skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sort of lore is drilled into the engineering students at LeTourneau University (my alma mater). There's an entire mini museum setup to LeTourneau's achievements on campus. After working there after grad school I realized much of LeTourneau's "genius" was some form of reductionism.

problem: "We need a machine that can grab these logs from these trees we cut down."
solution: "Why not make a gigantic claw and put it on wheels?" https://www.imcdb.org/i236846.jpg

problem: "All these trees are in the way. We just need a way to quickly clear the area."
solution: "Why not just stomp them down?"
'Stomp them down?'
"Yeah" http://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1964-tree-stomper-...

problem: "Ok, RG. Some trees we can't just stomp"
solution: "Ok. Let's just drive over them them." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-9yvNESLPo

There's this saying:
"Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."

RG was never guilty of making anything "barely". Dude straight over over did it on a lot of projects. He took small simple machines and just scaled them tf up. He didn't do small. "You've got a big problem? You just need a bigger machine." is something that fits with what his machinery says about his design choices.

He filled a niche for sure. His style and creations fit at a unique time in American history. American steel and manufacture was very much in it's heyday. He had access to all the stuff needed to execute his big ideas. His conservative religious fervor also fit the politics of the day, allowing him to link up with Billy Graham which had some factional differences of opinion from the likes of the overly conservative Bob Jones and Oral Roberts.
Seeing large numbers of GIs returning from WW2 eager to work, RG put them to work building gargantuan creations. My personal, somewhat cynical take, is RG also saw that each of those veteran workers had GI Bill money sitting unused. He formed LeTourneau Technical College on the grounds of a shuttered military hospital to train employees at his factory a short walk from the campus. Being a "college" meant he could charge exactly the dollar limit amount of tuition the GI Bill afforded. Being a private college meant he could control what and how they studied. It remains a quite conservative Christian institution and students and faculty alike are reminded how it's a "ministry" until it comes time for a student who can't pay or an employee that asks for a raise. Suddenly the "ministry" facade shatters and the word "business" hops into the wording. As soon as the matter is closed, it returns to its "ministry" persona (esp when asked to do something above-and-beyond).

RG is a fascinating character nevertheless. He's even listed in the Offshore Drilling Hall of Fame in Galveston (yep, it's a thing) for his work on Scorpion an offshore rig for the Zapata Oil Company, then run by a young businessman named George H. W. Bush.
Actually he later goes on to say the garbage collector can clean other resources by using the finalise method. The problem is that it doesn't necessarily clean them up at the right time. The garbage collector isn't triggered by having too many open file descriptors, it runs when you are low on memory. In theory it could look at other resources too, but for certain resources you don't want to wait at all.
> often, in human terms, much more natural to start from 1

This meaning of natural is highly cultural dependent. It took the Greeks a startlingly long time to accept that one was a number (because it's a singleton), much less zero. I do not e.g. want arrays that can't have length one, because they have to be containing a number of things.

> No need to build anything new;

Well, no, not "new". Arrays with arbitrary bounds is a well-trod path. But they still had to make it work in Julia: CartesianIndices, LinearIndices, and overloading of "begin", and "end" keywords, etc. And the radical dependence on multimethod dispatch meant they couldn't quite just reuse existing work from other languages.
> You know all the hoary jokes about the difference between theory and practice?

Only in theory; do you have a practical example?
this is pure copium and old fashioned antimodernist ranting. if it helps you sleep at night, great, but it wont work on everyone. some people dont appreciate their nation becoming north korea 2.0
That's exactly the thing- it is almost always going to be a judgement call, so the worst thing in the USA was for it to become politicized. In China, a monolithic 'zero COVID' policy was easily arguably better than the USA's fragmented efforts and conflicts 1-2 years ago, but now?

The evolutionary path of COVID seems more likely to follow that of the Spanish flu than to become more and more deadly. What happens if the next strain is even more contagious but also correspondingly less dangerous (especially as natural and vaccination immunity continues to rise)? Yes, people still die but there are trade offs with all policies, that's why we don't have flu lockdowns.
How far will the train take you?
Shows all the stations connected by a direct train (no connection). Limited to Europe. Contrast Vienna to Bruxelles-Midi, for example.
One major selling point of Ruby is the robust ecosystem of high quality, open source libraries which are relevant to the things SaaS companies need to get done. There's a ton of code you just don't have to write if you stick to Ruby.

The fact that "Ruby developers already basically know the Crystal syntax" is a selling point for Crystal, but if people are already evaluating a switch to another programming language, that's just one of many factors that must be considered.
There are lots of people on Twitter with 6502 (and similar) in their screen names that love showing pics of devices they own of that nature, and projects they do with them. You will definitely find an avid person to take it off your hands.

Also, there is this site: http://www.6502.org. Some of the groups are no longer (like the ones listed on G+ for obvious enough reasons) but it is an active community judging by the Twitter numbers.

Keep this guy in mind. He had his labour of love wiped out by the Russian invaders: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/29/1088680989/a-retro-computer-m...
Just switched everything over. I can live without the floating IP for now. I now pay slightly less than what I did at DigitalOcean while doubling the specs. Thanks for the tip!

The only problem is that now those other comments made me consider Contabo...
Yeah! That one time, in Canada!

Got any reference I can use to look this up, because it smells fishy.

Whereas I lived through the first Trump admin as an adult, and I could see the difference between what was reported (which mostly made sense) and what Trump stated himself, which was stream-of-consciousness gibberish.

Don't try to gaslight anyone on this issue. The press cleaned up what Trump said, and reported the cleaned-up version. The worst thing they could have done was report Trump's exact words.
Nice job on the wiring! I read that this is the second attempt and it shows. When I do wiring I always make a mess the first time and then get it a little better the second, third, ... time. Luckily at my job we get pros or panel vendors to do this, otherwise I'd be in trouble.
That is your working hypothesis? A fickle, ego driven person gives the world the first reusable rockets and electric cars? I hope you’re just speaking like this out of anger.
I don't disagree with your logic (people would try to hide sickness), but they do have mandatory testing.
That's one of the motivations for pkgbase. Which will land... checks notes... any decade now?
What about the theory that the NIST encryption curves may be backdoored ?

If this is the case, if I would be the NSA I would strongly push for free cryptography, to make sure that only the US can decrypt the communications and have a strategic advantage.
There are few, if any, billionaires in Europe with the kind of assets that US (and Chinese and Indian) billionaires have.

There might be 3 in the top 30 here:

https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
An Outer Banks house that collapsed into the ocean
You're thinking of truffles. Acorns don't have much scent.
User Outcomes is just as important as User Experience
to what are you replying?
Just about everything on the home page being in all caps makes for a difficult reading experience.
There was a peer-to-peer network solution that was associated with this "Luna" cryptocurrency that has been discussed on HN several times. The network did not have any ostensible connection to a cryptocurrency, it looked like just another p2p software project on the surface, but if one read all the documentation one could discover the connection to "Luna". Wondering if anyone remembers the name.
Thank you for the shoutout! Both projects have definitely been a community effort. There are many people and sponsors to thank.

I've worked on both Let's Encrypt and Caddy. Indeed, the goal with Caddy is to set the gold standard for other software to follow. I'd say Let's Encrypt does the heavy lifting in this space, though. It's truly a remarkable team and infrastructure.
It buys time until the next generation of vaccines. Which are coming along well.[1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/19/moderna-redesigned-covid-vac...
File that as "Cool thing that is an NFT, but doesn't need to be."
I can definitely attest to this, I have two brother cats, and usually calling one of their names gets the other's attention to, as if to say "oh I see how it is, you invite him and not me".

I'm also really happy this is empirically validated, its's so easy to notice things like this and wonder if you're crazy.
As someone that has a few sites that can get user generated content - I must say that it saddens me that spam stuffing would get the main domain and site delisted - and likely never re-listed.

A couple times a year I get hit with a bunch of spam blogs / user profiles and when I discover and clean them up, I assume that at least google/bing see that the spam-to-real ratio has been fixed and rank it higher again.. but I'm not sure really, especially since google took keywords out of click traffic.

What would be nice is something like the 'site has been hacked page' that I've unfortunately seen a few times for sites - that lets you clean it up and submit a re-check it's clean now button thing.

I've also suggested that google make it so you have to vouch for links which would expose people using the spam stuffing techniques.. kind of the opposite of the disavow tool - but they never read any of my disavow submissions.

Sucks to get spammed, fight spam, and then be penalized for it more ways than one.

One of my older buddypress/wpmu sites I recently turned off blog creation for users because it's just so tiring fighting the spammers - which are only doing what they do because google - meh.
The underlying technology of Web3 (distributed consensus building) is quite different from that of p2p (networking and information sharing).

While some of the criticisms of web3 are true, most of them are situations caused by the early phase we are in. Moxie's post surfaces the need for better decentralized infrastructure. The hyper financialization (everything is monetized) is caused by lack of identity solution and limited blockspace in L1 chains. These things are being built now, and will come online in the next few years. Transaction fees will become cheaper, applications will be more decentralized.

The core innovation is digital scarcity and crypto-enabled data ownership. For the first time in history, we can represent value without a middle-man. This completely changes the power dynamic of platforms vs. users, and makes value creation digital-native. Web3 has an opportunity to address some of the biggest problems with today's internet services like surveillance capitalism and censorship.
I think Scaleway is pretty cheap
PoS investors burn their reputation if they double spend on any network they invest in.

this is a stronger guarantor of safety than PoW for every chain aside from ones that dominate their computing platform (BTC/ETH). anon miners will eat a naive network and move on.
On the whole I think the GitHub Actions experience is really nice, but there are some baffling decisions for sure, like requiring GitHub Enterprise just to put a manual approval step in a workflow.
Surely airport security would recognize it as a single board computer! /s
There's also generally no guarantee that finalizers ever run, period.
Were there actually any/many 8-bit machines that supported palette-based color?

I think of this as more something from the Atari ST era; in fact, I think I distinctly remember the waterfall effect from the NEOchrome examples: https://www.retroshowcase.gr/index.php?p=article&artid=3
If you're going to go through the trouble of placing a microphone under someone's table or keyboard, you mind as well just install a keylogger. It would be much more likely to succeed given the risk.
At least, in the USA, we have learned nothing from the past two years. I'm pretty sure if Ebola went airborne, and people were dropping dead in the streets, there would still be a large number of people downplaying, denying, and politicizing the virus. And if the government dared to even suggest they voluntarily isolate, they'd be angrily protesting in the street for their innate right to spread it around and die.

We're talking about people, who, on their death beds, used their last breath before going on the ventilator to cus out the doctor and call COVID a Liberal hoax. The country is full of belligerent morons with persecution complexes, and there is no reason to expect that they'd change just because Ebola was more visibly disgusting.
PowerBI vs. Thoughtspot Semantic Model and Why Pricing Is an Engineering Problem
From the bill:

"Censor" means any action taken to edit, alter,
block, ban, delete, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost,
regulate, restrict, inhibit the publication or reproduction of, or
deny equal access or visibility to expression, to suspend a right to
post, remove, or post an addendum to any content or material posted
by a user, or to otherwise discriminate against expression. The
term includes an action taken to inhibit a social media platform or
interactive computer service user's ability to be viewed by or
interact with another user of the platform or service.

https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB20/id/2424328
Cryptocurrency may not be so crime-friendly after all
They have done so much in real world crypto, I feel like they should be the ones handinf out prizes and awards. The single biggest improvement in transport security since public key crypto imo.
If you are driving at night, and aren't sure if there might be a dangerous obstacle hidden behind some glare, damn right you should make a gentle brake check (to warn people behind you) and start shoulder checking for exits in case it gets weird. Defensive driving means you have a positive plan to navigate safety. You can't blindly assume your path forward is default-safe. Or you can yolo and risk being part of the 40k dead and countless maimed every year.
The Soviets did not parachute from commercial flights during Storm-333.
> Most WP sites should be static sites.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/

https://wp2static.com
A human in my country is supposed to drive in such a way as to be able to stop in the distance that they can see road is clear. So it's not that crazy to ask from Tesla that the car slows down if it can't judge to road to be free, that's exactly what we ask from human drivers.

Not all humans manage to do that, and they're liable if they crash into some other car. Loose their insurance and cannot drive anymore if they do it too often.
"Wash hands" was a simple silver bullet in medicine.
Other (explain as a comment)
>If self-determination were absolute then for example the U.S. could get any territory it wanted by using its immense wealth to buy off local residents.

I mean, yeah. Thats how panama was born for example. Colombia was kinda mad about it at the time but of all the things the US gets shit for its not even in the top 10.

The US also tried to do something similar (and failed) to Kaliningrad. Only Russia objected.

Theres a pretty long history of the US doing this and nobody really minding.

>I'm sure there are some villages along the Russian border who would be happy to see their land turned into a U.S. military base in exchange for U.S. passports and big piles of money.

I wouldnt be so sure. Argentina tried the same thing with the falklanders and it didnt work. Likewise Trump with Greenland.

Villages also wouldnt survive if they were severed economically.

Crimea wasnt bought, anyway. It's just 90% ethnically Russian and objected vociferously to the maidan.
One of the problems I never knew I had. Made me curious, how long does it actually take to start. Not entirely trivial to determine, but for the initialization time, Emacs has a function which reports it (of course):

(emacs-init-time)
"4.7 seconds"

Holy cow, that's a lot. But perhaps given that this is a first gen. Banana Pi (1GHz dual-core ARM32) not actually all that much. And given

(emacs-uptime)
"99 days, 3 hours, 14 minutes, 25 seconds"

not significant either.
I wish IntelliJ would sell git-only tool - their three way merge tool is the best I’ve used, and would gladly pay for a license.
Yeah, duh, totally forgot that one.

And I should know; the alarm clock on my windowsill says 0:54 right now.
I have seen a lot of people write this but I don't understand how. Shouldn't there be a black market rate in that case? Is there one? Some quick Googling gave no articles.
Makes me concerned when they still use the phrase "Mac/OSX" instead of the correct nomenclature "macOS".
ScreenToGif
This article is representative of my experiences as well. I'm thankful to the author for writing it. My favorite parts:

> This slowness affects other software written in Julia as well. For example, my editor formats on save. For most languages, the formatting time-delay is not noticable, but for Julia it sometimes took more than 10 seconds.

> The idea of “You only need to start the interpreter once a day” failed for me.

For me, this is the biggest obstacle to using Julia. It's not designed to support the traditional C/Python/whatever workflow of editing a text file and then interpreting/compiling it; it wants you to be in the REPL all the time. If you don't use the REPL, you have horrible problems with package loading times. So if you're someone who doesn't like developing in a REPL, you're out of luck.

Some comments by Julia users on the post are available here: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/blog-post-about-my-experie...
Fido Alliance and the end of 2FA revenue to CPaaS vendors
This is a very nice recognition! I realized that the registrar I have my personal site with purposefully does not support Let's Encrypt as a CA. Anyone have a registrar they'd recommend these days to transfer a domain to? FYI, the crappy registrar/host in question is namecheap.com so you can avoid them in the future.
It seems to me that much of the difficulty with interfaces, whether they are made explicit or kept implicit, lies in defining the semantics that the functions are supposed to have.

As we expand the types our generic code can handle, we have to refine the semantics it relies on. For a long time, Base.length(::AbstractArray) could mean “the largest one-based index of the array”, but then we started using the same code that handles regular Arrays for OffsetArrays and this interpretation was no longer valid. I guess the alternative would have been to leave length(::OffsetArray) unimplemented and block the valid use of OffsetArrays for all generic code that understands Base.length as “the number of values”.

It can still be difficult to tell what a function like Base.length should mean if I implement it for my types. For example, should it return the number of local values or the global length for an array that is distributed between multiple processes (e.g. in an MPI program)? Perhaps some generic code will use it to allocate a buffer for intermediate values, in which case it should be the local length. Or some generic code computes an average by dividing the (global) sum by the global length.

It seems impossible to come up with a precise definition of all the semantics your generic code assumes a priori, so we can either restrict our usage of generics to a small number of concrete types that were considered when the code was written, or we have to accept that we occasionally run into these sorts of issues while we refine the semantics.

Anecdotally, it has been my experience that packages that have been made to work in many generic contexts (such as the ODE packages) are likely to work flawlessly with my custom types, while packages that have seen less such effort (e.g. iterative solvers) are more likely to cause issues. This makes me hopeful that it is possible to converge towards very general generic implementations.

It is also worth mentioning that it is very possible to use Julia without ambitious use of cross-package generic functionality, and use it “merely” as a better Fortran or Matlab.
Ah, sorry, the Big Board was a Z80 system, not 6502. Do you know of a similar group for the Z80?
> he is defending a system that classifies "FirstnameBunchOfNumbers" as human and not spam

That's a signal that a user is new or inexperienced, not that they're a bot. Twitter uses that pattern when automatically generating usernames for new users.
Turkey threatens to block Finland and Sweden NATO bids
Social media sites work to limit spread of Buffalo shooting footage
I don't have any good answers here, but it would seem that a negative consequence of welfare for lower income classes would have them disproportionately incentivized to have children (as their welfare would represent a much higher % of their total income). With this being the case I have to imagine that's a large contributing factor to associating large families with lower income and thus it loses the former advantage of large families being a high status indicator and thus higher income (and presumably higher intelligence/ better adjusted) families were responsible for a larger percentage of the population.

I have no idea what a humane incentive would look like, but I do wonder if we could find one if giving higher income families more incentive to reproduce relative to lower income families (or more directly I'd want to incentivize higher intelligence and better adjusted families, I just don't know how to measure that so I use income class to differentiate).

Presuming in all of this, that it isn't controversial to want intelligent and adjusted people to be responsible for the lions share of genetic makeup of future generations.
I don't understand how this shit is still so persist on YouTube, do the engineers not realize the problem?
> So spammers have latched onto your search engine because they are getting useful results.

I'm not sure about this. At least with my search engine, it doesn't really seem to matter what response they get, I don't even think they look at the responses. They keep hammering away with tens of thousands of queries per day with the requests even though they've seen nothing but HTTP Status 403 since last October or so.

My best guess is they're going after search engines in general in case they forward queries to google, in order to manipulate their typeahead suggestions.
Another idea would be to contact the Computer History Museum and see if they want a donation:

https://computerhistory.org/
Makes sense. I guess the author's contention is that if Julia had those formal features the author wants, it would need very significantly less dev time to reach python's levels of reliability?

It's of course plausible, that's what those sorts of features are intended for, but I'm not certain I'm absolutely confident. At any rate, python demonstrates it is not the only path, as the author seems to be suggesting ("it is not obvious to me the problem can be solved" without these features, says the author. But it's not obvious to me that those features are necessary to solve the problem, or sufficient to solve the problem...)