Learning about Christianity, after being an atheist my whole life thus far.
You may enjoy dr Micheal Segrue on YouTube. He is a wonderful philosophy lecturer who has many fantastic lectures on the philosophy of Christianity.
Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
301–310 of 865 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
#302Low-plastic living. I read a book by the world's first zero-waste restaurant, Silo. The book got me thinking about how different our lives would be if oil were expensive. "Pretend oil is really expensive" is a good proxy for doing things that are "eco-friendly." Since reading the book, I've tried to eliminate single-use plastic from most of my life. It's incredibly hard. Everything from my socks to my vegetable packa…
I have been doing this for about 2 years now. Got a few glass mason jars that I fill up with items like rice and nuts from the bulk bin at the grocery store. Peanut butter and jelly both come in glass jars. I get just about everything else from a local farm share where the items are not packaged in anything. It’s nice not dealing with plastic with my food. I used to throw so much of it away. Now most of my food waste…
I do similar things. Just replacing plastic sandwich bags with reusable silicon ones has been a big win. Even at the farmer's market, I eliminated the last little plastic by bringing cotton vegetable bags.
To be clear, I'm not puritanical about this. I still do takeout sometimes. And, I'm about to hop on some flights that will burn a ton of oil. (Ironically, one of those carbon-belching flights is to a dinner at Silo, which I'm looking forward to.)
Two of my biggest realizations have been:
1. There are many low-hanging changes we can make to reduce plastic, such as going to a farmers market, replacing a one-time use sandwich bag with a reusable one, or skipping delivery food (which often has more plastic packaging than actual food).
2. Low-plastic is often synonymous with quality. My cotton jeans, leather bag, and metal water bottle are all more expensive - but they are higher quality, have lasted for years, and can often be repaired. For example, my leather was an expensive $400, but I've had it for 8 years and counting - and just had it restored to look shiny and new. (Put another way: Plastic lacks wabi-sabi beauty).
Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does replacing plastics with paper packaging means that trees will be eliminates much more on scale?
Trees are renewable. The mass of a tree comes from the carbon it extracts from the air. [1] It's not a zero-sum, though. Why does my cilantro need to come in a plastic bag? At the farmer's market, it doesn't come packaged at all. [1] And, fire is basically reversing the process - releasing the sunlight that created the plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE
> Why does my cilantro need to come in a plastic bag?
Everything here is hugely regional, but two answers spring to mind:
1) coriander is frequently sold in unpackaged bunches, typically larger than the packaged ones;
2) it's packaged in plastic because then it can be filled with some inert gas that prolongs spoiling, it's not completely obtuse.
(In the UK for example Waitrose sells it growing reared in Sussex, or packaged grown idk Spain or Monaco or somewhere; Sainsbury's sells it similarly packaged or cut and bunched of undisclosed origin.)
Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
#304Preserving family moments with a 35mm film camera and the attachment an analog photograph engenders vs. digital. After seeing a friend with young kids post candid photos of his family for the last few years, I decided to give it a try. Purchased a Retina IIIc rangefinder camera (from the 1950s, preceded SLRs) and it's one of the most amazing purely mechanical, consumer-focused engineered products I've held in my hand…
Film cameras truly are a joy. I’m using a Minolta X-700[0] myself. I also review the photos taken with it far more than my digital photos. There’s something about slowing down and focusing on taking a few good shots instead of a quick action with minimal effort that feels so rewarding. And they can look beautiful with the right film. Enjoy your new camera in good health!
Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
#305Math as prep for 3d game programming. I've been out of school a long time, and when I was there I didn't even get to the pre-calculus level.
This year I've churned through all the introductory level texts from Art Of Problem Solving. Yes, they're written for high schoolers and you need to have some humility to admit you might be missing or have forgotten some fundamentals, but the lesson strucutre really appeals to me. It's the only series I've found that respects the learner and really builds up knowledge one piece at a time.
Before I start the intermediate texts and the calculus book, I've taken a detour to "Linear Algebra: Theory, Intuition, Code" and it's sticking a lot better now than previous attempts on the subject. So that gives me some confidence.
Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
#306I'm reading a book about electricity markets. Modeling electricity prices using a mean-reverting model with "jumps", exotic derivatives, etc. Pretty exciting stuff. Though you need a million dollars in liquid net worth to trade with any ISO so it's a bit out of my league. Really interesting author too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mack Am working on some large scale authorship attribution stuff on the side and…
- "authorship attribution stuff" Can you tell more about it? I've done something about it in my master's and PhD, but I'm away from this area for some time and don't know the actual state of the art...
It's like my previous project https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 but on a much larger amount of data. Rewrote everything in C++, tried to minimize allocations etc but still have some things to optimize. Current algorithm is just the cosine delta method on word/character {1,2,3}-grams as described in https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/32/suppl_2/ii4/3865676 combined with a few other features from the Writeprint paper.
I have no academic or professional linguistic background so it's definitely not state of the art, but it works reasonably well and from what I can tell in the literature the fancier methods work slightly better but have significantly worse performance. The beauty of the cosine delta is that I can put the vectorized representations of each author into something like hnswlib (InnerProductSpace) or Milvus and get really fast comparisons.
Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
#307[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
#308Three things at the moment:
1. Improving my health / fitness.
2. Learning Korean.
3. Financial freedom through my business (currently growth has flattened...).
Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
#309[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
#310I recently bought myself a copy of Ashley's Book of Knots, and been teaching myself... well... knotting. In my ignorance, I used to see knowledge of knots as this complex, hard to learn thing, but one thing I've been learning is that the more common, practical, knots tend to be fairly easy to tie. There's just different knots for different purposes. The decorative ones can get very complex, though.
I've been way into decorative knots lately. Putting turksheads and coxcombing on everything, and I've come up with a nice way to use some lanyard knot trickery to tie a ukulele strap to the headstock in a way that looks like a tiny flower.