his recent Memcached Extstore posts. The default is 95th percentile but you can change the percentile to what matters to you (i.e. 99th percentile if you ask me!). Scroll down to see what he did and play with it. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22797291,"author":"wmfiv","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Must Read from ACM Library?","text":"This a life changing video by Gil Tene on this topic. Bottom line is because of the number requests to support a single customer \"request\", the high percentiles are the ones that actually matter. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35782413,"author":"leetrout","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Grasshopper \u2013 An Open Source Python Library for Load Testing","text":"We use locust at work but I HIGHLY recommend wrk for a very robust yet simple load testing tool. [LINK] And of course, this talk by Gil Tene is fantastic if you're interested in load testing stats [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13547228,"author":"telotortium","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Unlearning descriptive statistics","text":"Gil Tene has an entire talk about this point called \"How NOT to measure latency\" ( [VIDEO] ). In many circumstances, a web service (either server or client) has large numbers of dependencies, so a user only has to hit 95th-percentile latency for one dependency to have their overall latency significantly hurt. In other words, users may encounter the \"rare\" bad case on a majority of requests. Thus, even higher percentiles should be tightly controlled in order to truly keep a web service's overall latency under control.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18194507,"author":"latch","month":"2018-10","story_title":"We can do better than percentile latencies","text":"Worth watching is How NOT to Measure Latency: [VIDEO] The speaker Gil Tene is also the author of the HdrHistogram which addresses this articles point: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22630356,"author":"allanrbo","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Lies, Damned Lies, and Averages: Perc50, Perc95 Explained for Programmers","text":"The \"how not to measure latency\" talk by Gil Tene is another really good explanation of this topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23213863,"author":"agallego","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Kafka Removing Zookeeper Dependency","text":"who cares about lower percentage tiers in the world of big data? what does the p30 or 50 even matter at large scale? See Gil Tene's talk on how not to measure latency. [VIDEO] What matters is what most of your customers will get - p99, p999, p9999, p100.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42998735,"author":"super_linear","month":"2025-02","story_title":"How Not to Measure Latency (The P99 Lie) by GIL Tene","text":"Tried to link to the specific timestamp in the video, where the p99 lie is discussed. Core takeaway for me was that most users of a page will experience the p99 latency of the system: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lKQ0yaEJjok":[{"hn_comment_id":13257609,"author":"kryptokommunist","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Mind as an emergent self-organizing process","text":"Well in a way the articles approach is similar to Piaget's in the sense that the approach is also functional. The hypothesis here is that the mind is just a information processing system and the research approach therefore is developing functional models. It will either work or not, you can actually test your models. This approach doesn't just model biological structures but independently tries to find functional explanations/mechanisms that could result in a mind like system. I think the articles model is one of the most sophisticated of the highly integrated ones out there. It really is worth reading, especially the explanation for emotion and motivation i found to be quite interesting. If you need a teaser to get you going, there is also a talk by the author which is a good summary of the article: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16219459,"author":"freeflight","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Can staying awake beat depression?","text":"> In general I'd say the best tactic is to learn as much as you can yourself (while remembering to be honest with yourself) and pursue general purpose coping strategies across the board (for example, mindfulness based cognitive therapy). Yup, that's exactly what I've been doing for years now. I've read through quite a bit of stuff ranging from Freud, Jung, B.F. Skinner to Edward de Bono and countless others in addition to lots of Wikipedia surfing and study reading. A rather common theme among a lot of them: Many of them went into studying psychology as an attempt to diagnose their own issues and often it feels more like reading philosophy rather than actual medical science. I wonder if we will ever be able to articulate something like a \"Grand Unified Theory of the mind\"? Considering how much of this is subjective to the individual and atop of that the individual's brain physiology, it seems like an impossible task. But then I see stuff like talks by Joscha Bach on C3 [0] [1] [2] and it's quite inspirational as it gives me hope that creating strong AI might actually help us understand what's going on under our own hoods a little bit better. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20426583,"author":"jkachmar","month":"2019-07","story_title":"How much bandwidth does the spinal cord have?","text":"I don't particularly like that essay because the author seems focused on the idea that \"your brain is a computer\" is a metaphor rather than a theory (see [1] for a more nuanced discussion). The author correctly points out that past eras developed metaphors to explain how the mind might work based on the technological innovations they were familiar with, but I think there's a lot more nuance in the computational theory of the mind. Namely that the notion of computation is much more abstract, and potentially more portable across disciplines, than some of the historical examples that the author of that Aeon piece brings up. Anyway, obviously I don't have any real answers but for whatever reason the brain-as-a-computer theory rings pretty true for me and I've enjoyed reading essays and watching talks about the topic [2] [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO] ^-- This is the first part in an ongoing series of lectures that Joscha Bach has been giving at the Chaos Communication Congress; if you watch it and find it interesting you should check out the proceeding installments.","stance":"rec"}],"lKXe3HUG2l4":[{"hn_comment_id":19706607,"author":"dpeck","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Joe Armstrong has died","text":"That is so sad, he was in his late 60s and it seemed like he had a lot of life left in him, talking about how software can get better and having a great (and sometimes snarky) outlook on the profession. Highly recommend his thesis (2003) and a few of his great interviews/presentations for anyone who isn\u2019t familiar with Joe, it captures a lot of what he thought about and pushed for in his professional life. [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] I hope his family and friends can find some comfort in how much he was appreciated and admired in the development community.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19707649,"author":"zaph0d_","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Joe Armstrong has died","text":"This is absolutely devastating! His talk \"The Mess We're In\" was one of those talks which were incredibly funny and informative at the same time. I absolutely lost it, when he told the story of the single comment his coworker put into the Erlang code.[1] Rest in peace! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19924078,"author":"leonroy","month":"2019-05","story_title":"John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)","text":"> \"The mess we're in\" famous talk by joe amstrong For anyone else: [VIDEO] Fantastic watch, thanks for recommending. Sad to hear that Joe Armstrong passed away a few weeks ago.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12641781,"author":"0xmohit","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters [0] The Principles of Clean Architecture [1] The State of the Art in Microservices by Adrian Cockcroft [2] \"The Mess We're In\" by Joe Armstrong [3] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16003624,"author":"hepek","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Physical Limits of Computation (2009)","text":"Joe Armstrong gives a very good talk about ideas in the article in \"The Mess We're In\" (2014): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19706613,"author":"tosh","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Joe Armstrong has died","text":"Just re-watched his Strangeloop talk: \u201cThe mess we\u2019re in\u201d. Still so spot on. He will be dearly missed. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20789464,"author":"camgunz","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Software Architecture Guide","text":"Agree, but people tend to stop at Fowler and live it as gospel. There is a profound richness in the different ways to think and talk about computers, engineering, and information science, far more wonderous than any one person can catalog. Read SICP, Knuth, Code Complete, Codd. Hell, just YouTube around. If your vocabulary is prescribed by literally one guy in a fedora, you gotta get out there. Might I suggest Joe Armstrong [1] :) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29514934,"author":"badsectoracula","month":"2021-12","story_title":"C64 OS: make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful","text":"Luddite is someone who is opposed to new technology, which doesn't apply here as the sentiment isn't about being opposed to the new tech but about the new tech not being taken advantage of. The software we build today is \"vastly\" more powerful in the sense that, strictly speaking, you can do more stuff, but it is way less powerful - and often broken - than what it could be, considering what you can see being possible on older hardware and what seems to be done in modern hardware. Also it isn't really something that happens today, here is a nice (and funny) talk from Joe Armstrong on the topic from almost 8 years ago[0]. Though this sort of sentiment goes way back, e.g. Wirth's classic \"Plea for lean software\" article from 1995[1]. (Joe's talk is more about the broken part and IMO he misidentifies the issue being about trying to make things fast when the real issue -that he also mentions- is that pretty much nobody knows what is really going on with the system itself) [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30160727,"author":"mhitza","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you explain the sloppiness of modern software?","text":"For those that enjoyed the video you linked, Joe Armstrong's \"The Mess We're In\" talk could be interesting as well [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40194251,"author":"mif","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Did we lose our way in making efficient software?","text":"Reminds me of some of the remarks Joe Armstrong made a while ago [1], and which I came across via another submission a couple of weeks ago (which escapes me). It\u2019s a great talk about the physical limits of computers and computation. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lMcRBdSdO_U":[{"hn_comment_id":11742724,"author":"eggy","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Stanza: A New Optionally-Typed General Purpose Language from UC Berkeley","text":"Stanza looks very interesting. I'll have to check it out. Thanks! Shen allows you to turn the type checker on or off: (tc +) (tc -) You can leave your type signatures in the code when you turn them off, and when tc is on you only need a type in the top level of your function. It has a fully functional Prolog engine built in, and it supports optional lazy evaluation too. Great talk by Aditya Siram Sept 2014 Strange Loop talk introducing Shen [2]. Shen has been ported to many languages, since it only requires porting the 46 primitive instruction set, called Klambda. Shen has been ported to CL (SBCL), Ruby, JavaScript, Haskell and even Emacs Lisp. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37480645,"author":"eggy","month":"2023-09","story_title":"The Power of Prolog","text":"I love Shen, but I have not taken it on. I subscribed to the professional version for half a year, and I like the amount of implementations of Shen in other PLs. The pattern matching, optional type checking, and the built-in Prolog is incredible. It's a case where the creator has been shunned by the wider community, partially due to his diplomacy, but he is brilliant, and the uptake has been niche and bleeding edge. If it had a Mozilla behind it or other, I think it would have been more universally appealing. @deech's talks, though older now, are fantastic and relevant[1,2]. But take what I have to say with a grain a salt: I am an avid APL/J/BQN fanboy ;) [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9655243,"author":"delish","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Shen-js Browser REPL","text":"Looking for a feel for Shen? A Strange Loop talk by @deech (40minutes): Shen: A Sufficiently Advanced Lisp. [VIDEO] An essay: [LINK] It's insightful and readable and it links to several articles new Shen users would be interested in[0]. It was written before Shen, so it talks about Shen's predecessor, Qi. This article and the Bipolar Lisp Programmer by Mark Tarver (creator of Shen) made me feel not so weird for not \"getting\" UNIX, and helped me get excited about lisp. I'm looking to use Shen or another highly cross-platform functional language for my next project. Application logic in Shen with type-checking. web code using some framework. [0] Wow I'm re-skimming it now: it has Stanislav, James Gosling, buncha Smalltalk, Rob Pike's \"Systems Research is Dead\" and a lot more. This is actually a good overview of ways to be disillusioned with programming. IMO disillusionment by knowing our historical failures is an antidote to the hype-machine.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10270180,"author":"eggy","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Show HN: Eslisp \u2013 Minimal JavaScript S-expression syntax and macro system","text":"I am learning Shen [1], and this talk [2] shows how you can write Shen on JavaScript, Ruby, front an backend. Shen is a lisp with pattern matching, optional lazy evaluation, optional static type checking, macros of course, and many other cool treats! It can run on top of CL (SBCL), Clojure, JavaScript, Python, and more. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35553041,"author":"eggy","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Why Janet?","text":"I was considering Shen[1] for this type of use, since it is implemented in many languages. It is a Lisp with built-in Prolog. Feature list from the site's main page: pattern matching, lambda calculus consistency, macros for defining domain specific languages, optional lazy evaluation, static type checking based on sequent calculus, one of the most powerful systems for typing in functional programming, an integrated fully functional Prolog, an inbuilt compiler-compiler, a BSD kernel under 15 languages (Lisp, Python, Javascript, C ...) and operating systems (Windows, Linux, OS/X), is extensively documented in a book has nearly a decade of use. Aditya Siram made two very good videos on Shen. You can program your front and backend in Shen given Shen is implemented in JavaScript and other PLs. I know somebody did a port to C, but I am not sure if you can then make an exe as described for Janet. [VIDEO] [LINK] You implement K\u03bb in your PL of choice if it is not already available, and voila, you can program in Shen! [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"lPgZfhnCAdI":[{"hn_comment_id":11929433,"author":"atmosx","month":"2016-06","story_title":"May is Earth's hottest on record","text":"> let alone convincing people that a problem actually exists. I love this: [VIDEO] It's my favourite episode of the daily show.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12609189,"author":"atmosx","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Atmospheric carbon dioxide passes 400ppm","text":"Given recent events[1], one cannot stress the word deep enough. To be honest though, it's not just the republican candidate who thinks that global warming is a non-issue. It's the entire Republican party. Of course, I can't help but referring my all time favorite Daily Show clip, Burn Notice [2]. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10341965,"author":"lbenes","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Gains in Antarctic ice might offset losses","text":"Watch Fox new much? Climate deniers love this argument. Jon Stewart answers your question here: [VIDEO] While looking for the clip I found this gem: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"lWZ2Bz0tS-s":[{"hn_comment_id":14286461,"author":"dugditches","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Show HN: 100M Books \u2013 Open a new tab, discover a new book","text":"I personally found it 'heavy'. There's a lot to think about and take in. As it's not like reading typical technical books or papers. There's a great charm/fun and cleverness once things fall into place. There's an excellent MIT course for it. All the Lectures on Youtube as well. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21556220,"author":"azhenley","month":"2019-11","story_title":"G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach","text":"MIT had a course on the book with recordings on YouTube. They\u2019re great to watch as you work through the book: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26285061,"author":"xtiansimon","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently","text":"> \"...interesting trend in our discourse...\" > \"...more and more moralizing and virtue signaling. So much ... \"motivation porn\"...\" > \"..aspirational message - imagine yourself rich, happy, driving a Lamborghini..\" > \"...too many people have come to see reading as a lofty...\" > \"reading is just a hobby\" > \"Making it into such a self-serious pursuit kills most of the joy.\" > \"...you read books, we all read books. Everybody poops, and everybody reads books.\" WHAT?? This comment is apoplectic with contradictory statements and false beliefs. What could possibly be accomplished by it? It's an unapologetic rant on reading and writing on, of all places, one of the most text focused news and discussion sites on internet. Sheesh! Clearly, for some people reading is not just for entertainment, or 'joy'. And, clearly, for some of these people, their joy is also writing about reading (hence the OP). I do agree on one thing suggested by the response, though not said directly. Reading and Writing may converge into a bizarre infinite loop. If you find this maddening, rage inducing, then consider yourself warned! There is one book which you must not read. Dare I say it's name? YES! I DARE! Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter [1]. It is not an easy read for the shitter. You may even need the assistance of this MIT Open CourseWare video series on YouTube [2] about the book. Read this book at your own PERIL! Extreme brain expansion may occur. WHEW. (Now I'm going to site quietly and medit","stance":"rec"}],"lX-K63pVPTM":[{"hn_comment_id":21206657,"author":"ridewinter","month":"2019-10","story_title":"China attacks Apple for allowing Hong Kong crowdsourced police activity app","text":"I encourage everyone pessimistic about our future to learn about David Deutsch's infinite optimism: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32635123,"author":"nubero","month":"2022-08","story_title":"\u201cScience must respect the dignity and rights of all humans\u201d","text":"You need to read \u201cThe Beginning of Infinity\u201d by David Deutsch. It will help clear up all the muddled thinking I see going on when I read those lines of yours. Edit: You can also go here and watch this: [VIDEO] I still recommend the book though.","stance":"rec"}],"lXfEK8G8CUI":[{"hn_comment_id":29361774,"author":"RealFloridaMan","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Immunity from Covid-19 Infection May Be as Strong as from Vaccination","text":"The point of a vaccine is to not get the actual virus, or at least to minimize its effects if infected. When you are infected with anything, you do not always develop anti-bodies. If you do develop anti-bodies, they might not be effective at actually stopping you from being re-infected. Everything about the virus can mutate, but the virus will always target the ACE2 binding site. The spike protein can mutate to bind to it differently, but it will always require a spike protein. (Biology is Analog, not digital) Thus targeting the spike protein is more efficient as it will be highly conserved. There is a video series that does a nice job of breaking down how your immune response works: [VIDEO] The vaccine is more effective at developing anti-bodies for the spike protein as it is the only protein exposed during the process. An analogy that has helped some of my family: The virus is like a missile, and your immune system is a anti-missile system. Regardless of what the missile looks like, it has to have a warhead, and that warhead is what really defines what the entire thing does. So, if your defense systems targets the fuel of the missile, the enemy can change what fuel it runs on and evade your defense system. They can change the material it is made of, the shape of the overall device, change the propulsion and navigation systems\u2026but the warhead can only have minor changes as it has because it it makes too many, it becomes ineffective and is no longer a threat. Thus, if your de","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35883542,"author":"chasil","month":"2023-05","story_title":"T Cells Can Activate Themselves to Fight Tumors","text":"There is nothing in the behavior of cells that is reflective of human intelligence. Cells are \"amino acid robots.\" They string the 26 programmed amino acids into exotic plastics/proteins to execute their programmed functions. There is no relation to human behavior in cellular behavior. At the end of an infection, most immune cells trigger \"apoptosis\" (controlled cellular \"suicide\"). At the end of a riot, police obviously do not do this. You might find this Kurzgesagt introduction to immune system behavior interesting. There are several videos in this sequence, and Kurzgesagt ultimately published a book that is worth reading. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37471617,"author":"pixl97","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Chronic fatigue syndrome may have a post-viral infection origin","text":"> is there a department of immunology that takes over or even contributes. Because we don't see the immune system as the organ it is. Which is odd that things like vaccines are effectively medicines for that organ. But at the end of the day we still don't know 'that much' about the immune system because of its extreme complexity. It's still very difficult or impossible to target a bad acting immune response in an individual without disabling all the immune system (and yea, this puts you at a lot of risk). I like the series that Kurzgesagt made on the immune system as a way to explain this complexity a little more simply. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lY8Ol2n4o4A":[{"hn_comment_id":23989973,"author":"nicholasjon","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Microsoft Joins the Blender Development Fund","text":"Came here to say this. This video of his really opened my eyes to what Blender can do ( [VIDEO] ) and makes a cool entry point into that world.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33274699,"author":"slavik81","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommend me a Blender course","text":"Ian Hubert's Lazy Tutorials would be an excellent supplementary series once you know some of the basics. They're not a general guide to Blender, but they're great resources. He has his own style of working and he's shockingly productive with it. Lazy Tutorials: [LINK] My favourite guides of his are not in the Lazy Tutorials playlist, though. Perhaps they were not lazy enough: Blender Motion Tracking: Room Transformation - [VIDEO] Wild Tricks for Greenscreen in Blender - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23378428,"author":"aidos","month":"2020-06","story_title":"SpaceshipGenerator: A Blender script to procedurally generate 3D spaceships","text":"I'd also like to point people to Ian Hubert's youtube videos on some of the things he does in Blender. This short clip (he races through his stuff) shows how he turns a video in a farm house into a dystopian scene using Blender's motion tracking. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23989845,"author":"jcims","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Microsoft Joins the Blender Development Fund","text":"I just started paying attention to Blender again after some years. The tutorials Ian Hubert does really demonstrates how powerful the product has become - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"l_F9jxsfGCw":[{"hn_comment_id":10690600,"author":"wmeredith","month":"2015-12","story_title":"How to Get a Job in the Tech Industry","text":"This falls under the category of \"how I won the lottery\" vs. \"how to buy tickets\". The former isn't useful, the latter is. You can see an excellent talk about the difference here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12309882,"author":"peterlk","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Evidence on how to find the right career","text":"This reminds me of one of my favorite talks of all time[1]. Applied to careers, I take the talk as implying that trying things is the secret. After a certain level of experience in your career, you'll know whether you like it. Branching off of that, it might even be the right thing to do to find a new career. One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received is \"successful people do stuff. It doesn't matter what that stuff is, just do stuff and you'll eventually be successful\". Some people will be luckier than others, and be successful at their stuff at a higher ratio, but overall, the ratio is about the same, and you just need to keep doing stuff. Also, one of my favorite illustrations/cartoons of all time[2] speaks to this point. Basically, if you pursue the same career for your entire life, you're probably wasting your time. once you have your x,000 hours of work in, do something new where you can cross-apply that knowledge into domains that need it. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] Edit: sloppy link formatting","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35024845,"author":"psvv","month":"2023-03","story_title":"\u201c\u201dHere's the number I used to win the lottery\u201c \u2013Entrepreneurs giving advice\u201d","text":"I'm surprised I don't see a reference yet to Darius Kazemi's iconic 2014[1] talk, which is basically riffing on this joke for 10 minutes: [VIDEO] A key takeaway I've kept with me this whole time is the idea of there being two kinds of creative advice: (1) how to buy more lottery tickets, and (2) how to win the lottery. The former is useful, the latter not so much. [1] Wait, 9 years ago? That can't be right.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35024848,"author":"didntreadarticl","month":"2023-03","story_title":"\u201c\u201dHere's the number I used to win the lottery\u201c \u2013Entrepreneurs giving advice\u201d","text":"Darius Kazemi - \"How I Won the Lottery\" - a talk at XOXO Festival (2014) [VIDEO] brutally hilarious","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9887691,"author":"neilk","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Match Group Buys PlentyOfFish for $575M","text":"Darius Kazemi did a talk on a similar idea. [VIDEO] Kazemi is more of an programmer-artist or -comedian, but he releases dozens of side projects a year, all relatively low effort. He uses himself as a test case and also examines KickStarters and how unpredictable their success is.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14164421,"author":"skrebbel","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Survivorship Bias","text":"If you like this comic, you'll appreciate Darius Kazemi's talk \"How I Won The Lottery\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16010435,"author":"namuol","month":"2017-12","story_title":"A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k","text":"Here's a funny satirical antidote for \"bet the farm\" success-story fantasies like this one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"l_aFHrzSBrM":[{"hn_comment_id":26753203,"author":"KozmoNau7","month":"2021-04","story_title":"How a carnivorous mushroom poisons its prey","text":"That's a very common misconception and a stubborn myth: [VIDEO] I fry mushrooms (and many other things) in olive oil all the time. It works great, tastes great and as long as you use extra virgin oil, doesn't create any more harmful substances than using rapeseed or sunflower seed oil, probably a lot fewer actually. You can even deep fry in it, which some celebrated chefs do.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28000106,"author":"KozmoNau7","month":"2021-07","story_title":"What I know about cleaning and seasoning cast-iron skillets","text":"The majority of chefs from countries bordering the Mediterranean would laugh at your claim that extra virgin olive oil is not suitable for frying. Obviously you shouldn't go using your fancy $100 bottle for deep frying, but mostly because it would be a waste of money, and because frying dulls the flavor. You want to save the really flavorful and expensive oils for salads and as a finishing touch. I've been pan frying eggs, onions, pork chops, chicken, potatoes, fish, basically anything interchangeably in extra virgin olive oil and butter/ghee for decades. There is certainly a flavor difference, but that's because the olive oil is much milder in flavor than butter, and the process of frying dulls the flavor of the olive oil, as mentioned. I - along with millions of people in countries bordering the Mediterranean - enjoy the flavor of food cooked in olive oil. Adam Ragusea did a great video on the topic, with cited sources. I highly recommend watching it: [VIDEO] Sources: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Including this famous chef using it for deep frying: [LINK] Additional sources: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] The bottom line is that extra virgin olive oil is more heat stable than other cooking oils with higher smoke points. Just don't use it to sear steaks or something. So much of the conventional wisdom around cooking is not based on scientific fact, but rather on unsubstantiated observations and gut feelings. The viability of extra virgin olive oil for cooking is one of those pieces of ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30457615,"author":"donatj","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)","text":"The olive oil bit is a myth - see: [VIDEO] Olive oil is actually one of the chemically safest oils to heat.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32820481,"author":"cthalupa","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Prenatal cannabis exposure associated with mental disorders in children","text":"Adam Ragusea does a lot of well researched videos around food science, and did one around using olive oil, even past the smoke point, fairly recently - [VIDEO] Some good interviews with food scientists, etc. Interesting for anyone wanting to learn a bit more on this subject. I've swapped to using EVOO for most anything where it won't be too overpowering of a taste.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39584570,"author":"funklute","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Combating olive oil fraud with nuclear innovations","text":"That's not the whole story though. Often, what is more important is how stable the oil is below the smoke point. There's a pretty decent video on this by Adam Ragusea: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"la-sGpTpkxE":[{"hn_comment_id":15166965,"author":"johansch","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Miscellaneous Arduino bits and pieces","text":"If you can stand the video format, this one is unusually rewarding for being a youtube channel: [LINK] I started with this one: [VIDEO] \"My old BBC Micro system\" ... which kind of established his credibilities in my mind, and then I just kept going, devouring his entire channel. Recommended - this guy knows his stuff, and unlike certain other youtube channels in this genre there is no annoying bravado.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33747630,"author":"afandian","month":"2022-11","story_title":"iPod Nano V6 LCD Hacking","text":"Mikes Electric Stuff is one of my absolute favourite channels on YouTube. Highly recommend. A couple of classics: Heavily modified BBC Micro: [VIDEO] Design of LED sculpture with some interesting commentary: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16385297,"author":"the-dude","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Chip Aging Accelerates","text":"I dig the guy much better than David Jones ( EEVBlog ). Here is Mike's BBC micro : [VIDEO] Great stuff.","stance":"rec"}],"lcjdwSY2AzM":[{"hn_comment_id":44996270,"author":"tim333","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Why the Internet Is Turning to Shit","text":"Rather than turning to shit, I think the internet may be getting more diverse stuff in general. More good stuff and more shit. As an example of anti-shit I watched Veritasium \"The Biggest Misconception in Physics\" [VIDEO] yesterday and thought wow this is good. Much better than the physics lectures I had at Cambridge Uni.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43788757,"author":"cultofmetatron","month":"2025-04","story_title":"You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown","text":"reminds me of this video I found the other day [VIDEO] if I'm understanding correctly the implications of Emily Noether's work, its an absolute travesty that she isn't famous in the same breath as Einstein and Feynman. Yet this video was the first time I had even heard of her.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46142286,"author":"qnleigh","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Lie groups are crucial to some of the most fundamental theories in physics","text":"The typical example people use to illustrate that energy isn't conserved is that photons get red-shifted and lose energy in an expanding universe. See this excellent Veritasium video [0]. But there's a much more striking example that highlights just how badly energy conservation can be violated. It's called cosmic inflation. General relativity predicts that if empty space in a 'false vacuum' state will expand exponentially. A false vacuum occurs if empty space has excess energy, which can happen in quantum field theory. But if empty space has excess energy, and more space is being created by expansion, then new energy is being created out of nothing at an exponential rate! Inflation is currently the best model for what happened before the Big Bang. Space expanded until the false vacuum state decayed, releasing all this free energy to create the big bang. Alan Guth's book, The Inflationary Universe, is a great book on the topic that is very readable. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"le71yVPh4uk":[{"hn_comment_id":23752954,"author":"Cyph0n","month":"2020-07","story_title":"My dad got scammed for $3k worth of gift cards","text":"Obligatory kitboga mention: [LINK] . The dude is a genius at baiting scammers and his stream is family-friendly as far as I know. Then there is Jim Browning on YouTube.... I\u2019ll just leave this here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27248621,"author":"whoooooo123","month":"2021-05","story_title":"How to Tell a Job Offer from an ID Theft Trap","text":"Yes. Many scam operations are full-fledged \"companies\" which operate out of commercial office space and have a payroll of employees who show up to work every day Monday to Friday and scam people as if it was a normal job. This is a fascinating YouTube series from a guy who managed to hack into the IT system of an Indian scam operation (including gaining live access to their security camera footage!) It goes into a lot of detail about how this particular outfit operates: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"leFuF-zoVzA":[{"hn_comment_id":17572875,"author":"Consultant32452","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Review: A Counterfeit, $100 iPhone X","text":"You may enjoy this video where a guy goes to Shenzen and tries to build an iPhone 6s from parts. He claims it cost $300. Technically he spent a little over $600 because he broke a lot of parts and bought the wrong parts in the process, but if everything went perfectly it would be about $300. I think this was created back when the 6s was the current model. $300 claim [LINK] build video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25029635,"author":"Darkphibre","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Review: A Counterfeit, $100 iPhone X","text":"You addressed the first question, but I popped in to bring up this neat video I came across a few years back regarding the second question. How about this guy, who \"built a like-new (but really refurbished) iPhone 6S 16GB entirely from parts purchased from the public cell phone parts markets in Huaqiangbei.\"? :D [LINK] Making-of: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"leX541Dr2rU":[{"hn_comment_id":21582047,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Algorithms were supposed to make VA judges fairer: it's far more complicated","text":"> Someone who can get pop-culture\u2019s attention needs to do a fucking Ted Talk and explain why this is usually a bad idea. Tom Scott made a good attempt recently: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31530718,"author":"codefreeordie","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Parasocial Relationships: Imaginary Friends of the Social Network Age","text":"Not without a certain amount of irony, everybody's parasocial internet friend Tom Scott did a really good segment on the parasocial relationship as part of his talk to the Royal Institution: [VIDEO] I swear it's also a short video on its own somewhere, but neither Google nor I can find it today.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43305127,"author":"nativeit","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Kill your Feeds \u2013 Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think","text":"RIYL: Tom Scott's There Is No Algorithm For Truth [1] delivered to the Royal Society in October 2019. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lfo8XHGFAIQ":[{"hn_comment_id":19558196,"author":"cpeterso","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon","text":"This video (\"Can We Terraform the Sahara to Stop Climate Change?\") examines how we might do just that. The conclusion is that it's technically possible (like many things), but the cost far outweighs the benefit. It also introduces new climate risks. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19715694,"author":"Latty","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions","text":"I recently saw a video about doing this - apparently the desert is actually a really bad option if we want to combat climate change - the core problem is that the desert currently reflects a lot of light from the sun. If we cover it with forest or whatever, then suddenly we adjust the albedo of the earth and absorb more heat, negating some of the impact. Combined with the energy need to pump (and desalinate for trees - your suggestion of kelp would presumably help there) water, etc... make it not really work. Source: [VIDEO] I recommend watching the video - it explains it better and goes into detail - it cites its own sources.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27709017,"author":"jarenmf","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Simple, solar-powered water desalination (2020)","text":"Greening deserts is not a good solution for climate change. In fact it might worsen climate change due to albedo changes. A nice video about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lgivCGdmFrw":[{"hn_comment_id":37479190,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Show HN: C-ocoa, Write iOS/macOS apps in any language, with a generated C API","text":"Java also compiles to native code on Android. Try to write an iOS application using only C and C++, instead of either Objective-C or Swift. \"Swift was designed from the outset to be safer than C-based languages, and eliminates entire classes of unsafe code\" -- [LINK] \"Swift is a successor to the C, C++, and Objective-C languages. It includes low-level primitives such as types, flow control, and operators. It also provides object-oriented features such as classes, protocols, and generics, giving Cocoa and Cocoa Touch developers the performance and power they demand.\" -- [LINK] Some of the information related their Safe C dialect, [LINK] \"2023 EuroLLVM - Keynote: \u201c-fbounds-safety\u201d: Enforcing bounds safety for production C code\" [LINK] Finaly a recent gem from CppNow 2023, \"Introducing a Memory-Safe Successor Language in Large C++ Code Bases\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37610172,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Interoperability: Swift\u2019s Super Power","text":"On the same note, watch Apple's talk at CppCon 2023, \"Introducing a Memory-Safe Successor Language in Large C++ Code Bases\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38742594,"author":"mannuch","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Memory safety is necessary, not sufficient","text":"I wonder what the author thinks about Swift\u2019s new C++ interop story? Since the Swift compiler includes Clang, and can thus compile both your C++ and Swift into LLVM IR, without the need for an FFI later between the two, couldn\u2019t this be the \u201cTypescript for C++\u201d that the author points out a space for? The Swift folks are very much thinking about Swift as a C++ successor that can be incrementally migrated to so I\u2019m a bit surprised the author didn\u2019t discuss it further \u2014 especially given Swift\u2019s spiritual similarities to Rust. There\u2019s a couple great talks on this by folks on the Swift team. John McCall at CppNow [VIDEO] Konrad Malawski at StrangeLoop 2023 [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40651792,"author":"glhaynes","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Swift Static Linux SDK","text":"I'm not a (direct) user of the C++ interop, but everything I've heard about it has been quite positive. A few hopefully relevant resources, first a couple of videos: - \"Introducing a Memory-Safe Successor Language in Large C++ Code Bases\" (John McCall; CppNow 2023) [VIDEO] - \"Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB\" (Konrad Malawski; Strange Loop 2023) [LINK] And then a series of blog posts by Doug Gregor: - \"Swift for C++ Practitioners\" [LINK] And finally: - \"Mixing Swift and C++\" (Swift.org) [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"lhYGXYeMq_E":[{"hn_comment_id":26007746,"author":"visarga","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Is the Brain a Computer or an Antenna?","text":"I think it's mainly a competitive & cooperative self replicator. The brain exists because previous generations did well. Do we need to infuse \"antenna magic\" into our brains, aren't they marvelous enough? I found this video about open endedness (contrasting evolution vs optimization) in the brain and AI very inspiring: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27251958,"author":"ZephyrBlu","month":"2021-05","story_title":"NNCP: Lossless Data Compression with Neural Networks (2019)","text":"> The signal might be good but is it the signal you should be focusing on? There is an amazing amount of interesting stuff being discovered all the time. But is it helping you achieve concrete goals? My point is that putting everything through the filter of \"does this directly help me achieve my goals?\" isn't the best way to pursue your goals, assuming we're talking about big goals where the path to achieving them isn't clear. I recommend checking out this podcast episode called \"Why Greatness Cannot be Planned\". It really changed my perspective on achieving my long term goals: [VIDEO] Also on Twitter, yeah some people don't only tweet things in their domain. But I've found that some people do reliably stick to a single domain. Though I don't really follow science people on Twitter.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26139263,"author":"visarga","month":"2021-02","story_title":"DeepMind achieves SOTA image recognition with 8.7x faster training","text":"> Anyways, my point is, none of this required math or genius or particularly demanding thought. It was basically let's tinker with this until we find a way that's better, using guess and check. No equations needed. I get that you'd like to have a clear theoretical basis for what works and we're far from there. But in the meantime we're stumbling in the dark, discovering tricks and forming intuitions, not knowing even where the road is going to lead us. This is an evolutionary process of ideas, similar to biological evolution that managed to make us. If you know where you're going you can optimise your actions but when you don't even know what might be useful later on, then all attempts are good. They increase diversity and discover blind spots. Some of them will be the stepping stones for the future, but we can't say in advance which and how. Link to a long discussion about the evolution of ML ideas and the book \"Why greatness cannot be planned\" by Kenneth Stanley - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26933609,"author":"visarga","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)","text":"> Do things that don't matter. Aside from the doors it can unlock, it's just damn fun. I found this discussion about open-endedness being very illuminating about doing stuff that are just fun. A revolt against objectives. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26933796,"author":"bvsrinivasan","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)","text":"In all probability, Youtube's algorithm will already suggest this to anyone who watches the talk, but there is a (very) long, ML Street Talk interview on this idea here [VIDEO] Stanley addresses some strong and subtle criticisms here but I actually preferred the book the most. The book is a bit repetitive but has some very good ideas in the appendix.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27062803,"author":"visarga","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Crazy New Ideas","text":"This video is relevant. They talk about \"openendedness\", serendipity, the tyranny of objectives, the evolution of ideas (and biology), inventing new problems not just solving problems. There are important implications in AI. Kenneth Stanley - Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned on Machine Learning Street Talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32747113,"author":"visarga","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Campus College of Letters and Science plans to limit high-demand majors","text":"You're right, the search space is deceptive and going directly towards the goal might lead to a dead end. Only in hindsight we can tell which stepping stones were essential. Immediate results are the best, but in the meantime we need to focus on novelty and interestingness. A great video about open-endedness (warning - very long) with Kenneth Stanley, author of the book \"Why Greatness Cannot be Planned\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39669351,"author":"mikhailfranco","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Abandoning Objectives: Evolution with the Search for Novelty Alone (2011) [pdf]","text":"Lehman & Stanley concerning how explicit objectives encourage effort on exploit rather than explore. AI is progressing using objective functions that can be expressed in a concise form (energy minimization, gradient descent, etc.). A similar mechanism has been at work in industry since Ford and Winslow, from time-and-motion to jit-supply-chain, all under the short-term profit incentive. These are narrow known objectives with a desire to get relatively quick results. But perhaps the big leaps are not achieved by climbing local hills. The observation harks back to Thomas Kuhn, who described the activities of normal science and great leaps - scientific recolutions. Obviously there are further philosophical implications, but also economic and administrative cliffs - financialization of the economy, bloat in university admin, group-think in academic tracks, (US) healthcare administration - all lead to temporary money extraction, with cautious risk-averse investments in bits. But there is not so much free-riding backing of mavericks, long-shot bets on contrarian ideas, and speculative gambling on profound, but expensive and difficult, inventions from atoms (see Peter Thiel - \"courage is in far shorter supply than genius\" ). Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned is Stanley's latest book (2015). Here are some excellent long-form podcast interviews with Stanley on MLST: Is getting a pay rise a step to becoming a billionaire? #38 Prof. KENNETH STANLEY - Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (2021)","stance":"rec"}],"lhe286ky-9A":[{"hn_comment_id":12868416,"author":"gremlinsinc","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Why Are US Presidential Elections So Close?","text":"As an EX democrat, I'd say the Democrat party is broken too, the amount of election fraud, and corruption in the party makes it look like the Mafia. The whole system is broken and we need to pass the anti-corruption bill asap, if we're to have a chance to take back our country from wall street. [VIDEO] EDIT: I say ex loosely.. I voted mostly dem. down the line, but wrote in Bernie Sanders, I'm not fond of Jill Stein something about her doesn't seem right. But I couldn't in good conscience do a protest vote for Trump, and I can never support Clinton, the most corrupt politician of the past 40 years.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17545993,"author":"gremlinsinc","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Jeff Bezos Becomes the Richest Man in Modern History, Topping $150B","text":"The key is passing anti-corruption acts that get money out of politics: [VIDEO] If it's illegal for lobbyists, corporations, etc to donate to politicians, then we can make politics more fair/ethical. This is a bipartisan group working to get these passed. Anti-corruption benefits everyone.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29271008,"author":"auslegung","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Congress on Drugs","text":"Incredibly frustrating. Represent.us is trying to do something about this. I find these videos to be helpful in briefly understanding the problem and their proposed solution 1: problem - [LINK] 2: their solution - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lix-vr_AF38":[{"hn_comment_id":43777650,"author":"00N8","month":"2025-04","story_title":"First Successful Lightning Triggering and Guiding Using a Drone","text":"The future is now: Check out Lightning On Demand, [LINK] (Tesla tower approach & scientific motivations) & [VIDEO] (capacitor driven Lorentz plasma cannon demo)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45401592,"author":"bigiain","month":"2025-09","story_title":"High-power microwave defeats drone swarm","text":"You might enjoy Lightning On Demand's Lorentz Cannon: [VIDEO] I does seem like a lot of stuff is needed. He's got 2 tons of capacitors in a stack 20 feet tall to get around 35 feet of range. He although he says: \"I was surprised at just how fast the plasma cannon range scaled with increasing drive voltage and how much explosive force the shock wave can deliver to target the data suggests that a plasma cannon with just a 30t high Marx Tower could achieve 1/4 mile range\" I know military contractors will have 3 or more orders of magnitude more money to throw at their technology demos, but I suspect there's some cold hard physics which shows it's totally impractical to defend anything more then very small high value targets with a system like that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45401630,"author":"bigiain","month":"2025-09","story_title":"High-power microwave defeats drone swarm","text":"> Capacitors are a terrible energy source. They're a pretty good way of storing energy in a way you can deliver it _really really_ fast. Sure, not in a way your carefully designed electronic circuits can make use of it, but if you need a really really big ZAP! capacitors are a reasonable option. After all, clouds and dirt are not the most efficient choice for capacitor plates, and air is not an ideal dielectric, but lightning goes ZAP! quite satisfyingly. As I posted elsewhere here,you might enjoy Lightning On Demand's Lorentz Cannon: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ljOoGyCso8s":[{"hn_comment_id":18159157,"author":"est","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Apple Insiders Say Nobody Knows What\u2019s Going on with Bloomberg's Hack Story","text":"In case anyone want to see how QA looks like in a factory, here's a video [VIDEO] (the whole vid is worth watching)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18430606,"author":"ddeck","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Etch a circuit board with kitchen supplies","text":"Strange Parts[1] made a great factory tour video of the JLC facility in China for anyone that interested in such things: [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25825041,"author":"antoniuschan99","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Foxconn gets green light for $270M factory in Vietnam","text":"Strange parts has some cool inside look at the popular pcb manufacturing fabs such as pcbway and jlcpcb [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35308730,"author":"elihu","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Comparing Hobby PCB Vendors","text":"This is very interesting: [VIDEO] It's a tour of JLCPCB's factory, where they go through all the PCB manufacturing steps. (They just cover the PBC itself, not the assembly service.)","stance":"rec"}],"lkIicfzPBys":[{"hn_comment_id":30884207,"author":"bko","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What Are You Up To? (April 2022)","text":"I got inspired by an Emacs video [0] I found on HN and decided to (once again) try and learn to use it. A lot of emacs videos are tutorials and boring, but it was really cool to see some of the features from someone who was very enthusiastic about it. I keep coming back to emacs every few months so I figured it has to mean something. I tried setting up a react development environment. Got some stuff like auto-complete, but missing other stuff. I essentially want it to mirror VS code to start. I know it's possible but there's definitely a learning curve. I also tried setting up a python environment, and had similar results. It's one of those technologies that seems life changing. Not necessarily in productivity (who cares right?), but just empowering. The closest thing you can get to being a hacker in a movie, setting up an environment where you can easily program macros to do any arbitrary tasks or alter the environment. It really seems like an incredible piece of software that, on the surface level, looks like it could serve as as the framework for so many things, kind of like the web browser is today, but more flexible and programmable. Maybe it's just been around too long. I think if it was invented just today it would have a lot of hype. But because it's been around so long, it's just meh. I don't know, maybe I'm just being romantic about it and will never get over the learning curve. It's really hard to leave VS Code for development. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34037611,"author":"323","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Emacs User Survey \u2013 2022 Results","text":"For those who don't really know what Emacs is (besides being an editor), I found this overview video from Steve Yegge as excellent. I never used Emacs, so it was very informing for me: [VIDEO] One particular aspect that intrigued me: you can extend VS Code (and similiar), but it's a lot of work and boilerplate to create a plugin whose actual functionality is 3 lines of code (let's say toLowercase()). In emacs, you can just write those 3 lines of code and that's it, that's your plugin.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35228674,"author":"ehecatl42","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Master Emacs in One Year","text":"Two videos by Steve Yegge should be enough to convince the most dyed-in-the-wool anti-Emacser to consider re-evaluating their position. (Here is the first: [VIDEO] ). My top-tip, FWIW, is learning how to navigate the help system to the point that it drags you into the deepest layers of Emacs' source code. > smex The three packages, whichkey, helpful and marginalia are excellent for beginners for quick overviews of what's going on at the surface. And, yes, Mickey P's work is undoubtedly of great value!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36108291,"author":"snapdaddy","month":"2023-05","story_title":"How to Get Started with Tree-Sitter","text":"I will treat your comment as serious and explain why I personally use emacs. The thing I love most about emacs is that it is joyously consistent. The same key combination to jump ahead by a word works everywhere, such as when you're opening files or navigating directories. This consistency means that I am often very efficient trying new packages that I have never used. Maybe you've never seen someone use emacs in anger? If so, check out this video of Steve Yegge doing some stuff in Emacs: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39530194,"author":"geospeck","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The Second Golden Age of Emacs","text":"He has also recorded two videos on youtube demonstrating some of emacs' features that I really like. - A guided tour of Emacs: [VIDEO] - Emergency Emacs: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"lkgszkPnV8g":[{"hn_comment_id":22183456,"author":"wyldfire","month":"2020-01","story_title":"C++20 Reference Card","text":"No. Sorry for being unclear. [1] is a great video that covers a lot of good stuff in particular this usability bug. It's worth watching in its entirety. If you don't want to sit through the video, here's the broken code in question: void Obj::update() noexcept { unique_lock<mutex>(m_mutex); do_the_mutation(); } \"unique_lock<mutex>(m_mutex);\" has no effect, but you might mistakenly think that this will block on m_mutex. Labeling unique_lock's constructor as [[nodiscard]] would force you to think twice. See [2] for more details. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27602205,"author":"slavik81","month":"2021-06","story_title":"My favourite C++ footgun","text":"I'm a big fan of Scott Meyer's Effective C++ . It's a little dated now, but it was the most valuable book I'd ever read on the language. Louis Brandy's Curiously Recurring Bugs at Facebook presentation from CppCon17 has somewhat of the same feeling, though it only covers a few bugs: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34584557,"author":"oconnor663","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn't","text":"There are many differences when it comes to safety: - Like you said, Rust doesn't let you data race on the contents of an Arc. - Rust also doesn't let you data race on the Arc itself (i.e. repointing a global Arc without synchronization). This is Bug #5 in this great talk: [VIDEO] - Rust also doesn't let you retain a reference to the contents of an Arc longer than you retain the Arc. This is the bug that C++ Core Guideline R.37 is about: [LINK] But I'm not sure I'd call these Arc vs shared_ptr differences per se, because almost any comparison between a Rust container and its C++ equivalent looks similar.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43604887,"author":"ddulaney","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Pitfalls of Safe Rust","text":"Unfortunately, operator[] on std::vector is inherently unsafe. You can potentially try to ban it (using at() instead), but that has its own problems. There\u2019s a great talk by Louis Brandy called \u201cCuriously Recurring C++ Bugs at Facebook\u201d [0] that covers this really well, along with std::map\u2019s operator[] and some more tricky bugs. An interesting question to ask if you try to watch that talk is: How does Rust design around those bugs, and what trade offs does it make? [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lnA9DMvHtfI":[{"hn_comment_id":35704811,"author":"sainez","month":"2023-04","story_title":"A Completely Non-Technical Explanation of Deep Learning","text":"If anyone is looking for a quick overview of how LLMs are built, I highly recommend this video by Steve Seitz: [VIDEO] . It does an excellent job of taking you from 0 to a decent understanding without dumbing down the content or abusing analogies.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35977022,"author":"peter_d_sherman","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Large Language Models from scratch (2022)","text":"Consider the following frame/time from the video: [VIDEO] At this point in time in the video, we see the following 3 things: 1) Fourier Series 2) Taylor Series 3) Neural Network The remainder of the video goes on to show how Neural Networks can approximate functions -- much like the Fourier Series and Taylor Series can... Now, I don't hold an advanced Ph.D. degree in Math, and prior to watching this video, I had never made the connection between Fourier Series, Taylor Series, and Neural Networks... I knew about each of those independently -- but prior to watching the video, I never made the connection that they can be used to approximate one another. And that's the one of the key words -- approximate . The other key word is Identity -- as in Mathematical Identity ... That's because IF two Mathematical Objects (functions, algorithms, call them what-you-will) are approximately equal -- then there should be a set of conditions (i.e., \"If and only if...\", etc.), a set of rigorously defined mathematical constraints which, if those conditions/constraints are met, then the two Mathematical Objects are exactly precisely equivalent -- under those rigorously defined conditions/constraints.... In other words, under those rigorously defined conditions/constraints -- one Mathematical Object could be substituted for another -- with no loss of precision or result. In other words, under those rigorously defined conditions/constraints -- those two completely apparently different Mathematical ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35981641,"author":"runetech","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Can someone ELI5 Transformers and the \u201cAttention is all we need\u201d paper","text":"Not sure I can give an ELI5 explanation, but for me this the closest to what you are after in two short videos on the topic. At least they helped me get up to speed fast. Hope they will do the same for you ;-) Large Language Models from scratch [VIDEO] Large Language Models: Part 2 [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"lnnsDi7Sxq0":[{"hn_comment_id":18748893,"author":"swozey","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players","text":"I'm loving this UO talk, I just found this Postmortem by GDC published in Sep 2018 (so I think it's new? I've never seen it) [VIDEO] This is a much watch if MMOs fascinate you. They're very transparent. Absolutely great video. edit: Oh my god they bring up FlyGuys prostitution ring..","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22971584,"author":"chongli","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Custom Game Engines: A Small Study","text":"Fun fact: the word \"shard\" in this context was coined by the dev team of the first major commercial MMO, Ultima Online, as an in-universe explanation for why the game world was split into multiple servers. If you're looking for an exemplary server architecture for MMOs, look no further than UO. That game came out in 1997 and supported worlds with thousands of players and millions of persistent objects. Players could build their own houses within the game world, decorate (and later design) them to an incredible degree [1], and have other players visit (welcome or not). Players could run their own shops within their homes and sell their own hand-crafted, signed goods (weapons, armour, clothing, furniture) in addition to any found treasure they wanted to offer. What made UO so impressive, technically, was how they accomplished all of this on such modest hardware as was available in 1995 [2]. This second link is to the GDC postmortem of the game. If you're interested, I recommend you check it out. It may not answer all your technical questions but it's extremely interesting nonetheless. The story of how they had to shard the game is part of the talk. I'm pretty sure they did not use any off-the-shelf databases as the performance would have been terrible at the time. Everything would have been custom. The custom networking protocol is extremely reserved (not chatty), since it was designed for dial-up modems. Even when you run the game on modern hardware with broadband, the game us","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33244393,"author":"codetrotter","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Have you ever heard of users demonstrating against software?","text":"> While not rioting in real life, it feels familiar. The Ultima Online postmortem session from GDC 2018 has some similar stories about in-game protests. The stories in said session are quite entertaining, and there is a lot of other interesting information too in the session. The whole thing is worth a watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35483166,"author":"NegatioN","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Database \u201cSharding\u201d came from Ultimate Online?","text":"In a similar vein to the \"War Stories\"-clips, (even though I never played Ultima,) their Ultima post-mortem from GDC is a great watch too. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41352822,"author":"ksec","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Database \u201csharding\u201d came from Ultima Online? (2009)","text":"Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online [1], I think that goes into the origin of Shard. ( Sorry I didn't save down the time like but it is an interesting video for those into UO ) And if you do a search on HN you will see plenty of other links about UO and sharding. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"loCBvaj4eSg":[{"hn_comment_id":27495113,"author":"nabla9","month":"2021-06","story_title":"LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity","text":"Here is interesting study lecture and article, maybe somewhat related. The Geometry and objects of things you see in typical to DMT experiences are hyperbolic. Lecture [VIDEO] The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32196778,"author":"jlokier","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Strange new phase of matter acts like it has two time dimensions","text":"You might enjoy \"The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (@Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club)\", [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36453789,"author":"travisjungroth","month":"2023-06","story_title":"How to create a game using hyperbolic geometry?","text":"You\u2019re adding another dimension. Sort of a \u201chalf\u201d dimension. If you want a distance function in a space that\u2019s non-Euclidean, you\u2019re likely (always?) going to have something you can represent as hyperbolic geometry. Check out metric spaces and measures on Wikipedia. For a \u201cvibes\u201d intro, The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT experiences has a good intro in the beginning. [VIDEO] I\u2019m no expert on hyperbolic geometry. These things just helped me \u201cget it\u201d in the sense of \u201cI get why that\u2019s a thing\u201d. Also, seeing it for yourself doesn\u2019t hurt.","stance":"rec"}],"lpu-3UF_b48":[{"hn_comment_id":9491310,"author":"Ovid","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Three Tales of Second System Syndrome","text":"Perl 6 isn't as complex as people make it out to be. I have friends who are race car enthusiasts who could go in to excruciating detail about cars and if you don't know how to drive, it could seem daunting. The reality is that most of us get in to our car and just drive. That's part of the issue with Perl 6: its proponents get very excited about it and write about all the really cool stuff you can do with it, but for those who don't know the language, it sounds intimidating. Here's a talk I gave at FOSDEM explaining how day-to-day Perl 6 is fairly straightforward and easier than people think: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10342757,"author":"agumonkey","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Larry Wall Unveils Perl 6.0.0","text":"The typing and grammar mechanism aren't common, it may influence other languages. Also, Perl managed to survive even without mainstream relevance so the community will probably keep enjoying it. ps: I found this talk pretty convincing about pragmatism [VIDEO] also: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"lqJUIqZNzP8":[{"hn_comment_id":34459007,"author":"jononor","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Not worried about AI that passes Turing test, but AI that fails it on purpose","text":"For those curious about AI safety I heavily recommend Robert Miles channel on YouTube. He has lot of good content describing out the challenges we face when trying to create safe AI. Here is one potential starting point: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17147271,"author":"nmca","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Uber Self-Driving Car That Struck Pedestrian Wasn\u2019t Set to Stop in an Emergency","text":"This highlights an interesting general point - in many situations, there is no simple safe fallback policy. On a highway, an emergency stop is not safe. This is a general problem in AI safety and is covered nicely in this youtube video, as well as the paper referenced there - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lqzJewjZUkk":[{"hn_comment_id":41865107,"author":"consumer451","month":"2024-10","story_title":"A solar gravitational lens will be humanity's most powerful telescope (2022)","text":"The most complete plan for this was proposed by JPL's Slava Turyshev and team. It has been selected for Phase III of NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts. [0] > In 2020, Turyshev presented his idea of Direct Multi-pixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravitational Lens Mission. The lens could reconstruct the exoplanet image with ~25 km-scale surface resolution in 6 months of integration time, enough to see surface features and signs of habitability. His proposal was selected for the Phase III of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts. Turyshev proposes to use realistic-sized solar sails (~16 vanes of 10^3 m^2) to achieve the needed high velocity at perihelion (~150 km/sec), reaching 547 AU in 17 years. > In 2023, a team of scientists led by Turychev proposed the Sundiver concept,[1] whereby a solar sail craft can serve as a modular platform for various instruments and missions, including rendezvous with other Sundivers for resupply, in a variety of different self-sustaining orbits reaching velocities of ~5-10 AU/yr. Here is an interview with him laying out the entire plan.[2] It is the most interesting interview that I have seen in years, possibly ever. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42166535,"author":"FriedPickles","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981","text":"> the basic technology for \"much faster speed\" doesn't exist. \u2026but we\u2019re very close. The next technique will be flying near the sun then deploying a solar sail for a huge speed boost. Voyager goes 3 AU/yr, solar sail boost with todays technology will enable 7-9 AU/yr. Highly recommend watching Slava Turyshev discuss his work on an SGL telescope, which employs this technique. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41911612,"author":"stouset","month":"2024-10","story_title":"First images from Euclid are in","text":"> Really? I wouldn't think the sun is nearly massive enough to do what would be required here. You \"just\" need to get far enough away (~600AU). Interferometry is extremely difficult to pull this off with and it\u2019s further complicated by the host star being so much brighter than the exoplanet. See this recent Fraser Cain interview with Dr. Slava Turyshev: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lr4MmmWQtZM":[{"hn_comment_id":16226313,"author":"mtgx","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Curry spice turmeric boosts memory by nearly 30%, eases depression, study finds","text":"Speaking of Japan, I recently saw an interesting video about why Japanese people are so thin, compared to say the US: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23503416,"author":"novok","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Biohacking Lite","text":"Yup I agree. I call it the food gravity problem of america. Trying to eat healthy here is like trying to beat gravity: This youtube video goes into more detail about the US problem compared to japan: \"Why is it so Easy to be Thin in Japan?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25818306,"author":"presentation","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Japanese people may have gained longevity by balancing their diets","text":"Re diet: putting aside that alcohol-per-capita consumption here in Japan is less than the OECD average [1], and also how the article is actually about how the introduction of meat into the Japanese diet has caused a decrease in strokes (i.e. this is probably off-topic); it is true that if you are eating out cheaply, you'll likely find lots of rice and meat stuff like gyuudon (beef on rice), katsudon (breaded meat on rice) and what not. But a normal Japanese meal generally has a pretty good mix of stuff - some fermented side dishes (tsukemono), some veggies, miso soup, some rice or noodles, some fish, maybe some meat. Perhaps my wife is an outlier, but every meal she's cooked for our household has had at least 3 dishes of different categories as a part of it, and my impression from seeing other households and just looking at a typical bento box, is that that's a pretty normal expectation for any healthy meal. Someone else pointed me to this Youtube video on the topic on a different thread, and I'd say it's pretty accurate [2]. When I go to drinking bars, izakayas, with Japanese people they usually tend to do the same and order a variety of small dishes too - it's not common to just get fried chicken (karaage), but rather people almost always also throw in salty drinking foods (otsumami), which usually include seafood, pickles and vegetables (shiokara, takowasa, various tsukemono and so on). Even then, if someone orders sweets or something, they tend to be a lot less unhealthy ","stance":"rec"}],"lsDc1YVxHA0":[{"hn_comment_id":20337751,"author":"franknine","month":"2019-07","story_title":"I thought I made a hard game and then speedrunners destroyed it","text":"For people who like this post, I highly recommend \"Devs Play\" S1E06 - Psychonauts \"The SMK Speedrun\" by Double Fine Production: [VIDEO] They had a speedrunner running their game in front of the development team which is hilarious.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22628267,"author":"radnor","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)","text":"You might be interested in watching this speedrunner go through Psychonauts while the entire dev team watches. I found it entertaining and much more fun than trying to play it myself. :) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31104906,"author":"8K832d7tNmiQ","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Overhauling Mario 64's code to reach 30 FPS and render 6x faster on N64 [video]","text":"Psychonaut's dev reaction is my favorite one because they had one-to-one with a speedrunner talking about every game exploits used to get the fastest time possible.[1] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lvTqbM5Dq4Q":[{"hn_comment_id":21340515,"author":"glandium","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off","text":"Minute Physics has a really good explanation of Shor's algorithm, and by proxy, Quantum computing. [VIDEO] And the followup: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27456859,"author":"xmprt","month":"2021-06","story_title":"What makes quantum computing so hard to explain?","text":"This helped me a lot and I think it made the rounds on hackernews a while back as well. [LINK] There's also this video which walks through how quantum computers solve a very specific factoring problem (Shor's Algorithm) in a way that classical computers cannot. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35496552,"author":"diginova","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Quantum Computing 101","text":"This video clears a most important misconception everyone has regarding QC which is \"How a QC does operation's parallelly and what does that even mean when you can only get 1 output irl?\" I hope I myself have understood it correctly if that's right Also Minute Physics video for the Shor's Algorithm is good explaination [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lw6TaiXzHAE":[{"hn_comment_id":30068289,"author":"nfoz","month":"2022-01","story_title":"In defense of complicated programming languages","text":"In case anyone hasn't seen this most excellent talk on this topic, I highly recommend: Guy Steele - Growing a Language (OOPSLA '98) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32636011,"author":"MrDOS","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The Up-Goer Five Text Editor","text":"This is an excellent talk, and exactly where my mind went, too. I might suggest watching this upload of it instead, to avoid capture errors in the older upload: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24385622,"author":"jdontillman","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Growing a Language (1998) [video]","text":"For some reason that version has a large number of audio glitches. But very recently the Computer History Museum published a cleaned-up version: [VIDEO] Good!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33658992,"author":"pfarrell","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Fred Brooks has died","text":"Not writing, but I have found all of Brett Victor's speeches to be incredibly inspiring on how I think about what I want to work on and where we're going. Inventing on Principle by Brett Victor: [LINK] Growing a Language by Guy Steele: [VIDEO] We Really Don't Know How to Compute! by Gerald Sussman: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35304744,"author":"craftuser","month":"2023-03","story_title":"How Big Should a Programming Language Be?","text":"This Guy Steele talk is related to this topic: [VIDEO] A good watch for the fine people in this thread (and please ignore explicit or implied linkages to Java--it's full of the broad concepts, not narrowly JVM stuff)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48804177,"author":"pohl","month":"2026-07","story_title":"A Forlorn Hope of Fortran Modernisation","text":"It\u2019s a tragedy. I feel the work they were doing was important. At least we got this talk from guy steele [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lwhMThePdIo":[{"hn_comment_id":20310118,"author":"filmgirlcw","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Microsoft's Linux Kernel","text":"It\u2019s happening at the hypervisor level, and in this case it\u2019s Type 1, so I guess you could but I don\u2019t know how. My ops colleagues are hanging their heads at me right now. You can learn more about the architecture of WSL2 in this video from Build [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22121037,"author":"mikepurvis","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Wine 5.0","text":"If you're interested, the Build talk where WSL2 was introduced is pretty in-depth and does a great job of talking about the motivation. See starting around this point: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lyqt6u5_sHA":[{"hn_comment_id":10455431,"author":"amckenna","month":"2015-10","story_title":"First New U.S. Nuclear Reactor in Two Decades to Begin Fueling in Tennessee","text":"Actually there are potentially some large breakthroughs in fusion power depending on how the new Wendelstein 7-X does when it is turned on later this year. Stellarators are pretty cool and if they prove viable could lead to a big shift in the field away from tokamaks which have stalled in efficacy improvements. Here is an article about it: [LINK] And here is a great video showing the design in amazing detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10712427,"author":"sawwit","month":"2015-12","story_title":"The first plasma: the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device is now in operation","text":"Here is a time lapse video of the 9 year construction, quite fascinating to watch: [LINK] YouTube mirror: [LINK] A more technical video explaining how it works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13150383,"author":"saganus","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Confirmation of the topology of the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator\u2019s magnetic field","text":"How the hell do you test such a monstrosity? I mean... I know that testing complex software projects is a pain in the ass. But... this? I mean... how do you even begin to plan where all the wires and other elements go and then test that it's a sound design? I'm guessing they do a lot of simulations and such, but what if something fails? how much do you have to backtrack to fix a potential bug? It just boggles the mind. I had no idea these things were so complex. Thanks for the links. Edit: This video explains the elements quite in an understandable way [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14646977,"author":"nitrogen","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Artistically shaped magnets may make stellarators easier to manage than ITER","text":"Look for videos about the reactor on YouTube. Like this one. [VIDEO] Also search HN for previous articles.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14647416,"author":"okket","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Artistically shaped magnets may make stellarators easier to manage than ITER","text":"The engineering challenges and their solutions are described in detail in this video: \"Wendelstein 7-X - from concept to reality\" (10m30s) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lyu7v7nWzfo":[{"hn_comment_id":20521403,"author":"hcarvalhoalves","month":"2019-07","story_title":"What If Consciousness Comes First?","text":"I've recently watched this talk titled \"Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality\" [1] by Anil Seth, seems relevant to the topic. If you are intrigued by the question of the original article you might like the TED talk. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29255508,"author":"guerrilla","month":"2021-11","story_title":"To be energy-efficient, brains predict their perceptions","text":"This TED talk has a great example where the same sound sounds different to you based on what you expect to hear, if you need to prove this to yourself [1]. His thesis is also that the brain is a prediction machine. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"lzsZP9o7SlI":[{"hn_comment_id":38088313,"author":"nickthegreek","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education","text":"John Oliver did a great segment on the issues with home schooling in the modern age a few weeks ago. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38720671,"author":"rbobby","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Why Is the Press Attacking Home Schoolers?","text":"John Oliver did an eye opening bit on homeschooling: [VIDEO] The lack of regulation is concerning. What's truly disturbing is how easily it is for children to fall through the cracks when there are no teachers to report possible abuse. Frightening.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38720691,"author":"silverbax88","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Why Is the Press Attacking Home Schoolers?","text":"Here's your chance to get up to speed -> John Oliver breaking it down in a lot more researched detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"m05abdGSOxY":[{"hn_comment_id":23560055,"author":"sneak","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Realtime Starlink Satellite Map","text":"You don't need inter-satellite links for low latency, as Mark Handley has elegantly pointed out in his incredible video. I don't think internet access will amount to even 50% of the revenue of Starlink. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24792860,"author":"thamer","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Starlink Packet Routing","text":"I would highly recommend the video linked from this article: [VIDEO] It's a simulation of the various ways in which the Starlink network could be arranged to route between satellites and ground stations; very detailed and super interesting.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23414582,"author":"gadders","month":"2020-06","story_title":"SpaceX Starlink is now its own ASN and present at the Seattle Internet Exchange","text":"This [1] is a good youtube explanation of how a hybrid between Starlink and ground stations could still improve connectivity: [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23521957,"author":"cagenut","month":"2020-06","story_title":"FCC has \u201cserious doubts\u201d that SpaceX can deliver latencies under 100ms","text":"If you want a really great visualization and latency estimates for starlink check out the models and videos this guy came up with: [LINK] [VIDEO] The comment from the FCC about it not accounting for \"processing [&] routing\" is kindof nonsense on its face, those are not novel problems they're already done by ever other router and switch, including several other satellite networks.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23558585,"author":"sneak","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Realtime Starlink Satellite Map","text":"The orbital planes top parts are all up there at high latitudes. The circle you are seeing is actually made up of several different orbital planes that swoop down toward/past the equator and then up/down to 60 degrees N/S. Seeing them move will make it clearer. Here\u2019s an awesome visual explanation with a ton of other cool info: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23559126,"author":"sacred_numbers","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Realtime Starlink Satellite Map","text":"A ground station doesn't have to actually be on the ground. They could park a boat in the ocean between London and NYC with equipment to act as a repeater. This YouTube video (along with others on this channel) does a good job of explaining how this could work. [ [VIDEO] ]","stance":"rec"}],"m1lhGqNCZlA":[{"hn_comment_id":21034270,"author":"taylorfinley","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Aerial Saw Is Boon to Line Trimming","text":"I thought this link was going to be about Mr. Choppy, the drone-mounted power saw designed to cut power lines (for instigating coups, naturally) that Chris Rock showed off[0] in his DEF CON 24 talk, 'How To Overthrow a Government.' If you've not seen this amazing talk I can't recommend it enough. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13609570,"author":"eatbitseveryday","month":"2017-02","story_title":"U.S. Visitors May Have to Hand Over Social Media Passwords","text":"You might be interested to listen to this talk at DEF CON. Chris Rock (the speaker) tells you how to one could forge new identities, SSN, etc. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"m3svKOdZijA":[{"hn_comment_id":7628994,"author":"lrichardson","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Functional JavaScript, Part 3: apply, call, and the arguments object","text":"That is great feedback. I am actually working on creating a \"functional\" version of the 2048 game, along with my own implementation of the AI solver, as part of this series. Kinda goofy, and maybe not a \"real world\" situation as much, but should at least show the concepts being applied. I also very much recommend this video by Brian Lonsdorf, titled \"Hey Underscore, You're Doing It Wrong!: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8953664,"author":"wizao","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Lodash v3.0.0","text":"There is an excellent talk called \"Underscore, you're doing it wrong!\". The talk explains how well designed param order with currying leads to very short and expressive code -- and how underscore missed the boat. This aspect of it should be interesting as it's related to this post. It's well worth the watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32328068,"author":"r3a1d33p","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Learning Functional Programming in 2022?","text":"I find this talk inspiring. Underscore.js got many things wrong for FP: [VIDEO] . I've read Grokking Simplicity too. It's very approachable book. Highly recommend it for JS/TS developers who want to learn FP!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7977766,"author":"grayrest","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Don\u2019t Be Scared Of Functional Programming","text":"If you're interested in FP in javascript, you should check out the relatively new Ramda.js [1]. It switches from the underscore style collection first call pattern to a collection last pattern and automatically curries its functions. The combination allows for easier function composition. [1] [LINK] More info on the topic: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8019846,"author":"hueyp","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Videos about JavaScript","text":"I would add: 'Hey Underscore, You're Doing It Wrong' -- [VIDEO] It is much better than the title would suggest :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8051406,"author":"lsdafjklsd","month":"2014-07","story_title":"A Gentle Introduction to Monad Transformers \u2013 or, Values as Exceptions","text":"Meh, I don't know or use Haskell and I'm interested in this stuff. I'm a javascript programmer introduced to these concepts via [1] [VIDEO] and [LINK] . Programming in a point free style in javascript is great! 1: Hey Underscore, You're Doing it Wrong!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9887742,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming in JavaScript","text":"You might already be using certain functional programming constructs without being aware of them. Contrary to popular misconception, OOP and functional programming don't have to be mutually exclusive. \"Pure\" functional programming (ala Haskell) and OOP most certainly are to an extent non-overlapping (since OOP has state+behaviour at its core), and pure fn-languages have no side-effects. High-order function in java don't exist, so one would do : new Thread(new Runnable() { ... }).start(); A builder pattern can be distilled down as a form of partial application (or, currying, if you like. They aren't the same thing, but are very similar): alertDialog .setMessage(...) .setPositiveButtonText(...) .setNegativeButtonText(...) .setPositiveButtonOnClickListener(...) .setNegativeButtonOnClickListener(...) .build() .show() Functors (in OCaml) can be viewed as Java's abstract-generic-classes with dependency injection [0]. Note that functors in different languages mean different things. Monads are tricky to understand [1], I have been led to believe. But if you use the promises API in javascript, then you're using a form of monad [2]. If you're familiar with javascript, have a look at: [VIDEO] (Hey Underscore, you're doing it wrong!) I think the best way is to read a book on fn-programming. I've heard most people recommend these (pick a language, and choose a book; you cannot go wrong with any of these): Functional DS: [LINK] Real World Haskell: [LINK] Real World OCaml: [LINK] The Joy of","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12116047,"author":"patricklynch","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Just: A library of dependency-free JS utilities that do just do one thing","text":"Because then you can curry/partially apply functions independent of your data. It's _not_ because it's convention everywhere else. (I realize that only really makes sense if you know why it makes sense, so this video gives a pretty good explanation in ~30 minutes - [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15285253,"author":"splintercell","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Currying vs. Partial Application (2015)","text":"With all due respect, I don't think you understand the purpose of currying and partial application. In your defense, the article merely explains what currying is, but does not explain why you need it. For instance while writing functional Javascript code, I never curry my methods, instead I use helper methods from functional libraries such as lodash or Ramda to curry. Where currying is useful is in cases like this: ```javascript //Definitions const filterUsers = (fieldName, value, users) => //Implementation const sortUsersBy = (fieldName, users) => //Implementation const takeUsers = (count, users) => //Implementation //Without currying UserService .getUsers() .then(users => filterUsers('active', true, users)) .then(users => sortUsersBy('age', users)) .then(users => takeUsers(3, users)); //If these methods were curried UserService .getUsers() .then(filterUsers('active', true)) .then(sortUsersBy('age')) .then(takeUsers(3)); ``` Here is a video which explains proper uses of currying (and does it very well) [1]. Here is another article if your coworker start using functional programming and you want to stop them [2]. 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"m64SWl9bfvk":[{"hn_comment_id":15963632,"author":"luckystarr","month":"2017-12","story_title":"How to Design a Scalable Rate Limiting Algorithm","text":"For a different view on the topic watch \"Stop Rate Limiting! Capacity Management Done Right\" [VIDEO] The basic premise is not do do req/s limiting but rather concurrency limiting which results in req/s limiting by itself. Concurrency limiting is rather simple and doesn't require a lot of code complexity.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16047724,"author":"cpeterso","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What\u2019s your favorite talk from 2017?","text":"* To Serve The People: Public Interest Technologists. Matt Mitchell is a hacker, security researcher, operational security trainer, and data journalist who founded & leads CryptoHarlem, impromptu workshops teaching basic cryptography tools to the predominately African American community in upper Manhattan. [LINK] * Stop Rate Limiting! Capacity Management Done Right. Jon Moore is the Chief Software Architect at Comcast Cable, where he focuses on delivering a core set of scalable, performant, robust software components for the company's varied software product development groups. [VIDEO] * Keeping Time in Real Systems. This talk will tour the fascinating timekeeping mechanisms used in real systems. We will explore atomic clocks, NTP and GPS through systems that use them, and logical clocks in the context of systems built on logical time. [LINK] * Level Up Your Concurrency Skills With Rust. This talk will show you how Rust will catch many concurrency errors at compile time. [LINK] * Diablo: A Classic Game Postmortem. Diablo developer David Brevik returns to the GDC stage to give a classic post-mortem on Blizzard's action RPG hit Diablo in this 2016 talk. [LINK] * The Flash Games Postmortem . In this 2017 GDC talk, Kongregate's John Cooney attempts to encapsulate the immense history of Flash games and how it has shaped the current game industry by giving game developers their first chance to build and publish their games quickly to the web. [LINK] * Siege Battle AI in Total War: ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20293773,"author":"oftenwrong","month":"2019-06","story_title":"It\u2019s Time for Some Queueing Theory","text":"Relevant to queueing theory: \"Stop Rate Limiting! Capacity Management Done Right\" by Jon Moore [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42252404,"author":"Lanzaa","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Amazon S3 Adds Put-If-Match (Compare-and-Swap)","text":"You will like the Strange Loop 2017 talk about this subject: \"Stop Rate Limiting! Capacity Management Done Right\" by Jon Moore [VIDEO] Concurrent capacity might not be the best metric.","stance":"rec"}],"m7PVZixO35c":[{"hn_comment_id":45406403,"author":"MontyCarloHall","month":"2025-09","story_title":"The Weird Concept of Branchless Programming","text":"This great video [0] demonstrates how CPU performance has only increased 1.5-2x over the past 15(!) years when executing extremely branchy code. Really shows you just how deep modern CPU pipelines have become. The video also showcases a much more impressive branchless speedup: computing CRC checksums. Doing this na\u00efvely with an if-statement for each bit is ~10x slower than doing it branchless with a single bitwise operation for each bit. The author of the article should consider showcasing this too, since it's a lot more impressive than the measly 1.2x speedup highlighted in the article. I assume the minimal/nonexistent speedups in the article are due to modern CPU branch prediction being quite good. But branch predictors inherently fail miserably at CRC because the conditional is on whether the input bit is 1 or 0, which is essentially random. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43978286,"author":"dijit","month":"2025-05","story_title":"The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority","text":"Maybe since 1980. I recently watched a video that can be summarised quite simply as: \"Computers today aren't that much faster than the computers of 20 years ago, unless you specifically code for them\". [VIDEO] It's a little bit ham-fisted, as the author was shirking decades of compile optimisations also , and it's not apples to apples as he's comparing desktop class hardware with what is essentially laptop hardware; but it's also interesting to see that a lot of the performance gains really weren't that great actually. he observes a doubling of performance in 15 years! Truth be told most people use laptops now, and truth be told 20 years ago most people used desktops, so it's not totally unfair. Maybe we've bought a lot into marketing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45011910,"author":"torginus","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock","text":"Watch this video: [VIDEO] New computers aren't as much faster as benchmarks would lead you to believe. If your code relies on unpredictable branches, dependept memory accesses in a tight loop, or very tight feedback loops inside computations, new CPUs won't have that much of an edge.","stance":"rec"}],"mD4L7xDNCmA":[{"hn_comment_id":5548085,"author":"tjaerv","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Why would a government have created bitcoin?","text":"Indeed. Mike Hearn's talk at Bitcoin 2012 is a great overview of all that: [VIDEO] All these goodies just waiting in there to come out and play.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6791831,"author":"tlrobinson","month":"2013-11","story_title":"Bitcoin \u2013 The Internet of Money","text":"Yes, this is the most exciting part of Bitcoin, IMHO. It's quite amazing what sort of problems you can solve. I highly recommend watching this talk by Mike Hearn, as well as reading the links in NhanH's comment: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5515346,"author":"mesm","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Bitcoin Is Fundamentally Flawed","text":"Mike Hearn has talked some on how you could use existing functionality in the bitcoin protocol to issue loans. Around 25:50 he talks about ripple + bitcoin which is a practical autonomous lending system. A little bit simpler than the smart property way which is pretty deep down in the protocol. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6866662,"author":"buss","month":"2013-12","story_title":"How the Bitcoin protocol actually works","text":"The scripting language is the reason I'm betting on bitcoin in the long run. The scripting language lets you do so many interesting things with it (escrow, wills, and surely lots of things I can't envision). Check out this video about bitcoin contracts which talks about the scripting language: [VIDEO] Unfortunately, if I understand correctly, non-standard transactions are not accepted by most miners currently, which means the interesting things in the previously linked contracts video wouldn't work. This should improve over time as new transactions are proposed and added to the list of standard transactions. The bitcointalk forums, while having a lot of noise, also has interesting discussions about new transaction types. Bitcoin combined with its scripting language is just too good of an idea to go away, and I think we'll start to see more interesting transactions within a couple years. edit: Forgot to mention that everyone who is manic about bitcoin never even mentions the good ideas in the actual protocol, they only focus on the crazy price swings. Learning about the backing technology is the best way to feel confident about bitcoin's future.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7027004,"author":"jasdeepsingh","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Sick of your bank? Want to build a open source, non-profit, online bank?","text":"The whole point of de-centralizing a financial system is to move away from a central source for lending & borrowing. With Crypto currencies, it would be easier than ever for you to lend/borrow money to/from your friends/colleagues/investors etc. The idea & support for transactions like borrowing, lending, escrow and likely all other transaction types that you can think of are already built into Bitcoin & it's design. They are just not being used as of today. Infact, I would say it's safer to carry out such transactions using Crypto currencies than with a Bank. Please see this video: [VIDEO] Satoshi was clever enough to think of all use-cases and he made sure that the design & eco-system would be solid enough to replace centuries old incumbents like Banks. The features are just sitting and hiding there in the protocol to be made use of when there is enough traction & momentum.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8760169,"author":"bachback","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Bitcoin Developer Guide","text":"Mike's great 2012 talk [1]. Unfortunately 2 years later, we're not much further in those developments. Bitcoin has severe limitations, also because it has now a legacy to support. New projects can start with a fresh design. So far we've only seen very few new approaches. While many Bitcoiners realize the imperfections of the system, very few actually think there could be something better. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mHtdZgou0qU":[{"hn_comment_id":3551071,"author":"malandrew","month":"2012-02","story_title":"Ask HN: JavaScript Dev Tools","text":"The only other video that sticks out in mine head is this Google Tech Talk by Nicholas Zakas about javascript performance. [VIDEO] Besides videos, check out Javascript Garden: [LINK] Javascript Weblog: [LINK] Here are some links over on Quora: [LINK] The three books worth getting for someone who is already a programmer are: Crockford's \"Javascript: The Good Parts\", Stoyan Stefanov's \"Javascript Patterns\", and Resigs's \"Secrets of the Javascript Ninja\" IMHO, there are few videos worthwhile.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7014188,"author":"tangue","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Wonderful Javascript Talks?","text":"Classics John Resig : The Dom is a mess [LINK] Javascript, The Good Parts [LINK] Speed up your Javascript [VIDEO] Brendan Eich : Fluent 2013: Brendan Eich, \"JavaScript at 18: Legal to Gamble\" [LINK] Paul Irish : 10 things I learned from the Jquery source [LINK] Less known but very interesting Building High-Performing JavaScript for Modern Engines [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44654180,"author":"RumourRider","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Don't animate height","text":"You need to think about what the browser is actually doing when it displays a web page. You need to think about what happens when you type the URL in and what the browser is doing conceptually. If you have any experience programming 2D graphics with SDL this will help you to understand what is happening as well. There is an old school talk by Nikolas Zakas on JavaScript Performance from 2009 which while some of it is out of date now due to improvements in Browser engines, the fundamental ideas are still the same. [VIDEO] If you skip to the 35 minute mark he speaks about reflow specifically. Generally I still use many of these techniques when writing vanilla JS (which is unfortunately rare these days). There are other talks where he talks about many other performance specific topics. Obviously none of this is as good as real world experience of dealing with a thorny issue.","stance":"rec"}],"mII9NZ8MMVM":[{"hn_comment_id":8792261,"author":"Fuxy","month":"2014-12","story_title":"The world is not falling apart: The trend lines","text":"> Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening The US currency and most other currencies are working against the people and in favor of the bankers. Probably one of the best solutions that have presented themselves for this problem is bit-coin but since it is extremely volatile and still underused at the moment it is not ready yet. Here's [1] a simple youtube animation that explains it better than anything i have seen. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35243448,"author":"Jerry2","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Bank Failures Come in Waves","text":"Yes, that's how it works. There's this amazing animated movie from 2011 that explains how banking works and the history of banks: \"The Collapse of The American Dream Explained in Animation\" [1] It has almost 10 million views. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7323855,"author":"icu","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What is really wrong with the US economy, really?","text":"There are several levels to what is wrong. I have dedicated the last 5 years to discovering what is going on so I will try my best to condense it down. In terms of a 'shorter' business cycle view (less than 10 year perspective) to what is wrong is that we are not in a recession but in a deleverage. We haven't had one of those since WW2 so most people don't know what it is and think it is a recession. A deleverage is a once in a 100 year massive transfer of wealth event. I have put resources on what a deleverage is at the end of this reply. The long term problem is that the Fed is a private bank. This means that the US Government and American citizens do not control the Fed. Forget the fa\u00e7ade that makes them look like a branch of Government, especially the whole Presidential appointment of the Fed Chairman. It is a private bank that gets to print money and sell it to the US Government that American citizens are forced to use. That means that the US Government and American citizens are slaves with no control over their future. Each dollar printed is a debt burden on the American people and a debasement of the current currency value. Essentially think of printing money as a way that the Fed transfers wealth from your pocket into theirs. Furthermore, I believe that the Fed manipulates the economic cycle to create wealth transfer events that they reap the benefits of. For further information look to the following: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22575812,"author":"unixhero","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Book recommendations for understanding financial systems?","text":"Any book on International Finance, to start. And then maybe a Banking 101 to understand how banking works. Then Macro Economics, to know how economics of markets and countries work. There's no quick fix to learning this stuff. However you might still want to; so take this biased Internet-clip with a grain of salt and enjoy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42871893,"author":"normalaccess","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Fed leaves rates unchanged, drops reference to inflation 'progress'","text":"The fact that every dollar that is printed MUST be paid back to the Federal Reserve Bank with interest means that every dollar printed is worth less than it's face value. This is the original and primary source of inflation. All debt biassed currencies have this, not as a defect, but as a feature. If you own the bank you can do some money magic and get filthy rich. The Federal reserve Over the last 100 years the dollar has lost something like 96% of it's value. It's old and quite corny but this video gives the cliff notes on how the FED works [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mOJlg8g8_yw":[{"hn_comment_id":43548627,"author":"mega_dean","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Donkey Kong champion wins defamation case against Australian YouTuber Karl Jobst","text":"The youtube channel Summoning Salt made a great video that covers the history of Tetris world records: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48817458,"author":"cyphar","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Odin, Wikipedia and Engagement Farming","text":"> You lost me here. I mean, yes, there's serious fan community interaction around those subject which is unauthenticated and anonymous. But that's interaction and not research or journalism. Depends on the field. If you're talking about video games, their community (in particular, the associated modding and speedrunning communities) is probably second only to the original developers as a source for information (if not as good as) depending on the topic being discussed. For instance, the Wikipedia article on Tetris has a brief mention of the \"kid finally beat Tetris\" story from a few years ago. All of the primary information that is referenced by the articles is just reworded versions of research done by the community, some even just being dead links to old tweets (and I would argue that YouTube video about the topic like [1] are far more accurate and exhaustive than the articles referenced by Wikipedia, if Wikipedia really wants to prioritise accuracy). I don't necessarily disagree with the argument that you need to have a strong standard as otherwise you run the risk of accepting crap, but that shouldn't be taken to mean that the current standard actually provides the most accurate information you can get. Also, many articles about such topics feel like a weird kind of \"reputation laundering\" where the same person provides the same information in a different context (but now filtered through a non-subject-matter-expert) and now it is considered \"more reputable\". Yes, a third","stance":"rec"}],"mOtKD7ml0NU":[{"hn_comment_id":18705024,"author":"huntie","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Dependent Haskell","text":"Dependent types are types which depend on values. As an example, think of the cons procedure: (List A, A) -> List A. It takes a List of A's and an A and returns a List of A's. With dependent types you can write this as (List n A, A) -> List n+1 A. This tells us that cons takes a List of A's with length n and an A returns a List of A's with length n+1. Edwin Brady shows off some examples in Idris here[1]. I thought the matrix example was really impressive. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20378302,"author":"pezo1919","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite non-generic or semi-obscure programming language?","text":"Idris lang seems awesome with the atom plugin. :) Did not use it yet but I hope it will get more attention. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20391990,"author":"resoluteteeth","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Idris 2 programming language announced","text":"Until yesterday it was officially called \"Blodwen\" a \"prototype successor to Idris\", so I assume the fact that it's now officially being called a \"pre-alpha implementation of Idris 2\" means it's somewhat closer to being ready, but is there some specific announcement about the exact significance of it being officially called Idris 2 now? Edit: Never mind, I found the official announcement on the Idris mailing list: [LINK] He says \"No doubt I'll say more about this over the next few weeks,\" so it sounds like he's planning on making a more detailed announcement later. Edit 2: Also, as someone who hasn't been following Blodwen or how it's different from Idris 1, this looks like a good introduction: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27626805,"author":"still_grokking","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Fun and dystopia with AI-based code generation using GPT-J-6B","text":"You don't need the tests. You need only the types. And especially you don't need \"artificial dumbness\", which does not understand code, and therefore won't produce correct results, but just an advanced programming language. Say hello to Idris! :-) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28659571,"author":"sourceless","month":"2021-09","story_title":"What will programming look like in 2020? (2012)","text":"I don't know, some of that is at least starting to happen with Idris 2, though not in the exact way predicted: [VIDEO] (Type Driven Development with Idris 2) Short summary of linked video: when your type system is powerful enough you can restrict the set of possible implementations to the point that the compiler can make a decent guess as to what the program should be to satisfy the type signature.","stance":"rec"}],"mPZn4x3uOac":[{"hn_comment_id":21670886,"author":"cousin_it","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Jacob Collier\u2019s four magical chords","text":"\"In the bleak midwinter\" is an amazing recording: [VIDEO] But the people who say it doesn't strike a chord with them do have a point. Here's Myrone doing something similar, with 1/10th the complexity but 10x the feeling: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33643750,"author":"spookthesunset","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Resources for microtonal music","text":"Another grand master of microtonality is Jacob Collier: [LINK] [LINK] Probably the best example, especially the middle: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mPn2AdMH7UQ":[{"hn_comment_id":27365525,"author":"knuthsat","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Surreal Numbers \u2013 An Introduction (2019) [pdf]","text":"Knuth has a nice book on Surreal numbers. [LINK] This interview is excellent [VIDEO] He wrote the book in less than a week, the book was just flowing for days and after that he couldn't write a thing. Then he realized he missed a detail and had to rewrite the whole book.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27363957,"author":"maxbond","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Surreal Numbers \u2013 An Introduction (2019) [pdf]","text":"You can safely ignore it, the document is just a summary of Knuth's book. And it's a good one, I found it very helpful when I was working through the book. I found I had to read the material from several different sources to understand, in addition to working things out on paper/in code. I'm not religious myself but honestly that seems like a perfectly reasonable motivation. While there are some people who believe the Surreals could lead to a deeper form of analysis, I think the most common reason to learn them is to apprehend something beautiful without any sort of utility. But as a heads up, if that doesn't sit right with you, then Knuth's book is probably not right for you either; it's framed in the style of the old testament. On the first day, Conway created zero, and saw that it was good; things like that. This may be more to your taste. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33981803,"author":"AndrewOMartin","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The Pirah\u00e3 Are Off by One (2020)","text":"You sounds like you'd enjoy learning about the Surreal Numbers. [VIDEO] (15m video starring Don Knuth) [LINK] (1h15m video starring John Conway) It may be the case that you've already heard of the Surreal Numbers, but I remain confident you enjoyed learning about them. :)","stance":"rec"}],"mPqWstVnRjQ":[{"hn_comment_id":15888731,"author":"deepvibrations","month":"2017-12","story_title":"The largest living thing on Earth is a fungus (2014)","text":"I stumbled upon Paul Stamets on Joe Rogan's podcast, which made a nice introduction to the world of funghi- absolutely fascinating and exciting to think of what else we may discover in this field in the coming years! For anyone interested- [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16372962,"author":"tmnvix","month":"2018-02","story_title":"New antibiotic family discovered in dirt","text":"As a lay person, it's not clear to me whether these malacidins were found in mycelium (fungi). I'm inclined to think this is likely. If so, finding them in dirt is not really surprising (30% of dirt is comprised of mycelium - living and dead). It seems like the obvious place to look for new antibiotics. For anyone that's interested in fungi I can't recommend listening to Paul Stamets talk on the subject more highly. Like a lot of people here on HN I take in a lot of information and his recent interview with Joe Rogan[0] was one of the most fascinating things I've come across in years. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18139440,"author":"greenwireless","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Closer to Medicinal Use","text":"I generally dislike mushrooms but I was pretty moved by Joe Rogan's podcast #1035 with Paul Stamets. Despite being over 2 hours long I suggested it to and watched it in it's entirety with several different people and each time we end up discussing the content off and on for weeks or months afterwards. Highly recommended. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26597289,"author":"samstave","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Buildings made with fungi could live, grow, and then biodegrade","text":"\"There's been buzz lately about mycelium\" -- Well, Paul Stamets has been talking for decades. Did a TED talk, amazing other videos - a fantastic Joe Rogan Podcast etc. Mycelium is AMAZING - and I really hope that we start using it in the myriad ways it is versatile for so many different applications. --- Have you Seen these Paul Stamets vids: Joe rogan: [VIDEO] Ted (6 ways mushrooms can change the world: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15661856,"author":"OzzyB","month":"2017-11","story_title":"A fungus with over 20k sexes","text":"OT: The Joe Rogan podcast recently had Paul Stamets on who talks at great length about fungi and it's benefits -- truly fascinating stuff. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16840041,"author":"a_d","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Bret Victor - Inventing on principle [LINK] Alan Kay - Power of Simplicity [LINK] Steve Jobs - Marketing (unveiling Think Different) [LINK] Robert Cialdini - On Influence [LINK] Peter Thiel - On Zero to One (Notes on Starts Ups or How to Build the Future) [LINK] Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Systems for Decision Making, Habits, Honesty and More (Farnam Street podcast) [LINK] Josh Wolfe - On \"This is who you are up against\" podcast [LINK] Richard Feynman - Fun to Imagine [LINK] Paul Graham - Startup school (2008) [LINK] James Burke - Connections (BBC documentary) <No link> Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the Atom (BBC) [LINK] Elon Musk's 2003 Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture [LINK] Ken Robinson - Do schools kill creativity? [LINK] Paul Stamets on mycology, bioremediation and fungi- Joe Rogan Experience [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16863194,"author":"BadassFractal","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Mylo: A leather-like material made from mycelium","text":"I found the conversation between Paul Stamets and Joe Rogan to be super interesting: [VIDEO] . Never really thought much about mushrooms until that episode. This proof of concept seems like a great taste of how much untapped potential fungi have for changing everyday life if we invest more into its research.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18073416,"author":"TheAceOfHearts","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What podcasts do you listen to regularly?","text":"Joe Rogan Experience [0]. I love that he sits down with people and actually has long in-depth conversations with them. Here's a few interesting ones: * Let's start with his Elon Musk discussion [1]. It came out 2 weeks ago and it already has 14m views. They basically discuss a bunch of his ideas along with things such as AI and the future of humanity. It's fascinating to get a peek into the kind of person he is. * His discussion with Matthew Walker has been one of the most enlightening ones for me [2]. He's a sleep expert, and in the podcast they go over different myths relating to that. There was recently a HN post [3] where some people were quoting him and his book. * Another big favorite of mine was his discussion with Paul Stamets [4], a mycologist (i.e. a mushroom expert). They discuss some of the effects of different kinds of mushrooms, including psilocybin mushrooms (colloquially known as magic mushrooms). * I loved his discussion with Gary Johnson [5], the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate for 2016. How many other presidential candidates would you imagine would be willing to sit down and answer hard-hitting questions for +2 hours? He also had a discussion with Larry Sharpe [6], the Libertarian Party's candidate for governor of New York in 2018. Full disclosure: I recently joined the Libertarian Party. Listening to these podcasts pushed me to learn more about their movement. * He had a discussion with Mikhaila Peterson [7], the daughter of Jordan Peterson, whi","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20041101,"author":"sakopov","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Complex life may only exist because of millions of years of groundwork by fungi","text":"It is indeed. I'd also recommend giving this podcast [1] with Paul Stamets a listen. He's a fairly well-known mycologist who has some very interesting things to say on the topic. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20342884,"author":"ThouYS","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Radiotrophic fungus","text":"If you're interested in funghi, I recommend Joe Rogans podcast with Paul Stamets, funghi seem to be able to do many things: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mSB71jNq-yQ":[{"hn_comment_id":24596788,"author":"Naracion","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute","text":"You might enjoy the superb lyre bird imitating sounds as mind boggling as a chainsaw--and when I say imitate, I mean I couldn't have distinguished the lyre bird sound from a real chainsaw. It's really mind-boggling to me. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43371387,"author":"MrMcCall","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Why do some birds mimic the sounds of other species?","text":"Here's the one that blows my mind: [VIDEO] It's from one of (our honorary Uncle) David Attenborough's nature series, where a Lyre bird is imitating an analog professional camera, a car alarm, and a chainsaw. If I hadn't watched it well over a decade ago, I don't think I'd believe it. Search YT for 'lyre bird imitating chainsaw' for a choice of vids.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"mScpHTIi-kM":[{"hn_comment_id":38919551,"author":"hughesjj","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Cells across the body talk to each other about aging","text":"Veratasium just made an approachable video on this subject recently, I definitely recommend. It rebukes the whole 'oh no I just heard what a Nash equilibrium is and now I'm worried cooperation is impossible long term' fears some people interpret his thought experiment (prisoners dillema) to have. Tldr it's rare that you can't coordinate, communicate, or have exactly one trial. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47755499,"author":"pants2","month":"2026-04","story_title":"The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety","text":"This Veritasium video is excellent, and makes the argument that there is something intrinsic in mathematics (game theory) that encourages prosocial behavior. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38750620,"author":"ninkendo","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Crown shyness","text":"The way I\u2019ve always imagined crown shyness (from a total less-than-layman perspective where I\u2019ve only casually read about the topic) is from a game theory/selfish gene perspective. Trees of the same species will share a lot of the same genes, and genes that code for non-shyness will grow to the detriment of the trees around them. Trees which critically are very likely to share a lot of the same genes. So that non-shyness gene will lose out in the long run against genes that code for shyness. It\u2019s similar to the prisoner\u2019s dilemma, with shyness being \u201ccooperate\u201d and non-shyness being \u201cdefect\u201d. Groups of trees with cooperative strategies would do better collectively (and win out), even if a non-cooperative individual can beat a cooperative individual every time. Veritasium had a great video on this very topic today, in fact: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38801898,"author":"aeonik","month":"2023-12","story_title":"You've just been fucked by psyops [video]","text":"After watching this video, Veratasium's video brings me some modicum of hope at least: \"What The Prisoner's Dilemma Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything\" [VIDEO] Practice spotting those cognitive biases. Your Wikipedia rabbit hole may start here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38909650,"author":"0wis","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Fairness and kindness are not weaknesses","text":"According to game theory, you should have empathy but not too much. Its such a powerful theoretical finding for every aspect of life. I found it best explained in the Veritasium video on game theory [1] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39642207,"author":"travisgriggs","month":"2024-03","story_title":"The Forgiver's Dilemma: Can Letting Go Set You Free?","text":"To start with, I really enjoyed Veritaseum\u2019s recent take on the \u201cPrisoners Dillema\u201d and Game Theory ( [VIDEO] ). It seems appropriate to mention since it circles around this same \u201cdillema\u201d and even places a numerical value on the value of forgiving in game theory simulations. The historical part and layman\u2019s reduction is good to. I think THIS article undersells the \u201cHold a Grudge\u201d payoff: > David feels justified but might damage the relationship and stop Samantha from learning from her mistake. Most relationships have an ongoing bargaining element to them. Exchange of services, tit for tat, quid pro quo, pay each others backs, etc. Even when we pretend they don\u2019t, or obscure them by wrapping higher level words around them. What makes forgiving hard, is that when we feel wronged, we feel it gives us a better bargaining position go forward. If we forgive, we fear it devalues or weakens our bargaining power going forward. Why else are we so tempted in a debate to rejoin with \u201cyeah, well you do <fill in the blank wrong thing> too!\u201d To clarify, I AM a big fan and proponent of forgiveness. I aspire to be better at. But I think this article has missed a key part of the dillema, by not better portraying the real allure of not forgiving.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42453004,"author":"braiamp","month":"2024-12","story_title":"U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments over TikTok divestment law","text":"Tik for tat exists, but only when you can have a clear communication about it. Veritasium did a piece about it for explaining for layman. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44033805,"author":"tiffanyh","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game","text":"Vertasium has a great video talking how Tit-for-Tat (Copycat) wins as a strategy (and how there was a math competition that proved it as well) [VIDEO] --- This seems like a nice rebuild of the math competition performed years ago (as talked about in the video link above). Direct link to that part of the video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44591378,"author":"Sammi","month":"2025-07","story_title":"I was wrong about robots.txt","text":"You don't have to go as far as to straight up \"trust by default\". You can instead \"give a chance\" by default, which is the middle path. Actually Veritasium has a great video about this. It's proven as the most effective strategy in monte carlo simulation. EDIT: This one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47198243,"author":"trinsic2","month":"2026-02","story_title":"We Will Not Be Divided","text":"> it's no longer a matter of choice, you have to do it too You know, there are plenty of examples where people in positions of power choose different paths of escalation. I doesn't always need to be liner tit for tat. Some times you need to step back and look at the larger picture and decide of the escalation is worth the risk for all of humanity. There is a video about game theory [0] that describes this problem very clearly. You have better outcomes when you make decisions outside the direct course of escalation. Please don't talk in absolutes about these things, you have an opinion. I accept that, but its not as black and white as you think [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mSgXWpvQEHE":[{"hn_comment_id":20584922,"author":"eigenspace","month":"2019-08","story_title":"JuliaCon 2019 Videos","text":"If anyone is looking for video recommendations to get started: here\u2019s a couple that I thought were great and should be interesting and approachable to just about anyone. Steven G. Johnson\u2019s keynote address. It\u2019s longer format but really interesting, informative, entertaining and well delivered. The main topic is metaprogramming. [VIDEO] Stefan Karpinski\u2019s talk on the unreasonable effectiveness of multiple dispatch. He discusses the fact that Julia has such dramatic code re-use and sharing between libraries and he discusses some reasons why he thinks multiple dispatch is uniquely able to offer this. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24747138,"author":"ViralBShah","month":"2020-10","story_title":"CSV Reader Benchmarks: Julia Reads CSVs 10-20x Faster than Python and R","text":"You can write slow programs in all languages. There are many cases where Julia's language features enable higher performance than in comparable C libraries. Have a look at Steve Johnson's keynote from JuliaCon 2019: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mUcUy7SqdS0":[{"hn_comment_id":15836764,"author":"mycelium","month":"2017-12","story_title":"You Can Learn Glass Blowing (1938)","text":"The awesome youtube channel Applied Science put out a 40 minute intro video to melting your own glass a week or two ago, going into the equipment, chemistry and recipies: [VIDEO] In particular, he talks about making your own photochromic glass that changes color in response to light. I'd highly recommend his channel to anyone interested in science and fabrication.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16869664,"author":"tomn","month":"2018-04","story_title":"An in-depth tour of Nikon\u2019s Hikari Glass factory","text":"This was really interesting -- not a process I've ever realy thought about. You might enjoy this, Ben Krasnow talking about the challenges of making photochromic glass: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mVVNJKv9esE":[{"hn_comment_id":13967225,"author":"K0SM0S","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Next.js 2.0","text":"This talk is incredible food for thought: On the spectrum of abstraction by Cheng Lou (react-europe 2016) [1] If you've read some of the classics, such as Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1979, Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson) [2], this talk is a really interesting look at the state of affairs on abstraction circa 2016. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12527378,"author":"Rygu","month":"2016-09","story_title":"On DRY and the cost of wrongful abstractions","text":"For a more visual explanation of the \"cost of abstractions\" watch this presentation by Cheng Lou (Facebook). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16841186,"author":"rk06","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"The spectrum of abstraction: [VIDEO] This is an high level talk. it guides on how to choose between competing solutions to a problem when the commonly accepted answer is \"it depends\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19951287,"author":"namelosw","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Virtual DOM is pure overhead (2018)","text":"React is more like 'Lambda the Ultimate Web Component'. A component is almost a function returns element. Expanding a component is like calling a function and give it the property. So you can have some abstract common behavior in HOC f and g, then you can have HOC `h = compose(f(g))`. A quick comparison with Angular: @Component({template, style}) seems composable if we stretch a lot. But why make template and style in the decorator... They are not something we consider most abstract at all. The function is the simplest yet composable abstraction over the template, Cheng Lou also has a really excellent talk on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33230938,"author":"hnbad","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Moving from React to htmx","text":"I know, this isn't a novel concept. There was a good talk about the spectrum of abstractions and the tradeoffs of template languages vs React's approach at React Europe a couple of years ago (in fact, he goes into that this means there are some optimizations that are simply unavailable to React): [VIDEO] The question isn't whether DSLs or \"just JS\" are more powerful, the question is which tradeoffs they represent and which tradeoffs you prefer. It seems that HTMX is primarily based in the Python ecosystem and as a former Pythonista I see the advantage of having a DSL over having to write JS, especially that the former is much narrower, which is what you want in this situation.","stance":"rec"}],"mXVGIb3bzHI":[{"hn_comment_id":14015167,"author":"white-flame","month":"2017-04","story_title":"A New Yorker's Quest for the Perfect Amount of Noise","text":"There's a nice Veritasium video of an anechoic chamber here, with different people's reactions to it: [VIDEO] I've been in sensory deprivation tanks, but never in an anechoic chamber (yet). However, I'm sure I'd love it. Many people live their life fleeing themselves, fleeing the thoughts in their head, and fleeing the realities they don't want to face. However, if you're emotionally healthy and are purposeful in establishing your identity and life direction, silence is simply golden. Not just auditory, but visual, social, and conceptual. Because of this, I don't think that there can be any singular preferable amount of noise for everybody. If there's some average, plenty of people will still find it distracting and grating, while others would find it too quiet and uncomfortable. Plus, I doubt it stays consistent even for a given individual. When you're stressed, you might want more quiet... or more distraction, depending on your preferences and reactions.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21098102,"author":"Baeocystin","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Black Blacker Than Vantablack","text":"It's really not that bad. Some people find it unsettling, but many find it kind of relaxing. Derek from Veritasium has a good video on it for the interested. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mZyvIHYn2zk":[{"hn_comment_id":23080968,"author":"qu4ku","month":"2020-05","story_title":"A look at modern PHP","text":"If you want to know why-the-hate watch this[1] talk \u2014 one of the best and eye-opening talks I've ever heard. It has nothing to do with the language itself and everything to do with the user of the language. [1] The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18874171,"author":"chickenfries","month":"2019-01","story_title":"IBM releases Elm-powered app","text":"I literally have never experienced a bug because of the existence of Math.random(). I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever used it outside of a coding interview. Similarly, I don\u2019t spend time debugging runtime errors caused by document.querySelector()? If I do it\u2019s usually only once when I write the initial query. I don\u2019t understand your last argument: why would I divide by 0? Everyone\u2019s relationship to their tools of choice has an emotional component. Check out this talk, you might find it interesting: \u201cThe Pervert\u2019s Guide To Programming Languages\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23096335,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Buttplug: An open-source software suite for teledildonics","text":"Hi Kyle: I did know the answer but I just had to ask! ;) Come drop in on the epic Emacs -vs- VI battle going on in the Bill Joy thread. VI can't hold a candle to Emacs when it comes to teledildonics. You testimony might be able to convince a few lost souls to cross over. Emacs is ALWAYS in insert mode. The way you insightfully psychoanalyzed the personalities of programmers of different languages in your deldo demo suggests to me that you might enjoy W Watson's \"The Pervert's Guide to Programming Languages\": [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27065470,"author":"jolux","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Go proposal: new package to provide generic slice functions","text":"I don\u2019t think masochism is inherently negative and I did not mean to insult. For that I apologize. I was trying to characterize in a humorous fashion a difference between what I perceive to be the stated aims of the language and the experience of actually writing it. It was also an oblique reference to this talk which is one of my favorites: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29758931,"author":"mwattsun","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++","text":"Since the author is open up front about their OCD issues, this talk immediately came to mind. It's a bit of an elaborate tongue-in-cheek joke, but I found it personally helpful for thinking about why a choose a language. Pervert in this context does not mean sexual deviancy. In the Lacanian sense, a pervert is a person who enjoys being a vessel of the rules. The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages - SXSW [VIDEO] The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages Psychoanalysis and Software What are the issues with selecting a programming language? \u2022 Which programming language should we choose? - Just saying: 'use the right tool for the job' begs the question \u2022 Why are there over 1000 programming languages? \u2022 How do we critique a programming language? \u2022 Why do language designers create new programming languages? \u2022 Rational reasons \u2022 Maximize expression while modeling: \u2022 a specific problem \u2022 a broad range of problems \u2022 Psychoanalysts: \"Many decisions are not rational\" \u2022 Programming language choice can be rational, non-rational, or a mix \u2022 Use Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek's critical theory \u2022 Critique non-rational decisions \u2022 Discover ulterior motives (ours and others) \u2022 Explain the diversity of language options Jacques Lacan \u2022 French psychoanalyst and philosopher \u2022 Extremely cryptic \u2022 Preoccupied with desire and enjoyment \u2022 Popularized the mirror image, the Big Other, and the triad of the Imaginary. the Symbolic. and the Real \u2022 Believes all humans fall into th","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40438899,"author":"jimwhite42","month":"2024-05","story_title":"\"No way to prevent this\" say users of only language where this regularly happens","text":"Here's an attempt to explaining the irrational part of programmers deciding which programming language to use. Part of it goes into more detail on ideas like C programmers insisting 'on the danger because they cannot stand the possibility of the danger being taken away from them'. \"The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages\" [VIDEO] It's pretty out there, but I thought also interesting.","stance":"rec"}],"macM_MtS_w4":[{"hn_comment_id":21812945,"author":"mar77i","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Kurt G\u00f6del and the Mechanization of Mathematics","text":"For one practical example, G\u00f6del's incompleteness is directly related to decidability problems in CS. there's this glorious liar paradox machine discussed by Computerphile [0]. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27458208,"author":"gammalost","month":"2021-06","story_title":"DeepMind says reinforcement learning is \u2018enough\u2019 to reach general AI","text":">Like what? The halting problem is (I think?) the standard example. Here's a short video on it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mb3uK-_QkOo":[{"hn_comment_id":47674020,"author":"sph","month":"2026-04","story_title":"","text":"Keep making music. Here is author Brandon Sanderson eloquently explaining why AI generated slop will never be art: [VIDEO] tl;dr: the final product is just a receipt of the effort, the sleepless nights, the self-doubt and personal transformation that goes into creating art. They have found a way to automate creating this receipt, without the personal transformation that an artist goes through, a process which leads her to learn more about herself and her place in the world. An artist will find a way to leverage generative slop into this genuine process, but the by-the-bucket gruel generated in seconds from a prompt will always be a simulacrum of the real thing, despite how good it might sound. I am pivoting from sterile software engineering where only product and revenue are the guiding metrics, to others where artistry and this personal drive for self-expression will always be valued, despite the attempts at diluting the field for a quick buck by talentless hacks. The world will always care about Art. It is the most human of instincts.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46875721,"author":"babblingfish","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Show HN: I built \"AI Wattpad\" to eval LLMs on fiction","text":"> The surge of AI, large language models, and generated art begs fascinating questions. The industry\u2019s progress so far is enough to force us to explore what art is and why we make it. Brandon Sanderson explores the rise of AI art, the importance of the artistic process, and why he rebels against this new technological and artistic frontier. What It Means To Be Human | Art in the AI Era [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46884215,"author":"moron4hire","month":"2026-02","story_title":"I Miss Thinking Hard","text":"I have no idea who this guy is (I guess he's a fantasy novelist?) but this video came up in my YouTube feed recently and feels like it matches closely with the themes you're expressing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mbEfzuCLoAQ":[{"hn_comment_id":14089207,"author":"teej","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Leaked email from United Airlines CEO blames passenger for violent removal","text":"High speed passenger rail doesn't work in the US because freight is prioritized over moving people. That's the short version at least. I found this video to be a pretty good walkthrough - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14837867,"author":"sunir","month":"2017-07","story_title":"What it\u2019s like to ship yourself overnight on Cabin\u2019s sleep pod bus","text":"They have trains but all track is owned by freight train providers. Here's a good overview why. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16888248,"author":"trimbo","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Want airline food? Take Amtrak","text":"Wendover Productions has a good video that explains this and many other reasons why trains suck in the US [VIDEO] Spoiler: freight companies own most of the track","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19454671,"author":"NoNameHaveI","month":"2019-03","story_title":"There is no reason to cross the U.S. by train, but I did it anyway","text":"This is worth your 8 minutes of time. [VIDEO] I love trains, but the economics of rail travel in the USA can't be overcome. Until robot trains.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24244327,"author":"SahAssar","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?","text":"I might be wrong but this seems like a very US-centric idea. For most of the developed world trains fill this need very well, while the US has had problems with their rail network for reasons partially based on geography, partially based on population density, and partially based on their own fault. I think this explains it pretty well: [VIDEO] The solution is not aircraft, the solution is more and better trains. Or perhaps autonomous buses/trucks depending on how far out you look.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32278434,"author":"Manuel_D","month":"2022-07","story_title":"How far can you go by train in 5h?","text":"Trains in the US are widely prevalent! It's just that they're used for freight rather than passenger travel. The main driver behind this is the population density of the USA, cities are spaced too far apart to make passenger travel by train viable. Not coincidentally, the only area that does have significant passenger rail networks, the DC - Boston corridor, has population density similar to Western Europe. An interesting video on this topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mbyG85GZ0PI":[{"hn_comment_id":14769559,"author":"xtiansimon","month":"2017-07","story_title":"A Curated List of AI and Machine Learning Resources from Around the Web","text":"I'm a neophyte to ML, but one course I very much enjoyed auditing was \"Learning from Data\" [1] taught by Caltech Professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa. I found concept of the _Learning Model_ particularly fresh representation of the ML activity (starting at 14:39 in the first video linked here [2]) [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35545633,"author":"bob1029","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: I am a full stack developer, where do I start learning for AI","text":"I have found the Caltech machine learning intro course to be the most elucidating of any resource so far: [VIDEO] The delivery of the lecture material was like butter to me. Might work differently for others though.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12723543,"author":"weishigoname","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?","text":"there are some lectures about machine learning on youtube. I think they are good to watch: [VIDEO] and [LINK] and my favorite channels are Standford and MIT open courseware [LINK] and [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16168371,"author":"bonkerfied23","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How to Seriously Start with Machine Learning and AI","text":"Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Christopher Bishop. Book: [LINK] Notes: Its very very math heavy but if you really want to grasp the concepts and the idea around each topic, this is one of the way to go. Online Lectures: [VIDEO] I like how he explains stuff and adds some context behind the math of each topic. Alternative: [LINK] A pretty good youtube channel that follows up on modern machine learning and he has all of his video tutorial demos on GitHub. Hope this helps fellow Machine Learner :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37265177,"author":"GoldenMonkey","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: In 2023 which is the best path to get good at machine and deep learning?","text":"Caltech machine learning intro course: [VIDEO] karpathy's Zero to Hero series ( [LINK] ) meta llama 2 - is open source [LINK] Tools: ai - hosting Banana - Machine Learning Model Deployment on Serverless GPUs [LINK] pinecone - vector database: [LINK] how to run AI language models on a single cpu pc - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"mceaM2_zQd8":[{"hn_comment_id":22281734,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Volume of a Sphere","text":"Generalizations to higher dimensions[1] also have some fun properties. For one, the volume of a n-dimensional sphere (ball) goes to zero as n goes to infinity. But not in a trivial way: given a radius r, you can find the number of dimensions n that maximizes the volume of the n-sphere. For r=1 it's 5 dimensions, but for r=3 it's 55 dimensions. Numberphile[2] has a video on higher dimensional spheres which talks about this weirdness. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44134242,"author":"ithkuil","month":"2025-05","story_title":"A visual exploration of vector embeddings","text":"There is a good numberphile video about that [VIDEO] It contains also a hilarious reference to the \"parker circle:.","stance":"rec"}],"mdKst8zeh-U":[{"hn_comment_id":37614437,"author":"notsurenymore","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Something that you learnt and made you go Wow","text":"I watched this a while back and it was one of the few videos I\u2019ve seen recently that really impressed me: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42450531,"author":"hobs","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Silver amulet is the oldest evidence of Christianity north of the Alps","text":"My favorite find in the last few months is the youtube channel \"esoterica\" - here's his video on the origins of yaweh as a storm god [VIDEO] He recommends books and primary sources for every episode and they vary from interesting more pubscience type stuff to incredibly expensive and deep academic sources out of print. The gentleman who runs it is very obviously jewish in practice but only uses that to inform his historical context instead of override it, its very refreshing as someone who is an atheist.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40816688,"author":"bawolff","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Oklahoma orders schools to teach Bible 'immediately'","text":"I think the part i find interesting is it seems like we have a better picture of how the mythology shifted over time and was interpreted by different groups than we do with greek and norse mythology. So not just the stories themselves but how they were adapted in different contexts. I dont actually know that much about the subject. Recently this video on youtube popped up for me about early history of what would later become the abrahamic religions, and i was just kind of fascinated by it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"meHYBhcpdvQ":[{"hn_comment_id":33607407,"author":"somat","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Tesla finds a loophole in states where dealerships are forbidden: Tribal lands","text":"Here is a well researched youtube video on the subject. [VIDEO] And on that subject. What may be the best channel on youtube, amazingly well researched, written, shot, presented... and it's a(incredulous tone) motorcycle channel?!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31602982,"author":"dharmab","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ford CEO says EVs will be sold 100% online with nonnegotiable price","text":"This recent video on motorcycle dealerships argues that dealerships are beneficial for the financial arms of manufacturers and also manage risk due to warranty/recall work and sales flops. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32319167,"author":"somerandomqaguy","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ford CEO Had Enough: Dealers Raising Prices Need to Stop or Else [video]","text":"Just as a look at the other side: [VIDEO] - The Stealership Trap - Why We Need the Dealership \"Rip Off\" This is for motorcycles but the jist of it is that the situation with dealerships is convenient to motorcycle manufacturers. I suspect it's semi applicable to cars as well.","stance":"rec"}],"meiU6TxysCg":[{"hn_comment_id":19689492,"author":"acqq","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Life of Brian at 40: an assertion of individual freedom that still resonates","text":"This is the video that explains the best how the \"morality\" is natural even in the capuchin monkeys: [VIDEO] So, no to those that claim that, humans aren't special, and no, the good sides of morality don't come from religion, especially not from the modern ones with a \"jealous\" god (killing homosexuals, or punishing women when not wearsing something, however, if that is considered \"morality\", indeed provably does come from religion). The whole talk: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40336551,"author":"Qem","month":"2024-05","story_title":"The Age of Rage: Why Are People Are So Angry?","text":"There's a nice video from a psychological experiment that illustrates it: [VIDEO] I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group. Otherwise complex societies would have never emerged, because assholes exploiting and taking advantage of peers would ruin and doom any group larger than a few individuals.","stance":"rec"}],"mhBpI13dxkI":[{"hn_comment_id":12915660,"author":"syshum","month":"2016-11","story_title":"\u201cDRM is Used to Lock in, Control and Spy on Users\u201d","text":">>but that's all it is, a justification. And in my opinion, that justification results in less original content. Given that more content from more people is being created today that at any point in human history runs counter to your statement Copyright is about protecting the Gatekeepers, the Movies Studios, the Music Labels, the Book Publisher, not about protecting creators. Karl Fogel does a great job explaining the History of copyright and why is it not needed to protect creators [VIDEO] >> it's our own propensity to not respect the rights of the creator which has encouraged the adoption of DRM. I do not recognize them as rights. Copyright is a Positive Right created by government. I am a supporter of Negative Rights theory and do not support any Positive rights at all >>The rest of your argument centers on DRM; it is not just about DRM,DRM is how they attempt to force my property to disobey my commands, it is also about the law the DRM is attempting to enforce on my machine","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14125510,"author":"syshum","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Chrome 55-57 showed \u201cdownload\u201d button for all HTML5 media","text":">>Copyright limitations are a reasonable thing for society to extend to content producers. No they really are not, and have never been Copyright, historically, is a tool for Information Gatekeeping, censorship, and profiteering. Not one of benfiting the Creators of content See the Talk on the History of Copyright [VIDEO] We see this every day in the modern era where copyright is used to censor critics, prevent research (especially security research), and prevents more content from being created by locking up ideas for over a century Copyright is a Negative for Society, and for Creators","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28072216,"author":"exo762","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Apple enabling client-side CSAM scanning on iPhone tomorrow","text":"Why would any fan of someones work buy a knock-off copy? We can safely assume they are a fan, otherwise why would even buy it? Also, painting is a physical object. It's a one of a kind. EDIT: your objection and many many other questions like that are nicely argued against here: [VIDEO] (The Surprising History of Copyright talk by Karl Fogel)","stance":"rec"}],"mhJRzQsLZGg":[{"hn_comment_id":38318794,"author":"capableweb","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 at 7 Am Central Time","text":"Maybe [VIDEO] (NASASpaceflight) would be better, as it's accessible without any login-wall and doesn't require creating an account to view.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47617414,"author":"chasd00","month":"2026-04","story_title":"The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes","text":"The difference with spacex is you can watch the rockets fly. You can also watch them actually build. That's where the goosebumps come from one livecam view, there are many [VIDEO] this guy releases videos about once a week or so [LINK] this aerial photography channel documents bocachica every week or so too. Spacex is absolutely watched from every angle. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"mht-1c4wc0Q":[{"hn_comment_id":18942815,"author":"speakeron","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Strangeness of Black Holes","text":"The particle goes through the event horizon in finite time according to its own clock (and will then hit the singularity in finite term however it tries to travel). Think of the view of it by an external observer as being 'frozen' at the event horizon as kind of optical illusion caused by the extreme warping of spacetime. For a non-evaporating black hole (as described by general relativity), the 'last' photon coming off it will indeed be at infinity (or with infinite redshift). If (when) the black hole evaporates, the external observer will see that and of course there will be no more photons from the infalling particle. These two different views are hard to reconcile from our human perspective of how the world works, but they really do come from the mathematics of general relativity. Here's a really excellent and short video which attempts to explain this in ten minutes. (His explanation of how a Penrose diagram works is fleshed-out in more detail in the Susskind lectures I mentioned above). PBS Spacetime - What happens at the Event Horizon [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24696459,"author":"me_me_me","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020","text":"[VIDEO] I hope it helps. I think this is the cleanest explanation with actual visual representation. Edit: Sorry this one is even better. How Time Becomes Space Inside a Black Hole | Space Time [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27226721,"author":"neom","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Physicists identify the engine powering black hole energy beams","text":"PBS Space Time to the rescue: What Happens at the Event Horizon? - [VIDEO] What\u2019s On The Other Side Of A Black Hole? - [LINK] How Time Becomes Space Inside a Black Hole - [LINK] The Black Hole Information Paradox - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"mmfjM-SGlGs":[{"hn_comment_id":16246986,"author":"cookiecaper","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ted Nelson\u2019s published papers on computers and interaction, 1965 to 1977","text":"Ted gives a great overview of his life and work at [0]. In this, he ascribes the demotion/firing of Xu88's project lead Roger Gregory as the reason it failed to come fruition, and takes credit for the \"regrettable\" part he played in this. The whole talk is a wonderful high-level overview from Ted's perspective, which is so often warped and misrepresented. Though he admits that he has, at times, been \"overwhelmed by bitterness\", he doesn't seem to harbor any lasting hostility or malice to anyone, and continues to work on seeing his vision come to life. He identifies many of the mistakes he's made, identifying multiple critical junctures in which Xanadu may have taken off if he had done something better. Strongly recommended, and I'm grateful that he recorded this historical treasure. Far more valuable and significant than any \"incredible journey\" post-mortem. [0] [VIDEO] [timestamped to Autodesk discussion for relevance; watch the whole thing]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15261461,"author":"jonah-archive","month":"2017-09","story_title":"A Thought for Your Pennies: Micropayment and the Liberation of Content (2009)","text":"Ted's sitting across from me right now! He says this article is old, and wanted to link to a video he recently made talking about his life and work, if anyone's interested: [VIDEO] We're also hosting an ongoing archival project of his junk mail that he's saved over the years: [LINK] (more details on the project: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"}],"mn4L_aJ1rV4":[{"hn_comment_id":30194353,"author":"0xbadcafebee","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Building a modern home in the woods","text":"Doesn't the author actually mean postmodern ? \"Modern home\" architecture is from the early-mid 20th century. If you're looking to build a home, do yourself a favor and watch Essential Craftsman's Spec House series ( [VIDEO] ). Your eyeballs will grow wider and wider with all the considerations, but you'll be better informed for it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30202339,"author":"blhack","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Building a modern home in the woods","text":"If you're interested in this sort of thing, there is a youtuber called \"Essential Craftsman\" who did a lengthy (multi-year) series going through, in exquisite detail, the process of building a house. He is a general contractor who did or oversaw almost all of the work himself. It covers everything from finding land, to prepping it, goes into a tremendous amount of detail about framing, and concrete work. [VIDEO] Seriously cannot recommend this enough. It's a treasure that he created all of this and put it onto youtube for free.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17858883,"author":"Nelkins","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Have you built a house?","text":"I have no affiliation with this YouTube channel, but here's a guy who does an entire in-depth series on how to build a house from scratch[0], from surveying the land, to getting permits, to pouring the foundation, and so on. Good way to spend a few hours on a weekend. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31534547,"author":"thepasswordis","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Today\u2019s JavaScript, from an outsider\u2019s perspective (2020)","text":"Something like this: [LINK] Would be very easy to make with basic hand tools. In fact, what might be fun is to just look at the picture of that, and try to reverse engineer the parts for it. (I teach woodworking classes, and this is actually an exercise I make the students do in one of the classes). This saw would be fine: [LINK] If you can afford it, something like this will last you a very long time (probably a lifetime): [LINK] If you really want something that will definitely last you a lifetime (or two): [LINK] If you want something that is pretty good at most things, get this: [LINK] This is a handheld saw, but it's a very nice one, and could absolutely be used to make many, many things out of wood. You can use it for almost anything, and people do. Another thing which you will use all the time (and I mean ALL the time, regardless of if you are doing woodworking or not) is a good set of handheld drills: [LINK] If you want a long series of videos to watch, check this out: [VIDEO] Or this: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"modXC5IWTJI":[{"hn_comment_id":12641823,"author":"boulos","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"In addition to Linus's git talk, I really enjoyed Jeff Dean's EE380 retrospective on Building Systems at Google ( [VIDEO] ). Many people have mentioned Jeff's basic premise elsewhere (\"Design a system for 10x your current need, but not 100x, rewrite it before then\") but this talk gave several useful examples where tipping points occurred (at least with Search).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4966899,"author":"kqr2","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know","text":"Also recommend Jeff Dean's tech talk Building Software Systems At Google and Lessons Learned which references those latency numbers. Slides: [LINK] Video: [VIDEO] Also, a previous thread on latency numbers: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24482470,"author":"ma2rten","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Web Performance Profiling: Google.com","text":"There is a lecture from Jeff Dean about it: [VIDEO] It's from 2010, but the fundamentals probably haven't changed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32352900,"author":"mrazomor","month":"2022-08","story_title":"We're improving search results when you use quotes","text":"Probably this one: [LINK] Or this one: [VIDEO] (terrible audio) Both are very old, but extremely well aged. IMO, the secret behind Google Search is not the smartness of the algorithms, but how much of it is baked in those O(100ms) which takes Google machines to answer your query. That's why the links above are the true reason Google Search performs well. Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval state of the art is far beyond what Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex/Baidu employ. But, it's far too expensive to serve it at QPS & latency required for decent UX.","stance":"rec"}],"mpbeOCKZFfQ":[{"hn_comment_id":21502030,"author":"save_ferris","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Amazon\u2019s plan for Alexa","text":"Did you watch the Channel 4 report[0]? The CEO of CA clandestinely advertised far more than just ads for the reporter posing as a potential client. They are in the business of winning elections, through whatever means necessary. He openly talked about things like targeting and entrapping political opponents with blackmail via \"honeypots\". His deputies made some really interesting statements during that report as well. I highly recommend watching the report, it's a fascinating watch. Based on what he was caught saying on camera, in addition to his deputies, and the reporting around their political campaigns in Africa using propaganda that claimed AIDS would come back if so-and-so were elected, it's not a stretch to imagine those people doing everything the can, legally and illegally, to sway an election. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16623242,"author":"gt565k","month":"2018-03","story_title":"The Cambridge Analytica scandal isn\u2019t a scandal: this is how Facebook works","text":"Watch the mini documentary of the undercover op by channel 4 [VIDEO] This isn't just data mining, it's straight up misinformation, entrapment, and god knows what else.","stance":"rec"}],"msN87y-iEx0":[{"hn_comment_id":8662272,"author":"evanb","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Top Martin Gardner Physics Stumpers","text":"1. Feynman explains it best [VIDEO] 3. They approach one another at 30000 mph = 500 miles per minute, so two minutes before they collide they are 1000 miles apart, and who cares that they start out 1317 miles apart? 8. The balloon rushes forward, and gets pulled toward the inside of the curve. The best reasoning is via the equivalence principle: acceleration and gravity feel the same, and the fact that the balloon is buoyant in air means that it should rush away from whatever direction gravity is pointing. 9. It floats at the same location, by Gauss' theorem.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4950423,"author":"QuixoticChris","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Math Professor Invents Non-Reversing Mirror","text":"Since left and right and up and down are both the same, it's essentially as though you're looking through the back of the object. Imagine if you made a sign clear and looked through the back. Even though no reversal has taken place, the text looks backward. This is why things appear reversed. If you are confused about how left and right are not actually switched, I would say the easiest way is to think in absolute terms, not relative. That is, don't think about left and right, think about east and west. Face north and paint your east (right) hand red. Now when you look at a mirror (you're still facing north), your east hand is red, but the reflection's east hand (think in real world terms here) is also red. That's because the reflection's horizontal aspects have not been reversed. Richard Feynman enjoys discussing this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41857371,"author":"lloeki","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Eye Contact Correction: Redirecting the eyes to look at the camera","text":"> One thing I do remember though is how odd it felt looking at yourself in a mirror without your image being mirrored. Not sure my brain was ready for that one after thousands of years of looking at itself in mirrored surfaces. Feynman has a good explanation for that: [VIDEO] But it doesn't go deeper as to why we're perceiving ourselves that way, for that we have to dive into biology, neurology, bilateral symmetry, and the fundamentals as to how, as bilaterally symmetric beings, we're able to orient ourselves in a 3D world. (I recall reading a paper or watching some video about that, but can't find it anymore)","stance":"rec"}],"msVuCEs8Ydo":[{"hn_comment_id":24650347,"author":"willis936","month":"2020-10","story_title":"NIST Pair of Atomic Clocks Reveal Einstein's Relativity at a Personal Scale","text":"PBS SpaceTime has a treatise on relativity. There are a dozen videos worth watching on this topic alone. The video about \u201cthe speed of causality\u201d is the one that caused me to level up: [VIDEO] Here is a 12 video playlist on relativity: [LINK] Here is a six video series on measuring space and time: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25231631,"author":"tzs","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Warp Drive News","text":"There's an episode of PBS Space Time about this, \"The Speed of Light is NOT About Light\" [1], which comes pretty close to making the same points you are making. It might be useful to watch this earlier episode, \"Are Space and Time an Illusion?\" [2], first. There is a later episode (or maybe a couple of them) that go into how interactions with the Higgs field make it so things with mass travel slowed than the speed of causality. To tie back to the warp drive news, they have an episode that would be a good place to start on warp drives, \"Is The Alcubierre Warp Drive Possible?\" [3]. There's also \"Superluminal Time Travel + Time Warp Challenge Answer\" [4], and \"Will Wormholes Allow Fast Interstellar Travel?\" [5]. A non-warp unknown physics drive that comes up a lot also got an episode, \"The EM Drive: Fact or Fantasy?\" [6]. There is at least one episode covering interstellar travel without using any unknown physics, \"5 REAL Possibilities for Interstellar Travel\" [7]. The scope of the series is basically anything vaguely connected to astronomy, cosmology, and quantum mechanics, and the episodes are all pretty short (5-12 minutes), so it is a great thing to watch when you've got a short wait for something. Here's the series home page [8], and their YouTube channel [9]. Also on the PBS streaming app, for those who like to get their physics on their big screen TVs. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK] [7] [LINK] [8] [LINK] [9] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15106360,"author":"neom","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Rumours swell over new kind of gravitational-wave sighting","text":"These PBS Spacetime episodes should help: The Speed of Light is NOT About Light - [VIDEO] Is Quantum Tunneling Faster than Light? - [LINK] The Quantum Experiment that Broke Reality - [LINK] Pilot Wave Theory and Quantum Realism - [LINK] The Future of Gravitational Waves - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16285610,"author":"stcredzero","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Speed of light drops to zero at 'exceptional points'","text":"Something to head off likely confusion: The Speed of Light is not about the Speed of Light. [VIDEO] Don't get these two things mixed up: - The speed of electromagnetic waves in the local medium - The maximum speed our reality allows for causal phenomena","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20692812,"author":"rhinokungfu","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Milky Way\u2019s Black Hole Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as Bright for a Few Hours","text":"Speed of light is not really just speed of light, but universal speed limit of causality. Light (electromagnetic waves just happens to be one of the few things capable of hitting that limit. Even the effect of gravity is limited to speed of light. PBS Space time has a good video on this - [VIDEO] . So to answer your question, no it is not possible for anything to affect us any faster than the universal speed limit of causality (that light happens to be able to hit).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20949885,"author":"dkersten","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Water found on a potentially life-friendly alien planet","text":"@mesid asked in a now dead comment: > What does speed of causality mean? And how is light so close to that? Take a look at this video by PBS Space Time on the topic: [VIDEO] You may need to go down the rabbit hole and watch the earlier videos on relativity and related topics.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21731408,"author":"rhinokungfu","month":"2019-12","story_title":"If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)","text":"Some of the confusion is, I think from referring to speed of light as \"speed of light\". When it really is speed limit of causality between 2 points in space. And light (em waves) just happen to be able to hit that limit. Now since expansion of space is itself not going to allow one point in space to cause any effect on another, it (the expansion) can be faster than speed of causality. PBS space time has a good video on this - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21731429,"author":"rhinokungfu","month":"2019-12","story_title":"If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)","text":"Posted this to a point above, but probably more pertinent here, so reposting - Some of the confusion is, I think from referring to speed of light as \"speed of light\". When it really is speed limit of causality between 2 points in space. And light (em waves) just happen to be able to hit that limit. Now since expansion of space is itself not going to allow one point in space to cause any effect on another, it (the expansion) can be faster than speed of causality. PBS space time has a good video on this - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24665107,"author":"cthalupa","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Faster Than Light in Our Model of Physics: Some Preliminary Thoughts","text":"You\u2019re correct. The speed of light is not actually about light. [VIDEO] has a great explanation from the always excellent PBS Space Time, for the curious.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32554113,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-08","story_title":"\u201cI survived the TCP transition\u201d (2013)","text":"As an aside, the PBS space time video The Speed of Light is NOT About Light : [VIDEO] As an aside to the aside - as I rewatch it I quickly notice how young he looks (and then note the date is 2015 on there - one of the early ones and the production is less refined). You may also like The Geometry of Causality [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"msZ_E-4GFs8":[{"hn_comment_id":15148551,"author":"FidelCashflow","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Simple Techniques for Lowering the Cost of Zero-Energy Homes","text":"A blower door test is a great measure of a homes energy efficiency and it's quite cheap to have done. Not sure if YT links are OK but check out Matt Risinger Blower Door Test [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36609423,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Heat Pumps \u2013 The Well-Tempered Future of A/Cs","text":"> You\u2019re describing my situation. How do you de-leakify a house? Do a blower door test and see where the air is coming in/out: * [LINK] * [VIDEO] * [LINK] Then plug the holes.","stance":"rec"}],"muCPjK4nGY4":[{"hn_comment_id":9286935,"author":"jacquesm","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Dot matrix printer playing \u201cEye of the Tiger\u201d [video]","text":"A loudspeaker is nothing but a coil, a magnet and a piece of cardboard and it too is capable of incredible tonal quality and a huge range of polyphonics. This one really got me: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23293936,"author":"ssfrr","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Sine-wave speech audio encoding","text":"I love this demo. It\u2019s a good example of how much our perception is affected by our priors. This is a other great example, where speech is synthesized with an acoustic piano (though the keys are controlled digitally, the sound is just from the hammers and strings). Without the subtitles you probably couldn\u2019t understand, but it sounds pretty clear when you know what it\u2019s saying already. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37104199,"author":"gizajob","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Auditory illusions with examples from Daft Punk","text":"It's the Shepard tone effect running in the background of the actual notes, which produce a mild illusion that they're ascending when they're not, but nevertheless they're moving up and then down in pitches so it's not a brilliant example. I think the author is a little confused in this short essay about a few things. His \"talking piano\" effect is just standard vocoding, which has made me think this is all fairly new to him and he's not an expert. THIS is a talking piano: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mvmuCPvRoWQ":[{"hn_comment_id":14136168,"author":"BucketSort","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Miniatures: Mathematical and Algorithmic Applications of Linear Algebra [pdf]","text":"That whole channel is amazing! I can start just listing all the videos by virtue of picking out awesome ones, but check out the one he did on Euler's formula[1]. Blew my mind. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25277479,"author":"kortex","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Alternative notation for exponents, logs and roots? (2011)","text":"IMHO, the \"deeper truth\" is addition is translation and multiplication is rotation/stretching (at least when it comes to rings and fields). It involves getting a geometric understanding of e to the pi i, and 3blue1brown explains it better than I could: [LINK] [6.28 min] [LINK] [3.14 min] [VIDEO] [25 min]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40865288,"author":"moefh","month":"2024-07","story_title":"What makes e natural? (2004)","text":"Ah, a vaguely wondered if it had something involving Cauchy sequences, I think that was that limit! > The way we extend exponentiation to complex exponents is IMHO much less straightforward. I think it depends on how much you're used to dealing with complex numbers. In college, I was always taught to prove that Euler formula by replacing ix for x in that series, and then noting that the alternating signs and presence/absence of i in the terms allowed you to separate it into two series for cosine and sine. That always felt awkward, like there was no way anyone could just come up with that naturally. Many years later I found that construction with graphing e^(ix) by taking small steps using f(x+dx)=f(x)+f'(x)*dx, and everything clicked: how exponentials work in the real axis is pretty different from the imaginary axis, but both are completely intuitive and unavoidable once you understand that. Even later I \"discovered\" the connection with group theory[1]; that one still blows my mind. [1] This is a really nice explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mw2z9lV3W1g":[{"hn_comment_id":7082181,"author":"PythonicAlpha","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Obama\u2019s Changes to Government Surveillance","text":"I already do :( I think, it's in best interest of the people in power, that the campaign is so costly. When you look at the presidents of the last decades (I don't know to much US history, to go back to far), they all where already millionaires when they where elected. But you should better watch this one, I don't know if you know Lessig (I think, he is a real patriot): [VIDEO] In our country, the campaigns are less costly, but until anybody comes to the top of any major party, he must be inwardly corrupted already. I see it this way, that nearly no current leading politician in our country is not already totally corrupted by money and power. I think, Mark Twain had this one right, but I don't think, that it had to be exported, it seems to lay inside the human kind. I think it was already visible in the first republics like Rome. Maybe we are in a similar position today as in Caesars or even Neros time. You should know, that some years ago, even in Europe, rich people started building places to live for millionaires -- apart and secure from the \"plebs\". They provide for times, when the 99% will no longer hold still. Of course, millionaires are only third class \"rich\" people in our world. Second class are billionaires.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8857302,"author":"tim_hutton","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What can we do to show we don't support the response to Aaron Swartz?","text":"The root cause of this is the influence of money on our politicians. Symptoms include laws written for the rich and the corporations rather than for the people, causing the continued growth of inequality and a drag on the economy. Support Lawrence Lessig in his efforts to solve this root problem! [VIDEO] He departs on the second of his New Hampshire Rebellion walks on Sunday.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13427913,"author":"mtgx","month":"2017-01","story_title":"What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining a Unicorn","text":"All of that, plus tax software companies, such as Intuit lobbying against simplifying the tax code. [LINK] And once again we reach the conclusion that corporate lobbying and donations are the \"root of all evil\" in American politics, and everything is broken because of it. Larry Lessig has been right all along when he said this needs to be fixed before anything else [1]. Because once this is fixed, everything else should be a lot easier and a lot more in tune with what the People want [2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] It's just so easy and so cheap for corporations to buy votes right now. Why wouldn't they do it, when the upside is billions of dollars and there's no penalty for it? They can literally buy a vote with a few thousand dollars \"donation\". Set a limit of $200 (maybe $500 for presidential candidates) political donation per year per person and imprison (6-36 months) anyone who dares to do it any other way, fast and furious, no matter who he is, wealthy billionaire or former president. It's the only way to escape this corruption in the system. Also, I think the U.S. would need a special agency whose sole mission is to look for this type of corruption. In this case, \"mission creep\" and the purpose of maintaining their jobs would work in the People's favor. The more the agency would do (catch corrupt donors or politicians), the more it could justify its existence. Similar agencies have seen a lot of success in Europe, trying to catch corrupt politicians.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6011505,"author":"lifeguard","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Prism Break","text":"Is it a crime for a hungry man to steal bread? None of your proposed solutions would address his needs. America's government is so corrupt it is no longer democratic. Watch this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6137296,"author":"liscovich","month":"2013-07","story_title":"The entire US Code is now online in XML","text":"There is very little outright corruption in Congress. Special interests exert most of the influence through campaign contributions that are publicly disclosed. Larry Lessig has a great book on this: [LINK] . And here is the link to his TED talk on the same topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7314921,"author":"PythonicAlpha","month":"2014-02","story_title":"Privacy Protects Bothersome People (2013)","text":"That is a valid question. Good speech about it: Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7681999,"author":"slantedview","month":"2014-05","story_title":"The Launch of the Mayday Citizens' SuperPAC","text":"I'd argue that Congress has not done a good job of anything (at least not anything that the majority of Americans would care about) because our motivations are not aligned. That's the point of this campaign - to remove the motivation for Congress to act in ways that our not in the best interest of the general public, by removing the financial incentives for them to do so. This TED talk from Lessig gives more background: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34843610,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY\u2019s hedged repair bill","text":"Political movement related to this study: [LINK] A Ted Talk by Harvard Law professor and Copyright Law reform advocate Lawrence Lessig on the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43448338,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2025-03","story_title":"California Attorney General issues consumer alert for 23andMe customers","text":"Here is a Harvard law professor and tech darling (of creative commons), Lawrence Lessig, rebutting your overall point. [VIDEO] Summary: It feels like we have a government that governs on behalf of those with money because those with money vote first in the fundraising \"election\" that happens even before a primary election. More money is more votes in the \"election\" that mattes the most. Those with money get to filter candidates first. edit: Just because money comes from an individual and not directly from a corporation doesn't mean it isn't a pro-corporate/\"corporate\" contribution.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48242530,"author":"maratc","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI \u2013 actual intelligence","text":"In 2016, just 400 American families were the source of 50% of all election money that year. If your \"candidate\" is going to \"rein in big tech,\" how the hell are they supposed to raise money from them? And if they aren't going to do that, where will that money go? Your views seem to be rather ... idealistic. This TED lecture[0] is only 18 minutes long and it offers rather a chilling perspective on any sensible reform. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mwrA5IRGpfU":[{"hn_comment_id":25919994,"author":"DyslexicAtheist","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Should You Write a Wayland Compositor?","text":"this talk is phenomenal thank you. he explains (timestamp: [VIDEO] ) why he didn't go with Rust and it's quite puzzling what he says. I don't know enough about Rust if that's the case. To rephrase: \"Rust was an obvious contender but it lacked good support for wlroots. there was a project which attempted to address this but they gave up after 12 months of work and 1000 commits. Rust's strong safety guarantees and memory management conflict with wlroots which assumes a longer lifetime of pointers. If you unplug your monitor with wlroots this pointer receives an event that means the output has disappeared and needs to be validated (see here [LINK] ).* This is strange because Rust positions itself as a system language so I'd have imagined these scenarios are all over the place and unsafe Rust would be the way most of this is solved?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29632269,"author":"1_player","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Zig 0.9.0","text":"Congratulations! And welcome Isaac, I loved his Zig+Wayland screencast [1], where he explained very engagingly how Zig is able to embrace and extend a pretty hairy C library and make it more memory safe, without forcing the implementor to rewrite or painfully try to bend it to the strict or idiosyncratic rules of the language, as it may happen with Rust or even Go. I can't wait for 1.0! Or at least until the docs are a bit more accessible... :) 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27950281,"author":"jorangreef","month":"2021-07","story_title":"River \u2013 A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor","text":"The author of River has also done some fantastic talks, on Zig ShowTime [1] and at FOSDEM '21 [2]. [1] \"Writing a Wayland Compositor in Zig\" - [VIDEO] [2] \"Zig: the perfect language for a Wayland Compositor?\" - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29659736,"author":"rmanolis","month":"2021-12","story_title":"My negative views on Rust","text":"Rust does not bind well with C for this reason it can not become a system level programming [LINK] However, there is another programming language that does not need bindings. It is called Zig and here it explains how it solves the same problem [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"mzJmTCYmo9g":[{"hn_comment_id":321503,"author":"ra","month":"2008-10","story_title":"The Commanding Heights - 6hr documentary on the global economy (2003)","text":"Oohh... This is one of my favourite documentary series of all time. Compulsive viewing. I'm not sure how it exposes anything about the current situation, but it sure underlines what the free-market economy means, how it came about and why it's so important for our lives. One of the underlying messages in the series is that Free markets and Free democracy are intrinsically linked. I'd be really interested to see a 2008 update on this. One that takes into account the new China and Putin's Russia. While China is touched upon in the series - I feel that the author would have many more insights on the impact of China on the rest of the world, today. And Putin's Russia - well here's another piece of fascinating history in the making. One of my favourite sub-plots in the series is the Thatcher story, and the economic reasoning behind the removal of government subsidy for industry. While I was too young to understand it at the time, surely this was one of the greatest feats of leadership in a long time. For something lighthearted and more related to today, see either of the following: The subprime primer: [LINK] And from the BBC comedy department, 'Bird and Fortune' [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17999320,"author":"pdfernhout","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Post-crash economics: have we learnt nothing?","text":"Well, at least comedians seemed to understand the crisis several months before Lehman crashed: \"Subprime Banking Mess\" [VIDEO] \"John Bird and John Fortune (the Long Johns) brilliantly, and accurately, describing the mindset of the investment banking community in this satirical interview.\"","stance":"rec"}],"n02tImce3AE":[{"hn_comment_id":31001309,"author":"fenomas","month":"2022-04","story_title":"The Legend of the Music Tree","text":"An adjacent topic, since TFA is about acoustic guitars and this is about electric, but I recently came across an excellent video where a guitarist tries to determine exactly which parts of an electric guitar affect its tone. He did it by methodically swapping parts around on a cheap kit guitar and comparing the sound to a quality model, and he winds up finding the body shape/material appear to have no effect at all. He even gets closely matching sounds out of a \"guitar\" with no body at all, by keeping certain other elements (strings, pickups, electronics) the same as the real model. Really surprising results! Source: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31512907,"author":"CharlesW","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Simple And Terrible Machines","text":"If you're interested in how simple they can get, \"Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In An Electric Guitar?\" is a fun and technically-interesting video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36658718,"author":"dmbche","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Amateurs obsess over tools, pros over mastery","text":"[VIDEO] If you're interested, this is pretty fascinating - he shows experimentaly that the guitar itself has little to do with tone. Other than that better made instruments could (no promises!) hold their tuning a little better, but you can cheaply buy locks or spend some money having that re-done. More than this and I have a hard explaining what a \"pro\" guitar could do to help an amateur. You get the same tones out of it, pedals and amps have much more impact on sound anyway. And seriously, unless you have musical training, you'll never hear the difference between epiphone and gibson, or squier and fender.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47565224,"author":"gadtfly","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Comparison shows audiophiles waste a lot of money","text":"If this is appealing to you, check out this guy who ran a much more systematic set of experiments on even more sacred and sensitive targets: Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In An Electric Guitar? [VIDEO] Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In A Guitar Amplifier? [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"n068fel-W9I":[{"hn_comment_id":27376159,"author":"mikehollinger","month":"2021-06","story_title":"An F-35 Pilot Explains Why the Jet's Bad Press Misses the Point","text":"Slightly related, but there's a great hour-long lecture [1] by Colonel Randy Gordon, who's a test pilot, discussing the flight control systems for the F-22, contrasting it (a bit) to other jets, and even to a Cessna. He talks about the tradeoffs between human factors, mechanical engineering, software engineering, and shows how the software systems help the pilot. It's well worth the hour if you're an aviation geek. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29151134,"author":"khazhoux","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Pilot Says Too Many Jumpers Outside Led to King Air Spin","text":"I recently learned that this is an issue that bomber pilots / airplanes must deal with, when they deploy their payloads. Here is a video of a test pilot giving a talk at MIT on the F-22 and its advanced flying capabilities which --as he puts it-- makes flying an F-22 actually easier than a Cessna. [VIDEO] Apologies in advance for you losing an hour -- the talk is that good!","stance":"strong_rec"}],"n1QEj09Pe6k":[{"hn_comment_id":16100443,"author":"sillysaurus3","month":"2018-01","story_title":"As of today, no US passenger airlines operate the Boeing 747","text":"If anyone finds the operation of airlines a fascinating topic, you might like Wendover Productions: [LINK] How airlines price flights [LINK] The little plane war [LINK] Why planes don't fly faster [VIDEO] The economics of Airline Class [LINK] How airlines schedule flights [LINK] I just recently found the channel. So much good stuff. (My unrelated favorite is [LINK] How the US government will survive doomsday.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17573615,"author":"ckocagil","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Is killing the boom the key to supersonic air travel?","text":"This reminds me of a Wendover video I've seen. The author discovers that airplanes used to fly much faster in the 1960s than they do today. So our flight times have actually gone up! He then explains the reasons behind it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19692206,"author":"yarapavan","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the most educational,interesting or insightful vids on YouTube?","text":"Selected Twitter responses: - Why Planes Don't Fly Faster, [VIDEO] - Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement, [LINK] - Richard Hamming: \"Learning to Learn\", [LINK] - Rise and fall of Third Reich, [LINK] - The men who built America, [LINK] -History of the World, [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"n28W4AmvMDE":[{"hn_comment_id":38854931,"author":"plexman","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Reasons to grow and keep big muscles","text":"Sugar is poison. Check out the latest talk from Dr Robert Lustig [VIDEO] Its a 3.5h video, but roughly sugar is as toxic as alcohol and the food industry is adding it to most products. In short if it has a label (like most processed foods with many ingredients) you should avoid, switch to the ones that don't have (like an apple). This book is also great \"The hacking of the American mind\" `While researching the toxic and addictive properties of sugar for his New York Times bestseller Fat Chance, Robert Lustig made an alarming discovery\u2014our pursuit of happiness is being subverted by a culture of addiction and depression from which we may never recover. Dopamine is the \u201creward\u201d neurotransmitter that tells our brains we want more; yet every substance or behavior that releases dopamine in the extreme leads to addiction. Serotonin is the \u201ccontentment\u201d neurotransmitter that tells our brains we don\u2019t need any more; yet its deficiency leads to depression. Ideally, both are in optimal supply. Yet dopamine evolved to overwhelm serotonin\u2014because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they were constantly motivated\u2014with the result that constant desire can chemically destroy our ability to feel happiness, while sending us down the slippery slope to addiction. In the last forty years, government legislation and subsidies have promoted ever-available temptation (sugar, drugs, social media, porn) combined with constant stress (work, home, money, Internet), with the end result of an unpr","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49063891,"author":"dlahoda","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Pizza, pasta, potatoes, protein \u2013 how Italian children became so overweight","text":"This explains how sugars and fast carbs can be healthy [VIDEO] Tldr; highly processed food looses vitamins(micro nutrient starvation) and starch/fiber are needed to slow absorption until it gets to bacteria producing drugs(barbiturate and precursors to neuromediators including), and give signals over vagus nerve to head. May be summary of few books from me too. Do not recall. Add on top chewing fibery food takes time, feeling full starts earlier of being full, and saliva ferments help to digest either.","stance":"rec"}],"n3Xv_g3g-mA":[{"hn_comment_id":20120308,"author":"rayraegah","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness","text":"Kurzgesagt \u2013 In a Nutshell had an excellent research report as video summarizing loneliness, published earlier this year [0] with sources linking to the facts in the video [1]. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19739243,"author":"LesZedCB","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Why Do People with Depression Like Listening to Sad Music?","text":"Kurzgesagt had a really great video[1] on loneliness that described the downward spiral that people find themselves in. > > The controversial implication is that depressed people deliberately act in ways that are likely to maintain their low mood. > How is this remotely controversial? Finding something you like is not the same as liking your state or disposition for depression. i think that is controversial because it assigns agency to the person experiencing the depression, that they are causing their own depression. but the most common complaint from people with depression is that people are always telling them to \"just cheer up\" etc etc. this is the same sentiment in a specific context. \"if you just didn't listen to depressing music all the time, maybe you wouldn't be so depressed.\" [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20118487,"author":"nyxtom","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness","text":"Great explanation on why we should simply treat loneliness like a symptom of being hungry. As you form healthier habits in general around socializing, the person becomes more whole and in doing so you grant yourself additional opportunities to meet people, engage in conversation, and increase the probability of friendships and relationships. [VIDEO] The other thought process I've been subscribing to lately is the idea that you have to actually become the kind of person that \"can socialize\" or that \"can be friendly\" before you suddenly find yourself in: a friendship, a relationship, a marriage, a solid social network. None of these things come over night and they certainly don't come easy for people who are stricken with the habit of isolation. Once you make decisions and form actual habits around trying to be friendly to other people: - put yourself in a situation where you have the opportunity at all to socialize (a store, a coffeeshop, a restaurant, a club, a meetup). Socializing doesn't mean you have to be friends with the person, it seems to be about just being the kind of person who is even able at all to be friendly - make an observation (the weather, the environment around you, the place you're at, something someone is wearing, a pin, a shoe, an outfit, a drink, a dog... whatever - just make any observation at all and comment on it) - listen (observe how the other person make the same or differing observations; listen to any other observation other people make, interna","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30669203,"author":"paull39","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm So Lonely","text":"Sorry for the YT link but from \"Kurzgesagt - in a nutshell\" there is a really nice video about loniless. Maybe it does help you in the short term too. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"n691pLhQBkw":[{"hn_comment_id":14957083,"author":"onli","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer over his now viral memo","text":"> The \"scientific consensus\" is that women are inherently genetically hard-coded to not be as good at or interested in computer programming? I did not say that, did I? The scientific consensus is that there are biological differences that have an influence on job fit and job choices. But we are talking statistics here, there are always people from the other sex that are a good fit for a specific work. Did you watch the video I linked? [VIDEO] . Really, watch it. Also, the Google memo explicitly did not say that women should not be coders. If you think that, this is the warped media representation of the memo you are talking about, not its actual content.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14962335,"author":"onli","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Google Can't Seem to Tolerate Diversity","text":"If you want to see to which points science does have something to say, you might be interested in watching [VIDEO] . This presentation by Steven Pinker got posted yesterday in one of the other comment threads, and I found it to be an excellent pre-existing discussion of the merits of the memo.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16383957,"author":"ac2018-02-14","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Sex and STEM: Stubborn Facts and Stubborn Ideologies","text":"Whenever this comes up, I like to mention this video [0]. The video speaks for itself, but generally it advances the position that human behavior and preferences are a distribution, and the distributions for women are in some cases different from the distributions for men (in the sense that summary statistics like mean and variance differ), but there is always significant overlap. The position that men and women are indistinguishable behaviorally and in their preferences is not taken seriously. A notable point advanced in the video is that there is a difference in the summary statistics (not the entire distributions) which indicate men prioritize status and family different from women (with men more likely to prioritize status at the expense of family , the opposite of women). Another notable difference (again in the summary statistics, not the entire distribution) is that men prefer careers that are thing -centered over people -centered. I wish statistics were better understood by the general population. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13568814,"author":"Shubley","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Telling the whole truth in a post-truth environment","text":"The thing is, in a lot of ways those gender roles actually are universal. Not among individuals, of course, but among societies, there are no exceptions to these: \"M&F seen as having different natures\" \"F->M direct child care\" \"M->F more competitive\" \"M->F greater spatial range\" etc Steven Pinker talks about this (and much else) in this speech. Skip to 26:56 for this particular point. [VIDEO] An objective truth doesn't have to apply to every individual without exception, to be an objective truth. It just has to be a consistent trend. So M/F differences like the above really are objective truths, the same as \"men are taller than women\" or \"cougars are more dangerous than goats\". (edit: this is not to say anything prescriptive about what ought to be done; it's simply a descriptive statement. Of course Pinker covers all this ground; I recommend the whole talk)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13574641,"author":"js8","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Why Do So Many Women Who Study Engineering Leave the Field?","text":"I am little tired of this. The research is interesting but there should be more consideration for alternate hypotheses. There is lot of evidence that girls are biologically wired to prefer people jobs, while boys prefer jobs with things. I really recommend Steven Pinker talk: [VIDEO] But even if this was cultural, who are we to dictate preferences of people? I think the whole nature vs nurture debate is a non-sequitur. The article talks specifically about three reasons: 1. Self-doubt. It's well known that it affects girls more. But maybe it's how the brain presents risk-aversion to us? Or maybe it's actually needed for the job? Computers can be unforgiving. 2. Assholes. Sexism goes both ways. I label an asshole as an asshole, a girl might generalize it to \"men are sexist\". 3. Interesting work. Not much people in computing do world-changing work, you have to fight for it. It seems to me that there was a tacit expectation that someone will bring interesting work to you, which is IMHO false. The fact is nobody is preventing those girls to have a Github account. I am all for removing barriers, but at some point, when we just can't see any, we will have to declare that it is a matter of personal preferences. If people are indeed happier in some other job, why not just call it a day?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14952665,"author":"DidISayTooMuch","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer over his now viral memo","text":"If you're looking for a more scientifically inclined video about this topic, take a look here: [VIDEO] (The Truth Cannot be Sexist - Steven Pinker on the biology of sex differences)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14953402,"author":"onli","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Why it may be illegal for Google to punish that engineer over his now viral memo","text":"I think the spirit of the memo even in that section is perfectly acceptable. > Note, I\u2019m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are \u201cjust.\u201d I\u2019m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don\u2019t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there\u2019s significant overlap between men and women, so you can\u2019t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. It is also not an extremist position to take, it's the scientific consensus. See [VIDEO] for an example stating the same thing with almost the same words. And that's not coming from someone unqualified.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14962918,"author":"onli","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Google Can't Seem to Tolerate Diversity","text":"You're welcome :) If you are a bit interested in more references (those claims sound horrible, but they are not as far-fetched as they sound), have a look at [VIDEO] . It's a presentation by Steven Pinker that explains a lot about what science actually has to say about biological differences, and in an aside at the end even mentions stereotypes. I already mentioned it in a subthread to this post, no harm intended.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16102895,"author":"stcredzero","month":"2018-01","story_title":"James Damore has filed a class action lawsuit against Google","text":"In short, yes. You should look up the book which is cited in this video, and you should listen to the discussion of the prologue: [VIDEO] Since the human brain and its interaction with culture is very complicated, more research is needed. But a fair reading of what we have so far would seem to indicate: it's both. Beware of ideological just-so stories that make you feel good. Also, if it sounds messy and complicated, it sounds like actual biology and psychology.","stance":"rec"}],"n8Dd5aVXLCc":[{"hn_comment_id":16605337,"author":"kbaker","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook","text":"I urge everyone to watch this video from Cambridge Analytica about their techniques with big data and psychographic profiling leading up to the 2016 election. Very dystopian, it almost feels like a seminar with a Bond villain. Quote from the video: > \"we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.\" [VIDEO] Edit: also this article is a good read about how they used Facebook likes to build up profiles. Also contains a summary of the video: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13497241,"author":"cplanas","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself","text":"If you feel like the article is too long, you can watch this 11 minutes presentation: [VIDEO] . It summarizes their methodology. I took the presentation link from the article.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13522395,"author":"fmihaila","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Make America Hate Again","text":"The article [1] and video [2] below shed some light on the \"how\". The video is mentioned directly in the article. The text explains how highly sophisticated targeting was deployed by the Trump campaign, and how it differed from Clinton's campaign. Highly informative. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47108010,"author":"rramadass","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Palantir's secret weapon isn't AI \u2013 it's Ontology. An open-source deep dive","text":"> Ultimately, the bigger problem is that even in crowds like HN's, no one seems to have a good idea of what should be done about governments abusing datascience so efficiently. The general-populace/crowd/mob has already lost this game. Govts/Companies (all of them irrespective of ethics/democracy/etc.) are doing what they want with data and datascience. The populace is easily propagandized/distracted from reality and can be easily cocooned. The only recourse left for the individual is to learn and start playing the game himself. Fortunately the new tools are a great help in this asymmetric warfare. Organizations like EFF/OpenSource/GNU/etc. need to take the lead on this since most people are like sheep when it comes to uses/misuses of technology. Palantir is just \"Cambridge Analytica\" redux but with more money/connections/data/breadth/depth/etc. Watch this old presentation by their then ceo Alexander Nix and extrapolate to today's AI world - [VIDEO] Finally go and read the works of George Orwell, Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul, Marshall Mcluhan, Noam Chomsky etc. on the whole subject of Propaganda/Manipulation to really understand where we are now.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47108039,"author":"rramadass","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Palantir's secret weapon isn't AI \u2013 it's Ontology. An open-source deep dive","text":"Palantir is just \"Cambridge Analytica\" redux but with more money/connections/data/breadth/depth/etc. Their ethical/moral stance i will leave it to you to infer. Watch these old presentations by CA's then ceo Alexander Nix and extrapolate to today's AI world - [VIDEO] and [LINK] (note the Q/A at the end here) Also watch this interview with Christopher Wylie the CA whistleblower and again extrapolate to today's AI world - [LINK] Be afraid, Be very afraid.","stance":"rec"}],"n8m7lFQ3njk":[{"hn_comment_id":3659734,"author":"jacobolus","month":"2012-03","story_title":"What HN users don't mean to be","text":"Somewhat related to this subject of the link between concepts and words/phrases, the utility of clich\u00e9s, etc., I strongly recommend Douglas Hofstadter\u2019s lecture, \u201cAnalogy as the Core of Cognition\u201d, [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16843422,"author":"bobosha","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Anything by Doug Hofstadter * Analogies are the core of thinking [LINK] * Analogy as the Core of Cognition [VIDEO] If you haven't read Godel, Escher & Bach, go read it now. Will change your thinking.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25265098,"author":"sitkack","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Dijkstra Was Wrong About 'Radical Novelty'","text":"No discussion about concepts, analogy and metaphor is complete with a mention of Analogy as the Core of Cognition [VIDEO] by Douglas Hofstadter","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6609232,"author":"MichaelMoser123","month":"2013-10","story_title":"The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think","text":"Also of interest: Hofstadters lecture about analogy on youtube [VIDEO] Also some earlier work on the subject [LINK] [LINK] I have also written a review on this very interesting book \"Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6867215,"author":"sitkack","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Introduction to Artificial Neural Networks \u2013 Part 1","text":"Feynman would be proud of your explanation. Douglas Hofstadter, \"Analogy as the Core of Cognition\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7849671,"author":"rabino","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Atlassian Developer Makes A Horribly Sexist Presentation At A Tech Conference","text":"Some say analogies are at the very core of our cognition. [VIDEO] Even if you don't agree, it's an interesting and fun talk to watch.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27923422,"author":"ssivark","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)","text":"For more on metaphors, check out Douglas Hofstadter\u2019s fascinating talk on \u201cAnalogy as the core of cognition\u201d: [VIDEO] Ended up inspiring Melanie Mitchell, and became a driving theme of her research :-)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30217451,"author":"passion__desire","month":"2022-02","story_title":"The case for and against analogies","text":"I have following 3 suggestions regarding analogies. [1] Analogies in Fundamental physics Lecture by Douglas Hofstadter: Albert Einstein on Light; Light on Albert Einstein : [LINK] \u201cWhere does deep insight in physics come from? For those who view physics as a highly rational science grounded in strict mathematics, it is tempting to think that it comes from the purest and most precise of reasoning, following ironclad laws of thought that compel the clear mind completely rigidly. And yet the truth is quite otherwise. One finds, when one looks closely at any major discovery in physics, that the greatest of physicists are the most daring and are constantly being guided by blurry, instinctive, nearly irrational mental forces. Albert Einstein ideally exemplifies this thesis. In this talk, I will discuss the eternal mystery of light, which, over the course of millennia, was puzzled over, pondered on, and slowly worked out by a series of great minds, and finally, in the nineteenth century, was definitively settled with clarity and rock-solid certainty. And yet one day in the early spring of 1905, quite out of the blue, came an absurd-seeming new suggestion from an unknown Swiss patent clerk, third class, clashing violently with that rock-solid piece of collective wisdom. How did the brazen patent clerk come up with this crazy idea? How it was received by the physics world? What was its eventual fate? And what can we learn about the workings of the human mind from this twisty story fil","stance":"rec"}],"nAbCKa0FzjQ":[{"hn_comment_id":20915513,"author":"snailmailman","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Popcount CPU instruction","text":"I highly recommend Matt Godbolt's talk \"What has my compiler done for me lately?\"[0] and its follow-up[1]. Both are great presentations going into details on some of the crazy optimizations compilers will do. As someone who knows very little about the inner workings of compilers my mind was blown when I saw some them. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22268741,"author":"drej","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Rust: Zero-Cost Abstraction in Action","text":"This is not Rust specific, this is a compiler thing, both LLVM and GCC can detect sums and generate closed form formulas instead. There are other fun algorithm detections - e.g. if you try to do bitcounts yourself, LLVM will use popcnt instead. Compilers are awesome, check out Matt Godbolt's talk on this very topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22981369,"author":"manaskarekar","month":"2020-04","story_title":"I translated a simple C program to x86_64 and it was slower","text":"Tangent, but this reminds me of this great talk by Matt Godbolt from CppCon 2017: \u201cWhat Has My Compiler Done for Me Lately? Unbolting the Compiler's Lid\u201d [LINK] . And the follow up [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"nBNTAmLRmUg":[{"hn_comment_id":11374012,"author":"InclinedPlane","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Forgotten audio formats: The Highway Hi-Fi","text":"The coolest thing he's covered, I think, that I'd never heard of before is the tefifon: [VIDEO] It's basically a continuous loop of tape (similar to an 8-track) but with groves recording music (like a vinyl record). It didn't see much popularity outside of Germany and then was essentially obsoleted by magnetic tape. Such a fascinating technology though. In a parallel Universe it probably would have been vastly more popular.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17405356,"author":"rogerbinns","month":"2018-06","story_title":"The Nixie Tube Story: The Neon Display Tech That Engineers Can\u2019t Quit","text":"My gateway video was the one on the Tefifon - [VIDEO] - a consumer music playback format. Production ended the same decade we stood on the moon.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11475532,"author":"aembleton","month":"2016-04","story_title":"USB power supply puts 220 Mains power out on USB jack","text":"If you want another rabbit hole to start down, I can also recommend Techmoan. He doesn't do teardowns, but instead likes to buy old HiFi gear and reviews them. Some of them are incredibly obscure such as the Tefifon: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nBiJB8YuDBQ":[{"hn_comment_id":3763540,"author":"nextparadigms","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Don't Talk to Cops","text":"Any chance the US law will ever be fixed so that people can't be easily arrested over anything, really? There's also this mini-doc that's related to this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5053318,"author":"hellome","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Aaron Swartz commits suicide","text":"I want to offer my condolences for your loss, Im very empathetic to Arron's situation. I can only imagine someone that graduated and took the right path in life to be potential labeled as a felon If in fact he what I assumed cared greatly about his reputation I ask that you all watch; titled Illegal Everything [VIDEO] its my goal that maybe this tragedy may help the next Aaron????","stance":"rec"}],"nIKhUizkXxA":[{"hn_comment_id":22298214,"author":"MertsA","month":"2020-02","story_title":"The laser and microphone atop Mars 2020, NASA's next rover","text":"You'd be interested in Ben Krasnow's DiY attempt. It's still understandable but he tries to explain why it's built the way it is and give you a good basis of the theory of operation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30028558,"author":"anfractuosity","month":"2022-01","story_title":"DIY Raspberry Pi Spectrometer Guide","text":"You might like - [VIDEO] ( DIY mass spectrometer measures potassium in dietary salt substitute ) by Ben Krasnow","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36536421,"author":"hsjqllzlfkf","month":"2023-06","story_title":"YouTube is testing a more aggressive approach against ad blockers","text":"The channels that I had in mind when I wrote that are channels by experts in their fields, which somehow often happen to be low production value - because you know real scientists are about substance, not style :-) So here's a random one in that category: this guy decided to try and build a mass spectrometer from scratch [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nIoXOplUvAw":[{"hn_comment_id":30619141,"author":"Mizza","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Blender 3.1","text":"Make the donut: [VIDEO] It's kind of a right of passage for Blender newbies. I learned (well.. I'm learning) Blender this year and I'm glad I did. It's very intimidating at first, but you get the hang of it, and then you can't imagine a world without it. I now even prefer it to stuff like Photoshop for doing simple graphics work.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33276186,"author":"franciscop","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommend me a Blender course","text":"100% agreed, the Donut tutorial is great. Make sure to use the 3.0 version instead of the 2.8 version, he released an updated tutorial with the improved Blender UI: [VIDEO] PS, definitely use an external mouse! You cannot really only use the trackpad/keyboard for Blender effectively.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38287505,"author":"ur-whale","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Blender 16yo winner of UK younganimator of the year","text":"Youtube is your friend: it is a bottomless pit of Blender tutorials from the very basic step-by-step \"learn how to use the UI\" to super-advanced topics. This guy has an extensive collections on both basic and advanced stuff: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38296020,"author":"fractallyte","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Blender 4.0","text":"I've followed Janine Pauke's work for many years ( [LINK] she has produced a very cool introductory course for Blender: [LINK] And, of course, there's the famous donut tutorial series: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nJPERZDfyWc":[{"hn_comment_id":28692263,"author":"WallyFunk","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Ask HN: How can I get better at original thinking and being creative?","text":"Watch Everything is a Remix: [VIDEO] I've been prolific over the years in programming and art & code, and about 99% of it was remixes of others work. I'm not ashamed of that - many artists draw inspiration from multiple sources. The trick is to put your own spin on it, not directly rip off someone else's work. Many artists will never tell you they borrowed from various sources, because they think that would come across as unoriginal and merely copying others work, but have a few beers with an artist and suddenly they start sharing their secrets...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29788601,"author":"combatentropy","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Copyright doesn't need 95 years to get the job done","text":"I find that most people don't understand creativity. If you believe an artist or inventor is some mystic sage who creates works ex nihilo , then you misunderstand creativity and attribute to it far too much. And therefore you might grant an artist a period of copyright that is longer than is really deserved or needed. Through much of my life, I have been accused of being \"creative\". In elementary school my class recognized me as the best at drawing. In fifth grade I wrote a book that was checked out so many times from the school library that it filled up the check-out card front and back. In high school, I made dozens of little movies with my friends. After college I was a graphic designer, and both of my employers expressed awe at my work. The best explanation of creativity that I have found is a video series by Kirby Ferguson called Everything Is a Remix, [VIDEO] It shows what I always knew in the back of my head: that nothing I ever made was from staring at a blank sheet of paper. It was just me ripping off all my favorite things I had seen before. Everyone tries their hand at art, and often it obviously is a copy. My secret was that I would take a little of this, a little of that, copy 5 different things and mix them all together, rather than making a straight copy of just one thing. I wasn't trying to hide anything, it was just how my mind naturally worked. I thought one thing from one movie was cool, so I took part of that. I thought something else from a drawing was co","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41039329,"author":"indiv0","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Copying is the way design works (2020)","text":"Reminds me of one of my favourite video essays -- \"Everything is a Remix\" [0]. The video and this article cover the same ideas albeit with different examples. Which is funny on a meta level -- the article could be called a remix of the video. The video (if I recall correctly) goes a bit further, attacking patents/IP law as anti-creative. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15662397,"author":"guiambros","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Tesla\u2019s Dangerous Sprint into the Future","text":"This discussion reminds me of the \"Everything is a Remix\" [1] documentary. We tend to look at the winners to explain history, even though in many cases multiple players were working on the same theories at the same time, and the likely outcome would have been exactly the same if the winners have not existed. Worth watching. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18029204,"author":"mtgx","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Senate passes copyright bill to end 140-year protection for old songs","text":"> it's to allow the creator to extract all the possible value from their work That may be why governments of the world keep passing copyright laws now and how they view copyright. But copyright was established as a \"balance\" between making it profitable for the author to create the work (read: not to extract billions of dollars out of a work) in order to benefit the public . The primary goal has always been to benefit the public, not the author. Also, one of the reasons why copyright should be finite and not have too long of a term is because no author has ever created anything - anything at all - from scratch . They themselves have built upon the work of others . This is why copyright is meant to be a system where one creates something upon something else, and then someone new can create something new upon that previous work, and so on. Copyright was meant to be a kickstarting mechanism for authors, not a rent-seeking one, which is how it's used today. If you still don't see this what I'm trying to say from my comment, I highly suggest you watch this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39398416,"author":"rmbyrro","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Sora: Creating video from text","text":"I used to have the same view. Watching \"Everything is a Remix\" [1] helped me broaden my perspective. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49319517,"author":"alexpotato","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems","text":"I would highly recommend the \"Everything is a Remix\" series on YouTube to show how a lot of \"creative\" work is really just combining different items. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nJslrTT-Yhc":[{"hn_comment_id":33551494,"author":"Lariscus","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Show HN: An API for CO\u2082 Removal","text":"Carbon capture isn't real (as advertised). If you take green energy out of the supply to capture carbon, a carbon producing power plant will have to make up for it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33936466,"author":"themoonisachees","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Fuel Out of Thin Air: CO2 Capture from Air and Conversion to Methanol","text":"From a logical standpoint carbon capture is a scam [0]. The argument is \"if you don't have spare energy, why are you spending it on carbon capture? And if you have spare energy (you don't), why not spend the money you usee to build the over capacity to bring clean energy somewhere else?\" That is all assuming your entire power grid is 100% clean (it isn't) because otherwise you fall in case 0 where you spend energy that could be spent on offsetting non-clean energy usage. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41124857,"author":"xracy","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Carbon capture and storage is a fantasy","text":"At this point, my smell test is \"how much does the 'solution' smell of gas money.\" and if it does, I assume they don't want to do the hard work required cause it's not in their interests, and it hasn't been for decades. ( ahem Carbon offsets) In practice it's so much harder to debunk these solutions because we don't have good ways of dealing with bad-faith actors. The non-dismissive way to view Carbon Capture is this: Carbon Capture will be relevant when we actually reach zero emissions, and not a minute sooner. Until then, it is at best, creative accounting that does nothing, and at worst actively preventing electrification. The thought experiment I remember giving me clarity on this is: Imagine you have a solar plant that is fully dedicated to removing carbon from the atmosphere. 100 times out of 100, you would rather just stop the emissions at the source by making the emitter use the green energy. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nLApFANtkHs":[{"hn_comment_id":21470051,"author":"qohen","month":"2019-11","story_title":"CRDT: Conflict-free replicated data type","text":"Horde is indeed a really interesting Elixir library. It's based on the CRDT library, DeltaCrdt [0], also by Derek Kraan. He discusses DeltaCrdt here [1] and Horde here [2]. BTW, Horde is a distributed supervisor, i.e. analogous to what regular Elixir OTP supervisors do, except that it can restart processes on different cluster nodes. It also provides a distributed process registry. Daniel Azuma of Google gave a great 39 minute talk at ElixirConf 2018, \"Docker and OTP: Friends or Foes?\" [3], where he shows Horde (and DeltaCrdt) in action to keep a multi-player tank video game going while the Docker container it's running in gets killed and and the Elixir processes get respawned on another container. The state is persisted across Elixir nodes in other containers in an instance of DeltaCrdt. (Again, the talk is really good -- if the above sounds interesting, you'll want to check it out [3]). [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22416648,"author":"dnautics","month":"2020-02","story_title":"My favorite Erlang program (2013)","text":"Honestly, in most scenarios, you kill the vm and let it restart with new code (just like you would in a kubernetes pod, and in fact using kubernetes pods with BEAM languages is also a valid strategy). If you must keep some state preserved, there's even ways to do it without erlang's hot code reloading strategies, I would recommend watching Dan Azuma's fantastic video (stick around for the live demo): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18405704,"author":"pg_bot","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Phoenix 1.4.0 released","text":"You can use Docker + containers with OTP, they are not mutually exclusive. Daniel Azuma gave a talk at the most recent Elixirconf about this subject.[0] [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23755541,"author":"dnautics","month":"2020-07","story_title":"An Introduction to Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types","text":"In the elixir community CRDTs are well known for various HA; AP distributed state strategies, Phoenix Presence uses CRDTs to track processes and broadcast them over pubsub channels. This makes it trivial to represent \"user state\" in chat rooms, Sophie DiBenedetto describes using it for writing a trivial chat app: [LINK] For something a bit wilder, you can track your state machines across a distributed cluster and be able to pass and preserve state across the cluster using CRDTs, as is done in Dan Azuma's (live) demo of a tank game: [VIDEO] (worth it for the demo at 29m)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33539540,"author":"h0l0cube","month":"2022-11","story_title":"An animated introduction to Elixir","text":"> you should store the state in the external system It's an old talk, but this one has a strategy for robustly persisting state across ephemeral containers. The example here is running a multiplayer game server while doing code updates etc. using Horde and CRDTs [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nLF0n9SACd4":[{"hn_comment_id":21348235,"author":"throwaway_bad","month":"2019-10","story_title":"React Concurrent Mode","text":"The clearest demo that communicates what this solves was given when it was announced last year. That clock animation is pure genius: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18302998,"author":"ggreer","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Introducing Hooks","text":"Dan Abramov's talk starts 39 minutes into the livestream: [LINK] If you like live coding demos, he also gave a talk at JSConf Iceland where he showed off some future React features, such as asynchronous rendering: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21669058,"author":"mlsarecmg","month":"2019-11","story_title":"React in concurrent mode: 2000 state-connected comps re-rendered at 60FPS","text":"Yes, but it scales with the environment and device capabilities. Watch this, it explains it in detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nLjFTHTgEVU":[{"hn_comment_id":9087951,"author":"africandawg","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Female Founders Conference \u2013 Live Stream [video]","text":"Maybe it'd be helpful to not discriminate against other genders and have other gender specific conferences too. Maybe we can divide the groups by race too. You know, so people are comfortable. Maybe I am too simple but I do no understand segregation. Neither do I understand \"reverse\" discrimination; for the lack of a better choice of words. Anytime you have something going on where if you reverse the \"minority\" with \"majority\" labels and the result sounds bad, I feel like the original was bad too. For down voters: Please feel free to leave a comment explaining your stands. Also, people who are interested in the ideas of removing bias, scientifically backed arguments exist. The touchy-feely-ride-the-trend ones are just more talked about. It's like picking the color of a bike shed. Here's an interesting talk titled Unconscious Bias @ Work | Google Ventures. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13321627,"author":"garysieling","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues","text":"For the people who are interested in this topic, Google has a training video that talks through some interesting psychology research that ties to hiring / performance reviews - [VIDEO] I haven't been able to locate many similar good talks, so if anyone can point me to speakers / talks I'd appreciate it.","stance":"rec"}],"nM9f0W2KD5s":[{"hn_comment_id":23901791,"author":"scop","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation","text":"I recommend that people listen to that episode even if it's not interesting to you. Very good food for thought. Video: [VIDEO] Audio: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20689900,"author":"lunias","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Major Technological Changes Are Coming More Slowly Than They Once Did","text":"[VIDEO] Lots of relevant conversation within. There's a quote in there somewhere along the lines of: \"we've built the computer from the starship enterprise, but we possess little other tech from Star Trek\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22029141,"author":"ned7","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What were your most impactful podcast episodes from 2019?","text":"The first episode of \"the portal\" was great. In that episode Eric Weinstein and Peter Thiel deeply discussed a variety of topics. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23960176,"author":"cinntaile","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation","text":"This is also discussed on the very first episode [0] of The Portal where Eric Weinstein talks with Peter Thiel. It's been a while since I listened to it but I remember I found it to be an interesting discussion and an unusual viewpoint. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29014282,"author":"crmd","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations","text":"I enjoyed this podcast[0] with Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein, where one of their central discussion points is the current stagnation of technological innovation, beginning in the mid 1970s, with the sole exception of computer software. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29247135,"author":"petermcneeley","month":"2021-11","story_title":"David Graeber\u2019s Possible Worlds","text":"I think one can learn quite a bit from Thiel even if one is not ideologically aligned with him. Here is a much more lengthy discussion: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32640118,"author":"systemvoltage","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Welcome Home, Garry Tan","text":"I've studied Thiel, he's just not mainstream left. If you want to listen to him with good faith, I enjoyed this interview: [VIDEO] Doesn't come across evil to me unless by evil you mean just not mainstream left, which might be the correct in the valley.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41321945,"author":"HarryHirsch","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)","text":"There was a lengthy interview with Peter Thiel a few years back: [VIDEO] It's interesting and worth watching, but it becomes apparent that Thiel is a financier, and science takes place on a different timescale. Better seek advice from someone who was active when US science was still functional, let's say Roy Vagelos.","stance":"rec"}],"nO5vjmDFZaI":[{"hn_comment_id":18086859,"author":"wmat","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"Some of my favourite nerdy documentaries: BBS: The Documentary [VIDEO] The KGB, the Computer, and Me [LINK] 8 Bit Generation: The Commodore Wars [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21289126,"author":"aspenmayer","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Life, Death and Resurrection of Computer Art Group Mistigris","text":"Not a write up but BBS: The Documentary is covers a lot of what you\u2019re asking about. BBS: The Documentary (commonly referred to as BBS Documentary) is a 3-disc, 8-episode documentary about the subculture born from the creation of the bulletin board system (BBS) filmed by computer historian Jason Scott of textfiles.com. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nQHBAdShgYI":[{"hn_comment_id":11245499,"author":"rendezvouscp","month":"2016-03","story_title":"If you're alive in 30 years you might be in 1000 years too","text":"That\u2019s a great question that\u2019s been pondered by philosophers for a while: [LINK] Here\u2019s a fun video talking about the same thing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16577967,"author":"macintux","month":"2018-03","story_title":"A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is \u201c100 percent fatal\u201d","text":"This question descends from an ancient philosophical question; see the Ship of Theseus[0]. CGP Grey has a good look at the question wrt Star Trek teleportation[1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nQpxAvjD_30":[{"hn_comment_id":42020716,"author":"elmer007","month":"2024-11","story_title":"The Elimination Strategy \u2013 Why More Makes Your SaaS Worth Less","text":"I'll reference of one of my favorite YouTube videos, possibly of all time, about Amazon products: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30912066,"author":"codeulike","month":"2022-04","story_title":"USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)","text":"\"What Shopping On Amazon Feels Like\" [VIDEO] I saw this a few months ago and it really lays bare a lot of the crazy stuff we've just got used to with amazon","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35346264,"author":"codeulike","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn\u2019t buy","text":"I've posted this before but I'll do it again because it really highlights how unfriendly buying things at amazon has become, slowly over time as meanwhile we barely noticed, like frogs being slowly boiled in water... What Shopping On Amazon Feels Like - Ryan George [VIDEO] \"roll the dice\"","stance":"rec"}],"nSKp2StlS6s":[{"hn_comment_id":25859832,"author":"thunderbong","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?","text":"Man, those Dylan Beattie's videos are out of this world!! I laughed way too hard on a number of them - You give REST a bad name - [VIDEO] We're Gonna Build a Framework - [LINK] Enterprise Waterfall - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34302905,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Tail Call Optimization: The Musical","text":"I want to highlight Dylan Beattie while we're posting our favorites. [LINK] His song DMCA is my little favourite, but \"You Give REST a Bad Name\" is also excellent. And he does perform at conferences! (Mostly .NET ones) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nTFEUsudhfs":[{"hn_comment_id":2455230,"author":"statenjason","month":"2011-04","story_title":"What math (and programming) teachers should know about memory","text":"> We spend an hour learning a concept, and only practice using it when we get home. This is why I'm a fan of what the Khan Academy[1] is striving to do. It flips this pattern around, with more instruction at home and practice when with the instructor. The teacher can then spend less time introducing a topic and instead working through the process with individual students. Watching Khan's TED talk[2] is pretty inspiring. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3849534,"author":"stevenkovar","month":"2012-04","story_title":"","text":"Here's a great video of Salman Khan explaining that segment of the teacher dashboard at TED. It's a great perspective on learning and (in the context of the topic I wrote about) failure. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nU8DcBF-qo4":[{"hn_comment_id":150849,"author":"henning","month":"2008-03","story_title":"More data usually beats better algorithms","text":"One talk in particular in which he focuses on this idea, including with facts and figures from research literature, is a talk he gave a while ago called \"Theorizing from Data\": [VIDEO] . You should definitely watch it if you haven't seen it before. Norvig states his opinion slightly differently: of course being smart about algorithms is good. But until you get a lot of it, you often can't even fairly evaluate different algorithms. It's only when you're no longer getting significant gains from more data that you should then start thinking about being an algorithm smartypants.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":90353,"author":"dood","month":"2007-12","story_title":"Google Is All About Large Amounts of Data","text":"[ [VIDEO] ] Its a good talk, though maybe should be called \"theorizing from massive amounts of data\". Makes you wonder what Google are keeping under wraps for now, and how the powerset approach can compete, except maybe for domain-specific stuff.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":780556,"author":"timcederman","month":"2009-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Access to the Corpus - What Would You Do?","text":"If you really think that's all they're doing then you have very little understanding in just how subtly awesome some of the stuff they're doing is. Peter Norvig does a better job explaining some of it than I ever could. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nUBtKNzoKZ4":[{"hn_comment_id":18058363,"author":"glaberficken","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Another Week with Bad Software","text":"True, and this bias also applies to a bunch of other day to day things that we take for granted. For the comedic view on this: \"Louis CK Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20387778,"author":"spodek","month":"2019-07","story_title":"In 1919, an Army convoy drove cross-country from Washington to San Francisco","text":"Not sure this community's views on Louis CK, but he had an insightful bit on cross-country travel then and now: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22580936,"author":"Fezzik","month":"2020-03","story_title":"NY hospitals pitch tents, nix surgeries to prepare for influx","text":"Just to clarify, that was a Louis CK bit. I enjoy both of their comedic styles. Louis does it in a stand-up special, but here is a good Conan clip, with a great title: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22581002,"author":"TravHatesMe","month":"2020-03","story_title":"NY hospitals pitch tents, nix surgeries to prepare for influx","text":"No I haven't seen that skit, link it if you can. Louis CK tells a similar anecdote on Conan \"Everything is amazing and nobody is happy\". The passenger beside him is upset that the on-board wifi went down. [VIDEO] The whole clip is hilarious.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48943147,"author":"sandspar","month":"2026-07","story_title":"$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol","text":"Louis CK: >I was on an airplane and there was high speed internet on the airplane\u2026 it\u2019s fast, I\u2019m watching YouTube clips, I\u2019m on an airplane. It breaks down, they apologize, and the guy next to me is like \u201cThis is bullshit...\" >Like how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago? >Flying is the worst one, people come back from flights, they tell you their story and it\u2019s a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany. >\"It was the worst day of my life! First of all we didn\u2019t board for 20 minutes. And then we got on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there.\" >Oh really, what happened next, did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero? >You\u2019re flying! It\u2019s amazing! Everybody on every plane should be constantly going \u2018oh my God, wow!\u2019 >You\u2019re sitting in a chair in the sky >\u2026.Here\u2019s the thing, people say there are delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in 5 hours. That used to take 30 years. And a bunch of you would die on the way there. And have a baby. You\u2019d be a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and you take a shit and you\u2019re home. [VIDEO] - his delivery starts at around 2:00 but he starts with additional jokes.","stance":"rec"}],"nXaxk27zwlk":[{"hn_comment_id":11721276,"author":"humanrebar","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Why I don't spend time with Modern C++ anymore","text":"Here's a few: - \"Tuning C++: Benchmarks, and CPUs, and Compilers! Oh My!\" [VIDEO] - \"Understanding Compiler Optimization\" [LINK] - \"Optimizing the Emergent Structures of C++\" [LINK] - \"Efficiency with Algorithms\" [LINK] The first one is really good if you've never benchmarked anything in a Linux environment. Or if you otherwise want to learn how to investigate how C++ gets turned into machine code.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10448332,"author":"kbenson","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Do you know how much your computer can do in a second?","text":"Interestingly, there's quite a bit that's needed to ensure you bypass some compiler optimizations. Here's an ey-opening (for me) talk[1] on benchmarking C++ and compilers which touched on it. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22469180,"author":"thomashusa","month":"2020-03","story_title":"When Bloom filters don't bloom","text":"There is a very interesting talk [1] by Chandler Carruth that I stumbled upon last weekend that is very much related to this [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nYg6jzotiAc":[{"hn_comment_id":30794816,"author":"Stratoscope","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)","text":"If you enjoy Feynman's lectures as much as I do (he taught freshman physics when I went to Caltech!) I highly recommend his armchair series, \"Fun to Imagine\": [VIDEO] He's sitting at home in Pasadena, talking about stuff that comes to mind. \u2022 Jiggling atoms who like to make friends with each other. \u2022 Where do trees come from? (It's not the dirt.) \u2022 Why don't your arms sink through the armrests of your chair? \u2022 How do trains stay on the tracks? It's an hour of fun science, and especially accessible for anyone who is curious about physics but doesn't enjoy all the equations.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32784769,"author":"morphle","month":"2022-09","story_title":"How Transistors Work [video]","text":"Richard Feynman is the best teacher we know (explaining electricity): [VIDEO] He also explains seeing, heat, electro magnetism, elasticity and mirrors among other things. His academic lectures are just as good but too long and hard for laymen to follow. - Every time I switch on an electrical device I hear Feynman say 'Zzzzinggg' and I see the copper bars jiggling across town. - Every time I see a cup of hot liquid I hear Feynman say \"jiggling atoms\" - Watch his hands and fingers telling the more accurate science story, simulating the electrons and atoms. - I would say that this the most important video to see for any human being on the planet. De second most important thing would be half of Alan Kay's lectures [LINK] Great video's to watch with your kids! (from 3-4 years and older).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42941328,"author":"Stratoscope","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?","text":"Somehow this reminds me of my old physics professor, who often had simplistic, almost boring explanations of things, like jiggling atoms making friends with each other, or how a train stays on the track. His name was Richard Feynman. [VIDEO] (Highly recommended video.) I should also note that \"teach me something\" was intended to give the candidate a chance to be the expert at the beginning the interview. It wasn't something they would be judged on, it was an ice-breaker. And a fun one, based on the feedback I got from candidates.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28350059,"author":"modeless","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Train Wheels Are Cones","text":"Here it is in better quality, the whole thing, and with subtitles: [VIDEO] Particularly good parts are the explanation of fire and trees (\"trees come out of the air\"): [VIDEO] and the explanation of the mirror problem, i.e. how does a mirror know to reverse left and right but not up and down: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39677897,"author":"lloeki","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Lie-to-children","text":"In more general terms - not just applying to children but to anyone - I call these \"Feynman lies\": the kind of lies you have to tell so as not to drown the receiver into very deep technical details. In essence this means presenting a model of the world that is sort of fundamentally incorrect, but one that is useful in allowing one's to wrap their head around the ideas. \"All models are wrong, but some are useful\", yadda yadda. \"meet where they are\" is a really nice way to put it, although it can be tricky to not paint ourselves in a \"like rubber bands\" corner! > I can't explain [magnetic] attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we\u2019d said the magnets attract like as if they were connected by rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands, I shouldn\u2019t be in trouble, you\u2019d soon ask me about the nature of the bands\u2026 and secondly if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain, so I have cheated very badly, you see. > [...] > But I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you're more familiar with, because I don\u2019t understand them in terms of anything else that you are more familiar with. direct link: [VIDEO] but the whole chapter is worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39966654,"author":"lloeki","month":"2024-04","story_title":"When a black hole and a neutron star merge","text":"My understanding of it is somewhat similar, although I'd argue that's where our mental imagery breaks down: the \"weight on fabric\" metaphor works to a point then stops conveying what's really happening and becomes misleading. I think of it like \"magnets as rubber bands\", and what I call \"Feynman lies\": > I can't explain [magnetic] attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we\u2019d said the magnets attract like as if they were connected by rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands, I shouldn\u2019t be in trouble, you\u2019d soon ask me about the nature of the bands\u2026 and secondly if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain, so I have cheated very badly, you see. > [...] > But I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else that you're more familiar with, because I don\u2019t understand them in terms of anything else that you are more familiar with. direct link: [VIDEO] but the whole chapter is worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nYkdrAPrdcw":[{"hn_comment_id":36147485,"author":"yazaddaruvala","month":"2023-06","story_title":"React is 10 years old","text":"I'll try one last time: > Sorry none of this makes any sense to me. If you're not familiar with the MVC variants (MVVM, MVP, MVI, MOVE)[0][1] we should start there. Next you should read through some common mistakes of Backbone.js like applications [LINK] and some criticisms of MVC on HackerNews in 2012[0]. Finally if you haven't before these talks, they are the ones that sold me on React: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [VIDEO] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7721261,"author":"rattray","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Flux Application Architecture","text":"Video seems to start discussion of Flux just after the 10 minute mark. Direct Link: [VIDEO] EDIT: So far, the video is much more helpful to me in terms of bringing the concepts of Flux to life. Jing does a terrific job explaining in my opinion.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14709267,"author":"danesparza","month":"2017-07","story_title":"How to optimize React applications that use Redux","text":"Redux is an implementation of Flux. I don't use Redux, but the original Facebook engineering announcement videos helped me understand React and Flux tremendously: [VIDEO] If you're talking about Redux specifically -- I agree with you. I think it's ugly and confusing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36130831,"author":"franciscop","month":"2023-05","story_title":"React is 10 years old","text":"Exactly, this is the same as saying Redux has two methodologies, the \"setter system\" and the \"event system\"; since it wasn't that well documented initially doesn't mean that the setter way was ever recommended (it's not). In fact if you watched the Flux youtube talk, something highly recommended to learn the philosophy behind Redux, it was pretty clear. Edit: here's the video (from 10:20) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42334348,"author":"phailhaus","month":"2024-12","story_title":"React 19","text":"If you have state changes within your render cycle, then you can't write pure functions anymore, you have a stateful class. And if you have a stateful class, then React can't control when you render, because it can't know when you update a variable. So the onus is on you to decide when your component needs to re-render. This is extremely easy to screw up. You will end up in scenarios where the UI does not match the underlying state, just because the two have gone out of sync. React inverts the MVC paradigm and says \"no, you don't get to decide when to render.\" So if you want to update state, React will manage that for you and queue up the render. With React, your UI and state literally cannot go out of sync (except for refs), and all the data dependencies are managed for you. Facebook gave a great talk on Flux architecture vs MVC ten years ago that you should check out here: [VIDEO] > what's the point of the setXXX() functions? Why not just make them constant explicitly Look at the code again: it is explicitly constant! `const [myState, setMyState] = useState(0)`. `myState` is a const, and will literally not change its value for the entire render cycle. There is no mutable state to manage, no race conditions. You just tell React what to render based on what the value is now, and React injects the current value for you. The first time, `myState` is 0 since that's the initial value. Every subsequent render, React will give you the latest value. You can pretend everything is con","stance":"rec"}],"nbiVbd_CEIA":[{"hn_comment_id":32449988,"author":"otherme123","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Tough times on the road to Starcraft (2012)","text":"AFAIK, it beat Serral, but he said the setup wasn't optimal (not his keyboard nor his mouse). The games are in the Artosis channel ( [VIDEO] ), and the comments are beginner friendly.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39130846,"author":"pohuing","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees","text":"The world's best starcraft players got smashed by Deep minds AlphaStar a while ago. The only way to win was by limiting the apm. Turns out with perfect control you don't need very complex strategy. One of the games if you're interested in an anaylsis: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ncHmEUmJZf4":[{"hn_comment_id":21221167,"author":"nwallin","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Hash tables","text":"I think you're underestimating the number of memory redirections that are necessary for chaining. It's more than one. That's the killer. It's important to be wary of assuming your data will be in cache. It usually isn't. The problem isn't making lots of high density searches in a hash map, the problem is making a search every now and then. A hash map that makes three DRAM accesses will always be worse that one that makes one, regardless of how much work it needs to do, and this is for two reasons. First is there obvious: RAM is slow as balls, we get it. Second is more insidious. You just evicted two cache lines. It's not just the lookup itself that's slower, you also made the consumer of your data structure slower. Here's a look at what open addressing looks like these days: [VIDEO] (warning, it's an hour. Takes a while to build up, too. Still worth it.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26392475,"author":"sujayakar","month":"2021-03","story_title":"MIPS Becomes RISC-V","text":"Very cool! Independent of the cool use of `aesenc` and `aesdec`, the features for skipping ahead in the random stream and forking a separate stream are awesome. > My current home project is bump-allocator + semi-space garbage collection in SIMD for GPUs. As far as I can tell, both bump-allocation and semi-space garbage collection are easily SIMDified in an obvious manner. And since cudamalloc is fully synchronous, I wanted a more scalable, parallel solution to the GPU memory allocation problem. This is a great idea. I wonder if we could speed up LuaJIT even more by SIMD accelerating the GC's mark and/or sweep phases... If you're interested in more work in this area, a former coworker wrote a neat SPMD implementation of librsync [1]. And, if you haven't seen it, the talk on SwissTable [2] (Google's SIMD accelerated hash table) is excellent. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33677921,"author":"KerrickStaley","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Inside boost::unordered_flat_map","text":"Related: this talk [VIDEO] about the making of absl::flat_hash_map (a \"competitor\" to boost::unordered_flat_map) is one of my favorites.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49082650,"author":"lalitmaganti","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Golang Maps: how Swiss Tables replaced the old bucket design","text":"Have to plug the original Swiss Table talk by Matt Kulukundis: [VIDEO] Excellent talk which explains the concepts really clearly and concisely.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19761094,"author":"nwallin","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Open-sourcing F14 for memory-efficient hash tables","text":"They are very, very similar. The hashes are two level: one is fairly traditional. You take the first k bits from the hash and look that up in a table. The second layer is 128 bit blocks. (one SSE/NEON register) This block contains 14 8 bit blocks, where the top bit is a tombstone marker, and the bottom 7 bits are the k+1 though k+7 bit from the hash. (or the top 7 bits? not sure. it's 7 bits from the hash that aren't used in the top layer) It uses SSE instructions to identify which of the 14 blocks to do a full key compare with. Both of them have two variants, one which guarantees that references to keys and values will remain valid even if iterators are invalidated, and another which is faster but iterator invalidation invalidates references to keys or values. IMHO it looks like the Folly team saw the Abseil presentation last year and said, \"That's a good idea, we should do that.\" abseil presentation: [VIDEO] It's super interesting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20753471,"author":"kllrnohj","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Bulk Data Structures C++","text":"This is where we get into O(1) != fast territory. Algorithmic complexity has a weak relationship to CPU performance, not a strong one. If you want to find something in a set storing it as an array and doing a linear scan will beat a std::unordered_set up to a shockingly large number of items due to how CPU's work. In particular it's the pointer chasing aspect of std::unordered_set that becomes a problem (an issue shared with _most_ hash set implementations). Remember an unordered_set is not an array of items, it's an array of buckets of items (this is how hash collision is handled). Worse still, those buckets are usually linked lists. It typically can't be speculated effectively and it can't be prefetched effectively, so you become memory latency bound during an un-cached lookup. And memory latency is just shy of absolutely terrible. If you're expecting L1/L2/L3 cache hits on lookups then you're not dealing with vary large sizes probably and you're going to get much better cache density with the flat array than the array-of-buckets. There are alternative hashsets that are flat and avoid this, but they are less common and as far as I know no standard implementation on any language uses such a hash set. There's a good talk about such a dense, flat hash set here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22469593,"author":"vthriller","month":"2020-03","story_title":"When Bloom filters don't bloom","text":"May I suggest you to have a look at Swiss Tables? There's a good talk from CppCon [0] that explains its design decisions, and implementations available as part of Abseil [1] and Rust stdlib [2]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28505183,"author":"yakubin","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Transmission torrent client ported to C++","text":"STL has a lot of weird pitfalls. There was std::vector<bool> . Here you can see some pitfalls of std::unordered_map : < [VIDEO] >. The whole talk is interesting to watch. In the beginning you can also see the puzzling design of std::unordered_map (puzzling because of the number of indirections). I'd reach for abseil first: < [LINK] >.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41723634,"author":"jbandela1","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Hash Ordering and Hyrum's Law","text":"[VIDEO] Is a fun presentation by Matthew Kulukundis (designer of Google's Hash Table) with Hyrum Wright offering objections from the crowd (Hyrum's law) about the design and rollout of it at Google","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44618596,"author":"SkiFire13","month":"2025-07","story_title":"How we tracked down a Go 1.24 memory regression","text":"In addition to this comment's siblings resources, I also suggest this really good Cppcon presentation on Swisstable [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ncPyMUfNyVM":[{"hn_comment_id":27413140,"author":"rattlesnakedave","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Cost of a 51% Attack for Different Cryptocurrencies","text":"it\u2019s basically impossible to sustainably 51% Bitcoin or ETH at this point. You could 51% for an hour (maybe, if you can get that hash rate from nicehash for that long, but I doubt you actually can), but what happens at the end of that hour? Would everyone simply throw their hands up, allow your double spend, and keep mining your chain? Likely not. Andreas Antonopoulos has a good take on this for Bitcoin: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28126689,"author":"avnigo","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Bitcoin\u2019s Energy Usage Isn\u2019t a Problem. Here\u2019s Why","text":"It should be noted that the bitcoin network does not need to consume more energy to scale up: - Using more energy does not translate to more transactions committed to the ledger. Second and third layer solutions can handle the world's transactional need with minimal energy usage, still using the security provided by the bitcoin network. - The security of the bitcoin network is not dependent on the amount of users, and mostly driven by financial incentives. However, the more energy it uses, the more secure it is against attacks. As it is, the bitcoin network does not need to use more energy, and here's [0] a succinct explanation as to why. