skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years ago (I think it popped up on HN and all over Reddit) Martin made the Marble Machine[0], which was Rube Goldberg-style machine inspired by mechanical clockwork music devices like clock-towers, music boxes, and street organs. A little less than a year, he announced that he would be making a newer version with much more design intent, better precision, and the ability to tear it down to take it on a world tour.

I personally have been following the project through the weekly videos he puts up about the various design challenges he's been facing, and how his team has been growing from himself to around 10 people. The growth, scale, and skill seen from Martin has been amazing. The project has gotten to the point that he met with the developers of Fusion 360 because the model had so many parts it almost broke the program[1].

I figured that this video would be interesting to HN because it discusses the project management of such a massive endeavor, and I think the project as a whole might appeal to the hacker/maker side of HN.

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zL8pRDxPck
Message encoding formats, interoperability and insanity
Has someone here encountered crazy message encoding decisions in their projects, examples include:
* Outer Json with base64 encoded json as payload
* Outer Json with base64 encoded protobuf as payload
* Outer Avro with protobuf as payload

As horrible as this sounds, all these are pretty much in the same repo/project. Some of the proponents of these decisions are hard headed, irrational and impossible to reason with - especially to make the case of the users of this system who have to deal with more complexity.

Any advice?
T-Writer.js – Native typewriter effect, tons of features
Publishing Your Next Gatsby Site to AWS with AWS Amplify
> That one definitely sounds true to me, the complexity of modern software definitely makes it harder to be competitive with big shops.

As software professionals, this is a problem of our own making. Nobody is asking for software to be complex. Users don’t want complexity. Development companies don’t want costly complexity. Software developers don’t even want complexity. Who has sat down at the start of a project and said, “you know, this software needs to be as complex as possible!”

Yet we keep building complex software. Layer after layer of libraries and APIs. Frameworks and more frameworks. Containers. Multiple languages. Front end and back end. Machine learning. Problems that used to be solved on a PC now require a 150 node cluster.

It’s fashionable to throw huge teams, hardware and middleware at problems these days.

There is still opportunity for the lone coder and the lean startup. You need the competence to stop writing all these bullshit layers and code simply.
+1,000.

The best programming advice I ever got was to write code for other people to read (and understand at a glance), not for the machine to execute.

This code is the precise opposite of that.
I think it’s odd to limit the scope of the “minority” label of a global industry to just the USA.

18.2 million software developers in the world.

only 3.6 million are from the usa. ~5.7 million are from india. 5.8 million from china. etc.

No one race has the majority.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2483690/it-careers/ind...
No. AMP addressed a problem that had been solved for years; we already knew how to make websites that load quickly. URLs are different; they have issues that nobody is quite sure how to solve. Any solution Google comes up with that isn't purely cosmetic won't go very far unless Mozilla, Microsoft, and Apple agree to implement it.
People who ended up on the pointy end of that stick in the next war still didn't make it taboo, even though they did with the weapon of mass destruction made famous by that war.

I see the argument that it ultimately doesn't make much difference how a vast bunch of civilians end up indiscriminately dead, but the people who actually experienced it seem to think differently.
I find music to work best when I'm doing a semi-repetitive task, or if I've already designed the system, and I'm just writing it down. I've definitely noticed that it results in sub-optimal code if this is not the case.
I really dislike the double standard on HN. Such statements are given an echo chamber effect if it fits a certain narrative.

Sure, something can be said about inherent community biases and the like, but it doesn't change the fact that minority opinions are drowned out many times while noncontributing noise is upboated bc it pokes fun at America, Trump, Bezos, or whatever boogeyman exists.

But here we arw
What a progressive company from Mountain View, CA, would be sticking to? I believe it's sort of hard to be right-wing in a place like that, at least publicly.

I also suppose that this may be the default for a particular audience / geolocation. That is, maybe they'd show a different thing in Russia (sorry, I don't have a Russian VPN), and maybe even a different thing in Texas. Or maybe something based on your previous browsing history (e.g. if you read something like zerohedge a lot, they might show you a different, more aligned site).

I don't know, and am not inclined to thoroughly experiment. But the complete source is there, and it must be a relatively recent addition, so anybody interested could just dive in and find out. Yay Mozilla!
I agree; there are a lot of tradeoffs you can make for the map type, and having O(1) amortized deletion usually comes at a cost of making all the other operations slower (either by a constant factor, or asymptotically).

I do wish more people were aware of this because (as you say) deletions are much more rare.

Often compilers will use a non-standard map for just this reason (symbol tables basically never delete).
It's not too descriptive, however it is descriptive by function name. Take the afind line, you can ascertain what it does by afind's name and provided params:
afind -> find, $(id) -> find id, collapsed -> find id's collapsed state.

