skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Tips on writing long-form non-fiction?
I'm currently in the midst of a pretty substantial non-fiction writing project (a series of critical essays altogether roughly the length of a short book).

I've written short essays before, but nothing of this scale. I've developed most of the ideas, fleshed them out, written rough explanations, etc. I know roughly how everything will string together. But I'm feeling kinda stuck and overwhelmed with the task before me, of assembling everything together, knowing where to put what, concerned whether I'll over-explain or repeat myself, etc etc.

One particular problem I'm experiencing is that, while I know and remember all the points I'm trying to make, I feel like I've kinda "lost touch" with some of them, like I'm just robotically piecing ideas together. It's hard to explain, but I hope that makes some sense.

Obviously, I'll probably figure out some of these things as I go, but it'd be nice to hear how others have navigated big complex (non-fiction) writing projects like this.

So, writers of long-form non-fiction (or non-fiction book writers even): What's your process for navigating all this?

Thanks!
Bill Demirkapi Fired from Zoom
Some other cool uses of adjectives:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Attractor

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Magellanic_Cloud

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Magellanic_Cloud

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Void

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Void

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Nothing

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermassive_black_hole
Why are so many people turning to ‘dumbphones’?
I do this all the time too.
Ah right, Mono. I keep forgetting that was a thing.

This proposal will pave the way for jextract, though. I would argue this series of JEPs is much closer in spirit to something like Rust's cxx than P/Invoke is.
Yes. This is what I meant. Experience in code lets you see dark patterns quickly in software. Experience in law lets you see them in _everything_.
For the amount of ships this may be true, but not for the amount of TEU shipped.
> it's possible to check for yourself that your vote was actually counted and not ignored.

That's a bug, not a feature. The point of not doing that with paper voting is that it makes selling your vote difficult, as nobody else can verify what you voted for. You on the other side know that you put the ballot in the box and can stay around to see if the votes in the box get accurately counted.

With electronic voting you lose that. You either have to blindly trust the system or by allowing vote verification make it easy for others to sell the votes.
Russia Just Became the World’s First Former Space Power
I would summarise their contrived stance as “Don’t use Twitter if other users are trying to harm you”.

Which is all well and fine, but on the other hand, I don’t have any problem with blocking malicious people and continuing to use Twitter. I don’t see why I should yield to the bad actors.
Will they inform us who voted for this? Just a little joke. Interesting how on one hand personal attacks can and are being weaponized when they have nothing to do with software, yet on the other hand you have the potential for nefarious, ignorant, or incompetent decisions to be made without quickly understanding why and if you want to go along with it.
> That's a lot of fuel - and that's just one constellation.

Is that a lot of fuel? 5kg times 12000 is about 60 tonne. That's the weight of two big truck approximately. In which sense is that a lot of fuel?

And besides krypton is a noble gas, it doesn't react with anything.
The PCW wasn't an app. It was a computer, able to run CP/M and thousands of apps.

It also had a very conventional late-1980s UI.

I love PCWs -- I still own 2 -- but comparing PCWs to the Canon Cat is a bit like saying that an Airbus A380 is a car, because it has wheels and an engine.
It is funny because the squirrel gets dead.
Wide spread. Its very easy to work with. UART aka Serial TTL or just RX/TX is native to almost all chips.
There is no standard protocol though, so unless its a modem (AT commands) or you have a manual you will likely have a hard time communicating with it.
If you want to see what is going over the wire get a logic analyzer. Typically ~$30. Connects to USB and comes with software to decode the messages. Its read only so to speak.
Got into a little bit of his work early in uni, which inspired me into logic research and ultimately to me publishing/presenting my research at a conference he also attended. I met him on a boat trip and he was doing coin tricks, at the age of 88. What a character.
FWIW, Protext for the PC (and Amiga, ST, & presumably 8-bit platforms too) is now legal freeware.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140825104412/http://www.tigert...
>
For the way I type, with my thumb angled so the knuckle would hit the Leap key, that would be absolutely infuriating. But it's an interesting idea nonetheless.

