Hacker News Reader

spookyuseron Ask HN: I feel so shallow and dumb when I see what other smart people are doing

Definitely feel this, wow, even worse for me is when I work on something for someone else the whole time I am thinking: "I should be spending the little time I have working on my own stuff" then when I have free time to do that, exactly what you have written above happens lol.

spookyuseron Don’t be spooky

spookyuseron Show HN: Find Reddit discussion threads for your TV shows

Omg this is totally incredible I love it - congrats OP!

To address _a_ particular negative comment in this thread.

1. I am often weary of browsing subreddits for their episode discussions because it's quite easy to see spoilers by using the search field, since it will bring up future discussions of episodes where spoilers are allowed. YMMV but this has definitely happened to me before.

2. Some subreddits conveniently have episodes on their sidebar, some only have for the most recent season, some don't have at all

3. _Sigh_ Yes you could of course do this manually: Hacker news hasn't changed a bit lol https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

If this picks up traction it would be great to see an api so that apps like track.tv and others could pull data from reddit discussions in an structured way :)

spookyuseron Show HN: 40k HN comments mentioning books, extracted using deep learning

This is really incredible!

A while ago I created something adjacent to this that looks for hacker news review of books on goodreads (https://github.com/spookyuser/hacker-reads)

So I'm very curious how you managed to find book titles, I ran into a lot of issues trying to figure out, for example, with "Clean Code" whether to search for "Clean Code" or "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" since people mentioning the book used both instances. And of course someone mentioning just "Clean Code" might be referring to the concept not the book. I ended up settling on `${titleMinusColon} - ${author}` but I'd love to know what your approach was given that you used deep learning to search.

EDIT: Just read your comment below on your approach, very interesting!

spookyuseron Show HN: 40k HN comments mentioning books, extracted using deep learning

> random people mentioning book on platform like HN on a topic/post of my interest.

Same! Some of my favorite book recommendations have especially come from this one, I don't know why but a one line comment on a HN thread of "what book changed your life" has become my favorite way for discovering books.

spookyuseron Google to pay Apple $15B to remain default Safari search engine in 2021

Can't wait to read https://twitter.com/techemails in 10 years

spookyuseron Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

Same, I've enjoyed using it in a couple of one off scripts and honestly it made writing them more enjoyable because I was kind of excited to see what copilot would do. I asked it to write a js function to clean special characters from a string and it worked perfectly, I think, well it worked perfectly enough for the script to complete.

I can't speak to whether or not using copilot in long lasting projects would be a good idea, but even if you just tagged the copilot generated code with a comment that said '#TODO: Verify this is correct' I still think it would help you get a lot of work done that you would normally have to switch to stackoverflow to do.

One thing that I found very interesting from the article was the idea of anchoring bias, I definitely felt this a lot. When I used copilot to generate some nontrivial functions that were directly related to my problem, if the code did not work and I ended up erasing the generated code completely, I am just realising now that when I reimplemented it myself I was still essentially using the algorithm copilot had come up with.

spookyuseron Show HN: I made an interactive anti-procrastination video course

At least you managed to open the email :P

spookyuseron Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

Aside from the other praise people have given Obsidian it is also by far the fastest electron app I've ever used by a lot. Curious if the devs have any insight how they have made it feel so performant.

spookyuseron Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

I have been waiting to play No Man's Sky for so long and after all the good stuff I've been reading about how much better it had gotten I just assumed it would be incredible and that I would love it. To my surprise, when I downloaded it on Game Pass - I was extremely disappointed it just felt so empty. I uninstalled it after like 2 hours.

spookyuseron Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio

Wow thank you for introducing me to musicleague, I love the idea!

spookyuseron Don't make customers hunt for the Sign In button on your website

https://headspace.com/ is such a good example of this, login button is in probably the worst possible place on the page. And to make it even worse your login sessions are invalidated almost every day so you _have_ to login every time you use the website.

spookyuseron Yayagram

This is incredible, I wish there were more analogue centered devices for older people with both hearing and vision loss. The combination makes it virtually impossible to interact with any well designed software because it's all touch screen and way too complicated. But also makes it impossible to interact with the limited number of phones with analogue buttons because they are usually feature phones with even worse designed software than touchscreen phones and at that point the analogue buttons don't really help at all. So yeah this is truly incredible.

spookyuseron My Current HTML Boilerplate

But I like it!

spookyuseron My Current HTML Boilerplate

Wow thank you, tangentially I was trying to figure out how to change a hidden object to visible with tailwind and this seems like it would be perfect for that!

spookyuseron How to send an 'e mail' (1984) [video]

Wow great video!

I've recently been watching Look Around You and I have to assume that season 2 was directly inspired by this clip, the similarity is uncanny.

