skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Urbit's distribution and sponsorship hierarchy of galaxies, stars and planets is not designed as a political structure, or even a social structure. The actual social layer is in userspace -- one layer up. Socially and politically, Urbit is a flat network of planets. Galaxies and stars are plumbing.

Here are some statements about how the plumbing is done, from Urbit's own website, that I suppose must be non-political:

"...most theories of property agree that anyone whoever creates or discovers new property starts out by owning it. Because galaxies are premined, Urbit starts as a centralized system. But it has two strong motivations to decentralize. One, the more decentralized Urbit is, the more Urbit is worth. Two, the only way for Urbit to fund its own development is to homestead its own real estate."

From a page on "Common objections to Urbit," under "Urbit doesn't have enough planets for every human being.": "A 32-bit planet is a tool, not a toy. Like a car, it's a device for a responsible and independent adult. There aren't 4 billion cars in the world, nor 4 billion independent adults. If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine."

(They redid their website apparently but the posts are archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20181214175456/https://urbit.org/... and http://web.archive.org/web/20181214190532/https://urbit.org/... respectively.)

Moldbug thinks he's being non-political. I don't think we should trust him to even know what that means. This might be a good chance to recover whatever interesting ideas are in Urbit (if there were any; it's not clear to me that there are any) for the common good, but there are almost certainly deep-seated assumptions that weren't even publicly stated in the FAQs about who gets to control what and who doesn't.

... edited to add:

> When you live in Manhattan, you simply don't worry about who owns it or why; and nor does it matter. Are they Jews? Muslims? Christians? Communists? Italians? You don't care and you don't have to.

That's hardly my experience, but, sure.
I agree the users shouldn’t be the ones worrying about the subtlties. It’s we developers.
Does money laundering require 20 employees?
thanks and i would love to see your time tracking tool and congrats on $1k MMR - I know it's not a huge success but it's something :)
Think what you will of his politics, but his Moldbug blog displayed erudition, scholarship and analytical ability well beyond trivia -- unless of course Moldbug was a collective and not just Curtis Yarvin.

(E: I refuse to say "not that I agree with his politics". Whether I do or not should be immaterial here.)
One could argue that nuclear is a huge distraction to solving our problems with solar and wind. I actually think more nuclear power would be great, but I don’t think it’s very realistic politically.
That is a degenerate argument. an apartment is clearly yours. Without your password there is no way to conclusively prove that a phone is yours. SIM cards can be swapped, for example. The incriminating is not stating the password. it is the fact that you are proving the phone as yours.
Many of these kind of personalities unthinkingly identify themselves on the "winning" side of an ideal corporate utopia. It seems that they do not envision the misery they will have to face when they are (likely) on the disenfranchised side. Human rights and democracy do have a reason for their existence.

(Of course, I've no idea what Urbit means. I've tried many times to get it, thought I was stupid, but it seems no one else really understands it either.)
that's actually a great goal to have. We just need to figure out how to market - we both suck at marketing plus we don't really enjoy it.
Would have been cool to show it in Coq as well, to make the connection to formal mathematics more clear!
I don't serve Atom, simply because it's not as well supported.
> My take on this is that people need to realize that they are not an exception to this. _Everyone_ has an ideology that overrides logic for many topics.

Agreed, but it's also worth pointing out that not everyone indulges in ideological reasoning to the same degree in general. I've heard people make related arguments that because everyone reasons ideologically at points, there can be no objective position on <topic>; of course this argument holds little water, and it seems designed to rationalize the conversant's belief to himself rather than to persuade his audience.
Google's original LevelDB microbenchmark report shows LevelDB soundly beating Kyoto.

http://www.lmdb.tech/bench/microbench/benchmark.html

But using the exact same code and microbenchmark, LMDB obliterates them all.

http://www.lmdb.tech/bench/microbench/

All with full ACID transactions and crash-proof reliability.
> For those out of the loop as I am, what is Urbit?

A medium post that attempts to give a high-level overview (and will perhaps confuse you):

> https://medium.com/@mattcondon/hot-takes-in-which-i-try-to-e...

Another explanation attempt:

> https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/06/nock-hoon-etc-for-non-vul...

Urbit Primer (after which you will be confused even more) by the Urbit developers:

> https://urbit.org/primer/

If you become more and more confused: good. :-)

An AMA by the Urbit developers:

> https://www.reddit.com/r/urbit/comments/4okcm6/were_the_core...

