skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been enjoying it, but I suspect that LotR purists are having fits.

The stories were basically written from whole cloth, based on fairly short mentions, in the four "later" books. From what I understand, they weren't even allowed to use Tolkien's notes.

I haven't encountered anything that has made me think this was a different "universe," but the general "feel" of the show is vastly different from Tolkien's writing.

For one thing, ol' J. R. R. was more than a little chauvinistic. Women didn't really play much of a part, in his writings, and when they did, they were fairly peripheral, or "objectified" (not necessarily in a sexual manner, but they were obvious stand-ins for some ideal).

I've been enjoying seeing Galadriel as an arrogant ass-kicker, but am a bit disappointed in a flower-sniffing Elrond.
I guess they're using the LOTR's name/fame to attract people, if they would have done another fantasy show without LOTR's name, this would not have work as well so I guess they went for it, regardless of the fanbase.

The world can thank Jackson for doing a great trilogy that doesn't change the story that much and that is still a master piece.

Let's hope Amazon don't ruin the name.
Uh yeah there’s nothing overtly political in the show. People that are getting political vibes from the show all seem to be pointing to being annoyed about color blind casting. That’s not political, unless you’re the kind that thinks having black people in stuff is political, which is sad.
I wish the Tolkien estate sold the rights for Silmarillion and other stories published posthumously, AND retained some editorial control over the content of the content. Christopher could have done this in life. If he did, The Rings of Power could use more Tolkien content than just the appendices of Lord of the Rings
With respect, minimum paid leave in Ireland is 30 days (20 days + 10 public holidays). While paid parental leave is not a legal right, all the developer jobs offer sick leave, generous parental leave, notice periods, vesting, etc.

Commercial property, services, etc are far cheaper in Berlin. Hence why it's common to move start-up dev teams from Dublin to Berlin to save money. My own experience is that Berlin is significantly cheaper to employ developers in particular.
I'm working on and off on calendago: https://github.com/zikani03/calendago. Partly using it to help a friend get better acquainted with Go as well as getting familiar with graphics/image processing libraries in Go.
The goal is to run a free service to generate high-quality printable personalized calendars (as PDF).
This has never happened for me.
Rings of Power is roughly similar to rewriting the Bible. Keep the same characters but change the timelines and have all the characters get into new and unique things.

And then go and ask Catholics to just give it a chance. C’mon don’t be a hater it’s still about Jesus. Give it a chance.

Why not just make a show set within the rights you do have?!?
As I understand it, Mr & Mrs OP agreed they didn't want children; only OP has changed his mind. Unless Mrs OP had the much more specific objection to childbirth and indifference to children in general; non-biological children don't help OP.

> Sometimes I fantasize about leaving my spouse, who I love to death, find someone who I can have a child with.
The best phase is about to begin, and the worst of child raising is behind you. It will never be easy, but IMHO older kids are a lot more fun, clever and interactive.
> In Europe...typically data plans are just reduced in bandwidth once your volume is used up

"Reduced" is a very kind characterization, even if it's literally true - in my experience (with Vodafone and Three) this means ~64kbps which makes even messaging apps functionally unusable.

Since I started traveling more, I use my eSim slot for a ~7€ data-only plan from one of the discount MVNOs just to avoid being caught in this situation.
Operative word being protracted.

It's also important to realize that especially with infrasound, you're always exposed to it along with most regular sounds.

The modulation applied to sound to turn it into speech (i.e. amplitude and frequency shifts on order ~0.5-2 Hz) shows up in the frequency spectrum at those sorts of frequencies.

If you say "hey hey hey hey hey", that's a 1 Hz-or-whatever sound wave you're producing with a higher frequency carrier wave.
McDonald's owns their own farms. They are big enough that controlling their supply chain is very important.

Facebook does not use cloud providers and designs their own servers.

The very large compute uses and cloud providers have incentives to grow their own food. Doing so can save them a few percent at scale. That savings is both not passed on to you and even if it was is not significant at small to medium scales.
Am just here to agree with you on iPhone SE. Also using 12 Mini now.
Which is insane because they spent a lot of money just getting the rights to make this... "Fan" fiction essentially.
An elegant solution to this has already been proposed: go and share an office with like-minded people from the same or across different companies.
I don't know but I'm eager to find out when using this. So far it has been really interesting to get a glimpse into a walled garden I normally can't access.
> I always saw tech as the field where a disproportionally large amount of people truly love what they do.

You do confuse "loving what they do" with "being at the office" and "socializing during slack time". I do love my job but I do hate socializing with people, which is definitely not my job. That is why I'm working in IT, I don't have to socialize beyond the bare minimum to be successful. I think IT attracts introverts like me, and I do suspect we are the majority (but I have only anecdata for that).