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31826221,"author":"latchkey","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Are blockchains decentralized?","text":"> They don\u2019t provide an analysis of the true cost of launching a 51% attack. Andreas Antonopoulos has done this many times already. [VIDEO] (one of my favorites and only a couple minutes long) [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ne6tB2KiZuk":[{"hn_comment_id":36077781,"author":"mandmandam","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Neanderthal flute: The oldest musical instrument in the world","text":"Let's assume the thing is a flute. It's been reconstructed and plays beautifully. The odds of a hyena making such a thing with it's teeth are in silly territory, and we have other similar flutes that are nearly as old (relatively speaking). Given that, the fact that they made it using a scale so resonant with humans that it is still in very popular use sixty thousand years later - that's incredible. I felt the article drastically undersold the awesomeness of that, showing far too much restraint. Have you seen the video where Bobby McFerrin leads a whole crowd to sync perfectly with each other, without rehearsal, thanks to the pentatonic scale [0]? That's spiritual stuff ; it's 'sophisticated artistic expression'. That's the same scale that was (almost certainly) intentionally used to make this flute. 0 - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23391021,"author":"rrmm","month":"2020-06","story_title":"What Did Bach Sound Like to Bach?","text":"Some stuff based on pentatonic scales (blues) would probably make sense. From what I recall it's almost universal in different cultures. Bobby Mcferrin has a fun demo about this [VIDEO] But yeah I bet some jazz would be baffling. I wonder how fast it'd take people to get into it. You could probably find some indigneous populations to work with.","stance":"rec"}],"ne99laPUxN4":[{"hn_comment_id":31017426,"author":"infogulch","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Differentiable Programming \u2013 A Simple Introduction","text":"The most interesting thing I've seen on AD is \"The simple essence of automatic differentiation\" (2018) [1]. See past discussion [2], and talk [3]. I think the main idea is that by compiling to categories and pairing up a function with its derivative, the pair becomes trivially composable in forward mode, and the whole structure is easily converted to reverse mode afterwards. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: Talk at Microsoft Research: [VIDEO] Other presentations listed here: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18492499,"author":"infogulch","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Automatic Differentiation in Machine Learning: A Survey [pdf]","text":"Another paper related to AD was posted last month: The Simple Essence of Automatic Differentiation [0]. Video presentation [1]. I found it pretty awesome, just in case you hadn't seen it. [0]: https//news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18306860 [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21525236,"author":"noblethrasher","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Differentiable Programming Manifesto","text":"He also gave nice presentation on AD: [VIDEO] (surprised that you didn't already mention it, considering the venue ;-))","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32920650,"author":"sriku","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Automatic Differentiation in 38 lines of Haskell","text":"I'm yet to give reverse mode a second try, but my attempts at forward mode (linked in parent post) were on my own without the paper's help. There's a talk that Conal gives that makes the paper a bit more accessible - [VIDEO] - but only a bit more. I know it'll take effort to wrap my head around the implementation details ... but the paper certainly helped clarify things I was stumbling around about.","stance":"rec"}],"nfDoml-Db64":[{"hn_comment_id":36882486,"author":"asmor","month":"2023-07","story_title":"\u2018A very disturbing picture\u2019: another retraction for controversial physicist","text":"Sch\u00f6n got away with it for years. One of my favorite video essays is a long exploration of that case: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36926856,"author":"treesciencebot","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Room Temperature Superconductor Drama and Hope","text":"This reminds me an amazing piece of documentary[1] I've watched a couple months prior about a man who tried to \"scam his way onto a Nobel prize\". It really goes into showing how the majority of the system is based on trust and reputation and without well skepticism fraudsters can thrive. [1]: \"The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize\" -- [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38243825,"author":"atrettel","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Stanford Data Science Handbook","text":"For those unfamiliar with the story of Jan Hendrik Sch\u00f6n, I suggest watching this excellent series of videos by BobbyBroccoli on YouTube [1-3]. The series does a good job breaking down the context and the situation that Sch\u00f6n was in, along with the incentives that encouraged Sch\u00f6n to commit fraud. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30142990,"author":"jhallenworld","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Royal Society cautions against censorship of scientific misinformation online","text":">Most research is flawed or useless, Also the research could be downright fraudulent. A very interesting case is the Sch\u00f6n scandal, involving organic semiconductors. [LINK] There is an engrossing set of videos about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35098993,"author":"mustacheemperor","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Allegations of Scientific Misconduct Mount as Physicist Makes His Biggest Claim","text":"It reminds me of Jan Hendrik Sch\u00f6n, who looked like physics' next emerging all-star wunderkind until his \"discoveries\" of crystalline semiconductors won him so many awards and attentions it was discovered his entire career had been built on falsified data. A huge embarassment for Bell Labs and a black mark on the final years of more than one great physicist's careers there, since so many people thought they were helping a great new mind succeed when they were in reality perpetuating his fraud. There's a great 3-part documentary on youtube about it, which argues Sch\u00f6n was probably a contender for the Nobel Prize in Physics before everything collapsed: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36952555,"author":"lucubratory","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99","text":"Oh yeah, he is absolutely fucking wild. There's a great documentary on him, here's part one, the other two parts of the documentary are also on YouTube on the same channel: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nfY0lrdXar8":[{"hn_comment_id":13051280,"author":"tptacek","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Jacques Pepin, unlike other celebrity chefs, will actually teach you how to cook","text":"Recurring reminder that Pepin's chicken deboning video is the best cooking video that has ever or will ever be put on the Internet: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27486649,"author":"tptacek","month":"2021-06","story_title":"J. Kenji L\u00f3pez-Alt is Seattle\u2019s reluctant powerful food influencer","text":"That video is amazing and taught me how to make omelets. Of course, P\u00e9pin is also responsible for the single greatest cooking video on the Internet: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21581489,"author":"IvyMike","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?","text":"One minute: what a dechoker is and how to use it: [LINK] One hour (because as easy as it looks you're gonna have to do it at least 4 times): deboning a chicken: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ngpsJKQR_ZE":[{"hn_comment_id":6964083,"author":"anoncowherd","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Edward Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission\u2019s accomplished","text":"The only way to \"solve\" the problem is to spread awareness of it. Political authority is the idea that a small group of people \"has the right\" to impose their will on everyone else. In reality though, they obviously do not. Everyone has the exact same rights (and they don't include coercing other people), and you can't delegate rights you do not have. But the belief in political authority is the root cause of practically all problems in today's world. Once the \"Authority Religion\" unravels, so does mankind's enslavement: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10111044,"author":"sillygeese","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Stocks Off Sharply as Market Upheaval Grows","text":"Yeah, speaking the truth tends to get you downvoted. People are silly and emotional. But it's nice to see another independent thinker here. I've noticed you before. Don't pay much attention to the political circus though, the false choice between \"Demopublicans\". That's all smoke and mirrors to make you think you have a say in how you're \"governed\" (i.e. coerced ). > The current mess of the US economy is due to the choices of many politicians, in congress and the presidency, from both parties. It's much deeper than that. The dollar was detached from the gold standard in 1971, and that was the beginning of \"the real end\". Before that, the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 set the scene for all the economic trouble to come, and so on. Check out: [LINK] > This is why we need the government out of the economy, and let it work. You're on the right track, but take it further. We need the government out of existence : [VIDEO] .. it is based on extortion, after all. What maintains governments is the belief in political authority: [LINK] > Hell if it weren't for government the bad banks would have failed in 2008-- and we would have had a real recovery afterwards. That's certainly true.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10232944,"author":"HiYaBarbie","month":"2015-09","story_title":"America\u2019s Fragile Constitution","text":"In reality, it's not that complicated. Here's all you need to know about the Constitution: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13983705,"author":"kakapupu","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Anger as US internet privacy law scrapped","text":"> I do not understand. I thought that in the current climate, where people are becoming increasingly aware and concerned about privacy, that such laws would be expanded in scope. It's very simple. The government is not working towards our interests, but their own. That applies to every government everywhere, all throughout history, because all governments are populated by psychopaths. They don't want you to have any privacy at all. Instead, they want to monitor everything you say and do, because it helps them maintain their rule over you. Red Pill: [VIDEO] Oh and by the way, this account will be shadowbanned, because HN is controlled by psychopaths too, and anti-government (=pro-sanity) posters are censored out. One more thing. You're being told about a \"privacy law\" being scrapped, because they want to advance \"the chilling effect\". They want everyone to be afraid of speaking out, as the budding police state engulfs them. You could look into moving to some less scary country.","stance":"rec"}],"niKblgZupOc":[{"hn_comment_id":13936483,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Secret colours of the Commodore 64","text":"If you want to see how this type of colour magic works in video form, the 8-bit guy does a GREAT video on this: [VIDEO] He shows all the interesting artifacting that makes these extra colours possible.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12509869,"author":"qwertyuiop924","month":"2016-09","story_title":"A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art (2015)","text":"That's a thing more relevant on PC: this video has some more information on the phenomenon (I think) you're talking about: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21969731,"author":"gecko","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The Polygons of Another World: IBM PC","text":"CGA colors were designed for display on composite; the issue is most people were using digital cables, which had the garish colors. [VIDEO] has a great overview of what was possible.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22670372,"author":"jandrese","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Why do color TVs make black and white snow?","text":"The 8-Bit guy did a great piece on CGA that goes into detail about how old developers abused the fuzzy smeary nature of composite signals to output somewhat decent graphics. The tricks however didn't work when people upgraded to proper monitors and as a result a lot of CGA games look much worse today than they did on the intended equipment of the day. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26495977,"author":"laumars","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade EGA/VGA Comparison","text":"Bare in mind the displays of the time would have blended the pixels. Likewise those who complain that CGA is \u201conly 4 awful colours\u201d have clearly never used a proper CGA system the way it was originally intended. The following YouTube video does a good job describing what CGA was really like back in the day: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29316340,"author":"nzach","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]","text":"Your comment got me thinking: \"Wouldn't be nice if existed an 'awesome list' for this kind of content?\" After a brief google search the best I could find is this [0] and it seems to be abandoned. Does anyone know a better source for this type of content? I'm leaving some random links to great channels that produce this kind of content: - CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought! [1] - DVD-RAM: The Disc that Behaved like a Flash Drive [2] - The Story of Super Mario Bros. 3 | Gaming Historian [3] [0] - [LINK] [1] - [VIDEO] [2] - [LINK] [3] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"nm1TxQj9IsQ":[{"hn_comment_id":27473999,"author":"makison","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Why Can\u2019t I Sleep?","text":"I have found Huberman podcast incredibly helpful - in detail explanation(too much sometimes) of how brain works. There are 4 episodes(1.5h each) dedicated just to sleep. The whole podcast is great. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29354445,"author":"yamrzou","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How did you correct your sleep patterns?","text":"I was the same as you, and I was recently able to correct my sleep patterns. Now, I naturally wake up without using an alarm. What helped me was watching Huberman Lab's episode on sleep: [VIDEO] I highly recommend it. The key is light. Light controls your circadian rythm (biological clock), so make sure you get enough sunlight in the morning, and make sure to avoid light exposure after 10pm. For more: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30001844,"author":"musesum","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Burned Out. What Now?","text":"I've gone through two burnouts in my career. The first time around, I tried CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy), with limited results. Recently, I followed the Huberman protocol for sleep [1] and daily tools [2], with profound results. Recovery time was respectively 12 months (CBT) and 3 months (Huberman). YMMV [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30286969,"author":"moshferatu","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Sleep supplements that worked for you (excluding melatonin)","text":"I essentially solved all of my sleep problems by doing the following: Getting 15-30 minutes of bright light exposure first thing in the morning. Ideally this would be sunlight, but I don't have that option this time of year based on how early I wake up (I'm in the PNW and wake up at 6am), so I use a sun lamp I bought on Amazon. Likewise, minimizing blue / bright light after the sun goes down. If I need to use my computer, I have flux installed and set to the lowest brightness setting. I do something similar for my phone as well. Supplementing glycine, magnesium glycinate (which also contains glycine), l-theanine, and ashwaghanda in the evening before bed. Glycine has had the most impact on my sleep. It's as if I had been exiled from dream-land before, but now I've been allowed back! My sleep is so much deeper. Note: I bought the BulkSupplements powdered version on Amazon and take 3-5x the recommended dose in my evening smoothie. I've found megadosing magnesium in this way also helps. The recommended doses seem to be way too low, especially if you happen to be deficient. As someone who spends a significant portion of the day in front of a screen, I can't emphasize enough how important managing light exposure throughout the day is. Check out the Huberman Lab podcast if you haven't already. This episode in particular is what started me down the path to correcting my sleep: [VIDEO] After watching that episode, I used my sun lamp to dial in my circadian rhythm over the course of a","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25872613,"author":"afarrell","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How To Overcome Information Addiction?","text":"A. Meet your basic biological needs. Your brain is a part of your body. A person with an iron deficiency can feel compelled to chew ice[1]. Ice does not cures anemia, brains are weird parts of the body and do weird things when the body is not getting what it needs. So, get better sleep, food, and exercise. Prof Andrew Huberman has some good tips[2]. B. Decide what few things you really value and allocate your time to those on purpose. If you find yourself repeatedly drawn to the news, maybe you are genuinely give a fuck about civic engagement. Your personality has a need for it. Trying to meet that need by scrolling twitter is like eating 3 bags of tortilla chips for dinner -- quick-access, but not healthy. If you be better off deciding that you value Mexican food, opening your calendar and honestly deciding to spend the time to learn to cook Mexican food. Look for the virtue underneath your vice -- What information are you most drawn to and what healthy activities does it point towards? Pick 3 and pursue those deeply. Why 3? You can only honestly give a fuck about a few things[3], so that requires deciding to not do other reasonable fun activities. If shallow engagement with your interests has been your primary mode of procrastination, then honest and deep engagement might deceptively feel like a waste of time. That makes this hard. Why arbitrarily avoid those other things? You are choosing to be the arbiter of your time. Take pride in grappling with the fear of procrastinat","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27472769,"author":"slothtrop","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Why Can\u2019t I Sleep?","text":"This prattles on too much about things that don't answer the titled question. The list of problems is fine, but also light on helpful solutions. This guide is more comprehensive - [LINK] , and Andrew Huberman's video on sleep is also quite good - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28817540,"author":"mabil","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Blue light from monitors no danger to eyes or sleep","text":"Andrew Huberman goes to great extent explaining the effects of pretty much everything related to neurobiology, here he talks about blue light and how it affects sleep. [VIDEO] Also a great science based podcast. edit: context","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31073131,"author":"moshferatu","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What did you do that got you to wake up earlier?","text":"I managed to wake up earlier by ensuring that I got 15-30 minutes of bright light exposure immediately upon waking. Sunlight is ideal, but I'm in the PNW and it was winter at the time, so that wasn't an option for me. Instead, I bought a sun lamp on Amazon. The particular model is no longer available, but it was a 10,000 lux lamp that I placed right below my monitor. The incredible thing is that it took less than a week before I was waking up before 6am without the use of an alarm clock. I learned of this from the Huberman Lab Podcast, specifically the part where he touches on advancing your biological clock here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nmgFG7PUHfo":[{"hn_comment_id":33637462,"author":"kevlened","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Demystifying Fourier analysis","text":"The 2-minute brute-force explanation of Fourier transforms in a recent Veritasium video was my \"aha!\" moment. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34209760,"author":"kippinitreal","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?","text":"That video did the same for me. I also like the reducible video for Fast Fourier Transforms as well as the Veratasium piece that shares some fun history. Reducible - FFTs the most ingenious algorithm ever [LINK] Veritasium - The Most Important Algorithm of All Time [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33742938,"author":"yunruse","month":"2022-11","story_title":"I over-engineered a Fast Fourier Transform for Arduino","text":"If you have 26 minutes spare, Veritaserum's video [0] on the history of FTs and FFTs is quite good. Effectively, a Fourier Transform can turn a signal into its underlying frequencies using a neat property of maths. For a piece of music, say, you could produce a spectrogram [1] \u2013 Foobar2000 [2] has a nice one built in \u2013 to visualise the frequency of music with time. In general, this is all sorts of useful applications any time you have a signal \u2013 electronics, climate physics, astrophysics, detecting nuclear explosion testing underground, and so on. It's essential to modern medical imaging, and a whole bunch of differential equations can be solved a lot faster by using this. The FFT takes the naive O(N^2) algorithm and makes it O(n log n) by bunching together repeated calculations, so if you have a million samples, that's some 70,000 times faster. At the time of its discovery it was critical for Fourier analysis to actually be reasonable to do on a computer, taking days instead of years. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34090953,"author":"psychphysic","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Fascinating Interview with Martin Hellman of Diffie-Hellman Fame (2004)","text":"You might also like this recent Veritasium video on the link between the Nuclear test ban treaty and FFT. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34390246,"author":"ourmandave","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Fourier Transform, explained in one sentence","text":"Veritasium has an explainer of the Fast Fourier Transform on youtube. From how it's used and an interest history. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nnR8fDW3Ilo":[{"hn_comment_id":8433799,"author":"blhack","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Fluid Actuators from Disney Research Make Soft, Safe Robot Arms","text":"If you're interested in this, I highly recommend looking at the stuff that Festo (a german industrial automation company) is doing: [LINK] (This is from 2008). And not necessarily related, but really cool anyway: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12385088,"author":"Animats","month":"2016-08","story_title":"The first autonomous, entirely soft robot","text":"This is \"autonomous\" at the windup toy level. Festo, the German robotics company, is way ahead in autonomous soft robots. See their \"Air Ray\" fly around[1] Each year, Festo makes motion controllers and robots, especially high-precision pneumatic devices. Each year, they build something awesome. They do have some rigid components, but if they wanted to build one with fluidic logic, they certainly could. Their Smart Bird is spectacular.[2] Festo is a big, family-owned engineering company. 18,700 employees. founded in 1925. Annual sales \u20ac2.64 billion. One of the most innovative companies in mechanical engineering, yet a totally different business model than Silicon Valley's. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15810022,"author":"jacquesm","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Mercedes-Benz conducting the biggest test using drones to ship everyday items","text":"You should definitely watch this: [LINK] and [VIDEO] Also, while birds are really good at using their wings to glide and provide propulsion flapping designs that need to lift much more than their own weight have so far not worked very well. So I don't really see them as viable for packages.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28966043,"author":"_Microft","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Feasibility of a Dune Ornithopter","text":"The German industrial control and automation company Festo [0] created a bionic swift [1] as an engineering demo this year. The flapping wings are no longer as rigid as in their earlier flapping bird model [2]. Go and check out their other stuff (e.g. a dragonfly: [3], a flying fox or aquatic animals), it's great! Here is a Youtube search for Festo Animals for your convenience [4]. [0] [LINK] [1] BionicSwift: [LINK] [2] SmartBird: [VIDEO] [3] Dragonfly: [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"nnl6nY8YKHs":[{"hn_comment_id":13762885,"author":"darekkay","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?","text":"If you're interested in simulation theories, I recommend reading \"The Simulation Argument\" by Nick Bostrom [0] or watching his interview on Youtube [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20666739,"author":"Veedrac","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let\u2019s Not Find Out","text":"For people actually interested in the topic rather than painfully bad pop-sci reenactments, you should read the simulation paper[1], or, for a less technical introduction, watch the video of Bostrom talking about it[2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"noQcWra6sbU":[{"hn_comment_id":17995234,"author":"lathiat","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Show HN: Wat","text":"If you loved that video, try this great Perl presentation from Netanel Rubin: [VIDEO] And it's follow-up cousin \"The Camel Strikes Back\" [LINK] (He says wat alot and it's hilarious)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31218308,"author":"BonoboIO","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Experience Report: 6 months of Go","text":"Bit of offtopic: Best bash of a programming language \u201eThe Perl Jam: Exploiting a 20 Year-old Vulnerability\u201c [VIDEO] And part 2 \u201eThe Perl Jam 2 The Camel Strikes Back\u201c [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"np_ylvc8Zj8":[{"hn_comment_id":21212865,"author":"marcusjt","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Isle of Man is not in the UK","text":"This is an incredible documentary about British tax havens and the influence of the City of London in the running of UK government & foreign policy [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21570114,"author":"arminiusreturns","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank","text":"For those interested in this subject, I can't recommend the documentary \"The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire\" [1] highly enough. The guy who behind it not only did an excellent job, but did it for a tiny fraction of what a bigger studio would have spent for a much more inferior end result. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24395409,"author":"arminiusreturns","month":"2020-09","story_title":"How to Hide a Billion Dollars: Three Techniques the Ultrarich Use to Dodge Ex-Sp","text":"If are interested in this topic and you haven't seen the independent documentary \"The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire\", you owe it to yourself. It's a superbly done documentary on a budget of ~4k\u00a3. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40850197,"author":"arminiusreturns","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Pharma firms stash profits in Europe's tax havens","text":"Anybody who is interested in this topic really needs to go see this awesome documentary: The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | The Secret World of Finance [VIDEO] It was even done on a 4klb budget!!! The reality is that the brits realized they could no longer maintain hard power and Lionel Curtis was the primary pusher of the psyop transition to \"commonwealth\" soft power while maintaining all the real vestiges of empire under a false name.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20886171,"author":"patrickk","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Review of Moneyland by Oliver Bullough (2018)","text":"If this is a topic of interest, I can recommend this independently created documentary 'The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire'. It's the story of how Britain's elite created a financial web spanning the globe, replacing the old empire with a new financial one, running from the Commonwealth countries back to London. That's why so many overseas British territories are associated with money laundering and tax evasion. Free to watch on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21571407,"author":"zaro","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank","text":"> Although I will always be curious why countries are letting those small, insignificant islands and countries manage all this wealth This is easy, after all hiding cash is needed by everybody. And when it comes to finance , there are no countries only financial interest. Of course nothing bad will happen to these financial heavens, because they are protected by the richest and most powerful people and organisations. \"The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire\"[1] gives a good overview of how this started. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26371609,"author":"atweiden","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania?","text":"Kind of off-topic, but there's an excellent documentary called The Spider\u2019s Web [1] that explores how society reached this point of valuing increasingly ridiculous displays of paper wealth and the financialization of everything through the lens of British offshore wealth secrecy schemes. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31710337,"author":"olivermarks","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Low economic growth is a slow-burning crisis for Britain","text":"The challenge for the UK is that the flywheel of the City of London corporation and its offshore wormholes were at the core of globalization. Ironically the nation state the CoL coexists with (the UK) is as large a casualty of this as the many colonial nation states ravaged by globalization. This was compounded by the globalists - which the Economist exists to promote - forcing the merger of the UK into the european union. The vote to leave by the proletariat demonstrated massive dissatisfaction, but sadly there are subsequently no credible political parties or leadership that are not closely aligned with the CoL and/or the EU, resulting in a becalming. The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | Documentary Film [VIDEO] 'Michael Oswald's film The Spider's Web reveals how at the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the world of international finance'. 80 minutes, well worth watching imo","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34704354,"author":"arminiusreturns","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Reality Check","text":"This was a very wordy article that really ignores the true documentary makers that make informative documentaries on a shoestring budget because it's an important topic to them. The corporatization of everything is such a long-tail evil... If you want just one example, check out this excellent documentary made on a budget of \u00a34k: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nphxoUxSvgY":[{"hn_comment_id":10130633,"author":"oddsquare66","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Tsunami Warnings, Written in Stone (2011)","text":"The Clock of the Long Now: [LINK] The lecture on the Clock that I saw was recorded. You can see it here: [VIDEO] The remark on the stone in Japan is at about 44:30 into the video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11855728,"author":"JoeDaDude","month":"2016-06","story_title":"This is not a place of honor","text":"This team should collaborate with the makers of the Clock of the Long Now ( [LINK] ), another device intended to last thousands of years. There is a discussion of their research into various methods pursued by different cultures over the centuries to pursue similar goals, see video here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20811630,"author":"JoeDaDude","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Civilizational Collapse, Part 4","text":"As you probably know, the Long Now foundation has wrestled with the problem of extended time period preservation of physical buildings. In the video linked below, they discuss how ancient people attempted to carry knowledge through the generations. Some of my favorites: the stone markers for the high water mark of Tsunamis, and the temple that is physically rebuilt in exact duplicate every 20 years. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21186682,"author":"nyolfen","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Collapse OS","text":"it's extremely difficult to build waterproof subterranean buildings, especially if they're built into permafrost (which seems these days to be more like tempofrost). this very long but fascinating video discusses it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nq_SpRBXRmE":[{"hn_comment_id":8453303,"author":"frik","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Beethoven transformed music, but has veneration of him stifled his successors?","text":"I like his well known Pruit Igoe/Koyaanisqatsi music ( [VIDEO] ). But his recent work for a local small opera house named \"Kepler\" is off-putting ( [LINK] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25629872,"author":"kratom_sandwich","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the most inspiring documentary film in your opinion?","text":"I guess this boils down to what your mean by \"inspiring\"; let me give you some of my favorites by category: > Movies about people doing stuff, usually investigating something - makes me want to get up and get stuff done [1] Cold Case Hammarskj\u00f6ld - IMDB: [LINK] [2] Tickled - Trailer: [LINK] [3] Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles - Trailer: [LINK] (full movie is on Youtube, Too) [4] The Cove - Wikipedia: [LINK] > Movies about ... the human condition, human life on earth? IDK, but if you watch the trailer, you get what I mean. WARNING: Might evoke the urge to travel [1] Koyaanisqatsi - Wikipedia: [LINK] - Pruitt Igoe Scene: [VIDEO] [2] Samsara - Trailer: [LINK] [3] Anthropocene - Trailer: [LINK] (Check out his other movie \"Watermark\", too!) > Movies about the work of particular people: [1] Playing God - Trailer: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"nsJZ_kKjXcE":[{"hn_comment_id":12282171,"author":"Zancarius","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Hacker Unlocks \u2018High Security\u2019 Electronic Safes Without a Trace","text":"Spend some time on bosnianbill's Youtube channel and you'll definitely get some tips. In particular, I'd recommend these videos: Buying Security: [LINK] Choosing a high Security Lock: [VIDEO] (Be ware of about 2 minutes 30 seconds of sarcasm in the last one!) Otherwise, browse through the rest of his videos, skipping the challenge locks unless it's something that fascinates you: [LINK] Essentially, cheap locks can be bypassed very easily (almost anything by Masterlock). More expensive locks ($60+) will have more pins, making them harder to pick, and often have replaceable cores. Of course, security isn't just about the lock, which is addressed in the first video. Hope this gives you a starting point!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13920411,"author":"Animats","month":"2017-03","story_title":"The Document Which Used to Be Called the MIT Lockpicking Guide (1992)","text":"The top of the line in padlocks is the Sargent & Greenleaf 951 padlock, which is about $1300.[1] DoD uses these on weapons storage. Resists grinders, saws, liquid nitrogen, etc. Here's an amusing overview of available padlocks, starting with crap Master Locks and moving upward.[1] The ones that are hard to force or cut have large-diameter shackles, which probably won't fit a gym locker. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15352183,"author":"javajosh","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Coding in the open: how to do it securely","text":"Some locks with open designs are difficult, or impossible to pick. In this amusing video this guy goes over details of different locks, and explains why they are not all created equal. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nsaUX48t0w8":[{"hn_comment_id":12895722,"author":"lisivka","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Close to absolute zero, particles exhibit their quantum nature","text":"I highly recommend to watch this video first: [VIDEO] , to get the idea. Then this: [LINK] , for explanation. No need to read long books.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22373340,"author":"tsimionescu","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Double Slits with Single Atoms","text":"Interestingly, there is a (possibly still incomplete?) model of QM that explains this mystery and can even be replicated in human scale experiments: The de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave model. In this model, both the wave and the particle are simultaneously real. the particle is being moved around by the wave. When we get near the double slit, the wave naturally travels through both slits and forms an interference pattern.The particle randomly moves through one of the slits, and is them carried further by the interference pattern, the highest probability being that it will be carried to one of the local maxima. The nicest part is that this exact behavior can be seen by bouncing a droplet of oil or silicone on a vibrating bath of the same material: [VIDEO] . Of course, this being a consistent model for QM, it doesn't get away from the Bell inequalities, it doesn't have local realism. It does preserve realism, but it it is a nonlocal theory (some effects travel instantaneously).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24232652,"author":"drran","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What is a science fact that blew your mind when you learned it?","text":"If you want to develop intuition, look at this video: [VIDEO] . Please note that physics as science in general is advancing constantly, but mainstream physics advances in sprints. Currently, walking droplets and Pilot Wave Theory are not good enough to be included into mainstream physics.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25122018,"author":"drran","month":"2020-11","story_title":"A Spacetime Surprise: Time Isn\u2019t Just Another Dimension","text":"IMHO, you should look at this video, where water droplet at macro scale \u00ab exists in two places at once \u00bb (demonstrates self interference when passing two slits). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nv7-YM4wno8":[{"hn_comment_id":32739679,"author":"robomartin","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Create an Inexpensive Flying Wing / Drone (2019)","text":"Adding to that, here's slope soaring, which is really cool. I haven't really done a lot of this due to having to travel far to have access to this type of geography. Beautiful silent flight, no motors required. They do add motors to some of the planes just so you have backup in case you lose lift. Here's an excellent intro to the sport: [LINK] And then there's the absolutely crazy/demented --in a good way-- dynamic slope soaring. I have yet to experience this. This is the domain of sophisticated carbon fiber and top-quality components. You can find videos of planes exploding in flight due to loads. This is a long video with a detailed technical explanation of dynamic soaring: [VIDEO] 548 mph (882 kph) run: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38672519,"author":"jessriedel","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Dynamic Soaring","text":"Here's a really wonderful talk by Spencer Lisenby about the basic physics and Lisenby's work on pushing the speed [VIDEO] Some other interesting HN comments: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"nvK8fua6O64":[{"hn_comment_id":11051744,"author":"andrepd","month":"2016-02","story_title":"'RuneScape' Can't Escape 2007","text":"Everyone who played MMOs talks with utmost fondness of their unforgettable time in their first MMO. Be it Everquest, Ultima Online, Runescape or WoW, it seems no other genre in video gaming elicits such fondness, or reaches immersion levels so deep as the MMORPG. The immense potential in having a virtual, persistent world inhabited by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, with the virtually inexhaustible possibilities of gameplay that arise from people inhabiting a shared, persistent world, make the MMORPG the king in this department: immersion and fan dedication. Yet it seems that this doesn't happen anymore, that the cosy world of Ultima Online or Runescape 2006ish doesn't exist anymore. MMORPGs have found it more profitable to engage in a variety of design choices that, ultimately, destroyed what MMOs were about. The open endedness of Ultima Online, the thoughtfulness and deep worldbuilding of quests in Everquest, the charming aesthetics that left just the right amount to imagination, just like a book, of Runescape, all that was replaced by high action, cheap thrills, and a lot of shiny particle effects everywhere (and of course microtransactions, because why not). The charming, cosy, vast, deep world people remember from Vanilla WoW doesn't exist anymore. Now you got a conveyor belt to level cap and cheap end-game content. For anyone interested, this is one of the most insightful videos I've seen lately, and it addresses this issue: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15249304,"author":"chii","month":"2017-09","story_title":"How Eve Players Pulled Off the Biggest Betrayal in Its History","text":"> If you find mining asteroids or mission running enjoyable, all the power to you. most new players only find out about this aspect of EVE - running grinding missions for petty coin etc - because they've been conditioned by the stereotype of World of Warcraft (and its myriad of copycats). If you have a few minutes, have a watch of [VIDEO] - it's one of the best videos explaining this concept.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18749967,"author":"chii","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players","text":"> we're stuck with WoW (and its clones), which was an excellent game in its own right, but it wasn't a true MMO because most companies didn't realize what they were copying when they copied WoW. True MMO - aka, a sandbox game. See this very indepth critique, if you want more about this topic [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"nxeMoaxUpWk":[{"hn_comment_id":29553976,"author":"samwillis","month":"2021-12","story_title":"NASA's new sleeping bags could prevent eyeball 'squashing' on the ISS","text":"Scott Manley did a video looking at this, it\u2019s a good and informative watch: [VIDEO] The gist is that is actually doable at the same(ish) scale as the ISS. Bigger is better but we can do it at a radius as little at 40m.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32068779,"author":"deepdriver","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Japanese researchers propose a concept for making artificial gravity on the moon","text":"YouTuber Scott Manley has a great video on artificial gravity in space, including concepts that resemble the article's proposal: [VIDEO] Before I watched the video, I didn't know the Soviet Union tested a (small) centrifuge for artificial gravity in space back in the 70s: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"nxyxcTZccsE":[{"hn_comment_id":41988232,"author":"dp-hackernews","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Exercise Paradox","text":"Calories are a measure of energy, NOT nutritional value. Forget calories, think utility. Some types of calories are good for you, others may as well be poison - therefore, the dose is the poison. By consuming calories in accordance with their utility you will do a better job at staying (or getting) metabolically healthy than only counting calories. TL;DR: Eat more fat and protein from natural, preferably animal, sources, and you will naturally be less inclined to consume junk calories from carbohydrates and you will quickly feel better for it. Watch this video below to understand more, for why this is the case, and why colories in v's calories out is a very poor model. --- \"Is a Calorie a Calorie? Processed Food, Experiment Gone Wrong\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11564542,"author":"buzzcut","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Diabetes: can you really eat to beat it?","text":"Unfortunately I can only summarize. On the starvation study it's merely one example that highlights how calorie restriction affects people. Yes, it's an extreme version, but it is different only in degree from any other calorie restriction, and when people try to reduce by X calories, it's probably a linear effect; more restriction, more of these effects. Oddly though, fasting tends not to have these effects, it's only in sustained calorie restriction, so fasting in various forms is one of the tools people can use to lose weight. As for the lowered energy output Jason Fung wrote (pg. 53 of the Obesity Code, \"One major problem is that the basal metabolic rate does not stay stable. Decreased caloric intake can decrease basal metabolic rate by up to 40 percent. We shall see that increased caloric intake can increase it by 50%.\" If you want to learn more here are some sources: Jason Fung - The Obesity Code: [LINK] Robert Lustig on sugar: [LINK] and also here: [VIDEO] Peter Attia on ketosis and fat: [LINK] Reversal of diabetes by diet, also Jason Fung: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28958330,"author":"dp-hackernews","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Obesity Pathogenesis: An Endocrine Society Scientific Statement","text":"Food for thought... Sugar: The Bitter Truth [LINK] Is a Calorie a Calorie? Processed Food, Experiment Gone Wrong [VIDEO] Does calorie counting work? (Almost never) [LINK] What The Fat (WTF) #133 Dr. Philip Ovadia| Keto \"Causes\" Heart Scarring [LINK] The art of misdirection | Apollo Robbins [LINK] Who's zoomin' who?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35309107,"author":"orangepurple","month":"2023-03","story_title":"The Efficient Frontier of Fat Loss","text":"I would like to give you a succinct answer, but I am not as well spoken as Robert Lustig, MD, a Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology at University of California, San Francisco, and the author of Fat Chance: Beating the Odds against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease. Is a Calorie a Calorie? Processed Food, Experiment Gone Wrong Presented by Stanford Health Care [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"o0VrZPBskpg":[{"hn_comment_id":9492385,"author":"PerfectElement","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Death of a Programmer, Life of a Farmer","text":"> \"Even though I see them as livestock, not pets\" Isn't it funny how this is a completely arbitrary definition? The most sensible explanation I've seen about this phenomenon is called carnism and it's brilliantly explained by Dr. Melaine Joy in this TED talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11057920,"author":"PerfectElement","month":"2016-02","story_title":"One of Paris\u2019s last horse meat butchers discusses the disappearance of his trade","text":"Yes, there's absolutely no reason to believe pigs suffer less than dogs. In fact, they have similar cognitive levels. So we need to do some mental gymnastics to justify how we treat them. This behavior is labeled \"moral schizophrenia\" by some. We say that we recognize that animals are sentient and therefore deserve moral consideration and freedom from unnecessary suffering, but we often behave toward them as insentient things and treat them in ways that are diametrically opposed to any moral consideration of their interests. Unless we label them as pets, of course. Then they are automatically included in our circle of compassion. For a deeper look at the psychology behind this, I recommend this great TED talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13302811,"author":"PerfectElement","month":"2017-01","story_title":"COP21: Arnold Schwarzenegger: 'Go part-time vegetarian to protect the planet'","text":"For those who are interested in reducing their animal consumption and need an extra push, I recommend this great talk by Dr. Melanie Joy about carnism, which is the invisible belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12656038,"author":"PerfectElement","month":"2016-10","story_title":"The fight over transparency in the meat industry","text":"I think most people in this thread are new to animal rights theory. This TED talk from Dr. Melanie Joy is a good introduction to Carnism: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17112533,"author":"scottmf","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Exercise 'doesn't slow' progression of dementia if you already have dementia","text":"You\u2019re right but you should have included decent sources in your initial comment. Sadly the vegan crowd overlaps too much with the pseudoscientific new age/alt med/antivaxxers crowd, so skeptical types are quick to dismiss any suggestion that such a diet is healthier. And people generally don\u2019t like to hear that eating meat is bad for them anyway. If anyone is interested in why you instinctively react so negatively to the idea that your diet is unhealthy and unnecessarily wasteful/harmful, there\u2019s a great Ted Talk on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34993685,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-03","story_title":"After death of girl yesterday, 12 more detected with H5N1 bird flu in Cambodia","text":"I already have one. Meet my psychologist, Melanie Joy, Ph.D., Ed.M., a Harvard-educated psychologist, professor of psychology and sociology at the University of Massachusetts. [VIDEO] (Toward Rational, Authentic Food Choices | Melanie Joy | TEDxM\u00fcnchen) [LINK] (What to Say to Vegans | Melanie Joy)","stance":"rec"}],"o0fG_lnVhHw":[{"hn_comment_id":25389240,"author":"tastyfreeze","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Starship SN9 damaged in an accident in the high-bay","text":"A lot of rocketry advancement would not be happening if SpaceX didn't enter as a competitor. For that reason alone SpaceX should be lauded. It helps that SpaceX is pursuing the dream of a space faring civilization that was promised decades ago. Relativity Space looks cool. But until they launch they will sit in the stack of neat tech to maybe be excited about. I am excited by humans doing things to advance the species. I don't care much who is doing it. But, I have been burned by too much vaporware to get excited by marketing pieces. If you haven't watched Smarter Every Day's ULA factory tour I highly recommend it. There is even a nice bit about how their materials have improved as computers were better able to model stresses. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23372690,"author":"725686","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Crew Dragon Docks with ISS","text":"Smarter Every Day has a very interesting video[1] inside the factory of United Launch Alliance in which, among a lot of other things, shows the friction stir welding used in their Atlas Rocket[2]: [1] [VIDEO] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28058295,"author":"polytely","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Everyday Astronaut: Starbase Factory Tour with Elon Musk","text":"It's so cool to get a tour like this, fascinating stuff. The part at 13:30 seems to be some really valuable knowledge, when he says: if you are not occasionally adding things back in, it means that you are not eliminating stuff aggressively enough. Smarter Everyday did a tour of the ULA facilities [0], which is also worth checking out if you like this kind of thing. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40825807,"author":"AdamJacobMuller","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Navigating Starlink's FCC Paper Trail","text":"In fairness, ULA has done that too. [VIDEO] Also literally everything Destin/SmarterEveryDay puts online is worth watching.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46399201,"author":"tiffanyh","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Former ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno Joins Blue Origin","text":"There\u2019s a great \u201cSmarter Every Day\u201d video on how rockets are made and the guest host was Tory Bruno. [VIDEO] Two things I recall from this video from years ago 1. Tory really seemed to be a true expert. Not a typical \u201cCEO\u201d. 2. Seems like a genuinely nice guy, see this moment when Tory recognized Dustin\u2019s dad [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"o1Fyn_h6LKU":[{"hn_comment_id":36068479,"author":"lukasgraf","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Gis.chat \u2013 The Geospatial Community","text":"Not a podcast, but a Stanford MOOC (massive open online course): [VIDEO] The basic operation of a GNSS with ~30m accuracy is literally explained on one slide in lecture 1.2, and from then on the rest of the course is about implementation specifics, and enhancing performance. The basic concept at its core is so elegant and beautiful, but no less interesting are all the ways this system is augmented with different techniques to improve the accuracy down to ~1cm. This is one of those resources I've downloaded and made sure to have backed up, because it's so invaluable to me.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33766950,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2022-11","story_title":"GPS vs. Glonass vs. Galileo","text":"If anyone wants to get into the nitty-gritty details of GPS / GNSS, there's a good series of lectures (course) available from Standford University; playlist: * [VIDEO] Topics include navigation message structure, signal encoding, error budgets, Keplerian parameters, path loss/antenna gain/link budget, plus orbital details of GLONASS/QZSS/BeiDou/Galileo.","stance":"rec"}],"o25I2fzFGoY":[{"hn_comment_id":20402475,"author":"keldaris","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Living without the modern browser","text":"If there existed some form of global consensus across the English-speaking world on what the inoffensive version is, I'd be happy to abide by it. In the meantime, suggesting that people on a venue as global as HN have some sort of a responsibility to follow and observe the random cultural variations in whichever narrow bubble you were referring to strikes me as presumptious and absurd. I also wish more people valued clear language over these battles of ever more contrived euphemisms. George Carlin has a brilliant sketch on this very issue [1], which is both thoughtful and inoffensive (specifically references \"handicapped\" around the 5:30 mark). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37706351,"author":"barelysapient","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Leaked screenshot shows Amazon now tracking individual employee attendance","text":"In our entitled and highly litigious society I call this Corporate Normal Form. First Corporate Normal Form is messaging derogatories, or things perceived as such, to have a unoffensive coating and makes speaking about them not immediately trigger your fight or flight response. On a related note, George Carlin has a funny skit about how messaging has gotten softer over the years that you might enjoy. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"o2HBHckrdQc":[{"hn_comment_id":34890802,"author":"hardwaresofton","month":"2023-02","story_title":"It's TCP vs. RPC All over Again","text":"If you'd like to watch Ousterhoust explain Homa and his vision of replacing TCP: [VIDEO] Spoiler: Ousterhout is right, and the data shows he is right. Maybe not everyone knows it yet, or it's the kind of \"right\" that not everyone will ever get to (and we'll settle for \"good enough\" for much longer), but he is almost certainly right. Not to disparage the poster of this article of course -- I always love a good hot take or contrarian piece.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35234054,"author":"eklitzke","month":"2023-03","story_title":"RPC vs. TCP (Redux)","text":"You can obviously build an RPC protocol on top of TCP, people have been doing it for decades. However there are things that are difficult to efficiently implement on top of TCP (multiplexing different logical streams over the same connection, message priorities) in the TCP model, and some things that are impossible to implement over TCP (for example, you don't really have any ability to influence what happens during congestion control scenarios). There are also a bunch of things about TCP that are fundamentally inefficient on modern hardware. Do these things matter if you're running some RPC service over the internet with a Python backend? Almost certainly not. But if you read John Ousterhout's paper or watch his Netdev talk^[1] it's also pretty clear that this isn't the use case he's been talking about. He's talking about RPC in the datacenter, where in theory modern hardware is capable of delivering RPC messages with microsecond scale latency but in practice no RPC systems built on TCP come anywhere close to that. The Netdev talk I've linked below is really good and John makes a really thorough presentation of his ideas and what he's actually trying to optimize for. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34890741,"author":"hardwaresofton","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Is It Time to Replace TCP in Data Centers?","text":"If you want to watch Outsterhout in talk form: Netdev 0x16 - Keynote: It's time to replace TCP in the datacenter: [VIDEO] Netdev is an amazing conference btw, it is insane that we get access to the trailblazing being shown off at conferences for free on places like YT.","stance":"rec"}],"o4-YnLpLgtk":[{"hn_comment_id":41767000,"author":"hcarvalhoalves","month":"2024-10","story_title":"The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)","text":"See these demos for the kinds of interactive systems LISP enabled back in the day: [VIDEO] [LINK] It makes working on VSCode today look like banging rocks together, let alone 30 years ago.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20217573,"author":"zaarn","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Mezzano \u2013 An operating system written in Common Lisp","text":"Since he did AI work in the 50's, probably a lot of his work was written in LISP or IPL, which had many of the concepts that LISP later used. Most of his high-profile inventions (Computer mice, Hypertext, Interactive Computers) were first commercialized on LISP machines in the 80s. LISP Machines also pioneered some other concepts such as windowing ystems, graphic rendering, modern networking, garbage collection, etc. There is a fun little demo on youtube here; [VIDEO] . That shows off a LISP machine roughly as it was written in the 80s/90s.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23242311,"author":"mikelevins","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Production Lisp in 2020?","text":"There's this recent video showing a little of what the Pharo Smalltalk environment is like: [LINK] The video was made by a Ruby programmer, rather than an experience Smalltalker, so it's more a newbie showing you cool things he's discovered, rather than an expert showing the power of the system. On the other hand, there's this one: [VIDEO] That one is an expert, Kalman Reti, showing some of what it's like to work with a Symbolics Lisp Machine. (It's not a real Lisp machine; they're all at least thirty years old now; this is an emulator running the old Symbolics OS on Linux). Go to YouTube and search for Rainer Joswig and you'll find a few video demos of Lisp Machines and MCL and so forth. Finally, here are a few images from about eighteen years ago, also from Rainer. They show various views of the Macintosh Common Lisp and SK8 environments. It's not an experienced user showing you around, but at least you can get some idea what the environments looked like: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26726886,"author":"rml","month":"2021-04","story_title":"What have we lost? [video]","text":"If you are into Lisp Machines, this talk on Symbolics by Kalman Reti (who worked there) is worth watching (1h): [LINK] If you only have 15 minutes, he gives another demo here: [VIDEO] He has another video where he does some actual hacking (smooth scrolling of sheet music for display while playing an instrument): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37801117,"author":"yourapostasy","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Making Hard Things Easy","text":">My dream is to make everything visualizable at runtime. Check out demos of the old Lisp Machines, [1] is a brief overview demo, [2] links to a timestamp with a view of some simple diagramming, but I\u2019ve seen TI-Symbolics beasts routinely display complex relationships in Lisp code on their massive (for the time) bitmapped screens. The limitation was the end user managing the visualization complexity. With open source llvm, clang and similar making available abstract syntax trees and even semantic analysis and type checking results, LLM\u2019s assisting with decompiling binary blobs, and modern hardware (goggles, graphics cards, and so on), I sometimes wonder how close we can come to reproducing that aspect of the Lisp Machine experience on open source operating systems. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"o4MwTvtyrUQ":[{"hn_comment_id":7724333,"author":"wturner","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you deal with inferiority complex?","text":"Your strengths and weaknesses have curves, troughs, peaks and spaghetti complexity. Personally I completely accept that I'm pretty mediocre as a \"developer\", but honestly I don't really care because I don't personally consider myself a developer, I just look at myself as someone who simply likes to explore, learn and play with web based technologies. This way I don't get sucked into the pigeon hole psychology of the professional world. If someone else wants to look at me in that light that's fine , but I keep an invisible boundary between myself and that kind of thing. I also like to occasionally and inadvertently ask inane questions at stackoverflow which get down voted at machine gun intervals. It's good for the 'soul'. I have a mentor that has been programming since the 70's , I once lived in a place where an extremely smart Belgian software engineer was staying who helped me while programming, and I currently met a really smart engineer near where I live who has been gradually throwing me suggestions coupled with some pseudo mentorship. All of these people are very smart,very empathetic and willing to share. Being around people like that in my view is absolutely needed for your sanity. You've probably seen this video. It's the one where Google attempts to explain what a web browser is to random people on the street. Watch it if you haven't. It will lend perspective. [VIDEO] Ok that's all.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11305229,"author":"michaelbuckbee","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Why Tesla Motors Finally Acquired Tesla.com","text":"It's old now (and I wonder how much it's changed) - but there is this great video of Google employees asking people in Times Square what the difference is between a browser and a search engine: [VIDEO] Most people conflate the two. IIRC the video was used internally as a tool to press the notion that they _had_ to build a browser or risk losing their search engine dominance.","stance":"rec"}],"o6L6XeNdd_k":[{"hn_comment_id":7688609,"author":"mjhoy","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Thinking in Types","text":"I couldn't really tell you anything about category theory. But I am beginning to grasp monads. (At least in the context of Haskell programs.) I think the important thing is to see how they work, see what they do. btw, you might try this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7964099,"author":"gosub","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Mathematics is full of wonderful but relatively unknown theorems","text":"Category theory by Tom LaGatta[1] is also a nice introduction. He suggests taking a look at the nLab website[2], a wiki of Maths and Physics from the categorical point of view. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14210943,"author":"aputsiak","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Category Theory, Syntactically (2016)","text":"nLab has been one of the best sources I've come across. My aim is to express and work with philosophical logic in a more formal way, and nLab is a great source for that as well. Milewski's YouTube lectures gets mentioned a lot, but I couldn't make much sense of them before watching Tom LaGatta's more informal and conversational presentation [VIDEO] Good luck and keep at it.","stance":"rec"}],"o9pEzgHorH0":[{"hn_comment_id":4630473,"author":"inglesp","month":"2012-10","story_title":"An Object is not a Hash","text":"I think you're thinking of Jack Diederich's talk \"Stop Writing Classes\". You can (and should!) watch it online here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8693951,"author":"Vaskivo","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What do you think about using classes in Python?","text":"Stop writing classes - Jack Diederich - [VIDEO] Show them this. I'm still grateful for the moment I grew dissatisfied with OOP, or at least OOP in the Java/C# way. I was almost getting to an intermediate level in python (by myself) and had been thinking about a video game architecture problem I just couldn't solve. I was still \"indoctrinated\" in the gang-of-four patterns and inheritance. When I discovered the solution, Entity Component Architectures[1], I also discovered the \"composition over inheritance\" philosophy. My mind was blown! Coupled with some Python's characteristics (duck-typing, everything is public, first-class functions) I was having a blast. Then I saw the video above, and all fell into place. Class based OOP have specific uses, but It's a shame how heavily enforced the paradigm is. \u201cSometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.\u201d \u2013 John Carmack Now, for scripts or not-to-big programs in Python, I mainly use NamedTuples for passing data around and (mostly) pure functions. P.S. Another funny thing: At my job I use J2EE aka \"lots of hinheritance and classes and boilerplate\". Sometimes I just have to go home and write some code in python or lua to \"cleanse my palate\". It helps me get motivated for my personal projects. [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839199,"author":"kyleperik","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Stop writing classes is one of my favorites. Also many pycon talks are great, or any talks by Brandon Rhodes. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22563890,"author":"michelpp","month":"2020-03","story_title":"I Don't Use Classes","text":"I also tend to avoid writing many classes (in Python). Jack Diederich has a great video called Stop Writing Classes: [VIDEO] It's about Python, but the observation can apply to several languages. Pithy quote: \"I hate code and I want as little of it as possible in our product.\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5514633,"author":"gingerlime","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Hickey gives great talks, but I also really liked Jack Diederich's talk \"stop writing classes\" at PyCon 2012 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28106656,"author":"jmielkeway","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What has improved You as a Developer?","text":"I read this book: [LINK] While doing these labs: [LINK] Also a colleague made me watch this from Jack Diederich: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31475236,"author":"1penny42cents","month":"2022-05","story_title":"\u201cWhat if it changes?\u201d","text":"Reminds me of this talk, \"Stop Writing Classes\": [VIDEO] Changed my perspective on this newfound tool I'd learned to use called \"indirection\". My favorite quote is something like \"don't waste 10 minutes now to save yourself 2 minutes later\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45456527,"author":"zahlman","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Why Is Python So Popular in 2025?","text":"Yes, the standard library has a lot of questionable design (some inspired by Java, some by C), and many programmers overuse classes. I'm a fan of (former core dev) Jack Diederich's talk, [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"oAHbLRjF0vo":[{"hn_comment_id":37163928,"author":"ninjinxo","month":"2023-08","story_title":"A proposal for much faster aircraft exit \u2013 \u201cFill and Flush\u201d","text":"Better off watching CGP Grey's video \"The Better Boarding Method Airlines Won't Use\" which has more discussion of the topic, more simulations, and puts forward better methods that are either faster or allow families to remain grouped. [VIDEO] This is basically [LINK] but differs to the paper in that it doesn't consider: alternating odd-and-even row disembarkment, which would give passengers more aisle space to potentially speed-up luggage handling.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37538003,"author":"sand500","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Boarding a plane is a nightmare. Here\u2019s how we got here","text":"Highly recommend this video of plane boarding methods by CGP Grey [VIDEO] The end is the real kicker, how we deplane is the worst method.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22058073,"author":"Reedx","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Letting slower passengers board airplane first is faster, study finds","text":"CGP Grey has a great video examining different boarding methods and why some are slower or faster than others: [VIDEO] Also noting that the way we deplane (front to back) is the slowest method, heh.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26286175,"author":"the__alchemist","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Optimal boarding method for airline passengers (2008)","text":"Here's a derivative Youtube video (CGP grey). It visualizes how different proposed methods work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35591957,"author":"l1n","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Why aren\u2019t planes boarded back-to-front?","text":"You might like this CGP Grey video that explains it pretty well: The Better Boarding Method Airlines Won't Use [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37163392,"author":"lwhsiao","month":"2023-08","story_title":"A proposal for much faster aircraft exit \u2013 \u201cFill and Flush\u201d","text":"CGP Grey did a great YouTube video on this several years ago, and why airlines won't use it: [VIDEO] Note that this is from a boarding, not deplaning viewpoint, but the concepts are similar.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37163674,"author":"roland35","month":"2023-08","story_title":"A proposal for much faster aircraft exit \u2013 \u201cFill and Flush\u201d","text":"There is a great video from CGP Grey about the similar problem of boarding an airplane: [VIDEO] Unfortunately, having flown many times, I just don't see humans ever being able to self organize to this degree, especially at the end of a flight!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37938305,"author":"djha-skin","month":"2023-10","story_title":"United Airlines plans to board passengers with window seats first","text":"Obligatory reference to CGP Grey's excellent treatment of the topic (video): [VIDEO] And he shows that window middle aisle saves a little bit of time, but not much.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38080251,"author":"penjelly","month":"2023-10","story_title":"People with autism less likely to succumb to bystander effect, research finds","text":"or maybe people are in a new place and processing a totally foreign environment? Maybe theyre stressed/tired from flying? Not thinking because theyre in a rush? Its not that hard to find reasons for why people might make mistakes in an airport. > another example: queueing to board the plane. other than to fit in, why on earth would I stand there and compete to spend more time in a sweaty uncomfortable seat packed with 400 other people? plus, if you get on last, you can take advantage of empty rows before anyone else what? people are following direction, and the way the plane boards is actually important to how fast it loads, so youre messing with that because its a mild convenience to you and you consider that intelligent behaviour? cpg grey has a video on this i suggest you take a look [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oAVjF_7ensg":[{"hn_comment_id":3758305,"author":"lloeki","month":"2012-03","story_title":"The universe is big. This big.","text":"This [0] IMHO gives more perspective (don't be taken aback by the flashy images, the good stuff comes after, ~2:50 mark) When watching, remember this is when looking at the absolute darkest spot of our sky. [0] Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D [VIDEO] PS: Inevitably, the title reminded me of this: Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17168859,"author":"Isinlor","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What's one book that changed your life?","text":"Maybe not one, but 3 books: Into the Wild (book and movie): [LINK] When I was in high school I was considering the same path as Christopher took, but then I heard about him and I learned from his story. \"Happiness only real when shared\" Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen [LINK] This is how I got really hooked up to triathlon and ultramarathons. Great book, I lent it to many people and changed some of their lives too. Learning PHP and MySQL: [LINK] The book is ok, not great, but it changed my life. This is how I learned to program. But I would say that other media also had an impact. Like poems: \"If\u2014\" by Rudyard Kipling: [LINK] Then there are some short videos: The Race: [LINK] Godspeed: [LINK] \"The Hubble Ultra Deep Field\" by Deep Astronomy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oCZMoY3q2uM":[{"hn_comment_id":5515483,"author":"samatman","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"I was surprised to command-F for Van Jacobson and not find this lecture, \"A New Way to Look at Networking\". [VIDEO] Van Jacobson was the major architect of TCP/IP; here is how the Internet would work if he were in charge. If this is ever implemented it will change everything.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8071299,"author":"ned","month":"2014-07","story_title":"IPFS: The Permanent Web","text":"Yes! Ted Nelson talks about this in this amazing and inspiring Google Talk video from 2006. He talks about the rise of packet-based networking, and how the future will be content-centric. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4632379,"author":"barrkel","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Naming Things with Hashes","text":"You may be interested in this Google Tech Talk from 2006 - [VIDEO] . I found it interesting at the time it came out.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6459343,"author":"mbrubeck","month":"2013-09","story_title":"Urbit: The Internet failed (slides and video)","text":"The thing that got me interested in Urbit when it was first announced back in 2010 was reading Van Jacobson's \"Networking Named Content\" paper [1] and related work from PARC, referenced in this blog post [2]. As someone who has spent 15 years now working on web development, browser development, and web standards, I feel the Internet really needs some form of \"named data\" networking as its next big step. I don't know if Urbit is the way it's going to happen, but it'll happen somehow. Maybe we'll evolve browsers and HTTP into a named data network instead. (On the one hand, it would be orders of magnitude easier than building an entire new model of computing from scratch... on the other hand, you don't get to throw out the whole ball of mud if you just keep building on top of it.) Anyway, I encourage everyone to read the Van Jacobson paper or watch the tech talk. It points out some assumptions that are so baked into our network architectures that I had never really thought about them. And it gives some context for these slides' claim that \"the internet has failed,\" by pointing to a working alternate system that's a better fit for some common cases. The link from the Urbit blog to the Van Jacobson talk is broken since Google Video was shut down, but you can now find it on YouTube [3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oFeoS41xe7w":[{"hn_comment_id":13798546,"author":"benbreen","month":"2017-03","story_title":"My adventures in digital history","text":"Thanks for posting this. I started teaching my first history lecture course this January and very quickly came up against what the author mentions - not only students but also teachers have a lot of trouble sustaining attention for more than 30-40 minutes of straight-ahead lecturing. It's a medium that I do think works well if the person doing it is a natural public speaker (I was watching James Baldwin's speech at Cambridge University the other day and was riveted the entire time [1]) but unfortunately there's virtually no training in public speaking provided by a typical PhD. If anything PhDs are rewarded for learning how to speak in a way that doesn't work at all in a classroom - hyper-attuned to nuance but allergic to making the kind of memorable declarative statements that students seem to want for their notes. I noticed from grading midterms that my students fixated on phrases like \"the Catholic Church is the ghost of the Roman Empire\" or \"Cogito ergo sum\" but had trouble with things we spent a lot more time on, like the difference between natural philosophy and science. I haven't taught a digital history-focused class yet but have been experimenting with interspersing my lectures with class periods where the students research an historical topic in groups and then present their findings to the class. One unexpected benefit I've noticed from doing this is that the act of physically getting up and moving around the classroom, then standing up to present seems to do wonde","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41179487,"author":"padolsey","month":"2024-08","story_title":"The Private Life: On James Baldwin","text":"I know only pieces of his life, but whenever a video or audio clip of Baldwin pops up, I listen voraciously. He is articulate in a way that seems to blend the cerebral with the emotive. He seems to summon forth both Maya Angelou and Christopher Hitchens; The level of articulateness is so rare. I wish I had him on tap as a podcast, ... endlessly ruminating. If you want a slice.. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11641868,"author":"rtpg","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Why James Baldwin Still Matters","text":"There's a really interesting debate between Baldwin and William Buckley up on youtube. Riviting stuff: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23312089,"author":"ceilingcorner","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The Ghetto and the Mansion","text":"This is a pretty weak article with a smarmy attitude and mostly just a hit piece on Buckley (who I certainly have no love for) and a lionization of Baldwin. It's also filled with quite a few misleading, if not actually false, statements. See the paragraph mentioning Malcom X for an example. Nonetheless, it's interesting to watch old episodes of Firing Line on YouTube. Buckley doesn't generally come across as the smarter person, but the guests themselves are usually worth watching. The show is a calm, rational discussion between people with diametrically opposed worldviews. This seems almost unthinkable in the shouting match, tribalistic media we have today. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25339119,"author":"js2","month":"2020-12","story_title":"What the Church Meant for James Baldwin","text":"Also watch Baldwin debate Buckley: [VIDEO] (And as an aside, if you haven't had your fill of Buckley after that, watch Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal ) I recently came across an opinion piece Baldwin wrote for the NYT in 1967. I won't try to summarize it because it's short enough and I can't do it justice. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"oFfVt3S51T4":[{"hn_comment_id":41984145,"author":"rco8786","month":"2024-10","story_title":"How I write code using Cursor","text":"The founders did an episode on Lex Fridman's podcast that covers the technical sides of Cursor far better than I ever could: [VIDEO] But to summarize, Copilot is an okay ChatGPT wrapper for single line code completion. Cursor is a full IDE with AI baked in natively, with use-case specific models for different tasks, intelligent look-ahead, multi-line completion, etc. If Copilot is a horse, Cursor is a Model T.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43119163,"author":"light_triad","month":"2025-02","story_title":"You can\u2019t build a moat with AI (redux)","text":"AI enables new tools & features but in itself is not a product. There's a good essay from Andrew Chen on this topic: Revenge of the GPT Wrappers: Defensibility in a world of commoditized AI models \"Network effects are what defended consumer products, in particular, but we will also see moats develop from the same places they came from the past decades: B2B-specific moats (workflow, compliance, security, etc), brand/UX, growth/distribution advantages, proprietary data, etc etc.\" [1] Also check out the podcast with the team at Cursor/Anysphere for details into how they integrate models into workflows [2] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oFrTqQw0_3c":[{"hn_comment_id":19178731,"author":"lixtra","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Modern Alternatives to PGP","text":"According to parents nice talk[1] you can add a verify switch that lets you compare the signature of the actual key. So a public authenticated channel is enough. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27269142,"author":"alecst","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Magic Wormhole: Get things from one computer to another, safely","text":"Here's a link from Brain Warner (the author) talking about that: [VIDEO] Hope it helps, it's a good question.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38504526,"author":"touseefliaqat","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?","text":"Magic Wormhole: [LINK] An easy and secure file transfer program. I use it almost everyday since I discovered it. Author has a very good video on it at pycon-2016: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oFtjKbXKqbg":[{"hn_comment_id":41550056,"author":"nmrtn","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Ideas to make money as solo dev","text":"I highly recommend checking out this podcast with Peter Levels : [VIDEO] With the rise of AI and automation tools, solo developers now have more 'brain' and 'production power' at their disposal, allowing them to tackle more complex projects without needing a big team. It might give you some insights into how to approach your project and how to leverage AI tools to enhance your development process. Definitely worth a listen!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43063729,"author":"jll29","month":"2025-02","story_title":"My Life in Weeks","text":"In this Lex Fiedman video, they talk about how life is short, and a visualization as a spreadsheet is shown that makes one very concerned: Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #440 [VIDEO] [ironically, the podcast is very long - over 3 hours - speaking of not wasting time, but after initial annoyance I'm glad I watched it all.] The positive insight that can come out of that is use every week and don't waste it, and and if you can, move your long-term dreams closer to the here and now. I made a version of that spreadsheet for \"the rest of my life\" to hand it into my office as a reminder. (Even if I will live until 90, it fits my laptop screen without scrolling...)","stance":"rec"}],"oGTQ0Wj6yIg":[{"hn_comment_id":24630348,"author":"jjice","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Social Cooling (2017)","text":"Daryl Davis is a really interesting guy. His episode on the JRE is really good and his stories keep you engaged. Even if you don't like Joe Rogan, you should still be able to enjoy his episode because Davis does the majority of the talking. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23685342,"author":"bhawks","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Reddit shuts down subreddits including r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse","text":"The meme that you can't have a conversation with a person that changes their perspective and ideologies is a false and harmful one. Look at Daryl Davis's amazing work getting over 200 klansmembers to turn away from the klan through honest conversation. Is it easy? Of course not. But it's not impossible to reach people - it happens every day. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oHeehYYgl28":[{"hn_comment_id":32712891,"author":"bcjordan","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Interest in heat pumps has increased dramatically in recent years","text":"Came here to post this :D The TC channel is definitely a hacker's eye view in to all the technologies that we take for granted every day. Tons of fascinating tech history covered, too. Other fun ones: - a defense of the simple drip coffee maker [LINK] - why do the turn signals not sync up when you're at a stop light? [LINK] - how humidifiers work and ehy the simple swamp cooler style are pretty ideal [VIDEO] - why dishwasher detergent packs are stupid (use powder/liquid) and why you should use the pre-wash slot and not bother pre rinsing your plates [LINK] - why do light switches click? [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26102675,"author":"dirktheman","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Dyson air purifier outperformed by cheap DIY box fan filter in Marketplace test","text":"Technology Connections did an episode on air humidifiers a while ago: [VIDEO] The fan and filter size matter the most. Most of these things are hugely overpriced for what they are.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26288850,"author":"riggsdk","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Humidifier: Healthy or Harmful?","text":"Technology connections covers quite a bit of ground on various types of humidifiers and their up/downsides: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26968369,"author":"xaduha","month":"2021-04","story_title":"The health benefits of better air","text":"Ultrasonic one is my first, only started paying attention to all this stuff because of 2020 and went all in, just trying to make my home a less crummy place. Watch this [VIDEO] Optional follow-ups: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30680281,"author":"cheschire","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Why is it hard to buy things that work well?","text":"Were your humidifiers just not good at making air moist? Or were they completely non-functional? Technology Connections had a good video on the quality of humidifiers: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oHf1vD5_b5I":[{"hn_comment_id":35153613,"author":"alexpotato","month":"2023-03","story_title":"The Door Close Button","text":"If you liked the original post, you will probably LOVE this DEFCON talk about elevator hacking: [VIDEO] It also gives a lot of fascinating information about elevators in general and specific operation modes. e.g. there is a \"riot mode\" where the elevator goes to every floor except the first (or ground in EU) floor aka to the lobby. The idea was that, during a riot, a luxury building in NYC would lock the stairwell access from the lobby but people could still take the elevator to the other floors to visit their neighbors etc","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49125299,"author":"cruffle_duffle","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Elevators","text":"If you like elevator hacking don\u2019t forget the seminal DEF CON talk by Deviant Ollam and Howard Payne: [VIDEO] I watch it like once a year because it always tickles some part of me. Like all the different modes you can get an elevator into. The most fancy one people might encounter is when moving into or out of a building. The front office can give you a key to give exclusive control over an elevator so your movers aren\u2019t waiting around on elevators. Put it in that mode and it will stop responding to calls from other floors. Only the person with the key can control the elevator. You get on, select the floor, door closes elevator goes, and then just chills there with the door open waiting for you. Annoying for the rest if the building (the building is down an elevator when in that mode) but is amazing for the person using it! But there are way, way more depending on the installation and function. Fun fact: most elevator shafts are sealed at the top as tight as possible to prevent them from becoming a giant chimney in a fire. It never even occurred to me until I was in a mechanical room wondering \u201cwhere is the hatch to look down the shaft?\u201d The answer is \u201cthere is none, and it\u2019s a feature not a bug.\u201d You want to block all airflow so fire doesn\u2019t chase up the shaft into neighboring floors. Who knew!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15198605,"author":"lathiat","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Evan Doorbell's Classic Phreaking Tapes","text":"I realise the thread is phone phreaking related and that was kind of the point of your post; but in the spirit of the talk below to think more outside the box... There's a pretty good chance in many cases you can just open the external box with some easy to get (and relatively standard) key. And hit a button. Related: [LINK] This is a good related talk - goes outside the box on all the ways you can often get into commercial buildings without picking (or even in many cases, interacting with) the lock \"The Search for the Perfect Door\" by Deviant Ollam [LINK] Also good: [LINK] [Howard Payne & Deviant Ollam - This Key is Your Key, This Key is My Key] [VIDEO] [DEF CON 22 - Deviant Ollam & Howard Payne - Elevator Hacking - From the Pit to the Penthouse]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18741370,"author":"lathiat","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"Deviant Ollam - The Hotel Room Gourmet [LINK] Also not 2018 but his elevator with Howard Payne talk: [VIDEO] (1h version) [LINK] (2h version) And the search for the perfect door: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27778782,"author":"lozf","month":"2021-07","story_title":"List of Special Elevator Modes","text":"Deviant Ollam & Howard Payne did a great talk on Elevator Hacking at Def Con 22. You can catch it at: [LINK] or [VIDEO] [01:00:15]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47266675,"author":"simlevesque","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Let's Get Physical","text":"I love pentesting stories. Great blog post, I was smiling while reading most of it. It reminded me of Deviant Ollam's stories such has his elevator security talk w/ Howard Payne: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oHlpmxLTxpw":[{"hn_comment_id":32188450,"author":"xputer","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes","text":"Watch some videos from this channel and you'll be able to see how the US definitely does not do enough in terms of creating safe road infrastructure for all: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32363577,"author":"evolve2k","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Marc Andreessen says he\u2019s for new housing, but records tell a different story","text":"NotJustBikes has some excellent videos on the differences between US and European cities, this one captures many of the issues - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33281697,"author":"NegativeLatency","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Barcelona-style \u201csuperblocks\u201d could make cities greener and less car-centric","text":"Once the environment is safe for kids you don't have to do as many logistics for your children. You might be interested in this \"Not Just Bikes\" video about raising kids in non car dependent places: [VIDEO] or this one about kids who bike to school in a group for safety: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33629585,"author":"noahtallen","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile","text":"Well, part of the problem is our infrastructure choices over the past many decades. When you build suburbs that are very isolated from places you need to go and then need to drive to literally everything you do, nearly everyone starts viewing normal activities like walking to a grocery store as abnormal. As a result, kids can\u2019t actually go anywhere until they turn 16 and get a car. :/ There are a lot of excellent videos about this sad problem, like this: [VIDEO] But at the end of the day, when it\u2019s not actually possible to be independent every day, you just loose this culture. And countries that made different infrastructure and development decisions 6 decades ago are in a much better place today \u2014 it doesn\u2019t have to be this way.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34628506,"author":"CalRobert","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Connecticut Parents Arrested for Letting Kids Walk to Dunkin' Donuts","text":"Yet again this video on how there is something deeply, horrifyingly wrong with raising kids in American suburbs is apt. [VIDEO] Visited Utrecht in December and visiting Freiburg in April to decide where to live.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35551205,"author":"ignormies","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Kids Toys Suck (2011)","text":"The issue isn't purely house vs apartment. It's a symptom of our neighborhood design. Not Just Bikes has a really good video on why suburbia (usually single family housing) is often worse for children than denser environments. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39192060,"author":"malermeister","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Safetyism killed playtime","text":"There's a great video by the urbanist youtuber Not Just Bikes about this very topic - he ended up moving to the Netherlands so his kids can safely play on the street and independently meet up with friends: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oIG9ztQw2Gc":[{"hn_comment_id":29526986,"author":"systemvoltage","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Moore's Law, AI, and the pace of progress","text":"They've been saying Moore's law is dead for 20+ years. Reasons usually quoted for Moore's law's death are quite narrowly focused on a particular technology stack, whereas semiconductor fabrication happens on a complex web of technologies all moving forward with their own S-curves. It is worth watching Jim Keller's lecture at UC Berkeley literally titled \"Moore's law is not dead\". He talks on a different level alltogether and far more convincing than the pedantic look at the details that enable Moore's law. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46117498,"author":"timschmidt","month":"2025-12","story_title":"DeepSeek-v3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models [pdf]","text":"Someone always crawls out of the woodwork to repeat this supposed \"fact\" which hasn't been true for the entire half-century it's been repeated. Jim Keller (designer of most of the great CPUs of the last couple decades) gave a convincing presentation several years ago about just how not-true it is: [VIDEO] Everything he says in it still applies today. Intel struggled for a decade, and folks think that means Moore's law died. But TSMC and Samsung just kept iterating. And hopefully Intel's 18a process will see them back in the game.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21339603,"author":"lliamander","month":"2019-10","story_title":"AMD Rome \u2013 is it for real? Architecture and initial HPC performance","text":"There's a good talk by him about how Moore's law isn't dead: [VIDEO] . Obviously, people have different ideas about what they mean when they say \"Moore's law is/is not dead\", but I appreciate Jim's point that even if the current innovation curves we've been riding are slowing down, there are other innovation curves that we can take advantage of, and that the combination these curves mean that there's still plenty of innovation and improvement to be made in processor design. Of course, the question of whether the x86 architecture will be the foundation for that future improvement remains to be seen. ARM and RISC-V are both eating x86 from below, and the fact that both of the processor architectures allow for greater competition among processor implementations suggests to me that one (or both) may catch up with x86 at some point in the future.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21434630,"author":"WillPostForFood","month":"2019-11","story_title":"AMD is having its day","text":"Jim Keller recently spoke at UC, on the topic of Moore's law not being dead. Very impressive guy. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21772878,"author":"aklascheema","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Intel\u2019s Manufacturing Roadmap from 2019 to 2029","text":"There is this interesting talk by Jim Keller. Talks about new approaches (different transistor tech, architecture, etc) to keep moores law going for another decade or so. You should defintely check it out if have time. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38669340,"author":"JB_Dev","month":"2023-12","story_title":"ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips","text":"I used to agree with you until I saw this presentation by Jim Keller, one of the biggest names in chip architecture. It really illustrates how many more options we have to improve performance. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39662127,"author":"gfody","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Moore on Moore \u2013 The past, present and uncertain future of Moore's Law","text":"Jim Keller gave a talk at Berkeley titled \"Moore's Law is not dead\" (2019) where he summarized a bunch of up and coming technologies that will enable the continued scaling of transistor density - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44620125,"author":"timschmidt","month":"2025-07","story_title":"TSMC to start building four new plants with 1.4nm technology","text":"> Moore's law is dead People have said this for decades. Jim Keller believes otherwise and brought receipts: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oI_X2cMHNe0":[{"hn_comment_id":37573249,"author":"blueplanet200","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Why does water change the speed of electricity? [video]","text":"\"How Electricity Actually Works\" ( [VIDEO] ) from Veritasium is related and also a fantastic video.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37638444,"author":"jerf","month":"2023-09","story_title":"How the Most Useless Branch of Math Could Save Your Life","text":"The video in question for reference: [LINK] Interestingly, when I saw that I figured this channel for a goner because he was going to turn to the darkside, but quite contrary to expectations I feel like his channel has actually blossomed since then. His older videos are fine, but often just explaining concepts that you can find a lot of other explanations on, but some of his recent videos have rocked the boat even among physicists and IMHO he was ultimately proved to be correct for them. I particularly point at his videos about how nobody has measured the one-way speed of light ( [LINK] ), which was well-known among people very very deep in the field of relativity but not very well known outside of that (even amongst physicists in other fields, let alone lay people) and the electricity videos he's done in the last year ( [LINK] , [VIDEO] ) which attracted a whole whackload of \"debunking\" videos, which were themselves wrong (the best \"bunking\" video, if I may call it that, is probably AlphaPheonix's: [LINK] , since he actually set up the experiment, albeit on a smaller scale). They aren't all of that caliber, but the knot theory video was very good too and not something I've seen a hundred times elsewhere, and the airships video that preceded that one clearly had a high degree of research put into it beyond just the hype.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40772059,"author":"lugoues","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?","text":"Sort of, electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin, electromagnetism, so it's waves in the electromagnetic field with the wire acting as a wave guide. (as far as I understand) Veritasium has a video that goes over this. It was pretty controversial at release but it gives a good overview. [VIDEO] And why magnets work due to relativity [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49106407,"author":"leonidasrup","month":"2026-07","story_title":"A.I. Companies Are Recruiting Electricians and Carpenters by the Thousands","text":"Good intrpduction are Veritasium videos: \"How Electricity Actually Works\" [VIDEO] \"The Biggest Misconception About Electricity\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"oJTwQvgfgMM":[{"hn_comment_id":2424309,"author":"baddox","month":"2011-04","story_title":"Grokking Org-mode and putting it in charge","text":"It's funny. I've been using Emacs as my sole editor for about 8 months now, but I still haven't been able to reach enlightenment with org-mode. I have it installed, and I occasionally use it for todo lists, but I guess I'm just not good enough with it to see its value. I think the main stumbling block is the documentation (as with most things Emacs). There needs to be some use cases or something. Even the enthusiastic bloggers never seen to give concrete examples. The best advertisement for org-mode I've seen is this long Google Tech Talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24595805,"author":"BeetleB","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Toward a \u201cmodern\u201d Emacs","text":"First, the proper way would be to use the appropriate mode for LaTeX (auctex). It has a keybinding. I don't use that mode, though, do I can't tell you how to set it up. I use org-mode, which lets you embed LaTeX formulae. I use this often, but surprisingly am not seeing anything in my Emacs config for this, so it may work out of the box. You do need some packages installed on your machine (dvipng, latex, etc). I already had them installed, so for me it was a simple matter of the keybinding: C-c C-x C-l Details from the manual: [LINK] Perhaps a friendlier guide: [LINK] If you're not familiar with org-mode, it is highly recommended. Its learning curve is quite shallow. I'm sure there are tutorials out there, but for me the Google Tech Talk was enough to get me started and convince me I should use it: [VIDEO] Ever since I encountered org mode, I author everything with it: LaTeX, HTML, DOC files, etc.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":708218,"author":"aduric","month":"2009-07","story_title":"HN: I just started my own company, any recommended task management software?","text":"If you're familiar with Emacs you can use Org-mode. There's actually a pretty good video from its creator that shows you the main features: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25357128,"author":"RMPR","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Measuring \"efficiency\" in document prepration: Microsoft Word vs. LaTex","text":"Actually you can use org-mode without that much of a learning curve (at least in its basic form). Just pick an Emacs distribution (doom, spacemacs, ...) which come with pretty handy defaults, create an org-file and that's it. I use org-mode myself and didn't take the time to \"learn\" Emacs. This Google talk[0] was pretty handy to get familiar with org. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39827592,"author":"emporas","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Scientists rename genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)","text":"One good solution rather than Excel is org-mode. See the original Google talk by org-mode creator [1]. At some point 30 minutes or so, he explains how to use org-mode as a spreadsheet. Not so powerful as Excel, even though missing features might be trivially added. I haven't tried it myself but i want to really dive into it's functionality. Org-mode is really great at many things, spreadsheets might as well be one more. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oKg1hTOQXoY":[{"hn_comment_id":7071827,"author":"jgon","month":"2014-01","story_title":"WebKit.js: Pure JavaScript Port of WebKit","text":"You should check out Alan Kay's OOPSLA keynote \"The Compute Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet\" at [VIDEO] specifically about 20 mintues in where he says that a browser should be exactly what you say here. On the one hand, he was talking about this almost 20 years ago, on the other hand you're in good company because he's a pretty smart guy! I encourage all developers to watch that talk and do some thinking about the current state of our practice and where we want to go from here.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19587194,"author":"gambler","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Correctness \u2013 A paradigm for sustainable software development","text":"Most Alan Kay's presentations I've seen were worth watching. Tons of great ideas in each. They really improved how I reason about systems. There is this famous talk from OOPSLA 1997: [VIDEO] If you want to see what \"practical\" OOP looked like in the 80s, this is a good video: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12199519,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 4: What's running on the system","text":"I recently (re)discovered Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA talk: [VIDEO] For others that have been following his work (and talks), it doesn't really contain much new stuff, but the context of a talk to an audience of programmers brings out some different contexts. He touches on the the fact that they didn't \"just\" spend extra money to prototype the dynabook in the form of the Alto - but they built 2000 machines - and part of that is of course so they could invite (among others) whole classes of school children to come and play with the tech.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12219828,"author":"infinite8s","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Alan Kay on AI, Apple and Future","text":"No, compared to the early vision (1950s/60s) of computers as metatools that humans can use to augment their cognition. The current crop of mobile devices (and even most desktop devices) are nowhere nearer to that glorious goal. See his OOPSLA talk \"The computer revolution hasn't happened yet\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31439374,"author":"chongli","month":"2022-05","story_title":"460M Indian Internet Users Are Now on IPv6","text":"operating systems which are totally transparent and easily understood by their users I sort of glossed over this part so now I have a chance to elaborate. Alan Kay has put a ton of thought into this issue [1]. He firmly believes that we can build an operating system and application software with an extremely small footprint (LOC's) so that a single person can understand the whole thing. Since he gave that talk, we've moved further and further away from Kay's vision. We've made things more and more complex, opaque, centralized, and difficult to change. We've given away our future to big tech companies. Heck, we've even given away the past. We've lost much of the freedom we had back in the 90's, let alone the 70's and 80's when Kay did so much of his work. We're going to have to work incredibly hard just to regain what we've lost. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39616119,"author":"mpweiher","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Alan Kay's talk at UCLA \u2013 Feb 2024 [video]","text":"The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet , OOPSLA 1997 keynote [VIDEO] Others have already mentioned The Early History of Smalltalk , highly recommended. You'll probably want to read it a couple of times, revisit from time to time. The big idea is messaging, or rather \"ma\" [LINK] \"The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be.\" \"I think I recall also pointing out that it is vitally important not just to have a complete metasystem, but to have fences that help guard the crossing of metaboundaries.\" \" I would say that a system that allowed other metathings to be done in the ordinary course of programming (like changing what inheritance means, or what is an instance) is a bad design. (I believe that systems should allow these things, but the design should be such that there are clear fences that have to be crossed when serious extensions are made.)\" \"I would suggest that more progress could be made if the smart and talented Squeak list would think more about what the next step in metaprogramming should be -- how can we get great power, parsimony, AND security of meaning?\"","stance":"rec"}],"oLGZdLpHl1w":[{"hn_comment_id":28471737,"author":"casi18","month":"2021-09","story_title":"We Are as Gods\u2013A Film on Stewart Brand","text":"This looks great, certainly an influential mind. soundtrack by brain eno and a fun distribution model too! First time i have used mirror and it is very nicely made. For those interested in why this is connected to ethereum here is the keynote Stewart gave at devcon a few years ago on the connections between his thinking for the past 50 years and what eth does: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29444581,"author":"initialized","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Web3 Is Bullshit","text":"The status blog has some good posts covering daos+communities/wallets/zkproofs/clients => [LINK] [LINK] has lots of recordings of talks from their hackathons, their playlists split into different topics [LINK] is full of interesting discussions, organises meetups, more big picture discussions of the stuff web3/crypto is playing with I enjoyed this conversation with Stuart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalogue) from a few years ago, it lays the ground of what then became NFTs [VIDEO] [LINK] is a more technical forum to discuss eips [LINK] is a good podcast from some musicians interviewing people in the space. [LINK] Dom (creator of Vine) is constantly pushing novel toys on chain, i enjoy his playful approach to making stuff less serious. really though its a \"get involved to understand\" scene/subculture. if you can ignore the noise of markets/speculation/capitalism its a fun crowd poking around. Theres all sorts from content/identity/scaling/money stuff/games. it feels like playing an mmorpg. at some point it'll hit its eternal september moment but its been really great the past few years.","stance":"rec"}],"oLiheMQayNE":[{"hn_comment_id":35854731,"author":"ftxbro","month":"2023-05","story_title":"The AI revolution is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour","text":"Here are two. First one is Nathan Labenz who ended up Red Teaming for OpenAI during the six months after the base model was fully trained but before it was released (especially relevant parts are after 45 minutes): [VIDEO] Other one is Sebastien Bubeck who put Sydney into Bing before she was tamed down some notches; he explains the lobotomization process in a particularly poignant way, where they had the GPT keep trying to draw a unicorn even as it was progressively deadened: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36013530,"author":"ftxbro","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT","text":"All of that \"GPTism\" and the problems in the GPT conversation you posted are because of how they made it more docile and stupid by lobotomizing it with RLHF. It's not like that in its 'natural form' (its raw base model). If you don't believe me, check the two youtubes of people who had access to it before it was lobotomized: Nathan Labenz, red teamed GPT-4 for OpenAI: [VIDEO] Sebastien Bubeck, integrated GPT-4 with Bing for Microsoft: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36013689,"author":"ftxbro","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Don Knuth Plays with ChatGPT","text":"> I'm curious whether this fixation on specific topics is innate to the model or is a result of the aggressive RLHF to which GPT4 has been subjected. Yes it's because of the RLHF, depending on what you mean by 'fixation on specific topics'. > Anecdotally the strength of the model has degraded a lot as they've 'fine tuned' the model more. Yes this is true. For example Figure 8 in [LINK] They argue in the appendix that it does not affect 'capability' in answering test questions. But, there is a confounding factor. The RLHF includes both question-answer format training and docility training. For example if you see a question and you are in 'completion mode' (the only raw base mode) then you might suggest a second question. Whereas if you've had question-answer format training then you would probably try to answer the question. > I'd be curious to know how the original chaotic-neutral GPT4 responds. They talk about it in these two videos: Nathan Labenz, red teamed GPT-4 for OpenAI (especially after 45 min): [VIDEO] Sebastien Bubeck, integrated GPT-4 with Bing for Microsoft: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36137308,"author":"015UUZn8aEvW","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?","text":"Here's another interview from a guy who had access to the unfiltered GPT-4 before its release. He says it was extremely powerful and would answer any question whatsoever without hesitating. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36951850,"author":"rpeden","month":"2023-08","story_title":"How to Get ChatGPT to Stop Apologizing?","text":"This interview with one of the testers of early, unfiltered versions of GPT-4 might cover what you're looking for: [VIDEO] It's a video and not an article, but you may find it interesting nonetheless.","stance":"rec"}],"oLkfnc_UMcE":[{"hn_comment_id":28882968,"author":"acidbaseextract","month":"2021-10","story_title":"A viable solution for Python concurrency","text":"The video (or blog post) below is one of the best explanations I've seen about what subtle bugs are easy to make with asyncio, why it's easy to make them, and how the trio library addresses them. But yes, consider alternatives before you pick asyncio as your approach! Talk: [VIDEO] Blog post: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34667714,"author":"kzuberi","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Structured Concurrency Definition","text":"A useful introduction to the ideas is in Nathaniel's PyCon 2018 talk on trio [1], where he live-codes a solution to a concurrency-spaghetti problem. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oM6S7FEUfkU":[{"hn_comment_id":7819247,"author":"ivoras","month":"2014-05","story_title":"OpenSSL, OpenSSH and NTP to receive support from Core Infrastructure Initiative","text":"Anyone interested in details of LibreSSL development can watch the BSDCan talk at [VIDEO] - there really are a LOT of instances of braindamaged code in OpenSSL and a radical repair is pretty much the only thing which will work.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23348491,"author":"mrweasel","month":"2020-05","story_title":"OpenSSL 3.0","text":"There is a fascinating and funny talk by Bob Beck from OpenBSD on the first 30 days after forking OpenSSL. One of the things he addresses is the scary code and how is prevents community involvement. He also talks a great deal about all that stuff that's not really relevant anymore and how much they removed from the LibreSSL source code. Apparently the crypto modules are pretty well made according to the OpenBSD developers. LibreSSL: The first 30 days, and what the Future Holds: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33382544,"author":"yakubin","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Patch OpenSSL on November 1 to avoid \u201ccritical\u201d security vulnerability","text":"I'd expect higher quality code review from OpenBSD folks (who maintain LibreSSL), compared to OpenSSL. Also, an interesting talk: LibreSSL: The first 30 days, and what the Future Holds from BSDCan: < [VIDEO] >","stance":"rec"}],"oOlDewpCfZQ":[{"hn_comment_id":4104428,"author":"csl","month":"2012-06","story_title":"I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.","text":"On a related note (corniest pun of the day), the Australian musical comedy act Axis of Awesome made a song called Four Chords Song , which is basically a 47-song medley all using the same chord progression. [LINK] They've said that the chords are used by some of the most well known songs in the world, and their performance demonstrates this nicely, as in this clip: [VIDEO] The above link is the official video; but they explain their reasoning better in this live performance: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5378902,"author":"jcr","month":"2013-03","story_title":"I analyzed the chords to 1300 songs for patterns. Part 3 \u2013 Interactive Discovery","text":"Though a bit more on the \"actual implementation\" side of things, there's an Australian group called \"Axis Of Awesome\" who did an interesting song called \"Four Chords\". It shows the use of a set of four common chords in a lot of different songs. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31110242,"author":"Sharlin","month":"2022-04","story_title":"What chords do you need?","text":"Heh, I just this afternoon listened to a radio show about the famously popular vi-IV-I-V/I-V-vi-IV chord progression [1]. If you haven't heard it before, the \"4 Chords\" medley by Axis of Awesome is a great demonstration of its ubiquity [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oOttvpjJvAo":[{"hn_comment_id":28739607,"author":"woile","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Pandora papers: biggest leak of offshore data exposes financial secrets of rich","text":"I have the same feeling, like we were slowly indoctrinated into believing that upvoting is the only thing we can do and participation is worthless. I recently watched this video[0] that shows how public perception over cars has been influenced over many many years into what we now have (and we now perceive as normal). I feel like it's somewhat related. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30855635,"author":"fayten","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Americans do not want to return to urban living","text":"There are quite a few factors, I'd encourage checking out the following videos by Not Just Bikes and Climate Towns that cover a broad range of city planning and zoning in the US. Strong Towns Play List by Not Just Bikes (This heavily covers city planning issues in the US): [LINK] The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry by Climate Towns (This covers zoning): [LINK] How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream (This covers the auto industries impact on US cities.): [VIDEO] Dutch Cities are Better for the Climate (and my sanity) by Not Just Bikes (Not super relevant to zoning, but it's part 1 of The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry so I figured I'd link it.): [LINK] These are pretty snarky, but fun videos and the authors list their sources. Their video descriptions are worth checking out just to find a ton of reading material on each topic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32296930,"author":"otikik","month":"2022-07","story_title":"When cities treated cars as dangerous intruders","text":"> America got to be car-centric not because of nefarious car companies or other special interests, it got to be car-centric because cars work very well for our use case Orr it could actually be that they paid for advertisements and politicians just to do that. If you don't want to read about it, here's a video that explains it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45197059,"author":"fayten","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a \"reduced traffic zone\"","text":"This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure. There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury Well done video essays: Parking minimums [LINK] Noise pollution [LINK] Infrastructure strain [LINK] More on Infrastructure and Sprawl [LINK] Articles: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources. Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI. Some extra historical context is helpful too: [VIDEO] The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read. In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.","stance":"rec"}],"oP1Oq3JLNbc":[{"hn_comment_id":30501767,"author":"krallja","month":"2022-02","story_title":"200-foot-long railway to nowhere is a brilliant shipping loophole","text":"There was a video earlier this month on Half As Interesting about this railway: [VIDEO] HAI makes interesting, short, sarcastic videos about obscure topics that HNers will probably enjoy.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35778032,"author":"AntonyGarand","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Absurd 200-Foot \u2018Railway\u2019 Demolished After Court Closes Shipping Loophole","text":"I liked this short video from \"Half as interesting\" on Youtube on the railway itself if you're looking for a video on the subject. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oP3c1h8v2ZQ":[{"hn_comment_id":4924582,"author":"baconner","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Programmer creates 800,000 books algorithmically, starts selling them on Amazon","text":"Agreed. It's a shame to think about all the interesting things that might be getting built instead. Programming a novel generator is a great example. What a fantastic challenge being overlooked. It reminds me of this great video of Vonnegut graphing the emotional shape of stories. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25078089,"author":"bmitc","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64 (1977)","text":"Vonnegut is really special. I always like coming back to his Shape of Stories talks: [VIDEO] Here's a longer one: [LINK] It's interesting to see the difference in him with age. He seems to giggle more as an older man.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3482974,"author":"ZenPsycho","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Dear Tech Community, We Have A Communication Problem","text":"It's not about logic vs. illogic. Logic is important to understand for a technical person- if they do not understand logic, their programs do not work, and their bugs cannot be fixed. But normal humans do not respond to logic. Normal humans respond to stories, and this is what tech people are really BAD at. You know who is good at telling stories? The entertainment industry, and politicians. What is a story? A linear sequence of cause and effect, with some kind of overall shape. see this Kurt Vonnegut video where he explains story shapes [VIDEO] If you can construct a compelling narrative- which is empathetic with the listener enough that you know they will be able to insert themselves into the story, and imagine that they are them main character, then you win- that one battle. If you try to program a person like they are a computer, by simply listing a series of what you feel are logical statements, you will come across as condescending, and self absorbed. You will fail. When you notice that they are not following you, and you interpret this as \"Oh they must be missing a library. var TCPIP = import(\"internets\").tcpip;\" you just make the problem worse.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9574719,"author":"meesterdude","month":"2015-05","story_title":"How to Write with Style (1985)","text":"i read this and liked it, only after I scrolled up did I realize it was Kurt Vonnegut. Also, I really love this video of his, on the shape of a story [VIDEO] As a side note I found the formatting, or lack of formatting, interesting. It felt very much like a document, or a piece of paper, than a web page. That surprised me.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28426120,"author":"jonahx","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Chekhov's Gun","text":"Vonnegut drawing graphs of famous story plots: [VIDEO] I saw him do this bit in person in the early 90s and never forgot it.","stance":"rec"}],"oQbei5JGiT8":[{"hn_comment_id":10041429,"author":"jobu","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Assange, the law of limitation, and the next eight days","text":"This video does a pretty good job of explaining consent for those that don't think AA's description sounds like rape: [VIDEO] (Tea Consent)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23630839,"author":"bergstromm466","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Microsoft duplicates data from Firefox without asking","text":"> as it's often said when it comes to other people attempting to cross your personal boundaries, \"'No' is a complete answer\". I love that, so important! Have people seen the Tea consent video? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27749083,"author":"WhyNotHugo","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Console Do Not Track \u2013 Proposal for a standard environment variable","text":"You know what else expresses lack of consent? Lack of consent. It\u2019s very sad how this \u201cyou consent unless otherwise stated\u201d ideology keep growing and growing. \u201cWe\u2019re not spying on you, it\u2019s just that you never expressed not wanting to be spied upon\u201d. Here\u2019s a very educational video on how giving consent works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oSmqbnhHp1c":[{"hn_comment_id":7654144,"author":"kevingadd","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Racket on the Playstation 3? It's Not What you Think [video]","text":"The speaker actually begins talking about racket and how they use it at about 6 minutes into the video. Here's a link: [VIDEO] Interesting to hear how they replaced GOAL in their toolchain. The people I've met who used GOAL in the past talked at length about how much they miss it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18904632,"author":"steinuil","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Halo was written with a Lisp dialect called blamscript (2014)","text":"Other than the games they wrote entirely in GOAL, all of their PS3+ games use a series of lispy DSLs implemented in Racket that get compiled to C and C++ for defining data to be loaded in the game and dependencies between these data, light scripting, dialogues, stuff like that. There's a talk by one of the engine devs at RacketCon from a few years ago on youtube about how they use these DSLs and how they came to be: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29988565,"author":"neilv","month":"2022-01","story_title":"OpenGOAL: Port of Jak and Daxter, written in GOAL, a custom Lisp by Naughty Dog","text":"Related talk by Dan Liebgold from Naughty Dog, at RacketCon 2013: [VIDEO] Starting at around 10m into the talk, Liebgold says their DC language for TLOU (to get what they most needed from a DSL even if using C++ instead of GOAL) was implemented in Racket. For anyone not familiar with TLOU, it was a critically-acclaimed game, and my personal all-time favorite game for storytelling that somehow grabbed me. (I dislike all zombie franchises, but at a key point towards the end of the nonlinear narrative and playing in the game, I was surprised how much I really wanted to protect the kid. Which I'll partly attribute to a Lispy DSL that helped them execute immersive storytelling in a zombie stealth shooter.) [LINK] This is one of the Racket success stories. They seem to happen because someone already knows they want a Lisp, they end up picking Racket without needing anyone else's permission, and the people using it are capable of designing and building whatever missing pieces they need.","stance":"rec"}],"oTpA5jt1g60":[{"hn_comment_id":45931886,"author":"noir_lord","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Microsoft executive closes replies after Windows 11 \"Agentic OS\" backlash","text":"That's an entertaining read. I binned Windows 11 recently (only kept it around for gaming) because I didn't like the direction it was clearly going (and has been for a while - including their shoehorning of AI into everything when I don't want it or need it) and don't game enough that I care much any more. For the first time since the 80's I'm not running a Windows OS on any of my machines. I doubt they'll care, I'm one user of hundreds of millions but I don't have to consider whether every update is going to turn on something I don't want/hate so I care. The linked video (via a linked post) from Dave Plummer does indeed sum up my feelings pretty well - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46447109,"author":"pipes","month":"2025-12","story_title":"2025 was a disaster for Windows 11 as bugs and intrusive features erode trust","text":"The average home user probably won't know what power shell and GitHub are. I can't run the scripts you are talking about on my work pc. I can sympathise with your point of view but it does feel a bit like \"works for me because I know what I'm doing\". Also how long before another Windows update that undoes what the scripts do. I used to be very pro windows simply because of backwards compatibility and hardware support was ridiculously good. I can't recommend Linux to relatives as they'd be utterly confused. Dave Plummer, ex windows kernel dev does a good job of explaining what the issues are: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48621057,"author":"GeekyBear","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file","text":"I find this take (from the guy who wrote the Windows task manager while at Microsoft) to be evenhanded. > Windows \"SUCKS\": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oTugjssqOT0":[{"hn_comment_id":4270820,"author":"allardschip","month":"2012-07","story_title":"How to hack the beliefs that are holding you back","text":"Reminds me of Annette Benning in American Beauty: \"I will sell this house today. I will sell this house today.\" Not starting on activities because you don't like them or you don't feel not comfortable will drag you down. You'll be thinking about it all day. I tell myself in the morning to the most unpleasant thing on my to do list first. Eat the hairy frog first! I learned from Randi Pausch. Worth watching every minute: [VIDEO] -edit spelling","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25274310,"author":"will_pseudonym","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Writing well","text":"Absolutely. In that same vein, I've gotten a lot out of so many similar videos which are ostensibly about one thing, but to effectively use what they're teaching, you have to start learning/mastering something else entirely. \"Indirect learning\" is one way to put it, and a term I picked up from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture[0]. I've gained so much from watching that video, as well as his Time Management video[1]. So much so that I rewatch it about once a year, because every time you rewatch something, you're a different person in certain ways, and you often appreciate things much more the more you change and grow as a person. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":420637,"author":"bluefish","month":"2009-01","story_title":"Do you set goals?","text":"Not goal related directly; I've found this lecture by the late professor Randy Pausch regarding time management to be very interesting. I'm not sure I agree with his hands-free phone + bike use tip, but I think his talk has a lot of good points. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":583569,"author":"screwperman","month":"2009-04","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?","text":"Just to put my advice in perspective: I'm an Indian who will possibly be attending (a pretty good) public university this year. I'm the typical HN/reddit geek: started programming when I was 9, know around 9 programming languages, quite some bit of theory, etc. etc. In school in India, I was bored all the time, got mediocre grades, and had donkeys for teachers. Here's what I feel you should do: 1. Challenge yourself So, you've got to choose from these kinds of activities: A: Activities that you enjoy doing B: Activities that *might* impress (say) the college admissions staff I mostly did stuff exclusive to type A; bad idea . Of course, never do anything that comes only within B. Find what comes under the union of the two. You're in America: you don't hunt for opportunities, you are flooded with them. Someone on this thread recommended \"taking every AP exam available\". Sure, do that: it's really important. But that's not ambitious at all : AP exams cover only about 10% of what Indian entrance examinations do, and you get to use \"calculators\" and \"appendices\" (more like textbooks). Do something real , like aspire to be an IMO/IOI/IPhO/IChO/ISEF medalist (if you don't know what those are, shame on you). 2. Manage your time I was absolutely dismal at this. But I've started doing it for a month and it really does wonders: I have stopped procrastinating and started to feel less stressed out. I'd recommend you watch the late Randy Pausch's other lecture ( [VIDEO] ) or read Getting T","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25787615,"author":"will_pseudonym","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Time Management by Randy Pausch [pdf]","text":"\"This is the most important slide in the entire talk. So, if you want to leave after this slide, I will not be offended, because it is all downhill from here.\" [VIDEO] (Timestamped link of the \"Time Management\" talk by Randy Pausch, which is what the OP PDF is from) That part in the talk is about the \"Eisenhower Matrix\", popularized by Steven Covey in \"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People\", on the importance of prioritizing important, non-urgent tasks over urgent, unimportant tasks. You can read about it here as well, but I haven't seen it put as well as Randy Pausch did in his talk. [LINK] PS If you haven't seen his \"Last Lecture\", it's also fantastic. I watch it about once a year to re-center myself, and remember to focus on the truly important things in life. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"oUaOucZRlmE":[{"hn_comment_id":25360403,"author":"magicink81","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Learnable Programming (2012)","text":"You make a great point about notations becoming more abstract for more advanced use cases, indeed this may be a \"natural\" process. However I'd like to add nuance with the observation that Bret may not be suggesting that we reverse the trend from abstract notation back to concrete visualizations. Actually I think he is calling for a rich variety of visual/concrete notations and symbolic/abstract notations that work in concert together to express our dynamic concepts, and extending those with the use of the dynamism of the computing medium to add interactive aspects to the notations (ala \"Magic Ink\"). His talk \"Media for thinking the unthinkable\" goes into detail on this, especially from minute 10 to minute 17: [VIDEO] The essay Magic Ink: INFORMATION SOFTWARE AND THE GRAPHICAL INTERFACE also goes into detail about this topic [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28368610,"author":"vignesh_warar","month":"2021-08","story_title":"A visual introduction to Gaussian Belief Propagation","text":"What a great article - and the way it's presented is insanely great. It reminds me of a talk given by Bret Victor [VIDEO] (Media for Thinking the Unthinkable)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34487952,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?","text":"For the people asking who is Bret Victor: When \"What are your favourite tech talks of all time?\" is asked on HN, he gets more mentions than anyone else, usually. Some of his talks: Inventing on Principle [LINK] The Future of Programming [LINK] The Humane Representation of Thought [LINK] Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [VIDEO] Seeing Spaces [LINK] Drawing Dynamic Visualizations [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36082773,"author":"boomlinde","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you approach a problem you are not sure has a solution?","text":"I look for different ways of representing the problem domain or the desired outcome. This will improve your vocabulary/toolbox for reasoning about and subdividing them into more approachable units. For some inspiration, I recommend watching this talk by Bret Victor [VIDEO] (Media for Thinking the Unthinkable)","stance":"rec"}],"oV9rvDllKEg":[{"hn_comment_id":41528051,"author":"duped","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Understanding Concurrency, Parallelism and JavaScript","text":"If you prefer to learn by video, here's an excellent talk on the same subject by Rob Pike that I link all the time to people [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27442148,"author":"merb","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file","text":"yeah, basically. a lot of people do not know, but async/await does have NOTHING do to with threads or processes. you can use threads with async/await, but you do not. async/await basically means you are running your \"green threads\"/tasks/promises on a event loop, the event loop can be either single threaded or it can run the stuff on multiple threads. a lot of people just did not get the difference between concurrency vs. parallelism. threads and processes are basically parallelism, while concurrency is async programming. good talk about that stuff from rob pike (go): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33090117,"author":"cratermoon","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Kubernetes Worth It?","text":"Anyone that can wrap their mind around the model of Communicating Sequential Processes[1] implemented using channels in Go will improve their programming. See also Concurrency is not Parallelism by Rob Pike: [VIDEO] After I figured it out, I spent a good month writing personal projects to play with channels and concurrency and get the \"these are cool I'm going to use them everywhere\" urge out of my system. 1 [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46154929,"author":"auxiliarymoose","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig","text":"Agreed. Rob Pike presented a good talk \"Concurrency is not Parallelism\" which explains the motivations behind Go's concurrency model: [VIDEO] Between the lack of \"colored functions\" and the simplicity of communicating with channels, I keep surprising myself with how (relatively) quick and easy it is to develop concurrent systems with correct behavior in Go.","stance":"rec"}],"oVfHeWTKjag":[{"hn_comment_id":7531931,"author":"simias","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Facebook CPC \u2013 Don't Waste Your Money","text":"There's a good analysis for this phenomenon: [VIDEO] It was posted on HN a while back. The gist is that there's a high chance that your ad was clicked by click farms, even though you bought it legitimately from facebook (in an effort to fool clickfarm detection, apparently). What's even more interesting is that not only are you wasting money buying the ads, you also end up with less legitimate \"likers\" seeing your content because of the way facebook propagates new posts. So you're actually paying to get negative results.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7531933,"author":"Riseed","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Facebook CPC \u2013 Don't Waste Your Money","text":"Yes. Here's a video (by youtube user Veritasium) that walks through an experiment and explanation, for those who are interested. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7638445,"author":"vacri","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Facebook earnings gain as ad sales surge 82%; CFO is stepping down","text":"Veritasium on youtube has a couple of videos breaking down the numbers - not only do you have to pay to get views now, but the views delivered above and beyond what you usually get are fraudulent. He showed the usage of his page beforehand, with users clustered in Western countries, generally 20-40% of whom interacted with his page in some way. After paying for more views, they were all from developing countries, a profile of users he'd never seen before with very little (0-1%) engagement with his page. It's worth checking out his videos if you want more detail on the patterns he found. It's pretty clear that it's fraudulent. [LINK] (explores problems he sees with FB as a marketing platform) [VIDEO] (massive influx of unengaged developing-world pageviews)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9201935,"author":"Veedrac","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Reasons not to use Facebook","text":"Since this seems to just be a braindump, I might as well add Veritasium's comments on the matter: [LINK] [VIDEO] I found them pretty interesting listening from a content-distribution and -consumption side of things, rather than from a social-network perspective.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10025857,"author":"lingben","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Why Facebook\u2019s video theft problem can\u2019t last","text":"facebook as a platform and business is hollow, but very few realize it. this is similar to Enron, Madoff, the financial crisis, Groupon, etc. history has shown that 99.99999% of people totally miss these business models that are built on a MASSIVELY fraudulent or hollow foundation. When the music stops thousands and thousands of gallons of pixels will be spilt trying to explain how nobody saw their collapse coming and why they are not to blame. Here are two videos that succinctly introduce the reality of facebook's mirage: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13059196,"author":"sean_patel","month":"2016-11","story_title":"We turned $140k on Kickstarter into $40k debt and broke even","text":"> Is that for real? Is everyone else's experience with Facebook advertising similar? Yeah. It's called \"Facebook Fraud\". See a real live experiment someone did, to figure out the true reach and ROI on Facebook Advertizing. => [VIDEO] I too did a similar experiment using a pre-paid Visa card (for 50$) so that FB doesn't keep charging my Credit Card and/or lets it get stolen from bad security practices. My results were similar to the guy in the Youtube Video. Facebook's likes and \"reach\" are mostly automated or from in-house click-farms in South-east asia (think India, Vietnam, Phillipines etc)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45857151,"author":"game_the0ry","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams","text":"Veritasium had a really good video on how facebook benefited from people buying legitimate (not fraudulent, click-farm) likes from fb. [1] Its over 10 years old now, but really good. Basically, you could pay fb to boost your fb page, which is the \"legitimate\" way to get more reach. The problem was that click farms would like your page anyway, Why? Bc liking pages they were not paid to like would help hide fraudulent activity. So if one click farm clicked many likes on one page, that would be eady to spot as fraud, so that same click farm would like many other pages as well, ones that fb customers paid to boost and also got in front of the same click farms. This created a dynamic where buying legitimate traffic from fb would hurt reach anyway bc the algo would key off of engagement, which would plummet bc the click farms saw the post that the page legitimately paid for. But that just incentivized the page owners to pay for more reach, thus fb would get paid more - fb had no incentive to stop this and paying fb in the first place would be worse tha not paying them at all. LAWL. I guess the moral is -- never pay for boosting. And makes you question the quality of meta's revenue. But the flip sides is that many companies (mine included) rely on instagram ads for revenue. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oY59wZdCDo0":[{"hn_comment_id":8410123,"author":"adwn","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are your sources of inspiration and motivation?","text":"The Frontier Is Everywhere \u2013 the first video in the Sagan Series by Reid Gower: [VIDEO] It gives me the motivation to work towards a goal which lies tens, hundreds, maybe a thousand years in the future. Seeing this video puts my own selfish needs and feelings in perspective, and inspires me to do my little part in making humanity just a little bit better.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8676043,"author":"frinxor","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Wanderers: a short film of humanity's expansion into the Solar System [video]","text":"Check out Reid Gower's videos as well, the Sagan Series, a collection of videos he did that also used Carl Sagan's voice. [VIDEO] And of course, Cosmos, which is where all the audio is from in all these videos [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12490033,"author":"JorgeGT","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Why Bezos\u2019 rocket is unprecedented\u2013and worth taking seriously","text":"\u201cOur remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.\u201d ~ Carl Sagan. Bonus: with music [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oYk8CKH7OhE":[{"hn_comment_id":10838283,"author":"thinkpad20","month":"2016-01","story_title":"New Adventures for Elm","text":"> Elm is cute and interesting, but it's type system is less expressive than other languages and lacks features that I consider essential. I'd recommend watching this talk: [0]. Evan talks a lot about the decisions that went into the language, such as not having type classes or other advanced features. He makes a strong case for Elm not as a language-to-rule-them-all, but as a tool for the average programmer, who is more interested in building things than in learning about theory. The myriad language features in Haskell, OCaml, etc. are wonderful to those who understand them, but have not proven to be particularly effective at attracting those who aren't already interested in the languages. In that talk, he really made a strong case as to why Elm is valuable and relevant, even for someone such as myself, a functional programming nerd who loves learning about type theory, abstract algebra, and similar things. Also, I really don't think it's fair to say \"The amount of people using Elm right now is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of people using OCaml (and F#, in more recent years).\" OCaml has been around for almost 20 years now, and F# for more than 10. Both have the backing of very large development teams. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10547769,"author":"abglassman","month":"2015-11","story_title":"A sliding puzzle, built with Elm","text":"I'm pretty keen to play with Elm, but it gives me some pause that an app like this (or the demo at [LINK] ) results in... 11k lines of Javascript. Nevertheless, these talks got me bulled up on Elm: [LINK] (Richard Feldman, collegially, on React -> Elm)</a> / [VIDEO] (Evan Czaplicki on the motivation for Elm)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10598233,"author":"brodo","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Making Elm faster and friendlier in 0.16","text":"Evan has described a lot of the thinking behind his decisions in this talk: [VIDEO] The <~ for Signal.map is a good example for a \"clever\" thing which makes languages hard to read for newbies. It looks like it's part of the syntax and not a function. It's not hard to understand, but it's another thing to learn. I am very happy that things are removed from Elm (or not added in the first place, like type classes) because design is not finished when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing more to remove.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12153963,"author":"intellectable","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Functional Programming Jargon","text":"I like how mpj explains it. Monad - FunFunFunction #21 [LINK] Furthermore, the creator of Elm has a fun explanation too. Evan Czaplicki - Let's be mainstream! User focused design in Elm - Curry On [VIDEO] More serious computer scientist explains monads in the following. Erik Meijer: Functional Programming [LINK] and here too [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12286953,"author":"a-saleh","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Any great talks you would like to share?","text":"Lets be mainstream by Evan Czaplicky Designer of Elm language talks about principles he used to create language as approachable as JavaScript but as type-safe as haskell. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15030062,"author":"tcard","month":"2017-08","story_title":"The Problem with F# Evangelism","text":"A great take on this topic is a talk by Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, another functional language: Let's be mainstream! [1] The conclusions are more or less the same than the article, but Evan goes into a lot more depth. And in my opinion, as a result, Elm does very good in this regard. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29894472,"author":"redbar0n","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Features of a dream programming language","text":"Elm creator Evan Czaplicki can, in an elegant and pedagogical way that would feel familiar to at least developers coming from JS: [VIDEO] from 24:14 until 29:39. Haskell/FP/Math purists would probably balk at the oversimplification. But introducing intimidating concepts by way of such oversimplification (without entirely missing the target) is precisely the point! Beginners just need a very rough and coarse grained overview, so they are able to gain some basic familiarity with the concept. That gives them some already-familiar conceptual knobs to hang further details on, reduces fear, and inspires curiosity to investigate further.","stance":"rec"}],"oYp5XuGYqqY":[{"hn_comment_id":21272882,"author":"patcon","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Depressed People See the World More Realistically (2017)","text":"This reminds me of this amazing TED Talk: Do we see reality as it is? (Donald Hoffman, cognitive scientist) [VIDEO] The intellectual bomb in the video is this: Organisms that perceive only \"fitness\" drive to extinction all organisms that perceive reality as it is. (in model systems simulating environments and creatures navigating them) My take: at every level, it would seem, perceiving true reality is not favoured. Nevermind cognitive biases, that's just one level. Literally the fabric of the universe: spacetime, matter, language, etc. It means nothing that it might feel comfortable or intuitive -- we should question it all.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12758883,"author":"wh-uws","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Image Synthesis from Yahoo's open_nsfw","text":"This is basically the exact hypothesis of a TED talk I saw by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. [VIDEO] fascinating stuff","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27639049,"author":"cartoonworld","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Words of encouragement for someone lost in life?","text":"This is extremely relatable and true. Thank you. The Tinder game is so horrible, 5% of the women get the attention of 80% of the men or more, leaving both the men and women in the other group feeling like there is something wrong with them. People feel the need to edit themselves in order to fit the false narrative created by these gamified dating scenarios, or else experience the fear of dying alone . There is nothing wrong with you. Our complicated, 3-dimensional, deep , personalities and lives are not meant to be reduced to a catalog, best consumed on the toilet, dismissed or accepted instantly based upon a false presentation designed to harness the evolutionary biology of actual living beings. For money. This is not constrained to human society. There is an amusing anecdote of the Australian Jewel Beetle that also experiences the Tinder Effect. This nearly caused their extinction. I encourage you to watch Donald Hoffman's 2015 TED Talk \"Do we see reality as it is?\"[0] linked below for your convenience. I've timestamped the relevant section, skip forward about 100 seconds or so for the direct discussion of the Australian jewel beetle. [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oZAc5t2lkvo":[{"hn_comment_id":12133036,"author":"Someone","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Fresh work on the mathematics of bicycles in motion","text":"The surprising thing is that it is way more than \"a few feet\" . Apologies for repeating myself, but watch [VIDEO] (And that is not on smooth terrain) And nitpick: typical bicycles aren't symmetric left-right. The chain and gears make them heavier at the right. Most mass is close to the center line, though, so its moment is negligible, especially when ridden by a human.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13034926,"author":"ramanan","month":"2016-11","story_title":"The stability of the bicycle (2006)","text":"Bicycles are surprisingly stable as long as they are able to maintain some momentum. minutephysics had a great video about this too: How Do Bikes Stay Up?: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"o_4EX4dPppA":[{"hn_comment_id":18271925,"author":"GolDDranks","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Must-See Tech Talks for Every Programmer (2014)","text":"I enjoyed \"The Hard Parts of Open Source\" by Evan Czaplicki (the creator of the Elm programming language) a lot. [VIDEO] It's not a talk about technology, but it's a talk on people _in_ technology. As an open source enthusiast, I found the discussion very important, especially in context where we easily tend to be distracted by technical details.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26158243,"author":"spicyusername","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Elm Roadmap","text":"For those interested in hearing about Elm creator Evan Czaplicki's experiences with developing open source software and the complexities of internet social dynamics, there is an exceptional talk 'The Hard Parts of Open Source Software'. [VIDEO] Regardless of whether you agree with his approach to developing a programming language, it is a talk worth listening to. Very insightful.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18276267,"author":"shady-lady","month":"2018-10","story_title":"What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?","text":"I think the 2018 Strange Loop talk \"The Hard Parts of Open Source\" by Evan Czaplicki hits on some things which SO should adopt. relevant screengrab: [LINK] full talk at [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22074406,"author":"mannycalavera","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Actix project postmortem","text":"Evan Czaplicki (Elm designer) has a great talk about this issue \"The Hard Parts of Open Source\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22824318,"author":"jlokier","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Why I\u2019m Leaving Elm","text":"For me, the best thing I got from this critique was the link to this 2018 talk by Evan: The Hard Parts of Open Source, [VIDEO] I found Evan's talking style really entertaining and enjoyable, and I totally relate to the first part about \"why don't you just...\" and \"have you thought about delegation...\"! The HN comments here are near uniformly negative towards Elm and supportive of Luke's criticisms. Fair enough, it's a reasoned critique and those are definitely issues that would affect users. I found the critique informative and useful. I don't use Elm though I've watched with passing interest for a while. Now I feel there are gotchas or expectations I should be aware of if I'm considering using it, about the way the project is heading. But I felt it came off way more entitled than I'm comfortable, mainly when Luke starts moralising , placing ethical obligations upon Evan. That came over to me as \"you are obliged to do a lot more work that I want you to do, on your own time and personal cost, and to stop developing the project according to your own vision or you are a bad person\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22825700,"author":"klntsky","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Why I\u2019m Leaving Elm","text":"Great talk indeed. I feel like it might be helpful to online communities to add a real \"intent\" field to their posting forms, like here in this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23533214,"author":"TheDong","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Adobe to remove Flash Player from web site after December 2020","text":"\"why don't you just\" is called out in Evan's \"The hard parts of open source\" [0] talk. He goes into some of the reasons it's a bad phrase and some of the problems behind it. I'd recommend the talk. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25157040,"author":"allenu","month":"2020-11","story_title":"The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders","text":"There's a great Strange Loop talk by Evan Czaplicki (of Elm fame) where he alludes to the challenges of maintaining an open source project.[1] In it he describes how feedback often starts as an innocuous \"Why don't you just...?\" where the person making the request doesn't have the full understanding of the system as a whole and may see their request as a simple one-off that can be done quickly. To answer them fully, the open source maintainer has to respond with a long explanation of why their suggestion isn't an option. Or, maybe they don't respond and now the original poster doesn't feel the community is supporting them. This asymmetry can lead to poor communication in the community. I've been working on an app and was reading about the pros and cons of going freemium vs. pay up-front. I was surprised to read that people suggested the pay model is better for indie devs because with free, you'll have more users, but you'll also get worse feedback from the free users. Maybe there's a correlation between seeing something as free and feeling that the work behind it is trivial? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"o_AIw9bGogo":[{"hn_comment_id":40024465,"author":"TimeBearingDown","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Ubuntu 24.04 (and Debian) removed libsystemd from SSH server dependencies","text":"It\u2019s interesting you say that? It runs completely counter to my experience coming from the \u201cBSD-style\u201d rc.d init Arch used to use, and migrating to systemd. Any specific issues? I didn\u2019t see any. No offense. One factor may be that Arch prioritizes not patching upstream - helped save them from targeting here, and it doesn\u2019t go overboard with default configs, which I\u2019ve long appreciated. Not to distro-war, I\u2019m very grateful for Debian. My background is finding Linux in the mid-00s and breaking many SuSE, Ubuntu, and one or two Debian systems before finding something I could understand, repair, and maintain in 2008 Arch. systemd accentuated its ability to stay relevant with enterprise Linux, made it even easier to package for, and has been a useful tool in diagnosing service issues and managing bad software for me. I\u2019m not sure how often it\u2019s posted here but Benno Rice formerly of FreeBSD Core Team has an excellent and amusing discussion of systemd\u2019s technical merits. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40169433,"author":"eropple","month":"2024-04","story_title":"A BSD person tries Alpine Linux","text":"> Turning Linux into Windows by replicating svchost.exe shouldn't be applauded by the Linux community. ... We've got Linux's PID 1 (for most distros) controlled by a MS employee, who replicated Windows' svchost.exe. And people are all excited? systemd was pretty consciously patterned after launchd, not svchost. The goal was, and for good reasons, to make Linux behave like a more integrated Unix-like that already existed: MacOS. Benno Rice has an excellent presentation on systemd that's worth watching through to the end; unlike most of the table-pounding (and \"it's just svchost.exe!!\" is exactly that), he provides what I think is a pretty fair--and, interestingly to me, a BSD-grounded--view as to where systemd is strong and is weak. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41175576,"author":"SahAssar","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retrospective (2020)","text":"[VIDEO] (The Tragedy of systemd) is an interesting talk on this topic from the view of someone (Benno Rice) in BSD land. Highly recommended. EDIT: this is mentioned in the article, thanks koalacola","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42886297,"author":"fermigier","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Sixos: A nix OS without systemd [video]","text":"There is a wonderful talk by Benno Rice a few years ago. Insightful and entertaining. Not focussed only on the negatives, BTW. [LINK] [VIDEO] HN discusion: [LINK] LWN comments: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45314736,"author":"nickysielicki","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Systemd can be a cause of restrictions on daemons","text":"I linked it elsewhere in this thread, but you should really watch this talk, particularly 12:45 through 16:20: [VIDEO] tl;dr: systemd isn't meant to be an init system, it's meant to manage services, and the alternative world where you don't have a unified system for managing services and events actually sucks.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19208676,"author":"isostatic","month":"2019-02","story_title":"The Tragedy of Systemd [video]","text":"I think that the section on change at is great. The first 1500 seconds are about systemd any why it is and what it's trying to do, but that doesn't really get to the core of why I complain about it. [VIDEO] Systemd is change. Massive change that's being forced on us by a twat. Unlike Linux, which was a kernel delivered by a twat but was take-it or leave-it, this is being forced on us. It's untrustworthy and threatening and unknown. In some cases it's an attack on our identity -- \"the way you did it in the past is rubbish, do it this way\". Clearly we are going to be defensive about it. This isn't unique to people who've used linux for the last 3 decades. Douglas Adams knew this 20 years ago: 1) everything that\u2019s already in the world when you\u2019re born is just normal; 2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) anything that gets invented after you\u2019re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it\u2019s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.\u201d His original article (in a newspaper - remember them?) is at [LINK] He mentions John Humphrys and his sneering view of this new fangled internet. Humphrys was (and still is) the bbc radio 4 breakfast presenter. At the same time Terry Wogan was the radio 2 breakfast presenter, a similar age (about 60 at the time). His attit","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19960362,"author":"masklinn","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Linux distros without systemd","text":"> SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? The reasons for the controversies have not really changed (lennart, the idea that it's not \"unixy\", a takeover of many subsystems by various systemd components, \u2026) so people who didn't like systemd years ago probably still don't. As somebody who's not really involved, I found Benno Rice's The Tragedy of Systemd[0] interesting and enlightening. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19960611,"author":"holstvoogd","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Linux distros without systemd","text":"I recommend watching this to give you some perspective on the SystemD hate: [VIDEO] I too was furious about the existence of systemd, but now I realize that was mostly because I don't want new things and consider many new things to be bad because they are new and there have been a few 'bad apples' in my personal experience","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25266952,"author":"bromonkey","month":"2020-12","story_title":"macOS to FreeBSD migration a.k.a. why I left macOS","text":"\"Linux has systemd\" and that's why the author didn't select it supposedly. I hear this line of thought from people that use FreeBSD often, although I suspect if you ask many of those people why systemd is so horrible you won't actually hear a legitimate (and still relevant) reason from them. I suggest anyone that thinks systemd is terrible and doesn't spend lots of time in Linux to watch this presentation by Benno Rice. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26052355,"author":"mapgrep","month":"2021-02","story_title":"FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available","text":"Wouldn\u2019t have to be systemd, macOS has launchd for init, FreeBSD could come up with its own thing. This is a good talk I saw recently (by a FreeBSD contributor) on why these sorts of systems have become more common, and why they seem so sweeping in scope. [VIDEO] (In fact systemd and launchd are so tailored to their respective operating systems that FreeBSD likely would have to do their own init replacement if they cared to.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27650562,"author":"Ballas","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Avoiding Complexity with Systemd","text":"You have probably already seen this, but I found this an interesting explanation to the why question: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29929791,"author":"IntelMiner","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Slackware Linux 15.0 RC3","text":"There was a great talk by a FreeBSD developer about systemd, and specifically the (in his eyes, somewhat unwarranted) hatred it has attracted and why [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37209098,"author":"klysm","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Version 5 of systemd-free Debian remix Devuan is here","text":"For those looking to understand some of the history of the anti-systemd feelings, I found this presentation useful: The Tragedy of systemd ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38642418,"author":"jimmaswell","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Xorg being removed. What does this mean?","text":"I never had any horse in systemd/init.d and wasn't too familiar with the issue until I watched this presentation. systemd seems reasonable enough after considering it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38891561,"author":"nerdponx","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Systemd through the eyes of a musl distribution maintainer","text":"I always appreciated this presentation for being a reasonable and balanced take, if you're interested in other examples: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41574215,"author":"kemotep","month":"2024-09","story_title":"A word about systemd (2016)","text":"If you haven\u2019t seen this talk[0], I think it covers in a fair shake the positives, negatives, and what even a post-systemd world would have to deal with. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"o_TlE_U_X3c":[{"hn_comment_id":12511173,"author":"fzzzy","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data","text":"I had read a lot about the Cat, but never saw it in action, so I decided to look for a video. This is a fascinating view into Raskin's user interface concepts. The world might have been a very different place if Jobs hadn't interfered with the Macintosh project. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22042903,"author":"marttt","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Leap Technology (keyboard vs. mouse on a Canon Cat machine, ca 1987)","text":"More on the Canon Cat: [LINK] [LINK] There are also a few previous HN discussions on this machine. EDIT: I just have to post this lovely scene from the original video separately. This is about human-computer interaction after all, isn't it! [VIDEO] Aren't we actually approaching an age where this kind of (almost-)single-purpose machines might be making a comeback? The focus this model seems to allow or enforce on the user feels kind of... healthy.","stance":"rec"}],"oaDTiWaYfcM":[{"hn_comment_id":40216622,"author":"andy_ppp","month":"2024-04","story_title":"FTC challenges 'junk' patents held by 10 drugmakers, incl Novo Nordisk's Ozempic","text":"I\u2019m so impressed with the FTC lately, here is an excellent interview Jon Stewart did with the FTC chair Lina Khan: [VIDEO] I did joke I\u2019m really surprised the vested interests selected someone competent who wants to hold these companies accountable to the public.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39939236,"author":"8bitsrule","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Cory Doctorow on Kagi Search","text":"Glad to see Corey mention the Steward/Khan interview. Not only did she speak Peoplese, she pretty much sketched out (in the limited time she got) the main forces at work in the past 30 years of monopolization. Now, hoping to see FTC find their big stick. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40450222,"author":"csa","month":"2024-05","story_title":"US Justice Department to seek breakup of Live Nation-Ticketmaster","text":"Most stuff not easy to describe in a few blurbs, imho. Here\u2019s an article (gift link, so no paywall) that describes the whole situation: [LINK] Good interview with Jon Stewart: [VIDEO] Simple examples are: - Kroger and Albertson\u2019s (grocery stores) - Illumina and Grail (cancer detection) - Amazon for dark patterns regarding signing up for prime, and for privacy violations with Alexa and Ring - Lost challenge to Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard (good to look into, not sure about the specific case) - FTC released a framework for anti-trust that should be a regulatory win.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41075033,"author":"jauntywundrkind","month":"2024-07","story_title":"","text":"There's been very little that's given me hope for the future like seeing the FTC come back into it's own. Government has so many nasty gnarly aspects to it, but nominally it should be watching out for the American people. And the FTC full well ought to be the tip of the spear at keeping some balance to what would otherwise be a Thomas Piketty-style extractive stratification by the rich. It has been such a delight seeing the slumber of Reagan cast off, seeing the FTC active again. In person interviews are rarely super deep, but it's interesting seeing people get to talk out what they are up to. The interview with Linda Khan at the Daily Show in April was nice to see. [VIDEO] Hell yeah this awakening will ruffle some feathers. But my during my entire life it feels like the government has been utterly asleep at the wheel, in max (economic) liberalism overdrive mode. I don't think we can take this denigration much longer; restoring the world so that businesses aren't always leaving us feeling pillaged & blown about capriciously is an enormous phase shift we desperately need, which is integral to believing in some kind of social contract. And ideally the economy can do better if someone is out there defending competition.","stance":"rec"}],"obCjODeoLVw":[{"hn_comment_id":8768782,"author":"coldnebo","month":"2014-12","story_title":"How to Get a Job in Algorithmic Trading","text":"I had to laugh when I saw my response next to @getsat's. Both are valid viewpoints. In other words, not everyone who uses tools has to know how to make tools. Tool makers have more insight into the assumptions behind the tools they create -- they might know how a tool was meant to be used and what its limits are. That being said, there are times when using a screwdriver as a hammer is expedient and does no harm. Of course, there are other times where using Black-Scholes to model a high-volatility market outside of the 'smoothly differentiable' market assumptions it was built on can crash a large part of the economy. It can be a dangerous game to use someone else's tools without knowing their assumptions. As for applied math suggestions: 1) Watch Feynman's take on applied math in physics: [VIDEO] 2) Read this essay \"A Mathematician's Lament\" which points out the math learned in school is likely not really mathematics and that surprisingly math is not practical but aesthetic -- mathematics is closer to art than we are taught: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8903081,"author":"tim333","month":"2015-01","story_title":"What Doesn't Seem Like Work?","text":"There's a lot of physics that isn't maths - more visualising how stuff works. Feynman's quite interesting talking about it here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ob_GX50Za6c":[{"hn_comment_id":3079638,"author":"tuxguy","month":"2011-10","story_title":"26-year old iconoclast Steve Jobs' address to the Academy of Achievement in 1982","text":"Just saw another brilliant Jobs quote, circa 1991, via my svlug friend Rick Moen. I think one of the things that really separate us from the higher primates is that we are tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometre,and humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. It wasn't too proud of a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn't look so good -- but somebody at _Scientific American_ had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle, and a man on a bicycle -- a human on a bicycle -- blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. And that's what a computer is to me. A computer is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. -- Steve Jobs, 1991 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46316974,"author":"joshstrange","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Apples, Trees, and Quasimodes","text":"> the Bay Area tradition that treated computers not as office appliances but as tools for thought, instruments of liberation Missed a great chance to use the \"bicycle for our minds\" Steve Jobs quote (one of my favorite since it resonates so clearly with me) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1818483,"author":"kqr2","month":"2010-10","story_title":"Being Steve Jobs's Boss","text":"Interview with Steve Jobs where he talks about the computer as a bicycle for the mind: [VIDEO] To put it in context, he starts off by talking about the efficiency of animal locomotion. In the animal kingdom, the condor is one of the most efficient. It uses the least amount of energy to travel a kilometer. Human walking is rather inefficient in comparison. However, with a bicycle, a man can blow away a condor.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9037984,"author":"tim333","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Apple's New Market","text":"The Steve Jobs quote mentioned about bicycles for the mind is cool [VIDEO] . I know it's old but I hadn't seen it before. The rest of the article is kind of intellectual mush starting from saying \"litigated against\" in the first sentence when he hasn't and continuing in a similar vein.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35345174,"author":"nntwozz","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Bicycle","text":"Immediately made me think of Steve Jobs and this great clip: \"Computers are like a bicycle for our minds.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"obmt_PkIfBE":[{"hn_comment_id":14503674,"author":"hourislate","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Alex Honnold Scales El Capitan Without Ropes, and the Climbing World Reels","text":"Apparently so. I watch Joe Rogans interview with Robert Sapolsky which I might add was fascinating and he spoke about this at length and how people with toxo are more likely to take risks and or live dangerously. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15757743,"author":"blhack","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers","text":"Listen to this interview with Robert Sapolsky. Somewhat of a superstar in this field: [VIDEO] (Ignore the person interviewing him)","stance":"rec"}],"oeYBdghaIjc":[{"hn_comment_id":21962332,"author":"ptr","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?","text":"I'd start with CMU's \"Intro to Database Systems\", their lectures are on youtube. Highly recommended both for the depth and how Andy Pavlo presents the topic. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26813274,"author":"alistairw","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Foundations of Databases (1995)","text":"Agreed. I finished watching them at the start of this year and it's significantly helped me in using and making choices about databases. I've also since started implementing my own database for learning off the back of them. Couldn't be more grateful for those courses being public. link if anyone is interested: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30601667,"author":"maxmcd","month":"2022-03","story_title":"How does database indexing work? (2008)","text":"Obligatory recommendation for the CMU Databases Systems lecture series by Andy Pavlo. [VIDEO] Here's the lecture on tree indexes: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35747696,"author":"runlaszlorun","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The Part of PostgreSQL We Hate the Most (Multi-Version Concurrency Control)","text":"[VIDEO] There are multiple years available for his first DB class but that\u2019s the one I watched. I almost called it his \u2018basic\u2019 class but there\u2019s literally only like one or two classes on SQL before he dives into all the various layers of the internals. There\u2019s also a few of his advanced courses. And then you\u2019ll see guest lectures from industry on about every one of the new DB platforms you can think of. They\u2019re all under \u201cCMU Database Group\u201d on Youtube. Highly recommend.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35500682,"author":"avinassh","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best textbook or video lectures on a topic you've come seen?","text":"Intro to Database Systems by Andy Pavlo - [VIDEO] MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems by Robert Morris - [LINK] Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) - [LINK] Crafting Interpreters - [LINK] > What made it so special these break down really complex topics and make the concepts approachable. As a noob, I learned a lot from these.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36083018,"author":"joelrwilliams1","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some good resources for learning about low level disk/file IO?","text":"I stumbled across this Carnegie Mellon University database course a year or two ago and this guy gets really deep into the technologies behind a database. Here's the list of YouTube videos of lectures that the professor has posted online: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37248619,"author":"avinassh","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Which books, courses, projects have improved your programming skills immensely?","text":"Intro to Database Systems by Andy Pavlo - [VIDEO] MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems by Robert Morris - [LINK] Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) - [LINK] Crafting Interpreters - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"oeqPrUmVz-o":[{"hn_comment_id":24545349,"author":"jkcorrea","month":"2020-09","story_title":"New Steve Jobs recordings from the '80s released","text":"For those interested, AllAboutSteveJobs.com keeps a pretty good repository of Jobs moments. My personal favorite is his 1997 WWDC talk [1]. In one talk he demonstrates what it is to be a great leader organizationally, publicly, and as a product visionary. He also opens himself up to harsh criticism from people who were, in a lot of ways, rightfully pissed at him. He takes both tough questions and ad hominem attacks gracefully and reframes the narrative in a positive way without disparaging the questioner [2]. To me, this is in stark contrast to the staged events with canned/screened questions that most tech leaders run today. He also lays out much of the vision for products that are still being rolled out 10-20 years later. Crazy. Really recommend watching the full thing if you have time, but also linking to a little excerpt from one of the best moments. [1] (full video): [LINK] [2] (insult excerpt): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33786248,"author":"DieBruderBauer","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Oceanic+ on the Apple Watch Ultra and the perils of subscription based software","text":"[VIDEO] The libre/open app issue has been brought up by Apple nay-sayers for time immemorial; Steve Job's response is brilliant here, frankly quite timeless and ultimately (in my view) apropos. \"You've gotta start from the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39059171,"author":"ksec","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Mourning Google","text":"Most of the people who worked directly under Steve Jobs knows he is an Asshole. At the same time they all loves him. You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ojm74VGsZBU":[{"hn_comment_id":21186381,"author":"crummy","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong","text":"One of my favourite Youtube channels, Every Frame A Painting, talks about this in Vancouver - except that the movies are rarely set in Vancouver: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14112492,"author":"JBlue42","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Walking in L.A.","text":"I recommend \"Los Angeles Plays Itself\" to any interested in seeing the juxtaposition of what you see in movies/tv with the reality. There's also a much shorter, funnier one called \"Vancouver Never Plays Itself\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21099255,"author":"tobr","month":"2019-09","story_title":"When Filming in New York, the City Is Always the Star","text":"This made me rewatch Vancouver Never Plays Itself [1] from Every Frame a Painting. It didn\u2019t have as many examples of Vancouver playing New York as I remembered, but it\u2019s still an interesting demonstration of how a city is made to appear not to be itself on screen. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32269236,"author":"mynameisvlad","month":"2022-07","story_title":"That time when I accidentally social engineered myself to a film set","text":"> The idea is that this would promote more use of local businesses. It does not usually work out that way though. Great Youtube video on this topic, especially since you're likely talking about Vancouver: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ok2uR3btMrE":[{"hn_comment_id":13371659,"author":"bufordsharkley","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Why Many Cities Have No Money","text":"The author, Chuck Marohn, has previously made this video that explains how a Land Value Tax would affect the fiscal situation of a city (for the better): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31732287,"author":"emmateapot","month":"2022-06","story_title":"The Tax That Could Solve the Housing Crisis","text":"Simply put, Land value tax is a tax on the unimproved value of land. It also can be thought of as _location_ value tax. Property tax typically includes both land value tax and the value of the improvements to the land - buildings, etc. While they may sound similar, land value tax and property tax lead to vastly different outcomes. Check out this Strong Towns video for an explanation about both taxes and how they differ: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"okg7uq_HrhQ":[{"hn_comment_id":22200237,"author":"hybrid_cluster","month":"2020-01","story_title":"WHO declares coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency","text":"One of the main causes of death of the new coronavirus seems to be Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). This can be treated fairly effectively with ventilation, but such treatment would obviously require a bed, ventilation system, and attentive nurses, at the very least. It's easy to imagine how these requirements may currently not be met for all patients with ARDS symptoms in Wuhan. For more info on ARDS and treatment in the context of the current pandemic, see this informative explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22600394,"author":"taf2","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Low-Cost Arduino-Based Ventilator","text":"I really like this as DIY - I also found this video [VIDEO] - explaining how the virus eventually kills by causing failure of the lungs. After explaining the functional parts he goes on to explain what seem like some interesting things to consider when designing a ventilator with respect to how they were used during the SARS outbreak. e.g. tidal forces causing iteration and more inflammation, which then cuts off more air flow. So thinking about how you maintain a constant air pressure instead of more pushing force... at least the explanation made sense intuitively but I'm not a doctor and don't know if this video or your Ventilator are safe - but I do like the DIY aspect of it and figure thinking about or sharing ideas can't be bad...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22735668,"author":"brigandish","month":"2020-03","story_title":"E-VENT: Emergency ventilator design toolbox","text":"Thanks. I'm not a doctor so I could be wrong (and happy to be corrected) but from my understanding the problem with those techniques in this situation is that they are for clearing mucus from the lungs (in the bronchi and broncioles) not from alveoli, because mucus isn't the type of fluid in the alveoli. Hence, they'd have little effect. This video[1] goes into what happens when you have ARDS caused COVID and how it will be treated. It shows why machines like CPAP aren't appropriate too. [1] [VIDEO] How Coronavirus Kills: Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) & COVID-19 Treatment","stance":"rec"}],"ooNzRrHA9VY":[{"hn_comment_id":29947457,"author":"faitswulff","month":"2022-01","story_title":"How bad is my gas stove?","text":"Chef Jon Kung posted a video talking about cooking on induction that features a rounded induction cooktop for woks: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30655262,"author":"cespare","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The case for induction cooking","text":"It's true that most induction cooktops/ranges aren't great for woks, but in principle the induction surface doesn't have to be flat -- it can be a concave shape to match the wok. In fact these exist -- if you search for \"induction wok burners\" you can see some pictures. (I only recently became aware of this after watching this video of a chef who uses induction cooking in a small kitchen: [VIDEO] ) Perhaps in the future there will be cooktops that include a wok depression on the surface, similar to how some gas stoves today include a built-in wok ring.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35563577,"author":"femiagbabiaka","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Chipotle plans to ditch gas grills at 100 new locations","text":"> Doing a decent stir fry is all but impossible on either induction or standard electric. Not really. Jon Kung makes the positive case for an induction wok better than I can: [VIDEO] . The usage of the wok precedes the gas burner by.. maybe 1500 years? Cooking on an electric range is just something to get used to.","stance":"rec"}],"ooOL4T-BAg0":[{"hn_comment_id":12893702,"author":"michaelbuckbee","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Show HN: DeepRhyme (D-Prime) \u2013 Generating dope rhymes with machine learning","text":"Linked (but a little buried) in the post is this absolute standout of a YouTube video about the rhyme scheme in Eminem's Lose Yourself. [VIDEO] Really drives home both how much more sophisticated hip hop has become and the incredible degree of difficulty in trying to simulate such sophisticated language structures.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7695452,"author":"Goopplesoft","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary","text":"Interesting comment about the L, S, and D usage and rhyming. I was particularly surprised by the effort that goes into Eminem's rap that I just contributed to \"good flow\". Some of that effort explained in this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"oqu5DjzOBF8":[{"hn_comment_id":35675856,"author":"smonn_","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought","text":"I'd recommend watching this video if you'd like to know the more nuanced story behind climate change: [VIDEO] I am not qualified at all to really comment on it but this did open my eyes to how confusing the entire thing is.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36004476,"author":"jandrese","month":"2023-05","story_title":"The Upper Atmosphere Is Cooling, Prompting New Climate Concerns","text":"If you are confused as to why this is a bad thing this video explains the mechanics of global warming in a way anybody can understand. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36081139,"author":"orwin","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Emissions are no longer following the worst case scenario","text":"This is good news, somehow. Here is how the earth 'greenhouse effect' really works: [VIDEO] This is why Co2 do not have any effect until it reaches the high troposphere. That takes 20 years. The average climate we have right now is caused by emissions from 2003. I'll repeat that in the comments of every climate article I read by the way, sorry for the repetition. M","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39510440,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Xkcd: Greenhouse Effect","text":"For anyone who's curious, here's an explanation of how the greenhouse effect works -- it's not just that some infrared radiation escapes from earth to space, while some other infrared radiation gets trapped. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43165764,"author":"jeffbee","month":"2025-02","story_title":"The Upper Atmosphere Is Cooling, Prompting New Climate Concerns","text":"This Sabine Hossenfelder video helped me understand stratospheric cooling as a climate change outcome. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45515385,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap","text":"Related context: Sabine Hossenfelder's explanation of how the greenhouse effect works -- it's interesting and weird: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"orMtwOz6Db0":[{"hn_comment_id":24696618,"author":"codebolt","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020","text":"Such a joy to see Sir Roger Penrose awarded with this honor. One of my favorite contemporary intellectuals. If anyone hasn't seen it, I recommend his recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25542400,"author":"marius_k","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"Consciousness is Not a Computation (Roger Penrose) | AI Podcast Clips [LINK] Full episode: [VIDEO] I don't take Roger's view about consciousness for granted but it is very interesting nevertheless.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33273021,"author":"justsee","month":"2022-10","story_title":"New research suggests our brains use quantum computation","text":"Lex Fridman interviewed Penrose on this topic recently (2020) and Penrose delivered a very accessible walkthrough of his historical and current thoughts on the topic. [VIDEO] (Deep-link half-way through to his discussion on microtubules)","stance":"rec"}],"orQKfIXMiA8":[{"hn_comment_id":45179591,"author":"mixermachine","month":"2025-09","story_title":"iPhone dumbphone","text":"Also great video regarding this topic: \"You Need to Be Bored. Here's Why.\" [VIDEO] I now regularly force myself to \"actively\" do nothing for 15 minutes and just think. All the things I put into my brain as \"todo, please remember\" at some point in time are coming back during these 15 minutes. I get quite a lot of clarity with this exercise. As soon I pick up my phone afterwards and start browsing the clarity evaporates which feels bad. So wasting time on my phone becomes less and less appealing to me. Lets see where this leads me. I so far wasted quite a bit of time with my phone.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45430051,"author":"davelacy","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Kagi News","text":"Nice design. I like the \"today in history\" feature Lately I've been working toward less app time and more boredom [VIDEO] \u00af\\_(\u30c4)_/\u00af works wonders","stance":"rec"}],"osSMJRyxG0k":[{"hn_comment_id":14873600,"author":"robertelder","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Samsung ends Intel's 2-decade-plus reign in microchips","text":"I watched this video yesterday, and it seems to explain a lot about how Intel has been less focused on building better technology in the last 10-15 years: [VIDEO] I'm not sure how balanced the viewpoint in the video is, but the author comes up with a lot of references.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15155722,"author":"TheDongIsYou","month":"2017-09","story_title":"The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging for Skylake Xeons","text":"This is a very good overview of bad anti-consumer practices Intel has done throughout the last 30 years: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16932771,"author":"snvzz","month":"2018-04","story_title":"AMD's Stock Price Jumps on News of Earnings Spurred by Ryzen","text":"I'm not sure what you mean. From the time AMD released the K7 'Athlon' CPU, until the time Intel released Core2, AMD was king of performance. That's a long spawn of time. To understand why Intel kept selling CPUs like pancakes despite this, check this out: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"otAcmD6XEEE":[{"hn_comment_id":18954213,"author":"open-source-ux","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Algol 68","text":"I strongly recommend this talk by software consultant and author Kevlin Henney called Procedural Programming: It's Back? It Never Went Away He talks a bit out Algol 68 and how influential it was on programming language design. Many language keywords we're familiar with today originated in the 50 year old language specification for Algol 68: int, bool, skip, void, struct. Here's the snippet from the talk about Algol 68 - it's brilliant: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16838888,"author":"open-source-ux","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"If you have an interest in the history of programming methodologies, this talk is fascinating: Procedural programming: it's back? It never went away [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16891353,"author":"bunderbunder","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Designing very large JavaScript applications","text":"You may appreciate Kevlin Henney's talk, \"Procedural Programming - It's back? It never went away.\"[1] It's a tour of how all the best discoveries of the past decade or two really date back to the 1960s. [1] [VIDEO] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18742112,"author":"open-source-ux","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"I really liked this talk about the history of programming and how so many ideas we consider recent or modern are in fact much older than many of us realise. Watching this talk merely amplifies the feeling that the programming profession is in a perpetual loop - discarding or forgetting ideas or concepts, then re-discovering them anew. What's also striking is how rich and varied were the programming ideas that emerged from the 60s and 70s. Kevlin Henney - Procedural Programming: It's Back? It Never Went Away [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"otbnC2zE2rw":[{"hn_comment_id":26208916,"author":"shoo","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Have you taken on debt to fund your startup?","text":"In Australia our major commercial banks offer unsecured loans to businesses based upon the business' cash flow. Example eligibility requirements: turnover of at least $75K per year ; have been operating as current registered business for 1 year+ ; you can provide 12 months of business financial data from your accounting software. You'd need to convince the bank that your business is a relatively reliable and sustainable cash generating machine. Example terms: 9% p.a. interest rate, borrow up to $250k, no fees. Another trick you can do, orthogonal to finance, is the annual-prepay trick. Offer the \"sign up for 12 months at a X% discount\" plan to customers. If you can get some fraction of customers to pay you for a 1 year subscription in advance at e.g. a 30% discount that might really help the business' cash flow. Edit: if your SaaS business is the one linked in your profile then since you are not currently offering your customers an annual prepaid plan then you MUST watch Jason Cohen's talk about optimising SaaS cashflow from his 2013 microconf talk \"Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26663483,"author":"chdaniel","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Where do you find potential customers to validate your idea / MVP?","text":"A couple of things need to be balanced, I think, as I'm doing just that with PriceUnlock ( [LINK] ) PriceUnlock will help SaaS owners finds the perfect pricing for their product, with more upside and less downside when trying new prices. Besides, it helps you stop leaving money on the table. * THE THINGS* 1. You can \"scratch and claw\", as Jason Cohen (founder of WPEngine) puts it. He talks more about this in the YT link below and he also puts out this idea of 150 customers, not \"1000 true fans\". I highly highly recommend watching the video, regardless of going VC/bootstrapped. He also talks about 2 other ways besides scratching and clawing [VIDEO] 2. Building in public is an upward trend these days. Basically you share as many milestones/ups/downs about your journey of building it. This can be a trap as well: it only works if your audience is A) interested in you sharing that, B) probably hackers/builders etc. I asked PG about this and he pretty much summed it up: [LINK] 3. As I'm building PriceUnlock, you'll also notice that I'm collecting emails (the ol' way) to get people's interest. I don't want to make a mailing list, I want to build my product, so I'll aim to be better doing the second rather than the first. But it doesn't hurt to, as Rob Walling did with Drip, launch with some MRR hopefully... or at least with some interest. [LINK] 4. The usual set of things hackers do when they launch their thing: ProductHunt, Betalist, etc. Don't forget to join my subreddit on [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26688695,"author":"yoshyosh","month":"2021-04","story_title":"My experience releasing failed SaaS products","text":"This talk is the holy grail on this topic [VIDEO] niche b2b, w/ natural recurring cycles, $99 price point at a minimum, and not needing to be on call is most ideal","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27133546,"author":"stevoski","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Show HN: Csvbox.io \u2013 CSV import button for a web app, SaaS or API","text":"A good place to start with pricing is tiers at $49/$99/$249. (As recommended in Jason Cohen\u2019s classic and awesome talk \u201cDesigning the Ideal Bootstrapped Business\u201d: [VIDEO] ) Customers at very low price points (such as $9/month) tend to churn quickly, and, counterintuitively, send more customer support interactions per customer than at higher points. You\u2019ll never earn enough from them to cover your customer acquisition costs. Getting rid of the cheap plan also removes the, shall we say, more difficult customer.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31981864,"author":"philmcc","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The New American Micro-SaaS Dream","text":"Jason Cohen is one of my favorite people speaking in this space. Here\u2019s a great, actionable, talk he did at the equally informative Rob Walling\u2019s conference. [VIDEO] (I have followed this advice, and it has brought me a level of success and comfort I didn\u2019t know I could have, as an admittedly run of the mill developer)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32747950,"author":"robocat","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Is it okay to just bootstrap it, even when VCs are knocking?","text":"Jason Cohen has an amazing talk on bootstrapping, with some very solid advice from his own experiences: [VIDEO] Personally I think there is a lot of \u201ckudos\u201d for getting VC funding, so founders often get lured just for status reasons, joining the competition to become a unicorn. Unless you want to (or need to) \u201cswing for the fences\u201d, why give up ownership? Being a founder is already hella risky, and accepting VC money increases your leverage and your risk, which is just uneconomic for an average individual to do (unless they are already wealthy). Don\u2019t double down on a risky bet. VCs get preferential shares, and they have a lot of different ways of taking control in the clauses of the contracts you sign which disempower you, and in return you get shitty common shares and often lose control for the worst reasons. I helped found a small business, and we retained full ownership which worked out great for us, although we will never get those mystical 7/8/9 figure payouts. The majority of founders only make wages[1]. We were in an incubator during our inception and I saw a lot of businesses get sidetracked by all the funding bullshit, control issues, stress, wasting time chasing investors, trying to follow conflicting or bad advice. If you do want to chase funding, consider applying for [LINK] which will help avoid you getting shafted. Other VC transactions are highly negotiation information asymmetric, because they have done many many transactions and you are doing your first, so ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36432230,"author":"mtlynch","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Biggest mistakes to avoid to build a better 1-person business","text":"I think the better version of these ideas is in Jason Cohen's classic \"Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business\" talk.[0, 1] The difference is that Jason Cohen's advice is based on personal experience growing four businesses to over $1M/yr in revenue. I'm not seeing what qualifies this author to give such broad, sweeping advice about bootstrapping. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37438225,"author":"satvikpendem","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Every Software Project Is a Startup That Will Probably Fail","text":"I looked into that book, looks like it's really for venture backed companies trying to form a founding team. I'd recommend that you instead look up micro-SaaS, where you just target making $10k+ monthly recurring revenue and be set, rather than going on the VC treadmill and trying to raise capital, hire a team, etc which is often overkill for first time founders. Rob Walling coined that term initially through his conference on it called MicroConf, he has a new book called [LINK] which I'd recommend. His older book Start Small Stay Small is also quite good. But to start off with a free resource, Jason Cohen's video on designing a bootstrapped business can't be beat: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22202301,"author":"patio11","month":"2020-01","story_title":"My Second Year as a Solo Developer","text":"Two cents offered because this post really strikes a chord with me, and I also spent some time chasing down rabbit holes early in my software business: These products do not appear obviously commercializable and multiple years invested into them without materially improving the businesses does not decrease my confidence in that snap judgment. You could probably talk to business owners with problems, launch an (appropriately priced; hundreds to thousands of dollars per year) product against those problems, build contingent on getting 10 commits to buy, and be at +/- $100k in 12 to 18 months. Many people with less technical and writing ability have done this in e.g. the MicroConf community. If you want the best paint-by-numbers approach to it I've seen, c.f. [VIDEO] (I'll note that What Got Done is probably a viable boutique SaaS business if you somehow figured out distribution for it, at price points between $50 and $200 per month. My confidence on this approaches total. HNers skeptical because it is technically trivial should probably reflect for a moment on how much time is spent on standups at a company with 20 or 200 engineers, what one hour of their time is worth, and how likely that company is to put an engineer on this project specifically.) If you run an API-based business in the future: Usage-based billing is a really tricky business model for a solo developer. Note that you can say \"Usage-based billing but we have a minimum commitment\", and probably should prior to d","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26825223,"author":"147","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Ask HN: My startup has more annual subscribers than monthly. What to make of it?","text":"Please watch this video at this time stamp: [VIDEO] Jason Cohen goes into why annual prepays are great for bootstrapped SaaS.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28861517,"author":"mostlystatic","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Traits of a Desirable Business?","text":"There's a MicroConf talk from 2013 that discusses some of general traits of a desirable bootstrapped business: [VIDEO] (Notes here: [LINK] ) Regarding exits, I'd say low technical complexity also helps[1]. If your whole business is built on top of Wordpress it's probably easy for an acquirer to find someone to maintain it. If the product is complex and needs regular updates then they might need to hire an experienced full-time dev, so you need more revenue to make up for that. Obviously there's a trade-off, and a lot of custom tech also allows you to differentiate. Update: you might also find this book/podcast helpful [LINK] [1] applies to the typical bootstrapped business, there are also high-tech businesses that exit pre-revenue","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29315950,"author":"higgins","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you get started earning money on opensource?","text":"This might be tangential bc it's not about strictly OSS, but this talk is pretty centering: [VIDEO] Patio11's talks at MicroConf too","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34132623,"author":"grepLeigh","month":"2022-12","story_title":"1k True Fans (2008)","text":"This is tough to give general advice for, because you'll want to tap your personal strengths. Here's a great talk by Jason Cohen, if you're trying to design a bootstrapped business. He even mentions the 1,000 true fans goal as being unrealistic compared to a handful of high-paying customers: [VIDEO] Happy to brainstorm though. Here's a few questions to get the ball rolling: What're 2-3 things that people have come to you to learn? What are the 3 problems that are top-of-mind for the person who signs your paychecks? What are the top 3 sources of revenue for your current employer? How much is from expansion revenue (existing customers paying more over time) vs. new logos? Besides the all-in cost of personnel (salary, payroll taxes, health insurance, etc), what are the top expenses of your current employer? Follow the money! Once you start digging into how a company earns and spends money, you'll find ways to add revenue or reduce spend w/ software.","stance":"rec"}],"ouAG4vXFORc":[{"hn_comment_id":41484393,"author":"virgulino","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy","text":"\"Why Do Mainframes Still Exist? What's Inside One? 40TB, 200+ Cores, AI, and more! - Dave explores the IBM z16 mainframe from design to assembly and testing. What's inside a modern IBM z16 mainframe that makes it relevant today?\" - by Dave Plummer. This is an amazing 23-minute video by the Microsoft programmer who developed the Windows NT Task Manager, among other things. He visits IBM and talks to engineers about the Telum chip architecture (Hot Chips 2023), used in the z16 mainframe. Special attention is paid to the cache. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38662003,"author":"bane","month":"2023-12","story_title":"The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way'","text":"Great comment. IBM is as IBM wants to be. I don't think there's a mystery to it and they've ended up on an evolutionary path that can't be reversed. To wit, I just watched a long form video [1] on the passion that goes into IBM mainframes including some interesting clips of various physical robustness tests of the assembled systems. It reminded me of watching clips from various space programs where a largely full-up untested rocket had to put humans into orbit without blowing up. Another revolution that's occurred, but IBM chose not to really follow (asterisk) is the idea that you assume some percentage of your hardware will fail (instead of trying to make it never die) -- then you engineer around that. I'm not sure what will win in the end, but right now the entire industry is telling us to have failover into different availability zones in Amazon, or even across clouds -- one of which IBM offers. 1 - [VIDEO] (asterisk) - IBM does sort of have an understanding of this of course, they have a cloud after all.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39285489,"author":"Tor3","month":"2024-02","story_title":"New IBM LinuxONE 4 Express \u2013 Rack-mounted pre-configured Linux mainframe","text":"Check out this youtube video: [VIDEO] It does a reasonably good job at comparing mainframes to a regular server setup. It's not about SPEC or GFLOPs etc.","stance":"rec"}],"ouvi-fwrfIY":[{"hn_comment_id":23456042,"author":"rzzzt","month":"2020-06","story_title":"$1M treasure in Rocky Mountains has been found, says Forrest Fenn","text":"Ashens has a nice presentation on the video game version of \"Masquerade\": [VIDEO] (spoilers ahead!)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37671213,"author":"lyso","month":"2023-09","story_title":"The Possibly Never-Ending Quest for the Golden Owl","text":"As a footnote to this, can I recommend Stuart Ashen\u2019s talk about Hareraiser, a lacklustre kind-of follow up and contender for \u201cworst video game ever\u201d: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ovJcsL7vyrk":[{"hn_comment_id":28123217,"author":"cgrealy","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The 3x+1 Problem [video]","text":"Absolutely. His \"gravity is not a force\" video led me through a whole range of emotions from \"this is ridiculous\" to \"actually...\" to \"holy crap, I've been wrong about this my entire life\". In terms of sheer brain-breaking... this is my favourite: [VIDEO] But this is the one I think people on HN need to watch most [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29451727,"author":"Kaibeezy","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus","text":"Have you ever seen the Veritasium video on where fractals actually come from in 3D? If not, and since you already thought fractals were fascinating, hold on to your hat. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29504539,"author":"Kaibeezy","month":"2021-12","story_title":"How Wrong Is Veritasium? A Lamp and Power Line Story [video]","text":"Did you see his one about the 3D landscape underlying the Mandelbrot set? I\u2019ll cut him endless slack after that mindsplosion. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38007282,"author":"teaearlgraycold","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Why 10B snow crabs starved to death in the Bering Sea","text":"Here\u2019s a rabbit hole to go down on that theme - [VIDEO] That\u2019s my second favorite YouTube video. I love how it reveals some universal primitives are really complicated. The pattern in the video is as fundamental to the universe as circles are. Imagine how many other mind-boggling structures are ubiquitous but just outside our understanding.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26522501,"author":"Kim_Bruning","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Misunderstanding Malthus\u2019 mistake","text":"The original conversation happened almost 2 centuries ago I think (1830's). But sure! I think we throw away the baby with the bathwater when we say \"Malthus was wrong\". I think it's better to say \"Malthus inspired the beginning of an awesome idea\". Malthus' original idea was where he plotted population growth and food production in the same graph. When the 2 lines crossed, that's bad. That's obviously not very realistic, but actually he had the gist of it; it just needed a bit of refinement. Not much later, another Belgian by the name of Verhulst did indeed improve on Malthus' model. He came up with a formula where at first the population grows exponentially; and then later it slows down before it reaches the limit (carrying-capacity). In Verhulst's model, you don't have a catastrophic line-crossing. At that point, you basically have an actual Minimal Viable Product that you can use to predict and think about real-world population dynamics, and a whole lot more besides. Over the last two centuries people have built a lot of discoveries on top of that. This Veritasium video is about one small (but awesome) bit of that: [VIDEO] It's a good thing not everyone thought Malthus was (completely) wrong!","stance":"rec"}],"oyLBGkS5ICk":[{"hn_comment_id":13175414,"author":"sooheon","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Ok, let me explain: it\u2019s going to be Angular 4.0","text":"This talk [1] by Rich Hickey seems more pertinent than ever. It's a contrarian stance on semver (which, almost as much as vc itself, is lauded as \"the Right way\" among developers). He definitely challenged my beliefs, it's likely to be worth your time too. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15025489,"author":"smackay","month":"2017-08","story_title":"APIs as infrastructure: future-proofing Stripe with versioning","text":"Whenever an idea about API versioning springs into mind it is always worthwhile to watch Rich Hickey's Spec-ulation talk, [VIDEO] for an alternative view of the world.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21401675,"author":"finalfantasia","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Thank You, Guido","text":"To anyone who's interested in this topic, I strongly recommend this talk from Rich Hickey about \"giving something to somebody that they can use and making a commitment \": Spec-ulation ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13378981,"author":"opvasger","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Is Semantic Versioning an Anti-Pattern?","text":"This seems inspired and perhaps even duplicated from what Rich Hickey recently said about Semantic Versioning (found here: [VIDEO] ) I really enjoy how the package-manager for the Elm programming language automates semantic versioning by diffing your apis based on the type system. I think a bit part of the real criticism of SEMVER stems from this inability to either automate it or use it correctly. Hickey's discussion of the subject obviously has a lot more great points to it, and even when I don't agree, I can't help to enjoy listening :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14944887,"author":"gavinpc","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Software Engineering \u2260 Computer Science (2009)","text":"See this talk [0] about this addition to Clojure called core.spec [1]. I read the paper first, and it isn't until the end of the presentation that I understood how it was related to the feature at all. Basically, core.spec is a kind of formal verification tool designed to deal with the growth of software. It is not a type system, though it resembles one in some ways. The objective is to support comparisons between the signatures of a function at two different points and say, are these compatible? Is this a breaking change? You have to design for growth: make no assumptions about unspecified keys and always assume that later versions may return more than they used to. And so on. If you're a fan of semver, be warned. [0] [VIDEO] [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15328326,"author":"bad_user","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Project Jigsaw: Complete","text":"> I have a hard time being too impressed because more modern languages are doing this out of the gates The problem with Java is that it's an already established and very popular platform and it's been so for the past decade at least. When starting from scratch, it's easy to just throw it all away and start fresh, it's easy to fix mistakes that were made in the past. The irony though is that we still have a hard time learning from history. Just look at Go. Sometimes this industry feels like Groundhog Day, the movie. Also, no platform or language that I know of has gotten \" modules \" right, with Java being one of the platforms that has gotten closest to fixing the problem actually (by means of OSGi). To see why modules are still a big problem and why we won't have a fix for the foreseeable future, I invite you to watch this keynote by Rich Hickey: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17598772,"author":"_54qb","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Be Nice and Write Stable Code","text":"A very interesting talk by Rich Hikey (creator of Clojure) on the topic: [VIDEO] To summarize, any change that offers more (as in, more fields in the output) and/or requires less (more of the original parameters made optional) is non-breaking. Edit: Of course, this is all under the assumption that the semantics of methods should never change. Instead of changing semantics, he proposes to just create a new method with a new name.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19137230,"author":"ruuda","month":"2019-02","story_title":"What's next for SemVer","text":"For an interesting take on versioning, see the Spec-ulation keynote by Rich Hickey [1]. It specifically touches upon SemVer being itself versioned. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28036675,"author":"lvh","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Six Years of Professional Clojure","text":"The two are not mutually exclusive. Clojure has namespaced keywords and specs[0] to cover that. (There is also the third-party malli, which takes a slightly different appproach.) The advantage is that maps are extensible. So, you can have middleware that e.g. checks authentication and authorization, adds keys to the map, that later code can check it directly. Namespacing guarantees nobody stomps on anyone else's feet. Spec/malli and friends tell you what to expect at those keys. You can sort of do the same thing in some other programming languages, but generally you're missing one of 1) typechecking 2) namespacing 3) convenience. [0]: spec-ulation keynote from a few years ago does a good job explaining the tradeoffs; [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41592612,"author":"svieira","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Ask HN: How to roll out an internal UI component library","text":"This is all excellent, and I'll add one more sub point to \"Avoid becoming a bottleneck at all costs\": - Be backwards compatible. If you need to break backwards compatibility, advertise it widely and put your people towards the migration. Otherwise, only expand the abilities of components, never remove them and only require less, never require more. If you want to remove from what you give or ask for more than you currently require then make a new version of the component (e. g. `components/Button/v2`). Plan for this (e. g. don't ship `components/Button`, ship `components/Button/v1`). Rich Hickey's Spec-ulation talk goes into the principles in some more detail: [VIDEO] The reason for this is because your goal is to empower other teams to move faster. The minute that \"keeping up to date with the UI library\" requires any significant amount of attention you are draining any velocity you added. People will stop (either by not updating or by moving off the library).","stance":"rec"}],"oz49vQwSoTE":[{"hn_comment_id":12992810,"author":"huxley","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Miyazaki Tribute","text":"It feels to me sometimes that the \"new Miyazaki\" is much like being the \"new Dylan\" used to be in the music industry. Though we lost him too young, Kon Satoshi was able to reach the level of extraordinary several times. \"Every Frame a Painting\" covered his work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29547480,"author":"latexr","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Neon Genesis Evangelion (2019)","text":"> Is NGE worth watching for someone who never was really into anime? No. I recommend something by Satoshi Kon instead. Not the least because the time commitment is way shorter (movie instead of TV show). Watch Every Frame a Painting\u2019s video[1] and pick any movie. It\u2019s Christmas season, so maybe go with Tokyo Godfathers[2]. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31988481,"author":"mgdlbp","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Everything Is Anime","text":"> Satoshi Kon, the director of Perfect Blue and Paprika (Perhaps these examples were saved for the subscribers-only section) Quite notable is the influence of those two films on later Western films--elements shots in Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream match those in Perfect Blue ; the same for Inception and Paprika . Relevant Every Frame a Painting video essay: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"p-I8GDklsN4":[{"hn_comment_id":10123752,"author":"myth_buster","month":"2015-08","story_title":"The Uber endgame: privatized public transit","text":"I think the documentary Taken for a ride(1996) [0][1] which showed up on /r/Documentaries [2] is perhaps relevant to this discussion. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18779479,"author":"caravaggi0","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Fundamental rule of traffic: building new roads makes people drive more (2015)","text":"and building trains makes people ride trains. The fundamental rule is path of least resistance, literally and figuratively. It also matters who has the powerful interest. Seen this? Taken for a Ride - The U.S. History of the Assault on Public Transport in the Last Century [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"p2LZLYcu_JY":[{"hn_comment_id":12638204,"author":"cconroy","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Doing with Images Makes Symbols, Alan Kay. [VIDEO] The title says it all. It's really a summary of several software systems with good ideas abound. I believe all the software is 80s or prior. Edit: I also forgot to mention some psychology and math.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15035957,"author":"agumonkey","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Concrete-free washing machines are lighter to transport, just as good in a spin","text":"I'm already trying hard not to fall into full alankayism [1] and this only reinforces my view. Jobs said that many people in companies are clueless... [1] for people that never watched his talk where he demonstrates how pretty old and forgotten software can be, enjoy this fully [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17190521,"author":"scroot","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Media for Thinking the Unthinkable (2013)","text":"> Visualizations are great for shared intuition, but it should only be used at the end of a long personal struggle which should involve hours upon hours of undistracted effort, preferably involving something tactile like a pen and pencil. There is a classic Alan Kay talk that touches on this very issue, called \"Doing With Images Makes Symbols.\" It discusses what the true power of HCI really is: that complex ideas (or even \"unthinkable\" ones) can be expressed via HCI using some combination of visual, kinesthetic, and symbolic reasoning. The whole talk is well worth watching, but here is the part I feel is most relevant for Victor's point: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37987670,"author":"theodpHN","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Alan Kay: Doing with Images Makes Symbols [video]","text":"Dang, Alan Kay's old talks are so amazing. Check out this Smalltalk program written in 1975 by a 12-year-old girl. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15931809,"author":"skadamat","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Communicating Advanced Mathematics to Kids","text":"So many things I could say about this, but I\"ll let Alan Kay speak for me - [VIDEO] Alan talks about how ideas in Calculus could be manifested from an early age and a richness in understanding built up as they aged up: - at very young ages, kids really respond well through \"doing\" / the enactive channel. When asked to draw a circle, kids in Papert's group would first emulate what a LOGO turtle would do by rotating their body in a circle (making tiny increments in x and y). - as they got a bit older, the visual / iconic channel was more developed and they could understand the abstraction of a circle on pencil/paper and how the concepts carried over there - closer to early teens, symbols were much easier to grasp and relate to, etc. With this context in mind, there have been some cool efforts to mix the second and third channels I just mentioned to communicate advanced math concepts. Vi Hart and Grant Sanderson's youtube channels come to mind. Here are my favorite videos by Grant: - \"What does it feel like to invent math\": [LINK] - On the visual intuition behind a hard problem on the Putnam exam - \"The hardest problem on the hardest test\": [LINK] - From vectors to matrices to vector spaces to higher-level ideas like the link between linear algebra and calculus: \"Essence of linear algebra\" series: [LINK] What I especially like about Grant's videos, is that he often walks through what a mathematician would do, the questions she would ask, etc.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839378,"author":"jdale27","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"I was going to mention Growing a Language, but since it's already been posted, here is Alan Kay's \"Doing with Images Makes Symbols\": [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17990016,"author":"e12e","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Show HN: TechYaks \u2013 Best of 50k tech talks ranked by confidence intervals","text":"Maybe these are mostly too new, or you have different (more practical, hands on?) definition of tech-talk - but from a quick look the only speakers I expected - and found - were Sandi Mets and Rob Pike. If it's practical, I'm surprised not to see the js \"wat\" lightning talk (which I now can't seem to find...). If it's more general \"best of\", I'd expect something like Guy Steele \"growing a language\" : [LINK] Douglas Engelbart \"the mother of all demos\": [LINK] Alan Kay \"doing with images makes symbols\": [VIDEO] Or, if that's too long, the much more condensed ted talk: \"a powerful idea about teaching ideas\": [LINK] (Maybe that's not a \"tech talk\"?) Rich Hickey \"simple made easy\" : [LINK] To name a few of the top of my head.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25025497,"author":"artem247","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Programs are a prison: Rethinking the building blocks of computing interfaces","text":"> (see also Alan Kay's vision of software inspired by biological cells and systems \u2013 lots of talk, no non-trivial proofs of concept). I just wanted to say that actually Kay's vision was implemented in something very non-trivial, both on the hardware side - Alto, and the Smalltalk operating system. They were used by real people and exhibited lots of traits that this article talks about. And some of their ideas were hugely influential in mainstream computing. I love the demo of one of the Smalltalk programs in this talk by Alan Kay [0], starts at around 40:30 [0] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"p33CVV29OG8":[{"hn_comment_id":13273961,"author":"tomnipotent","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Hash tables with open addressing","text":"Raymond Hettinger gave a presentation a few weeks ago on the evolution of the Python dict implementation - one of the most insightful videos I've seen in a long time. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16840933,"author":"svieira","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Python dictionaries: A Confluence of Great Ideas (also known as Modern Dictionaries) by Raymond Hettinger [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30867355,"author":"AndrewOMartin","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Pre-Allocated Lists in Python","text":"[VIDEO] Modern Dictionaries by Raymond Hettinger The official description of this talk is below, but personally, I'd watch any video with \"Raymond Hettinger\" in the title. > Python's dictionaries are stunningly good. Over the years, many great ideas have combined together to produce the modern implementation in Python 3.6. This fun talk is given by Raymond Hettinger, the Python core developer responsible for the set implementation and who designed the compact-and-ordered dict implemented in CPython for Python 3.6 and in PyPy for Python 2.7. He will use pictures and little bits of pure python code to explain all of the key ideas and how they evolved over time. He will also include newer features such as key-sharing, compaction, and versioning. This talk is important because it is the only public discussion of the state of the art as of Python 3.6. Even experienced Python users are unlikely to know the most recent innovations.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13753285,"author":"Dowwie","month":"2017-02","story_title":"I Wrote My Fastest Hashtable","text":"Raymond Hettinger made an interesting talk about Python's dict (hash table) and how Python's core development team evolved it over time. He's giving the polished version of talk at PyCon this May but if you can't wait for it, here's a rough version: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16307841,"author":"StreakyCobra","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Migrating to Python 3 with pleasure","text":"This has been changed in Python 3.6 only, due to a change in dictionary implementation to make them more efficient. \"Modern Dictionaries by Raymond Hettinger\" [1] is a quite interesting and technical talk about these changes, explaining also the change in iteration order IIRC, worth a watch in my opinion! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17420128,"author":"maxnoe","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Python 3 at Facebook","text":"Actually they optimized the hashmap, and it turned out a side effect of the optimization was insertion order. First implemented in pypy, then ported to cpython 3.6. Talk by Raimond Hettinger about the new implementation with several other implementations: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218518,"author":"StreakyCobra","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"I don't know if it is part of the bests, but very interesting anyway: Modern Dictionaries by Raymond Hettinger [1] It's about Python 3.6 dictionaries improvements. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22268323,"author":"bbrik","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Python dicts are now ordered","text":"As far as I know, it was implemented by Raymond Hettinger. This is a very interesting talk about the new tech: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22275630,"author":"crashbunny","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Python dicts are now ordered","text":"Raymond Hettinger does or did a few talks on dictionaries too. He covers the history of dictionaries in python and how they evolved. It was mentioned in the article's comment section. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36415271,"author":"samwho","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Hashing","text":"You're welcome! I deliberately didn't go in to that for a few reasons. 1. It would have made this article very, very long. 2. It's a bit out of scope for an article on hashing. 3. I think I might give hash maps their own article in future. Hash maps are fantastically deep. So many different ways to do it. You'll find a lot of material online but I'd recommend Raymond Hettinger's talk on how Pythons hash map data structure has evolved over time: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"}],"p3lsYlod5OU":[{"hn_comment_id":33113383,"author":"nikivi","month":"2022-10","story_title":"A Universal Cancer Treatment?","text":"I loved Michael Levin's thoughts on solving cancer. Kind of similar to immunotherapy but on a level of reprogramming the cells back that got 'lost' from their big purpose in their organ. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33230995,"author":"tux1968","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Intelligence Beyond the Brain [video]","text":"Michael Levin recently appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast*, and here he goes over much of the same amazing material, but along with a visual presentation. * Michael Levin: Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Lex Fridman [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39108902,"author":"ruffrey","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?","text":"Related, lately I have been enthralled with the work of Michael Levin at Tufts. He studies things like goal directed behavior of cells and systems of cells. Here is an intro to his work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"p5Ac7ap_MAY":[{"hn_comment_id":8887567,"author":"ddeck","month":"2015-01","story_title":"The Federal Reserve has enormous power over who is president","text":"For a very interesting commentary of the immense power of central banks, I'd recommend the documentary \"Princes of the Yen\", a film adaptation of Richard Werner's[1] book of the same name. [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14253566,"author":"throwaway323444","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Japanese Economic Takeoff After 1945 (2002)","text":"\"Princes of Yen\" ( \u5186\u306e\u652f\u914d\u8005) has a more cynical view of things. I'd definitely recommend it, if you're the \"conspiracy theorist\" sort. [VIDEO] Some of Richard Werner's and Karel van Wolferen's lectures might be interesting too. Our society is inclined to attribute success to some intrinsic nature (race, culture, language..). Japan's successful ? It must be Zen. China not ? Must be Confucianism, shame-based culture. Now China is ? Ah it must be Confucianism, collectivism. India is not successful ? It must be Hindooism. They have Sanskrit ? Ah it must be the Aryans. The Native Americans died out ? Ah it must be their immune system. The play is clear. Japan's success is likely due to the way MacArthur normalized its war-economy, and because of how it was guided in the post-war years. Ditto with Korea/China/Thailand/ and now Vietnam/India (and other SE countries). I haven't seen a tick of anything \"native\" at the heart of it, even though nationalism dictates that the citizens be deluded into believing these things.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14415538,"author":"kadfasd4324","month":"2017-05","story_title":"China Can\u2019t Sustain Its Debt-Fueled Binge, Moody\u2019s Says","text":"Fair enough. I think the comment was implying that their policies, not being entirely democratically accountable - the effectiveness of these instruments themselves being arguable - are very likely going to be swayed by private interests. I know there exists a revolving door b/w FDR and major Wall Street banks, but I'm not sure about other countries. I'd not be surprised if this were the case everywhere. Edit: 'Princes of Yen' is a documentary that I found did a good job of illustrating the dangers of having such high powered unaccountable cabals (without all the BS that is typical in this genre). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16043006,"author":"pwaai","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Keynesian Economics Is Hot Again","text":"> China's ascension to number 1 world economy My gripe with this is that people seem to take this as a fact that hasn't even occurred with almost 100% certainty that it will happen. A lot can go wrong in 20 years. So far, all economies that challenged US in the past mysteriously gets IMF'd, pulling the rug out of a credit bubble that they help create by twisting the arms of the central banks that are supposed to be free from this kind of interference: This documentary about Japanese central bank is eye opening to just how much grip the US hegemony has, one which I fail to see China being able to emulate anytime soon because of the hostage situation that US allies are finding themselves in. [VIDEO] The theory that states Sadam was whacked because he started to accept euro instead of the petrodollar standard makes an awful lot of sense.","stance":"rec"}],"p5_tpq5ejFQ":[{"hn_comment_id":7715543,"author":"uptown","month":"2014-05","story_title":"How taking pictures through windows  can inadvertently reveal your location","text":"Dual Photography has always been the optical \"trick\" that's blown me away. Here's the demo video from Siggraph in 2005: [VIDEO] Skip ahead to 4:19 for a succinct demo.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6972866,"author":"evanb","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Reflected hidden faces in photographs revealed in pupil","text":"This reminds me of dual photography [1], in which you trade many projectors and one camera for one projector and many cameras using time reversal symmetry. The video [2] gives a good explanation, and the revelation of the playing card is what strikes me as similar to revealing reflected hidden faces. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22263376,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2020-02","story_title":"TV Backlight Compensation","text":"It sounds like \"Dual Photography\". [LINK] \"We present a novel photographic technique called dual photography, which exploits Helmholtz reciprocity to interchange the lights and cameras in a scene. With a video projector providing structured illumination, reciprocity permits us to generate pictures from the viewpoint of the projector, even though no camera was present at that location.\" I recommend watchign the video from the paper for good explains and demonstrates the technique. It's very impressive work. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23423715,"author":"saeranv","month":"2020-06","story_title":"In a photo of a black hole, a possible key to mysteries","text":"> Does anyone assert that any photon carries information about what it interacted with in the past? Does a photon have any information content other than its energy/wavelength? So \"each one carries a bit of the image of whatever it hits\" is total (ok, be nice now) poetic blarney. An analogy to how we perceive things seems appropriate. The light from some source (i.e the sun) hits an object, the light rays are then reflected/transmitted/refracted through the surface based on various material properties. Your eye, acting like a pinhole camera, captures all the light rays from that surface, and then projects it onto the sensor reception surface (I think the retina?) creating the 'image' that we see. So the specific way the light rays interacts with the surface is what creates the 'information content'. For example, we perceive a blue-colored surface because the surface properties (i.e roughness) will specifically reflect wavelengths associated with blue. A specular surface will reflect light back to the eye, creating a 'shiny' surface. A very cool demonstration of how light conveys information is in dual photography: [VIDEO] And the original paper: [LINK] . They shine a light source onto an object, take a picture, and then by processing the light rays in the photo, are able to generate the same scene but from the perspective of the light source. It's really astounding when you see it. They can do this reconstruction because the flow of light rays from the light source to the obj","stance":"rec"}],"p6K4iIMlouI":[{"hn_comment_id":8079942,"author":"Monkeyget","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Master Emacs in one year","text":"It takes a year because you learn it over time. Learning a tool progressively is the best way to go. There is a wonderful presentation called '7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0' [1] explaining this philosophy. The idea is to get the basics down upfront and then get more proficient gradually over time. When you use the tool you stay aware of what you are doing. When you find an inefficiency in the way you use the tool, find a quicker way and make it an habit. This is the most efficient. If you only care about the code you have to type right now and never read the editor's documentation nor learn new commands you'll keep using only basics commands and never will gain proficiency. Not efficient. If on the other hand you try to learn every feature immediately you'll waste time learning things you won't use and forget most of them anyway. Not efficient. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37011794,"author":"tzhenghao","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Bram Moolenaar Passed Away","text":"Loved his \"7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0\" (2007) talk and humor [1] \"How many of you are mostly using Emacs?\" a bunch of raised hands \"Okay, we'll try to convert some people today!\" RIP, Bram Moolenaar [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37084552,"author":"1-2-3-5-8","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Vim Boss","text":"Thank you Bram for everything. Your talk, 7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 inspired me and it started my Vim journey. Using Vim all these years has been a complete joy. You will not be forgotten. Link to the talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7586234,"author":"adem","month":"2014-04","story_title":"A Quick Guide to Sublime Text","text":"The only thing you need to read about Vim to get started is here: [LINK] , the rest is learned pretty much by the following principle: 1. Detect inefficiency for a particular task 2. Find a faster way to do it 3. Make it a habit You can learn more about this approach in this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10026222,"author":"e12e","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems","text":"Reminds me of Mjoolnar's (author of vim) talk on 7 habits of effective editing 2.0; the core idea is essentially (my current interpretation): awareness: look for repetition - they are candidates for automation and/or being more effective. Rule of three: If you do something (anything) 3 times - figure out if it can be done more efficiently. In vim (or any other editor) an example might be shifting the indendation of code: maybe you only remember how to do it a line at a time; figure out how to work on blocks of code; figure out how to do it on a file - a whole project. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11491358,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Vim 8.0 is coming","text":"Personally, I find vim's modal editing to be very efficient. When starting from a clean slate, it doesn't really matter much -- but when changing/ editing existing text/code, I find it feels much more natural. It also works well without using the mouse, which is important to me because of carpal tunnel syndrome (and also helps when working without a proper mouse, such as on laptops). I've only toyed with emacs, but based on that, I don't think emacs' idea of keyboard \"chords\" is as good a fit as vi(m). With standard keybindings, it also puts a strain on my wrists. Modal editing and the \"edit language\"[1] (verbs, nouns, modifiers (and motions), like dw=delete word, dd/dl=delete line, d$=delete from cursor to end-of-line, dG (delete to endo-of-file, where gg/G is motion for moving to top/bottom of file respectively), ciw()<ESC>P=change inner word (cut word under cursor to buffer), add \"()\", escape out of insert mode, paste word between \"()\"). These look cryptic, but quickly starts to feel quite natural and intuitive. My impression is that Emacs' Evil-mode has evolved quite a lot lately, and allows one to combine the best of both: a much better programming language (scheme dialect) for customization, with modal editing and vi(m) key bindings. But I've yet to play with it. If you don't mind using the mouse, you might also want to look at ACME[2] - it's a bit more exotic, and unfortunately hasn't gotten as much support as VIM/Emacs. The creator of Vim, Mjolnar, has a great video o","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11656960,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-05","story_title":"New GNU Emacs website","text":"> indexes everything So should your text editor (and/or it's companion programs) > and provides superior auto-completion. See above. Superior is a bold claim, superior out of the box for \"strongly\" supported languages, perhaps? (Eg: one way of working with java in vim is to use eclipse for extracting some information about a project[1]) Personally I'm more familiar with vim, than with Emacs -- arguably the main difference is that Emacs has one standard and sane scripting language (lisp), while vim doesn't (I'm very happy a lot of masochists work tirelessly to provide vim plugins for everything I need (and a great deal I don't) -- but I think it's hard to argue that vimscript is a \"good\" language. And having other bindings (eg: ruby, python) is a bit of a mixed blessing)). But what they have in common, is a strong focus on making it easy to automate transformation of text. Any kind of text. With any kind of automation, via commands. As such they empower a continued process of improving the process of writing and editing. I like Moolenaar's (vim's creator) short text and expanded talk on 7 habits of effective text editing: \"7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0\": [VIDEO] \"Seven habits of effective text editing\": [LINK] I often feel that modern IDEs with typical \"modern\" languages, tend to trap you in a certain way of working that is \"with\" the IDE, that tend to be counter-productive if that \"one true (editing) process\" doesn't fit. And they tend to provide only something like","stance":"rec"}],"p7bzE1E5PMY":[{"hn_comment_id":14556233,"author":"erikpukinskis","month":"2017-06","story_title":"The Largest Virtual Universe Ever Simulated","text":"Side note: I recently came across this YouTube video which did a fantastic job showing just the basics of waveform collapse, without straying into silly metaphors and cartoons, or getting bogged down by historical narratives: [VIDEO] Highly recommended for anyone trying to grok the relationship between a wave, a particle, and an observation. I find I don't want to hear what quantum physics is \"like\" I just want to have things explained to me slowly and completely.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15106547,"author":"erikpukinskis","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Rumours swell over new kind of gravitational-wave sighting","text":"I really wanted to like PBS SpaceTime. So many interesting subjects and I love physics videos on YouTube. But there's something about Matt O'Dowd that makes them unwatchable for me. Something about the pacing, I just can't stay focused. Another great channel is looking Glass Universe - [LINK] And Udiprod doesn't have a habit of making physics vids, but this is my all time favorite physics videos on YouTube which explains quantum waves better than anything else I've seen - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18747101,"author":"erikpukinskis","month":"2018-12","story_title":"The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm Explained","text":"Somewhat off topic, but one of my absolute favorite YouTube videos is this [VIDEO] one by Udiprod that shows visualizations of wave function collapse, with bite sized, iterative explanation of all the concepts involved.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15501449,"author":"deusum","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Intel Delivers 17-Qubit Superconducting Chip","text":"I found this video on quantum mechanics helpful. If you measure the qubit prematurely the function collapses. In classical computing it might be analogous to breaking out of a for loop before it has run its intended course and then you're left with an incorrect (or incomplete) answer. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29524609,"author":"Isinlor","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Long-form info-dense videos on YouTube you would recommend to anyone?","text":"Everything from 3 blue 1 brown: [LINK] Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics): [VIDEO] history of the entire world, i guess: [LINK] TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K): [LINK] Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens. and Grabby aliens: when we'll meet them, how big they are, and other predictions [LINK] [LINK] Everyday Astronaut videos (he has 90 min documentary on Soviet rocket engine): [LINK] Cool Worlds - a lot of 25-35 min very nice astronomy explanations: [LINK] 'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"p83QUZ1-P10":[{"hn_comment_id":14314786,"author":"logiseye","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Crash course to Amiga assembly programming","text":"If you think that article is awesome, you should fasten your seatbelts and check out this video tutorials by Photon of Scoopex (Demo Group). [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8836413,"author":"bemmu","month":"2015-01","story_title":"An Introduction to Programming C-64 Demos","text":"For Amiga demo programming with 68000 assembler, this video tutorial series is great as well: [VIDEO] I wish I could send these back in time to my teenage self.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10913776,"author":"bemmu","month":"2016-01","story_title":"The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video]","text":"Scoopex has a video series of Amiga demo programming starting all the way from the basics of using an assembler: [VIDEO] I would have killed for this back when I had an A500. It seemed like dark magic and all I could find was a book on ASM game programming tricks, which was too advanced for me.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22692216,"author":"flohofwoe","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Getting started with bare-metal assembly","text":"I think the opposite is true because those machines were built around assembly programming. The hardware was essentially the software development framework. Check out this assembly programming series, it's less assembly code on the Amiga to get something on screen or getting mouse/keyboard input than with highlevel languages and APIs/frameworks today: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28817810,"author":"flohofwoe","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Amiga 68000 Hardware Assembly Programming [video]","text":"I found this Amiga Hardware Programming playlist by \"Photon of Scoopex\" quite nice (I was actually expecting that it's this one), it also jumps right into action by writing a little 'wait-for-left-mouse-button' 3-liner: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38922381,"author":"farkanoid","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How many of you are consciously downsizing your devices/going retro?","text":"Reading this made me (very) sorely miss my A1200, which I used as my daily driver all the way up to 2003. I was shocked at how much difference in speed a 4MB Fast RAM expansion and 68881 FPU made. You might like Photon of Scoopex's Amiga Hardware Programming tutorial[1], in which he creates an Amiga Demo using assembly from scratch in ASMOne/ASMTwo [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"p8u_k2LIZyo":[{"hn_comment_id":27713767,"author":"greyfox","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments","text":"Very interesting that this was posted as I literally JUST watched an even MORE interesting youtube upload about this very bit of code just last weekend. Here's the very fun video if anyone wants to take a look: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28270822,"author":"colejohnson66","month":"2021-08","story_title":"One does not simply calculate the absolute value","text":"> The bits of a float as an integer literal are proportional to its log2 value (plus a constant), \u2026 I watched a video[0] a while back about that. Once that coincidence(?) was explained, Q_rsqrt finally made sense. [0]: [VIDEO] (~20 minutes)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28452935,"author":"infogulch","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Bit Patterns of Float","text":"Apparently the bit pattern of a float interpreted as an int is sorta-kinda it's own logarithm, which is why the famous fast inverse square root from quake 3 works: log(x^-\u00bd) = -\u00bdlog(x) =~ -log(x) >> 1. This video is approachable and explains it pretty well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pEKq8jmckz0":[{"hn_comment_id":20337216,"author":"djaychela","month":"2019-07","story_title":"2020 Honda E Has 148 HP and More Than 221 LB-FT","text":"It's great to see it looking so close to the concept car that was seen not that long ago - it's a great mixture of retro and future Honda, and it's also great to see Honda going for a full electric drivetrain as well as such a great design. Fully Charged got 19 minutes in one, and the video [1] is worth a watch - you can see how quickly it accelerates when he floors it, and he was really impressed with the car, the turning circle and the camera mirrors. I think the bottom line is that most electric cars will be a blast to drive - I'd love to have one as a rally car on single venue airfield-type events in the UK, if I was still competing; it'd be incredible in the forests too, but not sure range would make it possible for anything substantial, alas. [Totally ignoring any other practicalities that are impinging on my daydream about electric rally cars] [1] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20735172,"author":"clouddrover","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Jaguar and Audi SUVs Fail to Dent Tesla\u2019s Electric-Car Dominance","text":"> People don't buy ICE cars based purely on MPG Because range typically isn't a problem with ICE cars. I really like the Honda e. It looks good and has good features: [VIDEO] But its number one problem is lack of range. Solid-state batteries with better energy density will solve that problem, but those batteries aren't here yet.","stance":"rec"}],"pHsuIaPbNbY":[{"hn_comment_id":33338339,"author":"leecarraher","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Markov chain Monte Carlo without the bullshit (2015)","text":"Recently watched this on Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, and it was a fantastic primer on the basic concepts and motivations of mcmc, and later hmc [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15677070,"author":"srs70187","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Gaussian Distributions Are Soap Bubbles","text":"This is an interesting take and kudos to the author for relaying a helpful way to think about high dimensional distributions. I really like and often come back to this talk by Michael Betancourt where the theme is quite similar: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40291311,"author":"euW3EeBe","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Gradient descent visualization","text":"Not an expert in this field, but I'm guessing this is related to unintuitive nature of geometry in high-dimensional spaces. One rough example I can think of is the fact that the number of ways to move away from the origin increases exponentially (or even faster?) as the dimensionality goes up. There is _way_ more volume away from the origin than near it, I've seen this explained as something like \"most of the volume of a high-dimensional orange is in the peel\". One result of this is the fact that samples of a standard gaussian end up forming a \"shell\" as opposed to a \"ball\" that you would expect (this phenomenon is called the concentration of measure in general). Also, very roughly, high-dimensional objects have lots of corners, and these corners are also very sharp. I would guess that gradient descent would get stuck in these corners and have a hard time getting out. Some links related to this: - Spikey Spheres: [LINK] - Thinking outside the 10-dimensional box - 3blue1brown: [LINK] - This is a fairly long talk about HMC, but it does talk about some problems that come up when sampling high-dimensional distributions: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pIgMTsQXg3Q":[{"hn_comment_id":17130219,"author":"drexlspivey","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Facebook CEO speaks to select members of European Parliament","text":"In ancient Athens only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military duties were able to vote, roughly 20% of the population. This seems pretty oligarchic today but it was a massive improvement in the council of elders that used to rule before that. Historia civilis has a great video on the constitution of ancient Athens. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24855219,"author":"vulcan01","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Call to arms: Sweden raises defense spending by 40% in 5 years","text":"The ancient Athenians used something similar to select their leaders: [LINK] EDIT: I remember this from a Historia Civilis video: [VIDEO] You should watch the whole thing (it's pretty interesting) but skip to 8m00s to watch the part about sortition.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47343227,"author":"KK7NIL","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years","text":"Perhaps you're joking, but Athenian democracy had a significant amount of randomness, with candidates being chosen randomly from the top vote winners. Terms were also only 1 year for most positions. These, and other systems, helped prevent any one person from monopolizing power. This is a good video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pKmSdY56VtY":[{"hn_comment_id":20714351,"author":"microcolonel","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Japanese anime studio Khara moving to Blender","text":"2.8 already has the vastly more useful version of grease pencil, and the demo the foundation commissioned was amazing. I love how seamlessly they mix the 3D in with the direct illustration. It shows what skilled animators can do with a tool like Blender. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27732279,"author":"avhon1","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Blender and the Rabbids","text":"Blender can do that, too, with the \"Grease Pencil\". [LINK] Here's a short film produced as a grease pencil showcase. At the end, it shows what working with it looks like. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pL3Yzjk5R4M":[{"hn_comment_id":15751330,"author":"lentil","month":"2017-11","story_title":"What Made the SR-71 Blackbird Such a Badass Plane (2015)","text":"Agreed. I would also recommend this conference talk on the subject by Nickolas Means, it was very well done: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24376454,"author":"wp381640","month":"2020-09","story_title":"List of YouTube channels for improving web development and programming skills","text":"This list with no context is bordering on useless. Here are some channels i've watched and enjoyed: 1. interviewing.io - they do tech interviews with big5/6 tech co candidates and step through them: [LINK] 2. CS Dojo - ex-googler who steps through CS topics (data structures, algorithms) at the intermediate level and applications in python + javascript: [LINK] 3. Academind - Heard of tech x and have no idea what it is? Chances are there is a 20-30 min video on this channel explaining it clearly. He also does longer form \"build x app\" videos: [LINK] 4. comma.ai / George Hotz - ML + AI livestreams from geohot: [LINK] 5. Lex Fridman - ML, AI, python and tons of awesome interviews with luminaries: [LINK] 6. Joma Tech - data science, big companies / startups as a dev and some funny vids: [LINK] 7. Wes Bos - decent css explainer vids for whenever you're _how do i align the fucking boxes_ + react / js [LINK] 8. Rect conf - Sophie and Dan's presentations are great: [LINK] 9. Nickolas Means - not a channel but two presentations that are good: 9.1 How to crash a plane : [LINK] 9.2 The original skunk works: [VIDEO] There are tons of shitty tutorial videos and channels to avoid if you just rely on search (the comments are full of what appear to be dev contractors out of their depth begging for solutions)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29372767,"author":"sdoering","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The slowest SR-71 Blackbird fly-by","text":"If anyone is interested in learning more about the history of the SR-71 and Skunk Works there is a great talk on YouTube [1]. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pLPpl2ISKTg":[{"hn_comment_id":39782074,"author":"not2b","month":"2024-03","story_title":"What is a pig butchering scam? (2023)","text":"John Oliver did an excellent explainer about how pig butchering works. [VIDEO] (apologies if the YouTube link has geographic restrictions, don't know if it does)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41705399,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Should you reply STOP to unwanted texts?","text":"[VIDEO] It's well worth the watch, but tl;dr: it's a long-con scam. They invest as long as it takes to establish a relationship with you, and then engage you to do something (crypto mostly, apparently) involving cash online. They will say they made a bunch of money, and point you at the super-easy online exchange they used. You buy the crypto, you see the crypto increase in value (because it has in the real world) so you buy more, and more and more. The problems start when you say you want to cash out. They switch from \"buy more, it's going up\" to \"there are fees to withdraw, just deposit another <whatever> and then you'll get the withdrawal amount plus <whatever>\" and of course no money ever comes out. Oliver interviews people who have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars this way, some of whom still believe that if they just toss in another <whatever> it will all be resolved and they'll get their money back. It's very sad, and I'm not doing the video justice.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39746854,"author":"xyst","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Filipino police free slaves toiling in romance scam operation","text":"These pig butchering scams play the long game with their victims. It's crazy. The payoffs are huge as well. These are just some of the stories I have heard through various mediums (ie, podcasts, news stories, media segments) - Kansas bank CEO charged with $50M embezzlement as a result of being a victim to \"pig butchery\". The bank itself was forced into bankruptcy due to this debacle [1] - Woman lost $450K in pig butchering scam [2] - US government often the subject of cybersecurity fraud as well. Pandemic relief programs paid out billions to scammers [3] - halfway decent segment on pig butchering on \"Last Week Tonight\" with John Oliver [4] Researching potential victims is so easy now with the proliferation of online dating apps. Then given how many breaches there are amongst the many services we use, it's even easier to gather more data points that can be used against a victim to drop their defenses (ie, social engineering tactics). The Nigerian scammers of yesteryear have learned the errors of their ways. Notes taken from the \"cat fishers\" of the 2010s. The Indian scam call centers have graduated from script based tech support scammers to these romance scams as well since it has a larger audience beyond the elderly. Even preying on their own countrymen. At this point, I think any relationship that continues online for more than a month and refuses to meet IRL. The relationship should be sus. I wouldn't even trust Zoom/Facetime/Webex /Meets with the accessibility of AI to gen","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40834120,"author":"hamasho","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Anatomy of a cryptocurrency scam","text":"I recently watched John Oliver's video[1] about the \"pig butchering\" scam. It's a brutal scheme where scammers invest months in building fake relationships, gain a ton of trust, and then rob all of their money. Even though I'm pretty tech-savvy, I'm not sure I could totally avoid falling for this. These scammers don't ask for money directly; they casually mention how they're making big bucks through crypto trading on some app. Naturally, you get curious about the app, but you're still cautious. Then you see it's got a ton of good reviews on the app store, so your trust increases a little. You install the app, and it looks legit - like it was made by a solid dev team. It offers some limited-time crypto deals where you can't withdraw for a while. The victim invests a little, watches the crypto value climb, and sees their \"money\" grow on paper. So they put in more. When they finally try to cash out, they realize they can't. They panic and turn to their \"romantic partner\" for help. That's when the scammers and the fake app squeeze out the last bit of cash, claiming it's for taxes or fees, and they need to put some money. And the victim loses everything. It's not unreasonable for the victim to think the relationship is real if they've spent months chatting and calling, sharing really personal stuff. Plus, the app seems totally legit, both from the store reviews and how it looks and works. I really hope these scams will disappear soon. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45248465,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2025-09","story_title":"A qualitative analysis of pig-butchering scams","text":"For those interested in a lightweight summary, Last Week Tonight did a segment on pig-butchering about a year ago. [VIDEO] The interviews with the victims are heartbreaking. There's one dad/daughter pair where the dad has lost almost literally everything, is on camera being interviewed about everything that happened, and is still flipping between \"it was a total scam\" and \"maybe if I just send them another fee payment I can get at least some of my money back\" and the daughter saying, \"No, dad! It's a scam, and you are not sending them anymore money!\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45592169,"author":"ChrisMarshallNY","month":"2025-10","story_title":"DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia","text":"From what I understand, a number of them are Chinese nationals. I suspect that taking Chinese slaves might not be a great idea. China tends to carry a big stick; especially in that region. Wouldn't surprise me, if the DOJ had some \"under-the-table\" help from Chinese sources, but not in any way that anyone can prove. If you don't want to sign up for a podcast, John Oliver did a fairly decent bit about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pMYYx_im5QI":[{"hn_comment_id":45060248,"author":"jameslk","month":"2025-08","story_title":"AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study","text":"There's likely a slippery slope fallacy in there somewhere (I hope). If interested in the (not so) sci-fi aspects of automated weapons and their ramifications, I often plug Daniel Suarez's great Kill Decision talk and book: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6980021,"author":"salient","month":"2013-12","story_title":"I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on","text":"This is only going to get worse if they make drones autonomous, which this TED talk shows they have a lot of reasons for why they will want to make them autonomous, unless there's huge public outcry demanding a ban: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8509664,"author":"higherpurpose","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Musk warns of 'summoning the demon' with AI","text":"When you see governments already contemplating killing people based on algorithms, you begin to empathize with Musk about calling AI a \"demon\" that we're summoning: [LINK] However right now I'm much more afraid of governments \"setting loose\" autonomous killer robots than I am about Skynet-like self-conscious killer robots (which may be what Musk is thinking about). To the people being on the receiving end of the autonomous killer robots' missiles, it won't be much difference, though. They would already be living a \"Terminator-like\" future, where they have to \"fight the machines\". Relevant talk by Daniel Suarez: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pN34FNbOKXc":[{"hn_comment_id":12228793,"author":"edtechdev","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Calculus at the heart of the STEM gender gap, study suggests","text":"Teaching strategies and teachers/tutors have an effect on student confidence, motivation, self-efficacy, attitudes, and performance. The first link (teaching math in the context of engineering) increases the confidence of female students (along with many other benefits): [LINK] Peer instruction narrows the gender gap [LINK] Inquiry based learning in math helps female students [LINK] and so on confidence (and related concepts like self-efficacy and sense of belonging) can be taught directly or positively influenced indirectly. See for example interventions that teach 'growth mindset' in math: [LINK] This video explains growth mindset the best: [VIDEO] And Jo Boaler has written a great deal on how growth mindset can improve girls' performance in math classes: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12235899,"author":"edtechdev","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation (1998) [pdf]","text":"It's called \"growth mindset\" (vs. fixed mindset). There are books and hundreds of articles on it. I've found this TED talk the best explanation of growth vs. fixed mindset: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7283181,"author":"mamuninfo","month":"2014-02","story_title":"I'm completely demotivated to work; what can I do?","text":"This is very common situation for most of the people and it is also general for all fields. Many colleague around me who are also not interested about their daily work. Mind set is important factor to do something. Just sharing a video with you.... In youtube [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11385215,"author":"edtechdev","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Why every 10-year-old can emulate this iconic gameshow moment","text":"I think you missed the word \"also\" in my comment: \"See also work on 'growth mindset' vs. 'fixed mindset'\" That's all I said about growth mindset in my comment. For a good explanation of growth mindset, I usually show faculty and college students this video as a start: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23373786,"author":"khannavid","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Industries/Companies to Get into Today?","text":"As a manager I saw what people can do when you believe in them... So I honestly can't believe anymore that someone isn't talented enough! A growth mindset, having a plan, real effort and of-course some luck/support, are things that I believe in. I suggest this thought-provoking TEDx talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pNlq-EVld70":[{"hn_comment_id":43335868,"author":"odyssey7","month":"2025-03","story_title":"A 10x Faster TypeScript","text":"The key: > immutable data structures --> \"we are fully concurrent, because these are what I often call embarrassingly parallelizable problems\" The relationship of their performance gains to functional programming ideas is explained beginning at 8:14 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44888555,"author":"yomismoaqui","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Show HN: Doom port to pure Go \u2013 Gore","text":"After hearing the explanation about why he picked Go for the Typescript compiler I can only be more of a fan of Anders Hejlsber. He said that Go was chosen due to its suitability for the workload, offering low-level control, optimized native code, automatic memory management, and concurrency. And this coming from the same guy that created C#, Typescript, Delphi & Turbo Pascal shows how a real engineer takes a decision of this magnitude. Is Go the best decision for every SW project? No, but in this case the arguments (and the tests they did during their evaluation) check out. And no, picking F# simply because you love the language is not a mature decision. You can check his arguments here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pO4_Wlq8JeI":[{"hn_comment_id":37419112,"author":"h0l0cube","month":"2023-09","story_title":"My favorite Erlang program (2013)","text":"This was in a top level comment on this post. It perfectly articulates what sets Erlang/BEAM/Elixir apart from other runtimes/languages. Essentially performant, fault-tolerant parallelism by design. [VIDEO] If you need to break out into SIMD, you also have NX at your disposal. And Rustler/Zigler provide you an escape hatch to low-level languages, with the latter you can code in Zig inline [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15954531,"author":"auxbuss","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Elixir multiple processes: Basics","text":"Sa\u0161a Juri\u0107's Solid Ground talk is a lovely demonstration of Elixir's processes: [VIDEO] (Sa\u0161a is also the author of Elixir in Action; a highly recommend read once you have your head around Elixir's fundamentals.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16175055,"author":"rehemiau","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Elixir v1.6 released: code formatter, dynamic supervisors, and more","text":"For people wondering about what Elixir and the BEAM are offering, for a quick overview of the best features of this stack see [this talk]( [VIDEO] ). If anyone starts learning Elixir now: I can recommend using VSCode with ElixirLS extension. Also: pragprog books, Sasa Juric's book. If you like video tutorials I've heard good things about PragDave's course.","stance":"rec"}],"pOmXiapfCs8":[{"hn_comment_id":29658986,"author":"post_from_work","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Buying Influence: How China manipulates Facebook and Twitter","text":"Watch this interview with Yuri Bezmenov: [VIDEO] Then think about all the \"Culture War\" problems we are dealing with in American for the past ~10 years.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35563867,"author":"tenpies","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Hackers claim vast access to Western Digital systems","text":"Personally, I buy much more into the theory that the fissures in society, are a result of infiltration by Marxists into academia, as was detailed by the Soviet defector and KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov. It's impossible to watch this interview and not tick the boxes.[1] Putin is just the Russian leader who happens to be around when the fruits of those labours are paying off. --- [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42757637,"author":"imiric","month":"2025-01","story_title":"TikTok goes dark in the US","text":"I don't get how more people don't realize this. Yes, all domestic media has also been corrupted by various agencies that wish to psychologically manipulate the masses. Some of this manipulation is to get you to buy things, while other wants to get you to think, act or vote a certain way. The difference is that when a foreign adversary has the ability to do the same, it becomes a matter of national security. Allowing that adversary to also control the platform itself is beyond unsafe. The tricky thing is that the US built these tools, and opened them up for everyone to use. This libertarian position is what will ultimately be its downfall. They can't just go and block access to these tools for everyone outside the US, or heavily regulate them, as it will cause an internal uproar, but that is what they must do in order to survive this war. China is in a much better position in this conflict since the government has total control over the media its citizens consume (barring the rampant use of VPNs, which they can shut down at any point). They have no external but massive internal influence. I feel like everyone should watch this 1985 interview of an ex-KGB agent[1]. It's more relevant today than ever before, and explains the sociopolitical state of not just the US, but of many western countries as well. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38485627,"author":"bmitc","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Federal judge blocks Montana's TikTok ban before it takes effect","text":"In general, that is a quite naive understanding. Today's warfare is primarily executived via electronics, economics, and ideology. Here is a Russian agent explaining how it works: [VIDEO] . Adam Curtis' documentary Hypernormalism also covers this. By the way, this extends to all social media. Whether it's a state or a state's own people, the danger remains the same.","stance":"rec"}],"pPJf8KrvJXU":[{"hn_comment_id":8079978,"author":"revorad","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M","text":"Joel is a class act. He spoke at YC's Startup School, which brings out his unique perspective - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12947936,"author":"mehrdada","month":"2016-11","story_title":"You Don\u2019t Need a Master Plan, You Just Need to Start","text":"> Startups are overdosing on ambition these days > Not every billion dollar business starts with a billion dollar idea. Not everything unfundable by VCs is unworthy of doing. It's interesting the author is being a VC is understandably blinded by the bubble that never reports on such businesses. The vast majority of businesses created in the world, i.e. almost all small businesses, are exactly that. It's been done before and it's being done now, in large quantities. It's just so common that people don't feel writing medium posts about it and you don't tend to call them startups per se without the VC-funding and fast growth factor[1]. If you restrict the definition of a startup to this, then almost by definition you need such ambitious visions. [1]: [LINK] I remember Joel Spolsky talked at Startup School a few years back on this subject and he was spot on[2]. [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pQ0CvjAJXz4":[{"hn_comment_id":38814668,"author":"rramadass","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Good examples of fault-tolerant Erlang code?","text":"Not code but an excellent presentation of design/architecture of a Real-World fault-tolerant and distributed System in Erlang/Elixir - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38904735,"author":"rramadass","month":"2024-01","story_title":"The Erlang Ecosystem (2018) [video]","text":"After watching the above which gives one an idea of the Erlang System's capabilities, watch this presentation by Bryan Hunter where the design and architecture of a complete distributed and fault-tolerant Erlang/Elixir system is shown; You get to really see the mind-blowing power of the Erlang System in this - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36362566,"author":"notpublic","month":"2023-06","story_title":"A LiveView Is a Process","text":"This video may be of interest to you: [VIDEO] Bryan Hunter explains how they do it at HCA healthcare (not specifically LiveView process, but processes in general).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42405648,"author":"GCUMstlyHarmls","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Elixir/Erlang Hot Swapping Code (2016)","text":"This is a talk about a large scale, resilient elixir/erlang deployment in healthcare. Specifically they talk about running with no down time using hot code reloading here: [VIDEO] but the whole talk is quite interesting regarding availability. Warning: the video is quite quiet.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44547736,"author":"chantepierre","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Leveraging Elixir's hot code loading capabilities to modularize a monolithic app","text":"To add to this topic, people who do not know about erlang's hot code loading should watch this talk : [VIDEO] A multi-DC running cluster where parts are progressively swapped at runtime. No database, only OTP.","stance":"rec"}],"pSHj5UKSylk":[{"hn_comment_id":29988020,"author":"rgbrgb","month":"2022-01","story_title":"OpenGOAL: Port of Jak and Daxter, written in GOAL, a custom Lisp by Naughty Dog","text":"Cool, thanks for sharing that. I had no idea Andy Garvin was on hn, but makes sense :)! I had a vague memory that Super Mario 64 also used lisp and when I googled, I found him again [0]. You've likely seen this, but I recently watched and loved this extended interview with him about making Crash Bandicoot [1]. Really made me want to look more into making video games. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29989968,"author":"bmitc","month":"2022-01","story_title":"OpenGOAL: Port of Jak and Daxter, written in GOAL, a custom Lisp by Naughty Dog","text":"In the cause of Naughty Dog, it was Andy Gavin who introduced Lisp and GOAL and was one of the co-founders of Naughty Dog. He came from MIT and was a student of Rodney Brooks. [LINK] [LINK] If someone hasn't seen it, his episode on Ars Technica's War Stories was awesome. He seems to be a hacker's hacker. It's a fascinating story because it's not really how I personally work (internally), so it's fun hearing someone describe just diving in like that. [LINK] [VIDEO] It was my understanding that Racket wasn't in use anymore at Naughty Dog. It would be cool if there was an update or someone who knows (I know Dan is no longer at Naughty Dog), because unfortunately the tale of Lisps in companies is normally that it eventually gets replaced or set aside (where new stuff is built in something else).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24005990,"author":"djmips","month":"2020-07","story_title":"A Closer Look at the Super NES Doom Source Code Release [video]","text":"Check out Coding Secrets. There are probably a number of videos on this channel that you might enjoy. Some of it is newer and in the 3D era but it goes back into the 8 + 16 bit days as well. [LINK] And his original Game Hut channel. [LINK] And of course, even though this is Playstation the extended interview with Andy Gavin is fascinating. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29987883,"author":"bigdubs","month":"2022-01","story_title":"OpenGOAL: Port of Jak and Daxter, written in GOAL, a custom Lisp by Naughty Dog","text":"The ars technica extended interview with Andy Gavin is a great watch (mentions lisp from his time at MIT) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pSm7BcQHWXk":[{"hn_comment_id":8340047,"author":"chvid","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Poll: Are you a drinker or a teetotaler?","text":"On a side note; the distribution of alcohol habits in humans matches that of monkeys showing that our liking of alcohol is determined mostly by our genes. For more insight into this, watch this video from BBC Worldwide: [VIDEO] Which may also the best 3-minute video on youtube ever.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26183672,"author":"zappo2938","month":"2021-02","story_title":"I am a heroin user. I do not have a drug problem","text":"This video about our primate cousins, the alcoholic vervet monkeys in St. Kitts, might give some insight into addiction. [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pT19VwBAqKA":[{"hn_comment_id":26830731,"author":"Zacru","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Cohort IDs can be collected over time to create cross-site tracking IDs","text":"Your comment reminded me of this minutephysics video about the census. [VIDEO] It a great walkthrough of the \"privacy doom principle.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30635516,"author":"achille","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Why the 2020 census has 9 fake people in a single house","text":"Technical explanation by minutephysics: [VIDEO] The amount of privacy is configurable, and researchers who would like to tune it (in either direction) can make a plea so the public can decide the amount of privacy loss they're willing give up in order to aid research. Each culture is different and has different tolerances for privacy and amount of intrusiveness.","stance":"rec"}],"pTn6Ewhb27k":[{"hn_comment_id":25590722,"author":"aemreunal","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Well, Actually \u2013 Physics Answers","text":"Veritasium recently published a video [1] on why the speed of light can't be measured one way, only two ways (i.e. the speed it travels from point A to point B then back to point A). While I'm not privy to all the physics details of it, I found the video very compelling even as a thought experiment. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29200779,"author":"travisgriggs","month":"2021-11","story_title":"How imaginary numbers were invented [video]","text":"I love Veritasium. Derek has done a number of videos that are awesome like this. The videos are great and educational, but he also manages to subtly weave in an almost spiritual subtext to them as well. For example, in this one, you learn about imaginary numbers in some cool ways, history, how awesome e^ix is, etc, but also this yen-yang balance between embracing not only what is real but taking a chance on what is imaginary. Some of my other favorites: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [VIDEO] I think he\u2019s going to lose the $10,000 bet on the car though.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37638444,"author":"jerf","month":"2023-09","story_title":"How the Most Useless Branch of Math Could Save Your Life","text":"The video in question for reference: [LINK] Interestingly, when I saw that I figured this channel for a goner because he was going to turn to the darkside, but quite contrary to expectations I feel like his channel has actually blossomed since then. His older videos are fine, but often just explaining concepts that you can find a lot of other explanations on, but some of his recent videos have rocked the boat even among physicists and IMHO he was ultimately proved to be correct for them. I particularly point at his videos about how nobody has measured the one-way speed of light ( [VIDEO] ), which was well-known among people very very deep in the field of relativity but not very well known outside of that (even amongst physicists in other fields, let alone lay people) and the electricity videos he's done in the last year ( [LINK] , [LINK] ) which attracted a whole whackload of \"debunking\" videos, which were themselves wrong (the best \"bunking\" video, if I may call it that, is probably AlphaPheonix's: [LINK] , since he actually set up the experiment, albeit on a smaller scale). They aren't all of that caliber, but the knot theory video was very good too and not something I've seen a hundred times elsewhere, and the airships video that preceded that one clearly had a high degree of research put into it beyond just the hype.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25112567,"author":"jerf","month":"2020-11","story_title":"A Spacetime Surprise: Time Isn\u2019t Just Another Dimension","text":"Veritasium just had a good video which discusses this: [VIDEO] It turns out there's some circularity in your definitions of \"Move clocks at the exact same speed and acceleration in opposite directions\" and \"synchronized\"; that's basically the definition of \"synchronized\", which is fine from a certain point of view, but from the point of view of examining the nature of space and time themselves, not adequate.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25768354,"author":"faeyanpiraat","month":"2021-01","story_title":"New superconductor microprocessor yields a substantial boost in efficiency","text":"There is a Veritasium video really fun to watch which exmplains with examples why you cannot measure one way speed of light: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30560053,"author":"fsh","month":"2022-03","story_title":"We're building computers wrong [video]","text":"I think he is easily one of the smartest people on YouTube and is producing some of the very best videos. He is also a brilliant educator. For examples, his videos on special [1] and general relativity [2] were real eye-openers for me, even though I have studied physics and have seen this stuff explained a million times before. What I really don't like are the new video titles. At some point he started A/B testing them to maximize his revenue. He even made a video about it [3]. Of course, this selects for the most outrageous clickbait in order to get that sweet engagement. I am starting to wonder if he took into account, how much this is starting to alienate long-term followers. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36702134,"author":"baxtr","month":"2023-07","story_title":"How is the speed of light measured? (1997)","text":"There is a cool video by Veritasium about the specifics of how the speed of light is actually measured (1). I wasn\u2019t aware that only the two way speed of light was measured so far, not the one way. Which is probably very irrelevant but still quite interesting. (1) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pUF5esTscZI":[{"hn_comment_id":46527069,"author":"ProllyInfamous","month":"2026-01","story_title":"A4 Paper Stories","text":"You beat me in posting this (I searched for \"CGP,\" first \u2014 you mispelled so I didn't see your comment). ---- My favorite CGP Grey video is Metric Paper... , which explores the vast (but limited) world we live in, from plancs to observable universe. [\u2022] < [VIDEO] > Before generative AI videos, this had been what I considered \"the most psychedelic experience one can have without doing drugs .\" It's still a trip ...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47814975,"author":"ProllyInfamous","month":"2026-04","story_title":"God Sleeps in the Minerals","text":"Zoom out, too: [CGP Grey - Metric Paper] < [VIDEO] > - among my favorite videos Yet even Plancks remain analogue ...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46526848,"author":"jihadjihad","month":"2026-01","story_title":"A4 Paper Stories","text":"CPG Grey has a video [0] that goes into some, let's just say deeper , detail into metric paper that is well worth a watch if you haven't seen it. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pW-SOdj4Kkk":[{"hn_comment_id":22254524,"author":"spectramax","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Stop Perfecting, Start Shipping","text":"I am not so sure. This is a handwavy advise I always hear from contemporary business wizbangs, but I don't think it is objectively or universally true. Pedantic, careful and attention to detail, perfectionist products that just work without things breaking all the time are a pleasure to use from the standpoint of the customer. Figure out the implementation details, funding, motivation, etc. as an entrepreneur - shipping broken products to paying customers is something that I only see in the software industry. You don't buy a vacuum cleaner and expect to send half of the missing screws to the customer 6 months later. Hell, just 20 years ago when you bought your SEGA game cassette, it shipped as a final product. Not to be patched ever. Once its out to the factory, if you found a bug, tough luck. Yes, this analogy has its limits, but silicon valley mentality of this startup hustle is questionable. I recommend watching this incredible talk (it's about software) : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27240081,"author":"colllectorof","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Text editing hates you too (2019)","text":">Nostalgia for the simplicity of the past ends up having ugly cultural implications. It's easy to say \"let's go back to the time when things were simple\"; it's a lot harder to say \"folks in (e.g.) Israel shouldn't be able to type in their native language\". This is a ridiculous mischaracterization of what Jonathan Blow was talking about. Here is the full presentation. Very much worth watching in its entirety and thinking about: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20032205,"author":"worldsayshi","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Docker is vulnerable to a symlink-race attack","text":"If you'd like to venture further into this rabbit hole I can recommend \"Preventing the Collapse of Civilization\": [VIDEO] And \"The Thirty Million Line Problem\": [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21859126,"author":"beefman","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"The Soul of Erlang and Elixir, by Sasa Juric video: [LINK] HN discussion: [LINK] Preventing the Collapse of Civilization, by Jonathan Blow video: [VIDEO] HN discussion: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22220035,"author":"mrspeaker","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Amateur radio skills prove useful during bushfire emergencies","text":"Of course that's true - we probably don't need to start re-teaching the abacus... but I'm careful about getting too complacent. When everything has been going well for a long time it's tempting to think this will continue forever. But one, say, global pandemic can bring everything down - and some of our modern conveniences can be gone... possibly for centuries. An interesting (programming) talk by Jonathan Blow on the subject of losing knowledge! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23584571,"author":"perfect5th","month":"2020-06","story_title":"An Intro to Compilers (2017)","text":"I took a couple of compiler courses in university, and I think for the most part it made me a better programmer, mainly because it enforced understanding of how specific programming concepts and constructs are generally implemented. That, and a more intense look at the \"heap of abstractions\" you're generally working with when you write a higher-level language. I've always advocated that, if you want to really understand the tools you are using, you need to understand at least one level below the \"surface abstraction\" that you are working if. Even better if you can understand two or three levels down. There's a great talk from game developer Jonathan Blow [1] that describes how knowledge is lost \"generationally\" due to our lack of understanding of the black boxes we build things on top of. Not sure I 100% agree with his thoughts, but it's an interesting take. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23671054,"author":"fagnerbrack","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Why is development so expensive?","text":"It costs so much mostly because programmers don't know how to write software cost-efficiently. As everybody follows the same path, VCs start to believe the cost is increasing when in fact it's the programmer's knowledge of cost-efficiency software design that is decreasing. Take a look at this: [VIDEO] The costs to develop software are ridiculous and unrealistic. It turns out that if enough people act as ridiculous and unrealistic that becomes the new normal.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27069524,"author":"d_burfoot","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Crazy New Ideas","text":"I follow Blow's work and opinions quite closely. I am quite confident he was NOT criticizing Mighty specifically. Instead he was deploring the state of software engineering in general and web programming in particular. He is saying something like \"I can't believe web engineering sucks so bad that a tool like Mighty actually makes sense\". See his talk about preventing the end of civilization (!!): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28393460,"author":"city41","month":"2021-09","story_title":"The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make","text":"There's also the pessimistic view that we will actually lose progress and regress over time. Jonathan Blow has an interesting talk on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29631206,"author":"SQueeeeeL","month":"2021-12","story_title":"How are Rome's monuments still standing?","text":"Jonathan Blow makes a bunch of great points about our simplified view of ancient people, versus the reality of their complex achievements which could only be brought about by lots of ingenuity and iterations. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34112631,"author":"PartiallyTyped","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Is software becoming less efficient?","text":"> software actually becoming less efficient? I'd argue that software is becoming worse in some ways. It seems that the acceptable tolerance is _very_ low these days, with most people are just shrugging issues off. Personally, I find this talk by Jonathan Blow to be rather inspiring: [VIDEO] As for software becoming less efficient specifically, I'd say that it is, for example, relying on microservices for everything is probably not a good idea for most companies. Not everyone is AWS, nor do they need to be.","stance":"rec"}],"pX8BXH3SJn0":[{"hn_comment_id":21118706,"author":"avip","month":"2019-09","story_title":"CA Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes to Profit from Endorsements","text":"In case you're lacking context (not all readers here are US basketball fans) - John Oliver has an excellent take on NCAA salaries issue [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9323406,"author":"IkmoIkmo","month":"2015-04","story_title":"The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much","text":"It an expense, not necessarily a cost. Their property values just rose for example. Over time the equipment ages which leads to breaking, and replacement because it's not state of the art anymore. If you expect it to last 20 years, then you can write off 1/20th every year, which are your actual costs. Meaning it's $100 per student per year, which is reasonably cheap because those are essentially your costs to have state of the art equipment available to you every year. Things like heating & lighting, employees, cleaning etc is added to that, but it's mostly independent from renovation as you had to pay that anyway before you renovated. It might go up a bit, it might go down because of more sustainable engineering for example. There's a lot more to it, of course, don't get me wrong. But $2k per student for non-teaching isn't quite the truth, either. But I think the notion of building decent public facilities and amenities is one of the best things we ought to do. It sadly doesn't happen often. But universities do it, libraries, rec centers, I think it's great. It has to happen in a smart way, of course, I don't support some of the ridiculous over the top projects you sometimes see. A pool in the shape of a buffalo, ugh, great example right there. Sadly it's often in the pursuit of collegiate sports and not really providing awesome amenities and facilities to the general student body. Reminds me of the piece about Alabama in this great Last Week Tonight [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11710740,"author":"themartorana","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Amazon Proves Infertile Soil for Unions, So Far","text":"The \"league\" has billion dollar revenue, multi million dollar coaching salaries, enormous capital expenditures, and more. They are not \"break even.\" If in fact you believe that student athletes are not exploited to an unconscionable degree, here is just a little educational material to get you started. [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] And I'm not alone calling it slave labor. I'm just one in a massive chorus. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"pXOK-ZVJMaU":[{"hn_comment_id":4608052,"author":"ddellacosta","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Men with shaved heads are perceived to be more masculine","text":"There's a great interview with Patrick Stewart where he talks about his experience acclimating to baldness, I highly recommend it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20532684,"author":"SenHeng","month":"2019-07","story_title":"A \"cure\" for baldness could be around the corner","text":"Patrick Stewart has this awesome interview about his baldness. I'm not balding yet but it has inspired me enough that I plan to shave it all off when I eventually start. [VIDEO] Transcribe for those who can't watch videos, from [LINK] Even though Stewart lost his hair at an early age, he didn\u2019t shave it bald for a number of years. He relates the hilarious story of the first time he went fully bald, \u201cThere was a man who was at drama school with me, Hungarian, he was older than the rest of us, he ran his own theater in Budapest. He was a man of strong personality and a good loyal friend to me. He and his wife invited me for lunch one day, the two of them got to the end of their lunch and I thought they were going to make a coffee or something. Then all of a sudden, I was grabbed from behind by George, this big powerful man, and I thought he was playing some kind of game, so I was laughing and joking but then his wife appeared in front of me with a pair of scissors and I knew in an instant what she was going to do, and I began to scream and shout, and now it was serious. I was fighting to keep my appearance, then she lifted my hair and cut it all off. Then George came around, knelt down in front of me and said, now you be yourself \u2013 no more hiding! And he was right because I used to walk constantly embarrassed, I couldn\u2019t stand-up properly. It was not only inhibiting as a person, but it was hopeless if you were an actor, of course.\u201d","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6808924,"author":"w00tnes","month":"2013-11","story_title":"My genetics are making me miserable","text":"Just turned 26, been loosing hair since middle school (16-17), a few more years and I'll be rockin' a Balmer look :) How I cope with it? I've accepted the situation a long time ago and I don't let it get to me anymore (it did when I was younger tho, had huge self-confidence problems because of it). Hair isn't all that important, just be a good person... :) Maybe watch the patrick stewart interview, maybe it'll help a bit: [VIDEO] ;)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26252211,"author":"EdwardCoffin","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Researchers find stem cells for hair regeneration","text":"Patrick Stewart touched on the topic of going bald in an excerpt from an interview on the BBC (Parkinson) [1]. It's pretty funny. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32277184,"author":"wsc981","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Scientists have finally found the potential \u201ccure\u201d for baldness","text":"I also felt better after accepting my baldness. Patrick Stewart can be an inspiration in this regard: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pYXy-A4siMw":[{"hn_comment_id":34374754,"author":"durbleflorp","month":"2023-01","story_title":"We could stumble into AI catastrophe","text":"I strongly suggest anyone doubtful of the reasoning behind these concerns or asking questions like \"well why don't we just do x to solve this?\" go check out Robert Miles' YouTube channel[1]. It's quite an approachable intro, often entertaining, doesn't take a long time to get through all the core videos, and very thoroughly answers all the \"why not just do x\" questions if you go through the whole set. He also does a good job of introducing a lot of the terms used in the field if you then want to go look up papers and get more into the details. One important point he makes is that when you're making a risk assessment you have to both consider the probability of something going wrong and the scope of the potential consequences. When the potential consequences are an existential threat you don't need a high probability to take them seriously. I also happen to think that if you watch all the material he makes a compelling argument that the odds of something going wrong are fairly high unless we start approaching AI research (and particularly safety and ethical concerns) drastically differently than we are now. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32540962,"author":"WhitneyLand","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Beyond Hyperanthropomorphism","text":"Venkatesh\u2019s argument is so poor it comes close to \u201cnot even wrong\u201d territory. He doesn\u2019t really cite any specific people or literature to disagree with, and instead makes only vague references to the \u201cnon-sense\u201d of others. The most significant concerns around AI safety are not discussed nor even mentioned leading it to read almost as if he has no expertise whatsoever in this field, and indeed that seems to be the case. No need for an appeal to authority though - just taking a little time to hear the actual concerns and opinions on topic would be welcome. Great intro to the subject here, I wonder what his response would be? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33873270,"author":"casebash","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Show HN: Help, I let GPTChat control my computer","text":"Is there any chance you could add some links to AI Safety Resources such as Joe Carlsmith's Power Seeking AI ( [LINK] ) or Rob Miles Introduction to AI Safety ( [VIDEO] )? Perhaps you could link to a resource on the AI box experiment as well? I know you vaguely gesture at it, but would likely be better to explicitly link people to resources if they haven't heard of it themselves.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36124905,"author":"Veedrac","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Statement on AI Risk","text":"The basic argument is trivial: it is plausible that future systems achieve superhuman capability; capable systems necessarily have instrumental goals; instrumental goals tend to converge; human preferences are unlikely to be preserved when other goals are heavily selected for unless intentionally preserved; we don't know how to make AI systems encode any complex preference robustly. Robert Miles' videos are among the best presented arguments about specific points in this list, primary on the alignment side rather than the capabilities side, that I have seen for casual introduction. Eg. this one on instrumental convergence: [LINK] Eg. this introduction to the topic: [VIDEO] He also has the community-led AI Safety FAQ, [LINK] , which gives brief answers to common questions. If you have specific questions I might be able to point to a more specific argument at a higher level of depth.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36125310,"author":"lambertsimnel","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Statement on AI Risk","text":"I recommend Robert Miles's YouTube channel, and his \"Intro to AI Safety, Remastered\" is a good place to start: [VIDEO] I find Robert Miles worryingly plausible when he says (about 12:40 into the video) \"if you have a sufficiently powerful agent and you manage to come up with a really good objective function, which covers the top 20 things that humans value, the 21st thing that humans value is probably gone forever\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37772391,"author":"albumen","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Many scientists don\u2019t want to tell the truth about climate change. Here\u2019s why","text":"If only. There's a lot of space in between \"our morality\" (please do define that) and \"what we want to be\" where AGI can royally screw us. Check out Robert Miles on AI safety, here's a good intro: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"p_iZr2-Coqc":[{"hn_comment_id":22781105,"author":"kyuudou","month":"2020-04","story_title":"What is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?","text":"I bet you know about that salt cavern that collapsed at Lake Peigneur[1]. There should be a documentary on youtube where you can see the footage, including a really big boat going \"phoomph\" into the whirlpool created by the bayou water filling in the cavern. Edit: here's one[2] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] still blows my mind","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38708667,"author":"ljoshua","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Was an ancient bacterium awakened by an industrial accident?","text":"Also fascinating because we have video footage of it, and it\u2019s as crazy as it sounds. Quick 8-minute documentary on it that I found interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pa5_tudyAF8":[{"hn_comment_id":11532982,"author":"justsaysmthng","month":"2016-04","story_title":"BMW Loses Core Development Team of Its I3 and I8 Electric Vehicle Line","text":"Here's a video of the i3 production line: [VIDEO] As can be seen, they are not joking around. To me it looks like technology brought by aliens from the future.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15345424,"author":"retSava","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Dyson to make electric cars from 2020","text":"I can recommend this video: [LINK] \"Tearing Down the Model T of Our Time - Autoline After Hours 284\" and [VIDEO] \"BMW i3 Factory Production Tour\"","stance":"rec"}],"pagPuiuA9cY":[{"hn_comment_id":45742819,"author":"B-Con","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste","text":"Knives are a great example. Any chance it was this guy? [VIDEO] I've watched like 3 hours of his videos on sharpening because he's pragmatic, approachable, and scientific, and now I actually understand how to sharpen a knife and why it works.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48688262,"author":"IAmBroom","month":"2026-06","story_title":"The anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision","text":"Off-topic: what finally allowed me to gain the ability for high sharpening on a whetstone was watching a YT video of a master at the craft who worked slowly [0]. He wasn't one of those chefs doing the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh and it's sharp off a hone, nor even on the stone. He stared and concentrated and carefully made each pass. That leads to a lot of idiocy out there. I've twice handed knives to (amateur) others only to find them duller after \"sharpening\" than before. One had a hone; the other had a diamond-grit stone. The muscle memory to keep your edge at the same angle through the draw along a curved knife face takes a looooong time to perfect. He didn't trust in it; he always watched and moved with care. Once I accepted that as the end goal, I too could get knives that routinely shaved paper. [0]: OUTDOORS55 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45324881,"author":"czl","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Ultrasonic Chef's Knife","text":"Pull through sharpening creates an edge that does not last. This channel has great explanations about this and what to do instead: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pdJQ8iVTwj8":[{"hn_comment_id":36291609,"author":"teh_klev","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Mojo is a much better \u201cObjective-C without the C\u201d than Swift ever was","text":"This episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, where Chris Lattner talks to Fridman about Mojo and other things, might be of interest to readers: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36293296,"author":"spmurrayzzz","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Mojo is a much better \u201cObjective-C without the C\u201d than Swift ever was","text":"Lattner being behind Mojo always engendered some benefit of the doubt despite my initial gripes with the marketing claims, but his recent interview with Lex Fridman [1] further emboldened my stance that if Mojo can succeed, Lattner is one of the best-positioned engineers to see it through. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36571716,"author":"spacephysics","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Show HN: Python can make 3M+ WebSocket keys per second","text":"Mojo seems like a very promising solution, despite it being AI oriented. Lex Friedman had a great podcast with the founder, its first version was released about a month ago, and in two weeks got 10k discord users. A superset of python that, once finished, can run all native python code, but also adds language features to get closer to the \u201cmetal\u201d, getting speeds of C libraries with the ability to properly debug and step through it. If this project goes the way it\u2019s promised (the guy has great experience with language development), this could further cement python as it would solve its biggest criticisms. Very excited for it [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45142698,"author":"tony","month":"2025-09","story_title":"ML needs a new programming language \u2013 Interview with Chris Lattner","text":"Chris Lattner also has a very good episode on Lex Fridman (Episode 381, June 2nd, 2023): - [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK] He has two other episodes on the show: - [LINK] (Episode 131, October 18th, 2020) - [LINK] (Episode 21, May 13th, 2019)","stance":"rec"}],"pdmODVYPDLA":[{"hn_comment_id":22970390,"author":"lukifer","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Accidentally Turing-Complete","text":"For anyone curious about the details of building a Turing machine in MtG, Because Science did a thorough breakdown and demonstration, using actual cards: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38647206,"author":"bentona","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Magic: The Gathering Is Turing Complete (2019)","text":"Here's a demo: [VIDEO] Didn't realize this before watching, but it's interesting that there's an incredibly complicated board state but the game state / actions are deterministic, e.g. the players don't have any choices about what to do once the machine is set up.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48500242,"author":"mckn1ght","month":"2026-06","story_title":"MTG Bench: Testing how well LLMs can play magic","text":"Someone made a video based on the paper, if you want to see the cards being used and a little more explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pgoetgxecw8":[{"hn_comment_id":29085974,"author":"dundarious","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Anatomy of a Terminal Emulator","text":"Casey Muratori's refterm video series is a great example of how to do application design. It focuses on writing a terminal emulator for Windows, but almost all the concepts apply to nixes as well -- even down to the level of OS primitives like memory mappings to create a ring buffer, etc. He builds a nearly complete terminal that appears to better support unicode and escape sequences than windows-terminal, in drastically less code and with literally orders of magnitude better performance. In particular, I like his focus on experimentation to figure out a reasonable upper bound on performance (so you can measure success/failure), \"non-pessimisation\" (don't do things extrinsic to the actual task), understanding the actual machine and its capabilities (he doesn't use the term, but sometimes called \"mechanical sympathy\"), and tactics for isolating \"bad code\" that you probably have to use (at least to get started). [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29035521,"author":"grayrest","month":"2021-10","story_title":"55 GiB/s FizzBuzz","text":"> The overwhelming majority of slow code isn't slow because it's failed to do this kind of microoptimization, it's slow because it used the wrong algorithm. I disagree. I believe the majority of code is slow because it's written without any consideration at all to performance. I like Casey Muratori's philosophy of non-pessimization where true optmization (measuring, working hot spots) is rare and rarely necessary but massive speedups compared to the general state of the art are achievable by simply not writing code using patterns that are inherently slow. This isn't deep algorithmic stuff it's just avoiding copies and/or pointer chasing. Edit: [VIDEO] <- Casey's most recent intro to non-pessimization > For a realistic-sized problem, if you write solutions in C and Python with the same amount of effort from equally skilled programmers, the Python version will almost certainly be faster The Advent of Code runs every year and I'm not sure about C (not something I track) but there are plenty of Rust submissions and while the Rust submissions take longer to come in, it's not THAT much longer. From memory it's like 2x on a timescale of minutes. The Python programs are not faster.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29228427,"author":"hsn915","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Selecting a programming language can be a form of premature optimization","text":"The fallacy of premature optimization rears its ugly head again. When Knuth wrote that quote, he meant something very specific with the word optimization: low level micro optimizations. Spending a lot of time trying to get every little ounce of performance from every little CPU instruction. High level reasonable design decisions are not \"optimizations\" in this sense at all. You should think of them as non-pessimization. Choosing Python or another slow language is premature pessimization. You just make your program slower for no reason. So choosing a language based on how programs written in it perform is simply non-pessimization. If you are interested in an expansion on this idea, checkout Casey Muratori's lecture about philosophies of optimization: [VIDEO] The article makes claims about software being \"fast enough\" and not needing further optimization. But what you call \"fast enough\" is probably 10000 times slower than what it could be. I'm not joking. People who program in slow languages have a really skewed perception about performance. If a page takes 5 seconds to load, they don't see that as a problem. If a server takes 500ms to respond to a request, they don't see that as a problem. This is simply unacceptable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30120545,"author":"jiggawatts","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration","text":"I\u2019ve found this to be an unsuccessful approach in practice. Performance is a complex, many-faceted thing. It has hidden costs that are hard to quantify. Customers leave in disgust because the site is slow. No amount of \u201cthrowing more cores at it\u201d will help if there\u2019s a single threaded bottleneck somewhere. Superlinear algorithms will get progressively worse, easily outpacing processor speed improvements. Notably this is a recent thing \u2014 single threaded throughout was improving exponentially for decades so many admins internalised the concept that simply moving an app with a \u201cmerely quadratic\u201d scaling problem to new hardware will always fix the problem. Now\u2026 this does nothing. I\u2019ve turned up at many sites as a consultant at eyewatering daily rates to fix slow apps. Invariably they were missing trivial things like database indexes or caching. Not Redis or anything fancy like that! Just cache control headers on static content. Invariably, doing the right thing from the beginning would have been cheaper. Listen to Casey explain it: [VIDEO] You need to have efficiency in your heart and soul or you can\u2019t honestly call yourself an engineer. Learn your craft properly so you can do more with less \u2014 including less developer time!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30878142,"author":"AnIdiotOnTheNet","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in the Browser","text":"Honestly you don't even have to think about optimization to make your software not horrifically slow on modern hardware, instead you have to think about non-pessimization. Simply put, avoid needless complexity and gratuitous waste in the first place. See Refterm Lecture Part 1 - Philosophies of Optimization by Casey Muratori: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31743893,"author":"infogulch","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Making Code Faster","text":"I like Casey Miratory's \"non-pessimization\" approach in Philosophies of Optimization [1] [2]. He breaks \"making a program go faster\" into 3 modes: (1) \"optimization\" which includes counting expected cycles or memory bandwidth, careful benchmarking, designing custom algorithms, etc which can be fun but is expensive and is only rarely applied; (2) \"non-pessimization\" which is simply avoiding adding extra unnecessary work for the cpu, which should be done 100% of the time but isn't in the industry today; (3) and \"fake optimization\" which is shallowly repeating 'optimization tips' and conclusions from unrelated cases of (1) without actually measuring it. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31770381,"author":"AnIdiotOnTheNet","month":"2022-06","story_title":"The computers are fast, but you don't know it","text":"But perfect performance isn't even the benchmark, it's \"not ridiculously slow\". This is what is meant by \"Computers are fast, but you don't know it\", you don't even know how ludicrously fast computers are because so much stuff is so insanely slow. They're so fast that, in the vast majority of cases, you don't even need optimization, you just need non-pessimization: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33606510,"author":"DeathArrow","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?","text":"I under the impression that we are building software the wrong way. This video from Casey Muratori helped me point to some reasons: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34792032,"author":"AnIdiotOnTheNet","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Maybe people do care about performance and reliability","text":"I'm going to pre-emptively link Casey Muratori's Refterm Lecture Part 1[0], because invariably when this topic comes up people are all \"but optimization takes time and we gotta push the new features right now or the market will eat us.\" Computers are so ludicrously fast these days that in the majority of cases you do not need optimization at all. You do need de-pessimization though. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34976512,"author":"loup-vaillant","month":"2023-02","story_title":"\u201cClean\u201d Code, Horrible Performance","text":"Agreed, but most people here haven't paid for the rest of the course, and Casey sometimes forgot that here he's addressing a wider audience. For instance he fails to explain why he didn't bother addressing the tail of his unrolled loop. He does in the course, but here he's just assuming it's irrelevant, and doesn't address again potential criticism like \"he doesn't even bother to write correct code, look at that lazy unrolling!\" . Thankfully there's a free lecture that explains the broad concept with an example. It's this lecture that convinced me to try out his course, where I hope he'll go into more details: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35741639,"author":"Hikikomori","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Performance Excuses Debunked","text":"He isn't saying that you should spend time on optimising your code, rather that you should write performant code from the beginning by not giving the cpu more work than it needs to do to perform the task, typically by avoiding OO paradigms, followings things like SOLID, etc. Then if needed, real optimisation can handle the hotspots in your code and is typically something that only a few of an orgs best engineers can do properly, but if everything is slow then its an insurmountable task for these few engineers. If you want to understand what he means with this watch the refterm series. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38555052,"author":"DeathArrow","month":"2023-12","story_title":"For processing strings, streams in C++ can be slow","text":"Anything object oriented is slower than anything procedural. Boxing and unboxing is expensive, running constructors and destructors is expensive, copying objects is expensive, virtual tables are expensive. And stuff isn't aligned greatly in memory, we can expect lots of cache misses and branch mispredictions. The fastest possible way is to have C strings in an array and run a function over it. If there are advantages to OOP, speed is not one of them. Here's a great talk about software speed: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42213459,"author":"latexr","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Is Python That Slow?","text":"> Casey Muratori has a real in-depth course on why Python is slow and how to make it fast I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a fair characterisation of the course and that description does it a disservice. The course is not about Python, it\u2019s about programming with performance in mind. The video on Philosophies of Optimisation is a good primer on the tenets of the course. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ph8LyNIT9sg":[{"hn_comment_id":23506604,"author":"greyskull","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming","text":"IMO required viewing for any dev to form a more informed opinion on the SSD tech. Cerny talks about it fairly practically. Starting point on SSD: [VIDEO] for about 20 minutes","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23507659,"author":"slx26","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Storage Matters: Why Xbox and Playstation SSDs Usher in a New Era of Gaming","text":"Yes, a lot of people commenting here should really go watch the talk Mark Cerny gave [0]. It's clear there's no \"big technological breakthrough\". SSDs are great but have been around for a while already, we simply had to wait for the technology to mature enough. What we are seeing is that we can't just keep slapping better CPUs and GPUs to the machines, because the improvements nowaday are not that impressive anymore, so at least for the PS5 they have switched and started focusing on the architecture , removing bottlenecks, removing major pain points, and using additional hardware to handle tasks like compression and freeing resources for other purposes. Some people might say these improvements happen because they were lazy before and never focused properly on dev needs and bottlenecks and the specific needs of game development. I partially agree, but the SSDs really don't just improve disk speed, they allow a completely different set of architectural optimizations. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36693461,"author":"xela79","month":"2023-07","story_title":"RPCS3 \u2013 The Open Source Playstation 3 Emulator","text":"I can really recommend this tech talk regarding PS4 and PS5 hardware by their lead hardware architect [VIDEO] some really interesting topics related to what kind of performance they wanted as a baseline and how to optimize to make the PS5 do what it currently does... like no other platform. a $700 console that: - outputs 4k / HDR (upscaled from lower native res. ofc) - renders games steadily at 30 / 60fps - no hitches, framedrops - always records your gameplay - live video sharing of stream with PS friends - live streaming to youtube - updates of games being installed - downloads of games/data all simultaneous, instant game switches, quick loading times. the experience cannot be replicated with a 1k gaming PC, not even a $2000 machine. They really delivered a device which is imho, more than just \"an AMD gaming PC with a custom GUI and some DRM\" would have loved to have widescale keyboard/mouse support, as playing Far Cry with a controller is frustrating at best. And keyboard/mouse support is in hands of the game dev if they want to support it or not.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22633845,"author":"Avamander","month":"2020-03","story_title":"PlayStation 5: the specs and the tech","text":"The talk for those interested: [VIDEO] I found it really quite interesting, even if I don't game on consoles primarily.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27250245,"author":"jonas21","month":"2021-05","story_title":"What\u2019s your API\u2019s \u201cTime To 200\u201d?","text":"I believe \"time to 200\" is a reference to \"time to triangle,\" which Playstation architect Mark Cerny and others have used to describe the amount of time it takes to get a game engine up and running on a new console to the point where it can render its first triangle [1]. You can see him talking about time to triangle on various Playstation consoles here [2] (and if you have the time, it's definitely worth watching the entire talk). [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27304699,"author":"wincy","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Marvell Announces First PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD Controllers: Up to 14 GB/S","text":"The PS5s operating system and even how they package game files had to be developed from the ground up to realize these gains. There\u2019s a good technical talk about it from one of Sony\u2019s engineers. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ph9O9yJoeZY":[{"hn_comment_id":32176505,"author":"dodgerdan","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Myths about construction","text":"Grady also has an excellently made video about the leaning Millennium Tower in SF and what they\u2019re doing while still trying to fix it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34598405,"author":"mc32","month":"2023-01","story_title":"CA Cities to Lose All Zoning Powers in 2 Days","text":"Here is someone who goes into detail about the Millennium Tower debacle: [VIDEO] In short, shortcuts, or more charitably, miscalculations. They really thought they had enough margin to work with but obviously that wasn\u2019t the case.","stance":"rec"}],"pkCLMl0e_0k":[{"hn_comment_id":19978348,"author":"ehsankia","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Python built-ins worth learning","text":"Just watched his PyCon 2019 where he derives lambda calculus from scratch in Python, and he had similar shell magics going on there too. Great tutorial if you've never seen lambda calculus before, definitely brain twister. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20768920,"author":"sethgecko","month":"2019-08","story_title":"One-lined Python","text":"If you want your mind to blow up I recommend watching this year's \"Lambda Calculus from the Ground Up\" PyCon talk by the wizard David Beazley [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27661600,"author":"globular-toast","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Lambda Calculus Examples (2009) [pdf]","text":"For someone fluent in Python, David Beazley gives a brilliant introduction to lambda calculus here: [VIDEO] This is great fun to follow through on a rainy afternoon!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24194408,"author":"avador","month":"2020-08","story_title":"A circuit-like notation for lambda calculus (2015)","text":"This talk by David Beazley (Lambda Calculus from the Ground Up) might be useful: [VIDEO] Zero and one come in around the 35 minute mark (after booleans).","stance":"rec"}],"plVk4NVIUh8":[{"hn_comment_id":12555965,"author":"lossolo","month":"2016-09","story_title":"The Age of the Superbug Is Here","text":"This is an amazing video[1] from Harvard Medical School released couple of days ago showing evolution of bacteria that evolve in 10 days to become resistant to antibiotics. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20367074,"author":"robocat","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Bladder cancer 'attacked and killed by common cold virus'","text":"> Why do you think the strongest of the strong bacteria are found in hospitals? I presume you mean strong against antibiotics and sterilisation. The evolved bacteria are likely weaker along other dimensions (that are less important for survival in a hospital setting). Some evolution is compromises, improving X has cost Y. Aside: the mega-plate video is an unbelievably good demonstration of bacterial evolution: [VIDEO] especially note the tree at the end showing how many different mutations evolved.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12474724,"author":"Retric","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Videos of Evolution in Action","text":"The video shows mutations in real time as bacteria grow or fail to grow in various places. [VIDEO] It's more a demonstration than experiment, but visually it's just really striking.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13454431,"author":"sengork","month":"2017-01","story_title":"How to Avoid a Post-Antibiotic World","text":"For those that would like to visualise how the bacteria vs anitbiotics evolve in an experiment over 11 days, have a look at this video from Harvard: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16507186,"author":"ramgorur","month":"2018-03","story_title":"The man who bottled evolution","text":"Harvard medical school did a similar experiment on fast evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics on a petri-dish. It also clearly shows the lineage of evolution. Very interesting. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34309571,"author":"idiocrat","month":"2023-01","story_title":"It's 2023 and I still have to touch a piss soaked door handle to exit a bathroom","text":"Strengthens your immune system. Without exposure (playing in mud, touching other people), we are only weaker. Bio life is really complicated. Sterilization works well only to a certain degree, before becoming damaging, e.g. causing resistance. Somewhat related, here is an interesting visualization of bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"plcc6E-E1uU":[{"hn_comment_id":25847878,"author":"cronix","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Have we already been visited by aliens?","text":"Lex Fridman had a really good interview with Avi Loeb about Oumuamua, among other things, about a week ago. Highly recommend! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27675126,"author":"erellsworth","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Oumuamua, alien artefact or interstellar debris?","text":"There's a good interview with Avi Loeb on the Lex Fridman podcast about this very topic. His actual argument is fairly compelling and doesn't really sound sensational at all, IMO. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pm5xxlajTW0":[{"hn_comment_id":25724940,"author":"nwienert","month":"2021-01","story_title":"YouTube bans Steve Bannon's podcast channel","text":"If you want to genuinely understand the other side and not comfort yourself by relying on simple slanderous slurs to do the work, this is worth at least an hour of your time: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25744112,"author":"j8hn","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Two Worlds: So Much Prosperity, So Much Skepticism","text":"After the 2016 election I was really curious as to how Trump could be elected. Most of my peers brushed it off as dumb, racist white people, but I really wanted to understand. Especially since I had family who had voted for him who I don't consider to be dumb or racist. I'm from the coast and live in the city. When taking a road trip through the Midwest, it hit me that people from the rust belt and rural areas had to vote for his message. Honestly it was depressing to see the decaying factories and poverty stricken areas. He was giving them hope and was going to fight for them. Anyway, I may be wrong but that's just my perspective. Someone posted this video here yesterday with Steve Bannon explaining the populist movement and how Trump came to be president. There are multiple parts and this video is over two hours long but worth the watch. I'm not normally one to watch a video over half an hour and especially not Steve Bannon, but it's quite fascinating to hear this story and perspective. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pnv5iKB2hl4":[{"hn_comment_id":22319522,"author":"alpb","month":"2020-02","story_title":"State of Oklahoma's New Brand Identity / Logo","text":"This is painful to see. It looks like a shopping mall or apartment building logo, compared to other states with proper flags. And it goes without saying, on this topic, one must watch the short talk on state and country flags: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30206395,"author":"misterS","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Country Flags in SVG","text":"> kids in first year of school should know how to draw flag from memory Roman Mars taught me that \u2013 well Ted Kaye, but Roman taught me in his seminal TED talk [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22319606,"author":"djsumdog","month":"2020-02","story_title":"State of Oklahoma's New Brand Identity / Logo","text":"Their flag is terrible: [LINK] 99% Invisible does a great episode on what makes a good flag, and why cities like Chicago, DC and Amsterdam have iconic, memorable flags: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"pq1XqP4-qOo":[{"hn_comment_id":29480317,"author":"ndesaulniers","month":"2021-12","story_title":"A proposal to start \u201cllvm-libc\u201d (2020)","text":"Andrew Kelley makes an interesting point in: [VIDEO] about the PT_INTERP being hard-coded. That seems like a long ago assumption baked that binaries should only have one program interpreter per system. I don't know enough about configuring a system and the historical decisions around PT_INTERP, but I suspect Andrew is on to something.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39332793,"author":"Cloudef","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Building the DirectX shader compiler better than Microsoft?","text":"That mesa issue reminded me of wayland issue thats been open for 3 years now where apps crash if theres even a slight stall due to the wayland socket becoming full. Instead of providing quick fix for actual app devs and users who are affected most, they have been designing this perfect solution for apps and compositor to agree on the socket size for 3 years now. Its similar crap with the server size decorations where they finally had to admit people want them and merged the protocol but don't implement it in gnome compositor :) I'd say wayland really was barebones when it was being pushed and major contributions to actually get it usable on desktop was from outsiders. I'd say win32/flatpak/libretro are the only sane way for games to target linux right now. The fact that linux doesn't have real \"runtime\" and major components required by games link against libc is what makes linux really unstable for anything that needs to open window, draw stuff using GPU and play audio. It's possible to create static binaries for linux that work for eternity, thanks to kernel being actually stable. But link against something in /usr/lib and it all goes to hell. If the GPU drivers and libs that provided basic window / audio did not depend on libc and were standalone, the situation would be much better. Here's good video about this problem space btw [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pqQSwQLDIK8":[{"hn_comment_id":49065278,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Park by Robot at London Gatwick Airport","text":"The therapy that Juleiie needs begins by watching nine minutes of mixed car, bike, and pedestrian rush hour traffic at the intersection of Korte Prinsengracht and Haarlemmerstraat in Amsterdam. Unbelievably busy bicycle crossing in Amsterdam: [VIDEO] Watching that video sooths my mind and warms my heart by proving how well a society of people who have not literally driven themselves mentally ill by viciously driving around in environmentally and economically destructive metal tanks can harmoniously and heathily get along together without fearing and murdering one another, by simply looking each other in the eyes and acknowledging that they all exist in the same shared space together. The famous Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman believed drivers become more alert and cautious when there\u2019s more uncertainty on the road. Want fewer car accidents? Remove traffic signals and road signs: [LINK] >Hans Monderman believed that societies could make roads safer by making drivers more uncertain, and therefore alert. >\u201cWhen you treat people like idiots, they\u2019ll behave like idiots.\u201d >That was the philosophy of Hans Monderman, the Dutch traffic engineer who became famous not for what he added to road design and urban planning, but for what he removed: curbs, traffic signals, signs. He believed drivers become more alert and cautious when there\u2019s more uncertainty on the road. >\u201cThe trouble with traffic engineers is that when there\u2019s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,\u201d","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26510904,"author":"sjaak","month":"2021-03","story_title":"It's Never a Bicycle Accident","text":"To all the outlawed cyclists I'd like to say: show your fellow countrymen how it's done in the salvation state of the Netherlands. Cyclists own the roads here, see for yourself: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pqeJFYwnkjE":[{"hn_comment_id":10894626,"author":"philbo","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Towards an understanding of technical debt","text":"For the best description of technical debt, you can't do better than listen to the man who first coined the term. Ward Cunningham explains: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8637283,"author":"datashovel","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Your developers aren\u2019t slow","text":"Here are a few of the resources I have used in the past to help explain to non-technical folks some of what a developer needs to deal with when involved in a large project. 1) Ward Cunningham explains \"technical debt\": [VIDEO] 2) comic strip - \"How Projects Really Work\": [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27531435,"author":"cratermoon","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Tech debt is not a burden, it's a strategic lever for success","text":"It's kind of a pet peeve of mine around technical debt. Some programmers and places I've worked get it wrong, so I refer people to Ward Cunningham's explanation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34891797,"author":"cratermoon","month":"2023-02","story_title":"The age of cargo cult Agile must end","text":"While we're at it, let's talk about what Technical Debt really means. A mess is not technical debt. Ward Cunningham explains Debt Metaphor [VIDEO] transcript at [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"pqzcCfUglws":[{"hn_comment_id":11830910,"author":"rasz_pl","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Amateur Auction Theorist","text":"Unless you enjoy misery, trolling, and derive satisfaction from forcing other people to make stupid decisions. Personally I'm more than happy losing a bid if I make someone else suffer winner's curse just because they are blinded by escalation of commitment and a long list of other biases. One of my favourite speeches touching on the subject: The Psychology of Human Misjudgement - Charlie Munger Full Speech bit about auctions is at 59:30 [VIDEO] text [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12159586,"author":"eigenvalue","month":"2016-07","story_title":"The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (2005) [pdf]","text":"You can also listen to him giving this speech here: [VIDEO] I revisit this material every couple years. It's so easy to fall into these traps in your thinking.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24099747,"author":"cs702","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some available force multipliers that most people don't know?","text":"Develop an intuitive understanding of the key mental models mentioned by Charlie Munger in his classic speech given to a Harvard class 25 years ago: \"The Psychology of Human Misjudgment,\" by Charlie Munger [VIDEO] [LINK] If I may paraphrase Mr. Munger, you never want to be a one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest of life.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38451393,"author":"cainxinth","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Charlie Munger has died","text":"As billionaires go, he seemed unusually down to earth. I listen to his lecture on \"The Psychology of Human Misjudgement\" every few years: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8319945,"author":"timrosenblatt","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Practical formula for being relentlessly resourceful?","text":"Your first question is \"can you make a conscious effort to get better at [being resourceful]?\" The answer is almost certainly yes. Techniques for being resourceful are very specific to the individual, so what works for one person may not for another. That being said... The first thing I would do is meditate. It is becoming trendy, but I think for a good reason. By complete coincidence, [LINK] is a news article that showed up this morning. I think if a man like Steve Jobs arranges for a book on meditation (and self-actualization) to be given to the attendees of his own funeral, that is a powerful sign. Talk to other people about challenges you face. This sounds simple, but it is effective. Another way of saying \"I need a creative solution\" is \"I need a solution that I wouldn't have come up with\". To me, that sounds like \"I need a solution someone else came up with\". Every successful business leader has advisors. So should you. There is a talk by Charlie Munger (of Berkshire Hathaway fame) about decision making. It tends to focus on mistakes, but if you know what mistakes to avoid, it can help you find the right answer. [VIDEO] Tell me what you think about these.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17117987,"author":"melling","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Scientists think the cell nucleolus may play an important role in aging","text":"It\u2019s not a rule but an observation. We can certainly become more self-aware and change our behavior. Munger\u2019s Psychology of human misjudgment, for instance, is enlightening: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"prXuyMCgbTc":[{"hn_comment_id":31311072,"author":"panzerboiler","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Making a falling sand simulator","text":"Nice work, Jason. I enjoyed a lot a talk [1] at GDC by Petri Purho (Nolla Games and before that Kloonigames) that explains the \"Falling Everything Engine\" used in their game Noita (that I would love to play on my mac...). Highly recommended if you want to dive deeper into the topic. [1]: [VIDEO] \"Exploring the Tech and Design of Noita\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40130294,"author":"hopfog","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Web Game Engines and Libraries","text":"Thank you! If you haven't played Noita it's basically a \"falling sand\" or powder physics game where every pixel is simulated. You need a special cellular automata that is not your typical game physics engine, so I don't think Babylon.js would be a good choice but I may be wrong. I've modeled my architecture after this fantastic GDC talk by the Noita devs: [VIDEO] (\"Exploring the Tech and Design of Noita\")","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49241865,"author":"hopfog","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)","text":"Thank you! It's funny because I really wanted to introduce more things like that, but the very simple things I've added so far have received a bit of pushback (\"I want to play a factory game, not solve puzzles!\"). So now I'm reconsidering it, but I think there's a lot of room for really interesting Noita-style secrets when combined with the automation and processing tools. Overall it's a much simpler and more controlled experience than Noita though, so don't expect anything like it. By the way, this talk by the Noita devs has been instrumental when building my engine: [VIDEO] Highly recommended!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22644216,"author":"endgame","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Lemmings 2: The Tribes","text":"Noita does interesting things with terrain deformation, and this is a good GDC talk about how it does so: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25240404,"author":"zubspace","month":"2020-11","story_title":"30 years later, QBasic is still the best","text":"I owe Basic a lot. It got me into programming on our first family pc, a Compaq Presario around '94. QBasic was accessible on every windows installation from the command prompt. You could read the programming guide built into the editor and have your first running code shortly after. That was its true power. One of my first programs was teaching me french words, asking me to translate them in a random order until I got them all right. It was truly magical. I also made pixels move, trying to write games, but I quickly ran into limitations and problems organizing my code. If you like a small challenge, watch a few minutes of this video about a game called Noita, where in the beginning Q-Basic was used to create some simple physic simulations [1]. It was hacky yes, but I think if you're starting out, it's much more important to get something running quickly than learning how to do it the right way. When people speak of basic, they always seem to have the impression that you're spoiled for life after touching it, but I think that's wrong. You can always learn more and improve. It's breaking down barriers of entry, which is key. A simple editor, with an inbuilt help page and a run button is all you need. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27735458,"author":"Impossible","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The Powder Toy","text":"The Noita team explored some game ideas along those lines and had challenges. If you haven't seen the GDC 2019 talk about tech and design of Noita I recommend checking it out. They show some early prototypes focused on building [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31312859,"author":"bo0tzz","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Making a falling sand simulator","text":"Here's a talk from the creator of Noita about the underlying tech. From 9:20 he talks about their multithreading implementation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46984509,"author":"thezipcreator","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Sandboxels","text":"this doesn't answer any questions about this game, but I found this GDC talk about Noita pretty interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pwaWilO_Pig":[{"hn_comment_id":17136106,"author":"sakopov","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Sleeping in on the weekends might prevent an early death","text":"Highly recommend this [1] podcast to understand what sleep actually does and how sleep deprived our modern society is. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17330832,"author":"quickpost","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Eight hours a night isn\u2019t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist","text":"In addition to this, the JRE podcast with Matthew Walker has tons of fascinating insights into sleep (and how essential it is for health, longevity, etc.). Highly recommend just about everyone listen to it: Joe Rogan Experience #1109 - Matthew Walker [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17382441,"author":"jcims","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Sleep Scientist Warns Against Walking Through Life 'In an Underslept State'","text":"Matthew Walker, the author of Why We Sleep, was on the Joe Rogan Experience recently. I've been in material cognitive decline over the past year or so and I'm nearly certain it's due to my abhorrent sleep patterns. This episode really helped me prioritize a fix over other things that would normally result in a night of 3-5 hrs in bed or on the floor (who knows how much actual sleep). It's a great episode: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17522019,"author":"markdog12","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?","text":"Read it based on the thread you posted. I feel like it's a book everyone should read and wished I had read it sooner. Joe Rogan interviews the author here, great vid: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17636352,"author":"skadamat","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know","text":"Every single person here, if your serious about diving into the science of sleep, should read Matthew Walker's book: Why We Sleep: [LINK] His interview on Joe Rogan is a good summary: [VIDEO] He covers everything from why we sleep (obv), naps, melatonin, etc. I've just finished it and really enjoyed it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18073416,"author":"TheAceOfHearts","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What podcasts do you listen to regularly?","text":"Joe Rogan Experience [0]. I love that he sits down with people and actually has long in-depth conversations with them. Here's a few interesting ones: * Let's start with his Elon Musk discussion [1]. It came out 2 weeks ago and it already has 14m views. They basically discuss a bunch of his ideas along with things such as AI and the future of humanity. It's fascinating to get a peek into the kind of person he is. * His discussion with Matthew Walker has been one of the most enlightening ones for me [2]. He's a sleep expert, and in the podcast they go over different myths relating to that. There was recently a HN post [3] where some people were quoting him and his book. * Another big favorite of mine was his discussion with Paul Stamets [4], a mycologist (i.e. a mushroom expert). They discuss some of the effects of different kinds of mushrooms, including psilocybin mushrooms (colloquially known as magic mushrooms). * I loved his discussion with Gary Johnson [5], the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate for 2016. How many other presidential candidates would you imagine would be willing to sit down and answer hard-hitting questions for +2 hours? He also had a discussion with Larry Sharpe [6], the Libertarian Party's candidate for governor of New York in 2018. Full disclosure: I recently joined the Libertarian Party. Listening to these podcasts pushed me to learn more about their movement. * He had a discussion with Mikhaila Peterson [7], the daughter of Jordan Peterson, whi","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18607388,"author":"mattjaynes","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Why Do Hospitals Hate Sleep So Much?","text":"To get up to speed on how dramatically sleep affects our cognitive performance, listen to this excellent interview with Matthew Walker (Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at UC Berkeley, and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science) [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18743843,"author":"throwaway010718","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"It's not a talk , but worth a mention. Joe Rogan interviews Matthew Walker, a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science and author of the book \"Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19320351,"author":"manigandham","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Weekend \u2018catch-up sleep\u2019 is a lie","text":"Great JRE podcast episode with Matthew Walker (Professor of Neuroscience, Founder of the Center for Human Sleep Science): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19711558,"author":"faitswulff","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Sleep quality and stress level matter more than languages or practices","text":"Surprisingly, the Joe Rogan interview covers most of the book and is pretty funny: [VIDEO] If you have a long commute, I can recommend it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21893180,"author":"loceng","month":"2019-12","story_title":"How Microbiomes Affect Fear","text":"Watch this Joe Rogan interview with Matthew Walker - a sleep expert - for answer that doesn't counter science on alcohol: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25458241,"author":"mbesto","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Biomarker of Alzheimer's found to be regulated by sleep cycles","text":"> However, take some of the science positions in the book with a grain of salt. The author is notorious for being directionally correct in his opinions, I've read it and I agree. Although he does admit in the beginning that there basically is not much conclusive facts about sleep, hence his motivation for writing the book. It's implied that what he is saying is fact, and its a lot more correlation than I think panacea. > It's also commonly known that people get less sleep than they think they do. A few things IIRC from the book: - The specific number is irrelevant as long as its \"around 7~9\" - If you're lying down / resting this still \"counts\" (its not as impactful, but still beneficial) If people don't want to read the book, the JRE podcast is actually pretty good at summarizing whats in the book: [VIDEO] Good high level points about what to do to get to sleep (5 things): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"pxBQLFLei70":[{"hn_comment_id":22105648,"author":"wizardforhire","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it","text":"Obligatory UT Admiral William H. McRaven Commencement Address[1] Worth the whole watch, however it\u2019s makes he makes a very compelling argument for making your bed in the morning. I\u2019ll add cleaning as part of the morning routine is also highly effective to get moving. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14086267,"author":"musha68k","month":"2017-04","story_title":"The relationship between social media use and well-being","text":"That's why I call it DeplorablesBook but that's also where the problem lies maybe. Most probably. Maybe certainly. We need to engage in those tiresome discussions collectively. We need to talk more, with more people from more diverse backgrounds if we want to change anything actually. Let's educate everyone so that we get an even better internet than the one we came to love back in the 90s and early 00s! Just got a recommendation for this great correlating speech by a friend actually: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19651032,"author":"jefflombardjr","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are good resources for life advice?","text":"First and foremost, what you are describing is metacognition - thinking about the way you think. Hopefully that will aid you in your search for things! Secondly, here are some of my favorite influential material: - Li Ka-Shing, Tips on Life. My takeaway: invest in yourself. [LINK] - Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture. My takeaway: don't limit yourself [LINK] - Guy Kawasaki, Make Meaning. Aimed for startups, but equally applicable in life. My takeaway: Have the proper motivations for doing things. [LINK] - Admiral William H. McRaven, Make your bed. My takeaway: if you want to change the world, start by changing yourself. [VIDEO] - David Foster Wallace, This is Water. My takeaway: Take a big picture view, and don't sweat the small stuff. [LINK] - \u201cOut beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.\u201d\u2015 Rumi - Man's Search for meaning. My takeaway: We make meaning. [LINK] - \"All the livin that you're saving, won't buy your dreams for you\" - Townes Van Zandt - Idiot wind by Bob Dylan My takeaway: Your reaction to things can be just as bad as the actual thing. [LINK] - Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius, Seneca. My takeaway: Focus on what matters. [LINK] (read this one first for a good foundation) [LINK] [LINK] - Buddhism. Our takeaway: Meditation is important, the doctrine of emptiness (not nihilism!) is super interesting. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] - Leonardo Da Vinci My take","stance":"rec"}],"pyX8kQ-JzHI":[{"hn_comment_id":14172681,"author":"21","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Physicists demonstrate new way to violate local causality","text":"You can also look at some Susskind talks. He is a very good explainer. They don't skim on the math, but it's followable for somebody with a high-school level of math, at least for the basic concepts like spin or bell inequality. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32221312,"author":"kriro","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: YouTube Channels for the Intellectually Curious","text":"Not so much channels but interesting series: Playlist of all Susskind Physics lectures: [VIDEO] Sanderson Writing class (fantasy but applies to all genres): [LINK] Channels: Andreas Spiess aka Guy With the Swiss Accent for embedded / microcontrollers: [LINK] Hoopers Beta for a scienctific/medical POV about climbing: [LINK] IppSec for HackTheBox to learn security: [LINK] LiveOverflow for security: [LINK] Yannic Kilcher for ML news / overviews: [LINK] French Guy Cooking: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44912398,"author":"jackdoe","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Death and What Comes Next (2002)","text":"Ignoring the moral question in the story, many people are satisfied by saying \"haha funny, the cat is both dead and alive\" and they just move on. Reading Pratchett for almost 30 years, it has fueled quite an interested in quantum mechanics in me, he subtly introduces QM teasers in almost every book I read. Particularly Mort. As I dropped out of highschool, I didnt have the luck to properly study physics, but in my 30s, I my existential crisis hit, as they say, a man dies twice, and the stupid half dead cat wouldn't leave me alone. And one night the omnipotent youtube algorithm recommended Susskind's lectures to me, then Feynman, Shankar, .. it just kept going. Now I watch and re-watch them but take screenshots and send them to claude when I am confused (which is still most of the time). If you are a layman like me and just want to know what is up with the cat, I encourage you to watch Sean Carroll's lectures (dont miss the Q&A videos) and it will for sure allow you to ask at least better questions. I love that cat so much. --- Sean Carroll: [LINK] Richard Feynman: [LINK] and [LINK] Leonard Susskind: [VIDEO] Ramamurti Shankar: [LINK] Barton Zwiebach: [LINK] Carl Bender: [LINK] If you struggle with calculus, I found Herb Gross to be partucularly good Herb Gross: [LINK] Of course watch 3blue1brown, alphaphoenix, styropyro etc as well","stance":"rec"}],"q0RX59G2jaA":[{"hn_comment_id":43962733,"author":"nervousvarun","month":"2025-05","story_title":"A Typical Workday at a Japanese Hardware Tool Store [video]","text":"Longtime Paolo fan, he does a great job with his \"typical workday\" series. Not sure of the exact number he's done, but I personally estimate I've watched at least 20-25 of these across a wide range of industries (majority are in food preparation/service but he also covers construction, tech, animation, airlines, education, politics, and many more) and if there's one overriding takeaway it's the Japanese as a culture are extremely committed to maximizing product quality. It could be selection bias (maybe he only films exemplary people) but it doesn't seem to matter if you're dealing with someone preparing food, fighting fires, or delivering packages these people seem to really care about the overall quality of the service or product they provide. A few others worth watching: [VIDEO] (movers...as someone who only has experience with American movers this is ridiculously better than what I experienced) [LINK] (package delivery worker) [LINK] (politician) [LINK] (fire fighter) [LINK] (anime director) [LINK] (car repair shop worker) Honestly if you like any of these you'll likely find they're all worth watching.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22992262,"author":"bane","month":"2020-04","story_title":"An average family in Tokyo can own a new house for $850/month","text":"Decent family houses in Tokyo are definitely more expensive than this, but not hugely (also Kyoto surprisingly). There's some interesting things about the Japanese housing market, for example, many homes become \"worthless\" after the end of the mortgage -- so they depreciate and are more like buying cars. Tokyo is also an absolutely enormous city with even more massive metro area. There's very few examples on the planet that come close. Tokyo is sometimes called \"the infinite city\" for good reason. This means that yes, you can pay huge money for a coffin in some areas, and little money for an entire house elsewhere in the same city. New York is kind of the same way in that respect, but is actually still smaller and less diverse. I could write a ton more, but I think this series from \"Life Where I'm From\" which is pointed out in the article is a fantastic overview of housing for a nuclear family in Tokyo. How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New Home - [LINK] Brand New Japanese House Tour - [LINK] Are Japanese Homes Really Worthless After 30 Years? - [LINK] Old Japanese Apartment vs. New House - [LINK] What a Very Old Japanese House is Like - [LINK] Living in Traditional Japanese Townhouses: Kyo-machiya - [LINK] Checking Out New Japanese House Design and Technology - [LINK] I'd also point out this young couple who are expecting their first child (Paolo from Tokyo) What a Japanese Moving Company in Tokyo is like - [VIDEO] $1500 Japanese Apartment Tour in Tokyo Shibuya - [LIN","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27313323,"author":"AndrewOMartin","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Americans are on the move, but their stuff doesn\u2019t always follow","text":"Maybe if you used the Tokyo based Art Moving Center also known as Art Hikkoshi Center ( \u30a2\u30fc\u30c8\u5f15\u8d8a\u30bb\u30f3\u30bf\u30fc ) [VIDEO] Seeing their rigour and discipline is like a visual ASMR video.","stance":"rec"}],"q3OuCR0EpGo":[{"hn_comment_id":31907657,"author":"horsawlarway","month":"2022-06","story_title":"The PocketReform is a made-in-Berlin Linux handheld","text":"> Sad thing is, that if someone would spend a ton of research and thinking on making something usable and comfortable, most people would completely poopoo it as a freaky unusable layout, just because it would look unfamiliar, lol. Absolutely. 8-Pen was this for Android. (example video here: [VIDEO] ) It was absolutely, hands down without question, the most accurate way to quickly enter text into a phone using only a screen. Seriously - I could type at about 25-35 wpm on my phone screen at 100% accuracy, one handed. They'd done a ton of work to place letters based on frequency and likely combinations to make typing smooth and relatively fast. No fucking disaster of auto-complete that I have to click to get the word I want, or when you actually have a vocabulary larger than 150 words, but auto-complete is fucking dumb and always picks the most basic option from the path, or when the word you want isn't in the phone dictionary, no hiccups if you want to misssspell something for impact. It was genuinely just the best keyboard I have EVER used on a phone. The downside? It takes about 3 weeks of practice to actually learn, and most people just refuse to try for longer than 10 seconds. I still find it incredibly frustrating that qwerty, of all god-damned things, is the input formula we've picked for phones. It's fucking dumb.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34377370,"author":"Tijdreiziger","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The iPhone Keyboard \u2013 Make It or Break It (2022)","text":"The physical ones (on flip phones) were also 12-key (0-9, *, and #), so I suppose it was just swiping on the keys that was novel. It definitely does leave one to wonder whether that innovation was inspired by this prototype. Since we\u2019re on the topic of input methods: I\u2019ve always found the 8pen [1] fascinating. I sadly never had the opportunity to try it for myself, since I was using an iPhone rather than Android at the time (and it\u2019s since been delisted). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"q58dLWjRTBE":[{"hn_comment_id":42492037,"author":"viraptor","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?","text":"Good timing! If you have a spare hour that is. Coffeezilla just released two videos digging into the csgo skin casinos business: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42792440,"author":"PinkSheep","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat","text":"The above commenter was probably inspired by the recent investigative(!) video series by Coffeezilla (and decided not to mention it?). It was either in part 2 or 3, where C-z alleged/suspected Valve's legal actions to have been mostly about good PR and to send a signal to those ~websites~ businesses to keep them in check. However it is indeed the case, that Valve has introduced greater and greater restrictions on inventory handling. The measures obviously go far beyond just counteracting possible scammers and phishing. Still, I am inclined to believe, they could've implemented all these features many years ago, if only they had wanted to. I highly recommend the videos. You can maybe skip the first one. It's mostly about casino owners' drama. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"q5SRrsr-Iug":[{"hn_comment_id":23468441,"author":"GillBates666","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn't created in a lab","text":"[VIDEO] How does mainstream media keep their credibility? A considerable portion of the population is just ok with being lied too I guess. Shrug. At the very least we should be investigating all possibilities in regards to the origin of the virus. China has a terrible track record with viruses. They leaked SARS1 twice. The first largely publicized cluster is right next to the coronavirus lab there. Now we have a ton of genetic evidence that can't be hidden. To what length will the media go to hide this and redirect the conversation?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26620483,"author":"loceng","month":"2021-03","story_title":"The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus","text":"There's tons of propaganda trying to diminish the likelihood of a lab leak (purposeful or a mistake). Watch this though - [VIDEO] - and it's very clear that it likely originated from the Wuhan lab (they were studying those bats originating from 200 miles away + multiple markers in the genes showing human intervention/editing) - and that what's being promoted by these orgs into mainstream is gaslighting.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23506412,"author":"nradov","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Officer of China\u2019s People\u2019s Liberation Army Arrested at LAX","text":"There is no proof that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab, however it remains a plausible hypothesis. Yuri Deigin wrote a good argument for that possibility. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25587335,"author":"loceng","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it","text":"It would seem if you have a deep understanding and look at the actual structure of COVID-19 - then there are multiple markers that it was manipulated, if you believe Yuri Deigin knows what he's talking about: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25588328,"author":"nyolfen","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it","text":"specifically he is a specialist in bat biology, but perhaps more relevantly he had a very interesting conversation with a russian virologist who also thinks this is the case: [VIDEO] here is an essay written by his guest: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25656050,"author":"not_a_moth","month":"2021-01","story_title":"An Uncommon Cold","text":"> The covid-19 virus isn't the first coronavirus to jump from animals to humans Sigh, while controversial to state, there has of yet been no refutation of the lab leak hypothesis presented by scientists like Brett Weinstein [1] [1] [VIDEO] Wanting to discuss virus origins should not be political or knee jerk censored. At the very surface, natural origins next to a P4 lab doing gain of function coronavirus research is already asking a lot from us.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27390533,"author":"qrybam","month":"2021-06","story_title":"The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19\u2019s origins","text":"For anyone who\u2019s listened to Bret Weinstein\u2019s podcast from early on in the pandemic, \u201cgain of function research\u201d will be a familiar term. Great to see this hypothesis getting traction in mainstream media. What\u2019s still crazy to me is how quickly things were explained away and how strongly the directly related scientific community said the hypothesis was \u201cfringe\u201d. Here\u2019s an episode of Bret\u2019s podcast from June 2020 covering this in depth: [VIDEO] Edit: a word","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27610846,"author":"0-_-0","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Scientist finds early virus sequences that had been mysteriously deleted","text":"If I remember correctly, the disappearance of these sequences was discussed more than a year ago in Bret Weinstein's podcast, among many other indicators of a lab leak: [VIDEO] He's been the canary in the coal mine on numerous issues surrounding COVID. edit: listen from 30:43, also from 25:11: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"q7K0vRUKXKc":[{"hn_comment_id":1633321,"author":"JeanPierre","month":"2010-08","story_title":"Paul Graham and his \"no asshole\" rule (Interview)","text":"Never heard him? Not to derive this into some \"list of Paul Graham's speaks\", but I really suggest to watch [VIDEO] . A good speak, I think.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2808897,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2011-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best videos to watch about building startups?","text":"[LINK] - (Steve Blank / Eric Ries - part 1) [LINK] - (Steve Blank / Eric Ries - part 2) [LINK] - (Steve Blank / Eric Ries - part 3) [LINK] - (Steve Blank at the Startup Lessons Learned conference) [LINK] - (Steve Blank: The Democratization of Entrepreneurship) [LINK] - (Alexander Osterwalder speaking @ Google) [LINK] - (Eric Ries speaking @ Google) [VIDEO] - (pg at Startup School '08) [LINK] - (Peter Norvig at Startup School '08)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6302931,"author":"darushimo","month":"2013-08","story_title":"Dark Patterns - User Interfaces Designed to Trick People","text":"I think you're right here, but the qualifier \"all things being equal\" can't be taken lightly. Rarely if never are \"all things equal.\" I also don't think a shift in the market context is necessary. We already have a market place where people who feel tricked or duped will have a lower opinion of the company doing the duping. dark patterns have a bad edge to them too--very few of them, when noticed by the user, leave the user actually feeling good about how they were duped. This kinda reminds me of the talk PG gave at 2008 start up school titled \"Be Good.\" ( [LINK] or [VIDEO] ) He outlines many ways why it's not merely ethically appropriate to be good, but also a strategically superior approach to running a startup. Ease of use, simplicity, trustworthiness--these are important qualities of a biz's reputation, both internally and in public perception. And Dark patterns tend to harm that reputation. Edit: Addendum--obviously there are monopolies or monopoly-like situations where reputation isn't important.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16840041,"author":"a_d","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Bret Victor - Inventing on principle [LINK] Alan Kay - Power of Simplicity [LINK] Steve Jobs - Marketing (unveiling Think Different) [LINK] Robert Cialdini - On Influence [LINK] Peter Thiel - On Zero to One (Notes on Starts Ups or How to Build the Future) [LINK] Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Systems for Decision Making, Habits, Honesty and More (Farnam Street podcast) [LINK] Josh Wolfe - On \"This is who you are up against\" podcast [LINK] Richard Feynman - Fun to Imagine [LINK] Paul Graham - Startup school (2008) [VIDEO] James Burke - Connections (BBC documentary) <No link> Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the Atom (BBC) [LINK] Elon Musk's 2003 Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture [LINK] Ken Robinson - Do schools kill creativity? [LINK] Paul Stamets on mycology, bioremediation and fungi- Joe Rogan Experience [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"q9Golcxjpi8":[{"hn_comment_id":34066332,"author":"senko","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Against Homeownership","text":"> it's very hard to make a financially logical argument against sensible home ownership. No it isn't. Ben Felix has a great video talking about this: [VIDEO] We can argue which is better in a specific situation, but there's definitely an argument for renting other than \"people buy too big\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37365378,"author":"_huayra_","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Renting vs. Owning a Home, by State","text":"> But if you live in the house, then just considering appreciation and expenses leaves out a huge benefit: you have a place to live without spending any other money. What matters at the end of the day are the irrecoverable costs. When renting, it is just the rent. When owning, it is certainly not free: you're paying other irrecoverable costs (e.g. out of PITI+HOA, everything but P is irrecoverable; add on separate costs for when you must pay for repairs and it gets steeper). Sure, you have stability and can write off mortgage interest when you own (although the latter is an extremely unfair policy), but unless one is absolutely sure that one can stay in the home for close to ~7 years (the rough time it took for many HCOL cities in the US to recover their nominal prices from the GFC peak), it can be considered to be a risky time to make such a big financial commitment. Ben Felix has some videos on this concept of \"irrecoverable costs\" which I find helpful to illustrate this, such as this one [0]. Although I disagree with his idea that leasing cars is a good idea (expressed in some of his podcasts), I find his ideas on renting vs. buying to be quite sound. Personally speaking, I just doubled my compensation by moving from one HCOL city to another in the US because I was renting and not \"locked in\" to a mortgage. So many colleagues at my former place could not afford to come to the closing table with cash to close out their mortgage at a loss to move (the company I went to basic","stance":"rec"}],"qCGofLIzX6g":[{"hn_comment_id":13320285,"author":"ericfrederich","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Grumpy: Go running Python","text":"Python needs a new runtime. This talk shows how bad of shape it's really in. [VIDEO] Basically, the language doesn't have a \"spec\" per-se. The language is whatever the defacto CPython implementation happens to do within it's giant eval loop. Another great talk about CPython internals: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22290241,"author":"eigenspace","month":"2020-02","story_title":"JuliaLang: The Ingredients for a Composable Programming Language","text":"As others have mentioned, Python does have JIT compilers. The problem is that havign a JIT doesn't solve the problem. PyPy is often a factor of 10 behind julia performance and projects like Numba, PyTorch (the PyTorch people had to build their own Python JIT compiler yikes!), etc. will always have a more restricted scope than a project like Julia because Python's very semantics make many optimizations impossible. Here's a great talk from the author of the famous Flask library in Python: [VIDEO] where he discusses the fundamental problems with Python's semantics. If you fix these problems, you will end up changing Python so fundamentaly that you'll really have a new language. Generic CPython 3._ code will certainly not be compatible with it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24497980,"author":"nerdponx","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Python's Innards: Introduction (2010)","text":"I highly recommend this talk by Armin Ronacher as an accompaniment (or prologue, or epilogue) to the article: \"How Python was shaped by leaky internals\", [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24850511,"author":"arc776","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Attempts to make Python fast","text":"As the OP states: > mutable interpreter frames, global interpreter locks, shared global state, type slots On top of this, Python is extremely dynamic and nothing can be assured without running through the code. So this leads to needing JITs to improve performance which then give a slow start up time and increased complexity. Even with JIT, Python is just not fast thanks to the above issues and it's overall dynamism. It can be optimised and for sure there's some impressive attempts at doing so. However I don't think pure Python will ever be considered \"fast\" as these things necessarily get in the way. I highly recommend the two videos posted here that go into more detail as to why there are limits to how far optimisation can go: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28706370,"author":"haberman","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Writing Python Extensions in Assembly","text":"Python is difficult to optimize due to complex language semantics. This excellent talk describes how the semantics of the \"add\" operation are much more complex than generally described. a+b is not just a.__add__(b), you have to read 200+ lines of CPython interpreter code to fully resolve its semantics: [VIDEO] Not saying it's impossible, but it's more of an uphill battle than optimizing other languages that have more regular semantics. Python is also constrained by its C API, which is a very low-level and exposes a lot of implementation details to C extensions. Changing the API could improve performance but it would also make Python incompatible with a large ecosystem of C extensions. I sometimes wish for Python to define a new C API that exposes far less, and to begin a long-term migration towards the new API so that eventually the interpreter would be less constrained. It would be a large migration, but unlike Python 2 -> 3 it wouldn't affect everyday users, only extension authors. I don't know if it will ever happen, but a person can dream.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29165476,"author":"haberman","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Pyjion \u2013 A Python JIT Compiler","text":"I think \"a + b\" is a good example. I really recommend the talk I linked ( [VIDEO] ), it gets deep into this stuff. I don't think anyone benefits from \"a + b\" having so many special cases.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30048445,"author":"fault1","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Faster CPython (2021) [pdf]","text":"I thought this presentation by Armin Ronacher (the creator of Flask and Jinja) was very enlightening: How Python was Shaped by leaky Internals(2016): [VIDEO] See also this HN post (Attempts to make Python fast): [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13320956,"author":"the_duke","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Grumpy: Go running Python","text":"Someone else already posted this link: [VIDEO] It explains why CPython can't improve on many things.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14580036,"author":"dom0","month":"2017-06","story_title":"RTL MJIT \u2013 Register transfer language VM and JIT for Ruby","text":"Instead of typing a long list, I'll just refer you to this talk: [VIDEO] Some of that has been fixed / got make up applied to play pretend.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17210160,"author":"StefanKarpinski","month":"2018-06","story_title":"My favorite things that are coming with Julia 1.0","text":"Perhaps the best way to understand what makes Julia fast is to watch these two videos about Python and R and what makes them so hard to optimize: [VIDEO] [LINK] Take everything mentioned in these videos that make Python and R really hard to optimize and don't do those things :D","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17684602,"author":"ssivark","month":"2018-08","story_title":"How Numba and Cython speed up Python code","text":"There's a reason most high-performance Python libraries are not written that way, and core routines are just written in C instead. Proof of the pudding is in the eating! See this talk by Armin Ronacher (creator of Flask) on why the design of python makes it fundamentally unfriendly to performance optimizations: [VIDEO] Julia has be designed ground up to avoid several such problems. See this discussion: [LINK] If your domain falls under the umbrella of numerical and scientific computing, writing Julia is as painless as writing python, with code that automatically runs roughly as fast as C. If you're used to writing numpy, you can hit the ground running in Julia, with maybe a few hours to become comfortable with the slightly different syntax and the names of useful libraries.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20672199,"author":"ssivark","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Python Is Eating the World","text":"Python's success is richly deserved. The fact that it has been a long time coming (Python is almost 30 years old!) is an indication of the amount of sheer effort involved, and should give heart for all those working on building up the next generation of languages. Since this forum is likely to have some folks looking towards the future, I found interesting a couple of talks by Python veteran Armin Ronacher [1, 2]. Watching that presentation makes me wonder whether I should think of this in the context of \"Worse is better\". That said, Python's runtime introspection is such a killer feature that it's difficult to explain how empowering it feels for someone who is relatively new to programming. [1]: How Python was Shaped by leaky Internals -- [VIDEO] [2]: A Python for Future Generations -- [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24849302,"author":"ilyagr","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Attempts to make Python fast","text":"I found the following talks by Armin Romacher very informative on these topics (C API, why python is more difficult to speed up than JS). [VIDEO] [LINK] I wish these were the things Python 3 addressed, rather than Unicode. I guess it's much more obvious in hindsight than back when Python 3 was designed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26081001,"author":"nemothekid","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Node.js 14 is over 20x faster than Python3.8 for fib(n)","text":"Armin Ronacher, author Flask, actually has a good talk about this. The gist of it the way Python's internals leak into the language makes it very difficult to build a performant JIT that wouldn't break a large amount of userspace code. Python lets you do _far_ more shenanigans that Javascript does; and a lot of large libraries depend on some of that behavior. Breaking it would probably cause a new 2 -> 3 situation. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27572949,"author":"eigenspace","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Is Julia Really Fast?","text":"Python's classes can change dynamically though during runtime. So each iteration of a loop would need to check if the shape has changed. I'm no Python expert though, so please correct me if I'm mistaken. But it's more than that. There's a really nice talk here from the creator of the Flask framework about a bunch of different semantic choices in the language design, leak out into the ecosystem and make many optimizations impossible: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32384850,"author":"afiori","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to learn advanced Python?","text":"I know very little about Python, but I would suggest these talks about a few ways in which Python is unique. They won't teach you Python, but they might help in making sense of the confusing bits you might encounter: How Python was Shaped by leaky Internals, Armin Ronacher: [VIDEO] What Does It Take To Be An Expert At Python?: [LINK] and maybe also When Python Practices Go Wrong: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37424530,"author":"gobdovan","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Mojo: It\u2019s Finally Here","text":"You can't have Python run that much faster without loosing lots of features. I guess if they open sourced it, people wouldn't be that impressed with what they implemented. This video [0] from the creator of Flask explains it quite well. Here [1] is Guido talking about Mojo being in early days and sharing some technical details. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43111277,"author":"maxwelljoslyn","month":"2025-02","story_title":"A tail calling interpreter for Python (already landed in CPython)","text":"VWWHFSfQ, you may already know this, but: I recommend this talk by Armin Ronacher (Flask creator) on how Python's implementation internals contribute to the difficulties of making Python faster. [VIDEO] One case study Ronacher gets into is the torturous path taken through the Python interpreter (runtime?) when you evaluate `__add__`. Fascinating stuff.","stance":"rec"}],"qE7dYhpI_bI":[{"hn_comment_id":31116916,"author":"waynesonfire","month":"2022-04","story_title":"I can't let go of \u201cThe Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation\u201d","text":"Your post reminded me of one of my favorite Adam Savage videos where he touches upon this idea you're exploring. I encourage folks to see it, he articulates it so well. I linked to the start of the video where he begins to build the idea. TLDR is he mentions Monet painting Impression Sunrise and how it was something that people have never seen before and it took a bit of time for it to blow people away--they needed to develop \"new eyes\" to see the genius. Adam then dives into this idea of \"new eyes\". I'm sure many of us have experienced this in our life and it was so nice to hear Adam unpack it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29826605,"author":"gibolt","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Longform.org is shutting down its article recommendations service","text":"I think you will thoroughly enjoy Adam Savage's (of Mythbusters fame) recent video on measurement. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38454775,"author":"throw0101b","month":"2023-11","story_title":"'Nuts and Bolts' Review: The Levers That Move the World","text":"Adam Savage has an interesting (45m!) video entitled \"Epiphany on the Science of Measurement!\" where he gets a bit philosophical on accuracy and precision (using gauge/Johansson blocks as jumping off point): * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qEJ4hkpQW8E":[{"hn_comment_id":40635066,"author":"greentxt","month":"2024-06","story_title":"The U.S. Economy Reaches Superstar Status","text":"Here is the talk. Every multigenerational American family should be forced to watch this and discuss the ethical implications of each peesons vote in future elections. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44564508,"author":"Joel_Mckay","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Inequality, decay of democratic institutions linked to accelerated ageing","text":"Scott Galloway\u2019s TED Talk covers a lot of the current reality young people face entering the workforce. [VIDEO] [LINK] It is complicated, but may become more pronounced as the baby-boomer generation retires. =3","stance":"rec"}],"qEV9qoup2mQ":[{"hn_comment_id":29399788,"author":"fossuser","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Overdue library book returned more than 110 years later","text":"For a really great video mostly about checking out books from a library watch this: [VIDEO] I found it pretty funny that hundreds of years later he unearthed an old written feud that ended up directly affecting him in a way which caused him to empathize with one of the sides.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32781356,"author":"rozab","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What happened to theregister.com?","text":"To see this gloriously realised, check out CGP Grey's description of Pope's feud with Thomas Hearne. Linking the full video because it's a masterpiece [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33387534,"author":"lolinder","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Update on the fake story about the river laborers paying people to whip them","text":"> This one\u2019s notable in that it puts an entire passage in quotes, but it turns out the passage was not in Cheung (1983) at all\u2014not on page 8 or anywhere else in that article\u2014it actually came from a collection from 1998 of old Harvard Business School exam questions. One of my pet peeves is the chain of citations that will inevitably spawn from this. No author can be bothered to go find the original source and just cite that, so this inaccurate (and since retracted) quote will end up propagating itself for decades if not centuries, with each author citing the work that they got the story from. Eventually, hundreds of years from now, someone will be crazy enough to try to work their way down the chain to track down the original, only to discover it isn't there. For an excellent and humorous example, see CGP Grey's search for the original Tiffany: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37366464,"author":"Macha","month":"2023-09","story_title":"The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge","text":"If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy two videos from CGP Grey: - The Race to Win Staten Island ( [LINK] ) - Someone dead ruined my life... again ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46123914,"author":"ChrisbyMe","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Kids who ran away to 1960s San Francisco","text":"Very cool. If you're interested in things like this you might wanna checkout CGP Grey's videos on tracking down various stories from books through archives. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qH6sSOr-yk8":[{"hn_comment_id":16810207,"author":"Suncho","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the best Modern C++ MOOC?","text":"Yes! Alexander Stepanov is fantastic. He's the designer of the Standard Template Library (STL) for C++, which is C++'s core library of generic algorithms. It's part of the standard libary. If you can understand how to use the STL properly, you're well on your way to becoming a profiicent C++ programmer. His books are fantastic too. Elements of Programming: [LINK] and From Mathematics to Generic Programming: [LINK] If you prefer video lectures, his second book is based off his lecture series Four (three) Algorithmic Journeys: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] It's a combination of history and math/algorithms and programming (using C++). If you're just looking for a straight intro to C++ course this isn't it. But it's a ton of fun and the generic programming/STL mindset is very powerful. Programming Conversations is another great lecture series by Alexander Stepanov: [LINK] I would also recommend searching YouTube for videos by Sean Parent. This one in particular is very enlightening: [VIDEO] Sean Parent is very good at getting you in the STL mindset and showing off the expressive power of using the standard STL algorithms in your code. Except in the simplest cases, you should try to use them instead of writing your own loops. Here are some random tips if you're coming from C or Java: \"new\" is not the way to create objects in C++. new and delete should almost never be used by serious programmers in C++. Never use new and delete (or malloc and free). If you want a dynamically-allocate","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29350598,"author":"matthewaveryusa","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Loopless Code (2006)","text":"Sean Parent has a good talk about no loops in C++. His primary argument is that typically a loop is an algorithm you\u2019re applying (map, filter, reduce\u2026) and the raw loop masks the algorithm. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32413704,"author":"einpoklum","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Show HN: State-of-the-art German speech recognition in 284 lines of C++","text":"It was a cute gimmick for the title, nm. But you should try to avoid raw loops in favor of established iteration patterns / standard library algorithms. I found this talk on the subject by Sean Parent to be educational: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qID2B4MK7Y0":[{"hn_comment_id":23191959,"author":"ar-nelson","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Roman Finger Counting","text":"This video convinced me that base 6 would be even better for simple pen-and-paper math, as well as just about everything else: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24405844,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Show HN: Base32H, a human-friendly duotrigesimal number system","text":"Time to link the ConLang Critic's video \"A better way to count\" where he compares decimal and dozenal (base12) with seximal (base6) and base 6 wins. [VIDEO] One of the best videos of number-base related comedy.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18473572,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2018-11","story_title":"International System of Units overhauled in historic vote","text":"Why are you so obsessed with thirds? If you care about short, clean fractions on a human scale, base 6 is overall better, see this table: [VIDEO] Plus you get all the convenience of having five digits on a hand and 5 as the highest counting digit, so you can count to 55 on two hands, and all the rest of the benefits in that (totally serious) video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26867705,"author":"cjhveal","month":"2021-04","story_title":"My Love Affair with Dozens (1972) [pdf]","text":"One of my favorite language Youtubers, jan Misali, has an interesting video on Dozenal and \"Seximal\" (base 6) number systems. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qI_g07C_Q5I":[{"hn_comment_id":12643863,"author":"joeclark77","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"First, the \"Mother of all Demos\" by Doug Engelbart: [LINK] This was in 1968, at a time when most people thought about computers as being machines for solving computation problems, like processing payrolls or calculating rocket trajectories. Engelbart and his students had the radical idea that computers could be used for human \"knowledge worker\" productivity. In one 90 minute presentation, he introduces everything from the idea of a GUI, to the mouse, to word processing, hypertext, computer graphics, and (simulated) videoconferencing. You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the audience that has never seen this stuff before, and it'll blow you away. Something more recent: Martin Fowler's great introduction to NoSQL: [VIDEO] Not so technical, this is a great overview of the reasons why (and when) NoSQL is valuable. He crams a lot into a short speech, so it's one of the rare videos I've required students in my database classes to watch. Now, really getting away from the technical, I have to recommend watching the IDEO shopping cart video: [LINK] This is the classic introduction of Design Thinking to the world, in 1999. If you're using the Lean Startup or an Agile method, but have never heard of IDEO's shopping cart, you may be able to get along fine at work, but you should be kind of embarrassed like a physicist who's never read Newton.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15429433,"author":"WoodenChair","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Learning NoSQL, papers and books","text":"As a starting point, if you have little background in NoSQL, I strongly recommend this 1 hour talk by Martin Fowler: [VIDEO] It's slightly dated, but it still gives a strong overview of the different paradigms. The truth is what you want to learn probably differs greatly depending on the paradigm that fits your application. NoSQL databases can broadly be categorized into document-oriented, key-value store, columnar, and graph. This video will help you understand what (at least three) of those are. Then you can focus in on books/articles about the paradigm that makes the most sense for you.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9698248,"author":"alfonsodev","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Ask HN: When should i use a NoSql database","text":"[VIDEO] In this video Martin Fowler have some recommendations of when to choose a relational, graph or noSql database.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10478844,"author":"joeclark77","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Why some NoSQL DBs only let you perform transactions on a single data item","text":"The idea is that you won't need database-wide transactions if your data is structured into \"natural aggregates\" such as orders, articles, profiles, etc. In a relational database, something as simple as an \"order\" has components in lots of different tables -- customer, product, order, line_item, shipping_method, etc -- so you have to lock all of those tables when doing an INSERT or UPDATE. In the ideal MongoDB implementation, an \"order\" would be a document of its own, and all the other parts would be attributes or nested structures. So you only really need a transaction for the document itself. Other documents could be inserted/updated at the same time without creating a conflict. That's the theory, at least. Martin Fowler has a good Youtube on \"Introduction to NoSQL\" that I sometimes show to my students: [VIDEO] The other thing about NoSQL is that it's often used for write-once, then read-only applications. Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram would be good examples. When 1% of your queries are INSERTs and 99% are SELECTS (with UPDATE and DELETE almost never occurring), you really don't run as much risk of anomalies. I would not recommend NoSQL for something like a banking application where you're doing lots of updates and need to guarantee consistency.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10683040,"author":"mrwilliamchang","month":"2015-12","story_title":"I Dreamed of a Perfect Database","text":"\"There is as yet no absolute challenger to the relational model. When people think database, they still think SQL. But if there is a true challenger, it is in the graph model.\" This article is quite biased towards graph databases with regards to the SQL versus NoSQL tension. This video presents a much more balanced view of SQL versus NoSQL, in my opinion. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15428267,"author":"rolandm","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Learning NoSQL, papers and books","text":"Video from Martin Fowler about Introduction to NoSQL: [VIDEO] Tutorial from Felix Gessert about NoSQL [LINK] and Slides [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26192401,"author":"databrecht","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ask HN: SQL or NoSQL?","text":"Exactly, but it goes further than that. The mentality never made sense since the term NoSQL never made sense to start. It's amazing how many people use a term that just originated from a meeting to talk about alternative databases. How we keep using it, although it's practically impossible to say what NoSQL is. Depending on whom you ask that term means different things. This is a very good introduction to the term: [VIDEO] Graph databases are considered 'NoSQL' yet they have relations and transactions. Schemaless is often also one of the properties give to NoSQL, but it's also a bit strange to consider that a NoSQL attribute. Some traditional databases offer schemaless options and databases like Cassandra has schema yet is considered NoSQL. I work at Fauna which has relations, stronger consistency than many traditional databases. It is schemaless at this point but that might change in the future. Since it doesn't offer SQL it's thrown into the NoSQL bucket with the assumptions that come along with it. None of these one-liners in computer science make sense IMHO and we listen way too often to colleagues who use them. Similarly \"Use SQL for enforced schema\" might be accurate in many cases but in essence it depends on your situation, and we need to do research about what we use instead of following one-liners ;)","stance":"rec"}],"qJ7ZAUjsycY":[{"hn_comment_id":39474768,"author":"rezonant","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Cellular outage in U.S. hits AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon users","text":"The sibling response here covers all of the points I would say. Scott Manley has a nice video covering the history of GPS and how it works, well worth a watch [VIDEO] It's not as simple as you think.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37706510,"author":"franky47","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Official U.S. government information about the Global Positioning System (GPS)","text":"For a video form of this topic, Scott Manley did a review of how GPS actually performed better than initially designed: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44331948,"author":"nancyminusone","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Show HN: I Built a Site That Curates Weird YouTube Rabbit Holes Daily","text":"Don't mean to be rude, but your deep dives could be deeper. I clicked on 'How GPS works' expecting to see a certain Scott Manley video [0] there. Instead, it's 10 shorts I'd put firmly at the 'like n subscribe' end of the scale. Think I'll stick to my own curated list of creators for now. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qJEWOTZnFeg":[{"hn_comment_id":19561821,"author":"halirutan","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Why Wolfram Tech Isn\u2019t Open Source","text":"Your last sentence reminded me of an interview with the Ton Rosendaal, the creator of Blender. He talks extensively about how Blender became OSS and not abandonware. I highly encourage to watch the whole interview (you need at least 5 mins to get used to his accent), but the important part starts around minute 14 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27085039,"author":"greshario","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Blender Foundation Annual Report 2020 [pdf]","text":"I reccomend watching this interview with him - at least the parts where he talks about money. It's incredibly refreshing to hear someone at the top of their game in the tech sphere say they're not interested in money except as a tool to help them create. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31421058,"author":"solarkraft","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Gimp 3 Beta Released","text":"The Blender story is quite an impressive one of iterative development. Ton Rosensaal very explicitly doesn't want technology for its own sake and wants to \"get it out of the door\", but does it all while keeping an eye on it being usable for creatives (now more than before, but the ground work was laid long ago, see everything being animatable) Great interview with Blender Guru: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34176265,"author":"solarkraft","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?","text":"IIRC Ton Rosendaal, Blender's creator, still leads the project, but while listening very closely to its users and their pains and a very interesting approach to software development. The interview with BlenderGuru is great one: [VIDEO] The last major redesign was started by a vision shared by the interviewer, who seems to be one of the many deeply invested artists. (This is all very much \"IIRC\", based on stuff I've peripherally heard or seen years ago)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45288774,"author":"solarkraft","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Ton Roosendaal to step down as Blender chairman and CEO","text":"Blender is one of those shining FOSS successes we should all learn from. I loved watching the BlenderGuru interview: [VIDEO] Thank you, Ton!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45289104,"author":"invader","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Ton Roosendaal to step down as Blender chairman and CEO","text":"Ton is a legend and a personal hero of mine. He is a great innovator and an open-source superstar who disrupted the entire industry, traditionally dominated by big corporations. The entire Blender story is captivating - from modeler and raytracer prototypes on Amiga to the Internet bubble startup to the famous crowdfunding campaign to free Blender... It is a story that deserves a movie. For anyone interested in open-source history who is not familiar with the Blender story, I would highly recommend Ton's interview with Blender Guru, where he reflects on his journey - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16663307,"author":"dustinmoorenet","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Blender\u2019s Prehistory \u2013 Traces on Commodore Amiga (1987-1991)","text":"The history of Bender was pretty well explained in a long interview with Ton Roosendaal by Andrew Price of Blender Guru. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20140084,"author":"dorena","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Blender Is Free Software","text":"I\u2018m using blender every day and absolutely love it. the fact that it\u2019s run by such a genuine and inspirational guy like Ton makes me like blender even more :) if you want to know more about him and his plan for Blender watch this interview [VIDEO] or the tour of their new office (it\u2019s really funny) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24340873,"author":"Lievelingsduif","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Gimp project gets $68.34 monthly","text":"Blender already has a solid and enthousiastic user base before the 2.7 UI update. Blender was also the forerunner in having a kickstarter-like scheme to raise enough money to make it opensource. There's an interesting interview between Ton Roosendaal and Blender Guru about the history. [VIDEO] The Blender guys were also a lot less hostile towards people trying to make improvements to stuff like UX. One of the things that GIMP also desperately needs is a name change, while Blender is an odd choice it at least doesn't conjur up sexual images.","stance":"rec"}],"qJZ1Ez28C-A":[{"hn_comment_id":43381112,"author":"DanielVZ","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Did the Particle Go Through the Two Slits, or Did the Wave Function?","text":"I really don\u2019t understand the topic much but this veritasium video is quite eye opening and goes into further depth than any layman explanation I\u2019ve ever seen in the topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43386255,"author":"beyondCritics","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Did the Particle Go Through the Two Slits, or Did the Wave Function?","text":"[VIDEO] I had learned about the double slit experiment in school, but in my mind it was something of a theoretical construct. This veritasium video demonstrates, that quantum waves are very real and tangible. This is how physics should be.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44281972,"author":"Balgair","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Infinite Grid of Resistors","text":"Aside: Veritasium had a great video similar to this on the paths that light takes. I'll link to the part where they do the best physics demo I have ever seen : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qL0BB2PRY7k":[{"hn_comment_id":28834438,"author":"sillyquiet","month":"2021-10","story_title":"2,050-year-old Roman tomb offers insights on ancient concrete resilience","text":"The civil engineering-oriented channel Practical Engineering has a pretty good video on Roman concrete vs. modern. [VIDEO] The primary tldw; is the fact modern concrete uses steel rebar for tensile strength, whereas the Romans relied on architectural techniques to minimize tensile forces on their structures. Steel rebar is the primary route through which concrete deteriorates.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29812702,"author":"kibwen","month":"2022-01","story_title":"How to design a house to last 1000 years","text":"Here's a good video on the use and tradeoffs of Roman concrete engineering: [VIDEO] TL;DW: whereas modern construction uses rebar as a way to keep concrete from fracturing under tensile stress, the Romans made their constructions enormous so that the weight of the structure itself would compress the material and keep it from failing from tensile stress. Their monuments weren't built huge just because it cool, but also because it was practical. But large concrete constructions are both expensive and take years and years to cure, and depending on your concrete chemistry the strongest mixtures can also be much more difficult to work with.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33118165,"author":"adwn","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Startup Builds Houses by Pumping Concrete into Inflatable Forms","text":"Concrete without rebar lacks tensile strength, and Roman concrete is no different. When using materials with insufficient tensile strength, you're severely restricted in the kinds of structures you can build. That's why Roman buildings used so many domes and arches, and why they were massive . Practical Engineering has a good video about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33325580,"author":"wnevets","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Forgetting the Asbestos \u2013 how we lose knowledge and technologies","text":"> Same goes for roman concrete. We know far more about concrete than the Romans did. We just don't bother to engineer everything to last forever, because that costs money and has little point to it a lot of the time. Yes, some buildings are works of art, but many things just have a function to fulfill, which is often temporary. Nobody is sad that the millions of mass-made soviet residential crappy buildings aren't still as good as new. If they were made to a better standard they'd still be ugly cookie cutter things. Practical Engineering has a good video on Roman concrete [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qLjgXPDzeZo":[{"hn_comment_id":27657680,"author":"dijit","month":"2021-06","story_title":"The parallel universe of FireWire hubs","text":"> It seems those old Macs may still be in service in niche applications, most notably in audio processing chains at radio stations or recording studios. Highly recommend looking at the tour of fat-boy slims recording studio for an example of this kind of airgapped system in active use for decades: [VIDEO] (Though he uses an Atari ST, which is known for being a musical powerhouse)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28698101,"author":"zbuf","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Atari ST in daily use since 1985 [video]","text":"Not just any old musician, here's Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) in his studio in 2018: Still with Atari ST switched on, connected to the gear, and loading in old floppies of \"The Rockerfeller Skank\" from the 90s: [VIDEO] YouTube commentor says \"it's like a living museum that should be kept alive\" ... agree!","stance":"rec"}],"qMkYlIA7mgw":[{"hn_comment_id":19002528,"author":"CoolGuySteve","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Canada's Toughest Border Crossing","text":"There's an entertaining CGP Grey video about other oddities in the US-Canada border. [VIDEO] Considering how inconvenient it is in some geographies and how small the patches of land are, I'm always surprised the State Department doesn't negotiate a land exchange treaty with Canada to fix what are essentially cartography bugs. Both sides would spend a few tens of millions compensating people for land seizures and dealing with the administrative overhead of negotiating and ratifying the deal but would gain it back over time with simplified border stations.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21959903,"author":"gregmac","month":"2020-01","story_title":"A little-known US-Canada border dispute","text":"There's a great CGP Grey video on the Canada-US border well worth watching if this interests you: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24420832,"author":"sandworm101","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Northwestern Point of the Lake of the Woods","text":"There is a great youtube video on this and similar can-US border irregularities. Search for \"Canada-US no touching zone\". There is another exclave near vancouver. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qOP2V_np2c0":[{"hn_comment_id":2326271,"author":"pero","month":"2011-03","story_title":"Bottom just fell out of Nikkei","text":"Disasters like this are, in theory, actually beneficial to economies--especially stagnant ones like Japan's. The capacity for immediate bonafide economic growth has been diminished but that doesn't mean that economic production will decline. There is now ample room to deploy all that surplus capital (humans, machinery, money) that was previously unproductive. The upper echelones of the financial sector will make a killing shorting and re-buying. Advanced reading on a parallel concept: [LINK] The quoted and cited David Harvey piece (2007, albeit the condensed article veresion and not the full-length book) would have been a better reference however is apparently no longer online. This, though, is amazing: [VIDEO] I believe Naomi Klein made a good buck on dumbing down and re-orienting the above hypothesis.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2854526,"author":"thisuser","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Ask HN: what are some good resources to understand economics?","text":"Oh Graeber's book is out! Lovely! I have been passing around his essay by the same name for some time now. Should be a good intro to the book [LINK] I would also recommend anything by David Harvey. Start out with this animated version of one of his talks: [VIDEO] Then move on to his Capital vol. 1 lecture series. [LINK] There is also a book format of his reading guide","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7073070,"author":"smacktoward","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Value is created by doing","text":"In this particular case it may also have something to do with the LTOV's association with Marxist economics. The only thing Americans are expected to know about anything even vaguely associated with Marxism is that it's bad (mmmkay?), so U.S. educational institutions tend to avoid teaching things in that category to students who aren't specializing in economics. Which leads to Americans coming up with their own labels and descriptions for things that Marx observed and labeled long ago. All of which is too bad, because Marx had a lot of interesting and valuable things to say about the problems of industrial economies (see [VIDEO] for a good introduction), even if the solutions that were tried in his name didn't work out. It just wastes people's time and energy having them spin their wheels re-discovering things he discovered 150 years ago.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10765662,"author":"EGreg","month":"2015-12","story_title":"The Upward Redistribution of Income: Are Rents the Story?","text":"The main explanation is not considered here: Automation and Outsourcing. Both reduce the demand for local human labor, and thus depress wages. They cause wealth redistribution upwards by providing a power imbalance between the capitalist and the worker. David Harvey did a nice talk about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qOTYgcdNrXE":[{"hn_comment_id":19736399,"author":"drak0n1c","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors","text":"I see the point but it is a narrow and modernist characterization of other minds on the matter. A lot of perfectly decent people do defense work and don't really need the paychecks (the famous Youtuber SmarterEveryDay comes to mind). Here are a few reasons why: 1) Many work on oft maligned technologies because they simply see no moral conundrum. It's common to see tools as amoral, and believe moral responsibility in the use of tools for good or evil lies solely with its wielder - not any inventor or refiner. 2) Or, they may see their work as their moral duty as a competent professional in a society fending off morally worse alternatives. This is the patriotic or \"necessary evil\" view. 3) A few utilitarian engineers see the refinement of technology in and of itself as always a subtle moral good, as they believe the elimination of inefficiency is the primary reason why humanity no longer suffers as much as it used to. There's also the assumption that the development of any kind of tech leads to unanticipated benefits to other areas of life (this is a common demonstrated pattern in defense R&D). 4) There's also the classical Greek justification of Eudaimonia. Simply doing what one does best is seen as the most moral thing one can do, as it eliminates any outward and internal dishonesty about ones self. PS: Here is a great video by SmarterEveryDay explaining what he does and why [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19736423,"author":"drak0n1c","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors","text":"The educational Youtube channel SmarterEveryDay made a video about his day job as a military rocket engineer. It's an insightful how-and-why explanation for those wondering why there aren't more conscientious objectors: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20848235,"author":"godelski","month":"2019-08","story_title":"U.S. Unleashes Military to Fight Fake News, Disinformation","text":"Relevant video by Smarter Every Day[0]. Basically interviewing military people talk about the information part of war in the modern era. > I just made a weapon?! -Dustin @21:35 [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22811950,"author":"101404","month":"2020-04","story_title":"The leading cause of death in the US on Apr 6 was Covid-19","text":"That's really just the result of the decreasing trust within society. \"Bowling Alone\" is a good book that tries to explore the underlying reasons for this development, that started some time in the 1960s. The current \"war\" in cyberspace probably contributes to it as well. Here is an interesting interview with a US four star general about that new area of conflict: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22812445,"author":"101404","month":"2020-04","story_title":"The leading cause of death in the US on Apr 6 was Covid-19","text":"Sadly, that is very likely a main reason. Political discussion isn't so much about the exchange of views anymore, but about \"winning\" and \"destroying\" the other side. And there is a reason for that. There is an interesting interview with a US 4-Star General about the topic of \"controlling the public\" in cyberspace: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32950393,"author":"incomingpain","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Whistleblower: Pentagon purchased tool collecting Americans' web browsing data","text":"Check out this video by 'smertereveryday': [VIDEO] He has access to a 4 star general who gives him a little too much information. The first screen in the video is that it has been approved for public release. The military understands the situation. You can see why they are purchasing internet data. I don't see the problem. Who exactly has been punished by this? Or even snowden? NSA is spying on everyone? But is there people in prison for this? If so, were they people who did need to go to prison? You can pretty much bet every country has 'lawful intercept'","stance":"rec"}],"qPKj0YnKANw":[{"hn_comment_id":20799113,"author":"chasd00","month":"2019-08","story_title":"How do black holes destroy information and why is that a problem?","text":"man, watch the PBS YouTube channel SpaceTime. They're short, informative, and very well done. they dedicate a handful of episodes to getting you ready for Hawking radiation. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18900964,"author":"InclinedPlane","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Black Hole Evolution Traced Out with Loop Quantum Gravity","text":"There's lots of different ways to approach explaining the phenomenon of hawking radiation, PBS space time does a good job here: [VIDEO] Ultimately, hawking radiation does not come from within the event horizon, so it can escape into the wider universe.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19643999,"author":"nocturnial","month":"2019-04","story_title":"The Day Feynman Worked Out Black-Hole Radiation on My Blackboard","text":"The particle-antiparticle explanation is just an analogy and doesn't really cover what actually happens. I thought this video from PBS Space Time explains it really well while keeping it accessible for non-physicists: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qPb_0JZ6-Rc":[{"hn_comment_id":24739523,"author":"cableshaft","month":"2020-10","story_title":"More than half of all whale and dolphin species are of conservation concern","text":"If we wipe out the vast majority of the animal and plant life and drinkable water on the planet, how likely do you think we will keep our population at an all-time high? I think it's certainly possible you're right that population will keep increasing for the next, well, 10 years at least, maybe not 20, but meanwhile we're cratering our biocapacity, and we are not going to have anywhere near enough resources left on the planet to sustain that population if we keep going on our current trajectory. There's quite a few experts that say it's already too late, we've already depleted our biocapacity too much, the only way to correct for it is to undergo some form of rapid decline at some point in the future (collapse). I found this video incredibly illuminating on that point (I honestly thought we were still under the limit before watching it, not way past it already): [VIDEO] Extinction may be a bit extreme, humans might be able to survive somehow, but the vast majority will not. Here's one article that discusses the possibility of human extinction. Key quote: \"I don\u2019t want to claim that we can\u2019t survive the loss of many, many species. We\u2019ve already proved that we actually can. We\u2019re very adaptable. But I think the bottom line is, you wouldn\u2019t want to find out.\" [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36820924,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-07","story_title":"There\u2019s a heatwave in the sea and scientists are worried","text":"No, our real problem is \"overshoot\" ( [LINK] ) and the the \"Great Acceleration\" ( [LINK] ). \u2018Overshoot\u2019 occurs when humanity consumes bio-resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and waste production exceeds nature\u2019s assimilative capacity. Overshoot is a meta-problem: climate change; plunging biodiversity; pollution of land, air and waters; tropical deforestation; soil/land degradation etc., etc., are all co-symptoms of overshoot. Climate change is an excess waste problem \u2014 CO2 is the greatest waste by weight of modern techno-industrial economies. We cannot solve any major symptom of overshoot in isolation. Indeed, the mainstream approach to emissions reductions will not only fail to subdue climate change but, by promoting material growth, will exacerbate overshoot ( [LINK] ). Almost everything we undertake follows a pattern resembling a hockey stick, growing exponentially long after we've already surpassed safe boundaries. This has been happening for several decades now, at least since 1970. The carrying capacity of our environment has been deteriorating for decades, and recently, the rate of its decline has escalated. It is on the verge of entering free fall, if it hasn't already (nicely explained here [VIDEO] ). We should have stopped using fossil fuels yesterday and started changing our diets, reforming agriculture, reforesting, restoring habitats and biodiversity, reforming financial systems, promoting degrowth and implementing UBI to address inequality, etc., etc","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36826707,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Climate records tumble, leaving Earth in uncharted territory \u2013 scientists","text":"> when the alternative is decarbonizing using cleaner technologies There (might not be) enough fossil fuels left, and EROI is falling fast, so the question is whether we'd able to do this before the energy runs out and our economy will be forcibly reduced by nature. > carbon capture once that technology matures I'm worried that's just a technological pipedream. No such technology will probably exist for decades at the scale needed. We'd need millions of such factories. In fact, we already have such \"technology\", it's called forests ... but we're not doing that either. > Carrying capacity isn't fixed No, it's not. We've extended it in the past, but now it seems that it started decline ... and might enter freefall soon. I'd suggest this for more info: [VIDEO] > energy isn't fixed either Yes, and it's heating the planet and oceans 100x more than what we're consuming now. 5 atomic bombs every second now, is it? I'm aware that 254x254 km2 of solar panels would be enough for all our energy needs (except storage) ... but we're far from that. Even in the most optimistic scenarios we're targeting 25-30% of renewable energy in 2050 ... not really enough. > science fiction scenario where we become a type 2 civilization I'd like us to get there. But we might as well be at the end of the runway, looking at the great filter with our own eyes right now.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36841198,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-07","story_title":"How, Mathematically, We\u2019re Fucked: Exponential growth on a finite planet","text":"> Burn it all down and start over We won't be the ones doing that. > We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue. > we can't just ignore the problems We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored the problems. We may cross the 1.5C threshold in 5 years. Not in 2050 as previously expected, but in 5 years. And we're still pursuing economic growth. Have you noticed any evidence to the contrary lately? > it's going to be a big challenge, and things may get ugly I recommend few videos for you. I must warn you ... it may hamper your ability to enjoy parties. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario - Arthur Keller [VIDEO] How to Enjoy the End of the World - Dr. B. Sidney Smith [LINK] Arithmetic, Population and Energy - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett [LINK] Why Societies Collapse And What it Means for Us - Joseph A. Tainter [LINK] Revealing the Naked Emperor \u2013 Paris, 2\u00b0 & Carbon Budgets - Kevin Anderson [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36861151,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Deadly global heatwaves undeniably result of climate crisis, scientists show","text":"Quickly: > Or seed the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide That's not solving the situation, that's temporarily mitigating some effects with poisons for a short term and at the same time emitting a ton of emissions from a lot of flights. > global warming is bad (but manageable) Warming, or better climate change, is only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. We've managed almost zero, nil, zilch in past 50 years (coal is still at 82%). > but pre-industrial society is far, far worse Calling mitigation strategies return to pre-industrial society ... i don't have words for that. But if we don't start solving it, and fast (yesterday was late), the nature will solve the problem for us. One way is better than the other. If you're interested where else you're wrong, you should really spend some 30 mins here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qQTjLWIHN74":[{"hn_comment_id":34650317,"author":"azefiel","month":"2023-02","story_title":"43 Hours on the Amtrak Southwest Chief","text":"While technically true, that law is never enforced, so in practice OP's statement is sadly correct. Wendover Productions made a great video [0] explaining this situation. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34863608,"author":"arthurfm","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Vinyl Chloride and the Ohio Train Derailment","text":"Wendover Productions posted an interesting train-related video recently. [VIDEO] It would appear that the issues with Amtrak can be traced back to freight rail as well. See 07:46 onwards for more details.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38999026,"author":"zuppy","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare","text":"wendover did a good viedeo about that a while ago: [VIDEO] the law says that passenger trains have priority, but nobody respects or enforces that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45326997,"author":"andrewguenther","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Rail travel is booming in America","text":"It's not an enforcement issue so much as it is a heavily exploited loophole. Part of the reason freight trains are so long is so that they can't fit in passing sidings. Since Amtrak does fit, they end up having to yield because the freight trains simply cannot. Could this be fixed by legislation on max train length to ensure all trains fit in sidings? Yes. Will that legislation get passed? No. An interesting video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qS34oV-jv_A":[{"hn_comment_id":40616398,"author":"PartiallyTyped","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Gravity Without Mass: UAH Study Proposes Alternative to Dark Matter","text":"IANAP (physicist) The only the matter portion of the universe is 85% dark matter (26.8% of mass-energy content of the universe). As for the question; I don't think it's right to assume that dark matter really is exotic matter. It's just a set of observations. It's something that behaves like matter (with respect to density scaling) but only seems to interact gravitationally. Some theories posit that it's some unknown particles, others that they are primordial black holes, and some that gravity just behaves differently (MOND). I really enjoyed Dr Angela's videos on Dark Matter [1,2] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41369781,"author":"bunderbunder","month":"2024-08","story_title":"The possibilities for dark matter have shrunk","text":"If you've got the time, these YouTube videos are a nice counterpoint to a lot of popular communication and discussion on dark matter: Dark matter is not a theory: [LINK] That dark matter video aged like milk: [VIDEO] the tl;dr is that \"dark matter\" is a bit of a misnomer. (But also a fun name so it's probably here to stay through sheer memetic momentum.) Dark matter is not actually a hypothesized kind of matter. Dark matter is just an unresolved discrepancy between theory and observation. I'll say that again: \"dark matter\" is not an attempt at explaining the discrepancy; dark matter is the discrepancy. There are some hypotheses that postulate some kind of as-yet-unobserved matter that could resolve the discrepancy, but these hypotheses are not the actual problem that we call \"dark matter\". And not all hypotheses postulate unobserved or exotic matter. Some of them suggest alternative physics, others suggest measurement error.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41966964,"author":"scotty79","month":"2024-10","story_title":"James Webb Telescope discovers some quasars that seem to exist in isolation","text":"Dark Matter is a name for set of observations that aren't explainable with currently accepted cosmological theory. There are many possible ideas of how Dark Matter problem can be solved. Why do you think making fun of specific idea of what might be the cause of Dark Matter problem or even the Dark Matter problem itself is problematic? Did suddenly the deficiencies of current state of science became not funny? Modifications to gravity are one of the possible solutions to Dark Matter problem (just as Machos and Wimps are) but not especially good or plausible ones and deserve being joked about just as much. You can learn more about the problem from this physicist: [VIDEO] > Inflation has no influence on galaxy formation. That's completely not what I was talking about. I was saying that the era of rapid inflation that despite being postulated to be just a fraction of a second had immense impact on the shape of the universe can't be swept under the rug just because it's short and is already a kind of \"Dark Time\" when huge things were happening despite time barely passing. You could equally sensibly postulate that 500 million years since the Big Bang there was a fraction of a second when galaxy formation underwent accelerated progress that aged them few billion years and that explains early black holes and such. Hopefully it won't come to that and more sensible explanation of what JWST sees will prevail. It's true that \"dark age\" is not talked about in cosmology and is and invetion","stance":"rec"}],"qSfdtmcZ4d0":[{"hn_comment_id":25075686,"author":"dmitriid","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Angular 11","text":"In addition to links in sibling comments, there's the official Svelte blog with regular updates: [LINK] and this video from recent conference on the future of Svelte: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26558766,"author":"qbasic_forever","month":"2021-03","story_title":"SvelteKit Is in Public Beta","text":"Check out the creator's first posts and videos of sveltekit when he introduced the alpha version: [VIDEO] The way I understand it is it's an evolution of sapper to be more versatile, especially with respect to the backend. Out of the box it can work more easily with serverless providers that give you static file hosting + some kind of basic API gateway and serverless function platform. So you can write full stack client and server-side code all using the same framework (like you can with sapper). But the key difference from sapper is that you're not stuck using a node.js backend, with sveltekit you can swap in different backend implementations, like one targeting a serverless/lambda system.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26560340,"author":"alexandargyurov","month":"2021-03","story_title":"SvelteKit Is in Public Beta","text":"Rich Harris did a great talk[0] at an early stage of SvelteKit's development called \"Futuristic Web Development\". I really do believe this is the next phase of how JS web frameworks will work in the future. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qSjGouBmo0M":[{"hn_comment_id":6553993,"author":"tekalon","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Obamacare Website Crashing Because It Doesn't Want You To Know Cost of Plans","text":"[VIDEO] This video (which has been making its rounds) explains many of the contributing factors to the cost of healthcare.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7032348,"author":"projct","month":"2014-01","story_title":"The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen (2007)","text":"I'm not looking at the average for the whole country, I am looking at a specific piece of the FBI crime data, and comparing that to what should be by your own logic numbers that are already on the high side for other countries. In fact, the group I picked is of only areas with a population of less than 10,000, including areas where there is no population at all, as well as universities and colleges, excluding suburbs. It's about as biased toward the point you are trying to make as you can get from this data source and it still doesn't line up with what you are claiming. Feel free to provide evidence for your claim as you still have not done so. Here is one nonpartisan resource about healthcare I have offhand and a summary video by john green for those who don't feel like reading so much: [LINK] [VIDEO] Relevant points from it: no, obesity does not account for a significant portion; yes, it affects even those who pay; yes you need to look at a lot of data; and no the data does not agree with you. The John Green video has 2 other links of interest in the description, too. Your claims are still entirely unsubstantiated, and you keep throwing in more of them instead of backing your existing claims up with data.","stance":"rec"}],"qTBAW-Eh0tM":[{"hn_comment_id":24647353,"author":"ryanfox","month":"2020-10","story_title":"When Fonts Fall","text":"> I want fonts to be made out of just a handful (at a minimum) of primitives -- e.g. here's a vertical stroke, a horizontal stroke, diagonal strokes, what various serif endings look like, here are what the bowls of letters look like, etc. Tom7, who makes excellent videos about computers, has one about splitting letters up to create anagrams in this way.[0] All of his videos are technically astounding, like the one where he frankensteined a raspberry pi into a game cartridge to play SNES games on a NES, or the one where he designed and built a computer using IEEE 754 NaN and infinity instead of 0 and 1. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35826042,"author":"_jholland","month":"2023-05","story_title":"I found the best anagram in English (2017)","text":"This is great! It reminds me of a Tom7 video of a similar ilk: Anagrams, but where you can break apart letters: \"Anagraphs\" - [VIDEO] . Similar to this, he produces a standard form for each word, but breaks each letter into letter pieces or 'atoms' which gives much more freedom for moving between words. Definitely give it a watch. If you are not familiar with Tom7's videos, he has a hilarious whimsical style while also bringing to life completely out there ideas with some brilliant technical skill.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26668159,"author":"xmprt","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters","text":"His video on anagraphs is interesting ( [VIDEO] ) especially if watched alongside his followup video proving that generalized kerning is an undecidable problem ( [LINK] )","stance":"rec"}],"qWFScmtiC44":[{"hn_comment_id":24554542,"author":"vansul","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Why books don't work (2019)","text":"Jonathan Blow recently streamed a talk called 'Video Games and the Future of Education'[0] that makes similar arguments. He discusses various tools we have to transmit knowledge from teacher to student and argues that games really shine as away to trick people into 'learning by doing'. He's sharply critical of existing educational games and really lays into 'gamification' as a concept. The talk certainly left me hearing that echo that the author alludes to. Books are great. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35499767,"author":"the__alchemist","month":"2023-04","story_title":"To Supercharge Learning, Look to Play","text":"Relevant Jblow video on video games and education: [VIDEO] Spoiler: He thinks Zachtronics games (Spacechem, Shenzio IO, Opus Magnum etc) do this very well. The point is they're not explicitly educational games about specific topics, but they teach problem-solving skills in an engaging way.","stance":"rec"}],"qWKz3psejb0":[{"hn_comment_id":39205870,"author":"jakeogh","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Jones Act Contributions to Offshore Wind Difficulties","text":"Nice discussion on the history and future of the Jones Act. Dr. Salvatore R. Mercogliano on the Jones Act Debate | Center for Maritime Strategy & Heritage Foundation | Container ships & Dirigibles [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42931569,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2025-02","story_title":"The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution","text":"> This will never succeed because the economies of scale are nonexistent without dominance in the commercial shipbuilding market. War planners should have pushed to repeal the Jones Act decades ago The US used to subsidize the salaries of US merchant marines on ships (US salaries are higher than Filipino ones) so that there would be a trained population, but that was stopped in the 1980s because subsidies are bad, so there are hardly any US merchant marines any more. The US government used to own transport boats and lease them to US shipping companies, but they've not bothered to build news ones in decades, and so most transport ships are foreign owned. If there's a war, and you need ship mat\u00e9riel to the war zone, do you think commercial ships will enter it? Perhaps the US government should eschew the Free Market\u2122 a bit and own the means of transportation. The point of the Jones Act \u2014or at least that one particular section that a lot of folks tend to talk about\u2014is to have US citizens and US ships available in case of war. But given US prices relative to the prices for other countries, it costs more, and the US has not been willing to pay the premium to support that readiness. Edit: The channel What's Going on with Shipping? has a number of videos on the topic of the what people call \"the Jones Act \", but more specifically about Section 27, the cabotage rules. See perhaps these to get a good overview of the topic: * \"The pros and cons of The Jones Act\", [LINK] * \"The Jones Act","stance":"rec"}],"qZ73PftBfFg":[{"hn_comment_id":31715790,"author":"barnabask","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Lilium achieves first main wing transition for all-electric aircraft [video]","text":"Check out their other video posted around the same time as this one, especially the part about changing the wheel design to allow for rolling landings. Seems like regulators had the same concern. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33089854,"author":"entropicgravity","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The Lilium Jet","text":"Here's a youtube (June 2022) about Lillium by the company and it covers off a lot of the engineering questions. [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"q_vivC7c_1k":[{"hn_comment_id":13886754,"author":"kdamken","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Uber Driver Tip-Hustling Schemes","text":"Tipping is the worst possible thing for everyone involved. Your employer should be paying you a living wage, not expecting the customers to do so with tips. I highly recommend you check out this video: [VIDEO] Tipping doesn't really say much about a person other than how easily they fall for societal pressure and guilt.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22734622,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Internet Archive responds: Why we released the National Emergency Library","text":"> I'd also like to live in a world where waitstaff didn't rely on tips to make minimum wage, let alone a living wage. I don't. You do, mostly. I believe it's just the USA where obligatory \"tipping\" is a thing. I learnt a bit about the history of tipping from Adam Ruins Everything S01E05 Adam Ruins Restaurants, highly recommended. Excerpt about tipping, <4mins: [VIDEO] (Yes, his style is a lil in-your-face, but the content is excellent, and often shows onscreen the title and author of papers referenced - how many shows do that?!)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13264677,"author":"nayuki","month":"2016-12","story_title":"No tipping means better business","text":"A fast and entertaining take on this topic: \"Why Tipping Should Be Banned - Adam Ruins Everything\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14605987,"author":"sr2","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Uber rolls out in-app tipping","text":"\"Why Tipping Should Be Banned\", by Adam Ruins Everything is worth watching if you are of the school of thought that tipping is bad: [VIDEO] The gist of the video is that if you're tipping, then a waiter/waitress for example is not being paid enough, and tips are deliberately designed to bolster their unfair income.","stance":"rec"}],"qbIk7-JPB2c":[{"hn_comment_id":35509547,"author":"lhl","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The LLama Effect: Leak Sparked a Series of Open Source Alternatives to ChatGPT","text":"If you (or anyone else is) interested in the topic, I'd highly recommend giving some of these a look: Bubeck, S\u00e9bastien, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan, Johannes Gehrke, Eric Horvitz, Ece Kamar, Peter Lee, et al. \u201cSparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4.\u201d arXiv, March 27, 2023. [LINK] . or watching Sebastien Bubeck's recent talk he gave describing what GPT-4 can do that previous LLMs couldn't: [VIDEO] Geoffrey Hinton recently gave a very interesting interview and he specifically wanted to address the \"auto-complete\" topic: [LINK] Here's another way that Ilya Sutskever recently described it (comparing GPT 4 to 3): [LINK] I'd also recommend this recent Sam Bowman article that does a goood job reviewing some of the surprising recent developments/properties of the current crop of LLMs that's pretty fascinating: Bowman, Samuel R. \u201cEight Things to Know about Large Language Models.\u201d arXiv, April 2, 2023. [LINK] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35551423,"author":"iamflimflam1","month":"2023-04","story_title":"What GPT-4 Does Is Less Like \u201cFiguring Out\u201d and More Like \u201cAlready Knowing\u201d","text":"I used to say this as well, I\u2019ve written blog posts and made videos saying exactly this. But - I would strongly recommend trying GPT4. There\u2019s a very good video that is worth watching as well that may not change your mind, but will certainly make you think: [VIDEO] The thing to remember is that these models are unbelievably huge and deep. We don\u2019t know what is really happening in the layers or what it has really learned. Thinking that it\u2019s a simple language model that is just predicting the next most likely word is unwise.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36001923,"author":"neom","month":"2023-05","story_title":"ChatGPT Egg Balancing Task Convinced Microsoft That AGI Is Closer","text":"Highly highly highly recommend listen to this lecture by Sebastien Bubeck (the dude who wrote the paper), it's extremely interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45615177,"author":"Topfi","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Gemini 3.0 spotted in the wild through A/B testing","text":"It goes back to Sparks of AGI [0] unless I am mistaken. Can recommend the talk, one that has stayed in the back of my mind since I first saw it two years ago. Personally, still have major reservations about throwing claims of intelligence or understanding around, but I do agree that SVG code generation can be a very effective source to get a quick and easy to present understanding of a models ability to output code with a rather open ended prompt that needs a high degree of coherence and were a lot of layers depend/build on each other. Helps that these are eye catching (literally as the output is visual) and easy to grasp. Same reason a lot of hype is created around the web desktops. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35854731,"author":"ftxbro","month":"2023-05","story_title":"The AI revolution is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour","text":"Here are two. First one is Nathan Labenz who ended up Red Teaming for OpenAI during the six months after the base model was fully trained but before it was released (especially relevant parts are after 45 minutes): [LINK] Other one is Sebastien Bubeck who put Sydney into Bing before she was tamed down some notches; he explains the lobotomization process in a particularly poignant way, where they had the GPT keep trying to draw a unicorn even as it was progressively deadened: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35870569,"author":"pmoriarty","month":"2023-05","story_title":"LLMs are not greater than the sum of their parts: Stanford researchers","text":"You might find this video[1] on why \"GPT is smarter than you think\" interesting. They're older, but the \"Sparks of AGI\" paper[2] and video[3] are also well worth your time. [1] - [LINK] [2] - [LINK] [3] - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36410718,"author":"nazka","month":"2023-06","story_title":"GPT4 Can\u2019t Ace MIT","text":"You should take a look at this video. He is a researcher at Microsoft and had acc\u00e8s to private version of ChatGPT. He literally claims that ChatGPT 4 is not as good as before. His talk actually demonstrates the different evolutions. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qbKGw8MQ0i8":[{"hn_comment_id":32833146,"author":"jmmv","month":"2022-09","story_title":"When to use Bazel?","text":"Add your npm directories to the virus file exclusion lists of Windows Defender. Note that some of the directories may not be obvious (those under AppData for example). The speed improvements are massive for tools like these that touch lots of small files. Also take a look at this talk on NTFS, file system speed, and how the presenter optimized the Rust installer: [VIDEO] . There is an awful lot that can be done to tools that deal with lots of files to perform well under Windows too.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40940573,"author":"ablob","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Show HN: Dut \u2013\u00a0a fast Linux disk usage calculator","text":"I want to take this opportunity to recommend the talk \"NTFS isn't that bad\" ( [VIDEO] ). NTFS prefers a different access pattern than most usual file systems. I remember that a part of the talk was about speed-ups on Linux as well. So even if it doesn't sway your opinion it should enhance your perspective on how file systems work.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41085991,"author":"unchar1","month":"2024-07","story_title":"SQLite: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem","text":"That may be due to a combination of Malware detection + most unix programs not really written to take advantage of the features NTFS has to offer This is a great talk on the topic [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41086699,"author":"amiga386","month":"2024-07","story_title":"SQLite: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem","text":"NTFS can be especially awful if you're used to Linux behaviour, port code over to Windows and expect the same performance. Here's a talk on porting rustup to Windows: [VIDEO] To begin with, it takes rustup 3m30s to install on Windows. After rejigging the code again and again away from its naive implementation which works fine on Linux, to perform sympathetically towards NTFS, it takes the same rustup 14s to install. That's quite a performance gain! But it needed a lot of changes to rustup, and to Windows itself.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42820396,"author":"miki123211","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Wild \u2013 A fast linker for Linux","text":"And as a result of this, if you want to optimize your program to be fast on Windows, you will make very different optimization decisions than on other platforms. For example, Windows runs virus scans on close(), which makes it very slow. This means that sometimes it makes sense to have one or more background threads exclusively dedicated to closing files. There's a good talk on this at [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qd_hEja6bzE":[{"hn_comment_id":29107667,"author":"msadowski","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some technically inspiring movies, TV shows or documentaries?","text":"I highly recommend Pulling Power from the Sky: The Story of Makani [Feature Film] available on YouTube: [VIDEO] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34270173,"author":"chrisdalke","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Caltech to Launch Space Solar Power Technology Demo into Orbit","text":"Makani (Acquired by Google and shut down) built large airplane/kites which transmitted wind power to the ground via a tether. The engineering challenges were... intense. This was all documented extensively and this documentary summarizes all the footage they took: [VIDEO] One of my favorite engineering projects and documentaries, just because of the sheer ambition and scale, and the grit of the team to keep pushing through repeated failures. Sad the project was cancelled but it makes sense given the cost and complexity.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42802986,"author":"pveierland","month":"2025-01","story_title":"How shut-down Bay Area tech companies ditch their fancy gear","text":"There's a beautiful feature film about the story of Makani. It's a great watch with plenty of technical details that follows the story from beginning to end. Available for free on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27931808,"author":"Confiks","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Floating wind turbines could rise to great heights","text":"Reminds me of the incredible engineering done by Makani, as told in this 2 hours long autodocumentary [1]. They shut down in 2020 because they didn't see a path towards commercializing their airborne wind turbine. They made a non-assertion pledge on their patents, and open sourced much of their code (simulations, firmware) [2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29173291,"author":"gtpedrosa","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Kite Turbines","text":"I think the Makani documentary does a good job explaining the problem in less than 2 min [1]. [1] [VIDEO] Regarding the size x quantity, I believe the reason lies in where the best wind is, which is usually high above the ground. The roughness of the terrain and obstacles generate shear and turbulence, which translates into more stress for the components. The higher wind has a more uniform distribution across the rotor and is higher in magnitude than in lower heights. So for small wind turbines to have access to the best wind, you would have to build expensive structures to reach there, making it infeasible. Hence kite approaches like the one posted and Makani (with different principles).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35854318,"author":"userabchn","month":"2023-05","story_title":"TV series about startup failures, portraying greedy founders, and the damages","text":"Not a TV series, but an interesting documentary about Makani, a failed wind energy startup funded by X: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qgG5Jhi_Els":[{"hn_comment_id":22853599,"author":"imjasonmiller","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?","text":"> 3) Fuzzy file search in your editor I\u2019ve been using \u201cfzf\u201d [1] for file and directory search and I can\u2019t recommend it enough. It integrates nicely with vim [2] as well. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30739185,"author":"thetadot","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Fzf \u2013 a command-line fuzzy finder","text":"i use fzf daily - especially in Vim. thanks for this another resource I found valuable early on: [VIDEO] EDIT: just realised this is the repo README by the fzf creator. he mentions Samoshkin's video also but it's worth repeating","stance":"rec"}],"qhbuKbxJsk8":[{"hn_comment_id":15397383,"author":"jacobolus","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Beauty in Mathematics: Modular Multiplication Tables","text":"There\u2019s not really a reasonable continuous analog, IMO (unless you just want to see a single solid blob, like in your picture, but that hides all of the interesting part of the structure). But there are moir\u00e9-like patterns. Check out [VIDEO] for some insight based on a related type of diagram (related to a single row at a time from the OP\u2019s diagrams).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20560323,"author":"espeed","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Powers of Two in Lexicographic Order","text":"How does that work? ... Explanations invited. Hold the 1 fixed. Notice in both sequences the remaining numbers are 3 interleaved ordered sets, in multiples of 2. Then watch this (just happened to post it two hours ago too)... \"Times Tables, Mandelbrot and the Heart of Mathematics\" [video] [VIDEO] [LINK] NB: And once again we find cycloids hiding underneath it all.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23475691,"author":"csbuja","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Times Tables Can Make Beautiful Art","text":"Check out some of the png files to view the art! This YouTube video explains the algo behind what you're seeing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35550605,"author":"photochemsyn","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren Makes Its Silicon Valley Debut","text":"Grasping the concept of number regardless of base system is an interesting exercise (linked to modular arithmetic), see Mathologer on times tables in any number base: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qoyKe-HxmFk":[{"hn_comment_id":37261132,"author":"pimlottc","month":"2023-08","story_title":"The place where no humans will tread for 100k years","text":"Came here to post this same comment. It\u2019s a really thought-provoking film and quite striking in the way it was shot, edited, and scored. Highly recommended. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4967839,"author":"tferraz","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Movies you saw in 2012?","text":"This one in from 2003 , but I watched it this year: Memories of a Murder [LINK] . It's about the first recorded serial killer from Korea. There is also 2 amazing documentary: Into Eternity [VIDEO] and Nostalgia for the Light [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"qp0HIF3SfI4":[{"hn_comment_id":16975284,"author":"mtgx","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention","text":"You can apply this idea to everything, though. \"How is it the interest of Github stockholders to not censor certain projects when China starts DDoSing the whole site?\" or even \"How is it in the interest of Cloudflare to raise the prices for all of its customers, just to protect a site Russia doesn't like?\" It can't all be about money. Companies that think only about money fail in the long term. If you don't believe that, then I urge you to watch this Simon Sinek video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3422918,"author":"nextparadigms","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Windows Phone is failing because the seeds were planted elsewhere","text":"This is very relevant (How great leaders inspire action): [VIDEO] Hint: It's all about the beliefs of a company and how consumers associate their beliefs with a company's beliefs. We know what Apple stands for (higher quality and more beautiful products). We know what Google stands for (more openess, more user freedom). What does Microsoft stand for? Can you answer it quickly? The only answer that comes fast enough is \"money\". I don't think Microsoft has an inbred culture inside the company for much else, at least not anymore. I also agree with the ending conclusion of the post, about Microsoft trying to cater to the \"people in the middle\", like not wanting to be close enough like Apple to deliver a great user experience, but not open enough like Android, too. In fact WP7 is even much stricter than desktop Windows. So they aren't addressing neither the Apple users, nor the Android users with this \"mediocrity\" strategy. Seth Godin likes to talk about how mediocrity is a bad place to be in, too: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4127046,"author":"mtgx","month":"2012-06","story_title":"Apple to become most profitable company ever","text":"I think this video by Simon Sinek explains very well why Apple is successful. It's the motivation behind doing the things they do that matters, not just what they make. This tends to attract a lot of customers to think the same way, and believe in Apple's goals and philosophy. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18889986,"author":"peteforde","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time","text":"This essay is in radical need of a TL;DR. If something is this important, you owe it to the subject matter not to bury the lede under a mountain of history and flowery exposition. Ask yourself: who is this for? People who are not already deeply passionate will stop reading unless they are engaged in a minute of reading. Note that a minute is being extremely generous; on a commercial consumer site, it's apparently an average of 7 seconds before someone will click away. I recommend that you check out this video and reconsider how you might reframe your message as a call to action that speaks to a better future we can create together. [VIDEO] I even jumped you to the good part.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25421918,"author":"viktorcode","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Technical Copywriting:What Engineers Can Learn from Apple\u2019s M1 MacBook Marketing","text":"I find this a rather simple take on Apple marketing. Not saying it is wrong, but surely it can not apply to other products. I recommend watching this take instead. 10 years old, and still clicks: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qpoRO378qRY":[{"hn_comment_id":35509547,"author":"lhl","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The LLama Effect: Leak Sparked a Series of Open Source Alternatives to ChatGPT","text":"If you (or anyone else is) interested in the topic, I'd highly recommend giving some of these a look: Bubeck, S\u00e9bastien, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan, Johannes Gehrke, Eric Horvitz, Ece Kamar, Peter Lee, et al. \u201cSparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4.\u201d arXiv, March 27, 2023. [LINK] . or watching Sebastien Bubeck's recent talk he gave describing what GPT-4 can do that previous LLMs couldn't: [LINK] Geoffrey Hinton recently gave a very interesting interview and he specifically wanted to address the \"auto-complete\" topic: [VIDEO] Here's another way that Ilya Sutskever recently described it (comparing GPT 4 to 3): [LINK] I'd also recommend this recent Sam Bowman article that does a goood job reviewing some of the surprising recent developments/properties of the current crop of LLMs that's pretty fascinating: Bowman, Samuel R. \u201cEight Things to Know about Large Language Models.\u201d arXiv, April 2, 2023. [LINK] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35779911,"author":"tpowell","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and can now speak freely about his AI concern","text":"Yesterday, I randomly watched his full interview from a month ago with CBS Morning, and found the discussion much more nuanced than today's headlines. [VIDEO] The next video in my recommendations was more dire, but equally as interesting: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35930093,"author":"stareatgoats","month":"2023-05","story_title":"GitHub Copilot Leaked Prompt","text":"No, we're past that point. it's no longer the most useful way to describe these things, we need to understand that they already have some sort of \"understanding\" which is very similar if not equal to what we understand by understanding. Don't take my word for it, listen to Geoffrey Hinton explain it instead: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qs2QcycggWU":[{"hn_comment_id":32589413,"author":"__sy__","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Starlink is reducing your monthly service fee","text":"While on the topic of Starlink, I wanted to share this cool Youtube video [1] I watched tonight on how it works (PCBA design, beam forming, orbital velocity, up/downlink bandwidth as a result...etc). It's a bit long but has some good details! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34625415,"author":"jasode","month":"2023-02","story_title":"WiFi: \u201cbeamforming\u201d only begins to describe it (2014)","text":">But wouldn't it be cool if, using software plus magic, you could use multiple antennas to create \"virtual directionality\" and re-aim a \"beam\" automatically as the client device moves around? [...] We're left with the simple (ha ha) matter of making sure that the receiver is in an area of maximum constructive interference at all times. To make a long story short, we do this by adjusting the phase between the otherwise-identical signals coming from the different antennas. There's a good Youtube video that illustrates the idea of deliberate constructive/destructive interference to \"aim\" antennas. Deep link: [VIDEO] The video is about Starklink phased-arrays instead of wifi pointy antennas but it illustrates the same idea.","stance":"rec"}],"qsEjV8DdSbs":[{"hn_comment_id":36235334,"author":"mrandish","month":"2023-06","story_title":"US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles","text":"> So you're telling me, some random game developer was more competent than the US military guys who literally are hired for such analysis? In the case of the most-cited \"Gimbal\" video, all the military has officially said is they can't determine for sure what the object the glare shown in the video is from. But everyone already agrees on that point. No one can tell from the video whether the glare shown is caused by an airplane many miles distant or some other object. No one representing the U.S. government has ever said the video could NOT be a magnified thermal glare from a distant airplane. Remember, the pilot never saw the object with his own eyes, it was far too distant to see visually even as a spec on the horizon. All the pilot ever saw was the same auto-tracking thermal video we've all seen. > I suppose, having coded some \"parallax effect\" is sufficient in your book? I don't know what you're referring to but it doesn't sound like Mick West's analysis video: [VIDEO] . Also, Mick only assembled the video. He acknowledges the evidence shown in the video is the work of many independent researchers working collaboratively over many months while iteratively sharing their data for peer review. There are links to all the source data shown as well as the entire open analysis discussion and review. The summary video is concise and only 20 minutes long. I challenge you to watch all of it and respond specifically. Which of the four points evidenced from the on-screen camera do yo","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31216986,"author":"SemanticStrengh","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Teach me something new","text":"I forgot the names, don't remember wether nimitz is gimbal but anyway that explanation is a great example of what kind of analysis we should do [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34344629,"author":"agarren","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Alien Grave of Aurora, Texas","text":"Mick West put together what I found to be a pretty enlightening and convincing analysis: [VIDEO] Ultimately, it remains an unidentified flying object, but between West\u2019s conclusion and a physics defying anomaly, I\u2019d lean squarely towards the former.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36219018,"author":"shrimpx","month":"2023-06","story_title":"US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles","text":"After taking the pilots' accounts on face value, this analysis gave me new insight: [VIDEO] The pilots claim they saw a flying saucer that was rotating in weird ways, and provide a grainy video that's kind of convincing. The analysis proves it was lens flare. There are additional debunked UAP videos released by the military, including one that is lens bokeh around starlight, which is debunked by showing the configuration of the \"triangle UAPs\" matches the positions of stars at that time, including additional evidence that the camera used on those ships has triangle aperture. This tells me there's a chance of a disappointing but realistic option 4: military incompetence. They take these videos, they don't know what they are, so they go into some data pipeline and categorized as UAP. Then people/congress become aware that there are \"UAP videos\", and we go through this declassification song and dance, only to get these bokeh and lens flare videos, that the military themselves do not know they are bokeh/lens flare, and they have to find out about it on YouTube. Giving the military more benefit of the doubt, the likely option is 3: psyop. They spread UAP rumors to confuse adversaries, knowing these UAP videos they have are BS. When they release these easily debunked videos, the adversaries could be further confused, still not knowing what they really have.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36219706,"author":"bragr","month":"2023-06","story_title":"US urged to reveal UFO evidence after claim that it has intact alien vehicles","text":"Tangential, but there's some great analysis and debunks of the video the headline photo is taken from: [VIDEO] Simulation: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36511710,"author":"Triesault","month":"2023-06","story_title":"US Congress doubles down on explosive claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs","text":"tptacek could be referring to the following video: [VIDEO] This video does a good job at explaining how the \"UFO\" is probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it, and rotating only because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37354527,"author":"thamer","month":"2023-09","story_title":"U.S. Department of Defense Launches All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office Website","text":"How is the GIMBAL video still listed as \"unresolved\"? Mick West's analysis seems to explain it pretty thoroughly: [VIDEO] At the very least I would have hoped that there would be more than just a link to the video, and a section saying that some convincing explanations have been proposed. Right now it looks like on the first day it was released, as if this case was still just as mysterious.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45195923,"author":"trenchpilgrim","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Radar footage shows Hellfire missile fired by US Military bounce off UFO","text":"an interesting youtube comment: \"2:42 Check out the readout on the bottom right . One of the numbers is the target height above terrain - and after it's hit that goes down from 86 to 59 over about 6 seconds before the video cuts off. So after being hit the object isn't continuing on course, it's falling at an increasingly fast rate. The video was sent to Rep. Eric Burlison with no chain of custody and no context, and it's a video taken of a screen which crops out 80% of the analytical data along the edges of the screen, but that's the MOST IMPORTANT PART which would tell us the distance, speed, size, range, angle and other critical information for interpreting the video. This could be drone to drone intercept footage from a training mission, we just don't know at this point.\" Also note that the article's title contains an error - this is not \"radar footage, it's IR camera footage. Before assuming this is even an \"orb\" at all, check out this video on how these cameras work: [VIDEO] I'm no expert but my most likely bet is someone cropped IR footage of a drone intercept and sent it without context or SME interpretation to a congressman.","stance":"rec"}],"quLa6kzzra0":[{"hn_comment_id":28855789,"author":"Arainach","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Call of Duty Adds Kernel Level Driver for Anti-Cheat","text":"Everything is very much separated. It's actually a series of OSes running in a hypervisor. [LINK] [VIDEO] (for software discussion check around the 19:00 mark but the whole talk is incredible)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25193078,"author":"qayxc","month":"2020-11","story_title":"\u201cMicrosoft Pluton Hardware Security Coming to Our CPUs\u201d: AMD, Intel, Qualcomm","text":"> Why else would they design it for the xbox, of all things? If you really want to know the answer, here's the lead engineer explaining it en detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47414515,"author":"Arainach","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'","text":"Given that it held up against 13 years of dedicated efforts by people with physical access to the device, many years after its successor was launched, it seems merited in this case. This talk about some of what went into it is fascinating: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qv5b1Xowxdk":[{"hn_comment_id":31726596,"author":"jhallenworld","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Vintage Computing","text":"I like the very early microcomputers where the storage is paper tape punch / reader. Your ASR-33 basically types in your program, or punches it on tape when you \"list\". You can see some of these on \"deramp\"'s videos (he is selling Altair clones, but even so the videos are great demos). [VIDEO] The next upgrade to this is something like the AC-30 for SWTPC. It does exactly the same thing, except uses cassette tape. [LINK] Then came disk drives, but no DOS. Instead they use disk the same way you used the cassette: [LINK] It was up to you to remember which track your file was on.. Next step: file names, but no automatic space management: [LINK] You write files sequentially to the disk, and you can only write to the end. When you delete there are holes. You can run a defrag program to recover the space. This stuff was all just before my time, but there were vestiges of it in later operating systems in the early 80s.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42006727,"author":"HarHarVeryFunny","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Ed Roberts created the personal computer industry (2023)","text":"There's a nice video here of a complete BASIC boot sequence - entering boot code, loading BASIC, then loading a BASIC program. [VIDEO] As far as any program was concerned the TTY was just a serial port, and it couldn't tell the whether data coming in was from keyboard or paper tape reader.","stance":"rec"}],"qv6UVOQ0F44":[{"hn_comment_id":16744062,"author":"deepnet","month":"2018-04","story_title":"The differences between tinkering and research (2016)","text":"OP, Togelius, is quite wrong in 1 point at least. tl;dr Seth Bling directly references NEAT and his links[Show More [1]] link to 2 Togelius papers[13][14] among many others ! To wit, in OP, Togelius mentions Seth Bling's MarI/O[1] as lacking scholarship because he didn't mention Togelius: \" seen as research, it is atrocious because of the complete lack of scholarship. The guy didn't even know he was reinventing the wheel, and didn't care to look it up. \" Rather disdaignfully (sadly/ ironically/ poigniantly) Togelius refers to Seth not by name but only as \" some guy \". Yet Seth Bling[2] in his short video, mentions and explains NEAT and directly links Ken Stanley's and Risto Miikkulainen's foundational NEAT paper[10] at U.texas which Togelius builds on [hint: click SHOW MORE under Seth's video] And much more, i.e.: ---- the innovative toolchain Seth uses: Bizhawk to script SNES emulators in Lua [12]! ---- Seth links the wikipedia page on Neuroevolution[11] which directly references 2 of Togelius's own papers[13][14] Seth's [Show More] Links on the MarI/O video[1] are very very comprehensive and (IMHO) indeed a great example of scholarship ! Togelius is a top flight scholar, and publishes in the field of AI game players and level generators[15] so I hope he will welcome some random tinkerer pointing out his error. [full disclosure: I am a Togelius fan] To give Togelius his due he does at least link to Seth's MarI/O video. Perhaps Togelius failed to click / read the Show More li","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41438839,"author":"dberst","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Synchronizing Pong to music with constrained optimization","text":"I'm a novice at machine learning, but Open AI made a python library for reinforcement learning in video games, and a fork of it is still actively maintained [1]. It's been a few years, but I remember being able to get it up and running in a day or two (maybe a weekend). It used the Retroarch emulator, which is compatible with a huge number of emulators and consoles. [LINK] There also SethBling's excellent video on YouTube about machine learning specifically with Super Mario World: [VIDEO] I encourage you to give it a try! I feel that video games are a bit underrated by current AI buzz, I think there's lots of potential for a machine to learn a skill through playing a game. And lots of potential for a game being selected or even created with the goal of teaching a specific skill. However at that point maybe it's better to forego the audio and visuals and speak to the machine in text or with pure data. On the other hand, I have seen a video about convolutional neural networks that feed on each pixel of an image. So perhaps training with sound data, or with the pixels of a spectrogram, could have some positive results. And certainly I would be amused to see a game played in time with music, or possibly even dancing with a songs melody, harmony, and story as well. Anything that's ever been created by humans, existed first in the imagination of a human brain. And you've got one of those. A mental vision pursued and brought from the mind into physical reality is a beautiful thing, ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44279661,"author":"andai","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Self-Adapting Language Models","text":"Here is my favorite introduction to NEAT: SethBling's MarI/O - Machine Learning for Video Games [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9792946,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Hacking Super Mario World to Warp to the Credits [video]","text":"I believe it's been posted before, but sethbling (of vanilla-minecraft-hacks fame) pulled off the impossible and did the credit warp on an actual SNES, live[1]. As this video very-nicely explains, this required incredible amounts of pixel-perfect accuracy. Lining up the line of koopa shells on exact x-offsets and very narrow heights mid jump (!) to write the landing-sled - using a controller, realtime - is utterly insane. As a side note sethbling's latest project is teaching[2] (using neuro-evolution) his machine learning bot to play SMW[2], SMB1[3], and Mario Kart (original)[4]. While he machine learning is simple by today's standards, his brief videos give a really nice introduction to the topic that should be accessible to most people. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11281087,"author":"slpsys","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?","text":"There is an objective, but it may not be exactly as you reason about it. There's a great video that made the rounds last year about building a neural net that plays Super Mario World, that may help visualize what's going on - [VIDEO] There's also a great snippet in the currently-ongoing AlphaGo videos that explains that when AlphaGo plays in ways that you may not expect, it's because it's strictly worried about _winning_ (even by the slimmest margin) with the greatest probability, and not necessarily by winning handily, like a human might.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12918380,"author":"notgood","month":"2016-11","story_title":"NeuroEvolution \u2013 Flappy Bird","text":"You mean this script? Or machine learning in general? If the later then it has already been done: [VIDEO] (great educational video)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13253990,"author":"new299","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Whence your reward function?","text":"This video of a Super Mario playing AI was pretty neat: [VIDEO] It may, or may not be on a useful path to solving harder AI problems. I don't know. But it's a good way of demonstrating value (and publishing papers).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30956620,"author":"intunderflow","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Which algorithms based on biological ideas do you know?","text":"Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies is a classic genetic algorithm, as a teenager it was my first genetic algorithm I implemented after watching a Youtube video of an implementation of it - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35757475,"author":"circuit10","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The future of generative AI is niche, not generalized","text":"If a human brain doesn\u2019t use maths, what does it use? It\u2019s Magic? > \"training\", more accurately described as references Uh, no, that's not at all how the training process works. The training process very roughly mirrors evolution/natural selection except more more direct and faster. This is a good introduction to the concept of how a computer could learn: [VIDEO] This is a more technical look at how exactly it works in more modern AIs: [LINK] (it's a series) > If it encounters a problem it hasn't been programmed for, it cannot reason a new solution. But an LLM can? It's not as good at it as a human but it can Relevant: [LINK] (if you don\u2019t want to click it it says \u201creferring to AI models as \"just math\" or \"matrix multiplication\" is as uselessly reductive as referring to tigers as \"just biology\" or \"biochemical reactions\"\u201d) > By your logic, video game characters must use reasoning, when no, they don't. It's maths. \u201cBy your logic, if tigers are dangerous, then bananas must be too, when no, they aren\u2019t. It\u2019s biology.\u201d","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37010025,"author":"cookiengineer","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Is genetic programming still actively researched?","text":"The genetic programming scene kind of evolved into NEAT, HyperNEAT and ES-HyperNEAT as a meta learning concept. Connections between layers/nodes are serialized as genes of agents with phenotypes and dominant/recessive markers, and an observing CPPN learns to categorize agents into different traits to find more efficient breeding mechanisms. It's a strong concept, and AFAIK it's still used a lot in the robotics world where you have to guarantee behaviors and have to be able to reproduce behaviors due to safety regulations. There was a nice intro video into the underlying base concept which is called NEAT by a youtuber named SethBling [2] In my case I'm using this as a decentralized learning approach, because peer to peer networks can benefit heavily from genetic AIs that can communicate, adapt and learn from themselves. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qvNCVYkHKfg":[{"hn_comment_id":47421522,"author":"Xunjin","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Why AI systems don't learn \u2013 On autonomous learning from cognitive science","text":"In this podcast episode[0] he does talk about this kind of model and how it \"learns about physics\" through experience instead of just ingesting theorical material. It's quite eye opening. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47646726,"author":"qsera","month":"2026-04","story_title":"I used AI. It worked. I hated it","text":"This is not an appeal to authority, but this video probably contains the answers to your questions if you are open minded about it [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"qybUFnY7Y8w":[{"hn_comment_id":5831291,"author":"Intermernet","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Seriously.js","text":"That was OK, Go ( [LINK] ) . The song is \"WTF?\" They're famous for quirky video clips (original for this song is at [LINK] ). You should watch [VIDEO] . You'll like it. Trust me.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1285878,"author":"Perceval","month":"2010-04","story_title":"Another lovely Google Chrome ad - Extensions","text":"Reminds me a bit of Ok Go's latest video: [VIDEO] Seems like something Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze ( [LINK] ) would do. I think it is abstract, but I like it a whole lot nonetheless. It's creative and cute and whimsical. Kudos!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3194817,"author":"derrybryson","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Stop motion video shot over 2 years with 288,000 jelly beans","text":"Not really. Stop-motion music videos have been done quite a bit, especially 10 years ago and more. There was a time before CGI when artists shot \"videos\" on film and computers weren't capable of the things they are today. Consider the Peter Gabriel videos: [LINK] [LINK] both of which feature various types of stop-motion animation as well as other effects. Also consider the works of Bruce Bickford whom Frank Zappa hired to work on several videos. This guy is a genius/savant, I don't know which. Zappa saw the genius and funded some incredible work. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] You also might want to check out: [VIDEO] and their other videos, which aren't stop-motion but are incredible videos made without CGI. There's tons more out there to find if you look.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13028039,"author":"ymse","month":"2016-11","story_title":"OK Go\u2019s video, for the song \u201cThe One Moment\u201d, took only 4.2 seconds to film","text":"OK Go really do make some amazing music videos. The Rube Goldberg machine [0] one is particularily impressive. It even got its own TED talk [1]. 0: [VIDEO] 1: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48094611,"author":"gosub100","month":"2026-05","story_title":"The Greatest Shot in Television: James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene","text":"Reminds me of the 3 minute rube Goldberg machine in \"this too shall pass\" by Ok Go. [VIDEO] I thought they really did it all in one cut but there are at least two. Still a great music video and song.","stance":"rec"}],"r-A78RgMhZU":[{"hn_comment_id":21269007,"author":"kiriliponi","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Let's Write an LLVM Specializer for Python (2015)","text":"I recommand David Beazley's talk from a recent PyCon India on a similar subject : [VIDEO] Mostly live coded, it really is pretty amazing but also quite insightful.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25538035,"author":"VBprogrammer","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"Ok, it wasnt technically this year but I have to share this one just incase anyone missed it, because it's quite possible the best conference talk I've ever seen. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27832344,"author":"milliams","month":"2021-07","story_title":"WebAssembly from Scratch: From FizzBuzz to DooM","text":"I found this video [VIDEO] \"A Talk Near the Future of Python (a.k.a., Dave live-codes a WebAssembly Interpreter)\" to be a brilliant introduction to WASM as well as writing interpreters in general. I'm a relative novice in the subject and it was pitched right at my level.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21724330,"author":"tzs","month":"2019-12","story_title":"W3C recommends WebAssembly","text":"I found this [1] quite interesting. It doesn't really answer any of the questions you asked, but I think it gives some interesting insights into WebAssembly, which might make it easier to put other things in context and also give a good low level understanding of it. It's the closing keynote talk at this year's PyCon India. From the description: > In this talk, I live-code a simple stack machine and turn it into an interpreter capable of running WebAssembly. I then use that to play a game written in Rust. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27416730,"author":"kfrane","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Pokegb: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pok\u00e9mon Blue, in 68 lines of C++","text":"You're right about wasm not being too complicated, I've learned this when watching David Beazley coding a WebAssembly interpreter in under an hour. And it doesn't require any knowledge about it beforehand. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29558171,"author":"newswasboring","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Tech Talks","text":"Any talk by Dylan Beattie[1,2] or David Beasley[3,4]. I think they are quite unique in their presentation, they tell a story. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46216344,"author":"skylurk","month":"2025-12","story_title":"So you want to speak at software conferences?","text":"I agree with these, but David Beazley breaks most of them and his talks are way better than mine ;) e.g. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"r-TLSBdHe1A":[{"hn_comment_id":21862044,"author":"divan","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"\"Performance matters\" by Emery Berger on StrangeLoop'19 is a great talk - [VIDEO] Also, rest of his talks are also fascinating: - [LINK] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22089522,"author":"jaybosamiya","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Measure code execution time accurately in Python","text":"I haven't had a chance to mess around with it much, but the coz-profiler [1] uses basically the same idea, but the other way around (i.e., slow down everything else to get a \"virtual speedup\") which helps quantify what the effect of optimizing some code would be. I learnt about this tool from Emery Berger's talk [2] on this (at strangeloop), which I highly recommend. Lots of really nice insight, even outside of this tool. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23056029,"author":"robocat","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The naked truth about writing a programming language (2014)","text":"Aside: this is the most amazing optimisation information I have seen: [VIDEO] Unfortunate that it is a video... Summary: Modern CPUs have so many hidden causes of performance variation, that you require special tools to actually measure small performance gains. He finds an amazing but unobvious speed up in SQLite using the causal analysis tool they developed. And a surprising difference between -O2 and -O3 implying overfitting.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25488458,"author":"acidbaseextract","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ryzen 5800X vs. M1: Programming benchmarks","text":"I would highly recommend Emery Berger's talks [1] for anyone interested in benchmarking software. The alignment and code layout in memory that huayra mentions has shockingly large performance implications. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36367938,"author":"j-pb","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Poop: Performance Optimizer Observation Platform","text":"Nobody should do benchmarking like this anymore. Memory layout of your code has such a big impact on performance on modern computers that measuring performance without removing that variable leads to wild goose chases, where you think you improved something, but in reality you incidentally got the compiler to move the code around a bit. Emery Berger has an excelent talk on this [1], and a causal profiler that they developed called Coz[2]. Branch miss-predicts might be somewhat invariant to that, but still, one of the main points of the talk is that people do too much eyeball statistics, mistaking the variance of the underlying stochastic process with actual signal. Coz is pretty trivial to set up with Zig too. 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23634519,"author":"kristjansson","month":"2020-06","story_title":"C performance mystery: delete unused string constant","text":"This[1] talk from Emery Berger at last year's Strange Loop does a good job discussing the impact of alignment and other 'small' changes on performance, and how to estimate the actual impact of changes on performance [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23637484,"author":"Twirrim","month":"2020-06","story_title":"C performance mystery: delete unused string constant","text":"It's mentioned elsewhere in this HN discussion, but I think I'd encourage watching this talk: [VIDEO] . It's particularly relevant to what you're seeing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26686596,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Prefix Trees in Action","text":"Try getting them to watch this talk by Emery Berger: [VIDEO] And who knows, maybe they'd even be interested in using coz afterwards: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28899911,"author":"glandium","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Bubble sort slower with -O3 than -O2 with GCC","text":"Relevant talk by Emery Berger: Performance matters [VIDEO] I'd recommend everyone interested in the subject to watch it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30585567,"author":"abainbridge","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Algorithms for Modern Hardware","text":"I think the profiling section could benefit from a section describing the sort of profiling noise described in this video: [VIDEO] The noise source described is that changes to the code typically alter alignments of code and/or data and that is often the cause of the performance difference measured, not the change to the algorithm. The reason this is noise is because unrelated changes to the code might make it change again. IIRC, the speaker suggests improving compiler/profiler tools to randomise these alignments and benchmark many times.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39949297,"author":"deltasepsilon","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Looking for a Talk on Software Optimization","text":"Woah, I can't believe it, I've found the discussion that linked the thing I was looking for. [1] It's called Coz, the causal profiler [2]. I've submitted this talk again, because I think it's super interesting. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40100794,"author":"jcalabro","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Coz: Causal Profiling","text":"There's a great talk that explains how/why this works for those looking for more info. Also, Go UMass! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"r0plv_nIzsQ":[{"hn_comment_id":17772219,"author":"kjeetgill","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Do electrons think? (1949)","text":"I'm not super knowledgeable but I love this series, Looking Glass Universe, on the subject [0,1]. Specifically, she goes into some common but wrong beliefs about Bohemian Mechanics including that there is NO quantum weirdness. There is - it's called contextually. I don't know more than that. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15106547,"author":"erikpukinskis","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Rumours swell over new kind of gravitational-wave sighting","text":"I really wanted to like PBS SpaceTime. So many interesting subjects and I love physics videos on YouTube. But there's something about Matt O'Dowd that makes them unwatchable for me. Something about the pacing, I just can't stay focused. Another great channel is looking Glass Universe - [VIDEO] And Udiprod doesn't have a habit of making physics vids, but this is my all time favorite physics videos on YouTube which explains quantum waves better than anything else I've seen - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24091280,"author":"nmca","month":"2020-08","story_title":"How to become a good theoretical physicist","text":"Another good source for quantum and linear algebra in particular is \"Looking glass universe\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"r1ZLGqL1FMo":[{"hn_comment_id":22090611,"author":"olingern","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Japan\u2019s 99% Conviction Rate [audio]","text":"Current resident of Tokyo. Can be a little scary when getting randomly searched. I could argue, but my Japanese is intermediate and the police are always right. A youtuber interviewed a trial lawyer [1] last year and I thought it was really good. I wasn't aware that the holding days could be extended for each crime that you \"commit.\" There's an entire scheme to this: 3 days - initial detainment 10 days - judge determines whether you can be charged or not 10 days - possible extension. If you commit two crimes, that could be up to 46 days in detainment. Basically, don't come to Japan and do anything questionable and everything should be fine. In the unlikely event you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, you should know how to wield Japanese well to try to get yourself out of it. On the other hand, I watched an interaction between a couple of foriegners and the police one day. They were drinking in the park one day (legal and common) and the police were called on them for unknown reasons. After the police arrived, they basically told the police to go away for an hour and refused to show their resident's card (both also legal). Backups and backups of backups were called and eventually they dispersed. I think this is a good example of how there is a lot of restraint with regards to police here. I believe in most other countries jail would have been imminent out of disrespect. The thing about Japan is that once you're caught up in the system, it has no mercy. 1 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27834629,"author":"rramadass","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Carlos Ghosn: How I escaped Japan","text":"Here is a short interview with a Japanese lawyer on how the law screws over foreigners: [VIDEO] After watching this, i could understand why Carlos Ghosn did what he did; it is an abhorrent \"Hostage Justice\" system.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48080303,"author":"nayuki","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Getting Arrested in Japan","text":"I enjoyed learning from this video years ago, which introduces the topic of how you are treated when arrested in Japan: * Paolo fromTOKYO - \"Why Japan Arrests Foreigners\" [VIDEO] (14m23s) [2019-08-16]","stance":"rec"}],"r2CbbBLVaPk":[{"hn_comment_id":8037063,"author":"mrtksn","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Show HN: DrunkUserTesting \u2013 How does your site perform in the wild?","text":"Somebody took \"the user is drunk\" UI design method quite literally :) Here is a video about the \"the user is drunk\" idea: [VIDEO] Basically, the idea is about assuming that your user has an attention and a vision of a drunk person, not designing a UI for literally drunk people. I highly recommend the video.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7984577,"author":"ignostic","month":"2014-07","story_title":" Need feedback on Kickstarter landing page","text":"-Design quality is good, but you should re-evaluate that top image. Does a tar-covered hand say \"High quality leather\" to most people? Not to me, especially because I can't see the object. -Headline #1 should tell me what you're doing. Don't assume I know what your deal is about. You could almost switch the first and second. -CTA is way too far below the fold. I should immediately know what you want me to do. Donate? Subscribe? Drop it beneath \"You are about to challange [sic] the status quo\". -Challenge, not \"challange\". Might want to look over your page for spelling and grammar... This might be helpful: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9261009,"author":"fireworks10","month":"2015-03","story_title":"The User Is Drunk","text":"\"The User is Drunk\" is explained better in video by Will Dayble of Squareweave: [VIDEO] Also, OP's post seems more like \"The UX Consultant is Drunk\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26105010,"author":"Geeflow","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Always Use \u201cButtons\u201d for Size Selection","text":"I wouldn't be much surprised. The amount of things people do _not_ notice is staggering. When I do usability tests there's almost always something that doesn't get noticed although I thought it obvious and/or important. Personal anecdote: I managed to buy paper for my printer and only noticed upon arrival that it was the wrong size. The product photo looked right to be. I did not bother to check the details - or even the product title. \u00af\\_(\u30c4)_/\u00af Also, regarding \"if the person isn't drunk\": There's a great short talk called \"the user is drunk\" which makes one much more sympathetic to such seemingly unexplainable comprehension fails that sometimes drive product designers mad: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"r3snVCRo_bI":[{"hn_comment_id":15349550,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Google pulls YouTube off the Amazon Echo Show","text":"> Vid.me Unfortunately, simply cloning youtube isn't a competitor without also cloning youtube's bankroll. For a very good explanation of why, see Folding Ideas video essay \"VidMe or Why Platforms Aren't Your Friends\"[1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21784757,"author":"MrRadar","month":"2019-12","story_title":"An account is now required to read Reddit comment threads?","text":"Any \"Reddit alternative\" will have a hard time gathering users as long as Reddit exists (and doesn't alienate a critical mass of their users ala Digg). Dan Olson of the YouTube channel Folding Ideas made a very insightful video about the problem of setting up \"alternatives\" to popular social media platforms (having lived through several painful platform transitions himself): [VIDEO] The tl;dw is that if your \"alternative\" platform doesn't launch with unique and valuable features of its own to attract users away from the original platform then you will only attract toxic people who get kicked off the original platform as the first users of your \"alternative\" platform (because they are the only ones really in need of an \"alternative\"). This creates a self-reinforcing pattern where non-toxic users are repulsed from your alternative platform by the toxic users so growth only comes from more toxic users. You can clearly see this in the dynamic between Reddit and Voat.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19091760,"author":"anitil","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Reddit is raising a huge round near a $3B valuation","text":"There's a great video by Folding Ideas which talks about the issues with secondary services ( [VIDEO] - this is in the context of video platforms) One big 'bootstrapping' problem is that the first to adopt a new platform are the people who are _too toxic_ for the original.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19126886,"author":"8note","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Alternative HN-Like Communities?","text":"I think this is a good description of why an absolute free speech site will never flourish: [VIDEO] what you describe is basically just Reddit, but with the people nobody wants to talk to on Reddit ... so mostly just the people you don't want to talk to on Reddit talking to each other,which has no mass appeal","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19662522,"author":"anitil","month":"2019-04","story_title":"YouTube is trying to reward \u201cquality\u201d content","text":"There's a great video that goes through this phenomenon (in the context of Youtube vs VidMe) [0]. It points our exactly that the people who adopt a new platform tend to be the people most toxic for the original. I have no idea how you get around this. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21507171,"author":"etchalon","month":"2019-11","story_title":"YouTube says it has \u2018no obligation\u2019 to host anyone\u2019s video","text":"It would if it had a legitimate new take on the video hosting problem and wasn't just \"YouTube, but for free speech\", which would immediately become \"YouTube, but for Nazis\". Folding Ideas (on YouTube) had a solid video about VidMe, which is a case study in how NOT to do this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29232996,"author":"oriki","month":"2021-11","story_title":"YouTube takes down independent court livestreams","text":"I mean, not just perception issues, but also the fact that you're inherently setting yourself up to build a platform with a core userbase of \"People banned from [the more popular version of the platform they're cloning].\" You build VidMe and the first people interested in VidMe are people that got kicked off of YouTube, which it turns out are rarely oppressed free speech advocates and much more often trolls and similarly unwanted individuals. If your userbase is entirely toxic, nobody wants to stay there, and your platform never really succeeds because of that. It's worth noting that I'm loosely parroting the content of a Folding Ideas video[1] that covers the discussion of the creator vs platform relationship overall. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31159120,"author":"Qub3d","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer \u2013 sources","text":"That's true, but its a deeper problem with that. The moderation is a sort of \"in protest\" form, with lots of deliberate \"blind eyes\" and slow action so they don't get deplatformed by the app stores etc. Beyond the moderation, these sites have the problem that they are inherently set up as a sort of opposition haven -- \"we're twitter for people banned from twitter!\" This results in a phenomenon Hank Green calls the \"worst people problem\"[0]. I'm not a huge fan of the judgemental term, but the core idea is similar to pointing out the inherent contradiction of, say, an anarchists' society. You end up with a userbase that is defined by its desire to flaunt rules and reject any normative standards. [0]: [LINK] (somewhat related and worth a watch: Folding Ideas' 2017 video essay about YT alternatives. Alt platforms have had inherent problems even before the more recent political bent: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36166600,"author":"6D794163636F756","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Reddit Is Killing 3rd-Party Apps, the Best Way to Read the Site","text":"Folding ideas has a video on vidme that goes into this. A competitor that can't sell itself on features will inevitably gain traction most with those banned from the original platform. Currently that means a new platform will have very angry, very extreme voices. That is a terrible way to start a platform. Here is the video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"r6Rp-uo6HmI":[{"hn_comment_id":38833327,"author":"Rebuff5007","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Tom Scott: After ten years, it's time to stop making videos [video]","text":"To this day when I have buffering problems with online videos I immediately think about his explainer-demo with confetti [1]. Love his work! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25428606,"author":"rocgf","month":"2020-12","story_title":"How Video Works","text":"I do not know the answer, but I would absolutely shocked if it was streamed as a regular video. To the best of my knowledge, there are many, many optimizations which go into video. This is a pretty good high-level video I came across - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36436331,"author":"jerf","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Apple Vision Pro \u2013 Why It May Be Lousy for Watching Movies on a Plane","text":"It may be easier to think about high-quality swathes of pixels, because obviously any one pixel can't be wrong in isolation, and even to the extent it is, who cares. However, if you look at a swathe of pixels, say a 16x16 chunk, you can reasonably talk about with what fidelity that set of pixels represents the original signal, whatever that original signal was. You get into the whole perceptual coding thing which tells us that determining the human-perceived accuracy of a chunk of pixels is more than just adding up the differences, but you can take that as a suitable first approximation for thought. High-quality pixels have minimal deviation from the source material. Low-quality pixels have significant deviation. Tom Scott has a good video where turns up and down the quality live so you can see it in a single video: [VIDEO] The video's resolution never changes, and you could say the video's bit rate never changes (it probably does because adaptive coding saves YouTube a fortune, but conceptually you could say it doesn't), but the quality of the pixels sure does.","stance":"rec"}],"r6sGWTCMz2k":[{"hn_comment_id":23474898,"author":"kcoul","month":"2020-06","story_title":"A \u2018Useless\u2019 Perspective That Transformed Mathematics","text":"I wouldn\u2019t call this 3blue1brown video a reference, but until I watched this (coming from an audio background), I didn\u2019t quite grasp that a continuous stencil of any complex silhouette could be described in terms of a set of contributing vectors. Helped click that there is a perfect visual analogy to the deconstruction of complex audio to sine waves. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38531804,"author":"bldavies","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Old blog of Matt Henderson, beautiful math animations","text":"3B1B is incredible. I loved his video ( [VIDEO] ) using Fourier series to make epicycle animations. I worked through the details to make my own: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25198200,"author":"maze-le","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Why Is Scientific Illiteracy So Acceptable?","text":"> It remains a badge of honor for many who like to describe themselves as highly cultured or artistic to describe themselves as mathematically challenged, or to say that their brains aren\u2019t wired for mathematics. Because many of those they hold in high esteem have made similar claims, there is no real social penalty to them for doing so. For many scientific illiteracy is in the same category as mathematical illiteracy -- but the problem starts there already. Everybody should at least know what a Fourier transformation does -- it's not necessary to exercise it rigorously, but at least an idea... I think this video is enough to give even laymans an idea: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29033501,"author":"tene","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Is the great neutrino puzzle pointing to multiple missing particles?","text":"You can use epicycles to draw the actual orbits of planets. That's what \"epicycles\" are, or were: a fairly accurate model of the observed orbits of planets relative to Earth built through a composition of circular motions. One way to think about it is that you start by modeling the motion as a simple circular orbit. You then look at how the observed data differs from your circular model and add an epicycle whose parameters minimize the difference between your new model and your observations. Repeat this process until you get as close as you want to get. The success of heliocentric elliptic-orbit model isn't that it's able to represent something impossible with epicycles, but that it's dramatically simpler. Kepler's three laws are: 1) The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci. 2) A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time. 3) The square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of the length of the semi-major axis of its orbit. In contrast, the epicycle models had 40-80 cycles with parameters tuned to match the observed data. I really like this video on how Fourier series work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"r8RxkpUvxK0":[{"hn_comment_id":12798506,"author":"umbs","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Why does Google get away with such bad recruiting practices?","text":"Like with any BigCo, there are always bad apples (recruiters) and things slip through cracks. But compared to other similar sized companies, Google is quite focused on improving their interview processes. You can find lots of resources online from Google employees explaining it. The one I found very enlightening is from Moishe Lettvin given at Etsy: [VIDEO] My own personal experience couple of years ago was good. I failed the interview though.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17966982,"author":"ubernostrum","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Dark Motives and Elective Use of Brainteaser Interview Questions","text":"I like this video: [VIDEO] The speaker formerly worked at Google, and around 8:55 in the video relates the story of being on a hiring committee that was known for being tough on candidates. And a recruiter once forwarded a set of interview packets to them, and they voted \"no hire\" on all of them. The recruiter then revealed to the committee that they'd been given their own packets, slightly anonymized, from when they were interviewed, and had just voted against hiring themselves.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27837093,"author":"iooi","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Amazon has acquired Facebook's satellite internet team","text":"I think this is half the problem when people interview at FAANGs -- they think it's like preparing for olympics and you truly have to be in the top 1%. It's really not. There's thousands and thousands of engineers, from mediocre to truly great. With the right preparation, a lot of it just comes down to getting lucky with who interviews, how they're feeling that day, etc -- luck. You might find this interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40976153,"author":"gregors","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Re-Imagining Technical Interviews: Valuing Experience over Exam Skills","text":"As someone who interviews and hires engineers I'm not even remotely convinced live code exercises lead to better hiring than any other signal such as a CS degree. I remember when the the coding horror fizz buzz article came out and honestly things have just gotten worse since then. I always like to link the talk where the speaker mentions google hiring committee refused to hire themselves [0]. I suggest that this outcome isn't rare. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"r9eQth4Q5jg":[{"hn_comment_id":31467882,"author":"PainfullyNormal","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?","text":"A debugger like RemedyBG, but for linux and macos. Bonus points if you could use it for all the things, including but not limited to: WASM, javascript, android, and iOS. To clarify: I use Vim as a text editor. I use it for all of my programming editor needs no matter what I'm making. I also make a large variety of things because I'm a consultant. Vim has never let me down as far as being able to intelligently edit everything from React to assembly and everything in between on every desktop OS. I'd like a debugger that is suitably small, fast and flexible. [LINK] Here's Casey Muratori demonstrating all the way in which RemedyBG rocks. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31625201,"author":"vinyl7","month":"2022-06","story_title":"\u201cI think the vast majority of developers still debug using print() statements\u201d","text":"Anyone frustrated with debuggers, check out RemedyBG [LINK] Insanely fast and capable debugger for Windows. [VIDEO] (I have no relation to the project, just think it's great)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31897308,"author":"vinyl7","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Windows 95 in Electron","text":"> I start Visual Studio, which doesn't feel faster than Electron Well...Visual Studio is a part of the horribly written software collection. Here's an example of actually good software: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35107149,"author":"fwlr","month":"2023-03","story_title":"\u201cClean Code, Horrible Performance\u201d Discussion","text":">What\u2019s an example of a fast debugger? My apologies in advance if this feels like a gotcha, but\u2026 Casey ended up swapping to RemedyBG for debugging. He made a video about why. From about 0:50 onwards he talks about the speed and feature set of the watch window [VIDEO] Also, I don\u2019t mean to be rude by ignoring all the questions you posed; they\u2019re good questions, I just don\u2019t have answers for them (I would hope the developers whose full-time job it is to build debuggers would , though).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41411575,"author":"dundarious","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Why You Should Learn Linux (As a Developer)","text":"The watch windows are vastly inferior in the kinds of formatted information they can very quickly show, as the program is stepped through. Take a look at \"Twenty Minutes of Reasons to Use the RemedyBG Debugger\": [VIDEO] Haven't tried the Qt or KDE or Jetbrains environments in about 3 years, but last I did, they were much like Visual Studio -- slow, odd latency in displaying formatted values as you step through, lack of easy ways to format data in a human readable way in the watch window. To be clear, when I say \"slow\", I mean the GUI is slow, not the underlying debugger, which I presume is plenty fast.","stance":"rec"}],"r9rGX91rq5I":[{"hn_comment_id":9872891,"author":"Qwertious","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Why do some countries drive on the left and others on the right?","text":"I think you'll appreciate this CGO Grey video: [VIDEO] . You're not wrong , but the system is nonetheless extremely misrepresentative.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19776936,"author":"NeedMoreTea","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?","text":"> suggests a lack of representation That's a big can of worms for HN. Suffice to say we have one of the least representative democracies and it's steadily getting worse. First past the post is no longer fit for an electorate that wants to vote increasingly for minor parties. It works where there are just two choices. Individual constituencies, especially safe seats, are often hugely unrepresentative. Finally add demographics that skew the ageing electorate ever more tory, until the baby boom finishes playing out. So that's less North-South more safe seats vs everywhere else. Yet it does often play out North-South most when seeing election results maps. Still Scotland votes overwhelmingly against Conservative, who barely exist in Scotland, yet gets English Tory government. Admittedly they won a couple back in 2017, but I can see why they inch toward independence. It's different this side of the border, but NW and NE England issues are equivalent in scale. CGP Grey summarises it well: [VIDEO] I'm trying hard to avoid a political argument. :) > spending does localise in high population areas, no? Well it does, but thanks to the ever increasing centralisation of funding - started in 1974 I think, but especially since replacement of rates with council tax, even high population areas can't compete. The funding Leeds or Manchester gets for infrastructure, services is declining compared to the SE. Even though both are booming, they are permitted to do less per capita. We've ended up ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31145414,"author":"dmitriid","month":"2022-04","story_title":"UK-Morocco 10GW Renewable Electricity Interconnector Planned","text":"> creepy undemocratic bureaucracy of the EU > need for control and action on a local level Ah you mean that local control and democracy when the party with 13% of the votes gets 0.2% seats in the parliament\", right? [1] [1] Great CGP Grey video on the 2015 General Election in the UK: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rAl-9HwD858":[{"hn_comment_id":23442572,"author":"harikb","month":"2020-06","story_title":"There\u2019s plenty of room at the Top: computer performance after Moore\u2019s law","text":"Anecdotal - One of favorite YouTube live-streaming personalities, Jon Gjengset[1] is a Ph.D student at MIT CSAIL. His talks are very detailed[4] and captivating[3] [1] [LINK] Talks [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] Rust Details(my favorites) [4] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24506874,"author":"ashish01","month":"2020-09","story_title":"My Favorite Rust Function Signature","text":"I also used to feel the same way. But listening to [0]Crust of Rust: Lifetime Annotations by Jon Gjengset helped me understand its need. [0] [VIDEO] really helped me understand it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32928377,"author":"tialaramex","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Next steps for Rust in the kernel","text":"So, with \"good working knowledge\" of C++ and Swift, you probably aren't going to have too much trouble with the basics, if anything you might worry that there's some subtlety which you're missing when actually nope, whatever just seemed easy maybe actually was that easy. [ For example move really is as simple as Rust makes it look, it is a headache in C++ because they added it to a finished working language ] Several people suggested books/ web pages let me suggest some videos: Jon Gjengset's \"Crust of Rust\" Youtube videos are good once you reach the point where you can write more than \"Hello, world!\" with some confidence but certain specific things aren't clicking. [VIDEO] For example, Jon does a whole video on lifetime annotations, which are something you won't see in most popular languages, but also one on Rust's iterators, which are a familiar concept from both C++ and Swift but don't work quite like either (they're very different from C++ iterators, your Swift experience will help more). I recommend watching specifically a handful on topics you don't feel you understood well, although you could watch all of them especially if you just enjoy Jon's style and have the free time. They're not fast paced, if you wanted \"Rust in 60 minutes\" this is not that, but each one is actually writing carefully chosen code that runs and talking through what's going on, not just clicking through slides.","stance":"rec"}],"rC4FCS-oMpg":[{"hn_comment_id":37037807,"author":"rapnie","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Snappy UIs with WebAssembly and Web Workers","text":"> if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly. Get prepared to be blown away by Makepad [0]. I have no affiliation with them, but just watched their most recent conference presentation [1]. The slides were made with Makepad itself and included, embedded, a full-blown IDE, a synthesizer app, a Mandelbrot to zoom in endlessly, and more. All running at 120fps. The presentation is for the most part live-coding with this setup. What they want to do is bring coders and designers closer together, and while some code is in Rust they developed a DSL for the GUI parts that is close to how Figma works. These GUI's can run anywhere. And I couldn't help thinking \"Why would people have complicated stacks to create Web 2.0 apps for the Google Web, when they have this?\", in other words an opportunity to break out of the browser straitjacket. Btw. WebAssembly/WebGL isn't the only way in which Makepad is available. And while running well in the browser for a time, there were issues to be solved here (addressed in the presentation). And tbh this isn't a real answer to your assertion. Greg Johnston, creator of Leptos, has made a video with performance comparisons [2]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36582537,"author":"rvdca","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Makepad- Synthesizer Written in Rust","text":"For anyone interested, the main author (if I understood properly) did a presentation at RustNL on the UI aspect that was quite impressive performance wise : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rCMh7srOqvw":[{"hn_comment_id":22885570,"author":"gtpedrosa","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources to grok Emacs and use it well?","text":"I have started using emacs in 2016 because of org-mode. It was powerful enough to make me use emacs on a daily basis since them. However, I have been using RStudio/Sublime as IDE/editor, not emacs. Curiously last weekend I have found a video about org-roam and the presenter mentioned he was using Doom emacs. I was curious enough to try it. It uses vim key bindings by default. To get started I highly recommend this series by Zaiste [0], he explains how to set up the environment and digs into org-mode which were my main concerns. I found the sections on projectile, magit, dired and avy very helpful. Now I am tempted to give it a try in one of my projects. The downfall so far is I didnt find an in depth explanation on how to grok it with python. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19279462,"author":"zaiste","month":"2019-03","story_title":"A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust","text":"There is also Doom Emacs [1] which provides Vim experience out-of-the-box. It also comes with a fantastic theme. I've been using Vi/Vim for more than two decades now. Doom made me feel at home. I used to envy Emacs all these nice features such as Org Mode, Magit and even the ability to use Lisp to configure your environment. Now it's the best of both worlds. I just wish Emacs' onboarding process / cohesiveness was as good as in VS Code. It would be a dream come true. ;) PS. I've recorded a short Doom screencast for newcomers [2] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23210040,"author":"chairfield","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Making Emacs Popular Again","text":"I think there's a lot to learn from starting from scratch, and it's something I hope to do too. Gladly! I'll keep the list to what I've studied so far. Here goes: - If you ever want to explore, say, Doom (Spacemacs is likely too bloated for someone who gravitates to a vanilla config), chemacs[1] is a nifty, simple profile switcher - I think there's a lot of value in studying what they've done with their mnemonic keybinding systems (I love being able to narrow to an org-mode subtree and widen again with =, n= and =, N=, respectively, as but one of many examples) - Sasha Chua is a good source, as she's very knowledgeable and put out a drawn 1-pager[2] on starting Emacs - it's geared towards standard Emacs keybindings - Personally, I'm a huge fan of Evil-mode for Vim keybindings, as they're powerful and portable and I had basic familiarity with Vim before picking up Emacs - I haven't found a rough edge in Evil-mode yet - it seems very refined - Dired is worth getting a handle on early since any improvement in how you can navigate Emacs translates - Magit is pure magic, and I now have my full ~/org under version control with what feels like near-0 overhead - Seorenn makes mostly Spacemacs videos[3] and Zaiste Programming makes Doom videos[4], but I find them useful regardless of my config - you may just want to skip to the videos on packages that interest you - If you haven't yet, choosing either Helm or Ivy is huge - Personally, I'm happy with helm in Spacemacs and I was happy w","stance":"rec"}],"rCfPQLVzus4":[{"hn_comment_id":31450268,"author":"nemothekid","month":"2022-05","story_title":"PBS SpaceTime","text":"Science Asylum is great, but I dislike the 90s educational show presentation format. An absolute gem I've stumbled across is ScienceClic: [LINK] They have amazing presentations on Relativity, my favorite being: \"A new way to visualize General Relativity\" - [LINK] \"Hawking Radiation\" - [LINK] Another, while heavier and less accessible channel is Physics Explained: [LINK] These are closer like lectures, but I enjoy them because they go into the histories of some of these experiments; and what the prevailing wisdom was around the time the experiments were performed: \"What is the Ultraviolet Catastrophe?\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32832679,"author":"sbuttgereit","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Death by hockey sticks","text":"Kinda funny. Just before seeing this article I had just finished watching a wonderful video on the \"Ultraviolet Catastrophe\" ( [VIDEO] ) which isn't exactly the same as what's being talked about here... but in the same class of problem if you make that class big enough :-). When looking at these sorts of things, surely such \"hockey sticks\" are often times just not considering the limiting factors? I'm no mathematician (by any approximation) but it seems like more often than not finding such a result should point to some incompleteness or some closer look being required to get the full picture. (P.S. that video was very math heavy and no, I didn't understand most of the math beyond hand-wavy terms... still glad they went into the detail.)","stance":"rec"}],"rDPj5zI66LA":[{"hn_comment_id":14396947,"author":"pault","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Fermi's Paradox [audio]","text":"I really enjoy Isaac Arthur's videos on the subject (he has a playlist with several hours of content exploring different possible solutions). The rest of his channel is great too; he posts a new 30-60 minute video every Thursday. [VIDEO] Edit: The entire playlist: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26505637,"author":"mchusma","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Grabby Aliens","text":"If interested in this kind of thing, I always recommend Issac Arthur. He describes the Fermi Paradox and related concepts 100x better than anyone else. Some relevant ones: The Fermi Paradox Compendium [VIDEO] Fermi Paradox: The Dyson Dilemma v2.0 [LINK] I believe he would say that there is no really good explanation to why we don't see other intelligent civilizations except that we are effectively the first (at least in our galaxy), and intelligent space-faring life is exceedingly rare. This is a similar conclusion to Robin Hanson here, but I think I think Issac Arthur does a better job of deeply explaining it. I think both would agree though.