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Ask HN: Who's Seeking New Friends?

by hyperific·3y ago·58 comments·view on hn ↗
Hello HN community,

I wanted to create a space for anyone interested in making new friends. Whether you're open to online or in-person hangouts, feel free to drop a comment below. It's a chance to expand our networks and connect with like-minded folks.

To start off, here are a few of my interests: computational biology, game design, nature photography. Open to online friends. You can reach me on Discord where my handle is hyperific.

Looking forward to reading your intros and interests.

58 comments
Over the years, I've seen many posts like this one. I've joined a few groups myself and every single one of them died in a few days or weeks. What brings people together is a shared activity (and shared values/interests). You'd have a better chance of success if you started a project in some area you're interested in and asked people to join you.
+100 votes on this

The "making friends" solely is not strong enough activity/value to stick actual friends or even like minded people around.

okay this is great advice im saving this in my notebook
Where? If the plan is to create a space in Discord with like-minded HN individuals, I've been there already.

The space is still around, but in retrospect the choice of using Discord was not a good idea. Ping me on my mail if you want to chat about it, OP, or maybe, if I remember, I'll ping you on Discord.

tl;dr: you cannot create a self-sustaining small group of strangers on a closed, by-invite platform. The thing IRC got right is that people could come and go without needing an invite link. Otherwise all you have is a leaky bucket.

My wording could have been clearer on that. This post is the space.
Weird story.

I'm a decent card player and have an interest in systems. I always want to know how something interesting works. I ended up making friends with a guy who was an expert advantage player, someone who knew how to flip the odds at casinos in his favor. Never did anything illegal, but plenty of things the casinos wouldn't like you doing if they knew you were doing it, and they're watching.

To keep our profile low we'd travel to different places. It looks bad to win too much too many times. Casinos notice.

Between travel and off times we'd end up talking a lot about a lot of things. He was always diving into odd subjects. One of them was Flat Earth. At first it was just curiosity about a peculiar subculture. We'd discuss how stupid it was, but we'd also note where they made points we couldn't deny.

I won't say I've swallowed the whole pancake but I've taken a few bites. I'm not going to get into it here and this is an alt account because it's a topic that generates a lot of hostility from some.

But I have made a lot of friends in the FE community. They're the new people I tend to relate to the best without a known shared background. It's not the FE that's attractive, it's that they're people who put very little value on social conformity and thus can be honest in a way that "fit ins" can't.

I don't wear FE tee shirts or proselytize. It's just a thing I keep to myself and don't trouble anyone with.

JADP.

> but plenty of things the casinos wouldn't like you doing if they knew you were doing it

Most of the time casinos are quite happy for you to attempt whatever system you think you have, card counting or whatever. Most people are bad at it, and even if you're good, you can't actually "flip" the odds as much as nudge them slightly into your favor. You figure out when you're a _little_ more likely to win and increase your bets by an order of magnitude. If you've done it right (and you probably haven't) and the casino hasn't neutralized your advantage by tweaking the game rules, you will still lose those larger bets a good percentage of the time.

Casinos are quite happy to let you do this, because the average joe doesn't even have the bankroll sit through 3 shoes hoping for a chance to 10x his bet. At a $15 minimum bet table, you could lose $500 in a single shoe, no problem. They'll let you count to your little heart's content, and then when your count is finally advantageous, you'll up your bet to $150/hand and that's when they'll shut you down.

Card counting is the thing everyone knows about. A good counter is getting a 1-2% advantage and is under lots of heat. If the table is paying 6:5 on blackjack instead of 3:2 like more are becoming it kills your entire edige. We were doing stuff in the 8-12% range. It is far more advanced than CC and almost never discussed online.

Every casino game has a vulnerability, even slots. Advantage play is not free money, it's a job. You need skills, a bank roll, and to put in a lot of hours in casinos.

>We were doing stuff in the 8-12% range.

If there was a legal way of achieving that kind of edge, casinos would know about it. That kind of gain is incredibly noticeable if you're watching the gambler, which the casino is absolutely doing.

>Every casino game has a vulnerability, even slots.

This is even more alarming. Slots aren't a skill-based game, they're RNG machines with a mean EV that's substantially lower than any other game in the casino. The only possible strategy that I can think of for slots (besides breaking into the machine and changing the RNG) is to hunt down slot machines that award an accumulative jackpot and play them when you calculate that the EV is positive. Even then, this is a rare circumstance and your gains would be small.

Some slots machines may have a poorly designed RNG. For example it may have too little entropy, and its state may be calculated from multiple rounds of watching the symbols it displays.

