skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." is bunk. People don't automatically adopt new better things. I don't know why though.

In my teens and twenties I collected ideas the way some folk collect stamps. The simple fact of the matter is that there are amazing things out there that you've never heard of, and no one really seems to care.

(As an aside, I hate the question, "If FOO is so great why doesn't everyone use it?" I do not know. That's not my department.)

These days some of these things are better known and some even have Wikipedia pages and stuff ( E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator ) but a lot of others are still obscure (trawl through Rex Research if you want to look for weird tech.)

Like, there's a mechanism that can absorb kinetic energy. The demo has a little car on rails with a ramp at one end and a wall at the other. They put a wineglass at the wall and they put the car on the ramp and let it go: the glass shatters. They activate the device and repeat: car hits glass and halts, glass does not shatter. Messed up, right? They're from Poland IIRC, they've been doing demos at trade shows. I bet you've never heard of them. (Bug me and I'll try to dig up a link; They're in Rex Research.)

I already mentioned the "Vaneless" ion wind generator, an efficient solid-state device for converting wind into electric power without e.g. killing birds with spinning vanes. Cheap, simple, easy, durable, been around for decades, and you just now heard about it, eh? :)

There's a battery that desalinizes salt water. A nuclear reactor made of molten salt. Balloons stronger than steel. There's a guy in Michigan, Wally Wallington, who figured out how to move monoliths single-handedly, they walk just like the old stories say!

Anyway, I'm getting ranty here. To veer back on topic: yeah, it's a bummer, you build an awesome mousetrap and even the people with lots of mice ignore it. I wish I knew what to tell you. Maybe paint it mauve?
>I mean they basically nicked, against British law, the designs how to mass manufacture textiles.

And used slaves to pick the cotton! Talk about "cheap labor".

It might sound quaint now, but textiles then where one of the engines of industry growth. The world didn't have mass textiles/clothes production until the industrial revolution.

It's like "Yeah, my ancestors bootstrapped this country doing that, and I benefit massively from them doing so, but you shouldn't do it now to bootstrap your country's economy, because I'm all about being legit now - well, aside when I'm not, but we're talking about you now, not me. Heck, no I ain't giving any of those ill granpa's gains back either" - aka "kicking the ladder".
How does it compare with pidgin?

https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/
I am pretty sure I saw it there once. I've never been to Hague, or in fact anywhere else in NL. Must have been at least 5 years ago, probably more.
this idea was probably one of the first points that drew me into the Linux community when I was young (so many decades ago). The idea of customizing and even modifying my own Window Manager was intriguing!
Yes. The author discusses the relation between the homebrew solution and a DFA solution in part 2, and more about partial matches in part 3.
> We've got two indistinguishable shades of grey; one for available, and one for inactive. You can take it, or you can take it.")

What is up with this design choice to make the selection non obvious?

On Apple TV, it’s damn near impossible to see which app or show you have selected. The selected item is slightly enlarged, or slightly shaded, and I as a young tech literate person have to move around a bunch to figure out where I am.

Why not highlight the border of the damn thing? It’s like no one that works at Apple has older, non tech literate parents that use Apple TV.
> You're still abdicating personal responsibility

No. Blame isn't indivisible. It's not even a zero-sum allocation.
> Governments using private companies to decide who deserves to die based on ML algorithms without judge or jury is morally reprehensible. Full stop.

Governments (or, more accurately, human beings acting under color of law) deciding to assassinate people is morally reprehensible, regardless of how the targeting is done.

If "private company" and "ML" are the keywords it takes to get people outraged about assassination programs, I'm fine with that, but let's make sure we know why we're upset.

