skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What defunct software tool do you miss?
Why wouldn't, say, iOS be subject to the same incentives?
> - rpi has GPIO pins

This is certainly one of the "bespoke applications" I was referencing. That said, I tend to feel that USB GPIO boards[0] are more capable and flexible when/if you need GPIO. There's also the ESP32 series which almost always make more sense for me at least. You can add as many of these as you want to meet any GPIO need you will ever have. In almost every case I've needed GPIO having it available over wifi vs being limited to a few inches from a Raspberry Pi has been tremendously more useful.

> - many rpi boards' max power consumption is around the idling power consumption of a pc, rpi zero 2 can run off a standard usb A port of a laptop

Fair enough, but how often does this really matter? I'm not advocating for unnecessary burning of the planet but as an example at $0.20 per kWh a seven watt delta comes down to $1/mo which (to me, at least) is nothing over the lifetime of the hardware when factoring in the dramatically improved capability.

> - rpi zero 1/2, rpi 3A and rpi 4 has usb gadget mode which means it can be plugged to a notebook and two machines will connect over usb ethernet. That is especially helpful for debugging headless machines when in a hotel room (no wifi under your control, no ethernet cable).

Another bespoke application that is perfectly fair. This can also be achieved with a tiny travel router (I LOVE mine) which will also run circles around gadget mode in terms of performance and functionality - significantly better Wifi, multiple real ethernet ports, it's own USB host for whatever. Running OpenWRT of course so it's still a Linux machine you can do whatever with - including connecting the USB GPIO boards I referenced above.

> - yes microsd is slow, but it's also cheap and easy to swap. That means you can: 1. if a board is broken then take out the card and insert it into another board. It will take you 2 minutes max and then everything will be exactly the same. 2. clone your entire microsd card as backup 3. you can swap different OS by swapping microsd. No need to partition your harddisk.

MicroSD is EXTREMELY slow and unreliable when compared to NVMe, microsd is cheap but you "get what you pay for". You can also achieve similar cost, swap-ability, and ease of overall use with USB flash drives which are often higher performance and more reliable anyway. A full EFI BIOS, bootloader, etc comes in very handy.

These are generally excellent points but the vast majority of Raspberry Pi use cases seem to be people looking for a linux machine/home server/etc that doesn't touch any of this functionality.

But hey, in the end use what works for you!

[0] - https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264
I don't understand

EDIT: In all seriousness, anyone have an idea of _what_ they're thinking when they ask this? I don't get it, at all. Yes it's a horrible interview question, but...what do they even think they're getting out of it?
If a Pi 500 were to be made it should be a carrier case for the Pi5 compute module. The Pi as a keyboard form factor is too limiting.
The person just wants to collect a "project successfully executed" score. Nobody else in the organization really cares either, because the organization is way too complex and works to sustain itself rather than the customer or even profits. It's exactly like those pages that bombard you with engagement popups as soon as they load: they only measure increase of engagement, but never the portion of users that close the page instantly.

I don't really care though. Gas quality is the same across brands.
> Maybe it does in Wayland, I dunno.

And there lies the problem with linux.

You basically have to know how it works to use it and maintain it. You, at the very least, have to be a lightweight diy computer technician (or have someone you know like this) to figure out some intractable issues, like "copy paste isn't working" or "my screen is black."

You can be actively hostile to learning desktop computing and still kinda muddle through using Windows.

I have yet to find a distro I would, say, trust with my mother or some former work colleagues, but immutable distros like Fedora Kionite are getting closer.
Had not occurred to me to check tablets/phones/Android, thank you for the the suggestion.
Admittedly, I stopped reading just over half way, but the crux of the argument appeared to be that software should be fast, though I don't recall any justification for that philosophy other than suggesting that it is basically a truth. The article did acknowledge the counter point that in some cases the efficiency gains will never make up for the time spent chasing this efficiency, but it hand-waved that away without interacting with the argument.

The other key trait of the article was cherry-picking data and over simplifying domains. Several times the article alluded to the emotional plea that "what could the software possibly be doing that takes up that time/space" (my paraphrase) but it didn't place any serious attempt to answer that question, using their lack of provided answer as if it were an indication of an invalid answer and comparing various bits of software that do not have feature parity looking as if their only practical difference were performance. (Edit: Updated wording of previous sentence to be more clear.)

There's definitely alot to be said about how software could be more efficient as well as the social, environmental, and business costs of inefficiency, but there is also much to be said about how modern software empowers people that otherwise might not be able to write anything to write something "bad" that does what they need or to discuss how modern software developeres tend to aim to be "fast enough" in the way that an structural engineer would choose "strong enough."