In one of Kevin Mitnick's books—can't recall which one, maybe The Art Of Deception?—he interviews anonymous hackers about their exploits, and one of the chapters is about a group of 4 people who did just that. They bought used slot machines, reverse-engineered the RNG in the firmware, found it was vulnerable. They exploited it to win a few million dollars over many months/years and many casinos. They spread their winnings over time, and they stopped when they felt it was too risky to get caught by the casinos.

Enjoy your fantasy.
> you can't actually "flip" the odds as much as nudge them slightly into your favor

Slightly less into your dis-favour?

Have a look at StevenBridges at YouTube
> It's not the FE that's attractive, it's that they're people who put very little value on social conformity and thus can be honest in a way that "fit ins" can't.

There's a marvelous video [1] that Dan Olsen of Folding Ideas did as a deep dive into the community of Flat Earth and how it manages to survive. The TL;DW (though it really is worth the watch) is that people both want and need community, and all communities have ways of signaling that you belong to them. Sometimes it's language, sometimes it's clothes, sometimes it's behaviors--the "qualifications" vary wildly by group, but in many cases from the outside the exhibited behaviors of a group (e.g., believing in flat earth) don't jive with the rest of the perceived individual (e.g., scientifically literate) until you factor in that the behaviors don't have to matter beyond ensuring membership to a group.

A whole lot of things make a lot more sense to me when seen through that lens, including a lot of organized religion. People just want to belong, and often the "price of entry" is inconsequential vs. the payoff of belonging somewhere.

Thanks for sharing your story. It helps me to understand the "Why" of some of these things, and helps me feel more connected to my fellow beings.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

so it's a cult. where believing in wacky things is a rite you have to accomplish to prove your commitment to the community. the wackier, the stronger is the bond
> so it's a cult

Sure, I'd call flat earth a cult, but I'd say the say of most organized religions too, but I was deliberately avoiding putting OP on the defensive by using labels with such strong connotations. My point was more that this effect is common across ALL human groups--it's the defining factor of what a group IS, and it's useful to remember when people's behavior doesn't otherwise make sense.

I think the same dynamics are true of most political movements, or things like astrology. Yes, by the definition of "saying weird stuff to prove your membership", they all sound like cults, but the point is that in a lot of cases it doesn't matter, and it isn't useful to make inferences about the person behind the statement (e.g. "believes in flat earth" == "totally scientifically illiterate") without also considering the groupthink pressures.

I say that more as a "know thy enemy" kinda thing--so often I've tried arguing with people in these groups and made no progress and came out more confused than when I went in because I was missing the factor that many people don't hold those beliefs tightly, or those who do hold it to access the social benefits, so coming at their position from a purely logical perspective is unlikely to change their minds or epistemology--and that's doubly true if you put them on the defensive by calling them a cultist out of the gate.

Organized religions and groups designated as cults are patently not the same. There are properties inherent to major religions that enable their followers to create socially mature and stable communities, where the members of these communities can attain self-actualization in some manner even if they're not adherents. I am aware of the problems that these major religions have (on a personal level as well), but history provides plenty of evidence in support of the usefulness major religions have provided. People will always feel the need to belong to groups, but all groups and cultures do not produce the same level of social, communal and personal stability, and pretending otherwise is a huge disservice to the giants whose shoulders we stand on and also dangerous narrative for impressionable people. I am not even religious, but memey hot takes like saying major religions are the same as woo woo cults is just wrong.
I empathize deeply with this perspective. The individuals I most cherish interacting with are those who entertain unconventional topics, indulging in initial exploration before forming judgments. With them, I can freely brainstorm and bounce off "out there" ideas. They don't just echo my thoughts, but they also refrain from instantly dismissing concepts deemed controversial. Ideally, they'd subtly express their genuine beliefs, even if skeptical, without overt dismissal.

No I'm not into FE.

I'm not sure about FE, but the "we're spinning right now at 1000mph" disintegrates under any reasonable interrogation.

For example, consider you're looking at a disk shaped cloud 10 miles above that is 20 miles long from the center. If you're on Earth spinning below it at 1000mph you would be looking back at the cloud in less than 2 minutes.

So how do clouds linger above us on a fast spinning earth?

May not be a convincing question for some, but it's made me think.

The cloud is suspended in a fluid that is also spinning. The atmosphere is an ocean we live at the bottom of, and where it makes contact with the earth friction between the fluid and the solid conveys inertia from the solid to the fluid. Inertia is likewise conveyed, by friction, up the viscous column of atmosphere.

