Earlier quoted context omitted.
You forgot the part where people suspect that we are Boltzmann brains.
If I’m a Boltzmann brain that can only survive for an instant, why do I experience existing for a whole lifetime?
Ask HN: Teach me something new
201–210 of 782 posts
Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new
#202Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new
#203Take a positive integer. If it's odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. If it's even, divide it by 2. Example: 7-22-11-34-17-52-26-13-40-20-10-5-16-8-4-2-1-4-2-1-4-2-1... Any positive integer you take, you end up in a 1-4-2-1 loop. It's not proved yet but there's no number found yet that satisfies otherwise. That's the Collatz Conjecture or the 3n+1 problem. Probably the easiest conjecture to explain to someone. Good day/n…
Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new
#2041. "cat foo.json | python -m json.tool" pretty print on console.
2. "cal" pretty prints current month on console. "cal 2022" pretty print current year.
> interesting to you
1. Bank of England one of the earliest banks to issue paper money was establish to finance war expenditure.
2. Federal reserve is holding (and hence funding) ~$2.7T worth of mortgage backed securities[1]. It started out as a stop gap measure to cushion 2008 crisis but they are yet to discontinue it.
Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
You forgot the part where people suspect that we are Boltzmann brains.
If I’m a Boltzmann brain that can only survive for an instant, why do I experience existing for a whole lifetime?
Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new
#206I've described this on HN before; forgive me if you've already seen it. I have chronic migraine. It sounds worse than it is; I rarely suffer attacks anymore, and when I do, they're usually mostly harmless, as in the case I'll describe below. Contrary to popular belief, migraine is not a headache. It's something a little more like an epileptic seizure. Intense headaches are one common symptom, but there are a lot of o…
Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new
#207Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have experienced this several times and almost never have a headache. I definitely can't read what's beyond/obscured by the scotoma. The first time it happened was during a test in high school and the splotch grew until I was forced to read the questions in my peripheral. I have an anecdote that corroborates your observation that cognitive experiences are more complicated then assumed: I was once very, very sleep d…
One of the other weird things I referred to is best described as discovering that I could be awake and asleep at the same time. I think it might be another case of our naive ideas about cognitive processes being a little oversimplified. It sounds like nonsense, of course, but that's because we naively assume that sleep and wakefulness are opposites--that they are mutually exclusive. What if we're wrong about that? Wh…
Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new
#209I knew very little about music when I decided to play the harmonica. I looked for an instrument that required little maintenance, were easy to transport and easy to play everywhere. So I decided to learn to play the harmonica by myself. It's easy to start with it, but it gets challenging when you try to learn those techniques mostly because you can't see inside people's mouths to see what they are doing and you aren't used to force your tongue to do those specific movements. When you see what people can do with it, it can be jaw dropping. I'm still a beginner at it but it's so rewarding after practising a lot to get your first bending, to reproduce songs you have learned just by muscle memory, to sound a little bit closer to those blues masters... definitely something worth to try in my opinion.
Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new
#210afaik 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 )
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20201202084055/https://pubs.open...
cat > epoch.c
int printf(const char *__restrict, ...);
unsigned int time(unsigned int *tloc);
int main(){printf("%u\n",time((unsigned int *)0));}
^D
c99 epoch.c
./a.out