Viewing profile — austinl

In SF, there's a crosswalk on a street near me where cars regularly go 35 mph, so they rarely stop for pedestrians. A few days ago, I was waiting on the sidewalk to cross, and a Wa…

Having recently bought a house, I love thinking about things that increase perceived value relative to cost (more so because they're nice to have, not because we plan to sell any t…

I recently rented a new car, and just wanted to sit with the windows open while waiting. After I shut the engine off, the interior lights and dash display would remain on for 5+ mi…

I'm not sure how feasible this is, but I love the thought experiment of limiting a training set to a certain time period, then seeing how much hinting it takes for the model to dis…

Feudal Japan had a measurement called the "koku", which is roughly the amount of rice needed to feed a person for a year: about 330 lb. You can now buy 50 lb. of rice at Costco for…

It's possible to lock pages in Notion (from the ... menu on the page), which prevents editing without unlocking. Most org-level pages in our workspace are locked. People also typic…

This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices. At a previou…

"Be careful… about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is…

During COVID, the block I live on in San Francisco started doing outdoor happy hours every Saturday afternoon. People weren't traveling much then, so we had near 100% attendance of…

One thing that struck me when visiting Tokyo (as an American living in San Francisco), was that it was not uncommon to go to a restaurant or bar on, say the 3rd or 4th floor of a b…

I'm curious about the main use-cases for physical notebooks from folks on HN. I love the idea of physical notebooks, but also have years of digital notes that are searchable and th…

Banks' work assumes that AI exceeding human capabilities is inevitable, and the series explores how people might find meaning in life when ultimately everything can be done better …

Their sailing videos are very inspiring—from what I remember, they sailed from Vancouver to Japan, then down to New Zealand and back to Vancouver over the course of a few years. ht…

If you enjoyed this essay, I would recommend reading Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks by Prof. Joseph Heath ( https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2017/11/…

The Foreign Service Institute training is also full-time, 8+ hours a day, working with dedicated tutors in small groups. Basically, it's your job to learn the language.

I've honestly found German to be easier than French, specifically in terms of listening comprehension. It can take a while to get used to word order in German, but I've found it mu…

I think the sweet spot of company size for an IC software engineer is between 50 and 500. It's small enough to have autonomy, learn, and build good relationships with the people ar…

There was a popular submission to HN a few years ago that really opened my eyes to how having a low income can cause problems to compound, making things exponentially worse. An exa…

Github was the first thing I thought of when reading this. My only use case for the commit date is to quickly check if a certain commit merged before a branch was automatically cut…

There's been a general trend of grade inflation in U.S. universities, accelerating in the 1960s (during the Vietnam war), and then again in the 1990s [0]. In some sense, this might…

Spam teams at social networks typically shadow-ban spammers. The goal of this is to make it as difficult as possible for the spammer to determine that they've been caught (which is…

Reminds me that SpaceX has now landed rocket boosters successfully over 200 times. Landing just a single rocket was huge news a few years ago. The US is launching things into space…