skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heck yes, all the time. While it seems like the major computer/OS vendors these days are trying to turn computers into limited purpose appliances, I was first exposed to computers as a child in the late 70's, when it was expected that anyone who owned a computer would also want to program it for their own purposes. My own personal projects tend not to be very large in scope, but can be quite handy. Some examples include:

- A Pomodoro timer that has exactly the features and user interface that I want

- A script to perform backups of select files and directories from a source drive to a specified backup volume

- A "pixels-per-inch" calculator that allows me to compare the resolutions of displays that I may be interested in purchasing; by entering the width and height of a display in pixels, and its diagonal in inches, it calculates the density in pixels-per-inch, and the dot pitch in millimeters

- Various user-friendly graphical interfaces to aid in solving different types of puzzles (think sudoku-like logic puzzles)

- Programs to actually solve various types of puzzles all on their own (I've written over 70 of these in the last 10+ years!)

- Various command line scripts for code management tasks (i.e. useful for sofware development itself)
I just want to make sure the people in the meeting don't hear the toilet flush.
Ask and ye shall receive: https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/

That link is a little out of date. There's a spreadsheet floating around with more projects on it but I'm not exactly sure of the link.

It's a small but vibrant community. Our founding fathers would probably be Alan Kay and Bret Victor rather than Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson (not saying they founded our group but they are an endless font of inspiration for us).

We're trying all kinds of things in programming languages, and the main unspoken rule seems be be: no ALGOL derived languages allowed. Being ALGOL derived is what gives the "very similar to each other, with small variations" vibe that most programming languages have these days. In the PL field we iterated on improving imperative languages for the last 30-40 years, so a surefire way to end up with a radically different language is to build one in a different branch of the PL family tree.

https://futureofcoding.org if it wasn't obvious what the link is to the main site.

Edit: here's the spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12sTu7RT-s_QlAupY1v-3...
Even if it’s a sister project, it’s great PR for Google. I accept more ads from Google as it gives back so much in healthcare. I wish Meta would do the same, I wouldn’t care if it’s part of Facebook or not. GMail was something similar at the start: just do something good, to make more people like Google.

As for your own project I’m sorry for you: there are no more 20% projects, like in the old times :(
> Among myriad of issues, one is that the tax rates for the very rich are not high enough.

I'm curious-- why is this your conclusion?

California has a $40-70B surplus. California's got one of the highest tax burdens in the nation.
I see a Nobel Prize around the corner.

They arent often given for techniques or computation. But the results are outstanding.
I have many apps and scripts over the years, but the ones still in use are:

1. StrongLift 5x5 tracker. This is a python CLI based script that tracks 5x5 (Strong Lift) program. I haven't used it in awhile, but a few friends still do.

2. HNews calendar style home page. I wrote this as a way to reduce my daily HN screen time but don't want to miss anything. So I created an app (django on raspberry pi) that downloads from HN API and group HN articles by date and point in a calendar style page. Pretty useful, but the code is still in Py2 and awful.

3. A crawler that downloads swim school class availability so I can sign my kids up.
Interesting ideas and worth pursuing but currently my favoured approach for terraforming Mars would be by bombarding it with asteroids and comets. We can do this with technology that already exists, we just need to mass produce rockets capable of reaching the required material and fund the project somehow, maybe with a single platinum rich asteroid returned to Earth orbit. Bombarding Mars will have multiple benefits, it'll add a lot of dust, gases and heat to its atmosphere which might be enough to melt the Martian ice caps. We could use the impacts to excavate extremely deep craters, by repeatedly impacting the same location, which would have a higher atmospheric pressure due to their depth. By using very icy asteroids and comets you would also be depositing a lot of water, nitrogen and other elements which would help with the atmospheric composition.
It's a tough problem to solve when you need to house 70,000 people per square mile (similar to Manhattan) in order to not leave people on the street, but also not allow more than 6,000 people (San Francisco) per square mile.
Right. But we already have that technology with conventional heat engines which have the advantage of much, much, lower operating temperature requirements. If you have a 3,000 degree vat of thermal storage material this new engine stops working after draining 1000 degrees. Existing heat engines can usually work down to several hundred Celsius - though superheated steam engines need around 700 Celsius. But that's still an extra 1000 degrees you can bring it down, even in the conservative case.
> You don't explain what line's "--column" option does

