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Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

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Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#201

Post by StereoKavins »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #137

I’ve fallen into the plant tissue culturing rabbit hole. I was selling excess trimmings of aquarium plants locally on Facebook marketplace and made a surprising amount of money, and my kids really enjoyed it (they got a cut for helping me out). I thought hmm, this could be a great excuse to make a little business around this, teach them some skills, get them thinking more constructively and feeling a sense of agency…

This is really interesting! Wondering if there’s any good reading/books about it you’d recommend?

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#202

Post by cabbageears »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #137

I’ve fallen into the plant tissue culturing rabbit hole. I was selling excess trimmings of aquarium plants locally on Facebook marketplace and made a surprising amount of money, and my kids really enjoyed it (they got a cut for helping me out). I thought hmm, this could be a great excuse to make a little business around this, teach them some skills, get them thinking more constructively and feeling a sense of agency…

Sweet. I spent a few years cultivating mushrooms and found the hobby to be very rewarding. One can grow (legal) medicinal and gourmet mushrooms on a small scale with very little money. I recommend people interested give it a go because it's fun and offers a lot to learn. :)

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#203

Post by atonse »

IanCal wrote: post #166
atonse wrote: post #76

The wonderful world of research paper identifiers. DOI (Digital Object Identifiers) are used by many modern research papers as sort of a UUID for papers, run by doi.org. But they're discipline-specific. So they're used widely by certain disciplines. But others use different databases. So for biology-related papers, NIH's PubMed ID. Or for Astronomers, Bibcode. All are "global" identifiers and each has some kind of co…

Doi is the main one. Most published papers and many other things have them. They're newer so often older things hang around too, I'd wager most new pubmed articles have dois too. There are several registries, crossref is the big one in the west but it's not the only one. They have probably the best access to the data out of all of the larger registries though. Dois are pretty good, though not persistent and there's n…

Cool!

I know you guys work with OrcID too right?

We work with CrossRef to get data but if a DOI is missing, then things get harder to find in CrossRef in our experience.

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#204

Post by cabbageears »

virtuscience wrote: post #187
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #137

I’ve fallen into the plant tissue culturing rabbit hole. I was selling excess trimmings of aquarium plants locally on Facebook marketplace and made a surprising amount of money, and my kids really enjoyed it (they got a cut for helping me out). I thought hmm, this could be a great excuse to make a little business around this, teach them some skills, get them thinking more constructively and feeling a sense of agency…

This is really cool. I work in the plant industry, and most people don't know this but huge numbers of the plants bought in the U.S. are grown from tissue culture. I would guess it could be in the ballpark of half of all small and medium-sized plants (< 10" diameter), because it brings some benefits when propagating at scale for certain genera. For others, it's too difficult to grow a stable plant from tissue culture…

You're an industry plant.

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#205

Post by 7thaccount »

Figure skating. It should be illegal to have so much fun. The feeling of gliding out there on the ice with nearly zero friction is amazing. It's a great community too. Not cheap, but a lot cheaper than many hobbies. Less than $1k will get you a nice pair of skates, plenty of group lessons, and access to the rink for a few months. It's fun for the family or single adults. There are always tons of people just starting. Private lessons can get expensive, but for the average interested adult, you can probably do a single private lesson like once a month and then work on what you learned at the rink.

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#206

Post by emeril »

perihelions wrote: post #185

PDF files, and why the heck they are so slow to read. Hours upon hours of perf(1) and fiddling with ugly things in C. My main takeaway is everyone in the world is doing things HORRIBLY wrong and there's no way to stop them. (Digression: did you know libpng, the one everyone uses, is not supposed to be an optimized production library—rather it's a reference implementation? It's almost completely unoptimized, no really…

sumatrapdf seems better than most at reading them?

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#207

Post by ipunchghosts »

Used tensorflow since its creation until changed companies one year ago where I only use torch lightning. I'm fixing lighting to make it have some of the nicities that tenorflow has. Also finally fixing the graph engine in tensorflow so the abstraction actually works and doesn't have sharp edges around things like models of models.... aka graphs or graphs.

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#208

Post by perihelions »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #191
perihelions wrote: post #185

PDF files, and why the heck they are so slow to read. Hours upon hours of perf(1) and fiddling with ugly things in C. My main takeaway is everyone in the world is doing things HORRIBLY wrong and there's no way to stop them. (Digression: did you know libpng, the one everyone uses, is not supposed to be an optimized production library—rather it's a reference implementation? It's almost completely unoptimized, no really…

Question since you are probably knowledge-able about it right now. > Another observation: lots of people create PDF's at print-quality pixel density that's useless for screens, and greatly increases rendering latency. Is this relevant to text in the PDF? I would assume text is vectorized, meaning resolution is not relevant until you _actually_ print it? Or is it just relevant to rasterized content like embedded image…

Your understanding's right: PDF's that are text + fonts are easy and fast. I'm concerned about the other kind, that's scanned pages. Any sheet music from Petrucci / imslp.org for one example. That kind is a sequence of raster images, stored in compressed-image formats which most people aren't familiar with, because they're specialized to bi-level (1-bit, black and white) images. A separate class from photo-type images. The big two seem to be JBIG2 [0], and CCITT Group 4 [1], which was standardized for fax machines in the 1980's (and still works well!)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax#Modified_Modified_READ

(You can examine this stuff with pdfimages(1)—or just rg -a for strings like /JBIG2Decode or /CCITTFaxDecode and poke around).

Re: Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

#209

Post by jpt4 »

gnarcoregrizz wrote: post #25

Metal-air batteries/fuel cells. Made a mini aluminum air battery (you can easily DIY one with household items). It seems that most people consider metal-air batteries to be a dead-end, since they aren't green and are generally non-rechargeable, and air cathodes are tricky (sluggish, exotic materials, expensive catalysts). I dove into "alternative" battery and fuel cell research after looking into how to extend the ra…

I would be interested in discussing your project further, for use on my e-bike.
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