Ask HN: What interesting thought did you read on HN but couldn't find later? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What interesting thought did you read on HN but couldn't find later?

305 pointsspython226 comments

An article about some species of octopuses that have a relatively high IQ, but since the parents die before their offspring comes to life, every generation have to relearn everything from scratch.

IIRC, the lack of inter-generational communication deprived this species from developing to the level its IQ permits.

I wish I can find that piece again!

Is it this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13354852#13363510

They also live very short lifespans. Typically 2 years. Giant octopuses can live as long 3-5 years.

It does not matter how smart you are if you can't learn from parent and have only few years to gain life experience.

Are we learning a lot from our parents?

I had highly educated parents (university professors) and what I learned from them was a tiny fraction of the total amount of things that I've learned so far (from written material, other people, and life experience).

I think there's merit to what you said, but I don't think the crucial bit is the parents specifically. I think the crucial bit is that without language you can't easily communicate to others what you've learned, at least not complex things. This aspect doesn't depends on life expectancy as much. Instead it depends on two things: how much knowledge there is in society (of octopuses) and how doable it is to communicate that knowledge.

You're kind of disproving your own point here, no? Or at least, both the fact that its parents die and that they have no language creates a vicious circle.

Though you skipped over it, probably the most important skill you've learnt from your parents is language. The octopus' parents die before they can transfer that skill. Hence, they can (barely) communicate with others of the same species and elevate their collective knowledge.

But you didn't have to learn language from parents specifically, you could've leart it from other members of the society.

I was making the distinction between learning from parents and learning from "others". The argument around the mistmatch between the life time of parents compared to the time of the offspring to maturity only makes sense with parents.

> The octopus' parents die before they can transfer that skill. Hence, they can (barely) communicate with others of the same species and elevate their collective knowledge.

Yeah, but that can't be an important factor. Elephant parents hang around for long and you still don't see talking elephants.

If you've raised a kid, a lot of these things are really obvious with just a few gaps of understanding here and there where a good book on learning comes in handy. Watching a tiny human go from knowing virtually nothing more than how to breathe, three years later, singing, ABCs, various animal recognition and a plethora of other stuff is educational to understanding "learning". If you haven't raised a kid, then it's no harm, no foul. I didn't realize how important family influence was on a child's learning until I did it myself.

I think you're working too hard with the semantics here. Parents, as in, who ever the hell takes care of the kid the most. That's either your bio-parents, typically. Maybe grandparents if your bios are crackheads. Maybe a foster care system because everyone in your family is jacked up in general. But parent: those that are responsible for your general well being. Yes "society" plays a roll. But random people don't walk up to a toddler to teach them their ABCs or 123s. Someone has to work with a kid from beginning to end for that developmental knowledge foundation or that kid has a really good chance of having a ton of problems down the line. And yes, schools still do the ABCs and numbers. But that's more to fill gaps, which do happen. Not to straight up teach a kid that can't do shit at all. There are different programs for when a 5 year old can't even say their own name. Research shows things like consistent night time reading and playing with infants and toddlers give them a solid base that proves them well throughout their lives. There was one paper (out of many) that was on hackernews a week or two ago about it as well.

And technically elephants do communicate, both vocally and through body language. As do most mammals. Just no where near the sophistication we can. That has to do with the sophistication of the brain. Those crazy folks that have wolf sanctuaries and are "apart of the pack", would argue with you about animal language too. But to be fair, you have to be a level of crazy of jump into a cage full of wolves. Hell, bees do interpretive dance to communicate. They sure kick my ass in that field. Then take Koko. From the age of 1, they taught a guerrilla to use a modified form of American sign language and was pretty proficient at communicating. I highly doubt starting at a later age would have been as effective. Developmental years of learning are vital for that foundation.

> I think you're working too hard with the semantics here. Parents, as in, who ever the hell takes care of the kid the most.

I didn't mean we don't learn that much from parents versus who the hell takes care of the kids (that would be semantics). I meant that we don't learn that much from parents versus all the other people that you interact with throughout your life.

> And technically elephants do communicate, both vocally and through body language. As do most mammals. Just no where near the sophistication we can.

Right, that's why I said that the crucial point was not communication with parents (or who ever the hell takes care of the kid), but communication. If you happen to belong to a species that has difficulty communicating you will never learn much from anyone, regardless of which age your parents die.

An octopus doesn't have any type of parent. That's the problem. No one teaches them, at all. That's why info doesn't move around with them. They start from scratch every generation.

Now, if you want to make a real argument against the nuclear family model and trying to say it's useless, I'd take the tribal method. There are many Amazonian tribes where a child does not exactly "belong" to parents. The entire tribe/village/whatever IS the parent. That's an interesting concept. It's also been argued that some pre-neolithic Euro-Asian societies were the same way. In some respects you can even see a form of that in Spartan society as well, back in their glory days. If I remember right, it was more towards the males. At a point (I think it was 11 or 12), taken from the family to be trained and had a barracks like lifestyle. They still had family units and what not, marriage, blood lines, inheritance, but there was a much more "society owns you" than what we see today. I think the Mongols had a similar little thing going, a lack of a hard lined family unit as well, but I might be wrong or confusing with someone else. But I'm also talking about dead societies.

Can a village raise a child? Sure. But at the same time, it's also no one's direct responsibility at that point. I say there's too much risk. What happens when the trash needs to be taken out but it's no one's direct responsibility to do so? Either someone consistently bites the bullet in the name of "The house is doing it" because they are the weakest in handling the nasty smell or it never gets done and the house smells like shit. At least in a "parent" type lifestyle, it's someone's direct job to fulfill certain duties. Now, it does suck if they are no capable to begin with. But 80/20 rule, it works most of the time.

So, unless you have a really sour relationship with your folks and you're currently projecting, at this point, I don't understand your argument. The passing of knowledge is not happening with octopi. Doesn't matter if that's by parents or by some magical monolithic tablet in the middle of the ocean. If they did have some passing of knowledge, there's a fair chance that they'd be smarter than they currently are by leaps and bounds. Dolphins raise their young (parents) and are considered one of the most intelligent sea creatures. Octopi have a chance of that, but miss the one crucial point, passing of knowledge because the parents are not around, nor is anyone else.

Again, typically parents do the passing of foundational knowledge. No one is saying that's the only way. It's just the primary, typically convenient and typically efficient due to the whole evolutionary instinct "I protect my own blood". There will always be exceptions, but in terms of convenience and efficiency, parents are the best system for passing foundational knowledge to the newly born. Irks me to have to keep saying "typical" since we all believe in black and white suddenly when it comes to the internet.

>I meant that we don't learn that much from parents versus all the other people that you interact with throughout your life.

You can't read a magic tablet if you were never taught to read. You can't understand some random old guy singing wisdom if you can't understand spoken language. I got taught both, reading and speaking, in two languages, from my folks before I hit kindergarten. Parents are typically the ones that teach you how to do the basis of understanding here. Your professors would think you're a useless sack of meat if your parents didn't work with you when you were younger. Same goes for me.

I'm rambling and this is too long.

I wish I could remember the book, but I originally got it because it's title was something like "Understanding and improving learning", something like that. It ended up being more about the first 10 years of life's learning rather than just learning in general. Still read it because it was interesting.

Anyways, to the point. The first few years of someone's life is proven to be crazy important. It's well confirmed when they find kids who have literally lived in the woods since babies (Jungle Book style, there's a few cases world wide of this and they are all nuts/heartbreaking) and of one case of some loony parents that locked up their kid in a room from birth with next to no interaction. Just enough to feed. Wasn't rescued until around 13 or so.

They find that those missing the first few years of a parents teaching basic social interactions, speech and motor skills through play are at a severe disadvantage. It's simply a foundation. If you have a weak structural foundation, the building will collapse. Even though that foundation is never seen by the outside world (both for buildings and metaphorically), doesn't mean it's not there and it's not vital.

A bulk of your knowledge does come from outside sources. But you can't learn calculus without knowing arithmetic. And you can't learn arithmetic without someone putting up with "What number is this?" "Twee!" "Good job!". Those sessions help accelerate your learning. Without that base, learning is probably a shallow linear line through life experiences. Because you only "learn"... ish... from what you encounter. Parental teachings give you a base that help accelerate learning from linear to something more logarithmic.

I wish I could remember the book's name. She goes into some relatively well thought out public education reform that, at the least, is a damn good start in my opinion. The woman also better explains everything I mentioned because developmental teaching is her field of expertise. My library doesn't seem to offer an online history of checked out books... which is surprising or I'm stupid and can't find it.

Maybe the TLDR to this is, the parents education process helps turn learning into a logarithmic endeavor instead of a trial/error shallow linear one.

Examples of neglected children (Jungle Book style) are problematic. Learning won't work if their psyche is broken. Better example would be: loving parents who never teach their children anything useful - if something like that ever happened.

Absolutely agree. But the best progress made on how the brain works was to learn from people who received major brain damage/trauma. It's just slightly frowned upon to inflict brain damage to a healthy person for science. [Insert nazi or hydra joke here]. Jungle Book kids are the best study subjects without really crossing bad ethical lines. It's going to be difficult to convince well adjusted, loving humans to never speak to their offspring and teach them absolutely nothing. I'm sure there are some ethical issues there. Don't know exactly. But I know there has to be some ethical and legal problems there lol.

Just thought of this: Couldn't we argue that if it happened early enough and said "animal caretakers", I think one Ukrainian girl was literally raised by wolves, came in early enough, would the kid have psyche issues? Their frame of reference is so limited to knowing what's "normal" and what's not, that they could possibly not develop any actual psychological issues. Actually, them being taken out of that "Jungle Book" environment and integrated into human society would cause issues. Their "Jungle Book normal" was now disturbed greatly. If timeline is true, but they still have psyche issues, could possibly mean that the human brain is wired to a form of "normal" that can't deviate by some certain amount. Just spit-balling ideas.

Not about IQ but I read somewhere about how the properties of octopus bodies (squishiness, bonelessness) form a very different understanding of the world compared to those of primates. Can't find where it was.

This isn't at all what you're looking for, but the book Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (Flusser, V. & Bec, L., 2012) might be a fun read for you.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/vampyroteuthi...

Vilem Flusser writing about vampire squids? Sounds like a great read! Thanks a lot!

What was the gist of it?

Could it be this was actually a reddit comment? https://np.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/3x2cgv/octopus_mak...

TierZoo on Youtube made a great video about octopuses and friends and mentioned that topic. It's quite an interesting stat to spec into when you don't have a high lifespan.

There was a thread about interviewing, someone talking about how hard interviewing was and failing dozens of them even as a senior engineer. (there is a thread about that once every month or two, indeed) A commenter responded saying something along the lines of, "When you find the right fit/role, the interview will seem suspiciously easy."

I thought it was interesting because it's such a huge anecdote without any ways of backing it up, but for some reasons it does match my own experience in the past decade+ for almost every job offer I've landed (a handful). For every interview where I felt like I struggled really hard (even though in the end I was able to solve the problems the interviewers asked), I did not get offers. For the ones I did land, it always seemed really easy and somewhat like "what? is that it?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200322

An article about EV vs. ICE was posted, written from the perspective of an EV being the natural way of building things (few moving parts, little heat loss, etc) and that this ICE was an intricate machine of thousands of parts channeling the spirit of fine watchmaking or Jules Verne.

I found the perspective refreshing but have never been able to find it since.

Try out https://www.pagedash.com to help save pages you read for reference later! (Maker here)

All of these apps are essentially the same. I have to click some extra button or drag and drop some extra thing, and then when your service disappears I have to grab my export and figure out how to import it to the next one.

What does your product offer over the hundreds of other sites that do exactly the same thing? Have you innovated in this space?

I tried to offer a one-click solution (no additional drag and drop). It also tries to capture the page as you saw it in the browser, HTML and all (more faithfully than Evernote, at least).

See related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15653206

Does it have apps for mobile to share-save? Pretty important. The following would make me move from Pocket; Support for PDF, ppt, etc. Offline reading on Desktop (Pocket works fine on mobile but on Desktop it seems not very good). And yes, total export so when you close the doors, I do not have to start over.

Thanks for the comment!

I can't promise an app right now. For now I am strongly mulling a Telegram bot that takes in links from you and saves it to PageDash backend for you. This is quite high up in my roadmap.

> Support for PDF, ppt, etc.

PDF is supported. PPT is a Todo.

> Offline reading on Desktop

Need to explore service workers for this. Admittedly not a priority yet.

> total export

Auto Google Drive export is available for paid users. Manual export (page by page) is available to all users. In any case, if I do shut, I will open mass export to all.

Perhaps this one:

http://teslaclubsweden.se/test-drive-of-a-petrol-car/

Somebody was writing about a concept of negotiations that focuses on values of the other party, and asking the question "what if your value is met" instead of arguing for your positions. The example was about gun control: "what if there's no crime, would you be willing to give up guns?"

I suspect you're referring to this essay by Scott Alexander:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-argumentat...

In the context of negotiation, the book Getting To Yes describes a similar concept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_to_Yes

Someone mentioned a scifi short story with link to online version that I followed & read. The story was about a uploaded-human AI-spaceship that for a time worked as a asteroid miner. After a single overmind takes over 1st the inner planets, then the whole solar system, the protagonist to flee to insterstellar space, but is pursued by an overmind ship.

Been trying to find the story/title/author since, with no success.

I remember that story, but I sadly can't point you to a link. If you liked that story, you might also like The Egg [], though, which I also found via HN.

[] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

Asterisks don't work as you expect on HN.

This book? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-w...

If this isn't what the GP is referring to, it should be. I found this book and it's sequel a very fun and quick read.

I found and lost a similar story. There were no mentions of human characters, only programs that were evolving in their own digital space. It was a standard HTML page amongst a collection of other works, not a book.

Lots of Greg Egan work covers such ground, if that helps!

I think you're right. Could have sworn I had looked through his works already, but looking again I found this: http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html

Dammit, I know the one you mean and I can't remember where I read it either. Hopefully someone will help us out.

"The Long Chase", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192254

That discussion has links to books with similar stories. Enjoy.

Thank you! I've often wanted to point others at it in discussions on topics ranging from blockchain forks to 'friendly AI'. I even posed a question on Quora to try to find it – https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-scifi-short-story-name-autho... – now updated with your pointer.

Love this thread and the books mentioned. Folks might also enjoy “We are Legion” by Dennis Taylor: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569

Someone commented: "how things have changed, emacs and vim are partners and the enemy is Eclipse and Visual Studio"

A play on words of an episode in star trek the next generation, where someone from the past wakes up to realize that now humans and Klingons are friends and the enemy are the ferengi and the borg.

Ha, the Ferengi are never really an enemy. They just want that latinum.

The AI does not love you. Nor does it hate you. But you are made of atoms which it can use for something else.

Not sure if it was on HN but it was a short story about an old retired sys admin in an age where everything runs on the cloud. One day, something went wrong in a data center and he was called to fix it because robots manage everything now and nobody knows how to fix things anymore. He was accompanied by a younger sysadmin IT person as he fixed a server or something. By the end of it, the younger IT person wanted to learn about how computer works and be a sysadmin.

Reminds me of the sysadmin XKCD: https://xkcd.com/705/

Heh. That's always a good one. I'm not sure anymore if I found it here or on Nat Torkington's four short links.

I found it! It's Hardware Guy

http://praxagora.com/fiction/hardware_guy/

Meta comment: there's a very active subreddit for finding lost information, https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/ .

Meta comment: I was trying to remember what the name of that subreddit was!

Someone once posted a short science fiction story about the animals that became the dominant intelligent species on earth after humans. First it was raccoons, then it was crows, traveling by air balloon. I loved it, and I’ve searched many subsequent times to no avail.

