Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

news.ycombinator.com

261–270 of 446 posts

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#261
post #245

On a recent trip to Costa Rica, I discovered "Rice and Beans," which is not Gallo Pinto, but a Caribbean-influenced dish made principally of white rice, red kidney beans, coconut milk, and thyme. The dish name is in quotes because it's really the English words "Rice and Beans." It's marvelous, and I couldn't wait to try making it myself at home. Unfortunately, so far, it's been a mushy flavorless mess. I'll try a thi…

I really miss gallo pinto. I went to Costa Rica in 2009, and since then, nothing has been the same (in NYC).

It's mind-boggling that such a simple recipe can be so good in CR but so bad over here! I hear there are some Costa Rican restaurants in Paterson, NJ, but I haven't had the chance to check yet.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#262
post #156
post #115

I've been exploring kefir. I'm looking at finding some live grains to boost the store bought variety here (10-20 varieties) up to 50-60 varieties or so, like the kefir in Eastern Europe / Russia. The store bought stuff in my country (UK) is more like a diluted, gimmicky thing. However, I believe the strains of bacteria they do include are some of the more influential ones. I think it would just be interesting to expa…

I went down a similar path, sans book. I opted to remove processed foods from my diet in its entirety - to be clear, I consider neither oil, nor vinegar to be processed. This has resulted in basically the only processed food in my life now being soy sauce. The hard reality is that food, which I already enjoyed, tastes significantly better. Similarly, when I fall off the wagon and have some UPF (crips).. it just taste…

That's quite hardcore. Well done.

I've noticed the same flatness you're describing with a similar product. The other week I had two items spaced across different meals. I'm still permitting bread as long as it's real or homemade (4 ingredients max, hard after 2/3 days), which was the first, and then later I had "made-in-store" chips with the a bunch of UPF and spices (preserved).

After about 2 weeks of minimising UPF, the bread tasted much better than it usually would, even on its own. Then not only did the chips taste flat like you've experienced, but they didn't taste good, and I felt I could almost tell what they'd added to try and get you to finish them.

I find it quite insidious how much food is falsely branded as healthy ("Just Natural" snack bars) or fresh. Not just items that are dressed up as if they are made fresh in-store, but foods proudly showcasing claims about things added, or nothing bad being added, only to be invalidated by checking the ingredients on the back.

The extra difficulty to eat was a pretty big takeaway for me from that book. Imagining most processed food as having been broken down and reformed, the breaking of the food matrix, the sort of pre-digestion that stops my body doing that instead, the hurrying of the eating process to get more in before the body works out its full, have all been useful for me to slow down my eating and avoid this stuff in general.

I have noticed that my scattergun approach of avoiding stuff that's been transported long distance and overly branded (judged by packaging in both cases), has made supermarket trips very quick and simple. 80% + of the big stores must just be rubbish.

It's led to me doing most of my shopping at local markets, where things are loosely packaged in paper. The book > avoiding branded packaging got me down the road of avoiding plastic wrapped consumables wherever possible, because plastic leeching is also a concern.

The only disadvantage is that my food environment has shrunk a lot, and as an endurance runner it's made it quite hard sometimes to get enough energy in. For that reason I don't think I can drop pasta and bread entirely.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#263
I was looking at the llms.txt files of some sites today and saw how straight to the point they are and started thinking I'd love to have a browser that only loads these txt files and the markdown files they link to. It reminds me of the Gemini protocol tried to do. I think I'll try to make a PoC this weekend.

A search engine for llms.txt would be great too.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#264
post #8

I'm building in robotics. Setting up a new 3d camera today. I found that the 10m active USB C cable that I bought transfers power in both directions, but only transfers data in one direction, it turns out to be some weird video USB variant. Next I needed to plug a gripper into a modbus controller. That uses an M8 8-pole 20cm cable. The controller manufacturer recently decided to switch from male to female connector,…

I've recently been modernizing an old milling machine, and learned that for most types making your own cables is not that hard. The one painful thing is that there are a zillion tools involved for the different types of crimps and terminations.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#265
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ancient coin collecting is an awesome hobby! I have one that scholars think was made by / designed by Pythagoras himself. For a few hundred bucks! Recently I learned that only 3% of Latin works from 1450-1700 (including renaissance and scientific revolution) have been translated. Secondrenaissance.ai

No way At this point just learn latin

Latin isn't terribly hard to learn, and it is surprisingly easy to read "technical" documents in Latin; because once you learn the terms the other parts are relatively basic.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#266
Found out that our (small company's) VPS was compromised by a mining script, attacker probably exploited NextJS' RCE that I forgot to patch. The scripts were using half of the threads at 100%, i deleted all of them, found the watchdogs that kept recreating them and updated NextJS, luckily there was nothing to steal, now everything seems alright, but I'm thinking that I should format/rebuild everything just in case that I missed something.

I'm a junior dev with very little experience, I would appreciate any suggestion/advice

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#267

Found out that our (small company's) VPS was compromised by a mining script, attacker probably exploited NextJS' RCE that I forgot to patch. The scripts were using half of the threads at 100%, i deleted all of them, found the watchdogs that kept recreating them and updated NextJS, luckily there was nothing to steal, now everything seems alright, but I'm thinking that I should format/rebuild everything just in case th…

I would probably document, format and rebuild. Rotate secrets and inform anyone whose data might have been impacted.

Assume they compromised everything they would have access to by running code on the server.

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#268
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way At this point just learn latin

Latin isn't terribly hard to learn, and it is surprisingly easy to read "technical" documents in Latin; because once you learn the terms the other parts are relatively basic.

Declensions seem very extensive and unintuitive to learn, like they had a completely different structure than modern languages (verbs adjective noun articles)

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#269
I found 2 super cool blogs today, and spent most of my time digging into it

For understanding how internet works https://how-did-i-get-here.net/

How a computer runs our code (or anything in genral) https://cpu.land/

Also spent some time on reading about E2EE encryption because of some blog on HN I think :)

Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

#270

Finished "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Hemmingway Wow, so powerful. So real. I can see why it won the accolades at the time and why it stays. The ending. You could see it a mile away, but it was so hurtful still. Would love to see another adaptation made of it, especially nowadays. Maybe a really long movie, 2 parts?

Currently at page 127. Wish I didn't read this comment...
Post reply on HN