Hacker News Reader

brianjunyinchanon Launch HN: Fella (YC W20) – Tackling men's obesity using medication and coaching

Kudos on launch! (I know the founders personally) — amazing mission and the team is a great fit to solve this problem.

brianjunyinchanon How to stop writing like you’re in college

Well written, though it’s important to remember that different juries judge different writing styles as “better.” Conciseness would be celebrated in business and tech. Vague, ornate writing might be appreciated by those who enjoy surreal books and art.

brianjunyinchanon Writing advice should stop targeting people who hate to write

What happens to a craft that stops encouraging beginners?

brianjunyinchanon How Doctors Die (2013)

Can't leave us hanging on that

brianjunyinchanon The Spy of Night and Fog (2020)

Great share! The ending is also very grounding (versus modern "superhero" media)

brianjunyinchanon Backblaze submitting names and sizes of files in B2 buckets to Facebook

Absolutely. Better to focus on what actually matters, and keep the action dense.

brianjunyinchanon Ask HN: What books have you read recently?

Normal people, sally rooney. Quite intoxicating

Nexus, ramez naam. Good down to earth story for more people, and topic is right on the cusp of being ethically relevant (perception tech)

McLuhan understanding media

brianjunyinchanon Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

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

brianjunyinchanon The power of imagination, and other parenting lessons from Calvin and Hobbes

It tells people what they want to hear but don’t consciously realize

brianjunyinchanon The power of imagination, and other parenting lessons from Calvin and Hobbes

Thanks for sharing this. Reading this just threw my mind in an amazing spin.

brianjunyinchanon Ask HN: Should I give up on FAANG as a low IQ late 30s engineer?

Nothing additional to add here except want to cheer you on. Hang in there for whatever goal or path you visualize and decide to pursue in life. Wishing you well!

brianjunyinchanon Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130 (1992)

I feel the different vignettes also provide something relatable to more people than one story would

brianjunyinchanon Quitting Twitter

We might solve some of these problems with a 3rd party reader that uses Twitter APIs but with a differently structured feed (focus on X people, ignore Y term, etc). Anybody else?

brianjunyinchanon Ask HN: What tech stack would you recommend for a single-page web application?

Check out https://wasp-Lang.dev

brianjunyinchanon New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

On the different pathways that inflammation might lead to arterial wall damage, here is a good read:

https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/05/inflammation-disease-die...

brianjunyinchanon Creeping as a Service

Well said. Social dynamics would continue as pre Internet if humans naturally understood this extension. It seems profile pics with statuses turned out to be the complexity level sufficient for humans to begin conflating these abstractions with reality

Cases like this illustrate how electronic information is perception tech that has scaled human abilities much further than the printing press did, but with incorrect abstractions that have compounded over time, at the expense of our relationships...

We can’t stop human culture from evolving, but we would do well to measure more of where we’re headed. The best related examples off the top of my head is how debates via democracy were had at some point as we decided how juvenile criminal records work

Related, sonder is significant because it is a rare feeling

https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/...

brianjunyinchanon Ask HN: What is the best way to spend $1000 to improve your productivity?

Maybe take an adventure or experience that leaves you with utter awe

If you have access to a community with thinkers you respect: put up a challenge where you thoroughly detail the music/ books/ideas that changed your life or strongly empower your perception of it. If somebody recommends another worthy one they win the prize. But the important detail with this plan is that this would only work if the community already gets joy out of doing the recommendation by itself for free. The money is more just an excuse to start a “contest”

brianjunyinchanon Don't Offer a Free Plan

I feel this article both understates the effects of having a free plan, but also arrives at an unfair conclusion. It's probably smart to not offer a free plan when your startup is looking for PMF and iterating features, a la that Superhuman trope. Which is indeed impactful as that could kill a startup. But in the case of Trello or Jira as mentioned by top comment, which are established companies, they are indeed pointlessly leaving behind $.

brianjunyinchanon Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?

52 Random Weekend Projects: For Budding Inventors and Backyard Builders

https://www.amazon.com/Garage-Science-Incredible-Projects-Ba...

brianjunyinchanon The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company

I heard once that cost-plus is related to the bloating of US defense budget and Boeing, Lockheed etc post WW2. Could someone familiar share some thoughts on what differences there are w this in pharma?

brianjunyinchanon Foam: A personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode

Been using and loving foam since it came out. Decided to use backlinks as a tagging system to take advantage of VSCodes / the extensions backlinks display.

Wish the main mode of navigation was visual clusters of text + used key shortcuts like vimium.

Also wish the graph wasn’t newly generated each time. At the moment the graph is essentially pointless, with no long-term meaning communicated by the structure. There’s an open issue on that iirc

brianjunyinchanon Using GPT-3 for plain language incident root cause from logs

Super interesting. I wonder what other latent domain-specific intelligence GPT-3 picked up during training, that is parseable with text in and text out. Like a flash cards generator?

brianjunyinchanon Traffic Simulator

Check out ABstreet as well on github:

https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet

brianjunyinchanon Show HN: I built the antithesis of Zoom. Add GIFs, stickers, BGs. Talk like IRL

Check out gather.town

brianjunyinchanon Ask HN: What devtools will drones need?

Thank goodness nobody was hurt in the stampede!

Anyway, a couple educated guesses:

- fleet management and compliance

- authN / authZ, both by operators and determining allowed functionality of the drone itself, for the BigCos with multi-use drones used across depts

- simulation, QA

- modular equipment

- repair services hardware + software (unless economy of scale renders replacement a better deal)

Drop me a line if you're thinking about any of this.

brianjunyinchanon Save Cantonese at Stanford – Petition

Not personally involved with the petition, though I did use to be a student.

brianjunyinchanon Cincinnati is home to the largest unused subway system in the world (2016)

Would it be possible to repurpose it for future infrastructure? Ie a delivery drone highway?

brianjunyinchanon Google’s Wing warns new drone laws may have unintended consequences for privacy

I expect Google wants to "organize the world's information" with drones too, a la Google Maps did with roads/cars. Drones offer the latest coveted bridge to extend the Internet's instantaneous energy and awareness to incorporate the physical world.

brianjunyinchanon Another French Study Looks Into The Use of Nicotine Against Covid-19

Ah, missed that, thanks. Even more interesting then!

brianjunyinchanon Another French Study Looks Into The Use of Nicotine Against Covid-19

> The daily smokers rate amongst COVID-19 patients was at 5.3%, whilst amongst the general population, the daily smokers rate was at 25.4%.

Not to be macabre, but could it potentially be that more smokers die before reaching the older age range of most COVID hospitalizations?