skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> for the purpose of this discussion the spectrum runs from: all-government-regulated to all-individually-accomplished.

I've spotted the issue. This is a false dichotomy. The government is just an abstraction over a group, like any other; literally nobody who is suggesting that government-based solutions aren't good are advocating for individual accomplishment outside of groups.

The government has no hands and no brain; all actions undertaken under color of the state are carried out by "individual" humans.

Nobody's saying that coordination amongst people in large groups isn't required.

If there is a 'spectrum', it's "individuals" vs "groups", or it's "compulsory groups, on threat of violence" (the state) vs "voluntary association" (how almost every other group in our society works - and 100% of the effective ones).

You can't meaningfully threaten world-class, creative, hardworking people into being maximally efficient and effective. You need a carrot, not a stick, and the only solutions the state provides are based on their ability to print cash (already not a problem if you're effective and productive), or a stick.
> “If you want to be safe” doesn’t really jive with “extremely limited risk.”

Of course it does. To put it bluntly, it is extremely likely that any bottle of industrial argon is actually food safe because it's produced in basically the same condition that food safe argon. The main impurity while producing argon is oxygen. The main difference between industrial and food safe argon will be how their container is handled but argon as an environment is not really suited to bacterial development.

If you don't feel okay taking this risk, you can buy food grade argon which, well, is guaranteed to be food safe.

Also, don't get me wrong, I'm specifically talking about argon there. I would never use industrial distilled water or ethanol with food for example. That would be risky. I have heard of people using industrial CO2 to carbonate beverage. That makes me uneasy because CO2 is a good solvent.
I think some incentives have gone away and that keeps the price high.
>It won't need maintenance or a dealership network like traditional auto makers

Apple's UI is so clean that it actually reverses entropy.
Open source is not a business model.

Let me say this again. Open source is not, in and of itself, a business model.

People conflate having an open source project with having an open source business. Open source businesses can be done, of course, but open source in and of itself won't give you that business. It is not a business model therefore but rather a distribution/governance model.

The key is that being open source should not be a core value proposition in most cases (unless you're Red Hat) but rather it should be ancillary, merely incidental to your core business. For example, say you ran a task management app company. The core value driver is not whether it's open source or not (to most people). People don't buy based on whether the product itself is open source, they buy because it solves their problem, of task management in this case.

Labeling oneself as "open source" is a classic engineering trap because again, people don't care about that, if a closed source solution can solve their problem more than an open source one, they'll use the former.

By the way, I happen to run an open source task management app (a todo list + calendar hybrid basically, https://getartemis.app) but nowhere do I advertise it as open source, even though it is, because I know my core customers, non-engineers, don't care about that and just want to schedule their days better.

---

I am reminded of OpenHunt, an open source version of Product Hunt that was made. The only value proposition was that it was open source, but it shut down precisely because users didn't care about that, they cared whether it had enough cool products (as a consumer) and enough traffic (as a submitter).

Here's one post-mortem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940729

> OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers.

> It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is king, that's what consumers want.

> There have been many examples of people rallying around a "free and open" version of a service. They fail to realize that the end consumer barely cares. Look at voat (Reddit), app.net (Twitter), Diaspora (Facebook), even ycreject.com (Y Combinator) tried to be a thing for a while.

> If someone is able to make it "free and open" while also making it a better experience than the alternative, then it'll be a big success. But so far everyone gets that wrong.
I've been banned from two mastodon servers; one for saying "Neil Degrasse Tyson is my spirit animal" and the other for simply disagreeing with somebody. The tribalism is strong on Mastodon and of you don't make effort to conform you won't last long.
I thought these were some very eye opening stats:

“ there are 1.97 cars per U.S. household, but in Des Moines, Iowa, there are 19 parking spaces per household. In Jackson, Wyoming, there are 27. “

The article goes on to discuss how parking lots are major opportunity sites for housing development, especially in suburbs. This worked well in downtown Oakland, where from ~1998-2008 there were 10k units built, many on former parking lots. This has the benefit of reducing gentrification impacts.
I was replying to a post claiming the only novel part of mastodon compared to old message boards is federation. I’m merely pointing out that many old message boards did have federation.

To your points (1) yes, everything was slower back then (2) people could and did post streams of their work within the BBS framework, everything from multi-part posts to “owning” a message-board topic, to text/ansi e-zines, but back then the focus was much more on following topics than people.
in its current state this is less feature-rich and more expensive than alternative react + auth boilerplates. Maybe this can be differentiated by adding some common SaaS features - eg billing plans, checkout, multi-tenancy
Thank You for Fact Checking. Looks like I was wrong about Nvidia ( My memory might have mixed up a few things ). But the ARM P/E point still stands.