An example: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7t2yhw

spookyuseron Show HN: Git News – Social News website for developers and GitHub fans

I love this idea and also the way it's designed, it still feels like a kind of brutalism, but just a touch more modern. I don't really know how to explain it but something about the design appeals very much to me!

spookyuseron Show HN: My daughter and I made a site to explore the photos from the ISS

Very Cool!

spookyuseron OpenAI API

Yeah I can't tell exactly which ones but I really feel like some of the OpenAI demos of products could be potentially huge if fleshed out.

spookyuseron Ask HN: Which Coursera courses/specializations you recommend?

While not directly related to programming I'm currently doing The science of wellbeing https://www.coursera.org/lecture/the-science-of-well-being/b... and would definitely recommend it.

spookyuseron GPT-3: Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners

Thank for highlighting this, it's hilarious - I could so easily imagine it as a short interdimensional cable bit on Rick and Morty.

spookyuseron Stealing secrets from developers using WebSockets

Or even better wrap it in a blog post titled: Stealing secrets from developers using WebSockets

spookyuseron Demo of an OpenAI language model applied to code generation [video]

  def build_agi(CEV):
    """Build an AGI with the specified CEV"""

spookyuseron Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

(1) Have recently started learning how to touch type, I figure if I leave the pandemic alive and with that extra skill it will be a huge win.

(2) In march I spent way to long on an extension that adds Hacker News Comments to Goodreads https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-reads-for-g...

spookyuseron Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?

Just finished HPMOR and loved every second of it. Truly an amazing piece of work, would definitely recommend. I do hope that i remember some of the methods of rationality mentioned in the book, but even beyond that it was just a plain good story.

If people are interestead in reading it, I would highly recommend the audio book/podcast, it's extremely well produced and features an insane amount of good voice acting [1]. Though I would definitely recommend _not_ listening to it in podcast player, and instead use one of the stitched together mp3s.

[1] https://hpmorpodcast.com/?page_id=56

spookyuseron Show HN: See what Hacker News thinks of the book you're looking at on Goodreads

I actually hadn't planned on releasing the extension for Safari but I'll definitely look into it. If Safari supports the Browser Extension API it should be trivial to port.

spookyuseron Show HN: See what Hacker News thinks of the book you're looking at on Goodreads

This is a small extension I made to combine my love of Hacker News book recommendation threads and hate of Goodreads community reviews.

It uses the Algolia search API to find comments that match the title and author of a book page on Goodreads. Initially I wanted to use ISBN numbers but there are too many comments mentioning books on HN that don't use the ISBN number and for some reason Amazon links are rarely indexed without truncation by Algolia, which means the end bit of a long Amazon url that contains the ISBN isn't searchable.

The hardest part of this extension was figuring out how people write book titles. For instance, most people don't seem to write out full book titles rather they write out the title minus any subtitles. Because of this, if you search for the exact Goodreads title on Hacker news you won't find that many comments, and what turns out to work much better is searching for books without any subtitles.

Also worth mentioning that this is similar to https://hackernewsbooks.com/ (which I enjoy a lot) except instead of seeing HN's favorite books you see all opinions good and bad, and you can also see them directly in Goodreads.

You can download it for Chrome [1] or Firefox [2] or see the source code on Github [3].

Hope you like it :)

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ohkekgnmihdgcfflhe...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/hacker-reads-...

[3] https://github.com/spookyuser/hacker-reads

spookyuseron Show HN: A browser extension that adds Hacker News comments to Goodreads

I think it's certainly possible. In fact, I think it might already exist, is https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news kind of what you're talking about?

spookyuseron Show HN: A browser extension that adds Hacker News comments to Goodreads

Hi everyone, I've been working on this extension for more than the one weekend I promised myself, and hope there are some people that find it useful :)

I've personally been using this in my browser while I've been building it and have definitely enjoyed having it around.

One of my favorite things about HN are the book recommendations you can find from other users, especially in those long "Ask HN: What are you reading" threads. I've found some of my favorite books by going through those kinds of threads. At the same time, while I am a Goodreads user, I almost never look at the user reviews at the bottom of Goodreads because I find they do such a bad job at selling me on why I should read a certain book. Often, they're just beat by beat summaries of what occurs in a book and don't say anything about why you might want to read it. Whereas, I think the opposite is true on HN. When people recommend books here it's, in my experience, brief and much more meaningful, and seeing a single person on HN saying: "this is my favorite book ever" + child comments that say the same thing, makes me much more interested in reading a book than almost anything else could. So, I wanted to bring that experience to Goodreads and that is why I decided to build this.

It's far from perfect, and will display comments that aren't relevant just as soon as it will not display enough comments. However, after quite a bit of tweaking, I think the extension is at the point where it's pretty useful - even with these issues.

I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have. Thanks!

spookyuseron ‘People You May Know’ helped Facebook grow exponentially

I deleted my original Facebook account almost 5 years ago, and this is slightly off topic but I recently made a brand new facebook account just to use marketplace, I gave the bare minimum of information you could give and even used a brand new email address, as soon as I entered my phone number to verify my account I got the creepiest friend recommendations, they must have been pulling them from whatsapp because they were insanely accurate, and that was just with my phone number, with a brand new account and a brand new email.