> I know that "the office" is a bad place for a lot of people. [...] But shouldn't we rather work on fixing those things instead of making them bearable by just turning off a camera in a Zoom meeting?

Things have gotten worse and worse around the office. Small one- or few-person offices gave way to cubicles, which gave way to open-plan offices, which gave way to open-plan seat-lottery not-even-your-own-desk offices. No amount of pushback changed this direction in the slightest. Meanwhile noise and interruptions got worse and worse, where in my private office people knocked politely before entering or were kept out by the DND sign, nowadays the seat lottery puts me next to a loudmouthed marketing phone-drone, who when not screaming into the mic drones on about his awesome sales statistics and his new yacht. At least the boss can't easily walk over anymore and breathe down my neck because the seat lottery put him somewhere else usually. Any and all things that have been tried to fix this are band-aids and lip-service. It only got worse and worse.

WFH is great, finally a step in the right direction. I do have no sympathy for the extroverts, because they got us into the aforementioned mess.
The office can be great for socializing, but if you change your social circle every 1-3 years it makes them somewhat shallow or transitory. If they stay with you, given the current trends, they’re anywhere but the office you’re currently sitting in. My closest friends came from uni and have stuck with me. Longest, closest relationships and all that.

And this discussion assumes you live in a tech hub doing tech hub things. Specialize and you start moving to where the jobs are and uprooting to move sux.
Look at the ground near the bus stations next time. I can't make it any more obvious than that.
Thanks for the kind words, especially since your friend is using the iOS app, and that's super buggy and neglected. I wish I had more experience with iOS development (especially the Core Data part) to fix those annoying bugs that make messages not show up in the app after they arrive. One of these days I'll spent more time with iOS again.

Anyway, thank you ;-)
Shameless plug, we're working on a next-gen pinball simulator called Visual Pinball Engine[1]. It's free and open source, using Unity, and will eventually support importing FP's table format.

It's still WIP, but we've put a lot of focus on tooling, so anyone can easily create tables.

Quick video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CfZImFl1ME

[1] https://github.com/freezy/VisualPinball.Engine
Bell's Palsy is truly one of those things that just suddenly fuck you over. I was 16 when I called my mom from high school and said "hey, don't panic, but half my face is paralyzed". In retrospect, this was probably not the best way to do it. Food ? Slides out of your mouth. Spit ? Goddamnit, slides out too. I took the reasonable option of still going to school, as a high schooler. Bold move, but thankfully, noone was a dick about it. Best way around this whole situation was to laugh about it anyways. For what reason did it happen ? None, same as the article. Just popped in one day. It took 3 months to come back to mostly normal, so it was pretty short for me, thankfully, but the sudden onset can just... happen. Doctors were thinking of some herpes causing an inflammation and pressing against the nerve, but it can be literally anything, and even better, it can come back at any time. Just a stroke of bad luck. As of today, I'm back at almost 100%, but I still feel that muscles on one side of the face are just this little bit less strong than the other side.

Life without being able to blink just one of your eyes is a frustrating one. Sleeping with an eye patch might make you feel like a pirate for a few weeks, but dear god the dryness. Your face ends up overcompensating, naturally. Can't feel yourself smiling on one side ? Clearly that's because your muscles aren't going hard enough, so go on, make them work HARDER. The one side that was smiling looked more like a goblin than anything else really.

Being told I maybe had face herpes was truly a highlight in my life due do how out of the blue and unlikely it sounded.
Starlink antennas only aim downward so no it can't even be used to talk to other satellites/spacecraft, let alone the moon. Though there are planned tests to try to link to the network via the laser connections, but that would require being relatively nearby, at least with the current design.

Also even if it was facing upwards, the entire reason why they're using LEO satellites is to get low latency to get network performance similar to what you get with terrestrial service. If you're far away from the Earth then none of that is true.
> All major life decisions you make changes who you are. That's what makes them "major".

Meh. I'm married, bought multiple houses, moved country. I don't know how many major life decisions you can make but none of them have changed me in the way merely expecting a child already has. I expect when they're born will reveal the next 90% of that transition.
Only if you work with all people who highly value remote work. My office always has people there. And we have the option to work fully remote. Some people have never been to the office.

Finding the right company culture for you is often overlooked in favor of things like the right tech stack.
True, my wife and I have a 1 year old and I'm 44. She's 42.
Same! Weirdly remember this programme more than most. The episode where it stops working until the dad cleans it specifically!
I'm getting some Handmaid's Tale vibes from some of the answers here.

Either adopt or figure out what do you expect from life, deep down. Then think about what you will expect at different stages as you age. Remember that you have changed expectations radically at least once. Self-change is a good thing, forget about integrity and focus on your desires.

You will die alone, most likely. Virtually all old people in retirement homes are disappointed by the lack of visits from their offspring.

