Ask HN: What interesting thought did you read on HN but couldn't find later? - spython
======
ahmedfromtunis
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!

~~~
spython
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.

~~~
urspx
This isn't at all what you're looking for, but the book _Vampyroteuthis
Infernalis_ (Flusser, V. & Bec, L., 2012) might be a fun read for you.

[https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-
division/books/vampyroteuthi...](https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-
division/books/vampyroteuthis-infernalis)

~~~
spython
Vilem Flusser writing about vampire squids? Sounds like a great read! Thanks a
lot!

------
godot
There was a thread about interviewing, someone talking about how hard
interviewing was and failing dozens of them even as a senior engineer. (there
is a thread about that once every month or two, indeed) A commenter responded
saying something along the lines of, "When you find the right fit/role, the
interview will seem suspiciously easy."

I thought it was interesting because it's such a huge anecdote without any
ways of backing it up, but for some reasons it does match my own experience in
the past decade+ for almost every job offer I've landed (a handful). For every
interview where I felt like I struggled really hard (even though in the end I
was able to solve the problems the interviewers asked), I did not get offers.
For the ones I did land, it always seemed really easy and somewhat like "what?
is that it?"

~~~
allenz
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16200322)

------
codebeaker
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.

~~~
ernsheong
Try out [https://www.pagedash.com](https://www.pagedash.com) to help save
pages you read for reference later! (Maker here)

~~~
qop
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?

~~~
ernsheong
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15653206)

~~~
tluyben2
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.

~~~
ernsheong
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.

------
spython
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?"

~~~
jdietrich
I suspect you're referring to this essay by Scott Alexander:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-
argumentat...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/08/varieties-of-
argumentative-experience/)

In the context of negotiation, the book _Getting To Yes_ describes a similar
concept:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_to_Yes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_to_Yes)

------
gojomo
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.

~~~
0bit
"The Long Chase",
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192254](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192254)

That discussion has links to books with similar stories. Enjoy.

~~~
gojomo
Thank you! I've often wanted to point others at it in discussions on topics
ranging from blockchain forks to 'friendly AI'. I even posed a question on
Quora to try to find it – [https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-scifi-short-story-
name-autho...](https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-scifi-short-story-name-author-
about-a-single-AI-ship-racing-to-escape-a-conquering-solar-system-wide-
overmind/) – now updated with your pointer.

------
elviejo
Someone commented: "how things have changed, emacs and vim are partners and
the enemy is Eclipse and Visual Studio"

A play on words of an episode in star trek the next generation, where someone
from the past wakes up to realize that now humans and Klingons are friends and
the enemy are the ferengi and the borg.

~~~
mwilliaams
Ha, the Ferengi are never really an enemy. They just want that latinum.

~~~
taejo
The AI does not love you. Nor does it hate you. But you are made of atoms
which it can use for something else.

------
rkda
Not sure if it was on HN but it was a short story about an old retired sys
admin in an age where everything runs on the cloud. One day, something went
wrong in a data center and he was called to fix it because robots manage
everything now and nobody knows how to fix things anymore. He was accompanied
by a younger sysadmin IT person as he fixed a server or something. By the end
of it, the younger IT person wanted to learn about how computer works and be a
sysadmin.

~~~
icc97
Reminds me of the sysadmin XKCD:
[https://xkcd.com/705/](https://xkcd.com/705/)

~~~
rkda
Heh. That's always a good one. I'm not sure anymore if I found it here or on
Nat Torkington's four short links.

------
BoppreH
Meta comment: there's a very active subreddit for finding lost information,
[https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/](https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/)
.

~~~
mercer
Meta comment: I was trying to remember what the name of that subreddit was!

------
shijie
Someone once posted a short science fiction story about the animals that
became the dominant intelligent species on earth after humans. First it was
raccoons, then it was crows, traveling by air balloon. I loved it, and I’ve
searched many subsequent times to no avail.

~~~
ahane
The piece was posted on The Archdruid Report
([https://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com](https://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com))
and was called "The Next Ten Billion Years".

In a bit of an unconventional move, the author has closed down the blog and is
now selling the previously free articles as ebooks. There are a lot of
valuable perspectives in his writing, so it might very well be worth the
purchase. Most of it is not in the "short story format" that you remember
though.
([http://www.foundershousepublishing.com/](http://www.foundershousepublishing.com/)).

