skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: How to build a dual power supply and function generator around 8038 IC
Hi,

I'm learning electronics and documenting my way as I go. I'm periodically creating YouTube videos where I try to explain in simple terms what I've created, learned and understood, to help others who are also at a beginner level like me.

Today I've created this video:

DIY dual power supply & function generator! Explained!
https://youtu.be/ybsgdeOz3js

In this video I am showing and explaining:
- how to build a straight-forward dual power supply: For input it uses a simple supply, such as a single battery. It offers 3 output pins: HIGH, LOW and MIDPOINT (aka positive, negative and 0)
- how to build a signal generator, using the ICL8038 chip + some external components for selecting frequency, duty cycle, etc.
- how to amplify the signal and optionally apply an offset to it and then present it to the output as a "usable" low impedance signal.
I've been pretty skeptical about SPAs but having tried out Svelte for a few side projects, I have to admin I was probably directing my skepticism to the wrong thing, probably React was the cause of my dislike for SPAs. Svelte looks really awesome and the simplicity it brings back is invaluable. I really wish it takes off, for real. Looks very promising.
You are right. Sounds like they need to sponsor him!
> I'm glad you're having a good experience now, and git as a monorepo will work fine at smaller scales, but you will outgrow it at some point.

I would say the opposite. A lot of companies are fine with independent teams using their own versions of dependencies and their own versions of core code, but at some point that becomes unmanageable and you need to start using a common set of dependencies and the same version of base frameworks to reduce the complexity. That means pushing a patch to a framework means all the teams are upgraded. Monorepos are the most common solution to enforce that behavior.

Look, this is all dealing with the problem of coordination in large teams. Different organizations have different capacities for coordination, and so it's like squeezing a balloon -- yes, you want more agility to pick your own deps but then the cost of that is dealing with so much complexity when you need to push a fix to a commonly used framework or when a CVE is found in a widely used dep and needs to be updated by 1000 different teams all manually.

There is no "right" way. It's just something organizations have to struggle with because it's going to be costly no matter what, and all that matters is what type of cost your org is most easily able to bear. That will decide whether you use a monorepo or a bunch of independent repos, whether you go for microservices or a monolith, and most companies will do some mix of all of the above.
This is such great news! I've been vaguely aware of svelte for some time now but it wasn't until a few months ago that I started using it professionally and it is such a joy to use!

I recently did an onboarding and explained why svelte instead of react of vue, and svelte code, to me, is so much more intuitive and clean!

Thanks for the awesome work Rich and best of luck in this new chapter!
A lot of comments here point to users eventually running up against the boundaries of no/low-code environments and having to make the decision to graduate from them or push their limits to a place where they were really not intended to be used.

I've spent the past 1.5 years or so building a no-code data analytics tool called Mito [1] -- a spreadsheet extension to JupyterLab that lets previously Excel-based workers make the switch to a Python based environment. Unlike other no/low-code data analytics tools we spend a large amount of engineering time making sure that users are never locked into Mito. We do this in 2 ways: Firstly, every time you make an edit to your data in the Mito spreadsheet, we automatically generate the equivalent Python code for you. And secondly, to make it easy to work with that code, Mito is an extension to your JupyterLab environment. By existing in the IDE that you would otherwise be using if you didn't have the low-code environment, its really easy for users to switch back and forth between working in the Mito no-code environment and writing code themselves.

Practically, what we've seen over the past year is that giving users ownership of the code that they create using Mito and existing in JupyterLab has been incredibly important. The most active Mito users are those that use Mito in conjunction with custom Python code that they or their company has written. They do things like incorporate API calls to access their data, use advanced pandas/Python functionality that we don't support, etc.

TLDR: We believe that no/low-code are most powerful when they are augments to the "real deal" code-first workflow instead of a substitution.

[1] https://trymito.io/hn
Sounds like a great idea! And in the future we would need to dedicate at least one discrete GPU exclusively to AI progress bars, right? Would drive sales. So seems legit, doesn't it? ;-)

But maybe, just maybe, AI isn't the right answer for everything. Especially loading indicators…
I work at Stacker (YC S20) [0] -- we're actively building a part of this future and so I've done a lot of thinking about it.

My view is that, indeed, the general no-code category represents a paradigm shift in the truest sense. That is, it is not going to replace anything we currently use software engineering for, except at the very edges. This is pretty obvious to anyone who understands software and the complexity inherent in building custom things. Rather, it will enable a massive new category of software to be built, where presently it is uneconomical to do so.

Think simple tools, sometimes throwaway tools only needed for a few weeks, tools specific to each new project - things currently implemented with whiteboards and sticky notes that would clearly be better as digital tools in all sorts of ways - and indeed increasingly essential as the assumption that everyone is in the same office gets less true.

This stuff is typically quite straightforward but requires deep domain context that'd be really difficult to translate into a spec, and way too expensive anyway to justify hiring engineers to build, but it can now just be done directly by the domain experts themselves who need not necessarily be technical.

This category is simply massive - think of the number of such tools that could be useful in even a single given business if they were simple and cheap to create. Now multiply that by every business.

If you're convinced / intrigued by any of what I've said, by the way, we are hiring. So let's chat about it more! Email is in my profile :-)

[0] https://stackerhq.com
Seeing how often virtualbox breaks things and the swiftness with which this spins up a throwaway vm, it has some potential for a faster dev project host.
Reddit Has Enabled IPv6
Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka, Founder of Something Awful, Is Dead at 45
What are you working on now that was different between the last one and this one?
The beatings will continue until morale improves?

Spaces are very useful for readability.
I'm still driving my 2004 Volvo XC70. It crossed 100K miles this summer. My thinking is to replace it next year with a newer XC70. I love the shape and form factor. Wish they were still made. While I feel safe in the case, I know that I'm missing out on new active safety features.
Component level repair is something NASA does actually do on ISS. And Big Rocket allows you to also bring dissimilar redundancy.
That completely lets the companies off the hook for dangerous and unnecessary pollution. Even if nobody was around, they should have an ethylene oxide scrubber. That is a major source of teratogenic emissions per the article.

Also, it strikes me as extremely speculative on your part that this is a zoning issue. How do you know that these plants didn't shift product mixes or expand after there were established communities nearby, or that the companies provided incorrect information to regulators? Unless you want to fund armies of scientists for the regulator to validate the truth of claims made on submissions then you have to blame the companies that submit false data. That seems far more likely than your assumption.
> when a crash can't be avoided it should attempt to make the crash as close as possible to the nearest crash test protocol of the jurisdiction it's operating in

Like quickly put a dummy in your seat and throw you out?
Is there a point in having a monorepo if you're all in on the microservices approach? I'm a big microservices skeptic, but as far as I understand it, the benefit of microservices is independence of change & deployment enforced by solid API contracts—don't you give that all up when you use a monorepo? What does "Monorepo with microservices" give you that a normal monolithic backend doesn't?

(Obviously e.g. an image resizer or something else completely decoupled from your business logic should be a separate service / repo anyway—my point is more along the lines of "If something shares code, shouldn't it share a deployment strategy?")
> When I just tried it out now, it seems to be about 200 before the page has fully loaded.

Gmail was ready long before that. Most of those requests are just pre-loading the immediately visible email threads in the background.

Disclaimer: not associated with Google, but have reverse-engineered the Gmail XHR-format for (non black-hat) web-extension purposes.
>There is indeed a contingent of crazy people who don't think COVID is real

Do you know anyone, personally?
It's a red flag. Looks cool on the surface, but if it's what it appears, it should be subjected to a more rigorous review.
Awesome. Been using Svelte exclusively for a couple years in my projects and don't see myself using React ever again.
So the user knows if they should stop waiting, reload/refresh/restart, or just hang tight.

If a progress bar or loading animation does not stop when something goes wrong, the it is conveying zero information and shouldn't be there.
Based on the ref below it can be up to 2tons a year. Again this comes from french nuclear plant which I know are very different from US or Japan ones.

https://www-boursorama-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bourso...
What Artists Need to Know about Copyright
New insult for PMs: You're worse than NPM's progress bar!!
There was the recent case of ebay management stalking and harassing a critic.
My wife is out and kids upstairs so I'm reading HN alone in the living room and actually laughed out loud (after first thinking you had replied to the wrong comment).
Yeah, sorry, you're really all over the place, contradicting yourself, willfully misreading, etc.

Listen, though: your heart's in the right place. That's really the important thing.
It was deemed too dangerous by the powers that be, so it was banned from app stores, the extension was banned by Firefox and Chrome, etc.
I've been known to get up and code whenever something was too slow on the toilet.
He’s talking about selling NFTs not buying them (at least as far as I can tell). Selling NFTs (or the infrastructure for others to do so) seems like a reasonably sensible plan.
Quotes around the path is easier and avoids any issues - but tab completion and drag and drop files into terminal handles most cases for me.
> you will outgrow it at some point

Given that Google and Microsoft use monorepos that seems unlikely!
Centrally directed economy? No, that most likely wouldn't work. There is a lot of room for free-market economies that are very much not capitalist.
What could be improved in the documentation?
I use neither, I tried to use both, but my main driver is a latop and even though I have a 1TB SSD I consider this to be eating a significant portion of my disk space. electron apps already are disk hungry enough on their own.
Business value and technical implementation details method are not necessarily connected in any way…something that in my opinion many engineers should think about more often.

You can make a lot of money on sophisticated custom technology, or you can make a lot of money with very little technology or even white-labeling someone else’s technology.

Every business should focus on the basic value proposition on for their business and product and make decisions that support it.

How do we make money, and where is the best place for our time to be invested to make more money? That’s it, that’s the only question there is.
You have a better filter than I do. :) I went through a phase where I gobbled up anything productivity related, and eventually had to stop myself because it was too distracting. I still want to believe someone can tell me a valuable trick that I don't know about. Often even just the headline or title of a productivity-oriented article or Kindle book seems to evoke an appealing idea that I'm curious about, and after reading the text it's not always clear to me that the idea would work or not without trying it. But now I've developed a system that I'm happy with, it's much easier for me to filter.
> This is not a dead man, I am really alive

Hi there! Just a friendly note since it appears that there might be a slight misunderstanding (perhaps ESL?)

The "deadman's switch" [1] is not in reference to you (the creator) being a literal dead person, but rather to the definition of your service being built to operate in the event something (like being kidnapped/killed/incapacitated) happens to the user.

Hope that helps clear up the confusion.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch
Maybe I'm just a trivial person, but when I ask myself why I wouldn't live in those places, or any place, I find I'm simply psychologically incapable of being motivated by anything other than living standards, the attractiveness of members of my opposite sex, proximity to friends and family, and all that.

I would much rather not live in China, for the same reason I'd much rather not live in Montana, i.e. the living standards are a LOT lower in China than where I am, and it will be a lot harder to meet someone on places like Tinder I can feel attracted to.
Can someone convince me to not use spaces in music, film, and book files where they have a "standard title"?
On the other hand, the market has expanded beyond economies where users have the space, power and physical safety to actually own a desktop. For some people their first, last and only "PC" is their smartphone. Your choice then becomes embracing those users or not having those users at all.
Lots of my friends were watching myth busters, which I think would qualify for this.
And it's worth noting the Ethernet adapter is only $20, and appears to be a power supply as well:

https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Accessories_Guide_Rect... (page 8)
Because you want to know if there was an error during loading and it's not progressing anymore, instead of a forever-increasing loading bar that just makes you wait.
That's the equivalent of software monitoring alerts that engineers can't do anything to fix.

Alert! A new user has joined.

Alert! A user has logged in 47,000 times in the last minute

The second gets ignored because of the flood of the first kind of message. It's called Attention Fatigue and policies often don't take the effect seriously enough.

Better would be a warning with relative danger. Something like a how-cooked-is-your-goose measure: rare, mid-rare, medium, medium-well, well done, charcoal.
This is common in certain verticals, think e-commerce organizations with relatively niche products like replacement auto parts. They (the big fish being Autozone and Advance) go through the effort of having separate pages for each model year and the part name-- even when parts are interchangeable across multiple years. There are tools sold on a commission basis like http://www.youramigo.com that automatically create these pages, but they never seemed to get much traction.

The largest issue is Google's crawl budget. With limited domain authority, it will be hard to get xx,xxx+ pages indexed without a meaningful number of quality backlinks. Low MSV queries are even tougher if you don't rank #1, too, so using GSC to A/b test titles/descriptions CTRs will be super helpful. On-site interlinking will also be another easy way to juice visibility.
And soon in the US if you don't have a booster you'll be considered dirty and unvaxxed. They will just keep moving the pole as long as they are allowed.
My twins were born three months early, and we enrolled them in several studies during their NICU stay. Several came with potential but limited risks, either of side effects or a treatment regimen that might be somewhat less optimal (one was exploring different frequency of bilirubin lighting, for example).

We did so in part because my kids benefited from other people making that same decision years ago - to participate in clinical trials that might benefit future children like mine.
Vercel is a hosting provider for static websites. I see it as a simplified versions of AWS, specifically for static websites.
Looks cool - what is the timescale for Windows?
How many poor ones?
This is not the story I thought it would be based on that title!

"The “crack” in the façade, which covers 10 storeys, is a reference to Colorado’s dramatic mountain scenery." So it's designed to look like it has this crazy crack in it. I wonder what that'll look like in real life, the renders are... interesting.

I figured this was another building that's in danger of falling like San Francisco’s slowly cracking up Millennium Tower.
I thought 'M' was for Microsoft now, not Facebook
You mean we should invent something like the HTTP Content-Length header?
Welp. We are in a dead-end.
It's very likely. The difference between RHD and LHD models are much more extreme than is obvious. Vehicles have to be designed with chirality in mind, but not everything can just be moved to the other side of the vehicle, for example, a FWD car usually has the engine orientation fixed regardless of market, which is going to cause asymmetries.
I've checked multiple sources and I can't find a single definition of genius that requires the person be notable or "who greatly improved human society through their intellect." Only that they be exceptionally intelligent or gifted in a certain field.
I wrote about what I perceived as deficiencies of hierarchical file systems, and proposed an alternative organization based on tags and hashes. It was discussed on Hacker News last week and many years ago.

https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio... ; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29141800
I don’t know personally as I haven’t been in a company the uses it, but my understanding is the Culture Amp platform is designed to get around these pitfalls, and that’s why companies pay a lot to use it.

Surely a company that just allows these issues to persist will lose talent to companies that can do better at culture and retention, even if just a little?

I certainly know the founders/senior execs are very smart and also very well intentioned, and they’ve been growing strongly for a long time, so they must be getting some solid results for their clients.
Thanks for the feedback, we'll improve this!
The nice thing about spaces is there are so many to choose from, thanks to Unicode.
5 year NON-FROZEN food “adequate for Spaceflight”doesn’t exist. But if you simply bring a big freezer, the problem is almost trivial. Why don’t they normally do that on ISS already? Fundamentally, MASS. Freezers are heavy (mass) and use a lot of power (mass).

Fun fact, but SpaceX has launched ice cream in a freezer to ISS before. This isn’t hypothetical.

See how many hidden assumptions there are which can be relaxed if mass constraints are relaxed? It’s just assumed freezers aren’t viable because they’re too heavy. There’s stuff like this all over the place. The entire field is built under the assumption that mass is extremely rare.

Thanks for highlighting the point that big rocket solves these problems in almost a trivial way.

(And what does blockchain have to do with it? Blockchain is simply a worse solution to a database problem.)
"mainstream media" is code for "stuff i don't agree with"
Amos6 style explosiw would have been surviveable if there was crew on board because of the launch escape thrusters.

See Soyuz T-10a
Frontpage, dreamweaver, joomla, wordpress, etc.
While no-code tools have existed forever, the difference is now they have finally found their niche – workflow automation for mid to large sized companies.

I have personally seen entire departments move from pen and paper to off-the-shelf boxed software to SaaS and now to no-code apps. You can finally customize your software exactly how you like without hiring a team of developers, and that's a great thing.
Sounds like you're an edge case, ride an ebike!
So there's at least one counter example.
So you take a one page HTML post + Volvo marketing as "proof" of your decision?
Molecular tools reveal potential Covid-19 diagnostic and therapeutic targets
Hypothetically, where would "societal collapse" fall in this framework? I'm thinking that you'd just consider it the same as "sudden death," if it happens, assign it a prior probability distribution, update that prior every year or so, and act accordingly.
It depends on how they handle them, oversize the solar panes to ensure that you never drop below your minimum operation current requirements?

That is a very good question, because larger panels would mean more mass and cost more.

So careful balancing of the factors? or a different panel formula?
This is really well presented, but wouldn't it be more accurate and useful with actual cancer case data instead of estimated cancer risk?
He seems to deny the allegations here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/still-amazed-at-39693289
The big selling point of GMail originally was the amount of space you got. Earlier versions of the login page advertised this by having a bit of javascript that showed an increasing number showing you how the quota was increasing.

If you inspected source, it just had a little exp function with different constants depending on how far in the future it was.
I am probably missing something here, but how is Hightouch differentiated from other similar tools like Census (https://www.getcensus.com/)?
This is awesome. Next.js is garbage so hopefully SvelteKit gets all the love and attention from now on.
The problem is as it's always been. Solving problems in the general sense is hard. It is true in design, it is true in AI, it is true in the automotive world, and on the battlefield. Specialized for one task is easier to learn, and easier to design for. General is harder to learn, and harder to design for.

With that in mind, it's interesting that we still even have "general-purpose programming languages." There is some specialization for sure, but that's partly because of things like e.g. the browser only supports Javascript. And then you see things going back the other way, e.g. with NodeJS.

So I'd wait till we see some actual, real specialization in the languages / tools that engineers use, beyond "ecosystem" reasons. In the meantime, we've seen tools that help non-programmers "automate" things. Everything from CAD to Wix, Salesforce, Figma, etc. would fall under that umbrella. But then you still have code. If what you want is automation / labor-force-multipliers, the common denominator will still be highly generalized, and therefore, hard.
Very different concept from Tor -- this is about passing sensitive information between dedicated government facilities, not about hiding some of the details of your activity on the public Internet.

The argument for Tor's benefit for military personnel (which may or may not have panned out in practice) was all about protecting some of their activity on networks controlled or at least monitored by their adversaries. That's almost the opposite of SIPRNet.