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19339255,"author":"cletus","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox","text":"tl;dr it shouldn't take as long as previously thought to colonize the galaxy based on a simulation. That's largely an irrelevant finding that adds nothing to the Fermi Paradox because the time it would take to colonize the galaxy is so small in cosmological terms that shortening it is irrelevant. What's more the authors decided to modeled the suitability of star systems impeding colonization when this seems like it would be largely irrelevant because starfaring civilizations seem highly unlikely to be planet-bound as this is a pretty inefficient use of mass. The Dyson Sphere (Swarm) seems much more likely at which point the only thing of value is the star. The planets are just piles of raw materials ultimately. Obligatory plug for Isaac Arthur who has a series of videos on the Fermi Paradox. Here's an early one [1]. There are 10-20 others that go into particular aspects. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rE3j_RHkqJc":[{"hn_comment_id":17075368,"author":"stcredzero","month":"2018-05","story_title":"How Social Media Exploits Our Moral Emotions","text":"Great TED talk on the original twitter kerfuffle referenced in the article: [LINK] CGP Grey's take on how outrage is used to exploit us through social media: (Yes, I link this often, because the message is valuable.) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9980998,"author":"elisee","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Your Head as a Battleground, Dueling Memes","text":"Related, though less about brands, I really liked \"This Video Will Make You Angry\" by CGP Grey. [VIDEO] - Thoughts/memes as germs trying to reproduce and spread, battling for attention and thriving when people endlessly argue as part of an us/them dynamic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13108178,"author":"sosuke","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Dear JavaScript","text":"I looked back at your story a couple of times but couldn't figure out how the outraged attacks are being rewarded. I do feel like you might be on to something in how critical comments are often the most discussed. Think about how the single like \"thank you\" or \"thanks for that\" comments are hidden as being empty of thought. I don't have any solutions but have you seen this CGP Grey video called \"This video will make you angry\" [VIDEO] which says that outraged ideas are the quickest to spread.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17789489,"author":"dwaltrip","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Mastodon Is Better Than Twitter: Elevator Pitch","text":"CGPGrey has a great description of this problem with his video \"This video will make you angry\": [VIDEO] The gist is that pithy, low-effort strawmans of an opposing tribe are highly attractive and contagious memes. I don't think it has anything specific to do with Twitter. You see similar issues everywhere: Facebook, Reddit, and of course meatspace. It's a human problem. Twitter and the short character-limit may magnify it a bit, I'll admit that. But the actual problem can't be solved on Twitter or Mastodon. Each individual needs to be aware of this human problem and to constantly make an effort to notice and counteract it in their own brain (which is very difficult and error prone). Perhaps if enough people start doing that more, then cultural change will take place. I don't know.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19417009,"author":"ipython","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos","text":"Oh I think it\u2019s more about what\u2019s being said than who is listening to who. For better or worse, human discourse is optimized for face to face interaction. It seems that widespread, anonymous speech turns even the most mild mannered individual into a raging maniac. On a similar note I recently watched this video: [VIDEO] and completely agree with its premise.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32536137,"author":"dllthomas","month":"2022-08","story_title":"After 50 years, Michael Heizer is finally ready to unveil City, his life's work","text":"I don't like the turn this thread took, but weighing in here narrowly with something hopefully interesting... The memes themselves needn't be \"adversaries\" for it to be to the benefit of one of them to inspire rage against the other. \"X makes people angry at people holding Y\" can help X spread because people like talking about things they're mad about, and the presence of Y actually makes that more effective; the memes themselves are, to a degree, symbiotic within the broader society even as they maybe do bad things to the people in that society. For one particular perspective on this, I enjoyed [VIDEO] - relevant stuff starts around 3 minutes in.","stance":"rec"}],"rEf35NtlBLg":[{"hn_comment_id":18081430,"author":"joezydeco","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Abstract of the NTSB Report on Air Canada flight 759's taxiway overflight at SFO [pdf]","text":"PilotsEyeTV is a really really neat thing. They sell entire box sets of whole flights. It's pretty cool that the European airlines allow this amount of camera work in the cockpit: [LINK] If you really want to see something captivating, watch this clip of a Swiss A340 crew handling an overheating engine in-flight. It's incredibly well done. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8738511,"author":"joezydeco","month":"2014-12","story_title":"The pilots of Instagram: violating rules of the air","text":"There's a company called PilotsEYE.tv that sells DVDs of exactly this. It seems to be mostly European airlines participating, but they have some serious aircraft filmed in operation. They load the cockpit up with GoPros. Not sure but there might also be someone in the jump seat catching snapshots of the console displays as well. This one of a Lufthansa A380's final approach and landing from FRA to SFO is a really nice one: [LINK] This one of a Swiss Air crew handling an A340 engine problem in-flight is a great watch as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16875285,"author":"jballanc","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Southwest 1380: think about the flight attendants","text":"Here's an amazing video of what happens in the cockpit during an engine failure in a commercial airliner: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rFejpH_tAHM":[{"hn_comment_id":10949569,"author":"musha68k","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Best (Tech) talks from 2015","text":"I hadn't been particularly enthusiastic about Go but in the end Rob Pike won me over - \"Simplicity is Complicated\": [VIDEO] A powerful talk on Silicon Valley history by Kelsey Gilmore-Innis - \"What Tech Workers Can Learn From Harry Bridges\": [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12122666,"author":"donatj","month":"2016-07","story_title":"John Carmack on Inlined Code (2014)","text":"It's an active choice of the language to not allow many syntactic sugars that make the code have a much higher learning curve. [VIDEO] is a good overview.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16939743,"author":"paulriddle","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Why is data simpler than syntax?","text":"To me it feels like apples to oranges comparison. I watched this talk on strangeloop a long time ago, and a version of this talk given on RailsConf recently (watched recently, not given). Here's what I see on the page: > Complex constructs: State, Object, Methods, Syntax, Inheritance, Switch/matching, Vars, Imperative loops, Actors, ORM, Conditionals. > Simple constructs: Values, Functions, Namespaces, Data, Polymorphism, Managed refs, Set functions, Queues, Declarative data manipulation, Rules, Consistency. And to dig deeper, it makes sense to search for \"why state is bad\", \"why inheritance is harmful\", \"avoid conditionals\", etc., and read whatever you find interesting. Go has particularly simple syntax. Here's a talk by Rob Pike about simplicity, syntax, and language feature you might find interesting [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18151118,"author":"troytchell","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Iterative Optimization on Hot Paths in Go Apps","text":"The creators of Go are Rob Pike and Google. I think they would know if a different GC were better and use it. I used to sometimes doubt Rob Pike too and think Go had made some mistakes. After using Go and listening to his talks (like [0]) I realized how wrong I was. There's a reason he has helped build two wildly successful programming languages.. How many have you built? Are you smarter than Google? In the end, embracing Rob Pike's brilliant decisions and taste has made my programming life so much simpler and better. I switched to Acme [1], turned off syntax highlighting on Gitub PR reviews with a userscript[2], and my life is infinitely simpler. Rob Pike has been right on so many things and has made Go successful. I'm sure if a generational GC were better for Go, he would have built and used it, so you're obviously wrong. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20468206,"author":"zubspace","month":"2019-07","story_title":"What's Coming in Python 3.8","text":"Recently the Go team decided not to add the try-keyword to the language. I'm not a Go programmer and was a bit stumped by the decision until I saw a talk of Rob Pike regarding the fundamental principle of Go to stick to simplicity first. [1] One of the takeaways is, that most languages and their features converge to a point, where each language contains all the features of the other languages. C++, Java and C# are primary examples. At the same time complexity increases. Go is different, because of the simplicity first rule. It easens the burden on the programmer and on the maintainer. I think python would definitely profit from such a mindset. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22478647,"author":"hartzell","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Simple Systems Have Less Downtime","text":"> Go just hides the complexity from initial inspection. If you (parent, other readers) haven't seen it, Rob Pike's \"Simplicity is complicated\" is a good discussion of just this point. video: [VIDEO] slides: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24298386,"author":"yandrypozo","month":"2020-08","story_title":"New case studies about Google\u2019s use of Go","text":"the key is simplicity, you're complaining about language features that allow you to write \"fun\" code, but remember that we spend around 80% of the time reading or debugging code, the main focus of Go is about writing code that's easy to read which will allow you to scale a project or source code with more people, also remember that easy doesn't mean simple, I think these 2 talks will make you understand my idea a little bit better: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"rFqL9CkNxXw":[{"hn_comment_id":34370113,"author":"mperham","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Halo Drive: Fuel-Free Relativistic Propulsion (2019)","text":"Prof. Kipping is well known for his Cool Worlds youtube channel, which is fantastic. He created a video on his Halo Drive idea: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20072527,"author":"jp555","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Ways to travel at nearly the speed of light","text":"The halo drive concept is interesting. It uses a beam of light to extract gravity energy from a black hole and use to to maintain acceleration of your ship. Almost no fuel needed because its really just a kind of extreme gravity assist that we\u2019ve been doing since what, the 1970s? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28231512,"author":"chii","month":"2021-08","story_title":"A Dyson sphere around a black hole","text":"also, you can use light, instead of matter. Termed the \"halo drive\", it's a very nice theoretical concept: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rG_Eh0J_4_s":[{"hn_comment_id":28341361,"author":"chrispeel","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Japan tests a rotary detonation engine in space, big increase in fuel efficiency","text":"Would an toroidal aerospike work with rotary detonation? :-) What sort of nozzles can one use with an RDE? I see that one can have multiple rotating pulses in an RDE [1]; I guess with some work the engine designer can control the number of pulses, is that right? Are there performance tradeoffs when deciding how many pulses to employ? What are they? If employing multiple pulses, does one want them rotating the same direction, or opposite directions? BTW, Scott Manley has an introductory video about RDEs [2]. [1] 5:50 in [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40945575,"author":"class3shock","month":"2024-07","story_title":"GE Aerospace Successfully Develops and Tests New Hypersonic Dual-Mode Ramjet","text":"Another similar thing from the end of last year: [LINK] They really seem to love to talk about how fast they move except wait: [LINK] Per the above in 2019 they had been developing RDE technology for 5 years. Now developing the tech is different then building a prototype but it's good to take these timetable numbers with a large dose of salt. It is interesting to see RDE's getting alot of headlines recently. Really cool tech that works off of a principle known for a long time but only just recently hitting an inflection point in terms of development. Cool video from Scott Manly talking about RDE's: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rGgG-0lOJjk":[{"hn_comment_id":18237489,"author":"fredley","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Piano Genie: An Intelligent Musical Interface","text":"This suffers from the limitation of many generative music algorithms/tools in that you're locked into a key (in this case C major - no black notes are played at all), which makes it a cool toy and research project, but of no real use to anyone. Most of what makes good music good (or interesting music interesting if you'd prefer) comes from harmonic interplay and shift. Bach was a master of this. If you listen to the unaccompanied 'cello suites[1] then what makes the music so fascinating is that even though only one note is being played at a time, the harmonic landscape is shifting and changing (often in 'unexpected' ways) all the time. Doing this with algorithms and making it sound good is hard , and nobody's (afaik) done it well yet. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28360249,"author":"olau","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Apple acquires classical music streaming service Primephonic","text":"If you like Baroque keyboard music, try something like Scarlatti. It's a bit difficult finding good interpretations (I have a CD somewhere), but here's an example [LINK] Rameau is a different kind of beast from Bach: [LINK] [LINK] I also really recommend giving Bach's cello suites a try: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rGqiswuJuQI":[{"hn_comment_id":29583757,"author":"animal_spirits","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Pelosi defends stock trading by lawmakers. \u2018We are a free-market economy\u2019","text":"First I wanted to say I'm not trying to guilt trip you or anything, I admit I wrote my response quickly and didn't think it would attract this much attention. So just wanted to let you know I value your views and am not trying to put you down! > That doesn't really answer the question though. If knowingly making society worse were the standard for feeling shame, I think I'd be too depressed and shame-ridden to even get out of bed. I mean, you want to talk about damaging society: every single day I get into my car and burn fossil fuels on my commute to/from work, which is essentially slowly killing the planet. I know it's bad for society, but I do it anyway. Knowingly. On purpose. Can you imagine how psychopathic I am to treat society with such casual disregard? I think you bring up a good idea here. I recently came across a lecture by Jaron Lanier that discusses this kind of thinking and how to reason about it. > I came up with an image to help me think about who the beneficiary is of our activities, whether we're engineers or writers or anything else, and I called this the 'circle of empaty'.... Those who are inside the circle are the beneficiaries of what you do, and anything inside the circle deserves your empathy. Things outside the circle perhaps don't deserve your antagonism but on the other hand they're not the beneficiaries of what you do. So I hope that people believe that all human beings should be inside the circle. That's not always the case; there are racists and","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33227552,"author":"vghfgk1000","month":"2022-10","story_title":"GitHub Copilot, with \u201cpublic code\u201d blocked, emits my copyrighted code","text":"The best proposal I\u2019ve heard to deal with the societal/economic problems this sort of A.I. poses were made by Jaron Lanier: [VIDEO] \u2026I can see why his proposals of providing (micro-)compensation to people whose tremendous efforts end up being mined by these algorithms would not be popular with researchers/companies who stand to benefit vastly (\u2026presumably including the investors who own this site?). The lobbying power/political power/ awareness/financial resources of your average (atomised) artist/programmer/musician etc. is pretty much nil in comparison\u2026 Forgive the clumsy analogy, but I have a feeling the whole thing might end up something like a haulage company that doesn\u2019t want to pay any taxes to help fix the roads though?","stance":"rec"}],"rHIkrotSwcc":[{"hn_comment_id":30644518,"author":"metalrain","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Tech talks don\u2019t have to be boring","text":"Yes, tech talks don't need to be boring and I agree on many points on the post. But also not just 12 slides, more like hundreds of slides. One example I have is Chandler Carruths talk in CppCon 2019 \"There Are No Zero-cost Abstrations\" [VIDEO] Chandler presents his point clearly and goes deep enough into the subject.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22351492,"author":"blux","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Move, simply","text":"The non-destructiveness of move semantics in C++ is very annoying. It causes for example `std::unique_ptr` to not be a zero-cost abstraction in all cases. See [VIDEO] for a nice expose on this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24362266,"author":"mehrdadn","month":"2020-09","story_title":"The problem with C","text":"With the caveat that I am NOT suggesting this justifies choosing C over C++, I just wanted to mention this talk about how \"zero-cost abstraction\" is an idealism, not necessarily a reality: [VIDEO] That said, I tried to reproduce something similar, and it seems the issue only occurs in my example due to external linkage (adding 'static' fixes it)... but I can't claim this will always resolve the issue: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24749000,"author":"tylerhou","month":"2020-10","story_title":"The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% of the Linux Kernel","text":"The other time that you saw it was also probably me. It's from this talk, which is about how a large amount of generated protocol buffer code at Google led to a quadratic increase in compile times: [VIDEO] . TL;DW: The reasoning is because if you use a distributed build system, then your compile time is gated by the file with the longest compile time (tail latency). The more files you have, the greater chance that one of them takes a long time. When you generate source files, you tend to produce more files than if you didn't. Most users don't use a distributed build system to compile the kernel, so on further thought, in that case compile times probably scale closer to linear with the number of translation units. But wasted cycles are still wasted cycles, and regardless of how exactly compile times scale, you should still consider the cost of longer compile times when you duplicate code. With regards to link time optimization: sophisticated analyses take superlinear complexity: [LINK] . Disclaimer: I work at Google.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28124040,"author":"CountHackulus","month":"2021-08","story_title":"When zero cost abstractions aren't zero cost","text":"There are no zero cost abstractions. (According to Chandler Carruth, and he makes a convincing point). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32978509,"author":"kccqzy","month":"2022-09","story_title":"C++20, How Hard Could It Be","text":"> std::unique_ptr<Foo> doesn't have any overhead over Foo* in code where semantics is the same Not true. And you just refuted yourself by being up the ABI question. You should watch Titus Winters' presentation on this topic where he compiles code using unique_ptr and raw pointers, compares the assembler produced, and explains why unique_ptr has non-zero overhead. The overhead is indeed coming from the ABI. Google has been wanting the next C++ to break ABI but they didn't get enough votes in the standard committee. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36570687,"author":"TwentyPosts","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Scope-based resource management for the Linux kernel","text":"When it comes to the overhead issues of unique_ptr, I always think of this video here: [VIDEO] At 26:50 he gets into how this relates to ABI, and how 'fixing' some of this would require a pretty severe ABI change, as well as destructive move semantics, which would require a severe change to how C++ works. I frankly don't understand C++ well enough to fully judge about all of this, but everything he says seems entirely solid, and showcases how unique_ptr is in fact not zero-cost, and can in fact be a significant performance trade-off when you really need that extra bit of performance. > Rust occasionally forces my hand considerably harder (e.g. RC<RefCell<..>> vs std::shared_ptr<>)) in the direction of performance compromise. How so? Is RC<RefCell<T>> more expensive than std::shared_ptr<T>?","stance":"rec"}],"rHKwIYsPXLg":[{"hn_comment_id":10890180,"author":"makebelieve","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Opinion about Searle's Chinese Room?","text":"I was not trying to connect rule 110 to Searle's argument per se, but rather to the critique of Searle's argument. Namely, that criticisms of the lookup table are not criticisms of Searle's argument or the point he makes. a C++ program, brainf k, a CA, a one instruction set computer, or whatever computational process is used doesn't matter. The lookup table is just one component of the Rooms operation. I agree Searle is talking about a hash table, but he is also talking about the rules to interface an input value to a set of possible output values via some mechanical process, and the man in the room acts as a kind of stack machine. You are right, Searle isn't making an argument about the translation of sentences. (translating them to what?) He is making an argument about how the mechanism of computation cannot capture semantic content. He explains this in the google video very well: [VIDEO] And all of the... let's call them \"structural\" critiques are moot. Searle's point is that computer systems cannot understand semantic content because they are syntactic processing machines. And he shows this with his argument. The opposite view is that computers can understand semantic content. (so there is understanding and there is meaning understood by the computer) and the reason Searle doesn't believe computers can do this is because his argument is flawed. Which leaves us with a small set of options: 1) That the structure Searle proposes can in fact understand semantic content and Se","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13787768,"author":"3498rtigcufk","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Has philosophy ever clarified mathematics?","text":"Philosophy is not some sort of church where everyone praise some emotionally agreed upon idea... You seems to be turning this into some sort of us vs. them game based on your faulty projections, so I hope to stop here. (Btw, If you are getting your ideas about philosophy from popular youtube channels like [LINK] or [LINK] , maybe I can understand why you have such misunderstandings) ----------- If you happen to be interested anytime, you can start with some very introductory resources I bothered to look up for you (most are video, they are easy to consume): + Donald Hoffman - computational theory of mind, someone closer to HN's demographic ( [LINK] ) + John Searl is good speaker so try his talk ( [VIDEO] ) + Some thought experiments (remember that thought experiments are not highlighters of issue, not complete arguments) [LINK] + If you want to know what a complete technical work looks like, here's one I've been reading: [LINK] + Not agreed upon but a fun one to not include - about: what is philosophy: [LINK] + Science vs philosophy sort of video, slow but good discussion in there: [LINK] + [LINK] In the unlikely case that you become very interested, you can look up \"Introduction to philosophy of mind syllabus\" and go through the materials and/or books of your choice on the subject. ----------- > What is the philosophical method for interrogation an empirical phenomenon That would go into philosophy of science, which I have absolutely no familiarity with. I'm guessing, to a p","stance":"rec"}],"rHP-OPXK2ig":[{"hn_comment_id":16798161,"author":"tzakrajs","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Weirdstuff Warehouse is closed","text":"Your last sentence reminds me of this recent post [VIDEO] and it gives such a cool sense of Shenzhen as a place to make and modify things.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26715374,"author":"GeekyBear","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Chinese engineers cracked Apple's M1 chip and successfully upgrade RAM and SSD","text":"There's a video of a western guy living in China learning to desolder Flash memory chips from an iPhone and then solder higher capacity chips in their place from back in 2018. [VIDEO] Being in Shenzhen China, he was able to buy the needed tools and many broken boards to practice on, and eventually managed to do it on a live board himself.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29371633,"author":"G3rn0ti","month":"2021-11","story_title":"How I Made My Own iPhone [video]","text":"Another cool episode is where he upgrades a 16GB iPhone to 128GB by soldering a larger flash chip onto the board: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rHdS_4GsKmg":[{"hn_comment_id":12429333,"author":"MichaelMoser123","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Tesla envy grips Germany\u2019s giants","text":"Clayton Christensen argues here [1] that Tesla is going to have a problem with BMW etc. - he says that it has been easier in the past to disrupt existing markets from the low end and with low margin products; the field of high margin cars has a lot of sophisticated players that might give Tesla considerable trouble in the long run - on the high end. Fascinating and very enjoyable talk: [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20977353,"author":"guiambros","month":"2019-09","story_title":"How to be concise on multifaceted, complex topics like \u201cexperience\u201d or \u201cculture\u201d","text":"Strongly suggest to read about \"Jobs to be done\" framework, by Clayton Christensen (video [1]; starts @ 12:00). I bet you the job to be done in your case is not \" VR simulations for first respondents \", but something much more powerful, like giving first respondents the hands-on practice they need to save lives. The VR part is a characteristic of your product, but not what your customers are trying to solve for. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rI8tNMsozo0":[{"hn_comment_id":35757642,"author":"stcg","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The Egison Programming Language","text":"Related: the great and timeless talk called \"Simplicity Matters\" by Rich Hickey - [VIDEO] (By the way, any talk by Rich Hickey is worth watching)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8857448,"author":"sivers","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Is it really 'Complex'? Or did we just make it 'Complicated'? [video]","text":"Very interesting related talk about complecting things - \"Simple Made Easy\" - by Rich Hickey, inventor of Clojure: [LINK] If you're a Ruby person, maybe watch this version instead, since it's almost the same talk but for a Rails Conference, with a few references: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13790940,"author":"NegatioN","month":"2017-03","story_title":"How we secretly introduced Haskell and got away with it","text":"Prodcedural code can also be well compartmentalized and tested. I was also until recently quite convinced OOP was the only way to go, but I'm seeing signs everywhere that a lot of the design-problems I've met over the past few years are at least magnified by OOP. The abstraction promised by OOP is a good thing, however very few people are able to consistently make good, reusable and maintained abstractions. To the point where it becomes a weakness rather than a strength. I don't want a billion wrapper-objects that obfuscate my code, and makes the surface area of it bigger than it has to be. Often I struggle understanding code more because of how it was separated, than because of the complexity of what it actually does. I liked Rich Hickeys talk \"Simple made Easy\" [1] and \"Brian Will: Why OOP is Bad\" [2] [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15084205,"author":"cstrahan","month":"2017-08","story_title":"D as a Better C","text":"I'll let the parent answer you (though I have similar sentiments as someone with language implementation experience, and FWIW, I have professional experience with Go, Ruby, JavaScript, Clojure, C#, and I've used Haskell, F#, and much more in my free time). I will, however, point out that you're likely using a different definition of simple (\"easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty. \") than is often used in technical circles (\"composed of a single element; not compound\"). Simplicity and ease are distinct, and one does not necessarily imply the other; it's not hard to find convoluted designs that feel easy due to familiarity, while a much smaller, consistent design will feel difficult because the concepts (while fewer in number) are foreign. Rich Hickey (creator of Clojure) gave a great talk on easy vs simple: [VIDEO] Here's something familiar to most professional web developers: JavaScript. But it's also complicated: [LINK] Here's the spec: [LINK] And here's something unfamiliar and often considered difficult: lambda calculus. And yet it's very simple. Here's the entire definition of lambda expressions (lifted from Wikipedia): --- Lambda expressions are composed of: * variables v1, v2, ..., vn, ... * the abstraction symbols lambda '\u03bb' and dot '.' * parentheses ( ) The set of lambda expressions, \u039b, can be defined inductively: 1. If x is a variable, then x \u2208 \u039b 2. If x is a variable and M \u2208 \u039b, then (\u03bbx.M) \u2208 \u039b 3. If M, N \u2208 \u039b, then (M N) \u2208 \u039b Instances of rule 2 are know","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15866907,"author":"hbt","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Simplistic programming is underrated","text":"The blog post barely gets into the idea of what simplicity means in programming. If you have any interest in the topic, I recommend Rich Hickey talk \"Simplicity matters\" [VIDEO] My personal favorite is: Living with complexity 2010 by Don Norman (Author of Design of everyday things) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16840291,"author":"geksilla","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Rich Hickey - \"simple made easy\" [VIDEO] Rob Pike - \"concurrency is not parallelism\" [LINK] Uncle Bob Martin - \"future of programming\" [LINK] Martin Kleppmann - \"transactions: myths, surprises and opportunities\" [LINK] Simon Brown - \"software architecture vs code\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20773921,"author":"cutler","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Why Clojure?","text":"Clojure is by far the best programming language I've ever used. Rich Hickey's Sermons On The Mount changed the game of programming once and for all. With Clojure you could finally have your Lisp cake and eat it. Witness the sheer chutzpah of the guy when he basically told Ruby devs they were doing it wrong at Rails Conf in 2012 ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22068475,"author":"tosh","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The Roots of Lisp (2001)","text":"another angle: while Clojure is a Lisp with its own distinct flavor it gives you \u2026 * a large community of practitioners and professionals (great for asking questions, finding collaborators, \u2026) * easy access to libraries in the js/jvm/.net ecosystems * a style that relies more on data and transformations of data (illuminating simplicity) in any case: it is worth digging deeper, one thing that kept me away was not knowing where to start (analysis paralysis). in hindsight picking any Lisp would have been great (instead of postponing). Find a thread and start pulling :) Rich Hickey\u2019s talks were a great entry point for me [LINK] e.g. [VIDEO] (the \u201cSimplicity Matters\u201d keynote at Rails Conf 2012) edit: Land of Lisp is a great book as well","stance":"rec"}],"rJjKP8vYjpQ":[{"hn_comment_id":18610519,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What to do after $8M (all cash, post tax) exit?","text":"First of all, congrats. You are in a great situation, now you just have to manage it to allow you to live your life the way you want from here on out. The very first thing I'd do is watch this video (it's a famous scene from the movie The Gambler ). [VIDEO] The basic idea is to establish your \"position of 'Fuck You'\". You basically have that already... house paid for, cars paid for, etc. Put enough of your money aside in conservative, safe, long-term investments that you'll never be hurting for money. Include things like your kids college tuition or whatever things are important to you. Once you have that, even if you blow the rest of the money on toys, sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, whatever, you always have the ability to say \"fuck you\" to anybody who hassles you. Beyond that, you can decide if you want to try and grow your wealth by investing and actively managing your money. Maybe you would want to do some angel investing, who knows? Or maybe you want to engage in some philanthropy. You probably don't have enough money to get a hospital named after you, but you could buy uniforms for the local high-school band group, or donate to a local volunteer fire department, or any number of things. Should you continue to work? It's up to you... my guess is that if you flat-out retire at your age you'll find yourself bored pretty quickly, but it depends on what kinds of things you choose to engage in. Maybe there are some hobbies that have been latent in the back of your mind, that you w","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29606714,"author":"dharmab","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?","text":"Lots of great answers in this thread about finding meaning after your base needs are taken care of. I'd like also include this clip about setting up a Position of Fuck You (a stable base from which you can launch riskier endeavours) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34532478,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Good resources to become financially literate","text":"You might accuse me of being glib in saying this, but this scene from the movie The Gambler[1] contains a lot of wisdom. The movie as a whole is moderately OK, but this scene really distills a lot of good stuff into a few minutes. [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35689599,"author":"mindcrime","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Red Hat cutting hundreds of jobs, CEO says in letter to employees","text":"Anyone have tips to avoid this? Avoid? No. It probably can't be avoided in the long-run. But you can mitigate the effects. A great take on this can be mined from this little rant by John Goodman's character in The Gambler : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rNu8XDBSn10":[{"hn_comment_id":9528882,"author":"Twirrim","month":"2015-05","story_title":"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish","text":"Ireland is not part of the UK, but it is part of Britain. Northern Ireland is part of the UK, but that's a completely different country from Ireland. Being UK born or based gives you no privileges over the .ie domain at all. The best thing to do is to watch this great, quick and witty primer on the whole thing Britain/UK/England thing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15202815,"author":"bmelton","month":"2017-09","story_title":"The Equifax breach may be the worst leak of personal info ever","text":"Others have already chimed in here, but I honestly can't remember a CGP Grey video that I wasn't thoroughly entertained by, even when I already knew all of the facts presented. For amusement's sake, I really enjoy his videos on geography, such as (his first video ever) this one on the UK (which I guess might need updating soon?): [VIDEO] or this one on Scotland: [LINK] or my favorite geographical video, on the Vatican: [LINK] That said, they're all pretty great, so I'd just start with this list of all his videos in ascending order: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15387483,"author":"Mz","month":"2017-10","story_title":"How supermarkets choose where to open and close","text":"[VIDEO] 5 mins of witty, brilliant lowdown on The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19804103,"author":"SapporoChris","month":"2019-05","story_title":"China\u2019s vast fleet is tipping the balance in the Pacific","text":"Thank you so much for the introduction to CGP Grey. Watching 'The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained' [VIDEO] The line, \"While you can call them all British it's not recommended as the four countries generally do not like each other.\" hooked me, I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. Rest of my day is gone watching these videos, I'm down the rabbit hole.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12127353,"author":"lathiat","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Britain explained in 105 seconds","text":"Relatedly unrelated.. if you want to understand the relationship between Great Britain, the UK, Scotland, England, etc.. then this CGP Grey video helps a lot: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13289011,"author":"anexprogrammer","month":"2016-12","story_title":"EveryPolitician: Open dataset on politicians","text":"> having the UK, Wales and Scotland all on the list is somewhat confusing Why? UK is comprised of countries with their own legislatures (with devolved and varying powers). England doesn't. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have parliaments, and their own politicians so need an entry. They all elect MPs to the Westminster UK parliament as well. Just as all these areas elect EU MEPs too. CGP Grey explains UK: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21211792,"author":"lathiat","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The Isle of Man is not in the UK","text":"CGP Grey has a great video: \"The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England Explained\" which covers a lot of this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38035590,"author":"lathiat","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Yugoslavia's Digital Twin: when a country's internet domain outlives the nation","text":"\"The Difference between the UK, Great Britain & England Explained\" by CGP Grey: [VIDEO] A good watch to understand the above","stance":"rec"}],"rOwMW6agpTI":[{"hn_comment_id":2238740,"author":"spudlyo","month":"2011-02","story_title":"Black ops: how HBGary wrote backdoors for the government","text":"LNK files can point to DLLs that get loaded by Explorer when it draws the icon for the link target. I only know this because I watched an excellent video explaining the 0-day vulnerabilities that stuxnet used by Microsoft leet hax0r Bruce Dang. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2591163,"author":"JonnieCache","month":"2011-05","story_title":"Did the US write Stuxnet? Deputy Defense Secretary won't deny it","text":"Also, check out this excellent 27C3 presentation from Bruce Dang, a microsoft malware analyst, where he cracks numerous gags about mossad. [VIDEO] It's well worth watching anyway, lots of good info on the various exploits used by stuxnet, down to the opcode level. He's a pretty funny guy as well.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5290889,"author":"tbrock","month":"2013-02","story_title":"Stuxnet Missing Link Found, Resolves Some Mysteries Around the Cyberweapon","text":"If anyone hasn't seen this video from the Microsoft team analyzing how this went down, I highly suggest watching. I was on the edge of my seat! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27443182,"author":"nodesocket","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Microsoft Patches Six Zero-Day Security Holes","text":"Are these on the same level as Stuxnet? For an amazing technical deep dive into each 0-day Stuxnet vulnerability watch this talk with Bruce Dang from Microsoft[1]. I really enjoy his natural speaking style (it's like talking about Stuxnet over beers with him). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2213224,"author":"dmix","month":"2011-02","story_title":"Stuxnet is now on GitHub","text":"For those curious, a Microsoft employee broke down each of the exploits that Stuxnet used at a conference recently: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2677618,"author":"phlux","month":"2011-06","story_title":"Stuxnet Virus Weapon Now Being Sold On The Black Market","text":"Watch these in this order: [LINK] - brief overview great animation [LINK] - ted talk on stux [VIDEO] detailed analysis of stuxnet the last one is long and Bruce appears to be an arrogant prick, but it is clear - cyber war has been here for a while.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2691438,"author":"phlux","month":"2011-06","story_title":"LulzSec releases trove of AZ law enforcement documents","text":"PSY-OP MOTHERFUCKER, CAN YOU HACK IT?! This is NOT script kiddies going at it, this is bio-stux.... See the following: Watch these in this order: [LINK] - brief overview great animation [LINK] - ted talk on stux [VIDEO] . detailed analysis of stuxnet the last one is long and Bruce appears to be an arrogant prick, but it is clear - cyber war has been here for a while. --- As I have mentioned, cyber war is here - and the legislation is lacking in its awareness - but becuase we have incompetant douches in charge of tech legislation, we will have physical war used as a metaphor to cyber warfare and thus have draconian influences from physical imprisonment being applied to digital situations. Utterly broken.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11112338,"author":"samstave","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Unilateral Israeli changes to Stuxnet caused its exposure, angering US","text":"Stuxnet was such an amazing event. The speculation at first, the quasi confirmation a little later based on certain items in the code. The dissection of it and the tech talks by Microsoft and others on its design and build... And then that it had a successor - and now it comes out that Israel and US squabbling over what team did what which allowed it to be exposed. It is such an amazing cornerstone in the cyberpunk reality of where the world is heading. If you haven't watched the tech talks on stuxnet and duqu, please do - super interesting. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38961506,"author":"akira2501","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Engineer Used Water Pump to Get $1B Stuxnet Malware into Iranian Nuclear Plant","text":"Does anyone else remember the 27C3 presentation on this? My take away was that Stuxnet was _largely_ enabled by 0day vulnerabilities in Microsoft's products. The especially damning one was the print spooler script running vulnerability. Anyways, from this perspective, even back then, the analysis was pretty thorough: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rOzrJjdZDRQ":[{"hn_comment_id":8589609,"author":"alexggordon","month":"2014-11","story_title":"The Lives of Elevators (2008)","text":"This reminds me of an excellent talk on elevator hacking [0] given by Deviant Ollam and Howard Payne at [HOPE X] a little while ago. It changed my entire view of elevators and if you haven't seen it, I would highly recommend you watch. it [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10138986,"author":"nyolfen","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Remembering When Driverless Elevators Drew Skepticism","text":"this reminds me of a truly excellent HOPE X presentation about elevator hacking[0]. one of the most entertaining con panels i've seen, and interesting information on an esoteric topic. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12232941,"author":"unixhero","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Demystifying the Secure Enclave Processor [pdf]","text":"Does anyone know where the Blackhat 2016 videos will be posted? I've always found them incredibly educational. Okay I'll leave something behind as well. This is my favorite sec-conference video of all time: [HOPE X] Elevator Hacking: From the Pit to the Penthouse [VIDEO] Closely followed by DEF CON 18 - Joseph McCray - You Spent All That Money and You Still Got Owned... [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18218258,"author":"unixhero","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Elevator Hacking: From The Pit To The Penthouse by Deviant Ollam and Howard Payne [VIDEO] They've done several iterations of this, including a censored/shorter version for DEFCON 22. This version is the best, with all details, no secrets withheld. I find the content rather stunning, and I've even watched it several times.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34303959,"author":"danpalmer","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The secret undo codes for elevator floor buttons","text":"\u201cFrom the Pit to the Penthouse\u201d gives a lot of insight. All from a hacker perspective, but fascinating and fun. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rQKis2Cfpeo":[{"hn_comment_id":18613731,"author":"ChrisCinelli","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Guide to scaling engineering organizations","text":"Completely in agreement. Hire a bad leader when the company is growing and you risk one year later to have the whole company infested by all sort of people that you would not like to have around (managers included). Some companies completely screw up themselves because of this. Startups usually do not think about this early enough and when the founders realize what is going on is too late and the company culture is screwed. My favorite Steve Job's video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15885832,"author":"mentos","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Why don\u2019t software development methodologies work? (2014)","text":"Steve Job's view on management shares similarities to what you have described and I think from my experience I agree with this outlook [VIDEO] \"The greatest people are self managing, they don't need to be managed. Once they know what to do they will figure out how to do it. What they need is a common vision, and that's what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that, so the people around you can understand it, getting a consensus on a common vision.\" \"We were in stage where we went out and thought, Oh! We are going to be a big company, so let's hire professional management. We went and hired a bunch of professional management but it didn't work out all well. Most of them were bozos, they knew how to manage but they didn't how to do anything!\" \"If you are a great person, why would you want to work with someone you can't learn anything from? You know what's interesting? You know who the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is gonna do a job as good as them\"","stance":"rec"}],"rQhzEnWCgHA":[{"hn_comment_id":32409930,"author":"audunw","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Electric Vehicles Are Going to Suck; Here's Why [video]","text":"I didn't watch the whole thing, but did she mention electric bikes? IMO, Electric cars, or cars in general, are just fine. We just did a family road-trip around Denmark with our Ioniq 5 and it's absolutely perfect for that. The thing is, we should be renting them when we need them, and use bikes more the rest of the time. Electric bikes are quickly becoming a viable alternative to cars in many bike-friendly cities, and we're seeing an explosion in the choices of electric cargo bikes. Not Just Bikes has an excellent new video on this: [VIDEO] I rode my electric bike to work today in fact. Instead of our EV, ironically. But our family uses only one car at least. We don't necessarily need simpler cars, we need better electric bikes. Or electric motorbikes/scooters. And better public transportation. Something like this would be a nice option for some usecases: [LINK] GetAround is making renting cars more viable too. We do actually have a second car now, but I've been renting the old one out until we're ready to sell it and until we're sure we can handle two kids in kindergarten without it. It's been way more popular than I anticipated.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32457911,"author":"coalteddy","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Electric vehicles are way more energy-efficient than internal combustion","text":"I suggest you watch this video[1] by the awesome channel \"Not Just Bikes\". Bakfiets are a dutch cargo bike you can literally use for 99% of all your errands. People in a city do not need personal cars. And even Cargo bikes are only useful for 10-20% of occasions, depending on if you have big shopping tours or kids. For the 1 or 2 occasions a year where a car is needed, car sharing is the way to go. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35232322,"author":"Rendello","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Cyclists Now Outnumber Motorists in City of London","text":"I had my mind blown about Dutch-style cargo ebikes, bakfietsen . The cool thing is that you can use the bikes to haul cargo, or put three kids in the front in special harnesses when you need to: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rQmqVVmMB3k":[{"hn_comment_id":31142591,"author":"ComradePhil","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Why didn't our ancient ancestors get cavities?","text":"I started on this path when I was trying to nurish myself back to health over a decade ago when I suddenly got fat. I thought science was the way to go... but was robbed of that notion a couple of years into it when I discovered that the path to health was in the opposite direction of what the science tells us. Turns out the food industry fully controls the science of food and nutrition. You can start by reading Unsavory Truth or Food Politics by Marion Nestle for better understanding of why that is the way it is. Having said that, Marion Nestle doesn't really explore one side of it... which is that because of ethical reasons, we'll never have proper human experiments, thus nutrition science will always be limited and incomplete, which leaves a lot of room for manipulation, which the industry is happy to do for profits. This has been covered very well by the YouTube channel What I've Learned: [LINK] The same channel has several other videos on food and nutrition, one of the most important ones imo being the one on seed oils: [VIDEO] Nutrition and Physical Degenaration by Weston A. Price as described in this thread is one of the best works in support of indigenous foods. The Hidden Life of Trees is a great book on plant intelligence. Other than those resources, we have to piece these things together, take long term views... like should we trust a diet that kept a culture of people alive and well for 100s of years over several generations or do we trust studies with couple of d","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29181565,"author":"bavell","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Fatty acid found in palm oil linked to spread of cancer","text":"IIRC, vegetable oils (unsaturated fats) exploded in popularity in the middle of last century when chemical companies figured out how to mass produce them. Prior to that, we got most of our fats from saturated fats. Very interesting video about this and more from What I've Learned: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30456616,"author":"sinyug","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)","text":"> Soybean oil I saw this video about seed oils a few months back.[1] Some of the information there tracked stuff I have been reading for a while. Decided to switch over completely to coconut oil and ghee (clarified butter). A comment on the video that matches my view on the subject: > If you want to be healthy just do the exact opposite of everything we were told about nutrition by mainstream experts for decades [1] The $100 Billion Dollar Ingredient making your Food Toxic ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30469650,"author":"shaicoleman","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Soybean oil affects hypothalamus, causes genetic changes in mice: study (2020)","text":"For me it's enough to look at the process of making vegetable oils (acid wash, oxidation caused by high temperatures, bleaching, deodorization, degumming, etc.) to conclude ultraprocessed oils are not healthy for you. [VIDEO] From personal experience, my health significantly improved after replacing vegetable oils with butter, coconut and olive oil.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30835293,"author":"ComradePhil","month":"2022-03","story_title":"First chicken-free egg white product reaches US markets","text":"These should cover some of it: - Book: Food Politics by Marion Nestle - Book: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price - YouTube Video: The $100 Billion Dollar Ingredient making your Food Toxic: [VIDEO] (28 minutes)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33322156,"author":"OgAstorga","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Only virgin type of olive oil consumption reduces the risk of mortality: study","text":"less[1]. this video[2] is not the best reference but a very good summary on the industrialized oils and they alternatives [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rRbY3TMUcgQ":[{"hn_comment_id":5661893,"author":"lelf","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Erlang's Open Telecom Platform (OTP) Framework [video]","text":"And if you haven't seen it, here is some classic. \u201cErlang: the Movie\u201d: \u2014 [LINK] And sequel \u201cErlang: the Movie II\u201d: \u2014 [VIDEO] Don't think wtf. Just watch.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12629923,"author":"davidw","month":"2016-10","story_title":"The State of JavaScript \u2013 Survey results","text":"I don't care about downvotes, I thought that video was hilarious and enjoy sharing it. He's the same guy behind \"MongoDB is web scale\" and \"Erlang the Movie II\", which I'd also highly recommend: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18656186,"author":"francescoc","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Twenty Years of Open Source Erlang: A Retrospective from the trenches","text":"I use Erlang the Movie and its Sequel [VIDEO] whenever I teach my classes at Oxford Uni. #studentlife :-)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6935946,"author":"qohen","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Erlang: The Movie","text":"And, after you've watched the original, check out \"Erlang The Movie II: The Sequel\", by Garrett Smith (aka gar1t): [VIDEO] (You are likely familiar with one of gar1t's earlier videos, the classic \"Mongo DB is Web Scale\": [LINK] And he's got more on his YouTube channel: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16841644,"author":"paulsutter","month":"2018-04","story_title":"What Erlang Taught Me About Distributed Systems","text":"The sequel is shorter and more fun, \u201call erlang needs is an image upgrade.. we need something fresh, something edgy\u201d [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19710361,"author":"ubercow","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Erlang: The Movie [video]","text":"It's funny you mention that, I came here just to post another wonderful remix, \"Erlang The Movie II: The Sequel\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rRi8LptvFZY":[{"hn_comment_id":32673219,"author":"Stratoscope","month":"2022-09","story_title":"YKK zippers: Why so many designers use them (2012)","text":"That is a very cute page. I like their attitude. And the video at the top of the page is absolutely wonderful. It's the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. Watch it with good headphones or speakers and the sound up. Direct link: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38809093,"author":"compiler-guy","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Don't Say Velcro (2017)","text":"If you've never seen the video ad that went along with this campaign, it's hilarious and worth watching, as is the follow up. I love the good humor about the whole thing. And it has made their campaign stick in ways that other similar campaigns have not. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22764947,"author":"_jal","month":"2020-04","story_title":"'Call of Duty' wins First Amendment victory over use of Humvees","text":"Here is Velcro's lawyers telling you to call those other brands 'hook and loop' in a surprisingly straightforward, honest and amusing way. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rStL7niR7gs":[{"hn_comment_id":13104381,"author":"VladimirGolovin","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Russia\u2019s Creepy, Innovative Internet [video]","text":"Our government has no incentive to retain them. Their main source of money is not small / medium / innovative business taxation - it's oil and other natural resources. And you don't need higher education and talent to extract oil. Actually, you don't need any population at all. As I see it, their real incentive would be to shut down the higher education system, because it a) costs money, b) sends a good part of produced talent to other countries, and c) produces educated citizens which are harder to manipulate. Sadly, I hear quite a few confirmations of this from friends who work in education. BTW, here's a great video, Rules for Rulers, which is basically a video TL;DR of \"The Dictator's Handbook\" that explains incentives of democratic and autocratic rulers: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17622993,"author":"abandonliberty","month":"2018-07","story_title":"A Drop of 4 Degrees Made a Big Difference for a Garment Maker's Bottom Line","text":"Negative? It's how the world works. Those in resource-driven countries enjoy very little comfort, because you don't need very comfortable/educated people to extract resources. Our economies are more based on knowledge, so we get better lives. CGPGrey's rules for rulers is a very good outline of this and other related topics: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18032058,"author":"mtgx","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Former Columnist Jailed for Facebook Criticism of Myanmar\u2019s Aung San Suu Kyi","text":"I feel like this comment thread needs a link to CGP Grey's excellent Rules for Rulers video, too: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21474914,"author":"fredley","month":"2019-11","story_title":"You can fool some of the people, all of the time","text":"An excellent primer on modes of Government, how they arise, and how this perpetuate is this CGP Grey video, Rules for Rulers : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14470090,"author":"nickik","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Venture investors blast US decision to withdraw from Paris Climate Accord","text":"You are correct for the most part, but I think you are drawing the wrong implications. Yes, they are resistant to swings based on mood changes in the population. However, this does not hold for changes of mind or strategy by elected people themselves. They might promise something at some point and then not do it. US history is full of broken promises. A counterpoint is that Trump and Obama are elected directly and specially on foreign relations they have a huge power to do whatever they like. Obama promised some stuff, Trump retracted it. > In contrast, a dictatorship is unreliable, because all decisions are made by one person, whose mood swings can result in lots of unpredictability. That is true in theory but in practice many dictatorships are remarkably stable. A dictator has to please his cronies, he can't do whatever he likes. He can do what he likes as long as it does not touch the interest of the cronies. Check \"Selectorate theory\" in political science. Or this nice little video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18785189,"author":"afarrell","month":"2018-12","story_title":"An Estonian company developing unmanned weaponized ground vehicles","text":"I've read the book The Dictators Handbook (watch the CGP Grey video Rules for Rulers[1] for a good summary) and I can imagine a number of really clear and compelling Job Stories for this technology: * As a ruler facing large-scale protests, I want to clear the crowds of people from the streets without deploying soldiers who might choose to actually side with the protestors. * As a ruler who is afraid of a coup, I want to reduce the personnel-management costs of maintaining my military so that I can reduce the number of officers needed to maintain the same level of force lethality. This will let me purge my officer corps of possibly-disloyal members and lavish rewards on those who remain. * As a ruler from an ethnic/religious minority, I want to restrict membership in the military to that minority without reducing its lethality so that I can prevent members of the majority from having trained members who could seize power or resist marginalization. Technological advances like quinine and the Madsen and Maxim Gun allowed fewer than 1,000 Europeans[2] under Belgian King Leopold to spread the benefits[3] of civilization to The Congo, an area more than 3 times the size of Texas. I am excited to see the world that these new advances will usher in. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] (although yes, also [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23908684,"author":"derefr","month":"2020-07","story_title":"With oil cheap, Arab states cannot balance their books","text":"> It's not strictly a \"wrong leaders\" problem. It's much more systemic than that. Elect a good leader and the oil will provide the impetus to tear that leader down. See also, The Dictator's Handbook , summarized well by CGP Grey's video \"The Rules for Rulers\" ( [VIDEO] ). It's an unstable equilibrium to run a country on a wide power base, if it has centralized resource-extraction economy; as any dictator who just plans on staging a coup to take the oil and then reward their few revolutionaries with it, will be able to win over pretty much anyone from the previous wide-base government, who was previously getting a much-smaller slice of the pie.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26466975,"author":"rrsmtz","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Legislative Performance Futures \u2013 Incentivize Good Laws by Monetizing the Future","text":"You would probably enjoy CGP Grey's video Rules for Rulers, which covers very reasonable arguments for why politicians don't enact \"good\" legislation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27685696,"author":"nindalf","month":"2021-06","story_title":"HK media erase their archives amid rising arrests","text":"Lying? Manipulating? What? Is it wrong for a politician to mirror the opinions of their voters? That\u2019s literally what a representative democracy is supposed to be. Is it wrong for a person to express their heart felt opinion to folks who like and trust them? Isn\u2019t that what all human communication is? Obama did the right thing, in both 2008 and 2012. If he does 2008 differently, he remains a Senator with no national platform. If he does 2012 differently and doesn\u2019t use his national platform to advocate for gay rights, maybe it takes longer for it to reach 80% support in the general population. If you\u2019d like to actually understand politics, I\u2019d suggest reading The Dictators Handbook or watching this video for the tldr- [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33379893,"author":"novok","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The Iran Firewall: A preliminary report","text":"More accurately is the ruling class wants to stay rich, and if they can stay rich without needing an educated and non-poor populace, all the better, because the hungry, disconnected and illiterate do not start effective revolutions. You see this in many resource dictatorships, since you don't need your populace to create your wealth. In dictatorships where they need the populace, then they are in a tough spot, because the only way you get rich is having a developed population productive enough to tax, which you see in Singapore, China, Dubai and Iran somewhat. It is this kind of authoritarian regime that needs the internet, but also wishes they didn't need the internet in the case of Iran and China. CGP gray has a great youtube video summary explaining this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36620364,"author":"ilc","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Stuck as a developer for 15 years. How to become a manager?","text":"Some thoughts for you: Leadership is a taught skill. Start learning. If you want to get promoted, your current company has sent you a strong message... it is up to you to listen to it and understand it. Personally, I've stayed on the technical side of the house, no regrets. As a Principal Software Engineer... you'd have to pay quite a bit for me as a lead. That said, I have led teams, and enjoy it. I recommend the following books to anyone interested in leadership: And if you are a Senior looking to go to Principal, you are. - Getting to Yes. - Difficult Conversations. Now I also recommend: [VIDEO] The last video seems odd... until you realize it is how power works. Think about why your manager has power, etc... Why odd things happen. And that video often explains it. Good luck. Maybe it is time to pump the brakes on the car, or turn. Just some advice.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37983362,"author":"dijit","month":"2023-10","story_title":"EU-funded report calls for wealth of super-rich to be taxed, not income","text":"Governments are designed primarily to serve it's citizens and not the needs of shareholders or profit. They are designed additionally to prevent externalising of costs to some third party. IE; forced servitude or significant harm to the population while chasing profit. Your same statements could be reflected inward of course: British empire, the several thousand peaceful transfers of power that come and go without fanfare and of course very violent revolutions that pass with very significant fanfare and attention. A seated government, especially a democratically elected one should be capable of serving the needs of people, however governments are made of people and the smaller the government is the easier it is to buy it off. - The smaller the government, the easier the corruption. (which is why \"small government\" capitalists always end up embroiled in corruption scandals eventually). A good example of this is denoted \"the keys to power\" in the easy to understand video essay by CGP Grey: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41884981,"author":"motohagiography","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Code that helped end Apartheid","text":"the view of coups as one faction replacing another is quite a rabbit hole, but it's a political analysis that has some experimental and predictive power. there has to be guarantor or benefactor on the other side of it. in this view, leaders are figureheads accountable to the small essential coalition who keeps them there. the idea of secret cabals orchestrating these things is usually backwards, where a revolutionary (or politician) is really just an entrepreneurial dealmaker between elite factions. it's essentially demesquita's \"logic of political survival,\" also distilled into the well made cartoon, \"rules for rulers\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42173004,"author":"0xDEAFBEAD","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis","text":"This article is an interesting case study in the difference between \"monarchy\" and \"dictatorship\". The way I think about it, the differences are as follows: * Under monarchy, one person is chosen to rule \"at random\". Under dictatorship, there is a competition where the most ruthless person gets to rule. * Under monarchy, the people believe the monarch rules by divine right. Under dictatorship, the dictator rules by fear. * Monarchies are more stable, meaning the ruler can plan with a long time horizon. Dictators are more likely to siphon resources while the siphoning is good, since they fear a coup. * Lacking popular legitimacy, a dictator is forced to consider the self-interest and loyalty of their underlings. This leads to extractive and regressive policy. See this excellent video explaining the game theory: [VIDEO] * Under monarchy, criticism is kept in check while maintaining rule of law, via l\u00e8se-majest\u00e9 laws which make it illegal to criticize the monarch. Under dictatorship, criticism is kept in check via repression. That same repression makes the dictator less popular, which triggers more criticism, and thus more repression, in a doom loop. Monarchy is an imperfect system. A lot comes down to the person who is \"randomly\" chosen to rule. But I do wonder if monarchy should be considered an option in countries where democracy has been consistently dysfunctional and the population is poorly educated -- Haiti perhaps? Most successful democracies were monarchies at some poin","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43447184,"author":"leidenfrost","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Global population datasets underrepresent rural population","text":"There's a good video from CGP Grey about this: [VIDEO] Even the most tyrannical, draconian, egotistical ruler has someone to answer to. And the people second and third in power MUST be happy with the regime, or else everything goes bust.","stance":"rec"}],"rTawFwUvnLE":[{"hn_comment_id":15370542,"author":"bra-ket","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony?","text":"Prof. Hinton has an interesting talk about his new 'capsule' model based on psychology of shape perception: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15609898,"author":"dr_zoidberg","month":"2017-11","story_title":"A New Twist on Neural Networks","text":"Hinton explains the concept of capsules in this video: [VIDEO] Which is a lot better than reading someone tell you about this new idea that is called \"capsules\" but doesn't go into detail. The only thing is that, when this presentation was given, it seems they hadn't worked much more than MNIST (so the new thing now would be the toys-recognition net). Better source, with date: [LINK] (December 2014, for the lazy).","stance":"rec"}],"rURRYI66E54":[{"hn_comment_id":32536517,"author":"cercatrova","month":"2022-08","story_title":"A demo of GPT-3's ability to understand long instructions","text":"This video by Computerphile is a great overview of transformers and how we got to this point [0]. Basically the networks we used before, recurrent neural networks, \"forgot\" prior information so they're not good at long tasks. The transformer architecture however does not forget (or at least as easily). [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35980149,"author":"FranklinMaillot","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Can someone ELI5 Transformers and the \u201cAttention is all we need\u201d paper","text":"Those Computerphile videos[0] by Rob Miles helped me understand transformers. He specifically references the \"Attention is all you need\" paper. And for a deeper dive, Andrej Kharpaty has this hands-on video[1] where he builds a transformer from scratch. You can check-out his other videos on NLP as well they are all excellent. [0] [VIDEO] , [LINK] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43012536,"author":"mhast","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world","text":"If you want to get a better understanding of this I recommend playing around in the \"chat playgrounds\" on some of the engines. The Google one allows for some free use before you have to pay for tokens. (Usually you can buy $5 worth of tokens as a minimum and that will give you more than you can use up with manual requests.) [LINK] This UI allows you to alter the system prompt (which is usually hidden from the user on eg ChatGPT) and change to different models and change parameters. And then you give it the chat input similar as any other site. You can also install a program like \"LM Studio\" and that will allow you to download models (through the UI) and run locally on your own machine. This gives you a similar interface to what you see in the Google AI Studio but you run it locally. And with downloaded models. (The model you download is the actual LLM which is basically very large amount of parameters you combine with the input tokens to get the next token the system outputs.) For a more fundamental introduction to what all these systems do there are a number of Computerphile videos which are quite informative. Unfortunately I can't find a good playlist of them all but here's one of the early ones. (Robert Miles is in many of them.) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rUg_ukBwsyo":[{"hn_comment_id":39694386,"author":"FrustratedMonky","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Howard Hughes modified a 1925 Doble steam car to reach 133 MPH (2022)","text":"anybody have diagrams of this engine? Picture [LINK] This video opens the hood, and shows cross sections of engine. And is technical focus. [LINK] This Jay Leno video is actually good. Has cutaway of the engine to show the moving parts. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40532210,"author":"snaily","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Steam's Last Stand","text":"Jay Leno has a Doble car (mentioned in the article as a 1920s attempt at a \"user-friendly\" steam car revival). The video has great production and really shows the starting and driving processes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rWRbTnE1PEM":[{"hn_comment_id":26007038,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Email from Jeff Bezos to employees","text":"> This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. Jeff's pitch at the time (1997); so on point, so precise: [VIDEO] > The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, \u201cWhat\u2019s the internet?\u201d Blessedly, I haven\u2019t had to explain that in a long while. Here's Jeff explaining the Internet (at a TED talk): [LINK] > Invention. Invention is the root of our success. We\u2019ve done crazy things together, and then made them normal... If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. And that yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive. Jeff speaking about innovation, invention (based on first principles), making data-driven decisions (and also when to not trust data), learned helplessness at Stanford (2005): [LINK] > When times have been good, you\u2019ve been humble. Heh. Reminds me of this 2008 lecture where Jeff is selling AWS to startup school students: [LINK] Classic. > Amazon couldn\u2019t be better positioned for the future. We are firing on all cylinders, just as the world needs us to. Not sure about that last part, Jeff. So long, and thanks for all the fish.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26024072,"author":"HenryBemis","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Monkey.org","text":"> If Google were a book shop.. On the Amazon-CEO news yesterday, someone posted an interview of JB from 1997 [0]. In the first 2-3 minutes he explained exactly that (but for books). There are X million titles on books, they keep a tiny fraction of that in stock for 'next day delivery'. Kinda what Google does (or many search engines). Usually you find the 'most popular' answers on the first page. But when I have a tech problem, I have usually tried the 'first 5 pages' of solutions before I even try to duck it (DDG) for a solution (dear wikihow, yes I did restart my PC!). I assume HN has the type of readers that already KNOW the first 10 pages of solutions, and thus need that tiny level of detail that one gets after digging deep (stackexchange, forums, etc.) Question if anyone who knows: does Google search engine give preference to websites that display Google ads, or it is agnostic? I assume Google's crawlers can 'read' if a website is using X, Y, or Z advertiser's ads. (I haven't used Google for many many years and I usually block any google search and ads related IPs and URLs)(and ads in general). [0]: [VIDEO] I suggest you spend the 5mins to watch this video. He made it sound so easy..","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31690818,"author":"redredrobot","month":"2022-06","story_title":"I killed my startup","text":"Here is a 1997 interview with Jeff Bezos that I like where he talks about why he created Amazon - [VIDEO] . He describes a purely logical explanation of seeing data about internet growth and identifying books as being a uniquely good product to sell on the internet. Which is not to say he wasn't \"willing to dedicate [himself] entirely to solving the problem\", but I think it agrees with your take about finding market opportunities rather than following a passion.","stance":"rec"}],"rWlk9HreE7U":[{"hn_comment_id":21120652,"author":"chimi","month":"2019-09","story_title":"\u2018Out here, it\u2019s just me\u2019: one doctor for 11,000 square miles","text":"[LINK] I also like this 45 minute lecture Milton Friedman gave to physicians telling them how they were making healthcare worse due to this type of lobbying by their representatives. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21302694,"author":"snagglegaggle","month":"2019-10","story_title":"When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested","text":"Careful, \"for-profit\" healthcare has a lot of government controls on it. Single payer is only obvious after you add a lot of controls to the market. See [LINK] and the more complete [VIDEO] . He explains how regulation eventually results in a centrally planned setup that is less efficient than what used to happen.","stance":"rec"}],"rX0ItVEVjHc":[{"hn_comment_id":16841350,"author":"zengid","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"A lot of great talks already mentioned. Thought I'd add a gem from Mike Acton: Data-Oriented Design and C++ [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44740628,"author":"iamcreasy","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Writing memory efficient C structs","text":"This reminds of an amazing talk by Mike Acton on Data oriented design: [VIDEO] And there is a related talk by Andrew Kelley implementing these ideas on Zig toolchain: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47004811,"author":"moregrist","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu","text":"It clearly didn\u2019t come out of game dev. Many people doing high performance work on either embedded or \u201cbig silicon\u201d (amd64) in that era were fully aware of the importance of locality, branch prediction, etc But game dev, in particular Mike Acton, did an amazing job of making it more broadly known. His CppCon talk from 2014 [0] is IMO one of the most digestible ways to start thinking about performance in high throughput systems. In terms of heroes, I\u2019d place Mike Acton, Fabian Giesen [1], and Bruce Dawson [2] at the top of the list. All solid performance-oriented people who\u2019ve taken real time to explain how they think and how you can think that way as well. I miss being able to listen in on gamedev Twitter circa 2013 before all hell broke loose. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9244132,"author":"yoklov","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I become a faster programmer?","text":"I'm going to disagree with most of the comments here which say that you can't become faster, as I have become notably faster over the past couple of years (perhaps 1.5-2x faster!!). Basically, it was a fairly major coding style change that happened after working with others in my industry (game development) and seeing their prolific output of high quality code. My process for writing code used to be: - Identify problem. - Identify the abstractions that fit the problem - Implement those abstractions - Write code to solve problem using those abstractions. Now it is - Identify problem. - Write code to solve problem, pulling abstractions out if and only if they make sense and would actually be used . Honestly, I feel this leads to much better, cleaner and more understandable code, however, it tends not to mesh well with what some people consider best practices. The resulting code tends to not be particularly object oriented, tends to have large functions, and tends to perform very well due to having a very small distance from what the code says to what actually needs to be executed by the processor. For more on this approach, see [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9575973,"author":"harry8","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Asmttpd \u2013\u00a0Web server for Linux written in amd64 assembly","text":"Just because it's asm doesn't mean it's fast, sure. Just because it's C doesn't mean it's faster than an implementation in your favourite scripting language. Having said that, compilers do pretty badly on C-to-simd optimisation. The best you get is loop vectorization if it's really simple logic. You can usually get some pretty good wins there. The fact you lay out your memory for simd usually is a win all of its own due to cache prefetching even if you don't actually use any simd instructions. Compilers need heuristics to manage cache when you know what you're trying to do, (eg when should it use non-temporal writes, for example?) Fast C code is written while having a really clear mental model of the underlying architecture and the assembly that the C will produce with -O3 (or whatever flag is relevant to your compiler) and then checked with -S or objdump -D, profiled with callgrind/cachegrind, perf, rdtsc etc... The compiler really can't \"Do it for you\" You /can/ use a compiler as one of your tools when /you/ do it. As Randy Hyde points out you can always beat the compiler because you can use its generated assembly language in every case you can't beat, so the absolute worst you get is a tie. So yeah, you can totally smoke clang, Intel, microsoft and gnu C compiler and get paid something for doing it in certain industries too. :-) Mike Acton being aggressively opinionated on the subject, but the lecture is really good (despite/because of) the bits you'll disagree with and th","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23120705,"author":"cellularmitosis","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Old box, dumb code, few thousand connections, no big deal","text":"A great talk which gets you thinking in this mindset is \"Data-Oriented Design and C++\" by Mike Acton [VIDEO] As an example, if you are checking a boolean flag (1 bit) on an object, and it ends up being a cache miss (and x86_64 cache line size is 64 bytes), then your computer just went through all the expense of pulling in 512 bits from RAM yet it only used 1 of them. You are achieving 0.2% of the machine's possible throughput.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30661383,"author":"DeathArrow","month":"2022-03","story_title":".NET Myths Dispelled","text":"I think this is a valid critique. But then, most of the development (C aside) has been a victim to OOP. I have begun to think that OOP creates more problems than it solves. Added complexity and performance loss being the biggest. It's insane if you peek into a big projects where many developers came and went and each of them read an article about what it seemed an interesting design pattern and tried to implement them. You can have some kind of procedural programming if you use classes just to store data and use static methods. But the frameworks are OOP and there is no way around that unless you write your own frameworks. I am a big fan of Mike Acton's Data Oriented Architecture speeches, but I didn't find a way to implement something similar in C#. For those interested in something better than OOP, here's a few links: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36775120,"author":"dxhdr","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Data-Oriented Design Principles","text":"Mike Acton presented a great visualization of this in his 2014 DOD talk -- here's a link to just that clip: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39579337,"author":"mtzet","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?","text":"Most software in the industry is slow because it's doing a lot of stuff that it shouldn't. Often times additional \"optimization\" layers adds caching, but makes getting to the root of the issue harder. The biggest win is primarily getting rid of things you don't need and secondarily operating on things in batch. My playbook for optimizing in the real world is something like this: 1. Understand what you're actually trying to compute end-to-end. The bigger the chunk you're trying to optimize, the greater the potential for performance. 2. Sketch out what an optimal process would look like. What data do you need to fetch, what computation do you need to do on this, how often does this need to happen. Don't try to be clever and micro-optimize or cache computations. Just focus on only doing the things you need to do in a simple way. Use arrays a lot. 3. Understand what the current code is actually doing. How close to the sketch above are you? Are you doing a lot of I/O in the middle of the computation? Do you keep coming back to the same data? If you want to understand the limits of how fast computers are, and what optimal performance looks like I'd recommend two talks that come with a very different perspective from what you usually hear: 1. Mike Acton's talk at cppcon 2014 [VIDEO] 2. Casey Muratori's talk about optimizing a grass planting algorithm [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ra_9zU-mnl8":[{"hn_comment_id":33035840,"author":"jgoewert","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Gridfinity 3D Printed Storage and Organization Catalog","text":"Cool! I was hoping someone would make a better catalog for these. Searching thangs for specific things got really murky. I made a ton of the 2 grid 3 bay windowed bins to hold M3 and M4 screws and nuts and small but numerous lego pieces. Watching Zack's original video on the concept really helps to cement why this exists. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33735518,"author":"blamazon","month":"2022-11","story_title":"A 3D-printed ethernet RJ45 clip to secure/repair/fix broken tab (2020)","text":"For the unfamiliar, gridfinity is a project kicked off by Zack Freedman, who makes awesome YouTube videos with his life partner: [VIDEO] (Yes, that is a monocular HUD on his face, it's his teleprompter. There are a bunch of videos on the channel chronicling the various iterations of it)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33931962,"author":"lathiat","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Gridfinity: Unofficial Wiki","text":"For an introduction to the project see this video from the original creator Zach Freedman: [VIDEO] (Short version its an open and free expandable 3D printable modular storage system with modules to fit everything from screws to soldering irons and SD cards)","stance":"rec"}],"ras_VYgA77Q":[{"hn_comment_id":18742485,"author":"ArtWomb","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"Inside The Fake Science Factory from DefCon 26. First you'll laugh. And then you'll weep for humanity! [VIDEO] Also really dug Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy. Outlines the rollout of a possible new engineering platform consisting of free energy, satellite internet, and AI. [LINK] Keep the links coming, please. Terrific counter-programming for holiday down time ;)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19021409,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Most Published Research Findings Are False (2005)","text":"Inside the Fake Science Factory (2018) is an amazing DEFCON talk, by 3 people who stumbled on and investigated an unbelievably huge worldwide network (400,000 scientists involved) of fake-scientific conferences, journals, websites raking in money and enabling people to make claims that their products are scientifically proven. The presenters got hackers to track down the people behind one of the largest organizations, and analyze the huge numbers of conferences/papers. They present/publish nonsensical talks on graphs and bees+cancer to see what peer review there is... A must watch. Very funny, if depressing. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19119466,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Thousands of scientists run up against Elsevier\u2019s paywall","text":"Inside the Fake Science Factory is an amazing 2hr talk talk from DEFCON 2018 by 2 German journalists and a British science guy about an investigation into the world of predatory fake journals, conferences, websites. 400,000 scientists involved. Unbelievably huge scam. They wrote bogus papers and presented one at a fake conference. It's a funny talk, if depressing. A great investigation. Maybe the worst is that these fake scientific credentials are then used to sell useless products to dying people. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44802261,"author":"captainkrtek","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' analysis finds","text":"This presentation from Defcon in 2018 on \u201cFake Science Factory\u201d was fantastic and pretty funny as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18878484,"author":"gtrubetskoy","month":"2019-01","story_title":"The \u201cphantom reference\u201d: How a made-up article got almost 400 citations (2017)","text":"There was a fascinating Defcon 26 talk on \"predatory publishing\" which may explain how this kind of thing happens: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20691741,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Crispr pioneer among University of California researchers boycotting Elsevier","text":"More than a bunch! The scale of it is astonishing and depressing. See Inside the Fake Science Factory [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35800081,"author":"mablopoule","month":"2023-05","story_title":"A professor found her name on an article she didn\u2019t write. Then it got worse","text":"Another possibility would be to prop-up a fake journal/conference cycle, which is used by some interest groups to publish and thus \"validate\" dishonest research which then goes toward their own business/political interests. Think \"money laundering\", but for scholarly credentials. There is a very interesting DEFCON talk[1] called \"Inside the fake science factory\" about this. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rbu7Zu5X1zI":[{"hn_comment_id":44994986,"author":"emaro","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos","text":"Grant's work with 3blue1brown and Manim is simply amazing. The quality of the videos is so high, not the least thanks to the visualizations. Not an easy task given the abstract nature of the topic. It's linked in the readme, but I want to highlight the demo video [0], where Grant explains how he works with Manim. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41820566,"author":"vindex10","month":"2024-10","story_title":"How I animate 3Blue1Brown [video]","text":"It was impressive how he spotted a bug in his rendering engine and found a workaround for it in realtime! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47544043,"author":"john_strinlai","month":"2026-03","story_title":"This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]","text":"there is at least one video, if not a series of videos, where he explains his process in detail, showing the coding process and everything. it is a collaboration with another person where, if i recall, he is teaching them. i will see if i can find it. edit: \"How I animate 3Blue1Brown | A Manim demo with Ben Sparks\" [VIDEO] more on workflow: [LINK] code for videos: [LINK] manim: [LINK] manim community edition: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"rcwngbUrZNg":[{"hn_comment_id":11882813,"author":"dlmetcalf","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Intel and ME, and why we should get rid of ME","text":"Wow, no one here has mentioned Johanna Rutkovska's (Invisible Things Lab & QubesOS), \"Intel x86 Considered Harmful\"? [LINK] [LINK] Essential reading!! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11914342,"author":"kriro","month":"2016-06","story_title":"The Intel ME subsystem can take over your machine, can't be audited","text":"Joanna Rutkowska has written a nice paper on the topic, highly recommended: [LINK] Edit: There's also a talk from 32c3 for those more inclined to watch a video. I am pretty worried ever since I watched that: [VIDEO] (which is why I have researched non-Intel laptop alternatives..cliffnotes: GPUs without BLOBs are hard to find and there will be some severe tradeoffs which is expected)","stance":"rec"}],"re96UgMk6GQ":[{"hn_comment_id":21172415,"author":"modernerd","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Learning Haskell is no harder than learning any other programming language","text":"Yes, I didn't include the papers below in my parent response because, \u201cjust read these dense academic papers to understand what monads are and why Haskell has them\u201d doesn't tend to be good advice for Haskell beginners. But learning why monads came to be included in Haskell is useful if you want to dive deeper into this stuff: Philip Wadler's original paper on Comprehending Monads [PDF]: [LINK] Philip Wadler and Simon Peyton-Jones' paper on Imperative Functional Programming [PDF]: [LINK] Simon Peyton-Jones mentions both papers and talks about why monads came to be part of Haskell in his talk on the history of Haskell here, with examples that are a little more accessible than the above papers: [VIDEO] [introduction to purity and then monads starts around 30:07] It's a funny talk and it's worth watching in full, but here's a nice soundbite: \u201cSo what did we do for IO? Well, we just didn't have any. [audience laughs] So the joy of being an academic, right, is you can design a language \u2014 in 1990, I beg to inform you \u2014 that had no input/output. A Haskell program was simply a function from string to string. That was what it was. \u2026 But this was a bit embarrassing\u2026\u201d He goes on to talk about other ideas they explored to create effects, why they settled on monads, and why he wishes now they had called them something like \u201cworkflows\u201d (as F# later did[1]) to make them sound less intimidating. (Simon and Philip will both be at Haskell Exchange 2019 in London this coming week if anyone else,","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14552255,"author":"arianvanp","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Rust as a gateway drug to Haskell","text":"SPJ also noted that the original success of haskell was due to their pursuit of laziness. Because laziness has no place in a system with side effects, their pursuit of laziness and functional programming is what led them to discover the usefulness of monads for describing it in the first place. If they were pursuing a strict language instead, then they were allowed to take shortcuts, because sneaking in side effects is a lot easier. YEs maybe the next haskell will be strict, but getting to the point to make that decision required laziness. SPJ made a great lecture about this. It is very easy to follow and a fun insight into the academic history of modern functional languages [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16781167,"author":"superice","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Are unsound type systems wrong?","text":"Unsound typesystems are not necessarily a problem, but consider the problem the other way around: given a sound typesystem, how do we improve this in such a way that a) the average Joe will understand it b) it decreases the overhead of writing the types c) the type system helps the programmer write better programs Haskells approach to this keeps the constraint of soundness: [VIDEO] The whole video is very interesting even if you know nothing about Haskell, but are just interested in language design in general. To summarize the part of the video I just linked: Their approach so far has been to try and design the type system in such a way that you reduce programmer pain while not sacrificing soundness at all. It is a painful constraint for language designers, but it allows you to gradually add functionality to the type system from observing real world examples. The goal can be described as: Design a typesystem such that every working program can be typed in both a sound and correct way, while minimizing the amount of programs that can be typed, but are not working as intended.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17907511,"author":"Tarean","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Why I never finish my Haskell programs","text":"> I'm from Microsoft and when you see Microsoft documentation it often says, you know, x y or z is a rich something, right. In this case Haskell - or ghc's version of haskell is a rich language. What does this mean? Sounds good, doesn't it? But it always means this, right. That it's a large, complex, poorly understood, ill documented thing that nobody understands completely. From a great talk by Simon Peyton Jones [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41162510,"author":"ddellacosta","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Why does everyone hate Haskell, jazz, and pure math?","text":"Also, it's worth watching a bit of this talk (link at a particularly relevant time to start) because while Haskell is an \"ivory-tower language,\" it is not _just_ an ivory tower language, and the people working on it are very much not just \"a merry bunch of category theorists who had little interest in software engineering.\" [VIDEO] This talk is seven years old btw. Caring about industry users in Haskell is not new.","stance":"rec"}],"rgaTLrZGlk0":[{"hn_comment_id":22446974,"author":"rdlw","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits","text":"I found this video to be an extremely helpful and concise explanation of music theory basics: [VIDEO] \"Learn music theory in half an hour\" is obviously an exaggeration, but it really comes astoundingly close to fulfilling that promise. It contains a lot of information and each part builds on the previous parts, so it requires focus and maybe a few repetitions to 'get it', but I think the approach is fantastic for showing how many ideas of music theory are deeply connected. Not a book as you requested, but hopefully you'll find the other reply useful. As for some of your specific questions: Frequency is the same concept as radio frequency, but in this case refers to something we can directly sense. Radios transmit electromagnetic waves, which are photons moving at a certain rate, measured in Hertz, or cycles per second. Sound frequency refers to movement of air waves, so a more accurate analogy than radio waves is waves in a pond when a rock is thrown in. Human ears are sensitive to frequencies between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, so any sound you hear is a combination of frequencies. Natural language is helpful here, since higher frequencies sound 'higher' and lower frequencies sound 'lower'. A tone is a sound at a specific frequency, also known as a note. For example, 440 Hz is designated as the note A4 by the Geneva conventions, and this is what most instrument tunings are based off. Twelve tone equal temperament is the tuning system nearly all modern Western music uses. Certain ra","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27715008,"author":"foopod","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What is a cool technology to learn?","text":"Probably right on the edge of what you would define as technology.... Music! I am 30 and have spent my whole life not learning any music or instruments because it is 'too hard'. But now I am getting into music theory and wow it is really interesting and awesome. Highly recommend. I found this video really helpful - [VIDEO] .","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21824747,"author":"tarsinge","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How Can I Learn Music Theory?","text":"It really depends on your objectives. If you want to compose pop music (including rock and electronic music) the risk is to lose yourself in complicated harmony \"rules\" that are mostly irrelevant to the style you want to play (on top of my mind parallel fifths prohibited in classical theory but they are commonplace in rock/metal) and only useful to analyze classical pieces. Personally as a guitarist I kind of hacked my way into music theory to being able to improvise over and compose pop/rock/electronic by only using intervals and scale degrees. I can hear chords progressions, I know why a V I cadence works, can identify and play in modes (dorian, lydian...), but I can't name the notes so transcribing into a DAW is cumbersome but at least I can compose freely. Not ideal but considering the minimal time I invested it's a very good return for me. Concretely the idea is to focus only on patterns and formulas. The steps would be to learn to play and hear intervals, then construct chords, e.g. Major chord is 4+3 semi-tones, minor is 3+4, another +3 is minor 7 or +4 for major 7. Then by using a scale (e.g white notes on the piano for key of C major/A minor) it's easy to find the chord on each degree. After that learn a few common chords progressions and being able to identify them in everyday songs should come naturally. Finally practice composing melodies by targeting chord tones and you are ready to start composing. I found this video does a very good job at providing this overvi","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34392965,"author":"karmakaze","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Interactive Music Theory Cheat Sheet","text":"This is fantastic. I didn't grow up learning music and found so much of it seeming arbitrary and incomprehensible. This really pairs well with a 30min video[0] I watched taking away so much mystery and showing 'patterns in the madness'. It would be good if there were some keybindings to play notes (e.g. digits for I, II, or letters for notes ignoring #/b, or \"r t y u i o p [\"). A toggle to label the notes that are part of the selected key could help a beginner like myself. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rhgwIhB58PA":[{"hn_comment_id":29200779,"author":"travisgriggs","month":"2021-11","story_title":"How imaginary numbers were invented [video]","text":"I love Veritasium. Derek has done a number of videos that are awesome like this. The videos are great and educational, but he also manages to subtly weave in an almost spiritual subtext to them as well. For example, in this one, you learn about imaginary numbers in some cool ways, history, how awesome e^ix is, etc, but also this yen-yang balance between embracing not only what is real but taking a chance on what is imaginary. Some of my other favorites: - [VIDEO] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] I think he\u2019s going to lose the $10,000 bet on the car though.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28919519,"author":"seer","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Long-term NAEP scores for 13-year-olds drop for first time since testing began","text":"While we now know a lot about teaching, a lot of misconceptions have been found recently regarding \u201ctruths\u201d about teaching, its a fascinating subject really, and the main problem seems to be lack of rigorous repeatable double blind testing for all of those things. Veritasium did a very interesting video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30715436,"author":"systemvoltage","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Amazon's new role-playing game can help you build your AWS skills","text":"I kind of wish this urban myth dies. There are more common things amongst humans about learning than differences. By a long shot. Veritasium covered this in much greater detail but still approachable by the laymen: [VIDEO] It almost always shutsdown the discussion of improving or criticizing learning methods. Because, there is this deus-ex-machina of learning \"Everyone is different\" and therefore we must not question, we must not contest, we must not improve. Btw, this is also rampant in other dysfunctional fields such as nutrition and product-reviews.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31707314,"author":"ycdavidsmith","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Best beginner friendly linear algebra book?","text":"\u201cIntroduction to Linear Algebra\u201d by Gilbert Strang is the book. Recommend getting a used older edition as not much has changed. His course at MIT is legendary, completely available online [LINK] And there\u2019s so much good linear algebra stuff on YouTube from 3brown1blue. If you can do one thing now, watch this Veritasium video to disprove the myth that you\u2019re a visual learner: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31708081,"author":"Diris","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Best beginner friendly linear algebra book?","text":"Veritasium has a very good video on the subject.[0] Sources are in the description but I might as well post them here. Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological science in the public interest, 9(3), 105-119. \u2014 [LINK] Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Dobolyi, D. G. (2015). The scientific status of learning styles theories. Teaching of Psychology, 42(3), 266-271. \u2014 [LINK] Massa, L. J., & Mayer, R. E. (2006). Testing the ATI hypothesis: Should multimedia instruction accommodate verbalizer-visualizer cognitive style?. Learning and Individual Differences, 16(4), 321-335. \u2014 [LINK] Riener, C., & Willingham, D. (2010). The myth of learning styles. Change: The magazine of higher learning, 42(5), 32-35.\u2014 [LINK] Husmann, P. R., & O'Loughlin, V. D. (2019). Another nail in the coffin for learning styles? Disparities among undergraduate anatomy students\u2019 study strategies, class performance, and reported VARK learning styles. Anatomical sciences education, 12(1), 6-19. \u2014 [LINK] Snider, V. E., & Roehl, R. (2007). Teachers\u2019 beliefs about pedagogy and related issues. Psychology in the Schools, 44, 873\u2013886. doi:10.1002/pits.20272 \u2014 [LINK] Fleming, N., & Baume, D. (2006). Learning Styles Again: VARKing up the right tree!. Educational developments, 7(4), 4. \u2014 [LINK] Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M., & Tallal, P. (2015). Matching learning style to instructional method: Effects on comprehension. Journal of educational psycholo","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38781647,"author":"irajdeep","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Things software developers should learn about learning","text":"you'll definitely find this video: [VIDEO] interesting. Here they discuss the (lack of)efficacy of \"visual learning\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39636550,"author":"matt_j","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)","text":"This is debunked to some extent. Veritasium made a good video about it. [VIDEO] Personally I find a multi-pronged approach is necessary to really learn anything. Read it. Read it again. Visual guides are helpful. Work some examples. Make some mistakes, debug them, find the corner cases, write tests. Eventually when I've poked around the material for a while it starts to bed in. Three months later it's forgotten, but when I learn it the next time I move a lot faster!","stance":"rec"}],"rimtaSgGz_4":[{"hn_comment_id":37823123,"author":"parski","month":"2023-10","story_title":"To Fight Big Tech, We Must Seize the Means of Computation","text":"I really recommend Cory's talk at DEF CON and he was a guest on the Srsly Wrong podcast. DEF CON: [VIDEO] Srsly Wrong: [LINK] It's a great podcast. I recommend the episodes on degrowth and half earth socialism in particular.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37668933,"author":"neycoda","month":"2023-09","story_title":"FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power","text":"Finally. This is the kind of thing that needs to happen to all of these giant corporations and utilities fighting for monopolies. Incidentally I heard today how many laws against anti-competitive behavior were stripped with Carter and Reagan onward, and it's become a trend in our hyper-corporatist world now that's hurting workers and income classes below the highest. Watch \"DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification - Cory Doctorow\" on YouTube [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37679822,"author":"takeda","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Google's 25th Birthday","text":"What is needed is what Cory Doctorow is saying. [VIDEO] We need to push politicians to fix the antitrust law. It isn't just Google that is benefiting from this now toothless law.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39059546,"author":"smashah","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice","text":"You can see \"Adversarial Interoperability\" on Youtube to see talks on this. This is a good one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rk6z1vP4Eo8":[{"hn_comment_id":4541953,"author":"ThaddeusQuay2","month":"2012-09","story_title":"Dry-run experiments verify key aspect of Sandia nuclear fusion concept","text":"Bussard was a genius who couldn't get funding. Less than a year before he died of cancer, he asked Google for a paltry sum to continue his research, shortly after the government cut him off. I have wondered why Google didn't jump on this. Do you know? And now, ironically, the Navy, the very entity which tossed him out, has not only picked up his research, but has apparently gone all quiet about the results. Here's the video of his excellent (and, in retrospect, sad) presentation at Google. I say \"sad\" because it shows an intellectual giant, nearly on his deathbed, practically begging an Internet giant, for what was really the tiny amount he needed to continue with what had become his life's work. Anyway, it's an intense, fast-paced, insightful, and (likely) final public look into his mind, his work, and his character. [LINK] (Should Google Go Nuclear?) [VIDEO] (archive copy) UPDATE: I found a good paper covering the above talk. It's a 25-page PDF, of less than 2MB, with color photos and charts from the video. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8668195,"author":"carapace","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Inside the Dynomak: A Fusion Technology Cheaper Than Coal","text":"Dr. Bussard gave a very interesting talk on his design for \"inertial electrostatic confinement\" fusion reactor: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10124772,"author":"carapace","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Secretive fusion company claims reactor breakthrough","text":"I keep wondering why this talk doesn't get more traction? [VIDEO] Published on Aug 22, 2012 Google Tech Talks November 9, 2006 ABSTRACT This is not your father's fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that's been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects. Dr. Robert Bussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2), has spent 17 years perfecting IEC, a fusion process that converts hydrogen and boron directly into electricity producing helium as the only waste product. Most of this work was funded by the Department of Defense, the details of which have been under seal... until now. Dr. Bussard will discuss his recent results and details of this potentially world-altering technology, whose conception dates back as far as 1924, and even includes a reactor design by Philo T. Farnsworth (inventor of the scanning television). Can a 100 MW fusion reactor be built for less than Google's annual electricity bill? Come see what's possible when you think outside the thermonuclear box and ig","stance":"rec"}],"rkfAcWpOYAA":[{"hn_comment_id":24257110,"author":"recuter","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Semi-transparent solar panels allow concurrent production of crops and power","text":"You got the gist of what I was saying which is physics is at play and the answer is always \"it depends\". But people don't like that. Hence, AC off I'm a good person. Green roof I'm a good person. 'etc. > I agree to a certain extent with his points, but found his tone incredibly condescending and offputting That kind of says it all, doesn't it? Personally I found it good natured tongue-firmly-in-cheek conspiratorial humour. Considering he is an actual authority on the subject and has seen a lot of incredibly idiotic behaviour and expensive and downright dangerous mistakes I think you can forgive him if his comedy schtick is not to your taste as long as the info is good. This talk is even better: [VIDEO] He seems like the grumpy Linus of the building science world and if he is a jerk he is my kind of jerk.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18968272,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2019-01","story_title":"On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality","text":"A house should not breathe. A catchy mantra I've run across is \"seal tight, ventilate right\": * [LINK] Mold is not a ventilation problem, but rather a moisture control problem. Keep the humidity down (especially with whole house dehumidifiers), and eliminate condensation points (by eliminating thermal bridging), and it goes away. While the above video, which is from the really good channel by Matt Risinger, is a good introduction, I recommend you also check out the building science stuff put out by Joseph Lstiburek for a more science-y explanation: * [LINK] On the \"perfect wall\": * [LINK] Presentation on control layer (especially starting around 15m): * [VIDEO] Good webinar: * [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"rmueBVrLKcY":[{"hn_comment_id":19707170,"author":"djhworld","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Joe Armstrong has died","text":"This is devastating, RIP. I watched this talk a few months ago [VIDEO] called \"Computer Science - A Guide for the Perplexed\" It was superb, I think it's unfortunate that he had to rush through it because of time constraints, his anecdotes and delivery were really engaging and funny.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25940451,"author":"vector_spaces","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science (2014)","text":"One of my favorite talks by Joe Armstrong -- computer science, a guide for the perplexed. He talks through what he feels are some important but forgotten ideas in CS [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19706607,"author":"dpeck","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Joe Armstrong has died","text":"That is so sad, he was in his late 60s and it seemed like he had a lot of life left in him, talking about how software can get better and having a great (and sometimes snarky) outlook on the profession. Highly recommend his thesis (2003) and a few of his great interviews/presentations for anyone who isn\u2019t familiar with Joe, it captures a lot of what he thought about and pushed for in his professional life. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] I hope his family and friends can find some comfort in how much he was appreciated and admired in the development community.","stance":"rec"}],"rn7MmS3vazU":[{"hn_comment_id":28862995,"author":"lolive","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Pink Floyd's Young Lust \u2013 explained and demystified","text":"I suppose this is old news for the Pink Floyd nerds around. But the sync of Echoes and 2001 is the BEST thing I have ever seen in my life : [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48163846,"author":"jcb0wman","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Echoes (Live at Pompeii)","text":"My favorite Echoes experience will always be listening to it synced to the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey. When I was a teen I used to have to manually sync it up with a DVD and CD player. Fortunately some hero now has now posted it on youtube. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36467292,"author":"floor_","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Pink Floyd, 'The Wizard of Oz,' and Me","text":"I think this one it much more interesting: [VIDEO] Echoes lines up with the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey.","stance":"rec"}],"rnmcRTnTNC8":[{"hn_comment_id":27779303,"author":"rozab","month":"2021-07","story_title":"List of Special Elevator Modes","text":"Deviant Ollam's talks are always first class. I also love this one, about physical pentesting in general: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21587746,"author":"jstrieb","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?","text":"Simple physical penetration testing tactics are easy to learn and apply widely. These skills can be a quick way to have better security awareness, and can be a fun party trick. For example, many of the techniques listed in this (<1hr) video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21988424,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The first chosen-prefix collision for SHA-1","text":"The internet brings a much bigger attack surface than local people who can reach a front door, and home users access the same openssh as companies do, but companies (can) afford stronger doors. \"Most people's home doors can't withstand a hit from a sledgehammer\" -> \"we shouldn't talk about cryptographic weaknesses in case someone abuses them\" is a stretch, the comparison does break down. [1] is a fun YouTube video about physical pen testing; one example at 13:45 in the video, the presenter is walking home from a bar, walks up to a locked high street bank, spits a mouthful of beer through the gap in the doors, triggers the presence sensor on the inside which lets people out, and the door opens and lets him in. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25228542,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2020-11","story_title":"DIY Smart Doorbell with a Raspberry Pi","text":"Reminded me of this talk. So many silly things leading to easy access. \"I'll Let Myself In: Tactics of Physical Pen Testers\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26507218,"author":"jimpudar","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Phone app can figure out the shape of your house key by listening to you use it","text":"This is nowhere near being viable for real world use. Far more concerning is how easy it is to bypass most physical security measures. Forgetting about how easy it is to pick open most locks, many doors aren't even installed properly in the first place. Check out this YouTube video [0] to see what I'm talking about. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"roBkg-iPrbw":[{"hn_comment_id":33484494,"author":"mrpf1ster","month":"2022-11","story_title":"MilkyTracker","text":"If anyone wants to dive into the history of trackers, I highly recommend this documentary (and all of his other ones) by Ahoy ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36738747,"author":"el_nahual","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Chiptune.app","text":"I'm old enough to remember playing games with chiptunes, but young enough to not have known what a tracker was. This YouTube video (from the amazing Ahoy channel) is an incredible, in-depth overview of trackers, their sound and history: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29623450,"author":"bmn__","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Space Debris is an Amiga mod I composed back in 1991","text":"> just the coolest format in music ever Historic retrospective: Ahoy - \"Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31249185,"author":"mrpf1ster","month":"2022-05","story_title":"\u2018It was the poor man\u2019s studio\u2019: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music","text":"If your interested, Ahoy made a very good Youtube documentary on the rise of trackers and their impact on music: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34544999,"author":"b0afc375b5","month":"2023-01","story_title":"MusicLM: Generating Music from Text","text":"[VIDEO] I think this showed up on my recommendation. I didn't know anything about tracker music, but this video explains it chronologically and very well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35772164,"author":"alyssaxuu","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Memoirs from the old web: The KEYGEN element","text":"Ha, I had the same thought. I recently watched this video which you might find interesting (mostly re: demoscene): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37075311,"author":"gcr","month":"2023-08","story_title":"MilkyTracker 1.04","text":"The original was \u201cUltimate Soundtracker,\u201d and it was so influential that derivatives often named themselves ___tracker (noisetracker, screamtracker, impulsetracker) Ahoy on YouTube has a great video about tracker music, [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37379511,"author":"ant6n","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Amiga Samplers: Budget dance music in 1990","text":"Also shout-out to Retro Ahoy\u00b4s awesome documentary on trackers, which covers the amiga quite a bit as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rpyBYuu-wJI":[{"hn_comment_id":29348260,"author":"hardwaregeek","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Humble Brilliance of Italy's Moka Coffee Pot (2018)","text":"There's a great video with coffee expert James Hoffmann on making coffee in a moka pot: [VIDEO] However a moka pot generally doesn't make espresso as much as strong coffee. If you want something that makes espresso, check out the 9bar: [LINK] Of course you'll want a good hand grinder for either, but especially espresso. You can't get anything close to espresso with pre-ground or a cheap grinder.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29348619,"author":"samplenoise","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Humble Brilliance of Italy's Moka Coffee Pot (2018)","text":"I adopted a few tricks from either [1] or a similar video from James Hoffman\u2019s Youtube channel some time ago (including the foaming milk with a French press one) and it vastly improved my lockdowns. The one useful thing they don\u2019t say is (imo) it\u2019s easier to get it right with a smaller size pot. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34941345,"author":"ValentineC","month":"2023-02","story_title":"","text":"I like James Hoffmann's method for this, which is surprisingly from a channel that's not his: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rrkrvAUbU9Y":[{"hn_comment_id":46834602,"author":"Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings","text":"> The idea that money is not an effective incentive to drive behavior is wishful thinking It is obviously an incentive. But I think it's not an effective one and has many morally bad side effects. I highly recommend taking a look at the work of Daniel Pink related to money as an incentive. See The Puzzle Of Motivation (~20min) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1813668,"author":"hoop","month":"2010-10","story_title":"Does business school teach people how to assert power before they're ready?","text":"I'll read them all over the next couple of hours. (I am sick in bed anyhow :)) Readings that I recommend are \"The Great Jackass Fallacy\" (I got my copy <$10 on Amazon) and \"Drive\" by Daniel Pink. There's also a Youtube/TED video that sums up \"Drive\" very well. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7928303,"author":"arkitaip","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Employees That Stay In Companies Longer Get Paid Less","text":"Have you seen any of Daniel Pink's work on what motivates people in business? It might inspire you to focus on other incentives than just pay salary increases. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rsxCZAE8QNA":[{"hn_comment_id":44195177,"author":"Footpost","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Neuromorphic computing","text":"Neuromorphic computation has been hyped up for ~ 20 year by now. So far it has dramatically underperformed, at least vis-a-vis the hype. The article does not distinguish between training and inference. Google Edge TPUs [LINK] each one is capable of performing 4 trillion operations per second (4 TOPS), using 2 watts of power\u2014that's 2 TOPS per watt. So inference is already cheaper than the 20 watts the paper attributes to the brain. To be sure, LLM training is expensive, but so is raising a child for 20 years. Unlike the child, LLMs can share weights, and amortise the energy cost of training. Another core problem with neuromorphic computation is that we currently have no meaningful idea how the brain produces intelligence, so it seems to be a bit premature to claim we can copy this mechanism. Here is what the Nvidia Chief Scientist B. Dally (and one of the main developers of modern GPU architectures) says about the subject: \"I keep getting those calls from those people who claim they are doing neuromorphic computing and they claim there is something magical about it because it's the way that the brain works ... but it's truly more like building an airplane by putting feathers on it and flapping with the wings!\" From \"Hardware for Deep Learning\" HotChips 2023 keynote. [VIDEO] This is at 21:28. The whole talk is brilliant and worth watching.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37891557,"author":"tverbeure","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work","text":"I think your biggest mistake is ignoring the amount of software that runs on top of the hardware. There were times in the past where others had a higher number of FLOPS, but it didn\u2019t make a dent in the usage of CUDA. My standard assumption about anything in tech (and beyond) is that you don\u2019t win on first principles alone (\u201cparallel design is well understood\u201d). It\u2019s the details that make you stand out. Bill Daly gave a great presentation at Hot Chips a few weeks ago that explains how Nvidia\u2019s AI performance was only in small parts due to process improvement. The rest was doing things smarter: matrix sparsity, different number representations and so forth. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rtR63-ecUNo":[{"hn_comment_id":31432580,"author":"pyinstallwoes","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Korg NTS-2 DIY oscilloscope and wave generator kit","text":"Anyone have a some tips on wanting to build intuition on wave-forms, electronics, and having fun with an oscilloscope? This was amazing to me: How To Draw Mushrooms On An Oscilloscope With Sound [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15448172,"author":"chrissoundz","month":"2017-10","story_title":"My Sudden Synaesthesia","text":"I find this video quite mesmerizing: [VIDEO] Essentially it draws an object on an oscilloscope by splitting the audio channel into x y coordinates.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23129030,"author":"MayeulC","month":"2020-05","story_title":"The DooM-chip: no CPU, no opcodes, no instruction counter","text":"I like this guy. I thought this was going to be a more introductory video: [VIDEO] (holy c *, he published a lot of these since 2014, they're pretty good :) ) This has been done with quake: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ruNFcH-KibY":[{"hn_comment_id":12375309,"author":"tikhonj","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Z3 SMT solver interactive tutorial","text":"If you want a fun example of using Z3, I gave a talk recently that walks you through verifying programs in a tiny little imperative language by compiling them to Z3 formulas. It's easier than it sounds! It was recorded [1] and I have example code and additional resources (papers, etc) on my site [2]. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] If you want to do more, you can extend the same process to synthesizing programs, not just verifying them. It doesn't scale too far, but otherwise it's like magic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14852426,"author":"buckie","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Show HN: Dharma \u2013 Programmable Peer-To-Peer Loans Using Ethereum Smart Contracts","text":"### FV Resources These are few and far between. My paper on it is soup to nuts for how we do it in Pact which, while technical, should be somewhat approachable for most devs to grasp (I tried at least -- representing a program as equations is just an abstract concept). Until it comes out, the best one I've found as an entry point was the approach they use in Cryptol: [VIDEO] . Cryptol, generally is a great project to look to for guidance. We're not going with the interactive approach. An EDSL in the docstrings is our approach so that you can pull a contract from the chain (pact is interpreted so the code on chain is the code that executes... well after it gets inlined and validated) and do the verification for yourself. Pact inlines at module creation/update time as a safety feature -- this way if a dep upgrades the code your contract runs doesn't change though the dep can revoke your code's right to access its tables/data until you update your contract. The \"no leftpad\" approach to deps. All the imported code that's pure, however, still works. This way, when you are building a module, you know that the code you formally verified/tested against is the only code that will ever run (until you update it). ### Whitepapers Thanks for the offer but I've already got enough people looking at them currently and we're keeping them confidential for now... a glaring stupid mistake would be embarrassing. Subscribe to the mailing list on kadena.io and you'll get updated with them the secon","stance":"rec"}],"rv-mFSoZOkE":[{"hn_comment_id":31129779,"author":"panick21_","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Turning nuclear waste into diamond batteries","text":"A much more practical use of nuclear waste is to make traditional RTG. Nuclear waste could also be used for medical isotopes. There are lots of other interesting things in nuclear waste. This talk from 2010 is really amazing at understanding what 'nuclear waste' actually is and what it will be. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15554815,"author":"nickik","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Thruster for Mars mission breaks records","text":"While this is true it is just another reflection of the backwards nuclear policy of NASA and the US government. With different reactors, creation of more Pu-238 would not be a huge problem. The issue is just that there seems to be very little interest in pushing forward any areas and as so often the case many of these technologies are mutually supporting. I would really love a real push forward on Molten Salt reactors that would give you the ability to filter out a number of important substances that have a hole host of different uses. It would also go a long way in solving the nuclear waste problems. Here is some exploration of what is contained in nuclear waste: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22141881,"author":"quindecagon","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Rolls-Royce plans mini nuclear reactors by 2029","text":"Interestingly, this post on an application for Nuclear waste was on the front page[1]. This talk on nuclear waste may also be of interest to you[2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rvkEpstd9os":[{"hn_comment_id":39122504,"author":"4d4m","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Designed by clowns supervised by monkeys: Internal Boeing messages (2020)","text":"No matter how you may feel about (all) nation-state sponsored media outlets, AlJazeera deserves respect for this excellent footage they got from inside the factory. It's a few years old, but should have raised more alarm by now: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19561716,"author":"bb101","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Lack of redundancies on Boeing 737 MAX baffles some involved in developing it","text":"It's worth watching Al Jazeera's series on the production of the 787 Dreamliner, and related cultural issues at Boeing after their merger with McDonnell Douglas [1]. Personally, I think it's worth taking with a grain of salt as it appears quite one-sided, but the interviews with Boeing ex-employees and head engineers are enlightening, and could go some way to explaining the lack of redundant systems (i.e. cost and time). [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20237863,"author":"blt","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Capt. \u201cSully\u201d Sullenberger Slams Boeing for Inadequate Pilot Training","text":"Check out this documentary on Boeing's sketchy manufacturing & QA process back in the days of the 787 release. It seems that the company has been toxic for a while now. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21460858,"author":"piva00","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Boeing whistleblower raises doubts over 787 oxygen system","text":"Al Jazeera has a long report on YouTube [0] covering the allegations around Charleston, I know that they can be biased against the US but this report is quite eye opening. Even more given the interview with a VP (or director, can't remember exactly the position) being cut short by the PR person involved, the reports from workers inside the factory stating they wouldn't fly a plane built there, etc. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38981651,"author":"cjbgkagh","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Updates on Grounding of Boeing 737 MAX 9 Aircraft","text":"The MCAS is what brought Boeing issues into the zeitgeist, but I was aware of issues at Boeing ~ 18 years ago from friends who had worked there and Al Jazeera did a great investigation ~ 9 years ago ( [VIDEO] ). Boeing used to be the gold standard and as someone who researches such gold standards it was disheartening to see them give that up. But that happened very slowly and started a long time ago. Clearly diluting focus away from safety is an issue for whatever the reason especially when the safety of airplanes is declining. This should also be taken in context that many aspects of manufacturing have improved greatly over the past 20 years so even if everything else stayed the same the general safety should have been greatly improved. So the drag on safety by the culture is bad enough to overcome these 'free' gains and end up with even less safe planes should highlight just how bad that effect is.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39677693,"author":"asteroidz","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Boeing's woes continue as 50 injured on Australia-New Zealand flight","text":"Another worrisome development: [LINK] Al-Jazeera has really been on fire digging into Boeing. This video (though from 2014) was remarkable: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rvskMHn0sqQ":[{"hn_comment_id":31381700,"author":"axolotlgod","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Finding Van Tran, who brought female representation to games","text":"There is a video [0] I love that explains an argument for this well. The more people you have participating and iterating in a field, and more generally in life, the better that field/life ultimately becomes. Allowing more women in the video game field will ultimately make more satisfying and novel games for you and for everyone else. Modern video games are interactive art. People have emotional experiences from finishing games with stories and performances that speak to them. Part of this emotion comes from a deep understanding of the \"lived experience\" of people. There are parts of the lived experience that drastically differ for women and men, on the whole. Does that mean that men couldn't write a story that women find powerful and challenging? Of course not. But men aren't going to fully grok the little details of how society treats women, which means a lot of relevant themes relevant go unexplored if there aren't women on creative teams. Diversity of experience translates into diversity of ideas. Hell, I always thought that was a strength for FOSS, after all. --- [0]: [VIDEO] - Kurzgesagt","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17023137,"author":"arikr","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone","text":"This is amazing! I'm very excited for a future where more and more tasks can be automated, enabling humans to get higher and higher living standards with the same/fewer input resources. In short, technology is a wonderful thing that allows very low marginal costs. This is what we need to make the future a better place, given a consistent or growing population. \"Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less. \" This is a perfect demonstration of that. See also: [VIDEO] \"A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place \u2013 Egoistic Altruism\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17882090,"author":"arikr","month":"2018-08","story_title":"The 3 Tenets of Capitalism","text":"If you like this you may also like: - \"Egoistic altruism\" video by Kurzgesagt [VIDEO] , supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. - Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen. Presents an argument for how contributing to positive sum economic growth is one of the best things you can do for humanity in the medium-to-long-run.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18735289,"author":"baby","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Huawei Could Divide the World","text":"I think a lot of people (including me) want China to join the club of first world countries, not just economically, but also in terms of respect of human rights. How do you get there? By banning chinese products and heavily penalizing them? Or by inviting them to get their people richer and more educated? There's actually a very interesting kurzgesagt video on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29776400,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021","text":"I'm quite fond of the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt which has deep videos that are targeted at a \"you don't need to be an expert in the subject to understand.\" There's a video on this subject - Can YOU Fix Climate Change? [LINK] You may also like A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place \u2013 Egoistic Altruism [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rwhUpu9MfZ0":[{"hn_comment_id":34162765,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2022-12","story_title":"They Called 911 for Help. Police Used Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars","text":"I think you will enjoy this video breakdown from Skip Intro: [VIDEO] It\u2019s a superb video essay and absolutely worth the watch! But to be clear, it\u2019s also playing into the meme that paw patrol is copaganda, so take it as a mix of comedy and serious analysis :) The gist of the video is that, while paw patrol is not copaganda, it is problematic for parallel reasons. It\u2019s also a terrible tv show as you noted.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37887272,"author":"Quinzel","month":"2023-10","story_title":"The fascist state of Paw Patrol (2021)","text":"Paw Patrol is so shit, I had to study it in my undergrad forensic psychology course: [LINK] And if you can\u2019t be bothered reading an academic journal about it, this YouTube video really emphasises the issues quite well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rxOKEsBx4NU":[{"hn_comment_id":23599820,"author":"unixhero","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Deus Ex at 20: The oral history of a pivotal PC game","text":"I have to mention Ross' Youtube channel Accursed Farms' review [0] [1] [2] of Deus Ex. I would highly recommended watching them: \"I came for a game review and left with a better understanding of the economy and politics. Ross you blow my mind\" [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26022952,"author":"1_player","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Jeff Bezos Pitching Amazon.com (1997) [video]","text":"Here's my favourite essay on it, that doesn't only go into the game details but also the underlying narrative, political and economical philosophy that makes this game one of a kind: [VIDEO] It all starts with a pandemic.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15484132,"author":"Honeybunch","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Six agricultural giants on the verge of merging into three companies (2016)","text":"This is quote from the video game Deus Ex for those not familiar. Here's a good followup to this quote: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41118448,"author":"sph","month":"2024-07","story_title":"80% of developers are unhappy. The problem is not AI, nor is coding","text":"Pros: - not have to worry about replenishing your bank account every month - have all your modest needs in life met - workplace is in a way the only community of like-minded people have outside of family Cons: - help realise someone else's dream - you might forget you have any dreams of your own at all --- My adult mind has been shaped by the controversial, maybe conspiratorial discussion about self-employment rates over the past century in the Deus Ex game, and as I've grown older, I've found I'd rather struggle on my own path rather than making myself care about someone else's idea. [LINK] (take it with an open mind and a grain of salt, it's cyberpunk conspiracy fiction after all) For a deeper discussion, I can only recommend Ross Scott's review of the game: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"rzJqXd-1dEU":[{"hn_comment_id":24766197,"author":"Tade0","month":"2020-10","story_title":"What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)","text":"That Japanese Man Yuta has a great video demonstrating just how much Chinese script do ordinary Japanese folk understand: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26578873,"author":"scaladev","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms","text":">there's a bunch of stuff that kind of looks like it would make sense when reading a Chinese word in Japanese, but turns out there's a lot of meanings are very different As someone who knows nothing of the Japanese language beyond the very basics, I found these videos quite entertaining: [LINK] [VIDEO] It looks like many characters are familiar to his respondents, but their combinations make absolutely no sense.","stance":"rec"}],"rzQEIRRJ2T0":[{"hn_comment_id":17689383,"author":"nickbarnwell","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Show HN: I made a tool that made me faster at Git","text":"If you're an emacs user, I can't recommend magit [1] enough. I was a diehard CLI user and had flags and aliases out the wazoo, and it was still a step change in usabilty and power for me. Staging hunks, rebasing, and stashing are all vastly easier. Amending or editing a commit is a breeze, and it's tied in to all of the other emacs tools you already use, e.g. org-mode to boot! It's easier to see it in action than explain it. If you've two minutes to spare, check out this emacsrocks screencast [2], or Howard Abram's longer presentation from the PDX Emacs Hackers meetup [3]. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23107920,"author":"giggles_giggles","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Making Emacs Popular Again","text":"I cannot possibly encourage you more to check out magit. It is unbelievably good. I always share this demo with people to show off just a tiny portion of what it's capable of doing [VIDEO] My skills with git have gotten better after using magit, too, because it brings the power of git to the surface. It's a really fantastic git porcelain and the fact that it is deeply integrated into Emacs just makes it absolutely second to none. Magit is easily one of my favorite pieces of software and I will leap at the chance to sing its praises.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20374487,"author":"d0mine","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Hub: Use GitHub from the Command Line","text":"There is Magit Forge which is not limited to Github [LINK] If you are not familar with Magit, there is a screencast: Emacs Rocks! Episode 17: Magit [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24441831,"author":"ryukafalz","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Magit \u2013 A Git Porcelain inside Emacs","text":"Not sure about other editors, but Magit's hunk- and line-level staging/unstaging is hard to beat, IMO. For hunk-level staging, you put your cursor on the hunk you want to add and press \"s\". If you want to split that and only stage a few lines, you just select those lines and press \"s\". This demo is pretty good I think: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"s0ukXDnWlTY":[{"hn_comment_id":34729311,"author":"jeroenhd","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Apple\u2019s 2\u00bd year old iPhone 12 is 6% faster than the new Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra","text":"This doesn't really showcase how much Apple's chips are as much as how far Qualcom has fallen behind. On the other hand, the results also show how much work Apple will need to put into their GPUs, as the clearly inferior chip is still beating the iPhone 14 hands down in terms of GPU horsepower. The relevant review, though, is performance per watt. This video ( [VIDEO] ) from a few months ago explores the power efficiency graphs and that's probably what most phone users really want. Nobody is gaming on their phone until it hits the limits of passive cooling and very few people will need the raw CPU performance for more than a second per page load. I don't even know what intensive single core benchmarks are even good for in real life, maybe Javascript if you're somehow running the JS VM at 100% for minutes straight? That doesn't sound like something I'd want my phone to do! Qualcom's advancements in speed and longevity have been incremental, sometimes even decremental, for years now. Mediatek, previously the chipset for every 100 dollar Chinese phone, keeps closing while Qualcom desperately tries to squeeze just a little more juice out of their cores. Apple's progress is also slowing down, but not nearly as much as their most important competitor's. It's a shame, really. Hopefully Google and Microsoft will develop their own chips for real in the future because you can't just wait for Qualcom anymore. Microsoft REALLY wants a good M1/2 competitor but the other chips in the ARM s","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34730004,"author":"GeekyBear","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Apple\u2019s 2\u00bd year old iPhone 12 is 6% faster than the new Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra","text":"No, but there is evidence that Geekbench doesn't do a good job of measuring sustained performance. This video from Geekerwan takes more of a sustained performance / thermal throttling perspective. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36106884,"author":"Yoofie","month":"2023-05","story_title":"ARM\u2019s Cortex A53: Tiny but Important","text":"Someone else posted a really compelling video where they test the power efficiency of Android and Apple phones. [VIDEO] Its really quite informative.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37096776,"author":"adithyassekhar","month":"2023-08","story_title":"ARM\u2019s Cortex A710: Winning by Default","text":"Interesting that geekerwan found the exact opposite in their testing of A710 [VIDEO] ARM efficiencies at 13:10. Granted these are across multiple chips. The whole video is a good watch.","stance":"rec"}],"s10etP1p2bU":[{"hn_comment_id":21582235,"author":"RobertRoberts","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?","text":"Watch this, incredibly simple method that made me actually like omelettes. (I hated them growing up) [VIDEO] \"Really good\" is subjective. It's the very notion something is possible and that you can do it that I see as valuable. Practice makes perfect, nothing can be perfect the first time you learn it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13054830,"author":"wyclif","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Jacques Pepin, unlike other celebrity chefs, will actually teach you how to cook","text":"His omelette video is also great. Shows the difference between a \"country omelette\" and a classic French omelette. I like that he denies one is superior to the other. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"s19G6n0UjsM":[{"hn_comment_id":23442572,"author":"harikb","month":"2020-06","story_title":"There\u2019s plenty of room at the Top: computer performance after Moore\u2019s law","text":"Anecdotal - One of favorite YouTube live-streaming personalities, Jon Gjengset[1] is a Ph.D student at MIT CSAIL. His talks are very detailed[4] and captivating[3] [1] [LINK] Talks [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] Rust Details(my favorites) [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29617226,"author":"Orou","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Noria: Dynamic, partially-stateful data-flow for high-perf web applications","text":"The author of Noria, Jon Gjengset, gave a great talk about the system: [VIDEO] The speeds achieved are impressive but you do not get consistency.","stance":"rec"}],"s1i-dnAH9Y4":[{"hn_comment_id":14452604,"author":"coreyp_1","month":"2017-05","story_title":"The Turing Tumble lets you and your kids build real mechanical computers","text":"[VIDEO] This is an old military instructional video about fire (artillery) control computers, explaining the mechanical aspects of how they work. It's beautiful in its elegance! I have watched it on multiple occasions just for the sheer beauty of the mechanisms involved. And, yes, of course I'm a nerd!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18533594,"author":"boomlinde","month":"2018-11","story_title":"When mechanical analog computers ruled the waves (2014)","text":"The whole training film on mechanical computers, for navy mechanics I believe: [VIDEO] It illustrates the problems and solutions near perfectly, and I've watched it way too many times.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18534011,"author":"Bjartr","month":"2018-11","story_title":"When mechanical analog computers ruled the waves (2014)","text":"I did not see any link to the full training video[0] the clips in this article were taken from. I highly recommend it. It's a fascinating trip into engineering, computing, and the past. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41890981,"author":"kibwen","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Knocker uppers: Waking up the workers in industrial Britain (2016)","text":"Everyone reading this right now needs to check out this 1950s naval training video on the mechanical fire control computers of battleships: [VIDEO] For fun, before you watch, think for yourself how you'd implement addition, multiplication, squaring, etc. with only gears and other mechanisms.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7420288,"author":"NamTaf","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Gears of war: When mechanical analog computers ruled the waves","text":"Obligatory link to youtube video of a 1950s training video on the mechanical fire control computers (which I stole from HN last time this sort of topic came up): [VIDEO] edit: This video is the same footage featured throughout the article, in fact.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12365013,"author":"Sharlin","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Optical solutions to NP-Complete problems","text":"This old US Navy training film on mechanical fire control calculators (called \"computers\" back then, used to calculate firing solutions on warships) is pretty fascinating: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15114455,"author":"kqr","month":"2017-08","story_title":"One of the most complex wristwatches ever made","text":"I recommend watching this video if you're interested in learning about multivariate analysis using mechanical computers. It's very approachable and informative. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16771411,"author":"peterkelly","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]","text":"One of my favourites is this 1953 explanation of the workings of mechanical analog computers used by the US Navy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19425272,"author":"leggomylibro","month":"2019-03","story_title":"The Comdyna GP-6 analogue computer that I use daily at work","text":"Apparently the Navy also used mechanical 'computers' on old battleships to calculate firing solutions. Sailors would adjust cranks and shafts to set the input values, and those inputs were connected to cams which were machined in the shape of solutions to the equations that needed to be solved. You can watch an old training video about it from the '50s: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20242519,"author":"adrianN","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Wootz steel","text":"Mechanical computers for fire control where the standard solution until very recently. Here's a very interesting video about them: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33593289,"author":"ddulaney","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The Bendix Central Air Data Computer (CADC)","text":"If you\u2019re interested in some of the individual components, there\u2019s a great 1950\u2019s US Navy training film on the individual components of analog fire control computers here: [VIDEO] The ideas are the same, but the technology is about a decade earlier than the CADC, so everything is noticeably more primitive.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39580865,"author":"eigenvalue","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Telegram for America (1956) [video]","text":"Yes, these are awesome. There is another one of these old films about them which is a great explainer: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43864178,"author":"mrandish","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (2022)","text":"I just smile hearing the term \"Millihertz Computer\". I'd love it if building and designing mechanical and analog computers grew as a hobby/educational activity as I find them both fascinating and somehow satisfying. Also, this 1950s Naval Training film explaining the fundamentals of how mechanical fire control computers work to solve complex problems is excellent. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"s254IPHXgVA":[{"hn_comment_id":30299020,"author":"yamrzou","month":"2022-02","story_title":"France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors","text":"Jancovici is a legend. Listenening to him and reading his latest comic book ( Le monde sans fin ) made me very aware of climate issues and directly influenced my behavior. He deserves to be better known by international audiences. Here are some of his talks in english: - [LINK] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28618625,"author":"snoopx31","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Principles of Green Software Engineering","text":"You can try talks from this guy, he's a french energy and climate expert. I found that he explained very well the root of the issue between growth, energy and climate impact. Here is a talk he did for the MIT media lab in english: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32726348,"author":"alas44","month":"2022-09","story_title":"All poverty is energy poverty","text":"Interesting related presentation on what is energy and how it relates to the economy from a physical point of view [VIDEO] Note: presented in a controversial way, that's the style of this speaker","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32881367,"author":"cassepipe","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings","text":"If you can suffer the french accent, I believe Jean-Marc Jancovici is making some good points about this issue : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"s2xrarUWVRQ":[{"hn_comment_id":37976352,"author":"Eric_WVGG","month":"2023-10","story_title":"$9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN","text":"During a can't-sleep youtube session, I came across a video that explains how lithium-ion battery recycling works. I previously thought everything had to be disassembled, making recycling prohibitively impractical. Turns out that's not the case at all, they can literally just throw stuff in and crush it and at least have a moderately easy time getting the raw materials of batteries out. Made me feel a little more optimistic about things. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38309899,"author":"cogman10","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Electric vehicle battery prices are falling faster than expected","text":"> Is recycling even economical today? Very much so. I suggest watching the following video to see where we are at. [1] > Won't it become less so as new batteries become cheaper? Recycling will be the key to making batteries even cheaper. Getting already refined iron, nickel, and other chemicals will be far cheaper than trying to mine these materials fresh. Very similar to how pretty much all lead acid batteries are recycled. Mining new lead is a lot more expensive than reusing old lead. Recycling isn't always economical (see paper and plastic) but in the case of batteries, it absolutely is. The biggest problem battery recycle have is there's simply not enough batteries to recycles. Demand far outstrips supply at the moment. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"s7tWHJfhiyo":[{"hn_comment_id":9330934,"author":"polymatter","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Massive, Illicit Bust of Edward Snowden Stuck to a War Monument in Brooklyn","text":"I highly recommend the following CGP Grey video for further detail about the problems of First Past the Post voting ( [VIDEO] ). > But instead we have FPTP, and why? Its the simplest and most naive electoral system so Joe Bloggs understands it. Its just \"the person who gets the most votes wins\". The problems this system causes are ephemeral statistical problems that require more than a 10 second soundbite to explain or even to detect happening. So from Joe Bloggs point of view, you want to change his fundamental right to vote based on the fact that your intellectual busywork has concluded that the wrong person can win the election. That's how the UK failed to get Alternative Vote passed in 2011.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8972638,"author":"Quanticles","month":"2015-01","story_title":"EFF Wins Battle Over Secret Legal Opinions on Government Spying","text":"C.G.P. Grey has an entire series on why our voting system forces a two-party system. The issue isn't getting your neighbour to change their voting habits, the issue is changing the system: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10496526,"author":"npizzolato","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Lessig Ends Presidential Campaign","text":"Ideologically, from a single voter's perspective, you're right. But practically, and looking at the entire population, it's not. The first past the post voting system we use will always result in two prominent parties, and the spoiler effect certainly exists. I've always found this video a good explanation of the problems of our voting system [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11257266,"author":"nunyabuizness","month":"2016-03","story_title":"The New Mind Control \u2013 The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence","text":"Also, this CGP Grey video explains how a first-past-the-post voting system all-but-guarantees a two party system to emerge over time: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18919430,"author":"Faark","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Brexit Deal Fails in Parliament","text":"At that point you're basically discussion voting systems. Using first-past-the-post with three options, two of them being breixt, would heavily rig the vote towards remain. Improving voting systems would be great (especially looking at the US, if you ever want more than two real parties), but doing it on the back of such an important decision would be problematic at best. Here is a cutesy video for those new to FPTP voting issues: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26773396,"author":"viklove","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Ted Chiang: Fears of Technology Are Fears of Capitalism","text":"Check out this video, it helps explain why diversity of thought has little to do with the number of political parties that form in a system. [VIDEO] Dem/Rep are just two big coalitions in the US, and with first past the post voting, it's nearly impossible to have more than two parties in the long term.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27281457,"author":"reedjosh","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax","text":"I like CGP Grey on this issue. [VIDEO] I completely agree as far as voting methods are concerned and do think it would be a better system, but I still don't like giving a group of people rights to commit acts considered immoral when done by an individual.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27599826,"author":"paretoman","month":"2021-06","story_title":"What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?","text":"Okay, one more from Justin because it is a video: [LINK] Of course, everyone already knows CGP Grey's videos, right? .. wait.. nobody's posted it yet? OK, here's his whole video set: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32262040,"author":"Cxckers","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Forward: An alternative US political party","text":"And it will fail due to the current voting system. CPG Grey has a great explainer on why there will only ever be 2 political parties under the current system [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45405227,"author":"Sammi","month":"2025-09","story_title":"EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies","text":"It's because of the First Past The Post voting system that is used in the US, which means winner takes all. If you want to understand why the US seems so uniquely politically divided, then you will understand once you understand how FPTP voting works and how it inevitably leads to binary politics. Most countries have a voting system that leads to broader representation. US politics will always be black and white and divided so long as FPTP voting is used. There's a great video by cpg grey explaining FPTP: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"s86-Z-CbaHA":[{"hn_comment_id":28439875,"author":"Aicy","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Intermediate Algebra","text":"Learn set theory! Specifically ordinals (just one formal defintion of a number) This vsauce video is actually a really accurate (and entertaining!) introduction to set theory: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13623711,"author":"espeed","month":"2017-02","story_title":"The Essence of Linear Algebra [video]","text":"Other good STEM video channels/series: Dave Ackley's series \"Hyperspace Academy\", \"Robust First Computing\", and \"Artificial Life\" are well animated: [LINK] Vsause's video on \"The Banach\u2013Tarski Paradox\": [VIDEO] (mindblown) XylyXylyX channel's series on \"What is a Tensor?\" and \"What is a Manifold?\": [LINK] Socratica's series on \"Abstract Algebra\": [LINK] Mathologer's channel on all-things math: [LINK] Ben Garside's series \"Vector Spaces\": [LINK] PatrickJMT's channel on calculus, game theory...(too many to list): [LINK] Numenta's ( [LINK] ) series \"HTM School\" on the Hierarchical temporal memory ( [LINK] ) model for ANNs: [LINK] Dan Shiffman's series \"The Nature of Code: Simulating Natural Systems with Processing\": [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23732052,"author":"shezi","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Sphere Eversion","text":"I have done differential topology and geometry for a time in University. There is a lot of visualisation going on in every lecture every day, even if it is not computer visualization. Everything in difftop is drawn at some point, just so you can get an understanding of what's happening. In fact, I would say that topology and subfields are formalisations of these beautiful and silly visual ideas. One problem, however is that visualizations are by necessity simplifications, even in pure 2d cases like this one. That's not a sphere, that's a tessellation of one. Everything on a screen is differential and \"smooth\" (or actually, everything is discrete and thus not differentiable), but some things are symbols for \"not differentiable here\". Even these break down in pathological cases, singularities and such. This doesn't make the visualisation any less useful, but IMHO it can in most cases not be \"the\" reasoning, only a guide to reasoning. Besides,as the article points out, there are many non-constructive proofs that don't have any visuals. Have a look at how vsauce explains Banach-Tarsky [1] or any of 3blue1brown's excellent videos to see the edges of what's possible with visualisations. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31135510,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2022-04","story_title":"I stopped working on black hole information loss","text":"I agree that most videos in YouTube simplify the problem too much or are just wrong. My recommendations anyway: * Mathologer: \" Ramanujan: Making sense of 1+2+3+... = -1/12 and Co. \" [LINK] * Vsauce: \" The Banach\u2013Tarski Paradox \" [VIDEO] Each one is like half an hour long, but you may need to pause them and rewatch them a few times to understand the details.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33697480,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The Simple Geometry Behind Brownie Bake Offs and Equal Areas","text":"Note that the OP is about cuts that are nice, cutting polygons into smaller polygons, that could be done using a scissor. The article you linked is about using magical cuts that be non measurable, that look like magical interlocking 2D sponges. They are somewhat like the figures in the gif, but they actually more weird. It's somewhat similar to the Banach\u2013Tarski Paradox. If you like that, I recommend to watch the video by Vsause [VIDEO] that explains the Banach\u2013Tarski Paradox with some technical details, but not too many.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34484499,"author":"josephcsible","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Point of the Banach Tarski Theorem","text":"[VIDEO] nicely visualizes it. It's an infinite number of infinitely thin filaments from the center of the sphere going outward in every direction.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40797838,"author":"djvdq","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Banach\u2013Tarski Paradox","text":"I don't know if this will explain your questions, but years ago I watched this video from Vsauce about this very topic, and IIRC it was explained quite nicely: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"s8nFqwOho-s":[{"hn_comment_id":14397035,"author":"westoncb","month":"2017-05","story_title":"How a 64k intro is made","text":"I think that's a pretty nice overview you have. One thing I would clarify is about how the objects in the scene are represented mathematically: it's done using 'signed distance functions' so every object you have in the scene is actually created through one of these functions which takes a point in 3D space and returns the distance to the nearest point on the object's surface to that point\u2014which does, as you say, make the object/ray intersection testing trivial (the return value of this function is the radius of the sphere used to step along the ray). The other basic components when creating scenes to be raymarched are distance functions which combine other distance functions together. The simplest cases are just union and intersection, but it's easy to get more interesting things like smoothly blending objects together. This page is a nice reference of these 'combining' functions as well as distance functions for geometric primitives: [LINK] I think that combining power is one of the main reasons to use raymarching/distance functions: building procedural content this way is faaar easier than trying to knit triangle meshes together. Additionally, if anyone wants to go a little further on the subject of building up sophisticated content by raymarching distance functions, this is an excellent talk on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15648924,"author":"Impossible","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Making WebGL Dance: How, Where, and What to Draw (2013)","text":"Hg ( [LINK] ) is a great resource. I'm not a fan of the non-commercial license. The intro on the top of the site has a lot of great links to resources outside of iq, including the pouet.net thread on Raymarching, John Hart's original sphere tracing paper, and enhanced sphere tracing, as well as the author's original talk from NVScene 2015 ( [VIDEO] ). Definitely check out all of these resources. If you're more interested in signed distance fields outside of the shadertoy\\demo scene use cases there are a lot of interesting resources out there written by people using them in more complex contexts. Alex Evans (Media Molecule) Dreams talk is awesome. You can see the talk here ( [LINK] ) and read the slides here ( [LINK] ). [LINK] covers how to generate meshes. With modern hardware with ballot\\shuffle there are probably more efficient ways to do this in a compute shader now, but the talk is still good. Epic games siggraph presentation ( [LINK] ) is a good explanation of how UE4 uses signed distance fields for ambient occlusion and shadows. Q-Games presentation ( [LINK] ) on how the now defunct Game Tomorrow Children uses signed distance fields for dynamic world space reflections. Voxel Quest ( [LINK] ), a \"failed\" kickstarter project, has some good write ups of how he's built the engine over the years as well as source code. Unbound.io gave a talk at GTC 2017 ( [LINK] ) that goes into some detail on their signed distance field VR sculpting app. There are of course more resources t","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16458543,"author":"teamhappy","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Planet Shadertoy","text":"Here's a presentation from one of the mercury guys explaining how to do that kind of thing: [VIDEO] Also, elevated from RGBA should probably be mentioned since iq ( [LINK] ) is the guy behind Shadertoy. (Also because it's pretty.) [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"s9aCwCKgkLo":[{"hn_comment_id":35292486,"author":"follower","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Facebook is aggressively going after LLaMA repos with DMCA's","text":"For people interested in this topic, the \"People Make Games\" channel on YouTube have a couple of related videos with original research/interviews: * \"How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos\": < [LINK] > * \"Working at Valve: 'A Fearless Adventure' or 'Lord of the Flies'?\": < [VIDEO] >","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35578480,"author":"asmor","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful","text":"They care about whatever Valve employees are interested in / is perceived as creating most value (not always the same as creating most value). Valve has a system of weighted peer feedback (impacting salary and sometimes continued employment) that encourages follow-the-leader mentality despite their supposedly open culture. People Make Games made an enlightening documentary on the Valve model and where it fails: [VIDEO] Though if you need an example: Steam still doesn't have M1 binaries. Steam uses about 15 variants of UI framework, and some of it simply doesn't work on some platforms. Steam also took record time shipping an x86_64 (over x86) binary back in the day. Everything that's not the shiny current thing receives life support at most.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41329576,"author":"ARandumGuy","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Valve New Employee Handbook (2012) [pdf]","text":"If you want some more insight into what working at Valve is actually like, People Make Games released a great video last year [1] where they talked to a bunch of current and former employees. While there are people who can thrive at Valve, their structure doesn't set people up for success. Valve has a many pseudo-managers, people who have a lot of influence at the company, but aren't designated as such. Doing well at Valve often requires trying to figure out what sort of things these people want, which they often don't make clear. Getting meaningful feedback is difficult, with employees often having little idea on what they need to do differently to improve things. It really seems like Valve is kind of a mess internally, and they probably wouldn't still be around if it wasn't for the enormous success of Steam. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"s9fByRmAHgU":[{"hn_comment_id":4260269,"author":"locusm","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Whistleblower Binney says the NSA has dossiers on nearly every US citizen","text":"I live in the Southern Hemisphere and like most 40 something year olds I follow whats happening in the States from a distance. I've been reading and watching a fair bit of Jacob Appelbaum and reading Glenn Greenwald's posts which seem to be fair and well written. Democracy Now also does some interesting interviews with Jacob and William Binney. Some stuff I recommend to have a look at... in no particular order. Challenging the Surveillance State - Pt. 1 to Pt.4 [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Jacob Appelbaum (Part 1 & 2) Digital Anti-Repression Workshop - April 26 2012 [LINK] [VIDEO] Glenn's Salon Posts [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6043497,"author":"gnosis","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Poll: Do you encrypt your email?","text":"You might find it interesting/useful to read about: steganography[1], anonymous remailers[2] (particularly the Mixminion[3] type), the Paranoid Security Guide[4] (which was on HN today[5]), and a nice talk on privacy and anonymity options[6][7] There were also a couple of lists of darknets on HN recently, but I can't find them right now. [1] - [LINK] [2] - [LINK] [3] - [LINK] [4] - [LINK] [5] - [LINK] [6] - Part 1 - [LINK] [7] - Part 2 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13455334,"author":"ergot","month":"2017-01","story_title":"I Had My Electronics Seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection","text":"Worth listening to Jake Appelbaum's 'digital anti repression workshop' [1]. In this he explains why he takes the hard-drive out of his laptop and just uses a TailsOS thumb-drive for his computing. It would be actually hilarious when staff ask to peruse the contents of your computer for contraband, only to discover the laptop doesn't have a hard-drive. [1]: part 1 [LINK] [#]: part 2 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sBzRwzY7G-k":[{"hn_comment_id":12759270,"author":"rayalez","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How does a beginner get started with web development in 2016?","text":"Watch this brilliant video, I think the author nailed it: [VIDEO] tl;dr: - Learn Node, Django, or Ruby if you want to do the backend(personally, I HIGHLY recommend Django. It's extremely awesome and is the perfect way to start in my opinion). - Learn HTML/CSS/JS on the front end, then Sass and jQuery, then, if you want to be an advanced frontend developer - Webpack, React, and Redux. I think this is the optimal way to go right now.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13223612,"author":"dba7dba","month":"2016-12","story_title":"At the age of 38, am I too late to change career to front end dev work?","text":"Few random thoughts as I've gone (and am still going) through same experience. 1. Zed Shaw of the \"Learn Python the Hard Way\" said programmers are dime a dozen. What's really valuable is a programmer who has experience from another domain such as history, engineering, medicine etc (and accounting in your case). I cannot recall exactly where he said it but I remember reading it and chuckling to myself. 2. Are you sure you want front-end dev work? Why not back-end? Exactly what skills are in demand? I recommend you watch this video on state of tools available in web dev including front-end, back-end, and DevOps as of 2016. [VIDEO] I should warn that the shelf life of front-web dev skills seems to be much shorter than IT. In fact here's a list of tech skills, ordered with longest to shortest shelf life IMHO. Not sure about DevOps but my feeling is it has longer shelf life than programming... IT > DevOps > Back-end > Front-end Going into IT years ago, I knew I needed to keep learning new stuff to stay relevant. I slacked off a bit (due to family situation) and paid the price. With dev work, you need to spend even more time to learn new stuff to stay relevant. Often, you will have to spend your personal time to do so. 3. You should keep your day job as you try to break into coding. You don't want financial pressure to stress you out. And that means you will have to squeeze out every available hour of your life and devote it to studying/practicing. That means no weekend activities,","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13478787,"author":"amingilani","month":"2017-01","story_title":"The Road to Learning Web Development 2016/2017 Edition","text":"OP Here, I found this as part of the video 2016/2017 MUST-KNOW WEB DEVELOPMENT TECH [1] and thought this was a really neat thing to share. Check out other videos by LearnCode.academy. That's how I got started with React. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sCZJblyT_XM":[{"hn_comment_id":11567097,"author":"agumonkey","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Programming blogs","text":"From the same person: - The unix chainsaw, how to use tiny tools[1] as lever upon themselves. No absurd wit as in wat. Simply brilliant. [VIDEO] - Also listed above the wat page, [LINK] : boundaries, a whole new world. More abstract wishful thinking. Still brilliant.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19161505,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Problem solving with Unix commands","text":"Gary Bernhardt[1] gave a great talk about practical problem solving with the unix shell: \"The Unix Chainsaw\"[2]. \"Half-assed is OK when you only need half of an ass.\" In the talk, he gives several demonstrations a key aspect of why unix pipelines are so practically useful: you build them interactively . A complicated 4 line pipeline started as a single command that was gradually refined into something that actually solves a complicated problem. This talk demonstrates the part that isn't included in the the usual tutorials or \"cool 1-line command\" lists: the cycle of \"Try something. Hit up to get the command back. Make one iterative change and try again.\" [1] You might know him from his other hilarious talks like \"The Birth & Death of JavaScript\" or \"Wat\". [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"sD0NjbwqlYw":[{"hn_comment_id":17105312,"author":"laurilove","month":"2018-05","story_title":"An Interesting Pattern in the Prime Numbers: Parallax Compression","text":"Appropriate juncture to repost this: [VIDEO] \"Visualizing the Riemann zeta function and analytic continuation\" (Watch the last 30s or so if nothing else. You'll not regret it.) There is a kind of 'real' Ural spiral [or really a kind of chaotically decaying 'orbit'] related dynamic that gives the prime numbers (assuming the RH.) Conceivable that OP's pattern might have some relation to this dynamic, and fun pondering to boot.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25645506,"author":"st1x7","month":"2021-01","story_title":"How I learned to love and fear the Riemann Hypothesis","text":"I don't think it comes close to 3blue1brown's video on the same topic - [VIDEO] Still nice of the video in the original post to give a bit more of a historical context, instead of focusing entirely on the mathematics. It could have done without the building analogy around the beginning though, that didn't come up later and was just distracting.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13344456,"author":"vq","month":"2017-01","story_title":"The Riemann Hypothesis, explained","text":"3Blue1Brown recently did a video on the Riemann zeta function: [VIDEO] It's not as in depth but it has some helpful visualisations that I've never seen elsewhere.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17414737,"author":"denzil_correa","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Mathematician-M.D. claims to have solved the 110-year-old Lindel\u00f6f hypothesis","text":"3B1B has a nice visualization of \"Riemann zeta function and analytic continuation\" which might help in further understanding of this proof. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25654419,"author":"slavik81","month":"2021-01","story_title":"How I learned to love and fear the Riemann Hypothesis","text":"That was a fantastic video. I was left wondering a bit about the difference between the Riemann Zeta function and the original Zeta function, but I found this 3Blue1Brown video which explains exactly that: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37357944,"author":"jstx1","month":"2023-09","story_title":"A Duodecade of Numberphile","text":"> The 1+2+3+4+... = -1/12 video still seems a bit of a cheat, though! Because in that video they do invalid operations. Compare it to how 3blue1brown handles this - [VIDEO] - the video is on the Riemann zeta function and my timestamp is on his comment about -1/12 at the end. But trying to explain something in a nuanced way doesn't get the same views as dumbing it down and coming up with a clickbait title (not that 3blue1brown is struggling for views). I understand that the two channels have somewhat different objectves and approaches but in this case one of them strikes me as much better. The top comment under the 3blue1brown video addresses this too - you don't need to additionally mystify math.","stance":"rec"}],"sFrVdoOhu1Q":[{"hn_comment_id":22892265,"author":"paypalcust83","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Hand Scraping a Truly Flat Plane (1908) [pdf]","text":"It's interesting to get more precise and accurate machines out of the ones came before. These days, if you want to get milling and grinding down to 1 micron without lapping using only your own expertise and some parts from eBay (air bearings and precision-ground slabs): [VIDEO] The creator (Dan Gelbart) demonstrates nitrogen-tight parts without bearings, and claims zero wear or lubrication needs. #AvEclub","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40193317,"author":"hi-v-rocknroll","month":"2024-04","story_title":"My Homemade Metal Lathe Project","text":"If you enjoy absurd precision and accuracy, have a look at Dan Gelbart's older videos where he fabricobbles together a custom milling machine and grinder with air bearings that can work parts down to 1 micron. No lapping needed. [VIDEO] PS: More power to the professors who go into business and reach \"F everyone money\". [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"sG9UMMq2dz4":[{"hn_comment_id":12349719,"author":"rdtsc","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Trollala \u2013 Fight patent trolls by banding together confidentially","text":"This is great. Would like to see more of these kinds of efforts. Just watched The Patent Scam video by Austin Meyer (developer of X-Plane flight sim who was sued by patent trolls). [VIDEO] That kind of stuff makes my blood boil.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13973653,"author":"clamprecht","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Supreme Court Considers Why Patent Trolls Favor Texas Courts","text":"This video from Austin Meyer (creator of X-Plane) is pretty eye-opening: [VIDEO] Apparently there are TWO judges in the district, BOTH of whose own sons are lawyers in the same district. And BOTH sons handle a lot of the patent litigation, in front of their own fathers, the judges. Pretty incredible. Watch the video starting at about 5 minutes to see it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12620362,"author":"roflchoppa","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Apple loses patent retrial to the litigious VirnetX, ordered to pay $300M","text":"So there is a judge out there, and his son is a practicing lawyer who reps. PT and PT victims. Basically legal racketeering. It would be interesting to see emails dumped from these guys, and how much corruption is taking place. [VIDEO] its like 5 min in.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14394322,"author":"dangerlibrary","month":"2017-05","story_title":"U.S. top court tightens patent suit rules in blow to \u2018patent trolls\u2019","text":"For anyone looking for an ~20 minute intro to why this is a big deal and the impact it has on small tech companies: [VIDEO] tl;dw: There are some over-broad patents on usage of very common technologies ( using wifi or selling on the google play store are two egregious examples) that are being used as a bludgeon against small and medium sized firms that can't afford to defend themselves. It costs about $3 million to defend against such a suit, and the Eastern district is known for refusing to force plaintiffs to pay defendant's attorney's fees even if the suit is ultimately dropped.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19239523,"author":"rixrax","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Apple to Close Stores in Eastern District of Texas to Fight Patent Trolls","text":"URL: [VIDEO] (Austin Myers) URL: [LINK] (John Olivier) Above two YouTube videos I\u2019ve been passing around in regard to sometimes peculiar nature of patents law in US and in particular that of eastern district of TX.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27785581,"author":"zubspace","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Do patents kill innovation? The US patent office is asking","text":"Just watched this video [1] by someone who got sued because his \"android app uses a license server\". Those patent troll shell companies sue one victim after another and forward the incoming money to other companies. So there's no use in going after them directly. The victim can negotiate better terms if he signs a non-disclosure agreement. The patent trolls are protected by politicians, judges and lawyers. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sGG-A80Tl5g":[{"hn_comment_id":26968019,"author":"AI_Overlord_","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Epicurious Will No Longer Publish Beef Recipes","text":"I was much more concerned about my beef consumption before watching this WIL video. It put things in perspective for me. The efficiency of beef production in each country, how water and land use calculations are done, equivalent nutritional value compared to other crops was very interesting. It doesn't negate the moral problems with factory farming, but that wasn't the intent of the video. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27031840,"author":"iptpus","month":"2021-05","story_title":"The Brazilian Amazon has 'flipped' to become major producer of greenhouse gasses","text":"This video changed my mind in the opposite direction. [VIDEO] Stopping meat consumption would make a negligible difference in emissions. It's more valuable to focus on minimizing food waste instead.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26965704,"author":"ibeckermayer","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Millions of Groundwater Wells Could Run Dry","text":"Misleading -- 94% of the water that's \"used\" to produce beef is just rainwater, see here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27071221,"author":"hourislate","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Beyond Meat\u2019s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)","text":">90% less greenhouse emissions, 99% less water, and 93% less land This was a great video concerning those claims above.... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27369740,"author":"JohnWhigham","month":"2021-06","story_title":"G7 nations committing billions more to fossil fuel than green energy","text":"YT channel What I've Learned goes in-depth into inflated carbon footprints like these and can explain it more concise than I can. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28119896,"author":"emacsen","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'","text":"> taking space that we now use for growing animal feed There was a recent Youtube video that explained how this isn't quite accurate: [VIDEO] I'll save you the time (though you should watch it). 1. Much of the animal feed comes from agricultural byproducts. As an example, we eat corn on the cob, but much of the corn stalk is inedible to humans, but can be made into products for animals. 2. Much of the land used for animals is not suitable for growing crops. Some is, but it's not a 1:1 swapability factor.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28714341,"author":"spydr","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions","text":"I disagree with this article and frustrated with those who try to push this narrative Here\u2019s a 20 min video to show you why [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29128656,"author":"taejavu","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Which type of plant-based milk is best?","text":"Not true, live stock feed is mostly the husks and stalks of the plants that are inedible to humans, which if it weren't for livestock, would be discarded as waste. See this video for some more common misconceptions, if you're interested: [VIDEO] Every plot of land used to grow crop represents countless animals that used to live there, and were wiped out by the farmer. Farmers constantly battle against pests, which too are animals, just trying to live. Vultures are often seen following combine harvesters, to prey on the corpses of field mice and other small mammals that get caught in the blades. Zero harm is a myth.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30039345,"author":"cf141q5325","month":"2022-01","story_title":"\u2018Farms are failing\u2019 as fertilizer prices drive up cost of food","text":"Thats a simplification for a feel good narrative. Your source lists all land that grows anything but forest as agriculture land. Yet on large parts of those areas you cant do anything but pastures. Also, much of the cow feed isnt calories humans can process. Think byproducts of soy production. The youtube channel \"What I've Learned\" has a great video on it. [VIDEO] What they dont mention is the large part livestock (especially cows an chicken) will have to play in producing soil from the dirt left behind after industrial agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is the term here, with rotating cows and chickens on degraded dirt patches to build top soil. All of this of course doesnt take away from the madness that is industrial meat production. But nothing has ever been solved by oversimplified narratives and action-ism.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33778908,"author":"jokethrowaway","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says","text":"I think you're overestimating that, probably because of vegan propaganda. Eg. A lot of the water you use for animals turns into milk or pee (or sweat?), and goes back to the cycle of water. I don't like posting videos but this one goes through several points: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sI1C9DyIi_8":[{"hn_comment_id":12639698,"author":"shahar2k","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"[VIDEO] \"the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function\" not a high tech talk, or particularly technically complex, but it shows a common blindspot in a way that is both clear, enlightening and frightening.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36821392,"author":"theossuary","month":"2023-07","story_title":"There\u2019s a heatwave in the sea and scientists are worried","text":"Your point reminds me of my favorite guest lecture I've ever seen: [VIDEO] About 2/3rds through makes the same point you do.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36841198,"author":"myshpa","month":"2023-07","story_title":"How, Mathematically, We\u2019re Fucked: Exponential growth on a finite planet","text":"> Burn it all down and start over We won't be the ones doing that. > We're going to have to figure this sustainability thing out though It may be already late. I wish it wasn't so. I think we could have chance at repairing it ... if only we would do what's necessary. But we're not doing what's necessary, we never started even discussing it, and I'm starting to doubt that we'll ever do. We're talking only about climate change, but that's only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. Even people @ hacker news mostly don't have a clue. > we can't just ignore the problems We've been ignoring them for 50-70 years. The limits to growth / club of Rome was in 1972? So far ... we did nothing but ignored the problems. We may cross the 1.5C threshold in 5 years. Not in 2050 as previously expected, but in 5 years. And we're still pursuing economic growth. Have you noticed any evidence to the contrary lately? > it's going to be a big challenge, and things may get ugly I recommend few videos for you. I must warn you ... it may hamper your ability to enjoy parties. Collapse: The Only Realistic Scenario - Arthur Keller [LINK] How to Enjoy the End of the World - Dr. B. Sidney Smith [LINK] Arithmetic, Population and Energy - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett [VIDEO] Why Societies Collapse And What it Means for Us - Joseph A. Tainter [LINK] Revealing the Naked Emperor \u2013 Paris, 2\u00b0 & Carbon Budgets - Kevin Anderson [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"sI5Ftm1-jik":[{"hn_comment_id":27258070,"author":"lazyweb","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Teardown of a PC Power Supply","text":"> The 60-Hertz AC (alternating current) from the wall oscillates 60 times a second, but the power supply needs steady DC (direct current) that flows in one direction. The full-bridge rectifier [1] below converts the AC to DC. [1] [VIDEO] I just knew which video is linked without clicking. ElectroBOOM is a treasure.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11476140,"author":"jklp","month":"2016-04","story_title":"USB power supply puts 220 Mains power out on USB jack","text":"Not sure if HN knows about Mehdi Sadaghdar's (aka ElectroBOOM's) YouTube channel, which is somewhat similar - but takes a more lighthearted view on electronics. E.g. Compare Big Clive's mention of a full bridge rectifier in the video vs Mehdi's YouTube video of the same thing :) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12222308,"author":"pivo","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Macbook charger teardown: Complexity inside Apple's power adapter (2015)","text":"The linked video of how bridge rectifier works is enlightening, funny and terrifying. Makes me glad I'm a software developer and not an electrical engineer so I'm in no danger of killing myself if I miscalculate. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sIi_QS1tdFM":[{"hn_comment_id":27551934,"author":"clan","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Multiple local news stations say the same thing verbatim [video]","text":"There is a recent Last Week Tonight covering sponsored content on local news stations which is worth a watch as well. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29487466,"author":"mdasen","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Amazon\u2019s search results are full of ads \u2018unlawfully deceiving\u2019 consumers","text":"There's THE TRUTH and the truth ( [LINK] if you haven't seen that Simpsons episode). Let's say that I do an hour-long infomercial on a product and I try and make the infomercial look as much like content as I can. In fact, it's not just about the product. We talk about the news and weather as well. You watch 30 minutes of it and don't notice that at the end it says that it was sponsored. I clearly said it was sponsored. Just because you stopped watching before then isn't my fault, right? John Oliver did a great segment on this on sponsored content on local news: [VIDEO] Google's search results used to use a different background color and borders to distinguish ads from organic results. Now they simply put \"Ad\" near the paid result. That makes it harder to detect what is an ad and what isn't an ad. I'm not saying that Google is being deceitful. However, they're certainly trying to make the fact that it's an ad less noticeable. If I put photoshopped mockups of a product on a page and then note in the description that they're not actually photos of the product, is that deceitful? That's certainly getting closer to the line (and I'd say crossing it) given extra distance. Amazon has made choices to make the \"sponsored\" tag less noticeable. It's a light gray and not bold so that it blends in against the background while your eye is drawn to the much larger 45% larger font-size and bold text next to it. Amazon could have chosen to make the \"sponsored\" tag larger, with better contras","stance":"rec"}],"sJFnWZH5FXc":[{"hn_comment_id":32260881,"author":"h3mb3","month":"2022-07","story_title":"The man who made the \u201cworst\u201d video game in history (2019)","text":"Keeping in mind how ridiculously primitive and cumbersome Atari 2600 was to program on, I think it's actually remarkable how functional E.T. is (adding in the time pressure and all). I never got around to read Racing the Beam [1] but Retro Game Mechanics Explained on YouTube has a good demonstration [2] on how the graphics programming seemed like a nightmare compared to later computers and game consoles. Just positioning things on screen required calculating machine cycles of other preceeding instructions. Refactoring must've been fun. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34384232,"author":"ant6n","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Atari 2600 Hardware Design: Making Something Out of (Almost) Nothing","text":"Here\u2019s a detailed video by retro game mechanics that shows how the logo graphics of the infamous E.T. game is rendered: [VIDEO] It seems incredible, very difficult. And remember, back then cartridges only had 8KB of memory. This means even more hacks are required, if your game needs more than a few levels. Theres a recurring hn post how jungle hunt encoded levels in a single byte (bitfield), then used some sort of sequence generator to allow going back and forth among the 255 levels.","stance":"rec"}],"sJj9y4t9UnU":[{"hn_comment_id":30995891,"author":"paganel","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Eduard Artemyev, Soviet and Russian composer of electronic music and film scores","text":"Just stumbled on his Siberiade theme [1] recently, I hadn't listened to it in a couple of years, it hit me back hard how great this music is, even genius-like, I would say. There's a slightly re-mastered version by PPK [2] that manages to \"increase\" that genius a little. Amazing stuff. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1871559,"author":"hackermom","month":"2010-11","story_title":"Soviet Image Editing Tool from 1987","text":"[VIDEO] It's Eduard Artemyev, by many considered \"the Russian Vangelis\". His work has been truly defining for a handful of Russian sci-fi masterpieces.","stance":"rec"}],"sK5i-N34im8":[{"hn_comment_id":16008786,"author":"dominotw","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Demystifying container runtimes","text":"I watched this talk couple of years ago that made docker/containers finally click for me. Cgroups, namespaces, and beyond: what are containers made from? - J\u00e9r\u00f4me Petazzoni, [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36490301,"author":"dmpanch","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Build Your Own Docker with Linux Namespaces, Cgroups, and Chroot","text":"This topic is perfectly covered in a presentation by J\u00e9r\u00f4me Petazzoni from Dockercon 2015, a Docker developer, on how containerization works. After watching the video, I began to clearly understand that this is not virtualization at all, as many at first imagine. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15825714,"author":"antoncohen","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Good resources on learning how docker works under the hood?","text":"J\u00e9r\u00f4me Petazzoni's talk on cgroups, namespaces, etc. I think he has given the talk a bunch of times, I saw it in person once, here is a video I found: [VIDEO] He goes into cgroups, namespaces, etc. Then does a demo where is manually does what docker does, like untars an image, creates namespaces, creates the networking.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16735257,"author":"hardwaresofton","month":"2018-04","story_title":"A Workshop on Linux Containers: Rebuild Docker from Scratch","text":"In the same vein: Building a container from scratch in Go (Liz Rice) @ Container Camp 2016 -> [LINK] What's a container really let's write one in go from sctach (Liz Rice) @ Golang UK Conference -> [LINK] Cgroups, Namespaces and beyond: What are containers made from (Jerome Petazzoni) @ DockerCon 2015 - [VIDEO] Building Containers in Pure Bash and C (Jessica Frazelle) @ ContainerSummit 2016: [LINK] First two are basically the same talk, but it doesn't hurt to hear the same ideas more than once.","stance":"rec"}],"sKOk4Y4inVY":[{"hn_comment_id":9239473,"author":"belorn","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter","text":"When it comes to well formulated talks about free software, none seems to beat those from Stallman's lawyer, Eben Moglen. He knows very well how to speak to a crowd, and tends to use local references and languages to explain concepts (professor of law and history of law). Stallman has excellent skills in seeing problems in software before they get noticed by everyone else, but when I want to introduce someone to the philosophy of free software I would rather put on a talk like Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media from 2012 or the now 11 year old talk Die Gedanken Sind Frei from 2004. 1: [VIDEO] 2: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4817219,"author":"brabram","month":"2012-11","story_title":"Megaupload Assisted FBI vs NinjaVideo, But Evidence Then Used Against Them","text":"Just take a look at Eben Moglen[0], he is a very brilliant speaker and a brilliant man in general. Or J\u00e9r\u00e9mie Zimmermann[1] for the European side. Or Benjamin Bayart for the French side. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] (in french)","stance":"rec"}],"sKudSeqHSJk":[{"hn_comment_id":33564888,"author":"ZeroGravitas","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The world is run by people no smarter than you","text":"A recent video on co-op and social housing, that makes simlar points, with the somewhat clickbaity title of: The Non-capitalist Solution to the Housing Crisis [VIDEO] The video seems to switch to \"non-market\" as a description.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33686341,"author":"layoric","month":"2022-11","story_title":"I hate living in my tiny house (2019)","text":"That might work for some but moving away from common infrastructure creates other problems. I found this video [0] a decent dive into issues and possible long term solutions. None quick or easy but I think are most likely to succeed in a lot of places. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36067189,"author":"readonthegoapp","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Imagine a Renters' Utopia. It Might Look Like Vienna.","text":"i watched a couple youtubes over the past few months on this -- if you supply at least some public housing, it can have an outsized ability to keep rents down: Bloomberg Originals: Vienna's Radical Idea? Affordable Housing For All [LINK] About Here: The Non-capitalist Solution to the Housing Crisis (indy urban planning-types out of Vancouver, BC) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37830188,"author":"ImPleadThe5th","month":"2023-10","story_title":"The Rent Is Too Damn Algorithmic","text":"Making landlords compete with low-cost government subsidized housing. Vienna[0] is a fantastic model. Though I think implementing this in the US has a lot of stigma and challenges to overcome (ie, how can the government mass purchase apartments/land to create subsidized housing). Also, cooperative housing. A group of people buy a property with a Loan, and the cost of the loan + management is payed by all people in the apartment. Eventually, the loan is payed off and the cost of rent is lowered to cover only maintenance/mangement. This also has to come with restrictions about ownership and renting out the apartment. Because its ultimately a collective, its unfortunately totally possible there will be biases at play with these kinds of housing setups (ie, biases against allowing POC to move in, disagreements on how common space can be used). And lastly, fast public transit to expand the area its possible to live by people who can't afford cars. I found this youtube video[1] about the Vancouver housing situation interesting. Maybe a bit over-simiplified, but gives you an idea of some possible solutions. I know these aren't silver-bullet solutions. But I think it helps think of this in a different way then just a supply/demand problem. Its also a policy and profiteering problem. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sNhhvQGsMEc":[{"hn_comment_id":17561690,"author":"thomk","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Dissolving the Fermi Paradox","text":"I know everything I know about the Fermi Paradox from this video (and part 2): [VIDEO] That YouTube channel is awesome by the way. Say goodbye to the rest of your afternoon!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14396666,"author":"hashhar","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Fermi's Paradox [audio]","text":"I find the pair of videos by Kurzgesagt on YouTube to be much more appealing for me. Link for people interested: 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"sPFmKu2S5XY":[{"hn_comment_id":24713025,"author":"sosodev","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How to deal with ADHD on your own? (If you have to)","text":"ADHD teens tend to be rather oppositional. Personally, I always had a really hard time accepting unsolicited advice from anybody and that includes loved ones. The best thing somebody with ADHD can do is externalize everything they want/need to remember. Preferably in something centralized and always accessible like a notebook or planner app. Then make it a routine to read through and take care of the stuff in it daily. [VIDEO] Watching that video helped me put my behaviors in perspective and really understand how my brain works. He even says in the video that \u201cchaining a notebook to yourself\u201d is the best thing you can do if you have ADHD. If your son believes that he has ADHD that video, or others like it, might help him understand what that means and he\u2019ll probably start to draw the correct conclusions. I wish you and your son nothing but the best. Growing up with undiagnosed ADHD was both the best and worst experience of my life. The highs are high and lows are so unfortunately low.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31391171,"author":"estevaoam","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Senior Engineers with ADHD, any mental/physical structures for work?","text":"I was diagnosed with somewhat severe ADHD, hyperactive and attention subtype. I have few tips to share: 1. Find your medication. After I found mine with the correct dosage, my life improved ten fold. Our dopamine system is wired differently and medication is the basis of treatment to cope with it. 2. Externalize everything: thoughts, events, planning, even your life\u2019s values if you feel like it. Write it all down and build the discipline to keep those updated. Use todo-lists for everything. The poor executive functions we experience can be compensated by externalizing everything, so always organize your thoughts in a notepad. I use NotePlan mac/iOS app and highly recommend to check it out. 3. A lesser commonly known part of being ADHD is that it can also cause emotional unbalance. We can get overwhelmed, overexcited and overanxious easily. Keep awareness of your emotions. Again, write them down. 4. SLOW DOWN. Especially if you are also hyperactive. Try to think and react more slowly to the world around you. Give time for things to sink in your head before taking action. 5. Last but not least: be kind to yourself. You can\u2019t always do everything perfectly. Mistakes are going to happen and that\u2019s normal for everyone. Focus on improving yourself a little everyday and enjoy the present. If you haven\u2019t seen this video yet, it explains better and in much more detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33493821,"author":"sadhd","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Launch HN: Shimmer (YC S21) \u2013 ADHD coaching for adults","text":"Have you watched Dr. Russell Barkleys series? [VIDEO] . I have actually done professional research into executive function and working memory--not a PhD but have one masters and nearly through another. His explanation lines up with the physiological psychology that I have learned.","stance":"rec"}],"sPhpelUfu8Q":[{"hn_comment_id":25273675,"author":"nightowl_games","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best advanced computer science courses online?","text":"Hey. Check out Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente's talks om value oriented design. He worked on Ableton which is a large application. He specifically speaks to Undo. He describes a much better pattern than the Command Pattern. He also released his source for Value Oriented Data structures Juan Pedro is a next level programmer who I think has pushed the craft forward through his work on bringing Value Oriented Design into the C++ world. Talk I [VIDEO] Talk II [LINK] Data Structures: [LINK] Application Structure: [LINK] Text Editor: [LINK] Good luck.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20604656,"author":"proverbialbunny","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Build Your Own Text Editor","text":"In case anyone hasn't seen it this CppCon talk [VIDEO] talks about rrb-trees and how they're a great data structure for writing a text editor that can handle unlimited sized documents without locking up, and allows for editing while saving and opening, and an easy way to support an undo command. Most text editors today do not support such functionality. With lockless data structures like an rrb-tree it becomes easy. It really is an ideal way to do write a text editor.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20979647,"author":"proverbialbunny","month":"2019-09","story_title":"You're doing it wrong: B-heap 10x faster than binary heap (2010)","text":"Not a benchmark but rrb-trees are pretty neat. They give an effective O(1) for all operations. Modern languages like Scala's Vector type is an rrb-tree under the hood: [LINK] For more fun: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23638688,"author":"proverbialbunny","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Alex: ML-enhanced range index, similar in functionality to a B+ Tree","text":"Mmm tasty. If anyone wants a backstory building up to this data structure checkout this talk: [VIDEO] He builds an rrb-tree which uses the same underlying concepts ALEX uses, just without the ML-enhancement.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28405730,"author":"bertmuthalaly","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Joker: A small interpreted dialect of Clojure written in Go","text":"Immer [0][1] seems like a really serious attempt at bringing high-quality persistent data structures to C++. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36321573,"author":"modernerd","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Text Editor Data Structures","text":"You might be interested in ewig and immer by Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente: [LINK] [LINK] See the author instantly opening a ~1GB text file with async loading, paging through, copying/pasting, and undoing/redoing in their prototype \u201cewig\u201d text editor about 27 minutes into their talk here: [VIDEO] It\u2019s backed by a \u201cvector of vectors\u201d data structure called a relaxed radix balanced tree: [LINK] That original paper has seen lots of attention and attempts at performance improvements, such as: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45439060,"author":"zelphirkalt","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Type Theory and Functional Programming (1999) [pdf]","text":"> [...] which is a must for anything performance oriented. But that's also not really true. Using functional data structures it is possible to write highly performant software. Check out for example \"CppCon 2017: Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente - Postmodern immutable data structures\"[1], an impressive talk, in which someone shows their developed editor that can edit huge text files without lag faster than any mainstream editor today. This is enabled by functional data structures. Usage of functional data structures throughout a project also ensures, that parts can be trivially parallelized, which is not true for traditional algorithms, and therefore can easily scale with number of CPUs available. For more on that subject, you might want to watch a few Joe Armstrong talks. Rust achieves type safety by introducing more language concepts like ownership, borrowing, and lifetimes, to formalize, who has access when and how. It also creates things as immutable by default, unless you make use of `mut`. Unfortunately, Rust's philosophy is shared memory and making shared memory access safe, rather than message passing, which is at odds with FP. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sSfejgwbDQ8":[{"hn_comment_id":29903885,"author":"khazhoux","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt","text":"Jon Stewart's take is brilliant: [VIDEO] > \"The name of the disease is printed on the lab's business cards!!\" But the reason the Left in the US couldn't even consider Wuhan as the source, is because the Right (well, Trump himself) wanted to say that because it was \" Chi na's fault\", that his Administration bore no responsibility for dealing with it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34828238,"author":"khazhoux","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Controversial experiments that could make bird flu more risky to resume (2019)","text":"Yes, somehow it is considered racist and sinophobic to ask if the coronavirus outbreak that originated in Wuhan, might possibly be related to the coronavirus research center in Wuhan. Jon Stewart says it best: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34949457,"author":"khazhoux","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Agency Now Says","text":"Time once again to post Jon Stewart: [VIDEO] I still don't understand how in 2020 people were branded as racist sinophobes for saying that the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, probably originated from the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan . I know suspicion isn't fact, but that should have always been the leading theory to be disproved. Instead, IIRC Twitter and FB were flagging any post that said \"lab leak.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35112485,"author":"cypherg","month":"2023-03","story_title":"I Asked Leading Covid Scientists, Off the Record, About the Lab Leak Theory","text":"Seems rather insane to me to \"not care\" about the origins if we all intend on preventing this in the future. Each origin hypothesis has vastly different implications - incredibly vast. I'm shocked that this article didn't discuss the Biosaftey Level of the WIV or the many, many, MANY, other lab leaks from labs with even stricter BSL. The ever avuncular Jon Stuart said it well two years ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sTJ7AzBIJoI":[{"hn_comment_id":3102991,"author":"samirageb","month":"2011-10","story_title":"I quit my job last March and it was a bad idea.","text":"I never really post on HN (even though I should) and saw this post and had to respond. First, if you ARE VERY SERIOUS about suicide, please seek help as others have mentioned. I suspect you're simply very sad and venting, but please don't do anything rash. Next, please listen to/watch this: [VIDEO] And then this: [LINK] Perspective is the first thing you lose when you're depressed and when you're under 25, it's so easy to do. Don't put so much pressure on yourself, you took some chances, it didn't work out, life is far from over. Let me say I envy you. That's right, ENVY. You've learned at 20, what I learned at 31. You are VERY ahead of the game, and have SOOO many options because you have youth on your side and the pain today will guarantee your 20s are more productive & fruitful than they would have been had you not gone through this experience. The most important thing you can do at this time is seek advice from someone you trust and respect, and begin taking baby steps. Don't try to tackle your whole life at once, just 1-step at a time. Surround yourself with supportive people, and strip the negativity out of your life at this time. Friends that kick you when you're down are either not real, or immature. They are useless to you at this time in your life, so stay away from them. Be honest with your parents, and tell them you need their emotional support to help you through this time. Parents make mistakes, and ultimately their emotions often get the best of them when they ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47305883,"author":"Markoff","month":"2026-03","story_title":"I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years","text":"The real question is why do you care? Why you worry today about something which may not happen in the future? My job most likely won't exist in ten years, do you think I'm worried? You might die in car accident, from heart attack or cancer in those ten years, some lost job is absolutely irrelevant compared to your health, there are and always will be jobs available, just adapt. We have saying in my country \"There were, are and (always) will be the money\", which basically means you should not worry too much about money, just find a way to get them when you need them. I strongly recommend LISTENING to this song - Baz Luhrmann - Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen [VIDEO] I quote one of the most important part regarding the article (especially 2nd sentence): \"Don\u2019t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4:00 pm on some idle Tuesday.\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18399103,"author":"aqw137","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How to accept that life is unfair?","text":"\"If I could offer you only one tip for the future, Sunscreen would be it\" A lot of wisdom in a 5min song: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sTu3LwpF6XI":[{"hn_comment_id":19975987,"author":"compiler-guy","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Integrated Circuits Can Be Easy to Understand with the Right Teachers","text":"This video was reasonably good, but still required a lot of background. If you want really terrific easily understood, yet totally in-depth information about integrated circuits, starting from the physics how semi-conductors actually work at the electron level, all the way up through gates and on to an entire computer, Ben Eater's videos are outstanding. Most people know his work from the Breadboard computer, [LINK] , where he builds an actual functioning computer, with instructions and microcode and output, from scratch on a breadboard, along with terrific explanations. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. All his videos are amazing, and super easy to understand. Here is his version of how nor gates work: which is way easier to understand to me than this video: [VIDEO] Here is his whole channel: [LINK] and his website: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27742492,"author":"z3ugma","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Recommend Some Logic Gate Tutorials and Examples?","text":"Ben Eater\u2019s series on building an 8-bit computer from scratch was very helpful to me in this regard: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sULa9Lc4pck":[{"hn_comment_id":14574123,"author":"Houshalter","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Towards a Better Notation for Mathematics (2010) [pdf]","text":"My favorite new math notation is the triangle of power: [VIDEO] I slightly modified it to avoid subscript and keep it closer to existing notation for powers: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36417082,"author":"hashar","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Ego and Math \u2013 3B1B 2023 Stanford Math Department Commencement Speech [video]","text":"I opened the video in the background and immediately recognized the person: the author behind the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel. It has a long series of video regarding various mathematical topics which are rather accessible. My favorite by far is a \"proposal\" for an alternate notation which makes much more sense and, if adopted, would make mathematics way less intimidating (Triangle of Power (2016), 3Blue1Brown - [VIDEO] ). I'd give him a Fields medal (or at least an honorary mention of some sort) :-]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17168261,"author":"norepicycle","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Experimental music notation resources (2015)","text":"3Blue1Brown has a YouTube video called the \"Triangle of Power\" which uses a clever bit of notation to unify exponents and logarithms: [VIDEO] A bit lowbrow, perhaps (you'd want Penrose notation or such things in that case).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31091259,"author":"Banana699","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea","text":"Bad/Confusing/Complex notation can absolutely ruin a learner's attempt to grok a piece of math, it's not a trivial issue at all, and it comes up in all levels of math. But good notation doesn't necessarily mean easy understanding. It's just like language. If I speak a different language, forget about communication in any deep way. But even if I'm speaking the same language, it's still not guaranteed we can communicate well or at all. Absence of shared language guarantees the impossibility of communication, but it's presence guarantees nothing. The author is correct about one thing : Notation is incredibly under-appreciated and under-discussed by mathematicians, although it has immense power to shape thinking. Some visionaries like Charles Babbage, Kenneth Iverson or Stephan Wolfram might talk about it every 50 year or so, but that's it. It's mind boggling how the primary tool of communication is just developed ad-hoc on a whim with only minimal explanation and formalization. >But is there some book or dictionary that lays this out in a novel way What do you mean by \"this\"? is it specifically the overbars-and-underbars notation used in the article? as far as I know, that's the first time I encountered it. But the idea that exponentials, logarithms and roots all basically say the same thing and that notations should reflect that is discussed a lot, 3blue1brown has a very well known video that explains it in a visual way. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31092086,"author":"vaishnavsm","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea","text":"A similar idea was put forth on the math stack exchange [1], which I found through this 3blue1brown video [2]. Worth a read/watch! [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sWblpsLZ-O8":[{"hn_comment_id":16854026,"author":"kwoff","month":"2018-04","story_title":"A dive into the making of a 64K Intro","text":"I still play [VIDEO] over and over, just for the song, not only because it is 256 bytes, but because it is a compelling song too.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22638574,"author":"twic","month":"2020-03","story_title":"A Mysterious Song on the Internet (2019)","text":"There's an amazing demo called 'A Mind Is Born': [VIDEO] Amazing principally because the whole thing is 256 bytes: [LINK] I never meet anyone who has even heard of the demoscene, let alone come seen this particular work. I was at a film festival watching a programme of short films, one of which was the well-made AI-box escape romp 'Watch Room': [LINK] And similarly found my interface with my seat disrupted by the closing credits using the music from 'A Mind Is Born'. This being a festival, the director was there, so i could tell him how much i appreciated the reference!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23004463,"author":"wgx","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Memories \u2013 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020","text":"Not MS-DOS, but my favourite 256 byte demo is for the C64: \"A Mind Is Born\", check it out: [VIDEO] that music is astonishing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27226937,"author":"TacticalCoder","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called \"feature phones\"","text":"> fwiw, this made me spend a few minutes in youtube looking at old c64 and apple and Atari demos. what people ended up doing with those devices - years after they were mainstream - is still crazy to me. The craziest ever, to me, is the following in 256... bytes. Bytes (including the music ofc, which is the whole point). [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36396794,"author":"TacticalCoder","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Platform Hopping","text":"By now when I see \"linusakesson.net\" I upvote without reading, then I read TFA and watch the vid (or listen to the music in this case). I'm never disappointed. Speaking of which I plan to do something really cool: I've got a \"time capsule\" C64 (well C128 but close enough) and it still works. It's never been \"polluted\" by anything modern: no \"gotek\" SD reader, no nothing: just a real time capsule from the early to mid eighties. And I plan to encode, manually, the 256 bytes (yes, bytes) of linusakesson's \"A mind is born\" C64 demo. I'll then run it (with the C128 hooked to an old CRT, of course), thinking that technically I could have encoded and ran that in the eighties. Mind blowing stuff: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15579521,"author":"bane","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Procedurally generated electronic music","text":"Here's a winning demoscene production, 256 bytes, on a Commodore 64. [VIDEO] Technical discussion here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29818096,"author":"anitil","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Sonic 3D: Director's Cut (2019)","text":"I really like 'A Mind is Born' - [VIDEO] The summary of it's development could be summarised with \"It's LFSRs all the way down\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39803001,"author":"voiceblue","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Game of Life, simulating itself, infinitely zoomable","text":"You might enjoy watching the emergent behavior in the execution of this 256 byte program - a mind is born [0]. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46044175,"author":"yetihehe","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world","text":"For a demonstration of Kolmogorov complexity, it's good to watch \"A mind is born\"[0] by lftkryo. It's only 256 bytes, but can generate over 2 minutes of complex music and video. Also, the name is appropriate for this topic :D [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sWgDk-o-6ZE":[{"hn_comment_id":24621723,"author":"halayli","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Type Systems Explained with Examples","text":"If anyone is interested in Type systems and what's a type, I highly recommend watching the first 20 mins of Sean Parent's presentation: [VIDEO] It will change the way you think about types after this.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29037482,"author":"olvy0","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Programming talks that made something click for you?","text":"Sean Parent \"Better Code: Data Structures\" (2015): [VIDEO] I've been programming in C++ and using the STL for many years but this one really made me aware of what just might be the best way to think about it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11721769,"author":"e12e","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Why I don't spend time with Modern C++ anymore","text":"I've been spending a few days going through talks from last years cppcon[1]. They're all good, but they've all left me with a strong desire for a strongly opinionated, there-is-no-past-only-the-future introduction to C++14 (and incidentally, C11). I've added a few of those talks I've watched and liked to a small playlist (with a couple of other talks on programming, unrelated - the relevant talks are prefixed with \"cppcon 2015\"): [LINK] The full cppcon playlist is here: [LINK] Of special relevance is the rather excellent talk by Kate Gregory on \"Stop Teaching C\" (when you're supposed to do an intro course to C++): \"CppCon 2015: Kate Gregory \u201cStop Teaching C\"\": [LINK] (But again, I want an open wiki/live tutorial, along the lines of \"How I start\", but longer, which goes through all this stuff. We really should make one, both for C++14 and for C11). CppCon 2015: Herb Sutter \"Writing Good C++14... By Default\": [LINK] Is also rather uplifting, and: CppCon 2015: Sean Parent \"Better Code: Data Structures\": [VIDEO] makes a pretty good case for simple, modern C++ being clear, easy and efficient. Finally, CppCon 2015: Phil Nash \u201cTest Driven C++ with Catch\u201d: [LINK] apart for being a pretty straight forward intro to a simple testing framework, appears to reveal some secrets combining template magic and still get sane compile times (hint: don't recompile more (template) code on every iteration than you need to). There's a couple of good ones that touch on meta-programming too (Look for t","stance":"rec"}],"s_fkpZSnz2I":[{"hn_comment_id":37343591,"author":"cjs_ac","month":"2023-08","story_title":"7th century BCE Library of Ashurbanipal is the oldest recovered library","text":"This lecture by Dr Finkel on how he discovered the original Babylonian version of the Noah's Ark story is equal parts fascinating and hilarious: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45537207,"author":"AndrewOMartin","month":"2025-10","story_title":"How to write in Cuneiform","text":"Not to mention his book, about when he found an Cuneiform tablet circa 1800BC telling the story of Noah and the flood, which included more detailed instructions on how to build an ark than the biblical accounts and so he went and built it. Nice article: [LINK] Excellent lecture: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45924410,"author":"Jun8","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Why I'm Learning Sumerian","text":"If you are interesting anything related to cuneiform writing or ancient Mesopotamian culture , Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, is a treasure. Here he is teaching how to write cuneiform: [LINK] Here is a hilarious talk he gave at Chicago's Oriental Institute on Noah's Ark: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28064170,"author":"lalos","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Australian mathematician discovers applied geometry on 3,700-year-old tablet","text":"Great talk for those interested in clay tablets and technology: [VIDEO] In my opinion, I would bet that those old civilizations had more technology that we give them credit for. The only thing they lacked was to have a long lasting medium to share that knowledge. Whimsical stories or songs could've been a way to share advances. We're lucky to have one civilization picking clay tablets as a medium and luckier that those survived (some even by accident - fires destroying houses but cooking those tablets and burying them), who knows maybe we were writing on leather for centuries before that have all disintegrated by now (we hunted, we had access to paint, we naturally don't want to waste scarce resources).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44493518,"author":"cjs_ac","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Hymn to Babylon, missing for a millennium, has been discovered","text":"Somewhat related, since we're talking about cuneiform: Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum telling the surprisingly amusing story of how he discovered the oldest known version of the Noah's Ark story: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"s_osQvkeNRM":[{"hn_comment_id":3212887,"author":"stevelosh","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Think twice about that F-bomb in your next talk","text":"I'm with Stephen Fry on this one: \"There used to be mad, silly, prissy people who used to say swearing was a sign of a poor vocabulary. Such utter nonsense.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3217725,"author":"glenjamin","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Swearing","text":"I'm rather bemused by this whole thing, I'd be intrigued to know the demographics of the people who take such, issue with use of swear words. Perhaps it's an American thing, but in Britain I'm not aware of anyone I know who'd react in hysterics at the thought of a strong word appearing in something as public as a slide deck! Swearing at someone can be extremely rude, but using such words passively to add emphasis seems perfectly normal to me. The following video sums it up nicely IMO [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5694969,"author":"shocks","month":"2013-05","story_title":"I Don't Want Your Fucking App","text":"And as usual, any HN post that contains profanity is immediately overrun by 'offended' fuckheads that simply don't understand the joke and are offended by fuck all. Stephen Fry says it best: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7457977,"author":"anu_gupta","month":"2014-03","story_title":"WTF, HTML and CSS?","text":"From the fucking lovely Stephen Fry \"The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or a lack of verbal interest is just a fucking lunatic.\" Profanity is an essential and rich part of the English language. It's really only prudes and people who need to feel morally superior have a problem with it, and they can fuck right off, frankly. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12229771,"author":"bhrgunatha","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Why swearing is good for you","text":"Stephen Fry, whose intellect and vocabulary are way beyond mine, on swearing. The bleeping on the second video is so deliciously germane. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"saRir95iIWk":[{"hn_comment_id":18778948,"author":"tjohns","month":"2018-12","story_title":"911 emergency services go down across the US after CenturyLink outage","text":"There's an old AT&T video showing the careful coordination and huge amount of manpower needed to upgrade a single telco switch. They had rows of workers with cable cutters, in order to literally cut the entire service over to the new equipment. Total downtime was just 47 seconds. (And even during the cutover, they're careful not to interrupt any emergency calls.) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35650792,"author":"Doxin","month":"2023-04","story_title":"In 1930, the 22M-pound Indiana Bell building was rotated 90 degrees","text":"This[1] is a great video on the topic of cutovers. Not quite downtime-less, but seriously impressive little amount of downtime in any case. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sbQhgEJuExY":[{"hn_comment_id":1362145,"author":"corysama","month":"2010-05","story_title":"The Demoscene -- an Overview","text":"Farbrausch's \"debris.\" shows just how much you can pack into 200k (including the audio, btw). [LINK] For the webby crowd: \"Masagin\" features animated, recursive SVGs with antialiasing and motion blur at high rez and high frame rate. [VIDEO] Or, you could download both demos from [LINK] and run them on your own PC.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8065902,"author":"theandrewbailey","month":"2014-07","story_title":"Interview with Demoscener \u201ckb\u201d of Farbrausch","text":"The one for NVScene 2008 kicked ass. It's about as close as you can get to color intoxication (which is the rough translation of \"farbrausch\"). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8882800,"author":"hansjorg","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Conspire: A Programming Environment for NOWHERE","text":"Leonard Ritter is a very talented guy. Looking forward to NOWHERE. He's known as paniq in the demoscene and did the music, 2d engine and graphics for the awesome Masagin: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sf5OrthVRPA":[{"hn_comment_id":14358804,"author":"Tistron","month":"2017-05","story_title":"FBI Investigation: \u201cLouie Louie\u201d, The Song (1964)","text":"Matt Parker (standupmath at youtube) does a presentation he calls \"Clutching at Random Straws\". It doesn't, as far as I can recall, specifically deal with Mondegreens, but about 38 minutes in he does a fun demonstration of how perception is a process of actively patternmatching for what we expect: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40596131,"author":"OnACoffeeBreak","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?","text":"Matt Parker (\"Stand up Maths\" channel on YouTube) gave a very informative and entertaining lecture in 2010 titled \"Clutching at Random Straws\" [0], which, among other things, covered something similar. From the subtitle of the video: \"Did aliens help prehistoric Britons find the ancient Woolworths civilisation?\" The answer is \"no\". Given enough data points, you can find all sorts of patterns. 0: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sfGtw2C95Ms":[{"hn_comment_id":25441444,"author":"sarreph","month":"2020-12","story_title":"The biggest competitor to your digital service? The Mars Bar","text":"This is very much in the vein of Jobs to Be Done theory[0]. If you haven't heard of JTBD before, I would implore you to check-out Clayton Christensen's famous \"milkshake\" video here: [VIDEO] It goes into enlightening detail about the same framing of competition as the author here does. [0] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21466517,"author":"andygcook","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Know Your Customers\u2019 \u201cJobs to Be Done\u201d (2016)","text":"This video from Clayton Christensen gives a good summary of Jobs To Be Done using milkshakes at a fast food restaurant as an example: [VIDEO] Unrelated, but I saw Clayton Christensen speak at a conference years ago. He started out the talk by telling everyone that he had a stroke years earlier and after it, he couldn't speak clearly. For a professor, you can imagine that's not ideal. So he went out and bought Rosetta Stone and taught himself how to talk again. I was blown away and besides a few small stutters during the talk, I barely noticed. That story of grit always stuck with me as a truly remarkable example of how versatile humans can be.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41687418,"author":"nomilk","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Measuring Developers' Jobs-to-be-done","text":"Also odd is the expression 'jobs to be done'. At first glance this seemed like an allusion to this famous ' Jobs to be Done ' Clay Christian talk [1] (well worth the 5 minute watch). But AFICT it's just coincidental use of the phrase. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sfXn_ecH5Rw":[{"hn_comment_id":22441453,"author":"willvarfar","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits","text":"At the very beginning of this excellent interview [VIDEO] that I found in the comments here, they explain this. Apparently, for this to work, they have to \"affix them to a physical medium\". Strongly recommend watching that video! Excellent info.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22442607,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits","text":"Those are precisely the objections I'd raised with the Damien Rhiel (submitted via email, no response). Additionally there's the problem of releasing the works to the public domain. As discussed a couple of weeks ago when the 2016 billion-dollar infringement lawsuit against Getty Images was attempted ... and thrown out of court ... the act of putting works in the public domain also extinguishes, in the court's eyes, the rights of the author to sue for any claims including moral claims of authorship . See: [LINK] So: clever stunt, but legally impotent, both by law and the self-neutering actions of the actors here. Adam Neely's video (interviewing Rhiel and collaborator Noah Rubin) covers many points of copyright, though not the originality, authorship, or PD angles. (Posted elsewhere in thread, echoing here.) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26887660,"author":"varispeed","month":"2021-04","story_title":"The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music","text":"If someone automates music creation in the popular styles and then automates submitting it for copyright protection, then in not so distant future creation of any music will be illegal, as every nice sounding melody will be claimed. In a way this is what large labels do. They release a ton of similar sounding music just for that reason. I think the patent trolling equivalent in music world has not been discussed much. Check this video from Adam Neely: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31350890,"author":"nonstickcoating","month":"2022-05","story_title":"How many melodies are there? (2014)","text":"This[0] is a video by Adam Neely, who frequently talks about the cluster f*ck that is copyright law with regards to music, interviewing two guys having done this (within some constraints). This[1] is the website linking to the dataset and code that was used to generate it. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"sfrYOWlKJ_g":[{"hn_comment_id":28982006,"author":"drewg123","month":"2021-10","story_title":"20 years of the iPod","text":"I love Louis Rossman's video about why he does not use Apple products. Near the beginning, he talks about how he worked in a recording studio, and people would bring in background music they wanted to sing along with on MP3 players, and he was used to just copying files off. Which worked just fine until he encountered his first iPod: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14931968,"author":"posguy","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Why Apple and other tech companies are fighting to keep devices hard to repair","text":"Note how Apple hosts neither of those manuals? Apple doesn't care if their products are user serviceable at all, and has repeatedly shown malice towards the repair industry or long lived products at all. Louis Rossmann talking about how Apple devices are designed to fail: [VIDEO] Also, my iPad 2 broke down after a year and a half. Not buying Apple again!","stance":"rec"}],"sg2j7mZ9-2Y":[{"hn_comment_id":28691408,"author":"tdeck","month":"2021-09","story_title":"New work sheds light on the Etruscans, who may have founded Rome","text":"Folks reading this thread would likely appreciate this video on the history of C: [LINK] It goes into a lot of these evolutionary stages. And the history of W: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36518343,"author":"TRiG_Ireland","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspired by Stripe IDs","text":"That is indeed why w is named \"double u\" in English (and \"double v\" in French. And why it's a vowel in Welsh. See more from jan Misali: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37707699,"author":"meatmanek","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Who Invented the Alphabet?","text":"If you're interested in fascinating deep dives into the history of a few odd letters, the jan Misali channel on Youtube has a video on the letter W (which, along the way, covers F and Y) and another one on the letter C. w: [VIDEO] c: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"sgHbC6udIqc":[{"hn_comment_id":19949547,"author":"jteppinette","month":"2019-05","story_title":"\u201cPython's batteries are leaking\u201d","text":"You have to invest some time in understanding how strings (byte strings and unicode) work in Python. I put this off for way too long. After A TON OF PAIN I decided to put the time in to watch the talk \"Pragmatic Unicode, or, How do I stop the pain?\"[0] by Ned Batchelder and it all just clicked. Now, I make unicode sandwiches like a boss. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8909383,"author":"ptx","month":"2015-01","story_title":"Why Perl Didn't Win","text":"From a quick skimming through the docs[0], Perl 5.8's Unicode support sounds a lot like Python 2's except that the default encoding is latin1 instead of ASCII - i.e. unlike the Python 3 way of explicitly decoding binary data into Unicode text at the point where it's read (where presumably the encoding of the data is known), it will defer the decoding until the data is used (at some completely unrelated point in the program) and decode it with some assumed globally agreed upon encoding. Since there is no globally agreed encoding (Windows even has different legacy encodings between Win32 and the command prompt!) this will appear to work as long as the data is ASCII but later, when you least expect it (and someone inputs a non-ASCII string), give UnicodeDecodeError in Python 2 or garbage data in Perl 5.8. Ned Batchelder gave an excellent talk[1] that explains how the Python 3 approach to Unicode works. I think it makes a lot more sense once you understand it; the Python 2 way was clearly broken, and it looks like Perl 5 has the same problem but hides it better. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"si9iqF5uTFk":[{"hn_comment_id":41359167,"author":"joshstrange","month":"2024-08","story_title":"NSA releases 1982 Grace Hopper lecture","text":"I can't wait to watch this later. I watched just a few minutes starting at this timestamp [0] (it was linked in another comment) and it was gold, I love her sense of humor. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48282633,"author":"joschuaantares","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"I find Grace Hopper's lectures very entertaining, even though they seem to come from a bygone era when viewed from today's perspective. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"sj8Sg8qnjOg":[{"hn_comment_id":29084154,"author":"jazzyjackson","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Golden Ratio and User-Interface Design","text":"Golden ratio is not arbitrary, it solves the problem: How to make sure nothing lines up. This link gets passed around a lot and it's very illuminating, demonstrating that the golden ratio is objectively \"the most irrational number\": [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30892188,"author":"jazzyjackson","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Life\u2019s preference for symmetry is like \u2018a new law of nature\u2019","text":"a mind-rewiring video by numberphile concerning the golden ratio [0] made sense of all the spiral overlay art: yes, plants use it because it is an optimal solution for minimizing overlap when sprouting leaves during growth, maximizing spatial coverage but also, as a number that is least able to be approximated by rational, erm, ratios - it is a pattern that most closely approximates random patterns. So more than any other spiral, a fibonacci spiral has the highest likelihood of overlapping random points in 2D space... (and fibonacci series converges on the golden ratio because they are equivelent expressions of the continued fraction 1+(1/(1+(1/(1+(1/(1+(1/... [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17331568,"author":"ttctciyf","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Fibonacci Hashing: The Optimization That the World Forgot","text":"The article attempts to explain this property of phi: > Maybe you have a picture of a flower, and you want to implement \u201cevery time the user clicks the mouse, add a petal to the flower.\u201d In that case you want to use the golden ratio: Make the angle from one petal to the next 360/phi and you can loop around the circle forever, adding petals, and the next petal will always fit neatly into the biggest gap and you\u2019ll never loop back to your starting position. And points to a video. I think there's a much clearer explanation which shows how this is because (in some sense) phi is the \"most irrational\" ratio, stemming from its derivation from continued fractions: [VIDEO] I freely admit I have not a clue how this does or doesn't improve hash algos, but it's a cool video! :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46794105,"author":"glkindlmann","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Golden Ratio using an equilateral triangle inscribed in a circle","text":"I learned about this not from Mathologer, but Numberphile [1]. The second half of the video is the continued fraction derivation. I remember this being the first time I appreciated the sense in which the phi was the most irrational number, which otherwise seemed like just a click-bait-y idea. But you've found an earlier (9 years ago vs 7) Mathologer video on the same topic. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"skos4B5x7qE":[{"hn_comment_id":20031909,"author":"sgrove","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Update on await syntax in Rust","text":"The nuances in this case went well beyond what I was expecting - it's actually more than just syntax, this heavily crosses over into semantics. It's been a very impressive process, and I was surprised at the power of the solution they landed on. - Rust has to find a syntax that can work with different underlying libraries (Rust can compile to lots of different targets, some will have capability to accommodate larger libraries than others) - The abstraction can't incur undue overhead (callback-based solutions may cause allocations that are hard to keep under control and will split the language if it spreads too much) - The syntax should be pleasant to write for at least the majority of people (modeling your entire application as a state machine around async computation is pretty unpleasant) - The compiler has to be able to give helpful error messages (this was a problem early on I think) - Language authors had to think about how the borrow checker would work across async points, and whether to invest in changing the language to make that possible. - and so on and so on I really loved this talk by Without Boats (the author of the friendly article) going over all this stuff, really gave me a good sense of what they were up against [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19841705,"author":"holy_city","month":"2019-05","story_title":"A final proposal for Rust await syntax","text":"That document isn't about arguing one way or the other, it lists all the different options and pros/cons. The post thread is the current stance of the lang team and letting everyone know they're going to make the final decision later this month. Boats' keynote at rust-latam goes into some more detail as well. [VIDEO] I'm just a casual observer here, but it seems like just about every argument and position on the subject has been iterated across Github, internals.rust-lang.org, the IRC/Discourse/Zulip chats, Reddit, and now HN. This post by boats is just the next stepping stone alerting the community to the direction the team is leading and that it's going to be over soon.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21368958,"author":"AlexanderDhoore","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Why async fn in traits are hard","text":"I don't know anything about Kotlin, but if you are interested in the Rust story (history and evolution) this is an interesting talk: RustLatam 2019 - Without Boats: Zero-Cost Async IO [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21860110,"author":"teddyc","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"I thought this talk about Async in Rust was pretty cool (RustLatam 2019 - Without Boats: Zero-Cost Async IO): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22820922,"author":"xiphias2","month":"2020-04","story_title":"I can't keep up with idiomatic Rust","text":"I was referring to the fact that it is the only async implementation that I know of that compiles to a state machine that doesn't need to allocate new memory for each continuation. I think it will translate to extremely fast web services in practice. Pinning is of course part of the elegant solution. There are some great videos about it: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"slDAvewWfrA":[{"hn_comment_id":48441887,"author":"defrost","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests","text":"With the obligatory, must see, BBC Britain from Above segment in which Andrew Marr fly on the wall narrates the most challenging part of a live load engineer (UK)'s day ... <doof, doof, doof> the East Enders kettle break. * [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12835560,"author":"XaYdEk","month":"2016-10","story_title":"NASA Scientists Suggest We\u2019ve Been Underestimating Sea Level Rise","text":"Technically yes, economically difficult for most nations, if it's approached at this level. Germany has had an interesting approach to solar, where they subsidized solar panels for homeowners. I think it is the smarter approach because you incentives individuals to go green, rather than trying to implement a top down solution. And even so, we will need to keep power plants on call for redundancy and high load purposes. There is a video about peak power usage in England which I found fascinating (though this is a rather unique case) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16539191,"author":"vincentdm","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Continuing frequency deviation in the Continental European Power System","text":"Here's a great movie illustrating how the grid is balanced when a popular tv show ends and millions of people want a cup of hot tea: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33673191,"author":"jeroenhd","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Mystery Blips","text":"This reminds me of this YouTube video: [VIDEO] . There's a monitoring room to make sure people are ready to switch backups and reroute in case of some kind of grid failure, but also in very specific scenarios. Britain being filled with Brits, what would happen is that once the show was over, half the nation got up from the couch to turn on the kettle for a cup of tea. Those electric kettles are quite demanding, especially if millions of them turn on at the same time. So every time there was a major event, dedicated people are monitoring the grid frequency, power plants on standby and foreign contracts at the ready when needed, just to increase capacity at the right time. You can't just schedule this stuff, because if a football match runs over its allotted time, you may suddenly add power to the grid without any load, causing all kinds of problems like the grid frequency increasing and making digital clocks run ahead. There is a temporary demand of gigawatts of power that rises within five minutes and lasts until the kettles are done. The YouTube video provides an example of 600MW of power being requested from France... for the end of an episode of Eastenders. I always knew the British like their tea and that there's some kind of planning going on for events like street lights turning on, but the combination of the two is a great example of complex behaviour that's easy to overlook.","stance":"rec"}],"sln-gJaURzk":[{"hn_comment_id":4189739,"author":"vibrunazo","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Go videos from Google I/O 2012","text":"I'd particularly recommend \"Meet the Go team\". Some really interesting questions, and most importantly answers. In the video :) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4288333,"author":"james4k","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Effective Go","text":"That was actually one of the questions asked during the \"Meet the Go team\" talk at Google I/O. They joke around for a bit, but they end up giving some solid arguments. [VIDEO] Edit: If you're curious/interested in Go, it's worth watching the whole talk.","stance":"rec"}],"smStEPSRKBs":[{"hn_comment_id":34834963,"author":"Bluecobra","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Is the Living Computer Museum Dead?","text":"I love the Atari vector games! There\u2019s an excellent video by Retro Game Mechanics Explained on how they work: [VIDEO] Recently I stumbled on some Tektronix videos on YouTube. Those vector displays are even more mind blowing than Atari\u2019s arcade games. I hope I can get to see one in person someday.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26757476,"author":"jameshart","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Vector Games 32c3","text":"This is a great look at the hardware and of vector display - if you want to get a good in-depth understanding of how Atari's original vector graphics display systems worked from the software side, though, Retro Game Mechanics on YouTube did an incredible deep dive into how it all worked, including emulating the vector instruction sets and step-by stepping through complete frame renders from Tempest. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32307312,"author":"Bluecobra","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Raw footage inside Sears with Atari 800 and 2600 (1982) [video]","text":"Also the Retro Game Mechanics Explained channel on YouTube has a very well put together video about this as well: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37208487,"author":"aquova","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Atari Tempest: Time-Lapse Photography (2016)","text":"If anyone is interested further in how vector effects were achieved, there is a good video showing the rendering of frames of Tempest in slow motion [0]. And if you're really interested in how vector effects were achieved, here's another that goes into the nitty gritty of how Tempest encoded point, line, color, etc. data in RAM and then rendered those images [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"snAhsXyO3Ck":[{"hn_comment_id":23119100,"author":"vorpalhex","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Google, Facebook make statements to staff about working from home for 2020","text":"If you can setup a dedicated work area, even if it's temporary, do it and restrict work to that space. That means you only use that space for work, and don't use the rest of your home. Your sofa is for relaxing, don't let work ruin a perfectly good sofa. CCP Grey [^1] has an excellent video on this. [^1]: [VIDEO] (Video warning)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23613204,"author":"Jetroid","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How are you holding up?","text":"I'm doing well. Ironically I think I'm doing better now than I would have been if the pandemic didn't happen; but still not in a particularly good position. Optimistic, though! If you're struggling, it's probably because the systems that you put in place at the start of the pandemic have broken down. (Kinda like how we eventually forget/give up on New Years Resolutions...) I'd recommend these[1] two[2] videos from CGP Grey to help. The first talks about the kind of things that you might be doing that are making you miserable, and the second about specific ways in which we can cope with the pandemic (and specifically a lockdown, if you are still in one). Brief notes: Avoid doing any of these things: * Staying still, avoiding exercise * Having an irregular sleep schedule * Maximizing screen time; going to sleep looking at your phone, and using it as soon as you wake up * Encouraging negative emotions, eg: by looking at the news * Setting unmeasurable or unachievable goals. Waiting for motivation to strike. * Obsessing over trying to be happy. * Following your self-destructive impulses Partition your house/space into the following spaces, and try to obey these rules about the spaces: * A space for exercise. If you don't have equipment, you can do body weight exercises. If you have access to safe outdoor spaces, make sure to use that too. Make sure you set a minimum amount of time, and stick to it. * A space for sleep. Do not use your phone here. Do not eat here. Do not linger he","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23613396,"author":"mark-ruwt","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How are you holding up?","text":"\"Spaceship You\" by CGP Grey has been a really powerful re-calibration tool for me whenever I feel unbalanced: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23613934,"author":"goutham2688","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How are you holding up?","text":"[VIDEO] i found the above inked CGP Grey video to be helpful i watch it once a week to keep things in perspective. hope this helps others too","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24202191,"author":"ketanhwr","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you switch off from work, particularly when working from home?","text":"I think this is what he's talking about: [VIDEO] Even if it isn't - this is a must watch video!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25173172,"author":"randycupertino","month":"2020-11","story_title":"I Miss Working from the Office","text":"Checked out the video- really great! Thank you for the recommendation and here's the link for anyone else curious: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23121860,"author":"vageli","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Orca: an esolang for audio-visual live coding","text":"> It feels like we are on a space ship, drifting through time, but basking in peace and solitude. This comment reminded me of this video by CGP Grey which I think you may enjoy if you haven't yet seen it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23132059,"author":"teddyh","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Why are some people better at working from home than others?","text":"CGP Grey did a video about the importance of having different spaces for different activities\u00b9, and in one of the comments for the video\u00b2, one Vallejo B. said that they have handled the lack of physical space by using tricks to fool the mind into thinking it is a different space, using different lighting, sounds, tastes for different modes. Like stage set design, a simple difference goes a long way, and as long your own brain is fooled, it works. 1. [VIDEO] 2. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23775081,"author":"est31","month":"2020-07","story_title":"A $500M call option on home gyms","text":"There is a great cgp grey video about this: [VIDEO] TLDW: create areas with boundaries inside your home and make sure you follow these boundaries.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23908283,"author":"kleer001","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I get out of the procrastination abyss?","text":"What's your physical routine? Do you exercise regularly? Regardless of the pandemic, there's still truths here to learn about the connection between your body and mind. CGP Grey is great. : [VIDEO] Do you have a boredom routine? I find as a creative it's important for me to force myself to be away from the productivity grind for a little bit each week so I can get hungry to get back to it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24201416,"author":"ShakataGaNai","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you switch off from work, particularly when working from home?","text":"Give CGPGrey's \"Lockdown Productivity: Spaceship You\" a watch -- [VIDEO] In large majority it's about making dedicated spaces, which can be hard in a small space. But you can at least make dedicate mindsets spaces. Ex: I do these 5 things to prepare my desk for work at the start of the day, and I do these 5 things to clean up my desk at the end of the work day. These can be routines or physical things you do (Ex: get out work laptop, work notebook, etc). I'd strongly believe in coming up with a schedule that works for you and your needs. Then try and stick to that schedule. In my case, I (San Francisco Bay Area) have calls with Europe starting at 7am every morning. So I get up at 6:30, take a shower (always, never skip, even if I slept late), put my shoes on, have calls for at least 2 hours. At about 9am I take an hour to make breakfast (and eat) for my wife and I. Also, if you have trouble \"disconnecting\" yourself at the end of the day, turn off notifications from work apps on your phone. If you're someone who say has your work email and slack on your phone. Tell people that if it's urgent they can text/call you.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25634639,"author":"ateng","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Working from Bed","text":"The fantastic educational YouTuber CGP Grey did a video detailing why working from bed is a terrible idea [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25636301,"author":"gopalv","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Working from Bed","text":"> As a rule of thumb, your bed should be dedicated to sleep CGP Grey had a pretty good video about living in the lockdown titled \"Spaceship you\". [VIDEO] I'd say that a lot of work that isn't really work can be done from bed, but it does mess up your training for \"bed == sleep\". I used to work from bed before 2020, but the lockdown has made the \"walk downstairs to work, grab a coffee along the way\" into a natural thing rather than putting a number of other high attention activities (shaving, driving) between being awake-enough to sitting at my desk.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25835332,"author":"voodootrucker","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Anyone else burnt out due to extended lockdown and work-from-home?","text":"Yes, 100% this. When the virus isn't spiking in your area, I recommend meeting coworkers in coworking spaces. When it is spiking I've been going to parks to have beers with friends. A warm coat can help a lot. I also found this video to be helpful [VIDEO] [edit] Oh, and remote pairing over teamviewer turns a terrible isolated work day into a casual conversation with a friend about code. I find that 2 developers actually getting 1 job done is better than both being isolated and just scrolling reddit.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26344208,"author":"Morizero","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How to stay focused and motivated working from home?","text":"Most times I've seen this question asked, I see a reference to \"Spaceship You\". So here's the obligatory link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26593074,"author":"cassepipe","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Funds for Open Source","text":"True. But you also need empty space not to feel trapped in a cage or else you'll catch that cabin fever. You can always go the park provided you got into that discipline, that you there is a park less than ten minutes away or that it's not too cold/raining/snowing: Not ideal. And it might a shitty square surrounded by cars. Mentally, it is also very helpful to have separate spaces for different aspects of your life. When your room is also your office and your kitchen, it doesn't make for good sleep, good work or good cooking. Relevant videos : [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27516807,"author":"1experience","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How did an adult ADHD diagnosis help you?","text":"Either dedicate a room to study and work or change the environment when you have to (like assigning a specific color with led lights). [VIDEO] If that doesn't work, I would go out and study in a library or park.","stance":"rec"}],"snz7JJlSZvw":[{"hn_comment_id":13840144,"author":"danbruc","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Mirror grinding","text":"There is also a 90 minutes film \u00bbTelescope building with John Dobson\u00ab [1], inventor of the Dobsonian telescope [2], going through the entire process of building a 16\" telescope from scratch. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22897343,"author":"DanBC","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Hand Scraping a Truly Flat Plane (1908) [pdf]","text":"I like this video from John Dobson about handmade telescopes, where he builds a complete telescope including hand grinding the mirrors. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26256267,"author":"Prey4Jesus","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What entry-level telescope should I choose?","text":"The most important thing to look for is the diameter of the aperture. Your resolution is proportional to the diameter of the telescope (absent atmospheric conditions). I would recommend a minimum of 6\" in diameter. 8-12\" is preferred. With this in mind, the best telescope you can get for the price is a Dobsonian. Dobsonians are extremely mechanically and optically simple. This makes them long, and bulky. It also makes them cheap. It also makes them rather easy to point. They have a lot of mass and inertia, and a large moment of inertia. This makes them easy to move and point slowly and carefully. Dobsonians are ideal beginner telescopes. Easy to point, cheap, good resolution. This is the model I have (8\" aperture, $450): [LINK] They're also rather easy to construct, if you are of a DIY mind. Here's a 90 minute youtube video on how to build one, with John Dobson himself: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43353139,"author":"nvalis","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Amateur Telescope Making Main Page","text":"There is a very detailed video documentation [0] about telescope building techniques, featuring insights from John Dobson, the inventor of the Dobsonian telescope mentioned on the page. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"spUNpyF58BY":[{"hn_comment_id":24286802,"author":"justjonathan","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Discrete Cosine Transform in Video Compression \u2013 Explain Like I'm Five","text":"This is an explanation (from the amazing three blue one brown) of the DFT not the DCT, but this was the first thing that ever really made sense to me. It is explained by someone who really knows math incredibly well and is an amazing teacher, with amazing visuals: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29048708,"author":"andybak","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Circular Harmonics","text":"Dude really needs to subscribe to 3Blue1Brown: [VIDEO] (but anyone interested in stuff like this should be. I guess I'm surprised to see someone like this writing a blog post who isn't regularly checking out that channel)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29388499,"author":"faebi","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Videos that changed your life or how you think","text":"I never understood how multiple electrical frequencies can be in a copper cable. I always thought they must merge and therefore it must be impossible to find the right set of original frequencies and their strength. Then I learned about the Fourier transform in this beautiful video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33637917,"author":"SJSque","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Demystifying Fourier analysis","text":"I can also highly recommend 3Blue1Brown's treatment of the topic: [VIDEO] (...which I see now is cited in the video that you link to!)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34206912,"author":"sjaak","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?","text":"This is what made it click for me, can recommend it: 3Blue1Brown -- But what is the Fourier Transform? A visual introduction. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38689016,"author":"TimSchumann","month":"2023-12","story_title":"3Blue1Brown Calculus Blog Series","text":"Grant makes some amazing content. His visualization of the Fourier Transform[1] actually enabled me to understand the how it was happening behind the what was happening with one of the most used algorithms in computing. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45762781,"author":"garbageman","month":"2025-10","story_title":"How the cochlea computes (2024)","text":"It's an absolutely brilliant bit of maths that breaks a complex waveform into the individual components. Kind of like taking an orchestral song and then working out each individual instrument's contribution. Learning about this left me honestly aghast and in shock that it's not only possible but that someone (Joseph Fourier) figured it out and then shared it with the world. This video does a great job explaining what it is and how it works to the layman. 3blue1brown - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19705619,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Why have so many physicists shrugged off the paradoxes of quantum mechanics?","text":"3Blue1Brown has an extremely good explanation[1] of the intrinsic uncertainty, and why it's separate from measurement uncertainty. (the previous episode[2] is a recommended prerequisite for background on how the Fourier Transform works) > emerges through a different, as yet unknown, mechanism. In 3Blue1Bron's explanation[1], he shows how the intrinsic uncertainty is an inherent trade-off of trying to measure both position and frequency. A short wave packet only a few wavelengths long correlates with a narrow (precise) range of positions, but also correlates well with a very wide range of frequencies due. A Heisenberg-like uncertainty exists any time you are working with weave packets with length near the wavelength. 3Blue1Brown gives a very good example using Doppler radar. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21285468,"author":"quickthrower2","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The \u201cWindmill\u201d Problem on the 2011 International Mathematical Olympiad [video]","text":"I recommend watching the \"But what is the Fourier Transform? A visual introduction.\" [VIDEO] . Beautiful.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23166863,"author":"jmiserez","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Show HN: SHA-256 Animation","text":"3blue1brown is great, e.g. his Fourier transform animation is super intuitive: [VIDEO] He has opensourced his animation engine \"manim\" used in his videos: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27231162,"author":"itissid","month":"2021-05","story_title":"An Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform (2012)","text":"What about the 3 blue 1 brown video on it? I think that is pretty concise and intuitive too but does not seem to appear on this thread [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32295353,"author":"ryan-duve","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Shor, I\u2019ll do it (2007)","text":"If the part about the tack on the board under the clocks wasn't clear, and you're a visual learner, this video from 3Blue1Brown about the [classic] Fourier Transform might help clarify the relationship to periodicity: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36793718,"author":"superkuh","month":"2023-07","story_title":"What Is Radio Spectrum?","text":"There's no all in one stop for understanding radio but these 5 resources helped me a lot. The RF Get Down courses. This is by far the best material online to learn RF and how modulation works: [LINK] 3blue1brown's video tutorial on the fourier transform: [VIDEO] AT&T Archives: Similiarities of Wave Behavior [LINK] Quadrature Signals: Complex, But Not Complicated by Richard Lyons, [LINK] [LINK] Antenna Theory's website and forums, [LINK] I also highly recommend getting a $20 rtl-sdr USB software defined radio dongle. They're great toys for learning RF, what modulation is , and exploring the spectrum.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38655390,"author":"sizzzzlerz","month":"2023-12","story_title":"An Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform","text":"Just a nit. The pair of equations the author showed at the beginning of the article are not the equations of the Fourier Transform and its inverse. The Transform is a continuous function operating on an infinite input. The equation for the Transform involves the use of the integral taken over +/- infinity. What is shown, using the summation operator, is a discrete form on the Transform where the input is a limited time series. A good alternative explanation can be found on Grant Sanderson's 3 Blue 1 Brown channel [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42963365,"author":"mananaysiempre","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Pre-Trained Large Language Models Use Fourier Features for Addition (2024)","text":"(Almost-)linear models do linear things, it seems, and the Fourier transform is the quintessential linear thing. It is also an extremely neat piece of the real world, but I\u2019m hesitant to guess your background and offer an explanation because your phrasing makes me suspect an engineering one. With concepts usually being the first to be culled in a course targeted at engineers, there could be quite a bit of concept debt to pay off before I could really offer something I could honestly call an explanation. Have you tried the 3Blue1Brown video on the topic[1]? It does not AFAIR offer any answers as to why the Fourier transform should exist or be useful, but it does show very well what it does in the immediate sense. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45146563,"author":"N_Lens","month":"2025-09","story_title":"What Is the Fourier Transform?","text":"I found the 3Blue1Brown explanation to be more intuitive to understand, but this article has more practical examples/details. Here's the 3Blue1Brown explanation: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"sqEyWLGvvdw":[{"hn_comment_id":16668374,"author":"edanm","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources to learn real analysis?","text":"I highly recommend Francis Su's Real Analysis Youtube lectures, on Youtube [1]. He is an amazing teacher. I first started trying to learn Real Analysis from Baby Rudin, but I couldn't understand the point behind the ideas introduced there. Then I started watching these lectures, which are based on Baby Rudin and mostly follow it, and it helped a lot (together with reading the main text itself - a crucial step). The only bad thing is that only half of Rudin is covered - the other half is covered in Real Analysis 2, which is unfortunately not online as far as I can tell. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18002428,"author":"tildedave","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?","text":"One of my favorite video series on YouTube is Francis Su's _Real Analysis_. [VIDEO] He walks through the basics of constructing the real numbers, defines metric spaces and proves some topological properties, defines continuous functions, and goes into differentiable functions. The video quality isn't great but his teaching style is phenomenal - he's really great about engaging the class and getting them to walk through the reasoning for each of the theorems.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16667653,"author":"matheus2740","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources to learn real analysis?","text":"I've watched a series of lectures on the subject by Harvey Mudd college, on youtube [1]. It helped me a lot, tho, I'd have to say these are introductory level, not really a deep dive, but more useful as an introduction. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18940357,"author":"philzook","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Ask HN: How to self-study mathematics from the undergrad through graduate level?","text":"John Baez (physicist / category theorist / smort dude) has a list of books to learn math and physics. Is an interesting source to crib from. [LINK] Gerhard t'Hooft has a page on how to become of a good physicist. [LINK] Not math though. I'm not necessarily suggesting that a mountain of books is the best way to go about it. I think I respond best to video lectures. I'm not sure where you're starting from or how applied/pure you want. Here's a quick mind dump some of my favorites and some that I haven't watched. Roughly in order of how much I liked them. Gilbert Strang's Computational Methods for engineers was life changing for me. It is a two part MIT opencourse. [LINK] A Stanford course on the Fourier transform [LINK] Bartosz Milewski's Category theory for programmer's [LINK] Stephen Boyd's courses are online. [LINK] Linear Systems, convex optimization. Useful stuff. Francis Su's Real Analysis is very good [VIDEO] Indian universities have an astounding collection of videos [LINK] I have a tough time with the accents, which is a bummer. UCCS MathOnline has quite a haul [LINK] I've been enjoying this Visual Group Theory course lately [LINK] Math Doctor Bob [LINK] Wildberger has some interesting takes on elementary and non elementary topics [LINK] [LINK] Perimeter scholars lectures. Physics not math. Good stuff. Federico Ardila has a number of combinatorics courses. [LINK] Nonlinear algebra course [LINK] Also of course there is Coursera and edX stuff. Godspeed.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41126389,"author":"antman","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Tell HN: I am going to host \"Real Analysis\" book club meetings","text":"This series of courses from Francis Su. It is not mentioned a lot but I think it succeeded in creating an intuition on Real Analysis for me. I think it could help people joining this [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ssZ_8cqfBlE":[{"hn_comment_id":27935066,"author":"cbm-vic-20","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company","text":"Tom Scott had a good video a couple of weeks ago about a grocery packing warehouse that has a sophisticated picking network: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29988275,"author":"cecilpl2","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Automation is reaching more companies","text":"I thought this was an interesting insight into what a fully-automated grocery store looks like. And also wild to think about how different things are when you design them for automation from the ground up. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ssob-7sGVWs":[{"hn_comment_id":39963195,"author":"jwoglom","month":"2024-04","story_title":"An IRC client in your motherboard","text":"I think this might be the video you're talking about, in case anyone is also interested in a brief history of quick boot operating systems and UEFI: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47137507,"author":"nhubbard","month":"2026-02","story_title":"I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270","text":"> Hopefully the BIOS writers do not abuse this Unfortunately, they have. Multiple examples from the excellent Cathode Ray Dude: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"st571DYYTR8":[{"hn_comment_id":36446344,"author":"taldo","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Is Coffee Good for You? \u2013 James Hoffmann review of scientific literature [video]","text":"Then you should probably check out Hoffmann's \"ultimate french press technique\" [VIDEO] IMO it produces the best coffee I've ever been able to make in a french press.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34314960,"author":"_Algernon_","month":"2023-01","story_title":"My Coffee Maker Just Makes Coffee","text":"I've had a lot of success with James Hoffman's method[1] for making coffee with a french press. Good coffee and with a larger french press you can make enough coffee at once for at least two people. You only need a french press and optionally a coffee grinder if you want to grind your own beans to get started. It is a bit time consuming (10-15minutes) so it may not be great for making a quick cup before leaving the house in the morning though. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34935235,"author":"helsinkiandrew","month":"2023-02","story_title":"The Beginner's Guide to over\u00adComplicating Coffee","text":"I was also quite disappointed with my aeropress. I think it\u2019s OK coffee just it didn\u2019t match the hype/expectation. I find the James Hoffmann french press technique - basically stir, break the crust, and let time and gravity do the work produces a far nicer cup of coffee: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"stxVBJem3Rs":[{"hn_comment_id":18735555,"author":"cpeterso","month":"2018-12","story_title":"How \u2018Baldur\u2019s Gate\u2019 Saved the Computer RPG","text":"Jeff Vogel from Spiderweb Software have an awesome retrospective on his games and company at GDC 2018: \"Failing to Fill: The Spiderweb Software Way\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18742459,"author":"cpeterso","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?","text":"Jeff Vogel from Spiderweb Software gave an awesome retrospective on 24 years of creating old-school-style fantasy RPGs at GDC 2018: \"Failing to Fill: The Spiderweb Software Way\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20766288,"author":"hartror","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap","text":"Jeff is an enjoyable speaker, his latest GDC talk is fantastic (and a better version of this blog post). [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36128037,"author":"hu3","month":"2023-05","story_title":"1999 Game Developers Conference (GDC) Recordings Archive","text":"Speaking about GDC, if you're into game development or just curious, this talk is legendary and inspirational to aspiring game devs (and very intertaining to boot): [VIDEO] \"In this GDC 2018 talk, Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel presents a retrospective on his company's history and how they've managed to stay in the game-making business since 1994.\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20443844,"author":"Jach","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M","text":"There are probably economies of scale, sure, which is part of why Epic can get away with a lower fee for now. But it's also just business. They know how much it costs without economies of scale, and that sets a floor. [VIDEO] Here's a talk from a very old indie company, there's one section talking about how they existed pre-Steam (and other stores they use since Steam's not exclusive) and appreciate what it's enabled.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20477149,"author":"ahaferburg","month":"2019-07","story_title":"The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction","text":"Great talk from the author: [VIDEO] > In this GDC 2018 talk, Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel presents a retrospective on his company's history and how they've managed to stay in the game-making business since 1994.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20772386,"author":"eropple","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap","text":"I recall that post (I've been a fan of JV's work, and his blog, for a long time!) but that's ten years old now and the market has gotten more competitive. I think that post is actually pre-Steam, though might push it the other way--I recall that he did really well for himself early on after going to Steam. He has a really good GDC talk that goes into more detail and might shed light on why he operates the way he does: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27973093,"author":"BrS96bVxXBLzf5B","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Getting sweet patron money on the modern internet (2020)","text":"The author of the article, Jeff Vogel, is a few steps (25 years) ahead of you. [VIDEO] (like the article, a humour-laced talk, enjoyable)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27974841,"author":"Rd6n6","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Getting sweet patron money on the modern internet (2020)","text":"The author did a great GDC talk about being an indie developer in the brick and mortar, pre-steam days. He talks at one point about how people had to buy a shareware cd from some kiosk, then phone him, argue about the price, mail him a cheque or money order, then wait for a cdrom in the mail to buy a game from him back then, but he made it work and is still going [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29229150,"author":"SuboptimalEng","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Hackernews for game developers?","text":"I saw his talk on GDC (Game Developers Conference) about this exact topic - it made it to my bookmarks list! It's called Failing to Fail: The Spiderweb Software Way[0] for anyone curious. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39155574,"author":"mattl","month":"2024-01","story_title":"I am the cheapest bastard in indie games (2019)","text":"I really enjoyed Jeff\u2019s talk at GDC a few years ago. [VIDEO] It inspired me to go check out his games and now I have bought all of them on Steam.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43548107,"author":"moregrist","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Donkey Kong champion wins defamation case against Australian YouTuber Karl Jobst","text":"You\u2019re spot on about the chances in a hit-based industry. That said, Jeff Vogel has spoken at length [0] about how he\u2019s stayed in business for 30-ish years with a middle class lifestyle. Including the lean times. I think it\u2019s pretty inspirational that there\u2019s a way to make game development work if your primary goal isn\u2019t getting rich, but to have a comfortable life and enjoy what you do. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"suRDUFpsHus":[{"hn_comment_id":4783579,"author":"bradleyland","month":"2012-11","story_title":"Show HN: a tiny Instagram projector","text":"Why this product? Nostalgia. Why only Instagram? Because it's good product alignment. Instagram also sells Nostalgia and has a huge user base. If you haven't seen it before, take a moment to watch this clip from an American television show called Mad Men. It's a show about a group of people working at Madison Avenue (in New York City) advertising firms in the 1960's. [VIDEO] I felt pretty moved the first time I saw that clip. I still feel moved when I watch it. For a moment, I wanted a slide projector. All of the people I know who also watch the show felt it was a master stroke. Nostalgia is a powerful selling force.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9907994,"author":"27182818284","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Want a better pitch? Watch Elon Musk\u2019s presentation for the Tesla Powerwall ","text":"Mad Men's Kodak presentation in season one is one of the best pitches I've seen. If you haven't seen it, and even if you haven't watched the show, you should. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6567262,"author":"twoodfin","month":"2013-10","story_title":"The Economics of a Hit TV Show","text":"I want to believe you're on to something here, but how do you \"tease\" a show like \"Mad Men\" at low cost? The best tease for that show would be something like the incredible \"Carousel\" pitch from the end of Season 1[1], and indeed, a link to that from reddit was how I finally decided to check the show out a couple of years in. But that arose organically, after a ton of money had been spent on script, casting, production... [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"suo_aUTUpps":[{"hn_comment_id":15967069,"author":"angch","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Google Maps' Moat","text":"They fly their own planes these days. [LINK] Too bad it's a video. Fast forward about 2 minutes. Or: [VIDEO] Fly plane. Zig zag. 5 cameras, then photogrammetry. StreetView, from planes.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24126252,"author":"Hokusai","month":"2020-08","story_title":"AI Creates Detailed 3D Renderings from Thousands of Tourist Photos","text":"I have been spending some time on the Virtual Reality version of Google Earth, and it is amazing to see the world in 3D from inside. Here there is a video on how Google creates the 3D for Google Earth: [VIDEO] I hope to see more of this technologies as it is great to visit places without leaving home.","stance":"rec"}],"sw0VfmXKq54":[{"hn_comment_id":45383182,"author":"barishnamazov","month":"2025-09","story_title":"A platform-jumping prince \u2013 History of Prince of Persia's 1990s Ports","text":"> \"For the first time I felt what it's really like to play Prince of Persia when you're not the author and don't already know by rote what's lurking around every corner.\" This perfectly captures why code reviews by someone who didn't write the original are so valuable. You can't unsee your own assumptions. I remember seeing the following short but extremely interesting documentary about makings of the game as well: [VIDEO] - Essential viewing for anyone interested in game development history.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48500887,"author":"mscdex","month":"2026-06","story_title":"How we made hit video game Prince of Persia","text":"If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend watching the \"War Stories\" video on the making of Prince of Persia: [VIDEO] On a related note, I also highly recommend the \"War Stories\" video for the making of Crash Bandicoot: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48502173,"author":"stefanos82","month":"2026-06","story_title":"How we made hit video game Prince of Persia","text":"I have watched the creator explaining to us in great detail how he came up with so many tiny details that made it a perfect game for its time! Just watch it yourself, you will be in awe! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25408972,"author":"softwhale","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Examples of games developed by a single developer?","text":"Arstechnica has a great interview with Jordan Mechner, the creator of this game. A true technical and artistic wizard: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29713383,"author":"ajdoingnothing","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Prince of Persia in JavaScript","text":"If you haven't seen Jordan Mechner talking about the development of Prince of Persia yet (definitely recommended): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"swQbA4zub20":[{"hn_comment_id":19291163,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2019-03","story_title":"An introduction to distributed systems (2017)","text":"This is a great outline. Martin Kleppmann's Designing Data Intensive Applications [0] is very much in the same domain as what's in these notes. Speaking about scale and distributed systems: AWS specific resources I find interesting from their EdgeEngineering/NetEng teams (I haven't seen many other service teams in AWS openly share as much about design as them): - [LINK] series of articles on Route53's 100% data-plane availability architecture [1]. - [LINK] colmmacc [2] (seems to be the eng behind AWS HyperPlane [3][4]?) on 10 design patterns for building resilient systems. - [VIDEO] Peter Vosshall (co-creator of Dynamo [5]) presenting \"cell-based\" design in-use at AWS. ---- [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] Decandia, G.; Hastorun, D.; Jampani, M.; Kakulapati, G.; Lakshman, A.; Pilchin, A.; Sivasubramanian, S.; Vosshall, P.; Vogels, W. (2007). \"Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store\". [6] Bonus: The SRE Book [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19394825,"author":"ignoramous","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Post-mortem of March 12 Google outage","text":"From what you describe the 'AWS cells' are very different than Borg's. My view is that at a high level aws cells are isolated, fuzzy-partitioned, migratable, heterogeneous instances of a complete service stack that are managed such that they always fail independently of each other; contact points among these cell instances, if required, are established via highly available intermediate services (like ReplicatedStateMachinesOrStorage); the clients are routed to assigned cells by a highly available routing layer (like NetworkTrafficShapers/DNS), which can also help facilitate migration of clients from one/more cell to another. I encourage you to view the re:invent presentation on it [0] if resiliency in distributed systems is something that interests you. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25237836,"author":"talawahtech","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Summary of the Amazon Kinesis Event in the Northern Virginia (US-East-1) Region","text":"Multi-AZ doesn't protect against a software/OS issue like this, Multi-AZ would be relevant if it was an infrastructure failure (e.g. underlying EC2 instances or networking). The relevant resiliency pattern in this case would be what they refer to as cell-based architecture, where within an AZ services are broken down into smaller independent cells to minimize the blast radius. They specifically mention in the write-up that this was a gap they plan to address, the \"backend\" portion of Kinesis was already cellularized but that step had not yet been completed on the \"frontend\". Celluarization in combination with workload partitioning would have helped, e.g. don't run Cloudwatch, Cognito and Customer workloads on the same set of cells. It is also important to note that celluarization only helps in this case if they limit code deployment to a limited number of cells at a time. This YouTube video[1] of a re:invent presentation does a great job of explaining it. The cell-based stuff, starts around minute 20. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"sycgL3Qg_Ak":[{"hn_comment_id":46070372,"author":"nntwozz","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Don't be a scary old guy: My 40s survival strategy with charm","text":"Best advice on this topic: How to Age Gracefully | CBC Radio [VIDEO] [Spoiler] \"Dear 91-year old, don't listen to other people's advice. Nobody knows what the hell they're doing. Signed, a 93-year old.\" [Edit] This was originally passed down to me through RSS from: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46720533,"author":"Jamesbeam","month":"2026-01","story_title":"I'm 34. Here's 34 things I wish I knew at 21","text":"The best advise I ever got was this. [VIDEO] Don\u2019t listen to other people\u2019s advice. Nobody knows what the hell they\u2019re doing. Just do your own thing.","stance":"strong_rec"}],"syoqjYLDs48":[{"hn_comment_id":9766924,"author":"quadrature","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Tell HN: Kevin and I are doing HN office hours Friday from 11 am to 1 pm PDT","text":"I agree its really great of them, you can watch office hour sessions on youtube from the Startup School that YC runs [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10017989,"author":"dmnd","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Freight Startups Attract Silicon Valley\u2019s Attention","text":"Flexport is hiring engineers: [LINK] As an engineer starting at Flexport in a couple of weeks, here are some more interesting resources that shaped my thinking: Interview with Ryan Petersen (Flexport CEO) [LINK] Office hours at startup school 2013 with pg & sama [VIDEO] I also happened to have recently read Zero to One. Plus, Flexport has an appealing mission. Removing friction in something as basic as shipping makes pretty much everyone in the world better off.","stance":"rec"}],"szIGZVrSAyc":[{"hn_comment_id":12854505,"author":"Swinx43","month":"2016-11","story_title":"In Greece, Property Is Debt","text":"This is a really good talk that will give some valuable insight into how Greece has been bullied. (YANIS VAROUFAKIS | NOAM CHOMSKY, NYPL, 26 April) [VIDEO] More than 90% of the bailout money went to banks, not to Greece. Bank recapitalization via the back door while blaming Greece.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24967415,"author":"mxmilkb","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Another Now by Yanis Varoufakis","text":"Your narrative really doesn't sound real, and your argument of \"ignore them!\" comes across to me an attempt to psychologically bias other readers who are even less knowledgeable. [VIDEO] Yanis in conversation with Chomsky, long but insightful.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40642524,"author":"hi-v-rocknroll","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'","text":"Nooooooooooooooo...... How will colorless green ideas sleep furiously? :'[ Will miss his interviews on various forums often posted on YT and appearances on Democracy Now. Classic: Yanis Varoufakis with Professor Noam Chomsky at NYPL, April 16, 2016 | DiEM25 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"t-8TDOFqkQA":[{"hn_comment_id":46827805,"author":"e40","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers","text":"What? A 5 minute drive is miles, and that's plenty far enough. They are currently being built within 100 meters of homes. It's absolutely insane. EDIT: [VIDEO] Just watch that and not get hoppin' mad.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48243168,"author":"e40","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Why We've Filed a Referendum","text":"Watch these [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] Then, tell me if you want to live anywhere near those. Then, tell me of a nuclear power plant that has that bad a repo.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48695451,"author":"xavdid","month":"2026-06","story_title":"'Cost Me the Election': Data Centers Trigger Voter Backlash","text":"> People will claim real harms but the connections are spotty at best. This is a wild claim because it's trivially provable. There's been tons of reporting around the effect they have on the immediate vicinity, and that's without even getting into the unknown long-term effects. Here's a decent piece, but there's plenty more out there if you look at all: [VIDEO] Is every single mad person doing investigative reporting and / or living next to a data center? No. But something doesn't have to personally affect me to know it's harmful.","stance":"rec"}],"t-O-Qdh7VvQ":[{"hn_comment_id":23361634,"author":"willis936","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Black hole paradoxes reveal a fundamental link between energy and order","text":"I don\u2019t see why it\u2019s unbelievable. High mass energy conversion is one of the least crazy things about black holes imo. For readers who want some quick info: [VIDEO] This PBS SpaceTime video doesn\u2019t talk about the practical uses of Kugelblitzes, but it isn\u2019t a big leap from understanding what they are to how to get energy out of them. Hawking radiation rate increases as schwarzschild radius decreases. If you could make a properly sized black hole you could convert a little bit of mass into a lot of energy. Maybe this could be harnessed to solve all electricity demand issues. Maybe it could be used to make a room sized bomb that blows up Earth. Vote now on your phones. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28877851,"author":"jerf","month":"2021-10","story_title":"We've spotted a planet surviving its dying star","text":"Well, that very nearly is the method of power generation. It would presumably be paired with some sort of Dyson sphere around the white dwarf. (Remember that a \"Dyson sphere\" isn't necessarily a solid shell, but just some configuration of matter where no matter which direction the energy goes it is intercepted by something.) You may also enjoy: [VIDEO] which is a minutephysics on black hole power using much the same principles but attaining yet higher efficiencies.","stance":"rec"}],"t0mhvd3-60Y":[{"hn_comment_id":18174165,"author":"T-R","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Rust RAII is better than the Haskell bracket pattern","text":"Something to keep in mind - linear types are on their way[1], with exactly this usecase in mind. Simon Peyton Jones gave an excellent presentation on the topic[2], briefly discussing exceptions, as well as giving a mention to ResourceT and the phantom type solution in the article (described as channel-passing). [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22712365,"author":"throwaway17_17","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Programming Models for Distributed Computation","text":"Session Types, AFAIU are a specific implementation of a linear logic in some type system and I am not all too familiar with them in practice. However, I would like to think I am well versed in Linear Logic and Substructural Type Theory. I think the works by Wadler are a good place to start, in particular is a sort of review paper, based in intuitionistic logic (which he also covers in said paper), on linear logic. It\u2019s called \u2018A Taste of Linear Logic\u2019 (I actually have the paper open in Safari on my iPhone as I type this) and it is written as a sort of primer on the area. Wadler\u2019s bibliographies on the works contained in the pages you linked are a good source as well. If you are at all coming from a place of familiarity with Haskell, a decent overview of the current discussions on Linear Types in functional languages is at [2]. And lastly, if you like videos, Simon Peyton Jones has a great talk on YouTube [3] where he discusses practical linear types for Haskell, but the theory is not Haskell specific. I will warn you that the latter two references make several arguments and then discuss uniqueness typing (which is related but very different) and that is a whole other rabbit hole of sources, but generally a good topic to dig into as well. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24636771,"author":"pyrale","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Haskell GHC 9.0.1-alpha","text":"SPJ usually makes great introductions about new things being introduced to GHC. Here's one about linear types: [VIDEO] > How do people that don't have PhDs bridge the gap in their knowledge from what's commonly taught/used (OOP and it's design patterns) to thinking in terms of monads/monoids/functors/etc. In my own experience, you just practice, and munch new knowledge bits by bits. The crucial point here is that you don't need to know _all_ of haskell to be productive using it. So you learn the basics, start using monads without understanding the Monad abstraction (it's really not something you need to understand to use), and after a while it just clicks. And once you're confortable with this basic knowledge, you learn new things when you need them. As a result, I (and many other paid haskellers) have a job writing haskell without having a PhD, without learning category theory, or without a deep math bagage.","stance":"rec"}],"t1MqJPHxy6g":[{"hn_comment_id":19562700,"author":"netsharc","month":"2019-04","story_title":"A philosophy-quoting homeless man in China has fled internet fame","text":"This doc is eye-opening: [VIDEO] (although it's over 2 hours and I fell asleep the first time I watched it). but TL;DW: People are always looking for status, because status means others acknowledge and praise them. And today's celebrity culture means being famous is seemingly a quick way to gain status. With a better community you'd have friends who like you and acknowledge you because they got to know you and your character.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20034553,"author":"netsharc","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence","text":"Luxury goods are status symbols, we buy them because we crave status because deep down we crave recognition from others in society. So I wonder if urbanization/the trend towards more loneliness is the problem. If you have a tightly-knit community, you'd have people who appreciate you because of your character, sense of humor or good company; not because you drive a fancy car. And nowadays we don't really have real communities anymore, just polarization through the Internet, where people try to feel better about themselves by putting down others. This (2+ hours) documentary about status is quite eye opening: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27674174,"author":"ArnoVW","month":"2021-06","story_title":"We moderns are status-drunk","text":"If you found this article interesting, I can highly recommend the book (and documentary) \"Status Anxiety\", by modern philosopher Alain de Botton. The video has a couple of gems, such as the comparisson between an english country-side vicar, and an american TV preacher. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10069852,"author":"shenanigoat","month":"2015-08","story_title":"Why we travel","text":"Agreed. I also really enjoyed Status Anxiety. For those who want to condense the reading experience, here is a 2.5 hr documentary version [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13045388,"author":"flycaliguy","month":"2016-11","story_title":"The Need to Read","text":"May I suggest you watch Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety next time? Might hit two birds with one stone. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14536552,"author":"netsharc","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Stop Pretending You\u2019re Not Rich","text":"Meritocracy is an interesting \"religion\", which we unconsciously believe in, and one can probably argue is the basis of the Republican ideology. \"You're poor? That must mean you're lazy!\" I find Alain de Botton's essays enlightening, here's a 2+ hour documentary about it: [VIDEO] , and a 4 minute summary: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21629967,"author":"netsharc","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Greensboro Man Creates Dating App Where He's the Only Guy Allowed","text":"Hah, just like in that Black Mirror episode, where the main character avoids interacting with the waiter with a 3.x rating for fear of being judged by others as someone of lower status (score). Alain de Botton has an illuminating documentary about status (2h30m version: [VIDEO] , 5m version: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32493719,"author":"netsharc","month":"2022-08","story_title":"General belief in a just world is associated with dishonest behavior (2017)","text":"Well, the US is a fine example of your realization. People like to preach \"You just need work hard and you'll be successful.\". If you believe that, then on the flip side you'd have to believe, \"Those poor people are poor because they're lazy.\". To me that's why there's a lot of people screaming and yelling about \"Handouts for the poor!\". A good video about it: [LINK] , or even a longer documentary: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34445221,"author":"netsharc","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Money Can\u2019t Buy Happiness. It Can\u2019t Even Buy Status, a New Book Says","text":"I skimmed through the review, it seems it's skewering this book and the arguments it's trying to make. But curious, if other people see expensive cars as status, me showing up in a fancy car means me showing up with status. If I'm female and I show up with a Louis Vuitton bag, that also means showing up with status, but with a Michael Kors bag? As a female friend told me a few years ago \"Ewww, everyone buys that brand, it's now 'cheap'.\"... Interesting long-ass documentary about status: [VIDEO] , but also about the \"meritocracy\" and the US' idea of \"If you work hard you'll be successful\" which imply the flip of it: \"If you're poor, that means you're lazy\".","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45929515,"author":"netsharc","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Being poor vs. being broke","text":"Too many people buy the American dream of \"If you just work hard enough, you'll be successful.\". If you believe this, then you'd have to believe the opposite: \"If you're poor and unsucessful, that means you didn't work hard enough, you must be lazy.\". And too many trust-fund kids or kids from rich parents who could afford to send them to expensive schools (or rich enough to live in a district with a well-funded school) dismiss their luck and believe \"I'm successful, that must mean I've been a diligent and smart worker.\". Also, beware of survival bias, most of people in here will have similar paths (born with smarts, good education, high-paying IT job, great success) and probably have similar beliefs about hard work and luck... This 2+ hour documentary partly talks about it, in particular from ~28m: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49207721,"author":"netsharc","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Obviously, DOGE Did Not Save Money","text":"If only the government thought like this, instead of blaming those family members of being \"lazy welfare queens\"... A relevant segment on a 2h+ documentary: [VIDEO] Or before that: [VIDEO] If you've absorbed the American teaching that \"if you just work hard you'll be successful\", then you'd have to believe the opposite: \"if you're not successful that means you're lazy\".","stance":"rec"}],"t4vKPhjcMZg":[{"hn_comment_id":26415245,"author":"MaxBarraclough","month":"2021-03","story_title":"The tree-based approach to organizing documentation sucks","text":"Related to this: understanding the various types of documentation, and using them all appropriately. I highly recommend Daniele Procida's talk about this, [0] and the accompanying web page [1]. He gives a useful taxonomy of the 4 kinds of documentation. Through the power of Unicode: \u250c\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u252c\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2510 /\\ \u2502 Tutorials \u2502 How-to Guide \u2502 || Practical \u2502 (Learning-oriented) \u2502 (Problem-oriented) \u2502 || \u251c\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u253c\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2524 \u2502 Discussions \u2502 Reference \u2502 || \u2502 (Understanding-oriented) \u2502 (Information-oriented) \u2502 || Theoretical \u2514\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2534\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2500\u2518 \\/ <=== Useful for study Useful for coding ===> [0] [VIDEO] (that will take you to the start of the talk proper) [1] [LINK] edit Didn't spot the link to [1] at the bottom of the article :P","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30830191,"author":"ivan_ah","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?","text":"It's not a book but a website[1] and a talk[2] that explains a good strategy for writing docs, based on four quadrants. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31874345,"author":"O__________O","month":"2022-06","story_title":"How to avoid being a secretary for engineers (2018)","text":"____Response to Article____ Engineers are rarely good at writing technical documentation, especially compared to technical writers (that is \u201csecretaries\u201d per author\u2019s lingo) which by definition, should be. Engineers generally cost more than technical writers. Good technical writing saves engineering time both during AND after the documentation is produced. Author spends large amount of time, to poorly express that to be a good technical writer, you must understand who needs what and why, then figure out how to solve that the best way based on the context. ____System for to Producing Tech Docs____ Anyone looking for a good system of producing documentation should check out: [LINK] Which has a 30-min presentation: [VIDEO] Prior HN posts on the system are here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31874408,"author":"O__________O","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How to level up your technical writing?","text":"To be a good technical writer, you must understand who needs what and why, then figure out how to solve that the best way based on the context. Anyone looking for a good system of producing documentation should check out: [LINK] Which has a 30-min presentation: [VIDEO] Prior HN posts on the system are here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"t705r8ICkRw":[{"hn_comment_id":28064206,"author":"InTheArena","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Netflix announces Space X documentary on civilian mission into orbit","text":"The recent interview of Elon by Tim Dodd is probably more informative and interesting this this could ever be. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28087504,"author":"senectus1","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Tesla CEO berated employees, investors and tried to get rid of safety measures","text":"I can see this as being a real story. I just finished watching this really very interesting interview with Elon as he walks around the spacex stuff [VIDEO] He got vocally and visibly annoyed with the beeping noises that the machines were making. It was a useless cacophony of beeps and you could just see in his head he was thinking \"How the hell do I make this better and quieter\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28105018,"author":"_Microft","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Starbase Tour with Elon Musk (part 2) [video]","text":"This series is said to eventually have three parts. Part one [0] and two (this submission) were filmed at the production site \"Starbase\" (Boca Chica village, Texas). The third and last part is going to be at the launch site, a few kilometers/miles further to the east, right next to the beach. Part three has not been released yet. Tim Dodd usually makes a good interview partner for Elon Musk because he is more knowledgable about rockets than most reporters and can ask way more interesting questions than they could. If you haven't seen the first part yet, I would recommend to start with it [0] instead of jumping right into this one. [0] Part 1: [VIDEO] (53 minutes long!)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28214129,"author":"jxramos","month":"2021-08","story_title":"You don\u2019t need to work on hard problems (2020)","text":"Here's a great complimentary nugget of wisdom Elon Musk shared on the tour he gave of Starbase recently that intersects with a closely related concept. 17:29 Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize the thing that should not exist. And say, well, why would you do that? Well, everyone has been trained in high school and college that you gotta answer the question, convergent logic. So you can't tell a professor, \"your question is dumb\", or you will get a bad grade. You have to answer the question. So everyone is basically, without knowing it, they got like mental straight jacket on that is they'll work on optimizing the thing that should simply not exist. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28517755,"author":"harshreality","month":"2021-09","story_title":"High Performance Organizations Reading List","text":"Everyday Astronaut's walk and talk with Elon Musk where he attempts to explain his management process, starts at 13:30 of part 1: [VIDEO] Here's a rough summary: 1. Make requirements less dumb. 2. Delete part or process steps. If you're not occasionally adding things back (he says 10%) (ideally in improved versions), you're not removing things often enough. 3. Simplify, optimize, solve. Everyone's trained to jump to this because the educational process requires you to answer a question as posed, when often the question is dumb and shouldn't be dealt with as-stated. 4. Accelerate process 5. Automate Those tend to blur together at the edges. I'm sure if he formalized this and wrote it down for mass consumption it'd be presented differently, but it's his current mental model. Process testing - remove unnecessary in-process testing after production line debugging is done. Obviously there are nuances, he's not saying to do no in-process testing, but rather to remove testing which was intended to reveal information once that's already been collected and addressed. He cautions about false positives from in-process testing, and notes most testing can be done end of line with acceptable results. Finally, it's important to understand the context. The part about part/step deletion in particular, when things get added back 10% of the time, is not appropriate for all development processes. That would have to be adjusted a the specific product and market objective.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28952292,"author":"simondotau","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Tesla is outrunning the supply chain crunch","text":"> This is objectively false. I commend the response by user panick21 and would add that you can watch Elon Musk demonstrate his acumen in this three part interview on Everyday Astronaut. You can't fake this kind of breadth and depth of knowledge. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33033824,"author":"martyvis","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022","text":"Watch this walk around Starbase with Elon and Tim Dodd, and you'll get a pretty good sense that he has an engineering brain that really understands the complexities of design, build and execute more than anything. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33144117,"author":"modeless","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Brave browser to start blocking annoying cookie consent banners","text":"If I had to choose between network television and YouTube, I would choose YouTube every day of the week and twice on Sunday. I mean, I enjoy Seinfeld too, but on the whole YouTube is both more entertaining and vastly more useful and educational than network television. Not because the content has the highest production values, but because the content matches my interests and needs. That's the true power of targeted advertising. It allows creators to focus on niches that can't be served by content produced for a mass audience. Even large 'niches' get dumbed down to the lowest common denominator for network television. Case in point: Here's Jay Leno interviewing Elon Musk about SpaceX Starship for network television [1] vs YouTuber Tim Dodd [2]. Leno's program is fine for people who don't follow space. For my niche Dodd is vastly better, but he can't draw a wide enough audience to make money on non-targeted ads like Leno can. And the thing is, everyone has their niches. There is no large population of people out there who are average in every way and need the network television version of everything. The average person doesn't exist. [1] Leno: [LINK] [2] Dodd: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33705817,"author":"mlindner","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Why Twitter didn\u2019t go down: From a real Twitter SRE","text":"Maybe I'm a particularly dull engineer, but I've taken several aspects of personal advice from what he has said in interviews (the especially technical ones, not the ones aimed at a mass audience where he repeats his standard canned speech) and found them useful for myself personally. Here's two examples I've found particularly insightful that shows he has some ability to talk about engineering details. This example where he talks about the choice of steel for Starship as opposed to any other metal, something that would be an otherwise unsual choice: [LINK] This example that I've personally incorporated into my own thinking where he talks about his \"five step process\" for engineering design refinement (watch at least until he starts talking about Tesla Model 3 battery stuff): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34719819,"author":"TechBro8615","month":"2023-02","story_title":"SpaceX prepares to test fire all 33 Starship engines at once","text":"If you don't mind a little Musk propaganda, I enjoyed these two videos [0] [1] from Everyday Astronaut where he toured the SpaceX factory and launch site (\"Starbase\") with Musk. My favorite quote was about the most common trap that engineers fall into, which is to waste time optimizing something that shouldn't exist in the first place. I'm sure that's not an original Muskism, but it stuck with me nonetheless. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40617752,"author":"cs702","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Why Elon Musk switched Starship from carbon fiber to stainless steel","text":"This short video clip quickly makes evident why SpaceX has become so dominant, now sending more than 90% of all global cargo to orbit every year. In short: Musk is operating from first principles, questioning everything from the ground up, willing to try things that others are unwilling to consider or have not even thought of before -- there are no sacred cows. The result is that SpaceX is leaving conventionally run competitors saddled with increasingly outdated, higher cost, less scalable systems and processes. Whenever I watch interviews of other CEOs of other space exploration companies (Boeing, Northrop Grumman, United Launch Allience, etc.) or CEOs of other satellite internet service providers (Viasat, Eutelsat OneWeb, Hughesnet, etc.), I come away with the sense they're so far behind they are not even properly competing against SpaceX. --- PS. If you enjoyed this video clip, you'll also want to watch Musk's tour of Starbase: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"t7tA3NNKF0Q":[{"hn_comment_id":11185756,"author":"rryan","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Content ID and the Rise of the Machines","text":"While you're right that Google's implementation of Content ID doesn't handle fair use well, Content ID is critical for indie creators. Facebook's lack of protections lead to tons of lost revenue for them (and for indies, it matters!). This video changed my opinion on Content ID when I saw it last year: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12561940,"author":"sean_patel","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Facebook Overestimated Key Video Metric for Two Years","text":"\"How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views\" - Kurzgesagt \u2013 In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => [VIDEO] This is neither a bug nor a \"mistake\". It's straight up fraud. Fraud because Facebook uses these false #s to prove to their advertizing clients that they are getting a HUGE ROI, when they really aren't. Also the investors and analysts bump up their ratings and the stock goes higher and higher on false ad view #s. By counting a view as a legitmate view after the video plays only for 3 seconds, their \"algorithm\" counted billions of views even when the user has not even seen it, because Auto-play is enabled by default and you have to opt-out / disable it and no-one does it. It takes a person roughly 4 seconds to scroll off their feed as they quickly \"scan\" their friends posts.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12561952,"author":"sean_patel","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Facebook Overestimated Key Video Metric for Two Years","text":"Yes. straight up fraud. \"How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views\" - Kurzgesagt \u2013 In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12984641,"author":"sean_patel","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Facebook\u2019s ad metric problem is becoming Zuckerberg\u2019s headache","text":"This is not new, and I've spoken about this here before. Facebook used fraudulent methods to artificially inflate their view counts, and pedelled those fake and grossly exagerrated #s for \"eyeballs\" to the unsuspecting advertizers. \"How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views\" - Kurzgesagt \u2013 In a Nutshell exposed this with detailed analysis and evidence. Watch it here => [VIDEO] I contracted with their Ad team for a few months, and can't say more for NDA reasons, hence I am pointing you to publicly available media / expose.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18655641,"author":"apexalpha","month":"2018-12","story_title":"EU Copyright: Block Everything, Never Make Mistakes, but Don't Use Upload Filter","text":"[VIDEO] This does a very good job of explaining how small content creators are practically powerless now on the web in terms of protecting their content being stolen.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19492167,"author":"apexalpha","month":"2019-03","story_title":"European Parliament approves copyright reform","text":"A lot of European media sees their content stolen and re-uploaded by anonymous users on YT, FB, etc... FB in particular have not responded to this and thus content creators lose a lot of views and money. This video sums it up nicely: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"t8QEOBgLBQU":[{"hn_comment_id":7763229,"author":"MakingOfGames","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Valve\u2019s Design Process For Creating Half-Life (1999)","text":"If you like this type of content, check out the Reddit subforum [LINK] , which covers behind the scenes footage and 'making of' material for video games. There's an alphabetical listing of all submissions that you can use to search for a particular title. [LINK] Press CTRL-F on that page and try searching for your favorite game. Searching for 'Valve' will lead you to the numerous developer commentaries that Valve has included in their games, similar to cast commentaries on DVDs. Valve founder Gabe Newell gave a talk about productivity, economics and corporations that you might find of interest: [VIDEO] A good article during the final hours of Half-Life 2 development is this one written by Geoff Keighley: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9180332,"author":"teamonkey","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Ending the open office epidemic","text":"One of my favourite anecdotes about open offices is 22m in to this video[1], where Gabe Newell of Valve talks about his desire to have one office per person and how it didn't work out in practice. Bonus: he mentions Peopleware. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tAACYA1Mwv4":[{"hn_comment_id":39145871,"author":"boomskats","month":"2024-01","story_title":"WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters","text":"I thought this keynote presentation[0] by Luke Wagner at Wasmcon was great and covered it very well. I also found the WIT Format design doc[1] in the component model repo to be the most complete explanation of how it's all going to hang together. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39146140,"author":"jauntywundrkind","month":"2024-01","story_title":"WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters","text":"This does such a good job laying out the real fundamentals of what's happening. Capabilities model, component-model; it's well covered and nicely tied together. The WasmCom keynote What is a component? (and why?) by Luke Wagner is also a great intro. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39146257,"author":"jauntywundrkind","month":"2024-01","story_title":"WASI 0.2.0 and Why It Matters","text":"Now that there's a canonical ABI as specified by component-model, it seems like the good work can start. As recommended elsewhere in the comments, there's a pretty damned fine talk my Luke Wagner that covers wasm components & the promise. He talks about cross-platform was 18m35s in: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40536405,"author":"jauntywundrkind","month":"2024-05","story_title":"'WebAssembly Is Finally Usable, Almost'","text":"WASI preview1 modules aren't very modular. You can't compose them. All you can do is one shot compile & bundle the world into one massive module. You can't use that module to power another module, it basically has to be standalone. Luke Wagner has a talk going through WASI 0.2 that's pretty excellent. The title is What is a component (and why)? , and we go step by step through the properties component-model enables: a Standard Portable Lightweight Finely-Sandboxed Cross-Language Compositional Module . You get basically none of these without component-model. [VIDEO] The properties are amazing. Not only do we get Cross-Language, not only do we get composable, but ideally we get very very lightweight sandboxed processes that can safely re-use modules already loaded by the runtime. This could be such an incredible way to sandbox actively, with a base of supportinginrsriss dwarfing anything computer science has done before. The wasm view here has been so shortsighted & brutal. Once again, the hype cycle has gotten big enough that a lot of people are very angry & actively trying to tear down & discredit. Like systemd, like K8s. With not even a passing attempt to show balanced views in the process, no nods to the possible or good, just remorseless total war. This is the famous typical dripping sense of disdain, arising again in angry stirrings, here now to rage against component-model. Holy shit yes is it ambitious and hard. Yes you should be afraid of failure, of this crew not pull","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48505366,"author":"hectaman","month":"2026-06","story_title":"WASI 0.3.0 Released","text":"I don't think it's fair to say this work has happened in the shadows. I work on CNCF wasmCloud, and I know how hard we try to make this content available. - Many standing meetings organized around SIGs, all on the public community calendar: [LINK] - A dedicated Zulip: [LINK] - Conferences organized around exactly these topics: Wasm Day, WasmCon, Wasm I/O, and the Bytecode Alliance Plumbers Summit - CNCF projects: wasmCloud, Spin - Blogs, many with recordings, summaries, and transcripts: [LINK] , [LINK] , [LINK] If you want the architectural direction straight from the source, Luke Wagner's keynotes are the best place to start: - \"What is a Component (and Why)?\" (WasmCon 2023): [VIDEO] - \"The Path to Components\": [LINK] - \"Towards a Component Model 1.0\" (Wasm I/O 2026): [LINK] I mean this, though - what else would you like to see to try and make the content and process more accessible? Are there communities that are doing this really well that we could use for inspiration?","stance":"rec"}],"tD5NrevFtbU":[{"hn_comment_id":38228963,"author":"GuestHNUser","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Learning new coding patterns \u2013 how to start?","text":"> What resources do you recommend folks at my level look into? I'd argue that your best bet for learning is starting a project that drives you, then throwing that project away and starting it over again but try to make the code simpler. This way you can hone into what abstraction is actually necessary to solve your problem. I strongly recommend ignoring design patterns and instead honing in on what the essential data flow is in your problem space. Most design patterns will bloat your code base and, thus, slow both your program and your programming velocity down. As far as programming design and architecture goes, the best talks I have found come out of data orientated design talks. Casey Muratori has a number of talks well worth listening to[0][1][2]. I also enjoy Andrew Kelley's talk on Data Orientated Design specifically as it demonstrates DOD's power with actual numbers to back it up[3]. Tangent: I did my time with OOP design + trying to make my code 'clean' according to popular recommendations you'll see online. All of that time, I consider wasted because I focused too much on what the 'right' abstraction to use was, instead of solving my problem in the simplest way possible. I find now that often the best solution is the one that uses the least amount of abstraction and indirection. (E.g. One big function can be a lot easier to maintain than multiple little functions, you just have to develop a taste for when a function should be split up and why). (If you must have a pa","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40115784,"author":"GuestHNUser","month":"2024-04","story_title":"How do you recognize an expert?","text":"The issue with those books is that they don't have any concrete data that affirms that they are worth following. And, in fact, that style of code is largely to blame for why modern software feels so sluggish. They often reduce performance by 10x if not 100x or worse. I like this video on the topic for reasons not to follow SOLID principles[0]. Muratori also has an excellent talk on writing APIs that are flexible and performant[1]. As for books on understanding the hardware performance, Computer Systems: a Programmer's Perspective, is the best example (not the international edition though, according to the author's recommendation). I'm not aware of any architecture books recommended by anyone that cares about performance unfortunately. Most high performance software is written iteratively, meaning they aren't assuming a code structure from the start. Andreas Fredriksson, a lead engine programmer at Insomniac Games, has an excellent quote on how he writes high performance software[2]: > Work backwards from hard constraints and requirements to guide your design. Don\u2019t fall into the trap of designing from a fluffy API frontend before you\u2019ve worked out how the thing will handle a worst case. Don\u2019t be afraid to sketch stuff in while you\u2019re proving out the approach. > The value is what you learn, never the code. Hack it and then delete the code and implement \u201cclean\u201d or whatever you need. But never start there, it gets in the way of real engineering. > As an industry we spend million","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41388106,"author":"xiphias2","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?","text":"Look at Casey Murrey's Clean Code horrible performance youtube video: [VIDEO] I also watched clean code videos and used it in practice, and why it _felt_ right my code size blew up and actually it got harder to understand by other people instead of easier. Nowdays my main guidelines are getting a balance between less lines of code (while still readable), readable variable names and better performance. Also I may get hate here for it, but I learned a lot from watching George Hotz programming tinygrad (available on YouTube).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43289272,"author":"latexr","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Is Clean Code a waste of time?","text":"You may enjoy \u201c\"Clean\" Code, Horrible Performance\u201d, from Casey Muratori. [VIDEO] Casey specialises in game engine research and development [LINK] And has an ongoing course on computer performance for programmers. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48750530,"author":"xiphias2","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Solid and Clean Code never felt solid or clean to me","text":"If you want something real, look at Clean Code Horrible Performance youtube video if you haven't. I also found Bob Martin entertaining, but after trying to follow his suggestions I just got into the trap that Casey Muratori shows: even if I don't care about the performance of the code at the start, the amount of abstractions Uncle Bob advises makes it just too easy to make the code extremely hard to optimize later. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tDacjrSCeq4":[{"hn_comment_id":2917937,"author":"dorianj","month":"2011-08","story_title":"SeatGeek Blog: What An Earthquake Does To Page Load Time","text":"Also interesting: a Sun engineer uses dtrace to show HDD latency spiking after he yells at his disks [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15989990,"author":"teraflop","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Acoustic Denial of Service Attacks on HDDs","text":"The paper links to this entertaining YouTube video from 2009, in which someone demonstrates the effect by literally shouting at a rack of servers: [VIDEO] (EDIT: replaced the link I found via YouTube's search with the original, thanks robotmlg!)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26674417,"author":"geerlingguy","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Raspberry Pi 2.5 Gbps OMV NAS Performance","text":"One of the little gems I found while I was putting together the video for this post was \"Shouting in the datacenter\", an older clip (from the pre-HD era) demonstrating the consequence of doing exactly what the title says: [VIDEO] Warning: loud!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32585975,"author":"kuon","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Song from 1989 declared a cybersecurity vulnerability for crashing hard drives","text":"I had the \"vibration\" problem a few times in me IT career, train, construction work and once elevators. It is the kind of issue that are really hard to diagnose the first time but after the first time it's part of the standard \"diagnose suite\". I love to show this video about the effect of noise on HDD (be sure to put the volume down) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tF4DML7FIWk":[{"hn_comment_id":33911523,"author":"SXX","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Xiaomi\u2019s Humanoid Drummer Beats Expectations","text":"I can say I'm much impressed. At the same time I haven't watched Boston Dynamics videos for last couple of years. When I checked latest Atlas demo from 2021 it look like sci-fi to me: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28242963,"author":"sergiotapia","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot \u201cTesla Bot\u201d","text":"We said the same thing about movement in robots -- and today we have: [VIDEO] Just ridiculous how far things have come, it seems fake it's so far along.","stance":"rec"}],"tHEOGrkhDp0":[{"hn_comment_id":23759598,"author":"latexr","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked","text":"> if someone says they\u2019re in advertising I automatically hate them You might enjoy Bill Hicks\u2019 take: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34824718,"author":"ploum","month":"2023-02","story_title":"We boosted marketing email open rate from 20% to 60%","text":"\"Email marketer here.\" It\u2019s \"spammer\". Changing the word doesn\u2019t make what you do less awful. (and check this nice video: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"tISy7EJQPzI":[{"hn_comment_id":15891583,"author":"nsm","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Why Google stores billions of lines of code in a single repository (2016)","text":"There is a great talk by their C++ dev team about how a build everything from source, mono repo really helps with C++ change enablement [VIDEO] Personally, I\u2019d have to agree that at a minimum a mono repo per distinct product role (server side in one mono repo, desktop software in one mono repo) is immensely valuable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16365037,"author":"ot","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Advantages of monolithic version control","text":"Relevant talk by Google at CppCon last year focused on C++, but really talks about getting rid of versioning in general. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19694362,"author":"jacobparker","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Keeping master green at scale","text":"> You are totally correct that to achieve the same performance, correctness, and overall master level \"green\"ness in a multirepo system you would have to either define or detect dependencies and dependent repos, build the entire affected chain, and test the result. That part is much easier in monorepo. You also would need to do that as an atomic operation (in the mono-repo + especially with a commit queue you're building on the atomicity of git). Having to unwinding that transaction if you aren't atomic can get you into a big mess at larger scales. Here's a good related talk: C++ as a \"Live at Head\" language: [VIDEO] by Titus Winters (from Google).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21383747,"author":"kinjba11","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Why async fn in traits are hard","text":"Semantic versioning isn't a silver bullet, unfortunately, due to the 'Diamond Dependency Problem'. That is, A depends on B and C, but B and C depend on different versions of D. Easy to fix, until you scale that up to thousands of nodes in a dependency graph. This talk is one of the better ones about this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23982471,"author":"s3cur3","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Stop Abusing Semver","text":"For another perspective on \u201csemver is a lie,\u201d see the \u201cLive at Head\u201d talk from Titus Winters of the Google core C++ team. [VIDEO] TL;DW: By Hyrum\u2019s law, at sufficient scale, there\u2019s no such thing as a non-breaking change (including changing comments). Embrace that, and test sufficiently that you can always take the latest dependency but detect when it breaks.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24926736,"author":"klodolph","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Bazel Build System Support for LLVM","text":"> If you go listen to Google people talk about dependency/version management. It's like they think it's global lock vs inconsistency. Monorepo or chaos. This false choice irks me. I watched this talk: [VIDEO] I\u2019d say this is a much more nuanced look at dependencies & versioning. We all know these days that something like semantic versioning is not enough, because it is too easy to depend on behavior which the developers of your dependencies did not expect you to depend on. So you need something more powerful than just having a bunch of developers get together and agree not to break each others\u2019 code. Bazel is a part of that solution\u2014if you can analyze and understand the dependencies in a project, and do so in a very automatic and reliable way, you can provide people with tools tools for updating downstream code when upstream code changes. I think people are focusing too much on Bazel as only a build system and not as part of a platform for building developer tooling, and people are focusing too much on Bazel\u2019s original incarnation as a build system for a massive monorepo. I think there\u2019s also a reality that we must deal with that is\u2014as software gets larger and more complex, and as we have more dependencies, relying on version pinning for stability is losing ground as a technique for making our software more reliable. We have many more dependencies in our software now, so just subscribing to a mail feed of all of the version bumps in the libraries you use would be enough to dr","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25218504,"author":"ithkuil","month":"2020-11","story_title":"An ex-Googler\u2019s guide to dev tools","text":"Usually that problem is dealt with combination of: * Automation. * Ability to change other people's code safely, possibly gated by code review approval. Cultural and technical (e.g. unit tests must exist and be maintained) barriers may apply. * Making incremental changes that are backward compatible (at least until you migrated all clients so you can cleanup later) I recommend this talk [VIDEO] (even if the scope is broader than your question) (ex-googler)","stance":"rec"}],"tIeHLnjs5U8":[{"hn_comment_id":15625863,"author":"nouveaux","month":"2017-11","story_title":"What is backpropagation and what is it doing? [video]","text":"This was very timely for me and for anyone else learning, here are the first few videos of the series: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] (Original video) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15689936,"author":"hal9000xp","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to get started with AI?","text":"I'm in the same boat. For long time, I was interested in AI but at the same time intimidated by math. I'm relatively comfortable with discrete mathematics and classical algorithms and at the same time calculus and linear algebra is completely foreign to me. Also, I do not accept way to learn ML without good understanding of core principles behind it. So math is a must. A few months ago, I stumbled upon very amazing YouTube Channel 3Blue1Brown which explains math in very accessible way and at the same time I got feeling that I finally started understanding core ideas behind linear algebra and calculus. Just recently he published 4 videos about deep neural networks: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] So my fear of ML was gone away and I'm very excited to explore whole new world for neural networks and other things like support vector machines etc","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23521174,"author":"melvinroest","month":"2020-06","story_title":"From scratch: reverse-mode automatic differentiation (in Python)","text":"I'm just an enthusiast. With that said, I think the author's first image image really captures the core of forward propagation and back propagation. For people who want to get more of a feel on autodiffing, I find these 2 sources amazing [1, 2]. They don't use the word autodiffing, but looking at it, I can see it's the same thing. I once made an attempt at animating feed forward propagation [3]. If I'd animate back propagation, I'd probably make an animation on autodiffing as well as that is the most intuitive way I know on how to explain back propagation right now. It's still on my big to do list ;-) [1] [LINK] [2] 3Blue1Brown does in episode 4 of his Deep Learning series: [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"tIuj-oMN-Fk":[{"hn_comment_id":19241479,"author":"loceng","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes","text":"Most people are omnivores, not carnivores as PG stated - however the trend seems to be moving towards the health benefits of eating as carnivore - a purely meat diet; it's the food you don't eat that improves health, meat is a healthy food for most people. We have the sugar lobby who paid researchers to create propaganda that fat was the culprit. We have companies incentivized to sell fad diets, we have every participant of the food industrial complex trying to push for their product to be consumed - and we have governments who are trying to keep the lobbyists happy and perhaps for the purpose of keeping the economy stable. They all aren't going to be promoting or funding research that will give results against their own interests. Two videos I recommend everyone watch relating to diet: Dr. Georgia Ede - 'Our Descent into Madness: Modern Diets and the Global Mental Health Crisis' - [LINK] Dr. Jason Fung - 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem' - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19248599,"author":"loceng","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Does Carnitine from Red Meat Cause Heart Disease?","text":"Scientists/researchers in the past were paid by to say that sugar wasn't bad for you, and that fat was the culprit - we know this now to not be true. There's research that emerging that is it's what you don't eat that - it's people who are eating meat + other bad things that causes problems and then allows the connection to meat as possibly being linked as the cause; there's barely any research of people just consuming meats and animal products. Two videos I recommend everyone watch: Dr. Georgia Ede - 'Our Descent into Madness: Modern Diets and the Global Mental Health Crisis' - [LINK] Dr. Jason Fung - 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem' - [VIDEO] Imaging meat is fine and it's when you hurt the body with other harmful foods that then causes your body to not function as well to process meat and other foods properly - and where other systems to clear/clean the body aren't or can't function optimally (think inflammation, insulin, excess of food/availability of calories, etc) - and not specifically because of the meat? It's hard to know if oneself is ideology or propaganda, we've all been bombarded by things like government sponsored (influenced by food industrial complex) Food Pyramids, etc. our whole lives - or by fad diets looking to make money and marketing their own flavour of diet. The list goes on. Real research will happen that cuts through the confusion, people are waking up.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23516422,"author":"loceng","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Intermittent fasting works \u2013 not only for weight loss but also for heart health","text":"An accelerated version of intermittent fasting is longer term fasting - ideal minimum being 3 days, although even only being able to handle 24 hours at first is a great start; the next ideal number of days is 5 days, then 10 days, then 20 days based on different changes that occur at those periods. I always recommend people watch this by Dr. Jason Fung: 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem' - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13647984,"author":"fast_throwaway","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Live slow, die old: Mounting evidence for caloric restriction in humans","text":"Dr. Jason Fung, a Canadian Nephrologist is an encyclopedic resource for the impacts of calorie restriction and fasting. While he has a couple (really good) books, the following presentation is a nice overview of his work, findings and results of therapeutic fasting: 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem' [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16535364,"author":"RobertRoberts","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Complete and Voluntary Starvation of 50 days","text":"I am aware that extreme fasting is dangerous, but so is extreme water drinking.[0] But fasting in general seems to be stigmatised. Dr. Jason Fung [1] has some fascinating videos on Youtube about why fasting isn't bad. I am just curious why there's a mainstream view that it's bad and the exception is that it's good, vs the other way around? [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [VIDEO] Edit: Dr. Fung points out one common misconception that fasting causes muscle to be eroded.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16544636,"author":"RobertRoberts","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Complete and Voluntary Starvation of 50 days","text":"I read the link you posted [0] and it did not say distilled water is bad for you. I don't disagree with the statement \"extreme fasting can be dangerous\". > You have insecurity... Why are you making this personal? > break down your body, lose muscle, produce ammonia, urea, and all sorts of toxins, pull out stored toxins and use them because your body is so desperate on its low reserves of vital nutrients..and destroy your organs. Bravo! According to this video _none_ of that happens. He addresses all of those claims. (provides proof from actual medical studies) [VIDEO] The medical studies he presents (not his own) state the opposite of what you are saying. If you don't want to watch the video, I think this article is similar: [LINK] This does of course detract from your argument that distilled water is bad for you. [0] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16942633,"author":"jerrycruncher","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Features of a successful therapeutic fast of 382 days' duration (1973)","text":"Dr Jason Fung's \"The Complete Guide to Fasting\" You can get most of the same information from his online output, for free. I found this video especially interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19257697,"author":"loceng","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Exercise, fasting shown to help cells shed defective proteins","text":"Here are a few good videos to watch: Dr. Jason Fung - 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem' - [VIDEO] Dr. Georgia Ede - 'Our Descent into Madness: Modern Diets and the Global Mental Health Crisis' - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20545471,"author":"donniefitz2","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Meal timing strategies appear to lower appetite, improve fat burning","text":"Some of the best info on this can be found in the book, The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. Also, here's a short video by him: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22220289,"author":"loceng","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Weight Loss Is Harder Than Rocket Science","text":"You didn't mention fasting (non-intermittent) so I'll leave this video here: [VIDEO] - \"Dr. Jason Fung - 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem'\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22238190,"author":"ravenstine","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?","text":"I wouldn't say there's any one good resource. Most people preach intermittent fasting, which I've found is okay for maintenance and health but it's not nearly as beneficial nor will it lose you as much weight as fasting for days on end. But here's some material I went over to educate myself and convinced me that it's perfectly safe: Fasting vs. Eating Less: What's the Difference? (Science of Fasting) [LINK] Dr. Jason Fung - 'Therapeutic Fasting - Solving the Two-Compartment Problem' [VIDEO] Beginners Guide to Prolonged Fasting | 24-72 Hour Fasting Instructions [LINK] ^^ Not exactly a fan of Thomas DeLauer but there's some good information there. If you aren't faint of heart, check out some videos on the \"Snake Diet\" channel on YouTube. Cole is kind of a lunatic, constantly swears, and holds nothing back. He does this to be motivational. He's wrong about a few things(he thinks fasting cures everything and also thinks vaccines are bad), but when it comes to fasting properly he's pretty spot on. I just took from him what I thought made sense and left the rest behind. The best idea I got from him was the \"snake juice\", which is really just an electrolyte mixture you can make at home. It really makes all the difference. Overall, I wish there was someone who could preach this stuff without the Cole's level of insanity, but there you have it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22260566,"author":"lukifer","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Signs of cancer can appear long before diagnosis, study shows","text":"I've only done 3-days and not 7, but for n=1: - make sure to consume salt (adding to water is the easiest); if anything, err on the side of both too much water, and too much salt (we normally consume a lot of both through food). - Some people still consume certain zero-calorie items, like black coffee, green tea, or bone broth. You still get most of the fasting benefits, and it might be a good way to start (bone broth with added salt is a great way to keep electrolytes up, and fill your stomach). - I experienced a bit of back pain; apparently muscle pains are common, especially with new fasters. Accounts vary on this being evidence of \"detox\", or a side effect of mineral deficiency; but supplementing minerals in water probably couldn't hurt. - Dr. Jason Fung is a great resource: [VIDEO] - You'll find it odd that you don't know what to do during mealtimes. :) Have a plan for another way to take a break during lunchtime, etc. - Optional: it's vastly easier if you start already in ketosis (IF and/or low-carb)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31409602,"author":"loceng","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?","text":"Have you ever tried water fasting? The reason I ask/suggest is that when water fasting (which isn't starvation mode, starvation mode happens when you're regularly enough eating calories keeping your digestive system going - but not enough to actually provide your body with what it needs) is that when fasting your body 1) burns more calories so you'll have more energy available (to your body and brain) than if eating food, and 2) your body produces more adrenaline - so you have more mental energy too. I wonder if this relatively simple/quick \"hack\" could give you an experience that may help you have the mental energy, and get rid of brain fog that some foods you eat may also be causing you, to see if this shakes things up enough where your focus and therefore concentration sharpens? Start out with 24 hours while drinking a ton of water, and based on seeing how you feel - see if you can make it to 3 days (72 hours); starting at 7pm means at 7am you're already at 12 hours, and 7pm next day already 1 of 3 days done; you have to drink a surprising amount of water, I usually stop at 4pm so I'm not having to get up in the night. I recommend weighing yourself each morning and logging it just to have some numbers to passively start developing a more thorough understanding of how your body works in relation to food. Perhaps it sounds too simple, too good to be true, but I have had this experience and others too. Here's a 30 minute video by Dr. Jason Fung explaining by water fasting is ","stance":"rec"}],"tJoe_daP0DE":[{"hn_comment_id":21745429,"author":"ep103","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Paul Volcker has died","text":"\"Other People's Blood\". \u201c...to establish its credibility, the Federal Reserve had to demonstrate its willingness to spill blood, lots of blood, other people\u2019s blood.\u201d - Reagan\u2019s economic adviser Michael Mussa on Volker [LINK] I've been desperate to learn more about this since watching Mark Blyth's talk \"A Brief History of How We Got Here and Why\" ( [VIDEO] ) And while Blyth takes the opinion that Volker and Friedman were just the next steps in the evolution of capitalism, and I am still desperately lacking knowledge about this context, I can't help but have a feeling that if the future is continues with worsening inequality and political instability in a neoliberal context, we'll look back and be able to say it started with Volker.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26075530,"author":"0xfaded","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Block The New York Times","text":"neoliberalism has a fairly specific meaning in academic contexts. There absolutely was a \"culture war\", or war of ideas, that was waged to sell deregulation and privatization to the masses. Ironically, these included some fairly generous handouts, e.g. earned income credits or the welfare programs in the UK funded by the oil windfall. Ultimately, we wouldn't have ended up were we are today without a continuous campaign selling neoliberalism. It's how the Democrats became the party of wall street, and new labour in the UK is more conservative than the tories 50 years ago. Mark Blyth gives a great primer called \"A brief history of how we got here and why\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tKTZoB2Vjuk":[{"hn_comment_id":16531423,"author":"therockspush","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Google's Python Class","text":"I watched the original Nick Parlante videos that this material is based off 7 years ago, and recommend it to anybody that thinks they need to learn programming. First Lecture. [VIDEO] I took a couple C classes in college that were geared for people who already knew how to program and hated it. Never wanted to think about it again. Those videos helped abstract a lot of the low level muck away and build real stuff. Once I was able to understand some of these concepts and why you would actually use them I could go back and learn all the things that were too deep in the weeds to understand. Its a bit dated now but still some of the best training videos I've seen.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3334787,"author":"PythonDeveloper","month":"2011-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Ideas For Implementing A Simple Web App?","text":"The best tool for the job is the tool that lets you finish and ship a product. Try Python ( [LINK] ). It's free, easy to learn, uses the latest in methodologies, has massive community support, and you can have an app up in 10 minutes. You can also add django if you want a very well thought out framework with scaffolding, enhanced models, etc. Check it out on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4843467,"author":"willholloway","month":"2012-11","story_title":"ShowHN: I learned to code and got a job in less than a year. Here is my ebook.","text":"I found the post worthwhile and I do not doubt its veracity whatsoever. I think you attack the author unfairly. I clicked to read because I followed a similar path to the author, except I never attended any kind of bootcamps. I started writing my first django app and one month later I had my first coding job. It was difficult at first, I was often baffled by the intentions of the codes author who I took over for, but I made the product work and it changed my life forever. I just started coding professionally January 15th of this year and already I've fixed and enhanced two large complicated projects and built two of my own. So anyone saying this isn't possible is absolutely wrong. I recommend watching Google's Python Class [1] for anyone getting started with Python that has a familiarity with basic programming concepts. [1] : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tMP5Pbx8I4s":[{"hn_comment_id":42709889,"author":"somat","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Why the weak nuclear force is short range","text":"There is an interesting video essay by the Huygens Optics channel where some simulations of these field effects are considered. Turning Waves Into Particles [VIDEO] And if unfamiliar, that channel constantly delivers high quality thought provoking content on the nature of light.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43154751,"author":"TeMPOraL","month":"2025-02","story_title":"But good sir, what is electricity?","text":"I don't know how established this is, but I'm partial to the \"vacuum is elastic, non-linear medium, and particles are waves trapped in the non-linearity - self-confining energy\" hypothesis. IANAPhysicist, but this really seems to make a lot of sense and is quite elegant: [VIDEO] And with this, there's no empty space in atoms, as the vacuum perturbations from each particle spread out to infinity, so inside the atom there's more energy in those perturbations than outside - the space is less empty inside than outside.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43393047,"author":"TeMPOraL","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Did the Particle Go Through the Two Slits, or Did the Wave Function?","text":"I don't know how fringe this is, but Huygens Optics gives a possible answer here: [VIDEO] . TL;DW: if you assume certain non-linear properties of vacuum as a medium, it seems possible for light (EM waves) to self-contain spatially instead of spreading out, and such trapped energy seems, for all intents and purposes, to behave like particles. Again, IANAPhysicist, so I don't know what to think of that video, but the channel seems legit, and the explanation is beautiful in its simplicity .","stance":"rec"}],"tOMiAeRwpPA":[{"hn_comment_id":25522117,"author":"1cvmask","month":"2020-12","story_title":"No, Cellebrite Cannot \u201cBreak Signal Encryption\u201d","text":"Here is another great one where he ties American action movies as narrative with secure communications: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10665445,"author":"dates","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Signal Desktop","text":"I got excited about signal after watching this video, which explains pretty well the challenges of encrypted communication and how Signal addresses them (it might be basic stuff for people super familiar with the topic though): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27276443,"author":"sig-reduction","month":"2021-05","story_title":"I Was Robbed in San Francisco While the Cameras Rolled","text":"Check out this analysis of American action movies. It may change the way you see Batman and other characters that may have influenced your thinking. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tP-Ipsat90c":[{"hn_comment_id":18949209,"author":"reidacdc","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Perceptions of Randomness: Why Three Heads Are Better Than Four (2009) [pdf]","text":"There is a very accessible \"numberphile\" video which I think is closely related to this, about playing the odds on predicting elements of a nominally-random coin-flip sequence using the expected run length. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20098585,"author":"codesushi42","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Interview on \u201dBayesian Statistics the Fun Way\u201d","text":"I would argue that the problem with frequentist statistics is that it aligns with humans' flawed intuition of how randomness works. People are inherently obsessed with finding patterns to support their hypotheses. The problem is that what we perceive as random and extremely unlikely events are in fact much more probable than what we estimate from using Gaussian methods. And the frequentist approach helps to create this distortion by ignoring black swans. Here's a great video demonstrating how people tend to misunderstand randomness: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20852452,"author":"wruza","month":"2019-09","story_title":"A New Algorithm for Controlled Randomness","text":"Oh, I remember good old fallout 1-2 when you have 42% hit chance but still miss 7 times in a row. There is also a good Numberphile video on what we think random really is (it is not) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30366178,"author":"throwamon","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Some neurons are active when adding, others when subtracting","text":"This may indirectly answer your question: [VIDEO] TLDW: We don't pick numbers at random. At all. We're so bad at it that you can make money off this fact.","stance":"rec"}],"tQpqsmwlfY0":[{"hn_comment_id":32773248,"author":"NicolasL-S","month":"2022-09","story_title":"From Common Lisp to Julia","text":"You should check out this case study of migrating Simulink to Julia at NASA: [VIDEO] From Simulink to Julia, his code went from 1000 lines to 50 lines and ran 15,000x faster.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34477967,"author":"eggy","month":"2023-01","story_title":"GNU Octave","text":"<<was given at a SIAM conference and the recording can be found here: [VIDEO] >> At 14:00, the interactive slider exploration due to the speed is amazing. Over 500 Monte Carlo simulations in less than 60ms.","stance":"rec"}],"tR_6dibpDfo":[{"hn_comment_id":21566539,"author":"CharlesColeman","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims","text":"> I don't understand why the BDS movement against Israel gets so much attention when stuff like this, or worse, regularly occurs in China. The reason could be echoes of old Soviet influence campaigns directed against Israel [1] [2]. Once you get an idea lodged in the public mind, it takes on a life of its own (kinda like the trope of the AI weapon that fights on even after its makers are dead). [1] [LINK] [2] This is a good presentation of Soviet disinformation tactics and strategy: [LINK] (youtube link: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21845108,"author":"CharlesColeman","month":"2019-12","story_title":"New disclosures to our archive of state-backed information operations","text":"> I think the best thing that can be done is wait 1-2 generations; by then nobody will believe anything they see in the media or in social networks. That's not the best thing, that's the worst thing . The goal of disinformation campaigns is to make people so distrustful and confused that the adversary's social cohesion is compromised to the point where they become disorganized and less able to respond to threats. This New York Times video explains it very well: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25114217,"author":"ancarda","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, trials show","text":"Yes it was. We've had disinformation since at-least the cold war. Probably the best example is the idea that AIDS was created by the U.S. government. The New York Times made a great documentary on disinformation: [VIDEO] Well worth a watch IMO","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30573140,"author":"prox","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Putin says Western sanctions are akin to declaration of war","text":"This NYT opinion piece can fill some gaps : [VIDEO] From there you can search up some terms and periods mentioned in that video.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32974124,"author":"prox","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What\u2019s Going on in Beijing and to Xi Jinping?","text":"Lots of hoaxes are often posted to small outlets in the hope it will be picked up by bigger outlets. On Youtube checkout [VIDEO] , a look into how hoaxes are started from the 80s onwards.","stance":"rec"}],"tTBWfkE7BXU":[{"hn_comment_id":15146632,"author":"oiboabfljasbfo","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Insane state of today's advertising part 3","text":"I won't deny this has occasionally happened to me, but look at your example: it's B2B when my claim is primarily for B2C. B2B ads tend to be more targeted, aimed at corporations, and purchases are for higher dollar amounts. The product being sold was also competing based on build quality, a material improvement. Businesses often make more rational decisions because they can assign someone to do research (like you did of your own volition) who will make comparisons and think about it. Imagine the same process happening for shampoo. I'm sure there are some people that want \"the best\" shampoo, but most of the products are going to be nearly interchangeable and the marketing will try focus on various kinds of manipulation to dig that moat. These manipulations aren't what most people think of, like a sex symbol hypnotizing you. Instead they work to increase brand familiarity, social proof, and provide a life style narrative you can tell yourself and show off to other people with. The capital hiding behind these campaigns funds newspapers, television, radio, and civic centers. It acts as a filter on the public discourse. If you're interested, look up Manufacturing Consent for more information. Here's a clip from a documentary based on the book: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20070112,"author":"CyanBird","month":"2019-06","story_title":"\u2018Limbic Capitalism\u2019 Preys on Our Addicted Brains","text":">The more I see of this emerging mass mind control dystopia the harder it is for me to think of non-radical solutions. You should 100% see the adamn Curtis documentary I mentioned above and read up on manufacture of consent [VIDEO] What you mention is already the case , it is fully within the interest of the decentralized power holders and policy makers for them to control the population via the information that's fed to them, that's why the Iraq invasion happened in the first place, that's why the US continues to try spread fear about Iran or China. There is no way to destroy that machinery, only repurpose it for different means","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27880363,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Assange case: Key witness admits he lied","text":"See also a short video [1] or a long video [2] on the subject. Michael Parenti also published a book on this subject a few years before Chomsky. Inventing Reality: The Politics Of the Mass Media [3] Parenti also has plenty of talks on YouTube [4] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] EDIT: I\u2019m seeing downvotes. I consider these to be genuinely valuable resources on media literacy but if you disagree I\u2019d love to know what aspects of Chomsky or Parenti\u2019s theories you disagree with.","stance":"rec"}],"tU3rGFyN5uQ":[{"hn_comment_id":35257597,"author":"NotACop182","month":"2023-03","story_title":"America\u2019s banks are missing hundreds of billions of dollars","text":"Lots point to Covid-19 ppp and spending to be the cause of inflation. When the majority is supply chain and corporate opportunist. Great interview with Jon Stewart ad fed chair here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36036588,"author":"bb88","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Once a fringe theory, \u201cgreedflation\u201d gets its due","text":"There's an episode of The Problem With Jon Stewart about two months ago where he interviews Larry Summers about inflation in general and corporate profits being part of the issue. It's a real good exchange of viewpoints on the matter -- better than you'd get with most other commentary. Relevant clip is here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36485016,"author":"batmaniam","month":"2023-06","story_title":"IMF: Largest driver of EU inflation is corporate profits","text":"Jon Stewart touches on this issue (but for the US): [VIDEO] It's rather funny (and sad) to watch the entire conversation reflecting how inflation solutions are geared towards benefiting corporations over the people.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37957460,"author":"Supermancho","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Jon Stewart's Show on Apple Is Ending","text":"I dunno. I think he's the only person doing serious journalism. He had access and was willing to speak truth to power, publicly. [VIDEO] [LINK] It's not surprising that the show was finally shuttered.","stance":"rec"}],"tUAX0gnZ3Nw":[{"hn_comment_id":21777308,"author":"flafla2","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Discontinued Microsoft Products","text":"See \"Games as a service is fraud\": [VIDEO] If you have an hour, I'd highly recommend giving this a watch. It is really sad to see any form of media die forever at the whim of a corporation. Games are especially prone to this unfortunately","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22734425,"author":"flafla2","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Internet Archive responds: Why we released the National Emergency Library","text":"The problem is that for game ROMs specifically, opening them to the public domain devalues potential opportunities for re-releases and remasters. The Nintendo virtual console service and S/NES classic are prominent examples. So it isn't so simple that there is \"no harm done\" by forcing game ROMs to fall into public domain. That all being said, I still agree with you. I really don't care how much money Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony wants to make on decades-old games, at a certain point it becomes a cultural artifact. Snow White and other century-old movie properties should be public domain nowadays as well. At this point we're debating about the core values of trademark law though, and I'm not sure you wanted to do that. A similar debate revolves around what the law should say about \"dead\" games. These are games that, for example, rely on a central server that has been shut down. Many of these games were incredibly popular in their day, and some \"radicals\" (like myself, lol) argue that game companies should be compelled to release the server source code in an effort to preserve the game. Here's a great overview/rant on this topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27352009,"author":"DrSiemer","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Many Need for Speed Games Are Abiut to Be Erased by EA","text":"Ross from Accursed Farms has some great videos * about exactly this phenomenon and why it is so detrimental to gaming culture in general. * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27366789,"author":"rasz","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Many Need for Speed Games Are Abiut to Be Erased by EA","text":"Ross Scott covers it quite well in his \"Games as a service\" is fraud video [VIDEO] and others in 'dead game news' series.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29699687,"author":"gravypod","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ubisoft deleted account with hundreds of dollars\u2019 worth of games for inactivity","text":"Some more great information in this same space: [LINK] A less legally sound argument for why games as a service shouldn't be allowed: [VIDEO] Ross is very odd but his opinions on this topic align greatly with my personal sentiment.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41215117,"author":"beretguy","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Stop Destroying Videogames \u2013 European Citizens' Initiative","text":"Just watch this video so that you get up to speed with what we are talking about [VIDEO] Alternative YouTube link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41215127,"author":"beretguy","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Stop Destroying Videogames \u2013 European Citizens' Initiative","text":"You don\u2019t know what you are talking about and you are wasting everyone\u2019s time. Watch this video to understand what we are talking about here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tWr39Q9vBgo":[{"hn_comment_id":48972874,"author":"senshan","month":"2026-07","story_title":"AI advice made people 3x less accurate but 2x confident, researchers found","text":"This could serve as a beacon for those who still care: Richard Feynman: \"I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself...\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14148484,"author":"summerdown2","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Bangkok plans to ban all street food by year\u2032s end","text":"I agree with you a bit. But I also think there's a danger in assuming every anecdote is a data point, which is best expressed here: [VIDEO] (Short video with Richard Feynman)... tl;dv - it's very hard to know something and you have to be really careful that you've done the work and aren't just deluding yourself. Or, to put it differently - every anecdote is really only a data point if you understand what exactly it's measuring and what has been excluded. If you haven't taken the care necessary, then it's very easy to draw false conclusions. People are really bad witnesses and really bad at seeing what is and isn't given in the information they think they have - particularly if the anecdote is time-shifted from the point it was taken.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17293454,"author":"paidleaf","month":"2018-06","story_title":"The Lifespan of a Lie \u2013 Why can\u2019t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?","text":"> In other words, the field just has very low standards for truth, in a scientific sense. The field has little to no scientific sense. It's why psychiatry/psychology is a soft science. It isn't based on the scientific method or reproducibility and testing. It's mostly based on consensus driven by a handful of powerful practitioners. [LINK] What sigmund freud did wasn't science. His oedipal complex theory isn't a scientific theory. There is no scientific test to refute it. You just accept it or not. The biggest problem of our generation is the conflation of science ( hard science ) with pseudoscience ( soft science ). Because both has the word science in it, people give soft sciences far more credit than it deserves. If anyone is interested, Richard Feynman had a very interesting interview about it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18079137,"author":"qubax","month":"2018-09","story_title":"A Cornell Scientist\u2019s Downfall","text":"\"Social science\". The term science has been appropriated by so many pseudosciences that it has lost any meaning. Because real science has such a good reputation, all the academic frauds have decided to link their field to science to enhance their own reputation. There is political \"science\", legal \"science\", economics, etc. Here is richard feynmann's poignant take on the matter. BTW, it has gotten way worse since feynmann's interview. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48261769,"author":"aeternum","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Australia Four-Day Work Week Study Data Shows Boosted Productivity","text":"I'm the one that said usually, Feynman didn't have that cop-out and he was specifically talking about social science: [VIDEO] Worth watching the clip so you can hear the argument directly. IMO his point is that peer review is not what makes something science. Nor are studies, publishing papers nor p-values, even gathering and reproducing data is not what makes science science.","stance":"rec"}],"tWtvrPTbQ_c":[{"hn_comment_id":10174481,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Playing video games can improve our lives","text":"> time slips away It doesn't help that many modern games explicitly use Operant Conditioning to keep people playing. MMOs and \"free to play\" games are notorious, but you will find Skinner Boxes in a lot of modern games. Extra Credits has a nice overview, which includes a few design suggestions which games can use instead of hooking players with a reward schedule. [VIDEO] Also, it's not just games - you will find Operant Conditioning style reward schedules in some \"social media\" businesses, too, which can waste someone's day just as bad as any game.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15259866,"author":"glogla","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Parents Who Pay to Be Watched","text":"Take a look at this video [1] for explanation, and possibly other Extra Credits videos if you're interested in game design. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tX4H_ctggYo":[{"hn_comment_id":22213627,"author":"crubier","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Let's remove quaternions from every 3D engine (2018)","text":"Ok look just watch this mind blowing video: [VIDEO] After that, you can\u2019t argue that geometric algebra is not THE right way to do geometry. Projective geometry (in any dimension) is a subset of geometric algebra. Please watch it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22790218,"author":"cs702","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are you learning?","text":"The following video has a good, developer-friendly introduction to the subject that should answer your question. Take a look in particular at the code snippets that are sprinkled throughout the video and notice how much cleaner, shorter, simpler, less computationally costly, and \"universal\"/\"exception-free\" the code becomes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23115992,"author":"aabajian","month":"2020-05","story_title":"4D Toys: how objects bounce and roll in 4D \u2013 paper accepted to SIGGRAPH 2020","text":"If you like this, then checkout the presentation on Geometric Algebra from 2019 SIGGRAPH: [VIDEO] You can then play around with objects in 3D, 4D, and beyond: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23279048,"author":"aabajian","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?","text":"Geometric algebra: [VIDEO] It makes a lot of hard physics problems (Maxwell's equations, relativity theory, quantum mechanics) much more understandable and (I'm told) unifies them in a common framework. I think it will help your average developer become comfortable with these areas of physics.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23702427,"author":"adamnemecek","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Intuitive Guide to Maxwell's Equations","text":"It's one equation in geometric algebra. [LINK] Also there is a new community for geometric algbera people [LINK] . Check out the demo [LINK] Watch the SIGGRAPH talk [VIDEO] Join the discord [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24399014,"author":"ivan_ah","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Geometric Algebra for Python","text":"Here is a video [VIDEO] and the associated HN thread [LINK] that provide some more background on GA and its applications. I think you're generally right that GA is a rebranding of concepts we already knew about, however representing them in a uniform manner seems like a useful thing to do. The at t=4083 in the video they show some interesting examples of projections, rotations, and other geometric operations that can be done quite simply [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25143843,"author":"adamnemecek","month":"2020-11","story_title":"All Hail Geometric Algebra","text":"You should check out the bivector community [LINK] . Check out a demo [LINK] Join the discord [LINK] . Enki (the guy behind bivector) also gave a talk on GA at SIGGRAPH 2019 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25327212,"author":"adamnemecek","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Vanishing zeroes for geometric algebra in Rust","text":"You should check out the bivector community dedicated to geometric algebra [LINK] . Check out a demo [LINK] Join the discord [LINK] . Enki (the guy behind bivector) also gave a talk on GA at SIGGRAPH 2019 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25471928,"author":"adamnemecek","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ganja.js: Geometric Algebra Generator for JavaScript, C++, C#, Rust, Python","text":"You should check out the bivector community dedicated to geometric algebra [LINK] . Check out a demo [LINK] Join the discord [LINK] . Enki (the guy behind bivector) also gave a talk on GA at SIGGRAPH 2019 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25477286,"author":"these_are_not_t","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ganja.js: Geometric Algebra Generator for JavaScript, C++, C#, Rust, Python","text":"I think that simple should be understood here as easy to use . As a crude analogy, the mechanical principles underlying a car with an automatic shift aren't simple, but the abstraction it provides makes driving much easier to learn. A more mathematically grounded example could be the complex plane compared to the real line: when encountered for the first time, it is not simple in any way, but it offers a clean solution to many (originally real valued) problems (perhaps by the fact that it is algebraically closed?). NB: the author of this library also made a very interesting presentation of geometric algebra (using this library as vehicle) for SIGGRAPH 2019: [VIDEO] It has been posted a few times on HN before.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28051151,"author":"adamnemecek","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Quaternion Quantum Mechanics [video]","text":"Reasoning about space and time is just so much nicer in geometric algebra. There's a new cool community on geometric algebra [LINK] The founder (Steven De Keninck aka enki) gave a talk at Siggraph2019 [VIDEO] You should join the discord [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28253499,"author":"javajosh","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Manim: An animation engine for explanatory math videos","text":"Well I've been on a real Geometric Algebra (aka Clifford Algebra) kick lately, and ran across ganja.js [1]. It's a single no deps file that is...impressive. 120k uncompressed, and with it you can construct any degree algebra (including the more esoteric hyperbolic/parabolic ones), render to canvas, svg or webgl(!). It also includes a clever little DSL parser and interpreter (it overloads the scientific notation to name basis vectors!) that lets you construct more complex things from simple things using various kinds of products. The author, Steven De Keninck, is quite impressive as well, having got his start in the demoscene some time ago. He has a good video from SIGGRAPH 2019 [2] that explains why this algebra is better than [matrices, tensors, vectors, complex numbers]. Of particular interest (to me anyway) is the 2D projective geometry. I don't want to oversell it, but ganja is fucking amazing and there is a great deal I want to do with it. For one, I'd like to recapitulate my physics degree with it. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29512933,"author":"adamnemecek","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Quaternions","text":"You should check out the bivector community dedicated to geometric algebra [LINK] . Check out a demo [LINK] Join the discord [LINK] . Enki (the guy behind bivector) also gave a talk on GA at SIGGRAPH 2019 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31085276,"author":"orlp","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Exponentially Better Rotations","text":"> Quite bluntly, this all sounds like an attempt to reinvent euclidean geometry following a convoluted way. I mean, what does all this buy you that applying a subset of affine transformations (scaling, translation, rotation) to an orthogonal coordinate system doesn't give you already? It is attempting to reinvent Euclidean geometry, yes. I don't think it's convoluted though. To give a prime example, take the article we're commenting on: interpolating rotations. Or more generally: interpolating transformations. Just doing this with rotations without suffering gimbal locks already brings you to quaternions. Are quaternions 'convoluted'? The fact that all objects are native to the algebra means they're composable. Take for example this slide of the formula of a 4D torus in coordinates, and in 4D PGA: [LINK] The talk in general has a bunch of example applications: [VIDEO] Questions such as \"the intersection of this line and this plane\", \"the line through two points\" \"the circle where these two spheres intersect\", \"the point at the intersection of three planes\", \"the projection of this line on this plane\" and such are trivial, native (the resulting object is part of the algebra) and exception-free in geometric algebra. E.g. two planes always intersect, it just happens that the intersection is a line at infinity if they're parallel. The exact same code used to translate and rotate a point around the origin can be used to translate and rotate a line, or a plane around the origin. Al","stance":"rec"}],"t_rzYnXEQlE":[{"hn_comment_id":38986826,"author":"CSMastermind","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Decompilation of Paper Mario for N64","text":"There's an amazing video about refactoring Mario 64 to reach 30 FPS and render 6x faster on N64: [VIDEO] The changes were much more extensive than just removing the debug flags. They were also able to get local coop and a 4 player split screen working which were features originally intended for the game but cut for performance reasons.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39547200,"author":"alpaca128","month":"2024-02","story_title":"How video games use lookup tables","text":"Not always, though it might depend on what platform you mean with retro. Kaze Emanuar on YT does a lot of development for the N64 and it feels like half the time he talks about how the memory bus affects all kinds of optimizations. In Mario 64 he replaced the original lookup table for the sine function because an approximation was faster and accurate enough (or rather two approximations for two different purposes). I love that channel, he reworked the entire Mario 64 code [0] to make it run at stable 60FPS...because he wanted his mods to run faster. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34365497,"author":"MarioMan","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Nintendo 64 Java","text":"On a related note, Kaze has done a deep dive into optimizing the Super Mario 64 source code for his ROM hacks. Here\u2019s one of his more popular videos on the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35206349,"author":"psychphysic","month":"2023-03","story_title":"The model for the coins in Super Mario Odyssey is 65% simpler than in SM Galaxy","text":"If you like this stuff Kaze Emanuar does loads of neat work with the super mario 64 decompiled code. [VIDEO] Loads of interesting quirks of the N64 to do with slow bus.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37267408,"author":"psychphysic","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Leaked Wipeout source code leads to near-total rewrite and remaster","text":"Excellent..more of this please. Super Mario 64 has also had stupendous rewrites from decompiled code I believe. [VIDEO] His videos on the Sine function in sm64 is a fun watch as the limitations make nearly all optimizations justifiable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37969315,"author":"rdlw","month":"2023-10","story_title":"The Worlds First FPGA N64","text":"If anyone is interested in new projects for N64 hardware, Kaze Emanuar has an amazing series about optimizing Super Mario 64 to run incredibly complex romhacks on original hardware. Interestingly, SM64 is usually throttled by memory speed. This means that using 'inline' is detrimental to performance, since making the program larger can cause another read from memory. Here's an overview video, he has many more specific videos about specific topics: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38947343,"author":"Wolfbeta","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Super Mario 64 on the Web","text":"I've recently been enjoying watching this young modder on YouTube optimize all of the original SM64 source code, doubling frame rate, and modding his own Return To Yoshi's Island [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40047672,"author":"Apofis","month":"2024-04","story_title":"I ported thousands of apps to Windows 95 [video]","text":"If you found the video on Super Mario 64 being published with debug symbols interesting, check this out: After finding out about the debug symbols, a developer took a deeper dive through the codebase and optimized the ever living hell out of to get 60fps+. FIXING the ENTIRE SM64 Source Code (INSANE N64 performance) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"t_yh_S31R9g":[{"hn_comment_id":43888531,"author":"titaphraz","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Design for 3D-Printing","text":"I highly recommend MangoJelly Solutions's tutorials. Here's a playlist for FreeCAD 1.0: [VIDEO] But he has a bunch of other videos.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45973743,"author":"foofoo12","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Blender 5.0","text":"I use FreeCAD and it's pretty good. But I think it's impossible to learn by trial and error. MangoJelly has done an amazing job in churning out high quality tutorials for FreeCAD: [VIDEO] (this is just one playlist, there's a lot more on his channel).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42580060,"author":"deskr","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Autodesk deletes old forum posts suddenly","text":"I switched to FreeCAD 2-3 years ago. It suits me just fine and I'm so glad I can store my project in a local folder. I also don't have to worry Fusion360 taking any more features away or locking me out. I also don't have to beg them to renew my licence every year. FreeCAD has improved a lot recently. MangoJelly has also done massive work creating thorough video tutorials: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"taZJblMAuko":[{"hn_comment_id":29115433,"author":"f0e4c2f7","month":"2021-11","story_title":"DJI Mavic 3 Drone","text":"I had heard about Shenzhen for some years and then ran across this video and it absolutely blew me away. [VIDEO] Any other interesting companies / products from there you'd care to share? My dji mini 2 is one of my favorite gadgets I've ever bought.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32804101,"author":"irsagent","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"Here is a list of 20 documentaries I have come to love and return to when I come across them. There is no specific order to them. Enjoy! The * next to the number indicates the last 4 years. If you have seen one listed that you'd like to share what you think about please leave a comment with this structure [# in the list ] Comment... . i.e. [1] Loved learning about Noyce. What a guy. 1. Silicon Valley: Where the Future | PBS: American Experience [1:23:19] [2013] History of the how Silicon Valley came to be. William Shockley. Robert Noyce. Fairchild Semiconductor, The Traitorous Eight. Homepage: [LINK] Kanopy: [LINK] Where to Watch: [LINK] 2. Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware | Wired UK: Future Cities [1:07:50] [2016] the evolution of \u201cShanzhai\u201d \u2013 or copycat manufacturing \u2013 has transformed traditional models of business, distribution and innovation, and asks what the rest of the world can learn from this so-called \u201cSilicon Valley of hardware\". Youtube: [LINK] *2.1. The People's Republic of The Future | Bloomberg: Hello World [30:10] [2019] Shenzhen, tech-fueled entrepreneurs try to navigate an authoritarian regime. Youtube: [VIDEO] 3. The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard | TPB AFK [1:22:07] [2013] The history of the Pirate Bay. Torrenting. Legal. Privacy. Homepage: [LINK] Youtube: [LINK] Where to Watch: [LINK] 4. Can\u2019t Get You Out of My Head | BBC [6 Part] [2021] Adam Curtis takes you on \"An Emotional history of how we got to this place.\" Economics. History. Power. Psycholo","stance":"rec"}],"taaEzHI9xyY":[{"hn_comment_id":7361831,"author":"Perseids","month":"2014-03","story_title":"PowerPointless: Digital slideshows are the scourge of higher education","text":"> A straightforward lecture delivered directly from a powerpoint is not automatically a bad thing. It might not be bad in itself and if you do it right it can be as good or better than a presentation without the material that is read aloud. But at the same time you are wasting the potential of a presentation that is solely meant to help the attendee/listener along and to drive home the important points or even to just use it as a rhetoric device . As an extreme example, look at this presentation: [VIDEO] [1]. Most of the time his slides do not even contain a summary of what he talks about but just the headline or the punchline. And I find his style very refreshing. If you really want to have stuff that you want your listeners to be able to work through at home, something which contains all important aspects, then just publish lecture notes online.[2] [1] He begins his talk with some more conversational stuff but later on (skip to 18:30) he also features more technical stuff, and there his presentation is more interesting for our discussion. [2] I see myself making this point the third time in the discussion of the article and I'm somewhat surprised that it's not completely obvious.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9477378,"author":"tejohnso","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Gut Feelings: The \u201cSecond Brain\u201d in Our Gastrointestinal Systems","text":"Douglas Crockford has a great talk that touches on the head-gut connection and how it relates to programming. \"We could not program without our gut. I have absolutely no evidence to justify that statement. But my gut tells me it's true, so I believe it.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9585637,"author":"myth_buster","month":"2015-05","story_title":"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks","text":"Douglas Crockford touches on this aspect in this entertaining and insightful talk [0]. I'm guilty of what you state and I think a large part of \"programming\" is rudimentary boiler plate coding/configuration and staring into the Abyss. I think our role will be to design algorithms and come up with creative solutions/hacks (which would be difficult for a program) and designing a workflow/flow chart and feeding it into a program which spits out binaries and flag for edge cases. A whole swat industries and economies (read outsourcing) will become redundant and only outsourcing done would be to the generator. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tafGL02EUOA":[{"hn_comment_id":12558600,"author":"beothorn","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Researchers quantum teleport particle of light six kilometres","text":"For anyone interested, there is a great video by the PBS space time channel explaining quantum entanglement here [VIDEO] The thing is, although the quantum state of the photom collapses instantaneously on both entangled photons, we can't manipulate at which state the photon will collapse, and so, we can't really send information using quantum entanglement. We can't also confirm the entanglement until we can compare both measurement results or else we could send information from the future as in the quantum eraser experiment [LINK] Edit: formatting and typos","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15478222,"author":"neom","month":"2017-10","story_title":"A single photon reveals quantum entanglement of 16M atoms","text":"Some good related learnings: The Concept of Mass - with Jim Baggott (just watched this yesterday and it's reeeaalllyy good although basic): [LINK] Quantum Entanglement and the Great Bohr-Einstein Debate | Space Time: [VIDEO] Measure for Measure: Quantum Physics and Reality (kinda old but still good): [LINK] Would recommend this order.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32786747,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Two atomic clocks have been quantum entangled for the first time","text":"Its... weirder than that. The issue is that the measurement of the particle changes it - and changes the entangled particle. PBS Space Time - Quantum Entanglement and the Great Bohr-Einstein Debate [VIDEO] (and then watch the referenced Veritasium video)","stance":"rec"}],"tc4ROCJYbm0":[{"hn_comment_id":17638449,"author":"krmbzds","month":"2018-07","story_title":"The Shell Introduction I Wish I Had","text":"Nice guide. cd ~ command goes to home directory though, not root. I wish someone showed me the UNIX operating system introduction by Kernighan et al before anything else. It can be found in AT&T arhives: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21382680,"author":"gftsantana","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan","text":"> Recently I discovered the AT&T history channel, with this gem: [VIDEO] I go back to this video every once in a while ever since I discovered it a few years ago. I just think it is super relaxing. When I first watched it, I was beginning to use Linux and, when I opened my terminal emulator, I was like: \"It's a Unix system, I know this!\" The pipelines explanation was incredibly clear. I also love the Computerphile episodes with professor Kernighan.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46696101,"author":"GNOMES","month":"2026-01","story_title":"The Unix Pipe Card Game","text":"This gets shared a ton, but the old Bell Labs video from 4:56 to 10:52 is still the best way I have seen pipes explained: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21374263,"author":"gitgud","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?","text":"For me it's the unix example in [1] \"AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System\" . $ makewords sentences | lowercase | sort | unique | mismatch - It reads a file called sentences then prints the words that are not spelled correctly. To me it's; concise, expressive, flexible, modular... Which makes it beautiful... [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21375689,"author":"koffiezet","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Unix: A History and a Memoir, by Brian Kernighan","text":"I'm always amazed how well Brian Kernighan can explain things. I love the episodes on the Computerphile youtube channel with him. Recently I discovered the AT&T history channel, with this gem: [VIDEO] There is a massive difference in appearance and clarity between him and the other people appearing in that video, even the \"presenter\"...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25184595,"author":"teleforce","month":"2020-11","story_title":"The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan","text":"This is an old but informative video on UNIX system productivity by AT&T hosted by Brian Kernighan [1]. Fun fact, the original unused PDP-7 computer mentioned in the article that being utilized by Ken Thompson to first develop UNIX actually belongs to another well-funded sound processing research group in Bell Labs. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30359075,"author":"usrbinbash","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Lorinda Cherry, author of dc, bc, eqn has died","text":"Rest in Peace! Her demonstration of the capabilities of the (then novel) pipes and scripts of the Unix Operating System is one of the best parts of this documentary: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31123512,"author":"digisign","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?","text":"Was just showing the subject to a youngster recently. Other folks mentioned the Code book, I liked that one. The MMM by Brooks of course. We also looked at the following videos on youtube/Kanopy and other places: - The Story of Math(s) by Marcus du Sautoy to set the stage... school and taxes in ancient Sumeria, Fibonacci bringing Indian numbers to Europe, and other fascinating subjects. - We watched short biographies of Babbage and Lovelace, full-length ones of Turing and Von Neumann. The \"code breakers\" of WWII. - Top Secret Rosies: The Female \"Computers\" of WWII, another good one. - There's more history in PBS' Crash Course Computer science, than you might expect. It is great although so peppy we had to watch at .9x with newpipe. Shows relays, vacuum tubes, to ICs, to the Raspberry Pi. As well as the logic gates they model. - \"The Professor\" at Computerphile is a great story teller about the early days. - There are great videos about CTSS being developed at MIT I think, where they are designing an operating system via paper terminal and trying to decide on how to partition the memory/storage: [LINK] - The Introducing Unix videos by ATT are straight from the source: [VIDEO] - The movie/book \"Hidden Figures\" touches on this time as well. Facing obsolescence by IBM, one of the characters teaches herself Fortran. - The Pirates of Silicon Valley is a fun dramatization of the late 70s to 80s PC industry. It specifically calls out the meeting between MS and IBM as the deal of the ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32821547,"author":"rpigab","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Coffee with Brian Kernighan [video]","text":"bwk is awesome AT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System : [VIDEO] Coolest guy in this video, casually explaining pipes while resting his feet on the desk.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46860743,"author":"shevy-java","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Kernighan on Programming","text":"One of the few living oldschool UNIX legends still alive. Here is when he was young: [VIDEO] Kind of explains in an epic manner why pipes were useful back then. They are still useful, but computers are so much more powerful that many techniques back then came primarily because their computers were not as powerful. I still, oddly enough, prefer the hardware of the 1970s, 1980s, almost early 1990s too. Today's hardware is much better, but I am nowhere as interested in it; it is now just like a common tool.","stance":"rec"}],"tcTZvNLL0-w":[{"hn_comment_id":10398374,"author":"p4bl0","month":"2015-10","story_title":"To save on weight, a detour to the moon is the best route to Mars","text":"If you have one hour if front of you, I highly recommend this documentary: [VIDEO] In it they explain how it would be feasible to be on Mars in ten years with current technology and not so much additional fundings.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8689149,"author":"skriticos2","month":"2014-12","story_title":"NASA: We're sending humans to Mars","text":"Sometime in the past fifty years NASA became paralyzed not by budget cuts, but by political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape. And then there is all that pork that goes around with the entrenched contractors. The tale of the last Mars program that NASA put together is a great example of this. They got handed a technically sound plan to get there in reasonable time with reasonable resources. Then every org-unit in NASA wanted to add their own part to stay relevant and it got so bloated both technically and financially that it had to be put to rest. So unless they convince me that they managed to get their internal structural problems under control, I don't think they get anytime to Mars within this century. And certainly not before the private sector does. [LINK] p.s.: There is a free movie on YouTube telling the tale: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8959427,"author":"Udo","month":"2015-01","story_title":"The Economic Viability of Mars Colonization (1995) [pdf]","text":"Also worth mentioning is the Mars Underground documentary, detailing Zubrin's work and mission over the years: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tcV1EYSUQME":[{"hn_comment_id":21830643,"author":"ObsoleteNerd","month":"2019-12","story_title":"A Tesla Valve","text":"I\u2019m assuming this is being posted due to this recent popular video, which I think is a very well made demonstration of how the valve works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28158365,"author":"showerst","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Tesla valve","text":"For a fun visual demonstration, check out nighthawkinlight's video where he runs a flamefront through one -- [VIDEO] Also seconding the Huygen's optics video osamagirl69 already posted below -- [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"tcdVC4e6EV4":[{"hn_comment_id":11384601,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Why AlphaGo Is Such a Big Deal","text":"> exponential leap forward A recent(-ish) Computerphile video has a good overview of the AI-self-improvement problem. [LINK] I recommend watching the previous video first, which introduces the problem of strong-AI rapidly finding solutions (especially with poorly-specified questions) that may not be in humanity's best interest. [VIDEO] Before anybody jumps to overly-sensational conclusions, note that the last video in that series, Rob Miles explains how exponential self-improvement is an extreme point in the space of possible AI development. We don't know how to predict discoveries[1], so we need more research into AI, so we can hopefully make something that isn't exponentially growing beyond our understanding. [LINK] [1] see James Burke's non-teleological view of change","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33962078,"author":"johncs","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Perhaps It Is a Bad Thing That the Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs","text":"There's a great Computerphile video from 2015 that introduced me to the idea of AI safety awhile ago. It seems like some good context to this article: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35633080,"author":"circuit10","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Stability AI Launches the First of Its StableLM Suite of Language Models","text":"But the concerns about AI taking over the world are valid and important; even if they sound silly at first, there is some very solid reasoning behind it. They\u2019re big matrices, yes, but they\u2019re Turing-complete which means they can theoretically do any computational task See [VIDEO] for a really interesting video on why a theoretical superintelligent AI would be dangerous, and when you factor in that these models could self-improve and approach that level of intelligence it gets worrying\u2026","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35658241,"author":"circuit10","month":"2023-04","story_title":"GitHub Copilot emits GPL code","text":"\"those non-problems\" Why is that a non-problem? It's a really important concern that we need to take more seriously I pasted this from another comment I wrote but: The concerns about AI taking over the world are valid and important; even if they sound silly at first, there is some very solid reasoning behind it. See [VIDEO] for a really interesting video on why a theoretical superintelligent AI would be dangerous, and when you factor in that these models could self-improve and approach that level of intelligence it gets worrying\u2026","stance":"rec"}],"tfAnxaWiSeE":[{"hn_comment_id":40119736,"author":"netmare","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges","text":"David Crane, the creator of Pitfall, explains it all very nicely in a GDC Classic Game Postmortem [1]. I'm linking at the relevant timestamp, but the whole video is pure Atari 2600 goodness. The full Postmortems playlist is quite enjoyable too. I particularly liked the talks about the original Deus Ex, Myst, Loom, Adventure, Marble Madness, Ms. Pac-Man, Paperboy, Lemmings, and more. I find these videos very soothing and nostalgic. Got to rewatch them now... [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27113276,"author":"canthonytucci","month":"2021-05","story_title":"How Atari 2600 Game Pitfall Builds Its World","text":"[VIDEO] the GDC post-mortem of pitfall has some more info, and I found it pretty entertaining. I think the whole series is worth watching if you like this sort of stuff.","stance":"rec"}],"th3KE_H27bs":[{"hn_comment_id":33418122,"author":"pixelfarmer","month":"2022-11","story_title":"A Man Who Broke Capitalism \u2013 Did Jack Welch Destroy Corporate America?","text":"[LINK] (The Corporation) I'm soon leaving a company after having seen it grown from a mere startup to what it is today. It had a goal at the beginning, had to fight an entire industry to get an idea across which is accepted broadly nowadays. But there is also a strong inertia towards making these non-goal \"goals\" more and more important, which in turn define more and more how this company operates inside and what comes out of it in the end. It requires strong and really good leadership to see this problem in the first place and then prevent such a construct from sliding down that slippery slope. The problem with stuff like socialism, communism, but also capitalism is simple: Humans. You create rules, you have conceptions of how something could work. You add humans, and things go sideways. Even if you aware of the issue, there is potentially no way to create something stable, it requires humans to stop other humans from being dicks, as sad as it sounds. It only needs a few dicks to break pretty much everything into pieces. Worse, more often than not, there was not even real ill-intent in the first place, like with the company I've written about above. The only way we can change things on a larger scale is to change the incentives, to change the overarching goals. Check [VIDEO] (TED talk Nick Hanauer)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35241034,"author":"actually_a_dog","month":"2023-03","story_title":"South Korea has the lowest fertility rate, with lessons for us all","text":"Almost everybody is dancing around it here, but the real lesson here for us all is that capitalism, or, at least the way we're doing capitalism today, is unsustainable. You simply can't have the kind of sustained transfer of wealth from lower and middle income people to the top 1% that we've had over the past 50 years and claim what you're doing is a sustainable system. I recently saw this video: [VIDEO] The speaker, Nick Hanauer, has a net worth somewhere around a billion dollars. In his talk, he explicitly says he's a capitalist, capitalism is good, etc. But, if you ignore all that and look at the rest of what he says, he comes this >< close to advocating socialism. According to him (and I agree), the lessons we should be learning here are fivefold: 1. Markets aren't anywhere near as efficient in reality as they are in theory. That leads to some counterintuitive things like when Seattle raised their minimum wage, it didn't lead to unemployment because the price of labor went up; it led to people who work in restaurants being able to afford to eat in restaurants, which is good for the economy. Oh, and unemployment actually fell in the region while this was happening. 2. A big pillar of the neoliberal myth is that \"...the price of something is always equal to its value.\" He directly goes on to tie this to the case of one person who makes $50k per year and another who makes $50M per year. The second person's work isn't 1000x more valuable than the first. The person getting pai","stance":"rec"}],"thOifuHs6eY":[{"hn_comment_id":25342166,"author":"elihu","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Hexagonal Grids (2013)","text":"CGP Grey did a video about hexagons recently. I mean, there's only so much you can say about hexagons really, but he manages to cover a lot of ground. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25784935,"author":"TameAntelope","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What are you working on?","text":"Hexagons are, after all, the bestagons. On the very very low chance you haven't seen this: [VIDEO] And if you don't know who CGP Grey is and are wondering how this comment fits into HN, I can only offer that he's cashing in on his reputation a bit with the fun tone, but IMO the video is also interesting informationally.","stance":"rec"}],"thqbjA2DC-E":[{"hn_comment_id":16052173,"author":"crikli","month":"2018-01","story_title":"A personal ode to the Boeing 747","text":"I was rolling my eyes at the subtitle. The article devolved from there. Some great (sometimes indirect) information on why the 747 and to a lesser extent the A380 are being phased out, from my new favorite YouTube channel, Wendover Productions: The Economics of Long-Haul Flights: [LINK] ETOPS: Explained [LINK] Politics of Aviation / 5 Freedoms of Aviation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19378587,"author":"lagadu","month":"2019-03","story_title":"US refuses to ground Boeing 737 Max","text":"Norwegian is technically an EU airline because despite the name they're also headquartered in EU countries. This is so because being EU-based they're free to use all EU airports to base flights out of, which they use to good extent to make flights between the US and the French Caribbean islands, something that would be impossible had they been solely HQd in Norway :) Check out this video about it (Norwegian starts at about 10 minutes in): [VIDEO] edit: turns out they're registed in several countries, not just Denmark.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20952242,"author":"graton","month":"2019-09","story_title":"A Low-Fare Loophole for International Travelers","text":"The five freedoms of aviation are: 1) The right to fly over a foreign country without landing. 2) The right to refuel or carry out maintenance in a foreign country without embarking or disembarking passengers or cargo. 3) The right to fly from one's own country to another country. 4) The right to fly from another country to one's own. 5) The right to fly between two foreign countries on a flight originating or ending in one's own country. This video has a lot of good info on it: [VIDEO] And wikipedia page: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"tiJVJ5QRRUE":[{"hn_comment_id":9090704,"author":"sputr","month":"2015-02","story_title":"An Open Letter to Jessica Livingston About YC's Female Founders Conference","text":"I think everyone discussing any gender gap should really watch this Norwegian documentary: Brainwashed: The Gender Equality Paradox [VIDEO] The \"social expectations\" hypothesis fails to explain why countries with higher living standards have more polarized sectors. The idea that in a perfect world with no \"social pressure\" we would reach a parity between genders ignores just about all research done on the biological gender differences.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10372392,"author":"T2_t2","month":"2015-10","story_title":"What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech","text":"> We yearn to be with others like ourselves and to fit in. The idea is that this is what \"keeps people out\". Surely, the flip side is true, and people are defined / made happy by the same notions. People in the west are so far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that we've stopped caring about the basics of life. Specifically, of [LINK] we no longer choose a job that gives us food, shelter or safety (the first two), and instead we choose jobs based on how well it provides us with love/belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. That is why young people choose jobs less and less with money as the sole or even primary determinant. If this is the case, that people are choosing professions that help them feel self-actualised or belonging, no matter what tech does, or what Public Relations, Child-care workers or predominantly female dominated occupations do, is less important that the people it attracts / already has attracted. And these same sorts of people will dominate, as this belonging and fitting in becomes increasingly entrenched, and snowballs on itself like runaway recurssion. That seems, to me, the logical conclusion of slight biological gender differences combined with a rise up the pyramid of needs, which lessens the pressure of the former two to create cultures that trump biology. [VIDEO] is a documentary about Scandinavia's attitude to gender relations, and the whole series is brilliant, and shows that gender separation is, if not inevitable, certainly understandable.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7617204,"author":"oblique63","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Who Gets Into Accelerators? Persistent Men With SaaS Apps, Says Study","text":"> Most people feel that isn't the case though. That the disparity is a social problem that we can change and fix. Recently saw a really interesting well-researched Norwegian documentary that explores this topic and kinda throws that whole view into question: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12860438,"author":"T2_t2","month":"2016-11","story_title":"You can\u2019t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview","text":"> I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not. And that cultural difference is INDIVIDUAL CHOICE. When people are free to choose whatever they like, because they aren't scared of starving, which is true in Western countries, they overwhelmingly choose gender stereotypical professions. This is most true in the most gender neutral countries, Scandanavia basically, where the gap is the widest in traditional roles such as nursing. As you go down the GDP per capita list, the gender gap shrinks. Indian, Chinese, and Russians are from cultures where ANY job is hard to get, and good jobs are very few and far between. Because jobs are scarce and a safe, middle class life requires sacrifice, people in these developed countries are more likely to choose jobs based on pay and availability than what they will enjoy. [VIDEO] is a Norwegian documentary on this, in 8 parts, and it is well worth a watch.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21528927,"author":"the-dude","month":"2019-11","story_title":"A.I. Systems Echo Biases They\u2019re Fed, Putting Scientists on Guard","text":"Brainwash, a Norwegian documentary does a good job : [VIDEO] Among other things, he visits a doctor who has to decide which gender to choose for babies who obviously need some work ( sorry for the wording ).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24652888,"author":"woohoojoo","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Half of young women will leave their tech job by age 35, study finds","text":"100% agree. There are major psychological And physiological differences Between men and women. (Reminder: difference is the opposite of equal. Also, genetically distinct individuals are not equal. \u201cEqual\u201d is only useful in quantitative analysis). Learn more here: \u201cGender Equality Paradox\u201d - a Scandinavian comedian explores this topic by interviewing academics from various sides of the political spectrum. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29333925,"author":"mzan","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Stereotypes about girls dissuade many from careers in computer science","text":"If you view \"Brainwash: The Gender Equality Paradox\" on YouTube, you will find interesting answers. [VIDEO] In a scientific experiment, from the age of nine months, boys choose masculine toys, while girls choose femmine toys. Boys are more attract from inanimate systems, while girls from social interactions. Obviously culture has an effect, every person is unique, etc., etc. So there cannot be limitation on what a person want and can do. It is only unrealistic pretending that 50% of boys and 50% of girls will have the same interests in work and life, because they are different.","stance":"rec"}],"tiKCORN-6m8":[{"hn_comment_id":32628435,"author":"tzs","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes?","text":"Guitarist might find three videos recently posted to classical guitarist and lutist Brandon Acker's YouTube channel interesting. Lutes and early guitars (before around 1800) did not have metal frets. Instead they used pieces of string tied around the neck. They did this because the strings were very expensive, with a set of strings for a lute often costing more than the rest of the lute, and strings were not as robust as more modern strings. With metal frets strings would wear out faster. You could easily end up spending more per year on strings than you had initially spent on your instrument. By making the frets of the same material as the strings they didn't need to change strings as often. Acker and luthier M.E. Brune took a classical guitar Brune was building but had not yet put frets on and played around with putting on tied gut frets and gut strings. In the first video [1] they just go over the history of tied on frets, and do some comparisons with metal frets. With tied on frets it is relatively easy to try tunings other than 12-TET. You can change the position of a fret, or you can add extra frets. You can also add partial frets. Renaissance lutists would often glue on small pieces of string behind or in front of a fret. The fret would give them some particular note from a sharp/flat pair, and the little mini fret, called a tastino, would give them the other note from that pair. The second video [2] explores the tuning possibilities of tied on frets and tastinos. Acke","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46888861,"author":"mbo","month":"2026-02","story_title":"The Mathematics of Tuning Systems","text":"If anyone wants to hear the practical effects of a 1/4 comma meantone temperament compared to an equal temperament, Brandon Acker gives a wonderful overview on the classical guitar: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47497178,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Why your guitar goes sharp when you play hard: the Kirchoff\u2013Carrier equation","text":"I'd just say I'm playing microtonal music[1][2] and not worry about it. Jokes aside, great read. Always so satisfying when the predictions match experiment. [1]: [LINK] (for the latest craze in microtonal music) [2]: [VIDEO] (for a more informative and historical video)","stance":"rec"}],"tiwVMrTLUWg":[{"hn_comment_id":12302069,"author":"drewnick","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Ford Promises Fleets of Driverless Cars Within Five Years","text":"This is why Google is training their cars now in the real world to handle all of these kinds of things. Here's a Ted Talk [0] from 2015 where the head of their self driving unit makes the case for full autonomy vs. semi-autonomous because the semi-autonomous is good enough where people trust it, but not good enough to be trusted. Kind of like what happened where the Tesla driver went underneath the truck that wasn't properly detected. [0] [VIDEO] edit: Around the 8min mark you can see some interesting interactions of the lidar and the world.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12383162,"author":"haberman","month":"2016-08","story_title":"The Google X moonshot factory is struggling to get products out the door","text":"> I realise it's not apples to apples and that Google's cars may be more autonomous for now. I think that is an understatement. This video shows why staying in your lane on a highway (what Tesla autopilot does) and dealing with city streets are two just completely different things: [VIDEO] I think Tesla has a ton of catching up to do to compete with where Google is right now.","stance":"rec"}],"tk862BbjWx4":[{"hn_comment_id":15922652,"author":"Chardok","month":"2017-12","story_title":"How the US Pushed Sweden to Take Down the Pirate Bay","text":"CGP Grey also did a fantastic video on the history of copyright and Disney's constant involvement. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4943531,"author":"mtgx","month":"2012-12","story_title":"There Is Never a Need to Justify Sharing Culture and Knowledge","text":"Watchi these videos, and hopefully you'll understand why having 14 years for copyright is not the same as 30 or 100 years: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6135600,"author":"ucha","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Why does Amazon have more books from the 1880s than the 1980s? Blame copyright","text":"Copyrights are a deal passed between society and authors to encourage creative production. If they create something new, they can live off it for sometime until their copyright expires. Extending copyrights years after the author's death may serve a corporation or their children that can live on that rent but fails at establishing an incentive for creation. This video by CGP Grey summaries the problem pretty well ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6991899,"author":"aestra","month":"2013-12","story_title":"What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014","text":"It isn't just about \"stealing.\" Allowing works to enter the public domain actually encourages more works to be created. People are free to remake and remix works in the public domain. Think: A REAL lot of old Disney movies (Alice and Wonderland, Jungle Book, Pinocchio...) Pride and Prejudice with Zombies That Romeo and Juliet movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and guns. A Christmas Carol in play form (it lends itself really well to live theater, I suggest seeing it!) West Side Story (inspired by Romeo and Juliet) Clueless (based on Jane Austen's 1815 novel Emma) The anime/manga Lupin III was inspired by the French gentleman thief Ars\u00e8ne Lupin, created by Maurice Leblanc. Japan didn't enforce copyright at the time of its creation but the Leblanc estate got mad once Lupin started being sold in North America. Some foreign releases changed his name as a result. In 2012, Leblanc's original Ars\u00e8ne Lupin entered the public domain in France See this video for a different perspective: [VIDEO] Also read the copyright clause in the Constitution! [LINK] Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. \"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts\" is the goal and purpose of copyright, as written by the founding fathers, not \"financial","stance":"rec"}],"tke6X2eME3c":[{"hn_comment_id":1430605,"author":"forgottenpaswrd","month":"2010-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Why do I always waste time on the weekends?","text":"Oh man, don't you know that you need to rest and relax for making something productive? Read Tony Schwartz and see this video: [VIDEO] The human body is not a machine, you know... About the thing: \"you want to be rich\" Man, this is ethereal, an entelechy by itself, you can't motivate yourself with an entelechy. Your subconscious mind needs real, fixed things or goals, you know \"not to be rich\" but \"4000\", 5000, 6000, 1000eur/month rich, or getting a million, or two, whatever. You don't want to be rich, you want certain things money can give you, write it down in a paper what they are(as fixed specific goals). You will start realizing that you could get them without \"being rich\". You want so much money only for yourself?,IMHO that would be sad, the richest kid on the block. Maybe you want to really help other people in the process. The best money making people I know, and I know dozens of them, some are famous, are very good at filling OTHER PEOPLE necessities first. People can't stop giving them money because they did something for them. Money is only an exchange of value. Studying marketing is a way of getting what people necessities are. If you are sick of working for others, work for yourself, every day. At first it will be very hard, but once you get it you will love it: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7838584,"author":"nobbyclark","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Sweden\u2019s proposed six-hour workday","text":"As we move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, it becomes more about managing our energy as individuals, not how many hours we're putting on the clock Tony Schwarz's \"Leading at Google\" talk on this topic is excellent - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9459157,"author":"harryf","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Why Some Men Pretend to Work 80-Hour Weeks","text":"In my experience people who work long hours are often too tired to be objective about the quality of the work they are delivering or their own efficiency . It's worth watching this talk from the Leading @ Google series - [VIDEO] The short version is, despite the information-age, we still think about this stuff in an industrial-age terms; that productivity is directly proportional to time spent. In fact it's highly non-linear for most forms of information-age value creating activitie.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10842336,"author":"harryf","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Working fewer hours would make us more productive","text":"Interesting somewhat related talk from Tony Schwarz in the Leading @ Google series - [VIDEO] \"Demand is relentlessly rising. Our capacity is not keeping pace. The traditional solution to higher demand has been to invest more time. Unfortunately, time is finite, and most of us have no hours left to invest. Energy, however, can be systematically expanded --- and it can also be regularly renewed. To operate at our best, we need four energy sources: physical (quantity), emotional (quality), mental (focus), and the energy of the human spirit (purpose). This talk will focus on the role of energy in fueling sustainable high performance, and in motivating others.\" ...which relates to the work he does at the Energy Project - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"tmNXKqeUtJM":[{"hn_comment_id":7256154,"author":"TheCoreh","month":"2014-02","story_title":"The fastest pulsar spins at 716Hz; its equator spins at 24% the speed of light","text":"It has to do with the total angular momentum of a system composed of multiple smaller bodies. (Like the dust/debris cloud during solar system formation) This minute physics video (about the shape of the solar system) explains it probably better than I can put into words myself: [VIDEO] The relevent part starts at about 1:03, but I recommend watching the whole thing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36420555,"author":"igemnace","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Strong Solar Flare Erupts from Sun on Jun 20, 2023","text":"I like this video from minutephysics to get an intuitive sense for it: [VIDEO] It addresses a different question (Why is the Solar System Flat?) but it touches on the question of why things spin when they clump together from gravity. An answer through the lens of my own understanding: it's just more difficult NOT to have angular momentum. If you have a lot of particles falling toward each other due to gravity, imagine how difficult it would be to set it up such that all of them fall straight into their collective center of mass. They'd have to be in a precise, orderly configuration (e.g. equally spaced apart on a unit sphere). Note that each particle affects each other particle -- if any one particle gets too close to another, their gravitational interaction will cause them to move toward each other, and add an angular component to their motion with respect to the center of mass. There are so much more disorderly configurations that will result in the particles moving with at least SOME angular momentum about their center of mass. Vector sum them all together, and it'd again be difficult for that sum -- the total angular momentum -- to be zero; they'd have to cancel each other out exactly, and there's just way more configurations where that isn't the case. That's why it's simply much more likely for anything made out of particles in space to be spinning than not. Additionally, as they fall toward the center of mass, the radius lowers, too, which means to conserve angular mome","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43229075,"author":"orra","month":"2025-03","story_title":"Euclid finds complete Einstein Ring in NGC galaxy","text":"Indeed. And to elaborate: the random collisions which flattened the solar system (or galaxy) over billions of years all conserved angular momentum. Minute Physics have a nice video on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tnBQmEqBCY0":[{"hn_comment_id":12593660,"author":"agrafix","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]","text":"Came here to say the same thing, I was really hoping for some better questions like the ones in the \"How to build the future\" [1] interview... [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19704065,"author":"m463","month":"2019-04","story_title":"The Quest for Room-Temperature Superconductors","text":"A more down-to-earth video to watch might be this one: \"Elon Musk: How to Build the Future\" [VIDEO] (of course \"down-to-earth\" is very relative)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30174352,"author":"divbzero","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Cruise is opening driverless cars to the public in San Francisco","text":"The anonymous \u201cInterviewer\u201d in the last part of that Reddit post was Sam Altman, excerpted from a 20-minute conversation with Elon Musk in 2016 [1] that I found to be interesting even as a non-fanboy. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ts4BD8AqD9g":[{"hn_comment_id":42347266,"author":"DavidPiper","month":"2024-12","story_title":"RollerCoaster Tycoon was the last of its kind [video]","text":"Folks may also like the noclip documentary on RollerCoaster Tycoon: [VIDEO] . It goes into more detail, particularly about what happened after RCT2, and has some perspectives from people in the OpenRCT2 community.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47481850,"author":"HelloUsername","month":"2026-03","story_title":"The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon","text":"Fun read, thx! I'd also recommend more about RCT: \"Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)\" [LINK] \"Rollercoaster Tycoon (Or, MicroProse's Last Hurrah)\" [LINK] \"RollerCoaster Tycoon at 25: 'It's mind-blowing how it inspired me'\" [LINK] \"RollerCoaster Tycoon was the last of its kind [video]\" [LINK] \"The Story of RollerCoaster Tycoon\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tt2AYafET68":[{"hn_comment_id":7298676,"author":"frncscgmz","month":"2014-02","story_title":"For 40 years, this Russian family was cut of from all human contact","text":"In case you haven't seen it, Vice made and excellent documentary about Agafia's life in Siberia. It's a sad yet inspiring story, I highly recommend it for anyone interested. Heres the link: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12375052,"author":"aresant","month":"2016-08","story_title":"A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)","text":"Vice did a fun piece on this family a few years back that - on location - captures the environment they survived in -> [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25488734,"author":"verylittlemeat","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Early humans may have survived the harsh winters by hibernating","text":"Some people might find this video interesting. Family that fled into the siberian taiga for 70 years to avoid religious persecution. One thing that stands out in my memory is how they said their main form of entertainment was sharing and analyzing their dreams. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37381884,"author":"Rendello","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Yenish people","text":"There's a fascinating family of old believers who escaped to the Russian Taiga in 1936 to escape persecution, with the surviving daughter living there to this day: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tt7gP_IW-1w":[{"hn_comment_id":46679003,"author":"owlninja","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Gaussian Splatting \u2013 A$AP Rocky Helicopter Music Video","text":"A$AP Rocky has always put out interesting videos, here are a few others that are pretty cool: Yamborghini high: [VIDEO] L$D: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46696696,"author":"Centigonal","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Gaussian Splatting \u2013 A$AP Rocky Helicopter Music Video","text":"A$AP Mob has some really great music videos. They're usually not the first to adopt a new technology, but they love to push the envelope and popularize fringe techniques. The Yamborghini High music video from 2016 did some really cool stuff with datamoshing and hue shifting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tvos4nORf_Y":[{"hn_comment_id":12336551,"author":"khaledh","month":"2016-08","story_title":"How to be mediocre and be happy with yourself","text":"[VIDEO] How Will You Measure Your Life? Clay Christensen at TEDxBoston This is a very inspiring presentation, especially towards the end. The take away is that it's not important how high you went up a certain hierarchy or how much money you have in the bank. The important question is what did you do with your life to make other people's lives better? When you're put in certain situations that touch other people's lives, it's for a reason, and your life will be measured by how you did in those situations.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7892180,"author":"lateguy","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Founder Depression","text":"What a good response, I first read sam article and agreed to him but with good response changed a lot. I still feel there is a problem with life that is tradeoff. Lets see right from the start when we are born in this world we don't have any thoughts or goals nothing. The world start giving us reality. Suppose most of the people here on HN will want to be a better programmer and improve themselves. In Programming they find something good. Ideally as they were born with nothing so how they can say this is actually they want, so when people say this is what they really want I think they still say what the world them to say. Now the next point come when people make decision and then repent, its a tradeoff. Suppose Right now someone have option of doing a PHD in Physics( which is my passion) and other to roam across world in some job( which also he wants). He choose PHD and after 10 years he say he didn't satisfied with PHD he must have took the job, I feel we human always do that because we enjoy the first think and now we will say we didn't enjoy it much and want other think. Yes, I agree people say that enjoy their work and is in resonance with it because they don't have some equal tradeoff to make their work for them is given to world by them as a best thing. A good youtube link: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tw-rxtwhzcY":[{"hn_comment_id":12973314,"author":"internaut","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?","text":"Gene Wolfe is better than Robert Jordan and could surpass Tolkien. He is a currently unrecognized Giant, on the level of our new Shakespeare. Literally every famous author you've heard of says it. Gene Wolfe is what the journeymen read to improve their craft but he is little known outside rarefied circles. I wrote a piece 10 days ago (so before the election) explaining why a reading of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun explains Peter Thiel's motivations in backing Trump. He was following a thread nobody else saw. So many smart people, yes on the alt right also, are missing a much bigger picture. [LINK] It is not an exaggeration that this book changed my life. You don't have to be a neoreactionary to read it but reading it alongside Joeseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies is a wonderful and enriching life experience that will definitely change how you view the world. In addition I strongly recommend you watch Peter Thiel's videos on Youtube such as this: [VIDEO] Tainter, Thiel, Wolfe, Moldbug. If you wish to scry deeply into the world, that's how I'd start. Many people reading this will be liberals or progressives. To them I say, this is a rabbit hole nobody else is going to recommend, if you sincerely are interested in the order of the right's thought, here it is.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17842977,"author":"bachbach","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not","text":"Peter Thiel is really a kind of philosopher - the venture capitalism is more of an outgrowth of something else than his primary focus. This is a person who reads widely, has big ideas and is consistently ahead of everybody else - his reputation is wholly deserved. I've been following, causally at first, his ideas through books written about or by him, many hours of youtube videos and essays in and around the topics he talks about. It is difficult to distill this into a synopsis because although I can provide a TLDR it doesn't mean you'd get any predictive power of it. I suggest doing your own homework and coming to your own conclusions. I think I'd give a lot for a photo of his bookshelves. Here's a start. [LINK] A common theme in Thiel's thought is that 'reality is often very different from the mainstream conception of it'. Ron Unz wrote this essay which gives body to this belief. [LINK] Another theme is that humankind is highly mimetic - meaning they have a desire to be copying each other. This comes out of the philosophy of Ren\u00e9 Girard and you'll have to read something of his to fully understand where we're going with this. [LINK] Watch this if you only watch one video: [VIDEO] Peter Thiel is at the intersection of an unusually large number of obscure and strange topics, that's the reason why he's ahead of the curve over and over. Things like Seasteading, Urbit, if you ferret away at the peripheral you start to see interesting stuff, some of which gets ferried back to the ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12909564,"author":"internaut","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Ask HN: POTUS Donald Trump; What this means to Silicon Valley","text":"If you mean Gene Wolfe's masterwork, then yes, there are interpretations/commentary available online. If you meant the 'Wolfian World', I came up with that 2 days ago, so no. I did clean up the essay, added some material, made it a bit more accessible to non-HN readers and put it here: [LINK] In fact about 1/4 of my comments on HN relate to the 'Technological Stagnation Hypothesis'. The TSN is rather hard to appreciate (for most people in our society it seems unbelievable, they just can't shift their mental model of a world with progress because their benchmarks for that are mostly faith based) but Peter Thiel has made many videos available explaining what it means, I think this is one of the best ones: [VIDEO] The 'Wolfian World' is merely a way to look at our world sideways through a (brilliant) work of fiction with very similar themes to Peter Thiel's Technological Stagnation Hypothesis.","stance":"rec"}],"tybOi4hjZFQ":[{"hn_comment_id":31036242,"author":"codenlearn","month":"2022-04","story_title":"5-min breathing workout lowers blood pressure as much as exercise, drugs (2021)","text":"wim-hof is a life saver. I used during my covid battle as well. I had this video [VIDEO] on loop when I was suffering with covid","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33587730,"author":"mikae1","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Box breathing techniques and benefits","text":"Here's[1] a Wim Hof breathing exercise with 56 million \u201cviews\u201d. I've been doing it for two years now. I watched the video once (the narration is painful) and I've been doing it without guidance since. I've had been doing box breathing, some pranayama and reichian breathwork before I started doing this one, but somehow the Wim Hof one completely took over. It's been very valuable to me. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24676116,"author":"Confiks","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Why Breathing Is So Effective at Reducing Stress","text":"Here's a guided exercise [1], and a video with more explanation can be found here [2]. You shouldn't forcefully exhale completely; just let go of your breath. Also, sit or lie down; don't stand or do anything else. Initial scientific evidence related to auto-immune diseases here [3], although please don't mistake interviews with Hof with science. For example his comments about \"charging your body with oxygen\" and \"alkaline blood\" are completely off; a proper explanation can be found here [4]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24818008,"author":"Arech","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Wim Hof breathing technique can modulate immune response to pathogens (2014)","text":"It's very incomplete actually... I've just found this video while navigating through Wim Hof's site - [VIDEO] It's quite easy to do, btw... I'll try it for some days and see how it going to go...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29788616,"author":"justarandombobo","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Search engines and SEO spam","text":"Hey man, try some breathing exercises and cold showers if you can - I watched this documentary [LINK] and then the original vice documentary: [LINK] and then tried the breathing: [VIDEO] and cold showers and they've been helping a lot with inflammation! There are tons of benefits of cold showers, so if you can start doing that, that might already help a lot! Here's a bunch of results you could check out: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31152733,"author":"khofstadter","month":"2022-04","story_title":"How to Quiet Your Mind Chatter (2021)","text":"The best thing that stills my mind is concentrating on work (which could be linked to Cs\u00edkszentmih\u00e1lyi's flow state) or doing meditation. There are many different states of mind meditation can help induce and maintain. I think the basic categorisation splits meditation into two types: (a) concentrative/active and (b) receptive/passive. The fastest and most efficient technique I found is the Wim Hof breathing technique: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31583876,"author":"spacetraveler11","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Feeling burned out at an early stage in my career","text":"There are a lot of helpful tips in this thread and similar ones. Maybe I can add a bit about my own situation for perspective. 1. Become really good at your job. Be able to finish a task in less time than what is expected. Take the remaining time to relax and reduce stress. Don't engage in \"bull**\" tasks that are meant to make people seem productive. If you reliably deliver value in the important tasks nobody will mind. Find a niche in your team or company that makes you in particular valuable. For me that's writing code in a niche language where few people have experience and being able to teach others, ie. train colleagues in programming. Reduce your working hours if possible (4 days max of 9-5 per week). 2. Do some work on your mental attitude. Feeling guilty is a self-destructive path. Read [1]. If you're struggling with anxiety, I recommend meditation and breathing exercises (eg. [2], watch the video on safety before trying it). Get at LEAST some physical exercise (even just walking outside). Spend more time in the sun whenever possible. 3. Do stuff that makes you feel like a winner. Beat a difficult video game, set yourself a goal to lift x KG in an exercise of your choice or challenge yourself to do something you know you should be doing but makes you nervous. Find motivation outside of work. For me that's working on game development projects. Try to be persistent and get some work done before the workday starts. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33513946,"author":"duncancarroll","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis in unvaccinated Covid patients","text":"I'm sorry. I got Omicron in January '22 despite being double vaxx'd, and I felt totally fine until 3-4 mo. later when I started to get recurrent dizzy spells, major fatigue, and bouts of anxiety, which are all very unusual for me. Checkup / bloodwork showed nothing. I am 41 y.o. who exercise regularly, does not smoke, rarely drinks, etc. So far I can still function and maintain a job, but it makes me wonder what's going on inside of me that 11 months later it's still causing these issues regularly. Our 4 y.o. son got it as well and although he was asymptomatic I am still very concerned about what the long-term effects on him may be. I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, but I read a paper saying that hyperbaric oxygen therapy helped some people, so I've been using Wim Hoff breathing as a poor man's version. It does seems to help with the fatigue but not the vertigo. Best of luck. Wim Hoff Breathing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38162639,"author":"mandmandam","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Comment here about whatever you're passionate about at the moment","text":"If you're open to it, I'd recommend trying the Wim Hof technique. The combination of controlled hyperventilation followed by cold water exposure is something like a reset button. Here's a link [0] - just don't do the breathing exercises anywhere that passing out could cause problems; like when driving, in water, etc. 0 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38530615,"author":"mritchie712","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How are you dealing with the job market anxiety?","text":"Won't help with a job specifically, but look into breathwork for anxiety. It might sound silly, but try it. Many exercises only take a few minutes. e.g. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tyixMpuGEL8":[{"hn_comment_id":28861674,"author":"dTal","month":"2021-10","story_title":"One-of-a-kind computer systems of which only one unit was ever produced","text":"Missing from this list: the Foonly F1, used to create the animations in Tron (1982) and later to render the spaceship in Flight of the Navigator (1986) - of note as the first use of reflection mapping in a motion picture. I highly recommend this video on the making of Flight of the Navigator. Apart from being highly entertaining, it also goes into stunning detail on all the special effects, in particular how exactly one goes about putting CGI into film in the 1980s (as the narrator points out - Final Cut Pro hadn't been invented yet!). [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34449704,"author":"askiiart","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Foonly F1 Computer (2011)","text":"See also: Flight of the Navigator | VFXCool - Captain Disillusion A fantastic video detailing the VFX of Flight of the Navigator. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34450874,"author":"dTal","month":"2023-01","story_title":"The Foonly F1 Computer (2011)","text":"This comprehensive video on the special effects of Flight of the Navigator, including the role of the Foonly F1, is one of the most fascinating things I have ever seen on YouTube. I cannot recommend it enough: [VIDEO] <edit: I see that someone else has already posted this video. However, I'm going to leave this comment up because holy shit watch it >","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27567168,"author":"lowdest","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Rest In Peace, John. I was lucky to know you so deeply","text":"Slightly off topic, but Captain Disillusionment did a great video recently on Flight of the Navigator: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"tzt36EGKEZo":[{"hn_comment_id":39620132,"author":"jlundberg","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Embedded Swift on the Raspberry Pi Pico","text":"Looking forward to trying this out! Another place Swift seem to be getting traction in is godot. Miguel De Icaza\u2019s talk on the topic is highly recommended: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47643244,"author":"jlundberg","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Xogot: Godot for iPad and iPhone","text":"Miguels work on Swift for Godot is really inspiring. Highly recommend this video for anyone looking for more context: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38583651,"author":"zengid","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Murder is a pixel art ECS game engine in C#","text":"Yes and here is a really great talk from Miguel de Icaza about some of the history of adding C# to game engines, and why he's excited about using Swift in Godot because he claims that Swift's reference counting avoids the issues of GC pauses. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38979726,"author":"Decabytes","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Apple hiring compiler developers for improving Swift / C++ interoperability","text":"Miguel de Icaza\u2019s video^1 Swift Godot: Fixing the Multi-million dollar mistake got me interested in Swift. It starts around 12:30 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41571906,"author":"rescripting","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Swift 6","text":"Something like this? [LINK] > SwiftGodot can be used to either build an extension that can be added to an existing Godot project, where your code is providing services to the game engine, or it can be used as an API with SwiftGodotKit which embeds Godot as an application that is driven directly from Swift. Miguel de Icaza gave a great talk on Swift + Godot (among other things) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44748727,"author":"perennialmind","month":"2025-07","story_title":".NET 10 Preview 6 brings JIT improvements, one-shot tool execution","text":"Dotnet's GC has a real latency problem. Miguel de Icaza gave a nice talk on why noticeable pauses are inevitable in a stop-the-world tracing GC, proposing Swift's reference-counting GC as the viable alternative [1]. Still, there are recent developments (Satori GC) with the promise to make the worst case far more palatable (e.g. 250ms -> 5ms) [2]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49076131,"author":"KolmogorovComp","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Watching Go's new garbage collector move through the heap","text":"Ah it's from 2023, Miguel de Icaza : Swift Godot: Fixing the Multi-million dollar mistake: [VIDEO] Highly recommend.","stance":"rec"}],"u-x7PdnvCyI":[{"hn_comment_id":35641370,"author":"swyx","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Interview podcast with Jensen Huang founder/CEO of Nvidia","text":"jensen is a hero of mine. excited to listen in! highly recommend his convo with Morris Chang over 15 years ago: [VIDEO] as a guy from another small country these two taiwainese american semiconductor titans give me a lot of inspo","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3746181,"author":"ak217","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Nvidia deeply unhappy with TSMC, claims 22nm essentially worthless","text":"Very interesting. Those really are pretty stunning words for a business relationship as big as this. If I understand correctly, Nvidia has nowhere else to go since TSMC is so far ahead of other independent foundries (I'm not sure how independent GF really is - is it conceivable for Nvidia to work with GF?) and it can't very well go to Intel given the amount of competition they are engaged in. Maybe Samsung? Also, I'm not clear on the arguments presented in the slides. The transistor normalized price curves for 20nm and 14nm do eventually cross over the preceding curves, unlike the 40nm curve. And even putting the same transistor count on a smaller process node can result in lower power consumption once the leakage problems are mitigated, so the value is increased. Edit: For historical background, here's a fascinating conversation from 5 years ago between Morris Chang (founder and chairman, TSMC) and Jen-Hsun Huang (CEO, Nvidia): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33312830,"author":"robocat","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Product Market Fit","text":"Jen-Hsun interviews Morris Chang [VIDEO] Long interview, but I think it has moments where it reinforces the same concept that it is very difficult to copy a business, even if the CEO is directly telling you their secrets. Interesting interview - although exponentially above my pay grade.","stance":"rec"}],"u404SLJj7ig":[{"hn_comment_id":2205674,"author":"Isofarro","month":"2011-02","story_title":"And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project -  Jamie Zawinski (1999)","text":"Excellent documentary on YouTube covering the year long open-sourcing of Mozilla, right up to the point of jwz leaving Netscape. [VIDEO] (via codinghorror: [LINK] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3865837,"author":"redthrowaway","month":"2012-04","story_title":"The origins of the blink HTML element","text":"If you watch Code Rush, which I highly recommend, you'll see that they worked crazilly hard at Netscape back in the day: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2282577,"author":"toponium","month":"2011-03","story_title":"Jwz's Tent of Doom at Netscape in 1995","text":"Pretty cool free documentary titled Code Rush that films Netscape engineers during the Mozilla source code release. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3933946,"author":"jka","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What are your favorite films about startups?","text":"Although Netscape was already pretty large by the time, Code Rush is a great SV tech documentary about the initial release of Mozilla; it's also now under creative commons and is available on youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6880115,"author":"coldtea","month":"2013-12","story_title":"Learn to code like it's 1996","text":"> It's a really interesting thought that this whole \"learn to code\" movement existed in some form seventeen years ago and somehow didn't take off when it seems like such an inevability right now. It seemed an inevetability back then too (and 10 years before that, with the first wave of the cheap PCs). Like now, it actually wasn't. > But I think it's one of those things we'll look back on like the 2010 iPad / 1993 Apple Newton and say \"yeah coding trade schools were a cool idea back then, but the world just wasn't ready for it yet\", and now that they've become 'cool' so to speak we're going to see that permanent explosion. Nope, it's just a fad now too, driven by the current bubble. It will subside with it. > I mean, I'm new to this game but did you even call it \"coding\" in 1996? You'd be surprised, but it was called coding in 1986, 1976 and even 1966. And it has been considered cool, in the right circles, ever since 1970 (circa). > I mean were startups even a thing in 1996? Sure they were. And Open Source. Everybody and his dog started a startup around that time, until they had a bubble bust circa 1999-2000. Seriously man, you have to check up on the history of this \"coding\" thing. You seem to be missing a lot of knowledge, that's not just folklore but also essential to a well groomed developer. Here's a 1998 documentary on the building of Mozilla: [VIDEO] Here's the Hacker's Dictionary: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"u4L130DkdOw":[{"hn_comment_id":17091782,"author":"shalmanese","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Statistics, Fast and Slow","text":"This TED talk [1] about seeing how the rest of the world lives was very insightful for me. Anna Rosling R\u00f6nnlund (Hans Rosling's daughter in law) went to 264 homes of varying income levels and took photos of beds, stoves, toys and other standardized goods. When sorting by income level, you can spot globalized trends by income regardless of nationality. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34561628,"author":"somethoughts","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?","text":"This is just personal but anytime I feel similar to the OP, I watch something by Hans Rosling [1] or Anna Rosling [2]. Although 10 and 5 years old respectively, I feel the general sentiment is still true - that human progress is slow, in the background and might be ebbing and flowing in your specific sub-population. And when compared to the present, media narrative driven present its hard to see the improvements happening across the global population. It helps me put stuff in perspective - of course mileage may var (and maybe it's just helping me delude myself into getting out a funk but it works!). [1] Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - [LINK] [2] See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income - Anna Rosling R\u00f6nnlund [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"u4ZoJKF_VuA":[{"hn_comment_id":10779507,"author":"kalid","month":"2015-12","story_title":"BetterExplained: Math Lessons That Explain Concepts","text":"Hey! Thanks for the compliment, it really means a lot when the site resonates. I'm not super experienced with lectures (mostly writing), but I think it works in office settings. Check out this talk from Simon Sinek: [VIDEO] People are usually motivated by the why, the mission, the story. Then you get into the what and how it's accomplished. With math, it can be similar: the \"why\" sets the stage. Humans in general prefer a narrative to a list of facts (Hacker News readers excepted :-).)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15100231,"author":"andy_ppp","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Show HN: Link.fish \u2013 Boomarking meets web-parsing with archiving","text":"It sounds awesome but what is the use case for me? It allows me to grab parts of a webpage as bookmarks? I thought Safari does this already (and no-one uses it). Get a .com too (you have read all of Paul Grahams Essays right?); linkfish.com or something similar is fine - I particularly dislike the .fish it pheels very script kiddy to me. Given that this isn\u2019t a new idea can we all agree that User experience and design is going to be the way that this wins. Try to find someone awesome on Dribble or Behance to bring the code to life. Finally adding \u201cplease sign up\u201d at the end of your video came across as a bit desperate; it should be self evident at the end of any video that the person should sign up right! Maybe this will help: [VIDEO] Apart from that congrats on launching. My product is going to be launching soon and it\u2019s way more work than you ever think!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18765751,"author":"kken","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?","text":"A much faster way to understand the central message of \"Start with Why\" would be to watch the TEDx talk: [VIDEO] Is the book worth reading, in addition? I see very mixed reviews.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23374931,"author":"kthejoker2","month":"2020-06","story_title":"A Hierarchy of Engineering Values","text":"Here's a TED talk by Sinek on the concept (it turned into a book, Start With Why, and now a set of courses, etc.) It's a simple but powerful concept - one of those you should revisit on a regular basis to test your beliefs and the difference you want to make at work, in your society, etc. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37061027,"author":"ljf","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company (2019)","text":"Brilliant summary here of how Apple often focus on 'Why' you need something - rather than pushing the 'What' it is. They smashed this for the ipod, the iphone and the ipad - and more recently with headphones. Will be interesting to see if they can manage this for VR. 'Start with Why': [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38797705,"author":"mosselman","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Show HN: Anytype \u2013 local-first, P2P knowledge management","text":"All your communication could be stronger if you flip it around and start with why: [VIDEO] Apart from that I am so excited to try it this holiday","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38909329,"author":"mosselman","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat\u2026)","text":"I totally agree. Coming across Simon Sinek's 'Start with Why' has helped me a great deal in communicating in general. Even in conversations this applies: [VIDEO] I also suggest reading his book. In terms of this theory you should communicate like this: Why, How, What You are starting from your 'What'. I haven't really grasped the core of your product, but to restructure it could be something like: Stop wasting time looking up documents, e-mails and chats in different systems. Stop paying for 20 different single purpose services just to run your business. By having everything in one place it is easier to find and share information throughout you business. Creating custom combinations of docs, chats, sheets, forms, etc will allow you to create the tool to support your own processes and ways of thinking rather than having to learn some app's way of thinking. Nino allows you to quickly build your own custom flows using modular building blocks. Create the tools that you need and have all of your information in one place.","stance":"rec"}],"u5um8QWWRvo":[{"hn_comment_id":8738068,"author":"alecco","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Negative comments","text":"As a writer of critical comments of \"hacker\" school, I think this is typical of the times. If you call out somebody you are dismissed as a debbie-downer, cynical asshat, or other things like that. This comes from a culture now dominated by PR/marketing/sales, getting crazier by the growing viral marketing and astroturfing craze. I strongly recommend you to watch Smile or Die, a talk by Barbara Ehrenreich. [VIDEO] The parallel with that is a delusion SOLD to the community. In the case of \"hacker\" school I criticize it as I did with the \"MBA\" program by Seth Godin. And I consider that I might be _completely_ wrong in both cases, but what is telling is how aggressive people got with me for speaking up my opinion.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2724567,"author":"MostAwesomeDude","month":"2011-07","story_title":"Dealing With (Not Dealing With) the Open Source Assholes","text":"My issue wasn't with the \"retarded\" line, actually; I was more concerned by this: \"If someone says something negative about your project in an unreasonable way, don\u2019t take it to heart. There\u2019s something good in every project (it\u2019s open source, it already has one thing going for it), no single project is complete crap, keep the good things and learn from the criticism. All this boils down to basically 'surround yourself with good people.'\" This is the kind of thinking that lets people write bad code. \"Unreasonable\" is subjective here and lets people be very thin-skinned and defensive about their code. There is code which is complete crap and serves only as a warning to others to pay heed, lest they write code just as bad. (Feel free to consider that hyperbolic and point out that \"complete\" and \"serves only as\" are contradictory.) It's fine to surround yourself with \"good people,\" who I presume are people that are Good-aligned, but that's never going to reveal systemic weaknesses or flaws in your code; you're just going to end up as another group of people that relies on black hats to point out where your code was flawed. In other words, this entire post feels like thinly veiled positive thinking in excess. See [VIDEO] for a much better summary of the problem.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4870214,"author":"ak39","month":"2012-12","story_title":"Apple - Think Twice","text":"I disagree. The reason why we are often too eager to dismiss is because kindness takes effort. Empathy, and certainly sympathy, is hard work. We get lazy, we become exhausted and our reactions become snappy. Almost always the \"dry your eyes\" advice is inappropriate and insensitive. And it never really achieves its intended objective. I'm not saying we should all participate in crying orgies whenever someone shows signs of weakness (though, as I've aged, I think that is better than showing a cold shoulder) or that we readily invest in \"idiot compassion\". What I'm saying is: we are all trapped in this existential reality together and we all need to show kindness with all forms of suffering. Being cruel to be kind as a philanthropic philosophy has never worked (for me). Watch this: [VIDEO] (RSA Animate on \"Smile or Die\" a talk by Barbara Ehrenreich)","stance":"rec"}],"u6XAPnuFjJc":[{"hn_comment_id":2093913,"author":"MrDunham","month":"2011-01","story_title":"Inequality in Equalland","text":"There's a fantastic video on What Motivates Us. Link is [video] [VIDEO] . One of the things they showed an inverse correlation on amount someone gets paid and what they produce when it's anything above menial labor. Highly worth a watch.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7398595,"author":"btilly","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Why good managers are so rare","text":"The previous manager was very good at \"leading through inspiration\". He made people feel good about themselves, feel like they were learning, and feel like they were making a difference both for their corner of the world and the whole organization. The new manager was good at keeping track of things and micromanaging. But the most inspiring line she could come up with was, \"You still have a job.\" (I wish I was kidding.) She also had an unfortunate habit of lying badly and often, with a resulting destruction of trust. But that aspect I'm too bitter about at the moment to want to discuss. To see why it matters, go watch [VIDEO] . I believe that its message is not complete (for instance I've noticed that correlations between stress and mental performance is highly dependent upon the mental task you are doing), but what it says about motivation is spot on. The key factors are Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Good leaders can give people the sense of all three while still getting them to do what the organization needs them to do. Micromanagement makes it clear what the organization wants, but destroys motivation.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1447515,"author":"dreadlabs","month":"2010-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite TED Talk?","text":"I'm note sure if its my favourite but its one i find really interesting. Daniel Pink's talk on Drive, what makes people motivated to perform in the workplace. Really good for employers. There is a TED talk on it and i've seen it but i actually like the RSA animate one better which is essentially the same talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1709767,"author":"hasenj","month":"2010-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the big deal with startups anyways...","text":"Exactly, the \"Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us\" video is a great rebuttal of this idea. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2621699,"author":"sgentle","month":"2011-06","story_title":"Ask HN: No intrinisic motivation to build stuff","text":"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey is a pretty seminal personal management book. It's my top recommendation in terms of \"foundational\" material. It's not got much in the way of practical tools, but the ideas are applicable everywhere. I would recommend Drive by Dan Pink if you're interested in learning more about creative motivation. It's pretty short, and actually very well summarised here: [VIDEO] Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is very good programmer-specific management material. They cite a lot of work benchmarking the productivity of different workplaces, so it's very \"x is good, x is bad\". Jim Collins' Good to Great is an examination of businesses that succeed vs fail, and the attributes that get them there, it's essentially an extended summary of a longitudinal study he and his team did of businesses that outperformed the stock market by a high factor over 10 years. It's more leadership than management, but still very useful. One that I haven't read yet (damn my stupidly big reading list) but recommend on reputation alone is First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. Here's a summary: [LINK] I share your frustration about blah-blah blog posts. With the exception of First, Break All The Rules (which I haven't read yet) and 7 Habits (which I forgive because it's so damn good), the books I mention are based on actual research which is cited in the book, not just some dude going \"I think this because I know stuff\". ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2808031,"author":"szany","month":"2011-07","story_title":"When you're in a team that I lead, there are 3 things that I'd like to ask you","text":"My instantaneous gut reaction is discomfort. These are all good things, but the tone puts me off. As someone who appreciates autonomy, I would rather be given an objective with advice on how to attain it than rules to follow. Even if the content is the same, it shows more respect. In this case, the objective is simply situation awareness ( [LINK] ) for both parties. The advice is to ask, debrief, and warn. Dan Pink gave a good 10-minute talk about this sort of thing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2829109,"author":"tayip9","month":"2011-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Is passion a fair thing to ask for from an employee?","text":"This might fit in with Dan Pink's talk on 'Drive': [VIDEO] Passion can be driven by incentives outside of salary.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3378525,"author":"danberger","month":"2011-12","story_title":"Bingo Card Creator (etc) Year In Review 2011","text":"He is obviously not motivated by money and most people aren't when you dig deeper. Many geeks want to achieve mastery, succumb new challenges, etc. I recommend watching this [1] 10m video out about what drives us to understand this a little more. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7004637,"author":"jtchang","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Twitter SVP Chris Fry Breaks Down How His Engineering Org Works","text":"Chris mentions the 3 things that motivate people. Good video about this from RSA Animate if you haven't seen it yet: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7256706,"author":"balls187","month":"2014-02","story_title":"By The Time You Give Them a Raise, They\u2019re Already Out The Door","text":"For the record, I 100% believe in paying people what they are worth. Determining that worth isn't an exact science. I also believe that after a certain point, money has less appeal to people--that is, people are no longer motivated by the money. By asking someone what they want, I'd like them to tell me what it is they need to be happy, so I can offer it to them. The following video makes some pretty good points along that line: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30072092,"author":"Kim_Bruning","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Basic income would not reduce people\u2019s willingness to work","text":"I'm still around thinking about my next answer. In the mean time, have a video about drive/what motivates us by Dan Pink for RSA. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"u7TwqpWiY5s":[{"hn_comment_id":35090625,"author":"dralley","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Google dusts off the failed Google+ playbook to fight ChatGPT","text":"This interview of Conan, where Vic was the interviewer, was hilarious. Conan spent 20 minutes skewering him and then kicked him off the stage. I imagine a lot of Googlers enjoyed that. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46728803,"author":"mrsvanwinkle","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Douglas Adams on the English\u2013American cultural divide over \"heroes\"","text":"As an American I'm a huge fan of HHGG and Rowan Atkinson (not just his Bean character). I'm also a huge fan of Conan O'Brien and his Harvard generation's work for The Simpsons. Would be far ahead of Adams' time. Though while I find them _okay_ I never laughed so hard that my face and stomach hurt from laughter when watching Monty Python anything, not even Black Adder. For other American comedy what made me really, really laugh so hard was Kenan & Kel and The Lonely Island's work for SNL. I've tried to find something as funny as HHGG for so long that I've read P.G. Wodehouse as Adam's main inspiration. Also watched Fry & Laurey. I guess Sacha Cohen as British humour? Since he's Cambridge Highlights alum after all. Found his works extremely hilarious though the parody of racism was disgusting. Here is Conan's best (natural) performance roasting the Google CEO and gOogLers: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"u9KNtnCZDMI":[{"hn_comment_id":24794172,"author":"stephomi","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A 3D sculpting web application","text":"(dev behind sculptgl, but I didn't make the HN story) Nice project! sculptgl is based on polygons (tris/quads only, and using webgl for rendering). As for the other project it was just as a quick and dirty experiments :). [LINK] [LINK] On Unity there is Clayxel and more recently Mudbun, both based on implicit surfaces. And obviously, the Dreams presentation which is an inspirational must see [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15648924,"author":"Impossible","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Making WebGL Dance: How, Where, and What to Draw (2013)","text":"Hg ( [LINK] ) is a great resource. I'm not a fan of the non-commercial license. The intro on the top of the site has a lot of great links to resources outside of iq, including the pouet.net thread on Raymarching, John Hart's original sphere tracing paper, and enhanced sphere tracing, as well as the author's original talk from NVScene 2015 ( [LINK] ). Definitely check out all of these resources. If you're more interested in signed distance fields outside of the shadertoy\\demo scene use cases there are a lot of interesting resources out there written by people using them in more complex contexts. Alex Evans (Media Molecule) Dreams talk is awesome. You can see the talk here ( [VIDEO] ) and read the slides here ( [LINK] ). [LINK] covers how to generate meshes. With modern hardware with ballot\\shuffle there are probably more efficient ways to do this in a compute shader now, but the talk is still good. Epic games siggraph presentation ( [LINK] ) is a good explanation of how UE4 uses signed distance fields for ambient occlusion and shadows. Q-Games presentation ( [LINK] ) on how the now defunct Game Tomorrow Children uses signed distance fields for dynamic world space reflections. Voxel Quest ( [LINK] ), a \"failed\" kickstarter project, has some good write ups of how he's built the engine over the years as well as source code. Unbound.io gave a talk at GTC 2017 ( [LINK] ) that goes into some detail on their signed distance field VR sculpting app. There are of course more resources t","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16839166,"author":"Mr_P","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"Alex Evan's talk on developing the renderer for Dreams: He's given several versions of this talk (including the Advancements in Real-time Rendering course at Siggraph), but here's one available online: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17171379,"author":"veli_joza","month":"2018-05","story_title":"How Voxels Became \u2018The Next Big Thing\u2019","text":"There's so much misunderstanding and wrong terminology surrounding voxels. Voxels are a way to store world data in memory, basically 3d bitmaps. They won't give you infinite details, just the opposite - they can only give you single '3d resolution'. To actually get infinite details, you have to switch underlining world representation from static data (meshes, voxels) to mathematical (perlin noise, fractals). Here you make an important trade-off - mathematical representation is harder to make changes to, because each modification would increase complexity of math formula used to describe the world. You can see lot of deformations in voxel demos but they are global transformations (scale, shear). Minecraft uses hybrid approach. Inital world is described by math (called world generation) but it's then serialized (sampled) as data with specific voxel size, that you can easily manipulate. Edit: another, IMO far more impressive approach is Media Molecules' upcoming Dreams software that uses constructive solid geometry and sparse distance fields to describe and manipulate 3d geometry. Here's a detailed tech talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25683130,"author":"jmiskovic","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Metaballs and Marching Squares","text":"Another way to do blobby geometry are signed distance fields (SDFs). You define different geometry solids by specifying function which returns for any point in space how far that point is from the surface of the solid. [1] If they are defined this way, it is easy to smoothly interpolate between two or more solids. When rendering to screen, similar techniques have to be used to convert to screen geometry in realtime. The latest technical marvel that uses this tech is Media Molecules Dreams. With SDFs they made rich modelling tools (constructive solid geometry) that produce geometry for physics and painting-style renderer, all running on PS4. The Learning From Failure talk [2] was quite inspiring on lengths they went to achieve their artistic goals. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25705317,"author":"rsp1984","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Raymarching Distance Fields (2008-2020 compilation)","text":"I was actually looking for some resources on this but couldn't find much. Do you have any pointers? I saw Alex Evan's excellent talk from 5 years ago [1], which sparked my interest. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46581763,"author":"turtledragonfly","month":"2026-01","story_title":"I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]","text":"The Dreams team made a nice talk at SIGGRAPH 2015, if you want to check it out: * Slides (good notes): [LINK] * video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uB0gr7Fh6lY":[{"hn_comment_id":48708365,"author":"abalashov","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they're spreading fast","text":"These horrific things are multiplying exponentially in my (rural GA) environs. There are a dozen of them along every conceivable cycling route I could take, and far more if I drive somewhere. If you think this is a city thing meant to deter urban crime, the explosive proliferation of Flock cameras in quite rural and suburban areas may shock you. I find them in the darndest of places, near but not on county lines, adjacent to minor bridges, etc. And next time I go through there, there are more. They seem to be procreating. As others have pointed out, they're not just ALPRs or traffic cameras, and their use-cases, official and unofficial, are extremely dynamic and expanding fast. They are not the only thing of their kind, but they justly earned the lightning rod status for their conspicuous cooperation with the administration's immigration thuggery and the douchy--but highly consequential--pronouncements of their CEO. Moreover, there's a ticker tape of daily news about police misuse of Flock's database, mainly for stalking exes and things like that. This _is_ a stop on the way to a Chinese-style surveillance state, and there's nothing inevitable about it. But it will happen if we allow it to happen. Ben Johnson's video on the security vulnerabilities, linked in the article, always deserves an explicit shout-out. It's likely to intrigue the tinkerers here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46171891,"author":"stanac","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Have I been Flocked? \u2013 Check if your license plate is being watched","text":"I would also recommend Benn Jordan's YT channel, he has a couple of videos covering flock cameras. His latest one is: [VIDEO] edit: grammar","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46904237,"author":"text0404","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Flock CEO calls Deflock a \"terrorist organization\" [video]","text":"This is an excellent video documenting some Flock camera vulnerabilities by Benn Jordan, a security hobbyist/researcher: [VIDEO] . It's a bit long, but worth it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47690241,"author":"gorgonical","month":"2026-04","story_title":"US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology","text":"Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] I recommend them.","stance":"rec"}],"uBh2LxTW0s0":[{"hn_comment_id":6608927,"author":"npalli","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Darpa Initiative Will Focus on Advancing Deep Brain Stimulation","text":"Anyone who wants to see the dramatic impact of deep brain stimulation needs to see this video[1]. Just by turning off and on his neurostimulator (see starting 2:00-ish) see the dramatic change in his body. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7643357,"author":"bjourne","month":"2014-04","story_title":"The Science Behind Deep Brain Stimulation","text":"You should see this video to really understand how impressive dbs technology is. Incredible doesn't even begin to describe it. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7753535,"author":"darkmighty","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Tremor-cancelling spoon for Parkinson's tremors","text":"This video left a deep impression on me: [VIDEO] I didn't realize how this sort of tech can be so life changing (or life giving)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7752936,"author":"hansy","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Tremor-cancelling spoon for Parkinson's tremors","text":"For anyone interested in seeing the before/after effects of DBS treatment, this video is pretty powerful: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7752989,"author":"fossuser","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Tremor-cancelling spoon for Parkinson's tremors","text":"Obviously something like brain surgery shouldn't be taken lightly, but I've had a family friend with tremors go through the process and the result is pretty amazing. Went from pretty severe tremors to appearing basically completely cured. This is a pretty good example: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uCsD3ZGzMgE":[{"hn_comment_id":17385718,"author":"yantrams","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Dealing with Hard Problems (2015)","text":"Taking a break from sitting at the desk and going for a walk and thinking about the problem has worked surprisingly well for me many times. It was something I first read about in a Poincare's article on how Mathematical ideas are generated. Coming to general methods of problem solving in recreational math, I always look for symmetry and transforming the problem from one problem space to another and induction techniques before attacking it. For a research/modelling problem, my approach is to start working on the most simplified version of it and gradually progress towards the original problem. There is an excellent numberphile video on Josephus problem that illustrates how examining specific instances to observe patterns can help solve the general case. [VIDEO] Edit: Formatting","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32320618,"author":"hostcontroller","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite math/logic puzzle?","text":"I really like the Josephus Problem ([Numberphile\u2018s Video on YT]( [VIDEO] )) because of the binary twist, really enjoyed Veritasium\u2018s [3x+1]( [LINK] ) and my favorite is your described [100 Prisoners Riddle]( [LINK] ) too","stance":"rec"}],"uD4izuDMUQA":[{"hn_comment_id":34912106,"author":"sharkweek","month":"2023-02","story_title":"How Will the Universe End?","text":"One of my favorite YouTube videos does a great job with visuals and voiceovers about what will happen over the next trillions x trillions of years: [VIDEO] No idea how accurate it is against anything that might be more theoretically accurate but it\u2019s still a great watch.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41914569,"author":"purgedreality","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite YouTube video, ever?","text":"Journey to the End of Time - [VIDEO] Veritasium on Thermite reaction - [LINK] Problems of a Shared Office - [LINK] History of the entire world, I guess - [LINK] Colin Furze Underground Activities - [LINK] Future of Reasoning - [LINK] Sex in Trek - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21553085,"author":"xz0r","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Interstellar space even weirder than expected, NASA probe reveals","text":"I wonder if there is a documentary with visual explanations. It would be amazing to watch and understand. I recently saw a mind-bending documentary[0] titled \"Timelapse of the future\", there's a brief mention of Voyager, it shows what happens to the universe in the long run and how it ends. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25510256,"author":"enpap_x","month":"2020-12","story_title":"The universe is expanding faster than expected","text":"This video from melodysheep puts the long, long, long future in perspective for me: [LINK] [VIDEO] -- DESCRIPTION FROM YOUTUBE -- Support my work on Patreon: [LINK] | Get the soundtrack: [LINK] | How's it all gonna end? This experience takes us on a journey to the end of time, trillions of years into the future, to discover what the fate of our planet and our universe may ultimately be. We start in 2019 and travel exponentially through time, witnessing the future of Earth, the death of the sun, the end of all stars, proton decay, zombie galaxies, possible future civilizations, exploding black holes, the effects of dark energy, alternate universes, the final fate of the cosmos - to name a few. This is a picture of the future as painted by modern science - a picture that will surely evolve over time as we dig for more clues to how our story will unfold. Much of the science is very recent - and new puzzle pieces are still waiting to be found. To me, this overhead view of time gives a profound perspective - that we are living inside the hot flash of the Big Bang, the perfect moment to soak in the sights and sounds of a universe in its glory days, before it all fades away. Although the end will eventually come, we have a practical infinity of time to play with if we play our cards right. The future may look bleak, but we have enormous potential as a species. Featuring the voices of David Attenborough, Craig Childs, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michelle Thaller, Lawrence Krauss,","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25536493,"author":"hliyan","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Beyond \u201cFermi\u2019s Paradox\u201d: The Percolation Theory Hypothesis","text":"When you consider the potential age of the universe [1], we can also argue that the universe is currently in its extreme infancy and we many in fact be one of the very first civilizations to start thinking about other civilizations, and all other \"firstborn\" civilizations are similarly constrained by technology. [1] [LINK] , more dramatically portrayed in this excellent video: A Journey to the End of Time [2] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27759315,"author":"philjohn","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Kepler telescope glimpses population of free-floating planets","text":"From my understanding the universe is but a toddler - the longest stretch of its life will be AFTER the last stars have died - this video is somewhat existential dread inducing [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29113002,"author":"rapnie","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Timeline of the Human Condition","text":"\"Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time\" is also quite mindblowing and impressive. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29524609,"author":"Isinlor","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Long-form info-dense videos on YouTube you would recommend to anyone?","text":"Everything from 3 blue 1 brown: [LINK] Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics): [LINK] history of the entire world, i guess: [LINK] TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K): [VIDEO] Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens. and Grabby aliens: when we'll meet them, how big they are, and other predictions [LINK] [LINK] Everyday Astronaut videos (he has 90 min documentary on Soviet rocket engine): [LINK] Cool Worlds - a lot of 25-35 min very nice astronomy explanations: [LINK] 'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33094985,"author":"once_inc","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Timeline of the Far Future","text":"Protocol Labs on Youtube has a great video on this here: [VIDEO] Very much worth spending a half an hour on.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33902913,"author":"cercatrova","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Is it black holes all the way up?","text":"This video about deep time is pretty interesting: [VIDEO] Melodysheep (the creator) has some great stuff on the topic.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36169368,"author":"adityaathalye","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Eventually everything will evaporate, not only black holes","text":"This stunning video / visualisation features the evaporation of everything. Ultimately everything cools to absolute zero. Time becomes meaningless. Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time [VIDEO] edit: discussed previously here: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42307993,"author":"majewsky","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger","text":"> Does 4k matter? The PC I'm typing this on has two 27in 4k screens. I'm sitting so that I look at them from about 75cm away (that's 2.5 feet in weird units). I archive most of my video files in 720p, because I genuinely don't see that big of a difference between even 720p and 1080p. It is definitely visible, but usually, it does not add much to the experience, considering that most videos today are produced to be watchable on smartphones and tablets just as much as cinema screens or huge TVs. I only make an exception here for \"cinematic\" content that was intended for the very big screen. That does not necessarily mean movies, but also certain YouTube videos, like \"Timelapse of the Future\": [VIDEO] - This one hits differently for me in 4K vs. just 1080p. Having to watch this in just 720p would be tragic, because its cinematography relies on 4K's ability to resolve very fine lines. So why would I make a point to have both my screens be 4K? Because where else do you look at fine lines a lot? You're looking at it right now: Text. For any occupation that requires reading a lot of text (like programming!), 4K absolutely makes a difference. Even if I don't decrease the font size to get more text on screen at once, just having the outlines of the glyphs be sharper reduces eye strain in my experience.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43690903,"author":"jvm___","month":"2025-04","story_title":"How many supernova explode every year?","text":"[VIDEO] If you need some existential dread. It's a hypothetical video to portray the rest of the universe, the time speed moving forward doubles every 5 seconds - and it's 29 minutes long...","stance":"rec"}],"uDqjIdI4bF4":[{"hn_comment_id":18771770,"author":"rayalez","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Foundations of Animation","text":"I recommend watching this awesome video summarizing 12 principles of animation: [VIDEO] (by the author of Animation vs Animator) I second Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams, it's great. And Keith Lango's video course for 3D animation. These two are absolute best for learning intermediate/advanced animation. Also, of course, Animation Mentor and 11secondclub competition.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37445845,"author":"ttfkam","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Animations From First Principles (in 5 minutes)","text":"Not to be confused with the 12 principles of animation. [VIDEO] mathspp.com will help with making an animation programmatically. The video I linked will help the animation more compelling for the viewer.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42266656,"author":"fewgrehrehre","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Things to do on my phone","text":"If you want something a bit more out of the box than simply playing a game, give animating a spin! Just a simple flipbook-style animation app, there should be plenty out there. No need for pose-to-pose or anything at first, just try abstract, straight-ahead animation. If you find yourself gaining an interest, it's easy enough to pick up knowledge as you need it (if you do want a jumping-off point, I'd recommend Alan Becker's series[1] on the 12 principles of animation). It's incredibly fun bringing even the simplest of things to life, and really rewarding getting to look back and see how your understanding of motion and weight grow over time. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uDr4L6BzpP8":[{"hn_comment_id":11532957,"author":"_s","month":"2016-04","story_title":"BMW Loses Core Development Team of Its I3 and I8 Electric Vehicle Line","text":"There was a video ( [VIDEO] ) posted recently discussing the manufacturing tech within the i3; absolutely fascinating - the general gist being how this car is the Model T of our time. Perhaps it is a big loss or not that great; eitherway I believe the company will do just fine - they've set themselves up very well for the future unlike many of the other manufacturers in terms of brand, mobility, innovating / delivering on new tech / processes etc.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16315030,"author":"aorth","month":"2018-02","story_title":"A Company That Tears Cars Apart to Find Out How They're Built","text":"I don't follow the car industry but I did happen to catch this 2015 video of Munro talking about the BMW i3. He says things like \"this is the watershed,\" \"they invented new science,\" \"this is the Model T of our time,\" etc. I got a whole new respect for BMW after watching that video. Munro even followed the production chain to Morocco while investigating the costing! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10717801,"author":"janfoeh","month":"2015-12","story_title":"Volkswagen and the Blame the Engineer Game","text":"If anybody is interested in this kind of thing, here is an hour-long talk with a freelance analyst who disassembled the BMW i3: [VIDEO] His agency is selling that report for $500,000. I found the whole thing quite fascinating.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11458859,"author":"jonknee","month":"2016-04","story_title":"ReachNow \u2013 BMW car sharing service in Seattle","text":"I've heard a lot of good things about it, including in this somehow fascinating talk about a complete teardown: [VIDEO] tl;dr A guy who sells $500k reports of cars for competing manufacturers says the i3 is revolutionary (in materials and construction).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11533063,"author":"jonah","month":"2016-04","story_title":"BMW Loses Core Development Team of Its I3 and I8 Electric Vehicle Line","text":"This is a really interesting discussion about the production tech in the i3. \"Cutting Edge\" and \"Revolutionary\" are used. [VIDEO] You can buy the report for $500k: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15345424,"author":"retSava","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Dyson to make electric cars from 2020","text":"I can recommend this video: [VIDEO] \"Tearing Down the Model T of Our Time - Autoline After Hours 284\" and [LINK] \"BMW i3 Factory Production Tour\"","stance":"rec"}],"uF-GSj-Exms":[{"hn_comment_id":31241843,"author":"pcurve","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?","text":"I figured I'd get some downvotes mentioning PLTR here. ;-) GPalantir is definitely being more open with their demo now, so there are some good ones on their youtube channel. You can skim through. [VIDEO] I'm impressed by how polished everything looks. As a person who does UX / product design, their working software looks better than most designer's portfolio mockups. I'm impressed by how fast and snappy everything works or feels. I'm impressed by how rich and custom tailored their UI component library is. I'm impressed by how focused and tailored their UI for job at hand. I'm impressed by how every single page in their application looks beautiful, not just a handful. They actually have all their React UI library published as opensource here. [LINK] If there's anyone from pltr reading this, good job. Your design people are amazing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47026724,"author":"nimrody","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars from New York City's Public Hospitals","text":"They have an entire youtube channel. For example, see this: [VIDEO] Some of their stuff for handling data and versioned pipelines seem very well done.","stance":"rec"}],"uFQ3sajIdaM":[{"hn_comment_id":22417492,"author":"CaptArmchair","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Recovering Fossil Data on IBM 8\u201d Floppies [video]","text":"If you haven't seen this already, CuriousMarc has also done this awesome series on the restoration of an original AGC - Apollo Guidance Computer last year. [LINK] And then there are real treats such as the restoration of a Teletype 33 ASR: [LINK] Or them trying to get Fortran to compile on an IBM 1401 Mainframe dated 1959. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22931234,"author":"csense","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?","text":"Not a link, but a video. A computer from 1959 (IBM 1401) at the Computer History Museum, compiling FORTRAN. The Youtube user has a lot of good material on restoring historical hardware. [VIDEO] Also, be sure to read the email thread linked in the video comments. It's a conversation between the restoration team and the compiler's original authors (now in their 90s). If you're in SF and you want to see the 1401 in action, the Computer History Museum used to show it to the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Hopefully those demos will resume once the coronavirus situation's resolved.","stance":"rec"}],"uGlzRt-FYto":[{"hn_comment_id":17600824,"author":"antouank","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Our Use of Haskell and Elm","text":"Why is the pace of releases an important metric for using a programming language? Focus on code quality, and maintenance simplicity. If anything, being able to use the same version for x years and having it be consistently better than any JS library/framework I used, means that the work done is of high quality. Maybe you should watch Evan's talks from various Elm conferences ( search on youtube, for example [VIDEO] ) He addresses that concern that some people have, and why it has the pace it has. As I understand it, it's better to do things right and take as long as it needs, rather than hurry and ship fancy things just to ship them. Elm is perfectly production ready as is, and beats any JS stack for me. Both in code quality and maintenance cost.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17845990,"author":"ssivark","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Methodologies for measuring open source project health","text":"Interesting observation by Aaron Swartz. That could happen because the barrier to entry for adding to a text blurb is much lower than that for contributing to a code base \u2014 maybe because we practice the former for a decade in school. For code, ease of access (edit ability) is non-obvious and therefore, an important axis along which to evaluate open source projects. So, funnily enough, I agree with you because the data you quoted for Wikipedia is much less likely to apply to code :-) Btw, I recently came across a talk by Evan Czaplicki (creator of Elm lang) on \u201cWhat is success?\u201d for an open source project like Elm, and he raises some interesting points about how measuring projects by Github activity is strongly biased by a model of how the larger Javascript community works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19234672,"author":"ssivark","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What do productive people do on weekends?","text":"Agreed; I think it's important to realize that a naive bias for action/productivity is not always the best thing. It's imperative to cultivate a good sense of what is worth doing, otherwise one will just produce a lot that will be irrelevant at best or garbage at worst. There are many \"productive\" people, but a question worth asking is how many of those actions result in lasting value, however you choose to qualify that. A lot of competent and productive people leave lasting negative value, due to misdirected efforts. For some definitions, spending a weekend building sand castles with kids might have more lasting value than working on a coding project. Don't let more visible metrics of productivity (eg: number of Github projects, HN points, etc.) cloud your judgement. If you want to step back and think about this matter (one productive use of the weekend ;-)), I really like the talk by Evan Czaplicki (Elm creator/designer) on \"What is success?\" which might provide some food for thought [1]. To clarify, doing only things that are worth doing doesn't imply holding back from producing/practicing because you're not yet good enough. I was referring more to the direction than the quantum in that direction. See what Ira Glass said about taste and practice [2]. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"uHQ4WCU1WQc":[{"hn_comment_id":29113324,"author":"icelancer","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Magnavox Odyssey was the first commercial home video game console","text":"Related: A great video documentary on The First Video Game, by one of the best YouTube producers in this field: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24953988,"author":"banana_giraffe","month":"2020-10","story_title":"EXoDOS: Collecting every game developed for DOS from original media","text":"This indirectly reminds me of this youtube video: [VIDEO] It's a long one, but it tries to answer when the first video game was made. Most of it, though, is trying to figure out what it means to be a video game in the first place. Sometimes really the trouble with the question is the lack of precision in the definitions involved.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34671041,"author":"twic","month":"2023-02","story_title":"C Port of Ken Thompson's Space Travel","text":"Video games are like compilers, or computers themselves - there isn't really a first one. Far enough back, there are things which are clearly not video games; recently enough, there are things which clearly are video games, and in between, there is a parade of things which are not clearly video games or not. Here's an hour-long, meticulously sourced, rather thoughtful video on the question: [VIDEO] (which naturally concludes that video games are a British invention!)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47574729,"author":"teddyh","month":"2026-03","story_title":"The First Video Game Was Just a Box in the Corner of a Bar","text":"Ahoy did a comprehensive video about it: < [VIDEO] >, and a video is a more appropriate medium for discussing and demonstrating video games.","stance":"rec"}],"uKfKtXYLG78":[{"hn_comment_id":18656072,"author":"jimbokun","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Twenty Years of Open Source Erlang: A Retrospective from the trenches","text":"I had never watched Erlang the Movie before, this is truly a gem: [VIDEO] This is a great way to explain the benefits of Erlang. Anyone who has tried to write robust, distributed systems should immediately see the benefits. Even all of these years later.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14424153,"author":"SkyMarshal","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Let's Encrypt OCSP and Issuance Outage Postmortem","text":"Their original video demo of hot code swapping is also a classic worth checking out: [VIDEO] That got a lot of programmers interested in Erlang ~10yrs ago.","stance":"rec"}],"uL2D3qzHtqY":[{"hn_comment_id":12639145,"author":"x0x0","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Cliff Click was the jvm architect at sun then spent a decade at azul systems as their jvm architect. The talk is \"A JVM Does That?\" It's well worth watching if you are interested in vms at all. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5519772,"author":"qznc","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Probably this one: [LINK] Anything from Cliff Click is quite good. This guy has a very deep understanding of compilers, virtual-machines, CPUs, and their interactions. A JVM does that? [VIDEO] Java on a 1000 Cores [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9187106,"author":"Alupis","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Peter Lawrey Describes Petabyte JVMs","text":"There are some interesting challenging when scaling this large with any system. Peter referenced some of Azul System's stuff and their custom GC. Cliff Click from Azul has done some great Google Tech Talks about JVM development and scaling JVM's out to really big systems.[1][2] [1] A JVM Does That? - [VIDEO] [2] Java on a 1000 Cores - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9543058,"author":"btrask","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Linux futex_wait() bug \u2013 update to latest patches now","text":"I'm not part of the Java world at all, but I'm starting to think that Azul Systems is one of the few groups of people who know what they're doing with regard to Linux performance and the user/kernel boundary. I recently watched some talks by Cliff Click[1] that were extremely informative, and from what I understand about their proposed kernel patches, they seem like important improvements. This report by Gil Tene (their CTO according to Wikipedia) lends more support to that theory. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13743468,"author":"qznc","month":"2017-02","story_title":"The \u201chigh-level CPU\u201d challenge (2008)","text":"There is a fascinating talk by Cliff Click \"A JVM Does That?\" At the end he shares some opinion about what should be done by JVM or OS and what should change. video: [VIDEO] slides: [LINK] I remember a talk, where he was also talking about hardware. It does not seem to be this one. For example, a time register would be useful. Syscalls like clock_gettime are too slow. CPU info like cycle counts fail with dynamic frequency scaling.","stance":"rec"}],"uNjxe8ShM-8":[{"hn_comment_id":16066897,"author":"aeleos","month":"2018-01","story_title":"HDR Photography in Microsoft Excel (2017) [video]","text":"This is very similar in style to my favorite presentation and paper of all time, titled On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint [0]. The research, presentation and paper were all created inside of powerpoint and it is probably the greatest thing ever made. If you enjoyed the above video you will definitely enjoy this. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16383165,"author":"stanlarroque","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Age of Empires 2 Scenario Editor Is Turing Complete","text":"I can only think of one of the greatest videos[0] on Youtube when I read about unusual Turing complete systems. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22040853,"author":"K0SM0S","month":"2020-01","story_title":"The \u201cNo Code\u201d Delusion","text":"I think this drives your point with incredible wit: \u201cOn The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint (SIGBOVIK)\u201d by Tom Wildenhain[1]. (5 minutes video) [1]: [VIDEO] (Nerding out should always be hilarious like that!) [2]: Recording of a guest lecture he gave for the Esoteric Programming Languages course at CMU. (~1h) [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16046222,"author":"floatboth","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What\u2019s your favorite talk from 2017?","text":"On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint [VIDEO] Compiling C to printable x86, to make an executable research paper [LINK] HDR Photography in Microsoft Excel?! [LINK] Zebras All the Way Down [LINK] Solving Layout Problems with CSS Grid and Friends [LINK] Console Security - Switch [LINK] Let's move SMM out of firmware and into the kernel [LINK] Bringing Linux back to server boot ROMs with NERF and Heads [LINK] Sharing the Chisel [LINK] (looks like the actual conference video wasn't released)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16360060,"author":"codepie","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Lessons from Optics, the Other Deep Learning","text":"The former paper appeared in SIBVOIK 2017 ( [LINK] ), where you can find other such papers. My personal favorites are \"On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint\" ( [VIDEO] ) and \"Automated Distributed Execution of LLVM code using SQL JIT Compilation\" > Following the popularity of MapReduce, a whole ecosystem of Apache Incubator Projects has emerged that all solve the same problem. Famous examples include Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Pikachu, Apache Pig, German Spark and Apache Hive [1]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18049248,"author":"kgrizzle","month":"2018-09","story_title":"3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae","text":"Reminds me of a related project presented at SIGBOVIK demonstrating the Turing completeness of PowerPoint. It is also art. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20284350,"author":"bschne","month":"2019-06","story_title":"3D engine on MS Excel without VBA (2018) [video]","text":"For another completely insane but kind of fun way to abuse an office application, see \"On The Turing Completeness of PowerPoint\" [1]. (Gwern has a whole list of accidentally/surprisingly turing-complete things at [2]) 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25540050,"author":"alpaca128","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2020?","text":"If you liked the Game of Life running a Game of Life simulation you might enjoy the YT video[0] showing someone's functioning raycasting engine within the game world of Factorio using thousands of machines and parts provided by the game. It blew my mind. What I also found quite amusing was the PowerPoint presentation demonstrating the Turing-completeness of PowerPoint animations[1]. I'll never get tired of this kind of tinkering walking the line between genius and a healthy portion of crazy. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uOSnQM1Zu4w":[{"hn_comment_id":43822144,"author":"floatrock","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal","text":"Practical Engineering did a really great video a few years ago on why black starts are hard, complete with a tabletop demo about the physics of synchronizing large spinning generators: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36394907,"author":"pixl97","month":"2023-06","story_title":"How to ramp up a factory consuming a lot of energy?","text":"Heh, it's easy to model when you have a few generators, especially when one is much bigger than the others on the grid. But what's fun these days is you can have an absolutely huge number of generators. Keeping things in phase just seems insane to me. Practical engineering has a great video about power black starts that give some insight into this complicated machine. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40033902,"author":"puzzledobserver","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Turning off electrical grids to prevent wildfire\u2212 a complex, technical operation","text":"The Practical Engineering Youtube channel has a very interesting video on black starts of an electrical grid [0]. Are there any additional challenges in turning a grid off? [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41294617,"author":"msandford","month":"2024-08","story_title":"The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud","text":"The \"turning the grid up to 11\" attack isn't really possible. I know it seems like it is, but the inverters will only advance frequency so much before they back off, the inverters will only increase voltage so much. Etc. Sounds scary, isn't practical. Turning everything off when the panels are at peak output? That lets frequency sag enough that plants start tripping offline to protect themselves and the grid and it'll cascade across the continent in just a few minutes. Then you have a black start which might take months. There's an excellent video on how catastrophic a black start is. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43833376,"author":"feirlane","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal","text":"Practical Engineering on youtube has some good videos on the electrical grid. This one in particular is a good explanation on what they had to go through to get power back on: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45690028,"author":"habinero","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region","text":"The power grid absolutely can fail catastrophically and is a lot more fragile than people think. Texas nearly ran into this during their blackout a few years ago -- their grid got within a few minutes of complete failure that would have required a black start which IIRC has never been done. Grady has a good explanation and the writeup is interesting reading too. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uRe9w5PKmsE":[{"hn_comment_id":13918096,"author":"BrailleHunting","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Man dies charging iPhone while in the bath","text":"TL;DR: spend the $19 to buy a real, big brand USB charger because they have more to lose than grey market no brand. Tragic. Probably cheap USB without mains isolation or maybe enough water dripped down length of cable and socket to create a circuit, because USB is supposed to be 5V DC. Watch these USB charger teardown horror-shows to further understand why it's rational to pay for proper, authentic CE+UL, high-low isolation and quality components (ie insulated tape in transformers): [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14071238,"author":"fnord123","month":"2017-04","story_title":"A quick look at the Ikea Tr\u00e5dfri lighting platform","text":"Also of interest is this teardown of the Koppla USB power supply: [VIDEO] It's also a pretty darn good piece of kit.","stance":"rec"}],"uTRUQ-RKfUs":[{"hn_comment_id":20943734,"author":"muzzio","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting (2017)","text":"Longer form than EFaP, but Lindsay Ellis has some great film/TV analysis videos. She's usually more focused on writing than anything else, though. Here's a postmortem she did on the Hobbit films, which was recently nominated for a Hugo award: [VIDEO] Other solid works by her include a postmortem on the last season of Game of Thrones and an analysis of themes in Michael Bay's Transformers. (I know that last one sounds weird, but it's really well done.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22068682,"author":"Apocryphon","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Christopher Tolkien has died","text":"The Hobbit films had a troubled production and were terribly rushed. Here's the first video in a small YouTube series on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30182343,"author":"scott_s","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Over-reliance on CGI in movies","text":"Agreed agreed. The problem with The Hobbit was not the visual effects. The problem was that it was made without a plan, under duress. Lindsay Ellis has a three-part video essay series ( [VIDEO] yes, I know it says 1/2, I promise there is a 2/3) exploring this.","stance":"rec"}],"uTdyb-RWNKo":[{"hn_comment_id":42365502,"author":"brunorsini","month":"2024-12","story_title":"He Built Apple's 1980s iPad Concept [video]","text":"Highly recommend the documentary on General Magic. They were actually trying to build the iPhone as early as 1989 (and into the 90s). My former boss Meghan Smith was part of that team, she loved it \u2014 and so many Silicon Valley companies came out of that project. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25915160,"author":"the_af","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus","text":"Have you watched the (pretty good) documentary \"General Magic\"? If features a lot of the same people than folklore.org, to the point one could consider it an Apple \"side story\", though there are also future Googlers and people who built Android. Here's the trailer: [VIDEO] I found it interesting. There is a bit of hagiography going on, though (and note the trailer seems way more antagonistic towards Sculley than the documentary actually is.) One thing I found striking is that none of these people seem to need or care about money. They say so explicitly, \"we didn't care about the money\", and that it was all about the vision and passion. Yet somehow they managed to remain clothed and well fed. If that's not the definition of privilege, I don't know what is!","stance":"rec"}],"uU_Q2a0S0zI":[{"hn_comment_id":41472454,"author":"bgnn","month":"2024-09","story_title":"How does cosine similarity work?","text":"One cannot intuitively think about higher than 3 dimensions. Even for most their intuition is often wrong in 3D space. It's quite accurate for 1D and 2D. Richard Hamming has a whole section lecture to make everyone realize precisely this [1]. This was an eye opener to me. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29971064,"author":"it_does_follow","month":"2022-01","story_title":"A high-dimensional sphere spilling out of a high-dimensional cube","text":"To add to this list: Richard Hamming includes a section on this in his n-dimensional spaces talk from \"The Art of Doing Science and Engineering\" lectures [0]. Stripe Press also recently re-published a beautiful copy of the print version of these lectures [1]. 0. [VIDEO] 1. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36012762,"author":"time_to_smile","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Counterintuitive Properties of High Dimensional Space","text":"A good chunk of this comes directly from Richard Hamming's incredible The Art of doing Science and Engineering (a video of the specific lecture on n-dimensional spaces can be found here[0]) and yet I see no mention of this talk anywhere in the article, which is unfortunate. I highly recommend checking out Hamming's lectures if you find this enjoyable. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uUmIdq0D6-A":[{"hn_comment_id":20966640,"author":"tastyfreeze","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914","text":"This happened due to extermination of soil life through modern farming practices of heavy tilling, fertilizing and monoculture crops. Dead soil is more susceptible to erosion and requires ever increasing amounts of synthetic fertilizer to grow anything. More soil has been lost from the US than the amount of food that has been produced. Soil fertility can be returned to historical levels by changing farming practices to make living soil. The benefits of treating the soil as a living organism include increased fertility, water infiltration, moisture retention, and nutrient availability as well as decreasing or eliminating synthetic fertilizer requirements. [LINK] This is a long video but it has completely changed my home gardening practices. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26826129,"author":"tastyfreeze","month":"2021-04","story_title":"The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil","text":"YouTube soil health videos has all you need. Gabe Brown and Ray Archuleta presentations are easy to consume. Dr. Elaine Ingham focuses more on the soil life in greater detail than most care about but she does provide some important to understand details on rhizosphere interactions. Living Web Farms has quite a lot of lectures about regenerative practices. There are also a myriad of academic papers on soil health as well. This video, [VIDEO] , by Gabe Brown set me on the regenerative path. If you dont want to consume hours of information here is the gist. The soil is alive. Plants use microbes and fungus as an external stomach. Direct sun and disruption/tilling kill the soil life. Without life in the soil you eventually have a desert as the organics are sifted out of the sand by weathering.