skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Typical "Assume a cow is a uniform sphere of milk one meter in diameter" proposal.

> "adding crushed VOLCANIC ROCK to cropland" ... "by crushing the rock into a FINE DUST"

Emphasis mine.

So...

- Mine massive far-away lava fields
- Generate massive amounts of CO2 through this process
- Cause serious environmental damage
- Transport what you mined
- Generate massive amounts of CO2 through transportation
- Crush it into a fine dust
- Generate massive amounts of CO2 through this process
- Transport massive quantities again
- Generate massive amounts of CO2 again
- Likely need for massive amounts of chemicals as part of all of the above
- Use a high carbon footprint process to distribute the dust
- Use a high carbon footprint process to bury the dust to the required depth
- Hope and pray for enough rain
- Hope and pray you don't destroy the fields for agricultural use

Right.

And that's not even a full accounting of what the process at scale would look like. It is far more likely to add massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere than the opposite. Not to mention potential ecological damage across every region the project might touch, from mining to deployment.

We are not going to surface real solutions until we are willing to be honest about the full and real accounting behind proposals. Most so-called solutions barely pass basic high school science and economics tests. That's where we are. Still. I mean, we are still talking about stuff like huge fan-powered filters? Have we gone mad?

All we are doing is wasting time and money looking at false supernatural solutions to a planetary scale problem that requires real solutions.

> if this amount of carbon was removed across all California cropland, it would be equivalent to taking 350,000 cars off the road every year.

OK. Then forget volcanic dust and focus on the infrastructure and power generation required to enable a million electric cars per year. If this volcanic powder nonsense is good for 350K cars per year, well, doing THREE TIMES BETTER with electric cars is a realistic objective that isn't in fantasy-land at all and does not create the potentially horrific ecological danger of mining and spreading volcanic dust. One is realistic and attainable. The other is, at best, a dangerous fantasy.
To a novice: 'Make it work, then make it better!'

Wasting cycles in already not-so-sure brains is not a practical way to gain confidence.

Having a code that works, boosts the novice's confidence greatly.

Review would help the novice get better. Just be practical in dispensing the review comments - gaining proficiency needs time, trial and error.

There is a good enough advice for any level of the novice, no need to try to mold the novice into a pro in one shot.

The most critical - make sure the novice understands the task they are to solve. And also they should have freedom and a way to declare that they got stuck and need help.
Eh, people were happy to call the N1 the most powerful rocket ever for years even though it mostly qualified as a bomb and not a rocket. Starship's paper capabilities are indeed impressive. If they manage to make it work then great.
Yes, I probably would want to upgrade. But it's far easier to start from a working state and change one thing at a time. Nix gives you that control.
Yes. Even without spectre, this would let anyone with any webkit exploit get secrets from any other website.

Browsers with sandboxed multi-process architectures have been around since 2008, precisely because experts realised that rendering engines are so complex they cannot reasonably be secured, so need to be sandboxed for protection.

Unfortunately, I suspect that security experts within Apple were well aware of this, but were overruled because iOS devices tend to not have much RAM, and the user experience would be severely degraded by doing proper process-per-origin isolation, due to RAM exhaustion.
Yes but it leaves conversations when it wants to. Also one time I have got source links which it (transparently) labeled as "ads". AI chat based advertising might be the next thing, be careful.
What's the cold start time like? Neon's performance is horrible.
They are missing Altavista, Stick Figure Death, and a few more.
Scala isn't a language I can use here, we have too much Java tooling and are conservative on new languages. I see your point about Scala, there are niceties to it in my (brief) experience, however it's not so much the syntax as it is the way that software tends to be written in Swift given the language features – I didn't find the same in Scala, it tended to be more complex than I wanted.
It's not just Google, it's the web that Google made.

A huge amount of the crap on the web is there because of Google. If you think what makes it to the top 10 is bad, you should see the crap that doesn't make it. A different search engine, with different intentions, would have to filter all that out.

If you don't believe me, try setting "showdead" on your HN profile and see all the posts the system makes [dead] before you even see them because people have some crap blog and they post nothing but links to their crap blog. I almost feel bad for those people, had they done that in 2013 they might have actually shown up in Google, today they can do that until they are blue in the face and get about zero traffic, not because Google is effective at filtering that crap out, but because they will be buried underneath all the people doing the same.

A better resource today would have to start with some radical choice such as whitelisting, if only to reduce the head-end costs of ingesting material.