There might also be an free archive somewhere..

~~~
hoelzro
I found it on archive.is:
[http://archive.today/2016.10.25-213332/http://thearchdruidre...](http://archive.today/2016.10.25-213332/http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.de/2013/09/the-
next-ten-billion-years.html)

Funny thing - I was thinking about this post a few years ago but also couldn't
remember where I'd read it; I ended up writing a program to download the pages
I'd visited since 2012 (using a heuristic to discard unlikely entries and to
promote likely ones). That's probably the most effort I've gone through to
find something on the Internet!

------
p49k
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.

~~~
abhirag
Maybe this is the article you are searching for -- It's Okay to "Forget" what
you read
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15146715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15146715))

~~~
p49k
This was it, along with the accompanying PG article. Thanks!

------
snailmailman
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
:-/

~~~
teddyh
You probably mean this one:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103356](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103356)

~~~
snailmailman
Ah, yes this was it! thanks!

------
latenightcoding
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.

~~~
car
Maybe in reference to this:
[http://kundajelab.github.io/dragonn/](http://kundajelab.github.io/dragonn/)

------
thusly
Wow, great timing. Around a week ago I spent an hour digging through my
bookmarks for something I'd found via HN, and I must not have bookmarked.

I can't recall what the original post linked to, but in the comments someone
discussed their preferred method of organizing their digital notes/journal.
They linked to a forum post where someone described the system.

It involved using a single folder for all notes, with different categories,
that were indicated in the file name. In fact the file name contained
everything important. It also discussed never altering a file, but creating an
index to refer to other related entries.

I think the person who wrote the forum post was a journalist of some sort? And
they might have made reference to a Japanese system that was similar, but
physical, which used lines on the top of index cards to indicate categories,
and keeping the number of categories low (always 4?) was important.

I'd love to find that forum post again.

~~~
ATDrake
The index card version of that note-taking system sounds somewhat like Niklas
Luhmann's zettelkasten or Pile of Index Cards, which have both had some posts
describing them linked on HN previously:

[http://takingnotenow.blogspot.ca/2007/12/luhmanns-
zettelkast...](http://takingnotenow.blogspot.ca/2007/12/luhmanns-
zettelkasten.html)

[https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-
thinking...](https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-
writing/)

[http://pileofindexcards.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page](http://pileofindexcards.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)

[http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/cluster/](http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/cluster/)

Another HN post from the zettelkasten.de domain had a comment with a link to
this project on Github, which sounds a lot like the filename-based system you
mention, at least in terms of putting all the info into the filename:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16611413](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16611413)

[https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder](https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder)

Maybe it's not the one you were looking for, but could be useful anyway?

------
jswrenn
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. :(

~~~
abhirag
Maybe this -- [https://sappingattention.blogspot.in/2012/11/reading-
digital...](https://sappingattention.blogspot.in/2012/11/reading-digital-
sources-case-study-in.html?m=1)

~~~
severine
It sure sounds like it, thanks!

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

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

~~~
benbreen
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](http://bookworm.culturomics.org)

~~~
severine
Thanks! The Bookworm link doesn't work right now, but I found this demo video
very interesting:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kAlwiXt0bY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kAlwiXt0bY)

------
thiht
There was a guy who posted some comments explaining how the industry basically
doesn't know exactly why some batteries work better than others, and that the
research in this domain is a lot like "nobody know wtf they are doing".

There was also this one comment by a guy explaining that the components used
in Apple devices are "premium" components coming from the first batches, and
that they make Apple's hardware more reliable than another computer with the
same components

------
hetspookjee
I read about it about a year ago. It was about a small program with 4 letters
and someone posted 2 blog posts about it in a weeks time abusing the tool to
see what it can come up with. The tool or program seemed to have an
exploitative nature and seemed to be used in the security field. It worked
with, I think binary files, but I recall it also allowed other programs to be
ran on it. You provided an exit state and an input state and the program it
needs to work with and tried all sorts of things within the provided program
to reach the provided exit state. The blog post abused it to optimise to
something interesting which I can't recall anymore. The writer of the blog
post had more experience with it and already liked to toy around with it. It's
not angr.

Iirc it 2as called something like nmap or jobn. Something with 4 letters and
not the most straightforward name.

Please help me out.

~~~
nlawalker
Sounds like a fuzzer. Was it American Fuzzy Lop (afl-fuzz)? Doesn't quite meet
your 4-letter criteria but sounds like a candidate.

~~~
hetspookjee
Yes! Thank you. No wonder I wasn't able to find it as I strongly held my
belief that it was 4 letters. Love this place.

~~~
3131s
It's odd how a word can feel "on the tip of your tongue" and intuitions about
its number of sounds and their characteristics can be remarkably accurate,
especially if you consider the interposition of linguistically similar sounds.
And it can be totally misleading when your memories are incorrect, to the
point for me at least of making it nearly impossible to recall a word until I
have shifted focus to something else.

------
billconan
A blog post by a pythics PHD (or may be biolog or chemistry, I don’t
remember.) about the sad state of utility software in his/her area of study.
The software the author developed during the PhD program has become the
acedemic standard.

------
deegles
There was one motivational type article about how you should “go first” or “be
first” when approaching problems in life. Like when making friends or just
socially in general. I was looking for it again recently but couldn’t find it.

~~~
charlysl
I don't know about the link, but if you are interested in the subject I think
that you would enjoy this lecture:

MIT Math for CS, Matching Problems:
[https://youtu.be/5RSMLgy06Ew](https://youtu.be/5RSMLgy06Ew)

tldw: it can be mathematically proven that the best strategy is to take the
initiative when looking for a partner/job/vacancy, starting with your prefered
choice and working down from there, and let others shoot you down if need be

------
yobert
A post about a startup that was trying to create an open database of
algorithmic ways to treat patients. I've tried and tried to find this with
HN's search engine, but can't seem to pick the right search terms.

~~~
severine
Wild guess:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5599134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5599134)

Counsyl is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave (113 points by daslee on Apr
24, 2013 | 47 comments)

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/counsyl/](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/counsyl/)

------
arjunbajaj
A service that converts PDF research papers into a clean readable webpage.

Their example paper was a research paper with two columns and diagrams to show
their service actually works well.

I searched a couple of times but couldn't find them again...

~~~
orbuch
perhaps [https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/](https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/)?

~~~
arjunbajaj
Yes that's the one! Thank you so much!

------
Teichopsia
I've been trying to find an email server which was mentioned in a comment a
few months ago. I read through the setup instructions - the only point I
remember is once it's setup one can add as many domains to it as one wants -
if I remember correctly. There were several that popped up this past year,
[https://mailinabox.email](https://mailinabox.email) this being one of them
but I don't think it was the one I'm talking about. The setup instructions
were clear.

~~~
DanBC
Was it perhaps this? [https://github.com/nodemailer/wildduck#wild-duck-mail-
server](https://github.com/nodemailer/wildduck#wild-duck-mail-server)

It's had a few submissions, but no
discussion.[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wildduck.email](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wildduck.email)

~~~
Teichopsia
Thanks but it wasn't that one. The one I'm talking about wasn't in beta and I
would like to say one could use any DB one wanted to but that might just be
wrong :)

Edit: grammar.

------
spython
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.

~~~
roddux
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-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-feelings-the-
second-brain-in-our-gastrointestinal-systems-excerpt/)

~~~
spython
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.

------
rapfaria
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.

~~~
mayankkaizen
I use Materialistic app for HN. Saved there many stories. Lost my mobile. Then
I realized this app saves stories only locally.

~~~
slow_donkey
Materialistic doesn't run any servers

------
ianseyer
Someone posted a comment mentioning that coffee shops are a good metric for
cultural development when trying to look for a new city

~~~
severine
There's this discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10391753](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10391753)

How to know if where you live is “up and coming”: fried chicken vs. coffee
shops (medium.com) 326 points by edward on Oct 15, 2015 | 306 comments

[https://medium.com/@Sam_Floy/how-to-know-if-where-you-
live-i...](https://medium.com/@Sam_Floy/how-to-know-if-where-you-live-is-up-
and-coming-fried-chicken-vs-coffee-shops-546080119f98)

~~~
daveguy
Completely disagree about the fried chicken part of the equation. The more
fried chicken the better.

~~~
cm2012
Its not making a judgment call, just a correlation.

~~~
daveguy
I wasn't making a judgement call either. Just stating how much I like fried
chicken.

------
gdulli
Someone posted here a blog from a guy who had a plan to commit suicide at the
age of 50. He wrote a lot of articles explaining the reasoning. It was mostly
a fear of declining quality of life with age, and a fear of becoming
incapacitated at some point and being unable to follow through with euthanasia
if he was suffering. It stuck in my head and I'd like to find it again because
I couldn't remember if this was something he went through with or if it was
hypothetical.

~~~
danielvf
We’re you thinking of the author of zeromq?

[http://hintjens.com/blog:115](http://hintjens.com/blog:115) “A protocol for
dying”

~~~
gdulli
No, this was someone who was still in good health and wanted to be proactive
about avoiding possible future sickness and even just aging. But thanks for
posting that.

~~~
deft
Are you talking about the guy who ended up killing himself, revealing a never
ending manifesto-like site upon his suicide? I'd like to find that again
myself.

EDIT: one google search and here it is: [http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-
sports-writer-kills-himsel...](http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-sports-
writer-kills-himself-and-leaves-massive-website-explaining-why-2013-8)

The site looks like it's down now though.

~~~
gdulli
That's it, thank you! I didn't remember it was a sports writer, I assumed it
was someone who worked in tech since I had found it here. And here's a working
mirror: [http://martin-manley.eprci.com/](http://martin-manley.eprci.com/)

------
rahidz2003
There was this blog post about how to form yearly goals, maybe for New Year’s
resolutions or something? I remember they were divided into 10-15 categories,
dealing with all areas of life (career, health, family, etc.) and had probing
but specific questions in each.

~~~
varal7
Maybe this?

[http://yearcompass.com](http://yearcompass.com)

------
zerostar07
Off topic, but browsers should be appending the referrer page in the history
list when openning a new browser tab. Countless times i've lost an article
because i opened a link and much later discovered i had somehow closed the
opener page.

~~~
Darkenetor
This saved me a lot of time for these cases

[https://github.com/program-in-
chinese/HistoryInThreads_WebEx...](https://github.com/program-in-
chinese/HistoryInThreads_WebExtension)

~~~
deft
Saving this for later. Bookmark.

------
yread
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!

------
unimpressive
It was a post or discussion, I think involving Peter Thiel talking about how
innovation is in the world of bits not atoms now and that implies some
unpleasant things about our society.

Closest I could find was:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718654](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718654)

~~~
severine
What about this?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5641799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5641799)

In Tech We Trust? A Debate with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen [video]
(milkeninstitute.org) 74 points by jordn on May 2, 2013 | 39 comments

The original video link seems dead, I guess it's this one:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtZbWnIALeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtZbWnIALeE)

~~~
unimpressive
I think this was probably it (just reached that point in the video where Thiel
says the money quote). Thanks.

~~~
gdulli
FYI if it's the bits/atoms treatment you're specifically interested in reading
about, it goes back to at least 1995 from Nicholas Negroponte.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital)

------
jrvarela56
Dunno if this is management 101 but someone mentioned casually the
relationship between responsibility and authority. A mismatch between those
two creates tension (employee dissatisfaction).

I have not found the comment or literature on the subject. Experiences at my
day job tell me this is key to org/role design and management in general.

~~~
allenz
There are several good articles discussing ARA:

[http://blog.jbrains.ca/permalink/the-importance-of-
aligning-...](http://blog.jbrains.ca/permalink/the-importance-of-aligning-
authority-with-responsibility)

[https://ssbg.co.nz/about/media/words-with-meaning-the-
import...](https://ssbg.co.nz/about/media/words-with-meaning-the-importance-
of-definitions/)

[https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-
school/fall-2016/d...](https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-
school/fall-2016/decision-making-alignment/)

For HN comments specifically, you might have read one of these:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810365)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7184472)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9767231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9767231)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552107)

~~~
jrvarela56
Thanks! Seems I still need a couple of ‘Let me google that for you’ sent my
way hehe

------
liamzebedee
A paper some time back about performing large-scale host computations through
(ab)using the TCP handshake for arithmetic.

~~~
fawind
Barbarasi et al., Parasitic computing, 2001 [1]

[1]
[https://www.nature.com/articles/35091039](https://www.nature.com/articles/35091039)

~~~
liamzebedee
Been looking for this on and off for over 5 years, thank you.

------
ptman
I don't know if it was on HN, but I remember reading about productivity
research concerning the length of the workweek. IIRC 25h week improved
productivity compared to 40h. The study may have been done in Germany. But I
haven't been able to find it or similar studies of high quality since.

------
htwillie
Within the last year, a guy did a writeup on his DIY electrical panel circuit
monitoring setup.

It allowed him to very accurately measure power consumption of everything in
his house, and he was able to trace a sudden and mysterious rise in his
monthly bill to a faulty pool pump.

------
pimlottc
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.

------
bklaasen
An extraordinary long-form piece about a child who'd been born deaf (perhaps
of Latino origin, growing up in the streets of a US city) and was then
abandoned by his parents. He hadn't learned to speak. As an adult he was given
help by a charity (or research group?) who, over the course of years, taught
him to speak. There's a moment described in the article when he finally
realises that all objects have names, and bursts into tears. When asked to
recall how he thought about the world before he learned to speak, he could not
describe his cognition.

~~~
garrettgrimsley
That sounds like the story of Ildefonso. I originally heard the story on
Radiolab [0] and it is also the subject of a book [1] by Susan Schaller called
"A Man WithoutWords"

[0]
[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91725-words/](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91725-words/)

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words)

------
hgdsraj
Something about someone smelling cake or a bakery in their neighborhood when
there wasn't one, but it turned out to be chemicals leaching from the ground
due to what was there years ago and buried.

~~~
throw501
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14566057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14566057)

------
tosh
A slide deck on compatibility and incompatibility of various Lego bricks.

~~~
BoppreH
Would that be "Stressing The Elements"[1], an unofficial guide of what
connections are considered "illegal" because they are unstable or stress the
parts?

[1] [http://bramlambrecht.com/tmp/jamieberard-brickstress-
bf06.pd...](http://bramlambrecht.com/tmp/jamieberard-brickstress-bf06.pdf)

------
jesseendahl
There was a really interesting post against Elon Musk’s argument that AI will
destroy us all.

The article made lots of counter arguments about why AI _won’t_ destroy us
all.

I can’t find it even after lots of searching.

~~~
Hirak
This one?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14807818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14807818)

~~~
jesseendahl
Nope not that one unfortunately, but thank you! :)

I vaguely recall it being a pretty long blog post that walked through various
scenarios. The formatting/design of the site was pretty plain/old school.

------
wodenokoto
I got this one of reddit a long time ago[1], but maybe someone here knows
where to find it.

A blog post laying out why Japan prefers "gadgets" over PCs, due to their
complex writing system requiring more RAM, causing all early PCs to be more
expensive. The post was really well written with pictures and price
comparisons between US and Japanese versions of (if memory serves me right)
Amigas and Commodores and other systems.

[1] Maybe before the release of the iPhone, but definitely before the release
in Japan

------
amikazmi
Someone posted a youtube talk about Game Design that's applicable to general
product design...

I remember it was really good, but couldn't find it anymore

~~~
severine
Perhaps this?

Learn product design from game designers: [http://www.1bytebeta.com/learn-
product-design-fromgame-desig...](http://www.1bytebeta.com/learn-product-
design-fromgame-designers/)

But the links seems dead. On the other hand, a DDG search with that title
brings up some seemly links:

3 Things Software Product Designers Need To Learn From Game Designers:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/09/10/3-things-
softw...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/09/10/3-things-software-
product-designers-need-to-learn-from-game-designers/)

What Game UX Can Teach Designers about Product Design:
[https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/game-ux-product-
design](https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/game-ux-product-design)

edit: Duh, Youtube! Sorry, maybe this?

Designing emotions - what game creation teaches about design? | Piotr Milewski
| TEDxGdynia:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fYypN4JawY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fYypN4JawY)

------
leifg
I don‘t know if it was HN or not but it could have been here.

Anyway, I read about this concept of a 6 day week (with a 2 day weekend)
without losing any productivity.

The key was that the society is going to be split in 3 groups so that every
group would have 2 different days off. The overlap for any 2 groups is only 2
days. I find this highly interesting and have since tried to find out more
about it.

------
jradd
I was just doing this yesterday. Trying to find an article describing simple
devices that use no external power to send a basic on/off signal (TX–only)
over wireless (802.11 I think?).

Anyways, it was said to be used for simple applications that send a wireless
signal to a receiver when the laundry detergent gets too low. Sort of like
Amazon's push button thingies.

~~~
snops
The term you want to Google is "backscatter" I think. I reckon this might have
been what you were looking for:
[https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/12/05/in-
first-3-d-prin...](https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/12/05/in-
first-3-d-printed-objects-connect-to-wifi-without-electronics/)

------
janulrich
An explanation about grounding in our electricity system came to be. It went
through the evolution of just having positive and negative to various ways of
adding grounding until we get to the grounding we have today. I seem to
remember it being a Reddit comment or something similar.

------
kristjansson
I found a link to a SaaS product that provided full-document search across a
variety of cloud app platforms, chiefly Google and Atlassian. I spent nearly
an afternoon searching for it a few months later to no avail...

------
teehemkay
An article about someone telling his experience of slowly growing a business
(targeted at school teacher if I remember correctly) year after year
eventually led to a sizeable lifestyle business.

~~~
nekopa
I think you are looking for user patio11 on here...

~~~
saeranv
I think this article specifically
[https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-
busi...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-business-
on-5-hours-a-week/)?

------
spython
There was a blog post on the significance of crocodiles in Russian culture.
Mainly, that they are used as 'sensitive, educated outsider' characters. Not
sure if it was on HN, though.

------
earenndil
A comment about how we are entering a dark age in science. I can't quite
remember the whole argument, nor the subject of the post it was on, but it was
fascinating.

------
jacob_rezi
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](https://rezi.io)

~~~
severine
Maybe this?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073667)

~~~
jacob_rezi
Thank you so much this is exactly what I was looking for

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
When a metric is targeted, it fails to be a good metric.

~~~
bo1024
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

------
earlyriser
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.

~~~
amacbride
You may be thinking about some work that was done regarding mutational effects
on conformation and expression. (Molecular biologists have known about it for
a long time, but this was an interesting information-theoretical approach from
a group of physicists.)

[https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-confirm-a-second-
lay...](https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-confirm-a-second-layer-of-
information-hiding-in-dna)

------
martin_
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

~~~
johnsonjo
This should be helpful to finding it. It’s a search hacker news sorted by date
with a few key terms.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bay%20area%20ask%20hn%20meet&s...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bay%20area%20ask%20hn%20meet&sort=byDate&prefix&page=3&dateRange=all&type=story)

------
boanoite
A month ago or so, a guy made an article about the fact that machine learning
was not necessary everytime and go be replaced by some good old SQL queries.
Spoke about it with a client of mine, but could not find the link to send him.
Thanks in advance if you find it !

~~~
lkki
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898827)

------
z3t4
Related. I sometimes find a good recipe on Google, but next time I want to do
it, it's nowhere to be seen. I often find lost HN posts via Google search
though. And I always upvote or favorite post's that I might go back to later.

~~~
allenz
Have you tried searching your browser history?

~~~
z3t4
Yes. Browser history in Firefox sucks. It's like they don't want you do use
either bookmarks nor history. There is not even a search functionality more
then on site title.

------
inetknght
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.

------
sdiq
About 4 years ago, I saw a post about a startup, I think, that was going to
revolutionise hiring top talent - or something similar. I think there was a
Nigerian among the founders. I haven't been able to find the same again.

~~~
corporateslaver
Was that the one with the Nigerian prince?

------
sprintf
Someone created a site that compared flash memory storage prices (USB stick,
SD card, SSD) and they posted the link in some comment, but I can't find the
HN comment and a Google search doesn't find it either.

~~~
soulskill
Was it this? [https://diskprices.com](https://diskprices.com)

~~~
sprintf
Yes, thanks!