It is the same principle by which stirring your coffee causes the entire contents of the cup to swirl, and not just that touched immediately by the surface of the spoon.

OK, so if you take a sphere spinning on its axis and put it in a spherical aquarium I could see it all spinning together.

But what I don't see is how that works in an atmosphere which is mostly near the earth's surface. It seems like you would lose a lot of energy as you entered the stratosphere because the air density increasingly falls, there's less room for friction to cohere the atmosphere.

High clouds should be less effected which would make them appear to move much faster than low clouds.

Is there a good source somewhere on how this works that takes this into account? The stuff I've seen just assumes its own model and works backwards.

This is what I love about FE people. The desire to question, learn, and understand on a fundamental and intuitive level.

I would love to sit down, have a beer, and try to figure out how the clouds work. Not just what Wikipedia says happens, but really understanding why.

Reminds me of people who build rocket ships in their back yard or nuclear reactors in their garages.

-SE believer

The atmosphere is spinning with the Earth. It has to be, otherwise you'd have 1000 mph winds at Earth's surface. How? It gets dragged along by friction with the surface
OK, but how does that account for the fact that the atmosphere thins?

I'm not a physicist but it seems to me that given entropy and the thinning of the atmosphere as elevation increases that clouds would not a) not appear to float in place and b) only move in one direction.

Low clouds would appear to float in place but high clouds would move quickly away from the spin of the earth.

By that logic airbearings wouldn't work because they add friction instead of removing it.
I am sorry to ask, but do you think the astronauts in the ISS are liars? Or that satellite imagery is faked?
Well, if they bothered to fool everybody into thinking earth was a spinning ball a few lies from astronauts and some fake photos isn't really a stretch.
I've also noticed that people rally and gather together around various forms of controversial/bullshit topics. That's what religions, cults, anti-vaxxers, qanon, UFO stuff, moon landing hoax, flat earth, etc all are, and for all their faults they are welcoming towards quirky / non-mainstream people, and they hang out together and network, have events, etc.

Unfortunately, there isn't really an equivalent community / network for spherical earth "believers", atheists, and other such boring, uncontroversial topics. Sometimes it's tempting to feign support for some of these things, just to hook into the community.

I'm really interested in intuitive what I call futuristic software, async, multithreading and parallelism.

I am interested in CRDTs, database technology, alternative forms of GUI and decentralisation to a certain extent.

Do you find the ideas of Engelbart's Mother of all Demos interesting?

Do you like data structures and algorithms?

Do you enjoy writing a satisfying SQL join?

Or writing a beautiful Kafka or JavaScript or Clojure pipeline?

Or writing a beautiful easy to read bash pipeline?

I feel think Windows has a certain nostalgia of Windows98 and Windows XP with its icons and Visual Basic.

I actually really enjoyed the early web with free 10mb webhosts and random internet services.

Do you enjoy data structures or representations that make the computer do exactly what you want?

Do you enjoy automating things elegantly?

Do you enjoy designing server or software architectures or infrastructures?

I also believe God and want to do work and things that loves people, kindness and compassion.

Hey, I would like to learn "futuristic software" from you or just have a chat. I am a career software engineer who admittedly has very little knowledge in concurrency. Any recommendations to learn it?
Thanks so much for your comment ! :-)

I'm a beginner myself. But I enjoying modelling parallleism dataflow, and data dependency and concurrency as trees for performance and graphs for coorfination. Which is kind of structured concurrency.

If you take this graph of data flow or concurrency:

  digraph G {
   start -> task1;
  
   task1 -> task2;
   task1 -> task3;
   task2 -> task4;
   task3 -> task5;

   task4 -> task6;
   task5 -> task6;

   task6->end;
  }
(paste it into https://dreampuf.github.io/GraphvizOnline to see a visual representation)

Where task 1 diverges, you can run task2 and task3 in parallel, because they don't depend on eachother's outputs. Then you need to join task4 and task5 to task6.

My email is in my profile, I'd love to chat about your thoughts on what futuristic software means to you. For me it means futuristic interactions with computers, alternative approaches to programming.

Hey everyone,

If you are in Belgrade you will maybe interested into Decentrala (https://dmz.rs). Decantrala is a new tech-community/hackerspace organized around idea of decentralization and knowledge sharing. We try to organize talks/workshops every week and we covered many topics: form lambda calculus to Mail servers and PGP.