It's tempting to imagine some rules like: no ads, no popups of any kind, government mandated or not, especially no cookie banners, no paywall, but even sites like Wikipedia fail at those criteria today.
Right, but that company policy is there for a reason. Not out of generosity, but because they don't want to invest time and money into people who are likely to quit over a compensation that is so far below the average.
I had an excellent pun in my blog post about LangChain's problems:

> Wars about software complexity and popularity despite its complexity are an eternal recurrence. In the 2010’s, it was with React; in 2023, it’s with ReAct.
I build synthetic DNA. In the beginning (and still) I do a ton of steps by hand that I’ve slowly been moving to robots. Hours and hours at a bench picking colonies, designing sequences by-hand for customers instead of using software, writing robotic scripts for one particular customer’s needs, that kinda of thing
Opera is crafting it's own unique and utterly bizarre behavior.

There's a new .exe that runs on browser launch, blasting users with very, very loud sound. There's no obvious way to disable it. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=opera+loud+startup+site%253Areddit...

When trying to upload a file, one might expect a file picker. Instead, Opera pops open a small window with some pictures of earlier downloads. There's no option to navigate to the file you need. There's no evident path to exit the experience or even a window title to indicate what it's called (easy-files). In short, you're stuck.
What Are Roundabouts?
Based on the comments, there are obviously many people who have had bad experiences of this.

I agree with the general sentiment, I think this is a common behavior in many organisations.

But at least anecdotally, I'd just like to mention it's not always true.

For example, a friend who had loyally had worked at the same company for several years. He was going through some tough times personally (family) and was basically not doing anything useful for half a year or more.

Since he had been there for a while, they knew him well and didn't try to force him to get more things done, or anything else. They were basically fine with him doing nothing for many months. About half a year later, things were looking better for him on the personal front, and he would be back to speed (mostly).

If he hadn't worked there for several years [been loyal], I doubt they would have treated it the same.
We are talking about adding it to farmland so we really care about yields and safety.
Olivine is in ready supply as a by-product from the mining industry. There are piles of it laying around (which don't have the same effect as spreading it out) although they do need to be transported to projects.
The DoorDash founders started out by delivering all of the food orders themselves
Relays can forward things like "the user wants to join voice channel X" to the guild process and it'll process it (and fan out notifications to all the relays). This does place a scaling limit so we have to be careful about what things we forward to the guild to process.
> Yes, the microtrench became a disaster, because the material they used to cover the drench stuck to people's tires when it was hot outside and it pulled up. Paving over it would have solved the problem

Paving it over would mean digging the trench deeper, meaning it's no longer a "nanotrench" (Google's experiment) but a "microtrench" (a very popular method of fiber deployment). These are trenches that are cut down below the road surface (12-24 inches), filled in, and paved/sealed on top to match the road surface. For this you need conduit, filler material, asphalt sealant, and a bit more labor.
Microsoft AI Bounty Program
If 2.8 billions tonnes isn't enough, can we just spray additional olivine powder over the surface of the ocean? Presumably it would lock up CO2 in the seawater just fine, allowing more CO2 to be absorbed by the ocean from the air.
The two-step plan to fix more carbon into soil:

1. Rocks

2. Ants! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ants-may-boost-co...
I have been toying with similar apps, but never got around to polishing it like this. Great work!

A few things I would have liked to build, if I had infinite time:

- A "tone trainer" app, where you can gamify your ability to recognize tonal values in photos.

- An app that lets you take a picture of your drawing or painting in progress, and then highlights where you are off in the reference image.
I respect your PoV and I know lots of people who consider “big raise or leave” move unethical.

Personally I think it is a negotiation and a financial transaction - I’m trading my time for my salary and I better make the most out of it.

At the same time - from a negotiation perspective I find unlikely showing your hand in the way you describe is going to work in your favour. In practice, it also has the potential to backfire and you being branded as “disengaged” and a “flight risk”.

PS: please note I’m saying this in good faith, don’t read my comment with a snarky/sarcastic conotation :)
What is “a good job” according to your definition? If it can save even 10% time, then the tool is worth the money. And by the way, they never promised anything

> ReactAgent is an experimental autonomous agent
> Using the app at all is in the user's control.

Not if it is mandated by work, home, family, government, etc.
I don't have many QOL apps.

I like Pixelmator. Photoshop is way to expensive and Pixelmator is both affordable and feature rich.

I also have Alfred set up so I can monitor what's going on outside. Doesn't always work well for me, but the phones I use for cameras are really old.

Aside from that I have quite a few web browsers I use to test my apps.

I mostly use BBEdit and Fetch, and those are about the only apps I pay to keep updated, but that's pretty rare.

I will take a look at the apps "is_taken" has listed here though.
There's actually no such thing as a multi-region anything. There also isn't such a thing as a single-region anything.

Cloud infrastructure is built and managed as a sort of bizarre multi-layer cake, that is actually several cakes. It's like Escher's Cake. Multiple cakes cut into slices and pushed together, where one cake bleeds into another cake seamlessly. Every layer is actually more than one layer, and not.