We all mourn our lost childhood when we lose curiosity and playtime as we age. Having kids is one way to partially relive your childhood, and on the other side you get to be a mentor to someone who will actually listen to you, most of the time. These two things for example can also be fulfilled in different ways than having kids.
This seems to ignore the existing, wider audience that enjoyed the movies.

I won't defend the quality of the Rings of Power—I think it's lacklustre at best—but the premiere did get 25 million people watching it. It seems doubtful a completely original series would have attracted so large an audience right off the bat.

And I don't think there's necessarily a problem deviating from the source material when adapting something. But you do need to make sure your new ideas are as good, or better, than the original. To me, the single biggest failure of Rings of Power is that those deviations have been so poorly executed. Bad plotting and bad writing abounds.
This how I operated for a long time as well, but made liberal use of text replacement for frequent things like il -> I’ll.

Unfortunately, when I got a Mac laptop, those replacements were synched and for some reason can’t be disabled on just one device.

Now I’m back to autocorrect, fighting with the AI to learn technical terms and command line entries for when I need to talk to colleagues over chat.
It’s a Honda and it’s not a convertible. Memory is strange.
40 yr old? I doubt I am going to be economically ready for reproducing (capable of putting kids in a good school while also sponsoring enough free time for myself) before 50 yet I feel almost sure I am going to have kids.
After all these years I'm still looking for my first demo and shareware DOS CD-ROM that I had as a child, circa 1998. It was a weird compilation. Everything from AMIGA-like demo's to playable shareware CGA stuff such as Hugo's House of Horrors, Monster Bash, Keen and 4D Boxing. I have not given up, but I'm aware that the chances of me finding a copy are extremely rare.
Related. Non-obvious approach appears to work:

https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertif...
"Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age" is in the Silmarillion which Amazon don't have rights to. So they need to actively avoid stuff that Tolkien has written, either by ignoring parts of the timeline or changing the story.
If you'd rather watch (instead of read) a summary of the book history in the 2nd age, here's a nice rundown: https://youtu.be/tuRoZ_fbgXM

Lot of great content on that channel, without it I would have been completely lost watching Rings of Power.

Biggest problem with the show is the writing and the pacing. There's really good stuff in Season 1, it just isn't well written.

For all the money Amazon spent on production (it's a really beautiful show), they seemed content to hire amateur writers.
Read it rote out of a notebook for extra sincerity.
I’d say the real problem is not the technical insecurity - that’s a result. The real problem is in the last paragraph: the fact that banks are incentivized to use insecure mechanisms by being able to shed any responsibility simply by denying customers claim.
Is that a philosophical question? I look at the picture, think "interesting" and move on. I don't use Instagram so you should probably ask someone who does what the intrinsic motivation for looking at Instagram photos is.
The "elves will take our jobs!" scene in Numenor was pretty overt.
don't hate the player, hate the game

I think it's perfectly sensible to hate the players that perpetuate the game. It's nothing more than a very weak version of the Nuremberg defense.
You seem to ignore other basics, such as the military alliance agreements currently in place. These agreements are actually enacted in law and backed by the presence of thousands of American troops in Japanese territory, and in billions of dollars of yearly payment from Japan to the USA for this alliance.

Having a critical view of the world is a great thing, and I can only commend you for that. But you need to look into the facts first.
Mars is 3 minutes away at the speed of light at it's closest. So e-mails at best.
Not seeing pinterest is worth more
Commuting is the one thing I simply cannot stand wasting time on

Very early in my career i worked a job with a 1 hour each way commute. Quit it after a year and never again applied to a job that was more than 30mins from my house - best decision I ever made

Of course then covid came and now I work remotely with 0 mins commute.

Grocery shopping, cooking, household chores take up maybe 1 hour max per day for me, average probably more like 30mins
> Imagine watching watching a movie while taking off to somewhere distant

A movie is only a few GB - you can already store them locally on your phone.
Good luck lifting 50 times a day a 12kg todler while being in non-ergonomic positions and waking up 3-4 times during the night while having a productive work when you're in your 40's.

And then, when they grow up, to keep up with them during physical activities, to teach and show them the way. It's possible, but it's much easier when you're in your 20's.
About 6 weeks old (that's around when they start to respond to night and day)
OP, my mum was 44 and my dad 49 when I was born - they were great parents and they both admit having me kept them young. I lost my mum this year due to vascular dementia but my dad is still going strong at 89 and in better health than many 20 years younger.
It's strange to see you downvoted. I can't understand why anyone would treat RMS as anything but entertainment and occasionally curious ideas. I'd never take serious life advice from him.
It's not necessarily too late, my aunt had her first child at the age of 40. If I were you I'd get to work ;)
It's certainly lessening privacy at the very least. Government sanctioned spying in exchange for saving a few minutes.
Well, the hobbit doesn’t do much to bolster Jackson’s reputation. Harshly lit, far too long, trying to cash in on the Tolkien name and lotr fame. This makes Amazon’s effort start off as a cash in on a cash in - Jackson’s good stuff is almost 20 years and a viewing generation old.
I think a lot of people have genuinely just forgotten what they liked about office-based work.