There's much rich debate to be had, but this article didn't include it, instead going for an emotional rant, and failing to engage with actual reason. There is, in my opinion, truth to parts of the argument, but the article made itself clear that it didn't want a discussion.
Still, even when you need an RTOS, they're generally small and completely knowable.
USA is amusing :-D also asking "do you plan to co commit terrorist attacks" on visa / migration form is literally "xD" material.
Ever tried HolyC?
No reaction ? Straight to jail

Nervous ? Straight to jail

Laughing ? Straight to jail

Laughing nervously ? Guess what, straight to jail
Ceacle: Roductivity tools for your image and video editing
Oh wow, I somehow missed that. I'm surprised, as generally these kinds of tax measures don't make it past the Senate.

That's definitely good news.
Deploy your startup today instead of days or weeks
SvelteKit, Nuxt and Next.js starter kits to bootstrap your site development. Includes basic functionality like authentication, Stripe payments and transactional emails.
What would be the motivation to cut millions of households off from power?

EDIT: do you mean the system would be hacked?
Oh come on now, the Lisbon treaty was just a way to bypass the will of the people.

The people answered and the government of France should have listened, instead they came back with this treaty, changed a few tidbits and called it a day.

It was a slap in the face of democracy that was denounced by the right as well as by the left.

To say that this is a complex topic, so surely people don't know how to make up their mind because they may confuse the issue at hand with something else is laughable.

In a presidential campaign, it is perfectly valid to vote for someone because they speak well, wear nice clothes, say the right thing, or promise anything under the sun.

But a referendum should only be valid if people voted only for the question at hand and nothing else? That's very disingenuous.

If a government triggers a referendum and people vote no either because they don't like the proposal or because they don't like the party/government that brings the proposal forward, then this vote is as valid as any.
This is the modern equivalent of the "Swimming test" for detecting witches[1].

Being nervous when questioned by a cop is a perfectly rational response. Lots of people giggle when nervous. My wife, for example, laughs every time I hurt myself[2].

[1] https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/sink-or-swim-the-swimmin...

[2] I sort of hope this is a nervous response rather than her finding me hurting myself genuinely funny
The best inoculation against hubris is trying to fly to the sun.

Humans, to generalize, bias towards talking over walking.
I have never seen the big main lights using blue instead of green anywhere in Japan; the traffic lights for pedestrians however were blue in some places.
Why US allows such clowns to enforce law ?
TIL about 3)! That's fantastic to hear. Password managers sort of do this already, though.

So if you're a competent password manager user, only 1) matters. Passkeys really do seem like a bigger deal to your average user, since 2) and 3) implicitly incorporate password best practices.
i look forward to having sex with your body while you are comatose collecting an hourly rate for the privilege.
Funny how police departments cry crocodile tears every time the public discusses whether so many of them are needed, or about right-sizing their budget. "Don't cut back on police! There's crime everywhere!" But, then they have to resort to these tricks and gotcha-questions just to try to obtain reasonable suspicion (let alone probable cause to make an arrest).

If they so desperately want to find crime, they can, you know, pick up the phone when someone's car gets broken into. Plenty of that going around.
The actual paper: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6

Of note: This is an active test of the "Free Energy Principle" [1] with seemingly supportive results.

Their definition, in the paper, of sentience is as follows:

> It is proposed that these neural cultures would meet the formal definition of sentience as being “responsive to sensory impressions” through adaptive internal processes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle
Exactly. Inline is just surprisingly much faster than a lookup by URL, which has to check “do I have this cached? What type (immutable, revalidate, &c. &c.)? Now (if suitable) fetch it from the cache.” before it can get on with actually acting on the resource’s contents.
"Not this visit"
Would be a red flag for me about the company, that my performance is judged by unrelated factors that I have no control of.
> What ended up being passed wasn't the same treaty, so that's not entirely true.

But then you only have indirect democratic legitimacy at best.

> Complex situations like this can't just be reduced to a yes/no decision.

Perhaps. Usually it should be retried. But you cannot just turn around and say you suddenly have legitimacy because the executive of a government once thought to ratify a constitution.

You also cannot just say voters were misinformed. Perhaps you are misinformed? This just displays a concerning understanding of democracy. To me that was the propaganda of that specific time in which they needed to ratify something without popular support, against democracy in that case.
I’m in Hamburg Germany right now and it’s pretty wild to see just how bike friendly everything is. Commuters to work this morning were like a school of fish.
The article focuses on Tailwind CSS vs Semantic CSS. HTML attributes, beside "class" and "style" are outside the scope. Both approaches are equally good: there is nothing extra that Tailwind provides for making websites more accessible.
One underrated aspect of a real relationship is being on the giving end. I've no doubt that an AI could help me sort things out, but can't imagine a meaningful way to simulate being there for someone.

