skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Today, I really wanted a banana or two. I was craving it. I love bananas. I was craving them so hard that I was considering using the coins I've been saving as a gift for someone for the purpose of buying bananas from a store.

I prayed. I typically pray in 3 parts: gratitude-forgiveness-requests, and this time was no exception. It went something like this: Thank you for [... some gratitudes ...]. Please forgive me for [... some regrettable things I've done ...]. Please help me find a banana or two to eat.

Before I pray, I typically focus on my breathing, in traditional "breath meditation" fashion. This was the beginning and the foundation of all these practices, and I started practicing breath meditation several years ago.

After prayer, I listened carefully, and I followed what one may describe as physical intuition to a place where someone had left behind the bottom of a banana nut muffin. Not quite a banana, but it did the trick.

Physical intuition is subtle, it is like when you go for a walk without a purpose, going whichever way feels most natural.

In this case, of course, I went out of my way for food, but I also went for a walk, I meditated along the way, etc. I'm not an absolutist by any means.
As a founder of a fast-growing venture-backed company, I have found that there is no better resource to read than Paul Graham’s essays (paulgraham.com). He has seen more startups succeed and fail than any other individual in the history of startups. As such he has come closest to having a statistically representative sample to distill insights from. He is an excellent writer too.

I have also found Peter Thiel’s book Zero To One to be full of actionable insights and recommendations.

Finally, Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup is the bible of iterating fast and finding product-market fit before you invest in a product no one wants (#1 most common way to fail).

Just my 2 cents.

(Disclaimer: we are not funded by YC)
There are sure a lot of art and drafting groups in that book. I wonder how much of it would now be done by CAD software used directly by circuit designers.
That 2009 ThinkPad that the FSF certified is running proprietary blobs in updatable microcontrollers connected to the LPC bus which have full access to RAM and to take over the OS. Blobs which you can't audit, modify, sandbox, nor verify are the correct intended version.

I'd rather buy an M1; sure, it runs a pile of blobs, but at least I know those blobs are there and they're all sandboxed behind IOMMUs and cannot take over or compromise my OS.
> The other point they ignore that if some part is programmable but currently requires proprietary firmware, it's possible (and this has happened) that people reverse-engineer it and produce free software that runs on it.

If this is possible, then device makers should do it, ship the free-software firmware on the device, and then get it RYF-certified. No blobs needed, ROM or otherwise! Problem solved!

It seems like a feature, not a bug, that the RYF certification process makes it more painful and expensive to release devices that rely on proprietary software.
Also one phenomenon, multiple phenomena.
I probably should be more clear, i don't think we should make it hard to learn how they work, or do anything to stop them, and we should probably even make easier, but at the same time, we should make in unnecessary, so we can get stuff done with maximum reuse and minimum monkey patching and custom stuff.
I think one reason for the "missing middle" is that it's dense enough to make parking a serious challenge, but not dense enough to make a completely car-free lifestyle attractive.

I am not sure I'd give up a car for anything less than Manhattan subway (multiple redundant grade-separated tracks, that go everywhere you need, every 2-3 minutes) and you aren't getting public transit that good on just duplexes.
Massive cities are a destined trend under free market and Matthew effect.
Skyscrapers are one of the solutions to massive cities, the others I can think of:

* Lots of cars

* Reduce overall population

* A powerful government that controls a lot and does city planning

* A religion system to make people "do things for the greater good"

you may not what any of them either.

You can propose other solutions as well, feel free.
We need hydrogen for a number of chemical processes, and this will be increasingly true moving forward as we start using it for things like direct reduction of iron to reduce carbon emissions in making steel. Green hydrogen is coming, and will likely be cheaper than grey by the end of the decade, but governments had no way of knowing this when this project was commissioned.

Besides which, there are still many, many plants producing grey hydrogen that are going to keep running until they reach EOL. If we can find ways of reducing their carbon output, that seems like a net gain to me. This project is a demonstrator for such technology, and is a net gain over just another grey hydrogen plant.
Why do slaughtered cattle require more food? Naively I'd guess that the big adult bison eat at least as much as the young cows in the same timeframe.
I’m late to the party and the thread is nigh endless, so perhaps I repeat what others have said… perhaps consider a physical labour job in construction, at least for a while. It is practical, meaningful work, building someone a home. There’s tangible proof of having accomplished something and you know that people will appreciate the end result. Plus, it’s healthy, both physically and mentally. I think you might find it rewarding.
In Ux, you often optimize systems to help make user error as close to impossible as you can, and to optimize to be able to complete tasks quickly. However, in many video games, user error is a core part of the experience and you often don’t want to shorten tasks because they are pleasant. Starcraft players fight on forums to defend the unnecessary tasks they have to do manually because they enjoy practicing their good mechanics, some even asking blizzard to worsen the games pathfinding (big, fascinating subject, won’t get into it here)

That said, I own several books and games that I haven’t put the effort into reading/playing yet. Reading and gaming aren’t effortless
The Black Art of Video Game Console Design

The book is super accessible and has more practical value than bachelor in computer engineering while you build and code a game console

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Video-Game-Console-Design/dp/06...
"But this time, a group of younger (probably millennial) bystanders were cheering and jumping for joy for our trash treasures. They seemed genuinely interested in what we were digging for and what we found."