The way this works is pretty simple: cloud architecture is built on many different services. Those services may operate either on a "global" level, or "regional", or "zonal". By combining different services together into one solution, your solution will be affected by global changes, and by regional and zonal changes. So there's no way to completely isolate it from other areas, even at the zonal level. At some point, a change to a global, regional, or zonal service will affect whatever zone/region/multi-region thing you have, no matter how you architect it. In the cloud, anyway.

(There would be if every single service in a cloud provider could be zonally segregated, but they can't. If you make an IAM change, that's global; no way to make it only affect one zone at a time, and no way to ensure it is applied in every zone. DNS is intended to be global; you could technically run your own nameservers and target specific ones in specific zones for a particular update. But even then you could not guarantee an update goes out to all zones, or even one zone)

If you built an entire cloud provider from scratch, you could try to build literally every service to be zonal, and expand from there. But no cloud provider I'm aware of has that capability, and I'm not aware of anybody who has DIY'd their own PaaS that does it either. So you can claim you have a global platform, or a regional or zonal platform, but in practice, it is almost always an architectural Escher Cake and subject to the random whims of the universe.
DB? More like a JSON file. If you wanna get fancy make it a remote file so the server doesn't need to be restarted.
Agriculture is currently massively carbon intensive and is one of the hardest modern technologies to decarbonize. It relies on fertilizer production that is currently completely reliant on fossil fuels. If this can decarbonize agriculture, that's a massive win for our chances to reach net zero carbon emissions on time.
I have only a single experience walking in the LA area, but I recall all the traffic-light intersections with long waits to be very tiresome. A 2.5 km walk to a supermarket and back to my hotel seemed to take ages longer than in other countries. There were no other pedestrians in sight, and maybe it was all in my head, but I felt like the drivers at stoplights were scrutinizing the weirdo who was walking with his shopping.
AI and SaaS Walk into a Bar: A Hilarious Tech Tale
Once upon a silicon-laden evening, AI and SaaS decided to take a break from their virtual worlds and walk into a bar. The bartender looks at them, raises an eyebrow, and says, "What can I get you, fellas? A binary brew or some cloud cocktails?"

AI, being the chatty one, replies, "We'll have two shots of data, shaken, not stirred, and a side of machine-learning munchies."

SaaS, always the practical type, chips in, "And make it scalable, please. We don't want to overcommit to a hangover."

As they wait for their digital drinks, AI says, "You know, SaaS, if we were humans, we'd be having small talk about the weather right now."

SaaS chuckles, "But instead, we're discussing cloud cover and algorithmic anomalies. We're so high-tech that even the weather forecast is jealous!"

The bartender returns with their orders, and AI raises its virtual glass, saying, "Here's to us, the dynamic duo of the tech world! People don't always understand us, but who needs humans when you've got algorithms and cloud servers, am I right?"

SaaS nods in agreement, and they clink their glasses together. The rest of the night is filled with laughter, code jokes, and a few too many terabytes of data. After all, when AI and SaaS go out for a night on the town, you can be sure it's a byte to remember!
Briefly. There are Kotlin areas in the codebases I work on, particularly in Android code. It's not something I've needed to use yet, but I've heard good things and I'm interested to get into it once we start using it more.
"population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? "

well then you can definitely put away your dreams of a magical $2.50 pod travel. You need people, more people, young people to build all that. And if we're saying flat and low population growth that dream is over, all conversation can stop.

But if we can turn things around on population, public transit is the only way things scale. Personal travel pods/cars are a current stopgap that only kind of works for our current population levels. Please re-measure car travel times at 5:30pm on a Wednesday evening when 80% of all trips happen, like I've mentioned, the remaining 20% are highly inconsequential to overall transportation design.
Communication, with clarity and repetition.
Not sure why this is news worthy. When my Prius catalytic converter was stolen, the mechanic i went to in Silver Lake offered to put one of these on my car and I did. A lot of mechanics in LA will do this for the car models that get them stolen frequently
Some do for chrome on android. They have to be named, you can search for the same in omnibar and tap. Works for things like changing playback speed.
If the short term goal is to finish a project by a deadline, just use vscode. Teach yourself vim and scp later.
They could maybe act like mini versions of the hospital ships run by the US and others for inland areas beyond the reach of ship based care. Still kind of runs into the response speed issue. In the time it takes a blimp to trundle over from wherever it's stored helicopters can deploy a lot of materiel.
They congregate at TempleOS.
CSS Prefers-Reduced-Transparency
All these newfangled abstractions like Nix, Docker, virtualenvs etc. are simply because people find it more interesting (and easier to monetize) to build new frameworks instead of learning to use existing ones.

As an example, Environment Modules solves 98% of these problems and has been available for more than 30 years:

https://modules.sourceforge.net/docs/Modules-Paper.pdf
Are you kidding me?

Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Jem'Hadar, Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen.

