Went for a walk today.
Found a $100 bill in the grass. No-one nearby to think it might belong to them.
Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
371–380 of 446 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#372Reading up on the history of information management, and the real killer app for paper was double-entry bookkeeping, which made Venice rich and contributed to starting the Renaissance.
It was the killer app for personal computers as well. From Lotus123 to my family's small business in a tiny country that could only afford a computer in 92 for the business.
Indeed. That's why I am doubtful about LLMs, they just aren't doing something particularly well or solving a basic problem. No one in their right mind would let an LLM do their accounting. Just today I was looking something up and that AI summary was just so wrong. How can I trust it with anything important?
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#373My 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…
I measured my office too, with an Adafruit SCD-30 sensor, it also got to 1500ppm faster than I expected. And it took a long time (12+ minutes with fully open windows) to get it down to an acceptable level again. Certainly compelled me to do that more often. Surprisingly, i couldn't find any calculator or theoretical approach for estimating this (given room of a certain size, how long does gas need to equilibriate wit…
I wonder if there is a way to integrate this woth home assistant for historical data collection, then use it with other sensors to build a prediction model or some usedul analysis. A bit less principled approach but voild be interesting!
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#374Reading up on the history of information management, and the real killer app for paper was double-entry bookkeeping, which made Venice rich and contributed to starting the Renaissance.
Any titles or resources you have found particularly interesting?
Warning: opening a can of worms.
Ann Blair is a great source on general, but there are so many facets to this topic here's a list that I have read or am going to read.
* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen * The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin * Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair * Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account by Niklas Luhmann * Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design * Writing the Laboratory Notebook by Howard M Kanare * Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski * A System for Writing by Bob Doto * Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte * Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan * Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini * The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson * How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens * Filing and Database Systems by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle, Judith Scharle Greene * Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern * The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen * The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul * Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari * Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo * Filing by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle * How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess * A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham * The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll * The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara J. Charles * Chance Particulars by Sara Mansfield Taber, Maud Taber-Thomas * The Great Mental Models Volume 1- General Thinking Concepts by Parrish, Shane; Beaubien, Rhiannon * The Product is Docs by Christopher Gales * Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper Articulating design decisions by Tom Greever The Card System at the Office by J Kaiser * Systematic Indexing by J Kaiser * Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet * Magic and hypersystems : constructing the information-sharing library by Harold Billings. * The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information by George A. Miller * The Commonplace Book by Elizabeth Smither * The Oxford Handbook of Expertise * Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by Jean-luc Doumont * Applied Secretarial Practice by Rupert P. Sorelle and John Robert Gregg * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * What is a Document by Michael Buckland * The Commonplace Book by Ann Blair * Make Better Documents by Anil Dash * A Core Calculus for Documents by Will Crichton and Shriram Krishnamurthi * The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams * Information by Anthony Grafton * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * Files: Law and Media Technology by Cornelia Vismann * Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge by Cyrille Martraire * Living in Information by Jorge Arango * How to Write a Technical Paper: Structure and Style of the Epitome of your Research† by Georgios Varsamopoulos * Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by JoAnn T. Hackos * Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango * Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook by James (jamesg.blog)
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#375[flagged]
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…
Thank you for clarifying and thank you for looking after the rescues!
I don't remember where I read it, but there was an interesting case for pairing abandoned parrots with veterans and people suffering from PTSD. Both suffer in similar ways, and were able to reduce their struggles together.
Could have been Bessel van der Kolk who mentioned it.
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#376OpenCode has 11 options for installation.
I knew curl, npm, and docker, but asked Gemini about the rest:
bun, pnpm, yarn, brew, scoop, chocolatey, paru, mise.
Although its wonderful that people are building and creating, I also hope it calms down somewhat so I can choose from well tested few options in the future.
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#377I had some eye strain and think it is because my eye muscles are overused. A doctor told me the muscles in the eye are flat, like tapes, and that I would not feel a muscle ache. I noticed the strain when I focus on different points quickly. I started to pay attention to how I move my eyes and realized I read a lot of text while scrolling, for example reading X posts on mobile while scanning the text at the same time.…
Try Lutein (20mg).
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, Table1 = {"col1": [1,2,3]} Table2 = {"epiphany": [1,1,1]} for i, r in enumerate(Table1["col1"]): print(r, Table2["epiphany"][i]) He's really happy he found this (Edit: actually it seems like Chang She talked about this while discussing the Lance data format[1]@12:00 in 2024 at a conference calling it "the fourth way") and will represent this in a conference. [1] https://youtu.be/9O2pfXkCDmU?si=IheQl6rAiB852el…
Seriously, this is not what big data does today. Distributed query engines don't have the primitives to zip through two tables and treat them as column groups of the same wider logical table. There's a new kid on the block called LanceDB that has some of the same features but is aiming for different use-cases. My trick retrofits vertical partitioning into mainstream data lake stuff. It's generic and works on the tech…
Why a paper? A repo should do the trick.
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was the killer app for personal computers as well. From Lotus123 to my family's small business in a tiny country that could only afford a computer in 92 for the business.
Indeed. That's why I am doubtful about LLMs, they just aren't doing something particularly well or solving a basic problem. No one in their right mind would let an LLM do their accounting. Just today I was looking something up and that AI summary was just so wrong. How can I trust it with anything important?
You can't judge AI in general and LLMs in particular by the abysmal Google summaries.
Re: Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
#380When you use a microscope to magnify something, the objective (magnifying lens) is literally taking the Fourier transform of the image. The optical system recovers up to a limiting frequency, determining the spatial resolution of the image.
Gotta say, I assumed this is some sort of virtual/imaginary thing, but it seems like there's a point in the optical system where if we placed a screen, we'd see the FT of the image coming in! And before we had digital image processing people used to place masks there to filter out low frequency or high frequency details in the image. Which is absolutely insane and I have no comprehension of how the physics works out!
https://www.youtube.com/user/huygensoptics is the YouTube channel for this sort of thing. Set aside some time, you'll be there a while.