christiangenco

Wow! I hadn't heard about this leak and used to live in downtown Dallas so when I saw the first few street names I thought "huh, Commerce, Griffin, and Main must be pretty common street names."

That "sci-fi overlay of street names" is really cool tech.

My high school english classes would upload any papers students wrote to a site that would check for plagiarism. I figured out that if I inserted random zero-width no-break spaces in the middle of words my plagiarism score would drop to zero.

Presumably the plagiarism system was just looking for exact matches of long substrings.

HN comments.

> The capacity of recognition memory for pictures is almost limitless

To my understanding this is the core mechanism memory champions use to memorize huge amounts of arbitrary information like digits of pi[1]: encode the data as a picture.

I got interested in improved memory techniques a few years ago as my grandmother was losing her memory. I used to struggle with simple things like remembering my airport gate and seat number (I'd neurotically pull out my phone or boarding pass to check dozens of times) or hotel room number (I had to keep looking at the number written on the key on my way up the elevator and down the hall and I'd often forget if I left the key sleeve in the room).

After practicing for a few weeks I was able to encode random information like my friend's passport number, phone numbers, and addresses into amusing visual stories without much trouble. I can still recall them years later.

Learning a few simple visual encoding systems like the mnemonic major system[2] has been a great investment in my life.

1. https://youtu.be/mI96Ph-yHcA 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system

I had this problem living in Dallas: it'll hit 108°F just about every day this week.

I also couldn't spend thousands on an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) installation because I've been living in rental properties.

My solution was to buy an ERV for ~$500 and rig it up to an open window: https://gen.co/air

I've since moved into a condo with a bedroom with no windows and french glass doors so I installed a cat door and mounted the ERV vents to that.

I think there's a lot of money here for someone to build an ERV designed to be window mounted.

Oh sweet! I had a similar idea in undergrad in ~2012[1]. I love the retroactive timeline so you can see the rough balance of who was talking when—this is a really useful graph.

1. https://christian.gen.co/conversation-monitor/

I'm surprised to see Paypal only uses 0.26 TWh/yr (compared to Bitcoin's 200 TWh/yr and Ethereum's 112 TWh/yr) which includes their offices and data centers[1].

I've heard the argument that if you take into account all the human-associated energy costs Bitcoin's energy use compared to a company like Visa would be comparable. Now I'm not so sure.

Notably this 0.26 TWh/yr number doesn't include things like the energy used by each human to drive to and from work or the amount of energy needed to make the food that fed them that year but now we're getting into some anti-human territory.

Perhaps the goal shouldn't be to minimize energy use but to maximize energy output.

1. https://app.impaakt.com/analyses/paypal-consumed-264100-mwh-...

This is amazing! This tech unlocks some impossible card effects (ex: "shuffle the deck, pick your favorite card from it, hand the deck back to me, your card is the Ace of Diamonds").

While reading through this repo I was reminded of a project I'd heard Randy Pitchford, the CEO of Gearbox Software (creators of the Borderlands franchise) talk about wanting to make after one of the magic shows he hosted at his house in Frisco, Texas.

Randy is a huge fan of magic. He's the great nephew of Cardini and notably recently purchased the Magic Castle[1].

Lo and behold, the primary contributor to this project—Paul Nettle—is an employee at Gearbox Software[2]. What a small world! I'm so happy they've made this open source.

1. https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/the-former-magician-who-n...

2. https://github.com/nettlep

I've recently realized I'm uncharacteristically productive on airplanes. I did a deep read of the first 8 chapters of a book I've been meaning to read on my last long flight. I had every intention of continuing at the same pace through to the end as soon as I checked into my AirBnB.

The moment I got internet back at touchdown marked the end of my progress on the book. This was... four days ago. I think some airplane condition replication might be just what I need. I'm curious if I could go as far as to get some uncomfortable airplane seats and a simulated sky window.

I didn't know about devdocs.io—thanks!

I had a quick back-and-forth with Derek on HN a few weeks ago about applying this philosophy to a personal CRM system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30329475#30334269

This mistake is so interesting to me. Here's a great explanation of what's probably happening: https://youtu.be/6egeUxIEQnM

tl;dr: mentally we take off "millions" as a unit, do the calculation, then add "millions" back on. This works for addition, subtraction, and inequality but fails for multiplication and division.

That's fair. I suppose instead of "plain text" what I mean here is "minimally formatted plain text files that live on my hard drive."

