skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> History would suggest we’ll screw this up. Space is a commons, and we humans have a terrible track record of despoiling commons.

The question isn't "Will there eventually be some sort of incentive to clean up space junk?" (which would lead to some sort of free-market amelioration if not solution), it's "Can this be prevented?" Free market solutions to cleaning up commons often come too late and are imperfect.

The one saving grace here is that other living things won't be harmed; so there will potentially be less ripple effects.
On BBS and MUDs, cyberpunk MUDs and the Dragon Ball ones are really cool :D.

And Nethack/Slashem/Crawl over Telnet/SSH, OFC. A must have.
Ah, so you can't actually name any specific slimy practice relevant to this conversation? Thought so.
I was always jealous of schools that would teach some sort of programming or web design. My high school computer class (each year) was learning how to use MS Office. Which was probably the most useful instruction the rest of those kids could have received... but I wanted to learn to program.

So, the computer class instructor sat me down and asked me what I knew about programming. "I can use Perl", I said (I had read Perl For Dummies, v5.00502 edition). So he told me to make an online calendar for the school. So, I did. No instruction... just figured it out as I went. And that's how I learned that managing and displaying events in arbitrary times and dates is harder than P=NP.

Turns out that giving me that project was intended to save the school from having to pay for a real online calendar.
I'm able to solder Ball Grid Arrays at home, after a bit of practice, but I have no way to inspect them. I would love a cheap home Xray machine just for this purpose.
.NET is an umbrella term for the platform ecosystem that includes, among other things:

* Common Language Runtime(aka CLR, aka runtime) and its JIT compiler RyuJIT

* The C# language and it's compiler Roslyn

* The base class library and framework class libraries(aka BCL and FCL)

* ASP.NET the flagship web application framework

* F# the platforms flagship functional language

* etc etc

It's all ".NET"
If the waste in your software development process is basically on topic software development activity, you’re in pretty good shape already.

In my world it’s things like meeting load, calendar fragmentation, 3+ interviews a week, distributed sites, lurching from planning cycle overhead to perf/promo cycle overhead and back again, promotion oriented development, constant deprecation and migration churn among perfectly good dependencies, shitty oncall loads, etc. When you get an afternoon free to actually address the software development tasks ahead of you, that itself is cause for celebration, no matter whether they are the optimal tasks to do or done in the optimal way.
People keep coming up with these fanciful scenarios because they don't like the idea of being able to shoot intruders, but think about that for a second. You're positing that a person wants to kill a random person they don't know, but also wants to do it in the loudest, messiest way that absolutely guarantees a police investigation. And the outcome, if their brilliant little scheme fails, is the death penalty.
<!-- Generated by graphviz version 2.40.1 (20161225.0304)
-->

You can use the dot(1) command for that, with output set to SVG in this case (-Tsvg).
But I think why this hasn't happened (although there are a few color e-ink devices available from Chinese companies) is that the B&W e-ink devices like the Kindle handle reading normal books just fine. The only cases where color would really be needed would be for comic books, art books, and to some extent scientific papers with color figures.
Its may be hard to swallow, but I suspect you are 100% correct in your prognosis. The open internet is a national security threat whose days are waning...at least between geopolitical rivals.
>You can drive a car without...

There is at least one case where this doesn't hold:

On a 3rd generation prius the coolant loops around the cat to warm up the engine faster, and the coolant will leak out if someone steals your cat. The engine would be destroyed pretty quickly if you run it without coolant I think.
Game of Life: Programmable Computer
Your comment is an excellent example. You completely straw manned my argument. There is zero connection between what you claimed I said, and what I actually said. Zero.

Your comment was obviously malicious, but I guarantee you will now proceed to avoid responsibility by feigning ignorance. To those you wish to manipulate, particularly those without particularly good linguistic ability, your comment could work to trick them into ignoring what I said. However, to everyone else who can clearly see that isn't what I said, you will pretend to have 'simply not understood what I was saying'.
Minaj has a song called super bass, similar effect.
ISO 25010 – Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation
I love jetbrains' products, but I really miss the days where intellij ultimate was essentially an all-in-one release.

I'm in a polyglot environment, and it's frustrating to jump from editor to editor.
I don't know if I like this framing at all. If your company has fostered an atmosphere where there seems to be tension between writing unit tests and shipping features, you've already screwed it up. If you divide your development schedule between shipping features and writing tests you are simply enabling the bad actors in your organization to inevitably short-change that part of the cycle.
Some pretty horrible string / 'registry' metaclass hackery: https://github.com/xrudelis/pytrait/blob/master/pytrait/impl...
A boss of mine, older woman, once told me frankly she doesn't think men and women should work alongside eachother in most circumstances. She believed sexual tension is inevitable and impedes productivity. I was young at the time and I thought that was ridiculous cause I never had issues. It wasn't until later on where I was attracted to one of my coworkers. It was a moment of clarity, I had trouble focusing simply because of this sexual tension both of us were feeling. And us acting on those feelings didn't make it any better. Having worked from blue to white collar over a decade, one thing is for sure and that is, sex is never going to leave people's minds.
Are you in the US? The patent process usually takes a long time (potentially many years) and potentially a lot of money.

Your details about not being able to form a company are suspicious — why not? It’s really cheap and fast.
Earn money for the value you provide on social media
Big fan of Pluto, and I’ve watched the Computational Thinking videos several times already.

What I’m looking for when I talk about tools for thinking are the same type of sketching out a problem I do on paper. My first-year physics professor said (many years ago) that the way to start solving a problem is to make a well-labeled figure. I’m looking for something like MathCAD where you can label a figure with equations, or in COMSOL where you can start with a parametric description of a problem.
Seems like you should have been fully vested from any original grants by now. So, 8 year vesting, plus the low salary? Hope you are learning things that will position you for success in your next role.
>World's first! The fourth new material following wood, iron, and concrete.

..and stone, and brick, and glass, and adobe, and straw, and fabric..
The solution for this problem is relatively simple. Satellites should be put in very low orbits. A satellite collision in high orbit is practically irreversible and will pollute space essentially forever. A satellite collision in low orbit is automatically cleaned up by the atmosphere, over a period of years to months to days depending on the orbit height.

In the past it was not practical to put satellites in low orbit for several reasons. One, because the same atmospheric drag that cleans up debris would pull the satellites out of orbit too, severely limiting their useful life. Two, because a satellite in low orbit can only see a small part of the Earth's surface at once and passes over it very quickly. You can't use stationary satellite dishes to communicate with such satellites, and establishing continuous coverage over any part of the Earth's surface would require hundreds or thousands of satellites.

Two things have happened that changed the game. One, phased array antennas are now cheap enough for consumer applications and they are able to communicate with multiple fast-moving satellites at once without physically pointing at them. Two, SpaceX has decreased launch costs to the point where it is now feasible to launch thousands of cheap satellites instead of dozens of expensive satellites, and replace them all within a few years instead of expecting them to last for decades. Starlink satellites orbit at 550km where debris lasts only a few years before automatically being cleaned up by the atmosphere. Future generations may orbit even lower where debris is cleaned up even quicker.

The non-SpaceX proposals for large constellations mostly chose higher orbits. I think it's time to prohibit this. Starlink competitor OneWeb just had a satellite failure at 1200km and that dead satellite will pollute orbit for centuries if it is not retrieved (and there is no realistic plan to do so, nor proper incentives to ensure that it happens). Heaven forbid that it collide with something and produce an ever-expanding debris cloud that can never be fully cleaned up in our lifetimes. Meanwhile, Starlink has had tens of failed satellites and they are all deorbited already or well on their way.

It just doesn't make sense to do things the "old space" way with a small number of expensive high orbit satellites. Low orbit cheap satellites are the future.
The UK has ~82 house fires per day, for 27 million dwellings. It’s not clear if these map 1-1 with buildings (I.e building a split into apartments).

The USA has 928 fires per day for 139 million houses.

So if hastily googled statistics are to be believed, you’re over twice as likely to have a house fire in the USA.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
They've even been making slightly sarcastic browser games like "Pokémon or Big Data": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622752
Well if you are already in the purifying ores business it would be better than what they usually work with. It would serve as a laundering step - it isn't stolen catalytic converters with serial numbers or ones with their numbers filed off, it is generic low quality scrap metal now.
See also concrete dome homes: https://www.monolithic.org/domes

We were looking into concrete domes for building a home in Florida. We got cold feet when we couldn't find a contractor who would work in our area that had any experience with this procedure.

I still would love to live in a "dome home".
Yes, people in the states without testing can just straight pipe it for $10 and half an hour of labor rather than shell out thousands to get a new cat installed.

Save money and future proof yourself from further thefts.
I, as an embedded developer working for a vending machine manufacturer did this about 10 years ago.

The sales people came running and asked me to help them "fix the home page" because the sales chief had realised that diffrent markets could see what prices the other markets was being charged.

Not being a web guy, I said that we probably should have a look at the server code to see if we could figure out what to do.

Turns out there was no server code, just static web pages. I said we could probably password protect the price lists with javascript but any child who knew how to hit F12 would be able to see the prices anyway.

They said "What's F12? Can you do it today?"
> wouldn’t it just make sense to make a lot of cheap satellites that you throw up in a low enough orbit that a collision would only require a few years til the shattered pieces de orbit and burn up?