I've seen an adaptation[1] of the concept to a standard keyboard that used the Alt + Alt gr keys for Leap back/forward, and the result was quite usable.

[1] the Archy project by Raskin's son Aza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software)
The Absolute State of Web3
That works out to 6.0341E-06%
I love technology as much as anyone, but at the end of the day we're humans, and experience in being a human comes with time. I think detracting from the wisdom of old men because they can't post memes on their smartphone is not the best thing we could do as a society.
If an app can crash your system, that means the system is not stable in my books
Because public voting is the status quo, so 3 & 4 are identical in what they would (not) change in the procedures. 3 is just an additional statement of support. If you support public voting (3) you also support 4 over 1/2.
This is one of those answers that will get written up about in the New Yorker. Clearly the most logical answer for this audience…
Now everybody knows. Why coming out now, is the world ending?
DJI Enterprise – Introducing the DJI M30 Series [video]
This is absolutely true, I got downvoted and flagged in a thread just the other day - where others were actively denying the existence of trans-people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30819080
I bought my house on a contract that was based off the national standard contract for residence transactions. Deviations from the standard were clearly marked. Regardless the contract was read to me by the realtor when I signed for the intent to buy, and the most important points were reiterated by the notary when confirming the actual transaction. It was great I found it useful and comforting to know I was signing for, doubly so knowing it was mostly the standard contract everyone else signs for.

That said. Your "10s of millions of wasted person hours" is a twisted way of presenting the data. Reading the contract was 30 minutes. That's 0.00019% of the time I will spend paying my largest monthly expense towards.
Sure there is a lot of bad music in there, but the next top 40 song that tops the charts will likely also be in there, hidden away.
One of the Russian generals was recently killed in Ukraine when he was located by Ukraine forces because he was supposedly using regular cell phone as Russian military communication equipment was broken.

In general Ukraine seems to be doing a lot of cell tracking/intercepts for intelligence purposes there as Russian military personnel (whose cells were taken away before the invasion) robs the civilians of the phones and are using the phones for calls home as well as among themselves.
> Some people in comments are saying you are troll for doing this.

Poisoning a conversation with lies fits perfectly the definition of trolling.
I'll have to check how to call `madvise` to set MADV_RANDOM as index accesses in my use case are rather random, though. But the 2Gb chunks at most have been a really big issue. Luckily, the Foreign Memory API is getting to it's final version I think. The latest changes aren't that big IMHO :-)
I'd like to do this in theory, but practically I find it not worth it. Consider a case where your partner or your kid lose their phone, are stranded, and borrow a phone from someone. They won't reach you.
If you're going to check it in, at least have a CI job which rebuilds it from scratch, then fails if there are any changes.

I'm not persuaded of the value of having diffs in source control, but i haven't looked at concrete examples. This would be an interesting post for someone to write.

For performance, i'd rather follow a distributed caching approach. Hash the true source, look for /some/nfs/mount/or/s3/path/${hash}.tar.gz, if it exists, unpack it into the generated source directory, if not, generate the source, tarball it, and upload that to the said path. Takes some care to hash the right things (needs to include the version and configuration of the generation tool, etc). Again, you could have a CI job checking that the caches are correct if you're worried.
You're the reason why "the wisdom of the crowds" doesn't work.

Besides, your behavior is not ethical and you could be causing harm to some (gullible) people that followed your advice.
Not really? I said they "might want to look at their overall system architecture". I didn't say "your system needs to be redesigned". Maybe it's the best it can be given their constraints. Hence the word "might".
The Union of Concerned Scientists has a map that calculates the MPG equivalent of an EV car for real local grid carbon intensities.