OTOH, it might prove useful in giving advice on how to help others.
Sounds like a win for the battery manufacturer if there has to be a close to matching static capacity of batteries or maybe self driving to somewhere overnight for a quick 10 min charge would be the answer.
Exactly if it’s not broadcast, periodically the old manual system kicks in and the financial incentives to encourage use makes sense.

And network security is another important aspect that can be a challenge but ultimately a benefit if better network security is needed and implemented standard with a clan for iot
Nope, it doesn’t do this. A while back I looked into doing a “hello world” version of that - trying to remove the Print feature. To do this, I had to build Chromium, which did actually take like 5 or 6 hours on an M1 MacBook.

From what I could tell of the config files, Chromium is pretty modular. It looks like you could just delete a few lines and have it avoid compiling entire subsystems. But I didn’t ultimately achieve my goal because I couldn’t get it to compile with those changes. IIRC it hit a linker error and I couldn’t figure out what to prune next, and I wanted to get back to actually building my product. (I ended up switching to Tauri anyway)

Part of me wants to revisit that project though. It would be so great if there were custom minimal builds of Chromium for Electron apps.
I have a still barely usable HP MS200 all-in-one machine. I got it cheap at a garage sale in 2017. It wasn't fast, but with Linux on it, once Google Chrome was finally loaded, it was OK, even to the point of running the web version of Skype for fullscreen video chats, certainly for watching fullscreen Youtube. It went off to the in-laws as a Youtube watching and Gmail station.

Recently it came back to me. And with the old, 2017 vintage software on it, still worked as it did then. But before making it a kiddie computer, I installed FC38 and the current version of Chrome.

But Youtube videos were now "slide shows". No amount of fiddling with the settings made them play right. Finally gave up and changed the RAM from 2GB to 3GB - I just happened to have the right (laptop) memory card to do that.

And that brought it back to the old, barely adequate (720p fullscreen without noticeable skips) performance. 1.5x as much memory, an extra gigabyte, to do the same thing as six years ago.

"So get with the program and buy an adequate machine! Don't you know that 16GB is the absolute minimum to get anything done these days?" Sure - I have machines with 16GB+ in them. Even on the crappy machine though, Google Chrome is showing a memory footprint on the order of 30GB. I'm sure most of that is mmap'ed files; it sure isn't RAM. But 30GB. For a mostly idle web browser.
That person’s entire criticism of Dia is “it’s old”. That’s it; not even “the program, when I run it, looks old”! They merely criticize the web page for having old screenshots and support for old operating systems on it.
https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/power-systems/electri...

no price listed, alas.

edit: did find a fuel consumption number; 50% load for a 3MW model should be 45-50gal for 10min (quotes 467gal/hr).

so ~14 miles/gallon or 6 km/liter
Your questions are related.

For context: since a base64 character represents 6 bits, every block of three data bytes corresponds to a block of four base64 encoded characters. (83 == 24 == 64)

That means it's often convenient to process base64 data 4 characters at a time. (in the same way that it's often convenient to process hexadecimal data 2 characters at a time)

1) You use = to pad the encoded string to a multiple of 4 characters, adding zero, one, or two as needed to hit the next multiple-of-4.

So, "543210" becomes "543210==", "6543210" becomes "6543210=", and "76543210" doesn't need padding.

(You'll never need three = for padding, since one byte of data already needs at least two base64 characters)

2) Leftover bits should just be set to zero; the decoder can see that there's not enough bits for a full byte and discard them.

3) In almost all modern cases, the padding isn't necessary, it's just convention.

The Wikipedia article is pretty exhaustive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64
This reads the same as "Oh, is climate change really real? Maybe we should just wait and see", only with buying electric cars now instead of Toyota's maybe someday super battery car.
That's a staggeringly terrible question. I hope you're joking but I suspect you're probably not.

If someone asked me that question in an interview that would be a red flag for me.
The word "ao" in Old Japanese already had the blue/green confusion before the character 青 was borrowed to write it, so if classical Chinese did as well I guess that would be two such languages.
Technically - but greening in the arctic is bad news for us https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1858/
Life After "Calvin and Hobbes"
HP and subscription requirement now for home office printers, corporate greed.
> She wants to make sure at the very least that some unaffiliated AI project isn't just stealing these people's work, names, likenesses, etc., and selling it.

Sounds like thinly veiled ludditism to me, why would it be necessary for AI porn to steal anybody’s likeness? I’m sure the 100% generated content is fine without any need for that.

It’s hard to drum up any sympathy for such an exploitative industry (exploitative for both the participants and the customers). Am I supposed to care that pornographers ability to profit of their unhealthy and addictive product is in jeopardy?
> I think it's possible that chatbots will help people prepare and refine their relationship skills

By practicing with ai porn bots? Created by the advertising (manipulation) tech giants of the future? How skewed and messed up would your norms be after a while?
It is incredibly frustrating to me how slow gmail can be to load. And I have no idea what I'm gaining with that time, as far as features go.
And it's nihilist:

Same officer, another case, same phrases, there he testifies the warning sign was the laughter. https://x.com/OrinKerr/status/1715764780567572945?s=20

It's about power.

I don't mind police generally, and the bitter negative majority take really turned me off for 30+ years.

But they're right. It's about power.

The bitter negativity just results from seeing what happens when you're on the wrong side of that. I've been lucky enough to avoid it.
I disagree, I’ve never found a library hackerspace that I liked. I think the problem is in liability. A real hackerspace has insane liability issues, and city govs are about the most risk averse groups there is.

Unfortunately I think hackerspace on gov property are doomed to never be cool.
This is why we must question the term "engineering" in the title "software engineering". Most engineering disciplines are concerned about optimization and correctness on orders of magnitude more, compared to software discipline. Software is perhaps better seen as mass-market movies or music. Most software is less concerned about hard reality but is constantly struggling to keep up with the intangibles of the human mind and psychology. Put it another way, software addresses subtler aspects of reality (human mind, psychology, etc), rather than the hard realities of the world. And the human mind is mostly a black box, and quite dynamic and random. As the fancies of the market shift, software shapes itself to satisfy it.

In physical engineering, if a mistake is made, the bridge collapses, lives are lost, and therefore there is a deterrent against mistakes. But in software/movies, nobody cares if there are 10 flop movies/software, as long as one works/pays off.
> Genuinely curious, why does it matter if a relationship is real if the person is happy and mentally healthy?

It's like having an imaginary girlfriend in your head. If it makes that person happy then why do other people feel bad for the guy? Because although that guy may look happy, and maybe is happy right now, most people don't really believe that's a recipe for happiness in the long term. People see somebody on a path to loneliness and pity them for it.
This is mostly right but:

It's certain strains of lactobacillus, not yeast. Yeasts are probably-to-certainly present in small amounts in fermentation but they aren't critical to its success or failure either way.

The containers should be clean, no biofilms or visible grime obviously, but wash-rinse-air dry is plenty. Clean enough to eat off of. The fermentation lactobacillus are tolerant to salt and will dramatically outcompete everything else in a salty environment. The careful sanitization is for brewing where the yeasts don't have this advantage, or canning where botulism complicates it. For fermentation alone it's not a concern.

The vegetables on the other hand you don't want to clean too meticulously. You want them clear of dirt, debris, bugs obviously. But the bacteria you're using to ferment are naturally present on the vegetables and it is the only effective source of them. You can see this with ginger, a lot of which is irradiated, virtually bacteria-free, and notoriously inconsistent to ferment alone for that reason.
I couldn't wipe the smile off my face biking everywhere in Holland, and it was in the winter! That being said, this app didn't do anything nice to my make for vehicles no sidewalk cul-de-sac.
Basically $30 a month to talk to a chatbot pretending to be Riley.
Well sure, I don't think anyone is denying that. And there have been absurd documented cases like babel or some other core JS library including a full photo of Guy Fieri for no apparent reason, increasing everyone's node modules by a few MB. Unlikely to be a lone case of these sort of shenanigans either.

But sometimes bloat is also good in a way? Micropython comes to mind. It may be the most laughably absurd way to destroy one's performance on a microcontroller but the abstraction it offers is really nice to work with. The problem is, I suppose, that we're in a recursive spiral of abstraction and each additional layer has to take into account all possible cases, drivers and whatnot for the next one. Hence the bloat. But there is definitely something hilarious about running an OS that runs an OS VM, that runs a container, that then runs another VM to run an interpreted language.

One day we'll be able to chatgpt ideas directly into machine code and get both speed and efficiency, but until then I don't see how one can avoid long dev times without working at a higher level.
In my experience it goes a fair bit beyond that. There is a high tolerance for the involvement of government authority in such things as (to sample from recent history): "you shall slaughter your cattle to reduce greenhouse gases", or "you shall not leave your residence".

This is positively unthinkable in other parts of the word. Puzzlingly (or perhaps not-so-puzzlingly), large swaths of Western Europe are comfortable with this, despite having recent experience with totalitarian states that were positively brutal.

Say what you will, I do see a connection between the two.
Ten minutes. Is that lots of kW from the charger, or does it already pass 1MW?
The title seems (unless the data since 2016 tells a different story) at odds with the 2016 Nature paper by Zhu et.al and others who conclude from satellite observations that "show a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning)".

They add "Factorial simulations with multiple global ecosystem models suggest that CO2 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend, followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (LCC) (4%). CO2 fertilization effects explain most of the greening trends in the tropics, whereas climate change resulted in greening of the high latitudes and the Tibetan Plateau.".\\

https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
I have my own weird things I get excited about that I don't expect you to understand.