I wish everyone could react to things the way millennials tend to.
> I tried bounty hunting for a while, but it seems that a lot of companies don't care that much or are dishonest when it comes to paying you

Same experience here. What worked for me is app development with affiliate marketing. But finding a good affiliate program for my users took me a while.
I'm not advocating that anyone tear down the skyscrapers that currently exist. But I certainly do not agree with the idea that skyscrapers are the only or even the best solution to the problems we currently have rooted in trying to figure out how to make life work for roughly eight billion humans on planet earth.
How about a list of those with no VC backing? That’d be interesting
I actually subscribed for a while to SP, but I didn't like having to be connected to the internet to run it. I own two TBOS editions, and it scratches my Haskell, Lisp, Forth (because Klambda), and Prolog itch. I've toyed with the WaspLisp version, and I really want to dive into it. Deech's YT video years ago showing how you could program the front and back end in Shen, because there was a Ruby and JavaScript port really sold me. To me it is relevant, because I can use one language deployed on so many ports. Plus, I just really got into combinators after reading the beginning chapters of Stephen Wolfram's book on them. I don't live and die for open source-only projects. I think only the SP kernel, not all the libraries (grahics, etc.) were. I believe they are still in SP, but I may be wrong.
WebP is an open standard. I would blame your web browser and open an issue to support it. It was not supposed to work with Safari but it does in macOS 12.1. Can't speak for iOS.
There are also probably 9,999 others like you.

https://xkcd.com/1053/
That's not really relevant to the point of the article, which is talking about how privacy-centric internet services are rising in popularity, and the danger that poses to Google's business model.
FYI, that ThinkPad T400 that the FSF certified has multiple microcontrollers running proprietary updatable blobs on the LPC bus with full access to DMA to all of system memory. I am literally more insulated from blobs with an Apple M1, which runs a dozen blobs none of which can take over my OS (thanks to pervasive IOMMU use), than with hardware that the FSF claims "respects my freedom".
This machine does the work of ten men. Unfortunately, it takes twenty men to operate it.
Human societies "reproduce" like the human individual organism "reproduces itself" (its constituent cells are continuously replaced), not the way individual humans "reproduce" (make another human like it).

(Except sometimes human societies do really reproduce, like by colonization of foreign lands.)
Yeah, how dare those states make voting more secure. My gosh, they even offer better voting than Delaware...

Seriously, read the laws, you are just spouting misinformation.
Understanding and sympathising with this viewpoint, the issue is far more one of urban planning and transit than it is of structure height per se.

San Francisco hasn't been known for its soaring towers (though recently the leaning sort are making headlines), but it is centralised and well-served by transit both within the city and from surrounding communities. To this extent, it resembles Chicago.

At the same time, the Bay Area as a whole strongly resembles Los Angeles, with various tech hubs ranging from San Jose to San Francisco, and including Sunnyvale, Fremont, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park Redwood City, and Oakland. If you find yourself job hopping between these spots, commutes get long fast, and there's no one best place to live.

Chicago was built around rail with both the urban CTA and regional Metra rail service. Suburbs first emerged as points on spokes radiating out from downtown. Those have since filled in considerably, and inter-suburban commutes are both real and every much as horrible a mess as you'd imagine them to be.

Los Angeles grew up as an automobile city with boulevards and freeways, and looks it. Absent the constraints of terrain, what defines Los Angeles is a grid-pattern of both streets and freeways. Whilst Chicago does have a street grid, that grid does not define the city in the same way Los Angeles does.

If LA had instead opted to build distributed clusters of both high-rise (office/commercial) and low-rise (residential) towers, on a hub-and-spoke transit system, it might offer a far more reasonable set of commute and living options. There's no strict need for towers, so much as there is for connections between them.

Arguably, another element that defines much of Chicago is its greystone and bungalow residential styles. These don't reach the density of 5--6 story apartment construction typical of Europe, but are far denser than the predominantly single-story fully-separated housing of the Los Angeles area. As with elsewhere, density makes transit service, whether bus or rail, far more viable.
That sounds awesome man. You don't happen to live in Melbourne and be looking for a job, are you?
all i see is a square filled with gems and that's it
I don't really understand how you can "fail" to see the convenience. The convenience comes from the ease of getting it right. I consistently over-cooked steaks with the reverse sear method. Maybe half the time. With sous vide, I never---literally never---overcook a steak.