You bet! You're also one of my heroes so I'd be absolutely delighted to chat with you more about this problem on a call or something.

Hi Derek!

My implementation of your system is just a bunch of markdown files. The title of the file is a friend's name, the frontmatter at the top keeps info about them that doesn't change too often (ex: birthday, address, kids names), and each time I chat with them I add a section with an H1 title that's the date we chatted (ex: "# 2022-02-14\n"). My notes about the chat go under that heading.

Based off of that structure I can do a bunch of cool things with simple scripts:

- print out a list of upcoming birthdays, half birthdays, birthdays on Jupiter, etc. of all my friends - print out a list of friends I haven't contacted within my desired `frequency` (the subject of this post) - create or open the friend file containing a particular name from the command line (ex: `,people Sarah` prints out all the Sarah files I have and asks me which I'd like to open)

I think plain text is the way to go with something as personal as a system for keeping track of your friends. I was inspired to go this route by your post on journaling[1]:

> If digital, use only plain text. It’s a standard format not owned by any company. It will be readable in 50 years on devices we haven’t even imagined yet. Don’t use formats that can only be read by one program, because that program won’t be around in 50 years. Don’t use the cloud, unless you’re also going to download it weekly and back it up in plain text outside that cloud. (Companies shut down. Clouds disappear. Think long-term.)

I've been chewing on how to make this system something that might be used by other people who don't know how to use the command line. Something like the way Obsidian[2] works might make sense.

1. https://sive.rs/dj

2. https://obsidian.md/

Preaching to the choir! I'd be surprised to find anyone on HN with an argument against writing your blog/book in markdown with vim.

Now what I'd be interested in seeing is an argument for traditional publishers or WordPress users to switch to this sort of stack.

If you don't happen to have your 2000s-era iMac or iBook running OS 9 currently in arm's reach here's an online version of the same sort of game: https://www.unixpapa.com/floodit/?sz=14&nc=6

I modeled my Wordle solver[1] after Donald Knuth's Mastermind strategy[2].

An optimal guess is found by looking at the list of possible solutions and for each of those possible solutions checking how much each possible guess would narrow down the list of possible solutions.

Once you have a list of all possible guesses and how much each of those possible guesses would narrow down the total number of possible solutions for each possible solution, sort them by the maximum number of total remaining guesses.

The optimal first guesses from my solver are ARISE, RAISE, AESIR, REAIS, or SERAI because each will narrow down the possible word list to at minimum 168 remaining words.

Each guess after that uses the same algorithm with the list of possible guesses filtered with the information you learned in previous guesses.

edit: formatting

1. https://wordlesolver.com source: https://github.com/christiangenco/wordlesolver

2. https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1192961/knuths-mast...

My solver at wordlesolver.com plays the same 5-move game each time: ARISE, BLUDY, COMET, CHUNK, CHUCK.

It looks like optimal play is 4 moves: https://twitter.com/zwegner/status/1480037275803308034

Check out Paramotoring. It's self-powered Paragliding that opens up way more places to fly.

I love Hammerspoon. It's one of the first must-have-for-a-usable-laptop tools I set up when I get a new MacBook.

Here are the top ways I'm using it right now:

1) Hide/show apps similar to how iTerm lets you bind a hotkey to hide/show a terminal. I've got ctrl+space set to Vimcal, alt+space set to midnight.app (a time tracker I'm building), and ctrl+alt+space set to Things.

2) Start/stop playing my work playlist of lofi hiphop. I got tired of the friction around opening Spotify, going into my work playlist, hitting play, waiting several moments for the playlist to load, etc, so I downloaded a bunch of mp3s from YouTube and put them in ~/Music/work/. Now my work music is a single keyboard shortcut (semicolon+m) and a few miliseconds away.

3) Set up screen recording. There are a few things that need to happen before I start a screen recording (opening CamHead.app, setting my screen resolution, and showing the dock at a certain height so I can later crop the video to 16:9) and I have it all bound to a single hotkey (semicolon+r). I've got another hotkey set up to unset it (semicolon+e).

4) You may have noticed I'm using keyboard shortcuts with semicolon as a modifier key. That's done with Hammerspoon too! I've got an extra layer of hotkeys available to me to set up whatever else I can think of in the future. The code I wrote to use semicolon like this sometimes breaks if I try to type too many actual semicolons in a row but I usually rely on JS Beautify to add those for me.

It's interesting to me to see that the outlier in time to become refurbished is the Late 2016 MBP (the first version with the Touch Bar).

I would've thought the new design would've meant more broken laptops sooner which (I would think) would mean quicker refurbished laptops.

YYYY-MM-NN, or ISO-8601, is objectively the best date format[1].

1. https://xkcd.com/1179/

Goodness, that random zettel is hard to grep.

My own zettelkasten of random thoughts and casual ideas that pop into my head certainly aren't going to be compiled into a chapter of a sociology book, but I still find value in being able to connect ideas from HN posts and YouTube videos.

The products of those types of notes for me are just blog posts and interesting dinner conversations.

Could you go into more detail about how you're using xargs? I'm having trouble understanding how it can be used for concurrency.

Hah, I just followed your guide after stumbling on it on Google yesterday to set up a Canon M50 on Linux Mint! It works incredibly well—heads and shoulders above the video quality from a webcam, and now that I'm piping video through ffmpeg there's tons of potential to do some weird stuff with filters and swapping to pre-recorded video.

Whereby[1] gets proper convenience right on the first and Nth installs. It sacrifices some of the power of Zoom (max of ~16 participants, no dynamic backgrounds) to run entirely in a browser. IMO it's a much better solution for video conferencing nontechnical people that don't know how to install software.

1. https://whereby.com

> I’m interested in how they combine AI with EEG for better sleep tracking.

I'm not super well versed in how this works technically. My understanding is that even with raw EEG, accelerometer, and heart rate data it's not a straightforward problem to figure out what stage of sleep you're in. From the consumer side, I've just noticed a few patches they push down to my headband with "improved sleep tracking" in the changelog.

> have you experienced any discomfort from wearing a headband full of tech all night?

Nope. I was already wearing ear plugs and an eye mask, so the headband is a barely noticeable addition, even when side-sleeping.

I've had debilitating sleep onset insomnia (1-2 hour sleep onset latency) for my entire life, and I cured it with the Dreem 2 headband[1].

Unlike accelerometer-based sleep trackers (fitbit, Apple Watch et. al), the Dreem 2 is EEG-based. I can't trick it into thinking I'm sleeping by just holding very still.

Now I effectively get a free sleep study done on me every night, which is AMAZING for N=1 randomized control studies on myself (ex: do I sleep better with earplugs? an eye mask? how many days after a bad night of sleep do I feel cognitive impairment? how much does blue light before bed affect my sleep onset latency?). Clean data I could trust was vital to figuring out how teach myself to sleep like a human again.

My most recent sleep report from Dreem says I've logged 181 nights wearing this headband. It's amazing. It enabled the single biggest improvement to my life in the last decade.

It's expensive, and it's so much cheaper than a sleep study that only measures a single unusual night.

I've been tooting Dreem's horn on twitter for a while, so they gave me a promo code that I think gets you 5-ish percent off: GENCO

I also recommend:

* a Manta sleep mask[2] and/or blackout curtains. Aim for pitch black if you open your eyes in bed at night. Cover any small lights in your bedroom with aluminum tape (it's light proof)

* silicone ear plugs[3]. They're actually comfortable, and you can sleep on your side without them jamming into your ear

* the Coup adjustable-loft pillow[4]. Your pillow is more important for bed comfort than your mattress (particularly your neck angle). While I'm on the topic: I'm not convinced mattresses matter nearly as much as people think. The best sleep I've gotten so far is on an ~$80 cot mattress from Amazon.

* if you sleep with a partner that sleeps hotter or colder than you, get a Chilipad[5]. Kicking your leg in and out to regulate temperature is keeping you from sleeping deeper.

Also, if you snore, that's called sleep apnea and you're suffocating while you're asleep. Get that fixed immediately. You can pick up used CPAP machines on craigslist for a few hundred dollars.

Also AMA about sleep here on on twitter @cgenco. This shit is really important to get right.

I've got an article in progress better summarizing all this stuff that will be live at https://gen.co/sleep in the next few weeks :)

1. https://imgur.com/a/3FsK39j 2. https://mantasleep.com/ 3. https://www.amazon.com/Macks-Pillow-Soft-Silicone-Earplugs/d... 4. https://amzn.to/3dvoWKP 5. https://www.chilitechnology.com/

Here's a quick app I made to page through and play each of the melodies in the All the Music catalog: https://gen.co/allthemusic/?notes=53325332

I'm so glad you posted this—I have the same problem with this aphorism. I'm craving a more precise way to express this idea. Maybe "it would have been better to start five minutes ago, but starting now is better than starting in five more minutes."