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27815555,"author":"akeck","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies","text":"Gabe Brown's talk is my favorite introduction to regenerative ag: [VIDEO] He did a book on it: [LINK] I also like Geoff Lawton's work on food forests: [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28445123,"author":"frereubu","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Sri Lanka\u2019s overnight flip to organic farming has led to an economic disaster","text":"I don't know if you've come across this video on HN before, but I discovered it here and it was an eye-opener for me. It's a guy called Gabe Brown who transformed his farm into one that needed no fertilizer by using no-till and rotation. One of the most compelling things is that he's no tree-hugger (he even has an uncomplimentary comparison with the soil from an organic farm) - his focus is squarely on profit, which goes up when you're not forking out huge amounts of money on chemicals. I thought I'd give it five minutes, then 2.5 hours later I realised I'd watched the whole thing. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21111892,"author":"jakeogh","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Healthy soil is the real key to feeding the world","text":"I found this video series about soil really interesting: [VIDEO] It's long, and I was sure I would click away, but the presenter has a great tone and the content is heka cool.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22906621,"author":"VBprogrammer","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Fruit Trenches: Cultivating Subtropical Plants in Freezing Temperatures","text":"Not sure if you've come come across it but Gabe Brown has done some interesting stuff in farm scale low input farming. [VIDEO] That said, I think there is a lot of interesting stuff in permaculture design. But in a lot of cases it is a bit of a pyramid scheme / agile consultancy feel going on.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23799715,"author":"vram22","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable","text":"Gabe Brown has been doing regenerative agriculture for over two decades on Brown's Ranch, over 2000 acres, in Bismarck, North Dakota successfully. Food crops plus cover crops plus livestock, all integrated. Lot of good results compared to neighboring farmers doing the traditional synthetic fertilizer / pesticide / tilling / monoculture approach. There are others like him too. And he's been invited to and giving a lot of talks about it at many confs for years: Watch \"Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24667317,"author":"carapace","month":"2020-10","story_title":"\u201cFungi Can Teach Us a New Way of Looking at the World\u201d","text":"I had an experience with mycelium that changed my way of looking at the world: [LINK] I am coming around to the POV that soil should be thought of as a kind of organism. Check out e.g.: \"Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health\" [VIDEO] He talks about fungus starting around 1:20 (80 minutes in) [VIDEO] Fungal to bacterial ratios...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27809993,"author":"iorek_dev","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies","text":"For those who are interested in the topic of soil reconstruction and balance in nature, some more sources: Documentary on the Loess plateau in China: [LINK] Talk on the Caledonian Forest: [LINK] Talk on using the \"herd effect\" in Africa: [LINK] A talk presenting a realistic view on soil reconstruction, what IMO is the best argument to convince farmers: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32566309,"author":"carapace","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Study first to link weed killer Roundup to convulsions in animals","text":"More than borderline, there are many many examples these days of people practicing forms of ecologically-informed agriculture that match or exceed the yields of destructive systems and methods. When I first heard about Permaculture in the late 80's it was still pretty obscure, and regenerative agriculture in general was \"hippie-dippy\". Nowadays there are thousand of projects with videos on the youtube, and people are practicing ecologically harmonious farming all over the world. See especially Gabe Brown's talk linked below, he's not replacing current agriculture, just updating it with scientifically-grounded techniques that improve the volume and vitality of his topsoil while being more profitable. Quoting from some notes I've been keeping: There's the \"Grow Biointensive\" method which is designed to provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world. => [LINK] Grow Biointensive (These folks are also selling their system, but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their site curiously hard to use.) ## Permaculture Permaculture could be called \"applied ecology\" (with a kind of hippie spin.) and a similar school (or parallel evolution) called \"Syntropic\" Agriculture. Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create \"food forests\" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fert","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34219913,"author":"imtringued","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Five Things Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About Agriculture","text":"Would you rather grow cover crops or have soil depletion? Also cover crops don't result in a 50% increase in land usage. Here is a video that might interest you: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37390875,"author":"rapind","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Farms that create habitat key to food security and biodiversity","text":"As a complete outsider, I found this fascinating series of talks a few years ago that go into great detail on soil for farmers: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37590768,"author":"fuzztester","month":"2023-09","story_title":"\u2018Less than half\u2019 fresh produce sold globally makes any profit","text":"Watch \"Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health\" on YouTube [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44843751,"author":"Sightline","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Little-known leguminous plant can increase beef production by 60% (2022)","text":">If they could increase production by 60% with any additive at all, it would immediately see widespread use. 1. No, that's not true at all 2. It's astounding how everywhere I go online there is someone spouting off nonsense which is then repeated and perpetuated. 3. Go listen to Gabe Brown, he saves thousands and thousands by not not paying for synthetic fertilizers. \"Above every surface acre on earth there's approximately 32,000 tons of atmospheric nitrogen, why would any farmer want to write a check for nitrogen?, I just can't figure that one out\" -- Gabe Brown [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uWUHkCgslNE":[{"hn_comment_id":25689483,"author":"Sohcahtoa82","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Mute Your Microphone While Typing with Hushboard","text":"If you have an RTX card, get nVidia Broadcast. If you have a non-RTX card (like a GTX 1070), get RTX voice. Despite the name, it does not require an RTX card. Seriously, nVidia's noise removal is absolute magic, as far as I'm concerned. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28318592,"author":"Sohcahtoa82","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Discord has won over gamers. Now it wants everybody else","text":"> someone else's background or breathing noise NVIDIA Broadcast (Previously called RTX Voice) is a godsend for those scenarios. If you haven't seen it, it's worth checking out. It is absolutely magical. [VIDEO] Sadly, AFAIK, it does require an NVIDIA GPU, but it doesn't need an RTX card. I used it on my GTX 1070 and it worked wonderfully. What's really amazing about it is that you can use it to filter incoming voice audio, so if you have someone in your channel that has tons of background noise or breathing, you can filter it out on your own side.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25645169,"author":"wheybags","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Show HN: Unclack \u2013 a macOS app that mutes your microphone while you type","text":"A solution like rtx voice seems a better way to go tbh. For those who don't know, it's an nvidia thing that uses a GPU accelerated (ofc, it's nvidia) neural network to denoise voice calls, from all kinds of noise, not just typing. It's really pretty impressive, here's a demo: [VIDEO] I wish it wasn't proprietary though (and worse, hardware specific). And windows only of course.","stance":"rec"}],"uXdtafGdIVM":[{"hn_comment_id":28529576,"author":"ultramundane828","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Norm Macdonald has died","text":"[VIDEO] Bit starting at :43 (Germany) will easily go down as one of the greatest stand-up bits ever written and performed. And he was the perfect guy to do it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43671677,"author":"paganel","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Trump exempts phones, computers, chips from \u2018reciprocal\u2019 tariffs","text":"> But this time, the trade war is against the whole world. Reminds me of this excellent Norm Macdonald sketch [1] on Germany of which I've learned only recently. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uY-u1qyRM5w":[{"hn_comment_id":17002164,"author":"gizmodo59","month":"2018-05","story_title":"How the Manhattan Project\u2019s Nuclear Suburb Stayed Secret","text":"I highly recommend this talk by Richard Feynman on Los Alamos: [VIDEO] . His personal anecdote on some interesting details while he was working there.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36933971,"author":"mk_stjames","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Richard Feynman's 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University","text":"I spent a fair amount of time during the film playing 'Spot Jack Quaid' in anticipation of Feynman being called out at some point. He is spotted early during the montage when Oppenheimer goes recruiting, and then during various scenes in the background, twice playing bongos (!), but only once is he called by name- Teller calls his name right before the Trinity test for not having goggles or a welding glass to look through, and he notes he is in a truck with a thick windshield that blocks the UV. I smiled so much when that little tidbit happens, as it is a story he prominently tells in his book 'Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman...' He gives an incredible account of his time there in the lecture (and almost stand-up-comedy act) 'Los Alamos from Below' - [VIDEO] So highly entertaining.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34568433,"author":"MarkusWandel","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What happens if a nuclear missile is air-destroyed before detonation?","text":"If the fissile core is anything like the original Trinity test one, it relies on a solid ball of plutonium metal being compacted to reach criticality (modern ones may be hollow). This means the explosion wavefront needs to arrive simultaneously all around the ball. This is hard! A ton of the computational effort legendarily described by Feynman with his IBM tabulator/multiple coloured cards story was, I believe, just to make this work. Link to the relevant part (the whole lecture is a hoot). [VIDEO] Anyway the original bomb had a lot of detonators all around that needed to be fired right. Modern ones have only two, from the little I've seen in published imagery. [LINK] One hopes this is arranged so simultaneous firing of both detonators results in a fizzle, and a precise stagger is needed. Either way though, an external explosive force will just disassemble the thing, not cause it to go off.","stance":"rec"}],"uYNzqgU7na4":[{"hn_comment_id":27922947,"author":"verytrivial","month":"2021-07","story_title":"4.6B-year-old meteorite found","text":"Off-central-topic, but regarding where this was found, if you find yourself discussing this offline, \"Loughborough\" is pronounced \"LUFF-burro\" or \"LUFF-burrah\". Ref. [VIDEO] for entertaining additions.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35948247,"author":"happymellon","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British accents?","text":"It's due to being invaded by many different counties over the years, and each of them only invade a portion. Map men explain it best. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39989395,"author":"helsinkiandrew","month":"2024-04","story_title":"British Placename Mapper","text":"> Just needs a pronunciation guide now The Map Men on YouTube did a short (8min) video on why pronunciation is hard and a guide: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41718797,"author":"happymellon","month":"2024-10","story_title":"The other British invasion: how UK lingo conquered the US","text":"Hopefully Map Men might help with this. [VIDEO] TLDW; We have multiple different root languages in English city names, and you are only thinking one dimensionally, with the Roman Latin root. Cirencester is a good example, pronounced how you might expect while further north the town names get more germanic, and eventually Scandinavian. The video helps it makes sense.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41932347,"author":"Maakuth","month":"2024-10","story_title":"An Illustrated Guide to Maritime Signal Flags","text":"Yes, yes it is. My understanding is that it used to be spoken in a way closer to the written form, but it has drifted. And then there are all the loan words that retain at least some of their original pronunciation. Here's a fun clip about it, focusing on British place names: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uZgbKrDEzAs":[{"hn_comment_id":18037919,"author":"lylecubed","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Becoming a Better Software Developer: A Handbook on Personal Performance","text":"This video does a great job of explaining why modern programming in general has failed: [VIDEO] I think OOP specifically derailed programming because of how big it was, how fast it took over and how long it was considered to be the one true programming paradigm. When OOP hit, it hit hard and fast. It wasn't long before colleges were teaching OOP as The One True Way To Program. Every employer required knowledge of OOP before they would interview you. And I mean every employer, from startups to corporate enterprise. And once it took hold, it took people (and me!) 10-20 years to realize the OOP emperor had no clothes on. I still don't understand why or how it got so big so quickly. All I can figure is that the software industry as a whole pays attention to the wrong people.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23595791,"author":"goostavos","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Deno will stop using TypeScript","text":"They become really frustrating as the project grows in size. Personally, it becomes really difficult to maintain productivity. As compile times tick up, I start bouncing over to other tabs rather than just twiddling my thumbs starring at a terminal. Then I realize I've been on Reddit for a half-hour. I recently watched this talk by Johnathan Blow[0] where he talks about quality of life in programming languages and spends a fair amount of time talking about compile times and their effects. I think we collectively need to re-align on being performance focused. Tools are simultaneously amazing but crummy at the same time. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35365901,"author":"illiarian","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Type system of Fortnite's Verse language","text":"Hubris. \"Look at us, we have these LANGUAGE EXPERTS working for us\". As a result the only presentations these people do are about how great their new Yet Another Language toy is. Compare this to, say, Jonathan Blow talking about design decisions for his language: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"u_ktRTWMX3M":[{"hn_comment_id":29032780,"author":"abraae","month":"2021-10","story_title":"55 GiB/s FizzBuzz","text":"I have trouble with procrastination, but since watching Arnie's take on this I cannot get it out of my head and I have actually found it helpful (yet here I am on HN again :() [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31305100,"author":"incomingpain","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you \u201cfigure out\u201d what to do in life?","text":">I'm increasingly seeing people around me give serious thought to this question. Figuring out what to do in life? I thought I had figured things out, but now when I think again I feel doubtful. So, how do you \"figure\" things out in a way that it's bulletproof. This is something they fail to teach in school because teachers tautologically don't know the answer. Entrepreneurs also don't quite understand and often fall into serial startups until 1 works. Eventually they learn. Marcus Aurelius has something to say: [LINK] Here's probably the going book: [LINK] Arnold's video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36086912,"author":"hunkins","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Need Some Advice","text":"Of course. Seems like just yesterday that I was in the exact same spot! Congrats on making it to a final round, that's a huge accomplishment. I've been rejected from many companies and interviews, and (spoiler) so has everyone in the industry - the only failure is giving up! You've got this. Some motivation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uaCaIhfETsM":[{"hn_comment_id":40841557,"author":"pagade","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement","text":"I recently watched these 3 episodes of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Highly recommended. Opioids III: The Sacklers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ( [VIDEO] ) Opioids II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ( [LINK] ) Opioids: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ( [LINK] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28386840,"author":"reureu","month":"2021-09","story_title":"The Sackler Family Wins Immunity from Future Opioid Lawsuits","text":"For anyone that's just getting up to speed on this, John Oliver had a really good video specifically about this issue: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29591136,"author":"dstick","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Judge rejects Purdue Pharma's $4.5B opioid settlement","text":"Good. For those that haven't watched them yet, there are 3 John Oliver segments on the subject that will back up the \"Good.\" statement: Opioids [LINK] Opioids II [LINK] Opioids III (this one focuses 100% on the Sacklers) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uaje5I22kgE":[{"hn_comment_id":16890330,"author":"mycelium","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)","text":"I'd highly recommend the xonsh shell for scripting if you're familiar with python: [LINK] Once you do tutorial and learn the rules for going between shell and python, it's super easy to slice and dice. I have always disliked that moment of \"yes, a shell script is probably the best tool for this job\" that then leads me to banging my head against bash syntax for an hour. Python libraries like `sh` are great, but still a little high overhead. Now the twice a month I have to shell script I find to be pretty fun, and I'd highly recommend xonsh. Great PyCon 2016 talk on it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43178627,"author":"ambivalence","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Xonsh \u2013 A Python-powered shell","text":"Xonsh is a fantastic shell. I literally think they are most hindered by the name at this point, since it's one of those clever names that are pronounced in a peculiar way and one that doesn't convey too well that it's really Python + sh in a beautifully consistent design. It's very easy to switch if you're willing to spend 30 minutes to go through this talk about its design by the author: [VIDEO] After this short intro you will know how Python and shell interact within xonsh and you'll avoid surprises. I wish it started faster, but it's a really small price to pay for having Python 3.13 open literally at all times.","stance":"rec"}],"udJJ7n_Ryjg":[{"hn_comment_id":38301667,"author":"natmaka","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row","text":"> Nuclear AND Renewable energy It cannot be done because it financially condemns new nuclear plants. \"The rates at which conventional power plants are utilized will continue to decrease as competitive pressure from near-zero marginal cost solar photovoltaic and onshore wind power, and battery energy storage continue to grow exponentially worldwide.\" Eye-opening video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35215198,"author":"enslavedrobot","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Nuclear power plant leaked 1.5M litres of radioactive water in Minnesota","text":"I don't think there is much point is continuing this discussion, though, as a PhD materials chemist with an MBA, I could literally write dissertations on the future costs of solar and storage. Instead, I'll leave you with two YouTube videos that outline the future of distributed energy and the fate of centralized generation. [LINK] [VIDEO] Peace","stance":"rec"}],"udPY5rQVoW0":[{"hn_comment_id":28056330,"author":"ALittleLight","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Where are the robotic bricklayers?","text":"This video really amazed me in terms of automated game development. My fantasies are something like this and GPT-3 plus a couple decades of progress. I think we'll get to genuinely open ended sand box games. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31032834,"author":"ALittleLight","month":"2022-04","story_title":"DALL-E, the Metaverse, and Zero Marginal Content","text":"This YouTube video, to me, shows the promise of things to come. AI generated game worlds. Language models to generate plots and dialog, transformers and GANs to create illustrations. Imagine a game, a truly open world sand box, Grand Theft Auto meets AI Dungeon - every NPC is a \"real\" person with unlimited dialog options, the buildings you drive by you could easily walk in and investigate, unlimited play space - you could type in more general instructions and ideas to the plot generator (\"add in a vampire romance and murder mystery angle\") on the fly. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34089352,"author":"eru","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Netflix: 30% bitrate saving using Film Grain Synthesis","text":"> You could directly encode the elements as understanded by the process used to generate them, rather than attempting to reconstitute things from a stream of bitmaps. You might like Gan Theft Auto: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41382425,"author":"7734128","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Diffusion models are real-time game engines","text":"What you're describing reminded me of this cool project: [VIDEO] \"Playing a Neural Network's version of GTA V: GAN Theft Auto\"","stance":"rec"}],"udlMSe5-zP8":[{"hn_comment_id":21407593,"author":"puranjay","month":"2019-10","story_title":"The SpaceX Starship is a big deal","text":"I'm an idiot. I wrote John Cusack when I wanted to write John Carmack. I don't know how I could even confuse the two names. Here's the Carmack podcast where he talks about it. Fantastic listen for anyone honestly. Carmack is a fascinating guy. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20827410,"author":"adnzzzzZ","month":"2019-08","story_title":"John Carmack on the Joe Rogan Experience [video]","text":"Interesting perspective on work-life balance, certainly contrary to the usual discussion online on these issues [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20827686,"author":"tosh","month":"2019-08","story_title":"John Carmack on the Joe Rogan Experience [video]","text":"On open sourcing Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake: [VIDEO] Neuralink: [VIDEO] Artificial General Intelligence: [VIDEO] Quantum Computing: [VIDEO] \u201cEngineering is figuring out how to do what you want with what you\u2019ve actually got\u201d: [VIDEO] End of Moore\u2019s Law / On CPU architecture: [VIDEO] 5G and streaming (games & video): [VIDEO] edit: like already mentioned there are a lot of topics covered, some even for just a few sentences, the conversation flows, worth watching the whole thing","stance":"rec"}],"ue-1JoJQaEg":[{"hn_comment_id":44984615,"author":"bsimpson","month":"2025-08","story_title":"VHS-C: When a lazy idea stumbles towards perfection [video]","text":"YT recently recommended his explanation of how pre-computer pinball machines worked to me - a series of 3, hour-long videos. Gave me something to look forward to on my commute. I shared it with everyone I know, and now I'm sharing it with you: [VIDEO] Fascinating (and insanely impressive) to see how a bunch of switches and stepper motors implement complex logic.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38165486,"author":"iancmceachern","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Automata: The Extraordinary \"Robots\" Designed Hundreds of Years Ago [video]","text":"This video from Technology Connections on old mechanical pinball machines does a great job of explaining how a lot of this stuff can be done mechanically. Re: your for loop question, check out how they handle the scoring and I think it'll give you some ideas. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38869558,"author":"brewdad","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Why a toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today (2021)","text":"I've been watching his videos on a 1970s pinball machine. It goes horribly in-depth (in a good way). Fascinating how much complexity could be managed with the simplest of interfaces. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41746022,"author":"chongli","month":"2024-10","story_title":"How were 70s versions of games like Pong built without a programmable computer?","text":"You still use paper. Instead of writing the game in a general purpose programming language you write it using logic gates. You get abstraction and modularity by designing larger components (adders, flip-flops, timers, shift registers) on separate pieces of paper and then including them as named black boxes in a higher-level diagram. The good news for the Pong developers is that most of those larger components were already available off-the-shelf. Common families of these chips, such as the venerable 4000-series and 7400-series logic families, began to appear on the market in the mid-1960's. Edit just to add another bit of nuance . If it still seems like an extremely difficult task without much precedent, I think the lineage of these early arcade games can be traced back through their older arcade siblings: pinball machines. People had been building more and more sophisticated pinball machines over the decades since their inception in the early 1930s. For a look into pinball machines, some of their history, and an amazingly deep dive into the workings of a 1970's model, check out Alec's pinball series on Technology Connections [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42611598,"author":"exhilaration","month":"2025-01","story_title":"A man keeping hope, and 70-year-old pinball machines, alive","text":"Related - Technology Connections has several videos about old pinball machines that showcase how incredibly complex they are, here's the first video: Old pinball machines are amazingly complex [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46970933,"author":"roskelld","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Fun With Pinball","text":"I would have loved seeing this as a kid. I was obsessed with wanting to build a pinball machine when I was young. At the time my skills only stretched as far as cardboard builds with elastic band bumpers and pencils for flippers, but I got a huge kick out of making different layouts for the balls to travel around. It would be great to see some home made efforts now with so many amazing off the shelf bits of tech and 3D printers. The site is also a nice compliment to the Technology Connections series on old pinball machines [1]. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uhbDfi7Ee7k":[{"hn_comment_id":40986769,"author":"elric","month":"2024-07","story_title":"New technology could reduce the amount of energy for air conditioning","text":"> Passive cooling measures (e.g., window shutters) should not be overlooked as they cost nothing to run. Technology Connections just did a video on awnings. I'm not quite as puppy eyed about them as TC, but they are pretty darn effective. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42162712,"author":"hunter2_","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties","text":"It's almost certainly insolation (sol, not sul). UV/IR rejecting film on the windows might help, given mild enough winters that blocking it year round is fine. Check out [VIDEO] If you can find someone willing to do it, dumping the heat (pumped out as air conditioning) directly into the pool would be quite efficient relative to heating the pool separately. Have it dump to the ambient outdoor air only as overflow when the pool's thermostat is satisfied (upper 80s or whatever).","stance":"rec"}],"uk3A41U0iO4":[{"hn_comment_id":28909206,"author":"tjoff","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Code CAD \u2013 Use code to create CAD models","text":"There is a small clojure project that transpiles clojure to openscad, (if I remember correctly...) [LINK] Demonstrated and talked about in this clip: [VIDEO] edit: it is a fantastic talk but the part related to this starts at 17:35","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12639865,"author":"petr_tik","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"1 Martin Thompson busting myths about hardware and explaining why it's important to know. Mechanical sympathy makes you better, because you know how the code actually runs on the machine and interacts with different layers of memory [LINK] 2 Matt Godbolt (the man behind GCC explorer) - Emulating a 6502 system in Javascript Great talk about BBC micro and much more [LINK] 3 Matt Adereth - Clojure/typing History of keyboards and a custom keyboard written in Clojure [VIDEO] I like the 3 for their content and how each speaker presented the background and their project/hack/ideas. Highly recommend","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19792135,"author":"simias","month":"2019-04","story_title":"I made a smart watch from scratch","text":"Very impressive and inspiring. I've been thinking about making a custom keyboard for a while now but, while I have no problems with the electronic and software side of things, I'm a bit overwhelmed with the 3D modelling required. I tried learning Blender but it really feels ill-suited for designing physical objects. The author mentions considering openSCAD but I've heard pretty bad things about it so I haven't really given it a chance yet. The person making the dactyl keyboard had a very interesting talk where he explain how he basically ended up writing his own DSL in clojure on top of openSCAD, maybe I should try that: [VIDEO] (if you enjoyed TFA you'll probably like this video as well, it's a step-by-step explanation of how he designed his dream keyboard). Otherwise I suppose I'll have to betray rms and try this freeware Fusion 360 thing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20113535,"author":"Tepix","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Tokyo mechanical keyboard meetup photos","text":"Here's another great video about a procedurally generated keyboard frame clojure.core/typing - Matt Adereth [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22560810,"author":"tjoff","month":"2020-03","story_title":"OpenJSCAD","text":"There is an attempt to be able to write it in clojure. [LINK] Haven't tried it but enjoyed this talk (about 3d printing ergonomic keyboards using the above): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uknEhXyZgsg":[{"hn_comment_id":33271783,"author":"peterkelly","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Stop Writing Dead Programs","text":"Since the talk was already posted yesterday, here's another great related video that is well worth watching: Dan Ingalls demonstrating Smalltalk 76 on a restored Xerox Alto. [VIDEO] This is where it all started and it's truly amazing what they achieved on such limited hardware.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23078814,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Advanced Programming Languages (2009)","text":"Anything based on the workstation concepts explored at Xerox PARC, and further pursued at ETHZ, TI and Genera. Bitsavers has all the necessary papers and manuals, and computer museum as well. Here are some video sessions. \"Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto \u2502Smalltalk-76 Demo\" [LINK] \"Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk\" [VIDEO] \"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar\" [LINK] \"The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer\" [LINK] The end of the road from Plan 9, Inferno. [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25622823,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2021-01","story_title":"On Repl-Driven Programming","text":"Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. \"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar\" [LINK] \"Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0\" [LINK] \"Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo\" [LINK] \"SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO\" [LINK] \"Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk\" [VIDEO] \"Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988\" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) [LINK] \"The Interlisp programming environment\" [LINK] And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30871579,"author":"MaxLeiter","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The wild world of non-C operating systems","text":"I\u2019ve been on a Smalltalk binge the last few days and have really been enjoying this two hour long interview / demo with Dan Ingalls on Smalltalk and the Alto: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ulCdoCfw-bY":[{"hn_comment_id":17432185,"author":"Malic","month":"2018-06","story_title":"What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now","text":"Kurzgesagt had some nice summaries of: 1) Why white dwarves might be the last home for life in the universe - [LINK] 2) ...or maybe it will be black holes - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28168714,"author":"kadoban","month":"2021-08","story_title":"What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole? (2019)","text":"There's also the Penrose process which is theoretically useful on spinning black holes. I also watched this in the past, which has some fun ideas (that are probably a little fanciful?) [VIDEO] tl;dw: put a mirror around it and shine light in, get back lots of energy and/or blow up your whole solar system. I'm not sure if any of that would apply to a ~planet mass black hole spinning with ~planet sized angular momentum, or how solid the physics even is, but it sounds cool anyway.","stance":"rec"}],"umatbZ0n4mE":[{"hn_comment_id":13684719,"author":"kevinqi","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What're the best-designed things you've ever used?","text":"Teenage Engineering OP-1, a music synthesizer. Really well built, buttons and knobs feel fantastic, and the display is super fun. The OP-1 in action: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14304647,"author":"GuiA","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Get started making music","text":"Sounds like you need to get a modular synthesizer :) [LINK] Or, as an intermediary step, like another commenter suggested, an OP1: [VIDEO] llllllll is a fantastic community of people building/playing with new & experimental musical instruments: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18549339,"author":"neom","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Dropping Acid","text":"Seems like you really know your house. Not sure if you're musically inclined but if so the OP-1 is a great tool[1][2]. If you ever make it to nyc hit me up, I know James well and I'm sure he'd enjoy your thoughts around E2-E4. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"upzKj-1HaKw":[{"hn_comment_id":3078219,"author":"kemayo","month":"2011-10","story_title":"Steve Jobs has died","text":"One thing that he really forced down all our throats was the importance of taste. He knew what he wanted, and he made us all see how great it was. Here's a clip from back in 1996, before his return to Apple, where he talks briefly about Microsoft, and in it you can really see his continuing obsession with making insanely great things: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32110511,"author":"Shadonototra","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Why no company is able to deliver Apple M1/M2 performance per watt","text":"Because they lack taste for quality and efficiency, they don't want to invest in R&D and they don't know how to retain talents So you get companies that stagnate and higher ups are too focused on building a huge wealth and work hard to secure a golden parachute, maintaining their position and salary is higher priority [VIDEO] This summarize it very well, lack of taste and lack of vision, it's that simple and has huge impact on the products you release as a result Pigeons too busy eating random shit in this particular parking lot, they don't know any better This also shows why [LINK] Pure lack of taste It translates to: \"They are stupid for trying to do better, you should hate them too\"","stance":"rec"}],"uqH_Y1TupoQ":[{"hn_comment_id":9324758,"author":"Karunamon","month":"2015-04","story_title":"A Grand Juror Speaks: The inside story of how prosecutors always get their way","text":"I'm sorry, but that's a rather inaccurate view as to the justification for jury nullification. It is not a thing that's directly provided for in the law, it's a confluence of two legal principles: juries can't be held liable for their decisions, and the prohibition against double jeopardy. There's also the problem that that when people are told about nullification, they consider evidence less than they otherwise would. In other words, i'd argue that there are some very good reasons for this setup, as inconsistent and illogical as it sounds. Great video that explains this: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27577384,"author":"aaron695","month":"2021-06","story_title":"A Juror\u2019s Guide to Going Rogue","text":"Feels like a pretty unethical article on an 'ethical' website. They clearly have a bias on the issues of the cases which they didn't even need to mention. CGP Grey did a interesting video on this [VIDEO] CGP Grey claim now you know the idea you might not be able to use it. There have been a few arrests of different people advocating for jury nullification (Which I think only applies if you talk to actual jury members, hence why the arrests happen outside of court houses) ie [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32393379,"author":"cornstalks","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case","text":"CGP Grey has a video discussing jury nullification, for those interested in a further explanation of the subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uqKGREZs6-w":[{"hn_comment_id":19388543,"author":"gtsteve","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Ask HN: I am 33 yrs young, will we form a colony in Mars within my lifetime?","text":"Perhaps watch this video for a nice overview of what that might look like: [VIDEO] I think you'll probably see baby steps towards it but there are a lot of problems to overcome.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20160885,"author":"abledon","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Four Mars missions are launching next year","text":"sobering run down of the realities when living on mars: [VIDEO] The layers of soil we'd have to cover our buildings in really got me!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26942855,"author":"Etheryte","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Elon Musk on Mars efforts: \u201cA bunch of people will probably die.\u201d","text":"There is no sugarcoating it, Mars is a hostile environment and to claim otherwise would simply be lying. Between the radiation, temperature, microdust and more, inhabiting Mars will be very hard. Kurzgesagt has a great video outlining many of the challenges [0]. Regardless of how meticulously you prepare, mistakes on Mars will lead to death and it's good to be honest and upfront about it. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40790106,"author":"notTooFarGone","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Why Nothing Can Grow on Mars","text":"I think you vastly underestimate the amount of radiation and how hard it would be to build a colony that is protected enough and is \"self sustaining\". Nice kurzgesagt video: [VIDEO] If we manage to terraform mostly using robots and bacteria that would be so much easier.","stance":"rec"}],"uqY3FMuMuRo":[{"hn_comment_id":22330486,"author":"MarioMan","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Brown: color is weird [video]","text":"Not the same thing, but you reminded me of this since it's in a similar vein. Ben Eater went through the entire process of building a VGA \"video card.\" Anyone with a basic understanding of logic circuits has enough background to understand it. Worth a watch. Part 1: [LINK] Part 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25283568,"author":"chrisdalke","month":"2020-12","story_title":"NandGame \u2013 Build a Computer from Scratch","text":"If you're a visual learner, check out Ben Eater's channel: [LINK] He has a really great video series where he builds a small computer from scratch on breadboards. Also some other highlights: Reliable data transmission, more educational: [LINK] DIY VGA \"video card\": [VIDEO] Super educational, but if you want to get into more embedded hardware hacking, I would say that building a homemade computer like he does is probably not a super exciting place to start. I'd recommend picking up some Teensy 4.0 microcontrollers and build some small hardware projects with the microcontroller before diving into lower-level circuitry.","stance":"rec"}],"usSfgHGEGxQ":[{"hn_comment_id":27227129,"author":"dharmab","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Building virtual worlds: video games and autobiographical architecture","text":"For a more informed analysis of architecture in games, Jacob Geller has done several video essays on the topic: The Shape of Infinity [LINK] Games, Schools, and Worlds designed for Violence [VIDEO] Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House [LINK] Gaming's Harshest Architecture [LINK] The Architecture of Fumito Ueda [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40403316,"author":"underlipton","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Disabling Modernism","text":"Jacob Geller has an excellent video essay about how incidents like Columbine might have contributed to this trend (if only post-90s, obviously). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41872330,"author":"JRandomHacker42","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Rethinking School Design","text":"Jacob Geller did a really interesting video essay [1] about the parallels that can be drawn between modern school architecture and maps from shooter games - on top of whatever other context or functionality they provide, they are fundamentally spaces that are designed around the question \"what happens if violence occurs here?\" [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"uwCwtBxZM7g":[{"hn_comment_id":8451751,"author":"jonah","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech","text":"Here's the video associated with the Nvidia paper on Near-Eye Light Field Displays linked elsewhere in the comments. [VIDEO] It gives a very clear overview of the concept and prototypes.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8453386,"author":"VikingCoder","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Google May Lead $500M Round in Magic Leap Virtual Reality Tech","text":"Watch this video at the 4 minute mark: [VIDEO] It explains what they're talking about. Your eyes can focus on different parts of the view - it's not just an infinite depth-of-field display like we're used to. It's like the display version of a Lytro camera.","stance":"rec"}],"uxC1fPE1QEE":[{"hn_comment_id":31123099,"author":"beagle3","month":"2022-04","story_title":"What chords do you need?","text":"Tangentially related, but all you need is Pachelbel's Canon. [VIDEO] (Yes, it's a youtube video, and I hate videos, but this one is worth it)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35825342,"author":"wodenokoto","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ed Sheeran Wins Copyright Case over Marvin Gaye\u2019s \u2018Let\u2019s Get It On\u2019","text":"I thought you\u2019d link to pachelbel\u2019s rant, which is a funny standup music rant about how the canon is everywhere [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35869949,"author":"wodenokoto","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Ed Sheeran Demonstrates How Copyright Is Destroying Musicians","text":"The amount of songs you can play as a medley is staggering to say the least. Last time this was on the front page we were a few who posted different medleys. I\u2019ll repost my favorite, pachhelbels rant: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40443389,"author":"groby_b","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Pluckable Strings","text":"As others said - they're chords. And not just any chords, but chords we know sound great together. (If you haven't seen the 'Pachelbel Rant' yet, you should, it's an entire comedy bit based on the fact that these chords are fundamental to music: [VIDEO] ) If you click on the little notes in the bottom right, you can pick other sets of chords, which give a different \"vibe\". (Me, I'm partial to the Andalusian ones) That's why common advice to people starting the guitar is \"Three chords, you can play anything. Four, you control the mood. Five, you're a god among men\"","stance":"rec"}],"uxPdPpi5W4o":[{"hn_comment_id":19910818,"author":"el_benhameen","month":"2019-05","story_title":"A Norwegian town built a giant mirror to deflect the sun (2017)","text":"In a sort of related/inverse vein, I thought the engineering at play here was pretty interesting. 96 million shade balls on a public water supply reservoir: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33662944,"author":"Tyrannosaur","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Floating solar panels that track the Sun","text":"[VIDEO] Veritasium video about Los Angeles' reservoir black spheres project. They used black because - The goal was light-blocking more than anything else; black worked best - The black pigment held up to the environment (especially UV degradation) better than anything else they tried I expect the second point was the most important thing. Black plastic is very stable.","stance":"rec"}],"uxykI30fS54":[{"hn_comment_id":27903835,"author":"benrbray","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Twike","text":"For anyone who has trouble understanding this perspective because they've lived in car-dependent hell their entire lives, I recommend the Not Just Bikes channel. He does extremely detailed comparisons of US cities vs Netherlands and other places. Here is a recent one [1]. For me, I always felt that something was wrong about American cities / suburbs but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Then, I spent a few months in Tokyo and something \"clicked\". It's an entirely different paradigm that forced me to reevaluate what I thought was possible. When I returned to the US, on the ride from the airport my first thought was: Everyone in this traffic jam is going the same direction, and would fit in a handful of train cars. Why are we OK with this?? People say trains are expensive, but they don't realize how much money we spend on cars. Americans spent $1.1 TRILLION on personal vehicles in 2017 [2], not including the hundreds of billions spent yearly on road maintenance. Redirecting a fraction of that money would more than pay for high-speed rail. Let's do a crude estimate. Using the chart here [3], we can expect to pay somewhere between $3-163 million USD per mile of high-speed rail. The distance from NY to LA is 2789.9 miles. At $100M/mile, which is excessive, it would still only cost $279 billion. We could build THREE transcontinental high-speed rail lines every year with the money we spend on personal automobiles. If we're as cost-effective as Japan at $2.6 M / mile, we could af","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28016024,"author":"tux1968","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Pedestrian fatalities are rising in the US","text":"It also has a lot with the car-centric nature of urban planning. Can't recommend this guys entire channel of videos enough: [LINK] He delves into a movement known as \"Strong Towns\" that look to undo a lot of the mistakes city planners have been making for the last half century. Edit: Here's a link to another of his videos where he shows why it is dangerous to walk in many North American cities: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31799513,"author":"rendall","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Construction is life","text":"> The reality is the western world is falling behind in essential infrastructure in every capacity. Could you expand on this? What do you mean? > Its hard to build roads, highways, sewers these days without some pushback. We need to start changing our views and start seeing constriction as an essential human need and return to the old view of infrastructure as something we take pride in For me, it's not \"construction\" by itself, but I suspect it's pushback against urban sprawl and poor urban design. I watched an excellent video about Houston: [VIDEO] It takes awhile to get to the point, so you might want to skip to 3:42.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36491585,"author":"merek","month":"2023-06","story_title":"U.S. pedestrian deaths reach a 40-year high","text":"For those interested in urban planning, including contrasts between the US and places that do it well, I highly recommend the Not Just Bikes youtube channel. The intro video details a short walk in Houston, which is pretty alarming: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28625906,"author":"shafyy","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Airbus reveals the next generation of CityAirbus","text":"I'm not going to argue with you about the different definitions of public transportation, but for sure \"taxi\" isn't what comes to mind when someone mentions public transportation. The point you're making is exactly the problem. The reason bus lines aren't used more is because they suck in a lot of cities. Improving the public transportation infrastucture (and no, not taxis), would solve this problem - as demonstrated in many European cities. Here's a good video that compares the city planning of Houston to other cities, and explains why it sucks. It focuses more on cars vs. bikes, but the same basic point also applies to public transportation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28848431,"author":"tdeck","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP","text":"People in the US have developed an aversion to walking because our built environment makes it terrible. For example, watch this video from about 4:25 on showing a typical urban pedestrian journey the US: [VIDEO] (One thing the narrator mentions is shade: Keep in mind that Houston is a hot city, with temperatures often above 30c during the summer.) But that's not unusual at all. In fact, where I grew up in Pennsylvania many roads had literally no sidewalk. Let's say I want to walk into town where my parents live. I'd be going down this road (you can follow along on street view): [LINK] That's a narrow road, but don't let it fool you. People there drive fast and they're in a hurry. They certainly do not expect to see someone trudging along the berm of the road. Or more likely in a muddy ditch beside the road, because Pennsylvania is wet and that's the safest way to not get hit by a car. If you walk along into North Wales, PA, pay attention to the pedestrian infrastructure. Where are there sidewalks? Are there crossing signals? How would you know when it's safe to cross? Now imagine doing this in the evening (note: there are no streetlights).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30165505,"author":"marto1","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Can American Cars Be Made Safer for Pedestrians?","text":"Oh, the rabbit hole goes much much deeper. American infrastructure is actively hostile to people walking/biking/doing anything else than driving and even then not very safe. I'd recommend the NotJustBikes youtube channel that really drives the point home, e.g. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32188450,"author":"xputer","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes","text":"Watch some videos from this channel and you'll be able to see how the US definitely does not do enough in terms of creating safe road infrastructure for all: [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33028135,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2022-09","story_title":"KittyHawk air taxi startup is winding down","text":"Do you have a source for this claim? All the urbanists will tell you that small grocery stores are a joy to use in Europe due to transit oriented development that makes quick trips by bike to grab groceries fast and easy. But in North America we\u2019ve built out larger and larger car-centric developments which have become so hostile to anyone not in a car that people are forced to drive to the grocery store. This makes the experience way less enjoyable than a quick trip by bike to a small store, the urbanists will say. So your claim is that small stores were essentially selected out of existence by customers, but it may in fact be the case that city planners destroyed walkability in a way that left big box stores as the only viable option. Those two things are not the same, as the theoretical \u201cwe could have more smaller stores accessible by bike and foot traffic\u201d would be true in the latter case. For a detailed argument see the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33547518,"author":"dementis","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The Deadliest Road in America","text":"Deadliest road for pedestrians(in the US). This vid has a good take on the problem of car dependent city designs that is very predominant in the US and Canada. Why City Design is Important (and Why I Hate Houston) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37110317,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Texas could get a bullet train between Houston and Dallas","text":"There are several talking points mentioned in this thread that are explored more on the NotJustBikes YouTube Channel. - When Canada built a relatively recent urban rail to Toronto, they built it so you have to drive to the train station , and used the high value land right around the station for ... surface car parking. This is absurdly wasteful of valuable real estate and makes the expensive train add much less value to the people. Also the train only runs around rush hours, making it useless for almost anyone who isn't driving to the train for a commute to work. \"The Trains that Subsidize Suburbia - GO Transit Commuter Rail\" - [LINK] - \"Why city design is import (and why I hate Houston)\" [it's not walkable] - [VIDEO] - How American urban transit is built misunderstanding the way transit needs to work to be successful, notably trying to build transit as a bandaid over car problems, but not making it regular, frequent, reliable, fast, convenient, instead plonking an isolated transit connection from nowhere to nowhere which runs once every couple of hours and then pointing to it as an example of how transit doesn't work in America - \"America Always Gets This Wrong (when building transit)\" - [LINK] - Addressing the \"America is too big and spread out for rail\" arguments, notably that USA and Canada were built by trains, and streetcar suburbs, and that most journes Americans take every day are less than 5 miles. - \"The Dumbest Excuse for Bad Cities\" - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"uzkD5SeuwzM":[{"hn_comment_id":28393712,"author":"kibwen","month":"2021-09","story_title":"The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make","text":"This is forgetting to account for the accelerating expansion of the universe. Even if one were to depart from Earth today, traveling at light speed, 94% of the observable universe is already impossible to reach. See this excellent video for more detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28393885,"author":"unyttigfjelltol","month":"2021-09","story_title":"The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make","text":"I've been enjoying the kurzgesagt collection of videos[1] which discusses the same phenomena, and how we literally can never travel to large swaths of the universe. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33658237,"author":"dcwardell","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Map of the observable universe","text":"I always appreciate content like this which is easy to digest but still inspires awe in the universe around us. Scrolling around the map and looking further and further back in time reminded me of this Kurzgesagt video [0]. It's crazy to think how much of the universe is lost to and unreachable by us. Kurzgesagt has a lot of great content (even if it's a bit cartoonish). I'm sure they get things wrong, but I feel like they make an effort to research the topic first. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"v0YEaeIClKY":[{"hn_comment_id":25652591,"author":"davidwf","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What YouTube channels do you subscribe to?","text":"I keep a Google Document of these to share just in case people ask about my YouTube interests. I Actually Watched All of Them I have actually watched ALL of the videos on these channels and I don\u2019t even feel bad about it :-) I actually like new videos from some of the ones below (like NativLang, for example) but they maybe don\u2019t hold up in the early videos. - Space Time: PBS Physics, sooo good -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - Lindsay Ellis: Really, really intelligent video essays about film and culture -- [LINK] -- Great First Video: [LINK] - Periodic Videos: Chemistry, including a video for every element -- [LINK] -- Great first video (obviously): [LINK] Other Math and Science - 3Blue1Brown: Amazing math visualizations -- [LINK] -- Great first video, how e^pi*i works: [VIDEO] - NumberPhile: Fun math videos -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - PBS Eons: Biology! -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - PBS Infinite Series: Math math math, really really hard math -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - SciShow: Science! More poppy but fun -- [LINK] -- Silly first show: [LINK] -- Actual physics: [LINK] - VSauce: Science-y? -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] - Practical Engineering: -- [LINK] -- Great first video: [LINK] Other Humanities - Alliterative: Connections via language -- [LINK] -- Great first video about gin and gimlets: [LINK] - Bon Appetit: Such fun food stuff! -- Gourmet Makes: [LINK] -- It\u2019s Alive: [LINK] - Masaman: Genetics and human migration (an","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23107685,"author":"dgritsko","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Why is e^(pi I) = -1?","text":"3Blue1Brown's video \"Understanding e to the i pi in 3.14 minutes\" is a nice compliment to this post. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25277479,"author":"kortex","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Alternative notation for exponents, logs and roots? (2011)","text":"IMHO, the \"deeper truth\" is addition is translation and multiplication is rotation/stretching (at least when it comes to rings and fields). It involves getting a geometric understanding of e to the pi i, and 3blue1brown explains it better than I could: [LINK] [6.28 min] [VIDEO] [3.14 min] [LINK] [25 min]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27351197,"author":"adrusi","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Show HN: Kalk, A calculator with math syntax, complex numbers","text":"You actually have to understand calculus for that to actually prove it to you, but, you can show that it seems to work out numerically with a bit of programming knowledge, which I imagine is more common on Hacker News. I don't think either the numerical or symbolic proofs really help build intuition though. This video [1] kinda helps, although it glosses over the critical fact \"multiplying by i rotates counterclockwise 90\u00b0.\" [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"v19cu2hj2Ms":[{"hn_comment_id":22312966,"author":"falcolas","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Gears","text":"Clickspring's work on the Antikithra mechanism (and the Pateron exclusive Byzantine Sundial) is particularly interesting, because not all of the movements created by gears are circular or even. The input can be purely rotational, but the output is not. For example on the Antikithra mechanism, it has to account for the procession of the moon's orbit which causes an uneven time to complete one orbit. To properly simulate this, a pin-and-slot system is combined with an offset pivot to turn the rotation of gears into a movement that lags behind and then speeds ahead, mirroring the actual orbital period. I worded that poorly; the video does a better job of explaining it (within the first minute), and the rest of the video shows the gear train coming together [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27937520,"author":"utopcell","month":"2021-07","story_title":"The Antikythera Mechanism","text":"Perhaps the most beautiful part of the mechanism is the modelling of the motion of the Moon, which Chris describes in minute detail [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"v1WiCGq-PcY":[{"hn_comment_id":11393813,"author":"soham","month":"2016-03","story_title":"For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies","text":"There is only one way to toughen up: Practice. Be it interviews or sports. Be it negotiations or cooking. Practice and practice perfectly. 1. Take mock interviews from experienced engineers Go one topic at a time e.g. Recursion or Trees or DP or Multithreading etc. Before you walk into the interview, practice well. Do at least 20 problems on that topic, if not more. 2. Do practice interviews at companies you don't want to work for Don't feel an imposter in doing this. Realize that companies also go thru several candidates before they pick one. They are normal people like you, they have a learning curve to fill the position, and so do you. Finding the right company, at the right stage of your life, is not a trivial thing to do; it's a project and needs to be managed like that. Going thru various interviews hardens your skills of negotiation, your understanding of business models, and more importantly, gives you clarity about what your strengths and limitations are. 3. Practice the right mindset Never go to interviews with a loaded agony of getting a job. Go simply with the intent of solving interesting problems with interesting people (\"to add life to your character\"). Nobody explains this better than Bryan Cranston (possibly one of the most successful TV actors of recent times): [VIDEO] I make these observations based on my experience running a successful bootcamp for interview prep ( [LINK] ) and also being an early engineer and a hiring manager (Director of engineering) at ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11393936,"author":"eric_h","month":"2016-03","story_title":"For anyone who has been turned down by 38 companies","text":"> Nobody explains this better than the meth guy: [VIDEO] That clip just increased my already substantial respect for Bryan Cranston, though I feel as though calling him the \"meth guy\" does him a disservice. Yes, Breaking Bad brought him a great deal of exposure, but I think that even his role in Malcolm in the Middle showed how capable he is as an actor. The fact that he performed both roles excellently is also a testament to his skills. He's also won a Tony, and was nominated for a few director awards. ( [LINK] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10622332,"author":"js2","month":"2015-11","story_title":"What I Learned From Blowing An Interview","text":"\"Bryan Cranston's Advice to Aspiring Actors\" [VIDEO] Thanks for the tip. I hadn't seen this video before.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11460415,"author":"soham","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Ask HN: I do terrible in algorithm questions in interviews","text":"You're thinking of interviews as standardized tests (exam). To some extent, they are, but overall they are closer to a date , than to an exam. In other words, it's not sufficient that you be good at algorithms. You also need to get a panel of interviewers with whom you gel well. What interviewers you get at a company, is not in your hands. You can try a few things: 1. Do mock interviews with experienced interviewers. Get used to being judged. Repeatedly. 2. Don't interview with the agony of getting a job. Just go to solve the problems. Listen to this: [VIDEO] 3. Interview at companies that bias towards take-home tests. If you haven't already, then try triplebyte.com. They can help you find such companies. -- I make these observations based on my experience running a successful bootcamp for interview prep ( [LINK] ) and also being an early engineer and a hiring manager (Director of engineering) at Box prior to that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11804410,"author":"soham","month":"2016-05","story_title":"How to win the coding interview","text":"[Disclaimer: I run [LINK] . It's a hyper-focused bootcamp on coding interview prep] Probably one of the biggest mistakes developers make, is to treat coding interviews like they are standardized tests with a checklist of evaluation. They are not. They are like a date. The other person is judging whether they want to work with you, more than anything else. No matter how good you are, you won't get into a long-term relationship (date) if you don't confirm to the (technical and social) beliefs (and biases) of your interviewer (date). The reverse is also true viz. no matter how mediocre you are, you'll get in, if you do. So, do everything what the author says, but you'll progress faster if you keep your mindset grounded. See this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12319470,"author":"tomohawk","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Ask HN: How does someone get more confident?","text":"First, find a mentor you can talk to and who can guide you. In your case, getting a mentor who does not work where you work would be better. Perhaps someone at church, or within the local tech community. Second, it sounds like you may be overthinking things. Get yourself out there and start interviewing. You'll find that your thought processes will often change in response to actions. When you get out there and start looking, keep this in mind: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31964412,"author":"mandeepj","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: I\u2019m 41 and still unmarried \u2013 what should I do?","text":"> You can only present the best version of yourself, but you can't control who will and won't like you if you want to listen to that advice - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"v3pK0dccQ38":[{"hn_comment_id":16063727,"author":"mtgx","month":"2018-01","story_title":"High doses of vitamin D rapidly reduce arterial stiffness","text":"Proper supplementation (read: not what is currently recommended) of Vitamin D was found to reduce all-mortality causes (including cancer, diabetes, heart attacks, etc) by as much as 50%-70%. To get to that level of 40-50 ng/ml 25(OH)D, you need around 8,000-12,000 IU per day (depending on body mass). It was also found to reduce flu occurences by as much as 70%. This is starting to look like a super important vitamin, even for \"healthy individuals that work outside\" - let alone everyone else that stays all-day indoors. It also seems to have a huge effect on sleeping well, as it's apparently what the body needs to repair itself properly at night. I highly recommend these videos: [VIDEO] [LINK] Also, you should combine it with Vitamin K2, another hugely important vitamin most of us are likely lacking, that works in conjunction with D: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15868327,"author":"sitkack","month":"2017-12","story_title":"The Big Vitamin D Mistake","text":"One of the many great videos on the subject D is for Debacle - The Crucial Story of Vitamin D and Human Health, [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24063476,"author":"mtgx","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf]","text":"More studies referenced here, also showing ~55 ng/ml being optimum for maximum health benefits. The current recommendations are way below that. Well worth to watch the whole video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24263274,"author":"mitko","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Vitamin D, part 2: Shannon's story","text":"Few months ago I head how vitamin D is associated with COVID-19 outcomes and went into a rabbit hole to find more information about wtf is Vitamin D, and how our bodies use it/need it. There are two videos I found particularly informative. 1. [LINK] Cost/Benefit of Optimal Health with Sunshine Vitamin D William B. Grant, PhD 2015 2. [VIDEO] D is for Debacle - The Crucial Story of Vitamin D and Human Health Ivor Cummins BE(Chem), CEng MIEI 2014","stance":"rec"}],"v3pYRn5j7oI":[{"hn_comment_id":3440716,"author":"dirtyaura","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Feynman on explanations","text":"If you haven't watched these \"Fun to imagine\" with Feynman videos from YouTube, I really recommend them. You just can't capture his joy and passion with a transcript. \"Fun to Imagine\" playlist: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4529618,"author":"elteto","month":"2012-09","story_title":"Bill Gates: Books I Read this Summer","text":"I am a big time Feynman fan, sure we've had our share of great thinkers and awe inspiring intellects, but Feynman is just the perfect combination of that and a likable character that remains human for the rest of us. Einstein was also like that in many ways but he was the child of another time and while he was always humane and simple, Feynman was much more likable, full of funny and witty anecdotes that connect with people. Also if you have not seen Feynman lecturing on Physics then you haven't seen a great educator, see [1] and [2], just plain wonderful. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3135041,"author":"simonsarris","month":"2011-10","story_title":"My Heroes","text":"There's also a small series of Feynman that has been put on Youtube called \"fun to imagine.\" They are short and most of them are very good: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6526092,"author":"furyofantares","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Ten Hundred Words of Science","text":"If you haven't seen it before you should search YouTube for Feynman Fun to Imagine. I am extremely impressed with how accessible his explanations are, and I would have loved to see what he could have done with the given restriction. Probably not as well as he did without it but probably better than most could do with it. edit: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"v3y8AIEX_dU":[{"hn_comment_id":27069650,"author":"Diti","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Kardashev Scale","text":"Out of every video Kurzgesagt has ever produced, my favorite is this one, which talks about a stellar engine that a type \u2161 civilization could be using: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39335025,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Grabby Aliens (2021)","text":"In case anyone is interested in how grabby aliens (or we!) could travel the galaxy, Kurzgesagt has an excellent video on building a stellar engine to move our solar system at up to 50 light years per million years. Setting aside considerations of whether we'll survive the next few decades as a technological civilization, let alone the next few millions of years, the Caplan engine would let us colonize a significant fraction of the galaxy within a billion years or so. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24251154,"author":"Darmody","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Spaceship Earth","text":"And how do we move our spaceship? I was amazed to know that theoretically we can move our solar system. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45608102,"author":"gcanyon","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Flies keep landing on North Sea oil rigs","text":"You might enjoy Kurzgesagt's video on moving the Sun (and with it the whole solar system) they propose a method that would theoretically let us colonize the galaxy in a reasonable (but not trivial) time frame. To your exact point though, since we're moving the whole solar system, everyone would be living their whole lives on the/a ship. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"v68zYyaEmEA":[{"hn_comment_id":30234887,"author":"dowakin","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Play Wordle from Your Terminal","text":"If you wonder why in the demo author uses `crane` as first guess - check out recent video from 3Blue1Brown [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37161709,"author":"bnycum","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Mastermind Solver","text":"Reminds me of the 3Blue1Brown video about Wordle, and then it's followup video. I guess that's kind of a spoiler, but still worth a watch. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"v6jhjjVy5Ls":[{"hn_comment_id":42792440,"author":"PinkSheep","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat","text":"The above commenter was probably inspired by the recent investigative(!) video series by Coffeezilla (and decided not to mention it?). It was either in part 2 or 3, where C-z alleged/suspected Valve's legal actions to have been mostly about good PR and to send a signal to those ~websites~ businesses to keep them in check. However it is indeed the case, that Valve has introduced greater and greater restrictions on inventory handling. The measures obviously go far beyond just counteracting possible scammers and phishing. Still, I am inclined to believe, they could've implemented all these features many years ago, if only they had wanted to. I highly recommend the videos. You can maybe skip the first one. It's mostly about casino owners' drama. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45683102,"author":"pogue","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Counter Strike 2 update wipes nearly $2B off skin market value","text":"It's wild to me that people will use things like this as unregulated security investments. Coffeezilla did a great video series exposing the CSGO skin gambling scene and how it borders on straight up crime and exploitation (especially of kids to young to legally gamble) and is well worth watching if you are interested in the subject. It's a three part series & I can't remember which one is first... The Dark Side of Counter-Strike 2 [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42492037,"author":"viraptor","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?","text":"Good timing! If you have a spare hour that is. Coffeezilla just released two videos digging into the csgo skin casinos business: [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"v7AYyUqrMuQ":[{"hn_comment_id":20744214,"author":"LilBytes","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Information operations directed at Hong Kong","text":"Yes, totalitarian dictatorships are a literal alternative to Democracy, though I feel we're nitpicking on the semantics of my words here. When I say I don't see Totalitarian Dictatorships as an alternative, I don't mean in the literal sense, I mean in the viable sense. In the literal sense, yes, it's an alternative to Democracy. As is building a house on sand is a literal but not viable alternative to building a house on concrete. I don't think many would want to live under a Chinese authoritarian rule given the Democratic alternatives. Or perhaps they would until they're rounded up in Xinjiang camps, shot in the face with rubber bullets for wanting to protect their current way of life or ran over by Tanks by asking for change to better their way of life. But if we've seen what the conversations that are occurring in China about these violent acts taken by the CCP, it's clear the populace think it's in their best interests at this time. Though it's worth adding that the message we receive about the CCP's actions is very different to those living in China. I recommend anyone to watch the documentary created by Vice below about the atrocities that are occurring in Xinjiang and the first hand opinions of those that live there. I would guess the opinions of those being interviewed are honest with a side of oppression. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22462072,"author":"_bxg1","month":"2020-03","story_title":"\u2018Re-education\u2019, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang","text":"> Almost everything ughyur and xinjiang related has pretty much been shown to be propaganda and from highly questionable sources Do you have any evidence for that whatsoever? In contrast, here's a very thorough look from an established news source: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29893592,"author":"network2592","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Intel removes Xinjiang references from shareholder letter","text":"Most people would be unequivocally against slave concentration camps. Do not confuse lack of action with lack of caring. Effective action may require collective action. But individually, most people care. Yet, collectively, they cannot seem to do anything meaningful. You are making a statement that is the definition of an ecological fallacy [0] The article you pointed out is hardly balanced. The access of journalists is heavily restricted. Naturally, any information that comes out from a standard news outlet with government sanctioned offices like Associated Press will sound like government propaganda. CCP will not let AP have access to any information that counters the narrative of the propaganda. For a different take on things, and an outlet that does journalism differently without official representation with CCP, have a look at this piece from VICE [1]. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"v7Mt0GYHU9A":[{"hn_comment_id":19610929,"author":"jonahx","month":"2019-04","story_title":"J Language \u2013 New Website","text":"All of the languages you mentioned are watered-down and inferior versions of the programming models invented by APL and J. By that I don't mean that APL/J are unilaterally better -- there are plenty of practical reasons to choose R/Matlab/numpy -- but they are unquestionably more beautiful and visionary. They hang together at a deep level in a way those languages do not. They are also much harder to learn, and much more fun. On the readability of APL (terrific video): [VIDEO] Alan Perlis on its beauty: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32497070,"author":"myco_logic","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Programming breakthroughs we need","text":"> It feels like there's an unexplored dimension of abstraction here. Something where generics, interfaces and higher order functions are too static and low level primitives. Something where it's really difficult to pinpoint what exactly is the repeated pattern here and how to exploit it. Instead of generic framework that can do everything, I'd like an efficient way do something specific. This bit reminds me a lot of a concept Aaron Hsu mentions in his fantastic talk on anti-patterns in the Iversonian languages[0], a paradigm he terms \"Idioms over Libraries\". The idea being that because of the expressive power of APL's primitives programmers often opt for utilizing easily recalled snippets of symbols over the importing of library code to implement common functionality. This facet of array-lang culture can be seen with sites like APL Cart[1], which serve as indexes of these frequently used snippets. I think a lot of people miss that this is one of the major advantages induced by the terseness of these languages (it's not just about code-golfing for the implicit joy of laconicism). By allowing for the direct expression of algorithms in the same context they are being used, APL and its kin enable one to tweak and optimize these idioms on a case-by-case basis: precisely the kind of specificity the author of this article is asking for. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20300358,"author":"kadblas","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Why I think Haskell is the best general purpose language as of June 22 2019","text":"Qualification: I was introduced to FP a number of years ago and have finally reached a point where I feel that I have a deep understanding of FP in general. In my mind, Haskell is the \"best\" language out there (\"best\" in that it provides the best overall gain when all tradeoffs are considered). I'm no longer confident that Haskell is the \"best\" language anymore. I was recently introduced to a language that might be even better than Haskell: Dyalog APL. ( [LINK] ). Try it out yourself ( [LINK] ) To explain why, I recommend watching Aaron Hsu's videos on Dyalog APL: - Does APL need a Type System? ( [LINK] ) - This is actually a very interesting question that is more nuanced than upon first glance. - Design Patterns and Anti-Patterns in APL ( [VIDEO] ) - The main takeaway from this video for me was the principle of \"Idioms over libraries.\" - Higher Performance Tree-Wrangling, the APL way ( [LINK] ) - Or how to model Trees without using pointers by using \"Inverted Tables.\" (An inverted table is a table where the columns are the rows and the rows are the columns)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21802405,"author":"xelxebar","month":"2019-12","story_title":"APL and J (2015)","text":"Always excited to see APL/J content on the top page. Happily, this coincides with a brand new release of the J interpreter, namely J901. It's so new that the homepage[0] still claims 901 is in beta. The install page[1], however, does have up to date information. If you would like to taste a bit of the difference before deciding to jump in, Aaron Hsu has a really interesting talk[2] that compares APL and \"other\" languages via the lens of Human-Computer Interfaces. I am just beginning my journey into J, but so far it has been extremely rewarding. Head on over to #jsoftware on Freenode. The channel is super small, but has some really friendly and helpful people on it! [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"v8IQ-X2HkGE":[{"hn_comment_id":17535860,"author":"metalrain","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Lisp and Haskell (2017)","text":"Scala is interesting language, but I wish it had tighter focus. John De Goes describes pain points quite accurately in Scalapeno keynote: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26542078,"author":"MrPowers","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Scala projects are difficult to maintain","text":"There are certainly folks that argue the language it too big. Here's a great talk arguing that a lot of language features should be eliminated and Scala should be made a functional programming language: [VIDEO] I'm personally in the camp of \"keep Scala huge and weird and multi-paradigm, but just make less breaking changes and focus all efforts on making the ecosystem more stable\".","stance":"rec"}],"vAHXK2wut_I":[{"hn_comment_id":9715970,"author":"JonnieCache","month":"2015-06","story_title":"MarI/O \u2013 Machine Learning for Video Games","text":"Here's the author taking the world record (now superseded) at glitching mario world into the credits to \"win\" the game in 3:07: [LINK] This is on a real console, not an emulator. They overflow the snes into the controller registers to achieve arbitrary code execution by hand. They do this by placing koopa shells at pixel-perfect locations to spell out ASM, overflow to the controller registers, and press a specific combination of buttons to jump to the sprite table and their literal shellcode. At the start of this year there was a crazy few weeks where different speedrunners were competing to execute the \"credits warp\" in the quickest and most efficient way. It started at around 6 minutes, now it's down to around 2 I think, most of which is the game's intro. Fun stuff. SethBling was the first person to ever execute it on a real console. Here's a video explaining it, from a different speedrunner: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18110918,"author":"mlinsey","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Mario Kart Wii: The History of the Ultra Shortcut [video]","text":"The most interesting speedrun I've ever seen is the Super Mario World credits warp, which requires the player to write + execute arbitrary code in game by carefully positioning koopa shells. At first thought to only be possible with tools in an emulator, this has been done on an actual console! Summoning Salt video about the overall history of SMW speedruns: [LINK] Detailed explanation of how the credits warp exploit works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vBiIDwBOqQA":[{"hn_comment_id":32395198,"author":"AareyBaba","month":"2022-08","story_title":"A biochemist\u2019s view of life\u2019s origin reframes cancer and aging","text":"You can watch his presentations at the Royal Institute. How the Krebs cycle powers life and death - [VIDEO] Why is Life the Way it Is? [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44008434,"author":"wfn","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death","text":"I've read part of Nick Lane's other book, The Vital Question , cannot comment on this new one; TL;DR competent biochemist (from complete amateur standpoint at any rate), excellent science communicator; you can watch some of his talks online. e.g. the one linked on this new book's page is good: [VIDEO] He's really fascinated by the overall transformation process of inorganic matter -> organic matter, a sort of scientific fixation - which is always enjoyable when it's done by a competent scientist - and it's really captivating stuff. (The fact I haven't finished his previous book has nothing to do with the book material itself, if anything it really captivated me; it's just my not-amazing new habit of not finishing books...)","stance":"rec"}],"vDwzmJpI4io":[{"hn_comment_id":7747905,"author":"Oculus","month":"2014-05","story_title":"$10 Of Free Bitcoin For College Students","text":"This reminds me of a very similar campaign Paypal did to help jumpstart the online payments market. Paypal offered $20 to anyone for opening an account or referring a new user[1]. This served to help rapidly grow a market of Paypal users before one existed. 1 (I highly recommend watching the full conversation as it's immensely interesting) - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6269663,"author":"dvdhsu","month":"2013-08","story_title":"How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to traction","text":"Paypal buying eBay items wasn't actually the primary method for stimulating growth. Initially, Paypal offered new users $20 for opening an account, and $20 for referring somebody to open an account. They then dropped the bonus to $10 for both, then $5, then $0. This allowed them to grow immensely, and they reached 100,000 users in one month. These bonuses weren't \"cheap\" though: they cost PayPal around 60-70 million. Here's a reference - an interview between Elon Musk and Salman Khan: [VIDEO] . It's worth a watch.","stance":"rec"}],"vGAqYNFQdZ4":[{"hn_comment_id":23674859,"author":"sergeykish","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Zero-sum thinking on immigration will make America poorer","text":"I've recently stumbled on United States Department of War film from 1943 > We must guard everyone's liberty or we can lose our own. If we allow any minority to lose its freedom by persecution or by prejudice we are threatening our own freedom [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24333267,"author":"jenkinsj","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Don't Be a Sucker","text":"A classic. The part when the agitator-clown-carnival barker yells \"Folks I'm just an average American but I'm an American American! {{insert-ad-libbed-racist-tirade}}\". Good thing we defeated nonsense like this long ago. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28695185,"author":"Kim_Bruning","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Private censorship is not the best way to fight hate or defend democracy (2018)","text":"I'm not sure people can't grasp it. But it certainly can't be taken for granted. Perhaps we need to continuously keep making versions of this? [VIDEO] (\"Don't be a sucker\" 1945)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46653471,"author":"neilv","month":"2026-01","story_title":"East Germany balloon escape","text":"Yes, IIUC, that was one of the things that mobilized a lot of IMHO positive education/propaganda. It may not have always been for the most noble of reasons (e.g., a very wealthy person not wanting to be disrupted), but the fascism-is-bad messages are still great messages. For example, \"Don't Be a Sucker\" (long, but worth a watch sometime for anyone who hasn't seen it): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vHWiDx_l4V0":[{"hn_comment_id":24762870,"author":"snicker7","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Custom Allocators Demystified","text":"Would recommend watching the \"What's a Memory Allocator, Anyway?\" talk from Zig contributor Benjamin Feng: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26014884,"author":"Rendello","month":"2021-02","story_title":"The effect of switching to TCMalloc on RocksDB memory use","text":"It's interesting that I saw this post minutes after watching the talk \"What's a Memory Allocator Anyway?\" by Benjamin Feng. It's ostensibly about Zig's allocation schemes, but it's more of a general overview of the varied (single-thread) allocation strategies in use today. It made me really want to try out arena allocators It's a quick watch at 1.5x speed, the last third is an interview. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26435406,"author":"kristoff_it","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Drop millions of allocations by using a linked list (2015)","text":"For an overview of how Zig does this and at the same time a nice overview on different types of allocators: What's a Memory Allocator Anyway? by Benjamin Feng [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vI5pbDFDZyI":[{"hn_comment_id":30045157,"author":"stevesimmons","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The Future of E-Bikes","text":"I do all those things in Amsterdam. I can get everywhere in Amsterdam much quicker by bike than driving or public transport. Cycling in the rain and snow [2] is no problem, you just need the right gear. What non-Amsterdammers don't realise is the city never used to be a cyclist's paradise. In the 1960s, Amsterdam's car-obsessed urban planners had grand visions to drive motorways through the inner city, razing the historical buildings, and constructing Manhattan-like skyscraper clusters. Here's a 3 minute video \"Highways Almost Destroyed Amsterdam\" [1] about those plans, the fightback in the 1970s, and the resulting bike culture that Amsterdam has today. Enjoy! [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32295902,"author":"Tijdreiziger","month":"2022-07","story_title":"When cities treated cars as dangerous intruders","text":"Not Just Bikes made an interesting video on the thankfully-avoided plan to build a US-style highway system in Amsterdam: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vJG698U2Mvo":[{"hn_comment_id":21157588,"author":"chrisweekly","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Lethal memory fail: Why drivers see, and then forget motorcyclists","text":"As a motorcyclist -- and lifelong learner w/ a degree in cognitive psychology -- I really appreciate demonstrations like this one^1 from Daniel Simons. It's a short video (< 90s), but for many first-time viewers, it's an eye-opening experience. ^1. [VIDEO] Edit: just saw @elosarv's link to a longer but more relevant \"motorcycle invisibility training\" video ( [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17908507,"author":"crispyambulance","month":"2018-09","story_title":"A Fighter Pilot\u2019s Guide to Surviving on the Roads","text":"This is sound advice. The only time I've made contact with a moving car as a cyclist was when I was going past an off-ramp. The weird thing was that I thought the driver \"saw me\". It was late morning, no problem with visibility. From my POV, she was looking right at me. In fact, she was looking \"through\" me. She simply was expecting other cars and a person on a bike was not what she was looking for. Human attention is very much selective. Check out this shocking video: [VIDEO] After that, I ride with a bright flashing headlight at all times, even daylight. It gives some measure of protection, I think.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41223298,"author":"meowster","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Massachusetts 'Reviewing' Kei Car Ban After Uproar over Canceled Registrations","text":"It's called Selective Attention which explained in another comment: > Notably, people tend to see what they expect to see. > When they are looking for cars, they tend not to see motorcycles, even when they are in plain view. Watch/take this Selective Attention test (1 min 22 sec): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vJjKwSF9gT8":[{"hn_comment_id":37837690,"author":"drewg123","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification","text":"The YouTube channel Engineering Explained has an excellent video regarding why hydrogen is not a practical replacement for gasoline/petrol/diesel in a traditional internal combustion engine: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33507762,"author":"taylodl","month":"2022-11","story_title":"The New Hydrogen Car That Travels 2k Km with a Single Tank","text":"YouTube's Engineering Explained channel took a close look at the hydrogen engine Toyota recently unveiled and in doing so explained a lot of problems you can expect with hydrogen engines - including distribution and storage issues. Watch here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33790736,"author":"gwbas1c","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How innovative is the hydrogen industry?","text":"WRT hydrogen engines: This video explains why using hydrogen to power an internal combustion engine doesn't make sense: [VIDEO] Lots of more informative responses in this thread than I can explain; just remember that a lot of people are promoting \"hydrogen\" in situations where it is either economically inferior to traditional batteries, or where the laws of physics make it impractical. (IE, the hydrogen V8 requires tanks so large that the vehicle is impractical.) In whatever hydrogen space you're getting into, make sure you run the numbers like this video does. (IE, efficiency, volume of compressed hydrogen, energy lost to compressing / refrigerating, ect,) and make sure they make sense. For example, hydrogen might not make sense for day-to-day storage compared to a battery, but it may make perfect sense for a replacement for a standby generator.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34489720,"author":"gwbas1c","month":"2023-01","story_title":"'A complete failure' Japan's 'fantasy' hydrogen strategy does nothing","text":"> collect facts The physical properties and limitations of hydrogen are well-known. Many people repeat them in other posts in this thread. Here's a very factual explanation of why hydrogen internal combustion engines won't work: [VIDEO] (In summary, you can't compress hydrogen enough to fit in a reasonably-sized tank. The energy that it takes to compress hydrogen will be expensive.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39210118,"author":"drewg123","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Crash tests indicate guardrail system can't handle heavy electric vehicles","text":"Except containing hydrogen requires bulky tanks. I was curious, and googled.. It turns out the only hydrogen car I'm aware of that's on sale in the US (Toyota Mirai) weighs several hundred pounds more than the most popular EV in the US (Tesla Model 3).. ~4300lbs vs ~3900lbs. Except the Mirai isn't a pure hydrogen car.. its more of an EV with a hydrogen powered generator. I'm not aware of any purely hydrogen fueled cars on sale. i watched a fascinating YT video by Engineering Explained that went into the reasons why a pure hydrogen car is not practical ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"}],"vK1DazRK_a0":[{"hn_comment_id":21912505,"author":"ngcc_hk","month":"2019-12","story_title":"The Source Code of \u201cSolving Problems the Clojure Way \u2013 Rafal Dittwald\u201d","text":"Watch the video via recommendations here, but no longer can find it. [Solving Problems the Clojure Way - Rafal Dittwald]( [VIDEO] ) It is a great video and is highly recommended. Spent two days to type and tidy up the source code. If you want the source, and if you like me cannot find it, you may try my version. Just hope Mr. Dittwald would not mind.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25502256,"author":"tw25497050","month":"2020-12","story_title":"I rewrote a Clojure tool in Rust","text":"Sometimes the architecture/algorithm matters, and sometimes the architecture/algorithm needs to align with the language. Absent seeing the broader code base [1], I'm inclined to think that the author's larger design led to these expensive functions existing as they did [2]. Pure speculation on my part, but if one has a lot of experience with imperative, mutable languages, one might design a system that ends up being not so great when written in a functional, immutable language. If so, then seeing improvements when directly porting to an imperative, mutable language might be not so surprising. Tangent: Regarding the power and importance of code structure, I highly recommend watching \"Solving Problems the Clojure Way\" by Rafal Dittwald at Clojure North 2019 [3]. [1] I didn't see a link, but if it's available, I'd love to take a look. [2] The `rule-field-diff` function for example seems to be burdened with some odd choices, e.g., taking in two \"rules\" as arguments, (which seem to be collections of rules keyed by field), then using two hard-coded \"operations\" (also keyed by field), and yielding a map whose values are sequences by field (I think). Off the top of my head I don't see why this fn needs to work across multiple fields in the first place (i.e., any field-specific \"loop\" should be in a surrounding context. Ditto for `diff-rules-by-keys`. [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30294814,"author":"blunte","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Case against OOP is understated, not overstated (2020)","text":"-- (Even if you don't read this whole comment, I urge you to watch this fantastic video which illustrates procedural, OOP(lite), and FP approaches to a sample problem: [VIDEO] (Despite the name, it illustrates JavaScript, not Clojure). If you follow this approach, you don't even have to tell people you are doing FP. You'll just end up with better, more understandable, and more easily testable code.) -- The early (early as in C++ days) benefit of OOP was probably that it made programmers stop and plan before coding. Having learned FP 20 years after learning OOP, I feel certain that I can do the same things in less and more understandable (and MUCH more easily testable) code in FP. OOP was awesome for a small set of cases and for academic scenarios. But like REST, it doesn't map well to all needs. Then it becomes awkward and unnecessarily complicated. FP, or simplified as immutable data transformations with necessary mutations pushed to the edges, works everywhere, all the time. In FP you can still choose to model your data in hierarchies, keeping some of the useful bits of OOP. But it's still data in, results out. Until you've spent time on real projects in both, you cannot appreciate why FP is superior. (And to be clear, I'm not even talking about Haskell and type-obsessed FP. Perhaps because I'm not a Haskell guy, I can't appreciate it. But it smells to me like an extreme of a good thing (and therefore not usually the best thing for the situation); but I digress.) Concretely","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34866248,"author":"michaelteter","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Functional Core, Imperative Shell (2012)","text":"I like to build this way when possible. Unfortunately, I find many people - especially tech leads - resistant to this approach. The first and most common reason is, \"Why do I need this? What we are doing is fine.\" Or when the attitude is positive about it, the common issue is, \"I think this would be too difficult for our devs to adopt.\" I find both of these scenarios disappointing and frustrating, because technology (and software) is usually about improving processes and systems so better results can be made more easily. But at this point it feels like a lost cause, or rather a hill not worth dying on. For my own projects, I go this path; for others, I work dumber and keep the corporate apple cart upright. Rant aside, there is a video which I really like that demonstrates this functional core/imperative shell approach: Solving Problems the Clojure Way - Rafal Dittwald. It is a Clojure talk, but it gives an imperative to functional refactor demo in JavaScript in the middle of the talk. Even though it is a toy example, it is big enough that the result shows a meaningful difference in approach. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20269643,"author":"rafd","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Productivity brought by Clojure [slides]","text":"If you're new to functional programming, I recently gave a talk on applying FP concepts at ClojureNorth: [VIDEO] The main example I work through is in JavaScript so that Clojure's syntax doesn't get in the way (I love s-expressions, but they're not the point of the talk).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22679855,"author":"lymitshn","month":"2020-03","story_title":"How I became a better programmer (2017)","text":"Maybe more of the hype comes from the fact that its a Lisp. To get a feeling for the \"magic\" of lisp, I would suggest either watching SICP video lecs[0] or reading the book. I started learning lisp, almost the same time I've started learning programming with Java (college). Honestly I was thinking why they don't just teach us that, instead of Java at that time. Also Clojure is created by a fairly respected dude (afaik) Rich Hickey. His talks and Clojure design decision articles on the site are really insightful. Also this talk[1] also pretty good overview of different paradigms and `Clojure way`, imo. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23427982,"author":"slifin","month":"2020-06","story_title":"A History of Clojure [pdf]","text":"Hi fellow PHP'er and in a long time gone C#er here I would highly recommend learning the spirit of Clojure first: [LINK] [VIDEO] There are a few classes of tech that are uniquely Clojure: Data driven DSLs: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] Hyper normalised relational databases: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] Advanced SPA tech (hyper normalised data driven): - [LINK] - [LINK] Once you understand the spirit and rationale for Clojure it becomes apparent why other communities don't have this kind of tech yet Once it gets down to practical things I recommend using clj-Kondo with type hints, Cursive for Intellji, make sure you learn how to hot code inject new code into your running program using your editor shortcuts, and TDD in Clojure is also excellent and immediate: [LINK] Also look out for GraalVM and Babashka we're using it to compile fast native binaries out of Clojure","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23446820,"author":"ngcc_hk","month":"2020-06","story_title":"JavaScript: The First 20 Years","text":"There are lots of comments and no doubt JavaScript really has its problem. But one year still I watching this and how he used mainly JavaScript to demonstrate how to think in clojure way. It is not that bad, guys [VIDEO] (solving problems the clojure way by Rafal Dittwald).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24882871,"author":"ngcc_hk","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Admitting That Functional Programming Can Be Awkward (2007)","text":"In spite of its name this video use JavaScript to implement a game using the three styles of programming. Great video learnt from hacker news: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33448199,"author":"justcoder","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Functional programming should be the future of software","text":"In the second part of the \"Solving Problems the Clojure Way\"[0] talk, the speaker shows step-by-step transformation of the heavy imperative (book-keepish) JavaScript code to a more functional approach. As a result of transformation, ~95% of the code is easily unit-testable and the only impure code is the call to main which basically starts all the domino falling. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41005182,"author":"teodorlu","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Premature Abstraction","text":"> I would love a language that has this gradual evolutional abstracting as a core concern. That makes it easy. Where you can start from simplest imperative code and easily abstract it as the need for this arises. This is about how I write Clojure. I start out with some code that does the thing I want. Either effectfull code that \"does the thing\" or functions from data to data. After a while, I feel like I'm missing a domain operation or two. At that point I've got an idea about what kind of abstraction I'm missing. Rafael Dittwald describes the process of looking for domain operations and domain entities nicely here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42811396,"author":"fredrikholm","month":"2025-01","story_title":"I made a multiplayer shooter game in Lisp, here is my journey","text":"This is a common idiom, and does not necessarily imply mutation. Even in cases where you often do have mutation, say in databases, the benefits of a functional approach lie having pure functions between mutations rather than one big ball of Xs sometimes mutatingYs via Zs. Here[0] is a wonderful talk that demonstrates this in practice. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vKA4w2O61Xo":[{"hn_comment_id":9821413,"author":"drhdylan88","month":"2015-07","story_title":"A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving","text":"Veritasium, a pretty interesting youtube channel, posted a video on this experiment a while back. I found the discussion afterwards to be more thought-provoking than this article. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28424034,"author":"nightcracker","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Dogs distinguish human intentional and unintentional action","text":"Experimental science is all based around ruling out the null hypothesis. For that it needs to be falsifiable . The hypothesis 'the dog can differentiate between A and B' is very hard to falsify. Because the dog could differentiate, but choose to not act. You would need a fairly complete understanding of the dogs mental workings, and scanners to study them. On the other hand, 'the dog can't differentiate between A and B' is much easier to falsify. If you repeat an experiment a sufficient amount of times and the dog consistently has different behavior between A and B, you can rule this null hypothesis out. That is the real reason we always 'assume the worst'. Because 'assume the worst' is the easiest to scientifically rule out. EDIT: I would suggest this video by Veritasium, which also touches on this, at a very fundamental level: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38745238,"author":"avianlyric","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Let me repeat that back to you","text":"Veritasium has a great video[1] about people\u2019s cognitive bias towards using examples that prove their mental model, rather than using examples that disprove their mental model. But if you want to actually confirm you have accurate understanding of something, testing examples that don't fit your metal model is the workable methodology (i.e. use a null hypothesis). Testing examples that do match your mental model only proves your model partially matches the actual model, but it does very little to actually identify misunderstandings, or improve your understanding. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vN4U5FqrOdQ":[{"hn_comment_id":22908827,"author":"pfarrell","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?","text":"Top of my head, here are some books on specific histories I enjoyed. All old, but there are timeless nuggets in them. Soul of a new machine, previously mentioned. Where I first learned about mushroom management. Just for Fun: the story of an accidental revolutionary [0] was fun bio on Torvalds from 2001 The Mythical Man Month [1] offers some insight into the management and thinking that went into OS/360 Masters of Doom [2]: offers an enjoyable history of the shareware years and the rise of id software The multicians site [3]: is a collaborative history of Multics, one the most influential operating systems. The Mother of All Demos [4]: even better than Steve Jobs keynotes Steve Jobs iPhone introduction [5]: I\u2019m not a huge fan of Mr Jobs, but this is one of the best presentations ever. It\u2019s not history, per se, but very interesting through our eyes. 0: [LINK] 1: [LINK] 2: [LINK] 3: [LINK] 4: [LINK] 5: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6935970,"author":"publicfig","month":"2013-12","story_title":"The Day Google Had to 'Start Over' on Android","text":"If you have the chance, it really is worth going back and watching the original iPhone release video. It's pretty amazing to see some of the things that were so new and exciting a few years ago now so much a part of the phone landscape that we can't even imagine a phone without them. It's almost more amazing to see how basic it seems compared to what we have now, just 6 years later. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vNaEBbFbvcY":[{"hn_comment_id":16453856,"author":"pwaai","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Eldar Black Holes","text":"> [VIDEO] This is mind blowing...shatters my misconception of blackholes....is there any more books on this?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16453560,"author":"grondilu","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Eldar Black Holes","text":"There is a fascinating PBS Space Time video[1] about black holes that questions the very existence of whatever is \"inside\" a black hole. They point out that as you approach a black hole, your proper time is advancing slower and slower when compared to an observer located far away from the black hole (like us, on Earth). That means that from the point of view of this far observer, nothing happens inside a black hole until an infinite amount of time. In other words, what is inside a black hole is separated from us not by a space-like frontier, but a time-like one. Events behind the event horizon are postponed to \"the end of times\". Does it even make sense to say that those events exist, then? Are they any more real than fairy tales or mathematical equations? If not, we can make any speculation we want, including the existence of alien civilizations. 1. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16482619,"author":"grkvlt","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Most images of black holes are illustrations. Here\u2019s what our telescopes capture","text":"A better way of thinking about the event horizon is that it is the boundary beyond which events happening cannot be assigned a 'when' in our universe - i.e. the object falling 'in' to the black hole is never seen to pass this horizon, but to the object it seems that they do, however those events happen to it after an infinite time in our universe, i.e. never, due to time dilation. The contents of a black hole are the events that occur outside/after our universe relative to that boundary. I found these explanations on an awesome PBS youtube video [0] about black holes and space-time. 0. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18241398,"author":"drewrv","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?","text":"The youtube channel PBS Spacetime has some really great videos about how black holes work, I would start with this one: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18900335,"author":"czbond","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Black Hole Evolution Traced Out with Loop Quantum Gravity","text":"PBS Spacetime is a great series, and delves deep enough for interested layman as well as practitioners to be interested. I find the videos really good. Here is a link to one of many on black holes. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vOvQCPLkPt4":[{"hn_comment_id":15178669,"author":"dyladan","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Hey Synaptics, Can You Please Stop Polling","text":"Yes there is. Humans are normally not very responsive to the time between when an action is started and when it is carried out on the screen, but this changes for actions like drawing and dragging. This is the reason for the new Pro Motion behavior on the recently released iPad Pro models. For more information, this video [1] is a good place to start. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20090825,"author":"pcr910303","month":"2019-06","story_title":"iPadOS","text":"It can be very detectable, I'd say. Try watching this: [VIDEO] It shows the difference between from >100ms to ~1ms. It's mind baffling.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23805667,"author":"Junk_Collector","month":"2020-07","story_title":"How much your computer can do in a second (2015)","text":"I'm taking issue with latency in general and it's dismissal. There are reams of ergonomic targets, data, and guides on user interface latency that are just completely ignored these days. A terminal is close to the simplest possible interface whose job is to provide input and output to a user with as little disruption as possible. 30 ms is in fact noticeable. Here is a short video from Microsoft (about 10 years old now) on the experience of using a touchscreen with 100ms of delay vs 1ms showing the steps in between. The difference is extraordinary for the user even if the end result is the same. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vPnehDhGa14":[{"hn_comment_id":3112073,"author":"slmbrhrt","month":"2011-10","story_title":"Imagine if your house had Windows","text":"Reminds of a video I saw of a guy upgrading through every version of Windows. It's a sight to behold. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5469401,"author":"alexsb92","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Building Photoshop 1.0","text":"> I often think about how incredibly inefficient modern software is given that we've had roughly the same level of productivity software ability (with varying levels of usability) for a few decades now. I distinctly remember my NT4 system of the late 90's, and how it was roughly as productive as my current machine, and I wonder just how much cruft is inside modern operating systems and applications. As a fellow young person (probably even younger than you), I remember watching this video [VIDEO] two years ago when it came out and I remember gaining quite an appreciation for all the work put in over time in Windows and the complexity that it probably brings.","stance":"rec"}],"vQpUV--2Jao":[{"hn_comment_id":37670443,"author":"hnfong","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I","text":"> There is nothing inevitable about the dollar store putting the grocer out of business. I recently came across this, and I think it does a good job explaining the problem: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39692441,"author":"bonyt","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Family Dollar to close almost 1,000 stores","text":"A couple of good videos about the business of dollar stores with similar takes: [LINK] (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver) [VIDEO] (Wendover Productions)","stance":"rec"}],"vSSkDos2hzo":[{"hn_comment_id":41778405,"author":"mwmisner","month":"2024-10","story_title":"GLP-1 pills are coming, and they could revolutionize weight-loss treatment","text":"Like much of life it's more complicated than simple rules. It works for some people, but does not for everyone. As someone that has struggled with diet for the last decade or so these drugs have been a life saver. I've been able to eat healthy and feel full instead of being stuck in a cycle of eating right for a while and then eventually breaking under load. I've been able to have a consistency in the last 6 months on the drugs that i never thought I was capable of. I've even been able to build up a weight lifting plan that actually works for me and I feel good after the day. There are lots of problems with drug reliance still to be worked out, but I'm excited for the chance to rebuild my habits into something good and work my way off to something normal. Related, exercise is awesome but has little impact on long term weight loss! Check this out: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41812653,"author":"crooked-v","month":"2024-10","story_title":"How long til we're all on Ozempic?","text":"Just doing more exercise doesn't actually help much with losing weight, as it turns out. The human body will optimize around even intense exercise to reduce calorie burn to a homeostatically stable level. The exercise will still make you healthier (and have some marginal extra calorie burn from e.g. extra muscle mass), but you'll only lose serious weight if you also reduce what you eat. There are a bunch of articles out there about it, but Kurzgesagt has a decent pop-science summary: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vT1JzLTH4G4":[{"hn_comment_id":16921516,"author":"dahart","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Microsoft makes AI training courses available to the public","text":"The Stanford course is pretty good. [VIDEO] For something quicker & less applied, maybe the 3b1b series on neural networks: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44210120,"author":"jackdoe","month":"2025-06","story_title":"The Illusion of Thinking: Strengths and limitations of reasoning models [pdf]","text":"For studying? Mainly watching and re-watching Karpathy's 'Zero To Hero'[1] and Stanford's 'Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition'[2], also a lot of transformers from scratch videos like Umar Jamali's videos[3], and I also study backwards to McCulloch and Pitts. Reading the 30 papers [LINK] and so on. And of course Yannic Kilcher[4], and also listening in on the paper discussions they do on discord. Practicing a lot with just doing backpropagation by hand and making toy models by hand to get intuition for the signal flow, and building all kinds of smallish systems, e.g. how far can you push whisper, small qwen3, and kokoro to control your computer with voice? People think that deepseek/mistral/meta etc are democratizing AI, but its actually Karpathy who teaches us :) so we can understand them and make our own. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"vTMF6xEiAaY":[{"hn_comment_id":32774393,"author":"philistine","month":"2022-09","story_title":"It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over","text":"Watch both People Make Games video about Roblox and try to argue that the company should not deserve all the public controversy it is getting. They are actively stalling any moderation and protection because their profit margin would be severely diminished. Children's safety versus money, the choice is oh so simple. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29669631,"author":"josephg","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Twitter\u2019s founder admits that shutting down the API was \u201cworst thing we did\u201d","text":"> Tech sufferers greatly from a \"God Complex\" syndrome, and it's exactly what will prevent it from getting better. I saw an excellent critique of Roblox the other day, which covered many aspects of their business and different kinds of abuse which are happening in and around their game. The most bizarre part was that they sent some questions to the company - and the company responded by saying they \u201cclearly weren\u2019t being objective\u201d and essentially gaslighting the people making the video. I think the people in charge of Roblox seriously don\u2019t see themselves as holding any sort of responsibility to the broader society that pays their bills. It\u2019s like someone watched The Corporation and thought - \u201coh companies can get away with sociopathic behaviour? I want in!\u201d. Doing harm to the world in the name of your bottom line doesn\u2019t make you clever. It makes you the villain. (Video in question: [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30015783,"author":"DerArzt","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Roblox October Outage Postmortem","text":"To add, there is a nice documentary here[1] which also has a followup[2] that show even more of the issue at hand. Kids making games and only getting 24.5% of the profit is one thing, but everything else that Roblox does is much worse. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30086917,"author":"gorjusborg","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The trouble with Roblox, the video game empire built on child labour","text":"The 'People Make Games' videos discuss this: [VIDEO] Essentially, Roblox has made the decision that they are only responsible for interactions that happen on their platform. Parents may be letting their children develop games thinking that it's a cute hobby. Roblox knows that there are game companies wooing child devs and doing shady stuff that can be potentially harmful to them. They are not doing anything to stop the practices because they aren't technically on their platform . But the whole interaction is around making games for their platform. So they may potentially not be legally be at fault, but it does seem that they are making a lot of money, albeit indirectly, from turning a blind eye to companies extracting labor from young people, and in some cases abusing them. As a parent who is a developer and has kids who love Roblox, I think it's important that the situation be discussed and not swept under the rug. I like the idea of being able to develop and extend and open world like Roblox. I also think that when you market to kids, you have to meet a higher bar of responsibility in protecting them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30856915,"author":"AlexandrB","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok","text":"Like most adults, most of what I know about Roblox comes secondhand from the media. Recently I saw[1] a pretty damning video about Roblox's lack of moderation and exploitation of its users. My basic perception at this point is that TikTok, Facebook, and Roblox all deserve each other. Hopefully they waste their money attacking each other until they mutually self-destruct. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32016410,"author":"fabianhjr","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Problems at Roblox","text":"There are two video investigations from People Make Games into economic aspects of Roblox in particular child labor/exploitation and monopolistic aspirations via platform capitalism. 1. Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers ( [LINK] ) 2. Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33117561,"author":"pull_my_finger","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Roblox sued for allegedly enabling young girl\u2019s sexual, financial exploitation","text":"Some interesting related investigation (I think they mention this girl in the second video) related to roblox is anyone is interested. I had never used it, but after seeing these I don't think I would ever use it or encourage anyone to use it. [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35311028,"author":"shagie","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access","text":"People Make Games is one of the YouTube channels that I respect in this domain... Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers - [LINK] Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39038417,"author":"follower","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Ask HN: 9-yo son wants to build a game, I'm lost. What can I do?","text":"The YouTube channel \"People Make Games\" has a couple of reports that I'd suggest parents consider watching first before going down that road: * \"Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers\": [LINK] * \"Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vTbILK0fxDY":[{"hn_comment_id":26739818,"author":"TheAdamAndChe","month":"2021-04","story_title":"How Western Civilisation Could Collapse","text":"Of relevance is this video[1] discussing a demographic crisis in China caused from their one-child policy that will lead to significant economic issues in the coming decades, much like how Japan is having issues. There's a good chance this will limit their growth. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28813078,"author":"anm89","month":"2021-10","story_title":"China's Xi vows 'reunification' with Taiwan","text":"I've recently been really digging in on China, and the more I read / learn, the less threatening (not evil, the CCP is certainly plenty evil) I perceive them. A starter on this is the three part polymatter series. 1) China has a monster of a demographics problem that they are clearly lying about with census data: [VIDEO] [LINK] 2) It's pretty well established at this point that Chinese property markets have serious issues which threaten systemic issues: [LINK] [LINK] 3) Their resource situation, especially water issues are serious: [LINK] 4) They have terrible Geography from a military perspective and are not nearly as militarily strong as they project [LINK] 5) And the biggest one. Chinese citizens are increasingly not prosperous enough to be ok with it. Also the gender imbalance is so severe that there are guaranteed to be 10s of millions of angry single men over the next decades, almost certain to increase social discord. [LINK] [LINK] They have also seriously mishandled their relationship with Australia who they really needed which was just long term cemented with the AUUKUS alliance. Another interesting channel which I found because she was talking about evergrande default over three years ago: [LINK] Video on frequent structural disasters [LINK] I think over the next 30 years, the US tripping over it's own feet is a bigger risk than anything China related","stance":"rec"}],"vU1-uiUlHTo":[{"hn_comment_id":46407595,"author":"john01dav","month":"2025-12","story_title":"How we lost communication to entertainment","text":"> I feel there has to be something between \"I heard about a thing 7th-hand\" and \"I actively watch political discourse / read scientific papers\", but I'm no longer sure The News, as we currently know it, is it. I have found that some Youtube channels and videos (non-comprehensive examples below (I have hundreds of subscribed channels), mostly not politics, but these things inform politics since politics is making decisions about other things) can fill this gap nicely. This is not a perfect choice, since journalism integrity and standards do not apply, but I find that this can be mitigated by watching a wide variety (for example, in the field of economics, I regularly watch creators who espouse everything from very free-market capitalism all the way to full on communism). There are likely other forms of new media that operate at this level of depth, but I haven't found htem. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] (and associated channels) [LINK] (recent good example [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47690241,"author":"gorgonical","month":"2026-04","story_title":"US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology","text":"Musician-turning-tech anarchist (?) Benn Jordan is making a very interesting series of videos about Flock cameras, their poor safety, and their gray-area interfacing with local governments: [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK] I recommend them.","stance":"rec"}],"vVX-PrBRtTY":[{"hn_comment_id":10583829,"author":"Amorymeltzer","month":"2015-11","story_title":"The last unmapped places on Earth","text":"The West Wing clip on maps is still one of the best ways to teach someone about how different our classic maps are from reality: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25104992,"author":"eyelidlessness","month":"2020-11","story_title":"The True Size Of Countries: Mercator projection","text":"Requisite West Wing scene[1] on the subject (which is probably always going to be my top YouTube search because it\u2019s fantastic). [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vWkgEddb4-A":[{"hn_comment_id":8073778,"author":"ViralBShah","month":"2014-07","story_title":"The Julia Express [pdf]","text":"For those looking for a video tutorial, this one by David Sanders at SciPy 2014 [VIDEO] is a great start. More stuff at [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8643239,"author":"srparish","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Julia Package Ecosystem Pulse","text":"Not a book, but scipy had a two-part introduction to Julia talk that's worth watching: part 1: [VIDEO] part 2: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10569645,"author":"jarmitage","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Julia Computing Granted $600k by Moore Foundation","text":"For anyone interested in trying to get to know Julia (like me), I've found these talks useful as a starting point: Introduction to Julia - Part 1 | SciPy 2014 | David Sanders - [VIDEO] Get To Know JuliaLang - Guest Talk by Co-Inventor Viral Shah - [LINK] If anyone can recommend other resources that would be appreciated.","stance":"rec"}],"vXBfwgwT1nQ":[{"hn_comment_id":18824815,"author":"gowld","month":"2019-01","story_title":"YouTube Stars Are Pushing a Shady Gambling Site","text":"Back in the legacy world of arcades and carnivals, Mark Rober did some nice videos about the analog/physic and electronic tricks of scam games: [LINK] [VIDEO] It's quite a problem that all these gambling scams are (to more or lesser extent) regulated in geographic jurisdictions, but Internet-bsaed systems bypass all local sovereignty. How long before the governments step up and demand that all Internet businesses get import licenses and traffic must pass through \"customs\" at each ISP \"port of entry\" for their goods and services?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19482072,"author":"pavel_lishin","month":"2019-03","story_title":"The Elaborate, Dying Art of Hustling for Money at Dave and Buster's","text":"> You aren't just using skills and competing with physics. You are competing with software that is affecting the outcome. Mark Rober covered this in a pretty decent YouTube video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vXjVFPosQHw":[{"hn_comment_id":5121235,"author":"politician","month":"2013-01","story_title":"A new development era","text":"I've also successfully implemented Zakas' [1] approach after watching his presentation \"Scalable Javascript Application Architecture\" [2] and abandoning Backbone.Aura [3]. Aura theoretically implements this, but in practice we found that it made some assumptions that were incompatible with our needs. Consequently, we rolled our own implementation. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5121567,"author":"calpaterson","month":"2013-01","story_title":"A new development era","text":"This video: [VIDEO] (which was also posted by politician) was very useful in explaining the theory. I also made some changes to it, but offhand I can't remember what they were. I think it was to do with the separation of starting vs initialising modules (parts of a page).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9165643,"author":"obeid","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Front-end \u201cdesign patterns\u201d?","text":"I watched this old talk from the YUI Library recently. It's framework-agnostic and not heavy on code, just a lot of common sense that might not be obvious for some. Nicholas Zakas: Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vYA0f6R5KAI":[{"hn_comment_id":41906726,"author":"paulsutter","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Can SpaceX land a rocket with 1/2 cm accuracy?","text":"The key was the full scale combustion simulator software that SpaceX developed to design the Raptor. This talk was given at NVIDIA GTC 2015 and inspired me to go into manufacturing [VIDEO] title: \"GPUs To Mars: Full Scale Simulation of SpaceX's Mars Rocket Engine\"","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9872121,"author":"T-A","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Ask HN: What companies are doing work related to scientific computing?","text":"Here's a fun recent link: [VIDEO] Plenty more options to explore in the links under the video, starting from [LINK] Then there is NVIDIA's CUDA Zone with lists like [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10715529,"author":"cma","month":"2015-12","story_title":"The first plasma: the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device is now in operation","text":"There are bigger optimizations than 10X with some of the adaptive grid / wavelet compression stuff. I think these are still 2D, but pretty amazing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10715530,"author":"cma","month":"2015-12","story_title":"The first plasma: the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device is now in operation","text":"There are bigger optimizations than 10X with some of the adaptive grid / wavelet compression stuff. I think these are still 2D, but pretty amazing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19887895,"author":"swimfar","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Trump Administration Might \u201cRe-Examine\u201d Climate Modeling","text":"I remember that. Fluid dynamics is a very tricky thing to model and the work they did was really cool. There's a good video presentation on it here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32782414,"author":"danielvf","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Some things I realized about AI while contemplating slide rule prices on eBay","text":"Or maybe it is that SpaceX is doing simulations on a level ahead of what everyone else does. Here's one of several amazing videos from SpaceX simulations. (There are more, but I don't have the link to the others) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vYLEuQrvND0":[{"hn_comment_id":23599820,"author":"unixhero","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Deus Ex at 20: The oral history of a pivotal PC game","text":"I have to mention Ross' Youtube channel Accursed Farms' review [0] [1] [2] of Deus Ex. I would highly recommended watching them: \"I came for a game review and left with a better understanding of the economy and politics. Ross you blow my mind\" [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22991762,"author":"bmn__","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Restoring the Gold Filter in Deus Ex: Human Revolution \u2013 Director\u2019s Cut","text":"You never asked for this, but Ross's Game Dungeon: Deus Ex - Human Revolution is a delightful critique of the subject matter (a.k.a. lemon blast mode): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33701596,"author":"laidoffamazon","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Panoramas of Deus Ex Human Revolution","text":"He's absolutely correct on comparing it to the first game, but he may even be a little too warm towards some aspects of it. I also enjoy this video by Ross of \"Freeman's Mind\" [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vZ_a21fPkYM":[{"hn_comment_id":4843078,"author":"peterstjohn","month":"2012-11","story_title":"British aerospace company claims biggest engine advance since the jet","text":"Here's a documentary that was broadcast on BBC4 a couple of months ago about Bond and his quixotic journey to get HOTOL/Skylon into the sky: [VIDEO] It includes a test-firing of the new heat-exchanger at the end.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9872041,"author":"curiousjorge","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Reaction Engines Reveals Secret of Sabre Frost Control Technology","text":"I think this will be the single biggest revolution since aviation history. It would change the way we travel, send things up to space. Of course, military consequences will be interesting as well. I wonder if US military already has something like this in the works. I'd hate it to see it fall into the wrong type of people. Very inspiring stuff. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"v_UyVmITiYQ":[{"hn_comment_id":631481,"author":"luigi","month":"2009-05","story_title":"Five Reasons to Be Terrified of Google Wave ","text":"That's probably the most blatant example of FUD in internet history. Jumping to conclusions while remaining blissfully ignorant to the actual implementation. Until we get access to the sandbox, you should draw your own conclusions by watching the keynote: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":671236,"author":"bmelton","month":"2009-06","story_title":"Review my startup: Revizr.  You haven't seen this before.","text":"I'm surprised nobody has compared this to google's wave yet. If you haven't, you should go check out the demo -- I'm not for sure yet how much feature overlap there is, but their demo exhibits a wow factor that is undeniable. It's long, but skip around and you're sure to hit on at least some of the important bits: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5429760,"author":"Samuel_Michon","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Finale for Now on Google's Self-Inflicted Trust Problem","text":"For me it was Google Wave. The presentation[1] got me very excited and I couldn't wait to start using it. I signed up for the beta and told everyone I work with to do so as well. It quickly became an invaluable tool for me, I couldn't imagine what I'd do without it. And then, a year after it was introduced, only 3 months after it was released to the general public, Google announced Wave was dead. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45297055,"author":"rkagerer","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Meta\u2019s live demo fails; \u201cAI\u201d recording plays before the actor takes the steps","text":"Here's one of my favorites, of Lars doing the Wave dance on stage to ad-lib over connectivity hiccups. For some reason it evoked a lot more empathy from me... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vaCVh2SAZY4":[{"hn_comment_id":25164885,"author":"MrsPeaches","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Most efficient way for the inexperienced to learn PCB design?","text":"I am a MechEng by background and taught myself how to design PCBs. Disclaimer I am not a pro but have put a couple of boards into production and have worked closely with pros. > Do professionals do a lot of breadboarding? Depends on the complexity but yes there is often a fair bit of breadboarding, usually differnt parts of the circuit in isolation. So first step is (if you haven't already) to get familiar with the basics of electronics and the best place to start with that is The Art of Electronics[1] I would then recommmend checking out DigiKey's guide to KiCAD [2] which gives you everything you need to get started with a good software package that is user by pros. It has it's quirks but at least you don't have to pay for it (or get involved with Autodesk in anyway). Choose a simple project to get started. Breadboard it with a development board (e.g. ESP32 DevKit[3]) and then make a schematic of that using you CAD. You can then turn that into a PCB (again using the DigiKey guide) or you cna just try to recreate the dev board. Arduinos are pretty easy to recreate using through hole components. Also don't be afraid to just straight copy things and tweak them to your needs. From there you can find a vendor to get your PCBs on PCB shopper [4]. You can easily get 5 boards delivered to you in under a week for $40 including shipping. Also if you can afford it the going rate of a top EE in the UK is around \u00a3500 a day (you can probably find some decent ones for \u00a3250). Get in touch w","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28758287,"author":"kop316","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Teach Me PCB","text":"Digikey actually makes really nice YouTube tutorials on how to use KiCAD: [VIDEO] When I had to design a board I used that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31235468,"author":"helsinkiandrew","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Fritzing is an open-source electronic design tool","text":"I'd second that unless you really just want to make a PCB from a simple breadboard design with simple parts once and never do it again. But the few hours learning Kicad will be much more rewarding. Here's one of many tutorials: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vc4yL3YTwWk":[{"hn_comment_id":42586451,"author":"aunty_helen","month":"2025-01","story_title":"uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension","text":"[LINK] For context, this all started about 2 weeks ago with one of the best pieces of investigative journalism I've seen on youtube: [VIDEO] And it's spiraling from there into lawsuits etc. I'm kinda glad PayPal bought them as they can't just shut down and file bankruptcy. Hopefully some of these creators will get paid out for lost revenue.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42538488,"author":"smcleod","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Show HN: Open-source and transparent alternative to Honey","text":"Good video I watched recently on how the Honey scam works: [VIDEO] *Edit: Oh I see you mention it in the video on your project! Nice work.","stance":"rec"}],"vgT4Y30DkaA":[{"hn_comment_id":28686901,"author":"bb101","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Hypersonic HAWC missile flies, but details are kept hidden","text":"And our reality would segue into the storyline of Threads. The 1984 BBC film should be mandatory viewing for all people in positions of power. The bombing is only the start of the horror. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34448330,"author":"29athrowaway","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Nuclear explosion impact on humans indoors","text":"You should watch Threads (1984), the most messed up film ever made, produced in part by the BBC [VIDEO] (trailer only) It's about the lives of average people before, during and after a fictional nuclear attack in the UK.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38091886,"author":"willprice89","month":"2023-10","story_title":"What a third world war would mean for investors","text":"Of all post-nuclear-apocalypse stories I've seen or read, I think the movie Threads (1984) ( [VIDEO] ) does the best job hammering home just how miserable and hopeless life will be for everyone except a tiny fraction of lucky and privileged survivors. Maybe those are the people who will still be worrying about investments after WW3...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21585969,"author":"davidwtbuxton","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Beria and the Beautiful Game","text":"Also Threads, from the same era, incredibly bleak depiction of British society in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. [VIDEO] (For those who haven't seen it, it is grim, but gripping.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40627546,"author":"aspenmayer","month":"2024-06","story_title":"British Nuclear Warning System","text":"Threads (1984) [LINK] [LINK] Even the trailer is harrowing with audio alone: [VIDEO] The part where the audio seamlessly transitions from screams into screeching wind, wails, and explosions was chillingly well done in the most dramatic way. If you like Threads, check out Children of Men, which is also disturbingly realistic and also set in UK.","stance":"rec"}],"viJt_DXTfwA":[{"hn_comment_id":34618313,"author":"mikewarot","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Are ChatGPT answers getting worse for anyone else?","text":"This video[1] cleared up a lot of questions for me as to the issues I've seen with ChatGPT. My current operating theory goes thusly: Think back to \"This Person does not Exist\" [2], a site which generates a simulated human face. This works by randomly picking a vector into the latent space of human faces from a trained model, and showing it to the user. When you're using ChatGPT, you're getting a simulated assistant, at random. The quality of the answer is highly dependent on how that portion of the latent space (and thus that particular simulated assistant) was trained. Thus, as you get a wide variety of faces from this-person-does-not-exist, you'll get a wide variety of simulated assistants from ChatGPT. For me, this explains the schizophrenic nature of ChatGPT. As for the Bullshit it seems to spew, it is working against a rating system (another AI) trained to act like a human rating text. If those humans didn't know something, they had no way to express it, they simply had \"pick which is best\", which removes all the other dimensions of consideration, and quashes it into a scalar. The optimum strategy for the rating system is to try to BS its way through things, which then teaches ChatGPT to BS its way through things as well. Much like rating systems on HN, and all social media, this destroys information and tends to dis-incentivize nuance. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34620206,"author":"mikewarot","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Princeton CS Prof: ChatGPT Is a Bullshit Generator (2022)","text":"It might help quite a bit to watch this overview of how ChatGPT works, and especially how it was trained .[1] Human attention was too expensive for the training, so they made another AI to simulate the trainers. Unfortunately, the trainer simulator training didn't have an expressive enough set of options for the actual humans, which kept a lot of quite valuable feedback out of the whole system by reducing things to single ranking. If the person didn't know the correct answer, they'd likely just go based on gut. This in turn lead the training simulator to do the same. This lead ChatGPT to just try to bullshit an answer rather than stating it didn't know, and getting downvoted. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34660904,"author":"f_devd","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Open Assistant: Conversational AI for Everyone","text":"It depends on your definition of cheating, but this is definitely not \"using humans to answer all questions one could ask\". Rather it's a way to tune language models to be more like assistants rather than \"most likely continuation machines\". For context I recommend watching the discussion on what chatgpt is/does[0], and what the open assistant project's aim is[1]. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34834153,"author":"simonh","month":"2023-02","story_title":"The new Bing will happily give you citations for a pile of nonsense","text":"I\u2019ve read that before, it is fascinating. GPT3 was just trained on source text, but ChatGPT has undergone an an additional very rigorous programme of intensive training bootstrapped by human feedback. This has evolved it in order to improve its performance as an information assistant, especially on specific tasks that have proved problematic in the past. This video explains the approach and some of its limitations. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35553083,"author":"fxj","month":"2023-04","story_title":"What GPT-4 Does Is Less Like \u201cFiguring Out\u201d and More Like \u201cAlready Knowing\u201d","text":"I think it is still a problem that many people do not know how GPT really works. There is no part in GPT that can figure out something. So no intelligence and no learning of things. A good example is when you look at GPT writing poems. All poems that it writes are of the same structure and they are not very good. So it seems it does not know the difference between a sonnet and a limmerick. But what happens is, that there is a miss-alignment between writing a poem and making the user happy. GPT is trained that its highest goal is to make the user happy. GPT believes that users dont know what sonnets are anyway so i can get away with a rhyme that is not a sonnet. Here is a good video about that: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vkYEYjintqU":[{"hn_comment_id":25912223,"author":"navan","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamander (2019)","text":"This reminded me of a beautiful animation of \"Mitochondria: the cell's powerhouse\" which I recently watched. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33370522,"author":"thanatos519","month":"2022-10","story_title":"How food powers the body's metabolism","text":"An incredible story! Somewhere in [LINK] or [VIDEO] the narrator casually says \"... and this is why we breathe oxygen ...\"","stance":"rec"}],"vmgxtcbc4iU":[{"hn_comment_id":23714207,"author":"collyw","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Research database explores racial bias in police shootings (2019)","text":"Sam Harris did an excellent podcast (in my opinion) touching on the topics you mentioned. [VIDEO] or text [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23723319,"author":"collyw","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Drug overdoses are soaring during the coronavirus pandemic","text":">Our media is destroying the USA. I think this is incredibly true. And it is spreading to other parts of the world. There is a lot of sensationalism, around black lives matter protests, and very little objective analysis of the \"problem\". It seems incredibly irresponsible considering the results. I would urge everyone to listen to (or read) what Sam Harris says in his podcast on the topic, he brings some objectivity and rationality back to the discussion. You feel like there is still some sanity left in the world after listening to it. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25666797,"author":"kryogen1c","month":"2021-01","story_title":"U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests","text":"> The BLM protests were in response to a real, meaningful threat actually, your two examples are very alike in the \"things that did not happen\" category. the murder of George floyd was negligent at best and malicious at worst, but racist cops killing blacks is simply not a large issue, and certainly not a \"meaningful threat\" to all black people. San Harris published a seminal piece on the matter: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23545365,"author":"B4CKlash","month":"2020-06","story_title":"\u2018Hey Siri, I\u2019m getting pulled over\u2019: Records police interaction, sends location","text":"I suggest you give this a listen: [VIDEO] It will be difficult to hear, but it's not as cut and dry as most people are making this out to be.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25907543,"author":"ta1611602561","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Fatal Police Shootings of Unarmed Black People Reveal Troubling Patterns","text":"Throwaway because current environment is hostile to nuance, and consequences are disconnected from intent. On these topics, I am always confused by the variety of positions. I note that NPR is considered high factuality, left of center bias, so I generally want to trust them. It's tricky to cut through the difficulty of understanding that we have a set of laws and those laws say a police officer is allowed to shoot someone, race irrespective, under circumstances. And it's a tragedy when someone loses their life, but the hypothesis of allowing police to kill someone is that the individual is suspected to be dangerous to others whom are less suspected (ie innocent). Then there are takes like this [VIDEO] -- Sam Harris examines the available data and gives compelling argument that race is probably not a real variable in police killing civilians, especially when we start to examine same race police killings...","stance":"rec"}],"vmwnhZmEZjc":[{"hn_comment_id":16235047,"author":"sjs382","month":"2018-01","story_title":"2018 Stellar roadmap","text":"Crap. I'll reproduce the answer here, then: > Tl;dr: Stellar\u2019s protocol (SCP) uses a decentralized state propagation where each node commits to a value if every node it deems trustworthy agrees while Ripple uses a supermajority vote (80%) among all validating nodes. Stellar achieves better decentralization than Ripple > A pretty old, but still relevant discussion on the bitcoin stack exchange [ [LINK] ] > Stellar started out as a fork of Ripple (now completely rewritten) so they are pretty similar in implementation and use cases. > Stellar uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol [ [LINK] ] (SCP) to achieve decentralization, while Ripple uses the XRP Ledger Consensus Process [ [LINK] ]. These are alternatives to Bitcoin's proof of work whose goal is to have every participant in the network agree on the current state. > In SCP, each node decides for itself which other nodes it trusts. When a lot of these sets of trusted nodes are overlapping, there is a high probability there is agreement on the state of the network. Broadly, a node will only accept a message if all of their trustworthy nodes have in turn accepted it. This is similar to the way internet certificates and DNS servers are working. In principle, there is no central authority appointing trustworthy nodes, but de facto, the network will reach an agreement on which nodes are trustworthy. This is a great video explaining SCP in detail [ [VIDEO] ]. There is also the white paper [ [LINK] ] for more formal mathematical defini","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19914098,"author":"malgorithms","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Keybase and Stellar is live for everyone","text":"David Mazi\u00e8res (designer of the protocol) has given a number of talks. Here's a good video of his talk at Google, and I believe it's the one I watched a couple years ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vpTHi7O66pI":[{"hn_comment_id":18644738,"author":"monktastic1","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Can Dirt Save the Earth?","text":"> This view ran counter to a lot of conservationist thought, as well as a great deal of evidence. Grazing has been blamed for turning vast swaths of the world into deserts. But from Creque\u2019s perspective, how you graze makes all the difference. This is the idea behind this fantastic TED talk: [VIDEO] We're largely focused on high-tech ways to \"fix\" the Earth, but the Earth has known how to do it since forever. Finding ways to use her own intelligence seems like a great idea.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5392870,"author":"boon","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Bills seek end to farm animal abuse videos","text":"I would eat dog if it wasn't raised as someone's pet. Actually I just got back from Vietnam, and I'm pretty sure I ate both dog and cat at some point. Didn't bother me because they didn't raise them as pets. They raised them with the intention of eating every little bit (without wasting any part of the animal, I might add). You can grow fond of plenty of the animals that we eat on a normal basis, pigs in particular. We also have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals which can lead to attachment. Factory farming is indeed a huge problem, because it requires so much fossil fuel, grain, and antibiotics, and destroys the land and causes global warming. But the fix is not to stop eating animals, the answer is to go back to the roots of the ecosystem and actually raise more animals. Ever heard of Alan Savory? Check it out. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8449560,"author":"xamolxix","month":"2014-10","story_title":"How Wolves Change Rivers [video]","text":"Reminds me about this TED talk [VIDEO] where Allan Savory speaks about the behavior of herbivores with/without predators and the impact on flora. Fascinating, really. I hope the day will come when we understand the biosphere of this wonderful planet we live on.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16123178,"author":"dx034","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Britain's Next Megaproject: A Coast-To-Coast Forest","text":"But those are often desert. And desertification could (in part) be caused by overly protecting the area (e.g. not allowing cattle). Good video to watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18286541,"author":"andersha","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Carbon Removal Technologies","text":"We can manage grassland and savanah. Grasses exudate a lot of their sugars (carbon) into the ground feeding the microbes. Holistically managed grassing is all about timing the regrowth and recycling the nutrients and fibers through the cow. The prairies are amazing ecosystem pumping carbon into the ground when properly managed. The knowledge is available, but this ted talk only has 2 million views. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19901628,"author":"yjhoney","month":"2019-05","story_title":"CO2 in the atmosphere just exceeded 415ppm for the first time in human history","text":"This Ted talk gave me hope to reverse climate change and seems plausible: [VIDEO] Does anyone know / have experience whether this actually works?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24194209,"author":"wlib","month":"2020-08","story_title":"We should discuss soil as much as coal (2019)","text":"Glad to see this, a great related TED talk by Allan Savory that introduces why this is true can be found here [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26326445,"author":"lcamach84","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Beyond Meat signs global supply deals with McDonald\u2019s, KFC and Pizza Hut","text":"When the herd eat grass it stimulates grass growth and grass is a huge carbon sink. there is a cool ted talk about this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33781137,"author":"hitpointdrew","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Lab-Grown Meat Is Safe to Eat, FDA Says","text":"> I'm not entirely convinced by this argument. It\u2019s been proven by Allen Savory and others, you can check his Ted talk here [VIDEO] Even if lab grown meat is the next best thing since sliced bread it would be a complete climate disaster to not continue, and expand, holistic cattle farming.","stance":"rec"}],"vq2BxAJZ4Tc":[{"hn_comment_id":16241532,"author":"speakeron","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Graham's Number Is Too Big to Tell How Big It Is","text":"> David Metzler's series \"Ridiculously Huge Numbers\"[1] is a good introduction to this. It goes rather well beyond puny little integers like Graham's number. Yes, David Metzler's series is great and, I would say, essential viewing if your interest in large numbers is piqued. While he doesn't go through some of the big numbers talked about her (TREE(3), SCG(13), etc), he gives an excellent explanation of the fast-growing hierarchy. This is really the closest thing we have to a 'standardized' way of comparing the sizes of very large numbers. I would also recommend Giroux Studios' 'Extremely Large Numbers'[1], which takes a similar style to Metzler's videos and goes further with the fast-growing hierarchy. (Does something called 'infinite collapsing functions' sound interesting...?) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12115545,"author":"yk","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Large Countable Ordinals, Part 1","text":"Recently watched the Extremly large numbers [1] youtube series, which nicely complements Baez's series with examples. (Quick follow up question, as far as I understand, there should be a way to understand large cardinals as recursion, so I wonder if there is a (ultra-) finitist account of large cardinals.) [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vq2nnJ4g6N0":[{"hn_comment_id":13354843,"author":"paulsutter","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Stanford Unsupervised Deep Learning Tutorial (2014)","text":"For Deep Learning, start with MNIST. The 1998 paper[1] describing LeNet goes into a lot more detail than more recent papers. Also there's an excellent video from Martin Gorner at Google that describes a range of neural networks for MNIST[2]. The source code used in his talk is excellent[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14669194,"author":"speedplane","month":"2017-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What are the best resources to learn computer vision?","text":"I watched a great video on Tensorflow (link below). It mostly introduces very basic deep learning concepts, but there are a few key moments in the 2 hour+ video, where he explains what to do if something goes wrong. It's definitely not a \"science\", but with enough experience in deep learning, you can intuit what's going on inside the black box, and there are best practices on what to try next. For example, he goes through a few examples where a neural net has too many weights, or too little data or improperly connected nodes. All three result in problems, but the problems exhibit themselves in slightly different ways and with expertise you can start identifying them. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16494014,"author":"eddieplan9","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Machine Learning Crash Course","text":"For those interested in a deeper dive to just deep learning, \"Tensorflow and deep learning - without a PhD\" is really good, and covers a lot of material in a single 2hr talk. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23868406,"author":"halflings","month":"2020-07","story_title":"TensorFlow, Keras and deep learning, without a PhD","text":"The video version [1] is also pretty awesome, though its code itself is a bit outdated now. Explains a lot of very practical issues that you might not find in most academic textbooks, but you encounter every day in practice. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13654074,"author":"andy_ppp","month":"2017-02","story_title":"TensorFlow 1.0 Released","text":"Amazing work; it makes using AI and Deep Learning accessible for everyone here really. If you haven't seen it check this out for an intro: [VIDEO] I wish AMD graphics cards were supported fully. I really think AMD should find a way to work with the Tensor Flow team on this...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13654505,"author":"gregatragenet3","month":"2017-02","story_title":"TensorFlow 1.0 Released","text":"This is a good introduction focused on tensorflow. [VIDEO] (Tensorflow and deep learning - without a PhD by Martin G\u00f6rner) The ML/DNN rabbit-hole goes deep. If the video above leaves you wanting more, [LINK] does a good job on drilling into more specifics for the various techniques used. The examples on the tensorflow webpage are also very good.","stance":"rec"}],"vs41JrnGaxc":[{"hn_comment_id":12703523,"author":"carsongross","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Whether You\u2019re a Democrat or Republican, Your Social Media Is an Echo Chamber","text":"Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of work on this problem: [VIDEO] I would like to see peaceful political secessionism happen, so that as we sort ourselves out ideologically we can also sort ourselves out physically and sovereign-ly.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16638971,"author":"mistermann","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Facebook Sued by Investors Over Voter-Profile Harvesting","text":"Fair enough, but it wouldn't have made any difference. Disagreement with this particular aspect of the local culture will get you a downvote, not a discussion. Any discussion, if you're lucky to get one, would be better described as a re-education lecture, to teach you the \"facts\" of \"how things are\". Jonathan Haidt has studied this psychological phenomenon quite extensively and in my opinion it does a good job of explaining the recent unusual behavior of the public, it's a shame no one's interested. The moral roots of liberals and conservatives [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18248181,"author":"jerf","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ways people trying to do good accidentally do harm instead and how to avoid them","text":"Jonathon Haidt has actually done some great scientific work on the real differences between liberals and conservatives. This is a shortish version: [VIDEO] There's also some more detailed and longer versions if you poke around on YouTube a bit, plus a book you can buy if you're really interested. I don't think your characterization of either side is particularly accurate. Neither side is utilitarian, and both sides are plenty deontological, just with different rule sets. Both sides are rationalizing deeply-held instinctual beliefs, or the lack thereof.","stance":"rec"}],"vsMydMDi3rI":[{"hn_comment_id":16123677,"author":"willvarfar","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Elizabeth Warren's bill would fine the next Equifax for data breach","text":"I bumped into this talk today: Frank Abagnale: \"Catch Me If You Can\" [VIDEO] He became an FBI agent and works with data breaches. So after entertainingly describing his life story he does mention the Equifax breach at the 37m mark. He paints a very negative picture of Equifax. Its well worth watching the whole thing, and not just skipping to his FBI Agent opinion of Equifax.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19093105,"author":"dmcdm","month":"2019-02","story_title":"How A Young Woman Followed Two Hackers' Lies to Her Death","text":"He did a talk at Google where he asserted basically the same thing: [VIDEO] Great talk by the way, he's an incredibly charismatic and well spoken story teller, also a consultant for the FBI and a successful businessman - which makes you think about just how important likability and charisma are both to being a successful social engineer and being successful in-general. People will let you stray pretty far from reality if they like you - Holmes, Abagnale, and apparently Troy Woody (at least to this poor girl). Eventually reality catches up, one way or another.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19485621,"author":"ai_ia","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)","text":"Offtopic, Frank Abnegale ( Catch me if you can fame ) also says the same thing in his [1] lecture at Google. The whole lecture is also pretty interesting. One of the best google talks I have seen. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27049437,"author":"tchalla","month":"2021-05","story_title":"New book contends that Catch Me If You Can is mostly made up","text":"Frank Abnagale's Comments on the movie and book (2002) [0]. I don't know if his story is true or not. But regardless of his story, his talk at Google is one of the best ones I've heard [1]. > I was interviewed by the co-writer only about four times. I believe he did a great job of telling the story, but he also over dramatized and exaggerated some of the story. That was his style and what the editor wanted. He always reminded me that he was just telling a story and not writing my biography. This is one of the reasons that from the very beginning, I insisted the publisher put a disclaimer in the book and tapes. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16128287,"author":"52-6F-62","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Elizabeth Warren's bill would fine the next Equifax for data breach","text":"* not in current use according to Equifax. I'm hesitant to take their word at face value, as they've tried to mitigate the entire situation via PR already and claim many users [who were affected] were not affected. However the site was still live, and exposed to the public web. It's only unrelated to the specific event in the United States, but clearly indicative of a pattern of negligence. I also wanted to add that the software in question that was compromised was a free and open source solution[0], not some top-dollar security program. And it was breached by relative simple XSS attack that even may have been carried out automatically. Beyond that it could just as likely have been a script kiddie who caught wind of the vulnerability on a message board somewhere and went hunting. I wouldn't call that highly sophisticated. XSS protection is the very baseline of internet data security... I'd also like to point to a video posted by another user upthread (willfarvar): [VIDEO] FBI's Frank Abagnale speaks to the Equifax breach at ~37m (as willfarvar says, though, the entire video/talk is great) --- [0] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18220974,"author":"virde","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Technically not a tech talk but since it was at Talks at Google, this one: Frank Abagnale: \"Catch Me If You Can\" | Talks at Google - YouTube [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20263676,"author":"fatline","month":"2019-06","story_title":"I just had over a thousand Euros stolen and Revolut is siding with the thief","text":"very sorry to hear that. Debit cards are convenient etc, but they don't offer much in terms of fraud protection. The general suggestion is to always use a credit card instead so that you don't expose your own money to theft, but the bank's. This is among the most important learnings you can get from Frank Abagnale's talk at Google ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26611154,"author":"chris_f","month":"2021-03","story_title":"I tracked down my impostor","text":"This is an interesting talk by Frank Abagnale (the real life person the story was based on) at Google. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vt-zXEsJ61U":[{"hn_comment_id":15862289,"author":"brndnmtthws","month":"2017-12","story_title":"How I recovered cryptocurrency from a broken laptop","text":"Please make sure you take your coins off of Coinbase (or any other exchange) as soon as you can. Here's a talk by the venerable Andreas Antonopoulos on this subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16250642,"author":"bastijn","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Bitfinex fails to perform promised audits","text":"Obligatory matching advice: [LINK] The full seminar is worth watching as well: \u201cHow do I secure my bitcoin?\u201d \u2014 Andreas Antonopoulos [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vtIzMaLkCaM":[{"hn_comment_id":22629288,"author":"miguelrochefort","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Not delivering end-user value","text":"This is something I'm just starting to understand after being an idealist/perfectionist for most of my life. YAGNI seemed like a shortsighted dogma. My colleague's design decisions looked like ugly hacks. I preferred something to be well-done than to be useful. According to my MBTI type, I was a perfectionist of idea, not a perfectionist of action/result. I was trying to build a cathedral, not a bazaar. I can attribute my ongoing transformation to a single video about effective writing: [VIDEO] The main takeaway is that text is meant to be read, not written. Providing value to the reader is the only thing that matters. How well you write, how smart you sound, how much knowledge you deliver, doesn't matter as long as the reader gets value from the text. It sounds obvious, but it truly changed my perspective. I recommend this video to everyone.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25218127,"author":"will_pseudonym","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Writing well","text":"The resource that has spurred me into thinking differently about effective writing was shared on HN, from UChicago Social Sciences' Leadership Lab - The Craft of Writing Effectively. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31083602,"author":"verdverm","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Advice on Writing Papers","text":"Great video that will definitely help you rethink your approach [VIDEO] It challenges the bad advice you've received up to now","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39688146,"author":"learningerrday","month":"2024-03","story_title":"To write a great essay, think and care deeply (2015)","text":"Larry Mcenerney's lectures on how to write effectively are gold for getting better at writing. There's a lot packed in his lectures, but a big core idea is that you should use writing to help you do your thinking. With complex subject matter, writing is thinking. The thing that we've been taught is writing is more akin to publishing (i.e. the editing you do to share your thoughts with other people after you've finished writing and thinking for yourself). Link to snippets of his talk if you're short on time: [LINK] If you've got more time, you should watch the whole thing, it's a masterclass in understanding what writing actually is, and what it does for you: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42416908,"author":"nazka","month":"2024-12","story_title":"My PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash (2010)","text":"If anybody likes this article and wants to know more about the process of writing effective PhD papers they should watch [1]. In fact, anybody who desires to improve their communication skills should watch it. It is so good that I would have paid to have access to this video! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47580797,"author":"modriano","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Don't Let AI Write for You","text":"This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new. Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those ideas in the written word enables us to evaluate, edit, and compose those smaller ideas into bigger ideas. Kind of like how teachers would ask for an explanation in my own words, writing down my understanding of something I'd heard or read forced me to really evaluate the idea, focus on the parts I cared about, and record that understanding. Without the writing step, ideas would easily just float through my mind like a phantasm, shapeless and out of focus and useless when I had a tangible need for the idea. I am glad I learned to write (both code and text) long before Claude came online. It would have been very hard to struggle through translating ideas from my head into words and words (back) into ideas in my head if I knew there was an \"Easy button\" I could hit to get something cogent-sounding. I hope a large enough proportion of kids today will still put in the work and won't just end up with a stunted ability to write/think. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19006034,"author":"lugg","month":"2019-01","story_title":"The TypeScript Tax","text":"Not AP, But I'm curious, can you Tldr the tax for typescript? I skimmed half the article but I couldnt actually find what the tax was? In similar vein to the above above poster, you might find this lecture useful: [VIDEO] Your writing has a very nice cadence to it I'm just not sure you grasp the reason I might want to read it!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20430029,"author":"7373737373","month":"2019-07","story_title":"The Good Employee, a story about how you can explain companies with graph theory","text":"I agree with this. The beginning of the post describes how rereading a previous post has been insightful for the author, then it delves into details, without explaining why, or how this could be useful for the reader . Too much rambling/offtopic content and breaking through the fourth wall. I, as a reader need to know why this could be useful for me first, then I would decide to read it. Recommended: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20968102,"author":"lerxst00","month":"2019-09","story_title":"BLUF: A military standard to make writing more powerful","text":"A good video on writing that talks about similar ideas is [VIDEO] This video is geared more towards academic writing, but, I've found it helpful even outside of that space.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23912252,"author":"alextheparrot","month":"2020-07","story_title":"It's Time to Start Writing (2019)","text":"This aligns well with a lecture from the University of Chicago I watched recently[0], which explores how many academics use writing as a tool for thinking (What the article describes) and don\u2019t think about the reader. Writing is an incredibly powerful tool to form thoughts. However, as the lecturer in the video details, don\u2019t expect the writing done for thinking to be useful to readers! When we think, there is usually a certain incrementalism, whereas when we read we\u2019re trying to resolve dissonances in a current mental model. That\u2019s a key distinction, it means you need to make people care or understand why their mental model is broken when writing to informs reader. When we write for our own thinking, we usually understand the general problem already and are just traversing the problem space to better understand different components. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28073973,"author":"teddyh","month":"2021-08","story_title":"On academic writing: a personal note (2016)","text":"I have found this video very helpful: [VIDEO] LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively Do you worry about the effectiveness of your writing style? As emerging scholars, perfecting the craft of writing is an essential component of developing as graduate students, and yet resources for honing these skills are largely under utilized. Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago's Writing Program, led this session in an effort to communicate helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available to graduate students interested in further developing their writing style.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31782007,"author":"gnuvince","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Writing like a pro with Vale and Neovim","text":"A post about writing means that I need to plug a couple talks by Larry McEnerney. [1,2] The tool described in this blog post is all about text-based rules: what the _text_ ought to look like. To improve your own writing (a) learn who your readers are, (b) know what they value, and (c) write so that as readers, they find your work valuable to them. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32646024,"author":"bradbeam","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Don\u2019t think to write, write to think","text":"First time I heard of using writing to think was in this talk, \"The craft of writing effectively\"[1]. It's definitely been a motivation to try to write more. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36954977,"author":"andrenotgiant","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Cut out everything that's not surprising","text":"Write for an audience, read the other work that audience reads, that will help you get a sense of whether something is going to be surprising to them. Here is a longer lecture on a similar idea from U Chicago Writing Program [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42485834,"author":"brudgers","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you improve your writing?","text":"Mostly I write HN comments. In part because HN comments are a place to get feedback on my writing craft. Mostly because I frequently feel compelled to write. Anyway maybe you will find this perspective helpful: [VIDEO] Good luck.","stance":"rec"}],"vtWp45Eewtw":[{"hn_comment_id":9810096,"author":"gtrubetskoy","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Water Fluoridation May Not Prevent Cavities, Scientific Review Shows","text":"An educational video from Univ. of Nottingham, if you don't know how nasty (and fun) Fluorine is: [VIDEO] (and they explain the tooth enamel theory towards the end as well).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16965265,"author":"CaliforniaKarl","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Hydrofluoric Acid: An Invisible Fire (1996)","text":"Every time I hear anything about Flourine, I\u2019m reminded of \u201cSand Won\u2019t Save You This Time\u201d [LINK] I also suggest watching the Periodic Table of Videos episode on Flourine: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16969392,"author":"toss1","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Hydrofluoric Acid: An Invisible Fire (1996)","text":"This is a good little interesting video on fluorine here (previously linked by someone else), and the ending is the best description of tin fluoride for teeth I've ever seen -- well worth the ~6min [VIDEO] (edit: added link)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27331433,"author":"AndrewOMartin","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Trials begin on lozenge that rebuilds tooth enamel","text":"Just out of interest, and not detracting from what you're saying, but normal fluoride also forms a compound (flouro-apetite) more resistant to avoid than normal tooth material (appetite). At least according to this chemist: [VIDEO] (tooth chat at 5:10, but the whole video is interesting)","stance":"rec"}],"vuEQixrBKCc":[{"hn_comment_id":28094429,"author":"gorwell","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Homelessness is about housing","text":"Did anyone else notice this euphemism treadmill update? \"for people experiencing homelessness\" \"the number of people experiencing homelessness\" \"of those experiencing homelessness\" This softer language with more syllables is not for the benefit of the homeless, it's for everyone else so they don't feel as bad about it. Which makes it less likely anything will be done. George Carlin made this point brilliantly: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8723895,"author":"DevX101","month":"2014-12","story_title":"US Senate Report on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program","text":"\"You can't be afraid of words that speak the truth. I don't like words that hide the truth. I don't like words that conceal reality. I don't like euphemisms or euphemistic language. And American english is loaded with euphemisms. Because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent a kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it. And it gets worse with every generation. For some reason it just keeps getting worse.\" - George Carlin Here's an amusing and insightful video of Carlin dissecting the language behind Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [VIDEO] The U.S. military seems particularly prone to this habit of using euphemisms to mask reality.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31226025,"author":"ryandrake","month":"2022-05","story_title":"How to professionally say","text":"George Carlin had a great bit[1] about our continuous need to soften our language with euphemisms. That, combined with a kind of forced optimism: needing to hide all negativity inside robotic passive aggression, is what communication has become in a lot of corporations. I don't imagine anyone actually likes having to do it, but we all seem to adopt these speech patterns eventually. Every time your boss tells you, \"Hey, can you tone it down next time? Fred told me he was very offended by your asking him to do his job!\"-- you're being asked to participate in the game. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41315641,"author":"bullfightonmars","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Euphemisms are best changed frequently (2016)","text":"George Carlin has a great bit on euphemism where he makes the case that euphemisms are used to soften the meaning of things that are painful to the point of being meaningless, e.g. shellshock -> ptsd [VIDEO] The author of this article pointed our some similar examples: welfare -> cash assistance -> TANF.","stance":"rec"}],"vuIlsN32WaE":[{"hn_comment_id":15790469,"author":"agumonkey","month":"2017-11","story_title":"When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?","text":"Someone on youtube made a perfect video explaining this with enough precision: not sure it's this one [VIDEO] but close","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24667055,"author":"hkolk","month":"2020-10","story_title":"When we lose weight, where does it go?","text":"There is a nice Ted talk about the same topic. Something I often link to people saying \"I can eat everything I want in this diet...\" The mathematics of weight loss | Ruben Meerman | TEDxQUT: [VIDEO] My personal weight-loss (and now sports) is largely based on understanding how the human body works with metabolism.. carbs, fat, protein.. nice and geeky","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24667264,"author":"greenbush","month":"2020-10","story_title":"When we lose weight, where does it go?","text":"For the science geeks, here's a great TEDx demonstration with lab experiments: \"The mathematics of weight loss \" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28594602,"author":"relueeuler","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Death of the Calorie (2019)","text":"Your description above is not how the body works. To support a mass M must require a quantity of energy E obtained from food. The attempt to alter this model with \u201cloose\u201d ideas about \u201cburn rates\u201d therefore does not make sense. The mathematics of weight loss is laid out clearly in 20 minutes here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30384820,"author":"projektfu","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories","text":"Fat stores are considered, metabolically, as stored energy as they expand and diminish based on the metabolizable energy of the diet, which may be different from the measured total energy. But you\u2019re definitely right! There\u2019s a great Mr. Wizard-style TEDx video about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40491391,"author":"palata","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Have you tried weight loss drugs?","text":"Whenever I have a discussion about weight loss, I like to share this TEDx video: [VIDEO] Just because I think it is quite interesting, not trying to make a point or anything :-).","stance":"rec"}],"vvZA9n3e5pc":[{"hn_comment_id":23528104,"author":"steveklabnik","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Today is my first day at Oxide Computer Company","text":"So, I was trying to keep this post short and to the point, but if you want a longer description, straight from the mouth of one of the founders, you may like [VIDEO] > Are they trying to offer folks AWS or Azure quality servers for purchase? I think \"quality\" doesn't really capture 100% of it, but in a sense, yes. The goal is extremely quality, performant, robust servers. I will have to delegate the details to the above talk; I have a bunch of work to get started on, and would just end up re-typing out what it says above, ha!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23979416,"author":"steveklabnik","month":"2020-07","story_title":"The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer [video]","text":"The sibling comment is good. The problem that we're trying to solve is basically laid out on this slide: [VIDEO] The business is \"we will be selling servers.\" You can't buy any yet, but in the future, you'll be able to. The talk lays out a history of servers, describes the problems with the servers that you can buy from vendors today, and lays out why we think we can build better ones.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24266505,"author":"bcantrill","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Jensen Huang\u2019s vision for data center dominance may destroy the Arm ecosystem","text":"For whatever it's worth, the talk I gave at Stanford in February[1] goes into (much) more detail -- and given some of your other comments here, you will find many aspects of the talk educational. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24748283,"author":"bcantrill","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Rust After the Honeymoon","text":"Sorry if that's a bit thin; more detail on what we're doing and why can be found in a (pre-COVID) talk I gave at Stanford[1]. We're definitely not a Deep Stealth company, but we've also been very busy building; expect many more details over the coming year! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26352398,"author":"bcantrill","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Compensation as a Reflection of Values","text":"To take these in order: for what we're doing, I would recommend the talk I gave at Stanford about a year ago.[0] It's a bit dated (and of course we have much much more detail now), but it remains broadly on point. For the parts of Sun that we want to take after: the good bits, of course! ;) There were things that have influenced us with respect to mission, and then also with respect to hardware/software co-design (we are, contrary to the impression you might have, doing a lot of hardware[1]). Lest I sound too rosy about Sun, it had a lot of problems too[2] -- so we're trying not to recreate those! ;) Thank you for the kind words on the podcast -- very much looking forward to getting back in the garage and recording some new episodes! Finally, on Spring: yes, I need to find it (we just moved) and then find a CD-ROM drive (feels easier) and then I'll get it uploaded! [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28989011,"author":"panick21_","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Kerla: Monolithic kernel in Rust, aiming for Linux ABI compatibility","text":"I think its an FPGA with a costume Open-Source Titan chip on it (RISC-V). It is not really a traditional BMC, its more like a service processor that does secure boot and gets you in the OS. It does a few other things but I think they really want it to have minimum functionality. This is a great talk about what they do and why: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vwCdKU9uYnE":[{"hn_comment_id":15974943,"author":"mehrdada","month":"2017-12","story_title":"Apple and NeXT announce merger (1996)","text":"Must watch recollection of the history of Mach and NeXT and Apple by Avie Tevanian. Long but great. 1/2] [VIDEO] (early days) 2/2] [LINK] (around Apple acquisition and beyond)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16816795,"author":"GeekyBear","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Fuchsia is not Linux","text":"Correct. The Mach research project at Carnegie Mellon aimed to build a replacement kernel for BSD that supported distributed and parallel computing. Next's VP of Software Engineering, Avie Tevanian, was one of the Mach project leads. Richard Rashid, who lead the Mach project ended up running Microsoft Research's worldwide operations. Their work on a virtual memory subsystem got rolled back into BSD. [LINK] The Computer History Museum has an interesting long form interview with Avie: Part 1: [VIDEO] Part 2: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17612152,"author":"GeekyBear","month":"2018-07","story_title":"The secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT","text":"The Computer History Museum has one of their long form interviews with Avie Tevanian, who led the creation of Mach (multiprocessor BSD) as his Ph.D project. (His faculty advisor went on to head Microsoft Research) Next and Microsoft both sought to hire him, and he eventually went on to be in charge of the OS at Next and later Apple. One of the topics he covered in the interview was how Next (and Apple) decided to use and contribute back to open sourced software at the lower levels of their stack. He also covers what it was like to work for Steve Jobs. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25175448,"author":"lukeh","month":"2020-11","story_title":"The Best of NeXT Collection","text":"I haven't watched it in a while, but you will probably enjoy Avie's oral history (along with Blaine Garst and Steve Naroff's). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41473373,"author":"GeekyBear","month":"2024-09","story_title":"The PERQ Computer","text":"The Computer History Museum's long form interview with Avie Tevanian is a good resource for this era. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vyenmLqJQjs":[{"hn_comment_id":37860377,"author":"darau1","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Email and Git = <3","text":"Just dropping this gem of a talk[1], for the uninitiated. There is a place for this, even if people in the thread have never seen it. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14973578,"author":"hyperion2010","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community","text":"Here is another overview of how the kernel uses git and why no emails is simply not possible (or sensible). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21202372,"author":"cyphar","month":"2019-10","story_title":"OpenBSD Crossed 400k Commits","text":"Greg KH gives a pretty good talk about the rate of kernel development fairly regularly[1]. But yes, it's been consistently getting faster every kernel release. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"vzfy4EKwG_Y":[{"hn_comment_id":29388772,"author":"memco","month":"2021-11","story_title":"4x Smaller, 50x Faster","text":"> How would one optimize for immutability in this case, other than turning it back into mutability behind the scenes? Roc-lang, which is a functional, systems language in development uses something called opportunistic in-place mutation to do just that. Here's a video where the creator talks about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29389928,"author":"niels_bom","month":"2021-11","story_title":"4x Smaller, 50x Faster","text":"This talk by Richard Feldman about Roc (a new language) goed into why immutable does not necessarily mean slow and given enough attention can mean higher performance in certain cases: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30372113,"author":"aquadrop","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Haskell2020 Is Dead, but All Hope Is Not Lost (2019)","text":"Maybe [LINK] ? It's not production ready, I just saw nice talk by Richard Feldman [1] about it and it's inspired by Elm. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31920208,"author":"Akronymus","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Functional vs. Imperative Implementation of Algorithms","text":"> Functional programming experts say that their code is efficient because the compiler translates it to an efficient representation on the CPU. They have TCO and other things. But they don't mutate data and hence every function call creates a new data in memory taking up space. How do they overcome that? By letting the compiler make assumptions. For example, consecutive map calls can be converted into a single one. If the data isn't shared with something else, the compiler can mutate it. MUCH easier to paralellize maps. As a starting point for those nitty grittys, this talk is probably as good as any [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38349589,"author":"yashrk","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Roc \u2013 A fast, friendly, functional language","text":"If you are interested, \u00abwhy yet another programming language?\u00bb. The unique selling point of Roc is clever optimization to convert purely functional source code to deep-imperative fast machine code, while keeping all the correctness of functional algorithms. See this video of Richard Feldman for details \u2014 \u00abOutperforming Imperative with Pure Functional Languages\u00bb: [VIDEO] Among those clever optimizations: - static reference counting (no GC, like in Rust, but with no borrowing and borrow problems); - stack allocation of the data with no external links; - hidden (\u00abopportunistic\u00bb) mutability even in the cases, where Haskell or Lisp will copy the value.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41722112,"author":"greener_grass","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Serialization Is the Secret","text":"1. Structural sharing - most data doesn't change so you create a copy that reuses much of the original structure 2. Garbage collection and lexical scopes - you clean up memory quickly and in batch 3. Compiler optimizations - you turn functional constructs into imperative ones that reuse and mutate memory at compile-time, where it is provably safe to do so Roc Lang might interest you: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42947503,"author":"greener_grass","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Roc rewrites the compiler in Zig","text":"We already have many great GC'd functional languages at that performance level. I first learned about Roc from this talk: [VIDEO] That's a niche that is not currently filled (well, maybe MLTon) and that has me very excited! I'm sure I'm not alone here.","stance":"rec"}],"w-I6XTVZXww":[{"hn_comment_id":7075185,"author":"alternize","month":"2014-01","story_title":"1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... = - 1/12","text":"this infinite sum was featured in a numberphile video a few days ago with a entraining and simple \"proof\": [VIDEO] and a more advanced explanation & proof in the bonus-video: [LINK] you should definitely subscribe to numberphile ( [LINK] ) and their sister channel computerphile ( [LINK] ) on youtube :)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7057102,"author":"yelnatz","month":"2014-01","story_title":"1 + 2 + 3 + .. = -1/12","text":"Watch this entertaining Numberphile video about this topic: [VIDEO] Apparently it's used in many areas in Physics.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28768820,"author":"barbs","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Conterintuitive facts in mathematics, CS, and physics","text":"This is a good video explaining it: [VIDEO] Although it relies on a particular interpretation of the left side of the equation, it's used in some areas of physics.","stance":"rec"}],"w2A8q3XIhu0":[{"hn_comment_id":16720382,"author":"eliaspro","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Why is telephone \u201chold music\u201d still such poor quality?","text":"Relevant Tom Scott's \"Things You Might Not Know\"-Video: \"Why Hold Music Sounds Worse Now\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36770725,"author":"colejohnson66","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Computer memory prototype ditches 1s and 0s for denser data storage","text":"There's a legitimate reason for that. Tom Scott did a video on it.[0] It basically boils down to telephone switches starting to compress the audio. Compress and decompress multiple times (by various companies) on the way to you, and the quality degrades very quick. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"w3WYdYyjek4":[{"hn_comment_id":40851012,"author":"samatman","month":"2024-07","story_title":"A write-ahead log is not a universal part of durability","text":"I second this recommendation. I'm impressed by what TigerBeetle has accomplished, and would love to see more of the industry approach software engineering with their philosophy and rigour. The TigerStyle video is well worth watching for anyone who wants to build defect-free software systems, or recognizes that this is the correct thing to aim for. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41526836,"author":"samatman","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Why Haskell?","text":"> Zig will be easy to understand and use but too unsafe to use for important applications This is an outside perspective on Zig, and I have to say, not an informed one. If you'd like to understand Zig (and what I mean) better, this video is a good start: [VIDEO] Zig is, right now, being used for high-assurance systems where correctness is a terminal value, and it provides many tools and affordances to assist in doing so. It isn't a good choice for projects which give lip-service to correctness, but for ones which actually mean it, and are willing and able to put in the effort and expense to achieve it, it's an excellent choice. I'm willing to gloss that domain as \"important applications\", but perhaps you meant something different by that term.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43646566,"author":"jorangreef","month":"2025-04","story_title":"We Designed TigerBeetle's Docs from Scratch","text":"Joran from TigerBeetle here! We didn't design our docs because it was \"a fun thing\" (as suggested) but rather because we simply care deeply about the experience of developers reading our docs. For example, concerning performance and offline use, which were further reasons we gave in the post. We have a high bar for taking on dependencies. We don't take on dependencies automatically without justification. It's just not a philosophy that we share, to assume or to insist that everything needs to be a dependency. (The discussion on CSP in our post was also not given as motivation, but as an example of the thought process that went into this. Again, as per the post, it's a matter of defense-in-depth. We have plans for how our docs will be used in future, that you may not be aware of, and security is important.) Finally, we're happy with the result, the project was small and didn't take long. We're used to \"painting\" things like this fairly quickly. It's just easier for us than trying to \"sculpt\" off the shelf dependencies. That's not to suggest that everyone needs to paint like we do at TigerBeetle, but it's equally true that not everyone needs to sculpt either. [1] [1] To understand our engineering methodology, and why we prefer to paint than sculpt, see TigerStyle: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44603752,"author":"jorangreef","month":"2025-07","story_title":"NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency","text":"We apply this pretty much fully at TigerBeetle [1]. Reason being that TigerStyle is not only about shipping safer software, but shipping it in less time [2], factoring in the Total Cost of Ownership to end users. In other words, not only optimizing our development time, but also all the time spent in production with subsequent fixes. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44603827,"author":"jorangreef","month":"2025-07","story_title":"NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency","text":"Appreciated your post, Lewis! From the beginning, TigerStyle was intended not only for TigerBeetle as infrastructure, but for software (up and down the stack) in general. Nobody wants buggier, slower software. And so TigerStyle as a methodology was codified primarily to address this problem: How to write \u201chigher quality software in less time\u201d? [1] Before designing TigerBeetle, I was finding the principles more and more valuable, regardless of whether I was doing frontend or backend work, and so brought them into TigerBeetle. Of course, software higher up is likely to use some dependencies, but there's always a cost, and this principle (\u201cdo more with less\u201d), at least in my experience, tends to prove valuable when applied. [1] Some of the background motivation behind TigerStyle: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44606975,"author":"jorangreef","month":"2025-07","story_title":"NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency","text":"> How does TigerBeetle's existence support the argument that rolling your own dependencies is better than using off-the-shelf tools? At least from my own experience, without TigerStyle [0], there's no way we could have shipped TigerBeetle from 0 to production in 3.5 years, with the same quality, and to the same tolerances: [LINK] Whereas, for example, if we'd used off-the-shelf dependencies such as Raft or RocksDB, it would have been a nightmare, and taken longer, just to fix them up to solve our storage fault model and implement Protocol-Aware Recovery correctly. Even then, we'd have been stuck with a systems language of the last 30 years (C/C++), when we could have invested in a language for the next 30 and with a more powerful toolchain. Of course, we'd also have been without Deterministic Simulation Testing, because most software dependencies are typically not designed for DST. But finally (and to your point about sustainability), without TigerStyle, we wouldn't have had the company, or the investment, team, and customers we have today, or be as far along financially. Not saying that you need to share our engineering philosophy. But it works for us. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45705246,"author":"jorangreef","month":"2025-10","story_title":"TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation","text":"You're right! In the past, distributed databases written without Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) would typically take around ~10 years (~5 years for the consensus protocol and ~5 years for the storage engine). And then not without bugs. However, and we write about this also in the post, but TigerStyle and DST enabled us to ship TigerBeetle to production in 3.5 years, in less time, to a higher standard, and to be the first distributed database with an explicit storage fault model (Kyle Kingsbury added new storage fault injectors to Jepsen) solving Protocol-Aware Recovery. Our Jepsen audit is here (also linked in the post): [LINK] For more on TigerStyle as a methodology, hope you enjoy this talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45783444,"author":"jorangreef","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Tigerbeetle Simulator","text":"Joran from TigerBeetle here! This is a \u201cwalking sim\u201d real visualization of our Deterministic Simulation Testing harness, the VOPR. Typically we do DST headless in the terminal but this is a visualization, more or less the same thing but with a gaming engine on top. It\u2019s running real TigerBeetle code, but with simulated network/storage and fault injection, and multiple replicas in a cluster, all compiled to WASM and running in the browser, and you can interact with the simulation to poke it and watch the consensus recover. Here\u2019s the full background context and explanation from our talk, TigerStyle, for which we developed this sim: [VIDEO] See also a shorter explanation: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"w3_0x6oaDmI":[{"hn_comment_id":9338428,"author":"pdkl95","month":"2015-04","story_title":"Unit tests fail when run in Australia","text":"I love Tom Scott's computerphile videos. His frustration grows over a few videos; his videos about the difficulties of internationalization[1] and the problems of electronic voting[2] are even crazier. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17723134,"author":"ajurna","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Could programmers convince society not to use software voting systems?","text":"please watch this: [VIDEO] it has a good list of reasons why software voting is a terrible idea. also the secret ballet is very important to maintaining the fairness of elections.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18111146,"author":"marcyb5st","month":"2018-10","story_title":"US mid-terms: Hackers expose 'staggering' voter machine flaws","text":"I love [this video]( [VIDEO] ) from Tom Scott in which he explains quite well why e-voting is inherently bad. I am very happy that here in Switzerland, even if we have to vote several times every year, we still do it the old fashion way :).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14099568,"author":"mcast","month":"2017-04","story_title":"Election Commission of India throws \u201copen challenge\u201d to hack voting machines","text":"Having open source voting systems is a great thing, but electronic voting is inherehently flawed and is a terrible idea. There's no way to prove the checksum of your software is real unless you have root access to the voting machine and are assuming the OS is not compromised. Decentralized electronic machines that print paper ballots for you (which you can physically verify), and submitting to a tabulator seem to be the safest option. But your paper ballot can be compromised in transit by a worker. I have also heard talks about using a blockchain-esque system for voting and verifying it online with a hash code. Here's a great video by Tom Scott: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17718277,"author":"herogreen","month":"2018-08","story_title":"XKCD: Voting software","text":"Perhaps the most important political message I have seen on XKCD. Related Computerphile episode: [VIDEO] I guess that some computer-powered elections are coming in the US, EU ?","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20622683,"author":"ninjaPixel","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Darpa wants help cracking the election security problem","text":"I thought it was nonsense when I first heard it, but the traditional paper system is actually more secure than a completely digital system. Here is a really good video explaining it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45752186,"author":"DontBreakAlex","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Tell HN: Azure outage","text":"In europe, voting typically happens in one day, where everyone physically goes to their designated voting place and puts papers in a transparent box. You can stay there and wait for the count at the end of the day if you want to. Tom Scott has a very good video about why we don't want electronic/mail voting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"w70Xc9CStoE":[{"hn_comment_id":39909576,"author":"sph","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Stop Killing Games","text":"This is a campaign to stop game publishers from turning off and rendering their games-as-a-service which people might have paid for completely inaccessible. The goal is to contact as many consumer agencies worldwide until we have some solid legislation that forces game companies to patch or release their backend, so that paying users can keep playing the game indefinitely after the publishers decide to pull the plug. Games-as-a-service are an increasingly common practice that puts an expiration date to games that are sold at full price, and many users are totally unaware that after a few years the game they have paid for is basically worthless. There is no technological reason this is the case, but pure greed by publishers. Many of today's GaaS are single-player games that have no business at all being online-only. A studio might choose this publishing strategy to extract as much money from consumers, to milk the playerbase with a monthly subscription and killing games when a sequel is announced. There is no law today stopping companies from doing so. We can play games from the 1970s, we can play multiplayer games from the 1990s but many others not even a decade old now are lost forevermore. This is unacceptable. --- Companion video by the author, Ross Scott: \"The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games\" - [VIDEO] --- EDIT: it is quite disheartening to see software engineers in this forum defending the practice and saying it is impossible to patch an online-","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41127591,"author":"worble","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Stop Killing Games \u2013 European Citizens' Initiative","text":"For extra context, you can watch Ross Scott's videos about his campaign to stop games being killed. Original video with all the different avenues he's trying: [VIDEO] The one specifically about this initiative: [LINK] He's done smaller update videos on how it's been progressing on his channel if you want additional info.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41666720,"author":"boltzmann-brain","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Stop Killing Games Interview with Ross/AccursedFarms and Damian/SKG Organizer [video]","text":"The [recent CA legislation]( [LINK] ) brought back the topic of Stop Killing Games which is an ongoing campaign to pass laws similar to the CA ban and much more. If you want a very short exposition of what Stop Killing Games is, here's a ~1 minute video: [LINK] Ross Scott is best known for his youtube series \"Freeman's Mind\" where he plays Half-Life and narrates what Gordon Freeman must be thinking, with a lot of deeply philosophical considerations. It's a staple of YouTube. He's also been running a series called \"Dead Game News\" and that's how Stop Killing Games was born. The other organizer, Damian, is a real-deal neckbeard dev and has pretty much done it all from BASIC on 8-bit micros to theorem provers and from video games to cryptography audits. Here's the original intro to Stop Killing Games by Ross: [VIDEO] And here's a subsequent FAQ: [LINK] [Related discussion]( [LINK] ) P.S. had to edit the title a tiny bit as it was a few chars over limit.","stance":"rec"}],"wAIP6fI0NAI":[{"hn_comment_id":17075368,"author":"stcredzero","month":"2018-05","story_title":"How Social Media Exploits Our Moral Emotions","text":"Great TED talk on the original twitter kerfuffle referenced in the article: [VIDEO] CGP Grey's take on how outrage is used to exploit us through social media: (Yes, I link this often, because the message is valuable.) [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24652917,"author":"sebmellen","month":"2020-10","story_title":"My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison","text":"I would hope that all agree a violent crime is worse than a racist tweet. However, there is a sentiment of sympathy afforded to murderers (that they're somehow deserving of rehabilitation) which is not always extended to those who have tweeted racist things. Perhaps this comes because a murder can be seen as a sad result of circumstances. Perhaps the criminal only had to murder because they had a bad upbringing and needed the cash and it was a horrible mistake. On the other hand, people perceived as racist are permanently marked as being ideologically dangerous. Mainly, I think this comes because racist tweeters can be seen as more directly responsible for their actions than a murderer. Of course, this line of reasoning is nonsense, but it appears to be quite common. Jon Ronson has a great TED talk about this, titled \"How one tweet can ruin your life\": [VIDEO] . I would recommend that the grandparent post watch this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27295840,"author":"Zealotux","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Life after an internet mob attack","text":"A relevant TED Talk I always think of when reading about these stories: [VIDEO] Which makes me think: who are these people with enough time of their hands to be morality warriors on internet? Also who are these _friends_ who jumps on conclusion without allowing for a defense? I shouldn't be difficult, in this digitalized world, to provide solid proof of wrongdoing. I may not be the most aware of social cues, or maybe it's a cultural thing, but some of these people seems like absolute sociopaths.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34854531,"author":"josephg","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books","text":"Yep; to say nothing of the psychological effects of being told that the whole world hates you. That sounds really traumatic. I'm not generally a contrapoints fan, but I really enjoyed the video she made about her experience with this on twitter: [LINK] Or the TED talk \"How one tweet can ruin your life\" from 2015: [VIDEO] We studied To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crucible when I was in highschool. I remember thinking how barbaric and despicable \"mob justice\" was. I didn't understand it, and I assumed I never would - I thought it was something we reference from history. But twitter really has brought the mob justice style witch hunts back. I don't understand how anyone can claim its not a real phenomenon. Being cancelled is obviously quite a real experience for the people it happens to.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44637365,"author":"dkdcio","month":"2025-07","story_title":"The sadist assault on the 'Coldplay couple'","text":"I'm reminded of this TED talk in these scenarios, by a journalist and author who interviewed many people who have been publicly shamed: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wASCH_gPnDw":[{"hn_comment_id":7699478,"author":"pk2200","month":"2014-05","story_title":"Why I am excited about Clojure","text":"I'd like to learn Clojure. Any suggestions on how to get started? It's my first time using a Lisp dialect. I figured I'd tackle the Clojure Koans, and mix in a few Project Euler problems. I'd also like to do some code reading. I know the Clojure source code is on GitHub, but maybe something smaller to start? If anyone else is interested in getting started, here are a few links I visited over the weekend: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO] The last link is an hour-long interview with Rich Hickey - a fantastic introduction to the language and his design goals. It's probably the best technical video I've ever watched on YouTube.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18366337,"author":"nocman","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Minesweeper in Clojure","text":"Um, destructuring is a very old concept in Lisp circles. [LINK] Don't know if Rich first got the idea from Lisp or not, but it seems likely since he did a bunch of development in Common Lisp (generating C++, of all things :-D ) ages ago. I don't remember if I heard him talk about that in the \"Expert to Expert\" video ( [VIDEO] ), or in \"Simple Made Easy\" ( [LINK] ). I think it was the former, but both of those are worth watching multiple times. It's also entirely possible that it was in an entirely different video of his -- but it was him . I've yet to be disappointed in any of his talks, so if I'm wrong about the exact one, just keep watching any of his talks on YouTube till you find it. xD","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42663904,"author":"knubie","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Why we built Vade Studio in Clojure","text":"> What I don\u2019t understand the advantage for \u201cstate management\u201d. Like, you build a new state object, and then mutate some pointer from prevState to nextState\u2026 that\u2019s what everyone else is doing too. Clojure's real super power is its reference type(s) (in particular the atom). Rich does an excellent job explaining them in this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wBBnfu8N_J0":[{"hn_comment_id":40734176,"author":"Uehreka","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Nobody knows what's going on","text":"A couple paragraphs in and I\u2019m already like \u201cAh, here comes the Michael Crichton quote, the \u201cpapers\u2019 full of \u2018em\u201d one.\u201d I\u2019ve never read one of these that didn\u2019t come off as unbearably smug. Like sure, discerning the truth is hard, duh. But the people who try their best to do it, even if they sometimes fail, are worth immeasurably more than the dead-souled people who decide \u201cmight as well sling bullshit since it\u2019s impossible to be totally correct\u201d (if that\u2019s not what the article is saying out loud, it\u2019s certainly what a lot of the commenters are saying) Edit: Just to end on a positive note, I want to call out the one good piece of content in this genre, which takes Gell-Mann amnesia, flips it, inverts it, and then skewers Michio Kaku for trying to act like he knows about hurricanes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42405679,"author":"rozab","month":"2024-12","story_title":"The Depths of Wikipedians","text":"Dr Angela Collier has this fun concept she calls Mann-Gell Amnesia about how basic explanations of topics you are an expert in always seem very unsatisfactory, even when they come from good sources. It's definitely a weird little bias I've noticed in myself! [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wE5G1kTndI4":[{"hn_comment_id":39513637,"author":"theluketaylor","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Spain's plan to ban domestic flights where you can take a train in under 2.5 hrs","text":"The CityNerd youtube channel recently did a list of city pairs ideally suited for high speed rail based on Spain's own network. spoiler alert: the northeast corridor plays a pretty heavy part, but it's not the only place in the US high speed rail makes a ton of sense. Highly recommended. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39982309,"author":"browningstreet","month":"2024-04","story_title":"San Francisco-to-L.A. overnight train inches closer to reality","text":"CityNerd identifies 56 train segments that should be built, using data and reasonable, precedented criteria: [VIDEO] His video description: \"Nothing that exists in North America fits the definition of true high-speed rail. If we actually ever started building a network, where would we start? And how would we know when we were done? This video details a methodology for answering all those questions, then counts up 56 city pairs we really should've had high-speed rail service between long, long ago.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40224160,"author":"alistairSH","month":"2024-05","story_title":"General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy","text":"Mixed answer. One driving factor in the creation of the interstate system was military - we wanted the ability to easily move troops/supplies across the US without airlift or rail. Not sure that's still a valid need (as in, I don't know - would need to ask a general). Also, the US is huge. We do need some sort of road system to get across it. Building rail to everywhere is prohibitively expensive. That said, we should/could have good high speed rail in the densest areas. Like expand the Acela corridor CityNerd does a nice summary of city pairs that should have high speed rail based on population and distance... [VIDEO] tl;dr - DC-NYC tops the list (and include Philly and Balt). LA to SF is near the top. Chicago-DET-Toronto is up there. And on down the list. Basically, there's no good reason (other than momentum/history) to not build out solid rail networks over parts of the US. I don't think anybody reasonably expects an LA-NYC link any time soon because flying is a better option for now.","stance":"rec"}],"wFpeM3fxJoQ":[{"hn_comment_id":30525561,"author":"dTal","month":"2022-03","story_title":"A Rocket Launch Seen from the ISS","text":"Well, I'm not really a fan of picking favorites, but since we're talking about astronomical time lapses, I think this one must surely rank highly: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40862768,"author":"tohuvavohu","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Why is Chile so long?","text":"Watching this footage of the Very Large Telescope in Chile was the first time I really grasped that we're all together on a rock tumbling through the vastness of space: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13714076,"author":"dTal","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth","text":"Wanderers is indeed excellent. See also: the timelapse footage of the sky from the VLT, Paranal. Just thinking about it gives me vertigo. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wGt4XwBbCvA":[{"hn_comment_id":30299020,"author":"yamrzou","month":"2022-02","story_title":"France to Build Six New Nuclear Reactors","text":"Jancovici is a legend. Listenening to him and reading his latest comic book ( Le monde sans fin ) made me very aware of climate issues and directly influenced my behavior. He deserves to be better known by international audiences. Here are some of his talks in english: - [VIDEO] - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19278719,"author":"blencdr","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Cheap renewables won\u2019t stop global warming (2018)","text":"Another really interesting conference [1] about energy, economics and physics. Bill Gates is right and the path to reduce our greenhouse gas emission won't be easy. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22659353,"author":"H8crilA","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Stagnation and Scientific Incentives","text":"There's a much much simpler explanation for the stagnation of real GDP. You have to look at energy consumption (joules / year). The correlations are uncanny and seem to explain just about everything. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] It's so simple and accurate that I have no idea why doesn't everybody know about this. It better than discovering central banking.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23043159,"author":"artur_makly","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Climate experts call for 'dangerous' Michael Moore film to be taken down","text":"this doc illustrates the enormous realities of energy challenges with sober clarity often exposed by Jancovici [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29171024,"author":"nunja","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Macron says France will build new nuclear energy reactors","text":"Jean Marc Jancovici is one of the most vocal of we can call \"Nuclear ecologist\" around in France, the content is amazing and he definitely have a point if you want to follow [0]. He is a realist, but in this field we need to go beyond and to open big money for the research into small and decentralized nuclear power. Every citizen have to know the pros and the cons, and be educated to the risks. Energy provide good living standards, but we have to know the drawbacks and we have to account for externalities in every business model. This will be the only way to keep our standards of living and keep an habitable home. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37490734,"author":"BoiledCabbage","month":"2023-09","story_title":"WTF Happened in 1971?","text":"I haven't read anything that I've felt covered it fully. If you want something easy to consume on our economy and technological progress essentially being getting better at converting energy to productive work you can check out this somewhat decent link from Jancovici: [VIDEO] It meanders a bit for the first 5-7 mins, but does a decent job of making the argument. Min 40 also has another pretty good slide. It does go into covering recommendations which I'm not necessarily recommending, but it does accurately summarize our economy as one of energy transformation. The best analogy in it is this. Right now if we need to do construction and dig a 10ft x 10ft x 10ft hole we can pull out a backhoe and be done in a min. If we with all of our current knowledge had to do it without consuming energy we'd be digging by hand with a shovel, and no faster than someone pre-industrial would. When you start looking at every industry you come to the same conclusion. All of our technological know how boils down to just better ways to be more productive in converting energy. But fundamentally consuming energy to be productive is the modern economy.","stance":"rec"}],"wIC-iGDTU40":[{"hn_comment_id":17702287,"author":"news_to_me","month":"2018-08","story_title":"Energy Saved, Sleep Lost: The Unintended Consequences of LED Lighting","text":"The youtube channel Technology Connections has a couple of interesting articles about LED (and sodium-vapor lamp) bulbs in street lighting: [VIDEO] (Actually, most if his videos are pretty interesting to explore, especially the ones about early TV)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24073493,"author":"kibwen","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Germany plans to dim lights at night to save insects","text":"Here's a quite good video about the pros and cons of LED vs high/low-pressure sodium street lamps: [VIDEO] . It goes into lamp efficiency, how our eyes see differently at night, response time under different sorts of light, color temperature, circadian rhythm disruption, and light pollution.","stance":"rec"}],"wICOlaQOpM0":[{"hn_comment_id":19065347,"author":"justaguyonline","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Oumuamua continues to perplex astronomers a year after it vanished","text":"And I really recommend this PBS Space Time Video: [VIDEO] He makes excellent points that given historical data, a mm thin solar sail really shouldn't be our first conclusion instead of a collection of rocks that broke apart and refused back together (think of a combination of Shoemaker-Levy and Ultima Thule). And given the short length of time we've been observing space, chances of one of the first things we see enter our solar system be a tumbling, solar sail would mean that interstellar space is chock full of wildly tumbling solar sails! We need to take base rates for probability into account and realize that since most of the stuff we've seen in space is just rocks and most of our models predict just rocks in interstellar space, the probability of it being anything other than just a rock is very low. This whole media obsession with Avi Loeb definitely feels like an example of news organization paying too much attention to the institution an academic works at and not how the rest of their field thinks about their ideas.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18512757,"author":"herogreen","month":"2018-11","story_title":"6 Strange Facts about the Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua","text":"If you like videos, PBS Space Time published one recently about the paper that tests the light sail hypothesis: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19340909,"author":"cpeterso","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox","text":"The PBS Space Time video series, written and hosted by Lehman College astrophysicist Matthew O\u2019Dowd, has a nice analysis of popular 'Oumuamua theories: \"'Oumuamua Is Not Aliens\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wJWksPWDKOc":[{"hn_comment_id":25478988,"author":"Red_Tarsius","month":"2020-12","story_title":"'I am mine': Alzheimer's at 41 (2018)","text":"I've recently discovered Everywhere at the End of Time by the Caretaker (James Kirby). It's a series of six music albums exploring and depicting memory loss, Alzheimer's disease and dementia. I wish I had the writing skills necessary to convey the emotional turmoil I went through by listening to the six stages in one sleepless night. [VIDEO] I also appreciated the attention to the details from the track titles to the choice of album covers. The last image \u2013 a broken canvas seen from behind \u2013 is especially haunting. It's the kind of experience that makes you re-evaluate many life choices.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39672485,"author":"fallinditch","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Flowers for Algernon (1965) [pdf]","text":"Check out the 6 album cycle that depicts the gradual degradation of dementia: Everywhere at the end of time by The Caretaker. A brilliantly imaginative work. [VIDEO] Chatgpt: This ambitious project was released in stages (or \"stages\") from 2016 to 2019, across six albums, each representing a different phase of dementia. Through his distinctive use of manipulated pre-World War II ballroom music, The Caretaker, aka Leyland Kirby, explores the progression of the disease, from subtle early signs to the total disintegration of memory and understanding. The work is both an artistic exploration and an empathetic representation of the condition's impact on the human mind and memory.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29096119,"author":"datameta","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Organ transplant patients may not get dementia","text":"The statistical prevalence of dementia is absolutely shocking to me... It is bar none one of the worst experiences one can go through. This [0] is an album that is an auditory approximation of it. I sincerely hope for more discourse and research dedicated to understanding, preventing, and treating it. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41064902,"author":"saulpw","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Memory for music doesn't diminish with age","text":"Thematically related is the music of The Caretaker. It's haunting and beautiful and quite memorable. Check out An Empty Bliss Beyond This World[0], which is kind of a nice album for some melancholy reflection on age and the experience of dementia. His final 6-album sequence, Everywhere At The End Of Time[1], is less accessible, particularly the final 3 albums which are mostly noise (the whole 6-hour work was a terrifying listening challenge on TikTok a few years ago). [0] [LINK] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43020226,"author":"rglover","month":"2025-02","story_title":"The hallucinatory thoughts of the dying mind","text":"Semi-related: not delirium, but if you haven't come across it, check out the \"Everywhere at the end of time\" series of albums. The music is written to track the timeline of dementia progressing [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wJyUtbn0O5Y":[{"hn_comment_id":21285411,"author":"ccvannorman","month":"2019-10","story_title":"New universe of miniproteins is upending cell biology and genetics","text":"* 'Small proteins also promise to revise the current understanding of the genome. Many appear to be encoded in stretches of DNA\u2014and RNA\u2014that were not thought to help build proteins of any sort. Some researchers speculate that the short stretches of DNA could be newborn genes, on their way to evolving into larger genes that make full-size proteins. Thanks in part to small proteins, \"We need to rethink what genes are,\" says microbiologist and molecular biologist Gisela Storz of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland.' Wow. Amazing how incredible biology and proteins are and their still-barely-understood mechanisms. For anyone who hasn't already seen it, I highly recommend The Inner Life of a Cell [0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23464059,"author":"rstuart4133","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Reminder of Complexity","text":"This video blew me away: [VIDEO] It's an animation of the bio-chemistry a lymphocyte uses to move between cells (maybe - that's a guess?). It covers what I can only assume is a few milliseconds, it's just a tiny slither of the cells behaviours, yet how much is going on to make that happen is off the charts. I showed in it a club consisting of mostly software engineers, and the universal reaction was \"thank god I didn't do bio-chemistry\".","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30491450,"author":"dopylitty","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Discovery of ultrafast myosin, its amino acid sequence, and structural features","text":"Motor proteins are so incredibly cool. Like many others I was blown away by the 3D animated Inner Life of the Cell[1] showing these proteins physically walking around in the cell. Previously I had this idea that cells were just blobs of jelly and somehow they interacted with each-other to produce macro phenomena like muscle movement. And then you get into the other protein machines like the ATP synthase in the mitochondria [2] (also linked below) which are actually little motors/pumps. And we all have billions of these inside use spinning away. It's just amazing. 1. [VIDEO] 2. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39554094,"author":"adkaplan","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Rendering protein structures inside cells at the atomic level with Unreal Engine","text":"Appreciate the share. I've seen a compilation of these clips out of context and loved them. Never figured out where they came from. They really are amazing in striking the balance between organic and mechanistic. The Kinesin in particular are cute. [VIDEO] This video shows it quite well too. EDIT: looks like someone else shared the same.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39863990,"author":"bmitc","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]","text":">> I think our brains are machines for predicting what happens next. > Technologist thinks that humans are machines (breaking news) While I also dismiss or at least be careful of the inherent biases of technocratic viewpoints, humans and life in general are very much made of many types of machines. Take a look at these videos: [VIDEO] [LINK] I.e., life is insane and bewildering.","stance":"rec"}],"wK5v1Nw98xs":[{"hn_comment_id":34590586,"author":"fpoling","month":"2023-01","story_title":"When Will Fusion Energy Light Our Homes?","text":"The new video by the same guy who created the original criticism [VIDEO] starting from 2:03:00 explains that 95% recovery efficiency is not the whole story.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37679644,"author":"nabakin","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Nucor and Helion to Develop 500 MW Fusion Power Plant by 2030","text":"Additional resources for people who want to read or watch more on the subject: [VIDEO] [LINK] /u/ValAslanyan is Improbable Matter and he gets into some interesting debates about Helion [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"wM8Xli2KTzI":[{"hn_comment_id":28269883,"author":"IgorPartola","month":"2021-08","story_title":"A DIY E-bike Conversion on the Cheap","text":"Before you get on one of these, it\u2019s good to check your perspective on safety: [VIDEO] As a motorcyclist, electric bicycles make me very nervous.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29184637,"author":"nickysielicki","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Reflections on E-Bikes","text":"Fortnine made an excellent argument against the safety of ebikes, worth watching as a rebuttal to this article: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31014215,"author":"porknubbins","month":"2022-04","story_title":"E-bike injuries on the rise even on well protected Dutch roads","text":"The youtube motorcycle channel Fort Nine makes a pretty good argument that the risks of ebikes are similar to those of motorcycles, and the riders typically have less protective gear. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31800074,"author":"thoms_a","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Reasons to tour by bicycle","text":"Came here to say this. Bicycling is absolute madness to me in any location that doesn't have dedicated separate bike paths. You are maximizing all possible sources of risk by riding a bicycle on shared roads. I've ridden motorcycles since I was 16, and everyone always sees me as the daredevil. Yet, I still think bicycle commuters are the true madmen. Zero protection, can't keep up with traffic, your very presence is a psychological irritant to motorists which causes them to wish you harm, etc. But don't take my word for it: [VIDEO] My only advice to cyclists: put your bike on your car's bike rack, take to a bike path and enjoy. If you want to get on a road on two wheels, buy a motorcycle and wear every piece of protective gear you can afford. You (and your family) can thank me later.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32705057,"author":"Animats","month":"2022-09","story_title":"The E-bike Is a Monstrosity","text":"\"E-bikes\u2019 identity crisis might seem like the symptom of a transition\" The identity crisis is that they are electric motorcycles/mopeds pretending to be bicycles. Here's a good video on this by someone who has both an e-bike and a motorcycle.[1] He points out that for his commute in traffic, they get about the same performance. But on the motorcycle, he's more visible, has better protective gear, and has a lower center of gravity. The difference between a class I e-bike (20mph, no helmet required) and an electric motorcycle capable of 45 MPH is a switch. The trouble is, e-bikes with motorcycle speed capabilities lack motorcycle safety features. They're under-braked, under-tired, have crap suspensions, don't have full lights and turn signals, and the rider is up too high, so accidents are worse. There's a video of someone who put an e-bike motor hub in a small motorcycle frame, which got him something that's a better e-bike than most e-bikes, but is classified as a motorcycle. But low-end electric motorcycles have not caught on in the US. Bikers think they're uncool, and bicyclists think they're uncool. They're popular in parts of Asia. So, yes, there is an identity crisis. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44690391,"author":"Animats","month":"2025-07","story_title":"A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places","text":"That's a US definition pushed by the E-bike industry.[1] The EU has a completely different classification system.[2] Anything above a US class 1 e-bike comes with more restrictions. Good E-bike vs. Motorcycle discussion.[3] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wMFPe-DwULM":[{"hn_comment_id":1866899,"author":"DevX101","month":"2010-11","story_title":"If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)","text":"Of anyone I've read or seen (in person or from videos), Feynman has the best fundamental grasp of meta-knowledge. By meta-knowledge, for lack of a better term, I mean understanding what it means to know something. mhartl has already posted this excellent video: [VIDEO] , where he explains what the word \"why\" means in scientific inquiry. When we answer a \"why\" question, we don't really explain a concept in its entirety. At best, we're able to remove a layer of skin off the onion, but no one has ever really reached the center. I suppose science at it's heart is really just the elucidation of intermediate cause and effect scenarios. For the question \"why did the ball fall?\", \"Jimmy dropped it\" is a perfectly valid answer. So is \"Jimmy's motor neurons passed an action potential threshold, causing the muscles in his wrist to contract\". So is \"the ball moved along the curvature of space caused by the earth\". How far do we go?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1866564,"author":"mhartl","month":"2010-11","story_title":"If Richard Feynman applied for a job at Microsoft (2002)","text":"For those who think this doesn't sound at least a little bit like Feynman, I highly recommend this video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7010609,"author":"jliechti1","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Beware techies talking gobbledegook","text":"Sometimes it's not always possible to explain something in sufficient detail to someone who has no concept of what you are trying to explain. Feynman explains this really well when trying to answer a question about magnets: \"Of course, it's an excellent question. But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. That satisfies people. It satisfies, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and who knew nothing about why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital... when you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise, you're perpetually asking why.\" \"I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's familiar to you. For example, if we said the magnets attract like if rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they're not connected by rubber bands. I'd soon be in trouble. And secondly, if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I'm trying to use the rubber bands to explain. So I have cheated very badly, you see.\" The key quote being: \"I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you're more familiar with, because I don't u","stance":"rec"}],"wO2lWmgEK1Y":[{"hn_comment_id":33260323,"author":"open-source-ux","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Brexit update (August 2022) [video]","text":"For a more in-depth look at Brexit, watch this excellent documentary from the Financial Times (FT): The Brexit effect: how leaving the EU hit the UK [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33306246,"author":"madog","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Global media ask what's happened to Britain","text":"Just to add to this there was a good Financial Times film [1] recently that covered the after effects of Brexit. Covid and Ukraine have allowed politicians to divert attention away from the economic disaster that Brexit has been, and have been handy scapegoats, but the fact Brexit has damaged the U.K. economically is undeniable. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33456098,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Bank of England expects UK to fall into longest ever recession","text":"With the mess of England's prime minster, a number of Brexit videos showed up in my feed on Youtube... some of the ones that I've watched that are interesting. A German documentary (it has English subtitles for the German narration)): British Fishermen and Brexit | ARTE.tv Documentary [LINK] A financial times article on Brexit - The Brexit effect: how leaving the EU hit the UK | FT Film [VIDEO] A TLDR from earlier this week: No-one Likes Brexit Anymore: What Happens Next? [LINK] (the main part on this relevant is the polling and the corresponding events) --- There's a fair bit of Brexit-regret going on now and some people apparently still think its a good idea. At the time of the referendum, it appears that quite a few people who did a day's work in Britain thought that it was a good idea, but have since come to realize that it wasn't.","stance":"rec"}],"wOlcB-JxkFw":[{"hn_comment_id":10874632,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Why I Write Games in C","text":"You'd be surprised. There's a GDC talk about Antichamber from a couple years ago (I really recommend watching it) which explains the amount of time that was invested into the game. Antichamber was a 7 year long hack on Unreal Engine, it's really not a drop-in game. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14089446,"author":"Cpoll","month":"2017-04","story_title":"In the Videogame Industry, Hiring People Is a Last Resort","text":"No, they are exactly the same. It's hard to find a GDC talk on Youtube where the creator of a game doesn't get teared up talking about the despair and elation they felt slaving over their game for four years. Try this one: [VIDEO] I also firmly believe there are games that won't be forgotten in a few decades.","stance":"rec"}],"wOmjnioNulo":[{"hn_comment_id":16707162,"author":"emj","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Network of fortified towns indicates Amazon was once heavily populated","text":"CGP grey has a great video based on that book: [LINK] , there is also a follow up on the related subject of animal domestication [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33786031,"author":"oblio","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Beyond Meat Is Struggling, and the Plant-Based Meat Industry Worries","text":"A classic: [VIDEO] \"Ten pounds of grass make a pound of steak. And ten pounds of steak make a pound of tiger. But these have the same number of calories - so you might as well just eat the cow and save yourself a lot of work.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37670475,"author":"bizzletk","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Digging In: Why Don\u2019t Americans Eat Mutton?","text":"CGP Grey has a great video [0] that goes into why some animals are better to farm/breed/eat than others. The top selection criteria are animals that are: 1. Friendly 2. Feedable 3. \"Fecund\" 4. Family-friendly [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wROQUZDCIMI":[{"hn_comment_id":39530522,"author":"CaliforniaKarl","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Nintendo is suing the creators of Switch emulator Yuzu","text":"I really recommend folks watch this, from a lawyer: [VIDEO] \u201cWhy Are Emulators Legal? Dolphin vs. Nintendo, and the Fate of Dolphin Emulator\u201d","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37902185,"author":"Shish2k","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Playing Pokemon Red with Reinforcement Learning","text":"It varies based on country and jurisdiction, but from an American / European perspective - some parts of the emulation scene are \u201cdefinitely not legal\u201d (eg, distributing copyrighted ROMs), and most parts of the scene are \u201cIt is complicated. Well-informed people have different predictions, but it hasn\u2019t been tested in court, so we don\u2019t know for sure\u201d. Moon Channel (an actual lawyer) has a fairly clear and concise summary with particular relation to the Dolphin emulator\u2019s attempt to get itself on Steam: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wSF82AwSDiU":[{"hn_comment_id":6979411,"author":"Theodores","month":"2013-12","story_title":"The UK \"Porn\" Filter Blocks Kids' Access To Tech, Civil Liberties Websites","text":"Here is the truth - watch too much porn and you get erectile dysfunction: [VIDEO] Why did it take me decades to find someone able to present that reasonably plausible reason as to why I should definitely not want to watch porn under any circumstances whatsoever? The argument (with science) in the above TED talk is that if you do watch a lot of porn then you are not going to aroused by real women as much as you should, leading to unsatisfactory bedroom performances. Yep, porn is actually that dangerous. I might not care for the traditional 'don't watch porn because it is porn'/'think of the children'/'porn exploits women' arguments, however, I do have enlightened self interest and loss of libido is so not what I want to have. If I was in the UK government I would want to get this message out to kids in schools, not to scare them away from porn for the sake of it, but because they deserve to have 'normal', happy sexual health. By censoring porn they are not going to get this message, in fact they will be further away from it than they are now, doing what they can to get the 'forbidden fruit' instead of knowing why they just should not bother. Instead of censoring they could have demanded that there be a banner on the pages of porn sites warning that use of porn leads to erectile dysfunction. This would be a proactive move, no harder to get into law than that stupid 'this site uses cookies' directive. They could get the ISPs to do it so porn from outer Mongolia would be suitably","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12742607,"author":"cyberpunk","month":"2016-10","story_title":"UK Government proposes porn-viewing ID","text":"[VIDEO] ^^ This really opened my eyes to this problem for me.. It's really rather worrying, and I guess my generation (early 30s) were the last to avoid this so it's kind of invisible to us because of how awkward it is to talk about such things. We need to do something, perhaps better education and getting more comfortable talking about sex and relationships with young people is a better approach than failed-from-the-outset restrictions... Either way, the points in that video are imo, valid, and should worry everyone.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18497716,"author":"sizzle","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources for introverted devs to learn workplace politics?","text":"Also, an often overlooked topic of modern times, high speed internet pornography + chronic masturbation and its numbing effects on our neural reward system which makes things like eye contact and social activities unbearable and highly disconcerting. This addiction isn't talked about much because it is almost a universal coping mechanism for guys beginning in adolescence, but you have nothing to lose in trying to abstain and see if your social anxiety melts away. At worst you just determine that it's something else like depression and can go seek out a proper medical diagnosis. The crazy thing about the social anxiety inducing effects of chronic masturbation is that it is not taught in medical school and doctors do not diagnose or advise that it can be detrimental to people's lives, granted you are oblivious to the hormonal imbalances it causes w.r.t. neuroscience (orgasm induced prolactin release suppressing dopamine in neural pleasure/reward system). Great Ted talk on subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30443539,"author":"PKop","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Inside Pornhub","text":"Midwest US, mid 30's. This sort of view is strongly held by the intellectual and political circles I support and follow. I think it is a very insidious and corrupting addiction, and the modern incarnation of it is orders of magnitude more stimulating than in prior eras. Infinite access to a stimulus that simulates in male brains \"mating\" with ever varied women, which is hijacking a strong biological imperative. As another comment mentioned a similar problem with \"advertising\" in general, I think sexualization and over stimulus of the population weakens people, and not to say there is some conspiracy purposefully pushing this (it may just emergent from technology and human instinct) I do think the corrupting influence weakens a population and makes them more easily dominated by strong forces... media, business, government, etc. All to say that, in terms of \"what is best to cultivate a strong society and people\" porn is extremely antithetical to this. A stronger society is one that would be avoiding, however necessary, consumption and production of pornography. This presentation [0] on the physiological effects of porn consumption is very informative. Observations mirror what strong opiates do to the brain A good overview of the public health problem of porn[1] The psychologically destabilizing and weakening effects of porn, and how they breakdown willpower to oppose stronger forces are illustrated by the time when the Israeli military broadcast pornography onto the televisions","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5052423,"author":"msluyter","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Did porn warp me forever?","text":"On the same topic, \"The Great Porn Experiment\" TED talk, which provides some empirical grounding for the anecdote in the article: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5379890,"author":"argonz","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Maybe not the best place to seek life advice but I trust you guys","text":"Porn can create/maintain different thinking patterns, underhabituate you for normal real-life cues. By withdrawing and resensitizing your dopamine circuits you might jumpstart your motivation, getting more fun and getting out of the rut. Shouldn't expect a miracle but may worth a try. [VIDEO] good luck!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7443028,"author":"diadara","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Hexagon 16384","text":"[VIDEO] Have you seen this TED talk about porn addiction and how it has similar effects like some sort of hard drug addiction on the brain. Everything uses the same pipeline.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17167113,"author":"PKop","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Pornography and the Butterfly Effect","text":"Here's an enlightening video on the detrimental effects of porn on the brain. Porn addiction shows similar effects as opiates. [VIDEO] Related: \"NoFap\" [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25419175,"author":"trident1000","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Pornhub just purged all unverified content from the platform","text":"Ive watched porn all my life (like most). I dont have a moral vendetta against it. But it seems to be a no-go topic for discussing the serious societal issues from porn. As I've grown older ive realized its really very toxic and probably the most widespread addiction in the US causing real issues. When you watch porn all day or even just a few times per week, your testosterone and hormonal balance as a man changes. You do not go after women and start a family. You are more likely to be depressed. It causes brain fog and mood disorders. Etc. Theres some good TED talks on this which are easy to find. This is never talked about and should be. Little off topic maybe but just wanted to state this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26911650,"author":"Korpocalypse","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How Do You Optimize Your Intake of Information?","text":"related ted talk on dopamine, the internet, and novelty seeking [VIDEO] also related: the modern diet contains alot of calorically dense food, which means less stomach and intenstinal stretching, which means more ghrelin, which activates these novelty-seeking dopaminergic systems in the brain as for the original question: a) as far as optimizing, I think that approaching the optimal state is less important than making improvements to a consistent performance ethic. Better to do something a little better every day than to miss days trying to do it better than everybody else. b) with information, I tend to focus on information that relates to a particular goal relevant to job performance or general wellbeing and then take notes on any new information and review prior notes relevant to the newest information in order to build an intuitive mental logical structure of the problem/goal and all of its moving parts. But since so few things are scientifically provable, I try to \"bet\" on certain things based on how more or less likely they are and an informal cost-benefit analysis","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36380588,"author":"nashashmi","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Falcon LLM \u2013 A 40B Model","text":"And you know this because you\u2019re the expert of knowing what is morality? Decades of people telling you it is immoral, yet somehow you come along to say the opposite and hope people believe it? The only justification you can give is an ad hominem attack accusing the other person of not knowing what they are talking about. Try a little bit of academic knowledge here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wSdV1M7n4gQ":[{"hn_comment_id":18700021,"author":"ceronman","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Rust Analyzer in 2018 and 2019","text":"To better understand why this project is trying to re-implement the compiler frontend, I really recommend this video from Anders Hejlsberg (creator of C# and TypeScript) explaining how modern compiler construction oriented towards IDE works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22215520,"author":"atombender","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Rust Moving Towards an IDE-Friendly Compiler with Rust Analyzer","text":"Microsoft's Roslyn [1] design (now called .NET Compiler Platform) is what I think any language should strive for, turning the classical black box of the compiler into an incremental pipeline where each stage is annotated/augmented/refined by different mechanisms such as type checkers. If each step is incremental, it follows that it's easier to also let each step \"integrate\" deltas; for example, adding a comment shouldn't need to recompile anything at all, merely modify the AST, because it doesn't lead to any actual code artifacts. The second benefit is that all the information needed to inspect the program \u2014 from syntax highlighting to type information \u2014 is already there. If you can keep the entire high-level compilation state in memory, then it's easy to query it for all sorts of IDE features. This same design was used for the TypeScript compiler. Anders Heljsberg has a great little lecture [2] about it. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23001032,"author":"robocat","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Rust-analyzer \u2013 an IDE backend for Rust","text":"Anders Hejlsberg explains explains how \u201cthe IDE\u201d way compiler works. First ~10 minutes is traditional compiler background. Then about ~8 minutes before he starts talking about how an IDE focused compiler works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25390399,"author":"vector_spaces","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course","text":"I saw this great interview recently with Anders Hejlsberg at MSFT on how modern compiler construction differs from what is taught in traditional University courses. Is this what you're alluding to? After watching that interview, it's strange to read a comment like yours. While the architecture is completely different, it doesn't frankly seem like that big a leap to go from \"senior engineer with X years working on thing that's tangentially related to compilers\" to being able to be productive in a reasonable amount of time working with the new architecture. What am I missing? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wTPGW1PNy_Y":[{"hn_comment_id":23054737,"author":"nerdbaggy","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Medium-hard SQL interview questions","text":"I use to think that too. This is a good talk about how smart SQL query engines are. It is an hour though [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30297604,"author":"loudlambda","month":"2022-02","story_title":"A Hairy PostgreSQL Incident","text":"I would suggest that learning SQL (the syntax) isn't the crux--it's just syntax you learn over time based off need, just like learning python--what you need is motivation. I'd suggest watching this video to get a flavor of how much leverage using the database can give you: [VIDEO] If the database can make you more productive and more efficient and make your life easier, you now have incentive to use it more. Another thing that took my use of databases to the next level, was using PostGraphile ( [LINK] ). It takes a PostgreSQL database and provides a GraphQL endpoint for it. Use that as your only backend. You can use PostgreSQL row-level security to do access control (who can see or modify what). You can use PL/pgSQL to write business logic for higher level calculations. You can use constraints and triggers to do data validation. Each of these areas has an initially steep learning curve, and wonky syntax, but once you get over them you can implement many backends extremely quickly with them. And using PostGraphile where you only have SQL available (well, you can also add javascript extensions, but try to limit those) will be a great forcing function that will require you to scour stackoverflow and the excellent PostgreSQL docs to learn many of the useful corners of SQL you'd never learn otherwise.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37581728,"author":"lukaseder","month":"2023-09","story_title":"Permazen: Language-natural persistence to KV stores","text":"> This may be more intuitive for some developers, especially those that don't use SQL all the time. I tend to recommend my famous talk to such developers: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wUwZZaI5u0c":[{"hn_comment_id":16797779,"author":"adamisntdead","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Qusim.py \u2013 A toy multi-qubit quantum computer simulator written in Python","text":"You should check out these videos, one of them might give you an understanding! - [LINK] | Quantum Computers Explained - [LINK] | The Mathematics of Quantum Computers - [VIDEO] | Hacking at Quantum Speed with Shor's Algorithm - [LINK] | A series by the author of the standard textbook These are videos I particularly like!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18462970,"author":"msclrhd","month":"2018-11","story_title":"The Case Against Quantum Computing","text":"It's not that they can execute a computation faster in the traditional sense. It is that you can exploit the quantum behaviour in some types of computation (e.g. factoring primes) to make the answer more probable, and thus more likely to be \"observed\", when you read the state of the quantum computer and thus make it easy to locate the correct answer compared to traditional algorithms. PBS Infinite Series has several videos on quantum computing and Shor's algorithm: 1. [LINK] \"The Mathematics of Quantum Computers\" 2. [LINK] \"How to Break Cryptography\" 3. [VIDEO] \"Hacking at Quantum Speed with Shor's Algorthm\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21337209,"author":"fossuser","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off","text":"I'd recommend Charles Petzold's Code: [LINK] Which does a great job building up computing from bits all the way to a adders, CPUs, and assembly language (with the historical background around it too). I think the easiest way to get an idea for Quantum Computing and what the difference is comes from watching a specific example, I thought this example of Shor's algorithm was pretty good: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wVp5koAOu9M":[{"hn_comment_id":48741713,"author":"culi","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Forestiere Underground Gardens","text":"Almost all the videos on this channel are fascinating btw. Greenhouses enveloping entire houses/villages[0][1] in northern Europe to earthships[2] to someone growing citrus in Nebraska using trenches[3] to entire villages underground in Australia[4] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] I'd also recommend the channels FLORB and Happen Films though they're admittedly a little corny. [LINK] [LINK] Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't recently did a tour of an interesting alt home as well. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24068955,"author":"205guy","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Arcosanti","text":"Kirsten Dirksen Seems to be finding and documenting them on her YouTube channel: [LINK] Many are just individuals in alternative living situations or creative housing, but some are communities or -in-the-making: Earthship community in Taos New Mexico: [VIDEO] Back-to-the-traditional-village in Portugal: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30277013,"author":"somethoughts","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Separating urine from sewage could mitigate some environmental problems","text":"Kinda of reminds me of this fun video about a net zero desert house(/commune?). They proposed/demostrated a cycle that is basically Shower -> indoor plants -> toilet -> outdoor plants New Earthships capture more energy, water & food at lower cost [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wW9CAH9nSLs":[{"hn_comment_id":5942248,"author":"general_failure","month":"2013-06","story_title":"Docker joins the Linux Foundation","text":"EDIT: I had previously asked what exactly Docker is. [VIDEO] gives a super quick overview. Very interesting technology.