Feeling bad for spreading misinformation. :(

I will need to double check on Son, Softbank and Nvidia again.
I don't think it's really a price - including corporate projects was always the point of "open source" as opposed to "free software". The split is generally understood to have started when part of the community embraced Netscape's open source browser.
A community of contributors backed by a diverse set of companies has to be seeded by an MVP. Where would that MVP come from? For complex software it's either an internal project spun out from a unicorn or a labor of love from a gentleman hacker. These are pretty limited routes; it's much easier to start an open source startup with the caveat that the community will probably never emerge later because the startup will be moving too fast for outsiders to jump in. Now startups feel they have to use "innovative" licenses to be successful but the powers that be are deriding these licenses as "fake open source". We're setting ourselves up for an OSS winter where sophisticated developer tools or installable infrastructure software just won't be created.
> How do people trust Tesla to make cars that work even remotely as long as a Toyota? I don't want to own a car that I cannot resell after 10 years because it's worn down too much.

Anecdotal experience, but most Tesla owners I know don’t really care about resale value 10 years down the line. Tesla owners are pretty well off who wouldn’t be buying a Toyota Corolla in the first place anyway.

They are willing to overlook reliability issues for an EV experience with considerably better UX than traditional manufacturers (tbf some parts of it are bad too like not having a heads up display or all-touch interface), some shiny features and gimmicks which is more akin to using an iPhone than operating a car.

I personally think the build quality is an abomination for a $40k+ price tag car, which is why I don’t own one. But I can see why some people prefer a Tesla for the overall experience and a certain cool factor.
Folks with sensory processing disorders, be aware that miracle fruit / miraculin can be a very complicated experience if you’re trying it at full strength the first time. Make sure to be prepared for self-care if it triggers a panic attack.

I imagine something designed consciously as a food additive is probably a lot less intense, but I’m also in the SPD-taste zone of “I’d rather not have it taste sweet at all, than have it taste cloying/herbaceous from stevia”. YMMV.
This[1] suggests an orbit of 500-600km can a lifetime anywhere from 10-100 years. That's not short.

[1] https://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/orblife.htm

The 5-year lifespan is for them to be intentionally deorbited. If they die, they become debris subject to atmospheric drag and other forces.
I have a single user pleroma instance and I don't check local or federated timelines.
I think I even disabled them.
If I want to discover new content or users I go to the instances that interest me and explore their timelines.
> There's a perception, somewhat warranted, that if they can't persuade other people to adopt their preferences, it's going to be harder

Sometimes it is true. Imagine you wish something like the Spanish town model: a very dense centre, and nothing else than the centre, so wherever you are in the town, you just walk/cycle/drive less than a mile and you are in the fields, the hills, or other forms of 'nature'. Density located in a single point would also enable easy and efficient point-to-point public transit between similar towns, by the way.

Anyway, you can't have this if you take the French route and allow suburban sprawl. It will spread 5 miles around in all (free) directions. Then it doesn't matter if you densify the centre (following the mantra "density is good and efficient" which we hear all the time here), people living in the centre (and most of the suburb) will not have access to 'nature' unless they use a car.

(What actually happens in terms of densification in France is generally worse, because densification of the sprawl is not made in the US style with huge buildings in a very dense, punctual, centre, but it is made along some axes or in some areas here and there. You end up with some average density everywhere, while the infrastructure hasn't followed. And cannot follow, because the density itself is spread, instead of being in a single point easily served. The elected from those areas say they want to combat sprawl, but they make it worse for everyone this way.)

On the other hand, I agree that cities, or urbanism in general, shouldn't be designed for what I call the 14-28, like it is often asked on this site. Or at least it should be the only goal and it shouldn't be the goal everywhere. What I mean by 14-28 is people who are in a great demand of interactions, who want to meet people, a lot of people (of course it depends on individuals, I just arbitrarily peeked those figures). It has always been like that, teens and young adults have always wanted to leave and discover the world, to multiply experiences, good and bad ones, and are attracted by the city lights. That's something we must acknowledge, and we'd better provide an environment for that.

BUT that must not be the end of all things. When people get a bit older and become parents, most of them
tone down and wish to be in less hectic areas, that's just a fact we can observe, even if it doesn't match our own ideal. And that's like it until their death, you can find a few people who will move to a city for their retirement but most who move will move the other way. Same for kids: until a certain age, they are satisfied with the presence of their parents, schools, and a handful of neighbouring kids, they have no need or desire of a large and dense city.

So most of their life, people don't care for having a big concentration of people where they live, and on the contrary favour a bit more space and a bit more quietness. Urbanism shouldn't blindly optimise for the former (density).
key takeaways:

- fonts can be unnecessarily huge

- monolithic js = slow. Chunk at build time.

- content-visibility: auto for lazy rendering
There's some interesting discussion of the ultimate demise of the Alpha here:

http://alasir.com/articles/alpha_history/compaq_epoch.html
That is interesting. Thanks for elaborating.
Misleading headline. The text actually says "solar PV with revenue support" is now the cheapest electricity. In other words, solar PV is cheap, because somebody else is forced to pay for it.
Scale does indeed matter.

The life you can live at $35,000 a year is going to be dramatically less pleasant than the life you can live at $350,000 a year, just as the life you can live at $35,000,000 a year is going to be dramatically more pleasant than at either of those, but eventually you reach a point where even if you were to make $35,000,000,000 a year, it cannot dramatically change your life.

At some point, you become so wealthy that the only difficulties that life can present to you are difficulties from which no person has immunity.
> Decide to get ready for bed even if you’re not sleepy.

Thank you for reminding me of this.

Two years ago I had a sleeping revolution and I had success with a barrage of efforts I did, most notably giving up caffeine and having this routine, and ensuring 100% darkness. But I have to recognize that I lost the routine now.
> Very few people were willing to pay £600+ for a phone pre-iphone, but plenty of people do now.

That doesn't really translate. Most people are "willing" to pay that because most carriers offer 24 month financing.

A high end luxury car is going to be, at the low end $50K. Probably more towards $100K. You don't get interest free installment plans for $100K cars, and most people simply cannot afford them. There's plenty of appeal to current high end luxury cars but how are the sales of Model S P85s or higher (picking it as the most "hyped"), even compared to the 3.
Just want to point out that the abstract says the relationship is linear with log(income). And Fig 1 shows an x-axis range of 15,000-500,000; even if their conclusions are true, I wouldn't be surprised if the relationship breaks down beyond those limits.
Wait, why can't devs use GPL software at work? How is code compiled with GCC any different from code compiled with Clang, legally speaking?
I understand what you mean but I find curious the term "idiocy" when we live in a society that doesn't educate us on financial planning and at the same time does everything it can (succesfully) to make us spend more, because the economy itself depends on keeping consumption high at all times.

Financial illiteracy is a better term, since I don't see why we should expect financial planning to be an innate ability.

At some point we have to decide if we want people to consume the most they can or if we want them to be "responsible".
Curious what gender has to do with it?
My understanding is that a SPAC is more or less a corporation/fund that exists solely for the aim of doing a (or multiple?) reverse merger
Up to a point.

Try letting off the throttle on a sport bike in a turn and see how well it works.

Please don't actually do this.
Is that darkroom site a reference to, or pulled from, something? A quick search for that string only turned up that site, and this ( https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9781848880528/BP000023.xm... ) which seems unrelated.

Anyways, thanks for the link, I bookmarked it. Might also make a local version of it and set it as my homepage.
Agree with all points about long distance. I knew I’d be called out on it but the difference between it and, say, cable was that you could control costs on a per month basis. We literally used mail for most of those purposes before the cost of long distance dropped.
also, Birkeland Currents in plasma (ionosphere and space)
Why wait half a year when m1 air resale value will be close to retail price? We are talking losing $100 after using it for 6 months.
If you want live image reloading stick to a Lisp like SBCL rather than Scheme.

If you care about startup times or FFI then don't pick Clojure.

YMMV between Racket and Guile; I would say Racket is better insofar as the culture of documentation is really very good.

In practice, once you learn a Lisp, you can jump between them without too much trouble.
> If you are running a commercial business on top of your open-source solution, it is paramount that you own the product's full IP.

Why is it "paramount"? While I have seen that behaviour, there are also several commercial businesses in my corner of the 'net based on open source solutions that don't make an effort to own the full IP and they are doing OK.

I think there's some unstated assumption here, anyone care to explain?
I was looking to find an insightful article about the problems with Fediverse.

But I only found an article that rants about the toxic humanity.

This article has nothing to do with so called "Fediverse". It's so unrelated that the title almost reads like a click bait.
Shopping centers no longer need securing when the shops are closed and torn down.

As far as I'm aware we are not currently sealing dry casks in concrete and forgetting about them. They need to be maintained and managed.
Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans

New Orleans

Montreal

Kansas City

Pittsburgh
I don't understand anything and I tried a bit, but IMO this is much more effort than normal. A friend of my confirmed you need to know hiragana. She has studied it a bit and could follow the lessons, whereas I couldn't (knowing next to nothing).
We (mostly Matthew) have opened plenty of pull requests, although not for the most recent changes since they rely on earlier ones that are not merged. The Chez maintainers move at a deliberate pace, and don't necessarily share all the same priorities as Racket. But we're very much in touch with them, and they've helped develop even some of the changes that aren't upstream.