The bottom line is, they're already better everywhere today, and the grid is only going to get cleaner.
https://i.imgur.com/UB2r629.png you can tell it's pioneering science when they've used up all the fancy qualifiers like "polar" and "equatorial" and end up just saying "Another ring"
you can also run more than one dropbox account on the same machine using maestral
> So do ZKP based voting systems.

Assuming no vulnerabilities on the ZKP system, a perfect implementation and no information leak from other sources.

> What do you mean by this?

I assume that ensuring that the person voting is who they claim they are. If someone steals the certificates of that person, they could impersonate them.

> This is a lot of friction which prevents many people from voting.

In Spain (and I guess in a lot of other countries) voting in-person means walking to the closest polling center (99% of the time it's less than 10 minute walk) on a Sunday, picking up the paper, doing the queue (maybe another 10 minutes) and walking out. The alternative is mail-in voting, which usually takes a few minutes of walking to the closest post-office, signing some documents and waiting for the ballot to come. Compare that with getting the certificates, storing them securely, downloading the program to do the voting, installing it, praying it works, then using the program and cast the vote. Think of all the people who aren't good with computers, and how easy would it be for them to do all those steps correctly.

In the ideal case I agree that electronic voting systems would be better. But the world is not ideal, quite a lot of things can go wrong with them because of their complexity and detecting those issues will be difficult. On the other hand, paper voting is fairly simple, the number of things that can go wrong is low and easy to detect by anyone.
> Electronic voting systems using zero knowledge proofs are superior to paper votes because it's possible to check for yourself that your vote was actually counted and not ignored.

Which means somebody can hold a gun to your head and force you to prove that you voted and that your vote counted.

That is not, to put it mildly, desirable in an election.
That was surprisingly informative, analysis by military experts rather than political posturing. I've been watching for reporting like that and finding very little.
That book as trully outdated. By ~1999-2000 most BSD's and GNU/Linux since 1996 solved all the issues with better shells, faster tools and toolkits like Motif (and later QT), and multimedia thanks to SDL, DRI and FFMPEG.

It's like noticing Windows 9x's lack of security and stability on Windows 10 times. Absurd.

Heck, that book praised Mac OS back in the day, and just look what Mac OS has been turned into since Mac OS X.

Also, thanks to Unix philosphy my Fluxbox+Rox+Roxlib combo based "DE" it's much faster and featureful than most light desktops out there.
US Grid issues are 100% political, not technical.

If you want to put in a oil/gas pipeline, you need one permission from the state, then you're a go.

BUT. If you want to install new power lines it's a whole different ball game.

First you need state level permission, then you need one from the cities you're passing through, then the counties, then the individual property owners and everyone who can see the high-voltage lines. The amount of NIMBYing in the permit process is staggering.
>That's a bug, not a feature

It's a trade off. I want to be able to prove that my vote was counted. How can I trust that my voice was actually heard by the system?

>as nobody else can verify what you voted for.

You can mitigate this problem by giving people a way to fake any vote outcome. The voter knows how to verify their actual vote, but someone else would not be sure if what they verified was real or fake. Also I doubt this type of buying votes with verification is that big of an actual thing. You can trivially do it with paper voting to by just asking them to stream themself voting or by taking a picture of their ballot.

>You either have to blindly trust the system

Having someone else count votes without the ability for you yourself to count votes and check to see if your vote was included is the opposite of blindly trusting the system.
American here and I have had to wait >2 hours to vote multiple times. In the worst instance someone tried to illegally close the polling place even though people were still lined up outside. This is in clear violation of state law. So long as you are lined up to vote before the polling place closes they have to take your vote. To the sheriff's department credit (they are generally terrible) the deputy who responded refused to make people leave and told the worker they had to stay open. When I lived in a more rural area of the same county I would just walk in and vote within a couple minutes. I'm sure it isn't broken by design though.
Good catch! But I don't think it matters because I didn't implement full text search so there is no question that all documents returned are equally relevant.
Heh, I'm pretty sure these people were gaslighted by 'external consultants'. Whenever someone internal would mention an obstacle in our way, instead of trying to understand and solve it, they'd go and pay a lot of money to an external consultant that would ... in all honesty, motivate them that it's not a problem.
Where you charged for speeding afterwards?
The i3 REX especially was a fantastic car. It was just weird AF from the outside and didn't attract "normal" car people.
> Creating film is high tech, both the film itself, the camera to expose it, and the lab to develop it.