This is premeditated murder, and throwing around terms like "insurgent" and "rules of engagement" are just a way of legitimizing premeditated murder.
Duh indeed. Ventilators disrupt communication even more, and should be avoided.
Why? They are a natural byproduct of America's desire to occupy Afghanistan in perpetuity...a policy that has survived for two decades over three Presidents and will surely be continued by Biden. You voted for this: in the last six months alone there was a concerted, bipartisan effort to shutdown legislation to draw down our commitment.
The one feature I wanted (find a workout) was WIP, so I really didn't use it and uninstalled it
Yes, but they better not get caught. It's a trust based model. It's actually Internet stack developers/packagers (anything from protocols in OS or libraries to browsers and devices) that are trusting Let's Encrypt among other certificate authorities.
Look- I get what you are saying and yes I am concerned about it, but on the other hand, it's not always MY job to fix the problem.

It's like tipping in restaurants. I HATE TIPPING. Just put the freakin price all-in on the mneu. I don't want to play this stupid game where the server tries to act nice to get a tip. Just do your job. I do my job all day long without any tips. I'm nice to people and do my best. The service industry is no different- just do your job. Tip jar for handing me a donut or pouring me coffee? Sorry what?

So unfortunately for me- grocery delivery is the same. Just show me what it costs and I will make the decision to pay or not. Costco upped their prices online to say they are able to pay their people a living wage? Great! That's what I'm paying. Walmart doesn't change them online? Ok I'm not sure how works on their side, but I'm paying what they say it costs.

It's not MY JOB as the consumer to make up the shortfall that companies are not giving. You know who's job it is? First, the government- if we provided basic things like healthcare for all, required paid time off, and then you mix in a reasonable minimum wage- most of the issues are solved right there. Then it's up to the company to take care of their employees and make sure they are being paid a reasonable amount.

I'm sick of being told I have to make up the shortfall with tips for everything.

/rant off
Most of these are just mistakes you see in code written by novices or non-professionals.

Although its symptomatic of a larger issue when working with production C++ codebases, which is that you need a lot of eyes on the code to prevent these mistakes and automated tools only go so far.

As always, -Wall, -Wpedantic, -Wextra, and -Werror are your friends. But you should understand the error before you fix warnings (which is what `double x = double(1)` looks like)
We're about to change our deployment strategy actually!

We think the future for open source is offering private cloud, where we have some sort of control pane to manage upgrades without needing access to your data. That's a win for privacy reasons but mean we don't have to go at the pace of our users with the least powerful on premise servers.
I mean I am developing custom business applications, the customer and also the in-house developers have the knowledge. But sure, if you are trying to build a product you want to sell, then you or at least your team or company should certainly have deep domain knowledge. But this seems also really self-evident, how would you even build a product for something you do not understand? And whoever had ever to become familiar with a new domain will probably know this - from the outside and with no or limited knowledge things look often not very complicated, but once you dig into it, even the simplest looking domain has very deep rabbit holes everywhere.
A link aggregator that only accepts GitHub links is a great idea, though I agree with other posters that it would help to add support for other Git hosts.

Feature request: comment replies. As far as I can tell, comments don't allow replies, which makes it more-or-less impossible to have any kind of conversation about a comment.
>> There is something wrong in what amazon is doing. Not legally, but morally.

> There is nothing wrong with what Amazon is doing ethically.

You're responding to something he didn't say, and it's telling. He was referring to morals; you're talking about ethics. There's a difference, and it matters. MOST of the discussion on this issue seems to miss this distinction, and what the difference implies, and that's telling too.

As someone else pointed out above, Amazon owes the entirety of it's BAZILLION-dollar AWS business to open source. You'd think they could find it in their hearts to acquiesce to a simple request that they not muddy the waters around Elastic's registered trademark. That was immoral. Everything else that has now followed, whether legal or ethical, is based on an immorality.
No, that's what courts do. People can assume nothing.
Also a cold place which matches their color scheme. Either they are aware or very lucky coincidence.
Rememory: Record, edit and share your 3D captured video
Yea, Einstein’s papers and a lot of those early 20th century physics papers are surprisingly quite readable, even for a moderate layman such as myself. Because of this, I must say I find Carroll’s claim that he’s never read one of Einstein’s relativity papers a bit dubious.

Dirac’s paper on magnetic monopoles contains a rather beautiful and general introduction on progress in physics. I highly recommend it.

http://users.physik.fu-berlin.de/~kleinert/files/dirac1931.p...
> email before Gmail or maps before Maps

Hotmail and Mapquest would like to chime in here...
+1 on this.

To the author: It looks like your site is using next.js. You can use the `Link` component for this purpose: https://nextjs.org/docs/api-reference/next/link
Most Beautiful Question of Computer Science
Eric Ries, the guy who coined the term, has 2 categories: pivots and leaps. The analogy he used is basketball footwork. If you keep one foot planted, it's a pivot. Reviewing the article:

1 -> 2: Pivot, as it's still in sales.

2 -> 3: Pivot, as they kept the sales focus and "predictive analytics".

3 -> 4: Seems like more of a leap.

4 -> 5: Pivot, as it's still developer surveys.

5 -> 6: Leap.

Both are fine, honestly. But one should favor pivots over leaps, as you have less to re-do. A leap is a desperation ploy.
Supposedly Hot Dog Stand looked really good on monochrome monitors, at least.
WRT fatalities its not apples to apples comparison as USA highways are incredibly expensive with concrete barriers between oncoming traffic and in Ireland the highways between cities are literally two lanes no barriers much like USA farm roads yet with interstate highway levels of traffic.

Meanwhile the cars involved in the accidents are often unimaginably small and lightweight in EU. Rolling a typical Irish car off the road must have an outcome much like rolling a golf cart would, certainly fatal to the occupants, whereas rolling a typical USA SUV into the ditch will ruin the trim and probably the glass but the occupants should be unharmed if they're wearing seatbelts.
This question feels like a potential opsec danger zone.

Same question reformulated: “What’s the one thing you need to compromise to get into my entire digital domain?”
Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
Barely-related, but I love the .cafe TLD, I own two of them myself. I know the new TLDs were kinda an unpopular move but honestly some of them do lend a certain connotation to your website/product, since your domain is frequently a key part of your brand. .cafe, I think, makes your product feel casual, approachable, semi-social (it's like one step louder than a library), and trendy. Since, yknow, coffee is always trendy.
That makes me want to try it, I never did because I figured it would be as bad of an experience as Instacart when I lived in Austin.
That's supposed to be covered by the policy of protecting sex workers and the like. I think we all agree with you in spirit and we only differ in how we rate the implementation.
It doesn't work that way. rqlite is effectively a leader/follower model that uses raft for leader consensus. Writes can only happen online, and only to the leader.
> You can't license your way out of this problem

Why not? The government already distinguishes between a corp and a person - why can't licences do the same?

As an aside, the flip-side of not being payed is less liability. Charging people for your library could make you liable for security issues? Since security is important, maybe there is room for improvement on both sides of the aisle.
As per the description, all updates must be replicated to a quorum of instances. If Charlie is on a plane without the ability to contact a quorum, he can't add records in the first place.

This is a fundamentally necessary tradeoff to provide strong consistency, as described by the CAP theorem.
It's a mistake to think that the populace was ever rational and that there was a "truth" period that preceded the current "post-truth" era.

I don't even consider myself to be a rational person. Everything I think and do is through the perspective of my worldview, personality, and my peers. Human beings didn't evolve to be rational creatures - we're not Vulcans. We're born with good-enough rules for making sense of the environment around us and maintaining harmony with the people around us. It's a mistake to believe otherwise. In fact, I look at the "post-truth" label as just another non-rational attack against the other side.
Capcom yesterday announced Resident Evil Village. includes a multiplayer mode
The semantics of Raft has a "simple" (compared to the harder to understand Paxos) forward motion of events that is supposed to guarantee that you won't get into weird states regardless of if any particular node(s) goes down (I think it can surive (N/2)-1 dead machines in a cluster of N).

Raft is based on having a leader decide what the next COMMIT is going to be, so B could never have X and Y at the same time (they could both be queued but other mechanisms could reject them).

Also data is not considered committed until more than half the cluster has acknowledged it (at which point the leader will know it and handle going forward), leader election also works in a similar way iirc.

As others mentioned, the visualization on https://raft.github.io/ is really good (You can affect it to create commits and control downtime of machines)
Henley Passport Index
Deplatform Rachel Maddow and Hillary Clinton for 4 years of baseless Russia-gate nonsense and from the start opposing the results of a "legitimate election."
Or, the ESP32-C3, which is <$2.
Explain how it was like that in the case of NT.

IBM went their own way with OS/2 and Microsoft hired Dave Cutler from Digital to develop NT over several years. Windows NT is not OS/2. It never was.
Charlie doesn't have to lose the data he saved on the plane. Don't know what the rqlite implementation does.

In the second case, Alice-Bob consensus overrides Charlie
We currently use browsers on several devices (both laptops and android) and rely on google sync currently.
Maybe this could be used to sync bookmarks, history etc across my devices but still keep my data local to me?
Sure,

With regards to the non-desktop workforce:
70% of the workforce doesn't sit behind a computer and thus really don't benefit from working from home in most cases and thus we are working on a few projects in that space.

We did a test project https://www.realwork.ai which is a tool for frontline workers built for the people in the field rather than the backoffice and allow them to communicate and mange the distributed physical work they do. We are currently looking at expanding that into more of a linkedin type of network combining the tool with the ability to find work or find workers to hire.

With regards to the educational space we are building a LMS built more like an API that allow learning institutions or organizations with the need for employee education, certificate or compliance to easily manage their students/employees education. While we offer things like video and course-building tools the idea is to allow for our customers to use the best tools for the job so ex. we support not just our own video platform but also zoom, MS teams etc.

And last but not least.

Because we built a whole video platform we are looking at another area which is live ecommerce such as the whole unboxing trend with things like collector cards as we know a few people in that space.

We are then working with founders or potential co-founders in those industries and try to see where we can find product market fit.
On Windows most applications don’t even use the normal title bars and controls. What’s the use in allowing people to customize their colors?
Gatsby vs. Nextjs: Markdown Blog
The maker landscape is insanely wide these days, MicroPython has traction because someone with little prior experience can look at the script, say "I understand some of that" and get hacking.

I see it as the gateway drug of embedded development, you get pulled in by how easy it looks and then you move one to a more performant language when you need it.
Microsoft is increasing the price of Xbox Live Gold
Expensify had a version of something like this back in like 2013/14 I think.
Show HN: An Interactive Virtual Keyboard to Visualize Collections of Shortcuts
Another Mega Group Spy Scandal? Samanage, Sabotage, and the SolarWinds Hack
Personally, I think fossil is far better than git. It offers you a lot more than git: wiki, ticket system, chat, ...
> That's a 12 inch medium pizza

I don’t know what kind of barbaric society you hail from, but here in civilization 12” is a small pizza. ;-)
Yeah. Barnes and Frei didn't read the contract at all. They were just going off the court filings. I don't think they were aware of the additional provision about AWS having the right to terminate right after the 30 day suspension notice provision.
I understand the intent, but elastic has proven to create legal confusion despite being warned against it and then sue over it in the past when they mixed the APL source and the x-pack source under two different licenses in the same repo and then sued floragunn over copyright violations. They might be technically correct on that lawsuit, but IMHO they knowingly created that situation.
> Providing customer value is a business model, and it's rather independent of the license underneath.

Yes, my argument and tl;dr is that flooding the market with free software has created an environment where superior for-profit alternatives (open or not) have no value to the majority, so software developers have got to go much much further to create a sense of value. There is of course intrinsic value to the software being used and it took skill and expertise to produce, it's just the perception of value is near zero due to the abundance of free alternatives and the culture of expectation that it should be free.

