THIS IS WATER! by David Foster Wallace

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Strong rec cnick · 2023-03 · on “Amazon Photos just ate 240,364 of my photos”

In macro photography, taking an extreme closeup of something like an insect necessarily has a very, very thin depth of field due to its high magnification. To get the entire insect in focus, you use a technique called focus stacking where the focus changes by tiny fractions of a millimeter on each exposure. You can literally take 100 to 200 of pictures for one subject. If I do 10 of these in a day, I've reached one percent of OPs forever photo volume. [LINK] Time lapse photography is taking a photo every X seconds/minutes/days. If you want the video to look smooth, you need 24-30 shots per second, so a 30 second video has 720 exposures. So again, failed three time lapse attempts and I'm at 1

Recommends hacknewslogin · 2023-02 · on “Ask HN: What is the best advice you got on any aspect of life?”

Ok but what if the result of contemplating this is overwhelming existential dread? This comment kind of reduces life to a give and take philosophy. One where everything you do is to accomplish a task. I'm not sure that has anything to do with Buddhism. It's my understanding that part of Buddhism is the removal of the self, and appreciating the moment. I agree that focusing on the end result can detract from appreciating being in the moment, but this sounds sounds more like self-deception. I prefer the Japanese concept that, and I'm paraphrasing here, "every action has a purpose." Putting value on the actions themselves adds an appreciation for the moment you are in, and the process you are d

Recommends latexr · 2024-07 · on “My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website”

Respectfully, if you see the comment as critique, that’s on you. It could just as easily be described as “unsolicited advice” or “unsolicited tips”. The communicator does have responsibility on how their message comes across, thought not all of it. It’s on the receiver to also make an effort to understand what was meant and not take unnecessary offence. The comment reads pretty much neutral, apart from a post scriptum which is explicitly about the author’s preference. It’s up to you to inject the writer’s feelings as either “this code sucks, here’s how you do it” or “congratulations on making something cool, here are a few suggestions”. My experience is that life is much better if you take t

Cites natrik · 2020-07 · on “First a Thief Stole My Car, Then SF City Government Did”

When I arrived as a foreign-exchange student in Dijon, France, I was bombarded with war stories about run-ins with the infamous French bureaucracy. I got my first taste of it standing in line to enroll in my classes. You stand in line for three hours to see somebody at a desk tucked away in a narrow corridor just off the large entrance hall. You finally get to the front only to be told that this is the line for non-EU students, and that the much-shorter line for European "Erasmus" students is adjacent. Of course, both desks are hidden since the corridor is filled with people, so you cannot see the purpose of each line until you are at the front. Once you are there, you must present a number

Cites godelski · 2021-07 · on “The economic value of targeting aging”

I'm reminded of Nick Bostrom's story called "The Dragon Tyrant"[0][1] and David Foster Wallace's "This is Water"[2]. The dragon became so normal in our lives that we do not even question it, like a fish does not question what water is. That we've created a society around this how to deal with this inevitability. But at the end of the day if we could, killing the dragon would be more beneficial and reduce harm by a significant amount. I see several people in this thread complaining about the economic analysis here or how old people are messing up our world and thus we should fix those things first. For the former question, I see this analysis as adding ammunition to the debate, because many p

Cites semireg · 2023-01 · on “Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?”

I read “Deep Survival” a few years ago pre-pandemic and was pleasantly surprised it wasn’t a book of survival stories. The main takeaway for me was that sure, nature doesn’t care if you live or die, yet surviving in modern life is an illusion - a papering over of the brutal, unfeeling and inescapable “nature.” The author wrote of survivors coming home after a harrowing near-death experience and realizing that survival is one day at a time, even in the comfort of your own home. Once you taste true survival it may haunt you. Survival is an easy concept with subtle and deep physical and mental consequences. Kind of reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s “This is water” - [this video]