---

If this all feels like reading scientology texts: you have just inhaled your first breath of Urbit - and it goes down into a deep rabbit hole. :-)
There are existing rules for transporting hazardous materials by air. I don't know if those rules are general enough to also encompass unmanned aircraft.
I don't feel good about buying Chinese goods anymore. Look at what has happened. Even if he's not killed the fact that they brought media in is a subtle as a finger sliding across a throat.
> unless you’re willing to die

I feel like that's getting the threat model wrong. The mugger wants to spend as little time with you as possible. If a fingerprint is needed to make purchases, then it can actually be significantly better than a PIN, and even a PIN is a lot better than nothing because they have to memorize it.
When they blew up San Bruno they were clearly negligent.

They initiated the shift from low pressure to high pressure without proper testing inspection or notice. I assure you that any reasonable person tasked with doing that safely would have done better.
The fact that it was done so poorly indicates a critical failing of internal process.
Cassandra

To be honest, I don't like anything about Cassandra. Beginning with the naming: back when I was trying to learn about Cassandra, I couldn't get past the obscure and bizarre naming (super-columns?). When I dealt with systems using it, I never quite understood how you can keep saying that "the later timestamp wins" and speak of consistency with a straight face: in a distributed system, there is no such thing as a "later timestamp". Or speak of transactions which aren't really transactions at all.

Then I read the Jepsen reports about Cassandra. Yes, Cassandra has made progress since then, but still.

I think of Cassandra as an outdated piece of technology at this point: we can (and do) build better distributed databases today, with better consistency guarantees, and proper transactions in case of FoundationDB. Cassandra was designed for a specific use case and then outgrew its initial design, because there was nothing else at the time. But I see no reason to stick with it any longer.

Even now when you need massive multi-region scalability there is little to choose from — if you want it to be open-source, there's pretty much only FoundationDB left.
That has almost nothing to do with SAN and everything to do with Amazon's implementation. A nuc will never give you the resiliency or performance of a properly sized SAN.

Furthermore, you'll never get close to saturating a 40gbps link with a database workload, your limitation is iops, not throughput, and you don't have anywhere near enough cpu to max out those links in a loaded server much less a nuc.
This feature is configured via its software.
If you’re referring to my comment, by “not possible”, I meant “subject to the 5s transaction duration limit.” etcd and ZK could be implemented on top of FDB.
I worked in a lab at school. Between dodging dinosaurs and other hazards of that era, we had a Windows NT 3.51 machine with, I think, 4 CPUs, though it might have been 8 or 16, and I seem to recall EISA.

A glorious time. That machine was incredible and also rock solid.
Both propellers and wings are fundamentally the same thing: airfoils.

However, air passes over a propeller much, much faster than over a wing, and creates shock waves in a way that wings don't.
Five years wasn't bad, right?
So, this one incident isn’t unusual or remarkable and certainly isn’t a reason to avoid tourism in the country.
An Approach for Vetting Research Prototypes at Scale
Even though I'm a huge TypeScript fan, I'm grateful for the existence of Flow.

Their focus on soundness has shown the TypeScript team that they should give a lot more priority to getting the typesystem in a better shape over the years. If Flow didn't exist, I doubt we'd be seeing many of the features in TypeScript's --strict mode.

Plus, they were the first to develop some features like intersection types, or even some of the advanced type transformations. Shame it was (at least historically) a bit difficult to find them in the docs.

I'm hoping Flow can push TS to close up the remaining soundness gaps, and fix up some of their features (sealed vs open types is much better than the strange object literal checks in TS)
Beowulf was about the hardware and the interconnect - both being commodity. Not about the software. Most Hadoop etc runs on Beowulf I’d imagine.

Clusters used to use more custom hardware and interconnects - that’s now the exception rather than the norm. You still find that in some HPC situations but most people manage with commodity cloud.
The size is an issue because XML is much more costly to parse and query than JSON, in my experience. But even if that was solved, there are a ton of other more pressing issues to solve.

WRT zombie podcasts, you can't expect users to say "I'm paying for this hosting but I'm done publishing episodes". They always think they'll get around to publishing more. And in my experience, they end up letting the show go only when their credit card expires.
Sequent was awesome, but damn if I didn't hate their OS's, they reminded me too much of Domain/OS. They were acquired by IBM a while back, and their HQ is now Nike. The OSDL was based in one of the old Sequent data centers for a while, and it managed to bring on a few Sequent kernel developers to help remove kernel locks throughout linux.
All the employees and their families, for example. Do you think the receptionists had anything to do with the equipment failures?

What about the large number of taxpaying vendors who rely on PG&E's business?

Then there are all the taxes paid by the employees, PG&E itself, and their suppliers.
That picture is actually the EDSFF 1U Short form factor, which is the closest competitor to Samsung's NF1 out of the variety of form factors defined by EDSFF. Both allow for about 36 drives in the front of a 1U system.
Or "don't tie your self worth or happiness to your appearance," to be more general.
You are also leaving out environmentalists who fight against thinning and cutting down trees — source, the Angora fire in South Lake Tahoe, Canyon Creek complex in eastern Oregon, and many others. Playing politics and not acknowledging environmental lobby will not do anyone any good. If you know any actual foresters in the USFS, they will tell you as well because they are suid by environmentalists for stuff as simple as salvage logging.
Rumor Suggests Apple's AirPower mat has finally gone into production
Tandem was doing the same thing as far as redundancy and ordering it's own maintenance. Tandem even had redundant CPUs that would execute instructions in lock-step and compare results. They were very popular in banks.

There are stories of parts showing up without customers even being aware any hardware had failed because they were so reliable.
>This might be a good chance to recover whatever interesting ideas are in Urbit

I haven't really looked much into this space, but Tim Berners Lee's Solid tries to tackle essentially the same problem without all the reactionary politics, no?

Yarvin's controversial personality aside, I just don't see the use case for this. Handing everyone a server / pod/ starship and then trying to share this across machines with some common protocol reminds me of the semantic web which already attempted this a long time ago.
Not sure if you know about tantivy but it's cool too: https://github.com/tantivy-search/tantivy
It’s a combination of factors, one of which is that a prop is just out there, unshielded like the fans inside a jet engine (which still make a ton of noise in the case I’d high bypass models). Then there’s cortex shedding, which is mostly occurring along edges and tips. Airplanes also tend to fly at much higher altitudes except on takeoff and landing, or their noise would be an issue too. Finally you’re right that the number and arrangement of blades matters, because each blade produces some turbulence, vortices, etc which then interact with the next blade in sequence. All told the issue is just s high degree of aerodynamic noise. You get that with a wing and any aerodynamic body, and really if you’ve ever seen model jets fly you’ve heard the racket they make.

The major issue is that until drones came around, you didn’t have to worry very often about large number of high performance aircraft operating throughout civilian airspace, at very low altitudes in crowded areas.
Tip 1, which most people know: To quickly disable Face/TouchID you can squeeze left and right side buttons together (any combo) for two seconds to bring up the power off display.

Tip 2, which probably most people don't know: If you aren't holding the phone -- if someone shoves it in your face -- you can close your eyes to prevent FaceID from working and say "Hey Siri, who's phone is this?"

Not that it's wise to do this to frustrate a violent attacker, but it might work for some situations.
why is this being downvoted? i have no idea what urbit was and this was the only helpful, non-political comment in this thread.
There are copy protection schemes on magnetic disks that mess with the clock bits on the disk to produce an unstable value:

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/7853
Why would you prioritize punishing the shareholders? Middle class savings are also shareholders too, especially of big public companies. They're certainly too diffuse to be complicit in the crime.

Punishing companies and shareholders has too much collateral damage to innocent employees and shareholders. We should focus on criminal punishment of executives via jailtime, not via fines.
I read the entire thing (and watched the 2013 demo) and still have not the first clue what Urbit _is_. Too many neologisms, not enough ELI5.

Claiming that you don't use "the lambda calculus" to do dependency resolution, of all things, seems weird to me. Even from my 30k foot understanding, that seems like a non-sequitur at best.
That's a good point. Hopefully, those rules are applied and adhered to from the get go.
Microsoft forced a shutdown of a service that posted user submitted build strings of Windows (the evil one probably being this one: 10.0.18313.1004 (rs_shell_devices_foldables.190111-1800)).
How to decide when to quit and work on your side business?
How do you decide when it's time to quit the 9-5 job and focus full time on your side project?

I have a nice job, no stress, nice people around me, big career progress so far. About a year ago my manager started playing politics, to defend the position and shut me down a bit. That made me lose interest in the job, and in spare time I built a side project that got some nice traction and paying customers. Now 2 more persons are working on this with me, all of us part-time, and it's cashflow positive (because none of us is taking a full salary).

Coming from a family of workers, it seems crazy to leave a good and safe job. On the other hand, if I don't focus on this project full time it will probably die, as there is already a copycat and speed seems like the most important thing.

So how does one decide when the risk/reward ratio is good enough? What should be taken into account? Probably important things would be that I'm single, less than 30 years old, have savings for at least 3 years of life or downpayment for a flat.