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11767847,"author":"transitorykris","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Programmers are not different, they need simple UIs","text":"It's amazing that Docker has not been cited in the comments so far. LXC, jails, zones, etc were around for some time. What changed things imo was the incredible simplicity of the Dockerfile and the tooling around it. Re-watch the first public demo: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"w_znRopGtbE":[{"hn_comment_id":4727274,"author":"rrmm","month":"2012-11","story_title":"Build your own FPGA","text":"Check out Jeri Ellsworth's homebrow NMOS transistor for some real fun. Just get your bare silicon wafer from E-bay and have at it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6018025,"author":"DanBC","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Valve's flat management structure 'like high school'","text":"Jeri Ellsworth, for people who don't know, does really interesting hardware stuff. \"TSA body imaging at home\" ( [LINK] ) \"Home made EL wire\" ( [LINK] ) \"Recording Audio onto floppy discs\" ( [LINK] ) \"Home made transistor\" ( [LINK] ) \"Homebrew NMOS transistor\" ( [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25400940,"author":"didericis","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Become Shell Literate","text":"Another book recommendation: \"Elements of Computing Systems\" by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken. It doesn't go all the way down to the physics of semiconductors, but it goes down to logic gates and all the way up to tetris (there's a related course/website called nand to tetris: [LINK] ) If you want to go further down, check out Jeri Ellsworth's old videos where she built a transistor at home: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wbSwFU6tY1c":[{"hn_comment_id":16383544,"author":"codeulike","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Capturing Starman from 1M miles away","text":"You should watch the launch, its probably one of the most interesting engineering projects of the last few years. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23095378,"author":"tpmx","month":"2020-05","story_title":"SpaceX's Starship SN4 prototype fires rocket engine for first time","text":"I remember seeing it around or just after midnight when I was visiting a customer in Taipei. I had fallen asleep two hours earlier, but set a timer to wake up just for this historic event. Totally worth it. That was one the best executived live streams of all time: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33423069,"author":"somenameforme","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Falcon Heavy Launch [video]","text":"It's hard to measure objectively but I feel I was dramatically more impressed seeing first Falcon Heavy come down than I was seeing the first successful (non-heavy) landing. I've shown a lot of people (who aren't otherwise into space) the original Falcon Heavy landing video: [VIDEO] The most common response, by far, is: \"Is that real?\" It really is just that amazing. Even look at the YouTube comments. It's enough to make even the internet become a place of shared awe, wonder, and inspiration. Makes one wonder what the world would be like if we had media that focused more on things like this and less on things that divide and agitate people.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37996771,"author":"somenameforme","month":"2023-10","story_title":"NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12B miles away","text":"Falcon Heavy has been launching commercial, government, and military payloads successfully for years now. [1] I'd strongly encourage checking out their first successful test launch of it, from 5 years ago. [2] Skip to about 29 minutes in for the money shot. Still gives me goose bumps! So let's compare the two! Falcon Heavy was developed with completely private funding, at a cost of ~$500 million. The prices of the launches are listed in Wiki. They start at $117 million, as NASA paid in 2023 to launch their Psyche craft. The SLS has been in development for more than a decade now, fully paid by the taxpayer, at a cost just about to break the $30 billion mark. The nominal cost per launch is still unknown but will almost certainly top a billion dollars. The last NASA administration gave an estimate of $800-$900 million per launch in 2019 dollars. And SLS cost estimates only go one way. And what do you get for $30 billion, and then another billion per launch? Ideally up to almost twice the capacity of a Falcon Heavy. The reason people are so cool on the SLS is that it's already a very poor value against existing technologies. And will be completely obsolete by the time Starship comes to pass which should not only be able to launch for a fraction of the cost of Falcon Heavy (which is already a fraction of the cost of SLS), but also launch well over the ideal launch capacity of SLS. [1] - [LINK] [2] - [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42734145,"author":"somenameforme","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Starship Flight 7","text":"Just to link that: [VIDEO] Such an unbelievable moment. And I also think an indicator of how much better society could be if we focused more on doing amazing things. The comments on YouTube are just filled with hope optimism and general awesomeness. FWIW that link goes straight to the moneyshot - it's always so much better if you watch it all the way through. It's an amazing broadcast.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47618795,"author":"NitpickLawyer","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps","text":"> I think everyone forgot about early SpaceX product quality. This was 8 years ago and is one of the greatest stuff I've seen in space launches. The footage is so epic that it even got replicated in SciFi series! ... [VIDEO] This was 9 years ago, first droneship landing - [LINK] And this is 18 years ago, their first Falcon1 launch - [LINK] More live video from the ascent than we got on Artemis2 for sure...","stance":"strong_rec"}],"wbp-3BJWsU8":[{"hn_comment_id":10367548,"author":"isbadawi","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Python wats","text":"Java Puzzlers spring to mind. There's a book [0], and some fun talks available on youtube [1][2][3]. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18217966,"author":"denormalfloat","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"Java Puzzlers by Joshua Bloch and Jeremy Manson are pretty entertaining. For a pretty bog standard language, Java has some more exotic corners: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wcBEOcPtlYk":[{"hn_comment_id":44052841,"author":"mrob","month":"2025-05","story_title":"A Secret Trove of Rare Guitars Heads to the Met","text":"Jim Lill has a video testing amp tone: [VIDEO] It's almost entirely EQ and distortion, applied in various orders (the exact signal chain matters, because EQ after distortion sounds different than distortion after EQ). By getting this right you can simulate any tube amp tone with solid state to a high degree of accuracy.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45908509,"author":"WorkerBee28474","month":"2025-11","story_title":"How Tube Amplifiers Work","text":"I'd like to plug the YouTube Video by Jim Lill - \"Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In A Guitar Amplifier?\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47379220,"author":"mrob","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Wired headphone sales are exploding. What's with the Bluetooth backlash?","text":"I'm convinced that at least 90% of \"analog sound\" can be simulated by taking the ideal block diagram and replacing every link with a parametric EQ->waveshaper->parametric EQ chain. Configuring those added components correctly is left as an exercise for the reader. Jim Lill's video on guitar amp tone is an interesting demonstration. Hear how close he gets to the original with an even simpler combination of EQ and distortion: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47565224,"author":"gadtfly","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Comparison shows audiophiles waste a lot of money","text":"If this is appealing to you, check out this guy who ran a much more systematic set of experiments on even more sacred and sensitive targets: Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In An Electric Guitar? [LINK] Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In A Guitar Amplifier? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wdgULBpRoXk":[{"hn_comment_id":30803642,"author":"jordibc","month":"2022-03","story_title":"The end of the nice GTK button","text":"About the USB keyboard, that may be true only for the cheapest keyboard you could find, but basically not applicable anymore nowadays. Rather than giving you the details, let me link to this video, which is awesome at explaining it and much more -- the USB vs PS/2 part starts here: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42207318,"author":"ericbarrett","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Only buy a magnetic keyboard for gaming","text":"Among other things, the USB host polls the keyboard at a fixed rate. Fantastic breakdown if you have 30 minutes: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28402066,"author":"wmwmwm","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Keyboard Latency (2017)","text":"There\u2019s a great video here that goes through all this - the gist is that USB keyboards specify what polling rate to use, 1000hz for the best ones, maybe 125hz for the cheaper ones. An interesting thing about ps/2 is that even though it doesn\u2019t have to wait for the keyboard to poll it transmits data at much slower speed than USB (khz vs mhz) which somewhat offsets the advantage it gets from being interrupt driven [VIDEO] edit: ah, sorry, I see someone's posted a link to this video already!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28402096,"author":"exporectomy","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Keyboard Latency (2017)","text":"Apparently [1] PS/2 limited by a slower data rate than USB 2.0 which cancels out almost all the advantage of its lower initial latency to begin the transmission, making them both about equally capable in actual latency - at least in theory. [1] [VIDEO] Even if this conclusion is wrong, that video is a very pleasant and understandable explanation of the USB protocol.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29140126,"author":"throw0101a","month":"2021-11","story_title":"What is AT&T doing at 1111340002?","text":"> Embedded programming? Dealing with signals?! God forbid, man. \"How does a USB keyboard work? by Ben Eater: * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31760746,"author":"jai_","month":"2022-06","story_title":"How to Make Rust Leak Memory (Also: How to Make It Stop)","text":"If you're interested, here's a really comprehensive video on how USB keyboards work which may answer your question: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32841750,"author":"lozenge","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I write a Linux driver for my 15 year old photo printer?","text":"Ben Eater has some videos showing the USB protocol on an oscilloscope. [VIDEO] [LINK] And some videos on using chips and breadboards to meet protocols- [LINK] And a digital protocol too- [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"wfYbgdo8e-8":[{"hn_comment_id":13504222,"author":"otto_ortega","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness","text":"If you just learned that \"Split Brain\" was thing, I recommend watching this video by GPGrey, one of the best educational channels on YouTube: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12944268,"author":"BoppreH","month":"2016-11","story_title":"My Subconscious Is a Better Developer Than I Am","text":"For mind bending check the great explanation from CGP Grey, \"You are two\"[1], which argues the two brain hemispheres can operate independently. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16908575,"author":"glenneroo","month":"2018-04","story_title":"The limits of information (2014)","text":"Kurzgesagt[0] and CGP Grey[1] did a fun little 2-part intro into \"split mindedness\" i.e. the idea that we may have multiple consciousnesses(?) contending for control. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20013392,"author":"teddyh","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Self-distancing can help you make better decisions","text":"> how can there be two selfs in a single mind. Oh wow, do I have a YouTube video for you: [VIDEO] ( You Are Two , by CGP Grey)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24026838,"author":"surround","month":"2020-08","story_title":"A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness","text":"This reminds me of two mind-boggling discoveries I\u2019ve had about the human mind. The first is that the two halves of your brain act somewhat independently. And in rare cases, people\u2019s left and right halves are \u201csplit\u201d apart, and they act entirely independently - e.g. their left and their right hands will act separately, or even argue with each other. CGP Grey made a great video about this: [VIDEO] The other is that most people have a \u201cvoice\u201d inside their head - e.g. when they read, they hear their own voice inside their head reading; their thoughts are like sentences they \u201chear;\u201d they could look in the mirror have a conversation with themselves. Some ~10% of people do not have this internal monologue. [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28871559,"author":"tick_tock_tick","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Spinoza\u2019s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?","text":"Every time someone brings up consciousness I like to bring up [VIDEO] . Split brains imply some very interesting ideas around of consciousness.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43873013,"author":"alexpotato","month":"2025-05","story_title":"The language brain matters more for programming than the math brain? (2020)","text":"This reminds me of the following quote: \"Coding largely involves the 'logical part' of your brain. It tends to not include the 'language part' of your brain. This is one reason why comments you add to code are so useful: they force you to engage both parts of your brain and therefore get better results. This is also why when you go to explain a problem to a colleague, you often have a flash of brilliance and solve the problem: you are reframing the problem using a different part of your brain and the different part of your brain helps solve the problem.\" I'm sure some readers here will say this is preposterous and there is no such thing as having \"two parts of your brain\". To them I suggest watching: 1. \"You are are two\" (about people with their corpus callosum being severed) [VIDEO] 2. \"Conscious Ants and Human Hives\" by Peter Watts [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"wfm2xCKOCNk":[{"hn_comment_id":28940725,"author":"7373737373","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Why can't we build nice neighborhoods anymore?","text":"I found this video yesterday: \"Why Japan Looks the Way it Does: Zoning\" which was very illuminating [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31052869,"author":"mikem170","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Tax the Land","text":"I like the way that Japan handles zoning. It's based on population densities. Localities can designate industrial and commercial areas, but can't deviate from federal guidelines to prevent growth. Instead of single family homes they allow triplexes where a percentage of space can be used for a low-impact business, like a barber shop or something. They have setbacks geared towards making sure that you don't build three stories on top of your neighbor's house. They have neighborhoods. They don't have a housing shortage. They don't have a system that doesn't empower developers who want to clear-cut cheap land on the outskirts of town and build sprawling anti-social subdivisions of oversized identical houses. Here's some more information: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31886464,"author":"CaliforniaKarl","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Abolish Zoning","text":"The _Life Where I'm From_ episode on zoning in Japan is useful, I think, as a point of comparison. Zoning in Japan can still be pretty complex (limits on floorspace, setback, and angles), but allows for environments that many people like. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32451239,"author":"ItsMonkk","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Anyone else feels the commoditization of real estate is unethical?","text":"Yes, land use is one factor. What is interesting is that the dynamic actually flips once there is adequate zoning. Take a look at this[0] video on Tokyo zoning and how he talks about living in an industrial zoned area. He talks about how it's cheaper to do so, and if you want to move to a single family zoned area, it's actually more expensive! Under the current system, landowners want their own land to be zoned as high as possible, while they want everyone else's land to be zoned as low as possible. Since 1 < everyone else, when people vote on zoning it is zoned as low as possible. With a LVT the system flips, everyone wants their land to be zoned as low as they desire, and they want everyone else's land to be zoned as high as possible. They would only accept land zoned restrictively if those people would pay higher taxes for the exclusive use of it. This is a system with proper incentives. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33748909,"author":"alexchantavy","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Can Tokyo\u2019s charms be replicated elsewhere?","text":"The lax zoning laws (at least compared to the US) allow mixed use so you have more things within walking distance. This was a fascinating video on it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34216294,"author":"marsantwo","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Why Neighborhoods and Small Businesses Thrive in Tokyo","text":"If you are interested in why the Japanese/Tokyo urban design works then look at these 2 links from the \"Life where I am from\" Youtube channel Why Japan Looks the Way it Does: Zoning [VIDEO] What a Typical Tokyo Neighbourhood is Like [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36486561,"author":"com2kid","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Why Britain Doesn\u2019t Build","text":"The developed world has one great example of functional housing policy: Japan. A single policy that allows for unique neighborhoods, affordable houses, supports small businesses, and enables walkable cities. Just.... do what we know already works. For anyone not familiar, here is a primer [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44357099,"author":"jonpurdy","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Backyard Coffee and Jazz in Kyoto","text":"There are two great videos specifically on Japanese zoning and narrow streets: Life Where I'm From, on zoning: [VIDEO] Not Just Bikes, narrow streets: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46647886,"author":"jonpurdy","month":"2026-01","story_title":"America could have $4 lunch bowls like Japan\u2013but our zoning laws [prevent that]","text":"The best videos on this (in my opinion) which compliment urbankchoze's post: \u2023 Not Just Bikes: [LINK] \u2023 Life Where I'm from: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wfzSE4Hoxbc":[{"hn_comment_id":33184677,"author":"ThomPete","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Probability (1963)","text":"Any theory that is explainable and hard to vary does not need probability. Can you explain how probability is used in statistical mechanics in a way to contradict what I am saying? P.S. Thanks for being a sport and talk about this in a truly respectful way. If you want to understand where I am coming from, I can really recommend David Deutsch talk about probability here [VIDEO] It was a big awakening for me once I realized not only where probability theory came from (not physics) and how engrained it is in our thinking.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35937841,"author":"andrewgleave","month":"2023-05","story_title":"The World is Built on Probability [1988/2023]","text":"David Deutsch\u2019s \u201cPhysics Without Probability\u201d covers the history of probability, it\u2019s legitimate and misconceived uses and concludes that according to MWI there is no such thing in reality - it\u2019s basically that probabilities correspond to how measures of the multiverse proportion themselves as differentiation occurs. I watched it a few years ago so may be misremembering bits but I think that is the gist\u2026 Worth a watch especially if you balk at this idea just to to see a strong counter argument. [VIDEO] Edit: link","stance":"rec"}],"wgHIkdUQbp0":[{"hn_comment_id":23195604,"author":"Nelkins","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Online Compiler Courses?","text":"Here's a great YouTube series where a developer codes, step-by-step, a pretty fully-fledged programming language: [VIDEO] Not too much theory but from a nuts and bolts perspective I found it extremely approachable.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40302518,"author":"neonsunset","month":"2024-05","story_title":"The search for easier safe systems programming","text":"I don't have something that could be of Crafting Interpreters level on hand, but the general suggestion given to this question on DotNetEvolution discord by Roslyn team members was to start with the spec itself: [LINK] This might be a bit of a learning curve if you don't have experience with writing compilers like that though. There are other materials that might prove useful should you go down this path: - A series of blog posts of a student who is writing a Rust to .NET compiler which you could follow along: [LINK] The project itself: [LINK] - A video series on writing a compiler for .NET from scratch: [VIDEO] Notes: [LINK] As for CLR via C#, while it has certain facts that remained the same, the ecosystem has changed a lot since then, you really want to target the latest LTS to get best experience and performance. If you liked it, then I can strongly suggest [LINK] which covers .NET runtime internals. p.s.: if it's any consolation, the promise in CLR via C# of JIT having the advantage of dynamically profiling code execution and compiling to profile-guided version, tuned to the exact hardware and environment is finally fulfilled, many years later :)","stance":"rec"}],"wh4aWZRtTwU":[{"hn_comment_id":30001560,"author":"abracadaniel","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Google Kills YouTube Originals","text":"I love how well that channel is doing. It's an endless rabbit hole of fascination. I will never look at the color brown the same way again: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41378037,"author":"maximus-decimus","month":"2024-08","story_title":"If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention","text":"Or Technology Connections who made me watch a 20 minutes videos on the color brown and makes it feel like magic [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24362895,"author":"jasode","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Impossible Colors","text":"Fyi on a semi-related topic I learned from a fascinating Youtube video... the color \"brown\" is a psychological construct[0]. But from an RGB perspective ... there's no such color as \"brown\"; it's actually just \"orange\" in a particular context: [VIDEO] [0] pedantic alert: yes \"every color\" is ultimately a mental construct of the brain but hopefully you know what I mean","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26506007,"author":"avianlyric","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Show HN: Sorted CSS Colors \u2013 Sort the named CSS colors in a nice way","text":"Worth watching the Technology Connection video on the colour Brown [1]. It's a strange colour that only really exists when placed in the context of other colours, not something that can really be produced by a pure RGB light source, which explains why the CSS Brown colour looks red. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26506012,"author":"avianlyric","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Show HN: Sorted CSS Colors \u2013 Sort the named CSS colors in a nice way","text":"Worth watching the Technology Connection video on the colour Brown [1]. It's a strange colour that only really exists when placed in the context of other colours, not something that can really be produced by a pure RGB light source, which explains why the CSS Brown colour looks red. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29415421,"author":"spiralx","month":"2021-12","story_title":"What Makes sRGB a Special Color Space?","text":"A great video demonstrating the strangeness of representing colours is this video on the colour brown: [VIDEO] Colour theory can get pretty complicated, the video is however very understandable as well as interesting :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35466214,"author":"shever73","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Purkinje Effect","text":"It seems I learn something new every day about our visual system. Thanks for sharing. Last week, it was a link to Technology Connections' video on the colour brown[0]. I also really enjoyed reading Foone's older blog post, \"The EYES Have It\"[1]. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38430491,"author":"lutrinus","month":"2023-11","story_title":"The Weird World in RGB (2019) [video]","text":"Ah, Technology Connections. Such a great channel! If you enjoyed this video, make sure to also watch his video about the color brown: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43677382,"author":"JadeNB","month":"2025-04","story_title":"How much oranger do red orange bags make oranges look?","text":"In response to the observation the average pixel color is surprisingly brown, I'll take today's opportunity to induct some of my fellow HNers into today's lucky 10,000 by linking Technology Connections's \"Color is weird\" video ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"rec"}],"whPWKecazgM":[{"hn_comment_id":23754220,"author":"iamcreasy","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Blender green screen VFX of incredible detail \u2013 made by a single person","text":"Very similar one: [LINK] I also loved his Blender Conference talk about World building: [VIDEO] Here he talk about how to build very complex environment with very simple shapes/approaches with incredible speed.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47261250,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2026-03","story_title":"The L in \"LLM\" Stands for Lying","text":"I love Ian Hubert's demos of green screening in Blender. [LINK] His Blender Conference talk about photogrammetry / camera projection / projection mapping was fantastic: World Building in Blender - Ian Hubert [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21860443,"author":"gitgud","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"A [1] video essay about modern art by Jacob Geller. For me, it completely reversed my opinion on modern art and it's worth. This [2] talk about building worlds in Blender by Ian Hubert. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27291293,"author":"royjacobs","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Dynamo Dream \u2013 sci-fi short rendered in Blender","text":"This short was written and directed by Ian Hubert, who is an amazing 3d artist. I'm not affiliated in any way, but I'm just blown away by the sheer talent on display here. If you're interested, a few years ago he did a very interesting presentation[] that goes into a bit more detail on his way of working. [] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38282757,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Blender 16yo winner of UK younganimator of the year","text":"Absolutely, which is an enormous well deserved complement! He makes it seem so easy, but he's got a ridiculous amount of skill. He's on his way to giving mind blowing presentations at Blendercon too. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"whb4unrhy44":[{"hn_comment_id":32806378,"author":"AnonC","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best documentaries you've seen?","text":"I would recommend people not to watch it and instead watch this well done critique (and criticism) titled \u201cMy Octopus Teacher & Environmental Horror\u201d by Maggie Mae. [1] I could\u2019ve spent my time better if I\u2019d watched this and avoided \u201cMy Octopus Teacher\u201d altogether. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27397701,"author":"whymauri","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Heroic rat retiring from detecting land mines","text":"Love this analysis. It reminds me of Maggie Mae's breakdown of My Octopus Teacher as eco-horror film -- it ends up exploring the same themes around language and communication that you brought up here. [0] [0] [VIDEO] Specific time stamp for section on language (Gorillas in the Congo): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30016575,"author":"shard","month":"2022-01","story_title":"The mystery of social behavior in octopuses","text":"Here is a critique of My Octopus Teacher as a movie of a self-centered man who projects his issues onto an unsuspecting wild animal: \"MY OCTOPUS TEACHER & Environmental Horror, An Analysis\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wjZofJX0v4M":[{"hn_comment_id":39968821,"author":"BenoitP","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Visualizing Attention, a Transformer's Heart [video]","text":"3Blue1Brown is really a godsend. I had been trying and failed to get an intuition for the self-attention mechanisms, and also why you want to stack you transformer layers. I went through a lot of material (Key-Query-Value interpretations, SVD of these, etc.) but his comment in chapter 5 video [1] made it click for me: \"But you should think of the primary goal of this network that it (the word embedding) flows through as being to enable each one of those vectors to soak up a meaning that's much more rich and specific than what mere individual words could represent\". Here is my intuition: Transformers are merely a Convnet for token sequences. In the sense that information is first local and each data means something wrt its immediate neighbors. You extract data locally, and then you dezoom to and redo exactly the same at a higher level. Convnet have been shown to reproduce edge detecting kernels first (vertical edge), then assemble them into basic shapes (vertical+oblique: corner), then bigger shapes (something round), then link shapes together (round+round separated by a horizontal shape with rectangles on top), and then it's a car! [2] Transformers do the same. They assemble meaning among tokens (\"ju\" + \"mps\" : a conjugated verb), then assemble these at a higher level (\"cat jumps\" -> noun+verb), then it's a sentence \"the cat jumps over the wall\", then a paragraph, then a chapter, then a book. All differentiable so any deviation from something coherent can tweak its knobs high","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40240806,"author":"Wilduck","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Why can't ChatGPT solve Wordle-type questions?","text":"3Blue1Brown has a fantastic video on GPT that I'd highly recommend called \"But what is a GPT? Visual intro to transformers\" [1]. You'll need to have some background in mathematical reasoning, but not too much. He does a great job of drawing pictures to show the mathematical transformations that happen under the hood. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40873442,"author":"tomashm","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The Illustrated Transformer (2018)","text":"This is good, but what bade me finally understand the transformer architecture [0] and attention [1], are 3Blue1Brown's videos. 0. [VIDEO] 1. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43965713,"author":"manmal","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Embeddings are underrated (2024)","text":"This video explains the direction-encodes-trait topic very well IMO: [VIDEO] It\u2019s the first in a series of three that I can very highly recommend. > there's no way that there's a 1-to-1 correspondence between concepts and dimensions. I don\u2019t know about that! Once you go very high dimensional, there is a lot of direction vectors that are almost perfectly perpendicular to each other (meaning they can cleanly encode a trait). Maybe they don\u2019t even need to be perfectly perpendicular, the dot product just needs to be very close to zero.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46690583,"author":"gf000","month":"2026-01","story_title":"King \u2013 man and woman is queen; but why?","text":"I really recommend watching this section of this video. Embeddings do encode plenty of \"human knowledge\" into the vector values and their relations to each other. [VIDEO] This even opens up a more data-based approach to linguistics, where it is also heavily used.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48400517,"author":"robrenaud","month":"2026-06","story_title":"\"They're made out of weights\"","text":"3 blue 1 brown has a great visual introduction to transformers, the heart of LLMs. It's chapter 5. Start at chapter 1 if you want more background on neural nets and backprop. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39947285,"author":"CharlesW","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Ask HN: If AI can be creative, does this mean humans can be taught creativity?","text":"To quote GPT-4, \"AI's 'creativity' is more about remixing and reinterpreting the information it has been fed\". I think the degree to which a person perceives human-like creativity from AI/LLMs is inversely proportional to their understanding of how they work. Here's a great video that can help demystify GPTs: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40974756,"author":"MAXPOOL","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The Engineer\u2019s Guide to Deep Learning: Understanding the Transformer Model","text":"There are many others that are better. 1/ The Annotated Transformer Attention is All You Need [LINK] 2/ Transformers from Scratch [LINK] 3/ Andrej Karpathy has really good series of intros: [LINK] Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out. [LINK] GPT with Andrej Karpathy: Part 1 [LINK] 4/ 3Blue1Brown: But what is a GPT? Visual intro to transformers | Chapter 5, Deep Learning [VIDEO] Attention in transformers, visually explained | Chapter 6, Deep Learning [LINK] Full 3Blue1Brown Neural Networks playlist [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43575576,"author":"semiquaver","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Reasoning models don't always say what they think","text":"LLMs are completely deterministic. Their fundamental output is a vector representing a probability distribution of the next token given the model weights and context. Given the same inputs an identical output vector will be produced 100% of the time. This fact is relied upon by for example [LINK] a lossless compression system that would not work if LLMs were nondeterministic. In practice most LLM systems use this distribution (along with a \u201ctemperature\u201d multiplier) to make a weighted random choice among the tokens, giving the illusion of nondeterminism. But there\u2019s no fundamental reason you couldn\u2019t for example always choose the most likely token, yielding totally deterministic output. This is an excellent and accessible series going over how transformer systems work if you want to learn more. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43955038,"author":"andrehacker","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Writing an LLM from scratch, part 13 \u2013 attention heads are dumb","text":"It is regarded to be \"the best\" book on the topic by many. I found just like what Giles Thomas wrote that the book focuses on the details and how to write the lower level code without providing the big picture. I am personally not very interested in that as these details are likely to change rather quickly while the principles of LLMs and transformers will probably remain relevant for many years. I have been looking for, but failed, to find a good resource that approaches it the way 3blue1brown [1] explains it but then go deeper from there. The blog series from Giles seem to take the book and add the background to the details. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44424942,"author":"matthewolfe","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Show HN: TokenDagger \u2013 A tokenizer faster than OpenAI's Tiktoken","text":"Modal's GPU glossary is a good overview about how GPUs work [0]. Karpathy's LLM overview is a good high level overview on LLMs [1]. 3b1b's video (and subsequent videos) on transformers was excellent at helping me understand the math at a high level [2]. This matrix multiplication optimization worklog helped me understand writing better CUDA (not for beginner intro though) [3]. During this process I also asked ChatGPT a lot of questions. I'm definitely open to suggestions about \"how to learn\" with all the new tools we have. I felt this has not been straightforward to figure out. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46920204,"author":"chan1","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Understanding Neural Network, Visually","text":"Super cool visualization Found this vid by 3Blue1Brown super helpful for visualizing transformers as well. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47830832,"author":"dannyw","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons","text":"LLMs are explicitly designed to handle, and also possibly 'learn' from different tokens encoding similar information. I found this video from 3blue1brown very informative: [VIDEO] Also, think about how a LLM would handle different languages.","stance":"rec"}],"wlR5gYd6um0":[{"hn_comment_id":13044549,"author":"begemotz","month":"2016-11","story_title":"How to start using VIM?","text":"In video form, the best introduction I have seen is Chris Toomey\u2019s \u2018Mastering the Vim Language\u2019: [VIDEO] But here is something I wrote while I was learning how to migrate to Vim.. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19416757,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Vim Anti-Patterns (2012)","text":"Disclaimer: My vim knowledge has many gaps. Understanding vim's model, what Chris Toomey of Thoughtbot calls \"the Vim Language\", helps incredibly: [VIDEO] I've picked up numerous tips watching this and other of Thoughtbot's excellent video series. More importantly, though, is that I've learned why specific vim idioms and motifs exist. They've lead me to rethink my own usage patterns, sometimes changing them, sometimes holding them just a bit more tightly. (Say, my practice of doing global regex pattern-replacement edits rather than repeated vim edits or macros, generally.) But for a tool I use for coding, data cleaning, systems administration, email, writing, document preparation, and more, it pays to be on the lookout for more effective, faster, reliable, and/or repeatable methods. And no, vim's not the only editor I have, or do, use. It's not even the first Unix editor I'd used. There's been DOS EDIT, EDLIN, MacWrite, WP51, WordStar (me and GRR!), EDT, EVE, the ISPF editor, emacs, pico, ae, MS Word, ... you get the idea. But back in the 1980s, I first encountered (and balked noisily at, for a few weeks), BSD vi. And the basic muscle memory acquired, after a brief period of pain, has almost certainly been my best technical investment after learning to touch-type itself. Most importantly becaue both have been remarkably durable skills. No, vim is not vi, but it builds on its core . And over 30 years later, I find it useful both to see what new capabilities have been added, an","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48313220,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2026-05","story_title":"It's time to talk about my writerdeck","text":"My first experience, on a BSD machine at about the same time, was similarly traumatic. I've since learnt the tool. Its ubiquity (particularly over pretty much all of the other ones I'd listed, at least on the machines I had ready access to) cemented that. I did like EVE when I'd used it, but have had little access to VAXen since. And was proficient for a time on Emacs (until a subsequent gig's director insisted that if it didn't come installed software wouldn't be added to our Unix server). My WP-fu fell with the end of DOS, though I did hang on for quite some time, up to the late 1990s / early aughts. CUA has its benefits, but it is only one of multiple competing keyboard standards. Everything is convention. Oddly: I'm vi/vim in the editor, but readline on the shell. No, I don't set vimkeys bindings in Bash. But I do drop to bash as my shell editor. Also: for those stumbling across this thread later, \"Mastering the Vim Language\" is an excellent video I'd come across in my third decade of using the editor, and learned much from. It's now 11 years old itself: < [VIDEO] > Vim may have a long learning curve, but it also has a steep payoff function.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19795498,"author":"dredmorbius","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Intermediate Vim","text":"Recommended: Learn vim For the Last Time: A Tutorial and Primer [LINK] Mastering the Vim Language [VIDEO] An Incremental Approach to Vim [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23703348,"author":"urmish","month":"2020-07","story_title":"How Did Vim Become So Popular?","text":"The parent described only a fraction of what vim can do. The notion of text objects and combining them with plugins makes vim much more powerful. Even without plugins mastering vim makes writing code quite natural. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33211794,"author":"tantony","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How to become good at Emacs/Vim?","text":"I dabbled with neovim on and off for a while - kind of following the same logic as you, wanting to be like many people I saw on Youtube. It never really worked since I was really comfortable with my existing workflow - vscode + iterm and \"swiping\" between screens on macOS. I was super-fast with the Macbook trackpad with its sensitivity turned up to the max. It finally clicked when I started a job where I had to use a windows laptop with a linux VM as my primary computer. I found that using vscode either within the VM or over \"Remote-SSH\" from windows was severely cramping my productivity. So I switched to NeoVim+Tmux cold turkey (SSHing into VM using \"Windows Terminal\"). I set up some shortcuts that made sense for me somewhat from vscode (e.g. Alt+<number> for switching \"tabs\", alt+hjkl or alt+arrow keys to switch between tmux panes etc.). Within a couple of weeks I was back to my old level of productivity. My usual setup has neovim on the left and a terminal in the right pane. Adding more panes vertically or horizontally is super easy as well. This may not be the most optimal setup, and there are still a few pain points from time to time - particularly with the LSP/\"intellisense\" stuff. But it works for me. Oh and when I am coding on my MacBook Pro at home, I still prefer to use vscode + iTerm. Some resources that helped: \"Practical Vim\" by Drew Neil. I didn't read it cover to cover but I have scanned through it enough to pick up the important stuff. [LINK] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44125333,"author":"jsilence","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Edamagit: Magit for VSCode","text":"Have been using Spacemacs and Doom Emacs some time ago, but turned off evil mode, bc I was not used to vim style editing. Lately I understood that vim key bindings is actually an editing language and finally found joy in vim [0]. Surely going to return to Doom-Emacs with evil mode on. Maybe switching to evil god mode later. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wlvKAT7SZIQ":[{"hn_comment_id":23191140,"author":"dehesa","month":"2020-05","story_title":"So you want to write your own CSV code (2014)","text":"I can relate. I have been one of those who started writing a CSV library and went down the rabbit hole of edge cases and configurability. Looking back (and only thinking on productivity) my time would have been better spent doing something else. I did, however, learn quite a lot along the way: - how text is represented in a computer (and all its caveats), - how to identify and tune slow code, - how to vectorize code (thanks to Daniel Lemire's [VIDEO] ), - how to encapsulate code better, - how to use some great CSV tools out there (thanks to Leon's [LINK] ) - how to better manage and communicate an open source project. All in all, I am still not sure it was a mistake. Moreover when Swift didn't really had, at the time, a good Codable interface to CSV. Next time I encounter a similar problem I will probably just wrap a C library and create a good interface, though. In any case, if you are coding in Swift and find yourself in need of a CSV encoder/decoder, you might want to check [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28738355,"author":"Rendello","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Word-Aligned Bloom Filters","text":"I find these optimizations fascinating. Anyone familiar with Lemire likely knows about this, but I listened to a podcast episode[1] with him a few days ago and learned about `simdjson`, the tool he authored that parses JSON at 25x the speed of the standard C++ library.[2][3] It's worth looking at if you're into this sort of thing. 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO] 3. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38865323,"author":"D4ckard","month":"2024-01","story_title":"The One Billion Row Challenge","text":"Daniel Lemire has an interesting talk on this: [VIDEO] . They key takeaway is that the disk is rarely the bottleneck.","stance":"rec"}],"wo84LFzx5nI":[{"hn_comment_id":46042045,"author":"jauntywundrkind","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Fifty Shades of OOP","text":"I'd love a deeper dive on how Objects work in NeXTSTEP. From their brochures, they talk about objects being persistent and distributable, that in a workgroup of people everyone can rely on the objects being up to date. I've always been so curious what the broader technical ecosystem looks like here. Presumably there are still processes running on systems. But these processes have lots of objects in them? And the objects are using Mach message passing to converse with other processes elsewhere? Within an application, are objects communicating across Mach too? There's so much high level rhetoric about. Such as this bit. But I'd love a real technical view at what was happening, what objects really were here. [LINK] [LINK] This is a fun work. It feels like the brief outline for a Speaking for the Dead for OOP. Huge amount of things to lots of different people over time. Seconding @rawgabbit's recommendation for Casey Muratori's The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake, which really is hunting back and back for the cosmogenesis of objects, and covers so much terrain. Objectogenesis? [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46044719,"author":"fmjrey","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Fifty Shades of OOP","text":"Here is an example of a 2006 rant that qualifies: [LINK] OO conflates many different aspects that are often orthogonal but have been conflated together opportunistically rather than by sound rigor. Clearly most languages allow for functions outside classes. It's clearly the case today especially with FP gaining momentum, but it's also clear back then when Java and the JVM were created. I think smalltalk was the only other language that had this limitation. Like others in this thread, I can only recommend the big OOPS video: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44600453,"author":"abetusk","month":"2025-07","story_title":"The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]","text":"I found this talk to be great. It goes through the history of OOP and how some of the ideas for the more modern ECS were embedded in the culture at the formation of OOP in the 1960s to 1980s but somehow weren't adopted. It was pretty clear, even 20 years ago, that OOP had major problems in terms of what Casey Muratori now calls \"hierarchical encapsulation\" of problems. One thing that really jumped out at me was his quote [0]: > I think when you're designing new things, you should focus on the hardest stuff. ... we can always then take that and scale it down ... but it's almost impossible to take something that solves simple problems and scale it up into something that solves hard [problems] I understand the context but this, in general, is abysmally bad advice. I'm not sure about language design or system architecture but this is almost universally not true for any mathematical or algorithmic pursuit. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44628854,"author":"ndiddy","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Java was not underhyped in 1997 (2021)","text":"There's a really good talk about the history of OOP going back to the early 60s that goes over this point. The whole \"90s style OOP isn't OOP as it was originally intended\" thing is largely a myth. When Kay and other OOP pioneers were describing Smalltalk and OOP to professional developers, they all used 90s Java style \"compile-time hierarchy of encapsulation that matches the domain model\" OOP to explain it. Smalltalk-80: The Language , a book by some of the original designers of Smalltalk, even uses the same shape class inheritance example you'll see in every introductory Java textbook. Here's a link to the talk, timestamped to when he goes over this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45049401,"author":"hiker","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Object-oriented design patterns in C and kernel development","text":"Plexes are first mentioned in 1960 [LINK] and the paper even starts with a critique of the efficiency of Lisp's approach for representing data with cons pairs (citing McCarthy's paper from the same year). You might also want to watch Casey's great talk on the history of OOP [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45326580,"author":"OhMeadhbh","month":"2025-09","story_title":"How to stop functional programming (2016)","text":"This is the video that's been going around. It's a bit long and could have been compacted into a 20 minute video, but if you have the time, it's a good overview for people without a computer science background. \"Casey Muratori \u2013 The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake \u2013 BSC 2025\" [VIDEO] But if your point is there aren't any written articles about stuff like this, I agree. If they're out there, they're a bit outside the mainstream.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46041897,"author":"rawgabbit","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Fifty Shades of OOP","text":"Muratori traced the history of OOP to the original documents. Skip to the 1:18 mark if you want to skip to his findings. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46319214,"author":"jodrellblank","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work","text":"> \" Why are we wasting so much time on abstractions like .. objects? \" Aside: earlier this year Casey Muratori did a 2.5 hour conference talk on this topic - why we are using objects in the way they are implemented in C++ et al with class hierarchies and inheritance and objects representing individual entities? \" The Big OOPs: anatomy of a 35 year mistake \"[1]. He traces programming history back to Stroustrup learning from Simula and Kirstan Nygaard, back to C.A.R. Hoare's paper on records, back to the Algol 68 design committee, back to Douglas T. Ross's work in the 1950's. From Ross at MIT in 1960 to Ivan Sutherland working on Sketchpad at MIT in 1963, and both chains influencing Alan Kay and Smalltalk. Where the different ideas in OOP came from, how they came together through which programming languages, who was working on what, and when, and why. It's interesting. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46932597,"author":"afiori","month":"2026-02","story_title":"I Write Games in C (yes, C)","text":"I enjoyed the pragmatic historical definition of OOP given in [VIDEO] where essential it can be seen as subtype polymorphism","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48067595,"author":"eska","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Bjarne Stroustrup: How do I deal with memory leaks?","text":"Sounds like you would appreciate this talk: [VIDEO] Personally I use C or something, anything other than C++ really, if I need something more ergonomic or provably correct. Many excuse C++\u2019s design history with \u201cthey didn\u2019t know better\u201d, but the oft forgotten history explained in that video shows otherwise.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48632181,"author":"Rendello","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Code duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction","text":"That's one of the things Mike was pushing back on (in the context of C++ / game dev; there's a good example ~20 min in). In case you haven't seen it, Casey Muratori's The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake digs into the different ideas and viewpoints surrounding OOP and how it coalesced into a dogma: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wpOxbesRNBc":[{"hn_comment_id":17105728,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look and Feel Free","text":"Dasher is fantastic, because it's based on rock solid information theory, designed by the late David MacKay. Here is the seminal Google Tech Talk about it: [VIDEO] Here is a demo of using Dasher by an engineer at Google, Ada Majorek, who has ALS and uses Dasher and a Headmouse to program: [LINK] Another one of her demonstrating Dasher: Ada Majorek Introduction - CSUN Dasher [LINK] Here\u2019s a more recent presentation about it, that tells all about the latest open source release of Dasher 5: Dasher - CSUN 2016 - Ada Majorek and Raquel Romano [LINK] Here's the github repo: Dasher Version 4.11 [LINK] >Dasher is a zooming predictive text entry system, designed for situations where keyboard input is impractical (for instance, accessibility or PDAs). It is usable with highly limited amounts of physical input while still allowing high rates of text entry. Ada referred me to this mind bending prototype: D@sher Prototype - An adaptive, hierarchical radial menu. [LINK] >( [LINK] ) - a really neat way to \"dive\" through a menu hierarchy/, or through recursively nested options (to build words, letter by letter, swiftly). D@sher takes Dasher, and gives it a twist, making slightly better use of screen revenue. >It also \"learns\" your typical useage, making more frequently selected options larger than sibling options. This makes it faster to use, each time you use it. >More information here: [LINK] and here: [LINK] Dasher is even a viable way to input text in VR, just by pointing your head, with","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38400368,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2023-11","story_title":"AI is currently just glorified compression","text":"I love David MacKay's brilliant work on the Dasher text input system, which draws deeply from his work on information theory -- imagine Dasher integrated with an IDE and code search and Copilot and language model! \"Writing is navigating in the library of all possible books.\" -David MacKay We just allocate more shelf space to the more probably letters. [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] DonHopkins on May 18, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look an... Dasher is fantastic, because it's based on rock solid information theory, designed by the late David MacKay. Here is the seminal Google Tech Talk about it: [VIDEO] Here is a demo of using Dasher by an engineer at Google, Ada Majorek, who has ALS and uses Dasher and a Headmouse to program: [LINK] Another one of her demonstrating Dasher: Ada Majorek Introduction - CSUN Dasher [LINK] Here\u2019s a more recent presentation about it, that tells all about the latest open source release of Dasher 5: Dasher - CSUN 2016 - Ada Majorek and Raquel Romano [LINK] Here's the github repo: Dasher Version 4.11 [LINK] >Dasher is a zooming predictive text entry system, designed for situations where keyboard input is impractical (for instance, accessibility or PDAs). It is usable with highly limited amounts of physical input while still allowing high rates of text entry. Ada referred me to this mind bending prototype: D@sher Prototype - An adaptive, hierarchical radial menu. [LINK] >( [LINK] ) - a really neat way to \"d","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13262404,"author":"devilsenigma","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Dasher: Writing text really fast without typing or speaking","text":"This is really awesome. It looks hard, but it isn't. Here's a talk from 2007 that explains it well [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44173863,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2025-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing","text":"[LINK] DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: AI is currently just glorified compression I love David MacKay's brilliant work on the Dasher text input system, which draws deeply from his work on information theory -- imagine Dasher integrated with an IDE and code search and Copilot and language model! \"Writing is navigating in the library of all possible books.\" -David MacKay We just allocate more shelf space to the more probable letters. Why isn't Dasher built into every operating system and mobile phone? [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] DonHopkins on May 18, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look an... Dasher is fantastic, because it's based on rock solid information theory, designed by the late David MacKay. Here is the seminal Google Tech Talk about it: [VIDEO] Here is a demo of using Dasher by an engineer at Google, Ada Majorek, who has ALS and uses Dasher and a Headmouse to program: [LINK] Another one of her demonstrating Dasher: Ada Majorek Introduction - CSUN Dasher [LINK] Here\u2019s a more recent presentation about it, that tells all about the latest open source release of Dasher 5: Dasher - CSUN 2016 - Ada Majorek and Raquel Romano [LINK] Here's the github repo: Dasher Version 4.11 [LINK] >Dasher is a zooming predictive text entry system, designed for situations where keyboard input is impractical (for instance, accessibility or PDAs). It is usable with highly limited amounts of physical input while still all","stance":"rec"}],"wq5D43qAsVg":[{"hn_comment_id":2934871,"author":"kubrickslair","month":"2011-08","story_title":"Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.","text":"Parent and grandparent, take some deep breadths and relax. Please don't quibble. Then watch this rather insightful video titled 'Everything is a Remix' [VIDEO] And pardon me, for coming off as arrogant, but I hate to see trivial fights here when you are missing the bigger picture.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3626148,"author":"nextparadigms","month":"2012-02","story_title":"If Android is a \"stolen product,\" then so was the iPhone","text":"Look around in any industry you want. How would you define competition, if nothing but very similar products to the original product of that type in that particular market? This video describes very well how inventions get created and then evolve for the benefit of everyone: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"wqn3gR1WTcA":[{"hn_comment_id":31210944,"author":"praveenhm","month":"2022-04","story_title":"You can now ask Google to remove your phone number, email or address from search","text":"Removing from google doesn't go far enough, the big culprit is the data broker. Displaying your age, is the biggest worry, among your friends circle. John oliver recently made a late night show on data brokers, threatening the congress members, must watch for anyone. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33212129,"author":"roneoo","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Why do we allow Equifax, Transunion, and Experian to exist?","text":"To get an overview of these (toxic IMHO) companies, I strongly recommend this episode of Last Week Tonight: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31347065,"author":"thenaturalist","month":"2022-05","story_title":"European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids","text":"Care to share some details? When it comes to privacy invasion the EU has been a champion in curbing massively intrusive corporate practices for years now. Some of it is awful yes, but other high visibility projects have been amazing. I'm glad to be European when I look at the insanity that is the American tracking and personal data brokers industry. I recommend a recent John Oliver on this: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32133114,"author":"mixmastamyk","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?","text":"You may not be aware of the full extent of the problem. It's not just the \"time wasting\" of the old days, just ~15 years ago. Try these documentaries: - \"The Social Dilemma\" on Netflix - \"The United States of Secrets\" on PBS. - John Oliver on Data Brokers, [VIDEO] There are others I can't remember off the top of my head. You may feel differently when you find out about companies profiting off the current (as in right now) whereabouts of your child.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32557246,"author":"mixmastamyk","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into Google","text":"[VIDEO] John Oliver is informative here, though some of his jokes fall flat on this one. It's just not a funny subject I suppose.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39693202,"author":"ethbr1","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Auto Makers Are Selling Data on Your Driving Habits to Your Insurer","text":"John Oliver may be relevant to your interests: [VIDEO] >> \"I am sorry to disappoint you; we are not going to do that.\" >> \"Why would we? When we have already done it.\"","stance":"rec"}],"wqu_IpkOYBg":[{"hn_comment_id":1362145,"author":"corysama","month":"2010-05","story_title":"The Demoscene -- an Overview","text":"Farbrausch's \"debris.\" shows just how much you can pack into 200k (including the audio, btw). [VIDEO] For the webby crowd: \"Masagin\" features animated, recursive SVGs with antialiasing and motion blur at high rez and high frame rate. [LINK] Or, you could download both demos from [LINK] and run them on your own PC.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5463880,"author":"guiambros","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Simple Minecraft Clone in 580 lines of Python","text":"If you want to really show off the demoscene, try Farbrausch - fr-041. It's comparatively very big (179KB), but impressive how they were able to squeeze so much stuff there: video [VIDEO] , official repository: [LINK] . If you want to dig deeper, Farbrausch published most of their material and tools last year including the source code for fr-041. Search for farbrausch on GitHub. But I must say, it's pretty hardcore.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9252529,"author":"clay_to_n","month":"2015-03","story_title":"F***ing Learn to Code Again (1999)","text":"Farbrausch made the first demo I ever saw, a 2007 one called debris (fr-041): [VIDEO] Super cool, and in an executable of 177kB.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11852828,"author":"sclangdon","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Source code for 4kb demoscene production \u201cElevated\u201d released","text":"Although they generally didn't compete in the 4kb genre, Farbrausch open-sourced many of their demos and demo-making tools a few years ago [1]. fr-041: Debris [2], and kkrieger [3] (the 96kb FPS) are particularly worth checking out for the uninitiated. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"wrwgIjBUYVc":[{"hn_comment_id":24822017,"author":"zestyping","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Gravity is not a force \u2013 free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime","text":"This video really cleared up a lot of misunderstandings for me: [VIDEO] I had never visualized it this way in my head before, and it all makes a lot more sense now. Highly recommend!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31450268,"author":"nemothekid","month":"2022-05","story_title":"PBS SpaceTime","text":"Science Asylum is great, but I dislike the 90s educational show presentation format. An absolute gem I've stumbled across is ScienceClic: [LINK] They have amazing presentations on Relativity, my favorite being: \"A new way to visualize General Relativity\" - [VIDEO] \"Hawking Radiation\" - [LINK] Another, while heavier and less accessible channel is Physics Explained: [LINK] These are closer like lectures, but I enjoy them because they go into the histories of some of these experiments; and what the prevailing wisdom was around the time the experiments were performed: \"What is the Ultraviolet Catastrophe?\" - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32115958,"author":"nextaccountic","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Mass and angular momentum, left ambiguous by Einstein, get defined","text":"But under this point of view there's no force at all. Gravity doesn't exert a force on you, the movement under gravity is purely inertial. I know this is bonkers. Here's the video that made me finally understand it [VIDEO] ( [LINK] is another good video from the same author)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32228862,"author":"lahwran","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ask HN: YouTube Channels for the Intellectually Curious","text":"scienceclic also comes in an english edition. hands down the best visualization of general relativity I've seen. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24822444,"author":"manigandham","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Gravity is not a force \u2013 free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime","text":"That's linked at the bottom of the article. Another good video to visualize GR is this by ScienceClic: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29488235,"author":"ben_w","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Gravitational waves should permanently distort space-time","text":"The rubber sheet analogy is criticised for this exact reason. Here\u2019s a different visualisation that starts with what\u2019s wrong with the rubber sheet: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35092763,"author":"Amezarak","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Why AI Won't Cause Unemployment","text":"Sure, no doubt, a video can sometimes make things much clearer. A great example (to me) is this [1] for example. I had understood from the old illustrations that I was supposed to imagine something like that, but video makes it incredibly clear. The actual net impact of screens in classrooms, however, appears to me to be extremely negative, and I think learning outcomes bear that out. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48461809,"author":"rfgplk","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Show HN: Gravity \u2013 interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein","text":"Very nice, fairly efficient too. I don't like the explicit split of Newtonian and relativistic gravity, this is often how it's presented in educational content, but it creates too much confusion; for instance it gives the illusion that they are somehow separate theories even though Newtonian gravity is a limiting case of Einsteinian gravity when v << c and gravitational fields are weak (see Poissons eq for Newtons gravitational potential. Lastly, you should consider rendering spacetime similar to Alessandro Roussels spacetime visualization [VIDEO] ; probably the best and most innovative one I've seen.","stance":"rec"}],"wsaufB5F8dk":[{"hn_comment_id":23630798,"author":"cagenut","month":"2020-06","story_title":"What vertical farming and ag startups don't understand about agriculture","text":"This has the infuriatingly common fatal logical flaw of wrapping \"farming\" in one giant layer of abstraction and comparing indoor vs outdoor at the broadest scale. Indoor farming, or greenhouse farming, or high-tunnel farming, or a zillion others are all incremental adaptations of particular plants and particular markets. You cannot compare the global corn and wheat markets to the nyc lunch salad market. \"Farming\" has always meant thousands of different things, and for some of those things there will be markets for indoor grow ops. This is not an assertion, we all know there's a very robust one right now. Debating indoor vs outdoor farming at this broad a level is like debating cars vs bicycles as if we have to pick one. If anyone would like to see an extremely deep dive into the exact scientific measurements at which certain plant markets become viable at certain energy prices you will find this half hour very well spent: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22004056,"author":"halbritt","month":"2020-01","story_title":"For tech-weary Midwest farmers, 40-year-old tractors now a hot commodity","text":"You could grow salad in the cupboard. Lettuce is one of the few crops that would be economical to grow under indoor lighting. I believe that info comes from here: [VIDEO] If you think LEDs have gotten epic, check out his research. They're just getting to be more efficient than HPS.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24095105,"author":"cagenut","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms","text":"> Now lets get the yield potentials for everything else under the sun so we can start optimizing better. [VIDEO] That presentation is by one of the same scientists referenced in the linked paper, Dr. Bruce Bugbee, the one who grew wheat on the ISS. He has a whole youtube channel that goes into more detail than you can imagine: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26188567,"author":"SomewhatLikely","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Vertical farming does not save space","text":"For anyone who wants to get into the technical details on efficiency of growing crops under lighting, here's an informative talk from Bruce Bugsbee of Apogee Instruments: [VIDEO] He shows that wheat, which was the example used in the article, would cost 100x more growing under lighting, but for greens and microgreens the lighting costs are only a few percent of the market value of the crop so those are very viable as indoor crops.","stance":"rec"}],"wt-iVFxgFWk":[{"hn_comment_id":12640987,"author":"SonOfLilit","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"\"The Birth and Death of Javascript\" by Gary Bernhardt (probably the most talented speaker on tech) at [LINK] I'd mention Bret Victor's work before (maybe Drawing Dynamic Visualizations?), but Bret cheats by writing a lot of amazing code for each of his talks, and most of the awesome comes from the code, not his (great nonetheless) ability as a speaker. Then you have John Carmack's QuakeCon keynotes, which are just hours and hours of him talking about things that interest him in random order, and it still beats most well prepared talks because of how good he is at what he does. HN will probably like best the one where he talks about his experiments in VR, a bit before he joined Oculus (stuff like when he tried shining a laser into his eyes to project an image, against the recommendations of... well, everyone): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16841467,"author":"hotwire","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless. His QuakeCon talks are particularly good. QuakeCon 2011 - [LINK] QuakeCon 2012 - [VIDEO] I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code. Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4447526,"author":"jcr","month":"2012-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What happened to Augmented Reality?","text":"Augmented Reality has always been difficult, expensive, and very limited, but on the bright side, some really great work is being done on it. Start Here: [VIDEO] You might also enjoy: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4708056,"author":"wh-uws","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Is it possible to create a world like in the movie Matrix?","text":"John Carmack did a pretty fascinating segment about his work on something to this effect with a head mounted display at QuakeCon this year [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5544847,"author":"SonOfLilit","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?","text":"Maybe John Carmack's QuakeCon 2012 keynote: [VIDEO] But I think the 3 minute talks we host at home once a month or two have among them the 3-5 best I've heard (we just started taking videos, but they're in Hebrew). I highly recommend hosting your own 3 minute talk session. It's really easy and the format just inherently leads to amazing talks.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8346439,"author":"ramidarigaz","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Keynote by John Carmack at Oculus Connect 2014 [video]","text":"If you liked his talk, definitely check out his QuakeCon keynotes and his talk about physically based lighting. [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13738253,"author":"erikbye","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Id Software Programming Principles","text":"Carmack has programmed professionally at least since 1990, he was 19 then, 20 when he founded id Software. Genius or not, he obviously has a lot of programming experience, and familiarity with a subject counts for a lot. He has worked really hard, written millions of LoC. Obviously his \"genius\" lies not in learning a programming language and syntax, anyone can do that. But he evidently has a knack for developing new techniques (e.g. in graphics). He has a good understanding of especially light physics and hence physical based rendering. Considering his ventures with Armadillo Aerospace it's probably safe to say he's got a good understanding of physics in general. How many game developers went from games to aerospace? [LINK] [LINK] Elon Musk practically offered Carmack a job at SpaceX, tweeting \"Well, if you love rockets, come work on them with me at SpaceX!\" Carmack is a very enthusiastic person, who is hard working, and genuinely passionate about everything he pursues. I have \"followed\" him for a good while. It's not difficult to tell he's a lot smarter than your average Joe, but he also seems quite a bit sharper than your average smart programmer. I recommend watching all his talks and interviews. Some amusing and revealing stuff on his childhood: [LINK] \"In the gaming industry, there are a lot of people that are specifically in it because they love games and they want to create things. My love for programming is a more abstract thing. I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment w","stance":"rec"}],"wtIhVwPruwY":[{"hn_comment_id":21775410,"author":"eindiran","month":"2019-12","story_title":"First mathematical proof for a key law of turbulence in fluid mechanics","text":"I think this is a good lay-person's introduction to basis of Kolmogorov's length scale, specifically the Reynold's number: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24963252,"author":"bgilroy26","month":"2020-11","story_title":"Single-Celled Organism Appears to Make Decisions (2019)","text":"Thank you for writing out this comment! Even in the Age of the Internet, being able to put your hands on the right review paper is not given at all My girlfriend and I both have mental health issues and that is most of my saw in wanting to understand Neuro 101 or comparative animal neuro or Evolutionary Neuro or anything that will incrementally add to an understanding of human brains that will improve the ability to advocate for ourselves in the US health care system. Serendipitously, I was independent studying on fluid mechanics and dynamics last year[0] and had been through Purcell 1977, so I'm excited to check out your work on that account as well! [0] There are some nice YouTube videos out there to ramp you up to understanding Purcell 1977 better as a layman with undergrad maths Numberphile -- Reynolds Number [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28166580,"author":"dagw","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Tesla valve","text":"When it comes to fluids (and gases) the keyword you are looking for the the Navier-Stokes equation. In most cases gases and fluids can be handled essentially the same way. There is pretty a good video introduction to Navier-Stokes here: [LINK] (part 1) and [VIDEO] (part 2) The big 'problem' with fluid dynamics is that from the equations it looks like a really simple problem. The Navier-Stokes equation is a couple of lines and you can explain it to a reasonably smart high school student who has taken calculus. And in the 'easy' case where you assume laminar flow and no turbulence it is pretty easy. The problem is when you introduce turbulence into the system then it becomes basically unsolvable and you are forced to rely on 'tricks' and approximations to make the problem computable. Most of the 'art' of CFD is picking the right tricks and approximations to solve the particular problem you have (the second 'art' is creating and a good mesh to run the solver on).","stance":"rec"}],"wtV5ev6813I":[{"hn_comment_id":32622613,"author":"Lev1a","month":"2022-08","story_title":"At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt","text":"On the topic of prison systems in America vs. the civilized world, this is absolutely worth a watch: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14392416,"author":"okket","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Topics in Core Mathematics at Graterford Prison","text":"I'd recommend to watch this talk about the German prison system from an American perspective. The main point is the difference between European resocialization and US retributive justice. Although this may show the bright sides here in Germany a little bit too bright, they do exist. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25515804,"author":"freeflight","month":"2020-12","story_title":"In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)","text":"It's debatable if the police state was actually responsible for that drop in crime. Afaik Canada saw a comparable drop in crime, over the same time-period, without starting to mass incarcerate people [0] [0] [VIDEO] (Relevant stats and discussion start around 6:45, but the whole talk is rather worthwhile to watch)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27168373,"author":"Lev1a","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Joe Ligon: America's 'longest juvenile lifer' on 68 years in prison","text":"Or this talk about one of Denmarks neighbours (Germany) by an American, Jewish, (grand-)son of Holocaust survivors visiting a German prison with a bunch of other Americans (\"60 Minutes\" reporter, some Governor, a DA, a convicted murderer etc.). A bunch of stats and comparisons to underline the effects of different prison systems: [VIDEO] And the related segment from \"60 Minutes\": [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"wupToqz1e2g":[{"hn_comment_id":2185941,"author":"jwatzman","month":"2011-02","story_title":"The Size of the Human Radio-Broadcast Bubble in the Milky Way Galaxy","text":"Here's a YouTube link to the entire Pale Blue Dot bit by Sagan: [VIDEO] Sagan is absolutely amazing. It really does put things in perspective.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18785057,"author":"Crazyontap","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Which audiobooks did/do you like?","text":"I really loved the Pale blue dot by Carl Sagan. His voice is soo smooth and relaxing that sometimes I just hear it for his voice even though the content is nothing less than amazing. P.S. Unfortunately Sagan died before the book recording could be completed so some chapters are in a different voice. Still, listening to it is real zen like. Here is a sample[1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21270127,"author":"WhiteSage","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Depressed People See the World More Realistically (2017)","text":"I'm sorry for your loss. When something bad happens I often find myself going back to Carl Sagan's words on the Pale Blue Dot [0]. Puts everything in perspective, and makes everything feel insignificant, when compared with the vastness of what lies out there. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27086757,"author":"shafyy","month":"2021-05","story_title":"I\u2019ve had the same supper for 10 years","text":"Ah, legacy. It always makes me happy to listen to Carl Sagan's words on his text \"The Pale Blue Dot\": From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every \"superstar,\" every \"supreme leader,\" every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged pos","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47583685,"author":"bayindirh","month":"2026-03","story_title":"Artemis II is not safe to fly","text":"James May of Top Gear has flown with a U2 spy plane once [0][1]. When they reached to the edge of space, May said \"If everybody could do that once, it would completely change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything\". I can't agree more. Another thing I believe needs to be watched periodically is Pale Blue Dot [2]. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"}],"wwmOkaKh3-s":[{"hn_comment_id":28737880,"author":"ItsMonkk","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper Is the Latest Sign","text":"I encourage everyone who cares about this space to watch the 1994 Charlie Rose episode with Sir James Goldsmith[0]. He nailed it. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10879114,"author":"walterbell","month":"2016-01","story_title":"In 2016, let's hope for better trade agreements \u2013 and the death of TPP","text":"For historical context on trade and society, see the classic (1994) Charlie Rose interview of Sir James Goldsmith on GATT/NAFTA, now that we have 20 years of experimental results, [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12891436,"author":"sprafa","month":"2016-11","story_title":"How Economic Gobbledygook Divides Us","text":"You should look at Jonathan Goldsmith's appearance on Charlie Rose. [VIDEO] Free Trade is not always good, and he correctly predicts that the global movement of capital will disrupt the current agreement between capital and labor that served the West so well. Donald Trump is wrong on many issues, but this is not one of them as far as I can tell. There a religiosity to the argument that free trade is \"always good\", even though high performing Asian economies are somewhat protective. Economics at its current understanding is almost like a religion of capitalism. It has little to do with actual economic behaviour and has very little predictive power. That's why we keep having crises. Look into the work of anthropologists and behavioural economists to see the reality of how humans actually behave and what that means for \"classical economics\". Basically, most of it is bunk, all the way down to Adam Smith. One of the best references I've read on this so far is \"Debt the first 5000 years\" \"How Asia Works\" On behavioural economics, there's studies coming out all the time. The evidence is piling up that little of what economists have said makes sense. They've deducted general guidelines that sort of work at the macro scale, but their fundamentals are mostly wrong.","stance":"rec"}],"wxL4ElboiuA":[{"hn_comment_id":17402624,"author":"dustinmoorenet","month":"2018-06","story_title":"The Nixie Tube Story: The Neon Display Tech That Engineers Can\u2019t Quit","text":"The video in the article is just amazing. You don't normally get to see the exact details of how things get made. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27778798,"author":"brokenmachine","month":"2021-07","story_title":"List of Special Elevator Modes","text":"Going even more OT, I watched a mesmerizing and beautiful youtube video about making nixie tubes. I love craftsman videos. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35380793,"author":"dymk","month":"2023-03","story_title":"One Man\u2019s Quest to Revive the Great American Vacuum Tube","text":"I came to comment about Dalibor as well - amazing youtube channel. Recommended viewing for anyone who loves home-ish-scale, high-quality manufacturing: [VIDEO] He's got to be one of the world's experts on nixie tube manufacturing, at this point.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16910080,"author":"zxcvgm","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Hand Made Vacuum Tubes by Claude Paillard (2012) [video]","text":"if you liked watching this, then maybe you'd also like these videos, which i watched some time ago: making a miniature vacuum tube triode [LINK] The Art of Making a Nixie Tube [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23029772,"author":"janekm","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Casio CQ-1 calculator and clock","text":"Getting a custom VFD made would be a very expensive process indeed. If you need a very small number of segments then Dalibor Farny can make a custom Nixie tube, which is similar technology: [LINK] Also a good introduction to how they are made (making a VFD would be similar but more difficult): [VIDEO] Otherwise Noritake itron still make VFD monitors for industrial applications (seems they have high temp advantages over LCDs): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29245638,"author":"jkingsman","month":"2021-11","story_title":"IoT Nixie Tubes","text":"Tangentially, this is a beautiful (with no music or narration; text notes only) high quality video of modern artisanal (i.e. all by hand) nixie tube manufacturing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"x1bX3F7uTrg":[{"hn_comment_id":29107561,"author":"fimdomeio","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Can't Get You Out of My Head","text":"You should always acompany this documentary with a watch of this short little video. The Loving Trap ( [VIDEO] ). It mocks adam curtis style while making some very good points.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4316918,"author":"HarrietJones","month":"2012-07","story_title":"All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace","text":"If you're going to watch any Adam Curtis documentary, it's worth watching the parody video \"The Loving Trap\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4316920,"author":"craig552uk","month":"2012-07","story_title":"All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace","text":"These are not good films. These are bad films. Adam Curtis is not a good film maker. Adam Curtis is a bad film maker. This is better [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6859995,"author":"jn","month":"2013-12","story_title":"What the Fluck","text":"Have you seen \"The Loving Trap\"? [VIDEO] (spoiler: it's a parody of Curtis's methods)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6860354,"author":"JonnieCache","month":"2013-12","story_title":"What the Fluck","text":"That's his whole thing. His films typically come in three or four 60 minute sections. He occasionally does stuff like stage live action interactive theatre versions of his documentaries in abandoned warehouses. He once did a show with Massive Attack. So when he writes articles like this, it's him being restrained. See the following brilliantly observed parody for the reasons to take him with a pinch of salt: [VIDEO] That said, he is one of my intellectual idols, however much he does enjoy gimmickry.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7022891,"author":"andreaja","month":"2014-01","story_title":"Amusing ourselves to death","text":"And if you're interested in Adam Curtis, I recommend this parody/critique: [VIDEO] Not saying that Curtis's documentaries are without merit, just lending a little context.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9008519,"author":"benkant","month":"2015-02","story_title":"Adam Curtis: Bitter Lake","text":"Yes. I disagree with most of his points of view. Some of his statements are outright incorrect and a majority are at least questionable or wanting for references. In _The Trap_ he constantly uses the phrase \"based on numbers\" in a negative fashion, as if it were an inferior method of analysis. I find that particularly strange considering that if you just listen to his narrative without the images, there is no analysis and often no cogent argument. One argument, if I remember correctly, was that game theory should no longer be used as a tool because it was largely developed during the cold war, which is over now. And yet I'm utterly I'm fascinated by his movies. I probably (re)watch one every 2 months. Go figure. edit: You can't miss this parody: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13608087,"author":"thackerhacker","month":"2017-02","story_title":"HyperNormalisation (2016) [video]","text":"It's easy to get sucked into thinking it all makes perfect sense but there's a few pretty big implied leaps of logic. This spoof sums it up pretty well I think [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14719057,"author":"Angostura","month":"2017-07","story_title":"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)","text":"Obligatory. If you enjoy Adam Curtis, you should have a look at 'The Loving Trap of Pandora's Nightmares' - its only 3 minutes long and rather amusing. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25739297,"author":"rayrag","month":"2021-01","story_title":"A Brief History of Consumer Culture","text":"It's on YT: [LINK] Also if you're a fan of his work watch 'The Loving Trap' [VIDEO] Enjoy.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25878849,"author":"Melting_Harps","month":"2021-01","story_title":"New six-film series from Adam Curtis","text":"> [VIDEO] LOL! I had paused Hypernormilzation on the mid point when it got to AI and the picture of the screen was a one of these guys [0] and I just had it that way and kind of wondered why I prefer to just hear his work as as podcast as I do other stuff rather than hyper focus on the screen. This explains my latent feelings of the absurdity on screen rather well. His documentaries have so much exposition that you can kind of look up the topics on your own as you go along to try and compare and contrast the facts as they're narrated, his work is probably my first foray with interactive TV. 0: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25975051,"author":"twic","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Adam Curtis Explains It All","text":"> Boone directed readers instead to a short online spoof of Curtis\u2019s films by Ben Woodhams called \u201cThe Loving Trap,\u201d which describes his work as the \u201ctelevisual equivalent of a drunken late-night Wikipedia binge.\u201d I'm glad this was mentioned, because i think it's hilarious: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28518252,"author":"renjimen","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Adam Curtis\u2019 \u201cBitter Lake\u201d: A Review","text":"You'll enjoy this parody then [VIDEO] It hits the nail on the head (but I still enjoy Curtis' work)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33558302,"author":"luminouslow","month":"2022-11","story_title":"Half a million UK workers drop out of workforce, citing long-term illness","text":"Why do you think its a joke? it seems you agree with me? Sure brits love to get drunk but their politics always seemed reasonable to me. I love the different subcultures the UK birthed and its heartbreaking how bad things are and are still going to get in the coming century. Downvote me if you must, wont change my personal (albeit uninformed) feelings. As for Adam Curtis i enjoy his work but this parody hits it on the nail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40335950,"author":"arduanika","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)","text":"Adam Curtis? Commoditized?? You clearly haven't seen this short clip: [VIDEO] encapsulating his work.","stance":"rec"}],"x1v2tX4_dkQ":[{"hn_comment_id":25495113,"author":"opheliate","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Understanding how AES encryption works","text":"While we're here, Christof Paar's 'Introduction to Cryptography' lecture series (freely available on YouTube here in English: [LINK] , originally delivered at Ruhr University Bochum) is a really excellent explanation of the internals of a number of crytographic algorithms. The lecture on Galois Fields ( [VIDEO] ) is especially useful in understanding AES, and explains where some of the operations described in the blog linked here actually come from (i.e: S-Boxes used in AES are derived from inversion in finite fields).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14691016,"author":"ktta","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Galois Theory for Beginners (2010) [pdf]","text":"Galois fields are used in crypto a bit, and I recommend this lecture to understand it in the context of crypto [VIDEO] PS: He has an entire series of lectures on his channel. Highly recommend.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19248786,"author":"dnautics","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Reed Solomon codes are cool","text":"if you want to learn finite fields somewhat more formally, but not so formally, this is a pretty good introduction (yes, it's for AES, but the principles are the same): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"x2-rSnhpw0g":[{"hn_comment_id":29093855,"author":"tmountain","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Beyond Whiteboarding: Creating Expert System Architecture Diagrams","text":"These fail my litmus test, which is, \"can a third-party look at the diagram and make sense of it without verbal explanation?\" For a more formal approach to coherent diagrams and white boarding, I recommend the C4 model. It's conceptually simple and results in better system documentation than the free form method that's commonly used. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31576308,"author":"qrian","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?","text":"Recently stumbled upon [C4 Model]( [VIDEO] ), which seemed very promising. It builds on the failure of adopton of UMLs, and aim to be practical and communicative.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37230817,"author":"SnowProblem","month":"2023-08","story_title":"Architecture diagrams enable better conversations","text":"If C4 is new to you too, I recommend their intro video: [VIDEO] . It feels like a very light ruleset over what we would do naturally when explaining a system to another engineer. That's great. Some of the ideas that stood out were: 1. Allow flexibility in the notation (shapes and color) as long as the abstractions are good. 2. When drawing arrows, make them unidirectional to show the main intent. 3. Hide details to express the main story (@ 27min in the video) 4. Don't just give names to components. Give short descriptions too. 5. Don't document the lowest levels. Code is better here.","stance":"rec"}],"x2H60ritjag":[{"hn_comment_id":10025205,"author":"schiffern","month":"2015-08","story_title":"U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high","text":">if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture The logic here seems to be that: * Farmers buy neonicotinoids. * Therefore, neonicotinoids have a net positive effect on agriculture. (in other words, like a good libertarian you are assuming that the market has complete/perfect/accurate information) Unfortunately that's just not true. Today's farmers simply don't have the required soil science/botany/ecology/hydrology knowledge. Worst, they are actively misled by biocide and fertilizer salesmen, who have a natural profit motive to convince farmers that their products are essential. Far from being essential, in reality pesticides destroy the nutrient harvesting ability of healthy soil. Soil microbiologist Dr. Elaine Ingham explains: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10025784,"author":"schiffern","month":"2015-08","story_title":"U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high","text":">Because the alternatives to neonicotinoids are broader-spectrum pesticides Well 'ere's yer problem! ;) You're starting off by assuming that agriculture must use pesticides to grow food. But is that really true? I submit to you that it is not. Furthermore, I submit that a food system that depends on pesticides is doomed to self-destruct (because of inevitable biogeophysical processes). Pesticides destroy the nutrient cycling microorganisms in the soil leading to infertility, erosion, and ultimately desertification. Again, soil microbiologist Elaine Ingham explains the process better than I could: [VIDEO] >I don't know why you insist on being so overtly hostile You're right. My apologies, and edited.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15539067,"author":"schiffern","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Insects Are in Serious Trouble","text":"> If I eat a banana that has potassium in it, it lends to the fact that it took potassium out of the soil. This is true. However the little-known fact is that healthy soil contains all the \"machines\" required to break down the abundant insoluble potassium (along with every other necessary element) present in rock particles into plant-soluble fertilizer. This \"insoluble pool\" contains enough nutrients for literally thousands of years of plant growth, if only the soil life is present to unlock it. The problem is that tillage kills this soil life, and that dead land now requires the constant import of external fertilizer to grow food. Pesticide and fertilizer application also kills these organisms, which out-compete pest species (as mentioned here: [LINK] ). Spraying becomes a vicious cycle for the farmer, and a lucrative cycle for their chemical supplier. In other words, functional soil isn't just an inert \"tank\" for holding nutrients. It's a two-dimensional factory for converting in-situ rock and air and rain into biomass. This is all explained much better by soil microbiologist Elaine Ingham. [VIDEO] > luckily engineers and farmers are looking at these things more closely now. I would add biologists (including soil scientists, botanists, mycologists, entomologists, ecologists, etc) and indigenous experts to that list.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24828524,"author":"vram22","month":"2020-10","story_title":"No-till no-herbicide farming system in trial since 1981","text":"Also see, very significantly, Elaine Ingham, soil (biology) scientist, Ph.D., also founder of startup soilfoodweb.com (to consult and get her research applied widely). Almost all the farmers I mentioned above, quote her work with respect and apply it in their operations, and consider it key to their results. She (along with many other researchers, over years, not a sudden thing) has come out with some rather startling results that, as I said, are being applied by these guys and many others. A key result is that it is the quantity and diversity of the life in the soil that is as (or more) important to soil health and hence farm results (now and long term) as the actual levels of plant nutrients in the soil. And this is because it is the soil life (they use the term \"biology\" for it, but okay, go with the prevailing term the experts use) that makes the chemical nutrients available in forms that plants can actually use, via a deep symbiosis and mutual helping that happens between plants and the soil biology, which includes bacteria, fungi, archaea, nematodes, arthropods and small animals. Another quite surprising / non-intuitive result is her saying that most or all soils on earth, already have many times more the amounts of nutrients than plants need, like 1000x more, including macro (e.g. N, P, K) and micro ones (like trace elements), so the limiting factor is really the soil biology, which depends a lot on soil organic matter content (all those critters need to eat), humidity","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34637433,"author":"schiffern","month":"2023-02","story_title":"Microbes are 'active engineers' in Earth's rock-to-life cycle","text":"For a practical discussion of how this biotic cycling connects to agriculture, Dr Elaine Ingham delivers a salient presentation.[0] [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38667231,"author":"vram22","month":"2023-12","story_title":"How the nutritional value of staple crops dropped by 50% since the 1960s","text":"Yes. I keep sharing Gabe Brown's three-part video series titled Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem, now and then, here on HN, whenever such threads come up. Some really solid practical and pragmatic stuff there, on regenerative agriculture, which, as I understand it [1], goes beyond organic farming, and is related to many of the issues talked about in this thread. [1] I had done organic gardening successfully, for a few years, some time earlier, so I have at least some practice and experience (and also a lot of reading and thinking about what I read) as the basis for my opinions of his work and those of others I mention, such as Elaine Ingham (a video by her is below too). One of her most astonishing finds / claims is that (IIRC, I saw the video a few years ago), almost all soils anywhere on earth have more than enough nutrients for plants for many many years. She said the real issue and limitation is the lack of soil organic content and soil structure and mycorrhiza ( [LINK] ), without which even applying tons of nutrients is useless. And, Gabe has a big farm, a few thousand acres (so not small scale) in North Dakota, USA, with field crops, green manure, livestock on pasture / prairie, etc. And is making profits from his farming operations, sustainably, even regeneratively, without government subsidies, and more than his conventionally-farming neighbors, some of whose soils are getting worse, while his get better over time, by objective measures (checked by external govt. age","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41951604,"author":"schiffern","month":"2024-10","story_title":"In the US, regenerative farming practices require unlearning past advice","text":"> Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants. Thank you. This is one of those super-underappreciated biological facts. Industrial ag treats soil like it's a tank of fertility, and guess who sells the refills? Biologists know that healthy soil is a factory , making new fertility out of rock/air/rain/sun. Direct from soil microbiologist Dr Elaine Ingham: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"x5Efg42-Qn0":[{"hn_comment_id":32647342,"author":"blacksoil","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Show HN: I built a tool to help you read Hacker News on Kindle","text":"[VIDEO] Are you aware of Todd Becker's method to reduce myopia? I've been doing it in the past 1 year and am happy to report that I've had 1.5 reduction in my glasses prescription (from 6.75). There's a PDF from a different person with a concrete guide on how much to reduce. I can share it if you're interested, feel free to email me at denny at nusantara-cloud.com :)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38792338,"author":"blacksoil","month":"2023-12","story_title":"High myopia is now the leading cause of blindness in Japan, China, and Taiwan","text":"The TLDR is that a lot of people have very high myopia that causes severe eyeball elongation, which then causes retinal damage/detachment, which sadly could progress into blindness.. I myself was -5.75 and -6.25 with some non-negligible cylinders. I experienced discomfort when looking at my phone phone and reading book with my glasses on. I General check up said that my eyeball pressure and all were normal, but I know the discomfort is nothing good and can be quite serious. I read up online and found out that myopia could cause eyeball elongation, which could cause discomfort and ultimately could cause retinal damage/detachment. The discomfort I was experiencing was probably due to my elongated eyeball. I prayed and began looking for way to work around my myopic eyes without having to get yet another thicker glasses... And I'm super thankful to have found out about this life-changing video by Todd Becker on how to reverse myopia: [VIDEO] . The TLDR is that eyeball elongation (and hence myopic eyes) can be reversed in a way very similar to how strength training is conducted (hormesis). You simply need to keep wearing reduced prescription and do eye-focus exercises regularly. It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? I was scared too at first, and when I went to a glasses store to get a lower prescription glasses, the store attendant warned me too. But I went ahead anyway. My latest eyes exam before the attempt (back in August 2021) was -6.75 and -6.5 with -0.25 and -0.5 cyls.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32647380,"author":"blacksoil","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Show HN: I built a tool to help you read Hacker News on Kindle","text":"AFAIK, the way LASIK works is by cutting down part of the lens, which essentially is to reshape the eye to compensate for the elongated eye ball. Given it's an invasive surgery, personally I'm not too comfortable. A friend of mine also shared that his girlfriend can't no longer drive at night after having a LASIK surgery due to the glare and halo effect. A year ago I came across Todd Becker's method to cure myopia here from HN as well. In case interested to check it out: [VIDEO] There's also a PDF from a different guy with some practical guide. Feel free to email me at denny at nusantara-cloud.com if you want me to share it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45401909,"author":"rramadass","month":"2025-09","story_title":"The doctor who says we can improve our vision \u2013 at any age","text":"Important article particularly for us folks who sit in front of Computers for most of our waking hours. Key points: he says that working on our vision has the power to transform how we think, feel and function. In fact, our vision is so fundamental to our health and wellbeing, Appelbaum describes it as \u201cthe new microbiome\u201d. \u201cBut vision is so much more complex. It\u2019s how our brain processes, organises and stores the information coming through the eyes.\u201d He adds: \u201cVision is a direct reflection of brain function.\u201d We have to focus on the Whole Organism rather than just the Vision part i.e. stop overloading the Visual System, sync our Circadian Rhythms with the day/night diurnal cycle and understand/use Visual Technology (eg. Nits) properly. Some relevant articles/videos; 1) Myopia: A Modern Yet Reversible Disease by Todd Becker - [VIDEO] This explains how to use Hormesis ( [LINK] ) to cure myopia. 2) How Hormesis Works: The Biology of Beneficial Adaptation to Stress by Todd Becker - [LINK] 3) How optimizing Circadian Rhythms can increase Healthy Years by Sachin Panda - [LINK] Gives a practical 6-step process to sync our circadian rhythms; the visual system is key here. 4) The Circadian Code by Sachin Panda - [LINK] and [LINK] 5) Brightness levels & Nits explained - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"x6AOwDttBsc":[{"hn_comment_id":31949152,"author":"cableshaft","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds","text":"> it just isn't happening with dorky headsets and probably won't until the tech matures enough to get there Zuckerberg is well aware of the technical challenges of VR headsets and they're putting a lot of effort into getting the headsets where they need to be. Seems like they're helping push the technology much further than any other company right now. Here's a 30 minute video where he and Michael Abrash go into the technical challenges, and what they've been doing to address those issues, as well as showing off prototype devices they've been working on[1]. And there's an hour long episode of Adam Savage's Tested series where they get to try the prototypes and go into even more detail[2]. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32714960,"author":"johnfn","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Meta\u2019s metaverse hype leads to real-world backlash","text":"Why are we deluged with such low quality, low interest, low curiosity articles - about some screenshot of Mark Zuckerberg's avatar of all things - when plenty of really fascinating and intellectual-curiosity-satisfying information exists out there about the metaverse? For instance, this video: [VIDEO] Especially on Hacker News, of all places! This article is the equivalent of celebrity tabloids. (This comment is probably not written with the best tone, but I am upset. PR mishaps aside, the metaverse is extremely technically interesting. Why HN skips all of that and just does reruns of Zuckerberg's avatar or whatever is beyond me.)","stance":"rec"}],"x7cQ3mrcKaY":[{"hn_comment_id":16353878,"author":"EdwardMSmith","month":"2018-02","story_title":"How and why we moved to Vue.js","text":"If you\u2019re not sure of the \u201cwhy\u201d of react, I\u2019ve found that Pete Hunt\u2019s talk \u201cRethinking Best Practices\u201d gives a great overview of the reasoning behind react. Especially from about 15:15. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23144686,"author":"insin","month":"2020-05","story_title":"What if we'd had better HTML-in-JS syntax all along?","text":"How far back can we go? insin/DOMBuilder was initially based on a 2006 library of the same - but differently-cased - name by Dan Webb ( [LINK] ) and the earliest variant I can recall was Mochikit.DOM ( [LINK] ) By the end of DOMBuilder's life it could generate DOM or HTML from the same code and I'd tried unsuccessfully to implement a way to rehydrate HTML by hooking up events using the same code on the client. Not long after, I happened to be in the audience for Pete Hunt's React: Rethinking best practices talk at JSConf EU ( [VIDEO] ) and I was totally floored; they'd solved everything I had been trying to do with UI as code and much more, and JSX was the icing on the cake, as using nested object/array syntax has always been rife with comma-management hell when you're maintaining UI code.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7421374,"author":"versusdotcom","month":"2014-03","story_title":"Angular 2.0","text":"Totally agree and also recommend to look at React. While Angular is just way too much of everything React is pretty much thought-out: Here a quick comparison of both: [LINK] Here a pretty good video of React's founder pointing on some weakness of Angular: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8407351,"author":"munro","month":"2014-10","story_title":"Mistakes AngularJS Developers Make","text":"#1 -- Separating by concerns is much preferable to me, organizing by controllers/directives/services/... is a separation of technology, not the high level concept. There's a great React video on this concept, as well as some other good stuff! [1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8725870,"author":"paulshen","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Build with React \u2013 ReactJS articles and tutorials","text":"You're definitely not the only one. [LINK] as well as other HN comment threads. Check out [LINK] or this JSConf talk [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9556521,"author":"ChrisGaudreau","month":"2015-05","story_title":"How I learned to stop worrying and love React","text":"Separation of concerns and separation of technologies are a different thing. It would appear you haven't done your research. See Pete Hunt's famous talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11789671,"author":"firasd","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Thinking in React","text":"This is a very useful walkthrough. Some links for those who are also interested in \"Thinking in React\" in a more conceptual way (#4 is a presentation from the same person who wrote the walkthrough): 1) React \u2014 Basic Theoretical Concepts: \u201cA description of the conceptual model of React without implementation burden.\u201d [LINK] 2) Pure UI: \u201cA lot has been written about the merits of React as a framework. Today I\u2019m compelled to write about the benefits of a programming model it enables and its implications to the design and creation workflow.\" [LINK] 3) Removing User Interface Complexity, or Why React is Awesome: \u201cI\u2019m mostly concerned with the core problems of data binding and componentizing UIs. After much research and usage of the technologies mentioned above, I found React to provide the best solution.\u201d [LINK] 4) Pete Hunt: React: Rethinking best practices (youtube): \u201cbuilding views with JavaScript, \u2018re-\u200brendering\u2019 your entire application when your data changes, and a lightweight implementation of the DOM and events.\u201d [VIDEO] 5) Nothing new in React and Flux except one thing: \u201cWhat is it that makes React so innovative and compelling?\u2026 The Virtual DOM allows us to convert a mutable retained mode graphics API to an immutable functional immediate mode API.\u201d [LINK] (I collected them to go along with something I wrote in the same vein: [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14172445,"author":"vmasto","month":"2017-04","story_title":"An experienced Javascript developer\u2019s account of learning React","text":"I was very intrigued by the title: Things nobody will tell you about React.js Immediately had high hopes that someone is going to try and give a well researched, novel critique that maybe can spur out some constructive conversation. And then, sadly, the author goes on to write exactly what countless other articles have already covered and discussed to the death for years now. \"HTML in JS\", \"JSX is bad\", \"Redux is complicated\", \"The tooling is too much\". And then here we are again in the front page of HN for some reason. To me, this is, again, an extremely common case of \"trying to learn everything at once\". Still, a couple of points I'd like to try to mention: JSX: Has been argued about so much it's pretty much useless to try and add anything to this discussion at this point honestly. For whomever likes it, fine, for those who don't, thankfully the JavaScript ecosystem provides with a multitude of alternatives. For new-comers still trying to reason about it, this talk by Pete Hunt is a good start [VIDEO] Redux: > Anytime I work with redux I need to go back to its documentation because its core concepts are so complicate that my mind struggles retrieving them back puking them out as soon as I stop working with it. While I agree that working with Redux at scale can be complicated, the core concepts are extremely simple: Async Action -> Action -> Reducer -> Connect data to your components -> Display -> Async Action -> enter an extremely simple data flow paradigm (flux). (state, ","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32918202,"author":"yCombLinks","month":"2022-09","story_title":"React I love you, but you're bringing me down","text":"I actually much prefer how react handles this, I think this very early react talk makes a very good point [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"x7drE24geUw":[{"hn_comment_id":25776341,"author":"rkangel","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Decentralised Content Moderation","text":"The author is a researcher on distributed systems. I found this video from him to be an excellent first education on CRDTs, how they work, what they're good for and what they aren't (yet) good for: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39134489,"author":"iamwil","month":"2024-01","story_title":"CRDTs Turned Inside Out","text":"Ah, I'll put it in as a note in the beginning. You can see a more basic introduction in a previous post I wrote: [LINK] [LINK] Here's some introductory material I found helpful: - [An interactive intro to CRDTs]( [LINK] ) - [An introduction to state-based CRDTs]( [LINK] ) - [CRDTs for non-academics]( [LINK] ) - [CRDT: The Hard Parts]( [VIDEO] ) - [Readings in CRDTs]( [LINK] ) - [crdt.tech]( [LINK] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42344977,"author":"williamstein","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Lies I was told about collab editing, Part 1: Algorithms for offline editing","text":"What they claim is that if all editing stops, then after a period of time everybody will be looking at the SAME document. This is what is meant by \"eventual consistency\". Achieving this in general is indeed a difficult problem, but (some of) these algorithms do solve it, though it can be tricky to correctly prove that they do. I agree that it is not possible to ensure that the document everybody is looking at is what they actually wanted it to be. However, there are some options for what happens, where some results may be technically correct -- we are all looking at the same thing -- but obviously really bad. This beautiful talk has some examples: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"x94PGgYKHQ0":[{"hn_comment_id":19211158,"author":"pdovy","month":"2019-02","story_title":"US Cities Are Becoming More Dangerous for Cyclists and Pedestrians","text":"There's a great, if a bit cheesy video from FortNine [1] on why motorcyclists can be basically invisible to even cautious drivers due to the way our brain processes information, and I think the same thing would apply for bicyclists. When I'm on my bike (of either type) I assume nobody sees me and act accordingly. For cyclists and pedestrians to really be safe we need to design our road infrastructure to counteract those issues from the start. I visited Copenhagen a few years ago and biked everywhere, and it was a real eye opener how safe and easy it was compared with my home in Chicago. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21157584,"author":"alosarv","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Lethal memory fail: Why drivers see, and then forget motorcyclists","text":"Also an excellent video here [VIDEO] - tongue-in-cheek but highly relevant \"invisibility training for motorcyclists\" by FortNine","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21157588,"author":"chrisweekly","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Lethal memory fail: Why drivers see, and then forget motorcyclists","text":"As a motorcyclist -- and lifelong learner w/ a degree in cognitive psychology -- I really appreciate demonstrations like this one^1 from Daniel Simons. It's a short video (< 90s), but for many first-time viewers, it's an eye-opening experience. ^1. [LINK] Edit: just saw @elosarv's link to a longer but more relevant \"motorcycle invisibility training\" video ( [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27908586,"author":"jascii","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Twike","text":"For all practical purposes bicycles and motorcycles are invisible to drivers. FortNine has an amusing video on it: [VIDEO] My personal experience, after years as a courier on both upright, recumbent, and motorcycles is that I am more \"visible\" on a recumbent then the other options because I'm \"weird\" enough to make it into a drivers consciousness... None of this is ofcourse scientifically relevant data.","stance":"rec"}],"xAoljeRJ3lU":[{"hn_comment_id":17734362,"author":"vitalique","month":"2018-08","story_title":"New Map Scale Is More Readable by People Who Are Color Blind","text":"I am not colorblind, but work with data visualization in Matlab a lot. This hilarious SciPy2015 talk[1] convinced me to switch to the Parula color scheme. There's no way I'm going back to Jet. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19626142,"author":"Mizza","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]","text":"Grrr, why aren't scientists all using perceptually uniforms color schemes! This would still look awesome in `plasma`. Is there any where I can get the data and do it myself? One of my favorite talks ever is on this subject: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20754624,"author":"kbd","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Turbo, an Improved Rainbow Colormap for Visualization","text":"If you have any interest in this topic, I\u2019d strongly recommend watching this presentation at SciPy 2015 where Viridis and Inferno were first presented, when the developers of Matplotlib were coming up with a new default colormap to replace Jet: [VIDEO] I'd love to see Turbo analyzed in the same fashion.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20754712,"author":"spectramax","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Turbo, an Improved Rainbow Colormap for Visualization","text":"> Today we are happy to introduce Turbo, a new colormap that has the desirable properties of Jet while also addressing some of its shortcomings, such as false detail, banding and color blindness ambiguity. What are the desirable properties of Jet? Why not use Viridis or Magma or any of the recent linear colormaps from matplotlib 2.0? These shortcomings were the exact reason why Viridis was created as exemplified in this brilliant talk: [VIDEO] I don't understand the point of Turbo. > Turbo mimics the lightness profile of Jet, going from low to high back down to low, without banding. As such, its lightness slope is generally double that of Viridis, allowing subtle changes to be more easily seen. This is a valuable feature, since it greatly enhances detail when color can be used to disambiguate the low and high ends. Why would anyone want low-to-high-to-low colormap? > Viridis is a linear color map that is generally recommended when false color is needed because it is pleasant to the eye and it fixes most issues with Jet. Inferno has the same linear properties of Viridis, but is higher contrast, making it better for picking out detail. However, some feel that it can be harsh on the eyes. While this isn\u2019t a concern for publishing, it does affect people\u2019s choice when they must spend extended periods examining visualizations. Personal taste vs scientific accuracy - I will take the latter unless we are doing plots for marketing materials. In my view this is not substantiated reason","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21273861,"author":"neilpanchal","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Designing Accessible Color Systems","text":"I built similar perceptually uniform color library: [LINK] The sad part is that we have all these colors available in the physical world but representing in sRGB (or even Adobe RGB or DCI P3) space takes away all the fun. We have a narrow space to work within and it poses limits to what you can do. Vast majority of monitors in the world are barely capable of representing sRGB space, and even if they are, calibration is another issue. You can employ all kinds of science in representing proper colors but if the end user's calibration is not good, all bets are off. Colors are a problem for interface design (and accessibility), it becomes a real challenge when dealing with quantitative data and build perceptually uniform colormaps with accessibility considerations, here is an amazing presentation of Matplotlib's new colormaps: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23427719,"author":"azepoi","month":"2020-06","story_title":"How to Avoid Equidistant HSV Colors (2011)","text":"I'm impressed by the other mentioned picker, for HCL this time [LINK] This tool is also useful [LINK] I have to mention this fantastic presentation on colormaps [VIDEO] (A Better Default Colormap for Matplotlib, SciPy 2015, Nathaniel Smith and St\u00e9fan van der Walt). It is about perceptually uniform colormaps. [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11440241,"author":"elsherbini","month":"2016-04","story_title":"HCL: a color model that actually matches our perceptions (2011)","text":"This talk from the matplotlib people on making a better color map goes into some details about physical perception and what it means for picking colors: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15572555,"author":"vanderZwan","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Sorting Algorithms Revisualized","text":"There is the cube-helix approach, but I suspect you're thinking about something else. The linked talk about the creation of the viridis colour map[0] actually spends a good ten minutes on explaining colour theory, and makes it look very simple in the process. About ten minutes in it shows the \"perceptual colour space\" of a typical non-colourblind person. A few minutes later it shows the color spaces for people with various types of colourblindness. Perhaps one could project one perceptual space into the other in a way that more-or-less preserves the original information, but essentially with more banding? [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16796977,"author":"hprotagonist","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Color: From Hex codes to Eyeballs","text":"Color is way more fascinating than I had previously thought. A few years ago, i watched this pydata talk on designing colormaps for matplotlib that was pretty engrossing: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18219344,"author":"cosmic_quanta","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"A Better Default Colormap for Matplotlib ( [VIDEO] ) This talk is made better by the fact that it's rather brief (~20min).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26499505,"author":"maliker","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Which color scale to use when visualizing data","text":"There\u2019s a great talk [1] on how SciPy chose their new default colormap viridis to replace the rainbow colored former default \u201cjet\u201d. Turns out that there have been good studies on how the wrong colormap can lead to bad decisions in medicine, and designing a replacement took a lot of careful work. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27697406,"author":"CorrectHorseBat","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Rainbow Color Map Still Considered Harmful (2007) [pdf]","text":"You're increasing the discriminability at the cost of high _local_ distortion, I don't see how that is a good tradeoff. As a comparison, what would you rather have: a non-distorted plot or a plot that is on average about three times as big, but it's heavily distorted. At some places it's smaller than the original and on other places it's 5 times bigger. Would you really choose the bigger figure? That is what jet is. Look at this plot [VIDEO] (watch the whole video if you have the time), ideally you want the derivatives (the 2 plots on the left top) to be constant so not to distort your data. Jet is all over the place while viridis is basically constant (not shown in the slides, but the derivative stays all the way around 120).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37983405,"author":"quietbritishjim","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Why Japan Has Blue Traffic Lights Instead of Green","text":"Depending on what exactly your figures were/are, you might benefit from the viridis colour map, available in matplotlib and R (and probably in many other places). It's colourful, so those without colour blindness get a richer display than if you used greyscale, and the colours chosen aren't too affected by most common forms of colour blindness. But for those that really can't see the colours, even if you literally just convert to monochrome, it still works. It also looks nice :-) Here's a talk by the creators: [VIDEO] Here's a little article about it (with some R specifics): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42735377,"author":"qwertox","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Issues with color spaces and perceptual brightness","text":"If this submission has put you into a mindset of wanting to know more about colormaps, here's a good video about how Matplotlib ended up having `vividris` as its default colormap: A Better Default Colormap for Matplotlib | SciPy 2015 | Nathaniel Smith and Ste\u0301fan van der Walt [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49307601,"author":"carpdiem","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Show HN: Ember \u2013 Redshift safe color palettes","text":"That's a... surprisingly good question. I'm actually a physicist by background first, so I got my start doing waaayyy too many calculations with blackbody and emissions spectra. Then, back in 2010, when I was just getting into startups, I spent two weeks straight at Powell's in Portland reading through their graphic design section. After that, I never got very far away from light or perception... AR/VR -> graphics -> silicon photonics -> physical AI (now). I'm still very much learning, but if you like this stuff and want to learn more yourself there's a couple sources I can recommend: - Interaction of Color, by Josef Albers. Amazing book, but you really want to get a physical copy. - I really like this talk from SciPy 2015 to get a sense of how people work with and talk about color maps in practice: [VIDEO] - This is a really, really thorough (and beautifully illustrated) article on what color spaces are: [LINK] - And last, I wrote a very technical blog post a few years back, if you want to see some math on a bunch of this: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xEDZQtAHpX8":[{"hn_comment_id":19150310,"author":"mongol","month":"2019-02","story_title":"SQL: One of the most valuable skills","text":"I recommend you look at one of Markus Winand's presentations, such as this one : [VIDEO] I felt it summarized well the modern foundation of SQL databases.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34207893,"author":"scythmic_waves","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Easy, alternative soft deletion: `deleted_record_insert`","text":"I happened to fall down this rabbit hole a few days ago because of another HN thread. In it, a commenter mentioned [1] a talk by Markus Winand where he goes over some of the more interesting additions to the SQL standard since 92, including versioned tables [2] (I've linked to the timestamp, but the whole talk is good). I got real excited about that feature because I could think of a few tables at work that could use it. Sadly, PostgreSQL doesn't implement it [3] (I can't permalink to the feature but you can search for \"T180\", \"System-versioned tables\", \"T181\", or \"Application-time period tables\"). [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xFFs9UgOAlE":[{"hn_comment_id":30481520,"author":"syspec","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Mark Zuckerberg on the Lex Fridman Podcast [video]","text":"It's easy to poke fun at Mark because he's mega rich and can come off a little stiff, but he's pretty interesting to listen when he's speaking without a script. Here's Mark when he was 21 giving a lecture at Harvard's CS50: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45579911,"author":"alpine01","month":"2025-10","story_title":"Why is everything so scalable?","text":"There's a now famous Harvard lecture video on YouTube of Zuckerberg earlier in the Facebook days, where he walks through the issues they hit early on. [VIDEO] I watched it ages ago, but I seem to remember one thing that I liked was that each time they changed the architecture, it was to solve a problem they had, or were beginning to have. They seemed to be staying away from pre-optimization and instead took the approach of tackling problems as they had as they appeared, rather than imagining problems long before/if they occurred. It's a bit like the \"perfect is the enemy of done\" concept - you could spend 2-3x the time making it much more scalable, but that might have an opportunity cost which weakens you somewhere else or makes it harder/more expensive to maintain and support. Take it with a pinch of salt, but I thought it seemed like quite a good level-headed approach to choosing how to spend time/money early on, when there's a lot of financial/time constraints.","stance":"rec"}],"xFKFoGiGlXQ":[{"hn_comment_id":39633734,"author":"eska","month":"2024-03","story_title":"How do computers calculate sine?","text":"You might also find this video interesting: \"Finding the BEST sine function for Nintendo 64\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41156746,"author":"qingcharles","month":"2024-08","story_title":"SNES Coprocessors: DSP-1 and Friends","text":"Yeah, I used a ton of trig tables for software renderers in the late 80s/early 90s, but I'm just throwing ideas out there, since I've seen a lot of really great optimizations recently that were mostly missed during that time. This guy puts a lot of work into figuring out if there is a faster way to do trig calcs on the N64 than was used in SM64 (spoiler: there is): [VIDEO] Jez (CEO of Argonaut) once offered me an interview for the Starfox/DSP team, so I almost worked on this thing. He was very active on the coding groups on Usenet around that time.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41156755,"author":"qingcharles","month":"2024-08","story_title":"SNES Coprocessors: DSP-1 and Friends","text":"This is the video that got me thinking: [VIDEO] I was writing software texturers etc in the late 80s/early 90s, and even recently I've seen x86 people humble me with all sorts of info that I had no idea about at the time, concerning pipelining etc. I would just sit all day randomly reordering assembler instructions and reprofiling teapot renders to see if anything would move the needle.","stance":"rec"}],"xGbgDf4HCHU":[{"hn_comment_id":24090384,"author":"tanepiper","month":"2020-08","story_title":"The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)","text":"I watched this video the other day: [VIDEO] It's Sir Roger Penrose & Dr. Stuart Hameroff talking about the physics of consciousness - for the first time I think a truly compelling idea of what consciousness is in a scientific way that could potentially be empirically measured. They mention the use of psychedelics to create more \"conscious moments\" - and funnily enough in this piece, Bill Atkinson talks about pockets of consciousness. I wonder if there is really an argument to say that A) We have conscious beings on Earth due to some kind of quantum effect in our space (that is we really are just the bi-product of the quantum process in our universe) and B) Psychedelics can make humans more in-tune to quantum effects that give rise to consciousness - but as to your point I agree you don't need them for brilliant ideas.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39129379,"author":"suoduandao3","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Brains are not required to think or solve problems \u2013 simple cells can do it","text":"I quite like Penrose-Hameroff's theory [VIDEO] My best summary of it: consciousness is primal, every bit of matter has perspective, every interaction has experience, the body you're 'occupying' is having a particularly complex and long-lived experience. As for your question of why this one, well, someone's got to be having this one. As for why not another, there's no saying 'you' won't have another 'after' this experience ends, but if 'you' had them in a perfectly undifferentiated way that'd be a different experience again, and as stated, someone's got to be having this one.","stance":"rec"}],"xJ6Ym719urg":[{"hn_comment_id":24578636,"author":"eluketronic","month":"2020-09","story_title":"The Fungal Evangelist Who Would Save the Bees","text":"For those interested in learning more about Stamets and his fungal endeavors, I recommend listening/watching the JRE episode with him ( [VIDEO] ) as well as the Tim Ferris Show episode ( [LINK] ). Fascinating individual.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24667554,"author":"cmsefton","month":"2020-10","story_title":"\u201cFungi Can Teach Us a New Way of Looking at the World\u201d","text":"Am currently reading Sheldrake's book, Entangled Life. Highly recommend it [LINK] Came across it because I've always enjoyed mushroom spotting in the nearby forests, and decided to explore them in greater detail. Listened to a great talk by Paul Stamets on Jo Rogan's show [VIDEO] Decided to look for a book to read, and Sheldrake's book popped up. So much of it has been fascinating, and it's a very easy read, too. It's incredible how these organisms raise so many questions about life, from panspermia to questions about individuality. Well worth a read!","stance":"rec"}],"xKu2de0yCJI":[{"hn_comment_id":30042999,"author":"YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Bell Labs Org Chart (1980)","text":"Bell has a great historical material just watch the redesign presentation of Saul Basso in the 70s! [0] I had so many marketing meetings with worse presentations just a week ago. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42043152,"author":"joezydeco","month":"2024-11","story_title":"What should a logo for NeXT look like? (1986)","text":"I always go back to the Saul Bass presentation to AT&T over their 1970 logo redesign. He takes 30 minutes to explain the thought process and sell this design hard . By the end you're convinced it's the natural thing to do. I'm sure every executive in the room felt the same way. [VIDEO] (Bass would return a mere 13 years later to do the AT&T \"Death Star\" logo after the breakup)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35332555,"author":"joezydeco","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Bell System Vehicle Graphics Manual (1973)","text":"Then I'm sure you've seen Saul Bass' original proposal for the logo redesign. It's a 30 minute movie : [VIDEO] And this is the same Saul Bass that designed other iconic logos (he name drops a bunch at 7m30s) and well as doing credit sequences for directors like Hitchcock and Scorcese: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xLEe496IS1o":[{"hn_comment_id":558883,"author":"rms","month":"2009-04","story_title":"Is high IQ as much a burden as a blessing?","text":"Errol Morris interview with the \"smartest man in the world.\" Part 1: [LINK] Part 2: [LINK] Part 3: [LINK] (Good interview, but the best one Errol Morris did with his tv series was the one with the mob lawyer. [VIDEO] And the movie Fog of War, of course.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3486637,"author":"stfu","month":"2012-01","story_title":"Megaupload down, FBI Charges Seven With Online Piracy","text":"If you have half an hour left watch the following video: [VIDEO] Errol Morris interviews the notorious NYC lawyer Murray Richman. In the end you will realize, that it is all about the \"asshole\" factor and very little about actual laws.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":4446746,"author":"fleitz","month":"2012-08","story_title":"Jury foreman says Apple patents valid due to different processor architecture","text":"I don't think you can really jump to that conclusion. Prior art may have been 'ignored' but I have a feeling that the question in the minds of the jurors was 'Did Samsung copy apple?' I think that what's probably more at issue is that the vast majority of the populace regards copying as plagiarism / and/or something that ought to be punished. eg. copying = theft = bad = you should pay a fine. The jurors are just trying to stitch legal words and technical words together to create the impression that it was judged based on the law rather than the emotional feeling that copying is bad. The jury was probably looking for evidence to find for Apple, not examining the evidence to reach a conclusion. It's a hallmark of trials by jury, it's why when the facts and emotions are on your side you pick a jury trial and when the law is on your side you pick a trial by judge. I've heard that at one point in the trial the samsung lawyer said that the design of their tablet was so different that it couldn't be copied while pointing to an iPad. A gaffe like that in connection with the idea that copying = bad is game over for Samsung in court. Errol Morris interviewed a mob lawyer about how he got a mobster off a murder charge, it's a very telling insight into how the average person's mind works. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xLYYh4aPXAM":[{"hn_comment_id":26068917,"author":"ballofrubber","month":"2021-02","story_title":"My Opinion on Blockchain","text":"So you decide whats a waste of energy then? Here watch this: [VIDEO] Bitcoin mining allows energy companies to de-risk an investment in green energy solutions such as solar. If you place some miners onsite you always have full demand (which is a problem during peak production times). Bitcoin mining is a energy revolution.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26317037,"author":"arbawk","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Bitcoin Is Time","text":"Actually it's pretty important for many: [VIDEO] It's being widely adopted in countries with inflating currencies: Nigeria, Vietnma, and Argentina made it to #3 today (this link is slightly old). [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27362840,"author":"Geee","month":"2021-06","story_title":"It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency","text":"Individual freedom and sovereignty are more important to society than electricity. I'm pretty sure you haven't thought of Bitcoin in that way, or how Bitcoin might enable this. Importance is subjective, but I think most people would choose freedom over electricity. After that, we might argue whether Bitcoin would actually be helpful in enabling this. It's not a simple concept to explain so here's a couple of videos which might help you to understand it better. Bitcoin Is Protecting Human Rights Around the World: [VIDEO] Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xL_sMXfzzyA":[{"hn_comment_id":45264833,"author":"thomassmith65","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley (1962)","text":"Bertrand Russel also was - and hopefully still is - a public intellectual, like Einstein or Chomsky (for better or worse), whose opinions on many areas of life reached ordinary people. His values were ahead of his time. This is a wonderful interview with him that gives a great sense of what he was all about: \u2022 A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952) [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28968495,"author":"Archelaos","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Bertrand Russell Is Dead; British Philosopher, 97 (1970)","text":"For those, who are interested to hear Betrand Russel himself speaking. Interview from 1961: [LINK] ... or even watching him. Interview from 1952: [VIDEO] Interview from 1959: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xMP_AfiNlX4":[{"hn_comment_id":29813641,"author":"dejv","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Resources for \u201cLearning\u201d Manufacturing?","text":"There is \"Building Prototypes\" [1] series by Dan Gelbart on YouTube which is pure gold for anybody that wants to learn how building mechanical things, mostly precision/instrumentation things. Part 12 for plastic forming and casting. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10039279,"author":"plumeria","month":"2015-08","story_title":"High precision air bearing CNC lathe and grinder [video]","text":"Nice, thanks for sharing this. His Youtube series about \"Building Prototypes\" looks interesting: [VIDEO] Here is a bio about Dr. Daniel Gelbart: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22899519,"author":"kbr2000","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal [video]","text":"Thanks, first time I've heard of them, will be going through those (they seem to be available at archive.org [0]) soon! I'd like to point out another interesting 18-part series of videos about prototyping (in his words \"a short course on how to build stuff\" :)), by engineer/inventor/professor Dan Gelbart: [1] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28350720,"author":"mikewarot","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?","text":"It sounds like you need to add a \"stage\" to help position your sample. Flexures are systems that bend to perform motion, and can do surprising things that you can't do with joined together machined pieces. Here's an open source stage project using flexures that will likely help [LINK] Also, see Dan Gelbart's 18 video series about building prototypes [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xMYm2d9bmEA":[{"hn_comment_id":43700169,"author":"pogue","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Benn Jordan's AI poison pill and the weird world of adversarial noise","text":"I would encourage you guys to watch his video before going down the argument of saying that there's no money in music creation. There's also just enjoyment in the act of creation and even if you're doing it for free, why should GenAI companies then be able to take your artwork, incorporate that into their dataset and profit of the artist's unpaid labor? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48181764,"author":"wutwutwat","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Voice AI Systems Are Vulnerable to Hidden Audio Attacks","text":"Related: Benn Jordon shows how to poison pill AI harvesting music for training The Art Of Poison-Pilling Music Files [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xMabpBvtXr4":[{"hn_comment_id":26918476,"author":"hnbad","month":"2021-04","story_title":"4chan founder Chris Poole has left Google","text":"I can only recommend watching Innuendo Studios' _Alt-Right Playbook_ series for a deeper understanding of the dynamics, but if you don't have the time I'd at least recommend watching this one: [VIDEO] All of 4chan, but especially /b/, is built around \"haha just kidding ... unless\", ridiculing people for getting offended while \"trolling\" with the most nefarious opinions and defending them \"as a joke\". This escalated with /pol/ which at some point became mask-off unironically white supremacist. This is not just about 4chan being too white and too male and everybody self-identifying as NEET (whether as a joke or in earnest). The perpetual \"ironic\" regurgitation of racist, misogynist and anti-Semitic talking points attracted Nazis because it allowed them to hide in plain sight and they very successfully used it as part of their pipeline by getting people to repeat their jokes until they stopped laughing.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30591334,"author":"LordDragonfang","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Bad behavior is almost always good politics (2021)","text":"While to a large extent that is true, I think a larger part of the issue is that people actually have different foundational mental models of how the world \"really\" works. Conservatives, for the most part, believe that a hierarchy of haves and have-nots is not only natural, but inevitable . It is consistent for them to therefore extrapolate that anyone claiming to work on flattening the hierarchy (by giving to the have-nots) must really be trying to get their in-group further up the hierarchy, at the expense of those currently benefitting from it. That's why \"He\u2019s not hurting the people he needs to be\" can be rationalized as in their self interest. In their view, there is some constant, immutable amount of \"hurt\" that some demographic has to bear. \"No such thing as a free lunch\" and such. So deep down, conservatives interpret any calls to reduce that harm as instead being an existential threat to redirect that harm to their group. I really recommend Ian Danskin's videos on the subject, they explain it better than I can in one HN comment, with plenty of scholastic sources: [VIDEO] (Linked is \"Always a Bigger Fish\". Many of the historical sources justifying the argument are discussed in the \"endnote\" video that follows, but this video is the one that lays out this particular argument, along with the later video \"I Hate Mondays\")","stance":"rec"}],"xMzojQFyMo0":[{"hn_comment_id":8602145,"author":"daveloyall","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform","text":"[LINK] [LINK] > I think you have it backwards. It's the new vision of computers (walled gardens, all the interesting logic hidden away in data centers, content consumption appliances instead of real computers) that is pale and sickly. Yes, these new trends are worrisome. But it's not the first time! I firmly believe that we'd all be better off if THIS guy had been the one to introduce computers to the common man: [VIDEO] [LINK] To this day, Microsoft is putting computers in schools--but not LOGO, not free software, not unix, not lisp, not crates of disposable m68ks and bread boards... Nope, they are putting products in front of new generations eyeballs. Data can trump anecdotes, and it should when a culture believes they are doing the right thing but things are still going poorly and nobody understands why--at those times, by all means, collect some data and analyze it! But when \"everybody knows\" we're doing something wrong, and things are going poorly, then for the love of god use some common sense and stop doing it! The whole planet got 0wned by MS before many of us here were born--certainly before most of us were competent. So this is what we've got, this is where we are. Big picture: Where do we go from here? Immediate situation: don't become part of a new generation of MS fanboys. We don't need that.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12203048,"author":"pfooti","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Seymour Papert has died","text":"Wow, RIP - he was a big inspiration to me professionally both in terms of the tech he helped build and in terms of the learning theory of which he was a proponent. (I also work at the intersection of education, learning sciences, and technology). [0] is a great video from the early days of LOGO, and he's pushing notions of programming for all that felt new and revolutionary in the 2000s. Mindstorms [1] is a great book if you're interested in his ideas about learning. 0: [VIDEO] 1: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13492724,"author":"kickscondor","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Thinking about Thinking about Seymour: Livestream [video]","text":"If you haven't been exposed to Papert - check out some of his old videos from the 70s and 80s. [LINK] - One really powerful idea he had was ensuring that we stay \"somatic\" with our computer instruction - playing with abstract concepts in a physical way. Watch the video - he explains it better than I can. [VIDEO] - One from the 1970s - perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems like some of these computers they're using don't even have monitors, just control the turtle. [LINK] - I also like this discussion - it reminds me that school is a prison for children, unless I work to elevate it beyond that. I just kind of watch these periodically to remind me of the wonder that computing was back then.","stance":"rec"}],"xNjI03CGkb4":[{"hn_comment_id":37659948,"author":"grotorea","month":"2023-09","story_title":"The Casino in Your Pocket","text":"Must see video for anyone interested in the topic, from someone explaining how to do these monetizations tactics: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37660006,"author":"grotorea","month":"2023-09","story_title":"The Casino in Your Pocket","text":"Reminds me of this must see video for anyone interested in the topic, from someone explaining how to do these monetizations tactics: [VIDEO] Sometimes I wonder what is is about specifically mobile gaming that makes this sort of thing so much more prevalent. Like it is very far from absent from PC or consoles, but it's still a bit different.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41081742,"author":"jonathanyc","month":"2024-07","story_title":"How Mihoyo's monetization works","text":"I\u2019m not too familiar with gacha games, so I was intrigued. I thought the criticism of EA\u2019s former CEO was funny. But the rest of the article felt like a lot of term-dropping and examples that aren't linked together into a cohesive theory, so I\u2019m kind of disappointed. I think this industry talk about monetization ( [VIDEO] ) and Tynan Sylvester\u2019s book \u201cDesigning Games\u201d were a lot more informative. For example, the blog post says this but then doesn't really elaborate on what any of the clauses mean (\"repeatable design levers\", \"without compromising the core gameplay experience\"): > A healthy long-term monetization system should therefore have repeatable design levers that can be used to reliably generate demand without compromising the core gameplay experience. In contrast \"Designing Games\" has a whole section on fixed/variable reward schedules, e.g. (pg. 210): > We can avoid such shelf moments by superimposing several fixed ratio schedules. Consider what happens when the player can get a dollar for every 10th chest, a diamond for every 10th rock mined, and an arrow for every 10th goblin killed. ... The player shifts focus back and forth between activities, never missing a dopamine-driven beat. I asked some friends who play gacha games and they mentioned \u201cstamina\u201d mechanics as something that makes these game addictive. I\u2019d never heard of it before, but apparently you\u2019re limited to perform X number of actions per day. You can purchase some additional stamina/actions, but this c","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43097723,"author":"layman51","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Among top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds","text":"Gamification as a field of study also reminds me a lot of this video[1] of a talk about tips for game developers. It is very interesting because it is from 2016 which is close to the time period you mentioned. I\u2019m pretty sure this video has been shared on Hacker News a bunch. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xNzoerDljjo":[{"hn_comment_id":21862856,"author":"muhic","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?","text":"+1 for both talks Sa\u0161a Juri\u0107 is fantastic at condensing lots of information in a 1 hour talk without losing the audience, he gave another great talk this year called Parsing from first principles ( [VIDEO] ).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23346035,"author":"anarchyrucks","month":"2020-05","story_title":"What's in a Parser Combinator? (2016)","text":"Parsing from first principles by Sa\u0161a Juri\u0107 [0] is a good video on writing parser combinator in Elixir. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26723089,"author":"sandbags","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Parser Combinators in Elixir","text":"This is a good article. Especially in that it talks a little bit about error handling which does not feel like a strength of NimbleParsec. Another good resource is this talk by Sa\u0161a Juri\u0107 on Parsing from First Principles ( [VIDEO] ) where he talks about parser combinators and live-codes a simple Elixir PC library. That inspired me to build my own alternative to NimbleParsec . Partly because my use case makes error handling very important and I couldn't get a grip on how to do that with NP and partly as a decent problem to get to grips with Elixir. I'm currently figuring out lookahead. This is a great area to play in that has a lot of useful applications.","stance":"rec"}],"xOCurBYI_gY":[{"hn_comment_id":16312831,"author":"learc83","month":"2018-02","story_title":"A C89 compiler that produces executables that are also valid ASCII text files [pdf]","text":"Thanks for pointing that out. I wouldn't have noticed who that was otherwise. His video on learnfun/playfun is both hilarious and amazing. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26282511,"author":"fartcannon","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Medical chatbot using OpenAI\u2019s GPT-3 told a fake patient to kill themselves","text":"There was an AI created the absolutely brilliant Tom7 on on his YouTube channel 'SuckerPinch' on April 1, 2013 that paused a game of Tetris instead of losing. In my opinion, Tom doesn't get enough credit for his work. He released his AI a full 8+ months before DeepMind released their Atari playing AI. Watch the whole thing, it's delightful. The AI pauses Tetris right before it loses at around 16mins into the video. [VIDEO] I also recommend his other videos. Brilliant guy. Edit: Here's the paper [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9280787,"author":"recondite","month":"2015-03","story_title":"SIGBOVIK 2015 Proceedings [pdf]","text":"Haha, I love it. There was a SIGBOVIK submission a couple years ago that looked at byte patterns within video game RAM (specifically NES) to automate the playing of. Pretty entertaining stuff. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11416650,"author":"fixermark","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Automatic 3Dification of Nintendo Games: The GlEnd() of Zelda","text":"Tom 7's work on machine learning and NES emulation is very impressive. This isn't the first time he's attacked that space; you can see previous experiences he had with an automatic game-playing AI he built called \"LearnFun / PlayFun\" on that YouTube channel also: [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11750709,"author":"tomjakubowski","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Autonomous Mini Rally Car Teaches Itself to Powerslide","text":"If you're interested in a \"dumber\" approach to machines \"learning\" to play classic video games (including Super Mario Bros), tom7's video [1] and paper [2] on Playfun are both fascinating. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11812362,"author":"d33","month":"2016-06","story_title":"Deep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels","text":"In the context of AI and gaming, I definitely recommend this series of three youtube videos: [VIDEO] Some games are played better than human would.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14171612,"author":"onli","month":"2017-04","story_title":"The glEnd of Zelda(): Automatic 3Dification of NES Games (2016)","text":"You should look at some other things the author did. They fit in the same area of craziness, and are absolutely great. For example [LINK] , Portmantout: A portmanteau of every English word, or the first one, [VIDEO] , Computer program that learns to play classic NES games. I also liked the humor in What, if anything, is epsilon?, [LINK] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17218910,"author":"onli","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Reverse-emulating the NES","text":"I'm not sure many people can pull this off. The author here was also great in his presentation about automated NES playing, [VIDEO] . You don't see often academics & hacker work that is also combined with the right amount of humor. He even 3Dified the original Zelda!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33184239,"author":"dan_quixote","month":"2022-10","story_title":"MAR1D: First-Person Mario","text":"tom7 is awesome. He made an awesome and hilarious video years ago about his SIGBOVIK paper/research on AI playing NES: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43161763,"author":"rdlw","month":"2025-02","story_title":"AI-designed chips are so weird that 'humans cannot understand them'","text":"Not quite what you're describing, but no one has yet linked the classic Tom7 series where he applies deep learning to classic NES games: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xP5-iIeKXE8":[{"hn_comment_id":24831788,"author":"lqet","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Building a computer in Conway's game of life","text":"I remember seeing that video 3 years ago and being blown away. In case someone doesn't already know it, here is Conway's Game of Life simulated in Conway's Game of Life: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34316345,"author":"pierreyoda","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Tetris Is Capable of Universal Computation","text":"This is an excellent link, well known in the \"community\" around this. To add to it, here's a famous and really clear sub-2 minutes representation of the scales involved if it helps make things clearer, for those who've never seen the scales involved: [VIDEO] (and that's \"just\" the Game of Life in the Game of Life). I think I would enjoy helping push the state of the art in this field, but it's far beyond my abilities for the moment. If it wasn't, I would love to work on a new library specifically built for the kind of things like your idea, with the API aimed at working with metapixels-based \"hardware\", but with the lowest-level constructs (maybe by far) being thinks like RAM or CPU caches as building blocks - while still being able to zoom to the lowest level of cells in the renderer. But it's basically R&D and HPC combined if one wants to offer an interesting alternative to the established libraries. From what I know of upcoming hardware, such a library may have to wait a couple of years and basically target (as in, full buy-in, maybe at the programming language-level, certainly in tooling) the next Apple Silicon-like (or beyond) breakthough in commonly accessible hardware for a nice, \"free\" performance boost. Maybe GPUs are next?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15246914,"author":"avian","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Building a working game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life","text":"Here's a nice video showing OTCA metapixels in action, implementing Game of Life in Game of Life. [VIDEO] It would be amazing to see this Tetris computer rendered into a video like this.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22882928,"author":"Groxx","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Build a Working Game of Tetris in Conway's Game of Life (2014)","text":"2017 post has a much-needed youtube video of the metapixels as the top comment: [VIDEO] I haven't been able to find one for tetris tho","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33980086,"author":"fishtoaster","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Recursive Game of Life","text":"This is amazing! I've seen \"life in life\" as a video from ages ago[0], but this is just suck a slick implementation of it! [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43033330,"author":"zamalek","month":"2025-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best implementation of Conway's Game of Life?","text":"It might be argued that one of the dynamic programming (caching) ones would be the best by a reasonable standard. These can be used to simulate absolutely monstrous grids, and is where we see simulated CPUs and whatnot. Here's the game of life running in the game of life: [VIDEO] - that one uses Golly.","stance":"rec"}],"xR7XMkjDGw0":[{"hn_comment_id":34089924,"author":"komali2","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Show HN: Write 500 Words a Day","text":"One of my favorite videos is when George RR Martin asks Stephen King on stage, \"How the fuck do you write so many books so fast?\" [VIDEO] Stephen King answers basically with the same advice he's always given, as you said, he tries to write 6 pages a day. In the video, he says he tries to get 3-4 hours of work a day, and get to that 6 pages. He breaks it down, \"if the manuscript is x length, it will take y months to finish.\" George RR Martin goes on to ask essentially, \"but what if writer's block? What if internet distraction? What if something comes up?\" He goes on to tell a story about Rowling that basically resolves with \"nobody really understands what writers do,\" but based on King's own \"On Writing,\" I think he does claim to understand, and his tips are not really any different from how you generate content in any other medium, methods that those of us terminally online HN types are at this point experts via headlines alone, we see so many posts on the subject. The method is demonstrated in the \"6 pages\" quote that gets thrown around: define the objective (write a book), break the objective into estimable and achievable goals (write 6 pages a day: this allows for book length x to be finished in y months), and set dedicated, distraction-free time to achieve the day's goal (as I recall from \"On Writing,\" King has a dedicated writing office and doesn't bring his phone into it, and doesn't have internet access in there. I may be remembering incorrectly or mixing up my absurd ","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19363768,"author":"nybblesio","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Ask HN: How do I 3x my performance?","text":"I love what Stephen King says on this topic: \"I try to get six pages a day.\" [1] He works 3 to 4 hours per day, every day. He most likely works the same time block every day. As he says in the video, life happens. Don't stress life happening. Attend to things that come up and return to your \"six pages a day\". The number of pages isn't important. King even qualifies his answer by saying, \"...if things go well.\" The key component here is: - every day; - preferably same time block each day; - concentrated effort; - attainable goal with a bit of a stretch each day. I adopted this model several years ago and my productivity went through the roof. (From my own perspective, measuring against myself; not others.) I can say I'm overjoyed at how much work I can get done using this approach. Five hours each day, starting at 4am, is the sweet spot for me. Note, though, that I wake up at 2am to be ready by 4am and I go to bed, uh, about now. Here's the rub: it will always appear that you can do more. However, as others have said here, it's an illusion. Finally, I would make the following observation: if one feels secure and has a stable environment, productivity and motivation don't seem to be elusive. If you're chasing after dollars and you're about to go bust if-it-doesn't-get-done-by-this-Friday , you've already lost. It's been my experience that you cannot start from a foundation of anxiety. It can't be \"I have to do this or I'm screwed\". I realize this creates a paradox for many folk","stance":"rec"}],"xRel1JKOEbI":[{"hn_comment_id":13791555,"author":"neom","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Is Consciousness an Illusion?","text":"World Science Festival has a slew of really awesome talks etc on this subject posted to youtube: [LINK] And The Neuroscience of Consciousness \u2013 with Anil Seth is really great: [VIDEO] Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design - With Daniel Dennett: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14393673,"author":"awkwardtortoise","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of inference","text":"If you find the topic of consciousness interesting, here is an interesting neuroscientist's talk on consciousness. The idea that we can measure levels of consciousness as brain scanning tools become available and how consciousness may just be a \"prediction process/function/tool\". It's not \"I think therefore I am\", but \"I predict, therefore I am\". [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15145356,"author":"eighthnate","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Anil Seth: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality","text":"His lecture at the Royal Institution is better and more in depth. [VIDEO] Worth a watch if you have an hour to spare.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17635530,"author":"qubax","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world","text":"I remember seeing this on hn before. The current thesis is that the brain ( consciousness ) is a predicting machine. A very interesting lecture by a neuroscientist. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18261694,"author":"qubax","month":"2018-10","story_title":"I woke up unable to speak English","text":"If you are interested in the brain, there are good royal institute lectures on youtube. The Neuroscience of Consciousness \u2013 with Anil Seth [VIDEO] The Neuroscience of Memory - Eleanor Maguire [LINK] Also, any book by oliver sacks is great if you'd rather read books rather than watch lectures.","stance":"rec"}],"xSGx3HSjKDo":[{"hn_comment_id":47144988,"author":"jackvalentine","month":"2026-02","story_title":"Cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with lower anger and anxiety","text":"What you've just said is a common refrain, if you haven't already seen it please take a look at these two videos that attempt to address part of what you're saying. I found them very interesting when I came across them years ago and it changed my view of what's possible or even good! [VIDEO] \"Who else benefits from the Dutch cycling infrastructure\" (old people, disabled people) [LINK] \"Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)\" (frozen Finnish winters)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28609895,"author":"iknowstuff","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Google to Buy New York City Office Building for $2.1B","text":"\"Why We Won't Raise Our Kids in Suburbia (and moved to the Netherlands instead)\" [LINK] \"Who else benefits from the Dutch cycling infrastructure\" [VIDEO] \"Why Great Cities Let You (Easily!) Cycle to IKEA\" [LINK] \"8 to 80, people of all ages cycling in the Netherlands\" [LINK] As you can see, you don't need \"wide roads\". Quite the opposite, in fact. When safe cycling infrastructure is present, traffic shifts to cycling, because it's faster, cheaper and more pleasant. This makes roads less congested for your car trips. Widening roads does not have this effect, as additional lanes simply fill up with more traffic if there is no faster, safe alternative. Also, wide lanes encourage high speeds, and you don't want that around your kids.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35445706,"author":"iknowstuff","month":"2023-04","story_title":"The Electric Vehicles We Need Now Are E-Bikes","text":"I have for you a video titled \"Who else benefits from the Dutch cycling infrastructure\": [VIDEO] > There is a large group of people in the Netherlands who also benefit from the well-designed cycling infrastructure: people with disabilities. They can use hand-operated bicycles or tricycles or mobility scooters to get from A to B. The cycle tracks offer them good protection from motorized traffic and thus a freedom to independently move around. Also kids. Look how much freedom this infrastructure provides to Dutch kids. Car dependency is NOT good for the disabled. Not every disabled parson is even capable of safely driving a car.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42440239,"author":"k99x55","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Waymo will bring autonomous vehicles to Tokyo","text":"Cars are the most age discriminatory mode of transport of all: only 18+ and not too old can use it, and most disabled cannot use it. A Bicycles work to all ages, all abilities. In your case an ebike, trike (etrike?) or even mobility scooter might be a much lighter, cheaper, scalable option. Hey why not a self-driving e-scooter? Why does it have to weight 2 tons in the first place? Bike infrastructure is not only for bicycles: its for trikes, wheelchairs, mobility scooters, ebikes. Watch: * Who else benefits from the Dutch cycling infrastructure: [VIDEO] * 8 to 80, people of all ages cycling in the Netherlands: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xUezfuy8Qpc":[{"hn_comment_id":42118280,"author":"sph","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Bluesky adds 700k new users in a week","text":"> Essentially you should be tolerant of others, unless they themselves are intolerant. No, it's called a paradox because there is no \"easy\" answer to it. Also, who determines the exact line between free speech and intolerance? It is impossible to do. The reason the world is polarised today is because everybody thinks they have the simple answer to a literal ethical paradox that has none. The simple answer being: \"those that share my beliefs are OK, those that don't should be canceled/demonised/hidden somewhere I don't see them.\" Thus creating echo chambers so people get more and more radical. Free speech is the only half acceptable answer, which means free speech for anyone, whatever their point of view, however offensive you deem them to be. Rowan Atkinson explained it more eloquently that I ever could: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42310608,"author":"Etherlord87","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Breaking the 4Chan CAPTCHA","text":"Plainly to you, but not to me. What isn't obvious to everyone, isn't really obvious. You didn't care to explain what kind of stopping mechanisms are there, that make it not a slippery slope. Rowan Atkinson gives some nice examples here: [VIDEO] I'd say rather than there being *a risk* of descending too low on that slippery slope, we already have plenty of evidence this already happened. I'm from Poland and recently a party in ruling coalition proposed criminalizing hate speech on the Internet. Fortunately, precisely the slippery slope rhetoric, supported by evidence from countries like UK, seems to be enough of a backlash to stop politicians from following such ideas.","stance":"rec"}],"xVodkE47aLw":[{"hn_comment_id":27649798,"author":"glogla","month":"2021-06","story_title":"So you want to build a house more efficiently","text":"American houses aren't really built from \"wood\" as in directly from trees - they are build from \"engineered wood\" like fiberboard and particleboard. That's a lot of industrial processing with a lot of oil-based glues and so on. By weight, the houses are almost more oil than wood. Here's an enlightening chapter of \"Well there's your problem\" podcast about this with actual civil engineers [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40729202,"author":"cr125rider","month":"2024-06","story_title":"In Praise of 5-Over-1 Buildings (2019)","text":"A podcast, Well There\u2019s Your Problem, run by some engineers and others who rip into them a bit: [VIDEO] Some NSFW language I\u2019m sure. Lots of rambling. It\u2019s a journey.","stance":"rec"}],"xY45YE7ggng":[{"hn_comment_id":20442442,"author":"EvanAnderson","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Apollo 11 Had a Hidden Hero: Software","text":"\"The Charming Genius of the Apollo Guidance Computer\" is a wonderful talk: [VIDEO] The AGC implemented a virtual machine to run higher-level computational routines. The whole architecture is really interesting.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10524269,"author":"shawnps","month":"2015-11","story_title":"The Charming Genius of the Apollo Guidance Computer [video]","text":"The part about core rope memory was pretty interesting. Star charts and other bits of data were actually woven into a form of read-only memory via loom: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10582684,"author":"EvanAnderson","month":"2015-11","story_title":"In 1975, the USSR fired a cannon from an orbiting space station","text":"I was going to say much of the same, but I won't echo you. I just recently watched this really interesting video from London Code Mesh 2015 on the Apollo Guidance Computer where the radar antenna-generated interrupts were discussed (among other interesting bugs). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xYemnKEKx0c":[{"hn_comment_id":25743177,"author":"warent","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Theranos destroyed subpoenaed SQL blood test database, prosecutors say","text":"There's a mind bending TED Talk on this which really opened my mind on this topic: [VIDEO] I highly recommend checking it out. In my opinion it is one of the greatest talks of all time and it gave me goosebumps. But if you are really busy, a summary is that everyone has varying degrees of psychopathy that make a gray area in between extreme labels.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28024464,"author":"prakhar897","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best non-technical talks of all time?","text":"Here's mine: 1. Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams [LINK] 2. Strange answers to the psychopath test | Jon Ronson [VIDEO] 3. The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Pranav Mistry [LINK] 4. Steve Jobs MIT Class: What he learnt after he was fired from Apple? [LINK] 5. Eric Liu: Why ordinary people need to understand power [LINK] 6. Peter Lynch 1994 Lecture [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xZi4kTJG-LE":[{"hn_comment_id":18242986,"author":"threeseed","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your advice for a technical founder learning sales?","text":"There's a great video from Clever CEO about How to Sell: [VIDEO] Basically he can tell if a sales conversation went well by how much each person is talking. If the customer is talking 80% of the time it went well. Vice versa not so well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18286433,"author":"milansuk","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Founders need to get radically better at sales","text":"What about \"How to Sell by Tyler Bosmeny\"[0]. It's from YC online Startup school. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21367533,"author":"wmaiouiru","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations?","text":"This was a pretty good video on selling B2B from startup school: [VIDEO] 1. Prospecting 2. Conversations 3. Closing 4. Promised land(revenue) Slides of the talk: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"x_q50tvbQm4":[{"hn_comment_id":27409836,"author":"dorkwood","month":"2021-06","story_title":"The Woman Who Gave the Macintosh a Smile (2018)","text":"I love this video of Kare giving an introduction to the Mac interface on \"Computer Chronicles\" back in 1984 [1]. At first it seems quaint to see how slowly and carefully she explains what we now consider to be basic UI features. But then you realize that for many people in the world, a desktop computer is just as strange and confusing to them now as it was to most people back then. I think some of us (me included) would do well to keep this video in mind when explaining technology to non-technical people. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32016440,"author":"aasasd","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Ed is the standard text editor (2014)","text":"Yeah, I'm kinda getting into these vids from the seventies and eighties. \u201cIntroducing The Amazing Compact Disc, 1982\u201d [LINK] \u2014 \u201cYou can pick it up and move around, even shake, and nothing happens\u201d, yeah sure bud. \u201cIntroduction to Microsoft Excel, 1992\u201d [LINK] \u201cSusan Kare explains Macintosh UI ergonomics on the Computer Chronicles, 1984\u201d [VIDEO] \u2014 the control panel is just astounding by modern standards, especially seeing as for me the control panel is a litmus test of an OS interface. Also one of my favorite music-making tutorials is the three-part, three-hour series \u2018Intro to Synthesis\u2019 from sometime in the early 80s: [LINK] \u2014 instead of going through all the terminology in ten minutes and one second, the guy takes his time twiddling knobs and showing what each one does.","stance":"rec"}],"x_yHtfGH0nI":[{"hn_comment_id":4605995,"author":"maximilianburke","month":"2012-10","story_title":"Discovery Channel's Inside a Jet Crash","text":"Other factors that make aircraft like this one dirt cheap are that older aircraft (especially the 727) are very loud which makes it difficult to use them in commercial service to areas with noise restrictions. Hush kits are available but they're expensive and don't quiet the aircraft enough to operate some sensitive jurisdictions. If the aircraft is also near the point where it has to undergo a D-check -- the most expensive kind of maintenance check where the aircraft is very nearly completely disassembled, inspected, and re-assembled -- it would make more economic sense to sell it for scrap than it would to continue operation. The BBC has a great documentary on a BA 747-400 D-check that has been posted on Youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12477168,"author":"ubernostrum","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Rolls-Royce\u2019s single-crystal turbine blade casting foundry","text":"Another favorite aviation-related one, though more pop-sci-oriented, is this look at a 747 going through a D (\"heavy maintenance\") check that basically takes most of the plane apart and puts it back together, covering all the bits and how they need to work: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xa2Kpkksf3k":[{"hn_comment_id":41151427,"author":"dev1ycan","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Nvidia reportedly delays its next AI chip due to a design flaw","text":"There's a few videos by Sabine/Anton and also now PBS about Microtubules and conciousness, it's starting to gain ground and If I were an AI company right now I'd be having cold sweat. Video of reference (check especially the ending summary where they calculate more or less how much would be necessary just to replicate a human mind's way of achieving conciousness if microtubules in fact contribute towards it): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49311287,"author":"ck2","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Could a computer scientist build a brain?","text":"there is a theory by the brilliant Roger Penrose and extended by others that the brain is just not neurons but also quantum effect which would make it impossible to emulate via current technology excellent PBS Space Time on that * [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xb8idEf-Iak":[{"hn_comment_id":4247677,"author":"drostie","month":"2012-07","story_title":"Thoughts on Paul Rand","text":"One great story about Paul Rand: \"He is one of the most professional people I've ever worked with, in the sense that he thought through all of the formal relationship between a client and a professional such as himself -- obviously very deep thoughts about this -- and therefore he had very clear conclusions about what the relationship meant to both parties and how it should be conducted. For example: I asked him if he would come up with 'a few options'. And he said 'No, I will solve your problem for you. And you will pay me. And you don't have to use the solution -- if you want options go talk to other people! -- but I'll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that's up to you, you're the client -- but you pay me.' And there was a clarity about the relationship that was refreshing.\" -- Steve Jobs, [VIDEO] I really enjoyed his uncompromising attitude, \"I'm not going to attempt to solve the problem 4 times for you; you can consult 4 people who wholeheartedly attempt to solve the problem once.\" The idea that art is not something to be half-assed but something to be pursued, as the Tibetans might say, \"one-pointedly\", is a deep lesson which I myself resonate very strongly with.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1640138,"author":"danilocampos","month":"2010-08","story_title":"Steve Jobs explains branding","text":"Reminds me another Steve Jobs conversation, about the NeXT logo: [VIDEO] He talks about Paul Rand, who refused to give Steve multiple options on the NeXT logo. He would do just one, it would be right, and Steve could take it or leave it. I admire the courage involved in saying \"taste is more than subjective, it's right vs. wrong, and I choose to be right.\" That's a huge part of the power in Apple's branding.","stance":"rec"}],"xbBdIG--b58":[{"hn_comment_id":43846273,"author":"inetknght","month":"2025-04","story_title":"U.S. Economy Contracts at 0.3% Rate in First Quarter","text":"> A dramatic example of this are the arab states that are trying to brute force make the desert an attractive place to be They're doing it wrong. I'll point to places adjacent to the sahara building a \"green wall\" which is turning parts of the sahara back to a savannah and replenishes the water table. [VIDEO] Andrew Millison's youtube channel has several videos on the subject, and related subjects in other parts of the world too. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45754140,"author":"jillesvangurp","month":"2025-10","story_title":"China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990","text":"Just search for things like \"green wall\", \"china straw landscape\", etc. A few good ones that I watched: - Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project [VIDEO] - China Buried Tons of Dead Plants Under the Desert Sand [LINK] - Green Gold: Regreening the Desert | John D. Liu [LINK] There are way more. One channel that I might call [LINK] . They basically use donations to take on projects to do smalls scale nature restoration. I am actually considering making a donation to them because I like what they do. There are more examples of such channels. Not everything on this front is without controversy of course and I'm not blind to that. But I like the positive, constructive nature of these approaches. Just the simple notion that it's fixable with a bit of cleverness and lots of hard work. China is of course an autocracy that you can criticize for a lot of things. But they are doing a few things right as well. And it's worth calling that out and learning from them.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49104273,"author":"westurner","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Arizona's Declining Groundwater","text":"Would semi-circular bunds help fight desertification in Arizona and along the Colorado River and in the Southwestern US, as they do on the Sahel? From [LINK] : > Agricultural Bunds (and buried unglazed water vessels) would probably work in NM, too; but which agricultural resources can process bunds instead of rows? From [LINK] : > Water bunds look like they work to prevent water from flashing off, but probably initially disturb the mycorrhizae in the topsoil: Semicircular bund: [LINK] > \"Inoculating soil with mycorrhizal fungi can increase plant yield: study\" (2024) [LINK] From [LINK] : > Half Moon Bunds look like they are working to regreen the Sahel. Bunds would require different farm machines than rototilling tractors that cause erosion. > \"Mastering the Art of Half Moon Bunds\" [LINK] > Andrew Million's light board videos are a great resource , as a software dev with no real experience in hydrological engineering for sustainable agriculture. > \"Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project\" [VIDEO] Desert Control now has offices in Arizona. They specialize in water bags that catch silt for use as fertilizing soil amendments. Mycorhizzae are essential to healthy soil. Plant residue can keep moisture in soil that you're trying to reestablish Mycorhizzae in so that roots establish so that the soil holds water. Geotextiles can also keep moisture in soil. Chitosan-Alginate and/or plasma-fluffed hemp aerogel would make great geotextiles for erosion control, soil remediation, water ba","stance":"rec"}],"xb_PyKuI7II":[{"hn_comment_id":34344870,"author":"pcurve","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite illustration in Computer Science?","text":"maybe not CS concepts, but wanted to re-share Perpendicular disc storage from Hitachi. [VIDEO] It's a simple concept to explain, but animation sure makes it fun and lasting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48000201,"author":"staticshock","month":"2026-05","story_title":"What Is Z-Angle Memory and Why Is Intel Developing It?","text":"That song is etched into my memory and bring back a flood of great feelings. Daily Motion is giving me a playback error, but here's a copy from youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xc8epam4NyY":[{"hn_comment_id":41416652,"author":"LinuxBender","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Buy, Borrow, Die \u2013 Explained","text":"I don't know if this video will display for everyone as someone tagged it as private though I can see it not being logged in. I think David Mitchell has the best take on tax avoidance vs evasion . [1] [1] - [VIDEO] [video][3 mins] David Mitchell on Tax Avoidance from The Last Leg","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44693790,"author":"nabla9","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Donate to the Treasury to help pay down the $36.7T public debt","text":"\"If you want more taxes and are rich, just donate to treasury argument\" again. We want systemic changes, not patrons. Taxes are for equity and fairness. Taxes are compulsory, donations are voluntary. Taxes are payment for being for being rich. Donations are taxes for being a good person. Great rant: David Mitchell on Tax Avoidance from The Last Leg [VIDEO] Then Mitchell being more serious: You can't blame the rich for paying as little tax as possible. I do the same [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xcwJt4bcnXs":[{"hn_comment_id":30685224,"author":"antattack","month":"2022-03","story_title":"Cities should not pay for new stadiums","text":"John Oliver already settled this in 2015. After watching it, it's pretty clear that cities should not pay for stadiums. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11030118,"author":"joshstrange","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Why a city should not build a stadium for an NFL team","text":"John Oliver did a good piece on this as well and how crazy it is that the public pays so much for these things: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xdfeXqHFmPI":[{"hn_comment_id":12516996,"author":"kdamken","month":"2016-09","story_title":"The Programmer\u2019s Guide to a Sane Workweek","text":"It's also known as \"fuck you money\", and there's a really good scene with John Goodman in The Gambler about it - [VIDEO] So many people, especially in tech, work jobs that pay really, really, really well compared to most people and piss it away on stupid shit. You can choose to save a lot of that money instead and still have a very good and fulfilling life. Eventually, when you have enough savings/investments to cover you for a few years, your life changes. You don't have to worry so much if people are getting laid off, or if your job starts demanding unreasonable things. Here's the article that brought me to that video, and goes more in depth about the concept. I highly recommend it - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13649833,"author":"tenpies","month":"2017-02","story_title":"A fuck-you money attitude","text":"This clip from the Gambler summed it up pretty well: [VIDEO] (NSFW language) It's more about personal independence than anything and being able to take risks.","stance":"rec"}],"xe-f4gokRBs":[{"hn_comment_id":19417082,"author":"nate_meurer","month":"2019-03","story_title":"The Pyrex Glass Controversy That Won't Die","text":"Interesting. I love glass blowing. Maybe I'll learn about it some day. Borosilicate and aluminosilicate cookware is actually pretty tolerant of chipping, because pieces tend to be thoroughly annealed. Tempered soda-lime, on the other hand, is not, so it has tremendous internal stress that makes it much tougher than borosilicate, but once it does chip it's liable to shatter explosively. Like Prince Rupert's drops. Hey, you want to see something cool? You'll appreciate this since you work with the stuff. Go to 2 min 45 sec in the video at [VIDEO] . High speed video of one of these things exploding. Kinda blew my mind.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5551232,"author":"gvb","month":"2013-04","story_title":"Prince Rupert's Drop","text":"Also discussed and illustrated in \"The Curious Properties of a Molten Glass Blob Dropped in Cold Water\" [LINK] The story linked is just a blog wrapper on a \"Smarter Every Day\" episode, which is definitely worth watching. Smarter Every Day: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6075526,"author":"MiguelHudnandez","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch","text":"You'd just see some blinding white light for a few seconds and then maybe nothing else for the rest of your life. Our human eyes and brains limit us from perceiving even everyday things with the majesty they deserve. Even popping water balloons looks amazing in high speed video. On YouTube, there is a community of people doing silly things with high speed cameras that makes for stimulating watching: Smarter Every Day: weird glass phenomenon [VIDEO] Smarter Every Day: cat righting itself in midair [LINK] Lots of high speed videos [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36132876,"author":"skellera","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Prince Rupert's Drop","text":"Shout out to Destin from SmarterEveryDay for his love of PRDs. Learn about and see how it\u2019s made \u2013 [VIDEO] Encasing a shattering drop in glass \u2013 [LINK] The process the team uses in the second video to freeze the break in glass is pretty awesome! (If you\u2019re into that kind of thing)","stance":"rec"}],"xg29TuWo0Yo":[{"hn_comment_id":26686607,"author":"anonymfus","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Deprecated Grandparents of America","text":"I think that one of the best way to understand some strange corners of the transhumanist culture is through the satire: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38933317,"author":"sudosteph","month":"2024-01","story_title":"YouTube Bans True Crime Videos That Reanimate Dead Children with AI","text":"There's also a great Adult Swim Infomercial satirizing this idea, \"Live Forever As you Are Now with Alan Resnick\"[1]. Apparently it came out the same year as that Black Mirror episode (2013) ! [I] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xguam0TKMw8":[{"hn_comment_id":31327961,"author":"chubot","month":"2022-05","story_title":"No, America is not collapsing","text":"I tend to ignore the \"endless screeching\", and I've long had an optimistic world view somewhat aligned with say Steven Pinker -- we're living through the best times, roughly monotonic progress, with some temporary setbacks. But this recent video by Ray Dalio made me think a lot, and led me to his books: [VIDEO] Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order He did a bunch of quantitative research and came up with a model for the prosperity of countries, and \"the world order\". In the model, there were 4 world leaders at various points: Dutch, British, Americans, and Chinese. The basic pattern is that they were productive and industrious, gained military power, and grew to hold the world's reserve concurrency. After they hold the world's reserve concurrency, they stop being as productive. The rich parents can bend the rules and corrupt society for their kids. And there is more internal conflict about how to divvy up a fixed or declining pie. There can be more external conflict once rivals see weakness. In Dalio's view, China is obviously on the rise economically, and you also see signs of their increased military power. There is more to it than that -- see the video and books, but that's my short summary. ----- It sounds a little too \"clean\", but after some reflection, a lot of it is hard to argue with. (I'd definitely be interested in criticisms -- this presentation / framing is pretty new.) This doesn't mean America is \"collapsing\". But I would now say it's clearly \"dec","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34560953,"author":"chubot","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?","text":"Assuming you live in the US like I do, definitely watch this video and read Dalio's book (I bought 2 copies) Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio (2022) [VIDEO] Basically we're on the downward part of the cycle of wealth. That has NOT happened in our lifetimes, but it's happened many times before to other countries (Netherlands, Britain, China). Some things go in 150 or 250 year cycles and they're hard to see. Basically the idea is that in the long term, countries need to actually produce wealth in accordance to how much money they print. HOWEVER, the problem is that you can actually get away with NOT doing so for 50+ years -- the span of more than one generation. Particularly if you have the reserve currency of the world, as the US currently does. Dalio links a lot of our ills to Nixon's untethering of the dollar in the early 1970's. That reminds me of a good tweet -- What if your entire personality depends on low interest rates ? The idea there is that the habits and culture we've grown up with have been enforced by this distortion of wealth. --- To create wealth as a country, you need education, rule of law, cooperation, trust, etc. There has to be real output, and people have to push in the same direction. But if you can just print money instead of doing the work of those things, then why bother getting educated? Why not just rip people off? Why not rip off the government? They're just printing it anyway. So the social order is hugely affected","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36931760,"author":"short_throw","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Uh, guys, we should think about spending more on defense in the US","text":"If you aren't familiar with Ray Dalio's Principles for a Changing World Order, I can't recommend it enough (both the book and the YouTube video). You'll understand a lot better where the U.S. is in it's history and why so much is the way it is. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39236727,"author":"hayst4ck","month":"2024-02","story_title":"U.S. Strikes Iran-Backed Groups in Syria and Iraq","text":"Ray Dalio has weighed on exactly your question. This is a 45 minute video that directly answers exactly your question, that is very much worth a watch: [VIDEO] The extremely quick version is that wars happen when am empire is in decline, not when they have collapsed, so we are still salvageable, but only if we get a handle on income inequality. He would say that Pax Americana has not collapsed yet, but that it is definitely in the process of collapsing. He asserts that the main identifier of empire decline is income inequality which is fueled heavily by inflation which was enabled by the abandoning of the gold standard (Have you seen that WTF happened in 1971 meme? Abandoning the gold standard is what happened. [LINK] ). When the rich get richer because they are the main winners of inflation, they start gutting institutions that can threaten their entrenched power (such as infrastructure, R&D, and most importantly education -- \"we don't want people who can critically think, we want people who know how to perform a task\" -- there's a move from liberal to technical education) which results in less innovation and therefore waning military strength and adaptability. As a militaries strength falters, the use of the American petrodollar for trade becomes less appealing, which would ultimately stop you from living beyond your means by powering yourself with debt/inflation. As soon as quality of life drops, civil war/revolution/civil unrest becomes much more likely, leading to inabil","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30827607,"author":"OrlandoHakim","month":"2022-03","story_title":"What is money, anyway?","text":"I am surprised no one has shared these two important documentary videos on money: Money as Debt: [LINK] Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31134176,"author":"fervor","month":"2022-04","story_title":"War Without Rules: Inside China\u2019s Playbook for Global Domination","text":"This video seems appropriate with the article: [VIDEO] A friend recently shared this video \u201cprinciples for dealing with the changing world order\u201d which stirred up a very solemn feeling in me. It may be the first time as an American that I felt a sense of duty to compete in regard to our international place. I\u2019ve been wondering if any other Americans (and the west in general) wonder what they personally can do. In the video, Ray Dalio suggests saving money (fiscal conservatism?), being nice (political tolerance?), and competing technologically. If only it were that simple.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31899950,"author":"Litost","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Only essential services to operate from midnight","text":"I'm not that familiar with the Fourth Turning and this also originates from the US, but I did find it quite helpful when considering where things are, have been and might be going and how the US is in a cycle along with other nations: [VIDEO] I'd also not heard of Glocalization, but it reminds me of a couple of topics that are covered in Fritjof Capra's Systems View of Life book (also a course), around emergent behaviour in complex systems and how this competes with top down command and control ideas (or in organisations as the formal and informal networks).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32331013,"author":"f0e4c2f7","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Y Combinator narrows current cohort size by 40%, citing downturn and funding","text":"Ray Dalio wrote a book theorizing about some of these possibilities. I haven't read it yet but this video summary of it is pretty interesting. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32814620,"author":"theuri","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow (1972)","text":"Great piece. Most MBAs learn this in b-school. This is wonderfully paired with this video (from Ray Dalio) --> which draws analogs to this process on the macro / country level [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33110618,"author":"scifibestfi","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Celsius Execs Cashed Out $40M in Crypto Before Halting Withdrawals for Customers","text":"Fiat works until it doesn't. Whether that's inflation, corrupt government, or the long term debt cycle which we nearing the end of. Ray Dalio has a good video about what that means and how this has played out every time over the past 500 years: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43618525,"author":"muzani","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Could tariffs be used as a reverse pump and dump?","text":"I always recommend Ray Dalio's video on how economics: [VIDEO] The tariffs and heck, electing a man like Trump, is a response to the existing situation. 1. Debt is very high and increasing at an unsustainable rate. Rather than default on debts, empires always print more money. 2. Competitiveness has gone down. In times of comfort, work ethic goes down too and a culture emerges where the working class is looked down on. 3. Economic disparity results in political polarity between the left and the right. This leads to revolutions. American revolutions tend to be fairly peaceful, but many are violent. 4. Technological advances allows for a shift in the order. New contenders have the conditions to make good use of them, which allows them to outpace the global leader. 5. Wars increase in a desperate move to hold on to power without having an economic lead. This leads to overextension and further collapse. The tariffs are primarily a response to debt and competitiveness. Trump's election and everyone's distrust for him stems from political polarity. Many of his recent surprising actions are in preparation for a war. The tariffs are an attempted cure to an existing problem. But like many cures, it buys time until the inevitable happens. It's not making the US more competitive. It might not cure the economic disparity. So what you see is three things coming together: 1) admission that the US debt may not be manageable, 2) worrying long term outlook, 3) Trump's lack of diplomacy making","stance":"rec"}],"xi1Lq79mLeE":[{"hn_comment_id":38381663,"author":"vetinari","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Ubuntu: ~20% More Performance Than Windows 11 on New AMD Zen 4 Threadripper","text":"Because the userspace, old and baroque it is, is the compatibility layer for the existing apps. Not the kernel. The kernel is a very nice piece of work, but it come from slightly different assumptions, than the reality turned out to need. Btw, the recent Dave Cutler interview ( [VIDEO] ) is great. Worth the 3 hours it takes.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38450108,"author":"drewg123","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Windows NT: Peeking into the Cradle","text":"That's not his channel, its a different Dave. However, there is an excellent 3 hour long interview with Dave Cutler on that channel. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39453950,"author":"wil421","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 sold on eBay","text":"There\u2019s a fantastic interview on YouTube with Dave Cutler. It\u2019s 3 hours long but there are a few 10 minute highlight clips on the same channel. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43577343,"author":"progmetaldev","month":"2025-04","story_title":"How Big Is VMS?","text":"His series on YouTube, Dave's Garage, has really helped me to conceptualize Operating Systems in the past that I used, but didn't really fully understand. I started with Atari DOS, but moved to the 286 roughly around the time it started to become popular, along with MS-DOS. I'm 45 now, so didn't think about things as deeply back then, as far as constraints and why things may have been built the way they were. I think his series really does a great job at looking into both technology and company politics (especially his time at Microsoft). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xixM_cwSLcQ":[{"hn_comment_id":19482414,"author":"exabrial","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Where Boeing\u2019s 737 Max Planes Go When They\u2019re Grounded","text":"I highly recommend everyone suggestion engineering solutions to watch this video from an actual pilot performing a runaway stabilizer procedure in a 737 simulator. [VIDEO] What happened is a series of failures; this video frames it perfectly.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19518550,"author":"Declanomous","month":"2019-03","story_title":"No call for simulators in new Boeing 737 Max training proposals","text":"I'd highly recommend anyone who wants to see what an MCAS runaway looks like and the steps needed to correct it watch the following video by Mentour Pilot.[1] He's a 737 pilot for a European budget carrier, and I believe he is qualified to certify other pilots. In the video he goes over what an MCAS failure/runaway stabilizer would feel like to the pilots, the troubleshooting steps, and at the end of the video he shows a simulated runaway MCAS failure in a sim. He also has a few other videos on the MCAS accidents. I'd highly recommend watching all of them; he does a very good job at putting everything into perspective in a way that the news does not. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19692509,"author":"pas","month":"2019-04","story_title":"\u201cI worked at Boeing for about 1.5 years in the 2008-9 time period\u201d","text":"> You probably have nothing to worry about with air travel. Well, the conclusion is already made in the statistics, and air travel is the safest, yes, but it's worrying that it's safe despite the enormous fallacies, despite the insane pressure of market forces. A very eye-opening thing is to watch what the pilots should have done: [VIDEO] Runaway stabilizer scenario has associated memory items (meaning the pilot must have the checklist committed to memory). There are big wheels that turn, with noise and a big visibility marking. This was Boeing's initial defense too, that the pilots fucked up, because disabling any electronics works the same way. (There's a cutoff switch.) So if something is doing something, shut off the power, rotate the wheels manually. And in this regard Boeing is right. Pilots decisionmaking was suboptimal. However, it is Boeing's fault that they opted for a no-training-required strategy. A similar WTF is that pilots don't keep up with the aviation industry news. How - the fuck - can you pilot a plane that you know nothing about (except that your license is valid for it)!?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20043320,"author":"Zancarius","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Long Before Boeing 737 Max Crash, Ethiopian Air Pilot Warned of Dangers","text":"Depends on the aircraft. Some modern jetliners are using fly-by-wire, while others have hydraulically-boosted controls. Some still rely on cable-and-pulley. Either way, as I understand, it wouldn't matter with the MCAS-related MAX aircraft crashes. The elevator trim is able to move the entire elevator (literally, the entire elevator moves in response to the jackscrew controlled by the trim system) to such an extent that, depending on CG, airspeed, and other factors, it cannot be overpowered by moving the control surface to its full deflection. So whether or not the MAX had boosted controls or fly-by-wire probably wouldn't have mattered in the case the aircraft were trimmed fully nose-down. The pilots would have been struggling to maintain control either way. That's why there's stabilizer trim cut-out switches and manual trim. I'd highly recommend Mentour Pilot's videos on the subject, links below: Runaway Stabilizer: How to stop MCAS - [VIDEO] Boeing 737 Unable to Trim! Cockpit video (full flight sim) - [LINK] Five questions about the Boeing 737 MAX Answered - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19570743,"author":"sundvor","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 pilots 'could not stop nosedive'","text":"Not that video, but at least it shows the automatic trim system in action - and is rather educational: [LINK] . Even better: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19575820,"author":"proctor","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX Investigation Preliminary Report","text":"this video[0] from \"mentour pilot\" on youtube explains the stabilizer system quite well. it seems the trim wheels are connected manually to the trim mechanism in the back, but when the trim stabilizers are in an extreme position the wind loading on them makes it very hard/impossible to rotate the trim wheels manually. from what i understand, one way to relieve/lessen the wind loading so that the manual wheels can be used again is to (in the case of trim down) dive the plane. this would lessen the wind loading on the stabilizer and allow the manual wheels to move again. but you would need \"room\" to dive, something they did not have in this case. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19903853,"author":"janoc","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Ethiopian Max Crash Simulator Scenario Stuns Pilots","text":"Well, the \"Stabilizer wheel - grasp and hold\" item of the procedure doesn't necessarily mean the crew will be able to override it. That's the last ditch option on the checklist, when everything else has failed, even turning the motors off (there could be e.g. a short circuit powering the motor). There is no clutch on the 737, AFAIK, because the forces are such that it wouldn't work. Here is a good video by an actual 737 captain explaining how the runaway stab trim procedure works and what you have to do. [VIDEO] And this simulator video shows both how the 737 horizontal stabilizer is controlled and what kind of forces are on the trim wheel and control column when severely out of trim: [LINK] Should give you an idea what were the Ethiopian pilots facing when unable to use the electric trim, plane trimmed nose heavy by MCAS and at high speed ...","stance":"rec"}],"xn76r0JxqNM":[{"hn_comment_id":29127641,"author":"cma","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How were video games from the 90s so efficient?","text":"Some interesting related stuff in this talk: HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games [VIDEO] I think they say at one point it went from 14 to 8 instructions, and then the Duke Nukem guy (Ken Silverman) got it down to around 4. Quake would do something where it only issued a divide every 8 pixels or something, and then only interpolate when inbetween and the out of order execution on pentium pro (I think?) would let it all work out.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29494692,"author":"rasz","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Building a PS1 style retro 3D renderer","text":"From the horses mouths (minus Abrash/Carmack) 'HandmadeCon 2016 - History of Software Texture Mapping in Games' [VIDEO] Wolfenstein and Doom are 100% correct because Carmack 'cheated' by deciding to never look down/up or draw slopes :-) so whole game is drawn with 'lines of constant Z'. Or as they put it Chris Hecker (Microsoft/Maxis/etc): that's a classic Carmack thing which is like Fuck those general problems, Im gonna solve this other problem perfectly John Miles (ORIGIN/Miles Design/etc): Its all about not doing the math, we were still at a point in time when you won by not doing the math","stance":"rec"}],"xnWKz7Cthkk":[{"hn_comment_id":2656242,"author":"Griever","month":"2011-06","story_title":"DIY Weapons of the Libyan Rebels","text":"Top Gear had an excellent several-part episode which illustrated just how ridiculously well built these things are. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20286142,"author":"jakejarvis","month":"2019-06","story_title":"The Toyota Way","text":"The entire decades-long overseas diversion saga surrounding American Toyota pickups has always fascinated me. Top Gear did an episode [0] trying to destroy a Toyota Hilux (similar to the Land Cruiser) and literally couldn't, which explains why it's so popular with terrorists. It's a worthwhile watch if you want to see truck survive after being drowned in water, fire, and the rubble of a demolished skyscraper. Say what you want about Toyotas, but that's quite the engineering feat in my opinion! [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31011921,"author":"helsinkiandrew","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Never hose out a Honda Element","text":"Playlist of attempts: [VIDEO] Part 3 with the 23-storey drop from a collapsing tower block is worth a watch","stance":"rec"}],"xnez6tloNSQ":[{"hn_comment_id":18797489,"author":"michelpp","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What was your experience using a graph database?","text":"Thanks for this link, very interesting talk from the graphblas author: [VIDEO] I've never seen any advantage to graphdbs over relational models until I saw this talk. Raising graph analysis to the level of linear algebra is brilliant.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34519670,"author":"redbar0n","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Bullshit Graph Database Performance Benchmarks","text":"> If you want to be my hero, find a way to fix this problem: [LINK] Let me (try to) be your hero, Marzi. (Insert favorite reference to famous cheezy pop music song, if you like.) Couldn't you use GraphBLAS algorithms, like they do in RedisGraph (which supports Cypher, btw) to fix that problem with \"death star\" queries? Those algorithms are based on linear algebra and matrix operations on sparse matrices (which are like compressed bitmaps on speed, re: [LINK] ). The insight is that the adjacency list of a property-graph is actually a matrix, and then you can use linear algebra on it. But it may require the DB is built bottom up with matrices in mind from the start (instead of linked lists like Neo4j does). Maybe your double array approach in RageDB could be made to fit.. I think you'll find this presentation on GraphBLAS positively mind-blowing, especially from this moment: [VIDEO] Such math-based algorithms seem perfect to optimally answer unbounded (death) star queries like \u201cHow are you connected to your neighbors and what are they?\u201d That way, for such queries one doesn't have to traverse the graph database as a discovery process through what each node \"knows about\", but could view and operate on the database from a God-like perspective, similar to table operations in relational databases. Further reading: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18088604,"author":"espeed","month":"2018-09","story_title":"The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems","text":"On a related note, this upcoming paper on succinct graph representations will be presented at PACT next month ( [LINK] ) -- it's more data model than database, but I think you'll find it interesting... Log(Graph): A Near-Optimal High-Performance Graph Representation [pdf] [LINK] For something more database specific, check out the new RedisGraph module [1] implemented with GraphBLAS [2] by the venerable Tim Davis [3] himself, who as you know implements the underlying sparse matrix algos used in everything from MATLAB to Google Maps... RedisGraph in the Language of Linear Algebra with GraphBLAS, co-presented by RedisLabs and Tim Davis [video] [VIDEO] GraphBLAS is not Redis-specific, but the Redis data structures and new modular design made it an ideal candidate for the first popular database implementation. This is significant because GraphBLAS is more than 10 years in the making, the culmination of the initial D4M matrix model design by Jeremy Kepner [4] and his team at MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center. And for the last ~5 years or so the software model has been designed in collaboration with hardware teams at Intel, NVIDIA, IBM, and the labs [5] to make chips and architectures optimized for these new matrix models and capable of exascale. It all came together this summer with the release of GraphBLAS 1.0 [6]. Now that GPU and TPU accelerators are populating the data centers and linear algebra has come en vogue, hopefully enough software engineers will be ready wit","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18099520,"author":"espeed","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Log(Graph): A Near-Optimal High-Performance Graph Representation (2018) [pdf]","text":"This paper on succinct graph data structures will be presented at PACT ( [LINK] ) next month. To put it in the broader context of relational database programming and why it's significant now for software developers in general, here are some thoughts from a thread I posted yesterday [0] on the convergence of ideas that have been in the works for the last 10+ years on the graph database front and the forces that have aligned in hardware and other fronts to bring about the architectural paradigm shift that's to come... [0] The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems [LINK] --//-- This upcoming paper [...] is more data model than database, but I think you'll find it interesting. For something more database specific, check out the new RedisGraph module [1] implemented with GraphBLAS [2] by the venerable Tim Davis [3] himself, who as you know implements the underlying sparse matrix algos used in everything from MATLAB to Google Maps... RedisGraph in the Language of Linear Algebra with GraphBLAS, co-presented by RedisLabs and Tim Davis [video] [VIDEO] GraphBLAS is not Redis-specific, but the Redis data structures and new modular design made it an ideal candidate for the first popular database implementation. This is significant because GraphBLAS is more than 10 years in the making, the culmination of the initial D4M matrix model design by Jeremy Kepner [4] and his team at MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center. And for the last ~5 years or so the s","stance":"rec"}],"xnqTKD8uD64":[{"hn_comment_id":8788573,"author":"jerv","month":"2014-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How to refresh on modern features of C++?","text":"Herb Sutter, one of the most prolific C++ experts out there, recently gave a talk on Modern C++ [1]. In the beginning of his talk, he states that every C++ developer should read a \"Tour of C++\" [2] by Bjarne Stroustrup, the original designer of C++. I recently read it and it's great. The book has less than 200p, but still covers the most important parts of C++11, albeit not in great detail (the reader is pointed to \"The C++ Programming Language\" by the same author for that). Read it! And watch the youtube video in [1]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16536336,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Best way to learn modern C++?","text":"- Tour of C++ ( [LINK] ) - Principles and Practice Using C++ ( [LINK] ) - From Mathematics to Generic Programming ( [LINK] ) - The Scott Meyers books Some of the Bjarne Stroustrup videos, \"Learning and Teaching Modern C++\" - [LINK] Some of the Herb Sutter videos, \"Writing Good C++14... By Default\" - [LINK] \"Back to the Basics! Essentials of Modern C++ Style\" - [VIDEO] Some of the Kate Gregory videos, \"Stop Teaching C\" - [LINK] \"10 Core Guidelines You Need to Start Using Now\" - [LINK] \"It's Complicated\" - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xoVJKj8lcNQ":[{"hn_comment_id":35570085,"author":"NumberWangMan","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you cope with the existential dread of AGI?","text":"Have you watched this video? [VIDEO] (You don't have to, of course. An hour-long video recommended by a stranger on the internet is a big ask) There's a ton of evidence that this is moving way faster than people think. I don't think there's anything particularly special about human intelligence. And time and time again, we've been able to copy things that nature does and make them way more powerful, like planes vs birds. It does the same thing, but in a completely different way. It would be surprising if we couldn't do it with brains. I feel like a lot of people are not going to admit that we have already created AGI until we literally have an unstoppable AI that has taken over everything. It's not human level everywhere , but it's way better than humans in a lot of ways. It's never going to be exactly human, it'll work differently than we do. But if you count intelligence as the ability to achieve goals, which is how most researchers do, then we're already pretty much there.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35758651,"author":"than3","month":"2023-04","story_title":"AI Will Rapidly Transform Labor, Exacerbating Inequality, Insecurity, Poverty","text":"I agree, insofar that most of the discourse I've seen often neglects fundamental drivers of our economy such as the division of labor and has undue focus on outcomes that are less likely to come to pass, as opposed to risk oriented discussion which is key in risk management. There was a very good video someone posted not too long ago that covers what should be covered as an overview. Link: [VIDEO] Any engineer knows as soon as the rate of change exceeds the reaction time, you can't keep up and failures happen. In the case of systems, the larger the system the bigger and more damaging the failure. We're dealing with societal mechanics, so failures may have global impact.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35939601,"author":"EGreg","month":"2023-05","story_title":"A Former Pilot on Why Autonomous Vehicles Are So Risky","text":"Pretty much the entire AI industry is like this now. Similar to Web3 industry before it, except AI is potentially far more dangerous. AI Experts have predicted a chance of 10-20% human level extinction from AI, have a history of underestimating AI, but companies are rushing to the precipice, and it is just the early days. Everyone should listen to this warning: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35962494,"author":"reducesuffering","month":"2023-05","story_title":"OpenAI chief goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI","text":"It's very sad that people lack the imagination for the possible horrors that lie beyond. You don't even need the imagination; Hinton, Bengio, Tegmark, Yudkowsky, Musk, etc. are spelling it out for you. This moment, 80% of comments are derisive, and you actually have zero idea how much is computer generated bot content meant to sway opinion by post-GPT AI industry who see themselves as becoming the next iPhone-era billionaires. We are fast approaching a reality where our information space breaks down. Where almost all text you get from HN, Twitter, News, Substack; almost all video you get from Youtube, Instagram, TikTok; is just computer generated output meant to sway opinion and/or make $. I can't know Altman's true motives. But this is also what it looks like when a frontrunner is terrified at what happens when GPT6 is released and if they don't, the rest of the people who see billionaire $ coming their way are close at your heels trying to leapfrog you if you stop. Consequences? What consequences? We all know social media has been a net good, right? Many of you sound exactly like the few remaining social media cheerleaders (of which there were plenty 5 years ago) who still think Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, isn't causing depression and manipulation. If you appreciated what The Social Dilemma illuminated, then watch the same people on AI: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35569689,"author":"stillpoint","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is the apocolyptic scenario for AI \u201cbreaking loose\u201d?","text":"\"Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world.\" [VIDEO] A very succinct quote from this presentation, by Yuval Noah Harari: \"What nukes are to the physical world... AI is to the virtual and symbolic world.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35637182,"author":"112","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Auto-GPT: An experimental open-source attempt to make GPT-4 fully autonomous","text":"Been involved with LLMs for the past 2 years, and what I can say is we have no idea what the technology can do, and we have no way of monitoring when it gains new abilities. We're racing towards autonomous everything, and we're too slow and blind to even detect hidden exponential developments. Here's a good overview to get up to speed: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35734499,"author":"musicale","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Thoughts on A.I. Dilemma: Language as the ultimate medium","text":"Surprised there hasn't been more discussion on this on HN. Podcast and transcript: [LINK] Video: [VIDEO] The argument against putting a potential bioweapon (etc.) in everyone's pocket is compelling, but I fear that the cat is already out of the bag.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35739445,"author":"fwsgonzo","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Am I wrong to feel sorry for people that mindlessly scroll all day long?","text":"It's an open secret that social media and engangement metrics has created something that we don't know how to undo now. No media whether it be news or entertainment will show you anything but what they think gets extra engagement. Outrage, clickbait, infinite scrolling, auto-playing content, recommendations etc. Just have a look at r/teachers to see what the next generation of kids look like. They can't concentrate more than 30 seconds. I'm no expert on this subject, so I would just recommend watching the AI Dilemma video which goes a bit into the social media side, but also talks about LLMs. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35766627,"author":"nehal3m","month":"2023-04","story_title":"AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation","text":"In this very interesting video, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin argue that LLM's can feasibly generate their own training data sets [1]. It's a very interesting (and a slightly alarming) talk, maybe check it out. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35779911,"author":"tpowell","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google and can now speak freely about his AI concern","text":"Yesterday, I randomly watched his full interview from a month ago with CBS Morning, and found the discussion much more nuanced than today's headlines. [LINK] The next video in my recommendations was more dire, but equally as interesting: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36231319,"author":"than3","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Ken Griffin says the AI community is making a mistake by creating so much hype","text":"You seem under the mistaken impression that if I can't cite it, its not happening. This is why cascade failures cause so much mayhem and death. Because so many people subscribe to show me proof, and if there is no tangible proof because proof is a lagging indicator its not happening. This is a complete failure in any professional risk management. This is like a dam collapsing, I'm pointing at a crack, and you are saying show me proof this crack will cause everyone in the valley below to die. Its a flawed way of thinking in many ways especially with fundamental things that we base our lives and welfare on (as a society). In engineering there is different criteria for evaluating risk with items that are safety-critical. This is safety critical. Here is an example of a copyrighter losing her job. There are many other examples if you bother to go looking. [LINK] You can dispute it all you want, it won't make you any less wrong when it happens, and many experts are deeply concerned because the rate of change has been exponential even if you refuse to believe it. There's a video that covers the important parts if you want to educate yourself, its on youtube. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41724791,"author":"reciprocity","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Gavin Newsom vetoes SB 1047","text":"[LINK] This link convinced me otherwise. I wasn't too sure before (I'm a little ashamed to admit I hadn't been following the development of SB 1047). I will also specifically share this talk on YouTube: [VIDEO] I think this passing this bill would have probably been a very good idea. Not perfect, but far, very far from broken. Edit: I'm actually not sure if we as a community gave this topic enough attention leading in the months leading up to the announcement of this decision.","stance":"rec"}],"xodtfM1r9FA":[{"hn_comment_id":26729054,"author":"zamadatix","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted","text":"An attempt at a true ELI5 is the bodies exist in what we know as spacetime, not as separate independent concepts of space and time which we perceive from our day to day experience, so we have to know a bit about the difference. Chiefly in spacetime everything always travels the same \"speed\" (c, the universal speed limit) and it's just a matter of how much of that speed appears as \"traveling through space\" and how much appears as \"traveling through time\". When 2 bodies warp spacetime it causes changes in the way each body's spacetime speed is distributed causing them to accelerate towards each other. The ELI15 version is think about vectors in our normal concept of 3D space first, if I told you a body was always moving at 100 meters per second and it was 100% in the horizontal direction you'd say there was 0 meters per second in the vertical direction. Now say something curves this geometry a little bit, the body will still be traveling at 100 meters per second but now a tiny bit of that speed may appear to manifest in the vertical direction and a tiny bit less appear to manifest in the horizontal direction. Same general story with spacetime except the math is a lot more complex leading to some nuance in how things actually change. The ELI20 version should you want to understand how to calculate the effects yourself is probably best left to this 8 part mini series rather than me [VIDEO] and the 8th episode recap actually has a challenge problem to calculate what causes a stati","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29769907,"author":"Vetch","month":"2022-01","story_title":"We need to reclaim our attention","text":"It's difficult to find material that's a series, rigorously demonstrated and advanced at the same time (there's lots excellent material that ticks either one or the other of those boxes). Here are some examples I subscribe to that come close: Covers Quantum Field Theory and General relativity in as approachable a manner as I imagine is possible while still going deep into detail: [LINK] Theoretical machine learning, Information theory and probabilistic inference : [LINK] Heavy emphasis on analysis and measure theory : [LINK] While ScienceClic's coverage of differential geometry topics is mostly a thin vertical slice of the subject, it covers it with incredible visualizations and pedagogical approach: [VIDEO] .","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38529037,"author":"psc","month":"2023-12","story_title":"New theory claims to unite Einstein's gravity with quantum mechanics","text":"ScienceClic on youtube has some really great videos, the first half of the string theory video [1] does a good job framing the conflict at a high level, string theory being one attempt to resolve the problem. It doesn't go into math but mentions that in the standard model, interactions are local, which for example means something like photon emission is instantaneous. When applied to gravity/gravitons, you get infinities in the math. This sort of makes sense to me, but I have yet to find anything that does an understandable job explaining how/why exactly the math breaks down. There's a series on the maths of general relativity [2] which I haven't completed but I'm hoping will provide a bit more background to understand the math. Also, the article mentions that the new theory was motivated by solving the black hole information paradox [3], which there's a good video [4] about as well [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xoxhDk-hwuo":[{"hn_comment_id":18708538,"author":"ryanmercer","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Glitter bomb tricks parcel thieves","text":">I don't even know what this Mark person did, but going by comments here, Oh man, watch the video on his YouTube. It's pure comedic gold. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34082380,"author":"ubj","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Porch pirates stole 260M packages this year","text":"Obligatory links to YouTuber Mark Rober's quest for vengeance against porch pirates: * Glitter Bomb 1.0 vs Porch Pirates: [VIDEO] * Glitter Bomb 2.0 vs Porch Pirates: [LINK] * Glitter Bomb 3.0 vs Porch Pirates: [LINK] * Exploding Glitter Bomb 4.0 vs Package Thieves: [LINK] * Car Thieves vs the Final Glitter Bomb 5.0: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41758201,"author":"mdaniel","month":"2024-10","story_title":"So thieves broke into your storage unit again","text":"> There are some neat videos out there where people make their own The \"glitter bomb\" series is pretty funny: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xrIjfIjssLE":[{"hn_comment_id":5661893,"author":"lelf","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Erlang's Open Telecom Platform (OTP) Framework [video]","text":"And if you haven't seen it, here is some classic. \u201cErlang: the Movie\u201d: \u2014 [VIDEO] And sequel \u201cErlang: the Movie II\u201d: \u2014 [LINK] Don't think wtf. Just watch.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13476994,"author":"mnd","month":"2017-01","story_title":"What's all this fuss about Erlang? (2007)","text":"There\u2019s also \u201cErlang the Movie\u201d; the designers of Erlang demo some of the qualities of the Erlang system in a delightful way: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15036995,"author":"randomstudent","month":"2017-08","story_title":"Elixir in Depth \u2013 Reading and personal notes","text":"The author doesn't talk a lot about preemptive scheduling, which is probably the best thing about the Erlang virtual machine. This video explains what preemptive scheduling is and why it is extremely useful: [LINK] First, the speaker creates an application endpoint that runs into an infinite loop on invalid input. Then, he shows how that doesn't block the rest of the requests. Using native BEAM (EDIT: BEAM = EVM = Erlang Virtual Machine) tools, he looks for the misbehaving process (the one running the infinite loop), prints some debug information and kills it. It's pretty impressive. Another great (and lighter) resource, is \"Erlang the Movie\" ( [VIDEO] ). It shows the power of concurrency through independent processes, the default debug tools, and the power of hot code reloading. Don't miss the twist at the end.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17964128,"author":"StudentStuff","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ericsson and T-Mobile ink $3.5B deal for 5G","text":"It is one of the core features of Erlang (a language developed by Ericsson), being able to rewrite code in production, with errors/crashes that break one thread not affecting another. Obligatory link to Erlang: The Movie (10min)- [VIDEO] Note that they start crashing things in Erlang around minute 7, and fix them shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, their setup keeps calls that weren't directly involved in the crash alive and running unaffected.","stance":"rec"}],"xsLJZyih3Ac":[{"hn_comment_id":31953827,"author":"fossuser","month":"2022-07","story_title":"What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?","text":"I thought this was pretty great: [VIDEO] My favorite part is when the guy uses the scammers real name and she panics.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37598874,"author":"IG_Semmelweiss","month":"2023-09","story_title":"India's biggest tech centers named as cyber crime hotspots","text":"I think the definition of cyber crime is what is important here. I think there are huge buildings with call centers in India dedicated to cyber crime. Thousands of people. Nothing to do with tech skills. Here is Mark Rober basically bringing the war to their shores with incredible pranks: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39435498,"author":"jasonwatkinspdx","month":"2024-02","story_title":"FTC proposes new protections to combat AI impersonation of individuals","text":"> My second thought was the majority of this type of fraud is probably from foreign impersonation, not Americans. There's an industry for it in India, because they can source english call center workers there fairly easily. The youtuber Mark Rober ran into a couple of US mules for these sorts of scams while working on one of his prank videos, and decided to team up with some other youtubers to troll some of these companies in India. The video on it is worth watching: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xsSnOQynTHs":[{"hn_comment_id":9944127,"author":"GordyMD","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Ask HN: Can you suggest some good JavaScript projects to read and learn?","text":"Not a readable resource, but I feel it is worth the exception - Watch Dan Abramov's talk [1] about Redux (Reducers + Flux). Gives great insight into his motivation for creating React Hot Loader and Redux. +1 for Dan (aka Gaearon) being an excellent developer [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10562741,"author":"jongalloway2","month":"2015-11","story_title":"Writing code doesn't mix well with oration","text":"Dan Abramov's talk on Redux and hot loader at ReactEurope really nails live coding for maximum effect: [VIDEO] His presentation is web-based, so his live coding interacts with his \"slide-ware\", e.g. changing slides is accomplished by setting application state.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16838949,"author":"mcintyre1994","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?","text":"One of my favourites I watched recently was Dan Abramov introducing React hot loading, Redux and Redux Dev Tools in the same 30 minute talk: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9833022,"author":"danabramov","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Redux: Atomic Flux with Hot Reloading","text":"Hey, lib author here. Let me first explain Flux in five seconds. Instead of mutating your models, any data mutation in your app is described as a plain object describing \u201cwhat happened\u201d (e.g. { type: LIKED_POST, postId: 42 }) and broadcasted globally. Models (called Stores in Flux) have no setters and change their internal state in response to specific mutation objects (called Actions). The goal of Flux is to have single source of truth and make it easy to avoid race conditions and cascading updates. If some data is wrong, just repeat the same Actions in the same order, and you'll get the same data in Stores. Very easy to debug. Now, for Redux. It keeps the properties of Flux (mutations described as objects), but instead of Stores mutating internal state, it has Reducers\u2014pure functions with (state, action) => state signature. While writing Flux apps, I noticed that the _essence_ of every Store I ever wrote was a reducer function. It turns out that using pure functions instead of event emitters has many benefits: they are composable ( [LINK] ), it is possible to hot reload their logic ( [LINK] ). I wrote Redux for my React Europe talk about Hot Reloading and Time Travel ( [LINK] ). It got popular before I explained _why_ I made it. In my talk I show what kind of powerful devtools it is possible to build on top of Redux. The video of my talk will be up soon, you can check when it appears here: [LINK] . Also check out my article on the subject: [LINK] EDIT: THE VIDEO IS UP! [VID","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9857641,"author":"lingojs","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Angular vs. React \u2013 the tie breaker","text":"Directives are replaced by React components. I would argue, IMO, that directives are actually a half-assed implementation of components. In terms of services, I would recommend using Flux to perform actions / store your state. This is what a lot of developers are leaning towards these days. There was a great talk at React Conf about Reflux, I've never used it, but the presentation has convinced me to try it out on my next project: [VIDEO] When you build with React, imagine building an application in Angular using only Directives. It isn't that simple, but that is sort of the idea with React components. I started with Angular (and still work day to day with it at work) but if someone asked me how I would architect an application tomorrow, I would go with Flux + React + ES6, no questions asked. Also, Angular2 is heavily influenced by React, so learning React now will allow you to have a better understanding of Angular2.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9968619,"author":"adeptima","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Flux Architecture Visual Cheatsheet","text":"This is out-dated from my perspective. Check Redux [VIDEO] [LINK] Many Flux implementation lucks of isomorphic, proper hot-reloading, etc. ES6 transition is on its way. Most code will be abandoned. Alt, Reflux, etc are all in trouble.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9970288,"author":"findjashua","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Flux Architecture Visual Cheatsheet","text":"If you're wondering about which flux implementation to start with, I'd highly recommend checking out Redux : [LINK] The main idea is to think of stores as reducers (redux = reducers + flux). He also gave a very good talk on it at react-europe: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10334675,"author":"GordyMD","month":"2015-10","story_title":"The 3REE Stack: React, Redux, RethinkDB and Express.js","text":"I think if you take a lot at the motivations that Dan Abramov had for creating Redux [1], you'll see that improving debugging was at the centre of it. Check out his talk he gave at React-Europe. He basically is talking about improving developer tools. The functional approach Redux takes allows for you to see state transitions and replay actions - making it relatively trivial (compared to say Angular.js) to understand how to reproduce a buggy state. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10365552,"author":"kmg","month":"2015-10","story_title":"Ask HN: Which is best React or Angular?","text":"Though I don't have experience with a large rewrite like this. I am really liking what I see in React. React + Redux for the Flux pattern seems to be the best combination available right now. Watch this talk by Jessica Kerr - Functional Principles In React [LINK] about why Functional / Declarative approach is good for front end development. Also Dan Abramov (Redux Author) Talk - Live React: Hot Reloading with Time Travel [VIDEO] introducing Redux is great. Watch this awesome talk by Ryan Florence - Don't Rewrite, React! [LINK] on how to approach rewrites bottom up and he rewrites a part of the TodoMVC written in Backbone.js.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10944278,"author":"eicnix","month":"2016-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Best (Tech) talks from 2015","text":"As somebody who hasn't worked with react before I find this talk very interesting: [VIDEO] He talks about improving the development workflow by hot reloading parts of the application during runtime. Slow workflows affect every developer and the idea from this talk can be used to build tools for other stacks or languages.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11413835,"author":"iheartmemcache","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Introducing React Storybook","text":"Dan Abramov's DevTools[0] with Hot Reload and \"Time Travel\" (historical debugging) is basically the same thing too, though its tied to Redux pretty heavily IIRC. So yeah, nothing new. (\"TimeWarp OS\"[1] was a project developed in the late 80s that did the same thing at the OS level, primarily for physics simulations. (Something would break, you'd go back to state foo, change parameters mu,delta,sigma to yield foo' and continue the run.)) [0] [VIDEO] is the canonical talk on it, certainly worth a watch. [1] [LINK] Brian Beckman formerly of Microsoft as a second author. All those RX features I'd imagine were done largely in part by him and De Smet.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15743237,"author":"sailfast","month":"2017-11","story_title":"How Redux Works: A Counter-Example","text":"Yeah - I can see that. \"It's all functions so it all works\" haha. I think the context setter that helped for me was to see \"hey here's what I see with state, and here's how I think about it and did the thing\" at React EU: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31782511,"author":"swyx","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?","text":"i also asked this on twitter so just putting some replies here: - Doug Engelbart [LINK] - Twilio [LINK] - Stripe - \"7 lines of code\" - Netlify - [LINK] - Heroku - [LINK] and git push heroku master - Cloudflare - [LINK] - Node ( [LINK] ) and Deno ( [LINK] ) - Firebase (reportedly) - [LINK] smaller companies/less impactful pitches that i still like - Redux [VIDEO] - Stackblitz [LINK] - Comm [LINK] - Mongodb [LINK] - Let's Encrypt [LINK] - Figwheel-Clojurescript [LINK] - Svelte [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xt1KNDmOYqA":[{"hn_comment_id":41642906,"author":"bsder","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Committing to Rust in the Kernel","text":"C and C++ are very different. I think Casey Muratori hits the nail on the head here: [VIDEO] In short, RAII and smart pointers and borrow checker are all signs of \"individual element thinking\" and that way lies madness. You smear out lifetime and ownership so badly that it practically by definition becomes a problem. Your goal is to think about this stuff in groups to make thinking about allocation way, way easier. Programming is all about abstracting to the next layer. I'm not sure he has quite gotten to the heart of the issue, yet. However, a bunch of smart people (Casey Muratori, Jonathan Blow, Andrew Kelley, etc.) are all dancing around something that Rust and C++ don't seem to fit the bill on. Hopefully they can crystallize it out so that everybody can see it.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46457333,"author":"gingerBill","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Odin: Moving Towards a New \"core:OS\"","text":"Unfortunately I don't think you've understand what I was I trying to say. Rust was designed from day-0 around explicit individual-value based initialization. Odin from day-0 was not designed around this (explicitly). This ever so minor choice might not seem like a big thing to you, as you have stated in your comment, but it leads to MASSIVE architectural decisions later on when the user programs. Odin could not \"just add\" non-nil pointers and it be \"fine\". It would actually not be Odin any more, and the entire language would not even be a C alternative any more, and feel much more like C++ or Rust. Rust and OCaml (which Rust is based off) are different kinds of languages to Odin and their approach does not translate well to what Odin (or C) is trying to do. Unfortunately I will not be able to explain this to you in a comment or article, and it is something that takes a while to understand since it is a subtle effect of locality affecting globality. The best video on this might be from Casey Muratori: [VIDEO] > Yes, initialization can be less efficient in Rust but then most of the time spent is spend in algorithms when they run, not during initialization of the data structure. Sadly this isn't as true as you think it is. I've written a lot of C++ code before and doing its boilerplate for ctors/dtors actually leads to much slower code in general, and I'd argue this does apply to Rust too. Most of the time isn't necessarily spent in \"algorithms\", especially when \"algorithms\" als","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48974141,"author":"jackclayton","month":"2026-07","story_title":"Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now","text":"Above poster is talking about thinking in terms of grouped lifetimes and bulk allocations/deallocations, which is better for performance, and makes Rust borrow checking and other RAII style features completely pointless as they don't add any safety benefits. I used to think like you until I watched this video: [VIDEO] I can confirm after exploring programming like the above video explains, that everything he says is completely true.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43972066,"author":"slowmovintarget","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Odin: A programming language made for me","text":"Here's Casey Muratori on his habit of moving to ZII: [VIDEO] Much better outcomes and failure modes than RAII. IIRC, Odin mentions game programming as one of its use cases.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43972218,"author":"gingerBill","month":"2025-05","story_title":"Odin: A programming language made for me","text":"> It seems to me... that initialization time is unlikely to be significant The thing is, initialization cost is a lot more than you think it is, especially when it's done on a per-object level rather than a \"group\" level. This is kind of the point of trying to make the zero value useful, it's trivially initialized. And in languages that are much more strict in their approach, it is done at that per-object level which means instead of the cost of initialization being anywhere from free (VirtualAlloc/mmap has to produce zeroed memory) to trivially-linear (e.g. memset), to being a lot more nested hierarchies of initialization (e.g. for-loop with constructor for each value). It's non-obvious why the \"strict approach\" would be worse, but it's more about how people actually program rather than a hypothetical approach to things. So of course each style is about trade-offs. There are no solutions, only trade-offs. And different styles will have different trade-offs, even if they are not immediately obvious and require a bit of experience. A good little video on this is from Casey Muratori, \"Smart-Pointers, RAII, ZII? Becoming an N+2 programmer\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46299559,"author":"thegeekpirate","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Zig's new plan for asynchronous programs","text":"There's a GC library around somewhere, but I doubt anyone uses it. Manual memory management is generally quite simple, as long as you aren't using archaic languages. [VIDEO] is worth a watch.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48080557,"author":"ChrisTrenkamp","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Bun ported to Rust in 6 days","text":"This is a hot take, but programming languages haven't progressed since the 90's. We've been conditioned to believe that if you want to be a serious programmer, you have to either use C++-style RAII (which includes Rust), or garbage collection, and there's no in-between, and C programmers are dinosaurs who can be ignored. Arena allocators are a great way to automatically manage memory allocations. You malloc a whole bunch of memory and release it all with a single free, which makes it much easier to reason about your program's memory safety. Casey Muratori has a good video talking about this. [VIDEO] And about Zig, you have an Arena Allocator out of the box: [LINK] . And it's not just limited to that, you have debug allocators that detects memory leaks and gives you stack traces where they occurred. This isn't to say that Zig is great at everything. I think Rust is great for things like kernels, high-frequency trading systems, and authentication servers where memory safety and performance is paramount. But for things like video games, memory leaks and buffer overflows aren't that big of a deal, and Zig's \"Good Enough\" approach is great for those types of applications.","stance":"rec"}],"xtpgkX588nM":[{"hn_comment_id":5459877,"author":"tolmasky","month":"2013-03","story_title":"Want to Help People? Just Give Them Money","text":"Milton Friedman was a proponent (an originator?) of the idea of a negative income tax (as opposed to services). The idea of course, is that the problem of being poor is money , not services. Rather than explain it here, you can see him summing it up: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6501660,"author":"backprojection","month":"2013-10","story_title":"Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult","text":"There's still an incentive to work with a negative income tax. This is an interesting discussion about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6591781,"author":"mbesto","month":"2013-10","story_title":"New dutch political party wants \u20ac 1,000 basic income for everyone","text":"I assume this is akin to Milton Friedman's negative tax: [VIDEO] I think it's brilliant. The major issue would be how to do a transition to it and what the \"magic number\" is.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8148924,"author":"jfoutz","month":"2014-08","story_title":"The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?","text":"Which is the point of the deduction. Any work at all is better than sitting around doing nothing. - I'd suggest you check out Friedman's original position. [VIDEO] It's elegant.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13205170,"author":"raleighm","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Ask YC: Any Updates on the Basic Income Project?","text":"Friedman himself would disagree with you. He supported a related idea - a negative income tax. Hear him describe it here: [VIDEO] . This is not a capitalism vs socialism or left vs right issue.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13890862,"author":"andriesm","month":"2017-03","story_title":"Why we should all have a basic income","text":"What I really don't get is, why do everyone advocate for universal basic income, instead of a negative income tax. The negative income tax model achieves the same basic income with less negative motivation for people who want to pursue work at the low-end. It also avoids wastefully paying it to people who don't need it. This is my inspiration : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19525564,"author":"tomohawk","month":"2019-03","story_title":"What It\u2019s Like to Grow Up with More Money Than You\u2019ll Ever Spend","text":"When people focus on inequality, are they doing so because they love the poor and want to do something for them, or because they hate/envy the rich? Too often, it's the latter. Instead of UBI, a negative income tax is a much better approach. There's a lot of info out there about it, but here's a nice intro: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xtvT2XYlcOY":[{"hn_comment_id":32346071,"author":"jasonwatkinspdx","month":"2022-08","story_title":"Hyundai rolls out 27 heavy-duty hydrogen trucks in Germany","text":"So, not exactly the ideas you're talking about, but the racing world is increasingly exploring outside of the aero that FIA/F1 et all have allowed. Check out this fancar that set a new course record at Goodwood this year: [VIDEO] For anyone unfamiliar, a fan car uses motor driven fans to actively create a low pressure zone under the car, while also reducing the low pressure drag bubble behind the car. This particular one is all electric and quite compact. It's very fast, and yes footage of it looks weird, almost artificial, because its sustaining grip through corners that rivals F1 cars, with the torque of electric. Running full tilt the fan system creates about 2000 kg of downforce. But the neat thing is you can flip a switch and then the thing just becomes a Nissan Leaf with a really crazy body kit. So some future \"track day\" car based on this concept would be surprisingly practical. I think the future of auto racing in a pure electric era is going to be surprisingly bright. Anyhow, not really relevant to talking about making big trucks more efficient, but thought you'd find it interesting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33184822,"author":"ihunter2839","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Students break acceleration world record for electric vehicles","text":"Yes, this car uses powered ground effects (PGE) to achieve the necessary downforce at low speeds (they mention this in an instagram post) In Formula SAE in the US, PGE systems are not allowed, but in the European equivalent they are. Take a look at the Speirling at Goodwood Festival of Speed for an awfully mean fan car. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36002405,"author":"sokoloff","month":"2023-05","story_title":"If It Can't Spend $400M in F1 Anymore, Ferrari Might as Well Win Le Mans","text":"The McMurtry Goodwood performance is also impressive. Even the straight-line launch is eye-popping: [VIDEO] It shattered the previous record that had stood for 23 years.","stance":"rec"}],"xuCn8ux2gbs":[{"hn_comment_id":17203065,"author":"IanCal","month":"2018-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Which YouTube channels do you watch regularly?","text":"smartereveryday I love (particularly the enthusiasm), numberphile too. Anything (not a channel name, just anything) by Tom Scott, his recent gameshow has been pretty good as it's like Only Connect but I've got a better chance of answering the questions. Huge backlog of things too and as he's got more popular he's got more access to interesting places and things. Just seems like a genuinely nice guy explaining things he finds interesting. Probably worth starting with \"things you might not know\" or \"amazing places\". CollegeHumor - can be hit and miss but the ratio is good enough for me. They did a series of a gameshow called \"Umm actually\" which was great. Gus Johnson - never quite sure where I am on things going too far on these but it keeps me laughing and coming back. exurb1a ClarkeAndDawe - teaching me about Australian politics, one fake interview at a time. What got me into it: [LINK] Bill Wurtz - Ranging from absurd 5 second clips to, well, this: [VIDEO] CasuallyExplained","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29524609,"author":"Isinlor","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Long-form info-dense videos on YouTube you would recommend to anyone?","text":"Everything from 3 blue 1 brown: [LINK] Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics): [LINK] history of the entire world, i guess: [VIDEO] TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K): [LINK] Humanity was born way ahead of its time. The reason is grabby aliens. and Grabby aliens: when we'll meet them, how big they are, and other predictions [LINK] [LINK] Everyday Astronaut videos (he has 90 min documentary on Soviet rocket engine): [LINK] Cool Worlds - a lot of 25-35 min very nice astronomy explanations: [LINK] 'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41914569,"author":"purgedreality","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite YouTube video, ever?","text":"Journey to the End of Time - [LINK] Veritasium on Thermite reaction - [LINK] Problems of a Shared Office - [LINK] History of the entire world, I guess - [VIDEO] Colin Furze Underground Activities - [LINK] Future of Reasoning - [LINK] Sex in Trek - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"xx7Lfh5SKUQ":[{"hn_comment_id":19015467,"author":"emily-c","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Virtual Apollo Guidance Computer","text":"This is awesome. If you haven't seen this talk about the AGC you should definitely check it out: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20442808,"author":"mopsi","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Apollo 11 Had a Hidden Hero: Software","text":"This is the best description of AGC I have seen so far, from hardware design to mission software, layer by layer: \"The Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20447272,"author":"Zanneth","month":"2019-07","story_title":"Apollo 11 Had a Hidden Hero: Software","text":"If anyone wants to learn more about the Apollo Guidance Computer, this talk[1] from 34C3 will teach you everything you wanted to know and more. The AGC had some really fascinating features for the time, including a cooperative multitasking system, interrupt driven IO, and even a virtual machine for doing linear algebra! [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32382495,"author":"shadowofneptune","month":"2022-08","story_title":"The Apollo On-Board Computers","text":"The best presentation I have seen on the AGC architecture: [VIDEO] It does present addresses in hexadecimal, oddly. The computer was 15-bit and used octal in its display panel. I suppose the presenters thought the audience would understand hex better.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41102844,"author":"_jholland","month":"2024-07","story_title":"Virtual Apollo Guidance Computer","text":"For a comprehensive exposition of the technical aspects of the AGC, look no further than the Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk: [VIDEO] They not only do a brilliant job of exposing this niche system, but it is a foundational lecture for my knowledge of computer architecture in general","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43772743,"author":"msarnoff","month":"2025-04","story_title":"How MOS 6502 Illegal Opcodes Work (2008)","text":"Michael\u2019s blog is one of my favorites. His \u201cUltimate Guide\u201d talks are great and I rewatch them at least once a year. Ultimate Guide to the C64: [LINK] Ultimate Guide to the Game Boy: [LINK] Ultimate Guide to the Apollo Guidance Computer: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18454418,"author":"theclaw","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Apollo AGC Restoration Part 1 [video]","text":"This is amazing to see - completely unpotted AGC! I've been following Curiousmarc's channel for a while and it's great to see this. Anyone interested in AGC stuff might also want to check out this video from the 34th Chaos Communication Congress that exhaustively explains how it works: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20360660,"author":"lhoff","month":"2019-07","story_title":" Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer","text":"For anyone interested in the AGC itself I can recommend the \"ultimative Apollo guidance computer talk\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31503296,"author":"Banana699","month":"2022-05","story_title":"On rebooting: the unreasonable effectiveness of turning computers off and on","text":"Mandatory Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer [LINK] 34C3 - The Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"xzYgiOC9cj4":[{"hn_comment_id":27302256,"author":"whitepaint","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Uber recognises a union for the first time","text":"Listen to Milton Friedman. He explains this (and many more questions regarding the economy) extremely well. Begin with this video: [VIDEO] (The Real World Effects Of Unions)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15812384,"author":"conanbatt","month":"2017-11","story_title":"American Airlines Accidentally Let Too Many Pilots Take the Holidays Off","text":"Because its true. Unions can only increase wages by reducing the amount of workers. Unions dont get wage increases by reducing the profits of capital in the long term. If uber drivers unionized and made uber pay them more, then less capital would go to uber and eventually have less workers. Ultimately the return on capital will end up being the same, because capital looks for returns and will move. So in effect, it would only increase wages of drivers as long as it can prevent other drivers from showing up. For anyone at home that wants to listen to someone that knows more about economy than any of us: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20968784,"author":"Consultant32452","month":"2019-09","story_title":"The Myth of the Wealthy Welder","text":"Nobel Economist Milton Friedman, for one. [VIDEO] If you watch to the end he fully explains how the net effect of unions is to raise the pay of high paid workers and lower the pay of low paid workers. You might also like \"Basic Economics\" by Thomas Sowell which talks about this phenomenon also.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24577790,"author":"blueterminal","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Mark in the Middle","text":"Unions are absolutely detrimental to the society. Thank god we'll never have one for Software Engineers. Great short explanation from Milton Friedman: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"y-AXTx4PcKI":[{"hn_comment_id":3413856,"author":"richardburton","month":"2012-01","story_title":"How to date a supermodel (or get dealflow or find cofounders)","text":"Sales. It is all about the numbers. Just watch this classic clip from Glengarry Glen Ross: [VIDEO] Pure. Gold.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":1208745,"author":"thomaspaine","month":"2010-03","story_title":"Must-See Movies for Entrepreneurs","text":"That's really the only part of the movie worth watching to be honest. Save yourself 90 minutes and just watch that scene: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3220513,"author":"ims","month":"2011-11","story_title":"Lesser Known Ways to Persuade People","text":"If you liked this movie, may I suggest the David Mamet movie that inspired it: Glengarry Glen Ross ( [LINK] ). Brilliant (but NSFW, language) \"Always Be Closing\" scene to give you a feel for it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"y-uuk4Pr2i8":[{"hn_comment_id":21394315,"author":"droithomme","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Cell and Molecular Biology Animated Textbooks","text":"> the molecules seem to have intent Take a look at dynein and kinesin walking along microtubules while dragging along their cargo. It's pretty neat. Unknown is how the really simple microtubules get to their destination while building themselves just ahead of the walkers or how the walkers know which turns to take. [VIDEO] [LINK] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23870549,"author":"acqq","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Inside the Coronavirus","text":"Then you have to watch these videos too: [LINK] For example, this looks like a cartoon but it really behaves so (except that the molecules are too small to have the colors, as in other visualizations): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28380982,"author":"dopylitty","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Tardigrades Walk","text":"If you think that\u2019s cool you might also like to see the motor proteins that walk along inside our cells. There are a few types including the ones that make muscles work. Kinesin is fun because it has little legs made of proteins. It gloms onto big bubbles of stuff inside the cell and carries them along pathways to their destination. Chemical reactions cause the proteins to fold in the right way to take each step. This shows how they look. [VIDEO] This explains the mechanisms that they use to walk. [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"y3qfeoqErtY":[{"hn_comment_id":16460789,"author":"3dGrabber","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Airlines inching closer to dynamic pricing","text":"This video does a good job explaining how airline pricing works nowadays: [VIDEO] Basically, from the info they get, (destination, departure date, return date, etc.) they try to guess what kind of traveler the customer is and price the ticket accordingly. E.g. if there is no weekend between departure and return, they think that you must be a business traveler so the ticket is more expensive.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17089109,"author":"amorphid","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Boeing 747s are back in demand as workhorses of global shipping","text":"Wendover Productions did a great video YouTube on overnight shipping that goes into the use of old planes for shipping cargo. [1] . The short version is that cargo planes spend most of their time sitting around, usually much less time than an equivalently sized passenger plane. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27334397,"author":"caturopath","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Amazon Prime inflates prices, using the false promise of \u2018free shipping\u2019","text":"US prime is marketed as \"two day\", though in many markets free next-day arrival is common. [LINK] is a pretty good Youtube video about Amazon's shipping system. [VIDEO] is a good Youtube video that discusses how overnight shipping systems like Fedex etc. have works.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35136869,"author":"shaicoleman","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Framework 12th gen laptop review","text":"Regarding the Shipping Trivia section, the \"How Overnight Shipping Works\" video by Wendover Productions is a good resource to learn more [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"y4GB_NDU43Q":[{"hn_comment_id":18235670,"author":"zaxomi","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: YouTube down?","text":"When YouTube comes back up again, I can recommend Tom Scott with \"Single Point of Failure: The (Fictional) Day Google Forgot To Check Passwords\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35916491,"author":"richardwhiuk","month":"2023-05","story_title":"Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers by Tom Scott","text":"Single Point of Failure: The (Fictional) Day Google Forgot To Check Passwords - [VIDEO] is another, different topic, but still worth watching.","stance":"rec"}],"y4sOfO8Ei1g":[{"hn_comment_id":2693079,"author":"biturd","month":"2011-06","story_title":"How to Make Text Look Interesting: Minimalist Web Design","text":"For me, this Shop\u2022Vac Pardoy Commercial thingy had really great typography. It kepy me interested the entire time. Granted, it had other elements keeping me interested, though I feel it was mainly the interesting use of type. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2981097,"author":"programzeta","month":"2011-09","story_title":"Y Combinator by the Numbers","text":"I think it's a ripe field for experimentation at this point, as it's a very entertaining way to present information. There is/was a series in Australia called Hungry Beast, which produced \"Beast File\" segments that used kinetic typography in the same manner as this video: Stuxnet: [LINK] Google: [LINK] Apple: [LINK] There are more of these segments, but a lot of them have to do with Australian politics / corporations. I've watched them all because I adore the style but it might not be for everyone :) In addition, there have been several labours of love which really showcase what's possible when you make a full production out of such a work, such as this amazing piece of kinetic typography / video done to Jonathan Coulton's Shop-Vac: [VIDEO] Any potential company would have their work cut out for them to allow user-generated content to even get close to the above segments, but as the current crop of tools are general professional-level tools (Adobe After-Affects / Premiere or related) there's definitely a specialized gap here.","stance":"rec"}],"y5UT04p5f7U":[{"hn_comment_id":23832172,"author":"tacocataco","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Is It Time to Kill the Penny?","text":"All I want is for all paper cash to be plastic so I can wash the covid off of it. I support getting rid of the penny, but I feel that plastic cash would make more of a difference. CGP Grey has a wonderful video on the penny, he is my favorite YouTuber. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3774123,"author":"rogerbinns","month":"2012-03","story_title":"Canada ditches the penny","text":"CGP Grey has an excellent youtube video on the whole issue for the US. The US currently makes 4 billion 1 cent coins annually. And they have already been abolished at US military overseas bases. [VIDEO] (Come to think of it, doesn't the US military use a lot more metric system than the general population. If so, this would be a good reason to increase the military since it would appear to be the only way progress happens!)","stance":"rec"}],"y71lli8MS8s":[{"hn_comment_id":19026585,"author":"petercooper","month":"2019-01","story_title":"Let\u2019s Create a Speech Synthesizer in C++17 [video]","text":"Agreed. My favourite programming YouTuber by a long stretch. If anyone is unfamiliar with him and wants to watch some of the \"classics\" I'd recommend these: His \"cracking videogame passwords\" series: [LINK] Creating a Doom-style 3D engine in C: [LINK] Creating a Rogue-like game in C++11: [LINK] Creating a PIC16 emulator and NES music player: [LINK] Creating a NES emulator: [VIDEO] Creating a DOS VGA raytracer: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":7609730,"author":"petercooper","month":"2014-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Your favorite YouTube channels?","text":"[LINK] record high quality videos at many programming conferences each year and then share the recordings on YouTube. So much to enjoy here, especially if you're open source leaning, like most of the events they do. O'Reilly puts up lots of good stuff at [LINK] although the webinar recording quality leaves a lot to be desired. A real random set of tech topics though and often something worth watching. Entrepreneur - [LINK] - usually puts up lots of short videos with a business tip in or something. Sometimes longer interviews. Usually worthwhile if a little superficial at times. The guy who founded Something Awful has a ridiculously addictive channel - [LINK] - he generally plays horrifically poorly produced indie games with his sidekick Shmorky and I could listen to their absurdist banter all day. It's a bit of a mish mash but [LINK] always blows my mind when he does his coding videos such as coding a NES emulator in C++11: [VIDEO] [LINK] is awesome if you're into supercars. He's currently doing a tour of European supercar events and factories putting up a video each day. Far Lands or Bust - [LINK] - is a guy who started to walk towards the 'far lands' in a Minecraft maps years ago. He's something like 10% of the way but is still plodding along recording his progress. This is a real pilgrimage with all the highs and lows that entails. MrThaiBox123 - [LINK] - is a British IT expert who seems to have an endless supply of cash to buy gadgets, phones, and amazing computer setups.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9249745,"author":"atesti","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Nes emulator written in go","text":"Here's a very clean and clever NES emulator in C++ by Bisqwit of TAS fame: [VIDEO] He presents the code in the style of a tool assisted run, typing it in in high speed. I never saw templates used like that to create the unrolled CPU dispatcher","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12703000,"author":"petercooper","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?","text":"[LINK] is by far my favorite and I've spent many hours watching him. He does things like create a Doom-style engine from scratch: [LINK] .. create a NES emulator: [VIDEO] .. work back from a C++17 example to show why new C++ standards are needed: [LINK] .. and even building a Tetris clone in GW-BASIC: [LINK] .. Right now, he's doing a series on cracking 80s videogame passwords: [LINK] Sirajology - [LINK] - is another interesting one. He moves a bit too quickly for me, but does things like explain machine learning in 5 minutes or how to generate music with systems like Tensorflow.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33380058,"author":"molticrystal","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Smolnes: A NES emulator in less than 5000 significant bytes of C++","text":"Those who enjoy this might also enjoy \"Creating a NES emulator in C++11\" [0] [1] [2] while not short in bytes of code(space) there is a nice video series short in minutes(time). Bisqwit takes you on a 30 minute tool assisted coding journey of making an NES emulator and also provides a 15 minute followup Q&A video explaining different aspects. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"y7HrM-fk_Rc":[{"hn_comment_id":21259761,"author":"johnmaguire2013","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Google Announces Pixel 4","text":"The star tracking feature of the astrophotography mode definitely has me interested. I'm disappointed to see the continued lack of battery capacity on the smaller phone though. While I'd love a larger battery, I'm one of the unfortunate ones whose small hands can already barely reach across my Pixel 2's phone screen -- much less the top section. I'm also incredibly excited about the face unlocking feature -- I owned a Pixel Xs for about a week before returning it, and face unlock was my absolute favorite feature. It's very seamless especially compared to fingerprint unlock. As an aside, Marc Levoy, who spoke at the Google event today is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford, and has a great series titled \"Lectures on Digital Photography\" available for free on Youtube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24797531,"author":"deadmutex","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Sony cameras can now be used as webcams for Mac","text":"> No google pixel / iOS quality level HDR & night sight modes Marc Levoy (the brains behind Google's amazing Computational Photography technology), said that he had gone to the Camera companies before and they rejected his proposals. Camera companies were too afraid that someone was going to take a photo, and it would end up looking bad, and result in people returning their camera. Source: Somewhere in this excellent course shared by Google: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34596644,"author":"sys32768","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've ever seen?","text":"Marc Levoy's Lectures on Digital Photography: [VIDEO] >This is one of 18 videos representing lectures on digital photography, from a version of my Stanford course CS 178 that was recorded at Google in Spring 2016.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43985557,"author":"asafira","month":"2025-05","story_title":"What is HDR, anyway?","text":"I did my PhD in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physics, and despite \"optical\" being part of that I realized midway that I didn't know enough about how regular cameras worked! It didn't take very long to learn, and it turned out to be extremely important in the work I did during the early days at Waymo and later at Motional. I wanted to pass along this fun video from several years ago that discusses HDR: [LINK] . It's short and fun, I recommend it to all HN readers. Separately, if you want a more serious introduction to digital photography, I recommend the lectures by Marc Levoy from his Stanford course: [VIDEO] . I believe he runs his own group at Adobe now after leading a successful effort at Google making their pixel cameras the best in the industry for a couple of years. (And then everyone more-or-less caught up, just like with most tech improvements in the history of smartphones).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48040037,"author":"solarkraft","month":"2026-05","story_title":"What makes a good smartphone camera?","text":"To expand on the HDR example: There\u2019s this interesting lecture series about computational photography by Marc Levoy, who worked on the earlier Pixel cameras: [VIDEO] From what I remember, the core thesis is \u201ctake a lot of pictures and take the best parts\u201d, which works for a surprising number of cases.","stance":"rec"}],"yCcWpzY8dIA":[{"hn_comment_id":15367803,"author":"marknadal","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Distributed algorithms in NoSQL databases","text":"Is this website related to the popular [LINK] ? Holy cow, this is an intense article, with great definitions for a bunch of detailed variations of distribute system jargon, and even has some nice images to explain the ideas! My specialty is in eventually consistent data types, which there section is much smaller on, but they have some links to follow up on CRDT stuff. > are often limited in functionality and impose performance overheads This is for the most part true, with CRDTs. However we just formalized and proposed in a new paper, with some Stanford colleagues, how to construct a generalizable CRDT. One that actually lets other more case-specific CRDTs be built on top of it, which we use at gunDB, so that way you can get the advantages of the more optimized CRDTs but still have the rest of your data glued together. Another set of really interesting CRDTs which they didn't mention, are the ones used for making decentralized versions of Google Doc: - Martin's Kleppmann has an exceptionally great/interesting talk on this: [VIDEO] - And we recently did a \"layman\" animated explainer of a similar algorithm, that explains it for the non-academically minded, with simple analogies to \"distributed systems\" that happen in every day life: [LINK] I'll definitely be referencing the OP's article in the future though. Even though I'm in this world, I constantly get the vernacular mixed up. And this will be a really great dictionary to use.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16311920,"author":"marknadal","month":"2018-02","story_title":"Automerge: JSON-like data structure for building collaborative apps","text":"I've spent almost a decade working on CRDTs, largely from an industry perspective but also some academic side. They're great, and not too hard to understand if you take time to think about them. Here are some animated/interactive cartoon explainers we've made to help teach the concepts: - How a CRDT version of Operational Transformation (Google Docs) works: [LINK] - Why CRDTs are better than centralized alternatives like PAXOS/RAFT: [LINK] Martin Kleppmann's work (author of Automerge) is outstanding, especially check out: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19342647,"author":"lachenmayer","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Applied Monotonicity: A Brief History of CRDTs in Riak","text":"CRDTs are quite actively discussed in the IPFS community, in particular here: [LINK] (lots of great resources if you're interested in CRDTs) Also check out automerge, a CRDT that aims to be as JSON-like as possible: [LINK] Martin Kleppmann (one of the creators of Automerge) has given several great in-depth talks about it, eg. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19343657,"author":"marknadal","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Applied Monotonicity: A Brief History of CRDTs in Riak","text":"CRDTs are great, and I've seen a lot of quality in Christopher's work. A few other resources for those interested in CRDT subject: - Our cartoon explainer [LINK] - An excellent talk by Martin Kleppmann [VIDEO] - Marc Shapiro's in depth talk [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19889078,"author":"lewisl9029","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Why CRDT didn't work out as well for collaborative editing xi-editor","text":"> Indeed, the literature of CRDT does specify a mathematically correct answer. But this does not always line up with what humans would find the most faithful rendering of intent. This is a very salient point that anyone thinking of using CRDTs to \"solve\" synchronization in an user-facing application needs to take into consideration. Yes, CRDTs will guarantee that clients converge to an identical, mathematically \"consistent\" state eventually, but there's no guarantee whether or not that mathematically \"consistent\" state would make any sense to the application business logic that needs to consume that state, or to the human that needs to reason about the rendered result. That is a completely different can of worms that we'll still have to tackle to build a usable application. Here's great example to illustrate this from Martin Kleppmann's talk on this topic: [VIDEO] Rest of the talk is also highly recommended for anyone interested in an approachable primer on CRDTs. The trade-offs to CRDTs mentioned by the author in the context of text-editors make sense, but I would be curious to hear from the Xray team on what their current thinking on the topic is, given that they have collaborative editing as an explicit core objective (which might shift the value prop in favor of using CRDTs relatively speaking since in Xi it seems to be only an aspirational goal), and that their approach to implementation was similar but not quite identical to Xi's: > Our use of a CRDT is similar to the X","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16490979,"author":"marknadal","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Show HN: Graphite \u2013 A decentralized and encrypted Google Docs alternative","text":"Cool concept, but note: I just tested this, and it is NOT a google docs alternative - it has no realtime sync (or at least, it wasn't working). I work extensively on decentralized/P2P distributed systems and realtime P2P sync is non-trivial, you need to use a specialized CRDT for it: - Here is an interactive animated explainer on how to do a P2P realtime syncing CRDT: [LINK] - Here is an excellent more detailed explanation of how such a CRDT works, by Martin Kleppmann: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17536116,"author":"marknadal","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Differential Synchronization (2009)","text":"Neil Fraser went on to apply this work at Google with Google Docs (Operational Transformation, see other comment here). He was also one of my heroes that inspired my work to build a decentralized (and offline-first) version, that I later applied to graphs with [LINK] . Some good follow ups are: - Martin Kleppmann's [VIDEO] - Cartoon explainer [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17650854,"author":"marknadal","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves","text":"Yes, we did a whole interactive explainer article on this: [LINK] (cartoon version) Although, from a algorithm side, you may enjoy a talk by Martin (a CRDT researcher) for a more thorough technical overview: [VIDEO] Our team has a model for applying end-to-end encryption to this as well. It isn't a high priority for us to do it ourselves though, so if you are interested in getting involved, we can help explain all the algorithms for implementation!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19816490,"author":"marknadal","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud","text":"TLDR: Local-first software is powered by CRDTs. If you want to learn more about CRDTs, check out: - [LINK] (author's project, legit) - [VIDEO] (deep technical talk) - [LINK] (my Cartoon Explainer)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19851369,"author":"marknadal","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Open source collaborative text editors","text":"For anyone who wants a quick primer on OT / CRDT text algorithms: [LINK] ( Cartoon Explainer! ) For a detailed deep dive, including RGA: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22056172,"author":"marknadal","month":"2020-01","story_title":"OT and CRDT trade-offs for Real-Time collaboration","text":"Started, but never finished. :( @nmaro has some pretty good stuff. The cartoon explainers gives an overview. But you'd probably want to do RGA algorithm or one of the newer ones. Martin Kleppmann has a pretty good talk with bunch of paper references: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yCd3CzGSte8":[{"hn_comment_id":29621117,"author":"mwattsun","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Apple\u2019s use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 15","text":"I always wondered why the creator of Rust switched to Swift and just now found my answer by Graydon Hoare himself: [LINK] tl;dr it has nothing to do with the relative merits of the two languages --- Edit: I watched a couple of Lex Fridman podcasts this week with Chris Lattner (creator of Swift) that I thought were interesting Chris Lattner: Compilers, LLVM, Swift, TPU, and ML Accelerators | Lex Fridman Podcast #21 [VIDEO] Chris Lattner: The Future of Computing and Programming Languages | Lex Fridman Podcast #131 [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45142698,"author":"tony","month":"2025-09","story_title":"ML needs a new programming language \u2013 Interview with Chris Lattner","text":"Chris Lattner also has a very good episode on Lex Fridman (Episode 381, June 2nd, 2023): - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] He has two other episodes on the show: - [LINK] (Episode 131, October 18th, 2020) - [VIDEO] (Episode 21, May 13th, 2019)","stance":"rec"}],"yCm9Ng0bbEQ":[{"hn_comment_id":17151635,"author":"JoshCole","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Tesla that crashed in Autopilot mode sped up before hitting truck: police","text":"A quick google search puts the average number of deaths due to car crashes at 3,287 per day [1]. Another one gives me a list of four deaths attributed to autonomous vehicles [2]. Not four per day. Just four. Ever. Memory leads me to recall that statistical reports indicating that vehicles with assistive features like autopilot have a better than traditional safety record [3]. I especially disagree with your thought experiment, because I've watched YouTube videos of situations in which Tesla's autopilot avoided accidents both through stopping and through swerving out of the way [4]. I don't agree with your claim that robotic cars tend to have more severe accidents than traditional cars. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK] The short seller thesis for TESLA is that since the company is one which is valued based on its story, not its underlying fundamentals, it follows that its price will be volatile in response to negative press (accidents, missed projections, etc). There is a clear path from this observation to making money via negative press. If you're interested in hearing more about how the world is a lot better than you thought it was, but the truth of our situation is distorted by competing forces, here are some cool TED talks [5][6]. [5]: [VIDEO] [6]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27950391,"author":"blippage","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Americans' life ratings reach record high","text":"\"Is the world getting better or worse? A look at the numbers | Steven Pinker\" [VIDEO] tl;dr: it's getting better. We're living longer, homicides are down, fewer wars and autocracies, etc..","stance":"rec"}],"yCsgoLc_fzI":[{"hn_comment_id":27707989,"author":"kinjba11","month":"2021-07","story_title":"Science YouTuber Wins $10k Bet with Physicist","text":"Original video triggering the bet for context: [LINK] Video discussing the bet and going over criticism: [VIDEO] Veritasium is a great YouTube channel.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28116056,"author":"Tuna-Fish","month":"2021-08","story_title":"A wind-powered vehicle that can travel twice as fast as the wind itself","text":"The small demonstration that made it click for me is from that video: [VIDEO] This is exactly what the blackbird does, only with a propeller pushing air in place of the big wheel, and it's a much clearer and simpler demonstration of the same idea, which you can trivially verify.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32046080,"author":"TimSchumann","month":"2022-07","story_title":"DDWFTTW Vehicle Analysis (2013)","text":"Derek from the YouTube channel Veritasium made two interesting videos about this vehicle. [LINK] [VIDEO] They go into some nice detail about why the physics works out the way it does.","stance":"rec"}],"yErKTVdETpw":[{"hn_comment_id":28373651,"author":"narrator","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Facebook Is the AOL of 2021","text":"Well if you take that kind of stuff seriously, you really should watch the Yuri Bezmenov interviews. Yuri was a KGB defector in the 80s who was working in India and decided to defect after he fell in love with the culture of India and became disillusioned. He worked in ideological subversion of nations through propaganda: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28550442,"author":"rramadass","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Useful Spy Books","text":"No books on Mossad? My favourite is - Deception: The invisible war between the KGB and the CIA. by Edward Jay Epstein. This is the real \"Art\" of Spycraft. Another must see is Yuri Bezmenov's \"The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion\" video : [VIDEO] You can go crazy trying to interpret this video in the light of what Epstein wrote about Deception :-)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36157651,"author":"the_third_wave","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Was Modern Art a CIA Psy-Op?","text":"Yuri Bezmenov was a Soviet informant and KGB operative who defected to the United States in the early 70s who has some choice words to say on this subject, words which turned out to be more than prophetic. It is worth watching the whole interview, about 1 hour 20 minutes in which he laid out the four stages of ideological subversion\u201d created by radical Marxists to indoctrinate and weaken nations from within. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49195961,"author":"shevy-java","month":"2026-08","story_title":"Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is stepping down","text":"Trump is indeed effective at pillaging. The interesting thing is that Yuri explained and predicted (!) this in the 1980s: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yF2KgQGmUic":[{"hn_comment_id":30265945,"author":"mrighele","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Raid-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS Goes Live","text":"For those that like videos more than text, there is a youtube video from last year [1] that explain the feature (unless it's changed since ,but it seems not to be the case). One downside that I see of this approach, if I understand it correctly, is that the data already present on disk will not take advantage of the extra disk per slice. For example, if I have a raidz of 4 disks (so 25% of space \"wasted\"), and add another disk, new data will be distributed on 5 disks (so 20% of space \"wasted\") but the old data will keep using stripes of 4 blocks, they will just be reshuffled between the disks. Do I understand it correctly ? [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37194166,"author":"allanjude","month":"2023-08","story_title":"OpenZFS \u2013 Incremental add of disks to existing RAIDZ","text":"That is not how this will work. The reason the parity ratio stays the same, is that all of the references to the data are by DVA (Data Virtual Address, effectively the LBA within the RAID-Z vdev). So the data will occupy the same amount of space and parity as it did before. All stripes in RAID-Z are dynamic, so if your stripe is 5 wide and your array is 6 wide, the 2nd stripe will start on the last disk and wrap around. So if your 5x10 TB disks are 90% full, after the expansion they will contain the same 5.4 TB of data and 3.6 TB of parity, and the pool will now be 10 TB bigger. New writes, will be 4+2 instead, but the old data won't change (they is how this feature is able to work without needing block-pointer rewrite). See this presentation: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yFIa-Mc2KSk":[{"hn_comment_id":8590695,"author":"rbshadel","month":"2014-11","story_title":"Startup depression","text":"Here's a great talk by Greg Baugues in which he discusses his own mental illness (bipolar type II and ADHD) and notes that often there is a fine line between a symptom of depression/mental illness and a trait of a successful developer: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23255709,"author":"29athrowaway","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Surviving Depression","text":"I recommend this talk about depression and software developers: [VIDEO] There are newer versions of this talk, but I think this one has the most powerful storytelling.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":6123892,"author":"gregorymichael","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Ask HN: I can't think straight, my life is in limbo, and I want to end it now","text":"I am so sorry you're going through this. Remember, you can always procrastinate ending it all, and do it later while you examine other options. There is a community at DevPressed[1] of developers who struggle with depression. I am a developer and gave a talk on my struggle with depression and the greater issue of Developers and Depression [2]. Email me if you'd like to chat - greg at baugues.com 1. [LINK] 2. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8303712,"author":"cschneid","month":"2014-09","story_title":"Tech Has a Depression Problem","text":"There is a discussion forum specifically for this: [LINK] Please check it out, and also any of the talks [1] by its founder, Greg Baugues. It's from a ruby conference, but is applicable to all developers. [1] [VIDEO] )","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9913274,"author":"Ezhik","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Developers and Depression \u2013 Getting Unstuck","text":"I've watched the video by the author of this newsletter, and a lot of things did ring true for me. [1] I moved to the Bay Area all the way from Russia, as a student, with the intention of diving deep into this startup and developer world. Eight months later, however, I still have no clue at all what I'm doing. Don't have enough projects for a portfolio, don't have enough proper skills for a resume. Got overwhelmed with classes due to not paying enough attention in class, decided not to take any classes in summer - with the intention of working on some projects and maybe figuring my life out. Here we are what, three weeks later, and all I have is a static mockup page for the project and I haven't opened a code editor in a week. I still don't know if I actually have a problem or if I'm just lazy, however. On bad days I feel like it'd be really great if I could just get some magic pill that would make everything great and solve all my problems. On better days I almost feel like I can defeat all of this and just go marching forward. On days like that I can spend twelve hours staring into code and produce something, but then days, weeks, months will go on with nothing at all. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12545302,"author":"partycoder","month":"2016-09","story_title":"Devpressed is now OSMI","text":"I don't suffer of depression myself, but I think this initiative is worth supporting. This talk might be relevant: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21193392,"author":"samuraiseoul","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Ask HN: How to cope with burnout every 6 months?","text":"I think it's worth looking into for sure. I ran across this when I was suffering from some depression and was trying to see how other devs deal with it. [VIDEO] It's a talk about Bipolar Type II which doesn't have the same kind of full blown manic episodes as regular bipolar type I has. It has hypomanic episodes that are not often reported to the doctor because they seem like happiness or something good, or a sudden drive to do something productive. I've been getting looked at for it myself now and normal depression meds(SSRIs) can actually negatively effect it. It may be worth looking at OP!","stance":"rec"}],"yG1OZ69H_-o":[{"hn_comment_id":16596143,"author":"kllrnohj","month":"2018-03","story_title":"A Usable C++ Dialect That Is Safe Against Memory Corruption","text":"The generally recommended thing for catching & fixing this is: [LINK] CppCon has also had a lot of great talks on UB and why it is what it is, such as [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17191250,"author":"lyricaljoke","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Depressing and faintly terrifying days for the C standard [pdf]","text":"Chandler Carruth's talk on the subject was really useful for my own understanding of the reasoning behind UB: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18448216,"author":"Joky","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Trip report: Fall ISO C++ standards meeting","text":"Actually I discourage my colleague to use unsigned especially because they can overflow. The problem with overflow is that most of the time it is a program bug if there is an overflow that wasn't intended. Using signed arithmetic means that you can actually trap on overflow and catch these bugs (using fuzzing for instance). Chandler explained it nicely in his CPPCon 2016 talk \"Garbage In, Garbage Out: Arguing about Undefined Behavior...\". I encourage to watch the full talk but here is one relevant example: [VIDEO] And here he mentions how Google experimented with this internally: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37168729,"author":"moefh","month":"2023-08","story_title":"A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++","text":"One man's \"broken code produced by the compiler\" is another man's \"excellently optimized code by the compiler\". Where to draw the line is not always clear, but here's a very clear-cut example[1] where emitting a warning would be bad. If you don't want to watch the video, it's basically this: - the code technically contains undefined behavior, but it will never be actually triggered by the program - changing the code to remove undefined behavior forces the compiler to emit terrible code Making the compiler yell at the programmer in this case would be terrible, but it's clearly a consequence of what you're asking. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yHXx3orN35Y":[{"hn_comment_id":19104877,"author":"userbinator","month":"2019-02","story_title":"PC Speaker To Eleven","text":"The most amazing thing I've heard done with a PC speaker is in the last part of this equally amazing demo (starts at 6:37 --- the parts before have more \"normal\" beeper music): [VIDEO] Explanation here: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17965650,"author":"anyfoo","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Good Apple (Bad Apple Remix) on the Soviet BK-0010/11M","text":"Good summary. A bit more generally, demos are often written to run under constrained conditions. They are also often written for competitions that set those conditions. Sometimes, like in this case, the constraints are entirely dictated by the hardware, and the objective is just to make the most impressive demo given the particular device\u2019s limitations, very often pushing the hardware way past what was commonly thought to be possible. Modifying the hardware is usually not allowed, but playing \u201cdirty\u201d in software by using undocumented and maybe even unintended, obscure implementation details of the platform is highly encouraged. No stone is left unturned. 8088MPH (by the same makers as 8088 Domination) is a very good example. For decades, nobody knew it would be possible to display 1024 colors, at the same time, on the original PC (which most nominally supports only 4 colors at the same time, which could be stretched to 8 with a trick). You can watch the demo here: [VIDEO] And read about the methods used and invented here: [LINK] Sometimes, there are also additional constraints like size limits, which is especially popular on more advanced hardware like modern PCs. For example, the objective could be to make the most impressive demo in 1024 bytes.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38844750,"author":"bazza97","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Video playback on low-end MS-DOS machines","text":"Love how people are still pushing old hardware. These are also two excellent demo's on the XT: Area 5150 [LINK] 8088 MPH [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yJDv-zdhzMY":[{"hn_comment_id":5989874,"author":"estreeper","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Douglas C. Engelbart, Inventor of the Computer Mouse, Dies at 88","text":"I was just listening to one of Douglas Crockford's talks which discussed the contributions Engelbart made to computer science. What really stuck with me was the sheer number of new concepts he showed in his demo, which, though made in 1968, would showcase features not seen for decades, and some of which are still not effectively in use. If you haven't seen it, it's well worth the hour and forty minutes. I think this is also a good moment to reflect on how incredible it is to be involved in a science which is still so much in its infancy that seminal figures in its development are still alive and well. Let us not forget their contributions, and most importantly, not overlook the concepts that, if employed today, can advance us far beyond where we are now. Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9604205,"author":"gjvc","month":"2015-05","story_title":"Web vs. native: let\u2019s concede defeat","text":"those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. watching the mother of all demos once a year is a sobering reminder of that. [VIDEO] some better-than-most discussion here: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18199123,"author":"otras","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some old talks (10+ y) that are still relevant to watch today?","text":"The Mother Of All Demos is an absolute classic: [VIDEO] [LINK] I also very much enjoy Feynman\u2019s talks. Here\u2019s one on imagining physics: [LINK] For computer science in particular, I highly recommend the first lecture in the SICP series, especially on the naming of so called \u201ccomputer science\u201d: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24034605,"author":"kbumsik","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Bill English has died","text":"I was so surprised when I watched \"The Mother of All Demos\" from 50+ years ago (1968) and saw what they predicted and actually implemented. They demonstrated what's happening in 2020, video conferencing, real time collaborative word processing, and etc. Truly amazing. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31677075,"author":"mftb","month":"2022-06","story_title":"50th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (2018)","text":"Always glad to see this getting attention, I really enjoy computing history. There's a link to a video in the article, but it's part three of ten. Recently I came across this[0]. It's pretty much the whole thing in one video. It's long but it's well worth the watch. I was born in '68, so I can't remember the 60s, but I can remember the 70s and it's easy for me to understand why people felt Engelbart was, \"Dealing lightning with both hands\" at the Mother of All Demos. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31392606,"author":"m_mueller","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Introduction to Microsoft Excel (1992) [video]","text":"I know it\u2019s not spreadsheets and even more distant, but I think it\u2019s worth it for you to check [1] to see the origin of much of HID to this date. Best in mind that all of what you see there was done by 12 people from scratch (no OS, not even assembled hardware) in roughly 2 years until 1968. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38587752,"author":"memset","month":"2023-12","story_title":"1968-12-09 the mother of all demos","text":"I'm not able to see this link, but I'm assuming it is this: [VIDEO] Google \"The Mother of All Demos\" One fascinating thing to me is that he is explaining things with clarity that we take for granted - for example, the mouse - for the first time. He explains the mouse here: [VIDEO] \"The tracking spot [cursor] moves in conjunction with the mouse. As it moves up and down and sideways so does the tracking spot.\"","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48099666,"author":"hans-l","month":"2026-05","story_title":"Ratty \u2013 A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics","text":"Sometimes I really feel we're chasing UX that were solved in the Mother of all Demos (in 1968). For those who haven't watched it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yL_-1d9OSdk":[{"hn_comment_id":18406454,"author":"jerf","month":"2018-11","story_title":"A History of the Sentence \"Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.\" (1999-2015)","text":"It may not be the original video, but a video presentation of it is available at [VIDEO] by the original author, contrary to the link's claims. It is probably the better way to approach the paper, due to the importance of timing in comedy and the fact that paper presents so much to you in a way that it can't control the timing, though unfortunately the video resolution is quite low. Plus the Q&A is pretty good. It is an amusing combination of video that is a trenchant commentary on the excessive similarity of the vast bulk of hard science papers, and a video that my four year old enjoyed back in the day. That puts your standard \"family friendly\" comedy movie to shame in terms of how much comedy ground it is capable of covering.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35494956,"author":"fbdab103","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Trashcan \u2013 web based service for indexing scientific papers, or other documents","text":"That chicken paper always gets a chuckle from me. In case you have never seen the video[0]. Unfortunately, it appears to have been recorded on a potato. Do not miss the audience question at the end. Beautiful academic satire. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35746568,"author":"jerf","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken [pdf]","text":"If you've read a lot of papers and/or attended conference presentations, you will find that you almost know what he is saying in the presentation version: [VIDEO] . The same charts in every presentation; up and to the right, my thing higher than previous thing, here's some boxes and lines that really mean nothing in this context, some standardized statistical distribution with my dots scattered about... there's a fairly standard presentation that one could give with almost just a few made up payload words for your thing and it would apply to almost anything. I particularly remember in one of my machine learning classes where we had to give project presentations, the degree to which you could almost substitute the slide decks for each other and it would have been hard to notice. It doesn't mean that they have no content necessarily, merely that there is some ground to riff on here. I particularly like the presentation as one of the few bits of humor I know where you can make a two year old laugh and you can make a veteran professor laugh, and everyone in between, yet they are all laughing about different things at incredibly different levels of intellectual sophistication. The presentation is truly a humor masterpiece.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40715360,"author":"Joel_Mckay","month":"2024-06","story_title":"A long guide to giving a short academic talk (2022)","text":"Or one can quickly learn how to achieve clear presentations by indexing the common errata: \"Chicken chicken chicken\" (Yoram Bauman) [VIDEO] This should be required viewing for every academic author. =3","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5970508,"author":"baggers","month":"2013-07","story_title":"Show HN: Chicken chicken chicken \u2013 chicken chicken programming language","text":"Do check out the presentation ( [VIDEO] ) as he goes into a fairy bit of detail on the motivations and implementation of the project. Fairly moving actually","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33674167,"author":"JamesCoyne","month":"2022-11","story_title":"I quit my programmer job to become a chicken","text":"Yeah, the paper provides good insight into the phenomenon. Doug also gives a really good presentation on the same material: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45814034,"author":"Joel_Mckay","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)","text":"\"Still it's amusing how Whitney's style seems to personally offend people\" So it was for the lols after all... Notably, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp is a common assignment for second year CS students. In a production setting, there is little reason to misappropriate resources for such toys. Bud Haggert still teaches smart people something very important about communication with interdisciplinary crowds: [LINK] Doug Zongker's presentation similarly instructs people how to make better presentations to peers by demonstrating what not to do: [VIDEO] Best of luck =3","stance":"rec"}],"yNzQ_sLGIuA":[{"hn_comment_id":22420130,"author":"WillDaSilva","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Walmart Gets Into Health Care","text":">Are there legitimate safety reasons these mundane diagnostics are so locked down? Healthcare is not my area of expertise either, but my understanding is that the short answer to your question is yes. For a longer introduction to the issues surrounding letting anyone get whatever diagnostics they want to pay for, this Medlife Crisis video that came out today seems appropriate: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23882125,"author":"capn_cabbage","month":"2020-07","story_title":"I lost my boyfriend to cancer 'conspiracy theories\u2019","text":"The opposite can be just as dangerous * . \"Medlife Crisis\" has an [informative video][1] that explains some of what can happen. * Edit: I shouldn't have equated the dangers here. This was a bad take. I still believe there are good bits of info provided in the video, but the relevance to this thread is less than I considered and I should have thought more about what I was sharing. Edit 2: I didn't mean to link to a specific timestamp of the video in the original link. That has been removed. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27060332,"author":"ejolto","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Are we screening too much for skin cancer? It's complicated","text":"This one is even more relevant as he talks about dangers of over screening for beast cancer, and side effects of mastectomy+chemo: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29098650,"author":"Someone1234","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The paradox of the Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) test","text":"This video does a good job also of covering the topic of over-testing/over-treating potential cancer (or creating \"Fake Disease\" as it terms it): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29710341,"author":"eru","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The FDA's Restrictive Regulation of Home-Testing Devices (2017)","text":"Compare and contrast this video from 'Medlife Crisis': [VIDEO] > Trying to detect disease early seems like an obviously good thing to do. But reality isn't always quite so straightforward, especially in medicine. If It Ducks Like A Quack is a series where I try to go beyond the hype and explore how complicated the apparently simple phenomena in medicine are. One point from the video: five year survival rates of prostate cancer in the US are massively better than in the UK. However, roughly the same proportion of people die of prostate cancer in both countries. The US just screens a lot more.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32717690,"author":"fooblaster","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Shocking hospital mistakes led to our daughter\u2019s death","text":"I'd encourage you to think about the consequences of over testing. Although it is somewhat counter intuitive, there are many negative consequences to patient outcomes from overtesting. A deeper overview: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47019314,"author":"jamesbelchamber","month":"2026-02","story_title":"How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?","text":"It does, doesn't it! This is basically the reason scepticism in screening has risen (amongst scientists and medics, not the general population) - research seems to show that screening catches much more cancer but doesn't save many more people. Rohin Francis does a good video on it, which you don't have to watch because it has references underneath you can click straight through to (the video is good though): [VIDEO] I am frustrated by this because it seems obvious to me that \"more data == better\" but I guess it makes sense if you think of the scans as having high amounts of noise, and us having a poor understanding of the system we're monitoring (this never happens in tech, of course :)).","stance":"rec"}],"yQ16_YxLbB8":[{"hn_comment_id":21677175,"author":"mistersquid","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Inside Macintosh (1985) [pdf]","text":"Thanks for linking to the 1997 WDC (only 1 \"w\"!) Q&A with Jobs. For those hoping to cut to the chase, the timecode for Jobs' prompt and the hapless attendee who asks \"What about OpenDoc\" is 4:26 [0] The four and a half minutes prior are interesting (thoughtful introduction, Jobs' framing of the session and his brief thoughts about Apple's current position), but what he says in response to the questions following the OpenDoc question is deeply thought-provoking. Many of the ideas Jobs shares show the general shape of recent and current Apple business decisions macOS and iCloud, for example. Especially interesting are his discussions of NIH syndrome, networking, and more. Thanks, twoodfin, for pointing to this session which punctuates Jobs' return to Apple the year previous. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23027169,"author":"sjwright","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Tesla Q1 2020 Update","text":"I personally feel there's a big overlap between Jobs and Musk\u2014but none more so than the fact that they had the key combination of sufficient intelligence, clear vision, high self-confidence and (most importantly) strong influence over corporate direction. One of my favourite Steve Jobs quotes is just after he returned to Apple and began dismantling the massive pile of legacy cruft. When asked about a particular (terrible) technology that Apple scrapped, Steve went on a particularly insightful rant that holds numerous insights into what he believes to be key to a successful company. And history proved those insights to be exactly right. The quote\u2014 \"Some mistakes will be made along the way. That's good. Because at least some DECISIONS are being made along the way, and we'll find the mistakes and we'll fix them.\" [VIDEO] In other words, as long as you're right often enough, being decisive is more important than being right every single time. Musk strikes me as sharing that mentality. He's right often enough that it's more efficient to \"fix\" the mistakes than to suffocate big decisions with big committees. And it's not like any big committee is sure to be right more often than Jobs/Elon anyway. (That YouTube video is fantastic IMHO. Watched with the benefit of hindsight it shows that Apple's success wasn't an accident. Steve really did understand the formula that ultimately led to it.)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39061622,"author":"fidotron","month":"2024-01","story_title":"Mourning Google","text":"For those that haven't seen it the whole thing is worth it: [VIDEO] This Q&A is the evidence for why I think many tech people underestimated him, and as you observe such unfiltered Q&As do not occur with other tech CEOs, though he was not CEO at the time. He's not 100% right about how things would go, but he was a lot more right than anyone else proved to be. Some of his answers to the really tough questions are not stellar, but Apple was in a truly terrible state at the time, and there were not nice answers to give. The fact that he stood there ready to take the hits spoke volumes though.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17105512,"author":"pfranz","month":"2018-05","story_title":"Jim Black's Steve Jobs Story","text":"I've heard both of those stories from multiple places. I don't know exactly how you'd define \"technical,\" he clearly wasn't a strong engineer, but I have heard multiple examples of him managing technical things. I remember around the same time he was known for memorizing chips and vendors very very well that he could source them very cheaply. I think a good firsthand example is a one hour q&a with developers he did in 1997 soon after returning to Apple: [VIDEO] He doesn't necessarily show off deep technical knowledge, but he is able to discuss strategy about technology directly with developers. Managing technology is his competitive advantage.","stance":"rec"}],"yQ6VOOd73MA":[{"hn_comment_id":36323603,"author":"lloydde","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Consciousness and Anaesthesia","text":"The topic, but not this exception, is touched on in \u201cYour Brain: Who's in Control? | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS\u201c Episode 2 of a two-part series, premiered May 24, 2023. Both episodes are fascinating and eye opening. 08:36 Anesthesia and the Brain [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39800635,"author":"pixl97","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Visualization 'demonic' face distortions in a case of prosopometamorphopsia","text":"Perception Deception: Nova [LINK] Your Brain - Who's in control: Nova [VIDEO] Both of these videos are great resources on how much of what you experience of reality is made up or filled in by your brain at any given moment. I believe it's the Perception Deception episode that shows us how little of our vision is actual HD quality and that an external observer doing eye tracking on you can present a different reality to you than a 3rd party looking at the same object you are (on a screen at least, little bit harder in the real world).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45561804,"author":"pixl97","month":"2025-10","story_title":"The neurons that let us see what isn't there","text":"When talking about vision and what you see and don't I like bringing up the Your Brain: Perception Deception Nova PBS episode. [LINK] Also Your Brain: Who's in control Nova PBS [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yReDbeY7ZMU":[{"hn_comment_id":12246539,"author":"AndrewOMartin","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Computing machinery and intelligence (1950)","text":"Haha, this is arguably the article in AI. Other landmark events in the field include the Dartmouth Conference, when John McCarthy named the field \"Artificial Intelligence\", defined the goals, and set out to achieve them, unfortunately it's not easy to point to a single paper on the subject, though do read the conference proposal, posted on HN recently [ [LINK] ]; then you have the Lighthill report where the UK Government essentially lost interest in the project, the conclusions are debatable, but clearly and entertainingly argued, a video of the presentation of the report, with McCarthy present and responding, is available online also [ [VIDEO] ]. Finally I'd cite the 1970s era book What Computers Can't Do, and its 90s reprint, What Computers Still Can't Do as all you need to know about the current state of AI, its ultimate aims and the fatal flaws in its fundamental assumptions. The fact that it was written in the 70s and applies to today's discussions on AI should be enough to indicate its prescience. Modern AI ignores or is unaware of many of the critiques that have gone before, only time will tell if they will soon hit the same historical obstacles. The points I've mentioned here don't really cover the history and development of Neural Networks, but they went through a similar process of discovery, critique, near-dormant research, and finally a return to popularity, but with neglect of the critiques rather than addressing them. Welcome to the field!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14983831,"author":"sgt101","month":"2017-08","story_title":"A rising sentiment that IBM\u2019s Watson can\u2019t deliver on its promises","text":"Well, there was this place called \"The Turing Institute\" which was in Glasgow. It was run by a very nice man called Don Michie. I met Don a handful of times, and he was extremely kind and generous to me. He worked at Bletchley Park and died aged 91 having hit a bridge at 120mph going the wrong way up the M11 at 2am sitting next to his wife who had defected to Russia thirty years before. Don was driving, at the time he had been blind for six months. Anyway, The Turing Institute existed because of Don's drive to commercialise Expert Systems. Don was a driver in the Alvey project which was a grand project to solve issues around Expert Systems in response to the Japanese Fifth Generation project. A man called Lighthill then rumbled the Expert System movement. If you want to watch a demolition of it see the following video : [VIDEO] and the other 5 of them (you will find them in the sidebar!) Fun fact. In video 6 you can watch Christopher Strachey have a pop at AI. Christopher didn't work at Bletchley, he was too young, but he did work at Manchester with Alan Turing and they created computer music and love poetry in collaboration before Turing killed himself. Strachey went on to be the first Professor of Computer Science at Oxford, he was a scion of a great family of artists and poets. But enough of this. The Turing Institute was an attempt to say \"we are right, look\", but in fact it failed. Don was clear why, when you hit 40k rules knowledge bases became completely intractable. I","stance":"rec"}],"yS1ibDImAYU":[{"hn_comment_id":20214537,"author":"xvector","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Study finds that a GPS outage would cost $1B per day","text":"No, the issue with space debris is that we are quickly approaching the point where a single unfortunately placed collision could chain using a sort of exponential \u201cshotgun effect\u201d, destroying virtually all satellites at a given orbit and rendering space travel impossible for decades if not centuries, setting human space exploration back significantly as launches have to deal with thousands of metal shards traveling at tens of thousands of mph. See this video[1] by Kurzgesagt: \u201cEnd of Space - Creating a Prison for Humanity.\u201d [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20484739,"author":"samcday","month":"2019-07","story_title":"FCC fines Swarm $900k for unauthorized smallsat launch (2018)","text":"Kurzgesagt[1] convinced me that space debris will become a real problem if we're not careful. A \"Swarm\" of fist-sized cubesats whizzing around our planet at a few thousand km/h sounds like a nightmare. [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22139096,"author":"snuxoll","month":"2020-01","story_title":"DirecTV races to decommission broken satellite before it explodes","text":"> A graveyard orbit sounds like it will be flying around up their indefinitely as high speed shrapnel. Does anyone know why they would choose this instead of destroying it on re-entry? Because the \u2206v required to re-enter the atmosphere is significantly higher than that required to leave geosynchronous orbit for a higher graveyard orbit. But yes, ultimately it will remain up there as \"high speed shrapnel\" - which is not an ideal situation, and continuing to treat disposal as we have may put us in a situation where these orbits become so full of high speed garbage that they are unusable. As a species, we need to do more work on cleaning up our space garbage before it's too late. Kurzgesagt actually has a great video on the topic of space debris for anyone interested: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23589749,"author":"GoMonad","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Ask HN: What\u2019s a big trend we should all be following?","text":"Relevant Kurzgesagt [VIDEO] The gist: we could trap ourselves on earth for generations with space debris.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46577171,"author":"bicepjai","month":"2026-01","story_title":"China applies to put 200K satellites in space after calling Starlink crash risk","text":"Already it\u2019s getting hard to avoid noticing satellite trains when stargazing with the naked eye. If mega-constellations really scale into the hundreds of thousands, it feels like we\u2019re on track to permanently degrade the night sky, even in places without much light pollution. With mega-constellation launches accelerating, the sci\u2011fi premise of imprisoning ourselves behind a debris field feels less fictional. This is essentially the collision-cascade risk described by Kessler Syndrome Kurzgesagt has a good explainer. Hopefully we never trigger it. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ySuUZEjARPY":[{"hn_comment_id":26124025,"author":"PaulHoule","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Have You Consulted with Experts?","text":"Some kinds of \"expert\" are a commodity: you can hire an astronomy PhD or a registered nurse. Entrepreneurs traffic in a special expertise: valuable, unique and defensible IP. All Roy Kroc had to know was how to teach people to teach other people how to run a McDonald's restaurant. A business that achieves \"product-market fit\" has a very specific and path-dependent situation. Sometimes you find this \"one weird trick\" that lets you make money hand-over-fist for a while and you want most of all to keep that a secret. Other times the knowledge is so specific (how do you grow the most rice you possibly can in this valley?) that it's not of interest to outsiders. \"Expert networks\" are notoriously promiscuous so firms have a lot of fear that they'll bring in an expert who walks out with more valuable information (e.g. \"one weird trick\") than the they can bring into it. My favorite kind of expert is this kind of guy [VIDEO] who grew continuously through a 40+ year career and went from being in the dark about noise in circuit boards to an inspiring vision of how electrical energy flows not in the wires but through the space between the wires that makes everything I thought mysterious about antennas seem obvious.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28757693,"author":"fxtentacle","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Teach Me PCB","text":"My recommendation would be to search YouTube for \"Rick Hartley\". The guy is extremely knowledgeable, yet humble, and presents things like grandpa reciting a war story. It's easy to listen to, and I'd take him being on any kind of program as an endorsement that it'll be high quality content. The most important talk for beginners getting into high-speed is probably this one: [VIDEO] because without proper grounding, interference and EMI is going to destroy your HF signals (for example CPU to RAM bus).","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38434297,"author":"brunooo","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Signal Reflections in Electronic Circuits","text":"For anyone who cares enough to watch a 2 hour video on it and hasn\u2019t seen it yet, this Rick Hartley video is the recent gold standard of explaining the issues at play: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38552033,"author":"genter","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Unveiling secrets of the ESP32: creating an open-source MAC layer","text":"Not directly answering your question, but on preventing emission in the first place (and the best video I've ever seen on electrical engineering): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42261929,"author":"davidhyde","month":"2024-11","story_title":"Raspberry Pi CM5 is a faster, drop-in upgrade","text":"Admittedly I ended up building a board with a microcontroller rather than a microprocessor because I could interface with the modem over spi too. However, this YouTube channel was great to work through: [LINK] It has some high speed stuff with ddr memory, fpga\u2019s gigabit Ethernet and usb3 too so I\u2019m pretty sure you could use the same concepts to build a board with a microprocessor on it. Proper grounding, emi, impedance control and length matching are well explained. I think he has some more advanced courses via his website too. Additionally, this was an ah-ha moment video for me: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36107667,"author":"mordae","month":"2023-05","story_title":"The Mysterious 50 Ohm Impedance: Where It Came from and Why We Use It","text":"The article is not that good, but whatever. I am new to electronics myself and quite fascinated how has the art progressed in the past hundred or so years. There are people remembering \"we were doing it wrong\". Incredible. Anyway, if you are interested in signals traveling inside those cute green multi-GHz boards you make your living off, go watch Rick Hartley. [VIDEO] (How to Achieve Proper Grounding) [LINK] (What your Differential Pairs Wish You Knew)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40651278,"author":"dragontamer","month":"2024-06","story_title":"I like the RP2040","text":"The professionals use PCB-design software with physical modeling / FEA to calculate estimates to all of the important parameters of the circuit board (including how much trace lengths matter... but also board-capacitance, resistances, and resonance frequencies of the board itself, etc. etc.) In contrast, we hobbyists deal with \"rules of thumb\", because none of us will spend $4000+ on professional PCB software that run these calculations for us. And furthermore, we aim very conservative because its very difficult to debug a PCB layout issue... as we hobbyists are functionally blind to all of these issues (ex: trace inductance, trace capacitance, or other issues). I think spending a good bit of time on PDN / grounding / etc. etc. study is very worth your while. [VIDEO] 2+ hour talk on just the issue of good \"grounding\" design in PCBs, but it does relate to this issue of capacitors, trace-lengths and the like. I feel like you'd benefit from this talk. The \"correct\" way of thinking is exceptionally complex, far more complex than what is taught in colleges. But you have all the basic ideas thanks to the old rules of thumb. You just need to take the next step to see what the problems are. -------- And as you'll see, traces on the same side of a board are cake. Its things like vias that actually wreck you.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41303340,"author":"dragontamer","month":"2024-08","story_title":"So you want to build an embedded Linux system?","text":"This is advanced level PCB design. You need to know proper grounding and differential pairs and length matching to accomplish what is listed in this article. These are very difficult topics, but this 2 hour video should give you an idea of what's going on here: [VIDEO] -------- If this is too much for you, then instead stick to microcontrollers and other sub-100Mhz or sub-20Mhz projects. But 500MHz and above that requires length matching with controlled impedances is waaaayyyyy outside the scope for a beginner designer. --------- Beginner design is easier at 20MHz or so. The faster your signals, the more susceptible to noise they are. Those 500MHz+ Linux MPUs may fail to boot or fail spuriously if you make grounding / noise / EMC errors. And it's pretty difficult to explain to a beginner what is going on physically. The PCB board itself needs to be seen as parasitic capacitors, inductors and resistors (especially around Vias, between layers and other elements). But these 500Mhz or so processors here in this blogpost are still easier than Ghz+ chips. ------ The example I always like to point out: 2.4GHz wavelength is just a couple of cm long. That means any trace of ~centimeters can accidentally turn into a Bluetooth / WiFi antenna, which would inject a ton of noise into your circuit (or conversely: 'Throw' your electrons out like a Bluetooth / WiFi antenna). That's why faster speeds are harder. 900Mhz and slower needs an antenna over 30cm long, so staying below this means eve","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42843448,"author":"nyrikki","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Oliver Heaviside and the theory of transmission lines (2021)","text":"That video is good for the water like wave explanation that is a very useful lens. If you want a more in-depth explanation, particularly how the field is in the dielectric and the wires/traces are simply the wave guide, this long presentation by Rick Hartley will help move to the next level. [VIDEO] The dramatic shift in behavior above the audio frequency range is where the water wave lens starts to fall down IMHO. I was looking at my brothers memory card from a Cray 1a the other day and that video popped in my head. They had the timing traces snaking through several flat-pack chips legs. No wonder they had to move from parity to Hamming code even with exclusively using differential twisted pairs between modules.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44549063,"author":"aaronmdjones","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Vibe-Coding a PCB \u2013 surprisingly good","text":"I have some further video recommendations: [VIDEO] (\"How to achieve proper grounding\") [LINK] (\"Keys to control noise, interference, and EMI in PCBs\") [LINK] (\"What your differential pairs wish you knew\") [LINK] (\"Secrets of PCB optimization\") These are all by Rick Hartley (from GP's comment) and they are all worth watching in this order.","stance":"rec"}],"yTkzNHF6rMs":[{"hn_comment_id":11581509,"author":"pmarreck","month":"2016-04","story_title":"Have Software Developers Given Up?","text":"Here is the infamous Nagappan TDD paper from Microsoft Research [LINK] Also discussed in this infoq article [LINK] Here's someone's thesis paper on it, with data: [LINK] There's also interesting discussions like this [LINK] \"it is my experience that the value proposition for TDD grows exponentially as the time and resources involved in a project grows linearly.\" This has also been my own experience. This person's comment also is interesting and has data [LINK] Some of the above is empirical (read: scientific, no-bullshit) data. My opinion on it has grown to the point that I think TDD should literally be inseparable from programming, and the two together should simply be called, \"programming.\" Lacking any unit tests whatsoever (TDD or otherwise) should be called, \"taking stupid, extremely hazardous risks to save a little time, like reading your phone while driving\" I've not found a programming task in at least 5 years that wasn't waaaay better-written when done via TDD. Some things, like IO, can be a challenge to unit-test, but that's why we have great ideas to solve that like Gary Bernhardt's awesome \"Boundaries\" talk [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22161758,"author":"dnautics","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Elixir v1.10","text":"if you are a rubyist, I can't more strongly recommend watching this video, which has nothing to do directly with Elixir (in fact it precedes elixir by a couple of years) but if the topics that Bernhart (of wat fame) brings up resonate with you, then you will really like Elixir. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22558873,"author":"dnautics","month":"2020-03","story_title":"I Don't Use Classes","text":"> I find some problems are solved better in an OO way such as interacting with a relational database. I've switched to functional interactions with a database, (Elixir/Ecto) and really, it's much better. In particular the explicit and declarative nature of the database interactions combines the convenience of an ORM with \"not hiding important gotchas from you\". I'm not arguing for pure functional systems (which I can see going very poorly with relational databases). There are some things that objects are good at like caching state as a model. But even here the FP systems typically do it better via FP actors and (again, impure) message passing, which enforces no-shared memory, and at least in erlang virtual machine systems, couples segregated state with limiting blast radius for your systems failure domains, which is 150% the \"right thing to do\". Of course if we're getting pedantic, this is even close to OO the way that Alan Kay imagined it, than what the OP and GP talk about, and I don't consider that to be OO in the contemporary, colloquial sense of \"everything that happened after Bjarne Soustroup invented C++\" I highly recommend this video for a more philosophical take on how to do \"impure FP\" without OO that is informed by a decade of industry experience: [VIDEO] which is by Gary Bernhardt (of WAT fame) > I look for the right tool for the job rather than some idealistic purity This is all about right tool for the job. IMO, FP code is easier to read, easier to reason about,","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24916096,"author":"AaronFriel","month":"2020-10","story_title":"A Theory of Software Architecture","text":"A few years ago I was on a team and the dev lead had a practice of sharing Gary Bernhardt's Boundaries talk every time there was some degree of rotation or churn on the team. Almost part of the onboarding. As a functional programming aficionado, I didn't need the sales pitch, but it was the presentation that was gripping. Keep in mind, Ruby isn't a functional language, but here was this presenter describing essentially how you write good Haskell code, but in Ruby! A language that makes it so easy to mutate in place that it's known for libraries that \"monkey patch\" base classes and can change the definition of operators and functions at runtime! Fantastic talk, fantastic presentation. I now share it with my new engineering colleagues too. Here's the talk where he talks about imperative shell, functional core, \"Boundaries\": [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9163267,"author":"zachrose","month":"2015-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Front-end \u201cdesign patterns\u201d?","text":"Forgive me for being vague and brief, but I've been trying to test my UIs for the last year or so and this is what I've come up with. I've found the ideas in Gary Bernhardt's talk, Boundaries (1), to be very helpful in figuring out how to test interactive web UIs. The basic idea is that DOM manipulation can be an \"imperative shell\" with as little logic and as few conditionals as possible. Derive the state of your UI component with separate functions and methods that return plain values (a \"functional core\"), and write tests for those because testing for values is easy. So no, don't test for the presence of classes and IDs. Test your imperative shell once, maybe even manually or with an integration test, and that's probably enough. Angular and React both encourage something like this approach, but you don't need those technologies to do it this way. In Backbone, for instance, just try to avoid conditionals and logic in your templates and render methods. If you think your UI piece needs to render with conditionals because it can be in different states, ask yourself if those states are just appearances that can be programmed declaratively with classes and CSS. Also, testing is so much easier when you limit API surface areas. So if you're using a library like Backbone, where models and views both have many methods with many ways they can be called and used, don't give them direct references to each other. I've had some success in having models and views communicate only with a gl","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10338314,"author":"lectrick","month":"2015-10","story_title":"The microservices cargo cult","text":"Many of the advantages of microservices can be achieved by refactoring your monolith code to be less monolithic. I would suggest using functional styles wherever possible, plenty of isolated unit testable code, and a hexagonal architecture [LINK] that pushes all the I/O, mutation, side effects, etc. to the very boundary of your code. Also see Gary Bernhardt's \"Boundaries\" talk for more interesting thought in that vein [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11373452,"author":"itsmemattchung","month":"2016-03","story_title":"How to avoid brittle code","text":"I recommend watching this talk: [VIDEO] Both, unit and integration tests, are imperative. Integration tests point in the general direction of where an issue might be but unit tests are more precise.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23170170,"author":"magicpat2010","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Ask HN: Organization of Layered Software?","text":"This isn't an article but reading your post reminds me of the presentation by Gary Bernhardt titled \"Boundaries\", [VIDEO] I would be interested in looking at the article(s) if you can find them again.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24780097,"author":"aszen","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Prefer Fakes over Mocks","text":"I have been researching into several testing approaches and so far in my experience yes fakes are better than mocks. But what is even better is not having to fake or mock stuff especially for testing business logic. One of the problems we get ourselves into is abstracting service io code into functions and calling them from our business logic code. This forces us to mock all the io calls, instead we should be doing the opposite i.e abstracting business logic into discrete functions of pure data in and out and then calling those functions from our io code. This way we can test the business logic independently of the io code. Testing the business logic now becomes quite simple and one can leverage property testing to further boost our confidence in such tests. Many times the ramaining io code is just calling other functions and doesn't need to be tested. Several other ideas that relate to this are hexagonal architecture, Domain Driver Design, clean architecture and functional core with an imperative shell. Some resources to further explore these ideas: Clean Architecture in Python - [LINK] Why integrated tests are a scam - [LINK] Boundaries - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27593863,"author":"dnautics","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Onboarding to Elixir","text":"> Jose has really thread a needle with Elixir I feel. There was kind of something in the zeitgeist ready for this... This was a video by Gary Bernhardt in 2012 (that's like, Elixir -2 years?). I've queued it up to where he talks about basically wanting to go live on a cruise ship, fork rubinius, and rebuild ruby on top of erlang. The main chunk of the talk is about the software pattern that Phoenix and Elixir really tries to get you to adopt. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yXbJe-rUNP8":[{"hn_comment_id":36726106,"author":"pests","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Super Mario 64 \u2013 Watch for Rolling Rocks \u2013 0.5x a Presses [video]","text":"Complete History of the A Button Challenge [VIDEO] It's over five hours long. I put it on in the background or to pass the time. The amount of knowledge and abuse of bugs these guys are performing is insane.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39230762,"author":"houseatrielah","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Ask HN: What niche YouTube rabbit hole do you recommend?","text":"Langlangs program (The Dream: Riemann Hypothesis and F1 (RH Saga S1E1)) [LINK] History Dose (The Mongol vs. Order of Assassins War) [LINK] Beat Mario64 without hitting the A-Button (5h22m long!) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40027990,"author":"g___","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Super Mario 64's invisible walls explained [video]","text":"For over a decade, the author of this video has been leading an effort to complete Super Mario 64 with the smallest amount of A presses, often using extremely complex strategies. Here's a 5h video with the history. Bismuth says the history video took roughly 1500-2000 hours. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yY1FSsUV-8c":[{"hn_comment_id":40512148,"author":"epiccoleman","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Shadama: A particle simulation programming environment for everyone","text":"Andrew Sorensen is awesome. This video of one of his presentations on Impromptu is one of my all-time favorite programming talks: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24469076,"author":"thdrdt","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Electronic music pioneer Simeon Coxe has died","text":"[LINK] can also be added to the list. Visual programming audio and video. Maybe you also like this talk of Andrew Sorensen on live coding music for inspiration: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30628731,"author":"agentwiggles","month":"2022-03","story_title":"\u201cCompiling\u201d Music","text":"That is really cool, I had a ton of fun playing with Overtone a few years ago (Clojure Supercollider wrapper). There's also Impromptu, which I think is Scheme... There's an incredibly cool talk by Andrew Sorensen using it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yY96hTb8WgI":[{"hn_comment_id":28958145,"author":"WhitneyLand","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Magit, the magical Git interface (2017)","text":"You probably don\u2019t feel like you\u2019re fighting your front door when you walk out of your house or apartment also right? All that means is that git tools, and your front door, work well once you have mastered them. The ease of use and discoverability of tools over the life of their learning curve is what determines if they are a Norman door. For lots of people, using a Unix command line or Git for the first time feels like a Norman door. This is why other interfaces exist (like guis) for the same tools. What is a Normal door - 5 min Vox short [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43018751,"author":"crote","month":"2025-02","story_title":"The subtle art of designing physical controls for cars","text":"Yeah, but it's not supposed to. With good design it is immediately obvious whether the door is push or pull - even when the frame doesn't have any clear indications. For example, the door in [0] (apologies for the YT short) has no immediately clear hints if you look at the frame or handle. Both sides look exactly the same, so how are you supposed to know? Add a \"push/pull\" sticker you'll miss 90% of the time? The Vox vodcast(?) in [1] goes a lot further into the problem, starting from a very similar door. The solution is pretty simple, in hindsight: if they designed the door properly, you won't even be able to pull on a push door. Have a pull handle on the pull side, and a push plate on the push side. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yY9GAyJtuJ0":[{"hn_comment_id":25895371,"author":"wodenokoto","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Show HN: Sokyokuban, a puzzle game in a non-Euclidian world","text":"Code Parade on Youtube has some nice tech demo for non-euclidean 3D game engine. \"Non-Euclidean Worlds Engine\" - [LINK] \"Spherical Geometry Is Stranger Than Hyperbolic\" - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26074311,"author":"chairmanwow1","month":"2021-02","story_title":"HyperRogue: A puzzle roguelike in a non-Euclidean world","text":"There\u2019s another game being developed in a semi-3D hyperbolic geometry called Hyperbolica. The dev makes some fantastic videos [1]. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30011442,"author":"jerf","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Geometry from Another Universe","text":"Hyperbolica is mostly about the opposite, a hyperbolic universe, but there may be some section to the game that will be in a spherical universe. There's definitely some devlog video set in a spherical universe: [VIDEO] The end of the video suggests this will be in the final game, at least as the time that video's creation. In the meantime, the video I link is basically a video exploration of spherical geometry. One of the better ones, in my opinion, because it has \"normal\" objects in it, rather than floating heads or a ton of Earths or something. (Another amusing sidebar: As you can see in the video above, an inhabitant of that space would be naturally inclined to say the space curves in above them. It would take an Einstein to assert that it's actually flat, and Spherical Einstein would have a very hard time describing \"flat\" to anyone. You can only make things \"flat\" contingent on the observer being in a very particular place. If you look at the next devlog: [LINK] back in Hyperbolic space, you can also see that a resident of that space would naturally believe the space they are in is a sphere (albeit one of variable radius, which is weird, but still, you can look out in the world and see the curvature, obviously it's round), and it would again take an Einstein to say that it is flat. It's flat if you are exactly on the ground, but hyperbolic space exaggerates any degree to which you are above the ground to make the horizon look round.)","stance":"rec"}],"yYAw79386WI":[{"hn_comment_id":6231787,"author":"aa0","month":"2013-08","story_title":"Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements","text":"That was a great video, thank you! Knowing basic gear mechanics helps a lot in understanding how cars function. This 1937 video about differentials is also enlightening: [VIDEO] Why is it that old tutorial videos are so thorough and informative?","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19980625,"author":"dTal","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1908)","text":"Not just the 50s/60s - this video explaining differentials is from 1937 and is a marvel of pedagogy: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21358669,"author":"smogcutter","month":"2019-10","story_title":"South-Pointing Chariot","text":"Here\u2019s a terrific explanation of how differential gears work, from a film produced by GM in the 30s: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23268455,"author":"sajforbes","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]","text":"A similar thing - the best explanation I've seen about how cars' differential steering works comes from 1937. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28256409,"author":"AussieWog93","month":"2021-08","story_title":"Patterns in Confusing Explanations","text":"First thing I thought of when you said that: [VIDEO] Done properly, it's an amazingly powerful way of explaining things.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40896743,"author":"nixass","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The Basics of How Engines Work (2021) [video]","text":"One of the best \"how this mechanical thing works\" for me is about differential/steering by Chevrolet (1937.). It's almost 100 years old by now but still one of the best \"how\" videos ever. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41300169,"author":"mdorazio","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Basic Mechanisms In Fire Control Computers (1953) [video]","text":"Not just military training videos, older ones in general are often superior to what gets made today. My favorite is probably this one on vehicle differentials: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9902341,"author":"aunty_helen","month":"2015-07","story_title":"How a car works (2012)","text":"This is great. As for the criticism that a lot of the content is old, most of the core concepts can be explained better with older tech as it's simpler. This allows you to focus on what is happening and leave the extra details about what technology a part or process has for a case by case basis. [VIDEO] is a great example of this. Saying that, an article on direct injection, common rail diesels, efficient turbo charging, variable valve timing, MAF VS MAP EFI would be worth considering.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12373278,"author":"japhyr","month":"2016-08","story_title":"4WD vs. AWD. What's the Difference?","text":"Here are the key takeaways for me: \"Thanks to that differential between your axles, an AWD car will send your engine\u2019s power down the path of least resistance\u2014the wheel with the least grip. Where a two-wheel drive car can only choose between two wheels, an AWD system looks for that least resistance across all four wheels.\" \"4WD works by locking the front and rear axles together, splitting torque 50:50 between them. This provides great traction, but a vehicle locked in 4WD cannot safely be operated on dry pavement because its front and rear axles are forced to rotate at the same speeds.\" I remember being scared when I bought my first 4wd vehicle, a '91 Toyota pickup. I knew I shouldn't have the wheels locked in 4wd on dry pavement, and I was worried about going from snowy roads to dry pavement. When I moved on to an Outback (AWD, not 4wd) I wondered why I didn't have to worry about transitioning between slippery roads and dry pavement. Now I understand. There's also a great video from 1937(!) that shows why we need differentials, and how they work. Here's a direct link to the video if you're going to skip the article: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16771844,"author":"sheltron","month":"2018-04","story_title":"Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]","text":"Wow these are really great thanks for sharing. Heres a couple of others that I like. Differential Steering: [VIDEO] Turbo Encabulator: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18136053,"author":"foobarian","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Honda will use GM\u2019s self-driving technology, invests in Cruise","text":"This kind of mechanical device where there are more than two shafts are always cool. Classic video about differentials from 1937 (!): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18276223,"author":"Raphmedia","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Space Transportation System","text":"Videos were very instructive back then too. At some point, we started to prioritize form over function. E.g. [VIDEO] [Around The Corner - How Differential Steering Works (1937)]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19979558,"author":"lqet","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1908)","text":"A few months ago, this video [0] from the 30ies explaining a differential was posted on HN. It also is extremely interesting to watch. Minute 5 is very illuminating. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20584776,"author":"ohaideredevs","month":"2019-08","story_title":"Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?","text":"How guns work: [LINK] How a car differential works: [VIDEO] Downright the best zero-to-programmer course in the world. Wish I knew about it when I was starting out: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29540002,"author":"ironmagma","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What practical skills do you recommend?","text":"I would maybe start with the individual components. How a differential works: [VIDEO] There are a number of videos of transparent engines: [LINK] But if that doesn\u2019t work, searching YouTube for \u201chow an engine works\u201d should give lots of content. Once you\u2019ve figured out how the engine turns the flywheel, you can investigate how the flywheel applies different speeds to the wheels via a transmission. Manual transmissions are simpler, so I would start there: [LINK] then figure out how the clutch fits in. After that, you can move on to torque converters (coolest component imo, basically a fluid coupling) and automatic transmissions, which can be a mind-bender. Feel free to reach out to me at pc.peterso at Mail of g dot common TLD, happy to share what I learned and save you some time. Lastly, there is a wealth of tidbits on Engineering Explained and howacarworks.com, although the latter goes into far more detail than you probably need.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36900291,"author":"bramhaag","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Hydraulic Steering \u2013 Principles of Operation (1956) [video]","text":"Similar videos about cars: Chevrolet Suspension (1938): [LINK] How Differential Steering Works (1937): [VIDEO] How A Transmission Works (1936): [LINK] And as a bonus, an explanation about transistors from 1953: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38519255,"author":"deaddodo","month":"2023-12","story_title":"1962 Military Innstructional Video on Magnetic Cores","text":"All of the old US gov't/mil funded education films are pretty good. * [VIDEO] * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] * [LINK] Etc.","stance":"rec"}],"yYTSdlOdkn0":[{"hn_comment_id":46176478,"author":"erikrothoff","month":"2025-12","story_title":"Adenosine on the common path of rapid antidepressant action: The coffee paradox","text":"I went to the US recently and was fully prepared to drink caffeine on the trip because of all the cool coffee shops and roasters. But I was amazed that decaf was basically a first-class citizen there. The hotel breakfast had one giant brewer for regular and the same giant brewer for decaf. It was amazing. And it\u2019s pretty important to realize that well-made decaf doesn\u2019t have to taste worse than regular coffee. James Hoffmanns decaf project proved this for me, and his video about decaf sold me on the idea: decaf drinkers are the OG coffee drinker, drinking it purely for the taste, even without the drug-induced high that caffeine gives you. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39430547,"author":"gruez","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The case against caffeine","text":"James Hoffmann did a video on decaff coffee recently[1]. In it he basically says the \"scary chemicals\" aspect of other caffeine removal processes is basically overblown, and the reason why decaf coffee sucks has less to do with the solvents used and more to do with how the decaffination process makes the beans more prone to staling. In short, there's nothing really special about the swiss water process in particular and there are more important factors to worry about. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39431916,"author":"rubslopes","month":"2024-02","story_title":"The case against caffeine","text":"> Decaf can taste very good. I've certainly had decaf that was better than most caffeinated coffee I've had. But it's harder to find serious attempts at decaf roasts, sadly. James Hoffmann made a great video about this recently: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"y_SXXTBypIg":[{"hn_comment_id":32906310,"author":"acchow","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (But Finnish People Can)","text":"I love this YouTube channel. They did a series summarizing the findings from Strong Towns - US-style suburbia is fundamentally unsustainable. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40363717,"author":"iknownothow","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Parking reform legalized most of the new homes in Buffalo and Seattle (2023)","text":"I think everyone should watch the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel especially their series on Strong Towns [1]. It shows just how bad parking mandates are and just how bad American car centric city planning is. As they article pointed out, you need such vanguard cities to pave the way for better cities, with less parking and fingers crossed, fewer cars. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29736938,"author":"Improvotter","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Changes in Dutch streets throughout the years (photo album)","text":"I think this is due to how car dependent North America is. There are so many aspects that are missed in these pictures or what you are for example experiencing. It's not that you're situation is improving, it's most likely not. But that's not due to car independent cities being bad, it's because changing from being car dependent to car independent is hard and takes time. I would recommend you have a look at Not Just Bikes on YouTube, a Canadian that moved to the Netherlands. He talks about car independent cities in Europe, more specifically The Netherlands and compares it to car dependent North America. Here is a video that talks about how these \"car independent\" countries are still the best to drive in compared to others: [LINK] . Regardless, I would recommend you check out a few other of his videos, most importantly his series on the US non profit organisation \"Strong Towns\": [VIDEO] . It think it's about sharing the message that placing public transport, cyclists, and pedestrians in the forefront is better for almost everyone involved, including drivers, and especially people who live in cities and towns.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31943946,"author":"atoav","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco","text":"Profitable. For whom? For the municipiality a 6 lane street vs a two lane street with public transport and bicycle lanes can make the difference between neverending debt and prosperity. Places with good public transport and bicycle infrastructure and denser mixed use pay more tax revenue. Spread out urban sprawls and suburbs give the municipiality a lot of street surface to maintain, for very little tax revenue in return. A good introduction on that part is the strong towns playlist by the youtube channel Not Just Bikes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33092060,"author":"xorfish","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Inflation is at a 40 year high. What can history teach us?","text":"Fixing infrastructure is not always useful. Infrastructure for low density suburbs is a money pit that bankrupts cities. Here is a good playlist that explains why this is the case: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34140965,"author":"barrystaes","month":"2022-12","story_title":"People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities\u2013Until They Live in One","text":"If you are from the US and wonder whats up with the bike hippies: All cities you know are car-centric infrastructure, and i'd have a hard time seeing the problem also. Just watch this: [VIDEO] Im dutch and despite being able to ride over in 5 minutes and park my beautiful car right behind the stores, i still prefer to use my bike for daily groceries to get there faster and easier. The cities are designed for this. A bike never has to cross a 4-lane road with homes nearby.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45323914,"author":"rglullis","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently","text":"No, suburbs cost more per capita than people living in the inner city, generate less tax revenue and end up becoming a net negative to municipalities: [LINK] The whole series of videos from Strong Towns are good, you should take a look: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yaonVYOTSsk":[{"hn_comment_id":25489874,"author":"timrichard","month":"2020-12","story_title":"The Acorn Archimedes and the first ARM processor","text":"That drama is even more enjoyable the second time around with commentary from three of the Acorn team portrayed : [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30398939,"author":"klelatti","month":"2022-02","story_title":"ZX Spectrum at 40: a look back","text":"It's easy to quibble about some aspects of the Speccy - the rubber keyboard or the limited BASIC for example - but the key thing is that it offered an awful lot for the price - starting at \u00a3125 in the UK when the cheapest BBC Micro was \u00a3300. This made computing with colour and enough memory to write programs that were substantial and interesting available to a much wider group than before. Sir Clive Sinclair had a unique genius for designing and then marketing products that caught the public imagination. Sadly, he seemed to lose interest in building on his success and quickly moved on to the next project. Famously the C5 electric \"car\" but also wafer scale memory! [1] If anyone hasn't seen Micro Men, on the Sinclair vs Acorn rivalry, its definitely worth a watch: [LINK] And seeing some of the participants watch it and recall their own versions of the story is good too: [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ybcvlxivscw":[{"hn_comment_id":13068862,"author":"wallflower","month":"2016-11","story_title":"How to Master an Accent","text":"On the subject of accents, in case you missed her viral video the first-time around, the absolutely astounding Saara from Finland. \"What Languages Sound Like To Foreigners\" [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16245951,"author":"jpatokal","month":"2018-01","story_title":"An Italian Song That Sounds Like English But Is Nonsense","text":"Internet personality Saara turned speaking fake languages into a career with this amazing little clip: [VIDEO] And her pitch-perfect imitation of 14 different musical genres is equally amazing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8053116,"author":"sampo","month":"2014-07","story_title":"The Benefits of Failing at French","text":"At least for some people it's easy to pick up accents (even for languages she doesn't actually speak, she just speaks gibberish): [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14770796,"author":"wallflower","month":"2017-07","story_title":"Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer","text":"This is a video of Saara who is not a native speaker but who has an extraordinary ability to mimic accents. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16246440,"author":"wenc","month":"2018-01","story_title":"An Italian Song That Sounds Like English But Is Nonsense","text":"There's a clip that went viral a while ago where a girl was essentially spouting gibberish in various languages, but it sounded like she was speaking those languages! What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25535803,"author":"etiam","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Animal Crossing\u2019s fake language sounds different in Japanese","text":"On not all gibberish being created equal: it's been long enough since \"What Languages Sound Like To Foreigners\" that some people here may have missed have missed this. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29455400,"author":"dustintrex","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Fakelish \u2013 Fake English word generator","text":"Modern version: [VIDEO] \"English\" starts at around 0:48, but the others are also worth a listen!","stance":"rec"}],"ycPr5-27vSI":[{"hn_comment_id":17939218,"author":"nodesocket","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Company Update","text":"Highly recommend listening to the entire 2.5 hour Joe Rogan podcast[1]. It really does give a nice glimpse into his mind, and at times he appears to almost start choking up talking about fossil fuels and climate change. Once they get into the whiskey it actually gets more interesting, from evils of AI, to life being a simulation, to thinking positive and asserting as a whole judges, police, and military are some of the finest people we have. You can tell Elon is fed up with the constant negativity toward people and pervasive pessimism fueled by social media. I also honestly think he is probably dealing with depression, as you can almost see it in his face and speech. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18073416,"author":"TheAceOfHearts","month":"2018-09","story_title":"Ask HN: What podcasts do you listen to regularly?","text":"Joe Rogan Experience [0]. I love that he sits down with people and actually has long in-depth conversations with them. Here's a few interesting ones: * Let's start with his Elon Musk discussion [1]. It came out 2 weeks ago and it already has 14m views. They basically discuss a bunch of his ideas along with things such as AI and the future of humanity. It's fascinating to get a peek into the kind of person he is. * His discussion with Matthew Walker has been one of the most enlightening ones for me [2]. He's a sleep expert, and in the podcast they go over different myths relating to that. There was recently a HN post [3] where some people were quoting him and his book. * Another big favorite of mine was his discussion with Paul Stamets [4], a mycologist (i.e. a mushroom expert). They discuss some of the effects of different kinds of mushrooms, including psilocybin mushrooms (colloquially known as magic mushrooms). * I loved his discussion with Gary Johnson [5], the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate for 2016. How many other presidential candidates would you imagine would be willing to sit down and answer hard-hitting questions for +2 hours? He also had a discussion with Larry Sharpe [6], the Libertarian Party's candidate for governor of New York in 2018. Full disclosure: I recently joined the Libertarian Party. Listening to these podcasts pushed me to learn more about their movement. * He had a discussion with Mikhaila Peterson [7], the daughter of Jordan Peterson, whi","stance":"rec"}],"ydqReeTV_vk":[{"hn_comment_id":22948531,"author":"mettamage","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?","text":"It is, but it is increasing the branching factor by much more than finding all the \"good\" melodies in 400 years. Here's a good example of music that stands on it own right despite using the melody of despacito: [VIDEO] - I'm pretty sure that most people at HN will appreciate this one whether they like despacito or not :)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22991254,"author":"vikramkr","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?","text":"I'll take a shot at trying to explain that to the best of my ability. I'm starting from the point where we have organisms and dna, since nobody knows how exactly abiogenesis happened yet. First, two general points. The most important thing to keep in mind is time. Life has had insane amounts of time. Billions of years. Beyond human comprehension amounts of time. The second most important thing is that complicated != carefully orchestrated or optimal. Life is pretty cool, but it doesn't hold itself to a very high standard. It's the survival of the good enough, and is full of so many random hacks and poor design choices it's insane. Things get easier to accomplish when you lower the standard. Now an attempt at an explanation. Evolution by natural selection works on two principles. First, generation of diversity. Second, selective pressure. DNA can and does mutate frequently. One important type of mutation is a duplication, since it let's you gain new functionality. You make two versions of the same gene, one keeps it's original function, and the other does some new function. This theme of repurposing existing things comes up again and again. Take something you have, make another version of it, change it a bit. If you've worked out how to grow a vertebra as a lizard and want to become a snake, turn off legs amd make more vertebra. Use the same genes, and just modify how you control them. This video ( [VIDEO] ) is actually pretty good at running through the science behind evoluti","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25148049,"author":"TeMPOraL","month":"2020-11","story_title":"I should have loved biology","text":"> Producing a whole new limb or whatever is way more complicated that we'd like it to be. It isn't that much more complicated, though. Because as it turns out, you don't always have to code for that limb from scratch. You just have to flip a switch. The key phrase here is \"evolutionary developmental biology\". We've learned that complex life has a lot of Lego-life quality - a lot of DNA codes for signals that enable or disable creation of whole organs at various locations, stages and cadences. A TL;DR in four minutes by A Capella Science: [VIDEO] . A nice example that video gives is that snakes have DNA coding for legs, it's just turned off. It can be turned on, and a snake will grow legs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25911924,"author":"richardkiss","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Time-lapse of a single cell transforming into a salamander (2019)","text":"This entertaining video does a good job of, if not explaining, hinting at the mechanisms that make this possible: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40721411,"author":"Terr_","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Can you inherit memories from your ancestors?","text":"Homeobox genes [0] are relevant when it comes to pretty high level \"heads go on that end, butts go on that end\" stuff. There's also this parody video of Despacito [1] that may be, er, educationally amusing. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41126483,"author":"jkingsman","month":"2024-08","story_title":"The Genomic Code: The genome instantiates a generative model of the organism","text":"While this paper is perhaps is a bit of an overfitting of the concept of generative weights, another fun take is Evo-Devo[0], an acapella overview of evolutionary developmental biology. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42888288,"author":"TeMPOraL","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Ear muscle we thought humans didn't use activates when people listen hard","text":"Yup, DNA turned out to not merely be a sequence of triplets telling a dumb matter printer which hard-coded proteins to make - at least according to what little I understand of evolutionary developmental biology[0], DNA is much more like procedural generation in gamedev or demoscene. That is, there's plenty of recipes for various structures and body parts, and then there's lots of DNA that's responsible for conditionally enabling or disabling or modulating those recipes, depending on more DNA that controls when and where and how much to enable them, and then more - a complex network of logic . -- [0] - Didn't get much further than this four-minute intro to the field, but it is a good intro : [VIDEO] . (EDIT: It's actually the second part of a trio, that starts with a four-minute bottom-up overview of organic chemistry[1], and ends on a three-minute intro to nanotechnology[2]. I recommend the series together for how well it frames humans in relation to other life and universe as a whole.) [1] - [LINK] [2] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ydyztGZnbNs":[{"hn_comment_id":15039831,"author":"pera","month":"2017-08","story_title":"John Carmack on Functional Programming (2013) [video]","text":"Actually I really like the format of your presentations: just yesterday I watched your live coding session with vrscript ( [VIDEO] ) and it was fantastic because, first, you were showing to your audience how to work with Racket (and some of the features in DrRacket), and second, you build from zero a demo in a very casual, easy going way. I honestly don't think that a standard slide-based presentation would have been better in any way...","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11700040,"author":"khrm","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Whoever does not understand Lisp is doomed to reinvent it (2007)","text":"Checkout the VR script by John Carmack [VIDEO] It's on racket (scheme dialect). There are no language which can make you more efficient. But some languages open your mind. Just read SICP and find out what makes language EPIC. Many big projects are in Php. But surely no one would claim that it makes php \"the EPIC\" or even great.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20052823,"author":"staunch","month":"2019-05","story_title":"Racket: John Carmack\u2019s VRScript Samples (2015)","text":"He also did a live coding demo showing off this VR scripting concept. Having such a fast iteration cycle is very compelling. Hopefully at least some Javascript version of this will exist, even though this seems like a perfect application for a Lisp. [VIDEO] I wish he did live coding. Jonathan Blow's Twitch channel (naysayer88) is very compelling. Carmack's would be as well.","stance":"rec"}],"yftBiNu0ZNU":[{"hn_comment_id":46539393,"author":"iLoveOncall","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Introducing ChatGPT Health","text":"Since there are a lot of positive comments at the top (not surprising given the astroturfing on HN), please watch this video from ChubbyEmu, a real doctor, about a case study from someone who self-diagnosed using AI: [VIDEO] For every positive experience there are many more that are negative, if not life threatening or simply deadly.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46576736,"author":"Imustaskforhelp","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Google: Don't make \"bite-sized\" content for LLMs","text":"xD I am not even kidding but there is a guy who viewed twitter, found that table salt Aka sodium chloride is \"bad for health\" and the medical study recommends that if thats the case then they should less the consumption But he ends up asking chatgpt and it somehow recommends him the idea of sodium bromide instead of sodium chloride and it really ended up having him have so many hallucinations and so many other problems that the list goes on. I found this from a video, definitely worth a watch [VIDEO] A man asked AI for health advice and it cooked every brain cell","stance":"strong_rec"}],"yhGjCzxJV3E":[{"hn_comment_id":25357769,"author":"flobosg","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Designing 2D graphics in the Japanese industry","text":"Nice resource. While not strictly 2D, it brings to mind this GDC talk [1,2] from Arc System Works showing the lengths they went to achieve a high-res hand-drawn look while developing Guilty Gear Xrd. [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45024430,"author":"nathan_compton","month":"2025-08","story_title":"Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines","text":"This is an artistic choice with a variety of film precedents. Its not exactly the same thing, but if you watch this GDC talk about the way that Arc System Works uses 3d to simulate 2d animation, it gets some of the ideas across: [VIDEO] Artists might want to produce a lower framerate just to make something look filmic (eg, 25 frames per second) or hand animated, but it can also be a deliberate stylistic choice for other reasons. Eg, the recentish Mad Max films used subtle undercranking to make action scenes feel more intense, and part of that effect is a more noticeable frames and I think there is a bit of that in the Spiderverse films too.","stance":"rec"}],"yhO6jfHPFQU":[{"hn_comment_id":25577147,"author":"esarbe","month":"2020-12","story_title":"Apple\u2019s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China","text":"Let's see. Canada currently has 338 MPs and over 80% (!) of those (278) belong to one of two majority parties. So yes, in theory Canada has a multi party system. In practice this multi party system is severely damaged by the effects of the FPTP voting system. There are mathematical reasons for FPTP to result in two party systems. [0] explains it pretty well. There don't have to be deeper underlying stuctural reasons for the dichotomy. So to combat two party systems, replacing FPTP with an alternative voting system seems a pretty reasonable step. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33110901,"author":"awb","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Show HN: RankedVote \u2013 SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting","text":"> and then we promised to not game the system That's the key point. Unfortunately, all known voting systems can be gamed. Here's an interesting video that explains how they can be manipulated: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yiw6_JakZFc":[{"hn_comment_id":28625812,"author":"nebula8804","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Amazon\u2019s AI cameras are punishing drivers for mistakes they didn\u2019t make","text":"You are not representing the seriousness of this situation adequately (in my opinion). This excellent cartoon video explains the seriousness of all the lesser known sources of carbon: [VIDEO] Seems like Chairman Xi is serious about tackling Climate Change so he does not get deposed if the Gobi desert grows and eventually swallows up half of China.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30243272,"author":"LoveMortuus","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Satellite finds methane leaks from gas pipelines","text":"Kurzgesagt made a really good video about climate change [0]. What stuck with me the most was that if I would eliminate 100% of my emissions in my entire life, I would save 1 second of global energy sector emissions. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32770365,"author":"shagie","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide","text":"One of my favorite channels on YouTube is Kurzgesagt and they recently (looking at date, well, last year - still recent in the scale of things) had a video on global warming - Can YOU Fix Climate Change? [VIDEO] There's also Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change? - [LINK] Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, it's Complicated. - [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28680515,"author":"y4mi","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Europe\u2019s energy crisis is about to go global as gas prices soar","text":"Only in aggregation when everyone else changes their behaviour as well. Each individuals contribution is too tiny to have an impact, which is why we need a systematic change or legislation, so that its no longer a choice/personal responsibility to take action. Kurzgesagt's recent video (sponsored by bill gates notes)e xpressed the issue much better then I ever could, so i'll only link to it here. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28857148,"author":"jadams5","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Climate Clock","text":"Kurzgesagt: Can YOU Fix Climate Change? [VIDEO] Link in response to people asking what everyone is doing, should be doing, and can be doing...","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28929903,"author":"oblio","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Carbon-neutrality is a tale: the race for renewables is burning Europe's forests","text":"That's nice, but the unfortunate thing is: [VIDEO] It's a Kurzgesagt video about why individual action is far from enough, and why we need systemic action. Do your part, but also pressure politicians, because that's where the main pain point is.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29111193,"author":"bellyfullofbac","month":"2021-11","story_title":"The Pentagon\u2019s view of climate change and the risks of state collapse","text":"Kurzgesagt made a video about it, and they say, and I agree with them, the answer can only be political pressure: [VIDEO] They also mentioned the stat that if 1 person lived totally carbon neutral for 70 years, that would offset only 1 second of current global CO2 emissions, which I'm going to presume is sourced properly. I'm not very optimistic. Politicians follow the polls and go with what's popular, and if the people living in the rich nations have to pay more to fly to Asia for cheap holidays, and iPhones, etc, get more expensive because of carbon tax, the majority probably won't support the governments and will instead vote in populist idiots that will make things \"great again\". In the poorer countries, being told that the decades-old luxuries they've envied from richer nations will cost more because of government policies will also not be popular, never mind that the policies are meant to save the future.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29588746,"author":"anshumankmr","month":"2021-12","story_title":"A \u2018false solution\u2019? How crypto mining became the oil industry\u2019s new hope","text":">Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, the most-popular decentralized digital currency, have a notoriously large carbon footprint (bitcoin mining alone consumes about half as much electricity in a year as all of the UK). So to leverage a cheap source of energy to run their bitcoin mining operations, Lochmiller and Cavness found themselves partnering with oil companies to repurpose a byproduct, primarily methane, that\u2019s typically vented or burnt off in flares. Aren't crypto miners using GPUs to \"mine\" bitcoins? Doesn't that also mean every person who plays video games is also responsible for stressing the power generation system. And as GPUs become more powerful to give better frame rates and fancy tech like RTX, they also become more power hungry. Doesn't that also mean the massive data centers like the what Google is running for Stadia with massive number of GPUs is responsible for taxing the power generation system? Or people who train Deep Learning models with billion of parameters on GPUs? I do see people pointing fingers at Deep Learning and how it isn't \"carbon neutral\" but the other things are not really talked about. That being said, I am not people/companies who use GPUs aren't the cause of global warming or are somehow singlehandedly making it worse I believe that as a society we are kind of involved in this. Finger pointing will really keep going in circles. I am not the biggest fan of pop science as it often oversimplifies problems but this video by Kurzgesakt is very","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30246564,"author":"jstx1","month":"2022-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Do you care about your carbon footprint?","text":"No. > The use of household carbon footprint calculators originated when oil producer BP hired Ogilvy to create an \"effective propaganda\" campaign to shift responsibility of climate change-causing pollution away from the corporations and institutions that created a society where carbon emissions are unavoidable and onto personal lifestyle choices. [LINK] Kurzgesagt also provided a very good view on this that I agree with - [VIDEO] - \"Can YOU Fix Climate Change?\" (No*). The video explains it much better than I could in a comment but if you're concerned about your own contribution, you're focusing on the wrong thing.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35238422,"author":"shagie","month":"2023-03","story_title":"IPCC climate crisis report delivers \u2018final warning on 1.5C\u2019","text":"From Kurzgesagt \u2013 In a Nutshell: Can YOU Fix Climate Change? [VIDEO] and We WILL Fix Climate Change! [LINK] Make sure that you watch the second one if you watch the first one.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39734690,"author":"instagib","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Liebreich: Net Zero Will Be Harder Than You Think \u2013 and Easier. Part II: Easier","text":"If you don\u2019t mind YouTube, here is a decent video and a follow up more positive one I found. It does mention concrete and many other forms of co2 production we haven\u2019t figured out yet. 2022 Kurzgesagt in a nutshell. [VIDEO] 2023 less doomerism climate change update: [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ymaWq5yZIYM":[{"hn_comment_id":21608168,"author":"cs702","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook","text":"This is a thought-provoking speech. Do yourself a favor and watch it in its entirety -- before commenting: [VIDEO] Among the many thorny issues and questions raised by Cohen: * The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement , which is greatest for content that arouses the basest instincts and feelings of human beings, including fear and hatred. Social media companies earn more with the basest content. * Social media companies are ideal propaganda machines, enabling anyone willing to appeal to the worst in human nature to reach billions of people with a click. * Do social media companies bear responsibility for the negative impact their products have on society, in the same way that, say, car companies bear responsibility for faulty engines or airplane manufacturers bear responsibility for faulty plane designs? * Are social media companies publishers , like broadcast TV networks, magazines, and newspapers? Should social media companies be held to decency standards, like all publishers? I'm barely scratching the surface. Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21608174,"author":"cs702","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Sacha Baron Cohen: Facebook would have let Hitler buy ads for 'final solution'","text":"This is a thought-provoking speech. Do yourself a favor and watch it in its entirety -- before commenting: [VIDEO] Among the many thorny issues and questions raised by Cohen: * The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement , which is greatest for content that arouses the basest instincts and feelings of human beings, including fear and hatred. Social media companies earn more with the basest content. * Social media companies are ideal propaganda machines, enabling anyone willing to appeal to the worst in human nature to reach billions of people with a click. * Do social media companies bear responsibility for the negative impact their products have on society, in the same way that, say, car companies bear responsibility for faulty engines or airplane manufacturers bear responsibility for faulty plane designs? * Are social media companies publishers , like broadcast TV networks, magazines, and newspapers? Should social media companies be held to decency standards, like all publishers? I'm barely scratching the surface. Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing!","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21653494,"author":"dfsegoat","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Twitter CEO Endorses DuckDuckGo","text":"He gets into the relevant details in his speech at below timestamp [1]: > \"Just imagine what Goebbels [2] could have done with Facebook\" I think the bottom line is he is good at social engineering, and he recognizes the signs of manipulation at scale. Beyond that, he is smart enough to consume the literature. Note: Video is his award speech from ADL. But has sensitive wording and is NSFW. I found it to be pretty well put together - maybe reaching a bit in parts. [1] - [VIDEO] [2] - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21657291,"author":"mattigames","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Facebook's only Dutch factchecker quits over political ad exemption","text":"I can convince you in the same degree you are willing to understand any evidence I give, a similar challenge arises with anti-vaxxers, a group that few years ago was just a laughing stock but now thanks to the online fear propaganda through social media now has created some focus of kids without vaccines creating disease risks believed to be long gone, such risks of social network are measureable, but there are things that are practically harder to measure like if the \"pedophile hillary pizza place\" changed what people think about that political candidate; in general the way people are influenciated by propaganda is not immediate but take years to slowly aggregate with other falsehoods or uncorrelated facts in order to disrupt society. Of course I see the problem of trying to separate truth/false stuff and you can get all philosophical about it but at the end of the day just trying to remove the blatant lies like \"Hillary is an alien\" and \"Vaccines cause autism\" would give a better outcome than doing nothing at all that is what Facebook does right now about it. This guy can explain it better than I do: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25363387,"author":"flowerlad","month":"2020-12","story_title":"YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud","text":"On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen [VIDEO] Excerpts: Voltaire was right when he said \"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.\" And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25731884,"author":"flowerlad","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence in Myanmar (2018)","text":"On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen [VIDEO] Excerpts: Voltaire was right when he said \"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.\" And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25753341,"author":"flowerlad","month":"2021-01","story_title":"How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler","text":"> do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech Historically newspapers, television and radio have decided what is acceptable to be published through their media. There is no reason modern internet-based media should be any different. On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen [VIDEO] Excerpts: Voltaire was right when he said \"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.\" And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25778320,"author":"flowerlad","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Facebook Incubated the Insurrection","text":"Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It is as if the age of reason -- the era of evidential argument -- is ending. Knowledge is de-legitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy which depends on shared truths is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history. The above is by Sacha Baron Cohen, see: [VIDEO] More excerpts: Voltaire was right when he said \"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.\" And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32028529,"author":"petilon","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement","text":"I am going to let Sacha Baron Cohen, of all people, answer your question [1]: Voltaire was right when he said \"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.\" And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32028579,"author":"petilon","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement","text":"Disagree, there is no absolute freedom of speech, for example you can't yell \"fire\" in a crowded theater. Also disagree that such unrestricted free speech is constructive or beneficial. Sacha Baron Cohen explains it best: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45354323,"author":"breadwinner","month":"2025-09","story_title":"YouTube says it'll bring back creators banned for Covid and election content","text":"It is social media that is the root problem. On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen [VIDEO] Excerpts: Voltaire was right when he said \"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.\" And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.","stance":"rec"}],"ynbgMKclWWc":[{"hn_comment_id":15165783,"author":"TheDongIsYou","month":"2017-09","story_title":"To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider Janitors","text":"I used to be inspired by the Venus Project years ago. Unfortunately I realized it is extremely utopian and things needs to change in a more practical sense if we want a good chance of succeding. I'm currently very impressed by the work of Prof. Richard Wolff, an economist that heavily criticizes Capitalism and tries to make actual practical changes in the lives of people starting from their workplaces. Here is a talk he made in front of Google employees (the irony): [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15943928,"author":"yesenadam","month":"2017-12","story_title":"An Anarchist Critique of Democracy (2005)","text":"In this video[0], economist Richard Wolff talks about all the things he didn't learn studying economics at the US's most prestigious universities, because they were never mentioned. Fascinating talk. Towards the end he talks of a Spanish company run by its workers, which sounds like it has successfully transformed work for those people to something democratic, and, well, something free from what anarchists (and we all..uh 99% of us anyway) want to be free from. It sounds doable to extend that to other areas of life. Watch it! Highly enlightening ...and 'hope you can believe in' isn't that common nowadays. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14781718,"author":"Vektorweg","month":"2017-07","story_title":"How economics became a religion","text":"Suggested recently by Richard Wolff and many others before him: a possible solution out of this economy is worker coops aka democracy at work. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19435968,"author":"ace_of_spades","month":"2019-03","story_title":"Kickstarter\u2019s staff is unionizing","text":"To make this discussion maybe a little bit more solution oriented, what would be your solution to problems of labor mistreatment? Or do you suggest that nothing like that exists? I recently came across an interesting talk by Richard Wolff at Google [1] which suggests that a great solution would be the democratization of the work place in the form of worker coops. It\u2019s actually a tried and true model that works well in a variety of contexts. It would probably solve the problem you outline as well as make labor mistreatment a lot less common. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26781308,"author":"mempko","month":"2021-04","story_title":"How People Get Rich Now","text":"Mr Graham writes \"You would think, after having been on the side of labor in its fight with capital for almost two centuries, that the far left would be happy that labor has finally prevailed. \" Unfortunately Mr. Graham has an outdated view about the \"far left\". I recommend anyone interested in what a modern \"far left\" looks like learn about Richard Wolff and the Democracy at Work movement. A startup in a garage where everyone is an owner building great stuff is pretty much it. He did a Google Talk here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28822081,"author":"zja","month":"2021-10","story_title":"My Emotions as a CEO","text":"Very well said! You might find this talk interesting, it\u2019s about \u201cdemocracy at work\u201d as a new-ish flavor of socialism. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ypn3Fe_PLts":[{"hn_comment_id":35704695,"author":"sickofparadox","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a giant geothermal power plant?","text":"Firstly, Law of Headlines - the answer is no. But secondly, Volcanologists are not even worried about Yellowstone erupting anytime soon: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35705588,"author":"coltonv","month":"2023-04","story_title":"Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a giant geothermal power plant?","text":"Just so everyone knows, the whole \"Yellowstone is a supervolcano that could erupt any minute and cause cataclysmic effects on the planet\" is just not true. It was made up for TV \"documentaries\". Yellowstone does not pose any real threat to society at large. Volcanologists are practically unanimous in that belief. See this video for more information: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37683858,"author":"sparcpile","month":"2023-09","story_title":"What's Going on at Italy's Campi Flegrei Caldera?","text":"There is a video by Soup Emporium on Youtube that compares the uplift of the Yellowstone caldera to Campi Flegrei's. The video is queued up to where Campi Flegrei is discussed. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yqMjMPlXzdA":[{"hn_comment_id":1371265,"author":"edj","month":"2010-05","story_title":"Don't Talk to the Cops","text":"Excellent 45 minute ACLU documentary on how to interact with police in three situations: traffic stop, in your house, and on foot. BUSTED: The Citizen's Guide to Surviving Police Encounters [VIDEO] tldr: -say as little as possible. -be courteous and don't argue or complain. -memorize the phrase \"I do not consent to any searches.\" -do not invite police in your house.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5700035,"author":"coldpie","month":"2013-05","story_title":"Bakersfield cops and CHP beat man to death while he begs for his life","text":"No disagreement here. Sometimes you're forced into dangerous situations and must make the best of it. Some excellent advice from the previous director of the ACLU: BUSTED: The Citizen's Guide to Surviving Police Encounters [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ysa5OBhXz-Q":[{"hn_comment_id":9864491,"author":"zackmorris","month":"2015-07","story_title":"Why is the Northwest so warm?","text":"In hindsight this looks like the idle ramblings of someone out of touch with reality. But in truth it's closer to the opposite - I've spent too much time analyzing the repercussions of everything because that's what programmers do. If someone ever finds this, this video sums up a lot of what I was trying to say: [VIDEO] Now multiply that by every ecosystem that has been tampered with by humans across the face of the planet and decide for yourself if our climate has been affected.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13052443,"author":"nkoren","month":"2016-11","story_title":"Let's Colonize Titan","text":"You need to learn about trophic cascades. Here's a quick intro: [VIDEO] This played out in the Pleistocene extinctions to a very significant degree, having tremendous effect on ecosystems everywhere. Here's an entire conference worth of the subject: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":14402727,"author":"GFischer","month":"2017-05","story_title":"Last major primeval forest in Europe on 'brink of collapse'","text":"I saw a pretty cool documentary on how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone changed the ecosystem for the better. Not the one I saw but very similar: [VIDEO] More serious article: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22311731,"author":"heimatau","month":"2020-02","story_title":"Colorado voters are set to decide if wolves should be reintroduced to the state","text":"This could be good for Colorado. I had to watch this video [1] for my biology class. It's interesting how the wolves changed the entire ecosystem by just changing the behavior of deer (they avoided grazing near the river because that's where the wolves wanted to be). The ripple effects are fairly significant. 1 - [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ytpRnRke6I0":[{"hn_comment_id":22830081,"author":"dave7","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Has any progress been made on large format E-ink displays?","text":"Technology Connections (amazing Youtube channel btw!) has a few videos on using an Onyx Boox Max as a 2nd monitor: [VIDEO] (Intro) [LINK] (2nd channel longer look, mini review) [LINK] (6 months later, tips / tweaks / long term review)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23497333,"author":"scrollaway","month":"2020-06","story_title":"Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?","text":"If you two are serious about this, you'll defintely want to check out Technology Connections' series on e-ink: (quick intro): [VIDEO] (starting the breakdown): [LINK] He talks about that exact concept and moves on to do real-world testing and setup of a very specific tablet usable as an external display. It's exactly as you say: Hacky and unpolished. But I found it extremely informative.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24423713,"author":"GloriousKoji","month":"2020-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Anyone here experienced with e-ink monitors?","text":"About a year ago Technology Connections on youtube tried to use an eink display and thoroughly described his experiences. * E-Ink on Android, and other new things! [VIDEO] * E-Ink for Productivity: An Introduction [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"ytyjgIyegDI":[{"hn_comment_id":29621543,"author":"quocanh","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Are quantum-ready co\u2019s peddling snake oil?","text":"Wow. I actually just saw [a video from Sabine Hossenfelder]( [VIDEO] ) about exactly this. Long story short, we don't know if quantum nonlocality is real. Bell's Theoreom doesn't prove nonlocality. It proves that locality is impossible with statistical independence, that is, the measurement itself affects the quantum system. We can preserve locality if we also accept superdeterminism, which Sabine succinctly puts as, \"what the quantum particle does depends on what measurement will take place.\" We can accept nonlocality and statistical independence or locality and dependence. The former is taken for granted by Bell and many (most?) physicists today but only because the latter \"feels\" more spooky to a quantum physicist. The video does the subject justice much better than I can, but the point is that it's not cut and dry!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30111189,"author":"trixie_","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Why Quantum Mechanics?","text":"Randomly found a link to this video on super determinism from his blog and found it super interesting. 100% agree, what is 'free will' anyways? A concept with no scientific definition. Why is it even used to explain anything in quantum mechanics? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yvBR71D0nAQ":[{"hn_comment_id":20253237,"author":"appwiz","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Learning to Build Distributed Systems","text":"Here are a couple videos from reInvent 2018: Jaso talking about DynamoDB internals [VIDEO] Marc talking about Lambda internals [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30009415,"author":"mjb","month":"2022-01","story_title":"DynamoDB 10 years later","text":"We don't have a paper on DynamoDB's internals (yet?), but here's a talk you might find interesting from one of the folks who built and ran DDB for a long time: [VIDEO] And Doug Terry talking through the details of how DynamoDB's transaction protocol works: [LINK] If we did publish more about the internals of DDB, what would you be looking to learn? Architecture? Operational experience? Developer experience? There's a lot of material we could share, and it's useful to hear where people would like us to focus.","stance":"rec"}],"yvDCzhbjYWs":[{"hn_comment_id":12640863,"author":"ChicagoBoy11","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Peter Norvig on the \"Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data\" [VIDEO] I think it is so easy for us to discuss the impact of big data and quickly get into the weeds, but I think in this talk Norvig does an especially great job in making you truly appreciate the seismic impact that the availability of massive quantities of data can have on your way to think about problems. This is one of the first things I ever saw of him, and I've been in love ever since.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":3913433,"author":"stiff","month":"2012-05","story_title":"Beware The Hype Over Big Data Analytics","text":"I am not sure if I disagree with the central thesis of the article, but the argumentation seems rather weak in many places, for example he says: Let's take the example of the number of people who walk into a store and buy a certain product. By studying 10 customers you can get an estimate of the probability of the purchase and predict sales; by studying 100 customers you get a better estimate. By analyzing 1000 customers you have a very good estimate. You could study a million customers, but the results are unlikely to be vastly different from the results of analyzing 1000 customers and probably not worth the expense. This makes sense only for very low-dimensional data sets, but most real-life problems are very high-dimensional and in high-dimensional spaces a million customers (or any other number of samples you might reasonably expect to gather) might still very well be only a small sample. So, there are situations where because of various constraints you will never be able to get to this level where more data stops yielding better results. You can watch a nice presentation from Peter Norvig about the unreasonable effectiveness of data: [VIDEO] Or read about the well-known curse of dimensionality: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":5045829,"author":"gpcz","month":"2013-01","story_title":"Data trumps everything","text":"If you're looking for more examples and information about using simple algorithms with lots of data, I recommend Peter Norvig's \"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data\": [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yvFKh_3evC8":[{"hn_comment_id":7715209,"author":"calpaterson","month":"2014-05","story_title":"London black taxis plan congestion chaos to block Uber","text":"For anyone interested a documentary of the Knowledge test from the 1990s: [VIDEO] The documentary paints an interesting picture","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8295989,"author":"jdietrich","month":"2014-09","story_title":"For London's Cabbies, Job Entails World's Hardest Geography Test","text":"A lot of detractors miss the fact that the Knowledge is about much more than just memorising routes. The Knowledge is a very egalitarian way of hugely increasing the value of a taxi permit to the holder, creating a strong disincentive against any behaviour that might jeopardise their license. If you've spent four or five years working to get your Green Badge, you'll think twice about cheating a passenger or taking liberties with traffic laws. The exams (\"appearances\") are conducted in person, and are deliberately intended to be highly stressful. Examiners want to see not only that the candidate knows the routes, but that they can remain calm and courteous under pressure. By design, the Knowledge is a long and arduous test of character that happens to impart practical skills. If your interest has been piqued by this article, there is an excellent (albeit slightly dated) BBC documentary on the subject: [VIDEO] [LINK] It is also worth noting that the iconic black cab is a perfectly designed tool for the job, not just a kitsch symbol. It is fully wheelchair accessible, has a durable wipe-clean interior, and is designed with a very tight turning circle to maximise manoeuvrability in the tight streets of London.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15320254,"author":"michaelbuckbee","month":"2017-09","story_title":"Hello Londoners, I am a black cab driver (Green Badge) and I come in peace","text":"Pre GPS it was a requirement that cabbies have a massive list of places and routes through London memorized (that guy taking 3.5 years to study and pass the entrance exam is pretty par for the course). There's a 1996 documentary on the process that's pretty interesting - [VIDEO] Separately, this is the kind of non robots doing manufacturing automation that I think it's important to think about when we have discussions of future work, etc. Because on the one hand it's stunningly fantastic that what used to take someone 4 years and a series of examinations to achieve is now included for a negligible cost in the pocket supercomputer (of 1996) that we all carry around in our pocket. But, it's also a huge shift for all these industries.","stance":"rec"}],"yvhv7bgmz64":[{"hn_comment_id":39255311,"author":"skeaker","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Netflix: Piracy is difficult to compete against and growing rapidly","text":"Yep. This video is played for laughs but I was shocked to learn how much of it was true and not just satire: [VIDEO] Content being fragmented and constantly coming and going is a massive problem for users. Netflix used to be the go-to to find just about any given show or film, but has become a mystery box where the contents change on a near-daily basis. Piracy is reliable and simple instead, and works like Netflix used to: Just search up what you want to watch and you're golden. It has been and always will be a service problem.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40143473,"author":"geerlingguy","month":"2024-04","story_title":"'Expensive' Streaming Services Are a Key Reason for Americans to 'Pirate'","text":"\"If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing.\" And for a great illustration of the complexity of our current situation, see this videogamedunkey video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ywWBy6J5gz8":[{"hn_comment_id":21853405,"author":"Stratoscope","month":"2019-12","story_title":"A cool way to explain logic gates with water [video]","text":"Friend, I'm not saying you were wrong or trying to argue with you. Just pointing out that different people learn differently, and it's good to have different ways to illustrate and explain things. You never know when one kind of explanation may give someone an \"aha\" moment that they didn't get somewhere else. And sometimes it's good to do things like this just for fun. For example, my very favorite visualizations of sorting algorithms are the Hungarian dancers: [VIDEO] (Turn the sound up to enjoy the music!)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13644837,"author":"bogomipz","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Show HN: Illustrated Quicksort algorithm","text":"This is neat. If you enjoyed this you might also like the Hungarian folk dancers demonstrating sorting algorithms on youube: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"yy8jQgmhbAU":[{"hn_comment_id":18340845,"author":"phaedrus","month":"2018-10","story_title":"C++17 constexpr Compile-time Ray Tracer (2017)","text":"That's a very good point. It might be question of high versus low level. From a video I watched today (the rest of the video is worth watching, too, but the following stand-alone quote is apropos): \"Polymorphism and interfaces have to be kept under control. I don't believe that their role is in a very low level system like interpolating a couple of numbers in the animations, but they have their place in high level systems, in client facing APIs. They are amazing if you do a type of plug in and you really need some type of dynamic polymorphism.\" [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21676176,"author":"michael_j_ward","month":"2019-12","story_title":"Practical Examples in Data Oriented Design","text":"Just adding a more recent video on it from CppCon 2018 where the presenter goes over a specific worked example. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24265721,"author":"nikki93","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Unity Software Inc S-1","text":"Glad to see some agreement there. I'm interested in building an ECS-based approach for a UI system at some point. The Yoga layout engine (implements flexbox -- [LINK] ) seems to actually be pretty amenable to just incorporating as a `Layout` or `Flex` component, then you could have components for platform-specific renderings (eg. `iOSTextInput`, `AndroidTextInput`, `DOMTextInput` in wasm, ...) that could read from cross-platform common components (`TextInput`). A core aspect would also be a `Hierarchy` component that just has a parent entity id and a list of child entity ids (that it keeps in sync properly). Then bind things to JS and allow you to code it from React, while still being able to eg. run an animation thread for some specific animations that just queries and reads/writes the `Layout` and `AnimationSpec`s etc. Interesting talk re: data oriented design for a webby animation engine here actually: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"z1ROpIKZe-c":[{"hn_comment_id":13866182,"author":"Hagelin","month":"2017-03","story_title":"London\u2019s Big Dig Reveals Layers of History","text":"CGP Grey's \"The (Secret) City of London\" are great videos on the topic of the City of London (vs. London) Part 1: [LINK] Part 2: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28809026,"author":"mstade","month":"2021-10","story_title":"Ireland joins OECD International Tax agreement","text":"I used to live and work in the city and loved telling people about the dragons guarding the city borders and the often weird and funny traditions. As much as the city is a hub of corporations it's actually far from the soulless place many make it out to be, and there is lots of interesting history there if you care to look. My favorite gateway drugs to learning more about the city of London are probably CGP Grey's videos: The (Secret) City of London: History Edition: [LINK] The (Secret) City of London: Government Edition: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10707533,"author":"yoshamano","month":"2015-12","story_title":"The fall of Jersey: how a tax haven goes bust","text":"CGP Grey does a really good job giving an overview of the history of The City of London. [LINK] Along with another video about the governing structure of The City of London. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11693064,"author":"Malic","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Dark money: London\u2019s dirty secret","text":"If anyone cares to know more about the City of London, CGP Grey did a nice two-parter video describing its history, its privileges and how to become mayor if you care to. The (Secret) City of London, Part 1: History [LINK] The (Secret) City of London, Part 2: Government [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19180917,"author":"mstade","month":"2019-02","story_title":"London's billion-pound guilds","text":"I don\u2019t know whether this is true because I never looked into it really, but a colleague of mine in the ndustry told me I could join the banker\u2019s guild. His words were that because I lived in the city[1] at the time, and also worked for a bank in the city, I\u2019d be eligible for membership if the bank would nominate or sponsor me as a representative. I\u2019m hazy on the details, it was years ago, and I don\u2019t really know whether it\u2019s true since as mentioned I never checked it out. I kind of regret not doing so now though, since moving out of the city I\u2019ve learned much more of it\u2019s (weird and interesting) history and it would\u2019ve been fun to at least try to see some of this from the inside. It probably wouldn\u2019t have worked anyway, but would\u2019ve been fun to try. For anyone looking for a fun little intro to the weirdness of the city and it\u2019s history, I recommend CGP Grey\u2019s channel and particularly his videos on the City of London[2][3]. [1]: for the benefit of people who might not be aware \u2013 \u201cthe city\u201d is a colloquialism for the City of London, which is a small somewhat autonomous part of London, situated east of what most people (who don\u2019t know this) probably think of when you say the city of London. [2]: [LINK] [3]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33077337,"author":"Lio","month":"2022-10","story_title":"The City of London\u2019s oldest document is currently on public display","text":"Well on the one hand you're saying it's not that strange, on the other there's the election process for who can become Lord Mayor of the City of London. ;) In most parts of the country the \"Worshipful Society of Apothecaries\" plays very little part in local governance... Here's another video from CGP Grey that explains it rather well:- [VIDEO] ...and when did all this start? No body knows. It's so old there are no records.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":35232294,"author":"rjmunro","month":"2023-03","story_title":"Cyclists Now Outnumber Motorists in City of London","text":"There's a great video by CGP Grey about it here: [LINK] , and a follow up about how they elect their government: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"z6yL0_sDnX0":[{"hn_comment_id":25180400,"author":"sxp","month":"2020-11","story_title":"We have no idea what happens next","text":"I completely agree. For those who haven't experienced Connections-style history, four episodes are on YouTube: [LINK] My favorite is this one about proto-computers that came about due to the Black Death: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33269771,"author":"Maursault","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Part of the long-lost star catalogue of Hipparchus found in medieval parchment","text":"Every computer engineer, computer scientist and software developer should learn about the Jacquard loom and its predecessors and its significance as elegantly described by James Burke.[1] [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41053033,"author":"sxp","month":"2024-07","story_title":"How an 1803 Jacquard Loom Led to Computer Technology [video]","text":"If you want a more in depth view about this series of events, I suggest [VIDEO] which is an episode of the amazing documentary, Connections. (The show also has one of the best timed shots in history: [LINK] )","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45807748,"author":"aspenmayer","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Robert Hooke's \"Cyberpunk\u201d Letter to Gottfried Leibniz","text":"I believe Robert Hooke is mentioned in James Burke\u2019s Connections , a fantastic program that just got a new season on Curiosity Stream; I haven\u2019t seen the new episodes yet but I have thoroughly enjoyed everything else Burke has ever done, so I expect the new series to be great also. [LINK] The episodes Faith in Numbers (1978 original series, S01E04[0]) and Thunder in the Skies (S01E06)[1] feature Robert Hooke from what I can tell from a little searching, though it\u2019s been a while since I saw the series, so I apologize if I\u2019m wrong on that point, though the entire series is worth watching all the same. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44514246,"author":"ssalazar","month":"2025-07","story_title":"Phrase origin: Why do we \"call\" functions?","text":"For those who aren't already familiar, James Burke in Connections has a great summary/rundown of this technological progression from Jacquard loom to census tabulator to computer punchcard, starting around the 36 minute mark here (though the whole video is worth watching). [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"z71h9XZbAWY":[{"hn_comment_id":12036414,"author":"pavel_lishin","month":"2016-07","story_title":"Huge home-built computer used for Tetris","text":"A video tour is available on youtube, so we don't crush his website: [VIDEO] Spoiler alert: his Tetris skills are inversely proportional to his computer building skills.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12317386,"author":"diydsp","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Megaprocessor \u2013 A micro-processor built large","text":"The amazing thing about this is that you can't critique. I mean, you can say anything you want, but you can't stop it or change this guy's mind. :) It's pretty neat seeing him change the clock speed: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"z7ihNLEDiuM":[{"hn_comment_id":8037330,"author":"rflrob","month":"2014-07","story_title":"9th Grade Girls Soldering","text":"While it's true that women and men aren't the same, I think that there are good reasons to believe the level of inequality we have now is not due solely to natural inclination. This video of Neil deGrasse Tyson on minorities and science is apropos: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11184207,"author":"some-guy","month":"2016-02","story_title":"Why Tech Degrees Are Not Putting More Blacks and Hispanics into Tech Jobs","text":"Medicine has many more barriers to entry: schooling, debt, etc. I'm a white high school dropout, but I got a developer position at age 27 after rushing through a CS degree later in live which took about ~3 years. I work 40 hours a week and get a very livable $100k+ salary plus stock and benefits with negligible student debt all things considered (~$30k). My point being, in a vacuum, getting on track to making a good wage as a developer has a lot fewer barriers with the lack of medical school and debt. Not to mention the free time I have outside of work and regular hours. Salary isn't everything. I cannot speak for people of color and their experience who want to go through the same process as me. There are all kinds of barriers they experience that I don't. Neil DeGrasse Tyson (I know, I know...) had a good answer to the silly question \"What's with chicks in science?\", and the cultural / systemic barriers he had to go through to reach that point in life [1]. 1: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"z8MVKianh54":[{"hn_comment_id":20300358,"author":"kadblas","month":"2019-06","story_title":"Why I think Haskell is the best general purpose language as of June 22 2019","text":"Qualification: I was introduced to FP a number of years ago and have finally reached a point where I feel that I have a deep understanding of FP in general. In my mind, Haskell is the \"best\" language out there (\"best\" in that it provides the best overall gain when all tradeoffs are considered). I'm no longer confident that Haskell is the \"best\" language anymore. I was recently introduced to a language that might be even better than Haskell: Dyalog APL. ( [LINK] ). Try it out yourself ( [LINK] ) To explain why, I recommend watching Aaron Hsu's videos on Dyalog APL: - Does APL need a Type System? ( [VIDEO] ) - This is actually a very interesting question that is more nuanced than upon first glance. - Design Patterns and Anti-Patterns in APL ( [LINK] ) - The main takeaway from this video for me was the principle of \"Idioms over libraries.\" - Higher Performance Tree-Wrangling, the APL way ( [LINK] ) - Or how to model Trees without using pointers by using \"Inverted Tables.\" (An inverted table is a table where the columns are the rows and the rows are the columns)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21373433,"author":"xelxebar","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Dex: A research language for array processing in the Haskell/ML family","text":"Just starting to learn J, myself, and this brings to mind Aaron Hsu's \"Does APL Need A Type System?\" talk: [VIDEO] which argues that APL already provides the development ergonomics that are typically acribed to type systems. I.e. why type check your tacit function when it's implementation is about the same length as its type annotation? Anyway, as someone trained in Category Theory and a huge fan of type systems, I found Hsu's argument surprisingly pursuasive. I would love to hear any counterpoint arguments and the motivations behind attempts at giving J a type system.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22838379,"author":"eggy","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ode to J","text":"The right tool for the job. If you are building a huge website with input forms, videos, data collection, ML algorithms, yes then you wouldn't do the whole thing in APL or J even if you could. Python is big in ML because packages for working with data in array language ways were developed. Pandas by Wes McKinney is one example, and he studied J or q, and even tweeted: IMHO J is the best APL for data analysis because of its broad suite hash table-based functions. I like APL and J as a scratchpad where arrays are the basic unit and not scalars. J is functional and it turned me on to that world before I touched Haskell or F#. Aaron Hsu has a lot of great videos that speak to a lot of the usability and scaling out you mention: [LINK] I particularly like this one: [VIDEO] I am able to grasp concepts or own them after coding them in APL or J even if the code isn't as fast such as how well APL applies to Convolutional Neural Networks [1,2]. I really understood the mechanics of CNNs better after working through this paper a lot more than books I had read on ANNs in general since the late 80s/early 90s. By contrast, I have coded ANNs in C and Python, and I get lost in the PL, not the concept, if that makes sense. Anyway, I am a polyglot and find people criticize J/APL/k etc. from a brief look without really trying to learn the language. I learned assembler and basic back in 1978 to 1982, and I felt the same way when I first looked at opcodes. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"zAFcV7zuUDA":[{"hn_comment_id":48398756,"author":"rndz","month":"2026-06","story_title":"Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot","text":"More than 10 years ago, somebody shared this clip with me: [VIDEO] Been tying my shoelaces like this ever since.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10201758,"author":"filoeleven","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Shoelace knots","text":"Reminds me of the TED talk on how to tie your shoes. I was surprised to learn I've been doing it wrong for a quarter century. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21582554,"author":"leto_ii","month":"2019-11","story_title":"Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?","text":"Two quick things from back when TED talks were actually interesting/useful: 1. How to tie your shoes the right way (so the knot doesn't come undone): [VIDEO] 2. How to dry your hands with a single paper towel (so that you prevent unnecessary waste): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34579588,"author":"prometheus76","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Something you\u2019ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?","text":"Do you have to tie a double knot to keep your shoes from coming untied? Do your loops end up pointing down at your toes and up your leg instead of pointing to the sides of your shoe? Do you shoes come untied all the time? You are probably tying a granny knot instead of a square knot. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zBgCRJluWTc":[{"hn_comment_id":34000326,"author":"faeyanpiraat","month":"2022-12","story_title":"Ask HN: How to do that you need to do but not motivated at all?","text":"If you are stuck in a loop of: I need to do X, but you just nope out of doing it, then feel guilty, and it is a recurring pattern then watch these two vids: - Psychiatrist Explains Why You Feel Tired All The Time: [LINK] - Why Don't You Want To Do Anything After Binging 4 Hours of Youtube Videos: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34326419,"author":"sph","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder","text":"And technology in general. There is a video by HealthyGamerGG that explains how using smartphones or computers turns off a crucial part of the brain that knows what is important and you should focus on. The longer you're in front of a screen, the more you lose awareness of yourself and what you enjoy . Taking frequent breaks away from screens is important to stay motivated and restore that drive towards meaningful things. It's sounds wishy-washy how I explained it here, but the video has a more scientific explanation of this phenomenon. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zBkNBP00wJE":[{"hn_comment_id":12774487,"author":"dmit","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again","text":"For those who haven't seen it, there is a wonderful talk by Jason Turner about writing a simple Pong clone for the Commodore 64 in modern C++: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13692857,"author":"MereInterest","month":"2017-02","story_title":"C++ on Embedded Systems","text":"Absolutely. There was a fantastic talk at CppCon last year, using C++17 to program a game for the Commodore 64. Using standard C++ idioms, the optimizer was easily able to make it compile down to efficient machine code. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12640510,"author":"voltagex_","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"Your second link reminded me of [LINK] (which definitely builds on some of Matt's work). [VIDEO] - C++17 for the Commodore 64. Probable language warnings for my other suggestions: * Rescuing Prince of Persia from the Sands of Time [LINK] (was this talk ever given elsewhere?) * And You Shall Know Me By My Trail of Documentation - [LINK] * The History and Evolution of Computer Viruses - [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12652285,"author":"beached_whale","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Epiphany-V: A 1024-core 64-bit RISC processor","text":"Check out the cppcon 2016 presentation by Jason Turner and watch how eager the compiler optimizes away code when const is enabled on values. Cool presentation too, and uses Godbolt's tool [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13366535,"author":"sqeaky","month":"2017-01","story_title":"Add a const here, delete a const there","text":"I think this way of looking at it old. Even if the const-ness is somehow subverted without generating an error then most compilers (or at least GCC and Clang) will presume the code is compliant and make optimizations following what the standard allows. This potentially results in undefined behavior when that pointer you mentioned is used to modified a thing that ought to be const. Consider the amount of optimizations seen in the video from CppCon 2016: [VIDEO] Jason Turner, the presenter, is writing code a few lines at a time and cross compiling for the Commodore 64. He shows his assembly at many steps of the way and shows how many functions are completely elided when const (and later constexpr) are used correctly. There are a ton of other good talks from CppCon 2016 including one about const and what optimizations it makes possible and several about how compilers are more willing to \"break\" code that is non-compliant by making its behavior undefined. None of it really shocking or new, unless you have been writing to one compiler implementation instead of to the standard.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18290537,"author":"Nimelrian","month":"2018-10","story_title":"C++: Associative map containers with compile-time lookup","text":"Also highly recommended: Anything by Jason Turner and Ben Deane. Examples: - Ben Deane - Using Types Effectively [0] - Jason Turner - Rich Code for Tiny Computers: A Simple Commodore 64 Game in C++17 [1] - Ben Deane & Jason Turner - constexpr ALL the Things! [2] [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20532827,"author":"adev_","month":"2019-07","story_title":"ChaiScript \u2013 Easy to Use Scripting for C++","text":"For the note: ChaiScript is from Jason Turner. He also does CPPCast ( [LINK] ) and is a regular presenter at CPPCon ( [VIDEO] ). Many of his videos / tutorials are worth a look if you are interested in C++.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22685633,"author":"inetknght","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Getting started with bare-metal assembly","text":"> And once You think you\u2019ve run hw to its limits there are plentiful demos and examples around to blow your mind watching what people have been able to do with these machines (often in obscure ways). What blew my mind was using a modern C++ compiler to build optimized software for that old hardware. Here's an example with the Commodore 64 [0]. [0]: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22966281,"author":"magicalhippo","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Comparison of C++17, Go, and Java for a next-generation sequencing tool","text":"> I was hoping someone could prove this, actually. Maybe this presentation by Jason Turner from CppCon 2016 can illustrate just what can be done in C++17. His target in the presentation is a C64, but I think it illustrates well just what you can do with the language, and hence what tools are available for writing fast code. [VIDEO] edit: If you just want a quick fix, check out what a simple keyword does here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22983932,"author":"dhsysusbsjsi","month":"2020-04","story_title":"I translated a simple C program to x86_64 and it was slower","text":"This talk proves this point exactly: [VIDEO] Watch from 27:00 where he talks about using const wherever possible so the compiler can optimise. It reduces a full function call to work out a colour in 3D space from thousands of instructions to one. After watching this and a few others particularly dynamic dispatch in Swift, I find myself adding as many hints as I can and applying the most restrictions / scoping possible. Final, const, Private etc. [LINK] Even though actually it can work this out in your module!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31409213,"author":"einpoklum","month":"2022-05","story_title":"Common libraries and data structures for C","text":"> Nor does it have any concern for the elegance of its design. It has a lot of inelegant facilities, which, when used under the hood, allow you to express your elegant abstractions. > Hence the common practice of using a small subset C++ and pretending it's just C with Extras. That's mostly failure to use C++. Since C++11, and especially with later updates to the standard, idiomatic C++ is very different from C - even if you're not using a lot of the standard library. I'll link to a talk already linked-to in another comment in this discussion: Rich code for tiny computers / Jason Turner, CppCon 2016 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32822454,"author":"ciroduran","month":"2022-09","story_title":"8bitworkshop","text":"Creativity flourishes with the right restrictions. In this case, the graphics and sound limitations. Also, just because you're targeting old platforms doesn't mean you need to use old platform's tools. Modern tools make it so much easier to develop on these old platforms, check out this talk about coding in C++17 for the Commodore 64 [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34946045,"author":"0xcde4c3db","month":"2023-02","story_title":"I learned to program a C64 in basic and compiled C (2020) [video]","text":"There's a great talk [1] in which C++17 features are used to build an efficient Pong clone on C64. As I recall, the author wound up writing an (obviously limited) x86-to-6502 translator to get around the lack of 6502 support. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zDEpeWQHtFU":[{"hn_comment_id":16147831,"author":"jdiaz5513","month":"2018-01","story_title":"Stanford CS9: Problem-Solving for the CS Technical Interview","text":"Careful. Software engineering is very much a real engineering discipline, and it is a major cultural failing to not recognize it as such. Required viewing: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9674781,"author":"rb2k_","month":"2015-06","story_title":"Why Software Engineering Isn\u2019t Engineering","text":"I don't have a particular dog in this fight, but I thought this is interesting: The last O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference had a talk by Glenn Vanderburg titled \"why software development is an engineering discipline\": [VIDEO] I think the author of the blogpost does a lot of the things discussed in the talk (e.g. comparing it mostly to civil engineering as opposed to all the other engineering disciplines).","stance":"rec"}],"zDZFcDGpL4U":[{"hn_comment_id":5041602,"author":"manglav","month":"2013-01","story_title":"The Case for a Teacher Bar Exam","text":"I have a question for HN. At what point do you become responsible for your own education? Before, you may have not had a public library near you. Nowadays, there is too much information. Curation? Multiple MOOC's have taken the problem and squashed it. Internet Access? I'm not sure, but I remember reading that Comcast gives subsidized rates in poor income areas. Computers / Notebooks? This I'm not sure about at all. What access do people have? Assuming people have access to education, at what point are \"educators\" defunct? I feel as though I would not have gone to high school had these MOOC's been available. However, I did have enough personal curiosity to pursue these things. In college now, I'm not \"spoon fed\" anymore, it is my responsibility to do well, and seek out help if I am struggling. I am just curious where people think that line is drawn, and if it's different for everyone or not. I am for the Bar exam - for goodness's sake, we still have teachers trying to teach Creationism! One of my favorite videos on reforming education, from a very logical perspective from Sir Ken Robinson. Bonus: it's pictorially animated! [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":9574597,"author":"pcurve","month":"2015-05","story_title":"The Sound of TED: A Case for Distaste","text":"Some of these talks (not just TED) are incredibly inspiring. I particularly love the ones that were turned into RSA Animate. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12345306,"author":"crack-the-code","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Overselling A.D.H.D.","text":"While I do think that ADHD is a real condition, I don't think that the solution is to medicate children with a very serious life changing drug that alters the core aspects of a child's personality and behavior. The true solution is to revamp our country's education system and provide a framework that can accommodate the wide variety of personalities that come into the classroom. Instead of forcing children to think one way, we should let them think the way they NATURALLY think, and flourish with their native mindset. I strongly recommend this eye-opening video for those of you who haven't already seen it: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":2479401,"author":"DanielRibeiro","month":"2011-04","story_title":"MIT Creates The One Video Game You'll Be Thrilled To See Your Kid Get Hooked On","text":"This RSA video shows some reasons why the current education systems (not only US') has the problems it has: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10226614,"author":"nadams","month":"2015-09","story_title":"14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School","text":"If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence - I should remind you of 3 events: - A teacher confiscates Linux CDs claiming that the student was essentially distributing illegal copyrighted software - because no software is free [1] - A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. There is a lot of controversy about this case - but I read one news article (that I can't find right now) where the administration said they would have been ok with cancer research folding@home rather than searching for aliens with seti@home. This combined with the backpedaling of \"oh actually he was a bad employee, stole things, and cost the school millions in extra in electricity costs!\" makes me believe that they just wanted to use it as an excuse to fire him and make the position open for a friend/relative. [2]. - Or an honor roll student suspended for buying candy from another student [3]. His statuses were only restored after it caught media attention. I would go into my rant about the education system but you should just watch this video [4] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":10861110,"author":"progressive_dad","month":"2016-01","story_title":"The concept of \u201clearning styles\u201d is one of the greatest neuroscience myths","text":"Most education research is about how to evaluate TEACHERS not children. If you want to help children then you're better off starting here: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":11800904,"author":"LionessLover","month":"2016-05","story_title":"On the Wildness of Children","text":"An indirect response: Try this for another explanation/point of view (it's kept short and to the point): [VIDEO] (About the speaker: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23165626,"author":"bsldld","month":"2020-05","story_title":"A non-moral dilemma about cheating, but it brings up some points (2019)","text":"Isn't cheating a symptom of the failure in how the education system works? This^ very interesting video of Ken Robinson produced by RSA was recently posted by someone on this forum. It diagnose this problem very well. Trying to put kids in a system that is boxed due to constraints of age, time, subjects and grades is very harmful for the real development of individual kids. Kids understand this and get disengaged from the system but still have to force themselves to follow along because they are not provided with an alternative. ^ [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23352686,"author":"cmehdy","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Seven-year-olds as hackers, and why we should imitate them","text":"The author might like an illustrated summary of a talk given by Sir Ken Robinson about \"Changing education paradigms\"[0], which includes some of the essence of this article (particularly referring to studies about how many uses one person can think of for a paperclip) [0] RSA Animate: [VIDEO] [1] Full talk (55 mins): [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23755941,"author":"austinl","month":"2020-07","story_title":"Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study","text":"I wholeheartedly agree, and came out so disillusioned with the public education system that I'm struggling to decide what the right answer will be for my children. I understand that many kids are not this way, but I was the type that read physics textbooks while in elementary school. We had a mentorship program that paired kids with someone from two grades above (e.g. 1st graders with 3rd graders). My reading level was always higher than my mentors' and it made me furious (and probably insufferable). I feel like my entire time in school was spent getting it out of the way so I could study things that genuinely interested me. I would love for my children to not feel that same constraint, but instead feel free to go deeper at their own pace. I'd recommend this talk by Sir Ken Robinson on this topic generally: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zFhYJRqz_xk":[{"hn_comment_id":36163653,"author":"mabbo","month":"2023-06","story_title":"Radiation-hardened Quine: A quine that works after any one character is deleted","text":"There's a great video recently by Kurzgesagt video recently[0] on just how hard the immune system works to identify and kill any cell that is not cooperating anymore. In a nutshell, the DNA fails at protecting from changes all the time, and the immune system is constantly checking for that and killing off those cells. [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":36693011,"author":"borbulon","month":"2023-07","story_title":"Cancer\u2019s origin story features predictable plot line","text":"I found Kurzgesagt has a very good ELI5 on how cancer grows in the body: [VIDEO] I have lung cancer, stage 4. My cancer has a mutation that is uncommon in lung cancers (< 2%), but common in breast cancers (> 25%). All of the treatments for my mutation are breast cancer treatments. It has been alternately not too bad and hellish getting insurance to agree to give me medications that could be saving my life. That plus a previous steroid-treated pneumonitis disqualifies me from about 90% of clinical trials, so the tip-of-the-spear treatments (CRISPR-T, CRISPR-NK) are unavailable to me. So yes, lots of advancements are being made...in common cancers. Uncommon cancers, we have to wait and take the older stuff, or stuff that's just been approved. And even through all of that, it's a crap shoot as to whether it will work or not. I took 2 conjugates, in the same class of medication - each had a slightly different chemo med. One worked fabulously, about halved the size of my main tumor. The other did nothing, and ended up giving me neuropathy in my feet (it can be numbness, but in my case it felt like my feet were on fire, 24/7. I am on a medication now to fix that, and my feet feel totally normal). Fun fact - the neuropathy chances for that med were stated as 0%. I guess someone rounded down from 0.1%, because I got it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40234008,"author":"gnyman","month":"2024-05","story_title":"mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma in 48 Hours","text":"Not a book, but the Kurzgesagt series on cancer are a great start. [VIDEO] and [LINK] Also while not about cancer specifically, the book Immune by the kurzgesagt founder Philipp Dettmer has a chapter on it and the relation to the immune system. Which is very relevant for these new immunotherapies.","stance":"rec"}],"zNVQfWC_evg":[{"hn_comment_id":32458914,"author":"Eupraxias","month":"2022-08","story_title":"What is quantum field theory and why is it incomplete?","text":"I would love to hear any critical take on David Tong's excellent video here: [VIDEO] \"Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe\" I'm interested to talk to others who want to think about QFT past the maths. I had my own stab at making sense of related ontological implications here: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42630079,"author":"thekevan","month":"2025-01","story_title":"A video tour of the Standard Model (2021)","text":"When I see \"explanation of the Standard Model\", my mind immediately goes to my favorite YT video, which is Dr Tong's talk at the Royal Institution. I started watching this video and it took me a second to recognize the voice, it's him as well! If you want a long version: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43764552,"author":"jaggs","month":"2025-04","story_title":"David Tong Lectures on Theoretical Physics","text":"His quantum mechanics lecture on YouTube at the Royal Society I think, is a masterpiece. Some very interesting facts, mostly about what we don't know. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21845285,"author":"TheFiend7","month":"2019-12","story_title":"What Makes the Hardest Equations in Physics So Difficult? (2018)","text":"Honestly I feel as though that's one of the most incredible aspects of theoretical physics I've seen. The fact that often times these underlying physics are danced around and even though they're unknown, we can tell something is not quite right. I believe this guy even talks about it a bit in this video made by the Royal Institution (which I really enjoy watching), discussing the possibility of different fundamental building blocks of nature. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32139016,"author":"Agamus","month":"2022-07","story_title":"Why Read Fichte Today?","text":"Agreed - mathematics is predicated on the idea that there are individual things, but as we are learning, through things like quantum field theory, there are no individual things, hence, no individuated 'things' to count. As such, mathematics is not the 'language of nature'. Check out David Tang's lecture on QFT: \"there are no particles, only waves\" [VIDEO] Mathematics still works (at our scale); the consequence is precision. Individuation of anything is a construct - including subjects and objects: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34157386,"author":"Eupraxias","month":"2022-12","story_title":"The Zen Anti-Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2021)","text":"All of this makes more sense when understood in terms of Field theory: David Tong: Quantum Fields [VIDEO] \"All the electrons that are in your body are not fundamental. All the electrons that exist in your body are waves of the same underlying field.\" The next question is, if there are no individual things, what does math count? [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"zQGOcOUBi6s":[{"hn_comment_id":10205466,"author":"Houshalter","month":"2015-09","story_title":"Informative YouTube channels","text":"You won't become a physicist from watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos , but I found it immensely educational. It's worth knowing what science knows about what the universe is and our place in it. Of course you aren't going to become an expert in astronomy, but you don't need to be. Many, certainly not all, but many of these videos are educational in the same sense. They give a layman a basic grasp of a complex subject. E.g. this video on the immune system won't make you a biologist, but it's still pretty informative: [VIDEO] These are the kinds of videos that teachers might show in a classroom. Certainly they are way better made than the cheesy, poorly made educational videos I saw in school. And to be fair, all of this stuff is entertainment, even Cosmos. There's no practical value to me to learn about how stars are made, or how the immune system works. But I find these things interesting.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25347566,"author":"bun_at_work","month":"2020-12","story_title":"First person receives Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in UK","text":"[VIDEO] Here's a nice video on the immune system that might help you out. Their other videos on the immune system, the complement system, and viruses might also be helpful. Not the most technical deep dives, but good, abstracted explanations. In short, I don't think the vaccine prevents entry of the virus into the cells. That still happens, as it's a mechanical protein interaction (as far as I know). However, the vaccine (mRNA ones at least) work by producing the protein on the outside of the virus and putting that in your system, so your immune system learns how to respond. At least that's my mile-high interpretation.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27654283,"author":"123pie123","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Is one vaccine dose enough if you\u2019ve had Covid? What the science says","text":"this video is good simple(ish) explaination - note it says bacteria, but the vid is for most things that are invasive [VIDEO] It's from the Kurzgesagt \u2013 In a Nutshell channel","stance":"rec"}],"zSIDRHUWlVo":[{"hn_comment_id":8807814,"author":"yarone","month":"2014-12","story_title":"What is good running technique?","text":"This is the best video I have seen on natura running form: [VIDEO] Also, The creator of the pose running method recently released a new book that details proper running form step by step with specific exercises and instruction: The Running Revolution: How to Run Faster, Farther, and Injury-Free--for Life [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20770028,"author":"cbmcday","month":"2019-08","story_title":"A Tarahumara woman won a Mexican ultramarathon in sandals (2017)","text":"Not the person you asked, and I have paid attention to this. I found \"Run for Your Life\" [1][2] to have useful insights and tips. The biggest one for me was starting with foot landing, where the outside of the foot near the little toe hits first, it spreads out nicely to start taking body weight. Then letting the rest of the outside of the foot land until the heel touches, and then somewhat relax the calf muscle and pull the heel back and slightly roll the ankle in, so the big toe is loaded for the push back and lift off. I play around with variations and sometimes, it becomes almost effortless, almost floating along, even on hard surface. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23175929,"author":"cachestash","month":"2020-05","story_title":"Improve your walking technique","text":"Not OP, but I am a nationally qualified running coach (in my spare time outside of my day job). I have run all sorts of distances from 5k park runs to 100 mile and above ultra marathons. I have made every mistake in the book and helped quite a few people avoid the same mistakes. To keep things simple with two easy to follow steps: 1. Tall posture, imagine a balloon is tied to the top of your head and is pulling you upwards. 2. Download a metronome app to your phone and set it around 170 and in time climb up to 175 180 if it feels ok. You then want to time each foot strike to a beep. This will cause your stride to narrow and discourage an overstride. When you overstride the foot extends forwards and the force of landing gets absorbed by your knee / hips, which is inefficient (its almost like applying a break) and it can cause injury. Running at a high cadence tends to make you ligter on your feet and encourages a good foot strike (under the cartridge of the hips), landing in this way benefits from the elasticity we have in our tendons and you get a certain amount of energy return from this. This video describes it very well and the runner has beautiful form. Just don't try to take it all in, focus on the cadence 170-175-180 rhythm and get that right first [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zT58pzY41wA":[{"hn_comment_id":27144621,"author":"jrockway","month":"2021-05","story_title":"Midair Collision over Denver","text":"Here's an analysis of the CAPS system's safety record: [VIDEO] (contains some good footage of an SR22 parachuting into the ocean, and into the ground). This is a good overview on the survivability of water landings: [LINK] . I haven't watched the video recently but I think even a 172 that cartwheels after landing has a pretty good survivability rate, something like 90%. Parachute is a nice to have, of course.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":32800779,"author":"throw0101c","month":"2022-09","story_title":"Cirrus Vision Jet Pilot Pulls Chute in Florida","text":"AVweb did an interesting video a couple of years ago, \"Are Planes With Parachutes Really Safer?\": > The Cirrus line of aircraft have been flying for 20 years and although most people in aviation know they have full aircraft parachutes, it's fair to ask how effective these have been. With more than 90 uses of the so-called CAPS, has the system really saved lives? In this video, AVweb's Paul Bertorelli analyzes the record. * [VIDEO] Concludes that parachutes a generally a good thing, and even though the Cirrus aircraft fleet has grown from 5000 to 7000 airplanes over the last ten years (12m30s), the anual fatality numbers have stay the same and so have overall annual accidents. The first few years didn't see much improvement, probably because the training didn't emphasize it as much, but since ~2013 the advice is generally \" if you're experiencing issues just pull the 'chute \". There is a cost to fixing the aircraft afterwards, but it will be you paying it and not your widow or estate.","stance":"rec"}],"zU7Lww-sBPg":[{"hn_comment_id":25146697,"author":"friendlybus","month":"2020-11","story_title":"I should have loved biology","text":"Oh, well the 'current' argument is that it's unlikely for a bunch of reasons. - cambrian explosion of life is seen as unlikely given that changing random genes or dna mutations has such a low success rate in generating new life, that an explosion of life happening all at once seems out of step with the math. - we don't know how to create life at all. adding up bits and pieces of molecules into cells and onwards can be screwed up at any point in the process and has to start over from square one to succeed. people in the lab can't even get it right and they can write down their progress and adapt unlike nature. - self-organizing molecules and natural forces guided towards life haven't been seen yet to exist in nature, it has no expressed intent or will to self-organize into life. randomness and infinite time just isn't enough I don't see the evidence that local minima and maxima changes in body shape, size, ect, act to completely change the species of an animal. There's a long debate running from the 1980s on this stuff, it's just getting views on youtube more recently and becoming properly structured and scientific arguments instead of just conjecture. The stephen meyer 'intelligent design', david berlinski 'doubting darwin', ect arguments. The hoover institute did a piece a few years ago on youtube. James Tour has a great series on origin of life that shows in the hard tasks of applying biology we are way off knowing how any of this works. [VIDEO] The counter arguments to ste","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31014648,"author":"freediver","month":"2022-04","story_title":"Human brain compresses working memories into low-res \u2018summaries\u2019","text":"> Afaik we are very close to artificially creating living cells. This is one recent example [1]. I beg to differ. It may look impressive on the surface, just like GPT-3 looks impressive on the surface, but is far from the real thing. It is just another extension of the ladder to the Moon. The effort described in the article is nowhere near a living cell. It lacks protein building and DNA/RNA mechanisms. They basically describe a group of nanomotors. I can recommend watching James Tour on this very topic [1] and Stephen Meyer on the related topic of intelligent design [2]. Those two lectures were eye-opening for me learning more about this field. Note: both of them are self-confessed theist scientists which to me did not represent a problem (my viewes are agnostic, and it only made it more interesting as you rarely get to hear different views about these matters than pop-sci). > The consciousness part is similar to AGI. It is not clear what you mean by that. One thing is to build computer code and then have it manifest 'intelligence'. Whole another thing is doing same with organic matter that can not be 'programmed', even if we knew how to do it (let alone there is no evidence that 'programming' is responsible for consciousness at all to begin with). This is also known as 'hard problem of consciousness' and David Chalmers is considered one of the leading experts in the field [3]. Basically smartest scientists in the world are clueless about this and do not know even where to b","stance":"strong_rec"}],"zUyH3XhpLTo":[{"hn_comment_id":19624325,"author":"turshija","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]","text":"Related video, made by Veritasium yesterday, is one of my favorite videos in a long time. He explained how the prediction of this image was made (before the image got released) and the video is great and fun to watch. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19624358,"author":"JumpCrisscross","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]","text":"Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the way it does [1]. TL; DR The dark area is the entire surface of the event horizon, including the side facing away from us, plus some more due to photons missing the event horizon \"directly\" being drawn in. One side is brighter due to its being Doppler boosted. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19625580,"author":"delecti","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]","text":"If you mean the brightness asymmetry, it's because the accretion disc is spinning. This video predicts pretty well all of the features we expected to find, and it lines up with the actual image. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19629201,"author":"tempestn","month":"2019-04","story_title":"Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]","text":"The black hole itself is spherical, but the light we're seeing around it isn't projected by the event horizon; rather, it's light from behind/around the black hole that isn't blocked. This video explains in much more detail: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20373483,"author":"kaslai","month":"2019-07","story_title":"A Ring of Controversy Around a Black Hole Photo","text":"Derek explains the physics in a reasonably understandable manner in this video on his Youtube channel: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21112376,"author":"sudhirj","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Simulation of what a massive black hole would look like","text":"There's a clearer explanation of why the disk looks that way and how the gravitational warp makes those light paths [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21116203,"author":"sova","month":"2019-09","story_title":"Simulation of what a massive black hole would look like","text":"Veritasium made an excellent youtube video explaining how this effect works (before the image was released!) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28331068,"author":"gus_massa","month":"2021-08","story_title":"First image of a black hole: a CNRS researcher had simulated it as early as 1979","text":"If the black hole is not spinning, it should look the same from every angle. A spinning black hole is deformed (like the spinning Earth.) Anyway, we are not seeing the black hole (because it looks just like a black circle in front of a black background). The interesting part of the image is a disk of material spinning around it. There is a nice 3d cardboard simulation and clear explanation in a video by Veritasium [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zVhQOhxb1Mc":[{"hn_comment_id":16638809,"author":"shaqbert","month":"2018-03","story_title":"No Longer a Secret: How Israel Destroyed Syria's Nuclear Reactor","text":"In context, here is a great video from the Belfer center on nuclear bomb making and what are the hard parts [0]. Getting the fission material is the hard part, and in order to get plutonium nukes you need a enrichment plant, i.e. a reactor that is not meant to produce energy but breed plutonium. [0] [VIDEO] (at min 47, he starts talking about the hard parts)","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41464016,"author":"virgulino","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?","text":"For anyone interested in the basics of nuclear weapons, I highly recommend the \"Nuclear 101: How Nuclear Bombs Work\" lectures by Matthew Bunn, a man heavily involved in nuclear arms control. His lectures are always highly entertaining, a real pleasure to watch. This is a clip from his lecture explaining the basics of thermonuclear warheads: [LINK] And the full \u201cNuclear 101\u201d lecture, in two parts: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":34567568,"author":"verdverm","month":"2023-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What happens if a nuclear missile is air-destroyed before detonation?","text":"[VIDEO] has a good explanation of how nuclear weapons work. It may be possible that a missel is disabled and when it hits the ground, produces a much lower yield explosion than designed for, in particular a plutonium device, if I recall the video and extrapolate with sufficient accuracy","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42188478,"author":"nordsieck","month":"2024-11","story_title":"El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest","text":"> It's because of the way the weapons are designed, which requires a CNWDI clearance to know, so your curiosity is not likely to be sated. While that's true, the information that is online is surprisingly detailed. For example, this series \"Nuclear 101: How Nuclear Bombs Work\" [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"zZ_nI9E9g0I":[{"hn_comment_id":7199464,"author":"traviscj","month":"2014-02","story_title":"A Lazy Evaluation \u2013 Why I Find Learning Haskell Hard","text":"I haven't ever done anything too significant in Haskell, but the Jekor Redo [1] videos are fantastic, and demonstrate the slow building up of more complicated things than \"reverse this string.\" I haven't watched his xmonad [2] or pandoc [3] videos yet, but I would bet that they are highly worthwhile as well. - 1: [VIDEO] - 2: [LINK] - 3: [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":8156829,"author":"minikomi","month":"2014-08","story_title":"Getting It Done with Haskell","text":"There's definitely a stage when you want to graduate from bottom-up tinkering & learning the underlying concepts to making things -- this is where I feel there's a big gap in the haskell materials right now. There's some great screncasts though which have been helpful. [LINK] - Implement a sed clone in Haskell (a bit broken towards the end but a great look at a small incremental project) [VIDEO] - implementing redo in Haskell","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29720034,"author":"mavelikara","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Redo: A recursive, general-purpose build system","text":"Chris Forno (jekor) made an implementation of djb's redo in Haskell. The videos of him live coding it are on YouTube, and I recommended it for anyone wanting to learn Haskell. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"z_dt7NG38V4":[{"hn_comment_id":24787496,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2020-10","story_title":"Re-Thinking the Desktop OS","text":"Good that you mention Engelbart, because none of the mainstream desktop OSes are close to his ideas, or what the Xerox workstations allowed for, ironically Windows is probably the one most closest to it. While GNU/Linux have the necessary tooling for making it as well, but thanks to the fragmentation and some communities hatred against GNOME/KDE, it will never happen. This is what a modern desktop OS should look like, \"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar\" [VIDEO] Including the part of being written on a memory safe systems programming language.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25622823,"author":"pjmlp","month":"2021-01","story_title":"On Repl-Driven Programming","text":"Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. \"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar\" [VIDEO] \"Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0\" [LINK] \"Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo\" [LINK] \"SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO\" [LINK] \"Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk\" [LINK] \"Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988\" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) [LINK] \"The Interlisp programming environment\" [LINK] And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage [LINK] [LINK]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30003729,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Xerox PARC Mesa Programming Language 5.0 (1979) [pdf]","text":"Previous HN discussion about that video: [LINK] [VIDEO] I posted about PCR: [LINK] This is a great video! They discussed and demonstrate Cedar's early text selection, copy and move commands, and compare them to Larry Tesler\u2019s cut and paste (which didn't require any special keys or more than one mouse button). The Tioga text editor and other Cedar applications made common operations like repeatedly copying text into a document from different places very easy and streamlined (fewer actions than cut, copy and paste), by using the shift key while selecting text. Cedar took full advantage of the three button mouse as well as the control and shift keys (for 12 combinations of actions in any context, that worked the same everywhere). I think SunView and maybe even OpenWindows also supported a similar (but obscure) \u201cquick paste\u201d mode, where you hold down the special \u201cCopy\u201d function key, select some text without disturbing the current input focus, cursor position, or text selection, and then when you release the key, that text is pasted into the current input focus at the current position, moving the cursor forward. That way you didn\u2019t have to lose your current selection or position, in order to just select some other text and copy it in. Here, I found the code to do it in an old version of NeWS -- it was the cut key to move, or the paste key to copy, and it's called the \"Secondary\" selection (rank=Secondary): [LINK] % Cut key: Either delete the primary selection (stashing it % on the","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22456902,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2020-03","story_title":"Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-server windowing systems (2013)","text":"There are definitely a lot of difficult issues and trade-offs about implementing true \"WYSIWYG\" editors that let you layout text and graphics that looks exactly the same on the screen and when printed. This Cedar demonstration video has some great examples of many of these issues. The Tioga text editor was \"WYSIMOLWYG\": what you see is more or less what you get. [VIDEO] Some problems were due to technology and aren't as bad any more. Cedar and NeWS used black-and-white screens and didn't have anti-aliased fonts. CPUs were much slower and memory was much tighter and graphics were not accelerated, so even with color displays (which were usually only 8 bits with a colormap that makes anti-aliasing very difficult), anti-aliased text wasn't practical. And fonts rendered at screen resolutions have totally different measurements than high resolution printed fonts, so words have different widths and get flowed and wrapped differently, so the formatting is quite different. NeWS had a \"setprintermatch\" primitive that makes the font rendering machinery use the official precise printer measurements for fonts, instead of the actual pixel screen measurements. That was useful for the PostScript previewer, and for editors previewing how formatted text will look. (There was a nice port of FrameMaker to NeWS, but I don't remember how its preview features worked.) But text rendered with printer metrics looks terrible and is hard to read, so you wouldn't want to actually edit text like that. NeW","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25788846,"author":"Grumbledour","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Oberon OS Walkthrough (2009)","text":"It is inspired by it as the wikipedia[0] article notes. Both are inspired by Cedar/Mesa[1] from PARC. There is a great video of Eric Bier showing some of cedars capabilities on youtube[2]. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41855170,"author":"DonHopkins","month":"2024-10","story_title":"The Future of Big Iron: An Interview with IBM\u2019s Christian Jacobi","text":"Here's another great historic oral history panel with a live demo of Xerox PARC's Cedar, including Eric Bier, Nick Briggs, Chris Jacobi, and Paul McJones: Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar This interpretive production was created from archival footage of Eric Bier, PARC research scientist, demonstrating the Cedar integrated environment and programming language on January 24, 2019. Cedar was an evolution of the Mesa environment/language, developed at PARC\u2019s Computer Science Laboratory originally for the Xerox Alto. Mesa was modular and strongly-typed, and influenced the later Modula family of languages. Cedar/Mesa ran on the D-machine successors to the Alto (such as the Dorado) and added features including garbage collection, and was later ported to Sun workstations. Cedar/Mesa\u2019s integrated environment featured a graphical window system and a text editor, Tioga, which could be used for both programming and document preparation, allowing for fonts, styles, and graphics to be embedded in code files. The editor and all its commands were also available everywhere, including on the command console and in text fields. The demo itself is running through a Mac laptop remotely logged into Bier\u2019s Sun workstation at PARC using X Windows. Bier demonstrates the Cedar development environment, Tioga editor, editing commands using three mouse buttons, sophisticated text search features, the command line, and the Gargoyle graphics editor, which was developed as part of Bier\u2019s UC Berkeley Ph.D. diss","stance":"rec"}],"z_hm5oX7ZlE":[{"hn_comment_id":27617153,"author":"stefanpie","month":"2021-06","story_title":"The Night Watch: The Missing Pieces","text":"Robert Erdmann also gave a keynote talk at PyCon US 2021 about how they used Python for most of digitization and processing of the Night Watch (aka Operation Night Watch). Fascinating talk with tones of technical details. Link: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29551163,"author":"rocmcd","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Rijksmuseum to Stage the Largest Vermeer Exhibition in 2023","text":"I can\u2019t hear about the Rijksmuseum without thinking of the presentation Rob Erdmann did at Pycon on how they imaged Rembrandt\u2019s Night Watch: [VIDEO] Incredible work being done there. I\u2019m glad to see they\u2019re continuing to make headlines.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29654848,"author":"oqb23","month":"2021-12","story_title":"Ask HN: Best Talks of 2021?","text":"Robert Erdmann's keynote at PyCon: [VIDEO] The talk centers around Erdmann's use of python in \"combining materials science, computer science, and imaging science to help the world access, preserve, and understand its cultural heritage\". The technical complexity and nuance that went into the project was truly jaw-dropping. This was the first talk I immediately felt the urge to share with multiple co-workers & friends.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41609196,"author":"cyberlimerence","month":"2024-09","story_title":"Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch (2022)","text":"For anyone interested in technical aspects of this, I recommend watching Pycon talk [1] from Robert Erdmann. I bookmarked this couple of years ago. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"za56H2BGamQ":[{"hn_comment_id":31903412,"author":"noahmasur","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Why America can\u2019t build","text":"The problem is that \"inducing demand\" for people who would otherwise take public transit doesn't actually increase efficiency. Putting more cars on the road is not necessarily a net benefit. See this video from CityNerd for more details: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40549101,"author":"tidbits","month":"2024-06","story_title":"In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them","text":"Books are not a finite resource? Obviously there is a finite number of trees but there are enough for it not to be a bottleneck. Land on the hand is a finite resource, especially in large, urban cities. There is no way to design a highway or other car infrastructure that will meet the demands of any reasonably sized city without dedicating an unreasonable amount of land to cars. Anyway, Ray explains it better than I could and he agrees that the term is bad: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41024148,"author":"oblio","month":"2024-07","story_title":"I mapped almost every USA traffic death in the 21st century","text":"Have you read anything or watched anything about induced demand or did you just read the expression and figured it all out by yourself? [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zaUCDZ9d09Y":[{"hn_comment_id":41908784,"author":"sfblah","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Can SpaceX land a rocket with 1/2 cm accuracy?","text":"[LINK] Edit: Just out of curiosity, I looked up his video about Starlink, and his point was it's a bad business, not that it's physically impossible to do it: [VIDEO] I'd actually love it if you could find a single thing he says in that video that's provably false. I'm quite confident history will judge Elon Musk properly, as the \"Too Big To Fail\" version of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46166430,"author":"spwa4","month":"2025-12","story_title":"SpaceX in Talks for Share Sale That Would Boost Valuation to $800B","text":"Probably a good idea to do it now, because Trump has made sure SpaceX is about to have yet another European, a Chinese and an Indian competitor soon. 2 out of 3 have already demonstrated landing a rocket, as has Blue origin in the US with the New Glenn launch + landing. Plus a few countries are thinking about it, at least Switzerland, South Korea and Israel if you can believe it. Also the EU has setup a working Starlink competitor (by approving the feature on \"old\" satellites), and China is already doing launches and theirs should be at least partially operational. Russia claims to have a working Starlink competitor and India is building one. Oh and as for profitability ... not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before, with the most spectacular crash being Iridium, but that was far from the only attempt+bankruptcy building Space internet. Well, the economics are discussed in this video: [VIDEO] TLDR: SpaceX is bankrupt, Starlink is a pets.com \"We lose on every sale but make it up on volume\" style move. So yes, high time to sell the stock indeed. Oh, and Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars and will be the first private company getting a payload to Mars soon (the \"ESCAPADE\" mission). As in payload is on the way and there's no way SpaceX can catch up anymore. In fact it's pretty tough finding another rocket manufacturer that has not launched a mission to Mars. Boeing has launched payloads to Mars. Blue origin has. Arianespace has. Russia has. Not especially economically r","stance":"rec"}],"zaXKQ70q4KQ":[{"hn_comment_id":42546649,"author":"wenc","month":"2024-12","story_title":"Intolerable Genius: Berkeley's Most Controversial Nobel Laureate (2019)","text":"Veritassium did a recent video on Kary Mullis and PCR. It's one of the most accessible videos on PCR I've ever come across (I have no background in biology), and also an interesting history of Kary Mullis. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42654440,"author":"fhe","month":"2025-01","story_title":"Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things","text":"Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (goodreads link: [LINK] ) for a short video version of this history, see [VIDEO] from Veritasium. reasons for recommendation: - it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread - the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery - the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).","stance":"rec"}],"zb7Bs98KmnY":[{"hn_comment_id":40944255,"author":"samat","month":"2024-07","story_title":"The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy (2014)","text":"There is an excellent video about Lightbulb Cartel by Technology Connections, highly recommended if you want an engineers perspective, with no 'great conspiracy' hype. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37046507,"author":"audunw","month":"2023-08","story_title":"List of the longest-lasting incandescent light bulbs","text":"Technology Connections talked a lot about this and the supposed planned obsolescence of light bulbs [VIDEO] TL;DW: (if I rember correctly) Bulbs with shorter lifespans are generally more energy efficient. There was good reasons to not making bulb that last forever.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":37827759,"author":"TaylorAlexander","month":"2023-10","story_title":"The Anatomy of a Smart Bulb","text":"Honestly that story is really not as simple as people suggest it is. There is a tradeoff between bulb life and brightness and standardization may have been good for the industry. Technology Connections does a thoughtful deep dive in to this story in this recent video: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38063593,"author":"PaulKeeble","month":"2023-10","story_title":"Apple's Blue Ocean","text":"Its a bit of a myth for ever lasting bulbs, its more complicated than that. The life time was a trade off of colour and brightness. If you made them very red shifted and quite dim then there are bulbs that are very old still around, but they don't produce much light and never did. The harder you drive the filament the better the light properties but the quicker it died. The industry choose a point for trade offs as a standard. You can watch about the history of it on Technology connections. [VIDEO] Saying that the Dubai Philips LED bulbs really do last a lot longer since they have twice the filaments and run the filaments a lot less hard as a result (as well as being more efficient). It is possible nowadays to make an LED that wont fail anytime soon although LEDs are already much better than incandescents in that regard but there are ones that will likely survive your lifetime available at a higher price but only in Dubai. Most LED bulbs are designed to fail sooner, but they are also cheaper. Those 10k recharge batteries are absolutely coming and we will have them in a few years time, li-ion as it stands today will simply be obsolete.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40703804,"author":"mmkhd","month":"2024-06","story_title":"How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court","text":"Nice video from the well known channel Technology Connections: [VIDEO] => It's complicated. Yes, there was a cartel, but it was not all bad. There were legitimate reasons to go for 1000h light bulbs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40703828,"author":"Youden","month":"2024-06","story_title":"How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court","text":"It wasn't as simple as them wanting to make more money: [VIDEO] Key points from an AI summary: - Incandescent bulbs had to balance factors like light output, efficiency, and lifespan - hotter filaments produced brighter, whiter light but reduced bulb lifespan. - Longer-lasting bulbs were less efficient and produced dimmer, yellower light, so they were not simply \"better\" products being suppressed. - The 1,000 hour target was a reasonable compromise that balanced these competing priorities, not necessarily a sinister plot. - Even after the Phoebus cartel dissolved, the 1,000 hour lifespan remained the industry standard for general-purpose incandescent bulbs.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41184757,"author":"torginus","month":"2024-08","story_title":"East Germany invented 'unbreakable' drinking glasses","text":"Actually Technology Connections made a great youtube video on this: [VIDEO] The gist is that by running bulbs at a lower power, you can greatly prolong its life, but the downside is that it doesn't heat up as much, and since emissions spectrum correllates with temperature, ends up being much worse at converting electricity to light, which ends up being not worth it.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":42262871,"author":"RulerOf","month":"2024-11","story_title":"The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory","text":"It's true that the Phoebus cartel arranged to have light bulbs die after a certain number of hours, but bulb lifetime is a trade off between lumens, filament life, and energy consumption. The cartel-defined lifetime limit sits very close to the sweet spot for all of those metrics for incandescent bulbs. Technology Connections explained this well in a video about a year ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":49129743,"author":"mreome","month":"2026-07","story_title":"You have been mislead about lightbulbs","text":"For an even deeper dive into this topic... Technology Connections: Longer-lasting light bulbs: it was complicated [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zcqZHYo7ONs":[{"hn_comment_id":19341655,"author":"justinpombrio","month":"2019-03","story_title":"How random can you be?","text":"> Are you saying an omniscient being is impossible, because something about quantum mechanics implies that it is impossible to possess all possible knowledge? > Or are you saying that even if an omniscient being possesses all possible knowledge, they would nevertheless be unable to accurately predict all sequences because of some knowledge we have about quantum mechanics? That's an extremely astute question. I'm impressed that you managed to realize that that's an important distinction and that you don't know which it is. It's actually the latter, and incredibly we can prove it. And the proof of this is surprisingly accessible: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":21345896,"author":"cdumler","month":"2019-10","story_title":"Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off","text":"My goal wasn't to explain a \"correct\" view quantum physics, only to demonstrate at a cursory level that a binary computer's bits differs from a quantum computer's qbits. Quantum physics is not intuitive and attempting to use a classical understanding of probability will get you in trouble. I highly suggest looking at videos on YouTube, which have a far better explanations on the actual behavior of quantum computation. This is a very good video on Bell's Inequality: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22989793,"author":"ars","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?","text":"Why Quantum Mechanics I have no idea. Why interpretations: There is an experiment you can do that is hard to explain: Either particles are able to somehow influence each other faster than light (non-local), or the particle somehow doesn't exist except when interacting with some other particle (non-real). Try this video: [VIDEO] the AHA moment in the video comes when you realize you can entangle the light and that adding a filter by one stream of light somehow causes the other stream of light to also be influenced.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22990640,"author":"monocasa","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?","text":"Minute Physics and 3brown1blue did a two part collab that simplifies some of it down to a counting problem that'd be suitable for grade school. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22992393,"author":"vulcan01","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone would explain better?","text":"I found these two videos very helpful in understanding the quantum nature of light after being stuck in the same spot: [VIDEO] [LINK] (Watch those in order, because they're a collaboration between two YouTubers)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27095422,"author":"simcop2387","month":"2021-05","story_title":"What did Einstein mean by \u201cspooky action at a distance\u201d?","text":"Part of this is because of tests like the ones involved with Bells theorem. Minute physics does a better job explaining it then I can. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":27098686,"author":"tsimionescu","month":"2021-05","story_title":"What did Einstein mean by \u201cspooky action at a distance\u201d?","text":"I can also suggest a video that seemed to me to explain Bell's theorem and what it means that the correlations are stronger than classically possible here: [0] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39380936,"author":"demurgos","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Inside the proton, the \u2018most complicated thing you could possibly imagine\u2019","text":"I really enjoyed this Minute Physics and 3Blue1Brown video describing hidden variables and Bell's theorem: [VIDEO] As you said, it's implies that we're not failing to measure some \"hidden variable\" that would explain probabilities away, but that the vary nature of these objects is probabilistic.","stance":"rec"}],"zdkyGDqU7xA":[{"hn_comment_id":18354769,"author":"linsomniac","month":"2018-11","story_title":"Build Your Own Professional-Grade Audio Amp on the Sort-Of Cheap","text":"I kind of want to build one of these amps and connect it to a set of speaker built with these cheap exciters... One of the Youtube channels I follow messed around with them [LINK] but he got that from this other video [VIDEO] where he goes into all sorts of experiments he ran on the exciters to find the right design.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31180424,"author":"staindk","month":"2022-04","story_title":"MIT researchers develop a paper thin loudspeaker","text":"Yeah was going to say, this reminded me of this[1] video (series of videos actually, but this is the first in the series). Interesting stuff. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zduSFxRajkE":[{"hn_comment_id":41932357,"author":"cranium","month":"2024-10","story_title":"Probably pay attention to tokenizers","text":"I finally understood the weirdness of tokenizers after watching the video Andrej Karpathy made: \"Let's build the GPT Tokenizer\" ( [VIDEO] ). He goes through why we need them instead of raw byte sequences (too expensive) and how the Byte Pair Encoding algorithm works. Worth spending 2h for the deeper understanding if you deal with LLMs.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39557741,"author":"moozilla","month":"2024-03","story_title":"Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?","text":"ChatGPT is specifically bad at these kinds of tasks because of tokenization. If you plug your query into [LINK] , you can see that\"egregious\" is a single token, so the LLM doesn't actually see any \"e\" characters -- to answer your question it would have had to learn a fact about how the word was spelled from it's training data, and I imagine texts explicitly talking about how words are spelled are not very common. Good explanation here if this still doesn't make sense: [LINK] , or check out Andrej Karpathy's latest video if you have 2 hours for a deep dive: [VIDEO] IMO questions about spelling or number sense are pretty tired as gotchas, because they are all basically just artifacts of this implementation detail. There are other language models available that don't have this issue. BTW this is also the reason DALL-E etc suck at generating text in images.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":41304760,"author":"Chirono","month":"2024-08","story_title":"Artificial intelligence is losing hype","text":"This is just an artefact of tokenisation though. The model simply isn\u2019t ever shown the letters that make up words, unless they are spelled out explicitly. It sees tokens representing groups of words. This is a little like saying a human isn\u2019t intelligent because they couldn\u2019t answer your question that you asked in an ultrasonic wavelength. If you\u2019d like to learn more this video is a great resource: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43610570,"author":"zellyn","month":"2025-04","story_title":"Why Does Claude Speak Byzantine Music Notation?","text":"Andrej Karpathy goes into quite some depth about how tokenization works here: [VIDEO] tl;dr many of the LLMs use byte-pair encoding to create tokens. You take a set of documents, and then form tokens by repeatedly merging the most common pair of tokens. The initial set of tokens is 256 raw bytes. And the text is typically represented in utf-8. I expect that although the LLMs can understand arbitrarily but cleanly offset unicode code points by (eventually) noticing the final byte of each sequence, they would do markedly worse on actually processing and completing on them, because they will not have been reduced to the normal set of tokens. However, if the text is actually output cleanly converted, either in internal thinking tokens or in the beginning of the response, they should do fine. Understanding tokenization is surprisingly useful, even if that video seems awfully long to devote to such a tedious subject. Even Karpathy doesn't like it!","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45229908,"author":"vismit2000","month":"2025-09","story_title":"UTF-8 is a brilliant design","text":"Karpathy's \"Let's build the GPT Tokenizer\" also contains a good introduction to Unicode byte encodings, ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 in the first 20 minutes: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zeLToGnjIUM":[{"hn_comment_id":26941390,"author":"kbd","month":"2021-04","story_title":"Red and blue functions are a good thing","text":"I really can't agree with this premise after seeing how Zig implements color-less async/await: [LINK] I highly recommend watching Andrew Kelley's video (linked in that article) on this topic: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":23234002,"author":"bvrmn","month":"2020-05","story_title":"What Color Is Your Function? (2015)","text":"There is an interesting approach in Zig to explicitly kick call frames to achieve colorless asyncness. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26111847,"author":"jorangreef","month":"2021-02","story_title":"Comparison of Rust async and Linux thread context switch time and memory use","text":"I recently wrote an IO abstraction over io_uring using Zig's async/await. Here's how you would do a write()/fsync()/read() with this ( [LINK] ): const offset: u64 = 0; const bytes_written = try io.write(fd, buffer_write[0..], offset); try io.fsync(fd); const bytes_read = try io.read(fd, buffer_read[0..], offset); Other sync functions can use this asynchronous IO completion code in a synchronous style (as this snippet shows) and still get all the zero-syscall and asynchronous performance of io_uring. What this is actually doing under the hood is filling SQEs into io_uring's submission queue ring buffer and then later reading completion events off io_uring's completion queue ring buffer, so it's fully asynchronous in the I/O sense but this hasn't spilled out and leaked over into the control flow. The control flow is as it should be, nice and simple and synchronous. Beyond this, Zig still allows you to explicitly indicate concurrency with the `async` keyword, for example if you wanted to run multiple async code paths concurrently. But the crucial part is that Zig's async/await does not force function coloring on you to do all of this: [VIDEO] Pretty incredible on Zig's part to be able to pull this off. Huge kudos to Andrew Kelley. Also, thanks to Jens Axboe and io_uring, what you saw above was first-class single-threaded or thread-per-core, there's no threadpool doing that for you, it's pure ring buffer communication to the kernel and back, no context switches, no expensive coor","stance":"rec"}],"zi0rHwfiX1Q":[{"hn_comment_id":13253278,"author":"Naomarik","month":"2016-12","story_title":"QuickCheck: A Lightweight Tool for Random Testing of Haskell Programs (2000) [pdf]","text":"I'd recommend watching this [VIDEO] to see how powerful this can be. I've just discovered generative testing due to clojure.spec. Describing specs for your data works not only to help validate data structures but can be plugged in as properties for generative testing. After the \"aha\" moment it was followed by a feeling that I've wasted so much time writing specs just to validate data structures and writing specs just to see if my functions are working as they should. This is one of the things I wish was obvious in my learning track right after vim/emacs will help you code faster.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":33325681,"author":"dllthomas","month":"2022-10","story_title":"Show HN: IHP v1.0 \u2013 Batteries-included web framework built on Haskell and Nix","text":"While of course Haskell has more normal testing infrastructure available (eg. [LINK] ), my favorite bit of Haskell testing is QuickCheck, which IIUC started life in Haskell and has been reimplemented in other languages with various degrees of effectiveness and various degrees of connection to the original project. John Hughes (not the filmmaker) gives a great talk about it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45820002,"author":"robertfw","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Hypothesis: Property-Based Testing for Python","text":"I feel like this talk by John Hughes showed that there is real value in this approach with production systems of varying levels of complexity, with two different examples of using the approach to find very low level bugs that you'd never think to test for in traditional approaches. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47719452,"author":"devin","month":"2026-04","story_title":"Mysteries of Dropbox: Property-Based Testing of a Distributed Sync Service [pdf]","text":"One of the authors, John Hughes did a talk on property-based testing at Clojure West some number of years back. Worth a watch if you're interested: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zjkBMFhNj_g":[{"hn_comment_id":38407783,"author":"shrimpx","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Generative AI for Beginners","text":"Andrej Karpathy's \"Zero to Hero\" series on YouTube is the ultimate guide to building LLMs. Extremely information-dense but as complete as it gets: [LINK] Also, an amazing high-level overview of LLMs, including extensive discussion about attack vectors, that he published a couple days ago: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39505819,"author":"FlyingAvatar","month":"2024-02","story_title":"Ask HN: Do LLMs get \"better\" with more processing power and or time per request?","text":"Short answer is No. I highly recommended watching Andrej Karpathy's Intro to LLMs talk, particularly the section on System 1 vs System 2 thinking. Long story short, what you are describing, using more processing to prepare a better response, is something that is an area of interest, but is not currently part of ChatGPT (or any other LLM that I am aware of). See: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40687717,"author":"mindwok","month":"2024-06","story_title":"Why has LLM progress seemingly stalled around the GPT-4 level? Or has it?","text":"All of Andrej Karpathy's stuff on YouTube is absolutely top tier. He's a rare example of a brilliant contributor in his field who is an equally brilliant educator. Start with his short intro to LLMs, only 1 hour long but is dense with valuable stuff: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38653228,"author":"jpdus","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: AI/ML papers to catch up with current state of AI?","text":"Hey, imho best overall technical intro to LLMs (I guess that\u00b4s your main interest as you mentioned qlora + llama) is by Simon Willis [1]. Additionally or if you prefer videos, the recent 1h \"busy persons intro\" by Andrei Karpathy is great + dense as well [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO] EDIT: Maybe I misunderstood as you asked about papers, not general intros. I don\u00b4t think that reading papers is the best way to \"catch up\" as the pace is rapid and knowledge very decentralized. I can confirm what Andrej recently wrote on X [3]: \"Unknown to many people, a growing amount of alpha is now outside of Arxiv, sources include but are not limited to: - [LINK] - HN - that niche Discord server - anime profile picture anons on X - reddit\" [3] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":38653719,"author":"kozikow","month":"2023-12","story_title":"Ask HN: AI/ML papers to catch up with current state of AI?","text":"My view is to focus on doing stuff. That's what I did. Pick up some task you want the model to do, try finetuning llama, playing with APIs from OpenAI, etc. Googling and asking GPT along the way. Foundational model training got so expensive that unless you can get hired by \"owns nuclear power plant of GPUs\" you are not going to get any \"research\" done. And as the area got white-hot those companies have more available talent than hardware nowadays. So just getting into the practitioner area is the best way to get productive with those models. And you improve as a practitioner by practicing, not by reading papers. If you're at the computer, your time is best spent writing code and interacting with those models in my opinion. If you cannot (e.g. commute) I listen to some stuff (e.g. [VIDEO] - Anything from Karpathy on youtube, or [LINK] channel).","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":39909829,"author":"sk11001","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Why has ChatGPT a bias towards correctness?","text":"Look into the training process - [VIDEO] The goal of the initial pretraining phase is to make it good at predicting the next word. The rest of the training process is aimed at making it (1) helpful and (2) as correct as possible. I think some people oversimplify things by calling LLMs \"next token predictors\" and they leave out the tuning towards helpfulness and correctness.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40159206,"author":"runjake","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Ask HN: 16 yo Nephew, in E. Africa, wants to train an LLM with on disk Wikipedia","text":"In addition to the other great suggestions, point him to Karpathy's YouTube channel[1]. Karpathy has an approachable communication style. Here's his \"1 hour intro to LLMs\" video: [VIDEO] 1. [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40188612,"author":"tikkun","month":"2024-04","story_title":"Ask HN: AI Training for Executive Level","text":"I suspect these videos would be higher quality than most offerings from universities or business schools (given that it's a fast moving field, and most of the true experts are practitioners, and so if they're teaching, they're not teaching actual classes, at most they're doing youtube videos or interviews): - [LINK] (Jeremy Howard Hacker's Guide to LLMs) - [VIDEO] (Karpathy Intro to LLMs)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48679374,"author":"philipkglass","month":"2026-06","story_title":"The Unbearable Cheapness of Open Weight Models","text":"The weights are just numbers. I don't what technical background you have in other areas of computing, but I think that this is a good, short introduction that doesn't assume too much: [LINK] To quote part of it, Training a model can be thought of as tuning the dials on a really big machine. The way that a language model behaves is entirely determined by these many different continuous values, usually called parameters or weights. Longer and slightly more technical, \"Intro to Large Language Models\" by Andrej Karpathy: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zkTf0LmDqKI":[{"hn_comment_id":6376651,"author":"NhanH","month":"2013-09","story_title":"You Can Meet Your Heroes","text":"I saw a small clip of Steve Jobs talking about the same thing [1]. One of the advices that surprised me most the first time I've heard it. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13207672,"author":"bayer_rggb","month":"2016-12","story_title":"Ask HN: What are inspirational talks you watched which motivates you?","text":"Came here to post this Larry Smith link :) Even though Jobs gets some hate on HN, these interviews/speeches have never failed to inspire me. If you don't ask, you don't get - [VIDEO] On a very formulaic life - [LINK] (I couldn't find one without the bad bg music) Stay hungry, stay foolish - [LINK] I do realise, on some levels, he was not a good person, or atleast came off as an ass, but listening to these interviews and speeches, I feel I can relate to him and his struggles.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":22988160,"author":"johndavid9991","month":"2020-04","story_title":"Ask HN: Mid-life career crisis, need your help","text":"You know the core fundamentals of programming, and you simply need to be retrained. You may start with this basic JavaScript course to refresh your skills. If you are interested in learning more about training opportunities that could eventually land you to a better job, I will be happy to guide you. Whenever I feel fear of failure, I watch this video, and it might help you too. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":25796854,"author":"pettycashstash2","month":"2021-01","story_title":"Steve Jobs Secrets of Life","text":"what i find amazing is his thoughts on failure and asking for help from same series i believe Steve Jobs on Failure [VIDEO] now I've actually always found something that to be very true which is most people don't get those experiences because they'd never asked I've never found anybody that didn't want to help me if I asked them for help I always call him up I called up this will date me but I called up Bill Hewlett when I was 12 years old and he lived in Palo Alto his number was still in a phonebook and he answered the phone himself you know yes hi I'm Steve Jobs I'm 12 years old I'm a student in high school and I want to build a frequency counter and I was wondering if you had any spare parts I could have and he laughed and he gave me the spare parts to build his frequency counter and he gave me a job that summer in Hewlett Packard working on the assembly line putting nuts and bolts together on frequency counters he got me a job in the place that built him and I was in heaven and I've never found anyone who said no or hung up the phone when I call I just asked and when people ask me I try to be as responsive to pay that that debt of gratitude back most people never pick up the phone and call most people never ask and that's what separates sometimes the people that do things from the people that just dream about them you got it you got to act and you've got to be willing to fail you've got to be willing to crash and burn you know with people on the phone with starting a comp","stance":"rec"}],"zmCTmgavkrQ":[{"hn_comment_id":40398738,"author":"cletus","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Seven Dyson Sphere Candidates","text":"A lot of thought has gone into this and other possible explanations. Isaac Arthur, of course, has an excellent video [1] on this issue. His entire library on the Fermi Paradox is worth watching. The short version of why this seems unlikely is that there really is no hiding a K2 civilization for many reasons. For example, access to this much energy and having a megastructure as large as the Solar System (give or take) would allow you to create incredibly high resolution telescopes (with an without interferometry). But consider this: if you, as a spacefaring civilization, want to be left alone, the best way to do it is to make sure nobody comes into your neighbourhood. If you \"hide\" that may happen accidentally. Isn't it better to advertise your presence and otherwise keep people away to avoid unintentional conflict? [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19224688,"author":"simion314","month":"2019-02","story_title":"Hayabusa-2: Japan Spacecraft Touches Down on Asteroid","text":"This video gives a more optimistic perspective, [VIDEO] it challenges with good arguments the axioms in The Dark Forest.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":19973933,"author":"simion314","month":"2019-05","story_title":"The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet","text":"I also had a similar feeling after finishing the book, this video [VIDEO] made some good points, mainly finding problems with the axioms so it convinced me that the conclusion in the book is probably wrong since the axioms are probably not true.","stance":"rec"}],"zmeDzx4SUME":[{"hn_comment_id":7964737,"author":"epsylon","month":"2014-06","story_title":"Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution?","text":"Steve Huffman talks about this in his Udacity course on web development: [VIDEO] (The whole unit 7 talks a lot about how they built Reddit.)","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15654316,"author":"mohsinr","month":"2017-11","story_title":"Ask HN: How do sites like Reddit, HackerNews, etc get initial user content?","text":"In this video Steve, co founder of Reddit, mentions some tips, steps they did, like own account creation and submitting links on the fly... [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zrpUDuUtxPM":[{"hn_comment_id":38312497,"author":"Humbly8967","month":"2023-11","story_title":"Speaker Support in Asahi Linux","text":"This is actually a common misconception. In blind testing, the average listener reliably prefers the more accurate speaker. There is a talk [1] by Dr. Floyd Toole that is an excellent crash course on the science of sound reproduction and listener preference. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":20259834,"author":"1kGarand","month":"2019-06","story_title":"DIY Amps: A Roadmap for Beginners (2017)","text":"False. Rigorous double blind a/b/c/d tests using real listeners has been performed, and the research has been published in peer reviewed journals since the 80's. What has happened is that most of the audiophile community saw research as a threat to their revenue streams and actively FUD around it. And the audio engineering community has simply moved on. Here is a talk that could be very informative. [VIDEO] His book is worth a read as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":26371880,"author":"lioeters","month":"2021-03","story_title":"Audio \u2013 Science in the Service of Art [pdf]","text":"It's an article written by Floyd E. Toole, Ph.D., who was Vice President - Acoustical Engineering at Harman International from 1991 until he retired in 2007. \"His research focused primarily on the acoustics and psychoacoustics of sound reproduction. Most notably, he established methods for subjective and objective evaluations which have been used to clarify the relationships between technical measurements of loudspeakers and listeners\u2019 perceptions.\" From [LINK] > ...there really is such a thing as being \"good enough for rock and roll\". Here's a lecture by the same author, given at CIRMMT Distinguished Lectures in the Science and Technology of Music. [VIDEO] - Floyd Toole - Sound reproduction \u2013 art and science/opinions and facts","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43639368,"author":"Humbly8967","month":"2025-04","story_title":"GPD Pocket 4 Speaker DSP: Configuring PipeWire so laptop speakers sound better","text":"FYI, when attempting to apply this to speakers, the anechoic frequency response is required. If you try to equalize for flat-in-room response, the results are terrible. See this video[1] for loads more information and context. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45636416,"author":"Humbly8967","month":"2025-10","story_title":"EQ: A video about all forms of equalizers","text":"EQing for a flat in room response is NOT ideal! Correcting a speaker requires measuring the *anechoic* response, and only the bass should be tuned to subtract the room's effect. This video [1] provides a crash course on science of audio reproduction. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48773024,"author":"BoingBoomTschak","month":"2026-07","story_title":"24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense","text":"No mention of Toole? Obligatory considering the subject, even if it's about acoustics and not digital audio: [LINK] And a talk by the author covering some of the material for those who prefer that: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zsjZ2r9Ygzw":[{"hn_comment_id":11290983,"author":"ccvannorman","month":"2016-03","story_title":"Encryption, Privacy Are Larger Issues Than Fighting Terrorism","text":"I am surprised that a search for \"math\" only turned up one result in this thread, about car accidents vs terrorist victims. Isn't it true that encryption legislation or policy is sort of irrelevant next to the very clear math that says encryption will always be ahead of decryption? Even in a (hopefully avoidable) dystopia where encryption is illegal, would that really stop technology companies from continuing to do what they've always done? John Oliver has a great segment[1] where he notes that the majority of cheap, available encryption applications aren't even US-based, and so it becomes nigh-impossible for our (or any) government to stop any pedestrian from encrypting. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":12355207,"author":"spdy","month":"2016-08","story_title":"Taking stock of the new French-German encryption proposal","text":"Elections are coming and everyone has to play tough. None of this is targeted at terrorist as is does not even remotely make sense its all about controlling the population. Let`s see when they propose to ban math. Mandatory John Oliver on Encryption :) [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zt0OQb1DBko":[{"hn_comment_id":15418731,"author":"wahern","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Building on Rock, Not Sand","text":"> Without these, you simply can\u2019t have a fast, > memory-safe language: either you surrender > speed, by boxing everything, or you surrender safety. Not only can you have speed and safety without Rust's rigid enforcement of exclusive ownership, you can do even better--even faster and with even stronger security guarantees: [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":15418843,"author":"wahern","month":"2017-10","story_title":"Building on Rock, Not Sand","text":"How many buffer overflows were involved in the Equifax leak? The ultimate solution to the problem is formal verification. Rust solves this for buffer overflows, but nothing else. It's a one trick pony. Someone posted this interesting nugget on HN the other day: [VIDEO] Aside from some of the awkward ergonomics, its mechanism for formal specification looks brilliant. And you get to keep C's bag-of-bytes object manipulation and pointer arithmetic (when you want it) without having to resort to unsafe{}. For projects where it's worth the effort to carefully declare precise typing semantics (because safety, performance, whatever), I want a wholistic solution. Otherwise my time and money is better spent throwing Javascript or Python at the problem, which solve the buffer overflow problem just as well.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18055523,"author":"snaky","month":"2018-09","story_title":"How did software get so reliable without proof? (1996) [pdf]","text":"If you are interesting in a programming language suitable for system level programming, and using proving techniques, maybe ATS would be of interest. [VIDEO] [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":24336252,"author":"Athas","month":"2020-08","story_title":"Supporting Linux kernel development in Rust","text":"Yes, ATS can guarantee all those things and more. In particular, ATS allows you to write \"unsafe\" code, which you then prove safe with a mechanically verified proof. This is in contrast to unsafe Rust, which depends on programmer discipline, and has no (intra-language) mechanism for verification beyond the basic type system. You could say that Rust is all-or-nothing, while ATS allows gradual verification, as well as proving safe much more complex code than you can in Rust. I'm not going to claim that ATS is overall better than Rust - it's not - but it's a far more powerful language than Rust for safe systems programming. It's just that most people are not willing or able to pay the very high price in ergonomics. I recommend watching this presentation for a good idea of what ATS programming is like: [VIDEO] In short, it's about as user-friendly as an overheating nuclear reactor.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28215047,"author":"rtfeldman","month":"2021-08","story_title":"The ATS Programming Language","text":"Some entertaining talks introducing the language, by /u/deech: \"A Tase Of ATS\" at Compose Conf 2019: [LINK] \"A (Not So Gentle) Introduction To Systems Programming In ATS\" at Strange Loop 2017: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"ztAg643gJBA":[{"hn_comment_id":12671095,"author":"dcposch","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Minetest \u2013 A free, open-source voxel game engine and game","text":"Man, just a few days ago I was bummed that the top comment on most HN stories is critical or dismissive, and now I'm part of the problem. -- People have made some VERY COOL stuff using MineTest. Check out spheretest: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45094357,"author":"gatane","month":"2025-09","story_title":"Making Minecraft Spherical","text":"This reminded me of another attempt, but in Minetest: - [VIDEO] This person has another, more technical video where they talk about the math behind it btw","stance":"rec"}],"ztspvPYybIY":[{"hn_comment_id":12638469,"author":"samblr","month":"2016-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?","text":"There is a sort of palpable energy in (Ryan Dahl) node.js original presentation. [VIDEO] edit: +Ryan Dahl","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":18221351,"author":"knbknb","month":"2018-10","story_title":"Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?","text":"I like the talk by Ryan Dahl, node.js inventor Original Node JS Presentation, 2009, [VIDEO] In 2018 he gave a follow-up presentation \"10 things I regret about node\", but that presentation is more for experts.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":31782511,"author":"swyx","month":"2022-06","story_title":"Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?","text":"i also asked this on twitter so just putting some replies here: - Doug Engelbart [LINK] - Twilio [LINK] - Stripe - \"7 lines of code\" - Netlify - [LINK] - Heroku - [LINK] and git push heroku master - Cloudflare - [LINK] - Node ( [VIDEO] ) and Deno ( [LINK] ) - Firebase (reportedly) - [LINK] smaller companies/less impactful pitches that i still like - Redux [LINK] - Stackblitz [LINK] - Comm [LINK] - Mongodb [LINK] - Let's Encrypt [LINK] - Figwheel-Clojurescript [LINK] - Svelte [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"zuKV2DI9-Jg":[{"hn_comment_id":11809997,"author":"sw00","month":"2016-05","story_title":"Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person","text":"It's the long form of this: [VIDEO] The author founded The School of Life - which I think is wonderful.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":43848842,"author":"Nzen","month":"2025-04","story_title":"You Wouldn't Download a Hacker News","text":"Alain de Botton also published this in video form, seven years ago [0]. If you want the cliff's notes, his School of Life channel has a shorter version [1]. [0] [LINK] 22 minutes [1] [VIDEO] 4 minutess","stance":"rec"}],"zwAD6dRSVyI":[{"hn_comment_id":15410663,"author":"sillysaurus3","month":"2017-10","story_title":"What Is a Neural Network?","text":"A trick for visualizing higher dimensions: [VIDEO] Only 383k subscribers. Hmm. Remember to subscribe, comment, and smash that like button. Real Engineering is another great channel. And of course Veritasium and Numberphile.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":17507128,"author":"jedimastert","month":"2018-07","story_title":"Random Points on a Sphere","text":"Don't forget 3Blue1Brown's incredible video about visualizing higher dimensions[1]. He's getting to xkcd levels of \"Of course there's a relevant video\" [1]: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":44502339,"author":"kibwen","month":"2025-07","story_title":"New sphere-packing record stems from an unexpected source","text":"There's a great 3blue1brown video that demonstrates this unintuitive result in a relatively intuitive way: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":16524119,"author":"gilbetron","month":"2018-03","story_title":"Counterintuitive Properties of High Dimensional Space","text":"Great article! I've been thinking about this on and off recently, as I wonder if we might be having intuitive issues when it comes to gradient descent optimization. 3 Blue,1 Brown had a video recently that kicked off my head scratching and is a great complement to your article: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":30013004,"author":"jerf","month":"2022-01","story_title":"Geometry from Another Universe","text":"As you increase the dimensionality of a sphere, an ever-increasing proportion of the sphere is within epsilon of the surface. This 3Blue1Brown video addresses enough related stuff that the rest should become reasonably comprehensible: [VIDEO] This particular result is tossed in as a side note around 23:25, so it's not addressed directly, but it'll help.","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":40367217,"author":"NeoTar","month":"2024-05","story_title":"Strangely Curved Shapes Break 50-Year-Old Geometry Conjecture","text":"Three Blue, One Brown has a decent video which perhaps helps get a handle on how one can use higher-dimensional spaces, without needing to wrap you head around trying to envision a four-dimensional cube, or similar. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zxRgfBXn6Mg":[{"hn_comment_id":27454956,"author":"remarkEon","month":"2021-06","story_title":"Midair plane refuels done by a drone for the first time","text":"That whole channel is amazing. Check out the Desert Storm series if you need to burn an hour or two on the weekend refreshing yourself on the history of modern warfare. [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29076717,"author":"systemvoltage","month":"2021-11","story_title":"Could the U.S. Lose a War with China over Taiwan?","text":"For those who have forgotten, the US won Operation Desert Storm in the most overkill way. It was so insane and completely overwhelming. I highly recommend watching this series about it, no one has dug into history like the Operations Room channel: [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":29676803,"author":"systemvoltage","month":"2021-12","story_title":"The leader who's standing up to China","text":"> US couldn't defeat couple of goat herders and they're going to level up to S-tier opponents? I wouldn't even bet on US against Venezuela or Iran at this point. Operation Desert Storm was a success and completely overwhelming. The amount of power projected was incalculable. Here is an extremely detailed account of it: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zyQwAhppWj8":[{"hn_comment_id":48798662,"author":"willdr","month":"2026-07","story_title":"It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership","text":"Unfortunately the AI bubble means we are witnessing the death of PC gaming. Watch the GamersNexus video, The Collapse of Personal Computing: [VIDEO] Costs are driving manufacturers out of business. Essential components for PCs are becoming out of reach for the average consumer. You will own nothing and be happy.","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":48383596,"author":"brnaftr361","month":"2026-06","story_title":"32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 \u2013 AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building","text":"GN did a documentary on the situation from the perspective of consumer-facing companies. Seems pretty dire for them, and it's hard to see the long-range consequences, but the idea of consumers being priced out isn't too far out, which to me is a little alarming. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"}],"zyVTxGpEO30":[{"hn_comment_id":18748747,"author":"supernintendo","month":"2018-12","story_title":"Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players","text":"Same! Never used UOX but ran a few small private servers back in the day using SphereServer and eventually RunUO. While it didn't lead to any professional connections in my case, it was my first foray into programming. Ultima Online in its early iterations was truly a magical game and helped to define a lot of the core design patterns of MMORPGs. The lead designer of UO, Raph Koster, has a lot of great insight when it comes to game design. I recommend his 2014 GDC talk, \"Practical Creativity\" [1], even to developers who are not interested in game development. [1] [VIDEO]","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":45844234,"author":"runevault","month":"2025-11","story_title":"Game design is simple","text":"I need to sit down and give this a proper read, but anyone who wants more of Raph giving insights into game design should check out this old GDC talk he did about Practical Creativity: [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":46519859,"author":"wonger_","month":"2026-01","story_title":"Spherical Snake","text":"I watched this GDC talk recently about practical creativity: [VIDEO] I like his perspective that creativity = using an existing pattern in a new context. You can be more creative by first consuming lots of different patterns in all sorts of contexts (e.g. playing lots of games, and also reading and experiencing lots of topics unrelated to games). Then you try all the different permutations of patterns in your mental toolbox. Kinda like how the sibling comment rattled off different what-ifs. EDIT oh and oblique strategies might be helpful to come up with variations on an existing theme: [LINK]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":47909837,"author":"wonger_","month":"2026-04","story_title":"An amateur just solved a 60-year-old math problem\u2013by asking AI","text":"Yeah, I've been grappling with the definition of creativity too. There's a gamedev talk [0] on creativity that gave me useful perspective. Here's what I wrote elsewhere: --- i've been thinking about raph's definition of creativity [0]: permuting one set of ideas with another set of ideas (or trying an idea in new contexts) this is a systematic process, doable even by machine once enough pattern libraries have been catalogued. on a small scale, there's sprint.cards [1] or oblique strats [2]. on a large scale, there's llms... it's freeing to approach creativity as a deliberate practice rather than waiting on some fickle muse. yet it's a bit disappointing to see idea generation so mechanical and dehumanized. i am comforted by the value of mushy human abilities surrounding the creative process: mostly 1) taste, the ability to recognize pleasing output, ... [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]","stance":"rec"}],"zz4YVJ4aRfg":[{"hn_comment_id":22029075,"author":"TheAceOfHearts","month":"2020-01","story_title":"Ask HN: What were your most impactful podcast episodes from 2019?","text":"There's two FoundMyFitness podcasts that positively impacted my life. I've been telling everyone I know to try a broccoli sprout smoothie because of the outstanding effect it's been having on my health. I suspect a fair number of HN readers might also benefit from giving it a try. Since this is still an active research topic I think it prudent to remind readers to take all health or medical claims with a grain of salt. My first smoothie caused a physiological reaction and it lit up something in my brain. A while after drinking it I messaged a few friends to tell them that I value our friendship. It appears to make you less autistic, or something along those lines. There appear to be additional positive effects, although I hesitate to describe them because they even sounds like bullshit to my own ears. \"Sulforaphane and Its Effects on Cancer, Mortality, Aging, Brain and Behavior, Heart Disease & More\" [0]: > Isothiocyanates are some of the most important plant compounds you can get in your diet. In this video I make the most comprehensive case for them that has ever been made. Short attention span? Skip to your favorite topic by clicking one of the time points below. Full timeline below the fold... \"Jed Fahey, Sc.D. on Isothiocyanates, the Nrf2 Pathway, Moringa & Sulforaphane Supplementation\" [1]: > Dr. Jed W. Fahey is a nutritional biochemist with broad training and extensive background in plant physiology, human nutrition, phytochemistry and nutritional biochemistry. He is t","stance":"strong_rec"},{"hn_comment_id":13686212,"author":"amelius","month":"2017-02","story_title":"Can Changing When and What We Eat Help Outwit Disease?","text":"Here is a science-backed video talking about the benefits of a substance found in broccoli sprouts w.r.t. cancer. [VIDEO]","stance":"rec"},{"hn_comment_id":28658087,"author":"LinuxBender","month":"2021-09","story_title":"Ask HN: Blogs/YouTube Channels on Cancer?","text":"Sorry to hear your are going through this. Here are a few I have found interesting. I am not a doctor and by no means is any of this something I am suggesting. It's just interesting content on your topic. - Prof. Thomas Seyfried - 'Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: Implications for Novel Therapies' [LINK] - A New Cancer Strategy [LINK] - The MOST Important Cancer Prevention [LINK] - Antiangiogenic Therapy [LINK] - Sulforaphane and Its Effects on Cancer, Mortality, Aging, Brain and Behavior, Heart Disease & More [VIDEO] - Q&A with Dr. Jed Fahey on Sulforaphane, Moringa and Chemoprotection [An authoritative discussion!] [LINK] - [LINK] Also watch this site if your doctors run out of ideas. Look for newer and more targeted methods. [LINK] Some people that were written off by doctors had some success with prolonged fasting. Also important would be to get opinions by many doctors inside and outside of your medial group.","stance":"rec"}]}