Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?
I thought this post[1] from exactly a year ago was a nice type of post and so to celebrate it I thought I would start another to show the diverse interest of the HN community. Cheers!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488891 (thanks mckirk!)
864 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 446 ms ] threadhttps://www.google.com/search?hl=eo&gbv=1&q=heartbeast+%2Bsi...
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrHQNOyU1q6BFEfkNq2CYMA
Ever heard a pair of speakers that didn’t sound like hearing a recording of an instrument, but rather hearing the instrument itself? Me neither, but it’s apparently possible.
The DIY speaker/audio hobby is highly specific but also fortunately has a lot of informative available online. I’d recommend diyaudio.com and partsexpressforums for anyone interested, I have more resources if curious.
Also, if near Boulder, CO, I've got some CNCs if that helps you build stuff.
Re build logs, I have seen quite a few on diyaudio.com as well as reddit's r/diyaudio and r/diysound (which I frequent much more often). Are you more curious/interested in the enclosure hardware (woodworking) side or the driver selection and crossover building side? Because if you're curious about learning to make crossovers there are a few threads specific to that on diyaudio.com.
Yeah, full-range drivers + tube amp. I built the tube amp and speakers so it was not really expensive at all. (Maybe $500 or so all told — so not audiophile expensive by any means.)
Also your website's pretty nice and the moongame seems very interesting but its performance in firefox is around 2fps, which is bizarrely slow (Safari on my iPad was smooth).
https://youtu.be/zdkyGDqU7xA?si=UOPff5nJLD4d_iTn
https://youtu.be/EEh01PX-q9I?si=1deXn9OU1rvy2pJ2
edited: Thought DIY Perks did the big speakers, found them on Tech Ingredients.
Thanks for the links, I think I've seen (parts of) both videos but now that I have learnt a lot more I think I'll pick up more info.
Btw there have been a few valid criticisms of these speakers, although it's more of a "they aren't really the best in the world" rather than "they're shit" type of critique. I think ASR forums or diyaudio.com might have a few thread(s) on it.
If you're curious for a speaker build there are lots of excellent speaker kits and resources online that are (much) better reviewed.
The wealth of Czerny exercises is so much more engaging than the Hanon that have been inflicted unthinkingly on students for generations. Check out the Dohnanyi exercises for something wild and different; the later ones, not the first ones that focus on (potentially harmful) finger isolation.
It's kinda like watching Planet Earth about another ecosystem, with a strong focus on judgment-free ecology (ie there isn't good and evil, just different flora and fauna and otherwise interacting both with their normal food webs and with human outsiders).
It really tickles the environmental science geek in me. There's such a wonderful assortment of predators, prey, symbiotes, diseases, treatments, and thoughtful little touches everywhere. Beautiful art too.
------
That aside, I can't stop thinking about how much fun it is to throw people off cliffs in Baldur's Gate 3. https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199138390397/recomm...
Simple pleasures, man.
Very creative, but a bit hard to believe. Perhaps the timescale of how long they were stranded there could have been increased a little bit.
Yet, on the other hand, they seem mystified by things like which plants are edible, or the yellow fungus on the computer circuits, or the intelligent mind-power beasts. Stuff that should be top-level knowledge, I'd think? So do they understand the planet or not? Clearly a lot is known about the esoteric workings of the planet, but weirdly the BASICS of the place are a total mystery to them.
And yeah, the biology of the planet is both supremely alien yet also amazingly perfectly suited to incredibly specific use cases: this creature doubles as a gas mask, this other one is a personal flying machine with handlebars, reach inside this one and it'll inflate into a personal balloon guaranteed to hold your weight.
If I turn off that part of my brain, I enjoy letting myself get caught up in the "LOST"-ish mysterybox-ness of it (LOST, in space!).
The trick/explanation/excuse I've been using is that we know our characters are explorers and experts, so maybe the life on this planet isn't as "alien" or "unknown" to the characters as it seems to us.
I've had survival training, I know how to identify certain useful plants or recognize tracks from animals in ecosystems I don't live in, so I tell myself that it must be like that from their perspective. Which lines up, seeing as the character's don't seem to react that strangely or shocked to most of what they see. Even one of them says that their goal is to not only survive, but _thrive_ here until rescue.
Highly recommend it, the trailer gives a good sense of the vibes without giving away too much.
https://www.theverge.com/23912922/scavengers-reign-review-ma...
https://www.polygon.com/23798021/scavengers-reigns-announcem...
I just looked over a couple of trailers. I think this makes my watchlist.
About the artwork... reminded me of Another World [0, 1] but with the better rez of today.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_(video_game)?use...
[1] Walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjMf_bEfqIc
I was too worried about wasting loot then I finished the game with 20k gold and nothing to spend it on and thought "And nothing of value would have been lost if I had yeeted more people off cliffs."
Having his art style come to life as animation is beyond delightful.
If you are enjoying this I also recommend Blue Eye Samurai. Both are amazing.
Here's a link [0] - just don't do the breathing exercises anywhere that passing out could cause problems; like when driving, in water, etc.
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybOi4hjZFQ
Consider that perhaps being motivated automatically isn't always the best thing. Auto-motivation can make it harder to choose a good and worthwhile direction, which motivates you on its own merits to something above self-interest.
Maybe you could afford to let your self-motivation lie fallow for a while, if that's what you need to do. Put your brain in a jar, and do something helpful and physical.
Maybe none of this applies to your situation? I do find it an interesting topic as well though.
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=579886644&hl=eo&gbv=1&...
In this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23550758
... i posted links to other HN discussions on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553508
Everyone is passionate about the project, you can feel the care that’s being poured into the ecosystem.
'epoxy granite' is a thing
i think castings often come out closer to net shape than weldments and thus need less final machining, but i could have that backwards. they both shrink as they cool, but weldments don't need draft
i wonder if sand bonded with sodium silicate could provide vibration damping at a much lower cost than cast iron or epoxy granite? you'd want to use much more sodium silicate than you normally use in foundry practice to get a continuous silica hydrogel phase without air-filled porosity, and as with epoxy granite, you could make the members much thicker and probably heavier than you would with steel or cast iron in order to achieve the same rigidity. and sodium silicate should make an excellent bond to either quartz or carborundum (or other silicate aggregates like basalt fiber)
i think people also care about rigidity because side-loading induces tool deflection, which hurts precision, not just because of chatter
but i don't know anything
Started as a small project on wanting to learn C# better and being interested about how much sensors collect information about us and how we could analyze that, but it really got out of hand. I've been working on it for a ~month (with some breaks), sometimes all day, built a lot of tooling (like webassembly & android app to tag current activities for ML training data) and analysis things for it and am nearing a burnout point :P but been fun and I've definitely learned a lot about C# and ML.
I just checked my manual tags in the training database and I've been on this for 197 hours and 37 minutes since since 12th of October. No wonder I feel like I need a break..
only a 0.5cm change in saddle position can greatly improve comfort already.
A bike fit and correctly setup bike helped me a lot, especially on longer (100km+) rides.
Built a single speed out of a cheap, used frame with some spare or cheap parts and it has been going strong with little maintenance for 14 years.
Also have a long-tail cargo ebike that I got this summer and already have over 500 miles on it. It can be faster than driving a lot of times on top of being more fun for me and my kids.
And to top it off a full suspension mountain bike (2018 YT Jeffsy) which I get out on about twice a week and is really great for my physical/mental state, and has a huge skill ceiling so there will always be something to strive to get better at. Just got back from a weekend off riding an area with huge granite boulders and slabs with a few friends. Really fun to attempt features that made us a little uncomfortable and build skills/confidence.
Also a surprise like was Blue Reflection, if you watch its trailer it doesn't even look too dynamic but it was great fun.
I'm planning on going back and playing the Divinity: Original Sin games that Larian made before it. I hear they're fantastic as well.
They are. I'd play them in order -- the combat mechanics of DOS1 are kind of tough to swallow after the improvements in DOS2.
The DOS1 plot is also a bit thin, and you have to appreciate their brand of humor. But they are both great.
There were many technical issues with the release version, but GOG sells the game with unofficial patches integrated, which worked great for me.
Gaming is a great stress reliever and I make sure to make some time for it everyday. I mainly like single player games for my PS5 such as Horizon, Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher and more recently Spider-Man 2. Sometimes you just need to be selfish and have you time!
Controls have gotten easier in my experience, at least on anything made for a mainstream audience. Recently it came up on a podcast with a game reviewer among the hosts that games nowadays seem to all have a setting where enemies can be beaten by looking at them angrily and how it's basically story mode at that setting, and how much that's doing for inclusivity and how many non-gamers they've seen play/enjoy such-and-such game.
More anecdotal, my partner started playing hogwarts a few days ago and wanted to set it to easy. The default was normal, and there's also "story mode" and "hard" available at opposite ends of the spectrum. She's terrible with wasd+mouse (her own words, but I concur) and wanted to go for easy but I encouraged her to go with the default setting, figuring that'll be balanced to be enjoyable for Harry Potter fans (who are book nerds, not necessarily gamers). So far, she's managed to beat everything in one try!
I'm surprised you experience the opposite
I retired, and my chronic burnout started to recede (slowly). I realized that, for me, the issue was learning and remembering new systems were introducing a cognitive load that I just couldn't handle on top of the load I was carrying.
I know that's not directly helpful, but it may be worth looking at whether you are showing signs of burnout.
I also find it rewarding after getting robotics and memorizing recipes. Which allows me to focus more on designing (I suck so bad at it but it's fun).
After a good few hundred hours I moved on to krastorio2 + space exploration. It's so much more complex.
Oh and multiplayer is a great addition allowing me to asynchronously play with some friends /colleagues.
I do want to come back to Factorio since it's an awesome game, but currently I cannot find the good timing for it.
Maybe I’m not the target audience. I also play console games, so most of my library are games that don’t overlap with console (so games that are probably designed for keyboard/mouse).
I played it for a bit, and there are definitely some good games on it (I finally beat Portal on it), but I just haven’t found any games that make me want to break it back out.
• diving into plant law; writing a series on plants and property
• research clamping mechanisms and jigs for woodworking with handtools
• sadly smitten with all the genai advancements
• plotting multiple "chaos for social good" projects
• trying to figure out therapists can be so attuned to feelings while staying neutral
• promoting tiny blogs and the "small web": https://blogs.hn
• converting gendered restrooms to all-gender restrooms (with or without permission)
• easy legislative templates and meetups for removing billboards from your municipality
• low-powered and repairable permacomputing hardware designs
• tools for improving home ventilation
• software for retrofitting walkable infrastructure into existing towns and cities
I believe, for a long list of reasons, that families with stably married mother/father are the best way to preserve humanity and that they are most stable without wandering eyes. Avoiding having wandering eyes, or wandering loyalties, in turn, is helped when we make it easier for people to manage and direct sexual attraction to keep it within marriage, rather than otherwise. This includes avoiding porn or behaviors that are like porn to others. I want to keep my thoughts clean and faithful to my wife. I hope others can make that easier and less work, rather than often putting things in my sight that make it be more work.
...I'm going to have to get back to you.
This reads like you find people besides your wife attractive, but rather than recognizing this as normal and healthy, you vilify and repress it. But you see (part of) the responsibility for avoiding your thoughts with others, and expect of them to act according to your needs and wants.
The thought of people of the other gender using a toilet near you is sexual to you and you don't like that, but this is a you problem.
Also, I don't know whether your "stably married mother/father" is just heteronormative or deliberately excluding same-sex couples, but if it's the latter, your "belief" is demonstrably wrong. [1]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6309949/
That's how I feel about "I know it when I see it". It's the kinks of the proverbial seer.
I have learned for myself that God exists, that he cares, this life is not the beginning or the end, that our choices matter, and that the commandments he gives us (like the 10 commandments, as an example) are to help us get through this life and prepare to receive the blessings he has promised based on our choices.
I have written more of why I know this, at my web site (in profile).
All the best to you.
Interested to see what you have in mind
I'm trying to document the process of setting one up in such a way that I can do a teach in for my friends at my local hackerspace.
In the process I've determined I would like to write my own k8s enabled application (likely a daemonset for checking for a specific hardware device and configuration on each bare metal node, and storing that data in a way for k8s to use and reference later).
I've been working on this any free time I get, since September, each weekend sees a flurry of activity then I spend the week daydreaming about it.
It’s pushing me out of my comfort zone. For example, leading me to improve my math skills in order to understand some of the concepts and notations that are used in research papers. Also gives me some context into learning C, a language which I consider low-level as a web developer, and it’s been fun to have to think about things like memory management, along with other things I don’t generally need to consider. It gives me an appreciation for when I’m writing high level code like Elixir or JS, etc.
Compression, which I’d say is an application of information theory is just really interesting to learn about for some reason.
- Book called Compact Data Structures by Gonzalo Navarro https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/compact-data-structures...
- Ben Langmead's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@BenLangmead
- MIT Open Courseware https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-02-introduction-to-eecs-ii-dig...
- Stanford lectures https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv_7iO_xlL0Kz2nU05COp...
Please don't be so wreckless in your passion(s). And:
HODL
I have a heatpump, but why?! /s
None of the stable coins have gone through a full thorough audit done by a reputable company, thus it's safe to assume they are not fully 1:1 backed and thus it's a ticking time bomb.
30% interest rate sounds like a pyramid scheme. If something sounds like a scam, then it probably is a scam, since it's crypto, then it's most certainly a scam
Tokens should be viewed like stock. The team behind the token has a pool to fund their network / app. Different products in the decentralised finance space (DeFi) incentive usage by handing out their tokens (stock) to people who provide value to their product. In DeFi this is usually by becoming a liquidity provider (LP), providing your own assets to their protocol in return for a fee and incentives.
This makes logical sense for the team, because the most common metric for valuing an app is "total value locked" (TVL). The more TVL an app or network has, the more usage and value it has, which typically translates into increased value for their token.
There are way too many protocols to list. Checkout Velodrome as an example of a very high APY protocol https://app.velodrome.finance/liquidity?sort=apr&asc=false
Everything you described about LPs, TVL, and token value; you are just describing the mechanics of the ponzi scheme, not describing the way in which it isn't a ponzi scheme.
If you are getting "interest" over 20%, what you are doing is extracting that money (which isn't real until you turn it into fiat, btw) from the people in the future who lose money when the scheme inevitably crashes; they are transferring their future losses backward in time to you in the present.
That's fine as far as it goes, if you're aware of what's going on, ethically comfortable with it, and make sure to get out of the scheme early enough to not yourself be one of the people left without a chair when the music stops.
But from your comment, I think it seems like you aren't one of the people cynically taking advantage of the scheme, in which case, you are actually one of the marks.
It is simply not possible for a scheme that is above board to pay over 4x the prevailing global interest rate, without significant risk.
I’ve been in crypto for 13 years now, I’m sure any day now Bitcoin will hit 0 and you’ll be proven right, and all the yield farms and defi will collapse, sure sure.
I didn't say anything about Bitcoin. But yes, all those yield farming schemes that are paying double digit "risk-free interest" will eventually crash out and leave some set of people in the red. It has happened over and over again, it's just that new tokens get set up and re-start the cycle.
By the way, the point defi enthusiasts make about how that's just the same way interest in the "legacy" financial system works already is also true. The only difference is that the existing financial system takes its current interest payments out of future growth in real resources and productivity. And this is why double digit interest rates are extremely rare; because that rate of real growth is difficult or impossible to sustain for long.
But thus far, defi remains a closed purely financial loop, without creating any real non-financial growth, so it's all zero sum, just pitting current speculators against future ones.
You can't pay the rent or utilities with them, you can't pay with them at the store or anywhere else.
Meaning unless you can convert your random tokens - that are not accepted almost anywhere in the real world - to good old USD/fiat, you virtually have nothing.
That's the failure, smart contracts do not ensure you get real USD dollars out off the system, the ones normal people accept as legal tender.
What gives?
You can downright reject anything crypto currency related because it fails basic economic theory. There has never been a financial instrument that gives risk free 10-30% yields. No economy has ever grown at that rate. If it is a company what real products or real services does it provide? Where's the value add?
Exactly, there isnt, it's a plain old pyramid scheme hiding behind mumbo jumbo jargon that only impresses the mentally challenged.
Also building "drones". I create a glider and slap some propellors on it, then race it once a month in a local club.
Building a modular synth from scratch.
How do humans interface with computers and data, from control to visual feedback.
How humans interface with music, perform it, read it, store it. How do birds interface with tones and rhythm?
How software interfaces with other software and hardware.
How humans interface with the world via symbols. I've been reading about Semiotics a bit, and find the field fascinating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics?wprov=sfla1
Birdsong as code: https://youtu.be/OCYU0LtqRH0?si=4DwOKC3oZ6vE-w-y
Currently I'm reading Michael Pollen's "Botany of Desire" about how how plants interface/manipulate humans (spec: Apple, Orhid, Marijuana, Potatoe). There is a salacious passage on sexual reproduction strategies, involving bees ("flying penises") and this plant that "play resists" the bees entering — and then author Pollen ends his description of this interface by suggesting: many people might see this as the bee penetrating the coy defences of the flower, but in fact it is the flower manipulating bees.
I'm gonna give you the first recommendation free, but the next one'll cost'ya =D
Though he never called it such, a lot of it intersects with Donald Norman's work that he describes in "The Design of Everyday Things". Even the objects we intereact with are interfaces.
Drop me a line if you're looking to chat about it all.
I wonder if you know (and maybe have thoughts about) the arrangement of ancient Cusco, set up to be possible to navigate without any written directions (as the Inca effectively functioned without a writing system).
From Lynn Kelly's Memory Code:
> The Inca turned their major city, Cusco, into a massive memory space, the details of which were documented by the colonising Spanish. Radiating from the Coricancha temple in the centre were over 40 pilgrimage pathways known as ceques. The ceques divided the land into wedge-shaped political, agricultural and irrigation zones, each assigned to a specific kinship group. It is still unclear the degree to which the ceques were physical paths and how much they were purely imagined. To form a city-sized memory space, it does not matter as long as the pathways could be followed in the minds of the users.
I've been thinking about how memory intersects with navigation, and how both of these influence how we interpret the world.
I am noticing more and more how underwhelmed I am by the current status quo of human/computer interaction - everything seems so homogenous now, and after being heavily inspired by Alan Kay and Brett Victor, I'm sure there is a lot more to be done in this space.