The piece was posted on The Archdruid Report (https://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com) and was called "The Next Ten Billion Years".

In a bit of an unconventional move, the author has closed down the blog and is now selling the previously free articles as ebooks. There are a lot of valuable perspectives in his writing, so it might very well be worth the purchase. Most of it is not in the "short story format" that you remember though. (http://www.foundershousepublishing.com/).

There might also be an free archive somewhere..

I found it on archive.is: http://archive.today/2016.10.25-213332/http://thearchdruidre...

Funny thing - I was thinking about this post a few years ago but also couldn't remember where I'd read it; I ended up writing a program to download the pages I'd visited since 2012 (using a heuristic to discard unlikely entries and to promote likely ones). That's probably the most effort I've gone through to find something on the Internet!

An article that provided a strong argument for why you should never stop reading, even if you forget most of what you read. There are a few articles I’ve found via Google on the same subject but they are not the one I saw on HN.

Perhaps this essay by Paul Graham?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753526

The one set of material you probably shouldn't read.

why do you say this? i want to understand your point of view.

Because PG's essays are intellectually uninteresting and often times mistaken (which is a nice way of putting incorrect). If the essay's didn't have his name on it, they'd be harshly critiqued when they get past around these parts. If you're looking for academic perspectives, especially around the subjects of rhetoric and debate, there is absolutely nothing worth reading in those essays.

Quite frankly I find it annoying whenever I see someone linking to them. It's junk food for your mind, with some Silicon Valley sprinkles on top.

I mean look at this gem in the linked essay:

>So although not knowing how you know things may seem part of being human, it may not be.

On a thread about stories you found interesting but lost, a story about reading even if you forget. How very meta

Maybe this is the article you are searching for -- It's Okay to "Forget" what you read (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15146715)

This was it, along with the accompanying PG article. Thanks!

Not a "interesting thought" really, but I thought someone posted a link to a site for "un-mangling" text. would fix all the formatting issues like &amp, and other various issues caused by copy/pasting text from place to place.

I forget what I was doing recently but I thought "I should use that site" and couldn't find it anywhere after lots of searching. I should have bookmarked it :-/

Was it a mojibake (text encoding) fixer?

Maybe not what you remember, but maybe this helps? https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy/blob/master/R...

You probably mean this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103356

Ah, yes this was it! thanks!

Someone shared an MIT or Stanford class titled Deep learning for Biology or for Bioinformatics can't remember. I thought I saved it but couldn't find it anywhere later. Edit: The lectures were on youtube.

Maybe in reference to this: http://kundajelab.github.io/dragonn/

Wow, great timing. Around a week ago I spent an hour digging through my bookmarks for something I'd found via HN, and I must not have bookmarked.

I can't recall what the original post linked to, but in the comments someone discussed their preferred method of organizing their digital notes/journal. They linked to a forum post where someone described the system.

It involved using a single folder for all notes, with different categories, that were indicated in the file name. In fact the file name contained everything important. It also discussed never altering a file, but creating an index to refer to other related entries.

I think the person who wrote the forum post was a journalist of some sort? And they might have made reference to a Japanese system that was similar, but physical, which used lines on the top of index cards to indicate categories, and keeping the number of categories low (always 4?) was important.

I'd love to find that forum post again.

Not what you are searching, but I found Notational Velocity (http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/) indispensable for quick note-taking. It is very lightweight, and I have a shortcut bound to it, so I'm always just a shortcut away from writing down notes. Searching for notes is just as fast, and with a flat file structure for data it is easily synchronized across devices.

The index card version of that note-taking system sounds somewhat like Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten or Pile of Index Cards, which have both had some posts describing them linked on HN previously:

http://takingnotenow.blogspot.ca/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkast...

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking...

http://pileofindexcards.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/cluster/

Another HN post from the zettelkasten.de domain had a comment with a link to this project on Github, which sounds a lot like the filename-based system you mention, at least in terms of putting all the info into the filename:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16611413

https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder

Maybe it's not the one you were looking for, but could be useful anyway?

I recall reading a phenomenal blog(?) post about data science in history in which the author presented some historical data relating to the northern renaissance (iirc, shipping logs) and then presented two completely plausible but divergent analyses of the data.

I've spent hours trying to find it again on multiple occasions with no success. :(

Maybe this -- https://sappingattention.blogspot.in/2012/11/reading-digital...

It sure sounds like it, thanks!

That blog's been posted often, but with little success: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sappingattention.blog...

This thread is quite amusing, I think I'll fav it.

Great blog. The author, incidentally, is a youngish historian named Ben Schmidt. I feel like it's a natural fit with an HN audience given how data-driven his work is, but as you say, it doesn't break through very much.

He also created (helped create?) a tool called Bookworm that might be of interest: http://bookworm.culturomics.org

Thanks! The Bookworm link doesn't work right now, but I found this demo video very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kAlwiXt0bY

Alas, not quite! But thanks for pointing me to that article.

There was a guy who posted some comments explaining how the industry basically doesn't know exactly why some batteries work better than others, and that the research in this domain is a lot like "nobody know wtf they are doing".

