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padolsey
4,464karma·578submissions·June 29, 2011
about
padolsey.at.hn
I'm James. Living between Beijing and London. I like coding. Also plants. Stroke survivor & disability advocate. My dog's a whippet/iggy cross and is called Ducky. He's a beautiful lunatic.
* website: [j11y.io](https://j11y.io) * building: [nope](https://nope.net) * bsky: [@j11y.io](https://bsky.app/profile/j11y.io) * contact: https://tally.so/r/waYPvE * twitter: [@padolsey](https://x.com/padolsey) * book recommendations: [ablf.io](https://ablf.io) * me = founding eng @ [collective intelligence project](https://cip.org)
My work email is my first name at cip dot org.
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My meet.hn token: meet.hn-10d164d4-bf7f-4431-898f-e02b34b836dc
recent activity (578 total)
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Yeh -- I do agree, though I suppose that shows that the HN demographic is broader than the stereotype of software. The fertility one's quite fun.
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It's a large graph database that I've prepared myself over two years, as a kind of part-time hobby. It's largely an automated scrape of metadata available on wikipedia, goodreads, ISBNd…
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Thanks! - When you say 'Amazon integration' do you mean like an import of books read so far? I think that's a great idea. I've been exploring doing that with Goodreads. Re: escapin…
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Hi HN. I made a tool that allows you to discover what books you are least likely to have come across or enjoyed, but are nonetheless highly rated. These books will likely challenge you if you tend to …
344 pts
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So true. I joked with a friend that the best way of getting access to psychologists in the NHS is to have a TBI or stroke. When it's a "physiological" brain thing they are quick to reac…
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Agreed! This'll be very insightful. I've always found the mainstream understanding of neurotransmission to be annoyingly one-dimensional. E.g. AFAIK dopamine is very ubiquitous within the br…
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> What to do? Mandatory tutoring seems unrealistic and probably wouldn't yield quality, but I do think that some kind of scaled tutoring "norm" would be incredibly valuable to societ…
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Ahh, the site uses book images from Amazon's CDN so you may need to disable your ad blocker. I think that's what's happening.
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Hi HN! This app is backed by a graph db containing around 7 million book ratings/affections and 150k book titles published prior to 2020. A query requires at least two books to run and will go ab…
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> This is a real hot take to be asserting as blithe fact. Without knowing what is truly born of human hands, what value can art have? Our heuristics of establishing 'real' art are easy to…
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> It wont understand what it is to be human and mortal, But it won't need to. All it will need to do is manifest the same end-product via whatever means, no matter how vacuous or computational…
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> - Why were you selected for the team and who selected you? - What were the biggest challenges the team faced? - How did you measure you were doing the right thing and you did good work? So much o…
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I guess this isn't so surprising considering the holism with which the brain conducts itself. I.e. no specific functions are entirely localized to specific areas (although some areas do tend to…
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> a rugged community of 2300 people I wouldn't characterize it like this. Longyearbyen has schools, churches, a post office, a local elected government. Kids play hockey near the streets over …
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For better controlled research on the effects of green spaces have a look at Ming Kuo's work. E.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245234610_Aggressio... …
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IMHO the current state of affairs is actually the best possible scenario. - Experimental language proposals can be tested in the wild - Real non-ivory-tower feedback is raised to TC39 - Everything fee…
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Quite useful in situations such as: > (str.match(regexWithGroup) || [, null])[1] I.e. if the regex matches, then give me the first group (1st index) otherwise give me null.
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I agree with your larger point (that suicide is not a directed rational behaviour) but I want to take a stab at a trope I see repeating here again and again. The trope of the 'alien' mental …
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Gardens and other natural spaces absolutely affect social and mental wellbeing. An interesting piece of research into the effects of greenery and nature on wellbeing was conducted back in 2001 by Ming…
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The neurological field has grappled, over the last few decades, with an increasing understanding of the interconnectedness and pliability of the brain and the rest of the body. We've gone from ca…
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For lack of ideal heuristics, I recently built myself a tool to find books that "people like me" read most. This is similar to the rating heuristic, except it relies on a collaborative filte…
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A counterpoint to your point on shallowness and narrowness is Andrew Solomon's "Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity". Journalists, ostensibly, are good at w…
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What's funny is that your comment alluding to the generational persistence of punishment indicates the very cyclic nature that you are seeking proof of. Its persistence does not prove its worthin…
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> "you will naturally begin to do some real work, because the movement started" This works. But only if there is a cadence that you comfortably settle into. Slow feedback cycles in your t…
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Is anyone able to ELI5 this?
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The public wouldn't buy the 'neutral' aspect, as every mechanism that a platform provides, is in some way biasing the type of content that is broadcast. Twitter's RT feature, which…
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> They're not. And the specific reason they are not, is the algorithmic timeline and content suggestions. I think the more pertinent reason here is that these platforms have broadcast capabili…