Absolutely not. See https://hmfi.handmadefilm.org/

Seriously, film is a 19th century technology. All of its process is really, really simple compared to even the most basic computer.

> It's better than a CD, but doesn't hold a candle to paper.

It's much denser, a film roll can hold many gigabytes.
All in all, we eat and live in a more healthy way then generations before.
I love the "DR" (domain rating) metric on Ahrefs. However, it's their measurement of the "size and quality of their backlink profiles," meaning it's indirectly tied to popularity, I guess.
Absolutely. They were the pioneers in open sourcing so much knowledge. I'm doing a course on EDX from MIT and there are deadlines for homework assignments. It's quite hard. But one can learn the concepts from the OCW course if they're not interested in a certificate.
Thank you for the examples of a cruise, kitchen, and building bridges! Analogies are helpful :)

I work as a software engineer. If you asked me to do civil/mechanical/structural engineering, I'd have the same approach:

Build. And run!
Smart Sync is pretty broken in macOS 12.3 fwiw.
Most cars will also stop working if an EMP fries their electronics. The only things that will work are older diesel engines (90s and older depending on the brand).
You can already do that with mail in ballots easily. Someone could also threaten you to record yourself filling out a paper ballot.
Paper voting is provable too. Vote and then observe the counting which is usually public. You can take a look at the box to ensure that it hasn't been tampered with.
Experience comes from doing, not time. Just because someone is old doesn't mean they are experienced. It just means there is a greater chance they are experienced.
I've implemented a SQL database from scratch before (that one was only in-memory) so I wanted to try my hand at a document database and this time have it support real storage.

In general, posts on my personal blog are purely for fun and education. :)
Just out of interest... there was a pre-existing CP/M emulator for the Pico.

https://github.com/guidol70/RunCPM_RPi_Pico

It's a port of RUNCPM:

https://github.com/MockbaTheBorg/RunCPM
That's great =D Would be interesting to see a comparison to the parse that shellcheck gives[0][1], is this stricter and/or more abstracted perhaps?

[0] https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck/blob/master/src/Shell...

[1] https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck/blob/master/src/Shell...
Attacks or incompetence?

Hello Microsoft executives, we would like some transparency.
Just an educational proof-of-concept. Scaling not being part of that concept.
Phoenix LiveView the Form Function Component
Do you mean circuit theory or applied circuits?

No idea for purely circuit theory. My textbooks were not great, but videos from 6.002 (a course at MIT) were a godsend.

Sedra/Smith is my recommendation for applied circuits. It's mostly amplifiers---still with a heavy emphasis on theory. At 1400 pages, it's really, really long. (A good portion of this is also taught in 6.002.)

The Art of Electronics is a gold mine of knowledge but very, very in-depth/technical. By chapter 4, you're analyzing a precision waveform generator with 3 ICs, a MOSFET, and a handful of passive components for biasing/filtering. Horowitz/Hill even recommend specific components (lots of tables) with explanations, and they point out some common circuit mistakes, workarounds, and improvements. Also, it's over 1,000 pages just in the main book. If I had to pick one book as the sole resource for an EE degree, it's this one.

As a supplement to books: Falstad's circuit simulator[1] because it is very easy to use (compared to SPICE) and has examples of nearly every circuit you would learn as an undergrad.

