Hacker News Books

https://www.lostfalco.com/transcranial-low-level-laser-thera...

End of World War II true story of a plane crash into remote New Guinea.

The survival/rescue/recovery mission is remarkable.

If you like Robinson Crusoe, The Martian, and Lost In Space, you’ll enjoy this remarkable true story.

All games come with a tutorial, AIs and sound/music. It is the most polished board game platform out there.

Try Lost Cities if you don't know where to start. It is the most popular game.

The movie isn't bad either.

I'd definitely skip reading anything newer than Lost World. Like Tom Clancy, at some point (and $) you lose the fire to write.

- Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World

- Escape From The Deep: The Epic Story of a Legendary Submarine and Her Courageous Crew

- Ruthless River: Love and Survival by Raft on the Amazon's Relentless Madre de Dios (not as good but still worth reading).

I find that generally the situations are more for lives of 8-10yr olds, yet at that age cartoons may be already too didactic. More younger kids may not face the kinds of challenges depicted. I'm often asked to explain it to the 5yo. Still, the stories are very well written.

My so far most memorable is 'Lost and Found', very relatable almost dream/nightmare-like.

My partner bought / were given a couple of books, maybe three or four. Not all of them were read. The ones we did read, we took with a grain of salt, and sometimes humor. More importantly: almost nothing written in any of these books was relevant to our parenting so far, other than very basic, mostly biological information about the expected development stages. Beyond that, nothing really was required in our case, and the books all made pretty clear that all babies are different and that your baby's development will likely differ in one way or the other from what they tell us.

So, I don't really get what triggered the author to write this. Or, put differently, it's interesting to read this perspective, but frankly, it differs very much from my own experience.

Greeble: Having to press "z" makes me dread keyboard issues (I am on qwertz). Fell into a dead-end pit and quit.

Lossst: Uses ALT for a crucial move, ALT triggers my browser's menu. Got stuck. Quit.

Lost Beacons: Works nicely but the scrolling is jarring and confusing. Would have played more than 2 levels otherwise. Sound would help tremendously in keeping a track of what is happening.

The Lost Packets: My clicks often don't register? Gave up on the second level.

Lost in a Space Odyssey: Cute, fun and interesting. Had lots of fun!

A moment lost in time: Some confusion with cursor capture. Interesting but seems more like art than game. Confusing.

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter - strongly influenced my beliefs about how consciousness works

Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter - made me think more deeply about so many topics

Animal Liberation by Peter Singer - made me both an animal advocacy activist and strongly influenced me towards a consequentialist moral

Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker - more on how consciousness works, this time through a work of fiction

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin - strongly influenced my beliefs about political systems

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins - changed how I thought about animal behavior and what living things do

Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig - strongly influenced my beliefs about US government

Manufacturing Consent by Herman & Chomsky - made me rethink my view of the media and news

http://www.arscalculanda.com/

- Multiaxis singularities: much less of a problem than it used to be. We don't need closed-form solutions any more; we have enough CPU power at the robot to deal with this. You need some additional constraint, like "minimize jerk" when you have too many degrees of freedom.

- Simultaneous Location and Mapping. SLAM for short: Getting much better. Things which explore and return a map are fairly common now. LIDAR helps. So does having a heading gyro with a low drift rate. Available commercially on vacuum cleaners.

- Lost Robot Problem: hard, but in practical situations, markers of some kind, visual or RF, help.

- Object manipulation and haptic feedback: Look up the DARPA manipulation challenge. Getting a key into a lock is still a hard problem. It's embarrassing how bad this is. Part of the problem is that force-sensing wrists are still far too expensive for no good reason. I once built one out of a 6DOF mouse, which is just a spring-loaded thing with optical sensors. Something I was fooling around with before TechShop went down. I have a little robot arm with an end wrench and a force sensing wrist. The idea was to get it to put the wrench around the bolt head by feel. Nice problem because a 6DOF force sensor gives you all the info you can get while holding an end wrench.

- Depth estimation: LIDAR helps. The second Kinect was a boon to robotics. Low-cost 3D LIDAR units are still rare. Amusingly, depth from movement progressed because of the desire to make 3D movies from 2D movies. (Are there still 3D movies being made?)

- Position estimation of moving objects: the military spends a lot of time on this, but doesn't publish much. Behind the staring sensor of a modern all-aspect air to air missile is - something that solves that problem.