That's the convenience. I don't have to worry about the temperature. I drop it in the bath and I take it out at my convenience.
>Buildings are primarily about meeting human needs.

ok, what if a human wants to live in a very tall building?
I really appreciated this advice. It's vague enough that if it relates to your life, you'll probably see how when you hear it.

I think I can apply it to both my work life, thinking about times where I overworked myself at a company where nobody else cared enough, and to my personal life, thinking about times where I invested myself fully into relationships where it wasn't certain to be requited.
Speculative Assets Fall as Easy Money Dries Up
What would be an appropriate moderate approach? Because for anyone completely shut off to the idea, any approach is too extreme. And for anyone remotely interested with be intrigued enough to learn more on their own.
So just to clarify, its Google's list of videos and not the users, even if the user created said list.
RIP. You led me to find my true self amongst the noise of the world.
Just because you pay doesn't mean you're not the product.
The way you wanted to phrase that question is, "Cool! Was there any other reason you wanted to build this beyond the technical challenge of it?" Otherwise it sounds like you're saying, "You need to get laid more, bro."

This question is also handy at hackathons. Sometimes you get an answer like, "nope", other times you get anti-government screeds, sometimes dreams of saving the world once they've scaled up.

Personally, I find it better not to ask and to just enjoy the hack.
If you want tube socks manufactured in the US it can be done the same way. Not saying it is good economics, but if the government wants tube sock manufacturing jobs in the US it is trivial to make it happen. If you say "never" or "can't" your are lying, and you really mean you don't want it to happen.
I probably should have disclosed in my previous comment that I'm a former member of Facebook's MySQL infra/automation team, although I didn't work on schema management there specifically.

However, subsequent to FB, I independently built the declarative schema management tool skeema.io which is used by several large well-known companies. So Atlas is a competitor, and I may inherently be biased in my skepticism of tools that use DSLs to generically handle multiple DBMS. (It sounds like we are in agreement there though, regarding your comment on FB's all-MySQL environment.)

Anyway, in my previous comment, my point was that it is certainly possible to build trustworthy declarative schema management tools. It's difficult and requires a lot of effort, but it is not impossible.

Facebook didn't limit schema structure too much, btw. One of my main projects there was building the in-house DBaaS interface, which was used for all sorts of things across the company, quite a wide variety of workloads and table designs. iirc the only major table structure limitations were: you must have a primary key; you must not use foreign key constraints; you must use InnoDB (or later MyRocks, but that was after my time). These are fairly common requirements among other large MySQL-backed companies though, definitely not specific to Facebook.
> There is definitely a sense of reward in simply buying a book - even one you never read

Is there? Doesn't that just make you feel like an idiot for wasting your money? The only feeling I ever get after spending money is "this better not suck".

Feeling a sense of reward simply for spending money sounds unhealthy.
> Netflix estimates 1-7GB per hour.

Yes, and my estimate was “hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes per hour”. So apparently Netflix also agrees with me.

> Games need to load that much data in under a minute.

This is based on design decisions from the programmers, not some kind of iron law of nature. Obviously you can’t just drop a game designed for one set of constraints into an entirely different context without change and expect it to work precisely the same way.
Guiding Design Principles for Scientific Python Coding
You can—but that would be unusual.
If nothing else, skyscrapers are expensive; I don't think they would ever pencil out as the default mode of housing for most people. The 5-story model you talked about is pretty good - I went to college in a neighborhood like that - and that's what I'd like to see displace the suburbs for the greatest number of people in economically unspectacular places.

Still, I think it's important to have skyscraper cores and we should build them closer to the economic limits than the present legal limits.
I agree about tutorial hell, but I managed to avoid that when I learned coding.

From kits / lessons I’d like to just glean the basics / terminology enough to even google / try / test a few things ;)
We haven't been monotonically stacking layers steadily. In fact sometimes we collapse layers into monoliths. Sometimes we rebuild layers and make them bigger.

But we don't have 900 layers or anything. Performance is... usually pretty darn good, except for uneccessary disk writes.

It's trivial to do basic stuff because of those layers. What's hard is doing low level things from scratch in a way that doesn't conflict. But at the same time, there's less and less need for that.

I think things are way easier to maintain with a bunch of layers than the old school ravioli code. Most layers are specifically meant to make it easier to maintain, or they just formalize a layer that was already effectively there, but was built into another layer in an ad hoc manner.
I am far from a Java guy, but that seems like a poor example. Functional programming is not in the wheelhouse of Java. In the same way, it would be unfair to criticize Haskell for its object-oriented style.
Humans are the most destructive and violent species on the planet. So no surprise there.
I think you missed my point entirely.

Infections alone are meaningless. The only reason to even think about them is they impact other parts of daily life. If infections are 100x higher, but everyone is healthy and happy, who cares.