It was simply the equivalent of Awk printing columns like this.

awk '{ print $2, $3, $4 }'

Except with support for column ranges, which I don't think Awk supports without writing a for loop.

Something convoluted like :

awk -v start=1 -v end=3 '{ for (i=start; i<=end;i++) printf("%s%s",
$i,(i==end) ? "\n" : OFS) }' marks.txt

Idk, the amount of Unix that GNU and BSD accepted as a bare environment, the range is single purpose programs like tail and mini interpreters which are powerful but require a lot of skill. If I worked in system administration, and I HAD to use shell, I'd hold onto Awk for dear life. But I don't, so it's sort of this ancient swiss army knife.
shouldn't countries be allowed to decide whom to trade with? if so, doesn't that extend to countries being allowed to make their own rules of trade, including not trading with those who trade with unfriendly nations?
A lot of us are transplants from the midwest/south/east coast and feel the effects of property crime are blown wildly out of proportion. But its different for everybody. I would rather lose a catalytic converter than a friend! https://vanlifewanderer.com/2021/12/03/cities-with-highest-m...
I definitely think a human could use an AI to assist in the creation of great art (and to be clear, that is synonymous with conceptual art to me and also most people with a modern degree in fine art).

A comparison can be made with Damien Hurst’s or Anthony Gormley’s use of assistants to create the pieces as instructed by the artists.

Duchamp’s urinal isn’t brilliant because the urinal was difficult to acquire or to make, but because it expresses so much and asks so many questions.
It has a purpose, but the writer needs to be clear which groups are being compared. Saying that 80% of group's A value X fell under the median of group's B value of X can be a useful number for some analysis, even when group B is a subset of group A. The author must be clear which group they are using where, as any confusion between group A and group B should be considered an error in the analysis.
You don't have to wait 20 minutes for a Bitcoin transaction to clear for the price of an iced coffee, either. For low-value transactions with a low risk of double-spending you can just verify that the transaction made it into the mempool and is likely to be included in the next block or two, a process which takes seconds at most. It could technically still be reversed during that window but you could just as easily get a chargeback from a credit card, or a bad check. And with Bitcoin you'll have confirmation within less than 30 minutes that the transaction is fully irreversible, vs. 30 days or more with most other methods. Only physical cash offers a faster clearing time.
Global Innovation Index 2021
I use a hardware switch, albeit for a different reason: I hate the beeping sounds all videoconferencing apps make when you mute/unmute yourself. I guess a good call overall.
> a redirect spiral through multiple interstitial ads

For a second I was thinking you meant this as the correct definition of the symbol, and was very surprised :-)
I thought that the mark-sweep isn't even necessary, if you don't have cycles. Reference counting can be a sufficient GC strategy but when cycles are introduced, I think that's the problem that mark-sweep solves.

That's awesome. Which papers do you find the most useful?
Zero-knowledge proofs are coming. Zcash and Monero do some on chain obfuscation with I believe an ECC based DH? But they point is, coinfolk are working on it.
I love the descriptions b/c they explain the 'art' behind photo taking. It's people being creative, which is really what photos should be about.
> People like to live in single family homes and live next to single family homes.

People like living in walkable neighborhoods with public transportation more, as proven by housing prices, but those are mostly illegal to build.

Also I think that society is now much more complex than the single family American dream of the past. And the US should wake up to the reality that in their society the poor are subsidizing the rich in almost everything, especially in housing.
Crime reduces property value. If your main investment is your home, you are incentivized to pretend it's not an issue.
It's a super weird feeling to click on a hacker news top post and find out I know one of the authors. The world is a super small place.
Aren't EBS snapshots stored on S3? :)
Wow. Thanks for sharing. We know there is a much stronger gut-brain connection that we ever though possible. Interesting stuff.
Cartels smuggle cash. Cash is fairly untraceable, so it makes sense. If anything, it reinforces the idea that removing accountability from money encourages bad behavior.

> the bitcoin hack involving a YC founder ended with the coins recovered

Sometimes you get a happy ending. There's plenty of stories about the Wild West that don't end with two dead cowboys. On the other hand though, our banking system can almost universally guarantee a happy ending. Axie Infinity hacks simply don't happen on there. When someone is dumb enough to try it, they're in custody by the end of the day and their money likely never even left the source account in the first place.
'Fair use', to hide illegal acts by the police?
Using the Nikon 8mm f/8 Fish-eye Nikkor as Intended: for SCIENCE
I can honestly say that I never made this association, and it never crossed my mind once. Now that you mentioned it, I can see it. I just always say "analang" like golang
This does not sound like trade off for ambitions. More like ignoring her strong preference and then being shocked it turned out to be straw that broke camels back.
> has such a huge housing deficit

And, that housing deficit probably won't be filled with anything affordable. Starting 2023, title 24 requires solar panels that cover the full annual energy usage of the home, along with battery storage. But, guess that's a drop in the bucket for CA housing prices.
This is a dumb statement every time it's asserted. Sanctions are not an act of war in any sense. Not in theory nor in a pragmatic sense. The distinction between war and other modes of interstate hostility is an important one which we should not abandon. "Sanctions are war" is the same sort of statement as "speech is violence": it's sophistic, and it collapses nuance instead of encouraging it.
I agree that almost every startup investor claims to add more than money.

I'm a bit more negative - I think that most investors add less than money, that "help" from most investors is, at best, a waste of time, and all too often actually harmful.

I mostly agree with the idea that advice from most investors is useless. (That said, I do know an entrepreneur who says that some advice from a "not investor" got him into a very lucrative business that didn't need investment during the pandemic instead of flailing around looking for investment.)

However, there are other useful deliverables.
Isn’t this a function of them being such heavy Erlang users and are writing NIFs (via Rustler) in Rust.
The market allows short squeezes. SEC too. What the SEC doesn't allow is the deliberate triggering of short squeezes.
If you live in California, I recommend getting involved in your local housing element. This program will have huge implications in how zoning and development occurs in the state for years to come.
https://www.hcd.ca.gov/community-development/housing-element...

For example in San Francisco, they are reviewing drafts now.
https://sfhousingelement.org/
I know HN has a decent Factorio fanbase. Factorio properly stresses PC hardware, and borderline memory is usually ok for a casual gamer until you start a Factorio megabase. A decent example is Warger who does speedruns: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=100646
https://www.speedrun.com/factorio#100
Those that have played the game - speedruns are amazing to watch, if you haven't already.
I did the math for Mountain View:

Average Home | Downpayment | Finance | Monthly payment (Loan + Insurance + Tax) | Necessary Annual income

$2,140,000.00 | $428,000.00 | $1,712,000.00 | $11,517.00 | $414,612.00

Mix that with high taxes across every category, very high crime, homelessness and extremely poor indebted government providing poor service. The state needs to hit the reset button.

Taxes are already high, and a negative feedback loop has started: capital flight, loss of income, increase taxes, which in turn causes more capital flight. The annual costs of the state are increasing because we must retire the boomer generation and pay for past promises.

I think the best path forward for California is default, and then start over. The current path is not good.

