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

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281–290 of 446 posts

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

#281

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You'd think I'd feel differently having seven parrots, but you may be surprised to find I agree with you. To an extent anyway. I struggle with it.

Don't bring a parrot into captivity from the wild. Separating them from the life they already know is cruel -- save for medical exceptions, after which you release them back.

But it's already been done, and we have domesticated parrots. They are raised by humans, hand-fed by humans, and they bond with humans. They have slim odds of reintegrating back into the wild, where they fend for their lives against other territorial birds. One swoop from a hawk and they're gone.

Gone, your buddies that are an integral part of your every day. They climb on your shoulder and attach themselves to you like velcro. They mimic your laugh and preen your hair. You trim their nails, you give them all kinds of delicious fruits and veggies every day. They throw fruit back at you that they don't want, like little children throwing a tantrum. They have a giant daytime aviary that takes up quite literally half your home, and their own night time cages to sleep and rest in.

All they know is you and the human touch. They integrated with you and you're their only flock now. The bond of a parrot is extreme and lifelong.

Imagine the devestation when their only flock abandons them. A prior owner of one of my birds left their cage outside an exotic's facility, like a child in a basket outside the fire station.

For another, she came from a flock of two. Her prior owner murdered the other -- the remaining one is laying an egg now.

For two others, their owner's parrots themselves had fertile eggs. She couldn't bring herself to boil, freeze, or smash the eggs as you're supposed to do with eggs you do not want to hatch.

For two others, their prior owner of 25 years passed away. And for one other, she simply needed a new home.

They all have a home here now where they will peacefully enjoy the rest of their lives with me. I hope to never let them go hungry, alone, abused -- so I have to outlive them and make sure I am their last owner.

But as we wish more for our children, I wish more for them. I wish they could fly to the end of a lake and back and know how it feels to feel the breeze under their wings. I wish they could be adopted by a flock of their own kind. That they could endure the harshness of the wild -- and perhaps even come home after a long, fruitful, eventful day outside.

... But who knows if they even want that. :)

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

#282

The origins of Port and Starboard on ships. Chosen to be independent of a mariners orientation. Starboard - most sailors were right handed and the steering oar was placed on the right. Star = steer. Board = side of boat. Port - as steering oars got bigger, boats tended to dock on the left hand side. This became to be known as “lardboard” which sounded too much like starboard, so it was changed to “Port” (as in the si…

A fun mnemonic I use to remember port is to the left is "lp unix command = line printer = left to port".

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

#283

Today, I am revising Portuguese grammar and so I've mostly been exploring the things I can remember well and those that I can't. Portuguese has a lot of verb forms that I need to get right. But it also has really interesting constructions like "ir ter com" which literally means "to go to have with" but is an idiomatic way of saying "to meet up" (with someone) and I keep remembering and forgetting it.

The phrase looks like "intercom." Maybe visualize some kind of mnemonic based on that -- buzzing the call button at a friend's apartment and asking if they want to meet up.

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

#284
post #250

I used RfP (Request for Payment) today for the first time. It was ~11k USD between IBKR and Chase and the transfer was instant with verification on both sides. It's interesting to see the evolution of payments in the US moving so quickly over the past few years (FedNOW, etc...)

Wait, can't you do that already?! I'm in my 30s but we've had pretty much instant payments as long as I've had a bank account (20+ years) in the UK.

Now try getting mobile signal on most of the underground, something every other metro in the world has had for 20+ years

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

#285

I got a handheld emulator console as a Christmas gift. Configuring shaders that emulate crt TVs, I realized I had no mental model of how those TVs worked at all. I’m used to “pixels are three little lights combining rgb colors”, which doesn’t work here, so I went on a rabbit hole and let me tell you, analog TVs are extremely impressive tech. Getting an electron beam to hit a glass, making the chemicals on it spark, c…

[deleted]

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

#286
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lodash-es doesn’t ESM lodash/fp Most of my career has been JS and TS and I have no idea what this means.

It’s not just you, nobody uses ESM as a verb, I think they mean: The package doesn’t export lodash/fp in the ESM version.

Well, some people use it as a verb :)

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

#287

I live in a condo complex in Florida where the onsite staff at the front desk know me well and they are mostly bilingual and know I’m learning Spanish. I went up to ask then something and jokingly said “no hablo inglés, ¿Hablas español?” and I was able to carry on a more or less complete conversation with them in Spanish and ask for what I needed without pre rehearsing lines for the first time. So I found out within…

Now you can say "Me defiendo" when asked how much Spanish you speak :)

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

#289

My home office gets up to about 1500ppm of CO2 by the end of the workday, which explains a lot about why I often feel exhausted after the end of a long, uninterrupted session in there (especially when I’m on back to back zoom calls). I now have several plants in there that are supposed to be especially good at sucking up CO2, and my sensor reports that the current level is slightly below atmospheric ambient CO2 level…

You might be interested in this: https://youtu.be/ib-D1EelH4Y It's about a company ( https://neoplants.com/ ) which genetically enhances plants and soil with a product you can buy to make them much more efficient at filtering the air. It apparently does work rather than being a placebo.

I went out to the neighborhood plant nursery and bought a spider plant and snake plant, and the CO2 ppm is now down to ambient: somewhere between 395ppm and 410ppm.

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

#290
I have to replicate the little shoes on the cassette mechanics of a Becker Grand Prix car stereo from 1985. The plastic shoes are brittle from age, heat, and wear. I've spent the last couple weeks finding about two dozen ways that almost work. Their tiny and need to fit on three even tinier feet that ride rails for loading the cassette. This morning, I found out that I can probably make several possible plans work - good enough. Which is to say, I found out I was delaying the project with hopes for the perfect solution when good enough was already there.
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