I don't think it's likely that we'll move back to pure upstream Chez in the near future, but it's not quite a fork either.

You can read more about some of these issues in our ICFP 2019 paper: https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/rkt-on-chez/ which is co-authored with the Chez maintainers.
Then the rat race intensifies for those originating in the smaller cities.
This just reminds me that the problem with discourse isn't centralization, control, lack of privacy or security, or any other thing.

The problem is that people act in bad faith online, a lot.

Give a bunch of people a platform to broadcast their thoughts, and a lot of people will be lazy about those thoughts. A lot of people will turn it into a competition and be more concerned about creating a following rather than spreading truth and fostering healthy discussion.

Sure, I'd take a Fediverse over a Facebook or a Twitter any day; lack of corporate control and the ability to run your own instance and federate are just plain better from a "health of the internet" perspective. But that doesn't solve the social problems inherent in any community where people most don't know each other personally and don't have to interact face-to-face.
Yes, to oversimplify. Many do not expect a return to the daily commute.
> We’re heading towards a handful of giant companies that can afford to pay large teams to build and maintain FOSS, and hence own developer mindshare, for their own selfish reasons.

Can you name some examples of such "selfish reasons" connected to some OSS?

I can think of Google taking over the internet with Chrome, but MS did the same with IE, so that has nothing to do with OSS. It's more that Chrome happens to have source code available.
Collector roads serve areas.

$1.5mil, assuming a 10 year life, would need 7500 people at $20/yr each, or 3000 households at 2.5 ppl/household. Assuming each household is a quarter acre, that's 750 acres, or about 1.2 sq mi. That's a depth of .6 mile on either side of the mile of road. (Which is a depths of 15 lots. I think.)

Edit: $10-$20 per month. Well, there's a lot of other roads needed, too.
drivers came to trust it way too quickly. Drivers who were supposed to be closely monitoring the system instead spent their time looking at their phones, putting on makeup, and other distractions.

Really hope no one dies because of Tesla's autopilot. This is a real risk.

Quoting from below: if the car does it right 99% of the time it's just human nature to stop paying attention. The article makes a great point that slowly improving the autopilot with a person behind the wheel is super dangerous because we get lulled into a false sense of security.
While I agree with the gist of this, the ones to finally call the shots on such projects are always in a bad spot.

They underprovision and an anomaly happens. Now they are the ones who did everything wrong and should be blamed.
The overprovision and nothing ever comes close to the theoretical limit of the structure. Now they have wasted huge amounts of money and again, should obviously be blamed.
The easiest way out: Plan exactly to what is considered standard. No one will blame you in either case, even if you know that it is insufficient or stupid.

This is something that will probably hold true in many different industries, the consequences for dams are just a little worse..
> - Did less than nothing to promote general immune health, spread awareness of ubiquitous seasonal Vitamin D deficiency at high latitudes, etc

Is this the pharma industries job?
It is a great resource for Euclidean hexagons, but non-Euclidean tilings are a different thing. (He does a bit of spherical geometry in his other articles.)
That just isn't viable. People simply won't be able to afford a high margin Apple car no matter how willing they are. So the volume will have to be low.
Hey Batak! You're being way too modest, but agreed, good times!

The opening @evgen mentioned would involve exploring out to unowned, undeveloped sectors known as "wilderness", which would have various natural resources that could be developed once occupied and populated. Wiring up a balanced economy that could support continued expansion quickly was a fun challenge.
Don't forget to mention Nvidia's really weird license where they will tell you post-purchase what you can and can not do with their products and associated software.
Now I just need a concussion to compare.
There is only the choice of whether to use the service or not. If you get banned for wrongthink on Twitter, it does not immediately affect you on Facebook.

Twitter and Facebook only ban the more extreme or inconvenient forms of wrongthink. Mastodon servers on the other hand often are Subreddit style echochambers.
> Now, you can be making a couple million a year and only be worrying about who's about to take it from you or whether your assets are going to be worthless in the next financial crash.

Are you being serious? If you're lucky enough to somehow be paid a couple of million dollars per year, you could work for a small few years and retire without any financial worries at all.

That's an absolutely massive salary, and I don't understand how someone could be getting that amount of income and have any reasonable grounds to be worried about their financial situtation.
Saleor – A headless, GraphQL-first, open-source e-commerce platform