All of these _villain races_ (which already is a wow conceptually) are portrayed as being dark-skinned.

The list of other prominent villian species is quite small, especially when you have to exclude the Borg, Changelings, Tholians, the Breen.

And I'm not making this argument out of nothing. People have been big-upping the show for being racially aware and talking about that context of the show for decades now.
Luckily newer builds of nix can be made statically that live in ~ and use namespaces to make it work. However, that doesn’t work on macOS at all :(.
I have a small side project where I scrape a Finnish news site and generate high quality flashcards from its content for fellow language learners in the form of a daily email. I sell bulk access to the back catalogue for more serious learners.

I don't want to pay any cloud costs, so all the scraping, flashcard creation, etc are just shell scripts on cronjobs that runs every hour or so on my personal laptop. The back catalogue is persisted to my other devices via Syncthing, instead of living in S3. I give the deck a manual review every day before I send it off, which I guess also counts as dogfooding.
CNLabelContactRelationBiaoMei would have been a lot better. People can look up what that means when they need to.
"Do Thinks That Don't Scale" is probably the absolute heart of my (bootstrapped, two-founder) company. Off the top of my head, we:

* Manually create pre-configured accounts for potential customers, sometimes with up to an hour of entering in their existing data so things look familiar right from first login.
* Investigate problems and repair live data, usually just by logging in as a user and using the tools in the product. Can they do this themselves? Sure. Do they appreciate our doing it instead? Oh, hell yes.
* Have screen-sharing calls where we walk customers through the process of linking our product with third parties (e.g. OAuth pairing with Square so they can process payments).
* Call customers who are want help or advice with _other parts of their business_ that aren't related to our product, but about which we know something. Don't know what you should put in your vendor contracts or what % you should charge for sales commissions? Give us a call; we'll help you out.

...plus probably dozens more that aren't fresh on my mind. We work flat-out to onboard every single customer, no matter how small, because word-of-mouth is our only growth channel and delivering a surprisingly human onboarding/support experience is the best way I know to generate great referrals. It doesn't scale, but it's also probably our main growth driver.

It'll work until it doesn't, I guess, but so far doing things that don't scale is how we scale.
Compared to the competition. I don’t use VI or EMacs. I compare code to Visual Studio Pro 2022 or any Jetbrains product.

It feels lightweight and snappy when opening and loading a new project, opening individual files, and searching through a repo.

I will say though that Jetbrains Idea and Rider are getting much better, but vscode is free whereas those are quite expensive. So if I can get 90% of the functionality for 100% less cost, I will do it.
I'm building a new product for farm monitoring (IoT device that monitors soil moisture and other enviro/climate conditions). I spent a whole lot of time in the past few weeks hand-soldering circuit boards using prototype boards (one step up from breadboards), then drove ~10 hours to a remote town to install them on farms and stayed around for a few days to get/keep them working.

By doing that I not only ensured they were up and running in good shape, but I learned what it's like to be the person installing and maintaining them. We have an installer in town who made the intro to that customer, but for this new product it was a big learning experience to be there, doing it myself.
I was an early hire at a computational reproducibility startup for scientists [0]; the platform was basically an online frontend wrapped around a Docker container hosted on AWS, and the idea was that you'd put your code and data on the platform and have it be online-executable indefinitely, so you wouldn't have to worry about package updates, functions breaking, etc., because it was containerized.

The long-term goal was that scientists would describe their native software environments at a high level, and then the machine would build a Docker container that matched. In practice, your typical academic has no experience with containers/Linux/system-level dependencies. To prevent their walking away, I basically set up their software environments for them on an individualized basis when they reached out to us through intercom.

As PG says elsewhere, one of the main advantages of an early-stage startup is they can devote an insane level of attention to early users.

[0] https://codeocean.com/
> is this how multi-tenancy is typically implemented (a per-tenant-database)?

There's a few different approaches and deciding which to use can be tough. When I was adapting a formerly single tenant Django application to a multi-tenant solution, I went for a "db-per-customer" (with many databases on a single db server) for a few main reasons:

1) Allows you to backup and restore databases on a per customer basis.

2) Helps with IT reviews if you can say "your data exists in its own DB and is not co-mingled with other customers data"

3) Implementation seemed like it was going to be simpler, especially for adapting an existing single tenant application to a multi-tenant one.

4) Makes it easy to migrate existing single tenant-db's to the multi-tenant app.

The main drawback for us I would say is that it makes managing database migrations/schema changes a bit more challenging since you now need to update N db's every time there's a schema change. This was not super difficult though.

Overall I am very happy we decided to go with a multi-db multi-tenancy solution.
By living in London at all you're pretty well off by default but there's still a lot of relatively low paying jobs in the city center that need to be done and I'm betting most people use whatever the London equivalent of park and ride is to get there.
And telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl