skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'google: "SpaceX subsidies"

SpaceX gets almost $900 million in federal subsidies to deliver broadband to rural America
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/08/tech/spacex-starlink-subsidie...

SpaceX just won $885 million in federal subsidies to expand Starlink, Elon Musk's satellite-internet project
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/spacex-just-won-do...

In addition to that SpaceX is government contractor.

SpaceX and Blue Origin are the next Boeing/Lockheed. Government gives them both money to R&D so that they don't have just one innovative supplier.

Tesla is a great example of government project. Tesla has received $3-4 billion in subsidies.

edit:

SpaceX has received other direct subsidies. NASA has given seed money and development funding for Dragon, Falcon 9, engines and demonstration launches ($248M at least) https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/453605main_Commercial_Space_Minutes...
None. There is no good reason to do this. It doesn't stop people from doing it.
All code must run on a processor somewhere, and if it's not your server it is someone else's server.
I also have issues with the term serverless.

However, the term is generally accepted for cloud services where you run code on someone else's server. It is a product you can use.

I would be greatly disappointed if there are developers who think serverless code runs on air.
Not England, the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom
Was recently reading about the development of proximity fuses for anti-aircraft shells during WWII. The idea that they did that without solid state electronics is insane to me. They had tubes which could withstand the 20000 G's of being fired from an ant-aircraft gun (along with the spinning of the shell due to rifling) Transistors would have really simplified that.
Back in 90s there was a well defined menubar with all functions. Today you don't know where the functions are hidden - they may be everywhere on the screen, hidden behind visible or even unvisible graphical elements... This may be frustrating...
GP says if there is no originality, there is no copyright, so it does not matter if images were registered or not.
> Even the Android build is totally competitive now.

Are they still blocking most extensions?
"net win for humanity" can be taken two ways. Elon / Jeff not making it back could also be considered a "win" even if dark. For the good they have done they have done a lot of damage to humanity on their way to become billionaires.
There are endless examples of forks that pick up where some other project left off. They give it a new name, explain what's going on, and move on. If it's seen as hostile, that means the original project is still active and doesn't need this?
I can give you one to illustrate the point I am trying to make. When I first started working in 2005, we used to use Excel 2003. My first company gave me a modest desktop with 512MB RAM and old processor. Right clicking on a cell to format it, change font, etc. used to take few milliseconds at most and the window used to appear immediately after the click. Today I have a 16GB machine at work - doing the same operation takes 2-3 seconds to open the window on right click. Given that the reason I would right click has not changed at all over 16 years, I don't see why I should see a 100x degradation in performance using a machine which has 32 times more RAM (and I guess many more cores and processing speed).
As I understand it another driver in the same rack doing work is enough to effect the performance of the other drivers in the rack. This is why you use fancy expensive "enterprise grade" drives as they can cope better with it.

https://www.dtc.umn.edu/publications/reports/2005_08.pdf

> In the presence of an external vibration caused
by adjacent disk drive seek operations the bandwidth
performance of a consumer-grade disk drive “feeling”
these vibrations will decrease about 10%-15% when
reading data and about 25%-40% when writing data

Don't really know if this is enough to actually cause damage if the disk does not have the hardware to detect this vibration.
I've noticed people in the West love reaching for words in other cultures to name their project, whether it's Japan or Greek mythology. One practical reason for this is that the string is more unique on Google search. Meanwhile, one of the most popular projects to come out of Japan is Ruby the programming language. The tech demographic probably did a few more rounds of Google/Wiki (re)searching than a person who gets a random Chinese character tattooed, but I wonder how much is lost in translation and whether the conceptualization / romanticization / admiration that English-speaking Westerners hold of a word the same as in the original culture. Himeji probably refers to Himeji castle in Japan, and I wonder if developers outside the West consider naming their project The Alamo or Buckingham. It feels more authentic with Apple of California naming their recent Mac OS X releases Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur. Now that I live in Japan, that inclination to name my projects after Japanese things have gone away
Yea, same for many EU countries.

Also EVs require some specific knowledge and equipment random Mom & Pop shops won't have for a while. Just working with HVDC systems alone is a huge hassle.
Google's Q1 2021 revenue was $55.1bn [0]. So EUR220m is 0.4% of one quarter's revenue.

Commercially at least, that's basically a noise-level cost of doing business. It might be that it instigates a change in market dynamics but we'll have to see.

More generally, it is another example of the growing sentiment against the big tech players - and one of the few (thus far) that have come to conclusion.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue...
You may eventually be able to do it just with VAT; Andrew Yang doesn't like income tax, taking money away for work they're doing, but he hasn't put that forward as a policy proposal yet - ideally better to implement things step by step.
I trained in cold water rescue and there was a lot of emphasis placed on low head dams. They seem to be everywhere once you know what to look for.
> including all external dependencies

The OS too?
Irrelevant for fleet trucks, which travel relatively short distances compared to commuter vehicles and always stay at the company yard overnight.

A large charging network is really only relevant to regular consumers, and even that is more of a psychological reassurance than a strict requirement given measured consumer behavior.
To me, it sounded more like a call for a bit of empathy and thinking about the foundation upon which the modern economy is built than "a lot of banana republic heaven legislation". Something sorely needed, in my own experience (looking in the mirror at me here!).

I've been lucky, through no real merit of my own, to have ended up in a position where what interests me happens to be somewhat in demand, and financially valuable. I ended up in my field out of personal interest and curiousity, and the unexpected opportunities came on their own. True, those opportunities came through learning and effort, but the fact that I was able to invest the non-trivial time (2-3 years) involved learning those skills is, in itself, exceptional today. It's important to understand the context in which my own present success was possible, and that not everyone begins from the same starting line, and some people will never escape that arbitrary setback.

I'm not sure how a bit of empathy and looking outside our own narrow privileged silo is banana republic legislation, but calls for an honest assessment of the cost of things seemed refreshingly honest to me, and the article clearly communicated her point of view.
That is cool!

I think I may be able to explain the gist (though not the full details).

It uses an IIR filter, or Infinite Impulse Response filter. This is a digital filter (could be either software or hardware) where there’s a feedback loop from the output to the input. The advantage of an IIR is that it can produce a long output (potentially infinite, hence the name) from a single input. The disadvantage is that IIRs can easily get unstable and hard to work with; hence many (most?) applications use FIRs, Finite Impulse Response, where there’s no feedback and the output is strictly bounded.

It looks like they’re using an IIR tuned to produce a Gaussian bell curve as the impulse response. By feeding each pixel through the filter in sequence, each pixel produces a bell curve and those get blended together, exactly what you what.

So, that tight inner loop consists of reading in the next pixel and blending it with the intermediate results of earlier pixels.

Very efficient on a CPU where you can stream the data through, but it wouldn’t work in an OpenGL shader as that expects to work on each pixel in parallel, not sequentially.
Show of confidence + skin in the game
This is very true. Even when collaborating with very skilled engineers, it takes a lot of time and energy to respond to ideas, questions, and review PRs. It’s like a regular programming job to a certain degree, but you’re typically not paid for doing it.
What damage did they do?
It demonstrates what a skilled Rails developer can achieve by himself. It’s not a surprise that so many successful startups are still built with Ruby on Rails regularly.
> Achieving your dream depends on others never achieving theirs, just like Tim Ferris depends on a sea of fanboys striving to be like him, but never getting there.

The conclusion continues to hold if you replace “Tim Ferriss” with anyone else who makes a living selling a recipe for success (e.g. Tony Robbins).

They aren’t difficult to spot. If they’re described as a “lifestyle guru” or are famous for talking about their method instead of their results from applying it, there’s your answer.
Organizations are preparing for cyberattacks from quantum computers
Or the common problem that the teacher wrote the textbook. I'm sure they think it is a great textbook, but it is still a conflict of interest.
> items on virtual shops

No.

> "virtual shops"

But also, no.
Blue Origin doesn't need hydrogen at industrial scale. They could easily supply themselves with "green" hydrogen created via electrolysis.

Elon Musk has promised to eventually fuel Starship with synthetic "green" methane. Green hydrogen is a much simpler problem, so if Blue Origin hasn't yet made that promise, it's quite likely they will soon.
It is the ineffectiveness of the solutions that upsets me more than anything else.

These articles never think about what real resources people need.It's never "such and such square meters of living space, yea much food, so-and-so hours of attention by someone with 12 years training as a doctor".

The answer is always some variant of "more money! more taxes!". This is class warfare - and probably not the sort that will benefit the poor. A serious attempt at improving normal people's lives starts by articulating in precise terms what the minimum standard of life should look like.

"4 hours of work a week" is, I suppose, a good start. Better than average. But it is, as is traditional, totally overlooking any sort of accounting of what resources are needed and how they will be provided. Taxmen don't cause potatoes to grow.
> what can be done with absolutely no runtime memory allocations.

How does it handle long inputs then?

> var input_buffer: [max_input]u8 = undefined;

Well, I suppose setting a fixed maximum length for user input is a way to never allocate.
I have a lot of sympathy for developers like this, and this kind of story is too common.

It seems like a problem that could be turned into opportunity. If one's software is becoming that popular, and the demands for changes so many that it's too much -- why not try to monetize it? Let the current version stay open source, and create customization and support for a fee. It could make the effort worthwhile, and could even grow into a business.

Consumers in the foss world need to understand that getting their wishes fulfilled isn't necessarily going to be free. They might be asked to pay; or, they have the option to fork their own branch.
There is the Debian popularity contest: popcon.debian.org , which tracks how many Debian users have a given package installed.
Valid points:

- The four-hour work week is a fantasy

- Comfortable lifestyles are generally only possible when other people are doing the hard work on your behalf, particularly service industry workers

Dubious points:

- The US dollar is strong in impoverished countries due to colonialism (there may be some truth to this, but there are many other factors)

- "Tax breaks" (no definition provided) never create jobs

- Universal basic income is achievable if we "make everyone pay their fair share" (depends on how big the cheques are. $100/month, or $2,500/month?)
In an ideal world you're right. But most people don't create projects expecting -- or even wanting -- huge success.

1. Sometimes people create a project for themselves but use Github as a convenient place to store the code. I've done that before and found people filing issues against those projects.

2. Sometimes people create a project to scratch a personal itch and put it online in case it helps anyone else. Not in the sense of hoping people will use it but rather than in the "I bought 10 bottles of wine and only drank 9. Help yourselves to the last bottle" sense.

Maybe there should be (maybe there already is) a software license that should better explain the "wrote this for myself. You're free to use it but don't expect support".

3. Some people probably do hope that their project has some, maybe even just small, degree of success but they host in their own user profile because their Github profile is their CV and they're starting new projects in the hope of landing better jobs.

This 3rd group are a particular problem for open source. Not in the sense that they're doing anything wrong -- they're clearly not. But in the sense that you end up with a lot of NIH since the primary reason for a project existing is to boost the CV. So when the primary maintainer moves on, any future contributors will prefer to build their own solution rather for their own CV rather than taking over maintenance of the existing project.

---

It should also be noted that not all projects are large enough to warrant their own Github org. Take BurntSushi's stuff. I'd wager the percentage of HN developers who use BurntSushi's code is in the double figures. But there'd be no sense in every one of his projects being it's own org.
Can you give a brief breakdown of what features are the same between ToolJet and a service like Retool, what features are different, which ones are intentionally left out, and how close to feature parity you're hoping to get?
Not mentioned in this article is that they’re still working on the Y chromosome, so there’s more work to be done, but it’s still a monumental achievement.
$900 million = 5 days of federal food stamps spending

$3-4 billion = 3 weeks of federal food stamps spending

I know which I think is the better government expenditure
Spotify is a music streaming service.

These other apps are for curating your own audio files.

Also what does "bloated election app" mean? Because it seems like it's just a meme at this point.

I'm using the desktop app right now.
It's using 160mb of ram and it's very responsive.

Teams is just a bad application.

A lot of shitty "enterprise" software is written in Java. If I started saying Java = Bad software. I'm sure many people would disagree.
Someone gifted me the Tim Ferriss book this author is talking about (“The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”). It has a few potentially interesting parts about work life balance, but the majority of it is self-help pipe dreams.

It advocates techniques like only answering e-mail once per day or less. He provides scripts for asking your boss to work from home so you can secretly travel the world while collecting paychecks and doing as little work as possible. He suggests it’s simple to start a lifestyle business to sustain your lifestyle while only working a couple hours per week, using virtual assistants to do most of the work for you while you travel the world.

I’m sure there are some people who have used his techniques successfully, but I’ve mostly watched people become terrible coworkers after trying to implement his advice.

Like the author of this article says, much of his advice is about shifting your work to other people so you have more free time for yourself. That’s fine if you’re doing this as honest business transactions by hiring people, but most office workers implementing this advice just end up shifting their work to their teammates by hiding from communication and working less than everyone else. If you get a “4-Hour Work Week” believer on your team, you’re going to end up picking up a lot of their slack. At least until your manager catches on and lets them go.

That said, I can’t agree with the author’s argument that we need to put a legal upper limit of 35 hour work weeks on everyone. That wouldn’t actually solve the problem of certain people abusing systems to work less than others. It would just require even more people to pick up the slack.

There are broader arguments about those who can afford to live off of investments, but they aren’t really addressed in the article.

It’s worth mentioning that Tim Ferriss didn’t actually get wealthy by following his own advice. He claims to have built and sold a supplement company, but even when his book was released it was hard to find anything about it. By his own accounts he actually worked quite hard at many endeavors and he also writes about burnout from overwork. Much of his wealth actually comes from good timing on being an early investor in companies like Uber.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's opening line from One Hundred years of Solitude was enough for me to pick up the book. Personally, I feel that this is one of the best openings of any book I've read.
Putting it in terms I’ve seen used in sales training, people proactively respond to fear rather than personal betterment.

