Ask HN: Coolest thing you learned in 2023? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Coolest thing you learned in 2023?

29 pointsmikekoscinski38 comments

Coolest thing I learned is to clone trees. Roughest thing I learned is that most people who talk about climate, don't really want to plant trees. They just want to talk about it.

I learned how to localize sound events by the differences in the sound arrival time.

And I learned how to keep sub microsecond time accuracy.

Then I put the two together and made a raspberry pi sound localizer.

https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru

And then I got a bunch of geek friends together to cooperate with solving where the large explosions from the illegal fireworks come from. There are 5x in the group now with another couple coming online soon. Not to do anything with that except to confirm the science works over those distances, I was a kid once as well.

Anyway, the goal now is to find physical evidence that the localization was correct. In my area, there is lot of test data from the kind people that are setting off these large explosions. For that I am thankful :) Real life forensics can be fun :)

If I can find evidence that the indicated location was indeed where the explosion was set off then I will have verified that the localization can indeed be accurate over distances of almost 5km away, which is where one of the recorders is. Currently, I'm seeing a recurring pattern of explosions that appear to being set off in parking lot of a shopping area (Outside of a local Gamma in Limburg).

However, these fireworks do seem to destroy themselves pretty well, I haven't found physical evidence yet except for one that was very close (The next street), for that I found bits of the fireworks paper.

In any case, it will be quite a feat as right now the recorders are based 4.7km, 3k, > 2km sort of distances away from where they indicate that the most explosions are happening.

This is cool, do you think this would work as a phone application?

Does it do any kind of sound identification or matching? So if I sneeze around the device around the same time another system picks up a firework sound, will it be able to figure that out or is that a post process thing?

Would be interesting for you and your friends to pick a very exact point on GPS somewhere in the middle of all you and light off a big firework, then go back and see how close the system thought it was to the actual location. I know that kind of defeats the purpose of not launching illegal fireworks, but it’s better than shooting a gun in the air I guess.

Automatic matching is the next phase. Some people have done nice Phd projects on that have have posted github code. It will take a while to integrate that because there are very few gunshots here. First I want to establish what can we ultimately expect out of it and so that's manual testing. There are several big illegal explosions a week so there's test data enough. Likely when developing an automated system I'll have to detune it or train it on fireworks just so there's something to test against.

Currently I have about 7x people in a group so soon we will be able to test if you can localize an explosion from 5km away to something the size of a small car park, that being the case you have something to justify a bigger project in a place that really needs it.

There's another, less obvious usecase as well. Currently in the US there are innocent people being arrested and thrown in jail on the basis of the sound localization and no other evidence. If the people in those areas had their own localizer they could counter false arrest and challenge localizations that could well have been the result of bounces. I like the idea of a tool that can help fight against injustice.

That I was happier after I was laid off than I was employed writing software. Other software developers online seemed to relate but absolutely nobody in the real world (non-developers) could understand it.

Funny, I just remarked to my partner that I was visibly happier and healthier the last time I had a break between jobs, about a year and a half ago for a little under a month.

I find that people view my job as some kind of paradise where I get to sit on a computer all day and dont have to do any realy labor.

I was so much happier painting houses. There is something about the constant mental engagement and frustration of software engineering, plus the fact that you are tethered to a laptop all day every day, that is just completely draining.

Having a kid is the best thing you can do in life.

Congratulations! :)

Gracias.

+1!

It's pretty much the worst; you bring a child to this world without their consent. And the kid will live through the death of their parents, and then unavoidably die themselves. Read about antinatalism

Do you regret being born?

I do. Many others as well. The only solution to this problem is to not procreate

I’m sorry to hear you feel that way. I can’t relate to those types of feelings but I sympathize and hope the best for you.

It’s damn hard work but worth it.

gz!

Learned the art of fermentation and started to make my own fermented hot sauces.

Currently enjoying a two week fermented Carolina Reaper hot sauce!

Time's ticking, make it count! Life's too short to let inaction be the boss.

Chatting with an AI is a more productive way of finding answers then googling for them.

Swimming 3 times a week for about 45 minutes changes the body and mind.

And is a little addictive like ex. running.

Background: I've been swimming for the last few years for about 10-20 minutes twice a week and I've experienced the changes.

Switching few months ago to more intense sessions led to dramatically higher rate of the change and I start to think about the ways of sustaining this. For now I've bought the swimming paddles and this works.

I learnt how to swim this year (36M), and I've never felt better. I LOVE being in the water. It is an amazing feeling, and the cold water helps me calm down

Nice, I have been doing this twice per week two and the results in my mood are awesome. The waves have been a bit wild this week at my local beach but hoping it comes back to quiet to go back again

Organizing a wedding, is SO exhausting.

After it happens, you’ll have more time to play with AI :D

Swimming. I have submechanophobia. I went from never having put my feet in a children's pool to swimming in the ocean near Mantas and Baby sharks.

How to design a microcoded CISC CPU, then a RISC CPU. Nothing fancy in terms of getting modern applications to run on it, but it was a lot of fun seeing how much faster it could be than the CISC CPU. I've been looking into FPGAs but maybe I should just pick one and take the plunge.

What learning resources and applications did you use?

There's an excellent video series by Ben Eater on YouTube where he builds an 8-bit CPU on breadboards. I followed along and built something like it in Logisim, but 16-bit. Logisim wasn't very fast, and I was getting really sick of dragging wires around, so I eventually migrated to Icarus Verilog, then Verilator, and GTKWave to examine traces. I'm one of those developers who uses Windows, so WSL came in really handy for all these.

For the RISC CPU I couldn't tell you exactly what resources I used, it was kind of a blur lol. Basically it was Wikipedia, what I remember from computer architecture class 10 years ago, and a lot of googling, mostly lecture slides from classes I didn't get to take in person. I used ChipVerify for Verilog reference a lot. I can't remember what tutorial I used, but there are plenty out there.

If i don't do it myself, nobody will ever do what i wish for the way i like it.

Ai won't make me rich

Why? I'm still deluded

In our world, there are processes that cannot be compressed into functions. For example, turbulent air is very chaotic. Lets say you take a room and divide it into a 3d grid, where each cell is 0.1x0.1x0.1mm in dimentions, and has some properties of air associated around it (velocity vector, density, temperature, pressure, e.t.c).

At some time T, that grid is going to have a new values in every cell through the physics of air and turbulence.

The main question is, can an AI learn a compressed equation to where the inputs are the grid initial values and time T, and the output is the accurate final grid values for every cell?And by compressed, I mean the entire network takes up less space than a computer program that simulates the interactions at every boundary.

Or the more general way to put it, could we simulate reality faster than reality is happening, and have AI learn some compressed version of it to where you can ask it 2 "states" of reality (like the initial conditions of today, and then some time in the future where you have more money in your bank account and no criminal record and are still alive), and it can output a set of actions for you to take.

The answer, while not 100% definite, is very highly likely to be no.

I had to check if it was OP because your reply doesn't go much in the line of thought I was expecting nor it actually replies the question.

If I understood right, you are talking about asking an AI to devise an infallible plan to make one rich that takes into account the changes in the world in realtime? Which would also need to take into account other AIs devising plans to make their users also rich. I agree that it won't 100% true one day.

Java

I have worked with C++, Python, Node, React and compared to all this Java seems so much fun to write and understand

1. Transformer architecture and all that math behind it.

2. How do self-driving cars work

and

there's never enough time.

How the Apple 2 works inside

if i swap out the print statements for ones with parens, fakeap still works

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