We all share love for technology, but we try to organize as much as possible events live because we believe that live contact is very important today. If you are seeking friends and you love technology, come and visit us.

I've been making friends online for over a decade now (now 25); I discovered so many interests by basically ripping them off of people I met on Omegle or reddit or games and diving into them on my own time. And while ditching reddit because of the API change has been wonderful for me: it's kind of left a gap in my propensity to meet odd strangers.

I've been wondering what made those subreddits a successful platform for me, and what "successful" here even means, and what percentage of reasonable people would agree with my definition. But reasonable people don't meet strangers on reddit, because that sounds wretched. And it is. I got to see the throngs of perverts and pedophiles and bots that had fated it so. In-part because I moderated some of them. But something about trudging through dozens of low effort shitposts to find someone who actually speaks with some semblance of interest in the world is nice in a way I can't find as easily on any other platform.

So now I guess I'm curious where the people inclined to read this thread have found success in meeting friends.

Did you ever try to actively make friends online? Where? Is that place still around? What made it successful for you? Are you picky?

Comments welcome, or optionally: niam on Discord.

Hey! I am always looking for new friends :)

Currently I am living in Nashville, TN, USA. I like tennis (ntrp 4.0, if you know), bouldering (v3-v4), and history books with big glossy pictures. In fact, I host several tennis meetups in the city. I love reading sci-fi/fantasy and playing single player games with a good story (on easy difficulty).

I get competitive at potlucks.

You may ping me on twitter or send me an email (on my profile).

I work on vision, about how humans see and understand things. Robots with vision is something I am keen on. Philosophy in general. I like to play badminton, learning guitar. And I love travelling and exploring new places.
Great thought, it's quite hard to find new friends as you grow old. I've always been curious about computational biology, care to elaborate more? My interests are literature, philosophy and sports(mostly running and badminton).
Absolutely. My lab is heavily involved in live cell imaging using automated microscopy. We add fluorescent reporters to proteins we're interested in and quantify them by way of the fluorescence intensity. I write analytical tools to help our grad students better analyze their data. What aspects of computational bio interest you? I'm also interested in philosophy although I haven't actively pursued it in a while. What are you reading right now?
Interesting, I was mainly interested in genomics/brain imaging etc. Also curious about how/if medicines are tested against different cells/protiens, as far as I know they bind to specific molecules only. How does one figure that out?

Bored of writing traditional software, want to work on the applied science stuff. ex: like Large Haldron Collider, or genetics ,or sport biomechanics labs etc.

Will ping you on discord, would love to have a chat. I've just dipped my toes in philosophy reading Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy.

Can you send me another friend request? I may have deleted it accidentally.
I'm down. I'm into things like product management, climbing, gaming (diablo 2, starcraft broodwar mainly), swimming, landscape photography, stoicism, applied philosophies in general
I’m interested. I don’t want to pigeon hole myself into a list of interests, but at a broad level it is knowledge management, computation, and cognition right now. My email is in my profile.
Elixir, Rust, bit of blockchain related otherwise extreme sports (ski, snowboard, slacklining (highlining), paragliding, agressive-inline skating etc...), stunts, container gardening and DIY. Looking for active people to keep the hype and motivation up or just chit chat. Can contribute to interesting projects. Discord: ethuil Telegram: @flamll
Great, which sport was most exciting? I have just gotten into adventure sports have done scuba diving, white water kayaking, paragliding so far. Really want to learn skiing, next.
You should change your settings or add everyone as friend

"Your message could not be delivered. This is usually because you don't share a server with the recipient or the recipient is only accepting direct messages from friends."

Whose interests can be likened to the intersection between acoup.blog, cat-v and Annas-archive?
i actually just came here to ask how to network and make genuine friends along the way when i don't know anybody.

guess this is a start.

i'm a computer science student just starting out in back-end. i really like to learn a thing or two about ML as well.

i like playing moba games as well.

I’d recommend going to a local meetup around something you’re interested in or think you might be interested in.

If you’re looking to make friends online, I think if you find a community for whatever you’re interested in or passionate about and ask yourself how could I help this community? even if it’s just being friendly and giving people advice on something, you understand that they don’t you can get to meet really interesting people and you can form longtime friendships with them.

Around 11 years ago I was working with some software in my job that I hadn’t used before and found quite frustrating in places, so I joined the official forum and started asking questions, over period period of time I became quite friendly with a few of the folks on there and to this day, I’m still really good friends with one - despite the fact, he’s across the other side of the world and more than twice my age (in fact, he’s now retired). I have a few other stories similar to that.

I'm a musician