HN user

pyk

150 karma
Posts1
Comments52
View on HN

This is pretty amazing, I have been scrobblin’ for 23 years (pre-rename from audioscrobbler to last.fm), from Winamp and foobar2000 to iTunes to Spotify over the years - amazing to see them continue this service for the dedicated music lovers. One of the few services spanning decades of analytics - excited for the team!

Alright, I am building QuizFox, a small daily trivia app for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quizfox-daily-trivia-game/id67...

I’ve always liked trivia / Jeopardy-style games and learning, so this started as a fun side project to see how quickly I could build and ship something “real” using AI-assisted development (I got my niece and nephews in there trying it out, so a success there for them to see that they can build the next new awesome app themselves!).

AI dev is definitely hit or miss on development, but I am surprised at how well AI is doing some app dev tasks (using frameworks it does exceedingly well, not surprising!), and also some misses (trivia writing it does oddly well, but verifiability is imperfect, I had some issues early on with hallucination to fix, but pretty good now!).

Would love feedback, especially on the onboarding, obvious gotchas, question quality, and the app overall, I am using it to learn a lot quickly!

As a relative laymen in this hardware inference space, I am curious what exactly was Groq useful for vs. the typical hardware architecture? Or was this a “step in before they become more generally useful” situation for Nvidia/Groq?

Incredible for post-popcorn, and for $10 nowadays a no brainer. I still find floss does a better job at scraping the sides of the tooth vs water flossers for dislodging.

Fun project! For HN Pez fans, The Pez Outlaw is an amazing “hacker” collector documentary on Netflix that follows Steve Glew - who made his own dispensers semi-legit through connections in Europe (Pez Europe operated separately from Pez USA, and still does in many ways). Has some parallels to the scrappy nature of tech as well.

The 2010 Prius IV had this as an option - one of my favorite cars due to low maintenance (the lowest maintenance visits per year for its era). The solar panel air vent circulation is a nice feature (even if slightly gimmicky) and I suspect extends the hybrid battery life as well by preventing some marginal battery heat death while parked.

The newest (2023+) Prius brought back the solar roof as an option - and this time it charges the battery (albeit marginally / but not bad for those that drive minimally).

For telco at least, some countries have exactly that and unfortunately it does not run more efficiently and centralizes potential content control. Innovation comes from competition, and privatization keeps content more freely flowing. If we can solve those two while centralizing that would be amazing but maybe unrealistic with current policy.

If you have two people, you can have person A ask person B to “pick a random number”, and use heads for odd, tails for even. Don’t tell person B why you’re asking and my guess is you’re relatively random heads/tails. No studies that I am aware of to back this up, so people could be biased towards odd/even, but a bias correction could correct that too.

Until a PCR can be done within 15 min instead of 2-3 day turnaround, there will always be a gap in using PCR for public health purposes. That time may come in the future for faster PCR, but it is simply not the reality yet today and we have to rely on antigen tests to at the very least rely on detecting the most virulent days to prevent super spreader events.

Best I’ve heard it described is that Antigen tests are best for detecting high virulence on days 3-5 (e.g., when the spread is happening from tons of viral production, including in the nasal passages). They are more for public health usage to prevent spread rather than diagnostic like PCR.

Still an active field of study but your intuition seems to be right. One study is here [1]. Combustible “types” of PM are usually worse (think smoke / carbon) vs. vaporous types of PM. The method of action is hypothesized to be the carbon particulate getting lodged in your lungs (similar problems from smoking, carbon nanotube inhalation, or charred foods).

[1] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/ehp.0800185?url_v...

One note that these articles and comparisons miss almost every single time - including the linked article. Bottled water is better for your health vs. the alternatives it sits next to in-store - sugar filled drinks, soda and/or diet soda - all of which are just as bad for the environment or worse.

When that health comparison is made, it becomes difficult to understand how banning or restricting bottled water makes sense when the alternative is not really tap water.

If you have forced air, you can get a UV bulb that all air passes by for $200-300 - just requires drilling some holes and an AC plug. Also helps with killing mold and bacteria as an added benefit (and some of the original intention for the devices, e.g., OdorStop).

For those lactose intolerant out there, Tofutti makes a great no-lactose cream cheese alternative pretty widely available (Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods) that weirdly does a great texture-wise match to “real” cream cheese.

Several states have or have had laws against allowing unmarried partners or friends from making medical decisions. This was a huge deal for the legalization of gay marriage - before that you were in rough shape if your unmarried partner even wanted to visit you if you were incapacitated in the hospital.

1 cup rice 1.25 cups water is what I use as a ratio for short-to-medium grain white rice (I recommend kokuho rose extra fancy). That also is the one typically inscribed on the side of a rice cooker pot. You can go a little over water-wise for a mushier rice, or under for a chewier/drier rice - white rice is forgiving.

Recommendations for what individuals can do are buried but very practical:

* Try to get a few extra months’ worth of prescription meds, if possible.

* Think through now how we will take care of sick family members while trying not to get infected. Cross-train key staff at work so one person’s absence won’t derail our organization’s ability to function.

* Practice touching our faces less. So how about a face-counter app like the step-counters so many of us use?

* Replace handshakes with elbow-bumps (the “Ebola handshake”).

* Start building harm-reduction habits like pushing elevator buttons with a knuckle instead of a fingertip.

To piggyback the above comment, the recent Nature[1] article about centuries-old baobab trees mysteriously dying over the past decade of warmer-then-even-warmer temperatures is what hit me. A potential litmus test for our future as a species.

I suspect we will see more and more accumulation of research on impacts rather than just predicted impacts as we continue to experience increased temperatures. Although you do not have to touch a flame to know it will burn, more and more real world instances of getting "burned" are harder and harder to ignore.

"The researchers found no signs of an epidemic or disease, leading them to suggest that changing climates in southern Africa could be to blame — but they stress that more research is needed to confirm this idea."

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05411-7

After writing this one out, this reminds me of the Monty Hall problem. In this case my guess is that you use a prior -- assume the two unknown numbers are A & B, and then assume a random integer yourself C.

From there, if A (the first revealed number) is less than C, then that narrows the remaining cases giving you a 2/3 chance. If A is greater than C, that also narrows the remaining cases and gives you a 2/3 chance as well.

On a number line, the cases are below.

If A > C then the six originally equally possible cases are narrowed to three cases:

A-----B-----C (impossible)

A-----C-----B (impossible)

B-----A-----C (impossible)

B-----C-----A B < A

C-----A-----B B > A

C-----B-----A B < A

So you would guess B < A -- the first hand's number is higher with probability 2/3.

If A < C then the six originally equally possible cases are also narrowed to three cases:

A-----B-----C B > A

A-----C-----B B > A

B-----A-----C B < A

B-----C-----A (impossible)

C-----A-----B (impossible)

C-----B-----A (impossible)

So you would guess B > A -- the first hand's number is lower with probability 2/3.

Take Naps at Work 9 years ago

Not a biologist or neurologist, but my hypothesis for this is ease of blood flow to the brain while horizontal.

Boston is not surprising to me. As a Boston resident when I visit other major metropolitan areas they are exceeding Boston in microbrews and brewpubs, very likely due to cheaper real estate and maybe easier to navigate regulation.

Minneapolis is a great comparison, lots of breweries and tap rooms relatively speaking vs. Boston.

Agreed wealth is a confound, however there are several studies that control for socioeconomic status, air conditioning and smoking. These studies still observe a correlation between PM2.5 and increased all-cause mortality primarily driven by increased lung cancer and heart disease mortality. A couple studies linked below control for a few of these confounds, but there are several others too [1,2].

The causal reason is likely the fine particulate matter getting "stuck" in lung tissue and our bodies unable to remove the particles causing accumulative issues on lung function [3].

[1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmsa0805646

[2] http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/109/1/71.full

[3] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10473289.2006.104...

This is great information -- thank you. Do you have any general advice for switching over from one domain & TLD to another -- i.e., setting up redirects, etc... for those that have linked to the previous domain, as well as for Google indexing (e.g., Google webmaster tools)?