Any experience, advice, story or similar would be very helpful as I have no one to talk about this, and it feels that I don't have enough knowledge in order to make a rational decision at the moment.
A lot of things: the high rpm motor powering it, the combined area of the blade edge that is higher than the area of the wing edge, and the higher pressure differential between the air behind the propeller compared to the air in front of it. The sound results from this pressure differential collapsing so anything that increases the pressure differential will create more sound.
Afaik by now, there have been least two court cases where Echo recordings were handed over as evidence [0] [1].

At this rate, it's only a matter of time before evidence like that gets leaked/released, which would serve as a good probe on how much these devices really record.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/14/amazon-echo-recordings-jud...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/07/tech/amazon-echo-alexa-be...
I was (and still am) an old-earth evangelical christian.

Many of my friends were young-earth creationists. It's not a topic I hear much about anymore, but I've had many lively discussions about it.

YEC is interesting because there are different ways people think about it in relation to science. The most straightforward would be to claim something like "God created the universe with the appearance of age", so that it would be actually < 10k years old, but appear billions of years old.

Such a theory is consistent with scientific findings, albeit falling prey to Ockham's Razor, and violating the principle of Uniformitarianism, both of which are probably pretty crucial to the Philosophy of science.

Theologically this approach isn't quite as jarring as it may at first appear. I once heard it put as a question: "Did Adam have a belly button?" If he did, then that's not really all that different from "the appearance of age" in general.

For me personally it still didn't sit right with me, and I also disagreed with the general interpretive approach taken to scripture. Genesis isn't a scientific textbook and I don't think it should be read that way. I highly recommend this book for an alternative interpretation: https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Genesis-One-Cosmology/dp/0...

In general I think science is very important and undervalued in the christian community in general and that's unfortunate. To give just one Biblical example, King David spent years tending a flock of sheep by night, with nothing better to do than stare at the stars for hours on end. As scientifically illiterate as he was, he still knew a lot more about the constellations than I ever will.
I agree. I wouldn't rush to draw any conclusions, as this paper changes the status quo. We can not say anything about the rarity of transmission events in the past really. This work is focused particularly on heteroplasmy -- it doesn't rule out other causes.

It does not seem we understand the mitochondrial inheritance mechanism during conception.
here is their new primer: https://urbit.org/primer/
Found at: https://web.archive.org/web/20171027055523/http://www.cypres...
I don't think it is a good idea for the sanity of people to tell them to stay inside and have really good sound insulation. We have to remember that sound pollution is a health issue and impacts people's lives. I have my doubts how efficient insulation one can get against air traffic -- from personal experience, it doesn't work.
Has anyone ever used FoundationDB and not found it successful? All I read is "it supports RDMS + NoSQL and can be distributed". So what use cases doesn't it solve?
In 2005, they still thaught RPG at school. I was actually pretty pissed that it was already outdated.

I called it the matrix to the past. Because of the black screen with green letters
Tangent: I don’t think I’ve ever been more incensed than when I learned Harley Davidsons are quiet out of the factory and people make them loud. And while I can get a ticket for something trivial, I’ve never heard of someone getting a ticket for riding a motorcycle or car that’s obnoxiously loud and can be heard a mile away. My point, I guess, cities, townships, what have you, don’t care about noise.
Icecast: Open Source multimedia streaming
> ... If you aren't an independent adult, and you don't need or even shouldn't have unconditional digital freedom (no one's 8-year-old daughter needs unconditional digital freedom), a moon from someone else's planet is fine."

What's wrong with this? A 32-bit namespace for full-blown "server-like" identities still beats today's world where everyone and their dog just crowds onto a single centralized service like Facebook, enjoying an equivalent "not an independent adult" status. Besides, the IPv4 address-space is 32-bit, and is nowhere near efficiently utilized - so Urbit's projected "neo-feudal dystopia" is already here even in the best possible case. (No, IPv6 rollout is not helping practically, at least not yet.)
So it will become ubiquitous.
I'm seeing $135 for a Crucial MX500 1TB or WD Blue 1TB (and lower during the recent holiday sales), so we've already hit your target with name-brand drives from major retailers like Amazon and Newegg.
Really appreciate the emphasis on requiring 5x the process when working as a remote team. Prior the team I now lead I've only worked on co-located teams and it has certainly required some resetting of expectations on my end. Even though I've got a very talented small team I'm learning that we do need a level of process and protocol that feels much more "big-company" in order to work efficiently. Would love any more insights on practical elements you've added in terms of process that have worked well.
Perhaps this problem can be overcome by modifying the concept of a pointer slightly, to make it a "based pointer" (?)

I found an old discussion on this topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890011

Note that the Microsoft C++ compiler implements based pointers, using the __based keyword.
One key difference is that Urbit apps execute on your server but in Solid you have no control over the code, just the (canonical copy of the) data.