That's essentially Starlink, though for other reasons. But lower orbits see much less of the earth. Earth has a radius of about 6000km, at a low-earth orbit of around 600km you are way too close to have a good view, so you need a lot of satellites to cover the globe. There are also useful special orbits like geostationary orbits (where the satellite is always in the same spot relative to earth's surface) or sun-synchronous orbit (the shadows always look the same because you are in the same spot relative to the sun) that are much higher up.

However with cheaper satellites, cleaning up dead satellites or larger chunks of debris also becomes cheaper, we just need to figure out who has to pay for it. Right now we are kind of stuck with everyone being affected but no one feeling responsible.
The difference between average "stupid" and average "smart" is nowhere near significant enough to make a practical difference. It's a question of how willing someone is to take advantage of their situation.

By maybe 3 years old, humans figure out they can lie about their ignorance of what's generally good or bad to get away with a ton and that will be taken advantage of until some sense of accountability and honor is learned, or there's some significant threat to their personal well-being. A lot of people don't get past that stage until their late teens, but young people don't have much opportunity to do a ton damage with that mindset, they don't tend to have much power. Some people never develop the sense of accountability and go on to test the limits of their feigned ignorance until they find the lines, and walk them as close as possible. As adults, on average, they may not "succeed" as much as "smart" people, but the problem is, people like that are more likely to seek a position that allow them to get away with it, and "smart" people keep letting them off with a look of disappointment, and the assumption that they've "learned from their mistake" and won't do it again, but what they've really learned is they're not as close to the lines as they thought and go a little further next time.
Domes see expensive to build and expensive to maintain. Makes me wonder why we always assumed the moon colonies of the future would be exotic looking architecture rather than boring and easy to upkeep.
Particle physics has to a large extent become engineering: particle accelerators, nuclear reactors, radiotherapy for cancer. Evolution has been applied many times, most famously, to create SARS-CoV-2 right before it escaped from a lab ;)

As for the rest - well, who knows? Do I trust big bang theory? No, not really. I seem to recall it's inconsistent with various other measurements, hence the need for the enigmatic dark matter. But it doesn't matter or affect my life at all so I can easily choose not to trust it and who cares.

Where the problems start is when activists/politicians force me to "trust" self-proclaimed science that has never been through rigorous market-based mechanisms to weed out the crap. Epidemiology. Climatology. Virology. Standards in these fields are rock bottom low because nobody is at risk of losing their jobs if they're wrong, yet, I cannot simply evaluate this "science" and opt out.
I suppose this is sort of a problem depending on how you use it. I find that I don't really need to locate things that I've recently used, because I already know where they are as a result of having recently used them. But, other people have different workflows of course (I can imagine, for example, if somebody's workflow involved creating lots of files, only some of which are immediately useful, they might want the ability to scan through them for particular outputs).
That isn’t code you write in an application. The topic was how to find a method’s handler, this is how it’s done in the REPL.

Or if you mean, dynamically instantiated methods, those are found throughout Ruby and its ecosystem, and the reason it isn’t horrifying is that the language has terrific support at the REPL for developers needing reflection.
Yeah that site would benefit from just using browser default CSS.
But surely there are degrees to this? I mean, if someone tall sits in front of you at the movies, they are violating your right to full viewership of the movie. If you get cut off in traffic, your rights are being violated.

Where is the line? Why is property theft deserving of the end of a human life?
If you build it right, sure. Some roman concrete structures are still standing, and we've had better concrete than them for at least 50-100 years.

That doesn't necessarily make building everything out of it good, but concrete can definitely last a long time.
FWIW there are not many HN users for whom it would be cheaper to personally write 1000 emails than hire a lawyer to write one or two letters.
Who needs to look up anything? They already have to scan the box and note the serial number of the item. Most of the time, these will just match and there's nothing to be done. Likewise, the box of rocks scenario doesn't impose any additional burden. The only time there's any additional work that may need to be done is if there's actually a set of Air Pods in the box that don't match the serial number. In that case, the system can automatically check itself for a previous and recent order of AirPods, pop up the serial number and show the person receiving the return, and they can compare just like they did when the box was scanned.

This would probably take a whole 30 seconds extra, but it would be an edge case. And, as you said, unless they stand to lose this person as a customer, it won't make a damn bit of difference to Amazon whether this particular edge case doesn't work. But, then, so much for "customer obsession," right?
My question wasn't whether it was fast enough, it's whether it happens. There are so many other places cars are parked that seem so much better choices, so I was asking about whether it actually happens rather than if it were feasible.
My point is that every nation follows the same life cycle: the golden age, stagnation, social strife and internal squabbles, normalization of amoral behavior, the steep decline of birthrate and replacement by invaders, be it barbarians or another civilized nation. We're somewhere at last stage, but the US is big and it may stay another hundred years in this quasistable state.
To be clear: the idea of someone breaking into your car is enough to justify ending a human life?
Jaycar still does a lot of this! The one in Central Park Sydney still does a lot of workshops, they have a maker hub, sell a lot of the class electronic components and things like that. Nothing like it used to be with Dick Smith and Radio Shack everywhere, but there's still a few places around.
> Whereas MacPaint seemed almost supernatural compared to what was sat on people’s desks before it.

That's exactly what the experience of using a Mac was like. And it was just beyond comprehension that you could actually get one.
> I'm in the EU and I have not found a solution that works other than a local accounting office.

I am using Paddle from the EU, what do you mean it doesn't work? You will only receive a single invoice that you have to deal with instead of hundreds of invoices from customers from various countries with various tax laws, right?
Cody's lab has all kinds of chemistry and smelting videos: https://youtu.be/UHStZrQ3OP4 for getting them from a catalytic converter.

He's also done an attempt at getting the precious metals from the dust on the interstate
We used to have bison and what not on prairie land. I personally view it as the natural state for much of the US.

I am working on setting up my off-grid sustainable farm. Cattle are relatively easy to keep if you have some average for grazing.
Advanced go – Avoiding `if` for initialization using `sync.Once`
As a backend developer - I literally still use &nbsp; when I’m forced to touch something on the front end
>People that say proof-of-stake "won't work" have no idea what they're talking about.

My understanding is every POS blockchain is centralized and not secure.

Can you name a POS blockchain that you think has achieved sufficient decentralization and security so we can test your claim?

PS: How about answering the question instead of preemptively downvoting and attempting to shutting down the conversation. If POS truly works, you should be happy to provide an example or even multiple examples. Any reluctance is a red flag...
I’ve worked on a team that explicitly aimed to budget about 10-20% of its time on “tech investment” projects to expand/protect our capability to deliver. We also delivered fairly predictably on business goals. It was glorious.
The situation of Cornish is rather different from the situation of Yiddish. Cornish entirely disappeared as a native language for about 200 years and the surviving literature, mostly from the 15th/16th century, was so meagre that many common words had to be reconstructed by comparison with related languages because they didn't happen to appear in the written record. And yet they now have (a few) native speakers again. Quite a story, really. Of course you can read all about it in Wikipedia: https://kw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernowek
Definitely agree. One of the heuristics I use is NPC vs PC. If it feels like something NPCs do or is a fetch quest I avoid it, delegate it, outsource it, etc. If it's a PC thing, then I do it myself.
Car manufacturers usually set the warranty as 36 months/36,000 miles, for example. I'm not claiming that this is the case, but it'd be far easier to plan for X miles than years.
It’s not combative, it’s simply pointless to have a conversation with someone who isn’t actually paying attention.

It’s also a perfectly reasonable assumption, as explained by the first two lines of my comment.
> A before folks bring in lock in, limiting discussion to tech savy. Forget about ecosystem lockin etc, you are optimizing for your family not for you.

People who aren't tech-savvy likely won't realize what they've given up by locking themselves into a single ecosystem, but the cost is still there.

(I don't necessarily disagree with your end-point, just the argument.)
Personally, I no longer use the phrase "technical debt" when speaking to management. It's just too vague of a term. Instead I just explain the actual problem and the consequences - too much near duplicate code leading to slow maintenance, non-scalable design choices leading to slow processes, rigid design choices which hamper the team from implementing the upcoming stories, excessive complexity leading making the code hard to change.

Once you get our of analogies and into actual problems, then you can have a reasonable discussion about future tradeoffs. I find even with non-technical managers, debt/wealth is just not a good analogy for code.

Also, often poor code is just part of a larger process problem. You really need to optimize for the whole project, not just code-level to improve the situation.
Aanother one of those "standards" that you have to pay for, hence almost noone actually reads?

I vote that ISO should publish standards for free, or be defunded.
Ask the people convicted of soliciting a prostitute?

Not a lawyer but had a brief introduction to the entrapment defense as a youngster. As explained to me, in the US, an entrapment defense requires the prevention of choice on the part of the criminal.

So if the LEO offers the converters and the guy says "Get out of here with those things!" then no arrest and no entrapment.

If the LEO says, "I work at a place that replaces catalytic converters and we need to convert these older non-working ones to cash." Then the person making the choice can reasonably say he believed that it was a legal transaction, so even if he is arrested the defense would be entrapment.

I will leave the other script (LEO is the buyer) as an exercise for the reader :-)
I’m willing to bet doing nothing with those drums will turn out to be more problematic than having to decontaminate a few robots.
That's right. The reason for this is that it's a lot of boilerplate if you were to require listing every relevant Impl block as a superclass of your struct. I also, as a bonus, like enforcing a consistent class naming style.