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thestu

40 karma · joined July 25, 2012

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thestu··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
You get through a lot of books! do you speed read? have a strategy for skipping some parts of the book? just have a lot of time to dedicate to reading?
thestu··on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
It sounds like you have something less than full aphantasia. Remember it's a spectrum, not a binary.

For me with your triangle example, I know what the equilateral triangle and the parallelogram look like. I could describe them, or draw them, but the whole concept of a mind's eye is completely foreign to me. I don't have any ability to put something in my mind's eye and I guess I conceptually understand what people probably mean by "mind's eye" but I have no experience of it. I conceptually understand things, but there is no imagining happening for me.

A better example might be the brain teasers where you have a cube laid out in 2 dimensions, and you need to fold up that 2 dimensional cube and 'create' a 3d cube and manipulate that 3d cube to solve the brain teaser. From what I understand, most people can do this either completely in their head, or else in their head with some drawing.

The only way I can solve these is to draw the cube with pencil and paper and then use logic while looking at the drawing to figure out the answer. I just have zero ability to in any way create or manipulate a 3d cube in my head. If you took away my pencil and paper I would resort to trying to put together a chain of logic ... "if this side is X, then that side must be Y and the reverse side would be Z" but that quickly becomes confusing and hard to manage.

I also don't experience anything visual when I dream. This is actually how I found out I have aphantasia. I was trying lucid dreaming and none of the instructions made any sense. How am I supposed to fly when I don't have a body in the dream? How am I supposed to flip light switches when there are no light switches?

thestu··on Western Sahara
Skeletons on the Zahara is a fantastic book related to this part of the world -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletons_on_the_Zahara
thestu··on GPT-5-Codex now available via API
I'd like to see the ability to save and reload chats. Also the newline key combo doesn't work when running in a terminal inside VSCode.
thestu··on Ask HN: Is discrimination to promote diversity okay?
Is this perhaps an opportunity for some companies to explicitly do blind hiring, or something along those lines? I'm thinking of Coinbase (and others) who have taken a somewhat contrarian approach and said that the workplace is just for work, and not politics. They've taken flak for it, but are also probably(?) attracting people for whom that kind of workplace is a positive. A company that goes out of their way to say "We don't discriminate in our hiring, positively or negatively" and follows through on it could probably pick up talented engineers who are otherwise being filtered out of the hiring process due to their skin color / gender.
thestu··on Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)
This is my general feeling as well. People enjoy catastrophizing, and also fail to appreciate that we as a species are actually fairly good at solving problems.
thestu··on Forest Service officials close all California national forests
if you hit play in the bottom left of the webcam image it gives you a little time lapse video.
thestu··on Possible climate futures–from the optimistic to the strange
I think the most likely future is one where we do mostly nothing for a long time, until things get quite bad, and then one nation or a small group of nations does some kind of solar geoengineering to very quickly lower the temperature of the Earth. Mostly this takes the form of pumping aerosols in to the atmosphere to block out some percentage of sunlight. As far as I understand it we already have the technology to pull this off, and it's not so expensive (tens of billions per year) that a single very rich nation couldn't bear the cost themselves.

At the very least, I can't imagine a nation like China or India or the US staring down a relatively imminent existential climate change threat and not at least trying geoengineering. At that point what do you have to lose?

thestu··on What if a deadly heatwave hit India?
I'm halfway through the book. That opening bit is so great, and the rest has been a big letdown so far. Really feels like that opening was written as a short story and then the rest of the book was just tacked on. Maybe the second half will be better.
thestu··on Ask HN: What kind of chair are you using for WFH?
HAG Capisco. I think a big detriment to many chairs is that you end up in one position and never move. The Capisco seems to encourage a lot of fidgeting around, in a good way.
thestu··on Scientists break through the wall of sleep to the untapped world of dreams
They verified via brainwaves that he was in the REM stage of sleep. I don't really know anything about brainwaves, but this seems like the kind of thing that's fairly definitive.
thestu··on The most important part of modern government is database management
Govt's adoption of technology seems to lag society as a whole. What I wonder about is, is the lag a steady 20 years behind for example, or is it that the pace of adoption is just slower, which would imply that the lag (or gap between technological adoption in govt and society as a whole) is getting bigger and bigger.

Is Earth going to be at war with the planet state of Mars, in the great water wars of 2150, and the Earth forces VA department is still processing injury claims on paper?

thestu··on Show HN: Reddit Wallstreetbets Top Leaderboard
Would be cool to see this in bar graph form, broken down by day.
thestu··on Robinhood now has a 1-Star rating on the Google Play Store
Assuming this is all true, it still just feels like they're picking winners, which is probably the thing that's going to matter more than anything else going forward. People can and will point to a laundry list of rules violations by institutional investors (is a 140% short of a stock completely and unambiguously within the rules?) that show the hypocrisy of the little guy getting screwed.
thestu··on AMD Launches Ryzen 5000 Mobile: Zen 3 and Cezanne for Notebooks
https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/NX.HULAA.003 They mention an optional 2560×1440 monitor but it's right alongside a mention of an Intel CPU, which is incorrect, so maybe the 2560×1440 is incorrect also.
thestu··on James Damore and three others end Google suit
This post does the best job that I've seen of laying out the 'less inclined' argument: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...
thestu··on Ask HN: Intellectually simulating Podcasts/conversations/Talk
Tyler has spoken in the past about the huge amount of research he does for his podcast, and it shows. Always an interesting conversation.
thestu··on Shopify CTO: our platform is now handling Black Friday level traffic every day
I went to my local big box store maybe three weeks ago and the whole fitness section had been cleaned out. It seems like bikes are getting very popular (at least here in PNW) and I wouldn't be surprised if it's very hard to find a decent bike in 2 or 3 months. As we cycle through the seasons different items / categories are going to get unexpectedly popular. Nobody really knows how to keep themselves sane during August in a pandemic, but there's probably a product or product category that will help with that.
thestu··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2018)
ChartGuys | Fullstack Developer | Vancouver, BC, CA | ONSITE | https://alerts.chartguys.com

ChartGuys does education and technical analysis around various financial markets (currently mostly crypto-currencies).

We're looking for a full stack dev that can make back-end contributions and take the lead on front-end development. Stuff we use: Rails / React / Postgres / Redis / Heroku / websockets. Familiarity with candle sticks and technical analysis algos a plus but not necessary. We work remotely but do the occasional IRL meet-up, so a strong preference for developers in the greater Vancouver area.

Apply: https://angel.co/chartguys/jobs/407852-software-engineer

thestu··on Dropbox May Not Be LeBron James, but Is Still in the Game
Don't know about him, but I use -- https://www.sync.com/
thestu··on The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation
It was a political science class, so you're probably right; but how exactly does it apply?
thestu··on The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation
I had a professor pose a similar idea to a class I was in, the idea being that if a perfectly simulated universe is a technological possibility at some point in the future, and that more than one simulation could be created, and that simulations could be created inside of simulations, and so on for simulations within simulations, then odds are we are in a simulation.
thestu··on Show HN: I got tired of missing new music releases, so I built this
Probably the single program I miss the most on Linux. I've never been able to find an acceptable replacement.
thestu··on Show HN: A RottenTomatoes for Books
http://www.librarything.com is another that's quite popular.