Ask HN: What interesting thought did you read on HN but couldn't find later?

305 points by spython ↗ HN

231 comments

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There was a comment about the theory, that emotions are not represented in the body but actually happen there. And we learn to interpret the bodily state as having an emotion. Can't find it.
There's some really interesting literature about this topic, I only discovered it recently. I'd recommend starting with 'The Good Gut' by Justin Sonnenburg.

An excerpt can be found here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-feelings-the-...

Thanks, I'll look into it!

I recently found the theory of Lynn Margulis interesting, that we are all holobionts, not just relying on symbiotic bacteria but critically dependent on them, for breaking down food just as well as for staying healty. In that sense, we are less individuals and more landscapes, gardens that foster life.

There are various theories of emotion (overview here https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-psychology/chapt...). I think you might've been looking for the James–Lange theory?

"The James–Lange theory refers to a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion within modern psychology. It was developed independently by two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange. The basic premise of the theory is that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. Instead of feeling an emotion and subsequent physiological (bodily) response, the theory proposes that the physiological change is primary, and emotion is then experienced when the brain reacts to the information received via the body's nervous system." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James%E2%80%93Lange_theory

This is the James-Lange theory of emotions. Enjoy!
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Somebody was writing about a concept of negotiations that focuses on values of the other party, and asking the question "what if your value is met" instead of arguing for your positions. The example was about gun control: "what if there's no crime, would you be willing to give up guns?"
Some article 2-3 years ago about discovering a new "code" inside the DNA code, with a comparison like writing in the fore edge of a book.
An article about EV vs. ICE was posted, written from the perspective of an EV being the natural way of building things (few moving parts, little heat loss, etc) and that this ICE was an intricate machine of thousands of parts channeling the spirit of fine watchmaking or Jules Verne.

I found the perspective refreshing but have never been able to find it since.

Try out https://www.pagedash.com to help save pages you read for reference later! (Maker here)
All of these apps are essentially the same. I have to click some extra button or drag and drop some extra thing, and then when your service disappears I have to grab my export and figure out how to import it to the next one.

What does your product offer over the hundreds of other sites that do exactly the same thing? Have you innovated in this space?

I tried to offer a one-click solution (no additional drag and drop). It also tries to capture the page as you saw it in the browser, HTML and all (more faithfully than Evernote, at least).

See related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15653206

Does it have apps for mobile to share-save? Pretty important. The following would make me move from Pocket; Support for PDF, ppt, etc. Offline reading on Desktop (Pocket works fine on mobile but on Desktop it seems not very good). And yes, total export so when you close the doors, I do not have to start over.
Thanks for the comment!

I can't promise an app right now. For now I am strongly mulling a Telegram bot that takes in links from you and saves it to PageDash backend for you. This is quite high up in my roadmap.

> Support for PDF, ppt, etc.

PDF is supported. PPT is a Todo.

> Offline reading on Desktop

Need to explore service workers for this. Admittedly not a priority yet.

> total export

Auto Google Drive export is available for paid users. Manual export (page by page) is available to all users. In any case, if I do shut, I will open mass export to all.

I can't think of anything that I could not find but I just wanted to say that it is a great idea for a thread!
A blog post about specific advertisement targeting on facebook. Something along the lines of specifically making ads for some identified users.
There was a post the other day about a guy who targeted Reddit's CEO by essentially doxxing him and using geo targeted single shot ad runs with the guys name in big letters. Was that it?
An article about some species of octopuses that have a relatively high IQ, but since the parents die before their offspring comes to life, every generation have to relearn everything from scratch.

IIRC, the lack of inter-generational communication deprived this species from developing to the level its IQ permits.

I wish I can find that piece again!

They also live very short lifespans. Typically 2 years. Giant octopuses can live as long 3-5 years.

It does not matter how smart you are if you can't learn from parent and have only few years to gain life experience.

Are we learning a lot from our parents?

I had highly educated parents (university professors) and what I learned from them was a tiny fraction of the total amount of things that I've learned so far (from written material, other people, and life experience).

I think there's merit to what you said, but I don't think the crucial bit is the parents specifically. I think the crucial bit is that without language you can't easily communicate to others what you've learned, at least not complex things. This aspect doesn't depends on life expectancy as much. Instead it depends on two things: how much knowledge there is in society (of octopuses) and how doable it is to communicate that knowledge.

You're kind of disproving your own point here, no? Or at least, both the fact that its parents die and that they have no language creates a vicious circle.

Though you skipped over it, probably the most important skill you've learnt from your parents is language. The octopus' parents die before they can transfer that skill. Hence, they can (barely) communicate with others of the same species and elevate their collective knowledge.

But you didn't have to learn language from parents specifically, you could've leart it from other members of the society.

I was making the distinction between learning from parents and learning from "others". The argument around the mistmatch between the life time of parents compared to the time of the offspring to maturity only makes sense with parents.

> The octopus' parents die before they can transfer that skill. Hence, they can (barely) communicate with others of the same species and elevate their collective knowledge.

Yeah, but that can't be an important factor. Elephant parents hang around for long and you still don't see talking elephants.

If you've raised a kid, a lot of these things are really obvious with just a few gaps of understanding here and there where a good book on learning comes in handy. Watching a tiny human go from knowing virtually nothing more than how to breathe, three years later, singing, ABCs, various animal recognition and a plethora of other stuff is educational to understanding "learning". If you haven't raised a kid, then it's no harm, no foul. I didn't realize how important family influence was on a child's learning until I did it myself.

I think you're working too hard with the semantics here. Parents, as in, who ever the hell takes care of the kid the most. That's either your bio-parents, typically. Maybe grandparents if your bios are crackheads. Maybe a foster care system because everyone in your family is jacked up in general. But parent: those that are responsible for your general well being. Yes "society" plays a roll. But random people don't walk up to a toddler to teach them their ABCs or 123s. Someone has to work with a kid from beginning to end for that developmental knowledge foundation or that kid has a really good chance of having a ton of problems down the line. And yes, schools still do the ABCs and numbers. But that's more to fill gaps, which do happen. Not to straight up teach a kid that can't do shit at all. There are different programs for when a 5 year old can't even say their own name. Research shows things like consistent night time reading and playing with infants and toddlers give them a solid base that proves them well throughout their lives. There was one paper (out of many) that was on hackernews a week or two ago about it as well.

And technically elephants do communicate, both vocally and through body language. As do most mammals. Just no where near the sophistication we can. That has to do with the sophistication of the brain. Those crazy folks that have wolf sanctuaries and are "apart of the pack", would argue with you about animal language too. But to be fair, you have to be a level of crazy of jump into a cage full of wolves. Hell, bees do interpretive dance to communicate. They sure kick my ass in that field. Then take Koko. From the age of 1, they taught a guerrilla to use a modified form of American sign language and was pretty proficient at communicating. I highly doubt starting at a later age would have been as effective. Developmental years of learning are vital for that foundation.

> I think you're working too hard with the semantics here. Parents, as in, who ever the hell takes care of the kid the most.

I didn't mean we don't learn that much from parents versus who the hell takes care of the kids (that would be semantics). I meant that we don't learn that much from parents versus all the other people that you interact with throughout your life.

> And technically elephants do communicate, both vocally and through body language. As do most mammals. Just no where near the sophistication we can.

Right, that's why I said that the crucial point was not communication with parents (or who ever the hell takes care of the kid), but communication. If you happen to belong to a species that has difficulty communicating you will never learn much from anyone, regardless of which age your parents die.

An octopus doesn't have any type of parent. That's the problem. No one teaches them, at all. That's why info doesn't move around with them. They start from scratch every generation.

Now, if you want to make a real argument against the nuclear family model and trying to say it's useless, I'd take the tribal method. There are many Amazonian tribes where a child does not exactly "belong" to parents. The entire tribe/village/whatever IS the parent. That's an interesting concept. It's also been argued that some pre-neolithic Euro-Asian societies were the same way. In some respects you can even see a form of that in Spartan society as well, back in their glory days. If I remember right, it was more towards the males. At a point (I think it was 11 or 12), taken from the family to be trained and had a barracks like lifestyle. They still had family units and what not, marriage, blood lines, inheritance, but there was a much more "society owns you" than what we see today. I think the Mongols had a similar little thing going, a lack of a hard lined family unit as well, but I might be wrong or confusing with someone else. But I'm also talking about dead societies.

Can a village raise a child? Sure. But at the same time, it's also no one's direct responsibility at that point. I say there's too much risk. What happens when the trash needs to be taken out but it's no one's direct responsibility to do so? Either someone consistently bites the bullet in the name of "The house is doing it" because they are the weakest in handling the nasty smell or it never gets done and the house smells like shit. At least in a "parent" type lifestyle, it's someone's direct job to fulfill certain duties. Now, it does suck if they are no capable to begin with. But 80/20 rule, it works most of the time.

So, unless you have a really sour relationship with your folks and you're currently projecting, at this point, I don't understand your argument. The passing of knowledge is not happening with octopi. Doesn't matter if that's by parents or by some magical monolithic tablet in the middle of the ocean. If they did have some passing of knowledge, there's a fair chance that they'd be smarter than they currently are by leaps and bounds. Dolphins raise their young (parents) and are considered one of the most intelligent sea creatures. Octopi have a chance of that, but miss the one crucial point, passing of knowledge because the parents are not around, nor is anyone else.

Again, typically parents do the passing of foundational knowledge. No one is saying that's the only way. It's just the primary, typically convenient and typically efficient due to the whole evolutionary instinct "I protect my own blood". There will always be exceptions, but in terms of convenience and efficiency, parents are the best system for passing foundational knowledge to the newly born. Irks me to have to keep saying "typical" since we all believe in black and white suddenly when it comes to the internet.

>I meant that we don't learn that much from parents versus all the other people that you interact with throughout your life.

You can't read a magic tablet if you were never taught to read. You can't understand some random old guy singing wisdom if you can't understand spoken language. I got taught both, reading and speaking, in two languages, from my folks before I hit kindergarten. Parents are typically the ones that teach you how to do the basis of understanding here. Your professors would think you're a useless sack of meat if your parents didn't work with you when you were younger. Same goes for me.

I'm rambling and this is too long.

I wish I could remember the book, but I originally got it because it's title was something like "Understanding and improving learning", something like that. It ended up being more about the first 10 years of life's learning rather than just learning in general. Still read it because it was interesting.

Anyways, to the point. The first few years of someone's life is proven to be crazy important. It's well confirmed when they find kids who have literally lived in the woods since babies (Jungle Book style, there's a few cases world wide of this and they are all nuts/heartbreaking) and of one case of some loony parents that locked up their kid in a room from birth with next to no interaction. Just enough to feed. Wasn't rescued until around 13 or so.

They find that those missing the first few years of a parents teaching basic social interactions, speech and motor skills through play are at a severe disadvantage. It's simply a foundation. If you have a weak structural foundation, the building will collapse. Even though that foundation is never seen by the outside world (both for buildings and metaphorically), doesn't mean it's not there and it's not vital.

A bulk of your knowledge does come from outside sources. But you can't learn calculus without knowing arithmetic. And you can't learn arithmetic without someone putting up with "What number is this?" "Twee!" "Good job!". Those sessions help accelerate your learning. Without that base, learning is probably a shallow linear line through life experiences. Because you only "learn"... ish... from what you encounter. Parental teachings give you a base that help accelerate learning from linear to something more logarithmic.

I wish I could remember the book's name. She goes into some relatively well thought out public education reform that, at the least, is a damn good start in my opinion. The woman also better explains everything I mentioned because developmental teaching is her field of expertise. My library doesn't seem to offer an online history of checked out books... which is surprising or I'm stupid and can't find it.

Maybe the TLDR to this is, the parents education process helps turn learning into a logarithmic endeavor instead of a trial/error shallow linear one.

Examples of neglected children (Jungle Book style) are problematic. Learning won't work if their psyche is broken. Better example would be: loving parents who never teach their children anything useful - if something like that ever happened.
Absolutely agree. But the best progress made on how the brain works was to learn from people who received major brain damage/trauma. It's just slightly frowned upon to inflict brain damage to a healthy person for science. [Insert nazi or hydra joke here]. Jungle Book kids are the best study subjects without really crossing bad ethical lines. It's going to be difficult to convince well adjusted, loving humans to never speak to their offspring and teach them absolutely nothing. I'm sure there are some ethical issues there. Don't know exactly. But I know there has to be some ethical and legal problems there lol.

Just thought of this: Couldn't we argue that if it happened early enough and said "animal caretakers", I think one Ukrainian girl was literally raised by wolves, came in early enough, would the kid have psyche issues? Their frame of reference is so limited to knowing what's "normal" and what's not, that they could possibly not develop any actual psychological issues. Actually, them being taken out of that "Jungle Book" environment and integrated into human society would cause issues. Their "Jungle Book normal" was now disturbed greatly. If timeline is true, but they still have psyche issues, could possibly mean that the human brain is wired to a form of "normal" that can't deviate by some certain amount. Just spit-balling ideas.

Not about IQ but I read somewhere about how the properties of octopus bodies (squishiness, bonelessness) form a very different understanding of the world compared to those of primates. Can't find where it was.
TierZoo on Youtube made a great video about octopuses and friends and mentioned that topic. It's quite an interesting stat to spec into when you don't have a high lifespan.
Not a "interesting thought" really, but I thought someone posted a link to a site for "un-mangling" text. would fix all the formatting issues like &amp, and other various issues caused by copy/pasting text from place to place.

I forget what I was doing recently but I thought "I should use that site" and couldn't find it anywhere after lots of searching. I should have bookmarked it :-/

Was it a mojibake (text encoding) fixer?
Just a reminder to always upvote/favorite what you consider relevant, and you can find it later on your profile, in case you don't use an app like Pocket to consolidate everything.
I use Materialistic app for HN. Saved there many stories. Lost my mobile. Then I realized this app saves stories only locally.
An article that provided a strong argument for why you should never stop reading, even if you forget most of what you read. There are a few articles I’ve found via Google on the same subject but they are not the one I saw on HN.
Perhaps this essay by Paul Graham?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753526

The one set of material you probably shouldn't read.
why do you say this? i want to understand your point of view.
Because PG's essays are intellectually uninteresting and often times mistaken (which is a nice way of putting incorrect). If the essay's didn't have his name on it, they'd be harshly critiqued when they get past around these parts. If you're looking for academic perspectives, especially around the subjects of rhetoric and debate, there is absolutely nothing worth reading in those essays.

Quite frankly I find it annoying whenever I see someone linking to them. It's junk food for your mind, with some Silicon Valley sprinkles on top.

I mean look at this gem in the linked essay:

>So although not knowing how you know things may seem part of being human, it may not be.

On a thread about stories you found interesting but lost, a story about reading even if you forget. How very meta
There was a good quote about commercial interests becoming entrenched, something about once a business gets accustom to making a profit in some way it stars to think of it as a right and argues in that fashion to defend it.
There was a thread about sole founders who have experienced success. Notably, there was a someone who developed a resume software and was able to sell his company to the German government (if my memory serves right).

Anyways, as the sole founder of a resume company, I found the story inspirational, yet I was never able to find the thread again.

related, my company - https://rezi.io

Someone mentioned a scifi short story with link to online version that I followed & read. The story was about a uploaded-human AI-spaceship that for a time worked as a asteroid miner. After a single overmind takes over 1st the inner planets, then the whole solar system, the protagonist to flee to insterstellar space, but is pursued by an overmind ship.

Been trying to find the story/title/author since, with no success.

I found and lost a similar story. There were no mentions of human characters, only programs that were evolving in their own digital space. It was a standard HTML page amongst a collection of other works, not a book.
Dammit, I know the one you mean and I can't remember where I read it either. Hopefully someone will help us out.
This is less one that I read, but more one that I wrote. Sometime ~mid 2012 I wrote an Ask HN looking to meet people and find co-working space in the bay area, 6 years later I find myself living here (due to folks I met via that thread). Unfortunately, it was on a separate account and I've never been able to find it
I’ve actually been able to find everything with a little bit of work at most. The search engine is actually reasonably good. I also favorite everything even remotely interesting.
Haha I do the exact same thing. My "favourites" list is a long one.

I started doing it because inside half an hour a post can disappear from the front pages.

Someone shared an MIT or Stanford class titled Deep learning for Biology or for Bioinformatics can't remember. I thought I saved it but couldn't find it anywhere later. Edit: The lectures were on youtube.
Several, but the one that comes to mind at this moment is from a comment a couple years ago regarding their streaming setup to find movies, shows, etc.
Lol, could you be more unspecific? I'm trying to help!
I recall reading a phenomenal blog(?) post about data science in history in which the author presented some historical data relating to the northern renaissance (iirc, shipping logs) and then presented two completely plausible but divergent analyses of the data.

I've spent hours trying to find it again on multiple occasions with no success. :(

It sure sounds like it, thanks!

That blog's been posted often, but with little success: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sappingattention.blog...

This thread is quite amusing, I think I'll fav it.

Great blog. The author, incidentally, is a youngish historian named Ben Schmidt. I feel like it's a natural fit with an HN audience given how data-driven his work is, but as you say, it doesn't break through very much.

He also created (helped create?) a tool called Bookworm that might be of interest: http://bookworm.culturomics.org

Alas, not quite! But thanks for pointing me to that article.
I have lost count of how many stories I'd read here and then wanted to reference it later but could not find it.

I'd started to think maybe I was going crazy, maybe the search feature sucks, maybe the links were removed for one reason or another.

Something about an algorithm designing circuits that shouldn't have worked, but did. I might be mixing another story, but I think it was using electrical interference from an outside source to accomplish its task.
I heard that from a hardware professor, but he way saying it was running calculations to generate electrical interference on the board to influence nearby (logically unrelated) calculations.

I think he was saying it was a genetic algorithm on an FPGA board. It was designing circuits by simulating them (in hardware), but if you actually tried to build the design in a custom chip it wouldn't work because you'd only have kept the circuit logic, not the interference properties.