[1] https://www.falstad.com/circuit/
Friction to prevent people from voting is a US phenomenon where voting participation (i.e. turning up and declaring something, even if it is an abstention) is not considered a legal obligation - and thus, the lack of participation is not viewed as a possible attempt to interfere with democracy.
Previous GitHub incidents in March 2022:

* on 16th, https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/fpk08rxnqjz2

* on 17th, https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/sksd097hm0y5

* on 22nd, https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/83lq7ftk19r5

* on 23rd, https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/tyc8wpsgr2r8

* on 24th, https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/y5hdmv0p49x3
A new-round of Talks aims to Stop the Fighting in Ukraine
Do people still need faith in themselves? as much as they always have.

Are tribes of "we are right and the rest of the world is wrong" people still annoying and dangerous? As much as they ever were.

WE decided to call religion bad, then added the worst elements of it to politics and leisure and everything else in life. We don't go to church but we have to affirm our faith in "the current thing" to everyone we meet. Woe betide you if you've been out of touch and the current thing changed without your cognizance.
Augustus was famous for pushing for better morals, he even banished her daughter for that.
Ask HN: What desktop browser's features/abilities/standards needs to be offable?
Let us gather in root comments some annoying things in browsers which in theory might be disabled (by implementing extra switches in settings or by removing/adding some code with further compiling on user-side).

If you are in the browser developing and you understand what regular people can not understand, second level of comments is for criticism of why it is not possible or maybe for answers that it is possible with <something easy>. Please share annoyances which are applicable only to both of browsers (FF+Chrome). My opinion will be in one of root comments, please sorry that my question is about desktop browsers only, I just don't want to know that surfing from either mobile browser or from single-website-app does exist.
Plenty of languages far better suited for most use cases, yes we have that. But to replace C, there are not that much candidates. I don’t mean Rust is such a candidate.

Maybe Zig is currently the closest thing to such a candidate, but it doesn’t even pretend to aim at this, andalign with the "C ABI as interoperation modus for foreign function interface" policy, like the rest[1] of programming languages.

[1] https://ziglearn.org/chapter-4/
Yeah, tell me about it. I've built a search engine index including an on-disk hash table off MappedByteBuffers. Like chopping down a tree with a pasta sieve.
Anyone have real world examples of what JNI and this proposal could do?

I am guessing this is for more sophisticated things than just sending data to Microsoft Excel application?
Not even sure how to talk about this anymore with how frequently this has gone down.

Our company uses GitHub actions and other features for deployments so every one of these outages stops us from putting any work on production.
No, that’s not what I’m trying to argue.
HB11's hydrogen-boron laser fusion test yields groundbreaking results
Apparently it wasn't that well taken. Is the New Yorker accepting submissions from roundly rejected HN commenters these days? I've always wanted to caption one of those cartoons. "Yes, my accountant always does his business in the bushes". That sorta thing.
If this is baked into telephony, why we don't have this problem in Europe?

(genuinely curious why this happens in the USA but not here)
Your post reminds me of researchers that willfully submitted made-up research papers to multiple editors to test their ability to spot bullshit.

Many failed, as the HN hivemind failed to verify your statements.

I like how you accidentally called out the king for being naked.
The new version of OCaml got multiprocessor support recently.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/10/ocaml-5-multicore/
Yes, which is why I also dislike postal voting and want to minimise its use.
Yes,the new memory model for instance for "immutable classes" for instance will be one of the biggest improvements for some applications as you can finally build cache line optimized data structures, which are for instance nowadays common in in-memory database systems. I think first considerations regarding this have been made already 10 years ago.

The new upcoming (or even already in preview) language and platform features also support each other very well. I think they are heading in a clear direction with the different projects.
Oh it wasn't robust by todays standards (or any standards really), but it would be wrong to infer from that that the quality of OS9 was inferior to OS8, OS7, rotting, etc.
I hate to belittle a point, but this group is addressing the cause that is metaphorically killing 1 person per year while ignoring the cause that is killing 1,000 people per year.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that this cause is deflecting energy from any anti-coal movement by offering an new, shiny, space-age target for activists to concentrate on.
Amazon Glow Now Available, Connecting Kids with Remote Loved Ones