I agree it's not a simple glance to figure out what it does, however it is not unreadable.
Computer chips are still “Made in USA”
I'm also using Windows 10, 4K monitor, Firefox and GTX 1060 and have no issues. So your issue might not actually be related to resolution.
Sorry for using evidence to support my claim. I'll use fake news or conspiracy theories next time so it's easier for you to refute my argument.
I have not seen her current response to the situation.

Does she hold out examples? I don't know of any under delivery of this magnitude. (I think even webvan peaked at $4.8 Billion in value. It eventually had peak sales of $178million).
I can't wear even the Beyerdynamics for more than a couple of hours (I've owned them for years, they're excellent). My ears get too warm.
WhatsApp Finally Has a Plan to Make Money, and It's Genius
Have you considered Pale Moon? Do you thing it's usable/dependable?
Just because something is a criticism doesn't mean it's a valid one. Basically every developed country has a national standardized school-leaving exam. Almost all of them have better education results than the United States.
And wait millions of years for that plants to turn in to coal and oil, drill oil for $$$
The point I'm making is not "use short variables everywhere", it's that in this case, the verbose alternative is not "much more readable".

Abbreviating "element" to "el" or using "attr" instead of "attribute" (etc.) can significantly reduce noise in web client code. Everybody either knows what it means, or they shouldn't be editing the code in the first place.
Yes, it's more or less all fiber. And in that case the speed is 2/3 of the speed of light.

Delay will in most part be because of distance, forwarding delay in routers are a few 10's of microseconds while switches are at the sub-microsecond level. Stuff like this is quick when they have to handle 100Gbit interfaces.
Good point, this would be a great way to present it without triggering some people's political reactions to the topic.
Oxygen? Don't you mean water?

Most plants need some oxygen for the root network, but photosynthesis produces an excess of oxygen and doesn't require it to run.
The Firefox bookmarking implementation is unnecessarily complicated and I'm guessing very few features are actually used. It's a maintenance burden, I'm not surprised they want to slim it down.

To give you an example of a maintenance burden in the bookmarking system, the bookmarking system uses a bunch of synchronous APIs. Mozilla is trying to cut down or eliminate use of those APIs, to reduce UI hangs among other reasons, and in order to do that a bunch of bookmarking code needs to be rewritten.

You may have decided that you don't care about this particular kind of bloat, but all unnecessary maintenance burdens distract developers from doing work I'm sure you do care about.

Here is the bug for removing descriptions:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1402890

Here is a sub-bug that discusses issues with synchronous APIs.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1467996
If by 10 years ago you mean two years ago, then yes. Unvote was added two years ago.

Thing is simple, unreadable, and it works. Turns out, code can both work and be shit at the same time. We've all done it.
> CPU and data intensive heavy lifting is rarely done in such programs

How could you make such a blanket statement? is bashing java the new hipster thing to do in programming world nowadays?
I understand how you feel, I do the same thing but most of my friends think someday I am going to shoot up a school or something.

To many people NOT socializing doesn't compute.
Let's assume (mostly) good intentions from google. The article mentions that users don't understand URLs.

Pause to allow a moment to blame users for not trying. Then let's actually approach the problem constructively instead of blaming users.

As I see it, the URLs contain two parts that matter to the user: the domain and then everything after that. (Scheme they can either handle or has been made moot by https everywhere, port is rarely used for the average user, etc)

Domains actually ARE bad for the average user, because they identify a machine (or machine group) while the user cares about a company/individual identity. This is why it took 15 years to get people to stop assuming all websites started with "www". The domain works fine...for techies. It is poor for what users expect.

As for everything else...the path, query params, and hash are all interpreted by the end machine. Some sites try to make it human usable (my thanks), but even those are consistant from one to another. So to Joe or Jane User, these are meaningless.

It is easy to blame google and even easier to blame users. I love the url and hate efforts to hide it... but there really are tasks it does a poor job of that we have no particular good option for.

Rather than blame the url (or these other parties) we should figure out a good way to address (pun unintended but appreciated) these issues.
It's rarely that. It's usually a superficially constructive claim - America can't do it because it's not dense, America can't do it because it's too populous, America can't do it because its cities are too dense or too sparse or too far apart or too old or too new, America can't do it because Americans prefer what they have.

They'll usually have some irrelevant statistics. Presumably total population, total surface area, some other such superficial analysis.

I never engage in these discussions. This is the first time, and probably the last. But I've seen them time and time again.
Terafactory: largest single block solar powered organic plant
That's quite some newspeak to call Germany and Japan's situation "nation building". I'd call it "managing an invasion".
What can we do about it?
I tried it and it did not work well as well - I have been thinking about building a piece of software to solve this issue because I find incremental reading so useful (potentially)
Some words are different though, for example armor vs armour. Although that should be similar to en-gb.
That is a good point on the size of the machine.

It would be crazy -- I mean in a cosmic way, not talking about any particular person -- if it were possible to get a decent MVP if it were slightly larger and took in slightly more blood.

The book implied this might have been possible, but it was not clear to me.
This is why state welfare is so much better than random charity. People hate goverment bureaucracy, but it is there to make sure that money ends in the right hands. It is not 100% foolproof, but it is way better than this.
They expected to raise 10k, but instead won the lottery.
Modern medicine is remarkably good at keeping people alive, as long as the person has decent coverage. But that's an interesting opinion - I'd be curious to see some projects from experts.
how many new species are created a year? has this been studied?
I think it’s definitely a valid point and worth considering in the current reality of software development.
> After reading Bad Blood, I am not convinced that Holmes (at least initially) intended to perpetrate a fraud. She may have believed it was possible to produce the machine she dreamed off, and it was a question of putting in the R&D. (It still might be possible).

I suspect that's the case too. Especially considering she didn't take money off the table.

It seems she was completely invested in the idea of fake it till you make it. Dangerously so.
This is a lossy compression: You've removed the distinction that the immersion in the author's psyche is distinct or remarkable, that the novel embraces tedious experience, and that it's autobiographical.
It was the term coined by CLU, Ada, Modula-3, so it is already widely used in the academia.
The allusion was intentional.

> The title of the series, of both the English translation and the original Norwegian, is a translation of "Mein Kampf" and is thus a clear reference to Hitler. In an essay for the New Yorker's website, Evan Hughes explains how Knausgård, in interviews, "has argued that a frightening characteristic that connects Mein Kampf to the writings of Anders Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Utøya massacre, is that in the mind behind both texts there seems to be an 'I' and a 'we' but no 'you,' reflecting a dangerous blindness that allowed an otherwise impossible evil."[2] The sixth book of the series includes a meditation on the Breivik attacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Struggle_(Knausg%C3%A5rd_no...
Stockholder syndrome?
The burden of evidence is on the original claim if it is not widely accepted or reasonably obvious.

The only evidence is a lack of evidence. There are documented examples that surface on a rare basis.

The fact something has a term has no impact on the frequency of the event. Unless you think that a Dyson Sphere is something that's been observed.
> Cooling at idle can be a big problem for high performance cars.

Or any air cooled car ever made. But the reality is that in a lot of designs, idling will test the effectiveness of the cooling system more than driving the car at speed. (Adding power only exacerbates such a problem. The OP completely fails to understand this)

It's much less of a problem than it used to be, with lots of cars including electric fans to help out the radiator, but it used to be standard to see a warning in the owner's manual about temperatures increasing in slow traffic or at idle.
Google Dataset Search
With each new Firefox release, it gets farther and farther away from what the browser once was. I started using Firefox over a decade ago, now it's become just a different version of awful. I don't know exactly happened when Mozilla lost their perspective, but I do know when - the first introduction of Australis. And they should have figured out, when you name it after something upside-down, you should seriously wonder if it's upside down. WebExtensions is just piling error upon error.

And with each new release, more control is taken from the user, more decent features are removed. I swear, Firefox peaked at 4.0.
sounds like jail time to me
How can you conclude this without controlling for environmental effects like society?
if they outright said it was something to with helping the environment Donald would have them cancel it.
Quite a bit of HFT software is written in java.
Ah, I see; I was interpreting "a few crashes per day" as "a user will see a few crashes per day", which I understand now not to be the case. That being said, the sibling comment here suggesting that some crashes might not be reported is an interesting thing to think about, although I don't know nearly enough about mobile device to know how to tell if that's happening.
Hmm... that sounds a little like Hatim found a clever way to spite the emperor. I like it!
Actually even Assembly has magic if the CPU is microcoded.
> Because so many people run windows on hardware without decent graphics hardware?

Two words: Remote Desktop.
It seems you keep your corpse related conversation mostly to email: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=mikekchar%20corpse&sort=byPopu...

As someone who's quirked the odd sceptical eyebrow at base metabolic rate charts, that's a helpful way of looking at it. Thanks!
But if Netflix already has exclusives (I don't know if this is the case or not) on most of the good EU produced content, it is going to be a major barrier to any potential competitor.
Definitely thought this was going to be about the Mars Bar factory CO2 output, which would have been cool if they could reuse that in the product they're making.
Too compact? It's the size of an APL implementation, and all it does is some ux... ;)
I heartily agree with this. Cover and Thomas was a huge leap in clarity and digestibility over the canonical texts of the time - it still holds up today.