There was also this one comment by a guy explaining that the components used in Apple devices are "premium" components coming from the first batches, and that they make Apple's hardware more reliable than another computer with the same components

I read about it about a year ago. It was about a small program with 4 letters and someone posted 2 blog posts about it in a weeks time abusing the tool to see what it can come up with. The tool or program seemed to have an exploitative nature and seemed to be used in the security field. It worked with, I think binary files, but I recall it also allowed other programs to be ran on it. You provided an exit state and an input state and the program it needs to work with and tried all sorts of things within the provided program to reach the provided exit state. The blog post abused it to optimise to something interesting which I can't recall anymore. The writer of the blog post had more experience with it and already liked to toy around with it. It's not angr.

Iirc it 2as called something like nmap or jobn. Something with 4 letters and not the most straightforward name.

Please help me out.

Sounds like a fuzzer. Was it American Fuzzy Lop (afl-fuzz)? Doesn't quite meet your 4-letter criteria but sounds like a candidate.

Yes! Thank you. No wonder I wasn't able to find it as I strongly held my belief that it was 4 letters. Love this place.

It's odd how a word can feel "on the tip of your tongue" and intuitions about its number of sounds and their characteristics can be remarkably accurate, especially if you consider the interposition of linguistically similar sounds. And it can be totally misleading when your memories are incorrect, to the point for me at least of making it nearly impossible to recall a word until I have shifted focus to something else.

A blog post by a pythics PHD (or may be biolog or chemistry, I don’t remember.) about the sad state of utility software in his/her area of study. The software the author developed during the PhD program has become the acedemic standard.

There was one motivational type article about how you should “go first” or “be first” when approaching problems in life. Like when making friends or just socially in general. I was looking for it again recently but couldn’t find it.

I don't know about the link, but if you are interested in the subject I think that you would enjoy this lecture:

MIT Math for CS, Matching Problems: https://youtu.be/5RSMLgy06Ew

tldw: it can be mathematically proven that the best strategy is to take the initiative when looking for a partner/job/vacancy, starting with your prefered choice and working down from there, and let others shoot you down if need be

The matching problem was actually the first algorithm we discussed in my discrete math class

I'm sure the article is a nice read, but I think you summarized it quite well. Gotta take the initiative on things.

A post about a startup that was trying to create an open database of algorithmic ways to treat patients. I've tried and tried to find this with HN's search engine, but can't seem to pick the right search terms.

I am physician. Would love to work on a decision support tool...

Wild guess: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5599134

Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave (113 points by daslee on Apr 24, 2013 | 47 comments)

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/counsyl/

A service that converts PDF research papers into a clean readable webpage.

Their example paper was a research paper with two columns and diagrams to show their service actually works well.

I searched a couple of times but couldn't find them again...

Probably this demo: http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/demo/demo.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528797

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657988

I have stumbled upon this, but unfortunately, this is not it.

That was a hosted web service and it extracted the text and figures from the research paper but didn't maintain the structure. You could read it on a phone too.

I remember it didn't work on all research papers but was slowly expanding its database of supported papers. There was a place to paste the URL of a research paper to be processed.

Sounds like pdf2htmlEX. Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5657988

Pdf2htmlEX – Convert PDF to HTML without losing text or format (github.com) 161 points by coolwanglu on May 5, 2013 | 48 comments

http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/demo/demo.html (Demo of research paper)

http://coolwanglu.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/

Fwiw I've looked into these sorts of tools in the past for a work project and none of them work very well. Converting HTML to PDF is a solved problem but the other way around never comes out clean.

If your document structure is p simple it might be fine but I wouldn't bother for anything else.

perhaps https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/?

Yes that's the one! Thank you so much!

I've been trying to find an email server which was mentioned in a comment a few months ago. I read through the setup instructions - the only point I remember is once it's setup one can add as many domains to it as one wants - if I remember correctly. There were several that popped up this past year, https://mailinabox.email this being one of them but I don't think it was the one I'm talking about. The setup instructions were clear.

Was it perhaps this? https://github.com/nodemailer/wildduck#wild-duck-mail-server

It's had a few submissions, but no discussion.https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wildduck.email

Thanks but it wasn't that one. The one I'm talking about wasn't in beta and I would like to say one could use any DB one wanted to but that might just be wrong :)

Edit: grammar.

Email server as in "email server bundle", not SMTP server? If yes, there's Mailcow or iRedMail (among others).

Thanks. It wasn't either one of those. Now that I remember the one I'm talking about, it's system requirements were low. What comes to mind it could run comfortably on a 512mb system.

Citadel? http://www.citadel.org/doku.php?id=features

There was a comment about the theory, that emotions are not represented in the body but actually happen there. And we learn to interpret the bodily state as having an emotion. Can't find it.

There's some really interesting literature about this topic, I only discovered it recently. I'd recommend starting with 'The Good Gut' by Justin Sonnenburg.

An excerpt can be found here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-feelings-the-...

Thanks, I'll look into it!

I recently found the theory of Lynn Margulis interesting, that we are all holobionts, not just relying on symbiotic bacteria but critically dependent on them, for breaking down food just as well as for staying healty. In that sense, we are less individuals and more landscapes, gardens that foster life.

There are various theories of emotion (overview here https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapt...). I think you might've been looking for the James–Lange theory?

"The James–Lange theory refers to a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion within modern psychology. It was developed independently by two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange. The basic premise of the theory is that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. Instead of feeling an emotion and subsequent physiological (bodily) response, the theory proposes that the physiological change is primary, and emotion is then experienced when the brain reacts to the information received via the body's nervous system." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James%E2%80%93Lange_theory

This is the James-Lange theory of emotions. Enjoy!

It may have been this article: The Evolution of Pleasure and Pain - Antonio Damasio Tells Us Why Pain Is Necessary

http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/antonio-damasio-tells-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16206053

Not sure if that was article, but catching up with my fire hazard of paper subscriptions I recently read this article on emotion intelligence and that theory of what emotion is: http://nautil.us/issue/51/limits/emotional-intelligence-need...

Just a reminder to always upvote/favorite what you consider relevant, and you can find it later on your profile, in case you don't use an app like Pocket to consolidate everything.

I use Materialistic app for HN. Saved there many stories. Lost my mobile. Then I realized this app saves stories only locally.

Materialistic doesn't run any servers

Someone posted a comment mentioning that coffee shops are a good metric for cultural development when trying to look for a new city

There's this discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10391753

How to know if where you live is “up and coming”: fried chicken vs. coffee shops (medium.com) 326 points by edward on Oct 15, 2015 | 306 comments

https://medium.com/@Sam_Floy/how-to-know-if-where-you-live-i...

Completely disagree about the fried chicken part of the equation. The more fried chicken the better.

Its not making a judgment call, just a correlation.

I wasn't making a judgement call either. Just stating how much I like fried chicken.

That metric is so implicitly bigoted it's funny

Someone posted here a blog from a guy who had a plan to commit suicide at the age of 50. He wrote a lot of articles explaining the reasoning. It was mostly a fear of declining quality of life with age, and a fear of becoming incapacitated at some point and being unable to follow through with euthanasia if he was suffering. It stuck in my head and I'd like to find it again because I couldn't remember if this was something he went through with or if it was hypothetical.

We’re you thinking of the author of zeromq?

http://hintjens.com/blog:115 “A protocol for dying”

No, this was someone who was still in good health and wanted to be proactive about avoiding possible future sickness and even just aging. But thanks for posting that.

Are you talking about the guy who ended up killing himself, revealing a never ending manifesto-like site upon his suicide? I'd like to find that again myself.

EDIT: one google search and here it is: http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-sports-writer-kills-himsel...

The site looks like it's down now though.

That's it, thank you! I didn't remember it was a sports writer, I assumed it was someone who worked in tech since I had found it here. And here's a working mirror: http://martin-manley.eprci.com/

There was this blog post about how to form yearly goals, maybe for New Year’s resolutions or something? I remember they were divided into 10-15 categories, dealing with all areas of life (career, health, family, etc.) and had probing but specific questions in each.

Maybe this?

http://yearcompass.com

https://alexvermeer.com/8760hours/

There you go!

Off topic, but browsers should be appending the referrer page in the history list when openning a new browser tab. Countless times i've lost an article because i opened a link and much later discovered i had somehow closed the opener page.

This saved me a lot of time for these cases

https://github.com/program-in-chinese/HistoryInThreads_WebEx...

very good. thanks

Saving this for later. Bookmark.

I can't think of anything that I could not find but I just wanted to say that it is a great idea for a thread!

It was a post or discussion, I think involving Peter Thiel talking about how innovation is in the world of bits not atoms now and that implies some unpleasant things about our society.

Closest I could find was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718654

What about this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5641799

In Tech We Trust? A Debate with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen [video] (milkeninstitute.org) 74 points by jordn on May 2, 2013 | 39 comments

The original video link seems dead, I guess it's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtZbWnIALeE

I think this was probably it (just reached that point in the video where Thiel says the money quote). Thanks.

FYI if it's the bits/atoms treatment you're specifically interested in reading about, it goes back to at least 1995 from Nicholas Negroponte.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital

Dunno if this is management 101 but someone mentioned casually the relationship between responsibility and authority. A mismatch between those two creates tension (employee dissatisfaction).

I have not found the comment or literature on the subject. Experiences at my day job tell me this is key to org/role design and management in general.

There are several good articles discussing ARA:

http://blog.jbrains.ca/permalink/the-importance-of-aligning-...

https://ssbg.co.nz/about/media/words-with-meaning-the-import...

https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/fall-2016/d...

For HN comments specifically, you might have read one of these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810365

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184472

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9767231

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552107

Thanks! Seems I still need a couple of ‘Let me google that for you’ sent my way hehe

A paper some time back about performing large-scale host computations through (ab)using the TCP handshake for arithmetic.

Barbarasi et al., Parasitic computing, 2001 [1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/35091039

Been looking for this on and off for over 5 years, thank you.

I don't know if it was on HN, but I remember reading about productivity research concerning the length of the workweek. IIRC 25h week improved productivity compared to 40h. The study may have been done in Germany. But I haven't been able to find it or similar studies of high quality since.

Within the last year, a guy did a writeup on his DIY electrical panel circuit monitoring setup.

It allowed him to very accurately measure power consumption of everything in his house, and he was able to trace a sudden and mysterious rise in his monthly bill to a faulty pool pump.

There was a good quote about commercial interests becoming entrenched, something about once a business gets accustom to making a profit in some way it stars to think of it as a right and argues in that fashion to defend it.

An extraordinary long-form piece about a child who'd been born deaf (perhaps of Latino origin, growing up in the streets of a US city) and was then abandoned by his parents. He hadn't learned to speak. As an adult he was given help by a charity (or research group?) who, over the course of years, taught him to speak. There's a moment described in the article when he finally realises that all objects have names, and bursts into tears. When asked to recall how he thought about the world before he learned to speak, he could not describe his cognition.

That sounds like the story of Ildefonso. I originally heard the story on Radiolab [0] and it is also the subject of a book [1] by Susan Schaller called "A Man WithoutWords"

[0] https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91725-words/

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words

Something about someone smelling cake or a bakery in their neighborhood when there wasn't one, but it turned out to be chemicals leaching from the ground due to what was there years ago and buried.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14566057

A slide deck on compatibility and incompatibility of various Lego bricks.

Would that be "Stressing The Elements"[1], an unofficial guide of what connections are considered "illegal" because they are unstable or stress the parts?

[1] http://bramlambrecht.com/tmp/jamieberard-brickstress-bf06.pd...

There was a really interesting post against Elon Musk’s argument that AI will destroy us all.

The article made lots of counter arguments about why AI won’t destroy us all.

I can’t find it even after lots of searching.

This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14807818

Nope not that one unfortunately, but thank you! :)

I vaguely recall it being a pretty long blog post that walked through various scenarios. The formatting/design of the site was pretty plain/old school.

I got this one of reddit a long time ago[1], but maybe someone here knows where to find it.

A blog post laying out why Japan prefers "gadgets" over PCs, due to their complex writing system requiring more RAM, causing all early PCs to be more expensive. The post was really well written with pictures and price comparisons between US and Japanese versions of (if memory serves me right) Amigas and Commodores and other systems.

[1] Maybe before the release of the iPhone, but definitely before the release in Japan

Someone posted a youtube talk about Game Design that's applicable to general product design...

I remember it was really good, but couldn't find it anymore

Perhaps this?

Learn product design from game designers: http://www.1bytebeta.com/learn-product-design-fromgame-desig...

But the links seems dead. On the other hand, a DDG search with that title brings up some seemly links:

3 Things Software Product Designers Need To Learn From Game Designers: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/09/10/3-things-softw...

What Game UX Can Teach Designers about Product Design: https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/game-ux-product-design

edit: Duh, Youtube! Sorry, maybe this?

Designing emotions - what game creation teaches about design? | Piotr Milewski | TEDxGdynia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fYypN4JawY

Forgot to mention that the youtube video I saw was in english..

the "What Game UX Can Teach Designers about Product Design" article is pretty great too! thank you for sharing!

I don‘t know if it was HN or not but it could have been here.

Anyway, I read about this concept of a 6 day week (with a 2 day weekend) without losing any productivity.

The key was that the society is going to be split in 3 groups so that every group would have 2 different days off. The overlap for any 2 groups is only 2 days. I find this highly interesting and have since tried to find out more about it.

I was just doing this yesterday. Trying to find an article describing simple devices that use no external power to send a basic on/off signal (TX–only) over wireless (802.11 I think?).

Anyways, it was said to be used for simple applications that send a wireless signal to a receiver when the laundry detergent gets too low. Sort of like Amazon's push button thingies.

The term you want to Google is "backscatter" I think. I reckon this might have been what you were looking for: https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/12/05/in-first-3-d-prin...

An explanation about grounding in our electricity system came to be. It went through the evolution of just having positive and negative to various ways of adding grounding until we get to the grounding we have today. I seem to remember it being a Reddit comment or something similar.

I found a link to a SaaS product that provided full-document search across a variety of cloud app platforms, chiefly Google and Atlassian. I spent nearly an afternoon searching for it a few months later to no avail...

An article about someone telling his experience of slowly growing a business (targeted at school teacher if I remember correctly) year after year eventually led to a sizeable lifestyle business.

If you find this, please let me know!

I think you are looking for user patio11 on here...

I think this article specifically https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busi...?

There was a blog post on the significance of crocodiles in Russian culture. Mainly, that they are used as 'sensitive, educated outsider' characters. Not sure if it was on HN, though.

A comment about how we are entering a dark age in science. I can't quite remember the whole argument, nor the subject of the post it was on, but it was fascinating.

There was a thread about sole founders who have experienced success. Notably, there was a someone who developed a resume software and was able to sell his company to the German government (if my memory serves right).

Anyways, as the sole founder of a resume company, I found the story inspirational, yet I was never able to find the thread again.

related, my company - https://rezi.io

Maybe this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073667

Thank you so much this is exactly what I was looking for

When a metric is targeted, it fails to be a good metric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I saw this recently here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16892211

Some article 2-3 years ago about discovering a new "code" inside the DNA code, with a comparison like writing in the fore edge of a book.

You may be thinking about some work that was done regarding mutational effects on conformation and expression. (Molecular biologists have known about it for a long time, but this was an interesting information-theoretical approach from a group of physicists.)

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-confirm-a-second-lay...

This is less one that I read, but more one that I wrote. Sometime ~mid 2012 I wrote an Ask HN looking to meet people and find co-working space in the bay area, 6 years later I find myself living here (due to folks I met via that thread). Unfortunately, it was on a separate account and I've never been able to find it

This should be helpful to finding it. It’s a search hacker news sorted by date with a few key terms. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bay%20area%20ask%20hn%20meet&s...

A month ago or so, a guy made an article about the fact that machine learning was not necessary everytime and go be replaced by some good old SQL queries. Spoke about it with a client of mine, but could not find the link to send him. Thanks in advance if you find it !

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898827

Related. I sometimes find a good recipe on Google, but next time I want to do it, it's nowhere to be seen. I often find lost HN posts via Google search though. And I always upvote or favorite post's that I might go back to later.

Have you tried searching your browser history?

Yes. Browser history in Firefox sucks. It's like they don't want you do use either bookmarks nor history. There is not even a search functionality more then on site title.

I have lost count of how many stories I'd read here and then wanted to reference it later but could not find it.

I'd started to think maybe I was going crazy, maybe the search feature sucks, maybe the links were removed for one reason or another.

About 4 years ago, I saw a post about a startup, I think, that was going to revolutionise hiring top talent - or something similar. I think there was a Nigerian among the founders. I haven't been able to find the same again.

Was that the one with the Nigerian prince?

Someone created a site that compared flash memory storage prices (USB stick, SD card, SSD) and they posted the link in some comment, but I can't find the HN comment and a Google search doesn't find it either.

Was it this? https://diskprices.com

Yes, thanks!

Something about an algorithm designing circuits that shouldn't have worked, but did. I might be mixing another story, but I think it was using electrical interference from an outside source to accomplish its task.

I heard that from a hardware professor, but he way saying it was running calculations to generate electrical interference on the board to influence nearby (logically unrelated) calculations.

I think he was saying it was a genetic algorithm on an FPGA board. It was designing circuits by simulating them (in hardware), but if you actually tried to build the design in a custom chip it wouldn't work because you'd only have kept the circuit logic, not the interference properties.

This was Adrian Thompson using genetic algorithms to design FPGAs: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

There was an article with a slideshow embedded about how to make good presentations. It consisted of choosing fonts and stuffs. It was really interesting. I thought I had bookmarked it but I lost it somehow.

There was an article about russian bots on aws clicking google ad words of sites also hosted by russians on aws.

they were basically hosted a fake net to generate google ad word money.

can't find the link anywhere anymore

Quite sure I read a paper about graph/code sharing in functional languages and why it's harder than expected. The one paper I didn't save and catalogue... is the one I want to refer to

Someone sent a link to a simple programming online game. Player had to provide isntruction for an character walking araound a square level, gathering stars. Never could find it again after a month...

Doesn't sound like this is what you're looking for, but LightBot (http://lightbot.com/) is a wonderful game with similar sounding game play.

Thanks :)

When I was looking for the forgotten game, I crawled through the internet and found almost any other available title (LightBot also). I'm teaching computer science and try to collect as many tools (e.g. games) to people with no programming experience.

A synopsis of a short story where the protagonist writes -1 every day.

Can’t find the story, nor the comment. My memory of this is also very fuzzy at this point so it might be a completely different idea.

The post on why medium.com could have been profitable as a lifestyle business but since it took VC money, it should resort to spamming users with recommendations etc

Bookmarked a post about Document OCR that recreates the whole tables with text. Lost to wanacry, cannot find it since. Backup is important, learned the hard way.

My guess:

Probabilistic Scraping of Plain Text Tables (edinburghhacklab.com) 92 points by tlarkworthy on Sept 5, 2013 | 12 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334178#6337769

http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/09/probabalistic-scraping-o...

I think it was on HN. It was a quote to the effect that the world changes by just a handful of great people, not by the small contributions of billions.

An avalanche can be started by a single snowflake, but that doesn't mean a single snowflake is an avalanche.

Several, but the one that comes to mind at this moment is from a comment a couple years ago regarding their streaming setup to find movies, shows, etc.

Lol, could you be more unspecific? I'm trying to help!

A blog post about a guy trying out various ways of organizing his projects/filesystem. In the end the guy settles on chronological hierarchy.

This sounds very interesting! Anyone got it?

A blog post about specific advertisement targeting on facebook. Something along the lines of specifically making ads for some identified users.

There was a post the other day about a guy who targeted Reddit's CEO by essentially doxxing him and using geo targeted single shot ad runs with the guys name in big letters. Was that it?

No, there was a better one targeting his roommate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110385 ?

Should be this or the top comment

Thank you !

Someone recommending a podcast on the occult and other related topics by a guy associated with the Village Voice. Within the last month!

An article about an MIT student and his friend who eventually committed suicide, talking about the n+1.

I was looking for that startup that looks into research for your rare illness. Did they stop existing?

Apparently https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed

This thread. I tried to find it a month later, but couldn't remember anything to search for.

Regards, future pcf

An interactive fiction posted a few years ago with gothic black text against a white background

I’ve actually been able to find everything with a little bit of work at most. The search engine is actually reasonably good. I also favorite everything even remotely interesting.

Haha I do the exact same thing. My "favourites" list is a long one.

I started doing it because inside half an hour a post can disappear from the front pages.

I read an article on SlateStarCodex that talked about how a local decision could not take into account the obvious global decision, i.e. it expanded on Game Theory by detailing how the omniscient decision isn't possible from a first-person perspective.

P.S. If anyone can help me find it, I'd appreciate it. I last spent an hour trying to find it :P

Meta: I use https://hn.algolia.com to search HN. It has a nice interface that shows full comments rather than snippets.

Hm I actually have a custom search in chrome that uses Google for hn. It's essentially %s%20site:news.ycombinator.com

I love algolia for record searching (lists of items) but find Googles indexing superior for general queries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com