===

To support yourself financially when building a new library of some sort, you either require a commercial sponsor (someone who values this as part of a broader intent, thinks they will get kudos, free maintenance and hiring opportunities, but doesn't devalue their own business by open sourcing it), a derivative business from the software (support contracts, saas, book sales, bs enterprise features that should really have been there to begin with), or is run as a charity (donors or you simply just have to make $0 and lap up the praise for doing it out of the kindness of your heart).

The bottom line here is charity. People routinely work on software for no personal gain and people routinely expect all generic software to be free, to the point where a one off $5 per head charge is considered excessive and will never be considered.

If we imagined a world where people did place value on generic software, that is to say people expected to pay $1-$5 for a compiler or a library, that opens a lot of opportunity to individuals to compete and produce higher quality software and would give me the opportunity to work on things that I find interesting and care about.
I notice you didn't carve out an unconditional condemnation of violence in your comment here. It's implied.

Can we stop being so laborious?
Moonshots are just that. Most will not work out and a few will be incredible successful.
The 'China Girls' Hidden at the Beginning of Old Films
KeyCombiner is an app for organizing, learning, and practicing keyboard shortcuts. On top of that, there is a desktop app that can instantly show the shortcuts of the currently active application.

So, displaying keyboard shortcuts was always an important part of KeyCombinder, and I spent a lot of time to optimize this experience with searching and filtering features. However, these feature are not sufficient when you want to understand a collection of hundreds of shortcuts at a glance. I have been thinking about this problem since I started working on KeyCombiner almost precisely one year ago. Today, I am happy to announce that KeyCombiner offers a solution:
The Shortcut Collection Visualizer

For any shortcut collection on KeyCombiner, (public collections of 60+ popular applications, your personal collections, collections shared with you by people you know), it is now possible to show a virtual, interactive keyboard that uses colors to highlight which keys are used with which combination of modifier keys. Hopefully, it will be more obvoious if after you tried it out.
Ecological Footprint of NFTs and Crypto Art
Rami so happy for you to be building such an amazing product. Your track record speaks for itself and you have always had you finger on the pulse of what is needed for companies to thrive be that finance or security. Your entrepreneurial acumen is second to none and this is sure to be your next great thing.
You can build a pretty nice home 32-core/256gb threadripper system for ~ $5k. (24 nvme drives not included)
Very cool! I maintain a VS Code extension that allows creating, editing and commenting on gists, directly within the editor: https://aka.ms/gistpad. I’d be interested to explore an integration here, since it would be cool to author gists in your existing dev tool, and then share/publish them to gist.cafe.

I also maintain a VS Code extension for building CodePen-like playgrounds, which can either be stored locally, or in gists: https://aka.codeswing. So it feels like there’s some pretty cool opportunities to work together :)
It is regrettable that Hacker News has devolved into the sort of knee jerk outrage that you find on websites like Reddit.
I don't want that, I am only saying how this could be done. For example certain technologies could be permitted only in NATO countries and if you want to market your product that uses it you will have to prove it that it does not originate from China.
(Author is in the meantime back on Cloudflare, according to the served certificate)
Beeper uses Matrix infrastructure
FoundationDB and Comdb2 also use sqlite as a storage engine. Curious that they decided to implement yet another one.

https://www.foundationdb.org/

http://comdb2.org/
Why would inflation stay at 0? That is extremely unlikely.
2. If you need wireless, you need an ESP board. If you don't, you might prefer the more performant Pico. The last section of the article also gives some reasons.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, while blockchain is a distributed database. Bitcoin is powered by blockchain technology, but blockchain has found many uses beyond Bitcoin.
You are missing the point too.

Why did someone decide for that specific case and not the numerous others by ex. Twitter that are still there.

Picking on the little guy just because they are little seems to be a pretty questionable move.