We returned to the office part-time recently, and the sentiment of ‘I’d forgotten how great it was just seeing everyone in person!’ is often expressed. I’ve certainly felt it.

Would be interested to hear if that’s a common thought amongst folks here who’ve also returned.
Technical solutions exist and should be implemented by experienced people, but if it is central to your business model to sell video streams, you must absolutely understand the risks and challenges before you start and need to protect against unexpected cost explosion.

In any case, you need throttling / DDOS protection or a similar mechanism that will stop video download when you get too many requests - this risk is very real and when you can not stop some bot downloading videos a trillion times you can be killed financially in one day.

This must be implemented in some hard technical limitation on the server / service provider site and should not be some soft agreement like e.g. "we will find a solution, just go ahead".

Also very important is to implement all video streaming costs in a pre-paid fashion - put the max amount of money you are ready to pay for monthly delivery into the account in advance, but make absolutely sure that delivery stops when that money is burned. It is better to be offline for some while (or deliver some reduced quality content that is much less traffic intensive) than to go broke in one night.

But you do not only have to prepare for abuse and errors, you also have to see that in the long run, when the number of subscribers get bigger and bigger, you need a good solution to guarantee that the ongoing downloads of (old) subscribers will not accumulate to astronomical numbers - we could speak of an "inverted long tail" here that will eat more and more money. Plan ahead!

There are many more problems with selling video content and this was just a small introduction, but contained the most important points.

Sometimes it turns out that it will be a much safer solution to NOT sell the video content but sell additional services around your videos - put your videos on YT, forget about all problems with video hosting and focus on selling many much less intense products and services, while your videos generate lots of subscribers, because you will never deliver to as many people as YT can.

Good luck!
I remember how comically absurd it sounded when I saw women on Iranian TV: because the regime does not allow hair, even women in bed are pictured with a hijab on, in their movies. :D

The less funny thing now, is that the West has reached that level of absurdity without noticing, because a women sleeping with her hijab on, or an underground black creature (ork), or a black medieval British princess (as seen on some BBC shows), is pretty much the same level of insanity.

And you're right, of course there is nothing political in that. :)
That. Auto-correction is just about impossible for me. I write in two or three languages, and sometimes mix them. In addition to that, the suggestions, even in the correct language, are always 100% wrong. Auto-correction has always, without exception, been in the way for me, so that one gets switched off first thing.

It's actually bliss to write Japanese.. even with my limited ability to do that. The only thing that pops up is suggestions for which kanji or whatever to use for what I entered. Works smoothly and fast.
I said goodbye to my previous life when on one evening in a restaurant in Italy I discovered that I just don't enjoy going places that much any more.

As for creative work after hours: I realized I was overestimating its importance to me because previously I would frequently elect to just watch YouTube or argue on the internet - I just didn't see it back then.

After a year or so since becoming a parent I returned to the previous rate of producing side-projects so it's all good now. I just don't have time to waste on those other activities, which is also a net gain.
Somehow it feels like they are trying too much to milk every last single drop of IP available out there to create the next big thing that everyone is talking about, and for me, Rings of Power, just like with House of Dragon and that Harry Potter thing with Fantastic Beasts, it just seems like there are shows/movies created by suits strictly from a financial or business point of view and have absolutely no soul to them.

It's worse with Rings of Power because they don't have all the rights, but they wanted to take advantage of the name to increase the views, create some sort of off brand world that is there but not quite, just like sports games where one company doesn't hold all the rights and you end up playing with some weird teams like White Blue and some generic player names, because you know you can't legally use a name. Can't wait for Gonbolf next season.
You talk about "not having children" as a decision that you alone made, not a joint decision with your wife. (I'm assuming from the mention of a biological window that your spouse is a woman). I don't know if this is just the way you worded it but the first thing you should do if you haven't already is discuss this with her. Does she want children now?

Others have pointed out that it's not necessarily too late biologically for a woman at 39 and I'd add my own experience to that - my wife had our children at 38 and 41, and we had no issues with either conception or pregnancy. So don't assume it's impossible.

If you are in a place where she doesn't want children now and you do though then that puts your relationship in a very difficult place and perhaps you should try couples counseling if you haven't already. If she's open to looking after children but doesn't want to (or can't) go through a pregnancy then there are other options like surrogacy or adoption which might be open to you. A good couples counselor should be able to help you discuss this in a way which is safe both of you.