- Affordance discovery: Very little progress.

The real problem: solve any of these problems, make very little money. If you're qualified to work on any of these problems, you can go to Google, Apple, etc. and make a lot of money solving easier problems.

A bit off-topic, but there's actually something very similar: A 2008 animated short called 'Lost and Found' about a lost penguin and his friendship with a young boy. It's based on a children's book of the same name. The book and film are both charming and feature lovely visuals. The film was made by London-based Studio AKA:

https://www.studioaka.co.uk/OurWork/lostandfound

Edit: Just saw the comment from timthorn mentioning the same book.

Those kinds of games are perfect for mobile devices. It's fun playing several games with complete strangers, there is always something to do.

I absolutely love Lost Cities (http://lostcitiesapp.de) which is similar in the way and situations it's played (it's a very different game but it's also turn based and uses Gamecenter for matchmaking. It's also best played with several people at once.)

Instead, I'd suggest reading the great writers of the past and present (but focus more on the past). Study what works, what speaks to you, what stylistic approach you favor, and so on. As a bonus, you'll learn more about what has been said by other intelligent people and subsequently avoid writing over-confident, ill-informed essays...

If you're looking for stellar examples of essay-writing, I personally recommend Jorge Luis Borges and David Foster Wallace. Both manage to write in a manner both erudite and coherent, without seeming too florid or too simplistic. Here are a few samples:

- A New Refutation of Time, Borges:
https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1947-borges-anewrefutation...

- The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, Borges:
http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.htm...

- David Lynch and Lost Highway, Wallace:
http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/lhpremiere.html

- Laughing with Kafka, Wallace:
https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-...

- Consider the Lobster, Wallace:
http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf

Edit: added some more essay links.

Last year I did everything I could, to go to tons of concerts, meet up groups, and alumni events. I had a very successful year in terms of meeting new friends, finding high income partners , and generally loving my life. I've long been disillusioned with social media, and I completely blame it for destroying a generation of mental health.

You need to make friends, and you need to go back to the old fashioned way of having light-hearted discussions. Versus nasty arguments on social media. I had to stop using Reddit for the most part, since no matter what I said people would attack it in some way shape or form. Even something as mundane as I find Java to be difficult, turned into a personal attack on my abilities as a programmer. Tons of people are obviously angry for whatever reason, and you feeding into their anger isn't going to help anyone.

I went to tons of meetups, and even though and all of these cases I was a complete stranger I was never insulted or made to feel unwelcomed. There's community out there you just need to seek it out.

It's OK to not like David Lynch's work, it isn't for everyone, what with the "doing surrealism in a highly literal medium" and the logic of nightmares used.

To state that Lynch is "obviously awful movies ... had no clue .. disaster ... incapable" as an objective truth is just a category error.

it's like saying that a Mondrian is an obviously awful painting because it's not a good landscape composition, or that Jackson Pollock has no clue, because he paints trees in an unrealistic colour.

Steve Krug calls it "Lost Our Lease Usability Testing" and explains how to do it in Don't Make Me Think. You can download the relevant chapters here: http://www.sensible.com/downloads-dmmt.html

We did this at a company I worked at a few years ago and it made us completely change how we were building the product because our target users got nothing out of it (I talked a bit about this a RubyFringe: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/francl-testing-overrated)

Good examples are Mulholland Drive, a movie about dreams and reality. And Lost Highway, a movie about denial and jealousy.

02. The Firm: The secret history of McKinsey and it's influence on American business

03. The Simpsons and their mathematical secrets

04. League of denial

05. The Martian chronicles

06. The Sixth extinction

07. Lost stars

08. The Devil in the white city

09. China in ten words

10. The Fourth revolution

11. Red Mars

12. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe

13. Grit: Passion, perseverance and the science of success

14. The Signal and the noise

15. The Third chimpanzee

16. The Willpower instinct

17. The Master algorithm

18. The Emperor of all maladies

19. 1491

And I'm reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

Honestly, I really enjoyed League of Denial about all the shady stuff the NFL did around CTE, Lost Stars which is an incredible Star Wars book, The Willpower Instinct, and 1491. Everything else was kind of take it or leave it. I doubt I'll read as many books next year

[1] Ward-Perkins, Bryan. The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization

[2] Brownworth, Lars. Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization