Hacker News Reader

harscoaton Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

OP here, fyi Stuart Kauffman's comment is below on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39131136

harscoaton OpenAI Rival Mistral Nears $2B Valuation with Andreessen Horowitz Backing

https://archive.is/4F3dT#selection-4559.0-4954.0

harscoaton Why Wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier?

https://twitter.com/antonhowes/status/1537439264421449731

harscoaton Show HN: Practice Wordle with No Limits

really cool :) Cheers!

harscoaton Student photographs people with hidden spy cam in the 1890s (2018)

Same period as "Hunger" by Knut Hamsun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_(Hamsun_novel)

harscoaton Wordle Is a Love Story

- enriching for non native speaker. (Not so easy to come up with 5 letter correct words.)

harscoaton E.O. Wilson has died

"Thanks for the inspiration and may the ants be ever in your favor." https://twitter.com/phylogenomics/status/1475496023384465408

harscoaton E.O. Wilson has died

"He was so kind & supportive of my work when I was a student—I kept an email he sent me as a postdoc that was v encouraging, it was like a pep talk I would read & re-read in tough times!" https://twitter.com/JessicaLWareLab/status/14754258439629578...

harscoaton The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021

Summary Pr. John Wettlaufer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezsbf42_RTA&ab_channel=Nobel...

harscoaton Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021

eg. Explaining topology with bread donut and bretzel https://phys.org/news/2016-10-nobel-physics-prize-awarded-to...

harscoaton BepiColombo’s First Views of Mercury

To see how bare the planet is, with so many cosmic impacts… makes us wonder how fragile a planet with life is

harscoaton What are universals in story, and where do they come from?

"Stories with that structure often have 6 secondary features. These don't always appear with the sympathetic plot, but they're common: 1. The protagonist is appealing (e.g., strong, clever, kind). 2. They are alone & suffer early misfortunes (e.g., they're orphaned or abandoned). 3. They are high-status or tied to high-status individuals (e.g., there's a prophesy about them; they're the child of royalty). 4. They journey to distant places. 5. Their opponents are formidable & repulsive. 6. Anyone who opposes the protagonist suffers or is reformed." -- manvir singh @mnvrsngh

harscoaton What Made Early Humans Smart

Gravity’s Rainbow

harscoaton Minorities of less than 3% regular individuals can overturn social conventions

https://twitter.com/a_baronca/status/1372838300847906820 "Andrea Baronchelli - @a_baronca:

We show that 1 individual can reverse the norm of a group of 100s, and minorities as small as 0.3% of the pop can impose their norm (current thinking assumed 10%). Call it the @GretaThunberg effect?

How? When inds are _less prone to adopt a new norm, their group becomes weaker."

harscoaton Science’s Demons, from Descartes to Darwin and Beyond

Socrate's demon not mentioned? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(classical_mythology)#S...

harscoaton Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

re. Twitter negative comments: sorry, it's very valuable to me. It's easy to curate: I use LIST. I have a focused list ("story") which provides great, relevant information. It seems there is a subgroup of people on Twitter who understand how to use (& how not to use) it / imo Twitter is underrated.

harscoaton How and Why Athletes Go Broke (2009)

you just explained that the most important thing is knowledge not money

harscoaton General and Surprising

"surprising" in patent law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obvious...

harscoaton Modeling the emergence of novelties

Original paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.00994

harscoaton Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

cf. Peter Turchin http://energyskeptic.com/2016/peter-turchin-violence-and-soc...

harscoaton Peter Thiel’s Bet on Donald Trump Pays Off

"against Senator Bernie Sanders,..., it “would have been much tougher for Trump to win, and a healthier race for the country."

harscoaton How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools

... then OP, could you share this structure? "Soon the structure underlying The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol was laying bare before my eyes. I could see why the stories worked. I had reverse-engineered Dan Brown."

harscoaton Sam Altman talks with Mark Zuckerberg about how to build the future [video]

Calling BS on Mark, with FB new sponsored links in FB feed... this is total Business, not solving my problem or making my life better. To make the world a better place, Mark should have worked for FriendFeed.

harscoaton Show HN: Watson Developer Cloud

After AWS, WWS Cognitive computing as a service...

harscoaton Animated Factorisation Diagrams

Hypnotic. I'll show it to kids, so that they visualize numbers. Edit: Thank you awesome job! I am not closing that tab.

harscoaton Show HN: Simon.Says.do – easy way to dispatch tasks to 1 to many

btw I am "Dens" on the app. Task me anything!

harscoaton Show HN: Simon.Says.do – easy way to dispatch tasks to 1 to many

Think of it as my Fireman "Golf11" channel that was giving us orders that we could fulfill or reject (bcs busy). A civilian channel complementary to 911 would be helpful in "war time" (Sandy) or in peace time ("bake some cakes for School party")

harscoaton Show HN: Simon.Says.do – easy way to dispatch tasks to 1 to many

It's just the start. In any case cheers for your input. "Awesome task distribution for teams" is right on.

harscoaton Show HN: Simon.Says.do – easy way to dispatch tasks to 1 to many

Use case eg.: a Startup office is inundated by Sandy, I ask my team, friends (people I can ask for help in my contacts) to bring brooms + a pump +... now! and I want to have instant feedback if somebody takes care of it, who, or how many, and who can not do it. Them, just click yes or no.

harscoaton Show HN: Simon.Says.do – easy way to dispatch tasks to 1 to many

Simpler than project management (no calendar, very few options) and less verbose than email: yes/no task accepted or rejected.