From a sales perspective it becomes phrasing: “This will cost you $5,000 over the next 3 years if you don’t buy.”

Vs “You will save $5,000...”

People purchase something like 60% more often when using the fear inducing “cost you” phrasing.

From a political standpoint, everything is driven by creating fear of the other party.

Did you know that Republicans are all racist bigots who want you to be poor?

Did you know that Democrats are all lazy, naive communists who want to control everyone’s lives and will bankrupt the entire country while taking away your guns so you can’t protect your family?

Did you know Libertarians are all anarchists who want complete every man for himself chaos with no roads?

It’s always “fear of other” marketing.
The Mars Autonomous Helicopter Ingenuity Confounded by Timestamp Glitch
> When a form requires JS to be submitted, there’s a high probably that I abandon that website instead.

You say that, but I doubt that in practice. If the form is your bank login or bill pay or anything else you are locked into I really doubt you will give up because of some personal opinion on JavaScript and instead spend the next 30 minutes calling somebody to complete a similar action over the phone.

The goal is to achieve accessibility as equivalently as possible, with as little enhancement as possible, and yet often not force a page change because of form submission.
Could you be more specific? "A lot of damage to humanity" is a quite strong claim with deep ethical implications. I would prefer a concrete example of such an act.
!remindme 1 year

:-P
Is this just a function of how long it takes to recreate ~80% of the functionality?

It doesn't matter if it takes half a decade to implement the last 20% of the feature set and iron out all of the bugs and corner cases, if you can bang out a prototype in a long weekend, someone is going to do that over and over. Meanwhile, if it takes nearly a year just to get something half-working, the existing open source codebase has to be pretty bad for you to not at least fork it.
A 20-Foot Sea Wall? Miami Faces the Hard Choices of Climate Change
VAT is the worst tax you can choose to pay for UBI. The poorer someone is, more of their income goes into purchasing stuff. So, you'd penalize people who don't earn that much, while letting off people who earn enough to be able to actually invest part of their income instead of buying stuff.
the fact that this article has triggered so many in the comments by pointing out an uncomfortable truth (you can call it "pessimistic" if you like, doesn't invalidate the message) shows that (at minimum) it has served a useful purpose of stoking conversation
Looks great to me. Why do you think it is not of high quality?
This is kind of sad to read, that someone building and maintaining a free product feels compelled to over apologize for want burning out.

It may just be my cynical view of the world but it just seems like more and more people are demanding higher and higher levels of service for things that they don’t pay much if anything for.

I play a game right now that is in Beta called Dual Universe. Some people paid for Kickstarter packages 5-6 years ago for around 40 bucks. The game has its areas for improvement to be sure, but some of the players are just horrible and abusive to the community. I know they paid 40 bucks for a vision some years back and maybe DU has overproduced a bit, but the abuse of the 40 or so staff that is trying to build an amazing game where you can build anything you can dream of with voxels is just unrealistic.
> Otherwise, what's the motivation of the writer?

To point out the snake oil thats being sold here. Its easy to have a four hour work week if you're rich. The motivation of the speaker is to point out that what Tim is espousing is essentially unachievable unless you have a whole bunch of startup capital. It also points out that achieve the four hour week, you need to exploit people, either directly or indirectly.

So I'd say the motivation here is moral.

> Eventually, yes, we can get to the point where most people work fewer hours.

well given that "share of the national profit" movements have been about for almost a hundred years: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_Party_of_Great_B...) I'd say that the whole limited working week thing is a pipe dream. Well, not as the OP points out without creating a gopher underclass.
Manipulated the price of certain crypto, and monopolized e-commerce.
I worked at an ISP in 1996, where we would buy external Boca 28.8k modems in bulk from retailers and take the boards out to put them in our racks because they were cheaper - yet identical - to the "ISP-grade" versions that Boca sold as just boards.

Back then we referred to it as shucking the modems, so it's definitely not a new term in IT/computing (never mind the actual origin of the word).
JD leases tractors for those who prefer that model.
A lot of the new equipment is not even bought, but rather leased. The largest farms will keep rolling the leases into new equipment and then the used equipment is then put out on the used market for someone to buy. The first users do not have a whole lot of concern about legally of their ownership as their leases have them renting the equipment from the start.

The users down the line may have greater concern, but they are limited to what is available on the used market. If the first generation users choose John Deere, that means they are effectively limited to John Deere.
If you've ever tried to get a low-paying job in the US these days, it's very difficult. Many first have to take several tests first to prove they're a "good" Human.
I’d say it’s forever 1997. Netscape had a server side JavaScript platform in 1997.

People still build 3 tier apps, and web farms. It’s eternal 1997.