I took two grad-level information theory classes, one from Blahut's book, and one from Cover and Thomas, and the difference was night and day. I definitely recommend the book -- even the first two chapters (that define entropy and related concepts, and that cover the AEP) would be a good first cut.
Share with Confidence: Cell-Level Access Controls – BigQuery and Data Studio
(Not apologizing for what is clearly fraud, and hopefully they will spend a bit of time in prison after having all their assets liquidated and turned over to Bobbitt through civil actions)

They started a fundraiser for $10,000, which ballooned unexpectedly to $400,000. If I had to guess, I would say that they thought that $10,000 was reasonable for Bobbitt, and would have "happily" turned it over. But $400,000 they saw as excessive and unreasonable -- like the GP said, "why should someone else get so much money while they continued to struggle". $10,000 wouldn't have changed their life in a significant way, but would have tremendously helped Bobbitt, but $400,000 probably just seemed frustratingly unfair -- it would give Bobbitt a lifestyle in excess of theirs, and the only reason the money was there was because they started the GoFundMe. So really, it's their money, when you really think about it, because they raised the funds. Right? Right?
Oooh you'd love the hacker culture there, lots of builders. There's a little town devoted to their art, near ntu, can't recall the name.

You can get buy with just English but you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you didn't spend your time picking up Mandarin. There's often free classes, plus everyone is friendly.

Here, I found some of my old blog posts. The articles are relatively short and go over some of the details:

http://taipeitips.blogspot.com

http://ablate.blogspot.com/2014/05/what-does-it-cost-to-live...?

http://taiwanhikes.blogspot.com
Ask HN: What is the best resource to learn JAVA
Hi guys, I am already pretty familiar with Python, but would liek to learn Java - do you guys have any great resources you want to recommend?

Thanks in advance,
It's not defending large corporations, it's the reluctance to see the largest and most powerful "corporation", the state, to wake up and interfere.
Consumer?
What's the left-wing news that they are posting?
Don't donate to random charities, then. Donate to established ones with high levels of transparency or trust.
A great example of this are console "fanboys". Not only will they defend the multi-billion corporation that makes the console they bought, they will get upset if a game is playable on a "rival" console. Another aspect of this phenomenon is people using the products they purchase as part their personal identity.

I own a Mac, I'm a hip techie

I own a Xbox, I'm a hardcore gamer
Yes it's called a 'difference of opinion'.
Why it can't be both? And, Yes - it can
https://www.charitynavigator.org/
yeah lynx needs a fork that uses dom-distiller to render things off screen, and then just uses its own renderer to show the final content.
Freedom promoter ? Right-winger ? Adept of Socrates’ principles? or rather:

« Economist »?

I mean, apart from Keynes-style economism which, in turn, promotes an entire bigger and way more vile form of organization.

Those kinds of intellectual diversity are becoming rare on HN, that’s perhaps why you haven’t heard much about them. It about 52% of the population.
This is gene editing on a large scale, but they suggest that they're "permanently changing someone's DNA", which is true, and it's false. It's pretty inaccurate.

The issue with Hunter's syndrome is that the body refuses to produce a set of enzymes that break down certain sugars, resulting in a buildup, resulting in complications, resulting in death.

In order to fix it, they're going to use a virus that inserts a new gene that produces the breakdown enzymes in a large number of cells, up to hundreds of thousands. Large numbers however only in absolute terms. If compared with how much cells they have we're talking one in a million or even less cells of their body.

Because this will cause those cells to produce those breakdown enzymes, which will then spread through the body and do the work, this should work to treat the disease. But there's a lot of caveats:

They're introducing a new gene indiscriminately. They're not fixing the existing gene.

Also they're only "converting" a relatively tiny amount of cells. Enough so the treatment sticks (ie. it needs to infect stem cells), but certainly not all. Even so, it is expected the effects of the treatment will grind down over time, maybe requiring regular treatments, at an unknown rate.

Procreation cells, in both men and women, are protected against viruses through special mechanisms. The virus will not be effective on them, and therefore their children will at least be carriers of the disease and potentially need treatment themselves.

The sad thing is what these treatments will lead to over the long term. If we treat many people for metabolic diseases, genetic diseases will "spread". The diseases are currently limited from spreading because they are at an evolutionary disadvantage: infected people die before having kids. If that's fixed, there will be increased rates of genetic defects in children.

Eventually this may lead to very few human babies being born without metabolic disease and nearly everyone being dependent for their life on treatments like these.

Of course, that's a long term potential consequence. It would not be moral to not treat these people. And of course, in the future it may be possible to target procreation cells as well, and we probably should.
Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (BEZOS) Act
> No one sets out to look for an ugly, physically lousy mate, do they?

Search porn hub for BBW.