------
EFruit
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.

~~~
lars
This was Adrian Thompson using genetic algorithms to design FPGAs:
[https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-
circuits/](https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/)

------
ai_ia
There was an article with a slideshow embedded about how to make good
presentations. It consisted of choosing fonts and stuffs. It was really
interesting. I thought I had bookmarked it but I lost it somehow.

------
dhoman
There was an article about russian bots on aws clicking google ad words of
sites also hosted by russians on aws.

they were basically hosted a fake net to generate google ad word money.

can't find the link anywhere anymore

------
chewxy
Quite sure I read a paper about graph/code sharing in functional languages and
why it's harder than expected. The one paper I didn't save and catalogue... is
the one I want to refer to

------
ceceron
Someone sent a link to a simple programming online game. Player had to provide
isntruction for an character walking araound a square level, gathering stars.
Never could find it again after a month...

~~~
jonafato
Doesn't sound like this is what you're looking for, but LightBot
([http://lightbot.com/](http://lightbot.com/)) is a wonderful game with
similar sounding game play.

~~~
ceceron
Thanks :)

When I was looking for the forgotten game, I crawled through the internet and
found almost any other available title (LightBot also). I'm teaching computer
science and try to collect as many tools (e.g. games) to people with no
programming experience.

------
catblathrow
A synopsis of a short story where the protagonist writes -1 every day.

Can’t find the story, nor the comment. My memory of this is also very fuzzy at
this point so it might be a completely different idea.

------
rgovind
The post on why medium.com could have been profitable as a lifestyle business
but since it took VC money, it should resort to spamming users with
recommendations etc

------
glax
Bookmarked a post about Document OCR that recreates the whole tables with
text. Lost to wanacry, cannot find it since. Backup is important, learned the
hard way.

~~~
severine
My guess:

Probabilistic Scraping of Plain Text Tables (edinburghhacklab.com) 92 points
by tlarkworthy on Sept 5, 2013 | 12 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334178#6337769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6334178#6337769)

[http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/09/probabalistic-
scraping-o...](http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/09/probabalistic-scraping-of-
plain-text-tables/)

------
losvedir
I think it was on HN. It was a quote to the effect that the world changes by
just a handful of great people, not by the small contributions of billions.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
An avalanche can be started by a single snowflake, but that doesn't mean a
single snowflake is an avalanche.

------
Teichopsia
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.

~~~
severine
Lol, could you be more unspecific? I'm trying to help!

------
edwo
A blog post about a guy trying out various ways of organizing his
projects/filesystem. In the end the guy settles on chronological hierarchy.

~~~
brador
This sounds very interesting! Anyone got it?

------
bobberkarl
A blog post about specific advertisement targeting on facebook. Something
along the lines of specifically making ads for some identified users.

~~~
kodablah
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110385](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110385)
?

~~~
slow_donkey
Should be this or the top comment

------
gt2
Someone recommending a podcast on the occult and other related topics by a guy
associated with the Village Voice. Within the last month!

------
chegra
An article about an MIT student and his friend who eventually committed
suicide, talking about the n+1.

------
kaybe
I was looking for that startup that looks into research for your rare illness.
Did they stop existing?

~~~
auganov
Apparently
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed)

------
pcf
This thread. I tried to find it a month later, but couldn't remember anything
to search for.

Regards, future pcf

------
Immortalin
An interactive fiction posted a few years ago with gothic black text against a
white background

------
brazzledazzle
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.

~~~
52-6F-62
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.

------
knrz
I read an article on SlateStarCodex that talked about how a local decision
could not take into account the obvious global decision, i.e. it expanded on
Game Theory by detailing how the omniscient decision isn't possible from a
first-person perspective.

P.S. If anyone can help me find it, I'd appreciate it. I last spent an hour
trying to find it :P

------
allenz
Meta: I use [https://hn.algolia.com](https://hn.algolia.com) to search HN. It
has a nice interface that shows full comments rather than snippets.

~~~
slow_donkey
Hm I actually have a custom search in chrome that uses Google for hn. It's
essentially %s%20site:news.ycombinator.com

I love algolia for record searching (lists of items) but find Googles indexing
superior for general queries.