I wish California could compete with Florida and Texas, but it has real structural problems.
Very interesting site, although not all the rail routes listed are actually abandoned per se. For example, I live next to a popular and well-maintained trail that used to be a railway, and the site still lists it as an abandoned rail line.
It's always painful to setup infra for any project that I do as I want to focus on aplication not doing the devops, I'll try this one out
A few. Working on replacing my Pi Zero W based garage door opener with an esp32 for fun. The Pi had a basic service that accepted HMAC signed Webhooks to open or close the door.
Expressing Boolean Logic with Matrices (2018)
The efficiency of crypto farms and Facebook is zero if not negative: energy in, dystopia out.

It would be better to waste the energy than to let them have it for free.
you can travel to NK, but you might end up like Otto Warmbier and come home a couple years later braindead. (he stole as a propaganda poster a souvenir, but brain death after a year of brutal torture seems.. extreme.)

you're also not allowed to travel without a guide.

also, given the videos I've seen taken by tourists when they've been able to sneak away from their minders, NK does not look very happy.
Tailscale Authentication for Minecraft
Previous Discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22238335
Conceptual art is not about the artefact that comprises the work, but the conversation that artefact creates with the viewer.

If you put both in front of someone with no idea about conceptual art, there’s a real chance you might be right. If they happen not to “get” the work or understand the context or just know enough about conceptual art, then a viewer might easily miss the point.

But a computer could not have conceived Duchamp’s urinal, not with our current technology. You’re probably going to need AGI for that (which I’m certain will arrive eventually).
not necessarily the bad guy but you absolutely have relationship issues and could benefit from counseling if you found a good marriage counselor
The macro lens is the reason I bought the iPhone 13 Pro and the extreme sizem weight, and poor ergonomics of the phone are why I returned it. I'd buy an iPhone the dimensions of an iPhone Mini (but say, twice as thick) with the fancy cameras, LiDAR, etc.
I don't get it. If there are stores that sell half loaves of bread, can't you go to any of them and just buy half a loaf? Even if they don't have half ones, they will cut one into two halves, won't they? Otherwise, I don't see how they'd sell halves.
Their blog doesn't list all articles on a single page (so you could ctrl-f) and doesn't have its own search and doesn't have it's own domain (so googleing `site:discord.com rust` returns a mix of Discord communities and blog posts).

Makes it pretty hard to find stuff!
Zoning usually gets decided on on a very local level. The people who show up to community meetings tend to be older, white home owners who don't want the value of their home to go down. Fear of "undesirables" of course also likely plays a role and when I've heard it in person, even that gets wrapped in fear of that bringing down home values and schools.
Uh, yeah they have a certain slant, lol: https://www.city-journal.org/ivermectin-sparks-yet-another-c...
> I don't know how they mitigate the radiation losses (huge amounts of insulation?)

My guess is a vacuum flask made of tungsten. Tungsten sheet metal is a thing and it has the second highest melting point of currently known elements, which is 3,422C.

Then for the 'battery' you will want to find a material that has a phase change around the temperature required for this heat engine to operate. The energy required for water to go from 100c water to 100c steam is considerably more significant than the energy required to go from 0c water to 100c water.

Graphite will likely come into play because you need to have electrodes to heat the material up to storage temperature. Graphite is a good for this sort of thing. Although gradual erosion will likely limit the life of the battery.
Watching an elderly relative in cognitive decline is even more depressing. You won't be you forever even if your body is still around.
You may be thinking of http://techrights.org/2020/09/15/rmsf/ :

"So I asked Bostic himself. Originally, his reply was: 'It’s true. John Gillmore & Richard Stallman convinced me that opening up the sources was worthwhile, we wouldn’t have done that without their urging.'"
In general this is excellent advice! Having said this, I wager some of us don't mind drawing a soft wildcard before heading to work :)
> I might miss an entire day of work because of some minor thing that exploded into a 6 hour argument, while I was trying to disengage the whole time, but couldn't.

In this case, I would congratulate you for dodging the bullet. It seem to me, you was not the problem in that relationship.

I am even close to guess she was verbally abusive. And if not, then actually damaging to you.
Project Evolution in Go
I’m convinced that tax rates on the upper middle class (top 10%) need to be much, much higher. An interesting premise of Modern Monetary Theory is that taxes can and should be used to control inflation, and further that this can be done in a controlled way based on where inflation is occurring. If that is correct, one can reason that inflation for things like housing, education, etc., is caused by taxes being too low—specifically among the folks with high incomes competing for these goods.

More specifically, it appears that taxes are too low on the upper middle class specifically. In my neighborhood near Annapolis, the price of houses has doubled since 2016. We came here because it was a nice place where you could afford a house without being a dual professional household, but that’s increasingly less true. The problem, it seems to me, isn’t billionaires. The house next to mine wasn’t torn down and replaced with a new million dollar home by a billionaire. It was some upper middle class professional. The top 10% has been riding the coattails of the top 0.1% for decades and has significantly pulled away from the median American. Unlike billionaires, which are few in number, this is a large class of people who can use their growing incomes to outbid everyone else for homes, education, etc. At the same time, taxes on these folks are the lowest in the developed world, even lower today than after Reagan’s second round of tax cuts.
This, in my opinion, is a salient and hard to solve problem with unions.
I drove a lot of 3-4 cm deep different sized holes in a piece of firewood and put it to a dry and bee accessible place next to our house. Every hole got filled by next spring.
There are _many_ databases on each server, last I checked there was around 8 servers (or: "clusters") - and we have it so the traffic is somewhat evenly distributed across each server. There are reasonable capacity limits, and when servers get full we spin up a new one and start accepting new wikis there. I am not in OPS, and they do a lot of work behind the scenes to make this all run smoothly - but from an eng perspective we rarely have issues with this at scale.

Some of this was open source before we unified all of our wiki products, which has a lot of the selection / db logic, at https://github.com/Wikia/app.
> OK, so you restore backups to a separate system, and selectively copy the stomped accounts data back to production

You don't think that's exactly what they are doing?
That only applies to "low rise" buildings, which would never solve the housing crisis anyway. The only direction for Californians to build is up unless they move away from the coast or adopt a subterranean lifestyle.
The main thing I'm thankful for Let's Encrypt for is breaking the idea that an SSL-secured website is somehow magically less likely to be phishing or even anything but claiming it's the data from the domain you connected to, without changes.

Mainly this was propagated by EV cert sellers, but it was all kinda silly.
I love that you included the ASCII art!
When this sentiment leads to 6 hour long argument and partner missing work because of it, then it is beyond healthy need to finish argument.
It similarly sucks that our justice system punishes the clumsy criminals and lets the really skillfully sneaky ones go unpunished. Nobody has yet faced charges for robbing the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
I wonder if there is a coincidence between people with extraordinary vision and an extraordinary capacity for fantasy. Maybe those same fantasies can trigger extraordinary acts of creation by scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists, etc. On the other hand it could turn someone into a disfunctional wreck. I'd expect an overabundance of hyperphantasiacs toward both edges of the success-failure distribution.
> I don't think I would use a parsing lib to build a general purpose programming language though. At least not one that I intended to ship.

Curious why not? Too big of a dependency?
Humanity has always been getting intoxicated on drugs and alcohol though. Society practically evolved to organize the brewing of beer in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It's only recently that human societies have gotten so conservative with these things.
So if they are, they should be imprisoned?

Maybe you haven't met someone with high-functioning autism. Being naive is essentially a symptom.
Initial Coin Offerings.
You can download a directory containing a script, cd into that repo and less the file. ‘cd foo’ should never trigger arbitrary command execution. Ever.

Containerisation wouldn’t solve this, bash or similar would almost always be fun with near limitless boundaries.
The day I ordered my first Hetzner storage box (May 16) was the day I had my first Urgent Maintenance notice. Today the second one. "Urgent maintenance on Storage Box hosts XXX to XXX"

Never had any trouble with their vps offerings, but I'm not liking it.