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Ask HN: Teach me something new

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121–130 of 782 posts

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#121

By far the most important martial arts skill is the ability to function effectively after receiving a powerful blow to the face, solar plexus, etc. The only way to develop this skill is by practicing it; very few people do, for obvious reasons. If your martial arts training does not include this, it may have many benefits, but is severely lacking as training for actual fighting.

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." -Mike Tyson

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#122
Very few people know the potent facts about the brain:

* your neurons are not in your "brain" 90% of your neurons are not in what you generally denote by brain. They are in your cerebellum. The cerebellum has a distinct neural architecture, that difference is in fact clearly visible with the najed eye. A very poor simplistification would be to call it our GPU.

* the spinal cord is huge and is structurally a contiguous extension of your brain.

* your brain is mostly not filled with blood but with the transparent cerebrospinal fluid Btw there is a liquid almost twice as much more present in the human body than blood, the white lymph. It's unclear to me why we don't see lymph on dissected bodies. (possibly because of microvascularisation?) also anyone know how is lymph pumped? I don't think the heart pump lymph so is it stagnant?

* opiods,nicotine, and cannabinoids are endogenous neuroreceptors. They have the name of exogenous drugs because it happens they bind on those ligands but that also means that the brain generate similar but slightly different analogues itself.

* in terms of neurotransmitter s, types of receptors and even patterns of activation of brain regions per stimulus, humans are not much different from rats or other mammals and this apply for surprisingly high levels cognitive tasks such as e.g ADHD.

* the problem of consciousness/qualias If qualias are supraphysical then how can it be created from a physical process? Moreover where are you?! Where are you qualias located in your brain? And more remarquably, how many are you? Our two hemispheres are highly (but not that much though) symmetric, we might have one consciousness per hemisphere. Or not? But then what about those people that have their hemispheres crosstalk surgically cut? They behave normally (mostly), and have two independent brains. However the best proof might be e.g dolphins, which have a mono-hemispheric alternating sleep. So if one hemisphere dream, the other day it's the other hemisphere. Hence two distinct qualiesque brain in one dolphin brain.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#125

We can't know what would be new to you, without knowing what you already know. If you'd known this, you'd have given some idea of your background. Therefore, the above is the only thing that we can know is new to you. :P

When you post, how often and how much is it for a generic poster, and how often and how much for a specific poster.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#126
post #8

afaik the only way to get epoch with only posix-compliant tools is to use awk: $ awk 'BEGIN {srand(); t = srand() ; print t}' 1651247949 explaination: 1. srand if not provided with a seed will use the current unix epoch as seed 2. srand will return its previous seed in a new initialization (and we assign it to t) 3. we print t I learned this via a "Systems we love" talk ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfhMUed9RSE )

pax is POSIX:

    (: > f;echo "$((0$(pax 2>/dev/null -x ustar -wd -- f|dd 2> /dev/null bs=4 skip=34 count=3|tr -d '\0')))";rm -f f)
which might be beneficial to remember if your file server has a better clock than you do.

also, if you're actually targeting POSIX, you should make sure you've set PATH="`getconf PATH`" to guarantee you get the POSIX version of utilities.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#127

I'm going to go a bit random...get a styptic pencil! Nobody I've met even knows what they are. I came across them years ago in the shaving section, and was blown away by their utility. They are solid pieces of some saltlike material that are super effective at stopping bleeding. We don't even have bandaids in our house anymore, the pencils are way more useful.

We used them in the Navy!

Still have mine from the Air Force.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#128
post #120

By far the most important martial arts skill is the ability to function effectively after receiving a powerful blow to the face, solar plexus, etc. The only way to develop this skill is by practicing it; very few people do, for obvious reasons. If your martial arts training does not include this, it may have many benefits, but is severely lacking as training for actual fighting.

My teacher used to say the most important martial arts skill for real life is predicting a fight and turning around and running away.

Absolutely. And functioning effectively includes retaining the ability to run away, rather than falling to the ground in a heap, which will be followed by your opponent kicking you in the head.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always found it strange how UFOs concentrate in the U.S,is it because of the climate? /s I wanted to believe and there is a serious subreddit for UFOs but most are debunked. There exist ~2 truly mysterious UFOs and most of their mystery has been explained.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux > Folie à deux ('folly of two', or 'madness [shared] by two'), also known as shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD), is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations, are transmitted from one individual to another.

Well humans sure have many potent shared delusional disorders, one being e.g to ignore the 750000 humans that fled to Russia during the 8 years of Ukraine war on the dombas. The most common one is the idea of free will though.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#130
post #2

Quantitative easing (sometimes mistaking called "money printing") isn't directly inflationary. Because when central banks buy bonds, they do not pay with normal money. Instead, they pay with a special type of money that can never enter the real economy (as to not create inflation). This special type of money are called "bank reserves". And bank reserves can only be used to 1) settle interbank transfers and 2) buy mor…

"Not directly inflationary" does not seem like a very useful thing to say, since QE causally leads to higher inflation.

Japan barely had any inflation for a while because their QE program was temporary, and when it looked like inflation might go above zero, BoJ immediately hiked rates, contracting the economy(2000, 20006). This is how you achieve no inflation.

By the way, recently they've began trying a more expansionary policy once again. Using QE. It is working, so far. It might stop if they dive their head back in the sand!

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