To the extent we should care, it is because they have impacts on other aspects of our life.

If a country is healthy, happy, and prosperous, their policy was a success, even if infections are high.

Alternatively, if a country is swamped with deaths, miserable, and economically failing, it doesn't matter if their infection numbers are low and they had the harshest lock downs.
Here's where Purism says that the reason for the workaround is indeed for attempting to get RYF certified: https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurd...
That article is just one of many and this isn’t a comprehensive list of candidates he’s backed (directly or indirectly). LA’s DA George Gascon is one of them (https://nypost.com/2021/12/16/how-george-soros-funded-progre...).
In the imagined scenario of a 1980s MAD first-strike, it's wherever the nuclear missile silos are. There's a lot of farmland around Dayton. I would not rule out the possibility that there is at least one nuclear launch site near Wright Patterson AFB.
The median Netflix employee is definitely close to 40, and probably still up there if you only look at individual contributors.

A lot of older engineers go into management, because as much lip service companies pay to "equal tracks for engineering and management", it's way easier to move up in management than engineering.

That being said, I've worked with a lot of Amazon engineers in their 40s and 50s, and same at Netflix, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

So it seems like the big companies that can pay the big salaries are where a lot of older engineers end up. That and hardware engineering. The places that actually make chips or software to design chips seem to have a lot of older engineers.
Ask HN: Why does HN not have a dark mode?
That "libre" gives you auditability is a common myth believed by those pushing for libre hardware. The reality is you can't audit silicon, because it's a destructive process requiring extremely expensive analysis equipment.

You always have to trust the chip manufacturer; doesn't matter how documented the chip design is, even if the masks are outright public. You can never know that your CPU is not backdoored. That's just a physical reality.

There is one exception: FPGAs, under the premise that "generically" backdooring an FPGA is computationally infeasible. That's how Precursor gets to seriously claim trustability.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor

But if you want more than a 100MHz RISC-V softcore you're going to have to trust the silicon vendor.
Let me guess you never lived in Europe?

Europe is mostly very many small, sub million, cities with jobs scattered throughout the city largely created before the automobile.

The jobs are spread throughout the city in the buildings people live in you can choose to live in the neighborhood where you work.

Or, the American model where all the jobs are in the city core in monsterous buildings (most not skyscrapers, but anyway ugly orgies of concentrated office space) while everyone lives far in a suburb.
Thank you.

Those books look right up my alley/ a good starting point.
Fun, if you can believe it.
I was on the IPv6 transition task force for a large federal agency (well, one of the military services) from 2008-2010. They don't take it seriously, don't fund it, there's no internal mandate or accountability around it, and nobody knows how the hell it works.
It's a two-way street. Facebook has made significant contributions to MySQL, including commits (they're literally one of the top third-party contributors), bug reports, and overall roadmap. Several of FB's top DB engineers previously worked for MySQL AB, Sun, and/or Oracle.
Work out and do steroids, that's how you get looking like that.
What does this change? Few companies have the resources making it even potentially feasible that they even could give back at the scale Faebook could.
What's clickbait about it? When the public is sold on carbon capture by the fossil fuel industry, they're given to believe it's a net negative technology. You can argue that it is self-deception, but there is still a deception involved. Governments are only kicking the can by subsidizing things like this. Canada put $654 million into it? That would have been 654 MW worth of utility-scale solar panels.
For something considered modern, pretty much next to impossible.

All of the modern CPUs require blobs to function, whether it's microcode, embedded firmware, binary driver blobs, or otherwise.

I don't believe there is a wireless card (wifi, Bluetooth, etc.) on the market that doesn't use binary, closed source firmware. In fact, it's almost mandated by law that there can't be. FCC regulations require that devices be made resistant to attempts to change their function in an effort to limit people's ability to transmit stuff unintentionally (or intentionally). Modern radio protocols are heavily dependent on SDR (software defined radio), so fixed function is probably infeasible. You could make the firmware unchangeable, but now any bugs discovered in your public source code are now entirely uncorrectable.

Heck, even the SDR community is having to be really careful about not drawing the ire of the FCC. That's why so few of them tend to advertise transmit capabilities.

The main ARM cores have been generally blob-less, but that's only the cores. Various SOCs require blobs to initialize. Their GPUs are all proprietary blobs up and down the stack.

So you basically would have to make your own GPU, your own radios, etc. and integrate them into your own SOC - and get the regulatory bodies to certify them for sale in their various countries. You then have to fight the entrenched companies in court over IP for years. The GPU portion will be especially tricky. The moment you try, lawyers from Nvidia, AMD, Imagination Technologies, Apple, etc. will be all over you. The radios will have Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Intel all over you.

So technical, legal, and regulatory hurdles - which is why I say next to impossible, especially on the FSF's budget.

- a jaded hobbyist